Skip to main content

cosmic purpose

In an earlier post I talk about how "Atkins denies that the universe has a meaning or purpose, and then displays at every point in the discussion, a craving for unbounded knowledge of what is. That atheist is so purpose driven."


More on the same theme.  It seems to me that Atkins' objection to cosmic purpose is based on the fact that there is no measurable "purpose-fact" out there in the world.  Granted.  But he's looking in the wrong place.  Instead of looking for purpose in galaxies and black holes, look at    human beings (and possibly by other rational beings) engaged in distinctively human activities.  That is because of the way that purpose relates us to each other and to the universe.  Place a bunch of humans in the same place and you get -- not a sum of individual purposes -- but a community with one purpose: to discover what others would also recognize as true... something naturally achieved together with them.


Whatever our ultimate goal or purpose might be, it involves truth.  And seeking truth relates us toward all rational beings at any time or place for truths are judgments that hold for all.  And the world is the dwelling of those who share the truth in common, shares in that one goal of all rational beings.  If the world has a purpose, it is (let's risk sounding Heideggerian) to be our home.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dembski's "specified compexity" semiotics and teleology (both ad intra and ad extra)

Integral to Dembski's idea of specified complexity (SC) is the notion that something extrinsic to evolution is the source of the specification in how it develops. He compares SC to the message sent by space aliens in the movie "Contact." In that movie, earthbound scientists determine that radio waves originating in from somewhere in our galaxy are actually a signal being sent by space aliens. The scientists determine that these waves are a signal is the fact that they indicate prime numbers in a way that a random occurrence would not. What is interesting to me is the fact that Dembski relies upon an analogy with a sign rather than a machine. Like a machine, signs are produced by an intelligent being for the sake of something beyond themselves. Machines, if you will, have a meaning. Signs, if you will, produce knowledge. But the meaning/knowledge is in both cases something other than the machine/sign itself. Both signs and machines are purposeful or teleological...
Post a Comment
Read more

particular/universal event/rule

While listening to a recorded lecture on Quine's Two Dogmas of Empiricism, it occurred to me that every rule is in a way, a fact about the world. Think about baseball: from the p.o.v. of an individual player, a baseball rule is not a thing but a guide for acting and interpreting the actions of others.  But this rule, like the action it guides, is part of a concrete individual --i.e., part of an institution that has come into existence at a particular place and time, has endured and  may eventually go out of existence.  The baseball rule, as a feature of that individual, is likewise individual.  The term "baseball rule," on the one hand, links us to a unique cultural event; it can, on the other hand, name a certain type of being.  In this way, it transgresses the boundary between proper and common noun. If there were no such overlap, then we might be tempted to divide our ontology between a bunch of facts "out there" and a bunch of common nouns "in here....
Post a Comment
Read more