Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Fri Mar 11, 2022 1:26 amAll with exactly the right genetic mutation to produce the next generation of proto-humans? And none of them with a genetic makeup that would undo the genetic mutation for the next generation? And they all mate, and this produces the next generation, all with the mutational adaptive trait? And then the previous generation of proto-humans all died out, without exception, and without producing any alternate kind of mutation that would take the "tree" in a different direction?
But all of this scientesque lingo which you are using -- the terms of evolutionary science and biology -- you
cannot believe in and do not believe in. Yet you keep using the terms of one
épistémè as if they can be interchanged with another. Why do you even bother?
Your view is the literalist view expressed in Genesis. And, oddly enough from where I sit, you believe each and every element of the story as if it depicts a natural history and a human history and anthropology. It is a very curious position to have and to hold to.
The interesting thing is that your interlocutor, that is to say myself,
cannot do it. I simply cannot do what you do. And so the larger problem is that it is largely impossible for those of 'modern mind' to be able to see and believe the literal stories. But what I ask is How could it ever come about that masses of people could ever resolve to return to the way of seeing that you are accomplished in? You can start out with a mythological understanding of reality, that much is true. But that view will always be challenged by 'reality' itself which tells a different story. It is chipped away bit by bit until finally it collapses.
In order for that not to happen though it requires a *you* to come along and help patch the Olden View together with the New View. And a huge amount of rhetorical energy has to be spent in that project. It certainly does not come spontaneously.
The more that one enters that modern
épistémè the less possible it is to hold to the Olden View unless one remains in a sort of bubble or unless one can freeze oneself intellectually. Yet at some point one would be strung, uncomfortably, between one view that is irreconcilable with another view which can only be bridged with a bizarre perceptual manoeuvre. That is where cognitive dissonance arises, isn't it?
You embody, it seems, that manoeuvre. You are arguing for it and recommending that it is the *right* one to have. But the people you are talking with
cannot perform the manoeuvre that you succeed in pulling off.
And curiously they extend their disbelief from the incapacity to honestly and authentically believe in the Adam & Eve story into a larger disbelief in everything associated with religious belief generally and also universally.
Also curiously is the fact that
you do not help them at any level. You actually provide them with a tangible focus in order to sharpen their (as I understand them) atheistic views. It is a strange conundrum.
In regard to Intelligent Design
However, those who do pursue the *intelligent design* argument certainly seem to have at the least
some decent and considerable arguments. Such as the improbability of the complex cell arising out of the primordial slime. There are some serious people who just cannot see how that could have happened. So they edge toward the notion of the design coming from a designer.
But when you think things through that has to be the case no matter how the scenario is presented. They ask: If the cell according to mathematically probability could not have spontaneously put itself together in some electrified pool, then where did the cell come from? Some other place in the Universe? Or are they proposing that it was -- poof! -- spontaneously created by the Creator? (That view corresponds to your belief in the literal Genesis-version). But they do not speculate beyond their core point. They can only go so far as to state what they state: It is mathematically improbable (or impossible) that it (the cell) did
arise on its own. But if it did not then where and how did it?
But they certainly do not therefore justify the Christian view in its specificity. You could take on their view and have nothing at all to do with any existent religious mythology.
So in this sense they propose that a whole other way of seeing through the lens of science and reason be developed in order to explain.
But no matter how it came about, and no matter how one looks at the issues, it really all did arise out of that Original Event they refer to, when nothing really existed and nothing was formed. The only way that I can see is that it all existed in latency. But to say *in latency* means
that the idea of it had to exist, on some plane or other, prior to its taking shape. Or is it proposed that the Universe just invents itself as it moves from [
whatever they say the original stuff was] to [
everything that became manifest]?
I have no idea how those who devote themselves to physics-science and speculation would approach or resolve the issue that I try to express here.
