John Walton's logic on Genesis 1

@Daniel_Pech

I know you are going to be astounded by this wry observation.

But if you are “…trying to show [me that I am] vastly oversimplifying the issue…” you actually have to show evidence to this fact.

That means you have to explain more details that I explain. You have to trace the logic of the “larger arc” that is inadequate, and how tracing a more fine-tuned arc of logic approaches reality more plausibly.

But what you have been doing for quite some time now is simply describing alternate realities… no evidence… no compelling reason to reject the facts that we have on the table… just whimsy with creative leaps of “what could be true”.

Let me know when you understand the material enough that you can produce more detailed information than we can… and that the detailed information convincingly yeidls different conclusions!

Then you will have accomplished something! Brainstorming is not fact-finding.

Not astounded at all.

But correct me if I’m wrong: You believe that since there are no ancient documents that obviously state that the brain itself has something to do with thought, imagination, and inner speech, and that are no ancient documents articulating anything that today is called the embodied mind, enactive intelligence, etc, then the ancients (1) had no visceral sense, from inside their own heads, that the inside of their heads were involved with their consciousness, self-awareness, inner speech, etc., and (2) had no visceral sense, from inside their breasts and abdomens, that those torso locations were emotive, and otherwise informative, of their minds and thoughts.

Do you not understand what I have just said? Are you yourself lacking in these senses? Are you yourself so merely ‘rational’ that you have no inner sense of your own head and torso in terms of your thinking, knowing, believing, etc.?

Thus far in our back-and-forth, it seems to me that you must be so senseless in this regard. For, otherwise, you would recognize that your whole argument amounts to saying that the average ancient individual both:

(a) had no inner sense of any part of his own body in terms of his thoughts and motives,

and yet

(b) somehow had the idea that the insides of his torso was the sole location of his mind…

You seem to me to account for (b) by seeming to imply that the ancients, as a whole, had some actual direct visual, and personal bodily felt experience of the pumping of the heart, that therefore they concluded that, compared to the inside of their head, the heart must be the sole location of their thoughts and motives.

But I would expect you to admit that such an idea as to what the average ancient believed about the heart is an idea that presupposes (a).

But, I presume you realize that the linguistic articulation of a given sensibility is—at least normally—long preceded by that same sensibility. This is true for children universally, and it tends to be culturally true as well. Therefore, unless you produced a logic that shows to my my poor mind that it was NOT true for the ancients, then it seems to me that I shall be left to conclude that you are far more merely ‘rational’ than sensible (at least in regard to what the ‘evidence’ leads you to believe about the average ancient person).

@Daniel_Pech,

My position is not so adamantly asserted as you describe it. But it is much more conservative than the equally extreme position you have been advancing.

There is extensive literature covering the many phases of human civilization, where the reports on where the mind was, where the soul was “busy” … was not the head.

When people “felt” excited… it wasn’t their “head” where they felt it…
people said they felt it in their “livers” or in their “hearts”, right? These were the organs or bodily sections where they Felt the very things that they were thinking.

Word Origins online tell us this: "… in medieval times i[the Liver] rivaled the heart as the supposed seat of love and passion, hence “lily-livered”. "

The head? The Egyptians went through extraordinary efforts to dispose of it before bodies were sealed up. But they went to extraordinary efforts to preserve the following organs in four Canopic jars:

[1] Hapi, the baboon-headed god representing the north, whose jar contained the lungs …

[2] Duamutef, the jackal-headed god representing the east, whose jar contained the stomach…

[3] Imsety, the human-headed god representing the south, whose jar contained the liver…

[4] Qebehsenuef, the falcon-headed god representing the west, whose jar contained the intestines …

Brains? Thrown out with the garbage. Other cultures thought the brain was the source of sinus secretions (not too far off I suppose).

You’ve been told all this before, right? This isn’t news to you then.

So… provide us with the closest thing to evidence that would tell your audience that there were exceptions to this general tendency.

I would start with just which philosophers or physicians were the first
to comment that pain was controlled in the head… eons of warfare must have taught some folks that pain (and paralysis, the opposite of pain) could be triggered by damaging parts of the brain, right? So look there.

Can you do it? I’m thinking that this is do-able… but it starts to draw the limit of just which culture and when thought things differently.

… with none of this over-reacting nonsense that documentary evidence means nothing. Historians around the world base 80% of their conclusions on documents…

… not because they are stupid to do so … but because documents, unlike people’s opinions, don’t randomly change from year to year. They become the impartial recorder of what people said or thought at a specific point in time. And we all thank God for it!

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Any small child can do that. That in no way means that the child lacks all ‘subjective’ visceral sense as to the role of head in thought, imagination, and consciousness. Imagine asking one who has never been exposed to lingo about either the head’s or the torso’s connection to thoughts and feelings. I predict he will favor his torso without meaning to preclude his head.

If you ask him carefully, I predict you will find that he has a sense of both, but that that for his torso at least usually is much stronger. And why would it NOT be stronger?

Surely, you do not presume that these two different locations ought naturally to be felt equally as strongly. There is no bodily precedent for that presumption, mechanically or otherwise. On there merely mechanical side, the only time the inside of one’s head feels mechanically anything is when…say…it ‘pounds’ from some kind of heart-pounding connected feeling, or when one has a concussion that produces a sense of pressure inside one’s head.

So I’m merely pointing out that the universal natural emphasis is no justification for concluding that the average ancient person lacked all inner sense of his own inner head.

You can claim that your position is not extreme. But you have not, as far as I can see, actually demonstrated that is not extreme. Specifically, though you admit the conceive-ablity of ancient evidence that clearly shows to you otherwise, you are happy to simply accept that the ‘evidence’ strictly favors the idea that:

(a) Not even one ancient person ever had any sense that the inside of his head had anything to do with his thoughts, emotions, consciousness, etc…

Please notice, if you have not already, that ‘the inside of my head’ does not equate to ‘I know that what’s inside there has the particular viscosity’ that we moderns know it does.

So I would think that, given everything that I have been saying, and thereby implying, that the only logically possible moderate position is the very one that I espouse in all this.

…And that the only way anyone could think it is not moderate is because they are convinced that ancient humans were so less-evolved than we moderns that they lacked all sense that the insides of their heads had anything to do with their thoughts, emotions, consciousness, etc…

So let me repeat:

I presume you realize that the linguistic articulation of a given sensibility is—at least normally—long preceded by that same sensibility. This is true for children universally, and it tends to be culturally true as well.

Question: Are you assuming here that, short of our obtaining ancient evidence to the contrary, the ancients lacked all sense that the inside of their heads had anything to do with their thoughts and such?

Actually, no they don’t. Not all of them that have ever been, from modern one’s on down to all those that, in ancient times, been ‘historical’ in their efforts. A significant percentage of them allow the very kinds of things that I allow here.

And the issue also is one of what counts as an ‘historian’ kind of effort. (Who are the historians and who are not).

Pain? Mere physical pain? The first to comment on a connection to the brain?

How does

(x)‘the first to comment’ on such rudimentary senses

equate to

(y)**‘the first to have ** any visceral experience inside their head of some thought, or some visual imagination, going on up there’

???

@Daniel_Pech

Oh for goodness sake.

Just produce some shred of evidence, okay? Produce a single, clear and explicit statement … sometime while all of science was still focused on the Four Humors… 1700’s and before.

I won’t discuss it any further until you provide some evidence.

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@Daniel_Pech,

I’m suggesting that we actually have statements that contradict your views.

All you have to do is produce statements from known time periods, that would be consistent with your views.

Is it really so terrifying to you?

Actually, based on the evidence in this thread, I deny it.

The reason is simple: the ancients did not have a rigorous evidence-based approach to anatomy, physiology, and medicine.

In fact, evidence-based approaches did not emerge until the 20th-century. 18th-century doctors used leeches for a wide variety of ailments. 19th-century doctors rejected Pasteur’s findings for decades. No one even thought to test for the effects of tobacco smoking in the first half of the 20th century, and when evidence began to accumulate, it still took decades for the medical consensus to shift.

I mention the recent travails of medicine as a way of saying that the ancients were not idiots. Moreover, the gains we have laboriously made are tenuous, and constantly under threat of being undermined by demagoguery.

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There are multiple, affirmative lines of evidence that indicate the ancients were believed that thoughts and emotions were controlled by organs other than the brain. Much of the evidence is in the Bible that you and I both revere, and that evidence has already been cited in this thread.

You are misrepresenting what has neen presented to you. You are claiming that the case for non-brain processing of thoughts and emotions is based on an absence of contrary evidence. Not so, not by a long shot. The case is based on the presence of strong evidence that they indeed believed that other organs controlled such processing.

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@Daniel_Pech

They allow what you allow? How would you know unless it was written in a book somewhere?

You aren’t making much sense at this point…

Are you saying that, all prior to the 20th Century, no civilization had, in regard to even one empirical issue, an evidence-based approach?

Some of them did. Part of your problem (or so it seems to me), is that only certain individuals of the past were ‘historians’.

I’m not saying that they didn’t. Why do you so mistake my position? You are so given to utterly simplifying the issue, so you naturally can see mine as only so simplified as well in some way.

Western doctors treated patients with leeches for centuries. Would the practice have persisted for so long if the doctors were using statistically informed evidence-based medicine?

Terrifying?

Why do you all keep failing to see the obvious basic disagreement here? Every last one of your claims is made under the presupposition that humans have evolved, and rather slowly, from some ‘ape-like’ ape species of long ago. I, on the other hand, make every one of my claims under the presupposition that humans were created specially.

(The fact that I have not, until now, actually stated such an issue outright in these discussions should not be a problem for you all here. After all, you all here are convinced that you all are essentially versed in every basic issue of the debate, and that I have not been. (Hence you are pleased to think it likely that I am terrified.))

(A) Do you assume that that practice has no direct physiological benefits in some kinds of cases? Or instead, (B) Do you assume that every last human person who employed leaches was just blindly faithful to the tradition?

If (B), then whence the tradition in the first place?

Further, if (B), then (C) Do you presume that, short of an ‘evidence-based’ Medical Establishment, the human individual lacks all effective basis for self-treatment of any and every condition?

Walton’s point is that Genesis is neither a science nor a natural history text. One of his proofs is that the Scriptures contain misunderstandings (common to ancient cultures) about which organs process thoughts and emotions.

Since you say you agree with Walton, I guess we can also agree to accept the verdict of modern scientists regarding medicine, biology, and natural history–while we are encouraged in our faith by Scripture’s testimony of God’s loving purposes.

And this topic seems to have come to a satisfying conclusion.

Grace and peace,
Chris Falter

I did not say that I agree with Walton, period. Any in-context reading of what I actually spelled out thereto can see that I meant agreement with Walton on a limited set of things (as implied by the specificity of that one thing about which I explicitly stated my agreement with Walton).

I said, in response to Walton’s temple idea:

I, too, agree with Walton on this. There is no reason to doubt it. My own main issue is that Walton, in his aim at this temple principle, restricts the text to non-Material-Origins. This is like saying that any normal account of an actual wedding must be an account NOT of an actual wedding, since such an account is normal TO a wedding. Nobody goes around telling of their wedding by including in that telling the fact that it was a materially real wedding. Everybody KNOWS that an actual wedding is a material event…

(John Walton's logic on Genesis 1 - #28 by Daniel_Pech)