Global Warming and the U.N.

A letter from skeptical scientists:

It is not possible to stop climate change, a natural phenomenon that has affected humanity through the ages. Geological, archaeological, oral and written histories all attest to the dramatic challenges posed to past societies from unanticipated changes in temperature, precipitation, winds and other climatic variables. We therefore need to equip nations to become resilient to the full range of these natural phenomena by promoting economic growth and wealth generation.
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has issued increasingly alarming conclusions about the climatic influences of human-produced carbon dioxide (CO2), a non-polluting gas that is essential to plant photosynthesis.
[...]
The current UN focus on "fighting climate change," as illustrated in the Nov. 27 UN Development Programme's Human Development Report, is distracting governments from adapting to the threat of inevitable natural climate changes, whatever forms they may take. National and international planning for such changes is needed, with a focus on helping our most vulnerable citizens adapt to conditions that lie ahead. Attempts to prevent global climate change from occurring are ultimately futile, and constitute a tragic misallocation of resources that would be better spent on humanity's real and pressing problems.

(Emphasis added) (The full letter)

It seems to me that the environmentalists haven't dealt with the contradictions in their own philosophy. For example, on the one hand it's wrong to upset the balance of an anthropic principle apparently written into Nature while on the other man and technology are viewed as unnatural, causing "pollution" and misanthropic tendencies are allowed an outlet in this way. It's worth questioning, what is the basis for the judgments typical to environmentalists? Another example, many seem to be ignorant enough to believe in the Darwinian creation myth yet they object when one species causes the extinction of another. If all the diversity of Life has been created by random mutations being filtered by the process of natural selection then why object to more filtering?

Obviously you cannot create diversity or find the "origin" of specification of form and species in a process of filtration, which is why even Darwin noted that natural "selection" might more aptly be called natural preservation. Perhaps on some level even ignorant environmentalists know that their creation myth is false, therefore they know that species have value and are worth protecting because fundamentally different life forms do not and will not emerge based on processes of extinction or random mutation filtered by natural "selection"/preservation of form and information that already exists within a group of organisms. I.e. a group of organisms may be filtered through a process of natural selection all you like but all you can do is draw forth forms and adaptations already specified within the range of information already specified in the genome, perhaps even less given genetic entropy. Ironically this is the view that many environmentalists seem to adhere to in the real world of empirical facts. It's only in the imaginary world of Darwinism where one can cite their own hypothesis as the equivalent of empirical facts that they apparently believe that species or life forms emerge from natural selection filtering processes of death, extinction and so on.

Intelligent Design blog...

Intelligent Reasoning on ID type logic.

Comments

No biologist or biochemist argues we understand all the mechanisms of nature.
Clearly we don’t.
However, we need not look to intelligent design for the explanation of these puzzles, but rather await the stepwise progress of human technology and knowledge.

He seems to be summarizing how biologists train themselves to be blind based on myths about Progress and so on. Apparently biologists are indoctrinated, step by step, with imaginary notions of natural progress. They “need not look” or try to be aware of intelligence when simply imagining things about the mechanical tick and tock typical to technology, attributing their imaginings to the Blind Watchmaker is so much easier.

Ironically “stepwise” progress will never come if biologists sit around waiting for their Mommy Nature to make the type of selections that they imagine come naturally to her. Given their indoctrination it seems that generally they’ll never admit to the quantifiable impact of sight on things like intelligent selection and the progress typical to technology.[1] Indoctrination is not education, although those subject to it will fail to understand that. Sight is not blindness, although those who are blind may be confused on that point. Recognizing and seeing ID as a possible falsification of naturalism is only a science/knowledge stopper to those who want to act as if knowledge drawn mainly from their own imaginations is on a par with harder forms of science like physics which need not be propped up by or linked with philosophic naturalism.

Note that as knowledge tends towards progress “stepwise” based on the use of technology which tends to progress in such a way what is being found is that philosophic naturalism is less and less tenable the more that can be observed. Yet somehow progress towards something other a philosophy of naturalism is apparently interpreted as being based on “gaps” in knowledge, as many biologists want to fill all gaps with their own imaginations instead of admitting that the work of a mind can have effects which can be known as such. They seem to close their mind of the synaptic gaps as a supposed matter of principle and then imagine that opening it again will be the end of all progress towards knowledge as we know it. Every biologist that I’ve ever debated has been quite the fearful fellow as a result of the notion of Progress that seems to come naturally to them, yet putting aside all the fear and reading between their lines it still seems that they have a little mind left even if it is trying to crawl back into the womb of their Mother Nature, step by imaginary step.

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But surely the burden of proof lies with the challenger?

It seems to me that the burden of proof lies with those who claim that their theory is like the theory of gravity, claim that there is overwhelming evidence behind what they say, argue that the State must support their position and only their position, dictate that all parents must use their education dollars to teach their position and only their position, etc.

Also note that if someone is allowed to cite their own imagination as if it is evidence or proof then the burden of proof is itself imaginary. If ID types keep trying to specify a falsifiable definition and specification for Darwinism instead of joining Darwinists in blurring essential specifications then technology will naturally be on their side. Ironically, it will most likely keep evolving, step by step, to lift the burden for them with respect to revealing a number of highly essential specifications in the origin of the Cosmos, to the origin of life and perhaps even to the origin of specifications observed in many “species.”

By the evolution of technology I mean things like microscopes, telescopes, etc. I.e. it seems that technology will tend to reveal more specifications favorable to the ID hypothesis, naturally.
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[1] This was a reference to quantum mechanics. If you got it, then you're a bit of a geek. If you keep up with the debate there's a few layers of meaning here and there and probably some bad grammar as well.

A comment...

...if an infinite number of other possible universes exist then why is it not also infinitely possible for a infinitely powerful God to exist? Using the materialist same line of reasoning, if it is infinitely possible for a infinitely powerful God to exist then He, of 100% certainty, does exist no matter how small the probability is of his existence in one of the multiverses, and since he certainly does exist, according to the strict materialistic reasoning you gave me, Then all possibilities by default become subject to Him since He is by definition Omnipotent. As well logic dictates there can only be one infinitely powerful “Lord” of the multiverses. As well, the “recycling universe” conjecture suffers so many questions from the second law of thermodynamics (entropy) as to render it effectively implausible as a serious theory. The only hard evidence there is, the stunning precision found in the universal constants, points overwhelmingly to intelligent design by an infinitely powerful and transcendent Creator who originally established what the unchanging universal constants of physics could and would do at the creation of the universe. The hard evidence left no room for the blind chance of natural laws in this universe. Thus, naturalism was forced into appealing to an infinity of other untestable universes for it was left with no footing in this universe.

36
bornagain77, 11/30/2007 (Uncommon Descent)

If you like The Office...

...then you should probably see this movie:
The King of Kong

Occasionally I had to remind myself that it was a documentary and not an episode of The Office.

The Multiverse

Those who argue that science must methodically build a philosophy of naturalism seem to eventually conclude that an infinite number of universes can be proposed scientifically while an infinite Creator of numbers must always be denied, naturally. The little question of whether or not there actually is a Creator is excluded by stigma words and rules which naturally lead to philosophic naturalism, yet then those who begin to adhere to such a philosophy claim to have overwhelming evidence against that which they already decided that they must be blind to as a matter of principle.

That pattern of thinking is like saying that because your brain is all that seems to matter, therefore you must be blind to any notion of your mind governing it. Then you look at the evidence with that conclusion in mind and conclude that the mind is an illusion brought about by brain events in different regions and so on. The problem is this, the brain is all that you decided to see before looking at the evidence so the question of whether or not there actually is a mind actually wasn't even being dealt with in a reasonable manner, instead it will always be imagined away by definition. It was already excluded, yet if it was not then fact of the matter is that there might be a great deal of evidence that the brain is an interface between mind and body. No matter if there were a great deal of evidence it will not be seen as long as scholars studying the issue are systematically conditioned to be close-minded to any possibility of such evidence. If you cannot think of such evidence for your Self then there is nothing more that can be said. (But I may write a little about the evidence later for those who already know that they can think about it.)

Similarly multiverse hypotheses seem to be based on little more than the same type of conditioning through the use of negative stigma words like "magic" as opposed to positive words like "natural" and so on instead of facts, logic and evidence. After all, based on logic and reason one has to wonder just how natural the notion of many universes is, for couldn't one Nature be logically defined as unnatural to all the rest? Or isn't evidence for a multiverse excluded as a matter of principle given that any evidence has to be of this universe by definition? Etc.

Logically the notion may be defined as odd in other ways:

...I did not find the multiverse alternative very helpful. The postulation of multiple universes...is a truly desperate alternative. If the existence of one universe requires an explanation, multiple universes require a much bigger explanation: the problem is increased by the factor of whatever the total number of universes is. It seems a little like the case of a schoolboy whose teacher doesn’t believe his dog ate his homework, so he replaces the first version with the story that a pack of dogs—too many to count—ate his homework.

(There is a God: How the world's most notorious atheist changed his mind, by Antony Flew and Roy Abraham Varghese :136-137)


In the end it seems that those who dislike how the verses of the universe were written will always imagine that if only there were enough verses then they could write themselves.

A philosophy of death?

I'm not sure why a misanthropic pattern keeps emerging in biology but history shows it.

One of the latest examples:
Telic Thoughts: Scientist looking forward to human extinction

Archive

This is called an argument by poverty of the imagination. I find it easy to imagine…

Is that what it’s called? Imagine that.

It seems to me that you can call imagining things whatever you like and it will still be one of the lowest forms of knowledge imaginable. Yet those who engage in Darwinian reasoning claim very high levels of knowledge, sometimes equating their reasoning with Newtonian reasoning or even basic empirical facts. They seem to claim the highest yet when it comes down to it they are engaged in the lowest. Oddly, there is a form of safety in being able to crawl back into hypothetical goo at any given time. One can propose a specification as if it is so, yet given the nature of human imagination it will comport with and “explain” all observations with respect to biological form and characteristics. That’s because it was never a specified form of reasoning about form leading to knowledge about reasons for the formations of things and how form comes into being. For example, if squirrels have a flap of skin which is functional then then that is explained, if they do not then that is also explained just as the whole form labeled “squirrel” is explained no matter what its form is. Or, if you ever stop imagining things, you could try thinking of it this way, what form could squirrels possibly fit which would fall outside of Darwinian “explanation”/imagination. Perhaps if they had a little horn on their head which seemed to be formed exactly like that of another organism? Or perhaps eyes just like a chameleon’s? For how would such a convergence in the form of an eye be created by being blindly filtered by natural selection? And how do you imagine that blindly filtering and preserving fit forms, creates forms and their recognition by sight at any rate?

At any rate, I don’t know who started the “argument by summarizing arguments” but it isn’t actually much of an argument itself. For example, in one of his books Dawkins goes on about the “argument from personal incredulity” as if the mere fact that he can summarize an argument or point out that arguments are created and supported by persons does away with the notion that some things are incredible, improbable or impossible. Ironically, improbability and things of this sort can be measured and logically transferred/communicated to other persons given a philosophy of transcendence, while the way he engages in imagining things in subjective ways based on a philosophy of immanence that seems natural to him cannot be. Ironically, summarizing the other fellow’s argument and imagining that it is a “personal” matter seems to apply to him and his immanent brain events more than anyone else. At any rate, some things are actually incredible and can be objectively specified to be impossible even if those who are credulous and gullible enough to believe in mythological narratives of naturalism make a habit of imagining otherwise.

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(Archive: link)

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Occasionally I get comments from people claiming that they don't understand what I write based on some bit of text that is written incorrectly or perhaps too densely packed with information. But it's always seemed to me that they actually understand enough to understand that they don't want to.

Archive

I think I may not be allowed to comment on a fellow's blog anymore. I'll save this here and try again later. If it's not a technical issue it would be odd for a fellow that talks of how much he values reason to refuse to try to reason things out.
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Really... you come to sit at my feet and absorb my wisdom?

I'm merely accepting your argument about all that I do not know.

I don't think there is a thing in the world you can learn from me. But you already knew that.

Your original argument was based on all that I do not know which I should know and so on, so I would think that you had some knowledge in mind that I do not know.

The old argument from incredulity revisited.

I didn't say that the use of language was necessarily all that incredible. After all, marginally intelligent people can use language in incredibly credulous ways in order to cite their own gullible credulity as evidence as many Darwinists do. On the other hand one ought to admit that some uses of codes, like DNA, are rather incredible.

You can't understand how science could say language and genetic codes could evolve without at sentient force so you don't accept it.

There is no reason to deny that codes and languages evolve, many can be observed to do so. There is reason to deny that change is the reason for reason or that meaning is some type of illusion which emerges from meaninglessness. There is reason in Aristole's philosophy when it logically leads to some type of unmoved Mover but we have no reason to try to trace cause and effect back to an imaginary oblivion.
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Archive

f objective evidence were made available to demonstrate this point, then the presence in the religioous text would neither negate nor prove the point.

The religious text would be a form of evidence consonant with that type of evidence but history shows that a harmony between different forms of evidence would tend to be denied for that very reason. For example:

..in the late 1960s, I audited a course in cosmology from the physics Nobelist Steven Weinberg. He told his class that of the theories of cosmology, he preferred the Steady State Theory because “it least resembled the account in Genesis” (my emphasis).
[…]
But as he himself points out in his book, the Big Bang Theory was an automatic consequence of standard thermodynamics, standard gravity theory, and standard nuclear physics. All of the basic physics one needs for the Big Bang Theory was well established in the 1930s, some two decades before the theory was worked out. Weinberg rejected this standard physics not because he didn’t take the equations of physics seriously, but because he did not like the religious implications of the laws of physics.

(Uncommon Dissent: Intellectuals Who Find Darwinism Unconvincing
Refereed Journals by Frank Tipler :124)

Genesis is not in and of itself observations of the objective world.

Neither is anything you write here, whatever it is you think that the excretions of your random brain events in your text means, it may as well be excrement if philosophic naturalism is true.

At any rate, why should the Genesis somehow be “purely” objective? As the most objective and geometric language we have, mathematical logic speaks to and refutes the modernist myth of perfect objectivity, as subjects our knowledge of the world will always be subjective. Yet in postmodernist times most of us could stand to be much more objective and aware of a divine Logos that pervades all logic, all the ratios of rationality, all cause and effect and therefore laws and justice, etc.

As Galileo said, “The holy Bible and the phenomena of nature proceed alike from the divine Word.” and he also noted that, “The laws of Nature are written in the language of mathematics.” And what does mathematics do but make invisible realities visible? Kepler, Galileo and many modern scientists believe that they are studying the Mind of God through the language of mathematics, a view that is not “proven” by but is consonant with the Bible being of the same type of Word: “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.” –Paul, emphasis added

Note that to those with a Nature based/pagan urge to merge the notion that invisible realities can be clearly seen makes as much sense as claiming that unicorns, etc., exist and can be “seen.” Yet no sooner have they made typical atheistic arguments associating invisible realities with childish imagination than they fly off on flights of imagination about chimeric ancient ancestors or carve a graven image which seeks to symbolically blur known forms and so on and so forth.

Archive

Are you saying Hitler was a biologist?

I’m saying that you’re easily taken in by pseudo-scientia/knowledge and the notion of scientific consensus, therefore if you had lived in Germany when German biologists were preaching the scientific racism of their day you would have supported it based on little more than the “overwhelming numbers” typical to scientific consensus. It takes a severely limited intellect to point to scientific consensus as if it is the equivalent of facts, logic and evidence, yet apparently you’re up to the task.

implying that Genesis is objective scientific evidence shows…

I didn’t say that Genesis is scientific evidence. Apparently you believe that science can answer all questions, ironically that would only show that your grasp of science is poor given that science itself speaks to its limitations.

The objective world is defined by and understood scientifically by observation not a religious text.

Your scientism isn’t born out by science itself. For example, note that the conceptual language of mathematics and geometry on which much of science rests speaks to its own limitations in a systematic way:

Hilbert’s Programme was doomed in that it was unrealizable. In a piece of mathematics that stands as an intellectual tour-de-force of the first magnitude, Gödel demonstrated that the arithmetic with which we are all familiar is incomplete:

…that is, in any system that has a finite set of axioms and rules of inference and which is large enough to contain ordinary arithmetic, there are always true statements of the system that cannot be proved on the basis of that set of axioms and those rules of inference. This result is known as Gödel’s First Incompleteness Theorem.
Now Hilbert’s Programme also aimed to prove the essential consistency of his formulation of mathematics as a formal system. Gödel, in his Second Incompleteness Theorem, shattered that hope as well. He proved that one of the statements that cannot be proved in a sufficiently strong formal system is the consistency of the system itself. In other words, if arithmetic is consistent then that fact is one of the things that cannot be proved in the system. It is something that we can only believe on the basis of the evidence, or by appeal to higher axioms. This has been succinctly summarized by saying that if a religion is something whose foundations are based on faith, then mathematics is the only religion that can prove it is a religion!

(God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God
by John Lennox :52)

Every time one introduces Genesis one also by defintion is removing oneself from the scientific argument.

And? Your lack of awareness of the limitations of science that science itself speaks to and lack of focus on pursuing true and total forms of knowledge indicate why you believe in pseudo-science. It’s important to point out that the form of pseudo-knowledge that you derive from your attempts at defining science could easily lead people to deny the truth. For instance, note that if a people incorporated a historical event in their mythology (Perhaps by saying that “gods” came from across the seas born on creatures with huge white wings and a god gave them the gift of agriculture and so on and so forth.) then you’d have us deny it as a matter of principle simply because it was incorporated in a culture’s folklore. (If another civilization had come across the sea on ships with sails/”huge white wings” and so on then you would be denying important historical truths that shaped entire civilizations, technology, etc. And ironically you’d probably have to imagine some pretty inane mythological narratives of naturalism of your own to “explain” things that were actually the result of civilization.)

The natural reaction of those who venerate science and turn it into a creation myth, guide to progress, religion, etc., will be to argue that it somehow an “attack” on science to point out its limitations instead of admitting that science itself indicates its limitations.

It’s also important to point out that wisdom from the mouths of babes and common experience as a sentient being already points to limitations. E.g.

Perhaps a simple illustration will help convince us that science is limited. Let us imagine that my Aunt Matilda has baked a beautiful cake and we take it along to be analyzed by a group of the world’s top scientists. I, as master of ceremonies, ask them for an explanation of the cake and they go to work. The nutrition scientists will tell us about the number of calories in the cake and its nutritional effect; the biochemists will inform us about the structure of the proteins, fats etc. in the cake; the chemists, about the elements involved and their bonding; the physicists will be able to analyze the cake in terms of fundamental particles; and the mathematicians will no doubt offer us a set of elegant equations to describe the behaviour of those particles.
Now that these experts, each in terms of his or her scientific discipline, have given us an exhaustive description of the cake, can we say that the cake is completely explained? We have certainly been given a description of how the cake was made and bow its various constituent elements relate to each other, but suppose I now ask the assembled group of experts a final question: Why was the cake made? The grin on Aunt Matilda’s face shows she knows the answer, for she made the cake, and she made it for a purpose. But all the nutrition scientists, biochemists, chemists, physicists and mathematicians in the world will not be able to answer the question — and it is no insult to their disciplines to state their incapacity to answer it. Their disciplines, which can cope with questions about the nature and structure of the cake, that is, answering the ‘how’ questions, cannot answer the ‘why’ questions connected with the purpose for which the cake was made. In fact, the only way we shall ever get an answer is if Aunt Matilda reveals it to us.

(God’s Undertaker:
Has Science Buried God?
by John Lennox :40) (Emphasis added)

And if we quibble over the term science or pull at its definition and limitations all that should happen is that we move on to some of the best truths having to do with the transphysical and symbolic nature of information and communication. If we call such things science or no it matters little, they are true just the same and matter much more to us than the little matter of matter that more limited forms of scientia/knowledge deal with.

Archive

A miracle is an event that should appear impossible to a Darwinian in view of its ultra-cosmological improbability within the framework of his own theory. Now, speaking of macromutations, let me observe that to generate a proper elephant, it will not suffice suddenly to endow it with a full-grown trunk. As the trunk is being organized, a different but complementary system—the cerebellum—must be modified in order to establish a place for the ensemble of wiring that the elephant will require in order to use the trunk. These macromutations must be coordinated by a system of genes in embryogenesis. If one considers the history of evolution, we must postulate thousands of miracles; miracles, in fact, without end. No more than the gradualists, the saltationists are unable to provide an account of those miracles. The second category of miracles are directional, offering instruction to the great evolutionary progressions and trends—the elaboration of the nervous system, of course, but the internalization of the reproductive process as well, and the appearance of bone, the emergence of ears, the enrichment of various functional relationships, and so on. Each is a series of miracles, whose accumulation has the effect of increasing the complexity and efficiency of various organisms.

(Uncommon Dissent: Intellectuals
Who Find Darwinism Unconvincing
The Miracles of Darwinism, Le Recherche :49)
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(More archiving from comments here)

It’s rather ironic for those who rely on citing their own imaginations about the past as the equivalent of empirical evidence (”facts”) verifying patterns to also set themselves up as iconoclasts who condemn all the false pattern/image recognition that is typical to mankind. After all, they are the charlatans trying to make use of that very fact!

It’s also ironic that virtually every judgment that New Atheists make is reliant on Judeo-Christian history, including much of their skepticism. It’s as if Protestantism evolved to protest itself into nothingness, yet it seems that some protest too much. For what God was it that condemned all graven images/patterns and declared that they were just wood and stone and so on?

Christian theism undermined false pattern recognition historically, yet New Atheists try to pretend that skepticism of this type is reliant on atheism. Or they pretend that iconoclastic truths which do away with false gods and ghosts can somehow be perverted to do away with belief in the God that forbid graven images:

At this point we could easily make the mistake of jumping to the conclusion that getting rid of gods either necessitates or is the same as getting rid of God. Far from it. For Moses and the Prophets it was absurd to bow down to various bits of the universe such as the sun, moon and stars as gods. But they regarded it as equally absurd not to believe in and bow down to the Creator God who made both the universe and them. And here, it is to be noted, they were not introducing a radically novel idea. They did not have to have their universe de-deified as did the Greeks, for the simple reason that they had never believed in the gods in the first place. What had saved them from that superstition was their belief in One True God, Creator of heaven and earth. That is, the idolatrous and polytheistic universe described by Homer and Hesiod was not the original world- picture of humankind — an impression that is often gained from the fact that most books on science and philosophy start with the ancient Greeks and emphasize the importance of the de-deification of the universe, singularly failing to point out that the Hebrews had protested against idolatrous interpretations of the universe long before the time of the Greeks. This serves to obscure the fact that polytheism arguably constitutes a perversion of an original belief in One Creator God.6 It was this perversion that needed to be corrected, by recovering, not by jettisoning, belief in the Creator.

(God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?
by John Lennox :49)

Philosophy can lead to similar conclusions, as the rather theistic Xenophanes said of the superstitions of his day: “The Ethiops say that their gods are flat-nosed and black, while the Thracians say that theirs have blue eyes and red hair. Yet if cattle or horses or lions had hands and could draw,
And could sculpture like men, then the horses would draw their gods
Like horses, and cattle like cattle; and each they would shape
Bodies of gods in the likeness, each kind, of their own.” Yet he also concluded that there is “One God, greatest among gods and men…” because that is the conclusion that philosophy logically leads to if one seeks the truth.

As Chesterton noted, when people stop believing in God they generally do not start believing in “nothing”/oblivion like good atheists, instead they’ll believe anything. I.e. polytheism which in modern times it can take many forms, even reptilian alien “gods” capable of transfiguration that came down from their UFOs to help build the pyramids and other wonders, etc.etc. As history shows only a small minority of atheists insist that they ultimately believe in nothing/oblivion, the general population begins to believe anything as Chesterton said. For example, leading Nazis said things like:

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)

Yet generally they would fall into paganism and their association with the occult is fairly well known. For them science was the equivalent of naturalism, which turned out to be a form of Nature based paganism which led them to try to kill the “biological substance” of the Jews through which a message that condemned Nature based idolatry, superstition and false images had come.
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The New Atheism

The "New Atheism" typical to Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and so on is based on a myopic form of scientism that tends to justify their philosophical, historical and theological ignorance. They tend to make clever arguments given a low level of knowledge which often assumes some progressive Enlightenment myth, so only those who already make the same assumptions will feel validated.

For example, New Atheists seem to assume that the egalitarian values which the West tends to adhere to now developed from and are rooted in the philosophical naturalism that they preach. Yet it only takes a small amount of knowledge of the history of scientific racism and the myopic form of scientism that it was based on to see that they will tend to go back to some form of biologism because that's a type of blindness their philosophy leads to. Western values have to do with the very Judeo-Christian notions of transcendence that New Atheists want to do away with as the equivalent of Dark Age superstitions. Ironically, when it comes to equality they are judging "progress" by doing away with seeing things in a Darwinian way through ideas about natural selection and instead looking down on natural processes from a vantage point that can only be afforded given the Creator based worldview that they hate.

Ultimately they come to the ridiculous position of trying to argue that egalitarianism is somehow naturally rooted in Darwinian thinking while neglecting its "unnatural" historical and textual roots in Christianity and Scripture:

Dawkins even claims that the humanity of women and of other races is “deeply unbiblical,” an error we are only beginning to rise above. Quoting Hartung, “The Bible is a blueprint of in-group morality, complete with instructions of genocide, enslavement of out-groups, and world domination.” Even Jesus, Dawkins argues, “limited his in-group of the saved strictly to Jews.”
[...]
Neither man can have read either the Old or New Testaments carefully. [...]
The concept of salvation for all peoples runs through the Bible from Genesis to Revelation. The history of Israel is bloody at times, like most histories. And it’s true that God is shown commanding violent acts, which may be why the Jews survived. But the overall plan was always for the good of the nations. This comes to the fore in the New Testament, which is explicitly and dramatically a set of blueprints for blessing all humanity. Anyone who cannot see this may have moved his eyes across but has not really ever read the Bible.
True, the Old Testament does emphasize the Jewish responsibility to look out for other Jews. But there are also many references to caring for, loving, being kind to, or reaching out somehow to non-Jews. “Let the nations be glad and sing for joy” (Psalm 67:4). “Are not you Israelites the same to me as the Cushites? declares the LORD. Did I not bring Israel up from Egypt, the Philistines from Caphtor and the Arameans from Kir?” (Amos 9:7 NIV). “They will hammer their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not lift up sword against nation, and never again will they learn war” (Isaiah 2:4). Keeping Jews from getting killed has always been a tough job. But God’s plan to bless all peoples is a strong balancing counternarrative, which began with the very first Jew, Abraham, and his son, Isaac.
When it comes to the New Testament, the error committed by Hartung and Dawkins is stark indeed. “Jesus limited his in-group of the saved strictly to Jews,” says Dawkins. Hartung credited, or blamed, the apostle
Paul for the universalism of Christianity: “Jesus would have turned over in his grave if he had known that Paul would be taking his plan to the pigs.”
As we will see, Sam Harris says the New Testament was written by people who hated Jews. Hartung and Dawkins say Jesus hated Gentiles. That covers everyone!
[...]
Ironically, Dawkins hones in on the phrase “love thy neighbor” to illustrate his belief that Jesus only cared about the “in-group.” But there was a particular moment in history when “neighbor” emphatically stopped meaning “another Jew” and came forever to mean “anyone you meet.” Dawkins should recognize that moment, for he twice uses the term Good Samaritan.
A young Jewish man asked Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?” (Luke 10:29). Jesus responded by telling the story of the Good Samaritan, perhaps the most famous story ever.
A Samaritan was not a Jew. He was a despised half-breed. He was an improbable hero for a rabbi in an era when the always nationalistic Jews were chafing under foreign occupation. That is precisely, Funk points out, what made the Good Samaritan so typical a hero in a story by Jesus.2° The sheer absurdity of accusing Jesus, of all people, of “exclusiveness” seems almost inspired (by whom, I leave the reader to consider).
How did we really discover our common humanity?
Aristotle held that “from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule.” He even claimed it was better for the “lower sort” to be ruled by masters, since they were “by nature slaves.” Gnostics said some were naturally incapable of being saved from this “lowest region of all matter.” According to the Rig Veda, the four great castes proceeded from the mouth, arms, thighs, and feet of Brahma.
With a few kindly allies such as Confucius, the Bible taught us racial unity. It has always been a theistic dogma that humans are alike in nature and dignity as the image of God. In one of the earliest Old Testament documents, Job said, “If I have denied justice to my menservants and maidservants...what will I do when God confronts me?... Did not he who made me in the womb make them?” (Job 3 1:13-15 NIV). Paul wrote, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). Augustine thus rebutted Aristotle: Whatever society may do to us, no one is a slave by nature. There was a great future in that insight. But there was also a great future in the response by Social Darwinist Hermann Klaatch: “The humanitarian nonsense which grants equal rights to all on the premise of the unity of humanity, is to be condemned from the scientific standpoint.”

(The Truth Behind the New Atheism
by David Marshall :106-108)

Despite the victory of Creator based views over naturalism those who believe in Nature based paganism in modern times still seem to tend back towards tribalism and Darwinism, for all their talk of progress. For example: Nobel scientist condemned for 'racist' claims

It's ironic that those who self-define as "enlightened" tend to focus on intelligence without real knowledge of its nature. They have to be blind to the real nature of "intelligence" and sentience given their ridiculous attempts to reduce it to things like natural "selection," yet then they also often assume it as the transcendent measure of all things.

In this case, would Africans be better off with more communities of simple minded people trying to follow the teachings of Christ or highly intelligent warlords warring with each other, struggling over resources with only the fit surviving? There are too many layers of metaphoric idiocy to go through in a mind like Watson's. I note my metaphor because it's not right to use poor "idiots" as a metaphor for the spiritual issue of sin that slithers through all things in this case. It would take too long to catch it by its symbolic tale here, questioning Watson's assumptions is at least a start.

Archive

I've been told that I don't post enough, yet I am commenting a lot. I need to archive bits of text anyway because a lot of people who comment clearly won't read what their opposition has written any other way. Time and again they seem to be commenting on things that they have little knowledge of.

This bit of text used here: Intelligent Design aka Christian Chauvinism

Thanks to its enormous population size, rate of reproduction, and our knowledge of the genetics, the single best test case of Darwin’s theory is the history of malaria. Much of this book will center on this disease. Many parasitic diseases afflict humanity, but historically the greatest bane has been malaria, and it is among the most thoroughly studied. For ten thousand years the mosquito-borne parasite has wreaked illness and death over vast expanses of the globe. Until a century ago humanity was ignorant of the cause of malarial fever, so no conscious defense was possible. The only way to lessen the intense, unyielding selective pressure from the parasite was through the power of random mutation. Hundreds of different mutations that confer a measure of resistance to malaria cropped up in the human genome and spread through our population by natural selection. These mutations have been touted by Darwinists as among the best, clearest examples of the abilities of Darwinian evolution.
And so they are, But, as we’ll see, now that the molecular changes underlying malaria resistance have been laid bare, they tell a much different tale than Darwinists expected—a tale that highlights the incoherent flailing involved in a blind search. Malaria offers some of the best examples of Darwinian evolution, but that evidence points both to what it can, and more important what it cannot, do. Similarly, changes in the human genome, in response to malaria, also point to the radical limits on the efficacy of random mutation.
Because it has been studied so extensively, and because of the astronomical number of organisms involved, the evolutionary struggle between humans and our ancient nemesis malaria is the best, most reliable basis we have for forming judgments about the power of random mutation and natural selection. Few other sources of information even come close. And as we’ll see, the few that do tell similar tales.

(The Edge of Evolution
by Michael Behe :12-13)

All that Darwinism can do?

...the E. coli work has pointed in the same general direction. The lab bacteria performed much like the wild pathogens: A host of incoherent changes have slightly altered pre-existing systems. Nothing fundamentally new has been produced. No new protein-protein interactions, no new molecular machines. As with thalassemia in humans, some large evolutionary advantages have been conferred by breaking things. Several populations of bacteria lost their ability to repair DNA. One of the most beneficial mutations, seen repeatedly in separate cultures, was the bacterium’s loss of the ability to make a sugar called ribose, which is a component of RNA. Another was a change in a regulatory gene called spoT, which affected en masse how fifty-nine other genes work, either increasing or decreasing their activity. One likely explanation for the net good effect of this very blunt mutation is that it turned off the energetically costly genes that make the bacterial flagellum, saving the cell some energy. Breaking some genes and turning others off, however, won’t make much of anything. After a while, beneficial changes from the experiment petered out. The fact that malaria, with a billion fold more chances, gave a pattern very similar to the more modest studies on E. coli strongly suggests that that’s all Darwinism can do.

(The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism
by Michael J. Behe :142)

Richard Dawkins debate....

It seems that even atheists believe that Dawkins lost this debate:

Debate between Richard Dawkins and John Lennox

They blame the format. Given their form of blindness it's surprising that they see that he lost and so think that there is a need for excuses or explanations. It seems to me that no matter how intelligent you are if you begin your thinking based on blind forces governed by irrationality then the supposed logic of your own thoughts will always ultimately unravel, Lennox makes that point at one point.

(Link from Uncommon Descent)

Flatulence and Natural Theology

See: Atheism's Trump Card at Two or Three

I would like to write more satire. It seems that I haven't been in the mood.

Tangentially related: Benjamin Franklin, Vegetarianism and Flatulence

Archive...

I need to begin archiving a historical irony given how progressives tend to represent things. It's ironic that progressives have invested a lot of rhetoric in making fundamentalist a stigma word given that the Darwinian creation myth was often originally propped up by Christians with theological arguments, including "fundamentalists."

The most notable evolutionist contributor to The Fundamentals was George Frederick Wright, a renowned glacial geologist and professor of the harmony of science and revelation in Oberlin College. Wright had been a Darwinian for more than forty years when The Fundamentals appeared. In the mid-1870s he joined with Darwin’s most prominent American supporter, Asa Gray, in publishing a collection of Gray’s essays on Darwinism and natural theology.
...we shall have to look to the decade after the First World War to find a movement militantly opposed to evolution, a Fundamentalism that supplied the imagery to reinforce the metaphor in which the post-Darwinian controversies had been cast.

(The Post-Darwinian Controversies
by James Moore :72-73)

Kitesurfing

Pictures of my kitesurfing instructor from last weekend:




(NE winds, about 30mph)

Related posts: Gone Windsurfing

Moral relativism..... supposedly...

Many moral relativists seem to lose the capacity for reasoned moral judgments/"discriminations" and so have to wait for a little emotional moment in which they sneak a judgment in by association with imagery which "everyone knows" is evil. The very words good and evil sound archaic to a modern relativist and progressives have been conditioned not to discriminate, so they are left with trying to be intolerant of intolerance or discriminating against discrimination in some unreasoning way that has no real basis in good reasoning.

Usually progressives of this sort won't actually say on what basis they think anyone who opposes them are ultimately right or wrong in principle, instead they have to rely on the same sort of emotional conditioning that their minds have been lost in. So here come the Nazis marching through the conditioned minds of this sort of half-wit, given that such a mind is conditioned to be indiscriminate it has to rely on the fact that everyone knows the Nazis were evil even if it cannot allow itself to go too far into discriminating why things are right or wrong.

It seems that what is left of the progressive mind reads a little like this in so far as it can be specified in actual thinking/language and reason: "I won't say that anything is good or evil because I've been conditioned to feel that would be a narrow minded kind of discrimination. It's downright intolerant. After all, the Taliban, the KKK and the Nazis have all said that some things are evil.... which proves my point that saying things are good or evil is....uh kinda wrong or somefin'!"

And so on, language and thinking itself seem to degenerate as such a weak mind is conditioned to be indiscriminate based on patterns of negative emotional conditioning which it tries to spread to others through the same methods and modes by which it was conditioned. Ironically this evil pattern (Evil? Oh my!) of emotional conditioning is found in the typical structure of Nazi and Islamist propaganda itself.

It seems that a mind that is conditioned to be indiscriminate and tolerant above all else must always lift evil up as the equal of good or tear good down to the equal of evil, ultimately it driven to seek equality. So this pattern of "thinking"/conditioning will have to portray old allies like the American and British as the moral equivalent of Islamists and Nazis with no regard for what is actually reasonable so that what is generally good can be portrayed as generally evil and vice versa. (A local example and a comment critical of critics, in so far as "It's just like somethin' or somethin'." imagery can be referred to as critical.)

It's ironic that progressives are typically ignorant enough to believe in the Darwinian creation myth and seem to derive much of their moral relativism from a Darwinian worldview which they believe to be scientific.

As the philosopher David Stove noted, if we agree that the Nazis were evil then such a worldview is associated with evil*:

It is less well known that...Adolf Hitler found or thought he found an authorization for his policies in the Darwinian theory of evolution. He said, for example, that "if we did not respect the law of nature, imposing our will by the right of the stronger, a day would come when the wild animals would again devour us--then the insects would eat the wild animals, and finally nothing would exist except the microbes. By means of the struggle the elites are constantly renewed. The law of selection justifies this incessant struggle by allowing the survival of the fittest. Christianity is a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature."

...it is perfectly obvious that accepting Darwin's theory of a universal struggle for life must tend to strengthen whatever tendencies people had beforehand to selfishness and domineering behavior towards their fellow humans. Hence it must tend to make them worse than they were before, and more likely to commit crimes: especially crimes of rapacity, or of cruelty, or of dominance for the sake of dominance.

These considerations are exceedingly obvious. There was therefore never any excuse for the indignation and surprise with which Darwinians and neo-Darwinians have nearly always reacted whenever their theory is accused of being a morally subversive one. For the same reason there is, and always was, every justification for the people, beginning with Darwin's contemporaries, who made that accusation against the theory. Darwin had done his best to separate the theory from the matrix of murderous ideas in which previously it had always been set. But in fact, since the theory says what it does, there is a limit, and a limit easily reached, to how much can be done in the way of such a separation. The Darwinian theory of evolution IS an incitement to crime: that is simply a fact.

(Darwinian Fairytales: Selfish Genes, Errors
of Heredity and Other Fables of Evolution
By David Stove :106-109)

*Besides being evil, such a worldview is empirically groundless in the case of Homo sapiens because they are indeed sapient and so escape being governed by a law of natural selection at all times given that they are capable of intelligent selection. Darwinian reasoning can be rejected on the grounds that empirical evidence shows that it is not true and it can also be condemned as evil.

Indeed...

Someone else's comment:

My problem with God is that it seems to be terribly wasteful to have forced billions years of evolution from single-celled to multi-celled organisms and all that infinite space around us also seems to be too hostile and too wasteful if we are to play any part in his creation.

Calm yourself. Relax. There's nothing to worry about. If scientists told us tomorrow they had made some mistakes, and that the universe was actually only 1 light-year in diameter and only 100,000 years old, I doubt it would spark wild global street parties outside of the Bible Belt.

Heck, if you were a mere photon, you could fly across the universe in no time at all, because the distance between your starting point and your destination would be measured as zero in your frame of reference.

And remember: God is Light. In him there's no darkness, so in God's frame of reference, there are no spacelike or timelike separations, as it were. So in his frame of reference, maybe the universe is really, really tiny and no older than it was at the Big Bang.

Why do you always have to insist on making your frame of reference the measure of space and time? You are so darn anthropocentric! Where's the Copernican spirit? Here's leading string physicist Brian Greene, in The Elegant Universe, (p. 51):

…Thus light does not get old; a photon that emerged from the big bang is the same age today as it was then. There is no passage of time at light speed.

[emphasis added]

See?

You go on:

Your post is quite impressive, but it leaves no hope for any scientific experiment to validate it.. it is not science, notwithstanding the possibility that it might be true, because science simply doesn't work that way.

Nor does poetry, or music, or tennis, or kissing work that way. They're not science either.

Perhaps, after the LHC is fired up in May and comes up with extra dimensions, we'll have a better idea what's happening.

I doubt it. But let's suppose it confirms 10-dimensional string theory. We'd still want to know how strings manage to cause poetry, music, tennis, and kissing.

Actually, most of us wouldn't. Most of us would be unable to follow the mathematics involved even if we were interested, which most people on the planet wouldn't be. We'd say, "Whatever", and go back to kissing. --Stunney

Magic as a stigma word...

I've noted at times that those who believe in scientism use the word "magic" as a stigma word, a word of judgment which defines an idea as irrational without any further thought necessary.

For example, a commenter here once used magic as a stigma word in the case of the technology* of DNA: "Not organized by chemical laws? Then how does it hold together? Magic? And what kind of 'information' does it store? Be specific."
--Dimensio

Ironically the impression that an artifact is evidence of "magic" may itself be evidence that the artifact in question is actually an instance of an intelligent mind using logic to create technology which then mediates the impact of its intelligence on the world. When lesser minds see the artifacts of a mind that is beyond them then they tend to see it as an issue of "magic."

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
--Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of The Future

Ironically, if intelligence is magical in some sense (See: The Magic of Intelligent Design) then the intelligent processing of logic that goes into any technology is "magical" anyway.

It's also ironic that those who believe in scientism these days use the term magic as a stigma word when they were the class of people who were the magicians of old. That is to say that chemists used to be alchemists, astronomers used to be astrologers, etc. Not to mention that there are now transhumanists that see some of the "magic" of intelligence applying itself in technology who would be the new magicians.

There is nothing new under the sun.

---
*"[DNA] is not merely a matter of complexity. The uniqueness of nucleic acids lies in the fact that their nucleotides are encoding symbols for amino acids. Symbolic encoding systems are familiar to us of course. You encounter them in the course of reading and their causal source is always intelligence." (Intelligently Sequenced)

Old Photos

In case you're wondering, it's pretty fun.

Archive

1. mynym Says: Your comment is awaiting moderation.
   August 23rd, 2007 at 9:40 pm

   “If you can prove evolution wrong…”

   That’s a fools errand because the term evolution is based on hypothetical goo to begin with. Given the structure of typical Darwinian reasoning: “If I couldn’t imagine a sequence of events that seem natural to me, then my theory would absolutely break down. Yet see how I can always imagine something.” Darwinian theorizing will remain stuck in goo.

   “No critic of evolution has ever come remotely close.”

   Only if you’re using the term evolution the way popularizers of Darwinian creation myths do because they use to term to mean anything from all change that has ever happened in the Cosmos to a minute change in the size of finch beaks. To those adhere to “evolution” as a metaphysical system it seems that it is the be all, end all, which makes the term itself an “evolving” form of equivocation. When evolution is that sort of be all, end all to a person it doesn’t really make sense to try to reason with them. After all, intelligent selection is expelled from such a mind as it imagines more “natural selection.” Its own words and symbols and signs aren’t an artifact of intelligence by intelligent design, instead their words trace back to natural selection operating on some worms. A mind of the synaptic “gaps” which believes that may as well be excrement, so one may as well try to reason with worms.

   “The default-judgement is against creationism, not evolution.”

   Is that just what your Mommy Nature selected for you to say or do you think that you actually just say something?

2. mynym Says: Your comment is awaiting moderation.
   August 23rd, 2007 at 9:44 pm

   “One comment about the claim that the ID movement has MASSIVE funding, where do people get this idea?”

   It’s ironic given that the Darwinian creation myth is often propped up by relatively “MASSIVE” amounts of State funding, from PBS to textbooks (which have contained frauds that biologists have generally failed to correct.) Sometimes it seems that they’re little better than the eugenics movement, probably because they adhere to the same root philosophy of Life.

3. mynym Says: Your comment is awaiting moderation.
   August 23rd, 2007 at 9:57 pm

   “It’s already been mentioned many, many times that not everyone who accepts the theory of evolution is an atheist.”

   That’s true. History shows that Darwinian reasoning was generally propped up based on theological arguments favorable to naturalism, not empirical evidence. So arguments of this structure: “I don’t think God would make things this way.” “God wouldn’t get his hands dirty like that or something.” “How could a good God make cats to play with mice?” and so on and so forth are used to justify the Darwinian tendency of citing your own imagination as evidence. E.g. “God wouldn’t make the panda’s thumb like this but I can imagine something about it, so that’s evidence for the theory of natural selection.”

   It seems that Darwinists are frightened of any answer to their “panda’s thumb” type of negative theology in some form of positive theology. Negative theology has always been used to prop up the Darwinian creation myth, yet supposedly these little fellows who want to crawl back in the womb of Mommy Nature are being so “scientific” that theology has nothing to do with it.

4. mynym Says: Your comment is awaiting moderation.
   August 23rd, 2007 at 10:07 pm

   “Two things here: The actual origins of life (abiogeneis) is separate from evolution.”

   Except when people use the term evolution to describe all change that has ever taken place in the Cosmos. It’s an interesting little question though, for what defines change as change?

   “Evolution doesn’t care how life got started, only that it did.”

   Now I suppose “Evolution” is just about a sentient being…. why just the other day Evolution told me that it was about to naturally select something for me.

   “And second, we *do* have some promising ideas on how it all got started. You don’t need to start with full-up DNA.”

   Translation: “Even among those of us who make rules allowing us to cite our imaginations as naturalistic evidence (naturally enough), the origin of life is still a problem. In fact, it’s enough of a problem that we almost can’t imagine anything right now…. but just wait a little while and we may be naturally selected to imagine something.”

   For some Nature selects, Nature calls… and excrement happens…

Interesting movie...

Expelled the Movie

Wakeboarding

A small video: Wakeboarding

My brother trying and trying again. ;-)

Looooove....

That's the way I often used to write the word love, given how little it means to most people it seemed to me to be a word that ought to be blurred most of the time.

I also wrote about feeeelings, which apparently caused most people to think that I was saying that they should be avoided. It's easy to point out that disagreeing with people being ruled by feeelings is different than avoiding feelings or trying to master or deaden your feelings and so on. A common mistake of ascetics is to consider deadening one's feelings to be self-mastery, although ironically you haven't mastered your feelings at all, instead you're just killing yourself.

On the other hand hedonists wallow about in their feeelings yet wind up in a similar state of emotional death after they will away all rational and principled limitation. I think that most people think it better to be a hedonist than a legalist these days, perhaps feeeling that it is better to experience the highs of bipolarity even given its lows. This is the sort of thing that keeps therapists in business, the supposed doctors of the soul and mind that often harm more than they help people already ruled by their feeeelings. "How does that make you feel?"

Well, it makes me feel like many therapists are part of the disease that they purport to cure, like bipolarity. Should one be surprised that there are poles to being ruled by your emotions? Of course hysterical laughter can have a sinister edge of anxiety and fear fueled by hysteria and so on.

The emotional and the rational are actually complementary patterns which lead to a better sense of the sensuous but the hedonistic mind seeks to eliminate all rational/logical reasoning out of fear that it will feeel unhappy. Ironically if it succeeds it will wind up feeling unhappy anyway. For what good would it do for a person to pursue happiness and gain the whole world, yet lose the soul through which they sense it? The poor souls... that type of mind will always need more even if given the whole world because it's eating itself away.

The reason I would write of loooove when writing to such a mind is because it lacks the integrity of true love and the difference between the two should be defined. Although none of us truly love the way God does and most people define who or what they "love" as whoever or whatever makes them happy, even selfish people mainly concerned with their own happiness can still see that true love is less selfish than: "Now I feel happy so I love you." and "I feel unhappy now so I don't love you." It seems that the bipolarity of being ruled by feeelings often emerges in selfishness because selfishness is rooted in feeelings of the Self and nothing more.

It's ironic that a more selfless person who shapes their feelings based on external principles will actually be a happier person. Being happy isn't the be all, end all, there are many things in life more important than being happy.

How does that make you feeel? ;-)

An interesting article....

Here's an article to read if your brain is on your mind.

Another comment....

I've actually been around, just not blogging.

A biologist said: "Irreducible complexity has been soundly refuted."

Only if you believe that citing your own imagination is sound evidence as is typical to Darwinian "reasoning."

Despite feats of imagination the fact remains that what is observed empirically is irreducible complexity, i.e. you take component parts away from an organism and you can observe empirically that it typically loses function. Only given Darwinian reasoning can one simply imagine a little story about the past and begin to treat your own imagination as the equivalent of empirical evidence when the story actually goes against empirical evidence. The basic structure of one Darwinian argument: "If I cannot imagine how an organism came about then my theory absolutely breaks down. But fortunately it seems that I can always imagine something!"

BioProf:
"The 'design' in nature is a product of a few billion years of biological evolution, and before this, several billion years of stellar evolution."

I'll borrow what some with the urge to merge call their "universal acid" that eats away all intelligence and the like. I think that hypothetical goo is a more apt description than "unversal acid" but I'll borrow such reasoning for a moment to say that the symbols and signs of design that you are trying to communicate now are the product of natural selection operating on some worms. And given that we are imagining an unbroken chain of cause behind your words instead of admitting to basic facts of our experience like sentience and intelligence let's imagine that the worms ate some excrement, as worms often do. So it would seem that your words may as well be excrement.

Worms in your words might be fitting, naturally, given that those who have tried to adhere to "biological thinking" in the past may as well have had excrement for brains. The curious reader might try thinking without words to get some sense of how those with the urge to merge tend to do away with all distinction, specification and species.

"That is what the science tells us."

Scientia/knowledge cannot be divorced from sentience, although I'm willing to adhere to Darwinian reasoning long enough to divorce *your* sentences from your sentience. If you think such reasoning is correct then you can be the first to adhere to it.

Bioprof:
"Afterall, the punishment that you are to inflict upon someone who breaks the commandment 'thou shalt not kill' is death. How does this make sense logically?"

Maybe it's worms slithering in your words that cause you to fail to understand the distinction between murder and killing. It seems that a metaphoric snake has slithered into Darwin's so-called "Tree of Life" after trying to claim all knowledge/scientia for itself.

"The creation account is totally off. If god really was omniscient and inspired the writing of the Bible. Why didn't genesis read: 'The universe began as a point of infinite curviture, whose initial expansion began time and space. ...After more years than can be counted, more complex life arose, until you, dear reader. I set these events into motion, and watch eagerly the unfolding of my universe.' "

The Genesis account is obviously the work of a highly intelligent artist and an ancient genius, if nothing else. It's not a science text because it was never meant to be. It's likely that if God did give man technological or scientific knowledge without any poetic and artistic narrative with moral lessons that we'd all be dead already. I have no idea why God does what God does but there is a lot of evidence that the existence of man and perhaps free-will is intended and cared about on some deep level.

It's ironic that Sagan took his words from the same book to describe the mythological narrative of naturalism which he believed in and you almost cry a little tear about that, yet you also insist that the Bible is poorly written and so on. Of course it isn't, as you'd agree if it said what you want to believe. Given the literature of its day it has even more layers of meaning than we can now know, etc. The real problem is that you don't like and disagree with what it says, not that it is meaningless or poorly written or the product of "ignorant nomads" as the Nazis put it.

It's obviously the product of highly intelligent writers if nothing else.

Bioprof:
"What is actually written is clearly the understanding of the universe as a person would 2,500 years ago-not at all."

Not exactly, all ancient creation myths are not created equal... and I wouldn't portray ancient people as all that stupid anyway. E.g., there is the icon and myth of the "Cave Man" but if you were stripped of civilization and found shelter in a cave that wouldn't make you any less intelligent. There is plenty of evidence that the iconic "Cave Man" was intelligent, not to mention the fact that the icon probably came about mainly because ancient people buried their dead in caves and not because they actually lived there.

"A truly loving god would also not allow one to hold slaves, and would not have his creations stone someone to death for working on Sunday, or disobeying their parents."

Or as Darwin put it in one of his ventures into negative theology: "God wouldn't make cats play with mice or make parasites, therefore natural selection is true or somethin'."

It's odd how the Darwinian mind works, negative theology is okay and can be used to support a scientific theory. Yet then when someone replies with positive theology or argues that a scientific theory comports with positive theology the average Darwinists seems to go a little insane. I think that type of lack of integrity has to do with the urge to merge more than anything. They seem to have a sort of cosmic Oedipus complex in which the main goal is to do away with "Father God" in order to crawl back into the womb of Mommy Nature, thus the lack of integrity and irrationality of some of their statements.

"My point, to the last commenter is that if the god hypothesis is beyond the reach of science, it is certainly way beyond the realm of the theologian."

No it isn't. Throughout your wormy writings you act as if theologians can just imagine up anything just as Darwinians sometimes do with their little stories about the past and so on, yet that actually isn't the case. Theologians are limited by language and text that has been specified for millenia, although some go to great lengths to avoid such limitation it is still there. Darwinians do not seem to be limited by their hypothetical goo, nor have they specified the theory of natural selection in the language of mathematics and then verified it to be true in the trajectory of adaptation in groups of organisms and so on. For all that mewling and murmuring about how Darwinian reasoning is the equivalent the Newtonian reasoning and how the theory of natural selection is the equivalent of the theory of gravity and so on, it isn't.

"Again, you can't falsify the unicorn, as you can't falsify god(s), but that doesn't make either likely to exist."

You say things like that, yet in the next breath you'll be engaging in negative theology as if you could falsify God and the like. That's mainly because God has some specification given the Bible or other religious texts. Therefore you could argue in some puerile and ignorant way: "Rectal parasites exist but I read that the God of the Bible is loving, so I don't think that God exists!" Etc. You would have to read more about how the God of the Bible is specified to avoid silly arguments but that isn't the Darwinian way. At any rate, the first thing that those who tend to engage in Darwinian "reasoning" need to do is to stop engaging in negative theology in order to support a "scientific" theory while at the same time hypocritically censoring all positive theology.

Looks like an interesting book...

This one: (Hitler's Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State
by Gotz Aly)

I think I'm also going to buy: (Studying the Jew: Scholarly Antisemitism in Nazi Germany by Alan E. Steinweis)

My Jeep again...

...now with new tires, new shocks, a small lift, etc.



A mountain bike that someone wanted a picture of, I should have taken it out of the store room:

That's cool.

Apparently my blog has kept getting hits without me thanks to Google and the like, mainly people using GIS to search for windsurfing pictures. Plus it's spring and I like thinking about it, so here's a repost of some of the first pictures that I posted here.









Here's a video, it's DIVX.

My Jeep

Apparently I'm not going to update the way I should, although I have a couple of stories in mind. So instead here's a picture of a Jeep I just bought and a picture of my new mountain bike.

An Easter Egg Hunt

(I'm combining and revising two old short stories with a similar mix of metaphors for this post.)

A story, about some lil' eggs and some lil' guys trying to seek and find them. They both really want to greet and meet because they have some lil' genetic messages to deliver.

Some eggs just sit there. They do not try to deliver their message. For they are just an egg that is destined to be passive. After all, how can they deliver the message? So these prissy and prudish little eggs die in their predestined passivity.

Other eggs, they want to deliver their message very much. It's fun to deliver their message and it gives them a good feeling. So they wish some lil' guy would come along and deliver his message to them too. In fact, all they ever do is talk with other eggs about delivering their message or if he will deliver his lil' message. They chatter, oh how they chatter! They put the chit in "chit chat" with a little talk here and a lil' talk there. There is always some talk....will the genetic code be delivered? When will it be delivered? Is the delivery sperm here? Is there a male man with a message for her?

This type of egg gets a lil' frustrated with it all! So they do what the passive eggs don't do. They send out their tender little tendrils and signs to show the way. Then, perhaps the lil' guys will seek and find? No? If things don't match the will of these eggs then their tender lil' tendrils become a little stronger and the perfume that the little guys just can't seem to follow becomes stronger too. Then, a little stronger.... In the end, it seems that the tender lil' tendrils are not so tender at all. Their perfume turns to a smothering poison and their tendrils have a strangle hold on the little guys who are trying to seek and find! So then this sinister type of egg who puts out so much suffocating perfume dies when she smothers herself in her own emotional will. She did not deliver her message either.

Now, some lil' eggs have knowledge and Wisdom about things. They just know. So they do what eggs do. They send out their little tendrils and signs to show the way to them. They use their perfume just so, with nothing too much and nothing found wanting. Somehow, they just know how destiny will go. They aren't too passive or too active and their lil' tendrils are so tender. Yet somehow they know when a bad guy comes along and their lil' tendrils which were so soft get very strong! The evil lil' guy is no match and her signs lead him around in little circles until he dies. For the Wisdom of the true egg is quite wise and so they are wise to the ways of some guys.

Eventually her tender lil' tendrils and signs attract the lil' guy who is seeking and trying to be finding. He finds what he seeks and they speak the truth in love to each other. She tells him her messsage and thanks him for his designs, as he has some designs that complement her plan.

So they both run the race layed out for them....and it is just a little bit of a racy race because in the human race the Truth and Love combine so that new Life comes alive!

The other side of the tale is a story of many tails which goes something like this:

Once upon a time a group of lil' guys found themselves in a whole new world that was alien to them. They all had a lil' message to deliver that was in it but not of it. They were all little messengers, although most wouldn't realize it. To begin with, some of the little fellas died immediately on impact with the face of the waters. Others lived on to swim in a race, they were really happy! But some of them didn't know which way was which or how their tale would go, so some just swam in circles chasing their own little tails. They did not get far. They did not deliver the genetic code. They became unhappy. Then they died.

Others formed groups and all swam along together for a while and so their tale seemed to be going quite swimmingly for them! Yet they were all swimming the wrong way all along. So they died and did not deliver the message either.

Now some left all the others behind and swam stronger and farther than them. For they were stronger. Also, they seemd to be following a really strong swimmer, knowing their purpose. So they tried to deliver the message and got pretty far by following. Yet, these lil' sperm died too. There was only one who was stronger than all. He was a very potent sperm. He seemed an omni-potent sperm! He came into the strange world and led other lil' guys along while swimming very strong and things did go along quite swimmingly. It seemed only he knew the way and was strong enough to make a way for their sacrifice to succeed. He got all the way down in the world and delivered his message into the egg.

Then he died. But his message combined with the message of the egg in a complementary way so that new Life came alive!

The Great Global Warming Swindle

I recently watched this documentary (YouTube link) and I began to watch this one as well, which features David Legates for a while in the beginning. The first one is one of the more substantive documentaries that I've seen when it comes to facts, logic and empirical evidence. It's short on imagery, feeelings and hysteria. I haven't watched Al Gore's documentary yet, mainly because his psychological dynamics are already clear.

Speaking of hysteria and Al Gore, now Al Gore (Alpha Male Al!) seems to be saying that Mommy Nature has a bit of a fever! So now it seems that every perturbation of her womb can be taken as symbolic of the Great Doom. Nothing against the notion of a Great Doom, as it is inevitable that every living thing in the universe will die. That's something that Romantics who worship Nature don't tend to focus on, yet there are many lines of evidence that it is true nonethless.

I read at the bottom of the Wiki article on David Legates that governor Minner has said that he's not allowed to link his position to disagreement with hysterical claims about global warming. I guess that's one more scientist who can join the "scientific consensus" that Leftists are forming.

The historical pattern to fascist scholarship was that they would form a consensus with State funding and the like and then declare themselves overwhelmed by all the excrement of their own Herd. Sometimes I wonder if there is a similar Herd growing now, so on a historical note the old Nazi propagandists for "living space" and the "blood and soil" who lectured against the "murderous factories" held a Romantic and vaguely technophobic view of Nature. (Even as they always used technology to the utmost for their own ends. It seems it's always someone else using technology who is the problem.) It's an ironic pattern because they would argue that technology and civilization is somehow unnatural by its nature, as opposed to the organic and so on which is natural by nature. Many mixed their notion of "natural" in with the notion of "natural selection" based on the Darwinian creation myth because they fall into pseudo-science easily given their lack of conceptual and philosophical thinking. In other words they simply assume that man can use the practical application of logic and science in technology in ways that alienate himself from Nature. How this is so given the Leftist worldview that scientifically man is naturally just matter in motion is not explained, it's just assumed that humans have a capacity for going against Nature. If those who make such assumptions would stop assuming things and begin thinking about them then maybe those who fall into this type of mental incompetence could make more of a habit of thinking in general. The Nazis used to describe how they began to feel they were thinking with the notion of "biological thinking." It seems that some people feel they are thinking when actually their brains are ruled by conditioning based on the images, hysteria and feeelings of their "cult"ure. They may as well have excrement for brains at that point.

[Edit: If anyone local wants a decent copy of the documentaries, e-mail me.]

A scientist on an emerging form of socialist pseudo-science....

A former professor of climatology at the University of Winnipeg has received multiple death threats for questioning the extent to which human activities are driving global warming. ”Western governments have pumped billions of dollars into careers and institutes and they feel threatened,” said the professor. “I can tolerate being called a skeptic because all scientists should be skeptics, but then they started calling us deniers, with all the connotations of the Holocaust. That is an obscenity. It has got really nasty and personal.” Richard Lindzen, the professor of Atmospheric Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology […] recently claimed: “Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves labelled as industry stooges. Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science.”

cf. Uncommon Dissent

It's ashame that the science of global warming has basically been thoroughly polluted by socialism. Leftists abusing science is nothing new, even before Malthus Leftists of the totalitarian sort have created various forms of pseudo-science in order to make science into something that it is not. They seek to make it into a totalizing worldview that therefore justifies and supports totalitarian measures without realizing that a totalizing worldview cannot be scientific.

It seems that now that eugenicists/Nazis and Communists have generally been defeated the pattern of changing limited forms of falsifiable science into totalizing and therefore unfalsifiable forms of pseudo-science has found an outlet in "global warming."

Putting the issue of sound/falsifiable science aside, it's interesting how the average American seems to be taken in by simplistic political arguments that appeal to a mixture of their own pride and cynicism. E.g. arguments based on who is funding what in which we are supposed to assume that all research which is funded by an industry with an interest in the results is therefore invalid. People are being led to be cynical about it instead of truly skeptical, otherwise people who make that argument would apply the same reasoning to research funded by the State by noting that the State has vested interests in the results supporting socialism and scientism. (Socialism and scientism because funding will tend to be linked to increasing State power (socialism) and answers of uncertainty or a lack of totalizing knowledge will tend to be minimized, leading to scientism.) It is interesting that people of a populist bent often don't seem to apply the same skeptical reasoning that they apply to Big Business to the State.

No researcher is pure as the driven snow no matter who funds them and all should be questioned. They should all have a better answer than: "Well, a lot of scientists funded by the State agree or somethin' and everyone who disagrees isn't funded by the State. That's what makes what we say objective and we all agree! We ALL agree...and don't you feel as overwhelmed as we do by that?" If that is the type of answer that they give to skeptics then science has little to do with their claims.