God is integral to ID as it is postulated in this country; talk to an average ID proponent about little green men, and he'll think you're out of your mind. In Kitzmiller v Dover, the judge decided based on the evidence that ID was an obvious attempt to get religion taught in the public schools. But lets assume you're serious.
Nearly all arguments for ID talk about "the limits of scientific inquiry"...Are you suggesting that hypothetical aliens are outside the realm of our investigation? That's highly unlikely. It's far more unlikely that they could create anything that is ultimately irreducible to our inquiries.
And I fail to see how simple genetic modification translates to the level of consistent macro evolution on this planet, as depicted by the fossil record. I also fail to see any reason to suspect that there is anything in our heritage that would necessitate a designer; this is something you will have to show before your argument can be taken seriously.
Remember, you're going to have to explain the fossil record. If there is no evolution, then your hypothetical designers were hanging around for billions of years, churning out fractionally different animal types...They're still doing it today apparently.
Additionally you're going to have to explain why, if the designer is intelligent, 99% of all species are extinct, and the ones that aren't have unused organs, a la, the spleen, and vestigal wings, in the case of a goodly number of waterfowl.
A dog just wants to be a dog. A chicken just wants to be a chicken. A pig a pig. A frog a frog.
But a man wants to be more than a man. For the whole existence of our species we have striven to be more than just what we are. In everything where we have ever fallen short, we have built tools to extend our reach. Every comparison is upward. We have no final goals; when we achieve, we immediately try to take the next step.
We have ideals. People live in pursuit of dreams...We give up sex for them sometimes! We die for them when we must.
We have it in us to be truly animals. Hardly any doubt of that; we see it everywhere. Dogs, chickens, and pigs, as far as the eye can see.
But I'll set my sights a little higher, so that one day, perhaps, we can be something more.
If there is an actual provable god, then that would be constant and consistent. That's the whole point of proof.
Listing a few tautologies that have nothing to do with anything is hardly going to persuade me that Occam is right, when we haven't even finished asking the question yet.
Proof that Jesus lived would be trivial; I'd be surprised if he didn't, considering that there is evidence outside of the bible that he did, in fact, exist.
But I would argue that that has nothing to do with religion, though after repeatedly claiming there was no body, it would be inconvenient to be presented with a body. There is pretty much no way it could ever be identified to the point where 80% of christians wouldn't believe it was a hoax from the bad scientists trying to kill their god.
And attempting to redefine the concept of "faith" to make me wrong isn't much of an argument. There is no proof behind faith; you're believing in the absence of a rational reason to do so. Whatever emotive baggage you chose to load it down with is irrelevant to my point. If you have proof you don't need faith, because you subsequently have a rational reason to believe.
I said that God was ineffable, not Evolution. It's only literal read weenies who think that is ineffable, since we understand it so well.
Frankly, I find the literal-readers to be so flagrantly opposed to everything I believe, that I don't give a damn if it offends you. As far as I'm concerned you don't have a valid point of view; it's only fair, because you believe the exact same thing about me.
I would suggest, in all seriousness, that you could go anywhere and learn about the theory of evolution, if you had a real interest in doing so. As a scientific theory, it has no serious challengers. Sure there are a few scientists who disagree, but finding one of them would be considerably more difficult as they are a tiny minority.
I'd suggest you start with the Origin of Species, just so you know what it is you disagree with...It's almost obscenely boring, because Darwin was obsessed with gathering evidence, and so you have to wade through page after page of documetary evidence.
In fact, most books about evolution are like that; full of evidence. you could read Dawkins, but he's been so driven over the edge by the "there is no evolution" crowd that he's sunk to the point of writing flagrantly anti-god books...Hard to blame him, when a large segment of the population dismiss his entire life's work unread because their religious leaders tell them it's not true.
I love how everyone who has a crackpot theory thinks they're Galileo. The truth of it is, if there had been a real scientific community around Galileo, they'd have agreed with him. His evidence was sound.
There is zero evidence for ID. None. The only arguments I've ever heard in favor of it were arguments against "DE" as you call it, or Evolution as the rest of the world refers to it. Darwin wouldn't recognize much more than the shell of it, these days. He laid the groundwork, but there has been a lot of building since then.
Basically all ID arguments come down to the following: "Evolution doesn't explain X. X is either irreducible or too complex to have come about 'by accident'. Therefore ID is correct, and God exists."
This is not proof. This is not science...It's actually a fallacy: the argument from ignorance. In many cases, the ID objection isn't even rational. ID has no falsifiable hypothesis, it has no positive evidence supporting it. It's not science, by any definition of science I have ever heard.
I always ask, "Do you have any rational, positive evidence to support ID?" And the answer is always no. I have never heard a single thing that wasn't either negative, or trivial. Maybe this will be the first time.
The Problem of Evil is only a problem if you insist on God being Omnipotent and Omnibenevolent; if either of those concepts is tossed, then there is no problem. Or you can sacrifice your supposition that humanity is the center of the universe, and say that god loves all of god's creatures, including ones that may eat you.
Seems like you're pulling a little from Locke; this isn't a perfect world, it's the best possible world. I haven't been able to take that argument seriously since I read Candide "All things are for the best, in this best of all possible worlds."
Finally, I think a lot of people take intervention as a given, which is why the problem of evil is a problem. They don't know why god doesn't save them. I agree that this is a simplistic response, but for most people, faith is pretty simplistic, and a logical argument is little consolation to a person who has lost a spouse or a child.
There are always a few; that's one of the things the "proof" religious types trumpet loudest...That there are scientists who disagree with the majority view. Whether it's ID, or Global Warming, or Dark Matter, or any of a number of drugs and pollutants, there is always a minority view.
It's a good thing; science doesn't need a lot of people sitting around agreeing with each other. The pro-ID science guys are pretty fringe, however.
I highly recommend reading the transcripts of Kitzmiller v Dover. It is the whole debate couched in the form of a political drama, with top notch experts on both sides.
There was not one single objection raised by the pro-ID defendant that was not utterly crushed by scientific evidence.
There is not one single ID argument that doesn't reduce to the argument from ignorance...I cited it so often, it used to be my.sig, before I moved on to other fallacies...Here it is one more time.
Argumentum ad Ignorantiam: Fallacy of taking a statement not provably false and implying that it is therefore true
Irreducible Complexity basically states, "I don't know what is smaller than this, so it's irreducible, and therefore proof for the existence of god." It's a huge fallacy.
Anyway, read Kitzmiller. A lot of the standard ID irreducibles are reduced in there, and the judge is a character.
Ha! Yes, you're quite right. The "Literal Read" as it's called is actually a quite liberal read...They make some pretty broad leaps away from what I would consider mainstream Christianity.
Frankly I think it has a lot to do with the educational requirements of the priesthood in the modern evangelical churches...It was quite a shock to me, raised Catholic as I was, to find that most southern baptist preachers didn't have any formal religious instruction at all, and were perfectly free to preach their own version of the baptist faith within an extremely broad set of guidelines.
I actually have made quite a study of religion, both in and out of academia. I have heard all kinds of arguments for and against the existence of God. As far as I'm concerned, they break down into two categories: Proof, and no Proof.
Now it should be obvious to anyone that there is no scientific proof for the existence of god, and while I know that there are many who think science is complete crap, I am not one of those people. As far as I am concerned, however, there is also no scientific proof against the existence of god. Before the "prove a negative" people jump out of the woodwork, I should say that I would consider a scientifically complete model of the universe that includes no "extra" variables to be a sufficient proof...It's a high standard, but a reasonable one for a scientific proof.
As this is the case, it is my belief that any side who declaims to have "proof" one way or the other to be absolutely out of their fricking minds. This is an opinion I have stated repeatedly for about a decade now. If you check my comment history, you'll find any number of instances of me stating that very opinion here, and I haunt these ID discussions because the debate interests me, often racking up a dozen or more posts.
All that being said, claiming that I know nothing about standard Christian arguments for the existence of god, is a bit ignorant. I once got thrown out of a coffee shop for taking on a professor who was preaching ID to his students; they threw him out too because he got "disruptive". I'd tried to ignore him, but when he started taking natural bridges as "proof for the existence of god", I just couldn't let it slide. The most common "proof" that has been cited to me is the Bible itself, in the classic circular argument.
In my Catholic youth, I often heard the arguments from Faith. They are nearly a central tenet of the Catholic faith, and at no point will you hear a mainstream catholic priest spouting off about concrete "proof" for the existence of God...Logical proofs they will give you, a la Descartes and Anselm, but that's the limit. I have also heard similar arguments from Muslims and Buddhists.
Coming right down to it, I've never heard an argument that didn't boil down to either: "The bible says what god did, and science says how he did it" (this is what I call the argument ex cathedra, since it's been endorsed by no less than three Popes (Pius XII, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI)) or "The bible is how it was done, and science is full of it" which is the root of the Intelligent Design argument, though of course they have pretensions to science. I hear the latter argument all the time, because I live in Georgia, and here they think they really have proof, though I've never seen it.
If you have an argument for the existence of god that doesn't rely on faith or proof, I'd like to hear it. It would be unique in my experience.
I should have said, "Any religious type whose world view is predicated on the assumption that a divine being had a hand in its creation, but who isn't wedded to a literal interpretation of creation set down in a holy book thousands of years ago by a group of religious dogmatists, would view evolution as a miraculous wonder of god."
If you don't believe in God, it would be difficult to immediately jump to the conclusion that a basically chemical process like evolution was strictly divine in nature.
The only place I ever found for a god in my personal cosmology was at the beginning. Some tiny, nearly imperceptable quantum bump that pushed two molecules together, that last atom that bumped into that superdense mass and caused the big bang.
Eh. Sure, there a lots of testimonials about people who have witnessed the power of god in their lives...I don't know of any that lend themselves to experimentation or replication. You may believe that God has touched your life, you may have faith that something is evidence for the existence of a higher being.
But you don't have proof. Proof is something you can hold in your hand, and show to someone else, something that can have only one meaning, only one possible cause.
Robert Frost wrote a poem called "The White Tailed Hornet" basically to put his two cents worth in regarding instincts and evolution: "Once we began to see our images reflected in the mud and even dust...Nothing but fallibility was left us..." Basically, once you stop striving for something higher than yourself, you become no better than an animal.
Frost couldn't see in science a thing greater than himself. It was all about lesser and lesser things, smaller in every way than the ideals he loved.
But it's not about that at all; for many of us, science is about truth, and the glory of humanity, and we view those ideals to be a higher end. A great striving, a noble (nobel?) quest. Something greater.
True believers, and believe is the right word, those who have faith, they look up to an ideal greater than they could ever hope to know, and try in a small way to take some of that into themselves.
Neither of these groups bother me. Hell, there is often overlap. The striving for something greater is what humanity is about.
And then there is the third group. Those who know all there is about the world, and all there is about god, and all there is about science. It's not even only the intelligent design guys, though they annoy me most. They've got the world figured; they know everything about it, and they've pinned it's dessicated body to a piece of felt, and stuck it under glass, where they can point to it every day and declaim how much they "know".
God demands faith. God does not provide proof, because proof kills faith. If you see something that you think is proof of God's existence, you're wrong. He's ineffable. That means you can't effing figure him out.
The arrogance of the goddamn literal read types is just astounding....Anyone else would look at evolution and go, "Damn! That God guy is hella fricking smart! Look at this crap! It's a system for self-improvement built into self-replicating creatures! It's awesome!" but a literal-read weenie will look at it and say, "Don't say nuthin about that in da bible. You must be wrong."
The worst thing that can be said about the literal read types, is that they have nothing to look up to. They know all there is to know about god and everything. So very very sad.
By your logic, there are less jobs now than there were in 1793, which would indicate that there are more than 5.5 billion people on this planet who have no jobs, assuming everyone who was alive in 1793 had a job.
Damn you Eli Whitney! Damn yooooooouuuu!
What really happened is, Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, creating a huge surplus of cotton, reviving the slave industry so they could grow more cotton, kickstarting modern spinning and weaving factories, which produced more clothes, which went to more stores, etc.
At every step in the process, extra jobs were created, and not just a few, but thousands and thousands. People flocked to the factories to work, and why? Because it paid a hell of a lot better than subsistence farming. Sure, a lot of the new jobs sucked, and you know what? We replaced 'em with machines, and those machines created new jobs.
And yea, robotic fruit pickers. You ever picked fruit? It sucks. You bust your ass in the hot sun, toting huge baskets of fruit around, and you gotta hustle because the stuff starts rotting instantly. Hot, sweaty, miserable work. My heart doesn't bleed for people not having to do that anymore! I used to cut tobacco when I was a kid and it was still a popular cash crop; that is about the most miserable thing I've ever done in my whole life. Do I give a damn that people don't grow as much tobacco as they used to? Hell no!
People who romanticize fruit picking, and cotton picking, and god, cotton combing like had to be done before the cotton gin, have no fricking clue what they're talking about. Go do that stuff for a year as your sole source of income, and then you can come talk about how wonderful it is.
Depends on how fat you are, and what you're hunting.
Generally it's possible to gather enough food to keep going. Meat is nice and all, but bugs'll do. Add a few edible plants, and you're good to go.
And come right down to it, even using primitive methods, man was a fricking efficient hunter. If we had overlapped with the dinosaurs, you'd be finding T-Rex thighbones with human teethmarks on 'em, because some crazy caveman somewhere would have figured out a way to catch those bastards, just because he wanted to know what they tasted like.
We're pretty much the same today, but we're hunting the T-Rex's of the mind.
So what? Are there less jobs today than there were then?
Sure, jobs get automated out of existence, but new jobs always open up somewhere. Sure, it's probably not a "thread spinning" job anymore, but you had to be flexible, even back then. The same thing applies today.
You're not seriously suggesting we move back to a time when all thread is hand spun, are you? Hope you don't like owning more than two sets of clothes, and good luck paying for 'em.
Just another damn luddite. "Oh noes, teh machines are eating our SOULS! We should hearken back to the ways of the indians, for surely they were one with teh nature."
Just once I want someone to really take into account what it would mean for society to actually do the stuff they think it should do. Let's drop out of the rat race, lets stop burdening our children with science and math, and just teach them art and the kind of philosophy that has no practical applications.
So what happens? Lets say our technology doesn't decline, but just stays absolutely steady: All the crap we've been trying to outrun for years will catch right up. Global warming? Yup. Anti-biotic resistant bacteria? Yup. Shortage of clean water? Yup. Shortage of resources? Yup. To stay where we are, we have to push through some of this crap...It's a real race to see whether we can beat it before it beats us.
Alternative? Drop our tech back a couple hundred years, go agrarian. We've only picked up, eh, around 5 billion people since then...Better for the world if they starve, right? At least they won't have to be soulless users of math.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I don't feel soulless. Life's a grind, sure, but tell me that hasn't always been the case. Regardless of whether or not I kill a deer today, I'm still going to have dinner; that's a hell of a lot more than most of my ancestors could say. My kid may die of something but it's a hell of a lot less likely than it was even 50 years ago. I travel as far back and forth to work as a strong hiker could do in a day, and it doesn't even take me an hour.
Sure, this isn't the best of times (we hope), but it's not the worst either. We're still solving problems. Air quality sucks, but it doesn't suck half as bad as it did 50 years ago. Computers are still ramping up at a rate that is practically obscene when viewed from an objective distance. Think about the tech 50 years ago; most of us have calculators that crush that...And the tech is still in it's infancy. We're still seeking something better for ourselves, the growth of our minds and our societies and the glory of our species.
Or we could just give up. Go back to being hunter gatherers...If that's even possible.
"Language" as it's used here is a metaphor for the whole digital/computer culture that modern people are steeped in. Basically, they're saying that librarians aren't tech savvy enough, and they need to find some way of participating in the tech culture at a higher level than just "I know what a web page is." Video games might be an example of this, and while I don't necessarily think they're the "best" way to go about it, it will get you more computer facility than taking a bunch of training courses that you'll never put to use.
If you've dealt with a librarian recently, this isn't any surprise to you. They just aren't savvy at what I would consider the "required" level for a position that ought to require extreme information aptitude in this day in age; facility with the Dewey Decimal system ain't going to cut it. You need to know which digital archives are most likely to have pertinent information, and you need to know the best ways to dig through them. You also need to know enough about it that you can help drive intelligent computerization in your library system.
Library sciences is a masters level degree, and it's hard to be a librarian without that degree. They really ought to have a pretty substantial computer requirement, but from what I can tell they don't....Courses like "LBSC 690 Information Technology" would seem to indicate that they actually require some advanced computer work, but looking at the actual syllabus, it looks more like "CS 101 -- How to use Microsoft Office"...That's just not going to cut it.
The reason that the effects were so good is that they were by and large accents, rather than fabricated whole cloth. Big flashy effects still look dated very quickly, because the technology is improving so rapidly. I'd go so far as to say that the original Star Wars series (4-6) will stand up better than the newer series because the limitations of the day forced them to use more "real" models, rather than quickly dated CG.
Blade Runner was subtle; it used environmental effects and models to create a sense of the future that the viewer could fill in with his own imagination.
The point behind Biosphere was to create a naturally self-sustaining system, so they weren't supposed to use CO2 scrubbers or any such similar technology. Additionally, it was determined that the concrete foundations were binding CO2 as they cured (concrete cures for years and years), causing still more problems.
Blah blah blah. It was a total screwup, not just in management, but in pure conception. They needed to start with a working system and then figure out how to make it self sufficient, instead of starting with a system that they thought would work, and trying to live in it indefinitely. Does anyone really think we'd start off with a system that needed no outside inputs? It's not realistic. Basically the only thing they proved is that they didn't do very well at making a self-sustaining system.
Shrug. I learned on java, but it was java on the command line. Had to have a basic working knowledge of unix (Solaris) to do anything; the few projects I had in C used cc, rather than gcc, not that there is a whole lot of difference there.
Having to work from the command line is something I think of as hugely valuable in programming...Helped me out a fricking ton with Java, I tell you, because working with java classpaths and such is weird enough that having to actually type it out will teach you so much more than having Eclipse or Studio One work them out for you automagically. Moving on later to work with apps like Tomcat...You've got to know how to manipulate the raw commands.
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God is integral to ID as it is postulated in this country; talk to an average ID proponent about little green men, and he'll think you're out of your mind. In Kitzmiller v Dover, the judge decided based on the evidence that ID was an obvious attempt to get religion taught in the public schools. But lets assume you're serious.
Nearly all arguments for ID talk about "the limits of scientific inquiry"...Are you suggesting that hypothetical aliens are outside the realm of our investigation? That's highly unlikely. It's far more unlikely that they could create anything that is ultimately irreducible to our inquiries.
And I fail to see how simple genetic modification translates to the level of consistent macro evolution on this planet, as depicted by the fossil record. I also fail to see any reason to suspect that there is anything in our heritage that would necessitate a designer; this is something you will have to show before your argument can be taken seriously.
Remember, you're going to have to explain the fossil record. If there is no evolution, then your hypothetical designers were hanging around for billions of years, churning out fractionally different animal types...They're still doing it today apparently.
Additionally you're going to have to explain why, if the designer is intelligent, 99% of all species are extinct, and the ones that aren't have unused organs, a la, the spleen, and vestigal wings, in the case of a goodly number of waterfowl.
A dog just wants to be a dog. A chicken just wants to be a chicken. A pig a pig. A frog a frog.
But a man wants to be more than a man. For the whole existence of our species we have striven to be more than just what we are. In everything where we have ever fallen short, we have built tools to extend our reach. Every comparison is upward. We have no final goals; when we achieve, we immediately try to take the next step.
We have ideals. People live in pursuit of dreams...We give up sex for them sometimes! We die for them when we must.
We have it in us to be truly animals. Hardly any doubt of that; we see it everywhere. Dogs, chickens, and pigs, as far as the eye can see.
But I'll set my sights a little higher, so that one day, perhaps, we can be something more.
If there is an actual provable god, then that would be constant and consistent. That's the whole point of proof.
Listing a few tautologies that have nothing to do with anything is hardly going to persuade me that Occam is right, when we haven't even finished asking the question yet.
Proof that Jesus lived would be trivial; I'd be surprised if he didn't, considering that there is evidence outside of the bible that he did, in fact, exist.
But I would argue that that has nothing to do with religion, though after repeatedly claiming there was no body, it would be inconvenient to be presented with a body. There is pretty much no way it could ever be identified to the point where 80% of christians wouldn't believe it was a hoax from the bad scientists trying to kill their god.
And attempting to redefine the concept of "faith" to make me wrong isn't much of an argument. There is no proof behind faith; you're believing in the absence of a rational reason to do so. Whatever emotive baggage you chose to load it down with is irrelevant to my point. If you have proof you don't need faith, because you subsequently have a rational reason to believe.
I said that God was ineffable, not Evolution. It's only literal read weenies who think that is ineffable, since we understand it so well.
Frankly, I find the literal-readers to be so flagrantly opposed to everything I believe, that I don't give a damn if it offends you. As far as I'm concerned you don't have a valid point of view; it's only fair, because you believe the exact same thing about me.
I would suggest, in all seriousness, that you could go anywhere and learn about the theory of evolution, if you had a real interest in doing so. As a scientific theory, it has no serious challengers. Sure there are a few scientists who disagree, but finding one of them would be considerably more difficult as they are a tiny minority.
I'd suggest you start with the Origin of Species, just so you know what it is you disagree with...It's almost obscenely boring, because Darwin was obsessed with gathering evidence, and so you have to wade through page after page of documetary evidence.
In fact, most books about evolution are like that; full of evidence. you could read Dawkins, but he's been so driven over the edge by the "there is no evolution" crowd that he's sunk to the point of writing flagrantly anti-god books...Hard to blame him, when a large segment of the population dismiss his entire life's work unread because their religious leaders tell them it's not true.
I love how everyone who has a crackpot theory thinks they're Galileo. The truth of it is, if there had been a real scientific community around Galileo, they'd have agreed with him. His evidence was sound.
There is zero evidence for ID. None. The only arguments I've ever heard in favor of it were arguments against "DE" as you call it, or Evolution as the rest of the world refers to it. Darwin wouldn't recognize much more than the shell of it, these days. He laid the groundwork, but there has been a lot of building since then.
Basically all ID arguments come down to the following: "Evolution doesn't explain X. X is either irreducible or too complex to have come about 'by accident'. Therefore ID is correct, and God exists."
This is not proof. This is not science...It's actually a fallacy: the argument from ignorance. In many cases, the ID objection isn't even rational. ID has no falsifiable hypothesis, it has no positive evidence supporting it. It's not science, by any definition of science I have ever heard.
I always ask, "Do you have any rational, positive evidence to support ID?" And the answer is always no. I have never heard a single thing that wasn't either negative, or trivial. Maybe this will be the first time.
The Problem of Evil is only a problem if you insist on God being Omnipotent and Omnibenevolent; if either of those concepts is tossed, then there is no problem. Or you can sacrifice your supposition that humanity is the center of the universe, and say that god loves all of god's creatures, including ones that may eat you.
Seems like you're pulling a little from Locke; this isn't a perfect world, it's the best possible world. I haven't been able to take that argument seriously since I read Candide "All things are for the best, in this best of all possible worlds."
Finally, I think a lot of people take intervention as a given, which is why the problem of evil is a problem. They don't know why god doesn't save them. I agree that this is a simplistic response, but for most people, faith is pretty simplistic, and a logical argument is little consolation to a person who has lost a spouse or a child.
I just love ID debates, it's just chock full of the argument from ignorance...this keeps up, I'm going to have to put it back in my sig:
Argumentum ad Ignorantiam:
Fallacy of taking a statement not provably false and implying that it is therefore true
Or, as you put it, "We don't know how life got started, therefore god must have done it."
Ehh....I assume you mean Behe and his crowd.
There are always a few; that's one of the things the "proof" religious types trumpet loudest...That there are scientists who disagree with the majority view. Whether it's ID, or Global Warming, or Dark Matter, or any of a number of drugs and pollutants, there is always a minority view.
It's a good thing; science doesn't need a lot of people sitting around agreeing with each other. The pro-ID science guys are pretty fringe, however.
I highly recommend reading the transcripts of Kitzmiller v Dover. It is the whole debate couched in the form of a political drama, with top notch experts on both sides.
.sig, before I moved on to other fallacies...Here it is one more time.
There was not one single objection raised by the pro-ID defendant that was not utterly crushed by scientific evidence.
There is not one single ID argument that doesn't reduce to the argument from ignorance...I cited it so often, it used to be my
Argumentum ad Ignorantiam:
Fallacy of taking a statement not provably false and implying that it is therefore true
Irreducible Complexity basically states, "I don't know what is smaller than this, so it's irreducible, and therefore proof for the existence of god." It's a huge fallacy.
Anyway, read Kitzmiller. A lot of the standard ID irreducibles are reduced in there, and the judge is a character.
Ha! Yes, you're quite right. The "Literal Read" as it's called is actually a quite liberal read...They make some pretty broad leaps away from what I would consider mainstream Christianity.
Frankly I think it has a lot to do with the educational requirements of the priesthood in the modern evangelical churches...It was quite a shock to me, raised Catholic as I was, to find that most southern baptist preachers didn't have any formal religious instruction at all, and were perfectly free to preach their own version of the baptist faith within an extremely broad set of guidelines.
I actually have made quite a study of religion, both in and out of academia. I have heard all kinds of arguments for and against the existence of God. As far as I'm concerned, they break down into two categories: Proof, and no Proof.
Now it should be obvious to anyone that there is no scientific proof for the existence of god, and while I know that there are many who think science is complete crap, I am not one of those people. As far as I am concerned, however, there is also no scientific proof against the existence of god. Before the "prove a negative" people jump out of the woodwork, I should say that I would consider a scientifically complete model of the universe that includes no "extra" variables to be a sufficient proof...It's a high standard, but a reasonable one for a scientific proof.
As this is the case, it is my belief that any side who declaims to have "proof" one way or the other to be absolutely out of their fricking minds. This is an opinion I have stated repeatedly for about a decade now. If you check my comment history, you'll find any number of instances of me stating that very opinion here, and I haunt these ID discussions because the debate interests me, often racking up a dozen or more posts.
All that being said, claiming that I know nothing about standard Christian arguments for the existence of god, is a bit ignorant. I once got thrown out of a coffee shop for taking on a professor who was preaching ID to his students; they threw him out too because he got "disruptive". I'd tried to ignore him, but when he started taking natural bridges as "proof for the existence of god", I just couldn't let it slide. The most common "proof" that has been cited to me is the Bible itself, in the classic circular argument.
In my Catholic youth, I often heard the arguments from Faith. They are nearly a central tenet of the Catholic faith, and at no point will you hear a mainstream catholic priest spouting off about concrete "proof" for the existence of God...Logical proofs they will give you, a la Descartes and Anselm, but that's the limit. I have also heard similar arguments from Muslims and Buddhists.
Coming right down to it, I've never heard an argument that didn't boil down to either: "The bible says what god did, and science says how he did it" (this is what I call the argument ex cathedra, since it's been endorsed by no less than three Popes (Pius XII, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI)) or "The bible is how it was done, and science is full of it" which is the root of the Intelligent Design argument, though of course they have pretensions to science. I hear the latter argument all the time, because I live in Georgia, and here they think they really have proof, though I've never seen it.
If you have an argument for the existence of god that doesn't rely on faith or proof, I'd like to hear it. It would be unique in my experience.
I should have said, "Any religious type whose world view is predicated on the assumption that a divine being had a hand in its creation, but who isn't wedded to a literal interpretation of creation set down in a holy book thousands of years ago by a group of religious dogmatists, would view evolution as a miraculous wonder of god."
If you don't believe in God, it would be difficult to immediately jump to the conclusion that a basically chemical process like evolution was strictly divine in nature.
The only place I ever found for a god in my personal cosmology was at the beginning. Some tiny, nearly imperceptable quantum bump that pushed two molecules together, that last atom that bumped into that superdense mass and caused the big bang.
Eh. Sure, there a lots of testimonials about people who have witnessed the power of god in their lives...I don't know of any that lend themselves to experimentation or replication. You may believe that God has touched your life, you may have faith that something is evidence for the existence of a higher being.
But you don't have proof. Proof is something you can hold in your hand, and show to someone else, something that can have only one meaning, only one possible cause.
Robert Frost wrote a poem called "The White Tailed Hornet" basically to put his two cents worth in regarding instincts and evolution: "Once we began to see our images reflected in the mud and even dust...Nothing but fallibility was left us..." Basically, once you stop striving for something higher than yourself, you become no better than an animal.
Frost couldn't see in science a thing greater than himself. It was all about lesser and lesser things, smaller in every way than the ideals he loved.
But it's not about that at all; for many of us, science is about truth, and the glory of humanity, and we view those ideals to be a higher end. A great striving, a noble (nobel?) quest. Something greater.
True believers, and believe is the right word, those who have faith, they look up to an ideal greater than they could ever hope to know, and try in a small way to take some of that into themselves.
Neither of these groups bother me. Hell, there is often overlap. The striving for something greater is what humanity is about.
And then there is the third group. Those who know all there is about the world, and all there is about god, and all there is about science. It's not even only the intelligent design guys, though they annoy me most. They've got the world figured; they know everything about it, and they've pinned it's dessicated body to a piece of felt, and stuck it under glass, where they can point to it every day and declaim how much they "know".
It's not really religion either.
God demands faith. God does not provide proof, because proof kills faith. If you see something that you think is proof of God's existence, you're wrong. He's ineffable. That means you can't effing figure him out.
The arrogance of the goddamn literal read types is just astounding....Anyone else would look at evolution and go, "Damn! That God guy is hella fricking smart! Look at this crap! It's a system for self-improvement built into self-replicating creatures! It's awesome!" but a literal-read weenie will look at it and say, "Don't say nuthin about that in da bible. You must be wrong."
The worst thing that can be said about the literal read types, is that they have nothing to look up to. They know all there is to know about god and everything. So very very sad.
By your logic, there are less jobs now than there were in 1793, which would indicate that there are more than 5.5 billion people on this planet who have no jobs, assuming everyone who was alive in 1793 had a job.
Damn you Eli Whitney! Damn yooooooouuuu!
What really happened is, Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, creating a huge surplus of cotton, reviving the slave industry so they could grow more cotton, kickstarting modern spinning and weaving factories, which produced more clothes, which went to more stores, etc.
At every step in the process, extra jobs were created, and not just a few, but thousands and thousands. People flocked to the factories to work, and why? Because it paid a hell of a lot better than subsistence farming. Sure, a lot of the new jobs sucked, and you know what? We replaced 'em with machines, and those machines created new jobs.
And yea, robotic fruit pickers. You ever picked fruit? It sucks. You bust your ass in the hot sun, toting huge baskets of fruit around, and you gotta hustle because the stuff starts rotting instantly. Hot, sweaty, miserable work. My heart doesn't bleed for people not having to do that anymore! I used to cut tobacco when I was a kid and it was still a popular cash crop; that is about the most miserable thing I've ever done in my whole life. Do I give a damn that people don't grow as much tobacco as they used to? Hell no!
People who romanticize fruit picking, and cotton picking, and god, cotton combing like had to be done before the cotton gin, have no fricking clue what they're talking about. Go do that stuff for a year as your sole source of income, and then you can come talk about how wonderful it is.
Depends on how fat you are, and what you're hunting.
Generally it's possible to gather enough food to keep going. Meat is nice and all, but bugs'll do. Add a few edible plants, and you're good to go.
And come right down to it, even using primitive methods, man was a fricking efficient hunter. If we had overlapped with the dinosaurs, you'd be finding T-Rex thighbones with human teethmarks on 'em, because some crazy caveman somewhere would have figured out a way to catch those bastards, just because he wanted to know what they tasted like.
We're pretty much the same today, but we're hunting the T-Rex's of the mind.
So what? Are there less jobs today than there were then?
Sure, jobs get automated out of existence, but new jobs always open up somewhere. Sure, it's probably not a "thread spinning" job anymore, but you had to be flexible, even back then. The same thing applies today.
You're not seriously suggesting we move back to a time when all thread is hand spun, are you? Hope you don't like owning more than two sets of clothes, and good luck paying for 'em.
"Tech workers are notoriously resistant to...seizing control of the tech they service."
I wish you'd tell that to the script kiddies that keep filling up my security logs.
Just another damn luddite. "Oh noes, teh machines are eating our SOULS! We should hearken back to the ways of the indians, for surely they were one with teh nature."
Just once I want someone to really take into account what it would mean for society to actually do the stuff they think it should do. Let's drop out of the rat race, lets stop burdening our children with science and math, and just teach them art and the kind of philosophy that has no practical applications.
So what happens? Lets say our technology doesn't decline, but just stays absolutely steady: All the crap we've been trying to outrun for years will catch right up. Global warming? Yup. Anti-biotic resistant bacteria? Yup. Shortage of clean water? Yup. Shortage of resources? Yup. To stay where we are, we have to push through some of this crap...It's a real race to see whether we can beat it before it beats us.
Alternative? Drop our tech back a couple hundred years, go agrarian. We've only picked up, eh, around 5 billion people since then...Better for the world if they starve, right? At least they won't have to be soulless users of math.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I don't feel soulless. Life's a grind, sure, but tell me that hasn't always been the case. Regardless of whether or not I kill a deer today, I'm still going to have dinner; that's a hell of a lot more than most of my ancestors could say. My kid may die of something but it's a hell of a lot less likely than it was even 50 years ago. I travel as far back and forth to work as a strong hiker could do in a day, and it doesn't even take me an hour.
Sure, this isn't the best of times (we hope), but it's not the worst either. We're still solving problems. Air quality sucks, but it doesn't suck half as bad as it did 50 years ago. Computers are still ramping up at a rate that is practically obscene when viewed from an objective distance. Think about the tech 50 years ago; most of us have calculators that crush that...And the tech is still in it's infancy. We're still seeking something better for ourselves, the growth of our minds and our societies and the glory of our species.
Or we could just give up. Go back to being hunter gatherers...If that's even possible.
I know which road I'd choose.
"Language" as it's used here is a metaphor for the whole digital/computer culture that modern people are steeped in. Basically, they're saying that librarians aren't tech savvy enough, and they need to find some way of participating in the tech culture at a higher level than just "I know what a web page is." Video games might be an example of this, and while I don't necessarily think they're the "best" way to go about it, it will get you more computer facility than taking a bunch of training courses that you'll never put to use.
If you've dealt with a librarian recently, this isn't any surprise to you. They just aren't savvy at what I would consider the "required" level for a position that ought to require extreme information aptitude in this day in age; facility with the Dewey Decimal system ain't going to cut it. You need to know which digital archives are most likely to have pertinent information, and you need to know the best ways to dig through them. You also need to know enough about it that you can help drive intelligent computerization in your library system.
Library sciences is a masters level degree, and it's hard to be a librarian without that degree. They really ought to have a pretty substantial computer requirement, but from what I can tell they don't....Courses like "LBSC 690 Information Technology" would seem to indicate that they actually require some advanced computer work, but looking at the actual syllabus, it looks more like "CS 101 -- How to use Microsoft Office"...That's just not going to cut it.
The reason that the effects were so good is that they were by and large accents, rather than fabricated whole cloth. Big flashy effects still look dated very quickly, because the technology is improving so rapidly. I'd go so far as to say that the original Star Wars series (4-6) will stand up better than the newer series because the limitations of the day forced them to use more "real" models, rather than quickly dated CG.
Blade Runner was subtle; it used environmental effects and models to create a sense of the future that the viewer could fill in with his own imagination.
The point behind Biosphere was to create a naturally self-sustaining system, so they weren't supposed to use CO2 scrubbers or any such similar technology. Additionally, it was determined that the concrete foundations were binding CO2 as they cured (concrete cures for years and years), causing still more problems.
Blah blah blah. It was a total screwup, not just in management, but in pure conception. They needed to start with a working system and then figure out how to make it self sufficient, instead of starting with a system that they thought would work, and trying to live in it indefinitely. Does anyone really think we'd start off with a system that needed no outside inputs? It's not realistic. Basically the only thing they proved is that they didn't do very well at making a self-sustaining system.
Shrug. I learned on java, but it was java on the command line. Had to have a basic working knowledge of unix (Solaris) to do anything; the few projects I had in C used cc, rather than gcc, not that there is a whole lot of difference there.
Having to work from the command line is something I think of as hugely valuable in programming...Helped me out a fricking ton with Java, I tell you, because working with java classpaths and such is weird enough that having to actually type it out will teach you so much more than having Eclipse or Studio One work them out for you automagically. Moving on later to work with apps like Tomcat...You've got to know how to manipulate the raw commands.