NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #31/NN_1992_31.iso/spool/talk/origins/15959

Internet Message Format | 1992-12-30 | 8.6 KB

Path: sparky!uunet!stanford.edu!morrow.stanford.edu!pangea.Stanford.EDU!salem
From: [e-mail] (Bruce Salem)
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: Re: Throop/Nietzsche problems
Date: 30 Dec 1992 05:40:23 GMT
Organization: Stanford Univ. Earth Sciences
Lines: 169
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In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (news) writes:
>In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (Bruce Salem) writes:
>
>^>>Evolution logically denies the next world.
>
>^    Not true, evolution, and science in general, make no comments on
>^a next world or other world or supernatural relm, or one's own spirituality,
>^and indeed to have one's religion or spiritual awareness to be threatened
>^by the circumspect language of science and the provisional findings of
>^speaks of a weakened awareness of the scared.
>
>The general statement that we are derived from inert materials via a long
>sequence of essentially chance events covering many millions of years does
>not allow for a continuing spiritual existence for man (beyond this life)

    I don't see how this is necessarily so. Science can deal only
with Man's material body, in which his mind is seen to reside in his
brain and possibly consist of the integrated effect of many mental processes
and functions. None of this negates the possibility of an alternative
spiritual view of Man and his mind; of him having a soul or being part
of some chain of being beyond himself.

>UNLESS you wish to make the claim that man has evolved from inert materials
>SPIRITUALLY at the same time that he has physically.  That in my view would
>amount to trying to go the theory of evolution one stupider...  difficult,
>but perhaps not impossible.

    It may be that you are having the same old problem of language
that I have written about here before, expecting the limited objective
language of emperical research to be the same as a spiritual speech. If
so, then your thought is hamstrung by a regidity and lack of context
for language. Why do we all have to speak the same language? Why can't
we tolerate the language of the shaman or holy man who speaks of Man's
soul while at the same time regrding the neurophysiologist's discussion
of small molecules in a role of producing emotions?

    There is no necessay connection between the process of our origins
and the alternatives we have in giving ourselves meaning.

>^If this is not true, then
>^the person's sense of religion that feels threatened by evolution is
>^corrupted by his wanting wordly power and coercion over others.
>
>I don't feel terribly THREATENED by evolution.  You believing in evolution
>is no WORSE than somebody believing in the Easter rabbit.  It just seems
>to me a bad thing to have all of American academia propounding such a theory;
>it won't look good in the history books.

    I don't understand your concern, please explain.

>^>> Without something beyond this
>^>>world, what meaning would you claim your life has?
>^
>^    Does "Meaning" come only from supernatural acts and trancendant
>^moral messages?
>
>No, but neither can it come from something which will leave no trace after
>5000 years and, given evolution, that includes your entire existence.

    There are long vanished civilizations whose written record is
sparce or non-existant. Does this mean that each and every individual
who lived in them had no meaning to himself and no contribution to
posterity? No.

    Suppose Mankind becomes extinct, or even suppose that for some
reason Mankind moves off this planet entirely, then suppose that later
some other intelligant beings visit Earth. Would there be any trace of
Mankind? I think so. And I think that what people, or whomever, thinks
of us 5000 years matters less than whether a person living now thinks
late in his own life that he has made a mark in the world and that his
life was not a waste. I see no reason that to believe in things which
you cannot accept has any bering on the worth of another mans's life
or that you are fit to arbritrate such a matter. I would like to know
how you could ever presume to dictate purpose to another person or
would need to.

>^    1) No sufficiency has been provided for a early prefection in
>^      the condition of Man.
>I've mentioned Richard Heinberg's book, "MEMORIES AND VISIONS OF PARADISE",
>and that may be the best I can do for the present.

    Please summarize the main point of this book. Is that there was
a prior paradise which has been lost? Why sould I entertain such a
possibility? What does belief in such a notion suggest?

>^    2) No argument for the cause or necessity of a "Fall" of man
>^       has been given.
>
>For all I know, the fall of man, which accompanied the demise of the old
>solar system order, may have been occasioned by nothing more than bad luck,
>the old god, gods, or whoever/whatever created life on this earth being
>unable to prevent it.

    You seem to be contradicting your earlier statements about
Mankind having a spiritual meaning and saying that natural processes
could or had sealed our fate. Still, you haven't clarified the position
that the breakup of some older order has any meaning. So what if such
an order was replaced by another? What does it mean? And what does it
have to do with spiritual questions?

    If Mankind is the product of chance occurances, nipping alternative
outcomes in the bud, and I would agree with you in suggesting that these
events are other than the processes of evolution itself, then it would
seem that any implication of Mankind finding his meaning from his origins
would be in vein.

>^    3) No argument that Man's spiritual enlightment is anything so
>^       remote as the past or far away has been made.
>
>I would need clarification on this one.

    There is a view that the answer entailing enlightnment and
questions of spirituality is not in some remote place or time, there
is no Golden Age, and no God on High, but that these truths reside
in every maundane and commonplace person and thing, and that it is
our quest to find them, here and now and inside us. God is nearby and
in everything, and nothing.

>A proper understanding of the antediluvian existence indicates that a lot of
>what we call morality was then unnecessary.  Survival was no large problem,
>the earth having been a sort of a garden then, and there is the further
>observation that a number of the things which morality mitigates against
>would have been either difficult or impossible.  How, for instance, would
>you go about cheating somebody who could comprehend your thoughts as easily
>as his own (the telepathic group consciousness before the flood)?
>^

    This is just a varient of the Garden of Eden and the Fall, which is
really just a loss of innocence. In the Biblical accounts the innocents
lost innocence when they ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and
became self-conscious and contemplated death.

    What you are doing is involking this grand Rube Goldberg world
which was constructed to make the Biblical symbols sound real and
scientific, to try to invent a history that includes the idea of an
earlier paradise destroyed by some catastrophe and incorporating the
same message that Man fell from some prior grace due to external
circumstance.

    There is another view which requires none of this indescriminate
mixing of science and history with what is an allogory for the course of
human development on an individual scale, the loss of innocence of a
toddler and the emergance of consciousness and the individual, with all
the pain and responsibilities and power that entails.

    I am afarid that you are led astray by the delusion that spiritual
language and symbols must be given authority in historical and scientific
terms rather than be regarded as archotypical and psychological.

    Tell me, what do you think of psychology and psychaitry?

>You assume then that much of what we regard as morality has developed as a
>response to conditions of our own age.

    No, not all. There are clearly universals to morality, but they
probably come from shared stereotyps of behavior that have their roots
in our evolutionary past. Some things we sanction as moral are evolutionary
strategies. The scope of all behavior includes things which also are
reproductive or evoluttionary strategies that are not sanctioned.

    I think that condictions, especially social change driven usually
by techneological innovation, drives morality. It is an effect rather
than a cause. Moral systems work best when there is little change and
they are for the subjects of rulers and not the rulers themselves, if
history is any guide.

Bruce Salem