Posted on 09/20/2013 4:29:03 AM PDT by spirited irish
Truly, when we suggests the mind/soul/spirit is merely an epiphenomenon of the physical brain he is left with no logical basis for personal responsibility, judicial systems, etc.
And that, as you mention, is because an epiphenomenon cannot cause anything to happen. So it had to be the brain's fault. LOLOL!
"The Mind is as the brain does."
This is a most sweeping claim. So I just need to ask you a question: How do you know that? On what evidence do you depend to come up with this conclusion?
Use drugs and drink booze if you want to test that conclusion.
Please give me a thorough briefing on this matter. for I find your statement totally perplexing.
I'm not your personal secretary or researcher.
Do you believe that the evolution of human beings is essentially random?
Nope.
That the only power in nature that can establish anything new in biology is environmental pulls of Nature itself ("natural selection"), acting on accidents of mutation? (Which are usually fatal to organisms afflicted by such mutations?)
If non-fatal mutations are insignificant, why don't we look alike?
Do you believe there is any such thing as human nature itself?
Yes. We act on our preprogrammed instincts.
Human Nature... ...not a product of some (fictitious) evolutionary process?
What? Does that mean that everyone has the same family size?
If you check the history of the human race, you will find that, over thousands and thousands of millennia (judging from the historical record), that human beings qua human beings do not change much over time.
*cough* Whites, Blacks, East Asians, Ashkenazi Jews, Aborigines, Lactose Tolerance, Carbohydrate Tolerance differences...
I find it positively striking that whether you are consulting records from ancient Egypt, through classical philosophy, through Judeo-Christian writings, or just reading the 14th-century writer Boccaccio (See: The Decameron), the same human problems and concerns always emerge as the same over all historical time.
Let's consult some congo records... Oh wait, they don't have any! Hmmm...
So, how does Darwin's theory help us to understand ourselves? Answer: It doesn't.
Really? Would you rather take a midnight stroll in Honey Boo Boo's white trash neighborhood or Shaniqua Jackson's ghetto neighborhood? Heard of the phrase "alpha ****s, beta bucks"?
It [evolution by natural selection] says there is no human "nature."Man is "unfinished business," just leave it up to Nature to "complete" him.
"The theory of evolution by natural selection: Natural selection is the gradual natural process by which biological traits become either more or less common in a population as a function of the effect of inherited traits on the differential reproductive success of organisms interacting with their environment.
For a given environment, assuming that the living population already exists and that there is a variation of genetic traits in that population, those traits that enable making more babies than the other traits become more common. Split the population in two and put the the two groups in different environments, you'll end up with two different sets of traits being selected for."
You should read my posts before you reply to them.
The next thing you know, the way things are going, is that Man will "evolve" into a machine, or "devolve" into a sub-human, vicious predator.
Looks like your idea of "evolution" is the same as a progressive's idea of "evolution"... pokemon evolution.
Humans are vicious predators. You should start reading history and you should actually read the Bible instead of parroting what your pastor says.
And as long as we can blame his "brain" for doing all this, then Man is not responsible for what happens to him or to his species or the very world around him, which he profoundly influences by his thoughts ands actions. "Nature did it!!!"
Have you heard of the saying, "The stupid shall be punished"?
And oh, by the way, where did DNA come from? Is that an "accident" too, just another evolutionary process?
The theory of evolution by natural selection assumes that life already exists in order for it to work. Not only should you actually read my post, you should read other posts that already answered this.
YHAOS: I take it that your thesis is that “Gnostic dualism” denies free will
Spirited: Irenaeus described Gnostics as very proud (narcissistic), conceited individuals who make up something new every day. Whatever they imagine, desire, hate or covet at any moment is the measure of ‘truth’ and ‘reality.’
So for example, if in order to evade personal accountability and save face Gnostic Mullahs of scientism declare their innocence on the basis of “genes” and “grey matter” (Gnostic fatalism/determinism) this is unquestionably and authoritatively “true” and “real” on the basis of science. But if it happens that something they say or do seems quite brilliant in their eyes then they’ll loudly toot their horns in public in expectation of universal adulation.
Fascinating, dear sister in Christ, thank you for your insights.
To “see” one must look. In the first instance Dawkins represents his opinions as scientific fact and refuses to acknowledge that his opinions are religious. You may twist and turn at your pleasure. Nonetheless, Dawkins states that the “question” of whether there exists a supernatural creator is “scientific” and that his answer is “no.” He does not qualify his response as his “opinion.” He makes his statement as an unqualified assertion, knowing full well it enjoys the notoriety of his reputation as an evolutionary biologist and author (for whatever that is worth).
See Debate/Interview excerpt between Professor Dawkins and Dr Collins, conducted at the Time & Life Building in New York City on Sept. 30, 2006:
TIME: “Professor Dawkins, if one truly understands science, is God then a delusion, as your book title suggests?”
DAWKINS: “The question of whether there exists a supernatural creator, a God, is one of the most important that we have to answer. I think that it is a scientific question. My answer is no.”
In his book, The God Delusion, Dawkins not only declares The Judeo-Christian God to be nonexistent, but also questions the mental state of any practicing Christian (maligning religious people - particularly Christians - as delusional, and worse - misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent). The book’s title likewise makes it manifest that the existence of a god is what he considers them to be delusional about.
See: David Quinn & Richard Dawkins in an interview with Ryan Tubridy on the Ryan Tubridy Show: The main subject of contention was Dawkins’ book The God Delusion.
From the transcript:
Tubridy: “. . . Let’s just talk about the word if you don’t mind, the word delusion, so put it into context. Why did you pick that word?”
Dawkins: “Well the word delusion means a falsehood which is widely believed, and I think that is true of religion. It is remarkably widely believed, it’s as though almost all of the population or a substantial proportion of the population believed that they had been abducted by aliens in flying saucers. You’d call that a delusion. I think God is a similar delusion.”
Professor Dawkins grounds his reasoning in Science.
In other venues Dawkins has gone so for as to propose that parents should not be allowed to teach their children in religious practices and that any who enroll their children in church should have their children taken from them by the state.
“Darwinism” is purely a political system, advanced as a “scientific” theory in an effort to provide a justification for various Socialist/Marxist ideas, and an effort to undermine, or otherwise subvert, Judeo-Christian and Capitalist ideals.
You may as well have a neon sign slapped on your forehead, flashing TROLL.
Now, what is the expiration date on your memory? When will you again not remember what Dawkins has said and need to be reminded? Your defective memory (and that of many of your calumnious associates) is the greatest reason for my reference to “great billowing clouds.”
“Sorry, but the “great billowing clouds” were your hors d'oeuvres”
If you grow weary of my “great billowing” description, abandon and renounce your tactics.
“ there are no such “fans” posting of Free Republic, except in the projections of your own rather fertile imagination.”
Really?! I, and many others of my acquaintance, know differently. We know with whom we are dealing when we encounter correspondents on FR who deny the existence of God, who opine that morality comes only from human heads according to their narrowly defined interests; that any idea to the contrary is the product of childish adults; or when they insist that talking donkeys, talking snakes and other Biblical “fantastic stories” are central to Biblical Instruction. These “fans” mock Christians with sneering references to “Demonic” possession and accusations of the adoption of the principal that a lie, told often enough, acquires a semblance of truth by virtue of sheer repetition. Your blatant denial of the patently obvious is so irrational as to be comedic.
“So far as I know, Aquinas never addressed questions later raised by, for example, Galileo Galilee -- when findings or theories of science seem to contradict scripture.
What?! When Aquinas, in his work Of God and His Creatures, states “Since therefore falsehood alone is contrary to truth, it is impossible for the truth of faith to be contrary to principles known by natural reason” he is telling us that if faith and “principles know by natural reason” appear contrary to each other, then it is obvious that our understanding either of faith or truth (or both) is faulty.
A case in point: Into my late twenties, Science seemed to be quite convinced that the Universe was in a “steady state” and was eternal (some scientists - such as Einstein - suspected this was not exactly accurate as early as the twenties, but this suspicion did not find its way into the general public’s knowledge (or public school text books) for some forty years. But, in the meantime, bible scoffers were pleased to heap scorn on the opening phrase of Genesis, “In the beginning”), claiming that obviously there was no beginning.
In another example; for a very long time a great many people believed that the Biblical phrase “the four corners of the earth” was “proof” that the earth was flat.
We now know that both beliefs were erroneous (although ever since the discovery of the red shift, Einstein’s relativity, and the background noise of the “Big Bang,” Scientists have desperately been trying to walk back the discovery that there was a beginning, which philosophers (including Aquinas), for an uncountable time, had known.
Aquinas cannot be read as though his writings are lab report in a peer-review research paper (nor can the Bible).
“Of course, "science" by definition cannot "prove" any such thing.” (That Science “proves the nonexistence of God.”
Of course. So why do you continue to tell me something you know I know?
“but I've never seen that argument made by posters on Free Republic.”
You strain credulity. Again, to “see” one must look.
My thoughts are hardly worthy of consideration.
But, I think that you ask questions that no Materialist (Naturalist, Socialist, Marxist, Darwinist, Democrat, 0bamatron, Repubic, ad nauseum) can answer. Any more than can they deal with the issues of Free Will, Human Liberty (they are all for the liberty of Apes, dogs, & cats), or Unalienable Rights. Such issues exist beyond the boundaries permitted by their cramped, dehumanized understanding.
Apologies for the tardiness of my reply. Family celebrations intruded.
Oh, I’m sorry. And you did so want the last word. Very well, you may have the last word.
YHAOS: Issues "great billowing clouds" of smoke which in no way address the point.
YHAOS: "If you grow weary of my “great billowing” description, abandon and renounce your tactics."
Abandon the truth? Renounce exposing nonsense?
Never!
B-)
quoting BJK: "...there are no such “fans” posting of Free Republic..."
YHAOS: "These “fans” mock Christians with sneering references to “Demonic” possession and accusations of the adoption of the principal that a lie, told often enough, acquires a semblance of truth by virtue of sheer repetition.
Your blatant denial of the patently obvious is so irrational as to be comedic."
I've seen nothing remotely resembling your description here.
Indeed, mocking comes from the other side, as if science in general and evolution specifically were invented by Nazis to justify the Holocaust!
YHAOS: "[Aquinas] is telling us that if faith and 'principles know by natural reason' appear contrary to each other, then it is obvious that our understanding either of faith or truth (or both) is faulty."
Thank you for confirming my observation that Aquinas never specifically addressed questions about: what, when they appear to conflict?
He merely asserted that they must not.
YHAOS: "So why do you continue to tell me something you know I know?"
Because all your great billowing clouds of smoke strongly suggests you are confused and in doubt on this subject, FRiend.
It is impossible, I say, for the human mind not to believe that there is, in all this, design, cause and effect, up to an ultimate cause, a fabricator of all things from matter and motion.
- Thomas Jefferson
Darwinism, secularism, materialism -- these are notions that have seduced a lot of otherwise clever people into thinking we can simply spend what we received from our forefathers without ever looking to the bottom line.
- From:Try to Imagine Our Country's Founding if the Founders Had Not Been Advocates of Intelligent Design
How would our Declaration of Independence read?
We hold no truths to be self-evident, that all (men) are evolved based on chance, that they are endowed by a mindless chemical process from a mindless universal algorithm with circumstantial alienable rights that among these are a delusion of life, materialistic determinism, and the pursuit of happenstance.DNA has the following:
1. Functional InformationHow could such a system form randomly, without any intelligence, and totally unguided?
2. Encoder
3. Error Correction
4. Decoder
What would come first - the encoder, error correction, or the decoder? How and where did the functional information originate? IOW did the hardware create the software - or did the software create the self-replicating hardware? – All rhetorical questions…
Unguided Chemical Processes Cannot Explain the Origin of the Genetic Code.
To appreciate this problem, consider the origin of the first DVD and DVD player. DVDs are rich in information, but without the machinery of a DVD player to read the disk, process its information, and convert it into a picture and sound, the disk would be useless. But what if the instructions for building the first DVD player were only found encoded on a DVD? You could never play the DVD to learn how to build a DVD player. So how did the first disk and DVD player system arise? The answer is obvious: a goal-directed process -- intelligent design -- is required to produce both the player and the disk.
In living cells, information-carrying molecules (such as DNA or RNA) are like the DVD, and the cellular machinery that reads that information and converts it into proteins is like the DVD player. As in the DVD analogy, genetic information can never be converted into proteins without the proper machinery. Yet in cells, the machines required for processing the genetic information in RNA or DNA are encoded by those same genetic molecules -- they perform and direct the very task that builds them.
This system cannot exist unless both the genetic information and transcription/translation machinery are present at the same time, and unless both speak the same language. Not long after the workings of the genetic code were first uncovered, biologist Frank Salisbury explained the problem in a paper in American Biology Teacher:
It's nice to talk about replicating DNA molecules arising in a soupy sea, but in modern cells this replication requires the presence of suitable enzymes. ... [T]he link between DNA and the enzyme is a highly complex one, involving RNA and an enzyme for its synthesis on a DNA template; ribosomes; enzymes to activate the amino acids; and transfer-RNA molecules. ... How, in the absence of the final enzyme, could selection act upon DNA and all the mechanisms for replicating it? It's as though everything must happen at once: the entire system must come into being as one unit, or it is worthless. There may well be ways out of this dilemma, but I don't see them at the moment.The same problem confronts modern RNA world researchers, and it remains unsolved. As two theorists observed in a 2004 article in Cell Biology International:
The nucleotide sequence is also meaningless without a conceptual translative scheme and physical "hardware" capabilities. Ribosomes, tRNAs, aminoacyl tRNA synthetases, and amino acids are all hardware components of the Shannon message "receiver." But the instructions for this machinery is itself coded in DNA and executed by protein "workers" produced by that machinery. Without the machinery and protein workers, the message cannot be received and understood. And without genetic instruction, the machinery cannot be assembled.From: Top Five Problems with Current Origin-of-Life Theories
Examples of beneficial human mutations in evolutionary literature :
1. Sickle Cell Anemia
2. Cystic Fibrosis
3. Glucose-6-Phosphate Dehydrogenase Deficiency
4. Tay-Sachs Disease
5. Autism
6. Rape
7. Murder
8. Stupidity
Hmmm... That changes?...
How could such a system form randomly, without any intelligence, and totally unguided?
What would come first - the encoder, error correction, or the decoder? How and where did the functional information originate? IOW did the hardware create the software - or did the software create the self-replicating hardware? - (no longer rhetorical questions)
Indeed. Thank you so much for sharing your insights, dear YHAOS!
“I think that you ask questions that no Materialist (Naturalist, Socialist, Marxist, Darwinist, Democrat, 0bamatron, Repubic, ad nauseum) can answer. Any more than can they deal with the issues of Free Will, Human Liberty (they are all for the liberty of Apes, dogs, & cats), or Unalienable Rights. Such issues exist beyond the boundaries permitted by their cramped, dehumanized understanding.”
Spirited: At bottom, evolutionary materialism is a spiritual, religious worldview attempting to answer the Ultimate Questions.
1. Does God exist? They say no
2. Is there an afterlife? They say no
3. What is the cosmos? They say it is void, matter and evolutionary energies working in and through void/matter
4. What is wrong with man and why does evil exist? They say that creation itself is fallen because matter is evil hence what is wrong with man is genetic and chemical, meaning chemical imbalances in the brain.
5.What can be done if anything to redeem man? Answers according to Marxist materialists: Pavlovian conditioning which includes psychological and physical terror; application of brain-altering drugs in order to control, conform and properly channel thoughts; and for the genetically unredeemable, euthanasia, abortion, genocide (60,000,000+ men, women, children).
Lenin kept the statue of an ape on his desk to remind him that the people being ruthlessly butchered by his bully-boys weren’t human beings like himself but unevolved apes.
Thank you so much for sharing your insights, dear spirited irish!
The working analogy is the story of Flatland. Or, if you prefer, the dimensional framework / tesseract explanation offered by Carl Sagan during one of his COSMOS episodes.
Ah! the five questions any self respecting Socialist would ask their-selves.. and instinctively know the answers to..
BUT you never claimed on this thread to be very smart...
And any accusing you of it.. may be projecting..
Its a hard thing for a human to admit considering the deep things of life is a bit too deep for him..
him being like a primate inspecting a Rolex watch.. it don’t tick and he can’t figure out WHY?..
I asked you: Do you believe there is any such thing as human nature itself?
And you answered: Yes. We act on our preprogrammed instincts. Later on, you gratuitously added: Humans are vicious predators. You should start reading history and you should actually read the Bible instead of parroting what your pastor says. [Oh really???]
Here’s what I wonder about: Is Darwinist theory actually telling us that at the very top of the biological hierarchy we find a vicious animal — that is, man? That man is entirely shaped by blind natural processes, rather than that man is shaped by his heredity, the natural environment, and his particular cultural environment?
I have seen efforts by so-called Neo-Darwinist sociobiologists to explain human culture as an evolutionary development in itself. But why would material Nature care about human culture, if Nature purportedly is only interested in the survival of the fittest sexual reproducers, who all boil down to be exclusively material entities? (And yet, doesn’t this in itself imply a final cause at work? See more below.)
On your account, it seems Darwin’s theory leads us to conclude that human beings are preprogrammed to be vicious. Still, I note that not all human beings are “vicious predators.” If that is the case, the ones who are not vicious predators must be doing something to overcome the alleged “preprogramming.” I also note that Darwin’s theory really has nothing to say about the source of the alleged “preprogramming.” It is just “there,” an epistemically prior commitment which is yet totally inexplicable on Darwinian theoretical grounds.
For if something is preprogrammed, two issues instantly arise: (1) A program is constructed to enable a machine to achieve an end, goal, or purpose. But this would be a final cause — something strenuously rejected by materialist science. (2) Programs do not construct themselves: They have a designer; and designers do not reduce to purely material entities.
Seeing the difficulty, Darwinism refuses to grapple with the problem of design in Nature. Rather, Darwinists prefer to speak of apparent design. Which to me is like admitting that Nature is constantly fooling us with a persistent illusion.
This seems to be mantra which you are fond of intoning:
Natural selection is the gradual natural process by which biological traits become either more or less common in a population as a function of the effect of inherited traits on the differential reproductive success of organisms interacting with their environment.How do you reconcile the apparent discrepancy between “preprogramming” and natural selection, which is a alleged to be, as Jacques Monod put it, a purely “natural” process evolving by means of “pure, blind chance,” to no purpose at all?For a given environment, assuming that the living population already exists and that there is a variation of genetic traits in that population, those traits that enable making more babies than the other traits become more common. Split the population in two and put the two groups in different environments, you'll end up with two different sets of traits being selected for.
To me, Darwin’s theory is fundamentally incoherent and self-contradictory through and through. It is not science, but a dogmatic philosophical commitment, an outgrowth of philosophical materialism and the misapplication of Newton’s laws of motion — and it seems the eternal desire of some people at least to escape from God and His Providence (not to mention His Judgment)….
Furthermore, I regard Darwinism itself as a sort of fossil: This is mid-19th-century “science.” Darwin never heard of, for example, Max Planck (who discovered the quantum); Albert Einstein (who discovered the photon and Relativity theory); Gregor Mandel (father of the science of genetics, not to mention he was an Augustinian friar); Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schroedinger, et al. (the pioneers of quantum mechanics); Georg Cantor (father of set theory and the famous incompleteness theorem); Georges LeMaitre (who first conceived of the Singularity, not to mention that he was a Jesuit priest of monsignor rank); Alan Guth (father of the Big Bang/inflationary universe model); Claude Shannon (father of information theory); the list of the great ones goes on and on, but space prohibits extension here.
In short, since Darwin, two great scientific revolutions have occurred — relativity theory and quantum theory — and we are on the threshold of a third great scientific revolution, the information revolution. And yet none of these revolutions have put so much as a dent in Darwinian orthodoxy. Like Ol’ Man River, it just keeps rolling along….
But to me, this is an act of profound denial of some of the greatest achievements of science that have absolute relevance to biology. The late great Harvard evolutionary biologist, Ernst Mayr, was evidently aware of this, and seemingly it troubled him deeply. So deeply, that he made a proposal that biology ought to be regarded as a separate, sovereign science in itself, of a stature equal to physics, but with its own sovereign laws.
But I find such a proposal ridiculous; for biological organisms have a physical basis. It’s just that they don’t entirely reduce to their physical basis. [Which is why I think your statement that “the mind is what the brain does” is pretty lame.] To explain them requires more than physics and chemistry. But you can’t come up with a complete description of biological organisms without physics and chemistry.
And you certainly can’t get to a complete description via Darwin’s evolution theory. It explains less than meets the eye, and defies common sense in the process. I gather this has something to do with a penchant to be satisfied with seeing things as they appear, not as they actually are.
But evidently, its acolytes will defend it to their dying breath.
This attitude is not good — for science. IMHO, FWIW.
Welcome to FreeRepublic, R7 Rocket! Thank you so much for writing.
Spirited irish, you didn’t read my post where I actually stated the theory of evolution by natural selection.
Arguing with YEC’s is like arguing with progressives/feminists.
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