The London Times has a piece on Ayala’s Templeton prize, and it annoys me early:
Professor Francisco Ayala, who won the £1 million Templeton Prize for scientific thought,
Say what? There’s no amount of science you can do that will win you a Templeton prize. It’s a prize for religious apologetics, nothing more.
And then Ayala reveals why he won the prize. Not for science, but because he doesn’t like those annoying atheists.
said that attacking religion and ridiculing believers provided ammunition for religious leaders who insisted that followers had to choose between God and Darwin. “Richard Dawkins has been a friend for more than 20 years, but it is unfortunate that he goes beyond the boundaries of science in making statements that antagonise believers,” he said.
That Dawkins antagonizes believers is a given, but then, antagonizing them is a trivial exercise — run a sign past them that says “Don’t believe in God? You aren’t alone” and they’ll scream “oppression!” Many of us are quite happy to antagonize deluded believers in superstition, and we aren’t too happy with scientists who suck up to them instead.
But that other comment about going “beyond the boundaries of science” is a curious one. Where? I think that when you invoke an invisible, undetectable ghost in the sky who diddles quanta or turns into a man who raises the dead, then you are going beyond the boundaries of science. When someone points out that there is no evidence of such activities, that the claims of supernaturalists are contradictory and unreasonable, or explains that the material claims of priests are fair game for critical examination, they are actually operating entirely within the domain of science.
I would like to see a specific example from Ayala of an invalid scientific argument from Dawkins or any of the other ‘New’ Atheist scientists — or is it his belief that antagonizing believers is sufficient to make a claim unscientific? In which case we’d have to argue that the Catholic Church was acting ‘scientifically’ in their treatment of Galileo.
Ayala has more Templeton-worthy comments to make.
The professor, who was born in Spain and is a naturalised American, says science and religion cannot be in contradiction because they address different questions. It is only when either subject oversteps its boundary, as he believes is the case with Professor Dawkins, that a contradiction arises, he said. “The scientific fundamentalism proposed by Dawkins implies a materialistic view of the world. But once science has had its say, there remains much about reality that is of interest. Common sense tells us that science can’t tell us everything.”
Again with the boundary. Where is this boundary, please, and where does Dawkins cross it? Be specific.
It is absurd to claim that science and religion can’t be in contradiction. Look at Ken Ham’s Creation “Museum”; that’s pure religion through and through, and it is clearly in contradiction with science. QED. Perhaps Ayala wants to claim that his religion (if he has one) is not in contradiction to science, but that’s also bogus; science obtains its information from empirical observation of the real world, not magic and not revelation and not the interpretation of sacred texts. Almost every religion proposes an alternate source of information from a supernatural entity; science challenges those explanations.
What aspects of reality are not subject to science, or materialism, or natural investigation? I’d like to know. Is Ayala proposing ghosts or angels or gods capable of intervening in the world? (I will do him the credit of assuming that he’s not going to trot out the idiotic claim that love is not natural, which is the usual inane example that gets thrown at us.)
One interesting thing about Ayala is that he always avoids the topic of his own personal beliefs about gods, which he claims is to avoid biasing people about his views, but which instead to me looks like intellectual cowardice: if you will not lay your ideas out on the table plainly, no one can criticize them. Here’s a standard disclaimer from Ayala in a Spanish source (google translation).
Question. In his youth he was ordained a Dominican priest. Are you still a man of faith?
Answer. Never answer that question. Do not want any of the parties, faith or religion, influence how people perceive my views.
Either he’s one of those faitheists, who doesn’t personally believe but thinks other people should, or he holds a few ideas about gods that he knows are indefensible. Either way, I’m unimpressed. It means he’s going to hide his opinions safely away, and as we can see in the Times article, snipe away at atheists (we already know he won’t snipe at his fellow travelers in the Templeton world, which hints at where his loyalties lie already.)
He also gives two of the usual NOMA arguments for religion: that it’s domain is answering the “why” questions and providing morality.
Science and religion are two windows to look at the world. The world is watching it. But what is seen from the windows is completely different. Religion is the meaning and purpose of life and moral values and science attempts to explain the composition of matter, the origin of organisms. Areas are different, but not at odds. It is possible to maintain a scientific position and being religious.
Total nonsense.
An answer on the meaning and purpose life built around an untestable and often falsified proposition is no answer at all. I could declare right now that the meaning of life is found in the worship of Saturn, which is where the aliens who created life on earth reside, and where our souls will return at death, and sure, it is an answer, but it’s wrong and it’s a lie. Christians can declare that the meaning of life is found in Jesus all they want, but I don’t believe it (and neither do the Muslims or Hindus or Shintoists), and it isn’t a good answer, since they’ve got no reason but tradition and fear to back it up. Religion is a free-floating myth, completely wrong and therefore invalid as an answer.
As for morality…what a joke. Has he looked at the ethical shambles of his former church? The child abuse revelations keep pouring out. We cannot possibly take religion’s leadership in moral issues seriously — the purpose of the church is to maintain power and an exalted status for its leadership, not to provide any insight into the beneficent desires of a heavenly patron of our species. Unless, of course, the message is that raping children is a good and kind act.
Anyway, now you can see why Ayala won the Templeton Prize. He’s a master of the non-committal waffle, the pious denial of any problem with faith. He’s definitely not acting on the side of science in his declarations about religion, because science tends to be a bit more open and bold than that.
Yeah because Richard Dawkins is an evil fundamentalist new immoral atheist who writes books! Book writing being as fundamental as bombing buildings, raping children and the like!
Totally agree with Ayala!
What does that mean, “beyond the boundaries of science”? It sounds to me like he’s saying any scientist, especially a prominent one, has no business expressing an opinion outside scientific matters. If that is the case, perhaps he should heed his own words.
Sure, but didn’t he just win like $1.5 MILLION?
When you think about it, this phrase about “the boundaries of science” is very odd, coming from a Templeton recipient. Which is it?
Are science and religion dealing with totally different areas in reality, so that science can never either support, or undermine, anything in religion?
Or is science now starting to demonstrate that religious views have validity, as there are signs and hints that the universe is not cold and indifferent, but loaded with spiritual potential?
Make up your mind.
As it is, it seems that they advocate both views. Science is helping us increase our spiritual knowledge, and spirituality is informing our science. Plus, they’re in totally different domains, and science should never overstep its bounds to say anything pro or con. Unless it’s pro. But otherwise, no.
The only thing they’re consistent on is insisting that religion is very important, faith is very important, spirituality is very important, and scientists shouldn’t say anything con. They’ll throw money at any scientist who wants a “respectful dialogue,” as long as it starts out, and ends, with flattery them.
Okay, that’s a new one to me.
That’s not what my common sense tells me. Mine tells me that science is answering more and more questions every day and just because something happens to be an unknown at the moment doesn’t mean it will remain so.
Hmm. That’s got to be a weak and wobbly faith he has going. If you’re going to believe, then really believe, to paraphrase Esme Weatherwax.*
Groan. Not again. Science has plenty to say about life and moral values; gods were just a way to put a face on the unknown and those things which were feared.
*In Carpe Jugulum, in her conversations with Mightily Oats.
I said this on Facebook to Russel Blackford:
Can we dig up S. J. Gould’s body and smack him one more time for proposing NOMA? Why do people like Ayala grab onto to that all the time?
As far as I can tell, they’re trying to put religious beliefs such “the universe was created by a disembodied intelligence which forms material objects through the power of intentional will” in the same category as “one ought to be fair,” “I love my mother,” and “I have decided to become a ballerina.”
I would have thought it would have been grouped in with mind/body substance dualism, ESP, psychokensis, and ghosts. After all, scientific evidence for any of those claimed phenomenon would certainly go a good way towards establishing the existence of spiritual powers and forces.
But no. It turns out that “Jesus rose from the dead” is similar to feeling compassion for sick people. Not that the belief will somehow inspire compassion, but that it’s just like the emotion itself. Not an emotion. But like an emotion, epistemically. The belief justifies itself.
The “boundary” is I would propose perhaps like the US-Canada border. Someplaces its easy to cross and other places you have a real barrier. (Gray areas abound really)
Really? Even if I were to agree (I would lean more towards ‘science can tell us everything worth knowing’) it still doesn’t imply that religion can tell us anything.
Nice to see that the creationist tactic of ‘disproving’ science, therefore God, can be adapted to a more sophisticated understanding. In this form, the fact that there are questions that science cannot (yet) answer gives us the right to make up whatever crap we want to provide an explanation. It must really hurt some people to just say “I don’t know”.
PZ wrote:
Indeed. It baffles me how anyone can be satisfied with a religious answer. You might as well ask the Magic 8-Ball; its answers are just as compelling as what’s written in a thousand-year-old book of superstition, mythology and self-aggrandising fake history.
I always get a kick out of the lay person invoking “common sense” but it really irritates me when a scientist says it.
Common sense tells me that the Earth is fixed and the Sun moves through the sky. Common sense tells me that a bowling ball will fall faster than a BB. Common sense tells me that a lime green leisure suit is a good look.
Nice one, Ayala.
FTFY
Really. Science is about observations. If god is observable, then science can tell us everything about it. If it isn’t, then nobody can know anything about it, including those who claim they do.
He’s a damn good fighter against IDiocy, in any case. Probably because he’s cagey and pushes NOMA.
Obviously a lot of what he says about it is nonsense (as it was with Gould), and that is what a lot of people want.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p
bill.farrell:
Your common sense needs calibrating, dude. ;p
OK, my Spanish has fallen into desuetude, but I think I can still do a bit better than Google:
Q: When you¹ were young, you were ordained a Dominican friar. Are you¹ still a man of faith?
A: I never answer that question. I do not wish for either aspect (faith or religion) to influence how people perceive my views.
—
My take: that’s a Templeton-prize-worthy evasion of the question.
—
¹ Spanish has both a formal and an informal/familiar ‘you’², this is the formal version.
² ‘tu’ vs. ‘usted’.
That’s very disappointing and very Mooneyesque. The claim about god vs. Darwin, like so many religious claims, is simply not true. There are those who would always preach that Darwin is evil, that “evolution is only a theory”, and that “science is just another religion” and nodding nicely and saying “yeah, I respect that” accomplishes nothing – it only encourages others to be idiots. Scientists should demand that Ayala show the evidence that there are more people spurning science (or Darwin as the fundamentalists like to say) in favor of god because people say that religion is silly and that there is no god. This is the sort of thing that would drive me to mocking Ayala …
What? Dawkins is only allowed to talk about science? He can’t comment on other topics, especially one that threatens scientific understanding in the wider community? Idiotic footballers can rail about evolution being false, but an evolutionist can’t reply because of non-existent “boundaries”?
What utter rubbish.
What’s unfortunate is that someone like Dawkins has to spend the time writing books about religion so as to try and awaken people to the fact that it’s all bullshit.
This whole argument is interesting if one takes the meme argument into account. Memes are pieces of information that basically self-replicate, so they theoretically will do what they can to continue to exist. DNA is a meme. The Catholic Church is also a meme. It’s a meme that’s being killed (for good reason — a meme that is more relevant to our survival, currently, has been created as its replacement). I’m not saying we should preserve it or anything, but I am saying it’s interesting, from a cultural evolutionist perspective, to watch it die.
Ayala does not have to be cagey, ambiguous, and evasive about whether or not he believes in God.
He can always announce proudly that he believes in God — and then be cagey, ambiguous, and evasive about what he actually means by “God.”
It’s a much more acceptable area in which to be unclear. So Ayala is bravely bucking the trend, on that one, like the groundbreaking maverick he is.
Ayala says, ” Common sense tells us that science can’t tell us everything”
You know, when someone appeals to “common sense” anymore, I just reach back and feel for my wallet. I’ve heard that common sense says there has to be a creator. I’ve heard that common sense says a trace gas like CO2 can’t be warming the planet–and strangely enough from the same mouths that the effect of CO2 is saturated. I’ve heard that vaccines can’t be good, that government can’t solve problems, that women are inferior and on and on and on.
I’m starting to think that an appeal to common sense might just be another way to say, “well I believe this but I haven’t thought it through at all and I don’t want to waste time thinking about it, so I’ll just say, ‘Common sense tells us that…”
Pity. I’d have expected more from a scientist.
Meh. I have to have a (very) little sympathy for the bugger. A wise girlfriend who was raised Irish Catholic and despised the faith observed years ago that asking someone if they’re still Catholic is like asking someone if they’re still black. No doubt that in his childhood this guy was terrorized and brainwashed by “his former church” and is desperately trying to resolve the cognitive dissonance that he is now experiencing. Too bad, but he should really just STFU.
“In which case we’d have to argue that the Catholic Church was acting ‘scientifically’ in their treatment of Galileo.”
I HAVE seen apologists pushing that very line! Pathetic.
Or, if you’re Bill Donahue, that most of it was fondling instead of penetration, so there’s nothing to see here.
And regarding “common sense,” the problem with going with your gut is that your gut is normally full of shit.
I love how the whole ‘shouldn’t be overstepping the boundaries’ thing only ever works in one direction. If he actually meant that, why would he be picking on Richard Dawkins and not also on Ken Ham or the Texas school board, or the DI, especially the DI! What a prick.
Um, which is it? Is it untestable or have you tested it and falsified it?
Nice straw man, but obviously a distortion of a sad little atheist shaking his puny fist at his Maker.
Look, all PZ has is mockery. And credulous groupies. But no substance. Let’s see if he likes some of his own medicine:
An Interview with PZ Squiddy
-Sirius Knott
PS – No, I’m not a Poe. Get past the name.
A slightly better translation:
I hate it when people assume that a scientist is going to be a rational person. What makes science rational is the process of science itself, not any individual scientist. Automatically applying this characteristic of the process to a practitioner is the same mistake made by the Discovery Institute when they parade their lineup of PhDs. Everyone is human. We all have the same psychological blindspots. Scientists just as much as anyone else.
Richard Dawkins has done more for the public acceptance of atheism, than anyone else.
Before The God Delusion, atheists were considered mean and horrible, and refused a seat at the table.
After The God Delusion, any atheist who says “I’m an atheist, but I think The God Delusion was mean and horrible” is welcomed to the table.
You get immediate credit. Saying something scornful about Dawkins is like the VISA card of atheism.
You pay later, when you find out you don’t get the same servings as everyone else — but by then it just seems rude to say anything, and you’ve firmly established that you’re not going to be rude.
@ siriusknotts
The point is that while religion tells us that it is necessary to be a good person, be moral, etc., countless atrocities are carried out by religious organizations. Take the Catholic rape scandals- it is not just that some priests are molesters, it is that many are, in many different countries, and many other priests chose to cover it up instead of protect the children. Then they preach at us about family values.
Different religions make different claims. Some make untestable ones and others make testable claims that have been falsified. Some make both.
He does have substance. That you’re just focusing on the insults is not our fault.
When you have to say that…..
siriusknotts:
Your blogwhoring aside, this seems to be a very weak claim, as you also claim that
is shaking a fist at “the maker”. So, you and your maker, you don’t acknowledge all those raped and abused children, who were raped and abused by ‘the maker’s’ people? Or are you going to claim that catholics aren’t True Christians&trade?
“Richard Dawkins has been a friend for more than 20 years, but it is unfortunate that he goes beyond the boundaries of science in making statements that antagonise believers,”
isn’t the entire purpose of the templeton foundation to “go beyond the boundaries of science”? But of course a group who constantly claims science supports theism doesn’t see the irony in whining about someone claiming science supports athiesm.
PS: An interesting fact I found researching this post. The head of the Foundation, Mr. Templeton himself, donated money in support of Prop 8
THE TEMPLETON FOUNDATION HATES HOMOSEXUALS AND WANTS TO TAKE THEIR RIGHTS AWAY.
But of course that little fact is left out of their rants about how religion is a source of morals and ethics that brings us together…
siriusknotts:
Take your pick. There are so many different rationalisations about God. Those that actually make real world predictions have been falsified so the only rejoinder is to redefine God to be an untestable hypothesis. In that case, it cannot be disproved but the only reason for believing it is a personal desire for it to be true.
Yes, let’s, shall we?
The Watchmaker argument? Seriously? (Checks the name again). I guess so.
No. The watchmaker argument fails because watches (or, in this case, bridges) aren’t organic and we know who made them. We are aware of bridge builders in general without needing this particular bridge to inspire the idea. There is also no known mechanism for a bridge to evolve since it doesn’t reproduce and pass on its genetics.
And the rest of it is priceless from someone who just accused someone else of building a strawman.
That’s funny. Has PZ heard of Mother Teresa? Of Damien, the Belgian missionary priest who dedicated his life to helping lepers? Of George Mueller’s orphanages? Religion gave the world charity, hospitals [and on a side note even science itself], orphanages and all sorts of other good works in the name of Christ Jesus, but PZ can’t see past his own Christophobic misotheism.
Are some hypocrites? Certainly. Yet hypocrisy is not possible unless there is a true standard by which to determine what is genuine versus what is a sham.
In other words, all of these half-cooked, burnt-edged, egg shell ridden omelettes do not negate the recipe for the perfect omelette. They merely show you why you should follow the recipe.
The fact remains that someone can mount a laundry list of Christian-related hypocrisy and abomination until it reaches Mars, but hypocrisy does not negate the possibility of the real McCoy. But that’s positing guilt by association, by which I could rightly also condemn atheism, Buddhism, politics in general and a whole host of ideologies.
PZ demonizes religion. So what? Atheists have always done so. They need to in order to polarize people into armed camps so they can consolidate their own power.
-Sirius Knott
Blargh. Thanks for dissecting it all out, PZ. When I try to explain to people why things like the Templeton Foundation annoy me so much, it usually comes out something like “rackinfrackinblarghyreligionyucksciencedoesn’tfitaaaarrrrhhhh”
completely OT
having the biology of an 8th grade farmer I read the following study and it agrees with what I have suspected for a while. However suspicion is not science can anyone knowledgeable of biology comment on the following link?
http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S26/91/22K07/ math I can do biology not so much
siriusknotts #25 wrote:
Religion is an interesting combination of untestable assumptions, unnecessary assumptions, and falsified hypotheses, depending on what aspect of the supernatural is being considered, and what the believer has decided to do, to defend his belief.
What do you think? Do you think God is something that simply needs to be believed in, on faith — or is there good evidence and reason to believe in it?
Or, perhaps, is there good evidence and reason to believe in it — but only if you have decided, in advance, that you’re going to put a positive spin on any evidence, so that you help to discover, the conclusion you’re hoping to discover?.
siriusknotts:
The hypocritial piece of nastiness who took pleasure in withholding any medication or comfort for the dying? The one who told people in great pain that suffering would bring them closer to god? The same hypocritical piece of nastiness who was airlifted to a state of the heart hospital when she was ill? The hypocritical piece of nastiness who had a private room, the best doctors and pain medication out the ass along with every comfort?
Yeah, we’ve heard of her.
@ siriusknotts
That’s funny. Has SK heard of Christopher Hitchens?
@#31:
You make the mistake of presuming I would say anything of the sort. It may be that those who committed these crimes against “these little ones” were merely pretenders [and since our Founder assured us we will know them by their fruit, you could certainly make a case of it], but what if they turned out to be true Christians after all?
All of these half-cooked, burnt-edged, egg shell ridden omelettes do not negate the recipe for the perfect omelette. They merely show you why you should follow the recipe. Like I mentioned in another comment, PZ is just seeing the side of the coin he prefers to see, not giving the entire picture as it truly exists.
-Sirius Knott
PS – I’m not blogwhoring. I’m atheist baiting
Shit, that should be *state of the art* which got mixed in my head with heart problems. Sigh. I’m filling in for Rev. BDC while he’s gone.
SK, show us physical evidence for your imaginary deity. Evidence that will pass muster with scientists, magicians, and professional debunkers as being of divine, and not natural, origin. Until you can produce such evidence you are and will remain a delusional fool. An eternally burning bush might be a good place to start. Start your search immediately. And stay away from here while you are futilely searching for it, or an equivalent. The sooner you find it, the soon you are no longer a fool.
You’re right. Hypocrisy doesn’t negate the possibility that Jesus was the son of an all-powerful Sky Daddy.
Things like, you know, the inherent contradiction of possessing both omnipotence & omniscience? The complete and total lack of virgin births and resurrections in modern history? Well, those do, and rather robustly at that.
And while you’re busy over-quoting your pithy little metaphor, it might behoove you to flip *that* coin over and look at the other side: following a “recipe” allegedly assigned to Jesus – and one he couldn’t possibly take full credit for, since the Egyptians and Greeks were on record with similar ethical standards hundreds of years before – doesn’t mean you ought to swallow bucketloads of unmitigated horseshit, presented in the form of nonsensical myths written by Bronze Age boneheads.
Seriously? Because I know of a few omelette recipes, how do I know which one is the right one? Particularly if all the recipes tell me I’m going to hell if I make the wrong one. And seem to require a pinch of fairy dust to serve, where can I find that at the supermarket?
@Siriusknotts:
You write the phrase, “his Maker”, and you accuse us of being credulous groupies? Don’t make me get all Matthew 7:3 on your ass.
Stephen, Lord of the flies:
The TrueChristian&trade market, of course. And it’s Angel Powder you’re looking for, as opposed to Angel Dust.
Seriously Knotted:
Trolling, you mean.
Science hasn’t even begun to discover its boundaries.
It is truly bad-ass!
Caine:
I was using fairy dust as an example of something that we all agree does not exist. Whilst most of us here would say the same about Angel Powder (does that need a ™) I will make no such assumptions about our interloper.
I will.
There’s a lot of talk about category error, there’s very little in the way of destroying the arguments presented. Instead of looking at the arguments, many choose to get indignant instead. Leaving the likes of me wondering just what is so bad about the arguments presented, I keep being told they are bad but there’s no demonstration as to why they are bad. Unlike, say, Intelligent Design where I can find just why ID is a poor argument even if there are those who are trying to dismiss it on religious grounds. The category error is there and highlighted, but there still exists critiques on the arguments presented…
Just out of interest – why ‘Christ Jesus’ instead of ‘Jesus Christ’?
Sirius? Knott!
@#34:
Thank you for taking the time to comment on An Interview with PZ Squiddy
You wrote:
Your organic requirement is arbitrary. Artificial intelligence is proposed for inorganic constructs which achieve self-awareness. Don’t miss the forest for the trees, pal. [And they call me a literalist!]
You admit know who made the bridges or watches. Even a cursory examination will cause you to conclude they were made by an intelligent agent.
Your statement that “we are aware of bridge builders in general without needing this particular bridge to inspire the idea” is a red herring. I never implied this. But you must admit that the presence of the bridge implies a bridge builder, which was exactly my point.
Your last statement bears closer scrutiny:
In the case of my satire, I used the fact of a blueprint as analogous to genetic encoding. Bridges don’t evolve, of course; neither do organisms. Yes, the deck is shuffled a bit [natural selection, horizontal change within fixed limits], but a dog remains a dog and recognizably so, be it a wolf, English bulldog or weiner dog. It follows the general blueprint or overall type with variation and adaptation to changing environments. This is all observable and undeniable. And that’s all your requirement that bridges “reproduce and pass on its genetics” would account for,” btw.
What’s NOT observable is the actual claim of evolution, the common ancestry of all life, vertical microbes-to-man evolution which requires increases of genetic information, aka phyletic change.
It’s inference, not the evidence of either biology or the fossil record.
-Sirius Knott
He doesn’t have to, but if that’s what he wants?
It doesn’t disturb me at all, that he doesn’t want to answer that question. He hopes that by not answering, he can reach accross both aisles. Fair enough.
But he’s not being consistent, as it’s very clear (whether he believes in God or not) that he believes in belief, that he believes in religion.
That’s what disturbs me profoundly, that he can be such an intelligent and eminent scientist and still think that religion should be granted a territory of knwoledge that can tell us something that science can’t tell us. But how then, which method does religion use to justify its beliefs? It doesn’t have anything, apart from books of fiction loaded with fairytales.
If he wants to say that religion is the territory of the subjective, ie “I give meaning and purpose to my life thanks to religion”, that’s ridiculous. I don’t need religion for that.
If he wants to say that reality consists of more than what can be discovered by the scientific methos, fair enough. Why not ? There are maybe some things that we will never be able to discover, a physical impossibility, that’s not a crazy assumption : we can’t observe beyond the observable universe but we know that the universe is larger than this. Or maybe there are other dimensions that we’ll never be able to observe. We might be able to discover their existence without being able to observe what’s happening there.
But why then would that be the territory of religions ? What can they say about this that has any degree of validity ? It’s all pure bullshit, AFAIAC.
Serous Snott, thank you for providing fresh meat.
siriusknott #55 wrote:
Question:
Do you think that, if evolution did occur, this would undermine the case for the existence of God?
What is not observable, SK, is your creator.
Only because I have seen actual bridge builders building bridges.
Micro versus Macro evolution again. Don’t you creationists have anything new? Macro evolution is micro evolution over a very long time.
Very, very wrong. Read Richard Dawkins “Greatest Show on Earth”.
Stephen, Lord of the flies @ 50:
I know. My tongue was firmly in cheek. As to our interloper, I’m with Josh, OSG @ 51.
Why, because of City Livonia, of course.
Dale Husband here, reporting that David Mabus is running wild yet again.
See his attacks on Blag Hag:
http://www.blaghag.com/2010/03/i-need-your-help.html
http://www.blaghag.com/2010/03/homeopathy-now-for-vaginas-too.html
Then he went after me:
http://circleh.wordpress.com/2010/03/26/why-bother-with-religion/
No. And they’re not likely to look it up. Seriously, if they’ve been reading any type of scholarly journal (even ones designed for the lay person) they would know evolution is observable. Willful ignorance.
You know, that the Lord employs a team of elves to carve each snowflake. You see a snow flake, and the evidence of design is written into its complexity. Elf design.
Smoggy out there? Back me up on this.
Again, seriously? Now you’ve gone and pissed on my carpet. I study a gene family with members in taxa ranging from bacteria to humans. The evolutionary connections between them are clear and conform to the idea that they evolved from a common ancestor. What is your justification for saying that they can only change within fixed limits? Or do you think that those fixed limits involve lumping bacteria and humans into one group labelled ‘life’?
Wrong, start refuting the scientific literature with more science, or STFU. Welcome to science, not bad religious sophistry. And your delusional fool opinion is meaningless to us. Try citing the scientific literature.
Yep, that describes your inane and insane opinions alright. What a loser.
Sorry, a million or scientific papers, which are and will remain unrefuted except by more science (and your inane opinion is not science), begs to differ. More delusional fool loser talk.
Ayala love to say that intelligent design is a “blasphemy.” To suggest that God would have designed wisdom teeth, etc. is a grave insult to God and will not be tolerated by Father Francisco.
Not sure what kinds of things he is willing to attribute to his God. He doesn’t like to get specific about his religious beliefs and speaks in such vague terms that he can’t be pinned down. That make him the perfect recipient of a prize designed to bridge religion and science. They should give him a prize for obfuscation.
not if half the ingredients are imaginary, like in religion. at least there’s empirical evidence for the existence of eggs.
“What’s NOT observable is the actual claim of evolution, the common ancestry of all life, vertical microbes-to-man evolution which requires increases of genetic information, aka phyletic change. ”
Anyone else find it funny that in a topic about another accommodationist/apologist *same thing* claiming science and religion aren’t in conflict this brainwashed Zeus worshipper comes in and proves once again that religion encourages ignorance and opposes science by claiming, solely because his religion says so, that a century old scientific theory is bullshit?
Markuze has been at it for quite some time…except here. The registration keeps him out, and makes it easy to delete him when he does sneak in. He still sends me email just about every day (all trashed) and has been mailing every faculty member on campus — he’s actually regarded as quite the laughingstock at UMM.
The fossil record, genetic code, morphology, cladistics, observed mutation, adaptation through natural selection and observed speciation (among a host of other areas of inquiry) all attest to common descent.
Do you think that the vestigial legs on a whale just exist there because some cosmic engineer thought it funny to fuck with another cosmic engineer’s product (us) perception? Do you think the same blind spot in all vertebrate eyes is just a running joke for the team of cosmic engineers designed to work on vertebrates? That the fossils of feathered dinosaurs and protobirds are merely some cosmic geological engineer’s bad joke to play on the biology folks?
Just how much more evidence do you need for cosmic ancestry? Meanwhile, how do you get passed the notion that in order for a dog to make another dog, it has to have sex? Now a dog might know that it’s having sex, it might know that sex leads to puppies, but it damn sure doesn’t know how to make a puppy. All that a dog has to do is have sex and the genes within are passed on. This is why the watchmaker analogy is invalid – watchmakers don’t exist ex nihilo. Humans putting design into nature is indeed design, but all the life we see in nature knows not how to make life. It replicates, and replicating structures with variation will in time accumulate positive variation that will aid in the survival of replication.
It’s that simple, why is it 150 years later people still don’t get Darwin’s Strange Inversion Of Reason? Maybe 100 years ago it was excusable, but these days? You’d really have to be ignorant or stupid if you can’t grasp the elegance and simplicity of the algorithm.
If news came out tomorrow that Pope Palpatine skull-fucked an aborted fetus during last year’s Easter Mass, and still has plans to repeat the act next week, I would not be shocked in the least.
Nerd,
What’s inane and insane about what I wrote ?
#43:
Evidence, as requested.
#44:
1. How is possession of both omnipotence and omniscience a contradiction in the way Christianity defines those terms?
2. We never argued that virgin births and resurrections are common. We argue that one Man, Christ Jesus, rose from the dead… which makes your objection a straw man.
Jesus’ recipe wasn’t for an ethical standard. He died for humanity because we couldn’t live up to the standard required. You’ve obviously read skeptical works of Jesus. Have you read the Bible itself to see what He was really about?
-Sirius Knott
what crap. we see things evolving all the fucking time, and if common descent weren’t true, then the pattern of sorting animals & fossils by similarity wouldn’t be tree-shaped; it could be random, or circle-shaped, or linear, or grid-like; the tree-shape is evidence for common descent.
and in any case, you’ve got it backwards. evolution is evidence for common descent, not the other way round (historically speaking), since the latter was discovered before the former.
Kel,
Now, now, don’t belittle the Serous Snot’s dribblings.
Those alternatives are neither mutually-exclusive not exhaustive (e.g. you failed to mention mendacity).
Really? People never helped others absent belief in deities? Could you describe the religious origin of the scientific method?
Even if religion gave us all these things, does that mean that the object of religious worship exists?
Unfortunately, the things that we certainly know religion has given us are bloody wars and genocides, fundamentalist terrorists, historic divisions between otherwise similar peoples, and the means to control large groups of people by edict of a select few.
It must be weird having lunatics emailing you about a colleague, while going on about Nostramus or being owed an expensive camera.
Evidence, please? Yes, we’ve all read your Not To Be Criticized Book of Unsubstantiated Mythology. What else you got?
And do you realize how tremblingly, ridiculously, abjectly stupid you look when you capitalize “He” and “Maker?” Are you afraid you’ll get a divine spanking if you don’t hit the shift key?
Seriously – what the hell are you doing here? We’re not the uneducated, parochial, fearful targets you’re used to taking advantage of.
bullshit. people are social animals, and as such are likely to find ways and reasons to help each other; religion OTOH is the worst form of tribalism. Humans have developed charity despite religion, not because of it.
And in any case, other social animals animals are nice and helpful to other members of their herds, too. do they too have religion? *snort*
You forgot the Monty Python guy who usually goes with stupid quotes… Or are you getting soft? :-)
Knott Sirius;
Wishful thinking is not evidence. C’mon, evidence. Provide it. Surely that ‘Maker’ of yours is up to a smart god trick of some sort.
SK
I find your “parody” virtually unreadable. Agonizingly long. Excruciatingly dull. Poorly constructed. It’s a sort of metaphorical city built out of pure crazy, peopled with citizens fashioned from fresh cut straw. Really, what is it with the gawdly? Why does it seem that they’re almost universally incapable of humor?
Now
this is funny.
why do you lot always assume we haven’t read that pile of crap? FYI, reading the bible from cover to cover is a leading cause of atheism.
Is the godbot trying to claim morality is unique to religion? Because if they’ve read anything scientific, they’ll know it’s not.
The main problem with the intelligent design argument is the lack of evidence for it. There is no positive evidence for it, we don’t have any indication of a causal designer acting in nature. Instead what ID proponents do is talk about how Darwinism cannot explain certain kinds of complexity, and therefore the hypothesis of ID can.
The problem of such arguments is that even if evolution by natural selection failed to account for a particular trait, it doesn’t mean that a designer did it. All you have here is anomaly hunting, because there’s no positive evidence. Until one demonstrates that a designer (or many designers) are working in nature, then at best ID is going to be little more than “Darwinism cannot account for X”. In simple logical terms, if all cars aren’t red they must be blue.
I always have the same two questions for ID proponents, which have so far not been answered or shown why they are invalid. The two questions are: what did the designer(s) do? How can we test for it? Surely both questions ID proponents would be dying to answer such questions, for if it could it would get the scientific validity so many desperately claim. Where are those positive arguments for ID? “If it looks designed then there must be a designer” doesn’t cut it, problem of induction and all. Looking designed doesn’t mean that it was designed, and the only designers we know are lifeforms that exist on this planet. A spiderweb – designed. What about the spider itself? What could possibly design a spider?
negentropyeater #56 wrote:
But Ayala has just received a prize which “honors a living person who has made exceptional contributions to affirming life’s spiritual dimension.” If the person who is helping lead the charge of “open-minded inquiry” is not clear on what his hypothesis actually is, I don’t see how he’s going to promote “real spiritual progress in the world.”
Of course, as CalGeorge suggests in #68, obfuscation may actually be the future of spiritual progress. In which case, the less they manage to say anything intelligible, the more progressive they will sound, and soon they will progress to the point where nobody can say anything, and atheism wins by default.
Pareidolius:
“The total absence of humor in the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.”
– Alfred North Whitehead
Ayala is apparently one of the many people who feel like any conflicts between religion and science can be resolved if we all just respect their boundaries and be nice to each other.(I am all for being nice to each other, btw, so maybe I don’t belong here.)
The problem with this is that he will not acknowledge that when religion attempts to explain natural phenomena like the creation of the Earth or the origin of species, it is doing science. The people who came up with these theories thousands of years ago were neither stupid nor ignorant of current knowledge. They were doing science; trying to come up with the best explanation of nature that they could. If this sort of religionist really wants to completely separate religion and science, what he needs to do is get a razor blade and start cutting out all the (outdated) science in his religious texts.
LOL.
1. Well, true, that — but it was purported to be ethical.
2. So, now humanity lives up to the (non-ethical!) standard required? ;)
If not, I guess it was a big-time fail.
3. Jesus didn’t produce any “skeptical works”, or any works. Everything ascribed to the character was done by other (actual, real) people.
4. Have you?
<giggle>
I’ll belittle who I like when I like. PZ said I could (since he doesn’t read my comments, I can say anything I want apparently).
But seriously, this is the year 2010. We live in a world of instant information, it’s not like those who can argue on here can’t find any information they like. There’s no excuse these days for not being able to find the basics of what is being argued. It’s been explained time and time again just how natural selection works, plenty of experiments showing it in action, plenty of information about the evidence for common descent in general. Why Darwin’s theory (well the modified form) is accepted by almost all who are experts in the field dictates that the concept should be taken seriously. If one cannot bother to learn the very basics, then it is sad on their part and there is little to do but mock them and point them in the right direction for information that will cease them looking so foolish talking on a topic they don’t understand.
he meant about Jesus, not by Jesus. You know, the stuff that the majority of non-apologetic bible scholars wrote ;-)
To elaborate on this a bit further, a spider web comes from a spider. A spider doesn’t come from a higher form designing it, it comes from two other spiders copulating.
If one were to posit a designer, they have to break the cycle of life. Agency begetting structure in organisms goes against observations about how organisms come to be. Design theory is appealing against all observed phenomena to shove an external agency as responsible. This is not to say it can’t be that way, but to infer a designer is to engage in special pleading. There has to be a break in the chain, meanwhile evolutionary theory starts off at ultimate simplicity and predicts the gradual emergence of complexity.
And the greatest thing of all about evolutionary theory – it doesn’t need to appeal to unobserved forces. It works with mechanisms that are known. So the ID proponent is not only positing a force that is unknown, it is positing that this force acted against the process by which it is trying to explain!
Jadehawk, I suspect you’re right about what it meant, but I was referring to what it wrote (“skeptical works of Jesus”).
If it meant “works skeptical about Jesus”, it should’ve written that.
(No, I’m not often charitable towards self-confessed trolls! ;) )
God? Why, that would be Laurence Olivier as Zeus in the classic 1981 (I think) version on Clash of the Titans which also features Ursula Andress as a lesser but equally appealing immortal. I only mention this because the movie has just reached its climactic scene, uninterrupted by advertising, courtesy of Turner Classic Movies.
All hail Olivier who is, more credibly than any other actor, good, solid God stock. Unlike other pussy-footers Olivier doesn’t shrink from the obligation of portraying the gods as the posing and posturing and revenge driven fools that they are. Forever lacking practical solutions the tendency of gods is to just kill everybody and let who? sort them out. Kinda just like people do, eh?
There is a clue there, somewhere.
Step 1 is to contact the Times department of accuracy about their lead-in sentence. I’ll let you know if they ever respond.
#53:
Christ Jesus and Jesus Christ are used interchangeably in the Bible.
#72:
I admit the rest of your argument simply didn’t make ANY sense, so I’ve no comment on it really, but on the above:
1. Creationists use the fossil record as evidence of the Noachim Flood. It evidences stasis and sudden appearance, which supports our argument.
2. My argument is one of many that propose the gentic code as evidence of an intelligent designer. Whence came the information, laddy? And how did it increase to account for phyletic leaps?
3. Then you mention things Creationists and evolutionists agree on [natural selection, speciation, etc], but then you make the logical leap that this observable horizontal change within created kinds somehow results in unobserved vertical microbes-to-man phyletic evolution.
4. Vestigial organs! ha! Those “legs” on the whale aren’t vestigial. They have a distinct function in whale copulation. The idea that they are leftover from something else is simply speculation.
5. And he pulls the bad design card! That was even in my satire! You’re calling it a bad design, but I defy you to design a better one. The conceit of the willfully ignorant!
6. Feathered dinosaurs? really?? That’s… look, take a look at all the differences between dinos and birds [hips, lungs, all the rest] and you’re still in that same ol’ phyletic lurch you were in before. All you can do is presume Li’l jack Horner in his imagineerings that dinos evolved into birds in the end.
#76:
Caine @ 89
Great quote! And so true.
The only truly funny religious scriptures are those of L. Ron Hubbard, sadly, he didn’t mean for them to be. I love unintended hilarity.
Sastra,
what’s clear is that he claims religion can teach us something that science cannot. That claim is invalid whatever his personal religious beliefs are.
He can obfuscate his personal belief about the existence of Gods, he can’t about his belief in belief. Why would I care about what he or Mooney truely believe ? What’s clear is that they pretend that religious knowledge has some value. And that’s false.
shit, blockquote fail. first sentence is sirioustroll
(Can) knott (possibly be) sirius,
“Vestigial structures are often called vestigial organs, although many of them are not actually organs. These are typically in a degenerate, atrophied, or rudimentary condition, and tend to be much more variable than similar parts. Although structures usually called “vestigial” are largely or entirely functionless, a vestigial structure may retain lesser functions or develop minor new ones.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vestigal_organ
SS:
Heh. A wannabe Alan Clarke?
That little fantasy has been discussed on this very site.
—
PS That’s Noachian, not Noachim.
Through copies and errors. In general, randomness contains more information than structure. There’s a good article about the information theoric mistakes made by creationists at Good Math, Bad Math:
http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2008/08/why_is_randomness_informative.php
(I think a layperson could manage reading the article easily. You on the other hand….)
That little fantasy has been discussed on this very site.
which is exactly where this fuckhead should continue his “discussion” as it has fuck-all to do with Ayala, Dawkins, NOMA, atheism, or accomodationism.
this thread should be a clearly delineated attack of Ayala’s accomodationist position, idiotic, endlessly previously refuted creationist bullshit people can eat at their leisure somewhere else, eh?
we don’t talk about Ayala every day here, after all.
#80
OK, here’s your evidence.
I also capitalize pretty much every other accepted proper noun. Respect aside, it’s simply a matter of grammatical consideration that I capitalize the terms that thusly affronted your baffled butt.
I’m here to remind you that if you’re wrong about there not being a God, it won’t be due to a lack of evidence so much as a willful ignorance of the implications of the evidence that exists.
#84:
Thank you for taking the time to read An Interview with PZ Squiddy
Oddly, not everyone shares your dismal view of the satire in question.
But as to the accusation that us godly folk are simply incapable of humor, may I suggest My People Are Fat People
Of course, it would be fair to suggest the more likely probability that it is actually you who lacks a sense of humor here, at least where it concerns your deeply cherished beliefs.
-Sirius Knott
Here’s hoping that’s a goodbye from you, Knott Serious, along with your blogwhoring, trolling, wishful thinking and obvious lack of thinking ability.
Eat me. Raw.
except that it doesn’t. The flood hypothesis fails to explain anything that we see at all, meanwhile evolutionary theory is being used to successfully predict fossils in the record, what morphology they have and which rocks they sit in.
For example: the early tetrapods emerging from fish. Sitting in the fossil record between 410 million years and 360 million years ago are the fossils as predicted by evolutionary theory. Fish with certain amphibian qualities, early amphibians still with fish traits, and even fishapods.
Another example, the fossils showing the gradual move to the water from cloven hoof mammals to cetaceans. There are many fossils showing the gradual transition including the change in body shape, function and even the moving of the nostrils.
And that’s just two of many many many many examples. If you want a good intro on the fossil record, read Evolution: What The Fossils Say And Why It Matters by Don Prothero.
Explain how ERV viral markers and pseudogenes fit into the designers pattern. Take the pseudogene for vitamin C for example, this gene is switched off in all old world monkeys and apes (including us). The mutation that obliterated the gene is in exactly the same piece of genetic code on all species. Now either the designer put the broken gene in all monkeys, or there’s a better explanation – i.e. the mutation hit in an ancestral being and was not needed because such animals get their vitamin C from their diet.
As for where information comes from: mutation + selection = information. And how does it increase? Gene duplication (among other things). The 1000 or so genes for smell all appear as if they are modified duplicates of a single gene.
Once you have genetic barriers, why wouldn’t you expect the process to go on indefinitely? This is the elegance of natural selection, it’s not suddenly going to stop at our artificially imposed barriers. Given enough time, what works will get carried on. And in no way can we expect that homo sapien are any sort of evolutionary inevitability, the process is not goal directed. When we look back, we see what survives because we are seeing the successful “designs”. We happen to be one in this play through of the tape, just as ants, mould, oak trees and cyanobacteria are all successful strategies.
Where to start. Vestigial does not mean useless, a vestigial structure can still play a role. For example an Ostrich uses its wings for stability when running. While a kiwi has little nubs, remnants of lost wings.
“You can’t design a better eye, therefore designer!” Not buying it. Invertebrates don’t have that blindspot problem, octopus for example have an eye comparable to our own yet have the eye wired the right way around. But you missed the point by a long way. It wasn’t to highlight bad design, it was to highlight contingency that only makes sense in terms of common descent. We don’t see some vertebrates with their eye wired the right way, they are stuck with that basic pattern. That all vertebrates have that particular flaw in the eye is evidence for common ancestry.
What are you talking about? There are plenty of fossils that show the transition between dinosaurs and birds, including the evolution of feathers, the gradual morphological changes, early avian fossils still having saurian features – it’s not just what Jack Horner says you ignorant fool. The last discovered archaeopteryx (by all accounts an early bird) was initially mistaken as a Compsognathus (by all accounts a theropod dinosaur).
Can you actually read on the topic before discussing it in the future?
Ichthyic @106, you have a point. Troll-bashing is fun and all, but it’s derailed the topic.
Sorry, everyone.
It didn’t make sense to you maybe, but that’s the problem. You don’t actually understand what evolution is about. If you need it explained to you again, I’ll make it very simple:
When a mummy and daddy love each other very much, the daddy puts his penis into the mummy’s vagina. If all goes well, an egg is fertilised and a baby starts to grow in its mummy’s uterus. This is important because it means that a mummy and daddy don’t need to know how to make a baby from scratch, they just need to have sex in order for a baby.
And when the baby has grown up, all the baby needs to do to make a new baby is to find another fully grown baby to have sex with. The structure that makes a baby doesn’t come from the desire to have a baby, it comes from the genetic code within.
This is important, because once you have the idea of replicating genetic code being passed from parent to offspring, you have a process by which structure can come about with no agency required. Angels don’t need to fly into a cervix in order to put the cells in the right order, the genetic instructions determine the structure. And if there are any mistakes in the code that give the structure an advantage in continuing the process, then those mistakes will be carried on. Thus you have structure emerging from the process of replication, because advantageous structure will be passed on while structure that gives a disadvantage or prevents the process from continuing won’t.
In other words, evolution as an algorithm works. A spider doesn’t need to know how to make baby spiders, it just needs to be able to replicate. And because the better replicators will survive while the worse won’t, we should expect structures that are very good at surviving.
OMG, the same stupid Creationist delusion. The fossil record are layered in different areas which means they appear different eras. Current dating methods supports this. The “flood” could not have caused that much geological up lifting in that amount of time, but slow natural geological process can. Furthermore, where did the water go? Oh I know, God made it disappear right. Yeah that’s not science. Furthermore, the fossil records indicates that there are transistion between species. Oh shit, more evidence for evolution. (A shocker I know, since creationist don’t believe in transistional fossil)
You don’t even come close to using the same evidence.
Have I missed the post where Sirius Knott explains how his argument for a creator god necessarily leads to Christianity being the One True™ religion?
I ask this because, for me (a non-scientist), that leap from one unsupported assertion to another is far more important than his attempts to undermine the fact of evolution with his warmed-over and poorly-thought-out intelligent design rubbish.
If the universe was created, Sirius Knott, why couldn’t it have been Zeus and the Greek pantheon who are responsible?
Sorry about that, my SIWOTI got the better of me…
Your insult to our character AND the thinly-veiled existential threat(i.e. “Yer goin’ ta HELL!”) is noted.
Like most governments, it is not the policy of atheists to respond to terrorist threats, metaphyscial or otherwise.
#105:
That’s just shuffling the deck for observable horizontal variation within created kinds; how do you account for the information gaining vertical phyletic changes required of your theory?
#106:
Oh, I agree with PZ that NOMA is absolute bunk. His comments on NOMA were what attracted me to the article. Dr Michael Zimmerman touts such nonsense in his Clergy Letter Project and I was curious whether PZ would comment on that or on Dawkins hypocritical accomodation of the NOMA principle in chapter 1 of The Greatest Show on Earth.
Obviously, I disagree with PZ’s Christophobic hate screed, mostly because we’re on opposite sides of this fence. It is the fence-sitters that PZ and I disagree with. I daresay PZ would like to shake the fences as much as I would to see where these mugwumps would land [mug or wump?]
As a point of interest, not even God likes a mugwump if the Laodicean Church was any indication [Revelation 3:15-16]
-Sirius Knott
Excuse me: metaphyscial
Although Mr Religion (SilliusKnaughtius) has derailed the thread with his “I’m so superior to you atheists” line of smarmy posts, it really has been a good popcorn and beer afternoon for me.
I particularly enjoyed your riposte just now Kel,OM. :-)
WowbaggerOM:
No, because there wasn’t one. Just the same old shit about how we’re going to really regret being wrong about god. Ya know, Knott Serious’s The Maker&trade the all powerful who can’t manage to provide any sort of evidence for its existence.
There are so many gods; almost all of them are much more interesting than The Maker&trade
Actually, I had a similar argument with Mormons the other day.
One has to acknowledge that priestly sexual abuse and other equally unpleasant deeds are morally acceptable since they’re deeds that GodTM commands His blid followers to act on.
Knott Serious:
Hahahahahaha. This, from the no evidence, wishful thinking godbot who did nothing more than spout a same old, same old shit filled screed which ends in a pathetic “you’ll go to hell!”?
Hahahahahahahahahahaha. Oh my. Your master needs a better quality slave.
It is the fence-sitters that PZ and I disagree with.
nobody here cares what you think. don’t take engagement with your idiocy as anything other than people here using you as a chew toy.
logical fallacies, ignorance, and make-belief aren’t evidence, no matter how loudly you scream and stomp your foot that it is, too!
let me guess; you’ve once heard the term horizontal gene transfer, and got confused. All sexually transmitted variation is vertical, even if microscopically so. but millions of microscopically vertical things can build mountains.
what part of “stop talking about things you don’t understand” didn’t you get?
Caine, Fleur du mal wrote:
That’s one of the things I really don’t get about Christianity – it’s so mind-fuckingly dull.
All the other folk mythologies are so much more interesting; I’ve got some Irish ancestry, so I’m particularly fond of all the stories about the Tuatha Dé Danann and so forth. That my ancestors let that die in favour of pissant wuss-boy Jesus and his lame adventures offends me as a reader (and, from time-to-time, writer) of decent fiction.
The Maker™
wasn’t that a Dr. Who villain?
oh, and I was also gonna say that it’s not “shuffling the deck” if you add cards. anything form individual genes to whole genomes are sometimes duplicated during reproduction, and those extra copies are then free to mutate randomly until they hit something useful which will then spread thorough the population due to increased breeding and/or survival rates
you can blame the priests (both the christian and the jewish ones) for that. I find that the original version if Gen 2 is fucking hilarious: prepubescent god creates himself a pet; pet gets bored, so clueless prepubescent god creates all manner of critters to be pets for his pet, not realizing that what his pet REALLY wants is someone to fuck.
and some of the non-canonical stuff from the early Christians is also way more interesting than the canonical stuff.
I suspect that the first publication you’re given when you contact AIG or the DI or whichever other pissant collection of lying dumbasses you contact to obtain material for making yourself look stupid on atheist websites should be called Bad Analogies and How to Misuse Them for Jesus.
WowbaggerOM:
Hear hear. Other creation myths along with various godly antics have real creativity to them, a lilt, if you will. They lend themselves to narrative and everyone enjoys a good story. The old gods, in general, are much more human also, in their feelings, actions and general demeanor. If nothing else, it’s comforting that gods can be such fuck ups much of the time. And those gods which aren’t fuck ups much of the time, they are almost pure magic. Good story material.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_J._Ayala.
Although I am no expert on the matter, given his credentials and experience, it seems obvious Francis is guilty of intellectual treason against countrymen & co-worker(theworld). ‘Propagation’ by promotion of propoganda is his personal mantra. To me would it seems this is intentional misrepresentation of science to promote a self-asorbed/bias agenda. His claims are fallacious, delusional, irrational and fucking stupid. Although he might have tricked you, no not me – no no. Non-theism although global is only a small niche market. One who desires TRUE fame, fortune or global respect over truth would be foolish to waste resources on penetrating such a small niche market compared to their other options. Can you blame him?
*I also believe this clearly demonstrated his personal agenda calls for obvious deception on both sides of the fence. Kinda like that fucker Mikey Z(http://www.clergyletterproject.net/). That bastard makes my tummy hurt so I will not continue with my trite drivel. PS though PZ one day it would be very cool to hear your thoughts and comments on Mikey. Anyhow I will not go there
—————–
(The question before my rant: Can you blame him?)
Francis, because of who you are, what you have done and what you knowingly just did… You are like a fireman whose personal hobby is arson. I hope both PZ and Dawkins take you off their christmas(winter sol) list. Fuck you Francis – FU :)
Tony S
T_schwartz317@sbcglobal.net
Just once I’d like to read through a thread and think to myself “What about this?” and find that no one else has made that point before I get to the end. Nah, never going to happen unless I seriously up my reading speed or the regulars here all take a vacation at the same time.
Thanks for an entertaining troll chomping, they squeak so charmingly when you get them on your back teeth.
Ichthyic:
Something comes to mind…the Myth Makers, maybe?
You get immediate credit. Saying something scornful about Dawkins is like the VISA card of atheism.
I’d like to go back to this point of Sastra’s.
I’ve been thinking for years now that there are certain roles in every social movement that are inevitable, if there is ever to be any progress.
There must always be “firebrands”, in order to move the Overton Window, and there must then always be “moderates” to fill the ever-moving middle-ground, and elevate themselves by attacking the extremes.
I think this is a simple pattern most everyone would agree with?
that said, in this specific case, are these roles being chosen consciously? Is Richard aware that he has assumed the role of firebrand, and is consciously using it to the advantage of all who favor atheism? Is Ayala (who is no damn dummy, that’s for sure) aware of the value of Dawkin’s role, and feels himself more tactically valuable playing the middle ground? Or is it more the case that it’s more a game of “whack a mole”, and Richard is the only one of “serious” (pardons PZ) that has stuck his head up the proverbial hole?
As a parallel example… It’s pretty obvious that there has been a conscious effort on the part of professional deniers (who have specific political motivations in mind) to move the overton window in the opposite direction from reality.
these aren’t people that have fallen into the position of “firebrand” haphazardly, but rather carefully planned and chosen the wording and method in order to achieve a specific effect, if you’ve ever seen any of Naomi Oreskes’ stuff, you know what, and exactly who, I’m talking about:
http://www.bloomsburypress.com/books/catalog/merchants_of_doubt_hc_104
http://www.marshall.org/
so, my question is, did Richard haphazardly stumble into the role of atheist firebrand, or did he himself analyze the situation, and placed himself within that role specifically TO move the overton window? or have others simply thrust that role upon him? Is it all just haphazard?
I always wanted to ask PZ the same question, but I usually just get sidetracked with science chit chat or whatnot when I meet people over beers, and just never did get around to asking him when he went to LA.
So Sirius Knott(head) is here too. I’ve dealt with him before and he is as idiotic as it gets. At least I can laugh at David Mabus. It is the religious kooks like Mr Knott that look sane that are really dangerous.
Yeah right. You are a death cult internet troll. No substance and all you can do is hate and be obnoxious while crazy and stupid. Mockery and thought is beyond you.
Speaking of substance, how much substance do fundie creationists have? Believing the earth is 6,000 years old and Noah had a boatload full of dinosaurs. None.
How much substance do xian death cultists have when they burn an alleged witch or assassinate an MD?
Oddly enough a lot if you think pure evil and pointless murders are “substance”. Enough substance that these days we call those types of xians criminals and terrorists and lock them up in prison.
And no, Sirius Knott, this is NOT evidence for anything except your own arrogance and stupidity:
http://siriusknotts.wordpress.com/2008/02/06/resurrection-apologetics/
None of that would stand up in a court of law.
The bible is not substance. It’s not evidence. Give me peer-reviewed research, or your rant is bullshit. Insult PZ all you want (how often have I called him a poopyhead already), I can look up his research and see if it’s peer-reviewed. You’ve got nothing but the bible Knottbrains, so who’s laking substance now?
Naw. You are here because you are an internet troll and want to be obnoxious.
The Argument for God from his defective evil and stupid followers hasn’t worked very well. People are leaving the xian religion by the millions every year because of hypocritical morons like you.
Ichthyic, #134
That’s something I’ve been thinking about as well – that it actually benefits those advocating atheism to have a spectrum of opposition to the nonsense of theism.
I’d love nothing more than to find out that the accommodationists were really just a conscious decision on the part of some atheists to help keep the woo-soaked wrong-footed; to see the faces of the obsequious scumbags on the Intersection when they found out they were just all pawns in a ‘new atheist’ game would be worth having put up with all their fawning drivel over the years.
My battle with Sirius Knott on my blog:
http://circleh.wordpress.com/2007/12/10/a-useless-debate/
I don’t think it will be long before PZ sends him to his dungeon.
Ichthyic:
It strikes me that Richard Dawkins took the situation on. He may not have counted on the initial reaction and the continued ripples though.
Well let’s remember who picked Ayala and why. The Templeton foundation.
It is blindingly obvious that he won it for two reasons.
1. He has poked the fundie xian Dominionists with a stick before. The Templeton xians don’t much like creationist xians. The usual sectarian hatreds.
2. Ayala doesn’t much like atheists either and will poke them with a sharp stick now and then. Templeton and the xians don’t like them either.
FWIW, the xians are starting to wake up and notice their steady losses of victims, I mean members. The New Atheists scare them.
When you’re trying to mind control people with an undetectable, invisible supernatural spook who does nothing and a kludgy book of mythology like the bible, it has got to be tough when someone else points out that there is nothing there.
Ayala is a good choice for Templeton. Whose agenda is their own and who cares. The $1.5 million money might have been nice but Ayala says he is going to give it away.
“That’s not what my common sense tells me. Mine tells me that science is answering more and more questions every day and just because something happens to be an unknown at the moment doesn’t mean it will remain so.”
Well there are questions that science can’t answer. That’s what religion is good at, asking those questions.
Questions like “what color is hungry?” – bullshit questions that make no sense.
And questions like “What is my purpose in the universal plan?”
Bullshit, meaningless, stupid questions if you’re expecting outside answers. Only god questions if you’re relating them to the limited universe of your own head.
Then, hungry can have a color – it can be red and that’s the crayon you choose in your drawing. And your purpose in the universe can be to get the highest score on an xBox game.
Let’s face it, in the grand scheme of things, most people won’t give a rat’s arse about who won this year’s Templeton Prize, because most people have never heard of the organisation or, perhaps sadly, Ayala (by which I mean that the man certainly deserves wider recognition for his scientific achievements).
Far more likely to cause a stir is when a rather better known chap, Pope Benedict XVI, wins a far different prize, one which may actually benefit humanity far more, A Grand Jury Award for long being part of a world-wide conspiracy to cover up serious, organised crime.
Actually, something I got to ask PZ when he was here was whether he knew when he started Pharyngula that it’d turn into what it’s become – a bastion of outspoken atheism with folks like ourselves serving it up to the religious loons on a daily (heck, hourly) basis.
He said no, he had no idea.
That he’s kept it going despite what must be constant
pressurewhining and bleating from the Mooneys and Kirshenbaums and Nisbetts of the science world is a sign that, even though someone mightn’t intend for something to turn out how it has, as long as they realise it’s a step in the right direction they’ll keep at it.I suspect it’s the same for Dawkins. He didn’t necessarily intend to become the poster-child for poking religion with a pointy stick, but – thanks to his books – he found himself there; and, since he has the courage of his convictions, he’s staying with it.
I’ve just about finished reading The Selfish Gene and even back in 1976 Dawkins was already starting to poke at religion with a pointed stick. It’s just the stick has gotten bigger, sharper and allowed other people to pick up pointed sticks too.
If only they were taught self defence against pointed sticks instead of against fresh fruit.
Ayala is not true to a belief system. He’s a fake, fake, fake.
He makes UCI look bad.
He said no, he had no idea.
thanks.
I’m going to think more about the whole thing tomorrow.
He said no, he had no idea.
In general, I doubt few great things were ever accomplished by people who started with the intention of accomplishing them.
That’s a good point Kel. From memory, the first two books were mainly science focussed, with the odd barb here and there when religious arguments impacted on the matter at hand. The Blind Watchmaker (1986) however, was quite upfront about it, saying in the introduction that Darwin’s theory allowed one to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. The changes over the years haven’t been in his arguments or his style, just in the amount of attention they receive.
That said, having consistent convictions says nothing about their quality. In the case of Ayala, I don’t really care if he thinks that he is playing the moderate to Dawkins’ firebrand. He still makes statements like:
that attempt to remove any conflict from religion and science by defining them to be unable to conflict each other. It’s such lazy thinking that he deserves criticism for it whatever his intentions.
negentropyeater wrote:
Woo-hoo! I don’t have the faintest idea how to accomplish anything, but this means there’s hope for me yet! :)
Pareidolius said what I wanted to say about the writing skillz of SK; others have dealt with many of his debating points. I just wanted to add this: such things as vestigial whale legs & feathered dinosaurs are recent events when compared with the appearance of phyla. I suggest that if SK ever allows himself to appreciate how deep biological time really is, he will experience a dizzying rush which will rival any religious experience.
@conelrad:
It was pictures from the Hubble Ultra Deep Field that gave me that experience. All I could do was sit staring at the screen while my brain imploded with the realisation of just how big space is and how much stuff is out there. It really knocks you over the head with perspective.
tsg (#12)
And then they whip out the “other ways of knowing.” Which, I suspect, is what Ayala is getting at with boundaries–you have to believe in and be wise in these “other ways” to talk about religion properly. Which is utter bullshit but people are so enamored of the idea of “other ways,” they cannot grasp that knowledge, however it’s worked out, requires an epistemology that distinguishes between reality and wishful thinking.
~*~*~*~*~*
siriusknotts (#35)
Do you know what vile things that woman considered charity? She thought that to relieve suffering would endanger souls, so she helped bring suffering to thousands. She’s hardly someone you want to use as an example of religion inspiring good works.
Which isn’t the argument at all. What was that about strawmen, now?
(#55)
What your analogy requires and lacks is some form of self replication on the part of bridges. Not that blueprints are in any way a good analogy for DNA, but you at least need a way for bridge blueprints to get passed on without the help/judgment of a designer. ( Unless you think DNA only gets recombined and passed on under the explicit direction of your god?) Self replication (with errors) is the driving force behind evolution.
~*~*~*~*~*
Nerd of Redhead (#67)
This needs to be a bumper sticker.
~*~*~*~*~*~
Ichythic (#134)
Maybe he just tells it as he sees it–which is hardly isolated to his opinions on religion, after all–and that is considered firebrandish by those who would elevate religion. Its quite natural he would offend such folks given religion’s weakness to objective standards. It needs the excuses and special pleadings that Dawkins tears apart.
I get the sense that he is making a calculated push of sorts in his refusal to give religion special consideration, but I think he would like everyone to hold religion up to the same high levels of scrutiny. It’s really not unreasonable. I don’t think he considers what he says to be a way to create an extreme position to make the middle ground more palatable. And I think he’d be despised by religionists no matter the level of extremism on their end.
Also, Wowbagger’s mention of accomodationists made me think of something. Those are extremists, too, in their own way. If there’s a continuum here, it’s triangular, at the least, and moderates can’t comfortably drop somewhere onto the imaginary line between belief and non-belief when things are politicized like they are.
With people like Ayala, I really wonder what it is:
1. that they cannot grasp the obvious, ie that religion has simply no way of knowing anything worth knowing
2. or that they just pretend that religion is entitled a non overlapping territory of knowledge for the sake of keeping the religious happy and avoiding that they tread on scientific knowledge. An ill conceived defensive tactic.
Wowbagger @ 114:
No objection to your argument, but I feel the need to point out that Zeus didn’t create the universe in Greek Mythology. Really, nobody did, it kind of created itself (it’s pretty vague on the point of creation; the genealogy of the gods is much more clear).
Kyorosuke, I like your pedantry.
Chaos.
There’s little I despise more in this whole endeavour than the pissant response of ‘other ways of knowing’. It’s a non-answer and anyone with even a shred of intellectual honesty would never stoop to using it to justify anything. Sure, we’re all capable of making choices for ‘irrational’ reasons; the difference is that we (generally) own up to them.
Using ‘other ways of knowing’ as a defence is nothing more than pretending that one’s irrational choice is somehow justified.
It’s not and never has been ‘The London Times’… it’s just ‘The Times’ (or if you have to ‘the British paper The Times’)
You don’t get people saying the ‘Washington DC USA Today’
Basically OT:
Happy Birthday, Richard Dawkins!
Stuart @160, yes, but note that it was neither italicised nor in quotes.
There is more than one The Times, you know…
What ayala is essentially saying is that intuition, subjectivity, irrational and wishful thinking have the same level of validity in justifying one’s beliefs than empirical examination and logical deductions thereof, as long as they don’t contradict each other. This really pisses me off.
From the laudatios at RD.net :
(Pink Floyd)
Stuart:
‘The Times’ to me is The New York Times. Are you always such a git?
“Time” video link
WowbaggerOM:
*Nods* Every time I’ve encountered that in a conversation, what it comes down to is a vague emotion. “The idea of god makes me feel good” or “god comforts me” or “I know god is real, I can feel him in my heart.”. It’s nothing more than the vague warm fuzzies, which are self-manufactured a/o induced.
Oh how embarrassing !!!
Try again !
Caine, re: “I know god is real, I can feel him in my heart.”
That’s a perfect description of gnosis.
(And one by which, self-admittedly, “Mother” Teresa was an agnostic!)
Caine, Fleur du mal wrote:
Ayala complains about Dawkins going “beyond the boundaries of science in making statements that antagonise believers.” I have several problems with this statement.
What are the boundaries of science? If Ayala doesn’t like Dawkins going beyond these boundaries then he has to explain where these boundaries are.
Why are believers sacrosanct from antagonism? What is so special about their beliefs that nobody, or at least Dawkins, isn’t allowed to make them feel bad?
Certain believers have no problem antagonizing scientists. Sirius Knott’s ranting in this thread is evidence for this. If Ayala were to attack the believers on their science hating then I’d have a bit more respect for him. But only whining about people on one side of an argument when Ayala pretends to be above the issue shows his hypocrisy.
Most people who visit Pharyngula have probably already read it, but for those who haven’t, Dawkins does a great job of describing (and demolishing) the concept of NOMA in The God Delusion.
Ayala is using NOMA-talk, and NOMA fails to survive even cursory rational analysis.
What is beyond an event horizon? What is below a quantum wave-function? What will the weather (a chaotic system) be like in a month? How many angels can dance on a pinhead?
These questions are absolutely beyond the boundaries of science. They are meaningless, nonsense questions in the realm of science.
So science does have some boundaries, usually defined by science itself. Science tells us about the limits to what we can know and reason about.
I don’t believe this is what Ayala was talking about, and I can’t recall Dawkins crossing any such boundaries. But they do exist.
As for religion, it certainly _should_ have boundaries. A reasonable religion should stick to extracting meaning and morality from what we know about the world. What science tells us about the world.
SK, either post your physical evidence here for your imaginary deity, or it doesn’t exist. I don’t read blogs of delusional fools like yourself. And you are a delusional evidenceless fool.
You are getting way ahead of yourself delusional fool. First convince us with physical evidence your imaginary deity exists and is Yahweh. Failure to date. Then, and only then, is the possibility that the babble is anything other than a book of fiction/myth even begin to come into play. And then, only after good physical and historical evidence that it is true. What book of fiction calls someone is irrelevant to a scientific discussion.
Still no evidence, and your opinion is not evidence. What a loser.
Isn’t that cute, trying to pretend a book of mythology is a reference for anything. Loser.
SK, you will only refute evolution, which is science, with more science. That means your inane questions and babble quotes are meaningless. Science is found in the peer reviewed scientific literature, which is found at institutions of higher learning world-wide. Something you appear to be unfamiliar with. Write your paper (submission information link to Science and Nature) and submit it to scientific journals. If it passes peer review, which checks to see that the uses the methods of science, and that the results and conclusions are consistent with the evidence collected, it will be published. So, if you want to refute evolution you have to use the scientific literature. I still haven’t seen any citation to it. More proof of your loser status.
@’Caine, Fleur du mal’ #165
‘The Times’ to me is The New York Times. Are you always such a git?
ooooooh handbags! Calm down it was just a factual correction.
‘The New York Times’ was named that so to distinguish it from the original British one which has no prefix
There is a difference though between the question of say what the weather would be like in a month compared to angels dancing on the head of a pin. The question of the weather is not able to be properly addressed scientifically because of the inadequacy of data – it is still a scientific question but one beyond the realms of current inquiry. However, how many angels dancing on the head of a pin is beyond the realms of science because it relies on many metaphysical assumptions which are in no sense testable (or even meaningful).
I can see what you’re trying to say, but there’s a category error in itself as to what questions are beyond science due to limitations associated with our current position, and questions that are beyond science because they aren’t scientific questions in any meaningful sense. As a means of inquiry, science may be capable of answering all but the last question. But it will never be able to answer how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. That distinction is important to recognise I feel.
@John Morales #162
‘Stuart @160, yes, but note that it was neither italicised nor in quotes.
There is more than one The Times, you know…’
Yes I know, so then it should be referred to as ‘British paper The Times’. The city it is based is irrelevant as it’s not a London paper
I’m sorry. I must have missed the part where you explained how religion has any justification for pontificating on meaning and morality. Care to enlighten me?
Kel @ 176
I think you are too generous in saying
The last question is meaningless, and simply conflates the mythology with some poorly understood questions that are intended to illustrate some of thecurrent boundaries of scientific understanding.
Other questions science will have no answer to are What colour are unicorns? What is the maximum air speed of a flying fairy? Why is Rudolf’s nose red? There is no difference between these and those raised by religion. There is the real boundary – Science must deal with fact, reality. Religion should be in the province of literature, with the rest of fiction!
Just re-read my post above – to be clear, I mean too generous in responding so seriously to a ridiculous post!
When someone like Dawkins tries to show that evolution provides evidence against religion, Ayala says it’s crossing a boundary, but when Ayala uses evolution to argue that it solves the theodicy problem, that is somehow not crossing the boundary. Make up your mind, will you. Either science does or does not have anything to say about religion.
said that attacking religion and ridiculing believers provided ammunition for religious leaders who insisted that followers had to choose between God and Darwin.
All branches of science, especially evolutionary biology, leave the magical god fairy with nothing to do.
So the choice is accept modern science or accept medieval bullshit. Only idiots accept both.
http://darwin-killed-god.blogspot.com/
It is not Templeton prize ladies, but Templeton Bribe(tm). I know that here people respect copy right laws greatly but maybe we could make an exception…
Morten V. Christiansen said:
Until you can show that they’re not nonsense questions ENTIRELY, those last five words can be left off. We have no reason to think that these questions (apart from the weather one) HAVE answers.
He also gives two of the usual NOMA arguments for religion: that it’s domain is answering the “why” questions and providing morality.
…that its domain is answering the “why” questions… /grammar police
I understand it’s vaguely quotish, so not necessarily an error by the great PZ.
Actually, Saturn was originally one of the Roman gods. Most people have rejected Jupiter, however.
Kel, might you compose an on-line pamphlet, detailing your astute comments?
Ayala and Sirius Stupidity are both ID’ers as both are creationists = theists= supernaturalists as Amiel Rossow in effect notes in his essay on Keith Miller @ Talk Reason and our friend Jerry Coyne’s notes in his article there ” Seeing and Believing and in her blog Greta Christian has an essay on why even astute people commit three errors in creation evolution [ a worthy term,eh? ].
His book on evolution and values evinces my finding him just another obfuscator, no more credible than Sylvia Brown[e], as he makes the jejune statement about naturalism and values don’t mix.God cannot validate ones life:” Life is its own validation and reward and ultimate meaning.”
Creation evolutionists obfuscate by contradicting natural causes and explanations : pace George Gaylord Simpson and Ernst Mayr, Eugenies. S. Scott, my Face Book friend, not withstanding, there is no cosmic intent. Thus the atelic or teleonomic argument illustrates that crontradiction ],but they cannot vouchsafe this contradiction thereby. Natural selection itself evinces no teleology so that to posit teleology in the form of God is so absurd!
How do people arrive at thinking that there is that intent?
Scientists are researching how people see agency in patterns. This underpins the argument from pareidolia that people see intent and design when only teleonomy and patterns exist.
This argument by having that support then outdoes the other arguments of Xenophanes, Marx the faitheist [ Massimo Pigliucci ], the fraud Freud and others, none of which are examples of the genetic fallacy.
These are two biological arguments, eh, PZ?
We ought to stress all this Kel,PZ and others as this hits at the core of the supernatural, the twin of the paranormal, both which PaulKurtz calls ” The transcendental Temptation,” a must read book. Indeed, there is telepathic God and clairvoyant prophets- and profits.
Yes, Mother Dearest Theresa embodied vileness! Hitchings documents that as well as does one of her former nuns in Free Inquiry.
And Scott also prattles about it might be logical that God created the world ten minutes ago [ that illogical case of finding science compatible with religion ] , but logical possibility cannot gainsay the empirical: the empirical argument [ Atheist @ Evolution Blog ] is that no facts exist to instantiate Him [ the atelic again].
Supernaturalists cannot vouchsafe in abstruseness and modal logic Him, and thus are on par with paranormalists despite what one of them bleating about the wonderful books of the former; rubbish all dressed up is still rubbish!Alvin Plantinga is no more credible than Brown[e]!Billy Dogmatic Graham is as loony as John Edwards!
And the teleonomic argument is no category mistake as Scott and others err in that demarcation as Paul Draper e-mailed me.
Thus PZ,Dawkins, I and others can logically note that science can in effect deny the existence of God1 Victor Stenger notes that also.
PZ, might you add a book on this!
Ayala and Miller both are Roman Catholics.
yo Stogoe #73 as long as he hits confession and does absolution he is covered
Science itself evinces why qustions: why dooes natural selection pick such and suc characteristics rather than other? What the ibuscatirs bkeat us that there is the supernatural why is theres something than nothing [ How could there be nothing. That question is Leibniz’s big blunder. ], why does pattterning make for us , that begged question of all teleological arguments that He had us in mind that Coyne devastates, affriming this begged nature.]
Sory as always for typos!
Common sense is ordinary–run-of-the-mill, bubbling up from anyone’s pie hole, while uncommon sense is achieved through science. Thank goodness for that, or many more of us would still be groveling in the mud for our daily bread.
Ayala regards religion as a positive endeavor (maybe even for himself but we are left in the dark regarding his religious beliefs or lack of because of his intellectually dishonest caginess) for people. Therefore, he does not consider himself an enabler of addictive and dangerous mindsets. Religion not being true is the least of his concerns. His boring, trite ‘common sense’ speaks to him, informing him since religious beliefs are prevalent and are mostly benign, they will remain so (even though the god of the gaps keeps getting smaller and smaller). If anything, he lacks courageous vision in the social sphere.
The very fact that a crystal clear explanation by Kel made no sense to SK demonstrates SKs misguided and superficial grasp of this topic.
For many people, not understanding evolution as well as Kel does is not important in order for them to accept it as they are not threatened by it as SK is as evolution would destroy his literal acceptance of the Bible and hence his faith.
Unfortunately, SKs need to refute this threat is more than his need to find out the truth. If he can’t lose his fear, he does not stand a chance in accepting the fact of evolution. He will just continue working hard to defend his literal biblical interpretation, while stubbornly not applying his intellect to study the scientific and fact of evolution in depth. And since he won’t do that because of fear he will remain stuck in his literal interpretation bubble of nonsense. The name of SKs viciously circular mind fuck is willful arrogant ignorance born from a constantly fed fear.
claire-chan #185
Saturn was the Roman name of the Greek Titan Kronos or Cronus (Greek Κρόνος), the father of Zeus, Demeter, Hera, Hades, Hestia, and Poseidon.
broboxley, now, how can confession for Catholics before a priest or for Protestants, before a congregation get people to do better? Wouldn’t research reveal that like prayer, t’s noting?
I meant another Edwards; van Praagh would be a good example.
The same thing true of the Greek creation myth is also true for the xian one. Genesis 1 is hard to translate but a better translation has Elohim shaping preexisting matter. No creation of the universe ex nihilo.
Elohim is plural and the early parts of the bible were polytheistic as well. It’s not impossible that the original meaning of Genesis 1 was, in fact, about the gods not a god.
Although its name is never invoked, I could see NOMA in Ayala’s comments and I figured it would come up here. It is unfortunate than Stephen Jay Gould’s legacy has turned into this. Ayala uses it to lie about Dawkins ‘crossing the boundaries’ rather than the religious, who routinely and demonstrably do so. Ayala is certainly earning his keep.
I see there is some lively discussion with a believer going on, but I’ve read his holy book…best cure for xianity out there. :)
Ah,yes, the “they made the trains run on time” argument. Ignore the horrible things that have been done in the name of religion because of the good things.
If chihuahuas and Great Danes were in the wild, they would not be recognized as the same species.
And at issue is precisely how “fixed” the limits are. You cannot simply assert they are fixed, you have to offer an explanation as to why small changes cannot over time accrue to produce large impacts, much like explaining why I can walk to the end of the block but it would be impossible for me to walk across the country.
This is begging the question. The question at issue is whether all examples of apparent design require a designer — you can’t answer that question by simply asserting it. Yes, bridges involve designers (unless they are logs that have fallen across streams, or natural rock formations, or vines that connect two trees, or…), but the question isn’t whether some apparent design requires a designer, but whether all apparent design does. Paley’s watchmaker argument doesn’t answer that, any more than saying all cars are red because my car is red.
We don’t know (yet) – but we can tell you a lot about what it isn’t, we don’t know (yet) but we can tell you a lot about what it isn’t, we don’t know exactly (but here’s a decent guess with (large) error bars), define and angel and I’ll tell you.
What is the answer to supernaturalists who aver that there can be only one God, not many, folks? hume’s dysteological argument maintains that were design true, then it’d suggest many gods or other matters as the imperfections so suggest.
Plantinga and two others suggest that omni-God does His craftmanship with fluorishes whilst limited God has to be economical and thus make for no imperfections. Duh? Now, this is a separate argument in itself but becomes part of the argument from evil, whereby supernaturalists obfuscate with silly argumens that the logical problem of evil in the form of the problem of Heaven devastates!
Supernaturalists cannot gainsay the immperfections nor, can Plantinga with his silly sophomoric sophistry devastate the logical argument: the problem of Heaven exhumes that were God consistent, there would be Heaven on Earth in the first place, the silly Edenic myth notwithstanding.
And William Rowe is refining his the evidential argument from evil, a probablity one.
Supernaturalism cannot, Ayala and the accommodationists notwithstanding, be compatible with science from the side of science; but from its own side, why t’is compatible with clairvoyance.
Check out Careneades’s blog @ Bloggers and rationalists @ Google.
Baiting, huh?
Baiting runs the risk that someone will swallow the bait, the hook, the line, the sinker, the rod, and the angler. Let me try.
Indeed. Evolution is defined as “descent with heritable modification”; anything that is capable of this can evolve. This includes not only organisms, but also languages and certain computer programs (genetic algorithms).
The biggest piece of evidence for this is the fact that bridges and watches don’t have babies. We don’t need to watch them being built; they can’t evolve, because they don’t descend and they don’t inherit.
What makes you think there are any such limits? Which miracle is the cause of these limits?
Because it really would take a miracle to tell the DNA repair mechanism what to do and what not to do when electrostatic attraction and repulsion make it do something else.
Coyote?
Maned “wolf”, Cape hunting “dog”, dhole?
Fox?
Bush dog?
Marten, weasel, otter, red panda?
African “palm civet”, mongoose, hyena, cat?
Please tell us where the limits of the dog kind are, Grand Wise One. We biologists have completely failed to find out.
You don’t have the faintest idea what you’re talking about.
Please tell us what DNA is from a chemistry point of view.
Descent – with – heritable – modification.
Once we try to interpret the diversity of life in the light of the theory of evolution by mutation, selection and drift, common descent pops out. It’s not a part of the theory.
It is inferred from the evidence. Do you know what “evidence” means, or did you just mean “from” instead of “of”?
Repeated for truth.
Oh, dude.
Do you know anything about the fossil record? No, really, literally, anything?
The Bible would predict one sudden appearance, followed by stasis till the end of the world. That is not what we see. Even the “sudden” appearances cease to be sudden in those cases where we have a resolution of tens of thousands or thousands of years, which we usually don’t.
Damage to the DNA/RNA, and mistakes made by the enzymes that replicate and repair it.
The effects of gene duplication followed by different mutation in the duplicates have already been mentioned.
There is no such thing as a phyletic leap. You made that term up.
What makes you think there’s a difference between “horizontal” and “vertical”? Can you delimit a single “created kind”
The stupid! It burns!
You’re thinking of the hindlegs of Basilosaurus, which probably had such a function. (They still stuck out of the body and had 3 toes each, and knees that allowed only two positions.) Today’s whales lack that. However, they still have hip and thigh bones deep under their blubber. What is that good for? Why does such stuff even exist? Huh?
I’d only need to combine a vertebrate lens with a cephalopod retina to design an eye better than any that exists on Earth.
Have you no shame!?!
Have you no shame to shoot your mouth off about things you haven’t got the faintest clue about?
Hips? Compare Archaeopteryx and Sinovenator for instance.
Lungs? For crying out loud, even the sauropods (Brachiosaurus, Apatosaurus, Diplodocus, that sort of beast, you know, the big ones) had bird lungs. How do we know? Because that’s the only way to explain why their vertebral column (and sometimes other bones) consists mostly of air!
Even the crocodiles, for crying out loud, have lungs that are much more similar to bird lungs than to ours.
Let me reword it then: why is it a nested hierarchy? Why is there a platypus and an echidna, but no intermediate between mammals and insects or mammals and cephalopods? Why? Is there any reason, other than evolution, why this should be the case?
Homo sapiens is.
Heh. You’re talking about the sixth Archaeopteryx specimen. The last one so far is the tenth! And a fascinating specimen it is – you have something to catch up to. :-)
Good idea, that could be it.
Source.
Day saved :-)
I’d rather say that when the Romans learned of the Greek gods, they equated them one by one with their own. In some cases that didn’t work all that well – Ares doesn’t do anything but war, while Mars is additionally occupied e. g. with agriculture, so much so that the month when it begins, mensis Martius, is named after him.
>snort>
LOL!
The analogy runs even deeper: Mussolini didn’t actually make the trains run on time. He just managed to convince pretty much everyone that the trains were now running on time.
What hte hell is it with Christians? Do they just not get Science?
That’s just meaningless words. Evidence would be… let’s see, how about contemporary historical documents of Jesus? The Bible antecedes his supposed living by about 70 years, so that’s not actually very contemporary. What about records of his execution?
As to some sort of god, produce him. I think we can all agree here that if, say, the holy missile shield from the beginning of Left Behind happened, we’d at least admit the possibility. But thus far, precious little happens that we can’t explain without suddenly adding God to the equation (Which requires even more complicated mental gymnastics, as you’ve proven)
Maker is not a proper noun. Neither is god. The name of the Christian (That is a Proper noun) god is YHVH (Another proper noun). The word ‘god’ is just another improper noun. And ‘him’ is NEVER a proper noun. Imagine how stupid you would look if you wrote in a book “Betty was a chair Maker” or “Pass the ball to Him”.
Morten V. Christiansen,
Science can’t give a definite answer, but we’ve got no other way of knowing. Religion offers nothing.
Meaningless question.
Science can tell you that if you live in New York, the temperature will be higher by X°C within a certain degree of confidence. Same thing for pluviosity. As computing power, data storage, and models become more powerful, science will be able to make better predictions. Religion offers nothing here again.
Stupid question
The “boundaries” aren’t fixed. Science doesn’t tell us a priori where are the limits.
Religion can’t tell us anything worth knowing. There are no boundaries, as the complete set of religious knowledge is void. Religion offers nothing, no method for justifying one’s beliefs, so it can’t know anything.
That’s why religion has nothing to say about extracting meaning and morality from what we know about the world.
Religion is perfectly useless. The only thing it can do is get in the way.
The ‘boundary’ of science argument is probably the most frustrating. People claim the boundary of science is the supernatural, but they’ve made up the supernatural. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy and it amounts to “God wrote the Bible and I know he did because the Bible says God wrote it.”
I’ve recently been drawn into debates with Scientologists, people who I’ve known for years but only recently have they converted. It’s one of the strangest experiences of my life, as I’ve suddenly had to go from knowing that Scientology was utter nonsense to pretending like I respect their beliefs in order to engage them in conversation.
I get accused of standing on a ‘soapbox’ because I insist on rational discourse, emphasizing science and logic. It amazes me that what we all take for granted as common sense in most of our lives (that events have understandable and testable causes) suddenly disappears in the discussion of religion.
At the risk of finally just offending all of my religious friends (Scientologists included), I simply wrote my thoughts on rational vs. irrational thought.
Alas, it’s probably amounts to talking to a 5 year old about Santa Claus, but I just have to say something..
siriusknotts sez:
Ok, this one’s easy. If god can predict his own actions with 100% accuracy, and therefore not change them when they come about, he is omniscient but not omnipotent. If, on the other hand, he can defy his own predictions about his actions, then he (may) be omnipotent, but (as his earlier information was incorrect), not omniscient.
And also:
I see someone else answered this, so I’ll pose a counter-question: How do you account for the sudden appearance of information within your god’s mind?
From Ayala:
One question I’d love to ask Ayala here, is whether he is using the word “religion” so broadly, that it applies to all and any meaning, purpose, moral, and value questions per se — regardless of whether they reference supernatural entities/spiritual realities, or not.
What I mean is, is asking oneself whether to pursue financial security and become an accountant — or go for personal satisfaction and become a street artist — a religious question? If you’re trying to decide whether to spank your two-year-old, is this a spiritual question — and your decision, a spiritual decision? Not because there is a God, or isn’t a God, but because it is a subjective choice, dependent on goals, tastes, personality, and so forth.
If there is no God, and nothing inherently mindlike, moral, supernatural structured into the universe, which made us for a “purpose” — would the same language still apply, because people have minds and morals, and choose their own purposes?
From what I can tell Ayala is not claiming that atheists have no reason to be ethical. He’s not even claiming that atheists have no reasonable explanation where our moral sense “comes from.” It can be interpreted in those ways, yes — but then he’s made other statements which seem to contradict these rather insulting (and shallow) implications.
Instead, it looks like a rather stealth form of humanism, hidden by language. By “spiritual” he means “subjective.” Science can’t directly answer subjective questions, like what job you should take, or whether you should forgive those who wronged you. It can inform those choices, certainly. But when it gets right down to it, what you choose to do, will depend on ultimate preferences, and personal commitment, which is purely subjective.
“Affirming life’s spiritual dimension” and “progress in religion” are then just so much hot air. Taken at face value, one would think that those goals imply seeking truth itself — not personal truth. An Ayala could say that Mormonism (which I choose because it is an obviously false religion) is true, because it’s “true for the Mormons.” It “works” for them, by providing a narrative structure, a sense of purpose, community, delicious potlucks filled with jello-mold delicacies, etc. etc. blah blah blah. Who cares if the Book of Mormon is technically a fake, if it helps real people with their lives?
The only problem with atheism, then, isn’t that atheists are missing out on the truth about God. It’s that some atheists are telling other people that they’re wrong about what’s true, when truth isn’t the point.
“Truthiness” is. Progress in religion is not directed towards discovering the value of objective truth, but towards discovering the value in subjective affirmation.
I’d love to know whether Ayala would agree with that. And, if he doesn’t, how then would he categorize the “question” of what to do with one’s life?
And if he does, is he content with the fact that most people will never “get” stealth humanism from his statements, but continue to read him as “atheists can’t explain or be moral — not really — without God?”
I have a really straightforward question for PZ. Is it your view that science is able to falsify supernatural beliefs? I get the impression from this post that this is in fact your (irrational, in my view) belief.
Clearly supernatural beliefs are silly and irrational, and one should proportion ones belief to evidence, but to say that science is able to falsify supernatural belief is to overestimate the epistemic limits of science – that is, science is concerned only with natural phenomenon – and so has nothing whatever to say about supernatural things. Supernatural things (if they even exists, which I don’t think they do) would simply lie outside of sciences’ domain of inquiry. So, the grounds on which supernatural beliefs are rejected, while they maybe informed by scientific understanding of the world, are fundamentally philosophical.
Well, the problem for those of faith is defining “supernatural” in a way that makes sense. Anytime that occurs, science can test its predictions. Then it is natural. Supernatural is essentially a null word, meaning whatever the speaker wants it to mean.
Science cannot disprove a vague deistic god that started the universe and went away. A god of the bible is an interventionist god, and traces of that god should be discernible.
I would imagine part of Dawkins’ growing openess about challenging religion as the years passed was the rise of the Relgious Right in the US and their increasing attempts to force Creationism on US society.
If you have a supernatural belief that angels all prefer gay sex among themselves, especially favoring a certain act that can only be performed by beings with feathered wings, well, no, I can’t prove it false. Although I can call into question your source of information, and ask for some kind of verifiable confirmation. This is one of the pitfalls of making supernatural claims: how do you know?
On the other hand, if you claim that these supernatural angels descend on your bedroom every night and give you a great flamboyant anal rogering, now you’ve made a claim of supernatural intervention in the natural world, and that is subject to falsification. We can put cameras in your bedroom, micro-cams and force sensors in your rectum, and get evidence of the act or absence of the same.
More seriously, if you claim that God ensouled mankind at some point a few thousand years ago, but can’t even tell me what a soul is, same issues apply: how do you know? Where is your evidence? If you can’t provide it, I have grounds to dismiss your claim, even if I can’t prove it false.
If you claim that God influences the mutation rate of specific traits by quantum diddling, then also I can point out that that is subject to testing: we can look in populations of bacteria for a consistent statistical variation in some property, for instance. And if you claim God only diddles human genes in the past, then again, you’ve just moved a specific claim into the realm of unobservability, and I have to ask how the heck you know this.
In my experience, all you need to do to antagonize believers is to fail to show deference for their beliefs. Heck, mentioning evolution is enough to “antagonize” many believers. Voicing non-belief in their god makes them apoplectic.
Why should a rationalist worry about antagonizing believers, when no believer seems worried about antagonizing rationalists? I think it’s time for believers to keep their beliefs private and then no one will have to worry about inadvertently “antagonizing” them. If they think their beliefs are “the truth”, it should not matter that a rationalist does not. Creationists disbelief in evolution doesn’t “antagonize” me. It just makes me feel angry at their indoctrinators who made them ignorant.
Boundaries of science? There are no boundaries to science. As much as religion, and its apologists, would like to claim there are boundaries to science…
And while science can’t answer all possible questions, such as “what color are unicorns” or “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin,” neither can religion. But what we can do is note that there are no credible reports of unicorns anywhere in the world or look at the head of a pin under a very powerful microscope and notice there are no angels at all and posit that such things DO NOT EXIST.
That is, the claims that “Unicorns exist” or “Angels exist” have failed. And lacking better evidence, despite thousands of years of these claims being made, we can go with “superstitious belief system from primitive bronze-age cultures…” and move on with our lives without the burden of worrying about offending unicorns or angels…
Nay! The supposed supernatural intrudes so much onto the natural that the latter must reject it! Miracles are natural. There can be no human parthenogenesis as described in those fables [ Had Mary demurred, would the Holy Ghost have spiritually raped her?]hows no effects of prayer ,except as a form of meditation. Astrophysicists are ever finding out about the Metaverse, and God did it is meaningless as the ignostic [igtheist]argument notes.
So that was just another piece of accommodationist sophistry!
Anri, that is also part of ignosticism.
Carenades, the first ignostic demolished supernaturalism eons ago: we atheologists are a mere foot note to him.
Ah, t’is that matter of demarcation that Scott and the previous poster misuse.He tries to make a case for those venues, but that also fails. Some silly person alleges that logic and intuition supersede naturalism but naturalism/ rationalism encompasses logic and confirmed intuitions: previous experience makes for informed intuitions. Others mislead one.
Thus, supernaturalists err in so many ways.
See Michael Ruse’s anthology where Larry n twice speaks about demarcation [p.237 to 355 ].
Thus, I inquire; why not state that many religious people embrace evolution rather than make that stupid compatibility? Again, from the side of religion…., bur hardly from the side of science as Stenger amply illuminates!
Why I inquire would one want to be clay for which the divine potter gives purpose? Why does Ayala make the absurd statement that we need Him to overcome dread and to have a purpose? I used therapy to overcome my dreads, and I find my own human purposes, human loves and this Sally Field life suffice; to blather about a need for divine purpose and love and the future state evinces emotional disturbance as Albert Ellis would have stated per ” The Myth of Self- Esteem,” and Robert Price would concur per his ” The Reason-Driven Life.”
Covenant morality for humanity [ Do please Google that! ] – the presumption of humanism.And for in depth discussions of all this Google skeptic griggsy [ Overlook his style and concentrate on his arguments,derived from atheologians.].
Stenger is one mean atheologian!
And so are some of us! Thank y’all fellow naturalists!
Goodwill and blessing to all!
@inquiringlynn 191 no idea, I think thats how their circular logic works
Antiochus Epiphanes, you just have demolished their begged question of design,sir! yes, those two arguments – the atelic and from pareidolia illustrate that.Your version packs visual acuity! Sir, we need that form of sarcasm to enable our arguments to strike a chord with faitheists as mere phisolophy and science just cannot do so for so many,eh?
Yes to all three chords!
And Dawkins knows the supecilious sophistry of silly theology, and debtes with advanced theologians. He thus can rightly ignore their recondite sophistry as he is speaking to the lay people. I take on their silly sophistry! Plantinga, W.L.C.,Swinburne, Haught and others!
googly nick at #203 wrote:
I disagree. Science is an objective methodology, and it says nothing upfront about what it can, or cannot study. It studies what is real.
Consider the paranormal. In theory, could science confirm the existence of ESP? Yes. The fact that studies have failed to find any effect for the claimed phenomenon is good reason to think it is not there. It is not a good reason to think it must be “outside of science.”
Falsification is never absolute.
Now consider the distinction between the paranormal, and the supernatural. This will be difficult, because there really is none. Any supernatural belief could be re-tweaked as paranormal, and any paranormal belief could be incorporated into supernaturalism. The only difference, if there is one, is that paranormalists are generally more willing to subject their supernatural views to test, than are people who explicitly label their views as “supernatural.” Both groups, however, would see the success of parapsychology, as vindication of spiritual realities.
Richard Dawkins several times writes about the reaction of religious folks, should science one day discover some DNA from Jesus, and determine that it only has one human chromosome, and the other one has miraculous, even magical, properties. You would not see them waving their hands dismissively, and whining “oh, so what, this means nothing — science can’t say anything about religious beliefs, one way or the other. Ignore it.”
No, they would shout from the rooftops, “AHA! TOLD YOU SO!” And rightly so. It would be hard to fit this into naturalism.
Can’t have it both ways. If science could, in theory, make discoveries or find evidence which supports paranormal or supernatural claims, then they are open to either falsification, or Ockam’s Razor, as part of the science-based model of reality.
Naturalism is falsifiable. This entails that the alternate view, is also open to the same grim possibility.
let’s take an example:
I believe that tomato plants prefer prime numbers, ie when I say a bunch of prime numbers to my tomato plants in the morning, they will produce more tomatoes than if I say no prime numbers.
Can science say anything about this? First, there is nothing we understand about nature that would support such a claim. Tomatoes don’t have brains, they can’t hear what we say, and even less check whether numbers are prime or not. So to believe that this claim is true qualifies as a supernatural belief.
Can we test whether it is true: we can make a double blind study with several plants and check whether it works. So we perform the scientific study, and verify that such claim isn’t supported by evidence. So we reject it.
As you will most certainly agree, the gounds on which such a supernatural belief is rejected is not fundamentally philosophical.
Same is valid for all other supernatural beliefs, green genies coming out of an oil lamp and granting wishes, Gods provoking earthquakes because of homosexuals, etc…
Mother Teresa was an asshole. Her “hospitals” were ludicrous slum-clinics without staffs (except untrained local volunteers) that provided little, usually no, medical treatment to the patients.
In fact, they wouldn’t even even provide painkillers to the terminally ill.
And this is despite the fact that the Catholics, through Mother Teresa, routine raised tens of millions in contributions they used on everything but actually helping the poor, despite their claims they were using the money to help the poor.
Thee truth is, Mother Teresa not only did NOTHING to alleviate poverty of suffering, despite whoring millions and millions of dollars a year, she reveled in the suffering of the poor. In the words of your whore, herself:
So, the world is better off through the suffering of poor people. And they need to fucking shut-up and die, in pain, in poverty. That’s fucking sadism at its lowest.
So fuck your stupid opinions about the benefits of religion. Mother Teresa was an immoral asshole and you’re just another brainwashed asshole who doesn’t have a clue.
Ironically, Mother Teresa had the best medical treatment in the world when she had cancer. And it was in the west, not in one of her dirty, slum-clinics.
Seems she believed suffering was for the poor. Not for her.
Some fucking Saint, that…
As for the rest of you post and your brainwashed assertions and subsequent posts… Don’t care. I’m not wasting any more time on your ignorance. I’m too tired to argue with things dumber than rocks…
oh, dear.
There is not one shred of empirical evidence
you can lie to yourself to make yourself feel better, but that won’t change reality.
sorry.
micro-cams and force sensors in your rectum
are you working on the script for a new reality TV show, PZ?
I still no physical evidence for any creator or designer. Those pesky creobots are falling down on their job of providing hard core physical evidence for their imaginary creator…
There is not a shred of empirical evidence for gods (or demons, devils, angels, or souls)– There is, however, abundance empirical evidence for evolution… a whole a whole world of it in every thing that contains DNA, in fact.
However those who have been brainwashed to believe that their salvation depends on faith in a particular creation story are usually too damaged to even understand what “empirical evidence” means. There appears to be no amount of evidence they will recognize as evidence if it conflicts with the beliefs they feel “saved” for “believing in”.
Not even the strongest faitheist can break through the impenetrable ignorance of such a person. (Though I’d like to see Mooney and/or Ayala and/or Collins try).
The evidence is found in the fossil record, you creationist asshole.
indeed, and evolution is a fact. the evidence is in the scientific literature. go read some and stop being a victim of Dunning-Kruger.
So we have a real live birther on the other thread and a real live IDiot on this one…
Gee, Pharyngula is being assaulted by loons today.
You are entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts.
project much?
Have you looked at all at the million or so scientific papers in the peer reviewed scientific literature that back evolution, both directly and indirectly? Ignoring that much scientific evidence means your whole argument is unscientific sophistry, and is therefore meaningless to any intelligent discussion of science.
Perhaps, though I feel it’s a necessary distinction. What is a scientific question that cannot yet be answered by science, be it through theoretical boundaries of lack of sufficient data (is there life on other planets comes immediately to mind) are very different in nature to questions like you listed which are in no way scientific.
It’s worth responding to because it does show the distinction between science and scientism. What is beyond the scientific limits of today may not be in the future, just as what was the limits of the past aren’t the limits of today. And there are questions that don’t even fall into the scientific realm of inquiry, where they are meaningless to ask scientifically. It’s that distinction that some fail to grasp.
lol. evolution is simply descent with modification; the Theory of Evolution is descent with modification through natural selection and genetic drift. evolution as a mechanism is a repeatedly observable and well-documented fact. It can be observed regularly in college biology classes, in hospitals, and in the wild.
Fucking hilarious that you’d think that part of the ToE is in question.
I rather like Steven Jones soap nozzle illustration of the process: http://blog.case.edu/singham/2007/06/19/evolution1_the_power_of_natural_selection
Although it’s simple and many children can understand it, I’m not sure a brain damaged by faith can.
I’m sure bladerunner will let us know.
Myself, I’m betting that his faith in god depends on evolution not being true (a scary position to be sure), and thus he’s afraid he will lose out on “happily ever after” if he so much as admits to understanding the evidence.
It must suck to believe in an invisible guy who will punish you forever if you don’t believe certain unbelievable stories. More-so, if you imagine this god wants you to preach on science blogs. (If you ever get a clue, bladerunner, be sure to flog your indoctrinators for inciting you to post embarrassing things on the internets.)
Nice to see a reader.
Yes, it is true the first creation story in Genesis does imply multiple gods. That’s because there were!
Now, modern Christians say it was Jesus and/or the Holy Spirit and proves there was this whole “death and resurrection” plan and a trinity… That argument is false and is based on their own faith-internalized re-writing of the ancient scriptures that, themselves, were greatly re-written at various times.
The reason there are two creation stories is because Judaism is a polyglot-religion that borrowed, primarily, from two different mythologies. We see those two primary source finger prints in Genesis. In the ancient Hebrew scriptures, when Adam and Eve are created “in our image” the voice is feminine because the speaker is feminine. She happens to be the wife of God — Asheroth. This the part of the Old Testament/early Polytheistic-Judaism that came from the Canaanites.
This passage makes the most sense when one realizes “in our image” is spoken by God’s wife to God. After all, what happened? The “creation” of MAN and WOMEN in OUR image (male and female)…. It makes little sense from a Male/Male perspective that the modern Christian assigns.
Whereas, the second creation story (Adam’s rib) came from an entirely different religious tradition.
Anyway, about 900 years after Judaism became a distinct polytheistic (Northern Kingdom/Israelite) religion, Asheroth was written out of the Bible (but not religious practices for many more centuries) by the southern (Southern Kingdom/Judean) monotheists that ascended in political power in the time of King Josiah. Other deities that were written out include Baal (their son), Lilith (their daughter) and some other minor Israelite deities. (Mostly, when written out, they have even been transformed into demons and/or objects.)
The bottom line is that Judaism is/was a combination of many religions that has gone through many changes. Judaism was then completely re-written by Paul (the L. Ron Hubbard of his day) for whatever reasons he had and turned into proto-Christianity… It was again changed by the early Catholics and has evolved in many other ways over time…
Most everything in the bible can best understood as “work of fiction” combining many, many sources and writers over 1500+ years. None of which starts with a monotheistic God creating the universe and making two white people in the Garden of Eden…
Personally, I find creationists arrogantly-funny because I know the origins of the bible and the myths contained therein.
They’re so damn arrogantly certain, yet they’re blindly ignorant of the evolution of their religion. Once it was a Polytheistic Religion where El (El Shaddai, etc.) was the leader of a Pantheon of Gods and Goddesses, to a Monotheistic religion headed by Yahweh. And all of that is there, in their Bible, if they have the wit to read it and comprehend…
There is a huge amount of data about the mechanisms of evolution, mostly natural selection.
I’ve done it myself many, many times. So have you if you ever got the flu. We make a new vaccine every year because the influenza virus drifts because people who get the flu are immune. To that strain. This is antigenic drift, an example of natural selection.
You are simply an ignorant liar.
Well I do keep a blog, partly for that reason. I have one post on what I was talking about above: An inversion of reason to point out the obvious.
Which is the problem I’m finding with creationists. At best they may know how to fake knowledge, by asking a couple of seemingly relevant questions designed as “gotchas” which the evolutionist shouldn’t be able to answer (at which point I assume they think the evolutionist will renounce evolutionary theory and start reading Genesis). Though when you can answer the questions, because they don’t understand the topic at hand they fail to realise that their objection has been answered.
From many years arguing with religious believers over the topic of evolution, I have come to think that a lot of it is that evolution so brutally destroys the teleological argument. David Hume did a fine job some 250 years ago philosophically speaking, but it took Darwin to demonstrate it.
To illustrate this point further, teleology still exists among liberal theists and theologians who fully support evolution. Just instead of biology, design can be seen in the laws of nature. God now, it seems, is the great cosmic fine tuner – making sure that the amount of dark energy in the universe is exactly right otherwise there would be no galaxies, stars, planets and especially us.
Oh wait…
I guess bladerunner is a Behe type creationist… the type that accepts evolution, but believes an invisible form of consciousness needed to intervene because random mutation coupled with natural selection isn’t enough?
It’s getting so I can’t tell one type of creationist from another. I have no problem with you (bladerunner) inserting your magic man into the parts of evolution that you can’t make sense of. However, Ayala (the topic of this blog post) http://www.pnas.org/content/104/suppl.1/8567.abstract and most other scientists don’t find such notions supported by any evidence nor is such a notion useful or explanatory.
Don’t confuse your own ignorance for ours.
Sastra, you are making my point against Haught!
The presumption of naturalism is that not only are natural causes and explanations efficient and necessary, they are also primary and sufficient; they are the sufficient reason, contrary to Leibniz’s little blunder. It neither begs the question nor sandbags supernaturalists due it being the demand of evidence of extraordinary claims as Hume adumbrates in his corollary to this presumption about miracles.
Oh, should creation evolutionists answer what about the Virgin Birth and the Ascension, they might allege that those are metaphors. I query what are the metaphors for insight on a good God of those hard passages dealing with the Deluge, slavery and genocide? What might Leo Booth and John Shelby Spong say about that?
The ignostic argument is now with the Ockham as the ignostic-Ockham: either He is fatuous, meaningless, nebulous, otiose or vacuous or else he is uselessly redundant, Dawkins’s nemesis notwithstanding!
Do you just ignore all those studies done on the various processes by which evolution works, or are you unaware of them?
Accidental? Now there’s a loaded word. Are you talking in the sense that the evolutionary algorithm doesn’t necessarily result in us? Well in that sense, one can agree. But Natural Selection is the opposite of random, it is the opposite of accidental. It is necessarily non-directed, but not random or accidental. Mutations are random, selection is not.
How else can you explain mimicry? How else can you explain camouflage? How else can you explain convergent features for similar environmental niches? Sharks, Ichthyosaurs, and dolphins all sharing a similar streamline shape for swimming in the water even though the latter two came from land animals? How else can you explain the vestigial eyes in animals like cavefish and moles? How else can you explain destroyed violet opsin genes in various nocturnal creatures? How else can you explain the peacock’s tail?
Well, I can’t speak for PZ (especially given that he already did so), but personally I’m still waiting for a coherent definition of ‘supernatural’ that excepts it from scientific investigation while simultaneously differing it from ‘non existent’.
Really, until or unless we ever get such a definition, the word (as has been noted above) is purely a topic for fantasy.
Yes, how does the supernatural differ from the “non existent”? To me supernatural is synonymous with “magic”. If there was real magic, it would be of interest to scientists to discover and hone our information on the subject. If there isn’t, we can dismiss all such claims as being equally “not in the realm of science” or “untrue”.
Sastra, you are furthering what I’m ever stating about Ayala and purpose. One person said that he had dread from accepting Him when I mentioned the argument from happiness. And supernaturalists use the argument from dead in finding that as Augustine puts it that they are restless unless in His bosom. Where is the beef? Just more supernatural say so. Faith, the we just say so of credulity, that begged question of its subject [ Articulett ]to obviate giving real evidence therefore.
Articulett, my wise friend, Ayala and Miller themselves take ID out through the front door, only to bring it back in an obscurantist manner through the side door as Rossow and the other two would find the matter. Check out the blogs I mention sometime. I’m @ WWGHA also now,Sister Chromatid.
Atheologian Doug Krueger, Mr. atheist e-mailed me through inerrancy.com that he doesn’t use scientific arguments like those two. And Plantinga, you and other leaders in biology too might use those two arguments as you actually know them better than I!. PZ and you know that causalism -teleonomy- as Weiss puts in his ” The Science of Biology” rules as teleology puts the past into the future , the effect before the cause, thereby negating time- backwards causation.There is no orthogenesis as Simpson states.
And Plantinga’s argument from reason= the self -refutation of naturalism is so hilarious as I illustrated before here.
Follow Glenn Close and her sister in supporting mental health and taking the stigma off mental illness!
Kel, I’m going to subscribe to your blog in a few minutes,sir. And please try out the two I mention.
The most detailed types of supernatural arguments Skeptic Griggsy makes @ Amazon Religion Discussions under the titles arguments for God and arguments about Him -that square circle. He also has the threads there: the problem of Heaven, the paradox…, the presumption of naturalism…, the presumption of rationalism and the Buy-bull and only a man,Yeshua. The five presumptions he mentions in all make for that more abundant life rather than that superstitious rubbish of that silly and dangerous cult leader,J.Christ, jerk, the title of one of his many threads @ Skeptic Society Forums.
articulett,
Repeated because it’s so true.
If magic existed, scientists would be magicians — it’s what they do.
How is this not obvious to the woomeisters?
I love how a lot of relatively recent fiction actually follows from that assertion. Magic is based on rules… so the magicians are analytic-minded and reason oriented. Heck, one particular fighting game series that takes place in an alt-future of Earth outright states that magic was invented by scientists.
I wonder when Serious Knotts is coming back…
Working my way slowly through the threads, I commented on the previous one about Ayala winning, and what do I see here but corroboration of what I wrote:
(From the Spanish:)
Indeed.
====
bladerunnner2525 sounds like Charlie Wagner. Again. FFS.
I was about to point out bladerunner2525 sounding like Charlie Wagner. Looks like Owlmirror beats me to it.
As for people discussing Ayala, it’s important to recognize that he only respects NOMA to the degree that it keeps science from saying anything contra religion. He’s more than happy to mix science and religion, though, in that his theodicy involves blaming evolution for any poor designs in nature. This is why he calls ID “blasphemy”. His favorite trick is saying that it’s the randomness of evolution that allows the existence of poor designs while still holding to an omnipotent/omniscient God.
As I said in a previous thread, he’s a philosophical idiot.
What is beyond an event horizon?
Hopefully a good sequel.
Such a treat to read this exchange.
Such a treat to see someone like Knott Sirius owned so emphatically.
Thank you to all.
If ever I’m feeling low, in need of a boost; I’ll read his comments and feel fortunate. The bloke really hasn’t got a clue.
The only sad thing about pwning someone that comprehensively is that the person who gets pwned doesn’t realise that they were just pwned.
Ayala’s claim that science and religion are not in contradiction, depends upon his further claim that “religion and science are not properly understood by some people, Christians particularly.” In other words, Ayala’s contention depends upon the proposition that religion is not actually what the majority of religious people in the world believe it to be. In particular, it depends upon the notion that religion, properly understood, makes no empirical claims.
By stripping religion of its empirical content, Ayala is engaging in a high re-definition of what religion is. In other words, he is implicitly attempting to re-define the term ‘religion’, so that it applies to a narrower range of beliefs. This more narrowly defined bundle of metaphysical and moral beliefs, might well be consistent with scientific belief, but this can only be achieved by changing the original and commonly understood meaning of the word ‘religion’.
I’ve written an extended analysis of Ayala’s position here:
http://mccabism.blogspot.com/2010/04/francisco-ayala-and-easter.html