Jeffrey Goldberg visited the Creation “Museum”, and asked the question, “Were There Dinosaurs on Noah’s Ark?”. I can answer that one.
There were no dinosaurs on Noah’s Ark, because there were no animals of any kind on Noah’s Ark.
There were no animals of any kind on Noah’s Ark, because there was no such thing as Noah’s Ark.
There was no such thing as Noah’s Ark, because there was never a global flood.
There was never a global flood because…well, there’s so much evidence against it — no geological evidence, all the species on earth did not go through such a narrow population bottleneck so recently, the story is patently a myth — that you have to deny the bulk of all scientific theories to accept it.
Don’t accept their premises. The loons at Answers in Genesis are simply making shit up as they go.
Oh, and by the way, Jeffrey Goldberg, this comment tells me your head is so far up your ass that you don’t even know what questions to ask.
My sympathies, by the way, do not lie entirely where you might think. I find atheism dismaying, for Updikean reasons (“Where was the ingenuity, the ambiguity … of saying that the universe just happened to happen and that when we’re dead we’re dead?”), and because, in the words of a former chief rabbi of Great Britain, Jonathan Sacks, it is religion, not science, that “answers three questions that every reflective person must ask. Who am I? Why am I here? How then shall I live?” Like Ken Ham, I am appalled by the idea, as expressed by Richard Dawkins, that “the universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.”
Those three questions are no more answered by religion than they are by the poems of William McGonagall … that is, badly, with no beauty and no accuracy. Personally, I find Dawkins’ observation well supported by the observation that Jeffrey Goldberg, war advocate and monstrous propagandist to the Bush administration’s mendacious pretexts for aggression that led us into a war that was immensely wasteful of lives, money, and reputation, still has a job, rather than finding himself in a prison with the other media liars.
Talking of falsehoods and the deliberate re-writing of history:
https://answersingenesis.org/reviews/books/book-review-inside-the-nye-ham-debate/?utm_source=homepage&utm_medium=featured-slider&utm_campaign=inside-nye-ham-debate
shorter goldberg: “isn’t it pretty to think so?”
this reminds me, ive gotta see the nye/ham debates, wonder if theyre on youtoob?
You know what I find dismaying? People who don’t care what the truth is. Who think they can and should choose their beliefs for aesthetic reasons. Who use the word “Updikean”.
And of course, people who, having made such poor choices, compound them by mistaking religion for something aesthetically satisfying, never mind true.
In the words of another McGonagall…
I’m still waiting for the chaos of faith to reach a consensus on questions like this. Some say dinosaurs never existed. IIRC, a Chick Tract asserted fallen angels rode them to attack the ark as the floodwaters rose. I think others mass lumped them into a kind or two to be able to fit on the ark and super-evolve back into numerous species after getting off with the rest of the animals.
Oh, definitely. And if you’re don’t happen to be born to the group that religion is tailored to cater to, the answers are:
1. A sinner.
2. To suffer.
3. In pain.
1) I’m Ronald (aka Alex the Pretty Good, aka Seeker)
2) My Daddy and a Mommy loved each other very much …
3) by breathing the air and metabolising food.
Nope … didn’t need any religion to answer either of those questions.
Science on the other hand provided pretty clear and unambiguous answers.
It would be so nice if one of these alleged “questioners” (more like presuppositional idjits) would just go to a place like this, a scientific library, and look for the geological column on every continent that shows the extinction event and flud at the same time, for a world-wide event dating 6000 years ago. No all-continent one-time extinction 6000 years ago, the babble is mythology like that of the Greek, Roman, and Norse gods.
” it is religion, not science, that “answers three questions that every reflective person must ask. Who am I? Why am I here? How then shall I live?””
Ok, religion answers those questions? Great.
Which religion?
If I’m just randomly picking a religion to answer those questions, why don’t I just make up the answers myself to begin wtih?
re #1:
Watch for these future books in the series:
How Hitler Won World War II
How the Crusades Drove the Muslims From the Holy Land
How Apollo 13 was Damaged by Hitting the Crystal Sphere That Carries the Moon.
But but but…that’s unFAIR!
“blind, pitiless indifference.”
These are emotionally loaded words which treat the universe as if it were a sentient being. You wouldn’t call a rock “blind pitiless and indifferent” because those words just don’t apply to such things. People can be blind, can be pitiless, and can be indifferent. Rocks can’t, so far as we know, and the universe can’t unless it has some of the qualities of a sentient being. There is no evidence that it does nor any reason to suppose it does.
Ed at 13
I’m not so sure about that. These words, especially pitiless, are often used about deserts, particularly the Australian desert. To my ears, this wording expresses the lack of sentience inherent in the environment, and by extension the universe.
I don;t understand. Didn’t Dawkins imply something like, a drunk college girl having sex with someone she might not want to upon sober reflection isn’t exactly the same as a gang of men in India hi-jacking a bus with a couple on it, beating the husband and gang-raping the wife and then running over them with the bus, so isn’t everything he says now wrong?
re Ed Seedhouse @13:
Isn’t that the point of using those words to describe the universe; To emphasize that atheists believe the universe to be plain material. And theists know the sentience of the universe as being “seeing, pitying, and concerned”. The twists of logic I’m trying to imagine are inhibiting my typing ability. apologies for the jibber jabber.
No dinos on the Ark?
Pshaw.
A friend of mine from up north (the cold lands of Canada) explained to me how Noah fit two of these newly discovered dinos on the Ark. He said they were attached to the outside of the boat like burrs. So that totally proves the Ark existed. Right?
That’s how it works, no?
helenaconstantine @15:
Nah. Sexist douchecake though he may be, Dawkins is still right about a few things.
Sure you would. It’s a metaphor. Like calling an approaching tornado “relentless”.
@helenaconstantine #15: It’s like the people here are made of meat and not straw!
Wait, I seem to remember something very similar to this from my middle school days. I think it went along the lines of, “Do your parents know you’re gay?” (which, now that I think of it, shows how deeply rooted anti-homosexual bigotry is in society, but that’s another topic).
U Frood @ 10
Why, the generic, interfaith, placeholder religion with it ceremonial deity that everyone is expected to believe in order to be trusted by the mouth-breathing masses.
EDIT: …with its…
1. “Who am I?” and “How then shall I live?” are indeed questions every reflective person should* ask.
2. Science does NOT answer those questions.
3. I started down the path to atheism because the answers offered by religion to such queries were really bad. As in stupid. And as in NOT ‘just’ ‘moral’ and the rest of the yada yada the deity was alleged to be.
4. “Why am I here?” THAT’s the BS question, because religions already have a given Answer, and that Answer means “How shall I live?” becomes rhetorical. And that is just all kinds of wrong.
4.1 “Why am I here?”? Man how blindly anthropocentric can you get! Perhaps Goldberg could ask Ham to explain the elegant design principle — evidencing the existence of a Master Creator — behind the fact that there between 1,000,000 and 100,000,000 species of beetles? If Richard Dawkins thinks, “The universe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no purpose, no evil, nothing but blind indifference,” methinks Dawkins is being too kind to the universe. I mean, how then do we explain Richard Dawkins?
*Jonathan Sacks use of “must” doesn’t seem very rabbinical to me, but I grew up in a very Reform town, and as my Dad would say, we were only “Jewish by osmosis.” Which meant ‘culturally’ not ‘religiously.’ This movie is a pretty accurate rendering (within poetic license, natch) of the Zeitgeist of my hometown at the time of my youth.
PZ may or not may not be familiar…
@Alex the Pretty Good
Um, the first two questions are rather loaded and silly, but the last question is basically a good question, and I have no problem saying that your answer to it is foolish.
“it is religion, not science, that answers”
Actually, that should be “philosophy” which has the answers.
Also, I hate how that kind of phrasing, saying “religion”, tends to imply that every religion has a correct or valid answer. They don’t, they have ignorant silly answers.
All I can say is, if you were going to use a rhetorical example of a bad versemonger, I consider myself having gotten off lucky.
brianpansky @25:
I took Alex’s response to question #3 to be snarky rather than serious, but maybe that’s just me.
I got all the way to the part about supporting the Iraq war before it hit me that you were not writing about Jeff Goldblum. That’s a huge relief, because I’ve enjoyed his acting in at least some movies he’s been in. I should probably start to worry about my reading comprehension, but in my defense, my kids are distracting me, and the dinosaur question threw me into Jurassic Park mode. It seemed ironic for a movie chaos theorist to be a YEC in real life and my mind just took it from there.
LOL. This is the Fallacy of Wishful Thinking. It’s very dumb.
Jeffrey has trouble making it through the day without an Invisible Friend in the Sky. Well, so what. Wanting a god doesn’t make that god exist.
Grow up Jeffrey. At least a billion people make it through their lives without believing in Invisible Friends. And AFAWK, all 7 billion of us, whether we believe in gods or not,…make it through our lives without them because…we have no choice.
“The truth? You can’t handle the truth!!!!” (Some movie I never watched.)
Guy is an idiot. What you want reality to be has zero effect on what reality actually is.
.
Discounting, for the moment, that this thinkfully-wishing rodeo-clown-for-Christ is already on the shit list for being a class A (for anus) ultra-conservative propagandist, I award him three strikes:
1. Agrees with Ken Ham.
2. Invokes Rabbi Sacks.
3. Uses the word “Updikean” – possibly the most visible indicator that we’re dealing with a two-fisted wanker.
those questions how I hate those questions. well not so much hate them but hate where the questioner takes the questions.
take why am I here for a start where the fuck is here any way what is this place is? it a place at all?
why is always answerable with because to be followed by why again then because until the end of fucking time. bhaahg!
who? you ask who! that is just a name any name some one calls you any name you answer to no more no less. Now “what am I?” that we may try and find out. That question leads in many directions.
how do I live? If you are you really asking that I would say ask Hamlet. Those questions take so much for granted and are rooted in the ego they are centered around the “feeling” of self the best answers of religion are all self serving.
uncle frogy
I am an massive (about 85 kg of mass, in particular) collection of interacting chemical reactions, occurring in a stuck-together mess of leaky reaction vessels, called cells.
I’m here as side-effect of thermodynamics: the ‘flow’ of kinetic energy.
I shall live using and respecting thermodynamics, with further respect for the multitude of other instances of thermodynamic side-effects.
Those are the answers according to my (mis?)understanding of science. Has any religion proposed more accurate answers?
It’s so nice to read something Dawkins said that doesn’t make me want to beat my head in. I imagine that was from a long time ago, when Logic hadn’t interfered with his ability to form speech.
I don’t mind when religious people answer the third question “Live justly, love tenderly, walk humbly” . If you need a God because the indifference of the universe to your existence is too scary, well all right then. (I have to agree the universe is indifferent.) It’s a bit sad, but it’s a big world. There are people who follow rugby, instead of Australian Rules and so now in Melbourne the ABC doesn’t show us The Ladder and tells us rugby league scores instead*. I can accommodate the existence of rugby followers, I can accommodate people who want religion. But then I live in Australia, where for a long time it was extremely unfashionable and even tasteless to reveal your religion in public. And now Tony Abbott is PM and I am now required to advocate for the right of people to be Muslim if they want to.
My problem is when they decide the answers they have acquired are the Only Ones and everyone else is Wrong and should make the same choices as them.
Also, as Alexander up at @7 said, the answers they come up with are so dreary and require people to be miserable. That’s not necessary.
* the position of the winning teams in comparison to each other. Being in the top eight teams means you play in the finals. This is a fresh source of injustice to a person I live with every week.
Religion has answers to these. Not good answers. And huge numbers of ever shifting and evolving answers. Which is a problem.
One of the main drivers and supports of religion is just tribalism, the human property of organzing into groups.
Who am I? A xian, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist, Sunni, Shiite.
Why am I here? To support your tribe and its often parasitic leaders. The one you were born into most likely.
How then shall I live? This is when religion really goes off the rails. There are numerous answers, some good, some bad, some just silly. Don’t eat bacon. Cut the heads off of any European reporters you find. Bomb family planning clinics. Threaten to kill biologists. Feed the homeless.
In practice, almost everyone is just a Cafeteria Xian or Cafeteria Theist and makes their own decisions for their own reasons. You can cut out the middle mediator of religion and it makes little difference. In fact, it probably makes the world a better place.
QFT.
You don’t understand, authoritarian, because you’re not even trying. You’re trying to follow somebody instead of understanding the world. No wonder you’re perplexed when other people don’t do what you expect based on your own behavior.
When Dawkins is wrong, he’s wrong; when he’s right, he’s right. It really is that simple.
PZ took the quote and cited its source. The quote isn’t true because Dawkins is cited; Dawkins is cited because PZ didn’t come up with those words, that’s the only reason.
Depends on what you mean by “who” and “am”, and maybe even “I”.
Neither have I, but in these modern times that is no obstacle!
I’m just a prideful a-hole. I don’t want to be TOLD the answers to those questions (that’s all Religionists do). I’m satisfied by the “Huh, I don’t know” answer that my own brain came up with. And that IDK answer always motivates me to find a better answer than just “uh…”
.
Who am I? — myself! who do you think I am?
Why am I here? — why not? I’m here cause I’m not there.
How then shall I live? — the best I can. (best == “do as little harm as possible”)
.
[the bibble is just a “cheat sheet” for those questions we should answer ourselves]
“Accurate” turns the last question into a tautology.
You seem to be playing with multiple meaning of the word ‘respect’ to pull some non-science into your reductio.
I’m not sure how chemistry, cell biology, and thermodynamics guide you respect Cartman’s Authorita, respect a woman’s right not to violated because she’s intoxicated, or respect a mother’s anguish as she cradles what’s left of the mangled lifeless body of her 2-year-old son following a drone air strike paid for your tax dollars.
The problem with religion as a moral guide is that it screws up its good answers with dogma. But that shouldn’t prevent a non-believer from seeing the good answers MOST religions propose. “Do unto others…” works for me, and if he hadn’t been claiming to be the son of Yahweh and the sole gateway to eternal life blah blah blah, Jesus of Nazareth would have been a fairly decent moral philosopher.
Not at all, Science cannot stabilize meaning in/of common language terms. Especially ‘I’, which is an utterly un-scientific concept. Science can’t answer those questions, because it can’t ask them. Even the reductio ad absurdam gags in this thread are going outside science to frame their terms.
More word play! What fun! Redefining the broader sense of ‘who’ in the question to the narrower meaning of ‘which person’ leading to another reductio reifying the notion of unified, autonomous subjectivity.
Are you sure there is a ‘you,’ rather than, say, “only a pure screen, a switching center for all the networks of influence” or a fragmented assembly of multiple competing contradictory or unrelated discourses programmed into your bio-computer by an overdetermining cloud of ideologies?
Me, I don’t know who you are. But I think you might be a person who should read more Philip K. Dick.
‘Isn’t that the point of using those words to describe the universe; To emphasize that atheists believe the universe to be plain material. And theists know the sentience of the universe as being “seeing, pitying, and concerned”‘
These are metaphors and they have effects on human minds. Therefore we should be careful when we use them lest they have the effect of leading our thinking astray.
Applying the metaphors “blind pitiless indifference” accepts by implication that the universe *could* be “seeing, pitying and concerned” because these are concepts each of which has no meaning except by contrast with it’s opposite.
If, as I believe, sentience had no part in the creation of the Universe then using such metaphors is pointless. If you called a human being “blind, pitiless and indifferent” you are saying something bad about him. I would think of a blind pitiless and indifferent human being as being a very nasty piece of work indeed. I would think of such a human being as being hostile to the wishes of other beings. Calling the universe blind pitiless and indifferent implies that the universe is hostile to us.
But a universe that is not the result of sentience cannot be either hostile to us or loving to us. It just is what it is. The “blind hostile and indifferent” universe nevertheless somehow gave rise to sentient beings. That fact doesn’t make it “caring” because caring is not what it does.
It doesn’t “care” about us but it also does not “not care” about us. Care and not caring are not what it does and using such anthropomorphic language about it is misleading. It is a concept that simply doesn’t apply to the situation.
We need to be careful in the metaphoric language we use, I think. Metaphor is fine but when we start confusing the metaphor with the reality then we are going off course so far as good reasoning is concerned. The natural world as a whole does not, so far as we know, have emotions, so painting emotional concepts upon it is, n my opinion at least, rather dangerous. Natural for us, but still dangerous because it tends to mislead us.
That’s not what I mean. I mean that under some meanings of those terms, science* can of course answer the questions, while under others it can’t.
* Don’t spell it with a capital letter; Science is this journal.
I dunno Tony, I see so many people say junk like that. The se habla espol person in this thread seems serious enough. And being snarky doesn’t quite mean the person isn’t also seriously dismissing the subject.
There are people who very much seem to be allergic to the subject of morality, and wrongly lump it together with the follies of religious thinking.
@sadmar re #39:
It’s not clear to me how a question can be a tautology. ‘Accurate’ is intended to mean ‘in accord with reality’, which seems to be its obvious meaning in context. In what respects do you see it differently?
I spent mucho time mulling over the word ‘respect’ here, and finally concluded that all the meanings that it had pretty much worked, without recourse to any unreality, just a little subjectivity, as follows. Ones values are always founded on emotion, which might or might not be consonant with reality. I’ve worked for 60-odd years to guide my own emotions and values into such consonance, but they’re still subjective, by definition.
From other references I seen, I suspect the ‘Cartman’ is a reference to a fictional character whose interpersonal skills are dominated by, if not limited to, demands to ‘respect mah authoritay.’ I presume that meaning of this reference. A demand for respect need not be respected (see what I did there?).
What does intoxication have to do with it? Perhaps the sentence would work better if you changed ‘because’ to ‘even if’.
Again, there’s an irrelevant qualification: the words following ‘son’ are extraneous.
Now, back to the start of the sentence spanning multiple blockquotes. I referred to thermodynamics in terms of ‘kinetic energy’, because I couldn’t come up with a better way to show that ‘energy’ referred to the energy of reality, not the imaginary stuff that quackeries like reiki, acupuncture, and religions claim, and not the physiological/psychological stuff that the wife just complained of being low on.
Thermodynamics drives chemistry. Chemistry is a superset of biology. The results, if you will, of biology are conditioned by evolution. Thus, we are each and all, at a foundational level, artifactual side-effects of thermodynamics. In particular, H. sap. sap. is a somewhat sapient, gregarious/social mutually related collection of such artifacts.
The gregarious/social nature of H. sap. sap. seems to include the need for mutual respect, including empathy, compassion, and the like. Rightly or wrongly, I think of this as basic humanism, which forms a large portion of my values, subjective though they must be.
“Do unto others…” doesn’t work for me as a universal rule, ever since I considered the edge and corner cases. For example, I’m not going to put up with a masochist ‘doing unto me’ as he would be done unto: ‘turning the other cheek’ is not an option here.
The essential problem with religion, as a moral guide or for any purpose, is its episteme: in a religious episteme, belief takes precedence over reality. One might refer to, for example, the Answers in Genesis statement of faith, which proclaims that in any case where reality conflicts with Ken Ham’s chosen beliefs, then his beliefs are right and reality is by definition wrong. (AiG is not the only purveyor of this episteme, just the one I find easiest to recall.)
The scientific episteme, by contrast, requires that beliefs must be secondary to reality. A belief-based morality is thus subjective and probably irrelevant to reality; a reality-based morality may be objective, to the extent that one’s understanding and values actually conform to reality.
1) I’m me. Heck, even Flo from Progressive Insurance knows that one.
2) No particular reason other than that which I choose for myself.
3) According to my philosophy that I develop through my own examination of the world around me.
Is that really so hard?
I’ve always sort of liked Tom Ballard’s interpretation that the Noah flood story was an account of the flooding of the Black Sea basin where, as the story goes, one family saved itself and its livestock by building a boat.
The bowl of the Black Sea, roughly 700 by 300 miles, was most likely fertile ground suitable for farming and that a population took up residence in this are and were present when the land bridge separating the Aegean Sea from what would become the Black Sea gave way. The pre-Biblical story, as I understand it originally Babylonian, is much more modest than the Biblical version. The interpretation of ‘the world’ has changed. For people whose ancestors made their living the Black Sea basin unflooded the immersion of the area might be seen as destroying ‘their world’.
We do know that the people of about that time had round boats made of reeds similar to boats made today with the same materials and that the Biblical account pretty clearly referenced a round boat. We also know that these round boats are capable of handling cattle.
Speculation is that some major flooding event is mentioned in several different cultures and predating the Biblical texts. We also know that the flooding of the Black Sea basin happened after people had settled the wider area. Is the Biblical account the Babylonian story retooled and retold by fabulists seeking to gain converts?
Even if that was in some way true the Biblical account is a gross exaggeration and the creationist reading of it an even greater exaggeration. So, no world-wide flood, no massively huge boat, no death to all not on the boat, no transportation of every “kind” (much less every species), no God flooding the world to killing everyone in a fit of anger, no deity promising to never flood the world again.
To me the story left rings true. A story of a geological anomaly allowing a rich and fertile basin to form beside a sea. Humans setting up housekeeping for generations farm and herd taking advantage of the rich soil. Everyone forgets the potential danger. Then one day, possibly following an earthquake, the rock dam begins to crack. One family sees the danger and builds a boat. The other families reference the many generations before and don’t. The dam gives way and the basin floods. Some people and livestock drown. The family on the boat, and their livestock are blown to the newly created shore and lament the loss of so many. That sort of sounds like typical human behavior in the face of geological changes.
It’s not the entire Black Sea; the sea existed, it was just smaller.
Originally Sumerian, from where the Babylonians got it; the Bible probably got it from the Babylonians, though.
There’s an argument that the Biblical version is most similar to the very late one in Berossus, which if true is verra, verry iiiiinteresting.
My theory is that the flood story originated in Mesopotamia. Some farmer set up in the flood plain, and realized that it was a flood plain. He built a boat of some sort, just in case, and the case came through. I envision a barn up on a reed platform, useful for daily life, but flood-ready. A nice anchor, and when the flood is over, a quick rearranging of boundary markers, would make the guy famous.
re @48:
Who wrote Gilgamesh? Wasn’t Noah just a rewrite of Gilgamesh? Oh, was Gilgamesh just a rewrite of that Sumerian story you reference? Oral traditions really mess up strict chronologies, don’t they. THAT is what the creationistas need to comprehend: the bibble is a write-down after a long oral tradition; don’t get literal based on oral storytelling (contradiction of terms ^_^ ) Perfectly acceptable to teach morals/ethics from [some] bibble stories, but it ain’t no literal history/documentary of actual events. Storytellers tend to embellish their stories to keep listeners listening. Why deny them their embellishments and just presume every word to be actual events?
It’s a nice idea, but that flood took place, if indeed it was a signifcant event, around or before 5600 BCE. The earliest written flood narrative, the Epic of Gilgamesh, dates in part from around 2100 BCE. 3,500 years is an unfeasibly long time for an oral tradition to last. In short, there’s not a particle of evidence to connect the two.
I dunno. Are there cavemen in Heaven?
Not to mention some things just get plain lost after some iterations, and then the next storytellers patch it over to fill the gaps…
Ed Seedhouse #42: I have no difficulties with a “blind, pitiless indifferent” universe. The universe cannot see anything: blind; the universe has no pity: pitiless; the universe does not care: indifferent.
Apart from the fact that (active) hostility is very much not indifference, the universe is indeed (passively) hostile to us over a very large proportion of its volume. I don’t particularly fancy my chances anywhere near a neutron star, for example.
I believe that the answers to these questions are found within, and change with the individual in question. It is for each of us to determine, for ourselves, what those answers are.
I’ve always found the first two to be facile – you’re a person, and you’re here because your parents had sex and made a baby and you haven’t died yet.
Those who believe in the literal truth of the Bible have apparently never played telephone.
Well, science can tell you that you are a star-carbon-based descendant of tree-dwelling insectivores, and show damn good evidence for the whole process. It can also show that you are here because of the above, adding in some hormones and sperm motility. It can also show that the way most animals live is as best they can.
Now, if you want some personal advice out of all that, you can find cooperation, competition, and the freedom to make your own decisions.
But really, does everyone need to ask those questions? Does everyone even bother? The article even says that only the introspective should ask them. Truly, the introspective don’t have to ask, and the rest of us can piss off for beer.