note: this discussion has turned for the better;read pgs/Where do the laws come from?

WRONG!It doesn't take that at all.All it takes is for1. Tao to exist
2. Human beings to have access to Tao.

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ArcherAll species are transitional.

Mine, of course. See Message 67.Taoism thanks you, Iano.

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ArcherAll species are transitional.

Of course it does. Your argument is that faith in God provides grounds for confidence in investigation.Faith in anything provides such grounds. Because all faiths provide them, one faith is as good as another by this criterion.How compelling do you find grounds arrived at by means of a faith you do not profess?_

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ArcherAll species are transitional.

Aquinas's method stood within the Scholastic tradition. This tradition regarded supernatural revelation as the base of all valid knowledge. One could arrive at further valid conclusions from this base through the use of proper syllogisms. Through this means Church authorities, it was thought, could arrive at conclusions that held the same authority as the original revelation.The whole approach owed much to Plato. One starts with the universals (ideals) and reasons down to the particulars.By the time Aquinas and Meister Eckhart were on the scene, the writings of Aristotle were gaining ground in Europe. Aristotle's approach was the opposite of Plato's: it started by collecting particulars, then reasoned from these details toward larger concepts. Aristotle's approach prepared the world for the scientific method.The biggest problem with reheating the arguments of Aquinas, unless one makes some major adjustments, is that the exercise treats empiricism (Descartes to Hume) and Kant (paradigm shift!) as if they never happened. But they did.Once something is seen it can't be unseen. Kant recognized the role of cognition in acquiring and shaping any kind of knowledge at all. Since his time cognition has become a fertile ground of research yielding a constant stream of discoveries.You can't wish away a paradigm shift. That's why any argument worthy of the name in the realm of ontology and epistemology has to come to terms with Kant._

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ArcherAll species are transitional.

Hume stands at the end of a line that begins with Decartes. His radical skepticism was the K-T event that ended the paradigm. Hume said--in a nutshell--that we don't really know anything. And he did a supremely effective job of destroying every argument that had been offered up to then to prove otherwise.Hume is the first reason no one can just trot out Aquinas again. The second is Kant.Kant realized that Hume had scorched the earth. He saw the need to build anew from more solid foundations if any form of human knowledge was to retain validity. The impressive thing is that he did exactly that.You could call Hume and Kant the one-two punch that knocked out the previous. Relative to our point in history Hume stands on the far side of the border and Kant on the near side, but they definitely mark the boundary.Kant recognized the importance of cognition in human knowledge. He said we can only know our ideas of things, never the Ding an sich--the 'thing in itself'. But this does not make our ideas invalid.

quote:

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The monumental Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason) (1781, 1787) fully spells out the conditions for mathematical, scientific, and metaphysical knowledge in its "Transcendental Aesthetic," "Transcendental Analytic," and "Transcendental Dialectic," but Kant found it helpful to offer a less technical exposition of the same themes in the Prolegomena zu einer jeden knftigen Metaphysik die als Wissenschaft wird auftreten knnen (Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysic) (1783). Carefully distinguishing judgments as analytic or synthetic and as a priori or a posteriori, Kant held that the most interesting and useful varieties of human knowledge rely upon synthetic a priori judgments, which are, in turn, possible only when the mind determines the conditions of its own experience. Thus, it is we who impose the forms of space and time upon all possible sensation in mathematics, and it is we who render all experience coherent as scientific knowledge governed by traditional notions of substance and causality by applying the pure concepts of the understanding to all possible experience. But regulative principles of this sort hold only for the world as we know it, and since metaphysical propositions seek a truth beyond all experience, they cannot be established within the bounds of reason.

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The Philosophy Pages: Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

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Kant provided a sound basis for pursuits of knowledge--science, philosophy, and the like--to continue. His notion of 'synthetic a priori ideas has significance for the formation of scientific theories. Theories in psychology--even its emergence as an area of study--owe much to Kant.Philosophers since Kant have brought us further variations on Kantian themes and critiques of his ideas but nothing like the wholesale revolution that occurred at that point.

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The two interconnected foundations of what Kant called his "critical philosophy"[...] were his epistemology of Transcendental Idealism and his moral philosophy of the autonomy of practical reason. These placed the active, rational human subject at the center of the cognitive and moral worlds. With regard to knowledge, Kant argued that the rational order of the world as known by science could never be accounted for merely by the fortuitous accumulation of sense perceptions. It was instead the product of the rule-based [cognitive] activity of "synthesis". [....] Thus the objective order of nature and the causal necessity that operates within it are dependent upon the mind. [....] With regard to morality, Kant argued that the source of the good lies not in anything outside the human subject, either in nature or given by God, but rather only the good will itself. A good will is one that acts from duty in accordance with the universal moral law that the autonomous human being freely gives itself. This law obliges one to treat humanity ” understood as rational agency, and represented through oneself as well as others ” as an end in itself rather than (merely) as means.

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These ideas have largely framed or influenced all subsequent philosophical discussion and analysis.[...]

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Wikipedia: 'Immanuel Kant'
(emphasis mine)

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There's no retreat. Anyone making a serious proposal in philosophy has to take account of the role played by human cognition in any system of knowledge and the implications of this for that sytem.For all that, you're not going to meet many people who say Critique of Pure Reason is their favorite book. Kant faced an enormous task in presenting his thesis; the thing was never going to be a breeze to read. But that it's an important book, there can be no doubt._

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ArcherAll species are transitional.

I don't think we disagree. I'm not endorsing Kant as my favorite philosopher. He isn't. The reason I mentioned his philosophy is because of its influence on Western thought.I do think it's important here to distinguish here between personal assessment--'nothing important there for me'--and a general assessment--'nothing important there in the history of Western philosophy.'One reason his thesis struck you as nothing special, I'm sure, is because the ideas have been so thoroughly absorbed and developed since they were presented. You suggested this possibility yourself. They seem as obvious to us now as a round earth: psychology goes about the business of understanding cognition, science justifies its methods on practical grounds, people accept that one can't prove or disprove anything in the realm of metaphysics.Kant's ideas are part of the air we breathe now. The picture would not be quite the same if the last word had been left with Hume. Absolutely. And that's not small change.If that endeavor seems ordinary, it's because we talk about the acquisition and nature of knowledge every day now. Teenagers log onto message boards today and talk like Kantians without even knowing it.It's hard to believe that in Kant's day the nature and importance of human cognition was virgin territory. No psychology majors existed then in any university in the world. The field did not exist. The research did not exist. The terms did not exist.The picture before Kant was mechanistic in its simplicity: we register sensory impressions and 'think' about them. Philosophers discussed what we think. But they spent little effort considering how we think and what that means in the world of ideas. The picture was simpler, more linear, more atomistic... in a word, more naive.For me this exchange feels a bit like encountering a clever scientist who finds Darwin's Origin of Species nothing special. 'No big deal. I already learned most of this myself. The writing is dull. The biology is rudimentary and I don't really buy that explanation of the giraffe's neck. The seeds of this idea were already out there, anyway. Someone would have thought of this if Darwin hadn't. Most of the best ideas about evolution really come from Mendel.'As a personal response this is not only valid, but perceptive, thought-provoking and entertaining. And every comment is accurate, too, when you get right down to it. All except one.Darwin's idea is still a big deal.
___If it's okay with you, holmes, I do want to get back to original purpose in bringing up that subject. I'd appreciate your thoughts on this.Messanjah tells us he plans to prove the existence of God.It's an ambitious project. But he has time.And he's arrogant. That could work for him if he channels it. Projects of this magnitude are not completed by the humble.But he may as well know it doesn't do to reheat the old Scholastic arguments. There's been a paradigm shift since they were made. Whoever we credit for that shift--Descartes, Hume, Kant, Darwin, Hubble, Einstein, or all of them--it's there.The earth was scorched. New forests took root and grew tall and lush. Black gold can still be drilled out of Aquinas, but it's fossil fuel. The green growth stands elsewhere.Any idea intended for serious consumption has to take account of this.How would one go about this? What do you think a new 'proof for the existence of God' has to achieve now?_Edited by Archer Opterix, : Title.Edited by Archer Opterix, : Typo repair.Edited by Archer Opterix, : One more typo.

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ArcherAll species are transitional.