[MD] Betternes - 4 levels of!

[118]

Hi Ham,

I love your posts, they are rational and not dismissive without reasoning.
 They remain open to discussion and debate, such as this forum promotes.
 Indeed, if we feel our opinions are at stake and the result could be
complete dismissal as an intelligent voice, then there is reason to fear and
become unreasonably dogmatic.

I would like to respond to the last paragraph below.  I am presenting
something i talked about in my first sojourn in this forum several years
ago, and I don't think much has changed.  So I apologize if it is
repetitive.

[Ham previously]
> I can understand your skepticism, Platt.  You feel that to theorize about
> the ineffable by intellectual means is blowing in the wind, inasmuch as we
> can never test the theory.  At the same time, we are all endowed with
> discriminating sensibility and rationality, and if these faculties are the
> Creator's gift to us for a reason, might it not be to point to a solution
> within our grasp?  Judeo-Christians believe "man was created in the image of
> God."  I happen to believe that the values we realize are the essence of
> that transcendent source, that Value itself is our link to Absolute Essence.
> Inject that concept with a bit of intuitional insight, and you may just come
> up with a rationale that approximates the truth that is hidden from us.
>
> [Mark]


This notion of image is indeed intriguing if one looks at it in a sense
> other than one of anthropomorphic grandiosity.  If such an image does not
> exist, then we must assume that what we are is a result of what happened
> from the ground up, and such continued happening has infinite possibilities
> in the future.  That is, uninfrangible evolution as dictated by molecular
> chance.  (I guess unifrangible is not a word, Google doesn't like it, but
> hopefully you know what I mean, I don't feel like thinking of a synonym.).



> Now, we can provide some kind of hindsight rules on this evolution.  We can
> present the basics of molecular self-assembly (also an interesting theistic
> topic), which provides some kind of guiding force.  We also can conceive, as
> presented by Darwin, that there is a Selection Process which is outside and
> directing evolution.  (This selection process also receives little
> attention, and can have theistic interpretations).
>

To not reiterate what I spent some time on before, let us say that the force
of natural selection, that we can term environmental pressures, is met at a
boundary by the expression of species.  This expression can be considered
physical or intellectual or even spiritual.   However such expression cannot
go beyond what is accepted by the environment.  If you get too big or if
your horns are too heavy you won't survive.  If you are of intensely high
intellect (as with some autism), you cannot communicate and without support
your lineage will die out.  In this way we can see the environmental
pressures or selection process as being a limit to expression from all sides
and angles.  As such, these boundaries could be considered the mold for
species and intellect as it exists right now.  This would be the use of mold
in the same way it is used to make a bronze statue.  The contour of such a
mold has a positive image or a negative image side.  If we consider
ourselves the positive image, then the other is the negative image.

In the presentation above, one could indeed say that man is an image of
something.  Such a concept requires the active separation of both, which is
not my intuitive conclusion.  But in the world of subjects an objects, the
man in the image of God, is certainly one which can be rationally described
as existing.

Cheers,
Mark



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