We have a few carnivals for your Friday afternoon delectation…
Otherwise, talk among yourselves. I’m going to be helping a swarm of new freshmen register for their fall classes for a while.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Speaking of carnivals, I had an idea a while back which might be both fun and useful. My list of reviews and rebuttals of Behe’s The Edge of Evolution has gotten pretty long and thorough, but it is just a list. Furthermore, the glut of rebuttals seems to have passed; as John Wilkins pointed out, the ID quarter has been rather quiet about it, and so little fuel has been added to the fire.
I was thinking, then, what if we held an Edge of Evolution carnival? In a week or so, I can post an essay summarizing what the reality-based community has done about Behe’s book so far, and I’ll work all the links I’ve gathered into a narrative.
(Additional entries would, of course, be welcomed.)
D’oh! It was John Lynch, not John Wilkins. Serves me right for typing without looking.
Dawkins vs. Benedict XVI:
http://thestubborncurmudgeon.blogspot.com
A fascinating early CBC interview with David Suzuki on how he began his career in biology.
Unfortunately the CBC site appears to have only a portion of the interview up for download.
This is OT, but interesting.
From Matthew Yglesias vis Atrios:
http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/06/carping.php
The Hill (political rag) in a discussion of Obama’s use of earmarks describes a project to keep Asian Carp out of the Great Lakes as “quirky”. WTF? Anyone who has half-way been paying attention and has any sort of understanding of invasive species should know that this is an urgent environmentally and economically highly significant issue.
Just an example of how many journalists, especially those on the political beat, really do not understand or apparently care to understand jack about anything with a hint of science in it. Environmental issues and science are just “quirky”.
For Indianapolis area public television fans:
“Earlier this year you had expressed interest in seeing A Brief History
of Disbelief with Jonathan Miller on TV 20. I have good news! We plan
to show all three parts back-to-back on Sunday, July 29 starting at 2
pm.”
Enjoy!
Not Hitchens but eloquent in their own way.
Articles of interest:
Evolution, Religion and Free Will reports results of surveys of evolutionary scientists since 1914 on their attitudes toward science and religion, including a recent detailed survey. Some excerpts follow here, but the original is worth reading, and lives up to American Scientist‘s goal of lucid writing. The discussion is nuanced especially historically, as I’d expect from Provine.
> 2003 Cornell Evolution Project
> Gregory W. Graffin, William B. Provine
> Comprised of 17 questions and space for optional comments, this questionnaire addressed many more issues than the earlier polls [in 1914, 1933 and 1998]. Religious evolutionists were asked to describe their religion, and unbelievers were asked to choose their closest description among atheist, agnostic, naturalist or “other” (with space to describe). Other questions asked if the evolutionary scientist were a monist or dualist–that is, believed in a singular controlling force in natural science or also allowed for the supernatural–whether a conflict between evolution and religion is inevitable, whether humans have free will, whether purpose or progress plays a role in evolution, and whether naturalism is a sufficient way to understand evolution, its products and human origins.
> Taken together, the advocacy of any degree of theism is the lowest percentage measured in any poll of biologists’ beliefs so far (4.7 percent).
> …most (79 percent) of the respondents billed themselves as metaphysical naturalists. They were strongly materialists and monists: 73 percent said organisms have only material properties, whereas 23 percent said organisms have both material and spiritual properties.
> Only 8 percent of the respondents chose answer A, the NOMA principle advocated by Stephen Jay Gould, rejecting the harmonious view of evolution and religion as separate magisteria. Even fewer (3 percent) believe that evolution and religion are “totally harmonious,” answer D.
> …the wide majority, 72 percent, of the respondents chose option B. These eminent evolutionists view religion as a sociobiological feature of human culture, a part of human evolution, not as a contradiction to evolution. Viewing religion as an evolved sociobiological feature removes all competition between evolution and religion for most respondents.
> Conclusion:
Only 10 percent of the eminent evolutionary scientists who answered the poll saw an inevitable conflict between religion and evolution. The great majority see no conflict between religion and evolution, not because they occupy different, noncompeting magisteria, but because they see religion as a natural product of human evolution.
=====
And, unrelated, The Nation has a recent article The New Atheists in which Ronald Aronson comments on the successful books of Sam Harris, Dawkins, Dennett, and Hitchens. Noting these as evidence of the “unreported secret of American life: Considerable numbers of Americans, religious and secular, are becoming fed up with the in-your-face religion that has come to mark our society” he discusses a coalition of the left with atheists as well as with religions.
Trent Reznor and El-P recently did a song about religion’s exploitation of fear:
Flyentology
(I really need to excise more from excerpted quotes as above. Sorry about that…)
“I’m going to be helping a swarm of new freshmen register for their fall classes for a while.”
And lucky freshmen (and -women) they are indeed to meet such an idea-challenging professor so early in their careers! I assume you’ll be helping with p-z registrants, while someone else works with a-o. (couldn’t resist)
But freshman registration— ughh! Still makes me cringe all these decades later.
That part of the poll seemed rather poorly-written to me. They presented
“religion is a social phenomenon that has developed with the biological evolution of Homo sapiens–therefore religion should be considered as a part of our biological heritage, and its tenets should be seen as a labile social adaptation, subject to change and reinterpretation;”
and
“[religion and science] are mutually exclusive magisteria whose tenets indicate mutually exclusive conclusions”
as alternative choices. But I would agree with both. Religion as a phenomenon is perfectly explicable by evolutionary theory and science in general, but many religious claims and its preferred methodologies for truth-finding are incompatible with those of science and will be so for the foreseeable future. Many religions accept evolution, many don’t, but that doesn’t have anything to do with whether or not religion is itself the product of evolution.
Their interpretation of the poll results on free will was also amusing:
If most people define free will as being about choice, and most modern professional philosophers don’t, I fail to see how the philosophers are automatically the ones in the right….
ctenotrish, thanks for that reminder of A Brief History of Disbelief. I checked the KQED guide (San Francisco Bay area) and they’ve now got it scheduled for mid-July. Starts July 16, episodes weekly, with a dozen repeats of each on the digital channels (gotta love that economically allocated SDTV bandwidth).
Anton: touché on “I would agree with both” answers, accepting religion as evolved, and its tenets as incompatible with scientific understanding. Their pertinent paragraph about the preference for evolved religion is pretty iffy: “Evolutionary scientists are strongly motivated to ameliorate conflict between evolution and religion. Sociobiology [of religion] offers them an apparent conciliatory path … and sounds superficially comforting to compatibilists.”
As for “free will”, I guess I have to say I too believe in it. (Although the last time I was involved in Executing a will, it was far from free.)
It’s amusing to recall George Romanes’ search (he was Darwin’s protogé, in effect his post-doc) for the phylogenetic origin of consciousness. He defined consciousness operationally as any behavior which implied making a choice. Since earthworms can be observed to choose a preferred leaf instead of a less preferred one, he asserted they were the simplest conscious taxon.
PZ: the service you give by linking (which in turns leads those of us “students” to follow links) is invaluable. Everything I take the time to educate myself with the wealth of information presented to me can only be described as “positive growth” for each and every client (patient) whom I encounter. If I do not take the time to educate myself, how can I expect my patients to do educate themselves?!
Your original posts invariably lead to links, which lead to more links. Thank you to each and every poster (or fence sitter)! If I make the effort to learn, others may follow, my patients benefit, and if they choose not to, then I at least benefit. As an anti-theist but yet humanist, thank you.
Okay, what the fck is this all about?
The Medusa Strain – an unknown life form is hardening your
arteries and turning your kidneys to stone. That’s if it
exists at all
– by Bijal Trivedi, New Scientist, 23 June 2007, 38
THEY are minuscule egg-shaped structures mere billionths of a metre
across, dwarfed by the tiniest living cell and smaller than many
viruses. They have a hard bony shell, replicate like a living
organism and are wiped out by antibiotics and radiation, yet seem
to lack DNA. Some say they are infectious microbes, possibly even
an unknown form of life, able to cause diseases ranging from
Alzheimer’s to atherosclerosis. Others say they are simply
harmless crystals.
Welcome to the topsy-turvy world of nanobacteria. Once described as
the “cold fusion of microbiology”, the very existence of these
microbes has been denied or ridiculed by mainstream opinion for
nearly a decade and their proponents branded mavericks. Just like
cold fusion, though, nanobacteria have refused to go away and now
– under the new guise of “calcifying nanoparticles” – they are making
a renewed bid for scientific respectability. The stakes are high. If
diseases long thought incurable are actually caused by nanobacteria,
they could be prevented with vaccines, or treated with antibiotics.
Great White Wonder:
Sounds like an idea similar to prions. It seems possible. Which, obviously, has no bearing on whether it’s actually possible or real.
Of course, it makes me think of Andromeda Strain. Supposedly when Crichton practiced medicine he made up diseases out of boredom and stubborn patients, and eventually quit practicing out of guilt. I can’t find a reference so it’s probably bunk, but it wouldn’t surprise me if that story is someone’s science fiction that got picked up by conspiracy theorists.
Sounds like an idea similar to prions.
Except prions don’t “replicate like a living organism” and I don’t recall anybody ever claiming otherwise.
Or referring to them as “bacteria.”
Sloppy writing and sensational nomenclature = poop science.
Ever handy, the wikipedia: Nanobacteria
GWW: Depends on your definition of ‘replicate’, since prions supposedly take specific non-prion proteins and alter (replicate, if you’re a sensationalist copy writer) them into more prions. (That’s the laymans explanation I got somewhere… probably an X-Files episode *shame*. The WP article is nonspecific but can be interpreted to support me), and causes problems because it forms fiber chains, which can be interpreted as similar to hardening, or ‘calcifying’.
But yes, I agree that it’s sensational garbage, but I’m more convinced now that they’re theorizing a previously unknown type of prion. Or that some kooks have misdiagnosed something as prions, and have changed terminology when others pointed out it doesn’t fit a specific aspect of ‘prions’ as known.
Or thewaite could provide useful direction instead of abstract guesses, that works too. :)
To go off on an entirely unrelated thread of conversation, I’ve been pondering philosophy since the nutty neurosurgeon post yesterday. I think I just leveled up from “universal definitions exist, but are unrelated to behaviors, and are irrelevant because all possible definitions ‘exist’ but don’t necessarily have context” to “All universality is a delusion and all definitions exist only within the brain”. I’ve gained +2 materialism.
If anyone wants to critique my reasoning, or at least follow me on my journey, my train of thought as brief as I can make it: Without training, people suck at recognizing foreign viewpoints. Upon hearing an idea, a person assumes the speaker means their own preconception, and that the speaker shares it exactly – thus, universality seems to exist. Societies exist with ideas utterly foreign to me – ex. aborigines. A society can exist to whom there is NO concept of altruism, and if they killed all altruism believers, there would be no concept of it at all.
The biggest flaw I see is that I’m jumping a bit from the fallacy of apparent universality to the non-existence of universality. I accept this because it removes all usefulness of universality, so it has no reason to be maintained.
Do I make sense to anyone other than myself? Any idea what area I can go to grind for more philosophy XP? Am I just publicly showcasing my ignorance?
Anton, on reading the questionnaire itself it’s worded thus:
So the wording makes the reader think of religious tenets as labile. This may be true in general but not in any particular case – for example, somebody should have told Torquemada.
If all universality is a delusion, then the principle that all universality is a delusion is a delusion. Thus there are at least some universals that are not delusion.
Or thewaite (sic) could provide useful direction instead of abstract guesses, …
— could you be specific? *8^P
If you’re discussing free will, here’s some empirical data, but it confuse me as much as anyone (and that’s a lot): Benjamin Libet‘s work shows that the brain activity to initiate a finger motion (to designate a chosen item) occurs about 1/3 second prior to the subject’s conscious awareness of making the choice. So, the body is executing the choice before the mind is aware of the choice… which mostly illustrates that the consensus process of the mind is at least as complex as the consensus process of any legislature.
Turning to your post, it was pretty abstract but one point emerged: even aborigines certainly do display altruism, not only in the mother-infant bond characteristic of all mammals (you didn’t exclude kin-selected altruism), but also in more reciprocal forms, as Darwin noted in his travelogues.
Nor need religious tenets be labile enough to be harmonizable with science. Certainly religions periodically swap one god for another, decide that some sinful activity is actually virtuous or vice versa, and so forth. It doesn’t follow that they’ll ever manage to morph into full-on methodological naturalism.
Options 2 and 1 are also compatible, I think. One could claim that religion’s a social phenomenon whose tenets change over time but always remain outside the empirical realm.
I can’t really say without a definition. But it seems to me that when most people claim “free will”, they point to the feeling they have that their choices are undetermined. So it’s really a psychological question. And (I think) adequately resolved by the fact that the brain, like any computing device, can’t perfectly predict its own behavior. In which case the sensation of free will is inevitable, and has nothing much to do with whether the universe is deterministic or run by a god or anything like that.
I’m sure Darwin approved. I know he was happy to consider earthworms intelligent based on his own researches, and IIRC argued that they had basic emotional states as well.
I’ve said this many, many times. There is a backlash against fundie cultist wingnuts.
We are sick of the Xtian terrorists killing MDs, trying to shut down libraries and childrens programming for imaginary reasons, and sneaking their creo lies into our kid’s science classes.
The fiasco in Iraq isn’t helping them either. Their president, Bush, has one of the lowest approval ratings ever in history. 3,500 US soldiers have died and ca. 40,000 or so are seriously maimed. Human sacrifice of people’s children is a serious business. It damn well better be worthwhile or the powers that be have got some ‘xplaining to do.
Not to mention their agenda. Overthrowing the US government, setting up a theocracy, and heading on back to the dark ages. This is not hyperbole or exaggeration, just ask them and they say it like it was reasonable. It’s not and it’s not a popular agenda either. If we wanted to live in a theocratic dump we would move to Afghanistan, Somalia, or Sudan.
What goes around, comes around. The struggle against darkness seems endless but really, given the choice, most will choose the light.
GTMoogle wrote, “Upon hearing an idea, a person assumes the speaker means their own preconception, and that the speaker shares it exactly – thus, universality seems to exist”
Well, I’m not certain that I entirely grok what you are getting at here, but there is a lot of work done in communication theory which suggests that communication between a speaker and a listener always loses some information.
That is, the idea the speaker is attempting to communicate by using a spoken language always has some abiguity which the speak thinks is perfectly clear. Yet the listener, with their own preconceptions, has a slightly different understanding of the message and while it seems clear to the listener the message does not convey to the listener exactly what the speaker indend.
As an example, read negative comments on just about any blog entry. Typically the person posting the negative comment didn’t understand the blog entry in the same fashion the author did.
You can, as I’ve seen some people argue, believe that the language of mathematics is one which can communicate unambiguous ideas. However, as a layman, I suspect that the only reason mathematics is clearer than other languages is because the basic postulates have an easily understood, non-ambiguous, meaning. (Of course, based on some of the very confused abuses of mathematics I’ve read, not everyone ascribes to the same meaning of the basic postulates. Heh.)
So the idea of universality in communication is, very likely, an unachievable goal. Which is your point after all.
This doesn’t mean that reality doesn’t exist. What it does imply is that communication of our understanding of the universal nature of reality is always incomplete. As an example, Piaget records some interesting converstation with children about the nature of buoyancy. In his studies, young children appeared to link volume and mass and reported that things with less volume are more bouyant than objects which greater volume. The properties of bouyancy are a universal, neither your belief nor your description will alter how bouyancy operates.
However, the description of buoyancy is not a universal. The young children whom Piaget interviewed did not have a clear understanding of bouyancy, and so were unable to communicate the universal affects of density in liquids. (And yelling, “Eureka” while running naked through the streets of Syracuse is probably not much of a help in communicating this concept, universal though it may be.)
The problem of seperating universals from the description of universals is at the root, as I see it, of the problems with post-modernist philosophy. So I generally avoid discussions of the idea of communicating the concept of universal traits simply because of the problems of communication.
There appear to be universals, to the extent which we can test for them. Any unexpected results from the thousands of high-school students who replicate Galileo’s experiments with inclined planes every year are more likely to be experimental error rather then local gravitational anomalies. This strongly suggests that universals exist. The communication of universals, as evidenced by those students who do encounter experimental error, is a harder problem.
Maybe we need to assign confidence intervals to our terms as we use them? (Heh)
Sorry thwaite, the kerning on the ‘w’ was throwing me off on whether there was supposed to be a space there, and in my confusion I injected an e.
I wasn’t trying to say aborigines had no altruism, only that they’re an example of a culture that has ideas that to my understand of the world just don’t fit. Thus, one could theorize the existence of a culture that sees a different explanation for everything we would call altruism. I probably excised all context in my attempt not to post a small book here. That was almost entirely about Egnor’s altruism ranting. Basically I first thought there was a misunderstanding of what Egnor meant. I have since concluded that everyone was right on the money about altruism existing only in the brain by about any definition.
As for Libet’s research, I’m roughly familiar with it, and it’s the reason (along with color/number synesthesia) my working hypothesis is that consciousness is largely a device for convincing itself it exists (yes, I’m being trite). I’m still torn on to what degree conscious decisions are real or are rationalization that approach preconceived subconscious hunches until it seems to fit. My own change of mind today should indicate the former, but now I’m doubting it because I’m happily at a place where I’ve rationalized what I think fits. Gah!
Free Will? I’ll be disingenuous. Free will is a manufactured concept that doesn’t apply to reality. Our choices are predetermined because we’re meat machines, but are unpredictable because reality is nondeterministic. The molecules of my undergarments don’t leap simultaneously one foot to the left by mere chance. Free will exists to the degree you can rationalize the quantum uncertainty inherent in the neurons that made a ‘choice’.
Flex: (re: imperfect communication & math) Yes! That’s exactly what I was thinkiinnn… DAMMIT! Stupid irony. :)
Thanks for the rest, it’s very interesting. I’m beginning to form thoughts along the line of consistent scientific results being explainable by several different models, but I don’t think it’ll pan out.
Deepak Chopra’s sites further evidence(Rupert Sheldrake’s Parrot) for his mind outside the body:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/deepak-chopra/the-mind-outside-the-body_b_53394.html
http://www.intentblog.com/archives/2007/06/the_mind_outsid_5.html
“Explorations into the mind field will become more fascinating as time unfolds. But at least one finding has its share of entertainment value. A few years ago the adventurous British researcher Rupert Sheldrake received an e-mail from a woman in New York City who said that her African gray parrot not only read her thoughts but responded to them with speech.”
“In a small Manhattan apartment a step was taken, another bit of proof added to mounting evidence that the mind isn’t solely human property. Long ago the rishis of India asserted that the entire universe is intelligent, because it is permeated by consciousness. Now we are on the verge of proving that assertion within our own belief system.”
Skepdic on Sheldrake’s findings:
N’kisi & the N’kisi Project
http://skepdic.com/nkisi.html
GTMoogle,
Yeah, altruism is a tough one. Apart from kin-selected and reciprocal forms which don’t involve issues of intent, it’s hand-waving. So biologists, unlike psychologists, stick with those. And how can one define altruism if you exclude all acts with any intention of reciprocity?
Consciousness as post-hoc self-rationalization is a strong theme, to which I’d want to add only some discussion of planning. Both short-term and long – there really are times at which we consciously make life choices. But I doubt these moments can be tagged in a PET scan or fMRI.
Back to cultures with ‘entirely different understandings’ of some concepts. Flex’s example of childish misunderstandings of volume and bouyancy is apt but based on maturational issues. For an all-adults example perhaps the concept of ‘heat’ would suffice – no adults on the planet had a viable concept until the physics of thermodynamics was consciously constructed. Not until then could we (some of us) hold coherent conversation about heat.
We meat-machine humans all share the same evolutionary origin and solve the same physical and social issues (well, men and women lead differing lives but seem fundamentally obliged to retain some semblence of communication). So, apart from weird brain wiring as in synesthesia, can we assume the human species shares the same cognitive world? This is the presumption of ‘evolutionary psychology’, in both the broad vague form intimated by Darwin and in the specific modern forms of e.g. Cosmides/Toobey or the variants such as Merlin Donald. (This presumption was briefly contested by ‘cognitive anthropologists’ who held that, so to speak, Eskimos really did see more kinds of snow than us shirt-sleeve types – hasn’t held up, though.) Universal psychological adaptations seem to be our fate, shaping our mental and emotional lives. Evo Psychs seem to focus on the mental; and the emotional was pretty well sketched out by Darwin in his EXPRESSION OF THE EMOTIONS book, updated into a modern third edition (1998) by psychologist Paul Ekman. The resistance to Ekman by Margaret Mead and others who held than emotions are entirely culturally determined is a remarkable bit of scientific politics.
(I confess I haven’t yet read Egnor’s latest tripe, apparently on altruism. And won’t get back to any of this until tomorrow. G’night.)
http://christiananswers.net/q-aiia/questions-for-skeptics.html
In order to be fair in the debate about matters of faith, it’s not just the Christian who must be called to the witness stand. Even those who dispute or who otherwise persist in voicing skepticism about Christianity have some questions to answer. In fact, considering the evidence, it no doubt requires more faith to stand outside the circle of those who believe than to join it. To ensure integrity, therefore, on the part of even our readers who are not yet believers, here are a few issues about which you too should be able to give an account.
How do you explain the high degree of design and order in the universe?
How do you account for the vast archaeological documentation of Biblical stories, places, and people?
Since absolutely no Bible prophecy has ever failed (and there are hundreds), how can one realistically remain unconvinced that the Bible is of Divine origin?
How could any mere human pinpoint the birth town of the Messiah seven full centuries before the fact, as did the prophet Micah?
Account for the odds (1 in 10 to the 157th power) that even just 48 (of 300) Old Testament prophecies were fulfilled in one person, i.e Jesus.
How was it possible for the Old Testament prophet Isaiah to have predicted the virgin birth of Jesus (Isaiah 7:14) 700 years before it occurred?
How can anyone doubt the reliability of Scripture considering the number and proximity to originals of its many copied manuscripts?
Are you able to live consistently with your present worldview?
Wouldn’t it make better sense, even pragmatically, to live as though the God of the Bible does exist than as though He doesn’t?
In what sense was Jesus a ‘Good Man’ if He was lying in His claim to be God?
Do you think that Jesus was misguided in affirming the truthfulness of Scripture, i.e. John 10:35, Matthew 24, Luke 24:44?
If the Bible is not true, why is it so universally regarded as the ‘Good Book’?
Are you aware that the Old Testament alone claims to be God’s inspired word at least 2600 times?
Did you know that the Bible has been the number one best-seller every year since the 1436 invention of the Gutenberg printing press?
From whence comes humanity’s universal moral sense?
If man is nothing but the random arrangement of molecules, what motivates you to care and to live honorably in the world?
Explain how personality could have ever evolved from the impersonal, or how order could have ever resulted from chaos.
If Jesus’ resurrection was faked, why would twelve intelligent men (Jesus’ disciples) have died for what they knew to be a lie?
How do you explain the fact that a single, relatively uneducated and virtually untraveled man, dead at age 33, radically changed lives and society to this day?
Why have so many of history’s greatest thinkers been believers? Have you ever wondered why thousands of intelligent scientists, living and dead, have been men and women of great faith?
Isn’t it somewhat arrogant to suggest that countless churches and people (including men like Abraham Lincoln) are all radically in error in their view of the Bible?
How do you account for the origin of life considering the irreducible complexity of its essential components?
How can the Second Law of Thermodynamics be reconciled with progressive, naturalistic evolutionary theory?
How do you reconcile the existence of human intelligence with naturalism and the Law of Entropy?
Why does the Bible alone, of all of the world’s ‘holy’ books, contain such detailed prophecies of future events?
On what basis can the Bible (interpreted as per historic Christian orthodoxy) be challenged as a sole, final truth-standard (Galatians 1:8)?
Is it absolutely true that “truth is not absolute” or only relatively true that “all things are relative?”
Is it possible that your unbelief in God is actually an unwillingness to submit to Him?
Does your present worldview provide you with an adequate sense of meaning and purpose?
How do you explain the radically changed lives of so many Christian believers down through history?
Are you aware that every alleged Bible contradiction has been answered in an intelligible and credible manner?
What do you say about the hundreds of scholarly books that carefully document the veracity and reliability of the Bible?
Why and how has the Bible survived and even flourished in spite of centuries of worldwide attempts to destroy and ban its message?
Why isn’t it absurd to try to speak or even conceive of a non-existent ‘God’ when an existing God would, by definition, be greater?
Have you ever considered the fact that Christianity is the only religion whose leader is said to have risen from the dead?
How do you explain the empty tomb of Jesus in light of all the evidence that has now proven essentially irrefutable for twenty centuries?
If Jesus did not actually die and rise from the dead, how could He (in His condition) have circumvented all of the security measures in place at His tomb?
If the authorities stole Jesus’ body, why? Why would they have perpetrated the very scenario that they most wanted to prevent?
If Jesus merely resuscitated in the tomb, how did He deal with the Roman guard posted just outside its entrance?
How can one realistically discount the testimony of over 500 witnesses to a living Jesus following His crucifixion (see 1 Corinthians 15:6)?
If all of Jesus’ claims to be God were the result of His own self-delusion, why didn’t He evidence lunacy in any other areas of His life?
If God is unchanging, wouldn’t it be true that one who changes by suddenly “realizing” that he/she is “God” therefore isn’t God?
Is your unbelief in a perfect God possibly the result of a bad experience with an imperfect Church or a misunderstanding of the facts, and therefore an unfair rejection of God Himself?
How did 35-40 men, spanning 1500 years and living on three separate continents, ever manage to author one unified message, i.e. the Bible?
Would you charge the Declaration of Independence with error in affirming that “all men are endowed by their Creator…”?
Because life origins are not observable, verifiable, or falsifiable, how does historical ‘science’ amount to anything more than just another faith system?
What do you make of all the anthropological studies indicating that even the most remote tribes show some sort of theological awareness?
Why subscribe to the incredible odds that the tilt and position of our planet relative to the sun are merely coincidental?
If every effect has a cause, and if God Himself is the universe (i.e. is one with the universe, as some non-Christians suggest), what or who then caused the universe?
What would be required to persuade you to become a believer?
———————————————————–
A college student attended a philosophy class which held a discussion about God’s existence. The professor presented the following logic: “Has anyone in this class ever heard God?” No one spoke. “Has anyone in this class ever touched God?” Again, no one spoke. “Has anyone in this class ever seen God?” When no one spoke for the third time, he said, “Then there is no God.”
One student thought for a second and then asked for permission to reply. Curious to hear this bold student’s response, the professor agreed. The student stood up and asked the following: “Has anyone in this class ever heard our professor’s brain?” Silence. “Has anyone in this class ever touched our professor’s brain?” Absolute silence. “Has anyone in this class ever seen our professor’s brain?” When no one in the class dared to speak, the student concluded, “Then, according to our professor’s logic, it must be true that our professor has no brain!”
The student received an ‘A’ in the class.
Atheist smurf:
By the same “logic,” the student doesn’t have a brain either. (He certainly doesn’t seem to have gotten his out of neutral; it’s too bad the damn things don’t come with owner’s manuals.)
At least they’re all safe from zombie attacks.
Atheist smurf: What about the sharp thingummy of William of something or other?
GTMoogle wrote, “I’m beginning to form thoughts along the line of consistent scientific results being explainable by several different models, but I don’t think it’ll pan out.”
Don’t be too sure of that.
Recently I was pointed to an excellent book, Diffusion of Innovation by Rogers, which is attempting to describe how ideas propogate across a society. I haven’t finished it yet, but I’m greatly enjoying it.
At the same time, I’m in an advanced marketing course discussing how advertising allows ideas to propogate across a society.
Finally, many years ago now, I was interested in memetic theory and semiotics, which discusses how ideas propogate across society.
Roger’s book comes to the subject from a background in communication theory. The marketing courses ideas come from behavioral psychology. And memetics comes from a paragraph in Dawkin’s book, The Selfish Gene and began with ideas culled from biological models.
But all three are trying to describe the same phenomenon.
It’s like three squirrels climbing the same tree, each one staking out a different limb and chattering at each other. (And since my knowledge is incomplete, there may well be other squirrels I’ve never seen.)
Which means, if history is anything to go by, that a synthesis between all these fields may soon develop.
For historically what appears as conflicting scientific models of the same subject, like say between the wave and particle nature of light, often ends up as a deeper understanding of the phenomenon.
This appears to be one of the main bits of confusion for the religious about the nature of science. Science finds discrepancies interesting, many of the religious finds discrepancies threatening.
Not Somalia anymore. Parts of Pakistan should work, though.
Not Somalia anymore. Parts of Pakistan should work, though.
OK, I’ll bite:
No. Doubt! Start doubting. Start learning.
Hey, it’s almost in the Bible. Have a look at this short page.
Look harder. There is order, like that of the molecules in a crystal, but if there’s any design, it is STUPID DESIGN. Making an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent god responsible for the anatomy of any placental mammal looks like blasphemy to me.
Parts of 2 Kings are pretty well documented archaeologically. Much of the rest does not fit the picture we get from other sources, and plenty of Bible stories flatly contradict the evidence. Again: look harder.
No Nostradamus prophecy has ever failed either. That’s because they are deliberately so vague that they can mean anything. When a particular interpretation of a Nostradamus prophecy turns out to have failed in hindsight, the believers simply take another interpretation, or make up a new one if all of the existing ones have failed. Show me that’s different with the Bible! Hint: you can’t.
This presumes that 1) Jesus actually existed, 2) Jesus actually was the Messiah, and 3) Jesus was actually born in Bethlehem. If any of these three premises fails, we are not talking about a “fact”.
And indeed, the Christmas story looks like twisted into knots to fit a number of prophecies. Indeed, most of the gospel according to Matthew looks like that: every two sentences Jesus is said to do something just so that “Scripture is fulfilled”. Is that plausible?
See above.
Did it occur?
(Hey, isn’t it a mistranslation in the first place? But I digress.)
That proves it then: the Rgveda speaks the TRUTH!!!1!
Sure. Are you? If you looked closer, would you still be?
Ah, Pascal’s Wager. Nobody beneath the great Terry Pratchett can possibly answer this one:
The Quirmian philosopher Ventre put forward the suggestion that “Possibly the gods exist, and possibly they do not. So why not believe in them in any case? If it’s all true you’ll go to a lovely place when you die, and if it isn’t then you’ve lost nothing, right?” When he died he woke up in a circle of gods holding nasty-looking sticks and one of them said “We’re going to show you what we think of Mr Clever Dick in these parts…”
— Terry Pratchett: Hogfather
Ah, the trilemma fallacy. In what sense was Luke Skywalker a ‘Good Man’ if he was lying in his claim to know the Force?
I think the Bible is misguided in affirming its own truthfulness.
I genuinely had to laugh at this one. Your ignorance is staggering.
Hint: the “universally” part is bullshit.
What overkill.
What I tell you three times is true.
— Lewis Carroll
So what?
Most of it is innate*; the rest comes from long-term self-interest.
* Assholes tend to die out: nobody likes them, nobody helps them, nobody wants to have children with them. If being an asshole is inheritable, we are talking about natural selection. That’s right: the theory of evolution explains altruism.
Tss, tss. A random arrangement wouldn’t even be stable. Growth is not random. Natural selection, too, is not random.
If I do good, I feel good. If I do bad, I feel bad. That’s my religion.
— Abraham Lincoln
See above. I am not even capable of doing nothing when a baby cries.
The latter is easy. Compare a drop of water and a snowflake.
The former? First explain what personality is.
What if the resurrection and the twelve good men are invented out of whole cloth, or copied from another religion? So far you haven’t even considered this possibility.
More importantly, however, just about any religion has its martyrs. This holds for “religion” in an absurdly wide sense: the PKK, the Stalinist “Workers’ Party of Kurdistan”, has had suicide bombers. Yes, Stalinist: we are talking about people who were fully convinced that death is The End(tm) and sacrificed themselves for what they considered an even higher goal.
Che Guevara? OK, I’m kidding, that one was widely travelled. Rather try Muhammad.
It is interesting that many of them were Deists: they believed that God created the universe, sat back, and relaxed, to never meddle with the universe again. This suggests that — living before the publication of the theory of evolution and modern physics — they couldn’t imagine a natural explanation for the existence of “life, the universe, and everything”, but also that this was the last thing that held them back from agnosticism or atheism.
Isn’t it somewhat arrogant to suggest that countless churches and people were all radically in error in their views that the Earth was flat, that the Earth was the center of the universe, that the continents didn’t move, that space and time were absolute, and so on and so on and so on?
Nope.
Once you look closer, “irreducible complexity” evaporates in front of your eyes. Take the bacterial flagellum: I bet you wouldn’t know a Type III secretion system if a plague bacterium used it to inject its venom into your proverbial ass.
Look: the Second Law only holds for closed systems. A “closed system” is one that neither matter nor energy can enter or leave. The Earth is not a closed system. For crying out loud, the sun shines!
Isn’t it somewhat arrogant to pretend that everyone is as deeply ignorant about basics as you?
See above.
The Sibylline Books consisted only of prophecies. It’s just that nobody considers them holy anymore.
By not interpreting it as per historic Christian orthodoxy, maybe?
I am not a postmodernist. Reality really does exist.
I am a scientist. Whether there is some big-T Truth behind reality or not is simply not interesting to me.
Nope.
Please explain why I should even want to have “meaning and purpose”. A wheel in a machine has a purpose. Do I have a purpose? Am I like a wheel in a machine?
I find life interesting. I am not trying to fulfill some purpose; I haven’t seen the slightest evidence for the claim that I had a purpose.
How do you explain the radically changed lives of every convert from any religion to any other? How do you explain the radically changed lives of some of those who have deconverted (become atheists)?
How ignorant can one be?
Intelligible and credible? LOL. I bet you can’t even explain the contradictions between the two creation stories in Genesis.
What do you say of those who carefully document the opposite? Nothing, because you didn’t even know they existed, right?
“Worldwide”? Come on, please.
Why have the apocryphal writings survived for the same time?
Why have some of the scriptures of Manichaeism survived — and that’s a religion that really did die out* a few centuries after its founder was not merely crucified, but skinned alive?
* Except for having left lots and lots of traces in Christianity and Islam. Unfortunately.
Oh, please. This ridiculous argument (which you haven’t even managed to present in a coherent form) was refuted in the lifetime of Anselm of Canterbury by Gaunilo of Marmoutiers. St Anselm even got a chance to reply, and his reply is utterly pathetic: he wrote that the objections apply to everything except God. Special pleading, in other words.
You do not know what you are talking about. Dead and resurrected gods and demigods are a dime a dozen in the ancient Middle East. I recommend to start with Mithras.
What evidence?
If Yoda did not actually die and… enter into the Force or whatever it’s called, how could he have talked to Luke Skywalker across so many light years?
The claim that over 500 witnesses exist is not the same as existence of 500 witnesses. The claim that a guard was posted is not the same as that guard. The claim that there was an empty tomb is not the same as the existence of a tomb, empty or not.
You are still starting from what ought to be conclusions.
Er, if the Force is unchanging… Whatever. You are still starting from what ought to be conclusions.
Nope, no bad experience with any church. Just the realization that all religion hangs in the air: while it can’t be disproven, there is no evidence for it.
Look more closely, and you will find a lot of things, except for “one unified message”.
I’m an Apathetic Agnostic, not strictly speaking an atheist, so I don’t care… :o) But if they were wrong and we have those rights just so — because there’s no other way to build a society that ensures my own “life, liberty, and […] pursuit of happiness” –, then what? I don’t get your point.
You evidently don’t know what science is, yet you put it in quotation marks anyway? Bizarre. Each hypothesis on the origins of life makes predictions that are falsifiable by observation (whether observation of an experiment in a lab or observation of rocks or whatever), and is therefore scientific.
Why do you call it “awareness”…?
Religion is what people come up with to answer their questions when they don’t have enough science at their disposal.
Dude, the tilt is variable. That’s one of the Milanković cycles that are responsible for things like ice ages. The distance from the sun can easily be coincidental. Some 200 planets are IIRC known by now, and each has its own distance from its star.
You missed the discovery of quantum physics a hundred years ago. Congratulations.
…and if the Force holds the galaxy together (because gravity has apparently not yet been invented)…
A believer in what exactly? A creator? A resurrection? A son of a god? The trinity?
We both know this is a strawman. Don’t be dishonest to yourself.
OK, I’ll bite:
No. Doubt! Start doubting. Start learning.
Hey, it’s almost in the Bible. Have a look at this short page.
Look harder. There is order, like that of the molecules in a crystal, but if there’s any design, it is STUPID DESIGN. Making an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent god responsible for the anatomy of any placental mammal looks like blasphemy to me.
Parts of 2 Kings are pretty well documented archaeologically. Much of the rest does not fit the picture we get from other sources, and plenty of Bible stories flatly contradict the evidence. Again: look harder.
No Nostradamus prophecy has ever failed either. That’s because they are deliberately so vague that they can mean anything. When a particular interpretation of a Nostradamus prophecy turns out to have failed in hindsight, the believers simply take another interpretation, or make up a new one if all of the existing ones have failed. Show me that’s different with the Bible! Hint: you can’t.
This presumes that 1) Jesus actually existed, 2) Jesus actually was the Messiah, and 3) Jesus was actually born in Bethlehem. If any of these three premises fails, we are not talking about a “fact”.
And indeed, the Christmas story looks like twisted into knots to fit a number of prophecies. Indeed, most of the gospel according to Matthew looks like that: every two sentences Jesus is said to do something just so that “Scripture is fulfilled”. Is that plausible?
See above.
Did it occur?
(Hey, isn’t it a mistranslation in the first place? But I digress.)
That proves it then: the Rgveda speaks the TRUTH!!!1!
Sure. Are you? If you looked closer, would you still be?
Ah, Pascal’s Wager. Nobody beneath the great Terry Pratchett can possibly answer this one:
The Quirmian philosopher Ventre put forward the suggestion that “Possibly the gods exist, and possibly they do not. So why not believe in them in any case? If it’s all true you’ll go to a lovely place when you die, and if it isn’t then you’ve lost nothing, right?” When he died he woke up in a circle of gods holding nasty-looking sticks and one of them said “We’re going to show you what we think of Mr Clever Dick in these parts…”
— Terry Pratchett: Hogfather
Ah, the trilemma fallacy. In what sense was Luke Skywalker a ‘Good Man’ if he was lying in his claim to know the Force?
I think the Bible is misguided in affirming its own truthfulness.
I genuinely had to laugh at this one. Your ignorance is staggering.
Hint: the “universally” part is bullshit.
What overkill.
What I tell you three times is true.
— Lewis Carroll
So what?
Most of it is innate*; the rest comes from long-term self-interest.
* Assholes tend to die out: nobody likes them, nobody helps them, nobody wants to have children with them. If being an asshole is inheritable, we are talking about natural selection. That’s right: the theory of evolution explains altruism.
Tss, tss. A random arrangement wouldn’t even be stable. Growth is not random. Natural selection, too, is not random.
If I do good, I feel good. If I do bad, I feel bad. That’s my religion.
— Abraham Lincoln
See above. I am not even capable of doing nothing when a baby cries.
The latter is easy. Compare a drop of water and a snowflake.
The former? First explain what personality is.
What if the resurrection and the twelve good men are invented out of whole cloth, or copied from another religion? So far you haven’t even considered this possibility.
More importantly, however, just about any religion has its martyrs. This holds for “religion” in an absurdly wide sense: the PKK, the Stalinist “Workers’ Party of Kurdistan”, has had suicide bombers. Yes, Stalinist: we are talking about people who were fully convinced that death is The End(tm) and sacrificed themselves for what they considered an even higher goal.
Che Guevara? OK, I’m kidding, that one was widely travelled. Rather try Muhammad.
It is interesting that many of them were Deists: they believed that God created the universe, sat back, and relaxed, to never meddle with the universe again. This suggests that — living before the publication of the theory of evolution and modern physics — they couldn’t imagine a natural explanation for the existence of “life, the universe, and everything”, but also that this was the last thing that held them back from agnosticism or atheism.
Isn’t it somewhat arrogant to suggest that countless churches and people were all radically in error in their views that the Earth was flat, that the Earth was the center of the universe, that the continents didn’t move, that space and time were absolute, and so on and so on and so on?
Nope.
Once you look closer, “irreducible complexity” evaporates in front of your eyes. Take the bacterial flagellum: I bet you wouldn’t know a Type III secretion system if a plague bacterium used it to inject its venom into your proverbial ass.
Look: the Second Law only holds for closed systems. A “closed system” is one that neither matter nor energy can enter or leave. The Earth is not a closed system. For crying out loud, the sun shines!
Isn’t it somewhat arrogant to pretend that everyone is as deeply ignorant about basics as you?
See above.
The Sibylline Books consisted only of prophecies. It’s just that nobody considers them holy anymore.
By not interpreting it as per historic Christian orthodoxy, maybe?
I am not a postmodernist. Reality really does exist.
I am a scientist. Whether there is some big-T Truth behind reality or not is simply not interesting to me.
Nope.
Please explain why I should even want to have “meaning and purpose”. A wheel in a machine has a purpose. Do I have a purpose? Am I like a wheel in a machine?
I find life interesting. I am not trying to fulfill some purpose; I haven’t seen the slightest evidence for the claim that I had a purpose.
How do you explain the radically changed lives of every convert from any religion to any other? How do you explain the radically changed lives of some of those who have deconverted (become atheists)?
How ignorant can one be?
Intelligible and credible? LOL. I bet you can’t even explain the contradictions between the two creation stories in Genesis.
What do you say of those who carefully document the opposite? Nothing, because you didn’t even know they existed, right?
“Worldwide”? Come on, please.
Why have the apocryphal writings survived for the same time?
Why have some of the scriptures of Manichaeism survived — and that’s a religion that really did die out* a few centuries after its founder was not merely crucified, but skinned alive?
* Except for having left lots and lots of traces in Christianity and Islam. Unfortunately.
Oh, please. This ridiculous argument (which you haven’t even managed to present in a coherent form) was refuted in the lifetime of Anselm of Canterbury by Gaunilo of Marmoutiers. St Anselm even got a chance to reply, and his reply is utterly pathetic: he wrote that the objections apply to everything except God. Special pleading, in other words.
You do not know what you are talking about. Dead and resurrected gods and demigods are a dime a dozen in the ancient Middle East. I recommend to start with Mithras.
What evidence?
If Yoda did not actually die and… enter into the Force or whatever it’s called, how could he have talked to Luke Skywalker across so many light years?
The claim that over 500 witnesses exist is not the same as existence of 500 witnesses. The claim that a guard was posted is not the same as that guard. The claim that there was an empty tomb is not the same as the existence of a tomb, empty or not.
You are still starting from what ought to be conclusions.
Er, if the Force is unchanging… Whatever. You are still starting from what ought to be conclusions.
Nope, no bad experience with any church. Just the realization that all religion hangs in the air: while it can’t be disproven, there is no evidence for it.
Look more closely, and you will find a lot of things, except for “one unified message”.
I’m an Apathetic Agnostic, not strictly speaking an atheist, so I don’t care… :o) But if they were wrong and we have those rights just so — because there’s no other way to build a society that ensures my own “life, liberty, and […] pursuit of happiness” –, then what? I don’t get your point.
You evidently don’t know what science is, yet you put it in quotation marks anyway? Bizarre. Each hypothesis on the origins of life makes predictions that are falsifiable by observation (whether observation of an experiment in a lab or observation of rocks or whatever), and is therefore scientific.
Why do you call it “awareness”…?
Religion is what people come up with to answer their questions when they don’t have enough science at their disposal.
Dude, the tilt is variable. That’s one of the Milanković cycles that are responsible for things like ice ages. The distance from the sun can easily be coincidental. Some 200 planets are IIRC known by now, and each has its own distance from its star.
You missed the discovery of quantum physics a hundred years ago. Congratulations.
…and if the Force holds the galaxy together (because gravity has apparently not yet been invented)…
A believer in what exactly? A creator? A resurrection? A son of a god? The trinity?
We both know this is a strawman. Don’t be dishonest to yourself.
I forgot an important part. You have asked us* what it would take for us to believe. What has it taken for you? Why do you believe?
Just because you want to believe, maybe?
* I bet you’ve copied your whole post from some website, but so what.
I forgot an important part. You have asked us* what it would take for us to believe. What has it taken for you? Why do you believe?
Just because you want to believe, maybe?
* I bet you’ve copied your whole post from some website, but so what.
Anton Mates: I’m skeptical of the findings – I’ve seen some that push further and reveal that people, at least in largely European-derived societies believe in what is called by philosophers libertarian free will. This is what allows “choice” in the popular jargon.
GTMoogle: You can, if I may say so somewhat arrogantly, learn some philosophy on my website.
David Marjanović: You have the proverbial patience of a saint. I was going to answer some of that massive list, but it just went on and on and on …
That astonishingly ignorant screed was copied from here, it looks like.
Nah. It’s called Asperger’s. In other words, I have the perseverance of a nerd. For me, time a social phenomenon, and I’m alone in this room (in a students’ home); I don’t notice how time passes.
Why else do you think am I writing this at a quarter to 3 at night, even though I notice full well that I’m tired! :-)
Just too bad that I seem to have tried talking to a hit-and-run smurf, who’s probably afraid we might have answered the questions.
Nah. It’s called Asperger’s. In other words, I have the perseverance of a nerd. For me, time a social phenomenon, and I’m alone in this room (in a students’ home); I don’t notice how time passes.
Why else do you think am I writing this at a quarter to 3 at night, even though I notice full well that I’m tired! :-)
Just too bad that I seem to have tried talking to a hit-and-run smurf, who’s probably afraid we might have answered the questions.
Check out this amazing science experiment video linked by GrrlScientist:
And Now, This Week’s Science Experiment While Drunk
Find out what happens when you light a match, cover it with a glass, and put it in the microwave.
You could call it “The dull edge of ID.”