The problem with science II

As for your conclusion, you absolutely have said something against studying the brain scientifically. You denoted the attempt made by science to understand human nature as absurd. What do you think human nature is? Is emotion part of human nature? Happiness? Sorrow? Love? Hate? Altruism? Misanthropy? Do you really believe that science has no capacity to find what these trace back to? Do you have any idea how complex something can become given an extremely limited set of elements and rules?

The contrast of science with "the classics" was the theme earlier; now it is seen to be the cause of religious falling away as well. And of course it is the cause for the last hundred or two hundred years or so, and has been despite all the strained arguments here that try to prove science is not incompatible with belief. Of course it's not, as long as you lop off the inconvenient parts of religion to fit science rather than the other way around.

It's not absurd. Science is simply asking questions and seeking answers. What's absurd about that? Certainly, this area of science is in it's infancy, but then 500 years ago chemists (alchemists) were trying to make gold from lead...

Yes, Robin, that is a big part of the problem. It is very hard to abstract it for some reason and I think I'm about to give up saying anything more about it since what I'm saying is getting across such a big nothing to most here.

If you are using "scientism" to stand for this kind of thinking, I agree, and I like to use it myself

But I doubt they'd say they care about "doing away with" the feeling as long as they make sure it's understood that's all it is, a feeling and therefore an illusion that has nothing to do with reality.

I think I have a problem with the way you derive this, because when I was an atheist I would have thought that nihilism did make sense as you define it (without using the word), but I resented the thinking that made human beings into things, always hated the physicalistic reduction of mind to brain and thought and feeling to epiphenomena and human being to animal. All that even though I was an atheist and believed in evolution. But maybe I was being stubbornly irrational about it -- I trusted my subjective introspective "knowledge" that human beings were way more than that.I would have agreed, however, based on my atheism I suppose, and general nihilism in the sense of believing we have no "formal purpose" as you defined it, all thanks to Darwin really, that morality makes no sense, or sin or virtue. But I would have denied, just on the basis of subjective experience, or on the basis of human history, or even literature, what you say about how ""free will" is meaningless" or that "Our thoughts are merely like water running downhill."

Now I'm having trouble following you. I thought I'd disagreed with some part of what you were saying.

What kind of "scientific" explanation of human nature contradicts what it actually feels like to be human?

It does pain me that anyone would even TRY to explain such a thing Darwinistically, yes, because it really can't explain it, and also can't help but be trivializing and reductionistic.

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I don't understand how this relates to my opening post, SNC.1. I don't believe in any gods;
2. I don't have a problem with incredible scientific interpretations per se;