Richard Dawkins’ spring tour of the United States is bringing him to Minneapolis — he’ll be speaking in Northrup Auditorium (the huge auditorium on the UMTC campus, so there should be lots of room for everyone) on 4 March 2009. Be there!
In other Dawkins news, he has posted an unused and unedited interview with Father George Coyne on his site. It’s long and it’s very aggravating, so not many of you will make it through the whole thing, but you’ll understand why it wasn’t used in any documentary. Coyne is personable, intelligent, and pleasant without fault. He’s the kind of avuncular and educated fellow anyone could find wonderful in conversation … except on religion.
Dawkins politely asks him how he reconciles the peculiar details of his religious belief to reason, and Coyne can’t quite address the problem. He’s willing to admit that if he’d been brought up in an Islamic household, he almost certainly wouldn’t be Catholic, but that that should inform him that the specifics of his belief are not founded in evidence and reason evades him totally. He falls back on “tradition” and “faith” as excuses. It’s tragic — I’m certain he’s a very smart man, but on religion he is simply blind and stupid.
Another tangent came to me while watching the video. I’ve been doing a lot of traveling lately, which means I spend all this time with strangers in airports. It’s interesting; most people are just people, and you can’t pigeonhole them into narrower roles without talking to them, except for people in uniforms. And who wears uniforms? Soldiers returning or going back to duty, police and security guards who are on duty, and priests. The police I can understand; they have an official job to do, and the uniform is useful in announcing their authority and making them obvious people to turn to when you need help.
But priests? Nope. That is an utterly useless profession. No one is worried about needing an emergency exorcism, or handling a drive-by spiritual crisis, or requiring rapid cracker delivery. Wearing the clerical collar is simply a demand for deference and respect, a token flaunted in expectation that the bearer will be regarded as especially virtuous and important. It’s annoying and unwarranted. I’m afraid that when I see priests wandering about in the airport, I’m not thinking, “there goes a good man,” I’m thinking, “there goes a sad gomer who wasted his life on the nonexistent.” I suppose it’s fair warning, but it’s still pretentious.
So in the Dawkins/Coyne interview, I’m noticing that Coyne has the magic collar on (I suppose if he’d been raised in an Islamic culture, he’d have a beard and black robes; if Buddhist, he’d be shaved bald and wearing orange; same difference), and Dawkins is dressed like any academic, nothing particularly distinctive. It bugged me. There is a status game being played here, and clerics demand it and get it, while scientists shrug off the superficialities and don’t try to push it. If you just ignore the words they’re saying (trust me, Coyne’s words aren’t at all enlightening) and look at the image, the message is that Coyne has special status, while Dawkins is simply one of the hoi polloi.
I don’t quite know what to do about it. We’re certainly not going to propose a uniform for scientists, which would be just as pompous as priests making sure to announce their delusions visually even while they’re standing around the luggage carousel. I guess I’m just going to have to put it on my to-do list of things to accomplish while we’re destroying religion: diminish the credibility of the clerical uniform. We’re just going to have to start regarding it in the same way we view clown costumes, I think.
that’s one long paragraph of weaselling there eric. Yes, there could be naturalistic explanations for those phenomena and they would be explored. Science does this to a great precision. The reason we support evolutionary theory is because of the overwhelming amount of data that supports the conclusion, it’s not one fossil or one glimpse at morphology. This is exactly what is meant by “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” the magnitude of the claim would require a higher amount of proof. If you provided even a slight amount of evidence for God compared to how much there is for Evolution, you’d convince almost everyone of the matter. People look at weeping statues as proof of a deity ffs!
eric wrote:
True. I know that if I woke up and discovered that I believed in the judeo-christian god (or pretty much any of the others, for that matter) I could attribute it to divine intervention – but more likely I’d suspect a stroke, or perhaps a particularly subtly-performed frontal lobotomy.
“If you provided even a slight amount of evidence for God compared to how much there is for Evolution, you’d convince almost everyone of the matter.”
Kel, this is nonsense, and demonstrably so. Um, how many people in the U.S. reject evolution today? It’s well over 100 million, if the polls are to be believed, isn’t it? So, why think that ‘even a slight amount of evidence’ for god would ‘convince almost everyone of the matter,’ if the much more abundant evidence for evolution has failed to persuade well over 100 million Americans? Blinders are blinders, regardless of who’s wearing them.
Even if the voice was audible to everyone? Even if the voice responded to questions and comments?
Of course, if the voice could not or would not demonstrate omniscience, we might well call it a trick of technology, but there would be no reason to dismiss it as not being the voice of a real entity.
No, if it worked reliably, prayer would become a new medical therapy.
Fulfilled prophecy is a bit trickier, since humans do have confirmation bias (and sometimes commit fraud), but if things like that were eliminated, why would the prophecy be rejected?
Well, Clarke’s 3rd Law does come to mind…
But it sounds like you’re saying god is not even willing to make an effort, because skeptics are just so… mean, and skeptical.
Aw. Poor widdle god.
Around 90% of americans believe in God in some form despite the absence of evidence. Only 14% of Americans believe in evolution the way that the theory states out (about 40% or so believe in evolution with intervention which is not evolution). This is exactly my point, that the type and amount of evidence required for God is a scant amount compared to the amount required for evolution.
God is the ultimate non-answer. Where did life come from? Goddidit. How did the sun form? Goddidit. It’s the ultimate appeal to ignorance and it fits in perfectly with a population that doesn’t understand the first thing about the world they live in.
eric #500 wrote:
I think any strong scientific evidence for mind-body dualism would make the existence of God much more plausible, because it establishes the existence of supernatural phenomena or realm — disembodied minds, perhaps with direct causal powers, souls, fields of special value-laden “energy,” etc. Paranormal claims are clearly testable, and if verified they would falsify materialism, and the theory of naturalism.
Depends on the case. Given strong enough evidence for a miracle — better yet — series of miracles — there comes a point where the existence of God becomes a much more likely explanation than continuing to generate more and more farfetched natural hypotheses. Good scientists would be forced to recognize this.
The example that’s usually given is that of the stars suddenly shifting in the sky to write John 3:16. Given what we know of distances involved, this would be virtually impossible to explain under naturalism. Supplement this with dozens and dozens of repeated miracles — churches start to float in the air, Bibles cannot be burned, people who pray deflect bullets, and so forth and so on — and any remaining atheists start to sound like those insane skeptics in ghost movies, who watch the severed hands of spirits fling around the furniture as blood drips from the walls and they say “perhaps it’s mice.”
Eric, you keep setting off my BS alarm. Quit trying to sound erudite. You don’t succeed.
Proof of god. Moses’ eternally burning found, tested and no natural explanation for it burning for of years of observation. Obvious divine intervention. A recent signed letter from god, where the letters of the signature flame, but don’t burn the paper. The paper can be folded, and the flames go out. Open it again, the flames start up again. Also, no natural explanation for the flames, which also burn and never go out. Obvious divine intervention. The statue you talked about earlier, that stays moving long enough to be properly examined. Obvious divine intervention
Not proof of god. Relics like the shroud of Turin, which is a proven forgery. The virgin birth. The resurrection. Weeping Mary statues that can’t be examined because the priest is doping it with vegetable oil. The bible, not written contemporaneous to the events described therein. Essentially anything that can be duplicated by a magician or scientist. So the bar is high, requiring extraordinary proof.
I don’t for a second doubt that if the world were suddenly to start behaving in such strange ways, many people wouldn’t be looking to the OT prophets, but to the likes of Hume and Goodman. Grue would be the ‘rule,’ not a riddle, and we would be told not to be surprised if a brick thrown at a window doesn’t break it, but instead turns into Hegel.
eric does raise a good point – I have no idea what I would consider incontrovertible evidence of the existence of a specific god. Probably nothing that wasn’t first hand – I’d be very skeptical of anything that had occurred to someone else.
Heck, even a booming voice in my head saying ‘Wowbagger1, I am Yahweh, the god of the Israelites2, and I am real’ would have me banging on the door of the nearest neurologist, not the nearest Rabbi.
1Not my real name, obviously
2It’d really shit me if it was the christians who turned out to be right. They’re just so tacky. Judaism I could probably cope with – though I’d struggle with the dietary stuff.
“Eric, you keep setting off my BS alarm. Quit trying to sound erudite. You don’t succeed.
Proof of god. Moses’ eternally burning found, tested and no natural explanation for it burning for of years of observation. Obvious divine intervention.”
And you’ve obviously never succeeded in passing logic 101. Sorry, but it would not follow from the existence of an eternally burning bush that god exists. Talk about BS!
Haven’t I heard you allude to being a working scientist? You don’t seem to have the creativity required for the job.
Eric, your post #508 sounds like some bad fantasy books I’ve read, but not finished. Where the author thinks putting illogical things together is better than a real plot, without any humor or other redeeming factors.
This is why I have a simple experiment that God needs to do to prove to me he is real – turn my water into vodka. It’s a modified miracle taken out of the bible. It’s only one piece of evidence but what an extraordinary piece of evidence it would be. I’m making sure the water is still water when I fill the bottle and keeping an eye on the bottle so no-one can switch it on me.
*sips* still water
“eric does raise a good point”
Wowbagger, it’s not my point, though. I stole it from Hume. He argued, in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, that no argument with natural premises can get us to a supernatural conclusion, since — here it is again, for all of you who balked at it before — you can’t get anything into your conclusion that isn’t already in your premises (and I’m not talking about it being ‘in the premises’ in the sense of a petitio principii, either).
Eric, you fail logic if you think you can BS me, which it has been obvious you are trying to do. I have been a working scientist for 30+ years. And a skeptic for 20+. So my BS detector is finely honed and works well. I also read Sci Fi and some Fantasy for 40+ years. So I do have an imagination.
Where does he say that? In the Blind Watchmaker he says this:
So, what do we mean by a miracle? A miracle is something that happens, but which is exceedingly surprising. If a marble statue of the Virgin Mary suddenly waved its hand at us we should treat it as miracle, because all our experience and knowledge tells us that marble doesn’t behave like that. . . . But although the odds against the coincidence are extremely high, we can still calculate them. They are not literally zero. In the case of the marble statue, molecules in solid marble are continuously jostling against one another in random directions. The jostlings of the different molecules cancel one another out, so the whole hand of the statue stays still. But if, by sheer coincidence, all the molecules just happened to move in the same direction at the same moment, the hand would move.
This is about ‘miracles’ in the sense of very improbable events, not in the sense of supernaturally caused events. In other words, he is making the same point you made here:
However, this part doesn’t follow:
And any evidence for evolution (for example) is in principle open to imaginative supernatural explanations, so why isn’t it impossible to offer ‘dispositive’ physical evidence for evolution?
“This is why I have a simple experiment that God needs to do to prove to me he is real – turn my water into vodka.”
This wouldn’t ‘prove’ that god is real; the fact that it would persuade you is irrelevant. One could think up any number of explanations that don’t include god, from a natural, but currently unknown process by which water turns into vodka (again, think ‘grue’), or mischievous, finite beings like leprechauns with powers we don’t understand, etc.
Yet all our premises are based on the natural world, they are shaped by the way we take in data, by the way our brain is structured, by the experiences that we have. Our thoughts and understanding is build by reality, anything we have is merely an extension on what’s there.
eric #513 wrote:
Hume’s argument depends on how “natural” and “supernatural” are defined. Science doesn’t start out assuming the truth of naturalism. It’s only a conclusion — and a tentative one. Naturalism is falsifiable.
It wouldn’t prove the Christian God, for that only proof of divinity and resurrection of Jesus would suffice. But it would contradict everything we know about chemistry – it would be a violation of the laws of nature. Only a being outside the scope of nature can violate it in such a fundamental manner.
Plus I’m totally ripping the experiment out of the bible, did not God turn water into wine?
Nerd, please stop using “proof” when you mean evidence. There is no proving in science, and there is no such thing as “extraordinary proof” anywhere since things are either proven or not.
“Science doesn’t start out assuming the truth of naturalism. It’s only a conclusion — and a tentative one. Naturalism is falsifiable.”
Sastra, science doesn’t in any way support naturalism. The results of science would be perfectly consistent with naturalism, Berkeley’s idealism, Kant’s transcendental idealism, theism (supernaturalism), etc. (Of course, naturalism need not be identified with physicalism, but most naturalists today are physicalists.) If naturalism is a ‘conclusion’ that’s premised on science, it’s a blatant non sequitur.
“And any evidence for evolution (for example) is in principle open to imaginative supernatural explanations, so why isn’t it impossible to offer ‘dispositive’ physical evidence for evolution?”
Well, according to the way science operates, it is impossible, since every scientific conclusion is provisional.
I think this is a much more trite and/or misleading slogan compared to the one you complained about (“extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”)
Was “space-time bends” in Einstein’s premises? Was “neutrinos exist” in Fermi’s premises? Was “all life has a common ancestor” in Darwin’s premises? In something other than an extremely sophistic interpretation of “being in the premises”?
Now you are engaging in sophistry on the definition of ‘dispositive’. But exclude that word if you want – I’m sure you would agree that there is physical evidence for evolution?
Therefore, the fact that we can never definitely exclude alternative naturalistic explanations can’t be a reason not to examine the God hypothesis in the light of physical evidence.
eric #521 wrote:
I disagree. Again, a great deal depends on how “natural” and “supernatural” are defined. And, apparently, there has to be some discernible distinction between one type of world and another. If every possible observation would look exactly the same whether God exists, or it doesn’t, then I suppose you could claim that science couldn’t point towards or away from God. Neither could philosophy, or mysticism, or anything at all. Believing in God would be a sheer act of perverse faith, akin to believing we’re all in the Matrix — only its a version of the Matrix which is impossible, even in theory, to detect.
As it is, I’ve already said that mind/body dualism would falsify naturalism, and support supernaturalism. Repeated positive results from multiple paranormal experiments would NOT be “perfectly consistent with naturalism.” Their failure is, therefore, support for naturalism.
Windy, I was quoting Sagan with the extraordinary proof statement.
You are correct in that it should be evidence, but evidence needs to be strong enough it amounts to scientific proof, not mathematical proof. I write documents where I talk about a straight forward synthesis of a compound. Then I run various tests, like mass spectrum and nuclear magnetic resonance spectra, and write that the results are consistent with the proposed structure and explain why. With sufficient amount of rigorous evidence all supporting the structure, I can then say that the compound is what I claim it to be. Scientifically proven. Might be wrong but very unlikely. Since this document might be reviewed by a federal agency, it has to be right.
Sastra @506 speaks for me*:
I note eric @508 tried to handwave it off with a (bad) joke.
* Only better than I could’ve.
Wowbagger @468:
Kel @469:
Don’t forget that God’s Old Testament blockbuster miracles took place at a time when people were in many ways far more spiritually advanced than modern men. No miracle was necessary to prove the existence of a divine being to whom worship and sacrifice was due — the existence of some such entity was as obvious to natural human reason as the existence of the world itself. The only question was which of the competing cults was the true divinely sanctioned one. Human reason alone could not suffice here, hence the demonstrations of power. Since we’ve fallen so far as to deny the very existence of a divine dimension, an unthinkable impiety for the ancients, perhaps God disdains to disillusion us.
But God is merciful. I guess the nearest modern equivalent of a grand old-school miracle would be the dance of the sun at Fatima — for which you no doubt have a convenient naturalistic explanation.
Wowbagger @468:
Tough love?
Owlmirror @470:
There’s nothing oxymoronic about it. ‘Bigoted’ doesn’t mean intolerant, right wing, extremist, authoritarian, racist, sexist, etc — it just means you’re not prepared to engage in rational debate in order to defend your views, whatever they may be. It’s perfectly possible for an egalitarian to be bigoted in his egalitarianism.
Owlmirror @470:
I never said kings didn’t require checks and balances. To say that someone is the supreme authority in a particular sphere doesn’t mean they are an absolute authority. The pope is the supreme authority of the Roman Catholic Church on earth — but there are still certain things he’s constrained from doing.
That’s because we have faith that God keeps His word, not that God will obey our command.
The point is to be united with God in Heaven after we die, not to be able to demand special favours here on earth.
I’m happy to pray that God will enlighten you as to His existence, but I’m in no position to tell Him how to do it.
Kel @484:
No, because you’re still insisting God meets your arbitrary conditions.
Sastra @491:
Ah, but did you encounter flying elephants before acquiring the bell?
Only if the seeker is predisposed to find what he’s looking for. I doubt many people here are wanting to find God, any more than an orthodox Christian would relish the prospect of God turning out to be some kind of New Age cosmic Barney the Dinosaur.
Owlmirror @495:
You must admit it’s pretty funny … “Dionysus against the Crucified” — and Dionysus ends up with the clap. The ‘Antichrist’ who deplored Christianity for fostering “active sympathy for the ill-constituted and weak” and who lavished praise on the Hindu caste system for denying aid to pregnant outcaste women — this man ends up a drooling idiot cared for by others.
Ah Pilty, I’m glad to see you’ve reterned to your old self since the last comment of yours that i read. That being a turn of phrase, becasue why would it make me glad that you have reverted to a “drooling idiot [who thinks he is] cared for by others.”
Piltdown,
You’re writing about the Biblical god?
You haven’t read Deuteronomy 7?
lol, you cracketh me up Pilty
seems a pretty standard test. No matter how much I ask for my water to turn into vodka, it’s simply not doing. This is why your analogy fails, you make an unfalsifiable prediction because no matter what God does it’s validation of God’s position. This is why I find your rationalisations for God nothing more than apologetics for Her absence. God can’t even send to you a 1024 digit number, he can’t turn 750ml of water into vodka. Yet your excuse is not that he can’t but he won’t because he doesn’t like to be tested. How about he regrows a limb then? Are you saying that a Salamander is better than God?
I love that bit where God is so merciful that he drowns all of humanity. I also like that bit where he shows his infinite mercy to the adults of egypt by killing the children instead. I also love that bit where God smites Sodom and Gomorrah despite Abraham pleading for him not to. I also love that story where God puts a devoted follower through hell just to prove the faith of said follower. Or when God shows mercy by asking a devoted follower to sacrifice his own son. So much mercy and compassion in that book it’s overwhelming.
I don’t know what hallucinogen Pilty is on, but god is not merciful. Reread your bible from cover to cover, ignoring the churches take on it. Then ask yourself would a merciful god kill everybody in a town but virgin girls? Or torment Job just because he could? God, if he exists, is sick old bastard. Petty, mean and cruel, just for the sake of being petty, mean and cruel. Anything else is a lie, but poor Pilty cannot tell the truth from the churches lies because of his god delusion.
Pilty, you have lied so much you have no honor left. We presume everything you say is a lie. And you never disappoint us on that. Do everybody a favor and run along before PZ plonks you for being a godbotting liar.
In other words, it seems to me as if one could explain *any* (logically) possible event as a highly improbable, but nonetheless naturalistic occurrence. – eric
Sastra’s example of the stars rearranging themselves to spell out a biblical verse (or any other comprehensible message) could not be so explained as far as I can see. It would not prove the existence of a specific deity – I cannot see how anything could do that – but it would prove that something is manipulating what we (naturalists) have hitherto regarded as the real world. I would actually reach this conclusion on much lesser evidence than that, including Dawkins’ waving statue example, if evidence of the waving was sufficiently good. Naturalism is a potentially falsifiable assumption.
Nick, Aquinas’s arguments also lead to the conclusion that god exists necessarily (just think about what it means to say that there are essentially ordered causal series, to take his ‘first way’ as an example). – eric@389
I took you to mean “logically necessary”. Aquinas was surely depending on our observation of causal sequences to reach his conclusion. If (as is the case in at least some interpretations of quantum mechanics) there are events without causes, his argument collapses.
With regard to evidence for primality: you have a case with respect to small primes, but mathematicians do indeed talk about evidence that very large numbers are prime, when these numbers pass certain number-theoretic tests. Here, the use of “evidence” seems very similar to that used in science, even though everyone knows that the primality of a prime number is a logically necessary fact about it.
Mortimer Adler, who was born into a nonobservant Jewish family and became a skeptic, but who later converted to Christianity largely because of Aristotle and Aquinas, is one of the best. He not only started out as a skeptic, but he was undeniably one of the preeminent intellectuals of the twentieth century. – eric@412
I hereby deny that Mortimer Adler was one of the preeminent intellectuals of the twentieth century.
Even secular scholars like Gerd Ludemann and John Dominic Crossan will argue that the creedal material we find from Paul in 1 Corinthians 15 (which contains Jesus’ death, burial, an resurrection appearances) can be dated from within three to five years of the resurrection, and was received by Paul from Peter and James. Also, the crucifixion is almost universally accepted among historians because of the ‘criterion of embarrassment’: it’s just not the sort of thing you’d make up if you were trying to persuade others — at first, other Jews — to follow your guy! – eric@420
John Dominic Crossan is a Christian, although he does not believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus:http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/john_dominic_crossan/2007/04/wounds_not_bones.html .
The “criterion of embarrassment” is extraordinarily weak: there could be any number of reasons for it not to apply in particular cases – there is a long pre-Christian tradition of sacrificed gods in the near East, for example. Can you give specific references for your claims for 1 Corinthians 15?
By the way: “within three to five years of the resurrection” does not identify any time period, since no such event has ever taken place.
“Bob thinks he saw space aliens because Bob was stoned out of his mind on LSD, and that’s just the sort of thing you’re liable to hallucinate, especially if you’re a science fiction fan like Bob.” – Sastra
Actually, LSD isn’t particularly likely to generate this kind of indistinguishable-from-reality hallucination. If you want to see convincing space aliens, better bets would be one of the anticholinergics such as datura or belladonna (warning: dangerously toxic in psychoactively effective doses!), the NMDA antagonists such as ketamine or PCP (but possession of these, like LSD, is illegal in most countries), or the κ-opioid receptor agonist Salvia divinorum.
Time for today’s installment of Pages of Isaacson’s Einstein Biography I Read on the T:
Rocks.
And any evidence for evolution (for example) is in principle open to imaginative supernatural explanations, so why isn’t it impossible to offer ‘dispositive’ physical evidence for evolution? – windy
Indeed: Philip Goss’s Omphalos comes to mind.
Observation for the day:
I’ve long thought that philosophy (and many other disciplines) would benefit from the abolition of the verb “to be.”
Piltdown,
You have more than once urged people here to humbly beg God to reveal himself, and asked “What have you got to lose?” or similar. I gave two reasons@370, and Sastra has also given a reason. Why not meet these objections, if you can?
Of course a third reason is that we know your version of theism is false (and hence you are deceived), because it is logically impossible, as I’ve noted before, that Jesus the Nazarene (assuming his existence) was both man and (omnipotent, omniscinet etc.) god, since these entities have incompatible properties.
Your urging, by the way, gives the lie to your frequent claim that you are not trying to convert anyone. (Yes, yes, I know, you’ll come back with some drivel about how it would be God that does the conversion. Can it: the point is you’re plainly trying to change minds. Nothing wrong with that, and you’re not so obvious and persistent about it as to risk banning for godbotting, but be honest about it.)
Incidentally, Piltdown, on your recommendation of “holy water” to prevent paranormal activity – I’ve found that drinking ordinary secular water works 100%.
Pilty, you say we should ask God to reveal himself, so I do so. And what happens? Nothing at all. Your test is flawed.
Pilty appears to be approaching the usefulness of Pete Rooke as far as understanding what our positions should be. If he says we should ask god to reveal himself, then that is the same as saying god is non-existent. Thanks Pilty for confirming that fact.
Piltdown Man #526 wrote:
The seeker is predisposed to seeing if anything which happens can be interpreted as a sign — and that is all it takes. The human mind is very adept at finding meaningful patterns. One need not be actively hoping for the answer one “gets.” The process is so open-ended that it’s a virtual certainty that a sign there will be.
To illustrate this, let’s assume that I, an atheist, have asked God to reveal Himself to me. Now, I want you to describe the kind of events which could ensue over the next several months that you think should cause me to conclude that God has not revealed Himself to me, so that I’m right to be an atheist, and not believe God exists. Tell me some stories which end in climactic moments of nothing, where God is not there — and show that the doubting atheist is absolutely right to doubt.
Can you do it? If not, this should tell you something about how easy it is to see “signs” and omens and indications and signals from God — everywhere. Too easy.
Don’t forget that God’s Old Testament blockbuster miracles allegedly took place at a time when people were in many ways far more
spiritually advancedignorant than modern men. – PiltdownFixed for you. If the existence of God were “as obvious to natural human reason as the existence of the world itself”, it would have been obvious then across all cultures – which it was not – and would be obvious now – which it isn’t.
By the way, I hadn’t seen your #526 when I wrote my #539 – to which I await an answer.
Nick Gotts in 535, Actually, LSD isn’t particularly likely to generate this kind of indistinguishable-from-reality hallucination.
LSD is renowned for reverse paranoia, convincing trippers that the universe is a vast conspiracy on their behalf, a central mystery with which they feel deeply and profoundly connected–the sense of deep understanding with no object and inexpressibly profound revelations, or so I’ve been told, by Dr. Oscar Janiger, from whom Cary Grant got his. His work included isolating DMT (“Two hundred CCs injected muscularly ought to be enough, I eventually remembered thinking at the time”), and led directly to chemically treating emotional states, a research goal for which he was mocked by the Freudians in his day. He kept a card catalog of the responses of hundreds of writers and poets and priests and artists who first took LSD in his office in the 1950s, before it became stigmatized. They drew a Kachina doll he kept in his office if they felt the urge, and later offered their impressions for his cards. “I felt at one with the universe” was the winner. In conversations with Dr. Janiger in the early nineties, I was surprised to hear him challenge my assumption that these experiences were evidence of the nature of reality, when he reminded me that they were far more likely to be evidence of the nature of the brain, its mental states susceptible to a microscopic amount of tweaked serotonin analogues.
Wait… what?
God only does blatant physical miracles when it’s necessary… except that now that it’s more necessary than before, God disdains to do so?
You really have created God in your own image; he’s a complete git.
Do I really need to remind you that atheism is one small fraction of world-wide beliefs, and the majority of people follow one of the many, many “competing cults” out there — the same situation that you claim is why God provided empirical demonstrations of power in the past?
Genocide is Love. War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.
God is Big Brother.
So God is a bigot. Thanks for clearing that up!
So in principle, there’s nothing wrong with a constitutional monarchy, or even a republic?
The pope, as I also pointed out in the old thread, is also the monarch of Vatican City.
Why don’t you move there so as to be the subject of a proper Catholic monarch?
As I said, it amounts to the same thing. And of course, Christianity is predicated on God not keeping his word.
So, when I ask for simple, basic empirical evidence for God, you suddenly remember that Christianity is a death cult; that nothing on Earth matters.
Again, who’s telling? You’re asking. If it isn’t “demanding” that God transubstatiate, why is it different if you pray to God for a miracle of information?
Wouldn’t it be funny if Pilt has a brain condition that causes him to naturally hallucinates demons, but when he sips water that he received from a priest who waved his hands and intoned the proper words, he hallucinates the demons fleeing?
Wouldn’t it be funny if Pilt has a brain?
There, fixed that for ya.
SC:
I’ve long thought that philosophy (and many other disciplines) would benefit from the abolition of the verb “to be.”
Ever heard of E-Prime?
Too funny!
I just looked up the OED definition for “bigot”:
Well! Now, who does that remind me of… maybe the guy who believes in demons? Maybe the one who said that genocide was tough love?
That works too!
Owlmirror:
You must be consulting an inferior modern edition. My 1950 vintage OED has:
No mention of religion or hypocrisy, although superstition could conceivably fall under that definition. How does your dictionary define ‘superstition’, I wonder?
Yet God appears to be in a position to tell you how to do it…
And these signs shall follow them that believe: In my name they shall cast out devils. They shall speak with new tongues.
They shall take up serpents: and if they shall drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them. They shall lay their hand upon the sick: and they shall recover.
Now, some doubt the authenticity and validity of the Marcan Appendix, but they’re all damned heretic Protestants, right?
The NewAdvent Douay-Rheims translation has nothing that indicates any problem with those verses; the encyclopedia article on Mark concludes that:
So… why don’t Catholics demonstrate that they are True Believers™ in the Monarch of All™ by drinking poison, handling serpents, and infallibly healing the sick merely by touching them?
My request for digits of the 1024-digit-number might even be seen as a request to speak in tongues. Are not numbers the language of the universe?
And if you think that I am possessed by a devil of unbelief, well, I invite you to cast it out in the name of Jesus or God, or the Holy Ghost, or whatever name you think is best.
War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. – Owlmirror, quoting Orwell.
Yes, the Ingsoc slogan might have been invented for Piltdown, given his hatred of democracy, and admiration for Bronze Age ignorance! BTW, I’m still waiting for a response to #539, Piltdown.
*snort*
The “inferior” modern online edition gives citations from when the word was used; you know, in the past?
It also gives the etymology:
Your dictionary is a censored piece of useless propaganda if it doesn’t have the etymology.
I’m still waiting for Pilty to come up with a new test. All he said we needed to do was ask. I did repeatedly and got no response. What does that mean Pilty? Can your god be put into a falsifiable prediction or not?
Pilty seems to be very adept evading any question where he might be proven wrong. And I don’t mean this as a complement.
So, you’re saying that as humanity advances in everything else it decreases in ‘spirituality’? At least there’s one thing we agree on. Now, if we can just keep up the progress maybe we’ll get lucky and kill off
superstitious ooga-boogaspirituality altogether.Emphasis mine, to highlight the past tense. Why do you say ‘was’, PM? That implies there’s an answer to which is the ‘correct’ one – though I’m sure you think you have the answer.
Now, let me guess which one that would be. Is it…the one you happen to adhere to? Colour me unsurprised. Unfortunately (for you, that is; for me it’s another amongst the many dead giveaways), 37,999 of the other christian denominations, plus the innumerable other religions that have existed (not to mention those that are yet to exist) imply otherwise.
Exactly, we play his game and do the test he wants, but he complains when we do it that God doesn’t like to be tested. His methodology is so deeply flawed that it baffles me as to why he can’t see his own contradictions in reasoning.
Interesting how much the word “bigot” has changed over the centuries. It had already started to drift somewhat more towards the modern version by 1867, judging by my Chambers’ dictionary edition from then:
“one obstinately and blindly devoted to a particular creed or party”
It seems that some of the need for the person also to be a hypocrite (in the sense of not really believing what they ostentatiously profess to believe) has been dropped and the definition is edging more towards any under-critical holding of views.
Because doing so would undermine everything he has. He can’t accept the possibility that his god doesn’t exist; ergo, all his arguments exclude that possibility and instead focus on fantastic (in its literal sense – ‘pertaining to fantasy’) and evasive, convoluted justifications for why their god does or doesn’t do things. Consistency is ignored, words are redefined to suit the argument at hand, and intellectual honesty is thrown out the window.
I don’t find it baffling – just deeply unsatisfying. Well, as serious debate, anyway; I can’t help but find the underlying thought processes fascinating, at least from a psychological perspective. Plus, some of it is downright hilarious. I also suspect Piltdown’s writing with his tongue a little more in his cheek than is visible from a cursory glance.
Wowbagger@560,
Piltdown’s views are in many ways deeply unpleasant, but, contrary to my earlier impression, really more ludicrous than sinister, being so far removed from reality. Tongue-in-cheek? Well, sometimes he responds to a telling argument with a “witty” remark that is deliberately ambiguous as to whether it’s to be taken seriously, and he enjoys playing “shock the liberals”; but I’ve seen no reason to doubt that he really does long for the re-establishment of a medieval religio-political system dominated by the Catholic Church and “sacral monarchy”. Of course, even if the collapse of civilisation he patently hopes for occurs, there is no chance of this happening, any more than a reversion to the climate of the Cretaceous would produce re-evolved dinosaurs.
Wowbagger,
AKA high-class trolling, where by high-class I mean plausibly deniable in any one episode. His corpus, however, puts the lie to the deniability in my opinion.
About those spiritually advanced ancients…
When we call the corn Ceres and the wine Bacchus we use a common figure of speech; but do you imagine that anyone is so insane as to believe that the thing he feeds upon is a god? (Cicero)
Also on the topic of “spiritually advanced ancients” is this essay by historian Richard Carrier on the general lack of skepticism around the first century — “Kooks and Quacks of the Roman Empire.”
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/kooks.html
In his conclusion, he writes:
Even Crossan, whom you refer to at the end of your post, says that Jesus’ crucifixion — and hence, Jesus’ existence — is as historically “certain as *anything* historical ever can be” – eric
If he says that, he’s being rather silly. Compare the evidence for the crucifixion with that for Julius Caeser’s assasination – let along that of John F. Kennedy.
Ach! Ceaser -> Caesar and assasination -> assassination @565. The evidence for “Julius Ceaser’s assasination” is distinctly shaky ;-)
Hmm, I see another typo in #565: “along” should be “alone”. Evidently time for bed!
No, I hadn’t. Thanks! (I vaguely remember someone posting a link at some point, but I don’t think I followed it – I generally only click on links from people with whom I’m familiar.) Don’t know why some people have to take a good idea and turn it into a, y’know, thang, and his version seems a bit strange, but it’s interesting.
Agreed – he’s climbed so far up the woo-pole there’s no bringing him down. The power-of-holy-water-vs.-paranormal-activity comment removed most of the lingering doubt I had in that department; the one about the bronze-age peoples’ superior spirituality clinched it.
My reaction to the first posts of his I read (a few weeks back, IIRC) was one of vehement refutation – mostly due to his casual indifference towards the numerous genocides his god commanded and/or inspired – but since then I’ve realised there’s not much value in that.
He truly believes in his god’s image as ‘humble and magnanimous’ but is fully aware of his religion’s (and its predecessor’s) history of ultra-violence; he just pretends it’s somehow explicable if we only chose to let ourselves ‘believe’ as he does. His position is one of denial rather than justification.
I suppose the simple explanation of my position is that he’s a darned sight more entertaining than many of his brothers-in-faith, and provides further insight into what a mind damaged by religion is capable of.
Wowbagger #569 wrote:
From what I can tell, Piltdown Man is actually pretty normal. Belief in some form of the paranormal is fairly high among Christians, and, as for his apologetics, they’re more or less standard among those Christians who also reject evolution.
But of course, I haven’t been in every thread, so I may have missed something surprising.
Where he said he believed that PZ Myers was literally possessed by demons was one of the funniest things I’ve ever read.
PZ possessed by demons? The mild mannered professor? ROFLMAO
Posted by: Piltdown Man | December 16, 2008
Don’t forget that God’s Old Testament blockbuster miracles took place at a time when people were in many ways far more spiritually advanced than modern men. No miracle was necessary to prove the existence of a divine being to whom worship and sacrifice was due — the existence of some such entity was as obvious to natural human reason as the existence of the world itself.
The hoax is proudly standing on the shoulders of pygmies + dwarves!
Sastra wrote:
I imagine his novelty and apparent singularity (to me) is proportional to the amount of time I’ve spent debating theists, i.e. not very much before the last six months or so. Piltdown’s definitely the only person I’ve come across who espouses most of what he writes about – which why I’ve expressed some suspicion about how seriously he takes it.
But I’m getting used to the idea that his beliefs aren’t necessarily atypical – though it’ll probably take a while before I can fully accept it without stopping to think twice. Heck, I’m still assimilating the knowledge I gained from the kerfuffle following the cracker incident – it nearly blew my mind because I had no idea people could take that nonsense seriously.
Kel #571 wrote:
Again, this isn’t extraordinary — for Christians. Those groups which believe in a literal Satan often believe in literal demons. I looked quickly for some statistics, and found one place where it said about half of the Born Again Christians believe in the devil. Since Catholics have exorcisms, they’re in there too.
http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_demo2.htm
The only somewhat surprising thing (to me) is that Piltdown Man would have mentioned it to this group. They usually only talk about the demons to each other, because they know it sounds “crazy” to those who restrict their understanding to this world.
The sad thing is not that Piltdown is nuts, but that he probably isn’t. He’s more mainstream than atheists are. Even many “liberal” Christians who scoff at those who think people can be possessed by demons consider atheism to be just as extreme, in its own way.
I’m not sure whether to be amused or concerned.
The old testament people being more spiritually advanced, or just more gullible to the cons of religion due to widespread illiteracy? Once religion is looked at as a con game, a scam, it makes a lot more sense. And a lot more cents.
I was curious enough to hunt down the source of the above — “De Natura Deorum“, Liber III:
Cum fruges Cererem, vinum Liberum dicimus, genere nos quidem sermonis utimur usitato, sed ecquem tam amentem esse putas, qui illud, quo vescatur, deum credat esse?
(The god “Liber” was assimilated with “Bacchus/Dionysus”, it says there)
Does Piltdown reject evolution? I can’t recall seeing him discuss it at all?
His views are pretty weird even for a Catholic: only a small proportion are “traditionalist Catholics” (i.e., reject Vatican II – and remember he considers JPII an ultra-liberal), and I’m not sure whether the majority of those would endorse Piltdown’s bizarre attachment to “sacral monarchy” and admiration for feudalism.
Nick, I’ve never seen a post where he expressly rejects evolution, but then I haven’t read all his tripe. I can only take so much stupidity in a day, and some days at work…..
I don’t think it matters whether he rejects evolution or not. The man believes in literal demonic possession!
Well, he might be possessed by demons for his tortured logic, and the desire to revert to the twelfth century. And thinking that holy water is anything other than regular aitch-two-oh.
Speaking as the one who finds it hard to stop when the believers want to keep arguing (“You really believe that? Look, here’s all these logical problems with what you just said.” “No, here’s an analogy for why those logical problems aren’t really problems, blah blah blah” [and so on]), I do not recall Pilt ever saying the evolution was something that he explicitly disbelieved.
The closest I can recall him even approaching the topic was when he cited the Pontifical Biblical Commission on the interpretation of Genesis, which, whatever else it might be, is not a simple “God said it, I believe it, and that settles it” that you would expect from a genuine literalist.
On the other hand, science is something that he seems to have a hard time with in general; in that same thread, he wrote that gravity was metaphysical. When questioned about that, he responded:
And when I questioned that (“I have no idea what this means, and I suspect that you don’t either”), he simple dropped the subject, as he so often does.
Owlmirror @583:
It can be hard to keep up with rapidly proliferating combox comments. I haven’t even got around to addressing your Hypatia post yet, or Wowbagger’s remarks about Spanish colonialism in America!
+++
John Morales @528:
From God’s perspective, Israel served a threefold function:
Firstly, as a race of priests sworn to maintain true worship in a idolatrous world.
Secondly, to be a visible sign of God’s power — because Israel was such a weak and inglorious nation, her survival and victories against all odds could not be explained other than as the result of divine favour.
Thirdly, to give birth to the Messiah.
From Israel’s perspective, the pact with God brought protection from much stronger enemies who would otherwise wipe her off the face of the earth.
From God’s perspective, Israel HAD to survive in order for the Divine Plan to be implemented.
From the Israelites’ perspective, the correct worship of God HAD to be maintained at all costs, otherwise the divine protection would be withdrawn and their enemies would destroy them. Orthodoxy was literally a matter of life and death, which is why Moses instituted the first Inquisition:
When there shall be found among you within any of thy gates, which the Lord thy God shall give thee, man or woman that do evil in the sight of the Lord thy God, and transgress his covenant, so as to go and serve strange gods, and adore them, the sun and the moon. and all the host of heaven, which I have not commanded: and this is told thee, and hearing it thou hast inquired diligently, and found it to be true, and that the abomination is committed in Israel: thou shalt bring forth the man or the woman, who have committed that most wicked thing, to the gates of thy city, and they shall be stoned. By the mouth of two or three witnesses shall he die that is to be slain. Let no man be put to death, when only one beareth witness against him. The hands of the witnesses shall be first upon him to kill him, and afterwards the hands of the rest of the people: that thou mayst take away the evil out of the midst of thee. (Deuteronomy 17: 2-7)
And why we witness scenes like this:
And Israel at that time abode in Settim, and the people committed fornication with the daughters of Moab, who called them to their sacrifices. And they ate of them, and adored their gods. And Israel was initiated to Beelphegor: upon which the Lord being angry, said to Moses: Take all the princes of the people, and hang them up on gibbets against the sun: that my fury may be turned away from Israel. And Moses said to the judges of Israel: Let every man kill his neighbours, that have been initiated to Beelphegor.
And behold one of the children of Israel went in before his brethren to a harlot of Madian, in the sight of Moses, and of all the children of Israel, who were weeping before the door of the tabernacle. And when Phinees the son of Eleazar the son of Aaron the priest saw it, he rose up from the midst; of the multitude, and taking a dagger, went in after the Israelite into the brothel house, and thrust both of them through together, to wit, the man and the woman in the genital parts. And the scourge ceased from the children of Israel … (Numbers 25: 1-8)
(Of course, when you think of it, God has condemned every human being who ever lived, is living and will live to death. We all die sooner or later. Now that’s what I call genocide.)
+++
Kel @ 529:
I concede my suggestion that you pray for evidence of God’s existence is, strictly speaking, “unfalsifiable”. It is not a scientific test. Manifestly it is not an attempt to win arguments but to win souls.
Nick Gotts @539:
My suggestion about praying for evidence obviously presupposes that I believe such prayers could be efficacious. I would only point out that I eventually made the suggestion in response to Nerd of Redhead’s repeated demands for evidence, so it seems a bit unfair to then accuse me of proselytising.
Kel @541:
Sure you didn’t attempt to set any conditions about when and how? Were you humble?
Sastra @543:
The very fact that you can so coolly and clinically analyse this human capacity for self-delusion leads me to believe that you’re not likely to fall for any “meaningful coincidences” and the like. Pharyngulans are hard-bitten athiests, not the sort of idly curious who might browse the ‘Mind, Body & Spirit’ shelves in their local bookshop or let their eyes drift to their star sign in the newspaper horoscopes.
I certainly can’t conceive of a “climactic moment of nothing”. I suppose a lack of climactic moments of Something would be sufficient.
+++
Owlmirror @546:
Conceivably, provided there was no nonsense about sovereignty residing with ‘the people’ rather than with God. The only modern attempt to set up a Christian republic that I can think of is Garcia Moreno in Ecuador — but the Powers put paid to that.
All Catholics are the Pope’s subjects wherever they live.
?
Owlmirror @ 554:
Regarding definitions of bigotry, I accept the etymology carries connotations of religious hypocrisy; however I still maintain the word has since evolved to mean bull-headed, know-nothing, obstinate prejudice of any kind.
+++
Wowbagger @ 569:
Come on up, the view’s breathtaking.
+++
Nerd of Redhead @572:
Clearly your view of demonic possession hasn’t progressed beyond the Blatty/Friedkin level. Who better than a mild-mannered professor to do the Devil’s work? (Not that PZ strikes me as particularly mild-mannered!)
Sastra @ 575:
Belief in the Devil and fallen angels is an article of faith for Catholics.
+++
Nick Gotts @561:
I’ve said before I view the prospect of societal collapse with trepidation, not pleasure. Such a scenario might eventually result in a renewed period of Christian hegemony – but it’s at least as likely that the Church will end up even mote marginalized than she is today. And even if a ‘new Christendom’ did emerge, there’s no reason to suppose it will resemble the Middle Ages any more than the latter resembled the Christian Roman Empire of late Antiquity.
+++
Owlmirror @583:
I had a discussion on the RDF on this topic. I wrote:
My formidable interlocutor replied:
I replied:
Is there anyone here willing to discuss some points of evolutionary theory with me? I mean a serious discussion – no polemics or proselytizing.
Pilty, you are possessed by demons if you think godbotting and quoting the bible and theology will get you anywhere with anybody on this blog. Time for you to crawl back into your cave with your imaginary god, and enjoy your mental masturbation. Time to leave us alone.
Piltdown Man #584 responded:
Ah, but God does not necessarily reveal Himself in extraordinary events: sometimes He comes under guise of the ordinary, of small coincidences and little signs … etc. etc. etc.
The point I was making was that “asking God to reveal Himself” and waiting for “something” to happen which will “look like God trying to say something” is a very poor method. It’s vague, open-ended, and far too liable to bias and coincidence. You would not trust the results of people who used this method and arrived at answers like “The Mormon Church is the One True Church” or “We are all God and on the brink of a New Age of Spirituality” just because the seeker tried the experiment, and then experienced a climactic moment of Something-Or-Other.
And, by the same token, you don’t trust the results of atheists who claim that they asked God for a revelation, and nothing happened. Nor should you. Given the loose parameters of the test, the atheist could have been stupid and missed something. Or God could have been upset over being asked to perform for a “test.”
But any proper test we use is not really a test for God. It’s a test for us — to see if we are wrong.
But your test cannot tell anyone if they are wrong. It can’t show the theist that there is no God, and it can’t show the atheist that there is a God. Nor can it really confirm God to either. Instead, it’s an exercise of personal imagination and will.
Like us, you seem to understand and accept the human capacity for self-delusion — especially in religion and the paranormal. But I think you lose your critical ability to analyze human fallibility when it comes to your own religious beliefs.
It’s not that you think they are true. It’s that you have set it up so that you know they are true. It’s supposed to be God who is infallible — not us.
Scientific tests are not attempts to “win arguments.” They are honest, humble attempts to find out if a belief is wrong. What you have given us instead is a propaganda technique which will persuade the unwary and self-involved. Any result which comes from “asking God to reveal Himself” in some way at some point should be taken every bit as seriously as the testimony of a Mormon who says they felt a “burning in the bosom.” Meaning, not seriously.
Piltdown @584, regarding your response to me, wherein you (presumably) attempt to justify the claim that “God is merciful” in view of Deuteronomy 7, you write
So far as the story goes, that seems like a sound interpretation, but you argue against your claim when you write “at all costs” – clearly mercilessness is one of those costs.
Then you quote passages to the effect that transgressors of religious law must be stoned to death (no mercy) and that cruel and unusual punishment is efficacious (no mercy).
So, the Biblical god not only is a merciless one, but the god’s followers are also merciless through its twisted doctrines. Not nice.
Piltdown Man #584 wrote:
Yes, but I think it need not be a literal Devil and fallen angels. Plenty of Catholics seem to have no problem taking them as symbols. As far as I know, official Catholic doctrine is not clear-cut for either option. You can find support for both, depending on where you look.
Pilty, some comic relief.
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/12/fancy_tickled.php
I’ve said before I view the prospect of societal collapse with trepidation, not pleasure. – Piltdown
I know, but I don’t believe you. The relish with which you contemplated it on your early visits here was all too clear.
I’m still waiting for a response to my disproof of doctrinally orthodox Christianity: Jesus is supposed to be “Wholly God and wholly man”, but since the characteristics of “God” and “man” are incompatible, this is logically impossible. Therefore doctrinally orthodox Christianity is not only false, but necessarily false (i.e. false in the same way as 2+2=5 is false). (This proof, of course, does not apply to Arianism, Unitarianism, Judaism, Islam, or Jehovah’s Witnessism.)
Is there anyone here willing to discuss some points of evolutionary theory with me? I mean a serious discussion – no polemics or proselytizing. – Piltdown
Undoubtedly there are many, including me. But such a discussion would first require that you make your current position clear.
If I don’t set any conditions, how do I know it’s really God? This is why I do a simple test. And was I humble? I’ll say for arguments sake I was.
To win “souls” here, you are going to have to subject God to the process of science. Though I’m with Dawkins and believe the God hypothesis has already been falsified. When God first was hypothesised by the Jewish people (or would you count the Zoroastrians with creating the first monotheistic God of which Yahweh is a variant), God was there to explain things like storms and earthquakes. Drought and famine were because of God. These days we know better, we know there are natural forces at play for all these events. Hell, we even know our origins now thanks to evolution – we are just one of billions of species that have walked the earth.
God was always a god of the gaps. And now so many of those gaps have been filled in that really as an explanation God is nothing more than a placeholder that’s been superseded. God is a failed scientific construct.
Ah, lovely, lovely post hoc ergo propter hoc.
Why would a God who was real even want to be worshipped?
Post hoc ergo propter hoc.
In addition to noting the obvious fallacy, I note once again that “the Messiah” was never originally considered to be an incarnation of God, but rather as the true king of Israel.
Most enemies did not wish to exterminate nations, but rather to subjugate. “Dead people cannot pay taxes”, as a famous emperor is alleged to have said.
In addition to noting the obvious fallacy… why would a real God need any such convoluted plan? If he wants to declare humans saved, nothing else need be done.
[Skipping full quotations of Deut 17 and Numbers 25]
Uh-huh. And why is it that God needs mere mortals to carry out this genocide of idolaters? If they are so evil, he could kill them himself. Or, if he’s feeling merciful, he could give them a chance first by manifesting as he did on Sinai and booming out “YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG!”. Would people continue misbehaving if God himself showed up and told them so?
I would provisionally agree: If God is real, he is a murderer of incredible proportions, and is thus evil. I personally would not be able to honestly worship such a being, even if he did show up and demonstrate his reality.
Oddly enough, God has not seen fit to show up and slay me for expressing this sentiment.
(“athiests”? You can spell better than that.)
If you agree that there is indeed such a thing as self-delusion, how would you determine that you are not deluding yourself?
Deut 4:2
Deut 4:40
Deut 13
And your verses from Deut 17 and Num 25.
If it was indeed correct, as shown in the verses you quoted, to kill anyone who came up with anything that did “transgress his covenant”, then the Jews were doing nothing more than following God’s own orders in demanding Jesus’ death.
And if Jesus was telling the truth about being God, then God was breaking his word by showing up and telling his people things that contradicted that covenant.
And is thus still applicable to you.
Why? Satan is God’s faithful servant in the bible, not a Devilish enemy, and there are no fallen angels mentioned.
Gah. Completely insane.
I don’t suppose you care that William of Ockham was a good Franciscan Catholic?
Have you thought through the implications of your “angel hypothesis”? Are there angels bound to every particle of mass or to every combination of particles? Are they good angels, obeying God’s law, or are they evil angels, wickedly wishing to harm people?
Why am I even bothering to argue with such an insane idea?
Gah, again.
Perhaps you could read something from a fellow Catholic, although given that you reject parsimony, I am not sure if that would help.
http://www.millerandlevine.com/km/evol/
It’s unsurprising that Gabriel Garcia Moreno is one of Piltdown’s heroes. Garcia Moreno was a theocratic dictator, who made Catholicism a condition of citizenship, violently repressed Native American revolts against the exactions he imposed on them, exiled or executed many opponents, severely limited free speech, and signed a concordat with the Vatican (like so many dictators e.g. Franco, Mussolini, Hitler) giving the Catholic Church considerable secular power. On the plus side, he was (unusually for the place and time) not personally corrupt, improved higher education, and abolished slavery. He was (quite justifiably) assassinated in 1875.
Interestingly, there appears to have been a concerted right-Catholic campaign to whitewash him on the web.
That blew the fuse on my irony meter big time. What have you been doing ever since your fist post here. Oh yes, if you do it OK, if we do it bad. Dang, there went another fuse.
Seriously, atheism has no god. Science does not require god and just ignore his existence or non-existence. So we can’t proselytize since no god is involved. No god, no holy book, no theology, no possibility to proselytize. Drat, there goes another fuse.
I meant no polemics or proselytizing on my part.
My attitude towards Darwin’s theory of evolution (as far as I understand it) is one of provisional scepticism, not dogmatic rejection.
Just what element of the theory are you sceptical about?
Piltdown,
The question is not really about Darwin’s theory of evolution, but about the modern theory of evolution. Darwin was a brilliant scientist, but he wrote his key work a century and a half ago, and much of what he formulated has been superceded – although not the key ideas of common descent and natural selection. Unlike religion, science is self-correcting and self-improving. Unless you have grasped this, you are bound to make a fool of yourself in discussing it.
Pilty#595 emphasis mine
Unless you tell us what your understanding of evolution is, we can’t help you.
Maybe Piltdown can elucidate which of the tenets of the modern synthesis he finds problematic.
To relate my previous to the post topic, I note that, in the above-linked article, the next section “further advances” has it: (my bold)
Because SIWOTI, I am going to make one last attempt to address this piece of insanity:
No. Absolutely not. This is pathetic semantic confusion and equivocation.
In the language of physics, “force” precisely defines the ways in which objects are observed to attract or repel in terms of mass and acceleration. This is a separate issue from the cause of the force, which might be what you are complaining about, although your confusion is large enough that I cannot be sure. But even speculation about the cause of a force cannot be “metaphysical”, by any modern definition of the term, if in the end it is empirically demonstrable. It is precisely about something that exists as something in the physical world; an attribute of all matter!
Is any of this getting through at all?
And if I’m not sufficiently authoritative for you, I see that the Catholic Encyclopedia has an article on the History of Physics; is there anything in there that supports your confusion about forces being metaphysical? Besides the stuff about Aristotle and other philosophers working before modern physics was first worked out, at any rate.
Sheesh!
“To say objects are seen to attract or repel each other in certain ways under certain circumstances is scientific observation; to say this shows the existence of an attractive or repulsive force is metaphysical speculation.”
That type of statement seems to merit a SIWOTI promotion- SIWOTI squared.
Well, my TV remote must be a metaphysical device because it uses such a force- the Electromagnetic force -that allows me to change the channel. Brilliant. Also, electromagnets must invoke magic, or maybe even the moon is metaphysically tethered to the earth?
And who left the Door open to the 3rd Century in the first place? Pilty, you really Are a temporal enigma aren’t you?
DAMN IT! I’m going to be out of town at that time! :(
“To say objects are seen to attract or repel each other in certain ways under certain circumstances is scientific observation; to say this shows the existence of an attractive or repulsive force is metaphysical speculation.”
Nonsense. To not say the latter part is to entertain the possibility that the objects attract or repel each other without any sort of physical force being involved – and that isn’t metaphysical speculation?
Looks like Piltdown has “bravely turned his tail and fled”. I’d like to think it was my disproof of Christianity, but more probably it was the prospect of discussing evolution with people who actually know something about it.
He’ll be back.
Eh, he might be busy. He took 3 days to get back to the thread last time, and I’ve taken as long or longer to return to a thread, given distracting stuff happening.
And if he’s actually reading up on parsimony and/or physics, well, it would be a relief to not have to have such egregious wrongness repeated.
Gah.
I think he will be back. Reading does not equal understanding though.
Sastra @588:
S.I.W.O.T.I.
Catechism of the Council of Trent: And besides these enemies that dwell and live with us, there are, moreover, those most bitter foes, of whom it is written: Our wrestling is not against, flesh and blood; but against principalities and powers, against the rulers of the world of this darkness, against the spirits of wickedness in the high places. For to our inward conflicts are added the external assaults and attacks of the demons, who both assail us openly, and also insinuate themselves by stratagem into our souls, so much so that it is only with great difficulty that we can escape them. The Apostle entitles the demons princes, on account of the excellence of their nature, since by nature they are superior to man, and to all other visible creatures.
Catechism of the Catholic Church: The power of Satan is, nonetheless, not infinite. He is only a creature, powerful from the fact that he is pure spirit, but still a creature. … Satan or the devil and the other demons are fallen angels who have freely refused to serve God and his plan. … In this petition [“Deliver us from evil”], evil is not an abstraction, but refers to a person, Satan, the Evil One, the angel who opposes God.
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Nick Gotts @590:
I’m not competent to hold forth on the mysteries of the Hypostatic Union, but I don’t think one can reject the concept of a God-Man in the same way as one would reject the concept of, say, a square circle. Our intellects can grasp the essential idea of a square or circle but not that of God or a man, who are both mysteries.
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Owlmirror @592:
Between the idea/And the reality/Between the motion/And the act/Falls the Shadow
How should I know? How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? As many as are required.
Why should reality necessarily be simple rather than complex? I believe my God is a more of a prodigal monarch rather than a parsimonious one, a baroque architect rather than a brutalist one.
“When parsimony ceases to be a guideline and is instead elevated to an ex cathedra pronouncement, parsimony analysis ceases to be science.”
Owlmirror @601:
Well if in the language of physics “force” is no more than shorthand for a series of observations, then I have no quarrel with it. In your terms, then, I am indeed raising the issue of the cause of the force.
But every physical cause you point to merely pushes the questions of “what?” and “why?” further back without finally answering them. This sort of scientific terminology can only ultimately be descriptive, tautological even. For example, RickrOll talks about electromagnetism. What is that and why does it act as it does?
I suppose at the end of the day it depends on whether you consider “why is there anything rather than nothing?” a meaningful question or not.
+++
Nick Gotts @593:
You approve of political assassination?
He’s ba-ack.
And Pilty, god can never be used as a scientific explanation or conclusion. As far a science is concerned, we ignore god, if he exists.
Speak of the devil
Aww, Pilty’s back. Still as cute and full of fun as ever.
But enough of this gay banter. Let’s consider evolution!
Nick Gotts @597:
It’s the key ideas I have difficulty with. You don’t need me to tell you I’m a scientific layman, so apologies in advance if my questions seem naive.
Common descent.
In his recent TV series The Genius of Charles Darwin, Professor Richard Dawkins produced three pieces of evidence for common descent.
Firstly, the fossil record. Professor Dawkins called fossils “tangible remnants of evolution“.
This is what he said:
Now I can’t help feeling there’s a bit of sleight of hand going on here. It’s one thing to say that when you examine the fossil record you find fish then amphibians then reptiles then birds then mammals … an “ordered sequence” as Dawkins puts it. But where exactly does the “changed into” come from? It seems a bit of a speculative leap to insert that. A creationist might reasonably ask why a Creator could not have simply created fish, amphibians, etc in that particular sequence. Surely the geological layering of fossils just tells you when species A existed relative to species B — such a chronological sequence doesn’t tell you that A evolved into B. How does the fossil record support “changed into”?
Later on, Dawkins talked about the anatomical similarities between different species.
I don’t mean to sound facetious but doesn’t this really just amount to saying that similar animals display … similarities? To introduce the notion of a common descent seems another huge speculative leap unwarranted by what is actually being observed. A creationist might reasonably ask why a Creator could not simply have created animals with certain structural similarities. That apes bear a resemblance to humans isn’t exactly news — how is it evidence that they descended from a common ancestor?
Next up – genetics, “the ultimate proof of Darwin’s ‘tree of life’“.
Isn’t this just the Argument from Anatomical Similarity writ small? If DNA molecules are the basic building blocks of living organisms, why is it surprising that two animals with a visible exterior resemblence should also display an invisible interior one? A creationist might reasonably ask why a Creator should not combine his molecular building blocks in similar patterns to create similar creatures.
It seems to me that what Dawkins is basically doing here is pointing to observed phenomena (fossils, similar morphology, similar genetic codes) and saying “look, evolution is an explanation for how these came to be”. Well it may be a theoretical explanation, but it doesn’t follow that those phenomena in themselves constitute evidence for the truth of that theory.
What am I missing?
It’s not an ordered sequence from birds to mammals, Dawkins knows that and you are misrepresenting both him and evolutionary theory by stating it’s so.
Mammals.Birds
……../
prehistoric reptiles
The transitions to birds from dinosaurs are very well established in the fossil record. Just as the transition from fish to amphibians, reptiles to mammals, and non-humans to humans. You are missing what the fossils do tell us.
As I mentioned a little upthread, my relatively recent arrival in the world of theological debate means that I’ve never encountered anyone like Pilty before. So for me this is a fascinating insight into the convoluted mind of a theist who will stop at nothing to rationalise even the tiniest aspects of his belief system.
Those few vaguely coherent theists i’ve observed all engage in a sort of a philosophical tap number in the hope that no-one notices they’re just prancing back and forth without actually ending up anywhere; Piltdown’s dance, in comparison, is more like a ballet in its complexity. Sure, it’s a creepy and wholly uncompelling ballet – but a ballet nonetheless.
Parsimony. Again.
(And right now I actually am distracted, so a fuller answer will have to wait.)
Piltdown Man #609 wrote:
And yet, many Catholics in good standing do consider Satan to be a metaphor or symbol for evil, and cite various sources in Catholic theology. I have had this impressed on me several times, by Catholics themselves. No doubt you disagree with them. I only point to the controversy. One cannot assume that all Catholics believe in literal demon possession. Evidently, you do.
You misunderstand. Parsimony is not a principle which says something about the nature of reality — that it’s simple. On the contrary, the universe is often much more complicated than we think it is. Instead, parsimony (or Occam’s Razor) deals with human fallibility. When we make unnecessary assumptions, we place our speculations above correction. We are simple, and should not do that.
You approve of political assassination? – Piltdown
The assassination of ruling (not former) tyrants and their most prominent henchpersons, most certainly! The most recent example of an assassination I approved of that comes to mind is of Franco’s PM Admiral Carrero Blanco, whose car ETA blew over a 5-storey building in 1973 – giving rise to the amusing slogan:
“Up with Franco – higher than Carrero Blanco!”
Had he not been assassinated, he would certainly have delayed the return of Spain to democracy, and probably made the process bloody and violent rather than almost entirely peaceful. I would have approved the assassination of Franco himself, Salazar, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Lenin, Trotsky (during his period of power) and many other tyrannical murderers.
You’re missing huge amounts of corroborative detail. Your understanding of the evidence, as you have summarized it above, is extremely superficial. The fossil record, comparative anatomy (including embryology), and comparative genetics (including developmental genetics, genomics, and comparative biochemistry) each independently provide overall patterns and thousands of individual case histories and details that can only be plausibly explained by common descent; beyond that, the independent patterns of all three match each other (and other sources of data like biogeography and comparative pjhysiology) perfectly. That’s the linchpin. Everything we thought we knew about evolutionary relationships based on morphology could have been falsified unambiguously when techniques for molecular and genetic analysis were developed, but instead nearly all have been corroborated. The exceptions are, in retrospect, clearly due to misinterpretation of the older morphological data.
Seriously, it all fits together and no other explanation for life’s diversity and unity makes any sense. The more you learn the clearer that conclusion becomes.
But in terms of the fossil record:
We don’t see humans before hominid ancestors, mammals before reptiles, just as we don’t see reptiles before amphibians. And we don’t see amphibians before fish. There is a set order to the events, consistent with the timeline of common descent.
When you look at the fossil record over time, you see a gradual change from one age to another. When you put the fossil record together, it becomes obvious that one species turned into another. Now it could just be that God is making each new species in time, but that would just be making it look like species have evolved.
Yep, similarities. Look at the bone structure in Tiktaalik’s arm, it’s the same morphological structure we see in life today. A bat’s wing is like a really elongated hand, it’s still the same morphological structure.
And there’s more too, all mammals have mammary glands. All are warm-blooded. Then if you look at the different groups, you can see differences among isolation. Monotremes still lay eggs, marsupials have a pouch to store their live young, and placental mammals develop their offspring in the womb. These similarities are sorted by geographic location too, in Australia you see an abundance of marsupials that is present nowhere else. This country’s geographic isolation inhibited placental mammal migration aside from a few small mice.
As for genetics, there are so many markers in our DNA that point to common ancestry. The number of same genes, the number of genetic markers such as our fused chimp chromosome pair (humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes while all other great apes have 24 so for common ancestry to be true we’d need to have a fused chromosome or all other apes having a split chromosome), there are ERVs that are inserted by viruses into our DNA and subsequently passed on through generations. We share 16 ERV-K retroviruses with chimpanzees that sit in exactly the same position on the genome.
The evidence is there Pilty, taking Dawkins’ series that was really an introduction as grounds for dismissal is just highlighting your own personal ignorance of the subject.
I’m not competent to hold forth on the mysteries of the Hypostatic Union, but I don’t think one can reject the concept of a God-Man in the same way as one would reject the concept of, say, a square circle. Our intellects can grasp the essential idea of a square or circle but not that of God or a man, who are both mysteries. – Piltdown
Crap. We don’t need to understand the concepts “God” and “man” in every detail to grasp that they are logically incompatible. Nothing can be both omniscient and limited in knowledge, omnipotent and limited in power. Your religion is garbage, Piltdown, utter, total, complete, garbage.
Here you go Pilty, a couple of videos on just one line of evidence entirely to do with genetics.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUxLR9hdorI
I don’t mean to sound facetious but doesn’t this really just amount to saying that similar animals display … similarities? – Piltdown
Two points that haven’t been mentioned yet;
1) The overall pattern of similarities shows a tree-like structure: groups dividing into subgroups into subsubgroups… This is not the only way things could have been: the similarities could have had a pattern like that of the periodic table (which is basically two-dimensional, with groups cutting across each other), or that of stars (where classifications by brightness, chemical composition and mass cut across each other). Before evolutionary theory was developed, some naturalists suggested non-treelike schemas; but others, such as Linnaeus, noted the treelikeness but had no explanation for it. Common descent explains it. This is one thing really important scientiifc theories do: explain masses of apparently unconnected observations.
2) Similarities are often non-functional. Why do snakes and whales have rudiments of limbs? Would a rational designer put them in? Why? The same applies to many features of the genome – including, for example, extra, non-functional copies of genes, found in similar patterns in what were already thought on morphological grounds to be close relatives.
More generally, nothing can prove that common descent is true – it’s always possible to maintain that a designer made it look as though this was the case. (Look up Philip Gosse’s Omphalos if you’re not familiar with it.) However, evolutionary theory and the theory of common descent in particular predict what will and will not be found when particular investigations are made. No alternative does so with any success whatever.
Meaning that this god character is being more than a little dishonest by making things appear to have emerged as predicted by the TOE.
Which would be fine if creationists were happy to accept that their god is, in fact, a lying sack of shit who gets his rocks off fucking with us. But they tend to prefer the ‘kind and loving’ model, which pretty much kicks the ‘disingenuous prick’ theory in the crotch.
Admittedly, that people can read the bible and still consider the god of it to be ‘kind and loving’ shows they’ll swallow pretty much anything, so it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise they’d buy this particular load of tripe and gobble it down with smiles on their faces.
not just dishonest, but also somewhat inept. why a designer would chose DNA for the building blocks of water-based life is beyond me. DNA is so sensitive to destruction by water that all organisms have to expend a lot of energy in just repairing it constantly. PNA would have been a better substance.
and then there’s the similarities between animals which actually endanger the animal. for example: why is the human birth canal stuck in a narrow bone ring? there’s no advantage in that. if the birth canal was where our belly buttons are, childbirth would be far less dangerous to everyone involved. from an evolutionary standpoint it makes sense, simply because the animals from which humans evolved all had that arrangement without impairing them, and there was no mutation/”opportunity” to change the arrangement without killing the organism. from a designer point of view it’s either cruelty or laziness (i.e. copying from older models without paying attention to design flaws)
Of course you can maintain that it’s all an elaborate hoax by the designer, but that says more about the designer than anything else. You could also say that there is no such thing as gravity, it’s just the designer making it look like bodies attract but it’s a thoroughly useless statement. If God is just going to mimic what we expect to see in nature, then what good is the concept of God?
why is the human birth canal stuck in a narrow bone ring? – jadehawk
Well really – it’s to punish women for eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge – or maybe just for their general ickiness. You surely know God has a “NO GURLZ ALLOWD IKSEPT THE BVM” sign on the Heavenly Gates, don’t you?
which brings us back to cruelty (if he designed eve that way from the start, then he fully knew what was going to happen and it’s just a cruel setup), or deceptiveness (if he re-engineered eve to suffer, then he must have re-engineered all the other animals to cover up his tracks)
well said, Nick
re: Jadehawk, #625
Heck, I’ve got minor back issues and need to wear glasses to see long distance – that’s enough for me to reject ‘design’, at least by someone who wasn’t incompetent and/or a real shit.
I’ll be interested to hear what Piltdown’s rationalisation for such poor/short-sighted design is, should he deign to answer you. The only theistic answer I’ve heard is that it’s either part of god’s on-going punishment (which he can dole out and still remain kind and loving, apparently), or it’s the degrading effect of sin.
I add major back issues from being… umm… a bit “topheavy” and painful weeks leading up to the extraction of my wisdom teeth to the list of things that indicate really really dumb design.
and I’m sure every man with prostate problems would like to know what idiot came up with that ridiculous arrangement.
There are many great examples of design in nature, the human body is not one of them. It’s done well with what it had to build on, but only a fool would parade it as the triumph of an omniscient designer.
Running the plumbing through the pleasure areas is a terrible design flaw.
I’ve never understood why God put brains in human beings. Seriously. We are, they claim, formed “in His image.” Since God has no physical body, that’s presumably supposed to refer to God’s mental image — disembodied mind, or soul. Like God, we have a spiritual component.
The soul is supposed to be the thinking, feeling self, the real part of who you are which survives even death. Why then do we need or have an extremely complicated neuron-dense organ inside our heads? If, unlike other animals, we had no brain — and yet we could think and feel — then that would have given us a strong indication that souls exist, and, thus, God exists. As it is, the existence of disembodied minds are taken ‘on faith.’ We’ve no evidence for them.
Did God give us brains in order to trick us?
Do you even have to ask?
<*eyeroll*>
Job 1:12
Humans can be so amusingly blind to what is right in front of their eyes.
Oh, really?
God, whatever else he is, is supposedly infinite.
Man, whatever else he is, is finite.
Finite and infinite are by definition contradictory.
Reconcile that.
And how do you know that any are required?
Scientific parsimony is not an assertion that reality is “simple”. As you would know if you had bothered to look up poor William of Ockham’s razor, the phrase is “entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem” — “entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity”.
Are these entities that you are multiplying necessary to explain gravity?
It does not matter if you are positing 1, 10, 1,000, or 1,000,000 angels per gravitational event: as long as their existence is utterly indistinguishable from them not being there at all, they are unnecessary as explanations.
Although that does not mean that simplicity is the wrong way to posit parsimony. Another way of putting it, this time explicitly using “simplicity”, might be to phrase it as: Reality may be immensely complicated, but simple honesty demands that we posit no theory more complicated than the simplest falsifiable theory that can explain some aspect of reality.
And I have to admit, this is not exactly “simple”.
How do you know?
How would you know if you were wrong?
The only ex cathedra pronouncements of parsimony that I am aware of are, oddly enough, from theologians speaking about God.
And at some point every theorist must stop and say “Because that is the way the thing is”. You yourself do so when you assert that “God is a more of a prodigal monarch rather than a parsimonious one”. Why? Because that’s the way God is — according to you, at any rate.
The scientist is simply more honest in saying “because that’s as best we can determine from the evidence”.
I don’t think it’s meaningless — but so far, “an intelligent entity is responsible” has not been shown to be a necessary answer to the question.
=========
and:
It’s all parsimonious inference. This summation, by a paleontologist, explains how it is that fossils are determined to be transitional, by comparing a matrix of characteristics.
http://www.csicop.org/intelligentdesignwatch/fishibian.html
Now, if you reject that descendant species would have characteristics similar to their parent and cousin species, well, all I can ask is, would you similarly reject your being related to your own parents and cousins and more distant relatives, given your presumed physical similarities?
It is not surprising in the least, and the parsimonious inferences are all interdependent.
But the question remains: Given that we know how DNA changes from generation to generation in small amounts, and can extrapolate from that small change that there must necessarily be large changes over time as those small changes accumulate over hundreds of thousands and millions of years, why should we posit a God coming in and performing the exact same sort of changes that we would expect to find anyway?
Again, would you suggest that a genetic comparison showing your genetic similarities to your parents, siblings, cousins, and more distant relatives as having no bearing on the fact of your relatedness? Would you suggest that an omnipotent God created your more distant cousins — perhaps the ones you don’t like — separately from your branch of the family?
Running the plumbing through the pleasure areas is a terrible design flaw. Nerd of Redhead
Only so far as feces are concerned: urine is a good sterilising agent.
Gah. I just noticed the link fail in ‘not exactly “simple”‘ above.
That should point to this article on one of the more recent findings on particle physics and classical behavior:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16095-its-confirmed-matter-is-merely-vacuum-fluctuations.html
A quibble about Buddhists: the monks I’ve encountered in the US do change into robes for meditation sessions but the rest of the time they generally wear normal clothes. They certainly wear normal clothes (albeit not flashy – tending toward plain cotton pants in dark colors, fleece, etc.) when going outside the monastery to run errands or whatever. They might be noticeable as Buddhists for the shaved heads, but toss on a knit hat and they completely blend in.
Obviously it’s different in Asian countries, and Asian Buddhists do tend to walk around in their robes in their home countries and abroad. But not American monks.
OK, it’s been a while but if anyone is still out there & is willing to continue this most interesting discussion …?
Sastra @617:
By what criteria do we decide whether an assumption is necessary or unnecessary?
Kel @614:
Kel @620:
Would it, though? Or is it that putative evolutionary transitions seem “obvious” to you because you expect and want to see them? Granted, a series of hominid fossils showing more & more manlike characteristics as time moves on is compatible with the theory of evolution — insofar as an anomalous fossil in the sequence would presumably falsify the theory — but it’s equally compatible with the religious understanding of man as the crown and summit of God’s creation. Perhaps God is more of a symphonic composer than a scientist and what we’re witnessing is a … crescendo.
Kel @620:
But common descent is still being assumed rather than demonstrated.
According to the Wiki entry for “Chimpanzee genome project”: “Human and common chimpanzee chromosomes are very similar. The primary difference is that humans have one fewer pair of chromosomes than do other great apes. In the human evolutionary lineage, two ancestral ape chromosomes appear to have fused at their telomeres producing human chromosome two … The results of the chimpanzee genome project suggest that … ancestral [chimpanzee] chromosomes 2A and 2B fused to produce human chromosome 2 …”
I have two questions about this (again, apologies for the scientific naivety – I am very much a layman in these matters). Question 1: How do we know human chromosome 2 is indeed a “fusion” of chimp chromosomes 2A and 2B and not just a different chromosome altogether? Question 2: What is the mechanism by which this fusion is supposed to have taken place?
Surely all that tells us is that two similar species are similarly susceptible to similar viruses which are similarly inherited by members of those species??
Owlmirror @638:
I’m not saying hypothetical descendant species wouldn’t have characteristics similar to their parent and cousin species; I’m saying similar characteristics do not in themselves constitute conclusive evidence for common descent.
The difference is that members of a human family are still members of the human family. You’re talking about common descent applying to completely different species.
Suppose you had two laboratory rats, a male and a female. Would it be possible to alter their genetic structures so that they would be unable to mate with unaltered rats but would be able to mate with each other and produce similar offspring?
Jadehawk @625:
Kel @632:
Wowbagger @630:
I would indeed attribute biological inefficiencies to the degrading effects of sin — Original Sin, to be precise. You would no doubt say that’s insane — but maybe your response has been conditioned by all those crude conventional depictions of Adam and Eve as ordinary-looking people with 1950s haircuts wandering around a forest in the nude, while ordinary-looking lions cuddle up with ordinary-looking sheep in the background.
According to the visions of Anne Catherine Emmerich, our first parents in their original prelapsarian state would be barely recognisable as humans today. Dazzling beings emitting beams of glittering light and possessed of awesome preternatural powers … Likewise, animals as we know them today are mere distorted shadows of their original nature. As the centre and summit of God’s creation, Adam and Eve’s Fall caused a universal dislocation whose spiritual and physical effects are still going strong.
Nick Gotts @623:
See above. Interestingly, the Serpent seen by Emmerich in her visions is described as being bipedal …
Piltdown,
I think the main barrier to your response getting read is that you’re posting it at what appears to be the closest thing to the graveyard shift the Pharyngula has. But you’ve responded to people on three different continents, so you never know.
The heavy evolutionary science is lost on me as well, so I’m not going to debate the finer points of that with you. However…
You wrote this:
I think that if an explanation works without requiring something (in this case, a creator god of some kind) then adding that something would be unnecessary. It’s like considering that it’s ‘necessary’ to do an interpretive dance every time you boil the kettle. Once you try boiling the kettle without doing the dance and the water still boils, you realise the dance is unneccessary.
Look at all the other things humans used to directly attribute to (or consider to be) gods: the sun, the moon, the stars, the wind, fire, earthquakes, clouds, thunder, lightning, rain, snow, rainbows, eclipses – the list goes on. Each of those turned out to have wholly naturalistic explanations. Why should the diversity of life be any different?
Which, on its own, would be fine – except for the fact that the human race isn’t, on the whole, degrading. Quite the opposite. On average we’re living longer and getting taller and healthier – even those of us who aren’t getting some sort of Jesus-based inoculation.
What’s probably more significant is that your answer to my question contradicts your response to Kel earlier in that same post, namely:
So, either contemporary modern humans are the pinnacle (or nearabouts) of your god’s creation (i.e. we’re on the way up), or we’re the current stage of degradation from the perfection of Adam & Eve (i.e. we’re on the way down) – you can’t have it both ways.
Wasn’t she the same one whose visions that mad, drunken, anti-Semitic please-don’t-call-him-Australian-’cause-we-don’t-want-him Mel Gibson based that execrable piece of self-indulgent torture porn The Passion of the Christ on?
Oh, and you won’t hear back from me in the next few hours; I’m off to bed.
You know me so well…
Are you saying that God physically altered humans from good design to bad because a woman got tricked by a talking snake? That our eyes were at one time perfect design but suddenly with insubordination the genetic code to wire a human eye became poorly made it would look exactly like humans had evolved the eye?
This is why I find your notions absurd Pilty, you are playing the Goddidit card to the point that God made it look just as if God had never been there in the first place. You’d think that even a cursory glance at Genesis would show that the story of Adam and Eve is allegorical rather than literal, that it makes a hell of a lot more sense just to explain the human body without God rather than trying to explain it with.
Um. Well, that’s fantastic.
Literally.
Since you claim to believe in a literal Eve and Adam, in your opinion, did Eve and Adam’s children procreate with each other, or with their parents? Because, apparently, there were no others with whom to do so, and clearly they must have procreated.
Golly. You’d think God would’ve seen that one (“the Fall”) coming, supposedly being Omniscient and all. Or is it that God did foresee it, but wasn’t able to avert it? Oh wait, God is supposedly Omnipotent. Well, I guess God must’ve wanted it to happen then? Oh wait, God is supposedly Omnibenevolent.
Hm.
Piltdown,
There are many examples of poor “design” in species other than ours. For example, all vertebrate eyes are so constructed that they have a blindspot, because the optic nerve has to go through the retina. Species other than ours have trouble giving birth (e.g. hyenas). The trigeminal nerve takes a bizarrely inefficient course through the head in (IIRC) all mammals. Birth defects are quite common in all animals, AFAIK. The genome itself is full of what is apparently rubbish depositied by viruses, across the animal kingdom and even beyond. All these examples stem from before there were any human beings. Parasitism is another extremely extensive phenomenon far older than humanity. Nature was never perfect.
When and where did this “sin-caused degradation” occur? Where are Adam and Eve supposed to have lived and when? We know that people almost exactly like us anatomically lived in Africa nearly 200,000 years ago – long, long before the start of agriculture. Was that before or after “Adam and Eve”? You have put forward absolutely no alternative to modern evolutionary theory, except some bronze-age myths that are not even internally consistent – let alone consistent with the abundant evidence.
ERV’s, fused chromosomes, genetic similarity… common descent is so well established through evidence that it’s embarrassing to see people question it.
We have 46 chromosomes; chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans all have 48. So that must mean that either we have a fused pair of chromosomes or all the other primates have a split pair of chromosomes in order for common descent to be valid. So what do we find when we look at the human genome? A fused chromosome including the inactive markers. And when we look at the chimpanzee genome? We can see which chimpanzee chromosomes of ours are fused.
Likewise for ERV’s. Now these are viruses inserting themselves into our DNA, then getting passed down. So if we look at the genome of chimpanzees, we should see ERV markers in the same spots if common ancestry is valid… And what do we see? Of just the ERV-K type we see 16 different markers all in exactly the same spot on both the human and chimpanzee chromosome.
Then there’s the morphological similarity, the embryological development, the genetic code, the ancestor fossils, not to mention the behavioural similarities too. The evidence pointing to common ancestry is so overwhelming. It’s downright embarrassing to watch anyone shrug that off then appeal to a mythology involving a talking snake as a more powerful explanation than what the scientific evidence points to.
You know Nick,that night my spawn came into the world,and the sucker and forceps failed and ex was in agony and spawn was dying a little,I kind of was thinking that we do in fact have trouble giving birth…;-)
Maybe with the elegant design of sonar in bats and dolphins, but definitely not with anything in humanity. Clumsy brain, clumsy body. It does a powerful job, but it’s not very good design.
You need to understand the difference of a system built from scratch with intent and a system that’s had accumulated changes over time where each stage had it’s own advantages. If we were well designed, then we should see the former. If we evolved, then we should see the latter. In nature, we see the later over and over again in species after species.
1. Because we see two centromeres (the centres of a chromosome) in our chromosome, one of them inactive. And we see telomeres in the centre of the fused chromosome. 2. PZ has a nice little explanation here.
Pilty, about the fused chromosome pair. The chimpanzee chromosomes 2a and 2b were mapped (this can be done without a full DNA analysis), and compared to the map of the human chromosome 2. Every chromosome has a head end and tail end. The mapping analysis showed that the tail ends of chimpanzee 2a and 2b became the head and tail ends of the human chromosome 2. This was later confirmed by full DNA analysis.
Pilty, unlike religionists like yourself, who are required to Lie for Jebus, scientists, in their professional work, are required to be scrupulously honest. The worst offense a scientist can commit is to deliberately lie to his colleagues. So, that is the reason I trust what scientists say versus what theologians say. The level of honesty is vastly greater with scientists. Look at your evasions and failure to acknowledge being refuted as prime examples of a religionist’s lack of honesty.
clinteas,
Yes of course – how can you possibly misinterpret what I say as implying otherwise?
All good mate…:-)
All, I’m not a biologist, but I have a response to one of Piltdown’s queries wrt Occam’s Razor, simplicity of theories, etc. Piltdown asked: “By what criteria do we decide whether an assumption is necessary or unnecessary?”
The short answer is that an assumption is necessary if and only if it increases the predictive power of the theory and not just its explanatory power.
Actually there was a considerable amount of work done on just that subject during the last half of 20th century, and some very strong and useful ideas came out of it. A lot of it is related to Claude Shannon’s ideas on entropy and information in communications theory. Some of these ideas were applied to models.
Hirotsugu Akaike came up with his Information Criterion (AIC) a very compact and intuitive expression for the degree to which a theory diverges from the “true” theory. Because the expression involves an unknown constant, this doesn’t allow you to identify the correct theory, but it does allow you to compare any two models and see which is MORE CORRECT.
Basically AIC=2k-2ln(L), where k is the number of parameters in the theory (a measure of its complexity) and L is the likelihood–a measure of how well it accounts for the observed information used to set the parameters of the theory.
So, basically, you have a mathematical expression to compare the correctness of models that in essence contains Occam’s Razor!
Now one consequence of this is that it shows that “Intelligent Design” cannot be a scientific theory, because every development depends on an arbitrary decision by a “designer”, and the number of developments is unlimited. This means that it doesn’t matter whether the “theory” of ID can account for the observations. It’s information content is zero, and it cannot make any predictions.
Then how would you distinguish between a matrix of similar characteristics, and give an explanation of which do result from common descent, and which do not?
Did you follow this link, also above @#638? Did you read it carefully? Did you understand it?
http://www.csicop.org/intelligentdesignwatch/fishibian.html
How do you know that your family members are all related to you? What are you basing that conclusion on? Again, you don’t have direct evidence of your relatedness; it’s a parsimonious inference.
Sastra @617:
Sorry, but Church doctrine is not decided by unnamed “sources in Catholic theology”. Even St Thomas Aquinas, the 900lb gorilla of Catholic theology, got it wrong on occasion. The decrees of the Fourth Lateran Council put the real existence of the Devil and demons beyond question for Catholics. Those who think differently are misguided at best, heretical at worst.
Sastra @634:
You could argue that the concept of happiness is a superstitious superfluity because a smile is no more than a physical action performed by facial muscles acting under the stimulation of signals transmitted by the nerves. And a person’s facial musculature could be so disfigured by injury or deformity as to leave him unable to smile …
Nick Gotts @618:
Well the leftists are exacting a little posthumous revenge on the Caudillo. I wonder if they will enjoy life under their probable new masters.
Nick Gotts @621:
Who says Jesus the man was limited in knowledge or power?
Not so easy to dispose of, though.
Wowbagger @614:
Don’t fight it, Wowbagger. Join us … believe so that you may understand.
Pilty, your god doesn’t exist, your bible is a work of fiction, and we don’t even want to talk about theology based upon nothing. Join us in the comfort of being rational. Give up your imaginary god and become a free man.
Piltdown:
Yes, it is, being contradictory. As per my #645§2, for one of a myriad examples.
Pilty, I’ll stop my baiting if you stop yours. Your last sentence was over the top.
Because a bunch of Catholics decide Catholic doctrine.
And if a bunch more Catholics decide an earlier bunch were wrong, Catholic doctrine will change.
Saint Mark.
But of that day or hour no man knoweth, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but the Father.
But go ahead, tell us that Saint Mark was wrong (in the divinely inspired scripture).
There are probably other verses that could be applicable…
Nerd, I think Piltdown is revealing his own medieval-level theology by alluding to St Anselm: “Nor do I seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe that I may understand. For this, too, I believe, that, unless I first believe, I shall not understand.”
Well the leftists are exacting a little posthumous
revenge onjustice for those murdered by the Caudillo. – PiltdownFixed for you. No thanks necessary.
I wonder if they will enjoy life under their probable new masters.
Back to your stupid paranoia I see.
Who says Jesus the man was limited in knowledge or power? – Piltdown
If Jesus had not been so limited, he wouldn’t have been a man: such limitations are part of what it means to be human. If it were not, then it would make sense to suppose that all humans could simultaneously be unlimited in power – but it is logically necessary that there can be at most one such being at a time.
Speaking of which, I note that you ignored the very first part of #638.
Does your mind just blank out when the contradictions inherent in your religion are raised?
Wowbagger @643:
Unfortunately I’m working stupid shifts at present so my windows of opportunity are limited. If only I had access to the Vatican’s time machine.
Dare I point out that a kettle is a product of intelligent design and must be activated by an intelligent agency in order for the water to boil …
Well I don’t believe there’s any such thing as a “wholly naturalistic explanation” for any phenomenon because I can’t conceive of the natural without the supernatural to create, order and sustain it, any more than I can conceive of matter, however complexly configured, generating intelligence.
I never meant to imply that humanity is degrading, merely degraded.
Oh yes I can. There’s no contradiction in saying that mankind still has pre-eminence among God’s creatures, even in his fallen state. And to say that man is the crown of creation isn’t to say he is continually ascending.
That’s the one!
And if you liked The Passion, you’ll love this.
Who the hell would order that crap and then display it in their house?
John, with my baiting statement I was trying to refer to Pilty’s last sentence in #656 where it appeared he was baiting Wowbagger to join him in irrationality by believing in god. I then baited Pilty to join us in rationality #657. I then offered a quid pro quo truce on the baiting in # 659.
Or am I misinterpreting things again?
What, exactly, am I ‘fighting’?
All you’ve got is a flawed, archaic religion that’s all-but collapsed around you – philosophically, ethically and morally. That you have convinced yourself that your long-winded, content-free, sophist’s arguments are compelling means absolutely nothing to me – short of providing a more thorough understanding of the depths to which a mind addled by religion will stoop in order to maintain denial.
I can understand why people might struggle to leave a religion they’ve been indoctrinated from childhood into – it’s often far more complex, socioculturally, than just leaving once you’ve realised it’s a lie – but how anyone would choose, as a rational adult, to join one is far more baffling.
I could no more join your particular brand of deluded fantasists than I could the Raelians, Scientology, German Neopaganism (which at least sounds like it might be fun) or the Divine Light Missionaries. You’re selling the same thing – a comforting lie.
And that’s not good enough for me.
Piltdown:
Um.
Liked it? Does the description execrable piece of self-indulgent torture porn make it sound likable?
Sheesh. You just can’t resist pushing pr0n, can you?
Piltdown Man #642 wrote:
Well, Wowbagger and Ray Ladbury already mentioned some important criteria involving testability, prediction, and sufficiency. Within the context of the example we’re using, a natural series of unguided events which looks the same as those same events guided by God, leaves God as an unnecessary assumption. It can be removed, and nothing lost in the mechanical or physical explanation.
Piltdown Man #656 wrote:
I’ve read this several times, and I don’t see how it relates to my question. IF our minds are like God’s mind — disembodied essences of immaterial spirit-thought, or whatever, then what was the purpose of the brain? If dualism is true, then we don’t need them. Why are they there?
Your response seems to be an argument for dualism: the mind must be something higher and different than matter, or else a smile would be meaningless because happiness would be meaningless. Well, no — that’s assuming a greedy reductionism with no levels of complexity. That’s not what we argue for.
But I’m not going to go off on that tangent now, partly because I am interested in your answer to the original question, and the old sandbox appears to be open for play again.
If minds are not the workings of brain — and they don’t need brains to function — then what is the point of brains? We’re supposed to be made in the “image of God” — not God’s body image, but His mind-image. Clearly, we are not, because God has no fleshly part of Himself that is required for Him to think. Why not?
Seriously, thanks to all who took the trouble to reply to my queries about the theory of evolution. Much food for thought.
For now, I’ll just address Nerd of Redhead’s accusation of evasive dishonesty @651. The religious authorities to whom I defer have remained studiedly non-committal about Darwinism; it has not been condemned. Moreover, they have permitted a certain degree of non-literal interpretation to be brought to bear on the account of Creation in Genesis. So I have no religious ‘vested interest’ in stubbornly refusing to accept the truth of this theory — I’m just not yet convinced beyond reasonable doubt that it is true.
Nerd @666, I was specifically referring to P’s phrasing of that sentence, and its echoes of Anselmian presupposition. No misinterpretation on your part, it was an aside.
Piltdown does like his little allusions, though perhaps I give him too much credit here.
The gore-Jesus reminds me that I’ve never had the reasons for why he needed to suffer torture and death in order for God to forgive humanity explained to me.
What, exactly, stopped God from just forgiving humanity?
His deep and abiding love… of melodrama?
I can’t conceive of the natural without the supernatural to create, order and sustain it, any more than I can conceive of matter, however complexly configured, generating intelligence. – Piltdown
How sad that you are mentally so very limited.
Wowbagger @667:
Looks like a laugh a minute …
(If you did ever become a Germanic Neopagan, you’d have to drop Wowbagger and start calling yourself Rolf Ragnarok or something.)
When I clicked on Piltdown’s torture-porn link, Firefox shut down – presumably in protest. That’s the last of your links I click on Piltdown, you sick fuck.
Actually, it was my deep and abiding love of bureaucracy. O the red tape! The forms! The paperwork in triplicate! And even more copies! And coloured paperwork, even! The long aeons of waiting for some minor functionary to shuffle around! Having to start all over because some box wasn’t ticked or the heliotrope copy was misfiled!
It gives the heavenly host something to do, and that’s far more important than whether Adam and Eve and all their descendants were screaming in Hell for thousands of years.
And yes, I was the one submitting the paperwork, and the one who stamped final authorization of same. Funny old metaverse, isn’t it? But you’ve got to have rules, you know.
I loved finding out from Piltdown’s link in #676 that the Asatru Folk Assembly (Teutonic Paganism) is known by the same initials as the American Family Association (“Promoting Traditional Family Values”). This could lead to some interesting misunderstandings.
“Bye Mom and Dad — I’ve going with Karl and Viktor to the AFA Convention.”
“Oh, how wonderful — be sure to bring back plenty of pictures!”
At least it’s pantheonic. I’ll never understand why anyone would exchange a whole bunch of entertaining gods for one boring one. Though I imagine in a practical way it makes sense; you’ve only got one being to suck up to, and that saves time.
Slightly OT – I guess my PC has a sense of humour – as I’m writing this it started playing Dear God by XTC…
That gore-porn statue is $985.00.
Without the bloody bits it’s less.
Glittering? Sounds similar to the vision of Stephenie Meyer, and equally corny.
That Asatru site is interesting. I’m reading the apologetics:
Well, they’ve got some pretty strong arguments. For one thing, our ancestors considered them real — and they weren’t any dumber than we are!
Well, there you go, then. Plus, of course, “The Gods and Goddesses manifest to living men and women today.”
My favorite part, however, is at the end, when they deal in typical religious doublespeak/doublethink to explain how you can think of the gods as real, or as metaphorical, or as “spiritually true,” or as the secret code of the unconscious, or as mighty spiritual powers, or as any combination you want! “You can begin practicing Asatru right now, today, if you choose to do so!”
That gore-porn statue is $985.00.
And it looks like that Jesus was spitted and sliced for Döner kebab?
Mmmm… kebab.
Hey, hey, hey… We do not eat our Lord and Sav…
Uh, never mind.
Pilty the Mad, trying to explain away ERVs, dribbled,
Wrong.
You seem to have missed the important point that they are in exactly the same position in the genome. Not similar positions, exactly the same. Retroviruses don’t target specific points in the genome.
What do you think the probability is that the same retroviruses writing themselves into exactly the same places in two different species sixteen times?
Whoops!
Blockquote fail!
That second paragraph was Pilty’s
I’m sure that most people would probably have realised that anyway, as the first one is intelligently written.
Barbecue sauce *snicker*
Sacrilege! (Not on Jesus, on kebab.)
By the way why is it so hard to find proper kebab places (not kabob) in the US? Maybe they do exist but have been fiendishly codenamed “gyros”? Or is it because the famed kebab animal is not found in America?
I think they’ve been fiendishly codenamed “corndogs” and maybe just anything else you can wrap in dough and deep fry in lard.