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Vivid

Can you raise the dosh?

If you send me a decent manuscript, I'll see what I can do.

stunney:

Raevmo, it doesn't matter what evidence anyone offered, because you yourself could be granted a series of heavenly visions, see how babies are wonderfully nurtured in paradise, encounter your deceased relatives, have stimulating conversations with Jesus, and you would attribute it all to an abnormality in your brain because nothing else would be consistent with your worldview.

R: That's not true. Such evidence might very well change my worldview, honestly. But no luck so far.

That reminds me of a joke a Polish sculptor friend of mine told me. There's a Polish peasant farmer who suffers tragedy after disaster after misfortune. He climbs a local mountain, falls to his knees, and with arms outstretched, tears flowing, and in his rural dialect demands of God to know why. Why such a terrible run of very bad luck. "Why, God? Why me? What have I done to deserve all this? Why have you done this to me? Why, God, why?"

Suddenly the voice of God speaks, using the same rural dialect: "I just don't like you, that's all".:lol:

me: Did I tell you that one of my uncles is the retired head of the Vatican Archives? He might be able to swing it.

R: No you didn't, but I'm impressed. Then I guess you must have met the infallible man yourself.

My father met JP2. But then, so did a lot of people.

I'm more interested in Molinist explanations of papal infallibility in terms of scientia media.

And your uncle should be able to supply you with enough juicy information to make you the next Dan Brown.

He's too scholarly for that kind of thing, I think. Though he has been on TV in America several times in the past few years. Maybe all he needs is a 8-figure sum and a reason to leave most of it to me in his will.

Can you raise the dosh?

Um, Bradford, you quoted from it three times.

It's old news then?:grin:

You assume too much Keiths. I had not read your response to AnaxagorasRules.

Um, Bradford, you quoted from it three times.

Kind of hard to do without reading it first, isn't it?

Now that I've pointed out some serious flaws in those ideas, Bradford is falling back on his "the soul can't be studied empirically" mantra.

You assume too much Keiths. I had not read your response to AnaxagorasRules. I still think he hits curve balls well though.

Now that I've pointed out some serious flaws in those ideas, Bradford is falling back on his "the soul can't be studied empirically" mantra.

He wrote:

There is a preliminary question that preceeds this: does the phenomenon in question lend itself to empirical study?… The difference of course lies in the fact that flying is a physical phenomenon appropriate for scientific statements.

Bradford,

You maintain that the soul is the seat of the will. If you are right, then the action of the soul has physical consequences. If a man decides to propose to his beloved, then according to you his soul sets in motion a series of events culminating in the movement of the man's mouth and lungs to form the words "will you marry me?" It's a physical phenomenon, just like flying.

ID opponents want to have it both ways. They want to rule out ID inferences based on divine causality while attempting to debunk religious concepts through science.

Not this ID opponent. As I've made abundantly clear, I hold that divine causality, like the soul, can be tested if it has empirical consequences. Some concepts of divine causality do have empirical consequences; others don't.

I could even argue that there is only one soul in the entire world (an idea that might appeal to mcromer) and that it just switches among all the world's people very rapidly, many times per second.

Pretty accurate, except for the "time slicing" part. . .you're hung up in the notion of time being fundamentally real.

Time and space are relationships between observables. The demonstrated experimental findings of quantum mechanics shows us that all the apparently separate observables are in fact aspects of a single unified whole. A whole appearing as seemingly separate parts.

Mystics of every culture and belief system (including some of the greatest heroes of science) have always spoken of this.

Near-death experiencers describe the same thing. We are one Consciousness, experiencing the illusion of being separate, "material" beings.

If you're interested in the truth, the last thing you want is a team full of people who already agree on a conclusion and are just looking for ways to justify it.

So why does that sound almost exactly like how academia addresses controversial ideas (like ID or telepathy or religious belief)?

And the belief that non-teleological processes explain the origin of life. Those are the kinds of remarks that come back and bite ID opponents.

If you're interested in the truth, the last thing you want is a team full of people who already agree on a conclusion and are just looking for ways to justify it.

So why does that sound almost exactly like how academia addresses controversial ideas (like ID or telepathy or religious belief)?