Okay, then present just -one paragraph- asserting your morality in -specifics- (don't just lamely use the word itself as if that's sufficient for a normative system), explain why it's objective, and get one other person on earth to agree to follow it. My expectation is you won't, and have never tried, because you in fact have no interest in having a functional moral code.
Go ahead, it's just one paragraph.
Failing that, you can wait a while and have evolution make you inevitably lose this cultural conflict.
Well, no, you just have no conceptual grasp of what the image -is-. It is not a position of Christianity that presenting you with the term "made in God's image" gives you any sufficient idea of what that means, more of a steppingstone to understanding and a basic framework should one choose to take such a basic assertion on the most basic level of faith. Perceiving -the image- (or, rather, integration) is a work Christian contemplatives spend years and years on.
And no, there is absolulely no way you can logically make a judgment on this on the level of logical coherence, unless you can personally subset the scope of all of what an "image" can or could be, both inclusive and exclusive of your current knowledge, and make a exclusion based on this. "Image" is way too broad for you to possibly honestly do that.
When you see your image, you are pleased. But when you see your images that came into existence before you, which neither die nor become manifest, how much you will have to bear!
Well, in brief, your opinion as to what constitutes "just" is subjective and meaningless. In my subjective opinion (yes, I'm the only one between us who could possibly claim to have an objective metric here, but we'll leave that aside), a person having life at all (something wholly unearned and beyond that person's capability) puts them well ahead on the "just" scale. Since I cannot evaluate the circumstances beyond that in their future, nor do I know the second-order, third-order, etc. possible benefit of the circumstance, or wider consequences for others were it otherwise, I'll avoid making an assertion that I know what I don't know--as you seem comfortable doing.
As for the other point, yes, God plays favorites. And so?
Belief is a useless term in science. It is sufficient to state whether a theory has merit and accurately describes what it sets out to describe. Anything beyond that is unscientific drivel and unworthy of discussion in this context.
Nope, because hypothesis-formation itself in not an algorithmic, but a heuristic process. One absolutely must start with what they "believe is reasonable" or "seems to be right" -before testing has occurred or a model for testing has even been conceived-. Hypothesis-formation is, in its specifics of how it happens, a rather mysterious and certainly not systematically-defined process. Yet, is is core to scientific method, and as such certainly not "unscientific drivel".
Backgammon "went down" quite a while ago. A couple Googled citations:
Hans Berliner: ``Backgammon computer program beats world champion'' Artificial intelligence 14 (1980), 205-220
Hans Berliner: ``Computer Backgammon'' Scientific American 243:1, 64-72 (1980)
I remember reading the Sci Am one in high school; excellent article if you can find a copy--Berliner is/was (still alive?) quite an authority on computer chess as well.
Does it confuse you to characterize statements that are clearly plausible as not merely self-evidently wrong (without any elaboration on your part) but as literally "crazy" and thinkable only by "crackpots"?
I'm just not clear on how you get yourself to say with such conviction what you yourself know you don't believe (the emotional energy you have gives it away), and psychology is a sideline interest of mine.
Well, I think there's an argument this is a special case, in that it's a bank.
All your arguments as to the social harm done by the scenario are valid, but...
If you have on deposit $100 and receive $600, it's illegal.
If the bank has "on deposit" $1000000 (its assets) and loans out at interest $6000000 (in essence producing the $500000 difference from nothing) it's called "fractional banking" and is perfectly legal.
Not to say it's incorrect that an individual causes theoretical financial harm, but his action is like lighting a firecracker compared to the financial nukes the banks detonate as a matter of ongoing routine business. When their game proceeds further and your kids find it literally impossible to maintain a standard of living comparable to yours with the underlying value of all the money you and they have worked for stolen out from under you by the banking system's dollar dilution, you might find the analogy pertinent.
The linked article is discussing the conceptual content of the hypothesis, the Slashdot summary is discussing the conceptual content, neither contains mention of anyone by name. The entire content of the discussion at +3 Threaded gives mention of "Behe" twice in hundreds of posts.
This particular thread also, is about what matters, including (unadmitted) to yourself, the hypothesis. You had a straw man, it wasn't going well, so you tried to magnify your statement with this "everyone else" blatant, immediately-checkable-by-anyone direct nonsensical falsehood.
This has nothing to do with me wanting to be a "martyr". It has to do with you directly, clearly, deliberately lying.
No, neither TFA or "everyone else" (whatever that is supposed to mean) limited the scope of discussion to Behe et al. None of your notion of the "specific players" are even -mentioned- in the article. That was your personal, intentional misstatement and misdirection of the discussion.
Anyway, enough of this, I think. I'm content to wait for the people who are to be inevitably "deselected", by the terms of their own position, to be so. It'll save major time arguing.
We have an entire field of study in the domain of biological complexity theory which is directly germane to the inference of design. No effort to "refine anything" is occurring in this domain?
-Who- represents "all of ID" is all people in all domains around what the "design inference" -is-, that is, -design-. That scope includes exactly what it says. That you wish to redefine it as you wish, ascribe your straw-man redefinition to the people you wish, and pretend that you've addressed -the hypothesis for what the hypothesis is-, hardly addresses any form of honest inquiry, scientific or otherwise.
No, "outside operation of known natural law" is not synonymous with "magic". It's called "events which must be accounted for by a model subject to refinement", like -all of the history of science-.
Perhaps we should have stuck with Luminiferous Ether because we'd see any proposed alternative as dismissable as proposing "magic"?
And, of course, Behe doesn't represent all of ID. But, you left the realm of attempting intellectual honesty with your first sentence, so I presume you were clear on that as you said it.
What do you mean "what does it solve"? It would be -knowledge-. What do you think science is -for-?
We aren't going to pursue any given hypothesis is the hypothesis is not allowed to be posited. Yes, we will fully be able to "test" the hypothesis by crunching the numbers to determine probability of the required chains of mutations occurring across the given population over the given time. That you characterize the question as "magical turtles" doesn't add anything but revealing your inordinately absurd bias.
And since it relies upon built-in supernatural assumptions (a scientific no-no if there ever was one), and it's not even a logically valid hypothesis.
- No, ID doesn't. Any sufficiently-intelligent entity would do, including quite-physical extraterrestrial beings (lie again if you wish on this point, for my response to that, reread this statement).
- The distinction between "natural" and "supernatural" implies you can definitively, finally close the set of "physical"--you can't.
- Apparently, you simply have no clue what "logical" means or entails.
- That you not merely straw-man ID, but -explicitly state- you are straw-manning it by stating it is "dressed-up creationism" speaks for itself, and needs no further comment.
Yeah, not to mention that "science" is absolutely fraught with postulates that vary in no way from ID in terms of reliance on inference to non-testable hypotheses. It's simply when ID comes up that the ludicrous posturing that this isn't the case takes place.
99% of cultural anthropology, to name one, is based on inference to -wholly unreplicable and untestable- conclusions.
There's one -particular- hypothesis that "can't be made", in the sheer face of the clear, undeniable actual practice of science -throughout science-, -throughout history-.
Would the conclusion that a particular teacher shouldn't present it in their own class, based on this ruling, be a plausible inference, or an empirically-verifiable fact for that classroom?
How do I get the scientific answer here? Replicable, quantifiable suggestions only, please... and preferably a little more solidly quantifiable than reliance on nebulous constructs like "government", "declarations", and "politicians".
Well, I see it as an issue of making a fair objective evaluation of your scenario. In the extraordinarily unlikely event some present-day religious group starts "rubbing people out" in a manner that included you, how do you see that is different from what will happen to you by default?
It's primarily a distinction of timing? Like, you want to die, but you want to die... later instead?
So basically this will reduce "God"'s role in the creation of the universe further back before the big bang, by essentially verifying another prediction by the standard model, which will probably result in the following "creation" facts:
Curious--why do you see this process solely in terms of "reducing God's role" with your focus on the beginning of the universe, rather than as a mechanism for historical religiously-claimed ex nihilo miracles to happen at literally any time, literally by your own words? You just "know" that "of course", this is a wholly naturalistic deterministic process devoid of unspecifiable influence?
I'm trying to clarify for myself the thought process here.
I'm not going to explicate this fully, because your statement is pretty far off-base as to what the Church has taught regarding sin, but I will note that at minimum you'd have to de-oversimplify your notion of "flawed" with respect to the notions of responsibility here.
As a simple analogous example, take the war in Iraq. Few individual Americans have "direct blame" for the Iraq situation, yet it can be reasonably asserted that as an American, I retain a broad responsibility for the situation which I can be called upon to make effort to correct.
If you want to argue the Church's stance, at least let's start from what that stance -is-, which I think you'd find pretty well elaborated here.
I'd start with the part stating...
"There can be no sin that is not voluntary, the learned and the ignorant admit this evident truth", writes St. Augustine (De vera relig., xiv, 27).
Generally, though, "rejecting the scientific theory of evolution" isn't what's on the table for discussion. Usually, people advocating "evolution" from a secular standpoint mean the term as inclusive of the biological process of evolution itself, -plus- the -wholly unrelated unstated premise- that empirical naturalism is all that exists.
This is the problem with these endless false-dichotomy "debates" of "God vs. evolution".
I really hope more people will take a first-year philosophy course to understand from Aristotle that "creationism" as used here is simply an invalid concept (or "weasel-word" if you prefer).
It integrates wholly disparate concepts into a single term, that is, that the earth is a few thousand years old, and that a higher power created it. Neither premise is remotely dependent on, or even much associated with, the other.
Politicians construct intrinsically-misleading terminology all the time, but I'd hope Slashdot aspires to somewhat more constructive discussion...
Genesis 1:27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
In your preferred KJV.
Then, in Genesis 2, we have Adam and Eve. With Adam, the presentation is rather brilliantly ambiguous, suggesting something like cloning, but Eve is clearly subsequent to the "them" discussed in Genesis 1.
I suggest talking to someone knowledgable of the Torah in the original--that you may not (initially) like the answer doesn't mean it's not there.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, then present just -one paragraph- asserting your morality in -specifics- (don't just lamely use the word itself as if that's sufficient for a normative system), explain why it's objective, and get one other person on earth to agree to follow it. My expectation is you won't, and have never tried, because you in fact have no interest in having a functional moral code.
Go ahead, it's just one paragraph.
Failing that, you can wait a while and have evolution make you inevitably lose this cultural conflict.
Well, no, you just have no conceptual grasp of what the image -is-. It is not a position of Christianity that presenting you with the term "made in God's image" gives you any sufficient idea of what that means, more of a steppingstone to understanding and a basic framework should one choose to take such a basic assertion on the most basic level of faith. Perceiving -the image- (or, rather, integration) is a work Christian contemplatives spend years and years on.
And no, there is absolulely no way you can logically make a judgment on this on the level of logical coherence, unless you can personally subset the scope of all of what an "image" can or could be, both inclusive and exclusive of your current knowledge, and make a exclusion based on this. "Image" is way too broad for you to possibly honestly do that.
When you see your image, you are pleased. But when you see your images that came into existence before you, which neither die nor become manifest, how much you will have to bear!
--The Gospel of Thomas
Well, in brief, your opinion as to what constitutes "just" is subjective and meaningless. In my subjective opinion (yes, I'm the only one between us who could possibly claim to have an objective metric here, but we'll leave that aside), a person having life at all (something wholly unearned and beyond that person's capability) puts them well ahead on the "just" scale. Since I cannot evaluate the circumstances beyond that in their future, nor do I know the second-order, third-order, etc. possible benefit of the circumstance, or wider consequences for others were it otherwise, I'll avoid making an assertion that I know what I don't know--as you seem comfortable doing.
As for the other point, yes, God plays favorites. And so?
Option three: God doesn't care about everyone equally.
Option four: The actual outcome for a given person is of a scope wider than you perceive.
Belief is a useless term in science. It is sufficient to state whether a theory has merit and accurately describes what it sets out to describe. Anything beyond that is unscientific drivel and unworthy of discussion in this context.
Nope, because hypothesis-formation itself in not an algorithmic, but a heuristic process. One absolutely must start with what they "believe is reasonable" or "seems to be right" -before testing has occurred or a model for testing has even been conceived-. Hypothesis-formation is, in its specifics of how it happens, a rather mysterious and certainly not systematically-defined process. Yet, is is core to scientific method, and as such certainly not "unscientific drivel".
More on this can be found from Kuhn or Pirsig.
Backgammon "went down" quite a while ago. A couple Googled citations:
Hans Berliner: ``Backgammon computer program beats world champion''
Artificial intelligence 14 (1980), 205-220
Hans Berliner: ``Computer Backgammon''
Scientific American 243:1, 64-72 (1980)
I remember reading the Sci Am one in high school; excellent article if you can find a copy--Berliner is/was (still alive?) quite an authority on computer chess as well.
Does it confuse you to characterize statements that are clearly plausible as not merely self-evidently wrong (without any elaboration on your part) but as literally "crazy" and thinkable only by "crackpots"?
I'm just not clear on how you get yourself to say with such conviction what you yourself know you don't believe (the emotional energy you have gives it away), and psychology is a sideline interest of mine.
Well, I think there's an argument this is a special case, in that it's a bank.
All your arguments as to the social harm done by the scenario are valid, but...
If you have on deposit $100 and receive $600, it's illegal.
If the bank has "on deposit" $1000000 (its assets) and loans out at interest $6000000 (in essence producing the $500000 difference from nothing) it's called "fractional banking" and is perfectly legal.
Not to say it's incorrect that an individual causes theoretical financial harm, but his action is like lighting a firecracker compared to the financial nukes the banks detonate as a matter of ongoing routine business. When their game proceeds further and your kids find it literally impossible to maintain a standard of living comparable to yours with the underlying value of all the money you and they have worked for stolen out from under you by the banking system's dollar dilution, you might find the analogy pertinent.
No. Simply, no.
The linked article is discussing the conceptual content of the hypothesis, the Slashdot summary is discussing the conceptual content, neither contains mention of anyone by name. The entire content of the discussion at +3 Threaded gives mention of "Behe" twice in hundreds of posts.
This particular thread also, is about what matters, including (unadmitted) to yourself, the hypothesis. You had a straw man, it wasn't going well, so you tried to magnify your statement with this "everyone else" blatant, immediately-checkable-by-anyone direct nonsensical falsehood.
This has nothing to do with me wanting to be a "martyr". It has to do with you directly, clearly, deliberately lying.
Simple.
Are we done now?
No, neither TFA or "everyone else" (whatever that is supposed to mean) limited the scope of discussion to Behe et al. None of your notion of the "specific players" are even -mentioned- in the article. That was your personal, intentional misstatement and misdirection of the discussion.
Anyway, enough of this, I think. I'm content to wait for the people who are to be inevitably "deselected", by the terms of their own position, to be so. It'll save major time arguing.
Well, again, simply not true.
We have an entire field of study in the domain of biological complexity theory which is directly germane to the inference of design. No effort to "refine anything" is occurring in this domain?
-Who- represents "all of ID" is all people in all domains around what the "design inference" -is-, that is, -design-. That scope includes exactly what it says. That you wish to redefine it as you wish, ascribe your straw-man redefinition to the people you wish, and pretend that you've addressed -the hypothesis for what the hypothesis is-, hardly addresses any form of honest inquiry, scientific or otherwise.
No, "outside operation of known natural law" is not synonymous with "magic". It's called "events which must be accounted for by a model subject to refinement", like -all of the history of science-.
Perhaps we should have stuck with Luminiferous Ether because we'd see any proposed alternative as dismissable as proposing "magic"?
And, of course, Behe doesn't represent all of ID. But, you left the realm of attempting intellectual honesty with your first sentence, so I presume you were clear on that as you said it.
What do you mean "what does it solve"? It would be -knowledge-. What do you think science is -for-?
We aren't going to pursue any given hypothesis is the hypothesis is not allowed to be posited. Yes, we will fully be able to "test" the hypothesis by crunching the numbers to determine probability of the required chains of mutations occurring across the given population over the given time. That you characterize the question as "magical turtles" doesn't add anything but revealing your inordinately absurd bias.
This is horrible.
I don't know where to start...
And since it relies upon built-in supernatural assumptions (a scientific no-no if there ever was one), and it's not even a logically valid hypothesis.
- No, ID doesn't. Any sufficiently-intelligent entity would do, including quite-physical extraterrestrial beings (lie again if you wish on this point, for my response to that, reread this statement).
- The distinction between "natural" and "supernatural" implies you can definitively, finally close the set of "physical"--you can't.
- Apparently, you simply have no clue what "logical" means or entails.
- That you not merely straw-man ID, but -explicitly state- you are straw-manning it by stating it is "dressed-up creationism" speaks for itself, and needs no further comment.
That should do for now, in brief.
Yeah, not to mention that "science" is absolutely fraught with postulates that vary in no way from ID in terms of reliance on inference to non-testable hypotheses. It's simply when ID comes up that the ludicrous posturing that this isn't the case takes place.
99% of cultural anthropology, to name one, is based on inference to -wholly unreplicable and untestable- conclusions.
There's one -particular- hypothesis that "can't be made", in the sheer face of the clear, undeniable actual practice of science -throughout science-, -throughout history-.
Fun topic
Would the conclusion that a particular teacher shouldn't present it in their own class, based on this ruling, be a plausible inference, or an empirically-verifiable fact for that classroom?
How do I get the scientific answer here? Replicable, quantifiable suggestions only, please... and preferably a little more solidly quantifiable than reliance on nebulous constructs like "government", "declarations", and "politicians".
Help me out here.
Well, I see it as an issue of making a fair objective evaluation of your scenario. In the extraordinarily unlikely event some present-day religious group starts "rubbing people out" in a manner that included you, how do you see that is different from what will happen to you by default?
It's primarily a distinction of timing? Like, you want to die, but you want to die... later instead?
So, the processes associated with your expectations and worldview provide a 100% probability of your death. Seemed pretty "systematic" to me.
...systematically rubbed out.
Well, what are your expectations for yourself entirely apart from religion, say, in a 200-years-from-now timeframe?
Literally out of nowhere.
...
:
So basically this will reduce "God"'s role in the creation of the universe further back before the big bang, by essentially verifying another prediction by the standard model, which will probably result in the following "creation" facts
Curious--why do you see this process solely in terms of "reducing God's role" with your focus on the beginning of the universe, rather than as a mechanism for historical religiously-claimed ex nihilo miracles to happen at literally any time, literally by your own words? You just "know" that "of course", this is a wholly naturalistic deterministic process devoid of unspecifiable influence?
I'm trying to clarify for myself the thought process here.
I'm not going to explicate this fully, because your statement is pretty far off-base as to what the Church has taught regarding sin, but I will note that at minimum you'd have to de-oversimplify your notion of "flawed" with respect to the notions of responsibility here.
As a simple analogous example, take the war in Iraq. Few individual Americans have "direct blame" for the Iraq situation, yet it can be reasonably asserted that as an American, I retain a broad responsibility for the situation which I can be called upon to make effort to correct.
If you want to argue the Church's stance, at least let's start from what that stance -is-, which I think you'd find pretty well elaborated here.
I'd start with the part stating...
"There can be no sin that is not voluntary, the learned and the ignorant admit this evident truth", writes St. Augustine (De vera relig., xiv, 27).
Generally, though, "rejecting the scientific theory of evolution" isn't what's on the table for discussion. Usually, people advocating "evolution" from a secular standpoint mean the term as inclusive of the biological process of evolution itself, -plus- the -wholly unrelated unstated premise- that empirical naturalism is all that exists.
This is the problem with these endless false-dichotomy "debates" of "God vs. evolution".
I really hope more people will take a first-year philosophy course to understand from Aristotle that "creationism" as used here is simply an invalid concept (or "weasel-word" if you prefer).
It integrates wholly disparate concepts into a single term, that is, that the earth is a few thousand years old, and that a higher power created it. Neither premise is remotely dependent on, or even much associated with, the other.
Politicians construct intrinsically-misleading terminology all the time, but I'd hope Slashdot aspires to somewhat more constructive discussion...
Genesis 1:27
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
In your preferred KJV.
Then, in Genesis 2, we have Adam and Eve. With Adam, the presentation is rather brilliantly ambiguous, suggesting something like cloning, but Eve is clearly subsequent to the "them" discussed in Genesis 1.
I suggest talking to someone knowledgable of the Torah in the original--that you may not (initially) like the answer doesn't mean it's not there.
Why wouldn't we "like admitting it"? It directly addresses the "issue" of human beings predating Adam and Eve, per evolution.
;)
In case it's new to you, the bible says flat-out there were other people before Adam and Eve, your local theologian's assumptions notwithstanding.
The implications of this are left as an exercise for the (focused) reader.