This is a quick response to a naive pair of questions.
Why is it that all questions about atheism and evolution by the True Believers rest on false premises? Answer that one for me, ma’am.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
PZ provides concise, cogent answers to two ignorant quest6ions, simple as that. Stuff that xtian insanity in your superstitious pipe and smoke it.
The ignorant questions PZ answers prove human societal evolution has made NO progress. (to repeat my comment on spider evolution) We humans are basically still the violent, superstitious bipeds we were a few thousand years ago. And, yes, I personally admit my limitations and battle to exceed this stagnation of mental and emotional development by trying to be rational and use critical analytical thinking to learn instead of relying on superstition and guesswork and propaganda from a murderous, self-contradictory work of fiction.
The reason scientists are accused of pulling ideas out of their asses and foisting them on the world is the christerrs have no idea there are more sophisticated routes to knowledge than just that. It’s all they know.
Mathew Mark Luke and John fit the description of “some guy” better than Darwin. At least we know Darwin’s full name.
The books of Teh Bible, which were written by numerous guys and possibly a few women, are filled with scientific errors, historic errors, logical errors, moral errors and contradictions.
The books of Darwin are backed up by numerous lines of evidence, some laid out in his books, others discovered since that time, but all pointing to the same reality for observed phenomena.
“Why is it that all questions about atheism and evolution by the True Believers rest on false premises?”
Because if they admitted to the truth they’d have to face the fact that every one of their beliefs are ridiculous and wrong.
If they didn’t have false premises, they’d have no premises at all.
The fundamental error they make is to pretend that the various authors of the Bible were trying to provide scientific knowledge. It makes as much sense as to claim that James Joyces Ulysses or King Lear provides infallible knowledge about evolution or the speed of light.
There is much to disagree with in the Bible, but it’s pointless to criticize it for its lack of scientific veracity.
@8
I disagree.
There are religionists who insist that every word of teh Bible is true. Arguing scientific veracity is directly on point there. These people are not especially open to evidence, but there may be children listening, and won’t someone think of the children?
There are religionists who do not insist that every word of teh Bible is true. There the issue is cherry-picking. Pointing out that they accept that the boat-load of animals is not true, but they accept the story about how the Creator of the universe came to earth and got a Jewish teenager pregnant so she could give birth to Himself in human form, so that He could sacrifice Himself to Himself in order to save people from the Hell that He created for them, because He loves them so much is a coherent and effective argument. If it doesn’t convince the person you are disagreeing with, it might still have effect on observers.
Reginald,
That does not follow. That is, I disagree with you.
There is a difference between criticising the Babble and criticising a mistaken claim about the Babble.
See? It’s a disagreement with someone’s opinion, not a criticism of the source.
(Your thinking is muddled)
Reginald Selkirk @5
The Bible’s errors and that it suffers from multiple authors with differing polemic agendas are taken as at least inspired by God if not the literal word of God and the theology derived as such lacks the error correction mechanisms we find in science. Believers may pick and choose or vary from others interpretations, hence the many denominations out there. But at the end of the day they are stuck with variants of what was written thousands of years ago in vastly different cultural contexts.
Darwin has been superseded on much of his writings back then. He considered selection primary but not exclusive. It is very important for explaining adaptive evolution, but given the predominance of junk in our genomes selection has limits.
Also only cranks would take Darwin’s speculations on heredity (pangenesis and gemmules) seriously anymore. Science has moved on.
That’s a key difference between the Bible and Darwin’s works. Darwin gets eclipsed due to the innovations of evolutionary biology since his time. The Bible is not superseded in the same way. People still latch on to what it says, though some may choose to ignore its most odious parts as cultural progresses. Christian Nationalism shows the potential for cultural regression back towards the odious parts of the Bible. The most a Darwinian fundie might do is overstate the case for selection and be one of those obnoxious hyperdarwinists Gould lambasted. Not good for evolutionary biology or at least public perception of it, but less culturally damaging than religious fundamentalism.
Allison @8
Well the Bible works in part as history. Some of it may be ok and much not really. The authors of The Bible Unearthed (Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman) pointed to the lack of evidence for an exodus out of Egypt and that Israelites may have emerged from Canaanites. These views (if I recall them right or did them any justice) are based on some sort of scientific (archaeological) approach.
The authors of the Bible weren’t pushing science as you say, but science is still kinda relevant as is history, like considering other flood myths that may have inspired the Noah story. It is important to approach it as literature, as a compilation of narratives with agendas, but apply also some critical reflection where science or history may come into play. Also one could look at the Bible from the standpoint of moral philosophy and not do a Gould and cede ground on that as he did with NOMA.
Why do Atheists believe in gravity when it was made up by some guy called Newton? /s
Reginald Selkirk @9
I’ve seen this arc of the Jesus story put many similar ways and yours works just as well. When you try to wrap your head around that and realize that’s what was hidden behind the facade of Sunday school and all them years of church going it is maddening.
But there is a limit as Allison said to the approach of debunking the scientific merits of the Bible. Even the point you stressed is more philosophical than scientific. Or maybe a more critical theology.
If he wasn’t such a chode, the informal epistemological approach where you get people to reflect on how they came to form a given belief that Boghossian put out there might be better than confrontational scientific debunking. Rehashed Socratic method anyway, despite the despicable source.
Yeah, the Exodus never happened.
The distance from the Red Sea to Jerusalem is 202 miles.
The bible claims the Israelis took 40 years to walk that distance.
In reality, even a large group of people could walk that in a month or so.
The evidence that the Israelis are just another tribe of Canaanites is pretty solid these days.
By DNA sequencing the Canaanites still exist. These days we call them Jews, Palestinians, and Lebanese.
The archaeological and linguistic evidence says the same thing. Hebrew is just another Canaanite language.
As a followup to my @14
I followed the Street Epistemology Discord for many years and also Boghossian’s anti-woke trajectory. Both are shit on the sole of my shoe.
raven, nope. That is a misrepresentation. A straw dummy.
Not travel time, duration of collective punishment.
Story goes that (collective) rebellion provoked a judicial decree that any adults who doubted would die in the desert, and their children would complete forty years of nomadic life. One year for every day the spies scouted the land (Numbers 14).
gijoel @13
Because Newton was one smart apple. 🍎
@17
So you are saying the exodus did happen? Or you are venting on raven as you did Reginald because reasons only you might know.
No, Hemidactylus. I am saying is nonsense.
(Was I really that opaque?)
@15
Strictly speaking the Bible does say they spent almost all of that time camped in one place or another and not walking. It is the size of the group among other things that makes the story as given unbelievable.
Note it is entirely possible that some Egyptians did influence the early Israelites. Egypt is not that far away and quite often controlled the land of Canaan. In addition some Biblical names seem to be Egyptian. Suggested examples are Hophni, Phinehas, Moses, Aaron.
Basically, reading the proper Bible (before the fanfic that is the NT) is not science and not reportage‑style history. Overall, I reckon it functions as Jewish mythic national history: foundational stories, identity‑making episodes, and a long narrative arc. A cultural keystone.
Basically, reading the proper Bible (before the fanfic that is the NT) is not science and not reportage‑style history. Overall, I reckon it mainly functions as Jewish mythic national history: foundational stories, identity‑making episodes, and a long narrative arc. A cultural keystone.
(Obs the laws and cultural prescriptions and moral lessons and attitudes are part of that narrative)
[heh. Overwrite, not append error]
The Supremely Superstitious always start with their conclusions and then work backwards in an idiotic effort to “prove” their starting point. Real evidence supporting their “conclusion” does not exist so they invent “facts” on the fly, as required, When their lack of credible supporting evidence gets destroyed they always fall back on “it is a matter of faith”, And they declare that since you obviously have faith in science, their faith is the same thing, As though believing something supported by large amounts of consistent evidence is the same as believing something counterfactual, and lacking any credible supporting evidence.
In religious debates the one with the most unshakable faith always “wins”. Which is why they invariably try to reduce reality based arguments to just “a different faith”, which inferior to their own, since they claim to have the backing of an ultimate authority (which they also, quite obviously invented).
As an astronomer said decades ago: “If you start to show someone how to destroy their own power of reason, some will eagerly finish the job on their own. “Revealed religion” is a form of mental illness that short circuits all critical reasoning, And this is why the GQP is so against teaching critical reasoning:
https://truthout.org/articles/texas-gop-declares-no-more-teaching-of-critical-thinking-skills-in-texas-public-schools/
No PZ, you miss the point. These people have no idea that there is anyone except Darwin.
Oh, and the eyes in that still photo tell you all you need to know about this woman.
@8. Allison : “There is much to disagree with in the Bible, but it’s pointless to criticize it for its lack of scientific veracity.”
The problem here isn’t that some atheists try to debunk the scientific veracity of the Bible but rather that some Christianists claim that the Bible has some scientific veracity.
It really does not. Mythology, yeah, maybe some kernals of history told grander and larger than they were.Science? Nope.
@8. Allison : “There is much to disagree with in the Bible, but it’s pointless to criticize it for its lack of scientific veracity.”
The problem here isn’t that some atheists try to debunk the scientific veracity of the Bible but rather that some Christianists claim that the Bible has some scientific veracity.
It really does not. Mythology, yeah, maybe some kernals of history told grander and larger than they were.Science? Nope.
The blonde bimbo in the inset video didn’t just wake up some morning looking like that. She spent a lot of time making herself appear like Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel’s dream girl. And her questions about evolution were not just simplistic, but inane, again appealing to hog-slopping types.
Like, Darwin just pulled evolution out of his ass one day? Which displays a mind-boggling ignorance of the history.
There’s a false equivalence of the Bible vs. the Origin of Species in there: rival epistemic authorities, accepted or rejected without question. Pick one, arbitrarily, on faith. Except of course that’s not what actual atheists do. (OK, you can probably find a depressingly large number of atheists whose personal epistemology is not much better than your average fundamentalist’s, who actually do fit the apologist’s ad hominem of someone who rejected religion for personal reasons, then seized on the Four Horsemen as fuel for some motivated reasoning. They tend to wind up either as Sam Harris fanbois, or convert to some even worse religion).
Raven@15:
“Yeah, the Exodus never happened.”
Moses, like Noah, Adam, Eve, (and Adam’s “help meet”, Lilith, who refused to obey him) are all pious fiction, All of those massive plagues that the gawd of Israel hit Egypt with, never happened, The ancient Egyptians were very prolific writers. Archaeologists have recovered shopping lists, letters of complaint, graffiti, lists of all kids of things, religious texts, literature, personal letters, administrative records, economic records, and worker’s records, etc. But somehow absolutely nothing about those horrible plagues that the Israelites piously pretended happened. And zero evidence exists for any Moses figure leading a few million Israelites and others in the desert for 40 years, using magic to save them from harm. And if that isn’t sufficient to destroy those fables, the ancient Isrealites did not even know about the existence of the domestic cat, An impossibility, if they had spent even one day in Egypt. Given the Egyptian infatuation with domestic cats, which were located everywhere throughout Egypt.
nomdeplume @ # 25: … the eyes in that still photo tell you all you need to know about this woman.
&
weylguy @ # 28: … The blonde bimbo in the inset video … spent a lot of time making herself appear like Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel’s dream girl.
The lady in question seems AI-generated – and cheap obsolete AI at that. (Count the fingers!)
But at least she spells “Atheist” correctly…
Pierce, I looked.
Myrie Rahel has a fair footprint and is a real person.
Plays the game Ark Survival Ascended, for example.
@rachelannehopper on Threads.
I checked because she did not seem AI to me.
zetopan:
What? Upon what basis do you assert that?
They’re not in what is now the canonical babble, but they damn knew about their existence.
FWIW, from https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Letter%20of%20Jeremiah&version=NRSVUE
From https://www.thetorah.com/article/the-curious-case-of-cats
John Morales@33: “They’re not in what is now the canonical babble, but they damn knew about their existence.”
“Bats, swallows, and birds alight on their bodies and heads, and so do cats.”
Note that any mention of the pyramids or other architectural wonders of the ancient Egyptians are also totally absent. Curious that you have to go outside the bible to make a point that the bible does not even make. The Bible does not mention domestic cats at all, and only refers to specific wild cats like lions and leopards. It does not distinguish between different kinds of cats.
And where does it indicate that these are domesticated cats, and where does it show that they attack by “alight on their bodies and heads”? They only knew about African cats. But if you can squint hard enough like bible cultists do, you can generate an apologetic to support literally any point of view.
Bats, swallows and birds” is not biblical. The bible lumps birds and bats together as birds.
Leviticus 11:13 – 19:
“These are the birds you are to regard as unclean and not eat because they are unclean: the eagle, the vulture, the black vulture, the red kite, any kind of black kite, any kind of raven, the horned owl, the screech owl, the gull, any kind of hawk, the little owl, the cormorant, the great owl, the white owl, the desert owl, the osprey, the stork, any kind of heron, the hoopoe and the bat.”
The biblical author’s powers of observation are truly legendary, since they clearly state that insects have 4 legs: Leviticus 11:20 – 23:
“All flying insects that walk on all fours are to be regarded as unclean by you.” There are, however, some flying insects that walk on all fours that you may eat: those that have jointed legs for hopping on the ground. Of these you may eat any kind of locust, katydid, cricket or grasshopper. But all other flying insects that have four legs you are to regard as unclean.”
I would regard 4 legged insects as “injured”. Some butterflies may appear to only have 4 legs, but close examinations show 6.
“From https://www.thetorah.com/article/the-curious-case-of-cats”
And you regard the Torah as a “reliable” source of anything? Mice gang up on a cat and kill it? What kind of cat, and what kind of mice can ever kill a cat? Meanwhile, the Torah describes a bird that is so tall, that an ax head dropped into its ankle deep water didn’t reach the bottom even after 7 years. So the ancient Israelites “obviously” knew all about storks, right?
Aside from your lame occasional obscurantism trolling efforts, do you have any other hobbies?
I remember a video of a Norwegian Lemming aggressively posturing at a stray cat, who was clearly unnerved. The cat climbed up on a pile of big rocks to get away and observe. The Lemming tried to climb and chase, but the rocks were too big for it. Apparently such aggression is normal for the species to dissuade predators from taking the risk of a full-on fight instead of giving them the chase they expect.
Nothing to do with the religious texts, it’s just an amusing image that came to mind.
(sigh) The Babble is not the only source of information about ancient Israelis.
Educate yourself. That is part the Bible. The first 5 books.
From before the Christian fanfic was a thing.
It was not included in the canonical version (you know both are collections of writings over time by different sources, no?) but can be found in Catholic bibles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Baruch
Look, your claim is silly: “the ancient Isrealites did not even know about the existence of the domestic cat”.
Your sole basis is the alleged lack of cats in the Babble, as though that were the sole source of information available.
Cats were not exclusive to Egypt, either, they were domesticated from the Fertile Crescent area.