The Human Question

According to those who advocate methodological naturalism, we must presume that no process is an exception to the laws of nature: otherwise, (in those cases in which natural causes lay deeply hidden) we would fail to seek and eventually discover those causes.  This presumption is methodological; nevertheless, the  danger is that method will become dogma.  That is, one may end up thinking that one who wishes to foster scientific rationality must assert that there is no God who intervenes: "Law (and chance) account for everything; otherwise, nature can be regarded as a function of divine caprice." But if the fruitful search for laws of nature requires ontological naturalism (i.e., the assertion  that there is no supernatural intervention), then it requires determinism as well. For if everything in nature is the result of the confluence of chance and law, then human freedom cannot exist; and if humans are not free, then  no science is possible! It follows ...

"When a man makes his way through a piece of wood, he alone has made something new." Where did he say that?

Simply positing a multiverse doesn't get rid of theism: for if every "verse" has life as well as the conditions for life and does so in a manner that seems improbable, then you have a repetition of the same problem.  You have an intensification of the anthropic principle.

The claim that one cannot make a statement about the totality is self-destructive, for it has the totality itself as its background.  That is, it couldn't be true unless its true always and everywhere.

Perhaps it is better to ask questions about human creativity before asking about human freedom.  That is, how is it that we can produce something new?  What does it mean to say that we produce something new?  Do we really ever produce something new? The answer will involve the awareness of more than the individuals before oneself, more than what one can imagine, but of essence/being/stuff like htat.  There is an ordering of the lower that one can see or imagine toward the higher that is beyond the imaginable.  Perhaps the "meaning" of our acts must be framed in terms of this ordering of lower to higher.  And perhaps freedom of action is best understood in terms of this ordering.  Perhaps actions are free inasmuch as they possess this "meaning."  Perhaps this meaning is invisible to an ideological materialist in the same way that written words are meaningless to someone who doesn't speak the language in which they are written Perhaps the best e...

I wonder if it would be fruitful to contrast Heidegger's notion of finitude with the fact that a tendency to think of the infinite is involved in each abstract thought....

This post is part of a thought experiment I'm conducting, using emergentism as a  pivotal position.... one that opens the door to a view of nature that undercuts materialism, is perhaps to an Aristotelian understanding of matter/form and leads to theism. Materialists would look at human activities as more complicated versions of those done by lower animals.  Such a position is reductionistics inasmuch as it implies that what-seems-higher is just a more complicated version of the lower (we are just a pile of chemicals, etc.) Emergence affirms that higher level activites are not reducible.  It also maintains that higher operations build upon lower (I would want to correct that position  in part). My point is that "higher" always has to do with higher levels of unity.  Think of the knowledge of universal truths; and of the notion of the common good.  These involve objects that are one and the same for many different folks at different times.  Object...

Insist on ontological reductionism while granting that explanatory reductionism is false?  Isn't there something akin to fideism in that position?