GunnerJ

Hey, at least he's replying to you! What's really frustrating is when he replies to comment son you arguments (LP, I'm looking at you! ) rather than the arguments themselves!

Anyway, here'a something for Ed's education on the Flood and geology:

<a href="http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-noahs-ark.html" target="_blank">Problems with the Global Flood</a>

Ed

Jah. I know you are part of the master race, Mein Fuhrer. <img src="graemlins/notworthy.gif" border="0" alt="[Not Worthy]" />

Quote:

Ed: It plainly is implied and has been derived for the last 1600 years by the majority of biblical scholars that accept the authority of the scriptures. Rim:Baldfaced assertion backed up by triple arguments ad populum, ad actoritam and ad famam. (For the Latin impared, that's three appeals, to popularity, to authority, and to tradition, respectively).

No, it is backed up by some of the most intense documentary research by some of the most intelligent people in history.

Quote:

Ed: JWs use a erroneously modified bible, ie their own made up version. Rim n what authority to do state that their version is wrong?

As I said, the overwhelming majority of biblical scholars both liberal and conservative agree that the JWs bible is inaccurate.

This is the end of part I of my response.


</strong>[/QUOTE]

GunnerJ

Ed, you may as well not begun part one of your response. All you did was repeat the same fallicious arguments that I've already shot down. What the hell is wrong with you? I mean, really, are you that dense? I do not care how many people agree with you, how important these people are, or how long they've agreed with you. This is not evidence, they are appeals to authority and polularity, as well as tradition. Just saying that your assertions are only backed up by "intense" scholarship and the word of many "intellegent" people, or that your reasons for disagreeing with the JWs is because many theologians disagree with them is simply conceding the point to me. Come up with a logical argument or your posts will be ignored by me on this thread.

Synaesthesia

<a href="http://www.world-of-dawkins.com/Catalano/box/behe.htm" target="_blank">http://www.world-of-dawkins.com/Catalano/box/behe.htm</a>

Since I am not an expert, I suggest you look at the above links. It not only refutes the principle of irreducible complexity, it offers scores of examples of the evolution of irreducibly complex systems. The following is an interesting quote I found here:

"Behe's colossal mistake is that, in rejecting these possibilities, he concludes that no Darwinian solution remains. But one does. It is this: An irreducibly complex system can be built gradually by adding parts that, while initially just advantageous, become-because of later changes-essential. The logic is very simple. Some part (A) initially does some job (and not very well, perhaps). Another part (B) later gets added because it helps A. This new part isn't essential, it merely improves things. But later on, A (or something else) may change in such a way that B now becomes indispensable. This process continues as further parts get folded into the system. And at the end of the day, many parts may all be required.

"The point is there's no guarantee that improvements will remain mere improvements. Indeed because later changes build on previous ones, there's every reason to think that earlier refinements might become necessary. The transformation of air bladders into lungs that allowed animals to breathe atmospheric oxygen was initially just advantageous: such beasts could explore open niches-like dry land-that were unavailable to their lung-less peers. But as evolution built on this adaptation (modifying limbs for walking, for instance), we grew thoroughly terrestrial and lungs, consequently, are no longer luxuries-they are essential. The punch-line is, I think, obvious: although this process is thoroughly Darwinian, we are often left with a system that is irreducibly complex. I'm afraid there's no room for compromise here: Behe's key claim that all the components of an irreducibly complex system 'have to be there from the beginning' is dead wrong."[*] -H Allen Orr

You can in fact download programs onto your desktop computer that will evolve “irreducibly complex” systems. Isn’t that odd? It is supposed to be impossible!

Barriers to evolutionary change are postulated solely because evolution conflicts with their theological doctrine. There is no scientific justification whatsoever for these claims.

I’m going to operate with the assumption that it is this version of the argument that you’re talking about:

1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause of its existence.
2. The Universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the Universe has a cause of its existence.

The appeal of the Kalaam argument is so powerful because it appeals to the way we already think about things. We push things and they move, we talk to people and they respond. We think of the world in which we live in terms of causal regularities. However, in all of these cases, without ANY exception, we are pushing or pulling existent objects. There is a cause and subsequently there is an effect.

This stimulates an interesting question: How it is possible to have a cause before an effect when there is NOTHING before the effect? How can you have an antecedent cause at the beginning of the universe where by definition, nothing could have occurred before it? The answer is that it is logically impossible. Our notion of causation is simply inapplicable to the beginning of time. However the universe started, however you cut it, the universe cannot have been caused in the human understanding of the term since there was no time at which the universe did not exist.

On infidels.org, there is a collection of discussions about the various formulations of the cosmological argument. Several of them are quite exhaustive in their refutation of the argument.

<a href="http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/theism/cosmological.html" target="_blank">http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/theism/cosmological.html</a>

On a related note: To the best of my understanding, there is at least one kind of event in which we evidently observe something begin to exist. That is the formation of the electron-positron pair. There is, according to physics and observations, no cause.

Regards,
Synaesthesia

GunnerJ

BTW, Ed, LP has started a wonderful thread on the subject of morality, specifically in reply to your claim that it cannot come from "amorality." I invite you to join in at:

<a href="http://ii-f.ws/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=3&t=001623" target="_blank">Evolution of Morality?</a> on the <a href="http://ii-f.ws/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=forum&f=3&SUBMIT=Go" target="_blank">Evolution/Creation Forum</a>.

Ed

Because they didn't adequately address the biblical data.

Quote:

Ed: but since we don't have exhaustive knowledge of God there is no real reason it is impossible. Rim: Non sequitir.

How?

Quote:

Ed: And also Newton had a very large ego. Rim:Yeah, I guess that solves it. The arogant are always wrong! Scientists, chuck those laws of gravitation and motion out the window, they were the product of an arrogant mind! (Gasp, horror!) Lets hope this is the last argument ad hominem, eh?

What I meant was that people with large egos often want to swim against the tide or go against the majority opinion. Sometimes thats good but more often it leads to errors.

Quote:

Ed: Actually it was already understood by most believers prior to it being formalized by Athanasius. Rim:Most? Proof, please. Why not all, if it's such a fundemental property of God?

Read "A Short History of the Early Church" by Harry Boer. Its importance was not realized until the 4th century. Sometimes the importance of a certain fact is not realized until years after its discovery. This happens in science all the time.

Quote:

Ed: But anyway some of God's truth is revealed progressively. This has always been true even in biblical times. We don't know why He didn't explicitly teach the trinity from the beginning. He decided to reveal it to us progressively. That is what is expected if he is the real God, he doesn't do things the way we would expect him to. He can't be tamed. Rim: Oh. here we go with this schtick again. You see, folks, the uber-caste of cult member called an "apologist" knows that the Scriptures are flawed, erroneous, contradictory, and show the signs of tampering to fit the needs of society. Therefore, he must formulate an absurd god-concept that involves their god lying (and let's face it, people, failing to tell an important part of the truth is a lie of omission) to them about the fundemental nature of things, and "miraculously" "revealing" to them all the parts of their current theology piecewise, with a little being added on over time, almost like the work of finate, fallible humans changing the theology around over time to suit their current needs. But it's not, the cult apologist assures us, it's god's "progressive revelation," indistinguishable from a flawed work of humans minds in a developing culture, all done for some "divine purpose" which is also witheld from us. He then finishes it up with a statement like, "you are to (dumb/weak/immoral) to question god, so just accept it!" sometimes veiled in friendlier forms, like, "That is what is expected if he is the real God, he doesn't do things the way we would expect him to. He can't be tamed."

So now you claim to be a mind reader. Please provide evidence that you can read minds. Mind reading is a pseudoscience. What am I thinking right now? If the people are not at the stage to correctly understand a truth, withholding that truth to a later time when they can understand it better and will be of better use to them is hardly lying. If you wait to tell you child about sex until he is 11 or 12, is that lying? Hardly. And my last statement is a rational one if there is a real God. Your argument hardly demonstrates its irrationality. It is more of a veiled ad hominem attack.

Quote:

Rim: You see, the cult member's mind is riddled with a plauge called "cognitive dissonence," where he must constantly juggle many diametrically opposed facts in his mind, sometimes errecting complex argumentative machinery called "apologetics" to justify them, and sometimes, simply killing people they dissagree with so no one questions their absurd thought paterns. What we see here today is the first variety, much safer than the second, but also infinately more annoying.

Ad hominem attack. Not a rational arguement.

Quote:

Rim: Luckily, we have no need of such ridiculous looking mental gymnastics. We have a handy-dandy tool called Occam's Razor. This tool allows us to cut away all the unnessisay, overly-complex and meaningless elements in an explaination and cut right to the simplist explaination that fits the evidence. For example, on the subject of why the Trinity isn't very strongly stressed in the Bible, not at all in the Old Testament, and only by vague, questionable inferrence from the New, we have two explainations: 1) The Bible is the work of fallible humans who adapt older theology to support their current one. 2) God really wrote the whole Bible, but he "progressively" revealed himelf in it, omitting important facts in the begining and implying them towards the end, for a mysterious divine purpose, which we are too dumb to be let in on. For comaprison, let's add a third: 3) Aliens are playing a sick practical joke on humanity by giving us false and missleading scriptures, just to see what happens. Now, let me unsheath my razor and see what I can do. The Third one, while amusing, assumes alien contact for which there is no evidence, and thus introduces unnessisary complexity. The Second... well, where to begin! First, it assumes an unproven god, then it assumes a mysterious purpose, two entities we know nothing about. Quite complex for such a simple problem! Now, on to the First. If we shave off all the fat and gristle around explainations Two and Three, we're left with something like number one. Let's look at it. We do see a flawed Bible, and it's an historical fact that religions and "sacred" texts do get twisted to serve the purpose of those in power. We know about all the elements in it! Pass!

I would hardly call the existence of the universe a simple problem! Just because the scriptures have been twisted and distorted by evil doers hardly falsifies them. Did the Nazis distortion of evolution falsify it? I think most atheists would say no. So your attack appears to be more of an emotional outburst rather than a well thought out argument.

This is the end of Part II of my response.

jpbrooks

jpbrooks:

Thank you for the links, Synaesthesia. I'm sorry that it took so long for me to reply.
I'm not a YEC. (To be more precise, I remain open to convincing evidence for YEC whenever it is forthcoming.) I agree with you and the article(s) that you cited. Behe has no ground on which to rule out alternative theories of evolutionary development a priori. But that just shifts the focus of the issue to that of evidence. If gradual evolutionary development of new organs and biological systems has actually occurred, there should be clear evidence of failed attempts, ("transitional forms"?) to support the theory.

Also, evolution of computer programs is indeed a form of evolution, but the computer program's "enviromment" is only an approximation of a "real world" environment. Thus things that occur in a computer environment may not necessarily be likely to occur in the "real world".

jpbrooks:

Again, the evidence should show
at least one "unbroken" line of evolutionary development in a species, that transcends the postulated " barriers" to evolution. If not, then the alternatives to Behe are without conclusive evidential support.

jpbrooks:

First, let me state again that I am not a proponent of any of the traditional arguments for the existence of God. The attempt to use any of them to establish God's existence, at best, begs the question. (In fact, Presuppositionalists openly acknowledge this point.)

Second, your point above is a good one, and it suggests the need for clarification.

One thing that needs to be clarified is the idea of time. Briefly, there are (at least) two ways to view time in this argument. One way is to view time as beginning at the "time" that the universe comes into existence. The other way is to view time as extending from eternity past to eternity future. In other words, "eternity" means an infinite series of units of time of a certain size.
In the former sense of "time", there can be (by definition) no moments of time before the beginning of the universe, which as you suggest, raises problems for the Kalam (apparently, I was spelling it incorrectly) argument.
However, the Kalam argument appears to apply instead to the latter sense of time, in which a cause can exist before the beginning of the universe.

Another thing thing that needs to be pointed out is that a proponent of the Kalam argument wouldn't assume, at the outset, that "nothing" preceded the beginning of the universe. But, as I suggested above, this only emphasizes the circularity of the argument.

jpbrooks:

Again, thanks for the references. I just finished reading Dan Barker's "Cosmological Kalamity" article for the first time and found it informative. I agree with him that the Kalam argument begs the question when it is used as a demonstration of God's existence, but I don't see why God would ever have to "traverse" an infinite series of His thoughts.
God is probably as limited as we are regarding "traversing" an infinite series. But there is no reason why a being that already knows everything would need to think "sequentially".

jpbrooks:

Correct. Observation identifies no cause. But there must ultimately be a naturalistic reason why it occurs when it does, otherwise we would be concluding that reality is fundamentally irrational.

[ January 07, 2002: Message edited by: jpbrooks ]</p>

HRG

Sorry, I do not agree that this is a valid conclusion. "Indeterministic" (not all events have causes/are determined by the past) is not "irrational". We still can make statistical predictions (sometimes of amazing accuracy

Regards,
HRG.

jpbrooks

jpbrooks:

Thank you for your input, HRG.
The very fact that physical reality is amenable to statistical analysis suggests that it is (at a deeper level) deterministic. Statistics is a mathematical study and would therefore not even be possible in a reality that is not mathematically certain at a deeper level.

Furthermore, there is a difference between an event that has no specific identifiable cause and one that has no antecedent causal factors at all. An event that falls into the latter category would only be possible in a reality that is fundamentally irrational.

GunnerJ

Sigh. I used to think Koy was just being mean with his somewhat emotional responces to theists. Now I know where he's coming from.

(Mr.) Ed, I'm going to do the very best I can to reply to your evasions, non-answers, and general repeatition of demostratedly false "arguments" without being hostile, but the shoddy way you handle my arguments is just starting to get a little bit annoying.

ARG! I asked you for a reason why you are right and they are wrong! CLAIMING that you are right does NOT prove that they are wrong! In order for this to fly, you would have to SHOW, note, SHOW why and how they inadequestly address the "Biblical data." Pithy, unsupported one-liners are not going to fly as resposes here.

Look up the definition of the term non sequitir. The fact that we do not have an "exhaustive knowledge of God" does not prove that something is possible, nor does it invalidate any of Newton's arguments.

What this means, assborg, is that you are employing an argument ad hominem based on nothing more than an unfounded stereotype.

<img src="graemlins/banghead.gif" border="0" alt="[Bang Head]" /> SCIENCE is an invention of fallible human minds. Come on, Ed. Try harder. Why can't the ALL-POWERFUL, KING of the F-ing UNIVERSE get his message across? If he wanted us to know that he is a DinU, a Trinity, how is it possible that he needed four hundred years of theological debate for us to realise it? Why couldn't your god write more clearly?

Get off it, you horse's arse. The fact that your theological machinations are part of a predictable pattern that I recognize doesn't make me a "mind reader."

LOL! You asking for evidence! How'd you like it if I gave you the same treatment you gave me when I asked for evidence?

&lt;ArgumentType:Ed&gt;Because mind-reading has been backed up by years of intense documentation from both liberal and conservative pychic scholars, and the doubters are mostly arrogant asses who can't adequetly handle the occult data.&lt;/Ed&gt;

Please provide a logical line of reasoning why an omnipotent deity must "progressively reveal" his truth. I'll deal with your first attempt:

This would be good if we're talking about fallable, limited humans trying to send a message, but since we're talking about the OMNIPOTENT CREATOR AND KING of all there is, it seems that God could find a way to avoid such culture shock.

And, again, Occam's razor shreads this explaination up: What's the simpler explaination? God waiting for us to mature so we can understand him, or humans changing things around to meat their own ends? If the first, you beg the question of how man was somehow not "ready" to know that God is a DinU Trinity before the fourth century, and why is seems that, since the concept of the Trinity is absurd in any logical assesemnt, we are still not "ready" for it. After all, many epople are unconvinced by the Trinity because they see it as illogical and can't understand it. It seems that if we're "ready" for it now, or 1600 years ago, it would be less of a problem. ::Shaves off the unnessisary elements::

I wonder why it's OK for cultists to compare god to fallible, limited humans in order to show why he "can't" do something, but it's not OK for us....

In any case, this is a weak, deeply flawed analogy. If you told your child that sex was kissing with the tougne and let him believe that until he was 11 or 12, THAT would be lying. It would also be closer to the situation at hand.

<img src="graemlins/boohoo.gif" border="0" alt="[Boo Hoo]" /> Watch Ed play the victim. Your last statement is an irrational one if we're to assume that god is a worthwhile topic to consider. If you can't be sure of any of his motives, than you can't be sure of anything, especially what you think he's told you. After all, how can you be sure if what the Bible tells you is the whole Truth, or just one step on the "progressive" chain to it? Because he said so? We could belive him if we expect god to be honest, but, as you say, he defies our expectations. Your statement is an attempt, and a sloppy one, I might add, to make anything you say about god unfalsifiable. As such, it is an irrational concept. Further, it is irrational because it is paradoxical. "What we can expect from a real god is for him to be unpredictable." But, wait, if this is true, how can we expect anything at all?

Hey, doofus, here's a quick tip: "Ad hominem" attacks (what other type would I use, I wonder...) are not logical fallacies. Arguments from ad hominem attacks are. If you take a careful look at what I said, you may find a rational arguement. You may have already, but felt it safer to play the victim than to deal with it...

I would think you could stay on topic and not veer off wildly into terain I never covered in order to respond to me. Just what the hell are you blabbering about? My argument was about "progressive revelation," not the existence of the universe.

Oh, stop it, Ed! You're just making an even greater ass of yourself! First, the Scriptures are "progressively" revealed, now they've been "distorted?" Which is it? You have no argument in the later case. In order to prove the the Scriptures have been "distorted," you must prove that you know what they were supposed to say. That's a pretty tall order. Let's try to stay on track, brfore you get in over your head, and I have to let you drown for your own good.

Most people familiar with the actual theory of evolution would say "no" also. But, woah, lookie here, we HAVE the actual theory of evolution to compare Hitler's eugenical distortions to! You have no such parallel. Nice try though.

Sorry, but you have to be capable of MAKING a well thought out argument to spot one. So much for part two of your rehashin... er, response.

[ January 07, 2002: Message edited by: Rimstalker ]</p>