The commands of the universe. Doesn't a command require an intelligence?
Really? You're going to pull that stupid trick?
Human language is filled with colloquial expressions based on anthropomorphizing and personification. None of those typical expressions imply anything concrete.
When I speak of the sun or the moon rising or setting, does that require geocentrism? Or imply that I am admitting to the "truth" of geocentrism? No, of course not! Those expressions are just based on our perspective being stuck within a frame of reference that we perceive as being motionless despite it actually being in motion -- similarly the phone poles you see whizzing past you in the car are not themselves moving past you but only appear to be doing so as you yourself are moving past them. Watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJMYoj4hHqU for an interesting 1960 lecture on frames of reference; lots of visual examples.
When I speak of Apple software having it in for me, does that mean that Apple software is a sentient entity with a personal grudge against me? No, of course not! Rather, it is the expression of my own frustration from many attempts to deal with arbitrary software that defies logic.
When we speak of natural laws, does that require a sentient Nature serving as a Law-Giver consciously creating these laws? No, of course not! Rather, what we present as "laws" have been created by humans (we are the Law-Givers here) to describe how we have observed certain things to work.
The same applies to AZPaul's reference to "the commands of the universe", by which he was saying something like: "Everything in the universe works in certain ways, so we would naturally expect everything (eg, "energy, actual physical photons") to behave in accordance with those certain ways that we have observed the universe to behave." (and here the use of "behave" is yet another example of the pervasive personification in colloquial English that I can only hope that you will not also try to misconstrue).
I have been trying to discuss "creation science" with creationists since the mid-1980's, so I have seen a lot of their deceptive tricks. That includes twisting words to mean or imply things that were never intended, such you yourself just tried to do.
As such, I am thoroughly fed up with that kind of nonsense and have no patience with those games. Please do not play those nonsensical games.
Evolution, without an external intelligence itself leads to an infinite regress of processes.
Huh? Why would that be necessary?
Evolution, even without any external intelligence, would still lead to an optimally functional result. That is what evolution does. That is what life itself does, quite naturally.
While evolution does not conflict with Divine Creation (your "external intelligence"), it also does not require such a thingee. That your "external intelligence" is superfluous (like God or Zeus personally directing those bolts of lightning to their targets) does not negate the possibility of their existence, but it also shows that their existence is not necessary. Therefore, using such arguments to "prove" their necessity is completely and utterly useless. Do please try to find some other better arguments for your case.
Just in case that went right over your head, I'm not arguing against your case, but rather pointing out that you need to present a much better case. Or at least a much more honest one.
Also we are fundamentally unable to perceive of a world, (although as far as I understand it we can get a picture of more than one dimension of time mathematically), with more than our one time dimension and therefore cannot picture an eternal consciousness. It is faith. With we can move around infinitely with 3 spatial dimensions, so maybe we could do the same with 3 dimensions of time. I'm not in anyway suggesting that represents reality, except that it is one way of getting a picture of an eternal existence.
Jessica H. Christ! (taking parthenogenesis into account, which produces genetic clones of the mother, hence making any product of Virgin Birth female (though for some species, eg reptiles, the embryo can switch gender during incubation, but not so for mammals) -- as per my hypothesis (should be interesting reading for believers since it explains the displays they've see in church), the "H" is actually the Greek letter eta (Η or η) that appears in that ubiquitous religious artform, christograms)
There's that standard quote-mining of Darwin expressing how difficult it is to imagine how the eye could have evolved, but creationists make sure to leave out the following two pages of exposition in order to accomplish their deception. Darwin's use of "imagine" is the ability to visualize something in our minds, a form of reasoning that I have used all my life to reason through how mechanical systems and physics problems work. Darwin's response was to point out that while our ability to visualize all those stages may be lacking, we can still use reason to work through it. Which is what Darwin then did in his writing, working through that problem based in a plethora of examples of intermediate forms of the eye that exist in nature and are still fully functional.
You should read Flatland some time. Interesting intellectual exercise proposing how our own 3-D universe might appear to 2-D persons incapable to perceiving that third dimension. And yet we have physics that describe up to eleven (11) dimensions. Nobody can visualize more than three dimensions (some may be able to handle four dimensions, but no more than that!). So how do we handle all those extra dimensions? Through reason, namely mathematics.
BTW, do you like the appearance of three dimensions on a two-dimensional screen? What is happening there is that a three-dimensional world is being compactified as it is projected onto a two-dimensional plane. As a retired software engineer, I never did work in graphics, but I did read up a bit on that field, so I can appreciate what they do in my own limited way. As we work our way up into higher dimensions, the only way we can even begin to visualize them is to compactify them into lower dimensions, but then we lose so much information in that process. For example, we have the tesseract (not just some stinkin' Infinity Stone), a hypercube which is the projection of a four-dimentional object into our limited 3-D perceptive abilities.
James Burke was a science journalist for the BBC who also enjoyed some popularity on PBS. For your consideration, here is his "Masters of Illusion" TV episode (1991) in which he explores the Renaissance art of projecting three dimensions onto two:
We have ways of dealing with things that we cannot personally visualize. Ways which take everything into strict account (I'm thinking of the mathematics here). No need to yet again just wave our hands about.
You can observe and learn a lot about how evolution happened. What is the evidence though, that there can't be an external intelligence behind the natural processes? On that question
No evidence that there can't be, but also no evidence that there must be.
What did CAPT Montgomery Scott say? That the fancier you make the plumbing, the easier it is to clog it up.
In other words, ye canna disprove it, but ye also canna prove it!
Well I don't either...none of the small g ones....which in my mind are fakes or wannabes. I suppose you would put my God in that category.
One of the benefits/problems with being old is that I remember decades of TV commercials.
About 30 years ago MacDonald's came out with chicken nuggets (though in the Midwest it was a chicken sandwich unofficially called the "McCluck") made from reformed chicken chunks. In response, Hardee's came out with its chicken fillet sandwich. The Hardee's commercial had two people talking about the products: "Their product is made from chicken parts." "Which parts?" "I dunno. Parts is parts." One day on duty in the warehouse pulling parts, I commented "Parts is parts!" scaring my shipmates. You have to admit it's kind of catchy.
That's what gods are like. Gods is gods. They're really all the same. Gods is gods.
So what is it about your god that is supposed to make it so special? Just because it happens to be yours? What about that guy's god? Or that guy's god? Their gods are just as special in their own minds, no differently than with your god.
Kind of like another form of religion: sports teams. Which I also do not believe in, though far more strongly.
I think you once postulated that "In The Beginning....chemicals. I would assert that a chemist would precede the chemicals.
No, rather the exact opposite. First come the chemicals, which will react completely on their own without any outside help. All the chemist can do is figure out which chemicals to use and to recreate the conditions for the reactions that he wants.
I had a friend who had a PhD Chemistry. He said that a chemist cannot create any reaction that would not exist in nature. All he could do was to set up the conditions for that reaction. [i]You cannot make chemicals do anything that they would not naturally do themselves.
ABE:
Darn! I just read ringo's Message 713. That was supposed to have been left for you to solve, but I had to go and blurt out the answer.
First, Tolkien clearly set out to write fiction. There is no evidence that any known authors of any part of the Bible were knowingly or intentionally writing fiction. You just assume that its fiction because the main character in the book has no external evidence of existence.
One of the more idiotic fundamentalist proselytizing catch phrases was from C.S. Lewis (as I understand it, but have not verified since it's not important):
quote:Given everything that Jesus said about himself, he had to have been either a lunatic, a liar, or Lord.
Besides the obvious problem that that was somebody else putting those words into the character's mouth (ie, it's a story!), that list left out the fourth and most important "L": Legend.
Legends are built over time. You have a character who did or was something. Part of his fame involves people talking about him and repeating stories about him. One of the characteristics of those stories is that they change as they are retold, most often through embellishment based on the characteristics of the character (or at least of what the earlier stor(ies) say those characteristics are -- consider the worship stories around Trump giving him characteristics that he very clearly does not possess in real life). And new stories will arise constantly either by adapting existing stories of other legends or by creating new stories, but in both cases the new story will be created based on the characteristics of the legend and on what the teller thinks that the legend would do in this new situation.
As these legends develop, the real person and his real history start to fade and be replaced, similar to how a buried organism gets replaced by minerals to become a fossil. In the end, the actual person is gone and completely replaced by The Legend. And as we can see with the admittedly bogus Trump legends, they can arise and spread and grow in a very short time.
We have many examples of such stories. Most of what we know about US Presidents, especially from the Founding Fathers, is from legends about them.
As for the question of whether the writers are knowingly or intentionally writing fiction, that actually should be split between the writer and the readers. For example, there's the genre of fan fiction in which the writers take an existing story (eg, Star Trek) and write their own stories around it. In those cases, the writer and the readers both know that it is fiction, even though heated debates can go on for years over what is and is not canon (as well as whether what's not canon should become canon because it's better).
Then there's what we would call the conspiracy theory fringe. Do the writers of the original stories know that they are just stories? I can often trace those stories origins (or "oranges") back to pre-existing stories -- eg, V (1980's TV sci-fi series about reptilian aliens posing as humans), the blood libel (medieval rumors of the Jews kidnapping Christian children to drink their blood in their rituals, which is why you open the door during the Seder so that anyone passing by could come in and see for themselves that what you're drinking is indeed wine), power satellites become "Secret Jewish Space Lasers" (an idea by physicist Gerard K. O'Neill who advocated space colonies). Though while the writers know (or should know) that those stories are fiction, the readers take them seriously and believe them to be true.
In the case of existing stories getting embellished, the teller who embellishes the story based on what the character would have undoubtedly done or said. Or else mis-remembered and erroneously confused a point in the story with another story. So in such a case, the teller would feel justified and the listener who wrote it down (perhaps after several retellings) would have believed it to be true. Such is the stuff of urban legends.
The thing is that it started out as an oral tradition which eventually got written down, after which it got rewritten with further changes. We know very well how oral traditions work and what they can result in (consider the game of telephone ("Chinese whispers" in part of the Commonwealth) in which a message is repeated from person to person after which the final version of the message is compared to the original). That is obviously what happened to the Bible as it transitioned from oral tradition to written form (which also involved editors and committees dealing with many variant manuscripts, etc).
I don't know who started the "Tales Told Around Campfires" subtitle, but that's about right.
PS
The first phase of my college career was in foreign languages in which I studied about a dozen different languages (though I can only use about five and surprise myself when I understand something in the sixth (Russian)). As such, I am familiar with the characteristics of various languages, understand how grammars work, and how translation works (ie, that one must interpret the source in order to express the same ideas in the target, which completely blows biblical literalism out of the water).
In my Greek class, we studied Koiné, the form of ancient Greek that the New Testament manuscripts were written in. Our reader was Bruce Metzger's Greek New Testament which included the many different forms that practically every verse came in along with detailed footnotes of the source manuscripts -- it was described to us as a translator's bible.
What was Barabbas' first name? Jesus. Does Luke 2:14 say "Peace on earth good will toward men"? Or "Peace on earth among men of good will"? Or "Peace on earth among men with whom God is pleased"? All depends on the case (nominative or genitive) and interpretation of the word ευδοξια. How did Mark end? (Mark 16) The older manuscripts ended with verse 8 with the empty tomb and the apparent angel. Verses 9-20 were added later by a century or more. And there are variations. The ending of Revelation includes a curse (22:19) on anyone who makes any changes to this Revelation. Not only does the entire book contain many variations, but even that verse, which I must admit I get a chuckle out of as in "Whom do they think they're fooling?".
So whenever anyone insists that we take the New Testament literally, I always have to ask "which version and which variants?" And that's just considering the original Greek, so the translation stage consisting of fallible human interpretation just makes matters even worse. IOW, "Just whom do they think they're fooling?"
BTW, the second phase of my college career was in computer languages. Interestingly, the skills I had learned working with human languages helped me with computer languages.
We believe that Paul *did* meet the Holy Spirit and his head and heart were never the same since.(not to mention the beatings)
Yeah. Bad burritos. Whatever.
So just what is this "Holy Spirit" and what does it do to us? I mean, what is that figure, about 45,000 different Christian denominations and sects?
And the Holy Spirit had visited each and every one of those 45,000 different denominations and sects and gave each and every one of them a different set of instructions? ???
I completely forget who here came up with it, but the "Holy Spirit" does indeed end up just being that "bad burrito" or whatever form of food poisoning it takes to get you into that ultra-vulnerable state to accept whatever seems to work with your disoriented mind (I've been there a couple times, though never ever anything supernatural involved).
Seriously, your post is an example of how the Bible stories are manipulated to send whatever message is desired at the time.
But isn't that the best thing about the Bible? That it can be used to support any position one would want?
Not only did both pro- and anti-slavery sides use the Bible to support their position, but they would even use the same verses.
Abortion opponents repeatedly claim that the Bible supports their anti-abortion position, yet the New Testament makes no mention at all of abortion, let alone any stance on it (therefore, Jesus never even mentioned it). The Old Testament does mention it at least once (Numbers 5), but that is a commandment to perform an abortion and also gives instructions for performing that abortion.
When they no longer have the Bible to contort to support their particular cause, then what will they have to replace it?
And like the coach of a football team the priest leads in the "we're number one!" chant as their worship service. All cults are the same. Stupid mob mentality.
That reminds me of my 10-year-old son's confused reaction to a Lutheran service.
We had joined a Unitarian-Universalist church, so that was what Ian had grown up with. Our sermons were somewhat intellectual in nature, posing meaningful questions, discussing issues and history, etc. Even our hymns (traditional music with entirely new lyrics) were meaningful and thought-provoking; eg, "Some call it God, some call it Evolution.").
My then-wife's brother and his then-wife, Trisha, were fundamentalists of the Chuck Smith Calvary Chapel variety -- because of the turmoil and acrimony he caused when he tried to convert the rest of the family, my mother-in-law had a very strict rule forbidding any discussion of religion in the house. Actually, I knew Trisha from my French class where another student described her as "that Jesus Freak chick", which was the first time I had ever heard that term. She was best friends with Jeannie who years later showed up at an Atheists United lunch and told me about their "friendship". They were inseparable but Trisha kept trying to convert her and she kept resisting. When Trisha finally realized that Jeannie would never convert, she broke off their "friendship" and never talked to Jeannie again. IOW, the only reason Trisha was friends with her was to gain a convert, a dirty trick I've seen other fundies pull.
OK, that sets up the scene with the kind of people they were. So they were leaving "true Christianity" for Lutheranism. Why? Just because they wanted to get their young daughter into the church's school (I'm pretty sure Calvary didn't have a school yet). As Redd Foxx said in Harlem Nights: "That must be some really good ***** to make a man switch gods."
Part of their joining that "apostate" church was a dedication ceremony, which is why we and the rest of the family were there. The service was mostly praise that basically amounted to "Yeh, Jesus! Yeh, Jesus! Rah-rah-rah!" Dumbfounded, Ian looked to me as if to ask, "What is this? What is happening?"
As I recall, one thing that Word does is to replace apostrophes and quotation marks with open- and close-apostrophes and quotation marks.
I encountered this on a C Programming forum where someone wrote a simple C program with a word processor and the compiler rejected the quote marks ( " , U+0022, ASCII 0x22, 3410) . I determined that the quote marks had been replaced with left double quotation marks ( “ , U+201C) and right double quotation marks ( ” , U+201D). Let led me to ask him if you used a word processor, which he was, and advising him to not do that.
The same thing for apostrophes would be to change an apostrophe ("typewriter straight single quote", ' , U+0027) with left single quotation mark ( ‘ , U+2018) paired with a right single quotation mark ( ’ , U+2019).
To test that, type in some lines of text using single and double quotes and apostrophes. Refer to Wikipedia's article, especially the table below the section, Quotation mark - Wikipedia ("Curved quotes within and across applications").
Does the forum software try to interpret apostrophes?
The article I provided is written in plain English .... even you should be able to understand it.
The question is whether you understand it!
Creationists (evil by nature as you yourself noted) routinely cite articles which they have never even read! Or else they just read one sentence and ignore the rest -- eg, read the first line of the abstract where they present the problem that the article investigates and solves while ignoring the rest of the abstract where they tell us that they solved that problem and how they did it.
One of the worst cases (not Dr. Henry Morris' moon dust claim about a "1976" NASA document which was actually printed in 1967 from a 1965 conference as printed right on the front cover of the document) was a discussion I had with a creationist about the blatantly false leap-second claim (presents a highly inflated rate for the deceleration of the earth's rotation) who cited an article to support his position when in fact that article was the one which definitively refuted that claim. Not only did his own "supporting" article soundly refute his claim, but I'm sure that I had mentioned that same article and quoted from it earlier in the discussion.
So we do need for you to demonstrate that you did actually read your article and that you do understand what it says.
But maybe I'm wrong to be thinking in that direction. There are all those books and movies that are in essence about adding up people's scores to see if they get into heaven. The oldest one I'm aware of is Heaven Can Wait in 1943 starring Don Ameche, but it's a very common theme, there must be older.
Just for fun, check out the recent TV series, The Good Place, which is on Netflix (to my knowledge).
Getting into the "Good Place" depends on your overall score in which good actions gain you points and bad actions lose you points. Basically, everybody got the afterlife very wrong (about 5% right) except for this one guy, Doug, who one night was really high on mushrooms and scored 92% correct -- they idolize him in the afterlife and everyone has his picture on the wall.
What you need to pay especial attention to is the public displays of what scores you get for what -- sorry, I forget which episode in the first season does that. For example, watching the reality show, "The Bachelor", loses you a ton-load of points. Later when the demons from the "Bad Place" arrive to litigate, they're all worried to get back to the "Bad Place" so that they don't miss the next episode of "The Bachelor."
I'm really confused about what you're trying to say. It seems that you've abandoned everything in the bible apart from the nice stuff that you prefer to believe. You also add that it's not important which god you believe in so long as it has all these nice attributes. Fairly obviously, preferring particular attributes for your god is not going to affect whatever attributes the god actually possesses but I guess it's harmless enough. But all this leaves you is a general belief to live by the Golden Rule. Under that regime there is no need for all the paraphernalia of any particular religion; worship, preaching, scripture, beliefs etc etc. It seems that under your scheme atheists get to heaven too to why the need for any religious belief at all?
In the USA there's a religious pollster, the Barna Group, which has found some interesting trends. On my website, I post an Associated Press (AP) newspaper article about one of his polls (Do We Understand What We Think We Believe In?) which I will post here in its entirety:
quote:SURVEY: Americans believe all people worship same God, poll shows
The Orange County Register, Saturday, 07 September 1991:
NEW YORK - Most Americans think there is no such thing as absolute truth and believe that people of different religions all worship the same God, a new survey says.
George Barna, whose Barna Research Group of Glendale conducted the survey, has produced a book from it called "What Americans Believe." His findings show an interest in religion. However, "If there is a revival going on," it "must be viewed as a religious revival, not a Christian revival."
Barna, a marketing research professional who has done work for Billy Graham and Pat Robertson, says a "massive realignment of thinking is taking place in which people are transferring many elements formerly deemed `necessary' into the realm of the `optional,' " such as Bible reading, prayer and involvement in church.
While most say religion is important to them, they're increasingly likely "to feel that being part of a local church is not a necessity," the findings say. Traditional Christian beliefs are eroding, too."
For instance, the report says, 82 percent of adults think that "God helps those who help themselves," and 56 percent mistakenly think the idea is from the Bible.
Actually, the saying is attributed to Benjamin Franklin. The report says it runs counter to Christian teaching that people cannot attain wholeness by their own deeds, but only through God's forgiveness of their failings.
The self-sufficiency streak also shows up in a finding that 82 percent of adults think that "every person has the power to determine his or her own destiny in life."
In a similarly amalgamating way, 65 percent of Americans say Christians, Jews, Muslims and Buddhists "pray to the same God," although by different names.
The survey involved telephone interviews with a representative 1,005 US adults on about 60 questions covering a broad range of topics. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.
I found that part of Buddhists also "praying to the same God" albeit by different names to be rather ironic. My understanding of the Buddha's teachings regarding that is that we must not put any trust in the gods, since that would only hold us back from Enlightenment. Ignorance about religion is very strong in these people.
I've also jokingly said that the "Actual True God" must be Vishnu, so when posing as YHWH all that hair and beard comes in handy so he can get by with far less Caucasian-flesh-colored makeup to cover his blue skin -- in HBO's series, Watchmen, Hooded Justice, a black cop, only had to apply makeup around his eyes appearing through the hood to appear to be white.
The thing is that Christian doctrine is very specific about what it takes to be saved (Bumper sticker: "You don't want to be caught dead without Jesus") and yet "popular Christianity" allows for non-Christians to go to Heaven, directly contradicting Christian doctrine.
An image that I cannot shake related to:
quote:For instance, the report says, 82 percent of adults think that "God helps those who help themselves," and 56 percent mistakenly think the idea is from the Bible.
I once saw a clip from a silent film, maybe one of the Gish sisters in "Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm". The young girl enters the kitchen and is tempted by the pie that's cooling off. She wants to take a piece of it, but she looks up and sees a sampler (a framed embroidery with a saying stitched into it): "Thou shalt not steal!" Sadly, she turns away and starts to leave when she sees another sampler: "God helps those who help themselves." So she helps herself to the pie.
Re: How can ultimate purpose come from anyone else, especially a God?
He does apologetics not History.
One definition of apologetics is that it's making up excuses for religion, explaining problems away. A bit harsh, but all too often true.
It's supposed to be about harmonizing religious beliefs with contradictions or conflicts both internal and external (eg, when a belief contradicts reality). Ideally, that contradiction is only apparent, only seems to exist because there's something that you don't understand, in which case apologetics explains why that contradiction/conflict is only apparent and does not actually exist. One simple example would be that a person didn't understand what his religion actually taught and so came to a faulty conclusion that his religious leaders had lied to him. For example, many believers hold beliefs that are not actually part of Doctrine (eg, that all the books of the Bible had been written in the order in which they are printed, which is not true) and have a crisis of faith when presented with the truth. In such cases, having the truth explained to them and showing that the belief they had held would show the conflict to only be apparent. That form of harmonization would be a proper use of apologetics.
IOW, explaining what actual Doctrine is and showing truthfully how there's no conflict between it and reality would be the proper function of apologetics. For example, showing that there evolution no more conflicts with God than gravity or the Pythagorean Theorem does. And I view such use of apologetics as proper and necessary.
However, there are also many cases where that contradiction/conflict does actually exist, in which cases apologetics takes a sharp and hard left turn to the Dark Side. That is when apologetics starts just "making up excuses", abandoning education for dreaming up rationalizations for false beliefs. That is not harmonizing, but rather just flat-out lying. And that is the realm of "creation science".
That is why apologetics has such a bad reputation and deservedly so.
Spoiler! Now you've ruined the surprise for those who haven't seen it yet.
But still, it's a hoot to read which actions gain or lose you points and by how much. That only happens a few times in the show, the first time being the orientation meeting in the amphitheater to introduce the new arrivals to The Good Place.
Kind of like in that episode of Firefly, "Our Mrs. Reynolds", where Shepherd Book warns Mal to not take advantage of "that poor innocent child" (who's actually plotting against them):
quote:If you take sexual advantage of her, you're going to burn in a very special level of hell. A level they reserve for child molesters and people who talk at the theater.
I have always believed that if you don't stand for something you will more readily fall for anything.
And if you don't question anything, then you will fall for everything. Regardless of how blatantly and obviously false it is. Especially the con-man pitches.
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