Typhon

This is a typical, but unsubstantiated claim by theists. One however, that I think is easy to dispel.

We have good and increasing reason to think that we are not unique in our ability to both appreciate aesthetics and incorporate this with abstract or symbolic thinking into what we call art. Whales sing, for the pure pleasure of it. Gorillas paint, and build aesthetically pleasing nests. Dolphins have names for themselves, call-signs which mean nothing else in all the sea. Chimps display abstract thought, and know themselves from their own reflections. Baboons show complexities of social interaction and savvy that would put some politicians to shame.

Just as we are not the only bonified "tool users" in the animal kingdom, which once was held to be a hallmark of sentiency and human uniqueness, we are not the only species to possibly practice and appreciate art and abstract thinking. Now, like the antiquated definer of "tool user," we increasing find theists and others seeking to shoehorn art and abstract thinking into this old category for mostly it would appear, emotional reasons. However, all the misguided wishes to place the human species firmly on a pedestal over and clear of the rest of the biological species we are mixed in with, in much more messy arrangement, generally fail.

Humans like any species, are indeed unique. However, rather than standing on a promontory lifted up by a nonexistent god or clockwork, progressive evolution, the truth is more that we stand shoulder to neck, bicep to wing, in the rich, diverse valley, just one expression of amazing biological diversity among many others. In the rock beneath our feet is the ample and undeniable evidence that we are neither the sole inheritors of some methodical, stately progress nor the only organisms to lay claim however whimsical or based on supposed divine fiat, to the title "dominate species." We should gaze long and hard at that record and remember that have a long way to go through an uncertain future at best, to even approach the biological success of many of those who have gone before us and now can only be found in layered rock and compressed lake bed. We would be wise to be humbler still, when we turn our eyes to the starry night skies and gaze out upon a cosmos in whose cold, impersonal eye, we are but the tiniest flicker of light in a endless sea of both blazing, hopeful suns and terrible, vast darkness.

We are life, complex and amazing, one among many. Despite all the dreams of man and priest, no one has ever been able to prove otherwise.

.T.

[ July 10, 2002: Message edited by: Typhon ]</p>

Doubting Didymus

Oh! I was just about to say something similar, but I wouldn't have put it so well.

I have one more thing to add to your list of animals displaying abstract thought: Elephants.

I remember seeing a documentary, where people gave elephants canvas and brush and allowed them to paint. They produced paintings that, when shown in a gallery, were recieved with great praise from critics.

The only thing that separates us from other animals is the degree.

[ July 10, 2002: Message edited by: Doubting Didymus ]</p>

Coragyps

To lower the tone of this excellent discussion a bit, may I qoute and then comment:
I'll bet it was for lipstick. That crap is still (often) made from iron oxide, and still expensive. Can you hear it - "Og, pick me up some ochre when you go down to the mine, and be sure it's sabre-tooth blood red, not that nasty glyptodont crap you got last time!"

punta

it should be mentioned that humans are not the only intelligent (ya, right) mammals to mine.

Elephants in the mountains of Kenya,s (Kitmu(sp?) park, mine for salt.

Duvenoy

And thus we have proved, yet again, that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. As is ugly.

I think that man's first art was produced in his tools. A simple pride in craftsmanship; a modification in a bit of stone. I don't think body decoration - painting, piercing, tattooing, and so forth - preceeded this. Nor did cave and rock painting. I have no really good reason for these thoughts, they just seem to fit. To me, anyway.

It is the product of evolution, pure and simple. The more elaborate the tool is, the more leasure time it's maker had. And the more discerning his/her mind had become.

The Clovis peoples are a case in point (please forgive the pun, and yeah, I know: Clovis was Homo sapiens). Arguably, these peoples were the most skilled hunters ever seen on the North American continent. Their spear points were delicatly crafted. I've seen some. What mammoth-hunting Michaelanglo knapped these lovely harbingers of death? These points have evolved over several million years from a humble hand axe. Clovis was so efficient that in spite of the tough conditions that they lived under, they had time to produce art. Clovis had the leasure to carefully plan where each, minute flake would be pressured from the raw stone. It follows that they did a lot of body adornment and perhaps cave and rock painting that has been sadly lost.

So, was Clovis inspired by God? No doubt, but it was inspiration from God(s) that we would never have heard of. Superstition evolves no less than anything else.

doov

[ July 10, 2002: Message edited by: Duvenoy ]</p>

GeoTheo

Am I saying the "4 f's" don't exist? Or am I saying That there is more there than that? Am I saying that that is not the totality of human experience? Maybe it is the totality of your experience. Maybe you live in a smaller world of your own design. You would like to think of your self as a realist that can see so much clearer than we Theists. We have our heads in the clouds with our romantic notions of creation and beauty as We look at a sunset. Wheras, you the wise, know that it is nothing more than synapses occurring in our brains and the release of endorphins triggered by social conditioning. You would like to believe that pointing such things out to me is akin to explaining modern meteorology to pre literate cultures worshipping a sky God.
But actually what occurs is that I see that you are missing the point. I see all that you do and more. In the same sense that a person with a vocabulary of hundreds of thousands of words would live in a bigger world than a person with seven.
The person with a vocabulary of seven words can be fully understood by the one with a vocabulary of hundreds of thousands, but to the former, the majority of the latters speech would be gibberish.
Do you have any concept of romance, or is it all just sex? Two rutting dogs in a vacant lot and a man and a woman walking hand in hand along a beach are both the same? The male just wants to bang her, and there's nothing else to it.
Would you say that sex is a part of love and romance or that love and romance is merely part of sex?
Can a person with such a worldview ever hope to be in love? It is all just a matter of hormones and endorphins and social conditioning. That is all that any pleasurable experience is, a reaction of the nerve endings.
Why not just lay in an alley somwhere and smoke crack? Is the only reason, because of all the nasty side effects and social ills it causes? What if there were some kind of smart drug with no side affects?
I think the world holds some allure for you because you still find some mystery in it, but I'm not sure you are paying attention to the posts of some of the hardliners here. They don't wonder they Know. They have built their world brick by brick and reinforce it everyday. They have decided to limit their realm of experience to empiricism.
They won't agree with me of course, unless I can provide empirical evidence.

GeoTheo

Ok. fair enough. Show me what it looks like when a gorilla paints and compare it to what it looks like when a gorilla mucks around with a brush.

As an artist I'm often annoyed at what often passes for abstract art these days.

GeoTheo

None of your 'b's contradict your 'a's (except the silly one about the angels.)
There is no reason to believe that a creationist would reject any of these. You are just cutting yourself off from any higher purpose that can be intuited from any of these phenomena. You are deliberately limiting yourself, perhaps due to you discomfort at some of the ramifications. Yes life consists of eating and going to the bathroom and eventually dying, wheather you are an atheist or not. But sadly to you that's all it contains.
You just have one less demension in your world.
You sound like the Russian atheist astronaut that boasted he disproved Christianity when he got above the cloud cover and didn't see Heaven, unaware that he came off as being clueless, and didn't sway any Christians from their belief in the slightest.

Mageth

You are just cutting yourself off from any higher purpose that can be intuited from any of these phenomena.

Exactly what "higher purpose" is one to intuit from leprosy?

You just have one less demension in your world.

That's properly spelled "dementia"

GeoTheo

With your limited frame of reference I'm sure that's how it appears. Just like a person from a 3D world would appear to a Flatlander.