Using various search terms I generated a list, a couple you have and others you can check, as I ended up with a generous selection that also might show how the debate has developed and perhaps can give ideas for others to new articles. The method was to select a word enter it on the Sott search engine and copying links. For the first list of links, I used Behe, Darwin, Intelligent design, evolution news, darwinism, creationism, John Sanford, Douglas Axe, William Demski, Jonathan Wells, Steve Meyer and then entered titles, but not all, found on English Sott in column B while writing the search word in column A. Thus I could later order according to the title and remove the doubles, if any. When I came to "evolutionary" and "evolution" it became so long, that I entered those in a separate list. Finally there is a list composed of results on Dawkins and atheist, followed by a list with nihilism and postmodernism. The post maximum is 64,000 and I had to split it up, or so it said!
Darwin's Black Box - Michael J. Behe and Intelligent Design
- Thread starter Laura
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And then the other list with using evolution and evolutionary:
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Lists searching atheists and Dawkins. Here I did include a few of the links that had been mentioned before:
Before closing, I chose the search words postmodernism and nihilism:
Ending the lists of links with one that includes Darwinism, Intelligent Design and Information is an indication I have come back to where I began, like a circle - at least for now :)
Mandatory Intellectomy
Jedi Master
It really is an amazing (and very much ongoing) learning experience. I never imagined I would get interested in biology. So I thought about why that is, since in general, I'm definitely more interested in consciousness than matter.
This first lead me to the notion that it's microbiology in particular. DNA, proteins, etc. And that drove home the notion that it's the code, the information, and the intricacy of the systems involved. This relates more to my interest in programming and linguistics than anything really biology-related.
It's the ingenious design of these things that got me interested in all this.
It really is amazing how sophisticated the machinery inside the cell is. And it's also amazing how incredibly dumb it is to suggest it arose randomly out of dead chemicals. The disconnection from reality in Darwinism just keeps boggling my mind.
Mandatory Intellectomy
Jedi Master
Wow, thorbiorn, those are amazing videos for anyone who wants to have a better idea of what goes on on the molecular level and what it looks like. I have mostly figured this out from texts and images already, but it's still awesome to see it like this. How anybody can think all this is just an accident is incomprehensible.
Great idea. Count me in.
Perhaps something like this?
Irreducible Complexity - Revolt!
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The material realms are just platforms for the evolution of consciousness. This is something I already knew. (I'm not really sure how, I just was never a believer in Darwinian evolution.) As such, I think this is where Collingwood did such an amazing job of thinking things out. According to Collingwood, the evolution of thought is a process by which the mind goes from implicitly understanding or grasping certain things under certain illusions or thinking errors, to recognizing certain errors in thought rendering what was implicit, explicit.
So when I say there's more at stake here than whether it's possible to be good while enmeshed in materialistic conceptions of reality, It's really about the very conscious evolution of the human race that's at stake here. OSIT
I know we're basically saying the same thing here, A. I. I'm just trying to put it in my own words.
This is the rationalist, Kantian, and partly Sam Harris-like stance on it. But I'm not so sure it can work like that, at least not without some additional (and murky) part played by feelings, conscience, and unconscious beliefs. It's just not as straight-forward as the Kantian/Harris types make it seem like - that all you need is some rational thinking and off you go.
The problem is that while you can think about the greater benefit for society, you are still strongly tempted to act immorally for your own benefit. If you know you'll get away with it, if you know nobody will ever find out, and you know the gains are large - then it's kind of hard to engage in Kantian gymnastics in such a situation, isn't it? Why not just charge a little more than you deserve, why not take subtle advantage of someone, why not spend the evening binge-watching on Netflix? Why not leave the dishes to your spouse because you are in no mood washing dishes, why not tell a little lie to make a problem go away instead of fixing it? Why indeed?
This is not to say that people can't do the right thing without religion, but still, there needs to be something more IMO, at least in my experience. Because doing the wrong thing is always the easiest option. And it's so, so damn hard to do the right thing in many situations that we need everything we can muster to fight our bad tendencies. Like a super-powerful conviction that every single little thing you do matters and reverberates throughout the universe. Like the conviction that you will be held accountable in the next life for your actions. Like the feeling that there are powerful forces beyond your control that represent a higher order that you violate at your own peril. Things like that.
In the book "Paul and the Stoics", Troels Engberg-Pedersen lays bare the common understanding of both Paul and the Stoics that your ethical stance must completely fill your life, in everything you do, all the time. That way, transformation can happen. With Paul, it's "being in Christ", with the Stoics, it's more about an all-encompassing rationality, though it's important to define these words properly. I think the point is: you can't just think about this or that ethical conundrum when you encounter it, using Kantian philosophy or whatever. No, you must strive towards the Good and the Beautiful in every second of your life, with every breath you take. But since we humans forget ourselves all the time, and it's so difficult to boot, we cannot do this without a motivation and dedication of supreme power.
I agree with you that simple, authoritarian religious dogma doesn't cut it, and that rationality and critical thinking play a big role in all of this. But again, I think you need more than that - and that "more" does point towards a higher realm of some sort, however you choose to think about it. It could also be a connectedness via our higher centers to the realm of "objective morality", something we can sense if we pay attention to it and actively work towards overcoming our base natures. And in a sense, thinking about such things rationally CAN be the key. But some primitive utalitarian "let's maximize happiness" doctrine à la Sam Harris doesn't even begin to address the issue.
A final point: if you are an atheist, you tend to elevate your own thinking, your own rationality to the level of God. You think you can know right from wrong just by thinking things through - as if you could foresee what's best for you, for society, for the world. But things always turn out to be much more complex than we think. And how many "rational", well-intentioned ideas have led to so much suffering!
I think this fact, that we are not God and cannot "calculate" or even know what's "good for the world", means we need to "play ball" with God/the Universe, in the sense that we need to pay close attention to our interactions with the cosmos and how it responds. There is constant communication going on through the medium of our lives unfolding. I think learning to understand this "language" is more important than thinking about our decisions in terms of "if everyone did this, would it be good for society"? We can't know, and besides, it's kind of missing the point: we are interacting with the Cosmos individually. What's good for us may be bad for someone else, and vice-versa.
Sorry for the long post - I think it's an interesting question and not one that can be easily settled.
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I think M.I. would benefit from reading 'Whitehead's Radically Different Postmodern Philosophy.'
Yes! I think I intuited this all along but still insisted on trying to find an easier way through life with correspondingly crappy results. What you describe here makes life such a vastly more interesting and satisfying experience once grasped and utilized. I hope you can somehow work that idea into your article!
Mandatory Intellectomy
Jedi Master
This is clearly a controversial issue, and maybe we cannot objectively answer some of the questions. I think even religious people are perfectly capable of doing all those things you mentioned here, so we know religiousness doesn't guarantee morality. As for the question whether morality is possible without religion, this may be hard to answer if we're not that person. I mean, I'm not religious, but it's not strictly about religion - there's spirituality or whatever name we can use, and I can't really know how I would see things if I had none of that, so maybe you're right. But how can we really tell?
This is certainly a compelling argument. It's clear that, as I've said, some ideas are more conducive to morality than others, but whether a particular idea is absolutely necessary for morality to exist is difficult to objectively judge. But maybe the general tendencies are enough to make a valid point. At any rate, arriving at a properly moral stance without any metaphysical ideas would at the very least require more thinking that most people ever do.
So it's not that I disagree in general. I'm just not sure that I would categorically say that morality is impossible without some kind of "religiousness". It may just be highly improbable. (Also saying it's "impossible" is a lot more likely to trigger people into arguing, and maybe I've seen a lot of similar triggering by anti-Darwinist ideas lately, so I'm a bit wary of making any categorical statements about things I'm not really sure about.)
We don't need long lists of every article related to the topic of ID, we need a concise list of 8 to 10 articles that are hard hitters like Luc's and MI's that we can Tweet and post on FB every day. Perhaps a certain volume of such posts would have an effect? And since it's not really political, might fly under the censorship radar. At least for a while.