Whenever I suggest that we can’t get something from nothing, the ‘we believe in non-belief’ types laugh and marvel at my naivete. Here’s a little article about how faith and science really are the same thing at the end of the day.
Nothing Cannot Cause Any Thing
Christian Comedy for Hire
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Three Little Pigs
Three Little Pigs in Shakespeare is available as a children’s book. Get the illustrated story based on my viral comedy routine from Amazon. Makes a great gift for the word-lovers in your life.
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240 Responses
We’ve amassed quite a list of words our Atheist friends must handle with care, haven’t we?
It seems they have to buffer almost everything with caveats and disclaimers. (See: belief, worldview, morality, thought, consciousness, knowledge/wisdom/truth, etc.) I think I’ve figured out why they’re so squirmy about definitions…
Atheists will take little stabs at explaining “reality,” when we demand they do so. But after just a couple of clarifying questions, they’ll jump right back to the safety of “I don’t know!” Any theory they try to offer devolves into inconsistencies and paradoxes every time. So, at the end of the day, Atheists won’t say ANYTHING for certain.
This becomes a problem when a Theist (like JB) demands that the non-believer actually take a STAND on something–ANYTHING! “Explain the basis of consciousness” or “summarize the truest thing you know–and how you KNOW it’s true.” Because, the Atheists CAN’T do “basics” or “summaries” or even the tiniest, simplest absolutes.
They can’t even begin to stand because of their a priori elimination of the Foundation.
Furthermore, they can’t propose a replacement foundation, on which we might build a body of knowledge, because anything solidly true enough to serve as that Foundation would be–by definition–GOD.
If we know anything absolutely, then it demands an absolute God. So, an Atheist HAS TO give up absolutes altogether.
They’ve traded a place to stand for perpetual hovering in a void.
And, even more frustrating (for them), should they ever find something reliable enough to repeat universally and true enough to transcend human invention–it ends up sounding EXACTLY LIKE the reliable, timeless, true God.
So, it’s a sad, complicated demonstration of futility, when an Atheist tries to use phrases like “Search for truth” or “Gain knowledge” or “Conform with Reality.” Because, every time, a Theist replies–YES! That’s exactly what I mean when I say, “Seek God!” And the Atheist retreats to find another set of words which would allow them to talk about “Truth” without capitalizing the T. Or to discuss Knowledge without the capital K.
They have utterly rejected Truth himself.
Tideb said: “Your list [of metaphysical concepts] reveals biological properties that very much depend on the physical form and biological substances that produce them. How do we know? Easy. Remove the biology and, oh my, we remove the ‘metaphysics’ entirely.”
Wow, I’d really love to see how that experiment was conducted!
I know. I’m trying to figure out how to ask him that question. With the biology removed, what are you studying? And how?
There are a lot of Christians who would get bogged down by all the terms and the stubborn insistence that this is rational, irrefutable, “reality.”
But, if you really try to understand what is being said, then it becomes obvious that even a very long, wordy circle is still a circle.
“Reality” is only physical because only physical things exist in reality.
That’s it.
Tildeb, there’s no reply under your last comment, but it is a beauty. That pretty much sums up how I feel about the subject.
Maybe I’ve used up my quota!
I can’t believe you’re over here today, piling on with JZ about “contradictions” and being “too afraid” to answer questions.
We were talking about YOUR foundation for truth a couple of days ago, and you flat stopped answering when I pointed out that you’re stuck in a loop…
When you’re done calling JB a coward, maybe you can return to that topic and demonstrate for him the PROPER WAY to lose an argument.
I don’t think anyone is calling John a coward. More, intellectually evasive, slippery, willfully ignorant, sometimes thoroughly disingenuous, repeatedly contradictory, oblique when cornered, indirect when it suits him, scrupulously cagey, and comprehensively curt when confronted with facts.
Can’t get much more evasive than Tildeb has been in our most recent exchange, JZ.
I’m not sure if he knows what my next questions are going to be, or what. (The given reason for silence is that I’m being “childish” and “emotional.” But I’ve done a much more obvious job at those things, intentionally, in the past. This was not one of those times.)
I seriously doubt Tildeb is being evasive. If he’s not replying to you, then I would hazard to guess it’s because of the same reasons I generally don’t bother replying to you: You’re arguments are spectacularly puerile and your level of discourse resembles that of a milk-fed beach pebble.
No offense.
That’s the spirit, JZ.
Take “guesses” about conversations you haven’t been part of.
It’s a beautiful faith you have in Tildeb.
No offense.
Well, yeah, John Z, I am calling John B a coward for not owning his contradictions, for refusing to admit they are present, for diverting from them, for blaming others for them, for doing everything possible including vilifying atheists and misrepresenting them with stupid muffin analogies rather than deal straight up and honestly with the contradictions. I think John B really is exercising intellectual cowardice pretending they are an atheist fiction.
If you don’t believe it, then it must not be true!
You think your god is a foundation for and /synonymous with Truth. You assign to me a belief that the foundation for my Truth is logic. You suggest logic is not a Thing and therefore evidence of metaphysics. You have built a house of cards and, because you believe it is accurate, you then claim I’m in an inescapable loop.
Have I got that about right?
I didn’t assign to you anything.
I ASKED if it’s accurate that you build your beliefs on logic.
But, yes, my God is synonymous with Truth. Anything objectively true, independent of humans, belongs to him.
And that’s why I didn’t bother to reply. Nothing I can say will alter your belief. You believe, therefore it must be true. Period. End of discussion. The fact that your belief is wrong does not matter to you because you assume it can’t be. Again, you believe, therefore it’s true. So why would you even care if I responded? You already KNOW the Truth.
That’s the definition of “god,” Tildeb. That’s philosophy 101. (Which is why I said earlier that your problem is with philosophy and epistemology.)
It’s not my fault that you hear the word “God” and immediately picture a THING.
It’s not my fault that you equate my beliefs with Santa or the Easter Bunny or other mythical THINGS.
I can’t help that you won’t listen whenever I’ve tried to explain that–you’re correct–none of those creatures exist…but, if a god is so easily disprovable, then he would not (by definition) be God in the first place.
God is the Supreme Reality. So, if you believe in reality/truth, then you’re appealing to something outside yourself, which is knowable. (And THEN we can ask the Atheist’s favorite question: well, which god???” Or, in other words, what is God’s character?)
I figured you’d be happy to know our beliefs aren’t THAT far apart. I was asking honestly when I said, “Why is it so important to use certain [less-religious-sounding] terms to make these concepts more palatable?”
You demonstrate the problem of using numinous terminology: the key terms upon examination are interchangeable with whatever nebulous terminology is convenient for you at the time. This is a guaranteed way to avoid saying anything of merit. God is a mystery (that you seem to know something about). God is unknowable (that you seem to know something about). God is Nature (that you to know something about). God is physics (that you seem to know something about). God is the universe (that you seem to know something about). God is Love, God is Truth. God is the foundation. (I’m waiting for God is the ground of being.) And so on. Meaningless gibberish.
What do you know (ontology) regarding God? Well, so far you’ve assured me that you do in fact know particulars about your God, that it is s real, for example, that your God is the Creator of life, that your God is an interactive but immaterial causal agent in our universe. When I try to pin down what this evidence is you’ve used to claim this ‘knowledge’… you don’t provide it. Ever. You substitute the nebulous for the numinous. So when I ask you how you know any of this (epistemology) you tell me through your belief (the ‘scales’ drop away from your eyes and you can ‘see’ what the non believer cannot). When I ask you to differentiate your knowledge about this independent divine causal agency from your beliefs imported to it, you switch the conversation to be about me and try to equate your belief in your God to be just like the belief you presume I must have to utilize logic.
This is so wrong that it isn’t even wrong. It’s incoherent.
There are so many problems in the coherence of your line of thinking that I end up playing whack-a-mole with my commentary, which is how you avoid taking responsibility for any particular knowledge claims you make by quickly substituting you faith-based beliefs you maintain no matter and in spite of compelling alternative explanations as well as the problematic contrary evidence adduced from reality I introduce into the discussion. I point out that you are the one first creating and then applying your belief as if were knowledge of this (imaginary) divine causal agency.
At the end of the day, you simply stand by your beliefs because you believe them to be true no matter what alternative explanations are offered, no matter what contrary evidence may be raised to seriously question yours, no matter how well it is demonstrated that you project your beliefs to be what they are not, namely, adduced knowledge from reality. It matters not at all that your beliefs in this regard are without cause or merit, and you don’t care that you make the same thinking errors to imagine that your faith-addled thinking is the same thing non believers do to maintain belief in their non belief (yeah, no incoherence here).
Every discussion comes back to the same intractable problem pointed out to you without effect, that you are justifying your beliefs by belief that you import to them… no matter what examples I raise to justify this central criticism. And that’s why I find replying to you nothing but a wasted exercise that produces only frustrated intentions on my part.
Your response to this failure of mine to reply to you is to then cause for you to accuse me of ‘hiding’ from what you presume must be your awesome truth-filled points of validity – points you believe I cannot possibly or I would in my response to them (in spite of having done so seven ways from Sunday). That’s the lack of coherent thinking in response to my explanatory commentary that Carmen points out, and the reliance on your faith-based thinking you use empowered not by reason, not by evidence, not by knowledge, but by the emotional benefit you feel in place of honest and reflective consideration.
In other words, why should I bother?
Tildeb, I’d really appreciate if you stopped tossing out claims like: “At the end of the day, you simply stand behind your beliefs because you believe them…”
If that’s true for me, then it’s true for you, too. Because I have said (multiple times and not sarcastically) that anything YOU know to be demonstrably, consistently true is something that *I also* would accept as truth. I’m simply trying to understand this “alternative explanation” for the existence of truth in a rational, knowable universe, that you say you’ve offered.
How do YOU determine what’s true and what isn’t?
Every time we try to dig deeper into YOUR beliefs, it only takes a couple of questions on my part before you bristle and accuse me of playing games or being childish. I have no response other than to say you’re wrong; I’m genuinely asking how you handle the loops in your own godless perspective. (And, as a side note, I am unpleasantly surprised that you seem to be taking the tactics of my former-friend “Sarah,” of judging the tone of my questions rather than venturing to answer.) So, again, “What is YOUR foundation?”
When you answered “biology,” I explained that really knowing anything in the field of biology requires other things…like consciousness and the ability to reason.
So, maybe a better way to ask would be this way: “Which, in your view, ultimately came first: the brain or logic?”
My method of inquiry is Methodological Naturalism. and my beliefs about reality – about the universe and everything in it we can know anything about – arbitrated by evidence from it.
Why does this matter?
Because it means beliefs that depend on preponderance of evidence produces knowledge. Faith-based beliefs do not.
I’ve explained, over and over and over, that using nebulous terminology for empirical claims, knowledge claims, about the universe and everything it contains is not evidence but simply replacement claims. That’s what your ‘foundation’ is: simply replacement claims that you believe are legitimate conclusions, legitimate explanations, legitimate premises. They’re not. They are superstitious nonsense. The evidence you think is evidence in favour of your empirical claims that are factually incorrect isn’t evidence. It’s not linked to the cause you claim. I’ve already explained why. I’ve also explained that you, substituting claims based on faith and calling those claims ‘evidence’ for the belief, demonstrate backwards thinking. You’re using your beliefs to justify your beliefs. I’ve accused you of using assertion, assumption, and attribution based on your beliefs to justify the beliefs themselves, which you then use as if adduced evidence from reality when they aren’t, and assuming they produce knowledge when they don’t. Your belief in belief lets you pretend you know something about this god of yours. It’s bunk from start to finish.
And here we go around the mulberry bush again with your assertion that logic is a thing, that truth is a thing, that your god is a thing. And you’ve got nothing to back that up from reality. Nothing. Nada. Zip. So you go on the attack and pretend my evidence-adduced beliefs about emergent properties of mind like logic and other biological explanations that fit the evidence and can be linked to natural processes are an equivalent kind of faith-based belief. They’re not. But you don;t believe it, so that’s that.
In colloquial terminology, I use the term ‘true’ to mean an understanding that ‘appears to be the case as demonstrated by consistently successful application‘. You are using the term to be something akin to a synonym for your god. What’s true in my mind is a modeled claim that has a great deal of likelihood to be the case tested and buttressed by successful adjudication from reality in the form of applied knowledge. I think that deserves a high degree of reasonable confidence. Suggesting other possibilities involving magical agencies doesn’t add anything knowledgeable to the discussion but detracts significantly from it.
Take logic, for example. Suggesting this ordered mental processing method is evidence for a supernatural god I think is not just ridiculous but of no value at all. It’s more than a distraction; it’s an intentional deception that is pernicious.
Even if this god hypothesis were the case, there is no means by which we can know anything about it, no benefit we can then transfer to applications, therapies, technologies that work for everyone everywhere all the time. It’s an utterly useless hypothesis as a method of inquiry, as a reason for explanations, as a ‘foundation’ for finding out what is the case. It is absolutely untestable, indistinguishable from bullshit, and deserving of no serious consideration because of its uselessness. It has zero knowledge value. Any explanation based on it is equivalently useless. And all of that means the distraction has the power if believed by enough gullible people to derail honest inquiry by presenting a pseudo-explanation – that explains nothing at all – as an equivalent kind of knowledge…. a knowledge qualitatively different but just as likely as knowledge derived from using methodological naturalism.
This is a vast distortion (of biblical proportions) that I think is equivalent to an outright lie, an intentional deception from those people like you who should know better, who can think better than this credulous paper bag nonsense, a deception that really does cause a great deal of real harm to real people in real life when acted upon, when such belief is used a s justification for action or inaction in the public domain. Believing in belief due to this real world effect is pernicious.
I read that wiki article the first time you mentioned methodological naturalism.
I noticed it draws a distinction between the “method” and the “philosophy” of naturalism… It says, “The former is merely a tool and makes no truth claim; while the latter makes the philosophical – essentially atheistic – claim that only natural causes exist.”
So, you make the A-Priori assumption that only ‘material’ exists…
I know that. But why–suddenly–did you leap into criticizing what you think *I* believe, again? The vast majority of your many (many, many) words are picking apart my use of logic and my explanation for the existence of truth/rationality…even though you haven’t explained where they come from in your own view.
I know that your official position on ALL of our conversations will always be “Not the Christian Position.” But I’m trying to unpack what you DO believe, for once. How can you use reason while claiming it’s not a “thing?”
(And did I miss the part where you answered which you believe came first: Brain or Logic?)
Note that in regard to philosophical naturalism, “Essentially, they argue that the success of methodological naturalism, and the complete failure of other systems, means it is a logical leap to say that we don’t just use naturalism as an assumption in methodology, but that naturalism is actually the reality of the universe.”
What this means is that when a theist makes an empirical claim about the supernatural causing effect in the natural, these claims are indeed open to MN inquiry. For just two example the efficacy of prayer and faith healing. These are open to MN and have been found without any evidence. But there’s an overlooked feature, too: the absence of evidence that should be there is the claim were true.
Neither of these areas of concern are a priori as you presume to label them. They are post hoc. They are legitimate informed conclusions adduced from what reality tells us is probably the case. Every time we look into claims of supernaturalism, we come up empty of compelling evidence in its favour. We either come up with explanations that are purely natural, purely unguided, purely materialistic that fit the evidence, or we come up with an honest “I don’t know.” The supernatural explanation contains nothing more than the “I don’t know” response.
So let’s look at the role of absence of evidence to show why philosophical naturalism has a good basis: no evidence stands contrary to it!
If we descended from an original couple, MN would be a perfectly fine method. The genetic evidence should be there. It .could be there. It isn’t there.
If the world suffered from a global flood, MN would be a perfectly fine method. The sedimentary evidence should be there. It could be there. It isn’t there.
If the Jews did win free from Egypt, MN would be a perfectly fine method. The archaeological evidence should be there. It could be there. It isn’t there.
If a creator shaped kinds of creatures, then MN would be a perfectly fine method. The paleontology evidence should be there. It could be there. It isn’t there.
If Jesus were a historical figure, then MN would be a perfectly fine method. The historical record of evidence should be there. It could be there. It isn’t there.
And so on. This absence of evidence for the root explanations of all kinds of woo is as compelling as any contrary evidence can be. That’s certainly as true for religious claims of divine creative and causal and interactive agencies as it is for rain dancing. There is no link in reality demonstrable by MN to connect the selected ‘evidence’ with the selected supernatural ’cause’. Some other method must be used to claim this connection, and the only one that has any staying power is faith-based belief. That’s why I keep going back to your position and show you time after time that it is your faith-based belief that asserts, that assumes, that assigns, that attributes selected claims to be evidence and then connects them to this divine cause.
How can I use reason if it’s not a thing? Easy: it’s a brain process that emerges from its functioning. You do it, too. The mind is what the brain does. Adding some divine agency that supposedly, what, bequeaths reason by some kind of POOF!ism is hardly an equivalent understanding that ‘explains’ how reasoning occurs. That hypothesis adds nothing to the inquiry. You assigning it to your God is not helpful if we’re trying to understand how the brain creates patterned thinking we call ‘reasoning’.
I presumed you would understand – especially with John Z’s animal pictorial – that our brain functioning – including logic – is an emergent property of our biological history. I think the question you ask is a poor one in that obviously brains existed in their earliest forms before other complex properties emerged. the same way it’s obvious the first critter we call a chicken came form an egg..
-“When a theist makes an empirical claim…these claims are indeed open to MN inquiry…” Sure–if someone claims GOD WILL TAKE AWAY YOUR CANCER WHEN YOU PRAY, and then you pray and you still have cancer, they were demonstrably wrong. But that’s why most Theists don’t make that claim. You’re not criticizing “Theism.” You’re criticizing faith healers. (As well you should.)
-“If we descended from an original couple…If the world suffered from a global flood…If the Jews did win free from Egypt…” All of these statements are you criticizing THE BIBLE specifically–not Theism, which is what we’re talking about. You’re trying to apply logical deduction to a sacred text, without explaining why you trust logic in the first place.
-“This absence of evidence… is as compelling as any contrary evidence can be.” No, not when I’ve been asking you to provide an alternative explanation for existence. Look, I’m not just going to abandon my Foundational belief that there is a Supreme Truth, independent of humans, just to join you in the void. The endless rabbit trails of why we SHOULDN’T believe (X -Theory) don’t solve the problems with Pure Naturalism. With as hard-to-believe as the Theist’s claims may be, it’s still harder to believe that Mind Came from Mindlessness.
-“The mind is what the brain does. Adding some divine agency…[doesn’t] ‘explain’ how reasoning occurs.” No, I’m not trying to explain HOW reasoning occurs. (It’s you who obsessed with the mechanics of “how,” remember?) And I’m not suggesting God just bequeaths reason to people, either…I’m saying that Reason/Logic are actually PARTS of God Himself.
God IS Truth. He IS Goodness. He IS Reason. I’m trying to help you understand that rationality (although not a physical “thing”) IS still very much real, and that it exists apart from humanity. That’s why we talk about “discovering” new truths rather than huddling as a group to vote and “invent” them. I’m trying to help you see that your trust in a knowable universe and your thirst for an objective truth are either examples of your brain tricking you with “illusions”…OR, you know as well as I do that nature doesn’t just APPEAR to be following orders.
Anyway, I expected you to say “the brain” existed first. That’s consistent with naturalism. But I have a problem, then, with the “natural selection” which supposedly produced the brain, because only MINDS (using logic) can select between two (or more) choices. Do you have a theory for how brains evolved in an environment that wasn’t logical?
God IS Truth. He IS Goodness. He IS Reason.
Show me how you know any such things. I don’t doubt you believe it. What I doubt is that you have knowledge from reality to back these claims up.
So, failing that, please link ‘Truth’ to this causal agency, link ‘Goodness’ to this causal agency, link ‘Reason’ to this causal agency.
Failing that, please demonstrate the difference between ‘truth’ and ‘Truth’, ‘goodness’ and ‘Goodness’, ‘reason’ and ‘Reason’.
I’m trying to help you understand that rationality (although not a physical “thing”) IS still very much real, and that it exists apart from humanity.
You adding a capital letter to these terms does not make them into proper nouns. And my point is that these properties of mind come from the biology that produces them and that there is no evidence that they can or do exist independent of its biological root as some kind of property-less disembodied real not-a-thing. They are not evidence’ for your god.
When you treat truth and goodness like they exist APART FROM HUMANS–then, and only then, does the very concept of “reality” make sense. That’s my evidence.
If you believe truth/goodness come from the human brain, then the concept of “reality” itself (an immaterial “thing”) ALSO comes from the brain. So, if I can’t assume truth and goodness outside of myself then you can’t assume “reality” outside yourself either.
All of us are prisoners of the illusions in our brains OR there really is a reality, which is objectively knowable, outside of us…and we simply use our brains to discover it.
Anything outside you and me, which is objectively knowable, is a part of God. You can call it nature, if you want. But I’m not going to provide “evidence” that nature exists outside of me. I don’t need to. You already believe it.
I think the problem here is you conflating ‘human’ with ‘biology’. Biology demonstrates all these properties in all kinds of species but we don;t see it from geology, or weather, or tides. We don;t find these properties anywhere but in biology and we see it dispersed in proportion to brain/body mass. We see these properties cease when life ceases and we see these properties emerge and develop as as biology emerges and develops. That’s why I say there’s a a one-to-one correlation to biology that leads us to hypothesize that a better understanding of these properties lies within the further study of biology generally and brain function specifically.
Your assertion that reality is an illusion of the brain is an age-old philosophical chestnut useless in the pursuit of furthering our understanding about the environments that we encounter. Useless. But we do know, and can demonstrate, is that our environmental navigational senses are a brain function and not an organ function. You can train your ears, or tongue or balancing neurology to ‘see’ because it’s your brain interpreting incoming data – no matter the sensory organ used to collect the data – that formulates the vision needed so that you then can successfully navigate environments. We use the verb ‘to see’ a a symbolic representation of the process of visualizing environments that exist independent of us. ‘Seeing’, however, is not a thing, an independent property-less disembodied thing we are bequeathed from some god but a naturally occurring property fully dependent on the biology that produces it. To claim ‘seeing’ is evidence of some creative god is a useless hypothesis if we wish to further our understanding about what constitutes seeing. Applying the religious model to various sensory impairments involved in seeing adds nothing to our knowledge but studying the biology that produces it does. That’s why applications, therapies, and technologies involved with seeing never come from religious inquires or metaphysical pursuits but from the actual study of biology as it relates to producing vision.
I use this example to try to show the uselessness of the religious hypothesis about furthering any understanding about ‘truth’ and ‘goodness’ and ‘reason’; it’s not productive in knowledge. That’s just the brute fact of the matter. The religious hypothesis is a failed hypothesis not because I believe it is but because it does not now, has not, and probably never shall produce any knowledge about anything anywhere at at any time. All it produces is ignorance masquerading as wisdom, masquerading as knowledge, masquerading as another way to know, masquerading as an alternative. It’s all and entirely a mug’s game.
So presenting claims of nebulous terms like ‘truth’ to be an indication of religious insight into environments external from us is silly. And’s it’s silly because we have no means to apply this hypothetical ‘insight’ (equivalent in all ways to just a word game) in any way that is useful. That’s why, by its own failure to produce applicable knowledge, religious belief masquerading as empirical claims is useless. It doesn’t study reality like biology does; it emotionally masturbates to its own metaphysical groping.
I see that you’re now using the word “environment” instead of “reality.” If you’ll recall, I got that whole thread started with the observation that Atheists have to keep changing the words in order to avoid sounding too spiritual…
“Applying the religious model…adds nothing to our knowledge but studying the biology that produces it does.” Once again, you’re pointing out that studying biology leads to knowledge–and I agree. But what is knowledge?
I know it’s not a physical thing; neither is God.
So, if knowledge is discoverable outside of ourselves, then it is God. This is frustrating for someone with the A-Priori assumption that everything can be explained in material terms. Philosophy begs to differ. That’s why you can’t answer which came first: brain (matter) or logic (immaterial rules that govern our “environments”). You may not like that chestnut, but that’s the problem I’m trying to get you to confront.
The same logic you use to argue that God is an “illusion” also argues that your thoughts themselves are illusions. You can’t just use logic to prove the importance of studying biology and then abandon logic when I point out how much it fits the description of an eternal, immaterial God governing the Universe.
You claim we can demonstrate that our senses are a “brain” function and NOT an “organ” function. But, from a biological perspective the brain IS ANOTHER ORGAN. In your view, what’s the difference between what the brain does and what the colon does?
But you don’t treat your term ‘God’ like you do these others terms. You don’t try to pretend that knowledge IS love, knowledge IS truth, knowledge IS reason because you know that the terms are not synonyms. But you make a special exemption for your god, and claim it is causal, a real unreal propertied unpropertied unthing causal thing!
So I question the coherency of the term you use conveniently called ‘God’ and point out that none of these claims you make on behalf of the term ‘God’ produces insight into anything. It’s just a convenient word you use in all manner of ways that is a meaningless representation for whatever numinous concept you care to name.
But you don’t leave it there floating about in the ether; your mistake is to cross the boundary into our reality, into our environment, and start making all kinds of empirical claims that the effects we have here and now are caused by that mystical and unknowable agency. When I take you to task for committing this error, you pretend I’m denying any relevant meaning to the other terms, that without belief in your god, you presume to tell me that I am arguing that these other terms become meaningless!
No! I’m declaring that the claims you make about your god as a causal, interactive, creative agency comes only and entirely from your belief that this is so. I ask you to link your empirical claims about this supposed causal agency to the effects you select in the here and now. That would be evidence. All you offer are nebulous terms. That’s not evidence; that’s restating your claims… altered only by altering the meaning of the term ‘God’ over and over again to try to make it fit your belief!
And yes, the brain is an organ. So what?
“But you don’t treat your term ‘God’ like you do these others terms. You don’t try to pretend that knowledge IS love, knowledge IS truth, knowledge IS reason because you know that the terms are not synonyms.”
Right. I said all of those are PARTS of God. (Although, “parts” implies bodies, which are material). Look, I’m not denying it’s hard to grasp. And I’m also not saying I grasp it. Because if I had complete knowledge, then *I* would be Dear Leader.
Then *I* would be God.
Think of it this way: how would you explain depth to a person with no sight? Or how would you explain “volume” to a 2-dimensional creature? All attempts to do so would sound like philosophical meaninglessness, wouldn’t it?
And, if the 2-D creature just kept complaining, “I need 2-D proof, or you’re not talking about reality anymore!” Then how would you respond?
“And yes, the brain is an organ. So what?” So, you didn’t answer my question. How is what the brain does different from what the colon does? (I dare you to explain it without appealing to a “mind,” or similar spiritual concept.)
You might want to give Tildeb knowledge of his pal, JZ’s dire predicament. Atheism or naturalism or whatever you call it is taking a beating.
Somebody needs to post some actual Science to refute our claims of mysticism. Somebody…Doesn’t matter who…
Well, they WOULD explain, I’m sure.
But it’s just so hard to put some things into words…
John 1:14
I kid you not. You have to see it to believe it.
I’m reading it now.
*snort laugh*
“Rascal” is one of my favorite things to call people. It reminds me of Great Grandma Branyan.
JZ even suggested that we might be ‘fellow believers’!
If this wasn’t hilarious, I’d be insulted.
He really doesn’t know what to do with you….
At some point, most Christians lose their resolve and take his bait. Most of them eventually start feeling like maybe they DO owe him some answers.
That’s how someone gets to be of his advanced age–writing countless numbers of words–and never actually saying anything.
I already have. The ‘magic’ you talk about is a product of evolution. Understand evolution, understand how seed and bees and spiders are related to common ancestors but are different expressions of these ancient local units obeying local rules and producing marvelous complexity.
John’ Zs trying to pin you down to take responsibility for what you believe. and each time he tries to do that – to allow you to own your beliefs – you simply evade. Evading the important questions John Z asks you is not ‘winning’ nor is it a sign of his position’s weakness; it’s keeping your beliefs from being honestly examined.
Well done, John B. We wouldn’t want that to happen.
Stay ignorant of the consequences of your beliefs. That’s fine. But don’t for a moment think this reveals you to have any concern developing wisdom, for wanting to know what is the case, pretending to have any concern at all for what is true, nor any concern to exercise intellectual integrity concerning your faith-based, muffin-muddled, radio seeking, magical kingdom of religious beliefs; on the contrary, and as I have accused you of before, all you’re really doing is hiding behind your sense of humour, shielding your beliefs with ignorance, and think yourself clever for successfully doing so rather than feel any honest shame for what you are really demonstrating: cowardice.
” The ‘magic’ you talk about is a product of evolution. Understand evolution, understand how seed and bees and spiders are related to common ancestors but are different expressions of these ancient local units obeying local rules and producing marvelous complexity. ”
That is a beautiful faith statement that contains not a shred of the KNOWLEDGE you claim to value so highly.
The floor is open to you too, Tildeb. Shatter the mysticism! Destroy magic with Science! Pull back the curtain and expose the gimmick that makes the magic work.
Quit hiding behind the ‘Oogity-Boogity’ of evolution.
Be brave, for a change, John B. Go investigate the genetic evidence yourself. Don’t keep insisting that I explain everything to you because we both know that doesn’t work. And quit lying, too. It’s not a virtue even you think you do it for Jesus. You know perfectly well that claiming understanding the theory of evolution is just a faith-based belief is a blatant and intentional lie meant to smear others with the shit you thinks smells so sweet.
I’ve investigated the genetic evidence. I see molecules arranging themselves into double helix DNA all by themselves. It’s pure magic! Mystical, super-natural magic!
But if you think ‘Theory of Evolution’ makes your magical claims smell sweeter then go for it!
Here John, a little lesson in chemistry and how things catalyse. I would provide a link, but I know you fear reading scientific papers.
Before there were cells, before life encoded in the familiar DNA, there were proton powered rocks. This is was the RNA World: the life before life where autocatalytic mechanisms fundamental to living systems began with the evolution of families of molecules that could catalyse their own replication .
Water seeped 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 that then welled up in alkaline hydrothermal vents. Rich in dissolved iron, the upwelling of these hydrothermal fluids reacted with this primordial seawater and produced carbonate rocks riddled with tiny pores and a “foam” of iron-sulphur bubbles. Inside the iron-sulphur bubbles, hydrogen reacted with carbon dioxide, forming simple organic molecules such as methane, formate, and acetate, with some of these reactions catalysed by the iron-sulphur minerals not uncommon to those found in many protiens today. The electrochemical gradient between the alkaline vent fluid and the acidic seawater leads to the spontaneous formation of acetyl phosphate and pyrophospate, chemicals which act just like adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the chemical that powers all living cells. These molecules bonded to form amino acids; the building blocks of proteins, and nucleotides, the building blocks for RNA and DNA. Fatty molecules coated the iron-sulphur froth forming cell-like bubbles, some of which enclosed self-replicating sets of molecules: the first organic cells. Found in bacteria and archaea, 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. Some protocells started using ATP as well as acetyl phosphate and pyrophosphate. 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. 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.
Thanks, JZ!
Let me share a couple of the lines that you forgot to cut and paste:
“We may never be able to prove beyond any doubt how life first evolved. But of the many explanations proposed, one stands out – the idea that life evolved in hydrothermal vents deep under the sea…”
And this really resonated with me:
“If life did evolve in alkaline hydrothermal vents, it might have happened something like this:”
Again, I’ve got no problem with faith statements. Just want to makes sure we ‘fellow believers’ are discussing the same faith.
Those mindless molecules whirling through space tapped into a super-natural magic in order to get organized. That’s all we’re saying, right?
You’re confusing cut and paste with paraphrased notes.
The New Scientist article is OK, but if you want to read a fuller, more detailed explantion of the chemistry, here, enjoy…. although we both know you’ll never read it.
https://www.sott.net/article/195226-Was-our-oldest-ancestor-a-proton-powered-rock
And John, as you have a presented hypothesis, perhaps you can present yours now, with actual evidence, like how chemistry works?
I look forward to it.
The actual evidence like how chemistry works is what I’ve been inviting you to present all day.
You are the materialist, dolt.
I say it’s magic. I thought we agreed to that?
Ah, OK, I see the problem!
You dont understand how chemicals catalyse.
Do some research on what that means. You’ll thank me for it.
All done looking that word up?
Good.
So, here we go. John, you’re free to posit your Magician (a god named Yhwh) as the “catalyst” for life, but it falls to you to demonstrate where that catalyst appears in the RNA World. (you might want to look that up, too)
Can you?
No, dolt.
Do you understand what the word supernatural means?
Ah, an invisible, non-material catalyst, is it?
Okay… So, at which point does this non-material catalyst interact with the material?
Where can we observe this magic happening?
Watch those molecules form themselves into DNA, dolt.
…all freaking day….I’ve been saying this all freaking day…
Errrrum, they don’t just form into DNA.
Far from it.
Could you PLEASE stop exercising your wilfull ignorance, John.
Look up RNA World.
Molecules don’t form into DNA?
Now who’s being unscientific?
You. Proteins and enzymes form DNA. Proteins and enzymes come from amino acids. Amino acids occur from molecules formed when single compounds bond to create double compounds. In 2014, amino acids (like glycine) were captured in the coma of comet 81P/Wild (Wild-2) by the space probe, Stardust, together with more complex aliphatic hydrocarbons, methylamine and ethylamine, proving these essential building blocks for life are found naturally in space as they are on earth.
You see, you’re playing the Ken Ham Creationist here, John. You seem to think DNA just magically appeared, complete. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Did you look up RNA World?
You do know that RNA (a self-replicating molecule) came before DNA, right? It’s simpler, more ancient, but it is the precursor.
You.
Still.
Think.
This
Is
About
Design
?!!
You’re like a telemarketer. If it ain’t on your script, you can’t talk about it. William Paley can’t help you.
Boiling rock water can’t help.
Suffering protozoa can’t help you.
This has never been about design.
…RNA is the result of magic too.
It’s not about design?
My apologies, I thought you were implying Yhwh was the Magician, the Designer?
That is the Wacthmaker Argument, after all.
Okay then.
There is no design.
Yhwh just set the fundamental laws of interations at whim, a random role of the dice, a throw of the slot machine, and then watched (to date)13.82 billion years of history unfold.
I can accept that.
I do accept that.
So, although this simply contradicts the bible (your book and cosmogony) he didnt plan humans.
He didn’t plan anything.
Not a thing.
Is this your position, John?
John, I’m waiting.
Is this your position?
There was no plan?
…still waiting….
And John, please answer the question:
So, at which point does this non-material catalyst interact with the material?
Where can we observe this magic happening?
Look up supernatural again, JZ.
oh, forget it, I’ll let you off the hook…You’re not going to catch on…
Supernatural phenomena can’t be ‘observed’ in nature because they are ‘supernatural’. Kinda like things that are ‘submerged’ can’t be observed above water.
We (some of us anyway) see the magic in how it interacts with nature. (I’m not going to copy and paste article from above.)
…all freaking day…and still you’re making me repeat myself…
I know what you’re talking about. What you are saying is this universe is painted in impenetrable naturalism.
I agree.
Right down through receding degrees of complexity, we see all matter simply obeying the fundamental laws of interaction. Conservation and symmetry, continuity and transfer, classical mechanics and motion, gravity, thermodynamics, electromagnetism, photonics, and a host of smaller but no less unmoveable pieces of legislation that were snap-frozen in place at a hundredth of a billionth of a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang.
All we see is naturalism.
Even if you don’t know it, you are saying Yhwh is responsible for the laws of interaction. You are saying this entity, Yhwh, deliberately cooled the universe at a precise rate so as to set the stage from which certain chemical reactions would be possible. In this world, hydrogen fuses to the heavier and more complex helium, helium fuses into the heavier and more complex carbon, single compounds bind to make double compounds, simple molecules marry to create amino acids, amino acids come together to model proteins and enzymes, proteins and enzymes experiment to prototype self-replicating systems infused with a homeostatic urge where, according to the accepted paradigm of evolutionary biology, there is a continuum from simple to more complex organisms.
We are all, quite literally, hydrogen’s diaspora.
Yhwh enabled this adventure by deliberately cooling the universe at the precise time…. Then, I think you’re saying, he sat back and just watched as hydrogen played with gravity for 13.82 billion years.
I can accept that.
Excluding the deliberate cooling, observably, that is what we see. Perfect naturalism. No driver.
What I’d like you to answer now is what I asked you on your latest post, but have refused to.
There must be a purpose, John.
There must be a reason.
I answered.
You haven’t.
Please do….
Why did Rembrandt paint?
Why do you comment on this blog?
There must be a purpose, JZ.
You’ve answered with ‘chemicals’.
I’ve asked for specifics.
You will never provide them because you don’t know them. You are grasping at faith just like me. The difference is my faith is reasonable in light of the evidence.
See? There you go lying again. I don’t that’s funny in the least, John B; I think that’s just sad and pathetic.
Rather than settle for the comfort of ignorance behind the observation of ‘Magic!‘ (is it because it feels good to be pious?), why not actually pursue some knowledge, deepen your abysmally shallow understanding of basic genetic evidence for common ancestry, rather than pretend you have investigated it but – with all your ‘natural’ insight into the science of it (powered I have no doubt by an awesome level of piety) – rejected it on merit? That’s a lie, John B, because you utilize exactly the same scientific understanding you reject every time you access modern medicine for either yourself for someone you love. You wouldn’t do that if you actually believed what you were spouting here.
Your only choice is whether to own the label of glaring hypocrite or own the label of blatant liar. Either way, you demonstrate zero regard or interest in pursuing and trying to understand what is the case, so that means you’ve lied previously about thinking that what’s true and understanding why matters. I vote for blatant liar because I think it better suits the intellectual, cowardice you show with John Z’s attempt to educate you then glaring hypocrite but both work well enough to accurately describe the reality that is John Branyan today.
Lying for Jesus seems to be a common (and accepted) theme with evagelicals. So too, it appears, does the exercise of wilfull ignorance. In other words, as is on full display here, they’ve elevated self-inflicted, self-sustained stupidity to a Virtue.
Nobody’s mentioned Jesus except you two.
You acting like Peter denying Jesus again?
Now, from the linked article, an easy-to-read section
Interesting, huh?
Now, where’s your hypothesis…
My hypothesis is the magic of chemistry. The transcendent wisdom that causes these molecular interactions.
Did you forget that we agreed to that?
GASP!!!
Where you being dishonest earlier?!!?
I see… God of the Gaps anyone?
So, what you’re really saying is Yhwh consciously cooled the early universe at a precise rate so as to snap-freeze in place the laws of interation. This was long, long, long before chemicals existed.
I’ve never said Yhwh.
And you agreed to the existence of magic.
So you were lying about agreeing that magic exists.
I’m shocked!!
(…that was sarcasm…)
You don’t believe in Yhwh?
You are a Christian, are you not?
If not Yhwh (the god of Abraham), which god do you actually believe in, then?
This doesn’t work with me, JZ.
It works with other theists but you’re a very slow learner.
Asking me questions is NOT how you state your position.
You’re a liar.
You’re a fraud.
You’re a coward.
And there’s the song and dance, again.
Is it that hard for you to simply say, I believe in Yhwh, the god of the bible?
Appears so…
Blah, blah, blah…I’m a terrible, cowardly hypocrite…I know. You don’t have to open with that every single time.
Modern medicine, technology, science, indeed reason and logic fit perfectly within my worldview. I can accept any KNOWLEDGE that you care to pass on, Tildeb. So far, all you’ve done is prattle about your faith. All you’ve done is repeat ‘evolutionary theory’ as if that’s an explanation for anything.
How does a spider know how to weave webs, Tildeb? Educate me! Pour forth with your knowledge!
I think I can summarize for you.
Reality is only those things for which we have a natural explanation.
Whatever we can’t explain naturally falls officially under ‘I don’t know’ which really means ‘it’s superstition’ but it is impossible to pin us down on that.
That means we don’t BELIEVE anything. We KNOW everything except for whatever we don’t know.
I really liked your last comment to JZ on what makes a coward, Tildeb!
I’m surprised you don’t wear those boots yourself…. “for not owning [your] contradictions, for refusing to admit they are present, for diverting from them, for blaming others for them, for doing everything possible including vilifying Christians and misrepresenting them with stupid Oogity Boogity and Poofism oversimplifications, rather than deal straight up and honestly…” with the fact that YOU HAVE A GOD, TOO…
And, here’s the really painful truth for someone who hates Truth so much: the God you recognize as consistent, trustworthy, and able to be stood upon is the exact same one I worship. 🙂
The only difference between the two of us is that I call him “God,” and you call him “logic” or “reason” or “reality” or a whole host of other lower-case names that make you feel better.
I realize that sometimes a complicated subject needs extra words to unpack. But let’s keep this in mind, too.
(Sometimes there’s a fine line between being thorough…and being wordy because of unclear thinking.)
http://www.azquotes.com/picture-quotes/quote-if-you-can-t-write-clearly-you-probably-don-t-think-nearly-as-well-as-you-think-you-kurt-vonnegut-84-93-61.jpg
I watched this debate live. It was good, but here is a 6 minute breakdown of it, which addresses many of these points and explains the flaws in the reasoning often used by theists trying to dabble in cosmology.
Apparently you don’t share Tildeb’s disdain for the metaphysical.
I’m not sure which part of this video is problematic for theists.
It’s not that it’s problematic for Theists, silly JB. The video is problematic for FUNDAMENTALIST theists. i.e. the type of Christians most Athests were before renouncing their delicate faith…and the type of Christian that said Atheists try to force YOU to be, so they can more easily defeat your god.
Indeed, if you believed in flying magic spaghetti something-or-another, then “actual science” WOULD be a problem.
When the first premise is “the universe doesn’t need a cause”, we are not discussing actual science…
Yeah, in fact, an “eternal universe” full of information and intelligence sounds suspiciously like a god-type.
Sounds magical. 😉
Surprised me that JZ’s video suggested that life could exist that’s different from what we understand life to be. What Theist would argue with that?
I know! To paraphrase:”Are we defining life as just information-processing?”
Weeeeell, I don’t know, Mr. Actual Scientist. But let’s explore that, shall we?
Honestly, if it weren’t for Fedora Man telling me that WLC was “eating ass,” I wouldn’t have realized it. (Thanks for the commentary, Fedora Man!)
The few half-sentences of Craig’s that made the video’s cut didn’t sound very unreasonable to me.
I guess the TOTAL, FACE-MELTING, BUTT-TWISTING BEATDOWN would be more obvious if I watched the debate in its entirety…
Meanwhile, can I request that the Atheists please post more memes and videos? Literally every time a God-denier offers up the newest scientific thought in one field or another, it has lined up perfectly with my understanding of God.
I think Carroll was using the word metaphysics as a general umbrella term for that platform from which questions concerning known physics arise. That is why he says “metaphysics must follow physics.” The theist starts with the conclusion, god. Science is the exact opposite. Tildeb is exactly right when he says the theist fills in the unknown with the metaphysics, erroneously proclaiming it as something solid, when it is not. This is God of the Gaps.
Cause and effect are not the correct way to approach cosmology. As Carroll wrote in “Why (Almost All) Cosmologists are Atheists”, which I recommend you reading (link below):
https://preposterousuniverse.com/wp-content/uploads/nd-paper.pdf
You keep offering stuff like this as if it’s brand new information that I’ve never encountered before. I’m already ‘enlightened’ to all of this. Starting with materialism, the evidence leads me to God.
The title of the book alone tells me a lot. If I quoted from a book called, “Why Cosmologists Believe in God.” would you assume it’s a book about science or religion?
“…these notions are useful in an informal way for human beings, but are not a part of the rigorous scientific description of the world.” Kinda like the notion, ‘God made you and cares about you’, right?
I’m planning to ask Tildeb this question too. Do you think you possess free will? If possible, I’d like to avoid a tedious conversation where we take turns trying to define that term. I’m asking if you think you have the power to make decisions. For example, did you choose to write your blog response?
If you answer yes, then help me understand how free-will exists as a purely material substance.
To be honest, I’m not sure where I stand on the subject of free will. Intuitively, I used to believe in it, but from everything i’ve read, and thinking those things through in detail, i have to say we don’t have free will. It’s an illusion.
I appreciate your honesty.
I believe we have free will. This is one of the aspects of being made ‘in the image of God’. God makes choices and allows us to make choices too.
Have you encountered any difficulties trying to consistently live within your worldview?
None whatsoever. I’m quite comfortable in my panpsychism.
Intuition makes you think you have free will. Intuition cannot be trusted. It is often dead, dead wrong. It is intuitively obvious that the sun and the planets revolve around the earth. So too, a cognitive delayed feedback loop makes it intuitively appear we have free will, but everything discovered in neuroscience in just the last few years says this is wrong.
This is a good, well-balanced article on it
http://io9.gizmodo.com/5975778/scientific-evidence-that-you-probably-dont-have-free-will
I encounter a couple of difficulties when I contemplate materialism. For example:
I’m not going to read the article you posted. Am I being willfully ignorant?
I’m not surprised. You tend to act only in ways that don’t threaten your pantomime version of reality. You’re a fearful person.
Do you still not understand my problem?!
How can I act differently if there’s no free will?
Apparently you didn’t see my response.
How do I act differently if there is no free will?
Read the article then get back to me.
Congratulations! You are the featured contributor in my next blog post!
No. I’m not going to read your article.
And if you can’t respond to that statement in a manner that’s consistent with your professed worldview, then you’re in over your head here.
Of course you won’t read the article. You pretend to be interested in subjects, you pretend to “think honestly” about things, but it is all a charade. You have no intention whatsoever of exploring anything because the most important thing to you is protecting your pantomime version of reality.
Do remember: in the age of information, ignorance is a choice.
I DO remember: “in the age of information, ignorance is a choice”
But here’s the thing, JZ…
…you don’t believe we have choice.
So what ever does that statement mean?
I never said that. I said I’m not sure where I stand on the subject. Seems you’ve forgotten even praising me for this truthfulness. You see, this is another example of your dishonestly. All you want is a fight. You have no intention of actually learning anything, no intention of expanding your knowledge. It’s all a rather pathetic, juvenile charade. All you are looking for is an opportunity to attack and belittle.
It must be horrible to live like that.
First we have:
” Intuitively, I used to believe in it, but from everything i’ve read, and thinking those things through in detail, i have to say we don’t have free will. It’s an illusion.”
Then there’s: “So too, a cognitive delayed feedback loop makes it intuitively appear we have free will, but everything discovered in neuroscience in just the last few years says this is wrong.”
Then you audaciously accuse me of having no interest in expanding my knowledge! How am I supposed to learn from a guy who doesn’t know what the hell he believes?!
Yes, read. Read slowly, if it helps. That is where the science is taking us. I, however, don’t know where I stand. So, I will continue to read the research and think about it.
Is that so hard for you to grasp?
Evidently so.
And no, John, you have no interest in expanding your knowledge. You have exampled this by refusing, like petulant child, to read an article offered to you in good faith.
Fine. Swim in your ignorance. Enjoy it. With that attitude, I just hope you have no contact whatsoever with children.
“I, however, don’t know where I stand. So, I will continue to read the research and think about it.
Is that so hard for you to grasp?”
No. That’s not hard to grasp at all.
It’s also not what you said before I asked you a question that your ‘no free-will’ stance couldn’t answer. This is the beauty of ‘non-belief’! No convictions! Nothing to defend. No need to be accountable for claims when you can just accuse me of misunderstanding you.
You don’t know where you stand on the subject of free will so I’ll enlighten you. You believe we have free will. In the future, just come out and admit it. It will save a lot of time.
And I have frequent contact with children, JZ. They’re called atheists…remember?
Let me know if you read the article…
Ooo, I like that final point. I’m going to steal it and use it shamelessly.
Can’t claim authorship, but certainly hat’s off to the person who coined it.
And I’ve got another problem with your panpsychism:
“Intuition makes you think you have free will. Intuition cannot be trusted. It is often dead, dead wrong.”
This entire statement is intuitive, is it not? If intuition cannot be trusted then isn’t the statement itself untrustworthy?
Do the sun and planets revolved around the earth?
No.
Now answer my question.
Exactly.
To be clear:
My question was “If intuition cannot be trusted then isn’t [your] statement itself untrustworthy?”
Your answer is: “Exactly.”
To be clear: Exactly.
The sun and the planets do not revolve around the earth. This a hard fact that contradict intuition. There is no “intuition”in that statement.
Brilliant.
A fine answer to a question I didn’t ask!
Carroll’s argument boils down to clarifying that adding some god adds a needless complexity for which there is no compelling evidence to do so, which is why most cosmologists are atheists. I’ve been parroting Laplace repeatedly, saying that we have no need for that hypothesis.
I intensely dislike free will arguments because, as you rightly point out John B, they tend to bog down with a failure to share an understanding of what is meant by free will. I do know the standard arguments seem to reasonably conclude that if we have will it’s not free, but if it is free than we have no will. I find this result for all the work to arrive there as deeply unsatisfying. I also know there are two general camps of compatiblists and incompatiblists. I suppose I fall into one or the other but don’t care to take out a membership card for either.
What I suspect is that the metaphysical term ‘free will’ is the root problem here that is not alleviated by such terms as ‘intention’. As you have already demonstrated, John B, you equate ‘choice’ as well as ‘decisions’ as synonyms. That’s worth a few thousand books by underemployed philosophers of mind and I’m just not that interested.
So if the question is about whether or not we choose, we exercise decisions, then it can be framed as, “Given the identical conditions, could you have chosen differently?” That answer seems unequivocally to be ‘No.’ Ergo, no free will because you have no choice.
But this conclusion hinges on achieving the identical conditions, a duplication of a condition that I think is impossible to achieve in reality within an evolving spacetime; (at best, we can experimentally recreate approximate conditions, in which case the result can be different so that it appears we can exercise choice). It seems to me that such considerations are a form of mental masturbation without any eventual release! it’s frustrating.
So I think by ‘will’ what we’re really talking about is a set of conditions that we can (and do) affect by acting on intention to obtain a desired result. In this sense, I think we really do exercise ‘choice’. For example, (preface every point with a set of immutable conditions and we can arrive at two very different actions), I choose to play baseball (which the brain then sets out a preference for the circuitry to be used) rather than weed the garden, choose to step up to the plate rather than sit on the bench, choose to look at the thrown ball rather than close my eyes, choose to swing at it rather than scratch my butt, but I don’t choose to miss it when I do. My intention does not match my result so I then choose to go to a batting cage rather than repaint the house, choose to spend countless hours becoming better and better at batting rather than drinking beer on the couch while watching every episode of Friends, and so I’m exercising my intention through directed action to try to alter the conditions that produced my failure. I have what appears to be all kinds of ‘choice’, starting with the decision to play baseball. Ergo I have free will because I have choice.
As I said, I find all of this deeply unsatisfying because I also accept that our neural chemistry at a singular point is a certain way that will produce a certain result – a certain ‘choice’ – without any actual choice at the moment of function. For example, if I ask you not to think of a pink elephant, good luck directing your brain chemistry to comply. It simply functions. But I also know that we can exercise intention by directed action and create different neural circuitry to produce various ways and means to function (just watch a three year old ask Granny for a cookie very differently than the child asks Mom). We are not just auto-bots but a highly complex organism capable of many ways and means to obtain intended results. This process of creating multiple ways and means to face the same conditions is called ‘learning’and we have barely begun to explore what our brains actually do when we consider alternative actions, as in, should I swing at this thrown ball or should I wait for a different pitch? Again, we have to talk about directing intention (choice), conditions, taking action, and results… and move ever further and further away from the base term ‘free will’ to the point where we leave such useless and problematic terms far behind us as our understanding deepens.
First, we have:
“…That answer seems unequivocally to be ‘No.’ Ergo, no free will because you have no choice.”
Then we have:
“So I think by ‘will’ what we’re really talking about is a set of conditions that we can (and do) affect by acting on intention to obtain a desired result. In this sense, I think we really do exercise ‘choice’. ”
Which is it?
Right. Each line of framing produces a different conclusion. That’s why I say I grow frustrated with the issue about free will. I don;t think we’ve framed it yet in a a way that can produce independent knowledge to explain how the brain is actually functioning, actually producing what we call ‘will’. Because we get different answers depending on the framing, I think the problem is in the terminology itself… the very thing you and I understandably don’t want to get bogged down in.
Okay. I get what you’re saying.
Is it possible that your frustration is being caused by ‘reality’ not conforming to a predictable pattern? Is it possible that you actually believe that ‘intention’, ‘will’ and ‘choice’ are real things and the realization is unsettling?
** THE FOLLOWING CANNOT BE SUBSTANTIATED WITH DATA **
We all make faith claims. It is impossible to get out of bed in the morning without assuming some realities without hard evidence. Deciding where we put our faith is a matter of will.
It is possible but no. The causal link between neural brain function and thoughts is indisputably supported by overwhelming evidence from reality. I have nothing to do with it. Intention, will, choice, are very loose terms to describe various aspects of the neural brain functioning. Investigating those aspects means seeking evidence where it is in realty… in neural brain functioning. That’s not a faith statement but a nod to where we find what is being described by the terms. And we know it’s there because, as I’ve said, there’s a one to one with its dysfunction that has nothing to do with me or my beliefs.
It absolutely IS a faith statement. You would rightly call me out if I adjusted your phrase as follows:
“Intention, will, choice, are very loose terms to describe various aspects of metaphysical concepts. Investigating those aspects means seeking evidence where it is in reality… in metaphysics. That’s not a faith statement but a nod to where we find what is being described by the terms.”
John, can you give me a tangible example of metaphysics?
You seem to like this word, but I’m not entirely sure I know what it even is.
Metaphysics is reality without physical form or substance. So I can’t give you a ‘tangible’ example. But some intangible examples are things like:
Thoughts
Emotions
Instincts
Intuitions
Consciousness
Morals
OK, thanks. And you think these things are limited to human beings?
Maybe. I can’t speak for other species.
I’ve pondered the possibility of plants having thoughts. I suppose it’s not impossible…
So you accept then that the source of these things is biology. It is material. It’s natural. It arises through complexity.
Why then persist clinging to some vaporous, ethereal concept that you concede isn’t neccessary for these things?
No. I’ve never ‘accepted’ any such thesis.
Good grief, John. Did you just try to wave a magic wand and turn me into a materialist?
So answer the question without deliberately pussy-footing around it.
Yes or no: Do you think these things (Thoughts, Emotions, Instincts, Intuitions, Consciousness, Morals) are limited to human beings?
Maybe doesn’t cut it.
Yes or no.
My goodness!
That answer was intended as an effort to find common ground. If we’re open to the possibility of life in countless places scattered throughout the multi-verse, then it’s likely that some of those lifeforms will be sentient. It’s likely that their consciousness will arise thought an entirely different process than our own. I wasn’t trying to be evasive.
I don’t believe plants experience consciousness. (Sorry I mentioned thinking about it…sheesh!)
Obviously, consciousness is not limited to human beings. And there are many animals that display instinctive behavior. To the question of emotions, who can say?
Can you speak with certainty about what goes through the mind of a tree sloth?
Morality is the one concept in that list that I believe is exclusive to human beings.
No one is talking about the multi-verse here. We were discussing metaphysics, so please answer on the actual thread.
Actually, the video link you posted referenced the multi-verse. I thought it would be okay to consider your evidence in my dialogue.
I’m not going to play this game for very long, JZ. Your ‘non-belief’ doesn’t exist without a ‘belief’ to reject. You need me to say something so you can say ‘nope’.
You’re still officially in ‘limbo’ on the question of free will so be careful about accusing me of ‘pussy-footing’.
Here we go:
“No. Metaphysical concepts such as thoughts, emotions, consciousness etc. are not exclusive to human beings as it is likely other life forms experience the phenomena though we currently have no way of stating this with absolute certainty.”
Sorry john, but we do currently have ways of stating that with EXTREME CERTIANTY.
Biology explains your metaphysics.
End of story.
That’s all you wanted say from the beginning, isn’t it? You could have just said ‘end of story’ after your first post and saved us A TON of time.
How do you even breathe inside that claustrophobic mindset?
Project much?
End of story.
Touche
I can see you don’t really want to continue this conversation. Understandable. It is ruinous to the pantomime you hold so dear, so the defensive mechanisms have well and truly kicked-in.
Must protect the precious. Can’t let awkward facts ruin a good, comforting, ever-so-special delusion, eh?
Be sure, however, to let me know if you ever want to actually think honestly about this subject, and I’ll be happy to point you to a few decades of fascinating (easy-to-read) behavioural research.
No one is talking about the multi-verse here. We are discussing metaphysics. Please don’t muddy the water.
Many can say, John. There are libraries of behavioural animal’s studies which say quite a deal about exactly this. Published on the 7th of July, 2012, the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness firmly asserts that the absence of a neocortex does not preclude non-human animals from experiencing genuine suffering. Indeed, the signatories to the declaration stressed that the required neurological apparatus for total awareness of pain—and the emotional states allied to that—arose in evolution as early as the invertebrate radiation, being evident in insects and cephalopod molluscs, such as octopus, Nautilus, and cuttlefish.
Based on the overwhelming and universal acceptance among neurologists of the Cambridge Declaration, and drawn from the conclusions of over 2,500 independent studies, Professor Marc Bekoff has since proposed an even broader declaration, a Universal Declaration on Animal Sentience, where sentience—and by extension a total awareness of suffering—is defined as the “ability to feel, perceive, or be conscious, or to experience subjectivity.”
I could flood you with a mountain of specific studies which proves this wrong… But, of course, you won’t bother reading any of them, so why bother. You’re not interested in actually learning, are you, John? Let me then just say with great certainty, You are wrong. Higher order organisms have an extremely well-advanced sense of fair play and are capable of complex empathetic thought: the foundation of the thing we call “morals”
This is a proven fact.
Don’t stop at just instincts. We are dealing with “Thoughts, Emotions, Instincts, Intuitions, Consciousness, and Morals.” So, at the very least, you concede here it’s likely these things (Thoughts, Emotions, Instincts, Intuitions, Consciousness, Morals) aren’t exclusive to human beings. You therefore accept it is likely they arise through biology. Given the evolutionary paradigm, you accept biological complexity appears to give rise to these things; it enables them.
Why, then, are you inserting some extra, superfluous, un-exampled element (input) that isn’t needed to explain these things?
Is there any legitimate pretext or historically compelling observation to rationally support your assertion? Is there any credible reason to even suspect that something else, something invisible and magical, is at play?
“Why, then, are you inserting some extra, superfluous, un-exampled element (input) that isn’t needed to explain these things? ”
Because emotions, morality and consciousness SEEMS real to me. I’ve no reason to believe these things to be illusions. I think, feel and reason. Logically, I came from a source that has similar capabilities. That is the opposite of superfluous.
“Is there any legitimate pretext or historically compelling observation to rationally support your assertion?”
Yes. Millions of other human beings throughout history purport experiences with the metaphysical. It is unlikely that ALL of those people are dishonest or deluded.
“Is there any credible reason to even suspect that something else, something invisible and magical, is at play?”
Magical is a term that would need definition. An invisible something being ‘in play’ isn’t problematic for most people. There are many reasons to suspect invisible things have an impact on reality.
Who is saying they’re not real?
Strawman, anyone?
So demonstrate that this thing you call metaphysics is real. Demonstrate that it is unique to humans and independent of all natural explanations.
And John, an appeal to popularity is the weakest of all arguments.
Of course, because we’re biologically hardwired to FIND AGENCY IN NATURE. It’s an evolutionally trick, a skill that served us very well not that very long ago. It is the root of all our superstitions… and all our religions. It’s why we sometimes shout at the computer.
Name one and demonstrate it as being entirely independent of the natural world…
First we have:
“Who is saying they’re not real?
Strawman, anyone?”
THEN we have:
“So demonstrate that this thing you call metaphysics is real.”
I’m tired twirling around in your incoherent landscape of skepticism.
If you care to write something on your blog outlining your ideas, I’ll reblog it.
Emotions are real.
Some magical, invisible source for those emotions (this thing you call meta-physics) is not real…. Unless you can demonstrate that this meta-physics is unique to humans and entirely independent of all natural explanations.
Can you?
And here’s a series of photo’s for you to consider while pondering the uniqueness of human thoughts. This male rhino tried to save this baby zebra from certain death. He made a number of attempts. Sadly, though, the zebra died. The event was seen on a tourist safri; the guide took the photos.
If you like, I can produce many, many cases (filmed) of cross-species assistance.
http://i1027.photobucket.com/albums/y336/johnzande/Rhino%20Helping%20Zebra_zpsswladwxh.jpg
…and this is evidence of what?
This series of photos is hardly scientific evidence of the rhino’s intentions.
Weren’t you the one who insisted that intuition can’t be trusted?
If a rhino tries to save a zebra, that proves there is no God?
I’ve got no problem with nature demonstrating compassion. That lines up pretty well with my concept of the Creator.
Intuition?
Huh?
Intuition has nothing to do with the rhino’s actions here. Empathy, however, does. Empathy, that thing you think only humans can possibly experience. Empathy, that thing which is the foundation of what we call “moral behavior.”
Erumm, are you drunk?
Let’s see. I said:
“No. Metaphysical concepts such as thoughts, emotions, consciousness etc. are not exclusive to human beings…”
How did you get the idea that I think only humans experience empathy?
You are using intuition to determine the rhino’s motives. You are intuiting that the rhino is empathizing with the zebra.
I wasn’t kidding about being tired of your prattle. I’ve tried to respond reasonably and politely.
What point are you making with this series of photos?
So you concede that Thoughts, Emotions, Instincts, Intuitions, Consciousness, Morals, and Empathy arise through biology. Biology explains them. They are a product of material complexity. This, of course, is a demonstrable fact. No magic required. So, why are you harping on about this mystical meta-physics if you (seemingly) understand it doesn’t answer where these things come from?
That lacks coherency.
The people who witnessed the rhino event were quite certain what they saw. It was written up in a number of newspapers…. but you can believe some alternative, if that helps you in whatever your odd endeavor is.
No. I did not concede any such thing.
The lack of coherency is due to your cobbling pieces of my texts together in order to form conclusions that I have not made.
Below I have pasted in what I wrote to Tildeb. (I changed the name to JZ where appropriate…)
———–
I was only using the term metaphysics as a courtesy. Since you’re unhappy with that, I’ll drop it and use ‘God’ instead. That’s the term I wanted to use anyway.
Music pours forth from my radio. I manipulate the radio and the output changes. The volume changes. The EQ changes. Every affect has a physical correlation.
JZ throws the radio out of the room. With a triumphant smirk he says, “See? The radio gives rise to music! Without leaving this room or referencing another radio, demonstrate my thesis is wrong!”
You keep demanding naturally occurring evidence for a God that doesn’t exist naturally. Consciousness is a clue to God’s existence. The brain is the processor/receiver of consciousness. Taking away the brain and saying ‘there is no consciousness’ is like throwing the radio out of the room and saying ‘there is no music’.
There is no ‘reality’ apart from God. None. If God did not exist, neither would your brain. This isn’t something I need to ‘demonstrate’ because you already know it. Imagine if you found a radio on the street and I suggested that it wasn’t built with intention for a purpose.
How does it sound when you suggest that your brain exists purely as an unintentional consequence of mindless chemical reactions?
It seems you’re so thoroughly confused you don’t even know what you’re writing.
“God” is as meaningless as “Metaphysics.” It’s as meaningless as “Gloobethrowp.” The facts on the ground have not changed one bit. Neither God, Metaphysics, nor Gloobethrowp is required to explain Thoughts, Emotions, Instincts, Intuitions, Consciousness, Morals, and Empathy. They are not, in any way, shape or form, super-natural. They are products of biological complexity.
And yes, John, you have conceded this fact. Or what, are you now saying animals are not capable of Thoughts, Emotions, Instincts, Intuitions, Consciousness, Morals, or Empathy?
If that is your position then stop pussy-footing around and just say so without a baffling song and dance. If it is not your position then you have admitted these things are products of material complexity, no magic required.
So which is it?
I guess I’ve stumbled upon a pretty solid illustration with the radio.
That’s the next blog post. I appreciate your help!
Ah, running away to another post again, huh?
You do this quite often, don’t you, John?
So you just can’t answer the question… Or more’s the point, won’t answer it as you know it brings your pantomime down.
I’m not surprised. This is quite common behaviour for apologists.
I’ve answered it.
At least 3 times.
It’s all there in the comment stream.
See you on the next blog post.
Three times dashing your own assertion that somehting magic is afoot… but then denying it, and claiming magic again.
Great rhetorical skills you got there, John. Let me guess, voting Trump in November?
John, as you so clearly have a severe aversion (fear?) to reading actual words printed in published research papers, here’s a 2-minute video (moving pictures!) demonstrating organism’s (here Capuchin monkeys) advanced concept of fair play. They can be empathetic and exhibit strong moral behaviour… all made possible (as exampled in experiment after experiment) with appropriate biological complexity. No magic required.
Note, a Capuchin monkey has 3,691,000,000 neurons. A human being has 86,000,000,000.
Correlation?
Have you bothered read the article?
If you’re going to post off topic, at least say something useful. I’d appreciate a good meatloaf recipe….
Ah yes, that’s right… You don’t want to talk about meta-physics anymore, do you? That just got far too awkward for you and the safety of your pantomime. You got all squeamish and frightened and ran away.
My sincere apologies.
I guess I’ll just wait till you post some replica nonsense in the future, bearing the same flaws, the same mistakes, and demonstrating the same willful ignorance. Because you will post the same nonsense again. That I know. That is guaranteed, because you’re not interested in actually learning anything, are you, John?
Enjoy your charade.
JZ, I don’t have any problems with animals displaying empathy, compassion or the ability to reason.
Now respond on topic or let me have that meatloaf recipe. Either way, quit being a crybaby.
The topic WAS meta-physics…. But now you don’t want to talk about it.
You ended that story, remember?
I moved on to another topic upon which your worldview will offer zilch.
I believe it went on for the rest of the day, until you, John, ran away to a diversion-post… again.
So, if you have actually, really, truly moved on from your rather jejune “Maybe” comment and am now stating that yes, animals do absolutely have Thoughts, Emotions, Instincts, Intuitions, Consciousness, and exhibit strong Morals drivers derived, self-evidently, from an advanced capability of Empathetic thought, then you are also saying these things (things you have previously tried to argue are unique and unexplainable) are in fact not unique and are explained by material complexity… That is to say, they arise quite naturally through biology.
Correct?
You accept biology explains these things you tried (without actually providing any supporting rationale) to argue were unexplainable?
Are we on the same page?
Given that we are, in fact, on the same page, can you please tell me where your meta-physics/god/ Gloobethrowp fits into the picture now.
That is a serious question.
I would genuinely like to hear (understand) where you see it is needed or even required.
It’s kinda funny how the guy who doesn’t know where he stands on free will is impatient with me about ‘maybe’. And ‘running away’ isn’t accomplished by announcing where you’re going to be found.
We are still not completely on the same page. Your conclusions do not follow your premises. It does not follow that if animals have empathy, I must accept that biology gives rise to that empathy.
The short version of my view is that metaphysics/God/Gloobethrowp doesn’t ‘fit into the picture’ but is the artist responsible for the picture even existing.
The latest blog post describes another aspect of this (via my brilliant radio illustration) and I’d welcome your rebuttal on that post.
(Not running away! Requesting a change of venue!!!)
You tried to argue initially that meta-physics proves your particular Middle Eastern god, Yhwh.
Are you now jettisoning that approach as a failed argument?
The artist?
You’re referring to the Middle Eastern god, Yhwh, yes?
If not, please let me know who this artist is, so we don’t get confused.
Is this artist good? Is he in control of his Creation, or has he lost total control?
Honest question: How can you explain your “artists’” arrangement of things when we consider that life on this planet knew only varying pedigrees of suffering for some 3.75 billion years before it stumbled upon the chemicals (enkephalin) and cellular structures (opioid receptors) with which it could recognise something resembling ‘happiness.’
That’s not going to work, JZ. I’m not discussing the nature of a being that you refuse to even entertain the possibility of existing.
The void of Atheism possesses no content so your smug mockery must be coming from another source.
End of story.
So you are jettisoning meta-physics as a failed argument.
It’ll be interesting to see how long it is until you re-birth it, ignoring everything you’ve learned here.
But seriously, my question was honest. I would genuinely like to hear how you square this circle. I’m curious. In light of your belief, how can you explain life on this planet knowing only increasing orders of suffering for 3.75 billion years before discovering the chemicals (enkephalin) and cellular structures (opioid receptors) with which it could recognise something resembling ‘happiness’?
Was there a reason, you can think of, for this to be the physical reality/history of this world?
Go to the recent post. It is a fuller explanation.
Sorry, not interested. The conversation is here.
Let me, however, make this clear: if you give me a straight answer without all your usual diversion and evasion I’ll leave it alone. I’ll accept your answer for what it is. I am, though, genuinely curious, and deeply interested in hearing your answer. So, in light of your new “artist” hypothesis:
Great question, John. It assumes your materialistic universal origin and asks me to answer in theistic terms. We’ll done! It’s completely unfair but I like a challenge.
I have no explanation for the conditions faced by whatever lifeforms inhabited this planet 3.75 billion years ago. I’m doubtful that anybody can say with certainty what life was like that long ago.
I do not believe that single cell organisms are capable of ‘suffering’ as they do not possess the ability to process physical or emotional pain.
I do not believe that ‘happiness’ is a purely chemical experience. But for the sake of argument, if happiness was only a drop of opioid then I’d say God created enkephalin. After 3.75 billion years, the Creator gave his creation the experience of happiness.
To your question about the reason for suffering, I can only offer a humble suggestion. This is the same suggestion I gave my eldest son when he asked me why God allows awful things to happen.
Let’s assume there is no God. There is nothing in the universe but matter and energy. Does a universe without God answer the question of suffering? If there is not God, does it now make sense that children die and cruelty exists? Maybe.
But now we have to explain pleasure. Suffering is only part of the experience of consciousness. You can’t blame God for suffering and not credit Him for joy.
And there is a serious question that atheists need to answer. Why do we think the universe is cruel in the first place?
It assumes nothing. The universe is material. No super-natural element has ever been spied, nor as yet determined to be required. For example, you tried, and failed, to argue “meta-physics” was somehow super-natural. I (and Tildeb) demonstrated the things you called super-natural were perfectly natural. No magic required.
Not life 3.75 billion years ago, rather ALL LIFE for 3.75 billion years… and continuing into this day, of course.
And yes, John, we do know quite precisely what life forms existed. There’s a whole science dedicated to it. It’s called evolutionary biology, it includes Gene Theory, and it traces our common descent back through the evolutionary paradigm.
Please don’t exercise your willful ignorance on me.
While true that motile, single-celled protozoa do not possess a single neuron, they can and do skirmish with all that which threatens them, resisting organised and not-so-organised assaults launched against their existence, and by the protozoa’s animated behaviour to a menacing world we know that this primordial expression of life KNOWS its suffering, yet it is simply incapable of any reaction that may be mistaken for love or altruism.
This is recorded in great detail in Lian-Yong Gao and Yousef Abu Kwaik`s 2000 paper “The mechanism of killing and exiting the protozoan host Acanthamoeba polyphaga by Legionella pneumophila,” Environmental Microbiology, Volume 2, Issue 1, pp. 79–90.
You don’t read scientific papers, so you’ll just have to take my word on this, but if the urge ever grabs you, you can research this general subject further by starting at Professor Marc Bekoff’s Psychology Today article, 20th June, 2013: ‘A Universal Declaration on Animal Sentience: No Pretending,’
What do you base that sentence on? Do you have any facts to back this statement up?
Take away the enkephalin and opioid receptors and how can an organism EXPERIENCE happiness, John?
Can you answer that?
You even say above that you believe that without the appropriate biological structures an organism CANNOT experience suffering and pain, so it appears you’re now contradicting that very statement.
So, which one is it, John?
Which side of your contradiction do you ACTUALLY stand on?
Sorry, but you can’t have it both ways, you know….
Okay, so Yhwh waited 3.75 billion years before allowing the very first stirrings of something that could be considered happiness. For 3.75 billion years he then just watched organisms suffer and die in misery as they slowly but surely grew more complex… sentient creatures whose existence, you believe, Yhwh is ultimately alone responsible.
Why wait?
What possible reason can you give for this?
I can accept, “I simply don’t know.” That’s fine, but do please try to be honest.
I’m not blaming anything, merely responding to the excuses theists present for the existence of obscene levels of suffering.
“Cruel” implies intent. Of course, you are in fact positing a mindful, aware, conscientious Designer, so you are implying intent.
It rises and interesting question.
You like your teleological argument, so truly consider William Paley’s observation:
“Contrivance proves design, and the predominant tendency of the contrivance indicates the disposition of the designer.”
What is the predominant tendency of the contrivance, John?
This world inside which sentience has awoken, uninvited, is a vast entanglement apparatus. It is a self-enriching engine, a complexity machine spilling out from a state of ancestral simplicity to contemporary complexity where the greater talents awarded to each succeeding generation of things have always produced suffering proportionate to the extent of their powers.
This particular world of genes and then memes witnessed prokaryotes before eukaryotes, engendered ion channels and primitive action potentials before neuroreceptors and antique nerve nets, birthed bilateral nervous systems before central nervous systems, spawned pons before hindbrains, issued cerebellums before cerebrums, fathered talons before arrow tips, hatched incisors before hydrogen bombs, welcomed hunter-gatherers before gunsmiths, minted potters before chemical engineers, and begot corporeal barter systems before ethereal derivative trading.
Without any historical ambiguity or hint of equivocation, it is clear to all who look that this passage from the simple to the complex is not a mistake. This habitual, intuitive urge to self-embellishment is not an accident. Tensions stitched into the deepest recesses of Creation have always favoured one direction for the sweet debris of existence to be expelled.
By simple but persuasive design, the old and the ordinary yield to the new and the exciting, and with the new comes more energetic and capable families of physiological, emotional, and psychological pain. Indeed, for organisms whose fitness depends only on their own sequence information, physical complexity, be it genetic or cultural, must always increase, and as it does, so too does that organism’s exposure to an evermore potent, evermore creative ecology of suffering.
So, given that you like the teleological argument, can you explain this historical (teleological) fact?
Awesome comment, John Z.
He didn’t LINK his evidence to his claim.
Sure he did, John B. He demonstrated the direct link between biology and these properties by demonstrating the emergence of the necessary material components for suffering and happiness in biology through evolution.
How did you miss that?
What happened to ” I’ll accept your answer for what it is. I am, though, genuinely curious, and deeply interested in hearing your answer…” ?
I made every effort to answer in the context of the question you presented. You did not ‘accept my answer for what it is’ but dissected it instead.
Fair enough. I’ve learned my lesson.
Well, to be fair, you made some factually erroneous statements that had to be addressed. And you did answer, yes. You said, to paraphrase: I have no explanation as to why for 3.75 billion years life only knew suffering … but … After 3.75 billion years, the Creator gave his creation the experience of happiness.
That’s fine. But then you asked me a question, didn’t you? You asked:
I answered it. You did want me to answer it, didn’t you? In answering it I then presented you with the natural question that followed.
Will you address it, or does it make you too uncomfortable?
It’s frustrating to give you answers when you frequently focus on my motives for giving them rather than the answers themselves.
It is a well established fact that I am a theist so my answers will be from that perspective. It is a bias. An a priori assumption. It affects the way I understand the universe. I do not believe in God because I WANT to believe. My theology has developed (evolved?) over time as a way to (believe it or not) make sense of my personal experiences. I’ll confess I don’t care how protozoa lived 4 billion years ago. I care about why I live the way I do; right now.
“Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.”
There are volumes of books written on the subject of suffering. I won’t be able to sum up this subject in a few pithy lines.
There is no purpose without God. If there is no God then all suffering is pointless. Babies die. Widows mourn. The weak are subjugated by the strong. Then the Universe dies. That’s it.
From my perspective, things don’t SEEM meaningless. Feeding starving kids seems important. Fighting for the oppressed seems right. I have zero evidence I can offer for verifying with the scientific method. So I accept these intuitions by faith. I assume this sense is not an illusion.
If there is no God, there is no purpose. I believe there is purpose so there must be a God. Now I can begin the process of trying to figure out who (or what) this God is.
–fast forward through TONS of reading, living, philosophizing, etc —
Scripture says God will redeem our suffering. Blessed are those who mourn, they will be comforted. Blessed are those who need righteousness, they will receive it. Bottom line, I trust that there is purpose in every aspect of my existence, including the suffering.
This does not PROVE anything. I’m merely attempting to answer your question.
Well, that’s absolute nonsense. If you discovered tonight for certain (in a manner that would be meaningful to you) that the Middle Eastern god, Yhwh, didn’t exist, tomorrow, for you, would look exactly like today. Nothing would actually change. Not. A. Thing. You would still love your wife and children. You’d still try to do good. I’m guessing you’d also still try to be funny 😉
Thanks for your words, though. They didn’t at all address what was put to you, but to be honest, I knew you’d just evade it.
I guess I didn’t understand it. Evasion is intentional. I’m apparently oblivious.
You raised teleology, i asked you a teleological question. You evaded answering it.
Not to worry, though. i knew you would.
How would you answer it?
Well, I don’t see it as a teleological matter. I don’t posit a designer. You do. The onus, therefore, is on you to explain the “design.” That is why I asked you to consider the great Christian apologist, William Paley’s observation:
“Contrivance proves design, and the predominant tendency of the contrivance indicates the disposition of the designer.”
So, John, what is the predominant tendency of the contrivance, and what does that tendency tell you about the disposition of the designer?
You have 13.82 billion years of this universe, and 5 billion years of this earth, from which you can make your analysis and draw your conclusions.
So…. you’re not going to answer?
Okay…
?
I did answer.
It was unsatisfactory to you.
The predominant tendency of the contrivance is toward the redemption of man. The entire universe is about people.
God is introducing Himself through two books, the Bible and nature.
All the machinations of science are at our disposal for discovering the nature of our creator.
Everything outside the scope science also indicates what God is like.
Man has been man for 200,000 years. The contrivance has been operating for 13.82 billion years.
Any particular reason why you’ve ignored thirteen-thousand-thousand-thousand years of the contivance’s history?
Because history doesn’t matter until man shows up.
Oh really, and man rose from what, precisely, John?
Which part of ‘man’ are you asking about, dolt?
Man, 200,000 years old.
The contrivance, 13,820,000,000,000 years old.
Care to fill in and address this gap?
The spirit of man is 200,000 years old. The physical stuff that preceded was not sentient.
You were the one pointing out that we’re talking about teleology. Why keep pressing me for materialistic answers?
You’re contradicting yourself, John.
You’ve already conceded that animals are sentient, conscious, thoughtful, empathetic, and exhibit moral drivers.
Or are you now saying no animals existed before humans?
Which one is it, John… were there animals before humans, or not?
I am not contradicting myself.
I reluctantly conceded the POSSIBILITY of animals having empathy. You may recall I was (and remain) skeptical about our ability to know what other species are experiencing. Observing a wiggling protozoa and concluding it is ‘suffering’ is faith, not science.
Do you see why I am not a materialist? Contradictions arise immediately.
Wow, quite the dance you’re performing here, John. Now you’re denying what you’ve already conceded. You can read your own comments, can’t you?
And it is not a “possibility,” John, it is a fact, and by the animated behaviour of even the simplest of all life, we know things like protozoa KNOW they’re suffering. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t launch counter-attacks to repel all those things which seek to destroy them, would they?
So, man has been man for 200,000 years. The contrivance has been operating for 13.82 billion years. For 3.8 billion years life has existed on earth.
So, you have a gap of thirteen-thousand-thousand-thousand years (and 3.8 billion years regarding the earth) to fill in…
Or are you really saying there was no life before man?
Reducing suffering to a chemical reaction makes the concept incoherent, dolt.
I’m not a materialist because, as you keep demonstrating by perpetuating this argument, materialism contradicts itself when you introduce consciousness.
Does it?
So you’re now thoroughly contradicting what you admitted earlier, that animals are conscious. John Branyan on the July 28, 2016 at 3:43 pm, said:
Must be noisy inside your head, John, juggling all these contradictions.
So, we can say, then, that this statement of yours is false:
And we can say this statement of yours is just evasion:
I, of course, demonstrated with two-minutes of moving colour pictures that animals most certainly have a highly advanced capacity for empathetic thought, and from that, strong moral drivers. Indeed, the universally accepted Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness stresses that the required neurological apparatus for total awareness of pain—and the emotional states allied to that—arose in evolution as early as the invertebrate radiation, being evident in insects and cephalopod molluscs, such as octopus, Nautilus, and cuttlefish.
So, back to your false statement: “Because history doesn’t matter until man shows up.”
As you have already conceded John, history very much matters, and that is why I’m asking you to explain what the predominant tendency of contrivance reveals of the disposition of the “designer.”
13.82 billion years of history does matter, John.
3.8 billion years of the earthly evolutionary paradigm does matter, John.
Every single one of these years, and every single generation of life (billions upon billions of generations), matters a lot.
Every one of these sentient, conscious, aware generations is the sole responsibility of your “designer.”
Correct?
As much as you’d like to think otherwise, the “predominant tendency of the contrivance” is not revealed in a 200,000 year postage stamp. It’s not revealed in 200 million years.
I remind you, you are the one positing teleology, so the onus is on you to rationally explain the entire teleological picture.
Over to you…
Just clip my phrases from earlier in the conversation and assemble whatever answer you’re looking for. That’s working for you so far.
Over to you…
So you deny saying “Obviously, consciousness is not limited to human beings”?
I hope not.
So, if consciousness is not limited to humans, then the long, long, long history before humans DOES MATTER, John, right?
That’s the whole teleological picture… a picture you, apparently, believe in, yet now seem rather embarrassed to talk about.
Why is that, John?
Why are you embarrassed by history?
I’ve answered this question several times, dolt. Because you possess free will, you have rejected those answers. I’ve invited you to assemble an acceptable answer from my earlier posts. I don’t think it’s possible to be more magnanimous.
I’m not embarrassed. You’re wrong about that. Despite your claims to scientifically indisputable epistemology, you can’t read minds.
There is nothing intellectually compelling in your ‘what’s-the-matter-ashamed-of-how-stupid-you-look’ question. I haven’t forgotten that you refuse to answer your own question. Nothing scientific, interesting or honest in that either.
Refused to answer my own question?
Riddle me this: How can I answer a question about teleology (conscious design) when I don’t believe the universe has been consciously designed?
You, John, believe it was consciously designed.
And I’m afraid, you don’t get to pick and choose tiny little fragments of that.
It’s an either/or type situation you’re in, and it seems you can’t actually defend your proposition when presented as a whole picture.
That’s fair enough. No harm. No crime committed. But it would be healthy, for you, to just admit it without your strikingly odd, repetitively contradictory, evasive song and dance.
You have 13.82 billion years of history to explain.
Let me know when you can, OK…
You own those contradictions in your own thinking, John B. It’s not a failure on John Z’s part to point them out to you. Not dealing with them but avoiding them entirely, and constantly trying to divert away from them, is simply a kind of intellectual cowardice that refuses to be responsible for the opinions you are willing to broadcast as if true when they are not.
Does it matter if what you say is true? If it doesn’t then no one should pay you the slightest attention about anything at all. But if it does matter, then you need to own them rather than refuse to do your own due diligence.
And that refusal is what matters most because it shows a churlish and childish obstinacy to have it only your way or you’ll take your bat and ball and go home. Boo hoo. Your playmates are so mean… because they happen to think what’s true matters mroe than your piety. Oh, the cruelty.
And your refusal matters because it indicates, as Carmen has pointed out time and time again yet been ridiculed for doing so, you’re not thinking very well because you’re not thinking at all. You’re spouting what isn’t true and thrashing about when it’s revealed and then rather than change your opinion and align it with reality to find the coherence you plainly lack, you then spend time and make the effort blaming others for your discomfort. What you then do is write absurd and asinine little response analogy posts about radios and muffins to get a few pats on the back by the truly stupid… presumably to reassure yourself that what you say does matter. But what you won’t do is admit you have no clue what you’re talking about when it comes to evidence for your beliefs and, more importantly, simply don’t care if you do. Piety matters more to you than respecting what’s true… even about the paucity of your own reasoning. If you have to malign atheists to do so, then it’s a small price for YOU to pay.
Again, cowardice. The appropriate response is to thank John Z for his tenacity to wade through the bullshit you’ve thrown in his way and endorse what he has laid out with honest remorse for your actions, an honest apology for being a dolt, and shame for being so churlish and childish. Maybe you can even get your muffins in pants to help you with that dialogue.
Hey Tildeb. You taggin’ in now?
I answered the questions several times. Admitted I was biased. Once, I even admitted I wasn’t quite sharp enough to understand the question.
You guys won’t even believe me when my answer is ‘I am too stupid to answer this question.’
I further confessed that I have no interest or certainty about the experiences of lifeforms billions of years in the past. I guess if that’s cowardice, I’m a coward.
I am not, however, a fool. That’s what I would be if I accepted whatever you and JZ claim as irrefutable scientific facts regarding the origins of the universe. I’m confident that neither of you were there.
And we’ve sidetracked long enough. Do you have a faith claim for what ‘something’ existed prior to the universe or not?
Origins of the universe? Okay, who was talking origins here?
Diversion, anyone? It’s always served piping-hot at john’s place.
I, and I think Tildeb, are granting you your Creation and its Creator, a god named Yhwh. You claim this universe is designed. That, John, is what we’re asking you to defend.
You have 13.82 billion years from which to assess the design, and by doing so, addressing the great Christian apologist, William Paley’s observation:
“Contrivance proves design, and the predominant tendency of the contrivance indicates the disposition of the designer.”
So, John, what is the predominant tendency of the contrivance, and what does that tendency tell you about the disposition of the designer?
Take a gander at the title of this post. Did you forget how this started before YOU diverted it?
Errrrum, it was you, John, who brought up the teleological argument, not me, and certainly not Tildeb.
You.
Are you regretting doing so, now?
“I am not, however, a fool. That’s what I would be if I accepted whatever you and JZ claim as irrefutable scientific facts regarding the origins of the universe. I’m confident that neither of you were there.”
Claim as irrefutable scientific facts regarding the origins of the universe?
You cannot possibly justify this claim from anything either of us has written. That means now you’re just making shit up and smearing us with it. I think that is foolish, John B, because it demonstrates just how much honesty and integrity you bring to the table. John Z demonstrates your contradictions, and rather than deal with that straight up and honestly, you make shit up and then smear those who point it out. That’s your ‘method’ that I guess you think reflects well on your piety: avoidance, diversions, misrepresentations, distortions, deceit, dishonesty, and now outright lying.
If that’s what mrsmcmommy think defines respecting ‘Truth’ to be, then it’s no wonder people with intellectual integrity and courage and even a willingness to be shown to be wrong ‘utterly reject’ it.
I don’t think that’s a list to be proud of owning nor one that defines a virtuous character. Yet it does accurately define the method of your responses to legitimate criticism of your position. I think it demonstrates a childish, mean spirited, and churlish attitude. Time to get those muffins talking again.
JZ pulls quotes out of context. Not difficult to find contradictions that way.
John, I’m heading out to watch a bossanova band. I look forward to reading your answer in the morn. I might even then pop over to whatever it is you’re talking about regarding your new post.
Millions of other human beings throughout history purport experiences with the metaphysical. It is unlikely that ALL of those people are dishonest or deluded.
There’s that pesky little assumption hard a t work yet again. You presume the conclusion – that metaphysics is ‘real’ because it contains property-less concepts that many people claim to have experienced, therefore metaphysics is real – and then use it as a premise. It is YOU who equate, say, emotions to be a legitimate expression of metaphysics. John and I say emotions is an expression of biology. You say other people experience emotions, therefore other people experience these metaphysical realities, therefore metaphysics is real yet independent of your belief.
No. You are incorrect. You create metaphysics by fiat. Reality produces these emergent properties by biology. We have very strong evidence in favour of this. You have… your belief.
To disagree with you now means you think we are exercising a faith-based belief.
No. We are producing compelling evidence from which we have independently adduced biology to be the source because that’s true in every case where these attributes can be found.
What you are doing is simply labeling these terms to be evidence for the ‘reality’ of metaphysics, and then simply appointing metaphysics to be synonymous with these ‘dis-embodied’ terms. This is a mistake that you are making because you presume the conclusion you want – one that requires independent property-less existence for dependent properties – rather than allow reality to arbitrate them for their descriptive accuracy. If these terms accurately described ‘things’ that had no properties, that existed independent of your starting assumption, then you should be able to produce compelling evidence from reality to support their independent existence… independent from the biology we say is its source. This you cannot do or you would. That is the key clue.
Your starting assumption is incorrect not because I say so based on some faith-based belief I have, or because John wants to trick you, or any other reason you wish to assign to us, but because reality does not comport with your starting assumption whereas it does comport with our conclusion. That’s the difference. We allow reality to arbitrate our beliefs about it and, the Good News! is that you can too. But you have to stop assuming that your assumptions are legitimate conclusions when in fact they are your starting premises that do not align with being the case in reality.
I was only using the term metaphysics as a courtesy. Since you’re unhappy with that, I’ll drop it and use ‘God’ instead. That’s the term I wanted to use anyway.
Music pours forth from my radio. I manipulate the radio and the music changes. The volume changes. The EQ changes. Every affect has a physical correlation.
Tildeb throws the radio out of the room. With a triumphant smirk he says, “See? The radio gives rise to music! Without leaving this room or referencing another radio, demonstrate my thesis is wrong!”
You keep demanding naturally occurring evidence for a God that doesn’t exist naturally. Consciousness is a clue to God’s existence. The brain is the processor/receiver of consciousness. Taking away the brain and saying ‘there is no consciousness’ is like throwing the radio out of the room and saying ‘there is no music’.
There is no ‘reality’ apart from God. None. If God did not exist, neither would your brain. This isn’t something I need to ‘demonstrate’ because you already know it. Imagine if you found a radio on the street and I suggested that it wasn’t built with intention for a purpose.
How does it sound when you suggest that your brain exists purely as an unintentional consequence of mindless chemical reactions?
Catch the assumption, John B? Of ocurse not, because it’s your conclusion. You continue to have confidence that these terms represent real somethings that are really things yet without any physical properties that define and differentiate things from one another. By definition, nothing termed ‘metaphysical’ can be a ‘thing’, yet you treat these terms as if they were.
So what are these things you ATTRIBUTE to metaphysics?
Your list reveals biological properties that very much depend on the physical form and biological substances that produce them. How do we know? Easy. Remove the biology and, oh my, we remove the ‘metaphysics’ entirely. Funny that inconvenient brute fact. Accounting for this inconvenient fact means we can conclude that they are not ‘things’; we can grant confidence and likelihood to a very high degree that they are emergent properties of biology because all the evidence indicates that they are utterly and completely dependent on the biology.
So. How do we inquire into them if we have an honest curiosity about them? Well, this is where most proponents of metaphysics decide to get up and excuse themselves from the hard work of actually inquiring into them. Sound familiar, John B?
Here’s a radical idea: how about we turn to biology and say goodbye to the non-productive mental masturbation that goes under the exalted name of metaphysics (and its parasitic host, theology)… because neither has produced any knowledge about these ‘things’ ever. So the reasonable evidence-adduced conclusion is that because the premises used for metaphysics (and its parasitic host, theology) do not correlate with reality but are imposed on it as if descriptive, we can assume they are not helpful to our inquiry. They aren’t descriptive. They aren’t accurate. If they were, they’ve had millennia to demonstrate otherwise. So far… nada. So let’s incorporate that inconvenient brute fact into our considerations rather than pretend they exist only as figments of my faith-based beliefs. That’s patently untrue.
metaphysics (and its parasitic host, theology)
I am stealing that.
Let’s try this on for size:
“Music depends on the physical radio that produces it. How do we know? Easy. Remove the radio and, oh my, we remove the ‘music’ entirely. Funny that inconvenient brute fact.”
Substituting the terms doesn’t reflect reality, John B. You omit the one to one relationship between brains and thoughts. That’s the physical location. It does not exist in my imposed beliefs. It’s very silly and diversionary to suggest thoughts are not directly related to brains. For that assumption, you’re going to have to produce some evidence, I’m afraid, whereas my claim can be demonstrated.
I omitted the one to one relationship between brains and thoughts because it’s YOUR assumption. Thinking is not a simple matter of ‘this brain cell=this thought’. Your ‘one to one’ relationship is astonishingly simplistic.
And you should stop suggesting that my views don’t reflect ‘reality’. These discussions are our humble efforts to come to terms with reality. I know you’re great at pointing out my assumptions. Do you need help identifying your own?
I never suggested that thoughts ‘are not directly related to brains’. I suggested that thoughts are not solely the product of brain chemistry.
No, John B, it’s not my assumption. Why do I have to repeat myself? I said it’s demonstrable. I said we can affect thoughts by impeding brain function. You know perfectly well that this can be done in all manners and ways and yet you still regurgitate it as if meaningful. But you know it’s not. You know perfectly well that when you drink too much alcohol, you impede your brain function and think poorly compared to a sober state. Thinking is a property of brain function. You don’t need me to pretend you raise a meaningful point when the point you raise is meant only to divert. Again. You also know that thought in all likelihood ceases when brain death occurs because there is no evidence of any further thought, no evidence of any further emotions, no evidence of any further intuitions, no evidence of any instincts, no further evidence of morality, and so on. Zero evidence. That’s what you’ve got to support your hypothesis that thought is a thing in itself. No. It’s not. It is biologically based. In other words, there is absolutely no reason to suspect any of this exists independent of the brain. And me pointing this out to you is not an example of me exercising faith-based beliefs. To suggest it is – in spite of all my words – is simply and blatantly dishonest.
No we’ve gone over the stupidity of the radio analogy because there IS evidence of sounds produced OTHER than the radio. There is a WORLD of contrary and incompatible evidence waiting for the person so obtuse who thinks music must only come from the radio. One must omit any indication of making music from one’s self… like singing along with it. The analogy is so poor that it tells me you raise it from its grave only out of either desperation or a need to end the conversation as if we have equivalent beliefs… again. That too is dishonest. I’ve got a world of evidence. You’ve got your faith-based beliefs rooted in ancient metaphysical models that both of us know don’t work. That’s not equivalency, John B. That’s night and day.
My point for the post was that metaphysical thinking can be recognized quickly by the alert reader. And it is a red flag that we’re about to enter the twilight zone. Metaphysics is a piss-poor method of inquiry, a near useless method if we’re trying to inquire into reality as it really is, because it doesn’t produce knowledge about reality. Ever. This is a clue so obvious to anyone living in today’s technological society that it simply boggles the mind that any one in this day and age turns to it for any reason other than absolute desperation. That’s the state of theism, a belief set predicated on a method of inquiry that does not produce knowledge about reality ever but is used as camouflage to present archaic explanatory models that are factually wrong and empty of any knowledge value and full of ignorance and magical thinking… hence the superstitious nonsense that accompanies theistic belief.
We can be alerted to this by the presence and use of standard metaphysical terms. That’s why I suggested you go and read them for yourself to understand why and how the early church fully incorporated metaphysical thinking – cutting edge at the time – and why to this day – even here on this blog – theists resurrect it to block knowledge, to encourage ignorance, to make space for superstitious nonsense (aka belief in a causal and creative and intervening divine agency), and think themselves pious for doing so. It’s a fascinating history and helps explain why so many religious people today continue to behave this way, continue to tackle issues as matters of piety using metaphysics rather than seeking an honest understanding of reality using science.
So the right question to ask is why today’s dedicated theists continue to depend on metaphysics when we know it doesn’t work as advertised? And the answer is because reality fails to comport to its theistic explanatory models and refuses to justify with compelling contrary evidence to the various empirical claims made by various theologies (often incompatible with each other). I think it’s enlightening if we go back to the original reasoning using what at the time was the best method available. Let’s understand why the church continues to rely on metaphysical thinking and let’s appreciate why we need to set it aside and move on by first deciding to respect reality;s arbitration of our beliefs about it. That’s a really good starting point.
“In other words, there is absolutely no reason to suspect any of this exists independent of the brain.”
Sure…If I’m willing to throw out the testimony of millions of other human beings and ignore my own personal intuitions.
“So the right question to ask is why today’s dedicated theists continue to depend on metaphysics when we know it doesn’t work as advertised? And the answer is because reality fails to comport to its theistic explanatory models…”
Saw a video yesterday of a group of special needs kids playing in a drum corp. It overwhelmed me! It was an overt display of joy that truly defies description. You need to see it.
Stick that in your ‘one to one thought to brain relationship’ and smoke it.
Terrific video. Thanks for sharing.
But how does that video refute or mitigate or shade in any way anything I’ve said?
It doesn’t affect anything you’ve said.
I’d really appreciate an explanation of the neuroscience happening in my brain when I watch that video.
You will note that many of the pious attempt to use this argument about ‘something from nothing’ as if it is a legitimate criticism of methodological naturalism. They try to paint those who criticize the metaphysical methodology that makes empirical claims that are incompatible with knowledge we apply successfully as being ‘believers’ in the ‘something from nothing’ school of idiocy. Who goes along with such nonsense? Well, the pious are particularly susceptible to the allure of the misrepresentation and parrot it endlessly, don;t they, John B? And why? Well, because it makes them seem more pious!
You know this is just blatant ad hominem argumentation, right?
No, it’s not.
Ad hominem means an attack against the person rather than the position they hold. I am very much arguing against the position (a reminder, you falsely accuse non believers of believing something comes from nothing: that’s the position I am criticizing) that you and many other theists utilize all the time: misrepresentation.
Few times, when I criticize people for holding on to very poor ideas, do I not get back the accusation of ad hominem. People relate the personal criticism to be ad hominem. it’s not. This is a misunderstanding promulgated by anyone receiving personal criticism about dishonest motive and means while attempting to divert criticism back to the criticizer. It’s just another version of the tone argument. The personal criticism I engage in is legitimate because it is entirely dependent on the position they are maintaining. Change the position, change the criticism. Not ad hominem.
What a tremendous advantage you have being the sole arbiter of what words mean! Whatever, Dear Leader.
I gotta say, now you’re just sounding petulant.
Ha!
Because I dare to question yout authority?
Look in the mirror.
No, because it’s a childish response.
“Well, the pious are particularly susceptible to the allure of the misrepresentation and parrot it endlessly, don’t they, John B? And why? Well, because it makes them seem more pious!”
…ad hominem…own it.
No, this is not ad hominem. I’m referring directly to you misrepresenting me, you parroting the something from nothing idiocy and misrepresenting me as a non believer of believing it to be the case, not because you think this is so – you’ve admitted as much – but because this is fully a religious meme that you are passing on to your readers. You parrot this meme because you want to be seen as pious and not because the meme is true.
“You parrot this meme because you want to be seen as pious and not because the meme is true.”
…ad hominem…own it.
I agree with John. This is just argument for argument’s sake at this point. There has always been “something”. Matter didn’t come to exist because it wanted to. It isn’t sentient. God is. Nuff said. Great article you found there, John. Thanks.
God is sentient?
See what I mean? Misrepresentation of faith to be fact, a metaphysical claim pretending to be a knowledge claim. Thanks for the excellent example, zephaniah317.
You’ve got nothing but your faith-based belief to back up this extraordinary empirical claim, yet you state it as if a fact, as if reality itself supports this claim that you have deduced when it does no such thing. You gotta stop doing that, misrepresenting your faith-based beliefs to be masquerading as evidence-adduced beliefs. The former comes from you. The latter comes from reality. Your beliefs are synonymous with reality but, in this case, stand contrary to and in conflict with reality. Your claim is yours and does not reside somewhere in the reality we share. Pretending otherwise in my eyes advertises you to be either badly confused or intentionally trying to deceive.
So, if you don’t want your faith-based beliefs to be treated with the contempt they so richly deserve masquerading as knowledge when they’re not, (because they are intentionally presented to be so), then state your belief claims as they really are: faith-based belief (as in “I have faith that my God is sentient.”) That’s honest. ‘Nuff said.
Ok, that’s a good explanation of belief versus reality. (and I apologize; my reply was heavy handed… Please forgive me) But please understand, I’m coming from a reality where the Truth is a person. I’m sure you’ve heard the scripture where Jesus said, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” He didn’t say He would SHOW us these things, He said that He IS these things. So to me, there is a Truth out there that really is THE UNIVERSAL TRUTH, and my belief or rejection of it has no bearing on its existence. No more than if I believed a math textbook to be truth or not. To live a life based solely on truth is truth because I believe it or not is very stressful, at least to me. I hope you can at least admit that there are aspects of science that require belief and trust and faith, because there is not much more than hypothesis to back up certain parts of it.
And my faith (and John’s) is not blind faith. There are 300 prophecies in the Old Testament about Jesus that came true before He arrived on earth (however you may believe He arrived). And science continues to prove the Bible to be accurate. My favorite one is about circumcision. There is a substance in our bodies called Prothrombin. It helps blood clot. Studies have shown that it is most present in our body on or around the 8th day after birth. Amazingly enough, God instructed the Israelites to circumcise their kids on the 8th day after birth.
So there ya go. It may not be “nuff said”, but it’s enough for me.
Again, I apologize if it seemed like I was shoving my beliefs down your throat earlier. That was not my intent.
What I see you trying to do, zeph, is construct a ‘reality’ that you want me to think is qualitatively different than another and so it is quantitatively different than my own. Note the difference in terms. You assert that in your reality, there really was a guy named Jesus who said what he reportedly said, did what he reportedly did, and so really was a God independent of your belief about it.. What you’re doing is trying to extract your belief from this ‘reality’ you’ve created and pretend it quantitatively exists independent of you. This way, you can argue that it’s not your faith that is responsible for its creation but an actual, historical, and literal reality from which you adduce your faith.
So the question I ask myself is, is zeph’s description true and, if so, how could I know?
Well, this is where reality comes into it. I don’t know if your description is true. Does compelling evidence adduced from reality support zeph’s case? Well, it supposedly does in zeph’s reality. But If it did so our shared reality, then I too would know about this description and have independent evidence from our shared reality that supported it regardless of what thee or me thought of it.
Enter knowledge-based academics here to help us out… academics like history, archaeology, genetics, anthropology, linguistics, and yes, even biblical scholarship. Do these fields offer us compelling evidence adduced from the shared reality support for your claim about this guy Jesus? Nope. Do any of them support your claim about successful prophesies? No again. Support for you claim seems to come from only one direction: theology to its adherents. You’re not talking about Allah here; you’re talking specifically about Jesus. So dismiss out of hand most of what theology offers us in the way of a pantheon of different and competing gods and focus only on Christian theology. So that’s pretty biased from the get go. And a s source for producing evidence, Christian theology has a lot of skin in this game. Confirmation bias should be evident, and this is what we find rife throughout the field of Christian apologetics. The game is rigged from this source.
So do I think your reality is quantitatively different from mine? No. There is only one reality we share – the same one shared by the academics I mentioned – and it does not involve either my faith-based beliefs about it or yours. That’s the only reality that produces compelling evidence independent of both of our beliefs. It is not supportive of your claim, and that’s just the way it is. It didn’t have to be this way, of course, but we do have to account for it and see if it aligns 2with your claim. It does not. And this too is just the way it is.
The reality you say you have is built by you based on faith, supported by you using faith, and is true only within that faith. Simply put, your reality is not independent of you whatsoever and this is demonstrable: change your faith-based belief, change that ‘reality’ completely. It never did exist.
If you ever get the chance, John B, go back and explore the writings of many really big brained people Aristotle and Plato and The Greek Boys and see the foundation of this kind of thinking. Then, see where it leads. Indisputably, using such metaphysics reliably and consistently fails to explain how reality really operates yet never lacks for making not only positive claims about reality but is used to criticize explanations that do work. It’s all quite fascinating… in a slow motion car crash kind of way.
When the church was being assembled and cherry picked writings condensed into what we call the Bible, we can see how this kind of ‘science’ – this method of inquiry into reality – was imported wholesale into the training and education of the priesthood. That its claims were factually wrong (such as accepting the work Ptolemy for its celestial explanations) made correcting them not an impersonal scientific undertaking but a religious attack, a theological concern (which came to a head during the Galileo affair). This pitted piety against knowledge and, of course, we know how much suffering ensued as piety tried to gain supremacy by force. But piety doesn’t produce knowledge.
No sect is more dedicated to maintaining the fiction of the usefulness of metaphysics to gain insight into reality (and its metaphysical pillars regarding its failed scientific claims) than Thomists. And they recycle this metaphysical framework of First Causes and Prime Movers and all this idiocy as if it were a legitimate means to criticize a method of inquiry that shows its empirical claims by means of metaphysics to be factually wrong time after time after time. And I use the term ‘idiocy’ quite intentionally because it require an extreme form of foolishness to stick with a method of inquiry for its supposed piousness that does not, never has, and probably never shall produce any knowledge whatsoever. Yet this is the armament used by Thomists to justify their empty criticisms against a method of science that does work, that all of us know (and use daily) works to reliably produce applications, therapies, and technologies that work for everyone everywhere all the time.
So as soon as you encounter the kind of metaphysical terms necessary to frame reality for the convenience of the metaphysical explanatory models used by Thomists, you know you are encountering dedicated idiocy that confuses piety with knowledge and insists in the absence of evidence that the former produces the latter.
The most glaring idiocy here is the argument that nothing can come from nothing and so everything must have a cause… well, almost…except one, of course, namely, the first one. We’ll call that special little chestnut ‘God’ and accept on faith that everything we just laid out doesn’t apply to it! Because it’s God you see, and we have to make allowances for it so that we can assume the conclusion as a premise and then pretend we have ‘deduced’ God from reality rather than impose our metaphysical idiocy on it!
” …you know you are encountering dedicated idiocy that confuses piety with knowledge…”
Do you possess some ‘knowledge’ that proves the ‘something from nothing’ hypothesis? If not, then how are you not guilty of precisely the same piety as we idiots?
The argument presumes a state of ‘nothing’ means an absence of everything. What does that mean? How can there be a state of anything in the absence of everything?
There cannot be such a state. It’s incoherent.
The framework is wrong because it relies on idiocy to presume its conclusions are legitimate premises! They’re not. They never have been. And this method of using a metaphysical framework to then make empirical claims about reality doesn’t work to produce knowledge. Ever. So we KNOW it’s a methodological disaster if we should grant any of its ‘conclusions’ (or ‘explanations’ that explain nothing) any confidence whatsoever. If we are tempted, then there’s the idiocy in action.
The definition of ‘nothing’ is at the core of these conversations.
I agree with you that ‘nothing’ cannot be the absence of everything. That’s the point of the article. Something must have existed prior to the Universe. We’re discussing what we should call that ‘something’.
But you can’t dismiss the metaphysical as pious idiocy. If the metaphysical doesn’t exist, then what are thoughts? What is ‘knowledge’?
Yes, ‘nothing’ is at the core of this silly argument. That’s why Krauss wrote a book on exactly this. And he’s not a Thomist who specializes in word play in the service of piety – not knowledge – but “a theoretical physicist and cosmologist who is Foundation Professor of the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University, and director of its Origins Project.” If someone has an honest and intellectually valid curiosity about this ‘nothing’ then turning to a religious rather than a scientific source for expertise demonstrates assuming the conclusion. I can’t point this fact out too many times: if knowledge is what one seeks, then turning to religion top provide it is a guaranteed method to fail. Guaranteed. I state this because it is a fact and not a belief or opinion. You can demonstrate this to yourself and see if you can come up with a single – just one piece of knowledge religious belief alone has ever produced. If you can, you will make history as the very first.
So you do my job for me here by admitting that the religious description of non believers is the argument that ‘something comes from nothing’ is empty of any truth value describing those of us who respect methodological naturalism. So why promote it? Why do you continue to suggest us ‘believers in non belief’ think that we accept this idiotic notion that ‘something comes from nothing’?
Not only can I dismiss the metaphysical as pious idiocy but I do. And for cause. It doesn’t produce knowledge. You ask if “If the metaphysical doesn’t exist, then what are thoughts? What is ‘knowledge’?”… as if either/or. This is a false dichotomy. Metaphysics is nothing more than a word game using the form of logic to arrive at deductions based on its premises. The real question, the important question, is how do we know if the premises accurately reflect reality? More metaphysics simply presumes the conclusion and uses it to justify the truth value of the premises. I see it all the time.
This form of logic only works to reflect reality if the premises can shown to be true… true in the sense of accurately describing reality. It requires an axiomatic closed system. That’s why it works brilliantly if we can represent reality symbolically in an axiomatic system, do our calculations and manipulations and thought experiments, and then translate the symbolic results back into reality. That’s what physics is. That’s what chemistry is. That’s what math is. We do make insights and produce knowledge this way, not by faith but by allowing reality to demonstrate if it works. That’s what all the excitement was about actually demonstrating the existence of the Higgs boson. – that the ‘nothing’ that seemed empty of everything but space was in fact a quantum space filled with ‘something’ called a field that has advanced our fundamental understanding of particle physics. Note how the entire discussion leaves the metaphysical musings and imaginings where they rightly belong – in religious belief, and the ‘Prime Mover’ chestnut called ‘God’ has zero application in the study of reality and how it operates. As Laplace supposedly said to Napoleon, we have no need for that hypothesis. In modern parlance, if we wish to know more about reality and how it operates, we have no need for metaphysics.
If we leave metaphysics alone for the moment and turn to your questions about thoughts and knowledge and wish to better understand what these terms represent so that we can gain a better understanding according to reality and not our imported beliefs, then where should we turn? What method should we use? If, as history has demonstrated time after time, we utilize methodological naturalism for our inquiry, I have high degree of confidence that as our understanding deepens about ‘thoughts’ and ‘knowledge’ we shall find ourselves responding to these questions you ask the same way Laplace did: we have no need for that hypothesis. And, in case you’ve forgotten the key point here, metaphysics has never, does not, and probably never shall produce knowledge. Why turn to that method… unless the reason clearly has nothing to do with gaining knowledge and everything to do with supporting piety.
You didn’t answer the question.
What is this ‘knowledge’ for which you have such high regard?
My own definition for knowledge is an understanding that can be successfully applied and works independent of me.
That’s not the question. We agree essentially on the definition of knowledge. The question is deeper than that.
If there is nothing metaphysical, what physical elements make up ‘knowledge’? What are thoughts made of?
Knowledge is not a ‘thing’. It’s an umbrella term that represents a recognition of some aspect of reality independent of us. We use this recognition by modeling it and then applying the model to see how reality responds. Just because some understanding appears to be the case doesn’t mean it is. That’s why ‘knowledge’ we thought we had sometimes undergoes a radical shift and even change as some deeper insight and successful modeling demonstrates compelling reasons to alter our state of knowledge. Knowledge in this sense is always in a state of flux and we don’t need metaphysical musings to cloud the issues at hand with nebulous terminology that suits the musings of some imaginations as if containing some special insight accessible through faith when it is actually empty of any practical and useful knowledge value.
“Knowledge is not a ‘thing’.”
“…we don’t need metaphysical musings to cloud the issues…”
Knowledge, if not a thing, exists exclusively in the realm of the metaphysical. So you DO, in fact, need the metaphysical.
You are sawing away at the branch upon which you are sitting.
A question that you should ask yourself is: “How much of my knowledge is based on empirical, scientific evidence?”
John B, you state, “Knowledge, if not a thing, exists exclusively in the realm of the metaphysical. So you DO, in fact, need the metaphysical.”
Once again, using a conclusion as if a premise and justifying the truthfulness of the premise by the conclusion.
Why do you think knowledge ‘exists’ in this magical realm called ‘the metaphysical’. What does, what can, that possibly mean? What, it’s an umbrella term for a concept and so therefore it’s metaphysical? No. It’s a word. It’s a representation with meaning. The meaning is related to how we perceive reality and our accurate modelling of it by application of the model. Where in any of this is this supposedly necessary magical realm hanging about? Where’s the need for it?
Would you find it annoying if I accused you of referring to ‘magic’ every time you mentioned ‘knowledge’ or ‘thought’?
“No. It’s a word. It’s a representation with meaning. The meaning is related to how we perceive reality…”
So where are the ‘meaning’ atoms? What is the chemical formula for ‘knowledge’?
YOU, not me, are stuck with needing to explain what physical elements make up ‘thoughts’. YOU, not me, claim there is no metaphysical reality.
I am not going to let you keep hurling the ‘assuming your conclusion’ accusation at me when you’re doing EXACTLY the same thing!
YOU said knowledge is not a ‘thing’. By that, you mean that knowledge doesn’t exists as a physical entity. Do you still not see the dilemma? Unless you’re going to argue that knowledge doesn’t exist at all, you NEED a non-physical space for this non-physical concept to exist. If the term ‘metaphysical’ gives you heartburn, we can call it ‘Ooogity-Boogity’.
We know ‘thoughts’ are collections of electrical impulses firing neurons and dendrites in specific order. Where’s the Oogity Boogity! in that?
My point is that If I want to inquire into what thoughts are, it’s not metaphysics that will provide an explanation I can model and then apply. Nor is it religion. Both of these produce no knowledge about anything. Ever. So you assigning to metaphysics areas of pertinence is misguided. All you end up with are pseudo- explanations that explain nothing about anything ever. But they are useful in granting a patina of respectability to the nebulous and you can use it to fool people into believing stuff that isn’t believable and investing confidence where none has been earned.
I don’t believe that you KNOW what thoughts are. Sorry.
If thoughts are just electrical impulses in my brain then why should I distrust my impulses in favor of yours? And why is it so important to be able to ‘model and apply’ something before you can accept it as truth? Most of the things you accept as true don’t meet that stringent criterion.
I’m willing to accept everything in your response as a faith statement. I’m completely cool with faith statements. I make them all the time.
Surely you will agree that there is nothing in your response that is anything close to ‘scientific’.
Au contraire, mon ami. By affecting these electrical discharges to certain parts of the brain, we can directly affect the thoughts themselves. A one-to-one correlation. The same model holds true for damage and lesions and swelling and blood restriction and magnetic fields. All the evidence points to this electrical brain activity producing what we experience as thoughts… very much a material process. Again, no Oogity Boogity involved and, applying this knowledge, can successfully (to varying degrees) isolate the scope of TIAs (transient ischemic attacks) and assess the functional damage done to do up a plan of rehabilitation… retraining the brain to build new circuitry in place of the old. Neuroscience. Not metaphysics, not theology, not superstitious nonsense. Those lead to pseudo-explanations that explain nothing and certainly don’t lead us to therapies, applications, and technologies that work for everyone everywhere all the time.
Of course you’re right!
Neuroscience certainly works for everyone everywhere all the time.
Still no science my friend. Lots of enthusiastic faith statements though. But notice I am not compelled to label your faith statements as ‘superstitious nonsense’. I’m not piously accusing you of ‘pseudo-explanations’.
You are still assuming your conclusion (just like you accused me of doing).
And you still need to tackle the question of how you KNOW that your electrical impulses are correct and my electrical impulses are in error.
I (might) have thought of another question. That statement contains a bit of uncertainty because of the question…
Do you think you possess free will? If possible, I’d like to avoid a tedious conversation where we take turns trying to define that term. I’m asking if you think you have the power to make decisions. For example, did you choose to write your blog response?
If you answer yes, then help me understand how free-will exists as a purely material substance.