No Progress in Philosophy (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, July 24, 2015, 15:20 (3199 days ago) @ dhw

dhw:The surprising thing is how often you present us with information which lends itself to a very different interpretation from your own. But that is often the case when someone has preconceived ideas: they automatically select the pros, and seem to miss the cons. The latter usually underlie my own contribution to the scientific areas of our discussions, the intelligent cell being a prime example.-You have my developed ideas backwards. I was a lazy agnostic after medical school. Lazy in the sense that I had not done any deeper thinking than religion is boring and science will in time probably explain everything, a thought based on how well medical training was explaining the human biology. Then I began to read lay science reviews of the latest discoveries in particle physics and cosmology and surprisingly the Big Bang theory read like the first few chapters in Genesis. I had just written my book on American politics and discussed with my editor doing something on a comparison of the BB and Genesis as a piece of evidence there might be a God. He told me to check out Darwin's theory of evolution. I found it to be totally wanting, and also found a book by a Ph.D. theoretical physicist who also was an Orthodox Jewish scholar of the OT. He had done the comparison of the BB and the first chapters of Genesis, and I was now fully convinced there was a God. What you see from me does not come from an original preconception. I am strongly committed to a self-educated point of view.