🚀 go-pugleaf

Starbuck wrote:

>
>  >>>Do you look both ways before you cross the street? Do you count your
> change?
> Then you concede that reality is observable and has orderly patterns.<<<
>
> Ah then... why is that?

Why bother if there is no connection between observation and what
happens to you?


> >>>Which is cut away by Occam's Razor<<<
>
> A lot of things are.     :-)
>

Only things that have no explanatory function.

> >>>I understand. You want us to choose strategies for living by whatever
> feels
> good.  This is why xenophobia is spiritual truth if we are biased that
> way.<<<
>
> I consider "feelings" to be one of several indicators for sound strategies
> for living.

Fair enough, and I'm not suggesting all feelings are automatically bad guides.
But they are basically guides to life in ancestral human habitats -- i.e. the
Pleistocene world.  Our feelings are from the stone age -- and  earlier. That
is
when they evolved.  We don't live in the Pleistocene world, we live in a rather

different world. In our world, with our power, stone age feelings can sometimes

be big trouble.

> Other considerations such as tradition, reason, and (in my
> case) the Bible might counter any extremist tendancies with appeal to
> feelings alone could cause.  One needs balance.  Reason indicates that
> Truth, Justice, Courage, and Wisdom are also important values, and these
> values can moderate xenophobia.  The Bible teachs a unity of all humankind,
> a common ancestor, and a God who loves all persons the same.  Also
> moderating extreme xenophobia.

I would argue that we need to pay a lot of attention to consequences in
the modern world, and not rely on recipies that were perhaps useful
thousands or millions of years ago.


> On the other hand perhaps "xenophobia" can be a helpful feeling it we use it
> to guide us to other persons who are a part of our own social group... who
> have similar interests, feelings, ideas and values.  It can lead us to
> people whom we can trust and who feel warmly and helpful toward us, in
> return.
>

This is increasingly unlikely to be the standard mode of life, given the
demographic
changes afoot on Earth.  I live and work in Silicon Valley. I am the only
native speaker
of English in the building I live in. At many times in my carreer I have been
the only
"American" in my work group.  The world I live in is completely "multicultural"

(except that we are mostly engineers.) Xenophobia would be catastrophic under
such conditions, and could not be tolerated in any form by any employer. In
short,
it's a feeling from a dead world.

Or a dying world -- I understand not every place is the same as Silicon Valley.
I
have even known a person or two who fled to places like Boise essentially
because
they couldn't stand not being among others "like themselves". But increasingly
the
world is looking like those Star Trek episodes with  people from all over the
place,
with all sorts of different cultural backgrounds, working and living together.
It's
inevitable.  Unless you can halt all jet travel.

> >>>This makes perfect sense in terms of natural selection.  But it makes no
> sense at all in terms of intelligent Design by a beneficent Transcendental
> engineer.  Unless he is constrained to work by natural processes, that is.
> In which case, * he* dies by Occam's Razor.<<<
>
> Only if engineering for malaria were "His" only function.

The point is that this is a lousy "design" in engineering terms, a
design with unacceptable side effects.

If human engineers built a refrigerator that usually kept things cold
but some appriaciable percentage of the time exploded and killed people,
that  company would quickly be out of business from the court settlements.
One expects better from Transcendental Intelligence than from human
engineers -- but this is much worse.


> I don't believe
> that it is.  I view natural processes as the means by which the
> Transcendental Engineer performs his daily work.  I don't believe that He is
> necessarily 'constrained' by natural processes.  It's just His normal
> operational methodology.
>

Give us an example of a case --  for which you have concrete evidence, not
just ancient stories -- where "He" was *not* constrained by natural processes.
[No, the big bang is not known to be such an example.]

>
> >>>A child dying of sickle cell anemia is automatically a spoiled brat?<<<
>
> No.  What I am saying is that if I refuse to accept the reality that my
> child is dying from sickle cell anemia, then I am being what could be termed
> a "spoiled brat" in my relationship (or attitude toward) with the Author of
> reality.
>

Who cares what *you* feel? If the Great Designer is a person and is responsible

for such a miserable design, he's not Transcendental, he's an idiot. Or
compeletly
uncaring.

In other words, he's indistinguishable from natural selection, which neither
intelligent
nor caring. If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it's probably a
duck. Simplest
explanation: no God made sickle cell anemia. Natural selection did.

> >>>. If we ever do find some evidence that the universe is an artifact, we
> would have to rethink this. But it hasn't happened yet.<<<
>
> Hummm... I guess that I view the entire thing as an artifact.  Everything
> that we see, touch, feel, taste, and smell is evidence that the universe is
> an "artifact".

A signature. Something that could not have been produced by blind processes.

> Math is orderly, what more evidence do you need?

Evidence that math is a product of a Transcendental Intelligence. After all,
the only math we know has all been invented by humans.  Well, and a little
by machines.

--
Alan McGowen