I previously have stated what I believe to be an axiom of human nature: This is a shorter version of my thesis that intellect is greatly over-rated as a determinant of our most important decisions about life. Intellect holds only a secondary position - it is only used to justify what we already believe (know emotionally) to be true about the world and our place in it.

That's why it is amazing to me that you can carry on a discussion with Fred and believe that he is lazy, or unwilling to do the reading to understand the most basic scientific explanations of biology. You said to Fred, You continue to make reasoned arguments, believing against all hope that you'll finally state it in such a compelling way that Fred will be forced to understand the reasoning behind your assertions and will be forced by his intellectual honesty to accept them - or be revealed as intellectually dishonest.

Fred can't do that for you - any more than he can for Tom (or me, chuckle). Fred believes in a fundamentally different meta-narrative of life and existence than you do. That narrative is guiding his mind - not reason - just as ultimately yours is guiding yours. For Fred, any evidence or argument that falsifies or even casts doubt on his narrative - must be rejected and ridiculed. Anyone attempting to falsify his narrative must be opposed. His large number of posts provide massive and incontrovertible evidence for that. Fred's very reason for being here is to carry on that mission in this particularly heretic rich environment.

A narrative is a set of inter-related beliefs about the world that support each other and tell a larger story. A meta-narative is a set of inter-related narratives that support each other - like the Christian meta-narrative of why life exists and its purpose - as decribed in the many narratives of the gospels. The scientific meta-narrative that tries to address similar question using a different (and opposite) framework is Darwinian evolution..

I am not saying Fred is a bad or dishonest person - despite my frequent anger at him. We all start from a fundamental narrative of life and existence - and once that narrative becomes integrated into our identity we must defend it - just as Fred is doing. What makes one person different from another - in these discussions - are a few events in our early lives - probably in our teens - where we found we were more comfortable (we felt emotionally more satisfied) harboring a scientific vs. a theistic meta-narrative.

Which side of this divide we decided to spend our lives on was not determined by our intelligence or honesty. It had to do with even earlier childhood experiences, our relationship with our parents and siblings, our friends and their parents and siblings, our church and school experience, etc. It was a purely emotional decision tied in the most intimate ways to our identity - to who we are - as all such crucial decisions are.

Your meta-narrative, scientific naturalism, was not chosen because you were intelligent - any more than Fred's was. You are both well above average IQ, I am sure.

It is an accident of your past that you ended up on the side of that divide that lends itself to justification according to relatively straightforward rules of scientific evidence. And it was a similar accident that now Fred needs to reach for more philosophically grounded justifications for his. That's even to his advantage in some ways because philosophic lemmas are neither easy to understand nor refute.

My point is that there is no point - for persons with opposite meta-narratives to argue the relative merits of evolutionary explanations for life with each other. You both think you are arguing points about that topic but you are both incapable of violating your respective meta-narratives.

Obviously, I made the choice long ago to go with the scientific (non-theistic) view. All that really means though, is that scientific ideas feel better to me when I consider them - and religious explanations feel coarse and uncomfortable in my mind. I have no emotional choice but to savor the former and expell that latter.

When you argue with Fred, you are not arguing about the vailidity of evolution as you seem to think you are. You are both trying to falsify the other's meta-narrative. That could be an even more interesting discussion to follow if you had the inclination to do that directly - although equally futile - but there's no way you'll make progress discussing Darwinian evolution with Fred, or any other theist.

I'm not pointing this out to show some shortcoming in either of your minds - I think they both work very well - but to use your discussion to illustrate that universal way that all our minds work, For either of you to win this argument one of you will have to become a different person. Good luck on that.

Margaret