Into Good and Evil

Global warming research

2011-12-21T14:01:00.000-05:00

A Leftist Utopia

2011-05-17T10:11:00.000-04:00

The Swedish government has become notorious worldwide in recent years: Its blatant and sometimes brutal suppression of religious freedom, educational liberty, and the traditional family is well known among Western nations. In 2003, the Justice Ministry investigated the Holy Bible for “hate speech.” A few years later, a Christian preacher was sentenced to jail for criticizing homosexuality. Last year, the government passed a law banning homeschooling and religious instruction in so-called free schools. All educational institutions will soon be teaching the government curriculum — including the notion that there is no difference between genders. Examples of the state run amok are near endless.

One recent tragedy exemplifies the government’s attitude: the internationally known case of the Johansson family. Almost two years ago, following years of harassment by the municipal social services, the Johansson family made plans to leave Sweden for good. The government had been pestering the parents about putting their young son, Domenic, into daycare. They refused. Later, instead of enrolling the young boy in government school, the parents decided to educate Domenic at home until they left for India, the mother’s homeland. Homeschooling was — despite draconian restrictions — still legal in Sweden, after all.

But as they were sitting on the plane, just minutes before takeoff, armed police stormed onboard and seized the then-seven-year-old boy. There was no warrant, no suspicion of physical abuse — just an angry social-service bureaucracy that couldn’t stand the thought of the Johansson family escaping its iron fist. After the family was torn apart over the education matter, the government also made an issue about the boy’s not having received all of his optional vaccines. On top of that, a pair of baby-tooth cavities the family had scheduled an appointment to treat in India were also later included in the allegations against them.

Now, years and countless court hearings later, the family is still separated.
(Sweden's Big Government Utopia)

The Butcher and the Baker

2011-01-26T12:29:00.001-05:00

Once upon a time there was a Butcher a Baker and two Candlestick makers too. The Baker put yeast in his bread and baked some nice cakes for all his friends. He loved his friends and his friends loved him. Those who knew this Baker could have their cake and then eat it too because he could just bake another cake. Now that takes the cake!

The Butcher offered tasty meat but could not make enough of it. He did not want to be the Baker’s friend because he was jealous, so he took a cake. Then, he did it again. So he thought, “That tasted mighty fine. I bet I could even get some friends this way too.” So then the Butcher began stealing some of the best of the Baker’s cakes and he offered them to others. So some people became friends with the Butcher, although he had bloody hands and sometimes this got on the cakes too. It was obvious that something was wrong but some people were like the Butcher so they began to like him. But then the Baker began to lock his doors at night. His wife was a candlestick maker and her candles seemed to burn very bright, sometimes it seemed like they just kept burning through the whole night. So the Butcher was having a hard time stealing now and he was running out of cakes. He did not have enough and couldn’t bake a cake. His wife was a candlestick maker too. Yet her candles did not burn right through the night, if at all. In fact, it seemed like she would rather not have them burn. For it just did not seem nice to her to allow something she made to burn so she kept her candles smothered and hidden under bushels. So their house was dark.

The Butcher was trying to keep his friends, yet he was running out of food. So slowly, while his friends ate some of the best cakes of all he began to stop up their ears. Then, he began to blind them too. He had this way about him, since he was used butchering pigs and had some pigpens in the back. As the candles burned brightly and he couldn’t steal any more cakes he had to make his friends more and more deaf and blind. They were quite deaf, dumb and stupid in the end.

Then the Butcher began to eat his friends little by little. For you see, the Butcher and his wife were hungry too!

I rewrote this for Delaware Politics.

Still a proto-Nazi...

2011-01-22T10:17:00.010-05:00

Apparently PZ Myers is still at it.

A summary of his psychological dynamics:

Professionals and intellectuals have additional susceptibilities... as an antidote for isolation and weakness; to romanticized violence and a cult of hardness, as a denial of effeteness, softness, and “scruples”; to the crude and primitive....
Most of these susceptibilities involve claims to omnipotence in the name of humility, calls to sacrifice in which the sacrificial group is made up of the regime’s designated victims. These contradictions can be maintained, lived with, through the professional’s special talent for doubling. Only he or she can become a murderous sorcerer while claiming to be a healer....
Worse, one may do these things with the conviction that they are “in accord with the natural history and biology of man,” and that one is acting as healer and savior.
(The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide by Robert Lifton :491) (Emphasis added)

I emphasized that because note the hatred of certain forms of animal sacrifice typical to pagans, yet they will often be the first to sacrifice babies and Jews. It seems that some can be sacrificed for pretty much any reason, whether it's supposedly keeping Islamists at bay or having lower crime rates. Yet they rebel against animal sacrifice and tend toward the sin of Cain, naturally. Are they their brother's keeper? In any event, they reject the sacrifice of the Lamb of God and animal sacrifice. So one of the first comments from his Herd is:

I don't want to ignite an argument over the morality of using animals in medical research and things, but that's about all I could focus on in your post.Link

Note that the Nazis were among the first to advance anti-vivisection laws while experimenting on Jews. And so on.

Related posts:
Evolutionism and proto-Nazism
Related comments, although you may be left guessing as to how:
Safe and Legal

This day in history.

2011-01-13T15:29:00.003-05:00

Old post: January 13, 1779

The Dark Ages and the Tea Party

2011-01-05T13:46:00.002-05:00

A few interesting comments over at Delaware Politics here.

The Shrink

2011-01-04T09:17:00.002-05:00

I'm back to blogging and it looks like the Shrink is back too.

Sadism

2011-01-03T20:34:00.005-05:00

I've cited portions of this before, here is more context:

After considerable difficulties the S.A. was reorganized into an armed band of several hundred thousand men to protect Nazi meetings, to break up the meetings of others and to generally terrorize those who opposed Hitler.
...the brown-shirted S.A. never became much more than a motley mob of brawlers. Many of its top leaders, beginning with its chief, Roehm, were notorious homosexual perverts. Lieutenant Edmund Heines, who led the Munich S.A., was not only a homosexual but a convicted murderer. These two and dozens of others quarreled and feuded as only men of unnatural sexual inclinations, with their peculiar jealousies, can.
[...]
An organization, however streamlined and efficient, is made up of erring human beings, and in those years when Hitler was shaping his party to take over Germany’s destiny he had his fill of troubles with his chief lieutenants, who constantly quarreled not only among themselves but with him. He, who was so monumentally intolerant by his very nature, was strangely tolerant of one human condition—a man’s morals. No other party in Germany came near to attracting so many shady characters. As we have seen, a conglomeration of pimps, murderers, homosexuals, alcoholics and blackmailers flocked to the party as if to a natural haven. Hitler did not care, as long as they were useful to him. When he emerged from prison he found not only that they were at each other’s throats but that there was a demand from the more prim and respectable leaders such as Rosenberg and Ludendorff that the criminals and especially the perverts be expelled from the movement. This Hitler frankly refused to do. "I do not consider it to be the task of a political leader," he wrote in his editorial...
(The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History
of Nazi Germany by William L. Shirer
(Simon and Schuster) 1990 :120,121-122)

Relativism

2010-12-27T22:56:00.001-05:00

An old satire I re-wrote some and just used in a comment at Delawarepolitics.net:

Once upon a time two people were having a discussion and one made a judgment the other did not like.

So her friend said, “Who are you to judge?”

The first replied, “Who are you to judge that I am judging?”

“I….uh, what?”

“I figure that when I make a judgment I am probably the same type of person you are when you judge me for making judgments. If so, I suppose that is who I am to judge, just like you when you judge.”

“Huh? No, by asking who are you to judge I mean that you’re not supposed to judge because it is judgmental!”

“Who are you to judge what is judgmental?”

“You just need to stop that, right now!”

“Who are you to judge me?”

“I asked about you first, so you have to answer my question first.”

“It seems like just another questionable question. But who am I to judge? I am a sentient being, sentient beings think, which can become existential belief, which can become knowledge and then deeper knowledge when something is truly known. Knowledge is sound judgment and what people make further judgments based on. That is who I am to judge. I am not the omniscient “I AM that I AM.” of scriptures and I never claimed to be. I can still judge a few things here and there due to being conscious but who are you to judge?”

“Look, I never meant for you to actually answer that question.”

“I guess that question is just your passive agressive way of saying that you do not know the answer to something and do not want anyone else to know either. So you just drag everyone down to unthinking, unknowing moral degeneracy with questions which are questionable.”

“What?! Why, I…..you are judgmental!”

But her friend just laughed.

Show and tell?

2010-12-24T23:25:00.003-05:00

For people who used to read this blog I'm still around. I debated some liberals on homosexuality in the military here and have begun discussing the history of Islam here. (Although it looks like someone is going to take that on a tangent.)

My new puppy...

2010-12-24T23:16:00.009-05:00

Volition

2010-12-22T21:18:00.000-05:00

Interesting short film here.

Socialism

2010-09-04T11:18:00.000-04:00

Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all.

--Frederic Bastiat

Islamic Doctrines

2010-08-28T15:07:00.003-04:00

With due respect to Imam Kringle and Islam’s other American cheerleaders, this neither “twists up the religion to serve a political agenda” nor “hijacks” Islam. Hamas, to the contrary, accurately quoted Islamic scripture. As the scholar Andrew Bostom observes, the pronouncement by Mohammed about Muslims killing all remaining Jews on the Day of Judgment comes straight from a canonical hadith, Sahih Muslim, Book 41, No. 6985. Hadiths are collections of the prophet’s words and deeds, and the one in question flows seamlessly from the Koran itself, from verses like Sura 2:61, which condemns Jews for purportedly rejecting Allah’s signs and “slaying his Messengers.” That indictment, reiterated in Sura 3:112, is echoed in the Hamas charter’s opening passages: “They have incurred anger from their Lord, and wretchedness is laid upon them. That is because they used to disbelieve the revelations of Allah, and slew the Prophets wrongfully.” Thus, the charter warns, “Israel will rise and will remain erect until Islam eliminates it as it had eliminated its predecessors.”

THE BROTHERHOOD
This is why Imam Rauf and his friends get so tongue-tied when it comes to Hamas.
....
Again: no separation of the spiritual and the temporal, of Islamic and civil law. They are one. And, it turns out, the top priority of Rauf’s Cordoba Initiative is the Sharia Index Project, which is designed to plant and expand Islamic law in every country. Wonder of wonders, that just happens to be the Muslim Brotherhood’s top priority — the installation of sharia being the necessary precondition to the Islamicizing of a society. And, lo and behold, Rauf’s partners in the Sharia Index Project include Jamal Barzinji and his International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT).
Why they can't condemn Hamas by Andrew McCarthy

Wanting to kill the Jews but not Americans is not moderate, it's degenerate. To the extent that good Muslims take Islam seriously they will be bad people.

That's interesting.

2010-08-16T17:26:00.007-04:00

Someone said of this blog:

I had an argument with this person about a year ago about this blog, in the comments section. I was a little scared that someone who is obviously this well read would be so dangerously wrong.

I gave up in the end, a little shaken. This person was infinitely more sophisticated than this Michael character...

Would be interested to know what anyone thought of the fracas on the comments page. It appears that I rattled Mynym's cage a little bit, because two subsequent blogs made mention of me.

Here is the original post: Social Leftists at it again

I've noticed that people trying to tell me what my feelings are or focusing on my supposed feelings are usually saying more about themselves than anything. For instance, it would appear that I "rattled his cage a little bit," especially given that he was a "little shaken" and was still thinking about arguments I brought forth a year after he read them.

It seems like the same thing happens to biologists when their philosophy is challenged or even discussed. The reaction is not intellectual, it tends to be much more visceral. Perhaps that sort of reaction is actually apposite given the brute stupidity of what biologists typically believe about intelligence, origins and so on. Thus it seems that the sweaty little hands of the censor are quick to emerge.

There is one thing in the comments worth repeating:
As a person who makes fun to have some fun myself, my perspective and "interpretation" might even be that this is the most important lesson to be drawn from the imagery so often invoked about Galileo. Don't censor those who make fun.

On another note, why do people almost always have to shift away from the pursuit of the truth to talk about me instead? I'll be dead soon enough but the truth will remain.

Bear Grylls on Faith

2010-07-01T13:52:00.002-04:00

“Christianity is not about religion,” Grylls says. “It’s about faith, about being held, about being forgiven. It’s about finding joy and finding home. We all want that, but nobody wants religion. Why do people turn away from faith? They’re not, they’re turning away from religion most of the time. I’ve yet to meet anyone who doesn’t want to be forgiven or held or find peace or joy in their life. We try loads of other stuff—we think booze or foxy women or whatever will fill it—but it doesn’t fill the hole.”

“It’s about being strengthened. It’s about having a backbone run through you from the Person who made you. It’s about being able to climb the biggest mountains in the world with the Person who made them.” cf. (World Mag)

I found this interesting because I've watched a lot of episodes of Man vs. Wild.

The Road to Serfdom

2010-05-29T14:05:00.002-04:00

It is not to the Germany of Hitler, the Germany of the present war, that England and the United States bear yet any resemblance. But students of the currents of ideas can hardly fail to see that there is more than a superficial similarity between the trend of thought in Germany during and after the last war and the present current of ideas in democracies. .... There is the same contempt for nineteenth-century liberalism, the same spurious "realism" and even cynicism... Although one does not like to be reminded, it is not so many years since the socialist policy of that country was generally held up by progressives as an example to be immitated...
The supreme tragedy is still not seen that in Germany it was largely people of good will, men who were admired and held up as models in democratic countries, who prepared the way for, if they did not actually create, the forces which now stand for every thing they detest. .... Few are ready to recognize that the rise of fascism and naziism was not a reaction against the socialist trends of the preceding period but a necessary outcome of those tendencies. This is a truth which most people were unwilling to see even when the similarities of many of the repellent features of the internal regimes in communist Russia and National Socialist Germany were widely recognized. As a result, many who think themselves infinitely superior to the aberrations of naziism, and sincerely hate all its manifestations, work at the same time for ideals whose realization would lead straight to the abhorred tyranny.
...the socialism of which we speak is not a party matter, and the questions which we are discussing have little to do with the questions at dispute between political parties. It does not affect our problem that some groups may want less socialism than others; that some want socialism mainly in the interest of one group and others in that of another. The important point is that, if we take the people whose views influence developments, they are now in the democracies in some measure all socialists. If it is no longer fashionable to emphasize that "we are all socialists now," this is so merely because the fact is too obvious.
(Introduction to The Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek)

Comment on progress in knowledge/science

2010-03-15T17:17:00.002-04:00

You’re invoking a false mythology of progress. They did not consider intelligent design and then reject it in modern times. Instead they rejected ID a century ago, about the same time that the professionalization of science took place. So no matter what new evidence modern science uncovers many will support evolutionary creation myths that have been fused to their professional identity. Ever since the professionalization of science many0 have even openly admitted that scientific consensus and their professional identity come first and the actual empirical evidence second.* Only the ignorant and naive believe that scientists are always interested in empirical evidence per se.

*E.g.

Mainstream science reacted predictably to any suggestion that the prints were made by humans. Geologist Albert G. Ingalls, writing in 1940 in Scientific American, said: “If man, or even his ape ancestor, or even that ape ancestor’s early mammalian ancestor, existed as far back as in the Carboniferous Period in any shape, then the whole science of geology is so completely wrong that all the geologists will resign their jobs and take up truck driving. Hence, for the present at least, science rejects the attractive explanation that man made these mysterious prints in the mud of the Carboniferous with his feet.”
(The Hidden History of the Human Race by Michael Cremo and Richard Thompson :151)

Note on materialism

2010-02-22T16:01:00.002-05:00

I just want to file this so I can look it up, from comments at UD:

The key word here is information. The key issue is how does a philosophy (naturalism) explain the existence of information within the confines of its explanatory resources? Since the very definition of naturalism includes the idea that the universe is causally closed (that is all causes ultimately resolve in physical laws – NOT mind) and therefore that the laws of physics ONLY have explanatory power, how then do they account for information?

They cannot. Information requires language. All languages are comprised of symbols and rules for the arrangement of those symbols. It is impossible to have information apart from a language. It is equally impossible for the laws of physics to explain either symbols or the rules that govern the use of those symbols. Therefore, naturalism can never, ever, explain information, and thus life. When darwinism succumbs to the next naturalist explanation of life (evo-devo or whatever) the new explanation will face the same insurmountable challenge. How to explain information in terms of physics and time? The game is over but we seem to still be playing. Why is that? I think it must be rebellion against Reason. Tom

The history of Jesus

2009-02-26T13:03:00.001-05:00

Good post here.

Interesting chart...

2009-02-12T13:40:00.001-05:00

Check out the comparisons in the chart to the left of this post.

Thoughts on eugenics...

2009-02-11T11:27:00.000-05:00

Their view, so far as I understand it, is that since human beings create things of magnificence and beauty, but do not create according to principle of random variation and natural selection, it does not seem plausible to them that anything magnificent and beautiful — such as various natural phenomena — could have emerged through variation or selection, either.

No, creativity often emerges through variation and “selection,” the main point is that some are trying to reduce intelligent selection and sight that we already have knowledge of to blind processes. We know that we see and select by experience but they argue that this is an illusion. The language used to specify the views of Darwinists is consistently contradictory because we are in fact living, seeing, knowing beings who cannot be reduced to blind, dead, ignorant processes. The only people who argue that we can be are those who are dead in the head themselves. They pollute language and speak in contradictions but in so far as they are supposedly saying anything Darwinists argue that humans themselves arose through variation and natural “selection”/culling. They probably imagine that they happened across the truth of things by some happy happenstance in their own biological brain events. But given their admittedly ignorant and imbecilic view of things human beings creating “things of magnificence and beauty” are themselves created by variation and culling. This is why Dawkins believes that it is possible to breed for things like mathematical or musical ability.

So do you similarly agree that the creativity of human beings was created mainly by processes like random variation and natural culling or not?

The Day the Earth Stood Still

2009-01-15T15:48:00.002-05:00

I didn't know that the original had Christian allusions:

In the original, Klaatu the alien messenger descends from the heavens offering the gift of healing and bearing a message for the world that could mean either salvation or destruction. He is killed by small minded authorities but is resurrected a short time later; he delivers his final message of peace to the world before ascending back into the heavens. Oh and his cover name while walking among the humans? Mr Carpenter.
In the new movie he is just Klaatu, he walks on water, he doesn’t need resurrecting but he does resurrect someone else and his message is not so much one of salvation or destruction as a warning of impending destruction. In the first movie, intelligent space-faring civilizations of the cosmos warned humanity that if they didn’t give up our war-like ways they would cleanse the Earth of us. They could ignore us before we had nukes but now we were a threat to everyone. In the new movie the intelligent space-faring nations are alarmed at the environmental damage we are wreaking on Earth. Klaatu is kind of an alien Al Gore (“An Inconvenient Alien?”).
Read the rest at Uncommon Descent

Archive

2009-01-08T13:48:00.001-05:00

Comment on natural selection...

Over at Intelldesign

2008-12-17T17:00:00.003-05:00

I wrote a few posts on Darwinism:

The Difference Between Skeletal Remains and Living Organisms

Darwinism and Wikipedia

Intelligent Design vs. the Imagination

Debate on Entropy

2008-12-11T15:23:00.001-05:00

A good debate is going on here.

Everyone wants me to read and write stuff.....

2008-12-08T22:47:00.005-05:00

Sheesh, my sister just sent me this article. It's quite the intellectually toxic mix of a journalist writing about the Bible and marriage. Apparently they are passing most of their opinions off as an accurate understanding of the Bible as the expert on religion at Newsweek.

They begin by noting polygamy:

Let's try for a minute to take the religious conservatives at their word and define marriage as the Bible does. Shall we look to Abraham, the great patriarch, who slept with his servant when he discovered his beloved wife Sarah was infertile?

They may as well cite King David's adultery as an instance of the Bible condoning adultery. For those who do not know, according to the Bible we are still living with the fall out of Abraham's lack of faith and it may turn out to be literal nuclear fall out some day if some of the sons of Ishmael have their way.

Abraham, Jacob, David, Solomon and the kings of Judah and Israel—all these fathers and heroes were polygamists.

The Bible notes that most of them had problems for just that reason. For example it notes that Solomon had many wives and was led to paganism, the occult and "Did evil in the eyes of the Lord." as a result. It is interesting to note that if the Bible was inspired totally by the minds of men then it is likely that the mentality read in it would read just like a lot of cults read. Something along the lines of: "One of the rules is that men get to have sex with as many women as they like, preferably virgins." One would think that the fact that it doesn't read that way might cause these journalists to pause and think but then, they are journalists.

Moving on:

Would any contemporary heterosexual married couple—who likely woke up on their wedding day harboring some optimistic and newfangled ideas about gender equality and romantic love—turn to the Bible as a how-to script?

Many married couples have done just that and our culture is shaped by it. One of the main metaphors for understanding the Christ and therefore understanding Christianity is that of the bride and bridegroom. And if men do follow the biblical model and lay down their own interests, desires and even their lives for the sake of their wives it does not generate a terrible or oppressive civilization as these journalists seem to believe. Their modern notions of romantic love only arose after the biblical model came to prominence. A man and woman are naturally complementary and people often sense that this comes about by design but romantic love did not typify the pagan world. Much of what we call romantic love arose when Christian knights began to do away with pagan ways and to honor women. You would think that people would think of this given that it is still represented in the form of fairy tales and the like. Note that this form of romantic love has little to do with the "gender equity" that these journalists mention. Just think if every romance movie had a guy in the girl's role and so on, of course they do not because men and women are not the same and we should be thankful that they are not. Vive la difference!

Moving on:

...while the Bible and Jesus say many important things about love and family, neither explicitly defines marriage as between one man and one woman.

It may not be explicit enough for journalists to understand but it is explicit enough to promote marriage while condemning all forms of adultery and even lust. Pedophilia, zoophilia and homophilia are all explicitly or implicitly condemned because the "two in one flesh union" which is only possible between a man and a women is also the only possible way for their union to be exemplified in the flesh of their children. Given the biblical model it is the same type of union whether or not it is ever exemplified by children.

Social conservatives point to Adam and Eve as evidence for their one man, one woman argument—in particular, this verse from Genesis: "Therefore shall a man leave his mother and father, and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh." But as Segal says, if you believe that the Bible was written by men and not handed down in its leather bindings by God, then that verse was written by people for whom polygamy was the way of the world.

The fact that polygamy was often pointed to in a negative light although the practice was common shows that there is a difference between the biblical ideal and what goes on in the real world. It does not show that the biblical ideal is wrong, instead it seems to indicate that the Bible was inspired more than the interests and desires of the men who wrote it. I'm no biblical expert but here is an interesting experiment, look in the Bible and see if you can find anywhere where polygamy is mentioned favorably. Something along the lines of: "This man was a great man because he had many wives." Etc. Would it not be in the interests of those who wrote it to portray polygamy in the best light possible?

He preached a radical kind of family, a caring community of believers, whose bond in God superseded all blood ties. Leave your families and follow me, Jesus says in the gospels. There will be no marriage in heaven, he says in Matthew.

Yes, and he also said that anyone who causes a child to stumble should have a stone put around their neck and be thrown into the sea. That's something that proponents of same-sex marriage might want to remember because their focus is invariably the "rights" and desires of adults and they do not seem to care about children. It is already known that adopted children often go through a process of wanting to know their biological parents. It is not generally known what would happen if they were generally denied representatives for their natural or biological parents and instead lived with two women or two men or two effeminate men or one manly woman and another taking the feminine role. Gender roles do not simply disappear even among homosexuals because they are rooted in basic biosocial realities.

Jesus never mentions homosexuality, but he roundly condemns divorce...

He never explicitly mentions necrophilia, pedophilia or zoophilia either because some things should go without saying. It's funny how everyone turns into a prude when it comes to deep sexual disorientations and their main argument would be that no argument is necessary (After all, who would even talk about such things?!! Well, philosophers would and have...) but in the instance of homosexuality they've been conditioned to do away with basic forms of common sense having to do with basic natural categories which pretty much everyone but psychotics have a knowledge of. Ironically even the psychotic serial killer or sexual pervert who denies basic natural categories admits to them while in the process of perverting them. I won't go into how that is so, it's probably not worth thinking about for most people. Unfortunately people are probably going to have to think about sexual disorientations and perversions thanks to articles like this one. The funny thing is that this article was apparently written by "experts" on religion at Newsweek.

I may reply to more of in a future post. Or I may not, I'm not sure it's worth dealing with. It seems to be structured for people who want to believe something no matter what the truth of anything actually is because they have a nice gay friend who they want to support no matter what the truth is. The truth is that the Bible condemns homosexuality explicitly and implicitly time and again, every gay activist I've debated actually understands that and yet apparently these journalists from Newsweek cannot. I wonder if they even really expect people to take this article as some sort of serious news report on a current event or if it is just their way of saying: "We're nice and tolerant so we support homosexuality and you should too."

Blogging notes

2008-12-08T16:57:00.002-05:00

I may be posting more at Intelldesign and archiving more here while mentioning the decline of American civilization and the end of the American Empire occasionally. ;-)

This blog has always tended toward being an archive of my comments, research, etc. The Shrink offered to let me write at Intelldesign and I took him up on it. I'm not sure how much posting I'll do here or there. After all, right now I have a 300GB Raptor RAID array that I want to set up. Etc. ;-)

Archive, on the Enlightenment

2008-11-20T00:47:00.001-05:00

…so what would you accept as true about the intellectual, artistic, and political movements of the 17th through 19th centuries…

I would accept many things as true but you tend to weave a mythology of Progress around things which are true that actually isn’t true. That’s the main issue.

For example you seem to imagine it likely that polytheism gave rise to theism which ultimately turns into deism and perhaps that turns into atheism at the end of this scenario of imaginary Progress.

That seems to be what you’re imagining here:….from ancient Greek polytheism to modern Christian theism/Enlightenment deism…

But the Darwinian tendency to project Progress onto everything by imagining things has been widely undermined by historical and anthropological evidence, so the views of someone like Edward Tylor carry about the same weight as the hypothetical goo typical to Darwinism in general.

It’s far more likely that polytheism is a corruption or falling away from monotheism than that theism arose out of polytheism. The most ancient traditional knowledge of many cultures is monotheistic.* In fact if one were to draw a line of progression based on the evidence it would more likely go from theism to polytheism to secularism and nihilism.

*E.g. Hananim (Korean, the Great One), Shang Ti (Chinese, the Lord of Heaven), Koro (Bantu, the Creator) Magano (Ethopian, the ultimate Creator again, as contrasted to the malevolent Sheit’an), the Great Spirit (American Indian), Deos (Greek, perhaps corrupted to Zeus and drawn down into a corrupted anthropromorphic focus, later reformed back by the philosophers under the new name Theos) and so on and on.

You said of the Enlightenment: Our commitment to scientific methods (doctrines being, quite frankly, irrelevant) and to the Constitution are both aspects of the Enlightenment legacy.

But the development of science as we know it had little to do with the Enlightenment and the mythology that tends to surround it. Take the work of Newton as an example to compare the imagery and mythology typical to “enlightenment” with the historical reality of what Newton himself actually wrote:

One of the first actions of those who proclaimed the ‘Enlightenment’ was the ‘deification of Newton.’ Voltaire set the example by calling him the greatest man who ever lived. Thus began an unexcelled outpouring of worshipful prose and extravagant poetry. David Hume wrote that Newton was ‘the greatest and rarest genius that ever rose for the ornament and instruction of the species.’ As Gay noted, ‘the adjectives ‘divine’ and ‘immortal’ became practically compulsory.’ [...] In 1802 the French philosophe Claude-Henri de Sain-Simon (1760-1825) founded a Godless religion to be led by scientist-priests and called it the Religion of Newton (his pupil Auguste Comte renamed it ’sociology’).
However, as the ‘Enlightenment’ became more outspokenly atheistic and more determined to establish the incompatibility of science and religion, a pressing matter arose: what was to be done about Newton’s religion? Trouble was that Newton’s religious views were not a matter of hearsay or repute. He had, after all, in 1713 added a concluding section to the second editions of his monumental Principia, the ‘General Scholium’ (or proposition), which was devoted entirely to his ideas about God. In it, Newton undertook to demonstrate the existence of God, concluding that:
‘…the true God is a living, intelligent, powerful Being….’
‘…he governs all things, and knows all things that are done or can be done.’
‘….He endures forever, and is everywhere present.’
‘…As a blind man has no ideas of colors, so have we no idea of the manner by which the all-wise God perceives and understands all things.’
Worse yet, Newton had written four letters during 1692-1693 explaining his theology to Richard Bentley. In the ‘Bentley Letters’ Newton ridiculed the idea that the world could be explained in impersonal, mechanical terms. Above all, having discovered the elegant lawfulness of things, Newton believed that he had, once and for all, demonstrated the certainty that behind all existence there is an intelligent, aware, omnipotent God. Any other assumption is ‘inconsistent with my system.’
(For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch Hunts and the End of Slavery by Rodney Stark :167-168)

Monotheism is associated with science as we know it as well as Progress traditionally understood as Providence but it leads to a different attitude about knowledge/scientia. This caused Newton to comment:

I don’t know what I may seem to the world, but as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea shore, and diverting myself in now and then in finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me. cf. (Newton’s Gift: How Sir Isaac Newton Unlocked the System of the World by David Berlinksi :167)

If you are arguing that the Constitution and the founding of the American Republic is an aspect of the Enlightenment legacy then what explains the vast difference between the French Revolution and the American Revolution? I’m not sure what may be imagined about history but here is some of what the Founders said about the French Revolution:

And what was their Phylosophy? Atheism; pure unadulterated Atheism . . . . The Univer[s]e was Matter only and eternal; Spirit was a Word Without a meaning; Liberty was a Word Without a Meaning. There was no Liberty in the Universe; Liberty was a Word void of Sense. Every thought Word Passion Sentiment Feeling, all Motion and Action was necessary. All Beings and Attributes were of eternal Necessity. Conscience, Morality, were all nothing but Fate. (Letter from John Adams to Thomas Jefferson (Mar. 2, 1816), in The Adams-Jefferson Letters)

Original comment

Democracy and the Decline of Civilization

2008-11-14T20:51:00.005-05:00

A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury.
From that moment on, the majority always vote for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.
The average age of the world's greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, those nations always progressed through the following sequence:
1. from bondage to spiritual faith;
2. from spiritual faith to great courage:
3. from courage to liberty:
4. from liberty to abundance
5. from abundance to complacency;
6. from complacency to apathy:
7. from apathy to dependence;
8. from dependence back into bondage.
--Alexander Tyler, 1787

Earlier scholars noted how Republics tend to decline:

Plato says that from the exaggerated license which people call liberty, tyrants spring up as from a root…and that at last such liberty reduces a nation to slavery. Everything in excess is changed into its opposite…For out of such an ungoverned populace one is usually chosen as a leader…someone bold and unscrupulous…who curries favor with the people by giving them other men’s property. To such a man…the protection of public office is given, and continually renewed. He…emerges as a tyrant over the very people who raised him to power. –Cicero (De Republica, i, 2.)

Money is language, a statement of value and cost and so on. Civilization is rooted in language, when it declines then its monetary systems follow necessarily. Fiscal conservatives try to separate moral language from economic forms of language and so on but a separation between fiscal and social conservativism typically undermines both because it all has to do with language spoken by the same people stating their values in different ways.

Financial credit is no different than credibility in general, a nation of decadent liars cannot create or support a sound monetary system through the application of intelligence or better policies and economic management.* There is no way to manipulate an economic system in order to overcome the corruption of individuals and the decline of a civilization in general. So on we go, put more copper in the coin!

*Poor Obama, naive and ignorant people seem to view him as some sort of savior in this respect.

I didn't know that Micahel Crichton died.

2008-11-08T13:47:00.005-05:00

Here he is making a point I have sometimes made:

I studied anthropology in college, and one of the things I learned was that certain human social structures always reappear. They can’t be eliminated from society. One of those structures is religion. Today it is said we live in a secular society in which many people—the best people, the most enlightened people—do not believe in any religion. But I think that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind. If you suppress it in one form, it merely re-emerges in another form. You can not believe in God, but you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious.

Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it’s a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths. cf. Uncommon Descent

He's right but I wouldn't lump all religion together. I would at least classify some as more transcendent and some as more immanent. Environmentalism is an immanence based religion which matches patterns in other immanence based religions. For example, Catholics worship the mother of God while environmentalists tend to worship Mother Earth. Catholics used to sell indulgences so that one could pay for their sins while environmentalists sell carbon credits so that one can pay for their sins against the environment. And so on. You can't simply lump all religion together though, there are transcendent (Islam/Allah, Jews/Jehovah, Christians/Father God) and immanent patterns to them. It seems to me that there is only one which reconciles patterns of transcendence and immanence, as it is claimed in Christianity that the transcendent God was immanently incarnated, etc. It's even claimed that this is not a mythic, philosophic or symbolic way of unifying the mental patterns typical to us into One, it's a historical claim about what really happened. Despite the details in the end either it did or it didn't. As odd as it is I think it happened, so I'm a Christian. I'm not sure from what perspective it seems odd to me that God would do things in such a bloody, messy or dirty way because if it is odd then we're very odd creatures of blood, mess and excrement ourselves. If the gardening God wants to get His hands dirty or to create evil then I'm not in a position to object on "moral" grounds and neither is anyone else that I know. And in order to think things odd I must be imagining some other "normal," "clean" or "logical" way for the same ends to come about, yet the simple fact is that for all I know there may be no other means to achieve the same ends.

I know that logic may not help people experiencing evil in the moment but if an infinite God is totally good and a greater good can come about by creating, using or allowing for evil to exist then vast amounts of evil must necessarily exist. If messy forms of redemption are "more perfect" than law-like forms of perfection then evil must necessarily exist to the same extent that all the "more than perfect" things like redemption, mercy, forgiveness and so on exist.

Archive, on Chimps and Humans

2008-11-05T17:26:00.002-05:00

…to say that humans are over one-third daffodil [based on their DNA] is more ludicrous than profound. There are hardly any comparisons you can make to a daffodil in which humans are 33% similar. DNA comparisons thus overestimate similarity at the low end of the scale (because 25% is actually the zero-mark of a DNA comparison) and underestimate comparisons at the high end.
….
The problem is that in being told about these data without a context in which to interpret them, we are left to our own cultural devices. Here, we are generally expected to infer that genetic comparisons reflect deep biological structure, and that 98% is an overwhelming amount of similarity. Thus “the DNA of a human is 98% identical to the DNA of a chimpanzee” becomes casually interpreted as “deep down inside, humans are overwhelmingly chimpanzee. Like 98% chimpanzee.” ….
…whatever the number is, it shouldn’t be any more impressive than the anatomical similarity; all we need to do is to put that old-fashioned comparison into a zoological context.
The paradox is not that we are so genetically similar to the chimpanzee; the paradox is why we now find the genetic similarity to be so much more striking than the anatomical similarity. Scholars of the eighteenth century were overwhelmed by the similarities between humans and chimpanzees. Chimpanzees were as novel then as DNA is now; and the apparent contrast between our bodies and our genes is simply an artifact of having two centuries’ familiarity with chimpanzees and scarcely two decades’ familiarity with DNA sequences. (What It Means to be 98% Chimpanzee by Johnathan Marks :28-31)

The primates confirm the predictions of message theory. There are large gaps, and there is no clear-cut phylogeny.
….
The apes thwart any attempt to separate man from nature: they unify man with nature. The apes possess innumerable similarities to us. The apes show that we are a part of this unified collection of objects. We are a part of the biotic message, so we must draw the same conclusions about our origins. The apes make it abundantly clear-The designer of earth’s diverse life forms and the designer of man are the same. Our designer authored the biotic message.
Kenneth Miller writes:
‘The big emotional issue among creationists is human evolution. It might be safe to say that all their previous arguments exist only to support the notion that humans are in no way linked to the other animals.’ (Miller, K., 1982, p 9-10, my italics)
Miller is mistaken. Creationists are not saying that humans are “in no way linked” to other animals. On the contrary. All organisms are linked by design, not descent. This has been part of the creationist thinking from the beginning. Because of this, the discovery of the apes in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries did not frighten them.

‘Now you would have thought that the discovery of these half-animal, half-men [apes] would have most profoundly scared and upset people-this evidence of a link between animals and man. And yet the literature of that period contains no evidence of any such frightened references.’ (Medawar, 1982 p 106)
(The Biotic Message: Evolution Versus Message Theory by Walter ReMine :323-324)
Dawkins on the same topic, perhaps citing his own imagination and mythology as the equivalent of evidence as he sometimes does:
The rise of Darwinism in the nineteenth century polarised attitudes towards the apes. Opponents who might have stomached evolution itself balked with visceral horror at cousinship with what they perceived as low and revolting brutes, and desperately tried to inflate our differences from them. This was nowhere more true than with gorillas. Apes were ‘animals’; we were set apart. (The Ancestor’s Tale by Richard Dawkins :108) (He cites the “distinquished philosopher” Peter Singer approvingly in a footnote in the same chapter, yet as I recall Singer approves of infanticide.)

In another section he argues rather ignorantly:
Many of our legal and ethical principles depend on the separation between Homo Sapiens and all other species. Of the people who regard abortion as a sin, including the minority who go to the lengths of assassinating doctors and blowing up abortion clinics, many are unthinking meat-eaters, and have no worries about chimpanzees being imprisoned in zoos and sacrificed in laboratories. Would they think again, if we could lay out a living continuum of intermediates between ourselves and chimpanzees, linked in an unbroken chain of interbreeders like the California salamanders? Surely they would. Yet it is the merest accident that the intermediates all happen to be dead. It is only because of this accident that we can comfortably and easily imagine a huge gulf between our two species-or between any two species, for that matter.
(Ib. :303)

Note the way that the Darwinian mind constantly works towards citing imaginary evidence, so by the end of his paragraph he’s treating his imaginary ancestors and imaginary events in the past as if they are a reality which must be “imagined” away by others. Ah well, it bears repeating that he’s the one imagining things! It's a "huge gulf" as he puts it which can be observed empirically. That is simply a fact. And if one does away with the mental illusions typical to Darwinian reasoning (in which the imagination is somehow transmuted into “evidence” while the actual evidence that we can observe empirically and verify now is lost), it’s invariably the case that the Darwinist is relying on imagining things and passing it off as "science." That’s been my experience, at any rate. Also note his ignorance, he should know that if there were actual evidence for his imaginary ancestors it wouldn’t make a huge difference. Does genocide happen among humans? Of course. Do people who know that they have the same ancestors still kill each other? Of course. Is common ancestry among humans or chimps any safeguard if the Darwinian creation myth is true? Of course not, Jews were experimented on by Nazis who firmly believed in Darwinism and the Nazis advanced anti-vivisection laws at the same time that they performed experiments on Jews. There is no reason to become a vegetarian or to stop experiments on animals if the Darwinian creation myth is true, he seems to be playing pretend again by imagining that Jewish ethics are linked to Nature based paganism or the merging of basic natural categories but they aren't.

The ground of all being....

2008-10-23T23:21:00.003-04:00

I've noticed that Intelligent Design tends to be linked to Deism, not Theism. It comports with Theism and could be reformed but often it leads to the view that God set the universe up to run like clockwork somehow and then left. This is based on a mechanistic view of cause and effect which extends into the past. Tick tock! But it's interesting to note that a study of cause and effect leads to the same type of philosophical questions here and now, not events in the distant past created by a distant God. For example, the fact that you're reading this sits on chains of cause and effect as your eyes see, your optical nerve sends signals to the brain, certain brain events are taking place, the brain is composed of the same fields of energy and matter and so on as everything else, etc. We know that things are linked in causal patterns, yet they cannot extend infinitely so what is it that is at their end? Aristotle would answer that instead of an infinite regress there must be an infinite Being, an unmoved Mover or an unchanged Changer. Christian philosophers like Aquinas would go on to point out that this is God and go on to derive many conclusions about God such as omniscience.

Obama on abortion

2008-10-17T12:12:00.006-04:00

Here's a detailed post at Two or Three. I didn't know much of it, although you would figure that he must be pretty radical because he failed to support protection for babies born alive. His argument in the last debate was that they were already protected but what would be wrong with making sure given what was happening? It's telling that even people like John Kerry and Ted Kennedy supported some of the bills that Obama is still capable of rationalizing his failure to vote for.

Interesting point....

2008-10-08T13:58:00.002-04:00

Cal Thomas on William Ayers and the Old Press:

William Ayers is not somebody who just did evil things when Obama was eight years old. They have an adult relationship and Ayers has been a booster of Obama's and they have worked together on 'education issues' in Chicago. Let's have some perspective here. What do you suppose the mainstream media reaction would be had McCain been associated with an abortion clinic bomber?

Windsurfing

2008-10-05T17:01:00.007-04:00

Old videos:

Windsurfing1
Windsurfing2

Related posts: Gone Windsurfing, My Vacation and Windsurfing at the Keys

Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac

2008-10-03T13:00:00.005-04:00

Interesting arguments in video here and here. The second is a little more propagandistic than the first.

The Medieval...

2008-09-30T15:46:00.002-04:00

An excerpt from a book I'm reading, I'll probably archive a few more excerpts because progressives tend to believe in mythologies that they imagine about Progress more than historically based views on how progress as we know it has happened:

In many ways the term "Scientific Revolution" is as misleading as "Dark Ages." Both were coined to discredit the medieval Church. The notion of a "Scientific Revolution" has been used to claim that science suddenly burst forth when a weakened Christianity could no longer prevent it, and as the recovery of classical learning made it possible. Both claims are as false as those concerning Colombus and the flat earth.* First of all, classical learning did not provide an appropriate model for science. Second, the rise of science was already far along by the sixteenth century, having been nurtured by devout Scholastics in that most Christian invention, the university. As Alfred W. Crosby pointed out, "in our time the word medieval is often used as a synonym for muddle-headedness, but it can be more accurately used to indicate precise definition and meticulous reasoning, that is to say, clarity" (his emphasis). Granted that the era of scientific discovery that occurred in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was indeed marvelous, the cultural equivalent of the blossoming of a rose. However, just as roses do not spring up overnight but must undergo a long period of normal growth before they even bud, so, too, the blossoming of science was the result of centuries of normal intellectual progress.... Copernicus provides an unsurpassed example of this point.
(For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch Hunts and the End of Slavery by Rodney Stark :134-135)

Insight...

2008-09-30T00:09:00.002-04:00

A philosophy of insight from some geek to guru dialogues, the guru pointing out that what matters most to us typically isn't matter and mechanisms:

…it should be obvious to you that the neuronal activity that accompanies your act of seeing the meaning of “Give me liberty or give me death” is not the same as understanding what the thought implies.
Let me show you what I’m saying just by pointing out what you’re trying to do. You’re trying to convince me that no independent meaning-processing takes place in our minds. This is what you mean to communicate to me, this the point you want me to see. But is your point, the meaning you wish to communicate, purely a matter of neuronal transactions and brain states? Are you trying to alter certain of my brain events or to get me to see something to be the case? If it’s the latter, then meaning is something different from physiological states of affairs. You could say it’s dependent on a physiological substrate, but you would still have to admit that it’s not the same thing as the physiological transaction itself.
[...]
You can’t be convinced of something by the action of certain physical causes in your central nervous system. You’re convinced by reasons. You disagree with me because you haven’t seen enough reason to agree. Meaning is all about reasons and not causes. If I say a poem is beautiful, neither my message nor its truth is reducible to neuronal excitement in given regions of the cerebral cortex. It’s all about concepts, reasons and meanings, not causes and effects. I cannot see how you can dispute any of this without blatant self-contradiction.
(The Wonder of the World by Roy Abraham Varghese :165,166)

Superstition...

2008-09-25T13:14:00.004-04:00

I'm going to read a few books on the history of science and Christianity. Most indicate that science as we now know it as a system of thought is linked to Christianity. The atheist philosopher Daniel Dennett actually admits this point given the historical evidence but argues that we can essentially harvest the seeds of good ideas grown from a field of bad ideas.

It seems to me that there are possible lines of historical evidence that such a harvest is impossible or can't last long. E.g. the post-Christian culture of the Weimar Republic in which Nazism fermented based on a return to "scientific" forms of Nature based paganism which was associated with pseudo-science, superstition and the occult. The pattern seems to be that science begins with Christian assumptions but then science is said to be rooted in methodological naturalism, which naturally and gradually tends to build a philosophy of naturalism which undermines Christianity until science is turned into a form of Nature based paganism, then all the old occult/"hidden" practices and superstitions typical to the type of paganism that Christianity originally did away with emerge again. Those who base their opposition to Christianity on science are often in the odd position of undermining the ground upon which they stand. It seems that a protestation of Protestantism itself opens the door for superstition again.

Here's a recent WSJ article citing evidence of this apparent pattern:

From Hollywood to the academy, nonbelievers are convinced that a decline in traditional religious belief would lead to a smarter, more scientifically literate and even more civilized populace.

The reality is that the New Atheist campaign, by discouraging religion, won't create a new group of intelligent, skeptical, enlightened beings. Far from it: It might actually encourage new levels of mass superstition. And that's not a conclusion to take on faith -- it's what the empirical data tell us.

"What Americans Really Believe," a comprehensive new study released by Baylor University yesterday, shows that traditional Christian religion greatly decreases belief in everything from the efficacy of palm readers to the usefulness of astrology. It also shows that the irreligious and the members of more liberal Protestant denominations, far from being resistant to superstition, tend to be much more likely to believe in the paranormal and in pseudoscience than evangelical Christians. Look Who's Irrational NowBy MOLLIE ZIEGLER HEMINGWAY

That old topic...

2008-09-17T19:54:00.002-04:00

A few comments on homosexuality and history here, it will be interesting to see if anyone attempts to reply based on historical facts.

The Funeral of a Great Myth

2008-09-13T14:31:00.000-04:00

In the science, Evolution is a theory about changes: in the Myth it is a fact about improvements. Thus a real scientist like Professor J. B. S. Haldane is at pains to point out that popular ideas of Evolution lay a wholly unjustified emphasis on those changes which have rendered creatures (by human standards) 'better' or more interesting. He adds: 'We are therefore inclined to regard progress as the rule in evolution. Actually it is the exception, and for every case of it there are ten of degeneration.' But the Myth simply expurgates the ten cases of degeneration. In the popular mind the word 'Evolution' conjures up a picture of things moving 'onwards and upwards', and of nothig else whatsoever. And it might have been predicted that it would do so. Already, before science had spoken, the mythical imagination knew the kind of 'Evolution' it wanted. --C. S. Lewis, The Funeral of a Great Myth

A bitter irony

2008-09-11T14:32:00.006-04:00

Martin Luther King on Margaret Sanger:

There is a striking kinship between our movement and Margaret Sanger's early efforts. She, like we, saw the horrifying conditions of ghetto life. Like we, she knew that all of society is poisoned by cancerous slums. Like we, she was a direct actionist — a nonviolent resister. Planned Parenthood

Historical facts:

...Sanger was an ardent, self-confessed eugenicist... Like other staunch eugenicists, Sanger vigorously opposed charitable efforts to uplift the downtrodden and deprived, and argued extensively that it was better that the cold and hungry be left without help, so that the eugenically superior strains could multiply without competition from "the unfit." She repeatedly referred to the lower classes and the unfit as "human waste" not worthy of assistance, and proudly quoted the extreme eugenic view that human "weeds" should be "exterminated." Moreover, for both political and genuine ideological reasons, Sanger associated closely with some of America's most fanatical eugenic racists. Both through her publication, Birth Control Review, and her public oratory, Sanger helped legitimize and widen the appeal of eugenic pseudoscience.
[...]
...on page after page, Sanger castigated charities and the people they hoped to assist. "Organized charity itself," she wrote, "is the symptom of a malignant social disease. Those vast, complex, interrelated organizations aiming to control and to diminish th espread of misery and destitution and all the menacing evils that spring out of this sinisterly fertile soil, are the surest sign that our civilization has bred, is breeding and is perpetuation constantly increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents and dependents."
[...]
...she never lost her eugenic raison d'être, nor her fiery determination to eliminate the unfit. For instance, years after Sanger launched birth control, she was honored at a luncheon in the Hotel Roosevelt in New York. Her acceptance speech harkened back to the original nature of her devotion to her cause. "Let us not forget," she urged, "that these billions, millions, thousands of people are increasing, expanding, exploding at a terrific rate every year. Africa, Asia, South America are made up of more than a billion human beings, miserable, poor, illiterate labor slaves, whether they are called that or not; a billion hungry men and women always in the famine zone yet reproducing themselves in the blind struggle for survival and perpetuation....
The brains, initiative, thrift and progress of the self supporting, creative human beings are called upon to support the ever increasing and numerous dependent, delinquent and unbalanced masses....
(The War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's
Campaign to Create a Master Race
by Edwin Black :127, 129, 143)

On not giving Chance a chance...

2008-09-10T17:22:00.004-04:00

I was trying to think through chance in a recent comment:

Ironically the notion of chance is a science/knowledge stopper, it is an argument which stops the study of cause and effect. A scientific view rooted in the study of cause and effect would be that chance is an illusion brought about by an absence of knowledge. Even the examples that people use to argue for the creative power of “chance” combined with a process of filtering like natural selection can be surrounded by knowledge based on an actual scientific view. For instance, some use a coin toss to illustrate the concept of chance. Yet since chance is actually just an illusion brought about by the absence of knowledge it is easy to point out that if the trajectory of the coin, its mass, the force it was flipped with, etc., was all known then “chance” disappears as one advances toward a knowledge of how the coin will come to rest. Chance is ignorance, chance is ultimately nothing, yet it’s typical for proponents of Darwinism to argue as if it something which explains all there is to know.

A satire of philosophies based on chance:
Pre-Game Coin Toss Makes Jacksonville Jaguars Realize Randomness Of Life

(Found on Uncommon Descent)

Blog on Intelligent Design

2008-09-04T15:03:00.002-04:00

Here's a blog I've been commenting on lately: Intelldesign, although it's written by a psychologist it's pretty good.

Palin and Sex Ed

2008-09-03T17:09:00.002-04:00

Hube replies to shallow Leftist arguments on the topic.

Repost...

2008-08-27T23:44:00.001-04:00

From comments here, I rewrote and refined just a few things in this story so I'll repost it here:

The Art of Knowledge,
Once upon a time there was an Artist who could draw other artists into his pictures, some to draw some things for him and even some who could draw things for themselves too. So he drew an apprentice in his own image and his new student asked him about a piece of art that he was working on, “What is it going to be?”

“It’s a picture about good and evil, right and wrong.”

“But how can you draw a picture about wrong that is right?”

“Whatever I draw is right, even that which I let look wrong to those I draw to observe it so. It’s something in the lighting and my drawing, you see. Keep observing, I will not explain further until the picture is complete…. Come close little one, so that I may ask you a question. Now, why do you suppose I would draw you here to ask me annoying questions when I’m trying to work?”

“Well, I suppose…I, uh, eh, I don’t know why! Well it seems to me that you must know all about your own art. Say, why don’t you just draw me to stop it? Huh?”

The Artist turned to look at the little fellow staring up at him from his side, sighed, then said, “What you’re drawing me to do is going to hurt you more than it hurts me.”

“Uh, wait a minute…” the little fellow looked back at the painting, “I suppose I can wait until the picture is complete.”

“Very well, and besides the answer does not exist yet in any form that you can understand. You see, I’ve not drawn you to understand it yet. But perhaps you can think of it in this way as I work for now… making a picture about good and evil consists of drawing the line someplace.” As the artist spoke he drew a line and as he did some of the little forms that he had drawn into his picture murmured among themselves, “Why are things this way, rather than that? I can think of things my way and want them to be so, so why should they not be my way? Why?!”

This caused the student to comment, “Say, they are a little like me in that way! A rather likable likeness if I do say so myself… So I suppose their next question about what will be, will be why don’t you just take their will away?”

“Only I know, as I know all of my own art. Yet I would think that some of the answers about the will would be rather obvious, if you will.”

“It seems an odd decision to me.”

“Yes, I knew you would say that.”

“Ah, but what if I knew you knew? See how my knowledge increases to approach your own!”

The Master Artist just glanced at the little fellow and kept working on the picture. So his student asked, “Well…can you draw me to have some of your knowledge?” and the Artist answered, “For now you do not even have the symbols, imagery in your head or the forms of thought necessary to think many of my thoughts, so some of the best truths about my art and this picture will remain ineffable and paradoxical to you. That is my will. If you are willing to learn how my will must be done in all of my pictures then I will naturally draw you to have more knowledge of my nature.”

“Naturally….yes, that seems logical to me.”

“Yes, of course, I knew it would. After all, I just drew you to think so.” The little fellow just sighed at that, and thought that he might have heard the Artist chuckle as he did.

Archive...

2008-08-27T19:19:00.001-04:00

I don’t believe I was “demonizing” anyone.

One ought to focus on civility which can only be grounded in language/civilization designed to unfold providentially in all those created in the "imago dei" unless that is non longer possible based on reason.

Note that there is little difference between the concept of demoniac or maniac, in fact history shows that one was simply reclassified into the other based on a shift in worldview towards naturalism with little to no actual empirical evidence. There is still little evidence that brain lesions or a manifestly physical "illness" can cause highly complex actions which mimic intelligent agency. There is still just as little reason for the judgment "Not guilty by 'reason' of insanity." as "Not guilty by reason of the Devil made me do it." (Note the irony typical to both claims, at any rate.)

The only ground we have for doing away with both concepts is by admitting intelligent design and focusing on it in a systematic way. As David Stove notes of "puppetry theories":

...just as Calvin divides created things into potent demons and causally impotent everything else, so Dawkins divides the organic world into potent genes and causally impotent everything else. According to Calvinism, we are pawns in a game, in which the only real players are the demons and God. According to The Selfish Gene, we are pawns in a game in which the only real players are genes.
[....]
I do not believe that humans are the helpless puppets of their genes, and cannot even take that proposition seriously. Why? Because I have heard far too many stories like that one before, and because it is obvious what is wrong with all of them.
"Our stars rule us," says the astrologer. "Man is what he eats," said Feuerbach. "We are what our infantile sexual experiences made us," says the Freudian. "The individual counts for nothing, his class situation for everything," says the Marxist. "We are what our socioeconomic circumstances make us," says the social worker. "We are what the Almighty God created us," says the Christian theologian. There is simply no end to this kind of stuff.
What is wrong with all such theories is this: That they deny, at least by implication, that human intentions, decisions, and efforts are among the causal agencies which are at work in the world.
This denial is so obviously false that no rational person, who paused to consider it coolly and in itself, would ever entertain it for one minute.
....
The falsity of all these theories of human helplessness is so very obvious, in fact, that the puppetry theorists themselves cannot help admitting it, and thus are never able to adhere consistently to their puppetry theories. Feurerbach, though he said that man is what he eats, was also obliged to admit that meals to not eat meals. The Calvinistic theologian, after saying that the omnipotent Creator is everything and his creatures nothing, will often then go on to reproach himself and other creatures with disobeying this Creator. The Freudian therapist believes in the overpowering influence of infantile sexual experiences, but he makes an excellent living by encouraging his patients to believe that, with his help, this overpowering influence can be itself overpowered. And so on.
In this inevitable and tiresomely familiar way, Dawkins contradicts his puppetry theory...
(Darwinian Fairytales: Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity and Other Fables of Evolution
by David Stove :176-184)

Eugenics and Other Evils....

2008-08-07T13:09:00.003-04:00

A comment on a post which reminded me of G.K. Chesteron's fight against Eugenics:

I do believe, however, that evolution was the source for the creation of eugenics and “Modern” eugenics.

Evolution is a term defined by hypothetical goo so I hesitate to use the word but Darwinism or modern theories of evolution were the source of an amoral (i.e. immoral) eugenics movement. An understanding of principles used in eugenics had been understood since ancient times because they are based on the rather trivial observations:

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.
(War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race
by Edwin Black :12-13)

The problem is not that the theory of natural selection is incorrect, it's that given Darwin's theological arguments and a Darwinian philosophy of naturalism the theory is extended far beyond its limited (and often trivial) scope and applied in immoral ways. Naturalism is a totalizing philosophy which has to apply to all that is, was or ever will be. Given the total arrogance that such a view of total knowledge/scientia breeds it is little wonder that history shows that totalitarianism is often the fruit of a philosophy of naturalism. As G.K. Chesterton noted:

The thing that really is trying to tyrannise through government is Science. The thing that really does use the secular arm is Science. And the creed that really is levying tithes and capturing schools, the creed that really is enforced by fine and imprisonment, the creed that really is proclaimed not in sermons but in statutes, and spread not by pilgrims but by policemen--that creed is the great but disputed system of thought which began with Evolution and has ended in Eugenics.
(Eugenics and Other Evils: An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized Society
by G.K. Chesterton
(With Additional Articles by his Eugenic and Birth Control Opponents, edited by Michael W. Perry)

In his book Edwin Black notes some of the historical victims of this arrogance with respect to science/"knowledge":

"Eventually, you knew your time would come," recalled Buck Smith about his Lynchberg experience. His name is not really Buck Smith. But he was too ashamed, nearly a half century later, to allow his real name to be used during an interview with a local Virginia reporter. ..... Buck...recounted the day he was sterilized at Lynchberg. He was fifteen years old. "The call came over the dormitory just like always, and I knew they were ready for me," he remembered. "There was no use fighting it. They gave me some pills that made me drowsy and then they wheeled me up to the operating room."
....
Poverty .... was scientifically held by many esteemed doctors and universities to be a genetic defect, transmitted from generation to generation. Buck Smith was hardly feebleminded, and he spoke with simple eloquence about his mentality. "I've worked for eleven years at the same job," he said, "and haven't missed more than three days of work. There's nothing wrong with me except my lack of education."
"I'll never understand why they sterilized me," Buck Smith disconsolately told the local reporter. "I'll never understand that. ....they took a lot of my life away from me. Having children is supposed to be a part of the human race."
The reporter noticed a small greeting card behind Buck Smith. The sterilized man had eventually married and formed a lasting bond with his stepchildren. The card was from those stepchildren and read: "Thinking of you, Daddy."
Through tears, Buck Smith acknowledged the card, "They call me Daddy."
Mary Donald was equally pained when she recalled her years of anguish following her sterilization....when she was only eleven. Several years later, she was "released" to her husband-to-be, and then enjoyed a good marriage for eighteen years. But "he loved kids," she remembered. "I lay in bed and cried because I couldn't give him a son," she recounted.... "... He said it didn't matter. But as years went by, he changed. We got divorced and he married someone else." With these words, Mary broke down and wept.
Like so many, Mary never understood what was happening.
.... Mary didn't learn she had been sterilized until five years after her operation.(War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race
by Edwin Black :5-6)

A few comments....

2008-08-05T11:26:00.002-04:00

Here....

Nothing new, most of the time I link to my comments on this blog so that I can find them again and check for replies without having too many bookmarks.

Obama

2008-08-02T13:49:00.005-04:00

Here's an interesting video from his Illinois debates with Alan Keyes. His effete sniveling about being lectured to by someone who isn't his pastor seems ironic now given who his pastor was at the time.

Anti-American arguments....

2008-07-28T22:56:00.007-04:00

I've found that often Americans tend to be the best anti-Americans. After all, there is much to be critical of. But here are a few rather radical arguments about America which you probably won't see everyday. An odd synthesis of Fundamentalist and Leftist thought is possible which leads to the same conclusions:

"America is a decadent empire which isn't worth fighting for, it's no better than other nations. Any barbarism which you might point out in other nations is practiced in America by abortionists. If anything America is worse because it is both decadent and barbarous in a hidden way. It's only a matter of time until an apocalyptic cleansing."

I've never agreed with the moral equivalency that some try to draw between America and all nations, I simply think that some nations are better than others and America is better than most. Ironically it always seems to be those who are the most radical who fall into some sort of moral equivalence with respect to America. On the Left I have heard arguments of this sort: "If Iraqis had come to America and torn down the Lincoln monument then how would we feel? You have to break from provincial attitudes and see things from all sides." Ironically that was an example of the most provincial attitude I've ever seen, something some college student would say. (Needless to say there's a moral difference between Lincoln and Saddam which ought to shape attitudes about monuments to them no matter what culture you're from.)

On the other side an argument for moral equivalency looks more like: "Girls in America wear skimpy clothing and have abortions.... so American is just as bad as nations in the Mid East." It seems to me that this argument is more reasonable so it takes a little longer to deal with. To begin with, it's best to focus on judgments that are easy to make and then with precedents in mind proceed on to those that are difficult instead of becoming confused about easy judgments because more difficult judgments exist. With that in mind I think that the burka is worse than the bikini, female "circumcision" worse than American hedonism, pagan American "stars" and "idols" of hedonism dying in their pursuit of happiness and pleasure better than Afghan women burning themselves to death because their lives are already hell.

America may be the lesser of two evils but it is, indeed the lesser.

Huh....

2008-07-28T21:48:00.007-04:00

I was following a few local links and found that this fellow I once debated for a bit on ID is actually a local blogger.

Here is a collection of some of his posts on ID. Unfortunately there's not really much on ID because apparently he's more interested in politics and a movie than the concept itself. I'm interested in the concept of intelligent agency being detected based on the application of logic to empirical facts but ironically the notion of intelligent design itself doesn't seem to be his focus.

For example, he cites Dinesh D’Souza here:

[Someone making a judgment about ID] would summon a wide cross-section of leading physicists. They would inform him that despite unresolved debates about relativity–for example, its unexplained relationship to quantum theory–Einstein’s theories are supported by a wide body of data. They enjoy near-unanimous support in the physics community worldwide. There is no alternative scientific theory that comes close to explaining the facts at hand. In such a situation any judge would promptly show the dissenters the door and deny their demand for equal time in the classroom. This is precisely the predicament of the ID movement.

This seems reasonable but it still contains the same shift away from ID as a concept. He goes on to make a solipsistic argument about the natural and supernatural because naturally everything seems natural to us but I won't deal with that.* After all everything is natural, for how could it be otherwise? Putting that issue aside, Dinesh D’Souza agrees that ID is true but he's shifting away from that to talk about politics and consensus. Unfortunately even in that shift he's making some ignorant arguments, as all scientia/knowledge does not have equal standing just because it's called science by those engaged in it. Darwinian theories are not necessarily on a par with Einstein's theories and as I've often pointed out the equivalence that many draw between biological theories and physics is typically ignorant. The notion that we now have biological theories of evolution which are the epistemic equivalent of physical theories is prevalent, yet if trajectories of adaptation actually are not being traced and "the theory" of evolution isn't being used to make highly specified predictions which have been and can be verified empirically then all political arguments which assume such things fail. People may be able to create circular arguments based on scientific consensus and so on to indoctrinate a whole nation but empirical facts and logical truths remain. Ultimately anyone more interested in the truth than whatever explanations currently seem "natural" to the Herd can always seek the truth outside of the Herd, naturally enough. Perhaps seeking the truth may even be designed to come naturally to individual, intelligent beings.

*David Berlinksi comments on the way some seek an "equation" between science and naturalism which cannot be found:

In many respects the word naturalism comes closest to conveying what scientists regard as the spirit of science, the source of its superiority to religious thought.
….
What, after all, could be more natural than being natural? Carl Sagan’s buoyant affirmation that “the universe is all that is, or was, or will be” is widely understood to have captured the spirit of naturalism, but since the denial of this sentence is a contradiction, the merits of the concept so defined are not immediately obvious. Just who is arguing from the pulpit that everything is not everything? ….
If naturalism is a term largely empty of meaning, there is always methodological naturalism. Although naturalism is natural, methodological naturalism is even more natural and is, for that reason, a concept of superior grandeur. Hector Avalos is a professor of religious studies at Iowa State University, and an avowed atheist. He is a member of good standing of the worldwide fraternity of academics who are professionally occupied in sniffing the underwear of their colleagues for signs of ideological deviance. Much occupied in denouncing theories of intelligent design, he has enjoyed zestfully persecuting its advocates. “Methodological naturalism,” the odious Avalos has written, “the view that natural phenomena can be explained without reference to supernatural beings or events, is the foundation of the natural sciences.”
Now a view said to be foundational can hardly be said to be methodological, and if naturalism is the foundation of the natural sciences, then it must be counted a remarkable oddity of thought that neither the word nor the idea that it expresses can be found in any of the great physical theories.(The Devil’s Delusion by David Berlinksi :52)

Dissent...

2008-07-17T12:51:00.002-04:00

Junior high school mathematics easily refutes Darwinian random variation and natural selection as the source of the highly sophisticated software information in living systems, and appeals to self-organization are equally ridiculous in light of what is now known. Self-replicating, information-processing, error-correcting, anti/neg-entropic software and hardware do not self-organize or come about by copying errors. Such silly speculation makes alchemy look like hard science, and attempts to defend it are quite frankly an embarrassment to real science.

(--Gil Dodgen Uncommon Descent comment)

I was just thinking, that's a specified statement which can be verified by empirical evidence and yet the empirical evidence doesn't limit evolution. The Darwinian origins of life forms are imaginary and tend to capture public imagination with the support of museums, nature shows, etc., yet it's worth pointing out that when it comes to origins Darwinian reasoning typically relies on imaginary events which cannot be observed or tested. Imagining things about the past is all well and good but such story telling just a modern mythology which shouldn't be confused with harder forms of scientia/knowledge or an explanation for the origins of form and information typical to living things which can be falsified or verified based on empirical observation.

The funny thing about our capacity for imagining things is that it's unfalsifiable. It seems that we can always imagine that something is not what it is or is what it is not. Imagine that!

Interesting energy idea, zero emissions

2008-05-29T17:24:00.000-04:00

Solar Power Satellite

A comment...

2008-05-19T19:02:00.007-04:00

This could have applied here as well.

Are you seriously arguing that the astronomically improbable specifications necessary for the existence of Life just happened to happen based on “chance”/nothing but your own statements are transcendently significant and happen to summarize some sort of knowledge of the entire Cosmos? Sheer size? It’s not even clear what you imagine size has to do with it. Is one supposed to imagine that given enough “size” that which is illogical, irrational and unintelligible will become intelligent and intelligible based on “luck”/nothing?

What is chance, an effect without a cause or a cause without an effect? If Chance were a sentient god and we could ask about the nature of who it was would it reply, “I AM that I AM.”??? If it is uncaused, it would seem so.

I was thinking about this more because apparently one of Richard Dawkins main arguments is that given the way he has gradually evolved to imagines things (as biologists typically do) God needs a cause. And if God is complex then according to his logic God needs a more complex cause and so on. It's ironic that Dawkins would focus on a theological point which rests on an ignorance of the nature of God that has already been specified by prophets and philosophers for millennia* when it's "chance" and "luck" that need a cause. The notion of chance is not defined by knowledge, it's the absence of knowledge and an inability to account for cause and effect which causes people to attribute things to chance. A mental illusion in the minds of persons is the only thing that the notion of chance causes, it's nothing physical. It's really quite odd that "chance" would be so widely advanced in the name of science on issues like the origins of Life or the origins of a Cosmos favorable to it when chance is defined an the absence of knowledge of physical cause and effect. As a natural philosopher and early scientist Aristotle would certainly find it odd and ultimately illogical to deny the existence of an unmoved Mover the way that Dawkins does.

*(God is simply the uncaused Cause of astronomically complex events.)

Interesting article on global warming

2008-05-19T18:01:00.003-04:00

Excerpt:

Most of our leaders know very well the World is in little danger from climate change, at least not any caused by human activity. But they also realize, as does any thinking person, that there are indeed serious pollution problems that we must continue to address. In an effort to appear ‘green’, politicians are then pushed by party strategists to intentionally confuse the issue by referring to the benign gas carbon dioxide as “global warming pollution” (a favourite trick of Al Gore and Boxer) and speaking of ‘clean air’ and ‘climate control’ as if they were interchangeable. This is amplified by many in the media who, out of ignorance, laziness or opportunism simply repeat the mistake until it becomes part of the landscape. As a result, the emotional pressure to ‘do something about global warming’ mounts and billions of dollars are wasted trying to ‘stop climate change’ - a wholly impossible objective - while real issues are neglected.

Environmental extremism must be put in its place in the climate debate
By Dr. Tim Ball & Tom Harris

They note the link between pseudo-science and a Darwinian worldview in the beginning. I'm not using the term pseudo-science as a stigma word, accurate knowledge can emerge from pseudo-science. To me it's just a term to describe knowledge in need of reformation, alchemy can become chemistry, astrology can become astronomy and so on.

A Darwinian worldview rooted in gradualism is incorrect given that there's more empirical evidence for catastrophism than uniformitarianism, although it seems that people find the gradualism which typifies Darwinism comforting. Given the actual evidence it seems that it's more natural for there to be natural disasters than not, yet now somehow natural disasters are being included as evidence of the supposedly unnatural capabilities of man. The inconvenient truth is that given naturalism man isn't actually capable of doing anything unnatural. In the end the very term "pollution" only makes sense if we admit to our role as some sort of stewards of the earth, a sense which only has grounds in transcendence. After all, what we call pollution is just chemical elements and matter in motion. Mother Earth has no knowledge of pollution and she isn't going to hold any "Earth day" to try to "save" herself. Only we can know what pollution is by making anthropic assumptions or admitting that mind can impact matter in artificial or "unnatural" ways.

There does seem to be an anthropic principle revolving around man that pervades the earth, as it tends to bring itself into a balance favorable to humanity and Life naturally enough despite natural disasters and catastrophes.

Archive...

2008-04-14T01:10:00.002-04:00

ID is just a plea for special consideration of some peoples religious beliefs that they wish to privilege as science, when convenient, and privilege as religion at otherwise.

I wouldn’t doubt that many people will shift from high epistemic standards (”science”) to low standards (”religion”) based on convenience. That is the way of the world, all need reformation. Currently the established orthodoxy which purports to define knowledge/science in academic settings is Darwinism and it is clearly sorely in need of reformation, so what difference is it to me if there are some rabble rousers? They are typically necessary after all.

Note that Darwinists already shift from high epistemic standards to low: "We now know that the earth revolves around the sun so it’s obvious that we will inevitably progress towards a similar form of knowledge about the origin of life forms."
On the one hand a basic empirical fact is cited, then shifted seamlessly into a claim that may well be nonsense. What if sentience actually doesn’t reduce to the laws of physics as currently known?

“The theory of evolution is just like the theory of gravity.”

That’s just ignorant and only reveals the ignorance or charlatanism of anyone who makes such an argument.

“We have observed insecticide resistance, therefore we have a knowledge of the origin of all specification and form found in living organisms.”

Etc. Biologists are generally stupid enough to make such arguments, apparently. But what is to be expected of those who believe that intelligent selection based on sight and sentience is actually an illusion of blind, inanimate processes?

Archive...

2008-04-13T11:06:00.001-04:00

Most recently I've been learning about the molecular evidence for evolution.

Are the illusions of pattern recognition which are too typical to Darwinism a reason to believe that everything you say here reduces to natural selection operating on an ancient population of worm-like creatures? Is intelligence an illusion which you imagine yourself to have explained away based on biology? Does natural selection govern your brain events? If not and you can make intelligent selections at present then why should one imagine that past events "cause" and determine all that we know in the present?

If you want to imagine a little creation myth that seems natural to you, as most biologists do, then let us imagine that what you say here has more to do with brain events which reduce to natural selection operating on the excretory and reproductive organs of ancient ape like creatures than anything rational, intelligent and intelligible. After all, you seem easily overwhelmed by imaginary events so you should be convinced that what you write here has more to do with excrement in the past than sentience and knowledge at present. In fact, it seems that any symbols and signs of intelligence which you write may as well be excrement.

Archive....

2008-04-13T11:04:00.000-04:00

So now biologists deny “sentience” and mathematicians don’t??? That’s news to me…

Biologists are trained to imagine the transphysical nature of information away in a way that mathematicians are not. Note that various mathematicians from the Wistar conference on have worked to educate biologists with respect to the importance of information as a reality which cannot be imagined away, apparently with little success. To the purely biological “mind”/brain it seems that nothing is improbable, so it may always imagine that it can get something for nothing. Yet what do biologists mean when they talk about things coming about by “chance” or being “random”? It would seem to be nothing really because saying that something is random or comes about by chance is a statement of ignorance that will progressively be refuted by logic and a science of cause and effect. People who have knowledge of cause and effect do not say that something came about by “chance,” yet that is what Darwinists have a long history of saying even as they claim to speak for knowledge and science.

regarding dawkins wrt determinism, i don’t think it is understatement to say that there are a plurality of views of what it means to be alive.

Yet the established orthodoxy (as Dennett, Dawkins, etc. point out) is that any meaning to be found in life is ultimately an illusion rooted in mindless processes such as a natural “selection”/culling of organisms which are rooted in further events that seem “random” to biologists. Dennett says the illusion of meaning is the result of algorithms, Dawkins has said that it’s metaphorically “selfish” genes and so on. Yet on the other hand, if we accept our experience of sentience as a form of knowledge then we have to ask how something we know to be a valid and natural part of our nature influences other natural processes which we have knowledge of based on science, including natural “selection”/culling. After all, it’s science and knowledge that cannot exist without sentience and not the other way around. It’s already known at this point that sentience may have some impact on the observable world. It’s curious that those who speak of a Blind Watchmaker claim to be speaking about knowledge even as they claim to know that its only known basis is an illusion.

The history of eugenics is splattered with the residue of christianism.

Of course, it is linked to Darwinism and there are links between Darwinian reasoning and Christian theology, usually rather orthodox. The story of the provincial fundamentalist who goes on a journey and finds his answers to his religion in the Darwinian creation myth is so common that it is provincial itself. Apparently a residue of Christianity remains with its apostates. As I’ve pointed out before, even the blogs you refer to are named after theological arguments like the “panda’s thumb.” Yet the theological arguments typical to Darwinists seem to be rather puerile and shallow: “God wouldn’t make a panda’s thumb like this because we all know that the Bible says that creation is perfect or somethin’.” Perhaps that’s because they typically leave their original faith as an ignorant schoolboy and so on.

We don’t know of designers of fracterial blagella or clud blotting cascades. We have some dusty old books that make extravagant claims that may be interpolated to this argument but no explicit formulations or empirical evidence.

The problem with your argument is that extravagant claims about things which are not known to exist are already being made in the name of science and conflated with basic scientific facts. In many instances all that a Darwinian argument consists of is imagining past events which are assumed to “cause” the biological world that we now live in. Some of the same people who deny essential truths because they apparently cannot be observed empirically also seem to think that imagining past events which cannot be seen can be advanced as an explanation for the “cause” and origins of biological form as we know it.

R.C. Sproul interviews Ben Stein

2008-03-20T18:24:00.002-04:00

Interesting interview, here's the link.

Interesting post...

2008-03-20T15:19:00.001-04:00

From Uncommon Descent:The Mystery of Global Warming's Missing Heat

Refining....

2008-03-19T20:58:00.003-04:00

I'm trying to refine and define a few old arguments which I tend to use as a pattern. I save comments here so I can find them. Given the repetitious pattern of some of this debate I should probably save more.

From a comment:
Wow, your mythical creator man sounds extremely well thought out and complex. Far too complex to have just "come about".

The reasoning of that argument seems to go like this: "If you say that an organism is too complex to have come about randomly then I can apply that argument to God and say that God is too complex to have come about. Once I have said that God is too complex to have a random origin I can then believe that anything can just happen."

Feel free to clear up your irrational and random arguments. After all, if I make them more intelligible you will just argue that I'm putting words in your mouth and so on and I'm content to let natural selection operating on your ancestry of worms put words in your mouth.

So who intelligently designed your mythical creator man?

I don't expect your mind to grasp any ontological distinctions. It seems that those with the Darwinian urge to merge all species, form, distinction and specification together cannot grasp elementary distinctions. Let it suffice to say that given what the Word says of itself, it creates itself: "I AM that I AM." and all that. If you are created as a reflection of something of that nature then you have the capacity to select and create as well. If not then what you say here has more to do with natural selection operating on the reproductive and excretory organs of ancient ape-like creatures than with intelligence. You should know that generally when Nature calls excrement happens, yet instead you insist on attributing creative power to natural selections and so on. What selected natural selection? Does intelligence and language seem unnatural to you?

Comment on irreducible complexity

2008-03-12T21:35:00.000-04:00

The irreducible complexity argument is based on the claim that evolution cannot produce a certain system. As soon as a feasible evolutionary route is proposed that argument falls apart.

What can generally be observed empirically is typically a form of irreducible complexity where if a part is taken away then a lack of function results. For sociological, psychological, political, theological or some other reason many scientists do not treat what is generally observed as the evidence that it is. Look at yourself for example, you neglect empirical observation and instead focus on proposing "feasible evolutionary" routes in line with Darwinian reasoning: "If an organism could be found which I could not imagine coming about in a gradual sequence of events then my theory would absolutely break down." For some reason those who are the first to blindly assert: "There is no evidence." also seem to be those most willing to cite their own imaginations as the equivalent of empirical evidence.

Irreducible complexity isn't an "argument" similar to Darwinian reasoning, it's generally an empirical observation which can be observed in the form and function of organisms. If one does not go the Darwinian route of imagining your own imagination to be the equivalent of empirical evidence you quickly see that the capacity to imagine things doesn't change empirical facts or explain the history of all biological specification, form and species. (Link)

Obamaism?

2008-03-05T17:25:00.002-05:00

From a comment:

It doesn't surprise me that your students repeat your “[Natural selection] is not random” mantra back to you like sheep,and are willing to accept all of this unsubstantiated naturalistic rubbbish as though it were unquestionable fact.
Most students these days are just empty heads full of mush, ready to believe whatever they are told. That’s why all the kids are for Obama. He tells them he believes in ”change”, in “hope” and in “the future”. Like Darwinism, Obama-ism sounds good, but it lacks any actual realistic or specific mechanism to achieve what it claims to be able to deliver.

(Tyharris at UncommonDissent)

Faith in change itself is an interesting pattern. Even if history shows that change is likely to be destructive progressives have always tended to believe that change naturally/generally leads to progress.

My comment on Obama would be this, it seems to me like every candidate that relies on the vacuous "Deaniac vote" typical to American college students ultimately loses. Perhaps despite being a good voting bloc for rallies where everyone yells for change, it's actually too fickle and apathetic to be relied on for doing much more than running with the Herd. Their form of rallying seems to be like what they do every weekend at parties where they yell about their feelings about things.

I could be wrong, maybe this time the Herd will be different for a change.

Crystallizing a few reflections

2008-01-25T12:38:00.000-05:00

Once upon a time there was a crystal which reflected on its own light. So that is what it did, as it was its nature and it was good. In a moment of reflection it thought it good to crystallize more crystals like itself that would form reflections of their own. Yet it reflected on this thought for an extra moment, weighing the danger of allowing others to reflect its light in themselves against the possibility of being able to infinitely reflect on things together with others. It allowed its thought to crystallize. For a moment the danger did not crystallize and all the new crystals reflected on things in harmony with each other. But there was an illusion that crystallized in one which drew so many in to reflect itself that it seemed to be reflecting its own light just like the original crystal. This crystal apparently illuminated many questions, yet it was all just an illusion that the original had already reflected on before it began.

Being mean enough to mean a little something

2008-01-24T16:12:00.000-05:00

From a comment:
I didn't know where else to post this comment, but I thought it needed to be made.
To put it blatantly, you're a jerk.

If you call me a jerk then I may cry a little tear about it. After all, I'm a person too.

You approach each opinion and article that you refute like the person who wrote it was a clear idiot.

The interesting thing about text is that even if the person who wrote it is an idiot, they may be right because words have to be taken on their own terms. For example, you approach what I write like I am clearly a jerk and yet you apparently believe that I may be correct.

I treat honest idiots who happen to have a low IQ as the result of a disability in their brain with a form of respect, perhaps a little pat on the head.

They are people, wrong or not they deserve some respect.

This is all well and good in theory, yet in fact when you make a judgment you need to have examples in mind. So far all you've said is that a post where I suggest that people do not want to understand is the perfect example of a lack of respect, yet what if many do not want to understand. I wouldn't say that I respect all equally, at any rate.

You won't convince anyone if you're a jerk.

As social patterns in America indicate you'll never convince young men to be "nice" and feminine based on a feminized form of Christianity, instead they'll just leave Christianity.

I'm not sure that my goal is to convince anyone but if it was I wouldn't try to convince men based on how nice I am. You refer to biblical texts yet who knows what its writers might write to people who do not love to speak the truth and seek comfort by avoiding it in the name of love.

A perfect example is in this particular entry. Did you consider that people were actually struggling to understand your writing - that they WANTED to understand it and thus commented about it? ....

I have considered that, which is why I suggested some of the faults typical to my writing. Yet I also noted that they seem to begin to understand enough to know that they do not want to understand as is illustrated by the fact that their comments fail to focus on the facts or issues at hand. Typically they shift from the truth to dealing with whether or not I'm a nice fellow and so on but the truth is that even if I am not a nice fellow facts and logic will still be what they are. I wouldn't say that I'm always a nice fellow anyway.

But that is not the point, the point is that they are not lesser beings – they do not deserve your scorn.

It is because I do not consider them to be lesser beings that I treat what some write with contempt or disdain.

Refute away! Use the brains God had given you – but do so in love – as God has called you to do.

It seems that for you love can be summed up with: "Be nice." If that is your view of love and it is correct then you need to live by your own words because you're already failing by beginning a comment on being nice with: "You're a jerk." For that just doesn't seem nice!

Global Warming and the U.N.

2007-12-18T11:29:00.000-05:00

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...

2007-12-07T16:30:00.000-05:00

Intelligent Reasoning on ID type logic.

Comments

2007-12-03T21:36:00.000-05:00

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.

_____

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.
_______

[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...

2007-11-30T17:30:00.000-05:00

...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...

2007-11-27T00:46:00.001-05:00

...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

2007-11-26T23:36:00.000-05:00

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?

2007-11-21T13:45:00.000-05:00

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

2007-11-21T13:27:00.001-05:00

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.

(Link)

(Archive: link)

Readability?

2007-11-12T12:44:00.000-05:00

Get a Cash Advance

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

2007-11-09T16:54:00.000-05:00

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.
_______
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.
_____

Archive

2007-11-08T01:09:00.001-05:00

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

2007-11-08T01:08:00.001-05:00

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

2007-10-31T22:48:00.000-04:00

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)
_______

(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.
________

The New Atheism

2007-10-23T00:01:00.000-04:00

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

2007-10-11T20:35:00.000-04:00

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?

2007-10-10T17:15:00.000-04:00

...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....

2007-10-06T18:48:00.000-04:00

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

2007-09-26T19:10:00.000-04:00

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...

2007-09-26T00:26:00.000-04:00

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

2007-09-20T14:41:00.001-04:00

Pictures of my kitesurfing instructor from last weekend:

(NE winds, about 30mph)

Related posts: Gone Windsurfing

Moral relativism..... supposedly...

2007-09-17T18:44:00.001-04:00

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...

2007-09-05T22:46:00.000-04:00

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...

2007-09-01T17:39:00.000-04:00

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

2007-08-23T23:23:00.001-04:00

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

Archive

2007-08-23T23:16:00.000-04:00

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?
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.
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.
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...

2007-08-23T21:58:00.001-04:00

Expelled the Movie

Wakeboarding

2007-08-06T21:33:00.000-04:00

A small video: Wakeboarding

My brother trying and tryin g again. ;-)

Looooove....

2007-07-29T22:13:00.001-04:00

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....

2007-07-24T16:08:00.000-04:00

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

Another comment....

2007-07-12T13:12:00.001-04:00

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...

2007-06-04T18:41:00.000-04:00

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...

2007-05-19T14:27:00.000-04:00

...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.

2007-04-26T21:08:00.000-04:00

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.