Here's yet another interesting article that takes on Mr. Card's ID article. This one's from biologist/squid-lover/lefty atheist P.Z. Myers. He's a just a tad critical, if you hadn't guessed....
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Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :
How on earth are people reading that article as a defense of intelligent design?
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
I think it's OSC's use of the truly weird word "Darwinist" to mean "radical atheist non-scientists." Because most people opposed to ID would probably as a reflex include themselves in the "Darwinist" category, if those are the only two categories available, and thus think he's viciously misrepresenting their motives.
OSC has a tendency to rail against the small minority of people who might meet his narrow, focused definition of a term that would otherwise be applied to a broader audience, which often opens him up to accusations of having created straw men. It's as if someone were to start an essay saying "Now, those people who say they worship Christ but like to eat the flesh of the heathen -- let's call them Christians -- are obviously monstrous. I think we as a society owe it to ourselves to track down Christians and imprison them, for their sake and for our own."
People who self-identify as "Christian" -- or suspect that other people might identify them as Christian under another definition -- might rightfully be upset by this.
In the same way, OSC's use of the word "Darwinist" to mean "bad scientists" when he presents no third option means that most evolutionary biologists, reading his article, will instantly perceive it as an attack on their group.
It doesn't help that Card has previously voiced his support of ID, and in fact very prominently plugged Behe's Darwin's Black Box when it came out; it's not difficult to recognize, especially since he doesn't spend any time attacking ID supporters as dishonest, lazy, etc., that his sympathies lie with that crowd.
As the link above points out, his generalities apply to, if anything, a vanishingly small percentage of people in the field -- and are far MORE true of the IDers he's previously endorsed.
Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :
The ID movement's principle goal is that ID be taught as science. ID claims that it is science.
From the article (emphasis added):
quote:There might be several or even many other hypotheses. To believe in Intelligent Design is still a leap of faith.
quote:But if the Designists are right, and there is no natural explanation, no process of mechanical causation that can possibly lead to the automatic evolution of complex biochemical systems, then at that moment the subject ceases to be science at all, and becomes either history (what did the Designers do and why did they do it?) or theology (what does God mean by all this?). That's fine. There are lots of subjects in this world that are worth studying, and in which true and valuable things can be discovered, which are not and cannot be science. But when you purport to teach science in school, the subject you teach had better be science, and not somebody's religion in disguise.
quote:Real science does not in any way impinge on a belief that God (or some other Intelligent Designer) created the world and everything that dwells in it. At the same time, real science does not -- and never can -- prove or even support the hypothesis.
These are direct contradiction of ID's central claim - that science can provide support for the existence of a designer.
It clearly does not support ID.
The problem is that's it's unflattering to "Darwinists" and somehow people are interpreting it to mean he supports ID.
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
quote:It clearly does not support ID.
That's only true if you define ID's "central goal" to be "teach Intelligent Design as science." That's no more accurate than Card's definition of "Darwinists."
Part of the problem here is that the bit that you care about -- Card's acknowledgement that ID is not science -- is so blatantly obvious to most scientists that it doesn't come as news. You're asking readers who've just been insulted to recognize the signal honor that he's doing them by admitting the obvious.
But that is, I suspect, the issue with the article: the article seems to be aimed to persuade supporters of Intelligent Design; he goes out of his way to make lucid arguments of a sort they might recognize. In so doing, it dismisses and insults those who already think Intelligent Design is a crock, and I suspect it does so deliberately. Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :
Perhaps I see that as important because I'm more truly in the middle: I'm not a believer in ID as science, but I have seen insults heaped on religious believers by scientists and (more often) non-scientist science types who try to extend science beyond its true subject matter.
And that portion of Card's attack on "Darwinists" is one that needs to be clearly made - often.
Posted by Kent (Member # 7850) on :
Tom, you are getting good at this! You are absolutely right and knowing your audience is the first rule to writing editorials.
Posted by Orson Scott Card (Member # 209) on :
I do the unforgiveable: I separate evolution (which is obvious) from the belief in natural selection as a sufficient explanation of evolution, which has problems (problems that were partly addressed by serious scientists with the punctuational model, etc.) Everything I said is true enough - but if widely understood, would separate the aggressive, hostile Darwinist believers from sober and necessary science. Since they depend on being able to wrap their faith in the mantle of science, this is regarded as a grave challenge.
However, I was underinformed about one key point, which explains some of the hostility. I did not know that the phrase "intelligent design," which I think is a huge leap of faith anyway, has been adopted by the same old lying pinheads who created "creation science." CS was and always has been dishonest about what actual science is, and it deliberately misrepresents evidence. I have been informed since writing my essay that the same old CS trash has been repackaged using "intelligent design" as a catchphrase. So the legitimate questions originally raised by the earliest IDers have been swamped by the deceptions of the Creation Science people.
Still ... when people get as angry as the Darwinists are, you know I have trodden on their sacred faith; and since they have long smugly believed, in the fashion of most religious fanatics, that their beliefs are TRUTH and all others should bow before them, any challenge is regarded as heresy which must be stamped out, with vigor.
It's what I expected when I wrote the essay. People would respond, not to what I actually said, but to what they have to believe about anyone who challenges their faith. The nice thing is that rational people will realize that I have stated a formidably MODERATE position that basically says, would you all shut up and let the schools teach SCIENCE. But the fanatics are never content as along as anyone, anywhere does not concede the perfection of their doctrines.
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
quote:I do the unforgiveable: I separate evolution (which is obvious) from the belief in natural selection as a sufficient explanation of evolution, which has problems (problems that were partly addressed by serious scientists with the punctuational model, etc.)
Not only that, you completely fail to point out what you think these problems are. It is perhaps forgivable for a scientist to get just a minim testy when told that the framework of his subject has 'problems' by people who do not identify said problems. And I think it is also natural that he will suspect that the problems in question are of the form 'this theory does not involve a god.' Of course, I am entirely prepared to be corrected on this point.
quote:However, I was underinformed about one key point, which explains some of the hostility. I did not know that the phrase "intelligent design," which I think is a huge leap of faith anyway, has been adopted by the same old lying pinheads who created "creation science." CS was and always has been dishonest about what actual science is, and it deliberately misrepresents evidence. I have been informed since writing my essay that the same old CS trash has been repackaged using "intelligent design" as a catchphrase. So the legitimate questions originally raised by the earliest IDers have been swamped by the deceptions of the Creation Science people.
I would be most interested to learn who you think these 'earliest IDers' are. Because if it is Behe and Dembski, then they are affiliated with the Design Institute, which - as you pointed out - is just another Creationist group.
Posted by Zotto! (Member # 4689) on :
Y'know, I posted some fairly substantial responses on Mr. Myers' site, and barring a few exceptions, pretty much all I got back was barely-disguised verbal attacks on Mr. Card. I can't even quite tell if some of the people even read my responses before becoming annoyed with me. Kinda depressing.
Posted by cheiros do ender (Member # 8849) on :
Funny thing is, a fundamentalist starts a site, with his own strong opinions about subjects posted on it, and almost everyone disagrees with him. But these liberals post hateful essays on their own site, flaming religious people with opions because "they're irrational". And all their replyers agree with them.
"When a person finds Joseph Smith more convincing than Charles Darwin, there really is no need to go into the details. They're just mad I tell you. Mad."
Posted by MrSquicky (Member # 1802) on :
OSC, I'd venture to say that you seem to many to be underinformed on more than one key point (and there are those, myself included, who wonder how you could possibly ignore things like the Dover trial and still expect to describe the situation accurately). Most of the negative reaction I've read centers on your use of the word "Darwinist" and the vilification of those who, in your mind, meet this label.
As far as I can tell, "Darwininst" is a term most often associated with the ID movement as a label they use to refer to pretty much everyone who opposes them. If there are significant groups that self-identify as Darwinists, they don't seem to have made much impact on the public consciousness. So, from the start, your choice of label suggests that you're coming from a less than respectful or fully-informed place.
And then you attribute to this group - as a whole - a very low character and history of behavior, which would be fine, were it true, but it simply is not. I've no doubt that there are some people who fit under some defintion of the term "Darwinist" who also fit the pernicious accusations of simplistic and dismissive opposition to ID, but this is by no means a fair characterization of all of the opposition to ID. In fact, were we talking about the "elite", the prominent scientists who do the direct work on evolution and such, then this group is well represented by people who have argued in a much more measured, fair, detailed, and above all, effective manner than you seem willing to credit.
Many people are angry, more are just dissappointed (and many are not at all suprised). You've written an essay that seems to be designed as a piece of demogoguery to reinforce the religious activist community's notion that their opponents are all stupid, bad people who have little reason besides their own arrogance for their positions. And you use what appear to be blatant falsehoods as the main pillars in your argument. So, I can see how people have a low opinion of your essay.
edit: spelling, indeed, ye are a cruel master
[ January 25, 2006, 09:55 AM: Message edited by: MrSquicky ]
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
quote:when people get as angry as the Darwinists are, you know I have trodden on their sacred faith
Scott, I'm not sure this explains all the anger you're seeing. While I'm sure that part of it -- for some people -- is investment in a sacred cow, a lot of the anger I've seen here, on Ornery, and on other blogs is directly tied to your tendency to paint with a very, very big brush.
You use "Darwinist" in your article to refer to supporters of natural selection, differentiating them from Creation Scientists and Intelligent Design advocates. You then go on to list "seven mistakes of Darwinists," implying that these mistakes are common in or even inherent to the "Darwinist" position. The problem is that a surprisingly small percentage of actual "Darwinists" fall into any of those traps, and almost no Darwinists are guilty of all of them.
Had you, like Brin, merely pointed out that here are potentially hubristic problems that should be avoided, I don't think you would have offended anyone but the thinnest-skinned readers. But, then, I don't think you would have gotten all the hits, either.
By creating two categories for the "creationist" position -- Intelligent Designers and Creation Scientists -- and attacking only one of them, but then lumping ALL "Darwinists" into the same vilified category, you do "Darwinism" a disservice. Imagine if you had not made a distinction between creationists and IDers in your article; that's roughly what you did to "Darwinists."
Posted by Rakeesh (Member # 2001) on :
I think you have to go out of your way to view that article as a defense of intelligent design. I think you've got to be sticking your toe into the crowded hallway.
Posted by MrSquicky (Member # 1802) on :
It depends on what you're talking about. If you're talking about the idea of ID, then I agree. OSC is pretty clearly not defending that. However, I think you can make a strong case that it is a defense of the people who are pushing ID. They come out of the essay looking like the good guys and the people who oppose them as the bad guys.
Posted by Bokonon (Member # 480) on :
Yeah, to me, a lot of it seems to be saying, "Sure these people, to whom I'm sympathetic, may be wrong, but they might also have some valid points, but they are being shut out by these people over here, who are arrogant in their own knowledge."
Most of the arguments I've seen here seem to take issue with how open that latter group is. Many feel OSC hasn't effectively differentiated that group out, or even sees anyone who could be differentiated.
-Bok
Posted by Omega M. (Member # 7924) on :
I thought Myers was pretty rude (but I gather he's done this sort of thing a lot, so he's probably sick of it); but this article of his to which the OSC article linked has a good explanation of how irreducible complexity can come about through evolution. It doesn't show that every irreducibly complex system came about that way, but it might make it possible to assume in general that irreducibly complex systems in nature arose naturally and that we just don't have all the details yet.
Posted by plunge (Member # 9103) on :
quote:I do the unforgiveable: I separate evolution (which is obvious) from the belief in natural selection as a sufficient explanation of evolution, which has problems (problems that were partly addressed by serious scientists with the punctuational model, etc.)
See, this is where the problems start. You imply that PE is primarily a criticism of and an answer to natural selection as a mechanism. But it's not: it's a critique of phyletic gradualism.
I also think you grossly misunderstand the critiques being made of ID, but I doubt I'll convince you of that directly unless you come to that realization yourself without feeling you have to defend your article against a critic of it.
quote:Everything I said is true enough - but if widely understood, would separate the aggressive, hostile Darwinist believers from sober and necessary science. Since they depend on being able to wrap their faith in the mantle of science, this is regarded as a grave challenge.
That is one possibility, certainly. But there are plenty of others which I happen to find more plausible. Put shortly, I don't think there are lot of "Darwinist believers" who "idolize Darwin." Can you point me to any as an example? I don't think I've ever met a biologist who wasn't eager: EAGER, to point out that Darwin was amazingly wrong and ignorant about any number of things (most spectacuarly his model of heredity) or that science is never complete or finished. Your article is thus either attacking people that don't exist, or trying to smear a whole lot of people with a broad brush, which understandly makes them a little angry. I mean, you basically accuse of them of highly dishonest and fallacious argumentation.
Do you regularly remain calm when someone claims that you are dishonest and argue in fallacies?
quote:Still ... when people get as angry as the Darwinists are, you know I have trodden on their sacred faith; and since they have long smugly believed, in the fashion of most religious fanatics, that their beliefs are TRUTH and all others should bow before them, any challenge is regarded as heresy which must be stamped out, with vigor.
For someone that made a big deal over alleging that others were making fallacious arguments (without every giving a single citation or naming any names), surely you recognize that trying to emotionally characterize your critics (as "angry" or "fanatic") so as to cast doubt on their arguments is not exactly a gentlemanly tactic itself, no?
quote:It's what I expected when I wrote the essay.
The same statement is often made by those that pen defenses of astrology or suggesting that Sylvia Browne can predict the future. The fact that you got criticism for harshly criticizing others is, I'm afraid, not a very exciting prediction.
quote:People would respond, not to what I actually said, but to what they have to believe about anyone who challenges their faith. The nice thing is that rational people will realize that I have stated a formidably MODERATE position that basically says, would you all shut up and let the schools teach SCIENCE. But the fanatics are never content as along as anyone, anywhere does not concede the perfection of their doctrines.
But as far as I can tell, the responses you got, while they ranged in tone from vicious to straightforward, all drew attention to substantive misrepresentations of science in your article (I pointed out a problem right at the outset). More importantly, they pointed out that you made accusations about what you claimed "Darwinists" were using as arguments against ID... without citing examples or even specifying who "Darwinists" were: you even used the term almost interchangably with critics of ID in general. As such, you basically attacked a bunch of straw men and ascribed those straw men to a vague category of people using a term that Creationists and ID proponents alike use to characterize all scientists that do not agree with their claims.
Posted by Orincoro (Member # 8854) on :
quote:Originally posted by cheiros do ender: Funny thing is, a fundamentalist starts a site, with his own strong opinions about subjects posted on it, and almost everyone disagrees with him. But these liberals post hateful essays on their own site, flaming religious people with opions because "they're irrational". And all their replyers agree with them.
"When a person finds Joseph Smith more convincing than Charles Darwin, there really is no need to go into the details. They're just mad I tell you. Mad."
Well, this is my biggest problem with "liberalism." I vote democratic most often, and subscribe to an agenda that would sure label me a "liberal," but the thing I hate most is listening to other likeminded people who don't have the grace or taste to pick battles they can WIN. This is one reason that the Democratic party is in such poor shape politically, we have opinions, and they're substantively different, but we couch everything in this absurd way where we either claim the world is ending, or is going to end tomorrow if things don't go exactly our way. We as in both parties, but in different ways.
Rather than say, argue against a group like the IDers in the way OSC has done, identifying their belief as being misrepresented (not 'wrong'). This is his true opinion, and a demonstrable fact, ID is not SCIENCE. The problem is that yes, he looks like an equally intolerant name caller when he turns around and couches the "darwinist" viewpoint as this intolerant fascist psuedo-religion. Now HIS viewpoint is all muddy; is he intolerant? Is he understanding of people who simply look at the scientific evidence, hear the facts and say, 'hmmm' darwinism makes sense. He probably is one of these people, (though he doesn't say) and yet he doesn't want to be labelled within the SAME group he has just vilified.
The really POTENT irony in this is that the counter-argument from this jerk is as full of generalizations and pointless 'othering' as anything OSC wrote, and less aware of its own blow-hardiness.
I wonder if people like OSC (or Myers) didn't spend their time constructing strawmen to burn over issues like this, they might not be encountering a bunch of prickly adversarial science types. I believe I have heard similar sentiments from OSC himself, and yet through a myriad of threads, he fails to acknowledge that this point holds any water.
Hmm, there seems to be some good points in OSC's article, but I don't want to be labeled a "Cardist"
[ January 27, 2006, 03:47 AM: Message edited by: Orincoro ]
Posted by plunge (Member # 9103) on :
At least Myers is directly responding to actual claims made by someone, rather than railing against imagined claims made by no one in particular, but aimed by implication far and wide. That at least allows us to know what specific claims are being attacked and whether Myers' characterization of those claims is accurate. Most of Card's characterizations seem to be a case of misunderstood contexts or caricatures of actual arguments.
[ January 27, 2006, 05:25 AM: Message edited by: plunge ]
Posted by Tom Curtis (Member # 9104) on :
quote:But the problems that the Designists raise with the Darwinian model are, in fact, problems. They do understand the real science, and the Darwinian model is, in fact, inadequate to explain how complex systems, which fail without all elements in place, could arise through random mutation and natural selection.
quote:The irony is that there are plenty of Darwinists who are perfectly good writers, capable of explaining the science to us well enough to show us the flaws in the Designists' arguments. The fact that they refuse even to try to explain is, again, a confession that they don't have an answer.
Orson Scott Card has magnaminously admitted to one mistake, the mistake of not knowing that "that the phrase "intelligent design," which I think is a huge leap of faith anyway, has been adopted by the same old lying pinheads who created "creation science."" Apparently he also does not know that Behe, whose work he endorses, is a member of the same organisation as some of those "old lying pinheads", nor that Behe co-authored the adaptation of "Of Panda's and People" from a creation science textbook to a Intelligent Design textbook by the happy expedient of replacing the word "creator" with "Intelligent Designer" and in other respects leaving the text largely untouched.
But as my quotes clearly demonstrate, OSC straightforwardly endorses Behe's criticisms of Darwinism as genuine problems. They are not. They are pseudo problems supported by rhetoric. Taking OSC's favoured example we can note, for example, that Behe's argument is of the form of a dilemma. As I wrote in another forum:
quote:He allows that there are direct evolutionary pathways, and indirect evolutionary pathways. In a direct pathway, the system increases complexity over time while maintaining the same function throughout. In an indirect pathway the system may change function as it evolves, or may decrease in complexity, or may co-adapt. (There are four or five types of indirect Darwinian pathways known, depending on how you classify them.) Darwinists expect that most complex systems will have evolved through several different types of indirect pathway at some time in their evolution.
Now Behe defines an interesting property, Irreducible Complexity. It is interesting because no IC system could evolve by a direct darwinian pathway. So if we find an IC system (and there are many), we know that it either evolved through one or more indirect darwinian pathways, or that it did not evolve by darwinian means. To draw the second disjunct as a conclusion, Behe must show the first disjunct to not be true. BUT his only argument to that effect is that he personally finds it improbable that anything could evolve by an indirect darwinian pathway. It is clear when he describes a potential indirect pathway that what he has in mind when he makes that assessment is not a darwinian pathway at all, ie, a pathway involving only small, high probability transitions. Thus Behe dismisses the primary routes to complexity in Darwinian systems with an argument from incredulity, and apparently without even understanding the theory he thus dismisses.
This core problem - his reliance on a subjective probability estimate as his only argument to establish his second horn of the dilemma - is not the only problem with Behe's "problem" for Darwinism. He is guilty of vague definition, of ignoring counterexamples, and of presenting as examples of Irreducible Complexity systems which in fact are not IC by his own definition. What is more, there have been copious responces by Darwinists to Behe's argument. Examples include:
(The third is a talk origins faq which in turn links to four other Darwinist responces.)
And this brings us to the my second quote from OSC's article. It is simply not true that Darwinist's have "refuse even to try to explain" the flaw's in "the Designists' arguments". In addition to numerous internet articles, several articles in Philosophy of Science magazines, articles in popular magazines such as Scientific American and New Scientist, there are also a range of books written explicitly to discuss the arguments of the "designists".
This brings me to my own dilemma. OSC was either ignorant of those writtings when he wrote his article, or he willfully ignored them. In the first case he is guilty or purporting to an informed comment on a subject he had not researched, or researched in the most biased way. Even a simple Google search on "Irreducible Complexity" turns up five Darwinist critiques of IC on the first page, all of which link to yet more Darwinist critiques. The only way OSC can have avoided this mass of critiques is if he had confined his reading to designist sources alone, or not bothered to research at all. The alternative is even less savoury, for it would represent deliberate deception. Card is guilty of either pontificating without knowledge, or deliberate deceit.
No sin, however, is unforgivable. If Card had honest intent, then he is quite capable of demonstrating that fact by retracting his errors. Not just in an obscure forum, but in their original venue. Failing such a retraction, however, I see no reason to give Card's opinions any regard other than disdain.
Posted by plunge (Member # 9103) on :
The most ironic thing is that evolution proper is an EXTREMELY contentious field. There are arguments so nasty and vicious that they are shocking. Yet all of this is within a particular scope of discussion, and by and large it's not disputes over things with which most people are familiar. It is only by misrepresenting the nature of these debates to the public that PR movements like ID make any headway in convincing people that evolution is a "theory in crisis" or other such unscientific nonsense.
Evolution is a scientific explanation. That means it lives or dies on its ability to be consistent with the evidence we have and to continue producing productive lines of inquiry. So far, it's getting along just fine, which is the best any scientific theory can ever do. And that's that.
Posted by Francis D (Member # 9121) on :
Congratulations, Mr. Card. You have just downgraded yourself from "Tool" to "Useful Idiot".
Before the creationist lobby got in on the act, there was a small but valid ID movement both in Theology and in Science. Mostly it sat around theorising. Back then there wasn't much of a controversy (or rather most of the controversy in evolutionary biology was elsewhere). The entire controversy you are commenting on was stirred up by the creationists
And as for your take on things, your essay started with
quote:My first exposure to Intelligent Design theory was Michael Behe's book Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution. While disavowing any Creationist agenda per se, Behe pointed out serious problems in the strict Darwinian model of evolution.
At that point, you are defending the creationists (including a co-author of the revised "of pandas and people") by name as well as defending their cover. You then produce seven beliefs about the behaviour of scientists (you can probably find a very few examples where the middle five hold - but not many). You yourself admitted the last one to be true (and now admit the first one to be true).
You then wonder why you are about as welcome as someone wearing a black shirt in a Jewish neighbourhood is when he starts loudly defending National Socialism, even if what he means by National Socialism is that the belief that every country should look after itself and all members of that country.
The icing on the cake is your statement that If Darwinists persist in trying to tar the Designists with the Creation-Science brush, then it is bound to appear, to anyone who has actually examined both, that the Darwinists are trying to deceive us. - when, now you have examined both you admit that most of the Designists are in fact thinly disguised (and more media savvy) creationists. To quote what you claim about the "Darwinists", they’re apparently counting on most people to not care enough to discover the difference.
And seemingly it worked for a while...
Posted by El JT de Spang (Member # 7742) on :
[editted for preachiness]
La la la!
[ January 30, 2006, 05:18 PM: Message edited by: El JT de Spang ]
Posted by Kagehi (Member # 9123) on :
Oh, an amazing rebuttal there Spang...
Seriously, I am a fan of some people like David Brin, though not so much OSC. However, while I find the idea of Uplift that Brin wrote about interesting, I know enough biology to conclude that I could probably design better "code" than found in DNA on this world. Hell Microsoft could write better code. There simply isn't any scrap of evidence for any kind of design. Worse, the only people who where able to codify ideas like Irreducible Complexity, and some really bad mathematics from Dembski, are all members of the same organization that brought us the theory of Noah soup. You know, the one where some imaginary intervention prevented a global flood from boiling every living thing on the planet, including the boat, Naoh and everything on it. In other words, not only are the arguments invalid, they are predicated on the need to invent something sciency, to undermine science. None of those arguments for ID arose from the prior ID movement. They can all be traced back *directly* to the Discover Institute's think tank, whose sole and only goal is to replace over 200 years of critical thinking and analysis with, "Some things we will never know, and God did those!"
Here is a suggestion, find *any* argument for ID that isn't directly tracible to the DI think tank or fundimentalist nonsense. Then, if, which I find unlikely, you find one, present a theory about how to test the idea. OSC is right in the sense that the idea was hijeacked, by people with the resources, influence and well paid think tank needed to invent superficially believable arguments and who had a press corpse with the power, influence and ability to promote it, through ignorance, our failing science classes, human gullibility and vast infusions of money from those same gullible people. The only way ID can regain credibility is to, ironically, abandon its original name and disassociate itself from anyone remotely connected to DI. OSC however misses the point that ID without DI to think up arguments for it, is no more tangible than the numerous bits of wishful thinking found in books about pyramid power or the Burmuda Triangle. A lot of wishful thinking, misunderstanding of science and an unwillingness to give up an idea that seems compelling, no matter how much evidence suggests the believer is wrong and their understanding of the science involved inadequate to knowing why they are wrong.
I don't think Francis D's implication is exactly accurate. I think OSC has gone from totally clueless or mere fool. Fool in this case meaning one prone to walk over cliffs in the dark, because they are simply ignorant of being near a cliff. Ignorance can be cured. Behe and Dembski are true idiots, because they are literally unwilling, and possibly simply unable, to recognize that they are ignorant of the subject, gaps exist in their understanding and they can be or are wrong. This is a whole hell of a lot harder to cure.
Posted by Puppy (Member # 6721) on :
Wow, a bunch of insulting or highly-critical posts made by new members after a rebuttal essay is cited on someone else's webpage?
What a surprise.
Francis, your introductory line goes WAY outside the standards of civilized discourse. Seriously, tone it down, or you will not even begin to fit in here.
Posted by Puppy (Member # 6721) on :
You know, Card is actually very tractable and reasonable in a discussion when you engage him respectfully, as an equal.
These attempts to personally denigrate him, call him names, and insult his intelligence, however, will not accomplish anything at all, besides pissing people off.
If you think he doesn't know some key piece of information, you might try saying, "Mr. Card, this fact may interest you. Bearing this fact in mind, I think that THIS position might be more accurate than the one you have expressed."
Going up to him instead and saying, "Mr. Card, you are obviously an ignorant tool because you clearly didn't know this particular thing," smacks of third-grade social posturing, rather than intelligent discussion, and ought to be beneath anyone who engages in a discussion like this.
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
Say, Puppy, what happened to your complete dismissal of the thought that a small retraction might be in order? OSC's post here looks pretty much like a retraction to me.
Posted by Oobie Binoobie (Member # 8059) on :
I blame myself, fool that I was for thinking that since Brin and Card came to roughly the same conclusions, after reflection, that Creation "scientists" had hijacked ID for their own demagoguery, that the topic could be of interest on Brin's blog just as much as here. So I referred to it in full, over there.
I thought it would spawn interesting discussion to bring those there together with those here.
Instead, two of the more vocal knee jerkers from over there came here to call OSC names. I suppose he takes it with equanimity; I know I've been called worse, myself, just not since the ninth grade...
Personally I think the use of Card's *prior* writing to rebut a retraction written *later* was fallacy not worthy even of junior varsity debating, and succeeded marvelously, along with Myers, in making Card's original points about stupid arguments by dogmatic Darwinists, far better than he did himself.
I dearly wish people were above the juvenile stuff, because I think the subject is remarkably interesting, that both Card and Brin bring viewpoints that make it more interesting (and you'll note that even though Brin used Card's stuff mostly as a springboard for his own case, he did *not* treat Card to immature namecalling or dismissal of ideas. Instead he, as Card did, allowed for the possibility that he could be wrong, and thought about it, and responded to critics with *refinements* instead of *rejections*.
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
quote:Personally I think the use of Card's *prior* writing to rebut a retraction written *later* was fallacy not worthy even of junior varsity debating, and succeeded marvelously, along with Myers, in making Card's original points about stupid arguments by dogmatic Darwinists, far better than he did himself.
I don't understand what you are referring to, here. Could you explain?
Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :
quote:Say, Puppy, what happened to your complete dismissal of the thought that a small retraction might be in order?
It was a rejection of the possibility of a retraction "[b]ased on an expression of contempt by you."
quote:OSC's post here looks pretty much like a retraction to me.
A retraction based on additional research and information, not the contempt.
The contempt portion confirmed OSC's opinions expressed in the majority of the article which he did not retract. With good cause.
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
In all honesty, I do not see where that particular post of mine was contemptuous. Are you sure you're not reading my known opinions of religion into what I said about ID?
Posted by Puppy (Member # 6721) on :
Actually, I'm forced to concede that in light of what has been said in this thread, King of Men has been downright respectful
Though requesting a retraction is generally bad form in a discussion, in my opinion, and suggests a level of umbrage at the original statement that didn't seem justified by the problems King was trying to raise.
In other words, go ahead and disagree. Go ahead and persuade him to change his opinion. But requesting a retraction was really just weird in that context.
Posted by Francis D (Member # 9121) on :
quote:Originally posted by Puppy: Francis, your introductory line goes WAY outside the standards of civilized discourse. Seriously, tone it down, or you will not even begin to fit in here.
...
You know, Card is actually very tractable and reasonable in a discussion when you engage him respectfully, as an equal.
When Card actually takes the time to look at both sides of the argument fairly, and does that before wading in then I will engage him respectfully, as an equal. Unfortunately he did not do this and therefore gains reproof, as from an adult to a child.
His notions of ID appear to be taken from Behe's "Darwin's Black Box". This demonstrates that he has not done much background reading on the subject - that book has been thoroughly debunked. (A simple google for Darwin's Black Box gives a good debunking as the third link (the first after Amazon.com). The first link on a google for Behe is also a debunking. In order to describe ID as a scientific theory, Behe has to use a definition that makes astrology a scientific theory ( http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8178&feedId=online-news_rss20%22 ). None of this is hard to find.
Therefore, by offering Darwin's Black Box as a serious exhibit, Card demonstrates he has not done much background research. Instead he lists seven "Darwinist" responses. The first he calls name-calling because Behe's section of the ID movement were equated with Creationists. Even Card now admits that they are Creationists.
This was well known long before Card wrote his essay. There has even been a fairly comprehensive legal ruling with a fair amount of media coverage that found precisely this. Therefore Card did not check his basic facts before he considered himself expert enough to write an article on the subject.
Steps 2-6 all happen sometimes, but are definitely not universal. There is probably a good essay in there on Science Communication and what Science Communicators can learn from the ID movement. But that is not what Card wrote. (Incidently the reason that IDers are better at communicating to a lay audience is that most scientists are busy doing professional research - there are no articles in peer reviewed journals that argue for the intelligent design of complex mollecular systems. The IDers are entirely focussed on communication - meaning that they damn well should be better at it than the average scientist).
And without Behe's writings (debunked more thoroughly than even Erich von Daniken's writings - AFAIK Daniken was never pulled apart in court), and without the accusation of lying against the "Darwinists", all Card has left in the essay is a few criticisms of the approaches used by scientists to debunk creationists - and for every case I have seen where any of these applies, I can I have seen several where it does not. He has also contributed to the zeitgeist that the ID people are not creationists (for one thing, many many more people will read the essay than will read the retraction on the forums) thereby lending support to the Creationists.
Card received such forceful corrections because he has a reasonable amount of standing - and did not feel that this meant that he should do any basic background research before exposing his ignorance of the issues, and his willingness to pontificate despite this for the world to see.
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
Hmm. Well, in some sense, if you make a post disagreeing with someone, you are sort of automatically requesting a retraction - presumably, your goal is to get the other guy to say "Ok, you're right, I was wrong." So in that sense, it was perhaps a little redundant.
But I was not referring only to this forum, but also to the wider audience reached by OSC's columns. It is really rather unfortunate when respected authors say things that are just plain wrong, especially as comments on debates with wide-ranging implications. Whether he likes it or not, OSC has just given the ID-ists (and indirectly the Creationists) lots of ammunition. Of course, even if he does post an "I was wrong" column, it's quite unlikely that the ID-ists will stop referring to his first one - look at what they did to Anthony Flew's retraction. But still, it would be better than nothing.
Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :
quote:Unfortunately he did not do this and therefore gains reproof, as from an adult to a child.
Good, then you won't mind if you receive a reproof for your uncivil tone and poor manners.
quote:Steps 2-6 all happen sometimes, but are definitely not universal.
As OSC did not claim they were universal, this is a strange way to criticize him.
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
quote:When Card actually takes the time to look at both sides of the argument fairly, and does that before wading in then I will engage him respectfully, as an equal.
Francis, you've come to HIS site. You're struggling to attract HIS attention. You have, as far as I'm aware, won no Hugo awards.
You're not his equal. There is, from the point of view of the average observer, an enormous power discrepancy between the two of you, and it's not in your favor.
But let's leave that to one side.
What do you lose by addressing him respectfully right off the bat? What do you possibly hope to gain by insulting him with your very first post -- by treating a successful, intelligent grown man as, in your own words, a "child" -- that you could not gain more easily by being civil?
--------
Look, man, I'll level with you: I tire of having my own attempts to get Card to tone down the rhetoric now and then completely undermined and shotgunned by rabid critics who come on here and act like the exact sort of brash, self-obsessed fanatics I keep trying to convince him don't exist in great numbers in the real world. It doesn't help me persuade him that "Darwinists" are a rare and exotic species, completely unlike real scientists, when all these "Darwinists" crawl out of the woodwork the instant he taps the wall.
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
Dag, I disagree. The column refers to 'The Darwinists', as though everybody knows who this is. Now, it's certainly possible that OSC had some particular people in mind. But I do think that most people, on reading that, are going to see it as 'the scientists'. If that was not the intention, then it should have been made clear.
Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :
quote:Dag, I disagree.
You disagree with my contention that Card did not claim they were universal?
quote:Now, it's certainly possible that OSC had some particular people in mind. But I do think that most people, on reading that, are going to see it as 'the scientists'. If that was not the intention, then it should have been made clear.
Apparently you don't disagree with my contention. So the proper criticism, based on your contention, is that OSC was less than clear as to whom he included in the "the Darwinists." Which means that "Steps 2-6 all happen sometimes, but are definitely not universal" is still a strange criticism.
If one wants to come to an author's board and criticize him, one would do well not to make up criticisms that rely on a word ("universal") that, as best I can tell, OSC didn't use.
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
Arguing about interpretations with a lawyer is probably not very bright. Nonetheless, I do think OSC claimed, intentionally or not, that these patterns were universal among those scientists engaged in the ID debate. And I am certain that this is how the ID-ists will read it - after all, they've been making these claims since forever.
Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :
See - your criticisms, even if I disagree with them (I'm not sure if I do or not), are at least on point. It's not hard to do.
Posted by plunge (Member # 9103) on :
There just isn't any way to read the article as refferring to only a subset of people doing bad things. None of the language works out that way: the whole first section is presented as: here are THE criticisms made of ID by its critics (and there is no specification of any particular subset of them) and then he proceeds with some straw men that vaguely caricature some arguments made by what I'd consider to be legitimate critics, with no references or citations. All but the one _I_ (Card) recognize are bupkiss (straw men knocked down for the count!)
If you knew nothing about the debate and read Card's article, you'd come away thinking that the only scientist or critic of ID who understands science is himself. At the very least, it's some very sloppy polemicizing.
Posted by Francis D (Member # 9121) on :
quote:Dagonee wrote: Good, then you won't mind if you receive a reproof for your uncivil tone and poor manners.
No I won't. Particularly as I have been far more civil than Card here. I have only made criticisms about his actions, and the consequences of his actions. He, however presumes the motives of others (and gets them wrong in many cases).
To illustrate:
quote:Everything I said is true enough - but if widely understood, would separate the aggressive, hostile Darwinist believers from sober and necessary science. Since they depend on being able to wrap their faith in the mantle of science, this is regarded as a grave challenge. ... Still ... when people get as angry as the Darwinists are, you know I have trodden on their sacred faith; and since they have long smugly believed, in the fashion of most religious fanatics, that their beliefs are TRUTH and all others should bow before them, any challenge is regarded as heresy which must be stamped out, with vigor.
Ignoring the fact that not everything he said is true (for instance his claims that there is anything wrong with exposing the ID movement as creationists and his use of Behe), I for one am not an atheist. I (and all the vocal and vehement critics of ID that I know - almost all of whom are Christians (the Dawkinsites are actually very rare - and most of them point and laugh rather than getting involved)) object to the blasphemy involved in intentionally lying about God's creation - which is a different issue entirely. It's not the critique that's the issue - it's the critique on behalf of a movement that lies through its teeth, brings both science and Christianity into disrepute by their lies and has nothing constructive to offer.
In short, in his partial retraction, Card has another set of myths to offer, once again distorting people he knows little about in order to set up a strawman to bash. And, for arguing using facts, I'm the one being accused of incivility.
quote:
quote:Steps 2-6 all happen sometimes, but are definitely not universal.
As OSC did not claim they were universal, this is a strange way to criticize him.
I was acknowledging where he was (sometimes) right. Unfortunately, once you remove Behe and accept that IDers are Creationists, that is almost all he has to offer. If you read it (as plunge says can't be done, King of Men sees as contrary to what OSC claimed (whether intentional or not) and I see as extremely dificult) as things that sometimes happen, it can be boiled down to "Those opposing ID are human too and sometimes get exasperated and make arguments that aren't sound." I don't think anyone denies that.
quote:What do you lose by addressing him respectfully right off the bat? What do you possibly hope to gain by insulting him with your very first post -- by treating a successful, intelligent grown man as, in your own words, a "child" -- that you could not gain more easily by being civil?
That depends on the way he reasons and debates. If he enjoys overblown and slipshod rhetoric but can not take strong and precise rhetoric when aimed at him and correcting his misapprehensions, he is a bully. And a hypocrite. If he actively enjoys being met on his terms (and there are quite a number who use forceful rhetoric who do - including me) then it's not a bad idea to do so. Now, where does benefit of doubt go here?
quote:Look, man, I'll level with you: I tire of having my own attempts to get Card to tone down the rhetoric now and then completely undermined and shotgunned by rabid critics who come on here and act like the exact sort of brash, self-obsessed fanatics I keep trying to convince him don't exist in great numbers in the real world.
When he ceases to use shotgun techniques himself, and actually engages with the issues, fire will stop being returned.
Oh, and
quote:Dagonee wrote: See - your criticisms, even if I disagree with them (I'm not sure if I do or not), are at least on point. It's not hard to do.
Find a single one of mine that isn't.
Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :
quote:I was acknowledging where he was (sometimes) right.
So he made 7 criticisms, and 5 of them are accurate, and for this you will treat him as a child?
Yeah, right on point there. Posted by El JT de Spang (Member # 7742) on :
quote:Oh, an amazing rebuttal there Spang...
I guess that's one way to start off life at new forum -- criticizing someone you know nothing about for a statement not directed at you. That's to be expected, though, from someone who suggests Microsoft could improve the way our DNA is coded.
Posted by Francis D (Member # 9121) on :
quote:So he made 7 criticisms, and 5 of them are accurate, and for this you will treat him as a child?
5 criticisms that are sometimes accurate and that he presents as the rule. Also 5 generic criticisms that can be applied to defenders of almost any position. And, as I said, this would appear to be almost the sum total of his essay that was useful. Also not going into the reasons behind the positions. (Point 5, for instance, I have only ever seen raised as an opposition to the teaching of ID in school, where it is relevant (particularly given that his point 1 is plain wrong), and Point 4 is just returning fire as the ID movement has nothing more substantial than sniping).
If he had produced a half side of essay saying that "Sometimes the opposition to ID makes the following mistakes", I would not have treated him as a child. I would just have thought he was simply pointing out the blatantly obvious and ignored him.
However, he chose to mask five points that are occasionally accurate with a lot of evidence that showed he had not actually investigated the issues before writing.
Do you really want me to show the rebuttals for the five points I let lie? I said "sometimes" because they are the sort of issue where he has a point, but he appears to think that he has an entire sword.
Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :
You are entirely missing the point. You are being rude, inaccurate, and uncivil.
There are many forums where this kind of behavior is acceptable. Here it is not. The mods will probably not do anything about it, because they are fairly forgiving, but that doesn't stop us from commenting on it. You are not accused of incivility because you are "arguing using facts" but for doing so incivilly.
If you can't see why, look at the first line of your first post and your insistence on pretending to be acting as an adult.
Posted by Francis D (Member # 9121) on :
quote:You are entirely missing the point. You are being rude, inaccurate, and uncivil.
There are many forums where this kind of behavior is acceptable. Here it is not. The mods will probably not do anything about it, because they are fairly forgiving, but that doesn't stop us from commenting on it. You are not accused of incivility because you are "arguing using facts" but for doing so incivilly.
If you can't see why, look at the first line of your first post and your insistence on pretending to be acting as an adult.
OK, I'm being uncivil when confronted by an entire pile of badly researched tripe that makes broad brush accusations that are plain wrong, casts false aspersions upon the motives of those disagreeing with the author and seems to be unrepentant about having been fooled.
My apologies. I thought that these were Mr. Card's forums and therefore I should uphold the standards of civility he set. I have been far more civil than the standard he has demonstrated recently would dictate.
Now, if you have any rebuttals to the facts presented I shall be delighted to hear them. Until then, I have already admitted to being uncivil and explained my reasons. Your attempted defence of Mr Card's actions has failed, so you appear to have gone back to the incivility issue.
And, FWIW, you accuse me of having been inaccurate. You have yet to demonstrate a single instance of this without misreading my comments (such as by not taking into account the word "sometimes"). Perhaps you'd care to provide concrete evidence of what is otherwise an un-supported ad-hominem attack?
Posted by El JT de Spang (Member # 7742) on :
quote:My apologies. I thought that these were Mr. Card's forums and therefore I should uphold the standards of civility he set. I have been far more civil than the standard he has demonstrated recently would dictate.
You keep saying this, but it just ain't true.
Sweeping generalities != Personal attacks. And who are you that you speak for other people's motives? It seems like that's eerily similar to what OSC did that got you so hot and bothered.
Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :
quote:Your attempted defence of Mr Card's actions has failed, so you appear to have gone back to the incivility issue.
The incivility issue is the one I care about. If your apology is sincere and you plan on stopping your incivillity, then I am happy.
quote:And, FWIW, you accuse me of having been inaccurate. You have yet to demonstrate a single instance of this without misreading my comments (such as by not taking into account the word "sometimes").
I pointed out the inaccuracy. You have attempted to explain why it's not actually an inaccuracy.
quote:Perhaps you'd care to provide concrete evidence of what is otherwise an un-supported ad-hominem attack?
Perhaps you should look up ad-hominem and reconsider this, because saying your statement is inaccurate is not an ad-hominem attack.
Posted by Oobie Binoobie (Member # 8059) on :
quote:Originally posted by Francis D: Do you really want me to show the rebuttals for the five points I let lie? I said "sometimes" because they are the sort of issue where he has a point, but he appears to think that he has an entire sword.
The same rebuttals appear on the forums elsewhere.
Posted by Oobie Binoobie (Member # 8059) on :
These forums have a life of their own, and rules of their own, some OSC has set, and some set by the community.
One of the rules the *community* sets and enforces is civility *here*, and especially toward the hosts of this place, no matter what anyone infers from his Rhino polemics.
So, yeah. Robert's Rules might be a great starting point for anyone new, who can then relax after the community gets to know them a bit better. Especially if he can't bite his tongue.
Posted by Francis D (Member # 9121) on :
quote:I pointed out the inaccuracy. You have attempted to explain why it's not actually an inaccuracy.
No. I have pointed out that it is not an inaccuracy. Possibly slightly imprecise but accurate unless you decide to drop words from my statements and thereby create a strawman which you could call inaccurate.
quote:Perhaps you should look up ad-hominem and reconsider this, because saying your statement is inaccurate is not an ad-hominem attack.
My apologies. It is simply an unsubstantiated attack. (And you have, at last, found a single inaccuracy).
Spang: when did I accuse anyone other than the ID of having ulterior motives or speak for their motives? And there is ample doccumentation for the motives of the ID lobby. (Start with the wedge strategy). I simply commented on his actions. Sweeping generalisations that others are liars (see his point 1 in the original essay) are personal attacks on everyone within the category assaulted, as are attacks on motives.
Oobie, I know the rebuttals have appeared elsewhere on the site - which is why I found running through them here redundant and focussed on Card's latest comments. Dagonee seems to find them relevant, however - hence my offer.
Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :
quote:
quote:No. I have pointed out that it is not an inaccuracy.
Your pointing out something does not make what I say untrue. You have attempted to explain it away. In my opinion you have failed.
quote:Possibly slightly imprecise but accurate unless you decide to drop words from my statements and thereby create a strawman which you could call inaccurate.
I didn't drop words from your statement. I copied and pasted it exactly.
The inaccuracies are piling up now, aren't they?
Posted by Francis D (Member # 9121) on :
quote:I didn't drop words from your statement. I copied and pasted it exactly.
quote:
quote: I was acknowledging where he was (sometimes) right
.
So he made 7 criticisms, and 5 of them are accurate,
Yes, you copied and pasted exactly. Then, in your summary you dropped the word sometimes and the entire meaning of that word.
In short, despite having copied and pasted you dropped the word, thereby making a strawman.
The inaccuracies really are piling up.
Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :
Please quote the post to which you are referring.
Posted by Francis D (Member # 9121) on :
I did, above. Here it is again, this time in full.
quote:
quote: I was acknowledging where he was (sometimes) right.
So he made 7 criticisms, and 5 of them are accurate, and for this you will treat him as a child?
Yeah, right on point there. [Roll Eyes]
Now, were you not to have dropped the word "sometimes" from your summary, the relevant paragraph would have read:
quote:So he made 7 criticisms, and 5 of them are sometimes accurate, and for this you will treat him as a child?
Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :
Ah, I see - you forgot that I had already stated, on that same page, that OSC did not claim they were universal.
You know, the original point I made.
Since OSC did not claim they were universal, then "they are accurate" and "they are sometimes accurate" are the same thing.
Since they are the same thing, I'll stop quibbling about it and restate my incredulity in manner you've already declared to be accurate:
So he made 7 criticisms, none of which he claimed were universal, and 5 of them are sometimes accurate, and for this you will treat him as a child?
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
I do think that when X is true perhaps as often as one time in a hundred, and someone says "X is true", it is entirely reasonable to say "No, you are wrong, X is not true". The latter is a simplification, but it is certainly much more accurate than the former. Therefore, when OSC says "Darwinists say X, Y, and Z", and 'Darwinists' (I assume this means 'scientists', since he has certainly given no alternative definition) do this at most once in a hundred debates, then even saying 'Yes, sometimes, but they are only human' is bending over backwards to be accomodating. It would be much more accurate to say, as I did, "No, that is not true, and please stop saying so."
Dag, are you certain you believe that OSC did not claim universality? 'The Darwinist response' certainly looks pretty universal to me. Is it possible that you are responding more to the rudeness of comrade Francis's post than its actual content? Because, you know, tone aside, it's pretty accurate.
Posted by Francis D (Member # 9121) on :
quote:You know, the original point I made.
Since OSC did not claim they were universal, then "they are accurate" and "they are sometimes accurate" are the same thing.
And he never stated that they were not universal either. He never states that there were any responses that weren't "Darwinist". Therefore either interpretation is equally valid based on the pshat.
Although I accept the point that the out of context quote is not a fair and accurate representation of your stated views.
quote:So he made 7 criticisms, none of which he claimed were universal, and 5 of them are sometimes accurate, and for this you will treat him as a child?
That's 2.5/6 (with the 7th not being applicable). And I'm being generous there - the one that is completely wrong was, by far, the most important. Complete with falling hook, line, and sinker for Behe when a quick google provides plenty of rebuttals.
Tie 2.5/6 (when those 2.5 points fit both sides in almost all debates, and fit the IDers far more closely than those debunking them) in with a rhino-polemic and demonstrably trivial background research and I do indeed treat him as a child unless he demonstrates otherwise.
Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :
I assume that one of the many partisans here would have pointed out where OSC claimed universality had he done so.
By no rational method of intepretation does "Darwinists say X, Y, and Z" mean "Darwinists say X, Y, and Z all the time."
"Republicans say additional gun control measures are not needed" does not mean all Republicans say this, nor do most people saying so need it to be true to make the point.
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
quote:I'm being uncivil when confronted by an entire pile of badly researched tripe
Francis, again, please explain why badly-researched tripe forces you to be uncivil? I'm not sure I got that one.
Posted by Francis D (Member # 9121) on :
quote:By no rational method of intepretation does "Darwinists say X, Y, and Z" mean "Darwinists say X, Y, and Z all the time."
Is irrelevant.
What he was talking about was "The Darwinist Answer"
quote:The Darwinist answer was immediate. Unfortunately, it was also illogical, personal, and unscientific.
"The Republican answer is that additional gun control measures are not needed" does mean that all (except maverick) Republicans say this (or rather it means that that is the party line, although there may be rebellions).
Posted by A Rat Named Dog (Member # 699) on :
quote:Complete with falling hook, line, and sinker for Behe when a quick google provides plenty of rebuttals.
One note (ignoring the obnoxious tone of this comment):
Card read Behe's book around 1997. Were you doing Google searches in 1997?
Posted by Francis D (Member # 9121) on :
quote:Originally posted by A Rat Named Dog:
quote:Complete with falling hook, line, and sinker for Behe when a quick google provides plenty of rebuttals.
One note (ignoring the obnoxious tone of this comment):
Card read Behe's book around 1997. Were you doing Google searches in 1997?
Card was writing this year. If he didn't bother to research his views before writing the column, then that is his problem.
(And I was certainly googling this year).
Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :
quote:Originally posted by Francis D:
quote:By no rational method of intepretation does "Darwinists say X, Y, and Z" mean "Darwinists say X, Y, and Z all the time."
Is irrelevant.
What he was talking about was "The Darwinist Answer"
quote:The Darwinist answer was immediate. Unfortunately, it was also illogical, personal, and unscientific.
"The Republican answer is that additional gun control measures are not needed" does mean that all (except maverick) Republicans say this (or rather it means that that is the party line, although there may be rebellions).
Wrong. It means that someone who can be called a Darwinist put that forth as an answer.
If you want to point out such a position is a minority position, do so. I've done much the same on behalf of Christians, Republicans, lawyers, and government contractors.
If you want to disagree and say no one who does that is really a Darwinist, make that case.
But don't accuse him of saying something he didn't say.
Posted by A Rat Named Dog (Member # 699) on :
quote:Card was writing this year. If he didn't bother to research his views before writing the column, then that is his problem.
So, basically, you want Card to Google every single thing he references in his columns to make sure they haven't changed since last he studied them, out of paranoia that he might say something that already has a rebuttal out there — one that he may or may not agree with, anyway?
How about he just speaks his mind, it doesn't hurt you at all, and if you think he's wrong or misled or missed something, you start up a respectful discussion of it? I don't see why that is so hard for you.
Posted by Francis D (Member # 9121) on :
quote:Wrong. It means that someone who can be called a Darwinist put that forth as an answer.
Wrong. That would be "A Darwinist response" rather than "The Darwinist answer". (What he meant was very probably "A common Darwinist response" - but that is not what he wrote).
quote:So, basically, you want Card to Google every single thing he references in his columns to make sure they haven't changed since last he studied them, out of paranoia that he might say something that already has a rebuttal out there — one that he may or may not agree with, anyway?
If the entire column is undermined by trivially available facts (such as a recent court judgement), and is about a highly contentious issue then why not? He will only make himself look like a fool and a dupe otherwise.
quote:How about he just speaks his mind, it doesn't hurt you at all, and if you think he's wrong or misled or missed something, you start up a respectful discussion of it? I don't see why that is so hard for you.
How about he just speaks his mind, and manages to provide yet more propoganda for creationists, and when I see he's wrong, I speak my mind in a somewhat less offensive manner than he used.
Posted by A Rat Named Dog (Member # 699) on :
quote:I speak my mind in a somewhat less offensive manner than he used.
Does making this claim make you a "Tool" or a "Useful Idiot"? Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :
quote:How about he just speaks his mind, and manages to provide yet more propoganda for creationists, and when I see he's wrong, I speak my mind in a somewhat less offensive manner than he used.
That would be great. Let us know when you intend to start, especially with that "somewhat less offensive manner" thing.
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
quote:Originally posted by A Rat Named Dog:
quote:Card was writing this year. If he didn't bother to research his views before writing the column, then that is his problem.
So, basically, you want Card to Google every single thing he references in his columns to make sure they haven't changed since last he studied them, out of paranoia that he might say something that already has a rebuttal out there — one that he may or may not agree with, anyway?
Well, yes, actually. That would be good. Surely it's not unreasonable to expect a columnist to write based on up-to-date information? We are certainly quick to jump all over people here on the boards, if they something where the science has changed since they last read up on it. Are you seriously suggesting that a column published on paper should be held to a lesser standard?
Posted by Kagehi (Member # 9123) on :
quote:Originally posted by El JT de Spang:
quote:Oh, an amazing rebuttal there Spang...
I guess that's one way to start off life at new forum -- criticizing someone you know nothing about for a statement not directed at you. That's to be expected, though, from someone who suggests Microsoft could improve the way our DNA is coded.
Its called a joke Spang. The point being that you can't argue for design when the thing you are looking at barely works right. You want a good example, 2% of twin births result in successful twins, the other 98% one twin dies. But, its estimated, based on silly stuff like actually looking for unborn fetuses and verifying that they where genetically identical to the living child, that 8 out of every 9 pregnancies start out as twins. And then of course there is the also verified fact that only roughly 25% of pregnancies produce living children. Just that in itself means that *only* 14% or roughly 14 out of every 100 "possible" children are ever born. Worse, recent research indicates that women's bodies, when under stress, produce a high amount of a chemical that actually causes damage to male fetuses, resulting in most of them dying, so in a high stress environment, that 14% might drop to 7%. And yes, this is ***human*** births I am talking about. How the hell is that good design?
In the end, any argument you might make about design is based on ignorance of how DNA works and how actually ad-hoc, unstable and flawed it is. We are not talking about finding a watch on the beach, we are talking about finding a smooth rock inside another one, and some moron insisting that there is no way the small one got in there, unless it was carved. And argument from lack of imagination.
And to be clear, while everyone here seems to think "fool" is offensive, I intentionally avoided the extreme term used by Francis D. I don't blame Card for making a mistake, I do blame him for not bothering to get his facts straight in the first place. And I don't care what sort of awards people get, such as one person commented. Having one *does not* automatically make you an authority on every subject or recuse them of learning the facts about a subject *before* commenting on it. There are plenty of people who do great things in one field, then make complete asses out of themselves in something else, because they don't bother to learn anything about it beyond some best seller book or the latest crack pot that has sold X thousand copies of his crackpot theory. We all need to strive to do better than that, instead of giving into the modern trend of believing what ever some clown with a degree writes, just because a lot of clueless people find the ideas compelling and the author sold a lot of books.
I don't think Card is an idiot. I do think he is "still" given more credence to an idea that was buried years before Darwin ever even wrote a single sentence and it serves no one's best interests for someone as famous as him to remain so willfully ignorant about why the idea of design, vitalism and other ideas all failed.
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
Oh dear, I find myself agreeing with Tom, here. Would you people please calm down a bit? We were having a somewhat constructive dialogue before you started ranting. Your tone is getting in the way of your actual arguments, which are excellent.
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
quote:And I don't care what sort of awards people get, such as one person commented.
Let me be clear: I mentioned awards only because Francis was, by his own admission, refusing to respect Card because he did not consider Card his "equal," and in fact not even a grown adult. While I don't think a few Hugos make anyone a biology expert, I think it's safe to say that they help make the argument that someone is at least deserving of respect from fellow humans.
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
To be fair, though, respect is a line that travels two ways. OSC's polemics do not exactly give me the impression of a man who respects the intelligence of his readers. Especially when many of those readers are probably 'Darwinists' themselves. Accusing people of name-calling is not exactly the best way to earn their respect.
Posted by estavares (Member # 7170) on :
Hey Francis--there are far too many high-minded smarty-pants in the world who weave circular little arguments, personally insult others, get drunk on their own emotion, and act as badly as those they deride. For those of us interested in hearing all sides of such debates (including your own), please avoid becoming part of that particular clique.
Thanks for your help.
Now, a question for everyone. There's been a lot of talk on "Darwinists" but I'm interested in an exact definition. I've no opinion on this subject, so I'm curious why Card's use of the term is considered a broad (and insulting) generalization. What specific qualifier should he have said (or perhaps might he have meant)?
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
quote:There's been a lot of talk on "Darwinists" but I'm interested in an exact definition. I've no opinion on this subject, so I'm curious why Card's use of the term is considered a broad (and insulting) generalization.
It's actually used that way by the Creationist community, although Card might not have known that. More broadly, though, he doesn't make clear that his criticisms are only aimed at a narrow audience; the implication from his essay is that his "seven points" are failures of "Darwinism" -- whatever that is.
Posted by Kagehi (Member # 9123) on :
Look. I am sorry about any overt sense of annoyance that people figured out I have here. I didn't actually come from Brin's site. I got there from http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/ where I have spent over a year watching people who can't, won't or refuse to read *any* source material you point them to, repeat the same accusation about the imaginary vast Darwinist conspiracy. And 99% of them are tracible back to web pages that are run by religious groups promoting ID propoganda from the Discovery Institute and lying about everyone else. This promotes a serious decrease in ones sense of humor when people with real authority post the same arguments. Most people are fools. I am sure I am in some areas of my life too. The difference is if someone is willing to learn about the subject. Card makes a good start, but he still assumes some things, even in his retraction, that are at least questionable. In effect, his statement was, "I still don't know enough about the science to make accurate statements, but I did figure out that a lot of radicals are lying about it." Good start. But its like admitting airplanes really can fly, while still having no clue why they do. Imho, it no where near enough.
Posted by estavares (Member # 7170) on :
So are there scientists promoting the concept of ID without having any kind of hidden creationist agenda? I'm curious at to the scientific basis for that concept, if any.
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
I do not know of any. But then I would say that, to be sure. Perhaps OSC knows of some?
Posted by Oobie Binoobie (Member # 8059) on :
Kagehi, if you heard some pilots arguing "Bernoulli vs. Newton", you would know that they are a class of people who admit that airplanes can fly, who fly them generally with great skill and safety, and still have no clue why they fly.
You also wrote, "The point being that you can't argue for design when the thing you are looking at barely works right," referring to a rising popular idea that human beings are designed badly.
Well, OK, you've a right to that opinion, but it seems like so much movie-critiquing to me; noone has shown another system of life, biological or otherwise, which is empirically better, even from the standpoints you cite.
And in any case, wouldn't a creationist simply rejoin with, "The fact that it works at all is the Godly miracle!"
Gets us noplace.
Posted by Francis D (Member # 9121) on :
quote:Dagonee: That would be great. Let us know when you intend to start, especially with that "somewhat less offensive manner" thing.
quote:Card: (For reference) Still ... when people get as angry as the Darwinists are, you know I have trodden on their sacred faith; and since they have long smugly believed, in the fashion of most religious fanatics, that their beliefs are TRUTH and all others should bow before them, any challenge is regarded as heresy which must be stamped out, with vigor.
I only termed Card a tool who realised something of this and still remained a useful idiot. I did not ever accuse him of regarding any challenge as heresy, or of believing that his beliefs are TRUTH. Ignorance is curable - and that is the only sin I actually accuse him of (although one that leads him to take actions that are extremely misguided). I also cast aspersions on his actions rather than his beliefs. I therefore was less offensive than Card (and that's without his choice of language about "Darwinists" - which is almost invariably used as a slur on opponents by creationists).
As King of Men says,
quote:Accusing people of name-calling is not exactly the best way to earn their respect.
And Card does not only do this, he does this in a place where he is demonstrably wrong.
quote:TomDavidson: Francis, again, please explain why badly-researched tripe forces you to be uncivil? I'm not sure I got that one.
And Tom, there are three possibilities for Card. Either he likes the heat of strong rhetoric (he certainly used enough of it) - in which case he should enjoy my writing and it is a positive thing. Or he dishes it out and ignores it when it comes back - in which case it doesn't matter. Or he dishes it out and refuses to take it, in which case he is a bully. I give him the benefit of the doubt until he proves otherwise. Therefore I use strong rhetoric to match strong rhetoric.
Finally,
quote:estavares: So are there scientists promoting the concept of ID without having any kind of hidden creationist agenda? I'm curious at to the scientific basis for that concept, if any.
There may have been once - before the Creationists got in on the act. Unfortunately the creationist movement's hijacking of the term and completely dominating such discourse (and poisoning it with an entire pile of lies which need regular debunking because they keep getting used even after being shown to be lies) means that even in what is normally a highly controversial field, it is almost impossible to get a serious debate of these positions.
The fact that if the creator designed things directly (as opposed to simply shaped natural forces), he was an idiot (see the appendix, the eye (compared to the octopus) and the nerves in the neck of a giraffe for reasonable examples) is beside the point. As is the fact that the case for ID is ultimately an argument from incredulity that is only slightly more advanced than the 19th century attempted rebuttal of evolution that the eye was far too complex to have evolved.
Oh, and Kagehi gives a good analysis of why people get extremely annoyed by creationist and ID nonsense - some of which Card unwittingly reproduced.
And I fully agree with Kagehi that the partial retraction on this message board is not enough. Enough for me would be an overt retraction of at least the claim that IDers are not Creationists in the same places he made that claim - so it will be as easy to find and have as wide circulation. What I hope Card has the guts to do is publish a followup article on how he was fooled by the creationists.
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
quote: And I fully agree with Kagehi that the partial retraction on this message board is not enough.
Why not? What harm do you imagine he's done?
quote:And Tom, there are three possibilities for Card. Either he likes the heat of strong rhetoric (he certainly used enough of it) - in which case he should enjoy my writing and it is a positive thing. Or he dishes it out and ignores it when it comes back - in which case it doesn't matter. Or he dishes it out and refuses to take it, in which case he is a bully.
I suspect the truth is more nuanced than that. Or do you also agree with C.S. Lewis' Triune theory, which essentially "proves" the validity of the Bible using similar logic?
Seriously, the man enjoys a good give and take, but he's also sensitive to personal criticism and especially sensitive to accusations that he hasn't thought things through -- although usually strongly worded accusations of that sort (which include yours) are considered by him to be so off-base that he just writes off the poster altogether and never bothers replying to them. It's a little from all three columns, then, and a little from a fourth you didn't even mention.
I'm not saying that involving Card in an honest dialogue about his rhetorical choices wouldn't be valuable; I'm saying that your methods are pretty much doomed to fail, and I'm speaking here from a certain amount of experience.
Posted by Francis D (Member # 9121) on :
quote:Why not? What harm do you imagine he's done?
Provided free propoganda to liars who will use anything they can get their hands on (debunked or not - I speak from experience of dealing with them) and who wish to dismantle secular society.
How they will use it, I don't know.
quote:Seriously, the man enjoys a good give and take, but he's also sensitive to personal criticism and especially sensitive to accusations that he hasn't thought things through
Interesting that he has no problem dishing out such accusations then. The entire article is an accusation of not having thought things through and one based on his own lack of knowledge of the situation.
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
quote:Provided free propoganda to liars who will use anything they can get their hands on (debunked or not - I speak from experience of dealing with them) and who wish to dismantle secular society.
See, it's this kind of hyperbole that tires me out when HE does it, too. You DO realize, deep in your heart of hearts, that this is a tempest in a teapot -- right?
Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :
quote:I only termed Card a tool who realised something of this and still remained a useful idiot.
You called him an idiot. That's rude. Do you honestly not know this?
quote:I did not ever accuse him of regarding any challenge as heresy, or of believing that his beliefs are TRUTH. Ignorance is curable - and that is the only sin I actually accuse him of (although one that leads him to take actions that are extremely misguided). I also cast aspersions on his actions rather than his beliefs.
You could have been more rude? Yeah. I could be a lot ruder, too. So?
quote:I therefore was less offensive than Card (and that's without his choice of language about "Darwinists" - which is almost invariably used as a slur on opponents by creationists).
And this is relevant how, exactly? You agreed to terms of service when you signed onto this site that specifically prohibit the name-calling you have engaged in.
At this point you are simply taking advantage of the fact that were the rules to be enforced against you, you could then cry all over the Internet about how you were censored by OSC. Either way, you are breaking your word and being rude.
quote:And Tom, there are three possibilities for Card. Either he likes the heat of strong rhetoric (he certainly used enough of it) - in which case he should enjoy my writing and it is a positive thing. Or he dishes it out and ignores it when it comes back - in which case it doesn't matter. Or he dishes it out and refuses to take it, in which case he is a bully. I give him the benefit of the doubt until he proves otherwise. Therefore I use strong rhetoric to match strong rhetoric.
You use name-calling that you promised not to use to match strong rhetoric.
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
quote:Originally posted by Oobie Binoobie: Well, OK, you've a right to that opinion, but it seems like so much movie-critiquing to me; noone has shown another system of life, biological or otherwise, which is empirically better, even from the standpoints you cite.
I must disagree. The octopus eye, for example, is not installed backwards : A simple modification that costs exactly nothing, but gives a much better efficiency. Gorillas and chimps do not get back aches, for the good and simple reason that they do not insist on a bipedal gait their spine is not 'designed' for. Any number of other species have a working gene for making vitamin C. (Incidentally, the vitamin C thing is a really excellent smoking gun for common descent of chimps and humans.) Chimps, again, cannot choke, because their air and food channels do not cross. In short, there are plenty of examples of working biological systems that are better than what humans have.
Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :
For your definition of "better."
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson:
quote:Provided free propoganda to liars who will use anything they can get their hands on (debunked or not - I speak from experience of dealing with them) and who wish to dismantle secular society.
See, it's this kind of hyperbole that tires me out when HE does it, too. You DO realize, deep in your heart of hearts, that this is a tempest in a teapot -- right?
Actually, Tom, I do not think 'wish to dismantle secular society' is hyperbole. If you read the Wedge Document, you will observe that this is precisely what the Design Institute is trying to do. And like it or not, OSC has indeed given them ammunition. "Look, a science fiction author agrees with us! How can you say it's not scientific now?"
Posted by Francis D (Member # 9121) on :
quote:See, it's this kind of hyperbole that tires me out when HE does it, too. You DO realize, deep in your heart of hearts, that this is a tempest in a teapot -- right?
They have already taken over the curriculum in at least one school, then been put on trial and dismantled in court, then derided by the judge (who was both conservative and religious, despite the spin of the discovery institute) for "breathtaking inanity".
It may be a tempest in a tea-pot, but it seemingly takes in relatively influential people like Card and also manages to wreck the science education in at least one school (although with luck the Dover PA trial pushed it back).
In short, they have a stated goal that involves dismantling secular society, a demonstrable track-record of lying, distorting, and grabbing any evidence that comes to hand, and demonstrable power (although hopefuly a bit less following the Dover court case) and the ability to take in people like Card.
All the above is heavily documented (I have only scratched the surface in my links). Where is the hyperbole?
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
quote:Originally posted by Dagonee: For your definition of "better."
Well, let me be specific and take the example of the eye. The octopus eye receives more of the photons that hit its lens, because its receptor nerves are not installed behind the support system. In what possible definition is this not better? It is additional clarity of sight for no extra cost! I cannot fathom how you can manage to call this playing with words. The octopus eye does the same job, more accurately, for the same cost. If you are going to use words like 'design' at all, you cannot then proceed to make them meaningless by saying 'except where it works badly, for there must be a reason for that!' You then degenerate into the complete circularity of "It's good design because God did it, and I know God did it because it's good design."
Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :
Because, if we posit a designer, we also posit that he designed us to particular specifications.
"Design" doesn't posit "good design" by any particular engineering standard.
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
Sorry Dag, but it does. Recall that this 'design' is being used as evidence for a designer. That requires that we be able to recognise design in the first place, right? I mean, if you can't tell the difference between 'something designed by an intelligent being' and 'something thrown together by mutations' then the whole of ID is moot in any case.
Now, if you believe in a designer for other reasons, as you do, then it may be reasonable to postulate design and see what you can infer about the designer. (Incidentally, what does the human spine tell you about your god?) But that's just not how this particular discussion has gone.
Posted by Francis D (Member # 9121) on :
Dagonee, you might get further in understanding my comments if you look up "Useful Idiot". It is not name-calling (although it is a slight perjorative), it is a description of his actions - mistaken beliefs and misplaced benefit of the doubt, combined with speaking up without full knowledge of the facts leading to providing support for a dangerous and malicious organisation.
quote:From Wikipedia: In the contemporary United States, the term is used as a pejorative by political conservatives against political liberals. The tone of usage implies that the target of this sobriquet is ignorant of the facts to the extent that they end up unwittingly advancing an adverse cause that they might not otherwise support.
Once again, you drop a word of mine in order to attack a statement I didn't make.
And as for definitions of "better", how about "actually works without outside help" (vitamin C synthesis) or "provides better vision and is more reliable- without saddling the creature with a blind spot" (octopus eye) or "does not provide a both common and completely unnecessary means of accidental death, while providing no benefits" (wind pipe).
Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :
quote:Dagonee, you might get further in understanding my comments if you look up "Useful Idiot". It is not name-calling (although it is a slight perjorative), it is a description of his actions - mistaken beliefs and misplaced benefit of the doubt, combined with speaking up without full knowledge of the facts leading to providing support for a dangerous and malicious organisation.
It's name-calling, and it's out of bounds here.
quote:Sorry Dag, but it does. Recall that this 'design' is being used as evidence for a designer. That requires that we be able to recognise design in the first place, right? I mean, if you can't tell the difference between 'something designed by an intelligent being' and 'something thrown together by mutations' then the whole of ID is moot in any case.
Now, if you believe in a designer for other reasons, as you do, then it may be reasonable to postulate design and see what you can infer about the designer. (Incidentally, what does the human spine tell you about your god?) But that's just not how this particular discussion has gone.
No, it doesn't. The applicable thing being studied here is whether it could have arisen as the result of natural selection, or if intelligence was required to produce such complex structures. Intelligence being required does not mean the design had to be perfect according to any particular standard.
They say "it's too complex to arise by chance." Not "it's too perfect to arise by chance."
I happen to think this is one of the philosophical weaknesses with ID. But none of your examples are a response to the claim being made.
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
Ah, ok - you are looking at the 'needs help' bit rahter than the 'looks good'. In that case, the counterargument is that there are perfectly good evolutionary pathways for everything the ID-ers have suggested, from the eye to blood clotting. Judge Jones mentioned some of them in the Dover judgement, which I linked to in that other thread. But in any case, I was actually arguing with Oobie, who seems to agree with me that there can be an objective better and that it is a useful standard, since he said
quote:noone has shown another system of life, biological or otherwise, which is empirically better, even from the standpoints you cite.
I think you'll agree that this has been shown to be false, yes?
Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :
quote:Ah, ok - you are looking at the 'needs help' bit rahter than the 'looks good'. In that case, the counterargument is that there are perfectly good evolutionary pathways for everything the ID-ers have suggested, from the eye to blood clotting.
Of course there is - I'm not an ID-er.
quote:I think you'll agree that this has been shown to be false, yes?
I'm not as convinced as you that it's clear that none of these disadvantages have corresponding advantages that exist as a trade-off.
All in all, though, I don't think it's a productive line of analysis.
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
I think it is definitely up to you to show that the ability to synthesise Vitamin C has drawbacks.
Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :
quote:I think it is definitely up to you to show that the ability to synthesise Vitamin C has drawbacks.
It's not up to me to do anything, KoM. You haven't convinced me.
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
I haven't convinced you that being able to synthesise Vitamin C has advantages? This is just so mind-blowingly obvious that I'm at a loss. What possible disadvantage is there?
I also don't understand why you say it's not up to you to do anything. Obviously you don't have to discuss the subject further if you don't care to. If you do, though, I really don't feel it is incumbent on me to try to prove a negative. If you want to say that there could possibly be tradeoffs in vitamin production, I really do think you should give some possible examples. I'll argue with you, but I won't supply both sides of the conversation.
Posted by Francis D (Member # 9121) on :
quote:It's name-calling, and it's out of bounds here.
Change the record. To repeat myself from the first page, your attempted defence of Mr. Card's actions has (once again) failed so you are once again back to the incivility issue.
And, FWIW, when I signed up I agreed not to be abusive. Abuse is a term that means different things in different places (to give one example, is smacking a child abuse? is paddling them abuse?). I therefore took Mr Card as the baseline as they are his forums. My apologies if this was wrong. I never signed up not to commit "name calling" - which may be the standard interpretation of abuse here but isn't universal (the other definition I use says that to be abusive, it must be unsupported or only weakly supported (rather than just extremely annoyed) - which my statement clearly was not). Especially when what you are calling "name calling" was simply the quickest, clearest, and most concise description of Card's actions available.
And seeing that you can't tell the difference between the definite and indefinite articles ("The" and "A"), and have repeatedly dropped words from my statements to make them easier to attack and don't appear able to see that a system that makes you dependent on specific external nutrients (rather than a range of them) is disadvantageous, I really don't see the point in further discussion with you.
Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :
quote:I haven't convinced you that being able to synthesise Vitamin C has advantages? This is just so mind-blowingly obvious that I'm at a loss.
I didn't say it didn't have advantages. It might, however cause disadvantages.
quote:What possible disadvantage is there?
Quick off the head speculation, the need to seek vitamin C gives incentive to seek food that contains other, non-synthesizable nutrients that provide some advantage. There are so many possibilities that any scientist who says "this is an obvious disadvantage with no possibility of offsetting advantages" is not considering all the possible implications.
Sure, that's not proof of the underlying contention that everything was well-designed. But your simple examples all contain possible advantages that cannot be casually dismissed as offering no offsetting advantages.
quote:I also don't understand why you say it's not up to you to do anything. Obviously you don't have to discuss the subject further if you don't care to. If you do, though, I really don't feel it is incumbent on me to try to prove a negative. If you want to say that there could possibly be tradeoffs in vitamin production, I really do think you should give some possible examples. I'll argue with you, but I won't supply both sides of the conversation.
Because, as I have said, I don't buy the underlying premise you are arguing against. Further, you didn't ask me to list possible drawbacks that might exist. You said it was "up to [me] to show that the ability to synthesise Vitamin C has drawbacks." As if you had met any burden of production at all that vitamin C syntehsis was without drawbacks.
Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :
quote:And seeing that you can't tell the difference between the definite and indefinite articles ("The" and "A"),
Please quote or explain whatever the hell it is you are talking about here.
quote:don't appear able to see that a system that makes you dependent on specific external nutrients (rather than a range of them) is disadvantageous
You seem to not be able to understand context. But if you will refrain from being offensive, then this discussion won't be necessary any longer.
Sadly, as you still continue to attempt to justify your rudeness, I doubt this is the case.
Posted by Francis D (Member # 9121) on :
quote:Please quote or explain whatever the hell it is you are talking about here.
Your misguided attempts on the second page to assert that "The Darwinist answer" was equivalent to "someone who can be called a Darwinist put that forth as an answer". (That would be the meaning of "A Darwinist answer" - very different).
And then you had the nerve to follow it up by saying that the opposing view could be held "By no rational method of interpretation". While criticising me for being impolite. Not only was that abusive, it was just plain wrong.
And given that from the right false premises you can produce a rational method of interpretation that leads to any given conclusion (see Bertrand Russell's proof that he was the pope given the premise that 1+1=1), there is no way your statement could have been correct. Therefore it was pure abuse without even a possibility that it could have been true.
I didn't bring this up then because I am not so worried about you are about personal attacks - but as noticing them seems to be almost the only thing you have brought to the thread (that hasn't been swiftly debunked), I suggest you get your own house in order before criticising others.
No further replies will be made to Dagonee.
Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :
quote:Your misguided attempts on the second page to assert that "The Darwinist answer" was equivalent to "someone who can be called a Darwinist put that forth as an answer". (That would be the meaning of "A Darwinist answer" - very different).
And then you had the nerve to follow it up by saying that the opposing view could be held "By no rational method of interpretation". While criticising me for being impolite. Not only was that abusive, it was just plain wrong.
You really don't understand that claims that X happened are not claims that X is all that happened, do you?
Nor do you seem to understand the difference between calling someone an idiot (useful or not) and saying that a particular interpretation made by someone is not rational.
No wonder you are having so much trouble being civil.
quote:that hasn't been swiftly debunked
You can say you've debunked what I said over and over again. It doesn't make it true.
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
quote:Quick off the head speculation, the need to seek vitamin C gives incentive to seek food that contains other, non-synthesizable nutrients that provide some advantage.
Um, no. Recall that primates used to have the ability to produce Vitamin C; the gene was broken by a mutation. Unless you're going to postulate a simultaneous mutation causing our ancestors to seek out vitamin-C-rich foods that also happened to have your hypothetical other nutrient, I fear your argument doesn't hold water. Further, if we're going to have seek-out-this-kind-of-food mutations, why not go directly to the source and look for the hypothetical nutrient?
Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :
quote:Um, no. Recall that primates used to have the ability to produce Vitamin C; the gene was broken by a mutation. Unless you're going to postulate a simultaneous mutation causing our ancestors to seek out vitamin-C-rich foods that also happened to have your hypothetical other nutrient, I fear your argument doesn't hold water.
The context of this line of discussion is whether or not there are possible advantages from not being able to synthesize vitamin C in an attempt to demonstrate that the disadvantages demonstrate a lack of design. If we're going to bring in other evidence of non-design, then the line of discussion is even more nonsensical than it was before.
I don't buy the "this is as good as it could have been" defense of intelligent design. But the counterpart as an attack on intelligent design is just as nonsensical as the defense.
quote:why not go directly to the source and look for the hypothetical nutrient?
Perhaps because they're microclusters and thus undetectable? Posted by estavares (Member # 7170) on :
Geez Francis, are you really Bill Clinton in disguise? All this hair-splitting on articles just cracks me up. There are too many pompous blowhards on this forum as it is (heck, I can be one of them), and it's sad to see another drawn into the ranks.
Sigh. Back to the issue at hand––
I want to address criteria. By what standard are we basing what is considered "better"? And must something be "perfect" or "better" to be the product of ID? What if imperfection was, by nature, intentional? There are some creeds that believe this imperfect mortal state is the whole point––that humanity obtains development through dealing with and overcoming challenges.
Besides, a chimp might never choke and never have back problems, but I can still spank him at "Halo" and he'll never manage to solve a Rubik's Cube. (Well, neither can I, but that's beside the point.) Posted by Oobie Binoobie (Member # 8059) on :
quote:Originally posted by King of Men: Ah, ok - you are looking at the 'needs help' bit rahter than the 'looks good'. In that case, the counterargument is that there are perfectly good evolutionary pathways for everything the ID-ers have suggested, from the eye to blood clotting. Judge Jones mentioned some of them in the Dover judgement, which I linked to in that other thread. But in any case, I was actually arguing with Oobie, who seems to agree with me that there can be an objective better and that it is a useful standard, since he said
quote:noone has shown another system of life, biological or otherwise, which is empirically better, even from the standpoints you cite.
I think you'll agree that this has been shown to be false, yes?
Can't deny it, and won't try. And thank you for pointing it all out.
But it raises other philosophical questions which an ID supporter, or any religionist for that matter, could ask, rhetorically or otherwise, to continue to refute "natural selection as sufficient." The rhetoric merely has to bend itself in a circle, positing that human beings have flawed bodies for reasons important to God. Then appropriate holy books are cited for descriptions of the vale of tears, etc.
Or, there are contexts in which the assertion that this or that feature is "better without cost" could be challenged, if our knowledge of the biological systems involved is incomplete. Has anyone tried installing an octopus eye in an air breathing organism? Or exploring the sorts of voice boxes or head/brain sizes possible with a chimp's throat arrangment?
See, I've done engineering myself, though with electronics instead of bio systems. It is virtually always a balancing act, acheiving desired features by accepting a flaw elsewhere. Those sorts of questions arise easily in a mind like mine. Saying the octopus eye is "better" doesn't completely resolve the question. Octopus eyes live in salt water and the lighting conditions of an ocean. Human eyes do not.
(I'll allow, of course, that those questions have been answered satisfactorily, and I'm just ignorant of the answers. In which case, I'm happy to be enlightened, but it's beside the point; I'm citing counterpoint examples.)
The point is that every point has a counterpoint, some way to refine the argument which keeps the exchange firmly in the realm of philosophy, and not science.
But that was one of OSC's points, wasn't it? ID ain't science. Neither is Darwinist atheism. Keep 'em both out of schools and *poof*, end of controversy.
Posted by Oobie Binoobie (Member # 8059) on :
quote:Originally posted by King of Men:
quote:Quick off the head speculation, the need to seek vitamin C gives incentive to seek food that contains other, non-synthesizable nutrients that provide some advantage.
Um, no. Recall that primates used to have the ability to produce Vitamin C; the gene was broken by a mutation. Unless you're going to postulate a simultaneous mutation causing our ancestors to seek out vitamin-C-rich foods that also happened to have your hypothetical other nutrient, I fear your argument doesn't hold water. Further, if we're going to have seek-out-this-kind-of-food mutations, why not go directly to the source and look for the hypothetical nutrient?
I seem to recall learning that natural selection doesn't depend on descendants seeking something out. Disease like scurvy would simply have consumed all the runts before they could reproduce.
But, that raises the question of where all the primates are who *can* produce Vitamin C, because it seems to me that such a mutation would favor the unmutated population, by giving it a much wider range for its habitat.
Someone is bound to call me ignorant, at this point. :-)
Posted by Oobie Binoobie (Member # 8059) on :
quote:Originally posted by Francis D: Dagonee, you might get further in understanding my comments if you look up "Useful Idiot". It is not name-calling (although it is a slight perjorative), [...]
"You are a 'Useful Idiot'" is namecalling. The fact that it isn't the same as "You are an idiot" doesn't change that.
And the fact that it is pejorative is still rhetorically problematic, especially as a first post. Not everyone has read Mona Charon's book; some were bound to take it the wrong way, and I can't escape the notion that you meant to inflame passions more than a bit.
Posted by Rakeesh (Member # 2001) on :
Francis D,
You strike me as an educated person capable of rational thought, so I'll ask you this: who, exactly, are you trying to persuade? By premiering with "useful idiot" and "tool", surely someone capable of rational thought must realize, "Hey! The people I am capable of persauding-the ones who agree with Card, but have some doubts-are going to be really turned off by my calling him names. Maybe if I want to persuade them, I shouldn't do it."
Are you capable of that level of reasoning? Or does, as is almost certain after reading what you've written here, your ego and your sense of self-righteousness far outweigh whatever interest you may have on actually changing people's minds?
To dumb it down a bit, you're basically calling Card a jackass, and apparently trying to persuade people to agree that his jackass-ish tactics of slinging ill-founded mud are idiotic. Maybe fighting fire with gasoline doesn't actually help people think or reason any better.
To dumb it down even further, don't be such an annoying, pedantic prick and maybe the people who agree with you wouldn't be talking against you in this thread, to say nothing of people who disagreed with you from the start.
Please resume the urination-contest.
Posted by Francis D (Member # 9121) on :
quote:Geez Francis, are you really Bill Clinton in disguise? All this hair-splitting on articles just cracks me up.
I assume that you are referring to his notorious question about just what the definition of "is" is. The amusing thing about using this as your example of hairsplitting is that Clinton was asked "Is there a relationship with Monica Lewinsky?" - when a truthful answer would have been "No, there is not a relationship with Monica Lewinsky" - on the grounds that there hadn't been one for many months. Instead he chose to ask exactly what was meant when taking the question he was given would have been easier.
That's not hair-splitting, that's precision.
And if you think that pointing out the difference between "The" and "A" (a difference I was clear on when I was 6) is hair-splitting when someone appears to believe (and later explicitely stated) that no reasonable person could believe differently from him, we effectively speak different languages.
quote:Not everyone has read Mona Charon's book; some were bound to take it the wrong way, and I can't escape the notion that you meant to inflame passions more than a bit.
I haven't read Mona Charon's book. The phrase I used is far, far older than that (and fairly well know).
And I have yet to understand the viewpoint that passions have no place in politics or discussions. To be more accurate, I see absolutely no point in discussions (as opposed to gossip or banter) without passion, without information being presented and without well-reasoned arguments. (Any one of the preceeding is sufficient for a discussion). If you have none of the above, all you are doing is effectively chewing over the fat.
Without passion, you won't get anything done. Without information you won't learn anything new. Without well-reasoned arguments (something that requires precision of thought), you won't reach new understandings. I therefore do not think of inflaming passions as a bad thing.
quote:You strike me as an educated person capable of rational thought, so I'll ask you this: who, exactly, are you trying to persuade? By premiering with "useful idiot" and "tool", surely someone capable of rational thought must realize, "Hey! The people I am capable of persauding-the ones who agree with Card, but have some doubts-are going to be really turned off by my calling him names. Maybe if I want to persuade them, I shouldn't do it."
Cold argument had already been tried. Card had, in his partial retraction, shown himself to be almost beyond it. My goal was therefore not to persuade so much as burn his fingers badly enough that he would actually do some research before writing a column (rather than relying on an 8 year old and thoroughly debunked book and an entire collection of propoganda). With luck that would mean that he wouldn't look like quite so much of a tool the next time he considers writing a column that will provide propoganda for a group that has a goal of overthrowing secular society (which I have already demonstrated is not hyperbole).
I may have been wrong to assume that anyone with as much bombast as he uses in his columns has a thick enough skin to take statements that are less hectoring than his columns. If so, then my fault was one of giving him the benefit of the doubt and assuming that he is not a bully. I may also have been wrong to assume that people in this forum would have the open mindedness to read links and arguments (all of which have been both strongly supported and accurate) rather than simply say "Oh no! You weren't a model of politeness!" - particularly when these are Card's forums and he demonstrates levels of bombast I have yet to come close to.
If I was wrong about both the above then I apologise for expecting open-mindedness on behalf of the forum and a lack of hypocricy on behalf of Card. I am doing more harm than good in that case and shall return to my more normal haunts on the internet. Evidence to date does appear to indicate that I chose the wrong approach, and for this I apologise.
Posted by Puppy (Member # 6721) on :
quote:Instead he chose to ask exactly what was meant when taking the question he was given would have been easier.
That's not hair-splitting, that's precision.
I think people find fault with that episode because there is a general sense that an honest and forthright man would have answered both questions, rather than splitting a hair to avoid answering the one the would get him into trouble.
Posted by rivka (Member # 4859) on :
quote:Originally posted by Dagonee: Perhaps because they're microclusters and thus undetectable?
Posted by Francis D (Member # 9121) on :
quote:I think people find fault with that episode because there is a general sense that an honest and forthright man would have answered both questions, rather than splitting a hair to avoid answering the one the would get him into trouble.
And someone who valued precision and getting things right over forthrightness would have done exactly what Clinton did (although Clinton's phrasing was unfortunate) and asked what was actually meant. Clinton's question was more likely to get him into trouble than answering what was asked.
I'm afraid that I see precision of thought (which spills over into precision with language) as a good thing. Forthrightness without precision is easily going to slip over into forthwrongness
I would also say that forthrightness would appear to be almost impossible for a politician (as opposed to a campaigner) because they need to keep a disparate electorate happy (unless completely gerrymandered or unelected) and probably also keep their campaign donors and party happy, the interests of whom do not coincide with either their party or the electorate.
Could someone therefore explain to me why an overt lack of forthrightness in a politician is seriously objected to please? (A lack of honesty is another matter, but I digress).
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
quote: Could someone therefore explain to me why an overt lack of forthrightness in a politician is seriously objected to please?
Because it suggests dishonesty when noticed.
Posted by Rakeesh (Member # 2001) on :
quote:If I was wrong about both the above then I apologise for expecting open-mindedness on behalf of the forum and a lack of hypocricy on behalf of Card. I am doing more harm than good in that case and shall return to my more normal haunts on the internet. Evidence to date does appear to indicate that I chose the wrong approach, and for this I apologise.
Dude, people here are not so stupid so as not to recognize such an insulting, sarcastic, and BS "apology" both to card while also being the same to the forum. You're using a lot of five-dollar words to achieve the same level of sarcasm teenagers use.
Well-done! Geepers, that approach is revolutionary! It'll be a sensation! I suggest you should spread this revolution elsewhere on the Internet-it'll surely catch on. But as you've already sowed the seeds of your ground-breaking new technique here, please, consider your work done.
Posted by Oobie Binoobie (Member # 8059) on :
quote:Originally posted by Francis D:
And I have yet to understand the viewpoint that passions have no place in politics or discussions. To be more accurate, I see absolutely no point in discussions (as opposed to gossip or banter) without passion, without information being presented and without well-reasoned arguments. (Any one of the preceeding is sufficient for a discussion). If you have none of the above, all you are doing is effectively chewing over the fat.
Without passion, you won't get anything done. Without information you won't learn anything new. Without well-reasoned arguments (something that requires precision of thought), you won't reach new understandings. I therefore do not think of inflaming passions as a bad thing.
And yet, another notion I cant escape is that you've failed to sway anyone, least of all the people closest to Card (you've been corresponding with a couple of his kids, did you know that?), that your position is worth considering.
See, if you start with the bludgeon, all you get is bloody people shouting "OW!" Such people are ill-disposed to listen to your reason.
Plus, I have yet to see your strawman claim hold true: It's haughty arrogant anger which doesn't serve, not passion.
Posted by Zotto! (Member # 4689) on :
(Quick aside: I of course could be wrong, but I actually don't think there are a "couple" members of the Card familia posting here; pretty sure Geoff is the only one. Carry on, though.)
Posted by rivka (Member # 4859) on :
You forgot Geoff's other personalities.
Posted by Francis D (Member # 9121) on :
Seemingly this forum is swayed by emotions and pays absolutely no attention to facts. I shall therefore bow out with the following observations:
1. The best way to deal with arrogance is to demonstrate that it is not merited. There has been only one valid correction to anything I've said (even my supposed hyperbole has been accurate).
2. I am not trying to sway people directly. I am presenting some extremely damning facts which should suffice on their own. My presentation has a different (and repeatedly stated) goal. I would however challenge people to look through the many links I presented.
3. The person who seems most concerned about politeness distorts quotations, accuses his opponents of having understandings that no rational person could have (therefore his opponents are not rational people). I do not go anything like that far and yet I'm the one being jumped on.
I therefore think that my continued presence here will only further annoy everyone (myself included).
But please go back and read the links in my posts.
Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :
quote:But please go back and read the links in my posts.
Would you PLEASE stop pretending like people who disagree with some of your points or with the way you present them haven't done their research.
And also stop lying about distorting quotations.
Posted by Oobie Binoobie (Member # 8059) on :
Only Geoff? Well, OK. I didn't know he had multiple ID's here.... because they're multiple ID's! :-)
I'm not close-personal-friends with OSC or any of his kids, of course, but that wouldn't prevent me from inviting him to my house, should he make his way to the Portland Oregon area. My dad's an ameteur playwright, you see; he'd geek out! :-D
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
quote:My presentation has a different (and repeatedly stated) goal.
Dude. No one here is complaining about your facts. They're complaining about your presentation. Do you understand this yet?
Posted by Rakeesh (Member # 2001) on :
quote:3. The person who seems most concerned about politeness distorts quotations, accuses his opponents of having understandings that no rational person could have (therefore his opponents are not rational people). I do not go anything like that far and yet I'm the one being jumped on.
What, calling people idiots and tools isn't going as far as to indirectly call someone irrational? Not that I think that's what actually happened.
"You're irrational." "You're an idiot."
Yeah, I'm lookin' but I ain't seein' much space between those two things. You are either unable to see a difference, in which case you are an idiot. Or as is more likely since you appear intelligent otherwise, you know damned well there is no difference, and you're being duplicitous and throwing on the handy-dandy old martyr cloak and whining.
Boo-hoo. Bye!
Posted by Kagehi (Member # 9123) on :
quote:Originally posted by Oobie Binoobie: Kagehi, if you heard some pilots arguing "Bernoulli vs. Newton", you would know that they are a class of people who admit that airplanes can fly, who fly them generally with great skill and safety, and still have no clue why they fly.
You also wrote, "The point being that you can't argue for design when the thing you are looking at barely works right," referring to a rising popular idea that human beings are designed badly.
Well, OK, you've a right to that opinion, but it seems like so much movie-critiquing to me; noone has shown another system of life, biological or otherwise, which is empirically better, even from the standpoints you cite.
And in any case, wouldn't a creationist simply rejoin with, "The fact that it works at all is the Godly miracle!"
Gets us noplace.
Yes, if you simply assume that someone would design life the way it is, its not unreasonable. The fatal flaw with that logic is that when we describe design in comes with some *basic* assumptions. Among them is that designers try to minimize redundancies, design parts to efficiently achieve specific tasks, etc. The problem with trying to project design on biology is that it fails on *all* grounds that we define design. It is:
1. Rarely ever terribly efficient
2. It has a huge level of redundancy, more than half of it in bits and pieces of code that no longer do anything, but, save for the defective part, are identical to existing processes
3. It contains ad-hoc solutions, like the enzyme production in mice than has one junk of code that is defective, producing the wrong enzyme, and some entirely different section which tells the RNA to modify the defective one to turn it into the correct enzyme. Mice are the **only** species that incorrectly codes for this enzyme.
And so on.
This has led to the inescapable conclusion that either a) its not designed, since this is exactly what you expect from a semi-random process, or b) the designer is like some two year old kid with a hammer, a bag of nails and some boards, who tries to build a tree house, while having no clue about construction. You get extra nails sticking out that are 'maybe' just bent over, but don't attach anything to anything else, stuff nailed "to" the tree, instead of resting on the branches, bits that tilt pracariously when you stand in the wrong place and a roof that leaks. All problems that get solved through trial and error, using even more ad-hoc solutions. God or, for that matter, space aliens are *presumed* to have a far better understanding of what they hell they are doing than that. But natural processes can and do produce things which appears designed, like balancing rocks in some places, pyramid shaped formations in Egypt, nearly perfectly round holes through solid rock, etc. They are not perfect, but they are as good, if not sometimes better, than the two year old can come up with.
The problem with arguing design is that the pro-ID side is babbling about new discoveries supposedly proving it (though they can't give supporting evidence of that), the other side is looking at the same *complete* evidence and wondering, "Why the heck does this even work at all?" And it doesn't help that people like those on this project:
Are using the equivalent of 1% of the number of rules as the real universe uses to drive evolution and getting stuff that is a) so complicated they can't figure out how or why it works either and b) smart enough that in one case it figured out that the scientists where dropping it into a test program, to feed it specific types of data, then killing the more developed versions. They where trying to see if they could prevent evolution in the system, by killing all the more advanced versions. Instead, somehow, the artifical lifeform figured out that the condictions in the test environment where different from its normal environment, and that only those that pretended to be dead in that environment would survive. So they played dead when tested, then went right back to breeding in the normal virtual world, as though nothing had happened. Someone certainly designed the "world" these things live in, but *they* evolved from batches of purely random data, with some basic rules that defined how and when they would be able to replicate, just like abiogenesis. And they produce so called irreducibly complex systems within a very small number of generations.
This of course would all be a big, "Oops!", for creationists and design advocates, except the former simply claims it doesn't count, and the later insist it must all be staged. The fact that, according to the developers, something like 80% of the people downloading their software have been creationists and IDers, and that those people have to date been unable to do more than point out a few minor software bugs, doesn't bode well for either view point.
Posted by Rakeesh (Member # 2001) on :
Your other points are interesting, but speaking for myself, I don't see major redundancy as a flaw in engineering or biology, really.
Posted by camus (Member # 8052) on :
quote:This has led to the inescapable conclusion that either a) its not designed, since this is exactly what you expect from a semi-random process, or b) the designer is like some two year old kid with a hammer, a bag of nails and some boards, who tries to build a tree house, while having no clue about construction.
or c) the system was designed but over millions of years accumulated mutations that result in the redundancies and inefficiencies that we see today.
Posted by Kagehi (Member # 9123) on :
quote:Originally posted by Oobie Binoobie: See, I've done engineering myself, though with electronics instead of bio systems. It is virtually always a balancing act, acheiving desired features by accepting a flaw elsewhere. Those sorts of questions arise easily in a mind like mine. Saying the octopus eye is "better" doesn't completely resolve the question. Octopus eyes live in salt water and the lighting conditions of an ocean. Human eyes do not.
Except... There are numerous other types of eyes that do work in air and *are* still more effective. Its rather unclear from an engineering stand point why having a blind spot would benefit, when there are hundreds of other types of eyes that work better in the same conditions, many of them with identical capacity to see color, etc. The use of the Octopus eye in the example is merely due to it being the closest in overall design to a humans, including color perception, etc, save for a) the environment it works in an b) how the nerves are attached. It still begs the question of what advantage we get in trade for a flaw that other air based vision system *don't* have. Especially given that 90% of the vision system is in the brain, not the eyes. Its like, having discovered the flaw in hubble, we had just said, "Well, maybe there is something naturally blurry we can look at.." But even so, you are talking about engineering as applies to biology, without knowing enough about biology to judge what constitutes reasonable trade offs. Engineers that *do* know enough are the ones saying that a lot of it makes no sense.
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
quote:Originally posted by camus:
quote:This has led to the inescapable conclusion that either a) its not designed, since this is exactly what you expect from a semi-random process, or b) the designer is like some two year old kid with a hammer, a bag of nails and some boards, who tries to build a tree house, while having no clue about construction.
or c) the system was designed but over millions of years accumulated mutations that result in the redundancies and inefficiencies that we see today.
I don't think so : The original, non-ad-hoc version would work better, and be selected for. The kind of jury-rigged stuff we're talking about here can only survive if it's competing against things that plain don't work; against something properly designed, it would be outclassed.
But in any case, if you're going to use 'this works well so it must have been designed' as an argument, you can't very well turn around and say 'except for the bits that don't work so well.' That's completely circular reasoning.
Posted by Kagehi (Member # 9123) on :
quote:Originally posted by Rakeesh: Your other points are interesting, but speaking for myself, I don't see major redundancy as a flaw in engineering or biology, really.
Maybe not in software design... After all, someone a while back decompiled a version of something MS wrote and found that 60% of the code in it was unused dialogs, strings that are not used, printer dialogs that where not implimented, chunks of code that used to do something, only to be replaced by something else, but never removed, etc. Its almost funny how similar MS applications are to DNA. However, even they didn't have three to four identical copies of a dialog, each with slight changes, of which only one (or even none) do anything.
Point is, when you design an airplane and discover that the engine you planned to use doesn't work, you *remove* the old engine, not leave parts of it in the airplane, along with stray wires, etc. This is what you get with DNA. Parts that are not simply redundant in the sense that they do something or someone simply forget to remove them.
With DNA on the other hand it is quite ovious that replication errors caused duplications, which later got hijacked for other stuff. Sort of like if the application I mentioned had taken an unused printer dialog and glued it to a database, rather than designing a real database dialog. This would make no sense at all, since none of the fields would apply to such a database, but its exactly the sort of thing you see in DNA. What originally was a copy of something that produced stomach acid might grow hair, because a copy of the original got glued by accident to the code that produced claws and somehow that managed to produce hair (this is hypothetical btw). Point is, scientists **see** this type of replication, then reappropriation of processes in the lab, though usually in viruses. But not always.
Point being, I could try to describe book writing in terms of computer code, but I wouldn't have a clue what I was talking about, even though I could argue that both use letters and both follow some sort of planned path. I could even point at "choose your own adventure" books and argue that constituted proof. But short of *writing* a book, I would be arguing from the stance of ignorance. But it is true that engineers and mathmaticians tend to be more prone to seeing ID as reasonable. Both also argued that there must be tombs in Egypt under those pyramid shaped rock formations, that places like the Devil's Postpile, with its hexagonal stone extrusions where "carved", that there where canals on mars and numerous other arguments that are reasonable only from a standpoint of knowing too little about the subject being discussed. There are people who are both biologist *and* engineers though, and they are often the ones claiming it is *not* designed.
Posted by Kagehi (Member # 9123) on :
quote:Originally posted by camus:
quote:This has led to the inescapable conclusion that either a) its not designed, since this is exactly what you expect from a semi-random process, or b) the designer is like some two year old kid with a hammer, a bag of nails and some boards, who tries to build a tree house, while having no clue about construction.
or c) the system was designed but over millions of years accumulated mutations that result in the redundancies and inefficiencies that we see today.
Interesting.. There have been plants though that have code in them to repair their own DNA if altered, so *prevent* such errors. Was a nasty surprise to the geneticist trying to figure out why the genes he introduced didn't work. I guess the designers overlooked this in every other species on the planet? Seriously, the problem with this theory is that we know the rate mutations normally take place, and some of those glitches are so old they had to have appeared back when the only living things on the planet where microbial.
Oh, interesting article in Discover Magazine, seems they found a virus that has a mess of stuff in it that it shouldn't (1,000 genes, where normal viruses only have about 10). Viruses are only supposed to be made of simple chunks of DNA or RNA, very rarely both, and unable to replicate themselves or do any other complex things. This one is far larger than any other, and while it still can't replicate on its own, it has both RNA and DNA and a mess of processes normally only found in full cells. This suggests that life progressed like:
1. viroids - RNA that lack the ability to form a protective shell. 2. viruses - RNA or DNA with protective coatings. 3. Germs - Self replicating organisms that we define as life. 4. Multicellular, single cell type. 5. Multicellular, with specialty cells, like us.
Still leaves a gap between chemicals and viroids, but a viroid can be as little as a few fragments, which can and do cause disease, and can be copied and replicated by the host, but do not code for anything specific. Sort of like:
a = 1 end
By itself a viroid does nothing at all. Get a lot of them together... And the building blocks of those fragments are literally only slightly less common than carbon.
Posted by El JT de Spang (Member # 7742) on :
quote:The problem with trying to project design on biology is that it fails on *all* grounds that we define design. It is:
1. Rarely ever terribly efficient
I'm no biologist, but what definition of efficiency are you using? Plants are a lot better at converting sunlight to energy than anything we've been able to develop, right?
Posted by Bob_Scopatz (Member # 1227) on :
I have two major problems with "classical" ID theory (pre-Creationism de-evolution of the concept). Well...okay 3 problems.
1) Whenever sufficient time has passed following the publication of a claim for the "irreducible complexity" of some biological phenomenon, subsequent research has found precisely the kind of graded intermediaries that the ID folks claimed couldn't exist. I don't have the cites in front of me, but Behe's own challenges have been answered pretty spectacularly and not in his favor. Failure to keep up with the literature on this subject can really undermine a very appealing argument. Which leads me to #2
2) I completely and thoroughly reject the notion that God is "placeable" in the black box that Behe and others submit as the <insert God here> point for Intelligent Design. Partly, I think it's a mistake to point there and say "here's where God did it," because every time someone does that, someone a few years later proves that it was a natural phenomenon afterall -- this has been going on consistently since before Darwin. ID, in that respect is nothing new.
BUT...When I think about it, ID is really a theory that proposes an External Influence, not necessarily a designer. Check it out. They are usually silent on the possible extra-terrestrial origins of some things. It's not because of Occam's Razor, no no! They actually include among the possible sources of the "unexplained" phenomenon that they came from outside our planet...and may have arrived fully formed. Oops! Let's think about this. So, something couldn't have evolved here, but it got here somehow. That's one possibility, right? So, what makes them LEAP to the conclusion that it was intelligently designed? If that's a serious possibility, what they've really said is that we should go inspect the flora, fauna, and fossil record of wherever that "thing" came from and see if maybe it evolved there. Ooops. Seriously, this is a fatal flaw in the logic as far as I'm concerned. At least if the goal is to prove, by absence of other explanations, that there IS an intelligent designer. All they've done is give the opposing side a blank calendar on which to write in a date (perhaps millions of years in the future) at which time they would concede defeat having exhausted the intervening years searching all non-Earth planets and solar systems.
That's just muddled logic on their part, IMO.
And my #3...
3) ID theory is a repackaging of a theory that has been around a long, long time, and it is no more successful today than it was in Darwin's time. That's not fatal, of course, but I think biologists have earned a rest from this theory. It's as if every time someone came up with a medical advance, someone came carping in from the sidelines and screaming that they'd neglected to consider the influence of phlogiston imbalances on the bodily humors. I know that Behe (and a few others) seemed to really have hit upon something novel, but it really is/was another attempt at the same old argument that Darwin himself thoroughly exploded in his writing. And not only with data and observation, but with basic logic. The logic is as follows:
Absence of a sufficiently robust explanatory theory that does NOT include external influences does NOT, ipso facto, provide proof that an external influence exists. In short, it's the wrong evidence. It's the kind of evidence that "science" has a huge track record of demolishing...eventually...since empiricism and the scientific method gained sway among practitioners. Basically, it's betting on a horse that has lost every race that's reached a conclusion. Because there are always still open questions, this type of <insert designer here> theory continues to be put forward, but time is their mortal enemy.
(Special to OSC). I highly recommend reading Finding Darwin's God. I was a big fan of Stephen Jay Gould and punctuated equilibrium until I read this book. I think he does a VERY good job of explaining why PE is just Evolutionary Biology anyway. I mean a REALLY good job.
I still like Jay Gould's writing (he was a brilliant essayist), but his theory of PE comes down to nothing but a slight repackaging of plain old evolution through natural selection, and it's a repackaging that is not really necessary. The issues he raised were ALSO addressed by Darwin in his original work.
Finding Darwin's God is also a very good treatment of the whole ID question (on it's own terms, not the Creationism aberration of it).
I don't think the author nailed the theological arguments in the last half of his book, so it sort of fell flat for me in terms of resolving the BIG questions, but it did an admirable job of showing why the ID alternative doesn't do well.
Posted by Bob_Scopatz (Member # 1227) on :
Oh, and I'd like to add that I too was taken by complete surprise when ID morphed into Creationism with a twist. It didn't make any sense to me at all, but it happened and I got caught by it just as you seem to have. I made some statements about ID and found out I was talking about the older, more pure version of it. Dare I say, the almost clever version of it...
Currently ID is Creationism, right down to its 6,000 year old earthy toes.
Very disappointing.
Posted by Kagehi (Member # 9123) on :
quote:Originally posted by El JT de Spang:
quote:The problem with trying to project design on biology is that it fails on *all* grounds that we define design. It is:
1. Rarely ever terribly efficient
I'm no biologist, but what definition of efficiency are you using? Plants are a lot better at converting sunlight to energy than anything we've been able to develop, right?
So, because plants are better at one thing than what we manage means "all" forms of life are, or that everything the plant does is better? I didn't mean that life can't produce specific improvements we can't currently duplicate, just that the code used to get there is often more convoluted than needed and the solution found isn't always the best possible.
Posted by Kagehi (Member # 9123) on :
quote:Originally posted by Bob_Scopatz: Oh, and I'd like to add that I too was taken by complete surprise when ID morphed into Creationism with a twist. It didn't make any sense to me at all, but it happened and I got caught by it just as you seem to have. I made some statements about ID and found out I was talking about the older, more pure version of it. Dare I say, the almost clever version of it...
Currently ID is Creationism, right down to its 6,000 year old earthy toes.
Very disappointing.
Yeah. I don't have much of a problem with something David Brin's uplift concept, save for a) it doesn't appear necessary and b) there is absolutely no evidence of it. Its not an impossible idea, but the only valid argument I have seen for non-terran origins is that maybe we came from Mars on some rocks, since we find Mars rocks here and there are some microbes and even multicelled organisms, like one called a Water Bear, which could survive the re-entry. In fact that animal is a bit creepy. You can boil it, back it at thousands of degrees, etc. and the moment conditions allow it, such as just adding a drop of water in the case of baking it, the damn thing starts moving around again. Its life span though is like a week or something, so its not exactly immortal, even if it is nearly indestructable.
In any case, the more I read, the more unlikely distant origins or external interference becomes. But the real irony is that everyone is looking for some external intelligent force. I think the best argument against it is that I can't comprehend why a universe (or just earth) that may as well have infinity-1 permutaions of landscapes, chemical variations, etc. and a big ass thermal battery bathing it in energy would possible induce the formation of something "less" complex than the planet itself. Its like claiming that a golf ball dropped on the side of a mountain should, without outside intelligent influence, simply stop right where it hits and never roll any place. But that is backwards. If such intelligent interference happened, you would expect to find *less* diversity, more similarity and fewer solutions, not billions of species of animals and what one biologist estimates is close to a billion times more different viruses than animals. At best you can shove the time of intervention so far back as to render it virtually irrelevant, given that you are still stuck explaining why intervention was needed to make the first microbe, if something else managed to develop before that, then show up here to make microbes. It also begs the question of how, that far back, there would have been any life without a million light years that could have done it anyway. It certainly wouldn't have been form this galaxy, since there isn't enough time between the formation of the first planetary systems in it and the formation of early earth, to even come up with us there, never mind one that managed to do what we haven't and figure out a way to a) travel probably thousands of light years to here, b) start it all up, and c) somehow fail to leave the slightest hint of having been here.
ID in the old sense - vaguely possible, but increasingly improbable. Especially given resent new projections that imply life "might" have been able to form something like 100 million years *earlier* than previously estimated, based on the presence of known life near volcanic vents and even some ancient species found in rocks that may have been no where near the surface of the planet for nearly as long as we are able to determine time, and are "still" alive in there, feeding on thermal heat and sulfur, among other things.
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
[total derail] In the Uplift books, it was always clear to me that humans really were 'wolflings' - evolved to intelligence without outside interference. [/total derail]
Posted by ClaudiaTherese (Member # 923) on :
Bob, can I block-quote your "problems with ID" elsewhere on this site? (i.e., in another thread)
Posted by Bob_Scopatz (Member # 1227) on :
Sure! where? Have I missed another ID thread...I do so love them. Posted by Kagehi (Member # 9123) on :
quote:Originally posted by King of Men: [total derail] In the Uplift books, it was always clear to me that humans really were 'wolflings' - evolved to intelligence without outside interference. [/total derail]
Yes, but, while its been a while since I read it, there where I believe a small number of nuts that insisted we had to be some long lost species that had been uplifted and somehow forgotten. Just because every scrap of evidence says X, doesn't mean there won't still be people saying it is actually Y.
Hmm. On a similar note, was pointed to this hilarious page today from PZ:
quote:Originally posted by Oobie Binoobie: Well, OK, you've a right to that opinion, but it seems like so much movie-critiquing to me; noone has shown another system of life, biological or otherwise, which is empirically better, even from the standpoints you cite.
And in any case, wouldn't a creationist simply rejoin with, "The fact that it works at all is the Godly miracle!"
Gets us noplace.
Yes, if you simply assume that someone would design life the way it is, its not unreasonable. The fatal flaw with that logic is that when we describe design in comes with some *basic* assumptions. Among them is that designers try to minimize redundancies, design parts to efficiently achieve specific tasks, etc. The problem with trying to project design on biology is that it fails on *all* grounds that we define design. It is:
1. Rarely ever terribly efficient
2. It has a huge level of redundancy, more than half of it in bits and pieces of code that no longer do anything, but, save for the defective part, are identical to existing processes
3. It contains ad-hoc solutions, like the enzyme production in mice than has one junk of code that is defective, producing the wrong enzyme, and some entirely different section which tells the RNA to modify the defective one to turn it into the correct enzyme. Mice are the **only** species that incorrectly codes for this enzyme.
And so on.[/QB]
Kaeghi, let me offer appreciation to you for some very decent and interesting thoughts on the subject. The difference between what you're doing and what Francis did are well-illustrated here.
You make a good case that biological systems don't follow the rules of design you put forth, but I'll counter that those are rules of design for only one context.
Other design requirements prevail in human designed systems which do not meet your requirements (and using the term "intelligent design" only technically):
Efficiency: The design of an SUV is rarely fuel-efficient; it's touted by many as a *flaw* in the design, as you've put for that that certain bio systems are not efficient. SUV's are nonetheless "intelligently designed," and entirely appropriate for certain applications, such as hauling 10 people or two tons of stuff.
Redundancy: The avionics packages on a Boeing 777 are seven-way redundant, illustrating a context where a massive amount of capability is held in reserve against the time when the primary system fails. The Space Shuttle design also employs three-way redundancy.
Both systems were "intelligently designed."
Ad-hoc solutions: Microsoft-designed software, indeed, most software programmers working on a mature system, where the designers assume a surfeit of certain computer resources, leave unused bits of code behind and simply don't call on them, on the rationale that excising them creates more side effects than leaving them in place. I can think of two or three examples from my own work where I took the unusable output from a small subprogram and wrote another program to translate it into something useful; there is actually an entire sub-industry of programmers about the business of doing in software what mouse RNA does for that enzyme.
Also, "intelligently designed," while at the same time being much more complex than avionics systems and much less complex than a biological system.
And, if you want the best example of an intelligently designed system which contains massive inefficiencies, at least four-way incomplete redundancies, and about 26 ad-hoc solutions, well, look no further than the Constitution of the United States, as amended.
Also, "intelligently designed," and arguably as complex or moreso than a biological system.
Maybe software is the best example of the sort of thing for this sort of discussion, since its permutations are as mathematically endless as Turing has proved. You mentioned http://dllab.caltech.edu/avida/
...well OK, but while that defeats the arguments for a designer in terms of irreducible complexity, one cannot ever escape the notion that Avida itself, even if patterned after some bio processes, was...
...intelligently designed, as was the simulated universe in which the simulated organisms find themselves.
The point of this is not to trumpet the supremacy of "Intelligent Design" as a philosophy, merely to point out that a scientist's efforts to understand bio processes does not *ever* resolve the question of whether "God did it," even if they system is irreducably complex.
And since his work also doesn't ever *deny* the notion that "God did it," the whole argument is dogmatist-eat-dogmatist. Who is behaving worse? That's difficult to say, but right now, I'd lay money that Creationists are behaving worse, and that reactions such as PZ Myers to it are not helping them behave better.
Posted by Kagehi (Member # 9123) on :
Umm. "by PZ's site" rather, not written by PZ himself, in case that sounds as incorrect as I realized. Posted by Bob_Scopatz (Member # 1227) on :
quote:The point of this is not to trumpet the supremacy of "Intelligent Design" as a philosophy, merely to point out that a scientist's efforts to understand bio processes does not *ever* resolve the question of whether "God did it," even if they system is irreducably complex.
And since his work also doesn't ever *deny* the notion that "God did it," the whole argument is dogmatist-eat-dogmatist. Who is behaving worse? That's difficult to say, but right now, I'd lay money that Creationists are behaving worse, and that reactions such as PZ Myers to it are not helping them behave better.
Well said.
The only thing I might add is that a debate over who is behaving worse is, to me, a symptom of the unresolvable nature of this debate.
Personally, my sympathies go out more to the evolutionary biologists because, from what I've seen/read, they really have addressed the concerns put forth in "classical" ID numerous times over the course of the last 150 years. The counter-examples change, sure, but the basic argument is the same, and it's still as flawed as it ever was.
I give partial sympathy to the ID folks because I agree that current evolutionary theory doesn't explain everything, even within its own domain (i.e., the stuff it SHOULD explain). A lot of evolutionary thinking reads like a "Just So" story rather than something backed up by direct observation (let alone experimentation).
As long as that is true of evolutionary biology, there will be people who insist that God is in the gaps.
All I have is my gut feeling that it's a bad strategy -- and I think it really IS a strategy, rather than an intellectually honest attempt at meaningful dialog.
I believe God is undiscoverable through the means being applied in ID-type arguments because the answer isn't really "it must be due to a designer" as much as it is "we don't know WHAT happened, so it must be due to an intelligent designer."
And the various versions of this argument have not progressed in 150 years beyond that clearly incomplete and disatisfying assertion.
Granted, irreducible complexity sounded like a new wrinkle, but when those counter-examples started falling apart in the face of new data (sometimes published within mere weeks of being trumpeted by Behe and his fellows), I think people in the scientific community just had a sense of collective deja vu. It's the God in the Gaps argument all over again. And it just doesn't satisfy.
We need, instead a scientific theory that would distinguish between a designed system and a naturally evolving one. It would have to have some sort of predictive strength -- i.e., it should be able to point us to someplace fruitful to look for evidence of the designer beyond an apparent complexity.
Ultimately, I despair of ever seeing such a theory because, honestly, I can't think of anything that a designer would do that nature couldn't produce. As someone said earlier (brilliant, whoever you were), complexity may really indicate lack of any intelligent direction since one thing designers do is simplify.
I think of things like...sometimes designers scrap everything and start over from scratch. So does nature. One good asteroid strike and it's a giant reset button.
Designers sometimes float more than one version of a product to see which one does better in the real world. So does nature.
Designers sometimes fail spectacularly in hidden ways so that the product's fatal flaws only become evident after long periods of use. Nature's got that covered too.
To me, this is shaping up as another intellectual dead end, like the nature/nurture debate. The only difference is that evolutionary thinking has a long and robust track record of providing meaningful explanations and, at least from a scientific perspective, is the simpler theory in that it doesn't rely on a giant unknowable "effector" inserted to make everything work out.
I'm betting on God in the infinite. But I'm betting on evolution in the proximate.
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
quote:Originally posted by Kagehi:
quote:Originally posted by King of Men: [total derail] In the Uplift books, it was always clear to me that humans really were 'wolflings' - evolved to intelligence without outside interference. [/total derail]
Yes, but, while its been a while since I read it, there where I believe a small number of nuts that insisted we had to be some long lost species that had been uplifted and somehow forgotten. Just because every scrap of evidence says X, doesn't mean there won't still be people saying it is actually Y.
Hmm. On a similar note, was pointed to this hilarious page today from PZ:
What you say is true, but you were referring to "David Brin's Uplift concept" as though you thought he believed in his own books. Apparently I misunderstood you. Posted by Oobie Binoobie (Member # 8059) on :
quote: The use of the Octopus eye in the example is merely due to it being the closest in overall design to a humans, including color perception, etc, save for a) the environment it works in an b) how the nerves are attached. It still begs the question of what advantage we get in trade for a flaw that other air based vision system *don't* have. Especially given that 90% of the vision system is in the brain, not the eyes. Its like, having discovered the flaw in hubble, we had just said, "Well, maybe there is something naturally blurry we can look at.." But even so, you are talking about engineering as applies to biology, without knowing enough about biology to judge what constitutes reasonable trade offs. Engineers that *do* know enough are the ones saying that a lot of it makes no sense.
By the same token, you are yourself projecting naive ideas about engineering. And you probably shouldn't assume that I don't know enough of what I'm talking about regarding biology. I don't have to be a biologist to reject Behe. (and here's a hint: I reject Behe)
In any case, you've excluded the middle: which of those biology-wise engineers are also atheists? And which controls thier opinion? The disposition toward atheism? Their training as engineers (who are not trained as scientists, near as I can tell)? A more-likely complicated combination of both?
(Of *course* ID makes little sense as science. I count my blessings that our school district isn't plagued with a call to teach it as science; I'd end up standing against people who go to church with me.
And OSC said as much; he thinks is a leap of faith.)
Posted by Tom Curtis (Member # 9104) on :
It has been interesting to read this thread, and finally a lot of good sense is being written. I do have a bone to pick with one comment, however. Bob writes:
quote:I give partial sympathy to the ID folks because I agree that current evolutionary theory doesn't explain everything, even within its own domain (i.e., the stuff it SHOULD explain). A lot of evolutionary thinking reads like a "Just So" story rather than something backed up by direct observation (let alone experimentation).
I absolutely agree that current evolutionary theory doesn't explain everything, or even most things within its domain. But that is just because it is an evidence based endeavour. Consider, for example, Behe's most famour example, "the" bacterial flagellum. At the time of Behe's writting, the proteins in the flagellum had not yet been all described (indeed, AFAIK, still have not all been described). What is more, at the time of his writing there was still not information on the detailed structure of a range of bacterial flagella. The flagella is not the same, of course, on all bacteria. So, at the time of his writing, Behe's complaint about the lack of an explanation of the origin of the flagella amounts to an expectation that we have a complete evolutionary explanation of the system before we even have a complete description of the system.
This is fairly typical, and has been commented on by critics of ID and creationism. The examples are always drawn from poorly known and poorly studied systems rather than from those which are well known.
Depressingly it suggests that even in a hundred years creationists will still be with us. There is simply so much to learn about in biology that even in a hundred years there will be hundreds of systems only partly characterised, and for which detailed evolutionary explanations have yet to be found.
Posted by Kagehi (Member # 9123) on :
quote:Originally posted by Oobie Binoobie: In any case, you've excluded the middle: which of those biology-wise engineers are also atheists? And which controls thier opinion?
Hmm. This might be a valid point if not of a single obvious flaw. Despite statements to the contrary by IDists, something like 70% of scientists *and* engineers are Christians, with less than 1% of them supporting ID in any form. I would say that since it is therefor impossible for the majority of such engineers, given that only 30% are atheist to begin with, would be basing their assessment on atheism, instead of engineering and their understanding of biology. The only way the question is even valid is if you presume that most engineers and scientist are atheists, which is pure bullshit. Merely applying that its a valid question *is* ignoring the middle, than is neither fundimentalist *or* atheist, but who never the less reject the creationists version.
Posted by Kagehi (Member # 9123) on :
quote:Originally posted by Tom Curtis: I absolutely agree that current evolutionary theory doesn't explain everything, or even most things within its domain. But that is just because it is an evidence based endeavour. Consider, for example, Behe's most famour example, "the" bacterial flagellum. At the time of Behe's writting, the proteins in the flagellum had not yet been all described (indeed, AFAIK, still have not all been described). What is more, at the time of his writing there was still not information on the detailed structure of a range of bacterial flagella. The flagella is not the same, of course, on all bacteria. So, at the time of his writing, Behe's complaint about the lack of an explanation of the origin of the flagella amounts to an expectation that we have a complete evolutionary explanation of the system before we even have a complete description of the system.
This is fairly typical, and has been commented on by critics of ID and creationism. The examples are always drawn from poorly known and poorly studied systems rather than from those which are well known.
Depressingly it suggests that even in a hundred years creationists will still be with us. There is simply so much to learn about in biology that even in a hundred years there will be hundreds of systems only partly characterised, and for which detailed evolutionary explanations have yet to be found.
And it also makes very obvious that they are attacking biology out of some bizzare fear or as a literal wedge to get at all of science, else why is it considered acceptable that **every** other science contain similar gaps and incomplete understanding, but evolution is the only one attacked?
Cases in point, weather - we are still decifering this, gravity - What the hell is it anyway?, much of cosmology, quatum physics, atmoic theory - guess if its so accurate and gapless they don't need those new super colliders.., etc. Logically, if they where at all serious about the supposed "gaps" in science, then Pat Robertson's definition of how weather happens, i.e., "God will strike evil people with hurricanes", would be a main stream theory, we would still be looking for the demons/angels that hold our feet to the earth, instead of gravity, people would be testing for Psi waves to explain quatum physics, geologist would be trying to ask Pele or Hephaestus about continental drift and volcanism, and so on.
There are a million things that Christianity and other religions came up with to explain things, not one of which we have 100% complete explanations for, some of which have far bigger holes in them than evolution (what did you say gravity actually was again?) and are *not* being challenged. Why? Because they make useful predictions and produce tangible results? Hmm... 90% of modern research into everything from making bacteria that produce insulin to possible causes of diseases and cures/treatments for MS, Down Syndrome, AIDS, antibiotic resistance etc. is **all** based in things from the field of evolution. None of them are even possible without the basic presumption of common descent, changes over time and that everything works enough like everything else that you can make reasonable preductions about it.
The only reason evolution is being attacked is because people have a biased belief that being the only species that invents mass genocide, child rape, world wars, dooms day devices, destructive ideologies, oppression, racism, fascism, religious bigotry and environmental destruction *must* make us somehow superior to mere animals, who do *none* of these things. That in essense, there is something so horribly wrong with being an animal, that they have to fight it tooth and claw, even if that means lying to do it.
And the very first argument you will get from *everyone* making this claim is that animals are ammoral and we have free will. So.. All the evidence that proves otherwise, like monkeys who will "help" others get food, even when they don't, birds that chase of known theives of their own species, and so on, are all what, someone's imagination? And.. Just like people, the monkey can "choose" not to help the other. The bird that steals wouldn't be remarkable, if other birds of their species didn't react to their "choice" to do so. And so on.
Animals do think, they do make choices and they do know right from wrong and "choose" to do the wrong thing, just like people. Why are we superior? Because we can invent more convoluted and insane justifications for it than, "I want that shiny object and if I have to steal it from the other guys nest I will."? This hardly impresses me as making us somehow qualitatively better or more free will possessing than and animal. More self deluding and dangerous maybe... It doesn't make us special, unless your implying Special Ed.
Posted by Bob_Scopatz (Member # 1227) on :
Kagehi...
Welllllllll....I think you're giving us a lot of cleverness wrapped in hyperbole. I mean, really, aren't your own biases leaking through just a bit much?
Slamming humanity for all the bad actors in the past, and talking about moral arguments at all, really, doesn't address what this thread is all about. Nor does it address the arguments from what, for lack of a better term, we've been calling classical ID theory.
Ultimately, I agree that part of the reason behind ID theory has always been to assert a moral philosophy (a religious viewpoint, even) into a science. And, to some extent ID's proponents have a point about there being a moral philosophy underpinning evolutionary thought.
What I think Tom Curtis was saying is something far more concrete and, actually, more correct. That ID proponents are always going to be around because there are always going to be gaps in evolutionary thought. I think it's only PARTIALLY because we lack full knowledge. I mean, really, if that were the ONLY thing wrong with evolutionary theory, people would probably be content to take a more wait and see attitude.
I think the bigger problem with evolutionary theory is its abuse by people who ought to know better. Specifically, because of the power of the concept of evolution, some in the field have gone forward with speculations about all sorts of stuff that goes well beyond the data. And, there's a role for that in science, but where things go haywire is when the proposed explanations are later taught as accepted truth.
That makes evolution into a belief, a dogma, instead of a scientific theory. The ID folks really do have a point there. And it's too darn bad that the criticism is even partially true. It invites the kind of squabbling that we've ended up with. In popularizing the concept, people forgot to teach that some unknowns still exist.
To me, that stiffles a lot of really good things. Kids might think we know everything there is to know in Biology and thus steer clear from studying it. That'd be a shame, I think.
Also, if teachers approach it as dogma, instead of as a very powerful theory with a good record of success in explaining observable phenomena, I think the effect is to dampen creativity and it's a lost opportunity to learn about how a living science really works.
I don't think teaching ID as a counter theory is the right way to address that particular set of problems. It might help in some aspects (like teaching people what a theory really IS and is NOT in science), but I think we'd be better served in teaching something about the gaps in evolution, and about the reasons why most practioners in the field believe it to be true, but are still working to test its predictions.
Posted by clod (Member # 9084) on :
Bob,
quote: I think the bigger problem with evolutionary theory is its abuse by people who ought to know better.
social darwinists, perhaps?
Posted by Tom Curtis (Member # 9104) on :
Kagehi, you have gone way beyond what I am saying. I am not particularly worried about the religious motivations of ID advocates and creationists. There are good scientists with similar motivations; and there are atheists who are scientists who are just as bad in the converse direction. Very few of them confuse their ideology with their science, but some definitely do, and some (such as Dawkins) only avoid doing so by subtle distinctions which get lost in popular exposition.
I emphatically reject the notion that humans are not special. They are nothing special in terms of biology. It is true that they have an amazing adaption in terms of cognitive ability and language, but biologically these are no more exceptional than is sonar or navigation by migratory birds, and so on.
But humans are special in moral terms. They are unique, so far as we can tell, in that they alone on Earth are capable of moral agency. Creationists and IDists are motivated by the fallacy that because humans are morally special, therefore their origin must in some way be special also. But the argument that human origins are not special, therefore they are not morally special is also a fallacy.
Posted by Tom Curtis (Member # 9104) on :
Bob:
quote:What I think Tom Curtis was saying is something far more concrete and, actually, more correct. That ID proponents are always going to be around because there are always going to be gaps in evolutionary thought. I think it's only PARTIALLY because we lack full knowledge. I mean, really, if that were the ONLY thing wrong with evolutionary theory, people would probably be content to take a more wait and see attitude.
I think the bigger problem with evolutionary theory is its abuse by people who ought to know better. Specifically, because of the power of the concept of evolution, some in the field have gone forward with speculations about all sorts of stuff that goes well beyond the data. And, there's a role for that in science, but where things go haywire is when the proposed explanations are later taught as accepted truth.
Speculations that go well beyond the data breakdown into three sorts. First, scientists with new theories often present them to the media and in popular books in a manner which suggests the ideas are much more certain than they are. This is human nature. The scientific community responds to such excesses with damning reviews in science journals, and (if the theory is important enough), no holds barred criticism in yet more popular books.
This is not a problem with science. It is a problem with human nature, and as such is prevelant in all disciplines and belief systems. Science is distinctive in this respect only in that the criticisms tend to be more immediate, robust and cogent. It is a problem for science education, in that few people are scientifically literate enough to distinguish wild speculation from sober theory. It is definitely a problem in science journalism, where journalists would rather report shaky, but controversial theories than solid, ground breaking science. It is also a problem in anti-evolutionists, who take such examples as representing the entire field, while scrupulously ignoring the rebutalls.
The second way in which speculation goes well beyond the data are in "just so" stories. What is ignored is that "just so" stories are a first step in scientific enquiry. They are elaborate scenarios to flesh out an idea in order to elaborate falsifiable predictions. They are not unique to evolutionary theory. The most elaborate "just so" story in modern science is "string theory" which after 15 years of elaboration is still to produce a falsifiable prediction. The most famous "just so" story was Einsteins thought experiment that lead to Special Relativity, or possibly Schroedinger's Cat. Again, they are not a problem with science because they are not typically taught in textbooks or classrooms. And when discussed, they are treated as one of several views (which invariably they are when the need to be taught). Again, this is only a problem because critics ignore they whole of the literature; and the role that just so stories play in science.
The third way in which speculation goes well beyond the data is when science exposition is used to illustrate or inform philosophical or religous views. A panoply of famous Darwinists have done this, including Gould and Dawkins. Typically they are carefull to distinguish between the science which illustrates or informs the view, but does not justify it, and the philosophical view itself. But sometimes they are not as carefull as they should be and their readers are often less so.
Again this is not a problem for science. Atheists, agnostics, theists and pantheists are all entitled to their philosophical views; and their views will naturally be informed by their knowledge base. The suposition that Dawkins, for example, should not write books in support of his Atheism which draw support from science, or that his expositions of science should not mention his atheism amounts to an insistence that scientists should not be allowed to be citizens. In fact, it is a distorted prohibition. No one raised a furore about Fritjoff Capra's "Tao of Physics". No one objects to Christians writting works in which the works of nature are used to illustrate "God's glory". We don't have a problem with creationists because they use science to illustrate or inform their theism. We have a problem because they want to substitute pseudo-science in place of science. But Christians object strenously to open admissions of atheism by popular science writers. What is more, even reasonable Darwinist Christians describe as objectionable writtings such as "The Blind Watchmaker". The problem here is clearly not that some scientists are atheists, and admit it; but that many theists are incapable of saying, It is your opinion, and I disagree; but you were entitled to express it.
So, I don't think there is a problem with the abuse of evolutionary theory. Not that it doesn't happen. It does, occassionaly. Not more often than abuse of physics or even mathematics (think of Godel's theorem). It happens far less frequently than, for example the abuse of sociology, psychology (think of "The Bell Curve), or economics. I do think that there are a lot of people who lack perspective on the issue; often and most vocally because they are pushing a distorted science motivated by theism. (And I am not including Bob, or anyone else here in that number.)
Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :
*applauds Bob*
Posted by Bob_Scopatz (Member # 1227) on :
Tom, I agree with everything you say except when you say it is NOT a problem for science. It causes HUGE problems for science. Among which are:
1) Scientists still having to address theories that were dead before Darwin even published Origen
2) Spreading ignorance of the masses is never a good thing for science. Decision makers (school board members, legislators) are, in essence, part of those ignorant masses. It'd be a bit more difficult to create accurate impressions of scientific information and theories, but the benefits to science, and our society are worth it.
3) Funding. Every dollar spent teaching ID in science curricula is a dollar that could've been spent doing something about the woeful lack of knowledge about science. Every fight over ID or Creationism is, rather than an opportunity to educate, more like an opportunity to polarize. Perpetuation of the silly stereotype of scientist = God hating atheist.
4) I was serious about turning potential students off. I know that if I had felt we knew everything about the human mind I wouldn't have gone in Psychology.
but hey, I'm worried you might be thinking I disagree with you. I don't.
I just that that scientists suffer for this stuff in ways that might not be readily apparent.
In point of fact, evolutionary biology suffers dramatically if the general public starts to see that science as a dogmatic realm populated by people who will stomp unbelievers into the dust.
Posted by Bob_Scopatz (Member # 1227) on :
Thanks Dag. I know you've read Finding Darwin's God. I was wondering if you felt like Miller's last 1/3 of the book (the theology part) was satisfying. I kind of felt like what he gave was more of a meta-theology, as in "I know it can't look like this...maybe it could look something like this over here..." but I felt he really could've used help from a solid theologian.
I'd be interested in your take on that both as a devout Catholic and well...just 'cuz.
Posted by Bob_Scopatz (Member # 1227) on :
Re: social darwinism...
I personally find the "evolutionary framework" to be a powerful way to give shorthand explanations for processes involving change over time in response to external factors.
Sadly, that's as far as it goes. Evolutionary biology is a robust science with both quantiative and qualitative research/observation to back it up.
Social darwinism, and all the other "petty darwinisms" are just arguments from analogy, and, as is pretty typical with such things, the analogy breaks down into a muddled mess if/when carried to too great an extent.
It's like the analogical models of the mind. "it's a computer..." "it's a switchboard..."
Well, it ain't.
Oh well...I wasn't referring to social darwinists in any of my previous posts because I tend to give them no thought whatsoever.
Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :
quote:Thanks Dag. I know you've read Finding Darwin's God. I was wondering if you felt like Miller's last 1/3 of the book (the theology part) was satisfying.
I actually haven't. It's on a very long list of books I know I should read but haven't gotten around to. I'm on Chesterton now.
On a different topic, has there been much study of something I'll call "evolutionary design" (I have no idea if there's a "real" name for this)?
By this, I mean things that are clearly designed, such as computer programs, but that have been changed by intelligence over a long period of time - each iteration resulting in a functional (for some definition of the "functional") entity?
Prior to software, there were few individual entities that could be heavily modified. Buildings might be altered, but there's a limit to how much and for how long that can be done.
Whereas programs can be altered and "reproduced" at the same time. The parallel is even stronger when you consider that programs are almost all information that controls what other things do, much as DNA does.
Have there been any scientific studies about how one would differentiate between selected random evolution and evolutionary design?
(Note: I don't propose that God used iterative design to make animals and people. I just find the parallels fascinating.)
Posted by clod (Member # 9084) on :
Tom C.
quote: I emphatically reject the notion that humans are not special.
"Unique" might be a more neutral term to use than "special".
quote:So, I don't think there is a problem with the abuse of evolutionary theory.
That's kind of surprising. What if that sort of "abuse" or over-interpretation is used as a justification for some grandiose ideological argument?
Posted by Tom Curtis (Member # 9104) on :
Bob, I assume you don't think I was supporting the exposition of ID. So the problem for science is the view of science that the general public gains if they get a distorted view of popular science writting, or of how science actually works. And that is the key point, it is a distorted view. For every Richard Dawkins there is a John Polkinghorne; for every Daniel Dennett, there is Dennis Lamaroux; for every Stephen Jay Gould, there is a Robert Bakker or a Simon Conway Morris.
So if the public gets the impression that science is a "dogmatic realm populated by people who stomp unbelievers into dust", it is because the many theistic scientists don't write well enough, or don't get the publicity they deserve, or don't write the books they should. Frankly, to answer a question directed to someone else, I did enjoy the last third of "Finding Darwin's God". It was the best part, IMO, and I'm an atheist. The answer to the Dawkins of this world is not to stomp on them and stop them writting, but to get the Christians to write enjoyable, interesting popular expositions of science in which their Christian belief is clearly reflected. The same goes for expositions of speculative scientific theories. Don't stop the expositions, but make the alternate views as readilly available.
The problem with requiring science writters to conform particular standards which exclude religious discussion or speculation is that it gives exactly the wrong impression of science. Science procedes by the ferment of ideas. It is because scienists violently disagree with each other, and will move heaven and earth to find a recalcitrant fact to demolish theories they don't like that science progresses. Keeping all that ferment of ideas away from the public will only mean it will only come into view when pseudo-scientists quote it out of context in their attack on science.
However, I do of course agree that problems are created for science by the publication of speculations without proper restraint. But it is not a problem in science, but a problem in society about their expectations of scientists. I think we agree on the symptons, but disagree on the diagnosis and cure.
Posted by Tom Curtis (Member # 9104) on :
Clod:
quote:"Unique" might be a more neutral term to use than "special".
Venus fly traps are unique. What I definitly meant is special. There are moral considerations we owe to humans that we do not owe to any other known species. What is more, the presence of humans makes the universe valuable in a way that no other Earthly life does.
quote:That's kind of surprising. What if that sort of "abuse" or over-interpretation is used as a justification for some grandiose ideological argument?
When that happens, the proper responce is to write very public reviews that clearly indicate what is well supported science, what is speculation, and what is philosophy in the book. You might well want to condemn the author for not distinguishing adequately between the three (if he didn't), but you should not condemn him for speculating or for philosophising. If anything, you should make it quite clear that it was his right to speculate (as a scientist), and his right to philosophize (as a citizen), and expound on the roles of each in science.
The problem, such as it has been, is not that speculative books have been written, but that too much of the responce to them has been not easilly accessible to the public.
Posted by clod (Member # 9084) on :
Tom,
I think that's a fine view. I was thinking more in terms of folks that on the one hand criticize popular science-writing (flawed as it is), but on the other hand use it to prop up and justify their broad rationales for this or that ("this or that" = petty concerns, social change, whathaveyou depending on the author).
Also, by "ferment" in your previous post, I think you might have meant "foment".
cheers
Posted by Tom Curtis (Member # 9104) on :
Clod,
Thanks. I agree that their is a problem of people who do use the criticism of popular science presentations as a means to argue for their own pet projects. In fact, we are beset with such problems, but you already know my solution.
I did actually mean "ferment", as in the process whereby yeast breeds in low oxygen environments producing alcohol as a byproduct. It was a metaphore. I looked up "foment" which means "to apply warm liquids to the surface of", and yes it to is a good metaphore. Possibly I misheard the second, and settled on the first. But a google search on "ferment of ideas" yeilds 9000 results, compared to just 127 for "foment of ideas".
Which do you recommend I use in future?
Posted by Kagehi (Member # 9123) on :
quote:Originally posted by Tom Curtis: But humans are special in moral terms. They are unique, so far as we can tell, in that they alone on Earth are capable of moral agency. Creationists and IDists are motivated by the fallacy that because humans are morally special, therefore their origin must in some way be special also. But the argument that human origins are not special, therefore they are not morally special is also a fallacy.
No we are not. This is a popular mythology. There are dozens of research projects into animal behaviour that give lie to the idea that we are somehow moral while everything else isn't. There is nothing from any of that research implying that morals are solely a human domain and even less indicating that animals don't learn moral behaviour from each other, instead of functioning on pure instinct. This isn't *my* bias, this is simple fact. The last vestige of resistance some people have to the reality that we are not any *better* than anything else, beyond being better able to invent.
I am sure with enough time I could find many others that put a bullet in the idea that humans have something called morals and animals don't. But heck.. Before you *find* morals in an animal, you have to first assume there are some to look for, and unfortunately most scientists are Christians and this is one range of behaviours that there is a long track record of their religious bias making most of them, until fairly recently, insist they where not seeing it. Its simply another one of those God of the gaps situations, "Insert something special here!", where the gap has started to rapidly close. Like many misconceptions, including the concept held for over 50 years of similarly biased research that birds are all perfect visions of monogamy, and overturned by better tracking methods, this one is getting its legs cut out from under it. Its hardly my bias or my fault that once again the universe doesn't conform to what some people *want* it to be.
In fact, one theology site talking about the reciprosity issue started with, "I am not saying they are moral *like us*..." Uh, huh. As long as that's clear, we can all ignore the implications...
Posted by Bob_Scopatz (Member # 1227) on :
Well...even if the differences between humans and animals are ALL matters of degree, they are ALL still there. I think it's a mistake to say that because some animals show evidence of some behaviors that humans do habitually, there's no difference between humans and animals. Tool use monkeys is probably a great example: sure, some monkeys make and use tools in specific tasks and pass that knowledge on to their offspring, but monkey tool use and tool use by humans are not the same.
If mankind disappeared, and someone came back a few million years in the future to see what the earth's critters were up to, it might well be that there'd be LOTS of technology around, but it'd take that time. Just like it did when humans evolved as tool users.
Some of that stuff really DOES depend on mental capacity -- whether we have good measures of mental functioning or not.
To me, this is exactly the KIND of result, btw, that one would expect if evolution explains things better than an ID theory. Capabilities and capacities that are present throughout the animal kingdom may get more or less expression depending on historical circumstances during the evolution of a particular species. And humans got an extra dose of few things like associative cortex, communication, small-group cohesiveness, and so on.
I'd be much more surprised to learn that humans shared none of their "defining" characteristics with other animals. That, to me, would simply scream out "special creation" for humankind.
And I don't for a minute believe in "special creation" for any species.
I believe that there's a special "something" between God and man. How it got there, and what the nature of it is, exactly, is getting into the realm of theology, so I'd rather leave that for a different thread.
Posted by Tom Curtis (Member # 9104) on :
Kagehi, I want to make two points in responce to your argument.
The first is that even if we recognise a moral capacity in animals, the moral capacity in humans is so much more highly developed that that in itself makes them special. The same thing applies to our epistemic capacity. Certainly all animals are capable of coming to know certain things; but the epistemic capacity of humans is so great in comparison that that of animals pales in comparison.
This does not of itself make humans special, as opposed to unique, until you add in the factor of the good of knowledge. Knowledge is inherently good. Seeking knowledge is always worthwhile for its own sake. So we might note that cheetahs are faster than humans, and humans better knowers than cheetahs; and run the argument that each is unique and neither special. But we would be wrong to do so, for knowledge is an inherent good in a way that speed is not. And because of that, the greater capacity of knowing makes humans not just unique but special. The same point can be made of aesthetics; and above all, the same point can be made of morality.
This means that even on its home ground, your argument is flawed. Specifically, it reallies on a hidden philosophical premise that the moral value (or rational value) of the ability to act morally, and the ability to run fast, or see well, or camouflage yourself (and so for all the many areas in which different animals are better than humans) are the same. That premise is false, indeed, absurd. And what is more, regardless of whether you agree with me on this point, it is philosophical. So your conclusion is not a conclusion that follows from science.
(I may be wrong on this premise. You may be asserting that the moral capacity of some other animals is equal to the moral capacity of humans, a claim which is absurd on its face with respect to most animals, and prima facie false with respect to the possible exceptions such as dolphins.)
The second point is that you are simply confused as to what is meant by "moral", and the examples you provide are not primary examples of moral behaviour. Specifically, morality is a type of ethic, that is a stipulative set of rules (or value system) that guides behaviour. Moral systems are distinct from other ethical systems in that (at a minimum) they must be universalisable. They must satisfy Kant's dictum that no principle is an element of moral law unless it can be coherently universally acted upon.
One of the interesting things about humans is that they can act on the basis of moral principles (ie, universalisable ethics) because they are moral principles. In one example that is close to my heart, a man opposed an unjust system to the advantage of people who were not his immediate neighbours, or closely related to him with the consequence that he was banned; ie, that if he met more than two of his relatives at the same time, he was liable for imprisonment, and that if he met some particular of his relatives including at least one of his sons, and one of his daughters, both he and they would have been liable for imprisonment. He did this because it was the right thing to do, because the system he opposed was "morally wrong".
Now, my claim is that no animal (other than humans) has ever, or is capable of acting on that sort of principle. It is a distinctive capacity of humans, and is the most special thing about them.
What science has shown is that other animals can and do act in ways which coincidentally coincide with what would be moral behaviour. But it has also shown, were it has been capable of determining it, that basis of that animal behaviour has never been moral.
I am not claiming that the antecedents of this capacity cannot be found in animals. They can be. This capacity is a consequence of sociality, high linguistic ability, a definite sense of self, and the ability to reason abstractly. All of these are possessed either completely or at a rudimentary level by at least some animals. But only humans possess the whole package, so only humans are capable of morality.
Posted by Kagehi (Member # 9123) on :
quote:Originally posted by Bob_Scopatz: Well...even if the differences between humans and animals are ALL matters of degree, they are ALL still there. I think it's a mistake to say that because some animals show evidence of some behaviors that humans do habitually, there's no difference between humans and animals. Tool use monkeys is probably a great example: sure, some monkeys make and use tools in specific tasks and pass that knowledge on to their offspring, but monkey tool use and tool use by humans are not the same.
If mankind disappeared, and someone came back a few million years in the future to see what the earth's critters were up to, it might well be that there'd be LOTS of technology around, but it'd take that time. Just like it did when humans evolved as tool users.
Some of that stuff really DOES depend on mental capacity -- whether we have good measures of mental functioning or not.
To me, this is exactly the KIND of result, btw, that one would expect if evolution explains things better than an ID theory. Capabilities and capacities that are present throughout the animal kingdom may get more or less expression depending on historical circumstances during the evolution of a particular species. And humans got an extra dose of few things like associative cortex, communication, small-group cohesiveness, and so on.
I'd be much more surprised to learn that humans shared none of their "defining" characteristics with other animals. That, to me, would simply scream out "special creation" for humankind.
And I don't for a minute believe in "special creation" for any species.
I believe that there's a special "something" between God and man. How it got there, and what the nature of it is, exactly, is getting into the realm of theology, so I'd rather leave that for a different thread.
See, I agree with everything up to the last paragraph, since to me there is no evidence to suggest that anything we define as gods are real things, so the only reasonable "special something" we might have is that of child and imaginary friend. Certainly more than, as far as we know, any animal can achieve, but hardly grounds to claim the sort of special status we do. But as you said, its an issue for a different discussion.
Posted by Kagehi (Member # 9123) on :
quote:Originally posted by Tom Curtis: Kagehi, I want to make two points in responce to your argument.
The first is that even if we recognise a moral capacity in animals, the moral capacity in humans is so much more highly developed that that in itself makes them special. The same thing applies to our epistemic capacity. Certainly all animals are capable of coming to know certain things; but the epistemic capacity of humans is so great in comparison that that of animals pales in comparison.
This does not of itself make humans special, as opposed to unique, until you add in the factor of the good of knowledge. Knowledge is inherently good. Seeking knowledge is always worthwhile for its own sake. So we might note that cheetahs are faster than humans, and humans better knowers than cheetahs; and run the argument that each is unique and neither special. But we would be wrong to do so, for knowledge is an inherent good in a way that speed is not. And because of that, the greater capacity of knowing makes humans not just unique but special. The same point can be made of aesthetics; and above all, the same point can be made of morality.
This means that even on its home ground, your argument is flawed. Specifically, it reallies on a hidden philosophical premise that the moral value (or rational value) of the ability to act morally, and the ability to run fast, or see well, or camouflage yourself (and so for all the many areas in which different animals are better than humans) are the same. That premise is false, indeed, absurd. And what is more, regardless of whether you agree with me on this point, it is philosophical. So your conclusion is not a conclusion that follows from science.
(I may be wrong on this premise. You may be asserting that the moral capacity of some other animals is equal to the moral capacity of humans, a claim which is absurd on its face with respect to most animals, and prima facie false with respect to the possible exceptions such as dolphins.)
The second point is that you are simply confused as to what is meant by "moral", and the examples you provide are not primary examples of moral behaviour. Specifically, morality is a type of ethic, that is a stipulative set of rules (or value system) that guides behaviour. Moral systems are distinct from other ethical systems in that (at a minimum) they must be universalisable. They must satisfy Kant's dictum that no principle is an element of moral law unless it can be coherently universally acted upon.
One of the interesting things about humans is that they can act on the basis of moral principles (ie, universalisable ethics) because they are moral principles. In one example that is close to my heart, a man opposed an unjust system to the advantage of people who were not his immediate neighbours, or closely related to him with the consequence that he was banned; ie, that if he met more than two of his relatives at the same time, he was liable for imprisonment, and that if he met some particular of his relatives including at least one of his sons, and one of his daughters, both he and they would have been liable for imprisonment. He did this because it was the right thing to do, because the system he opposed was "morally wrong".
Now, my claim is that no animal (other than humans) has ever, or is capable of acting on that sort of principle. It is a distinctive capacity of humans, and is the most special thing about them.
What science has shown is that other animals can and do act in ways which coincidentally coincide with what would be moral behaviour. But it has also shown, were it has been capable of determining it, that basis of that animal behaviour has never been moral.
I am not claiming that the antecedents of this capacity cannot be found in animals. They can be. This capacity is a consequence of sociality, high linguistic ability, a definite sense of self, and the ability to reason abstractly. All of these are possessed either completely or at a rudimentary level by at least some animals. But only humans possess the whole package, so only humans are capable of morality.
Hmm. Lets cover this one at a time:
1. Moral capacity being more developed. I am not so sure of that. When confronted with things we don't know how to deal with or challenge our percieved position in the world we don't think at all, we act instinctively. There was research done during the last presidential election that showed this. Those who where strict democrats and those who where strict republicans *both* universally, when confronted with contradictory statements about their candidate showed brain scans that involved critical judgement when dealing with the canditate they apposed. When confronted with similar statements about their own candidate, the scans showed that all the critical thinking centers of the brain shut off, and the emotional ones activated. Faced with an attack on the *group*, they reacted by instinctual emotions, instead of logic. A species with a more advanced moral system wouldn't do that.
I see the same thing with epistemic ability. Confronted with contradictions to the fundamental "group" people belong to they stop thinking critically and just attack the challenger. While it is true we have greater capacity to understand, it doesn't automatically follow that we "will" know, if knowing something threatens some basic social norm, group belief or social system that frames the structure of ones own social group.
2. Interesting how often that "despite" my agreement that knowledge for its own sake is a good thing, the more ridged the structure someone grows up in, the more likely they are to reject this and declare some or even all forms of knowledge anethema. Again, what challenges the groups social structure is attacked, without regard to "if" its useful or the consequence of banning it is self destructive.
3. No, your misunderstanding me. I don't mean that humans are not better in many ways, just that we can't delude ourselves into thinking that being better doesn't mean we don't make similarly bad judgements and mistakes as animals. The last few hundred years we have shifted the structure of society, at least in most of the world, to one that emphasizes the persuit of knowledge. Prior to that fear of knowledge and the dogmatic declaration that anything that apposed the group had to be destroyed was the prevailing system. But many of the belief systems and structures that overlay the old world are still present and they react to such knowledge in precisely the same way they always did, by defending territory, snapping at anything that comes to close to the edges of their systems and trying to kill what ever gets to close. This is animalistic behaviour, not advanced morality or logic.
Thing is, I think I societies are more complex, we have the capacity, though it often goes unused, for understanding far more nuance and we build far more complex sets of rules. All this is true. What isn't true is that those systems are any more flawless, any less prone to mistakes, less arbitrary in many cases, ect. than what an animal might come up with. Just because you can build an oak table doesn't mean its always inherently more valid that simply using a flat rock, especially if you insist on ignoring common sense and haul the table around every place you go, so you don't have to look for a flat rock. Complex doesn't mean better. In some cases it can mean you need to rethink things.
5. Please, show me a univerally moral concept. No, come to think of it, lets not go there, I already spent a week of my life watching other people argue that point, only to have it revert to a case of the pro-universality guy proclaiming over and over, "Its universal because I say so!", and the other guy unsuccessfully pointing out numerous inconsistencies with the idea that every thing the other guy brought up was actually universal to everyone. At best all he managed to do is point out 2-3 cases where societies "generally" agree, but no case where they universally agreed on where the lines should be drawn between, "It is OK when..., but not when..." That is hardly universal, unless you use the ID tactic of redefining universal to mean, "roughly similar, with noted exceptions". Heck, the most morally relativistic people I know are usually the ones following some literalist version of a holy book. Why? Because someone that obsessed with literalism *must* find justifications for *everything* they do in their book, and the first time you have to twist it into a pretzel to justify something, it becomes that much easier to bend it the next time. Result - Everything you want is justifyable, everything you don't is condemnable and supposed universal morals go out the window.
I general I think we agree on the data, just not the interpretation. What you see as true differences, I see as a secondary symptom of being able to build complex systems of rules and our need to justify those as somehow superior. Call it herd mentality, pack mentality, tribalism or what ever, its still far too dependent on raw emotional concerns and instinctual thinking to justify the level of hubris and self congradulation we apply to it.
Posted by Tom Curtis (Member # 9104) on :
quote:1. Moral capacity being more developed. I am not so sure of that. When confronted with things we don't know how to deal with or challenge our percieved position in the world we don't think at all, we act instinctively. ... Faced with an attack on the *group*, they reacted by instinctual emotions, instead of logic. A species with a more advanced moral system wouldn't do that.
Why would a group with a more advanced moral capacity than (for example) chimpanzees not do that? Are you aware of similar studies of chimpanzees which show "criticism" of other groups is reacted to by critical thinking, while "criticism" of the in group is reacted to emotionally? If not you have not shown that human moral capacity in this respect is not more advanced than that of chimpanzees.
And what is more, even if you had you would not have shown that overall human moral capacity is not superior. There are other aspects to moral capacity, and in many of them there are not equivalents from the animal kingdom. I have cited an example of someone willingly accepting disruption of kin sociality, and disadvantage for his kin to advantage strangers. This is not something for which equivalents can be found in the animal kingdom. There are no chimpanzee Bonhoeffers, let alone a chimpanzee Ghandi. While human moral capacity demonstrably extends to that of a Ghandi, nothing parallel can be found amongst animals.
quote:2. Interesting how often that "despite" my agreement that knowledge for its own sake is a good thing, the more ridged the structure someone grows up in, the more likely they are to reject this and declare some or even all forms of knowledge anethema. Again, what challenges the groups social structure is attacked, without regard to "if" its useful or the consequence of banning it is self destructive.
What point are you making?
quote:3. No, your misunderstanding me. I don't mean that humans are not better in many ways, just that we can't delude ourselves into thinking that being better doesn't mean we don't make similarly bad judgements and mistakes as animals. The last few hundred years we have shifted the structure of society, at least in most of the world, to one that emphasizes the persuit of knowledge. Prior to that fear of knowledge and the dogmatic declaration that anything that apposed the group had to be destroyed was the prevailing system. But many of the belief systems and structures that overlay the old world are still present and they react to such knowledge in precisely the same way they always did, by defending territory, snapping at anything that comes to close to the edges of their systems and trying to kill what ever gets to close. This is animalistic behaviour, not advanced morality or logic.
I would go further, because we have greater moral capacity, humans are capable of making greater moral mistakes than are animals. I need only cite Hitler, for whom there is again no moral equivalent outside of the human species (but multiple equivalents within it). But again I do not see the relevance. A cheetah's normal pace is no faster than that of a man walking. A cheetah, just like a man walking is capable of falling over, of tripping. None of that has any bearing on the fact that cheetah's are superior runners to humans.
Now, you claim that I misunderstand you, ie, that you are not claiming that humans are not superior in many (presumably moral) ways. But the issue between us is not simple superiority. My claim is that humans are moral agents in a way that no animal is; and that this makes humans special. You are willing to conced uniqueness, but not specialness. At heart this comes down to a value judgement. Is moral capacity at which humans are superior just another attribute of no greater importance than, for example, the capacity to dig, which moles are superior at? IF moral goodness is inherently good, not merely instrumentally good, than the superior moral capacity of humans does make them special - of greater value than other animals, all else being equal.
quote:Thing is, I think I societies are more complex, we have the capacity, though it often goes unused, for understanding far more nuance and we build far more complex sets of rules. All this is true. What isn't true is that those systems are any more flawless, any less prone to mistakes, less arbitrary in many cases, ect. than what an animal might come up with. Just because you can build an oak table doesn't mean its always inherently more valid that simply using a flat rock, especially if you insist on ignoring common sense and haul the table around every place you go, so you don't have to look for a flat rock. Complex doesn't mean better. In some cases it can mean you need to rethink things.
It is not a matter of greater complexity of sociality. It is that human principles can be (even of often they are not) of a different type than animal social "rules". Animal social rules are essentially self centered, in that the applicability of a rule to a given individual is defined by the relationship of that individual to the self. Some animals have a rule approximately eqivalent to "Thou shalt not kill". When they do, it applies to kin. It applies to members of a social group capable of reciprocaly beneficial acts. But it does not apply to outsiders. Many human ethics are like that also. The ancient Hebrews had an ethical rule, "Thou shalt not kill", but it did not prohibit genocide.
But some humans have developed and acted on rules whose beneficiaries are not defined by relationship to the self. Their rule that "Thou shalt not kill" is applied to everyone without restriction (although often the rule is more complex). Some Americans, for example, treated the rule that "All men are created equal ..." as applying to all men, and not being restricted to ethnically determined beneficiaries, when the appropriate ethnic group is defined by the actors membership there-of. Some South Africans treated the principle that people should not be governed without their consent as governing all races, not just their own favoured white race.
When people universalise their ethics like that, they have turned their ethics into moral principles. And this is a capacity that humans have, and which some have acted on in quite exceptional ways. But animals are simply not capable of the conceptual moves to do the same thing. And nor have any animals exhibited a universalised ethic. This is a distinctive capacity of humans, which makes them special.
quote: Please, show me a univerally moral concept. No, come to think of it, lets not go there, I already spent a week of my life watching other people argue that point, only to have it revert to a case of the pro-universality guy proclaiming over and over, "Its universal because I say so!", and the other guy unsuccessfully pointing out numerous inconsistencies with the idea that every thing the other guy brought up was actually universal to everyone.
Your way of phrasing this question shows you have a presumption of moral relativism. You do not ask me to show a moral concept that is accepted in all societies; but one which is true in all societies. If I were facetious, I could say, "Always treat others as ends in themselves, and never exclusively as means to an end." It is a moral concept which is true in every society, even though it is not acknowledged in all societies.
However, that would be beside the point. I did not claim that moral principles are universal. I claimed that they are universalisable. http://www.philosophy.ru/library/hinck/morsoc1.html Posted by Kagehi (Member # 9123) on :
quote:Originally posted by Tom Curtis:
quote:1. Moral capacity being more developed. I am not so sure of that. When confronted with things we don't know how to deal with or challenge our percieved position in the world we don't think at all, we act instinctively. ... Faced with an attack on the *group*, they reacted by instinctual emotions, instead of logic. A species with a more advanced moral system wouldn't do that.
Why would a group with a more advanced moral capacity than (for example) chimpanzees not do that? Are you aware of similar studies of chimpanzees which show "criticism" of other groups is reacted to by critical thinking, while "criticism" of the in group is reacted to emotionally? If not you have not shown that human moral capacity in this respect is not more advanced than that of chimpanzees.
And what is more, even if you had you would not have shown that overall human moral capacity is not superior. There are other aspects to moral capacity, and in many of them there are not equivalents from the animal kingdom. I have cited an example of someone willingly accepting disruption of kin sociality, and disadvantage for his kin to advantage strangers. This is not something for which equivalents can be found in the animal kingdom. There are no chimpanzee Bonhoeffers, let alone a chimpanzee Ghandi. While human moral capacity demonstrably extends to that of a Ghandi, nothing parallel can be found amongst animals.
Ok, maybe.. But less than ten years ago we didn't believe that what we "have" observed was true either. I am sure we could find cases of misplaced socialization, for example, where a female defends something not even of her species, from her own kin.
quote:
quote:2. Interesting how often that "despite" my agreement that knowledge for its own sake is a good thing, the more ridged the structure someone grows up in, the more likely they are to reject this and declare some or even all forms of knowledge anethema. Again, what challenges the groups social structure is attacked, without regard to "if" its useful or the consequence of banning it is self destructive.
What point are you making?
Just that greater capacity for knowledge is easilly derailed by misplaced morality.
quote:I would go further, because we have greater moral capacity, humans are capable of making greater moral mistakes than are animals. I need only cite Hitler, for whom there is again no moral equivalent outside of the human species (but multiple equivalents within it). But again I do not see the relevance. A cheetah's normal pace is no faster than that of a man walking. A cheetah, just like a man walking is capable of falling over, of tripping. None of that has any bearing on the fact that cheetah's are superior runners to humans.
Now, you claim that I misunderstand you, ie, that you are not claiming that humans are not superior in many (presumably moral) ways. But the issue between us is not simple superiority. My claim is that humans are moral agents in a way that no animal is; and that this makes humans special. You are willing to conced uniqueness, but not specialness. At heart this comes down to a value judgement. Is moral capacity at which humans are superior just another attribute of no greater importance than, for example, the capacity to dig, which moles are superior at? IF moral goodness is inherently good, not merely instrumentally good, than the superior moral capacity of humans does make them special - of greater value than other animals, all else being equal.
I supposed it depends on your definition of superior. As you pointed out, Hitler is a perfect example of it going wrong. And its hardly likely that he considered himself immoral. The problem is, when people start talking about inherent good, they are not talking about the capacity to form reasonable moral standards, they are usually talking about enforcing "their" moral standards, which they are usually sorely unqualified, do to their emotional investment, in judging. Such standards don't persist because *they* are better, but because those that believe them are able to come up with more complex justifications for them. Only someone on the outside of the group are generally able to see the flaws in the logic.
quote:Animal social rules are essentially self centered, in that the applicability of a rule to a given individual is defined by the relationship of that individual to the self. Some animals have a rule approximately eqivalent to "Thou shalt not kill". When they do, it applies to kin. It applies to members of a social group capable of reciprocaly beneficial acts. But it does not apply to outsiders. Many human ethics are like that also. The ancient Hebrews had an ethical rule, "Thou shalt not kill", but it did not prohibit genocide.
But some humans have developed and acted on rules whose beneficiaries are not defined by relationship to the self. Their rule that "Thou shalt not kill" is applied to everyone without restriction (although often the rule is more complex).
Sorry, but bullshit. We are just as self centered as animals in why we believe in some moral standard. Press anyone hard enough and you find that their justification for acting a certain way, even if it provides no direct benefit, *still* makes them feel better or has some other emotional center, which determines "why" they do it. Our rules are more complex, we are better at teaching our kids that X is good because Y, but in the end I have never met anyone who is purely or inherently atruistic, or who presented with someone or some thing that conflicts with their goals or vision of how the world should work, doesn't abandon some aspect of their moral code to get back at the percieved threat. I think this is the key myth, the one single concept in human morality that people believe, for which there is not one scrap of evidence, but which is so deeply ingrained into the very justifications we use that is inseperable. Its simply a statement, "It makes me feel good about myself and the world to believe that I am truely altruistic to everyone", five minutes before they prove otherwise by cussing out someone in traffic. Its a justification used by those that do next to nothing, for why someone else will do something, used by fundies to justify trying to change the world to one of actual intolerance, by claiming they are trying to make everyone more tolerant, etc. Anyone that thinks they don't act from selfish motives, hasn't examined their own emotions and thoughts on the subject well enough to tell the difference in the first place. Yes, we can invent myths that benefit us or our offspring, by making the world safer for *everyone*, but I don't care if you are sterile, familyless and dying when you do something that helps everyone else, you are still doing it becuase *you* feel some benefit from doing so, even if its purely emotional. If we didn't gain something from it, we would never do anything. But somehow, "It makes me feel better.", is considered less self centered, by our definitions, than, "Because I personally made money off it." I don't agree. I do agree that its generally a better reason than pure greed, but its still basically being done for "you", not everyone else.
Ok, point taken. In that respect we do have one up on the animal kingdom.
Posted by Omega M. (Member # 7924) on :
I agree, actually. If, say, helping someone neither made you achieve a greater sense of inner peace nor, however indirectly, made you safer, why would you help that person? Of course, many traditional "good" things are in practice still worth doing. For instance, it's worth feeding the hungry because, if nothing else, people who don't have enough to eat tend to get angry and turn to violence to meet their needs.
Posted by clod (Member # 9084) on :
hey,
Reading through some interesting posts. Forgive my brevity, but I'd like to comment/question on some points along the way without forgetting anything. (I could take notes, I suppose, but I'm a lazy human).
quote: (from Bob_Scopatz) I believe that there's a special "something" between God and man. How it got there, and what the nature of it is, exactly, is getting into the realm of theology, so I'd rather leave that for a different thread.
This seems a little odd to me. A lot of the discussion around this thread could be condensed into "humans have big brains, animals do not. 'nuff said. humans is special." What makes me curious about this comment is that the general tendency among people is to think that "big brains" and technology have removed humans from a close association with earth/nature/god. It leads me to wonder which direction Bob thinks we are moving?
Posted by Bob_Scopatz (Member # 1227) on :
quote: What makes me curious about this comment is that the general tendency among people is to think that "big brains" and technology have removed humans from a close association with earth/nature/god. It leads me to wonder which direction Bob thinks we are moving?
Bob thinks that if your first sentence is true, then we are moving the wrong direction.
Okay, without going into theology, I think it's a mistake to assume that humans are removed from earth or nature. I'll leave questions of religion out of it.
Basically, I look at human capacities as being completely explainable in an evolutionary framework, eventually. That puts us right smack in the thick of things in terms of earth and nature go. We share genetic makeup with every living thing on earth...some more than others, of course, but still, the point is that we are all of a piece. And forgetting that has led us down some particularly destructive paths. Racism (generally relying on the belief that external characteristics, geography, or parentage govern a person's human worth) is just one part of the error. Our failure to view the earth as our shared home...a resource that not only gave us our shape, but on which we and all other creatures depend has generated some sad episodes in our stewardship of the planet.
As for what humanity may become? I currently don't view homo sapiens as a name we've quite earned yet. I think we put too much stock in our superiority or specialness to be viewed as fully sapient. Or, perhaps we are sapient, but lack enlightenment.
And that's where I hope we're heading.
An enlightened species would take better care of its world, and everything in it, it seems to me.
Again, I'm not going down the theology side of this issue. What I believe there is not important to this discussion. Suffice it to say that I believe enlightenment and God are inextricably tied in ways that we do not fully understand. Eventually, we may. And, perhaps it will have something to do with our big brains, and maybe even our technology. But I don't think it will have to do with divorcing ourselves from our nature.
Posted by clod (Member # 9084) on :
TC,
I find your arguments very compelling, but your word-use and spelling continue to perplex me in ways that distract me from your argument - leading, for example, into thoughts/recommendations that you should learn to fly a helicopter in Hawaii and befriend a vietnam-vet who drives (not his own) a ferrari.
Kagehi,
I think you win by a couple points. But, I'm biased.
Posted by clod (Member # 9084) on :
quote: (from Bob_Scopatz) Okay, without going into theology, I think it's a mistake to assume that humans are removed from earth or nature. I'll leave questions of religion out of it.
There were no questions in that regard, Bob. The question I posed was about technology, not theology.
Posted by Tom Curtis (Member # 9104) on :
Kagehi:
quote:Ok, maybe.. But less than ten years ago we didn't believe that what we "have" observed was true either. I am sure we could find cases of misplaced socialization, for example, where a female defends something not even of her species, from her own kin.
Not only will they find such examples of misplaced socialisation, they have found them. In the most common case, birds will often feed cuckoo chicks in preference to, or better than their own chicks. I am sure more benign cases can be found. Certainly they have been observed in domestic animals. But Ghandi was not an example of "misplaced socialisation", and nor would such cases in some bizzare way be the moral equivalents of Bonhoeffer.
quote:The problem is, when people start talking about inherent good, they are not talking about the capacity to form reasonable moral standards, they are usually talking about enforcing "their" moral standards, which they are usually sorely unqualified, do to their emotional investment, in judging. Such standards don't persist because *they* are better, but because those that believe them are able to come up with more complex justifications for them. Only someone on the outside of the group are generally able to see the flaws in the logic.
It doesn't matter what people are usually talking about. What matters is whether there are such things as moral standards, and whether they are inherently good. If there are such things, and if they are inherently good, the fact that humans are superior at discovering them, and acting in accordance with them, ie, of being moral, makes them valuable in a way that other animals are not.
I feel that you are trying to argue against the existence of moral standards (or their inherent value) without explicitly doing so. You need to be more explicit, to definitly assert the non-existence or arbitrary nature of moral principles, and not assume that arguments against moral realism are arguments against my conclusion on any basis other than the fact that they deny moral realism.
quote:Sorry, but bullshit. We are just as self centered as animals in why we believe in some moral standard. Press anyone hard enough and you find that their justification for acting a certain way, even if it provides no direct benefit, *still* makes them feel better or has some other emotional center, which determines "why" they do it. ...
First, as a technical point, moral principles are not restricted to altruism, and nor was I talking about altruism. In particular, rights based ethics are typically not altruistic in that they do not dictate actions taken to give others benefit, but rather only prohibit some acts which cause others harm. The question is regarding the circle of benefit from the principle. Thus the first interpretation of the "Declaration of Independance" which insisted that "All men ... have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" restricted its application to male people of European ancestry, and so did not restrict the holding of slaves of African ancestry. As such it was not universalised, and was not a moral principle but a declaration of self interest. In the fifties, the declaration was finally interpreted as a moral principle, a principle that applied genuinely to all, though since then George W Bush has tried to remove it as a moral principle by insisting that "all men" only applies to US citizens.
On a related point, I am not claiming that genuine altruism does not exist in animals. Animal motivations to help others in a restricted group may well be genuinely altruistic, ie, performed with (effectively) no thought of the potential benefit to the agent or its kin. Such actions will approximate in effect to actions based on reciprocal altruism, or kin altruism so long as the group of potential beneficiaries suitably controlled. Specifically, if a social group are all kin, genuinely altruistic behaviour restricted to within the social group will be as beneficial in Darwinian terms as a stricter kin or reciprocal altruism and so is as likely to be selected for by Natural Selection. But this is true only if the group is so restricted. That is why the human capacity for universalisable principles acting as the basis of actions is very rare in animal species, and probably unique to humans.
Second, I am not so silly as to deny that all humans have self orientated motivations, and indeed that those motivations dominate in controlling most people most of the time. Nor am I so silly as to deny that human motivations are complex, so that any act will be the consequence of a variety of motivations (both for and against), and so that if you break down the motivations of even the most altruistic act, there will be some self orientated motivations amongst them. But neither of these admissions is enough to sustain your denial of the existence of genuinely altruistic acts.
If one person, just once in their life, acts on a group of motivations one of which is altruistic, and such that if that motive had not been present, the person would have done something differently, then altruistic motivations exist, and so do altruistic acts. Even in this extreme case, no psychological explanation of human behaviour would be complete without the inclusion of altruism.
But the human condition is far from this extreme case. Genuinely altruistic motivations are common in humans, and are sometimes overriding motivations; sometimes even the dominant motivations in deciding the course of someones life.
Attempts to show that all apparently altruistic motivations actually reduce to selfish motivations are invariably contrived and specious. As one example, it is suggested that people often perform altruistic acts because it will make them feel good. The question ought to be raised, why does it make them feel good? If is is simply because they have acted according to some arbitrary principle, then their choice to act on an altruistic principle rather than a self serving principle is unexplained. They would have been better to choose the self serving principle, and consequently both become rich and get to feel smug about it. Alternatively, if they feel good because they have helped someone, then the feeling good is explained by a pre-existing altruism. The apparently altruistic motivation has not been reduced after all.
Returning to the example of the morally principled person I have already refered to, whose principled actions had the effect of cutting of relationships with immediate kin, I can show the true absurdity of the anti-altruist dogma. By choosing to act in the principled manner, and teaching his children to do the same, it had the following predictable consequences:
He lost his political career (he had been president of a political party, if I remember correctly); he sabotaged his chances of promotion and professional advancement; he became largely cut of from familly interactions except with his wife; he suffered random harrassment from the police force; one of his sons also found his professional career and political career (one time president of the national union of students) terminated; this same son was subject to arbitrary arrest and torture resulting in crippling spinal injuries; this same son was forced to flee the country and live in exile; on of his daughters was also forced to flee the country; this daughter was later killed by a letter bomb along with one of his grand-children. His chosen course did not make all of these effects explicitly predictable, but it was predictable from the time that he chose them that effects of this general type were likely to follow.
Now, purely on the basis of self interest, he chose radically wrongly. He should have remained politically uninvolved, with the probable consequence that he would have become a millionaire, that his familly relationships would have been unimpeded, and that, when the whole system came down, he would have been able to recieve a subsidised immigration to another western country as a refugee, as did so many of his compatriotes who remained uninvolved politically.
The absurdity of the anti-altruism dogma is that it suggests that these decisions stem from self interest. It is transparent, I would think, that decisions based on disguised self interest should typically lead to benefit to the self; and transparently, that is not the case in this, and many other situations.
clod:
quote:I find your arguments very compelling, but your word-use and spelling continue to perplex me in ways that distract me from your argument - leading, for example, into thoughts/recommendations that you should learn to fly a helicopter in Hawaii and befriend a vietnam-vet who drives (not his own) a ferrari.
I apologise for the spelling. At the age of eight I had an unfortunate experience with the English language. I was taught a spelling rule that "I before E except after C", then given a spelling list of ten words, not one of which obeyed the rule. I then decided that it was a bad joke, that they were making it up as they went along, and that I couldn't be bothered playing arbitrary and meaningless games. I was right about the first two points, but I should not have given up, as you can clearly testify. (Hint, it will stop being distracting if you stop thinking of it as important.)
Posted by Bob_Scopatz (Member # 1227) on :
quote:There were no questions in that regard, Bob. The question I posed was about technology, not theology.
Actually, your statement was about technology (and big brains). Your question was completely indeterminate and could be about anything and everything.
I interpreted it that way, and answered without getting into theology.
If you wanted to know where I thought we were heading vis a vis technology, you should've asked. My answer is simple -- if I knew, I'd be a much wiser investor than I currently am.
Posted by Kagehi (Member # 9123) on :
quote:Originally posted by Tom Curtis: [QB] Kagehi:
quote:Ok, maybe.. But less than ten years ago we didn't believe that what we "have" observed was true either. I am sure we could find cases of misplaced socialization, for example, where a female defends something not even of her species, from her own kin.
Not only will they find such examples of misplaced socialisation, they have found them. In the most common case, birds will often feed cuckoo chicks in preference to, or better than their own chicks. I am sure more benign cases can be found. Certainly they have been observed in domestic animals. But Ghandi was not an example of "misplaced socialisation", and nor would such cases in some bizzare way be the moral equivalents of Bonhoeffer.
Actually, I didn't mean to imply that it hasn't been seen, nor do I include things like cuckoo chicks in that category. One that comes to minds was a lion that adopted a wilderbeast calf for a time in the wild. While it might have been tied to emotional stress from recently losing a cub, it shows a capacity even in less... I don't think there is a proper word for it that doesn't express human centric assumptions, but I think you get the point.
quote:It doesn't matter what people are usually talking about. What matters is whether there are such things as moral standards, and whether they are inherently good. If there are such things, and if they are inherently good, the fact that humans are superior at discovering them, and acting in accordance with them, ie, of being moral, makes them valuable in a way that other animals are not.
I feel that you are trying to argue against the existence of moral standards (or their inherent value) without explicitly doing so. You need to be more explicit, to definitly assert the non-existence or arbitrary nature of moral principles, and not assume that arguments against moral realism are arguments against my conclusion on any basis other than the fact that they deny moral realism.
No, I am not denying morals, I just don't feel that arbitrary concepts like "inherently good" should be applied to them. Such a term doesn't imply mere success or survival, but are loaded with connotations that tend to lend themselves to people making arbitrary distinctions about their moral standards being inherently good, "Simply because I believe them!" Its the hidden meanings that jump out at you from such phrases that I object to. We have a superior capacity to invent justifications, morals are a combination of very primitive, basically unchanged, emotional systems, with complex rules and stories tacked on to guide us in how to control those basic emotions. This means most moral systems are a collection of mostly stable ideas, with a few truely great one, and some horrifyingly scary ones. Standing on the inside, its damn hard to tell which are which. In that respect, being able to invent such complex structures can actually make the result slightly inferior and unintentionally destructive. I like to call it, "The Chaos Theory of Social Engineering", instead of understanding "why" we act a certain way, then shaping the structure to fit what we are, we dredge up failures from 100, 200, 300 or more years in the past, tack on some random stuff we think might fix it, them sit back and watch all the other ants, since we rarely do anything that inconveniences the person that came up with the new-old theory, and wonder why the only result was to retarget the resulting mess, instead of stopping it. And everyone is so *sure* that someone else simply screwed it up somehow, because well... they turned out OK using those same rules. It frustrates the hell out of me every time I see it.
quote:On a related point, I am not claiming that genuine altruism does not exist in animals. Animal motivations to help others in a restricted group may well be genuinely altruistic, ie, performed with (effectively) no thought of the potential benefit to the agent or its kin. Such actions will approximate in effect to actions based on reciprocal altruism, or kin altruism so long as the group of potential beneficiaries suitably controlled. Specifically, if a social group are all kin, genuinely altruistic behaviour restricted to within the social group will be as beneficial in Darwinian terms as a stricter kin or reciprocal altruism and so is as likely to be selected for by Natural Selection. But this is true only if the group is so restricted. That is why the human capacity for universalisable principles acting as the basis of actions is very rare in animal species, and probably unique to humans.
True, most animals can't anthropomorhise and even those that can often don't exist in places where they can *afford* to do so. If you never learn to use a skill, it doesn't matter if the ability to do it is there or not, you may literally never learn it, like trying to teach language to someone past the critical point where they need to develop the brain structures for it.
quote:Second, I am not so silly as to deny that all humans have self orientated motivations, and indeed that those motivations dominate in controlling most people most of the time. Nor am I so silly as to deny that human motivations are complex, so that any act will be the consequence of a variety of motivations (both for and against), and so that if you break down the motivations of even the most altruistic act, there will be some self orientated motivations amongst them. But neither of these admissions is enough to sustain your denial of the existence of genuinely altruistic acts.
Well, the problem here is you still have to define "genuinely altruistic acts." I have seen people that truely believe in such try to do so and invariably they come up with some justification for it that isn't. True altruism by any definition must be something that gives "no" benefit, not even a percieved, but later proven invalid one. The problem with that definition is that its patently false. If they don't do it because it makes them feel good, they do it because not doing so would make them feel bad. And both are learned from some place. Nature provides the "ability" to gain emotional reward or avoid pain, but how has to be invented and instilled by teaching what ever definition someone else has come up with. Best case, they do what they do because they learn to feel rewarded, worst case you get some clown like this clown:
Ironic name... But basically, the sort of person where the invented "structure" and "fear" are the only things that apparently keep them in line. These sorts of people, who seem to think that giving up their pacifier will cause them to pull a David Banner and become some sort of monster scare the hell out of me. Why? Because odds are, they are right. They have no moral compass, no sense of right and wrong. The follow the rules because someone told them, "You will be sorry later if you don't!", instead of, "It can be fun to help people." This is what you get when you assume that having the capacity for superior morals means shit if they never internalize the rules and **feel** something when they do the right thing.
I wasn't the only person who this clown gave the creeps to:
quote:If one person, just once in their life, acts on a group of motivations one of which is altruistic, and such that if that motive had not been present, the person would have done something differently, then altruistic motivations exist, and so do altruistic acts. Even in this extreme case, no psychological explanation of human behaviour would be complete without the inclusion of altruism.
So, show me such a person. Then show me why doing that was not a result of how they where taught to think, but inherent to being human. I simply don't buy it. If you don't teach someone "how" to use inherent abilities, then they will never learn to use them, same as with speech, socialization in general, etc. Its the boy raised by wolves syndrome. Without the rules, the ability becomes no more functional in them than their appendix. But, since it "must" be taught, you get people ranging from the hypothetical ones you describe, who do X, simply because, with on understanding or awareness of what they gained from it, to those that think they "must" evangelize their view to everyone, because it drives them nuts when they "aren't" trying to do what they think is good.
Its also possible to become addicted to *anything* that makes you feel good. All it takes is a) learning to feel good doing it, and b) having a gap in your life that needs to be filled with your chosen obsession. Such people would strip naked in public to give away their clothes to cold people in a blizzard and never once realize that they are just masking a different issue, and probably freezing to death in the process. I would classify such a person as having a mental disorder, just like a sex addict or compulsive gambler. Most people would attribute it to your "genuine altruism". Why? Because when it appears on the surface to be positive, we don't bother to look closely at it, nor ever consider that the reason might have more to do with compulsion or obsession, than choice. This isn't imho a good thing.
quote:But the human condition is far from this extreme case. Genuinely altruistic motivations are common in humans, and are sometimes overriding motivations; sometimes even the dominant motivations in deciding the course of someones life.
Again - Evidence. And I mean real evidence, like brain scans proving they are not getting an endorphin kick from it, not annecdotal ones that amount to, "I can't see how it benefitted them, so it must be genuinely altruistic." As someone with a skeptical mind and scientific view, I want to see evidence before I believe that some magic line exist between, "this is altruism, but not the genuine type", and, "this other thing is genuin altruism". The evidence suggests that this distinction is arbitrary, not real.
quote:Attempts to show that all apparently altruistic motivations actually reduce to selfish motivations are invariably contrived and specious.
Why? What possible grounds exists for excluding them from skepticism and scientific examination, save your own specious assumption that they "must" exist?
quote:As one example, it is suggested that people often perform altruistic acts because it will make them feel good. The question ought to be raised, why does it make them feel good?
Because we reward ourselves and are taught by something called parents that certain things either "should" make us feel good, or they suggest we do things which do give some tangible benefit, which we then project to a much wider context, such as sharing our candy with our brother, which tends to make us more likely to share later, unless the result produces a negative experience instead. Some people learn nothing but negatives, they become sociopaths, and only maybe 1/100th of 1% of those people have a medical condition that prevented them learning. They simply failed to do so for various reasons.
quote:If is is simply because they have acted according to some arbitrary principle, then their choice to act on an altruistic principle rather than a self serving principle is unexplained. They would have been better to choose the self serving principle, and consequently both become rich and get to feel smug about it. Alternatively, if they feel good because they have helped someone, then the feeling good is explained by a pre-existing altruism. The apparently altruistic motivation has not been reduced after all.
So, because the capacity exists to "be" altruistic, and that capacity is employed, its by definition "genuinely atruistic", regardless of the reason it was done? This is like arguing that someone who never learns human language, but does great bird calls, has "genuine language skills", because they manages to tell an ornithologist who has studies bird calls where to find a blackberry bush, using the correct call. Yeah, in theory it might be possible, since it would require some innate language skill, but that doesn't mean they can turn around and learn to speek French. Point being, yes, the capacity exists, but its on the purely animal level, to go past that you need to "learn" to do so. Otherwise this is no more genuine than a dog saving the child of someone it doesn't know from drowning in a river. Hardly the sort of mistake a species that lacks some human "genuine altruism" would make, since even dogs form packs and are still basically operating from that mentality. Why save the young from some other unrelated pack? If such a thing exists, it exists on a primitive level, not some advanced human one.
quote:Returning to the example of the morally principled person I have already refered to, whose principled actions had the effect of cutting of relationships with immediate kin, I can show the true absurdity of the anti-altruist dogma. By choosing to act in the principled manner, and teaching his children to do the same, it had the following predictable consequences:
He lost his political career (he had been president of a political party, if I remember correctly); he sabotaged his chances of promotion and professional advancement; he became largely cut of from familly interactions except with his wife; he suffered random harrassment from the police force; one of his sons also found his professional career and political career (one time president of the national union of students) terminated; this same son was subject to arbitrary arrest and torture resulting in crippling spinal injuries; this same son was forced to flee the country and live in exile; on of his daughters was also forced to flee the country; this daughter was later killed by a letter bomb along with one of his grand-children. His chosen course did not make all of these effects explicitly predictable, but it was predictable from the time that he chose them that effects of this general type were likely to follow.
Now, purely on the basis of self interest, he chose radically wrongly. He should have remained politically uninvolved, with the probable consequence that he would have become a millionaire, that his familly relationships would have been unimpeded, and that, when the whole system came down, he would have been able to recieve a subsidised immigration to another western country as a refugee, as did so many of his compatriotes who remained uninvolved politically.
The absurdity of the anti-altruism dogma is that it suggests that these decisions stem from self interest. It is transparent, I would think, that decisions based on disguised self interest should typically lead to benefit to the self; and transparently, that is not the case in this, and many other situations.
Hmm. First, people are horrible at statistics. I am sure that he might have predicted "some" of the potential consequences, but most people look at the most positive outcome when doing something they like and the worst when doing something they don't. They would rather risk literal life and limb to buy and ice cream, but hide under the bad at the mere idea of going to a dentist, for fear of the dozens of things that may happen to them once there. Put simply, even those of us that "might" think about such consequences will simply ignore most or all of the likely ones, if we are doing something we want to do. We are also a product of everything that we learn. If what we learn tells us X is true, we will defend X like it was our own child. In more primitive times the only things that fell into the category where our tribe and our own children. Now "principles" fall into that category as well as other things. I can see lots of justifications for doing such a thing that are on some basic level self interested. The mere fact that a whole mess of negative and not directly predictable things happened, all of them bad, is irrelevant. Myself, I have a stubborn streak, which I *learned* from my father. The more someone pushes me around, the less flexible I become.
I can see myself starting out just like this politician, upholding some principle I believed in, then just getting more and more intransigent and resistant, the more they did to me. This isn't altruism, its learned behaviour. Its something I didn't inherit, its something I was taught and sometimes it seriously screws things up for me. But, I, understand the source and why I act that way, even if, when I am simply acting on what I feel, I don't realize I am doing it.
But I think we are taking in circles here, or maybe just doing what I once did at college with an electronics engineering technology guy, being a CIS instead, we tended to use different words to describe the same things, this resulting in a two hour argument about the flaw in current AI design and what needed to be done to fix them. In the end I got suspicious we where talking at cross purposes, asked him to stop and let me restate what I meant a different way, and it turned out we where basically saying the same thing. I get the feeling this might be the case here too. We may agree in the broadest sense, but our definitions of some critical concepts are screwing things up enough that its difficult to pin down what we "do" disagree about and to what extent.
Posted by clod (Member # 9084) on :
quote:Actually, your statement was about technology (and big brains). Your question was completely indeterminate and could be about anything and everything.
I interpreted it that way, and answered without getting into theology.
If you wanted to know where I thought we were heading vis a vis technology, you should've asked. My answer is simple -- if I knew, I'd be a much wiser investor than I currently am.
So, basically, you felt inclined to make a theological statement, then begged-out of answering any questions about it? or, turned-tail and ran with a fart-joke (humor) to cloud your trespass?
I asked the question I wanted to hear your thoughts on.
TC,
I think your definition of self-interest is a bit narrow and self-serving for your arguments. Kudos on learning the english thang, at all.
Posted by Bob_Scopatz (Member # 1227) on :
clod,
Now you're just being rude.
I didn't make a theological statement. I answered the question you asked, whether or not it was the one you had in mind is a matter I can't be responsible for. Chalk it up to a less-than-perfect communication medium. I can see how your current question is implied in what you said originally, but seriously, that's not the question you asked.
As for your "real" question, take it as a given, if you will, that I don't have (or choose not to share) an answer on the question you now have posed.
I don't see anyone else leaping into the breech either. Perhaps you'd care to share your views on the matter and we can use that as a jumping off point.
However, since you've now crossed the line into personal attacks, I suspect you may not get many people willing to actually enter into a discussion with you.
Posted by clod (Member # 9084) on :
Bob,
I wasn't being rude, and I will chalk it up to a less-than-perfect communication medium. I should have added one of these , maybe.
I don't see any personal attacks (and certainly didn't intend any), but perhaps that's where one of my blind-spots lie. Thanks for helping me locate it. This is always a good thing.
ciao
Posted by Bob_Scopatz (Member # 1227) on :
clod,
no worries.
I hope by ciao you aren't thinking of leaving Hatrack already? I've enjoyed your posts...even that one I called rude.
Posted by BannaOj (Member # 3206) on :
I know this addresses something further back but it's bugging me.
KoM, your entire argument with Dagonee about vitamin C and octupus eyes, is totally useless and irrelevant to a creationist. You seem to be missing a big point of the creationist argument. One which nicely packages a lot of stuff philosophically in a way that is palatable to many intelligent people.
You see, Creationists believe that Creation was perfect, but once we got past the first few chapters of Genesis we now live in a fallen, flawed world. And that the falling happened extremely rapidly, particularly after the Noahic flood, at which time, the entire setup of the priciples the world ran on were altered.
Some intelligent people that I respect, figure that mutation rates went exponential at that point in time. They believe that it's the nature of the fallen, flawed world that leads to increasing entropy and all of the mutations and evolution we see today. They also believe that the fact that some of the mutations can work to help us survive is because God is merciful, and wouldn't let the world go completely to Hell.
I'm not saying that this is *true* but that rational people can believe it.
AJ
Posted by Tom Curtis (Member # 9104) on :
Yes, rational and ill informed people can believe that.
Informed people understand that natural selection can only increase information in a genome if the effective mutation rate (ie, the rate of mutations with actual phenotypic effect) is approximately 1/N where N is the number of basepairs in the genome. Other factors, including sexual reproduction can affect this, but not significantly - no factor alters the effective mutation rate by an order of magnitude. What is more, for any species which has developed by natural selection, the effective mutation rate will evolve to match the maximum permissible mutation rate.
Humans reflect this. The mutation rate in humans is such that on average, each new child has three novel mutations with phenotypic effect, which is close to the maximum permited for a sexually breeding population with human birth rates.
For the creationist supposition that mutations went exponential for a time, the mutation rate would have been such that each new human would have had literally thousands of mutations having phenotypic effect, the vast majority of them harmfull. Such a high rate of mutation would have resulted in extinction in just a couple of generations.
The suposition of literally thousands of mutations is based on creationist claims that, for example, zebras and horses belong to the same kind, so that the genetic divergence between them has arisen in the 6 to 8 thousand years they allow since Noah's Ark.
Posted by clod (Member # 9084) on :
bob,
by ciao, I meant something akin to "later bro" in a fancy-pants sorta way.
ciao
Posted by Tom Curtis (Member # 9104) on :
quote:No, I am not denying morals, I just don't feel that arbitrary concepts like "inherently good" should be applied to them. Such a term doesn't imply mere success or survival, but are loaded with connotations that tend to lend themselves to people making arbitrary distinctions about their moral standards being inherently good, "Simply because I believe them!" Its the hidden meanings that jump out at you from such phrases that I object to.
"Inherently good" has quite a precise meaning. It is something which is good in itself, and contrasts with intrumental goods, ie, those things which are good because of their tendency to bring about desirable outcomes. As a matter of logic, it is not possible that there be instrumental goods if there are no inherent goods.
Even if we treat inherent goods as subjective, so that what is inherently good for me need not be inherently good for you, there still exist a class of goods which can be considered rational end goals as organising principles of a life. For some end goals, we can recognise that it is rational to pursue them as a passing whim, because the fancy takes us. We might, for example, sing a nursery out of whimsy and for no other reason. If we do, the singing of the nursery rhyme becomes for us a subjectively chosen end goal. But some one who made the singing of nursery rhymes the organising principle of their life would be recognised as irrational.
There are other end goals, however for which this is not the case. If someone made pleasure the organising principle of their life, we might consider them wrong, but we would not consider them irrational. Pleasure makes sense as a subjectivally chosen end goal of a life (as distinct from just a moment). The same can be said of the pursuit of sporting excellence, the pursuit of knowledge, the pursuit (or creation of beauty), and the pursuit of the good of all persons. These then, are inherent goods. The are goods desired for their own sake.
Because I am restricting my discussion to subjective inherency, I must admit that different people may choose different end goals, and different combinations of end goals. As such, my claim is then that anyone who chooses morality as their end goal must also (for the sake of consistency) recognise humans not just as unique, but special because they have a moral capacity in a way which no other animal possesses. By the same token, someone who chooses physical prowess as an end goal must recognise certain other animals - tigers and peregrine falcons come to mind - as not just being unique, but special. In contrast, if you do not recognise morality, nor the pursuit of knowledge, nor aesthetics as being (for you) end goals of your life, then you have no reason to consider humans special (for outside these areas, humans aren't specially gifted).
I believe that we can go one step further, that there are some inherent goods that are objectively good, so that people who do not include them in their end goals are guilty of limited rationality. But I do not need to for the sake of this discussion. Even the existence of subjective inherent goods shows the claim that humans are not special, only unique goes beyond science, involving as it does an implicit value judgement.
quote: We have a superior capacity to invent justifications, morals are a combination of very primitive, basically unchanged, emotional systems, with complex rules and stories tacked on to guide us in how to control those basic emotions. This means most moral systems are a collection of mostly stable ideas, with a few truely great one, and some horrifyingly scary ones. Standing on the inside, its damn hard to tell which are which. In that respect, being able to invent such complex structures can actually make the result slightly inferior and unintentionally destructive. I like to call it, "The Chaos Theory of Social Engineering", instead of understanding "why" we act a certain way, then shaping the structure to fit what we are, we dredge up failures from 100, 200, 300 or more years in the past, tack on some random stuff we think might fix it, them sit back and watch all the other ants, since we rarely do anything that inconveniences the person that came up with the new-old theory, and wonder why the only result was to retarget the resulting mess, instead of stopping it. And everyone is so *sure* that someone else simply screwed it up somehow, because well... they turned out OK using those same rules. It frustrates the hell out of me every time I see it.
Congratulations. You have just dismissed the whole field of moral philosophy as being non-existent.
quote:True, most animals can't anthropomorhise and even those that can often don't exist in places where they can *afford* to do so.
It is not a matter of anthropomorphising. The abolitionists who argued that enslavement of Africans was as immoral as the enslavement of humans were not "anthropomorphising"; and neither are the current moralists (such as Peter Singer) who argue that animals should be extended moral rights.
quote:Well, the problem here is you still have to define "genuinely altruistic acts." I have seen people that truely believe in such try to do so and invariably they come up with some justification for it that isn't. True altruism by any definition must be something that gives "no" benefit, not even a percieved, but later proven invalid one. The problem with that definition is that its patently false. If they don't do it because it makes them feel good, they do it because not doing so would make them feel bad. And both are learned from some place.
Have you noticed how absurd this claim is? I mean, seriously? Take a hypothetical example. Suppose someone sees a woman being threatened with rape by a gang. They intervene in the almost certain knowledge that the gang will turn on him and beat him to a pulp, but in the hope that the woman will have the opportunity to escape as a result. The only conscious thought they have at the time of intervening is that it is necessary to stop the woman from being raped because rape is wrong.
Now, should they survive, it is probable that the man will feel good about what they have done. Therefore, you say, it wasn't altruism that led him to intervene. As you say, "True altruism by any definition must be something that gives "no" benefit, not even a percieved, but later proven invalid one."
Hogwash. The action in the scenario was taken without any consideration of potential benefit to the man. Therefore, it was not taken for any benefit that might have been recieved. The mere fact that benefit arises does not mean that the action was taken for that benefit. If we were to inist on that, then parity would demand that we also insist that if harm arises then the action was taken in order to recieve that harm.
What is more, even if benefit is expected, it does not follow that the action was taken for the sake of that benefit. In the scenario, the man expects to spend several minutes lying on the ground being kicked repeatedly by five strong men; to wake hours later (if at all) with multiple broken ribs and a variety of other injuries. His expectation is of extreme pain; but your thesis is that if he also expects some mild pleasure that therefore he took the action for that pleasure. No matter what the relative proportion of expected pain or disadvantage to expected pleasure or advantage, by your thesis the existance of any expected pleasure or advantage means that the supposedly altruistic act was not altruistic. Again I say hogwash. This is not a believable theory of human motivation, but merely an absurdity.
quote:Again - Evidence. And I mean real evidence, like brain scans proving they are not getting an endorphin kick from it, not annecdotal ones that amount to, "I can't see how it benefitted them, so it must be genuinely altruistic." As someone with a skeptical mind and scientific view, I want to see evidence before I believe that some magic line exist between, "this is altruism, but not the genuine type", and, "this other thing is genuin altruism". The evidence suggests that this distinction is arbitrary, not real.
The supreme irony here is that you required no evidence to arrive at your sceptical outlook regarding altruism. You merely found it congenial, and started applying absurd definitions and evidentiary standards to the opposing view.
Now, feel welcome to prove me wrong and indicate the study using catscans that showed that "altruistic" and "egoistic" motivations stem from identical parts of the brain, with identical brain activation patterns for each. As no such study has been done, you may find it difficult.
What has happened is that people have a range of motivations, some altruistic, some egoistic, and some not related to that plane at all. For a combination or reasons including poorly thought out science (in a few cases) and really atrocious philosophy (in the majority of cases) some people have wanted to deny this. But, having formulated the intention to deny it they simply assume that it must be true unless their opponents provide the evidence they never even looked at.
As to the presence of endorphins, I have already answered that above. But, try banging your head against the wall. That will release endorphins as well. Doesn't make it rational, and doesn't make it the reason you did it.
quote:Hmm. First, people are horrible at statistics. I am sure that he might have predicted "some" of the potential consequences, but most people look at the most positive outcome when doing something they like and the worst when doing something they don't. They would rather risk literal life and limb to buy and ice cream, but hide under the bad at the mere idea of going to a dentist, for fear of the dozens of things that may happen to them once there. Put simply, even those of us that "might" think about such consequences will simply ignore most or all of the likely ones, if we are doing something we want to do.
Very people are so bad at statistics as to not recognise the likely consequences of publicly opposing the Apartheidt regime in South Africa.
quote:I can see myself starting out just like this politician, upholding some principle I believed in, then just getting more and more intransigent and resistant, the more they did to me. This isn't altruism, its learned behaviour. Its something I didn't inherit, its something I was taught and sometimes it seriously screws things up for me. But, I, understand the source and why I act that way, even if, when I am simply acting on what I feel, I don't realize I am doing it.
It is becoming very apparent that nothing will be allowed to count as altruistic behaviour by you. If they behaviour results in any slight benefit, no matter how outweighed by the harm it also results in, you won't count it as altruistic. If the principles that lead to the behaviour are learned, no matter how altruistic the principles, then the behaviour doesn't count as altruistic. And so on and on, with no evidence ever being allowed to count against your belief.
Well, congratulations. As a citizen it is your right to hold and propogate such absurd beliefs. But I have to point out that they are not in anyway based on science, just on attrocious philosophy.
Clod:
quote:I think your definition of self-interest is a bit narrow and self-serving for your arguments.
I'm not sure I follow. My definition allows, for the sake of argument, that altruistic acts performed for kin count as egoistic rather than altruistic; it allows that altruistic acts performed for members of a group with which you frequently interact, and hence from which you can expect reciprocal altruism, as egoistic. If that is too narrow, it can only be because even allowing the possibility of any altruism is too narrow a definition of egoism.
Posted by Kagehi (Member # 9123) on :
quote:Originally posted by Tom Curtis:
quote:No, I am not denying morals, I just don't feel that arbitrary concepts like "inherently good" should be applied to them. Such a term doesn't imply mere success or survival, but are loaded with connotations that tend to lend themselves to people making arbitrary distinctions about their moral standards being inherently good, "Simply because I believe them!" Its the hidden meanings that jump out at you from such phrases that I object to.
"Inherently good" has quite a precise meaning. It is something which is good in itself, and contrasts with intrumental goods, ie, those things which are good because of their tendency to bring about desirable outcomes. As a matter of logic, it is not possible that there be instrumental goods if there are no inherent goods.
No, "you" give it that precise meaning. It might even be the dictionary definition of it, but people don't consult dictionaries every time they make such statements, to make sure they are using the right word. What someone who believes in a literal divinely inspired morality means by "inherently good", is *not* the same thing you do.
quote: We have a superior capacity to invent justifications, morals are a combination of very primitive, basically unchanged, emotional systems, with complex rules and stories tacked on to guide us in how to control those basic emotions. This means most moral systems are a collection of mostly stable ideas, with a few truely great one, and some horrifyingly scary ones. Standing on the inside, its damn hard to tell which are which. In that respect, being able to invent such complex structures can actually make the result slightly inferior and unintentionally destructive. I like to call it, "The Chaos Theory of Social Engineering", instead of understanding "why" we act a certain way, then shaping the structure to fit what we are, we dredge up failures from 100, 200, 300 or more years in the past, tack on some random stuff we think might fix it, them sit back and watch all the other ants, since we rarely do anything that inconveniences the person that came up with the new-old theory, and wonder why the only result was to retarget the resulting mess, instead of stopping it. And everyone is so *sure* that someone else simply screwed it up somehow, because well... they turned out OK using those same rules. It frustrates the hell out of me every time I see it.
Congratulations. You have just dismissed the whole field of moral philosophy as being non-existent.
No, invalid perhaps, but then a lot of philisophical arguments have been rendered invaid by a better understanding of the world, it doesn't stop some people from still making the same arguments.
quote:
quote:True, most animals can't anthropomorhise and even those that can often don't exist in places where they can *afford* to do so.
It is not a matter of anthropomorphising. The abolitionists who argued that enslavement of Africans was as immoral as the enslavement of humans were not "anthropomorphising"; and neither are the current moralists (such as Peter Singer) who argue that animals should be extended moral rights.
Yes it is. You can objectively observe how an animal acts and even show that its brain structures are triggered in the same way our are in relation to certain things, or you can make wild guesses that behaviour X "looks like" Y, and simply assume your right. The later is anthropomorphising and its what people who send their pets to fake pet psychologists and pet psychics do, they project both thought and behaviour on them that *isn't* realistically possible, based on what the real science shows to be actually possible. Animals may on some level project their own thinking on us, but on a qualitatively weaker level, and they certainly don't derive complex justifications for why they must be right, in the face of contradiction.
quote:
quote:Well, the problem here is you still have to define "genuinely altruistic acts." I have seen people that truely believe in such try to do so and invariably they come up with some justification for it that isn't. True altruism by any definition must be something that gives "no" benefit, not even a percieved, but later proven invalid one. The problem with that definition is that its patently false. If they don't do it because it makes them feel good, they do it because not doing so would make them feel bad. And both are learned from some place.
Have you noticed how absurd this claim is? I mean, seriously? Take a hypothetical example. Suppose someone sees a woman being threatened with rape by a gang. They intervene in the almost certain knowledge that the gang will turn on him and beat him to a pulp, but in the hope that the woman will have the opportunity to escape as a result. The only conscious thought they have at the time of intervening is that it is necessary to stop the woman from being raped because rape is wrong.
Umm. Sorry, but you are not seeing how absurd your example is. Some people may have no problem with rape, would never lift a finger to help someone being raped, simply fail to recognize that it was happening or even cheer the rapists on. It *all* depends on what they learned to think about it. No one starts out knowing something is wrong, they learn what is expected of them by society, then learn to determine right and wrong from a combination of their own empathy and the rules their society create to justify when, how and if they should express that. In a culture where rape is acceptable, the reason for stepping in will have nothing to do with the rape itself, if they interfere at all. In much of the middle east, such an act would be interferred with as a means to stop the rapist from sinning, and to jail the women, so she can later be stoned to death for tempting him. Those who believe in that version of reality do what they do because they "think" they are being just and I am willing to bet few if any lose sleep over doing it. For every example you can come up with to try to show some innate moral standard, I can find people or a society that does the exact opposite and believes they are acting morally when doing so.
quote:Now, should they survive, it is probable that the man will feel good about what they have done. Therefore, you say, it wasn't altruism that led him to intervene. As you say, "True altruism by any definition must be something that gives "no" benefit, not even a percieved, but later proven invalid one."
Yep. The problem is simply using "true" in there. True, to use your argument about "inherent good", has a specific meaning. It implies something pure and untouched by secondary factors. Find a different word or admit I am basically correct.
quote:The action in the scenario was taken without any consideration of potential benefit to the man. Therefore, it was not taken for any benefit that might have been recieved. The mere fact that benefit arises does not mean that the action was taken for that benefit. If we were to inist on that, then parity would demand that we also insist that if harm arises then the action was taken in order to recieve that harm.
See, this is your assumption. But science has shown that in most cases we react, then look for justifications for why we did. This "might" on the surface seem to make you right, but other research has shown that the reason for this is simply that a whole series of thoughts go on in our heads, and only after a decision coalesces do we become aware of the choice. In other words, you can claim that he reacted entirely without thought of reward, but there where probably hundreds of competing thoughts going on, many giving justifications for acting, and he would never be aware of any of them. Mental disorders like scitzophrenia are in fact a failure of this system designed to integrate such desperate thought processes. The person becomes aware of themselves thinking a bunch of different things, but lacking proper integration, they don't recognize them as their own thoughts, and some that slip through in the worst cases might be telling them to stand and watch it happen. Normal people filter out all but the most strongest and relevant threads, then build a justification for their action *after the fact*, based on those threads.
You can't argue with biology and nueroscience by talking about philisophical explainations, which is all your are really providing.
quote:Now, feel welcome to prove me wrong and indicate the study using catscans that showed that "altruistic" and "egoistic" motivations stem from identical parts of the brain, with identical brain activation patterns for each. As no such study has been done, you may find it difficult.
See my prior statement on how the brain works. Besides, doing the "right" thing and the "wrong" thing both trigger the part of the brain that involved inhibitions and moral behaviour. The amount of activity is the only issue, as well as if justification is "invented" or "learned". Learned justifications are, if I where to guess, going to come from the logical half, given that its mostly retrieval and integration, doing a known wrong thing is more likely to trigger the creative side, since justification must be invented, not simply integrated from existing behaviour. Otherwise, your point is invalid anyway, there is no "altruism" brain component, just a, "what do I do in this morally charged situation" one. If something as specific as an "altruism" section existed, I would have read about it, and I read a *lot* about brain structure and function.
quote:What has happened is that people have a range of motivations, some altruistic, some egoistic, and some not related to that plane at all. For a combination or reasons including poorly thought out science (in a few cases) and really atrocious philosophy (in the majority of cases) some people have wanted to deny this. But, having formulated the intention to deny it they simply assume that it must be true unless their opponents provide the evidence they never even looked at.
This is the first thing I entirely agree with.
quote:It is becoming very apparent that nothing will be allowed to count as altruistic behaviour by you.
No, just nothing "inherently altruistic". That is where the sticking point is. Biology design us so that altruistic behaviour makes us want to repeat it, that isn't denying altruism, its simply stating that you shouldn't confuse what you "think" is altruistic, like becoming an evangelist and trying to *help* people by banging on their doors, is the same thing as helping a kid that is being beaten up. You can call the later "true", "inherent" or what ever, but the point is, its not something that you can't be taught to ignore or even help the bully do, and still feel good about. We can't "morally" justify sticking a bunch of kids in a box to see what rules they derive on their own, without interference, so its impossible to say "which" types of moral or altruistic concepts are innate and which are entirely learned, let alone "how" they are derived. Lacking a clear an precise means to define which are which, its rediculous to talk about inherent or true anything. Doing so is not helpful, since there is no clear deliniation and everyone can come up with any definition they like as to what fits there.
quote:Well, congratulations. As a citizen it is your right to hold and propogate such absurd beliefs. But I have to point out that they are not in anyway based on science, just on attrocious philosophy.
See, here is the problem. I consider arbitrary association of a behaviour to some category, just because you want it to exist, to be absurd. As I have said, I don't deny altruism, just arbitrary and entirely philosophy based assumptions of what fits into someone's definition of such, especially when research implies that justification *follows* action in all case, not the reverse. Someone not understanding why they did X, doesn't mean it automatically has to be Y, it just means their own thoughts are conflicted enough that they don't know. Since both long term and short term moral acts arise from the same part of the brain, there is no qualitative assumption that can be made than the less specific and explainable act *must* arise from some unfound, apparently non-existent, altuism component in the brain. The fact that the can, according to on recent article, even accurately "guess" what you will think next, based on those same scans, the odds of some unknown and as yet undetected altruism system existing is highly unlikely:
quote:No, "you" give it that precise meaning. It might even be the dictionary definition of it, but people don't consult dictionaries every time they make such statements, to make sure they are using the right word. What someone who believes in a literal divinely inspired morality means by "inherently good", is *not* the same thing you do.
So what. You are not having a discussion with someone who believes in a "literal divinely inspired morality"; you are having a discussion with me. So why do you insist on interpreting my words as meaning what a fundamentalist would mean by them in the face of my explicit definitions? Are you only capable of arguing against straw men?
quote:It is not a matter of anthropomorphising. The abolitionists who argued that enslavement of Africans was as immoral as the enslavement of humans were not "anthropomorphising"; and neither are the current moralists (such as Peter Singer) who argue that animals should be extended moral rights. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Yes it is. You can objectively observe how an animal acts and even show that its brain structures are triggered in the same way our are in relation to certain things, or you can make wild guesses that behaviour X "looks like" Y, and simply assume your right. The later is anthropomorphising and its what people who send their pets to fake pet psychologists and pet psychics do, they project both thought and behaviour on them that *isn't* realistically possible, based on what the real science shows to be actually possible.
So now we have it on record that you believe the abolitionists, in insisting that african slaves were humans with human rights were anthropomophising, ie, were treating a nonhuman thing as human.
quote:transitive verb
Definitions:
treat nonhuman thing as human: to give a nonhuman thing a human form, human characteristics, or human behavior our tendency to anthropomorphize wild animals
I'm pretty sure that is not your opinion; that you have merely been thoughtless rather than racist. But you really ought to think a bit more about what I actually write before jumping in with absolute certainty that I am wrong.
quote:No, just nothing "inherently altruistic". That is where the sticking point is. Biology design us so that altruistic behaviour makes us want to repeat it, that isn't denying altruism, its simply stating that you shouldn't confuse what you "think" is altruistic, like becoming an evangelist and trying to *help* people by banging on their doors, is the same thing as helping a kid that is being beaten up. You can call the later "true", "inherent" or what ever, but the point is, its not something that you can't be taught to ignore or even help the bully do, and still feel good about. We can't "morally" justify sticking a bunch of kids in a box to see what rules they derive on their own, without interference, so its impossible to say "which" types of moral or altruistic concepts are innate and which are entirely learned, let alone "how" they are derived. Lacking a clear an precise means to define which are which, its rediculous to talk about inherent or true anything. Doing so is not helpful, since there is no clear deliniation and everyone can come up with any definition they like as to what fits there.
The problem here is that I have never talked about "inherent altruism". I have talked about "inherent good" as a property of moral capacity, not of humans. And I have clearly defined what that means. I have talked about a human capacity to be moral. But a capacity to be moral is not the same as being inherently moral, let alone inherently altruistic. Humans have a capacity to learn language. But by stating that I have not asserted that humans have an inherent language. Likewise, humans have a capacity to be moral. That does not mean they have an inherent moral system, or even (as I have already pointed out) that there is an objective moral system.
It is now evident that the view you are arguing against is so complete a strawman that it does not even constitute a caricature of the view I am arguing for. Consequently, I won't waste my time discussing it with you unless you care to reread my prior comments, and actually comment upon my opinions.
Posted by clod (Member # 9084) on :
Tom,
quote:I'm not sure I follow. My definition allows, for the sake of argument, that altruistic acts performed for kin count as egoistic rather than altruistic; it allows that altruistic acts performed for members of a group with which you frequently interact, and hence from which you can expect reciprocal altruism, as egoistic. If that is too narrow, it can only be because even allowing the possibility of any altruism is too narrow a definition of egoism.
Let's set aside your passion for winning this argument for just a bit - though I quite like it!
I'm not one for longwinded-sidewinding paragraphs, so let me bullet-point a few things.
1. [question] As particularly evidenced in the quoted paragraph here, you seem to regard egoism as opposite altruism. You may have meant to put "quotations" around "altruism" if you were allowing for alternative explanations in your argument. But, either way, is that your viewpoint? That those two words are antipodal?
2. [clarification] I'm not sure that you actually defined altruism (and I'm too lazy to reread), but you did provide some examples. I think that the examples you provided circumscribe a rather narrow set that serves to substantiate your argument.
3. [another example] Martyrdom. Self-identification. If a person who commits allegedly "altruistic" acts self-identifies with personal-perception or a community-based belief system that honors/rewards this behavior, doesn't that make the the altruistic act selfish (egoism).
-Ugh - that was messy and I'm not doing the point justice. Please ignore this point, if you like. I speak english, and sometimes I have great difficulty composing my thoughts.
4. [more to the point - another question] It would seem to me that any action taken intentionally by a being with a "self" is, by definition, selfish. My understanding of "altruism" is that it is equivalent to selflessness.
- so the question I might pose to you is this: A person commits an action, cognizant of what s/he intends to do. How can it be both selfish (egoism) and selfless (altruism)?
Posted by Tom Curtis (Member # 9104) on :
Clod,
1) Altruism and Egoism are contraries. That is, an act cannot be both altruistic and egoistic at the same time, though it can be neither. (And yes, I probably shoud have used quotation marks.)
2) The examples I presented were counter examples to the claim that all human acts are egoistic (or that no human acts are altruistic). They are not intended to provide an implicit definition of altruism, but to be clear examples of acts which are altruistic, and which it would be incoherent to call them egoistic.
3) That depends on what you mean. If a person subscribes to a belief that performing some heroic sacrifice will result in eternal reward, and if their reason for performing the act is the expectation of that reward, then the act is egoistic rather than altruistic.
If they believe that performing the act will give them great renown such that their deeds will be told in song a thousand generations hence, and that this is a more desirable thing to acheive than life itself; and if the achievement of the renown is the reason for the act, then it is egoistic rather than altruistic.
If their community believes that acts of a certain kind are good to do, and the person performs the act because they agree with the community, that in no way tends to make the act egoistic.
4) Any act performed by a self is performed by that self because of motives which are that self's motives, but that has no bearing on whether the act is egoistic or altruistic (or something else). The words "altruistic" and "egoistic" were introduced to distinguish between two different kinds of acts and motives of agents. To simply redefine one of the words so that it applies of all acts by agents only reduces your vocabulary. It means that were before the revision of language we could say of an agents act that it was performed for their own benefit, or that it was performed for someone elses benefit; after the revision all we would be able to say is that the act was performed by an agent.
Finally, as I have already said, an act cannot be both egoistic and altruistic at the same time. There is a slight confusion here because for purposes of evolutionary psychology (or ethology), acts which benefit kin or immediate social groups are considered to be for the benefit of the agent, because in evolutionary psychology the only benefit recognised is the propogation of genes. Any act which tends to increase the average propogation of your genes (including their duplicates in your siblings and cousins) is considered selfish, as are acts of recoprical altruism (which tends to increase average propogation of genes for all members of the group). This means that "egoism" so defined is not what is normally called egoism. Some silly philosophers (or scientists playing at philosopher) have used this extended meaning of "egoism" to argue that maternal sacrifices aren't "altruistic" without noting that they are using a technical term outside of its technical context in doing so. Kagehi has been doing this, and for the sake of argument, I have not disputed it because:
a) It is possible to argue, the ethologists definition is the most suitable for this discussion; and
b) Even given the extended meaning of egoism, I can easilly make my case. There are human acts which are altruistic even in the special sense of ethology; they are not unusual; they are not aberations; they are the result of a unique capacity which humans have and which SFAIK no other animal has.
And for a final point of confusion, altruistic acts are not necessarilly moral acts as I defined them in my original claim. An act can be alstruistic without being moral, and not all moral acts are altruistic.
Posted by Earendil18 (Member # 3180) on :
quote:Originally posted by Tom Curtis: And for a final point of confusion...
Yeahhh, I'm a bear of very little brain, and this thread was candy. Couldn't eat all of it though.
Finally finished reading up to this point, whew...
Great thread, I'm going to bed finally and will definitely sleep on all that's been said here.
Bob, Tom, Kag...when I rule the world, please join me at my decahedral table. We'll invite Tante for extra spice.
Posted by Kagehi (Member # 9123) on :
quote:Originally posted by Tom Curtis:
quote:No, "you" give it that precise meaning. It might even be the dictionary definition of it, but people don't consult dictionaries every time they make such statements, to make sure they are using the right word. What someone who believes in a literal divinely inspired morality means by "inherently good", is *not* the same thing you do.
So what. You are not having a discussion with someone who believes in a "literal divinely inspired morality"; you are having a discussion with me. So why do you insist on interpreting my words as meaning what a fundamentalist would mean by them in the face of my explicit definitions? Are you only capable of arguing against straw men?
Are we the only two people in the universe that might read this? If not, then their definitions are as relavent and ours.
quote:
quote:It is not a matter of anthropomorphising. The abolitionists who argued that enslavement of Africans was as immoral as the enslavement of humans were not "anthropomorphising"; and neither are the current moralists (such as Peter Singer) who argue that animals should be extended moral rights. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Yes it is. You can objectively observe how an animal acts and even show that its brain structures are triggered in the same way our are in relation to certain things, or you can make wild guesses that behaviour X "looks like" Y, and simply assume your right. The later is anthropomorphising and its what people who send their pets to fake pet psychologists and pet psychics do, they project both thought and behaviour on them that *isn't* realistically possible, based on what the real science shows to be actually possible.
So now we have it on record that you believe the abolitionists, in insisting that african slaves were humans with human rights were anthropomophising, ie, were treating a nonhuman thing as human.
Sorry, wasn't paying attention and forgot to clip out your racism strawman from it. No, I didn't mean that at all. I just quoted the whole block, instead of the specific part I was refering to, and you decided to jump on the part I wasn't talking about. Sorry for the confusion.
quote:The problem here is that I have never talked about "inherent altruism". I have talked about "inherent good" as a property of moral capacity, not of humans. And I have clearly defined what that means. I have talked about a human capacity to be moral. But a capacity to be moral is not the same as being inherently moral, let alone inherently altruistic. Humans have a capacity to learn language. But by stating that I have not asserted that humans have an inherent language. Likewise, humans have a capacity to be moral. That does not mean they have an inherent moral system, or even (as I have already pointed out) that there is an objective moral system.
Good is a term I find even less definible in the sense you are trying to. Its so vague and imprecise a term that everyone has a different definition for it. But in a general sense, that its certainly beneficial that some capacity exists for forming such rules, your correct. Good though is simply too vague and for some people seriously loaded with a lot of "assumptions" about what it means that go way beyond how you are using it.
quote:It is now evident that the view you are arguing against is so complete a strawman that it does not even constitute a caricature of the view I am arguing for. Consequently, I won't waste my time discussing it with you unless you care to reread my prior comments, and actually comment upon my opinions.
What is clear is that I am arguing for non-vague, non-loaded words, applied to *actual* behaviour, while it seemed, at least initially, that you where implying something less tangible and where instead just using phrases I think should be avoided like the plague, do to how less rational people will invariably misread them. All you have to do is look at how people in the ID crowd quote mine a few words or a sentence out of something condemning their ideas, then claim it promotes them instead, to realize that being imprecise and using loaded words that they pick *because* they imply mystical gibberish, is *not* beneficial. Worst thing is, its all to easy to misread someone that is on your own side as one of them, precisely because they refuse to use less loaded terminology.
As for it being a strawman.. I don't think so. Its as important, if not more, to understand what and how altruism works, than that is simply exists. Its merely assuming it does, then arbitrarilly pegging some things are "good", without even a clear definition of what "good" is intended to mean in the context, that get people in trouble in the first place. But by all means, this has gone from what I intended to argue into something very muddy, probably in no small part, as I said before, because we are *not* using the same assumed definitions or words to convey our intent.
Posted by Kagehi (Member # 9123) on :
quote:Originally posted by Tom Curtis: b) Even given the extended meaning of egoism, I can easilly make my case. There are human acts which are altruistic even in the special sense of ethology; they are not unusual; they are not aberations; they are the result of a unique capacity which humans have and which SFAIK no other animal has.
And I would argue that a) this is an unproven assertion on your part and b) there are instances of animals, such as family pets, acting without thought of their own safety, to save what "isn't" even one of their own immediate family or owners family, which invalidates the assertion anyway. The question still arises if they might have projected their association with "some" humans to an association with "all" humans, thus also invalidating the more literal definition of altruism, but that isn't at this point all that eailly tested. My objection is to applying a default presumption of altruism, when laking sufficient evidence to prove if it was, or that such a definition is even relevant.
Yes, we come up with words to describe things we don't understand, so they can be more easilly categorized. The problem is, we also find ourselves having to merge some of the categories, when later evidence suggests the original terms where invalid, e.g. Willow Wisps become a form of lightning, instead of evil spirits that lead people to death in swamps. This doesn't mean the term isn't still applicable to the phenomena, since it more precisely describes how it differs, just that it is not longer valid to presume they are completely different phenomena. I.e. Your claims that altruism and egoism are polar opposites is only valid if you first presume that one of them is uniquely human or that they derive from different sources. If they don't, which seems likely, then they are subcategories of the same behaviour, not two seperate and opposing ones. I don't think I can be any clearer than that.
It comes down to an assumption on your part, not a known fact supported by additional evidence. I just happen to distrust, "Just so.", stories.
Posted by clod (Member # 9084) on :
Tom,
Thanks for the response and comments.
quote: 4) Any act performed by a self is performed by that self because of motives which are that self's motives, but that has no bearing on whether the act is egoistic or altruistic (or something else).
I fail to understand how the "self's motives" can differ from selfishness. I think you're being cagey on this point. And, conflationary, indeed.
Posted by Tom Curtis (Member # 9104) on :
quote:I fail to understand how the "self's motives" can differ from selfishness. I think you're being cagey on this point. And, conflationary, indeed.
Let's start with the obvious - you can only act from your own motives. That someone else has a motive has no direct bearing on your actions by itself. So, by definition, every motive that forms a direct basis for your action is your self's motive (ie, your motive).
Does that mean it is selfish? No! Consider the definition of "selfish" from the Merriam-Webster dictionary:
quote:selfish One entry found for selfish.
Main Entry: self·ish Pronunciation: 'sel-fish Function: adjective 1 : concerned excessively or exclusively with oneself : seeking or concentrating on one's own advantage, pleasure, or well-being without regard for others 2 : arising from concern with one's own welfare or advantage in disregard of others <a selfish act> - self·ish·ly adverb - self·ish·ness noun
Supose I hear about some people in a distant country that have been effected by a tidal wave; that I feel sympathy for their suffering; that I then take money which I had saved to upgrade my computer and give it to a charity inorder to alleviate that suffering.
Now, at this stage it is an open possibility that my action did not "aris[e] from concern [for my] own welfare or advantage in disregard of others". In fact, prima facie, I have disregarded my own advantage (and improved computer) from concern for the welfare or advantage of others (the alleviated suffering of tidal wave victims). But it is not an open possibility that I acted from motives which were not my motives. In this putative case, I have a motive (aleviating the suffering of the destitute) which outweighs the strength of another of my motives (upgrading my computer so I can play more recent and larger computer games).
Now, we could revise the meaning of "selfish" to mean "an act that flows from a motive of the actor". From the Merriam-Webster definition, there can be no doubt that this is a revised definition. It would also be a useless definition, for essentially every act flows from a persons own motives. Consequently, saying a persons act was selfish would convey very little information. At most it would inform you that the act was not the result of coercion or a hypnotic trance.
Despite the poverty of the revised definition, it is from time to time suggested that the revised definition is part of the meaning of the normal term. That claim is false, as shown by the dictionary definition. Almost always when it is made, however, the person who makes it is arguing that all actions are necessarilly selfish, and that in consequence there are no altruistic acts. But in doing so they are trading on an ambiguity. They use the revised definition to argue that all acts are selfish; then they use the standard definition to argue that selfish acts are necessarily not altruistic, and conclude that no acts are altruistic. That is transparently a bad argument. It is made worse by the fact that the revised definition has no use other than in this rhetorical legerdemaine.
So, yes I am being cagey, in that I am explicitly avoiding a well known argumentative fallacy. But no, I am not being conflationary. On the contrary, I am resisting the conflation of two distinct meanings of "selfish", and providing clear grounds for resisting that conflation.
Posted by BannaOj (Member # 3206) on :
Tom, I'm not a 7-day literalist by any stretch. Heck, I'm an agnostic fairly frequently. And I generally agree with your rebuttal.
Again though you make an assumption. You assume the rules are the same today as they were then. (whenever "then" was... there are certianly 7-day literalists that are not necessarily young earth creationists)
quote: no factor alters the effective mutation rate by an order of magnitude.
You are making the same fallacious assumption that many creationists make. The Earth is Not a Closed System.
And the answer, however simplistic, is that God could have. (And we won't even talk about a drastic influxes of UV radiation which certianly can send mutations up at exponential rates)
Those creationists who understand that the 2nd law of thermodynamics does not apply directly to the Earth because the earth is Not a Closed System, actually have far more options. Even though radioactive decay rates are now constant, and through them we get linear extrapolations of age,we are still gambling that the decay rates were always like they are now.
However if the Fall affected everything down to the quantum state of atoms, there's no guarantee that the gamble is correct.
Dispensationalists believe that God changed the guidelines for communicating with humans several times throughout history, even if there was a steady progression towards the ultimate Crucifixion of Christ. And, they believe the rules are going to change again in the future.
This is why it does not seem fallacious to them, to think that God could have changed the rules of the initial Creation. Especially when the Bible says they changed at least twice.
Scientists don't have the liberty of speculating on "rule changes" though, they have to look in the now and the evidence as it is now. (Although when you look at quantum physics, even they admit the quantum rules changed frequently at the point of the big bang.)
I think that they would be able to accomplish more, by deliberately addressing things indirectly rather than head on, which always causes a clash that polarizes things even more.
AJ
Posted by Kagehi (Member # 9123) on :
quote:Dispensationalists believe that God changed the guidelines for communicating with humans several times throughout history, even if there was a steady progression towards the ultimate Crucifixion of Christ. And, they believe the rules are going to change again in the future.
The irony here is that this is just goal post moving. First century Christians thought the second coming had already happened. Why? Because the Roman campaigns, as recorded by Flavius Josephus, an "adopted" member of the Flavian family, who was Jewish originally, excatly parallels both the prophecies of the book of David *and* the path, nature and linearity of the events that the Bible says happened with Christ. Who where the first official Christians? The Flavians, Herods and Alexanders, all of whom had direct blod ties to each other and close relationships. Who was the first pope (or at least the first that it is claimed one of the disciples gave that position to? One of the Flavians. Who was the second coming according to all of them, Titus Flavias, who led the campaign the brought about the fall of the temple and of the Jewish state in the 40 years prophecied.
One person even goes so far as to suggest that the reason that the only historical references to Christ are a few passing mentions of a very common name and the New Testimate itself, the parts of which where all written 50 - 100 years after the fact, was that both the NT and Josephus' campaign history where written together, as a means to replace the militant messiah proclaimed in the book of David, with one that embodied concepts that might produce piece, while at the same time emphasizing submission to the Roman empire, but not fighting against it. The only providence for an earlier draft of the NT comes from someone that might have been sitting in a Roman prison at the time and wrote it 50 years after the fact. Worse, the rest of it is known to be written by several people that *never* could have even met Jesus, given the time frame, so no prior version from the time period is even possible, unless it was pure word of mouth, and we know how well that works...
Atwill may get some stuff wrong, I am hardly an expert of Roman history, but most of the argument I have heard against his interpretation have been nitpicking about details that are not provable. For example, why would the public stance of someone that faked such a thing imply they faked it? If you don't have a letter or document stating they knew is was all made up, how do you know that the official public statements are accurate ones, not them playing the part? I think the idea is compelling, even if the evidence is at least as sketchy as for the reality of the NT (actually, given how scetchy that is, its more a case of how scetchy the evidence of who wrote what and when that is the problem). Too much of it fits too well. The book BTW is Caesar's Messiah, by Joseph Atwill. Even if he got 90% of the wrong, he is still right about two things, the NT has less evidenciary sources to confirm it than any other book in history and too many things in the campaign recorded by Flavius Josephus fits with the events in the NT. The only question is, was the history written to fit the NT, or the NT written to parody the historical events? Since no provable written version of the NT exists "prior" to the near simultanious writting of that campaign, its currently impossible to say.
One thing is certain, the modern belief in the end of times contradicts early Christian assumptions about when it was supposed to happen. Put simply, there is no real evidence, even within the history of their own religion, that implies they are right and some vast change is going to take place that rewrites the rules.
And, as you said, its a mute point anyway, since science can't test, "What if God made it work in some way that makes no sense at all according to current rules in some obscure past?". They can however run limited simulations that prove that unless something equivalent to 2+2 = 5 happened, any change in such state in the universe would render it incompatible with any sort of life that we know of, or even any life at all, since even planet formation shouldn't be possible in many/most such universes. In those that they might, its hardly certain life could exist in them or that anything can be so fundimentally different there that you can ignore some form of entropy, nothing would ever die, etc. Science can look at such rule changes in simulation, but on some level its still dependent on basic assumptions, mathimatical ones if nothing else. If no existing rule is valid, you might as well start doing 'x/0' type math. Its not even possible to simulate something you can't define logical rules for.
Damn hard to argue with someone that, unlike a scientist, won't run a simulation to try to find if such a universe is even possible, but just says, "It really happened, prove me wrong!".
Posted by BannaOj (Member # 3206) on :
quote: Damn hard to argue with someone that, unlike a scientist, won't run a simulation to try to find if such a universe is even possible, but just says, "It really happened, prove me wrong!".
I agree it is difficult to argue against. More precisely I'm trying to highlight why arguing against it, in the way which has been going on here (which I enjoy) with logic and rebuttals etc, is not the way to go about changing "hearts and minds" as it were on this topic.
I personally don't think that *any* experiment can be run in this universe to prove or disprove whether the other universe is possible. But, I think that's where the questions should start with the uber-creationist argument.
For the record, I was raised as a 7-day literalist. As a child, I rapidly came to the conclusion, that the point of the story was was a)that God *could* have done it that way if He'd wanted to, whether or not he actually *did* and b)regardless of the mechanism of how we got there at some specific point God gave man a soul, different from the animals.
The question that I pondered on for a very long time, which can be taken several ways, one quite tounge in cheek, is this: "Did friction exist in the Garden of Eden?" Friction always generates entropy increases. Was the "perfect world" a universe without entropy?
This sort of question can be asked more respectfully than a direct confrontation, and gets the more sensible Creationists thinking outside their box, and thinking in more scientific methods. It gets them realizing that things are different now whatever they were then, and that they need to put their ideas in context the facts and reality of where we are today.
AJ
Posted by clod (Member # 9084) on :
Tom,
Thanks again for the rebuttal. I think we might be getting somewhere.
I'm no expert in argumentation, but your reliance on the dictionary quote seems like an "argument by authority". Is that allowed? The definition is curious, and subsequently so is that of "selfless", as the definition is derived from that of "selfish".
(that's actually kind of interesting, in the sense that the "good" term is derivative of the "bad" one - hmph! interesting.)
Perhaps better terms can be coined. One for any action emating from the self's motives, and one for it's opposite - any action that emanates from the self but without regard to the self's motives.
This would appear to be an arduous task.
Posted by Tom Curtis (Member # 9104) on :
quote:I'm no expert in argumentation, but your reliance on the dictionary quote seems like an "argument by authority". Is that allowed? The definition is curious, and subsequently so is that of "selfless", as the definition is derived from that of "selfish".
I rely on the dictionary as an authority on the common meaning of the term. That is only an argumentative fallacy if the dictionary constitutes a final authority, ie, it is argued that "selfish" has the meaning given by the dictionary because the dictionary says so without appeal to any other fact, ie, it is claimed that the dictionary saying that p is itself sufficient reason to believe that p.
That is not my claim. I claim that good dictionaries determine the meanings of terms by an exhaustive emperical search of their common usage. So by appealing to the dictionary, I am appealing to the common usage of the term by English speakers. I appeal to the dictionary as prima facie evidence of what that usage is on the basis of the research that goes into the preperation of dictionaries.
quote:(that's actually kind of interesting, in the sense that the "good" term is derivative of the "bad" one - hmph! interesting.)
Actually, they are both derivatives of the term "self". Neither is derived from the other.
quote:Perhaps better terms can be coined. One for any action emating from the self's motives, and one for it's opposite - any action that emanates from the self but without regard to the self's motives.
This would appear to be an arduous task.
As already indicated, we could to this, but it would be largely pointless. We would have little (if any) use for the terms. Further, they would not be substitutes for the terms "selfish", "selfless", and "altruistic" which we would still have a use for in that we are interested in whether peoples primary motivations in general or in particular cases are their own well being or advantage, or the well being or advantage of others.
Posted by Tom Curtis (Member # 9104) on :
AJ:
quote:Again though you make an assumption. You assume the rules are the same today as they were then. (whenever "then" was... there are certianly 7-day literalists that are not necessarily young earth creationists)
quote: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- no factor alters the effective mutation rate by an order of magnitude. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
You are making the same fallacious assumption that many creationists make. The Earth is Not a Closed System.
And the answer, however simplistic, is that God could have. (And we won't even talk about a drastic influxes of UV radiation which certianly can send mutations up at exponential rates)
Those creationists who understand that the 2nd law of thermodynamics does not apply directly to the Earth because the earth is Not a Closed System, actually have far more options. Even though radioactive decay rates are now constant, and through them we get linear extrapolations of age,we are still gambling that the decay rates were always like they are now.
We seem to have gone of into left field here because I phrased one of my claims poorly - the claim that you quoted.
As I originally asserted, there is a maximum effective rate of mutation which if exceded for any sustained period, or by any significant amount results in a "mutation catastrophe". (An "effective mutation" is just a mutation which effects the phenotype of the individual.) The species will loose viability and become extinct because the rate of harmfull mutations is too high. If the rate of harmfull mutations is too high, natural selection cannot eliminate them and they will accumulate in the population to a lethal extent.
The maximum effective mutation rate beyond which mutation catastrophe strikes approximates to 1/N where N is the size of the genome. At least two known factors modify this, allowing a higher mutation rate. High rates of reproduction allow a higher maximum effective mutation rate; and sexual reproduction also allows a higher effective maximum mutation rate. The consequence of this is that humans, for example have an maximum effective mutation rate of around 3/N (meaning that on average, each new human has three mutations which have a phenotypic effect).
Now what I claimed is that no factor alters the maximum effective mutation rate without mutation catastrophe by an order of magnitude. (It's probably more correct to say more than an order of magnitude.) Certainly there are conceivable circumstances in which the base mutation rate is increased by more than an order of magnitude, but all such circumstances will result in mutation catastrophe. Deleterious mutations will increase in the population at an unsustainable rate.
Furthermore, Young Earth Creationists do not just claim that mutations happened more frequently in the past. The claim that mutations which evolutionists claim took place over millions of years occured over a few centuries. That is, they claim the mutation rate was 4 or 5 orders of magnitude greater than the limit above which mutation catastrophe is inevitable. In simple terms, they suggest a mutation rates such that every newborn would have, on average, between a thousand and a hundred thousand new mutations that effect the phenotype - a situation, in other words were every new born has from 900 to 90,000 harmfull mutations. The correct term for this scenario is immediate extinction.
Now, you suggest that "God could have". Well of course he could have. God could also have created the entire world (including our memories) just five seconds ago, so that while I believe I have written this entire post, and have memories of doing so, in fact I have only written this paragraph, and God created the rest of this post and my memory of writting it. God could ... anything he wants to.
This means, of course, that God could have is not a scientific explanation. It is not an explanation that can have evidence supporting it from science. Because God could have anything, then saying God did predicts nothing. Because God could do anything he wants, saying that he did tells us absolutely no emperical facts about the world. It also provides no emperical explanation for anything in the world either.
So if you want to use "God could have" as an explanation, be my guest. But don't pretend it is science, or that the view you propound is an alternative scientific hypothesis in any form. Because it isn't.
Posted by BannaOj (Member # 3206) on :
I never *ever* clamed it is an alternative scientific hypothesis. Nor am I actually propounding it, if you'd read what I said correctly. Even though I was raised a particular way, I do not currently claim to believe it.
I was addressing how to open dialouge that can get both sides thinking outside their pre-defined parameters, somewhere between religion and science, in order for both sides to gain greater understanding of the other. A lot of times this works better than telling someone they are full of manure and flat out wrong, even if it's true, because it automatically engages defense mechanisms all around.
As far as the mutation catastrophe, I'm not arguing with your data. However the one of the biggest points of faith of Creationists is, "There but for the Grace of God go I". In other words, mutations could have happened at a catostrophic rate, and it's only the Grace of God that prevented the catastrophe. It's only the Grace of God keeping the world from being a living Hell now.
You might say, "Why play this silly game when the Creationists are so out to lunch?" I would also submit that the number of hard core Creationists out there, is actually far less than the number of anti-abortion activists. I believe that there are many more people that are willing to be flexible in creation sequences than it may seem. But none of them are going to give the time of day to someone who thinks they are silly to begin with. Again, defense mechanisms will be thrown up.
I don't understand why the scientists, have a problem with using psychology to get people at least a smidgen closer to reality, if hard facts aren't working. And why they don't measure progress, in getting people smidgens closer, rather than demanding leaps. This is at the level of faith and belief, you *have* to address it sideways. Cold scientific facts, no matter how much evidence you have, ain't gonna work.
AJ
Posted by Kagehi (Member # 9123) on :
quote:Originally posted by BannaOj: I don't understand why the scientists, have a problem with using psychology to get people at least a smidgen closer to reality, if hard facts aren't working.
In the simplest terms, because science is about determining how the world works and using psychology in such a manner, to apply untruths and half-truths about the universe to the purpose of finding a middle ground is fundamentally dishonest. It goes against the very concept of what science is meant to achieve, promoting compromised definitions to the real world, instead of factual ones. You might as well ask someone that believes so strongly in the Christian prohibition against killing so completely that they will not even defend their own life if threatened to assassinate a child. The mere suggestion for many is like driving a knife into their back. I happen to think that in the short term it is a necessity and that, while a clear line should be drawn between what is *still* unreasonable about their stance and sound science, groups like the Catholics have become the strongest allies. Ironic, given that for much of their history their entire purpose was bent to destroying science and any idea that contradicted them. The flip side of such an allience though is that at some point the line still gets drawn, where one can't pass, and/or religion persists, not because it holds any truth, but simply because it can't be killed with anything short of divine intervention.
Posted by clod (Member # 9084) on :
quote:That is not my claim. I claim that good dictionaries determine the meanings of terms by an exhaustive emperical search of their common usage. So by appealing to the dictionary, I am appealing to the common usage of the term by English speakers. I appeal to the dictionary as prima facie evidence of what that usage is on the basis of the research that goes into the preperation of dictionaries.
Ok, so allowing this authoritative source into the argument, you would allow me to cite it as well?
quote:re: my claim that the definition of selfless was conditioned on the definition of selfish, TC remarked: Actually, they are both derivatives of the term "self". Neither is derived from the other.
The fact that selfish and selfless are linquistic modifications of the term "self" is obvious. That the empirical definition (from your source) of "selfless" is derivative of the definition of "selfish" would seem to return to the concern I posited earlier. You rely on an "authoritative source" when it supports your argument, but dismiss or otherwise obfuscate the authority of that source when it contradicts your argument.
Generally speaking, I disagree with your emphasis on the utility of terms. A well-posed problem is more easily solved than one mired in murk. Good solid root definitions can alleviate superfluous postage.
Posted by clod (Member # 9084) on :
B.OJ and AJ,
I think it is important to remember that no theory of evolution implies progress (at least not in the sense of improvement - except the Red-Queen arm's race analogy). The theory of evolution via natural selection that I understand implies no progress save that of one towards increasing complexity (as a product of selection on a temporally stable substrate). That the evolution of complexity should invoke essentiality is not an argument against Darwinism.
Posted by BannaOj (Member # 3206) on :
quote: In the simplest terms, because science is about determining how the world works and using psychology in such a manner, to apply untruths and half-truths about the universe to the purpose of finding a middle ground is fundamentally dishonest.
I don't think you need to use untruths *or* half truths. I think it can be done honestly, but non-confrontationally, tactfully and respectfully.
Also if it is so horrible, for people to believe a falsehood, then anything closer to the *truth* is an improvement. If it is really that important, why not use the knowledge of how human brains work to achieve the end, of getting someone at least closer to that *truth*. Confrontation and debate doesn't change many minds. The minds that are changed normally have more to do with the debater's style, than actual content.
In other words, even though that you can argue it's anti-science, the scientists need to do a better job of marketing and advertising, and embedding their ideas as a positive meme in the collective unconscious. I don't think marketing or advertising is inherently anti-science, since begging for research grants is on precisely the same moral plane.
AJ
Posted by Kagehi (Member # 9123) on :
From a purely practical standpoint, the number of scientists that are religious is about 20% lower than the general population, but those 70% *do* exist on a middle ground. The major issue is that probably 90% of both the 70% that are and the 30% that are not religious, don't have time to either learn how to cater to the layman, the skill to do so, or the layman don't have the patience to learn the minimum necessary to understand what the scientist is trying to say in the first place.
This problem is compounded even more by recent revelations that in some states there is a defacto standard of teaching creationism and religious explainations, at the expense of science and biology, even though its not legal for them to do so. The state simply isn't stopping it and the parents don't mind because they are just as brainwashed and ignorant as the schools are making their kids. Its also impossible to find a middle ground when you don't speak the same language and your opponents are hell bent on making sure their kids never learn it either.
Posted by BannaOj (Member # 3206) on :
See. That's why I'm saying that it rests on the *Scientists* to learn how to speak "common" language, cause the other way around it isn't gonna work.
I can't believe I'm doing it, but I'm quoting my mother here. She has a Master's degree in science education.
Anyway, in her ideal, a "truly educated" person, is able to interact with anyone on the level they understand. The onus is on the "educated" person to explain a concept to the "uneducated" using the uneducated person's paradigm. Not the other way around. The onus is on the person with the Truth to walk a mile in the other person's shoes in order to help them see the Truth.
To do that requires both subject knowledge and people knowledge. I would suggest that many scientists would be helping themselves and their colleagues if they cultviated the latter.
AJ
Posted by kitmarlowescot2 (Member # 9176) on :
What I can't understand that such a man as Mr. Card seems to totally understand racism, and pressure from a group to be what they want to be, that why can't he just be "live and let live" about gays ?
Posted by Tom Curtis (Member # 9104) on :
Clod:
quote:Ok, so allowing this authoritative source into the argument, you would allow me to cite it as well?
Yes, but not as a final authority.
quote:The fact that selfish and selfless are linquistic modifications of the term "self" is obvious. That the empirical definition (from your source) of "selfless" is derivative of the definition of "selfish" would seem to return to the concern I posited earlier.
But my source did not list "selfless" as one of the derivatives of "selfish". Looking to the Merriam-Webster definition of "selfless" I find:
quote:: having no concern for self : UNSELFISH
Now, here is the twist, "unselfish" is prima facie derived linguistically from "selfish" (it could be derived from "self" in a two step operation, but it is not derived from "selfish semantically. Specifically, it does not mean the same as "not selfish". "Selfish" by the dictionary defintion means concerned "excessively or exclusively with oneself" or "arising from concern with one's own welfare or advantage in disregard of others." Now if I choose to cook dinner for my familly, I am not being selfless. I cook meals that I would like to eat, sometimes in prefference to meals that others would preffer to eat but which I don't like. I also do it, in part because I am hungry. But I am not disregarding others. I cook meals in ways that will be more enjoyable to my familly than the way I would prefer it. In particular, I love fairly hot chilli (medium for Texans and Mexicans) and tomato - none of my familly like chilli, and my wife swears at me if I put tomato in my shepherds pies, or stews. A lot of peoples acts fall into this middle ground.
I would say that these acts are not neither selfish nor selfless, and would be inclined to use the term "unselfish" of some of them - but I am prepared to by guided by the dictionary on this. Curiously the World Heritage Dictionary defines "unselfish" as:
quote:Generous or altruistic.
So, while not act can be both unselfish and selfish, they can be neither. (Please note again that the common definition of "selfish" does not coincide with the definitions of "egoistic" or "self interested" as used in my discussion with Kagehi, as has already been noted.)
quote: You rely on an "authoritative source" when it supports your argument, but dismiss or otherwise obfuscate the authority of that source when it contradicts your argument.
First, I had not looked up the definition of "selfless", and nor had you introduced it. So my comments were both accurate and were not a "dismissal or obfustication" of the dictionary definition (which had not been introduced into discussion).
Second, I have been quite clear that dictionary defintions are not final authorities. They can be disputed so long as reasons are given for the disagreement. If they are disputed, you can rationally respond by saying providing reasons for accepting the dictionary definition; or you can rationally plead incompetence, ie, say that you are not in a position to understand and decide on the various reasons, so will simply rest on the authority. The later is what we do with Quantum Mechanics all the time.
So, if you have a problem when I use a dictionary definition, you need to provide reasons why it is wrong (which you have not done). If I have a problem with the dictionary definition, I have to provide reasons why it is wrong (which I have always done).
Finally, I find offensive your suggestion that I am being inconsistent or obfusticatory when I went out of my way to explain in what way dictionaries are authorities, and in what way they are not.
quote:Generally speaking, I disagree with your emphasis on the utility of terms. A well-posed problem is more easily solved than one mired in murk. Good solid root definitions can alleviate superfluous postage.
As I have been very clear about the meanings of the terms I have used; and as I am explicitly resisting an attempt to obfusticate discussion by equivocation, I'm not sure what your problem is.
Posted by Tom Curtis (Member # 9104) on :
AJ:
Having spent five years in the Creation/Evolution debate, I can tell you some things you need to consider.
First, on numerous occasions I have proceded step by small step, and the creationists have agreed with my conclusions of each small step until they realised that together they implied the truth of evolution. At that stage they have suddenly stopped accepting all the things they previously agreed to. The step by step path does not work because the dogmatism with which creationists hold onto their beliefs is overwhelming.
Second, the problem of science communication does not lie primarilly with scientists but with creationists. It is the standard pattern in creationist (ie, all fundamentalist circles) that the more extreme veiws are never criticised. You can be thrown out of a fundamentalist church for believing that the earth is old, or for accepting common descent, and certainly for accepting Darwinism. If you express support for these views, you will be violently condemned, your Christianity will be questioned, and even those that agree with you will question your right to "place stumbling blocks" in front of the weak. In contrast, YEC's and even geocentrists are never so condemned, and are even admired for their "faith". This sociological pattern places an impenetrable barrier across any "step by step" process of convincing people to accept scientific evidence.
What is needed for creationism to end is for the few Christian leaders who are trusted by a significant proportion of fundamentalists to get up and say that the creationists are lying. The have to preach from the pulpit that Kent Hovind is a deliberate fraud; that the ICR builds its claims on a policy of deliberate deceit; that the Discovery Institute has built its strategy on deceit, and publishes lies.
Only people who are open to learning can be convinced step by step. And so long as the various creationist organisations can go around openly teaching lies without being condemned for it, the fundamentalist community will not be open to learning.
Posted by BannaOj (Member # 3206) on :
Having been raised in the fundamentalist lifestyle, (and actually having visitied ICR's "museum") I disagree somewhat. I don't think that Creationism is actually as monolithic as you perceive it to be.
Nor do I think many of the "teachers" are as trusted as you think they are.
Yes, you went step by step. I think however you should Not have pressed for the final conclusion. Just stopped 3 steps away. And let it simmer. Maybe never actually take the conversation any further. Then, later on, something from somewhere else could hit them and it could make sense.
If their teachers are lying to them, I think there's absolutely nothing wrong with being subversive to combat it. But your approach as you are discribing here is still way, way too direct for what I'm talking about. I suspect that the Land Before Time 1 through whatever has probably done more for the evolutionary cause, than any argument you could come up with.
AJ
Posted by clod (Member # 9084) on :
TC,
Your logic is quite close to impeccable - possibly infuriatingly so (a compliment) and nearing the saturation point. But, you seem/seemed resistant to agree on a set of terms, rigorously defined, on both sides of an argument. Lots of blather and argumentation-correctness-sounding blither - something I'd call obfuscation.
Though I do appreciate your posts. You have no reason to be offended.
Posted by Tom Curtis (Member # 9104) on :
Clod, you are not proposing any terms for me to agree to. I am trying to be clear about the meaning of my terms, and I see no point to the terms you apparently wish to introduce. But by all means introduce them if that will make you happy. Just make sure you define them clearly.
Posted by Bob_Scopatz (Member # 1227) on :
This has been the most entertaining of the many, many threads on Creationism/ID/Evolution on Hatrack.
I'm also very grateful to TC and AJ for pointing to sources I hadn't seen before.
I despair of resolution of this issue in my lifetime...and I intend to live a good long time. The problem is that, even as we see here, when intelligent people of good will and no particular vested interest in convincing one another (e.g., it's not like we are each battling for control of a local school board...) have this much trouble agreeing to the terms of the discussion, or the meaning/relevance of that which has already been discussed, my hope for resolution when the stakes are higher diminishes exponentially.
Ultimately, I have to say that I like AJ's approach because I think she has real insight into the mindset of those who are most difficult to convince of the value and importance of the science on this issue. If pressed to the point of defense of faith, they will naturally become intractable. If brought to a fuller understanding of some of the things they thought supported their case, but do not...and you leave it at that...for now, I think something important has been accomplished.
Posted by BannaOj (Member # 3206) on :
*scratches head* What source did I ever quote Bob? Land Before Time??
Posted by MrSquicky (Member # 1802) on :
Banna, From my perpsective, there's no such thing as a responsible, good faith biblical literal creationist. These are people who don't even respect the Bible (in which literal creationism is impossible). When they're willing to treat what they claim to be the central thing in their lives with such contempt when it disagrees with them, what chance would I have in getting them to consider other things that disagree with them?
Posted by BannaOj (Member # 3206) on :
quote:From my perpsective, there's no such thing as a responsible, good faith biblical literal creationist. These are people who don't even respect the Bible (in which literal creationism is impossible). When they're willing to treat what they claim to be the central thing in their lives with such contempt when it disagrees with them, what chance would I have in getting them to consider other things that disagree with them?
By all means don't waste your time with them if you don't want to. The condescenscion of your attitude would certainly be counter-productive to furthering your cause.
For crying out loud, you've done all kinds of research showing that when on the "inside" humans accept things that those on the "outside" clearly see as cognitive dissonance. But you tell someone to their face that they are cognitively dissonant, and they'll deny it and yes, even die for it. They *don't* think they are treating the ideas with contempt even if you do.
AJ
Luke 1:37- For with God nothing is impossible.
Posted by MrSquicky (Member # 1802) on :
Banna, I wouldn't try to treat with these people in a rational way. I'm also not KOM, to openly express my contempt in a putative expectation of changing their opinion.
But I'm not talking to them here. I'm talking to you and to others. You're saying that what's missing is an attempt to meet these people halfway. And what I'm saying is that they claim to venerate a book that they are extremely willing to ignore if it disagrees with their preconceived notions. The Bible clearly presents two mutually exclusive accounts of creation. I figured this out as a devout Catholic when I was 8 through reading the Bible with respect as something to learn from.
From my perspective, when people are unable to treat their central sacred literature with respect, it's a fool's errand to try to follow the course you're laying out of using halfway measures of compelling debate. If you're successful, in general, with people like these, the effect you will acheive is a hardening of their position.
The effective ways towards changing their opinions do not lie through rational argument. If they did, these people wouldn't have strongly held views that are in direct contradiction with the source they claim to venerate.
Posted by BannaOj (Member # 3206) on :
Christianity as a whole requires you to accept things that are cognitively dissonnate paradoxes. Free will vs. Predestination for example. The people I grew up with will acknowledge it is a logical paradox from the human perspective.
However in the eternal realm they believe God has it figured out.
I know too many 7-seven day literalists of high integrity, and impeccable scientific backgrounds. One is my own father. His best friend *in their fundamentalist church* is not a 7-day literalist. I also know science and engineering professors from major Universities that are 7-day literalists. Most of them would acknowledge cognative dissonnances in the standard Creationist lines. However there are a few (some of which have been illustrated amply in this thread, that *do* apply equally the opposite direction.)
Most of them, even with their 7-day literal beliefs, would much rather spend the day discussing the Crucifixion and Ressurrection which are far higher priorities of Christian Doctrine on their list.
They normally are considerably quieter and don't go around making broad proclamations or ludicrous scientific statements like the ICR nutcases, but you insult their integrity and they'll batten down the hatches, and get the boiling oil ready.
AJ
Posted by BannaOj (Member # 3206) on :
quote:If they did, these people wouldn't have strongly held views that are in direct contradiction with the source they claim to venerate.
Again, you on the outside see them as direct contradictions. You've got to be open-minded enough to be willing to imagine a world where they aren't necessarily direct contradictions.
AJ
Posted by MrSquicky (Member # 1802) on :
Banna, This isn't a matter of difficult to reconcile philosophical concept, but rather ignoring or at the very least failing to give much consideration to what is written in black and white in the Bible. If you're going to hold a strong belief in something like Biblical literalism, in order to have me respect your integrity, you had better have looked at your source thoroughly. In my opinion, your father's belief precludes this, so you can tell me all about how you think he has high integrity, but, in this matter, I'm not going to agree with you.
It is possible to have integrity in some areas of your life and not in others. However, in cases like that, people often tend to be even more dysfunctionally protectinve of the areas that they lack integrity.
Posted by MrSquicky (Member # 1802) on :
Banna, That's absurd. The order of creation, the literal history is different in the two stories. The "open-mindedness" that you're talking about is a williness to reject the flow of time and causality in something they are holding as literal history. Coupled with this, when I've brought this up with people who claim to believe in Biblical literalism, they weren't aware that it was an issue. It's not like, in my experience, they've considered the contradiction and found a way to rectify it. They've just never noticed it.
edit: And it's hardly like this is the only example of something like this. Consider, for example, the "What about the other laws of Leviticus? Don't we have to follow them too?" objection to the Christian objections to homosexuality. There's a extremely simple answer to that objection that is contained in the Bible and is one of the most important "This is how you follow the rules." parts of the New Testament, but you almost never hear about this. Most of the people who claim to be following God's law don't seem to know about this incredibly important part of Christian legalism. Am I supposed to respect that?
[ February 16, 2006, 12:19 PM: Message edited by: MrSquicky ]
Posted by BannaOj (Member # 3206) on :
*shrug*
I'm curious as to specifically which parts of "black and white" in the Bible you are talking about. However I don't think it's actually germaine to the conversation.
I'm saying that if you treat someone like they lack integrity the feeling rapidly becomes mutual. And considering that I actually agree with evolution and would like to smack you, I can imagine how a creationist would feel.
AJ
Posted by BannaOj (Member # 3206) on :
And yes, creationsists do consider things like, how did light from the stars get here, considering light year distances.
Interestingly enough in the creation account light was created before the stars and sun and moon.
AJ
Posted by Bob_Scopatz (Member # 1227) on :
Oops, sorry AJ, that should've read "pointed to ideas and sources I'd never seen before.
For some reason I remembered your personal info as if you'd posted links, rather than ideas from some people you respect and trust.
Bob
Posted by MrSquicky (Member # 1802) on :
Banna, The contradiction is in this, tell me when man was created relative to the animals? The two stories give two different orders. And, as I've said, the contradiction is obvious enough that I noticed it at least as early as when I was 8 years old.
And, as I said, I wouldn't use this tone when attempting to manipulate a creationist. I am using it with you because, in this context, I consider saying things that are true more important than being nice. But hey, I guess that makes you want to smack me.
Posted by kitmarlowescot2 (Member # 9176) on :
I don't suppose both creationist and evolutionist are both right?
Posted by MrSquicky (Member # 1802) on :
There are plenty of people who believe that. I actually believe it. It sort of depends on how you define creationist.
Posted by BannaOj (Member # 3206) on :
Literalist to most conservative Christians (if they actually know their theology) means the gramatical-historical interpretation. What the true meaning is, is what it meant to the person that wrote it.
Repeating things twice with different nuances to emphasize different points, was a common stylistic form of the day. See Leviticus and Duteronomy. Duteronomy is the "second telling" of the Law.
The second telling of the Creation story is more anthropomorphic than the first. The first telling emphasises God's omnipotence and power, the second God's unique relationship with man. Even the re-ordering of the second telling, does not necessarily abrogate the 7 days in the first telling. I believe that one is considered more poetic in the Hebrew than the other, also. The emphasis in the second, is that God created the animals for Man's enjoyment and use.
Some literalists actually argue for three tellings of the creation stories, with the first happening in Genesis 1:2, when the earth and that the earth was frutful and then became "without form and void" before the 7-day story.
Take a look at the doctrinal statement, one of the most conservative Armenian-type theological seminaries in existence, Dallas Theological Seminary. Most of the people there probably would consider themselves 7-day literalists. They are very explicit on their end times eschatology.
Yet, they don't actually have a lot of specifics on Creation events in their doctrinal statements.
Now other seminaries, do have explicit statements about 7-days. The Master's College and Seminary for one. However, personal experience with both, leads me to disrespect the Master's College for many other reasons of disagreement over scriptural heuristics besides mere creationism. Not to mention how whacked out their collegiate social scene is.
AJ
Posted by BannaOj (Member # 3206) on :
And as far as disagreement with homosexuality, Leviticus and Deuteronomy are not horribly relevant, since the concept was reiterated as a negative in the New Testament, particularly in Romans.
AJ
Posted by David G (Member # 8872) on :
quote:Originally posted by Tom Curtis: I would say that these acts are not neither selfish nor selfless, and would be inclined to use the term "unselfish" of some of them - but I am prepared to by guided by the dictionary on this. Curiously the World Heritage Dictionary defines "unselfish" as:
quote:Generous or altruistic.
So, while not act can be both unselfish and selfish, they can be neither. (Please note again that the common definition of "selfish" does not coincide with the definitions of "egoistic" or "self interested" as used in my discussion with Kagehi, as has already been noted.)
If I may enter this debate, I wonder whether soft shell crabs could be considered both "shellfish" and "un-shellfish" at the same time. Also, if my family likes to eat shellfish for dinner, but I done't like shellfish, would I be considered selfish by refusing to cook shellfish?
Posted by BannaOj (Member # 3206) on :
No, what made me want to smack you, is that without knowing him personally, you made a judgement on my father's integrity.
My father will not teach in church any more because of me. You see, he does believe it literally, when it says a teacher should have raised children who are also faithful to God.
I'm not. (The issue has everything to do with me living with my boyfriend and nothing to do with my opinions on creation.) Therefore he no longer teaches in church, even though it's something he loves and is very good at.
That is the sort of integrity he has.
Something that KoM wouldn't understand.
AJ
Posted by MrSquicky (Member # 1802) on :
I don't see how that's relevant to the part I judged. I'm not judging your father's commitment to his beliefs. I'm judging the responsibility and respect he brought to the formation of these beliefs. If someone reads the Bible and comes away with a belief in literal biblical creationism, in my oinion, that belief did not come from a responsible, respectful reading of the Bible.
Commitment is easy to get. Responsibility is much harder.
Posted by BannaOj (Member # 3206) on :
How much do you know about Bibilical heuristics?
You see, with any of the liberal or conservative denominations, all you really need to know is the meta-premises. Most of which do originate from the Bible itself. Following those through, in respectful interpretation is how you end up in the places you do. I'm quite sure all of them read the Bible as responsibly and respectfully as they know how. To actually insinuate that they disrespect the Bible, even if you *don't* agree with their interpretation is highly offensive.
AJ
Posted by MrSquicky (Member # 1802) on :
The claim that two stories that can't logically both be true constitute literal history is not a matter of interpretation. It's not a matter of heuristics or meta-premises or any other big words you want to throw out to muddy the issue. It's a matter of wanting to believe something even though this belief is impossible based on the source material. I don't see how this is can be construed as anything but disrespectful to the source material, and I don't see how you've offered me any reason to see it as not disrespectful.
And, for the purposes of discussing the actual point of contention here, can we stipulate that I'm a bad person who is arrogant and highly offensive and whatever else you want to say about me?
Posted by BannaOj (Member # 3206) on :
Squick, I don't think you are a bad person. However, your method of communication, is one that would cause most of the fundamentalist Christians that I know to disregard you before you said more than a few sentences.
quote: The claim that two stories that can't logically both be true constitute literal history is not a matter of interpretation. It's not a matter of heuristics or meta-premises or any other big words you want to throw out to muddy the issue.
*shrug* These people believe in literal ressurection from the dead too. Horrors! You can find more inconsistencies in the accounts of who saw Jesus when after his ressurection than you have in the first two chapters of Genesis.
There are tons of inconsistencies in the Bible, which leave loads of lattitude for interpretation, literally or more figuratively. Heuristics (I'm amazed Squicky is yelling at me about using a big word) is precisely, what Biblical theology is all about. And at some points most theologians, even many of the liberal ones, accept certain cognitive dissonances because of faith. Believing in ressurection from the dead is a cognative dissonance.
AJ
Posted by MrSquicky (Member # 1802) on :
No it's not. Resurrection of the dead is a case of divine power impinging on the normal order of things. Saying that two stories, one that has X come before Y and the other that has Y come before X, are both true and represent literal history is just wrong.
This is not a matter of intrepretation or of inconsistencies in the accounts. Heuristics don't enter into it. It's not at all complicated. It's a matter of there being two separate stories with very deliberate accounts of when things occured that don't agree with the order that things occured in. Which is perfectly fine for most things because the larger points are in accordance, but it really doesn't wok when you are trying to claim that both of them happened in a literal historical sense.
There are pretty specific rules that are in place if we assume a unidirectional flow for tiem and causality. One of these is that for any two events separated by time, one must occur before the other. Literal biblical creationism violates this rule because it claims in one version that one event that occurs before another event and in another version that this event occurs after that same event. They can't both logically be true. Nothing you have offerred changes this fundamental aspect of the situation.
And this isn't a matter commanded by faith. We are not told in the Bible: The two versions of creation are literally true. It is a choice made by the believer or community to see it this way. It comes from outside the Bible. Also, as this particular interpretation is contradicted by the Bible, I can't see it coming from a place this is not disrespectful of the Bible.
---
edit: I'll state again, this isn't the tone I would use when dealing with Christian fundamentalists. I deal successfully with people that I know are wrong or don't have much respect for all the time. However, I also, for the reasons I'm outlining here, would not do as you are suggesting and expect that rational appeals would avail me any better.
Also, I'm not complaining about your word choice, but rather your introduction of irrelevant "fancy word" topics instead of addressing the rather simple central point.
Posted by BannaOj (Member # 3206) on :
Mr Squicky, your problem with Genesis 2 has everything to do with what will always be a somewhat inadquate translation of Hebrew verb tenses into English. I'm quite frankly surprised that that is what you are complaining about, because that is one of the dumber arguments I've ever heard, and a bit of research even from non 7-day literalist theologians is all that is necessary. I'm not doing it for you.
You've got far, far more of a case with ressurection account discrepancies than you do with Genesis 2.
Posted by BannaOj (Member # 3206) on :
quote:unidirectional flow for time and causality
God is outside time. The unidirectional flow for time and causality, puts limitations on an omnipotent, onminicent God that few but the LDS could accept (and I don't know if this is actually an area where the LDS would accept it either)
AJ
Posted by BannaOj (Member # 3206) on :
Heuristics *is* the topic *inherent* in creationism. It is not a fancy word, it is an accurate and precise term for exactly the topic at hand.
AJ
Posted by MrSquicky (Member # 1802) on :
quote:Mr Squicky, your problem with Genesis 2 has everything to do with what will always be a somewhat inadquate translation of Hebrew verb tenses into English. I'm quite frankly surprised that that is what you are complaining about, because that is one of the dumber arguments I've ever heard, and a bit of research even from non 7-day literalist theologians is all that is necessary. I'm not doing it for you.
Really, because I consider myself somewhat well versed in Genesis theology and I've never come across that suggestion. For that matter, I don't see how verb tense confusion could change either one of the stories around such that the order of creation could be reversed. In one, the creation of some of the animals happened on a previous day from the creation of man and the narrative introduces the creation of the other animals on the same day but before the creation of man. In the other, Adam is pretty clearly created first and the animals created after as possible companions, as Adam would otherwise be lonely. But since you're not going to do that work for me (or looking at it another way, substantiate your claims), so we'll leave it there, I guess.
quote:God is outside time.
Yes, but history on the other hand, is not. If it were, it wouldn't be history.
quote:Heuristics *is* the topic *inherent* in creationism. It is not a fancy word, it is an accurate and precise term for exactly the topic at hand.
I'm not familiar with that usage. Could you explain how this is the case? I mean, is it like Eschatology, such that the study of creation is called Heuristics?
Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :
Squicky, See the NIV for one example of tense issues:
quote:15 The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. 16 And the LORD God commanded the man, "You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; 17 but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die."
18 The LORD God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him."
19 Now the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. 20 So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds of the air and all the beasts of the field. But for Adam [h] no suitable helper was found. 21 So the LORD God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man's ribs [i] and closed up the place with flesh. 22 Then the LORD God made a woman from the rib [j] he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man.
Banna, I think you're missing an important verb tense there yourself. Allow me to point it out.
quote:18 The LORD God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him."
Posted by BannaOj (Member # 3206) on :
Yeah... no reason why God couldn't say that on Day 6 after he paraded the animals past Adam. It's clear he made Adam first... then Eve... in order to make a specific point to Adam to value the female of his species.
heuristic n : a commonsense rule (or set of rules) intended to increase the probability of solving some problem
Heuristics are constantly applied in developing theological frameworks for Biblical interpretation.
Hermenutics, a closely related field, is the act interpreting the information in light of that heuristic theological framework.
Both are *inherent* in any systematic interpretation of the Bible be it liberal or conservative.
AJ
Posted by MrSquicky (Member # 1802) on :
Yes, and in order to accept that interpretation of that specific constructed series of words, you just have to believe that they used a "flashback" narrative structure that is otherwise not found in the Genesis accounts. Again, it's not what's there. It's what people want to be there and force in, despite the fact that it doesn't fit.
---
Look, I get it. I said something bad about your Dad. I'm running out of ways to keep making the same point.
edit: Yes, I get that heuristics are used to intrepret the Bible. And I think I get what you're saying here. I guess my response would be that the heuristic "The creation stories are literally true." springs from extra-Biblical source and is directly contradicted by the Bible. In addition, the extreme stretching that you have to do to get these passages look like something that supports the literal creationism adds things that don't fit with the surrounding material and have no other purpose than to justify the literal creationist reading.
[ February 16, 2006, 04:55 PM: Message edited by: MrSquicky ]
Posted by BannaOj (Member # 3206) on :
Squicky, it doesn't start with Genesis 1 at all. It starts with the Gospels. If you choose to believe that a man, Jesus, that called himself God was literally ressurected, then you have to decide what else in the Bible is literally true. There are various heuristics for doing so. But the one that leads to 7-day creationism, is not that difficult to arrive at. AJ
Posted by MrSquicky (Member # 1802) on :
There's no compelling reason to take the Genesis stories as literally true inherent in the Gospels. There's no diminishment of anything in the Gospels if the Genesis stories are meant not as literal history, but rather as figurative accounts. Jesus himself made wide use of this technique in his teachings.
The idea that "I have to force this interpretation into this." as opposed to "Let's read this to get the sense of what it means." is exactly the kind of disrespect that I'm talking about. There's nothing wrong with leaning on other bits of scripture or even extra-scriptural sources to get a better understanding of what's meant by some section, but deciding "This is what I want this to say." and then trying to twist it to make it say that, especially when the final fit is very poor, is a very different thing. You're putting yuorself and what you want to believe before the supposedly venerated source.
Posted by BannaOj (Member # 3206) on :
quote: There's no compelling reason [to Mr. Squicky] to take the Genesis stories as literally true inherent in the Gospels.
Maybe it depends on the extent to which you can embrace the miraculous.
Posted by MrSquicky (Member # 1802) on :
I have no idea what that even means. Which, I'm not entirely sure was unexpected.
I think you're implying that I can't embrace the miraculous. In which case, you've got the wrong person. And, for that matter, are not being particularly respectful to the many, many Christians who don't believe in literal creationism.
Posted by BannaOj (Member # 3206) on :
If you are going to make the leap of faith and accept the Ressurection. Then, it is a logically consistent path to follow to expect to find the miraculous elsewhere. In the Ressurection we are asked to believe something that doesn't make sense, from any other human experience.
Once you agree to one miraculous proposition in the Bible, and that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God accepting other miraculous propositions logically follow. The question is how far you take it. Applying faith in the miraculous to the belief in 7-day literal creation is really not even taking that proposition to its true extreme.
A good part of the Creationist movement, generates momentum, not from evolutionists, but from the theologians that deny the miraculous, physical ressurection of Christ. Evolution is viewed as a slippery slope to the denial of the miraculous (even if it doesn't have to be)
AJ
Posted by Kagehi (Member # 9123) on :
quote:Originally posted by BannaOj: Squick, I don't think you are a bad person. However, your method of communication, is one that would cause most of the fundamentalist Christians that I know to disregard you before you said more than a few sentences.
[QUOTE] You can find more inconsistencies in the accounts of who saw Jesus when after his ressurection than you have in the first two chapters of Genesis.
Well, one guy names Jospeh Atwill interpretted that, in his book "Ceaser's Messiah", like this:
1. There is no history providence of the NT, beyond the letters that the first of the Biblical authors claimed where written years earlier, but which have never been dated to find out, some occurances of the name Jesus in Roman records (which was a name as common among Jews as it is in Mexico today), mentions of messiahs, which where crawling out of the wood work back then, and the Bible itself.
2. The progression of events and places in the Bible exacly mirrors the places and events in Josephus Flavius' history of the campaign of Titus Flavius. Example: Same lake and same sequence as in the Bible - Jesus, "I will make you fishers of men.", Titus, "Use your nets and spears to fish those Jewish rebels out of the lake."
3. Jospehus was an adopted member, originally Jewish and disillusioned about the militaristic stance of the Jewish nation and its waiting for the messiah prophicied in the book of David, which was a **military** messiah, not Christ.
4. Romans often wrote plays and other works in ways that on the surface have one meaning, but where if you know the Cypher, mean something else entirely. This can include works that cleverly hide who is doing what, until you puzzle out how the characters are connected. One possible example - In Josephus' history there is the mention that Mary is used like we do Jane Doe, or like some names where used in WWII to refer to certain women. As a generic term to mean, "Some Jewish woman."
5. The earliest forms of the NT have specific words used to describe "when" the events happened. Specifically, words that can precisely describe: "Before sunrise", "At first light", "As the sun crests the horizon", "Early morning" and "Mid morning", if interpretted in their strictest form.
His conclusion was that the resurrection wasn't describing the same events, but a series of events, with emotionally overwhelmed and superstitious people confusing each other for angels and spirits, after the first mary got lost in the dark, came across the wrong tomb and concluded that the messiah had arisen. This connects directly with a similar removal of someone from a tomb, reported with similar following events, in Josephus' history. Only in that case, the empty tomb was a result of them taking the body from it.
Interestingly enough, I was watching a special a few days ago on TV, which showed various murals about the ressurection. One of them, instead of showing the modern version of the story, shows Jesus' followers *carrying* his body from the tomb. Oops!
Posted by BannaOj (Member # 3206) on :
Kagehi thank you for elucidating my point.
Posted by MrSquicky (Member # 1802) on :
quote:Applying faith in the miraculous to the belief in 7-day literal creation is really not even taking that proposition to its true extreme.
You're not addressing what was said then. I didn't say at any point that there is no reason to believe in literal creationism because it couldn't of happened because miraculous things don't happen (check out all the negatives in that puppy). What I said was that the two stories described are logically mutually exclusive and that there is no compelling reason in the Gospells to get the idea that they have to be literally true. Jesus doesn't say that they are true. His message is not altered in the slightest whether the accounts are literally true or not.
What you provided doesn't actually refer to anything specific. You could say that believing that Adam had the ability to fly is not beyond the limits of the miraculous things in the Bible. That doesn't change that fact that there is no reason to believe that he did and plenty of reasons to believe that he didn't.
Posted by Robin Kaczmarczyk (Member # 9067) on :
wtf is a squid lover?
Posted by clod (Member # 9084) on :
TC,
Thanks for the exchange. You are quite correct in pointing out that I failed to offer an alternative set of root definitions. I would have thought that "self" could be an agreed-upon conceptual defintion, and, then, that an intentioned action (kinda redundant) could be judged and labelled with the appropriate "ish" and "less". What you showed, was that the common usage of those terms was far from the logical linguistical one - that, right down to the dictionary definition, they are contingent.
And that's cool.
Not as cool as actually posing a question well, and then solving it, but almost.
ciao
Posted by kitmarlowescot2 (Member # 9176) on :
Who knows, maybe Cthulhu farted and created the world ? And we are all going mad in his dreaming.
Posted by plunge (Member # 9103) on :
Pretty odd how we were discussing evolution, and now we've ended up discussing the Bible.
Sort of like how when ID theorists tried to get involved in the science standards, they kept trying to add the word "unguided" into the standards for evolution (without explaining if it was meant in a metaphysical absolute sense, or a limited process sense), against the objections of many of the scientists. Then, later on, they started complaining that the standards referred to evolution as unguided, apparently forgetting that it was their own allies who insisted it be there in order to caricature evolution as an anti-religious dogma.
Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :
quote:Pretty odd how we were discussing evolution, and now we've ended up discussing the Bible.
Not odd at all to those familiar with the forum.
quote:Sort of like how when ID theorists tried to get involved in the science standards, they kept trying to add the word "unguided" into the standards for evolution (without explaining if it was meant in a metaphysical absolute sense, or a limited process sense), against the objections of many of the scientists. Then, later on, they started complaining that the standards referred to evolution as unguided, apparently forgetting that it was their own allies who insisted it be there in order to caricature evolution as an anti-religious dogma.
It's fairly insulting to suggest that this was done as part of some master plan.
Posted by plunge (Member # 9103) on :
It's a fact, how can it be "insulting?" The term was added into the standards by ID proponents, over the objections of scientists. Then Dembski's people started harping on it's prescence in the standards, apparently forgetting who put it there.
That's pretty embarrasing. But it's not me being insulting: it's me pointing out how ID people often try to frame the debate to heighten the apparent conflict between religion and science.
Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :
Sorry, the "this" I referred to was the diversion of the thread into a discussion of the Bible.
"pointing out how ID people often try to frame the debate to heighten the apparent conflict between religion and science" in connection with the diversion to the new topic is what was fairly insulting.
Posted by plunge (Member # 9103) on :
The point is that as much as people assert that it isn't their religious beliefs that make them question certain facts, we always anyway end up debating the Bible and all sorts of brain-in-a-jar philosophies. But a discussion on the intricacies of music theory isn't going to end up debating Biblical literalism. What this suggests is that the preoccupation with singling out biology for assault has a lot more to do with Biblical beliefs then people seem to think.
Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :
It might interest you to know that the primary people who have been talkin about the Bible are not "ID people."
Posted by Robin Kaczmarczyk (Member # 9067) on :
Jeepers Creepers, folks. I just read 'Forbidden Archeology's Impact' regarding the age of mankind. The author, Michael Cremo argues that contrary to popular scientific beleif, mankind is millions of years old.
Of course, to understand such novel ideas, one must immerse themselves in vedanta and Hindu idiologies regarding the Kalpas (or ages of mankind), the Hindus believe that we are in the year 5,000 of a Kali Yuga (or age of Kali) that will last many hundreds of millions of years.
Cremo has ample evidence to prove his point, which kind of proves my point... Folks gather round the wagons when it comes to philosophy and modern biology (and all it's subsciences like anthropology) is ultimately a philosophical point of view based on empirical evidence that can only be observed by a limited scope (the scope of modern science).
It is absurd to discuss the Bible scientifically. The book is a book on ethics and philosophy. It is also absurd to discuss scientific creationism because empirical evidence is certainly against a 'person' making the whole universe.
Now, if we take the science-fiction view, all things are possible and suddenly we are not strapped to narrow scientific approach. Thus, we can safely roam among the gods, looking for deeper answers to our existencial questions. But to teach science-fiction instead of science is a dangerous thing if one wants to train scientists.
Posted by Robin Kaczmarczyk (Member # 9067) on :
BTW, if you happen to know the person who made the universe, please tell him or her that I am very sorry, but that scientific evidence suggests that he or she does not exist.
Posted by David G (Member # 8872) on :
Actually, for an interesting argument in support of the claim that God/creator can be proven scientifically, see this essay by SF writer Robert J. Sawyer. I also recommend his book Calculating God.
Posted by Kagehi (Member # 9123) on :
>Folks gather round the wagons when it comes to philosophy and modern biology >(and all it's subsciences like anthropology) is ultimately a philosophical point >of view based on empirical evidence that can only be observed by a limited scope> (the scope of modern science). > >It is absurd to discuss the Bible scientifically.
No its not. Such an argument amounts to, "We will believe any acheological evidence that suggests its true, but reject the stuff that doesn't.", the same with everything else. Before you start babbling about limited scope, you first have to define what those limits really are, based on something other than, "My mommy taught me to believe in ghosts, and I think I saw one some time." There is a saying in the computer industry, Garbage in, Garbage out. The human brain invents excuses for what it percieves *after* the fact. If you don't have sufficient knowledge or enough data to come up with correct conclusions, instead of coming up with "no" conclusion, like a computer would, you instead come up with ones that fit, however nebulously and in-exact, what you do know.
Worse, its is possible to induce malfunctions that produce false perceptions, feelings of paranoia, visions, the sense of ghostly presences in a room, feelings of oneness with the universe and everything and anything that people call spiritual. I.e., you can use empirically provable conditions to create experiences that supposedly fall outside the "scope" of empirical study. That right their should shoot holes in the entire idea that such things are outside of the scope of science.
Heck, to use your own science fiction example, the stories behind Battle Star Galactica or Star Gate SG-1 are more internally consistent than the religions they derive most of their stories from. Taken to the most logical conclusion, if such things are describable, they must be possible, so therefor there must be Goa'uld hidding out their some place. This is the fundimental problem with not discussing the Bible scientifically. Someone some place *is*, to try to prove it really happened. And unlike true scientists, they apply acheology, history, geology, etc. exactly the same way they apply religion itself, by picking and choosing when, what and how it applies. Your basically saying that even if they *found* the Summerian kings tomb that gave rise to the Noah myth, and found in that tomb evidence both of the actual events, the real boat *and* some mention that the predicessors of the Jewish faith talked to the guy, that would be irrelevant, because religion lies outside the scope of science.
First you have to prove that there is something outside of the known universe, not just imagine there is, then you can talk about how or if science fails to address it. Otherwise, its no more valid to argue that science can't adress some fundimental underpinning of the Bible than it is to argue that science can't quantify some underlying "truth" in Tolkien's works, or the legend of Zues.
Heck, one at least as rediculous argument recently involved the idea that black holes produce baby universes and that the reason intelligence exists in the universe if because the universe itself is an intelligent life form, which breeds more universes. It makes at least as much sense as God, suggests some scientific basis for how it all happened, etc. Of course, he also both quotes something Hawkings said, while completely failing to take into account Hawkings radiation, which proves that over time black holes evaporate, not spawn new universes. Point is, even before the rules of science where codified, people have been insisting that the very next thing over the horizon can "never" be proven, tested or examined by science. The only thing that this has been true for is a) religion, and b) known fiction. For me, I don't quite see the point of insisting the two are completely seperate things. Some people even go a step farther off the deep end and insist they really are the same things, but that the religion in them negates any fictitious aspect, e.g. Scientologists.
When you insist that X is untouchable and unchallengable, you not only create a blind spot in your own understanding, you start supplanting anything you find hard to understand or inconvenient with X, instead of looking for real answers. Like Behe, who, unwilling to understand "why" or "how" something developed, would rather claim it never did. History can be very interesting too, but there is hardly any point to trying to understand how the Jews got from A to Z, if someone insists that B through Y never happened and everything in their official version must be true. Then you get Christians that come along and do the same thing, by tacking even less provable stuff onto what everyone already insists should never be questioned.
A thousand years from now there will probably be some branch with their own fiction of the war of ID vs. evolution that insist they have proof God did it, and all the archeological evidence is just misinterpreted or lies, and they will have a book to prove it.
Hmm. Heard of Robert J. Sawyer.. Wasn't that the guy whose entire book was summed up in an equation you could plug some numbers in and get anything from the probability that God existed being 0% to 100%, all with no solid grounds to define what the right answer to any part was. Can do the same thing with the tooth fairy and I am sure children would come up with 90%+ odds of that existing too. lol
Posted by clod (Member # 9084) on :
Kagehi,
Nice post. Why ask why?
*apologizes for being silly*
Posted by David G (Member # 8872) on :
quote:Originally posted by Kagehi: Hmm. Heard of Robert J. Sawyer.. Wasn't that the guy whose entire book was summed up in an equation you could plug some numbers in and get anything from the probability that God existed being 0% to 100%, all with no solid grounds to define what the right answer to any part was. Can do the same thing with the tooth fairy and I am sure children would come up with 90%+ odds of that existing too. lol
Did you read the Essay? I don't think Robert Sawyer is the guy you are referring to, and the analysis most certainly does not apply to the tooth fairy. Why don't you actually read the essay and judge it on its own terms.
[ February 20, 2006, 03:34 PM: Message edited by: David G ]
Posted by Kagehi (Member # 9123) on :
Ok, I must have been thinking of someone else. There is a creationist out there with a similarly titled book who tried to invent an equation to determine the "likelihood that god exists".
However, with all due respect to Sawyer, whether or not science proves parallel universes or not, that won't prove any sort of God. Why? Well, the same science has dug up evidence that strongly suggests a) the early universe didn't have the same physical laws as now, b) they shifted a lot between then and now, and c) evidence suggests that those laws are "still" shifting, albeit at a rate so slow that most of the stars in the universe will burn out long before things like gravity show more than a 0.00000001% varience, or something like that. We are in the equivalent of a warm period in the universe, at some point thousands of billions of years from now we will likely end up with the universes equivalent of an ice age, while a few hundred billion ago the entire universe went through the equivalent of planet wide volcanism. Neither the universal volcanism or ice age are conducive to life. Forgive me if I got the numbers way off.
The only amazing thing is that the "livable" period will be such a huge span of time. It could have just as easilly been a few million years, or ten second. But the argument being made is basically one of some guy on a beach in the Carrabean saying, "I have heard of ice and volcanos, but never seen either. God must have made this place so water can't freeze and volcanos never happen." Umm, no.. Its simply that humans themselves might be extinct long before the drift in the physical laws render life impossible and we where not around when they drifted enough to allow it in the first place. The same science that this guy says will prove God by default, if there are no parallel universes, says "life wasn't always possible, and eventually it won't be again, we are just lucky to evolve near the 'start' of the period it is possible in, instead of near the end."
Posted by David G (Member # 8872) on :
The physical laws critical to Sawyer's analysis are the strength of the "strong nuclear force," the property of water such that it expands when freezing, and water's high surface tension. Is there any scientific evidence that these particular physical laws or properties are, or have been, shifting over time?
If the laws of the universe have been changing, and continue to change over time, such that there will be a near infinitie number of physical laws as they pertain, say, to the strong nuclear force and the properties of water, then for purposes of Sawyer's analysis, this would be no different than having an infinite number of universes.
However, if these particular laws are relatively static, or if there are not a near infinite number of variations, then the fact that our universe is changing would not alter the odds of our universe possessing these essential life-generating properties, which odds happen to be only 1 in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
Posted by Kagehi (Member # 9123) on :
Sigh.. Hard to argue with that sort of logic. The key point is that such drift, assuming all such properties are in fact interconnected, doesn't require some magic sky faerie with a screw driver "tweaking" it to fit, any more than ice melts because someone intentionally sits there and adjusts the temperature of a fire by 1/10000000th of a degree until it does, instead of just letting the heat radiate. Its an argument of, "I just can't comprehend such numbers, so it must be impossible!" No, its just unimaginably unlikely and no "less" likely than any single grain of sand having a unique shape. I hate arguments from incomprehension...
Posted by David G (Member # 8872) on :
Sawyer's argument, as I understand it, is premised in the belief that the universe was either randomly/arbitrarily constructed (no God) or constructed by an intelligent designer (God) who tweaked the properties of the universe to make life possible. If there is only a 1 in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 chance that the universe possesses the various properties that make life possible, then it is more likely that the universe was constructed by an intelligent designer.
According to Sawyer, therefore, "[t]hose kinds of odds virtually demand the conclusion that someone did indeed tweak the parameters, carefully fine-tuning the universe's design."
How is this an "argument from incomprehension"? I don't think I understood your last post, Kagehi.
My children play with blocks with the various letters of the alphabet on them (one letter per block). They are usually scattered around the floor when they are done playing. But if I come into the room and find all of the blocks neatly arranged from A to Z, which is more likely: ONE - that they were randomly distributed throughout the floor and by chance they fell in order neatly arranged, or TWO - that someone with intelligence purposefully laid them out in order neatly arranged.
Now use the same example, but there are numbered blocks, with every number laid out from 1 to 10 to the 39th power. If you find them all neatly arranged in order, would you conclude that it was random or intelligently designed?
Another example: you hear a piano playing Mozart's "Emperor Concerto." What is more likely, that somebody is randomly hitting the keys or that someone is purposefully playing the piano with the intent to produce specific music? Is concluding that the latter has occurred an "argument from incomprehension"?
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
This is quite a bit like the puddle saying "look how well I fit into my hole in the ground - it must have been designed especially for me!" It's true that we rely on water's properties for the kind of life we have; it is not true that this is the only possible form of life. Sawyer simply waves his hands and says "If X weren't so, we wouldn't be alive", which may or may not be true, but he has not demonstrated that some different lifeform wouldn't be. As for the strong nuclear force, his argument is, um, a little silly; if it were weaker, stars would contract more and still burn; were it stronger, stars would not contract as much (for the same amount of heat) - and still burn.
Posted by David G (Member # 8872) on :
quote:Originally posted by King of Men: This is quite a bit like the puddle saying "look how well I fit into my hole in the ground - it must have been designed especially for me!"
Is Sawyer's argument more consistent with my example of numbered blocks being laid out from 1 to 10 to the 39th power, or your example of water filling a hole in the ground? The physics of water flowing into a hole makes it probable for water to the fill hole randomly, as opposed to it having to be intelligently designed that way. But the likelihood that the blocks would randomly fall in order is very improbable.
quote:Originally posted by King of Men: It's true that we rely on water's properties for the kind of life we have; it is not true that this is the only possible form of life. Sawyer simply waves his hands and says "If X weren't so, we wouldn't be alive", which may or may not be true, but he has not demonstrated that some different lifeform wouldn't be.
Sawyer's argument addresses the likelihood not only that life would exist in this universe, but also the following: the existence of planets, the continued existence of the universe beyond the first few minutes after the big bang, and even the existence of multi-proton atoms (without which the only element in the universe would be hydrogen). For Sawyer's argument to be valid, must he first prove that there could be no life in a universe that exists for a few minutes, without planets, and with hydrogen as the only element?
quote:Originally posted by King of Men: As for the strong nuclear force, his argument is, um, a little silly; if it were weaker, stars would contract more and still burn; were it stronger, stars would not contract as much (for the same amount of heat) - and still burn.
I think you are confusing Sawyer's argument concerning the strong nuclear force for his argument concerning gravity. The strong nuclear force must be precisely what it is. Otherwise, there would be no multiproton atoms. Gravity has to be precisely what it is. Otherwise, planets would not form. I'm not sure how that argument is silly.
[ February 22, 2006, 02:07 PM: Message edited by: David G ]
Posted by Kagehi (Member # 9123) on :
No, they need to be precisely what they are for "our" universe to exist. Its not impossible for some other circumstances to allow for one to exist that is different. Heck, just an anti-matter universe, where protons and electrons are reversed, is *possible*, and we can even create small amounts of it, which remains stable, as long as it in a vacuum and suspended where it won't bump into any normal matter. And I meant "incrudulity", I just couldn't think of the right term at the time.
Posted by Kagehi (Member # 9123) on :
In any case, this is all pretty irrelevant to the situation anyway. The question of how, what or why something did or didn't create anything is *not* an issue that we can answer at this point and from the stand point of good science, saying someone with a screw driver tweaked things billions of years ago doesn't change *now* in any way. The problem is people that insist what we know about now is irrelevent, because it somehow contradicts the idea of the guy with the screw driver still being around and making sure it all still works, for which there is no evidence at all. We have wandered from stuff that has some critical consequences for science into stuff that amounts to, "Yeah, but what effect does any of that have on the real world, even if its true, since there is no evidence of "current" tweaking of that sort?"
Frankly, I don't have much problem with Deists, who like many of the founding fathers, don't insist that their magic sky faery is looking over everyone's shoulder and tweaking the world to fit humans, in complete contradiction to things like.. Global warming, lethal diseases, famine, drought, tornados, hurricanes, tsunamis, the very high odds of another planet killer asteroid being out there... Well, you get the point. lol
Short of finding more direct evidence, all "not" finding evidence of alternate universes really does is make us possibly lucky, it doesn't prove anything else.
Posted by David G (Member # 8872) on :
With all due respect, Kagehi, I don't think I understand your point.
Are you saying that a universe full of planets and multi-proton atoms would be just as likely to exist as our universe without the strong nuclear force and gravity being exactly what they are? If this is your position, then perhaps your belief in the possibility that such a universe could exist is less probable than the possibility that an intelligent designer created our universe.
Sawyer's argument centers around mathematical probabilities. If there is only one universe, then the probability of life existing in the universe randomly (as opposed to the universe being intelligently designed) is exceedingly unlikely. (As an aside, the term "intelligently designed" has nothing do whatsoever with the term "intelligent design" as used in the evolution debate.)
Also, what is "incrudulity"?
Posted by David G (Member # 8872) on :
quote:Originally posted by Kagehi: Short of finding more direct evidence, all "not" finding evidence of alternate universes really does is make us possibly lucky, it doesn't prove anything else.
The odds are 1 in 10 to the 39th power. That's pretty darn lucky. Perhaps that kind of luck is indistinguishable from God. More importantly, when science faces odds like that, it does more than just chalk it up to luck.
I understand that Sawyer's argument does not prove God's intervention in the world today. The point simply is that perhaps there is a place for science when it comes to thinking about God.
Posted by Tom Curtis (Member # 9104) on :
Let's assume that the odds of a universe being friendly to life are really 1 in 10 ^ 39 against; and let us also assume that there is just one universe. In this scenario, would science have shown that there is a God?
No!
The reason is simple, and is tied to the nature of explanation. If we were to infer that their was a God because of the long odds against there being a life friendly universe, we would be invoking God by inference to the best explanation. So, for science to show that there is a God, it would need to show that "God created" was a better explanation than "it just happened".
We can get a better handle on this by considering what makes an explanation good. Various rules of thumb exist, eg, a good explanation is simple, but what they boil down to is, a good explanation is more probable than the alternatives. Specifically, if the probability of the explanation being true times the probability of the phenomena existing given that the explanation is true is greater than the independant probability of phenomena existing, then the explanation is good. In symbols, p(E) x p(P|E) > p(P|~E).
Now, if you have a look at our scenario, it gives us a very good reason to think that "it just happened" is a bad explanation. But it gives us no reason to think that "God created" is a good one. Specifically, it involves no calculation or estimate of the probability that God exists, and no calculation or estimate of the probability that God would create a life friendly universe if s/he did exist. Consequently it gives us no reason to think that "God created" is a better, or a worse, explanation than "it just happened".
This indicates that the explanation that "God created" simply cannot be a matter of science on current data. It may well not be a matter of science in principle, in that in principle it may be impossible to generate a scientific calculation of the probability that God exists, or of his or her motives if s/he does. It may simply come down to a matter of arational faith. Do you subjectively believe that it is very likely there is a God? Well then, by faith you accept that "God created" is a good explanation. Do you subjectively think a the existence of God is an unlikely hypothesis? Then by faith you think that "It just happened" is a better explanation.
Does this mean that, in this scenario, people who reject the existence of God are being peculiarly dogmatic? No. Odds of 1 in 10^39 against are small potatoes in the world of probability. The odds that a group of transistors and diodes will form a circuit capable of implementing a chess program are far longer than 1 in 10^ 39 against. The odds of an electronic circuit being capable of implementing "Windows" are longer by several hundred (if not thousand) orders of magnitude).
I know of two methods to attempt to estimate the probability of there being a God. The first claims to be science, but is not. It is Dembski's "Law of Conservation of Information" which asserts that Complex Specified Information is conserved. That means that the CSI of the creator must be at least as great as the CSI of the universe. As "complexity" by Dembski's definition is just the inverse of probability, then by the "Law of the Conservation of Information" the probability of the Creator must be equal to or less than the probability of the thing created. That is, if Dembski's Law was valid (it is not), then "God created" is necessarilly a worse explanation than "It just happened".
The other way is explicitly philosophical (but not religious, and not scientific). It assumes that the minimum complexity of a God is equal to or greater than the minimum complexity of a full Artificial Intelligence. This assumption can be motivated, but not proven. That is, I can give you good reasons to accept that it is true, but they do not amount to logical proof, or even proof on ballance of probability. In contrast, the contrary assumption cannot even be "motivated" as that term is understood by philosophers.
Using this estimate, it is clear that the probability of a God existing is much, much less than 1 in 10^39 against. So, even if we had scientific evidence that a life friendly universe is very improbable, and that there was only one universe, we would not have a scientific reason to believe that there was a creator; and if that was our only evidence, we would have a (weak) philosophical reason to believe that there was not a creator.
[ February 22, 2006, 07:27 PM: Message edited by: Tom Curtis ]
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
Strong force : As written, Sawyer's thesis is, um, misleading, to put it kindly. OK, you can certainly adjust the strong force such that only helium exists, but to call the required adjustment 'slight' is to stretch the word rather out of shape. Likewise for making it weaker; and in this case, you can in any case adjust the electromagnetic force strength to compensate, which opens up a whole new universe of parameter space. I am willing to bet that this alone reduces that 10^39 by several orders of magnitude.
Incidentally, I'm deeply suspicious of that number. To get a probability of life being possible, you need to establish some range of parameter space in which it is (a tricky exercise in itself, because of the unknown-lifeforms argument I gave above), and then divide that colume by the whole possible volume. And how do you establish what the maximum value of any parameter is? Plain hand-waving, is how. The accurate statement of the problem, then, is that the probability is either zero (that is, some finite range divided by infinity) or else undefined (one infinity divided by another, with no information on how the limits behave.) The former is absurd; while the latter doesn't sell any books. Ten to 39 is just ridiculous, and possibly dishonest.
Which brings me neatly to my next point :
quote:Sawyer's argument addresses the likelihood not only that life would exist in this universe, but also the following: the existence of planets, the continued existence of the universe beyond the first few minutes after the big bang, and even the existence of multi-proton atoms (without which the only element in the universe would be hydrogen). For Sawyer's argument to be valid, must he first prove that there could be no life in a universe that exists for a few minutes, without planets, and with hydrogen as the only element?
In a word, yes. Who knows what kind of complex molecules you can make out of quarks, if their density is high enough? Protons, after all, are hardly the only kind of particles out there, as I should well know. Trust me on this, there are all kinds of analogies to chemistry that occur with the strong force, and these are incredibly much more rapid than the electromagnetic interactions that drive our kind of life. A few minutes could well be enough to produce lifeforms. In addition, since we are allowed to mess around with the fundamental parameters here, you can make the speed of light arbitrarily high; this, as Einstein will tell you, has all kinds of interesting effects on time, and can stretch those few minutes into what would seem, even to us, to be - well, any number you like, really.
And this is just playing around with the forces we already know about! Add forces that are cubic, one-over-r^1.5, exponential, sinusoidal, act in only two dimensions, universes with five or ten or 66.3 dimensions (ask a mathematician about that one)... The possibilities are endless. I mean, literally endless. The problem with these kind of probability arguments is that they are, bluntly, lacking in imagination to the point of utter, screaming dullness. People play around with one or two variables, and think they have discovered the end of variation! Simplifying a problem is all very well, but really, this isn't just removing air resistance - you've removed the actual cannonball that made the problem interesting in the first place!
Posted by David G (Member # 8872) on :
I cannot speak for Robert Sawyer, nor am I best equipped to defend his position, but here's my best shot.
In response to Tom Curtis: If there is only 1 universe and the odds of a life friendly universe are 1 in 10^39 against, then I see only two possible (logical) alternatives. Either the universe just happened (random creation), or it was created (intelligently designed). In other words, the opposite of, or only alternative to, "it just happened randomly" is that "it didn't just happen randomly." And if "it didn't just happen randomly," then what possibly did happen? The only logical explanation for a universe that did not just happen randomly is that some intelligent entity deliberately created the universe. Are there any other logical alternatives? I am genuinely interested in knowing whether you can conceive of any.
If you accept that there are only two possible alternatives (random creation v. intelligent creation), then would not logically the high improbability of one alternative render the other alternative probable? If there is a 1 in 4 chance that you draw a diamond from a deck of cards, it is necessarily the case that there is a 3 in 4 chance that you draw a heart, club or spade.
In response to King of Men: First: I am not a scientist and cannot defend the odds which, according to Robert Sawyer, were computed by Cosmologist Paul Davies. When I have time, I will try to research his work. In the meantime, 1 in 10^39 odds is beyond comprehension improbable. I don't think Sawyer's argument is undermined signficantly if we change the odds to 1 in 10^29 or 1 in 10^19. This is especially true if, in fact, there only are two alternatives for the creation of the universe (random creation or intelligent creation).
Second: I don't think you can successfully argue against the existence of an intelligent creator by establishing that life is possible/probable in any universe, no matter how it is constructed. Life is so incredibly complex. Would not the probability that life (and all of its complexity) randomly arises from any universe, no matter how elemental or exotic, still be incredibly low? In other words: that life is probable in any and every universe is, in and of itself, highly improbable.
EDIT: That life is probable AND RANDOM in any and every universe (no matter how exotic) is, in and of itself, highly improbable.
[ February 23, 2006, 10:45 AM: Message edited by: David G ]
Posted by Tom Curtis (Member # 9104) on :
David G:
quote:If you accept that there are only two possible alternatives (random creation v. intelligent creation), then would not logically the high improbability of one alternative render the other alternative probable? If there is a 1 in 4 chance that you draw a diamond from a deck of cards, it is necessarily the case that there is a 3 in 4 chance that you draw a heart, club or spade.
The other logically possible alternatives are that there was no universe at all, or that there was a universe and it was not life friendly. It could very easily be that the odds that a universe just happened, given that it exists are approximately 1, but the odds that it be life friendly are 1 in 10 ^ 39.
Here is a consistent assignment of probalities which make it probable that the universe just happened:
Probability that there is just one universe: 1
Probability that there is a God: 1 in 10 ^ 200
Probability that the universe just happened: 1 - (1 in 10 ^ 200)
Probability that a universe that just happened also just happened to be life friendly: 1 in 10 ^39
Probability that a God would create a life friendly universe: 1
A posteriori probability that the universe just happened, given that we know it is life friendly:
(1- 10^-200) x 10^-39)/((1- 10^-200) x 10^-39) + 10^-200)
which is approximately equal to 1.
These figures are, of course, entirely hypothetical, but it is logically possible that that a life friendly universe just happened given that we live in a life friendly universe is a dead certainty. You just don't know unless you know the other probabilities.
Posted by David G (Member # 8872) on :
Tom, with due respect, I still don't understand how there are any more than two alternatives to which we can assign probabilities.
We are assuming 3 fundamental variables to be true: (1) that there is only one universe, (2) that the universe is life friendly, and (3) that the probability of a life friendly universe happening randomly is 1 in 10 ^39. Under these assumptions, either the universe just happened or the universe was intelligently designed.
Given the assumptions we are operating under, you cannot proffer as alternatives that there is no universe or that the universe is not life friendly. Those alternatives are inconsistent with the assumptions. You may, of course, challenge the assumptions. But doing so may be a matter for science (to prove or disprove), which is Sawyer's basic point: perhaps science has a role in the debate.
Under our assumptions there are only two alternatives, and for one (random creation) we have assigned a probability of 1 in 10 ^39. Therefore, the probability for the other alternative (intelligent creation) is (10 ^39 - 1) in 10 ^39. How can you, therefore, consistent with our assumptions, assign a probability of 1 in 10 ^200 that there is a God?
We agree that it is logically possible that a life friendly universe just happened. But if science proves that the odds of such a universe happening randomly is only 1 in 10 ^39, then it is necessarily true that the probability that the universe was not created randomly sky rockets.
Posted by camus (Member # 8052) on :
quote:My children play with blocks with the various letters of the alphabet on them (one letter per block). They are usually scattered around the floor when they are done playing. But if I come into the room and find all of the blocks neatly arranged from A to Z, which is more likely: ONE - that they were randomly distributed throughout the floor and by chance they fell in order neatly arranged, or TWO - that someone with intelligence purposefully laid them out in order neatly arranged.
Now use the same example, but there are numbered blocks, with every number laid out from 1 to 10 to the 39th power. If you find them all neatly arranged in order, would you conclude that it was random or intelligently designed?
In the example with the blocks, you know for a certainty that someone with intelligence with the ability to arrange the blocks does in fact exist. With that knowledge, the probability of the arrangement by intelligence is far greater than the arrangement by chance. If the children did not exist, then that dramatically changes your belief of whether it was randomly or intelligently arranged.
In regards to the universe, we don't have that underlying assumption of the existence of some intelligent being, at least scientifically. If an intelligent creator does not in fact exist, then the probability of intelligent creation is significantly less than (10 ^39 - 1) in 10 ^39, basically, zero probability.
Posted by David G (Member # 8872) on :
quote:Originally posted by camus: In the example with the blocks, you know for a certainty that someone with intelligence with the ability to arrange the blocks does in fact exist. With that knowledge, the probability of the arrangement by intelligence is far greater than the arrangement by chance. If the children did not exist, then that dramatically changes your belief of whether it was randomly or intelligently arranged.
Again, I am operating under the assumption that there is only 1 of 2 possibilities for how the blocks can be arranged: They were scattered randomly (by whatever force of nature), or they were arranged deliberately by an intelligent being. So if the children did not exist, either some other unknown person got into my house and arranged the blocks, or the improbable occurred - they randomly arranged themselves in order. But the existence of the children does not change the following facts: there are only two alternatives, and one is very improbable.
quote:Originally posted by camus: In regards to the universe, we don't have that underlying assumption of the existence of some intelligent being, at least scientifically. If an intelligent creator does not in fact exist, then the probability of intelligent creation is significantly less than (10 ^39 - 1) in 10 ^39, basically, zero probability.
But if science can prove that there is only one universe, then we can establish, scientifically, the probability that the existence of a life friendly universe occurring randomly is highly improbable. The existence of an intelligent creator, therefore, becomes highly probable - because there is no other logical alternative to a randomly existing universe.
Posted by Kagehi (Member # 9123) on :
Thanks King of Men, that is much more clearly what I was trying to say.
And David.. While I realize I mispelled "incredulity", I am starting the suspect that using "crud" in their instead wasn't far off..
quote:The only logical explanation for a universe that did not just happen randomly is that some intelligent entity deliberately created the universe. Are there any other logical alternatives? I am genuinely interested in knowing whether you can conceive of any.
Hmm.. That maybe something pre-universe as we know it was there and the universe was a direct result for a process from that? I mean the key problem here seems to be that only two options are being allowed for - "The universe is just one of a lot of them." or "It just popped into existence." Frankly, multiple universes doesn't remove God either, if you want to get seriously rediculous about it, but it does obliterate what we *describe* as a god. Then again, one that just made it pop into existence, then went on a lunch break for the rest of creation is also not what we define as a god. Why people find the idea, "Well, my magic sky faery might not be actively doing anything now, but I am sure he/she/it created it all.", as a) useful, b) relevant to anything or c) at all comforting, is beyond me...
However, one possibility not being allowed here is that natural processes in some other place gave rise to this one, with the subsequent loss of the original. Heck, since, as I said, we know that the physical laws shift, and we have no complete understanding of what those shifts actually produce or how they connect to each other, its *possible* that the unverse could become hostile to our life, but form some other, or even that the break down of things like strong nuclear forces might fracture space time in a way that "caused" the dimensions to restructure themselves and produce a new big bang of some sort. We simply don't know and the entire argument about what would, could or was possible under different physical laws, or any calculation that might be derived, assumes we do know what the heck happens in those cases.
I find it ironic that some people reading about the odds would even bring up the usual, "Well, you scientists think you know everything, but you don't know this.", in the same speech about how *they* know that no other kinds of life or universes can exist and they know how all the physical laws interact so completely that they can even makes such a prediction.
And again, science proving that there is only one doesn't do anything for the arbitrary nature of the probabilities being assigned. We would need a) evidence that something exists that can create universes in the first place and b) some concept of what was there "before" this universe existed, to say either that it just appeared somehow, or that anyone had to or could have created it. As several people have pointed out, all you do by suggesting that a God is necessary is apply an added level of complication, based solely on the rediculous assumption that because some religion defined a being that created everything (generall not true of all other religions), it must be a possible explaination.
Well, there are *other* alternatives in other religions, about half of them describing the event as an accident, due to something a completely disinterested and preoccupied being did without specifically intending to create the universe. None of which can be discounted by the standards you have to define the creator, without having evidence of what kind of creation took place. All you have is an assumption that "your" version is correct, not evidence that every other alternative is impossible. Thus by the same logic, one could conclude that its more likely that the creation myths here:
and other places, are at least as likely. Heck, some of them can even be bent to fit some of the theoretical models of universe formation, which the Christian version can't. The first one on that page, involving the Fairy Tradition is almost finctionalization of several multi-universe theories that make ours a fragment of some other larger universe, which got extruded from the original. If we want to talk probabilities, then the odds, of parts of that being true is far higher than a god that can't even get his people to write the correct order for the formation of the planets and the sun, never mind plants and animals, down correctly.
There is also some ancient one involving a serpent or such, which you could bend to describe as a worm hole, etc. Not to mention the Buddhist version, which basically just repeats the Big Bang in mystic terms. Where does the, "God as creator", one at all come even marginally close to having a higher probability than the thousands of far more, albeit probably accidentally, more scientifically accurate stories? I mean, if we really want to talk about which theory is more probable...
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
I'm at work and can't really go into the nitty-gritty of a reply, but I do note that an extremely unlikely universe doesn't prove anything at all. It seems quite clear that any creator is going to be still more un-probable, so where did that come from? You've just shoved the problem one step up, in a way that makes you feel better. It doesn't answer any actual questions.
Posted by David G (Member # 8872) on :
In an effort to try to find some common ground on this issue, let's break it down like this:
PROPOSITION ONE: Can we agree that one of the following two alternatives are necessarily true and that there are no other alternatives exclusive of these two?
"The universe came into existence randomly/arbitrarily, or the universe did not come into existence randomly/arbitrarily."
PROPOSITION TWO: If you agree with PROPOSITION ONE, can we agree that the following proposition is necessarily true?
"If science proves that the odds of the universe coming into existence randomly/arbitrarily are 1 in 10^39, then the odds of the universe not coming into existence randomly/arbitrarily are (10^39 - 1) in 10^39?"
I would like to see whether we can agree at least on the foregoing propositions. Notice that I am not talking about God - for purposes of evaluating these propositions, let's remove God from the discussion.
Posted by David G (Member # 8872) on :
quote:Originally posted by Kagehi: And David.. While I realize I mispelled "incredulity", I am starting the suspect that using "crud" in their instead wasn't far off..
I actually did not make the connection and realize at the time that you mispelled "incredulity," but thought you might be referring to something else, which is a reflection of my occasionally very slow processing speed. I did not mean to condescend, but if it came off that way, I apologize.
I sincerly welcome your staunch opposition to Sawyer's thesis, as well as the opposition argued by TC, KoM, and others. I actually have not yet come to a decision in my own mind about the validity of Sawyer's thesis. But I find it very interesting to think about, and I am defending his position to the best of my ability just to see where the holes in his argument may lie. I am learning from watching this debate unfold.
Posted by Tom Curtis (Member # 9104) on :
David, your two propositions are necessarilly true and irrelevant to the discussion.
There are several relevant probabilities.
p(R) - the probability that the universe came into existence randomly or arbitrarilly;
p(~R) - the probability that the universe did not come into existence randomly or arbitrarilly;
p(G) - the probability that God created the universe;
p(L) - the probability that the universe is life friendly;
p(L|R) - the probability that the universe is life friendly given that the universe came into existence randomly or arbitrarilly;
p(R|L) - the probability that the universe came into existence randomly or arbitrarilly given that it is life friendly;
p(L|~R) - the probability that the universe is life friendly given that it did not come into existence randomly or arbitrarilly;
p(~R|L) - the probability that the universe did not come into existence randomly or arbitrarilly given that it is life friendly;
p(L|G) - the probability that the universe is life friendly given that God created it; and
p(G|L) - the probability that God created the universe given that it is life friendly.
In probability theory there is a simple theorem, Bayes Theorem, that relates these probabilites. Specifically:
p(R|L) = (p(R) x p(L|R))/p(L) (and equivalents)
We can take this formula further in two ways. We can notice that p(L) = p(L|R) + p(L|~R), so that if we had the relevant probabilities we could go further.
Or, we can recognise that we really don't care about the absolute value of p(R|L), but only its value relative to p(G|L) (or p(~R|L)). Noticing this we can subsitute out p(L) and determine the value of the following inequality, if we have the relevant probabilities.
(p(R) x p(L|R)) ? (p(G) x p(L|G))
Now this is your basic problem, you have a value for p(L|R). It is a very disputable value on a number of grounds, but I don't care about that. Your problem is that you cannot solve any of these formulas without at least two other values, nor the last without at least three other values. As a simple matter of mathematics it cannot be done.
Sawyer's scenario is entertaining because he asks, what if we discover that p(~R) = p(G) = (1 - p(R)). Well, interesting, but it still leaves us two values short for solving either for p(R|L) or the inequality (we still don't know p(L), nor p(R), nor p(L|G)).
Finally, you seem to have the mistaken belief that Davies' estimate is of p(R). It is not. It is explicitly an estimate of p(L|R); ie, the probability that the universe is life friendly given that it follows known physical laws and that the cosmological constants are chosen randomly.
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
And, as I mentioned, that estimate is probably nonsense anyway, even within the constraint of following the known laws.
Posted by Kagehi (Member # 9123) on :
quote:Originally posted by David G: In an effort to try to find some common ground on this issue, let's break it down like this:
PROPOSITION ONE: Can we agree that one of the following two alternatives are necessarily true and that there are no other alternatives exclusive of these two?
"The universe came into existence randomly/arbitrarily, or the universe did not come into existence randomly/arbitrarily."
Ok.
PROPOSITION TWO: If you agree with PROPOSITION ONE, can we agree that the following proposition is necessarily true?
quote:"If science proves that the odds of the universe coming into existence randomly/arbitrarily are 1 in 10^39, then the odds of the universe not coming into existence randomly/arbitrarily are (10^39 - 1) in 10^39?"
No, because this is an arbitrary number based on an assumption that we have sufficient information to make such a prediction. In fact, if we did have such, we would already have an answer. Since the odds must be predicated on sufficient information, and we do not have a sufficiently complete understanding of all the variables in how the universe even works, i.e. no unifying field theory, for one example, the data is incomplete. We can't point to the universe and say, X, Y and Z are irrelevant to the determination of this statistic, because in some critical ways we don't even know what X, Y and Z are in some case. Any odds given in such circumstances are like trying to determine the odds of finding a blue marble in every box on the planet, using a box of marbles from a company that only makes blue marbles. Fine, if you know that there are only blue marbles, but useless if there is even an assumption that other colors exist, or that it might just be possible for one to have "no" color.
Statistics based on incomplete information, or using the wrong data, are sometimes *worse* than merely guessing.
Posted by Kagehi (Member # 9123) on :
Oh, and more to the point, his "answer" for what the answer might be is the equivalent of finding one clear marble in the box and assuming someone some place makes clear marbles, instead of possibly that someone forgot to add the blue coloring to it when they made it. Though that stretches the analogy a bit.
Hmm. Maybe a better version would be a box of red rocks, and the assumption that someone some place must make red rocks, or they wouldn't be in a box?
Anyway, I think you get the point.
Posted by Robin Kaczmarczyk (Member # 9067) on :
quote:Originally posted by Kagehi: In any case, this is all pretty irrelevant to the situation anyway. The question of how, what or why something did or didn't create anything is *not* an issue that we can answer at this point and from the stand point of good science, saying someone with a screw driver tweaked things billions of years ago doesn't change *now* in any way. The problem is people that insist what we know about now is irrelevent, because it somehow contradicts the idea of the guy with the screw driver still being around and making sure it all still works, for which there is no evidence at all. We have wandered from stuff that has some critical consequences for science into stuff that amounts to, "Yeah, but what effect does any of that have on the real world, even if its true, since there is no evidence of "current" tweaking of that sort?"
I couldn't agree more with you. Waiting for some Super High-Level Half-Elf Druid to save the world is silly. We must all gather round the Green bandwagon, Greenpeace, ELF, ALF, the folks who are doing the most damage to corporate mentalities and stop this irrational use of our world as a garbage can. Theologies can be discussed AFTER we save the world.
Posted by Kagehi (Member # 9123) on :
Well.. That is another problem in and of itself. Greenpeace isn't what it once was and many of the other organizations have corporate sponsorships that *don't* belong to those with global industries. And when you go to some rally funded by them, all you get is, "The same globalization that hurts our sponsors are hurting the planet!", never mind the fact that half the time the company being protesting is someone trying to feed people, cure diseases, etc, but happen to have a global market. The environmental movement got hijacked some time ago by corporations that don't give any more of a damn about the environment than the people being protested, but who, if those protested companies lost money, business opertunities or got more restrictions added to them, would benefit the sponsors. And they don't give a shit about how, or even if, any new restrictions have an effect at all, or even make sense.
Case in point, I am sure that this being a science blog, everyone can figure out what dihydrogen monoxide is. A while back Penn & Teller, for their show on Showtime, went to one of these rallies and managed to get about 70% of the people there, including the women who organized it, to sign a petition to ban it. At one time people considered the "science" behind environmentalism, now you are lucky of you don't have some clueless twit running the show that can't even figure out what water is, can't answer any questions about what is being protested and in the worst cases actually believe psuedo scientific BS, instead of basing their ideas on sound science. And even back *when* real science was used, some things implimented to try to protect the environment, like 100% fire prevention, later turned out to only endanger the wild life or cause even worse problems, including negatively impacting the health of the entire ecology. If they had thought about it, it wouldn't have been to hard to figure that lightning fires happened down through time and life probably adapted to deal with them, so preventing "any" was likely to have the opposite result from conserving anything.
What where once solid, science based, movements that try to change things, like Greenpeace, as turned into little better than psuedo scientific, corporate sponsored fools, who don't even see who is pulling their strings. And frankly, only the most radical and nutty members of Greenpeace, for example, are even still in the organization. The man who founded it left years ago, to become a park ranger, because he realized what had started to happen, and concluded he could do more good working "for" the federal government in parks, than following the environmental movment down the drain.
I am all for environmentalism, but those claiming to be about it, are now mostly clueless people who want to help, but know nothing about it, joining up with groups that if they bothered to look hard enough, are being pushed around and directed by the very corporate interests they *think* they are fighting. That is why I might seriously consider an alternative fuel vehicle, bioldeisel or solar panels on my house, but I won't be caught dead at most of these so called environmental rallies. If 90% of your "allies" are clueless idiots and the people organizing them take their cues from what can be traced strait back to a coporation, your not helping anything, your hurting it.
Posted by Kagehi (Member # 9123) on :
Sigh.. Please forgive the numerous spelling mistake, especially in the last sentence.. Was trying to type fast because I thought I was going to be leaving shortly to go do a job for someone. Seems they decided to postpone it. Posted by Orincoro (Member # 8854) on :
quote:Originally posted by Tom Curtis: David G:
These figures are, of course, entirely hypothetical, but it is logically possible that that a life friendly universe just happened given that we live in a life friendly universe is a dead certainty. You just don't know unless you know the other probabilities.
Then do away with the silly math games David. Just say that, yes, no matter who created the universe, if anyone, humanist principles tell us that the fact that we can beg the question leaves us with a simple conclusion: we know we exist because WE EXIST! Whether this is due to god is a yes or no question, but there is NO reason why God must in any way supplant scientific investigation into the origins of the universe. Arguing about WHY the universe allows us to exist is stupid, because the fact is, the universe could have existed 10^BILION times before, without life resulting, and it would have no effect on us. In fact, those events would have literally no consequence in our lives, since any trace of them would have been erased by the homogenizing effects of the gravity well of the early universe.
I agree with the earlier kagehi assertion about this whole "God answer," its something I've believed for a long time: Religions are VERY VERY VERY good at protecting themselves. A religion survives for thousands of years by adapting to current circumstances and recruiting according to the sensibilities of a new age. Modern religious institutions employ the most efficient means by which to gain members and keep members from leaving.
Frankly that's all it is. If you believe in your religion, fine, you might even be right, but you may be ignoring history, you may not be seeing your religion the way others do. Fact is, the Catholic church for instance has changed so drastically in 500 years that they spend a good amount of their time now dispelling the myths and prejudices they inspired and created in a different age. On top of that they continue to inspire and create new beliefs and ideas that will support the existance of the church in the future.
At one time the church could defend and support the practice of selling seats in heaven, and today they call that practice ludicrous. They call it ludicrous because they need to, to survive. If the world population would respond positively to a religion which suggested that people should be required to eat their own feces, I guarantee there would be large tomes of scholarly religious writings on the wholiness of human fecal sandwiches. I make this tasteless point to show that religions function no differently than other human beaurocracies: go where the money is, go where your needed and go where your wanted most.
Any person, even any religious person who understands history knows this simple fact to be true: If ID, creationism, or evolution, or all three, are the answers which well support the growth of a church, then they will BE the anwers before long. This is NOT a conscious process most of the time, it is like evolution, the strong shall live. If a church sprang up today that recommended the consumption of fecal matter, it would immediately die as a religion, the time would not be right for that.
Once again, I am sure many will react with a "PHEH! religious questions can't be judged in this way, what about GOD sir?" Well this is why religions survive, by NOT listening to people like me.
Posted by cheiros do ender (Member # 8849) on :
Originally posted by David G:
quote:However, if these particular laws are relatively static, or if there are not a near infinite number of variations, then the fact that our universe is changing would not alter the odds of our universe possessing these essential life-generating properties, which odds happen to be only 1 in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
There's no such thing as a near infinite number. Think about it.
Sorry if someone already mentioned that. I was reading down the page and couldn't help quickly pointing this out. As such, your entire argument, according to this apparent "logic" of yours, needs tweaking.
[ February 27, 2006, 12:18 PM: Message edited by: cheiros do ender ]
Posted by cheiros do ender (Member # 8849) on :
Whilst we're on the topic of God manipulating every outcome from the uniqueness of grains of sand to the formation of puddles, where is everyone getting this from. The way I understand Genesis, the God of Earth (Jesus) didn't do any manipulating on Earth until the Garden of Eden was created and Adam was placed into it. (I.e. when humans first came here)
LDS beliefs serve me well in understanding the Universe. Who else (LDS) sees the Godhead like I do?
Posted by Kagehi (Member # 9123) on :
Sorry, but your ignoring the contradictory version of Genesis in... Well Genesis, which has life, like plants, being created "before" there was any way for them to photosynthesise. In point of fact, to not have the God of the Bible fiddling with life "before" pesky things like stars and our sun where formed, you have to ignore one of the two creation stories in it. Some Bibles try to fix this by ignoring the original texts, and instead tweaking the meaning of words, then placing footnotes at the bottom to try to explain away any lingering confusions. A sort of, "God always meant us to use definition 8 of the word blah, it just took us 2,000 years to go from Latin to English, so that definition would be available." lol
Posted by Kagehi (Member # 9123) on :
Oh, and that assumes it wasn't something written 6-10 thousand years ago in Coptic, for which even the Latin translations are questionable and uncertain. Or even the Jewish language, which don't have the same verb tenses or concepts as Latin, never mind English.
Posted by David G (Member # 8872) on :
quote:Originally posted by Tom Curtis: Finally, you seem to have the mistaken belief that Davies' estimate is of p(R). It is not. It is explicitly an estimate of p(L|R); ie, the probability that the universe is life friendly given that it follows known physical laws and that the cosmological constants are chosen randomly.
Robert Sawyer states in his essay that “[c]osmologist Paul Davies has concluded that the odds of our universe, with its specific, ultimately life-generating properties, arising by chance are one in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Those kinds of odds virtually demand the conclusion that someone did indeed tweak the parameters, carefully fine-tuning the universe's design.” Has Sawyer accurately characterized Davies’ position, or has he mischaracterized position? Do you have a specific cite to Davies’ work?
If Sawyer has fairly characterized Davies, then why hasn’t Davies estimated p(R) only, and the only other logical alternative is p(~R)? Or perhaps Davies is best characterized as having estimated p(R|L). If so, then why isn’t the only logical alternative p(~R|L)? Tom, I’m trying to understand your probability calculations and can’t understand why there are more relevant variables than just these two: the odds of the universe arising by chance and the odds of the universe not arising by chance.
Posted by David G (Member # 8872) on :
quote:Originally posted by cheiros do ender: There's no such thing as a near infinite number. Think about it.[/QB]
You're right. My use of the term was "near infinite number" was poor terminology. I will edit to "many." But this does not impact the argument.
Posted by David G (Member # 8872) on :
quote:Originally posted by Orincoro: Then do away with the silly math games David. Just say that, yes, no matter who created the universe, if anyone, humanist principles tell us that the fact that we can beg the question leaves us with a simple conclusion: we know we exist because WE EXIST! Whether this is due to god is a yes or no question, but there is NO reason why God must in any way supplant scientific investigation into the origins of the universe. Arguing about WHY the universe allows us to exist is stupid, because the fact is, the universe could have existed 10^BILION times before, without life resulting, and it would have no effect on us. In fact, those events would have literally no consequence in our lives, since any trace of them would have been erased by the homogenizing effects of the gravity well of the early universe.
Yes. We know we exist because we exist. But why is it stupid to ask why? And have you actually read Robert Sawyer's essay or my posts in this thread? Sawyer freely admits that his argument is valid only if science proves that there is one universe (as opposed to multiple universes).
quote:Originally posted by Orincoro: I agree with the earlier kagehi assertion about this whole "God answer," its something I've believed for a long time: Religions are VERY VERY VERY good at protecting themselves.
quote:Originally posted by Orincoro: Any person, even any religious person who understands history knows this simple fact to be true: If ID, creationism, or evolution, or all three, are the answers which well support the growth of a church, then they will BE the anwers before long. This is NOT a conscious process most of the time, it is like evolution, the strong shall live. If a church sprang up today that recommended the consumption of fecal matter, it would immediately die as a religion, the time would not be right for that.
Once again, I am sure many will react with a "PHEH! religious questions can't be judged in this way, what about GOD sir?" Well this is why religions survive, by NOT listening to people like me.
Robert Sawyer's argument is NOT an attempt to justify any particular religion. If it holds up, the most his argument establishes is the probability that the universe was created by an intelligent being. Also, I believe Sawyer claims that science is the only valid discipline for knowing and learning about anything. Whether you agree or disagree with the validity of his position or his reasoning, his argument rests entirely on science and not on religion.
Posted by Kagehi (Member # 9123) on :
quote:Originally posted by David G:
quote:Originally posted by Orincoro: Then do away with the silly math games David. Just say that, yes, no matter who created the universe, if anyone, humanist principles tell us that the fact that we can beg the question leaves us with a simple conclusion: we know we exist because WE EXIST! Whether this is due to god is a yes or no question, but there is NO reason why God must in any way supplant scientific investigation into the origins of the universe. Arguing about WHY the universe allows us to exist is stupid, because the fact is, the universe could have existed 10^BILION times before, without life resulting, and it would have no effect on us. In fact, those events would have literally no consequence in our lives, since any trace of them would have been erased by the homogenizing effects of the gravity well of the early universe.
Yes. We know we exist because we exist. But why is it stupid to ask why? And have you actually read Robert Sawyer's essay or my posts in this thread? Sawyer freely admits that his argument is valid only if science proves that there is one universe (as opposed to multiple universes).
And our point is that its *not* any more valid if science proves there is only one. Its still a guess, based on not having enough information, and inserting some hypothetical cause into things that is if anything even more improbable than one universe popping into existence.
One of the more interesting recent ID arguments made at some site called Dead Darwin, or something like that, is that the universe can't have been around for an infinite amount of time, because no one can possibly count to infinity. Its Xeno's Paradox of archeles and the tortous, only on a universal scale. Someone pointed out on another blog that you can't count to 1,000,000,000,000 either, since if you said one number per second it would take you over 31,709 years to finish, so obviously since no one can count that high, trillions don't exist and the national debt is completely fictional. I suspect you can't be a billionare either, lets see... 31.7 years. I guess only double digit billionares are impossible, since that would take over 317 years. lol
Point is, "I can't imagine how X is possible, so something I can imagine must have done it", is not a valid premise, **especially** when all evidence points to no definition of that thing, which isn't 100% based on humans inventing the descriptions of it.
Posted by Tom Curtis (Member # 9104) on :
David G:
quote:If Sawyer has fairly characterized Davies, then why hasn’t Davies estimated p(R) only, and the only other logical alternative is p(~R)? Or perhaps Davies is best characterized as having estimated p(R|L). If so, then why isn’t the only logical alternative p(~R|L)? Tom, I’m trying to understand your probability calculations and can’t understand why there are more relevant variables than just these two: the odds of the universe arising by chance and the odds of the universe not arising by chance.
I am puzzled as to why you are not following my points. They seem very basic to me. I will try to explain it again.
The first thing to fix in your mind is that Davies calculated p(L|R) - the probability that the universe would be life friendly given that it obeys known physical laws, and given that the cosmological constants are set randomly.
The second thing to fix in your mind is that we are interested in p(R|L) - the probability that the universe is random given that it obeys known physical laws, and given that it is life friendly.
These two values are related by the formula:
p(R|L) = (p(R)/p(L)) x p(L|R) (This is Bayes theorem, as I have indicated before. I have merely bracketed it differently for ease of exposition.)
Plainly we cannot determine p(R|L)from p(L|R) without determining the value of (p(R)/p(L)). As neither Sawyer nor Davies nor anyone, SFAIK, has attempted to determine p(R) OR p(L), any argument by them to the value of p(R|L) from the value of p(L|R) is very specious handwaving. In fact, any non-zero value of p(L|R) is consistent with values of p(R|L) lying anywhere between 0 (if p(R) = 0) and 1 (if p(R)/p(L) = 1/p(L|R), which will be true if and only if p(R) = 1).
Now, this is just the mathematics which I have been through before. To help you better understand the situation, I will set up a scenario. I will imagine a number of shapes. Every shape will be either Square or Triangular. Every shape will also be either Yellow or Red. I will also tell you that one quarter of square shapes are red, ie, p(R|S) = 0.25
Now, tell me, what proportion of red shapes are square?
This is an exact mathematical equivalent of what Sawyer and Davies purport to do. It is also something that cannot be done without extra information. If you think otherwise, answer the question.
:: Edited to improve grammar.
[ March 01, 2006, 05:09 PM: Message edited by: Tom Curtis ]
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