The really amusing and ironic thing here is that if adult stem cell therapies develop to fruition, the result will be.... cells that are essentially like embryonic stem cells, to the point where you could implant them in a womb and they could grow into a person! That means that there are hundreds of thousands of "potential people" in your body right now that you, with your murderous refusal to allow them to develop, are denying the potential life they deserve!
The reality is that human sexual reproduction is just a subset of asexual reproduction. There is no start of new life: we are as much simply biomass that buds into new individuals as any other biological organism, we just happen to have a process of gene juggling included to complicate matters.
I belong to an organization called the Snowflaky society that demands that everyone have unprotected sex at every opportunity so as to minimize their murder of potential people.
Think about it: my parents ALMOST didn't have sex the night I was conceived, BUT THEN THEY DID!!!!
I really dodged a bullet there: my life was in the balance, but they made the right decision and decided to save me from eternal oblivion. Phew.
"Adult stem cells, I'm told, have had lots of applications (hence the research money available for it). It's the embryonic stem cells that don't seem to have as many applications."
Even researchers that are against embryonic stem cell research still admit that embryonic research is extremely promising and important insofar as our knowledge goes.
Saying that because adult stem cells are productive that this invalidates any benefit from embryonic stem cell research is like saying that because we can cure cancer we shouldn't bother trying to cure AIDS.
"I know embryonics are in the grey area, but the willingness of people to cannibalize babies just seems wrong, in general."
IMHO, an embryo is only in a "gray area" if you happen to be a complete loon. A bunch of cells without ANY of the functional characteristics of a person is as far on the clearly not of moral concern side of things as one can get. A fetus is very very legitimately on the gray area side of things. Something with no nervous system, that could subsequently develop into any number of fetuses later on, or none, and has no concerns, feelings, or even nervous system, much less one that is developed enough to have experiences and interests, is not.
Ah yes: because someone has a dream where a lobster is chucked at him by a watery tart, all of a sudden it's no longer moral to stone your bride to death on her father's doorstep if you discover she isn't a virgin.
Honestly, they didn't have much choice. Many of the claims made by the early Christians were so preposterous to educated Jews that it's no wonder the movement had so little success with them. Most of Jesus' followers were either illiterate and mostly ignorant of rabbinical Scripture, or cranks and outsiders, like Paul. Not a single major rabbi from the time converted to Christianity or even felt that it's claims passed the laugh test (mostly because the definition and veracity of a messiah were very clear, and Jesus fulfilled none of them: his followers tried to invent a whole bunch of subsidiary prophecies he was supposed to have fulfilled in order to draw attention from the reality that all the main qualifications were very obviously missing).
The founding fathers did not hate religion. The major ones were neither orthodox Christians nor deists (though ironically, many of the orthodox Christians at the time went as far as to clal them atheists, despite the fact that they were not).
What they did understand, however, was that religion and government were both better off the more they were allowed to simply operate without any special secretarian authority over the other.
What the hell are you talking about? Crosses ARE allowed on individual graves in memorial cemeteries for goodness sakes.
Like many people, I think you are mightily confused about the nature of endorsement and accommodation and what people want.
The basic doctrine that most SOCAS groups advocate is that the government should not use its authority to specially privilege one religion over another: it should be religiously neutral. That doesn't mean, however, that it cannot give reasonable accomodation to the needs of religious observance done by individuals, or in spaces in which all individuals are equally allowed to express religious or any other ideas. The basic rule of thumb is that if you want a government space to have religious expression, it has to become an open forum where all religious expression is equally allowed. Likewise, basic and reasonable accomodation must be made so that people's religious beliefs do not preclude them from taking part: that is NOT the same thing as endorsing them: it's recognizing that they have particular needs and accomodating those needs of individual citizens acting as individual citizens.
It cannot and should not be able to create places where one and only one religion is held up as official.
This is mostly because countries like Thailand don't much care if these sorts of treatments have terrible side-effects: they consider their citizens expendable in the pursuit of profit and business.
Have no fear though, if a Republican wins in 2008, America is sure to head in that direction eventually.
No, I'm afraid not. In science, the word theory refers to the idea that many different concepts are all combined to form an explanation for something. You keep trying to pretend that it has something to do with speculation or interpretation, and it does not. That's not how it works.
We CAN talk about how we might interpret various facts. But that discussion is not, in science, merely a matter of personal preferences: in science, we go and test the evidence to figure out which interpretations are supported by the evidence and which are not.
You also keep insisting that we need to "see" things, as if with eyeballs. This is simply wrong. What we need is evidence. All of the evidence is consistent with the mainstream idea of fossil formation (and, in fact, in this case, you happen to be just plain wrong in any case: we can and do observe the formation of fossils in every stage of the process).
The idea (not interpretation) that fossils were made rapidly very recently does not fit the evidence. It goes against everything we have learned about chemistry. It is inconsistent with a large number of very different sorts of physical findings from all over the world (physical findings that instead all converge and fit with the one and only "interpretation" that does explain and fit with all the evidence).
Why you are correct that there are certain basic assumptions about natural consistency, these assumptions are no different than the ones you make when you assume that your bed is made of matresses and not solar plasma, and so it is safe to lie upon night after night without fear of yourself being set on fire. You are welcome to reject those basic assumptions of the uniformity of natural laws, but at the cost that you cannot from that point on even pretend that this messageboard exists or that your keyboard might not turn into a snake the next time you touch it. In short, you can only get away from those assumptions by basically eradicating all knowledge, not JUST the knowledge you for religious reasons do not like.
Furthermore, we can in fact test many of these assumptions in limited ways against, again, the evidence. If the rate of nuclear decay were once much higher, for instance, it would be immediately apparently because of the much higher degrees of latent radiation in everything around us as well as the extreme damage this would have caused all sorts of things.
"Just because we can't test or verify a metaphysical concept doesn't make it silly, doesn't make it useless to think about."
You've missed the point. The problem is that we CAN'T THINK ABOUT IT because we cannot talk about something unless we have some concept in our minds the words refer to. In this case, all we seem to have are the words: the purported concept itself is nowhere to be found. When we try to examine it, it seems at best to become something of a square circle. That is, it makes no sense to speak of whether or not we can "test" or "verify" whether square circles exist or not: the very concept itself prevents us from having any idea what it is that we're looking for. This is what makes most debates about Free Will nigh incoherent: no one on any side of the debate has any idea what it is they are talking about. We might as well debate whether Snargles are necessary for rain.
And look at your definition:
"Free will is the act of selecting between to options, that is neither predetermined (causal) nor random."
Don't you see how this definition practically cancels itself out into absurdity? The whole purported purpose of Free Will is to allow us to credit a choice TO a particular someone and yet not to credit the state of that someone to anything other than itself. In other words, it's nothing but a continual removal and avoidance of the very question its trying to answer: who or what is responsible for the choice made, and how. And act, a willing of something IS itself a determination: it makes no sense at all to even speak of determinations being "not predetermined." Not predetermined by WHAT?!
This is my core assertion: the concept relies on a mistaken application of the concept of the freedom of an agent to the agent itself. It's like an incomplete sentence. It's like saying that "walked to the bank." Um: WHO walked to the bank? Free Will is the same way: my choices are "not predetermined"? How in any sense can they then be "my" choices, or anyone's for that matter??
I've put it to you again and again that if you can't give SOME answer to that question, even in the vaguest most conceptual sense, then you are simply supplying nonsense terms. I don't think you've even tried to meet that challenge.
"Can you supply one metaphysical explanation to anything, that couldn't be objected to on the same grounds that you object to free will?"
Whether or not metaphysics is objectionable or not is a red herring: how would we ever know? A better question for you would be, can YOU supply any objection to my metaphysical concept of "Goofaroo" which proves definitively that Free Will does not exist? Goofaroo is a basic component of choice, after all, because that's how I define it.
"Your declaring that you had or have evidence is, well, not convincing."
The convincing part is that the evidence is there: you only have to go out and look. You've already basically admitted that you haven't. I've looked at all the evidence, and I've formed my own opinion. You, I don't think actually are aware of the evidence, or even how science works in the first place. THAT is why you are unconvincing.
"When one has actual evidence, they present it."
Or they just point out that its out there to look at, if you're actually interested. There are countless good resources with which you can learn about the subject. But I don't think you are interested, are you? You're basically asking me to sit you down and teach you basic biology and then work from there. That actually might be sort of fun, but since you seem more interested in ranting and raving, I very much doubt you'd listen to anything I have to say.
It's true that the mere number of informed people who agree with me doesn't prove anything by itself. But there are good reasons WHY those informed people agree with me, and in this case that's because your ideas don't pass the laugh test. You don't have to take my word for it, but figuring this out is going to involve you doing the hard work of learning about the subject: not just waiting for a slashdot post to inform you.
"Thus far in history, to date, there has never bee a scrap of unambiguous evidence discovered which can not be explained by a Creator."
This is just a pointless claim. A hypothetical Creator could do anything, leave ANY sort of evidence at all. That makes that proposition untestable: and as outside the realm of science as the claim that the universe began yesterday (complete with our false memories of a past long before it).
What we DO have is evidence that points unambiguously to a particular set of conclusions. If you want to argue that this is all a grand trick by some universal trickster to just fool us all, okay, but so what? That doesn't change what the evidence says. Try going into a court of law and arguing that the defendant was framed by a demon who snapped his fingers and made all the blood, DNA, and physical evidence for the murder appear in a puff of smoke. See how long it takes you to get laughed out of court. It's the exact same principle.
"NOTHING happens by accident. Simple as that. Called a LAW, not a theory."
Really? Which law is that? Is it a law of chemistry? Biology? Physics?
And did you really just embarrass yourself by implying that laws are contrasted with theories? Do you not understand that theories often encompass laws, and do not, in fact "turn into" laws at any point?
"I can defend my statement that evolutionism is useless, unproductive deadly, dangerous and purely religious."
I doubt it. I don't even see much evidence that you even understand the basics of evolutionary theory, much less back up what seem to be purely tactical accusations about it being "religious."
"I noticed that you did not answer which of the four scenarios best fits how you believe we got here. Non-committal?"
Your question doesn't even make sense. We don't know, and may never be able to know, anything relevant to the question of how the universe began, or even if it ever began. We don't have any evidence about the matter, and any discussion about what is "more likely" is pointless: all of the physical laws we are familiar with come from observations of things WITHIN the universe: we have no idea what sort of conditions restrict or are involved with the universe itself.
And of course, that question has nothing at all to do with evolution in the first place.
"Here's a new one. Start with a tadpole and explain metamorphism into a frog from purely evolutionary means."
Tadpoles do not evolve into frogs. Did you mean to ask how things like distinct and different life stages for organisms evolved?
"Or take flight in four groups and explain how it naturall
"That's right and just fine. Why then is the THEORY of evolution presented as fact in our high school text books?"
Seriously, are you joking? This is such a basic and common misunderstanding that I'm STILL shocked to see it come up time and time again.
Scientific "theory" is not the opposite of facts. Theories in science are COMPOSED of facts (and laws, and and so on). Theories NEVER "become" facts: not even theories that are 100% deductively proven (like, for instance Number Theory). This is just a basic and honestly sort of embarrassing confusion of terminology on your part. "Theory" is not a measurement of certainty. If you think it is, then you need to go back and learn some more about science first.
"Why is the THEORY of intelligent design not given equal time?"
Because ID doesn't have a scientific theory: it doesn't even have a testable set of core claims to begin with, much less have any supporting evidence. You might as well ask why astrology isn't given equal time, or why Harry Potter spells aren't given equal time in science class, or Lord of the Rings history isn't taught in history class.
"It is because evolution is NOT science, but a religion."
So, wait: your explanation for why a basically untestable and ultimately religious idea isn't taught in science class is that OTHER parts of science are religious? Really? Are you kidding me? Forget the pot calling the kettle black, the pot is calling the porcelain black here.
"You don't expect the Q'ran to be taught in a catholic sunday school class do you? So why should religious evolutionists teach intelligent design or creationism in their so called "science classes"?"
You are the one accusing evolution of being a religion. But an accusation doesn't make it true, and in this case, the accusation is false.
Again, the reason ID isn't taught in science class is because a) it's not testable, even in theory and b) it's basically in practice just a bunch of warmed over creationist arguments meant to advance religion, and the whole point of public education is that it has to be religiously neutral.
Again, it's hard to tell if you are serious of if you are putting me on for fun.
Everything about the formation of fossils is in accord with what we know of the physical sciences, and in fact we DO have lots of examples of relatively "modern" fossils in various states of mineralization. Heck, in some places, we have entire beds of dead creatures fossilizing right on top of each other year after year.
Again, most of the claims you folks make seem to rely on near total ignorance of what the evidence is for things like fossils is or what's out there. You even seem to think that fossils are generally composed of living material, which they are not. So you've pretty much admitted that a) you have no idea what you are talking about... but b) you aren't about to let a little thing like a complete lack of knowledge about what you are talking about stop you from drawing conclusions!
"The salt content of the oceans is far to low, for the earth to be as old as the evolutionists claim. "
This is an old Morris argument: it's based on a false model of the interaction of salt in the ocean that simply ignores processes that remove salt. You can make anything sound ridiculous if you simply ignore or misrepresent whole swaths of evidence. You might as well argue that rain is impossible because clouds should just evaporate and distribute evenly in the atmosphere. That's just as silly and ignorant.
"The moon still recedes from the earth a little each year."
Again, this is just another goofy argument that's been debunked a million times. It's almost embarrassing that you fall for this stuff, because it shows that you basically are satisfied to read a bunch of creationist claims without spending any time checking to see whether they actually make any sense. Not a single astronomer I've ever read thinks this argument has any merit, but I guess they must all be part of the same vast conspiracy to cover up what you alone understand.
"Free will and determinism are exactly as useful as any other metaphysical concept. If you happen to think metaphysics and philosophy are useless, then we'll have to agree to disagree."
I said that free will in particular is an incoherent concept.
"Really, tell me something about a vacuum assuming for a second there is no concept of matter. It can't be done in precisely the same way that free will can't be described assuming that there is no concept of determinism."
Again, this is nonsense. Vacuums are negatively defined, but that doesn't mean that they are without implications, have predictable interactions with matter, and so forth. I can at least distinguish a vacuum from, say, a boat (here, in this region of space, we have near total vacuum, and here we have a boat, and here's how you can tell), and I can define what it is, and discuss what it's like for there to be one or not be one. You can't do any of those things for free will.
You keep claiming that determinism has something to do with free will, but so far you've failed to explain what the actual link is. I'm not stuck on determinism: assume that the universe is characterized by indeterminism. Okay: so now what the heck is the concept of free will? What role does it play in choice making?
"At some point physical randomness gives way to metaphysical free choice, and no one will ever be able to put a finger on precisely where that is, but again it is exactly as useful as any other philosophical concept."
How? Good grief: you've STILL said absolutely nothing about what it is or what it explains about anything. Either a choice is determined by something or it isn't (the only two possibilities, excluded middle): we are ALREADY talking about choice, and THEN asking why the choice happened one way or the other. So, what is your answer? Why all the stalling?
Far from not being able to put a finger on the boundary between the "two," you have yet to explain what we are putting our finger on. Nor does there seem to be any explanation possible even conceptually.
"It starts with Adam and Eve, we exist in the state that we do, because they choose to eat the apple."
Again, the actual text of the Bible doesn't talk about free will here, nor require it.
But this is a great example. Why did they choose to eat the apple? Me even asking the question completely ruins the game of free will (which is nothing more than a game of avoidance: using an undefined concept to avoid a logical conclusion). No answer you could possibly give would do anything other than explain the PARTICULAR nature of Adam and Eve such that we have no other questions about why. The very IDEA of explaining why they chose to do it leaves no room for "free will." The only other alternative you have is simply NOT explaining it at all.
"If you ask "why" enough times eventually a physical answer can't be found, either you are content with that, or you appeal to a (unprovable) metaphysical explanation."
I don't mind in theory the idea of supplying a metaphysical explanation. But in this case, it seems to basically be a bunch of handwaving to cover up the reality that no explanation is forthcoming or even conceptually possible. The escape here is not an escape from determinism, but from logic and coherent ideas.
This comes up time and time again in theology: there's this constant air of superiority about how "theological" explanations can explain things like morality and choice... but when you actually ask what those explanations are, they never actually get delivered. They are all just clever restatements of ignorance, or simply the very sort of bold arbitrary assertions we just scoffed at perviously.
The rest of your accusations are, well, nonsense too. We have lots and lots of good evidence for all of those things, and more importantly, the one and only interpretation it supports (evolution via common descent) has held up against new evidence and new methods. You simply declaring the opposite is, well, not very convincing.
You don't seem to understand what science is at all: your understanding of "theory" is a common and very basic misunderstanding that really casts doubt on pretty much everything you have to say. All of science ultimately involves theorizing, and by theorizing we mean constructing larger scale explanations of phenomena, not, as you seem to imply, speculation.
I also don't know what you think you mean by "Origins" (capitalized) but science studies things like the origins of various species and ultimately of life precisely because there is testable evidence regarding the question.
Biologists do not think that modern amoeba are primitive, so I'm not sure why you are accusing them of doing so.
You seem to be under the misapprehension that the only sort of evidence worth anything are personal accounts of human witnesses seeing things with their eyeballs.
That's not the case: physical evidence can not only be very good well-established evidence, but can even be superior to direct eye-witness, especially in cases where there are converging lines of independent evidence, which is probably the strongest forms of evidence that there is.
That is, assuming you are sincere in the first place: a lot of people just try to troll by making all these claims about evolution being a religion and pretending to be creationists.
Whenever someone mentions ID, they almost always mean the modern movement, whose core figures are the Discovery Institute, Philip Johnson, Bill Dembski, Michael Behe, etc. Most people do NOT mean, by Intelligent Design, things like theistic evolution.
"No, I can't tell you functionally what it is, what it does, or how it works, but neither can I tell you functionally what a vacuum is - again, not a meaningless concept."
But that's simply not true. You can tell me all sorts of different characteristics of vacuums and dry and so forth in all sorts of ways that you cannot tell me what free will is.
For all you've explained about what it is, one could object to anything on the basis of a totally unexplained concept. The sun is not actually nuclear, you see, because of foopharrah! What's foopharrah, exactly? Well, I can't tell you functionally what it is, does, or how it makes me correct: but its VERY meaningful because it demonstrates that I'm right about the sun, and oh, say, German morality depends on it.
The above argument is profoundly silly. In exactly the same way that the usage of "free will" is.
"Of course not, because choice depends on free will, imagining making a choice with free will disabled is like imagining gravity without mass, the concepts are inextricably linked. But just because I can't imagine what gravity would be like in the absence of mass, doesn't make the concept of gravity useless."
But I can explain why gravity and mass are important and linked as concepts. You cannot do the same for free will and choice. Not even conceptually: as I said, you cannot describe what it is to choose A vs. B (i.e. what happens when I choose A and you choose B, and describe why we made different choices) such that you can explain what free will is or why it's necessary to the process. All you do is simply keep insisting that it is, without explaining WHAT it is or what role it plays in the process of making choices.
There are perfectly sensible ways to talk about making choices as a process, of course: the fact that some outcome is predetermined by it's program does not mean that a wholly deterministic or even a partly deterministic partly random thing cannot be said to consider two options and then choose them. You can insist that they are not "philosophically" really choices, but I don't think you can really explain what that means either: you have presented nothing with which we can compare and contrast.
"True, but that's what I mean when I say that free will is currently, and possibly perpetually untestable, the same could be said for string theory."
Again, I don't see how you are getting there. String theory is _pragmatically_ untestable in several ways, but that doesn't mean that it isn't at least a fairly well described ideas that's at least distinguishable from other theories conceptually. Free will doesn't even get anywhere near that stage: it never gets off the drawing boards as a _concept_.
"On the contrary, free-will is necessary for (Judeo-Christian) conceptions of morality, only if we are free to choose are we responsible for our actions."
Read over this sentence and notice that it is basically incoherent. Only if we are free FROM WHAT??? Ourselves? How can we be free from our own particular natures and yet still have any connection or responsibility to the choices we make? What is the difference between you and I such that we make two different choices? ANY attempt to explain the difference is pretty much the death knell for the "free" half of free will: suddenly we have a causal difference that traces back to some essential difference in our natures. But NOT explaining the difference is ALSO a death knell for the other half, because then we have no cause to ascribe the "will" part to any being in particular.
Again, there is a basic confusion of concepts of here. It DOES make sense to speak of the freedom to choose when what we are implying is that "we" are not being forced into making some choice or another (i.e. a gun to our head, etc.) But that's clearly not the sense you mean, because your account of the necessity of free will seems to apply to the process of making a choice INTERNALLY: it's a process that somehow free... OF ITSELF. And that's right where
"The question of whether we have free will isn't really abstract, it's just currently, and possibly perpetually untestable."
The problem is not testability at all: the concept itself is the problem LONG before we get to the state of asking whether it is the case in humans or not. The question has nothing to do with determinism: we can imagine a non-deterministic universe/humans or any mix of the two, and free will still doesn't make any sense as a concept.
The basic problem is this:
We have agents that make choices (small c): there are two options to choose from and some set of agents choose A and some choose B. The question is why, and how that explanation changes agent to agent. For a computer, the explanation can be very simple: it's programmed such that various conditions determine the choice (these explanations can become extremely complex of course).
Now, the claim that humans are unlike this in some fundamental way (that they have something called "free will") is actually just a negative claim: it doesn't explain what is different about how humans make choices (i.e. why one chooses A and another B) such that they are not like the standard choosing example we understand: all it is is a reaction against that example. But at no point is it explained what "free will" actually IS or what role it plays in the process of making a choice. You can't tell me functionally what it is or what it does. That's what I mean about a non-concept. There's no way to imagine a human being making a choice with "free will" enabled, and then imagining it with free-will disabled for a comparison, because there's no concept there to think about (don't get confused either with ideas about external forms of taking away free will, such as comic book mind control: we're talking about the INTERNAL processes of choicemaking, not someone externally forcing one choice or another)
But it gets even worse. Again, forget material determinism or anything else: imagine anything you like: even just conceptually, the very act of trying to explain what free will is or does is self-defeating: a explanation will involve some description of how the choice was made (a particular choice instead of another) and thus trace the choice made back to some particular _nature_ of the chooser.
And still it gets worse. While it makes sense to note that we are free to choose amongst various alternatives without being EXTERNALLY forced to make one choice or another, the claimed concept of free will purports to be more than that: that we are free from, essentially, our selves. But this actually makes things like moral judgment impossible: it breaks the link of responsibility for choices. If there is no "why" for why agent 1 makes a different choice than agent 2 (and free will makes a "why" impossible not just in practice, but in theory, period) then on what possible basis are they to be judged. We have no way of assigning different responsibilities to different agents when there is no explanation, and can never have an explanation (because explanations would be anathema to free will), as to why one made a good choice and the other a bad choice. We're judging outcomes that have no actual causal links back to the agents that caused them.
In a lot of those cases, the people telling the story leave out or misrepresent key details (you don't name the case, but there is one oft cited case in which it is claimed that the person was born blind, but in fact was not: they became legally blind in childhood). You also seem to be confusing a bunch of different NDE cases together because you seem to be describing the Pam Reynolds case in parts of it, but she wasn't blind at all. Again, a lot about this case is misrepresented to make it sound far more amazing and inexplicable than it actually was.
And then those neurologists went and tested that hypothesis, and they turned out to be correct. We can turn the "tunnel to the other side" experience on and off in people's brains pretty much at will, without ever bringing them anywhere near death.
It's like the famous Pam Reynolds NDE case. It sounds mysterious and crazy until you figure out from the timeline that her near "death" experience began before the decision to go ahead with a cardiac arrest/blood cooldown proceedure was even made: at the time she was supposedly flying towards heaven, she was merely doped up on lots of aethesia drugs, which generally make for some pretty crazy vivid hallucinations if they don't put you under far enough.
Um, because the system that gives rise to my consciousness isn't connected to yours?
You've been reading too much theology and or philosophy, where vaguely defined abstract concepts are equivocated all over the map to reach vague and nonsensical conclusions.
No one has ever explained what free will is or how it works in the first place: whether or not determinism is true is irrelevant. It's just as nonsensical with non-determinism or anything else. And yet people base entire theories of morality off this non-concept. Go figure.
"The idea that personality or "mind" being in and of itself not physical is not that far fetched"
Only in the same sense that it's not far fetched that a troop of keebler elves lives in my underwear drawer baking cookies BUT ONLY WHEN IM NOT LOOKING. In other words, anything's possible, but there's no reason to believe it, and most of the cases made for it and claimed evidences of it are generally a load of bs.
"How is it possible to walk on water? I BELIEVE that Jesus did."
When then you've pretty much undermined your whole case. It isn't necessary for any of this stuff to actually BE true: all one needs to do is believe its true, and apparently that's satisfying enough.
"Did He arise from death, after three days, without refrigeration or other modern medical technology? I believe He did and many have died for that belief."
And many have died for the belief that God has like, a big bag full of virgins from which he doles em out upon your martyr's death. So?
Slashdot Mirror
The really amusing and ironic thing here is that if adult stem cell therapies develop to fruition, the result will be.... cells that are essentially like embryonic stem cells, to the point where you could implant them in a womb and they could grow into a person! That means that there are hundreds of thousands of "potential people" in your body right now that you, with your murderous refusal to allow them to develop, are denying the potential life they deserve!
The reality is that human sexual reproduction is just a subset of asexual reproduction. There is no start of new life: we are as much simply biomass that buds into new individuals as any other biological organism, we just happen to have a process of gene juggling included to complicate matters.
I belong to an organization called the Snowflaky society that demands that everyone have unprotected sex at every opportunity so as to minimize their murder of potential people.
Think about it: my parents ALMOST didn't have sex the night I was conceived, BUT THEN THEY DID!!!!
I really dodged a bullet there: my life was in the balance, but they made the right decision and decided to save me from eternal oblivion. Phew.
"Adult stem cells, I'm told, have had lots of applications (hence the research money available for it). It's the embryonic stem cells that don't seem to have as many applications."
Even researchers that are against embryonic stem cell research still admit that embryonic research is extremely promising and important insofar as our knowledge goes.
Saying that because adult stem cells are productive that this invalidates any benefit from embryonic stem cell research is like saying that because we can cure cancer we shouldn't bother trying to cure AIDS.
"I know embryonics are in the grey area, but the willingness of people to cannibalize babies just seems wrong, in general."
IMHO, an embryo is only in a "gray area" if you happen to be a complete loon. A bunch of cells without ANY of the functional characteristics of a person is as far on the clearly not of moral concern side of things as one can get. A fetus is very very legitimately on the gray area side of things. Something with no nervous system, that could subsequently develop into any number of fetuses later on, or none, and has no concerns, feelings, or even nervous system, much less one that is developed enough to have experiences and interests, is not.
Ah yes: because someone has a dream where a lobster is chucked at him by a watery tart, all of a sudden it's no longer moral to stone your bride to death on her father's doorstep if you discover she isn't a virgin.
Compelling reasoning indeed.
Honestly, they didn't have much choice. Many of the claims made by the early Christians were so preposterous to educated Jews that it's no wonder the movement had so little success with them. Most of Jesus' followers were either illiterate and mostly ignorant of rabbinical Scripture, or cranks and outsiders, like Paul. Not a single major rabbi from the time converted to Christianity or even felt that it's claims passed the laugh test (mostly because the definition and veracity of a messiah were very clear, and Jesus fulfilled none of them: his followers tried to invent a whole bunch of subsidiary prophecies he was supposed to have fulfilled in order to draw attention from the reality that all the main qualifications were very obviously missing).
The founding fathers did not hate religion. The major ones were neither orthodox Christians nor deists (though ironically, many of the orthodox Christians at the time went as far as to clal them atheists, despite the fact that they were not).
What they did understand, however, was that religion and government were both better off the more they were allowed to simply operate without any special secretarian authority over the other.
What the hell are you talking about? Crosses ARE allowed on individual graves in memorial cemeteries for goodness sakes.
Like many people, I think you are mightily confused about the nature of endorsement and accommodation and what people want.
The basic doctrine that most SOCAS groups advocate is that the government should not use its authority to specially privilege one religion over another: it should be religiously neutral. That doesn't mean, however, that it cannot give reasonable accomodation to the needs of religious observance done by individuals, or in spaces in which all individuals are equally allowed to express religious or any other ideas. The basic rule of thumb is that if you want a government space to have religious expression, it has to become an open forum where all religious expression is equally allowed. Likewise, basic and reasonable accomodation must be made so that people's religious beliefs do not preclude them from taking part: that is NOT the same thing as endorsing them: it's recognizing that they have particular needs and accomodating those needs of individual citizens acting as individual citizens.
It cannot and should not be able to create places where one and only one religion is held up as official.
This is mostly because countries like Thailand don't much care if these sorts of treatments have terrible side-effects: they consider their citizens expendable in the pursuit of profit and business.
Have no fear though, if a Republican wins in 2008, America is sure to head in that direction eventually.
No, I'm afraid not. In science, the word theory refers to the idea that many different concepts are all combined to form an explanation for something. You keep trying to pretend that it has something to do with speculation or interpretation, and it does not. That's not how it works.
We CAN talk about how we might interpret various facts. But that discussion is not, in science, merely a matter of personal preferences: in science, we go and test the evidence to figure out which interpretations are supported by the evidence and which are not.
You also keep insisting that we need to "see" things, as if with eyeballs. This is simply wrong. What we need is evidence. All of the evidence is consistent with the mainstream idea of fossil formation (and, in fact, in this case, you happen to be just plain wrong in any case: we can and do observe the formation of fossils in every stage of the process).
The idea (not interpretation) that fossils were made rapidly very recently does not fit the evidence. It goes against everything we have learned about chemistry. It is inconsistent with a large number of very different sorts of physical findings from all over the world (physical findings that instead all converge and fit with the one and only "interpretation" that does explain and fit with all the evidence).
Why you are correct that there are certain basic assumptions about natural consistency, these assumptions are no different than the ones you make when you assume that your bed is made of matresses and not solar plasma, and so it is safe to lie upon night after night without fear of yourself being set on fire. You are welcome to reject those basic assumptions of the uniformity of natural laws, but at the cost that you cannot from that point on even pretend that this messageboard exists or that your keyboard might not turn into a snake the next time you touch it. In short, you can only get away from those assumptions by basically eradicating all knowledge, not JUST the knowledge you for religious reasons do not like.
Furthermore, we can in fact test many of these assumptions in limited ways against, again, the evidence. If the rate of nuclear decay were once much higher, for instance, it would be immediately apparently because of the much higher degrees of latent radiation in everything around us as well as the extreme damage this would have caused all sorts of things.
"Just because we can't test or verify a metaphysical concept doesn't make it silly, doesn't make it useless to think about."
You've missed the point. The problem is that we CAN'T THINK ABOUT IT because we cannot talk about something unless we have some concept in our minds the words refer to. In this case, all we seem to have are the words: the purported concept itself is nowhere to be found. When we try to examine it, it seems at best to become something of a square circle. That is, it makes no sense to speak of whether or not we can "test" or "verify" whether square circles exist or not: the very concept itself prevents us from having any idea what it is that we're looking for. This is what makes most debates about Free Will nigh incoherent: no one on any side of the debate has any idea what it is they are talking about. We might as well debate whether Snargles are necessary for rain.
And look at your definition:
"Free will is the act of selecting between to options, that is neither predetermined (causal) nor random."
Don't you see how this definition practically cancels itself out into absurdity? The whole purported purpose of Free Will is to allow us to credit a choice TO a particular someone and yet not to credit the state of that someone to anything other than itself. In other words, it's nothing but a continual removal and avoidance of the very question its trying to answer: who or what is responsible for the choice made, and how. And act, a willing of something IS itself a determination: it makes no sense at all to even speak of determinations being "not predetermined." Not predetermined by WHAT?!
This is my core assertion: the concept relies on a mistaken application of the concept of the freedom of an agent to the agent itself. It's like an incomplete sentence. It's like saying that "walked to the bank." Um: WHO walked to the bank? Free Will is the same way: my choices are "not predetermined"? How in any sense can they then be "my" choices, or anyone's for that matter??
I've put it to you again and again that if you can't give SOME answer to that question, even in the vaguest most conceptual sense, then you are simply supplying nonsense terms. I don't think you've even tried to meet that challenge.
"Can you supply one metaphysical explanation to anything, that couldn't be objected to on the same grounds that you object to free will?"
Whether or not metaphysics is objectionable or not is a red herring: how would we ever know? A better question for you would be, can YOU supply any objection to my metaphysical concept of "Goofaroo" which proves definitively that Free Will does not exist? Goofaroo is a basic component of choice, after all, because that's how I define it.
"Your declaring that you had or have evidence is, well, not convincing."
The convincing part is that the evidence is there: you only have to go out and look. You've already basically admitted that you haven't. I've looked at all the evidence, and I've formed my own opinion. You, I don't think actually are aware of the evidence, or even how science works in the first place. THAT is why you are unconvincing.
"When one has actual evidence, they present it."
Or they just point out that its out there to look at, if you're actually interested. There are countless good resources with which you can learn about the subject. But I don't think you are interested, are you? You're basically asking me to sit you down and teach you basic biology and then work from there. That actually might be sort of fun, but since you seem more interested in ranting and raving, I very much doubt you'd listen to anything I have to say.
It's true that the mere number of informed people who agree with me doesn't prove anything by itself. But there are good reasons WHY those informed people agree with me, and in this case that's because your ideas don't pass the laugh test. You don't have to take my word for it, but figuring this out is going to involve you doing the hard work of learning about the subject: not just waiting for a slashdot post to inform you.
"Thus far in history, to date, there has never bee a scrap of unambiguous evidence discovered which can not be explained by a Creator."
This is just a pointless claim. A hypothetical Creator could do anything, leave ANY sort of evidence at all. That makes that proposition untestable: and as outside the realm of science as the claim that the universe began yesterday (complete with our false memories of a past long before it).
What we DO have is evidence that points unambiguously to a particular set of conclusions. If you want to argue that this is all a grand trick by some universal trickster to just fool us all, okay, but so what? That doesn't change what the evidence says. Try going into a court of law and arguing that the defendant was framed by a demon who snapped his fingers and made all the blood, DNA, and physical evidence for the murder appear in a puff of smoke. See how long it takes you to get laughed out of court. It's the exact same principle.
"NOTHING happens by accident. Simple as that. Called a LAW, not a theory."
Really? Which law is that? Is it a law of chemistry? Biology? Physics?
And did you really just embarrass yourself by implying that laws are contrasted with theories? Do you not understand that theories often encompass laws, and do not, in fact "turn into" laws at any point?
"I can defend my statement that evolutionism is useless, unproductive deadly, dangerous and purely religious."
I doubt it. I don't even see much evidence that you even understand the basics of evolutionary theory, much less back up what seem to be purely tactical accusations about it being "religious."
"I noticed that you did not answer which of the four scenarios best fits how you believe we got here. Non-committal?"
Your question doesn't even make sense. We don't know, and may never be able to know, anything relevant to the question of how the universe began, or even if it ever began. We don't have any evidence about the matter, and any discussion about what is "more likely" is pointless: all of the physical laws we are familiar with come from observations of things WITHIN the universe: we have no idea what sort of conditions restrict or are involved with the universe itself.
And of course, that question has nothing at all to do with evolution in the first place.
"Here's a new one. Start with a tadpole and explain metamorphism into a frog from purely evolutionary means."
Tadpoles do not evolve into frogs. Did you mean to ask how things like distinct and different life stages for organisms evolved?
"Or take flight in four groups and explain how it naturall
"That's right and just fine. Why then is the THEORY of evolution presented as fact in our high school text books?"
Seriously, are you joking? This is such a basic and common misunderstanding that I'm STILL shocked to see it come up time and time again.
Scientific "theory" is not the opposite of facts. Theories in science are COMPOSED of facts (and laws, and and so on). Theories NEVER "become" facts: not even theories that are 100% deductively proven (like, for instance Number Theory). This is just a basic and honestly sort of embarrassing confusion of terminology on your part. "Theory" is not a measurement of certainty. If you think it is, then you need to go back and learn some more about science first.
"Why is the THEORY of intelligent design not given equal time?"
Because ID doesn't have a scientific theory: it doesn't even have a testable set of core claims to begin with, much less have any supporting evidence. You might as well ask why astrology isn't given equal time, or why Harry Potter spells aren't given equal time in science class, or Lord of the Rings history isn't taught in history class.
"It is because evolution is NOT science, but a religion."
So, wait: your explanation for why a basically untestable and ultimately religious idea isn't taught in science class is that OTHER parts of science are religious? Really? Are you kidding me? Forget the pot calling the kettle black, the pot is calling the porcelain black here.
"You don't expect the Q'ran to be taught in a catholic sunday school class do you? So why should religious evolutionists teach intelligent design or creationism in their so called "science classes"?"
You are the one accusing evolution of being a religion. But an accusation doesn't make it true, and in this case, the accusation is false.
Again, the reason ID isn't taught in science class is because a) it's not testable, even in theory and b) it's basically in practice just a bunch of warmed over creationist arguments meant to advance religion, and the whole point of public education is that it has to be religiously neutral.
Again, it's hard to tell if you are serious of if you are putting me on for fun.
Everything about the formation of fossils is in accord with what we know of the physical sciences, and in fact we DO have lots of examples of relatively "modern" fossils in various states of mineralization. Heck, in some places, we have entire beds of dead creatures fossilizing right on top of each other year after year.
Again, most of the claims you folks make seem to rely on near total ignorance of what the evidence is for things like fossils is or what's out there. You even seem to think that fossils are generally composed of living material, which they are not. So you've pretty much admitted that a) you have no idea what you are talking about... but b) you aren't about to let a little thing like a complete lack of knowledge about what you are talking about stop you from drawing conclusions!
"The salt content of the oceans is far to low, for the earth to be as old as the evolutionists claim. "
This is an old Morris argument: it's based on a false model of the interaction of salt in the ocean that simply ignores processes that remove salt. You can make anything sound ridiculous if you simply ignore or misrepresent whole swaths of evidence. You might as well argue that rain is impossible because clouds should just evaporate and distribute evenly in the atmosphere. That's just as silly and ignorant.
"The moon still recedes from the earth a little each year."
Again, this is just another goofy argument that's been debunked a million times. It's almost embarrassing that you fall for this stuff, because it shows that you basically are satisfied to read a bunch of creationist claims without spending any time checking to see whether they actually make any sense. Not a single astronomer I've ever read thinks this argument has any merit, but I guess they must all be part of the same vast conspiracy to cover up what you alone understand.
"Free will and determinism are exactly as useful as any other metaphysical concept. If you happen to think metaphysics and philosophy are useless, then we'll have to agree to disagree."
I said that free will in particular is an incoherent concept.
"Really, tell me something about a vacuum assuming for a second there is no concept of matter. It can't be done in precisely the same way that free will can't be described assuming that there is no concept of determinism."
Again, this is nonsense. Vacuums are negatively defined, but that doesn't mean that they are without implications, have predictable interactions with matter, and so forth. I can at least distinguish a vacuum from, say, a boat (here, in this region of space, we have near total vacuum, and here we have a boat, and here's how you can tell), and I can define what it is, and discuss what it's like for there to be one or not be one. You can't do any of those things for free will.
You keep claiming that determinism has something to do with free will, but so far you've failed to explain what the actual link is. I'm not stuck on determinism: assume that the universe is characterized by indeterminism. Okay: so now what the heck is the concept of free will? What role does it play in choice making?
"At some point physical randomness gives way to metaphysical free choice, and no one will ever be able to put a finger on precisely where that is, but again it is exactly as useful as any other philosophical concept."
How? Good grief: you've STILL said absolutely nothing about what it is or what it explains about anything. Either a choice is determined by something or it isn't (the only two possibilities, excluded middle): we are ALREADY talking about choice, and THEN asking why the choice happened one way or the other. So, what is your answer? Why all the stalling?
Far from not being able to put a finger on the boundary between the "two," you have yet to explain what we are putting our finger on. Nor does there seem to be any explanation possible even conceptually.
"It starts with Adam and Eve, we exist in the state that we do, because they choose to eat the apple."
Again, the actual text of the Bible doesn't talk about free will here, nor require it.
But this is a great example. Why did they choose to eat the apple? Me even asking the question completely ruins the game of free will (which is nothing more than a game of avoidance: using an undefined concept to avoid a logical conclusion). No answer you could possibly give would do anything other than explain the PARTICULAR nature of Adam and Eve such that we have no other questions about why. The very IDEA of explaining why they chose to do it leaves no room for "free will." The only other alternative you have is simply NOT explaining it at all.
"If you ask "why" enough times eventually a physical answer can't be found, either you are content with that, or you appeal to a (unprovable) metaphysical explanation."
I don't mind in theory the idea of supplying a metaphysical explanation. But in this case, it seems to basically be a bunch of handwaving to cover up the reality that no explanation is forthcoming or even conceptually possible. The escape here is not an escape from determinism, but from logic and coherent ideas.
This comes up time and time again in theology: there's this constant air of superiority about how "theological" explanations can explain things like morality and choice... but when you actually ask what those explanations are, they never actually get delivered. They are all just clever restatements of ignorance, or simply the very sort of bold arbitrary assertions we just scoffed at perviously.
Now, if only you could translate those "points" into coherent English, then we might even be able to have a discussion.
"Darwinism is religion and not science. "
Seems like a pretty weak accusation.
The rest of your accusations are, well, nonsense too. We have lots and lots of good evidence for all of those things, and more importantly, the one and only interpretation it supports (evolution via common descent) has held up against new evidence and new methods. You simply declaring the opposite is, well, not very convincing.
You don't seem to understand what science is at all: your understanding of "theory" is a common and very basic misunderstanding that really casts doubt on pretty much everything you have to say. All of science ultimately involves theorizing, and by theorizing we mean constructing larger scale explanations of phenomena, not, as you seem to imply, speculation.
I also don't know what you think you mean by "Origins" (capitalized) but science studies things like the origins of various species and ultimately of life precisely because there is testable evidence regarding the question.
Biologists do not think that modern amoeba are primitive, so I'm not sure why you are accusing them of doing so.
You seem to be under the misapprehension that the only sort of evidence worth anything are personal accounts of human witnesses seeing things with their eyeballs.
That's not the case: physical evidence can not only be very good well-established evidence, but can even be superior to direct eye-witness, especially in cases where there are converging lines of independent evidence, which is probably the strongest forms of evidence that there is.
That is, assuming you are sincere in the first place: a lot of people just try to troll by making all these claims about evolution being a religion and pretending to be creationists.
Whenever someone mentions ID, they almost always mean the modern movement, whose core figures are the Discovery Institute, Philip Johnson, Bill Dembski, Michael Behe, etc. Most people do NOT mean, by Intelligent Design, things like theistic evolution.
"No, I can't tell you functionally what it is, what it does, or how it works, but neither can I tell you functionally what a vacuum is - again, not a meaningless concept."
But that's simply not true. You can tell me all sorts of different characteristics of vacuums and dry and so forth in all sorts of ways that you cannot tell me what free will is.
For all you've explained about what it is, one could object to anything on the basis of a totally unexplained concept. The sun is not actually nuclear, you see, because of foopharrah! What's foopharrah, exactly? Well, I can't tell you functionally what it is, does, or how it makes me correct: but its VERY meaningful because it demonstrates that I'm right about the sun, and oh, say, German morality depends on it.
The above argument is profoundly silly. In exactly the same way that the usage of "free will" is.
"Of course not, because choice depends on free will, imagining making a choice with free will disabled is like imagining gravity without mass, the concepts are inextricably linked. But just because I can't imagine what gravity would be like in the absence of mass, doesn't make the concept of gravity useless."
But I can explain why gravity and mass are important and linked as concepts. You cannot do the same for free will and choice. Not even conceptually: as I said, you cannot describe what it is to choose A vs. B (i.e. what happens when I choose A and you choose B, and describe why we made different choices) such that you can explain what free will is or why it's necessary to the process. All you do is simply keep insisting that it is, without explaining WHAT it is or what role it plays in the process of making choices.
There are perfectly sensible ways to talk about making choices as a process, of course: the fact that some outcome is predetermined by it's program does not mean that a wholly deterministic or even a partly deterministic partly random thing cannot be said to consider two options and then choose them. You can insist that they are not "philosophically" really choices, but I don't think you can really explain what that means either: you have presented nothing with which we can compare and contrast.
"True, but that's what I mean when I say that free will is currently, and possibly perpetually untestable, the same could be said for string theory."
Again, I don't see how you are getting there. String theory is _pragmatically_ untestable in several ways, but that doesn't mean that it isn't at least a fairly well described ideas that's at least distinguishable from other theories conceptually. Free will doesn't even get anywhere near that stage: it never gets off the drawing boards as a _concept_.
"On the contrary, free-will is necessary for (Judeo-Christian) conceptions of morality, only if we are free to choose are we responsible for our actions."
Read over this sentence and notice that it is basically incoherent. Only if we are free FROM WHAT??? Ourselves? How can we be free from our own particular natures and yet still have any connection or responsibility to the choices we make? What is the difference between you and I such that we make two different choices? ANY attempt to explain the difference is pretty much the death knell for the "free" half of free will: suddenly we have a causal difference that traces back to some essential difference in our natures. But NOT explaining the difference is ALSO a death knell for the other half, because then we have no cause to ascribe the "will" part to any being in particular.
Again, there is a basic confusion of concepts of here. It DOES make sense to speak of the freedom to choose when what we are implying is that "we" are not being forced into making some choice or another (i.e. a gun to our head, etc.) But that's clearly not the sense you mean, because your account of the necessity of free will seems to apply to the process of making a choice INTERNALLY: it's a process that somehow free... OF ITSELF. And that's right where
"The question of whether we have free will isn't really abstract, it's just currently, and possibly perpetually untestable."
The problem is not testability at all: the concept itself is the problem LONG before we get to the state of asking whether it is the case in humans or not. The question has nothing to do with determinism: we can imagine a non-deterministic universe/humans or any mix of the two, and free will still doesn't make any sense as a concept.
The basic problem is this:
We have agents that make choices (small c): there are two options to choose from and some set of agents choose A and some choose B. The question is why, and how that explanation changes agent to agent. For a computer, the explanation can be very simple: it's programmed such that various conditions determine the choice (these explanations can become extremely complex of course).
Now, the claim that humans are unlike this in some fundamental way (that they have something called "free will") is actually just a negative claim: it doesn't explain what is different about how humans make choices (i.e. why one chooses A and another B) such that they are not like the standard choosing example we understand: all it is is a reaction against that example. But at no point is it explained what "free will" actually IS or what role it plays in the process of making a choice. You can't tell me functionally what it is or what it does. That's what I mean about a non-concept. There's no way to imagine a human being making a choice with "free will" enabled, and then imagining it with free-will disabled for a comparison, because there's no concept there to think about (don't get confused either with ideas about external forms of taking away free will, such as comic book mind control: we're talking about the INTERNAL processes of choicemaking, not someone externally forcing one choice or another)
But it gets even worse. Again, forget material determinism or anything else: imagine anything you like: even just conceptually, the very act of trying to explain what free will is or does is self-defeating: a explanation will involve some description of how the choice was made (a particular choice instead of another) and thus trace the choice made back to some particular _nature_ of the chooser.
And still it gets worse. While it makes sense to note that we are free to choose amongst various alternatives without being EXTERNALLY forced to make one choice or another, the claimed concept of free will purports to be more than that: that we are free from, essentially, our selves. But this actually makes things like moral judgment impossible: it breaks the link of responsibility for choices. If there is no "why" for why agent 1 makes a different choice than agent 2 (and free will makes a "why" impossible not just in practice, but in theory, period) then on what possible basis are they to be judged. We have no way of assigning different responsibilities to different agents when there is no explanation, and can never have an explanation (because explanations would be anathema to free will), as to why one made a good choice and the other a bad choice. We're judging outcomes that have no actual causal links back to the agents that caused them.
In a lot of those cases, the people telling the story leave out or misrepresent key details (you don't name the case, but there is one oft cited case in which it is claimed that the person was born blind, but in fact was not: they became legally blind in childhood). You also seem to be confusing a bunch of different NDE cases together because you seem to be describing the Pam Reynolds case in parts of it, but she wasn't blind at all. Again, a lot about this case is misrepresented to make it sound far more amazing and inexplicable than it actually was.
And then those neurologists went and tested that hypothesis, and they turned out to be correct. We can turn the "tunnel to the other side" experience on and off in people's brains pretty much at will, without ever bringing them anywhere near death.
It's like the famous Pam Reynolds NDE case. It sounds mysterious and crazy until you figure out from the timeline that her near "death" experience began before the decision to go ahead with a cardiac arrest/blood cooldown proceedure was even made: at the time she was supposedly flying towards heaven, she was merely doped up on lots of aethesia drugs, which generally make for some pretty crazy vivid hallucinations if they don't put you under far enough.
Um, because the system that gives rise to my consciousness isn't connected to yours?
You've been reading too much theology and or philosophy, where vaguely defined abstract concepts are equivocated all over the map to reach vague and nonsensical conclusions.
No one has ever explained what free will is or how it works in the first place: whether or not determinism is true is irrelevant. It's just as nonsensical with non-determinism or anything else. And yet people base entire theories of morality off this non-concept. Go figure.
"The idea that personality or "mind" being in and of itself not physical is not that far fetched"
Only in the same sense that it's not far fetched that a troop of keebler elves lives in my underwear drawer baking cookies BUT ONLY WHEN IM NOT LOOKING. In other words, anything's possible, but there's no reason to believe it, and most of the cases made for it and claimed evidences of it are generally a load of bs.
"How is it possible to walk on water? I BELIEVE that Jesus did."
When then you've pretty much undermined your whole case. It isn't necessary for any of this stuff to actually BE true: all one needs to do is believe its true, and apparently that's satisfying enough.
"Did He arise from death, after three days, without refrigeration or other modern medical technology? I believe He did and many have died for that belief."
And many have died for the belief that God has like, a big bag full of virgins from which he doles em out upon your martyr's death. So?