Analytic Philosophy, Creationism, and Space Program

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Analytic Philosophy, Creationism, and Space Program

Humans display an innate desire to ?'lose the body'. In one form or another Analytic Philosophy, Creationism, and the American Space Program are products of the human effort to flee its material body and to send its spirit into a world free of the mortality associated with our body.

"We've evolved to be creationists" is a quote from the "The Atlantic Monthly" article "Is God an Accident?"?-December 2005 issue.

Paul Bloom, author of the article, informs us that "human beings come into the world with a predisposition to believe in supernatural phenomenathis predisposition is an incidental by-product of cognitive functioning gone awry".

Paul Bloom informs us that nearly everyone on earth believes in miracles, afterlife, and the creation of the earth by some supernatural power. While doing research into infant behavior, psychologists have recently discovered that humans are born with a predisposition to believe in some supernatural actuality. These scientists conclude that this predisposition is a random happenstance of cognitive functioning gone awry. These conclusions led to the question "Is God an Accident?"

I have just found the answer to a question that has baffled me for years. Why do non-believers love to talk religion? Perhaps talking about religion is much like ?'whistling past the cemetery'.

Everyone loves to talk religion because we are all born with the "gut feeling" that there is a body/mind duality. Because we "feel" that mind is a "spiritual" entity we easily accommodate heaven, soul, god etc.

Science says that this gut feeling is a result of "cognitive functioning gone awry" and religion tells us that this is a matter of faith.

In the 20th century Anglo-American philosophy took the "linguistic turn". The characteristic of this style of philosophy "is based on the belief that it is by analyzing language that we come to understand everything that supposedly matters to philosophy, such as concepts, meaning, reference, knowledge, truth, reason, and value."?-George Lakoff

Lakoff considers this turn to linguistics was fundamentally correct but that it was unfortunately too narrowly focused on the work of mathematician Gottlob Frege.

Frege was too narrowly focused upon making mathematics an objective mind-independent reality, which lead him "to adopt a view of all meaning and thought as disembodied and formalUnder Frege's influence analytic philosophy?-a philosophy whose central focus was language?-defined itself as formal and logical analysis of allegedly universal, disembodied senses (meanings), propositions , and functions."

The American space program is an obvious effort to seek out a new world somewhere in the heavens that will be like a giant step for mankind's effort not only to discard our mortal body but to discard our trashed-out and dying planet.

This tradition of an autonomous reason began long before evolutionary theory and has held strongly since then without consideration, it seems to me, of the theories of Darwin and of biological science. Cognitive science has in the last three decades developed considerable empirical evidence supporting Darwin and not supporting the traditional theories of philosophy regarding the autonomy of reason. Cognitive science has focused a great deal of empirical science toward discovering the nature of the embodied mind.

I think that humans try too desperately to move our presumed position between God and animal closer to God and further from our hairy ancestors. What do you think about this flight from the body and the planet?

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Re: Analytic Philosophy, Creationism, and Space Program

coberst wrote:

I think that humans try too desperately to move our presumed position between God and animal closer to God and further from our hairy ancestors. What do you think about this flight from the body and the planet?

Is escaping from what is unpleasant or painful not natural for life forms with sensual activity? Those knowing nothing try to escape because of instinct and the wise because they realize that only by moving forward their is a chance to reach true freedom because man will never be free as long as he remains imprisoned in a body bound to material dependency and never ending desire.

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Re: Analytic Philosophy, Creationism, and Space Program

cob erst wrote:

The American space program is an obvious effort to seek out a new world somewhere in the heavens that will be like a giant step for mankind's effort not only to discard our mortal body but to discard our trashed-out and dying planet.

The Captain beat you to it in a more memorable quote:

Space: The final frontier
These are the voyages of the Starship, Enterprise
Its 5 year mission
To explore strange new worlds
To seek out new life and new civilizations
To boldly go where no man has gone before

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That's a slightly odd twist to analytic philosophy. True, it often did deal with formal constructions that didn't apply to direct objects (abstract logic - kind of like math), but it wasn't some kind of appeal to an otherworldly realm. In fact, the goal of analytic philosophy was largely to show to much of traditional philosophy, which concerned itself with questions relating to immortality, God, heaven, etc., was in fact completely senseless and therefore had no meaning. (To be technical, many analytic philosophy believe(d) that a statement must be capable of being disproven in order for it to even have a meaning at all. If there is no situation under which I refuse to believe in God, even if the worst possible occurrence just leads me to say "It's God's will, who am I to say?", then the statement "God exists" corresponds to no *particular* empirical state and therefore has no meaning. There is no situation in which I would say "God does not exist," so saying "God exists" is meaningless.) Analytic philosophy is generally associated with precise rigor and empirically verifiable statement, not, what analytic philosophers might call, mystical imagination.

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coberst wrote:

Paul Bloom, author of the article, informs us that "human beings come into the world with a predisposition to believe in supernatural phenomenathis predisposition is an incidental by-product of cognitive functioning gone awry".

It's not a byproduct of cognigive function gone awry. It's a byproduct of logically extrapolating limited experiences and observations to aspects of nature which are beyond our senses ability to interpret.

With only limited information, it would be logically correct to assume the sun goes around the Earth and not the other way around.

With only limited information, it seems reasonable to assume that aspects of our own behavior and thought are reflected in larger aspects of nature.

It is only with discipline of thought that we realize that these extrapolations are only possible, not necessarily probable. And with the addition of more and more information, certain possibilities can be eliminated, leaving possibilities with higher and higher probability of accuracy.

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Buescher wrote:

That's a slightly odd twist to analytic philosophy. True, it often did deal with formal constructions that didn't apply to direct objects (abstract logic - kind of like math), but it wasn't some kind of appeal to an otherworldly realm. In fact, the goal of analytic philosophy was largely to show to much of traditional philosophy, which concerned itself with questions relating to immortality, God, heaven, etc., was in fact completely senseless and therefore had no meaning. (To be technical, many analytic philosophy believe(d) that a statement must be capable of being disproven in order for it to even have a meaning at all. If there is no situation under which I refuse to believe in God, even if the worst possible occurrence just leads me to say "It's God's will, who am I to say?", then the statement "God exists" corresponds to no *particular* empirical state and therefore has no meaning. There is no situation in which I would say "God does not exist," so saying "God exists" is meaningless.) Analytic philosophy is generally associated with precise rigor and empirically verifiable statement, not, what analytic philosophers might call, mystical imagination.

Analytic Philosophy, in its attempt to lose the body, ignored our inheritance from our animal ancestors. It seems that traditional philosophy has constantly run from recognizing that our reasoning capacity is constructed upon the reasoning capacity we have inherited with our animal nature.

Cognitive science has developed a new paradigm centered around the theory of the embodied mind.

The three major findings of cognitive science are:
The mind is inherently embodied.
Thought is mostly unconscious.
Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.

These findings of cognitive science are profoundly disquieting for traditional thinking in two respects. "First, they tell us that human reason is a form of animal reason, a reason inextricably tied to our bodies and the peculiarities of our brains. Second, these results tell us that our bodies, brains, and interactions with our environment provide the mostly unconscious basis for our everyday metaphysics, that is, our sense of what is real."

Just from a lay-person's point of view - this seems to make the most sense to me. It seems to me to be a good mix or meeting of the best parts of idealism with the best parts of realism.

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Analytic Philosophy, Creationism, and Space Program

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