Posted on 08/18/2005 5:16:50 PM PDT by RightWingAtheist
A clarification: the remark about 'lipstick on a pig' was not meant to suggest that Biblical stories don't have many valuable qualities. My only point was that such stories are not, nor were they ever intended to be, scientific theories.
Well, it was the original title, and I did add the keywords "evolution" and "crevolist" so that those who do look up articles that way (like I do) would find it. But basically, I let my posts go through the same process of selection and competition that the natural world goes through. If no one posts to or even reads a comment I made, well, that's life.
Thanks for the ping!
Brilliant piece. Thanks for posting it.
A true compliment when it comes from you! You're welcome!
From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and have always been an atheist.... I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one. You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our being.
Whoops. Thought this was a discussion questioning the theory of evolution.
Not funny at all. Derbyshire is neither an liar nor a fool. In fact, he epitomizes the opposite of both.
Load of crap. Darrow asked the judge to instruct the jury to find Scopes guilty and thereby prevented any closing arguments. This was a predetermined strategy so that Bryan, who was a terrific speaker, could not give his closing statements dealing with the scientific challenges to evolution and the negative effects of social Darwinism. By doing this Darrow also ensured a guilty verdict so that the case could be appealed and the constitutionality of the law challenged in the state supreme court.
Bryan did not ask for harsher punishment but instead offered to pay the fine for Scopes![xx] Bryan had objected to the law imposing a penalty when he first learned of anti-evolution laws being considered by state legislatures.
Edwin Hubble
http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einprayr.htm
Some choice quotes
It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.
I cannot conceive of a personal God who would directly influence the actions of individuals, or would directly sit in judgment on creatures of his own creation. I cannot do this in spite of the fact that mechanistic causality has, to a certain extent, been placed in doubt by modern science. My religiosity consists in a humble admiration of the infinitely superior spirit that reveals itself in the little that we, with our weak and transitory understanding, can comprehend of reality. Morality is of the highest importance-but for us, not for God.
Go quote-mine somewhere else, and leave a great man alone.
"God does not play dice" imports a belief in an objective intelligibility in the continuous dynamic structures and transformations in the space-time reality of the universe which we may apprehend, but only at relatively elementary levels through open structures, even though they are mathematically precise in their formalisation. As I understand him, even Heisenberg toward the end of his life concluded that in quantum theory the scientist is in touch with nature which in its depth is so subtle and elusive that it cannot be explained in terms of the couplet "chance and necessity". That "God does not play dice" highlights the fact that chance is after all a negative way of thinking, or rather a way not to think. This is a lesson I believe that many scientists today, especially perhaps in biology, need to learn-their appeal to "chance" too often appears to be a sort of "scientist's God of the gaps"!
But "just to stir the pot" just consider how you might define a "scientific fundamentalist"--they don't know when to quit being pedantic, in all the wrong times and places.
I heard a story once about someone breaking up with a too-academic girlfriend; during the obligatory "I'm sorry it's not working out" dinner she spent the entire time pontificating about insurance fraud in ancient Greece.
But as Dilbert creator Scott Adams pointed out,
"Everyone is someone else's weirdo!"
Cheers!
Watch me wriggle out of this one :-)
Depends on whether you are looking for pearls of wisdom or scanning with a B.S. detector--are you a believer or a skeptic?
And to complete the analogy to pigs, since we are using Biblical references, how about a reference to "pearls before swine" (ducks for cover while running for exit...)
Cheers!
read later bump
Ah the good old "Annalen der Physik". Which, of coursse, is translated into the "Anal Physics."
A lot of people didn't realize just how many German physicists were really into gay porn. However, I have been told that Einstein subscribed to the journal "just for the articles".
Einstein did not believe in a personal God or an afterlife.
But he was not an a-theist. Not by a long shot.
He had a great appreciation and awe for what/who he called "the Old One"...the cosmic intelligence that laid out the universe whose secrets he could only dimly appreciate through scientific theory. Selected quotations do not adequately address Einstein's beliefs.
Isn't that what used to be called "quibbling"?
The concept both schools of thought share is....that there is/was an intelligent Creator and we are living in a universe of His/Her design.
It is the nature of that Creator....how "human-like" He is, and/or how "God-like" are we....is secondary and a matter of religious faith.
I have no idea what you think the difference between a 'personal god' and a 'cosmic intelligence' is. Einstein used the metaphor of 'god' to express his feeling that the Universe obeyed a set of meaningful and consitent laws. He also expressed regret this metaphor was exploited by the religious to attribute to him beliefs he did not hold. This thread is a case in point.
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