IQ
Why Me? Paradise Lost: Part 1
27/January/2010 11:37 Filed in: Weekly
Column
At the close of my philosophy class at the end of
my undergraduate college education, Mr. Gibbons
stated essentially that your success in any
philosophical argument that you may choose to
pursue, really wasn’t due to the strengths or logic
of your arguments, but rather the weakness of the
position of others. This came as I spent the
quarter discussing in written response to Mr.
Gibbons questions, the role of language in our
interpretation of reality, and a term paper on
Philosophy and Science,
with a conclusion that stated: Science is
what my father uses to convince me to eat my
peas and philosophy is what I use to state why
I think (eating peas) is a bad idea, and “and”
is the word that holds the whole thing
together.
Of course none of these discussions dealt with the epistemology of sophisticated language itself and how it developed only in humans. To say that somehow it evolved from the grunts, howls, cries, and similar communications of less evolved animals, truly lacks any intellectual acumen. Furthermore that discussion would quickly require the reality of supernatural intelligence that never has been a prerequisite for what we call the modern university, which doesn’t deal with the real universe at all, and especially in the arts and humanities, mostly uncontested, ad hominem, personal bias about the universe.
We touched on those profound truths last week in our exegesis of the Genesis creation account. This week we continue along those lines looking at how sin entered the perfection of God’s creation and what that means to us today, a day and age when we think we have evolved to such a point that evil and sin no longer exist. That construction, again based not so much on the strength of the evolution argument, but rather a lack of anything looking like an argument from the other side in common life, or as Augustine defined the term, “City of God.”
In a worldview that holds that the beginning really isn’t that long ago, like thousands of years, rather than millions and billions of years, what we see demonstrated in creation, is not a revelation of the deity of creation itself, but rather the omnipotence of God. Furthermore when you look at human history, especially its violence and a sacrificial system of appeasement to nature’s supernatural gods, many times including human sacrifice, you see evil depravity at the opposite extreme of the continuum of good and evil, where our definition of good is some warm fuzzy feeling of my desire to withdraw from the reality of actual life.
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Of course none of these discussions dealt with the epistemology of sophisticated language itself and how it developed only in humans. To say that somehow it evolved from the grunts, howls, cries, and similar communications of less evolved animals, truly lacks any intellectual acumen. Furthermore that discussion would quickly require the reality of supernatural intelligence that never has been a prerequisite for what we call the modern university, which doesn’t deal with the real universe at all, and especially in the arts and humanities, mostly uncontested, ad hominem, personal bias about the universe.
We touched on those profound truths last week in our exegesis of the Genesis creation account. This week we continue along those lines looking at how sin entered the perfection of God’s creation and what that means to us today, a day and age when we think we have evolved to such a point that evil and sin no longer exist. That construction, again based not so much on the strength of the evolution argument, but rather a lack of anything looking like an argument from the other side in common life, or as Augustine defined the term, “City of God.”
In a worldview that holds that the beginning really isn’t that long ago, like thousands of years, rather than millions and billions of years, what we see demonstrated in creation, is not a revelation of the deity of creation itself, but rather the omnipotence of God. Furthermore when you look at human history, especially its violence and a sacrificial system of appeasement to nature’s supernatural gods, many times including human sacrifice, you see evil depravity at the opposite extreme of the continuum of good and evil, where our definition of good is some warm fuzzy feeling of my desire to withdraw from the reality of actual life.
Read More...