Ed

See my post to Rimstalker.

Quote:

Ed: Because morality cannot come from amorality. LP: Check out research into the evolution of cooperation. Such cooperation does produce something like "morality". Bees in a hive don't sting each other (queens do sting rival queens, but that's the only exception), and wolves in a pack don't try to have each other for dinner. Could their behavior represent a sort of "morality"? No, these behaviors are instinctive there was no decision made. Bees don't decide whether to sting or not to sting each other. Wolves don't decide whether to eat each other. Morality requires free agency. LP: How does one identify "free agency"? Furthermore, these are examples of what are commonly considered morality; I doubt that Ed likes to stick his friends with poisoned spears or tries to have them for dinner.

Free agency is the weighing of evidence or options and making a decision. You are right but as a being with a free moral will I could choose to do those things.

[b] No, the Law of Sufficient Cause states that the cause must be sufficient to produce the effect not that it is a mirror image of the effect. However that may be the case for some effects. And usually the more similarities a cause has with an effect then is more likely to be the cause of that effect.

Ed

Specified complexity is highly improbable events that also fit some independently identifiable pattern. DNA is a complex codelike language, such a thing has only ever been produced by an intelligence.

Datheron

Ed,

...don't you get what he's trying to say here? Natural algorithms prove conclusively that complexity can arise from simplistic laws; even on a lesser level, we can see AI formulating quite an advanced level of intelligence - in typical Ed fashion, I would tell you to go and read more on this subject.

Theli

It's like a processor. It's a very advanced contruction capable of milions>x>bilions instruction per second. But still it's just based on simple AND, OR, NOR (and so on...) grids. And those mostly based on transistors. And it all just started with those simple AND, OR functions wich then grew into the worlds biggest calculator hehehe and over to the computer we know today.

A complex construction like that does not need any "grand design", it can grow from something simple to something complex. The same goes for DNA. The first DNA strain was probably very short and simple.

Synaesthesia

I’m sorry, I still don’t understand what you mean. “Independently identifiable” patterns formed by totally blind process not only exist, they are ubiquitous. “Information”, functional information being formed by totally blind processes is also very, very common. For example, it occurs in DNA, being produced by radiation or chemical interference. Even though you have presupposed that DNA is the product of intelligence (a contention at odds with the current scientific knowledge), information creating mutations are directly observed on a regular basis.

lpetrich

Why don't you do some study of cellular automata, such as Conway's Game of Life? I'm sure that there are lots of sites on that subject, and on artificial life in general. So go and search the Internet; I cannot hold your hands everywhere.

Ed

"Big" crowds in a small backwater on the fringe of the Roman empire hardly qualifies as famous. Since the gospels were already circulating to the churches in oral form and possibly parts were in written form, there was no need for Paul to spend much time in his letters on Christ's earthly ministry. Paul's calling was to provide Christ's follow up teachings to his earthly ministry.

Quote:

lp: Josephus, for example, had described in detail several self-styled prophets who had had sizable followings, but his only descriptions of JC are a few controversal paragraphs.

Actually his reference to Jesus and his brother James is not controversial at all. Also given that
he was an innocent man unjustly killed by leaders of the jews and the Romans, and Josephus trying to balance his reputation to both groups it is unlikely he would spend a great deal of time on such a controversial figure.

Quote:

LP:And which errors does the Bible have? Ed: Just minor copying errors of no significance to its teachings. LP: The next question arises: how does one tell whether something is or is not a copying error? And you may want to visit these pages on Biblical errancy: <a href="http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/theism/christianity/errancy.html" target="_blank">http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/theism/christianity/errancy.html</a>

Copying errors usually occur in names or numbers because there are usually similar spellings of other words in hebrew and greek in personal names and numbers more so than in other words.

Quote:

lp: Though the Bible does contain some legitimate history, the same can also be said of a variety of works that feature deities that Ed refuses to worship.

Yes but if you compare the gospels to mythological stories there are major differences in style. There are no overblown, spectacular, childishly exaggerated events. Nothing is arbitrary. Everything fits in. Psychological depth is at a maximum. In myth it is at a minimum. In myths such spectacular external events happen that it would be distracting to add much internal depth of character. It is also done with an incredible economy of words. Myths are verbose, the gospels are laconic.

[b] Reread Genesis 1:1. It says God created the heavens and the earth. After that initial creative act from nothing then the earth is formless, as stated in verse 2. The hebrew term for "heavens and earth" means all that physically exists. Physical objects require space to exist and once objects and space exist, time can be measured.

This is the end of part I of my response.

Vorkosigan

Yes but if you compare the gospels to mythological stories there are major differences in style. There are no overblown, spectacular, childishly exaggerated events. Nothing is arbitrary. Everything fits in. Psychological depth is at a maximum. In myth it is at a minimum. In myths such spectacular external events happen that it would be distracting to add much internal depth of character. It is also done with an incredible economy of words. Myths are verbose, the gospels are laconic.

I don't know what gospels you're referring to, but in the gospels I know, all sorts of mythological nonsense happen. In Mark; people walk on water and feed crowds, cast out demons...in Matthew; a star shows the birth of the messiah, the mother is a virgin, jesus dies and is resurrected, tombs open and the dead walk about; in Peter, the Cross talks; in the Apocryphon of John, a youth changes into an old man and then into a slave, and so on. Of course, in John, a Jewish crowd tells a Roman governor that he'd better execute a jewish man so that he'll be a friend of Caesar (that to me is probably the weirdest thing in all the gospels).

Michael

lpetrich

Apologetic absurdity. From the looks of it, he had been very popular in that part of the world, and the interesting question is why Josephus does not discuss him in nearly as much detail as some other self-styled prophets, like someone who had claimed that he could knock down the walls of Jerusalem with one word.

Also, why not appear to the Roman Emperor himself? That's what I would do if I was a ruler of a Universe as gigantic as the one that we live in.

Which is absolute horse manure. Since the Gospels were written, there has not been a single Christian church, as far as I am aware, that views the Gospels as essentially irrelevant, which is what you are claiming that Paul had done.

Earl Doherty in The Jesus Puzzle has a really funny imaginary conversation in which Paul acts as if many of the details of Jesus Christ's life are unimportant.

Says who? Josephus's alleged comments are tiny compared to the amount of space he had given other self-styled prophets.

Pure idiocy. He'd have been very willing to discuss JC if that had been the case, though I doubt that he would have felt very sorry for JC.

Some of these "copying errors" are much more serious. And what kind of god would sit back and let His Word get corrupted???

This reminds me of how some Muslim apologists brag about how the canonical accounts of Mohammed's life do not depict him as a miracle-worker. Furthermore, Ed makes no effort to demonstrate this claim.

And as to literary style, there is also the important question of why the JC of the Gospels fits the Mythic-Hero profile so well (see a thread in Biblical Criticism & Archaeology on this subject). So what makes the accounts of Jesus Christ's life so much different from those of:

Romulus and Remus
Perseus
Hercules
Oedipus
Moses
Krishna
The Buddha

In Eddian Hebrew, perhaps, but not in the Hebrew that other Hebrew speakers use; neither Apikorus nor Devnet seem to support this interpretation.

Also, an omnipotent being would have no trouble issuing a message in unambiguous language. Or very nearly unambiguous language.

Ed

There is other evidence for Egyptian influence in ancient Israel as well. See below.

Quote:

LP: (That the Israelites had worshipped several gods before worshipping only a single one...) Ed: What evidence do you have? Actually it was just the opposite. During the period beginning around Solomon they began worshipping other gods prior to that they only worshipped one. Then after the Babylonian exile they returned to one God. LP: According to all the archeological evidence, they had worshipped several deities before the single-god faction got really big in the time of the Babylonian Exile.

Depends on what time period the archeological evidence came from. As I said above for about 800 years there was a sizable number of idolators living in Israel. So it would be expected to find some evidence for it in the archaeological record.

Quote:

lp: (stuff on Ed's defense of Book-of-Daniel vagueness...) With imprecise language, it's much easier to find "proof". However, by doing so one ultimately violates the principle of falsifiability, which is that a hypothesis that can predict anything really predicts nothing. Ed, I suggest that you look at some of the "Biblical Errancy" pages in this site, like the "Skeptical Review" pages -- they have a lot of discussion of the Book of Daniel.

Ancient hebrew terms are much broader than many similar english terms, I am afraid that is just a fact of linguistics. It is not an attempt at unfalsifiabilty. I have looked at those pages and there is nothing new that I havent already encountered before and that most have been easily explained using grammatico-historical hermeneutics and a scholarly understanding of the original languages.

Quote:

(jtb: the Genesis 1 creation order all wrong) Ed:You are assuming that the fossil record reflects the creation sequence, the fossil record may reflect ecological zonations. (LP: statement that it is really temporal) Ed: What evidence says it is temporal? lp: Oodles of evidence. In the large majority of cases, the superposition order of different fossil strata is completely consistent; the exceptions can be traced to overthrust faults and the like. Furthermore, the superposition order is completely consistent with the dating derived from radioisotopes -- and yes, different isotopes do agree. I suggest that you go to some site like <a href="http://www.talkorigins.org" target="_blank">http://www.talkorigins.org</a> some time -- geologists are not the ignoramuses that you seem to believe they are, Ed.

I never said that they were ignoramuses. Just that some of their assumptions are unproven. The order of the fossils fits a flood moving from sea to land just as well as macroevolution.

Quote:

Ed:See my post to Rim regarding the physical evidence for the flood. lp: If there was anything like Noah's Flood, it would have shown up as unmistakable sediment layers -- and a mass extinction. But there is zero evidence of such a flood.

Not if the flood was in the very distant past (in other words erosion could have erased some evidence over long periods of time) and its duration was only a year. The evidence may not be that great. But there is evidence of hydraulic catastrophe in many fossil beds. I am not saying that the entire fossil record is the result of the flood.

Quote:

lp: Australian marsupials, edentates, afrotherians in their own locales as a result of continental drift... Ed: There are any number of possible explanations. Australia may have been the only area that had all the necessary habitat characteristics for marsupials therefore they were drawn to that area. Or they were out competed by placental mammals in all other areas and forced to australia and then australia became isolated by a geographical barrier. lp: I really wonder if Ed has done any serious research; the ecological-compatibility hypothesis has been tested by the import of exotic species, some of which have done well enough to become pests. There has also been the natural dispersion of those species easily capable of traveling long distances, like elephants and sea cows.

I think the ecological-compatibility hypothesis and natural dispersion support my point.

Quote:

Ed: No, a recent article on Mars (I'll have to look up exactly which one) stated that many scientists beleive there was a global flood on Mars. Just because the hydraulic catastrophe evidence is now smaller then it once was, is quite possibly due to all the erosion since it occurred which could be quite a long time, maybe a million years. lp: Find that article.

I'll try.

Quote:

Ed: (LP: Moses mythical...) Ed: There is no evidence that he is mythical and in fact the literary evidence that we do have is totally unlike mythology. lp: WHAT evidence? All we have is what had been written about him centuries later -- written by those who had considered him a founder figure. There is not a shred of independent documentation of him.

There is not independent evidence of Moses but there is indirect textual evidence that the author of the Penteteuch was familiar with Egypt. Read "The Language of the Pentateuch in its Relationship to Egyptian" by Abraham Yahuda. Also, the author obviously knew a great deal about Egyptian geography. Also the author makes use of numerous distinctively Egyptian names. In addition, certain words and phrases used in the Pentateuch are known to have become obsolete after the Mosaic Age. And there is more.

Quote:

lp: Here's a nice article on this question: <a href="http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/fi/price_20_1.htm" target="_blank">http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/fi/price_20_1.htm</a> Robert Price suspects Moses, Jesus Christ, Mohammed, and the Buddha of being at least partially mythical. In particular, RP suspects Moses of having originally been a sun god, and that he had been brought down to Earth by worshippers of a single god.

Why would the hebrews give their sun god an Egyptian name? There is not a shred of hard evidence for this theory. It is pure speculation.


[b] No, as I stated above Allah can be eliminated as the likely cause of the universe because he is a pure unity and the universe is a diversity within a unity and therefore cannot be as adequately explained if allah was the cause.

[ January 15, 2002: Message edited by: Ed ]</p>