In “New scientific paradigm makes ‘feelings’ primary” (Vancouver Sun, reposted February 5, 2012), Doug Todd reports,
Scientist-philosophers such as Australia’s Charles Birch maintain that feelings are the basis of all reality; and that thoughts are “intellectual feelings.” In his groundbreaking and controversial book, Feelings, Birch says history basically amounts to the expression of human feelings — they have produced both the heights and depths of experience, the beauty of a Shakespearean love sonnet as well as the evil of a Hitler or Stalin.
As a biologist, Birch believes everything has subjectivity. Animals are not glorified robots. They have an inner life. They’re on a continuum with humans, and are governed by emotions. Birch, who won the 1990 Templeton Award for Progress in Religion, goes further and maintains that neither are cells and molecules blocks of unfeeling matter. He believes they show minute elements of subjectivity, which makes them unpredictable.
Birch belongs to a small but growing school of thought called “panexperientialism,” which proposes that everything in the universe is constituted of feelings, however subtle.
Look, it’s Friday night here. And we are just telling you. Your toothpick has feelings too. Todd originally posted this in 2006, but thought it worth recycling, due to this interview with a hard materialist.
Here we seek a third way – design
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