Jim Lesurf wrote:

But, anticipating your "that's just the way things are"
argument,
below, humans just happen, along with their sense of
purpose, and
everything to which humans might attribute purpose.
Purpose is then, at
best, an illusion. Presumably an illusion that "just
happens". Fatalism
excludes purpose entirely.

Afraid that does read to me like the kind of rhetorical
waffle that
'philosophers and sages' come out with to show how clever
they are. Bit
like the way they can assume that any set of words with a
question mark
placed at the end is a question(?) 8-]

Wondering how it can be waffle and rhetorical at the same
time...

Anyway, as it happens, it's pretty much the standard logical
objection to determinism, or fatalism, quite succinctly put.

The common idea and practice of justice rests on the notion
of "free will", so it's a practical problem of public order
if nothing else. Determinism is clearly a threat to that
notion, because if it were accepted every plaintive could
argue "that's just how the world happens, m'lud, my purpose
was entirely incidental".

Hence the frantic moral debates surrounding the human genome
project, and the work of Dawkins in particular...possibly
because he happens to have become famous. The fear is that,
if human purpose can be reduced to science, free will
disappears, and so the meaning of "purpose", as a reason for
someone doing something, disappears along with it.

Yes. You are just an illusion. So I no longer need to
consider what you
say. :-)

No, I'm certain I'm not an illusion. Nevertheless you are
free to consider whatever you wish.

Or are you?

Ian