Pheobe Debates The Theory of Evolution

Original scene from the show... Friends. ^ | NA | NA

[Mr.Atos]

I was just lisening to Medved debating Creationism with Athiests on the air. I found it interesting that while Medved argued his side quite effectively from the standpoint of faith, his opponents resorted to condescension and beliitled him with statements like, "when it rains, is that God crying?" I was reminded of the best (at least most amusing)debate that I have ever heard on the subject of Creationism vs Evolution, albeit a fictional setting. It occurred on the show, Friends of all places between the characters Pheobe (The Hippy) and Ross (The Paleontologist). It went like this...

Pheebs: Okay...it's very faint, but I can still sense him in the building...GO INTO THE LIGHT MR. HECKLES!!

Ross: Whoa, whoa, whoa. What, uh, you don't believe in evolution? Pheebs: Nah. Not really. Ross: You don't believe in evolution? Pheebs: I don't know. It's just, ya know, monkeys, Darwin, ya know, it's a, it's a nice story. I just think it's a little too easy.

Ross: Uh, excuse me. Evolution is not for you to buy, Phoebe. Evolution is scientific fact. Like, like, the air we breathe, like gravity... Pheebs: Uh, okay, don't get me started on gravity.

Ross: You uh, you don't believe in gravity? Pheebs: Well, it's not so much that ya know, like I don't *believe* in it, ya know. It's just...I don't know. Lately I get the feeling that I'm not so much being pulled down, as I am being pushed.

Ross: How can you NOT BELIEVE in evolution? Pheebs: [shrugs] I unh-huh...Look at this funky shirt!!

Ross: Well, there ya go. Pheebs: Huh. So now, the REAL question is: who put those fossils there, and why...?

Ross: OPPOSABLE THUMBS!! Without evolution, how do YOU explain OPPOSABLE THUMBS?!? Pheebs: Maybe the overlords needed them to steer their spacecrafts!

Pheebs: Uh-oh! Scary Scientist Man!

Pheebs: Okay, Ross? Could you just open your mind like, *this* much?? Okay? Now wasn't there a time when the brightest minds in the world believed that the Earth was flat? And up until what, like, fifty years ago, you all thought the atom was the smallest thing, until you split it open, and this like, whole mess o' crap came out! Now, are you telling me that you are so unbelievably arrogant that you can't admit that there's a teeny, tiny possibility that you could be wrong about this?!?

Pheebs: I can't believe you caved. Ross: What? Pheebs: You just ABANDONED your whole belief system! I mean, before, I didn't agree with you, but at least I respected you. Ross: But uh.. Pheebs: Yeah...how...how are you gonna go in to work tomorrow? How...how are you gonna face the other science guys? How...how are you gonna face yourself? Oh! [Ross runs away dejected] Pheebs: That was fun. So who's hungry?

[unspun]

I'll sign on to your draft agreement without hesitation, A-G.

I haven't seen the resolution... but who could say anything against science?

[f.Christian]

To: gg188

The whole apparatus of scientism is cult-like from the ceremonial white lab coats down to the ... ritualized curses --- hurled at Christians. And now...the sacrifices on the strange biotech altars. The hominid skeletons serve the role of hallowed saints' relics.

93 Posted on 08/08/2001 21:03:43 PDT by veritas_in_enigma

[Right Wing Professor]

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-backroom/955167/posts

[CobaltBlue]

If I say that it is a simple, objective fact that if everybody followed the Golden Rule, we'd all be better off, would you bring in De Sade and baby torturers to refute me?

The difference between the Golden Rule according to Jesus and the Golden Rule according to Ayn Rand is that Christians do it out of love for their fellow man (at best) and fear of God (at worst) while Objectivists do it out of enlightened self-interest.

But it's objectively true regardless of the source. If we all lived our lives so as not to initiate force or fraud against each other, we'd all be better off.

[f.Christian]

To: f.Christian

That's basically correct as far as I can tell. There are Heraclitean and atomistic aspects, of course, which one also finds in ancient Greek pre-Socratic philosophy, but the adherents of scientific materialism don't seem to really understand philosophy that well. You'll notice those responding who hold specific grudges against Christianity - considered by most intellectual historians as a rather integral contributor to the development of modern science - they ingnore as far as possible any positive accounts of Christians, like Newton's considerations of light having some background in the Middle Ages, Robert Grosseteste, etc.Reality has to be understood to have a certain order in order for it to be intelligible and in the Christian tradition the order of nature and the universe have been understood as part of the providential order of God. But with the type of scientism which fetishizes empirical methods for establishing knowledge, there is a subtle depreciation of the intellect's capacity to comprehend rationally a pervading order to reality as such. It's hard to figure why one would fantasize that the empirical methods of scientific materialism, cancelling the intelligibility of the consciousness of the knower, reveal EVIDENCE negating the propositions of Christian theology, the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, the divinity of Christ, the drama of redemption, distinctions between moral good and evil. The only way they can make it do that is by reverting to a mythological ideology which is merely willed as being the true account of ultimate reality. The anthropological rituals with the monkey bones, the evolutionary charts, etc. these do not establish what is really the reductionistic materialism of this Weltanschauung. That is a function of the will of the materialist as it attempts to impose this imaginary picture of reality - a materialistic, Epicurean universe. Mobile matter without the Logos. There is no "scientific" reason to accept this ideological vision as "proven." It's not. It's just the product of the imagination, largely, of agnostics or atheists with sex hang-ups and grudges against Christianity. It's an obsessive complex. The pictures of the monkeys, the apes, the hominids, etc. play the same "mythical" role (although on a different level) as, say, the illustrated Children's Bible. They are comforted by these images. "The Beast Within." They give them a "story" (a mythos) which structures the range of emotions and sentiments which one finds among those ... disturbed people --- who read the Ayn Rand books and frequent Science Fiction conventions. Same basic emotional types. Hence, some of the threatening and extreme rhetoric in the anti-Christian tirades. You do find troubled, confused souls among those who take this path. The variations of the ad hominem, attacking Jesus and so forth. The study of religion,theology, ethics, and spiritual psychology is a highly sophisticated philosophical discipline which empirical or laboratory science in now way destroys (in the fantastic manner imagined by such proponents). At any rate, we'll all find out some day. Does scientific materialism offer any exhaustive explanations of, say, Love? Logically, explore propositional responses to the question "what is love" and try to make it make sense in an absurd, materialistic universe that doesn't have a meaning or a purpose for humanity. That's their position. Weird. It doesn't seem at all clear that such a position is "proven" by empirical "science." There are realities and verities to human existence beyond anatomy charts and the Smithsonian natural history narratives. Nothing Darwin or Carl Sagan ever did changes that.

160 Posted on 08/12/2001 17:06:44 PDT by veritas_in_enigma

[Aric2000]

But it's objectively true regardless of the source. If we all lived our lives so as not to initiate force or fraud against each other, we'd all be better off.


Truer words were never spoken!!

[conservababeJen]

But I'm not done calling you names!!!

And *sigh*...being nice will surely take alotta fun out of this, but ok, deal,....fresh start.

I guess I'll have to slum over to DemoRat Underground to have any fun now

[js1138]

On the other hand, his theory might help to explain why major chords produce one emotional response in every culture, whereas minor chords produce a very different response.

I'm not convinced that's true.

There are some really interesting things about music worth discussing. For example, instruments and objects judged to have a musical sound as opposed to noise -- bells, horns, stretched strings, as opposed to garbage can lids -- have overtones that are rational multiples of the primary frequency (i.e. thirds, fourths, fifths, sevenths). The original musical scles of the Greeks matched these intervals.

But this didn't allow transposing songs to different keys, and didn't allow instruments having a different natural pitch to play together.

So the tempered scale was invented. Now our notes are separated from each other by a ratio of 2^1/12. This means that all starting notes for any song are equivalent, because every note is separated from its neighbors by the same interval.

But the downside is that complex chords are now dissonant with their own overtones. This is really obvious with pipe organs.

So one of the mysteries of music is how it seem so right, when the western musical scale is unrelated to any natural phenomenon and clashes with our sense of what natural sounds are "musical".

[f.Christian]

To: f.Christian

Yeah. Hee, hee. The obsession with the picture charts of the various hominids is a bit much. Sort of like the hairy creature Bill Hurt metamorphosed into in "Altered States." Now, the post-empirical ideological interpretation in which man is proposed merely as some sort of "advanced" chimpanzee is going beyond the evidence. There's no empirical justification for asserting that man (Homo sapiens) is a "merely" anything. The attempt to deny the spiritual element in man, God's image, etc., is not justified by any observations. Why does a scientific materialist want to do that? You have to look at other motivations, emotional factors, the personality type. Most atheists of this type tend to be left-brain dominant, slightly alienated from natural affections, etc. One guess might be that they were not held very often by their mothers when they were infants. That was almost certainly true of the types involved in the debates in Victorian England. There's that book _Faith of the Fatherless_ that puts some of this in perspective. Some have difficulty believing in a loving God because they did not feel much love from their parents. Nietzsche's a classic case of a boy who was whipped and caned by a cruel father. You sort of have to feel sorry for him. And, of course, he became a raving lunatic. Wherever you have someone with problems with ... affection --- a tendency toward cruelty, and sadistic tendencies in general, you have to look at the childhood experience and psychodrama. And, of course, with materialistic evolution, there's a desire to define reality as essentially the struggle for the "survival of the fittest," mutually sadistic rivalry between humans - Strife.

172 Posted on 08/13/2001 15:16:53 PDT by veritas_in_enigma

[Aric2000]

You can call me names, just do it via Freepmail, I won't tell anyone!! ;)

Fresh start it is then.

[NewLand]

Totally Flame Resistant

[Lurking Libertarian]

If man evolved from monkeys and apes, then why do we still have monkeys and apes?

Do you believe that dogs evolved from wolves? (I ask that because most creationists I have discussed this with accept that as an example of "micro-evolution" or "adaptation within a created kind"). If you do believe that dogs evolved from wolves, do you wonder why we still have wolves?

[f.Christian]

To: Gladwin

Those are valid points. To some degree. Probably defining a "rational person" with a code of morality goes beyond the epistemological methods of empirical science, just a tad. A rational philosophy can be legitimate and even the ethical writings of the pre-Christian Aristotle and Cicero display this. Whether the universe exhibits an order, an intelligent design, open to cosmological theism, etc., is up to the ... professional --- scientists to debate. That's a valid discussion. One could propose the utilitarian benefits to society of people honoring theistic ethical codes like the Judaeo-Christian ones. Prohibition of murder, theft and so forth. A sense of the intrinsic worth and sacredness of the individual person. It's a philosophical debate whether or even how this might be "known" and understood. How do we KNOW it is wrong to kill a person and so forth. I welcome that type of discussion. Thanks for raising the topics. The points are well taken. I think these types of friendly discussions, with some differences of opinion or interpretation, are healthy for a free and open society.

[NewLand]

"This is why I'm here"

I for one am glad that you are here! Great testimony...

[conservababeJen]

No, actually, I don't. If you saw a photo of my dog, you would understand why.

Suffice it to say that he looks like a large hamster.

[Aric2000]

And 1286 was the last statement I will make on that particular subject. It is in the past, done and over.

[f.Christian]

To: f.Christian

"Love" is the...uh... monkey wrench (pardon the pub) in the evolutionary paradigm. If, anthropologically speaking, we find behaviour which tends to go against the "survival of the fittest," how does that fit in the paradigm? So, they just bracket that. Human behaviour at its deepest and most fundamental levels doesn't necessarily fit the ... Darwinoid --- mythology. And, of course, not all scientists fit the Ubermensch image of physical excellence of the myth. The mythology becomes caught up in the fantasy images and physique preferences of the Darwinoid.Shouldn't we all be perfect 7-ft Olympians by now, according to the myth? That's the weird part. It's just hard to figure why so much emotionalism accompanies the claims. Why get excited about it if the universe is a meaningless, clockwork machine without any purpose? What difference would it make one way or the other?

175 Posted on 08/13/2001 17:22:34 PDT by veritas_in_enigma

[Junior]

I just sat through a four-hour ethics course. At no point was any appeal made to a supernatural authority as a reason for acting ethical. Indeed, the entire reason for acting ethical boiled down to "it makes good business sense." If people trust you they will do business with you; if they don't trust you they'll go to your competitor. Trust becomes the very foundation of all human transactions.

We are social critters. We need each other to survive, because individually we are weak and make a great meal for a goodly number of predators. Plus, individually, we have a hard time procuring that which we need to survive. Because we need to work as teams, trust is paramount. The great ethical philosophies, including those predating Christianity, realized this. The golden rule cropped up independently in a half dozen civilizations simply because it is rational and promotes survival. One did not need to be a God-fearing Christian to realize this.

[conservababeJen]

I'm sorry...but if this was ever a wolf, I beg you to tell me what makes it "fittest". How can Darwin explain this away? This is proof that God has a sense of humor...

NOTE: THAT is NOT my dog!!

[RightWingNilla]

Prokofiev's 'Troika' from the Lieutenant Kije Suite BTW, I'd be astonished if there were anyone who hasn't heard this piece,

Every Christmas time on "rock" radio stations they play Emerson Lake and Palmer's "I believe in Father Christmas" constantly. THe little keyboard part in the middle is from Lt. Kije.

Prokofiev also wrote the Romeo and Juliet Ballet parts of which would be instantly recognized by most people.

Stravisnky is my favorite, but I think he emigrated from Russia around WWI?