Vitruvius wrote: ↑Wed Oct 06, 2021 12:06 am
If your religion and/or God is a cure for all these things - what are they waiting for?
Your choice.
that's not reeeeeal Christianity, is it? So what is?
What the name says, literally: that which Jesus Christ taught and did.
Homo sapiens developed from the gradual evolution of earlier forms that were able to interbreed.
I suppose I'm a gradualist
I figured. Punctuated Equilibrium has other problems, but is the only version that might let you get away with denying that there was an original mating pair of homo sapiens.
So now we agree again. Maybe you want to call the original pair "Og" and "Eek," and I call them "Adam" and "Eve." But either way, we're totally agreed there had to be an original pair, because that's what gradualism insists has to be the case. Species don't just burst out in a kind of universal effloration at a given point in time: they're products of gradual, slow, incremental genetic modification -- or at least, so Evolutionism says. That means there had to be a first pair of true homo sapiens, at a time when all the rest of the world was pre-sapiens or Neanderthals of some kind. And it was because the progeny of that initial mating pair had a genetic survival advantage that homo sapiens are with us today, and Neanderthals are not.
Now, of course, there's problems with that narrative, too: like, how did the progeny of Og and Eek manage to sustain the genetic advantage when all they had to mate with were Neanderthals? How did they beat out the genetic reversion effect, that would then threaten to remove their survival advantage within one generation? But since the whole gradualist narrative is a fiction anyway, such questions needn't trouble us for the moment. The main point is simply this: both the gradualist version of Evolutionism and the Creation narrative posit the one-time existence of an original mating pair.
human being wanted to join together, and religion was the means by which they did it. A useful device to overcome tribal hierarchies.
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Tue Oct 05, 2021 9:42 pm So many problems with that theory. One is that "religion" does not, in fact "overcome tribal hierarchies" at all. The two most often coexist. I've lived in Africa: I can assure you that many of the people there are fiercely tribal, fiercely hierarchical, and totally "religious" as well...and have been for all of recorded history.
That's bad reasoning in about every way I can fathom. First is that people wanted to join together and used religion to do so. African people may not want to.
Right. But it's your faulty theory, not mine. I can't defend it for you: I think it's untrue.
you're telling me evolution is a weak theory?
I was speaking of your "religion is a solution to tribal hierarchy" theory. It's just not even empirically tenable.
Yes, it is. Societies have a religious central coordinating mechanism - from Egypt, Greece, Rome, unto the Catholic Church and European civilisation.
That's a basic error in logic. Even if we concede that all societies have only one "religoius central coordinating mechanism," which clearly isn't true anyway, the functioning of that narrative as "coordinating" tells us nothing about its origin and nothing about its truth value at all. Very clearly, people have "coordinated" around false narratives -- indeed, they have done so many times -- but they can also "coordinate" around true ones. The utility of the belief does not tell us that it originated by way of that utility at all.
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Tue Oct 05, 2021 9:42 pmBut yes: Evolutionism is a very troubled theory, actually; and completely devoid of good evidence in the case of homo sapiens. (Not that Evolutionists have always been shy about faking such evidence, of course; seek the monkey-to-man theory. They got caught on that one, for sure.)
No it's not.
Yeah, it is. And if you knew and understood the various theories of Evolution that have been offered yourself, you'd know that.
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Tue Oct 05, 2021 3:25 pmI have no doubt that having a common belief system is unifying. I don't even doubt that in some cases at least, an ideology of that kind could be created deliberately and manipulatively. But again, there are serious problems with this answer. One is that religions actually vary extremely widely. Some have gods, some have God, and some have nothing of the sort. Almost all ancient religions, save Judaism, were polytheistic. And even of those that have a "god" and who have a singular "god", they often believe in very different profiles of that "god." So we might say that the religions impulse has shown some utility in unifying people: but if we imagine its been the same kind of religion or the same kind of assumptions worldwide, then we really need to brush up on our history of religion. It's just not how it has worked.
Why is it a problem that religions vary?
As Aristotle so cogently put it,
genuinely contradictory beliefs cannot be simultaneously true. The world's religions are genuinely contradictory. Therefore, it is not possible that they are all true. Logically speaking, they could all be false -- unless they already represent all possible alternatives. In fact, it means that whatever else we think, the vast majority of them
must be false. No more than one can be true, so long as they genuinely contradict.
That's logic. It's no opinion or ideology. It's just how the mathematics of reason inform us on the subject.
So, for example, let's take three options:
1. Atheism -- there is no God (or gods)
2. Theism -- there is one God
3. Polytheism -- there is a plurality of gods
Together, these might sum up all the possible alternatives regarding the possible existence of God. There can be one, none or multiples. That covers everything possible.
What we can know from pure logic, from Aristotle, if you like, is that two of the three are most certainly false, and one is true. You and I may disagree about which is most likely to be true and false; but what we should not be arguing about, and what, in fact, it is not logical or reasonable for us to argue about, is the fact that one of the three is true, and two are most certainly false.
Believing something without evidence is not valid reason. It's faith. I think it's Spinoza who argues that faith is necessarily unreasonable.
Spinoza was wrong. It's that simple. He got himself cast out of his own Jewish community for speaking nonsense on that, and he's never been Biblical in his comments on that.
Maybe he was talking about his own "faith." He certainly was never talking about the Biblical understanding of faith.
Science is based on reason. It's not faith.
You don't know what Science is, then. It's
inductive: and inductive knowledge is, at most, probabilistic, not absolute. So actually, every person has to have faith in science in order to believe in its declarations. You won't call that "faith," probably; but that is what it is. And it's quite legit, of course.
There wasn't a Bible before Constantine.
The Jews will be so disappointed to hear you say so.
No, no...that's just factually, verifiably wrong. Sorry. There was no final version of the canon of the New and Old Testaments, perhaps: but there were most certainly all the books of the Torah and Tanahk, as well as all the gospels and epistles of the New Testament. All that was settled at Nicea was the elimination of the apocyphal books created in the meanwhile.
I agree humankind is a special animal; that intellectual awareness is qualitatively distinct, and unique and precious.
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Tue Oct 05, 2021 3:25 pmThen I think you'd have chosen your words more carefully. You implied an objective value claim there. There is no ground for any such under Evolutionism.
Really? Is there any under Christianism?
Of course. Man is a unique creation, a reflection of the image of God Himself. That's pretty special status.
Evolution isn't accidental
Really, now? So you think it's a guided process? Are you a Deist now?
I don't know!
Okay, fair enough. Anybody can "not know" things, without being challenged. But don't you want to know?
This is a high level argument you probably won't understand
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Tue Oct 05, 2021 3:25 pmI don't find it particularly taxing.
Then why did you delete it?
Honestly? Because it was so completely routine, so ordinary and shallow, that I'd heard it many times before. I felt it didn't really merit a reply. I could get the same kind of summary from any public school textbook.
Methodologically, all scientific conclusions are held to be provisional
That's right. But that means they're no longer what you claimed for them -- products of pure "reason," "true," "unrequiring of faith," etc. They're just theories, and revisable ones. And people's trust in them also changes -- and should change -- as they get replaced with better theories.
Then there is no truth.
Sure there is. Don't mistake ontology for epistemology. "X is true" is a different statement from "Nobody knows whether or not X is true."
For example: is there another inhabitable planet in the universe? Nobody knows, at least at present. But does that mean there then can be no truth about whether or not one exists? No. It just means we don't presently happen to
know that truth.
Human knowledge is always partial and incomplete. But the truth is the truth. It's the thing we're trying to know more
about. And the more we know about the truth, the better we are.
That's the expectation of science, anyway.
Religion thinks earth is fixed in the heavens
Which "religion" thinks that? None I know of.
Nagel?
Thomas Nagel.
Please bear in mind that my argument is that there's a 400 year old religious conspiracy against science,
Yeah. That's nonsense.
...you think Nagel is a good rational clear minded advocate for what science is and is not? He's a Bible thumping scientific heretic.
Oh, that's SOOOO funny !
Nagel would be aghast to hear you say so. No, if you actually bothered to read "Mind and Cosmos," you'd know that's not even close to true. He was and remains, an Atheist.
Read Daniel Dennett if you want to know about evolution.
Dennett? I know Dennett. He's been debunked to death by others, of course, so I shall not bother; I'll just say, quite frankly, that I find his arguments...unchallenging. That's the kindest I can be, I think.
I have not done so, nor can I. The Piltdown Man Scandal happened, that is all. You can read about it yourself. And the only reason it happened is that credulous and unscrupulous Evolutionists got ahead of themselves and embarrased themselves. They have still never owned their responsibility, of course; because that's not how Scientistic ideologues do business. 