On Sat, 11 Jan 2003, Dan Minette wrote: > That's a fair statement. Nothing I've said should be construed to make the > arguement that God has been proven to exist.
True enough. What I've perceived myself as arguing against is chiefly an idea that reason, "properly" used, somehow naturally leads one to theism if not to a particular theology. In hindsight I'm not sure that was actually your position, but it was the "target" in my mind's eye. > This brings forth an interesting point about debates. An argument as > strong as Mr. Goodalls is much easier to refute than an argument like the > one I think you have made. On the list, before, he has made arguments > strongly tied to the idea that only that which is empirically verifiable is > real. My point about self awareness directly counters this type of > argument. My problem with this counter-argument is that mental solipsism - believing I am conscious but nobody else is - seems to contradict evolution and genetics by implying that I have a trait, whatever its origin, shared by no other human being. So, even if I can't prove the existence of your self-consciousness by direct observation, it seems to me that there's a fair bit of indirect empirical evidence that you and I are the same w/respect to having a mind in general. Whereas the opposite assumption, that I alone am conscious, requires a great leap of faith (not just that God exists, but that He exists and made the world for ME alone; or the I am God), minus any direct evidence and contrary to the indirect evidence that we do have. So, to my way of thinking, believing that other people are conscious isn't an act of faith of the same kind or degree that believing in a God -- more or less well described by a certain religion or set of religions, and actively excluding certain others -- is an act of faith. If one assumes that our scientific perspective on the brain and behavior doesn't touch on and can never touch on consciousness in some essential way, then one is defining consciousness a priori as something untouchable by empirical knowledge, and *that* itself may be a theist-scale act of faith...but it's not a necessary one. Declining to make that leap is not, in my mind, identical to making the opposite, naturalistic one that all questions will be revealed by science and only science for ever and ever, amen. > But, as you pointed out, many atheists would not insist on this argument. > They would allow that there are things that reasonable people accept as > real that are not reducible to the empirical. They still don't believe in > God, and have an understanding of the world that explains much without God. ...or in which they believe theistic explanations actually fail, or create more questions than they answer. > In my experience, these folks fall into two rough groupings: objectivists, > and everyone else. Objectivists talk about truths that are known and > proven, but are not derivable from the empirical. IMHO, objectivists are > typically folks who are overwhelmed by Ms. Rand, and have not though things > through much on their own. Ugh. _Anthem_ convinced me that Ms. Rand probaby isn't worth reading further. Marvin Long Austin, Texas Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Poindexter & Ashcroft, LLP (Formerly the USA) _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
