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Podcasts: Nancy Pearcey on humans as robots, freeloading from religion
| October 25, 2015 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Mind, Philosophy |
Pearcey i author of Finding Truth, and these podcasts touch on its themes:
Are Humans Simply Robots? Nancy Pearcey on the “Free Will Illusion”
and
“Freeloading” from Religion: Nancy Pearcey on Materialism and Human Rights
Well, robots gotta freeload, right? But wait! CAN they?
2 Responses to Podcasts: Nancy Pearcey on humans as robots, freeloading from religion
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If I think that a hungry tiger is just a big, friendly kitty who wants to play and someone else thinks it is an extremely dangerous predator that wants to eat one of us, guess which belief is more likely to be true and guess who’s more likely to survive? It’s nonsense to try and separate survival and truth value. Survival in a dangerous environment depends on an account of that is as accurate as possible. Yes, you can envisage false beliefs that might incidentally benefit survival but overall the truer the belief the better.
And that being the case, why wouldn’t such a mind, that tends to survive because it forms truer beliefs than others, be able to apply itself to metaphysical questions? Creating explanations for the physical involves mental modeling. Why shouldn’t that capacity be adaptable to modeling metaphysical explanations? No, it may not be absolutely reliable or accurate in its explanations and conclusions but what else is? What else is there?
Some philosophers argue that free will and consciousness are illusions because there are well-known problems with both concepts. How do we tell whether or not evolution or any other explanation about the world is true or not? See if it hangs together logically and compare it with what we see, in other words, the scientific method.
Is it rational to believe in the existence of a God based on a compilation of stories written over hundreds of years, whose original authors are unknown, many of which cannot be verified, some of which show signs of tampering, some of which describe phenomena which are at odds with what we observe to day and which are riddled with discrepancies and contradictions?
And one of the reasons why believers fail give due weight to the problems with their own belief systems is the flip side of hyperskepticism, hypercredulity.
Seversky
You are of course correct to think that God of the bible might be the wrong one and that may very well be. But that does not mean the universe and all in it was not designed. People of the Christian faith do question their faith I do it often.