Analytic Philosophy, Creationism, and Space Program

Humans display an innate desire to ‘lose the body’. In one form or another Analytic Philosophy, Creationism, and the American Space Program are products of the human effort to flee its material body and to send its spirit into a world free of the mortality associated with our body.

“We’ve evolved to be creationists” is a quote from the “The Atlantic Monthly” article “Is God an Accident?”—December 2005 issue.

Paul Bloom, author of the article, informs us that “human beings come into the world with a predisposition to believe in supernatural phenomena…this predisposition is an incidental by-product of cognitive functioning gone awry”.

Paul Bloom informs us that nearly everyone on earth believes in miracles, afterlife, and the creation of the earth by some supernatural power. While doing research into infant behavior, psychologists have recently discovered that humans are born with a predisposition to believe in some supernatural actuality. These scientists conclude that this predisposition is a random happenstance of cognitive functioning gone awry. These conclusions led to the question “Is God an Accident?”

I have just found the answer to a question that has baffled me for years. Why do non-believers love to talk religion? Perhaps talking about religion is much like ‘whistling past the cemetery’.

Everyone loves to talk religion because we are all born with the “gut feeling” that there is a body/mind duality. Because we “feel” that mind is a “spiritual” entity we easily accommodate heaven, soul, god etc.

Science says that this gut feeling is a result of “cognitive functioning gone awry” and religion tells us that this is a matter of faith.

In the 20th century Anglo-American philosophy took the “linguistic turn”. The characteristic of this style of philosophy “is based on the belief that it is by analyzing language that we come to understand everything that supposedly matters to philosophy, such as concepts, meaning, reference, knowledge, truth, reason, and value.”—George Lakoff

Lakoff considers this turn to linguistics was fundamentally correct but that it was unfortunately too narrowly focused on the work of mathematician Gottlob Frege.

Frege was too narrowly focused upon making mathematics an objective mind-independent reality, which lead him “to adopt a view of all meaning and thought as disembodied and formal…Under Frege’s influence analytic philosophy—a philosophy whose central focus was language—defined itself as formal and logical analysis of allegedly universal, disembodied senses (meanings), propositions , and functions.”

The American space program is an obvious effort to seek out a new world somewhere in the heavens that will be like a giant step for mankind’s effort not only to discard our mortal body but to discard our trashed-out and dying planet.

This tradition of an autonomous reason began long before evolutionary theory and has held strongly since then without consideration, it seems to me, of the theories of Darwin and of biological science. Cognitive science has in the last three decades developed considerable empirical evidence supporting Darwin and not supporting the traditional theories of philosophy regarding the autonomy of reason. Cognitive science has focused a great deal of empirical science toward discovering the nature of the embodied mind.

I think that humans try too desperately to move our presumed position between God and animal closer to God and further from our hairy ancestors. What do you think about this flight from the body and the planet?

Once we are able to to accept the sobering truth that we are as yet little more than 'trained monkeys', we may only then begin the process of training ourselves to see more than a monkey does.

Why do you think the Planet is 'trashed-out and dying' at all? No screeching from the trees has any significance unless it is put into Real action.

You speak of 'flights from the body' as if this were a foregone 'truth', or even a Real possibility. 'God' is a 'flight from the body' which represents no truth whatsoever, a delusional construct with no grounding in Reality, something 'manipulatable' that an individual can mold to a shape of their own 'fantastical' liking.

The process of 'cognition' is not separable from the host (body) in which it occurs, as they are aspects of the same entity of being. A physical 'organ' is evolved and adapted to 'sense' its surroundings. How is it possible for these 'senses' to exist without the host that they are performing the task for? It is not, and they do not. If we want these things to continue to exist after we 'die', we must pass on the 'code' to a newer version of ourselves, our 'offspring'.

It is 'philosophy' itself that needs as desperate shake up. Ideas concerning 'evolution' have provided the foundations of this necessary shaking, as this has brought us all a step closer to Realism. So, we must learn to see 'old philosophy' by taking into account the dimness of the times in which it was written, and not the brighter and more lucid forms we are capable of today, because of greater understanding.


At some point Man will cease to be 'Man', because evolution is not a process of beginning or endings, but one of continual becoming/change. It is becoming apparent that 'we' will become more dependant on our manipulations of other forms of existence. The 'robot future' looks abhorent from our 'organic' position, but is just another 'form' of possibility. 'Emotion' (from which 'morality' springs) is another 'form', and like all others it does not have to exist, it just currently does. That which we have evolved to 'counter' our own barbarity (love), turns out to be as equally, yet unconsciously, barbaric (hate) as anything else!



g.

What crapola! It's an effort to explore our surroundings.

QUOTE

The American Space Program is a product of the human effort to flee its material body and to send its spirit into a world free of the mortality associated with our body?