Interesting insight into the thought processes of a flaming, godless, God hating, liberal.
But this is what we’re up against.
Bring it on idiot.
[Interesting insight into the thought processes of a flaming, godless, God hating, liberal.But this is what we’re up against.]
This is the ideology our children are being taught in public schools and universities. And we wonder why this generation is so messed up.
And it will only intensify.
When someone has to write an essay as long as this one, to make a point, they don’t have a point to begin with.
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Yes, that is what we are up against, and it will not go away. Salon is well funded by those that seek to re-make America.
Wow. The fear they have of Cruz is phenomenal; but to be expected.
Thanks for the ping!
By a tragicomic process of inversion, thus, we have to take Barber seriously, precisely because we would be inclined to disregard him as deeply un-serious, and thereby fail to appreciate the increasing threat that Christianity poses to our Constitutionally godless Republic. The latest reification of this faith-based menace: the proliferating “religious freedom restoration acts.” Nor should we forget the already shockingly successful stealth campaign underway to circumvent Roe v. Wade and deprive women of rights over their own bodies….
Accusations of “bigotry,” trotted out with the intent to silence, should still the tongue of no outspoken atheist. We attack not religious folks as people, but the irrationality inherent in their religion, which is nothing more than hallowed ideology, and therefore is, or should be, as much fair game as, say, socialism….
Yes, we atheists freely admit that no one can epistemologically prove there is no God. But the strength of our convictions should match the validity of the evidence on which they are founded [Well that would be nice…. ]
Sounds good to me. But here’s the pièce de résistance:]
The universe, we now know, did create itself, arising out of a quantum event – a “singularity,” when time and space were wrapped into one — some 13.7 billion years ago, exploding from a tiny speck of unimaginably dense, hot matter to its present dimensions. (And it’s still expanding.) Some four billion years back, it is postulated that a still-unexplained chemical occurrence gave rise to the first self-replicating biological molecule from which began life on Earth and from which we evolved according to the (eminently comprehensible) process of Natural Selection. This renders God, as Richard Dawkins put it, “an excrescence, a carbuncle on the face of science,” unnecessary for any phase of “creation.”[Boldface added in the above for emphasis.]
WOW. This guy is a freaking scientific genius!!!
[NOT!!! He seems entirely ignorant of developments in the physical/natural sciences over the past 25 years. He sounds like a “wind-up toy” sputtering out "memes" of what passes for pop-scientific orthodoxy nowadays.]
Plus his fallacies, which become his premises, are legion. Examples: (1) He reasons from physical cosmology to the imputation that biology arose owing to a “still unexplained” chemical event, probably around 4 billion years ago, of the total 13.7 billion years of cosmic existence. But there’s nothing in physical cosmology suggesting that chemical occurrences per se are the deepest or most fundamental processes in nature. He’s simply begging the question here, building an edifice on an undemonstrated presupposition.
(2) He stipulates, without reservation, the idea that religion itself is the source of disorder in society, on the grounds that it is fundamentally “irrational.” The implication being that, unless “religious ideology” is expunged from “society” — the society that he and his class will “perfect” for us, if we’d only give them the chance — “society” cannot “progress.” I see here only platitudes, not verified propositions. More than that, I see a self-interested person at work … a member of a self-appointed “vanguard” seeking a pay-off.
But he stands up for a woman’s “rights” over her “own body!” [What on earth, precisely, does that mean??? Is this a natural or a positive right? Does it have any limit at all? Note: Evidently, these are not scientific questions; they are political ones.]
And, by the way, what does ANY of this have to do with TED CRUZ???
(3) Adverting back to (1), to his insistence that life arose from an “unexplained chemical occurrence” roughly 4 billion years ago, and this by random evolutionary processes, in a (usually) eternal universe scenario. He is invoking scientific, physical cosmology here, but doesn’t seem to realize the implications. Moreover, he seems to be wildly out-of-whack with current state-of-the-art physics, which increasingly seems to be taking a dim view of an accidental, or randomly evolving universe.
Some cosmological considerations that have come to the fore in the era of Hubble and COBE, two experimental satellite probes of deep space:
(1) Increasingly, evidence accumulates that the universe had a beginning in time, in the Big Bang of a “singularity,” before which event nothing — not time, nor space, nor energy, nor fields, nor organizing principles — existed at all.
(2) Somehow, the initial conditions of standard big bang theory were astoundingly consequent to the emergence of a “low-entropy,” anthropically-friendly — meaning able to bear life — universe, a universe not “static,” but ever “growing,” inflating. The observed fact of cosmic inflation — which over recent eras has been observed to be accelerating (presumably owing to dark energy, which seems to move according to principles at variance to classical Newtonian gravity) — argues for a beginning of time. How can something be said to be accelerating if one does not have a reference time to measure the acceleration against? Such a reference time cannot be infinite (therefore, time is past-finite, it has a beginning): At the very least, no human “measurement” can be conducted in “infinite time.”
(3) When we speak of cosmic inflation, we need to need to recognize that what we humans are able to observe is restricted to the current Hubble expansion, or Hubble volume. That’s because the total universe is not reducible to the currently humanly-visible universe, notwithstanding our magnificent space probes. It takes time for human observation to catch-up with cosmic events already concluded in a deep past, events that can only be conveyed to us human observers at the rate of the speed of light. Thus in an inflationary universe, it seems we humans are put in the perennial position of always having to play “catch-up ball”….
(4) I mention the Hubble Volume because it is key to the assessment of the tremendous proliferation of “eternal universe” cosmological models, which are mainly attempted, it seems to me, for one or two reasons: Either to completely obviate the problem of a “beginning” to the universe (because such a possibility eerily suggests a creator or superintelligence acting in/on Nature, which “we” will not countenance); or simply to insist that all of nature evolves according to purely “natural” (as opposed to supernatural or metaphysical) cause — more or less because science itself can only address “natural” or “physical” cause. Thus such investigators want to reduce the cosmic problem to the capabilities of the “tool” — i.e., the scientific method — they want to use to investigate the problem…. It seems it’s the only tool they’ve got….
Thus the amazing proliferation of scientific cosmologies struggling to get around the idea of a cosmic beginning in space and time, by adverting to various “eternal universe” models — multi parallel universes, ekpyrotic, bouncing universes, eternal boom and bust universes, etc., etc.
All these models require time to be past infinite; i.e., no beginning applies. This is all very Newtonian: For he stipulated that the universe exists for an infinite amount of time with an infinite amount of space and an infinite amount of interacting content. Therefore, as Robert Spitzer notes, “there would have been an infinite number of ‘tries’ to bring about virtually any degree of complexity” [such as associated with living systems in Nature]. But as Spitzer also notes, “Once an infinite number of possibilities is inserted into the probability equations, improbability disappears — and literally anything becomes possible.”
But if everything is ultimately “possible,” given infinite time, and the human mind is finite, how do we get the two to “measure up?” Which begs the question: What is the point of science at all?
At which point, I’d like to cite Spitzer’s cogent observation:
There is much loose talk, even among physicists and philosophers, of “many universes.” In all the theories we have been talking about, there is really just one universe, if we mean by universe the entirety of physical reality that is in any way physically connected to the world we experience. In “multiverse” models, the universe has many “domains,” but they are all parts of the same structure that is governed, ultimately, by one set of fundamental laws. Those fundamental laws may be realized in different ways in different domains, but the fundamental laws are the same in every domain, and the domains physically interact with each other in ways governed by those laws. Similarly, in bouncing or cyclic universe scenarios, there may be different cycles, but all those cycles are all part of a single process governed by one set of fundamental laws. In scenarios with many “branes” in a higher-dimensional universe, those “branes” are not really other universes, by all parts of one physical reality. — Robert Spitzer, S.J., New Proofs for the Existence of God: Contributions of Contemporary Physics and Philosophy, 2010, p. 43.The Hubble Volume test comes in handy here. Most of these multiverse constructs that depend on infinite past time — on obviating a creator — are defeated by this “test.”
It appears that a whole lot depends on the “average” expansion of the Hubble Volume, or HAV. HAV > 1 seems to account quite admirably for the universe we actually live in (based on actual experimental evidence). HAV = 0 represents the case of the “asymptotically static” universe, which doesn’t do much at all. HAV < 0 seems to represent the case of universal chaos, in which not only does nothing get done, but in which nothing can get done.
The scientific case that has been building up over the past two or three decades increasingly is in retreat from presuppositions that chance is the mother of the natural world, of the universe itself.
Indeed, anyone who clings to a belief in a “chancy universe” nowadays needs to grapple with Roger Penrose’s number: 1010123. This is the probability he assigns to the astoundingly low entropy (and anthropically-friendly nature) of the universe, in its initial conditions, to have occurred by chance.
Just a few illuminating reflections in closing:
“Astronomy leads us to a unique event, a universe which was created out of nothing, and delicately balanced to provide exactly the conditions required to support life. In the absence of an absurdly improbably accident, the observations of modern science seem to suggest an underlying, one might say, supernatural plan.” — Arno PenziasMy takeaway: There is a “miracle” at the foundation of the world, at the Beginning. Call it superintellect, or cosmic designer; we Christians call it: God.…A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question. — Fred Hoyle
You find it strange that I consider the comprehensibility of the world to the degree that we may speak of such comprehensibility as a miracle or an eternal mystery. Well, a priori one should expect a chaotic world which cannot be in any way grasped through thought…. The kind of order created, for example, by Newton’s theory of gravity is of quite a different kind. Even if the axioms of the theory are posited by a human being, the success of such an enterprise presupposes an order in the objective world of a high degree which one has no a-priori right to expect. That is the “miracle” which grows increasingly persuasive with the increasing development of knowledge. — Albert Einstein
And in this belief, it seems that recent developments suggest that, if anything, science is “on our side!”
So dear fellow Christians, do not despair when you hear the rantings of ignoramuses like Jeffery Tayler. In the final analysis, he has no rational or logical ground to stand on.
BTW, yet again, what does any of this have anything of substance to do with Ted Cruz???
Thanks ever so much for the ping dear sister in Christ!