Posted on 12/29/2011 1:01:09 PM PST by daletoons
Atheist militant Richard Dawkins has produced a children's book entitled "The Magic of Reality" and in doing so has joined the Millstone Swim and Dive Club. Spreading his venom for God to kids under the guise of Scientism is about as putrid as it gets. Children using simple God-given logic conclude the existence of a creator. It requires an abandonment of logic to attain self omniscience and declare there is no God. The materialist's faith in the escape hatch of "there just wasn't enough evidence for me" won't wash on judgement day. Here's a book idea: The ghost of Christopher Hitchens, Jacob Marley style, appears to Richard Dawkins and sets him straight. Dickey would probably make a hash of it, too bad Hitchens isn't still around to write it.
You are suggesting your belief (there is no God) is not simply another belief.
I find that silly, as should you. It's okay for you to admit you "believe" there is no God, just don't try to sell it as anything but belief (like equating it to physics).
You are painting yourself into a corner.
It sure enough is. EVERYONE has a belief system of some kind, a worldview if that suits you better.
Some include God, some don't, but it is still a system which operates on *beliefs* as it operates on something that can neither be proved or disproved objectively.
Since it is impossible to produce evidence regarding the existence or non-existence of God(s) then all opinons about his existence or non-existence is pure suposition ( belief).
Again: All sentient beings have a religious worldview. Their worldview is either godless or God-centered. Neither of these two worldviews is religiously neutral in political and cultural content or consequences.
Those are the reasons I refuse to accept it, not what you are implying.
I'm awaiting a better defense from you, but "believe" there is none forthcoming.
No, you are the one with the paintbrush, trying very hard to push me into a corner. But I don’t feel cornered at all. I have seen this behavior before. It’s an attempt to set up the chess board a certain way so that you can then progress down a familiar path that, if everything is done a certain way (usually Pascal’s wager is involved) you end up where you want to be. But it won’t work if you can’t get me to accept that a lack of belief is a belief. It’s not.
The fool has been Zotted !!
Lying is frowned upon here.
Well...If evidence isn't available, then any opionion about his existence or non-existence is pure belief. Is a “duh” needed here?
Fundamentally...All sentient beings have a religious worldview: God-centered or godless and neither is neutral in content or consequences, culturally, politically, or religiously.
Bad form. Not good. Poor choice. All signs of a lost argument.
But there isn't a lack of evidence for God. The evidence for God is all around us.
It doesn't cease to be evidence simply because someone doesn't like it and tries to disqualify it from being evidence based on nothing more than opinion.
Also, the definition of *belief* does not by default mean there isn't evidence. Plenty of things people believe they believe simply because there IS evidence.
Just because there's evidence doesn't mean it ceases to be a belief. Now you may posit that belief in God is done despite lack of evidence and that is certainly your prerogative, but that is merely an opinion of yours that there is no evidence. Others do not share that opinion.
This is not something I really expect any of you to understand. If you could understand it, you wouldn't be religious. These debates usually end up here: with the theist trying very, very hard to recast the atheist as just another kind of theist. Usually you're trying to recast us as some level of satanist who is trying to deny God for dark reasons, or someone who is angry with God. If you can do this to your own satisfaction, you have kept your world God-centered by assigning the atheist a role in it that you can recognize and understand.
I suppose I shouldn't let it irritate me... we are fortunately no longer in an era where your type can get your hands on my type and bring on the copper boot or whatever. Tell you what... I'll let you have the rest of the thread. I actually DO have laundry and errands to run out there in the real world. And we all know this will never come to any conclusion that satisfies anyone. You all have a good 2012, and let's all hope that the truth didn't lie with the Mayans after all.
It's simple, she can't and won't, but she'll continue anyway. Belief systems do that to people....
:-)
Apply it however you see fit :-D
Cheers!
You've got the best part of a year to go shopping, even if it does.
Ciao!
:-)
Lol ing about your cartoon.
of
Canaanites."
****
Sodom and Gomorra were also populated by Canaanite peoples. The residents of the land had warning 600 years before the "ban" was executed that God would judge such depravity. But instead of heeding this warning, they went on into depravity.
We can be sure that if the Canaanite peoples had repented, God would have spared them.
The same God who waited through ten devastating plagues, who waited centuries for the Canaanites to repent, and who time and time again waited and warned the Israelites over a period of 1,000 years is still the same, loving, merciful God today.
A. "I believe, based on my experience (which may be incomplete) and my reasoning (which may be incorrect), that nature and especially man's ability to reason and to distinguish between truth and error are insufficient causes of themselves and that they must, therefore, have both their material and personal/intellectual sources in a being whose nature is sufficient to explain both nature as a contingent whole and man's ability, though he is a part of that contingent whole, to use reason in a non-contingent fashion to arrive at conclusions about nature and human nature that are demonstrably rather than only apparently true.*Against that, we could have something like this:
B. "I believe, based on my experience (which may be incomplete) and my reasoning (which may be incorrect), that nature and especially man's ability to reason and to distinguish between truth and error are sufficient causes of themselves and that they have as both their material and personal/intellectual sources nothing other than nature itself, which is sufficient to explain both nature as a contingent whole and man's ability, though he is a part of that contingent whole, to use reason in a non-contingent fashion to arrive at conclusions about nature and human nature that are demonstrably rather than only apparently true.*It's self-serving to claim that B is not a belief system but that A is because A posits the existence of a cause of nature that is extra-natural, a dualist rather than monist philosophy. The reason for the claim, though, is understandable. He who will admit that both are belief systems writ small must also admit that he is like everyone else, not a special "bright" person, a member of the cognoscenti, an insider who knows the real story, unlike those poor chirping chicks who use semantic tricks to posit things. This is just human nature, as attested to by groups (whether tribal, linguistic, religious, or political) throughout history claiming for themselves the title of human and denying it to those outside their group. It also means that the possibility of being wrong carries with it more serious and unequal consequences: if the theist is wrong, he is ultimately no worse off than the a-theist. If the a-theist is wrong, well...
As an atheist you can’t even speak to any acts that a God you don’t beleive in as being “Good or Not Good”! You have no frame of reference to argue that point other than your own belief system. You can’t even argue that hypocrisy is “good or evil” for in your own view there is no Deus Ex Machina that will judge the “good or evil” of it!
So try again... and consider the Psalmist who said..”The fool hath said in his heart there is no God!” What made him so high and mighty special that he could state such a belief about fools...was it something he ate? Perhaps a little ergot poisoning got into his “milk, bread, and honey”? An evil Flying Spaghetti monster tickled the “God spot” in his right temple? I mean the gall of such a person, calling people fools who didn’t believe in God...why he was just an ignorant 10th century tribal king who just happened to write some of the most foundational poetry, psalms and prophecy forming much of the basis of western judeo thought and political government; and whose genetic and monarchical influence changed the course of history to the point that even the future Romans were in awe of the culture. Yell all you want to about “slaughters and pestilences” of the OT God but be intellectually honest and admit that your concepts that these things might be evil or good come from this same Judeo Christian mindset!
There was something at work in these ancient cruel and crude “Hapiru” that eventually colored the very governmental constitution that grants us our FREEDOMS(even to be atheist if you must be so)!
“where there is smoke...a fire is burning somewhere...but try to find the fire that burns without smoke or consumption”. Moses encounter with God via the Burning Bush, a fire without consumption of the object that was burning, was the most sophisticated concept ever to be found in all existing stories of Gods and legends. The only other time we see such an image again was during Pentecost 50 days after passover and some days after the ascension of Christ...when we find the apostles with flames around their heads but not being consumed by them. This was the work God had begun with Abraham and thru the Hebrews...being finished thru Mary and the only Holy Spirit conceived Son of God, Jesus Christ. The very Logos of God made flesh...
But there isn't a lack of evidence for God. The evidence for God is all around us.
The typical atheist retort at this point is
"the plural of anecdotes is not data".
Which is a philosophically loaded question.
What they are *trying* to say (should they spell it out) is this:
If you give me loosely organized information, not only is the signal-to-noise ratio too low, but the information is not systematic enough, to enable to to "falsify" any claims made on the basis of that information.
The unspoken theme here is that "falsification is necessary."
OK, falsification is necessary...for what?
The less informed, less intelligent, more smug atheists will either take their marbles and go home "I *knew* it was over your head, cretard!" or say "Well, you don't know science".
The more informed will say "Well, you can't do science without it!"
OK, so why do we have to do science in the first place?
Again, the less intelligent will merely result to ad hominem; the more important will painstakingly paint a stereotypical picture presented (without *scientific* evidence, ironically) of how people used to blame gods or demons for things, since they didn't know how the world worked, but now that we have science, we know better. And falsification is necessary for science, and makes it better than superstition. And besides, science *works* and religion doesn't. QED).
The problem is, they fail to remember the philosophical presuppositions which are necessary for science to have gotten a firm grounding, and, as well, the care taken by science to make sure these conditions inhere in any system under study, in order that scientific techniques become useful.
These can be summarize by the following brief quip:
Uniformity of causes in a closed system.
A minutes' reflection on this enables one to see, given this, why chemistry, physics, and mechanical engineering are sciences, but sociology, and medicine are NOT.
But the problem with philosophy is a little deeper than that.
First, as to the question of God...the question under consideration is, quite literally, whether they system *is* closed. "Is there a God" means "is there something or someone outside of nature?"
So using an ansatz which proceeds from the assumption "there is nothing else" is not going to be a marvelously efficient tool for resolving this question.
The atheist may then revert to the second line of defense, which is, "Well, we can use science, so that proves it's true!"
Philosophically, this can be expressed as "correlation does not imply causation." The fact that predictions of science are borne out is not sufficient to prove (logical proof, tautology) that the claims are accurate.
The rules of science are given by Feynman's famous quip that "If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong." In other words, tomorrow may happen to have an experiment in which relativity is refuted, or conservation laws broken, or a living Tyrannosaur captured. And if that happens, it's the theories which must give way.
And the third, is the complimentarity principle. Newtonian physics fails in both the relativistic and quantum regime. Therefore Newtonian physics cannot be "true" but only act as a useful predictive model.
The larger philosophical issue is that neither "root cause" questions nor moral questions can be resolved by science: the very categories considered are different. To borrow from my earlier post, one might analyze the paint samples on a canvas to see if the work is genuinely by Seurat, and eliminate the possibility if it shown that (say) the pigment on the paint was only invented last year, or the paint is still wet(!); but this kind of disproof does not serve to solve the question of whether Seurat really lived, or whether supposed historical accounts of his favorite food for lunch are accurate.
Atheists pretend that it does.
As far as morality, C.S. Lewis came up with the most concise explanation in The Abolition of Man:
From propositions of fact no practical conclusion can ever be drawn. This will preserve society cannot lead to do this except by the mediation of society ought to be preserved. This will cost you your life cannot lead directly to do not do this: it can lead to it only through a felt desire or an acknowledged duty of self preservation. The Innovator is trying to get a conclusion in the imperative mood out of premises in the indicative mood: and though he continues trying to all eternity he cannot succeed, for the thing is impossible..
There is a certain analogy here to the "efficacy" of evolution, of the blather about survival value: often one reads of "such and such being favored, because it has 'survival value' " (think The Selfish Gene and the like).
The problem is this: IF a particular adapatation, change, or mutation, *if spread throughout the species*, will result in increased survival probability (as I.A. Richards was quoted by C.S. Lewis elsewhere, "a concept as unemotional as a definite integral"), this in no way guarantees either that
a) that mutation is likely to occur in the first place
b) that adaptation will result in greatly increased survival odds for the first few individuals (the first brood, clutch, or whatever) to possess it.
Two "philosophical, general" examples, and then a concrete one.
If you have a system which allows you a 2% greater chance of picking a winning lottery ticket, then yes, it is true, over the long term, your winnings will be MUCH greater than someone else who doesn't have the advantages of your system.
And it is on this basis that evolution claims to work, it is a statistical happening.
The problem is, in the short term, those odds aren't going to be enough to guarantee that the first possessors of a gene live long enough to make it to breed. And if they don't live long enough to breed, the mutation is wasted and cannot accumulate.
(Think of having a "bad run of luck" or a "hot streak" at the casino. You can do significantly better or worse than that predicted by gross statistics, for a short period of time. And evolution is always held true for *populations* : but when a gene is first expressed, at least for macroscopic, multicellular creatures, you're not dealing with a statistical ensemble. You've got a single generation or two from a single nest or clutch, or whatever. And if they get eaten while in the egg, or still in diapers, you're hosed. The overall improved statistics for a whole population don't get to kick in.)
The second example is from chemical kinetics, the difference between a set of products being thermodynamically favored over the reactants, and the reaction rate as observed.
Thermodynamic equilibrium constants characterize the final proportions of reactants and products within a chemical system, based on energetic and entropic considerations. For example, the relative concentration of water molecules, over the concentration of hydrogen and oxygen, at equilibrium, is for all practical purposes, infinite.
And yet, throughout the universe there are vast quantities of oxygen and hydrogen which just hang around, unreacted.
The fact that there is a certain "energy barrier" to reaction: the hydrogen and oxygen molecules must actually run into each other in order to react; and, the rate the reaction occurs at depends not only on the number of collisions, but the relative velocity of the hydrogen and oxygen upon impact, and the internal quantum states of the molecules.
If there are too few collisions occurring, or the molecules are colliding at too low of an energy, or are in the wrong quantum states, the reaction simply will never happen.
No matter how thermodynamically favored the products are.
The analogy to evolution is this: "fitness" is akin to thermodynamic favorability of a configuration of atoms. But a system cannot (in general) "automatically" go from reactants to products; there is generally a certain amount of energy required for the reaction to proceed. And so it is with evolution: no matter how much of a survival advantage inheres to the species by an adaptation, that adaptation alone cannot indemnify or protect the individuals against *all* sources of death, prior to subsequent breeding and propagation of the gene.
And without that, the mutation, even should it occur, is not guaranteed to be efficacious.
The point here is not "Look, I've disproved evolution!": but rather, the common description of evolution is too facile: since the putative mechanism of accumulation of beneficient mutations is less robust than commonly presented, (average probability for many trials ^= repeated constant probability for each individual trial in the ensemble), an observation of a trait throughout a population CANNOT be taken as "proof" that "a favorable change to a gene" propagated throughout the population.
That's not to say it CAN'T happen: but the delivery of the scientific popularizers is "it MUST happen".
A real resolution would require much more detailed information than is available now -- including a detailed mapping of the death of all causes within each evolutionary microniche for the organism in question, the relative importance of the form of death affected by the beneficial mutation, and how much of an improvement in survival is affected with respect to that particular form of death by that particular mutation.
Because, after all, survival pressure is the name of the game.
Trivial counterexample: why didn't the Dodo adapt to the dogs and pigs by suddenly mutating to fly, or lay its eggs in trees, or adapting new neural connections to allow it to kick at predators and drive them off?
"These things take time." Right.
So we conclude that if a particular environmental change takes place more quickly than the organism can adapt, the organism will go extinct.
And we conclude secondly, that a detailed understanding of sensitivity analysis is necessary to do any accurate, detailed predictions in the wild.
But I never see or hear any biologists or evolutionists discussing these things on forums.
Full Disclosure: another interesting pair of topics would be
"how close to fully adapted to its niche is each species today, and what is the "shape" of the fitness function (think 'frequency of small oscillations in a potential minimum from classical physics) --> to determine the expected "rate" of observed evolution today"
"can we induce bulk macroscopic changes *today* in controlled populations (e.g. the evolution or disappearance of a tail, creation of limbs or wings) as is held to have occurred in the past? can the environments which heavily favor such mutations be selectively engineered, and then, a large enough population bred -- by anaology to the ergodic theorem turned inside out -- that we can *observe*, measure, and characterize these mutations as they appear in real time?"
Cheers!
My wife is pestering me to go shopping, so I'll mull over how to recast my *actual* question, so you don't conflate a re-casting and a mixing of my statements with Dan's, with an answer to my question.
Enjoy your pheasant...and in the meantime, my doctorate is in molecular physics, so I appreciate the bra-ket notation. :-)
Cheers!
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