Karen Armstrong on Aljazeera.net announces her new book on Axial Age. Life is not fair, someone who has made a complete bollocks of the question of the Axial Age writes a book that will sell due to her reputation.
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Gene Expression discussing transhumanism links to Wikipedia’s article on Axial Age, which is really quite dreadful. There is a note saying the page requires cleanup, and I wonder if they would go for my approach.
This kind of confusion over the Axial Age has been the object of several efforts on my part, check Was There an Axial Age?. There certainly was, but we ought to change the terminology, and in any case my ‘eonic model’ does the ‘clean up’ necessary, but because I take on Darwin, the correction gets shunted off.
The article makes one good point: the original word for ‘Axial’ having the meaning ‘pivotal’.
Checking out Fuller’s Social Epistemology at Wikipedia, the Epistemology link didn’t even contain a reference to Kant.
I think that, modern critiques of Kant notwithstanding, Kant is and remains at the peak of epistemological balance.
Kant has been the victim of three (or more) confusing distractions, Hegel’s attack, Nietzsche’s, and the pragmatists’.
And the result? Precisely the epistemological bedlam we find currently, and well documented by Steve Fuller in various of his books.
Noone is apparently able to surpass Kant, either because of the positivistic rejection of ethical considerations, or else because of the subtle way Nietzsche seems to convince those he somehow intimidates.
Actually, once you have been thru Nietzsche’s thunder symphony and he has made his point all that begins to pall and you realize that Kant remains about what he always was, the pivot around which the whole discussion turns.
Everyone is like a gunslinger trying to take out Kant, to become the new foundationalist debunking foundationalism. Nietzsche is especially clever at insinuating his new foundations in the name of anti-foundationalism. With what result? He can’t even handle the issue of cruelty, and does so in superb prose style.
Is that brilliant or a mess?
E. O. Wilson in USA Today wants me to accept the fault line between science and religion. What on earth for?
Wilson is completely unrepentant on natural selection, so the fault line persists. ID is also at fault, so that has to go.
Presto, we have a bridge between science and religion. Actually, the right approach would be to have religions with no content, dogmatically. Buddhism came/comes close to that, its many accretions notwithstanding.
Religion should be about consciousness, and a series of gestures or incidents of self-awareness. Doctrines of the dogmatic type are the curse that has ruined monotheism.
A similar fate will overtake biology is Darwinists foist their religious attitude on the subject.
I got an email from someone who had read an amazon review of mine on Armstrong’s Battle For God. I had forgotten that I had reviewed it, but went to look, see below.
Armstrong’s idea of a second Axial Age doesn’t quite add up, as I have commented before on this blog, search ‘Axial Age’ in the search box.
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Guardian has an article on Steve Fuller who testified at the Dover trial. I would certainly agree that Darwinism has had its own way for too long, but is ID really going to correct the problem?
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Continuing our Descent of Man Revisited series, day 4: The Metaphysics of Evolution
Forwarded from Rad-Green
January 27, 2006
Counter Currents
www.CounterCurrents.org
NASA: 2005 Was Warmest Year on Record
by
Deborah Zabarenko Reuters
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Uncommon Descent’s post title The Plausibility of (ID) Life rather gives their game away: insinuate ID into the hard work of (post-)Darwinians who are trying hard to extend our understanding of biological mechanisms. The work of Kirschner and Gerhart shows precisely the kind of hard-earned insights gained from close study of the limits of selection that an arbitrary ‘conversion’ to ID could never achieve.
From the always interesting Panspermia, Ward’s Life As We Do Not Know It
Like almost everyone else, Ward ignores the software aspect of the origin-of-life problem. Nothing new about that. But with all his willingness to consider every imaginable scenario, we wish he were more receptive to stronger versions of panspermia. He admits only the standard two possibilities for the origin-of-life: God or “some chemical pathway” (p xxiv). But to us, the complete lack of direct evidence for any origin-of-life, anywhere, ever, suggests a third possibility: life always existed.
Telic Thoughts, debating Evolutionblog, compares ID to early Darwinism: Big Ideas Take Time. ID, thuswise, is going to suddenly take off, like Darwinism (finally) did.
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Catholic online has a headline: ID belittles God. This is a key issue for ID. How could anyone seriously maintain divinity would micromanage evolutionary detail?
This does not mean that I really agree with much in this article, which is treading the difficult terrain close to doublethink.
I think theology has a problem with Darwin any way you look at it. If you affirm evolution, that is one thing, but if you affirm natural selection you have subtle detail problems in unforeseen collisions with theology.
Continuing with my new blogbook, Descent of Man Revisited, I have put up the second section:
Beyond Natural Selection
We are about to get bombarded with another round of fake science on religion in the sociobiology vein: Dennett’s Breaking the Spell is due out next week, and I find the question depressing because this type of material has an immense groupie following, and is ground out according to the Dawkins formula.
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The repetitious ID pitch starts to get on one’s nerves. The IDM has formulated a package, and plans to simply repeat that ad infinitum to create a critical mass of confused Darwin doubters.
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Darwinism has not produced a satisfactory account of the descent of man. The eonic effect shows why, and if you feel unsure, confused or intimidated by either Darwinists or their intelligent design confreres, this different approach to the whole subject might prove useful, a theoretical self-defense in a situation where you are being bullied into submission.
So, in addition to the online text, I am starting up a new blogbook on the question of history, evolution, and the eonic effect: Descent of Man Revisited, in seven chapters and seven sections. That should produce a short book in 49 days, plus or minus!
Start here: Descent Of Man Revisited: Start Page
or jump to first section:
One Long Argument
An interesting passage from Neil Shanks’ God, The Devil, and Darwin: A Critique of Intelligent Design Theory (Oxford, 2004).
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A note on irreducible complexity at Cleveland Jewish News.
The point is well taken that we have no real definition of what is ‘complex’. There is an irony here if we think of Paley’s watch. That’s not complexity. It’s moronic simplicity compared to even very simple biochemical complexes in their context.
However, I don’t agree with the analogy of the New York economy. Economies show considerable design, and all in fact designed ‘free market’ economies, which is not the same as totally undesigned economies.
Not that undesigned economies might rapidly be modified by those who are ‘designed’ to be exploited by the ruling class which designs and controls them.
But in any case, the question of what constitutes ‘complex’ design is relative to the intelligence of the scientist observing nature.
Darksyde at Daily Kos interviews DR Wesley Elsberry who currently serves as the Information Project Director at the National Center for Science Education.
Terrific.
But what happened to my diary at Daily Kos?.
Censored, that’s what! The edit button quietly disappeared, and sending an email to anyone there to protest is hopeless.
That strategy here is digging its own grave, because the tide is against Neo-Darwinism over the long haul.
My innocent essays, e.g. Toward A Liberal Postdarwinism, might help here, but the Talk.Origins and NCSE gangs have taken over, I guess.
Don’t believe the NCSE. Heresy is rampant among specialists:
Franklin Harold’s The Way of The Cell (Oxford, 2001)
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After all the use to which I put Kant in my eonic model it is ironic that I differ on a key point, to the consternation of some students of Kant.
But the issue of teleology is nothing but endless muddle. I think my approach does the job right….
From an exchange at the Kant list at yahoo.
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Everything on both sides of the ID/Darwinism debate is a battle of hypothetical possibilities. Why doesn’t everyone just admit noone yet has the foggiest about how important items evolved?
Reading an old review by Berlinski of Dawkins’ Climbing Mount Improbable, I find this:
It is one thing, however, to appeal to a path up Mount Improbable, quite another to demonstrate its existence. Dawkins has persuaded himself that because such a path might exist, further argument is unnecessary. Impediments are simply directed to disappear: “There is no difficulty”; “there is a definite tendency in the right direction”; “It is easy to see that…”; “it is not at all difficult to imagine….”
I saw a reference at Panda’s Thumb today to Originatin of Organismal Form, went to Amazon and realized I had already reviewed it last year. Here’s my short take.
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