From: salem@pangea.Stanford.EDU (Bruce Salem)
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: Re: Throop/Nietzsche problems
Date: 24 Dec 1992 04:14:26 GMT
Organization: Stanford Univ. Earth Sciences
NNTP-Posting-Host: pangea.stanford.edu

>From: news@fedfil.UUCP (news)
>Newsgroups: talk.origins
>Subject: Throop/Nietzsche problems
>Message-ID: <182@fedfil.UUCP>
>Date: 23 Dec 92 04:22:25 GMT

	The following is remarkable in its candor, if not insufficiency.

>What gets the Throops of the world so riled at this sort of talk is the
>following consideration.  Suppose evolutionists are right, that man is
>simply a freak accident, the final end product of a long chain of events
>governed by random and chance processes, originating with single-celled
>creatures somehow self-generating from inert/inorganic materials which
>somehow simply got lucky.  Then basically, you're saying to the common
>man, "Abandon hope!  You're going to die in thirty or forty years, and
>like as not, nobody will give a damn about anything you ever did 30
>years later, and that's every bit of it.  Even the greatest man of the
>age will be forgotton 5000 years from now, and that's just a grain of
>sand on the beach in the framework of the oceans of time we're talking
>about."

	I don't see that any of this follows. If there is no teleological
origin for Mankind, and no preordained directed creation culminating in
Mankind, I don't see that this deprives him of purpose or hope. Nor do I
see any necessity that he cannot have vision, even moral vision, in a
universe in which his existence is incidental. I see no need to promise
immortality as part of the bargan either. So what if Mankind is left alone
to his own devices? Does that lead to a fall? So sayeth the believers in
supernatural controls and the antidelivian Good Old Days. I say that such
later day miracles needen't exist, and that asking for them gives you too
much authority to beg the rules we should be playing by in our lives.

>Nonetheless, I tend to hold jusgement of Jesus in abeyance.

	Well, I have come to judge Jesus, Christainity, Judaism, and
Islam harshly as one kind of spiritual approach among many which has
become corrupt with the trappings of earthly authority and power.

>The fact that man's
>entire existence becomes utterly meaningless under this system does not
>even strike him as a problem.

	I am very inclined to agree that a Natural system using evolution
as the origin for Mankind does not dictate to mankind what his meaning
to himself ought to be. I also agree that this is not a problem that necessitates
that we abandon evolution. Note, that I did not say that mankind having a
sense of his own meaning is not a serious problem. Finding a purpose
does not precondition the search for our origins, nor does finding origins
that are not teleological preclude that there is a message from which we
may find purpose for ourselves. If the only message we gleam out of evolution
is that we could destroy ourselves by poisoning our habitat and that nothing
like us need arrise again when we are gone, then at least our purpose can
be to manage our world wisely as our own fate and that of other creatures
that share the world with us is linked. That takes a surprizing
ammount of moral strength to adhere to as the world becomes smaller in
relation to our power over it, and to destroy it.

>Again, for any normal person who might chance to be reading this, I am 
>recommending Richard Heinberg's "Memories and Visions of Paradise", Tarcher,
>1989.  The notion that the afterworld is completely inaccessible and/or
>unknowable to us in this world no longer appears to be entirely the case.

	And there are alternative views of spirituality which state that
the divine, our way in life, our purposes, our sense of Right, our salvation,
as close at hand all the time and it is just our need to look for them.

	If we truly are alone on this Earth, and that this is what
there is and there is no better, then the hope, or the blame, for what
we make of it is entirely our responsibility. Maybe this explains the
need for God, that we cannot shoulder that responsibility and need to
blame or hope to God for help. What fools are we?

Bruce Salem

Newsgroups: talk.origins,talk.religion.misc