Was she a fan of the materialists, like Hobbes, D'Holbach, and Diderot?
> > > Ray
> >
> > To quote from an objectivist website on objectivist epistemology "To be
> > objective, people must know how to define the terms they use (so they
> > know what they mean), base their conclusions on observable facts (so
> > their beliefs are anchored in reality) and employ the principles of
> > logic (so that they can reliably reach sound conclusions)."
Gosh, sounds like Wittgenstein and Korzybski, and John Locke centuries
before them -- so you, Ray, can't accuse the first two of plagiarizing Rand.
See the third book of Locke's _Essays Concerning Human Understanding._
I've been arguing in Amazon.com with someone who idolizes Wittgenstein
for pretty much the same reasons you idolize Rand. He thinks the
philosophy of the future "will just be footnotes" to Wittgenstein.
I'd love to see the two of you go toe-to-toe on who idolizes the
better philosopher.
[Granted, he might be too busy filling his replies with
"LOL!" at every bit of praise for Ayn Rand to deign to argue
with you. But you would be just getting a taste of your own
medicine.]
He goes by the moniker of SteveT, but he is an ethnic Chinese fellow
who lives in Malaya or thereabouts.
> >I don't
> > recognise those principles in your arguments - you use idiosyncratic
> > unspecified meanings for words, you attempt to refute "Darwinism" by
> > literary criticism, and you regularly commit logical fallacies.
>
> Since my main on-going point is that Darwinism or evolution is illogical and thus false and thus non-existent, existing only in the minds of Darwinists, not in nature,
> your belief that I commit logical fallacies supports my main on-going point.
Wow, that is SteveT to a T! Except that he argues for the opposite
things you do. He claims God exists only in the minds of believers,
as does a life after death and tries to use the Philosophy of Language
and Wittgenstein in particular to show that these things are illogical.
> You don't recognize "those principles in [my] arguments" (E.M.) because said principles are completely foreign to your way of thinking and all other Darwinists. Your comments above simply convey the main point of contention between I and evolutionary theorists.
These last two months, I've learned to draw a number of sharp distinctions
between evolution, evolutionary biology, evolutionary theory, and
the Theory of Evolution. This last would be a theory worthy of the name,
a gathering together of isolated bits of evolutionary theory into a
coherent theory worthy of being called The Theory of Biological Evolution.
And I've concluded that this is still in its embryonic stage. "Infancy"
would be too charitable a word.
In sharp contrast, the actual evolution of animals, especially
vertebrates, from a common ancestor
is so powerful that your best bet would be to not fight it but
to maintain that a purely secular evolutionary theory cannot
handle it. IOW, you ought to adopt Lord Kelvin's theory that
God speeded up evolution.
Lord Kelvin even believed that the sun was less than 100 million
years old (maybe a lot less, I forget) and so his theory could
be one that you might be willing to accept.
> Evolutionary theorists are COMPLETELY ignorant of the fact that evolution is an illogical theory----that's why no one understands it except believers/Evolutionists.
For the last month, I have been quizzing Harshman and Norman and Simpson
on evolutionary theory, and from their hidebound replies, I have come
to the conclusion that the embryonic Theory of Biological Evolution
is only a Theory of Biological Microevolution. It is a half century
old fossil that has been in stasis since Eldredge and Gould supplemented
Neo-Darwinism with "punk eek".
> You people are SO ignorant and deluded (and when I say you people I'm mainly talking about people like John Harshman and Peter Nyikos) that you don't understand the BASIC fact that if something is identified as illogical
Read: "something is blatanly asserted by me, Ray Martinez, to be
illogical..."
"said identification means "doesn't exist, cannot exist."
SteveT would say the same exact thing about the existence of God
and of a life after death, if I read him right.
> John Harshman has how many years of college and he doesn't know that illogical means non-existent, cannot exist?
He does know that, but he isn't about to accept the allegation
that it is illogical just on the basis of your say-so. That
goes for me too.
> So you people are the dumbest and the most deluded people in Western society,
SteveT is such a reflexive atheist that he thinks that concern about
the very QUESTION of whether God exists is an example of "Western
cultural imperialism" and a hang-up of "the Abrahamic religions."
> very close neighbors with "Christian" Fundamentalists,
> your brothers and sisters who accept existence of natural selection
> and micro-evolution.
Are you using a private definition of microevolution? The accepted
definition of that is "change of frequency of alleles in a population"
and "evolutionary change below the level of speciation," and you've
confirmed that you have no problem with these things.
And as for "natural selection", Harshman and co. have chided me
for thinking it could possibly apply to anything except
populations -- freely interbreeding groups of animals that are
well within the Biblical *min* ("kind").
I think of the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs and many other
creatures as an example of natural selection on a grand scale.
But no, that is excluded by evolutionary theorists BY DEFINITION.
On what grounds do YOU exclude it, by the way?
>
> >
> > One of the principles of objectivist epistemology is that there is an
> > objective universe. That strikes me as a perfectly reasonable working
> > hypothesis, but doesn't seem to be consistent with your
> > presuppositionalism and occasionalism.
>
> You've never been able to understand and convey my view----which again shows the degree of ignorance and delusion your mind is suffering. When Randian Objectivism speaks of an objective universe the same is defined within the well explained presupposition that existence = known absolute certainty.
And so her "objective universe" excludes what she thought of as the
Christian God. As it does for Robert Camp. I've sheathed my claws
in a rather long, ongoing discussion with him. He hasn't sheathed
his, but he's willing to keep the discussion going and I'm slowly
beginning to understand where he is coming from.
> Absolute certainty of course is a concept wholly rejected by current scholarly mainstream thought, which Rand was attacking. So you've quickly scanned an Objectivist website and quote-mined a main claim without understanding it's meaning.
>
> As for me I'm a "periodicist" also known as an "interventionist," which means I accept the fact that species, past and present, owe their existence in nature to Divine intervention occurring periodically in real time.
Well, then, you have no quarrel with Lord Kelvin or anyone else who
believes in speciation being speeded up by divine manipulation of
mutations. So what are you fighting against, exactly?
Maybe you will answer that you think God intervened to poof
first Hyracotherium, then Orohippus, then Epihippus, then Mesohippus,
into existence as fully formed adults, and so on down the line until
he poofed horses, asses and zebras separately, in the same way.
But why go to all that trouble when, with a few mutations, God
could have achieved the same effect while always having a lovely
panorama of whatever equids inhabited whatever environments (leafy
forests, grassy plains,...) to delight his angels and archangels?
I've snipped some specialized talk about Ayn Rand's philosophy
between you and Ernest Major. I don't know enough about it
to make it worthwhile to comment on it at this point.
> Ray (Objectivist)
>
> PS: I would gladly lay my body over a mud puddle so Rand could walk over.
With stiletto high heels? or did Rand not go in for such foolishness?
Peter Nyikos
Professor of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--
U. of South Carolina
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos/