I don’t have much time this morning.
Can’t include my usual brand of delightful wit.
Here’s a link to an article about how the Bible is archaeologically verifiable.
(Lots of stuff the Bible talks about has been dug out of the sand.)
Of course EVERYTHING the Bible talks about hasn’t been dug out of the sand.
You skeptics have plenty reasons to keep doubting.
As long as there are undiscovered cities…
As long as there are unproven events…
As long as mysteries remain…
…you can assure yourself that Christianity is a sad myth.
With careful selection of evidence you can build a water-tight case against God.
Objectivity is the death of dogma.
For those of you with an open mind…
59 Responses
Hey, Tildeb. My laundry is washing itself this morning.
It matters not if you ‘accept’ that clothes can wash themselves any more than it matters whether you accept ‘gravity’. What matters is that you understand the mechanism.
The Theory of Self-Washing Clothes can inform your daily life… Understanding how clothes wash themselves matters because if you substitute the belief that something intelligent has to HELP with the clothes-washing, then you have no explanation for why the clothes APPEAR to be washing themselves. (I can hear them tumbling and draining right at this moment. BY THEMSELVES!)
All of this is not something debatable or open to controversy. Your beliefs about who or what designed the washing machine simply don’t matter. It doesn’t matter if you ‘believe’ the Self-Washing Clothes explanation any more than it matters that you believe something other than things fall. They simply do. THE CLOTHES WASH THEMSELVES. DO YOU NEED A VIDEO?!?!?!
‘Believing’ that the machine needed a designer has ZERO effect on whether my clothes get clean.
Believing in some magical, mystical, mysterious agent responsible for how we’ve arrived at this point in the wash cycle is deluded. You’re maintaining beliefs that are COMPLETELY COUNTER to the scientifically observable conclusion: my laundry is washing itself.
There is all kinds of evidence about your clothes being washed that indicates intervention by causal agencies at every step of the process – from the clothes to the delivery of water, to the machines themselves, to the detergent. The same evidence for intervention is not true for evolution. The analogy fails.
Now, because you seem convinced that your contrary beliefs must be based on something other than incompatible, anti-scientific, intellectually vacuous religious indoctrination, please show me the compelling evidence you have for your god’s intervention. Remember, you have to demonstrate a link between any claim you have and the causal divine agency you claim.
See, this is the thing, mrsmcmommy: you hold certain contrary beliefs about reality and then import confidence to them only from your beliefs even when they are in conflict with compelling evidence from reality that your claims are factually wrong. That’s a problem… but only if you’re concerned with the truth value of these claims. Unlike you, I am concerned because real solutions to real problems in the real world require we deal with what is and not what some people simply wish to be the case. I happen to think what’s true actually matters – especially when educating children – and so I also think it deserves at least a modicum of respect. You either don’t care (in comparison to your religious beliefs) or don’t understand why you should; instead, you think this respect I have for reality over and above my wishful thinking is actually a character flaw.
I asked my five year old a couple of days ago, “If you see a sandcastle on the beach, how did it get there?” She replied, “Someone made it.”
I didn’t tell her that. And I would appreciate if you didn’t plant the idea in her head that–if we waited long enough–the water itself may do it.
How about you plant the idea that we should respect reality enough to tell us what is true about it?
Bite your tongue. That’s the kind of talk that will get man onto the moon.
The reality–which even a child has already figure out–is that anything which appears to be done intentionally was.
Wrong.
Lol.
Okay…
“Sweetie, anything which appears to have been done intentionally–like a washing machine or a sand castle–was done intentionally UNLESS someone like Tildeb tells you otherwise.”
#DearLeader
No, it’s not about me. It’s about reality and trying to understand it, how it operates. Complexity CAN and DOES arise without intervening guidance. That’s why you should recall and use the advice wiser people have given you: appearances can be deceiving, don’t judge a book b y its cover, etc..
You’re so cute, Tildeb. 🙂 <3
But, seriously, you need to pull your head out of the washing machine for a few minutes…
Hey! Here’s a thought that might garner us a little sympathy from our intellectual superiors.
If naturalism is true, then we are all the product of universal chemistry. The unguided, impersonal happenings of the cosmos brought us here. We can’t be any different than we are. We are determined.
We didn’t CHOOSE this pathetic ignorance. The universe did. At the same time, Tildeb and JZ didn’t CHOOSE their boundless knowledge and intellect. The universe did.
So what are we arguing about?
I’m really struggling to get them to understand that pure naturalism is too narrow.
Yes, there are many, many things we can learn about this complicated washing machine we call the Universe. From the furthest galaxy to the smallest atom, the machine “WORKS” (to use Tildeb’s all-caps emphasis). But that’s only MORE reason to believe it was built by an engineer.
When I talk about reality, I mean ALL of the things we take for granted… I mean particles and black energy and TIME and the Laws of Math and Logic and EVERYTHING.
All of it is part of the code that has been written into this program called “reality.”
…and here are Tildeb and JZ, stuck inside the washer, pulling wires and tubes out and saying, “See?! THIS is how water gets in here…and this is where the soap comes in. What an amazing, unguided process!”
Isn’t it possible that we are the product of this washing machine’s ancient rinse cycle? That we just tumbled into existence from an intergalactic pool of fabric softener?
The Machine very well be ancient. (I tend to believe that it is.) But it isn’t an eternal washing machine. Somebody had to build it.
And that’s not just a religious idea! Even atheist scientists and agnostic philosophers are coming up with newer, better, godless theories about the nature of our universe. They are starting to see Reality as a “code” (made up of information) more than being purely physical…
The Universe is like Sim City–and everything we experience is like a highly sophisticated software program, they say.
….and here are Tildeb and JZ, helpfully saying “well, computers have screens and motherboards…and we have software that can repair itself!”
Yes, you nincompoops. And computers and software also have DESIGNERS.
By the way, I don’t know how to add my comments to your thread with JZ because it has been going for so long.
But feel free to direct him down here if you’re tired of him.
Maybe I’ll let Cami take over and explain the sandcastle thing.
Unless you’re trying to punish her, leave Cami out of this.
…I just stuck my ear up to the dryer, and it never once whispered “Maytag.”
Therefore, I have an announcement: there is absolutely ZERO evidence that some Magical Engineers in China “oogity boogitied” my appliances into existence.
Period.
Ah, I see he has returned to explaining what the washing machine was doing two billion years ago…
And apparently believing he’s making a point.
Can’t you just agree with Ken Ham already, JB?
Can’t you just SAY, “Oogity Boogity” and prove–once and for all–that you never think about anything?
You’re making it hard for the fundamentalists (both theist and atheist fundamentalists) to figure out which box to stick you in.
How are they supposed to have a conversation with you, if they can’t label you either a science-denier or a heretic?
I Googled, “Cornering a Christian who doesn’t thump the Bible,” but it wasn’t very helpful.
LOL! That’s the best you can offer?
Anyway, it appears you’re not aware, but from about halfway through Kings the Tanakh is broadly considered an excellent historical source. That is to say, post-exile. No one doubts that. It`s the Pentateuch (the Jewish origin tale) which was dismissed as myth over three generations ago, and nothing has changed in that time to alter this consensus. In fact, so solid is the evidence that even Orthodox Jewish rabbi`s are beginning to concede it’s simply inventive 7th Century BCE geopolitical fiction. That is to say, they are falling in line with rabbi’s from every other Jewish movement who accepted their origin tale as verifiable myth decades ago.
LOL! Your response doesn’t have anything to do with the link offered?
Anyway, appearances can be deceiving. I AM aware of the ‘Pentateuch Is Fiction’ movement. I’ve even discussed it, at length, with a friend of mine who not only possesses a PhD in Old Testament studies, but he assures me that your assertion is correct! There you go, JZ! You are correct!
If my faith depended on a literal interpretation of Old Testament writing, I’d be completely undone! But I’m not really bothered by this revelation.
Personally, I don’t find archaeological arguments compelling. That’s the reason I don’t make a fuss about the total lack of fossil evidence for Darwinian evolution. I just don’t care. Maybe God used some evolutionary process in creation. Maybe He didn’t. Maybe Abraham was a literal person. Maybe he was a metaphor for ‘faithfulness’.
Like I said in my post, it’s not a big deal. There will always be plenty of material for you to scoff about. If archaeologists someday uncover Joshua’s bones, you can just double down on your skepticism about talking snakes!
Hi John
It had everything to do with the linked article. The author was citing names, many of which are from Kings. This is not surprising. Post-exile the Tanakh is a remarkable historical source.
”But I’m not really bothered by this revelation.”
You should be. You believe Jesus was a credible person, right
Think again.
According to the Lectric Law Library a credible witness is someone “competent and worthy of belief… an individual capable of knowing the thing thoroughly about which he testifies.” It’s a solid, all-weather definition, and if we are to entertain the claims made by Christians then there has been no greater witness in history than Jesus Christ himself; a sage who personally guaranteed that he spoke for and as the Hebrew god of the Tanakh, Yahweh. “I and My Father are one,” he stated in John 10:30, and to the value of his word he left no doubt: “I came into the world to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me” (John 18:38). Strong words, a robust statement, and certainly something one would expect a god incarnate to say. The headache however here for the Christian apologist, such as yourself, who’s left to actually defend the claim is that if we apply the definition of credibility to Jesus he fails it in a specular and unignorable way. Indeed, through the course of his own words Jesus reveals himself to in fact be so incompetent that no court today could possibly accept him as a credible witness for it can be proven that he simply didn’t know what he was talking about.
By the gospel accounts Jesus makes a number of historical claims (including a failed prediction of his own second coming), but for the sake of brevity let us focus on just one test case: Moses. In total, Moses is mentioned a whopping eighty-five times in the New Testament with Jesus directly naming him twice in Matthew (including a rather bizarre face-to-face meeting detailed in 17:3-4), and in John 5:45 where he says: “If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me.” Now this is an unambiguous statement; a clear and definitive declaration that Jesus believed Moses was a real person who, we’re told, spent a great deal of time with the god of the Tanakh, who Jesus not only claims to speak for, but also be… and this is when things turn awkward.
We know Moses wasn`t a real historical character.
Now Jesus’ colossal blunder in naming Moses as a real person is as conspicuous as it is damning to his credibility. It doesn’t, after all, speak too highly of a witness’s authority, intelligence, competence, insight or judgment if he couldn’t distinguish the difference between inventive geopolitical myth and actual historical fact; a history he, as god, was allegedly and intimately involved in. Indeed, if Jesus’ claims are to be taken seriously then there can be zero tolerance for even minor bungles in his knowledge of any earthly event, let alone one he supposedly participated in, and yet here is an oversight so outrageous that it is the equivalent of a charismatic preacher three-hundred years from today proclaiming Batman existed. This bumbling ignorance of basic regional history exposes Jesus (if he indeed existed) to be little more than an amateurish charlatan masquerading as a supernaturally inspired magi… a naïve magician whose word was and is, by definition, thoroughly worthless.
Or what, you`re not bothered that Jesus (Yhwh) didn`t know basic regional history?
I’m not qualified in any way to speak with authority on this subject. Everything I know has been gleaned from articles and books like the one I posted.
I’m not able to say with complete certainty that Moses never existed. I’m not able to say with complete certainty that Alexander the Great did exist. I’ve simply not done enough research to present myself as an authority.
As I alluded earlier, my faith is not contingent on any one item of evidence. There are many things I have to accept on faith because I can’t personally verify everything I believe. At the same time, I reject the notion that fictional stories contain no truth or value. I admit I can’t even imagine a civilization where the only writings are pure historical and scientific fact.
My root problem is origins. I can’t imagine how sentient life just springs up from the ether. I think something created us. From there, it becomes a journey of figuring out which ‘god narrative’ lines up with what I think I understand about reality. I’ve no expectation of nailing down every detail. And I can’t come close to proving most of it beyond my own reasonable doubts (let alone someone else’s).
Fair enough. I appreciate your honesty.
…I hit ‘send’ on accident before I finished the reply. It’s been updated now.
”I reject the notion that fictional stories contain no truth or value.”
As do I. Did I ever say anything contrary to this? We are, however, talking about the truth claims made in the Jewish origin narrative upon which Christianity and Islam are raised, and which both Muhammad and Jesus ‘credibility can be measured in a quantitative manner.
The revealed religions are lacking the revelation, and that’s no small matter.
”My root problem is origins. I can’t imagine how sentient life just springs up from the ether.”
God of the gaps. Simply because you can’t imagine it, doesn’t mean others can’t.
As detailed by Nick Lane and Michael Le Page
1.
Water percolated down into newly formed rock under the seafloor, where it reacted with minerals such as olivine, producing a warm alkaline fluid rich in hydrogen, sulphides and other chemicals – a process called serpentinisation.
This hot fluid welled up at alkaline hydrothermal vents like those at the Lost City, a vent system discovered near the Mid-Atlantic Ridge in 2000.
2.
Unlike today’s seas, the early ocean was acidic and rich in dissolved iron. When upwelling hydrothermal fluids reacted with this primordial seawater, they produced carbonate rocks riddled with tiny pores and a “foam” of iron-sulphur bubbles.
3.
Inside the iron-sulphur bubbles, hydrogen reacted with carbon dioxide, forming simple organic molecules such as methane, formate and acetate. Some of these reactions were catalysed by the iron-sulphur minerals. Similar iron-sulphur catalysts are still found at the heart of many proteins today.
4.
The electrochemical gradient between the alkaline vent fluid and the acidic seawater leads to the spontaneous formation of acetyl phosphate and pyrophospate, which act just like adenosine triphosphate or ATP, the chemical that powers living cells.
These molecules drove the formation of amino acids – the building blocks of proteins – and nucleotides, the building blocks for RNA and DNA.
5.
Thermal currents and diffusion within the vent pores concentrated larger molecules like nucleotides, driving the formation of RNA and DNA – and providing an ideal setting for their evolution into the world of DNA and proteins. Evolution got under way, with sets of molecules capable of producing more of themselves starting to dominate.
6.
Fatty molecules coated the iron-sulphur froth and spontaneously formed cell-like bubbles. Some of these bubbles would have enclosed self-replicating sets of molecules – the first organic cells. The earliest protocells may have been elusive entities, though, often dissolving and reforming as they circulated within the vents.
7.
The evolution of an enzyme called pyrophosphatase, which catalyses the production of pyrophosphate, allowed the protocells to extract more energy from the gradient between the alkaline vent fluid and the acidic ocean. This ancient enzyme is still found in many bacteria and archaea, the first two branches on the tree of life.
8.
Some protocells started using ATP as well as acetyl phosphate and pyrophosphate. The production of ATP using energy from the electrochemical gradient is perfected with the evolution of the enzyme ATP synthase, found within all life today.
9.
Protocells further from the main vent axis, where the natural electrochemical gradient is weaker, started to generate their own gradient by pumping protons across their membranes, using the energy released when carbon dioxide reacts with hydrogen.
This reaction yields only a small amount of energy, not enough to make ATP. By repeating the reaction and storing the energy in the form of an electrochemical gradient, however, protocells “saved up” enough energy for ATP production.
10.
Once protocells could generate their own electrochemical gradient, they were no longer tied to the vents. Cells left the vents on two separate occasions, with one exodus giving rise to bacteria and the other to archaea.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17987-how-life-evolved-10-steps-to-the-first-cells/
Where is your particular Middle Eastern god, Yhwh, in that process?
My particular God is the catalyst for that process. “These chemicals ain’t gonna mix themselves!”
I misspoke. I shouldn’t have said, “I can’t imagine…” Obviously I can imagine lots of things. I’m not comfortable publishing my fanciful musings as plausible explanations for human beings.
I’ll admit, I don’t even know what consciousness IS let alone how it came to be.
And since I seem to be in confession mode lately, I’ll toss out one my other problems. There are unanswerable questions in every dogma I’ve encountered so far. I’m at least as much of a skeptic as you are and I notice the unsubstantiated conjecture in every faith. The difference between me and fundamentalists is that I admit when I don’t know something. I’ve already conceded that I can’t personally verify most of the things I claim to know.
I’m also bothered by the reality that our beliefs have real life consequences. We can’t smugly declare, “There is no God” without experiencing some affects when people start to believe us. Even Richard Dawkins understands that strict naturalism makes life unlivable.
Your (or whoever’s) origins narrative is exactly what I learned in elementary biology class. As a child I never understood why the idea of randomly mixing chemicals should replace the concept of a creator. I still don’t.
‘God of the gaps’ is a worn out phrase used by ancient naturalists. I figured out several decades ago that you’re preaching ‘science of the gaps’ as a replacement. You’re endlessly critical of Scripture because you can’t prove every letter of it with archaeology then you scoff when I’m reluctant to embrace a godless origins narrative which cannot ever be anything other than pure speculation. Or as I like to call it, faith.
“These chemicals ain’t gonna mix themselves!”
Actually, yes, they will. In this universe, it is inevitable. At 10-34 seconds (a hundredth of a billionth of a trillionth of a second) after the inappropriately named Big Bang, this particular universe cooled from 100 nonillion Kelvin to 1 billion Kelvin, snap-freezing in-place the laws that govern everything. Conservation and symmetry, continuity and transfer, classical mechanics and motion, gravity, thermodynamics, electromagnetism, photonics, and a myriad of smaller but no less unmoveable pieces of legislation were set, and once set, this modest but thoroughly persuasive basket of rules set the stage for affinities that would govern all things without sentiment or bias. Cooled gases become liquids, cooled liquids become solids, and solids arrange themselves into increasingly complex, ultimately self-replicating patterns, no driver required. As the 19th Century historian and philosopher, John Fiske, observed:
Now, microbial life might be astonishing, but it is also factually unremarkable. Adhering to disquietingly discourteous, thoroughly impersonal affinities, matter will organise itself. It cannot help but organise itself, and negative entropy ensures that any sufficiently organised assembly of stuff will secure a repeatable foothold in its environment. Given an appropriately dressed test bed, the simplest of all self-replicating systems will then leap quite naturally from its most primitive state of existence (essentially proton powered rocks) to that of multicellular activity; a jump observed on no less than 24 separate occasions in the earthly theatre.
Twenty-four times this has happened. Think about that.
Of course, you could always postulate that your particular god cooled the universe at precisely the right rate, at precisely the right time, so as to set the laws as they are, but then you’re no longer talking about the Middle Eastern god, Yhwh, are you?
Yes.
Same Middle Eastern God, Yhwh.
Asserting that matter ‘will organise itself’ is not an explanation about the phenomena of matter organizing itself. I can look under a microscope and watch cells divide. It doesn’t follow that, “therefore, God doesn’t exist”.
I hope we can agree that regarding microbial life as ‘factually unremarkable’ is not a statement that can be scientifically substantiated.
We can also agree that life displays a dizzying amount of complex machinery. I have to part company with Atheism when I’m encouraged to look no further than the machinery for the existence of the machinery.
The same Middle Eastern god, Yhwh, based on what, precisely? You have your cosmogony laid out in black and white in Genesis. That is your Creation story. How does that cosmogony fit with the 13.8 billion year evolutionary history of this universe?
“Asserting that matter ‘will organise itself’ is not an explanation about the phenomena of matter organizing itself.”
Erm, what does that even mean?
No. My cosmogony is not laid out in black and white. That is precisely what I confessed at the beginning of this conversation. 🙂 You’re not talking to Ken Ham here.
“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth” is as far as I go. It ‘fits with the 13.8 million year evolutionary history’ in that time is irrelevant to God. I’ve read some stuff from guys who are much smarter than me who suggest that the gravitational denseness of the early universe would slow time to the point that days could literally take eons to pass but I’ll quickly get out of my depth if you ask me to provide the math that they included.
Am I going to be the only one who’s willing to concede that I don’t have explanations for everything?
“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth” is wrong. In the beginning, and for the first 400 million years, there was nothing but hard radiations. Light didn`t even exist, and it wouldn`t exist until the beginning of the age of the stars. As for the earth, it`s 4.5 billion years old. The universe is 13.8 billion years old.
Your cosmogony is wrong from the first sentence.
So, how does the Middle Eastern god, Yhwh, fit into it all? Sorry, John, but you are tied to that cosmogony for just as long as you say, Yhwh. There is, after all, only one reference source for that particular Middle Eastern god, and it`s the Tanakh. The Tankh is the single source for your cosmogony.
If you asked me how this universe came into being i would answer: I don`t know. That is the only honest answer as all physics breaks down at Inflation. We simply have no idea whatsoever what was happening before Inflation. None.
Sorry, John, but I am not tied to whatever cosmogony you conjure up for me.
‘We simply have no idea whatsoever what was happening before Inflation…”
…but you’re CERTAIN there is no God.
Tell me again how this is science.
Sorry, John, but you most certainly are tied to that cosmogony. That is, of course, unless you can show me some other source that mentions Yhwh…
Why would not knowing today what was happening before Inflation equate to Yhwh? Did not knowing the cause of polio equate to Yhwh? You seem hopelessly ensnared in the God of the Gaps.
You seem hopelessly ensnared in the Science of the Gaps. (See how helpful it is to say stuff like this?)
Apparently, I am the only one who’s willing to admit I could be mistaken. So I’ll offer this:
Yhwh, as defined by John Zande, does not exist. I will join with you and declare that your concept of god is historically, scientifically and rationally impossible.
There is no “Yhwh as defined by JZ.” There is only “Yhwh as defined in the Pentateuch.”
That is it.
That is all there is.
Temporally speaking, the god of the Pentateuch, Yhwh, is entirely absent from all but the last 1.25% of human history, and even after its literary debut in the 7th Century BCE failed to register as anything other than a minor Middle Eastern artistic anomaly envisaged by no other culture on the planet. It didn’t materialise independently in mainland Europe, emerge unassisted on the British Isles, or rouse a single word across the entire Far East. It inspired no one in any of the 30,000 islands of the South Pacific, energised nothing across the African continent, stirred naught in North America, and didn’t move anything or anyone in Central or South America. No one across the vast Indian Great Plains or Russian steppes ever heard of it. No Azorean fisherman suddenly spoke of it, no Scandinavian shipwright carved its name in a stone, no Japanese mother ever thought she’d heard it speak in whispered tones, and no Australian aborigine ever dreamed of it. Outside the pages of the bible there is positively nothing in the natural or anthropological landscape which might even remotely lead a person blissfully ignorant of the claims made in bible to suspect that that particular Middle Eastern god has ever inspired anything except the imaginations of a few linguistically specific Iron Age Canaanite hill tribes looking to add a little supernatural spice to their otherwise perfectly terrestrial lives.
Period.
I hope that’s clear, and I’m perfectly open to being wrong on any number of subjects. I welcome any and all advancement in my knowledge. Regarding Yhwh, however, I have no reason to even suspect that god, or any god for that matter, might exist. The god of the Pentateuch (re-invented in the New Testament, then again revised in the Qur’an) is invisible and inaudible. It gives off no odour and has no perceptible taste. It generates no heat signature, produces no electromagnetic field and provokes no resonance at any frequency. It cannot be detected with any instrument and no measurement of any natural phenomena has ever indicated its presence. Its influence cannot be inferred from any secondary observation, no earthly geological record speaks of its intervention, and no examination of any biological or astronomical system has ever alluded to its agency. It is massless, it displaces neither liquids, solids, gas nor plasma, has no perceptible gravitational effect on anything, and no disturbance in the fabric of spacetime suggests it’d once moved through any region of the cosmos.
But yes, if evidence comes to light that indicates unicorns might indeed live inside my shoes, then I will adjust my thinking accordingly.
“Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?
Tell me, if you know.
Who measured it? I am sure you know!
Who stretched a measuring line across it?
What was it built on?
Who laid its most important stone?
When it happened, the morning stars sang together.
All the angels shouted with joy.”
Teacher (to Lil’ JZ): What are you doing?
Lil’ JZ: I’m drawing a picture of God.
Teacher: Nobody knows what God looks like.
Lil’ JZ: They will when I’m finished.
You and Tildeb are both fundamentalists. Only difference between you and Ken Ham is your god dogma.
Nice ad hominem attack. Good to see you can defend your cosmogony in a rational and adult manner.
So, the earth your quote is referring to was made complete, even with an oxygen rich atmosphere?
That’s interesting, considering the Great Oxygen Catastrophe only occurred 2 billion years ago.
I can defend my cosmogony just fine. I can’t defend the cosmogony you keep assigning me.
I’ve stated multiple times that I cannot speak with absolute authority about ancient history. In contrast, you have absolute certainty about events that occurred billions of years ago. You’ve proclaimed that there is only one description of Yhwh (yours). And you’ve humbly admitted that you can’t describe reality prior to the Big Bang (sorry, I know that’s not the correct term) while simultaneously stating with confidence that there was no God “in the beginning”.
You seem to me to be a fundamentalist. But I could be wrong! As the possessor of all knowledge, the final analysis belongs to you.
Again, I am not assigning you any cosmogony. You have done that yourself. You say the Middle Eastern god, Yhwh, therefore you are taking on-board the cosmogony of the Middle Eastern god, Yhwh, which is laid out in the Pentateuch: the single and only for this particular god.
Again, if you have some other source for this particular god and its cosmogony (some other document or oral tradition) then by all means present it. Until then, you have the Pentateuch.
Period.
Please stop being an utter child about this. If you want to jettison Yhwh then do so and state your belief in some nameless deistic or pantheistic concept. I assure you, my commentary will adjust accordingly.
Until then, you are defending the named Middle Eastern god, Yhwh, and the cosmogony (including a belief in a flat earth) attached to that Middle Eastern god, Yhwh, as detailed in the Pentateuch.
“And you’ve humbly admitted that you can’t describe reality prior to the Big Bang (sorry, I know that’s not the correct term) while simultaneously stating with confidence that there was no God “in the beginning”
And there is the God of the Gaps.
John, we do not know if there was a “beginning”. Inflation “began,” but Inflation is not the phenomenal Universe. Please understand that.
S.O.P., John. JB posts a claim, defends any challenges by rephrasing the challenge, then responds to clarity and facts with diversions when corrected. When push comes to shove, JB turns to ad hominem.
Tedious. Predictable. No intellectual integrity. He does not have the strength of his beliefs other than his beliefs. Reality doesn’t matter. And then the cheering section enters with a piss-poor analogy that is corrected but doesn’t care. Anyone who offers informed commentary and insight with explanations is the real problem here.
Total lack of fossil evidence for Darwinian evolution? Wow. That is either a statement of profound scientific ignorance or a simple case of outright lying. There is no middle ground. Here’s a partial list.
Yes. This is why I don’t bring up fossils.
Fossils are like the Bible in that fundamentalists use them to prove their particular dogma.
I accept everything on your list of transitional species. It’s settled. Evolution happened exactly how you say it happened.
I am unconvinced that such evolution took place via purely natural means.
It matters not if you ‘accept’ evolution any more than it does ‘gravity’. What matters is that you understand the mechanism.
It matters that you understand how the theory explains how evolution is applied to and informs your daily life, informs how industries like mining and forestry utilize it to the profit of billions if not trillions of dollars in investment and profitable returns, informs how animal husbandry and crop science is advanced, informs how medicine and healthcare improves over time, informs how biology actually works (which is why the theory is the central pillar of all the biological sciences) and how the understanding we have derived from it matters. Understanding how evolution works matters because if you remove this understanding of the mechanism by which evolution occurs and substitute superstitious nonsense, then what you have left is a vacuum of understanding. You are left with no clue why all these applications and therapies and technologies BASED on this explanation just so happen to WORK for everyone everywhere all the time, understand how the explanation continues to produce new avenues of inquiry, new insights into how biological reality operates, and directly and regularly produces new applications, new therapies, and new technologies that also, oh by the way, just so happen to work for everyone everywhere all the time.
All of this is not something debatable or open to controversy. Your beliefs simply don;t matter. This explanation factually works, factually yields useful products. It doesn’t matter if you ‘believe’ the evolutionary explanation it is the case anymore than it matters that you believe something other than things fall. They simply do. You are not welcome to make up your own facts. And your unwillingness to ‘believe’ in the explanation only says something about the state of your own mind and not the reality you think your beliefs reflect.
‘Believing’ some alternative superstitious explanation that has zero applications, zero technologies, and zero therapies that work, an alternative that is founded upon contrary anti-scientific explanations – that are also in conflict with others superstitious beliefs – believing in some magical, mystical, mysterious agency that stands contrary to and in conflict with YOUR actual use of the applied working explanation you supposedly can’t bring yourself to ‘believe’ in but bet your life on – and the lives of those you love – is not equivalently reasonable. It’s not even rational. It’s deluded. It’s duplicitous. It is hypocritical. Maintaining anti-scientific beliefs contrary to reality is an indication that there is a significant break going on in your beliefs that separates reality as it is and the beliefs you hold about it.
Creationism in any form is the very opposite to evolution and it explains nothing while promoting ignorance about reality to be a virtue.
I accepted your entire evolutionary explanation and still you’re not happy? I’ve got to buy your entire religious worldview?
You are the definition of fundamentalist, my friend.
You didn’t show any understanding of evolution and it’s not ‘mine’ to give. Because evolution means unguided, natural processes, you didn’t show any understanding of it… trying to insert some god at some point without any evidence whatsoever to do so. In addition, it’s not ‘my’ understanding. It’s called ‘science’. That you think you’re reasonable to not ‘believe’ it is a problem entirely of your own making. You need to own it before you can fix this deplorable state of ignorance… an ignorance that you think is pious. That’s a clue about the truth value you can derive from religious belief….
Evolution is not actually ‘science’. It’s not testable or falsifiable. It’s faith at best and religion at worst.
Restating your position is unnecessary. I understood the first time. Any variation from your description of reality is evidence of my ‘deplorable state of ignorance’. You’re a fundamentalist. You, and only you, have the truth about reality.
I forget who told me that a Dear Leader won’t tolerate divergent ideas…
John, it`s quite clear you have no idea whatsoever about what you’re talking about. May I suggest you start with Richard Lenski’s on-going 25-year long-term E. coli evolution experiment.
Does Richard Lenski’s experiment require adherence to atheism in order for me to understand it? Because if it requires that kind of a priori bias, I’m not interested.
I won`t even bother answering that…
It’s not testable or falsifiable (evolution)
Yes, it is both and continues to pass both. That fact is not ‘fundamentalism’ when understood; that’s recognizing an explanation that’s almost certainly true. Denying it is almost certainly a denial of reality.
What is ignorant is refusing to understand the vastness of compelling evidence in its favour. In fact, nothing humans call ‘knowledge’ is more likely to accurately describe reality than the explanation we call the theory of evolution. Nothing. It is a crowning achievement because it explains HOW life changes over time, HOW life creates complexity, HOW emergent properties arise. The mechanisms really do link anything we claim to be caused by it and the effects we select for it. That makes evolution the opposite of a religion, the opposite of a ‘faith-based belief’… namely ‘science’. And the evidence for this explanation that works for everyone everywhere all the time is as beyond reasonable doubt as anything knowable. There is zero evidence for intervention. That’s just the fact as things stand today. Now, if evidence for and against this explanation was metaphorically put on lever with a fulcrum, you would see that all of biological reality rests on one end labeled ‘Evolution’ and only religious belief on the other labeled ‘The Controversy’. That’s not exaggerating. You would also see some stuff in the middle labeled ‘We don’t know’ but that doesn’t alter the balance on iota.
The scope of your failure to appreciate this fact – how natural, unguided mechanisms of evolution change life over time – and why it is the most robust theory ever created by man is jaw dropping and borders on the unbelievable. But then, that’s what religious belief is all about, isn’t it: believing the unbelievable and cloaking it in virtue regardless of anything reality has to say in the matter. That’s not a sign of intelligence, John. It’s a sign of thorough indoctrination.
Yes, Dear Leader.
Whatever you say, Dear Leader.
Forgive me for being so simple.
Dangerous website blocked by my internet security…very interesting….
Archaeologically verifiable? Well, in many of the trivialities, yes, and also some of the more modern historical figures… very similar to Harry Potter references to real places and people. We must be careful to see if the core features are verifiable… say, if there is evidence that the central characters like Harry Potter ever existed, if the central events ever happened, if the central setting is borne out by archaeological evidence. These are what matters.
Now let’s keep that mind open and see if these core features of the bible, namely, the historical grounding of characters, events, and setting has compelling evidence.
The answer is unambiguous: no. None of the core features have any validity. The Pentateuch – the first five books of the bible – is a complete fiction.
See <a href="https://thesuperstitiousnakedape.wordpress.com/2016/06/26/kadesh-barnea-gaza-the-exodus/"John's erudite posting to explain this in more scholarly detail.
I think your link buggered up there, Tildeb, although thanks for reminding me of that meme. i’d forgotten completely about that one. I’m guessing, however, you meant this:
https://thesuperstitiousnakedape.wordpress.com/2016/06/26/kadesh-barnea-gaza-the-exodus/
Oh, I excel at buggering things up. It’s one of my few strengths. Thanks for fixing that link.
Some people here might even learn something new… if they are willing to try a wee bit of skepticism in place of maintaining their iron age beliefs in the face of a harsh reality.
As I told JZ, I’m aware of this. He’s correct.
Moving forward, I’ll look to you as my Dear Leader to explain which archaeological findings are ‘trivialities’ and which are of monumental importance.
Such a mantle is far too heavy for my paltry head. Yours can probably bear the weight. You should give it a try.