Sarkus #120, while acknowledging his erudition is vastly superior to mine, I would like to take strong exception to Frame's categorisation of humans as powerless components of an impersonalist Universe.
"If the world is basically impersonal, it is a pretty dark, dreary, and hopeless place. Happiness, justice, love, beauty might spring up for a while, but they are cosmic accidents of no ultimate importance.
I would like to treat just with the above quote for the present.
Firstly, what is his "world" in his assertion "If the world is basically impersonal......" Could it be Earth, the Universe or something else? That it is "a pretty dark, dismal and hopeless place.", strikes me as more of an unsubstantiated opinion, especially when he mentions happiness, justice, love, beauty and how ephemeral they are.
I think he should provide compelling argument why he thinks so.
For clarification, he doesn't think that the world is impersonal. This is his view of what an impersonal worldview would mean... to him at least.
The world he refers to is existence, the human condition, etc. He would find it a dark, dismal place, clearly ignoring the way those of us who are impersonalists find it.
I can't speak for him, and I quoted him merely as a counter to wynn, who held that people such as her, the personalists, are unable to explain their worldview to impersonalists.
I subscribe to the proposition that happiness, justice, love, beauty are constructs of the human mind, as are, notions of innocence, guilt, morality, compassion, fellowship and altruism. Neither Nature nor the Cosmos are imbued with these qualities. Whether one calls it impersonalism or indifference, Nature and the Cosmos are our masters figuratively speaking. We are an integral part of them and not apart from them. Our masters have no concern if we cannot keep pace with their progress. They will continue without us without a backward glance if we become extinct.
The supernatural world is a human construct also. By definition science cannot provide evidence for it because should it do so then the supernatural becomes natural and faith becomes irrelevant.
We share this view, then.
Wynn is quoted as asserting: "well, personalism and impersonalism can't meaningfully communicate". I'm interested in why you dismiss the claim.
You seem to have understood what Frame was trying to communicate, right, as did I. It is expressed in terms that both can understand, even if they do not agree with it.
Frame is a personalist.
I am an impersonalist, although do not tend to think of myself in those terms, but rather as whatever impersonal philosophy I actually am (whether it be emergentism, rationalism, empiricism, or mix of these and others etc).
Given that Frame, in that quote alone, was able to meaningfully communicate... I thought there was no option but to disagree with wynn.
One needs merely to understand where the boundaries of meaningful communication lie, or at least when they may have been crossed, as with any subject.