I think it's impossible to look at the world around you, at nature, at human beings, or to look at yourself in the mirror and believe that it all came about by accident. I think that takes a lot more faith and invention than believing in God. But that's just me.Originally Posted by Debol1990
Paranoid Schizophrenia. NEXT!
To recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.
-Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism
You just showed your scientific ignorance in the bolded part, buddy. That's Creationist claptap with no basis in reality.
To recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.
-Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism
The Argument from Design (the fancy name for what JPT said) is not "creationist claptrap" and has a long history in human thought. It is not an argument against evolution. "Creationist claptrap" would be saying the world was 5000 years old or that dinosaurs lived at the same time as humans.
Wondering how and why the world came into being is an activity every intellectually curious person will engage in at some point. Simply saying it is all a great accident is possibly true, but does not comport with human experience of the causes of things. It is not intellectually or emotionally satisfying.
James50
Last edited by James50; 09-02-2010 at 09:28 AM.
The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected. - G.K. Chesterton
Of course you would say next....of course, if he was a right winger you'd be blaming Beck, Limbaugh or some other talk show host for fanning the flames of hate and ginning up a guy like this.
I wont blame MSLSD, Kieth Unterman, Rachel Madcow and the rest as we conservatives usually place the blame where it beongs....with the criminal...
Ummm... if you READ what he said, he's essentially saying that everything developed with an order that's difficult to deny. Creation, evolution, call it what you will, he's just saying it's impossible to believe it all happened by accident. James is right, intelligent design better describes JPT's point.
"The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." —Albert Einstein
"The road to perdition has ever been accompanied by lip service to an ideal." —Albert Einstein
"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex... It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.” —Albert Einstein
I'd have to agree with the above sentence. Fortunately, since 'accident' implies an outcome which inexplicably confounds the intentions of a actor, evolutionary biology doesn't claim that life as we know it is anything even remotely resembling an accident.
Now "chance"? Oh yeah; we all know that even low, low, low-odds event will occur, given enough spins of the wheel (or rolls of the dice, or pick-your-metaphor). That's even a provable assertion. What's more, the fact of life as an ongoing, self-replicating, competitive process means the dice are going to be loaded in something like our favor, once that first roll goes the way of 'life'. It makes non-directed a pretty coherent model.
"Qu'est-ce que c'est que cela, la loi ? On peut donc ętre dehors. Je ne comprends pas. Quant ŕ moi, suis-je dans la loi ? suis-je hors la loi ? Je n'en sais rien. Mourir de faim, est-ce ętre dans la loi ?" -- Tellmarch
"Человек не может снять с себя ответственности за свои поступки." - L. Tolstoy
"[it] is no doubt obvious, the cult of the experts is both self-serving, for those who propound it, and fraudulent." - Noam Chomsky
Actually, the strongest argument for some sort of creative impetus is the one that precedes life, mainly: why is there something rather than nothing? Matter matters.
Marx: Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.
Lennon: You either get tired fighting for peace, or you die.
Honestly, what difference does it make? We'll never know for sure anyway.
I stand corrected. My comparison was inapt. You were right. I'm wrong. Jeremiah Scudder? I have that book, might have to read it now.
"Freedom is not something that the rulers "give" the population...people have immense power potential. It is ultimately their attitudes, behavior, cooperation, and obedience that supply the power to all rulers and hierarchical systems..." - Gene Sharp
"The Occupy protesters are acting like citizens, believing they have the power to change things...that humble people can acquire power when they convince themselves they can." - William Greider
Argument from Design is simply not necessary, there is little evidence for it (and no evidence in Biology) and a lot of evidence against it, and most of the "fine-tuning" arguments in physics and cosmology have plenty of hypothesized explanations that do not rely on appeals to a designer. IMO it's a variation of the "God-in-the-Gaps" argument mixed in with our own prejudices as a tool-making species that designs things.
I myself believe in a cyclic, eternal universe with no beginning and no end.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ekpyrotic_universe
Last edited by Odin; 09-02-2010 at 05:14 PM.
To recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.
-Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism
Sure, but that's not evidence in its favor. Humans ascribe intention to things that don't have intention all the time. It's a common cognitive error. Witness animism.
Emotional satisfaction is not the goal of knowledge. Intellectually, there's no problem with life on Earth being a great accident -- especially since, as Justin pointed out, the term "accident" is misleading. What the science really says is that advanced life is fairly unlikely on any given planet, but since there are ~300 billion stars in this galaxy those dice are getting rolled quite a bit. It had to happen somewhere, and has likely happened many times in our galaxy alone.
Could you not derive emotional satisfaction from being lucky to live on Earth?
You are correct. It is not necessary. However, I don't understand how you can say there is no evidence in Biology. People who explain evolution often say that evolution gives the appearance of design. They explain the appearance of design using evolution. But of course, evolution itself is evidence of design if you think about it.
No one can talk you out of a philosophy based on materialism if that is the way you want to explain the world. I would not even try. All I can say is that I think there is more to our world than the material. There are things which are real that are not actual.
James50
The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected. - G.K. Chesterton
No, but we are not computers. I don't know about you, but I am not satisfied with mere knowledge if it is not also accompanied by a sense that it is right. (I am a boomer after all.).
Einstein never accepted quantum mechanics because he could not abide the idea of a universe based on chance. You probably remember his famous statement about how God did not play dice with the universe. From all we know right now, it looks like he was wrong and that we do indeed live in a probabilistic universe. Whether he was right or wrong is not my point. My point is that we are never satisfied with knowledge that leaves us unsatisfied. I hope that makes sense.
As I mentioned to Odin, you can explain all of the world, including the actions of human beings, from a purely material view. In that view, free will itself may be an illusion. But I am not satisfied with that view. You can discard my feelings and emotions as mere irrationality if you want. All I can say is that my gut, my soul, my being- whatever you want to call it - rebels at a materialistic view of the universe.
James50
The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected. - G.K. Chesterton
I think you mean Nehemiah Scudder, don't you?
I really don't know. I was referencing something Glick said. He said Scudder was an insurgent, which pricked up my ears. Was he in some Heinlein short stories? I found a reference to the name I had being in "the past through tomorrow", which I happen to own but have not read. Do you know any names of the stories?
"Freedom is not something that the rulers "give" the population...people have immense power potential. It is ultimately their attitudes, behavior, cooperation, and obedience that supply the power to all rulers and hierarchical systems..." - Gene Sharp
"The Occupy protesters are acting like citizens, believing they have the power to change things...that humble people can acquire power when they convince themselves they can." - William Greider
Yes, that's exactly what we should do. If it can't be proven without very convincing proof, we ought not to believe something. Fantastic claims require fantastic proof.As I mentioned to Odin, you can explain all of the world, including the actions of human beings, from a purely material view.
Steven Hawking has apparently changed his view and now believes that a law such as gravity could be the reason matter exists in the form we know.
More here."Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist," Hawking writes.
"The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." —Albert Einstein
"The road to perdition has ever been accompanied by lip service to an ideal." —Albert Einstein
"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex... It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.” —Albert Einstein
That is very intriguing.
I guess you just dont like the word "higher" because it makes you uncomfortable. Ok, we will use omniscient because that is neither higher nor lower, its all at once. Better?
You obviously cannot separate yourself from modern secular beliefs. Thomas Jefferson was a "diest" which ,even by your description, puts the rights of man into omniscient "Nature" (hmmm sort of like omniscient "god") You act as if the founding fathers were some sort of atheistic group because of Jefferson. It's not accurate.
To say the founding fathers were not religious is just untrue, and it had a major impact on the way they went about the revolution and the founding of the country.
All men are created equal and our endowed by their creator the inalienable rights of....
It is the very basis of American Liberty. That all men were created by something, whether that be God or Nature (omniscient of course). We are all born equal. And we have human rights that are in-alienable because they were given to us by said "omniscient entity", not Man(government or king).
It has very religious undertones that are apparent and expected because they were religious men, after all. And as I stated before the idea of a "higher power" helped them to their ends because they are asserting that "God" gave you these rights (coming from above King George) and nobody has the ability to deny you those rights.
The point isn't that their is an invisible man that tells you what to do, or some sort of karma or spiritual energy guides you through life. Only that there is something, beyond the whims of man, that gave you these rights thus they are in-alienable.
So, what is the problem with religious founding fathers? specifically Christianity because you don't mind "deism" (essentially replacing god with nature). The only thing I can come up with is that you must have a strange and weak ideology that will crumble as soon as any form of Catholicism rears it's ugly head? what if instead of "creator" my rights came from the "ancestral spirits" or "Pantheon of Greek Gods". Hell what about the "Flying Spaghetti Monster" his noodly appendages do touch us all you know!
What is it specifically, that prohibits religion in the founding of the country? The answer is nothing, because it was an important part of the culture at the time, and continued to be a large part of American Culture until mid 20th century.
There are some philosophical theories that argue you may indeed be a computer, or rather merely a small algorithim inside of a computer simulation. Interestingly, quantum physics and mathmatics may indeed add to the likelyhood that the observable universe is a simulation.No, but we are not computers. I don't know about you, but I am not satisfied with mere knowledge if it is not also accompanied by a sense that it is right. (I am a boomer after all.
Einstein never accepted quantum mechanics because he could not abide the idea of a universe based on chance. You probably remember his famous statement about how God did not play dice with the universe. From all we know right now, it looks like he was wrong and that we do indeed live in a probabilistic universe. Whether he was right or wrong is not my point. My point is that we are never satisfied with knowledge that leaves us unsatisfied. I hope that makes sense.
As I mentioned to Odin, you can explain all of the world, including the actions of human beings, from a purely material view. In that view, free will itself may be an illusion. But I am not satisfied with that view. You can discard my feelings and emotions as mere irrationality if you want. All I can say is that my gut, my soul, my being- whatever you want to call it - rebels at a materialistic view of the universe.
James50
Thus, even the strongest argument isn't bullet proof. There is one point where conjecture stops, at least for now, and that's the instant prior to the Big Bang. No one can really know what lay in that region of space-time, though there is no shortage of hypotheses. A word to the wise: if you plan on life as a theoretical physicist, operating in an untestable region has its advantages.
Last edited by Marx & Lennon; 09-03-2010 at 08:52 AM.
Marx: Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.
Lennon: You either get tired fighting for peace, or you die.
Remember the context. The Founders had access to the knowledge of the enlightenment, but that was limited to the observable at the time. Physics was Newtonian physics. The concept of electricity was just being explored, though little was understood. Chemistry was an infant. Biology was actually more advanced, but Darwin was still well in the future as was Mendel. This was the end of the pre-technology era ... before the steam engine, even before manufactured machinery.
Yet for all of that, the brightest thinkers were already seeing over the horizon. Jefferson and Franklin were both Deists, as were many of the other Founders. Certainly Virginia had more than its share, because it never was a religious colony in the first place. It's not by chance that the doctrines of religious freedom originated there ... or here, since I'm a resident (albeit, never a true Virginian).
Marx: Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.
Lennon: You either get tired fighting for peace, or you die.
Ideally, what we know based on evidence and reason should also harmonize with older knowledge that we experience intuitively. But when it doesn't the best course of action is to assume the intuitive sense is wrong.
False. Einstein suspected that the probabilistic elements of quantum theory would vanish when more a detailed and precise theory was developed. However, he accepted that the theory fit observation and was a good model of very small parts of our universe.
Sure, and this conflict is useful in that it drives us to try out new avenues of inquiry. However, acting contrary to the evidence that you have in the present is just foolish. It's entirely reasonable to try out alternate explanations for a phenomenon (and test them), but saying that the current explanation must be wrong because it just makes you uncomfortable is not reasonable.
As long as all you've got to support your positions are feelings, yes, that's exactly what I'm going to do -- and that's what everyone should do. Personal discomfort is not evidence. But, as noted above, personal discomfort is not bad. After all, it could drive you to find evidence. The problem with IDers and especially Young Earthers is that they don't want to look for evidence because of the serious danger that they might find some.
It still is. Just not among the elite.
