Posted on 04/07/2009 12:17:49 PM PDT by GodGunsGuts
==You respond to the charge of being a one trick pony by once again reiterating that the battle lines as you see it are “atheist camp” and you.
That’s not what I said at all. You have demonstrated that for all practical purposes here on Earth, there are plenty of people who call themselves Christians who are in the atheist camp too.
Can you detect God guiding dice?
What makes you think you can detect God guiding evolution?
It’s common knowledge. Although I’m not surprised it’s news to you.
“there are plenty of people who call themselves Christians who are in the atheist camp too.”
Amazingly triple ply dense GGG. “call themselves Christians”. Yep. All of us who do not agree with you are your preposterous quackery are just calling ourselves Christian.
The Pope calls himself a Christian as well, but by your criteria he lacks faith in God, doesn’t believe in the Bible, and is only calling himself a Christian.
You are truly only a one trick pony, and not a very novel trick.
So what you’re saying is that biology appears to be designed, but it really isn’t, except that it is?
Look whose talking! All you do is go around trying to undermine the faith in biblical creationists because they believe God’s word. You are one strange costumer, let me tell you!
Actually, I am aware of his anti-Semitic sister who had control of his work after he went insane. At her hands there has been much distortion, and, of course, in many translations by scholars, there has been distortion, also, so that there is much contradictory information about his thinking.
I, myself, have not read his work since I do not read German, but I have read about his philosophy translated by others whom I trust, including Pope Benedict XVI and Allan Bloom.
I would love to gain more insight on him. I think he was the most interesting and profound of all the German philosophers from what I do know. So if you have any suggestions of books to read, I would appreciate it.
This is what the Pope said in his encyclical letter, Deus Caritas Est.
“According to Friedrich Nietzche, Christianity had poisoned eros, which for its part, while not completely succumbing, gradually degenerated into vice. Here the German philosopher was expressing a widely-held perception: doesn’t the Church, with all her commandments and prohibitions, turn to bitterness the most precious thing in life? Doesn’t she blow the whistle just when the joy which is the Creator’s gift offers us a happiness which is itself a certain foretaste of the Divine?” (The Pope’s encyclical is worth reading.)
This is from Allan Bloom’s book on page 194 (The Closing of the American Mind):
...From Nietzsche he (Max Weber)learned that religion, or the sacred, is the most important human phenomenon, and his further study of it was made from Nietzsche’s unorthodox perspective.
“God is dead,” Nietzsche proclaimed. But he did not say this on a note of triumph, in the style of earlier atheism—the tyrant has been overthrown and man is now free. Rather he said it in the anguished tones of the most powerful and delicate piety deprived of its proper object. Man, who loved and needed God, has lost his Father and Savior without possibility of resurrection. The joy of liberation one finds in Marx has turned into terror at man’s unprotectedness. .....Nietzsche replaces easygoing or self-satisfied atheism with agonized atheism, suffering its human consequences. Longing to believe, along with intransigent refusal to satisfy that longing, is, according to him, the profound response to our entire spiritual condition. Marx denied the existence of God but turned over all His functions to History, which is inevitably directed to a goal fulfilling of man and which takes the place of Providence. One might as well be a Christian if one is so naive. Prior to Nietzsche, all those who taught that man is a historical being presented his history as in one way or another progressive. After Nietzsche, a characteristic formula for describing our history is “the decline of the West.””
BTW, my son had a t-shirt that said “God is Dead.” Nietzsche and on the back it said, “Nietzsche is Dead.” God. I did laugh at that...
All I do is post to threads about my subject of expertise. Threads that you start and ping me to. The threads that you post from Creationists sources are dishonest, ill written, illogical, and if they contain any science at all, are wrong about it (including not knowing the difference between transcription and translation).
You are one strange customer.
And I do not make costumes. ;)
And what I am saying is that all things unfold according to God’s will. Can you detect God’s hand guiding dice rolls? Do you deny that God is in control of dice rolls? Is it OK with you if people describe dice rolls as “random”, or to you would that imply for some idiotic reason that God is not in control of dice rolls?
==Can you detect God’s hand guiding dice rolls? Do you deny that God is in control of dice rolls?
No, I cannot. But then again, it is quite clear that the dice had to be intelligently designed to produce what we call a random result.
And yet the “intelligent design” movement claims to be able to do exactly that, be able to scientifically determine the extent of God’s involvement in somethings creation; as if some things are MORE created by God than other things; a rather ludicrous theological proposition.
You are right, Creation/ID are perfectly capable of determining that the dice have been specially designed to produce what we call a random result.
The Evos on the other hand are forced to maintain that not only the dice produce what we call random results, but that the dice themselves were produced by random processes. Talk about ludicrous—theological or otherwise!
What foolishness. There is nothing inherent in acceptance of the theory of evolution that would make one deny that humans can design things by nonrandom or by random processes.
Thus ordered and functional structures with novel abilities can be created by utilization of random processes, an ability seen manifest in humanity, yet “cdesign proponentists” deny that God could have the power to do the same.
The point is, when Evos find biological machinery that is finely tuned to produce random results, they have to assume that the finely tuned machinery was produced by random processes, and not design...lest a divine foot get through their materialist door.
Or to put it in the words of Alex Williams, writing for the Journal of Creation (I’m pinging a few others as they have expressed an interest in this subject at one time or another):
Gregor Mendel showed experimentally that—for certain carefully chosen characters—inheritance was carried by paired factors (genes on homologous chromosomes) that dissociate during gamete formation (meiosis) and then recombine randomly (according to the laws of chance) during fertilization. It has ever since been widely assumed among biologists that random natural variation points back to the possibility of a random natural origin. Nothing could be further from the truth.
A random outcome is surprisingly difficult to obtain, and it is always constrained and not open-ended as evolutionists require for ‘goo-to-you-via-the-zoo’ evolution. The tossing of an unbiased coin can produce a random result but only between two possibilities—heads or tails. The tossing of an unbiased die can produce a random result, but only among its six possible faces. Even a computer cannot produce a truly random result because it does calculations and calculations always produce predictable results.17
Truly random outcomes are difficult to obtain because they crucially depend upon the stability of the system that produces them. If Mendel’s pea plants had not reliably produced seeds from independently segregating cell divisions every generation, and had not produced a sufficiently large amount of pollen to ensure independent fertilization events, he could never have discovered the random outcomes that showed him the laws of hybridization. Likewise, coin-tossing produces random outcomes only while the coin remains solidly round and flat, and the die only works if it remains rigid and unbroken. Any system that is capable of continually producing a chance outcome must have a stable core mechanism. Indeed, any system that varies continually in any manner, random or otherwise, without a core of stability will quickly encounter an error catastrophe—changes mount upon changes until the core functionality collapses.
The random variation we observe in biology provides a powerful case for intelligent design. It requires a wellengineered underlying mechanism of stability to protect itself from error catastrophe, and it is not infinitely plastic but constrained to the range of possible outcomes provided by the kinds of gene regulation combinations accessible to it.
Finely tuned anything produced by random processes defies credibility.
I still can't figure how they mock *Goddidit* with a straight face and then offer that *nothing* did it, for no reason, all by itself.
They don’t have to answer to “nothing.”
Those are constrained by the possible combinations of chemical bonds the the elements are capable of forming. ID proponents seem to constrain themselves to only considering life to have been intelligently designed. The idea that life is a subsequent consequence of an intelligently designed universe doesn't seem to be something they can fit into that theory.
It still comes down to an argument for intelligent design, but only as far as it remains consistent with biblical creationism.
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