Dr. Retard

After maybe one minute of reading page 6, I can tell you. Christian philosopher-historian William Lane Craig. The "gospels are unlike mythology" line is almost verbatim and the firing squad story (devised by John Leslie) has been popularized by Craig.

Datheron

Dr. Retard,

Haha...well, you got me there. Hm....I'm figuring that the online medium is indeed very poor in conveying lingual expressions and tones - cynicism, sarcasm, and rhetoric seems to be lost. But thanks for the info. anyway. I'm sure that Ed, upon reading the unveiling of his hidden source, will begin to actually diverge the other much-sought sources of his numerous unbased assertions.

Dr. Retard

It must be, because my response was intended to be dry. Not that the info's wrong.

Jack the Bodiless

What is the evidence that either Matthew or John is a firsthand account? Matthew, in particular, was written by someone who was not a native Hebrew speaker (as shown by the "stunt rider" entry of Jesus into Jerusalem on two mounts, a mistranslation of a Hebrew idiom). And Paul wasn't an eyewitness either, of course.
Not where there's a strong vested interest at stake (e.g. the Egyptian boasts of the conquests of Rameses 2, or Kim Il Sung's alleged magical powers). And religion is the most extreme of all vested interests.
ALL fiction borrows from the real world, including mythic fantasy. The Lord of the Rings includes references to mountains, trees, horses, people, swords. rings... all of these exist in the real world.
There is no "Law of Biogenesis" in science, there is a principle of abiogenesis: that bacteria come from other bacteria rather than thin air. There is no scientific law or principle which prohibits the formation of self-replicating systems (life).
What are the significant differences between a chimpanzee and a human? Both are capable of abstract thought and language (sign language, in the case of chimps). Apart from vocal ability, an adult chimp is comparable to a six-year-old human. Are children not human?
This would be headline news if it were true. I suspect your standard of what constitutes "evidence" differs from mine.

HRG

Sorry, this cries out to be corrected.

First, molecules do exhibit quantum behavior; in fact, they only exist because of quantum mechanics.

Second, Bose-Einstein condensed states of rubidium, helium II, quantum interference devices (for measuring minute magnetic fields), Josephson junctions, entangled systems of 1 Mio atoms etc. are all actual examples of quantum behavior of macroscopic objects.

Regards,
HRG.

lpetrich

There is enough bogosity in Matthew and John to suggest otherwise.

Consider the mob who wanted Jesus Christ dead; they said "May his blood be upon us and all our children" or something like that. Now when has a lynch mob ever claimed that there was something wrong with the death of its intended victim?

Also, John makes Jesus Christ stay in Jerusalem much longer than the Synoptic writers do; and in John, JC's temple temper tantrum does not provoke the Jewish authorities the way it does in the Synoptics (Matthew, Mark, and Luke).

Most of which are ambiguous, secondhand, or controversial. Josephus's reference is often thought to be a forgery. Mara bar Serapion does not refer to JC explicitly, just to "the Jews' wise king". Pliny the Younger and Lucian of Samosata had learned about JC from his followers. Etc.

And I wonder if Ed enjoyed reading those references -- some of them view early Christianity as some sort of bizarre cult.

Like...

Paul had nearly zero interest in the putative historical Jesus Christ. Which has led some to conclude that JC was a myth; see <a href="http://www.jesuspuzzle.com" target="_blank">http://www.jesuspuzzle.com</a>

Such evidence does not prove anything about JC; does the existence of mosques indicate that there is no god but Allah and that Mohammed is his prophet?

Why don't you study their views directly? The mainstream view is that the Big Bang can be traced back to a quantum-gravity era, from which we cannot proceed any further with any confidence.

Says who??? To me, when it says "heavens and earth", it means simply "heavens and earth" unless there is good reason to think otherwise, such as a context that suggests some metaphorical meaning. But there is no such context.

How is that supposed to be the case?

Noam Chomsky claims that there is some deep structure in human language, and that we are genetically predisposed to use this structure. This hypothesis says absolutely nothing about some supposed common origin.

I do think that there is reason to believe that our species' ancestral population had had a single language, but that does not confirm the Tower of Babel story of the origin of different languages. What happened is that this original population split up as it spread, and different populations changed their languages in different directions -- something that's been abundantly observed in historical times.

So does that mean that one can reasonably conclude that the deities of Mt. Olympus are real beings and not simply figments of the imagination?

Totally beside the point. I was using historical-fiction writing as an ANALOGY.

However, the Gospels are not independent reports; Matthew and Luke both copied off of Mark and Q, the latter source not surviving.

Like what?

How are Pasteur's experiments supposed to be absolute proof? Most research into origin-of-life conditions has involved considering conditions very different from those in Pasteur's laboratory. Pasteur was right about what he looked at, but he had not looked at everything.

Allowing people to misbehave and then complaining about the results? According to the Gospels, JC had taught that parts of the body that cause trouble are to be removed; so if free will causes trouble, then it is best that it be gotten rid of.

Datheron

Ed,

Is it just me, or is it extremely frustrating to debate with Ed? This post illustrates my complaint well.

I didn't say that assumptions were bad - as you say, they are elementary and required to construct any worldview. What I'm saying, to be frank, is that your assumptions suck. Indeed, I have tried to refute most of your assumptions, but instead of rationally explaining your assumptions with other assumptions which I can agree to, you make more assumptions which I deny and refute, which then prompts you to make even more assumptions, etc. Do we see a pattern?

Name the books, find the websites, show the evidence. I'm just tired of vague references to authority.

My sister has owned a cat, and I have played with dogs all my life. You may think that dogs are intellectually bankrupt from lack of evidence of any alternate behavior, but I can make the same argument of a very elusive God that somehow evades all our queries.

How is that possible when the terms that define persons is obscure and being debated? You're deliberately setting the battlefield to your side and making the definitions impossible; like I said, a tautology cannot be refuted, and the statement "persons come from the personal" is indeed a tautology. But the statement that "abstract thinking beings must come from more abstract thinking beings" is not a tautology, and easily refuted by evolution. Now, argue as you will, but queries of that matter are better kept on the E&C forum anyway.

I don't think I ever said nor implied that I can directly test the BB. I said that I could test the results of the BB.

...because it is the simpliest and most coherent explanation. Yes, we may assume that tge background radiation may have been created in some freak accident of logic some 10,000 years ago, but saying that it came from the BB, assuming that all laws are constant within the Universe, is indefinitely simplier.

Read above. And learn to refute arguments properly. One liners usually are not adaquate in countering paragraphs of thought.

Yes, and that logical explanation is: "The Universe may or may not have been caused, by something or nothing. We don't know." Any more and you have gone off the end of rationality.

Synaesthesia

Hey Ed,

You might find it interesting to engage this topic in the evolution section of this BB. Although it’s a little off topic for this here section, I would like to at least touch upon the two primary points you made:

First is you cite the fact that over the (not hundreds but thousands of) years, we have discovered that it’s difficult to change some features of dogs beyond a certain point. This is most certainly true. Indeed, you will find also that we have been unable to make a mouse run as fast as a cheetah, an ant as big as a mouse or to breed dogs with IQ’s comparable to that of human beings. There are reasons for all of this but they are not, as you claim, actual blocks to genetic variation- The genetic makeup of dogs continues to change unabated.

So why can we not make a mouse as swift as a cheetah or a dog as big as a horse? Simple, the sheer size and speed of animals is dependent upon thousands of factors. There is no genetic sequence for speed, size or intelligence, these properties are the result of the interplay of thousands of genes in billions of different cells. We cannot manipulate them in isolation, we have to provide the physiological capacity to support that kind of size, speed or intelligence. An insect as big as your torso, for example, would be unable to absorb enough oxygen because they breath through their skin- the surface area to volume ratio would simply not permit it. In order to make them grow beyond a certain point, they would have to develop novel mechanisms for surviving at that scale, a process which in nature could take billions of years. None of this will happen, of course, if the appropriate mutants are not available and the selective pressures do not exist. Besides, human breeders have known mendel’s principles for only about about 96 years, modern genetics are only a few decades old.

Your claim that all mutations involve a loss of information is simply wrong. Some of the most common mutations involve the duplication or addition of a nucleotide base-pair. Doubling in the length of a genome after only a few generations is not unheard of. In fact, in many plant species, nondisjunction can produce stronger breeds of crop. Granted, most mutations don’t really do all that much, but very often beneficial ones crop up. These random, information generating changes proliferate through the population. When established in the population, any change, any additional mutation, will be added to the mutant genome. There is no way to undo this process. When the selective pressures exist, mutants are here to stay.

Mr. (Dr?) Gould would likely wince if he heard you say that. It evidently pains him a great deal that his theory is so widely misconstrued. That gaps exist in the fossil record is due only to the relative rarity of the fossilization process. Punctuated equilibrium (Gould’s theory) explains not the existence of these gaps, but the commonness of certain kinds of fossils and their sequence. That is, it explains not the absence of fossils, but the way in which they are distributed over time. Indeed, the more fossils we find of animals, the better his theory fares. We can refine our idea of how fast, and when, various animals have changed.

The picture that the fossil record presents to us (leaving aside the enormous amount of other geological evidence) is quite diametrically opposed to a massive global flood. It is simply too astounding of a coincidence that the morphological record is so precisely laid out. I suggest you do a bit of reading in this area, flood geology is truly on par with flat earth geology.

Since we know virtually nothing about the most prosaic of reasoning, it is impossible to understand the distance from abstractness to “instinct”.

I said we know nothing about the internal representation. That is quite as true for primates as for insects. I agree, however, that we can know a great deal about what cognitive processes a animal needs to be able to do in order to perform the tasks that it does. My point is that this is only the tip of the iceberg and we are still very often mislead by our human chauvinism.

Regards,
Synaesthesia

jpbrooks

Sorry. This post was due to an error on my part.

[ January 05, 2002: Message edited by: jpbrooks ]</p>

jpbrooks

jpbrooks:

I usually don't quibble about details like what aspects of life are to be considered by Theists to be the products of design and I agree with much of what you have written.
However, evolving a whole new breathing apparatus is a major change for a life form to undergo, and could involve many individual mutations that must occur simultaneously in order for the apparatus to function.
The sheer improbability of getting all of the necessary simultaneous mutations right on the first trial would be an enormous task for evolution, and could be the reason why "barriers" to evolutionary change are postulated.
Life forms that, on the surface, appear to be similar enough to prompt biologists to assume an ancestral connection, (for example, birds and reptiles), may be many "mutations" apart from one another and thus, not very likely to result in evolution from one into the other. Observation appears to confirm this.

Also, I'm no fan of the traditional arguments for God's existence. But I haven't seen a convincing refutation of the Kalaam Cosmological Argument. Perhaps a refutation is possible, but I yet to see one.
The other forms of the Cosmological argument are usually arguments for a hierarchical first cause and not a temporal one.
In any case, the Kalaam Cosmological Argument, even if successful, (by itself), doesn't establish that the first temporal cause of the universe was the God of Middle Eastern Theism.

-John Phillip Brooks

[ January 05, 2002: Message edited by: jpbrooks ]</p>