I feel like this is me actually starting this blog, so I'll introduce it and me. I am a second-year at the University of Chicago. I'm undeclared as yet, was going to be an English major, but then I decided to write a BA on Novalis which means I'm going to be a Comparative Lit major or something like that. Which means I need to teach myself German over the summer. Which is intense.
Grew up young-earth creationist in Arkansas. I don't recommend it. Kicked around charismatic evangelical Christianity for a long time, until I realized that none of it had ever made sense to me, and that I'd manufactured all the warm fuzzy Jesus feelings. So now I'm an atheist, and that, my friends, has simplified my life wonderfully. Guess I'll talk about that more later.
I am surrounded by exceptional people, to whom I talk about (lately) literature, ethics, and philosophy of science. I'm in charge of the fiction selections for one of the literature magazines on campus (it's called euphony and it's actually pretty legit. I think I've got a book review of Umberto Eco somewhere on that site.)
As for this blog, it's about music, literature, film, and so forth. Used to have theology instead of film, but you understand why that changed. My music tastes are omnivorous and ever-expanding, but I plan to review Of Montreal's Hissing Fauna Are You The Destroyer? and Demon Days by Gorillaz in future blogposts. Maybe Air's Moon Safari as well. Oh and Steven Wilson's Insurgentes. Lots of stuff, is my point. In terms of genres, classic rock, progressive rock, progressive metal, eighties synthpop, eighties punk, folk rock, and pretentious indie bullshit cover it pretty well.
As far as literature goes, I'm weirdly limited to mostly 20th-century novels, but a lot of those (GK Chesterton, Italo Calvino, Hemingway, James Joyce, Nabokov, Umberto Eco is a good list). Theoretically, I like sci-fi. In practice, usually not so much. I care less about fantasy, but therefore have lower standards for it and so probably enjoy most of it more? I tend to dislike most poetry not written by TS Eliot, and almost nothing before 1900.
Film is much more haphazard. Pretty sure Blade Runner is the greatest movie ever, with maybe Pan's Labyrinth in second place. Visuals are important - plots can be vague and still work, but a beautiful detailed world makes a lot of films great.
The rest is pretty much whatever I feel like. Perhaps this will include me talking about coming out to one's (fundamentalist evangelical Christian) family as an atheist. Perhaps it will include good conversations I have with exceptional people. Who knows? The possibilities are Literally Endless.
41 comments:
Levi, I am interested what the viewpoint of an atheist is when discussing ethics with exceptional people in Chicago....in others words is there actually a "golden rule" for exceptional atheists and what would the basis for that be?
I feel like you're asking two distinct questions here: 1) Why do we have morality (and what is it)? 2) Why should we act in accordance with it? I'll try to answer them in order.
1) So dozens of political philosophers have come up with answers to this question (Rousseau, Hobbes, and Locke come to mind). I prefer to think of it in terms of evolutionary psychology, but they all amount to pretty much the same thing: we have morality in order to enable cooperation, without which we would have no societies.
To break it down further, morality in my view essentially boils down to two principles: don't infringe upon others (life, liberty, property, physical and emotional wellbeing); do what you say you will do. Without the first, there's no reason to form a society because, hey, someone's gonna take your stuff or stab your face as soon as it benefits them to do so; without the second, there's no way to trust others enough to do anything in conjunction with them.
So yeah, morality exists to enable cooperation, which has huge and obvious evolutionary advantages, which is why it exists. Note that the "don't kill members of your family" instinct has been around pretty much forever, since any animal that doesn't have it will wipe itself out of the genepool pretty quickly. Also, the "do what is expected of you" instinct leads to cooperative hunting or defense, huge advantages for pack or herd animals.
2) This question is more complex, and worth a great deal of thought. Why do we tend to behave morally? Because we have this moral intuition, which is basically the highly evolved version of the "don't harm others" and "do what's expected of you" instincts. "Is", however, does not imply "ought". So if it's in my advantage to break with morality, why not do it?
First, let me clarify: even acting completely selfishly, one will, if intelligent, behave ethically the vast majority of the time, simply because if you don't, people will be less likely to cooperate with you in the future, and probably inflict some sort of punishment on you, thus making it a long-term bad decision.
This isn't sufficient, though, as there are cases where you can get away with it - although cases where you can do so with anything approaching certainty are extremely rare. What stops you from, for instance, killing your fellow shipwrecked sailor for the last bit of food or water?
Additionally, I feel (and I think you do too), that acting out of self-interest all the time leads to a petty, uninteresting life.
So we choose to behave ethically regardless of self-interest. That's fundamentally all there is to it. Certainly, we censure people who do not do so, and certainly, ethical behavior makes us feel good about ourselves - these may be the incentives for our ethical behavior, but they are unimportant: we behave ethically because we choose to do so.
That may be disconcerting to people whose ideas of morality are fundamentally based on absolute belief in a particular dogma, but I find it difficult to believe that there would be a stronger argument for choosing to believe a particular dogma than there is for choosing to follow the ethical code inherent in pretty much the whole of mankind.
There are lots of other points to discuss, so feel free to bring them up.
Thanks for the response. So through “evolution” we have learned that good behavior promotes cooperation therefore enables society to exist. Sounds easy enough. Years ago I used to love studying evolution. I wrote papers on phyletic gradualism vs. punctuated equilibrium, even attended a lecture featuring Stephen J. Gould. It wasn’t until years later that I realized how bankrupt the theory or should I say theories really were. Assumptions piled upon assumptions piled upon assumptions until you realize (if you are intellectually honest) that you got nothing, absolutely nothing. Except maybe warm fuzzy evolutionist feelings! J May be the reason I gravitated towards engineering later. Engineers use cold hard facts, footing strength , structural capacity, etc. . Oh we still make mistakes but the science is sound, its reproducible. With evolution your are awaiting with great anticipation for Richard Dawkins to finally verify the theory of evolution and drop kick Christianity for good. Just not going to happen and everything you wrote in your blog hinges on evolution. Sorry for the rant. I was just disappointed in your answer and honestly am just concerned for your spiritual well being. I hope and pray that you come to the same conclusion I did years ago. Come back to the roots you spoke about earlier Levi, they are simple but are steeped in absolute truth, something the atheist will never find. God Bless you and take care of you.
So with reference to the original question, and your comment that everything I wrote hinges on evolution, note that Hume, Kant, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, to name just a few, all came up with justifications for morality, none of which need God to function, and obviously all of them are way before Darwin, so even rejecting evolution, there's no way to claim that God is necessary to morality without dealing with centuries of philosophy to the contrary. I just think about it in terms of evolution because that's the way it makes the most sense to me.
Also, for the record, I came to believe in evolution years before I became an atheist.
Now then. Evolution. If I may simplify your argument, it consists of essentially three or four points: 1) Anecdotal evidence of your own experience. 2) Assertion that evolution is intellectually bankrupt, based on groundless assumptions, and that an intellectually honest examination will lead one to this conclusion.
3) An implied claim that evolution is not a unified theory and that actually multiple theories of evolution are in competition. (I'm less sure if you're saying this, but it's a point worth addressing regardless.) 4) Claim that evolution is a less valid scientific field than, for instance, engineering, since evolution is not reproducible. Let me know if I'm misrepresenting your argument at all.
With regard to 1) and 2) it is interesting that I would use almost exactly the same language to talk about Christianity: an intellectually honest investigation will (and in fact did in my case) lead to the realization that the whole thing is based upon a lot of groundless assumptions.
You may not have been saying anything like 3), but if you were, the Theory of Evolution, that all life on earth descended from a common ancestor by means of natural selection acting on genetic variation, is very nearly universally accepted among biologists. Plenty of the details are still in question, but no one disagrees with the big picture. See also this page from the talkorigins.org index of creationist claims, an incredibly useful index, with cited sources, and one I would recommend you check before making any more arguments about evolution just to make sure it's not something that has already been refuted thousands of times. Saves time for both of us.
4) So "reproducible" doesn't really work very well as a criterion for the validity of a scientific theory. "Well-confirmed" does - if you're able to reproduce a particular experiment multiple times with the same results, that's one way of confirming those results, but not the only way. And evolution is extremely well-confirmed. And actually evolution is testable, verifiable, reproducible and what have you. Obviously it is unreasonable to expect humans to suddenly evolve wings or something like that - in fact, such a thing would contradict evolutionary theory - but we observe natural selection acting on populations all the time. We've observed speciation - we've even produced new species in the lab. This is evolution. (Please don't bring the "that's just microevolution, macroevolution is impossible" into this. Macroevolution is microevolution happening a lot.)
So yeah, evolution. It happens. Seriously, that index is the most useful resource on this topic I've come across.
For the rest of what you wrote, 1) you seem to conflate atheism and belief in evolution. This is silly. Not all people who accept evolution are atheists. Probably most are not, just because atheists form such a small percentage of the world's population.
2) We (either the atheists or the evolutionists) are not waiting for Dawkins to confirm evolution and drop kick Christianity for good. First, because evolution has already been confirmed hundreds of times over. Second, because we (the atheists) do not view this as a titanic duel between the forces of Atheism and Christianity. We have decided we are atheist, and other people can do what they want. We all think Christianity is pretty much false, of course, but we're not all trying to get rid of it. Some are, I suppose, but I personally think it's a valid existential framework: it gives meaning to people's lives when otherwise they might not have any. I think the phrase "opiate of the masses" is apt here. If people can make meaning for themselves, then I think they should, rather than accepting someone else's prefab.
3) Terribly sorry my last response disappointed you. Not entirely clear what you were disappointed by. Hopefully this one is more satisfactory.
4) As for returning to my roots - no. When I decided to become atheist, I experienced a rush of freedom I had never felt before. All of the niggling inconsistencies that had always bothered me about Christianity, all of the many ways it had utterly failed to line up with the way the world actually world, ceased to be a burden to my mind. It was liberating, and if I may paraphrase Galatians 5:1, it is for freedom I have been set free; how could I submit again to a yoke of slavery? You're correct that the atheist will never find absolute truth, but that's not much of an argument against atheism, since I'm pretty sure no one can.
And I'm fine with that. We determine the purpose of our lives. There's no overarching grand narrative of this world, just billions of individual people making their own little stories. And when you realize that, the world becomes a much less claustrophobic place. You're no longer relegated to a tiny footnote of the ongoing inexorable march to apocalypse - you are the teller of your own tale. And that is glorious.
5) In the future, it'll save us both time if you skip the evangelism schtick. You want me to be a Christian again - got it. But I've heard and spouted all of the rhetoric far too often to be anything other than mildly annoyed by it. I've built up an immunity. Make your point with rational argument, or not at all.
I don't at all mean to interrupt the discussion going on here (which features some rather important ideas), but if I may just make a small, almost irrelevant remark:
"I tend to dislike most poetry not written by TS Eliot, and almost nothing before 1900."
If this were a classical text, there would definitely be an editorial note to the reader: "Supply I like before almost." (This is the intended meaning, right?) I don't mind the anacoluthon, though—I actually like it.
By the way, what's up, Levi. Good to hear from you (such as it is). (My semester has once again plunged me into a prolonged incommunicadoness—you know, the usual.)
Thanks for the links, I haven’t delved into this discussion in years so I found them fascinating. I have to say that the arguments sound about the same. Maybe it’s my limited cranial capacity but I am not seeing anything really new or definitive here (I will continue to review to make sure!). When I refer to the evolutionary theories as bankrupt, I don’t mean that all we have learned about creation is bunk or that we haven’t unlocked many mysteries over the years. What I am trying to say (poorly) is that the whole thing makes no sense to me. Primordial soup magically generating single cell creatures, magically diversifying into all this flora and fauna over billions of years. What the heck is driving nothing to something ? Not to mention the 3rd rock from the sun being the perfect distance, perfect speed of rotation, and perfect atmosphere to support all this. Statisticians laugh at the possibility of all this just happening. ( I believe we have now drifted off our original discussion but I am actually liking the new direction if it’s not too boring to you!) Let me ask you this: Could the rush of freedom you experienced be associated with not having to be accountable to a higher being? Or could it be the frustrations associated with (humor me here) being a created being, i.e. not knowing everything?
(Removed a couple of duplicate comments above. I'm slightly anal that way.)
Erik! [looks up anacoluthon] Yeah that's what that was. Good to hear from you as well, and let me know what's up with you when you have a break in your incomunicadoness (incomunicacion?)
Moses, the arguments against creationism haven't changed because the arguments for creationism haven't changed: creationist arguments are still just people rehashing the same already-refuted arguments over and over. Case in point: "primordial soup magically generating single-celled creatures" - the idea that life could not have come into existence from unlife because, well, it just couldn't - some of the refutations of which are here, here, here, and here.
As for your argument that the earth is too perfectly suited for life for this to be the product of chance, consider: the probability of a single planet selected at random having exactly all the right variables to support specifically earth-like life is indeed incredibly small. However, that's entirely irrelevant. One, there's a lot of universe out there, a lot of planets for life to evolve on. Two, Earth seems tailored to terran life because, hey, terran life evolved to fit the conditions on Earth. And three, a race of intelligent observers will necessarily observe that the conditions under which they evolved were in fact conducive to their evolution.
To sum up, the chance of a particular planet having precisely the right conditions for specifically terran life is very small. The chance of some planet somewhere having the right conditions for some kind of life is much, much better, and it's pretty much a tautology that life evolves in circumstances conducive to its evolution. You should read up on the anthropic principle.
As for the diversification of life and what is driving nothing (presumably, by "nothing" you mean "a universe full of matter and energy swirling around and smashing into each other", unless you're no longer talking about the origin of life but the origin of the universe, which is a different conversation.) into something, well, we know exactly what does both of those. It's called "evolution by means of natural selection". This argument seems to me to boil down to "I don't understand evolution; therefore it doesn't happen." Evolution may not make sense to you, but it does make sense to approximately every biologist. And to the vast majority of other scientists.
Let's take a moment to examine your use of the word "magically". Examining it in context, you appear to use it to mean "somehow, we don't know how, it just does." Let me ask you: how does this word, which you use in ridicule, not apply a thousand times more to creationism? "God magically created the world" seems to be a correct use of "magically" where "life magically arose from primordial soup" does not.
In response to your question, this is a fine topic of discussion. Discussing evolution is not boring to me. What is boring is having to answer creationist arguments which have been refuted hundreds of times over. Please check the talkorigins index before you end up making more dead arguments. Maybe actually read the whole thing. I've done it. It's fascinating.
In response to your last two questions: Please clarify. I actually don't understand the question here.
Here are a couple of quotes from your links you provided me, “Nobody knows what the most primitive cells looked like,” and “Nobody denies that the origin of life is an extremely difficult problem. That it has not been solved, though, does not mean it is impossible.” Your argument that my statement about primordial soup magically generating single celled creatures has been refuted over and over loses a little steam with the quotes above. You and your legion of evolutionist have not refuted anything. You have merely offered suggestions (yes based on much science and research that is all valid) but they are still just suggestions not fact, not settled. It is absolutely the pinnacle of arrogance and elitism to state so.
As far as the anthropic discussion, my point is much broader than you are giving me credit for. Observe : Bang – planets - sun – earth – rotation – gravity – atmosphere - day/night – water – ground. The odds of this just happening is statistically ridiculous but for fun let’s say yes, all this just happened. Continuing: primordial soup – lightening - single cells – multi-cells- critters – more critters – fish – big critters – hairy critters – Elvis. The odds of this natural process following the Big Bang adds another statistical impossibility, however because I’m a swell fellow and I like you let’s say this just happened also. Now add this happening concurrently: seasons – tides – plants – trees - etc etc etc. The odds have now exceeded the capacity of the first TI calculators. Now come on dude, give me a break, I’ll never understand scientists that stake their reputations on these kind of odds but I a guess as you have stated that most biologists agree on this, the herd mentality is in effect.
As far as my last couple of questions that puzzled you, I’m just wondering what was there about believing in God that kept you from feeling the freedom that atheism has now provided you.
“If I discover within myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world”
- C S Lewis
When Richard Dawkins entitled his book, “The God Delusion,” I believe he himself was suffering the self-induced delusion Paul speaks of in 2 Thessalonians:
2 Thessalonians 2
The coming of the lawless one will be in accordance with the work of Satan displayed in all kinds of counterfeit miracles, signs and wonders, 10and in every sort of evil that deceives those who are perishing. They perish because they refused to love the truth and so be saved. 11For this reason God sends them a powerful delusion so that they will believe the lie 12and so that all will be condemned who have not believed the truth but have delighted in wickedness.
I say this because God wants us to look to Him as the reason for our existence. That does not mean we cannot research and study all that He has created, but when we start to use our discoveries to disprove Him or justify disbelief I am sure this is where we confuse ourselves and begin to force pieces of the puzzle together that just don’t fit. The more we try the more we convince ourselves we must be right and the research will look like something it is not, it becomes a delusion.
Beginning our scientific study with God as our Creator greatly enhances the accuracy of what we discover but we must understand we will never have all the answers until the next life.
Moses, the argument that has been refuted is not "No one knows exactly how life arose." That's uncontroversial. No one is arguing with it. The argument that has been refuted time after time is "Life could not have arisen from unlife without God." And the multitude of plausible pathways for unlife to give rise to life ("based on much science and research that is all valid", I believe you said) is ample refutation of that.
Oh, and "the pinnacle of arrogance and elitism" which you applied to your straw-man there, you will indulge me if I take that and apply it to an engineer claiming that he is right and all the biologists are wrong about biology because "the herd mentality is in effect". Just sayin'.
Moving on: for life to exist, you need precisely one thing to arise randomly: something self-reproducing and capable of variation. It doesn't matter what it is, because then evolution by means of natural selection starts acting on it and you get life in abundance and variety. The chances of something meeting those criteria anywhere in the universe are pretty damn good.
And once you have life, it will evolve naturally to fit whatever conditions are present. There's nothing particularly special about earth's situation. We just evolved to fit it.
There's another argument, usually referred to as the anthropic principle, which I have to confess I have difficulty wrapping my brain around, but here's the thing: the human brain is bad at probability. We just are. Therefore, lotteries, casinos, the gambler's fallacy, and so forth. Additionally, probability is an incredibly poorly-defined concept, philosophically. So this gets hazy, but essentially, the anthropic principle states that the probability of us observing that the conditions on earth support our existence is one, since we couldn't observe any other conditions since we wouldn't exist.
And you know, for the sake of argument, suppose we are a several-trillion-to-one fluke. So? My own specific existence is just as unlikely. Random things happen. The answer is not to stop looking for a natural explanation, to give up and say "God did it."
And here's why: once you say "God did it," you stop investigating. You stop learning. You stagnate. "God did it" is not a valid final explanation for anything, because it is giving up on achieving an explanation. Case in point: when you say "Beginning our scientific study with God as our Creator greatly enhances the accuracy of what we discover but we must understand we will never have all the answers until the next life," first, that's utter bullshit. Explain how starting from the assumption that God made everything helps scientific discovery in any way. Second, "we will never have all the answers until the next life"? Seriously? That kind of cop-out is precisely why the God-as-creator assumption is spectacularly unhelpful. Starting from any point other than "let's follow the evidence and see where it leads" gives direct rise to things like the persecution of Galileo because of his support of heliocentrism.
So here is where you fail: you accept or reject scientific evidence based on whether it conflicts with established dogma ("...when we start to use our discoveries to disprove Him or justify disbelief I am sure this is where we confuse ourselves and begin to force pieces of the puzzle together that just don’t fit."). You're going to want to have a whole lot more proof for that dogma before you can legitimately claim that it overrides science. As in, nigh-mathematical certainty. Science is The Best Tool we have for determining the nature of the world. Treat it with some respect.
So your question remains incoherent, but I think I can answer it. Belief in God - specifically, belief in Christianity - was claustrophobic. It made the world smaller. It forced me to interpret everything through the narrow lens of dogma, and, unsurprisingly, reality refused to line up with my Christian understanding of it. Coming out of that allowed me to take reality on its own terms. That's what was liberating. Your C. S. Lewis quote is laughably irrelevant, however.
And um, turns out that when I became an atheist I stopped taking the Bible as truth. So using it as an argument is pretty ineffective. Doesn't really surprise me that the Bible describes people who don't believe the Bible as deluded. Doesn't convince me either, though. (It's not a self-induced delusion, by the by. The verse specifically says that God sends them the delusion. So yeah, Richard Dawkins is inspired by God by that argument.)
So a multitude of plausible pathways is proof? One can prove an apple falls at 32.2 ft/s2. One cannot prove life from unlife. I agree there are plausible explanations but I still don’t understand how you can claim “ample refutation.”
I never said I was right and all the biologists were wrong. I am saying that just because most of them believe that their heap of evidence points to evolution is not enough to claim, case closed. Engineering calculations have to be exact or the structure fails. I just see comparing the 2 as very different.
As far as your “Moving on” paragraph I find it most amazing of all. A random thing arises with reproductive and variation capabilities waiting for natural selection to act on it and create lots of cool critters. Wow! I have had to sit and listen to lots of salesmen in my day, and I have heard some pretty tall tales, but dude, that one wins the “ I can’t believe you just said that award!”
As far as probability is concerned you totally lost me (most likely my fault not yours) but basic statistics never seemed that hard to grasp for me. I also never heard it referred to as a poorly defined concept but I will take your word for it. I know my point was not complicated because I really cannot make complicated points! But the odds of the physical universe, followed by the generation of life, then evolving to us, with all the supporting elements including all the cool stuff in the ground like natural gas and oil. Odds are pretty tall, how do you say, several trillion-to-one fluke. My goodness man, I just don’t see how you hang your hat on that.
And who in the world said stop learning once we honor God as the creator of it all. You think science started with all atheists? You know that answer better than me. Starting with God fixes your problem also. We were not there before your Big Bang. Where did the matter come from and what were the boundaries of the matter, are there boundaries. You and I will never ever know this. Science will never reach that conclusion. If we start with the Creator and study the incredible accuracy and design of living creatures and the environment that support us it really fills in the many gaps in “godless” science.
I do respect science and I do respect all the research done in the name of evolution. I find it fascinating. But to tell me I’m not up to the argument until I prove my dogma, I think you know down deep that I don’t have to. I believe the evidence is apparent to all whether they admit it or not. My dogma as you say is based on faith, I know that you know that’s how my dogma works. Faith not sight.
BTW what was wrong with the C.S Lewis quote, thought you liked him?
And finally yes, the delusion was sent by God but only to those who refused to believe.
Mr. Foster you are an extremely bright and gifted fellow, I enjoy your comments immensely and do not wish to anger or frustrate you with my faith but as you are well aware, that is my job! Whatever you do please don’t close the gate completely on Christianity. You are young and as a somewhat older fellow I can promise you a good portion of what you think is settled science will change and change again. Happened to me! That’s a fact. God exists and He is fully involved in this conversation.
So you're not taking the time to actually read and understand my arguments. I know this because the first paragraph of your last post is already answered by the first paragraph of my last post.
So all you've got now is the argument from incredulity rooted in an apparent ignorance of evolution. Seriously, man. You do not understand evolution.
Here's a thing I've learned: when you read, say, Plato or Hume or Locke, you have to understand the text before you can disagree with it. And you have to reconstruct the argument in the text in terms that make sense to you before you can claim to understand it. This requires you to be able to put yourself in someone else's head, to see that, yeah, given Hume's assumptions, his argument is actually pretty coherent.
And here's the thing, Moses: you can't get outside your own head and into someone else's. This is why you do not understand evolution - because you are unable, even for a moment, to set aside your own preconceptions and try to see the world through a different lens. This is also why you are having such trouble communicating with me, why you come across as incoherent: you are fundamentally incapable of understanding how I think. No doubt your C. S. Lewis quotes and Bible passages are relevant to this argument in your head, but they aren't to me, and you don't seem to be able to grasp that.
It's ironic, really, that the practitioners of a religion whose primary function is evangelism would be so very bad at actually understanding other people. This was a big problem I had when I was a Christian. I think that one of the major forces driving my conversion was that I actually wanted to understand other people, and Christianity was a pisspoor model for doing that.
And the rest of your post: I didn't claim that you couldn't be a Christian and a scientist. Here's the difference between Galileo and you: Galileo starts by examining the evidence and following it to see where it goes. God-as-creator is only a secondary concern for him, if it's a concern at all. You (and Galileo's persecutors) start with dogma like God-as-creator and, as a result, fail to advance science in any meaningful way. This is borne out when you say that we will "never ever know" certain scientific details about the origin of the universe, while the scientific community is hard at work trying to figure out these very details. You actually explicitly state that you have a "God-of-the-gaps", and what you fail to realize is that science fills in those gaps. Does it all the time. Does it because it's not working under the assumption of God-as-creator.
So you don't have to prove the dogma on the grounds of which you are accepting or rejecting scientific findings, eh? "Faith not sight" indeed, "blind faith", in fact. You'll forgive me if I reject that attitude with the contempt it deserves.
C. S. Lewis ranges from mediocre (most of his theological writings, his literary criticism)to just decent (Narnia) to actually pretty good (Screwtape Letters, Perelandra). That doesn't make your quoting him relevant. I have some problems with Lewis (parts of That Hideous Strength read like well-written versions of the paranoid delusional ravings of Frank Peretti) but he doesn't deserve his misappropriation by braindead evangelical Christianity.
Thought I told you about the evangelism schtick already. It's not productive, it's a waste of time, and it's annoying. Lose it.
You are correct in saying that I believe I do not have to prove my dogma. God made it that way, not me. I am fully aware from each of our starting points there probably is no good discussion left. Thank you for taking the time to answer and not just blowing me off. I enjoyed it (except you last sentence sounded like a Chicago mafia thug).
I bid you peace, and one final schtick: God loves you dude, you are on my permanent prayer list.
Good evening priestwarrior it's Moses again. Came across a verse in my daily bible reading and thought of some of our previous conversations. Eccl 8:17 then I saw all that God has done. No one can comprehend what goes on under the sun. Despite all his efforts to search it out, man cannot discover its meaning. Even if a wise man claims he knows, he cannot really comprehend it. Now I know that scripture doesn't carry much weight with you but 2 things that came to my mind when reading these verses. 1) matter is infinitely small & 2) the universe is infinitely expanding. We really can't get to the smallest piece of anything or identify our external boundaries. Oh we have discovered incredible mysteries with science and will continue to, but can't we give Solomon a little credit for recognizing there will always be limits on our understanding of life? And this a few thousand years ago! And don't these limits logically prevent the declaration that there is no God. You said I can't understand the way you think, well help me, thats the whole reason I ask the first question. I really want to know. I want to know why I look at this life and its intricacies and see incredible design and others see the replication of DNA as just a continual random act of nature. Let me know....
Hey there. Welcome back.
So Ecclesiastes is an interesting book, because it, like Job, is in many ways a portrayal of man's struggle to make sense of a world where God seems absent and justice a myth. And while I don't think it's all that impressive that some folks a couple of millennia ago figured out that the world is a crazy and confusing place, I am impressed by one of the ways the author of Ecclesiastes chose to deal with that. Ecclesiastes 9: 7-10 could be my own perspective on life - Eat, drink, have sex, be happy, do what you want, and do it well, cause then you die and that's the end. Why, did you have anything better to do? In fact, v. 10 ("Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might, for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol, to which you are going.") wouldn't look out of place in Camus. Incidentally, how do you reconcile the "when you die, the end" perspective the author of Ecclesiastes adopts with Christian views on the resurrection of the dead? I'm legitimately interested - far too often, Christians simply ignore the most interesting bits of the Bible - the points of internal friction. I have yet to see anyone except Kierkegaard even attempt a satisfactory explanation of the Abraham and Isaac story.
Okay, I agree with you on some things here: yes, we are very small; yes, the universe is very big; yes, there are some things it is just physically impossible for us to know. (For example, since - as one of my physics major friends informs me - electromagnetic signals simply aren't coherent past a few light years, there are, in all probability, whole civilizations out there of sentient beings that we will simply never know about, and who will never know about us. We're not even a footnote to the universal story - there is no universal story, just a bunch of individual stories scattered through the libraries of a world where an inter-library loan is treated as high treason. If that makes sense.) And of course it is impossible to prove that God doesn't exist. Rather, since God's existence, as far as I can tell, isn't necessary to explain anything about the universe, and since his existence would raise many more questions than it would answer - the most obvious being, of course, why an omnibenevolent omnipotent omniscient God would create evil - Occam's Razor dictates that we eliminate God from our picture of the universe. That's the claim atheists like me make - not so much that God does not exist as that there is no real reason to think he does.
And okay, let's just take the extreme case here. Suppose, for instance, that we will never be able to discover scientifically what caused the Big Bang. Even then there's no reason to assume the existence of anything like a Christian God. I'll grant you that everything has a cause; I'll grant you that therefore the Big Bang must have had a cause; you can even call that cause "God" if you want. I don't care, as long as by "God" you mean precisely "whatever caused the Big Bang". But if you try to equate "whatever caused the Big Bang" with "an anthropomorphic omnipotent being who is really very interested in the specific behaviors of some tiny mud creatures", then I'm gonna have to stop you and ask you to fill in a couple of the intermediate steps.
So let me see if I can help you out getting into the head of an atheist. The argument from design is a really old argument - and for a long time, it was actually a pretty good one. We had no clue how stuff worked, and "God did it" was actually as good an answer as any we had. But then - to simplify a bit - we got Science, and Science told us how stuff worked. Biological organisms are among the most complex things around, and it was hard to imagine that something so complex had happened without outside input. But that's precisely why the theory of evolution is so very important: it tells us how those things happened. So when the argument from design says, "This could not have come about without something like God," the theory of evolution says, "no, actually, it could come about via these evolutionary pathways".
So the reason we don't find the argument from design compelling is that we already know - at least generally, if not yet specifically - how these things got to the point where they appear designed. But there's more: the argument from design really starts falling apart when you start to examine the purported examples of design. Take the human eye, for instance. Why's there a blind spot? It doesn't have to be there (octopuses get along fine without it). That's just shoddy workmanship. As an engineer, I'm sure you can understand how inelegant that is. And yes, we do get by, blind spot and all, reasonably well. But that's what evolution is supposed to do - that kind of jury-rigging and work-around is precisely what we expect of a blind natural process. It's not what we'd expect of an omniscient, omnipotent Engineer.
Or consider your half-evolved monkey brain (or my half-evolved monkey brain, if you'd rather). Here is a (really cool) website entirely devoted to the ways in which the human brain is bad at its job. So if you take the design perspective, everything looks like really shoddy craftsmanship, which doesn't jive with God's purported omniscience and omnipotence. If, on the other hand, you take the view that everything is the result of natural processes, then the clumsy apparatuses that have evolved to meet challenges make a lot more sense. And that is why I don't find the argument from design at all compelling. Hopefully that helps answer your question.
Here is the way Ecclesiastes ends: 13 Now all has been heard; here is the conclusion of the matter:
Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man.
14 For God will bring every deed into judgment, including every hidden thing, whether it is good or evil.
So I believe Solomon, like all of us, was simply reflecting on the shortcomings/frustrations of this life but in the end he still understood and revered the master plan.
Moving on to the God creating evil thing. I don't think you can really tag him with creating evil but more like he gave created beings choices. Some rebel, therefore evil exists. Does that demean God or exalt Him? I believe the latter.
The shoddy workmanship statement is most amazing to me. It really is unbecoming of an intellectual like yourself and I mean this in a positive way. Come on priestwarrior, you're a smart dude. You and other proponents of this philosophy just lost a few million years of your monkey brain with this statement. Blind spot? In- efficient brain? Come on. Nothing can match the complexity and efficiency of the body human. It was, and I say "was" a perfect machine before the fall of man, then imperfections set in and our years on the earth became numbered. But even with this our physical make up is nothing short of amazing, far from "shoddy."
However if the atheist wants to look at themselves and underdeveloped, I guess thats ok.
BTW Have you seen Aishwarya Rai, shoddy workmanship!!! Puuleeeezzzz..
I don't think much of your exegesis of Ecclesiastes. For one thing, it's debatable whether the person who wrote the last six verses of Ecclesiastes and the person who wrote most of the rest of it are the same person. But that's mostly irrelevant. The problem is that you haven't actually addressed my point at all. You've quoted a different part of the book, but if you believe that all scripture is god-breathed, you need to directly engage with the verses I quoted you.
Okay, let's do the theogony tango. One, the existence of beings with free will only explains the subset of evil that results from the free actions of such beings. It doesn't explain the existence of the immense anguish and suffering caused by natural disasters and diseases. That's all God right there. You will respond by saying that such things didn't exist prior to the Fall, so that's still our fault, by which you mean the fault of Adam and Eve, but due to original sin, our fault as well. Now I think it's pretty apparent that original sin is an intellectually bankrupt concept, but there's no way I can get you to accept that. So instead I'm going to challenge you on the existence of free will.
Let's examine the concept of choice. Now, in my model of human behavior, I have a mass of various desires arranged in a heierarchy. I make choices according to these desires and the information I receive from external sources. Now I am not ultimately responsible for my desires - these are pre-existing. Yes, I can generate new desires, but I choose to generate them based on pre-existing, more fundamental desires. So, for example, I have a pretty fundamental desire to be happy. I have received three data: that eating ice cream makes me happy, that eating ice cream makes me less healthy, and that being unhealthy makes me less happy. Thus, I construct two desires: to eat ice cream, and to be healthy. These desires are in competition, but this competition will be decided by fluctuations in the strengths of those desires - for example, let's say I'm hungry, so the desire to eat ice cream becomes stronger - or suppose that I've noticed that my body isn't in such great shape lately, and so the desire to be healthy becomes stronger. That's how choices work in my model of human behavior. Now, let's examine the free will model of human behavior (and if you have a better free will model than I do, by all means present it, but I think this is as good as it gets): Maybe you have the mechanism I just outlined, but additionally, over all that, you have some sort of choice-making faculty, some part of your soul or your mind that makes choices. Let's look at that faculty in isolation - strip away all the biochemicals, all the desires. Let's put the faculty of choice all by itself in a vacuum and ask it, do you want any ice cream? Now, on what basis can it say yes or no? It doesn't have any reason, any motivation, for choosing one or the other, and so its choice will essentially be random. And randomness is not what I think you mean by free choice. So for the faculty of choice to do anything, it has to be choosing on the basis of desires, which just reduces to my model. Free will is an illusion. It's a useful illusion, and one which everyone uses every day, but an illusion nonetheless.
Which means that God, being omnipotent, omniscient, and creator of all, is directly responsible for every choice every created being has ever made. For that not to be true, you need the faculty of choice to be somehow undetermined by anything else, and that simply does not make sense. Furthermore, this view is biblical: Romans 9 says very clearly that God is responsible for human behavior. Verse 18: "So then he has mercy on whomever he wills, and he hardens whomever he wills." Now obviously this is problematic - how is it just for God to judge people if he makes them do good or do evil? Paul continues: "You will say to me then, 'Why does he still find fault? For who can resist his will?'" (v. 19) Pretty much what I just said. It's a valid objection. Paul's response: "But who are you, O man, to answer back to God? Will what is molded say to its molder, 'Why have you made me like this?' Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honored use and another for dishonorable use? What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, in order to make known the riches of his glory for vessels of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory[?]" (v. 20-23)
Okay, Moses, look at what Paul has said and tell me that it's an intellectually satisfactory response. It's not remotely. The objection is, If God makes us the way we are, vessels of wrath or vessels of glory, why is it just for him to judge us for being what he has made us? Paul's response is, Shut up. He made you, he can do what he wants with you.
Look, if there were an omnipotent being who had created us, in some sense he would have the right to judge us for being the way he made us, since no one could really stop him. But in such a case, that being gives up all claim to be just in any meaningful sense. The problem of evil is that, no matter how you slice it, no matter how many hairs you split, at the end of the day, God is responsible for everything. That is what it means to be omnipotent.
Alright, so presumably you don't dispute the existence of the blind spot, or the numerous shortcomings of the human mind, so I'm not clear what your argument here is. Look, life is stunning, even at a single-celled level, let alone the amount of complexity that has been reached with not only human life, but human civilization. No one denies this. My argument consists of two points: 1) we know more or less how it got there. 2) It's amazing precisely because it wasn't designed. If it's not designed, then the existence of flaws is only to be expected, and really doesn't detract from the grandeur of the fact that it even works at all. If it was designed, then the existence of such flaws reflects poorly on the designer.
Look at it this way: let's say you have a child draw a picture. And you look at the picture and you're actually kind of impressed - the proportions are all wrong, but it's definitely a good picture for an eight-year-old to have drawn. Now let's say you have the same picture, but now you're told that it was drawn by a great artist. Now the flaws are intolerable. You reject the picture and say, "Well, if that's the art, I really don't think much of the artist." That's the point I'm making here.
Couple of final points: you really do yourself no favors with cheap shots like, "If the atheist wants to look at themselves and[sic] underdeveloped, i guess that's ok." That's not witty, and it entirely misses the point of my argument.
Second, and this continues from the first: when you returned, I thought, "Maybe he's really just trying to have a dialog here." So I gave you the benefit of the doubt. But it is becoming increasingly clear to me, from your clumsily executed potshots, among other things, that your only reason for being here is to engage in petty partisanry. You're not here to debate - you're here to be proven right. And while that may register as a "mission accomplished" in your own mind, all that's going on out here in reality is a failure to have a conversation.
Look, I'm willing to be proven wrong. I'm not to the point of excluding you from this site. But you're going to have to start trying to engage with my points. You're going to have to stop with the cheap shots. You're going to have to be, in a word, intellectually honest. If you can do that, excellent. If not, you will no longer be welcome.
Sorry about the "cheap shot" statement. Didn't see it as that egregious. You have been much tougher on me. But because I am truly sincere about our discussion I will refrain from any more of these. Heading to work, hope you have a great weekend priestwarrior. I need a little more time on your last post, you have some great points.
So going back to Ecclesiastes, I thought I was addressing the verses you referred to by saying Solomon was merely reflecting on the limits of this life. To gain everything while here is meaningless. The physical body returns to dust. At least thats the way I take it. Even though your point on potential author change is correct, I still see the ending as consistent with other scripture. The main point is to understand finite vs infinite. This make sense or not?
On the subjects of free will and original sin, you have excellent points but there is much more going on here when it comes to being the clay vs the potter. Your well articulated logic and explanation of free will doesn't begin to explain the omnipotent, omniscient Creator and just what it means to posses these qualities. In Romans 9:22 "What if God, choosing to show his wrath and make his power known, bore with great patience the objects of his wrath -- prepared for destruction? I see an indication here that even clay created for common use has a choice. In no way do I believe anyone was ever or will ever be created without a choice. If I thought this I would agree with everything you are saying. Also I don't think Paul is saying shut up and believe it, more like this is above your level clay. Is it not possible that a Creator residing in eternity while we reside in the finite has the ability to handle both free will and our destiny? I know it taps the brain but thats what I think Paul is telling us. So what I am trying to say is free will may seem like an illusion to the clay but the potter makes it work. Am I incoherent again?
Hey Priestwarrior, before addressing my last post could you please answer a few questions. I reviewed some of the links you provided in the past and some of our previous conversations and it appears to me that evolution is of paramount importance to the nonbeliever. If Monday morning came around and all the major proponents of evolution said oops, my bad, we were wrong. 1) How would this affect you & 2) Is evolution or scripture not making sense to you the more powerful reason for nonbelief. thx
In response to your third comment: Why I am not a Christian and why I do not believe in God are two different things. Similarly, evolutionary biologists going on record as saying "We were wrong," would have very different effects based on in what way they were wrong. Short answer: I would believe the large number of people who have spent their lives studying the relevant subjects. In fact, it's very difficult for me to imagine a scenario in which evolution wasn't true, but here's the most plausible such situation I can come up with: it is revealed that a massive conspiracy has been hiding or destroying all of the massive amounts of fossil evidence that contradicts the evolutionary narrative. (The question of how they got everyone involved to be so completely silent on the matter for decades is tabled.) If that were the case, again, it depends on what the suppressed evidence was. Assume it showed that all kinds of organisms have always coexisted on earth. Well, then, I'd probably be forced to admit that there was good reason to suspect the existence of some outside agency at work here. Assume further that the fossil record shows a six-thousand-year-old earth, and cataclysmic global flood about, what, four thousand years ago, as well as plenty of other evidence that somehow corroborates the narrative of the Bible. At this point, I would probably be forced to admit that the Christian God probably exists, and would promptly become a Satanist, because I view the Christian God as so fundamentally evil - or at least totally amoral - that the only ethical course of action, in my view, would be to oppose him. Which brings me to the second question: evolution is an important reason for my lack of belief in a deity. It completely dispenses with the argument from design. However, the omnipresent lack of evidence for a deity is obviously bigger than just evolution. The principle reason for my unbelief in a deity is the fact that he is a totally superfluous entity and thus terminated with prejudice by Occam's Razor. As for my specific unbelief in Christianity: a God who orders genocide, a God who makes some people in order to damn them and others in order to save them, a God who refuses to answer prayer, a God who inflicts needless suffering on the world, a God who, in short, is a total dick, is not a God I will serve. Hence the hypothetical Satanism. Furthermore, a religion such as Christianity, which reduces everything to merely one domino in the line to Armageddon, whose followers are often blatantly evil, which in my experience fails to apply even the most rudimentary textual criticism to its own sacred text, which thus accepts Matthew as perfectly consistent with Revelation, and above all, a religion which forces its followers to live in prisons of the mind, constantly suppressing independent thought, is not a religion which in my mind has any claims to validity.
Ecclesiastes 9:10 is not talking about merely the physical body. It is talking about you, the person, the human being, the consciousness. "There is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol to which you are going." These are not activities of the body, but of the mind - of the consciousness. The author of Ecclesiastes is clearly saying here that death is The End of everything. You have not answered this point. This is a problem that many if not most Christians have: they read the Bible as a monolithic text, totally self-consistent, when in reality it is a piecemeal collection of the writings of very different people in very different times. And so they gloss over the bits that don't make sense - the parts of Job where characters show up out of nowhere, say their piece, and then disappear completely, or where four or five contradictory morals of the story are given. And that's a real shame, because those are by far the most interesting parts. You never find contradictions in the Bible because you assume they don't exist, and so you fail to see them. Cognitive dissonance - it happens.
As for Paul, free will, and pottery: I see no indication in "Will what is molded say to its molder, 'Why have you made me like this?'" that the pot has any choice at all in the matter. If God has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, well, he made them vessels of wrath, and he prepared them for destruction. He is still responsible. I think if Paul wanted to communicate that we had a choice in the matter he would have used an analogy other than that of pottery. When you say, "This is above your level, clay," I don't see any difference between that and "Shut up and believe." In fact, "Shut up and believe" is the logical continuation of "This is above your level."
As for the compatibility argument: I agree that an omnipotent God would doubtless have abilities far beyond the mortal ken, perhaps even to the extent of reconciling free will and determinism, but the point I am making is, why should I accept that this is in fact the case? Free will says that you could have done otherwise, and determinism says that you could not have done otherwise, so why should I suspend the law of non-contradiction here? It's just more, "Shut up and believe". Maybe God is just to make people in order to damn them to hell, too, but my definition of justice is very different, and my definition is all I have. So when you ask me to set aside my reason and/or everything I believe to be ethical in order to embrace Christianity, what reasons could you possibly give that would be strong enough to convince a reasonable person?
Thank you. Maybe we can simplify the discussion by talking about your problem with the Christian God. I do find it interesting (and this is not a cheap shot) that this non-existent entity really gets under your skin. I know we are not supposed to read tone into email but dude you bristle when talking about Him. Was there any particular event in your life that created the perceived anger towards Him? If that is too personal I'm sorry we can move to our focus on God. I believe since the fall of man we are all inherently evil and deserve nothing more than His wrath. I cannot fully comprehend this (why me I wasn't around then) but attempting to point out all His perceived deficiencies and perceived inconsistencies is simply attempting to make God conform to your way of understanding. Are you not now playing God? Scripture says His ways are not our ways. God knew you,even before your were born. He is omnipotent and sovereign. He is not evil. You agreed with me in your last paragraph that He could have capabilities beyond ours and He does. I believe if you sought out his counsel like your do secular philosophers and scientists you would have a change of heart and we haven't even touched on His own personal sacrifice. What say you?
So here's the shocking secret reason I talk about God like I think he's a dick: I think he's a dick. When we're talking about someone who is on record as commanding the slaughter of children, you really don't have to try to go digging into my past to figure out why I dislike the guy. It's not that it's too personal - I like to think I'm pretty open. But seriously, the "you are an atheist therefore something must have happened in your life to make you angry at God" is a tired, foolish argument (almost as bad as "you are a lesbian because you had a bad experience with men") - and when it is used to avoid dealing with the objections said atheist would make, it's an ad hominem. It may not be a cheap shot, but it is a fallacy. You could have tried answering the actual issues I have with the guy.
As for my life, I actually had a pretty good childhood. My parents were good parents (creationist/right-wing/evangelical indoctrination aside) and I have a lot of respect for them, and what I think is a good relationship with them (friction over my atheism notwithstanding). The churches I went to consisted of good people overall, and I still keep in touch with some of these people. So no, I'm not personally angry at Christianity - I just think it's stupid and false and very often harmful.
Look, Moses, if God is going to punish us in hell forever if we don't believe in him, is it really so much to ask of an omnipotent being that he make it reasonable for us to believe in him? You can rationalize anything you like by saying "It is beyond our comprehension", but that is less than convincing to an unbeliever - i.e., the people you should be trying to convince, given the premises of Christianity.
Now, I think that it is fundamentally unjust to punish someone for believing something that, given the best information available, they had no reason to believe. You can say that my definition of justice is inherently flawed after the fall, but if your God is just, then you mean something completely different by the word than it does in common parlance. When by "justice" you mean "whatever God happens to do", then claiming that God is just is meaningless. It also means you seriously need to go read Plato's Euthyphro: your argument was debunked before your religion even existed.
So then you assert some things without supporting them, and I'm ignoring those points, but let me deal with your final bit there: "if I sought God's counsel". I kind of wonder what I was doing for the first nineteen years of my life if not seeking God's counsel on a regular basis. Look, I was a damn good Christian. If God existed, all he had to do was to say, "Hey, here I am," and I would not be an atheist today. Again, not a lot to ask of an omnipotent being. I guess I'm just a vessel of wrath prepared for destruction, huh.
What say I? I say that we've been at this for thirty comments, and you have yet to provide me with an interesting argument for anything. I say that, furthermore, you have failed to engage with any of my points in any meaningful way. I say that your repeated attempts at evangelism are obnoxious. In a word, you're boring. Go away. That is all.
Before dismissing me totally.... When you were seeking God earlier in your life, what kind of answer did you not get? What were you looking for that was not revealed? His actual voice or presence? Sometimes His silence is deafening to me also. Just asking. Also I'm trying to engage in some of your points but they are quite a stretch for my own cranial deficiences. :)
Okay, what I was looking for was something from outside of me - a feeling, a voice, a sign, anything - but something that I didn't manufacture myself. I had by that point gotten pretty good at screening out my own manufactured "voice of God" feelings and thoughts, and nothing remained.
So it went like this, more or less: "Hey God, you need to let me know you're around, because I'm losing my faith." ... "Well, there goes my faith." Obviously, it was a much longer process than that, and much more painful, but that's the essential point. I asked God for anything, he gave me nothing, I left.
And yes, this conversation has exhausted what usefulness it had. Perhaps I was too elitist in my rebuke, so let me say this instead: have a good life.
Well dang, I wish we had started here but I won't push my luck. Can I come back later if I promise to engage better? I bid you peace priestwarrior.......
I really have absolutely no interest in your rehashing arguments I've heard all my life for why we just need to have faith, so no. You can't.
I'll bring pizza...
Priestwarrior, one last item popped into my mind this morning that I had to share and its from your comments. You are lacking perserverance. Perserverance with understanding scripture, perserverance in your relationship with God, perserverance with this blog discussion. Seems like if it doesn't go the way you want it to or it's boring to you, thats it. I'm gathering my marbles and moving on. You don't want to hear this but since you were blessed with an incredibly sharp mind, maybe God is expecting more out of you. More patience and perserverance with things that don't make sense to you right now. Dude you are only a 3rd year college student, keep seeking. And this is not "evangelism schtick" as you call it, just interested in your well being if you can accept that. No mas,I will not bother you again.
You may not know me, but we are distant cousins on your mom's side and I dearly love your Branum grandparents. I would not be presumptious enough to think that I could convert you to a Christain faith after reading your blog and some of the discussion that followed your coming out post. However, I am interested in your process of abandoning your faith and wondered if you would be willing to talk about it with me via e-mail. While I would be delighted to see you return to your faith, my purpose is not so lofty. I want to understand your unbelief and help you view the Christian faith from a more respectable position even if you never accept it again. I have been through a similar process of losing my faith but found it again. I'm not as smart or as well read as you, but I may be able to understand your thinking if you help me some. If are interested, please contact me at dan.bouchelle@mrnet.org
Hello Priestwarrior, Long time no irritate! Humor me with some help if you will. In one of our earlier conversations you discussed Occam's Razor as follows: "the most obvious being, of course, why an omnibenevolent omnipotent omniscient God would create evil - Occam's Razor dictates that we eliminate God from our picture of the universe. That's the claim atheists like me make - not so much that God does not exist as that there is no real reason to think he does." Could you help me understand the use of this theory as you have stated. I thought it was about comparing 2 theories with the same outcome and choosing the least complicated. Not getting how you are using this...thx Moses
There is a tiny, tiny chance that I would have been willing to continue this conversation with you, had you demonstrated even the smallest fraction of a sign that re-engaging would have been productive for either of us. Your basic inability to grasp such fundamental concepts as Occam's Razor (seriously? just go read the article on Wikipedia. It's not difficult, and I used it pretty much by the book) shows otherwise.
Therefore, no, I am not willing to resume this inane discussion (not that you did me the minimal courtesy of asking). Let me be clear: go away. Do not come back. Do not bother responding.
It is completely wrong to assume that the idea that there are multiple theories of evolution must be creationist/intelligent design. It is a fact that there are several different theories of evolution. No, "microevolution" and "macroevolution" cannot be universally accepted as distinct theories. There are evolution theories that considers them to be scales of the same thing, although other theories of evolution (such as Ian Tattersall's inbreeding punctuated equilibrium) actually distinguishes between microevolution and macroevolution WITHOUT endorsing creation or intelligent design. Classical complexity-constructive neo-Darwinism is actually not the same theory as the limiting factor neo-neo-Darwinism that contains admixture of neutralism. The latter, which appears to be the mainstream opinion, has clearly given up trying to explain the information content of organisms by referring to limits to how many mutations per generation that can be purged by natural selection. The mainstream version runs into serious trouble considering that only one hereditary disease out of 20 can be explained by officially acknowledged functional DNA, meaning that evolution must work on a scale massively greater than thought possible to be viable. As shown on Pure science Wiki (the pages "Self-organization" and "Inheritance of acquired characteristics") a modernized version of Lamarckism (quite distinct from the classical version) based on working biological contexts sending complaints about proteins that do not do their job properly to the responsible genes can solve the paradox.
Martin J Sallberg
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