Philosophy Now Forum

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitzmille ... l_District

From the courts decision,

"After a searching review of the record and applicable caselaw, we find that while ID arguments may be true, a proposition on which the Court takes no position, ID is not science. We find that ID fails on three different levels, any one of which is sufficient to preclude a determination that ID is science. They are: (1) ID violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation; (2) the argument of irreducible complexity, central to ID, employs the same flawed and illogical contrived dualism that doomed creation science in the 1980s; and (3) ID's negative attacks on evolution have been refuted by the scientific community. … It is additionally important to note that ID has failed to gain acceptance in the scientific community, it has not generated peer-reviewed publications, nor has it been the subject of testing and research. Expert testimony reveals that since the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries, science has been limited to the search for natural causes to explain natural phenomena. (page 64) [for "contrived dualism", see false dilemma.]"

In his Conclusion, he wrote:

"The proper application of both the endorsement and Lemon tests to the facts of this case makes it abundantly clear that the Board's ID Policy violates the Establishment Clause. In making this determination, we have addressed the seminal question of whether ID is science. We have concluded that it is not, and moreover that ID cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents. [...]
The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy. With that said, we do not question that many of the leading advocates of ID have bona fide and deeply held beliefs which drive their scholarly endeavors. Nor do we controvert that ID should continue to be studied, debated, and discussed. As stated, our conclusion today is that it is unconstitutional to teach ID as an alternative to evolution in a public school science classroom.
The breathtaking inanity of the Board’s decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial."

Fanatics will take this trial and make more of it that there is, the trial addressed the legal aspect of teaching ID in the science classroom and anything beyond that was not pursued to it's conclusion, in fact the court took no position on the validity of ID.

Nick_A wrote:Did they ever explain for example how the law of the excluded middle came into existence.

No, that's Aristotle. Anyway, what changed your mind?

On Sun May 15, 2016 7:07 pm in 'Why unification of science and religion?' you wrote:I said that both the Law of the Excluded Middle and the Included Middle are real.

Nick_A wrote:It is one thing to explain it and another to explain its origin.

The origin of the law of the excluded middle doesn't need explaining, any more than the origin of 2+2=4 needs explaining. It is an axiom of logic which you either accept, or you don't.

Nick_A wrote:The basic theory already exists.

Really? What is this basic theory?

uwot wrote:

The origin of the law of the excluded middle doesn't need explaining, any more than the origin of 2+2=4 needs explaining. It is an axiom of logic which you either accept, or you don't.

Yes but the question is how it came into being. Did it arise accidentally or does it have a conscious source? You can say it is self evident but even that is not entirely correct since the Law of the INCLUDED middle as described by Dr. Basarab Nicolescu is also real. What is the origin of yin and yang?

Nick_A wrote:uwot wrote:

The origin of the law of the excluded middle doesn't need explaining, any more than the origin of 2+2=4 needs explaining. It is an axiom of logic which you either accept, or you don't.

Yes but the question is how it came into being.

It really depends on what you mean by 'being'. To me, it doesn't have any 'being' beyond being an axiom of logic.

Nick_A wrote:Did it arise accidentally or does it have a conscious source?

You really need to explain how you believe it to exist.

Nick_A wrote:You can say it is self evident but even that is not entirely correct since the Law of the INCLUDED middle as described by Dr. Basarab Nicolescu is also real.

I didn't say it is self evident; I said it is an axiom of logic. Furthermore, I said you can either accept or deny it. I gather some mathematicians and logicians think we should dispense with it, but that's not my field.

Nick_A wrote:What is the origin of yin and yang?

Nor is oriental philosophy.

uwot wrote:

Yes but the question is how it came into being.

It really depends on what you mean by 'being'. To me, it doesn't have any 'being' beyond being an axiom of logic.
Nick_A wrote:
Did it arise accidentally or does it have a conscious source?

You really need to explain how you believe it to exist.

Logic expresses lawful relationships. Being is the "isness of a quality of creation. It is determined by the ratio of spirit to matter. The lower the quality of being, the greater its materiality. A mineral has one quality of being, a plant has a higher quality, an animal has a higher and Man has a higher quality of being and on it goes. The lower quality of being is always included in the higher. The "isness" of relative qualities of creation and how they interact is determined by the logical relationship between the interaction of logical laws. So the question becomes if these laws that determine the functioning of qualities of being and without which there would be no universe can appear accidentally or do they require a conscious source?

Nick_A wrote:uwot wrote:

The origin of the law of the excluded middle doesn't need explaining, any more than the origin of 2+2=4 needs explaining. It is an axiom of logic which you either accept, or you don't.

Yes but the question is how it came into being. Did it arise accidentally or does it have a conscious source? You can say it is self evident but even that is not entirely correct since the Law of the INCLUDED middle as described by Dr. Basarab Nicolescu is also real. What is the origin of yin and yang?

these principles have always existed since the beginning of time, it is only that scientists and mathematicians have discovered and described them, that humans have become aware of them.

Doc wrote:

these principles have always existed since the beginning of time, it is only that scientists and mathematicians have discovered and described them, that humans have become aware of them.

But the question remains, what is their source even though these laws have existed from the beginning of time? Is the beginning of time an accident or the result of a conscious source?

Philosophy Now wrote:How did life on Earth come about? Recently the buzzword among those dissatisfied with Darwinism has been ‘Intelligent Design’. But isn’t this just another name for Creationism? Not so, argues Todd Moody.

http://philosophynow.org/issues/31/Inte ... _Catechism

I might give Intelligent Design some credence if life had taken less time to evolve to its present complexity. If an intelligent designer was involved, it should not have taking him 3.5 billion years of tweaking to come to the present complexity. I am pretty sure the design of life itself was far more complex than the design of the most complex organism present today. If there was a source which designed life, then for it to reach the present complexity would have been a peace of cake and the perfect organism would have been on earth in the first few seconds.

If an intelligent designer is involved, then the slow evolution of life suggests that even he did not know what he was really doing which would seem highly unlikely.

The time taken for life to evolve is the main problem against the argument of an intelligent designer.

uwot wrote:

Yes but the question is how it came into being.

It really depends on what you mean by 'being'. To me, it doesn't have any 'being' beyond being an axiom of logic.
Nick_A wrote:
Did it arise accidentally or does it have a conscious source?

You really need to explain how you believe it to exist.

Let's tidy this up for you, Nick_A:

You wrote:Yes but the question is how it came into being.

I wrote:It really depends on what you mean by 'being'. To me, it doesn't have any 'being' beyond being an axiom of logic.

Then you wrote:Did it arise accidentally or does it have a conscious source?

In response to which I wrote:You really need to explain how you believe it to exist.

So, in reply to the above, you wrote:Logic expresses lawful relationships.

Well, yes, logic is simply a set of rules and some 'laws', by which language is judged to be coherent, or not. It is generally, but as I have already pointed out, not universally accepted that for most circumstances, the law of the excluded middle is sound. So for instance, 'All swans are white.' is either true, or false. As it happens, there are such things as black swans; I don't know the proportions, but say 10%. That doesn't mean that it is 90% true that all swans are white; it means the proposition 'All swans are white.' is 100% false.

More or less coherently you wrote:Being is the "isness of a quality of creation. It is determined by the ratio of spirit to matter. The lower the quality of being, the greater its materiality. A mineral has one quality of being, a plant has a higher quality, an animal has a higher and Man has a higher quality of being and on it goes.

Up to this point, this is all very Platonic. Plato agreed with Empedocles that the Greek elements were stratified. In ascending order of purity we have earth, water, air and fire. Basically, Empedocles believed that 'love' and 'strife' (attraction and repulsion doesn't sound so archaic) mixed it all up into the world we inhabit. (Empedocles also had an interesting idea about evolution; before people and animals came together as such, the individual components spontaneously appeared, as living things were believed to have done since ancient times, so that: ‘Here sprang up many faces without necks, arms wandered without shoulders, unattached, and eyes strayed alone, in need of foreheads.’ All sorts of abomination resulted until, under the influence of love, the combinations we would find in a zoo rather than a freak show came to be. He is also famous for jumping into Mount Etna to prove he was a god; which according to the witnesses, he wasn't.) Plato believed that beyond the air there is something even better, an idea he attributes to Socrates: If a man could but fly and stick his head above the air, like fish poking their heads above the water:

Plato, 'quoting' Socrates wrote:...and if his nature were able to bear the sight, he would recognise that that is the true heaven and the true light and the true earth. For this earth and its stones and all the regions in which we live are marred and corroded, just as in the sea everything is corroded by the brine, and there is no vegetation worth mentioning, and scarcely any degree of perfect formation, but only caverns and sand and measureless mud, and tracts of slime wherever there is earth as well; and nothing is in the least worthy to be judged beautiful by our standards. But the things above excel those of our world to a degree far greater still.

It is this Platonic contempt for the Earth and bodies that is largely responsible for Christianity's fucked up attitude to the physical, and especially, sexual.

However, Nick_A then wrote:The lower quality of being is always included in the higher.

You're getting mixed up with Freud: id, ego, superego and all that nonsense.

Breathtakingly, Nick_A wrote:The "isness" of relative qualities of creation and how they interact is determined by the logical relationship between the interaction of logical laws.

This is spectacular gobbledegook. What on Earth do you mean?

Finally, and predictably, Nick_A wrote:So the question becomes if these laws that determine the functioning of qualities of being and without which there would be no universe can appear accidentally or do they require a conscious source?

You keep asking this. We all know how you would answer, but do you do you really need a conscious source to come up with a law that states that either all swans are white, or they are not?

uwot wrote: However, Nick_A then wrote:
The lower quality of being is always included in the higher.

You're getting mixed up with Freud: id, ego, superego and all that nonsense.

No. The being of a mineral is within a plant. The being of a plant is within an animal. The being of the entirety of animal, vegetable, and mineral is within Man or the highest level of mechanical evolution with the potential to pass into conscious evolution

Breathtakingly, Nick_A wrote:
The "isness" of relative qualities of creation and how they interact is determined by the logical relationship between the interaction of logical laws.

This is spectacular gobbledegook. What on Earth do you mean?

It is said that God is simultaneously one and three. Becoming open to what this means intellectually requires opening to the vertical interactions of logical laws. This isn't easy for you since you've confined yourself to the dualistic expression of these laws. For example the Law of the Excluded Middle is a flat dualistic expression.The Law of the Included Middle expresses a vertical triune relationship. If you understood it, Plato's ideas on relative being would make sense to you

Nick_A wrote:

uwot wrote: However, Nick_A then wrote:
The lower quality of being is always included in the higher.

You're getting mixed up with Freud: id, ego, superego and all that nonsense.

No. The being of a mineral is within a plant. The being of a plant is within an animal. The being of the entirety of animal, vegetable, and mineral is within Man or the highest level of mechanical evolution with the potential to pass into conscious evolution

Right, and it was pretty much 'conscious evolution' that Freud was talking about. The id is the animal, the ego the rational and the superego the moral. From memory he placed them in the hippocampus, cerebellum and cerebral cortex respectively. All very Darwinian and materialistic.

Nick_A wrote:

Breathtakingly, Nick_A wrote:
The "isness" of relative qualities of creation and how they interact is determined by the logical relationship between the interaction of logical laws.

This is spectacular gobbledegook. What on Earth do you mean?

It is said that God is simultaneously one and three.

So say the Catholics.

Nick_A wrote:Becoming open to what this means intellectually requires opening to the vertical interactions of logical laws.

Well now, I have my own idea of what it means. I have made the point before that Genesis is typical creation myth for the time, in that it accords with contemporaneous 'scientific' thought. Creation myths answer three basic questions: Where did the world come from? What is it made of? How does it work? The Roman Empire was generally tolerant of 'foreign' religion, provided they could put a statue of the emperor in any temples. The Jews refused to do so, so there were a series of brutal wars and Rome flattened Jerusalem. Despite this, the Jews would not accede, so in a bid to win the hearts and minds, the Romans came up with a cunning plan. 'What if,' they said, 'the statue we stick in your temples is one of your own, and we call him Christ, as in the messiah you've been waiting for?' 'No deal.' said the Jews, for which they have been persecuted ever since. Ironically, everyone else in the empire signed up for the cult of a figure for whom there is no historical evidence. Or rather the pagan warlords that converted gained the support of the Roman Empire, giving them a huge tactical advantage over their rivals.

Nick_A wrote:This isn't easy for you since you've confined yourself to the dualistic expression of these laws.

You slander me with dualism, you scoundrel. If I had to nail my colours to a metaphysical post, it would be monism. What isn't easy for me is accepting that a story, almost certainly, concocted by the Flavian dynasty and Josephus their Jewish scribe, relates to historical events for which there is no independent historical record.

Nick_A wrote:For example the Law of the Excluded Middle is a flat dualistic expression.

Ya hah. And as I am bored of repeating, the law of the excluded middle is a logical device that you are not compelled to accept. Don't try and pin that one on me, sunshine.

Nick_A wrote:The Law of the Included Middle expresses a vertical triune relationship. If you understood it, Plato's ideas on relative being would make sense to you

I understand Plato very well, but as Aristotle pointed out, the measure of how well you understand an hypothesis is the clarity with which you teach it. Since you are struggling to convey your meaning, I would suggest that rather than the fault being my cerebral faculties, it is more likely that you don't really understand what you are talking about.

Uwot wrote: Nick_A wrote:The Law of the Included Middle expresses a vertical triune relationship. If you understood it, Plato's ideas on relative being would make sense to you
I understand Plato very well, but as Aristotle pointed out, the measure of how well you understand an hypothesis is the clarity with which you teach it. Since you are struggling to convey your meaning, I would suggest that rather than the fault being my cerebral faculties, it is more likely that you don't really understand what you are talking about.

Granted I could never explain the relationship between the laws of the included and excluded middle and do it justice. I’m not Dr. Nicolescu. I am going to post a link for reference and for anyone open to vertical thought. My guess is that if we survive technology, appreciating levels of reality through the law of the included middle will open new paths to an often forgotten conscious human perspective.

http://ciret-transdisciplinarity.org/bulletin/b15c4.php

Nick_A wrote:Granted I could never explain the relationship between the laws of the included and excluded middle and do it justice. I’m not Dr. Nicolescu.

I looked at the link. The irony is that he is using a very dated understanding of matter and energy. It is baffling to most people how something can behave as a a particle and a wave, and to be fair, it is rarely explained with any clarity by physicists. But rather than leaping on some 'include middle' pony, it is better, in my view, to furnish yourself with at least some appreciation of quantum field theories; in particular QED, QCD and Higgs. What they imply is that 'particles' are disturbances: standing waves, knots, eddies or some other stable excitation in a 'field'. 'Virtual particles', by contrast are waves in a field, that carry energy between actual particles.
Many physicists are cagey about the ontological status of such fields, reluctant to commit to actual 'physical' fields. For the purpose of physics, it doesn't matter whether a field is a 'thing'; all that is certain is the influence they have on perceptible objects. The fields as 'things' cannot be directly detected, it is only the whirlpools and waves we can see, to use a water analogy. As such, they are metaphysical, literally beyond physics. Or, as Kant would put it, noumenal.
Long story short: there is no harm in believing that the fields are 'real', or that they were created by god, or even that they are god, but there is nothing about them that demands that you do so.

Uwot, Dr. Nicolescu is very highly regarded in the field of particle physics. Perhaps he is aware of relationships you are unaware of. For example he just concluded a dialogue in China with a Buddhist monk on the question of reality. There may have been more in their dialogue than 90% of people are aware of.

1 June 2016

Basarab Nicolescu in dialogue with the Buddhist monk DM Heng Chuan on "What is Reality", ATLAS International Transdisciplinary - Transnational - Transcultural (T3) Conference "Education / Technological Singularity / Technological Innovation" , Xi'an Jiaotong - Liverpool University, Suzhou, China.

Nick_A wrote:Uwot, Dr. Nicolescu is very highly regarded in the field of particle physics.

I'm sure he's a lovely bloke, but his CV is not that of someone very highly regarded. The chairs he has occupied, the institutes that have employed him, the awards he has won all deserve respect, but none of it is major league. You cannot rely on arguments from authority and exaggerating the authority of your authority makes you look desperate.
But then it is not even his work in particle physics you wish to defend. It has never been the case that being an authority in one field makes you an expert anywhere else. So for instance, despite the fact that Newton invented the law of universal gravitation, the laws of motion, calculus, has a SI unit named after him, his work on alchemy is nonsense.

Nick_A wrote:Perhaps he is aware of relationships you are unaware of. For example he just concluded a dialogue in China with a Buddhist monk on the question of reality. There may have been more in their dialogue than 90% of people are aware of.

Perhaps he is and maybe there was. So: what have you to say about these perhaps and maybes?