The new atheists like to go on and on about how ancient man thought wrongly that Earth is the center of the cosmos, etc. and how this mistake supported anthropocentric teleology. A comment made by C S Lewsi in God in the Dock may address this claim. He points out that the very first page of Ptolemy's Almagest makes it quite clear that ancient man did not think the earth large in comparison to the rest of the cosmos. Perhaps this point helps disabuse the new atheists of their view of teleology as being based upon an anthropocentric cosmology.
Here is a summary and comments on the essay Freedom and Resentment by PF Strawson. He makes some great points, and when he is wrong, it is in such a way as to clarify things a great deal. My non-deterministic position is much better thanks to having read this. I’ll summarize it in this post and respond in a later one. In a nutshell: PFS first argues that personal resentment that we may feel toward another for having failed to show goodwill toward us would have no problem coexisting with the conviction that determinism is true. Moral disapprobation, as an analog to resentment, is likewise capable of coexisting with deterministic convictions. In fact, it would seem nearly impossible for a normally-constituted person (i.e., a non-sociopath) to leave behind the web of moral convictions, even if that person is a determinist. In this way, by arguing that moral and determinist convictions can coexist in the same person, PFS undermines the libertarian argument ...
Comments