Here is what I actually said: “In the 1970’s we had explanations and theoretical models that the earth was headed for an imminenet ice age.”
Claims of an imending ice age WERE common and WERE freuqent. Skeptical science (who argue against widespread claims of an ice age) claims that in 1970, 1 out of every 6 scientists were predicting an ice age. (What were climate scientists predicting in the 1970s?)
You are running from this discussion since your ‘defense’ consists of appealing to an unknowable magic man. You do realize this?
The fact is your position is incoherent and you have to reject large swaths of science in order to maintain it.
Admit that you hold your position on faith, not because it’s rational and I’ll leave you alone. Otherwise, you are going to have to start actually defending your position instead of retreating by explaining blatant contradictions with ‘god’s unknowable’. Once you’ve given up logic, you’ve conceded the debate.
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A red herring? I think not.
The relaity is that science operates on trial and error to a large extent. Until compelling empirical evidence is presented, science continues to to refine it’s hypotheses and theories to fit wiht what we do know.
Hypotheses about other universes have no empirical support. However, let’s assume they do. They still provide no enlightenment on how ANY facet of ANY natural phenomena can expplain it’s own existence.
So rather than attempt to ridicule me, why don’t you apply good science and address this issue:
The God hypothesis is based on the notion that nothing in the natural universe (or universes) can explain it’s own existence.
If you reject the God hypothesis, provide an example of a single living organism that can explain its own existence, that came literally from ‘nothing’. If you cannot, the God hypothesis is not only on the table, it is in the best chair.
Sure, we eventually get organisms that fight and kill. And we eventually get organisms that fight and kill as a team: they’re still tooth-and-claw brutal to the prey they’re disemboweling, but they do it as a group to reap nifty benefits from cooperation, which can help a fledgling population survive.
The problem is that you can mean one of two things by “they competed”.
First off, me and mine will have an easier time holding territory and getting food and so on if we band together against other competitors. My group will do better in that competition if I refrain from killing my teammates and they refrain from killing me.
Now, granted, there’s some benefit to be gained by winning competitions against the other guys in that group. I don’t just want to be on the winning team; I want to be the top guy on the winning team. But there’s an upper limit; there’s little profit in repeatedly starting red-in-tooth-and-claw fights to the death against my teammates – because, well, (a) even if I win, it makes the group a less effective competitor; and (b) if I lose, I die, and that’s no good. Isn’t it better for everyone in the group to limit “reshuffle the pecking order” contests to nonlethal tests of dominance, so that we can keep functioning as the lethal-competitor team?
And doesn’t it make twice as much sense if we postulate kinship among the teammates, such that it’s my brother and my offspring and so on within the group, such that we’re all fine with disemboweling our prey via teamwork but have even less reason to eliminate one another?
You refer to conflict between groups, but what of conflict within a group over mates, terriotory, position?
But more importantly you make an assumption that a sense of cooperation has already evolved to lead individuals to organsie as groups. But what of the time before this has evolved?
Good heavens, man – are you replying to these copy-and-paste bits before you finish reading the entire post? This got addressed in the very next sentence; you went on to quote it, and respond to it, in your very next post; just slow down a bit, many of the answers are already in place.
Well, at least some of the same dynamics remain; there’s still little incentive to start red-in-tooth-and-claw fights to the death against everyone you come across. Even among go-it-alone predators, isn’t it better for both sides to engage in nonlethal fights for territory or dominance or whatever, so the winner gets the best pickings and the loser settles for second-best? So, okay, figure such a fighter’s aversion to initiating such conflicts would still go for the kill against prey, no problems there, and still has no hang-ups about responding to lethal force with lethal force – but is willing to opt for grudging-truce reciprocity, which doesn’t yet rise to cooperation in a full alliance but isn’t a bad start.
If you then start working in selfish-gene stuff to figure a bare minimum of social practicality when it comes to your offspring – that bit you mention about “the ability to understand the value of a sense of kinship”, so we can get the occasional animal with at least some aversion to killing its own young – then I figure it’s not entirely implausible to move the needle yet closer to bona fide cooperation.
Yes, if we postulate a long-ago jungle curiously unlike many actual modern-day jungles, we can figure that a loner who doesn’t hunt in a pack or raise its offspring and so on maybe doesn’t get any use from either the aversion or the inclination under discussion. But the first one who does take an interest in helping its offspring survive and thrive…
I would not suggest that conflict occurs at every contact, nor that every conflict results in death. However the reasons for conflict are many, and the conflict would have been fierce, specifically in earlier life forms, with no developed motivation to cooperate or aversion to conflict.
Your notion of non-lethal fights is evidenced in the animal kingdom today, as is posturing, however this is balanced by wanton acts of violence, including play (cat catches mouse). At least some of these animals could be (supposed) recipents of evolved traits, so one can reasonably assume earlier life forms were even more brutal.
I think I have to agree with you. It is improbable (in general) that a given species will survive through millions of years.
That’s just what evolution predicts and what research has shown to be true. Many, many species have gone extinct. (Sure doesn’t sound like something a ‘designer’ would plan, at least not an intelligent one.)
All natural selection requires is that one is just slightly better than another. The fittest survive and all that.
Yes. YES! Notice there’s still some wanton violence amidst the non-lethal fights and posturing, reasonably assume that earlier life was even more brutal, and start figuring out how untold billions of tentative experiments played out to get here from there.
And, yes, postulate that conflict would have been even more fierce back when there was no developed motivation to cooperate or aversion to conflict – and swiftly mention that conflict occurs for many reasons but doesn’t occur at every contact, and then add that not every such conflict results in death. What follows? Which strategies or traits or whatever (a) pay off, or at least (b) don’t ruin the organism’s chances for reproduction, and so can stick around long enough to pay off when situations change?
Again, figure the ancestors of current team players used to be loners who get by without hunting in a pack or raising their offspring; how did things work out for the first one who did take an interest in helping its offspring survive and thrive?
And figure, if you want, on animals that (a) maybe go 50/50 on starting a fight-to-the-death with each other, but of course (b) pretty much invariably respond to lethal force with lethal force; how did things work out for the first animal in that situation who’d still enthusiastically respond to lethal force with lethal force but is more reluctant to start that kind of fight?
So give it a ridiculously long span of millennia, let the experiments play out billions of times, factor in the utility of meta-traits like adaptability or experimentation or whatever – and make sure to factor in your replies to assorted previous questions: that benevolent behavior leads to good results in the long run, that altruism in fact works in the wild nowadays, and so on. And remember, the evolutionary process doesn’t only reward perfection; the goal is “good enough”.
You do realize you are using the same analogy for a Supreme being don’t you?
Please cite the chapter and verse where the the Bible states the world is round or the center of the universe! It does talk of the 4 corners of the earth. Augustian in his City Of God states, it would be impossible for the world to be round!!
Even theologins admit God is unknowable,all about God is faith, belief in one’s own thoughts or the thoughts, teachings, and beliefs of some other human. If you really “KNOW” anything about God you can prove it! You even state that “FAITH” in the hypothesis etc. is your answer!
I wonder where was this creator before there was existence? If it was nowhere it would be nothing. A Being would need a place to exist or it would not be in existence!
Are you a presuppositionalist? Do you support the TAG?
I’d say that this is false, but irrelevant to our discussion at hand. I don’t want to open that bag of worms until the one you’ve already opened is sufficiently dealt with. As it is, I’m a little tired of pointing out the worms that are already on the table, so-to-speak, only to have you ignore them.
I’m not sure how you determine the first part, so I’ll ask you to elaborate.
As to if God were unknowable, if that were the case, then you couldn’t say anything about his existence. How exactly would you calculate the existence of something that you have no data on or no idea of what data would look like? I think you are equivocating on the term unknowable here.
This is not a ‘faith’ proposition. To accept that everything can be accounted for by naturalistic explanations is to accept it based on reasons, models, and evidence. The idea that there is nothing outside of the natural would need to be further defined in order to have any comment on whether or not it should be regarded as rational to hold.
It is not a hypothesis, since a hypothesis is meant to explain phenomenon and facts. Positing an ‘intelligent designer’ does not explain anything. Further, as has been pointed out repeatedly, what we can figure out about this ‘intelligent agent’ leads to absurdities.
Hence, it is irrational to accept ‘B’.
Why? Just because you say so, in spite of arguments to the contrary? That isn’t very convincing.
I don’t even know what this means. Please explain.
Here’s what you have:
You can multiply entities and posit an ‘absolute time’ and ‘absolute space’ that require no creation in which your intelligent agent can act.
Or you can hold to the idea that this intelligent agent acted without time/space on ‘nothing’ to create time/space.
If you hold to 1, you would have just created a further mystery. If that absolute time/space can exist, why can’t our universe? Why can’t this time/space exist? If you say it can, then parsimony favors rejecting 1.
If you hold to 2, you hold to a contradictory mess of ideas that are incoherent.
I’m sorry that this upsets you, but you’ll have to do more then baselessly assert that an intelligent creator could create in light of this in order to be convincing.
This is flatly false. Block time does not require an uncaused first cause.
So we can reject ‘1’.
This is flatly false, again. A first cause, is the first event. There is no ‘before’, so there is no way it could be ‘caused’. It is not outside of time, it is the first moment of time.
If something is ‘uncaused’ then it cannot have a causal agent.
So we can reject the notion that an intelligent agent had anything to do with this first cause.
I don’t need evidence, since it is the most coherent explanation of what we experience. That alone makes it the most rational choice to hold.
Whereas the idea you put forth is incoherent and cannot be rationally held since it is actually unclear what you are positing!
Nonsense - these ‘thoughts’ are coherent, which is why it is rational to hold to them. The concept that you’ve put forth isn’t.
Which is why rational people should reject it.
Actually they are, since I’ve repeatedly pointed out (and you’ve repeatedly ignored) that they are coherent whereas an ‘intelligent agent’ is not.
You keep ignoring that the option you are putting forth is incoherent, that is why we can take it off the table.
If you want it on the table as an explanation then you have to make it coherent!
Again, it doesn’t matter - the multi-verse model is still more rational to hold to then the ‘intelligent designer’ model, since it has some theoretical framework and actually attempts to explain the phenomenon. It is not flatly incoherent as the intelligent design model is.
Yes, which are still vastly more rational to hold to as opposed to the idea that the earth was headed for a radical transformation into candyland.
Do you get that? Even though that model turned out to be wrong (the ice age), it was still more rational to hold to it, since it could have been correct.
The candy land model (ie, God did it) could never have been correct since it is ‘magic’ and incoherent (technically it’s more coherent then the God model, but I digress).
I don’t know how you would define ‘belief’, so I don’t want you to equivocate. When I speak of believe, I speak of a rational appraisal of the facts.
As in, ‘makes sense’, able to be understood.
This is nonsense, as I’ve repeatedly shown.
Please tell us how it is coherent to hold to a contradiction? The idea that a creator could create time/space requires time/space. The idea that this creator did not have either of these things, but created them is a contradiction (since they would be necessary for the creation).
This is funny - you accept this, yet you seem to think that block time, which doesn’t need something coming from nothing, is somehow not as rational as a creator who would presumably create something from nothing??
You don’t get it - I’m not saying that models are evidence. Some of the models have evidence, some don’t. Some have facts that seem to refute their positions, others do not.
All of these are more rational to accept then the idea you are putting forth. PLEASE understand that - even if you don’t agree with it.
Nonsense - I’ve repeatedly shown that what you are putting forth is simply nonsense. It’s incoherent.
All you can do is assert that we should accept that God is coherent and on the table. That might be good enough for church, but it’s not good enough for reasonable people.
If you want God on the table, then present a coherent explanation of God’s creation.
This is hypocritical - your position CAN’T even be tested. It DOESN’T even make sense, yet you accept it.
So why the double standard?
I’m going to give you one last chance to answer my points and then I’m done, since it will be apparent that you aren’t interested in demonstrating your point of view is rational. You are simply interested in preaching. I have no interest in accepting your irrational, incoherent dogma.
And how could this being who exists with no space and time, create something if there is no time separating the before from the after? Change of any kind would be impossible.
Yes, but we arren’t referring to the survival of any one particular species. We are discussing the evolution of a trait…the aversion to murder as we experience it today as modern man. As each species die out, so does any progress toward this goal achieved by that species.
Your explanation are based on the very assumptions my propositions undermine.
1> You have no evidence that there is a ‘here to there’, ie that animal behavour millions of year ago was any different than we observe today. You point is based on pure speculation.
2> You still haven’t explained how, if indeed the contact was ‘more fierce back then’, that species populated.
3> Your contentions (for that’s all they are) require that the “experiemnts to play out billions of times”. But my point is that they can’t, because the species will not survive the depopulation caused by this lack of aversion.
