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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