...so hit reload if it hasn't updated.
[Edit: Email me if the comments don't come back on, Haloscan seems to be down now.]
Wednesday, July 12, 2006
Monday, July 10, 2006
Still going?
...its instinct i.e. no morality involved. Let’s move on.
I edit that because you want to move on. We will have to disagree, as it seems you cannot agree that morality is often intuitive, i.e. instinct.
Alright, I'll do my best to address each item in your list. [...] I'll have to google every one. I won't read creationist articles because they are self interested and at the same time I won't look at scientific publications as you may make the same claim. (Emphasis added)
There you have it. Nothing more really need be said because you have consistently relied on arguments and claims based on ignorance and bigotry throughout this dialogue. I do read what Darwinians say as such and so on. Those are the arguments about the evidence that I use as the material of satire: "If I can imagine a little story about this, then it is so." In contrast, if you come across a source that is Christian then you don't even look at it. E.g., "Google turned up one referrence to this and it was a Christian site." What is it that you're expecting, the Darwinian mind to disagree with itself? Of course it is going to be Christians, Jews, Muslims, UFO kooks, etc., that tend to disagree with the Darwinian creation myth. It's as if you turn away from every sort of person that disagrees with you about what happened in the past and then insist that there is no other perspective, no evidence against what you believe and that you are "overwhelmed" by the supposed truth of your own narrow perspective.
I may be able to verify some references further, yet it seems that if they are not Darwinian then you will turn away from the evidence anyway. And if you follow the memes of talk.origins further then if they are from Darwinists then you will probably assert the old canard that is so typical to those with the urge to merge about supposed "quote mining." It's not clear what half-wits expect when it comes to that, given that their standard for evidence seems to be Darwinians disagreeing with themselves it will always be that a fellow half-wit can go back to the Darwinist that made a heretical comment about the evidence to say, "But you really believe in the Darwinian creation myth, don't you?" So then with a furrowed brow and perhaps a little tension in their voice the other half-wit replies, "Of course I do! I'm no heretic. It's just those ID types and creationists quote mining again, I says!" Etc. There is an added layer to heresy hunting these days given that the definition and testability brought by being really defined by the symbols and signs of text is lost on those with the urge to merge, thus claims of "quote mining" are not surprising.
At any rate, who is it that you think is going to disagree with the Darwinian mind if not Christians and others?
1. Precambrian, site: Ottosdalin, South Africa, item: grooved metallic sphere
Your search - Precambrian site Ottadalen South Africa item grooved metallic sphere - did not match any documents.
Here is one, but I'm not really attached to this supposed evidence or ideas about it. It is shades of the canals on Mars and so on. However, I wouldn't begin including my own imagination as evidence either. I.e., I can imagine natural ways that such an object can come to be formed much easier than say the origin of Life and so on, yet that does not mean that my own imagination is sufficient evidence or is the default answer that all must agree to without any testing. If I can imagine a way that a physical object can be formed then I ought to test the hypothesis out physically. At any rate, in the interest of brevity...
2.Precambrian, site: Dorchester Mass., item: metal vase
The only thing even close I found was this site Ancient mysteries The explanations they posit are far fetched like aliens and multiple universes.
Far fetched? I suppose it is going quite far to posit multiple universes and yet scientists themselves seem to do so naturally enough, often enough. One is left wondering just how natural all these hypothetical universes are or if calling some a form of heavenly worlds of the Forms and others levels of hell in which our form of sentience can emerge to be born again would be religion and not "science" again. I.e., which areas of knowledge are our self-defined Policemen of Knowledge capable of policing?
As for the item, there were many such reports before the Darwinian creation myth became established and so you probably won't be able to find much. The full report:
by Michael Cremo and Richard Thompson :106-107)
3. Cambrian, site: Antelope Spring, Utah, item: shoe print
In fact, it is nothing more than a slab of Wheeler shale that has a fragment spalled off in the form of a footprint, which reveals a trilobite, Erathia kingi. To fully appreciate that fact, which has been established beyond any reasonable doubt, you should read Conrad's account.
Unfortunately I simply cited the beginning of an index of evidence drawn from Hidden History, so the ambiguity of some of it will allow you to more easily reject everything as false pattern recognition and so on. I should note that I'm not really writing for you because you don't even believe in reading what ID types, creationists or UFO kooks or anyone else disagreeing with Darwinism write. It seems that you cannot deal with the evidence they find or reading their perspective and view on the evidence anyway. Instead, you seem to be sitting about waiting for Darwinians to disagree with Darwinism. Ironically, given the inane nature of the Darwinian creation myth they sometimes do just that but most of the time they do not and instead engage in imagining things about the evidence again. E.g., when a hominid fossil does not comport with their creation myth they imagine that a deer stepped on it and then they break it apart and arrange things the "right" way.
On the other side I am indeed left with some crackpots, kooks and so on who stand outside the paradigm. They may sometimes imagine that a pattern is an image of something when it is not. Yet when the paradigm itself is made up of people who are breaking apart the actual evidence to make it fit to their imaginings about the past then I feel more comfortable with the occasional crackpot on my side that imagines something "odd" about the evidence. There is a difference between pattern/image creation and pattern recognition. Note that one is capable of having false positives while the other is not, yet the original degenerate epistemic standard that is often set by Darwinists relies is a case of pattern/image creation: "If I can imagine a little story about the past about that, then that is evidence of how it came to be."
4. Devonian, site: Kingoodie Quarry Scotland, item: iron nail in stone
My search didn't turn up much except to confirm a nail was found there in a rock. Ththweb
You can't exactly trust the web either. But in the interest of brevity...
I'll be honest with you, I got the impression this sort of "evidence" is of the same quality as the image of the Virgin Mary appearing as a stain under a highway bridge being "evidence" for her existence.
For one thing, there is evidence that Mary existed. It is worth thinking about what evidence exists to this day because it illustrates just how easy it is for an organism to recede into the dust without a trace. In fact, without there being a great catastrophy resulting in fossilization that is most likely the typical way of things. But what evidence for the existence of Mary does exist, it's textual in nature. The notion of text relies on a coding system and so on that often can be translated. It is the best conduit for information and the best way of saving information in a world in which forms with spirit and meaning travel from dust to dust. It is the best way of saving the meaning of forms that once were and the like, so information carried on through language is the best and perhaps the only remaining evidence for the existence of Mary. All else is actually more questionable than your original terms and reasoning about fossils made it seem. Things can always be questioned and the information drawn from fossils lends itself to questioning more easily than information saved in text and language.
It's tenuous at best and that Meister print was an outright hoax like Piltdown man.
Again, there is a difference between false pattern recognition and the creation or setting a standard in which the continual imagination of imagery is common. As far as that print, I should note from the same source that their view on it was that it was weak: "...as evidence for a human presence in the distant past, is ambiguous." (Ib. :120) As I said, I began by using the index of evidence that they include in the back of their book. I probably should have begun with cases that are not as ambiguous and then worked backward. I wasn't thinking about it at the time.
You slammed me for saying that scientists had a conspiracy against creationists. You called my assertion a red herring. Very well, if there is no conspiracy and this evidence is solid, then it should be accepted, at least in some areas, of the world's scientific community. Of the few sites that had anything to say about this evidence, the vast majority were young earth creationist sites.
I care little about whoever the world's self-defined Policemen of Knowledge currently are and those who define themselves as the "scientific community" at the moment. The eugenicists were the scientific community of their day, with alchemists before them. It is not all history, as if that was then but science these days is in fact all fact. For instance, most paleanthropologists these days are little better than the phrenologists of old. The tell tale signs of the same forms of charlatanism that propped up mixtures of "knowledge" such as anthropology/phrenology/eugenics seems to begin to emanate from a community that begins with degenerate epistemic standards (as is the Darwinian way) and then falls down from there. Another sign of pseudo-science and pseudo-knowledge is when the "community" seems to be more interested in maintaining its professional identity than in seeking scientia/knowledge as such, thus charlatanism becomes more prevalent in such communities and those within it come to claim a knowledge of more than they know.
What "community" seems to be quite interested in maintaining its professional identity, often more than seeking knowledge as such these days? The pattern of it seems to bleed through in every other argument when it comes to the Darwinian creation myth that is fused to it: "Geologists may as well be truckdrivers if that is accurate knowledge. Geologists are scientists and not truckdrivers, therefore that cannot be accurate. Me scientist, so I know!" Or another: "ID is just creationism in a cheap tuxedo but we real scientists wear real expensive tuxedos when we go to our scientific conferences. That's the way real science is."
There were no newspaper or magazine articles. That is telling.
Telling of what? It may be that I can find what you cannot but it seems to me that what the Old Press decides to report on often says more about the Old Press than what is worth reporting on. In this case, perhaps on the one hand challenges to the Darwinian creation myth could be sensationalistic stories to report in some respects. Yet on the other the Old Press tends to be "liberal" and so it is biased towards propping up the Darwinian creation myth as it fits in with other myths. E.g., the myth that man has emerged from Nature as the measure of all things and is capable of progressive progress towards "saving the planet" (Why not the Cosmos while we're at it.) and this sort of thing if only the power of the State of man is used correctly. In that myth the true state of man cannot be admitted to but the myth is amusing given that man will never be able to hold the planet in orbit, etc. Yet I meander, all I would say is that the Old Press has its own interests just as scientific charlatans who work with it to generate the illusion of knowledge and control do. An interesting note to bring things back to the issue at hand though, note the proliferation of paleoanthrolopologists making their name and establishing their professional identity through the Old Press with reports on supposed evidence of human origins. It seems that the degenerate nature of the scholarship of what amount to modern phrenologists matters little when it comes to propping up their professional identities as scientists and the like. The results of the need for some to prop themselves up as the Policemen of Knowledge in this case are that we seem to have many types of human ancestors, yet modern apes have virtually none. But it's curious, is it not? Apparently many hominid fossils along the "hypothetical" human line of descent just happened to be preserved and yet there is virtually no evidence left for apes and their line of descent. A more cynical person might note that apes don't read newspapers.
Mynym, if you have the time I would like to ask what you think about this article.
No time now.
...due to the wild goose chase you led me on...
I don't feel bad for you, entering things into Google is a small thing compared to the number of Darwinian claims I've wound up researching. For that matter, I once debated a fellow who got his hand bitten by a spider when he was tracking down some old bit of knowledge at the library. I don't know why you bother anyway. Again, you've already come to the narrow-minded position in which all you can accept as evidence is Darwinians disagreeing with Darwinism and so every challenge is met by an attack on the source for not being Darwinian. So you are left waiting for Darwinists to disagree with Darwinism, or perhaps you are also waiting for a vast change in the views of the current "scientific community," the scientists that you seem to put far too much faith in. Those sorts of things are not going to happen very much and so your views and beliefs are set, even if they are based on an absurd foundations such as faith in scientists of the socialist sort.
Some creationists are very intelligent, articulate and well read. This is where I think they cross the line from ignorance to full blown delusion. You have made it clear that you feel as much about evolutionists. In fact, you think of them like Nazis.
Apparently you have too high an opinion of modern evolutionists and too low an opinion of Nazis as well as the whole "scientific" cultural milieu in which they existed that was based on the very same philosophic naturalism and demarcation arguments that you have been supporting. There were plenty of "nice" people who believed in the Nazi form of scientism just as today there are nice people that are the leading propenents of scientism these days who tend to fall into saying things that the Nazis said. I think that some are like Nazis because they are like Nazis. I have evidence in mind when I say that, so what evidence do you have in mind when you assert that creationists who are intelligent, articulate and well read must be delusional? You make many claims that echo with empty rhetoric. How do you know that they are delusional when you will not even read what they write?
Anyway, please use the Steven Schafersman article as my "evidence" and rebuttal to many of the creationist attacks on evolution. My response is longer than I wanted, so sorry for that as well.
Apparently I will need to read that article and if I am interested then I will use it eventually. Note that you are often relying upon reading only the critics of creationists and as you have argued you won't even read what creationists write anyway. That's why I cited Ronald Numbers from the original article saying something along the lines of: "Creationists respect science, as any reading of their literature clearly shows." That's because he's read their literature while you clearly have not. It's little wonder that you are repeating almost every canard that has ever been spouted by the charlatans of Darwinism these days given that all you seem capable of accepting are Darwinian attacks against creationism.
I still have to demand evidence and not just paranoid imaginings layered over imaginings, so cite leading creationists' texts that portray the worldwide scientific community as a vast conspiracy and so on or cite them attacking science and so on. There are a number of claims that you made about creationists, yet you cite no evidence. I can cite evidence as to Darwinists imagining things to back up my claims or evidence on how Darwinism comported well with Nazism, yet your sweeping rhetorical claims are echoing with the fact that all you've done is read attacks on creationists and so you can't seem to deal with the texts of leading creationists or ID types even though they are supposedly the very people you are referring to.
I edit that because you want to move on. We will have to disagree, as it seems you cannot agree that morality is often intuitive, i.e. instinct.
Alright, I'll do my best to address each item in your list. [...] I'll have to google every one. I won't read creationist articles because they are self interested and at the same time I won't look at scientific publications as you may make the same claim. (Emphasis added)
There you have it. Nothing more really need be said because you have consistently relied on arguments and claims based on ignorance and bigotry throughout this dialogue. I do read what Darwinians say as such and so on. Those are the arguments about the evidence that I use as the material of satire: "If I can imagine a little story about this, then it is so." In contrast, if you come across a source that is Christian then you don't even look at it. E.g., "Google turned up one referrence to this and it was a Christian site." What is it that you're expecting, the Darwinian mind to disagree with itself? Of course it is going to be Christians, Jews, Muslims, UFO kooks, etc., that tend to disagree with the Darwinian creation myth. It's as if you turn away from every sort of person that disagrees with you about what happened in the past and then insist that there is no other perspective, no evidence against what you believe and that you are "overwhelmed" by the supposed truth of your own narrow perspective.
I may be able to verify some references further, yet it seems that if they are not Darwinian then you will turn away from the evidence anyway. And if you follow the memes of talk.origins further then if they are from Darwinists then you will probably assert the old canard that is so typical to those with the urge to merge about supposed "quote mining." It's not clear what half-wits expect when it comes to that, given that their standard for evidence seems to be Darwinians disagreeing with themselves it will always be that a fellow half-wit can go back to the Darwinist that made a heretical comment about the evidence to say, "But you really believe in the Darwinian creation myth, don't you?" So then with a furrowed brow and perhaps a little tension in their voice the other half-wit replies, "Of course I do! I'm no heretic. It's just those ID types and creationists quote mining again, I says!" Etc. There is an added layer to heresy hunting these days given that the definition and testability brought by being really defined by the symbols and signs of text is lost on those with the urge to merge, thus claims of "quote mining" are not surprising.
At any rate, who is it that you think is going to disagree with the Darwinian mind if not Christians and others?
1. Precambrian, site: Ottosdalin, South Africa, item: grooved metallic sphere
Your search - Precambrian site Ottadalen South Africa item grooved metallic sphere - did not match any documents.
Here is one, but I'm not really attached to this supposed evidence or ideas about it. It is shades of the canals on Mars and so on. However, I wouldn't begin including my own imagination as evidence either. I.e., I can imagine natural ways that such an object can come to be formed much easier than say the origin of Life and so on, yet that does not mean that my own imagination is sufficient evidence or is the default answer that all must agree to without any testing. If I can imagine a way that a physical object can be formed then I ought to test the hypothesis out physically. At any rate, in the interest of brevity...
2.Precambrian, site: Dorchester Mass., item: metal vase
The only thing even close I found was this site Ancient mysteries The explanations they posit are far fetched like aliens and multiple universes.
Far fetched? I suppose it is going quite far to posit multiple universes and yet scientists themselves seem to do so naturally enough, often enough. One is left wondering just how natural all these hypothetical universes are or if calling some a form of heavenly worlds of the Forms and others levels of hell in which our form of sentience can emerge to be born again would be religion and not "science" again. I.e., which areas of knowledge are our self-defined Policemen of Knowledge capable of policing?
As for the item, there were many such reports before the Darwinian creation myth became established and so you probably won't be able to find much. The full report:
The following report, titled “A Relic of a Bygone Age,” appeared in the magazine Scientific American (June 5, 1852): “A few days ago a powerful blast was made in the rock at Meeting House Hill, in Dorchester, a few rods south of Rev. Mr. Hall’s meeting house. The blast threw out an immense mass of rock, some of the pieces weighing several tons, and scattered fragments in all directions. Among them was picked up a metallic vessel in two parts, rent asunder by the explosion. On putting the two parts together it formed a bell-shaped vessel, 4-1/2 inches high, 6-1/2 inches at the base, 2-1/2 inches at the top, and about an eighth of an inch in thickness. The body of this vessel resembles zinc in color, or a composition metal, in which there is a considerable portion of silver. On the side there are six figures or a flower, or bouquet, beautifully inlaid with pure silver, and around the lower part of the vessel a vine, or wreath, also inlaid with silver. The chasing, carving, and inlaying are exquisitely done by the art of some cunning workman. [...] The matter is worthy of investigation, as there is no deception in the case.”(The Hidden History of the Human Race
by Michael Cremo and Richard Thompson :106-107)
3. Cambrian, site: Antelope Spring, Utah, item: shoe print
In fact, it is nothing more than a slab of Wheeler shale that has a fragment spalled off in the form of a footprint, which reveals a trilobite, Erathia kingi. To fully appreciate that fact, which has been established beyond any reasonable doubt, you should read Conrad's account.
Unfortunately I simply cited the beginning of an index of evidence drawn from Hidden History, so the ambiguity of some of it will allow you to more easily reject everything as false pattern recognition and so on. I should note that I'm not really writing for you because you don't even believe in reading what ID types, creationists or UFO kooks or anyone else disagreeing with Darwinism write. It seems that you cannot deal with the evidence they find or reading their perspective and view on the evidence anyway. Instead, you seem to be sitting about waiting for Darwinians to disagree with Darwinism. Ironically, given the inane nature of the Darwinian creation myth they sometimes do just that but most of the time they do not and instead engage in imagining things about the evidence again. E.g., when a hominid fossil does not comport with their creation myth they imagine that a deer stepped on it and then they break it apart and arrange things the "right" way.
On the other side I am indeed left with some crackpots, kooks and so on who stand outside the paradigm. They may sometimes imagine that a pattern is an image of something when it is not. Yet when the paradigm itself is made up of people who are breaking apart the actual evidence to make it fit to their imaginings about the past then I feel more comfortable with the occasional crackpot on my side that imagines something "odd" about the evidence. There is a difference between pattern/image creation and pattern recognition. Note that one is capable of having false positives while the other is not, yet the original degenerate epistemic standard that is often set by Darwinists relies is a case of pattern/image creation: "If I can imagine a little story about the past about that, then that is evidence of how it came to be."
4. Devonian, site: Kingoodie Quarry Scotland, item: iron nail in stone
My search didn't turn up much except to confirm a nail was found there in a rock. Ththweb
You can't exactly trust the web either. But in the interest of brevity...
I'll be honest with you, I got the impression this sort of "evidence" is of the same quality as the image of the Virgin Mary appearing as a stain under a highway bridge being "evidence" for her existence.
For one thing, there is evidence that Mary existed. It is worth thinking about what evidence exists to this day because it illustrates just how easy it is for an organism to recede into the dust without a trace. In fact, without there being a great catastrophy resulting in fossilization that is most likely the typical way of things. But what evidence for the existence of Mary does exist, it's textual in nature. The notion of text relies on a coding system and so on that often can be translated. It is the best conduit for information and the best way of saving information in a world in which forms with spirit and meaning travel from dust to dust. It is the best way of saving the meaning of forms that once were and the like, so information carried on through language is the best and perhaps the only remaining evidence for the existence of Mary. All else is actually more questionable than your original terms and reasoning about fossils made it seem. Things can always be questioned and the information drawn from fossils lends itself to questioning more easily than information saved in text and language.
It's tenuous at best and that Meister print was an outright hoax like Piltdown man.
Again, there is a difference between false pattern recognition and the creation or setting a standard in which the continual imagination of imagery is common. As far as that print, I should note from the same source that their view on it was that it was weak: "...as evidence for a human presence in the distant past, is ambiguous." (Ib. :120) As I said, I began by using the index of evidence that they include in the back of their book. I probably should have begun with cases that are not as ambiguous and then worked backward. I wasn't thinking about it at the time.
You slammed me for saying that scientists had a conspiracy against creationists. You called my assertion a red herring. Very well, if there is no conspiracy and this evidence is solid, then it should be accepted, at least in some areas, of the world's scientific community. Of the few sites that had anything to say about this evidence, the vast majority were young earth creationist sites.
I care little about whoever the world's self-defined Policemen of Knowledge currently are and those who define themselves as the "scientific community" at the moment. The eugenicists were the scientific community of their day, with alchemists before them. It is not all history, as if that was then but science these days is in fact all fact. For instance, most paleanthropologists these days are little better than the phrenologists of old. The tell tale signs of the same forms of charlatanism that propped up mixtures of "knowledge" such as anthropology/phrenology/eugenics seems to begin to emanate from a community that begins with degenerate epistemic standards (as is the Darwinian way) and then falls down from there. Another sign of pseudo-science and pseudo-knowledge is when the "community" seems to be more interested in maintaining its professional identity than in seeking scientia/knowledge as such, thus charlatanism becomes more prevalent in such communities and those within it come to claim a knowledge of more than they know.
What "community" seems to be quite interested in maintaining its professional identity, often more than seeking knowledge as such these days? The pattern of it seems to bleed through in every other argument when it comes to the Darwinian creation myth that is fused to it: "Geologists may as well be truckdrivers if that is accurate knowledge. Geologists are scientists and not truckdrivers, therefore that cannot be accurate. Me scientist, so I know!" Or another: "ID is just creationism in a cheap tuxedo but we real scientists wear real expensive tuxedos when we go to our scientific conferences. That's the way real science is."
There were no newspaper or magazine articles. That is telling.
Telling of what? It may be that I can find what you cannot but it seems to me that what the Old Press decides to report on often says more about the Old Press than what is worth reporting on. In this case, perhaps on the one hand challenges to the Darwinian creation myth could be sensationalistic stories to report in some respects. Yet on the other the Old Press tends to be "liberal" and so it is biased towards propping up the Darwinian creation myth as it fits in with other myths. E.g., the myth that man has emerged from Nature as the measure of all things and is capable of progressive progress towards "saving the planet" (Why not the Cosmos while we're at it.) and this sort of thing if only the power of the State of man is used correctly. In that myth the true state of man cannot be admitted to but the myth is amusing given that man will never be able to hold the planet in orbit, etc. Yet I meander, all I would say is that the Old Press has its own interests just as scientific charlatans who work with it to generate the illusion of knowledge and control do. An interesting note to bring things back to the issue at hand though, note the proliferation of paleoanthrolopologists making their name and establishing their professional identity through the Old Press with reports on supposed evidence of human origins. It seems that the degenerate nature of the scholarship of what amount to modern phrenologists matters little when it comes to propping up their professional identities as scientists and the like. The results of the need for some to prop themselves up as the Policemen of Knowledge in this case are that we seem to have many types of human ancestors, yet modern apes have virtually none. But it's curious, is it not? Apparently many hominid fossils along the "hypothetical" human line of descent just happened to be preserved and yet there is virtually no evidence left for apes and their line of descent. A more cynical person might note that apes don't read newspapers.
Mynym, if you have the time I would like to ask what you think about this article.
No time now.
...due to the wild goose chase you led me on...
I don't feel bad for you, entering things into Google is a small thing compared to the number of Darwinian claims I've wound up researching. For that matter, I once debated a fellow who got his hand bitten by a spider when he was tracking down some old bit of knowledge at the library. I don't know why you bother anyway. Again, you've already come to the narrow-minded position in which all you can accept as evidence is Darwinians disagreeing with Darwinism and so every challenge is met by an attack on the source for not being Darwinian. So you are left waiting for Darwinists to disagree with Darwinism, or perhaps you are also waiting for a vast change in the views of the current "scientific community," the scientists that you seem to put far too much faith in. Those sorts of things are not going to happen very much and so your views and beliefs are set, even if they are based on an absurd foundations such as faith in scientists of the socialist sort.
Some creationists are very intelligent, articulate and well read. This is where I think they cross the line from ignorance to full blown delusion. You have made it clear that you feel as much about evolutionists. In fact, you think of them like Nazis.
Apparently you have too high an opinion of modern evolutionists and too low an opinion of Nazis as well as the whole "scientific" cultural milieu in which they existed that was based on the very same philosophic naturalism and demarcation arguments that you have been supporting. There were plenty of "nice" people who believed in the Nazi form of scientism just as today there are nice people that are the leading propenents of scientism these days who tend to fall into saying things that the Nazis said. I think that some are like Nazis because they are like Nazis. I have evidence in mind when I say that, so what evidence do you have in mind when you assert that creationists who are intelligent, articulate and well read must be delusional? You make many claims that echo with empty rhetoric. How do you know that they are delusional when you will not even read what they write?
Anyway, please use the Steven Schafersman article as my "evidence" and rebuttal to many of the creationist attacks on evolution. My response is longer than I wanted, so sorry for that as well.
Apparently I will need to read that article and if I am interested then I will use it eventually. Note that you are often relying upon reading only the critics of creationists and as you have argued you won't even read what creationists write anyway. That's why I cited Ronald Numbers from the original article saying something along the lines of: "Creationists respect science, as any reading of their literature clearly shows." That's because he's read their literature while you clearly have not. It's little wonder that you are repeating almost every canard that has ever been spouted by the charlatans of Darwinism these days given that all you seem capable of accepting are Darwinian attacks against creationism.
I still have to demand evidence and not just paranoid imaginings layered over imaginings, so cite leading creationists' texts that portray the worldwide scientific community as a vast conspiracy and so on or cite them attacking science and so on. There are a number of claims that you made about creationists, yet you cite no evidence. I can cite evidence as to Darwinists imagining things to back up my claims or evidence on how Darwinism comported well with Nazism, yet your sweeping rhetorical claims are echoing with the fact that all you've done is read attacks on creationists and so you can't seem to deal with the texts of leading creationists or ID types even though they are supposedly the very people you are referring to.
Friday, July 07, 2006
Homo sapiens...
This ignorant statement reminded me of some issues in which various lines of evidence is overlooked, imagined away or literally thrown away:All you need to prove to the world that Darwin was wrong is a homo sapiens fossil from the era of the dinosaurs.
Yet:
by Michael Cremo and Richard Thompson :150-151)
As for geologists, many seem to be saying: "The Darwinian creation myth has been fused to the professional identity of being a geologist, therefore no geologists can question it as a geologist. Given that geologists define what geology is, for who else can, the answers of geology and science will always comport with the Darwinian creation myth no matter what we must imagine about the evidence." Truckdrivers would also support the Darwinian creation myth no matter the evidence if it had been fused to their professional identity as "truckdriver."
That fusing probably only came about because the Darwinian creation myth came to be accepted about the time that the professionalization of science was also taking place. So the logic was: "Scientist, therefore not amateur natural theologian." I would argue that this set of circumstances will not change until those who believe that the professional identity of "scientist" is defined by belief in the Darwinian creation myth die out. The current set of professionals may literally have to die out given how powerful fusing one's professional identity with any set of beliefs can be, let alone types of belief that can challenge religions because they are pseudo-religious beliefs themselves. If they were not that type of belief then they wouldn't be a challenge to religion. The Darwinian creation myth is a challenge to religious creation narratives only to the extent that it is religious enough to challenge and effect religions.
A note on that last bit of evidence, apparently imagining things is once again the key to propping up the Darwinian creation myth against the evidence:
It's ironic that we live fairly well now based on fossil fuels yet seek to deny the great catastrophism and cataclysm that brings about the beds of coal, fossils and so on in which evidence about the past sits. The evidence for catastrophy being the reason for fossil fuels is such that any schoolboy can read it. Although it is a heretical notion to orthodox geology and archaeology numerous lines of evidence also comport with a Great Flood as the catastrophy responsible for destroying a great civilization of ancient times. For example, a small thread of it:
(Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization
by Graham Hancock :118)
Yet:
In December of 1862, the following brief but intriguing report appeared in a journal called The Geologist: “In Macoupin county, Illinois, the bones of a man were recently found on a coal-bed capped with two feet of slate rock, ninety feet below the surface of the earth. . . . The bones, when found, were covered with a crust or coating of hard glossy matter, as black as coal itself, but when scraped away left the bones white and natural.” The coal in which the Macoupin County skeleton was found is at least 286 million years old and might be as much as 320 million years old.(The Hidden History of the Human Race
Our final examples of anomalous pre-Tertiary evidence are not in the category of fossil human bones, but rather in the category of fossil humanlike footprints. Professor W. G. Burroughs, head of the department of geology at Berea College in Berea, Kentucky, reported in 1938: “During the beginning of the Upper Carboniferous (Coal Age) Period, creatures that walked on their two hind legs and had human-like feet, left tracks on a sand beach in Rockcastle County, Kentucky. This was the period known as the Age of Amphibians when animals moved about on four legs or more rarely hopped, and their feet did not have a human appearance. But in Rockcastle, Jackson and several other counties in Kentucky, as well as in places from Pennsylvania to Missouri inclusive, creatures that had feet strangely human in appearance and that walked on two hind legs did exist. The writer has proved the existence of these creatures in Kentucky. With the cooperation of Dr. C. W. Gilmore, Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology, Smithsonian Institution, it has been shown that similar creatures lived in Pennsylvania and Missouri.”
The Upper Carboniferous (the Pennsylvanian) began about 320 million years ago. It is thought that the first animals capable of walking erect, the pseudosuchian thecodonts, appeared around 210 million years ago. These lizardlike creatures, capable of running on their hind legs, would not have left any tail marks since they carried their tails aloft. But their feet did not look at all like those of human beings; rather they resembled those of birds. Scientists say the first appearance of apelike beings was not until around 37 million years ago, and it was not until around 4 million years ago that most scientists would expect to find footprints anything like those reported by Burroughs from the Carboniferous of Kentucky.
[...]
David L. Bushnell, an ethnologist with the Smithsonian Institution, [imagined a little story about the past to suggest that] the prints were carved by Indians. In ruling out this hypothesis, Dr. Burroughs used a microscope to study the prints and noted: “The sand grains within the tracks are closer together than the sand grains of the rock just outside the tracks due to the pressure of the creatures’ feet. . . . The sandstone adjacent to many of the tracks is uprolled due to the damp, loose sand having been pushed up around the foot as the foot sank into the sand.” These facts led Burroughs to conclude that the humanlike footprints were formed by compression in the soft, wet sand before it consolidated into rock some 300 million years ago. Burrough’s observations were confirmed by other investigators.
According to Kent Previette, Burroughs also consulted a sculptor. Previette wrote in 1953: “The sculptor said that carving in that kind of sandstone could not have been done without leaving artificial marks. Enlarged photomicrographs and enlarged infrared photographs failed to reveal any ‘indications of carving or cutting of any kind.”
[...]
Mainstream science reacted predictably to any suggestion that the prints were made byhumans. Geologist Albert G. Ingalls, writing in 1940 in Scientific American, said: “If man, or even his ape ancestor, or even that ape ancestor’s early mammalian ancestor, existed as far back as in the Carboniferous Period in any shape, then the whole science of geology is so completely wrong that all the geologists will resign their jobs and take up truck driving. Hence, for the present at least, science rejects the attractive explanation that man made these mysterious prints in the mud of the Carboniferous with his feet.”
by Michael Cremo and Richard Thompson :150-151)
As for geologists, many seem to be saying: "The Darwinian creation myth has been fused to the professional identity of being a geologist, therefore no geologists can question it as a geologist. Given that geologists define what geology is, for who else can, the answers of geology and science will always comport with the Darwinian creation myth no matter what we must imagine about the evidence." Truckdrivers would also support the Darwinian creation myth no matter the evidence if it had been fused to their professional identity as "truckdriver."
That fusing probably only came about because the Darwinian creation myth came to be accepted about the time that the professionalization of science was also taking place. So the logic was: "Scientist, therefore not amateur natural theologian." I would argue that this set of circumstances will not change until those who believe that the professional identity of "scientist" is defined by belief in the Darwinian creation myth die out. The current set of professionals may literally have to die out given how powerful fusing one's professional identity with any set of beliefs can be, let alone types of belief that can challenge religions because they are pseudo-religious beliefs themselves. If they were not that type of belief then they wouldn't be a challenge to religion. The Darwinian creation myth is a challenge to religious creation narratives only to the extent that it is religious enough to challenge and effect religions.
A note on that last bit of evidence, apparently imagining things is once again the key to propping up the Darwinian creation myth against the evidence:
Ingalls suggested the prints were made by some as yet unknown kind of amphibian. But today’s scientists do not really take the amphibian theory seriously. Human-sized Carboniferous bipedal amphibians do not fit into the accepted scheme of evolution much better than Carboniferous human beings...(Ib. :151)
It's ironic that we live fairly well now based on fossil fuels yet seek to deny the great catastrophism and cataclysm that brings about the beds of coal, fossils and so on in which evidence about the past sits. The evidence for catastrophy being the reason for fossil fuels is such that any schoolboy can read it. Although it is a heretical notion to orthodox geology and archaeology numerous lines of evidence also comport with a Great Flood as the catastrophy responsible for destroying a great civilization of ancient times. For example, a small thread of it:
(Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization
by Graham Hancock :118)
Thursday, July 06, 2006
Now, now...
I was just checking a few links today and came across this about my blog:
At any rate, as far as I know no one is following me. In fact, sometimes the complaint is that I cannot be followed. Consider that I may not want to be followed all the time, which may be why I sometimes try to get those who seem to be following me to question me.
Oh yeah, blogs. Well the following are the ones I check often (other then this one you are reading right now). DarbyDinatale.com, yeah I know I'm married to her but it's a great weblog to read as she mixes heart-wrenching memories with humorous insights, BoySetFire.org, another site that could update a little more these days (cough cough, Josh), but when they do it's great. MyNym, who was a visitor to our site, riled up the waters, accused us of being Nazi lovin' anti-Christs, declared a self-imposed ban on posting here, then started his own weblog, where he has a small band of devoted followers who hang on his every written word (and there are many of them).Some of my claims were that this sort of sentiment: "I view you as vermin that needs to be exterminated now." were the manifestation of a Nazi-like spirit. Anyone with a marginal knowledge of Nazism ought to know that is not a loose association, nor is it the equivalent of any sort of claim about what feelings a person has towards the Nazis. And if the association is true then the sentiment contains an anti-Christ type of spirit given the nature of Nazism as illustrated in Hitler's messiah complex, etc. I won't meander. All I would note is that it would seem that I didn't accuse you of anything personally, as my focus was on the spirit of your own words, so you need not take it personally. I had to rely on that because personally I am just a simple fellow who has to let some forms of logic/logos eat themselves up when they speak, naturally. (It seems that they seldom fail to do so, in any language.)
At any rate, as far as I know no one is following me. In fact, sometimes the complaint is that I cannot be followed. Consider that I may not want to be followed all the time, which may be why I sometimes try to get those who seem to be following me to question me.
The struggle of a Darwinian mind vs. some small bits of evidence...
It continues.
Yes, yes of course this is true of humans. But, you said "living organisms" which encompasses humans and everything else alive. The question is one of sentience, meaning consciousness. Without it, there is only survival instinct. The only animals that we are sure think "life is worth living" are ourselves. This is why morality is a human construct.
The same observations that I referred to can be made of animals with the only lacking observation being a direct observation of their subjective experience of their form of sentience, sapience and intelligence.
This is why science itself is not moral or immoral, though it's application can be. You are trying to apply morality where it can't apply and it fails..
All scientia/knowledge relies on sentience, and sentience entails a sense of right and wrong, historically the notion that there is a form of knowledge/scientia that sentient beings can have that is not moral or immoral has lead to scientism, the eugenics movement, Nazism, etc. That is why above when you made argument of the same structure based on the myth of moral neutrality the words of Nazis, eugenicists and so on run in parallel, as they argued for the same foundation.
Your reply from this point on down is a cop out...
Don't think I'm going to go off and chase red herrings now, my friend. No, you made an assertion about actual evidence of some type that can be falsified or verified, and it is one that can be proven to be falsified time and again. To make matters worse when it comes to your claims it was woven into yet another unjustified attack against creationists, those attacks that you seem capable of pulling out of thin air with no evidence cited, no texts cited and no claims verified. The claim divorced of from that context:All you need to prove to the world that Darwin was wrong is a homo sapiens fossil from the era of the dinosaurs.
Well, there are artifacts that indicate enough use of technology to infer that they are the work of homo sapiens that have been found in such eras. For that matter, at least some homo sapien fossils have been found in the same supposed "era of the dinosaurs." Using your attacks against creationists as a red herring now does not hide the fact that your own terms were met and that your own claims lack substance, as is proven by the lack of evidence cited. I can back up my claims about Darwinists imagining things by citing texts written by Darwinists just as I can back up my claims about Nazism by citing what they wrote, said and did, perhaps combining historical sources such as newspapers of the day, etc. In contrast, it seems that you continually fail to back up claims about creationists that ought to be easy to prove and instead just make more and more! Which creationists attack science and where is the textual record of such attacks? What creationists claim that there is a "worldwide conspiracy" among scientists? Cite them, lest one assume that you are referring to ignorant bigotry or the specious charlatanism of talk.origins as all the evidence you need for such claims. There is a structure of argument that is typical to bigots or charlatans in which one is supposed to simply assume that an assertion is true as they shift away from the evidence, so I demand proof. Take one of your latest claims:"You think it’s all just a big world wide, century long, conspiracy. No wonder it’s near impossible to take creationists seriously. Creationists assume non creationists are witless automatons."
So prove it. That is a provable claim, probably much easier to prove than historical claims about Nazism. There are probably plenty of texts to refer to. As to claims about what I have written I know that I didn't claim that there is or was a worldwide conspiracy anywhere. And I typically claim that the Herd merges and runs together naturally enough.
On the topic, it seems that there is an interesting contrast between you and Ronald Numbers:"If you read their literature, you'll rarely come across an anti-scientific notion. They love science."
Emphasis added...because you don't seem to know what you're talking about when it comes to creationists. If you had knowledge even of a minimal and marginal sort then your arguments would be of this structure: "At least this one creationists here said this. So as you can see my case is proven!"
I don't expect much of the Darwinian mind and so I don't expect that you will live by your own evidential terms and claims, as they seem to be quite imaginary. E.g., "If human fossils were found in the same era as the dinosaurs then it would all be so obvious that creationists would have proven their case! Such fossils don't exist, which is why creationists are dummies or somethin'." But such fossils have been found a number of times, so then in theory the mind that is met on its own terms will say: "Very well, now that the terms that I set have been met I'll change my entire view of the world!" Well, not exactly, not if it has made its mind up to be in rebellion against some forms of wit/knowledge. So instead you are still trying to prop up the claim that creationists are paranoid, ignorant or stupid, etc., which is ironic given your apparent ignorance of basic facts combined with apparent paranoias about creationists.
Okay? Peace be with you Mynym.
Don't pretend that you have softened up that much even as you weave various attacks against creationists and I into the same comment. It seems that some fellows attack and then say "Be at peace...uh, please!?"
At any rate, I'm not attacking you yet. Just cite me the text that backs up your claims, assertions and attacks. I can and will do the same for my claims, perhaps even including the notion that some within the Herd may be conspiring when it comes to the evidence and access to it. Conspiracy? But of course, you didn't know?
What a bunch of charlatans, liars and moral degenerates, I say...ummm, be at peace Cineaste. Peace out!
Yes, yes of course this is true of humans. But, you said "living organisms" which encompasses humans and everything else alive. The question is one of sentience, meaning consciousness. Without it, there is only survival instinct. The only animals that we are sure think "life is worth living" are ourselves. This is why morality is a human construct.
The same observations that I referred to can be made of animals with the only lacking observation being a direct observation of their subjective experience of their form of sentience, sapience and intelligence.
This is why science itself is not moral or immoral, though it's application can be. You are trying to apply morality where it can't apply and it fails..
All scientia/knowledge relies on sentience, and sentience entails a sense of right and wrong, historically the notion that there is a form of knowledge/scientia that sentient beings can have that is not moral or immoral has lead to scientism, the eugenics movement, Nazism, etc. That is why above when you made argument of the same structure based on the myth of moral neutrality the words of Nazis, eugenicists and so on run in parallel, as they argued for the same foundation.
Your reply from this point on down is a cop out...
Don't think I'm going to go off and chase red herrings now, my friend. No, you made an assertion about actual evidence of some type that can be falsified or verified, and it is one that can be proven to be falsified time and again. To make matters worse when it comes to your claims it was woven into yet another unjustified attack against creationists, those attacks that you seem capable of pulling out of thin air with no evidence cited, no texts cited and no claims verified. The claim divorced of from that context:All you need to prove to the world that Darwin was wrong is a homo sapiens fossil from the era of the dinosaurs.
Well, there are artifacts that indicate enough use of technology to infer that they are the work of homo sapiens that have been found in such eras. For that matter, at least some homo sapien fossils have been found in the same supposed "era of the dinosaurs." Using your attacks against creationists as a red herring now does not hide the fact that your own terms were met and that your own claims lack substance, as is proven by the lack of evidence cited. I can back up my claims about Darwinists imagining things by citing texts written by Darwinists just as I can back up my claims about Nazism by citing what they wrote, said and did, perhaps combining historical sources such as newspapers of the day, etc. In contrast, it seems that you continually fail to back up claims about creationists that ought to be easy to prove and instead just make more and more! Which creationists attack science and where is the textual record of such attacks? What creationists claim that there is a "worldwide conspiracy" among scientists? Cite them, lest one assume that you are referring to ignorant bigotry or the specious charlatanism of talk.origins as all the evidence you need for such claims. There is a structure of argument that is typical to bigots or charlatans in which one is supposed to simply assume that an assertion is true as they shift away from the evidence, so I demand proof. Take one of your latest claims:"You think it’s all just a big world wide, century long, conspiracy. No wonder it’s near impossible to take creationists seriously. Creationists assume non creationists are witless automatons."
So prove it. That is a provable claim, probably much easier to prove than historical claims about Nazism. There are probably plenty of texts to refer to. As to claims about what I have written I know that I didn't claim that there is or was a worldwide conspiracy anywhere. And I typically claim that the Herd merges and runs together naturally enough.
On the topic, it seems that there is an interesting contrast between you and Ronald Numbers:"If you read their literature, you'll rarely come across an anti-scientific notion. They love science."
Emphasis added...because you don't seem to know what you're talking about when it comes to creationists. If you had knowledge even of a minimal and marginal sort then your arguments would be of this structure: "At least this one creationists here said this. So as you can see my case is proven!"
I don't expect much of the Darwinian mind and so I don't expect that you will live by your own evidential terms and claims, as they seem to be quite imaginary. E.g., "If human fossils were found in the same era as the dinosaurs then it would all be so obvious that creationists would have proven their case! Such fossils don't exist, which is why creationists are dummies or somethin'." But such fossils have been found a number of times, so then in theory the mind that is met on its own terms will say: "Very well, now that the terms that I set have been met I'll change my entire view of the world!" Well, not exactly, not if it has made its mind up to be in rebellion against some forms of wit/knowledge. So instead you are still trying to prop up the claim that creationists are paranoid, ignorant or stupid, etc., which is ironic given your apparent ignorance of basic facts combined with apparent paranoias about creationists.
Okay? Peace be with you Mynym.
Don't pretend that you have softened up that much even as you weave various attacks against creationists and I into the same comment. It seems that some fellows attack and then say "Be at peace...uh, please!?"
At any rate, I'm not attacking you yet. Just cite me the text that backs up your claims, assertions and attacks. I can and will do the same for my claims, perhaps even including the notion that some within the Herd may be conspiring when it comes to the evidence and access to it. Conspiracy? But of course, you didn't know?
What a bunch of charlatans, liars and moral degenerates, I say...ummm, be at peace Cineaste. Peace out!
Wednesday, July 05, 2006
Still going...
[I rewrote some of this comment for here. For those who want to begin at the start the comments before it are below this one.]
I need some clarification of what you mean by this statement. As it stands, I am having trouble making sense of it. When you say "living organisms have to consider life worth living," are you confusing survival instinct with a sense of morality? Again, survival of the fittest, as a concept, is not right or wrong.
It has been documented that the sentience of humans has an impact on their survival in various ways. That's the same sense and sentience by which we consider, measure and "value" things right and wrong. I'm not confusing a survival instinct with a sense of morality as it can be observed that human sentience and sense has an impact on survival.
Note that often what is missing from Darwinian "reasoning" or imagining is the organism and biology itself, so I will simply refer you back to it. Again, survival of the fittest is laden with morality given that even Darwin admitted that organisms "struggle" to survive. The notion that different rates reproduction lead to "evolution" or higher forms of life emerging from lower forms is laden with morality and values just as the notion of "natural selection" is weighed down with the Darwinian creation myth based on inane logic such as: "If not divine selection, then natural selection..."
Ad hominem.
I can attack Darwinian reasoning as a perversion all I like. That is not an ad homenim. And Darwinism is a perversion based on an inversion that exchanges the freedom of thinking through biology philosophically for the mental retardation of a proto-Nazi form of "biological thinking," i.e. thoughts that cannot be truly thought. As for the notion that Darwinian reasoning is often based on imagining things about the past and blurring things together that is not an ad hominem either, it is a provable fact. So I could clog this blog with examples of such imaginings. Perhaps I should, yet I wouldn't want to overwhelm you. For it seems that you are easily overwhelmed.
Not at all. It's not evidence for natural selection. One simply can't prove the former and there are mountains of evidence for the latter.
One cannot prove any selection in the same sense that one proves a "natural" unfolding of physical events, your own supposed selections included. Yet you still expect to be treated as a sentient being that is making selections. There are also various lines of evidence by which selection can be inferred, including an inference back to intelligent selection based on an unfolding of physical events (i.e. programming). That is not direct physical proof of the intelligence that programmed the events based on a logical if/then structure but it is evidence nonetheless.
The ironic thing about crude empiricism and any mind's demand for "direct physical proof" and the like is that without the sentience there to sense the proof as such it doesn't matter as "proof" anyway. Yet with the sentience there and the subjective portion of our nature admitted to as such, that opens the door to claims of hallucination, misunderstanding, (Well, what about all these people over here who see things differently?) etc.
As for there being mountains of evidence for things living and dying at different rates, of course there is. But is there overwhelming evidence that different rates of reproduction are a physical mechanism that "selects" for higher forms of life to emerge from lower, naturally? Well, go on...overwhelm me! When I make a claim about evidence or "proof" I have things in mind with which I can back it up. E.g., I can clog this blog with examples of Darwinian reasoning being full of imagining things about the past. So go ahead, what is the overwhelming evidence that "natural selection" has and will "select" for higher forms of life to emerge from the lower?
Morality is a human construct and not applicable to wild animals any more so than is calling an earthquake immoral because it was responsible for the death of thousands.
Humans are animals, trying to make use of a sort of alienation from Nature by human intelligence and sentience while also denying human intelligence, design, selection and the role of the selections of organisms in Nature is a half-witted form of reasoning. I.e., on the one hand you make use of the sapience and sentience of Homo sapiens to claim that they can construct things within Nature and have a sense of ought by their own sort of nature and yet on the other you insist that all animals are governed by physical processes such as "natural selection" of the sort that comport with notions of "naturalism."
Note that from our perspective the results of earthquakes often are a natural evil, anyone that cannot admit that is dead in the head. On another note, earthquakes are evidence for catastrophism and the evidence clearly indicates a record of great catastrophism and cataclysm throughout the earth's geologic history and not one of uniformitarianism in which an infinitely slow process has the time to "select" things. Instead, things are always one so-called "selection" away from mass extinction at a much larger scale than the sort of processes described based on natural selection, the mystical creative properties assigned to the notion seem to be too slow given a finite amount of time. (Note that the theory of natural selection was first developed by a creationist as a way of explaining the degeneration of fit forms, not their creation.)
Your equating limited sentience with morality.
Just as every sentence you write here entails some notion or definition of right and wrong an organism's sentience leads to an awareness of right and wrong.
The presence of one does not necessitate the presence of the other.
Yes it does, everyone who is sentient has a sense of right and wrong. If you disagree with me about that then you've only offered one more bit of evidence of it given that you consider me wrong based on some sense of right and wrong that is bound up in your sentience and the setences that you draw from it.
The concept of "inanimate nature" playing a large role in the "natural selection" of sentient animals is neither difficult or inane.
I didn't say that. The context was the blanket denial by Darwinists that it is organisms that have a role in their own selections and the attempt to reduce their selections and sentience to the inanimate. Of course the inanimate has a "large role" in the selections of organisms but it is their selection that matters. The inanimate elements of Nature do not actually select anything unless we blur, pollute or change the very definitions of animate and inanimate. You see how Darwinism is based on the pollution of language and how the reasoning works towards blurring the distinctions and definitions of words and information. It is only fitting that it does so, given that in Darwinian theory anything that you can imagine fits the evidence, although in fact it does not.
Do you see the difference between practicing eugenics and making the observation that in nature, the fittest survive? I do.
It's false and half-witted notion that people can generally believe as "truth"(evolution) one thing while living by another (a Christian ethic or some form of transcendence such as Natural Law, etc. Therefore what people take as true becomes what they act on. Take for example Darwin's projection of the ruthless form of economics typical the Industrial Revolution onto Nature that people came to accept as true:
by Edwin Black :12-13)(Emphasis added)
Another variant of scientism:
Hitler: Backround, Struggle, and Epilogue
by Ernst Helmreich
(Detriot: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1979) :303)
It seems that combined with German higher criticism and the like it was the Darwinian creation myth and the suitability of Darwinian imagining for the Christian apostates of the West that undermined the Church. It is likely that a few of the frauds of Darwinism like Haeckel's embryos, Piltdown, etc., made the effect of its perversion more "overwhelming." It is worthwhile to consider what you'd think about things if you lived at the time and were subjected to it all. Note that the German church once again had to go back to the Bible in the end, at least for a short time:
by Ernst Christian Helmreich
Reviewed by Arthur A. Preisinger
Church History, Vol. 49, No. 3. (Sep., 1980) :347)
You often go back to and rely on distinction and differences that you've already denied given Darwinian reasoning. For instance, given Darwinian reasoning there is no difference between the subject/organism and the object/Nature, animate/inanimate, etc. Instead, it has been blurred away based on the pollution of language and so the perversion of thought itself. Little wonder that people seem to have minds that exist only in their imaginations. Those that practiced eugenics saw no difference between what they observed in Nature and what they did because eventually Christian apostates lack the view of the world or worldview by which they can have a perspective to judge what is observed in Nature. You seem to be one of those that is still playing pretend that there is some perspective such as Christian ethics or Natural Law that is totally divorced from science/evolution/"truth" that is really just a personal view, illusion or fiction, yet we still can or "ought" to go against natural selection and unity with what is observed in Nature. The fact is that if your own view of the world truly succeeds among Christian apostates in the West and the like then the historical evidence shows that people will begin to live by it in political and public life. I.e., it will be taken to be the factual and that which governs political/public life while personal faith/fictions will be relegated to private life before disappearing. It is an inexorable truth that sentient beings want to believe that what they believe is true. That is their selection, naturally, while interwoven in all their selections is a sense of morality. You are playing pretend when you try to pretend that is not the case.
This is exactly what I think about your attacks on Darwin and natural selection. You have no evidence to support your creationist perspective so you resort to attacking Darwinian thinking. This is bigotry.
No, some fellows have been claiming here how overwhelmed they are by Darwinism and "evolution", so of course it should be pointed out to you that imagining things about the past is not actually evidence and so on. As for arguments and opinions vs. actual historical evidence, misinformed opinion was for the most part exactly what you were citing when it came to Nazism as you seem to well know given your shift away from that and back to Darwinian imaginings about ancient history and the supposed mystical powers lurking in differential rates of reproduction. As far as claims about Nazism I'll take reading what the Nazis actually said, wrote and did over the opinion of some theologian trying to make some moral point to Christians any day, whether the theologian is conservative or liberal. They hardly ever seem to know what they're talking about anyway. Some of them are clearly just plain ignorant in this case as well, as generally people are not motivated by "centuries of hate" because most have no sense of history anyway. Generally the mob is lost in the moment and it is the theologian or the scholar that has a sense of history. So perhaps they're projecting that onto the general public and then making claims about the centuries again. I'll ask you again, what Christian public do you think that there was in the Weimar Republic?
All you need to prove to the world that Darwin was wrong is a homo sapiens fossil from the era of the dinosaurs.
You're wrong about that. What do you think about the latest find of possible red blood cells in a T. Rex bone? That ought to keep the Darwinian myth makers busy for a bit. But only a bit, as given the original degenerate epistemic standard that they adhere to of: "If I can imagine a little story about that, then that's evidence for evolution or somethin'." they can work wonders with their own hypothetical goo.
You are ignorant of the facts, as artifacts that are anomalous to the Darwinian creation myth have been found in nearly every "era."
Examples:
Precambrian, site: Ottosdalin, South Africa, item: grooved metallic sphere
Precambrian, site: Dorchester Mass., item: metal vase
Cambrian, site: Antelope Spring, Utah, item: shoe print
Devonian, site: Kingoodie Quarry Scotland, item: iron nail in stone
Carboniferous, site: Macoupin, Illinois, item: human skeleton as well as site: Rockcastle County in Kentucky, item: humanlike footprints
And so on, see: (The Hidden History of the Human Race
by Michael Cremo and Richard Thompson)
There are block walls in beds of coal, etc.etc. There is more that is anomalous to the Darwinian creation myth as well in various fields dealing with history, prehistoric times and the like. E.g., Egyptologists finding holes drilled through granite in the pyramids that an engineer tells them would take a drill spinning at thousands of RPM. But you can believe that some egyptian sat there spinning and spinning a copper tool to drill through solid granite in the supposed Copper Age if you like.
If you creationists had anything like this I am sure you would let the scientific community know.
And I suppose that you suppose that the thanks that one would get from proto-Nazis would make it all worth while? Or perhaps the Old Press would be pleased to report that the Darwinian creation myth that they seem so desperate to prop up is annihilated by lines of evidence of all sorts?
But you don't and your position is weak. So, you create these long posts filled with sophistry and little substance.
It is not sophistry to clearly state what people are doing, i.e. imagining little stories about the past and shaping the evidence to fit instead of looking at the actual historical evidence as it is and going from there.
There is more evidence, all of it can supposedly be explained away if one agrees to the original degenerate epistemic standard of including your own imagination as evidence. Sometimes I find myself agreeing to the standard because the little stories are entertaining. Too bad that you didn't even want to try to imagine a little story about the copulatory organ of the male dragon fly. It is not bait, biology is full of such instances. Apparently you are overwhelmed by people who choose the easiest things to merge together out of millions and millions of types of organisms ("Say, this looks a little like that or somethin'...well, I ought to imagine a little story about this and that then!"), sometimes choosing to arrange the environment in a sequential way (aquatic, semi-aquatic, etc.) in order to make imagining things a little easier. Then it seems that they become overwhelmed by their own imaginations. It seems after they are "overwhelmed" that their mind exists only in their imagination, naturally enough.
Perhaps when those that have made a habit of imagining things come across an iron nail in a bed of fossils that according to their creation myth must not be there it is easier to cast it aside or to once again imagine a little story about it.
I need some clarification of what you mean by this statement. As it stands, I am having trouble making sense of it. When you say "living organisms have to consider life worth living," are you confusing survival instinct with a sense of morality? Again, survival of the fittest, as a concept, is not right or wrong.
It has been documented that the sentience of humans has an impact on their survival in various ways. That's the same sense and sentience by which we consider, measure and "value" things right and wrong. I'm not confusing a survival instinct with a sense of morality as it can be observed that human sentience and sense has an impact on survival.
Note that often what is missing from Darwinian "reasoning" or imagining is the organism and biology itself, so I will simply refer you back to it. Again, survival of the fittest is laden with morality given that even Darwin admitted that organisms "struggle" to survive. The notion that different rates reproduction lead to "evolution" or higher forms of life emerging from lower forms is laden with morality and values just as the notion of "natural selection" is weighed down with the Darwinian creation myth based on inane logic such as: "If not divine selection, then natural selection..."
Ad hominem.
I can attack Darwinian reasoning as a perversion all I like. That is not an ad homenim. And Darwinism is a perversion based on an inversion that exchanges the freedom of thinking through biology philosophically for the mental retardation of a proto-Nazi form of "biological thinking," i.e. thoughts that cannot be truly thought. As for the notion that Darwinian reasoning is often based on imagining things about the past and blurring things together that is not an ad hominem either, it is a provable fact. So I could clog this blog with examples of such imaginings. Perhaps I should, yet I wouldn't want to overwhelm you. For it seems that you are easily overwhelmed.
Not at all. It's not evidence for natural selection. One simply can't prove the former and there are mountains of evidence for the latter.
One cannot prove any selection in the same sense that one proves a "natural" unfolding of physical events, your own supposed selections included. Yet you still expect to be treated as a sentient being that is making selections. There are also various lines of evidence by which selection can be inferred, including an inference back to intelligent selection based on an unfolding of physical events (i.e. programming). That is not direct physical proof of the intelligence that programmed the events based on a logical if/then structure but it is evidence nonetheless.
The ironic thing about crude empiricism and any mind's demand for "direct physical proof" and the like is that without the sentience there to sense the proof as such it doesn't matter as "proof" anyway. Yet with the sentience there and the subjective portion of our nature admitted to as such, that opens the door to claims of hallucination, misunderstanding, (Well, what about all these people over here who see things differently?) etc.
As for there being mountains of evidence for things living and dying at different rates, of course there is. But is there overwhelming evidence that different rates of reproduction are a physical mechanism that "selects" for higher forms of life to emerge from lower, naturally? Well, go on...overwhelm me! When I make a claim about evidence or "proof" I have things in mind with which I can back it up. E.g., I can clog this blog with examples of Darwinian reasoning being full of imagining things about the past. So go ahead, what is the overwhelming evidence that "natural selection" has and will "select" for higher forms of life to emerge from the lower?
Morality is a human construct and not applicable to wild animals any more so than is calling an earthquake immoral because it was responsible for the death of thousands.
Humans are animals, trying to make use of a sort of alienation from Nature by human intelligence and sentience while also denying human intelligence, design, selection and the role of the selections of organisms in Nature is a half-witted form of reasoning. I.e., on the one hand you make use of the sapience and sentience of Homo sapiens to claim that they can construct things within Nature and have a sense of ought by their own sort of nature and yet on the other you insist that all animals are governed by physical processes such as "natural selection" of the sort that comport with notions of "naturalism."
Note that from our perspective the results of earthquakes often are a natural evil, anyone that cannot admit that is dead in the head. On another note, earthquakes are evidence for catastrophism and the evidence clearly indicates a record of great catastrophism and cataclysm throughout the earth's geologic history and not one of uniformitarianism in which an infinitely slow process has the time to "select" things. Instead, things are always one so-called "selection" away from mass extinction at a much larger scale than the sort of processes described based on natural selection, the mystical creative properties assigned to the notion seem to be too slow given a finite amount of time. (Note that the theory of natural selection was first developed by a creationist as a way of explaining the degeneration of fit forms, not their creation.)
Your equating limited sentience with morality.
Just as every sentence you write here entails some notion or definition of right and wrong an organism's sentience leads to an awareness of right and wrong.
The presence of one does not necessitate the presence of the other.
Yes it does, everyone who is sentient has a sense of right and wrong. If you disagree with me about that then you've only offered one more bit of evidence of it given that you consider me wrong based on some sense of right and wrong that is bound up in your sentience and the setences that you draw from it.
The concept of "inanimate nature" playing a large role in the "natural selection" of sentient animals is neither difficult or inane.
I didn't say that. The context was the blanket denial by Darwinists that it is organisms that have a role in their own selections and the attempt to reduce their selections and sentience to the inanimate. Of course the inanimate has a "large role" in the selections of organisms but it is their selection that matters. The inanimate elements of Nature do not actually select anything unless we blur, pollute or change the very definitions of animate and inanimate. You see how Darwinism is based on the pollution of language and how the reasoning works towards blurring the distinctions and definitions of words and information. It is only fitting that it does so, given that in Darwinian theory anything that you can imagine fits the evidence, although in fact it does not.
Do you see the difference between practicing eugenics and making the observation that in nature, the fittest survive? I do.
It's false and half-witted notion that people can generally believe as "truth"(evolution) one thing while living by another (a Christian ethic or some form of transcendence such as Natural Law, etc. Therefore what people take as true becomes what they act on. Take for example Darwin's projection of the ruthless form of economics typical the Industrial Revolution onto Nature that people came to accept as true:
In 1859, some years after Spencer began to use the term “survival of the fittest,” the naturalist Charles Darwin summed up years of observation in a lengthy abstract entitled The Origin of Species. Darwin espoused “natural selection” as the survival process governing most living things in a world of limited resources and changing environments. He confirmed that his theory “is the doctrine of Malthus applied with manifold force to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms; for in this case, there can be no artificial increase of food, and no prudential restraint from marriage.”(War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race
Darwin was writing about a “natural world” distinct from man. But it wasn’t long before leading thinkers were distilling the ideas of Malthus, Spencer and Darwin into a new concept, bearing a name never used by Darwin himself: social Darwinism.’ Now social planners were rallying around the notion that in the struggle to survive in a harsh world, many humans were not only less worthy, many were actually destined to wither away as a rite of progress. To preserve the weak and the needy was, in essence, an unnatural act.
Since ancient times, man has understood the principles of breeding and the lasting quality of inherited traits. The Old Testament describes Jacob’s clever breeding of his and Labans flocks, as spotted and streaked goats were mated to create spotted and streaked offspring. Centuries later, Jesus sermonized, “A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.”
Good stock and preferred traits were routinely propagated in the fields and the flocks. Bad stock and unwanted traits were culled. Breeding, whether in grapes or sheep, was considered a skill subject to luck and God’s grace.
But during the five years between 1863 and 1868, three great men of biology would all promulgate a theory of evolution dependent upon identifiable hereditary “units” within the cells. These units could actually be seen
under a microscope. Biology entered a new age when its visionaries proclaimed that good and bad traits were not bestowed by God as an inscrutable divinity, but transmitted from generation to generation according to the laws of science.
by Edwin Black :12-13)(Emphasis added)
Another variant of scientism:
The Christian churches build on the ignorance of people and are anxious so far as possible to preserve this ignorance in as large a part of the populance as possible; only in this way can the Christian churches retain their power. In contrast, national socialism rests on scientific foundations.(The German Churches Under
Hitler: Backround, Struggle, and Epilogue
by Ernst Helmreich
(Detriot: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1979) :303)
It seems that combined with German higher criticism and the like it was the Darwinian creation myth and the suitability of Darwinian imagining for the Christian apostates of the West that undermined the Church. It is likely that a few of the frauds of Darwinism like Haeckel's embryos, Piltdown, etc., made the effect of its perversion more "overwhelming." It is worthwhile to consider what you'd think about things if you lived at the time and were subjected to it all. Note that the German church once again had to go back to the Bible in the end, at least for a short time:
It is noteworthy, but hardly surprising, that the [Bible believing] Confessing Church, by and large, furnished the leadership for the revived postwar Evangelical Church.(The German Churches Under Hitler: Background, Struggle and Epilogue
The great majority of Evangelical pastors did not join either the [pro-Nazi] German Christian movement or the [anti-Nazi] Confessing Church, although many were in sympathy with the latter. The story of these “neutrals” has yet to be researched and told. [...]
The book is an exceedingly valuable contribution to the literature of the German church struggle; it is exhaustive in scholarly research and rich in bibliographical material, documentation and heretofore unused archival sources.
by Ernst Christian Helmreich
Reviewed by Arthur A. Preisinger
Church History, Vol. 49, No. 3. (Sep., 1980) :347)
You often go back to and rely on distinction and differences that you've already denied given Darwinian reasoning. For instance, given Darwinian reasoning there is no difference between the subject/organism and the object/Nature, animate/inanimate, etc. Instead, it has been blurred away based on the pollution of language and so the perversion of thought itself. Little wonder that people seem to have minds that exist only in their imaginations. Those that practiced eugenics saw no difference between what they observed in Nature and what they did because eventually Christian apostates lack the view of the world or worldview by which they can have a perspective to judge what is observed in Nature. You seem to be one of those that is still playing pretend that there is some perspective such as Christian ethics or Natural Law that is totally divorced from science/evolution/"truth" that is really just a personal view, illusion or fiction, yet we still can or "ought" to go against natural selection and unity with what is observed in Nature. The fact is that if your own view of the world truly succeeds among Christian apostates in the West and the like then the historical evidence shows that people will begin to live by it in political and public life. I.e., it will be taken to be the factual and that which governs political/public life while personal faith/fictions will be relegated to private life before disappearing. It is an inexorable truth that sentient beings want to believe that what they believe is true. That is their selection, naturally, while interwoven in all their selections is a sense of morality. You are playing pretend when you try to pretend that is not the case.
This is exactly what I think about your attacks on Darwin and natural selection. You have no evidence to support your creationist perspective so you resort to attacking Darwinian thinking. This is bigotry.
No, some fellows have been claiming here how overwhelmed they are by Darwinism and "evolution", so of course it should be pointed out to you that imagining things about the past is not actually evidence and so on. As for arguments and opinions vs. actual historical evidence, misinformed opinion was for the most part exactly what you were citing when it came to Nazism as you seem to well know given your shift away from that and back to Darwinian imaginings about ancient history and the supposed mystical powers lurking in differential rates of reproduction. As far as claims about Nazism I'll take reading what the Nazis actually said, wrote and did over the opinion of some theologian trying to make some moral point to Christians any day, whether the theologian is conservative or liberal. They hardly ever seem to know what they're talking about anyway. Some of them are clearly just plain ignorant in this case as well, as generally people are not motivated by "centuries of hate" because most have no sense of history anyway. Generally the mob is lost in the moment and it is the theologian or the scholar that has a sense of history. So perhaps they're projecting that onto the general public and then making claims about the centuries again. I'll ask you again, what Christian public do you think that there was in the Weimar Republic?
All you need to prove to the world that Darwin was wrong is a homo sapiens fossil from the era of the dinosaurs.
You're wrong about that. What do you think about the latest find of possible red blood cells in a T. Rex bone? That ought to keep the Darwinian myth makers busy for a bit. But only a bit, as given the original degenerate epistemic standard that they adhere to of: "If I can imagine a little story about that, then that's evidence for evolution or somethin'." they can work wonders with their own hypothetical goo.
You are ignorant of the facts, as artifacts that are anomalous to the Darwinian creation myth have been found in nearly every "era."
Examples:
Precambrian, site: Ottosdalin, South Africa, item: grooved metallic sphere
Precambrian, site: Dorchester Mass., item: metal vase
Cambrian, site: Antelope Spring, Utah, item: shoe print
Devonian, site: Kingoodie Quarry Scotland, item: iron nail in stone
Carboniferous, site: Macoupin, Illinois, item: human skeleton as well as site: Rockcastle County in Kentucky, item: humanlike footprints
And so on, see: (The Hidden History of the Human Race
by Michael Cremo and Richard Thompson)
There are block walls in beds of coal, etc.etc. There is more that is anomalous to the Darwinian creation myth as well in various fields dealing with history, prehistoric times and the like. E.g., Egyptologists finding holes drilled through granite in the pyramids that an engineer tells them would take a drill spinning at thousands of RPM. But you can believe that some egyptian sat there spinning and spinning a copper tool to drill through solid granite in the supposed Copper Age if you like.
If you creationists had anything like this I am sure you would let the scientific community know.
And I suppose that you suppose that the thanks that one would get from proto-Nazis would make it all worth while? Or perhaps the Old Press would be pleased to report that the Darwinian creation myth that they seem so desperate to prop up is annihilated by lines of evidence of all sorts?
But you don't and your position is weak. So, you create these long posts filled with sophistry and little substance.
It is not sophistry to clearly state what people are doing, i.e. imagining little stories about the past and shaping the evidence to fit instead of looking at the actual historical evidence as it is and going from there.
There is more evidence, all of it can supposedly be explained away if one agrees to the original degenerate epistemic standard of including your own imagination as evidence. Sometimes I find myself agreeing to the standard because the little stories are entertaining. Too bad that you didn't even want to try to imagine a little story about the copulatory organ of the male dragon fly. It is not bait, biology is full of such instances. Apparently you are overwhelmed by people who choose the easiest things to merge together out of millions and millions of types of organisms ("Say, this looks a little like that or somethin'...well, I ought to imagine a little story about this and that then!"), sometimes choosing to arrange the environment in a sequential way (aquatic, semi-aquatic, etc.) in order to make imagining things a little easier. Then it seems that they become overwhelmed by their own imaginations. It seems after they are "overwhelmed" that their mind exists only in their imagination, naturally enough.
Perhaps when those that have made a habit of imagining things come across an iron nail in a bed of fossils that according to their creation myth must not be there it is easier to cast it aside or to once again imagine a little story about it.
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