Vlad,
Not sure what alchemy and astrology have got to do with philosophy and religion.
Chemistry achieves the goals of alchemy more successfully and astronomy is a better way of looking at the stars.
Given that it’s been explained to you several times, why not? Theology stands in relation to philosophy as alchemy stands in relation to chemistry and astrology stands in relation to astronomy. All three are essentially guessology grounded in the best understandings available from their times that have been superseded by more reliable ways to understand the world.
I do feel you guiding us back to today's philosophies and their superiority to anything in the past.
Not to anything, no. Lots of ancient philosophy and logic stands today because it hasn’t been falsified.
That of course is a fallacy of modernity.
It’s also not true. What
is true though is that many early attempts at it – "if we don’t sacrifice a virgin to the volcano god the crops will fail" etc – are demonstrably inferior to the understandings we have now. This is generally why theology fails.
Secondly…
Your firstly just collapsed, but ok…
…modern philosophies such as empiricism, naturalism and scientism can be as cosmologist and atheist Paul Davies points out, alienating, in other words, they deprive people of any self exploration by demeaning self knowledge , in other words reducing them.
As well as being demeaning they remain philosophies.
Utter bollocks.
First, truth matters. Whether or not you think logically robust thinking is “alienating” doesn’t change its robustness.
Second, as Richard Feynmann said knowing about photosynthesis doesn’t make the flowers in your garden less attractive – to the contrary it enriches and enhances our appreciation of them.
Third, your problem with that blithe “self-knowledge” is that absent any method to test whether it
is knowledge at all (you know the kind of empiricism, naturalism etc you dismiss) you have no means to know whether all you actually have is baseless opinions.
Apart from all that though…
Now onto your argument from geography.
Any chance of it being less incoherent than your efforts so far?
I find The implication that there are obscure areas of the world from which nothing useful can eminate is something no sensible person should brook. It reminds me of AC Grayling who thinks that the glory that was Greco-Rome was somehow polluted by Middle eastern beliefs.
So that’s a no then. That supposed “implication” is just another of your endless straw men. It’s entirely possible that something useful could have come from anywhere. What we’re talking about here though are grandiose theological claims from an age and place from which many such claims came, as they did from ancient Egypt, from Norse Scandinavia, from the Amazon basin, from aboriginal peoples, from Polynesian islanders, from etc. Fine – do you accept all of their of gods as necessarily true therefore, or do you apply methods to test the veracity of these multiple theistic claims?
Assuming for now that you do, how then would you justify the special pleading necessary to give the faith tradition with which you happen to be most familiar a free pass?
It also is reinforced by that notion from the modernity fallacy and argument from snobbery, Bronze age goatherders.
No it isn’t.
So, now your latest effort is in tatters what are the chances of you finally telling us how you’d bridge the gap from a necessary feature for potential universe creators to the many necessary features for your god (albeit that you change position on what your god might be more often than you change your socks these days). Or do you intend to maintain your position of never answering anything here?
