Actually, what is the point of asserting that all tools are amoral?
Is this based on some notion of tools in their inert state sitting poised on the balance between equal amounts of possible good or evil use? Because I’m pretty sure that’s an unlikely scenario.
A thumbscrew, for example, isn’t especially useful for many kinds of morally good purpose, but it’s great for torturing people. Why bother saying that a device only suitable for evil uses* is just an amoral tool.
Likewise, there must be some tools whose potential for good uses vastly outweighs any potential for evil. Why bother saying these are neutral until someone uses them?
*Unless the amount of potential good and evil is always exactly balanced for all tools, then it must be possible to find the extremes of imbalance. The thumbscrew might not be that specific device.
I did precisely one philosophy subject at college and I seem to recall this line of argument. Some long dead dude came up with this half assed excuse for an argument which panned out to a suggestion that nothing could be meaninful without a god. I seem to recall the analogy around which his argument was built went along the lines of:
“Say you come across a rock with some scratches on it which look like words and form a sentence. If the scratches were actually carved by someone on purpose then it makes sense for you to have read the scratches as a meaningful sentence. If they are actually random scratches on a rock then all you’ve done is fooled yourself by taking as meaningful that which is actually meaningless. Similarly (so the argument goes) if there is no god then what your senses tell you - and your thoughts - are whargarble even if they appear to you to mean something”
It is of course complete dribble. I said as much in a paper and I think I got a 6. Or maybe even a 7. For the paper. I seem to recall I couldn’t find a way to have nearly as much fun writing the second paper required for the subject, and my overall mark for the subject was pretty mediocre.
Anyway, I think the above line of thinking is where our friend the OP is coming from.
Thanks, but I don’t understand why you responded to that post like it was new information. If you have decided to stop improvising definitions and are giving up on the tortured analogies, maybe you can finally answer this?
I really look at it as the need to use different analytical skills for different situations. When we are discussing tuning up your sports car, then of course empiricism is the right way to go. However, when you are dealing with important life events that are non-repetitive then different instincts take over. In addition to the senses that empiricist use I only add two more senses and that is intuition and revelation.
In my opinion intuition is a winner here. In addition to what I’ve already pointed out earlier. The very fact that I can be creative and have new ideas, the ideas need to come from somewhere. A computer is unable to generate these new ideas. Without a God with some intellectual foresight, my new ideas would be pretty random.
Also, if you ask Christians about when they first Knew God existed. I’m sure that some of them would say that they had attended masses, spoken with ministers, read the Bible, and prayed. Subsequently God revealed His presence to them. I’ve called it personal revelation, but other Christians may call it something else.
Intuition and personal revelation can only be checked by results. It either makes your life better or it doesn’t.
Yes, by it’s nature, both intuition and revelation are subjective. There are plenty of people who felt God had let them down and have given up on attending church.
What if one person is inspired by God to believe that evolution is how God developed life on this planet and that she must actively work to keep it in the schools, while another person is inspired by God to believe the story of Adam and Eve to be the literal truth and to actively work to banish evolution from the schools? They can not both be correct.
Not all religious people agree with me on this. But I don’t see the NT as being an answer book. The fundamentalist do and that causes a lot of problems.
I look at the NT only as a guidebook that points me in the right direction to search. My God would not ask me to kill another over evolution or religious differences.
Your brain is not a computer. Why can’t the ideas come from your brain?
You realize this is a useless way to evaluate things, right? You decide after the fact that it wasn’t revelation if it ruins your life, but you had no way to know that first - or if it helps, it was revelation. I guess you are forced to spend a lot of time hoping you are not throwing your life away and going into decisions with no information.
Again, I speaking about situations in which you can’t use the empirical method. Suppose you are thinking about proposing to your wife. Would it make any sense to take out your notepad and compare her against all the women you’ve known and then go out and date other types of women to make sure that your research has been thorough or do you ask God for his opinion?
Because it isn’t very smart, our computers aren’t that good. They can come up with novel solutions to problems, just not as well as we can yet; “computers cannot be original” is bad sci-fi, not reality.
Proposing marriage? Hopefully, your wife accepted a long time ago.
Yes to the first part. If you haven’t compared her against the baseline established by all the women you’ve dated in the past, you are a fool. “Don’t date crazy folk” is good advice. Problem is: how do you know who’s crazy or not? That comes from experience, i.e. the women you’ve dated in the past.
If you are seriously considering proposing marriage to a woman, it DOES help to take out your notepad on human interactions and consider the likelihood she accepts.
Presumably, you have also taken out your other notepad on yourself and had a good, long think about whether or not she would be a good fit for you.
It also helps if it’s not your first date, so you have a pretty good empirical log on most of her traits, including personality, appearance, physical/emotional match with you, etc, which, presumably, you compare against a general baseline of human behavior and see where it tallies up against your own personality and traits.
I suppose that 20 years after the fact, you can chalk all that up to “intuition”, but that’s a lazy way of describing what should be a well considered decision based on a multitude of factors grounded on empirical observation.
