Re: Abiogenesis -- Definitions (Kevin)
Kevin O'Brien (Cuchulaine@worldnet.att.net)
Wed, 25 Nov 1998 11:38:03 -0700Mike, I told you I wasn't going to respond publicly to your last post. I
was letting you have the last word in public. The comments I sent to you
were private; the fact that I sent them to you and not to the group should
have told you that. Therefore it was extremely rude of you to post them to
the group without my permission. That, along with the dogmatic, arrogant
and demanding attitude displayed in this post and the one I replied to in
private convince me that you are not interested in hearing about your own
misconceptions, but in forcing me to acknowledge what you think are mine.
That is why I chose not to try to explain them to you. I tried to end the
discussion as a gentleman, in private, by pointing out that I believed you
were wrong without trying to pass judgement on you as a person, then
explaining my basic position so that you understood it. Your insistence at
making this public has forced me to respond in a way that I would not have
prefered. But now I have no choice. I will not respond to you publicly as
long as you make demands and dogmatically assert the rightness of your
position to the exclusion of mine. I had the knowledge to recognize your
misconceptions and tried to point them out to you. You rejected them simply
because they do not conform to what you believe is true. But that's why
they are misconceptions; they are not true and you do not recognize what is
true. Since I do not have the expertise to explain why they are
misconceptions, I will have to rely on others to that. As for your views on
science vs. philosophy as alternative ways to understand the universe,
nothing that philosophy can say about the universe can be tested against the
universe to see if it is true. As such, philosophy may have alot to say
about what the universe is like, but since we can never know whether any of
it is true, it is all irrelevant. Only science can tell us anything
significant about what the universe is, what it is made of, what governs it,
how it developed, or even how it originated, because only science can test
its claims against the universe itself to see if they are true. All your
hand-waving about the way that philosophy has influenced science (something
I have never denied or contested) or about the philosophical origins of
science (something else I have never denied or contesated) or about
arguments from pure reason (whether you believe they are possible or not) or
about philosophical rationality can change this fundamental fact. And as
long as this fundamental fact is true, I will continue to maintain the
superiority of science over philosophy as the way to understand the
universe.
Kevin L. O'Brien