Science Forum - Analytic Philosophy, Creationism, and Space Program

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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?