The Competition of Memes (Humans)

by xeno6696 , Omaha NE, Saturday, July 17, 2010, 15:34

As I stated briefly in the "Origins: A skeptics..." thread, the off-topic exploration of Dialectical Materialism vs. Idealism in the book serves as the primary motivator to why dhw, David, George, and myself cannot come to any concise agreement.

At this stage of the game, we are simply ignorant of the nature of origins--though we're better off than we were 100 years ago. But in the book Shapiro constantly says that we're in-between paradigms right now--which to me chillingly recreates my long-ago point that the research needs to find a "pidgin chemistry," some combination of bio/organic/inorganic chemistry that simply doesn't exist at this point.

But to stick to the thrust of my thread; the only disagreement we really have is really due to the differing levels of skepticism exercise.

Lets review the present nature of the endeavor:

Thus far, science can create some, but not all of the needed components for life. Life, when pared down as far as we can get it, requires DNA (for information storage) and enzymes (to carry out the functions of the cells.) The present state is a "Chicken and egg" conundrum.

I can say now that I do have a deeper appreciation of the intelligence argument. However, I'm completely in line with Shapiro that invoking a Watchmaker isn't science and cannot be substantiated. The reason for this is because in my epistemology, I only accept what amounts to material evidence as knowledge. But note that it is exactly at this point where we all diverge; at the level of personal frameworks or "memes" as it were.

David argues a 'la Adler; that because we have been unable to create life from scratch, we can conclude at this time that it did not have a spontaneous (as in spontaneous generation) origin--perhaps for no other reason that it required intelligence for man to do it in the first place.

dhw argues more like Shapiro or myself; though I can only guess at his framework for evaluating claims, though it appears quite similar to my own: Caution is key. Only state what we KNOW. The amount of truth that can be attributed to a claim is paramount--and in the case of a creator we can't "KNOW," and we also have no reason to believe in spontaneous generation.

George (Though I have rather limited experience with him here) seems to argue very much like Dawkins. (Religions are debunked purely by the fact that nearly all their claims on the material world have been proven false; so why bother?)

The problem, is that thus far it appears that the only avenue for raw materialism is spontaneous generation. We're just not close enough for anyone to be satisfied. It is more truthful to the actual state to say "I don't know" than to assert (and it is only assertion) atheism or theism.

As we can tell; personal frameworks litter this landscape. So what--should we do to remedy this?

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As a rule, men worry more about what they can't see than about what they can.
Julius Caesar