Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Thu Mar 23, 2023 8:23 pmWell, I can do little else but *recognize* the design in nature. The more that it is examined, the more strange, unlikely and *impossible* it seems. Yet who dreamed it up? I cannot make sense out of it.Given that you also recognise the design in nature, then my second sincere, direct question (riffing off yours above) is: Who or what (if not an objectively-existing God) stands behind the design of this world?
You affirm, then, your fundamental metaphysical ignorance. You have previously in various posts to this thread also affirmed your rejection of (in my assessment) every significant element of Christian metaphysics.Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Thu Mar 23, 2023 8:23 pmI am just as unable to answer this question as you are.Who or what (if not an objectively-existing God) stands behind the design of this world?
Here's a peculiar thing: at the same time, you bemoan our having fallen away from metaphysical understanding. It is unclear to me why you would bemoan our having fallen away from a metaphysical understanding whose every significant element you reject, whilst lacking any understanding of your own. What, exactly, is the (correct) metaphysical understanding that (you propose) once was common knowledge but now has mostly been forgotten?
Here's another peculiar thing: you bemoan the disinterest of others (including participants in this thread) in metaphysics, but how do you expect to interest them when the example you offer is that after having spent years and years reading book after book on metaphysics and related matters - and presumably undertaking your own independent thinking and reasoning - the position you have arrived at (or, more likely, never left) is... rejection, uncertainty, ignorance, doubt, and inability to answer the most basic of questions or even to make sense of that upon which those most basic of questions is predicated?
Note: I'm not criticising your ignorance per se; I am also ignorant in this respect.
As I've pointed out to you in the past, this is an incomplete oversimplification. It is true in part, but there is also much in nature that is cooperative and kind rather than cruel and uncaring.Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Thu Mar 23, 2023 8:23 pm And as you know -- I think it is plain and undeniable -- our world, the planetary world, the world of biology, is utterly cruel and simply without care or concern.
This is really bad, fallacious reasoning, (potentially) unless you mean that there is something about the specific nature of the world that entails its immutability, in which case, what is that specific nature and how does it entail immutability?Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Thu Mar 23, 2023 8:23 pm The way things are [...] cannot change in a way given that the nature of the world is as it is.
That's a great example of (yet) a(nother) core Christian metaphysical tenet that you at least question if not outright reject. There's really nothing essential - that you'd endorse - left; nothing to which we might recur.Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Thu Mar 23, 2023 8:23 pm The moral system, and the sense of moral guilt men feel -- that sense that everything man does is wrong and that something in man is dreadfully wrong -- is something I question in itself.