Sunday, November 05, 2006
An excellent post ...
... by Maxine: Wrong-headed on evolution. I would not myself equate Intelligent Design theory with Creationism. The latter barely rises to the level of pseudo-science. The former raises some interesting questions of a scientific nature, but then proceeds to answer them metaphysically - committing thereby, in my view, a category error. Add to that the faulty metaphor underlying the theory - that living things are artifacts , or at least look like such - a mistake Richard Dawkins himself makes - and you have a pretty weak school of thought.
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"...the faulty metaphor underlying the theory"
ReplyDeleteBut that's not just an underlying metaphor. That is the theory--the whole theory. There's nothing more to it.
You may be right. But it remains faulty for both points of view.
ReplyDeleteThe former [Intelligent Design] raises some interesting questions of a scientific nature
ReplyDeleteI agree creationism is for the birds, but all Intelligent Design is is creationism dressed up. Since neither of them can offer a shred of proof for their claims, I'd be interested to hear more regarding how you justify associating Intelligent Design with science, beyond wanting to believe that it should be associated with science, or by providing some personal opinons of scientists who want to believe it should be associated with science.
As Richard Dawkins said:
"[Intelligent Design] is not a scientific argument at all, but a religious one. It might be worth discussing in a class on the history of ideas, in a philosophy class on popular logical fallacies, or in a comparative religion class on origin myths from around the world. But it no more belongs in a biology class than alchemy belongs in a chemistry class, phlogiston in a physics class or the stork theory in a sex education class.
... If complex organisms demand an explanation, so does a complex designer. And it's no solution to raise the theologian's plea that God (or the Intelligent Designer) is simply immune to the normal demands of scientific explanation. To do so would be to shoot yourself in the foot. You cannot have it both ways. Either ID belongs in the science classroom, in which case it must submit to the discipline required of a scientific hypothesis. Or it does not, in which case get it out of the science classroom and send it back into the church, where it belongs."
I didn't associate it much with science at all, Noel. I said that I thought it raised some interesting questions - about complexity, for instance - but then doesn't really pursue them in anything resembling a scientific manner. I certainly don't think "god did it" is a scientific answer to anything.
ReplyDeleteSince God is not defined as complex - and I don't conceive of God as a designer anyway - God as complex designer needing to be explained strikes me as a straw man (which Dawkins specializes in). And this is rather inconsistent anyway, don't you think? Almighty Evolution is premised upon complexity deriving from simplicity - as a grand musical structure can be bulit from a tiny motif. The science/religion debate really comes down to the mind/matter debate. Some of us think that a being we call God is imagining the world and all that is in it. Others do not and just think what we others think God is imagining just is. Please don't tell me that science has explained mind yet.
And please understand, Noel, that I am not trying to shake your faith. But that is what it is - faith.
You said Intelligent Design "raises some interesting questions of a scientific nature." Whether something is complex or simple doesn't make it scientific and I was curious to know your basis for considering Intelligent Design scientific. I think you know that there is no scientific basis for ID, only religious.
ReplyDeleteI don't just 'believe' in science. Science is not something that is taken on faith, but even if it were, it would be faith based on evidence, the provable kind, not the hearsay kind, or the imagined kind.
If I'm understanding you right, you believe an intelligent superbeing imagined rather than designed the universe and everything in it, suggesting that he, or it, was there from the beginning. The problem I have with a being called God imagining everything is that it's been 15 billion years since the Big Bang when the entire universe occupied the space of a sub-atomic particle and it's been 5 billion years, give or take a few hundred million, since a cloud of gas and dust collapsed to form the star which sustains life on our planet.
If a being called God was there at the beginning, it has been in a very deep slumber for billions of years and has taken a very long time to gradually wake up. There is no evidence to support the idea of a supernatural superbeing, but even if there was, when you think of the life span of the stars and the life span of, say, bacteria, how could there ever be communication between sentients that experience time in such a radically different way? If you think of galaxies as, say, space jelly fish, what sort of conversation could you hold with one?
When you look up at the stars, what you are seeing is hundreds of millions of years into the past because that is how long it took for the light from those stars to travel to Earth. If a star has a conscious mind, how could we leave a message and how would we ever hear the answer that would be likely to come millions of years after our planet vaporizes? Would there be anyone left who could hear or understand the answer or even know it is a response to a message sent millions of years before by ape ancestors?
If the entire universe is sentient, you're talking about a life span of billions upon billions of years. We're looking at something if it exists that is so vast, worshipping it is ridiculous. Do the germs on the palm of my hand feel a connection to me? I doubt it. I'm all for discovery, particularly when I can see the results in my lifetime or at least know our species will reap the benefits within the next two thousand years or so, but I'm too puny to be interested in a cosmic conversation on that scale.
I think the universe and everything in it evolved, as everything on Earth has evolved, without any involvement from a superbeing. Since evolution is the proven cause for life on Earth, I think the universe and everything in it has over the eons also evolved too.
If you don't mind my saying so, drawing a distinction between Intelligent Imagination and Intelligent Design seems like an attempt to distance your beliefs from the reach of science, believing that the mind will always be safe territory from its inquiries.
I don't think science can explain everything about life, but I do think it is inevitable that it will come to explain a lot more about the mind than we currently understand.
For example, Francis Crick, a scientist who among other things discovered the structure of DNA more than fifty years ago and shared the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1962, spent the last years of his life studying the little known brain structure called the claustrum which he thought "might be critical in tying together the components of consciousness." He'd switched from molecular biology to neurobiology in the early 60s. He was quite a character. When he was 80, he and Christof Koch wrote "the defining paper on the neural correlate of consciousness."
"Crick predicted that once the detailed workings of the brain were eventually revealed, erroneous Christian concepts about the nature of man and the world would no longer be tenable; traditional conceptions of the "soul" would be replaced by a new understanding of the physical basis of mind."
He died in 2004. His research will be continued.
No, I am saying that I don't believe that mind can be reduced to matter - if only because matter really isn't very material, if I may put it that way.
ReplyDeleteAs far as ID is concerned I don't know what more can be said after one has said that it is a category error.
Now,if you want to reduce everything material causes, to the extent that it can it be so reduced, fine by me. I'd like to be accorded the privilege of thinking otherwise, however.
I would also suggest that if you are going to discuss any term, an understanding of the term is in order. When the term God is used, temporality does not apply. The term refers to an eternal being. Eternity is not the same as everlastingness. It means outside of time, not bound by time, a state of being to which temporal categories do not apply. The term also refers to a being that is not material and not finite. You may not accept the term, but the term means what it means and not something else.
This has been an interesting thread.
ReplyDeleteNo one has proven evolution as the cause of life on Earth, Noel. It is the prevailing theory of how life came to be what it is today, the approach, albeit imperfect, that we use in schools for starters. But, it is just where we are based only on what we know and how we tend to frame this knowledge.
I have two bents when looking over such a conversation. One is to ask why it is so important that someone who is sticking closely to a theory, sticks so closely to it. One reason is political, in that if such a theory prevails, then this secures the purporter's social position or goal. Either a creationist of some sort or a scientist gets more respect due or social reward based on who is winning the debate as of the moment. Another reason is to be a devil's advocate, along the lines of trying out different hats, keeping an interesting one on until convinced it definitely doesn't fit. Just a good game in an earnest inquiry, even if one doesn't realize one is playing, being so into the role.
The other bent is to process what is being said through both the scientific and logical part of me (being a smart cookie from Lowell High), as well as the spiritual. But, Dawkins's argument quoted, takes a nose dive before I ever get to spiritual experience. Noel quotes him here:
"[Intelligent Design] is not a scientific argument at all, but a religious one. It might be worth discussing in a class on the history of ideas, in a philosophy class on popular logical fallacies, or in a comparative religion class on origin myths from around the world. But it no more belongs in a biology class than alchemy belongs in a chemistry class, phlogiston in a physics class or the stork theory in a sex education class.["]
The first sentence sets up a case of two categories, the scientific and the religious. In the scientific category, goes a biology class, a physics class, and a sex education class. In the religious one goes Intelligent Design, history of ideas, a philosophy class on popular logical fallacies, a comparative religion class on origin myths from around the world, alchemy, phlogiston, and stork theory. (Hallelujah on the stork theory, brother, and can I get an amen on alchemy and phlogistons!)
Dawkins is obviously having trouble holding onto his train of thought. If he wants to go down in history as a great pope of science, he should have surrounded himself with bishops that would have advised him not to write a book with that paragraph in it.
I am reminded of the scene in "Oh God" when George Burns playing God tells John Denver's character to tell a popular televangelist that God wants him to shut up, that long ago he stopped serving God's cause and started serving himself.
Self-serving irrationalities don't serve scientists anymore than such stereotypical evangelists. If they are going to preach the truth, we must demand from them a very high standard. This isn't physics class anymore. It's the real world.
We need another Francis Crick now, one to account for all the erroneous concepts coming from scientists.
I am saying that I don't believe that mind can be reduced to matter - if only because matter really isn't very material
ReplyDeleteThat's true. Matter is mostly empty space. Did you know that the relative distance between the nucleus of an atom and its orbiting electrons is the same as the distance, relatively speaking, between the Sun and Pluto? It is electromagnetic force that binds everything together and is the fabric of the universe. Matter doesn't exist. It's just energy. This doesn't mean, however, that it isn't real or can't be explained and understood.
I'd like to be accorded the privilege of thinking otherwise, however.
Frank, it's not like I'm trying to outlaw your beliefs. I'm only asking you to support your reasons for holding them.
As far as ID is concerned I don't know what more can be said after one has said that it is a category error.
You could just come straight out and admit that there is no scientific basis for Intelligent Design, only religious. Instead you say it is making "a category error," suggesting that there might be a scientific basis for ID if only it wouldn't make "a category error."
if you are going to discuss any term, an understanding of the term is in order
I didn't use the term 'temporal' to describe 'God'. Were I to use it, I would mean it to imply secular, non spiritual, worldly, non religious, which is what the word means, but I do not think 'God' can be termed temporal. I think the idea of 'God' is wholly religious.
I admit I implied that the supernatural superbeing called 'God', if he or it exists, must be a part of our universe because I think that there can be nothing in the universe that is not a part of the universe, that is not natural to the universe, and this includes imagination, thought, feeling, everything. Even if there were any evidence for the existence of 'God', it would not mean he or it was outside the universe. Outside of our current scientific understanding perhaps, but not the universe. If it is in any way in it, it is a part of it. I could ask though, how do you know that 'God' is "a state of being to which temporal categories do not apply"? What is your evidence for dogmatically suggesting this?
[Evolution] is the prevailing theory of how life came to be what it is today, the approach, albeit imperfect, that we use in schools for starters. But, it is just where we are based only on what we know and how we tend to frame this knowledge.
ReplyDeleteRus, in the popular view, the word "theory" simply means something that is unproven, an assertion that may or may not be true. In science, however, the word "theory" has a very definite meaning. It means that data and information, in the form of verifiable evidence, has been gathered and studied and a hypothesis formed. The hypothesis only becomes a scientific theory after it has been tested and verified by independent observation and experimentation. A theory in science is not a hunch or a feeling or a guess. It is based on evidence that can be verified, and has been verified, in the real world.
By all means, have as many bents as you like when considering evolution, but none will change the fact that evolution has been proven. How evolution occurs is still open to debate, but that it occurs is scientific fact. If you doubt it, take a look through a microscope at a flu virus where you can see evolution working at incredible speed, at least in terms of our life span. That's the difference between evolution and whatever flavor of creationism you want to believe in. Evolution is supported by facts. Belief is 'God' is not supported by facts.
I agree we need another Francis Crick. He had a great mind and gave us much to work with and build on, as many other scientists have done and continue to do, unlike religionists who can do nothing but peddle supernatural stories designed to indulge our delusions.
I don't see how Dawkins "takes a nose-dive" or where he is "obviously having trouble holding onto his train of thought" in that excerpt. What he is saying is clear to me though I am interested to hear more about your "spiritual experience."
In the meantime, I would like to give some additional information to support my assertion that evolution does indeed explain how life began and how it has developed. If you can approach the Theory of Evolution without preconceptions, understanding that everything alive shares a common ancestor, you can see how evolution is the source of all of the multitudinous varieties of life on Earth.
On the question of the beginning, some interesting evidence has come to light. DNA, which is in every single living creature including germs and is, in fact, the one thing you share with everything alive, is a collection of protein strands called genes which are made of amino acids. The argument which supported creationism to a degree was that 4 billion years ago during the meteor bombardment of the Earth, delicate strands of amino acids that were present in the primordial soup and that would have had to form into proteins in order for life to begin on Earth, would have been destroyed from the impact of the meteor showers and the seismic explosions occurring under the oceans in the Earth’s crust. Therefore, the chances of life forming in the primordial soup were infinitesimal.
It was also the argument against life on other worlds because the chances under those circumstances of life ever forming are practically zero.
This is what was believed … until an interesting experiment. Scientists decided to test this theory of amino acids being destroyed under the force of the impacts of millions of meteorites and seismic explosions. They recreated the primordial soup with little strands of amino acids (but no proteins) floating in the chemical composition they discerned would have existed at the time. They then subjected this mix to the impact force of a substantial meteorite and expected to find precisely nothing. To their surprise, when they analyzed the results of their experiment, they found that the impact had not destroyed the delicate strands of the amino acids, but had in fact forced the amino-acids to bind together to form proteins. This means two things:
1). it is not at all surprising that life formed during the meteor bombardment of the Earth. In fact, the chances of life not forming are now very small
and,
2). in all of the billions upon billions of planets orbiting suns in our galaxy alone, the chances of finding at least microscopic life on some of those planets is possible. Not in our lifetimes perhaps since we have no way at the moment of traveling those distances (though here's something you might find interesting: http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/mg18925331.200.html ), but maybe one day if we stay on track and don’t destroy ourselves or throw away the knowledge we have gained in order to cling to ancient superstitions.
I enjoy the thought of my descendants, or the descendants of the great antelope, or any other members of the brotherhood of life on this planet, having the chance to see the universe in all its glory.
Sorry, Noel. You are mistaken. Evolution has not been proven-- unless you have done it. And I would like you to supply such proof, as I fulfill your request for spiritual experience.
ReplyDeleteSome of my sprituality is laid out here in response to a poem by Roberta Nolte, "Calliope Waits", that Frank linked to:
I have much ...
It's just reporting back, what poets sometimes do. It doesn't prove anything. Poets usually wouldn't. But then again, neither have you--yet.
And while you supply such proof, I want to caution you on supplying an explanation, or a model, versus a proof. In a model, for instance, you would do what current cognitive psychologists are doing, trying to fit their studies into prevailing theory. Such exercises become fascinating and turn what seems apparent on its head, as it were, and even provides new ways of looking at things. But, it is still only a model.
Yes, look again at the surprisingly lack of rigor in that paragraph by Dawkins. I pretty much showed already how Dawkins' argument took a nose dive. What he (or maybe you if you follow him) seems to want to do, is take all scientific fallacies and put them in with religion. If so, a lot of what is thought to be truth (even maybe proven truth) in today's science, will become what he calls "religion"--and we go back a hundred years to William James and the problem of definitions, such that here today we have a case of religion being defined as the garbage heap of fallacies, which isn't the case. There are many different categories we can have for fallacies, two of which are (1) the religious ones, and (2) the scientific ones.
Rus, you remind me of a friend, someone I went to school with. He is a shaman, a mystic - of the Irish kind, which is of course the best kind. ;) I guess the difference is that you have more knowledge of poetry than he does, but the outlook on life is very similar. We don't agree on much, but it always make for interesting conversations when we get together. I think there is a fascinating book inside of him, if only he would sit down and write it.
ReplyDeleteI agree that "there are many different categories we can have for fallacies, two of which are (1) the religious ones, and (2) the scientific ones." The difference between them is that the religious ones always remain fallacies since they can offer no proof whatsoever for their supernatural claims while the scientific ones must prove their claims, if they expect to survive. We demand evidence from science while demanding none from religion. That, in my opinion, is hypocrisy.
It is true that no scientific model can be considered absolute proof since some later observation or information may upset the model. For example, at some point in the future we might look at the shadow cast by the earth on the moon and say that it is square, suggesting that the moon does not really revolve around the earth. However, based upon all of the verifiable evidence we currently possess, we can conclude that this is not likely, and our confidence in the solar system model is therefore justified. Although it has not been proven to an absolute certainty, it has been verified by the observations and experimentations that have been conducted. The same is true for evolution.
As Dawkins has said:
"While it is inevitably true that there are incompletenesses in evolutionary science, the positive evidence for the fact of evolution is truly massive, made up of hundreds of thousands of mutually corroborating observations. These come from areas such as geology, paleontology, comparative anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, ethology, biogeography, embryology and - increasingly nowadays - molecular genetics.
The weight of the evidence has become so heavy that opposition to the fact of evolution is laughable to all who are acquainted with even a fraction of the published data. Evolution is a fact: as much a fact as plate tectonics or the heliocentric solar system."
You have your beliefs and they are not going to change. Well, okay. Everyone is free to believe what they want. However, considering the overwhelming and publicly available evidence supporting evolution, I think it is fair to say that denying evolution is denying the fabric of your own being.
Btw, I enjoyed your analysis of Roberta Nolte's poem, Calliope Waits. Thanks for providing it. It has helped me to understand poetry a little better.
Hi Noel,
ReplyDeleteYou're welcome on the explication of Roberta Nolte's poem "Calliope Waits". That's just mystic talk on my part, as much as poetry talk. It doesn't apply too much like here:
First we'll use Spahn
then we'll use Sain
Then an off day
followed by rain
Back will come Spahn
followed by Sain
And followed
we hope
by two days of rain.
(Boston Post, 9/14/1948)
Most anyone tuned in at the time of reading her Calliope poem would have figured what was going on. Like anyone else, I might have missed it if distracted or too boxed into another mode of thinking, which, like anyone else, I am wont to do at times.
Thanks for a great discussion.
Yours,
Rus
Holy Yogi B! I didn't even attribute the poem. It's called "Spahn & Sain" and is by Gerald V. Hern.
ReplyDeleteRus
Rus, it's been a pleasure speaking with you.
ReplyDeleteI couldn't believe it when my Mrs. told me someone had written a poem about evolution and I couldn't resist repeating it in full here. Hope you like it!
Evolution
By Langdon Smith (1858-1908)
When you were a tadpole and I was a fish
In the Paleozoic time,
And side by side on the ebbing tide
We sprawled through the ooze and slime,
Or skittered with many a caudal flip
Through the depths of the Cambrian fen,
My heart was rife with the joy of life,
For I loved you even then.
Mindless we lived and mindless we loved
And mindless at last we died;
And deep in the rift of the Caradoc drift
We slumbered side by side.
The world turned on in the lathe of time,
The hot lands heaved amain,
Till we caught our breath from the womb of death
And crept into life again.
We were amphibians, scaled and tailed,
And drab as a dead man's hand;
We coiled at ease 'neath the dripping trees
Or trailed through the mud and sand.
Croaking and blind, with our three-clawed feet
Writing a language dumb,
With never a spark in the empty dark
To hint at a life to come.
Yet happy we lived and happy we loved,
And happy we died once more;
Our forms were rolled in the clinging mold
Of a Neocomian shore.
The eons came and the eons fled
And the sleep that wrapped us fast
Was riven away in a newer day
And the night of death was passed.
Then light and swift through the jungle trees
We swung in our airy flights,
Or breathed in the balms of the fronded palms
In the hush of the moonless nights;
And oh! what beautiful years were there
When our hearts clung each to each;
When life was filled and our senses thrilled
In the first faint dawn of speech.
Thus life by life and love by love
We passed through the cycles strange,
And breath by breath and death by death
We followed the chain of change.
Till there came a time in the law of life
When over the nursing sod
The shadows broke and the soul awoke
In a strange, dim dream of God.
I was thewed like an Auroch bull
And tusked like the great cave bear;
And you, my sweet, from head to feet
Were gowned in your glorious hair.
Deep in the gloom of a fireless cave,
When the night fell o'er the plain
And the moon hung red o'er the river bed
We mumbled the bones of the slain.
I flaked a flint to a cutting edge
And shaped it with brutish craft;
I broke a shank from the woodland lank
And fitted it, head and haft;
Than I hid me close to the reedy tarn,
Where the mammoth came to drink;
Through the brawn and bone I drove the stone
And slew him upon the brink.
Loud I howled through the moonlit wastes,
Loud answered our kith and kin;
From west to east to the crimson feast
The clan came tramping in.
O'er joint and gristle and padded hoof
We fought and clawed and tore,
And cheek by jowl with many a growl
We talked the marvel o'er.
I carved that fight on a reindeer bone
With rude and hairy hand;
I pictured his fall on the cavern wall
That men might understand.
For we lived by blood and the right of might
Ere human laws were drawn,
And the age of sin did not begin
Til our brutal tusks were gone.
And that was a million years ago
In a time that no man knows;
Yet here tonight in the mellow light
We sit at Delmonico's.
Your eyes are deep as the Devon springs,
Your hair is dark as jet,
Your years are few, your life is new,
Your soul untried, and yet --
Our trail is on the Kimmeridge clay
And the scarp of the Purbeck flags;
We have left our bones in the Bagshot stones
And deep in the Coralline crags;
Our love is old, our lives are old,
And death shall come amain;
Should it come today, what man may say
We shall not live again?
God wrought our souls from the Tremadoc beds
And furnish’d them wings to fly;
He sowed our spawn in the world's dim dawn,
And I know that it shall not die,
Though cities have sprung above the graves
Where the crook-bone men made war
And the ox-wain creaks o'er the buried caves
Where the mummied mammoths are.
Then as we linger at luncheon here
O'er many a dainty dish,
Let us drink anew to the time when you
Were a tadpole and I was a fish.
Hi Noel,
ReplyDeleteWhat a terrific poem! Thank you for posting it, and please thank the Mrs. for finding it.
That cannot be topped, no way, and cannot be followed. So in spirit, I offer a limerick from 1999 below.
Yours,
Rus
~~~~~~
The Limerick of Adam & Kermit
A cave ape named Link once said, "Madam,
if you'll be the mom then I'll dad'em."
They had an affair
a chromosome spare.
The boy whom she bore they named Adam.
Now Link gave to Adam a pet,
a pre-frog who always stayed wet,
that mated some fish,
this caviar dish.
From this he and Kermit so met.
The ape girls thought Adam a ringer
for Elvis, the chimpanzee singer.
With each coy ape look
those pelvises shook,
and thus he became quite the swinger.
But Adam, he thought it quite cruel
that each ape he had birthed a mule.
He went to his Dad
who seemed more than glad
to father an Eve for his fool.
For Adam and Eve tweren't no biggie
to nudie it under the figgie.
They had Cain and Abel
and Betty and Mabel
and Kermit the Frog had Miss Piggy.
~~~~~
I loved that, thanks!
ReplyDeleteJim Henson was fun. John Lasseter from Pixar reminds me of him in the same way Walt Disney does. It's a similar understanding but done in computers, putting emotion into computer-generated sets and characters.
Steve Jobs of Apple owns Pixar. He's on Disney's board while Lasseter works inside it now approving future film production in Disney. It looks like a sort of slow reverse takeover. All of the Pixar movies - Toy Story, Bug's Life, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Cars - have been successful and Disney has been the distributor for all of them.
The reason I'm telling you this is because of something Steve Jobs said that I thought was true, or rather, something he recounted about Edwin Land of Polaroid saying that I thought was true.
"Leonardo da Vinci was a great artist and a great scientist. Michelangelo knew how to cut stone at the quarry. Edwin Land at Polaroid once said, 'I want Polaroid to stand at the intersection of art and science,' and I've never forgotten that."
It is art and science, and between the two of them is trade.
I'm with Rus on his comments here. But then, I come from a mystic's, shaman-poet's perspective, which can be seen in most of my own poetry, so that's my given perspective, anyway.
ReplyDeleteI do agree that Intelligent Design is just creationism in a new package. It's simply a better package, with better window-dressing, but it's the same argument underneath.
Frank's point about complexity is also a good point. Chaos theory, fractals, strange attractors—chaos math ahs already shown us that complex systems CAN arise out of very simple initial systems. This seems to be a natural law of self-organizing systems. I don't think you necessarily need to invoke the Divine as primum mobile for complex systems, but some folks certainly do see an elegance in that. I think it's unnecessary, but I don't dismiss anyone's faith the way Dawkins does.
Dawkins thinks that people who study comparative religions will inevitably deduce that it's all bunk and become an atheist—precisely as Dawkins did. (He seems unable to see himself from the outside—a hallmark of a True Believer, one might add.) I tend to think, though, that when studies all the world's religions, one discovers some basic truthes that they all agree on, and that at their core they all talk about some very similar, mystical experiences.
I posted this comment in another thread, but realize it belongs better here. In that thread I said:
ReplyDelete"I don't have supernatural forces paying occasional visits to my mind."
That's not entirely true (there goes my career). I have had non-drug personal experiences that were outside what you'd call normal. Probably everyone does which might account for why superstition survives. There are many stories of people declared clinically dead who returned to life and told everyone what they saw and experienced while dead (or almost dead). I am sure there is an explanation and am also sure we do not know what it is yet, but at least science works to investigate these things.
For example, scientists photographed a leaf and its electromagnetic field. They then cut a piece out of the leaf and photographed it again. In this second photograph, the electromagnetic field of the leaf was whole even though it was missing a piece. They kept photographing it. A few hours later, its electromagnetic field shrank to the new size of the leaf.
There is no question that when something dies, be it leaf, germ, or person, the binding energy leaves and the body decays. This does not mean we go to heaven or hell. This does not mean there is a God. All it means is that while we are alive there is energy within us that leaves and dissipates when we die. For those of you who like ghost stories, one could claim that occasionally the imprint of life sticks around for a while in some cases.
Because some experiences are not your everyday experience doesn't mean they came from some flavor of God and therefore God must exist, anymore than it means they should be discarded as delusions if you know within yourself what was experienced was real.
Hi Noel,
ReplyDeleteI only have time this moring to note a misdirection in the application of science and invoke William James' argument from Varieties of Religious Experience, a Study in Human Nature. The misdirection is to the physical when talking about or attempting to prove out spiritual matters. What each of us knows exists is our perceptions, conceptions, and so forth. What may not exist at all other than in our shared imaginations, or may exist, say, only as a secondary versus the primary experience, is what we perceive as everything physical.
Below the squiggly line is William James.
Yours,
Rus
~~~~~~~~~
from Varieties of Religious Experience, a Study in Human Nature
We are surely all familiar in a general way with this method of discrediting states of mind for which we have an antipathy. We all use it to some degree in criticizing persons whose states of mind we regard as overstrained. But when other people criticize our own more exalted soul-flights by calling them 'nothing but' expressions of our organic disposition, we feel outraged and hurt, for we know that, whatever be our organism's peculiarities, our mental states have their substantive value as revelations of the living truth; and we wish that all this medical materialism could be made to hold its tongue.
Medical materialism seems indeed a good appellation for the too simple-minded system of thought which we are considering. Medical materialism finishes up Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex, he being an epileptic. It snuffs out Saint Teresa as an hysteric, Saint Francis of Assisi as an hereditary degenerate. George Fox's discontent with the shams of his age, and his pining for spiritual veracity, it treats as a symptom of a disordered colon. Carlyle's organ-tones of misery it accounts for by a gastro-duodenal catarrh. All such mental overtensions, it says, are, when you come to the bottom of the matter, mere affairs of diathesis (auto-intoxications most probably), due to the perverted action of various glands which physiology will yet discover. And medical materialism then thinks that the spiritual authority of all such personages is successfully undermined.[2]
[2] For a first-rate example of medical-materialist reasoning, see an article on "les varietes du Type devot," by Dr. Binet-Sangle, in the Revue de l'Hypnotisme, xiv. 161.
Let us ourselves look at the matter in the largest possible way. Modern psychology, finding definite psycho-physical connections to hold good, assumes as a convenient hypothesis that the dependence of mental states upon bodily conditions must be thoroughgoing and complete. If we adopt the assumption, then of course what medical materialism insists on must be true in a general way, if not in every detail: Saint Paul certainly had once an epileptoid, if not an epileptic seizure; George Fox was an hereditary degenerate; Carlyle was undoubtedly auto-intoxicated by some organ or other, no matter which--and the rest. But now, I ask you, how can such an existential account of facts of mental history decide in one way or another upon their spiritual significance? According to the general postulate of psychology just referred to, there is not a single one of our states of mind, high or low, healthy or morbid, that has not some organic process as its condition. Scientific theories are organically conditioned just as much as religious emotions are; and if we only knew the facts intimately enough, we should doubtless see "the liver" determining the dicta of the sturdy atheist as decisively as it does those of the Methodist under conviction anxious about his soul. When it alters in one way the blood that percolates it, we get the methodist, when in another way, we get the atheist form of mind. So of all our raptures and our drynesses, our longings and pantings, our questions and beliefs. They are equally organically founded, be they religious or of non-religious content.
To plead the organic causation of a religious state of mind, then, in refutation of its claim to possess superior spiritual value, is quite illogical and arbitrary, unless one has already worked out in advance some psycho-physical theory connecting spiritual values in general with determinate sorts of physiological change. Otherwise none of our thoughts and feelings, not even our scientific doctrines, not even our DIS-beliefs, could retain any value as revelations of the truth, for every one of them without exception flows from the state of its possessor's body at the time.
~~~
Er -- all I can say is, well done, Noel. You understand science and theory very well.
ReplyDeleteEvolution is not a faulty theory -- there is no "debate" about creationism/ID or any other pseudoscientific religious struggle to fit the facts into preconcieved notions or belief systems.
Hi Maxine,
ReplyDeleteThanks for the compliment, the truth is I understand very little about science or theory and even less about art. What little I do understand I've thought about and am open to learning more.
there is no "debate" about creationism/ID or any other pseudoscientific religious struggle to fit the facts into preconcieved notions or belief systems.
I'm interested to know more about what you think Jews, Christians and Muslims have tried to do and continue to try to do.
Rus, there's no denying there's another aspect to this dimension, but conventional religion does not have the answers. Every atom in our bodies is stardust originating from the same source as every star in the sky. It's not so strange to think that the answers lie within each of us.
ReplyDeleteAs all large organizations develop, layers of hierarchy form inside them. As this continues, it thwarts its original intention and it changes to serve itself rather than the people who believe in its teachings.
I'd also like to add that there are laws governing the universe that are real and it is probably a good idea to respect them. What's around you isn't only what you perceive it to be, or want to perceive it to be. What it is, for the time it is, is real, and the more we understand about it, the better. There is no reason to fear knowledge and discovery. We're born with minds and whether you believe God put them there, or they evolved naturally, they are there to be used.
Maxine, Frank can defend himself, the old war horse ;)
ReplyDeleteThe old war horse is back, but only for a moment. What I would like is for everybody to share their outlooks, compare them, the way collectors display and compare their prize possessions. I think we should not argue for our points of view, but explicate those points of view. Some people may be attracted by what we say and adopt some version of it. Others may go their own way. We spend too much time trying to prove things that are simply matters for discussion - rather than discussing them.
ReplyDeleteHi Frank,
ReplyDeleteI have been writing what is below, which came out longwinded. While preparing to post, I see your new post, therefore not considered (sometimes called a "slip"). I think what I wrote follows your guidelines.
Rus
~~~~~
Hi Noel,
I wonder what some of your scientific background is. Because you respond to Maxine:
Thanks for the compliment, the truth is I understand very little about science or theory and even less about art.
And that's cool, because I often think of my learning and training as a sort of street smarts coupled with aptitude and inquiry, when maybe that describes you better.
So there's an embarrassment I have in allowing any scientific credentials I do have to go undisplayed at this point. I'm not an ScD or anything, but my first love though JHS and HS was math, and my first years in college were in studying as a physics major through the Applied Mathematics program (the scientific program versus the one with computer orientation) at then Lowell Tech, now UMass Lowell. My degree is in Psychology, and I studied, doing just fine, at the graduate level, before being a single dad took priority nearing 20 years ago.
When we were talking about proofs, for instance, I was thinking in mathematical terms. Proofs start with assumptions. For instance, all of Linear Algebra grew out of the assumption about addition of vectors. So far that holds up for LA's applications. What hasn't held up, of course, is the assumption behind the Euclidean universe.
But you also write this:
Rus, there's no denying there's another aspect to this dimension, but conventional religion does not have the answers.
Amen to that. If you think I have been defending organized or conventional religion, I must say for the sake of anything anyone anywhere might have misread in anything I have written into this or any other thread: not, not me, no no no, wrong guy believe me.
I personally reject the majority of organized religions as too often dogmatic attempts at stilting congregations, using powerful mind control and fear. I also think both the best and the worst are the congregation-grown churches. They can be very bad cults, or a groups of earnest giving people living life to the fullest. We should also not forsake the Judeo-Christian roots of the educational system and how this inquiry and application itself led to the science we now have in the institutions we have it in. Also, in fairness to any decided-upon church doctrines, scientific discoveries (or any discoveries) may overturn both scientific assumptions and religious ones--both having roots in misapplications, even when these were honest errors.
Rus
~~~~~
Hi Maxine
You say:
Evolution is not a faulty theory -- there is no "debate" about creationism/ID or any other pseudoscientific religious struggle to fit the facts into preconcieved notions or belief systems.
The practical problems with evolutionary theory as something holding ultimate truth (rather than being the current big thing)-- including all the missing links for all the species with genders, and that it is like saying the car made the driver, or even that there are no drivers--does not disqualify it from being a powerful tool for us to use.
I agree: "Evolution is not a faulty theory". How can it be? Only its misapplication is, especially when dogmatic, but also whenever mistakes are made, such as misdating. I argue against exclusionary dogma, which is what Dawkins seems to want it all to be, that the truth will come solely from scientific inquiry applied to a system assumed to be fully explained through evolutionary theory. That's arrogance coming from within a school of thought, something we know religious institutions have done.
When applied to argument, these theories can be like schools of martial arts. In the hands of Bruce Lee, Chinese kick boxing seems the best. MMA pretty much shows that wrestlers are the toughest to beat, especially when they get a hold of their opponents. But there is nothing faulty about one theory over the other, it has much more to do with how practiced the student is. There is no need to pick one theory over another. Best to go into the fray knowing where and when to best apply anything that can be learned within any school.
In Psychology at Rivier College, we learned to apply different models or schools at different times. Behavior modification applied in situations where especially reinforcement but also punishment and such would bring about desired changes in behavior. But drugs need to be taken in other circumstances applied to the same person. Sometimes, the best explanation, anyway, of behavior is Freudian; sometime principles of Gestalt therapy worked best; and so forth.
This is the same with evolutionary theory. If we can use this way of thinking, and apply it to our service--terrific. It is not faulty, just as Chinese kick boxing isn't, just as behavior modification isn't. None of these schools of thought are. But, let's not purport to give our whole life and world over to them.
Rus
Hello again.
ReplyDeleteNoel, I wasn't "defending Frank" -- just agreeing with your comments about ID and creationism. I concur that Frank is more than capable of justifying whatever he writes without my or anyone's help!
Rus, I don't fully understand your point -- I am from an empirical science background. I don't make any philosophical claims for anything, and know nothing of theology. All I know is that the evolutionary theory put forward by Charles Darwin on the basis of a lifetime of observation, and supported by much evidence since, works. ID/creationism etc is a load of old tosh, so far as science is concerned.
I do agree with you, Rus, that the type of thinking that scientists are trained to do -- objectively weighing up the evidence and not having preconceived notions -- would be extremely well applied to many walks of life. But dream on, sadly.
Hi Frank,
ReplyDeleteLet me pull some of my thoughts together, as I respond to Maxine, and I'll resist being so longwinded after this.
Thanks very much for such a forum and for stimulating this thought.
Yours,
Rus
~~~~~
Hi Maxine,
Evolutionary theory works well when applied well. We've just come through an age when we have been finding its sundry applications. Indeed, much of the research science has done, is in getting the evolutionary story straight, what dates go where, which species came from where and when. The evolutionary story, like all stories from science, keeps shifting.
Much of the later effort has been in getting a straight story that makes differing branches of science, such as archaeology and physics, agree. Where someone has realized disagreement across disciplines, a fortune would be spent in shoring it up. Science has gone to great pains on its agenda to create its baby: a very believable evolutionary theory--like religions of the past have in their efforts, for both better and worse, with weaknesses and strengths--an imperfect but somewhat compelling theory.
Neither addresses life in full. Just as the problems of religions have come when they have purported to address life in full, problems of science come from its own exclusionary dogma.
For instance, evolutionary theory does not speak to a spiritually-oriented person for so much of what is going on in life. It is some curiosity at work to some degree in the physical world, with proponents evolved from its school of thought, proponents as staunch as any religion ever created to convert the world. The power at work in the spiritual world is what feeds the physical any light that is does have. It feeds it with the same thing that gives us our life. It obviously and in every moment creates us, or at least creates us in any sense that we have value. Picture Dick Van Dyke dancing with sooty clothes, or a Raggedy Ann doll being stiched together and brought to life. This happens moment to moment through a spiritual influence on the universe, within every pore of the universe. Tell Bert the chimney sweep or a living Raggedy Ann that the universe bows to some evolutionary theory of the sewing machine. Life created the sewing machine.
Science, because it is a practice versus a theory like evolution, understands its limitations. Its practitioners may not, though. This does not have only to do with how science's big story keeps changing, how the model of the universe keeps morphing as arguments come from different camps and discoveries are made. It's at the basic level of living that science has a long long way to go. Henny Youngman has a joke about how eggs used to be the best thing for us. Eat eggs. Eat eggs. Now, it is the worst. Along these lines, anyone who has had health issues knows that for all science's worth and value, there simply are not cures, or even understandings within these applications of science--yet, always yet.
It used to be that for organized science, there would be a group of Einsteins whose work that the rest of us would (try to) study and then trust that their formulas and proofs were sound. They were all geniuses and could work through the fallacies of wannabee geniuses' works. (In this sense, btw, they had a social structure similar to organized religions, whereby there are those who were both trusted and looked to in spiritual matters.) The shift took place for science with computers about halfway through last century. Proofs and models are so advanced that not even the greatest mathematician can be expected to work things out.
And there's a huge problem. If science is to address even the mental side, never mind the full spiritual side, of being human as well as it does our physical world, we will need computer models or something at least as powerful. Otherwise we will be left to our ancient wisdoms. Look at CBM, Cognitive Behavior Modification, trying to apply now both evolutionary theory as well as science--and those guys are decades behind because there is no computer system they can so powerfully use.
People need to live now. We are all here well before science gets around to everything, and we live knowing it never will. It cannot. And yet we spiritual beings have to get on with life. As powerful as science is in its element, it will never touch on most of any human being's life, unless it attempts in its politics to reduce human life. And evolutionary theory will never be a truth, only a model to help us think some things through in different ways.
Yours,
Rus
Rus, I think the roots of Western civilization - our politics, educational systems, philosophy, science, and art - are found in Ancient Greece which predates the rise of Christianity by a thousand years.
ReplyDeleteI've been watching Dr. Eugene Weber of UCLA and author of the PBS documentary, The Western Tradition. Here's something he said:
"Our kind of institutions, our thinking, even our kind of sinning are all connected with the rationalism of the Greek mind. The Greeks did not take the world on trust, they did not take it on the will of god, they did not abandon themselves to faith. Instead they asked questions and came up with answers. Plato once wrote that "Philosophy is the child of wonder" and it was the gift of the Greeks to inquire into the things that excited their wonder. Their insatiable curiosity paid off in instability, in insecurity, but also in greatness. Warriors, athletes, artists and colonialists, sailors and pirates, traders and philosophers, the Ancient Greeks never ceased to make trouble for themselves and in their talent for creation and destruction, we recognize ourselves."
Also, in fairness to any decided-upon church doctrines, scientific discoveries (or any discoveries) may overturn both scientific assumptions and religious ones--both having roots in misapplications, even when these were honest errors.
Yes, but until new evidence overturns old evidence I don't think we can overlook the evidence we do have, or add a sort of multi-mystical addendum to it in the absence of anything that could reliably be called evidence to support it. Who can say, after all, which belief is the right one, the definitive one, out of all of the beliefs people have wanted to hold about life throughout life? What's so different between the mythology of primitive races and 'modern' religion? In fact some of those ‘primitive’ myths are much closer to nature and to ‘God’ than monotheistic religions. And keep in mind that at least science is expected to prove what it claims; religion never does.
As Douglas Adams said:
"I don’t accept the currently fashionable assertion that any view is automatically as worthy of respect as any equal and opposite view. My view is that the moon is made of rock. If someone says to me “Well, you haven’t been there, have you? You haven’t seen it for yourself, so my view that it is made of Norwegian Beaver Cheese is equally valid” - then I can’t even be bothered to argue. There is such a thing as the burden of proof, and in the case of god, as in the case of the composition of the moon, this has shifted radically. God used to be the best explanation we’d got, and we’ve now got vastly better ones. God is no longer an explanation of anything, but has instead become something that would itself need an insurmountable amount of explaining."
If someone claims God revealed himself to him, it is a revelation to him alone. When he tells others about it, it becomes hearsay and we are free to believe or disbelieve him. And when someone tells me that 'God' paid him a visit or chats with him every once in a while, I invariably exercise my right to disbelieve him. Doesn't mean they experienced something that wasn't real, but it also doesn't mean that what they experienced came from 'God.' The rest of us don't really know what it was, but I think it is lazy to attribute mystical experiences to 'God'.
Life does have another side to it - a personality - which we don't fully understand yet. Doesn't mean it isn't real, or that we will never fully understand it. It's possible we never will, then again, who can say what we will come to understand? How reasonable is it to expect science to include beliefs that can offer only hearsay evidence to support them? Would you sell a car to someone with no license, no insurance? (lots of taxes though!) It's a different kind of truth? I don't think so.
Everything you say requires you to prove it, whether it's that a burglar broke into your home and stole your computer or there are fairies at the end of your garden. There could be, I suppose, but the onus is on whoever is claiming it to offer some evidence to support it.
Dawkins reads to me like someone who sees trouble on the horizon and wants to do what he can to attack and weaken the cause of it which he thinks is religion. If there is a "final idiot war," the culprit at the moment is far more likely to be religion than something secular. We may find ourselves splitting into dictatorships to handle religious terrorism should it grow stronger, a sort of return to feudal times, but the spark that has ignited the war we are now in is religion, not secularity, or some brand of political ideology.
This is not a legitimate cause for an opposite religious opinion to point the finger at a religious cousin and use the trouble criminals of that faith are causing as an opportunity to advance its own hare-brained beliefs, seeking to polarize the world into religious camps - Judeo-Christian or Muslim. I think that is trying to happen. It's possible of course that by Western intellectuals attacking and trying to weaken their own religion, they are unwittingly aiding religious terrorism since as Richard Nixon was fond of quoting Whittaker Chambers saying: "Communism is a faith that is only as strong as the failure of all other faiths." Like Nixon said, radical Islam appeals to the soul, not to the material things of this world. He suggested secular values alone would not be enough to defeat religious fundamentalism. It has to be a combination of all of the great ideas both civilizations and religions gave us, not just a fight between religions. If we can't arrange this, we may still have livable parts to our planet, but they are likely to be run by the Chinese who will watch us blow ourselves to kingdom come, and then step in and take over whatever's left. I like Chinese people, but I wouldn't want to live under their government.
I agree that there's more to it than genetics. A portion of it is genetic, but it is likely there is something else that is not wholly genetic and I think it is art. If someone wants to interpret spirituality as art, go ahead, but any time I've tuned in to the idea of the artist being closer to god it has smacked of ego and there's too much of that to go around already. I get more out of C.S. Lewis than I do Freud for his understanding of human nature, Alan Leo among others in astrology, Chiron in palmistry and Edgar Casey (or Cayce) in the occult. Even sci-fi writers like Heinlein, Asimov or Clarke offer far better brain candy (for my brain anyway) than religion or Freud. I'm a newcomer to poetry and lately I've been reading William Blake. Here's one of my favorite poems of his:
Dear mother, dear mother, the Church is cold; But the Alehouse is healthy, and pleasant, and warm. Besides, I can tell where I am used well; Such usage in heaven will never do well.
But, if at the Church they would give us some ale, And a pleasant fire our souls to regale, We'd sing and we'd pray all the livelong day, Nor ever once wish from the Church to stray.
Then the Parson might preach, and drink, and sing, And we'd be as happy as birds in the spring; And modest Dame Lurch, who is always at church, Would not have bandy children, nor fasting, nor birch.
And God, like a father, rejoicing to see His children as pleasant and happy as He, Would have no more quarrel with the Devil or the barrel, But kiss him, and give him both drink and apparel.
The Little Vagabond
There was and is no plan. And the other thing that is conveniently ignored is that we are a tiny insignifcant part of a very big universe. Things really do not revolve around us nor are they focused on us. We are a microscopic element and, in my view, not a very important one. I say this because if planet earth and all of its inhabitants were to suddenly disappear in a puff of smoke, the solar system earth belongs to would instantaneously absorb the vacuum, the galaxy would keep spinning among all of the other galaxies, and the universe would continue expanding, in much the same way your body effortlessly repairs a damaged cell without you noticing.
Based on what we know and can prove, believing we are somehow special or significant is not a mature way of looking at our situation in the vast coldness of space.
Hi Noel,
ReplyDeleteI appreciate very much what you say.
Two points. The last day or two I have been posting to backtrack, backtracking because what I have been saying has been misread. What you misread was my statement about having to at least hand it to the Judeo-Christian educational system (a corrupted system with great attributes) laying the groundwork for current science to take off from. The current scientific movement did not take of from any ancient culture. There was a Dark Age, for instance, in between. But to say that I agree with, and have realized, what you say about the Ancient Greeks. Plato is my favorite poet, or mystic.
On the Chinese, they are an atheistic culture as to power, which trains people who think otherwise in "right thinking." Thus murders and imprisonment of journalists, and significantly the Tibet situation. This type of oppressive power has nothing to do with whether they are evolutionary thinkers, religious thinkers, or what have you. It has to do with them saying they have the best way to think, and anyone who disagrees needs to be silenced. And there again, is the political impetus behind arguing the truth behind any theory or practice.
You say:
Who can say, after all, which belief is the right one, the definitive one, out of all of the beliefs people have wanted to hold about life throughout life?
That's my whole point in abstract. Amen to that.
Yours,
Rus
I suspect there's been more than one Dark Age, but in the one we know very little of, what Pericles and Pythagorus and Homer thought came through, gave us the Renaissance, the Declaration of Independence and much of the world as we know it today.
ReplyDeleteBtw, I don't think science is a faith. Science is not taken on faith. It's constantly changing, sometimes making huge advances and sometimes small and slow ones with all of them expected to produce enough evidence to justify what they claim before they are accepted as a working hypothesis. Now why don't we ask the same from religion? Because it can't stand up to the inquiry.
As Tony Whitson opened this discussion by saying: "There's nothing more to it."
Hi Noel,
ReplyDeleteBtw, I don't think science is a faith.
Why would you? I certainly don't.
Now why don't we ask the same from religion? Because it can't stand up to the inquiry.
People inquire from mystics all the time (not corrupted religious systems, no). They don't cure head aches or make nuclear weapons, but they can do wonders for individuals and societies.
Yours,
Rus
And I hope mystics will always be a part of life, the more individual the better, not because they are a curiosity, but because of what they inspire. The real trouble starts after they're dead and their disciples start institutionalizing what was essentially a philosophy, a personal code, and repetition and ritual start to replace the thinking mind.
ReplyDeleteHey Noel,
ReplyDeleteRight on!
Yours,
Rus
Hi Noel,
ReplyDeleteOops. Why you put that ritual and repetition statement in, I cannot be sure now some hours later. If you mean rituals that are intended and known to bring the mystical into lives, then I am all for them. Just like knowledge of the nuclear, misapplied aspects of ritual can come to horrific results for humankind.
Yours,
Rus
The steps that are taken in meditation and relaxation intended to free the mind I don't consider ritual. I would if the purpose was not to free the mind, but through some collective or organization to try to control it.
ReplyDeleteHi Noel,
ReplyDeleteOkay. Whoa. God help us. Jesus. Wait.
Once the mind is free, truths far more powerful and personal than evolutionary theory come about. I will tell you also, that the mind may be encumbered, and still powerful religious experiences can come about. These themselves show that there is acceptance and loving, spiritual inclusion, no matter.
Therefore, we need to--just as William James did who was not a mystic, but a smart cookie--learn from these mystics. St. Paul, Plato, Confucius, all of them. Never forget what they say, never stop listening to them, never annihilate them, never torture them.
We may at this point go outside the powers of both mystic inquiry and scientific inquiry, and take lessons, not just from history, but current affairs:
Outrage at killing of Tibetan monk and refugees in China.
Here's how that item begins:
Civil rights, development and faith groups have expressed horror at the news that a number of Tibetan refugees – including Kelsang Namtso, a 17-year-old nun – have been killed, apparently by Chinese soldiers, near the 6,000-metre-high Nangpa Pass on the border between China and Nepal.
The Tibetans were among hundreds who will make what is, as far as the Chinese government is concerned, an illegal journey to seek the blessing of their spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama.
This is a serious problem. Let's use science, history, evolutionary theory, transactional analysis, Kung Fu, Socratic method, whatever will work to rectify this situation.
Yours,
Rus
I got drawn into the Nepal border situation, and clicked into the video below. So, as addendum, here is footage:
ReplyDeleteProTV: Exclusive footage of Chinese Soldiers Shooting at Tibetan Pilgrims.
It reminds me of the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989, only on a smaller scale. Whereas Tianamen Square is out in the open, shots aimed against demonstrators for democracy and freedom, here the massacre is aimed at the religious trying to sneak away from the territorial captivity of their atheistic overlords.
That looks rotten. People should be allowed to hold whatever beliefs they want and practice them - they will anyway. I think it's okay to challenge people's beliefs, not annihilate them for having them, or daring to express them.
ReplyDeleteThere's an old maxim that says you can't win at the negotiating table what you couldn't win on the battlefield. Ghandi managed it. Maybe the Dalai Lama can too, though it must be a great test of a person's faith to continue to believe in a god that stands by and lets that happen. Either he doesn't care or he's bloodthirsty, neither being good reasons in my opinion to worship him.
Hi Noel,
ReplyDeleteMaybe the Dalai Lama can too, though it must be a great test of a person's faith to continue to believe in a god that stands by and lets that happen. Either he doesn't care or he's bloodthirsty, neither being good reasons in my opinion to worship him.
That's not necessarily true, but only an assertion. It pretty much comes across as being mad at your own (g)od, and a challenge to your own (g)od, because you want to assert that being a god yourself, you would do the world differently, that you have the answers. This would mean there is in fact belief behind your talk, but you just don;t like the way life has been laid out for you. Because it is not a rational argument for not believing. That's not scientific at all, but very human, very human.
Rus
Either he doesn't care or he's bloodthirsty, neither being good reasons in my opinion to worship him.
ReplyDeleteThat's not necessarily true, but only an assertion.
It is an assertion, though it comes with some filmed evidence to back it up. If it isn't true, I'd be interested to hear your take on it: God as a really nice guy .
I wouldn't say I'm satisfied with the way life is laid out. I'm satisfied with the way my life is laying out though I don't think it was done either magically or specially for me, or any other ape ancestor who happens to be happy.
Since I think God(s) do not exist, I cannot think I am one. Because some people believe God (or God through the devil) created them, or they are a reincarnation of God (or the devil), or that God (or the devil) was reincarnated in man and man must therefore be descended from him, or believe God (or the devil) is taking a deep personal interest in what he gets up to and he must therefore act Godlike (or defy Him just to be a better bastard), being in the company of Gods (and wicked Old Nick) and all, is not much reason for me to believe the same.
I like my sanity!
Noel,
ReplyDeleteThanks for that. I see now that Dawkins is absurd, and needs to stick with his own expertise. In fact, he needs to take responsibility himself, instead of expecting any God, cosmic great, or "Super Whatever" to do it for him. Jesus, btw, is an exceptional personality for application to the powers we're discussing (or denying as it were).
Dawkins does not qualify to talk about this, obviously. He's a little kid saying how mommy and daddy should give him all the ice cream he wants and they won't. They're meanies, and he's disowning them. We are here to be pampered by whatever Whatever might exist, because s/he loves us so much? Come on. This is the real world.
It is what It is. I will tell you different just as millions of others who know better will. In the context of the real world, mystics inform this situation.
Yours,
Rus
We know very little about Jesus's personality. We don't even know what he really said, or meant. He wrote nothing that we know of himself. His words and story have been handed down from generation to generation, and I suspect altered greatly in the passing. His personality is a fable, which I understand to be part of his attraction. Mystery encourages some people to believe in whatever they're told is hidden (for some strange reason), for others it causes them to question it. And when you question the story of the Bible and Jesus, it closely resembles many other myths of primeval cultures. So what makes it so special? Why is the story of Jesus the true story and all of the others fakes? What is the evidence to support your beliefs?
ReplyDeleteIn the real, civiliized world we can be expected to treat people in the same way we we would like to be treated ourselves. You don't need a Bible to tell you this. We are born with a moral compass that our parents in raising us help to hone. Saying you walk with Jesus (or are regularly absorbed into the Deity) does not automaticallly confer virtue anymore than being secular automatically implies you must be perverted.
If you want to love and worship some supernatural being called God as described in the Bible, go ahead. I can't see the attraction. If you've read the Bible and believe it, the personality of your God is as Dawkins described him in that clip. You might believe he's other things too, nicer at times in strange ways perhaps, but keep in mind the more prominent, sadistic traits as manifested in nature outside your window.
You say mystics inform the situation and I agree with you. Mystics can inform the situation. Very few people however are mystics in the same way very few people are artists. Thinking I am one, even believing I am one, doesn't make me one. Most people I've met claiming to be mystics (or artists) are only indulging their own senses and there's no harm in doing that, so long as you know that's what's happening. I think one of the worst corrutions is to lie to yourself. Once you do that the possibility of committing every other crime that can be imagined opens up.
And if you are a genuine mystic, it doesn't necessarily mean there is a God and you've got a hotline to him; all it means is that you are living your life according to your own personal code. Good for you. Hope you can stay strong, and sane. :)
Hi Noel,
ReplyDeleteWhen I say "Jesus", what must you think I mean? Instead of going into a pat argument about how we have no video footage of his life, why not instead address the point? What must I have meant? Does what it must mean call for a history lesson? No. I've only been alive since 1955. I wasn't there. Why would I be communicating about anything other than the teachings we have. I was confirming an aspect of them. In Christian terms, this might be called witnessing.
Some people may be interested to know that the Holy Spirit has a comic side. How often do we say this to each other? Not enough, and here we meditiate on the Trinity, not thinking of the hoaky, cornball aspect of it.
Now, there is definitely no historic individual called Holy Spirit. All it can be, then, is either a fable as you say of historic Jesus, or some aspect of spiritual life that spiritual people use to communicate with and realize life through.
Back to mystical experiences. I assure you that I have had many. What does the Bible say: to let my yes be yes? Not me. My own personality is different. I elaborate.
Someday I may categorize them. Anyway, some experiences that come under the larger category of the mystic can and do completely undercut the foundation of the experiencer's philosophies, showing them to be a house of cards collapsing with nary a breath--no matter who that person is or thinks she is, including Dawkins and the Dalai Lama, you and me.
What collapses is what then gets reconstructed, usually erroneously again. I charge you with erroneous construction of a belief system, as well as me. It's part of being in the game.
This is one reason the Dalai Lama says he is only a monk--which is quite egotistal on his part, if I may. Really, he is just folk like we all are.
This is why I love "Oh God" the movie. I have not seen it in decades now. Remember George Burns in court. To prove his Godship, if I have it right, he approached the bench, pulled out a deck of cards, and fanned some before the judge in a card trick. Every mystic gets it. That's all there is. That's all I can give you, or you me. We're insane if we think otherwise.
Once when I was in my teens, I was alone up at the rez where my gang hung out. Like I say, I was a smart cookie. I had been struggling with God's existence, having been raised as a Congregationalist (passed down from the Pilgrims) and taking the teachings for what they were worth. (Not a bad thing for a kid to do really.) I went to the Hillside Congregational Church down the street here from where I live now in West Centralville, Jack Kerouac's side. That white church in need of paint, with its steeple and old rooms, burned down years ago and now stands at the corner as a metaphor for me.
So I was at the reservoir on a sunny day, on top of Christian Hill, what my East Centralville neighborhood is called--named after some hardassed old coot with buckshot, they say, named Christian who owned all the land some hundred plus years earlier. And I had worked out pretty much what you have worked out--and this isn't to convert you. I have no remarkable evangelical gift that I know of.
And I'm looking up from the green park around the rez, and the old houses and sidewalk trees across the streets, up to the sky for my final prayer. The prayer ended something like with a mental, "So I guess I am giving you the benefit of the doubt by doing what I won't do anymore, talking to you who is not there, because you give me no reason to. Even if you are there, you know how I think, and you would then know how untenable your existence is the way things are, and therefore is to me. Done." New atheistic life. Born again, and free.
Something started bugging me when I was a 25-year-old car salesman in Nashua NH. People from different areas of my life, were saying that if you knock, the door will be opened to you. It was spoken like some great truth--seek and you shall find--and several times around me from different sources. How do we explain this weak card trick? Could be anything.
But being so easy to knock on Heaven's door through prayer, my integrity is at stake. In other words, there would be this proof I had not considered, and I was placed in a position of renegotiating my belief system with the possibility of new information. I called for a retrial of God, or a hearing.
If I were to pray, and earnestly and honestly say, "Okay, I am knocking, and if you're there you know I am, so prove yourself," he would. Of course, I am thinking he won't. So I pray it. Some days pass, as I periodically poll the world for some indication of some God, ultimately finding, with a preponderance of evidence: same world, no God.
So, I was at my desk in the used car shack on Main Street, where I worked selling cars, and decided to say another final prayer. I looked down at my desk, closed my eyes, and it went like this: "I knocked and no answer. This method of moving you to enter my life, was repeated to me. Furthermore, it is scripture brought into my life, something irrational that was suppose to lead to revelation. It did not. Again, maybe it's me, but you'll then have to forgive me, because you made me like this. And, knowing how I think, you and I both know you would have to open the skies and show your face in a blaze of glory in order for me to believe. Until then, I'm an atheist."
Bear in mind, no nun had ever come into the car lot in the three or so years I had been working there, but when I opened my eyes and lifted my head, there was a nun at the short partition rail not five feet away from me. She came through the door unheard. She asked me if I was Catholic. I said, "No, but Christian." She handed me a pamphlet. I thanked her, took it, she left, and I put it into my desk drawer without ever reading it.
This is one kind of mystical experience. But all kinds are really card tricks in their own way, but communications as well. There's a poetry to them.
I have these sychronicity experiences, as with pretty much most kinds other than the most powerful unique ones, it seems, in flurries. The nun trick was pretty cool, though.
The problem is that my life cannot be proven by science. I cannot ask you to then be back in 1955 and born me, make all the moves, thoughts and decisions I made for the reasons I made them, such that you would then knock and a nun would enter the used car shack of Nashua Ford in 1970. Even if we could, and she did not come for you, we would need to re-evaluate our reasons and methods, and not jump to unscientific conclusions that God doesn't exist. And then, of course, we would not prove that he does if she did.
This discussion has been on my mind as I have worked the last few days. Before going to work a couple days ago, I had posted the William James excerpt. Richard Dawkins seems not to be able to apply any logic when he leaps out of his element and into these matters. I was at work on the showroom here in Lowell, at the computer, thinking about some of this and the above nun experience, and the customer in the cubicle behind me said to her salesman, "Burt Russell". I love Bertrand Russell. George Burns in the room again (or should I say, Carl Jung)?
So the topic of synchronicity has come to bear. Today, I go up to a customer, and ask him his name. He tells me "Dave Marotte". "What's your last name?," I ask. "Marotte," he says. "Oh, how do you spell that?," I ask. And he spells it. I say back to him, "Oh, Marotte." He has an accent like he is from Lowell, but I could not remember meeting anyone with the name. I started trying to picture work vans with the name, or business signs. We spend an hour or so, and he leaves. Good guy.
Five minutes later, I greet a customer and ask him his name. He says the same thing. "Dave Marotte?, M-a-r-o-t-t-e?," I ask. No, "M-i-r-o-t-t-e."
So, here is one kind of mystical experience. I think of them as the card tricks. Probably most people have them, like most people have had deja vu too. The problem with them is, as George Burns's God character said in court, that after he leaves, people will interpret what they saw their own way. Did some god or Whatever deal me two Dave M(a/i)rottes today?
In my experience with mystical experiences, these are set-ups, openings, or acts of presence, for larger mystical "conversations." Just as in the "Oh God" courtroom. My interpretation is that something greater may be coming, or, in this case, I am urged on in this thread being read by less and less people. Until Frank kicks me out, of course.
Yours,
Rus
That was interesting, thanks. I've had similar experiences to the ones you describe. The difference between us is that I don't think they came from God. Had it been me in Lowell when the nun showed up, I would have definitely read her pamphlet rather then slipping it into the drawer unread. I'd want to know what 'God' was trying to tell me, if I believed the nun had come from God, instead of a man-made (sorry, woman-made) nunnery close by. Coincidence is neat, but it isn't evidence of God's existence.
ReplyDeleteI charge you with erroneous construction of a belief system, as well as me.
I don't try to write off evidence as not perfect enough, evolution for example, so as not to disturb beliefs I want to cherish, some flavor of creationism for example, in the absence of anything that could be reliably called evidence to support my beliefs and despite plenty of evidence to dispute them.
Douglas Adams was asked "how long have you been a nonbeliever, and what brought you to that realization?" Here's what he said:
"Well, it’s a rather corny story. As a teenager I was a committed Christian. It was in my background. I used to work for the school chapel in fact. Then one day when I was about eighteen I was walking down the street when I heard a street evangelist and, dutifully, stopped to listen. As I listened it began to be borne in on me that he was talking complete nonsense, and that I had better have a bit of a think about it.
I’ve put that a bit glibly. When I say I realized he was talking nonsense, what I mean is this. In the years I’d spent learning History, Physics, Latin, Math, I’d learnt (the hard way) something about standards of argument, standards of proof, standards of logic, etc. In fact we had just been learning how to spot the different types of logical fallacy, and it suddenly became apparent to me that these standards simply didn’t seem to apply in religious matters. In religious education we were asked to listen respectfully to arguments which, if they had been put forward in support of a view of, say, why the Corn Laws came to be abolished when they were, would have been laughed at as silly and childish and - in terms of logic and proof -just plain wrong. Why was this?
Well, in history, even though the understanding of events, of cause and effect, is a matter of interpretation, and even though interpretation is in many ways a matter of opinion, nevertheless those opinions and interpretations are honed to within an inch of their lives in the withering crossfire of argument and counterargument, and those that are still standing are then subjected to a whole new round of challenges of fact and logic from the next generation of historians - and so on. All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others.
So, I was already familiar with and (I’m afraid) accepting of, the view that you couldn’t apply the logic of physics to religion, that they were dealing with different types of ‘truth’. (I now think this is baloney, but to continue...) What astonished me, however, was the realization that the arguments in favor of religious ideas were so feeble and silly next to the robust arguments of something as interpretative and opinionated as history. In fact they were embarrassingly childish. They were never subject to the kind of outright challenge which was the normal stock in trade of any other area of intellectual endeavor whatsoever. Why not? Because they wouldn’t stand up to it. So I became an Agnostic. And I thought and thought and thought. But I just did not have enough to go on, so I didn’t really come to any resolution. I was extremely doubtful about the idea of god, but I just didn’t know enough about anything to have a good working model of any other explanation for, well, life, the universe and everything to put in its place. But I kept at it, and I kept reading and I kept thinking. Sometime around my early thirties I stumbled upon evolutionary biology, particularly in the form of Richard Dawkins’s books The Selfish Gene and then The Blind Watchmaker and suddenly (on, I think the second reading of The Selfish Gene) it all fell into place. It was a concept of such stunning simplicity, but it gave rise, naturally, to all of the infinite and baffling complexity of life. The awe it inspired in me made the awe that people talk about in respect of religious experience seem, frankly, silly beside it. I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day."
P.S. We might not be agreeing on much, but I'm still enjoying the exchange and hope you are too.
ReplyDeleteHi Noel,
ReplyDeleteIt's been very good. I woke up this morning realizing how much else I have not done and need to do, with my scant free time, while discussing this. Fortunately I have a day off today.
The pamphlet had nothing to do with it. It could have said, "Buy Coca Cola" as anything else. The "message" was obvious. It might even have been heresy to read it for some truth, taken in that sense.
In that most recent post, you talk a good game. But then bring up Dawkins again, and it all falls apart. The Douglas Adams is much much better. It even smacks of honesty. Let's hope he doesn't become pope of evolution. Let's not you and I either. It may not make us insane, but maybe alcoholics or something.
Furthermore, far too many street preachers and ministers are talking through their hats. And too much of that crazy talk is institutionalized into organized religions. Let's not make these mistakes with the theory of evolution, trying to force five quarts of water into the gallon jug of Darwinism. I think if Darwin's ghost were to enter the world, he would find some John Denver to tell Richard Dawkins to shut up.
When you invoke Dawkins, you become a spokesperson for an irrational zealot. He attacks like a rottweiler as in the video, but as a mad dog. You are better off purporting your own line of thought, and not invoking him. It reminds me of when Sylvester Stallone got into the boxing ring against real boxers. He went from famous actor and writer, to speed and punching bag. Memes are cool. Nothing Dawkins seems to say on this matter though, does not open him up to a pounding.
You want proof, and you are willing to throw your hat into the ring with whatever proves out best, even though something does not prove out in total, some perceived near-total is good enough for you. The details can be worked out later, but you want to be quick to spot alchemy. You then accept evolutionary theory as gospel, as it seems to come along for the ride with rigorous scientific inquiry, and the whole God thing does not.
On the other hand, I want proof--but to see how rigorous a theory can get, to see how it does in the ring. Such rigorous theories include both evolution and behavior modification. Both, by the way, have proponents who want their postulates made into natural law. BM is a bit more elegant than evolutionary theory, but not as encompassing when applied to the cares of our modern civilization. BM wants a Natural Law of Positive Reinforcement. But proponents have never got beyond where evolutionary theory is, in the stage of forming what they will become. Whereas evolutionary theory has a broader storyline, and so a lot more to form up, both are onto "something."
A problem is political. At this point in time, the evolutionists want this "something" translated into exclusionary laws for our educational system. The problem is, neither evolutionary theory nor scientific method, as such, apply to whether there is a God, as you note. And please note that nowhere have I been evangelical that there is. I don't want you to believe in God. I want you to do what you want.
As soon as I would preach Christian Godhood, which I appreciate very much, I exclude the truths and highlights from all other religions. So I don't. Furthermore, I would have taken the same position opposed to a staunch creationist. And there are preachers as faulty as Dawkins, whom I would realize are not in the argument at all, but in the politics and social rewards of it.
That's my training, and my philosophy, to apply theories for what they are worth, for what they can be applied to, not what they do not apply to. And to realize that each good one can only go so far, within the sense that none of it has been proven. This is why I can hold to and use both evolutionary theory and creationism and stand against them both when misrepresented.
Indeed, the Bible has two creation stories we are welcome to choose truths from. The first speaks into the evolution aspect of this conversation, and can challenge us to consider how we passed through the impossibly infinite vastness to get to where we are. In fact, we still ponder the impossibility of creation or evolution, in how the cosmos (versus the universe) was able to get through the infinite period of time to the time we are in right now. Thought coming from say Reimann and Lobachevsky or even integral calculus, are interesting meditations. But blown out of proportion, these types of meditations translate into meager attempts at being the generation to explain it all.
The second creation story has more to do with moment to moment decisions we make in our lives--and I don't want to be read from the Christian side of things, as if I am reducing either creation story to only what I extract from them. Adam and Eve is very sociological as well, for instance. It also presents that at some point, there was a seemingly impossible first family of human beings, something evolution has a hard time accounting for, as it points so strongly at them. After their start getting into the issues of living, neither evolutionary theory nor creation theory (as such) could then help this family in the garden get along and put food on the table. There was no sense pondering whether God or gods evolved, always were, or were created--just how to deal with the human condition.
No, evolutionary theory cannot tell us if George W. Bush should or should not be tarred and feathered, or whether taxes should increase or decrease. But it cannot tell us whether there is a God. It needs to assume otherwise, but we who use the theory need to realize that it is only a theory. Because no god need fit into the the story the evolution brings to us, it holds God at zero. Thus it is looking to see how far it can go on its own, because God doesn't apply. That does not mean that we who mentally look at evolution in its theoretical operation, coming up with the dates and stories it comes up with (and then overturns), are suppose to disbelieve in God.
In Pythagorean's theorum the hypotenuse squared is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. This means that the hypotenuse squared (plus God) is equal to: (God plus) the sum of the squares of the other two sides. Mathematically, we need to get God out of the equation to have an elegant Pythagorean theorum. This says nothing about whether God exists, however. By the same token, a believer in God cannot be a heretic for using and thinking of Pythagorean's theorum in its ungodded elegance.
The Laws of physics apply to religious matters, as you are quite sure. To my own Christian background, they allow me to know when something is more apt to be poetic or mystic, and when it is physically possible, like was there a Moses who brought down laws in stone. Yeah sure, why not? Now then, is this Moses and his stones poetic? Yeah sure, why not?
Did God keep keep the sun and moon still so that the Israelites would win their battle for the Gibeonites? And, does God, from moment-to-moment, never sleeping, hold the sun in the sky as it moves? Physics says no to the first, and holds God at zero for the second. Speaking from the phenomenal experience such as then-Saul had in Damascus, God, or the great loving creative force that some call God, keeps the sun in the sky. The issue at Gibeon might be like we say "sure" to a Moses chisling as a metaphor, that some Damascus-type, or spiritual baptism, or other revealing mystical experience that came from the sky, was maintained onto the first teller of this Gibeon story until the battle was won. But anyone, not only the mystically sensitive, can say "sure", that some mystic force holds what we experience as the physical sun in the sky, whether those who see it (or have "seen" it) agree with it or not.
This is also a place where agreement, not disagreement, between physics and mystics lies, that there is a sun, apparently held by some force, in the sky. For the sake of conceptualizing, it may depend on one's angle only. Physics cannot determine much if anything about how the sun is mystically held in the sky, as mystics cannot say much about how the physical aspect works. Mysticism would not be what it is, if it were open to the type of inquiry that science requires of its studies. Indeed, psychology, which means the study of behavior, comes from what means to study the psyche. Scientific inquiry almost necessarily evolves such study into the physical, as it holds all things spiritual to zero to observe its phenomenon unmuddied.
Yours,
Rus
I can think of worse ways to spend Sundays. ;)
ReplyDeleteI still find it astonishing that you didn't read what you believed God sent you. A message from God? Rus, I would have read it.
The problem is, neither evolutionary theory nor scientific method, as such, apply to whether there is a God, as you note.
I've never noted that. I think Darwinian evolution seriously undermines the idea of God which accounts for religious denial and hostility towards it.
That's my training, and my philosophy, to apply theories for what they are worth, for what they can be applied to, not what they do not apply to. And to realize that each good one can only go so far, within the sense that none of it has been proven
Rus, evolution is proven. It is a process that occurs in every living thing in the world of which you and I (and God if you believe he is in the universe in any living way) belong to.
There's something else I would like to clear up. Evolution is not premised on chance. It works according to natural selection, which in a way is a design, but it's a blind design - it doesn't know where it is going, there's no grand plan. Take a look at evolution. I suspect from what you say that you may not understand it. You find it threatening to the idea of God. It is, but it still might be a good idea to understand it.
Indeed, the Bible has two creation stories we are welcome to choose truths from. The first speaks into the evolution aspect of this conversation, and can challenge us to consider how we passed through the impossibly infinite vastness to get to where we are.
I'm curious to know what beliefs, if any, you've cherry-picked from the Bible: Earth made in six days? Adam born without a mother? Earth six thousand years old?
In Taking Back Astronomy, the book written by Intelligent Designer, Jason Lisle, he tries to explain "how starlight from billions of light years away has reached Earth in only a few thousand years." It is one of the greatest obstacles to creationism. His explanation? "Maybe God created the light already en route; or maybe the Milky Way sits in a large gravitational well where the time-stretching effects of general relativity can explain the anomaly; or - the creationists' favorite - maybe the speed of light was much, much greater in the past." (from New Scientist, 11 November 2006).
there are preachers as faulty as Dawkins
The difference between preachers and Dawkins is that Dawkins can offer proof for what he claims, preachers can't.
Your hostility to Dawkins I question. He seems to me a decent person with no nefarious designs on the world that I can discern. That someone is clever and articulate is not a good enough reason in my opinion to dislike them. I think he makes his case very well. You and every other person claiming faith are free to do the same. I think 'the other side' doesn't have as clever or articulate or accomplished a spokesperson as Dawkins and I think this is what accounts mostly for the hostility towards him: it is because he is effective. I could see how infuriating he is, being so bloody direct and right all the time, but I'd rather have the plain truth come tumbling out of an old rust bucket than superficial inanities rolling smoothly from a silver tongue. ;)
It might be a good idea to read Dawkins before writing him off. I enjoyed The Ancestor's Tale. The Selfish Gene I had to work at.
There was no sense pondering whether God or gods evolved, always were, or were created--just how to deal with the human condition.
Gods have been a part of life throughout the life of all ancient cultures. There is no evidence any of those Gods people believed in existed, only mythical and supernatural stories, strikingly similar to what religions offer today. The difference now is that we know a lot more about life than our ancestors did, for example, how to read and write, what causes disease, how to fly through the air, travel into space. We have the Internet! Knowledge is freely and easily available. We can get both sides of a story. And if someone goes in search of truth, they can find it. It might lose its appeal ten minutes after finding it, but for the time that is in it, it is the truth.
Science hasn't proclaimed final truths. It goes to work everyday, step by step figuring out the puzzle, adding new knowledge to add to our old knowledge, unlike religion which shows an historical propensity up through the Dark and Middle Ages until the Renaissance for wanting us to shut off our minds and blindly accept fairy-tales as absolute truth while violently enforcing its ridiculous assertions for hundreds of years through the Inquisition.
Religion doesn't want you to think for yourself. I think religions are the enemy of knowledge because they instinctively know that knowledge threatens to expose their silly stories and just as instinctively look to discredit it before finding they are unable to avoid it. Then they try changing the stories, stories supposedly fixed in time.
The Christians say that since God lived incarnate on the Earth, their version of God is more adaptable than any Muslim who believes God appeared to someone in a dream and that therefore what he said in that dream (if he said it, you understand), cannot be adapted; it has to be taken literally.
So the Pope bends like a reed in the wind and agrees evolution is a fact, but claims it doesn't apply to the soul. That's the preserve of 'God.' That's like saying, as Daniel Dennett put it: "Our bodies are made up of biological material, except, of course, the pancreas. The brain is no more wonder tissue than the lungs or the liver. It's just a tissue."
a believer in God cannot be a heretic for using and thinking of Pythagorean's theorum in its ungodded elegance.
You conceive of something outside of God's jurisdiction. That has to be frightening, if not to you personally, to anyone religious you tell it to.
Physics cannot determine much if anything about how the sun is mystically held in the sky, as mystics cannot say much about how the physical aspect works.
I don't see the mystical connection holding the sun in the sky. I see what we can imagine might be happening, but without evidence it remains only imagined. What science imagines, it has to prove, if it has any hope of having what it imagined accepted. Same with any claim.
Mysticism would not be what it is, if it were open to the type of inquiry that science requires of its studies.
That's probably true, which doesn't say much for mysticism, though here's something you might find interesting:
"Both Darwin and Wallace failed to understand an important aspect of natural selection. They realized that plant and animal populations are composed of individuals that vary from each other in physical form. They also understood that nature selects from the existing varieties those traits that are most suited to their environment. If natural selection were the only process occurring, each generation should have less variation until all members of a population are essentially identical, or clones of each other. That does not happen. Each new generation has new variations. Darwin was aware of this fact, but he did not understand what caused the variation. The first person to begin to grasp why this happens was an obscure Central European monk named Gregor Mendel. Through plant breeding experiments carried out between 1856 and 1863, he discovered that there is a recombination of parental traits in offspring. Sadly, Darwin and most other 19th century biologists never knew of Mendel and his research. It was not until the beginning of the 20th century that Mendel's pioneer research into genetic inheritance was rediscovered. This was long after his death. He never received the public acclaim that was eventually showered on Darwin during his lifetime."
All mystics ever do is to live life according to their own personal code. Not everyone can do that. Some grown-ups want a group to tell them what the code is, as though the difference between right and wrong is a mystery. They willingly surrender their own judgment and let the group tell them what to think. And they do it because they don't fully trust themselves. In return for a sense of comfort and security, they are willing to believe whatever they are told to believe (or are willing to pretend they do). I think there's more to enjoy in life when you trust yourself.
Here's more on Gregor Mendel.
ReplyDeleteHi Noel,
ReplyDeleteYour Mendel post slipped. It blows my mind that you by now might think I have not studied Mendel at least several times in my life.
Anyway, the post I prepared since your previous one, is below.
~~~~
You say:
Rus, evolution is proven.
Okay, then, you must have the proof, whether you proved it or not. You've said this mulitple times and each time I have corrected you. All you have to do is show the proof. Write it out, link to it, bring in the person who proved it, whatever you want to do. But if you cannot prove it, then you are giving hearsay to this discussion. And if you don't know the proof after asserting it so many times, you are guilty of being a mindless follower of whatever ism you've chosen.
I think Darwinian evolution seriously undermines the idea of God which accounts for religious denial and hostility towards it.
I have no hostility toward it.
You find it threatening to the idea of God. It is, but it still might be a good idea to understand it.
Assume that I understand it, and then you will see that, from what I have been saying, someone like me would not find it "threatening to the idea of God." I find it remarkable that we get this far, and you think I have no clue about how evolutionary theory works. I thought at first as I read this:
It works according to natural selection, which in a way is a design, but it's a blind design - it doesn't know where it is going, there's no grand plan.
. . . that you were simply establishing a basis for some delving into evolutionary theory yourself. Little did I know you would be displaying that you thought I did not know that. But now you know.
I'm curious to know what beliefs, if any, you've cherry-picked from the Bible: Earth made in six days? Adam born without a mother? Earth six thousand years old?
With the approach of a mystic usually, I don't cherry pick at all. As shown in above posts, in this post, you'll see how this works especially when I address your citation about the Pope below.
By the way, speaking of Adam, who or what was his mother? And who or what was Eve's? What species did they each belong to, and what species did their parents? As to myself, I was not there, so I have no answer, and no evidence has been brought forth. You may know that Eve seems to have come from Africa, and scientists were trying to close in on dates and such, but I have not read up on it for some months or maybe over a year.
Also, this Jason Lisle you cite does not seem to be able to support creationism very well, does he? I didn't pick him. You did. You've also picked out Dawkins. You seem attracted to unsupportable or unrigorous arguments.
Your hostility to Dawkins I question.
Dawkins is the hostile one. You were the one who posted his hostile diatribe against God. Not me. And if he has some proofs, then why not display them for us, paraphrase or quote them.
I think 'the other side' doesn't have as clever or articulate or accomplished a spokesperson as Dawkins and I think this is what accounts mostly for the hostility towards him: it is because he is effective.
From the way this discussion has gone, it is obvious that you need a spokesman. I don't. But if we assume that "the other side" has no spokesperson as effective as Dawkins good or bad as he might be: oh well. I watched Richard Dawkins' YouTube video, Richard Dawkins vs. Ted Haggard, posted in another thread here: Amen, brother ..., and thought Ted Haggard was pretty hostile in the end there.
Would he have kicked Dawkins out if he was not "effective" but some "unknown" just like him who came and said that human beings, or members of the congregation are animals? Maybe so. I don't know. But this does not address where Dawkins has been wrong in his assertions. It is an attempt to sidestep the discussion, by shifting the argument, as if the only person you have to answer is someone who knows very little about evolutionary theory, and is hostile that someone would try to undermine creationism.
Talk to me. Neither apply here. Address the issues with rigor. Show your proof for starters. We're moving in on 50 posts in this discussion thread, and you have kept this proof of yours under wraps. It's time. I answer everything I see you address as if you are intelligent and in earnest, and you respond to me as if I am some uneducated dunderhead moved by irrational emotions. NO. Please state your points as if to move the argument forward, and as if I already know about them.
I read your paragraphs leading up to the following one quoted as establishing some of what we would both agree upon, such that you would present them. I will just note, that there would be no need for science to find evidence of God. Like I had said in the previous post, most science needs to hold God at zero in order to be clear. Science does not disprove God. It has nothing to do with God.
Religion doesn't want you to think for yourself. I think religions are the enemy of knowledge because they instinctively know that knowledge threatens to expose their silly stories and just as instinctively look to discredit it before finding they are unable to avoid it.
True. Nicely put. Except that all intitutionalized thinking doesn't. One problem religious institutions have and have had, is that any safeguards of checks and balances have been too easily undermined throughout history. When people think institutionally, they get irrational, as with the Dawkins video with the diatribe you posted, and your excerpt from Jason Lisle.
With Dawkins, one problem occurs, that if his irrational thinking takes hold, this attack dog technique of his, he will keep people who do not think as he does, outside of science. People with similar values gravitate to institutions where they find like-minded people, and get out when they get put down. With medicine, for instance. There was a study some time back that showed the relatively well-off people who became doctors had strikingly similar values as those from the slums who got into drug dealing. Both as a rule valued money, for instance. Here in this discussion, we find Dawkins attempting to either define or solidify for the institution of science, what values people better have if they want to belong, have a voice, or pursue such a discipline.
You say:
So the Pope bends like a reed in the wind and agrees evolution is a fact, but claims it doesn't apply to the soul. That's the preserve of 'God.' That's like saying, as Daniel Dennett put it: "Our bodies are made up of biological material, except, of course, the pancreas. The brain is no more wonder tissue than the lungs or the liver. It's just a tissue."
Again, again, evolution does not prove or disprove God. For its purposes as a theory, it holds God to zero. And social science tends to hold the psyche (or soul) to zero, and look only at behavior, what can be currently, at least, studied with scientific method.
I did not know this about the Pope, but he is correct here. He is either a mystic himself , has listened to his mystic advisors, or is quite deft at interpreting such matters of the soul in some other way. Again, as I stated in the previous post, consider when there is agreement, as the Pope notes here, that we are looking at the same phenomenon from different angles. Like physics can explain to a large degree how the sun is "held" in the sky, mysticism does as well. This is agreement from different angles. Not disagreement. The Pope clearly sees that evolutionary theory does not undermine knowledge obtained from the mystic. Conversely, mystic knowledge for him does not undermine evolutionary theory.
Daniel Dennett, however, does not see this. I have a news flash for him. The brain is made up of "wonder" material and is biological at the same time. And so is a blade of grass.
You conceive of something outside of God's jurisdiction. That has to be frightening, if not to you personally, to anyone religious you tell it to.
Not to me personally. And I am very sure many people who believe in specifically and only the exclusionary Christian "God", a group I do not belong to, would not find it frightening. Notice how the Pope doesn't, and he's Roman Catholic (I assume).
But I am sure there are others who are put off by this idea, and some number of those who may feel frightened by the conception, as you have imagined or experienced some such opponents of evolution to be. It takes all kinds. I would probably root for you in the arguments you might take up with such a person, if I could not join in myself.
I don't see the mystical connection holding the sun in the sky. I see what we can imagine might be happening, but without evidence it remains only imagined. What science imagines, it has to prove, if it has any hope of having what it imagined accepted. Same with any claim.
I won't prove it, and I never said that this came from my imagination. But the Pope and I know the truth of it. This is an answer in life obtained from outside of science. You don't have to believe it. It's quite okay with me if you don't (and I definitely don't mean this damningly). But there is an intelligent frame of mind that can be taken about it, such as William James did.
You cited this page: Darwin. I've been there before. Interesting. That excerpt you displayed summarizes things fairly well. It is pre-college information. I believe my first lessons on Mendel were in high school, or maybe television programming at the time. My older brother and I would have discussions from time to time, and maybe he got the info first, and discussed it with me.
You say:
All mystics ever do is to live life according to their own personal code. Not everyone can do that.
Most mystics do, I guess. Most car salesmen that I've gotten to know do as well.
Some grown-ups want a group to tell them what the code is, as though the difference between right and wrong is a mystery. They willingly surrender their own judgment and let the group tell them what to think. And they do it because they don't fully trust themselves. In return for a sense of comfort and security, they are willing to believe whatever they are told to believe (or are willing to pretend they do).
Like some Dawkins followers? (You asked for that.) Most people who enjoy what Dawkins says as how he says it, I imagine, are not like this though. Some, though, very likely are if he is popular to a large degree. Most Buddhists aren't either, but some are as well.
By the way, on "willing to pretend" part, sometimes the politics gets so bad that people are killed if they don't pretend. In a lesser inflamation of irrationality, as Dawkins found himself socially attacked at the Ted Haggard compound, it would be interesting to see what would happen if someone from the Haggard camp went into a group of Dawkins-like people going about their business, to engage the leader in a pop "tete-a-tete" about evolution. (And what must be compellingly obvious to you by now, is that I am in neither of those camps, even though I have read volumes of the same material that has informed both of them, as most educated people have)--although I sense you are in the Dawkins one.
I think there's more to enjoy in life when you trust yourself.
Not a bad line. You could have quoted Shakespeare. And as Darwin knew, there are so many different and various people in the world.
Yours,
Rus
Hi Noel,
ReplyDeleteTouche on the Mendel trick. Here's Stephen Hawkings on proving a theory (and is why you're having such a hard time doing it):
According to Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time, "a theory is a good theory if it satisfies two requirements: It must accurately describe a large class of observations on the basis of a model that contains only a few arbitrary elements, and it must make definite predictions about the results of future observations." He goes on to state, "any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis; you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict the theory. On the other hand, you can disprove a theory by finding even a single repeatable observation that disagrees with the predictions of the theory."
Yours,
Rus
Rus, you give us your credentials and reference some subjects that require a grasp of mathematics to understand, and I think you probably do understand them, but when it comes to evolution, I do not think you know what you are talking about, and this is based on what you've said.
ReplyDeleteYou mentioned how you loved the "Oh God" movie and how George Burns, to prove his Godship in court, "pulled out a deck of cards, and fanned some before the judge in a card trick. Every mystic gets it. That's all there is. That's all I can give you, or you me. We're insane if we think otherwise."
Evolution isn't a game of chance. Evolution works according to Darwinian principles of Natural Selection which is not the same thing at all as chance. You would know the difference between a game of chance and evolution, if you understood evolution.
All mammals, including cats and dogs, evolved from a common ancestor. To understand evolution, it is easiest to look at the cellular level because it is in our cells that we find DNA. DNA not only explains physically how we form, there are also instructions in our genes for when genes are switched on and when genes are switched off. For example, we share something like 60% of our genes with the sea cucumber and 80% with the house fly. When genes are turned on and turned off determines how many arms and legs we have, where they grow from and what size they become. Our closest relative on earth today, as far as we are aware, is the chimpanzee, varying only in a minor way from our own DNA.
It is worth noting that Europeans were unaware of apes and monkeys before exploration in Africa and the Far East began, and if you look around and see cows and horses and mice and cats, but no other bipedal creature with hands like ours etc., it is easy to fall into the trap of believing that we are unique. But when you see a mama chimpanzee holding her baby with its fingers wrapped around her finger, and see her put its little fingers to her lips, exactly the way I have seen my wife hold our little babies and kiss their fingers, it is much easier to understand the genetic connection, a connection that has been scientifically proven. (Naturally there are gaps in the fossil record because the circumstances required to form a fossil are very rare. Very few deaths result in a fossil. Nevertheless, scientists can trace through the fossil record man’s evolution from the bipedal ape Australopithecus).
We evolved from apes and are still apes, less hairy maybe (unless you originated from the mediterranean where your beard grows up to your eyes and your eyebrows up to your hairline and even the women sport a thin mustache) and more ingenious, but apes nonetheless. That is the family of animals we belong to. Some of us still live in trees. I dare you to look into the eyes of a gorilla, a chimpanzee or even a baboon (which is not an ape, but a monkey) and tell me you do not see intelligence there. All of us in the ape family shared a common ancestor and through the slow process of evolution, branched off in different directions.
Look at the difference between a flying squirrel and a gray squirrel. One can glide from tree to tree and therefore avoid snakes; the other cannot, but essentially they are both squirrels.
A fish has a heart, intestines, a liver, a brain, spine and ribcage, and eyes just like we do, but it continued on its evolutionary path in the ocean while our ancestors climbed out of the water and onto land. And to see a perfect example for this transition from water to land, look at amphibians, frogs, for example. An adult frog has lungs, liver, brain, intestines just like we do, but when it’s a baby it swims in the water and breathes through gills. It is as they mature that they develop lungs and live on land. The point is that when you look beneath the surface of life on this planet, it is obvious that we all developed in a beautiful variety of ways from the same ancestors.
Evolution happens very slowly over time - subtle changes, little by little with the birth of each new baby. You can have a sudden change, which is essentially a mutation, for example when an albino is born, they are missing the information which allows them to produce pigment. This is a change in the DNA, an evolution. But would you say that an albino is inferior to us? Would you say that I am inferior because my eyes are brown and maybe yours are blue? In the same way we cannot think ourselves superior to any of the earth’s creatures. We have all evolved together and we all began from common organisms in the sea that decided over time that it was more convenient to work together and form larger cooperative units or multi-cellular creatures like fish, and eventually, human beings. As suggested before, to deny evolution is to deny the very fabric of your being, and also to deny yourself the pleasure of reveling in all of the multitudinous varieties of life on earth.
You write off the truly massive body of evidence that exists for evolution without, I suspect, having researched it for yourself and without offering a shred of evidence to support your own claims. Your point of view seems to be that we can never be certain of anything. I think you know better, particularly if you have studied mathematics, as you claim to have. As Churchill put it: "the mathematical process has a reality and virtue in itself, and that once discovered it constitutes a new and independent factor."
That mathematics hasn't proven everything (and may never) is not a good enough reason to deny what it has proven. It's been proven through mathematics that the Earth has been spinning at 900 miles an hour around the sun for more than 4 billion years. Newton looked at something we take for granted - gravity - and worked it out mathematically. His calculations are still used when we send craft into space today. Einstein came up with the formula E=mc2 to prove that mass and energy are interchangeable which they most certainly are. Every scientific discovery began in someone's imagination, but they didn't stop at just imagining it. They worked hard to come up with reliable evidence to support their claims, unlike religion which just proclaims the most fantastic things and then expects the rest of us to accept them, without providing any evidence to support them. The testimony of long-dead saints and mystics is interesting, but it does not qualify as evidence of anything.
Evolution is proven. How it occurs is still open to debate but that it occurs is proven scientific fact. Even the Pope accepts it, and he's supposed to have a hot line to the big guy himself. Coming up with the ridiculous assertion that one part of the body, the brain, is not biological tissue, shows a sense of humor I didn't know the Pope had.
The story of Adam and Eve is an ancient fairytale. Armageddon isn't a given and I distrust those who preach it.
On Dawkins, you are insulted that he termed the personality of God as clearly described in the Bible in the way he did. I think that is how any objective observer reading the Bible would describe the personality of God as he is depicted in the Bible.
Ted Haggert of the New Life Church clearly reveals himself to be an arrogant bully in that interview with Dawkins. As someone put it, he would have made a great warm-up at a Nuremberg rally. Dawkins did not call his family or his congregation "animals." That is what Ted Haggert chooses to understand evolution to mean. Of course, he is right. It is what it means. Human beings belong to the ape family of creatures. Over vast stretches of time our ancestors branched off in a different direction by walking on their hind legs, coming out of the trees, learning to use tools and hunting for food in the plains, in the process developing larger brains giving greater computing ability. But our upright method of walking evolved before significant brain enlargement occurred. Ted is not the first bully to find the truth offensive.
You said earlier that "a believer in God cannot be a heretic for using and thinking of Pythagorean's theorum in its ungodded elegance." Now you say: Science does not disprove God. It has nothing to do with God.
If science has nothing to do with God, then God has nothing to do with science. Again, you are suggesting that there is something outside of God's jurisdiction. Rus, you are on your way to becoming a true Darwinian evolutionist. ;)
I won't prove [there's a mystical connection holding the sun in the sky], and I never said that this came from my imagination. But the Pope and I know the truth of it.
You or the Pope can offer nothing that could be reliably called evidence to support a belief in the existence of God (or the mystical connection holding the sun in the sky), where I and anyone else who's studied evolution can point to a mass of publicly available evidence to support evolution. As Douglas Adams has been quoted saying:
"All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others."
You ask me to assume you understand evolution after making statements that suggest you do not. You could do a little work for yourself: visit a library and read about evolutionary biology maybe, or molecular genetics. Visit an archaeological museum, a medical laboratory, talk to scientists, ask to look through a telescope at a flu virus, or any virus. Maybe it's been a while since you took at look at it, I don't know. In any case, make sure your beliefs are not only what you were taught as a child when you had no real defenses of your own, before you could decide for yourself what makes sense and what's baloney. I tell my children about Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny, but I also tell them the truth when they are old enough to start asking questions.
I think the reason many people claim to believe in God is because it gives them a sense of self-importance: the idea that some all powerful, supernatural being is taking an interest in what they get up to. It is ego, or rather the indulgement of their own ego.
On the other hand, you can disprove a theory by finding even a single repeatable observation that disagrees with the predictions of the theory.
- Stephen Hawking
As Richard Dawkins quoted the great biologist, J B S Haldane saying, "when asked what might disprove evolution: "Fossil rabbits in the pre-Cambrian." Evolution, like all good theories, makes itself vulnerable to disproof. Needless to say, it has always come through with flying colours."
ask to look through a telescope at a flu virus, or any virus.
ReplyDeleteDon't do that, don't even ask to do that. A telescope could cause you to imagine you're seeing viruses. To really see them you need a microscope.
Hi Noel,
ReplyDeleteI am at work, so have to be relatively brief. I cannot believe you are again stating that evolution has been proven. No sense saying it again any more without the proof. In this argument, I can say that you have lost that point miserably. I am also beside myself that you think I need any schooling on evolution. I had asked to to assume I am up on these matters.
Evolution happens very slowly over time - subtle changes, little by little with the birth of each new baby.
A change from one species to another is a quantum leap. Changes within species usually happen relatively slowly over time, but not always.
Again, you are suggesting that there is something outside of God's jurisdiction. Rus, you are on your way to becoming a true Darwinian evolutionist. ;)
I don't see it as one or the other. I see both as having credence. Whenever I apply evolutionary theory to a problem, I suppose you could say I am being an evolutionist in the moment. Just as whenever I apply Euclidean geometry to a problem, you could say I am being a Euclidean. I assure you that I am not on my way to either.
You or the Pope can offer nothing that could be reliably called evidence to support a belief in the existence of God (or the mystical connection holding the sun in the sky), where I and anyone else who's studied evolution can point to a mass of publicly available evidence to support evolution.
Sure. Lots of mystics for one. But I don't try to prove God anyway. You're the one who needs proof to believe. Unfortunately, evolution has not been proven.
You ask me to assume you understand evolution after making statements that suggest you do not. You could do a little work for yourself: visit a library and read about evolutionary biology maybe, or molecular genetics.
At least I have given my qualification andn oted how I have been schooled in molecular biology several time, used it, and thought about it many many times afterward. I am not a biologist, but unless you are, I assume that your not putting any qualifications on the table means it is your turn to go to the library.
As Richard Dawkins quoted the great biologist, J B S Haldane saying, "when asked what might disprove evolution: "Fossil rabbits in the pre-Cambrian." Evolution, like all good theories, makes itself vulnerable to disproof. Needless to say, it has always come through with flying colours."
All theories for as long as they are forming themselves, come through with flying colors. That formation shows their limitations and strengths of application to our lives.
You again stated that evolution has been proven, and show nothing to support this. Again, "any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis; you can never prove it." [--Stephen Hawkings]
Rus
I have been mispelling "Stephen Hawking"--sorry.
ReplyDeleteHi Noel,
ReplyDeleteWhat precisely is your point about the microscope. I have, of course, looked through them both in high school and college.
Yours,
Rus
I assume that your not putting any qualifications on the table means it is your turn to go to the library.
ReplyDeleteIt is the merit of what you say that matters here, not your credentials. ;)
What precisely is your point about the microscope.
Never mind, Rus. I've already explained it in this thread. It's been fun chatting with you!
Hi Noel,
ReplyDeleteBye, then. Your arguments deteriorated at times, and especially these past couple days. In wrestling, that's called gassing.
Here, you wanted to challenge me on how much biology and evolutionary theory I have studied and bring to bear, but you fold at the challenge yourself. There were far too many questions I asked of you, that you never responded to, including the proof you mentioned so often.
It's been good, and very good at times. Thank you.
Yours,
Rus
Rus, the evidence supporting evolution is there for you to understand for yourself if only you will put a little work in. I have explained evolution and how it works. You try to equalize the claims evolution makes with those creationism makes, overlooking the fact that there is no evidence whatsoever for creationism and plenty of publicly available evidence for evolution. You say that because something is subject to change, it can not be considered evidence. I have suggested you take a look at evolutionary biology and molecular genetics. You tell me you know it all already while demonstrating that you do not understand evolution at all.
ReplyDeleteThere's not a lot more I can do here.
Hi Noel,
ReplyDeleteYour position acknowledged.
Thanks.
Yours,
Rus
Rus, yours too. Hope I haven't been too harsh. I think you're just trying to make sense of it, same way I am. See you in another thread!
ReplyDeleteN
ReplyDeleteUhmmmm . . .
Not exactly.
OK.
R
It's finishing ambiguously. Can't have that. That should read, "I think you're just trying to make sense of it, I am too."
ReplyDeleteHi Noel,
ReplyDeleteI have died before, flatlined twice and for a good time. I'll tell you about it someday maybe, not today. But, my attitude does not come under such a category. It's more like: "This is all there is." Like you, I am at risk of dying before I click "Publish" to my next blog message.
Even though I have always had a brain that is as good as most any for making sense of matters, my application to such matters as these, is to report or inform, to bring what I come from. But I am open. You showed me how my prejudice was wrong about the Pope, that he is to be respected at least for his messages applying to such a discussion as we have had.
But I don't have a pope, or a dalai lama, or a dawkins. I don't have a spokesperson. I'm not a pentecostal or an evolutionist. I am a Christian in the sense that I am a spiritual person who has been raised in a predominantly Christian culture. So the teaching I most easily fall back on are written in the Bible. In this sense, I am a born again Christian. But I imagine the pentecostal movement would not have me for reason you point out.
People take ism hats and spokesperson hats on to see how long and how well they fit for them--even if they "are" them. It was very typical for young girls trying to figure how they should present themselves to the world, to dress like Madonna. Same with young men and Eminem. What we do, is then keep what works for us, the baggy pants and forthrightness, and cast away what doesn't, the blond near-crew cut and the "yo" attitude, say.
So "not exactly". Other things are too, but death is a great equalizer. Sorry I was ambiguous.
Also, you never showed your proof. In all honesty, to be true to the discussion, with all the answering I did of your questioning, you could have at least answered that of mine, or simply backed away and admitted your error.
It was shown that at bottom, all natural laws and theories are based on assumptions--and none are proven in themselves. You will not have your ultimate answer on the terms you want it, neither will or does Dawkins have his.
Yours,
Rus
Rus, I don't think Dawkins belongs in the same category as the Pope or Dalai Lama. Last I heard, he's not religious. ;)
ReplyDeleteYou're still trying to equate creationism with science by suggesting that if evidence supporting evolution is not personally provided to you, evolution isn't proven. The evidence supporting evolution is widely and publicly available; there's none for mysticism or religion, unless you believe hearsay can be considered evidence. I've tried to explain how evolution works and suggested you take a look at evolutionary biology, biochemistry and molecular genetics, talk to scientists, maybe visit a scientific or medical laboratory and an archaeological museum. Examine the fossil record for yourself. Considering how much you claim to want evidence of evolution, I don't see why you won't put in a little work yourself to start understanding it.
I have no problem with people wanting to hold onto two-thousand-year-old customs and traditions. These things are part of our history. Wanting to believe, however, that there is truth, absolute truth, in 2000-year-old tribal myths, and wanting to give those ancient ideas equal billing with proven knowledge about life we have collectively accumulated since then is willful ignorance.
That's interesting about you dying twice before. I'm curious to know if you were pronounced clinically dead by medics. Kerry Packer, the Australian businessman, suffered as many as eight heart attacks, one of them left him clinically dead for six minutes. When he was revived, he told a reporter, "The good news is there is no devil. The bad news is there is no heaven."
Look it. I'm getting impatient here. Knock it off.
ReplyDeleteYou don't have to explain how evolution works to me. I know how it works. I've known for years how it works. I've read volumes on it. I have w icked high IQ suited just so for such theories as evolution. Don't you ever ever speak to me this wat again.
Now knock it off.
Rus, I can tell you're clever by the way you make your arguments and also that you are as interested in the subject as I am or you wouldn't be involved in the discussion. But I am certainly going to speak as I please in an open forum especially since I am not being impolite and I am sure you can do the same.
ReplyDeleteYou baited me. I had closed the argument off when I acknowledged your point. You then could not help somehow redefining my position to me. I then said "Not exactly" to your assertion. You then asked me to not be ambigious, so I clarified. You took that opportunity to insult me.
ReplyDeleteNow,knock it off, You're not a very mice person at all. Either that, or you're dense. I wake up this morning, and you want to further this.
Do not insult me again. Period.
That's what I love about blogging. It's easy to check exactly what was said, and who said it, at any point in a conversation simply by using the scroll bar. If you read the flow of conversation from eight comments back you can see that you reopened the argument after I had tried to remove an ambiguity I may have created by saying, in closing:
ReplyDelete"I think you're just trying to make sense of it, same way I am."
You objected to this by saying "Not really."
So I changed it, in what I intended to be my final comment, to read:
"I think you're just trying to make sense of it, I am too."
I was trying to do a nice thing by agreeing there are differences of opinion between us and that's fine. The discussion could have happily ended there, but you reopened it by raising the Pope, the Dalai Lama, the Bible, Christian culture and your near-death experiences while taking the opportunity to accuse me again of not having personally provided you with evidence of evolution which was the basis of your argument for claiming that therefore there mustn't be any.
You have shown in this thread that you don't understand evolution, yet act 'offended' that someone would dare to point it out while suggesting ways of learning about it, demanding they "knock it off" in response to what you say because, as you say, you are in possession of a "wicked high IQ suited just so for such theories as evolution." A person can have the biggest IQ in the world, but it isn't worth a hill of beans if it isn't put to use.
You are now hoping to drag the discussion down by inviting me to join you in trading personal insults so that you can feel justified in being offended. I bid you Happy Trails ...
Some trails are happy ones,
Others are blue.
It's the way you ride the trail that counts,
Here's a happy one for you.
Happy trails to you until we meet again.
Happy trails to you, keep smilin' until then.
Who cares about the clouds when we're together?
Just sing a song and bring the sunny weather.
Happy trails to you 'till we meet again.
Music and Lyrics by Dale Evans-Rogers
Listen you had to add this:
ReplyDeleteYou're still trying to equate creationism with science by suggesting that if evidence supporting evolution is not personally provided to you, evolution isn't proven. The evidence supporting evolution is widely and publicly available; there's none for mysticism or religion, unless you believe hearsay can be considered evidence. I've tried to explain how evolution works and suggested you take a look at evolutionary biology, biochemistry and molecular genetics, talk to scientists, maybe visit a scientific or medical laboratory and an archaeological museum. Examine the fossil record for yourself. Considering how much you claim to want evidence of evolution, I don't see why you won't put in a little work yourself to start understanding it.
I already know how evolution works. Furthermore, I never tried to prove anything to you. I need no proof. No one needs proof really. We just live here. Then we die.
I am not even proving that I am alive to you by typing this. My life is self-evident to me. I'm all set. But you wouldn't listen anyway.
You were trying to say that evolution has been proven. Your move:
Prove it. Or lose your argument.
Rus, prove it to yourself. I did for myself. Until you understand it with your own eyes, you won't believe it.
ReplyDeleteScience has used DNA to trace people’s ancestry. Every human being has a slightly different genetic code and different races share different genetic characteristics. For example, a black man in Africa has more pigment in his skin to protect him from the harsh rays of the sun at the equator than a man from Norway with blond hair, blue eyes and very little need, owing to the way the sun’s rays are angled and weakened toward the poles, for pigment in their skin. A cursory glance around the world’s peoples shows that we have evolved to suit our environments. Nevertheless, there is too little to separate us into different species.
Different people from different parts of the world have general differences in their codes and each and every one of us have smaller differences in our codes. We’re all different. And it’s always changing, but it’s important to remember that while there are little changes over each generation, it takes millions of years to see a visible change occur in a species so that it can be said to have evolved, or branched off, into a new species. Looking at a flu virus is a way of seeing evolution working at breakneck speed, at least in terms of our life span. Personally examining what you can find of the fossil record in archaeological museums is always a good idea. The evidence is there.
Here's something you might enjoy. (Please keep in mind that it's intended for you to enjoy. If you have read it or understood it before, I have no way of knowing, in the same way that were I to buy you a microscope for Christmas, I would have no way of knowing your Auntie Mabel also bought you a microscope, as well as your Uncle Rupert, Cousin Joe and 42 other people you're acquainted with.)
"I take it you prefer the story of Adam, though he had no mother, was created with a navel, and that fossils were placed by the Creator where we find them now – a deliberate act on His part, to give the appearance of great antiquity and geologic upheavals.
The remarkable advances of molecular biology in recent years have made it possible to understand how it is that diverse organisms are constructed from such monotonously similar materials: proteins composed of only 20 kinds of amino acids and coded only by DNA and RNA, each with only four kinds of nucleotides. The method is astonishingly simple. All English words, sentences, chapters, and books are made up of sequences of 26 letters of the alphabet. (They can be represented also by only three signs of the Morse code: dot, dash, and gap.) The meaning of a word or a sentence is defined not so much by what letters it contains as by the sequences of these letters. It is the same with heredity: it is coded by the sequences of the genetic "letters" of the nucleotides in the DNA. They are translated into the sequences of amino acids in the proteins.
Let me try to make crystal clear what is established beyond reasonable doubt, and what needs further study, about evolution. Evolution as a process that has always gone on in the history of the earth can be doubted only by those who are ignorant of the evidence or are resistant to evidence, owing to emotional blocks or to plain bigotry. By contrast, the mechanisms that bring evolution about certainly need study and clarification. There are no alternatives to evolution as history that can withstand critical examination. Yet we are constantly learning new and important facts about evolutionary mechanisms.
One of the great thinkers of our age, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, wrote the following: "Is evolution a theory, a system, or a hypothesis? It is much more. It is a general postulate to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems much henceforward bow and which they must satisfy in order to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light which illuminates all facts, a trajectory which all lines of thought must follow. This is what evolution is." Of course, some scientists, as well as some philosophers and theologians, disagree with some parts of Teilhard’s teachings; the acceptance of his worldview falls short of universal. But there is no doubt at all that Teilhard was a truly and deeply religious man and that Christianity was the cornerstone of his worldview. Moreover, in his worldview science and faith were not segregated in watertight compartments, as they are with so many people. They were harmoniously fitting parts of his worldview. Teilhard was a creationist, but one who understood that the Creation is realized in this world by means of evolution."
Theodosius Dobzhansky
You asked God to prove himself to you and when you say he did, you didn't read the message you believed he had sent you.
The first link is broken. Here it is again.
ReplyDeletehttp://anthro.palomar.edu/evolve/evolve_3.htm
Okay, we have common ground here.
ReplyDeleteThat page pretty well sums up what most educated people, along with me, know about evolution. It progreses well too. It has nice informative links. A nicely done page.
Not only that, but you developed your own thoughts in your post that you linked from. You tended to stay away from insulting me, because I take your comment, "Until you understand it with your own eyes, you won't believe it," to mean a general "you" as opposed to me in particular. After all, it has been established between you and me, that I understand evolution already.
Now, using that information that we share, from that good page that you linked to (versus the Dawkins mumbo jumbo), along with other information that you may have, show your proof of evolution. Don't say why you believe it will never be refuted in your lifetime, but why it will be impossible for some future Einstein to ever make it passe, albeit still usable, such as Newtonian physics, for instance. This is what you have said muliple times, that evolution has been proven.
You seem to back away from your position, though, when you say, "I did for myself." (Then an evolutionary Hallelujah! to you.)
In your proof, you will need the assumption. I'm thinking something like, "For the sake of the following proof, we will assume that animal species both exist and bear young." Even though solipsim may come to bear, I will accept this as will any scientist. But something like that, that is acceptable to rigorous thinkers, who are quite comfortable not retracing metaphysics, but rather who are enthusiastic, as I will be, for the proof which is about to be shown.
You then state a hypotheses that should be true if the premise is true, and more hypotheses, each forming into its own elegant proof, some giving quite pleasurable and immediate "Ahhh, yes!'s" to your readers. Yet at some you will need to pause knowingly, saying "Remember we said . . .", to bring your readers back around and through again. There is no need for this latter sensitivity, but it will be a nice touch. You will have corollaries, that if such things are true, certain others must be. These corollaries may be just the side roads to bring you to your ultimate proof. You will have developed sundry rules that you will do well to number for your readers. Because in the end, each one will be referenced back. You will be checked and double checked by great scientists now and in the future. You will indeed become a millionaire on the Nobel prize alone that you win the very year your proof is made public.
Rus, you may understand more about evolution now having looked up the meaning of Natural Selection, but you didn't before.
ReplyDeleteWhere have I ever suggested that evolution is not vulnerable to disproof? I have mentioned one way a scientist thought evolution could be disproven: "Fossil rabbits in the pre-Cambrian." One telling difference between science and religion is that science makes itself vulnerable to disproof while religion never does.
What's proven to be true, or if you prefer, what's generally taken to be true for the moment - like climbing into a plane and expecting to land thousands of miles away or flying into space and expecting to live through the experience - relies on evidence scientists have gathered, studied, tested and verified. Though it is true that the object of science is not to prove, but to explain, I accept evolution as proven because of the weight of evidence that supports it, some of which I have read, seen and touched. As mentioned previously, how it occurs is still open to debate.
If you're really serious about wanting proof for evolution, I think you must verify it for yourself and I've suggested ways you could do that. The rest is up to you. If you choose not to 'believe' in evolution, my position is that evolution is not a matter of faith; it is proven scientific fact. If you ask me again how I know this, or ask me to prove it, I repeat my suggestion to investigate for yourself the publicly available evidence supporting evolution. If you have trouble with some aspect of it - gaps in the fossil record, for example - I'm interested to chat about them, but only after you've thought it through. To put it another way, I am asking you to read the message your God has wrapped in the fabric of your own being.
Yes, I did before. I did not lie. And you cannot be serious. I told you I studied all this many times in my life, including at the college level.
ReplyDeleteI will now not read beyond your first sentence. You have now disqualified yourself for having any such discussion with me concerning what I knwo and what I don't. And you are serious risk of having disqualified yourself from bweing able to handle the aspect of the argument that is your premise.
Your next post, if not your proof, should be something leading to it. It will have nothing to do with what you think I might know or not know.
Now, as to
I can be serious because of what you yourself said.
ReplyDeleteYou made it plain that you didn't understand evolution when you mentioned how you loved the "Oh God" movie and how George Burns, to prove his Godship in court, "pulled out a deck of cards, and fanned some before the judge in a card trick. Every mystic gets it. That's all there is. That's all I can give you, or you me. We're insane if we think otherwise."
Evolution isn't a game of chance. Evolution works according to Darwinian principles of Natural Selection which is not the same thing at all as chance. You would know the difference between a game of chance and evolution, if you understood evolution."
I've handled the argument fine, a lot more patiently than I suspect you deserve. You're coming across now as a bully, trying to give me orders on what I can and cannot say. I never salute bullies, despite the many fits they throw to demand it.
I still will not read beyond your first sentence. Your are and have been very mistaken about how much I have known.
ReplyDeleteDo you have your proof ready?
Hey, at least you read my first sentence. That much you wouldn't do for your God.
ReplyDeleteHi Noel,
ReplyDeleteI'll clue you in on a secret. I have a personal blog called "What I'm Listening to Tonight". Please don't advertise it. It's my kick-back blog.
I am very sorry the following is not a biological post, but a physics one:
PBS NOVA: The Elegant Universe: Welcome to the 11th dimension
You'll need to trust me now. And that's why I won't go beyond your first sentence. Believe me. I have studied all this stuff and do it for pleasure. Further records are at UMass Lowell and Rivier College for your inquiry, and should be available after my death--if I understand how that works.
That post, you may note, is between the Donovan "Atlantis" post and the John Lee Hooker "Boom Boom" post. But no, I don't think any Boom Boom Theory led to ATlantis.
Yours,
Eulille Soinseau
Uh huh. So you say you won't read what I wrote, but don't mind suggesting I read what you wrote (or hosted) AND download and watch five parts of a movie.
ReplyDeleteI'm teasing. That was interesting and definitely worth a look. Thanks!