English Department Limits Graduate Admission to Pre-1900's Focus

[MWolf]

@JBStillFlying

Thank you for disclosing that you have never taken a literature class and that your perspective on topics such as the insignificance of humans or “good” and “bad” are confined to your understanding of the natural world.

Since any claim that "good and “evil” are universal is a claim that they exist in the natural world, my education and training is more than enough.

@JBStillFlying

If you were to, say, debate a theologian on some of these points, what arguments would you use to prove that “good and bad” are no more than human/social constructs? Your statement is so confidently-delivered that I’m concluding you presented it as fact. What facts would you rely on? Or am I misinterpreting and you have merely expressed your subjective opinion?

A. The universe is vast, and we are barely a scrap of organic material, and a speck of rock orbiting one of ten billion trillion stars in a billion galaxies. Yet you would have me believe that our concepts of “good” and “evil”, actually mean something for the rest of the universe?

B. When the concepts of good and evil that you use were developed, people did not understand what stars were, had no concept of galaxies, did not have more than the vaguest inkling of atoms, much less subatomic particles, thought that the “material” world was exactly what humans could see and touch, etc.

Yet you are claiming that they had an understanding that was s deep and fundamental, that they could perceive meaning and morality in the universe?

C. No species behaves in a way that does not have a long-term benefit for the spread of their particular genome. Ichneumon wasp continue to lay their eggs inside spider and caterpillars and their larvae continue to eat those poor critters alive. Is that evil? Do they get punished? They have existed for millions of years, yet they seem to be doing pretty well. Did non-avian dinosaurs commit sins, but the mammals were virtuous? What sins did the dodos commit that caused them to go extinct? When a Cooper’s hawk kills a sparrow, is the sparrow good, and the hawk evil?

D. If good and evil do not exist in the rest of the animals, that means that they are limited to humans alone. Did Homo erectus or Homo habilis have good and evil? Did their ancestors? What about the species which looked like a tree shrew, from which we all evolved? If these did, that means that animals have Good and Evil. If they didn’t, that means that Good and Evil magically appeared in some human ancestor, suddenly and out of nowhere. That assumes the supernatural, which is an additional assumption that has no basis in reality.

Of course, I would like to hear what arguments the theologian has which do not assume the existence of a god.