Okay, my bad on the spirit thing. I honestly thought that was a staple of Christianity. You think we might be just meat?
No, I don't think we're 'just' meat. There is another Jewish notion that we don't have souls, but that we
'are' souls, that our soul, spirit, and body are "one" in integral fusion, not separate bits that have been put together like Lego pieces.
And I know that you aren't an advocate of ID, but God had to design physical reality in order to create it, didn't He? I'm assuming God must have created what "seeing" is, for example. Why am I wrong there?
Of course, as a Christian I can semantically use the term "believe" when I say I 'believe' that our universe IS God's handiwork. But to use this term doesn't by necessity denote a singular reference or connotation as to how and why I believe that idea. My affirmation of the idea may come rather as an extension from a complex of what I Subjectively see as coherent, even if not systematically structured, theology involving the Christian idea(s) of Revelation. I'm not looking for physical structures in the universe to back this idea, and even when I DO look at the physical structures of our universe, it isn't to 'see' in some direct, empirical fashion the seeming fingerprints of God, but rather to be confronted by the aesthetically and existential impression enormity of its Glory. (As I've noted to another poster here several months back, think the movie
2001: A Space Odyssey, or the movie
Gravity for the general conceptual typology I'm attempting to infer but can't really directly demonstrate.) As for the physical, as a Methodological Naturalist, I just leave the grandeur of the scientific study of the universe to our various experts, specialists, and scientists...
That's the part that confuses me. I asked if you believed there was a being capable of deceiving us like that, and you said yes, but when I asked how you know that being doesn't want to, you point me to someone arguing that it's impossible to deceive us like that.
That's because my answer, reflecting some of the things that Descartes expressed in his Meditations, was actually referring to God Himself, not the Devil nor an evil demon god or Malevolent Matrix Architect.
So, as I see it, my answers were accurate: God is capable (the only one, really who can) of deceiving us in a totalistic way; and through the filter of having applied Philosophical Hermeneutics rather than just playing with concepts and words by way of semantic sophistry or "magical theories of reference," I also understand that God does not wish to deceive us in that way, even IF as a course of judgement against those who hold out against Him in the long run of Apocalyptic transgression, He may allow the Devil to run the course against (and through) much of humanity.
On a practical, linguistic scale, I also accord with Hillary Putnam's analytic assessment, as well as Descartes final resolution, Pascal's deliberation, Kierkegaard's existential choice to move beyond the aesthetic, the intepretive measures of Philosophical Hermeneuticists in their Critical Realism and thereby reject the seeming claimed cogency of any Brain-In-A-Vat scenarios along with any and all evil god scenarios.
I sure hope so. I won't see Dark Phoenix till it hits DVD/streaming, but I hated Captain Marvel. I hated Black Panther too.
... just don't expect
Dark Phoenix to be '
the Avengers: Infinity War/Endgame,' it is somewhat parred down from that scale, even though the original story from the comic books in the early 80's was essentially on a par with that level of story. If anything,
Dark Phoenix has a cool soundtrack ...
...the interesting thing about the Dark Phoenix story is that it does kind of tie into my OP;
so, what do we do if we're influenced against our will to see the world in a cynical way, or make certain negative decisions and/or destructive choices, one way or another, from both the outside, and the inside, of our minds?