Well, the debate went well, about 450 people or so in attendance. I heard it will be posted on Youtube tomorrow so as soon as I get a link I will post it here. Once I get it up, we can discuss it. Meanwhile, maybe some people who attended and would care to can post their impressions here. View the debate.
Debate done, went well, post tomorrow?
November 17, 2010 12:17 AM
To everyone on this list, Fr. Hans did us all very proud. His passion was evident, yet he was totally approachable for the college audience. Even his “foe” was taken in, but had to give a below the belt punch that we are sure was just a sound bite for his radio show. i.e., “Thinking about it further, no we cannot have a beer together if you hold that secularism could have been responsible for Nazi atrocities” paraphrasing of course. We watched the audience holding firm to their ideas and waiting for Fr. Hans to flinch. He didn’t. Instead he opened them up to ideas they never heard before, we could see them almost stop breathing while thinking of some of these ideas. Fr. Hans definitely planted some good seeds, including in the head of his opponent in the debate.
No, it was Fr. Hans insinuating that secularism leads to concentration camps that was below the belt, and evading rebuttal by the dirty trick of waiting until after Matt’s closing remarks to do it. Matt indignantly calling him out on it during the Q&A was not “just a sound bite”, but a well‐deserved chiding.
If anything, Matt was far too polite about it. I’d’ve dressed down Fr. Hans as a Holocaust revisionist for his dishonesty.
“Dressed down”? Where?
Actually, to be clear, I never said secularism leads to concentration camps. What I said was that secularism is just a layover from one place to the next, although this trip takes a century or so to complete.
What I said was that atheism leads to concentration camps and gulags, as the historical record makes clear. This is not the same thing as saying that all atheists support such a development. Clearly they don’t. In fact, I contend that some atheists can be moral people as I indicated in my opening statement.
Atheist morality however, is necessarily derivative. It depends on first principles drawn from places other than atheism itself. The materialist ground of atheism allows for nothing except moral relativism.
Neither was I “insinuating” that secularism (atheism, actually) leads to concentration camps. I was very frank, outspoken actually, in asserting the claim. All the great tyrannies of the last century were atheist. The fact that almost all (thinking) atheists are Marxists is Exhibit A.
The “chiding” is to be expected. It’s a cheap substitute for a historical problem atheists have yet to address. I have yet to hear any reasoning internal to atheism that explains away this problem besides wagging the finger while muttering “That’s not fair!”
If you can provide one, I am all ears. I contend however that your materialism precludes it.
You didn’t just insinuate it, you baldly asserted it: “That’s the vision that is lost to secularism. And the historical record, as I said, shows that secularism, the denial of that sacred dimension, is a place that leads in the end to concentration camps and gulags. It does. Read your history.” (part 5/9, 13:01)
I can refute that in two words: Nazi Germany.
You haven’t met many atheists, have you?
How about a wager? There are a couple dozen atheists in my local atheist group. I propose to poll 20 members at the next meetup on whether they are Marxists, and I’ll bet you $20 not a single one professes to be one. Because I’m capitalist enough to scheme to profit off your prejudice.
(I’ll even skip the one I already know to be an outspoken libertarian, which is about as far from Marxist as you can get, but that probably disqualifies him from being a “thinking” atheist right there.)
Recasting your claim from secularism to atheism makes it even more indefensible, since atheism has no belief system by which you could derive any public policy.
Your invocation of concentration camps is particularly ironic, since the most infamous regime associated with them, Nazi Germany, sent atheists to those camps, along with Jews, gays, and gypsies. A regime headed by a Catholic dictator who often said he was doing the work of the Lord.
Atheism cannot lead to anything remotely comparable, and I dare say you cannot find a single instance in the historical record that can back up your assertion.
Atheism is not founded on materialism, and atheists need not be materialists or moral relativists. Atheists need not even have no supernatural beliefs; an atheist could believe in reincarnation, for example.
Furthermore, I am a materialist, but not a moral relativist. I reject the idea that there are no objective moral standards. Indeed, philosophers over the milennia have expounded plenty of objective moral standards, frex, Kant’s categorical imperative.
I can: there is no such problem. Your charge is completely groundless.
Yes, that’s what I meant by:
Secularism is the layover that leads to atheism. Atheism, in denying any transcendent dimension (the sacred dimension) must necessarily embrace nihilism. That’s when we get into the great social engineering projects like the Final Solution (racial Social Darwinism), Five Year Plans, and other delusions.
Don’t take it so personally Robin. You might be a moral atheist for all I know. If your outrage is at all authentic you probably are. But you clearly don’t understand atheism in any comprehensive way. I make a distinction between your run of the mill atheist who thinks he understands what he believes (many of them don’t), and the philosophical ground of atheist beliefs (yes, beliefs).
Have you ever studied Nietzsche? He said there were few things worse than atheists who were not true to their atheism. They live, in other words, like unbelieving Christians. Nietzsche saw the contradiction. So do I.
Great evil is always justified in the name of good, nothing new there. Your point about atheists in the concentration camps is no surprise either. Atheism eats its own. Solzhenitsyn writes about Marxists arrested by Stalin who were convinced that their arrest must have been a mistake. They simply could not comprehend the real nature of the evil they embraced. They died still committed to the ideology that killed them.
Oh my, its clear you know nothing about Nietzsche. He prophesied it all Robin. He championed the destruction in fact, thought it was necessary. It also clear you really have no idea what happened in the last century, either. You’ve got to start reading Robin. Much more happened than you seem to know.
Ever hear of Anthony Flew?
Then you don’t understand what materialism really means. There cannot be such a thing as “objective moral standards” in the materialist vision. That simply cannot exist. Again, Nietzsche understood this. All that exists in a materialist universe is a will to power. Morality is simply what you believe it is, nothing more. It has no “objective” character.
Robin,
It is impossible to assert that Kant is a materialist. If his morality is the one that you produce as being objective but nonetheless materialist, you are mistaken.
In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant asserts that reason is not suited to make overarching metaphysical claims, which materialism with its reductivism certainly is. On all these questions (that is, metaphysical questions) Kant advocates quiet agnosticism.
However, Kant also says in the CPR that he saw fit to limit reason in order to make room for faith. In order to discover the rational faith that Kant is talking about here you have to look at his moral philosophy in the Critique of Practical Reason and The Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. In these texts he explicitly says that reason raises us up above nature, and that it has a higher and more noble purpose than our survival or happiness – namely, it issues commands that have as their objective making us moral.
I agree with you that Kant’s ethic is a version of moral objectivism, but I do not think it is at all consistent with an atheistic and materialistic view. For the materialist, reason is inevitably reduced to an instinct and as Darwin has taught us, all successful instincts will improve our survivability. In his discussion on these points Kant explicitly states that reason has a higher purpose than our survival because instinct does a much better job at ensuring our survival and we find no organ for any purpose except that which is best adapted for that purpose. Hence, since reason is not well adapted to ensure our survival, it must have another purpose entirely. Given a materialistic outlook it is difficult to see how any more robust purpose than survival can emerge, which means no true moral objectivism – which must aim at moral goodness as a higher value than survival.
What is more, Kant himself thinks that his morality only makes sense if one postulates the existence of God as a rational faith. This is because his morality forces us to aim so wide of our own happiness that it is only psychologically possible if we believe that at some point happiness will be distributed according to moral goodness. The practical postulate of God’s existence is what allows us to hope that this is true and act accordingly, which also gives us hope that our moral lives will not be utterly miserable. Kant has to build this sort of assurance into his ethic because it does not aim at survival or happiness, and for this very reason many people find Kant’s ethic counter-intuitive, especially if they are at all inclined towards egoism.
All this is simply to ask, who can you really point to as advocating a materialistic version of moral objectivism?
Atheism is nothing more than not believing in deities. It requires no disbelief in transcendence, nor intrinsic value, nor objective meaning, nor objective morality, nor whatever you think “nihilism” entails. Just deities.
You apparently mean something different from “transcendent” than I do, however. To me, math is transcendent. Numbers are transcendent. Logic is transcendent. There are plenty of transcendent things in my worldview.
Huh? No, your statement “all atheists are Marxists” was too divorced from reality to take personally. That’s not outrage, that’s me teasing you. So you won’t take my bet?
Sure I do. It’s very simple:
Theists claim, “There is a god.“
Atheists respond, “I don’t believe you.”
That’s all. Nothing else. Yet as simple as atheism is, you keep getting it wrong.
This is how daft you sound:
Hans: Atheists have to believe this, and atheists have to believe that.
Matt: I don’t believe either of those things.
Hans: Oh, I don’t mean you, you’re not like other atheists.
Hans: Atheists have to believe this, and atheists have to believe that.
Robin: I don’t believe either of those things.
Hans: Well, you don’t understand atheism.
You know who actually knows what atheists believe? Atheists.
So stop building straw atheists to argue with, and argue with positions and beliefs I do have.
The Final Solution to rid the world of those Christ-killing Jews, you’re still trying to blame that on atheism. That’s nonsense.
I don’t think Stalin’s Five Year Plans to use prison labor to build railroads, canals, dams, factories, and coal mines lend any support to your point.
I haven’t read Neitzsche. Wikipedia says he thought the death of God eventually leads to a loss of universal perspective and an end of a sense of objective truth.
That’s upside‐down and backwards: the pursuit of objective truth leads to atheism.
Right back at you.
I heard he was an atheist author who went a bit senile and converted to deism. Never read him.
Why not? Nothing about the idea that reality is comprised only of matter (and energy) precludes basing your moral standards on objective criteria.
In the beginning of this universe, shortly after the Big Bang, all that existed were matter and energy. There were no conscious beings to will anything.
T. Nathaniel writes, in 1.1.1.1.2:
I did not assert anything like that. I said that I am a materialist, and that Kant’s categorical imperative was an example of an objective moral standard.
How so? Where are they incompatible?
One need not accept Kant’s opinions about reason to adopt his categorical imperative as one’s moral standard.
He’s wrong about that. You can accept it on purely rational grounds, with no faith at all.
Alonzo Fyfe, for one.
Robin,
It seems daft to say that you know Kant’s moral theory better than he does. If you think therefore that one can accept Kant’s Categorical Imperative without any of the context that gives it meaning, I think that it is prudent to ask whether what you accept is really the Categorical Imperative at all.
What is more, your reasons for accepting the Categorical Imperative tell us everything about the moral theory that you espouse as an atheist, and it will be difficult for you to be a moral objectivist (I am not saying impossible, because I do not know enough to warrant this stronger claim).
Do you accept the Categorical Imperative on the basis of your own choice alone? Then you are a subjectivist.
Do you accept the Categorical Imperative on the basis of the choices of your society or culture? Then you are a conventionalist.
Do you accept the Categorical Imperative because the agreeement to something like it is necessary to keep us from killing and harming one another and you want to survive? Then you are a social contract theorist in the tradition of Hobbes.
Do you accept it because it is a good rule to use in considering which rules are productive of the best consequences? Then you are a rule consequentialist much like Mill.
If you do not accept the rest of Kant’s philosophy then you cannot accept the Categorical Imperative for the reasons that he argues we should – namely, because it is a command of reason whether we choose to believe that it is or not. What we must then do is trace the geneology of your acceptance of the Categorical imperative to discover what sort of ethical theory you really espouse. While the Categorical Imperative in its native context may constitute a morally objective standard, it is not clear that when it is transplanted this must be the case.
Only the last of the options above is a truly morally objectivistic theory, which we can identify as such because its fundamental principles cannot be reduced to a hypothetical imperative. The utilitarian says unequivocally that our duty is to maximize pleasure, even when this means that we ourselves suffer (Russell himself wonders how such a theory is consistent with Bentham’s egoism).
The atheist ethicist that you point to is in fact a utilitarian. Now, we could have a discussion about the relative merits of utilitarianism and whether this theory makes sense from an atheistic point of view (utilitarians have a notoriously difficult time giving an adequate account of justice for instance since pleasure is a very jealous foundational value), but you seem to be more interested in short and polemical exchanges. I recommend that you spend much more on Fyfe’s blog since it seems like he is engaged in much more nuanced inquiry – especially when he acknowledges that many atheists do not adequately answer the question of moral motivation when they give their crass biological accounts.
If you would like to discuss these things further, with more honesty and less polemic you can reach me at toddtrembley at hotmail dot com.
Peace.
The Source of Human Morality Debate PART 01
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkMAJai5D3c
SO what>? Are the rest of the links broken? Just one?
Yeah …. Watch the first 4 minutes: the rules and notice the large attendance. The remaining 10 minute are used by Matt Dillahunty . I do not need to watch this part. I’ve been listening to lies and atheist propaganda for 25 years.
Seems like you decided from the very beginning to listen to only one side, Eliot. I’ll keep that in mind when reading your uninformed assessment of this debate.
Careful Robin. I know Eliot’s history. He has much more experience with atheism than you, living in America, will ever see. Your experience amounts to a thimble, his an ocean.
Robin: I know that “belief” is not something you can turn on and off. I’ve been utterly indifferent toward religion for a long time. Now I believe in Christ because the evidence convinced my mind.
You strongly suspect that God doesn’t exist. As a believer “I have everything to gain, and nothing to lose” (Pascal’s pragmatism or Pascal’s wager) but this is not reason for may faith. The unbeliever has everything to lose. So, for your own good make sure that you are well informed because there’s just too much at stake. Wishing you all the best …
2.1.1.1.1:
2.1.1.1.2:
Pascal’s wager? So far, his arguments are shallow as a puddle.
If you’re impressed by Pascal’s wager, Eliot, have you not considered the consequences of believing in the wrong god? What if you’re avoiding the wrong hell? The Qu’ran says Jews and Christians go to Islamic hell. If chances are better that Jesus will forgive you for being a Muslim, than that Allah will forgive you for being a Christian, then odds favor being a Muslim over being a Christian.
There’s even a tiny but nonzero chance I’m the one true god, and will grant you an afterlife of eternal bliss for the low, low price of $20. You can’t rule out the possibility that for admission into the real heaven, you don’t need faith, you just need cash. The wise bet is to pay up, right? What’s $20 next to eternity? (I take PayPal.)
Part II
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WqcYLSYqPU
Viewing the first video right now…
Part III is now available:
http://www.youtube.com/user/umbcOCF
http://www.youtube.com/user/umbcOCF#p/a/u/0/aIvCVwHqH1s
Father Hans said something about Hitler that got the Atheists upset.
Ruminating after hearing parts II/III. I wonder whether the possibility of, broadly phrased, any concept including or presupposing ‘the universal brotherhood of man’ can have meaning within any framework including atheism.
Leaving aside the project of what ‘brotherhood’ might mean in the variety of athiest understandings, the atheist needs must agree about some measurable boundary defining who qualifies as man. Thus and such a percent of DNA variability off some agreed ‘standard’ perhaps, but including thus and such a basket of required components? Perhaps self awareness above thus and such a score on an assessment of same? Perhaps the ability over time to attain the foregoing, or possibly being born of one who had the foregoing?
All assessments of the fitness of such attempts, for an atheist, needs must be in the service of an agenda, the morality of which, oroborus fashion, looks to the presupposition of some fraction of the foregoing, which is yet seeking support.
One thing I hope those who find themselves supporting atheism explore is the strong conviction within philosophical cirlces in universities and so on is the horrific outcomes arising from the dubious applications of philosophical theories in particular and the very difficult project agreement on any central topic in philsophy has been to date.
The uploading of the rest of these clips is going very slowly. But, I’ve seen enough to have some comments.
1.) I think that it is important, within the context of this type of debate for people to have a familiarity with Orthodoxy. Most of the counter arguments are based upon either what they experienced in their protestant or non-denominational Christian sect. Perhaps things that even we as Christians may agree to be very irrational or beyond explanation. In not defining Orthodoxy we allow them to define us as only, “Theists.”
2.) Atheists like to be clear in defining the difference between science and a phenomenon like Social Darwinism, evolution, or Eugenics – but they don’t like to differentiate between religion and faith. We need to do this for them.
3.) I’m surprised that Father Hans hasn’t yet (I’ve only gotten to the 5th clip) mentioned the “nous” mind-heart “dichotomy” and how perhaps our ability to rationalize isn’t the best method to obtain Truth.
Part IV & V are posted:
The Source of Human Morality Debate PART
The fact that Matt was raised as a fundamentalist Baptist and became an atheist does not surprise me. The apostasy from the Orthodox Faith lead to many errors and horrors: Inquisition, Marxism, fascism, atheism and concentration camps.
Fr. Hans made very valid points. Man is not the measure of all things, neither is reason the source of the Truth. Reason is only an imperfect receptacle for truth.
Rationalists hold the prideful idea that the fallen and sinful man can still reason aright. The demons are prideful and seize the prideful
Eliot, lest we get too triumphalistic it’s important to recall that the world has countries in which Orthodoxy was faith of most folk — who did war against one another.
Haven’t seen all the parts yet, but very pleased with what I have seen. Eliot’s comment is on the mark and reminds me of Metropolitan Anthony’s “God and Man”. In that there is an exchange between the Met. and Laski (the atheist):
Bloom asks, “What do you think of the people who are sure that there is an otherness which they call God, how do you take into account their experience or what they assert? Do you think that all of them were completely mistaken in the judgment or hallucinated?“
Laski responds, “You lead me to the besetting sin of the atheist which is arrogance, so I think I have to say I don’t know.“
I still appreciate Laski’s honesty and preference for modesty. Fr. Hans strikes me as similarly (and cautiously) modest and circumspect in his assertions. As these debates can all too easily head towards the bombastic, it seems a better witness to avoid the same besetting sins Laski sought to avoid.
Fr. H: The bit in part 4 where you upheld the beauty percieved in music as a category entirely different than anything capable of being measured about its production really said something important yet got no good answer. All agree there is something beautiful in some music and at a the same time can say science and measurements have nothing that bears upon it.
The atheist points to morality arising from reason needs to address something they admit ‘is’ yet about which their toolkit is silent.
Part VI is up
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9j3LCKUBetg
I think following some of the youtube commentary and the nice virtual church er uh, virtual social networking group the atheists have set up for themselves there you’ll be please to see that the beauty of music example Father Hans talked about (along with pretty much every thing else) was met with the argument, “He’s delusional” –
In conclusion, I am beginning to think that the theory that Atheists can be moral to be false, let alone something outlandish like morality stemming from reason. They want “hard facts” take a gander at the youtube culture they’ve so nicely set out for the world to see. Forgive me, this may in fact be a judgement call on my end.
Chris, what I picked up on from the crowd: Many atheists so call themselves because they don’t feel it proper to subordinate themselves to a person or authority structure whose claim to authority over them stems not just from an appreciation for that about which reason is silent — but their authority trumps what reason repeatably demonstrates.
That is, they feel ‘not atheism’ includes denying inconvenient bits of repeatable demonstrable reason and so leads down the path of cult membership.
I think it would disarm many, many who are considering atheism if it was clear that there is a theistic system which accepted all that can reason can repeatably demonstrate, which carried that project forward into relationship with that about which people recognize exists but about which reason is silent, and that provided guidance about living that centuries later developed reason found supportable.
Fr. Hans did much along those lines during the bits about non literal ‘typeology’ in the meanings of ‘adam’ and ‘eves’ names in the pre-science ages.
Amusing, atheist disclaiming without scruple the misdoings of atheiests in history as unrelated to the validity of atheism, while holding others to account for their misdoings. When you don’t have a star to steer by, and you don’t feel the need to even steer by your own wake, then you certainly are safe from ever being wrong since wrong doesn’t mean anything!
Harry,
I catch your drift, albeit much of this is over my head. I do seem to find it interesting that while they denounce “dogma and authority” their stance and process of “reasoning” seems to be more dogmatic than even Orthodoxy. And, in following some of the messages on Youtube, they seem to view Matt Dillahunty as an “authority” on their viewpoint, rock starish. And yes, they simultaneously seem to want their own view to be authoritative. How much this is part of these kids’ growing up process at this stage of their lives I guess we’ll find out.
I am also interested to see how these “seeds” end up.
Chris,
I also notice there appears to be a search for authority among the atheists, choosing a leader and then, as history hints, they find themselves as caught as they would have been if a theistic guru held them in thrall.
I found Fr. Hans identification of various sorts and modes among the attitudes of atheistic people interesting.
Atheists can act in moral ways because of a self-limiting code which they adopt, but there is no rational, anthropological or cosmological basis for their morality. They cannot, therefore, be moral people or build anything approaching a cultural morality other than some form of social darwinism.
Michael, I think one of Fr. Hans point’s is that ‘athiests’ could indeed attain a cultural morality more in spite of their tenets than because of them. As nothing is ‘closed’ to an athiest such sense and reasons as they intuit that are beyond what can be measured might land them in a good spot. Not so likely but possible. This as a distinction from ‘atheism’ which really can’t lead anywhere because something that starts off with ‘not-X’ doesn’t establish anything by which to steer.
The theist has a name and a reason for it and is more likely to get there, if they pay attention.
I have a great deal of fun comparing this and the mathematical construct ‘the square root of negative one’. A thing which cannot itself exist nor can be seen, but only described, and about which an enormous roster of breathtakingly consistent and physically applicable mathematics has come.
Here at the heart of math two steps beyond counting on the fingers we have a thing which we can only describe but not see and upon which a great deal of truth and science is described. Talk about a precedent of interest outside its own world.
Harry:
Science uncovers nature’s secrets, its laws. It does not dictate how the nature works. We can build two, or more theories to describe the same physical reality. What mostly matters when building a theory is the simplicity of the equations.
Imaginary numbers do not exist in the real world. They are abstractions used to get the right answers to problems and to simplify the math whenever periodic wave phenomena (electricity, electromagnetism, quantum physics, wave physics, oscillating systems, etc) are considered. All physics theories are mathematical constructs, abstractions used to arrive to the right answers or to describe what we observe.
One’s mind cannot ever be a mere reflection of matter.
I wonder how the atheist/evolutionist explain this abstraction ability specific only to humans beings. Also, humans, as far as we know, are the only species to possess religious beliefs.
The Four Laws by which Christ will Judge the World–By Elder Cleopa
Eliot:
You could also say zero does not exist in the real world. All numbers are abstractions with no physical existence. But indeed, complex numbers have many real world applications.
It’s not specific to humans. Gorillas can learn sign language and dolphins can do math.
That is true. We are very imaginative creatures.
It looks like Matt has a small crowd commenting on these videos.
It is obvious that they never heard about saints and the grace they possessed.
The rationalist can search in vain to find the physical methods used by the saints when performing their many wonders: they could understand the heart and read the thoughts of a person they had just met for the first time; they will call him by his name; they would answer on what troubled him, without waiting for the visitor to ask.
To those coming to thank them for the miracle, they answered: “It is not me, but Christ Who made it happened. Give thanks to the Lord.”
I am saddened by their tasteless comments and arguments showing how poor and ignorant they are. There are always people like that …
“We Should Tell the Truth, Come What May”
Such people will accept the false miracles of the Deceiver, and persecute those who won’t.. .. Lord have mercy on us!
I think this follows Fr. Hans’s statement that you can find more truth in Fiction than Non-Fiction. How can one “rationally” explain the events, healings, miracles of Father Arsenie? Of Our Lord? You cannot.
Part VII:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KYlD_n0Fzc
Just picked up their twitter post -
The Acton Institute has picked up on the debate:
http://blog.acton.org/archives/20144-debate-the-source-of-human-morality.html
Fr. Hans:
Even more impressive is the fact that Christianity emerged as a dominant religion after three centuries of persecution by the pagan majority and their rulers. Christians endured:
Absolutely Eliot. And then think, when recalling this witness of enduring faith, how anemic our faith is in so many ways. St. Paul says, “Gird up the loins of your mind,” and he cites those you quoted above as the standard-bearers of those with faith in Christ.
Even more impressive is the fact that two thousand years later New Martryrs and Confessors still proclaim that man is a spiritual being with an immortal soul and destiny. Communism strived to destroy everyone who proclaimed the Kingdom of Christ and opposed its materialist doctrines.
Christians were arrested deep at night and taken away in secret, slandered and blamed for criminal and political offenses. They were interrogated, humiliated, tortured and killed without trial and investigation. Their embarrassment, dishonor, pain or death brings greater honor and glory to Christ.
‘The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church’ (St Cyprian of Carthage).
Since 1991 some four Russian Orthodox churches have opened every day and approximately one monastery or convent every ten days and some more in other former Communist countries.
Why such hatred toward those who follow Christ? How many Christians have to die before the world takes notice? How can anyone claim to be moral and just while ignoring this reality?
This hatred is the hatred of the devil and his spiritual children.
Elder Cleopa:
Robin writes:
There’s the nub. If the “pursuit of objective truth leads to atheism,” then the “objective truth” is that all that exists is matter. That’s the inevitable end. It can’t be any other way. And that conclusion, believe it or not, functions not as a point of fact, but as an article of faith.
Because if matter is all that objectivly exists, then morals have to arise from matter itself. In atheist philosophy anything non-material fits into the realm of the “ideal.” The “ideal” however, has no independent, objective existence. It arises from the material. Ideas, sentiments, morals, etc. all inhabit this realm of the “ideal.”
Thus morals really are nothing more than subjective impressions of right and wrong. Good and evil become relative. Atheism, properly defined and understood does not allow for “basing your moral standards on objective criteria”.
Read the atheists more and listen less to your friends. If they are telling you that morality can have an objective existence then they are really functioning as cultural Christians, albeit without any reference to God. (Living in a culture shaped by Christian morality gives them that luxury.)
Not to oversimplify: Matter, energy, and spacetime.
I should elaborate: our best method to pursue objective truth is empiricism, and empiricism leads to atheism. Follow?
No, as a provisional conclusion based on the best available evidence.
Yes, morals arise from that gray matter between your ears.
Calling it a “realm of the ideal” makes it sound like we’re talking about Platonic forms. “realm of concepts”? “ideaspace”?
They always were.
Wrong. There you go again.
First, you drew that erroneous conclusion from materialism, not atheism.
Second, both materialism and atheism allow for basing your moral standards on any criteria at all, objective or otherwise.
Morality is entirely conceptual.
You seem to be confusing “objective existence” with “objective criteria”.
Not me, I live in America, a far more egalitarian and free culture. We don’t even keep slaves or burn witches any more.
Robin,
You say that empiricism leads to atheism. I think that the Western philosophical tradition does not bear this out. Empiricism leads to either idealism (Berkeley) or skepticism (Hume). Berkeley is obviously a theist since he thinks that everything we experience is caused by the ongoing thought of God who keeps the entire world in existence as so many thoughts within His mind. Hume on the other hand is not so clearly an atheist, although his religious ideas are certainly unorthodox. Skepticism does not allow one to state much of anything as a strong knowledge claim, so one becomes an agnostic on most things, including the existence of God. However, most current atheists lack the humility and rigour of Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.
To be a materialist is to affirm the existence of something, matter, for which we lack any empirical evidence. Locke himself says that the idea of matter or substance is nothing but a supposition of something, we know not what, that unites within itself all of the qualities that we do experience. But our idea of this underlying stuff that possesses all of the qualities that we experience and that underlies our experience of any qualities at all is never itself experienced. As a consistant empiricist you should dispense with this notion entirely or admit it for the fiction that it is. What you cannot do is claim to be a materialist in any strong sense. So on what basis do you accept the existence of matter?
Perhaps however you are a radical empiricist and have given up on any sort of metaphysic whatever – the truth is nothing but the useful, and paying close attention to the things that we experience is the surest way to accomplish our goals and projects and to construct comfortable lives for ourselves. This is pragmatism and amounts to a reaction against the traditional pursuit of truth for truth’s sake. Here truth is measured by nothing more than what is useful to us. I doubt that you think of your own epistemological views on pragmatist terms since you seem to be claiming something more than that the thesis that God exists is not useful, instead you seem to be saying that it is literally false.
I suggest that you pay closer attention to the things that you say. For instance, above you say in response to Fr. Hans that good and evil always were relative, while having previously claimed that you are a moral objectivist. These two claims are incompatible. It is tantamount to saying, “I am a moral relativist and I am a moral objectivist,” or “There are no objective moral standards and there are objective moral standards.” To seriously say this is to reject the principle of non-contradiction on which all of Western logic is based, so there really is not much more to say or any point to saying it.
What is it that you are really saying? What is your position? Please state it plainly and without the flourishes of rhetoric that obscure what you really mean and then we can investigate the possibility of an atheistic and materialistic moral objectivism.
Exactly, empricism leads to being skeptical of the proposition that a deity or deities exist. If you don’t have a belief that a deity or deities exist, you are an atheist. Hence, empiricism leads to atheism.
Good question. Yes, we cannot be absolutely certain our experience of matter reflects actual matter. This could all be a lotus dream. We could be living in the Matrix.
I hold only one belief on pragmatic grounds: the physical world is real (until proven otherwise!). Without that, all is pointless solipsism.
None of us perceive reality directly, but only through the filter of our senses. Our brains process those sense impressions and build a virtual model of the world outside. It’s not 100% reliable; our mental models can be wrong. Reality is the way things really are, independent of what any mind thinks.
You and Fr. Hans both confuse subjective/objective with relative/absolute. Relative does not equal subjective. One can consistently have morals that are both objective and relative.
See, Hans, isn’t asking better than making up what you think my position is?
My overall position is that one can arrive at moral principles through reason alone, without any magical beings giving them to us, or authority figures telling us how to behave, or fear of punishment either corporeal or metaphysical.
Subjectivism as an ethical theory is a version of moral relativism, so your attempt to divorce subjective from relative is at least prima facie suspect. What is more, moral objectivism requires moral principles and their accompanying views of good and evil which are universal. While you are right to say that objectivism does not entail absolutism, it seems difficult to maintain that values are relative and yet universal. This seems like a blatant contradiction to me. Perhaps you would like to define moral objectivism such that it is in keeping with relativism?
Even Utilitarianism, which Fyfe, your champion of atheistic ethics draws upon, is a form of moral absolutism. Absolutism is by definition a form of moral objectivism. If you clearly identified yourself with him your position would make more sense, although you would still have to do some work in explaining the motive to be moral.
I would argue that your insistence on reason alone here is largely rhetorical. It is a rare atheist who can deny any sort of rational principle at work in the universe and nonetheless assert that reason is normative for human behavior. Hume makes much more sense here when he asserts that reason is a slave of the passions – it can tell us how to get what we want, but never what to want. Thus, the basis of ethics for Hume is feelings and instincts, which makes much more sense from an atheistic point of view than reason. I think that you have not traced your ethic back to its origin. When you do, you will find that it is something other than reason.
What is more, the ethic that you rightly criticize among the religious is the divine command theory. What you ought to be engaging if you want to deal with the best that religious thinkers articulate is natural law theory. Here it makes sense to trust the dictates of reason and the commands that it issues because these are the laws that govern the entire cosmos. Reason pervades all things and when we govern our own behavior in keeping with reasons laws we are in harmony with the universe – or as the ancients say, the microcosm, which are human beings mirror and match up with the macrocosm. What story can you tell as an atheist that can ground reason’s ability to issue commands and thus ground an ethic? Here it would be nice if you would respond in depth and not with quick snippets. These are serious subjects after all.
In 18.1.1.1.1, T. Nathaniel writes:
No, it doesn’t. I’ve already given a counterexample: The categorical imperative does not require universal views of good and evil.
Height is objective and universal, but that doesn’t mean everyone is the same height. Alice may be taller than Bob. Height is relative.
If I say Alice is taller than Bob, that is either true or false. The objective truth of that statement is relative: It may be absolutely false in January and absolutely true in September. Its truth depends on circumstances.
Values are relative, since we value different things. A statement about values, like “I prefer chocolate ice cream”, is true or false. The objective truth of that statement is relative: it may be absolutely true on Monday and absolutely false on Friday. (Maybe after eating chocolate all week, I got sick of it.) Its truth depends on circumstances.
Let’s apply this to the categorical imperative. (For readers who don’t know, the categorical imperative is, as Kant put it, “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.”) For any maxim you evaluate, it is either true or false that this maxim fulfills the categorical imperative. That objective truth, however, is relative. What you would will to become a universal law may not be what I would will to become a universal law. Thus, the categorical imperative is simultaneously objective and relative.
Fyfe is a champion of desire utilitarianism, not Utilitarianism per se. Desire utilitarianism evaluates desires relative to all other desires that exist. Would you call that moral absolutism?
There seems to be no rational principle at work in the universe as a whole, only in those rational beings who are part of it.
Our innate urge to be social is a foundation for empathy and for moral behavior.
When did I criticize divine command theory? Well, for once you’ve attributed a position to me that I actually would take.
What I ought to engage is whatever who I’m talking to adheres to, best, worst, or in between. However, it’s a lot more enjoyable to talk to someone who is interested in philosophy and ethics, like you.
A pretty idea, but our laws of physics are only products of reason in the sense that we applied our reason to describe how matter interacts. They are not like traffic laws, legislated and enforced; they are properties of the universe.
I’m not sure I understand the question. Weighing one thing against another is a rational act. Why wouldn’t reason lead to values?
Robin,
Your understanding of the categorical imperative is wholly inadequate. It is simply not the case that anything can be willed universally depending on who is doing the willing. Reason oversees the application of the categorical imperative in order to determine when a contradiction occurs with a universalized maxim. If a contradiction occurs, then the action is immoral.
Your use of the categorical imperative, that each person wills whatever they choose to be universal without paying any attention to rational contradictions in maxims is more in keeping with Sartre’s notion of universality. This is not at all surprising given the fact that you have also stated that an atheist can choose whatever morality they want. If this is true, then you must admit that moral objectivism is false. What moral objectivism states is that there are valid moral principles and values which exist independent of human choices whether individual or collective. The way that you talk about choice here is not in keeping with objectivism. The most you can hope for with your approach is some sort of intersubjectivism, which is precisely where Sartre ends up rather than any sort of objectivism. Once you say that values are relative you bar yourself from being an objectivist. If you doubt my use of these terms please ask Fyfe – I am sure that he will set you straight.
Utilitarianism is a form of moral absolutism because it has an objective and non-overidable ethical principle: maximize the good! In any situation we can judge whether someone is ethical or not by whether they have in fact maximized the good. What separates the different versions of utilitarianism is what they define the good to include, but for all versions the good is some value that is objective and beyond the fickleness of human choice. Fyfe thinks that you are moral when your actions maximize desire fulfillment, I am assuming that this would apply not only to the individual but to everyone: act in such a way that your action maximizes aggregate desire fulfillment. A desire fulfilled is objectively and universally good, while an unfulfilled desire is objectively and universally bad. I cannot will for something to be good other than desire fulfillment, this is simply and objectively what the good is according to this ethical theory.
Weighing one thing against another is indeed a mental act, but this does not mean it is a rational act, for we can hold each thing up to examination in order to determine which one we prefer on other than rational grounds and in accordance with our passions, emotions, desires, etc. If you deny any inherent rationality in the universe, why the constant appeal to rationality as something that we should attempt to be. Here Fr. Hans and others are correct, if the the universe is irrational then Nietzsche’s own irrational philosophy seems like a fitting response. This is again why I say that your appeal to reason is rhetorical and nothing more. You lack a view that gives reason the dignity that makes an appeal to reason compelling. If reason is nothing but an instinct as many atheists claim, then why waste so much time discussing this with us. Simply acknowledge that our instincts are not working as well as yours, that that is too bad for us, and move on.
What you need is more clarity in discussing moral concepts and more awareness of basic philosophies and terms. I think your time would better be spent studying these things than charging ahead and trying to win debates regarding things that you do not fully grasp yourself. If you only care about winning debates then, yes, all you need concern yourself with is what your opponent is arguing. But if you are honestly seeking the truth, it behooves you to engage with the best arguments that can be advanced for every position. To do anything less is to betray the insecurity with which you hold even those minimal beliefs that you do claim.
@Todd
After looking into it some more, you’re correct that my understanding of the categorical imperative was inadequate. Kant rather lost me and I didn’t understand the CI as well as I thought I did. Perhaps it is not as deficient a moral standard as first I thought.
I think the world would be a better place if everyone tried to be rational.
Not familiar with Nietzsche’s philosophy, but I’m interested in being a rationalist, not an irrationalist.
You want me to dignify reason to you? Seems a weird attitude for a philosopher.
In my view, when it comes to assessing reality, reason is where it’s at! My life’s incomparably better for it. I highly recommend it. Five stars. 👍
Why not?
Don’t be so hard on yourself, you seem like a reasonably intelligent guy to me.
Well said. I agree.
T. Nathaniel,
Let me express my gratitude for the clarity of your posts. I think we are all learning. I’m sure I speak for others here too.
Robin, if you are simply a-theist (God does not exist) why all the foam and heat?
How can thought lead to no thing? Don’t you end up in a denial of thought itself?
While you are technically correct in your assertion that one need not be a materialist to be a-theist that is not at all a common understanding. Non-materialist, a-theists with whom I am familiar posit a non-personal pre-exisitent ground of being that is greater than matter from which matter decends as either illusion or particulation. Re-incarnation only makes sense from a perspective of a higher, non-human, non-personal ground of being.
If you are positing re-incarnation as some sort of cosmic recycling conservation of matter/energy you have then reduced yourself to being a materialist.
Ultimately the conversation is stuck in the secondary. A person assuming (and it is an assumption) Not God will arrive at different conclusions than those who assume God. Neither has to be illogical.
There is no last letter of the alphabet in this sentence.
Oh, I have no supernatural beliefs. That was an illustration that it is possible to be both an atheist and a supernaturalist, as some Buddhists are.
But the point Robin is that there are at lesst two types of a-theism. Your posts continually try to confuse one with the other either out of a lack of clarity of your own beliefs or an attempt to create a red-herring. Either of which weakens your argument.
Your type of a-theism demanads materialism. You are not really a-theistic so much as believer in self-organizing matter. You voluntarily restrict your thoughts and feelings to what you can taste, see, etc. and ascribe a volition to matter that it is impossible prove and, to me, illogical to assume.
That your choice is based upon a belief which is unproveable makes it a matter of faith. The tenets of your faith then guide you into a self-oonstructed code of conduct which you label morality. So many questions which are unanswerable from within a materialistic framework.
You place an arbitrary end to your thought and call that nothing, but as with math where there is always a +1, it can simply be stated …yet.
Besides, there is plenty of data for the existence of the divine which you arbitrarily dismiss as data simply because it does not fit your pre-defined belief.
Still, why all the fuss and feathers. Why not just write us off as delusional and go about your life?
No, my definition in 1.1.1.1.3 was quite clear, the same one I’ve consistently used in 1.1.1.1, 18.1, and 18.1.1.1. If you have any confusion about what I meant, maybe you need to read more carefully. I’ve spelled it out several times. Once more, as plainly as I can put it:
Atheism is nothing more than non‐belief in gods.
No, it doesn’t. Counterexample previously mentioned: atheistic Buddhists.
Atheism demands no beliefs whatsoever.
Self-organizing matter is not a deity. Are you confused as to what a god is, too? This really isn’t that hard.
No, Hans ascribed a volition to matter in 1.1.1.1.1, I argued against that in 1.1.1.1.3. You really do need to read more carefully.
As a rule, I don’t take things on faith.
“It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.” — “Clifford’s Credo”
Such as?
Quotes or it didn’t happen.
Great, let’s hear it. Mind, though: The plural of anecdote is not “data”.
Perhaps I respect you too much to write you off so quickly. I may plant some seeds of rationality yet.
Robin:
You understand the universe as the entirety of spacetime, matter and energy bound by physical laws – a lawful unfolding of physical properties. Can’t we say the same about cars, computers, cell phones, traffic lights and buildings? They are the result of physical interaction between their own constituent parts. Why not? How do you describe the property of the human mind called intelligence? A computer is “intelligent” but we know who wrote the software.
Yes.
They are.
In short: Brain chemistry. It’s also a property of minds of other animals, to a lesser degree. Gorillas can learn sign language and dolphins can do math. Isn’t that marvelous?
Not very. AI’s got a long way to go yet.
Ah, yes, the material vs. ideal distinction I mentioned above.
In the materialist vision, the logic of the computer should be contained in and arise from the substrate of the motherboard.
Hans writes:
No, in the CPU (particularly the Arithmetic Logic Unit), and other microchips. Where’d you think the logic was stored, in the motherboard’s soul?
Those who understand science, and particularly theoretical computation, logic and mathematics very well, all take great care to separate the beauty even awe they sense and feel in the relationships they percieve, from the particulars of the inter-relationships themselves.
This business of felt qualities attaching to that which is pointed at by symbolic and technical language is the nemesis of the strict materialist.
Finally the more honest and rigorous the scientist the more they will be most careful never to assert that anything does or doesn’t exist or obtain unless the assertion can be tested by repeatable experiment.
A great further challenge to the materialist view are phenomenon that can be measured and predicted but for which the explanitory framework of ‘how’ or ‘why’ is completely absent. We only have a predictive model with no ‘narrative’ as Fr. Hans would call it. Something that tells what to expect quite accurately without the slightest shred of ‘why/how’ at all.
Already we have experiments testing the very strange predictions of quantum physics that demonstrate a message can be sent across a distance without anything travelling between the endpoints, requiring only that the endpoints were carefully constructed together in one spot then placed at their stations sometime earlier.
As there appears to have been a ‘Big Bang’ a while back, talk about ‘being together in one spot’ writ large– it seems the phrase of the ’60′s Flower Children’ ‘Everything is connected to everything else’ has more than drug abuse dreams behind it. That and on a scale that quite literally spans the cosmos.
Robin:
I clearly stated that I believe in Christ. I mentioned Pascal’s wager (and clearly stated that this is not the reason for may faith) to encourage you to keep looking, keep searching, keep reading and asking question until you find the truth and have no doubt about it.
I don’t blame you for being so confused about God. This is what happens when one gets his “theology” from independent missionaries, freethinkers or from bumper stickers.
Do not be offended when people do not agree with you; we love you even if you are an atheist and even if we are aware of the fact that historical record clearly shows that atheists proved to be incredibly cruel that no words can describe their hatred towards believers. How is that possible? We know that great sinners who repent can become saints!
See for example:
Beyond Torture The Gulag of Pitesti Romania
The wounded tortured
St. Luke Archbishop of Simferopol the Surgeon
http://full-of-grace-and-truth.blogspot.com/2008/10/st-luke-archbishop-of-simferopol.html
So set me straight: Name one incorrect statement I’ve made about God here.
I see what you did there: admonish me not to get offended, then demonize atheists. Poison the well much?
Robin:
Interesting reaction: you seem overly concerned about the atheists’ reputation. What about human compassion for those who suffered atrocious physical and emotional torture? What about our duty to tell the truth about what happened? If we keep turning a blind eye to mistakes of the past, we’re doomed to keep repeating them. Should we conceal reality just because “modern” atheists might get offended?
And to do that, you should put the blame on Stalinism where it belongs.
But you distorted the truth into propaganda. Perhaps changing one word will make what you did clearer:
Even adorned with “we love you”’s of dubious sincerity, that’s despicable.
Condemn Stalinists all you want, I’ll condemn them right along with you.
Well, it’s good you condemn him, but the topic here is the historical record of atheism. The brutality unleashed by atheist dogma in the last century is unmatched in Western history. It’s a historical problem atheists refuse to address.
Robin: Those who committed these atrocities were atheists with no fear of God. They were Russians, Romanians, Germans, etc. Hitler borrowed his “morality” from animals: “survival of the fittest”. Your own morality is borrowed from Christianity or from somewhere else.
Hans:
There you go again. Atheism has no dogma, no tenets, and no scripture. None. Atheism is merely not believing in gods, nothing else.
The dogma here was the toxic dogma of Stalinism. Stalinism was as dogmatic as any fundamentalist religion. One could call Stalinism a political religion. Dogmatism, blind acceptance of the dictates of an unquestionable authority, is the mindkiller, a tool that can turn decent people into goosestepping monsters.
Eliot:
Those who ran Soviet hospitals and cared for the sick were also atheists with no fear of God.
Those who gassed nine million Jews were God‐fearing Christians.
What does that tell you about the correlation of atrocities with fear of God or lack thereof?
Why would I choose the primitive, barbaric morality of eye‐for‐an‐eye infidel‐stoning slave‐owning Bronze Age Hebrews, when I have thousands of years of ethical thought by the best philosophical minds in the world to choose from?
So, even you don’t find Pascal’s wager persuasive. Why lead with that, then? To encourage me to look for a good argument? Don’t you have any?
Hans writes:
Amounts to the same thing. In the materialist vision, the logic of the computer is contained in and arises from the material substrate of the CPU and other microchips.
Robin, you won’t find CPUs in ores or mineral deposits; they didn’t evolve over millions of years through a natural process; a CPU carries out the instructions of a computer program. There was a programmer or coder who wrote the software.
Eliot:
Good argument that CPUs are not at all analogous to the natural world.
Right, the CPU performs the logic. Without it, a program is just a recipe.
Probably a whole department of programmers. Another way that CPUs are unlike the natural world.
Let us consider man to be a high performance computer system made of organic matter, capable to grow and multiply itself, displaying intelligence (and related capacities: abstract thought, understanding, communication, reasoning, learning, planning, and problem solving) plus emotions (compassion, caring, love, appreciation, gratitude, forgiveness) uniquely combined to yield different personalities, appearances, etc.
If you explain this with the classical “brain chemistry. It’s also a property of minds of other animals, to a lesser degree” I’ll tell you that you’ve never really thought about it; you are just repeating what you’ve heard in your atheist circle.
Eliot:
A slow, glitchy low performance computer system by modern computing standards, but with massively parallel processing.
Uniquely? My cat displays all of those characteristics too. I watched her work out how to open a closed door. I’ve also seen a squirrel crawl into a vending machine and come out with a candy bar.
And you would be talking out of your… hat.
Science points to our minds being neurochemical. We can attach electrodes to your brain tissue and stimulate a specific memory into consciousness. We can see love on an MRI. We can alter your emotion with drugs. We can permanently alter your personality with a lobotomy. You don’t just have a brain, you are a brain.
You guessed wrong. Hasn’t come up in any of our meetups.
Hans:
From everything except the substrate. The substrate doesn’t do anything.
Since you apparently don’t know what you’re saying, the “substrate” of a motherboard is the non‐conductive board onto which the conductive metal tracks are etched and the chips are mounted.
You remind me of a Catholic Scholastic, always crafting ever finer distinctions until the shavings on the floor are so numerous that you can’t put anything back together again.
Look, here’s the point. The logic of the computer does not spontaneously generate from the material substance (will that do?) of the CPU. It takes a programmer to do that.
When it comes to human beings though, you want us to believe that ideas spontaneously generated out of the matter of the brain. (Call it evolution but even so there is an element of spontaneous generation entangled in the concept.)
I guess you can believe that if you want. Just make sure to indicate that it’s an article of faith.
Hans:
Matter and energy. Neurons firing in the brain.
So, you don’t believe ideas come from brains? What organ do you think with?
No faith involved. We’ve learned a lot about how the brain operates.
Robin,
Reading you is like listening to a politician. Do you ever deviate from atheist talking points?
Your ignorance of the philosophical tradition is showing the more that you speak here. Believe it or not, but in the philosophy of mind it is an open question whether the mind can be reduced to the brain or not. For a classic essay on this issue from a secular perspective, read Nagel’s “What is it like to be a bat?”
A little more honesty and curiosity on your part and a little less sarcasm would go a long way. But I suppose that you are more interested in winning debates than you are in the pursuit of the truth. All of this smacks of the fear that you so detest in close-minded theists.
Todd:
What part of 20.2.1.1 was a talking point?
Anyway, the logic does not spontaneously arise from matter as they assume. The logic comes from the electronically implemented logic gates: AND, NAND, NOR, etc.
Robin:
The laws of nature and human body are wonderful. Science and its discoveries should lead us to assume An Author of this world who is not from a law and Who is above the law. Christ proved that He is above these laws. He is Risen! Budda, Mohammed, Marx and Freud are all dead. Every Non-Christian religion and philosophy may contain some good, but they lead to death. Christ said: “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.” You choose not to listen to His words. Christ disciples and others after them received from Him the power to work miracles which are beyond the normal way that nature works.
I said that you are confused about God … Yes, you are! You are so confused that you concluded that He does not exist.
Christ is the goodness and love greatest model. As a Christian, I am trying to follow Him. He represents the infinite level our ascent. It is true that we often fail…
Eliot:
Science should not lead you to assume anything. Moreover, in practice, leading scientists don’t believe in God.
In the same way that Mohammad proved donkeys can fly, when he rode one to heaven.
We can’t even prove Christ existed, much less any of the miracle stories.
Transhumanism could lead to immortality. Not Christian pie‐in‐the‐sky‐when‐you‐die wishthink immortality, indefinite‐lifespan‐in‐the‐real‐world immortality.
Already did, I’m an ex‐Christian. Used to believe, but I grew out of it.
Newton, Copernicus, Pavlov and many other great scientists were great believers. Being an atheist does not make you smart.
Wishing you a very, very long life here on earth! After that … you’ll see for yourself
Eliot:
Isaac Newton was also an alchemist trying to turn lead into gold. He was wrong about a lot of things. Today, a high school student knows far more about how the world works than Isaac Newton, thanks in part to his pioneering work. As Isaac once said, “If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
Your list of great scientists is Newton, Copernicus, and… Pavlov? All due respect to him and his dogs, he’s kind of anticlimactic after Newton and Copernicus. If you wanted to end with a scientist who didn’t die centuries ago, I’d’ve gone with Father Lemaître and his Big Bang theory.
Or just decompose, most likely. May you live long as well.
Speaking of Copernicus, the Church wasn’t too fond of his work. Just ask Giordano Bruno. Of course, you can’t, since he died a long time ago, when the Church burned him at the stake for advocating the Copernican heresy that the earth revolved around the sun. Unlike Galileo, he wouldn’t recant. Just saying.
Robin: You are taking here about the Roman Catholic Church (RCC). I am not sure if you know what is the difference between the Catholic Church and Orthodox Church. Before the great Schism (1054), Roman Catholic Church and Orthodox Church were as one. After the eleventh-century schism most of Western Europe fell under Papal sway. The Orthodox title of ‘Vicar of St Peter’ was dropped by the Popes of Rome and replaced with the title ‘the Vicar of Christ’. This asserts that the Pope is the replacement for Christ. The outcome was the doctrine of papal infallibility. Many Popes, supposedly infallible, made many mistakes. This is one more proof that man cannot replace God. RCC is the Institution and Western ‘rationalism’.
Regarding science and religion see:
21 Great Scientists Who Believed the Bible
You’re directing me to the notoriously intellectually dishonest, quotemining Answers in Genesis? I’ll take a look.
So, at least three of their “great scientists” are actually great inventors. Someone there needs to learn the difference.
Robin:
An other idea from your atheist circle? Half a century before WWII Friedrich Nietzsche declared “God Is Dead”. Darwin was around about the same time. Stalin was planing to go to seminary. When he heard about Darwin and his theory of evolution he changed his mind. All the brutality was unleashed by the atheist dogma. Atheism poisons everything.
Robin: Again confused …
“Eye for an eye” law replaced “death for an eye” law(lessness) thus allowing your best philosophical mind to be born.
So the Bronze Age Hebrews were preceded by people who were even more barbaric? Well, I can do better than their ethics too, then.
Eliot:
There is no atheist dogma, and the Nazis were not unleashed by Stalinist dogma.
Darwin’s work showed that all of humanity had a mutual common ancestry, a powerful argument against Naziism. Which may be why “Die Bucherei, ” banned Origin of Species and books promoting Darwinism to be committed to the Nazi bonfires.
Again, read your history Robin. Here’s a review I wrote a while back:
REVIEW OF FROM DARWIN TO HITLER: EVOLUTIONARY ETHICS, EUGENICS, AND RACISM IN GERMANY, RICHARD WEIKART, AUTHOR
Robin:
What do you want to prove? Even a mechanical device emits heat or makes noise when in function. You can destroy or improve some function but that does not mean that you understand how everything was created. From chemical elements alone you can’t even make a seed that germinates. You prefer the evolution narrative… That’s your choice.
Evolution is the creation story of the philosophical materialist.
See: Evolution and Me. (Just noticed Gilder uses the term “substrate.” Maybe that is where I got it from.)
Hans:
And the exciting part is, this one’s true!
Eliot:
Did you forget how that paragraph started? I’ll refresh your memory:
In 20.1.1.1.1, I wrote:
Robin, how poorly informed you are about the history and philosophy of atheism. Your retort here is, well, reflexively dogmatic.
Start your self-education here:
You are right about one thing: Communism is a political religion. Atheism, because it has no ground for morality, conflates itself with the power of the state. It started with eugenics BTW, a thoroughly atheistic project (read your history) and moved into totalitarianism in short order. (Hitler’s Final Solution ideology came from American eugenicists, who, with their inebriation with Social Darwinism set out to make a New Jerusalem by killing the unfit. Sound familiar? Atheism was the central tenet of their dogma.)
When you are done with Black above, read this:
The more I debate atheists, I see that almost all don’t have an adequate understanding of philosophy or history.
Here’s another good book that takes on the paucity of some of your retorts such as: “Atheism is merely not believing in gods, nothing else”.
All three are excellent books.
Hans Jacobse writes:
Says the man who risibly told me “almost all (thinking) atheists are Marxists”. I have not seen you make a single true statement about atheism anywhere in this comment thread. You misrepresent atheism constantly.
If we’re so conflated with state power, why can’t we get “in God we trust” off our dollars?
Atheism provides no ground for any philosophy, because it has no beliefs.
Which started with Plato’s Republic. He wasn’t an atheist.
Because only an atheist would talk about making a New Jerusalem.~
The more I see you tell atheists what their position must be, the more you don’t listen as they argue their real positions. Surely, atheists’ constant failure to hold positions that Hans Jacobse, authority on atheists, tells them they must hold can only be attributed to them not knowing what atheism is about, not you being constantly, stubbornly, pigheadedly wrong.~
They are. Note the disclaimer “thinking,” however. I’m not convinced that most atheists understand much about their position at all, a point confirmed I think by your comment:
…as if this assertion has no broader ramifications just because you say so. Put another way, “no beliefs” is a belief, a way of looking at the world based on unprovable assumptions.
The atheist projects of the last century (eugenics, Communism, etc.) have their own teleology, utopian in character that unleashed a torrent of blood. That’s a historical fact. It’s indisputable. To argue that I don’t understand the atheist’s “real position” instead of dealing with these facts means either 1) you don’t understand the ramifications of your own ideas, or 2) you can’t explain how the atheism that drove these events differs from your own.
Just make sure to indicate that that’s an article of faith.
As for me, I know lots of thinking atheists, but as far as I know, no Marxists. Maybe they’re secret Marxists, like Obama being a “secret Muslim”.~ Was Joe McCarthy right all along?~
To be an atheist, you need not believe one single thing, only not believe in deities. That’s not an unprovable assumption, that’s a definition of atheism.
Let me try a different tack. By your rhetorical reasoning, it’s also an indisputable historical fact the Christian projects of the last century (Naziism, African witch hunts, Uganda’s anti‐homosexual pogrom, etc.) unleashed a torrent of blood.
Already did in 19.1.1.1.3. Atheism didn’t drive those events, dogmatism did.
Nazism unleashed a torrent of blood, but that was merely atheism in Teutonic dress. You can’t call it Christian. No credible historian would. I know the atheist cultural lobby is trying to float the idea, but I would let it go if I were you. It’s on the same level as, say, 9/11 was an inside job.
Uganda? African witch hunts? Not sure what that has to do with anything. Please, don’t go into explaining them. If you don’t want to be intellectually honest, then there is no point in talking.
You need to listen to the Berlinski-Hitchens debate. Berlinski is not a Christian but takes Hitchens to task for making the same claim you do. My hunch is that you will see this problem with the atheist historical experience examined in more detail in the future.
Kind of. You really can’t separate atheist dogma from its atheism, but, yes, not all atheists are dogmatists. Your atheism remains relatively benign as long as it remains private. But atheism as a cultural force can’t be trusted.
Hans Jacobse writes:
Liar.
It may be embarassing for you, but it is undeniable that Naziism was steeped in Christian rhetoric and Christian iconography, fighting in the name of Christianity. One of their slogans, emblazoned around an eagle and swastika on German Army belt buckles, was “GOTT MIT UNS” (God is on our side).
Au contraire! Only a Holocaust revisionist would call Naziism atheist, a big lie worthy of Josef Goebbels.
What you’re saying is on that level.
Right back at you.
Oh, yes! Readers, do go watch Hitchens take Berlinski apart after he tries these same Nazi‐baiting lies Fr. Hans uses.
Hans:
In that Hitchens-Berslinski debate you commended to my attention, Hitchens makes a case that totalitarianism is inherently theocratic:
Hitchens is putting a new spin on an old thesis: Marxist utopianism borrows the categories and teleology of Christianity but temporalizes them. I largely agree with the thesis (Google: Marxism as a secular religion). He of course calls it “totalitarianism” and in so doing ignores the Marxist praxis underlying it (read Solzhenitsyn, Lenin in Zurich), but that’s because any mention of Lenin undermines his belief in Troskyism (Hitchens is a Troskyite).
It’s an interesting spin for this reason: it describes the totalitarian in terms of internal self-identity, not in terms of the terror by which the disenfranchised viewed the regime (anyone outside of the “vanguard” which would comprise what? – 90% of the population?). And it follows form in almost all cases that I am aware of; megalomania, a sense of being chosen by “history” to direct history.
Ignoring the theoretical underpinnings of totalitarianism however, is disingenuous. He twists history here, describing the internal self-identity as if it was shared by the populace terrorized. No Communist revolution is ever a popular revolution, especially the European varieties. He revises history here, stretches it in fact, in order to fit his increasingly fragile thesis that religion spoils everything.
To get a better read on these ideas from a real historian, read Paul Johnson’s Modern Times. It’s outstanding.
Well, Hitler might have been catholic but he wanted to rid christainity of its jewish roots and make it nordic and also wanted to go back to the old germanic gods like woden since that was apart of the anicent german peoples. In fact some neo-pagans that are also white supremists or white nationalist prefer the old germanic gods to chirstianity since chirstianity leaves too much to internationalism and not national and ethinic or white european pride. Also, chirstianity was too pacifistic since the best warriors were anicent pagan societies. As for atheists, Hitler didn’t like those that didn’t think the state and nazism were gods.
I mean the white nationalist neo-pagans think that christinaity leaves to what Gibbon believe too much for the afterlife and hence no desire to defend the nation state.
Robin, you don’t believe in the divine. Whatever else you profess that is the foundation of your belief (and it is a fundamental assumption impossible to prove or disprove).
The foundation of my belief is my encouter with a personal and living God. My encounter is of such a nature and extent that absolutely nothing you say can or will make a dent in it. From that encounter, the teachings of the Church and my own fitful application of them, I forge a life of faith that includes a manner of thought consistent with that faith.
I perceive that you are doing much the same, just in the opposite direction. While that saddens me, there is little I can do about it as never the twain shall meet no matter how many times we try to go around the barn–absent some sort of ‘road to Damascus moment’ in your life.
Our assumptions are so radically different, there is no way we will ever come to the same conculsion about much of anything important.
The continuing attempt by you and others here to overcome the deeply held fundamental assumptions of others about the nature of being is a waste of time and effort that only leads to increasing frustration. From a patristic sense, it exacerbates the passions.
Michael:
As T. Nathaniel noted, Robin is more interested in winning debates than in the pursuit of the truth. The discussion might be useful for those who are truly interested in pursuing the truth.
Eliot,
In reality, the truth pursues us. For Him not to catch us we have to actively run away, don’t you think?
The more we ‘debate’, the more we contend with our own minds and the minds of others, the faster we are running.
Excerpt from: Orthodox Christianity and the English Tradition
There was a time I imagined I had encounters with God. Numinous glowy feelings I associated with God’s presence. But secular, ungodly things also evinced such sublime feelings, and I came to realize nothing about them was supernatural.
If by “about the nature of being”, you mean about materialism and what materialists believe, that was Hans’ hobbyhorse. I may yet persuade you that morals can be arrived at by reason alone, if I can stop getting sidetracked by Hans’ and Eliot’s attempts to link me to the ghosts of Hitler and Stalin.
Robin:
I’ve stayed on the sidelines in this discussion, I have been fascinated with your arguments. I don’t want you to get distracted either by Fr. Hans or by Eliot or by Nathaniel. I would like to engage you.
Help me to understand, Tell me, (i) what do you actually think you are, (ii) why do you think you exist, (iii) why do you think I exist, (iii) why should I or you continue to exist rather than terminate our existence, and (iv) what will happen to those around us that care for us when we opt for (iii). Bear with me and be honest in your answers. OK?
Hi, Nick. Your questions called for thoughtful answers, so I took my time composing my thoughts before responding.
Thank you, that is nice of you to say.
I come from a long line of intelligent primates.
I am your cousin. If we each had unlimited information, we could trace our ancestry back until we both arrived at a great‐to‐the‐nth‐power‐grandmother we have in common.
I am my cat’s cousin too. If I traced my ancestry further and further back, ancestor to ancestor, brows becoming gradually more sloped and jawbones gradually more pronounced, and traced my cat’s, through her wild feline ancestors, legs becoming gradually longer and body size gradually larger, back through hundreds of thousands of years, eventually both lineages would arrive at a mammalian ancestor we share, long before hominids walked the earth.
I am a relative of every living thing on earth, all of us derived from some 4.5 billion year old primordial microbe, before there were even plants.
I am stardust. Every atom in my body is billions of years old, forged in the heart of an exploded star. My left hand is probably made of atoms from different stars than the atoms of my right hand.
I am a miniscule part of the entire vast universe, looking around at itself, trying to figure itself out.
And so are you.
Even if the world and everything in it were an illusion, Descartes’ famous argument “I think, therefore I am” is a reason to believe that whatever I am, I am.
If my perceptions of the world have any reliability at all, and I believe that they do, then other human beings exist.
In my personal experience, other people whom I initially encountered on Internet message boards and subsequently in real life proved persuasively existent. Though I can’t entirely rule out the possibility that Nick is a hoax perpetrated by parties unknown for motives unknown, that hypothesis is not parsimonious. “Nick exists” (until proven otherwise) is likelier.
Because life is an adventure! Death is a mug’s game, I’ve got so much to live for.
On the other hand, occasionally people have something to die for. Some people sacrifice themselves to save other lives, which I admire. Some people martyr themselves to destroy lives or bring their family honor, which I do not admire. I hope you never find yourself in a situation where it seems more moral to die than to live, though.
Some people have less to live for than others. If you were so sick from terminal cancer that your life was constant pain, I shouldn’t fault you for choosing euthanasia, though it wouldn’t be my choice. If you were a suicidal teenager, I’d hope to persuade you that there’s more to live for than you thought.
As for me, today, I want to live forever or die trying.
Sounds like something a suicide counselor would ask. You proposed two options in your previous question.
If you choose “continue to exist”, then in most circumstance, you will get more days to spend with those you care for, more memories to make, more legacy to leave on the world when you’re gone.
If you choose “terminate your existence”, in most circumstances, you’ll probably hurt the feelings of those who care about you, for a time. It’s not always a bad choice, though. Sometimes people die heroic deaths sacrificing themselves for another, for example.
Of course. I hope my words are of use to you.
Robin: Thank you for responding. What I would like to explore with you, first (otherwise this post could become a book) is:
Before doing that, however, I need to tell you something about myself. Upon starting college, I waived out of both physics and chemistry 101-202 and was allowed to start at 301. Since then, I have read everthying I can get my hands on regarding the macro universe and the quantum universe. I have done extensive course work in general biology, morphology, genetics, evolution, etc. Although I have done no formal course work in geology and anthropology, I have varaciously read in those areas.
In all of that work and reading, I have come to understand that the Einsteinian and post-Einsteinian theories of the macro universe are inconsistent with the Planckian and post-Planckian quantum theories. Science is now further away than it was say 30 years ago in coming up with a unified field theory and the rift is ever growing. And, the string theories, once thought promising, have widened the rift even further. I think most honest physicists would say that the one or the other, or both, could not possibly be correct, and each has a favorite to champion. Which is championed is usually determined by which discipline one is in.
In the disciple of evolution, I have always asked, what is the mechanism that caused brows to become gradually sloped and jawbones to become more gradually pronounced, and legs to become gradually longer and body size gradually larger. Reading and re-reading Darwin and others, I have never found an answer because Darwin doesn’t give an answer. His theory of natural selection provides an explanation as to why the change endures and becomes dominant. But he cannot explain what caused it ab initio
The one thing that always troubled me is that there are wide gaps in the archeological fossil evidence. Sure, I have seen the shape of a dinosaurs’ leg structure. And yes, indeed, it looks just like a modern bird’s. But, consistent evidence of a general, gradual change from say a Raptor to a Robin (no pun) is not found. Knowing that, the more modern evolutionist have now tried to solve the problem by a new theory generally called catastrophic mutation. My own preference from a reasoned position is that it works better than any other. In other words, it makes the most sense. However, there is no empirical evidence to support it since we have found no instance of it, as of yet.
The other thing that has always troubled me is what Darwin actually discovered in his trek around the Andes and what he was at a loss to understand. In a lot of instances, he found, in the higher stratas, species from whom it appeared certain more recent species evolved. However, those newer species were in the lower stratas. That troubled Darwin till the day he died and it troubles me even now.
Robin, have you ever been to the LaBrea Tar Pits in the heart of Los Angeles? I have been there several times for one reason alone. To try to understand how some 10,000-25,000 years ago (depending on whom you ask) a plethora of animals got trapped there at the same time that should not have been there together. Those that should have been extinct with those into whom they evolved. There is no explanation that I am aware of.
Coal and oil are said to have come from eons of compression of former animal and plant life, respectively, as they sunk deeper and deeper into the bowels of the earth and as more and more layers of surface grew over them. The theory makes a whole lot of sense, until you learn that in many places (Pennsylvania and Colorado, to note a few), the coal is not deep but is near the surface. It’s extraction is known as strip mining. And, as you know, oil is not evenly distributed around the world. It is most commonly found in areas where little dense flora have been thought to exist over the eons. And deep below the ocean floor in areas where it has always thought to have been ocean, makes me wonder.
We can talk about this and other matters more in the days to come. I hope you will do that. But, I will tell you, I for one cannot take as a blind article of faith the Big Bang, evolution, etc. because the jury is still out in my mind until some gross inconsistencies in the empirical evidence exists. I respect the fact that you do take evolution and the Big Bang as articles of faith.
Have you considered the problems I have raised from the empirical evidence and how have you been able to resolve them?
Nick, the problems with a lot of Darwin’s assumptions about science is even more basic than most laymen know. In his day, the structure of the interior of the cell was unknown. His ideas of morphology and transmutation made sense only given the fact that he (and others) believed that cells were simple little globs. Today we now know that it takes 4,000 different proteins to complete cell division. Andthat’s just cell division. That’s not metabolism, catabolism, or anything else. Think of how wasteful that is. There are hundreds of billions of cells in the human body.
Exactly as I thought. Biological immortality… Obviously, it is not meant for everyone. Overpopulation is a natural hazard for the habitat of the “immortals”; some (many) will have to be eliminated.
We know that we are dust. Science just figured it out! We’ve been singing it in the memorial service for the departed for centuries. This is also the first of God’s commandments, that one is dust and into dust one shall return. The soul never dies. It remains unto the ages of ages, because it is spirit from God and cannot die.
Worldly people totally lack the sense of eternity. Our life is one minute compared to eternity. Even if you’ll live a thousand years, it will be like ten minutes when compared to eternity. After that is hell. Hell is not only a place of weeping and gnashing of teeth, and tormenting flames, but it is also a place of blackness of darkness. (See Jude 1:6, 13). Gnashing of teeth represents the overwhelming sorrow felt when seeing how easy would have been to gain eternity and what has been lost during the short time you had on earth.
The greatest love of all is concern for the the loved one eternal salvation.
Robin, I said nothing about feelings at all. If I relied on feelings, I’d be a dark and bitter old man. My continuing encounter with the living God in the person of Jesus Christ allows me to transcend my feelings on really good days, ignore them on others and avoid becoming totally submerged by them on the bad days. The nature of my encounter is congruent with the description given by a diverse group of people from diverse cultures and times since the advent of Christ. It is actually quite empirical in its own way.
Your arguments, i.e, rants, are neither logical nor rational. You’d do yourself a favor if your took Nick up on his offer.
I am sure you will disagree, but my personal experience with the source of atheism in people is an unresolved hurt with the consequent anger directed at God. Talk about feelings…..
Empiricism is a tool. Used in the correct way, it can be beneficial. Used incorrectly it is either ineffective or destructive. As a philosophy it is absurd.
The theological debate you’ve entered does not end with deciding on the existence or non-existence of the divine. One must also consider, as Nick alluded to, our own existence, our own nature, how we are interrelated, the nature and source of evil among other contemplations. Such consideration must be given, especially, if the desire is to forge a coherent morality. So far you have merely continued to assert that atheists are right and theists are wrong. Therefore the conversation has become a variation on the age old theme…”so’s your old man…”
An atheist has to be able to explicate the nature of being. Buddhists do; Taoists do, Confucians do. Modern atheists whose belief is founded solely on a rejection of the divine and the worship of self-organizing matter typically don’t. They don’t, IMO, because they can’t.
Allowing the conversation to continue on the ground of personal interpretation of the motives of historical figures… Well, that is as boring as it is futile. Evil will always justify itself in the themes of the dominate culture while at the same time seeking to destroy anything positive in that culture. Just because someone appeals to Christianity to do evil does not mean that Christianity is the source and ground of the evil. To confuse the justification for evil with its foundation is illogical. Neitzche, et.al. arose in the midst of the same culture as Hitler because the reality of the Christian faith had long before ceased to exist. What was left, as Neitzche so graphically described, was a list of rules and regs, a system without an energy source (‘God is dead’).
Lenin and Stalin manifested a similar spirit in a similar circumstance in Russia.
Neitzche’s rejection of the system of ‘values’ in his time and his subsitution of the Will to Power; the subjection of the culture and the masses to that Will expressed in one dominant leader had far more to do with the totalitarian impluse gaining the upper hand in the 20th century than Christianity. In Christian terms, Neitzche’s Will to Power is just a modern re-statement of the rejection of our true nature as beings made in the image and likeness of God and contingent upon Him for our life. The so-called Christian culture in Germany had already made the same step without yet subsituting the solpisitic solution that Neitzche provided until Hitler came along.
Michael:
Oh, you meet him in person? Did you take any photos? Shoot any video? Empirical minds want to know.
If you were angry at God, you weren’t an atheist, you were a disaffected monotheist.
I never asserted either. From my point of view, atheism makes no claims to be right about. Neither “a god exists” nor “no god exists” is proven, and some gods, like the disinterested, noninterventionist god of deism, seem neither provable nor disprovable. There simply is no good reason to believe in them.
Why must they? It’s not relevant to atheism.
What would worship of self‐organizing matter look like? “O self‐organizing matter, without whom we would not be, lead us not into fallacy and superstition, but show us the way to knowledge. Amen”
None of the modern atheists I know do that.
(Boring, futile talk elided.)
Robin, if there is “no reason to explicate the nature of being” then is there no being? If there is no being, then why don’t we live under the iron law of nature, which is “red in tooth and claw”?
Michael: Like you said: “In reality, the truth pursues us. For Him not to catch us we have to actively run away.”
On Science and Religion by St. Luke Archbishop of Simferopol the Surgeon
27.2.2.1-27.2.2.1.1:
George, if there is no reason for religion to explicate the workings of a piano, then are there no pianos?
And who are you quoting?
Robin, worship entails far more than just poetic language to describe someone or something greater to which one gives honor.
If you acknowledge and give honor to the material forces of the cosmos for your existence, that is akin to worship.
Carl Sagan certainly sounded worshipful when he raptuously spoke in awe of the ‘bilions and billions of stars’ on his TV programs espeically in the context of his weekly paeon to the cosmic reality that broght it all into existence.
But perhaps you have no poetic impulse at all and perfer to inhabit the cold and unimaginative world of facts without context; thought without belief; life without mercy; existence without being? If so: How is it possible that life is worth more than death? How is it possible to care for anyone, even oneself? Why do you need morals at all?
You say you use the standard “I think,therefore I am”. That merely assumes being without addressing it at all. I prefer, I am therefore I think. In either case the antecedant question needs to be answered. From whence thought? or From whence being?
Unlike Nick, I am not fascinated with your arguments. I really don’t see any arguments. I am, however, fascinated with the blind irrationality and purposeful ignorance of those who steadfastly deny the existence of the divine. It is the ultimate vandalism IMO. Horrible and so wasteful; a terrible insanity of self-destruction. I greive for you.
Christian faith is not a feeling. Feelings come and go and for that reason, cannot be trusted.
To a degree, yes. Evil is justified in the language of the good, and in this case it was a cultural necessity that the good was Christian. That’s why you need a historian’s eye to penetrate the misuse of the language.
But you have to dig deeper, especially the racists myths employed by the Nazis and you see more, much more. Most of it was driven by Social Darwinism, especially the notion of the Master Race, which provided the rationale for the reemergence of the Teutonic myths, some that had laid dormant for thousands of years, albeit diluted and in modern dress.
Thus, phrases like “Gott Mit Uns” were calculated to deceive the gullible. Reading your response, it may still be working.
Look Robin, your argument just cannot be sustained. It’s not credible. No historian argues it. The facts on the ground don’t support it. I don’t know how much clearer it can be.
Nor does the volume of your protestation negate the historical problem of atheism and the last century. That’s not going to go away. In some respects, the cultural aggressiveness of the atheists themselves is drawing attention to it. “Really? Religion spoils everything?” a reasonable observer will ask, and the search into history begins.
Not trying to be offensive here Robin, but you really do need to examine your premises more deeply than you have. Most of your objections are rhetorical, not substantive.
Because it was a cultural necessity to win the support and allegiance of whom? Not the atheists Hitler was sending to the concentration camps. Certainly not the Jews.
Ample historical evidence contradicts your atheist‐demonizing revisionist history. Your unsustainable claim that Nazism was “atheism in Teutonic dress” so denies the most glaringly obvious facts about the Holocaust, that I have to wonder whether you’re just willfully historically ignorant, or an intellectually dishonest propagandist.
Wow, if that’s how offensive you are when you’re not trying…
Germans, obviously. Russia was a bit different. There we saw full blown totalitarianism — a terror state.
Could you offer some examples? Books are preferred and they must be by accomplished and credible historians.
I believe that Robin is trying to say that one can be moral and atheist because we all have what is called “conscience”. He regards conscience as a mere reflection of matter – common among the atheists, among Christians, or Mohammedans-, a lawful unfolding of physical and chemical properties.
We know that as we get older our body starts to decline and to decay no matter what we do to prevent it. Robin, why to you believe that conscience is something lasting, not influenced by the time or by our food intake?
Sure, individual atheists can be moral in a leglistic sense. I don’t think anyone disputes that. The greater problem is what happens when a materialist atheism is projected on the culture? Materialist atheism has no coherent manner to identify and correct evil. Often the very existence of evil is denied.
Several questions are begged: where does the legalistic moral code of the individual atheist come; why should anyone follow it; why should there be any societal reprecussions if one does not follow it; since religious thought has dominated philosophical and ethical thinking for the vast majority of our societal existence, how does one discern that the derivation of a particular moral principal is atheistic rather than derived from a theistic approach to God, man and society?
The atheist rejects God’s Written Law (given a couple of thousands years earlier) and wants to write a new moral law (a better one he believes) or a legalistic moral code. Indeed, where does the legalistic moral code of the individual atheist come from? Robin said that it comes from great philosophical minds. Why should anyone obey it. After all, the one who wrote it is a man, like I am. I might have much better ideas. I can even start a war to impose my ideas and to replace his moral legalistic code.
Pedro Blas González just wrote a good essay on philosophy and the transcendent that I posted on OrthodoxToday.org: Reconstructing Philosophy.
Robin:
We already knew that we have common ancestry: God. How is Darwin’s theory more powerful than that? His message was that there is no need to worry about eternal punishment, or so has (almost) everyone received it.
Darwinism sees death as the engine of social progress. That’s how eugenicists and other Social Darwinists (Darwin was not a eugenicist) suspend morality in the name of an ostensible greater good. Christianity sees death as an enemy that must be destroyed (accomplished in Christ) which led to the revolution in social humanitarianism in Western culture. These two philosophical/theological precepts are irreconcilable.
Hans:
No, Darwin said social progress eliminates death as an engine, and that procreation is the engine of social progress.
In The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, he writes:
The way I read it Darwin is the laying a theoretical framework that would later morph into Social Darwinism. Not sure if that was intention, but it surely is the way his followers developed it. Your notion of “procreation” fits into that context, but I just don’t see it as much more than fanciful thinking (Darwin, not you). The “savage tribes” were still busy ‘supplanting and exterminating each other’ but thankfully Europe was past that apparently, since they had done enough natural selecting back whenever. I don’t see much about procreating here, just the notion (which seems self-contradictory) that natural selection became volitional for Europeans after some kind of progress was reached. You can see the myth of progress working here as well.
Robin, is Darwinism based on materialism or transcendentalism? If it is on the former (and according to the New Atheists it can’t be anything but), then why can’t we live like animals? What compells us to be moral? Morality is very much like what what Hitchens said Lucretius said about it: an overcoat worn on a hot, summer day. It completely unnecessary and very destructive.
As for Darwin somehow abolishing racism because all life originates in one source, that’s never been the issue as far as Christians are concerned. More insidiously, it was never the issue as far as Hitler was concerned. He most definately believed in the common descent of man from primates. It’s just that the process of speciation results in different species being formed (evolution). According to the eugencists, this process is going on right now. According to the best scientists of the early twentieth century, the different races of man were in fact different sub-species. Eugenics was simply a program for weeding out the “unfit.” (Margaret Sanger’s dictum: “more children from the fit, less from the unfit.”)
And believe it or not, this view (though non-PC) has never gone away and is in fact making a ferocious come-back now that the commissars of PC Darwinism such as Stephen Jay Gould are safely in their graves. See Herrnstein and Murray’s The Bell Curve if you don’t believe me. Gould tried to pour cold water on its findings in his book The Mismeasure of Man but his research was so sloppy and his historical takedowns of the 19th century eugenicists so incorrect that subsequent editions completely omitted several of his key criticisms.
So my answer to Hitchens and others is: why should we be merciful to the impaired? And the impaired races as well? The Spartans weren’t. No atheist can give me a compelling reason why not. “Just because it’s not right” doesn’t pass evolutionary muster. For our puruposes, it’s not even philosophically satisfying.
True atheism is simply the absence of faith and belief, not an ideology unto itself.
The problem is that certain virulent ideologies seem to take a firmer hold in the minds of those who will not acknowledge the possibility of a law higher than themselves. In other words: genocide is rarely (ever?) done in the name of atheism, but atheism makes it easier for some to use nationalism or racism to engage in genocide. (As humans, it seems we must at some point come to positively embrace one set of beliefs or another.)
That being said, one’s theology matters. Fundamentalist Islam’s vision of God actually provides to the fringes of that religion’s adherents a reason to engage in the violent overtaking of one’s “enemies”.
The problem is that certain virulent ideologies take a firmer hold in sheep who revere lawgivers as higher than themselves and obey them without question.
In 27.2.1.1.1, Nick writes:
You took extensive course work in genetics and evolution and they never taught you about genetic mutation? Did you go to Liberty University or something?
Darwin wrote over 150 years ago, before genetics. You should read a book on evolution from this century.
Me, I’m surprised how complete the fossil record is. Fossils are pretty uncommon, requiring favorable conditions for preservation, scavengers not getting to the animal first, not getting destroyed by erosion, and so forth. And then there’s the odds of a fossil ever being discovered.
Many wide gaps should be more of a challenge to creationists. If each gap were due to creation, that would mean there were hundreds of separate creation events widely scattered through time.
Anyway, we don’t need transitional fossils to demonstrate divergence from a common ancestor, genetic and molecular evidence can provide that.
Plate tectonics crumple continental plates to produce mountain ranges like the Andes. It is not uncommon for this to produce faults where rock on one side is thrust up, raising lower rock layers alongside higher ones.
I haven’t been there, but unlike a fossil bed, a tar pit collects remains over a long period of time. La Brea’s fossil deposits began to form 40,000 years ago, towards the end of the Pleistocene. Surely this is explained somewhere in their museum. Didn’t you ask a docent?
I don’t know about coal geology, but both Pennsylvania and Colorado are mountainous states, so the earth’s crust has been crumpled in both regions. A local geologist would probably be able to explain how the coal ended up near the surface.
That reminds me of the geode I found in Pennsylvania when I was young, up around Lancaster.
A region’s climate can change a lot over geological time. In the Sahara Desert, dried up riverbeds still exist from when it was wetter region.
When the ocean was warm and rich in nutrients, organic matter can collect on the ocean floor faster than it can decompose. If it then gets buried under a deposit like shale formed from mud, then heat and pressure can turn it into oil.
As a rule, I don’t take anything on faith. Keep asking questions, and don’t give up too easily in your search for answers.
George: I tried to reply but the “Reply” button did not appear under your post to me. So, I’m starting at the end. What amazes me is the fact that there no evidence of absolute efficiency (except one) exists in the universe. In fact, it is quite the opposite. Most of what is out there is violent and cataclysmic. That is all an empiricist in astrophysics can conclude.
However, my first introduction to the Krebs Citric Acid Cycle left me in utter awe. For those who are reading this and are not familiar with it, it is the first stage in oxygen dependent cells converting carbohydrates into eventually usable simple sugars and carbon dioxide to provide the cells with a usuable form of energy. Simple stated, it is a complex series of chemical reactions that initially reduce a carbohydrate molecule into a precursor of pyruvic acid.
It is the most perfect (perhaps only) system that exists that virtually is a perpetual motion machine. Each chemical reaction, driven by an enzyme, produces only enough heat (energy loss, so to speak) to drive the next reactions. And this is repeated an incredible amount of times until the pyruvate percusor results, and the next step in metabolism starts. What happens at the end of the Krebs cycle however is not just a loss of enough energy to start the pyruvate cycle but also just enough energy to restart anew the Krebs cycle. Nothing else is lost. Nothing like it exists in the known universe.
Imagine the probabilities and permutations that would need to occur from the first ACGT precursor to spark the first precursor DNA to the development of the first perfect machine to sustain that life. It would have to be near instantaneous. Otherwise, there would either be no life ab initio because nothing was there to keep the engine going or a violent start of a metabolic process that would burn its object up because the initial excess heat would destroy the precursor protein (don’t need much — a fever could easily kill us).
There aren’t any minds in creation that I know of that could make this machine and necessarily make it instantaneously. Wow! Nature is awesome.
In 27.2.1.1.1, Nick writes:
You took extensive course work in genetics and evolution and they never taught you about genetic mutation? Did you go to Liberty University or something?
Darwin wrote over 150 years ago, before genetics. You should read a book on evolution from this century.
Me, I’m surprised how complete the fossil record is. Fossils are pretty uncommon, requiring favorable conditions for preservation, scavengers not getting to the animal first, not getting destroyed by erosion, and so forth. And then there’s the odds of a fossil ever being discovered.
Many wide gaps should be more of a challenge to creationists. If each gap were due to creation, that would mean there were hundreds of separate creation events widely scattered through time.
Anyway, we don’t need transitional fossils to demonstrate divergence from a common ancestor, genetic and molecular evidence can provide that.
Plate tectonics crumple continental plates to produce mountain ranges like the Andes. It is not uncommon for this to produce faults where rock on one side is thrust up, raising lower rock layers alongside higher ones.
I haven’t been there, but unlike a fossil bed, a tar pit collects remains over a long period of time. La Brea’s fossil deposits began to form 40,000 years ago, towards the end of the Pleistocene. Surely this is explained somewhere in their museum. Didn’t you ask a docent?
I don’t know about coal geology, but both Pennsylvania and Colorado are mountainous states, so the earth’s crust has been crumpled in both regions. A local geologist would probably be able to explain how the coal ended up near the surface.
That reminds me of the geode I found in Pennsylvania when I was young, up around Lancaster.
A region’s climate can change a lot over geological time. In the Sahara Desert, dried up riverbeds still exist from when it was wetter region.
When the ocean was warm and rich in nutrients, organic matter can collect on the ocean floor faster than it can decompose. If it then gets buried under a deposit like shale formed from mud, then heat and pressure can turn it into oil.
As a rule, I don’t take anything on faith.
Keep asking questions, and don’t give up too easily in your search for answers.
Robin: Sorry, I had to take a break. I have been bed-ridden these past few days with a severe knee sprain and I had to get up and move around a litte to prevent a clot. I see that I somehow did something that screwed up the formatting. Sorry, some things somehow got into block quotes that were not your quotes but my responses, but the readers should be able to figure out what is what.
Anyway, where was I? Oh, yes. You say you do not take anything on blind faith. But you seem to me that you do. First, it seems the issues I raised did not come to your mind. Perhaps it was as a result of not being critical enough of what we are spoon fed as science. No problem. Most are not critical enough.
I want to maintain an open mind. But before I can accept the so-called moedern scientists beliefs as “Gospel” they have to answer the questions which I raise and many more that I have, which I will share with you if you have the time.
But, let’s go back to what science is supposed to be and what it is supposed to be based upon that truly distinguishes it from blind or educated faith.
First, emperical data is gathered. Next, a working hypothesis is developed. Next, the hypothesis is tested by experimentation. Next, if further empirical data is produced, does it fit into the hypothesis. If it fits, it is again tested. If there is no empirical data that exists that cannot be explained, science calls the hypothesis a “Law”. Otherwise, if it does not, the hypothesis is called a “theory”. It is because of the gross inconsistency that Einstein’s and progeny’s macro universe and Planck’s and progeny’s quantum universe propositions are still called theory and not law. Both theories have better footings, foundations and support than what is called the theory of evolution. It is not even a theory until it can answer most of my questions (not necessarily all of the hundred) which I and others have.
Until it becomes the “Law” of evolution, which no one has yet assigned such a glorious title to, your belief is based on incomplete empirical data, is supposition, and can only be held based on blid faith, impervious to the problem of the unanswered questions.
After you respond, I would like to discuss why Christianity is based on just as firm an empericalo science as the “hypothesis” of evolution.
As my Father once said, let’s hold our conclusions in check until we are certain enough to mate theory with Truth.
Robin: (I reformatted this and am reposting it so that your words are in bold and mine are not for easy of reading)
You took extensive course work in genetics and evolution and they never taught you about genetic mutation? Did you go to Liberty University or something?
Robin: The Univeristy of Chicago. More Nobel Prizes than the speed of the universe’s expansion. Are we going to be sarcastic or are we going to engage? I wasn’t bragging. I was humbly trying to tell you why, after a scientific background, and not just blind, metaphysical one, I had questions. Is there charity and patience in your response. Mocking is not a high road.
Darwin wrote over 150 years ago, before genetics. You should read a book on evolution from this century.
I’ve read maybe more than you. Excuse me, that was not charitable. Then tell me the mechanism. Enlighten me.
Me, I’m surprised how complete the fossil record is. Fossils are pretty uncommon, requiring favorable, conditions for preservation, scavengers not getting to the animal first, not getting destroyed by erosion, and so forth. And then there’s the odds of a fossil ever being discovered.
So, you are willing to admit that the record is incomplete and commit to blind faith that it would be but for the conditions that you cite? That kind of science troubles me. I like to think of myself as scientific. Developing theories or speculative hypothesis, when the empirical record is incomplete strikes me as a leap of faith, if I can quote from one of the Indiana Jones movies.
Many wide gaps should be more of a challenge to creationists. If each gap were due to creation, that would mean there were hundreds of separate creation events widely scattered through time.
Maybe there were. I don’t know. But you don’t either. But it is hardly scientific to say that my opponent (and I am not one) must explain the inconsistency of the record. But, I only need to accept that the record will be some day explained to conform to my a priori assumptions or beliefs.
Anyway, we don’t need transitional fossils to demonstrate divergence from a common ancestor, genetic and molecular evidence can provide that.
I guess we don’t. Our theory must be right — the emperical evidence or lack thereof is just an irrelevant nuisance. I thought science was based on sounder principles than that. Am I missing something. Again, no transition; no matter; Indiana Jones, just take the leap of faith; no worry. You will survive.
Plate tectonics crumple continental plates to produce mountain ranges like the Andes. It is not uncommon for this to produce faults where rock on one side is thrust up, raising lower rock layers alongside higher ones.
I don’t know if he knew that or not. He should have because Louis Aggasiz figured that out before. But the problem is that the the empirical evidence does support an upheaval like they teach in Montessori to put your coat on the floor and go up and over to put in on. The inconsistencies occured in the same layers of strata from the same side. That puzzled him. It puzzles me. It doesn’t seem to puzzle those with a preconceived agenda. I’m not talking about you, Robin. I’m talking about the Royal Acedemy and its intellectual successors who dismiss nuisances that get in the way of the theory (agenda) as nuisances.
I haven’t been there [LaBrea Tar Pits], but unlike a fossil bed, a tar pit collects remains over a long period of time. La Brea’s fossil deposits began to form 40,000 years ago, towards the end of the Pleistocene. Surely this is explained somewhere in their museum. Didn’t you ask a docent.
Sure did. They all died at the same or near the same time. Go there, yea of certain faith!
I don’t know about coal geology, but both Pennsylvania and Colorado are mountainous states, so the earth’s crust has been crumpled in both regions. A local geologist would probably be able to explain how the coal ended up near the surface. That reminds me of the geode I found in Pennsylvania when I was young, up around Lancaster.
Fair enough. But I forgot to mention that below the coal strata, and deep into the mountains, what has been found is fossils of more modern species. And again, the mountains rose. They did not do a 180 degree flip. How in the world can anything but blind faith in what one’s mentor or prior professor previously said cause me to ignore this in order to hold to his faith — or rather, my Fides Receptus, if I could be permitted to digress to my poor Latin.
A region’s climate can change a lot over geological time. In the Sahara Desert, dried up riverbeds still exist from when it was wetter region.
When the ocean was warm and rich in nutrients, organic matter can collect on the ocean floor faster than it can decompose. If it then gets buried under a deposit like shale formed from mud, then heat and pressure can turn it into oil.
Robin, I’m not understand. All this flora growing on the surface and sunk. Or was it somehow transported there from land which was rich in flora. Think about the logistics of getting the flora from where the geological record shows it grew to places quite far a way where the geological record shows it did not or could not have grown. But, more to the point, “organic matter can collect and can decompose and can turn into oil, dosen’t sound like science but “Can-Speculation”. Does that not trouble you?
I’m going to take a break for a moment and post this so I don’t lose it and finsish it. So don’t respond yet.
Nick (38.1/38.2.1, 38.2):
I just did. Mutations are the mechanism that caused brows, jawbones, legs, and body size to gradually, heritably change. Natural selection favors beneficial mutations and weeds out harmful mutations. This is Evolution 101. How did you pass your extensive coursework in evolution without learning something so basic?
Other factors too. Small animals are fragile and don’t preserve well. Many species have a small ranges which lessen their chance of being in conditions where fossils form. Fossils can be destroyed by heat and pressure if buried deep undergound. Species move as climates change so transitions don’t occur all in one spot but all over a continent. Places where fewer paleontologists live are less explored (Europe and North America are better explored than Africa). Regional politics can interfere with collecting fossils (ex. China).
Yes, there are gaps in the fossil record. Evolutionary theory never predicted finely detailed sequences of fossils lasting for millions of years, nor is this a reasonable expectation.
Did you stop reading that sentence halfway through? I cited two other lines of empirical evidence that confirm it.
Again you assume intellectual dishonesty on the part of scientists. Which Royal Academy are you talking about, and why do you think it is driven by an agenda?
Are you driven by an agenda? Do you oppose evolution as a matter of faith?
Not according to the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles’ FAQ:
La Brea sounds interesting. If I ever get out to LA, it’ll be one of my sights to see.
I spent a half hour reading about coal. Coal is formed of plant material, buried peat deposits from swamps and bogs. Underneath coal beds are found paleosols, fossilized soil horizons filled with plant roots. Most coals form near the surface; often there are trees projecting up through the coal beds, still rooted in the underlying sediment, and consistent with fossil vegetation in the coal itself.
It was in the Science section of the New York Times a few months ago. Here it is— “Tracing Oil Reserves to Their Tiny Origins”, August 2, 2010:
It is not just speculation.
No, that’s all wrong. You misunderstand scientific terminology, despite all your science courses.
A hypothesis becomes a theory after it has been supported by a considerable body of evidence. A theory is an accepted, supported hypothesis, valid as long as it is not disproven by contrary evidence.
As They Might Be Giants sing in their kids’ song “Science is Real”,
Laws and theories, though used together, are different things with different purposes.
Scientific laws are describe what happens, an observed regularity among facts.
Scientific theories explain how something happens.
For example, the law of gravity describes the rate at which matter is observed to be drawn together. Einstein’s theory of gravity is that this attraction is due to mass causing space-time curvature.
Hypotheses and theories cannot become laws. Explanations are not descriptions. More evidence for a theory will never turn it into a law, just into a better-supported theory.
Nick, you repeatedly charge me with relying on faith:
Your criticisms imply that the more faith a proposition requires, the less likely it is to be true. It seems ironic to defend your religious faith by criticizing me, incorrectly, for having faith.
Faith is intellectual laziness unbefitting a seeker of truth. (Matt puts it well on his call‐in show: Faith is an excuse people give themselves to believe things for no good reason.) As he said in the debate (4/9, 12:22),
I wholeheartedly agree, and so I do not accept beliefs that I cannot rationally justify.
My trust in the findings of science is not blind faith, but grounded on my understanding of the scientific method and how and why it works, and science’s proven track record of success. Science is reliable. Science works.
Nick, you repeatedly charge me with relying on faith:
Your criticisms imply that the more faith a proposition requires, the less likely it is to be true. It seems ironic to defend your religious faith by criticizing me, incorrectly, for having faith.
Faith is intellectual laziness unbefitting a seeker of truth. (Matt puts it well on his call‐in show: Faith is an excuse people give themselves to believe things for no good reason.) As he said in the debate (4/9, 12:22),
I wholeheartedly agree, and so I do not accept beliefs that I cannot rationally justify.
My trust in the findings of science is not blind faith, but grounded on my understanding of the scientific method and how and why it works, and science’s proven track record of success. Science is reliable. Science works.
Robin, Nick was not saying at all that relying on faith makes something less true, just remarking on the fact than someone who claims not to rely on faith at all does so extensively. Just one of the many irrational, illogical and inconsistent components of your ‘argument’.
BTW faith is one of those essential anthropological realities that that your type of empiricism belittles or ignores. In fact, nothing that we do as human beings is possible without faith. Each human being decides in whom or in what to place our faith. Ah, there’s that nasty, nasty word again being Even your favored “I think, therefore I am” syllogism relies on the unexamined presumption of being even as it gets it backwards.
Any person who claims to have a system of morality has to take being into account. Your snide and categorical refusal to do so invalidates anything you say in the area of morality and leaves you as a mere dependent on the moral insights of others who have taken being into account.
Robin, in your own coursework, didn’t they teach that that almost all mutations are deleterious? When I took pre-med at a very secular university, that’s what they taught us.
As for your faith in the “completeness” of the fossil record, that would make you a better scientist than either Darwin or Huxley, his most agressive disciple. Both men were well aware that the fossil record showed no micro-mutational changes in the strata between the different species. Huxley was very worried about that. He implored Darwin to consider adding a little saltation [i.e. macromutational jumbs] to the mix (Latin: saltus).
Darwin was unconcerned. His reason? He told Huxley, that “given time, the necessary fossils will show up.” That’s not science, that’s faith.
That is incorrect. The vast majority of mutations are neutral. For example, a mutation in your junk DNA has no effect. However, of the remainder, more are harmful than helpful.
Mutations get filtered through the sieve of natural selection. Those with favorable mutations are more likely to propagate their genes. Those with deleterious mutations are more likely to not to spread their genes.
There are gaps, and to expect every extinct species to have left a fossil is unrealistic. But we are fortunate so many fossils have been preserved, especially fossil sequences with many transitional forms, such as from mesonychid (land mammal with nostrils) to whale (cetacean with blowhole).
You exaggerate. Huxley didn’t beg, he told Darwin, “[y]ou have loaded yourself with an unnecessary difficulty in adopting Natura non facit saltum [nature does not make leaps] so unreservedly”. Darwinian gradualism vs saltation was a scientific debate following the publication of Origin of Species, but nowadays saltation is on the scrapheap of incorrect hypotheses.
Robin: You got left behind! Evolution is a religion with is own “holy relics” – the fossils.
EVOLUTION AS SUBVERSIVE SCIENCE
The Truth taught by the Church is confirmed by the incorrupt and intact holy relics of the Saints that win over the biological corruption. Holy relics “have not received any scientific intervention but they exhibit within them the energy of divine Grace. Because at the moment the corruption of the cellular system begins, it stops automatically, and instead of foul smell, fragrance emanates.”
Robin, hate to bust your bubble, but there’s no such thing as “junk DNA.” Yet another myth of evolution that is biting the dust. (You know, Haeckl’s embryos, vestigial organs, the peppered moths,etc.)
Nick:
Perhaps the universal flood is a good explanation.
As for the gaps in the creation, shall we start a discussion about our radiometric dating methods?
Robin claims that “we can’t even prove Christ existed”. Instead, he comes here with his stories of 4.5 billion years cosmic evolution. “Did you take any photos? Shoot any video? Empirical minds want to know.
Eliot: I was too busy exploring the back room collections. As you know, most museums don’t allow photos and they keep a small amount of their collections on display. You have to get special permission to see the non displayed items.
There are a lot of possible explanations, including the flood. As you know, virtually every culture, including the Chinese and Pre-Columbian Indians have such stories. The Flood had to have been world wide.
There is a lot of liturature available on what I said both about the Andes and LaBrea. There are other things I have not yet brought up to Robin but hope to. The more I immerse myself in this area, the more I realize that the less we really know.
I think it would be a good thing to start a thread on “radiometric dating”. That area has always intrigued me. Like most things in the evolution discussion, as well as current geological thinking, there is an underlying assumption, namely, that things have always been as they are. Carbon-14, for example, assumes that the relative levels of Carbon-14 have always been as they are now in the historical period. But cataclysm cannot allow for such an assumption to be valid.
For example, until we started polluting the atmosphere in the 20th Century, there is an assumption that the levels of CO2 were relatively constant. We know that not to be true when the floral evidence of the dinosaur period, for example, is studdied.
A little discussed example of recent memory of modern man is this: In 1883, Krakatoa errupted causing approximately 50,000 deaths in Indonesia. It poured into the atmosphere a phenomenal amount of CO2, CO, ash and other things into the atmosphere. Because of the erruptiom, on the Centennial Celebration in Philadephia in 1876, it was so cold on the 4th of July because of the residual junk in the atmosphere world wide, that it snowed a foot in Philadelphia on that day. National Geographic has an article on it in its archives.
Think of all of the cataclysmic erruptions over time and their effect. Anyone that posits an atmosphere without change over the eons is simply ignorant or doesn’t care that the facts don’t fit the theory. Again, Carbon 14 dating is based on an assumption of unchangeableness.
Nick:
No scientific method can prove the age of the earth and the universe. We are arguing about unobserved history. Depending on the assumptions we make, we can obtain any date we like.
Radioactive decay (radioactive parent elements, daughter elements, half-lives for radioactive elements) and the different techniques employed (counting techniques and mass-spectrometry) to determine the concentrations of isotopes is science.
Trying to establish the time for a race is impossible without knowing at what time did it start (starting time) and end (present time).
Radiometric dating technique has a fatal flaw : we have no knowledge about the radioactive elements content when the rock formed (starting time) and we did not monitor the way those elements changed over the entire geological history. Catastrophic events (volcanic eruptions, a global biblical Flood) and possible wide variations in solar activity are ignored (uniformitarian assumptions). Changes in the solar wind and the sun’s magnetic flux can greatly influence the rate of cosmic rays striking the earth’s atmosphere.
Creation scientists assume the Bible records true history.
Those interested in preserving the concept of millions-of-years work from assumptions too. They use a false circular reasoning. Evolution is the basis for geologic conclusions while geology is taught as the basic evidence for evolution. They determine the age of the rock layers by the fossils that they contain, and then they turn around and determine the ages assigned to the fossils by the ages of the rock layers that they were found in.
Well, one can prove that Jesus Christ exist even if their were unsual stories about his life. One of Jesus’s contempories the Emperor Augustus had usual stories about his life. One the god Apollo bite his mother when he appeared as a snake and this occurred before Atia gave birth to Augustus-Octivian. This is in Suetonius. Also, Suetonius mention that Jews were during exile during the reign of emperor Claudius because of them facing over Chrestius, either a referance to Jesus Chirst or a slave. The book of acts also mentions about Jews being exiled during this period. Tactius in his Annals mentions about Christ dieding under Pontius Pilate. Both Suetonous and Tactius writing in the early 2nd century.
Hm, I tried submitting a post 5 times but it hasn’t shown up. And the numbering seems to have gone out of whack, I see four posts numbered “40″.
It had a lot of links so was flagged as spam. I pulled it out of the spam bin and posted it.
The numbering might be off because we have so many comments in this thread. Not sure if the database has a limit. If it doesn’t self-correct, we will have to start a second thread as a continuation.
Robin:
We have finally got to the core of the issue:
My trust in the findings of science is not blind faith, but grounded on my understanding of the scientific method and how and why it works, and science’s proven track record of success. Science is reliable. Science works.
Let us test that “hypothesis”.
In doing so, I concede that Newtonian physics (gravation, in this case) is a valid tool for NASA to use when launching a man to the moon. However, it breaks down the more macro you get. So, it has got some elements of truth on the scale to which its predictive abilities apply. However, its predictive abilities are greatly circumscribed in the overall grand scheme of things.
Einstein’s special theory of relativity seems to work better, but its truths are predicated on the empirical observation that bodies of considerable mass (a relative term [pun intented]) do indeed bend light.
That leads to general relativity. A marvelous theory to which I am intellectually attached because it explains the all of macro physics (sort of). It ultimately posits the expanding universe which, through backward (which is OK) reasoning postulates the Big Bang.
So, the Big Bang is now the big thing in cosmo physics. However, because an infinitely expanding universe seems to be predicated a one time event with no causal explanation, born is the steady state theory. However, because it intellectually implies creation of energy ex nihilo it comes under sharp criticism. Then background radiation is discovered and Hawkings puts the steady state to a permanent state of repose.
But now, with further observation, the universe is not expanding as fast as it should under the theories, so, we got to explain that. The only rational explanation is that there must be a lot of dark matter out there (about 25% of the total of all matter) that is not visible or observable. Problem is that dark matter has never once been empirically proven. Then, in order to explain other anamolies, this secret dark matter now has to be postulated as cold dark matter, warm dark matter, hot dark matter.
What the matter? The theory of the Big Bang must be true. So every time there is a problem, we have to invent something that solves the problem by a sheer act of reason, but with no empirical support. Since I have faith in the underlying theory, I will invent, through the imagination of my mind, a construct which will, at least, keep my faith in the theory alive.
And having said that, my neighbor Mr. Quantum goes on to show that he is having the same issues, but they are opposite of mine. I say potato but he says, I’m wrong, it is tomato.
Then comes my other neighbor Mr. String who says, “Guys, I will get you to quit quarreling. My spagetti string proves you both wrong. You can never know; nothing really exists, or rather, it must exist but never is what it appears to be (Heisenberg is ALIVE!). Only the temporary possibility or probably of its existence is possibly probable or probably possible”.
Me have faith in this? Robin, if you can’t see, then you are blind. You have faith in this method? It looks like a method that we used to have fun with as early teens playing with the young ones — make up the rules as you go.
George is right = there is no such thing as junk DNA. You are wrong = there is such a thing as junk science (a lot of it); but don’t get me wrong, in many ways, science has a great ability to predict many things. It also has a great ability to be unable to explain (only invent explanations of) many things.
Ultimately, we are all driven by what we have enough faith to believe in. Most Christians are faith driven (as are most athiests). And, we have the same thing in common. Our faith is also empirically derived. Except our empirical data is more sound (or profound). Want to know how?
Where is Robin??
Hopefully he went in earnest search for God!
I believe atheists display an unreasonable or excessive belief in scientific concepts, like time and gravity. Time is seen as an “almighty” god (lower case g) : given enough time anything can happen. Hence, their 4.6 billion year narrative.
Two different people can look at the Grand Canyon and reach two completely different conclusions An evolutionist would say that the Grand Canyon was created by the flow of the Colorado River over millions of years. The creationist view is that the grand Canyon is the result of the flood and it took about, let’s say, three weeks.
Gravity is also an “almighty” god. It is a concept very loosely defined which is responsible for many natural phenomena observed on Earth, in the solar system and the universe. Gravitation causes objects with mass to attract one another, causes dispersed matter to coalesce, thus accounting for the existence of the Earth, the Sun, and the stars. Gravity is responsible for the high pressure and temperature in the interiors of forming stars and in the Sun, triggering fusion reactions to occur naturally in all active stars.
But what really is gravity? So far I listed what gravity causes: it causes objects with mass to attract one another. What is mass then? In the current theoretical framework of particle physics, the concept of mass is deeply connected to a hypothetical particle called the Higgs boson. The Higgs particle (or mechanism) is the key to understanding the property of mass. It is believed that Higgs is the last piece of the puzzle, remaining to be discovered.
To make the matter even worse, astrophysics experiments indicate the presence of gravitational forces that seem to come from an unknown type of invisible matter, called dark matter (invisible or nonluminos matter). It is believed that the dark matter accounts for more than 90 percent of the entire mass in the universe. So, what do we know about gravity? That it exists and it is “almighty”.
No, about 90% of matter is dark matter. You probably misread a different statistic, that the universe is about 25% dark matter.
Empirical evidence is what led us to conclude that dark matter is there. It’s still pretty mysterious, though. Early days.
You seem to grasp the idea of dark matter, but you reveal that your understanding of quantum physics and string theory is as superficial as your understanding of evolution.
I have trust in this method. It works.
Yes, there is, and creationists dogmatically asserting that junk DNA doesn’t exist won’t change that fact. Very little of your DNA, less than 5%, is functional.
Not all of us. Speak for yourself.
Seems to me that if you have a belief based on empirical data, then by definition it’s not “faith”. But do tell, what empirical data backs up your religious beliefs? In particular, what evidence do you have specifically for your god, that, for example, a Hindu could not cite for their gods, nor a Pastafarian for the Flying Spaghetti Monster?
Glad to have you back, Robin. I hope you had a wonderful Christmas.
Robin: “No, about 90% of matter is dark matter. You probably misread a different statistic, that the universe is about 25% dark matter.”
On the contrary, I did not “read” the wrong statistic. I “know” that the current models, to work, “needs” about 25% of the universe to be dark matter. That leaves about a 65% gap to be explained. If you keep current in the scientific literature, you will discover that about 65% is now posited to be “dark energy”. Of course, it is even more elusive to detect empirically. The only thing that keeps this newly thought up stuff from the realm of mere speculation is the unrelenting faith that, as you put it previously, it is a work in progress. I suppose mystical revelation could also be apropos in idiomatic English.
Robin: “Empirical evidence is what led us to conclude that dark matter is there. It’s still pretty mysterious, though. Early days.”
Robin: I challenge you to lay forth on the table the empirical evidence to which you refer. The fact is that the known visible matter was so small that it could not account for the rate of expansion that was believed to be occuring. So, invisible matter had to be postulated. However, when the math didn’t work out properly, dark energy had to be postulated as well. However, now we have another problem: the universe is expanding at different rates. The rates are greater the closer one gets to the perimeter. This is inconsistent with the Big Bang of a uniform primordial source. So, now it is being postulated that gravity is relative and that there is no such thing as a uniform law of gravity. You should look into this stuff: Loop Quantum Gravity, Nonsymetric Gravitional Theory, Modified Newtonian Dyanmics, to name a few. It is incredible, the human imagination, that is. Every problem is solved by new inventions with no resort to empirical analysis.
Robin: “I have trust in this method. It works.”
You gotta be kidding! It doesn’t “work”. It exists in the empheral imagination. The closest analogy I can think of to describe it is the shape-shifters prominent in several of the Star Trek scripts.
Robin: “Yes, there is, and creationists dogmatically asserting that junk DNA doesn’t exist won’t change that fact. Very little of your DNA, less than 5%, is functional.”
I got a kick out of this one. You accuse my knowledge to be superficial. It may well be, but at least I try to keep up with what is going on. Have you not read in the peer reviewed journals of late that now they are finding out that the 95% of supposed non-functional DNA is alas functional. As an example, the recent Princeton study released last year indicates that the so called non-functional DNA actually regulates how the so called 5% functional DNA actually functions. Go back and get current in this area and then come back and tell me that George is wrong!
Robin: “You seem to grasp the idea of dark matter, but you reveal that your understanding of quantum physics and string theory is as superficial as your understanding of evolution.”
Thank you for the compliment. I think however that Green, Schwarz etc. would agree that their knowledge is also superficial in this stage of the theory’s evolution.
Robin: “Seems to me that if you have a belief based on empirical data, then by definition it’s not “faith”. But do tell, what empirical data backs up your religious beliefs? In particular, what evidence do you have specifically for your god, that, for example, a Hindu could not cite for their gods, nor a Pastafarian for the Flying Spaghetti Monster?”
“Empirical data”, if I am not mistaken, is data dervied from actual and direct observation. Let’s see. Where do I begin? Oh, yes.
Michelson ventures out with some mirrors and lantern and observes the light. Based on his observations, he calculates its speed to a remarkable degree of accuracy. I, of course, was not there. But, I know about it because he told me about his observations.
Darwin takes a long cruise. He observes things. Again, I was not there. But I know about his obsevations and conclusions because he told me about them.
Einstein thinks through other peoples’ observations who told him about them. He comes up with general relativity. A bunch of guys go out to Africa and South America to view a solar eclipse. They see a star that is behind the sun appearing to be to the side of the sun. It appears that way because the sun bent the light of the star around it and made it visible, thus confiming general relativity’s prediction that gravitation (more accurately, the warp in space caused by the sun) bends light. Alas, I was not there. But I know about it because the guys who saw it told me about it.
Wow. This is the stuff that science is built upon. Pretty amazing and extremely logical. Observe. Write down what you observed. Others read what you observed and add to it what others observed. And, the edifice keeps on growing. These observational revelations are quite revealing, aren’t they?
Let’s see. The 12 and the 70 lived with Him. They heard him talk. They saw Him die. After He was ressurected, they ate with Him, touched Him and walked with Him. They observed all these things. Then a guy named Saul who hated him, took a trip up north to put a stop to those being misled by the now 11 and the 70. But, a strange thing happened on the way to Damascus. Saul saw Him. He talked to Saul. And not just on this one occasion, but on several other occasions.
The 11 and the 70 and Saul told others what they observed. I was not there. But at least 8 of the observers told me what they observed through the books and letters they wrote and left behind. Their observations are just as empirical a data as Michelson’s and Darwin’s.
There is one difference, though. Most of these observers were willing to and did die in defense of their observations. That’s at least a compelling case that they believed what they observed. No one can be tested more with regard to their veracity than their willingness to die in proof of their veracity.
Robin: How many atheists do you know that are willing to die in defense of their atheism?
By the way, when is some Big Bang enthusiast ever going to attempt an explanation of where the so-called primordial mass came from that started the Bang?
Is it so hard to admit you made a minor mistake? 90% of the total of all matter is dark matter, not 25%; 25% of the universe is dark matter.
“Mystical revelation” is a poor term for “conjecture based on the best available scientific evidence”.
The problem isn’t so much missing matter as missing light.
Yes, I do. So far, you have shown yourself to be misinformed about tar pits, about coal beds, about evolutionary theory, about quantum physics, about string theory, and about junk DNA.
Earlier, you claimed you went to the La Brea Tar Pits several times for “one reason alone”, to understand how animals from different eras got trapped there. Yet despite repeated visits for the sole purpose of finding this out, you failed to learn a simple, basic fact about the Tar Pits which explains it: they accumulated animals over tens of thousands of years. “There is no explanation that I am aware of”, you said, but I’ll bet you $20 if I go there, I’ll come back with a photo of a display or something explaining that very fact, much as the website for the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles did.
You spoke of your “extensive course work in general biology, morphology, genetics, evolution, etc.”, then showed you lacked even a rudimentary understanding of how evolution works, yet claimed you have “always asked” about it and read and re-read books looking for it. And despite all those science courses, you misunderstand basic science terms like “theory” and “law”, something you should have learned in high school. (I suppose if you earned a degree, you probably would have said “I have a degree in X” rather than “I took lots of courses in X”.)
So, twice you demonstrated lack of basic knowledge of a subject, while boasting of your extensive search failing to find the basic knowledge you lack. Are you that poor a researcher, or do you just pretend to have studied things you do not comprehend?
Because it seems like you didn’t try very hard to answer your own questions. You were puzzled why coal is found near the surface in Pennsylvania and Colorado; I learned how coal forms near the surface in half an hour. Why didn’t you?
King Louis XI and hundreds of Parisians were eyewitnesses when, as Esmeralda was being led to the gallows, Quasimodo swung down on the bell rope of Notre Dame and swept her off to the sanctuary of the cathedral. A verifiable historical monarch, and an actual historical place, which you can go visit to this day. Just one problem, the eyewitnesses are as fictional as the rest of the story.
After Jesus died, “And the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, and came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many.” (Matthew 27:52-53) A mass resurrection of the dead, witnessed by “many”!
So why do no other gospels nor any epistles even mention this grand, impressive miracle? No history books record the day the zombie saints came to Jerusalem and everybody saw them. Nor do we have any books or letters by the zombie saints, recounting their first hand knowledge of the afterlife. You’d think those zombie saints would have had hordes of followers asking them about their experience, and writing about it. But alas, there are no other letters or journals or testimonies from any of the “many”, solely one brief, offhand mention in the Book of Matthew. It’s rather like the author of the Book of Matthew embellished the story, isn’t it?
No, scientific observations are repeatable. You need not take Michelson’s word about his experiment, you can reproduce it. You need not take Darwin’s word about his finches, you can go to the Galapagos and observe them for yourself. Science thrives on verification and peer review. If they had just made it all up, the scientific community would have exposed them as frauds.
An anthology of books giving contradictory accounts of ancient myths is not remotely comparable.
Only two do in the Bible, Judas (who gets a couple contradictory deaths), and James. Legends of the deaths of the others were invented later.
Robin, if I may jump in here on two points: “junk” DNA and the martyrdom of the Apostles. First, junk DNA does not comport with the economies that we find in physics. There is no wastage in biological systems. Simply physics can’t allow it. The evolution of the 1000s of “superfluous” proteins within cells would negate the evolution of “necessary” proteins. “Junk” DNA is “junk” science. It’s just a weasel-word (like Richard Dawkin’s “meme”) which is invented as a place-holder until something better comes up. In the meantime, the peasants are awed by the Great Professor who seems to have a sense of humor.
As for the other martyred apostles, no their stories aren’t told in the canonical Gospels –but are often told in the non-canonical gospels. Or are repeated in the Christian communities which they founded. This type of narrative can be considered to be folklore, much the same as the ancient tales of Troy were folklore for the Greek people. These too were discounted until archaeology proved them correct (in the main).
Michael:
Confessing upon one’s deathbed
Excerpt from “Ecce the Confessor – Fr. Arsenie Papacioc
Between the lines, I read a different story in Fr. Arsenie’s account. A poor sick old man is pestered by priests for three days to confess his sins before it’s too late, until, as his dying body fails, hallucinations of those sins incarnated torment him (for now he had become delusional). And Fr. Arsenie and his misguided priests who caused such unnecessary anguish shake their heads and feel that they’d tried to spare him from what they hypnotized him into imagining.
Robin, how much experience do you have with sick or dying people?
I read a different story in Fr. Arsenie’s account: Terrible is the end of sinners and ungodly. The death of the righteous is different because the angels are coming for his soul ….
How the smile of Elder Joseph is from eternity
http://www.impantokratoros.gr/387DDB11.en.aspx
Eliot quotes Panagiotis Koutsou:
Many photos of this allegedly “smiling” corpse accompany that article. All I see are slack, horizontal lips with no curved edges, and closed eyes with no contracted corners (and hands across his chest with wrists bound together with a black band to hold them in that pose). Why would anyone imagine that corpse was smiling? Perhaps your credulous poster thought Joseph’s chipmunk cheeks seemed raised, and saw what he wanted to see.
However, if I went to a funeral and viewed an arranged corpse that, unlike this one, did have smile-like upturned lips and crinkled eyes, my first thought would not be, “it’s a miracle!”, but rather, “what a skilled mortician!”
Hi Robin: so, you are still around! I’ve been thinking of you and I was wondering: would it be too difficult for you to say once in a while “God, if you exist, please reveal yourself to me!”? Ι think this does not clash with your principles or your conscience.
Well, mentioning about the flood, recent arechological work and geograhic work show that the Perisan Gulf was once a land mass, and on the shore from the perisian gulf since early sophicated settlement around 7,500 B.C., houses and such. This area may be the area where the four rivers mention in Gensis met each other. In modern times this is impossible since the Perisian Gulf is water now, very closed to anicent Mesopotmia, one of the oldest civilcations that the ancestors of the Jews came from Abraham. Also, the Perian Gulf land mass was destroyed by a massive flood around 8,500 b.c.
http://www.halos.com/
Evolution Theory Proven False by Scientific Observation – Science and Evidence For Creation – 1
Evolution Theory Proven False by Scientific Observation – Science and Evidence For Creation – 2
Evolution Theory Proven False by Scientific Observation – Science and Evidence For Creation – 3
Robin, do you ever think that you could be wrong about evolution, your soul, God or Salvation? Why do you keep rejecting these perfectly normal doubtful thoughts? Why do you have absolute trust in the amalgam of your own thoughts? Don’t you realize that you serve the one who hates you?
Elder Arsenie -On thoughts:
Yes. When I thought I had been wrong about my soul, God, and Salvation, I changed my mind about them, because I am open-minded enough to admit that I was wrong about things I had believed all my life. How about you? Would you admit any possibility that you could be wrong about God, and souls, and Salvation?
Maybe you should be asking yourself those questions. I’m the one who did listen to my doubts, and didn’t have absolute trust in my beliefs.
Naw, I love myself, most of the time.
Not impressed by Arsenie’s fable. I don’t believe in the devil or demons either, you know.
Robin, if materialism is true (and that’s what Darwinist evolution is; note: I did not say “evolution”), then why are your thoughts any more cogent than those of us who believe in God? And no, you can’t say because “God doesn’t exist.” That’s a dogmatic statement. By what referent do you maintain belief in such a belief system, especially since in a random universe there can be no independent referents for measuring quanta. One of the great atheists of recent times, Sir Antony Flew, came to change his mind shortly before he died. His last book was titled There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind. He goes through all the arguments that he himself posited over 40 years in brilliant works and came to see the logical fallacies within them. Although he did not claim that the God that exists is the God of Israel, but instead Aristotle’s Prime Mover, this was still a cold slap in the face to the the New Atheism.
In addition, I would direct your thoughts to atheists such as Andre Glucksman, Bernard-Henri Levi, Camille Paglia, and the late Orianna Fallaci. Though these people don’t believe in God, they understand that there is a hole in their philosophy in that they believe in the transcendent. Again, another fallacy which pure materialism cannot explain.
Geo:
I’ve never read anything by Anthony Flew, though I read an interesting New York Times Magazine article, “The Turning of an Atheist”, about him and that book:
…
Critics say Flew went a bit senile and was bamboozled into lending his name to a book ghostwritten by an apologist, uncritically describing recent poor modern theistic arguments like the “fine tuning” argument, which doesn’t jibe with your description of its contents:
If, as you say, all of Flew’s arguments over 40 years contained “logical fallacies”, why do you describe Flew as “great” and his work as “brilliant”? By your characterization, “There Is a God” exposes Flew’s entire corpus as rubbish. I wouldn’t know myself, having read neither Flew’s “brilliant works” of his heyday nor his ghostwritten book of his dotage.
What fallacy is that, and what’s inexplicable? Synapses fire in our material brains producing transcendent ideas. For example, 2 is a transcendent abstraction we can draw from any pairs of material things from apples to asteroids. Physically, 2 is an electrochemical pattern in your brain. Both of us have been taught a complex collection of transcendent abstractions we call language, through which we can communicate by shared labels like “2″. There’s nothing supernatural about any of this. It’s all physics.
Robin:
And I suppose you understand everything about quantum mechanics, string theory or relativity? My guess is that your understanding is merely relative admiration for these various theories. The authors of these theories themselves admitted that we know very little.
“My religiosity consists in a humble admiration of the infinitely superior spirit that reveals itself in the little that we, with our weak and transitory understanding, can comprehend of reality.”
-Albert Einstein
What we know here is very little, but what we are ignorant of is immense.
– Pierre Simon Laplace
What do we have on the other side? We have eyes to see the hand of the Creator in everything around us: the beauty of the universe, the sun hanging in the sky, the fruits and beautiful flowers and the perfume of lilies and roses.
There is plenty of scientific evidence to support the biblical accounts of creation and the flood. See: http://www.halos.com/
We have the Holy Tradition which is the teaching of the Church, God-given with a living voice, from which a portion was later written down.
Finally, as Fr. Hans said “In historical terms, that testimony of the twelve men known as the Apostles and then in the lives of others was so powerful it that became the foundation of an entire new civilization.”
Fr. Andrew Phillips:
Never heard of him. From your description, he sounds frustrated at not having anything persuasive to say to atheists, but rather than admit he can’t give them a good reason to believe, he gives up and decides it’s because they’re broken somehow. If he’s got nothing to say to me, he doesn’t seem worth my time.
Feel free to take Porphyrios’ advice and ask your invisible friend to touch my heart. It’ll have as much effect as asking a lucky horseshoe, though.
Thank you Robin. Atheists are mostly offended by prayer. I don’t blame you for claiming you don’t believe in God. It is “normal”: students today are only being shown one theory of the origin of the universe; textbooks contain many lies used to make the students believe in the evolution theory. We did not receive an education; we have been indoctrinated. Many people believe in evolution because “it is in the books”.
Do not underestimate the power of prayer. You are correct about our inability to live a life of deep prayer and union with God.
Elder Porphyrios
Indeed, it does not work to pray for the devil. God loves you more than the devil hates you. You are a fine man, perhaps fairly good looking, in your mid thirties, happily engaged but not married. You have plenty of time to turn to God.
http://www.monachos.net/forum/archive/index.php/t-4571.html
Nick:
This is what the atheist cannot or does not want to comprehend:
Starting with the Holy Apostles (except John, the only Apostle to have died of old age) who were martyred for their faith and their testimony about Jesus Christ, millions of true Christians throughout history sealed their testimony with their own lives.
Innumerable miracles have taken place demonstrating the supernatural power of God over nature and evil forces. Everyone knows and is amazed at the many miracles that our Savior did, yet He did not save the world through the great miracles that He did, but through His sacrifice on the Cross! Without sacrifice, nothing is possible, no matter where we are!”
There are two kinds of people in this world: those that choose to follow a path through life according to their own feelings and their own truths, oftentimes mixed in with the worst sort of muddled pragmatism. Others choose to walk in truth.
To this day, there are many, many who walk the spiritual path even if that means to sacrifice themselves.
We Should Tell the Truth Come What May
On miracles:
Elder Arsenios – On Suffering
Eliot:
So, your argument is “If someone martyrs themselves for their beliefs, their beliefs are true”?
19 adherents of Wahabi Islam flew planes into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, certain in their faith that Allah will reward them in heaven, with 80,000 servants and 72 virgins and endless wine that doesn’t make you drunk. They wouldn’t have died for a lie, surely. The evidence is clear! There is no god but Allah, and Mohammad is his prophet!
All: Robin is right in one respect. A willingness to die for a belief is just that–a willingness to die for a belief. Such willingness can, and often does come from pure ego, i.e self-will to glorify themselves. Such a death is not a path to salvation, but a path to perdition.
The teaching of the Church is that martrydom is not about death at all really (the word means witness), it is about transformation and the fruit produced. A true marytr must willing give himself up for the life of the world out of love, just as did Christ. The martyr must die loving his enemies, those that kill him/her. “….forgive them Father for they know not what they do”
No Islamic ‘marytr’ can qualify. Many Christians who do not suffer a heroic death can.
Here is one account of a true marytric approach: http://silouanthompson.net/2009/12/with-my-own-eyes/
And then there is the atheist historical problem: Atheism provides a rationale to kill others in the name of ideology (Nazism, Communism, etc.). Your definition shows that Muslim “martyrs” (those who kill themselves in order to kill others) is very close to the atheist social dynamic. The ideological atheist however, at least maintains the will to live. (Caveat: Not all atheists are ideologues of course.)
Hans:
There you go again. Atheism provides no rationale for anything. There is no rationale that can get you from “I don’t believe in gods” to “I should kill people.” And as a token refutation of your repeated Holocaust revisionism: Naziism was a Christian ideology. Shame on you, Hans, for blaming the Holocaust on its victims.
Robin,
At the risk of being accused of giving aid and comfort to the enemy, I will say this: I don’t think there is anything you would perceive about the world that would necessarily lead you to a belief in God. And, if you were persuaded by the order in nature that there must be an Orderer, you would not really have any reason to believe in a moral Orderer in any case.
I have always been suspicious of proofs for God or for arguments for His existence. I’m a lawyer and could always see holes in the arguments or make a strong argument, if I wished, for the opposite proposition.
Not having myself witnessed what one might call a miracle (in the sense of a divine intervention which clearly abrogates the laws of nature) I have to confess that I believe in God because I have felt him from an early age. I can’t explain it but, even when my mind could not accept the existence of God, I knew He was there.
If I interact with another human being, but simply treat them as a material object to be used for my gratification, then I am not appreciating their humanity. There is a recognition of personhood, a personal relationship, which (healthy) humans have with one another. It is that same sense of recognition of personhood in the reality behind material reality, I suppose, which I have always felt which leads me to believe in God.
There are many reasons to be pessimistic in life. Sometimes things do turn out for the worst. Very often, the crises and bad things we invent as boogiemen in our minds never come to pass. If a child truly believed it could never walk, it wouldn’t. Believing is a kind of trust. But this trust is actually quite powerful in its consequences. It can raise you to the limits of your physical and mental abilities, beyond where you thought you could go.
If there were no God and no afterlife, human beings would have to invent one. They would have to invent one in order to draw the courage to face their existential anxiety. No one knows for sure if God or the afterlife exist. I did not know before I could walk that I could. I did not know that I could become a lawyer and develop a practice. I do not know if I can grow old gracefully, but I believe I can. I do not know if I can face my last years, if I am granted a long life, gracefully given the everpresent fact that I could die at any moment. But we all could die at any moment, we live with this by dismissing the possibility as highly improbable. Later in life, it gets more probable. In times of war or violence, it gets more probable as well. Courage is hard to come by for many.
Death seems to many to be a “dead end”. Science can only tell us what happens to our material bodies. It does not presume to detect or measure the soul. One can assume that human experience ends at the death of the body, but this is an assumption. Science has evolved greatly over the centuries and millenia. I see no more reason to place the final say on life after death, the soul, or God in this generation of scientists as opposed to the early “scientists” of the ancient Greeks.
In the end, it is better to judge the utility of belief in God, or in this or that particular faith, than to presume that the final authority on objective reality is the scientific consensus of this age as opposed to a thousand years ago or a thousand years from now.
It is risky to believe, but it is also rewarding. We are always in the position of ultimately not knowing. Ptolemaic astronomy is outdated, as will ours be one day. Scientists centuries in the future will amuse themselves at the mistakenness of theories we assume to be laws. Some things are important enough to believe without direct, immediate evidence.
Scott, if there were no continuation of life, therefore no God with us, we would be wholly different beings unable to conceive of such a concept. We intuit what is actually there.
I doubt that. There are neither Aesir nor Amitabha Buddhas. Human beings do have a fantastic capacity for imagination. That does not mean that anything we can imagine is actually real. Really, proofs for God strike me as being not only not persuasive but as actually tending to turn off thinking people.
Scott,
I may not agree with your beliefs, but I respect that you have the intellectual honesty to admit that no one knows for sure that God exists, and that arguments for God you have heard have holes. You seem to respect the truth too much to overstate your case, which is admirable.
Indeed, human beings have invented multitudes of gods and afterlives. Many people may rely on religion to draw courage; others put aside their crutches and face their existential anxiety on their own two feet. I’ll take a uncomfortable truth over a comforting lie any day. And I think you, too, can find in yourself the courage to face that this life is the only one we know we are going to get, so we must make the most of it.
Funny story: in 1907, a physician named Dr. Duncan MacDougall tried to measure the weight of a human soul. He observed people before, during, and after death, measuring their changes in weight. Although his methodology was flawed and his measurements of post-mortem weight loss varied considerably, since his first test subject lost three-quarters of an ounce, there is a pseudoscientific maxim in some circles that the soul weighs 21 grams.
If souls have a measurable impact on the universe, then science can presume to measure that impact.
Until there is good evidence of life after death, the soul, or God, I see no reason to believe in them. What is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. Without evidence, you have no case.
So, if I understand you correctly, you think it is better for your beliefs to be useful, than for your beliefs to be correct.
Like, when a terminal patient asks their doctor what their chances of recovery are, a doctor might lie that their prognosis is good, because it is more useful to their recovery to give them false hope than give them truth.
Science’s dustbin of discarded hypotheses grows ever fuller, and our present’s discards may seem as silly to future eyes, as past discards like Lamarckism seem to us. Don’t confuse scientific theories and scientific laws, though, they are different things with different purposes; I explain this in another comment here.
Robin,
“Many people may rely on religion to draw courage; others put aside their crutches and face their existential anxiety on their own two feet. I’ll take a uncomfortable truth over a comforting lie any day. And I think you, too, can find in yourself the courage to face that this life is the only one we know we are going to get, so we must make the most of it.”
Yes, but thereby you place yourself at a disadvantage. Neither of us knows whether God exists. You choose not to believe in Him because you find no evidence to do so (a kind of Occam’s razor approach). I choose to believe in Him not because of evidence (at least primarily) but because of the utility of the belief. I do not look at God as a scientific proposition or theory to be proven or disproven.
Much of success in life, whether spiritual, emotional, financial, etc., depends on emotional managment – - summoning and retaining hope, motivation and an attitude that cannot be dissuaded by challenges and obstacles. I choose to put more emphasis on the fact that I don’t know that there is not a God. Thus I can take advantage of the benefits of theism. Essentially, given no direct evidence at all regarding God or the afterlife, I choose to be optimistic regarding it and feel rewarded in my emotional attitude toward life, death and eternity. If I am wrong, I certainly will never know it.
One of the most insightful sayings in all of religion comes from Cha’an Buddhism (the Chinese counterpart of Zen). A teacher named Mo-tzu was approached by one of his disciples who asked him, “Why do you teach that mind is Buddha?”. He replied, “To keep a baby from crying”.
Now, I’m not saying that I know that “Mind is Buddha” (or perhaps the Christian equivalent, “God is the source of Grace”) and I’m not saying that I know that, “Mind is not Buddha”; what I am saying is that it is impossible to know the truth of the matter and that teaching that “Mind is Buddha” does keep the baby from crying.
In materialistic terms, or in terms of academic logic, I have to proof, evidence or case for the proposition that there is a God; nor do I know of any evidence that negates this proposition. That is why I suggested that theism is a proposition that really should not be decided based on materiality but utility.
“So, if I understand you correctly, you think it is better for your beliefs to be useful, than for your beliefs to be correct.”
Not exactly. What I am saying is that the only way to know whether there is a God and an afterlife is to die. Either you will experience an afterlife and God or you will experience nothing. You take on faith that the latter is the truth. I take on the evidence that I don’t know and that it is impossible to know in this life. Correctness is not possible. There is no verification. In the absence of verifiable knowledge, because of its utility, and because of “intuition”, I choose to believe in God.
Incidentally, Robin, you will not find any harsh condemnation of your views or reasoning coming from me. I sympathize with your point of view and believe that you are sincere in your convictions and are discussing these matters in good faith. I am amused by the whole discussion regarding evolution as well. Before I first came on this site, I had never met nor read anything by any Orthodox writer that denied the basic theory behind evolution. In Fr. Seraphim Slobodskoy’s book, The Law of God, which is widely used as a catechism in the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (one of the most conservative jurisdictions in this country) the author is very candid about the “days” mentioned in Genesis being undefined periods of time or eras and states that “days” are used in this way in other places in the Bible and in the Fathers.
I also am skeptical of the whole thesis that atheism necessarily leads to mass murder in the vein of Stalin or Hitler. It all depends on what the atheist or group of atheists decides to believe regarding morality. I would say that religion does have the advantage of providing a fixed standard of morality that endures over generations, regardless of whether its adherents follow that standard. At least it is a reminder that can be revived if it falls into disregard. That seems better to me that depending on any – - and I do mean any – - moral framework that any particular atheist comes up with and can convince others to enact. Nonetheless, I am sure there are many atheists whose moral views, apart from their atheism, are superior to those of some theists.
Robin:
Robin: There is rampant and persistent confusion in your mind!
Atheists constantly accuse Christianity of being made up of bloody people, hypocritical in their teachings of love and kindness.
Pagan and atheistic societies have killed far more people (mainly Christians) than more than several of the major religions combined.
Your analysis should go much deeper than you’ve shown so far.
The rot started a few centuries ago with the age of great spiritual darkness, called ‘the Enlightenment’. The West proclaimed: “God is dead”; “There is no God, therefore I am”. Atheism developed in two different forms: first came the Communism, exported to Russia, proclaiming: “I hate God”. Then came the fratricide of Fascism: “I hate other men”. These views are totally anti-Christian. The Nazis were fundamentally anti-Christian while devout Christians were anti-Nazi. How is our atheism different than the “old” atheism? Can you predict how will it develop after you are gone?
I wasn’t a bloody hypocrite when I was a Christian, but you can’t deny Christianity has a lot of hypocrites. For example, those who backed Proposition 8 in California to break up same sex marriages (predominantly Mormons) were huge hypocrites.
I don’t think you can back up that groundless charge. The Third Reich alone adds some 60 million to Christian societies’ death toll just for openers, without even delving into the holy wars of antiquity.
That would make Communism theistic, undermining your ‘argument’.
I can try. In future generations, religion’s attrition will continue, until in industrialized societies, gods are mostly irrelevant fringe beliefs, sort of like astrology today. Religious holidays which were proclaimed national holidays will grow almost entirely secularized, like Halloween already has, and Easter and Christmas are becoming. In the future, the word “atheist” will fade from use, because atheism will be normal, unworthy of note, like being an “afairyist”.
And human nature being what it is, there will still be dogmas, and prejudices, and wars. People just won’t justify them with gods so much. Because that
would sound silly.
Actually yes, if you use Nietzsche as a guide. He says the next century will be worse than the last. Sorry, but I can’t find the source.
Robin: Communism is the supreme atheistic government and Nazis were fake Christians; Nazis were pagan.
Paul writes to the Church of Corinth “Expel the wicked man among you.” The failure to follow this command by all Christians has directly led to the loss of faith in Christian doctrine and ultimately to atheism. You and many others try to paint Nazis as Christians. This is the “politically correct” history.
The Swastika against the Cross: The Nazi War on Christianity
http://www.hyperhistory.net/apwh/essays/comp/cw01christianity.htm
http://www.ww2f.com/sacred-cows-dead-horses/30247-nazism-christian-religon.html
49.1.1.1.1
Robin Lionheart says:
December 30, 2010 at 6:46 PM • Edit
Hans:
Not all atheists follow the atheist ideological trajectory Robin. That should be clear. That atheism is the philosophical ground of killing fields however, well the historical record is quite clear on that as well.
As for atheists dying in concentration camps and gulags, yes, that happened. It happened to a lot of Russian Marxists too. All this proves is that the killers were indiscriminate.
You see, it comes down to this: The phrase “Atheism provides no rationale for anything” contains within it the seeds of the barbarism we saw revealed. When no “rationale” exists, when great social questions are reduced to the furtive cry of nothingness, the vacuum is filled with many things such as secular utopianism, utilitarianism, you name it.
If you want to keep this phrase as an expression of private piety, fine. The problem is that too many atheists like social engineering projects, especially under compulsion. Even non-believers for whom atheist nihilism is just to much to swallow make this same point as I am sure you know.
Hans:
So, to summarize your buffoonishly stupid argument: if something provides no answer to great social questions, it provides a rationale to kill others.
Therefore, heliocentricism (among many other -isms), in providing no answer to social questions, leaves a vacuum to be filled by rationales to kill others.
According to Jacobse-illogic, by providing no rationale for anything, heliocentricism provides a rationale to kill others.
Congratulations, Hans, you’ve graduated from inane to asinine.
Syllogisms, comparisons, trite rebuffs work in atheist circles (it’s how atheists prove to themselves how stupid Christians are), but in the real world they carry no weight at all, Robin. Your problem is that atheism has no intellectual tradition, no art, no literature, it just hasn’t produced much (except a lot of blood, unfortunately).
Atheism has a historical problem. Everyone accepts that except the atheist. It’s an indisputable fact. That atheists can’t accept it is, I think, reflective of the intellectual paucity of atheism. As I said upstream, even non-believers who cannot accept the implicit nihilism in the atheist outlook mention it as one of their chief problems with atheism.
Syllogisms and comparisons also work in intellectual circles, debate circles, and academic circles. In places where logic is valued, generally. However, you are correct that logic carries no weight with some. Sadly, in “the real world”, your preferred tactics of demagoguery, fearmongering, and demonization can be more effective.
It’s an easily disputable fact, as all of my comments to this post demonstrate. That atheists don’t accept it, I think, reflective of you being pigheadedly wrong and not knowing jack about atheism.
Like whom? Do any such non-believers exist? If you can find any, I have great news for them: atheism does not imply nihilism.
Well, I don’t want to pile on. You’ve got three other people arguing with you.
Actually, I know more about atheism than you do. I understand the philosophical ground and implications, I know the history, I know it has no credible intellectual tradition, or art, or literature, I know the nihilism it portends.
Most important I know that your assertion that atheism is nothing more than the non-acceptance of the transcendent betrays a historical naivete. If you want to believe this, be my guest, but understand that it is woefully insufficient in defending the atheist cause.
So, I will let this go. In closing, here is a good article to read (if you dare!) that draws from the ash heap of the great atheist experiments of the last century:
Awakening from Nihilism: The Templeton Prize Address.
When atheist apologetics can actually weave a coherent analysis and critique of culture that rises above resentment to produce something enduring, well, maybe I will change my tune. Haven’t see it yet though and I don’t think I will. Atheism simply can’t conceive of it.
BTW, I finally heard the first intelligent analysis to my debate with Matt Dillahunty by an atheist. This guy gets it. I don’t buy his answer, but he understands things that Dillahunty and his supporters (and you) have not.
Hans, 5.1.1.1.1:
Says the man who knows that almost all atheists are Marxists. Proving that you haven’t got a clue.
Not only did I not assert that, I presented myself as a counterexample in 1.1.1.1.3:
Don’t try to put words in my mouth, because in my experience, you’re wrong about what atheists assert every single time.
You lost coherence with the oxymoron “atheist apologetics”.
Mark Michael Lewis is apparently not an atheist, since his book blurb begins “The Key Is In The Darkness invites you to discover the love and beauty that come from a deep connection with Divinity…”
Sheesh, Mark thought po-mo drivel like “you guys have no truth, there’s no transcendent realm where truth can exist” was a good argument? But he does seem to express your argument more clearly than you do.
Robin, you’d have a rather hard time marshalling any evidence that Nazi Germany was in anyway Christian.
Did Hitler or any of his associates accept the Nicean Creed as a foundation for their belief?
Did Hitler or any of his associates worship Jesus Christ by celebrating His Incarnation, Crucifixtion, Resurrection and Ascension?
Did they practice any sort of prayer or repentance seeking forgiveness of sins.?
Did they in any way shape or form attempt to propagate the fundamentals of Christian faith: Love God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength. Love your neighbor as yourself? However short one may fall in one’s attempt to live as Christ commands, the are still His commands?
Was their law founded upon Christian principals?
The mere allusion to a Christian residue does not make a person or a nation Christian. Appropriating Christian rhetoric and misusing our symbols does not make one a Christian. At best the Nazi’s were chiliastic apostates from the faith but IMO they were much worse than that. Fundamentally, National Socialism under Hitler was an evil ideology that looked for any camoflage it could find in its initial effort to seduce the German people and win control. They sought death, not life.
Mormans are not Christian, BTW. Neither are JW’s. There is an extensive list of religious bodies who claim the title of Christian without any aherence to the fundamentals of Christianity. I suspect that your prior experience may have been in just such a body, but maybe not. As Christians, we have done a horrible job of defining what Christianity means. Historically that is, as Eliot briefly describes the result of the Islamic captivity of Christianity in the east and the captivity to rationalistic/humanism in the west. Russian Christians had the additonal yoke of the total depravity of communism.
Of course, mere mental ascent to a bunch of doctrinal statements does not make one a Christian either. To be a Christian requires effort. Christians are called to be not of this world. We are also in this world and function here as best we can, but ultimately empirical standards of evidence and logic cease to have any real function or meaning in the Christian life. They are limited tools with a limited function that is as transient as the world itself. The confines of human thought are simply too restrictive to allow for the transcendent and abundant life given to us by Jesus in his Incarnation.
While I agree with Scott that God’s existence cannot be proved (or disproved), His existence can be known without a shadow of doubt while His non-existence can only be postulated. BUT, His existence is a revealed existence not a learned one. “He who has eyes to see, let him see–ears to hear, let him hear”
As a Christian, I am required to witness to what I know. I know God is and that He forgives out of ineffable, unfathomable love. He can be known through His Incarnate Son and our Lord, Jesus Christ. Such knowledge is available to anyone who opens their heart in humility rejecting the illusion of self-sufficency and autonomy.
Not hard at all. I find that German Army belt buckle with “GOTT MIT UNS” (God is on our side) around a swastika to be a damning Exhibit A.
Probably yes, yes, and yes.
As with everything in the Big Book of Multiple Choice, not all Christians interpret the Bible the same way. The medieval biblical exegete Rashban said of “love your neighbor” that “if your neighbor is good [love him], but if he is evil, ‘the fear of the Lord is to hate evil’” (Proverbs 8:13).
You seem to enjoy a popular Christian pastime of saying that any follower of Christ who doesn’t share the doctrines of my church isn’t a true Christian. It’s like that “no true Scotsman” story:
Scotsman A: “You know, laddie, no Scotsman puts sugar in his porridge.”
Scotsman B: “Is that so? I seem to recall my cousin Angus puts sugar in his porridge”
Scotsman A: “Aye… but no true Scotsman puts sugar in his porridge.”
As I use the term “Christian”, all y’all are Christians, even Quakers who don’t believe in the divinity of Christ. Catholic pedophile priests and Nazis who committed genocide in Christianity’s name may be very bad Christians, but they’re still Christians.
Not doubting isn’t “knowing”, it’s just credulousness.
You seem to enjoy a popular Christian pastime of saying that any follower of Christ who doesn’t share the doctrines of my church isn’t a true Christian.
No, it is just that there are beliefs that are Christian and beliefs that are not Christian. Christianity has a duty to articulate which are which and not allow confusion and the world to do the job.
The beliefs of the Mormans depart from a Christian understanding of God, man and creation on just about every level and particular. Actually, their theology, such that it is, is more polytheistic than monotheistic. They are not followers of the theandric savior Jeus Christ, fully God and Fully Man of one essence with the Father. The specifically reject the Nicean Creed and all traditional Christian expressions of the faith and subsitute their own cosmogenic fantasy. That they may agree on some superficial matters of public morality does not make them Christian.
The hard work of articulating Chrisitan doctrine was accomplished over, roughly, the first 800 years of the the Church’s temperal existence.
1. Many of the core beliefs of that common heritage are held by Orthodox, Catholics and Protestants, who despite our sinfulness are striving to, by God’s grace, become more as God created us to be.
2. There are many in each tradition that speak the core beliefs with their lips and deny them in every other way.
3. There are those in each tradition who actively seek to undermine the Christian faith for ideological reaons
4. There are those who, like you, deny everything about the Christian faith.
5. Then there are those who actually hate God yet seek to seduce as many as possible in groups 2 & 3 especially for the purpose of doing evil. National Socialism is an example.
It is interesting that you, the champion of empiricism present no real evidence in response to my questions, just conjecture based upon your own bias. The one specific you mention: the belt buckle that says God is with us could easily fall into the seduction category (Christian symbols appropriated for the sake of and use of evil). In any case, I’d want to ask “Which God?” As an empiricist, you need to support your claim that National Socialism was Christian with specific documentary evidence and a clear connection to a specific Christian confession of belief. Otherwise you are merely accepting on faith those you are predisposed to believe.
Nothing of Nazi agenda, methods or the fruits of their labors is even remotely Christian.
Credulousness is simply an unwillingess to investigate or challenge the nature of things. It is laziness and has little to do with dobut or faith either one.
I know God is real because I once doubted but sought the truth. That journey, which began consciously and in ernest some 40 years ago, is still in progress. Along the way, any dobut that I had about God’s existence vanished. Now, I question myself and the extent to which I am more or less like God. The answer is obvious, but I persist anyway because I still seek the truth.
• “Truth is not just an abstract idea, sought and known with the mind, but something personal—even a Person—sought and loved with the heart, Jesus Christ”
Fr. Seraphim Rose
Michael:
Didn’t follow the link, eh?
When I write comments like “We can see love on an MRI.“, “Gorillas can learn sign language and dolphins can do math.”, or “It is undeniable that Naziism was steeped in Christian rhetoric and Christian iconography.”, those links lead to articles backing those statements up.
Faith is credulousness. Or as I said in 38.1.1.1, “faith is intellectual laziness unbefitting a seeker of truth.” Like Matt says, faith as an excuse people give themselves to believe things for no good reason.
Pat Condell describes faith more harshly, “It’s a word that lets you believe what you’ve been told to believe, without feeling that you’ve been told what to believe, but you have, and you can stop pretending any time you like. It’s not a virtue, that’s the last thing it is. It’s an abdication from reality. It’s a dumb act of self-hypnosis. It’s a cowardly cop-out. It’s gullibility with a halo, and hiding behind it is like pretending to be an invalid.”
That’s probably the point where you lost your way. I hope your search for truth leads you back to reality someday.
Michael:
Didn’t follow the link, eh?
When I write comments like “We can see love on an MRI.“, “Gorillas can learn sign language and dolphins can do math.”, or “It is undeniable that Naziism was steeped in Christian rhetoric and Christian iconography.”, those links lead to articles backing those statements up.
Faith is credulousness. Or as I said in 38.1.1.1, “faith is intellectual laziness unbefitting a seeker of truth.” Like Matt says, faith as an excuse people give themselves to believe things for no good reason.
Pat Condell describes faith more harshly, “It’s a word that lets you believe what you’ve been told to believe, without feeling that you’ve been told what to believe, but you have, and you can stop pretending any time you like. It’s not a virtue, that’s the last thing it is. It’s an abdication from reality. It’s a dumb act of self-hypnosis. It’s a cowardly cop-out. It’s gullibility with a halo, and hiding behind it is like pretending to be an invalid.”
That’s probably the point where you lost your way. I hope your search for truth leads you back to reality someday.
No, Nazis were not bad Christian, they were wicked people. Many wicked people “converted” or more correctly, “infiltrated” Roman Catholicism or other denominations. We have been forewarned: “Expel the wicked man from among you”.
“By their fruit you will recognize them. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles?”
A very interesting analysis of atheism. “He who has eyes to see, let him see–ears to hear, let him hear”
GOVERNMENT-SPONSORED ATHEISM AHEAD:
IDOLS, DEMONS, ATHEISM AND THE LAST JUDGEMENT
Eliot:
Kinda silly of you to argue with someone who doesn’t exist, then, Eliot.
Sure I can.
I cannot deny the possibility that a god or gods exist, but I do not believe any gods exist, therefore I am an atheist.
Scott cannot deny the possibility that no gods exist, but he believes a god exists, therefore he is a theist.
Admitting you could be wrong doesn’t mean you’re not a theist/atheist, it means you’re an open-minded theist/atheist.
Robin: It is foolish to ignore all the generations that lived before saying there’s nothing I can learn from it, they were all wrong. Life is too short for us to understand everything. One needs no fancy philosophical arguments to realize that something dreadful infects humankind pushing it to sin and from sin to insanity by deceiving souls into a complacent and destructive mindset. I prefer brute truths. The devil is real. They are powerful beings beyond what is natural. It is said that the most cunning trick of Satan is to make us believe that he does not exist. He has got you! You are a blind insisting that you can see better than all the other people. We are at war; every Christian’s life is a warfare with Satan, and his principalities and powers.
“Put on all the armor that God has forged, that you may be able to make a stand against the devil’s cunning tricks.”
Elder Paisios:
Eliot:
So why are you so quick to dismiss the time-tested findings of generations of scientists?
Yes, to believe that, one merely needs imagination.
Sounds like you prefer fantasy.
Then ride up to his legions on your unicorn and lop their heads off with your +2 vorpal sword.~
I do not dismiss the time-tested findings of generations of scientists. I do have a problem with bad science, bad scientists and pseudo-scientific nonsense which was specifically designed to “prove” that there is no God.
Making fun or just being silly does only show that you are very superficial. I told you: wake-up, there is too much at stake! I don’t get upset. One cannot get upset when one sees a sick or a blind person. I just feel compasion for you.
St. Luke Archbishop of Simferopol the Surgeon
http://full-of-grace-and-truth.blogspot.com/2008/10/st-luke-archbishop-of-simferopol.html
Eliot:
So, since you reject the theory of evolution, common descent, and measurements of the earth’s age, do you consider all of those to be specifically designed to prove there is no God, rather than earnest attempts to understand reality as it truly is? Why do you suppose some people accept that science, yet remain Christians? Have they just not understood their full implications?
By warning me about a make-believe boogeyman.
In the interest of reciprocation, and in utmost concern for your well-being, I have a very important warning for you: Don’t fall asleep, or Freddy Kruger may kill you in your dreams.~
Eliot:
So, since you reject the theory of evolution, common descent, and measurements of the earth’s age, do you consider all of those to be specifically designed to prove there is no God, rather than earnest attempts to understand reality as it truly is? Why do you suppose some people accept that science, yet remain Christians? Have they just not understood their full implications?
By warning me about a make-believe boogeyman.
In the interest of reciprocation, with utmost concern for your well-being, I have a warning for you too: Don’t fall asleep, or Freddy Krueger may kill you in your dreams.~
A Nightmare on Elm Street’s last words
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1179056/
Robin:
I have often wondered why scientists claim that the earth (and the entire solar system) is 4.6 billions years old. What scientific evidence do evolutionists use to support their argument that the world and universe is 4.6 billions years old? What did I find:
The technique of radiocarbon dating was developed by Willard Libby and his colleagues at the University of Chicago in 1949.
Why should evolutionists bother to discuss it honestly. Evolution is the only one theory in all science books.
There is plenty of evidence to explain the origin of the universe and life in startling “new” way.
Fingerprints of Creation
The Young Age of the Earth
Radioactive dating method ‘under fire’
Robin: I prefer prayers not silly rhymes.
Living an Orthodox Life: Prayer
Eliot, since one hopeful fairytale deserves another:
Jiminy Cricket
* * *
Here is the Spiritual Director: Father Arsenie Papacioc
Eliot quotes Fr. Arsenie Papacioc:
You’ll find out, Arsenie, when Allah damns you as a heretic for idolizing Jesus as a god.~ For so it is written, “Indeed, they who disbelieved among the People of the Scripture and the polytheists will be in the fire of Hell, abiding eternally therein. Those are the worst of creatures.” (Qu’ran 98:6)
And what if you and every Christian you know stepped on the wrong bridge, a bridge marked “Jesus” that gives way beneath your feet, plunging you into the abyss.
Arsenie takes a terrible gamble with his eternal life, and the holy Qu’ran says he will burn in hell forever. Does this not concern you?
You already know why it does not concern me.
Islam copied most of the stories from the Bible. The Ottoman authorities always “stressed” on the conversion of Christians to Islam. The wars on the pre-Islamic Albania were among the bloodiest in the Balkans. Today Albania is a mostly a Muslim nation. Robin, you are not a muslim (and free to call yourself atheist) because others before you sacrificed their own lives to defend Christianity. Orthodoxy was defended by valiant confessors of the Faith.
The unshaken Christian belief and the spirit of sacrifice is highly illustrated by St. Martyr Emperor Constantin Brancoveanu. He was tempted by the Ottoman rulers to convert to Islam in order to save his life and the lives of his four children. Having a deep faith that the soul is infinitely more precious than some extra miserable years of life on earth, he refused that offer. (See Saints Branconeni Icon). Like all atheists, you are proud of your spiritual ignorance and freely renounce your own immortal soul being under the illusion that you are wise, intelligent and educated.
http://valahia.wordpress.com/2010/08/16/martyr-voivode-brancoveanu/
Just as Christianity copied much of its mythology from the Torah. Neither religion is original.
Thus if you’d been born into most families in Albania, you’d've been raised Muslim. Largely because of where and to whom you were born, you are doomed to Islamic hell. It hardly seems fair that billions are damned mainly because of an accident of geography, but Muslims say that we finite beings cannot understand Allah’s infinite wisdom.~
I’m an atheist because there’s no reliable evidence to support a belief in any gods, no matter whose.
So his four children literally died for nothing, since souls do not exist. Another five to chalk onto major religions’ death toll.
Muslims, too, have martyrs who bowed their heads to their Christian executioners and met their death with unshaken faith. Lots of people have died for silly beliefs.
Intelligent and educated though I am, if I were wise, I probably wouldn’t spend so much time arguing with you. Not fortunate enough to be “spiritually ignorant”, though. So many wasted Sunday mornings. No, I was raised and Confirmed as a Christian and taught, as we often recited, to believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy Christian church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. (My denomination preferred the Apostles’ Creed.) In fact, reading the Bible for myself was a big step toward giving up my Christianity. (“Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.” – Isaac Asimov)
Still … Pagan and atheistic societies have killed far more people (mainly Christians) than more than several of the major religions combined. The devil is real and he hates mankind. No fancy arguments needed to understand who pushes humankind to sin and from sin to insanity. The atrocities in the atheist Soviet Union tell the complete story of the most murderous regime ever. See the Soviet Story
Again: Elder Paisios teaches: “The devil does not hunt after those who are lost; he hunts after those who are aware, those who are close to God. He takes from them trust in God and begins to afflict them with self-assurance, logic, thinking, criticism. Therefore we should not trust our logical minds. Never believe your thoughts.
Sorry for you … my dear lost brother.
Robin, Eliot, et al.,
I’m not sure what science or evolution have to do with the question of God’s existence. I will freely admit several truths: It is not possible to prove God’s existence logically or, by arguments from design, incontrovertably. Also, it is not possible to prove by scientific means or by logic that God does not exist.
Now, the much more interesting question, it seems to me, is why, under those circumstances, some people want to believe in God and some others want to believe there is no God. I think the real game here is in people’s motivations.
Eliot says he has a problem with science to be “specifically designed to “prove” that there is no God”, though he didn’t answer whether he includes evolutionary theory in that group. My impression is that Eliot regards God and evolution as mutually exclusive. I didn’t when I was Christian.
If gods existed, they could provide proof of their existence. And it is possible to prove that some kinds of gods don’t exist. A god that always gives you what you pray for, for example, is trivial to disprove: Just pray that everyone on earth with cancer be cured tonight. It won’t happen.
Speaking for myself, for any proposition, if it is true, I want to believe it; if it is false, I want to not believe it. Keeping only beliefs that I can justify is my way of maximizing that function.
Robin:
Rampant confusion…but as I said, I don’t blame you. The evolutionism comes from the ancient pagan believes and it is not compatible with the existence of God. Contemporary philosophers with theological pretensions hurried to reconcile evolution -a hypothesis based on no evidence – with the Gospel. They invented “theistic evolution” which is the view that evolution occurred, but was planned and guided by God.
About Evolutionism by Ioan Vladuca
(Emphasis added)
Eliot:
So I inferred correctly. I’m not sure what you mean by “evolutionism” here, but from context, you seem to mean “evolution as a religion”, which doesn’t exist.
Universal common descent is a theory based on overwhelming scientific evidence. This does contradict various religious creation myths, including the Garden of Eden myths of the Abrahamic religions. Some deal with the falsity of the two (contradictory) creation myths in Genesis chapters 1 and 2 by interpreting it as an allegorical story; others, like day-agers, by creatively twisting the language to try (and fail) to fit the story to scientific facts.
You then quote Ioan Vladuca:
What a dirty lie! Ioan not only misrepresents Darwin’s sentiments as opposite of what he really stated, but also uses a phony quote to do it. Contrary to Ioan’s disgustingly dishonest calumny, what Darwin actually wrote in The Descent of Man is this:
You just spread a propagandistic lie, Eliot. If you would argue in good faith, you need to do better at vetting your sources.
Revised January 4, 2011
Eliot, Darwinian evolution (a process of linear development) would not have been conceptually possible in the pagan world because the notion of linear time and thus progress, require Christian philosophical presuppositions. This notion entered the world through Genesis, the narrative that portrays time and space as created, rather than eternal entities. This radical break from paganism, to which the entire world was subject until Christ entered the world, was even difficult for Christians to fully comprehend at first (Origen for example, despite his brilliance, could never shake the notion of circular time), and it would be many centuries later before the full power (freedom really) of these concepts would bear fruit. The scientific system in other words, could not have developed anywhere except in a Christian culture.
Darwin was a philosophical materialist. His theory (randomness in particular) is wholly dependent on philosophical materialism. I approach the Christian – atheist debate in terms of the history of ideas (I have to leave the science to others). Freud fell, Marx fell, and I believe that the Darwinian collapse is inevitable as well. Taking a long view it might be that Dawkins, Hitchens, and the other radical atheists represent little more than the last gasps of a dying philosophy.
My theory doesn’t speak to the ardency of the atheists of course. Their unquestioned faith in the power of their own logical processes leaves little room for any challenge from the outside. Nevertheless, atheism as we understand it today is wholly dependent on Christian presuppositions. Atheism can only arise in a Christian culture. It’s a conceptual impossibility anywhere else. Atheism presumes monotheism. Christianity is the source of both the logical concepts the atheist uses to deny it and the moral concepts and vocabulary he uses to discredit it.
Furthermore, a rejection of God, of the transcendent, does not portend a return to paganism. That, I think, is a historical impossibility because the light that came into the world by Christ, is real light. Christ in not a concept, an organizing principle, the unmoved mover of Aristotle or the great designer of Plato (as prescient as some of those concepts were), but the one through whom Creation is reconstituted in space and time. The birth, death, resurrection of Christ is an incontrovertible brute fact the ramifications of which are evident if one has eyes to see. Further, the denial or rejection of this thesis doesn’t change negate the fact; it merely leaves nihilism as the last remaining option.
The atheist disputes this of course. He sees atheism as a road to enlightenment. But here too we see the notion of moral and material progress, albeit temporalized. The atheist moves forward thinking that eschewing all things non-material is progress; that the process of reason alone is sufficient to find the meaning and purpose of all things. Again, it’s a conceptual framework wholly dependent on the Christianity it denies. Lacking sufficiency to fulfill this hope of enlightenment however, it will in the end either be abandoned or directed into a will to power. Those are the only two possibilities. We have seen the horror of the later in the last century and discussed this before.
I would not be surprised to see some of the atheists embrace Islam in the end if, God forbid, the West collapses and we are forced to choose between slavery or Muhammad. There is congruency between the Muslim notion of a static god (processes and actions are a direct reflection of Allah’s will, no mediating and thus personal agent exists) and the atheist notion of an impersonal universe. Sometimes I wonder, using the biblical imagery (I believe the Jewish/Christian scriptures are the foundational and primordial narrative), if Islam is not the Assyria of the North to us Westerners. Assyria found no favor with God but yet was an instrument of His will; necessary to clarify Israel’s vision and bring them back to the one thing needful. Israel went into bondage. I hope we can avoid that fate.
Hans:
You believe many silly things.
Seems unlikely, when surveys show that atheism is growing and most religions are shrinking.
In the USA, according to the American Religious Identification Survey‘s 2008 results, Christianity is dwindling by about 0.6% a year, and “None” is the fastest growing religious category.
And in recent news, Britain is now a majority nonreligious nation. According to the British Social Attitudes survey’s 2010 result published last month, 42% of Britons now say they were Christians and 51% say they have no religion. When they started taking this survey in 1985, Britain was 63% Christian and 34% no religion. Quite a turnaround for one generation.
Perhaps your anti-atheist fearmongering represents a backlash against shrinking religiosity by a declining religion.
An anti-Muslim fearmonger, too, I see.
If I were forced to choose between slavery or Muhammad, I’d publically pretend to accept Islam, as many atheists in Islamic theocracies do.
Fr. Hans:
What I had in mind was the philosophical speculations about the origin of life, not necessarily Darwinian evolution. The idea that life began with a single element – water – and complex life has arisen from simpler forms of life, had its beginnings with the Greeks about 700 B.C. The other version explained life in terms of the gods of Greek mythology.
Meanwhile, the light of Christ came into the world. The Word becomes flesh and the night of the world becomes day. There are still many who reject the light and call it darkness.
In 51.1.1.1.1, Fr. Jacobse boasted:
Fr. Jacobse once again proves that incorrect by saying:
The word “atheism” originated in a polytheist culture; it derives from ancient Greek ἄθεος (atheos). The term referred specifically to those who rejected their pantheon of gods.
To ancient Greeks (and subsequently to ancient Romans), Christians were “atheists”. Hellenists and Christians both used the Greek term, pejoratively, to describe each other. Its meaning narrowed over time to mean one who disbelieves in not just the speaker’s gods, but all gods.
Atheism itself long predates Greece, however. It predates the oldest living religion in the world, the Aboriginal Dreamtime religion, which has lasted for 47,000 years. Atheism goes back to the dawn of humanity. Before prehistoric cave dwellers first invented deities, everyone was an atheist, they just had no need for the concept.
Hans:
No, the roots of the scientific method were developed by the ancient Greeks, and refined by medieval Muslims.
Robin, your sense of history is, well, so poorly formed. The Muslim “Golden Age” you simplicity refer to was merely the legacy of Byzantium after the conquest. It seems like your historical sense draws from little more than the atheist apologetics you have read.
As for the note above praising the decline of religion, it only applies to Europe and perhaps the US. Haven’t you heard of this book:
(responses combined with following post)
Hans:
No, the roots of the scientific method were developed by the ancient Greeks, and refined by medieval Muslims.
Well, sure, the contributions of the Greeks cannot be discounted. Medieval Muslims? Again, the Muslim “Golden Age” was the legacy of Byzantium as were the texts imported by Muslims into Western Europe that sparked the Renaissance.
Robin, in your rush to discount all things religious, you end up denying incontrovertible historical facts. That, by the way, is why I argue that atheism is ultimately a culture denying movement and why the great atheist experiments of the last century were so bloody. To the dogmatic atheist, Western Culture is an enemy.
Here’s an essay I wrote a while back the thesis of which you may reject but other readers might appreciate:
The Artist as Vandal: Culture and the Desecration of Religious Symbols
Sorry about the duplicate posts, the “Request deletion” button doesn’t work for me anymore, it pulls up a pop-up with the latest blog post instead.
Hans:
My previous comment just cited, without praise or condemnation, statistics that do not support one of your claims. Islam may well be gaining in Third World countries, though I doubt good poll data can be collected in countries where people are killed for being the wrong kind of Muslim.
Hans:
No, that’s you again, when write obvious falsehoods like “Naziism was atheism was Teutonic dress”. Your criticisms keep coming back to such historical revisionism.
Yeah, right from the first paragraph, your characterization of Chris Ofili’s “The Holy Virgin Mary” as “desecration art” and “sacriliege” shows me that you didn’t understand his blending of sacred and profane. And your false description that Ofili “smeared” elephant feces on it reveals that you’re blathering about artwork you’ve never even seen. Another instance of Fr. Jacobse bloviating about things he doesn’t know jack about.
Atheism has no real pedigree, Robin. It has to deny history in order to justify itself. That’s why men who have difficulty with Christianity or Judaism like Berlinsky, Glucksman, Levi, even atheists like Anthony Flew later in life, don’t embrace atheism. It’s a personal struggle for them and I hold no judgment towards them for it. In fact, I profit from their writings because they have not abandoned the search for truth, something that atheism will require of you eventually as it forces you to close yourself to history.
BTW, these men probably would have understood Ofili’s intent. The atheist, in rejecting the transcendent, allows no possibility for the sacred. He will look at the piece with either blank incomprehension, or cheer that a (bourgeois?) symbol of culture he despises was defiled. Your explanation of mixing the sacred and profane employs a category that your polemics does not allow. The confusion, in other words, is on your end and may explain why you don’t really understand it. Ofili, I am reasonably sure, would not agree with you at all.
I’ll leave it at that. It’s a big world out there. There’s a whole lot more to life than atheist apologetics can ever capture.
Hans:
Of course it doesn’t, it’s not descended from anything. Everyone’s born an atheist ab initio.
No, atheism is completely justified as long as the existence of gods is unproven.
A feebleminded old man converting to deism isn’t much of a feather in Christianity’s cap.
I’m an atheist who doesn’t reject the transcendent. Nothing is sacred, however.
This atheist did neither, but instead is endeavoring to school you about it.
That’s beside the point. Sacred is a category to Christian Ofili.
Ofili would say it’s not only about that contradiction, but much more (and much that a priggish old white man like you probably wouldn’t relate to).
“Deep Shit: An Interview with Chris Ofili”, Parkett, May 2000:
Ofili, I am reasonably sure, would not agree with you that it is merely vandalism of a religious icon.
Hans:
Yes, much bigger than you imagine.
Atheism has no doctrines to apologize.
There’s a whole lot more to life than Christian apologetics can ever capture, too. A great many beautiful experiences that the puritanical Christians cut themselves off from. A wealth of wonder and knowledge that the anti-intellectual Christians put on blinders to.
Robin:
Funny … I was raised in an atheist society were religion was mocked. I used to believe (rather I was taught) that religious people were losers unable to understand calculus and science …. as I was. Now I am very thankful to all these brave people who have been standing still and preserved the faith until I finally woke up!
Eliot:
Oh, where are you from? I’m from the United States, where people have a right to believe whatever claptrap they want, and other people have a right to mock them for it. We’re cool that way.
If you set your mind to it, you can learn just about anything. I think your scientific ignorance is curable. If you’d like some suggestions, Jerry Coyne’s “Why Evolution is True” is pretty approachable, and might be a good place for you to start.
Robin:
Is this going to be before or after the mark of the beast (the biometric chip on the right hand or forehead) will be imposed?
Eliot:
There won’t be any atheists left when the mark of the beast is imposed, what with the sky having been rolled up like a scroll, the stars having fallen to earth like figs, every mountain and island having moved from their places, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalyse having killed one quarter of the Earth’s population, an army of 200 million men with breastplates of fire on fire-breathing lion-headed snake-tailed horses led by four angels having killed a third of the remaining 3/4, a great red seven-headed dragon having swept a third of the stars out of the sky onto earth with its tail (apparently they didn’t all fall like figs) then having gotten thrown to earth, a seven-headed ten-horned lion-mouthed bear-footed leopard having risen out of the sea and becoming leader of the world for 42 months, and all who live on Earth now worshipping it. No doubt finding it preferable to a deity whose proxies just slaughtered half the planet. (Revelation 6-13)
Then, after all the world has converted to Beastatarianism, another lamb-horned beast, who rises out of the earth and makes fire come down from heaven to earth in the sight of the people, makes people receive a mark on their right hand or forehead. (Revelation 13)
After which, Jesus comes back wielding a scythe to begin the carnage in earnest among the remaining half of the earth’s former population. (Revelation 14)
Robin:
Is your enthusiasm artificially (chemically) provoked? I find somewhat at odds with your believe that you are going to decompose and perish without a trace. Or, perhaps you are not exercising long-term thinking?
Eliot:
Not on drugs, just high on life.
Perhaps you’re not. You and Nick both remind me of Randall Munroe’s xkcd comic strip entitled “Nihilism”:
Since this is the only life we know we’ll live, live it to the fullest!
Robin:
This is what you wrongly believe not what you know! I do live my life to the fullest. It is true that I experience sometimes sorrow, especially when I see people like you. The person who lacks humility doesn’t want God to get in the way of his desires. You did make a bad bargain!
AMERICAN ATHEISTS– EXPOSED AND CONFRONTED!
Eliot:
You have carelessly misread what I wrote. Go back and read it again, slowly.
Definitely.
Contrariwise, what kind of living to the fullest can a person have when they believe this life is just a place to wipe their feet on their way to a paradise better than anything this world has to offer; when they are certain the greatest joys they may experience this world are nothing compared to what follows your death; when they extinguish their grief over the death of loved ones and cheer for their entrance into a blissful afterlife; when death is anticipated instead of staved off; when they pervert their understanding of “love” and “justice” to include infinite, endless torture; when they believe themselves one a chosen few destined for paradise and harden their hearts to the vast majority of humanity doomed to eternal agony. Why should such a person try to live in this world any longer than they have to, or take medicine or wear seatbelts?
Robin:
Here is the answer to your pueril question:
Suicide is, in effect, self-murder. The one who commits suicide cannot confess his sin and repent. The damage is permanently done.
One sure way to acquire wisdom in this chaotic and depraved world: read the lives of the Saints! There is wisdom preserved over the span of thousands of years. Also, confessors, who spend ten hours a day or more hearing confessions gain a good understanding about how the devil works to deceive people.
I have done my little experiment here with Robin and I conclude that Elder Porphyrios is 100% correct. He says that words are wasted with atheists, rather we should pray for them, because though we cannot touch their minds, but we can touch their hearts. I do not know if I can touch “lionhearts” though.
Eliot, That question wasn’t about committing suicide, it was about not doing things to prolong your life, like go to a doctor, take medicine, or wear seatbelts.
Words changed my mind on Christianity once before. You just haven’t given me a single good argument for your god. That’s not your fault; theologians haven’t come up with any in thousands of years.
Apart from the creation myth of atheist origins (“before prehistoric cave dwellers” and all that), I have little disagreement with your assertion.
The a-theism (“a” can mean in place of, against, or something like in distinction to) of old however was not the a-theism you describe. The notion of not believing in any transcendent or non-material reality, of a purely material basis to reason and knowledge, is new. It would have been incomprehensible to the Greeks, even those who rejected the accepted pantheon of gods.
It is not accurate to say Christians were perceived as atheists in the Roman empire. They were perceived as subversives that threatened to overturn the harmony between gods and state (developed by Diocletian who believed the god Jupiter guided his success, which was substantial btw).*
BTW, most Christians in the early years were Hellenized. It was a Hellenistic world.
My assertion, that modern atheism could only have arisen in a Christian culture is based on the fact that atheist apologetics presupposes monotheism. Atheist deep category thinking is culturally Christian. The great atheists of the last century prove it (Thousand Year Reich, the New Man, Socialist Paradise, etc.).
* Here’s a book that explains late Roman antiquity and the interplay between Christians and the Roman Empire, particularly Diocletian, in great detail (I am reading it now):
Hans:
Your assertion is based on denial of historical facts, and of common sense. Polytheist Hindu cultures have atheists, too. Wherever people worship gods, there are atheists.
Your nonsensical assertions that “Atheism presumes monotheism.” and that “Atheist apologetics presupposes monotheism.” refute themselves. When you say such idiotic things, you are claiming that one can’t believe in no gods without presuming one god. How is it that you still don’t comprehend what the word “atheism” means? It does not mean “materialism”, nor “nihilism”, nor “rejection of the transcendent”; “atheism” just means “not believing in gods”.
The definition is just that, a definition. How you flesh it out, how it directs your thinking, how it plays out in practical terms shows me what the atheist really believes (yes, believes). And, being the creatures of the West that atheists are, their categories are Christian. Where do you think the ideas of the great atheists such as Thousand Year Reich (millenialism), the New Soviet Man or the New Man (redemption), Workers Paradise (millenialism again) came from?
Where do you think your the deep structure of the thesis you outlined above came from? Certainly not paganism or any form of pre-Christian history. The structure, ie: creation myth attached to linear history and progress is exclusively a product of Christian culture.
No, I am not saying that one cannot believe in no gods without presuming one god, at least I am not arguing as a general principle like you are positing here. I wouldn’t do that because I don’t really believe there are atheists in poly-theistic cultures. I think it is a conceptual impossibility. If there are, or if there are people who claim to be, they most likely have been Westernized. I am not saying either that there are not people who are indifferent to their religion. But you are not saying that either. You are saying there is no God.
Despite your definition and denial, your deep structure thinking always presumes one God. The atheist must first posit God in order to deny Him. One must first have A in order to posit non-A. In poly-theism, where you have B, C, D, E… gods and you want to create a catch-all category that captures the multiplicity of gods, well, thank Judaism and Christianity for creating that category for you — “Hear O Israel, the Lord your God is one God.” This development was hard fought and took centuries. It enables you to create the non-A. See how it works?
Hans:
Your despicable Holocaust revisionism doesn’t fool anyone outside your bubble. Hitler was a Catholic, doing what he saw as the work of the Lord, and Nazis committed their genocides in Christianity’s name. No matter how many times you bear false witness about the Holocaust, that truth will never change.
Your referents are unclear. You mean my thesis that claiming that one can’t believe in no gods without presuming one god makes no sense? It’s not all that deep, just basic logic and common sense.
How divorced from reality you are. I’ll name a few: 1998 Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, Hindi filmmaker Amol Palekar, Marathi writer Vijay Tendulkar, and Indian actor and filmmaker Kamal Hasaan.
So by Jacobse-illogic, when I posit “there are no fairies”, there must be fairies.
There are no unicorns. Yay, unicorns must exist!
There are no dragons. Oh no, hide your delicious maidens!
There are no Lovecraftian horrors from a dimension beyond space and time who ate the creator of our universe for breakfast. Well, that about wraps it up for God or Allah or Brahma or Nana Buluku or whoever, then. Hope it doesn’t eat me next, what with my power to gainsay things into existence.
The unicorns, dragons, fantasy figures are, well, unicorns, dragons, and fantasy figures. Words mean things Robin, and in cultural terms the word “God” has tremendous meaning, while unicorns, dragons, and fantasy figures have a lesser and exclusively literary meaning. This doesn’t discount their meaning of course (think Lord of the Rings for example), only that the meaning is of different weight and value. Further, it should be self-evident that the real meaning of things cannot be reduced to syllogism. One doesn’t need to be a believer to see this. One only needs a little knowledge of history and literature.
The “Hitler was a Catholic” apologetic is foolishness. I guess the effort to tie the Catholic Church to Hitler in order to discredit it doesn’t work anymore. (It died I think after Pope John Paul II stared down General Wojciech Jaruzelski — and won.) At least in that apologetic Hitler was recognized as the evil that he was. Now we are to believe the real evil was that Hitler was actually Catholic! Yet, this thesis has absolutely no credibility. The only people I see arguing this are atheists. Can you name one respected historian who defends this thesis? I can’t.
Like I said, they’ve been Westernized.
BTW, my examples included more than Hitler’s millennial Thousand Year Reich. I also included the Soviet New Man, and Socialist Paradise.
What I said was that your sketch of the atheist pedigree contains a creation story, the notion of linear time, the notion of progress, and the assumption that the end of this development is some kind of enlightenment. That’s your basic thesis.
I argue that the deep structure categories that inform this sketch (what you call “common sense”) are exclusively Christian in character. You are a creature of your culture Robin, and you employ the philosophical categories that the Christian faith bequeathed culture in order to deny religious faith altogether. That’s your prerogative of course. Just be aware of where you draw it from.
Another book recommendation (out of print but you can pick up a used copy):
STOP THE PRESSES! IT’S BACK IN PRINT!
Hans:
Indeed, they are fantasy, thus disproving your stupid, stupid argument.
They’re pretty good for showing how illogical your arguments are, though.
No, Hans, I was not stooping to your level and using Hitler to smear Catholics, like you use him to smear atheists. I only mentioned his Catholicism to rebut your lie.
I’m not discrediting the Church, I’m discrediting you, you lying Holocaust revisionist.
Whoa, there. That’s not what I did. Back in 59.1.1.1.1, I agreed with your assertion that atheism has no pedigree:
Okay, continue.
No, no, no, and no, none of those were part of my thesis. You’re completely off base. Go back and read what I actually wrote.
Robin:
It’s not stupid. Words mean things. They mean very different things. And because they do, their impact on culture (how they inform, shape, direct human interaction) differs. Arbitrarily fitting them into some kind of syllogism (God = fairies and so forth) ignores this cultural weight and, in the end, leads to debilitating ignorance. I’m not arguing that you have to believe in God. That is entirely up to you. I am only arguing that your defense of atheism stretches the boundaries of credulity. It requires a denial of history that most people (including many non-believers) are not willing to make.
Just so you know, this idea is a variation of the tabula rasa, the “blank slate” which argues that every child is born without any structure or content. It’s not new, and that the atheist reworks it to encompass religious ideas is, well, a logical development of this particular strain of thought. The strain is controversial though and has plenty of critics. It skirts the fringes of totalitarianism too closely for my taste. Read the Wiki article, note how closely the concept is allied to eugenics, politics, even architecture.
Nothing arises in a vacuum Robin. Not even atheism.
Hans:
Well, you can compare me to Nazis once, you can compare me to Nazis twice, but compare me to Nazis a half dozen times, that talk gets a slapdown.
I made no equivalence, I substituted different things for your variable A, things which proved wrong your very stupid argument. Something does not have to exist for me to deny it exists.
Somehow you got from “everyone’s born an atheist” to totalitarianism. It’s like Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon with you, except Kevin Bacon’s a fascist dictator.
That cliché’s days may be numbered, since according to quantum mechanics, things are constantly arising in a vacuum (and almost instantly annihilating themselves), with no apparent cause.
I’m not comparing you to a Nazi, I am drawing historical parallels to atheism and Nazism. I’m sure there are/were atheists repelled by Hitler. I’m sure there were/are atheists repelled by Stalin. My point is not that all atheists are Nazi’s or Communists, only that Nazism and Communism have atheism as a precondition.
Robin, ideas have consequences, and ideas like “tabula rosa” have been around long enough to where where can examine some of those consequences. I did not say that every one who believes that “everyone is born an atheist” is a nascent totalitarian, I said that the body of ideas that employ that concept skirted too close to totalitarian ideologies for my taste. Did you read the Wiki article? It’s fairly accurate in terms of cultural history.
Draw some clearer distinctions Robin, and don’t take every challenge so personally. It’s not about you. It’s about your ideas.
Hans:
Rather like Naziism had Judaism and homosexuality as a precondition, ’cause those concentration camps weren’t going to fill themselves!
I took a look, but nothing in that article connects tabula rasa to totalitarianism or anything close to it. I expect it’ll probably be as flimsy and fallacious as the leaps of illogic that led you to conclude that it’s conceptually impossible to be an atheist in a Hindu culture.
Robin:
You have been listening to an other “theologian” and you received his word.
I choose to listen to the words of those who suffered a dozen years (or more) of torture in communists prisons and did not lose their faith. Their living testimonies are very powerful “arguments”. Others, who did not suffer, argue that the suffering in the world is a proof that there is no God.
What scares my to death is the fact that I could would have been in your place here, arguing there is no God, had I not escaped the web of lies surrounding me.
I did not try to prove you anything. You’ve made your choice -a bad one I say. In a debate one does not try to prove anything to the atheist. The words are for all those people out there honestly trying to figure out the meaning of life.
Eliot:
Sounds like a description of Tibetan monks like Sonam Dorje, tortured for 13 years in prisons in Chinese prisons. But you wouldn’t be referring to Buddhist words.
If you don’t even try to convince, no wonder you feel words are wasted. You quit before you begin.
Already worked that one out. There’s no apparent meaning, except what meaning we make for ourselves.
You quote Fr. Calciu:
Since one “Truth” deserves another:
So many “Truths” to choose from. I’ll go with what is provably real.
Robin:
If the Christians would have been publically pretending to be pagans you’d still be worshiping stone idols. The almighty God warned us against worshiping false gods or idols. Yes, it is true, it is a very confusing world out there. Some religions are sharing some common themes and doctrines while others are claiming the opposite. We’ve been forewarned: Satan is the master of deception, “he is a liar, and the father of lies,” and “he was a murderer from the beginning.” He knows the Scriptures well and he is intentionally misinterpreting it to confuse us and to destroy our relationship with God. He and his fallen angels are quite adept at preaching “different gospels” and creating new “religious systems.”
I have my own “scientific theory”. We have an impressive collection of scientific theories all dealing with the material world and none of them incorporating the spiritual component of the human nature. We lack a true theory of everything which includes good and evil. Satan is a very good scientist; better than all the scientists of this world put together. As a fallen angel he knows some of the secrets of the Creation. He and his demons know the intimate relationship between mass and energy. They are far more advanced than we are: they can turn themselves from matter into energy and from energy into matter in a fraction of a second and they can actually materialize in bodily form. He and his demons can can cast evil suggestions, in the form of pockets of electromagnetic energy, into our minds and hearts. Researchers can see what is going on across the entire brain; we can see thoughts on MRI, don’t we? Our thought process is affected by these influences and hence we follow/do what comes to our mind. We can be following tampered thoughts and acting upon them or we can follow the teachings of the Church and obey the commandments. Unrestrained passions (pride, anger, greed, lust, jealousy, egoism, etc.) lead to wars, violence, crimes, addictions, abortion and all the evils that we can abundantly observe in our fallen world.
I believe that my theory is in accord with what we observe in our world, with the teachings of the Church and the Holy Fathers and in accord to the scientific observations. St. Paul had the will to resist his fleshly desires, but he lacked the power to perform what he knew was right. Later he came to understand that the power of the Holy Spirit ruling in his life was the only path to victory and he teaches “Walk in the spirit, and you will not fulfill the lust of the flesh.” (Galatians 5:16).
Robin: your choice: “So many “Truths” to choose from. I’ll go with what is provably real” is a mere uneducated guess.
Eliot:
Not me, I’d be a stone idol atheist, too.
Which is why, according to Qu’ran 98:6, he will damn you for worshipping Jesus as a god.~ Allah, in his infinite mercy, warned you.
(Bracing self for unscientific speculation.)
For the same reason we have no scientific theories incorporating magic. Until we establish that either a “spiritual component of human nature” or “magic” exists, it’s rather premature to test hypotheses about how they might work.
Alas, none of Satan’s work has passed peer review, because he’s never been published.
Where’d you learn that, the Monster Manual?
Material forms could provide scientific evidence, though. Hair or tissue samples from one of their materializations would be a good start.
They’d best stick to minds; packets of electromagnetic energy into your heart will only give you arrhythmia.
Either way, though, this electromagnetic energy would be scientifically measurable, providing evidence to back up your story.
A bunch of crap you just made up isn’t a “theory”. However, scientific observations could be made of the sort of demons you describe. You could gather evidence to prove your wild speculations about demonic phenomena, if they’re correct.
No, that’s a decision to not guess.
Robin : Let us move forward. I told you that all the lies and evil in the world come from “the liar, and the father of lies,” and “the murderer from the beginning.” The deception started back in the Eden. To say there is no truth because there are too many lies, well, it does not sound very reasonable to my. Your truth is very questionable.
We have many reference points for orientation to the truth: “By their fruit you’ll recognize them” and you CANNOT Serve Two Masters, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. Neither can you be neutral. There is no such option in the Scripture.
BTW, the Qu’ran says that Jesus will judge the world.
As for the peer review published work concerning satan, do you really expect it from secular governments and agencies? If you read the lives of the Saints you’ll find many interesting clues. The demons were defeated by humans (the saints) and their latest tactics is to make people believe that they (demons) do not exist.
The Gurus, the Young Man, and Elder Paisios
A Fakir’s “Miracle” and the Prayer of Jesus. By Archimandrite Nicholas Drobyazgin
Eliot:
That’s contrary to my experience, where quite a lot of them come from talk radio and Fox News.
Who, Cain? Wouldn’t he be long dead?
Heh, the first one being God telling Adam and Eve not to eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, because on the day they do, they shall die (Genesis 2:17). Adam does, but lives on decade after decade, after decade, after century, after century, after century, after century, after century, after century, after century, after century, after century (Genesis 5:5).
Yes, that would be a stupid, postmodernistish thing to say. Good thing no one here is saying anything like that.
Good thing “my” truths are backed by logic and evidence. Everything should be questioned.
Backing an evident falsehood with the authority of Scripture just discredits Scripture:
Scripture says you cannot be neutral.
People can be, and often are, neutral.
It is not true that you cannot be neutral.
Therefore, what Scripture says is not always true.
And the Qu’ran says that your judgement will be a painful doom forever, that Allah will not relax your punishment, and that your food shall be to eat from the tree of Zaqqum which will burn in your belly like molten brass.
No one said anything like that either. Your reading comprehension seems very deficient, Eliot.
And Betty and Barney Hill were abducted by extraterrestrials (the Greys) and the Air Force conspired to cover it up and make people believe that aliens do not exist.~
You quote testimony of a seance:
And since two testimonials deserve a third:
Robin: You and I are nothing but specks of dust in the vast universe.
If you believe that you are the result of an evolutionary process, perhaps you are honest in your belief. If you believe that the solar system or the eco-sphere we call earth is only the result of blind cosmic chance, well, I’d say that you either are not sincere or you lack sound reasoning. Regarding UFOs and extraterrestrials: if an extraterrestrial (demon or fallen angel) comes after you, call out the name of Jesus Christ and they will flee.
“CHRISTIAN” INTEREST IN UFOS by Blessed Hieromonk Seraphim Rose
Similar to what Michael said, the foundation of my belief is of such a nature and extent that absolutely nothing you say can or will make a dent in it. Human life is surrounded by mystical and incomprehensible phenomena. Only ignorant and thoughtless people can reject the bond between the human soul and the everlasting Spirit of God. I don’t want to discuss it any farther because I can’t bear to see you persisting in the “unpardonable sin”.
Eliot:
If that blind cosmic chance were as remote as one in a billion, then when you look out at the vast universe, you might expect to find one planet like earth amid billions of lifeless planets.
Sounds like our universe.
If only Captain Kirk had known, he could have saved himself a lot of fistfights. Hee hee.
Yeah, I know several people with that character flaw. One of them still believes WMDs will be found in Iraq.
Lightning was a mystical and incomprehensible phenomena once. Native Americans said it was the fire and smoke of the pipes of people from the thunder world whose beating wings sounded like thunder. The Japanese said they were catlike animals falling to earth, whose cries sound like thunder. They were the bolts of Zeus to ancient Greeks, the vajra of Indra to Hindus, spears of Ba’al to Canaanites. Scientifically minded people did not accept those legends, and tried to find the truth, learning meteorology.
Earthquakes were a mystical and incomprehensible phenomena once. Indians said it’s because the elephants holding up the earth moved. The Japanese said the great catfish under the sea upon which Japan lay was moving. New Zealanders said the Mother Earth has the baby god Ru in its belly, and it was kicking. And some said El Diablo was ripping his way out of hell so he and his demons could come wreak havoc. Scientifically minded people did not accept those stories, and tried to find the truth, learning plate tectonics.
So it is with every incomprehensible mystery that baffled our ancestors. Why does the sun rise, why do the seasons change, what are rainbows, where did the first human beings come from? Religions made up stories. Science found the truth.
As our knowledge grows, we have fewer and fewer mysteries for superstitious storytellers to invoke a god of the gaps to explain. What is the origin of the universe? How did life begin? While credulous people cling to ancient myths and take comfort in an illusion of knowledge, scientists seek true answers and real understanding.
What is incomprehensible today, may not be tomorrow, thanks to people for whom fairytales are insufficient.
I doubt you’ll save any souls telling unbelievers you think they’re ignorant and thoughtless. But then, you’ve already decided that mine’s unsaveable:
If my sin of honest doubt is “unpardonable”, then persuading me I’m wrong would do me no good.
It’d even be unkind, making my days before that final judgment unhappy ones. Letting me laugh until I die would be more merciful. (Personally, though, I wouldn’t mind the unkindness.)
Robin: I used the term “unpardonable” on purpose. “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). God is ready to forgive any sin—no matter how heinous—if we come to Him in repentance.
The demon was making funny faces and mocking the monk who prayed to God to save the devil and his demons.
Elder Paisios realized that it was futile to pray for them and that God would save the devil if only the devil and his demons would repent.
Robin, why the hatred of Fox news? I now see that you’re an ideologue and not a truth-seeker. You just rely on talking points. What exactly did Fox news report that wasn’t factual? Or is it simply because they blow away the competition?
George,
I figured Robin was a liberal from his remarks about Proposition 8 in California. This is why I made the observation that in absence of any conclusive evidence one way or another, it is impossible to verify the existence of God. Thus it becomes a choice. Since it is a choice to believe or disbelieve, it may be more insightful and enlightening to examine the reason that people want to believe in God or to believe that there is no God.
I suspect that many on the left reject God as part of a political worldview. Since the God of traditional Christianity (and Orthodoxy Judaism, and Islam) is not at all a progressive sort of fellow, they cultivate not just a rejection based on lack of evidence, but a contempt for the very concept of God. This is similar to liberals’ claims that their ideas are better and that opponents are not intelligent enough to appreciate them. It’s not that leftist atheists ignore an unnecessary hypothesis but that they combat what they consider to be an idea with evil consequences. Leftists are never particulary concerned with objective truth, just ideology. The “truth” is an argument to them. There being no objective “truth”, all propositions are reduced to competing narratives behind which are marshalled favorable “facts”. They are so emotionally attached to their narrative and ideology that they desperately want it to prevail, regardless of the consequences. Thus they do not like to examine, for example, the consequences of socialism wherever it is tried, or the consequences to the black family from the Great Society welfare programs, etc. It’s a very romantic ideology. But it is also willfully blind. It has to be to sleep at night. The standard answer to the effects of self destructive policies is a call for more of the same.
There is another form of this in progress as well. It is called “liberal Christianity”. The idea behind it is that there is no objectively real God; however, the idea of God is useful so long as the clergy can gut the old morality and replace it with progressive morality. Neither of these approaches are particularly successful. “Active rejectionist atheists” will continue to be a fairly small percentage of the population and, as the article I linked pointed out, since their birthrates are much lower than that of theistic people, their ascent seems very unlikely. The “liberal Christianity” atheism has the effect of emptying “liberal Christian churches”. The reason is that real Christians find it anathema and, and this is one of my favorite observations, “liberals don’t need liberal churches to do what liberals do, and liberals know it.”
The whole thing is a deathstyle, not a lifestyle. Secular Europe is disappearing, rapidly. Their welfare states are collapsing. Muslims grow as a percentage of the population, and rapidly, because they have more children than secularists. In the end, who’s right is irrelevant since the existence of God cannot be proven or disproven conclusively. The question is who’s left. This is why I think it is valuable to judge unconfirmable beliefs by the desireability of their effects. But leftist atheists condemn the effects of religion since they conflict with their moral priorities. Hence the value of examining the reason why people want to believe what they do rather than searching for proof of God’s existence or non-existence – - the proverbial blind man in a dark room searching for a black cat that’s not there.
George:
I believe Robin is not a simple atheist, he is working to become an atheist activist. Robin believes that empirical truth exists only in science. The lives of the Saints are quite empirical truths! For him, the countless miracles are “fairytales”. The lives of the Saints are unknown to him.
There are more than 200 million Orthodox Christians worldwide and about 4 million of them live in the United States. Orthodoxy beliefs and practices are unfamiliar to most Americans and Westerners, even if they call themselves “Christians”.
Anglican Archbishop’s, Dr Rowan Williams, first encounter with God was at a liturgy of the Russian Orthodox Church, when he was aged 14.
St. Seraphim of Sarov’s Conversation With Nicholas Motovilov
MATRONA OF MOSCOW: SAINT AND WONDERWORKER
Saint Luke, Bishop of Simferopol and Crimea, the Blessed Surgeon
Eliot, Scott: I’m gonna go out on a limb and state that the type of atheist you are referring to, the type that Robin “Lionheart” appears to be becoming, is not an atheist but an anti-theist. This anti-theism will degenerate (devolve? evolve? transform?) into a very religious system, not unlike Marxism/Leninism. Otherwise it will become nihilistic and destroy itself. Hence, it will be dogmatic and even if science proved the existence of the Triune God, he will refuse to accept it. Yes, it is an ideology but it’s more than that.
There, I said it. We’ll see if I’m onto something or blowing smoke. (BTW, I am enjoying a new pipe today, so technically speaking I am blowing smoke!) What do you think?
The Sadness of Professor Richard Dawkins
The Lord has Risen up in Judgement A Saint Speacks to Europe from Dachau
Eliot:
Snowflakes forming themselves would not be a proof, but a counterargument to the claim that our universe could not form itself.
Neither mysterious nor unknowable, as every step in this process exists in animals living today. Watch Sir David Attenborough explain it easily and simply.
Old Darwin sussed those steps over 150 years ago, in Chapter 6 of Origin of Species:
• photosensitive cell
• aggregates of pigment cells without a nerve
• an optic nerve surrounded by pigment cells and covered by translucent skin
• pigment cells forming a small depression
• pigment cells forming a deeper depression
• the skin over the depression taking a lens shape
• muscles allowing the lens to adjust
More rational than observing galaxies billions of light years away, galaxies our human eyes cannot even perceive, and assuming that this entire vast universe was designed by an intelligent being with the purpose of producing us.
There are tens of thousands who do not, including the most highly qualified ones. As I mentioned to you in 21.1, leading scientists don’t believe in God. Arguments from authority are fallacious enough without citing people who mostly disagree with you.
Indeed, why do you jump to the dogmatic conclusion that there is one? Why are you so egocentric as to believe that we insignificant beings on a tiny rock in an outer spiral arm of one little galaxy among hundreds of billions in just the observable part of this humongously vast universe, are the center of creation? Such arrogance!
The joy of Richard Dawkins:
Finding suitable names for things and ideas for the enormous number of “new things” is necessary in order to be able to communicate our findings. Examples of suitable names for “new things” observed by Darwin : photosensitive cell, aggregates of pigment cells without a nerve, and so on.
We are obliged to create a vocabulary and to find names to attach to new concepts with which science deals. In science, in order to make it possible to communicate and duplicate the results of experiments, we use standard units. Standard units do not prove neither invalidate theories.
You keep using the same argument over and over again: “this process exists in animals living today”, “my cat displays all of those characteristics too”. These resemblances are rather proof of the existence of a Creator who designed both the human body and the bodies of animals. That is a possibility, and I see no reason to insist that evolution is the only possibility. In fact, according to the atheist evolutionist logic one can say that four-wheel vehicles evolved from two-wheel powered vehicles, and two-wheel powered vehicles evolved, over millions of years, from single wheel.
This is called worshiping our own human intelligence, but “what is human intelligence compared to God’s will and knowledge? Not even a single drop in the ocean!”
The following are a few excerpts from the prophecies of the Righteous Dimitri Tarabicz (recorded around the 1850s).
I wrote in 20.1.1.1.1:
Eliot writes:
You completely misunderstood what I wrote, and did not watch that three minute video, if you mistook those for the same argument.
For eyes, I made a very different argument: For each transitional stage of eye development, an animal with that sort of eye is living today. We have living examples of every step from photosensitive cell to human eye, and also of ones more capable than ours, like squid eyes which can see polarization of light and don’t have the flaws of ours, like backwards rods and cones or blind spots where our optic nerve runs on top of the retina instead of beneath. (If our badly structured eyes were designed, their designer botched the job terribly!)
No, “evolutionist logic” contradicts your stupid metaphor. Vehicles are neither alive, nor capable of reproducing themselves, nor natural.
No, that’s not what Richard Dawkins was doing. A little more context:
Robin:
Akathist Hymn: Glory to God for All Things
Eliot:
Since one deity‐glorifying hymn deserves another:
Saraswati Chalisa (A hymn to Saraswati)
Robin: you need to go back to comment no. 67. “He and his fallen angels are quite adept at preaching “different gospels” and creating new “religious systems.”” In order to confuse, they usually imitate or copy; they are not creators.
It is good to have you around Robin, but frankly, I am getting tired.
Eliot:
You could append to your comment to Robin about getting tired, the following additional words of wisdom:
“There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact”. –Mark Twain
“Science does not know its debt to imagination”. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Science is built up of facts, as a house is built of stones; but an accumulation of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house”. — Henri Poincaré
“Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little; it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover”. — Bertrand Russell
“Science is always wrong. It never solves a problem without creating ten more”. — George Bernard Shaw
“Theory helps us bear our ignorance of facts”. — George Santayana
And finally:
“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it”. Max Planck
Nick, if I may add something recent which shows the utter dogmatism of modern “science” and how its pieties can be overturned, please go to the recent issue of Discover (Jan/Feb 2011, p 20). The famed evolutionary biologist, E O Wilson, is interviewed. Why? Because in 1985, he postulated a new theory of evolution called “sociobiology” that took the evolutionary world by storm. Though not popular at first, by the 1990s, his doctrine of “inclusive fitness” had become evolutionary orthodoxy.
So why am I writing this, because Darwin’s theory of natural selection (which acted only on individuals within species, not entire populations as Wilson was now positing) was up-ended? No, good science is always corrected (“falsifiability”). But because now Wilson is repudiating his theory. In the words of the interviewer, “…the scientific world quaked last August when Wilson renounced the theory that he had made famous…he reported in Nature that the mathematical construct on which inclusive fitness was based crumbles under closer scrutiny. The new work indicates that self-sacrifice to protect a relation’s genes does not drive evolution.”
Now think of this: right before I went to college, natural selection as the driving force for evolution was being overturned by probably the greatest living biologist of the 20th century. After some resistance, it became the orthodoxy du jour. Now, it’s proponent is looking at the data and saying “oops, I forgot to carry the one.” (Forgive my flippancy, I have a tremendous amount of respect for Wilson.) Mind you, this is good science: the scientific method is being followed.
So what’s my beef? The hosannahs that are being sung and the dogmas that are being proclaimed by the likes of Robin and his like; that the “case is closed,” and “nobody in their right mind questions Darwinism anymore,” etc. So who looks foolish now?
I said it in another thread (about the New Atheism) but I’ll be even more blunt now: remember the movie Planet of the Apes? Remember when Taylor took Dr Zaius hostage and took him to the Forbidden Zone and showed Zaius the truth about human superiority? What did Zaius do? Did it matter? No, because he already knew the truth. All he was concerned about was preserving the reigning orthodoxy, so he callously blew up the evidence. My point is this: the New Atheists don’t care about the truth. It’s the reigning orthodoxy that matters, nothing more.
I stopped singing hosannahs and proclaiming dogmas when I gave up Christianity.
Your foolish straw men saying such things.
Wow, did you miss the point. Pro-orthodoxy, anti-science Dr. Zaius, Chief Defender of the Faith, keeper of the ancient scrolls, who arrests Cornelius and Zira for heresy, represented not atheism but religion.
So in a nutshell, your argument was: E. O. Wilson repudiated his own theory, therefore science cares only about “preserving the reigning orthodoxy”? You disproved your own conclusion.
Eliot:
You only say that because you’ve been deceived by Loki, who would you not read the Eddas and know your true lineage, descended from the first man, Aske, formed by Odin from an ash tree, and the first woman, Embla, formed by Odin from an elm, whom he endowed with life and souls.~ For so it is written, we are not descended from ape-like hominids, as overwhelming scientific evidence would have us believe; Nay, the legendary Truth, borne through time from antiquity, is that our True ancestors are trees!~
Norse creation myths are just as credible as your creation myth of a rib-woman convinced by a talking snake into eating the fruit of a magic tree, while all creation myths are far less credible than the evidence-backed findings of anthropology.
Robin: You still haven’t told me where the primordial speck of plasma came from that initiated the Big Bang. Until you tell me that, all of your stuff is still mythological. Also, if it always existed, what made it explode? And if it did not always exist, from whence did it achieve a critical mass for the explosion? Don’t tell me a collapsing universe since the evidence is the opposite. In any evet, there has never been anyone that has come up with a mathematical answer to that. You either have stasis or you have something that causes hyperstasis. Which is it, Mr. Physicist?
Robin: Forgive me. My questions presumes you “believe” in causality or are you a Nul-A?
I didn’t understand your question. What is a “Nul-A”?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/jan/08/religion-human-nature-religiosity-evolutionary-advantage
All might be interested in this article.
“Why I Am Not An Atheist” An Interview With Dcn. Andrei Kurayev
Read more: “Why I Am Not An Atheist” : Journey To Orthodoxy | The Orthodox Christian ‘Welcome Home’ Network for Converts
I’ve come to the conclusion that Robin really doesn’t exist. He is just a figment of Fr. Han’s imagination simply made up in order to keep folks interested and keep us on his side. After all there is no empirical evidence that he exists. We just have the poster that call’s himself ‘Robin”s word for it.
Michael: Intriguing idea. Maybe it is possible. Fr. Hans is quite able to pull off something like that (that is a compliment to Fr. Hans, by the way).
Also, until you guys started called “him” him, I assumed Robin was a girl. In any event, although I got tired before Eliot did and dropped out of the dialogue, I was trying to suggest that you cannot argue with them on our terms since they don’t understand or accept our terms. The only way to argue with them is by arguing and questioning their science, most of which, quite frankly is theoretical speculative junk. The only thing Robin could do in response is to vaguely say that my understanding of the science was superficial but never giving anything concrete. One example is string theory. I never elucidated on string theory but did raise a comical scenario. The response was — you don’t understand string theory.
I think my post to Eliot from quotations of Mark Twain’s to Max Planck’s is the stuff that they cannot respond to because they poignantly reveal that most science is speculation and that is why it is called theory.
Nick, I agree that “most science is speculation and that is why it is called theory” but we should not underestimate the remaining small fraction of true science. Nowadays there is a competition between Truth and the feeling of awed wonder that science can give us. Science can be a good thing but the historical record clearly shows that weapons, destruction, annihilation and pollution are the bitter fruits of science without God. “Without Me ye can do nothing,” (John 15:5)
The prophecies of the Righteous Dimitri Tarabicz (recorded around the 1850s) mention good and wise scientists, as well as evil ones who will ravage the whole earth. The mysterious phenomenon of thousands of dead birds dropping out of the sky in two towns on opposite sides of the world is all too real.
Modern “miracles” can be performed using some kind of extremely advanced electromagnetic (EM) technology such resonant EM standing-waves strongly interacting with plasma-like substances creating striking geometric patterns. http://www.enterprisemission.com/Norway-Message3.htm
Such false signs and wonders can be associated with the false Christs and prophets in Matthew 24:24 “For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall show great signs and wonders; so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect.”
Vatican II & New Age are all too real and a technologically faked (holographic) messianic event is not an impossibility.
All these are very different than the miracles of St. Spyridon at the 1st Ecumenical Synod of Nicaea. Back then there was a competition between Truth and rhetorical art.
Michael:
Let’s think that hypothesis through. Hans’s figmentary atheists have several properties:
• They are almost all Marxists.
• They deny anything transcendent.
• They necessarily embrace nihilism.
• They refuse to address the “brutality unleased by atheist dogma”.
• They posit God to deny him.
I explicitly possess none of those properties. So, in order for you hypothesis to be true, Fr. Hans would’ve had to imagine an atheist who’s opposite of everything he says atheists are. To imagine someone who is a counterexample to all his claims, Hans would, in short, have to imagine being completely wrong. Then write a character who tells him off.
Seems implausible to me.
Nick:
Fr. Hans strikes me as neither humble nor imaginative enough to pull it off. Although Hans does engage in revisionist history, I don’t have reason to think he’d be quite so dishonest as to hoax you all with a sock puppet.
Perhaps they bought Eliot’s oracularity in 48.1.1:
Was that meant to be a “word of knowledge”, Eliot? If so, you blew it; whatever voice in your head you listened to was not telling you the truth.
Did too. In 42.2.1.1, I went into paragraphs of detail about why I call your scientific knowledge superficial. And 38.1.1.1 was so full of extended quotations and supporting links that my attempts to post it were originally blocked as spam.
Robin: You fail to take several things into account:
1. Fr. Hans is that smart and capable of doing that.
2. In his zeal, his imagination would have created the penultimate opposite. No reputable scientist would be as “dogmatic” as you ignoring any doubts. In other words, one who doubts nothing and holds to a hyper-rigid construct is not an opposite but rather an extreme opposite. In his zeal he is capable of creating such an impossible opposite.
3. Your knowledge of science is absolutely superficial and I note he did not want to get into that area saying he would defer to me and Chris.
4.
You did not respond to my reply to your 42.2.1.1 and your 38.1.1.1 were superficial garbage not deserving of a reply.
5. Lionheart could also be a pun.
Fess up Fr. Hans!
Nick:
You mean Fr. Hans Jacobse who wrote:
In light of how frequently Hans says stupid things, your assessment of his smarts seems rather dubious.
Nick:
I’m no longer a Christian because I didn’t ignore my doubts. If anything, I’m adamant for doubt. Perhaps you’ve projected your own dogmatism onto me.
How so? Back up your charge, like I did mine.
You did not reply to 42.2.1.1. In 38.1.1.1, I did your homework and researched your topics, giving your claims substantiated rebuttals with citations. Instead of responding to my substantive, concrete, intellectual discussion in kind, you now belatedly, lazily dismiss my (uncontested) points as “garbage not deserving of a reply”.
I’m disappointed with you, Nick. At first you seemed genuinely interested in having a serious conversation, but then you gave yourself away as a pseudointellectual who doesn’t understand the basics of things he claims to have extensively researched, who runs from the debate when someone exposes his ignorance and tears apart his hollow arguments.
For my fierce rhetoric? It’d be a fine pen name, were it not my actual surname.
Well, I suppose I could have created Robin as figment of my imagination but it would be too much trouble and take too much time!
Interesting though that Robin’s “proof” that he is the real Robin are intangibles, what a thorough (and honest) materialist would argue are things that are not really real.
That Robin argues (as he does above) that these intangibles are the proof the I don’t really understand atheism does no such thing of course. It merely indicates that he has not thought his atheism through to any appreciable degree. He doesn’t understand the ground or the implications of his beliefs (yes, beliefs).
For that reason that things I said about atheism (attraction to Marxism, Nazism as atheism in Teutonic dress, the blood of the atheistic project of the last century, atheism is a conceptual possibility only in a Christian culture [don't confuse apathy or agnosticism with atheism Robin; the a-theist must first presume theism; the atheism of the atheist is mono-theistic in orientation], still stand. Put more simply, although Robin presents himself as exhibit A his proof of the falsity of my assertions, it doesn’t work because he does not understand the atheism that he professes he believes.
I’m not alone in my estimation of the atheistic apologetic of course. There really isn’t much “there” there. It doesn’t produce much of anything actually, except perhaps a surplus of adamance.
Hans:
The electronic record of you writing those statements is real enough. Words are symbols representing intangible ideas, but ink and electrons have physical reality, as do sets of neurons firing in your brain.
Thanks for saving me some typing by refuting yourself.
My previous rebuttals in 1.1.1.1, 24.1.1.2, 63.1.1.1 still stand.
Of course an absence of a belief has no “there” there. What’d you expect? There’s nothing to it.
No, Robin, that is my definition of immaturity. If the situation is different must be that there are some wise people around you. Please, don’t tell me that all people you love and care for are atheists. This would be an inhumane environment not suited for human beings or their requirements.
How can you prove that God exists? by Fr. Andrew Phillips.
Eliot:
im·ma·tur·i·ty n. fine, perhaps fairly good looking, man in his mid thirties, engaged to be married.
Why would you imagine I would ever say that? You can put your mind at ease: many people I love and care for are theists, including most of my family.
You quote Fr. Andrew Phillips:
Ha, how speciously convenient. Let my try that logic with another creator deity who surpasses mortal understanding:
If there is proof the Flying Spaghetti Monster exists, that proves the Flying Spaghetti Monster exists.
If there is no proof the Flying Spaghetti Monster exists, that proves the Flying Spaghetti Monster exists.
Wow, that proves it, hail the Noodly One!~
Robin :
Is this thing called atheist culture? I see that these “cultural” elements abundantly in your posts.
Ah, I should have linked for those of you who have not heard of Him. Wikipedia has a pretty good article on the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Still no empirical evidence that Robin actually exists. Until you can show me the evidence that you exist, I’m not going to believe in you. Oh, BTW, I get to decide what evidence I will accept as vaild. Since I don’t accept the assumption that there are such things as atheists in the the first place, you’ll have to start somewhere else. No digital representation of your supposed thougth will do, no testimony of your closest friends, in fact I can think of nothing that will convince me that you exist, since you deny the necessity and importance of being. Since I would have to accept the existence of “Robin” on faith alone, I would simply rather not believe.
I’m an arobinist. Anybody want to join me in starting a new AAA group (American Association of Arobinists)?
At best “Robin” is a sophisticated internet bot designed to collect and replicate the meaderings of other God denyers.
Michael: Great summary of of the atheist’s way of reasoning.
Michael:
If that were a case I cared to waste my time making, I’d start with other human beings besides yourself existing.
But go ahead and deny atheists exist if you think that’s clever. Next you may want to deny the existence of Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and then move on to Mormons, Mennonites, Quakers, Shakers, and so forth. If you really apply yourself, you can deny any point of view besides your own, and make yourself autistic.
When have I ever denied the necessity and importance of being? Personally, I like existing. Being is the way to be!
For my part, your posts sufficiently convince me of a rather ordinary claim that Michael Bauman exists, though I could be wrong and would reconsider if contrary evidence comes to light.
That initialism is taken, you might want to add another A.
Cool! If so, maybe you should submit me for the $100,000 Loebner Prize.
Robin, I told you that I was raised in a society where it was considered cool to criticise and mock religious believes. The trick works to some extent… It did fool many people but not everyone. Christianity is the regular target of most atheist.
I find this tactics childish, embarrassing, tasteless and immoral. The trick works on ignorant people. Nowadays we praise critical thinking (the ability to rationally decide what to do and what to believe) while indoctrinating students with one side of the story. The communists did play the trick on young people and it did work until they found out about the millions of crimes hidden from them by these regimes.
Eliot:
Yes, you did not answer my question in 60.1, what “atheist society” are you from?
Criticism of Christianity is no “trick”. There’s a lot to criticize about your religion. You’ve probably even heard some from other Christians.
All religions are equally wrong to me, but as an ex-Christian, Christianity is the religion I’m most familiar with. Living in the American South, most people I get into arguments with are Christians. And in the US, when atheists’ freedoms get trampled upon (frex, firing people for being atheists, trying to have politicians removed from office for being atheists, trying to ban atheist billboards, jailing people for refusing to recite the Pledge of Allegiance), the bigots are generally Christians.
If I lived in the Middle East, no doubt I’d spend a lot more energy on Islam.
I find most religions a bit childish, kind of like adults believing in Santa Claus.
Are we still talking about Christianity? Public schools mostly don’t do religious indoctrination here, despite schools trying to post the 10 Commandments, religious bigotry in the Pledge of Allegiance our schoolkids are often forced to recite, and so forth.
I guess you were talking about indoctrinating students with Communist propaganda. So, are you from a Communist regime, then?
Nick, 70.1.1.1.4:
“Still”? You never asked.
I’ll have to add “the Big Bang” to that list of things you don’t understand the basics of, then. The Big Bang, despite Fred Hoyle’s initially pejorative name for it, was not an explosion, it was an expansion. No primoridal speck of plasma, no critical mass, just pure energy at incredibly high temperature.
Matter formed out of radiation as the cosmos expanded and cooled. About 0.0001 second after the expansion of the universe began, elementary particles froze out as the temperature dropped below 10^13 degrees Kelvin…
Am I wasting my time? Last time I explained science to you, you dismissed my response as “garbage not deserving of a reply”.
How about this, then: If you would like to know about the Big Bang, Simon Singh’s “Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe” is a good place to start, which you may find more accessible than Steven Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time”.
No, even if I’d been unable to answer that, plate tectonics, evolution, et cetera would still not be mythological. Scientists not having all the answers does not invalidate the answers they do have.
Robin:
Now you really exhibit your ignorance of the theory. Let me teach you.
“Speck” is a term of language. According to the generally accepted “belief”, there was a point (I don’t want to argue how big it was, because that is irrelevant) where there was only energy, highly compact and isotroptic). I also don’t want to argue whether it was an “explosion” or and “expansion” because now you are playing a sophistic game. Everyone knows, reading this, that an explosion is a rapid expansion.
Based on general relativity and an assumption of isotrophy (and this is a pure assumption because singularity breaks down at this point, as least as we know it), there is no theory yet that I am aware of as to what caused this infinitely dense and hot “glob” (my term) of energy to begin a rapid expansion. The “belief” that an expansion occurred is posited but not explained. What is explained in the moment that expansion begins is that matter and anti-matter would have been created in equal proportions (randomness can result in nothing more nor less mathematically). Given that isotrophy of matter and anti-matter anihilating itself constantly, we would still have nothing but a lot of hot energy.
But because we have matter, it is “assumed” (working backwards) that there must have occured an imbalance between matter and anti-matter (in this case baryons and anti-baryons, I believe). I must admit that that works beautifully! However, because of the absence or paucity of anti-matter, the theory seems wrong. It does not explain (i) why the imbalance occurred and/or (ii) why the absence or paucity of anti-matter.
I suppose the anti-matter that existed was anahilated by the matter and what we have is the surplus matter. But that is a real stretch given the isotrophy assumption. Something makes no sense. It has yet to be explained. It is at best a supposition in progress. However, if you want to call it a “mystery”, I will respect that and you.
Nick:
You spoke of a “critical mass” as if you were speaking of a nuclear explosion, so you were not using “explosion” figuratively. Now you are playing a game of trying to equivocate “explosion” and “expansion” to save face. Don’t bullshit, just admit your mistake and move on. It was a common misunderstanding.
Still occurring. The universe is still expanding in all directions.
It’s spelled “isotropy”.
Now that I don’t know. Why the universe had an excess of matter over antimatter is a fascinating mystery. Asymmetry between kaons and antikaons may provide a clue to solving it.
Nick:
I think we probably will figure out why there is more matter than antimatter. My prediction is based on more than hope; we’re already in the process of solving that mystery. Read the article about kaons I linked to.
As a rule, I don’t take anything on faith.
If you did show me a belief I hold based on faith alone, I would relinquish that belief on the spot. That’s the kind of rationalist I want to be.
Robin:
I am willing to bet that you take the principle of the uniformity of nature on faith. Hume’s problem of induction is still very much a problem for all scientific inquiry, and an empiricist epistemology cannot ground it. I do not think that you would take the rationalist tack of admitting innate ideas, or the Kantian one of admitting that the world of experience is being built in accordance with the categories of the understanding that we have onboard in our minds. The former solution admits that we have ideas in our minds that were never experienced – which lends itself more readily to a theistic explanation for such minds, while the latter cuts us off from reality and confines us to the world of experience. Kant’s solution forces us to be humble and agnostic about all metaphysical matters, which is not in keeping with the pride, certainty, and sarcasm of your scientistic musings. Perhaps you could claim to be a pragmatist – which is the epistemology that Hume’s theory opens up given its emphasis on habits and the fact that habits cannot be judged to be true or false but rather useful or not – in which case you would think that the truth is simply what is useful. But this theory sacrifices getting at the objective world as well. Thus if you are an empiricist who believes that our senses are thus capable of helping us formulate true theories (in the sense that these theories correspond to reality) then you have to take it on faith that our senses accurately report reality to us, and that nature is uniform (this latter claim being the reason that we can generalize from observed cases to universal judgments). Any of the options available to you here require you to check the superior and somewhat arrogant stance that you have consistantly taken here rhetorically.
You are not a rationalist epistemologically. You are not a rationalist ethically. I have already disputed with you about your use of these terms. No atheist can put forward an account of reason that guarantees it a privileged place in making true judgments or issuing ethical commands. What is at the base of atheist epistemologies and ethics is our vital impulses and instincts (of which reason, if it is invoked at all, is simply one among others). Our instincts and impulses are not selected for truth or goodness but for survival. In epistemology if reason and our senses are instinctual and habitual then they can only get us to what is useful, not what is true. And in ethics such reason is a slave of the passions (Hume again – a generally honest atheist, please adopt him as your teacher!), it can tell us how to get what we want but not what we should want. Here Hume is very illustrative, he says that it is not irrational to prefer the destruction of the entire world to the irritating itch on his little finger. Granted, the person who did prefer this would be lacking in the feeling of empathy for others and thus unethical. But reason has nothing to do with it. Your consistant use of the words “rational” and “rationalist” are thus nothing but rhetorical attempts to take an intellectual high ground that you have no right to. Please study more philosophy and read fewer contemporary atheist polemics.
This whole conversation has been going nowhere for some time now and I have been amazed not with the strength of arguments on any side but the stubborness with which many have said the same kinds of things again and again while expecting different results.
Eliot: The lives of the Saints will never be compelling to Robin.
Robin: Mocking Christian belief by putting forward the religious hypotheses of many other “religions” (the scare quotes are here simply because you have included the Flying spaghetti monster among the religious “myths” that you have sarcastically adopted) will not further the conversation. All this expresses to me is that you are afraid to simply and plainly ask how one determines which of the religious traditions is true.
Please consider my own involvement complete. This is just getting ridiculous.
T. Nathaniel:
Please forgive me, but I must point out that you’ve missed two important points. Firstly, the discussion here is not intended for Robin alone; maybe some honest seekers, atheists or agnostic, can benefit from it. Secondly, as Elder Paisios said, words are wasted with atheists; it is better to try to touch their hearts not their minds.
There is not such thing as Orthodoxy without the Saints. Orthodoxy does not relay on the strength of our arguments. Intelligent arguments can indeed be attractive to seekers of truth. Many Christians embraced the devil’s suggestion (or call it self-deluding pride of mind) and became hostile to the veneration of saints while putting themselves and their minds in the center of the world. There is a wealth of knowledge in the lives the saints who bore the cross and followed Jesus. Fancy philosophical arguments are not going to help us resist when (when, not if) persecutions will come. We can get strength from lives of saints and most of all through the grace of God. Pride of the mind is the greatest danger and few are delivered from it. God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.
On one side of the world, the devil tested many to the limits of their endurance to see if they would deny Jesus Christ. His irrational malice, when finally exposed, caused people to open up their eyes to reality. Monasteries are being more and more populated with people holding university degrees.
On this part of the world, the devil played his greatest trick convincing many that he doesn’t exist. Spirituality has been replaced by cheap sensual passion, modern consumption and self-indulgence for personal desires. Robin’s motto is “have as much fun as possible before rotting in the ground”. Be aware Robin, your destiny is not compost; you took a path which leads hell.
Eliot:
Hedonism’s not my philosophy, but you should gather your rosebuds while ye may.
Be aware Eliot, we both took paths that lead to us broiling in Islamic hell, yet neither of us are troubled by this. Nor do we tremble at the thought of shivering out our eternities in icy Helheim, or squinting in gloomy Hades. Nor do we worry what Osiris’ tribunal shall find, when our hearts are weighed against a feather.
Todd, one level further back:
I did ask plainly.
Now I respond to Eliot’s Christian copypasta with similar non‐Christian copypasta, and Christian mythology with non‐Christian mythology, which neither of us find persuasive. My point is not subtle. Other religions make similar claims, so why believe yours over theirs?
You can’t rule out Pastafarianism just because it’s silly. There’s no less chance the Pastafarian hypothesis is true.
Todd:
No, I need not take either of those on faith.
One morning after having been up all night, I walked through my unlit living room, and glimpsed my sister’s dog out of the corner of my eye. Wait, that can’t be right, interrupted my brain, you sister’s dog lives with her in Oregon. So I turned, and realized that I had seen a beige footstool of similar height and color. My sleep-deprived brain’s pattern-matching had made a mistake, which my logic processing faculties had caught. So, I definitely do not take it on faith that my senses accurately report reality.
Gravity follows a uniform mathematical relation everywhere we have measured it. As far as we know, gravity does not just stop working here and there. However, I am willing to entertain the hypothesis that gravity may have operated differently during the Big Bang, when the entire universe was a singularity, because I do not take it on faith that nature is always uniform.
Reason is our most reliable method for discerning truth from falsehood and for making sound decisions, at this time. I cannot guarantee we shall never find a better one, although to demonstrate another method’s superiority, you’d have to show it gets better results (using reason).
Your poor illustration in no way invalidates my use of “rationalist”. Forget empathy: The consequences of not having a world to live in would be far more deleterious than an irritating itch. Reason has everything to do with that.
Robin: To quote from “Big Jake”: “Thought you was dead”.
I hate to bring up old posts, but did Robin respond to my earlier post about E O Wilson repudiating his earlier theory of evolution (#70.1.1.1.2)? Honestly Torquemada wasn’t as dogmatic as these New Atheists.
George: Robin still has not responded. The atheistnet is down so he has to wait until it’s up and running to find the stock answer to cut and paste.
Eliot asks me (43.1.2.1.1):
Not at all. Indeed, I fervently requested that when I was losing faith in Christianity.
Even since relinquishing my religious beliefs, I’ve prayed that God show me convincing evidence he’s there at least a dozen times (often at the behest of visiting Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons, since I like to discuss religion with door-to-door proselytizers, too). None worked.
But for you, I’ll pray it again, Eliot:
God, if you truly exist, I sincerely want to believe that you exist. Please give me a convincing reason to believe I’m not just talking to myself. You’d know how to convince me. Amen.
If anything happens, I’ll reply to this comment to let you know. Won’t surprise me if nothing happens, though, since prayers have no effect.
Please, be patient Robin. If you’d get an answer right away that would be amazing indeed. I do not expect this to happen, just keep saying it once a day for a year … or twenty. It can’t do any harm you. People endured threats, beatings, and terrible conditions while wrongly imprisoned for many years and still did not loose their faith in Christ. Why are you so disappointed with God? Is there a great suffering in your life or you are just acting like a spoiled child? What kind of evidence for God’s existence would you like to see?
Eliot Ryan:
Twenty years! Even one year of talking to the ceiling and feeling foolish would tax my patience. Why should I believe your god would be more responsive to 365 prayers than a dozen? If God still hasn’t responded 20 years and 7305 prayers from now, what will you suggest I do then? Tell me a 7306th is necessary to get God’s attention, cautioning me not to do a “vain repetition” of wording I’ve used before?
The Bottomless Hole of Prayer Requests:
Ok, than be grateful to your god called “time” who made possible your evolution, to your god, called “gravity” the one who made possible the formation of planets and stars , and so on. Or if do not want to be grateful to any god, that is fine too. Just enjoy …the present.
Eliot:
Seems like Michael Bauman isn’t the only one who’s confused about what a god is.
The “Bottomless Hole” essay is an apologetic tract, not anything drawn from real experience, especially 20 years of prayer and 7305 prayers. Life just doesn’t work that way. It doesn’t really establish any real facts either, despite the claim that “…human beings in the realm of religion exercise their limitless creativity untrammeled by fact.” It’s just more of the atheist mythology (superstition?) that atheist reasoning is untainted by faith (it’s not), or that Christians divorce themselves from reason (they don’t).
It’s very simple Robin. If you want to know if God is real or not, ask Him to show Himself to you. This is different that asking Him for a reason to prove to you He is real. That latter doesn’t happen. God is not an errand boy. The former takes some preparation on our part, chiefly the cultivation of humility which is a word that means (among other things) that it is hard to find God when we believe that the gifts and powers we possess are sufficient to answer the deeper questions. Usually this awareness is not reached apart from some crisis that proves to us that are dependencies are indeed insufficient.
Fr. Hans Jacobse:
If you had followed the link and read the whole post, you’d’ve found that not only was it drawn from experience, but also it’s a response to Leah recounting trying prayer at her boyfriend’s suggestion on her blog Unequally Yoked, an interesting blog about a Catholic/atheist interfaith relationship, and various commenters telling her, differently, how each thought she should have prayed instead.
In my experience, the way life really works is that no one’s prayers seem to have any effect whatsoever.
Atheism has no mythology. 😒
While I personally take nothing on faith, not all atheists are like me. Some atheists are very tainted by faith, such as Buddhists or Raelians who practice religions with no deity, and I know at least one atheist who believes in woo-woo like psychics. Being an atheist doesn’t make one rational or skeptical, though being rational and skeptical can make one an atheist.
Hey, God, if you’re out there, please show yourself to me.
…
Nada.
God showing himself to people doesn’t really happen either, I suspect.
Seems more like the cultivation of gullibility, to the point where you can believe that when you talk to your invisible friend, someone else is talking back to you.
Robin:
Huh? Do you know what a god is? I would be honored to be as “confused” as Michael Bauman is.
Sure. A god is a deity. A supernatural being which worshippers think controls (ex. Poseidon: god of the sea) or personifies (ex. Chronos: god of time) some aspect of life.
There are gods of time (Chronos, Nortia, Zurvan, Kan-Leon…), though time is not actually a god. There are gods of love (Kamadeva, Venus, Astarte, Xochiquetzal…), but love is not actually a god. There are moon gods, sun gods, earth gods, sky gods, day gods, night gods, wisdom gods, war gods, fate gods, death gods, you name it. Polytheistic religions have many gods, duotheistic religions have two, and monotheistic religions just one for everything. Some human beings have even convinced others to worship them as gods (ex. Mao Zedong, Jim Jones).
Contrary to above posts, these things aren’t actually gods: Gravity. Evolution. Progress. Science. Human intelligence. Culture. Self-organizing matter. Actors, musicians, and athletes (though sometimes we metaphorically describe them as such).
It’s pretty funny to me that you seem to believe all those thousands of gods humanity has come up with are existent supernatural beings, just that most of them are demons in disguise.
St. Paul uses the words “demon” and “idol” almost interchangeably in his letter: “The things which the Gentiles sacrifice they sacrifice to demons and not to God…” An idol is what we are willing to trust in, and give time and attention to, more than to God. The fallen “modern” man preaches the worship and glorification of man in his sin. Actors, singers and sportsmen have become idols. People currently give so much time to the things of the world which they receive through television. Atheists and ‘agnostics’ have grown ‘grace proof’ and they practice self-worship.
There exist beings who thrive in deadly sins, demons, named after the sin they take on. Various demons inspire various sins: gambling, deceit, lust, revenge, etc. Guess who is the one who inspires mankind to turn away from God!
Eliot:
Ha, so I’m graceproof! Even your Almighty cannot grace me, no matter how hard he tries!~ Thus answering that aged conundrum, “Can God make a human so graceproof, even he cannot bless it?”
Never practiced self-worship, how would one’s prayers go? “O me, I am so awesome. Thank me for choosing to be so wonderful. I rock. Amen.”
How many people do you suppose are thinking about sex right this very second? Poor Lust must be constantly on the run.~ Must be exhausting to be a personification.
“Heresy”? Another busy demon, keeping those 4 billion non-Christians occupied.~
That is not a problem at all: demons travel with the speed of thought. Our thought process is affected by their suggestions and hence we follow/do what comes to our mind. “We can be following tampered thoughts and acting upon them or we can follow the teachings of the Church and obey the commandments. Unrestrained passions (pride, anger, greed, lust, jealousy, egoism, etc.) lead to wars, violence, crimes, addictions, abortion and all the evils that we can abundantly observe in our fallen world.”
Therefore submit to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you …
Something is “holding back” the demons and keeping them from doing all of the things that iniquity wants to do. The POWERS are so called because they have power over the devil. The power of God is keeping evil from doing more evil deeds. After the first fratricide war (WWI) much of the grace of God has been lifted. Imagine how demons gloated when God’s Holy Law was broken. They rejoice when they hear people like yourself declaring that there is no God. The day will come when the restraining force of God will be all taken away. That will be a very dark day for mankind. That day is called the Great Tribulation: a time of death and destruction and sorrow such as the world has never seen.
Eliot:
Only 10 feet per second? That’s only about 7 mph. Lust wouldn’t even be able to catch up to someone driving a car at that rate.
Let’s give demons superspeed, like The Flash. No, wait, even The Flash still can only be in one place at a time, while people may be thinking about sex in Nashville, Cairo, Hong Kong, Juneau, and Fiji, all in the same microsecond. We need a better superpower.
I’ve got it! Let’s say demons have the magic power to be in many places at once! Polylocation! That’ll solve it!
Let’s give it to Santa too, so his reindeer don’t burn up trying to visit every child’s house in the world in a single night.
Were did you get this speed from? Thoughts are merely electrical impulses; they are just as fast as the speed of light.
Obviously you never read the lives of the saints. The saints existed here on earth; they co-existed with other people. Some saints -that is human beings- did posses some miraculous gifts: they could levitate (ex. St Seraphim of Sarov) or bi-locate or read people’s thoughts or miraculously heal people. Don’t be too quick to dismiss all things that you do not understand.
Anyway, I am glad that you stick around. Did you find some other interesting posts on this site? Or you just stick around to make sure that you’ll have the last word?
Time to call it quits, Robin. Your conversation isn’t rising above what you find on a typical atheist website. Atheism doesn’t really have much to offer besides constant reiterations of the same tired themes. This is a condition of having no real culture from which it can draw. Hearing the continual assertions of the superiority of the atheist position gets tiresome, and the self-congratulatory scorn which typifies so much atheist discourse gets old after hearing for the seventh time.
So, I am closing this thread. Hope your stay here was worthwhile.