Sterling: Oh, I thought you were going to ask me to comment on Elder
Packer.
Jack: Oh, I wouldn't restrain you from doing that.
Sterling: I was kind of looking forward to the opportunity. Well, I
will just make a very short statement. I think he is a total disaster
to the LDS church.
from http://www.lds-mormon.com/newell_mcmurrin.shtml
That was true in 1993, and it is still true today. Kind of sad. Good thing we've got some fairly decent authorities among the twelve, though I haven't done enough research to have an opinion on all of them.
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
Thursday, December 22, 2011
Response to http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/religion-science/ essay
I was just wondering,
how do you justify the ending to your mostly decent essay regarding science and religion, in the section on naturalism and science? If cognitive faculties evolved to be completely unreliable, as the essay seems to imply, in what way could the mechanism of natural selection have been used to evolve them? Doesn't it make better sense to acknowledge the possibility that more accurate cognitive faculties, at least in certain areas of thought, have a more competitive advantage? One doesn't need to accept that all of our faculties evolved to be reliable, either. After all, scientific naturalism doesn't really come naturally to the common man. Personally, our cognitive faculties seem geared toward assimilating what we experience into what we believe is a consistent understanding of the world around us.
Not that much of the above matters, only I am a bit bugged that the argument at the end of your essay seems to be a weak misapplication of statistical reasoning in an attempt to demonstrate an imagined fault of naturalism in conjunction with evolution, as if that somehow buffets the logical support of theistic religion. Is there a reason you ended the essay this way? I hope it was not due to political considerations or personal theological views, but I can't imagine what else would have motivated such an unfair conclusion...
Sincerely,
~Jacob
how do you justify the ending to your mostly decent essay regarding science and religion, in the section on naturalism and science? If cognitive faculties evolved to be completely unreliable, as the essay seems to imply, in what way could the mechanism of natural selection have been used to evolve them? Doesn't it make better sense to acknowledge the possibility that more accurate cognitive faculties, at least in certain areas of thought, have a more competitive advantage? One doesn't need to accept that all of our faculties evolved to be reliable, either. After all, scientific naturalism doesn't really come naturally to the common man. Personally, our cognitive faculties seem geared toward assimilating what we experience into what we believe is a consistent understanding of the world around us.
Not that much of the above matters, only I am a bit bugged that the argument at the end of your essay seems to be a weak misapplication of statistical reasoning in an attempt to demonstrate an imagined fault of naturalism in conjunction with evolution, as if that somehow buffets the logical support of theistic religion. Is there a reason you ended the essay this way? I hope it was not due to political considerations or personal theological views, but I can't imagine what else would have motivated such an unfair conclusion...
Sincerely,
~Jacob
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