In Walked Luck

Bagwell's first "Gimme Shelter" post , hmm a while ago now (is this becoming a theme? :-) and I am so pleased that your medical result was not as bad as you had expected it might be in that post ! :-)

I read the Derbyshire "renunciation" (?) I think that the root cause of his problem is right here in a question put to him:

Q. Have you ever had a religious experience?

A. No. I’m a bit miffed about this.

Absolutely. How on Earth does one expect an intelligent thinking human being, which Derbyshire clearly is, to put his faith is something that he has no evidence of?

A very interesting read though thanks for pointing me at it.

And again I am learning stuff, this "mysterion" category that Derbyshire puts himself into, Wikipedia says "New Mysterianism is a philosophy proposing that certain problems will never be explained or at the least cannot be explained by the human mind at its current evolutionary stage. The problem most often referred to is the hard problem of consciousness; i.e. how to explain sentience and qualia and their interaction with consciousness."

I have to say that I wholeheartedly believe that that is a complete cop-out! They've given up, it's no better than pseudo-science -- shades of intelligent design or multiverse theory? By that I mean, "All things are possible therefore we exist because an infinite number of things exist so by definition we, humanity, is a subset of those infinite happenstances, so that's why we are here - pure chance". If that is how it is, then -- how unsatisfying.

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"evolution vs. creation head-on" and "Might it be that God, who is timeless, willed the development of man "in His image," though it took the slow forces of natural selection billions of years to realize the commandment?"

It might be. I can point you at the reference work in this are, this is what Ned Flanders said to one of his sons in "The Monkey Suit", an episode of The Simpsons seventeenth season that aired on May 14, 2006:

Todd: Daddy, was Mommy a monkey? I can't remember.
Ned: No one was ever a monkey! Everything is what it was and always will be! God put us here and that's that!
Todd: But you said a stork brought me.
Ned: Umm...that was God disguised as a stork.
Rod: Then who brings baby storks?
Ned: There's no such thing as storks! It's all God!
Todd: (Kneeling beside a statue of a stork) Please bless Daddy and Roddy...
Ned: Stop praying to that stork!

:-)

A lot of Christians believe that. They will be hard pressed to accept that they evolved from lower life forms. Although The Bible does not document the journey to the arrival to man from these lower lifeforms, The Bible does have enough non-specificity in it that it allows us to interpret it in the way that the physical evidence suggests, ie. that we evolved from lower life forms.

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... there's something about my disposition that just finds everything a struggle. It's been that way for as long as I can remember. There are brief periods where the struggle abates, but it always returns.

Two questions 1) What that's all about then? and 2) is it something unique to your good self or does everyone feel that way but keeps quiet about it? (for whatever reason ...)