“Spiritual” too is a metaphor. Spirits are invisible agents. Much like covid-19. If intelligence is defined as the ability to process information, then covid-19 is intelligent. It processed the information necessary to evolve into the Delta variant which is more deadly and more contagious than the earlier species of the virus. Now the panpsychists would also say that covid-19 is conscious. What do you suppose the pragmatic implications of that proposition are?
You have absolutely no understanding of the process of viral variation.
The virus cannot process information.
Variants are not the result of intelligent design since a virus has no machanism for doing that.
Here’s what ACTAULLY happens.
Trillions of viruses replicate in host cells, in millions of people all over the world
This is subject to RANDOM errors in transcription.
Mostly these errors cause the failure of the virus, in the millions
Occaisionally these errors lead to a slightly different strain which persists.
Science has already identified thousands of such variations.
Once in while a variant is slightly better suited to survive in its host.
The so-called “delta” variant is a little better at infecting the host.
Because delta is slightly better it makes better headway in the infections than the older variant.
It then becomes the most common type of covid.
The virus knows nothing. It does not know what a host is. it does not know how, or why, or with what it infects. It does not understand infection, or disease. It just exists, and reproduces.
This is not “intelligent” in any meaningful way. It is not what we mean by “spirit”.
Your post is childish nonsense that ought not to appear on a forum claiming to be a philosophy one.
The Delta is very much LESS deadly than the original. Variants become wiser toward their own proliferation - * spread faster,
- more stealthy, and
- less likely to kill the host.
That is what is meant by “intelligent design”.
You have just described some of the spiritual experiences claimed by those who say they have experienced contact with God. What’s in a name? A rose by any other would smell as sweet. I think Buddhists are God’s special people.
I thought I gave a decent description of the difference between religion and spirituality.
All I want is for a devout atheist to describe what a spiritual experience is like. The agnostics, Einstein and Sagan, seem to believe it entails awe and wonder at the operative complexity of the natural world and the vastness of the universe. A spiritual person would agree.
One early study assessing the risk of hospital admission in Scotland reported that hospitalization is twice as likely in unvaccinated individuals with Delta than in unvaccinated individuals with Alpha. If the Delta variant is less deadly it is because the vaccines are effective. This is not to say that you’re wrong about the likelihood of less lethal viruses to survive. I’m thinking in terms of natural selection not intelligent design. Sculptor nicely summarized how it works.
You could write to the administrators and see if you can get me banned from ILP. It’s not likely to work though. Meanwhile, I applaud your verbal battle on behalf your point of view. It’s almost heroic. I rate it right up there with Iambiguous’. Maybe even higher.
Dawkins should be banned too. After all calling a gene "selfish"was anthropomorphic. Or as you would say “childish”.
Still more he called the whole process of evolution a “blind watchmaker”. That’s a far more vivid personification then “spirit”. So Paley’s watchmaker was blind? A blind person would be an intelligent designer. No? Like the Gnostic demiurge or the deity of deism. I’m glad Dawkins cleared that up!
Dawkins would be 100% behind everything I said. You are just too dumb to understand how he is using the word.
You are totally clueless.
Paley is as dead as a dodo. No one takes him seriously except damn fools desperate to hang on to the vestige of god.
Get serious!
I suggest you actually read my description of how a new variant virus emerges, because there is no one in biological science that would disagree with me. Not Dawkins, not Gould.
So does Sculptor decide what is appropriate in the Sandbox or what philosophy should be under any condition? At least Iambiguous was civil, although redundant.
I just know the difference between philosophy and fantasy.
For yourself, not for billions of believers. Dawkins is your God replacement. I’ve read “The Blind Watchmaker” and “The Selfish Gene” and was not impressed.
IMHO Dennett writes better as does E. O. Wilson.
Your view of philosophy is fragmented.
Iambiguous notes the truth about you in his thread.
Sculptor said:
“Your post is childish nonsense that ought not to appear on a forum claiming to be a philosophy one.”
Another whose childish nonsense ought not appear on this forum is Francis Collins head of the human genome project and the National Institutes of Health who wrote the book “The Language of God” where in he argues that faith in God and faith and science can coexist within a person and be harmonious and declares “the God of the Bible is also the God of the genome.”
He’s also a fucking moron.
I don’t much like Dawkins either.
You are your religious buddies can gang up on the heretic as much as you want. I’m still right and you are still wrong.
You are all about 200 years out of date. The enlightenment actually happened. You guys are still in the dark
The “light” of the Enlightenment was thought to be reason. But Descartes never defined what the light was in which his reason appeared to him to be clear and distinct. It must have been the light of his consciousness.
Still, but for counterintuitive theories, our genesis as human beings in the cosmos is dark. Faith in God lights up their world for people of faith in a way that supports and is supported by their intuition. It doesn’t explain how and but it tells them why. In other words, it makes the unfathomable cosmos meaningful.
The sciences apparently don’t do that for them. That’s what you’re up against.
If the enlightenment paved the way for a fragmented view of human reality, it has failed miserably and will continue to fail. For the Earth to survive Man’s exploitative and competitive destruction of his environments the how of science and the why of religion must unite. Nihilism is not our destiny. Our fondest hope is that we realize the sacredness of ecosystems in time to prevent their demise. An ecosystem requires a plurality of participants. No one is totally right or totally wrong. If that were the case all human questions would be answered by now, and they have not been. Humans progress by asking why and why not; we do not rely on ready made answers, but on striving to realize the truth. If science alone had all the answers to what it is like to be human, we would already have entered a Brave New World utopia. Who does science comfort in times of despair? It may satisfy childish curiosity, but it cannot satisfy the soul. The soul needs music, laughter and a sense of meaningful existence.
Oh, but why argue. You can argue with a snake until you turn blue, but it will still bite you because it is his nature to do so.
The enlightenmnet gave you the computer you used to make a complete arse of yourself everyday.
On that basis it is an abject failure.
Before the enlightenment gave us the methodological tools to make vaccines and other medical treatments, an old git like you would have been long dead, even if you made it past childhood.
So keep hold of your fantasies. And enjoy them, curtesy of the people who have taken the trouble to think about the world and how it works so that morons like you can persist with their pathetic dreams.
Sculptor,
Why the venom–unless your entire self- image depends on your ability to dismiss all other points of view? IMHO, that’s a rather narrow perspective. Humans are much more than your perspective can allow. So the great inventions in science and technology have prepared us for a world in which our very existence is threatened? This came about because of a lack of universal agreements on morality necessary to perpetuate ecosystems. Science will not save us from ourselves. It supports the I at the expense of the we. What is it worth if you gain the whole world but lose your soul?
"The poverty of an objectivistic account is made only too clear when we consider the mystery of music. From a scientific point of view, it is nothing but vibrations in the air, impinging on the eardrums and stimulating neural currents in the brain.
How does it come about that this banal sequence of temporal activity as the power to speak to our hearts of an eternal beauty? The whole range of subjective experience, from perceiving a patch of pink, to being enthralled by a performance of the mass in B minor, and on to the mystics encounter with the ineffable reality of the One, all these truly human experiences are at the center of our encounter with reality, and they are not to be dismissed as epiphenomenal froth on the surface of a universe whose true nature is impersonal and lifeless."
J. Polkinghorne, “Belief in God in an Age of Science”
No one is doing that.
You are just tiltling at windmills.
“After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.”“—Aldous Huxley.”
I grew up in poverty, living as folks did in the 1800’s, without running water, cooking on a wood stove, etc. My father played the banjo; Mother played harmonica. We always had music. What I miss most about growing up in those days is singing in church and playing in the woods. Music made the words real. God was in the woods.
If Zarathustra could not worship a God who couldn’t dance ; I cold never abide one who couldn’t appreciate music. While I appreciate what science and technology have given me, I would trade all my junk for my former way of living. It had God and music in it. I wasn’t poor.