I have thoroughly enjoyed listening to Mary Eberstadt's satire on atheism. The main benefit I got from it was excellent counter-arguments about theism/atheism and the aesthetic (e.g., Chartres) and moral (see later)high ground. One point she makes is that abortion is the key issue of our day and the theists have been right on this. Another is the fact that atheists like Steven Pinker and Peter Singer have argued for infanticide and bestiality respectively. If these are heinous yet acceptable in principle to atheists, then the claim that an atheist is as likely to be moral is problematic. Furthermore, she notes an excellent survey that correlates theism/atheism with generosity/selfishness respectively when it comes to giving $$$ to charity. Finally, her comeback to Dennet's reference to atheists as "brites" is to point out "the woman problem," i.e., that women are more likely to believe in God than men: so the question Eberstadt poses is, does Dennet believe that men are brighter than women?
How about defining it as an instance of functional complexity? And treating the list of properties as following necessarily from this definition? Okay, this is very diamond-in-the-rough (or perhaps zirconium...) but here goes my thoughts on the matter: (Complexity) Many diverse parts (functional) acting for the sake of the whole I think I need to add something like "not as the instrument of another" or something like that. Given that they act together as one whole and given entropy, etc., the organism will need to posses more order than its surroundings (homeostasis). It will therefore need to take in energy (nutrition), which it will use to sustain its readiness to interact with its environment so as to preserve its own being (homeostasis again?), but which will eventually break down (death), so that in order for that life form to continue it will need to duplicate itself (reproduction), which, upon occurring, will involve both development (growth) to maturity and...
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