PZ open cut quote mines

_{Mark

June 12, 2011

Intelligent Design}

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PZ has a lot to say. I present some gems below for your education.

I’m sure that I have some irrational beliefs of my own. I have no idea what they are. It’s not holding irrational beliefs that makes you an idiot. It’s holding the irrational beliefs and demanding that those be imposed on everyone else.

Nobody has convinced me that God exists. That’s not going to happen.

Science is the answer. I’m sorry; you may be a very devout religious person, but praying is not going to solve the world’s problems. It never has. We’re living in an enlightenment, which is fuelled by rational thinking and science. Science is the answer.

I’m buddies with a lot of the big shot new atheists, people like Richard Dawkins and Dan Dennett. There’s nothing we’re saying that Betrand Russell didn’t say. This is all the same old stuff. The only difference is that we’ve got the primal scream therapy of atheism. New atheists are the people who shout and yell a lot about this stuff. But it’s the same old stuff that atheists have been talking about for years and years.

Atheists tend to be politically liberal, fairly tolerant. The tolerance part is that there’s no question that nobody is going to deport creationists. Nobody is going to shut down the churches. Nobody is going to do anything like that. What we want to do is put things in a proper perspective. If you want to believe that in the privacy of your home, if you want to get together in church and talk to people about this, yes, that’s perfectly reasonable. That’s the tolerance we’ll give them.

There are some of the people in the intelligent design movement who are incredibly nasty, awful, and misrepresent science in ways that I cannot forgive. This is not about demonizing the individuals.

I have to single out this man, whom I consider the most contemptable, despicable, cruel, and vicious evil liar in the creationist movement today, yes, he’s a nasty, nasty person. (PZ has never met or talked with this ID proponent.)

Comments

KF, in case you've forgotten what I'm talking about, here's what you said in # 85: "DM is of course tossing out red herring after red herring led away to a forest of strawman caricatures laced with ad hominems awaiting some firebrand rhetoric to set ablaze, bitterly polarising and poisoning the atmoshpere." I'm just wondering where I said anything like that.dmullenix_{June 20, 2011
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KF at 99: "Please scroll up, and look with fresh eyes to see what you and others have done and what I said in respnse ..." Since you made the charges, I would like you to point out any place where I used slander, mischaracterized an argument or used poisonous rhetoric. You made the charges, it's up to you to back them up. Also, idnet, you still haven't provided a cite for the last two sentences of your opening post: "I have to single out this man, whom I consider the most contemptable, despicable, cruel, and vicious evil liar in the creationist movement today, yes, he’s a nasty, nasty person. (PZ has never met or talked with this ID proponent.)" Also, is that last, bolded sentence yours or did somebody else insert it?dmullenix_{June 20, 2011
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IEP on Fallacies, ad hom here:
Ad Hominem You commit this fallacy if you make an irrelevant attack on the arguer and suggest that this attack undermines the argument itself. It is a form of the Genetic Fallacy. Example:
What she says about Johannes Kepler’s astronomy of the 1600?s must be just so much garbage. Do you realize she’s only fourteen years old?
This attack may undermine the arguer’s credibility as a scientific authority, but it does not undermine her reasoning. That reasoning should stand or fall on the scientific evidence, not on the arguer’s age or anything else about her personally. If the fallacious reasoner points out irrelevant circumstances that the reasoner is in, the fallacy is a circumstantial ad hominem. Tu Quoque and Two Wrongs Make a Right [--> i.e. im-/a-moral equivalency] are other types of the ad hominem fallacy. The major difficulty with labeling a piece of reasoning as an ad hominem fallacy is deciding whether the personal attack is relevant. For example, attacks on a person for their actually immoral sexual conduct are irrelevant to the quality of their mathematical reasoning, but they are relevant to arguments promoting the person for a leadership position in the church. Unfortunately, many attacks are not so easy to classify, such as an attack pointing out that the candidate for church leadership, while in the tenth grade, intentionally tripped a fellow student and broke his collar bone.
kairosfocus_{June 20, 2011
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PS: Notice too, the difference a little context made just now -- the above I had to respond to looks like a REAL case of clipping out of context and substitution of a highly misleading one. But, I think it was inadvertent, as many trifecta fallacy objectors don't seem to fully realise what they are doing, e.g. there is no relevance of a Village Atheist string of texts trying to take regulations of slavery in Ancient Israel to the sort of personal abuse Mr Myers exerted towards Mr Wells, but moral monster mud-slinging feels so good to the angry- at- the- God- of- the- Bible and often works very well as "shut-up!" rhetoric.kairosfocus_{June 20, 2011
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F/N: Onlookers, observe my 62 above to DM responding to 61 [and an onward scroll-up will show the wider pattern, nb on MG's tangent I took time to make a whole new thread here], and onwards, in response to a patent ad hominem circumstantial [Dr Liddle it is a bit more than merely personally abusive, it is intended to undermine credibility through an attack to the person and/or the group . . . ], compounded by the dilemma [so beloved of those who are embracing the indefensibly self-contradictory . . . (cf here, here and here) that if a theological discussion is engaged, it provides rhetorical ammunition for those who wish to characterise design theory as Biblical Creationism in a cheap tuxedo, and on the other hand if it is left standing, the wrenched out of context claims are well- /atmosphere- poisoning. --> Let's make a deal, ID objectors: you don't indulge in habitual distractions, distortions and demeaning, and I will not have to call you on it.kairosfocus_{June 20, 2011
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DM: Please scroll up, and look with fresh eyes to see what you and others have done and what I said in respnse; noting from the OP what the blog thread is supposed to be discussing (hint, it has something to do with PZM and his behaviour towards a certain Mr Wells . . . ) and what you have helped pulled it away to. And, I think you will find that I will only highlight the use of distractive, distorting and denigratory tactics when there is a specific reason to do so. Unfortunately, this pattern of abusive argument has now become the standard pattern of argument for all too many objectors to ID. Indeed, your just above is a turnabout rhetorical attempt, in which your hinted-at subtext is that I habitually accuse people of the trifecta rhetorical pattern without foundation. But, instead, it only manages to exemplify the problem I have pointed out. When someone like Dr Liddle is willing to engage on the merits, you will find that in this case I have actually taken time to commend her for so doing through a post. Good day, GEM of TKIkairosfocus_{June 20, 2011
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kairosfocus: I asked you this question in # 89: "... how about showing us where I slandered or caricatured an argument or used poisonous rhetoric or did anything else you accuse just about everybody you’ve ever argued with of doing. My words are right here in this thread. It shouldn’t be hard. And remember, mere disagreement with you or formulating an effective argument doesn’t count." I'm still waiting and so are a lot of others. The thread is still here and my words are still in it. Please show me where I did anything like what you charged me with.dmullenix_{June 20, 2011
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I try to always read the book before calling someone a moron. I call a lot fewer people morons that way. Dawkins is discussing the problem of evil and brings up an actual crash of a bus full of Catholic schoolchildren with great loss of life. He quotes a priest who has no good explanation for things like that happening. Dawkins replies, "On the contrary, if the universe were just electrons and selfish genes, meaningless tragedies like the crashing of this bus are exactly what we should expect, along with equally meaningless good fortune. Such a universe would be neither evil nor good in intention. It would manifest no intentions of any kind. In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference. As that unhappy poet, A. E. Housman put it: For Nature, heartless witless Nature Will neither know nor care." Dawkins is saying that when you look at the universe, there's no sign of intelligence or consciousness in its operation. When only a portion of a single sentence is quoted, it can sound like he's saying that “no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference” exists in the universe, but he's really talking about the operation of the universe.dmullenix_{June 19, 2011
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David @94:
Because Dawkins was comparing the operation of the universe as we see it to the universe we would see if it was run by a benevolent intelligence.
The universe as we see it contains intelligent beings, like us.
In other words, when he says “universe”, he means the universe minus us and any other intelligent beings that might reside in it.
IOW, a universe quite unlike the one we actually find ourselves in. That reading of what he wrote makes Dawkins look like a moron, so I reject your interpretation. And since I have no reason to think your premise is true, so much for your conclusion.Mung_{June 17, 2011
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puragu at 93: "It does not follow that because we have certain characteristics we have to work with what we have." Well, it's hard to work with what we don't have. :) My point is that we're stuck with our human fallibility and we have to do the best we can with it. "There may be no objective morality. There is no scientific fact in the universe which says that plunging a knife into someone’s eye is bad. Even if we dissected the brains of knife plungers and non-knife plungers and found significant differences between the two groups, there would still be no fact to tell us which brain structure is correct." That's right and brain structure is the wrong place to look. Golden Rule moralities base themselves on what you do or don't do to sentient creatures, not on your brain states. Knowledge of brain states might tell you why a person did something, but it’s what you do that is moral or immoral. For instance, that Arizona guy who killed all those people and shot Representative Gifford clearly did all that because of his brain states - he's barking mad! But to see if his actions were moral, you have to see how they affected sentient beings and they affected them very, very adversely. They killed a lot of people and put others in the hospital. He was immoral because of his actions. His brain states just explain why he committed those actions. "Since we evolved from slime and are no better than slime, whether we co-operate peacefully or not is not objectively relevant." [RANT] I don’t hold this against you personally, but this ‘we are no better than slime’ meme is one of the most common, false and disgusting things you hear from the ID / creationist culture and you see it here on UD constantly. It’s like saying, “Your father was a scumbag so you’re a scumbag too.” If I said something like that, you would very properly think I was the scumbag because that’s a nasty and untrue thing to say. You are yourself, not your parents or ancestors and you should be judged solely on your own qualities, not the qualities of any ancestors. So why is it supposed to be ok if you go back far enough in someone’s family tree that their ancestors actually are slime? The answer is that it’s NOT ok! You are you and I am I and it doesn’t matter a bit how either of us got that way. We are judged on our actions, not our ancestors. Slime is non-sentient. We aren’t. We are almost infinitely better than slime because of that and if some of our billions of years distant ancestors were slime molds, then congratulations to us for being so much improved and congratulations to the slime molds for having such illustrious descendents. It would be nice to never hear that “we are no better than slime” lie again. [/RANT] “I also don’t see your basis for condemning the Old Testament. Even if you had some objective basis for judging what moral or immoral behaviour is, your would still need all the facts. We’d need to study the history and anthropology of these ancient peoples and decide if our current norms would do more good than bad.” People try to defend the Old Testament this way all the time, but we know quite a bit of the history and anthropology involved and they don’t excuse many of the things in the OT. There’s a character named “Tektonix” or something like that and I’ve seen him argue that enslavement is the best thing for a little girl because she’d starve to death or be eaten by wolves if we didn’t since we’ve killed her mother, father, all of her brothers and any non-virgin sisters she might have. Honestly. Sometimes when the apologists really get rockin’ and rollin’, you just lose hope for the human race. There’s too much in both testaments for any amount of history and anthropology to excuse. And even if they were excusable, you have to ask why a book that is supposedly intended for all people through all time didn’t say, “But this is all immoral and someday it will be forbidden.” “Human interpretations of God’s morality or natural law may be flawed but for me at least, they can be argued about and there is at least a foundation for objective morality.” If you have a truly objective morality, there should be no good arguments against it, so the arguments should be short. And we can certainly argue about Golden Rule based philosophy. “If there is no God, then there is no basis for any objective morality and instead we’ll have imposition of morality by those who are deluded and powerful on the weak.” If there is a God and He has presented us with an objective morality, you’d think that somebody would be able to tell us what it is. So far, they haven’t. But we have plenty of impositions of “morality” by those who are deluded and powerful on the weak and the vast majority of those doing the imposing have believed in a god or gods and had a religion. “Note that it perhaps would still be evil to make a sentient being suffer, just that Jews and the rich would not be classed as sentient beings or perhaps even if classed as sentient beings there would be a reason to do this – perhaps a utilitarian or a consequentionalist one, as one Marxist put it, “…you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs”. That was Robespierre, actually, Too early to be a Marxist, but nasty all the same. The powerful are always going to try to warp morality to suit their desires. One way to thwart them is to put morality on a sound, defensible basis. If we establish that hurting or killing a sentient creature is the definition of bad and doing so deliberately and unnecessarily is immoral, then all we have to do to thwart the anti-Semites is to point out that Jews are sentient, which is pretty easy to do. But even that won’t work every time. Hitler thought he was doing the Lord’s work and defending Jesus by killing Jews and I’m sure he thought that serving God and Jesus justified all the killing. Thanks for the best response so far.dmullenix_{June 17, 2011
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mung at 92: "Can you offer an explanation as to why Dawkins would ignore our own presence in the universe when making such an argument about what “properties” the universe has?" Because Dawkins was comparing the operation of the universe as we see it to the universe we would see if it was run by a benevolent intelligence. In other words, when he says "universe", he means the universe minus us and any other intelligent beings that might reside in it.dmullenix_{June 16, 2011
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dmullenx: "First of all, I don’t care if the world is material or god-blessed. When it comes to morality, we are here and how we got here doesn’t matter. We have certain characteristics and it doesn’t matter how we got them. We have to work with what we have." It does not follow that because we have certain characteristics we have to work with what we have. You beg the question. Your current brain state is telling you this but your brain state does not have to be correct. In fact there does not have to be a correct answer. Just because you're convinced of this meme, it does not follow that it is correct. "Look to post 61 for a sound basis for morality – whatever hurts a sentient creature is bad, if you hurt one for no reason, you’re evil." Why is it 'evil' whatever that means to hurt a 'sentient' creature? What is this reason you say excuses this behaviour? This just begs the question. There may be no objective morality. There is no scientific fact in the universe which says that plunging a knife into someone's eye is bad. Even if we dissected the brains of knife plungers and non-knife plungers and found significant differences between the two groups, there would still be no fact to tell us which brain structure is correct. Even if we found that knife plungers' brains directly led them to lead much shorter lives or lives with much discomfort, it would still not mean they are incorrect. Their brains may be deficient when it comes to peaceful coexistence but it does not mean that that it's necessarily a morally bad thing. Since we evolved from slime and are no better than slime, whether we co-operate peacefully or not is not objectively relevant. I also don't see your basis for condemning the Old Testament. Even if you had some objective basis for judging what moral or immoral behaviour is, your would still need all the facts. We'd need to study the history and anthropology of these ancient peoples and decide if our current norms would do more good than bad. Certainly we don't even know if our current norms are correct and it is a fallacy to assume that some future time will not come and label us as post-post modernists or something else. Even now many of us can't agree on whether it's ok to kill human beings for the sake of sexual convenience. Human interpretations of God's morality or natural law may be flawed but for me at least, they can be argued about and there is at least a foundation for objective morality. If there is no God, then there is no basis for any objective morality and instead we'll have imposition of morality by those who are deluded and powerful on the weak. If the Nazis or the Soviets had won, it would be moral to kill non-persons such as Jews and the rich, as is the case that it is ok to kill unborn non persons nowadays. Note that it perhaps would still be evil to make a sentient being suffer, just that Jews and the rich would not be classed as sentient beings or perhaps even if classed as sentient beings there would be a reason to do this - perhaps a utilitarian or a consequentionalist one, as one Marxist put it, "...you can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs". :-) Thanks.Puragu_{June 16, 2011
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David @84:
Dawkins isn’t talking about individuals here, he’s talking about the workings of the inanimate universe which, being unconscious, is incapable of design, purpose, evil, good or anything else except indifference and really, not even the last, since indifference is usually associated with something that is capable of caring, but doesn’t.
So you would have us believe that what Dawkins really meant to say is that: “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference as long as we ignore out own existence in the universe.” That's what you're saying. Well, I reject that interpretation because I think it makes Dawkins look irrational. Can you offer an explanation as to why Dawkins would ignore our own presence in the universe when making such an argument about what "properties" the universe has?Mung_{June 16, 2011
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Driver:
Evolution is nothing like monkeys at keyboards. It is incremental and not at all random.
It can incremental, including losses of function. "not at all random"? Any data to support tt claim? BTW there sill isn't any evidence of incremental change constructing new, useful and functional multi-part systems. Why doesn't that count against the theory?Joseph_{June 16, 2011
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Nitpick: The ad hominem fallacy is an argument based on some negative personal attribute of our opponent: e.g. Darwinism is wrong because Hitler espoused it. Or: Christianity is wrong because Constantine espoused it. Or even : ID is wrong because it is just Creationism in disguise. Or directly: Your argument argument is wrong because you are a liar/cheat/bigot/theist/evilutionist/atheist/clinging to your sky fairy delusions. These are all fallacious arguments. However: Non-intelligent processes cannot create information, you lying atheistic Darwinist is not an ad hominem (though it be both fallacious and insulting). Ditto with: GAs demonstrate that Darwinism is true, no matter how much you choose to ignore any evidence that threatens your precious theistic worldview. Rude, possibly fallacious, but not an ad hominem. Just had to get that off my chest :) I've seen a little bit of rudeness here (though a lot less than on my home turf :)) but very few ad hominems, at least ad participants (one or two ad Hitler).Elizabeth Liddle_{June 16, 2011
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KF at 86: "It is clear that you are not addressing the direct implication of the materialist universe, which is the context in which there is no evil extends to us and our dealings. Evolutionary materialism has in it no IS that can ground OUGHT, on a line of reasoning that goes all the way back to Hume. (On such a view, there is no more to “ought” than a particularly intense form of what “I” like or dislike.)" First of all, I don't care if the world is material or god-blessed. When it comes to morality, we are here and how we got here doesn't matter. We have certain characteristics and it doesn't matter how we got them. We have to work with what we have. Look to post 61 for a sound basis for morality - whatever hurts a sentient creature is bad, if you hurt one for no reason, you're evil. This shouldn't be new to anybody - it's a variation on the Golden Rule, which Jesus loved so much that he gave it to civilizations that flourished and died centuries before he was born. You and other posters, meanwhile, claim to have an absolute morality. I'd like to see it. In fact, if somebody doesn't come up with one soon, I'm going to assume it doesn't exist. Then, how about showing us where I slandered or caricatured an argument or used poisonous rhetoric or did anything else you accuse just about everybody you've ever argued with of doing. My words are right here in this thread. It shouldn't be hard. And remember, mere disagreement with you or formulating an effective argument doesn't count.dmullenix_{June 16, 2011
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Disagreeing with you doesn’t count as any of the above
KF once accused me of an ad hom because he claimed that by disagreeing with him I was implying that he didn't know what he was talking about, and was therefore attacking his person.DrBot_{June 16, 2011
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allanius at 83: "Where to begin? So many candles to light against the smug darkness. Let’s start with the simple fact that slavery was a universal condition of existence at the time those verses were written—and indeed, right up to “modern” times." A very good point if the Bible is the work of man. They were just doing the best they could in the world they found themselves in. But if the Bible is the work of God, then we really have to ask why He didn't mention that this slavery thing is actually pretty immoral and I expect you all to drop it as soon as machinery lets you do without slaves. Or, better yet, use his advertised powers to create a better way to farm. Or just leave out verses like Ex 21:4. Or treat foreign slaves and female slaves like male Israeli slaves? The point is that if the Bible is the work of men, then it's about what we'd expect and very possibly an improvement on what came before. Just fining a slave owner for beating his slave so hard he dies in a day or two is probably an improvement on former practices where the owner could do whatever he wanted because the slave is his money. Or how about Ex 21:7? If a father sells his daughter as a slave, why not let her go after six years like his son? "Leviticus simply states that buying slaves from neighboring nations is permissible. It does not say that slavery is commendable or right." Well yeah! And rape and murder are permissable too. (Num 31:9-18) Kill all the men and boys and the women who aren't virgins and keep the ones who are for your own use. That's permissable, but it's not commendable or right. Except that that's Moses telling you to do the killing and raping. Hmmm... "The same Bible that contains the offending verse from Leviticus also says: “Is this not the fast that I choose? To loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?…Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up speedily; your righteousness shall go before you, and the glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard.”" As I said, you can take the Bible and use your own human judgement to pick and choose from the verses you like and ignore the rest and make yourself a fairly decent moral code. But that's human-made morality, not the absolute morality that so many people on this blog claim the Bible possesses. Show us this absolute morality and you'll shut us right up. You should be able to do it if it's in the Bible and it's really absolute. It should stand out. You shouldn't find any other passages disagreeing with it or countermanding it. But of course, you can't do that because it's not there. Just a bunch of humans doing their best with what they've got and inadvertently setting moral traps for later, more enlightened times. Short version: If there actually is no God, then religions start to make sense.dmullenix_{June 16, 2011
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DM: It is clear that you are not addressing the direct implication of the materialist universe, which is the context in which there is no evil extends to us and our dealings. Evolutionary materialism has in it no IS that can ground OUGHT, on a line of reasoning that goes all the way back to Hume. (On such a view, there is no more to "ought" than a particularly intense form of what "I" like or dislike.) So, in addressing an avowed evolutionary materialist, the commenter above was entirely in order to object: how can you ground good or evil, please? That is, he pointed out the inherent amorality of evolutionary materialism, which BTW is one way ti reduces itself to self-refuting absurdity. You have dismissed such and derided my pointing out a well warranted finding as thought they were wrong. But what you cannot do is to provide a warranting basis for ought on the ises of evolutionary materialism. That may be shocking or painful, but ti is indeed a well warranted finding, actually a commonplace in ethics. (The more sophisticated materialists tend to try to imply that other views have no good grounds for morality either, by for instance improperly extending the Euthyphro dilemma from pagan gods that are not the root of being, to the inherently good Creator God who is.) Your turnabout attempt fails. GEM of TKIkairosfocus_{June 16, 2011
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KF at 70: “DM is of course tossing out red herring after red herring led away to a forest of strawman caricatures laced with ad hominems awaiting some firebrand rhetoric to set ablaze, bitterly polarising and poisoning the atmoshpere.” What a bunch of horse pucky! I corrected the moderator on a factual error, you hijack the thread and now you accuse me of tossing out red herrings, making strawman caricatures, spreading ad hominems, doing something or other with firebrand rhetoric and polarizing and poisoning the debate. I’m calling you. “ad hominem” means “to the man”. In other words, instead of addressing an argument, you start to slag the person making the argument. Either show us all who I slandered and the words I used or retract that statement. What argument did I make a caricature of? Either show us the words or retract that statement. What polarizing and poisonous rhetoric did I use? Again, show us or retract that charge. Disagreeing with you doesn’t count as any of the above.dmullenix_{June 16, 2011
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KF at 68: “EDM: This is beginning to look more and more like a further threadjacking attempt.” I assume that’s directed to me. The name is David, by the way. I don’t know where you got the E. What’s your name? Now, let’s look at that threadjacking charge: The name of this thread is “PZ open cut quote mines”. idnet starts it off with some good ones, probably unintentionally because few people around here seem to understand that “quote mine” is just a colorful synonym for “quoting out of context”. (In fact, a lot of posters don’t seem to understand what quoting out of context means. I still remember one poster insisting that every word he typed came directly from the person he was quoting, so what was the problem?) My first post was # 23 where I gave paragwinn a URL for the source of the PZ quotes and asked for the source of the last line, which I don’t think we’ve gotten yet. I then gave idnet what little I could dredge up from my high school English classes about proper quoting procedure. In message 3, the moderator had asked, “How can someone be ‘evil’ where there is ‘no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.’” That quote is from “River out of Eden”, by Richard Dawkins, which I have, and it’s a quote mine. The full quote is, “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.” Dawkins isn’t talking about individuals here, he’s talking about the workings of the inanimate universe which, being unconscious, is incapable of design, purpose, evil, good or anything else except indifference and really, not even the last, since indifference is usually associated with something that is capable of caring, but doesn’t. So I added this at the end of #23: “moderator, when Richard Dawkins says, “there is ‘no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference’, he’s referring to the inanimate universe. There is plenty of evidence for evil individuals.” In message #33, you type FOUR PAGES of bad philosophy, aided and abetted by a Will Hawthorne, in which the two of you charge materialism with being “inescapably amoral”, claim that to a materialist, “…terms like evil and good etc become simply tools for cynical emotional manipulation and programming of populations and individuals.”, claim that for a materialist, “..for any action you care to pick, it’s permissible to perform that action.”, and “…if atheism is true, every action Hitler performed was permissible.” You then claim that, “This is not usually explained plainly to the public, so it may seem strange.” No seems about it, it is totally strange and false. You finish up by saying atheists claim that the highest right is might (and you bold it to boot) and associate Saul Alinsky with “jack-boots marching in torchlight parades and the secret police knock on your door at 4 am…” and “I do not exaggerate when I say our civilisation is in mortal danger.” In your next message, #36, directed to MG, you call distinguished Kant scholar Lewis Beck “sophomoric” and claim he’s ignorant “…of the nature of actual theistic beliefs”. You then go into a disquisition on miracles complete with 6 Bible verses, say that MG seems “bound up in a strawman distortion of the[i]stic thought” and quote Isaac Newton as an authority. Newton believed that the Bible had been tampered with to the point of unreliability and that the Trinity was a false doctrine. I guess he was “bound up in a strawman distortion of the[i]stic thought” too. You finish the reply by saying to MG, “In short, the reason why you find the Beck quote to support your views is because you have been led to swallow a strawman caricature of the thought of those who are theistic and believe in miracles.” The thread is now effectively hijacked from quote mining to slander. If you want to see the threadjacker, look in a mirror.dmullenix_{June 16, 2011
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It’s quite amazing to see the degree to which Modernism and its rear-guard mongoloid step-child, Postmodernism, have annihilated context. No, Poindexter, the “text” does not exist in some sort of magic vacuum, as if it came into being from pure nothingness. Every text has a context, and there’s the rub for our would-be moralizing tale spinners. Their love of pure and simple valuations requires them to negate context in order to get to a bare-naked “text.” There are countless examples of this loss of context in current academic discourse. It is as if we had forgotten history in our rush to satisfy our moral vanity and make ourselves seem like Zarathustras of racism and sexism and whatever. We were so busy running away from Hegel and the historical method that we ran right into a benightedness that actually seems to pride itself in its ignorance of context and shadings of value—Zinn and Chomsky being models of the type. The game now is to show how righteous and morally superior we are by simplifying history to the point where it is no longer history but merely a story of savage indignation. Case in point: the ongoing attempt to depict the Bible as pro-slavery. Here is an offending “text” from Leviticus: “As for your male and female slaves whom you may have, you may buy male and female slaves from the nations that are round about you.” Heroically, the Postmodern critic seizes upon this scarlet verse and turns into a synecdoche. See! The Bible advocates slavery. Or how about this really juicy tidbit from Ephesians? “Slaves, be obedient to your masters, with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as to Christ, not in the way of eye-service, as men-pleasers, but as servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart.” Doesn’t this “text” prove that the Bible not only advocated slavery but even engaged in subtle slavery apologetics? Can’t you just read between the lines and see the self-serving “rhetorical strategies” of the writer, O Dionysian interpreter? Where to begin? So many candles to light against the smug darkness. Let’s start with the simple fact that slavery was a universal condition of existence at the time those verses were written—and indeed, right up to “modern” times. Households and farms did not have machines to make their chores light. In the past, slaves did the work that machines do today. Slavery was the rule, not the exception, in all civilized as well as uncivilized nations. For that matter, let us not forget that most of the population of Western Europe consisted of “serfs” up until the Middle Ages. In Russia, serfs made up 40% of the population as late as the 1850s. Serfs are not, strictly speaking, slaves, but they were servants, and serfdom is no less unthinkable today than slavery. And in the West, even middle-class households had servants to help with the chores. The main driver for the abolition of slavery was the Industrial Revolution, not the superior virtue of humanities professors. Today we have machines to do our bidding, making slaves both unnecessary and economically unfeasible. To get one’s dander up over the existence of slavery in the past is to annihilate the context of history for the sake of a simple story that glorifies ourselves and our superior virtue when there is no reason whatsoever for us to feel superior. The reason there have been no major wars in the West since WWII is because the armaments, and particularly the atom bomb, have become too potent to make war seem attractive, not because modern man suddenly became enlightened and shed the bellicosity he had exhibited throughout the preceding centuries. Similarly, the reason we no longer countenance slavery is because technology has made it unnecessary, not because we are morally superior to our ancestors. Leviticus simply states that buying slaves from neighboring nations is permissible. It does not say that slavery is commendable or right. The verse reflects the universal condition of the time in which it was written. To smugly condemn it from the Modern vantage point, when slavery is no longer necessary or even desirable, is to annihilate history as if it had never been written. To what end? Simply to demonstrate our moral superiority. The same Bible that contains the offending verse from Leviticus also says: “Is this not the fast that I choose? To loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?...Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up speedily; your righteousness shall go before you, and the glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard.” This stirring liberation text has virtually no peer or even counterpart in the ancient world. Any balanced discussion of the Bible and slavery should include consideration of such verses. But they complicate things for those who seek shelter in simple valuations and the sweeping negations that are used to prop up moral vanity. A posture of savage indignation requires simple valuations, but history is not simple; therefore it must be annihilated. The self-glorifying abuse of the verse from Ephesians involves a different kind of contextual negation—not of history but of cultural givens. There was a time when we could take cultural givens as givens and reach a sensible, well-rounded judgment with regard to such “texts.” But now that the “texts” have been stripped of their context, all sensibility has gone out of academic discourse. The cultural given for the Ephesians passage is the principle of submission. According to the Bible, the fall of man and cause of his unhappiness was rebellion against God. It follows, then, that the path back to happiness is to “submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.” Just as Christ submitted to God’s will and the cross and was rewarded with life, so slaves are advised to submit to masters and wives to husbands, not to empower masters and husbands, or, God forbid, corporations and “empire,” but as a matter of spiritual discipline. Of course if God is negated, summarily and airily dismissed, as he is in the modern academy, then this sensible, logical context simply vanishes, as it if it had never existed. Centuries and ages of contextual understanding evaporate under the withering heat of Nihilism and its extreme subjectivity, which is necessary to sustain the heroic identity of the superman and ubercritic seen in Postmodern discourse. This is the situation in which we now find ourselves. Humanities departments churn out volumes of smug but benighted value judgments from which all sensible context has virtually disappeared. And those who are repelled by this foul tide are cowed into submission, not by Postmodern arguments themselves, which are generally childish and shallow, but by the magnitude of the challenge of trying to recreate a substantive context that took millennia to come into being and now seems lost. The Postmoderns are bulletproof in their benightedness. Doesn’t matter what you say to them; they smile condescendingly as if to let you know that they have gone ahead of the rest of us—the “common herd,” as their prophets like to say—into the world of light and no longer need to burden themselves with such mundane things as context and history. It is as if they had liberated themselves from everything that is interesting and true.allanius_{June 15, 2011
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Driver, where in the paper does it say that the addition of mutations did not produce negative epistasis? New Research on Epistatic Interactions Shows "Overwhelmingly Negative" Fitness Costs and Limits to Evolution Excerpt: The research paper published out of the Cooper lab (with Richard Lenski as a co-author), by Khan et al., is titled "Negative Epistasis Between Beneficial Mutations in an Evolving Bacterial Population." It found that "Epistasis depended on the effects of the combined mutations--the larger the expected benefit, the more negative the epistatic effect. Epistasis thus tended to produce diminishing returns with genotype fitness, although interactions involving one particular mutation had the opposite effect. These data support models in which negative epistasis contributes to declining rates of adaptation over time." The other paper from the Marx lab, by Chou et al., is titled "Diminishing Returns Epistasis Among Beneficial Mutations Decelerates Adaptation." The article's abstract likewise explains that: "patterns of epistasis may differ for within- and between-gene interactions during adaptation and that diminishing returns epistasis contributes to the consistent observation of decelerating fitness gains during adaptation." The title of a summary piece in Science tells the whole story: "In Evolution, the Sum Is Less than Its Parts." It notes that these studies encountered "antagonistic epistasis," where negative effects arise from epistatic interactions: Both studies found a predominance of antagonistic epistasis, which impeded the rate of ongoing adaptation relative to a null model of independent mutational effects. In essence, these studies found that there is a fitness cost to becoming more fit. As mutations increase, bacteria faced barriers to the amount they could continue to evolve. If this kind of evidence doesn't run counter to claims that neo-Darwinian evolution can evolve fundamentally new types of organisms and produce the astonishing diversity we observe in life, what does? http://www.evolutionnews.org/2011/06/new_research_on_epistatic_inte047151.htmlbornagain77_{June 15, 2011
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Driver you state; 'but anyway evolution is NOT a random search.' Fine Driver, you seem to have evolution all figured out!!! Tell you what I want a 'bird dog'!!! No not a dog that hunts birds,, I want a dog that flies!!! :) Please tell me exactly what 'non-random' evolutionary process I can implement to achieve this goal!!! Do I start by throwing dogs off a roof and keeping the ones that survive???bornagain77_{June 15, 2011
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ba77, Where in that paper does it say that organisms cannot evolve?Driver_{June 15, 2011
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Driver, having just gone through a grueling with this paper, I know exactly what the paper is saying, it is YOU that is harboring illusions!!!bornagain77_{June 15, 2011
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Driver, it may interest you that the ‘one tiny step added to another tiny step’ conjecture has recently been shown to NOT EVEN be able to climb ‘Molehill Improbable’ must less ‘Mount Improbable’, for the steps are found to drag each other down the molehill when added together;
ba77, please. Do yourself a favour. The paper you cite does not say what you think it says.Driver_{June 15, 2011
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as to ‘incremental’, That’s the neo-Darwinian fairy-tale,
Is it? Do you accept micro-evolution?Driver_{June 15, 2011
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ba77, To quote Meyer:
Now, if you go back to the universe of elementary particle Planck time chemical labs and work the numbers, you find that in the finite time our universe has existed, you could have produced about 500 bits of structured, functional information by random search.
I dispute his numbers, which are made up since no-one knows how life arose, but anyway evolution is NOT a random search.Driver_{June 15, 2011
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Driver, it may interest you that the 'one tiny step added to another tiny step' conjecture has recently been shown to NOT EVEN be able to climb 'Molehill Improbable' must less 'Mount Improbable', for the steps are found to drag each other down the molehill when added together; Mutations : when benefits level off - June 2011 Excerpt: After having identified the first five beneficial mutations combined successively and spontaneously in the bacterial population, the scientists generated, from the ancestral bacterial strain, 32 mutant strains exhibiting all of the possible combinations of each of these five mutations. They then noted that the benefit linked to the simultaneous presence of five mutations was less than the sum of the individual benefits conferred by each mutation individually. http://www2.cnrs.fr/en/1867.htm?theme1=7 (from Lenski's LTEE)bornagain77_{June 15, 2011
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