Comments

1. #1 The Chimp's Raging Id

   September 25, 2009

   Sorry, didn’t have time today. Hopefully back soon.

   Don’t worry, Rho. I don’t think anyone’s missing you. Take your time.

2. #2 Tommykey

   September 25, 2009

   Since the Force surrounds us, penetrates us,

   I’m not so sure I want the Force penetrating me.

   Don’t worry, Rho. I don’t think anyone’s missing you.

   That’s not nice! We’re supposed to be demonstrating our superior secular morality to Rhology by letting him know that we care about him, value his input, and that it’s okay if he wants to be Christian but that he can have a happy, fulfilling life without religion and live in peaceful harmony with his fellow human beings.

3. #3 a lurker

   September 27, 2009

   Something for someone who will be there to notice is how well they explain to people who don’t know what phyla or “major groups” are. In other words, will someone whose only knowledge of the Cambrian Explosion comes from the film the DI is showing know that during the Cambrian there were _NO_ amphibians, reptiles, mammals, birds, insects, trees, grass, any type of flowering plant whatsoever, bony fish, sharks, etc.? About the only vertebrates known at the time were things that most laymen would probably fail to recognize as “fish.”

   I suspect that they will say “major groups” and “phyla” a lot but not point out that for their purposes mammals are not a “major group.” It is hard to emphasize just how alien the Earth was at that time. A lot of new things clearly evolved at that time, but pretty much every metazoan that ordinary people encounter in their every day lives had not even remotely appeared yet. Creationists often wish their victim to think that “poof” everything first appeared in the Cambrian.

   /I realize that there is some overlap in the plants I listed. Just so creationists can’t claim I just played the same game they do.

4. #4 Tommykey

   September 27, 2009

   Good point Lurker. There are no mammal fossils in Devonian and older strata. And the earliest whales don’t even appear until millions of years after the extinction of the dinosaurs.

5. #5 Rhology

   September 28, 2009

   Hi all,

   Sorry, busy weekend!
   And maybe I’ll see some of you tonight. Introduce yourself – I’m a nice guy in person. Med-length auburn hair, red goatee. Lovely brown-haired girl by my side (my wife).
   Also, I’m noticing that, as has happened here before, as time goes on the proportion of worthwhile interaction on y’alls’ part to worthless vitriol and missing the point is decreasing. Step up your game. Give me some evidence for naturalism or whatever your atheistic worldview is.

   #79, LanceR –
   We have observed common descent.

   No, you haven’t. You’ve observed some things that you then lay assumptions upon and infer CD.

   #80, Stephen Wells –
   They are _claims_. You are still stuck at “magician did it by magic”. It’s not an answer.

   1) They are explanations if Christianity is true. That’s one of the reasons I keep asking you for evidence that naturalism (or whatever your worldview is) is true.
   2) You want magic?

   #81, eddie –
   who’s too cowardly to take his nonsense to a more relevant forum, such as pharyngula

   ERV isn’t relevant? Why not? Doesn’t this blog deal with the ID/ToE issue pretty often? Don’t be a fool.
   I don’t go to Pharyngula b/c I have limited time. If I had time to answer 30 ppl at a time, every time, I’d go over there and I’m sure it’d be fun. But I have a day job and a life.

   #90, Cubist –

   In particular, God has told us that He, himself, was not *directly* involved with creating life, because He *delegated* that job to mindless natural forces.

   1) You missed the first 10 verses of Genesis.
   2) He was the one who spoke. Stuff happened when He initiated it. It’s not like these processes started without Him.

   #91, Reed –
   what’s the scientific method based on ?

   ? Based on? Observation?
   And you haven’t observed the events in question, namely common descent, rocks turning into non-rock living beings, and unicellular organisms becoming kiwis and Kiwis.
   I’d like to ask you to prove, scientifically, that the scientific method is a good way to discover truth.

   #92, Tyler DiPietro –
   In the real world we use consequence relations that are not monotonic but are nonetheless justified tentatively. You’re not up on your formal logic. Might I suggest some reading on defeasible reasoning?

   Yes, you may suggest away, and if you have specific suggestions I’ll be happy to check up on ‘em. In the last couple of years, I have taken up challengers’ suggestions and read books I wouldn’t ordinarily read for fun.
   Anyway, this is more or less equivalent to inductive judgment. And your challenge is related to my challenge of pragmatism as test for truth. You’ll either end up in this strategy with assumption-laden statements like y’all have been here or with an infinite regress when I just keep asking you “How do you know it worked? … OK, how do you know THAT worked?” unto infinity.

   #93, DJD –
   It’s either:
   a) facts provide evidence for a particular worldview
   or
   b) the meaning of facts is dependent on one’s current worldview

   That’s one thing I like about you, DJD. You, at least, are thinking.
   What I mean, and maybe I didn’t communicate it well, is that I’m starting off looking at internal consistency. Then I move on to seeing how well a given worldview accts for the facts at hand. These are related, it is true. Anyway, what I was meaning here is that if my worldview can explain Fact X and your worldview can’t, then that is evidence for my worldview over and against yours. Hope that helps.

   #95 – Oakes,
   What does “internal consistency” have to do with truth, and how can we prove that anything that is “internally consistent” is true?

   Int const is a negative test for truth. Take it to the extreme – let’s say Joe’s worldview is that evolution both occurred and didn’t occur. Is that worldview true?

   I can think up lots of scenarios that are “internally consistent” but still impossible in the real world.

   1) Sure, but that’s not the only test for truth I’ve mentioned. It’s just where I start. And, interestingly, I never have to get past this step when I’m looking for a worldview to believe, b/c I’ve only ever found one worldview that’s int const.
   2) In reality, I doubt you can do that. You guys go on to talk about the Star Wars universe and the Force and all that. This is far from int const. The FSM is another attempt, a failed one. Usually it just takes a few of the right questions to discover that the worldview isn’t actually int const; it just looked that way at first glance.

   #96, Stephen Wells –
   since the example concedes that under naturalism people can _accurately perceive the existence and location of tigers_

   No it doesn’t. It’s using that example as an illustration, b/c you naturalists have limited powers of reasoning and so can’t take a full argument ad absurdum. But to really lay it on thick and say “he THINKS he sees a ____” at every single step would be exhausting and take more time.

   the example concedes that _beliefs which entail that you don’t need to run away from tigers are selected against_,

   Well, YOU won’t find out b/c you’ll be dead, but you could say “it could be found out that you were wrong”, and that’s true. One of your problems is that by nature of the absurd illustration, one can think of nearly infinite thoughts that would lead Joe Caveman to flee the tiger.

   all the example shows in the end is that _naturalistic beliefs about hard-to-observe things like a mental or emotional state might be wrong_.

   …and that you have no access to find out WHETHER you are indeed right.

   #97, Dr Funk –
   It affirms the existence of sin, which is notorious for leading people to faulty conclusions/beliefs

   Leading UNREPENTANT ppl to faulty conclusions, using their own self-deception as the jumping-off point.

   And just FYI, I’m having my doubts at a full Van Til-ian approach. Wish I had time to do all the reading I need to do in that area.
   Anyway, your attempts to cast aspersions on the Christian approach can LOOK bad to the casual observer, but you still aren’t providing evidence for your own position. When are you guys going to give some evidence for your position?

   there is no justification in believing that nature is uniform,

   Hmm, you missed the other parts of the Bible, in which it turns out that it pleases God to hold the universe together with regular natural cycles for a time, until the Eschaton. And that He’s given various promises that the Eschaton will be unmistakable.

   Jesus was all God and all man at the same time – although how one can be both mortal (man) and immortal (God) at the same time with running into a contradiction is anyone’s guess.

   Easy – He was God and took on a human nature. He has a divine nature and a human nature. What is contradictory about that? Confusing, sure – it confuses the HECK out of me! But contradictory? Prove it.

   #102, Tommykey –

   We’re supposed to be demonstrating our superior secular morality to Rhology

   Hahaha, I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic, but either way I chuckled.
   Don’t worry, Tommykey, I know exactly what to expect when I come to interact here – alot of vitriol and profanity, a few nuggets worth dealing with here and there, alot of bloviation, and no interaction with ERV herself.

   Peace,
   Rhology

6. #6 Dr Funkenstein

   September 28, 2009

   Leading UNREPENTANT ppl to faulty conclusions, using their own self-deception as the jumping-off point.

   Nice try, but you also accused anyone who accepted an old Earth as having succumbed to the effects of sin on your own blog! …including people like Alvin Plantinga and Gleason Archer who both otherwise believe fairly similar things to you ie they are not unrepentant the way a non-believer who accepts an old Earth is. Likewise below, you seem that you may be veering towards the same view on van Til – but let’s face it, you couldn’t realistically accuse him of not affirming a Christian worldview could you!

   And just FYI, I’m having my doubts at a full Van Til-ian approach. Wish I had time to do all the reading I need to do in that area.

   Are you then saying this is yet another example of someone (van Til) who subscribes wholeheartedly to a Christian epistemology coming up with incorrect answers? For a system that trumpets its supposed ability to guarantee certainty of knowledge it sure seems pretty bad at it given the diversity of contradictory opinions its adherents hold to.

   Anyway, your attempts to cast aspersions on the Christian approach can LOOK bad to the casual observer, but you still aren’t providing evidence for your own position. When are you guys going to give some evidence for your position?

   It’s fairly irrelevant if anything anyone else believes is wrong or not – other views being incorrect doesn’t immunise the Christian worldview from having flaws that can be pointed out. Your test, as you’ve said on this very thread, is that internal consistency determines whether a worldview stands up or not. If anyone (me or otherwise) can find any examples of internal inconsistencies in what you believe, you have to therefore concede by your own standards that your worldview is false, regardless if another person’s is as well.

   As regards this thread, plenty has been provided – lots of folk have explained that the insertions of ERVs are random based on the available evidence, and therefore the only realistic way that the pattern of ERVs we see now can be explained is by common ancestry. On the other hand you have provided no evidence to support the idea that they can simultaneously insert in multiple different species in exactly the same locations in their respective genomes and in a pattern that just happens to mimic common ancestry (remember, giving us a hypothetical scenario is not the same as providing evidence to support that scenario).

   Hmm, you missed the other parts of the Bible, in which it turns out that it pleases God to hold the universe together with regular natural cycles for a time, until the Eschaton. And that He’s given various promises that the Eschaton will be unmistakable.

   Erm, that’s precisely my point as regards the internal contradiction – the bible claims that God will hold the universe together in uniform fashion, yet as van Til noted God can also perform a departure from this uniformity (ie a miracle) at any time he feels like it, and he does not require his believers say so before doing it (as it states in Psalms). So basically, any view that affirms both of these ideas must be self-refuting

   Also, you are aware that the question here is not how God (ie the entity doing the controlling of nature) would know when miracles would happen, it’s how someone who affirms the above view (ie you in this particular instance) would know when nature was about to take a departure from the norm?

   Easy – He was God and took on a human nature. He has a divine nature and a human nature. What is contradictory about that? Confusing, sure – it confuses the HECK out of me!

   So just like the Trinity, this is another one that you admit you can’t really explain, but there’s no way it can be a contradiction, even though it’s not difficult to show that it is? This isn’t really anything more than a stalling tactic to avoid admitting the obvious. If this is the case, you don’t really have a leg to stand on when accusing any other view of being contradictory, since we could remain indefinitely agnostic on any contradiction waiting for an answer that doesn’t actually exist.

   Prove it.

   Immortal is the contradiction of mortal , infallible is the contradiction of fallible, omnipotent is the contradiction of having limited power and omniscience is the contradiction of having limited knowledge.

   God is characterised as having the former qualities and man the latter in all those examples. So if something can be said to be all man and all God at the same time, it must be contradictory to believe that (since it is a contradiction to say something is mortal and immortal at the same time etc etc).

   Fairly easy really.

7. #7 Tyler DiPietro

   September 28, 2009

   “Anyway, this is more or less equivalent to inductive judgment.”

   No, you clearly haven’t grasped what non-monotonic consequence relations are.

   “And your challenge is related to my challenge of pragmatism as test for truth.”

   Yes, in the sense that pragmatism is a defeasible inference rule.

   “You’ll either end up in this strategy with assumption-laden statements like y’all have been here or with an infinite regress when I just keep asking you “How do you know it worked? … OK, how do you know THAT worked?” unto infinity.”

   Rhology, old chap, this is why nobody takes you seriously when you claim to have any kind of mastery of philosophy. It is always possible to regress to extreme skepticism, you can always take an assumption and question it. Even if you somehow managed to show that you assumption of a God allows to analytically deduce all relevant propositions (which you haven’t done, you’ve only asserted that you can), I can question the assumption that true antecedents always entail true consequents, and thus analytical deduction is meaningless.

8. #8 Prometheus

   September 28, 2009

   The hitch I find more often in these debates is a sort of cerebral “program is not responding”. Rho will tend to behave as though his questions are unanswered if he finds the answer provided ungratifying but that is not the same as pounding your heels in the dust and squealing “lalalalal I do not think about that which I do not think about!” so I will give him that much credit.

   I don’t mind this so much. Post modern Christian apologetics (particularly fundamentalist front line) rely on some heavy presuppositions as well as looking the other way when it comes to people like Popper and Haak. It also tries to stay away from certain modern developmental breakthroughs that dramatically inform things that Locke and Descartes were after (to wit: the capacity of the mind to comprehend parts of itself and its operation).

   The reason he prattles on about worldviews is because he is partially overlaying the teleological grid he works from onto the empirical “naturalist” one we work from.

   You then can say some things then like:

   1. Empirical evidence is fallible and astoundingly limited because human sensory perception is fallible and limited (thanks Plato).

   Or

   2. How do you know that everything is not the illusion created by Descartes’ demon peeing in your brain jar?

   Or

   3. Infinite regress from belief justifications (prove your proof).

   These are all fine propositions and questions that pose very real problems and to the extent that they overlap classic scholasticism Rho works well with them.

   Just don’t get your empiricism into his teleology/metaphysics or he will assert that the standards he applies to your “world view “ do not apply to his.

   That’s frustrating and I am not going to waste anymore time playing tennis in a dark closet. Rho may be the world champion of dark closet tennis.

   You can become the world champion of just about any game where you author and dictate the parameters.

   My problem is that he doesn’t just deny doing this, I think he really believes that his personal apologetic framework accurately reflects the current state of the western intellectual tradition and that he has won when he puts a hockey puck on the chess board and shouts touchdown.

   Sorry. Summary. He’s nuts.

9. #9 Rhology

   September 28, 2009

   #106, Dr Funk –

   Nice try, but you also accused anyone who accepted an old Earth as having succumbed to the effects of sin on your own blog!

   Which I don’t deny, but that’s hardly the same thing.

   you couldn’t realistically accuse him of not affirming a Christian worldview could you

   A heterodox one, but Christian yes. I don’t know what you want me to say, really – shall I analyse these men on their merits or shall I just act like I accept their views wholesale? No, I quote them when they’re right.

   ability to guarantee certainty of knowledge

   Rather, ability to ground intelligibility. Guarantees nothing but the possibility. As opposed to naturalism.

   lots of folk have explained that the insertions of ERVs are random based on the available evidence

   Which is not evidence for naturalism. At best it’s evidence against ID, given naturalism.

   On the other hand you have provided no evidence to support the idea that they can simultaneously insert in multiple different species in exactly the same locations in their respective genomes

   No no no, we’re coming to the same data – ERVs exist in multiple different species – and trying to explain it.
   You say common ancestry, b/c you presuppose naturalism. I say God made ‘em that way b/c I presuppose Christianity. Each one can explain the data. So, don’t we have to ask which system is correct?

   as van Til noted God can also perform a departure from this uniformity (ie a miracle) at any time he feels like it,

   Can, but won’t until the Eschaton, or if He decides to perform, as you said, a miracle. And miracles are extremely rare and have specific purposes.

   Immortal is the contradiction of mortal

   On Christianity, mortal is the PRECURSOR to immortality. 1 Corinthians 15.

   God is characterised as having the former qualities and man the latter in all those examples.

   More specifically, Jesus is. And there’s nothing about man that is inherently fallible, and Jesus limited Himself intentionally for a specific reason.
   Look, you have made some thoughtful incursions into Christian theology above with van Til and all that and I give you props for it, but on this topic, not so much.

   #107, Tyler DiPietro –
   I commend your numerous big words. That’s a new and interesting tactic. If you want to get rid of me, you could just post pr0n images all over the place, you know.

   It is always possible to regress to extreme skepticism

   Yes, on naturalistic presuppositions. Not on Christianity.
   In fact, I like to take ppl who say they’re empiricists to that very issue – I ask them to provide evidence they’re not a brain in a vat. Now, maybe that wouldn’t work for you, since you know what “monotonic” and “defeasible inference rule” mean, but then again maybe you are an empiricist. Anyway, istm that this is indeed the endgame for the naturalist, and the only reason you don’t go there is b/c you can’t tolerate it. You don’t have a good reason not to go there, but you CHOOSE to “create” “meaning” for yourself in this world, b/c otherwise you’d go crazy or pull a Sartre and say it’s better just to off yourself. That’s called Fantasyland, and it’s where naturalists live, whether they know it or not.

   Peace,
   Rhology

10. #10 Tommykey

    September 28, 2009

    Hahaha, I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic, but either way I chuckled.

    It was equal parts humor and sincerity.

    Don’t worry, Tommykey, I know exactly what to expect when I come to interact here – alot of vitriol and profanity, a few nuggets worth dealing with here and there, alot of bloviation,

    Well, as I have learned in interacting with others in the blogosphere such as yourself, it’s rather stupid to get all agitated and emotional over our differences. I came to the conclusion that if you can’t have fun with it, then it’s a waste of time.

    no interaction with ERV herself.

    If you weren’t a married guy, I would say try some flowers and a box of chocolates.

    you still aren’t providing evidence for your own position. When are you guys going to give some evidence for your position?

    Okay, now onto this. My worldview (if you want to call it naturalism or some variant of it, then so be it) is one of discovery. We can examine nature, whether it be the study of microbial life here on Earth, or the cosmos, and create a foundation to build on to make more discoveries. Sure, there will be mistakes made along the way, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. For instance, once we realized that the Earth, along with other planets in our solar system, revolved around the sun rather than the other way around, then it was only logical to suppose that other stars we see in the night sky have their own solar systems as well. It took until the availability of the necessary technology to confirm this. But what we also found was that the assumption that our solar system was a template for how other solar systems would appear was wrong. In our solar system, the gas giants are far from our sun, but in many of these newly discovered solar systems, astronomers are finding gas giants closer to the sun. So, now they have to devise an explanation for this. Now, it could turn out that the explanation offered will be wrong. But it merely means that more work needs to be done and that we will know at least one possible explanation does not work.

    Your worldview, on the other hand, is not one of discovery. It is one of maintaining a specific faith belief. Thus the answer to everything is “God did it and it can’t be older than 6,000 years”. (If I am wrong on the date, apologies in advance.) Rather than not being able to trust anything in a universe not created by the god of the Bible, as you claim, it seems to me to be the opposite. In a universe created by TGOTB, we can’t trust what we see because so many of our measurements don’t just conflict with a literal interpretation of the Bible, they conflict wildly. The speed of light. Radiactive decay. The mid-Atlantic Ridge, ice rings, coral reefs, and so forth.

    Now, can our senses fool us? Of course they can. That is why peoply dying of thirst in the desert run towards the pools of water they think they see in the distance, only to find out to their consternation that it was just a mirage. Naturalism explains why we think we see water in the desert where none exists. Supernatural thinking, at least to me, offers the hope that God just might turn that mirage into an actual pool of water. How many people must have perished in the desert praying to god that the next seeming pool of water might turn out to be the real thing we can only conjecture.

    What personally kills your worldview for me, Rho, is that it can all be explained away as a manifestation of human egocentrism. Stars exist in the heaven to provide light for us at night and to mark the seasons. God created us to have dominion over all the living things on Earth (though microbes seem not to have gotten that message.) “God has a special plan for me.” Our little speck of a planet in this vast universe is some kind of central front in a cosmic war between the forces of good and evil.

    Yes, I understand that for a religious believer such as yourself, God is put first above all else, even your lovely wife and children. But even the act of making God the focus of one’s life in the end serves as a means of self-validation. Having once been quite religious myself, in the end, I couldn’t help but notice that believing that I had a special relationship with the all-powerful Creator of the Universe was a way to make me feel better about myself. Of course, I am not going to affirmatively say that this is the case with you, but merely suggest that it is a possibility.

    To be honest, when I comprehend the majesty of the universe, the way that our own Earth has been shaped and reshaped over the eons, I don’t know how it all came about. It is just as wonderous to me whether it came about entirely through natural processes or as the work of some higher intelligence. But I find it preposterous to think that some god would create the Andromeda Galaxy only to destroy it and all of the other billions of galaxies in the universe because Jesus Christ will return to the Earth at some unspecified date to judge the living and the dead.

    Best regards,

    Tom

11. #11 Tyler DiPietro

    September 28, 2009

    Shorter Rhology: “Oh, these words are too big for my tiny Christian brain to understand!”

    “Yes, on naturalistic presuppositions. Not on Christianity.”

    Ho hum, yet another twit thinks that arguing by assertion precludes the need for explicit reasoning.

    I just provided a basic demonstration of the fact that I can regress to extreme skepticism no matter what presupposition you use. You haven’t dealt with that, probably because you didn’t understand the argument.

12. #12 Prometheus

    September 28, 2009

    Tyler wrote:

    “Ho hum, yet another twit thinks that arguing by assertion precludes the need for explicit reasoning.”

    He tends to weld on a tautology to stop the regression to skepticism in his metaphysics (I am he who is.)

    But I understand your point.

    I have tried and tried but he is completely indifferent to all of the interesting ways empiricists have addressed the regression problem without resorting to nihilism and he really doesn’t like pragmatic answers to Brain-in-a-vat.

    Dennett kind of likes to use heuristics when confronted with brain vat and regression puzzles but this is inelegant and more effete philosophers usually make fart noises in response.

13. #13 Tyler DiPietro

    September 28, 2009

    “He tends to weld on a tautology to stop the regression to skepticism in his metaphysics (I am he who is.)”

    That’s easy to overcome, just question the assumption that tautology yields truth. Hell, question all of the assumptions of propositional calculus, we can’t be having ASSUMPTIONS built into our reasoning, after all. It’s the same things as FAITH!!!!

    Rhology really doesn’t get how trivial his stupidity is.

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