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    C O G I T O: A P H I L O S O P H I C a L D I S E R T a T I O N
    C O G I T O: A P H I L O S O P H I C a L D I S E R T a T I O N
    C O G I T O: A P H I L O S O P H I C a L D I S E R T a T I O N
    Ebook126 pages1 hour

    C O G I T O: A P H I L O S O P H I C a L D I S E R T a T I O N

    By G E R A R D U S R A M C

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    About this ebook

    The eternal dichotomy between science and religion.
    Are they compatible? YESNOMAYBE!
    The theory of creation and the theory of evolution are fundamentally at loggerheads with each other. The one being based on faith, the other on reason.
    The fact remains that the supernatural explanation of the universe is a fantasy; the purpose of our existence, an unresolved mystery; the question of where we are going, the back-pain enigma and gaping hole in the postulate of intelligent design.
    Are we lost somewhere on a cosmic road to nowhere? If God exists, why does he need all these gigantic fiery celestial marbles to play with?
    If there is no god, what else is out there, and what shall we call it, him, her? This force can have no gender and must be beyond time as we know it.
    OCTOPUS MAGNUS!
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTrafford Publishing
    Release dateApr 10, 2012
    ISBN9781466915831
    C O G I T O: A P H I L O S O P H I C a L D I S E R T a T I O N
    Author

    G E R A R D U S R A M C

    T H E A U T H O R RAMC are his initials And Also his pen name American Foreign-born Multilingual Multicultural Delta Mu Delta Honorary Counselor Retired CEO Painter Author Spikes, 1990 The Leadership Labyrinth, 1994 The Leadership Luxation, 1997 The Leadership Legacy, 1999 Octopus Magnus, 2000 The Powerhouses of Ill Repute, 2001 Niccolo Machiavelli, 2003 Sacerdots, 2005 Manifest Destiny, 2008 Cogito, 2011

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      Book preview

      C O G I T O - G E R A R D U S R A M C

      © Copyright 2012 G E R A R D U S R A M C.

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

      Cover by RAMC (Robert A. M. Coppenrath)

      Homo Sapiens

      Painting N° SA 183 2005

      Acrylic on canvas

      ISBN: 978-1-4669-1584-8 (sc)

      ISBN: 978-1-4669-1582-4 (hc)

      ISBN: 978-1-4669-1583-1 (e)

      Library of Congress Control Number: 2012906062

      Trafford rev. 06/01/2012

      7-Copyright-Trafford_Logo.ai

      www.trafford.com

      North America & international

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      phone: 250 383 6864 ♦ fax: 812 355 4082

      I think! We think! Therefore we cry—we laugh—

      We pray—we dance—we fight—we kill—we kiss—

      We rearrange our earthly habitat and reevaluate

      Our cosmic and human condition—we hope and we

      Despair—we create manmade, scientific, and great

      Artistic and Technical wonders—we love—

      we hate—we live

      Alas, we also die!

      Image22241.JPG

      A Philosophical Dissertation

      Gerardus Ramc

      Philosophical Script by Gerardus RAMC

      Homage to

      Rene Descartes

      This philosophical treatise is dedicated to my very dear friend and mentor, em. Professor Dr. Albert Beken, an erudite Cartesian thinker and spiritual militant in matters of intellectual integrity and progress; to my two daughters, Margaret and Martina; and to my grandson and scholar, Robert Andy Coppenrath-Tumbusch.

      In grateful recognition to the legions of intellectuals who praised reason above faith and who fought religious oppression and faith-based intimidation and damnation.

      This manuscript was proofread by Joan Armour Mendell, a poet and a lady of great intellectual distinction. This manuscript was digitalized by Marie Didion.

      To both these ladies I extend my most sincere thanks for their diligence and attention to detail.

      Dear Reader,

      Please know that all philosophical and theological argumentation is speculative in that nothing in its savant ornamentation is carved in stone. There is no solid proof of many of the thoughts that are being formulated in these areas. They are often nothing more than smoke and mirrors. Metaphysics is nothing more than spiritual dreaming, often with intense scrutiny into the realm of sleepwalking hide-and-seek. More often than not, we are walking in the dark. A new study suggests that there are a mind-blowing 300 sextillion stars in the universe. That is three followed by twenty-three zeroes, or 3 billion times 100 billion.¹ The astrophysicist Charlie Conroy looked up how many cells there are in the average human body—50 trillion or so—and multiplied that by the seven billion people on earth and came up with about 300 sextillion!

      In this gigantic, cosmic circus we on planet Earth are like a solitary ant, and our heliosphere is a rather lonely place. Are we alone? Who knows! Donald Brownless, an astronomer at Washington University, is not very optimistic that we may find alter egos. Many imponderables and differences in geologic and atmospheric forces on exoplanets may keep life as we know it from evolving into something complex or intelligent. Also, God’s angels must be long-distance runners because the intergalactic distances are simply mindboggling!

      All this makes metaphysics an occult science and all philosophy pure speculation at best. This being the case, all that follows has to be taken with a grain of salt!

      brain3-1.jpg

      French Boutade

      On a Souvent Tort D’Avoir Raison!

      (One is often wrong to be right.)

      This quotation with respect to the contents of this essay means that logic and reason may intellectually prevail and remain in the shadow of universal acceptance and endorsement. Not all things that are human are reasonable. They are not supposed to be or we would not be human. This is part of our primordial heritage; this is part of our biochemical and biogenetic condition. This is a key factor in what is to be our destiny. We humans are like a feather in the wind (comme la plume au vent!). The wind is our friend and our foe, at times acting as a gentle breeze and at other times blowing with all the ferocity of a hurricane. The secret of a happy life is to find shelter from both.

      brain3-1.jpg

      Rene Descartes (French, 1590-1650) was a mathematician, a medical doctor, and a philosopher. He received a Jesuit education. He traveled extensively throughout Europe in the pursuit of a military career. At the age of thirty-nine, he emigrated to Holland, where he lived most of his life. After some trepidation, he answered the call of Queen Christina of Sweden to become her tutor and moved to Stockholm. The regimen of the queen was such that she demanded his presence at all hours but mainly at the crack of dawn. These were rather frigid sessions physically and spiritually. On one chilly morning, poor Descartes caught pneumonia, which was the cause of his premature death.

      He was a philosopher who devoted himself to research work in connection with the various sciences, like effects, causes, and principles. Descartes was a rationalist par excellence! He situated himself somewhere between rational thought, pure science, and innovative mathematics, such as geometric algebra, deductive methodology, rational doubt, and metaphysics. He used free inquiry as a prelude to the study of the mechanics of the external world. He had some religious conformity and embraced the traditional creed.

      Descartes began with doubt, with a veneer of piety in between renown and repudiation. Cartesian thought became a philosophical vogue and a break with Aristotle and the scholastics. (The world order is set in stone, and logic falls into the fold of a more regimented, predetermined conclusion. There is little room for deductive speculation.) Descartes experienced dry and lifeless medieval theological book learning.

      He was at the dawn of the enlightenment, and it became fashionable to praise reason! The orientation was still very much between reason and religion and some kind of elegant compromise between religion and philosophy. This was a major breakthrough after one and a half millennia of theological dogma!

      Dogma, according to Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary, is a tenet put forth as authoritative without adequate grounds or an authoritative proclamation by a church.² Steve Jobs, the visionary behind Apple, said, "Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other peoples thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice." Dogma is like the petrified wood in the forest of spiritual human aspirations. Descartes had his antagonists, and one of them was Blaise Pascal, scientist and philosopher. Dixit Pascal: Descartes would have been glad to dispense with God but could not avoid allowing him to fillip (a snap of the finger released from the thumb) to put the world in motion: After that he had no use for God!

      Theologians were increasingly alarmed by the difficulty of reconciling transubstantiation with Descartes’s views. Louis XIV, Le Roi Soleil, uneasy with the disturbance of his spiritual comfort zone, forbade the ambivalent philosophy in the College Royal and the University of Paris. It was the time of the Fronde (Anarchists). Descartes, traumatized by what had happened to Galileo, withheld the publication of one of his treatise and decided Paris was no longer safe. His book Le Discours De La Methode (The Discourse on the Method of Properly Guiding the Reason in the Search for Truth in the Sciences) was put on the index of the Catholic Church. Dixit Descartes: Since I desire to devote myself wholly to the search for truth, I thought it necessary… to reject as if utterly false anything in which I could discover the least ground for doubt, so that I could find out if I was left with anything at all which was absolutely indubitable. Thus, because our senses sometimes deceive us, I decided to suppose that nothing was really as we were led to believe it was. (Omnibus dubitandum—all things must be doubted.)

      Descartes’s god was a lazy god (dieu faineant). This was not the majestic and awesome god of the Old Testament or the merciful father. He was the god of deism—impersonal, functionless, negligible, and subject to invariable laws. Who would think to pray to such an epicurean futility?

      Descartes, in company with Socrates, regarded rightness of action to depend upon certainty of knowledge and wrongdoing upon ignorance.

      This was the seventeenth-century man who thought in geometric curves, mechanical curves, circles, parabolas, hyperbolas,

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