I agree with you Matt about the supernatural being an equally valid and important category for philosophical consideration. Recently I have become impatient with deconstruction, but can't get very far with reconstruction. My friend James and I came up with this recently. Help us out.

1) to suppose that nothing exists is preposterous. You cannot argue that there is NOTHING because in the act of arguing you imply something (like mind or reason or logic at the least).

2) Let us all the opposing of NOTHING-not-existing the PREMISE OF ACTUAL EXISTENCE. I cannot thing of anything else at all that makes a better premise, since the opposite of this premise is worthless.

3) If PREMISE OF ACTUAL EXISTENCE than something is.

4) Given that something is, you can then use this something to conclude that there is knowledge in the form of this one something and therefore there is knowledge in reference to this something.

5) Let us call this something ANCHOR. From ANCHOR one creates a system capable of explaining reality. There are many systems to explain reality that are mutually exclusive but also equally defendable because they all have different Anchors.

Here is my question; is there a way to know that any given anchor (hang reality on it) is better than any other? How should we pick one then?

I am afraid however that I must strongly disagree with the notion of validity being buried in ID. It is simply an underhanded way concealing creationism within the idiom of science (my belief system). It is an insult to the careful research and thought of hundreds of thousands, there have been many rebuttals to its weaker points, but there can be no scientific discussion about its stronger points because no such points exist. ID theories about kangaroo origins, for example, do not take place in journals of mammalian biology because, for example, they would require researchers to disregard overwhelming genetic, morphological, distributional, and physical which submitted essays never attempt to discuss. e.g. It doesn't matter if a flood could have been responsible for Australia's endemic fauna (which I have never seen argued well) when for the flood to take place the atmosphere would have to hold over 800 lbs of water per cubic meter before the rains, which would suffocate mammals anyway (an atmosphere of 90% H2O and 8% N with less than 2%O ?!). Anyway, I'm sorry for being so hostile to ID. If it admitted that it was religion, I would be respectful because I really enjoy religious studies, but if it wants to masquerade as science, it will have to disprove many things which we have substantial evidence for before even attempting to prove things that we have (even mild) evidence against. If anyone EVER suggests to me that the vertebrate eye would have had to be designed, than they need to know how the retina is layered. Mammals and birds have very inefficient retinas and I am extremely tired of hearing that it is perfect (the light detecting cells aren't on the surface for example but burried, and blood vessles often cast shadows onto the surface in mammals). the human eye isn't as good as the pigeon, which isn't as good as the bullet shrimp (which is amazing). Mammals lost the ability to see UV. Not "never had" but lost, its in the DNA, we have a broken sequence that has mutated a lot. It is a worthless sequence outside of the context of losing that spike during the Cretaceous--an entire Hue, not Red Green or Blue, but an Entire COLOR! Point blank, and no one has ever explained the differences well without referencing successive periods of selection--mammals were nocturnal, vertebrates came from worms, ect. If you don't know about what is inefficient about the eye, you should not claim that it was designed, and believe me I've heard people try. I would never mis-quote the Bible to my roommate Dan, but he insists on statements about biogeography and paleomorphology that are simply wrong and it disturbs me that so many people buy this tripe.

alright. I'm done. sorry about the froathing at the mouth;)
Have a good night everyone, I'll be trying to memorize all of the bones of the axial skeleton and their important features. shoot me.

posted by Adrian   [6:29 PM]

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