Tuesday, January 29, 2008

An excellent debate from a couple of years ago

I re-read this exchange between J. D. Walters and Blue Devil Knight and was impressed by it. In spite of some acrimony, it is one of the best blog discussions I have seen on the relevant issues. It is illustrative of the difference between a naturalistic perspective and an anti-naturalistic one, and why it's so difficult to resolve the debate surrounding naturalism.

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3 Comments:

At 1/29/2008 01:34:00 PM , Blogger Blue Devil Knight said...

I had forgotten about this one. Luckily, I still largely agree with what I said.

Basically, for those who don't feel like wading through a zillion long comments, I argued that public symbol systems can act as cognitive "glasses" that we can use to go beyond any inherent cognitive limitations our brains have in the absence of such external scaffolding.

 
At 2/03/2008 05:55:00 PM , Anonymous Anonymous said...

There's an AFR debate going on here:

http://www.theologyweb.com/campus/showthread.php?t=107509

 
At 2/18/2008 08:18:00 PM , Anonymous Anonymous said...

I hadn't thought about this one in a long time too. Luckily, I still largely agree with what I said:), although I have learned much since then about cognitive science and the neurobiological basis of thinking. Basically I've realized that science isn't so much the issue as the respective deeper metaphysical accounts of science that theism and naturalism provide. BDK appealed to science quite frequently, but that wasn't really what was at stake. Scientists as scientists can certainly go about their work and trust the cognitive machinery they have. The difficulty arises when the wider worldviews enter the picture.

 

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