Posted on 06/09/2006 6:16:57 AM PDT by tomzz
Hey Chuggy,
before I go to sleep--
I came in late, did you ever cite any specific examples of this?
And, if so--did the people justifying it use Darwinism as a lame "after the fact" excuse (with shades of I.A. Richards' 'existence is its own justification'), or did acceptance of Darwinistic tenet and their corollaries drive them to genocide?
Sleepy cats want to know.
*Yawn*
Cheers!
IMO avid Darwinists have difficulty constructing chains of cause and effect in the physical world by assuming relationships where there may be none. I hardly think think it would be characteristic of them to get it right when their theory in effect is used for justification of genocide. On the face of it, however, it is only consistent: Products of mere physical processes need not be treated with particular care, and in fact should be disposed of if it means improvement for the rest of us. I can understand why some would prefer to be blind to any correlation, just as some prefer to be blind to any suggestion of intelligent design where organized matter performs specific functions.
IF one takes all the claims (direct and implied) of Darwinism, and applies them in a reductio ad absurdum, yes, there is no philosophical protection against genocide, merely from within a Darwinist framework. As a scientific construct, it is explicitly amoral.
What I was asking is whether you had specific examples of Darwinists who had in fact pursued or openly endorsed such a program explicitly on account of Darwinism.
Do you have any such examples?
Cheers!
"You're convinced by mere conjecture when it comes to fossils"
It's not conjecture. I have fossils. I dug them up myself. Some were 100 feet deep in Middle Alabama Clay. They predate 6000 year old world theory by ~55 million years. The exact year is irrelevant because the order of magnitude is WAY more than 6000 years. And to tell people who have collected physical evidence and made scientific theories that work both physically, and mathematically into a coherent model, that the "Poof" theory is "proven" or even better, "law" is way more than conjecture.
"The vicous nature of some vocal Christians turns people off"
If you ask the questions to the extremists just the right way, you will notice is what they really want is an Islamic type of government for their Christian beliefs. Forced prayer in school. Verbal abuse such as I heard in another thread, "your mother is a prostitute" because the person liked the DaVinci Code. Strict adherence to the letter of the bible. Defining the bible as "law". Yep, sounds like Islam to me. And what you will see in coming years is more of a movement away from school prayer, away from government sponsored religion, etc, because extremists have no limits. Once they get their way once, they are plowing over people's rights to get the next thing on their agenda accomplished.
Should we consider Hitler to be a Darwinist? Not really. He was a politician who put the implications of Darwinism into practice. I don't think it is Darwinists themselves who openly espouse genocide, but people who pick up on its implications and apply them.
Well, thanks. I may have blown out my memory on this stuff. Just last night, in another gathering, I confused Dick with Heinlein and 1978 with "the 80s."
As far as what supports my version of events, I could as easily have said, "the peer reviewed articles," but encyclopedias are easier to look things up in. My version is what my civilization generally knows. By elevating yourself to being one of the select few who has the secret that not only was the science of the last 150 years wrong, but the science of the Middle Ages was more correct, you're far more on your own in dealing with what the evidence "maybe" means.
If the evidence could reasonably be interpreted to support any theory at all, science wouldn't spend the time it does gathering evidence. The evidence does matter because there tends to be a single straightforward interpretation and an infinity of the less straighforward, most of them really tortured in how they kink and swerve to fit the outlines of some absurd proposition. Yours is one of the latter. Occam's Razor cuts off the nonsense.
Sometimes there's genuine ambiguity between whether the data support one theory or a very differently structured one. That's seen as a call for more research. Differing predictions can be extracted from different theories so that further observations can distinguish what is going on.
That's certainly true in mainstream science versus literal Genesis. Mainstream science can't find and doesn't need gelogic evidence for a global flood. Literal Genesis needs it, claims it, but is all over the place on where in the geologic column it is and how much of the column it occupies. At any rate, there just is no such feature visible.
Literal Genesis would seem to predict Haldane's Precambrian rabbit. That rabbit ain't comin'. Literal Genesis would seem to predict no radiometric dates would be greater than about 6 thousand years. Nuclear chemistry goes on the trashheap rather than LG, of course.
Which is to say that the very different stories of mainstream science and strict literalism do not make the same predictions. Now, if you start to realize that maybe "day" doesn't have to be what we tend to think, and this and that can be an allegory, then you're probably started on the right track. If it doesn't have to be a science book, you don't have to insist on putting nonsense into science class.
The only way you can ascertain how those fossils came to be, and why they are ordered in a particular sequence, is through conjecture. You do not enjoy the luxury of observing their history in the present day. The breadth of information, coupled with the constraints of time, result in a necessity for reasonable conjecture. That's okay, as long as your conjectures are presented as such, and as long as you do not think your conjectures are worthy of special protection by law.
"Nuclear chemistry goes on the trashheap rather than LG, of course."
Of course! It is much more logical to think that Noah collected two of every animal on the planet and put them in a boat, then the earth was totally submerged in a flood, then the waters receded fast enough for him to get keep all the animals alive, and redistribute them all over the earth, than it is to put forth a "silly" theory like Nuclear fusion, and watch that theory work like a charm in the Bikini Atoll (as well as other places). After all physical proof of a theory actually isn't what it seems. I can't even believe this is a discussion. But it solidifies my thoughts that we don't need prayer anywhere near schools. We'll be bleeding people with leeches again before you know it.
I'll pounce before the creos do. We ARE starting to do that again in a few instances.
The value is not in the blood removal, but in the anticoagulants they inject, and how they clean necrotic tissue around a wound. It isn't that the medecine of 2000 years ago didn't work at all. It had a few things that worked. It just didn't have a clue what was going on or why anything worked or didn't work.
"I'll pounce before the creos do. We ARE starting to do that again in a few instances."
My favorite is putting the maggots in open wounds. Yum. But hey, if it works...
The maggots are also good eating if the Australian aborigine experience tells us anything. (Or so Philip Jose Farmer wrote in his Riverworld novels. If he got that wrong, don't come after me, PC Police!)
Q. What's harder than getting a pregnant Brontosaurus into the ark?
A. Getting a Brontosaurus pregnant in the ark!
(Noah! Make them stop. I'm getting seasick!)
LOL. It does seem that a literal ark would flat line the gene pool pretty quick. But hey, in the lack of any physical evidence whatsoever, I'm gonna pull out an Ace and claim miracle.
Chirp, chirp, chirp....
Observe that I never asserted that you made a tautological statement, I challenged you to replace your erstwhile debating opponent's tautological version of natural selection with a manifestly non-tautological one.
Your debating tactics are on the order of a school-yard "am not" "are too" exchange.
For the good of the defense of neo-Darwinism, or any other cause you believe in, either learn to answer challenges with something more substantive than "is not", "you're wrong" or stop trying to defend your beliefs publicly.
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