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You seemed to imply that you thought that there's more to "our moral codes" than being built up in culture over time. So do I, because a lot of our apparent moral behaviour has its roots in our biological nature.
I do not think you two brought the weave out of the loom.
John
has saidquote:
After all, the universe required ten billion years of evolution before life was even possible; the evolution of the stars and the evolving of new chemical elements in the nuclear furnaces of the stars were indispensable prerequisites for the generation of life.
John's rather distinct viewpoint is dependent on us being "carbon beings". He does not have much of an issue with evolution, given that one has to have carbon to begin with(It might proove instructive to see what he would say if Sara Conner/Baum could actually exist with Silicon life integrated with oxygen as the new FOX show portrays but I would guess all this would be fiction to him). That is the prerequisite for his rather expanded explanation.
Now the question is can "the moral codes" or the answer to the purpose of life be also dependent on carbon or evolved carbon. Seeing that John P's view, not mine or yours necessarily, refers back to something that comes out of Medelev's Periodic Table the only way to not follow this line of discussion is to assert that there really is no difference, or to say just what it is, within Kant's "Metaphysics of Morals" during his preface to THE METAPHYSICAL ELEMENTS OF JUSTICE where he wrote
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Indeed, the possibility of an a priori intuition and of space being such an intuition, rather than merely (as Wolff held) the juxtaposition of the manifold of objects external to one another that is given in empirical intuition
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page 5 The Library of the Liberal Arts 1965
between that and Wolf's empirical view of any kind of substance itself in terms of current views on physics.
In other words what is more than cultural (assuming we are not arguing Lamarck vs Darwin)and biological OR beyond toward the suprasensible is either the simple juxtaposition of carbons OR the changes in the space of carbons over geological time. Biology of purpose (if there were such) and moral codes (whether sociobiological or not)need not be in the latter while they ARE at least in the former. John permits one to ask the deeper question in the latter place BECAUSE he has a physicist view of the space place itself.
Now, I admit that John has allowed this from his physical viewpoint, not a biological one first and foremost. So if you were to have the off topic view that some of the juxtapositions of bauplan carbon could not give the expanded region of the Q&A on thread @EVC that you thought was a lie (above), this ?might? be possible given a particular reading of evolutionary theory, but for my own understanding I can not agree to/with this.
I think that scientists HAVE already asked if there is a purpose in evolution and some (Will Provine) have been convinced there is none but at the same time they do not have a sophisticated enough view of the places spaces (beyond random deme interactions) that must be so so as to even touch on the same carbon jughandles that one must approach physically given Polkinghorne view. The only way then is to culutrally dismiss John rather than biologically being more sophisticated. This I personally find is in error.
Sure, if it is only blind faith that is the answer then this is insuffient as to the questions but as it is that the current elite science refuses to bring Wolff and Kant anycloser today (via the spaces of population genetics etc), and I can clearly cognize such a possiblity, it still seems that John's extended relations from testing to trusting say, is required in the process of bringing the places of these spaces OUT of coincidence in our individually confused minds and into community. As long as the elite have two walls to evolutionary thought it is only us on the other side that will drill through. It is needed if the inutition towards the moral code (whatever that is) be made, otherwise we simply have a disgreement like you and GDR posted above.
™ Version 4.2
