Wayfarer

A lot of Buddhists would answer 'no'. But the first real in-depth book on Buddhist philosophy I read was The Central Philosophy of Buddhism by T.R.V. ...

As the OP is about religion generally, not simply Biblical faiths, it might be worth considering the Buddhist ‘doctrine of two levels of truth’, absol...

Actually I think THE book to read about this whole issue is Walter Isaacson’s The Code Breaker, which profiles Jennifer Doudna, who was the scientist ...

There’s been predictions of Armageddon, ‘the end of the world’, in Christianity since it started. How they deal with it is to say that the Faithful wi...

Totally on your page there (although I think it was David Mermin who coined that phrase.) I think nowadays ‘nature’ has become a stand-in for ‘the unc...

Sure thing - the title was referring to the movie, Jurassic Park, with its theme of re-animation, not to the actual Jurassic. I’ve been interested in ...

I don't really understand the logic of your analogy, but I do think it's feasible to compare genetic engineering with hacking the genetic code. I'm su...

Just to recap: I drew distinctions between natural and artificial, as ‘that which occurs in nature’ and ‘that which is a result of human acts’. Then b...

My favourite definition of intelligence is ‘the ability to make distinctions’. Can’t you just see? Anyway, SLX, that’s it from me, I know you hate my ...

OK, the tomato wasn’t ‘engineered’. It was selectively bred. ‘Engineering’ is at best a metaphor in the context. It’s a distinction that ought to be m...

One of the concerns. The other is the distinction between genetic engineering and selective breeding, although apparently this is too subtle a distinc...

‘Engineering’.

Isn’t there a difference in kind here? DNA itself was only discovered around the time I was born, a little after in fact. It’s impossible to say that ...

As I’ve explained, I think there’s plainly a difference between hybridisation and genetic engineering. If you can’t see this difference, then indeed t...

Generally not. Virus are not sentient life-forms, and obviously the benefits of such medicines are enormous. Haven’t been aware of doing that. In a se...

Don't you feel you are being a little blasé? Agree with it or not, the ability to directly manipulate the genetic code, which is quite distinct from s...

Further to 'artificial selection', one of the most interesting topics I studied in prehistoric anthropology was in the origins of agriculture in the F...

But not by direct manipulation of the genome. None of them were 'created by humans', except for in the sense that the breed was selected. Artificial s...

Sure. Naturally-occurring mutations are not brought about by direct manipulation by human scientists. Is that what you had in mind?

OK then, instead of etymology, just what the words actually mean. I’m saying there’s a clear distinction between ‘artificially engineered’ and ‘natura...

I’d simply note the etymology of ‘artificial’ which is ‘made by hand’. The distinction with ‘natural’ is that what is not made by hand occurs naturall...

Aha! But in a very different way. Surely you can recognise the difference between 'artificial' and 'natural' - if you don't, it's not something I thin...

Selective breeding is not the same as genetic engineering. Science is creating completely novel life-forms, not variations of existing life-forms. Dog...

I see your point, but actually, I'm more suspicious of the genetic engineering angle, than of biotechnology generally. The moral qualm I have about cr...

Fnno foo! ex0hejg. Wouldn't have made it that far, I would suggest.

True, but I had read it on this forum, or actually the previous forum. In fact I even remember who said it, but he's not around any more to ask. They ...

Elephants are said to be among the higher mammals that recognise the death of their kind. And there was this story - about two herds of wild elephants...

Reading ‘the myth of the fall’ symbolically - what it symbolises is the beginning of self-consciousness, the emergence of the sense of ownership, of t...

Recall Pierre Hadot’s approach in Philosophy as a Way of Life: I would suggest that most of the academic chatter about ‘theories of truth’ are about a...

And I didn't say that it did. I said that not everything is determined, and that chance is a factor. :clap: Eloquent.

No apologies required. But I think there's a point that is being missed here, albeit a difficult one to state. But let's say deliverance, liberation, ...

Here is one index https://www.csiro.au/en/research/environmental-impacts/climate-change/climate-change-qa/information The IPCC, Intergovernmental Pane...

Basically, everything that was predicted by Al Gore’s film Inconvenient Truth in - when was that? 2006? - is happening, but the bad news is, a lot of ...

for chrissake MF, there is abundant documented evidence with vast scientific consensus. Only a fool would deny it.

Bollocks.

oh please. We haven't discovered America yet. We don't know how to kindle fires yet. We don't know if germs cause disease yet.

I've started on that, following your recommendation. Another facet to that whole argument is the rejection of mathematical Platonism in analytic philo...

Thanks for that. Overall I like your style and I value your contributions. And your blog is very well done. But I’d beware of dismissing ‘religious sa...

Adhoms instead of arguments, as always. For my part, I'm done responding to your incoherencies.

:clap: Happy that you've taken that on board, I think it's a really fundamental point. I posted that essay in 2019, it elicited a good discussion but ...

You're not worth the time, 180. The Buddhist conception of the atom is not the material atom of Greek atomism, but moments of experience, arising and ...

Not a false dichotomy. 'Galilean' science divides the world into the bearers of primary attributes, namely, material bodies that have measurable chara...

I just don't understand how you come to that conclusion on the basis of what I said. To recap - there's an element of chance in life. Buddhism is not ...

Of course. If you think that Nirv??a can be won by some contrivance then you are indeed wasting your time, and indeed many of these discussion are lik...

There's always an element of chance. Not everything is fixed by karma, because reality is not fixed. :ok: Where the idea of karma becomes negative, is...

Don’t have time to respond right now but start with this. I’ll add more later.

actually the height of Everest constantly changes, if only by millimeters, due to continental drift. Also major corrections have been made to its heig...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conformal_cyclic_cosmology

Science is concerned with third-person observables. Dependent origination is something that has to be understood in the first person. It’s the ‘insigh...

Actually the OP question is badly phrased. It should be ‘what is fact’. The question ‘what is a fact?’ has an illimitable number of answers.