If the shoe fits…
How?
Thank you for your detailed exposition of your beliefs - with which I largely agree. My questions are not intended to attack but clarify your position.
Do you believe God has never intervened in the process of human development?
Are these attributes bestowed solely by physical means?
Is God’s self-communication restricted to the Incarnation? Or does it occur in other ways?
Does this apply to beings throughout the entire universe?
Over about 3 billion years.
What’s the alternative? What experimental procedure would you suggest to confirm the existence of angels? How much do they weigh? How tall are they? How great a ratio of wing size to body mass do they need to sustain flight? What instruments do you have to measure these and other features? Why should science as such (as opposed to scientists, many of whom are religious) recognize something outside its range?
I have yet to see any other animals murder each other in the name of a God of love.
Or in the name of a Godless ideology…
What experimental procedure would you suggest to confirm the existence of your thoughts, beliefs, choices, decisions, principles, values and plans? Or those of other beings? How much do they weigh? What instruments do you have to measure these and other features?
If your last sentence was true, it wouldn’t mean you belonged to a different species. We are talking about the ancestry of homo sapiens; whether they number two or two thousand, there is only one species homo sapiens.
.No. Only considerations to which the scientific method can apply. Morality gan be iffy. Does evolution create or affect it, and if so, how? Science made the atom bomb possible, but couldn’t tell us whether we ought to use it. If there were no more questions to answer, how dull the world would be!
As far as it can.
Why does the fact that something has a physical cause “infringe the law of conservation of energy”? The energy used in making a decision is minimal, nor is it lost; it changes from one form to another. Neurons in the part of the brain governing decisions, plus whatever other parts are involved (e.g. fight or flight reflex) send signals to the relevant muscles which perform their task. How does that infringe the conservation law while breathing, which is an autonomic function independent of will, yet using a similar chemical mechanism, does not?
fMRI procedures have established the parts of the brain where activity is associated with many of the functions you mention. I have no data concerning their weight; the brain weighs about two pounds, I believe. I’m not sure phenomena like neurotransmission have measurable weight; the pull of gravity on them is probably too insignificant to measure with current instruments.
You don’t have to answer because if we are essentially animals there is nothing to distinguish us from other species so that it does not make sense to claim we have free will, moral responsibility, human rights or any more significance than the insects we crush beneath our feet…
Not sure what you mean by “blind processes”, or what evidence shows them to be blind, and in what sense. It seems to me that you are using words loaded with emotional connotations (blind=bad, intelligence=good) to establish your point on a kind of unstated, emotional level without having to prove it rationally.
“associated with” and “many” are the basis of your conclusion that all mental activity originates in the brain? Hardly scientific!
These considerations are insignificant until you produce more evidence for your hypothesis…
Why not “outside the range of my brain”?
How would that make it insignificant? If you ignore the traffic laws on the grounds that they are merely human conventions, not God’s eternal decrees, you will still have to pay the penalty.
How informative can one be in answering a question like, “How far does scientific evidence lead”? It is stopped by the limits of human intelligence and by assuming divine causes by faith which can neither be investigated not falsified. Aside from those barriers, it can go pretty far. Look how far it has gotten us in the last hundred years.
That’s merely your assumption (which perhaps accounts for your hostility). Do chimpanzees have no free will? Is everything they do dictated by instinct over which they have no control? Why would our status as animals deprive us of rights?
.It’s more scientific evidence than you have for the soul.
“My” hypothesis, or the hypothesis you have invented for me because it’s easier to mock?
I don’t think my muscles or liver had anything to do with it…