Posted on 11/17/2003 6:02:20 AM PST by Tribune7
The idea that he is a devotee of reason seeing through the outdated superstitions of other, lesser beings is the foremost conceit of the proud atheist. This heady notion was first made popular by French intellectuals such as Voltaire and Diderot, who ushered in the so-called Age of Enlightenment.
That they also paved the way for the murderous excesses of the French Revolution and many other massacres in the name of human progress is usually considered an unfortunate coincidence by their philosophical descendants.
The atheist is without God but not without faith, for today he puts his trust in the investigative method known as science, whether he understands it or not. Since there are very few minds capable of grasping higher-level physics, let alone following their implications, and since specialization means that it is nearly impossible to keep up with the latest developments in the more esoteric fields, the atheist stands with utter confidence on an intellectual foundation comprised of things of which he knows nothing.
In fairness, he cannot be faulted for this, except when he fails to admit that he is not actually operating on reason in this regard, but is instead exercising a faith that is every bit as blind and childlike as that of the most unthinking Bible-thumping fundamentalist. Still, this is not irrational, it is only ignorance and a failure of perception.
The irrationality of the atheist can primarily be seen in his actions – and it is here that the cowardice of his intellectual convictions is also exposed. Whereas Christians and the faithful of other religions have good reason for attempting to live by the Golden Rule – they are commanded to do so – the atheist does not.
In fact, such ethics, as well as the morality that underlies them, are nothing more than man-made myth to the atheist. Nevertheless, he usually seeks to live by them when they are convenient, and there are even those, who, despite their faithlessness, do a better job of living by the tenets of religion than those who actually subscribe to them.
Still, even the most admirable of atheists is nothing more than a moral parasite, living his life based on borrowed ethics.
(Excerpt) Read more at worldnetdaily.com ...
As Audar Abu Tayi, the Anthony Quinn character, said in Lawrence of Arabia:
"I carry twenty-three great wounds all got in battle. Seventy-five men have I killed with my own hands in battle. I scatter, I burn my enemies' tents. I take away their flocks and herds. The Turks pay me a golden treasure, yet I am poor! Because I am a river to my people!"
It started with betty boop’s remark at post 567 that ”quantum theory, on the other hand, predicts that there is no such thing as a discrete object” to which you replied at post 621 that ” quantum mechanics in fully compatible with the existence of discrete objects. “.
My response to you at post 684 was intended to stay in the realm of quantum mechanics/quantum field theory, not classical physics. I said:
Physicists tend to explain the Higgs as either (a) a "field" or "mechanism" or (b) a particle. Remember that in quantum eletrodynamics, the same entity can be a wave (or as a series of waves, a "field") or a particle. The Higgs, too, might have options.
Visualizing the Higgs as a particle has problems. How would a Higgs add mass to another particle? Is mass an added property, like a wad of bubble gum stuck to the side of a tennis ball? That hardly seems likely, but it is hard to imagine a Higgs particle adding mass to other particles without imagining some sort of aggregation. Furthermore, if the Higgs is the contributor of mass, it presumably must have enormous mass itself. If it has such mass, why hasn't it been observed already? Even nimbler, lighter, and shorter-lived particles might be elusive but they have been observed. Why not the densest thing in the universe?
As a field, perhaps the Higgs makes more sense. The Higgs needs to provide a theoretical mass value when it is factored into other equations/reactions. Whereas a Higgs particle doesn't contribute anything to calculations requiring mass, a Higgs field does. Imagine that a particle gained its mass, not by aggregation with another particle, but by interacting with a force field. David Miller, of University College, London, explains the field/interaction idea this way: "In order to give particles mass, a background field is invented which becomes locally distorted whenever a particle moves through it. The distortion-the clustering of the field around the particle-generates the particle's mass." The idea comes from the physics of solids. Imagine a solid, say, our tennis ball, contains a lattice of positively charged crystal atoms. When an electron moves through the lattice, its atoms are attracted to it, causing the electron's effective mass to be as much as 40 times bigger than the mass of the electron when it is free of the field. Crystal lattices carry waves without needing electrons to move through them, and these waves even behave as though they are particles. "The postulated Higgs field in the vacuum," Miller conjectures, "is a sort of hypothetical lattice which fills our Universe."
Simon Hands at CERN provides an alternative analogy. The Higgs field is like the grain in a plank of wood. "The direction of the grain is undetectable, and only becomes important once the Higgs' interactions with other particles are taken into account. For instance, all particles called vector bosons can travel with the grain...." In this case, the same particle travelling one direction (say, "with the grain") would have one identity-a photon, perhaps-and travelling in the other direction ("against the grain") another identity-perhaps a Z or W boson. The Higgs field, then, could actually simplify the Standard Model by making mass an outcome of the activity of particles rather than one of their unchanging characteristics.
Physicists' energetic defense of their informed beliefs might remind us of the story of the blind men and the elephant. For lack of proper instruments (eyes), the blind men guessed about the elephant's appearance based on the information available to them. So it is with physicists and the Higgs factor. "Take a poll in, say, the Fermilab cafeteria on what exactly the Higgs is," writes David Kestenbaum, "and you could very well start a food fight." Is it a field? Is it a split-second pairing of particles? Is it a major flaw in the Standard Model, requiring many more particles to be named? The instrumentation is vital for discovering the links and finding experimental evidence of the mass-factor, whatever it is. A new generation of colliders may well provide the answers in the next few years. CERN's LEP collider, limited by the energies it deals in, could identify a "light" Higgs factor. The facilities at Fermilab could detect a somewhat "heavier" Higgs, and CERN's Large Hadron Collider, which will replace Fermilab's Tevatron as the highest-energy accelerator in the world, would probably be able to identify an even "heavier" Higgs.
Furthermore, Yockey’s work dovetails quite nicely into the research on autonomous biological self-organizing complexity. The indication is that the evolutionary process is not happenstance, that evolution is not a directionless walk after all.
That doesn’t mean evolution didn’t happen but - IMHO - it may go a long way to explain the non-mutability of regulatory control genes which leads to eyeness developing seemingly independently across phyla, the absence of new phyla since the Cambrian explosion, the relatively rapid evolution considering finite opportunity and other such anomalies.
As to the applicability of Shannon entropy to biological systems:
Abstract In the last decade, two tools, one drawn from information theory and the other from artificial neural networks, have proven particularly useful in many different areas of sequence analysis. The work presented herein indicates that these two approaches can be joined in a general fashion to produce a very powerful search engine that is capable of locating members of a given nucleic acid sequence family in either local or global sequence searches. This program can, in turn, be queried for its definition of the motif under investigation, ranking each base in context for its contribution to membership in the motif family. In principle, the method used can be applied to any binding motif, including both DNA and RNA sequence families, given sufficient family size.
Introduction Gatlin (1) first recognized that the Shannon expression for string entropy might prove useful in sequence analysis. This function is a statistical average for the distribution of possible characters at a particular position in a message. [Although it shares the form of the Gibbs–Boltzman entropy function it is independently derived and nonisomorphic with that function (2, 3).] Gatlin insightfully proposed that this function, originally developed to assay the fidelity with which strings could be transmitted in noisy communication channels, was also appropriate for the analogous transmission of string information represented in the central dogma of genetics. Schneider et al. (4) subsequently developed a redundancy index (RI), based on this function, to profile a given family of DNA-binding-site sequences. This index measured the reduction in Shannon entropy relative to the background DNA, represented in the strings of the sequences belonging to a particular motif….
With all due respect, Right Wing Professor, I’m not about to ignore Yockey simply because you disagree with him.
I won't change. But let's not assume that they are the same thing. I suspect they aren't There is some overlap, in that some versions of the antropic principle are really nothing but pure declarations of astonishment that we're here, but I think there's more to it than that.
*sigh*... What do you think will happen to your supposed 'objective good' once you die? If no one picks it up behind you and carries it on, does it not cease to exist, thus proving its lack of true objectivity?
Though imagine that you could somehow reach your goal.
Immortality and total 'convenience' for all. Now what?
The also last administration refused to speak directly to suggestions of dishonesty, feigning the same civility. As long as you commit yourself to fraud, I don’t care what you think. Just consider any of my post with your name in the “to” field as a courtesy when speaking about you.
I can’t see any other explanation for Alamo-girl’s behavior other than blatant fraud. I expected more honesty from such an established Freeper.
She’s misrepresenting atheistic origins of life probability in the most obvious way, and she refuses to address it directly in the same plain English in which she promotes such a fraud .
After practically begging her repeatedly to summarize the relevance of the labyrinth of theories she insists on as her only rebuttal, we’re given a wondering 1200 word parade of esoteric jargon and links of no clear relevance. That’s dishonest. She did however include this interesting piece:
The posters at Talk-Origins are not speaking to issues of information theory at all. Information theory is the focus of Yockey’s analysis. The best analogy I could think of off-hand is one guy saying it is hot outside and another thinking he has rebutted that statement by answering “but the grass is green.”That’s right, and dismissal of Hoyle and Yockey calculations from the 70s are not dependent on her list of newer controversial info theories. But that’s the only basis own which she’ll address them. That’s obfuscation. And when someone ignores that and responds in such a nonsensical way as in her above “grass is green” example, the reason’s usually clear. Like when Carville refuses to discuss perjury, only right wing conspiracies and the evil Ken Star. That’s exactly what Alamo-girl’s doing in refusing to address the refutation of the garbage that she promotes.
What’s worse is that she’s playing others who trust her for fools, egging on people like Tribune7 who may or may not be able to compose a logical rebuttal , but can be relied on to post garbage like this story and launch into name-calling.
After years of chronicling Clinton atrocities, Alamo-girl may think that dishonest tactics like this are rewarded, but that would be a mistake. Clinton succeeded because of rare talents and timing, and was probably crippled from real greatness by his tactics. Alamo-girl does a similar disservice to Christianity by sinking to such low of behavior.
Over the years dozens of Christians have pulled at me though the romance of their journey and the strength of their integrity. But post like these of Alamo-girl reinforce my understanding and commitment to objectivist (atheist) ideologies. If her blatantly dishonest tactics weren’t so disruptive to the larger purpose shared by us all, I’d thank her.
However it’s not to our advantage to sink to such dishonesty to win a convert or two, while stirring anger and disrespect among many. We’re all served by people happy pursuing the best of virtually any ideology, rather than showing their worst in its promotion. Happy Christians and atheists honorably working toward a better society is not enhanced by such a silly fraud.
If you want to discuss dishonest tactics, elfman2, I suggest you start by looking into a mirror. Your screed is illogical in form and baseless in fact -- all heat and no light. I would love to understand the motivation that produces hit pieces like this.
At the end of the day, you and others around here behave as if you thought A-G's open-ended speculation might actually be true, not false as you claim. If it were false, and therefore something safely ignored, you wouldn't need to invest so much energy in character assassination.
She articulates an argument. She answers your questions. She provides links to back it up, and you impugn her character.
Why the personal attack?
I think that if you will seriously engage her on the issues, you'll find that she'll honestly deal with whatever subject matter you have. The longer I know her, the more I respect her ... even as I sometimes don't agree with her.
A lot of people around here really are dishonest. She's not one of them. Please, give your evaluation of her some reconsiderion.
I gave her the benefit of the doubt until there was not other reasonable explanation for such elaborate evasion of the question. I outlined the disagreement so that it would be possible for others to review it. If anyone can briefly offer another explanation than dishonesty and evasion that explains those absurd replies, I’m all ears. Sorry, but I can only check-in here about once a day now.
Do you see things that no one else can see?
Well, yes, actually.
The most obvious explanation of your perception of A-G's posts are that you are seeing things that aren't there.
Remember the thesis of the posted article is that atheists are irrational.
And you are an atheist.
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