Questions on Christianity (Again...)

Firstly I said that the Bible stated the earth is NOT the centre of the universe. And by Augustian, do you mean Augustine?

Earth is round:
Isaiah 40:22
Job 26:10
Isaaih 22:18

(The modern belief that especially medieval Christianity believed in a flat earth has been referred to as The Myth of the Flat Earth. It was started in the 19th century, thanks largely to the publication of Washington Irving’s fantasy The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus in 1828).

Earth is not the centre of the universe:
Isaiah 40:22
Job 26:7

So I didn’t say that God was unknowable? I thought not. I’m not sure which theologians you are referring to. If you can quote one I may be able to help you out.

[quote=“monavis, post:814, topic:551952”]

You are making an awful lot of assumptions!

Wh said God was ‘nowhere’?

Perhaps you might actually care to outline your points in a coherent manner, devoid of the ramblings.

It would also help if you (and others) took the time to actually confirm what I HAVE said, before taking a pot shot at what I HAVEN’T.

It would seem that many of you are a little too eager to accept any hypothesis, no matter how absurd or unsubstantiated, just as long as it doesn’t involve anything outside the natural. Yet there are a number of things science cannot explain about the natural world.

Djeez, aigonz, what’s so difficult about this?

There are thousands of (“lower”) life forms to be observed today that still live that way.
Besides from being prey to ferocious hunters they are ferocious hunters themselves that eat their own kind and even their own young.

The answer; lots and lots of offspring…

Is that “undermine” or “disprove”? Because you’re apparently doing reverse-Sherlock-Holmes logic, here: some folks prefer to figure that, “when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth” – and you’re essentially saying, er, no; if something sounds improbable, then let’s postulate the impossible.

Still, let’s go with that for a moment. You say your propositions undermine the very assumptions in question? Fine by me; they’re your assumptions, which is why I’m happy to drop 'em for to swap in other assumptions. Here, watch:

Again, I was merely taking your claim at face value. Perhaps you’ve forgotten:

That’s your claim; I shrugged and ran with it for the sake of argument, since, hey, why bother disagreeing with you?

I’d first replied that, in the wild, “such responses have value within the group, be it a tribe or a clan or whatever; even animals hunt in packs. And animals go plenty further, as well; reciprocal altruism isn’t just useful in the here and now among sophisticates; it’s found in the jungle; it aids survival. It happens. It works.” Your reply was to of course agree that “Altruism in the wild is observable NOW”, before then claiming that it wasn’t that way earlier.

If you want to stick with the stuff you’d written before, I’ll stick with my replies. If you now want to drop those claims and replace 'em with something else, I’ll of course reply in kind. The assumptions you supply are, so far, a matter of profound indifference to me.

Again, let’s just make clear that we’re talking about whether your propositions allegedly undermine your assumptions; I’m just as happy to assume the contact wasn’t “more fierce back then”. You just now copy-and-pasted your own quote to that effect: “one can reasonably assume earlier life forms were even more brutal.” If you no longer wish to assume it, then don’t.

So stop assuming they lacked any such aversion.

I’m not insisting on that assumption; are you?

Well, yeah; “agreement” is presumably the ultimate way to skirt an issue, and I’m simply granting whichever assumptions you supply, because I’ve yet to see any reason why I should bother disputing 'em.

It’s sickening that you don’t even have the decency to actually respond to what he said. Someone takes the time to actually rebut your nonsense in detail and you revert to the same old blanket dismissals.

You just aren’t getting it. I’ll try to simplify this.

1> The claim is that an aversion to murder can be explained by the greater theory of evolution.

2> The Greater theory of Evolution, often called Macro Evolution, claims that a combination of mutation and natural selection has produced all of the deiversity of life that ever lived on earth from a single organism.

3> For this aversion to murder to evolve from the tooth and claw societies of the earliest creatures, species would have to survive millions of years of competition for food, mates, territory, family and tribal dominance; in addition to disease and wanton killing.

4> In such an environment, the most vulnerable, generally females and the young, the very elements necessary for the survival of the species, would be at great risk.

5> These ‘thousands of species’ that you allege survive this way are already invested with this trait via millions of years of previous evolution.

You’re going around in circles and ending up nowhere.

Gee you really do have double standards don’t you.

I will respond when someone responds to what I have actually said. I will not repsond when someone misquotes me and then procceds to attack a position I did not take.

You seem confused. I am arguing against evolution; when I refer to it, I am speaking as to how evolution is said to work. For example, Evolution depends on fundamental changes occurring over millions of years. It is not logical to observe living things today and directly compare their behaviour with that of living things millions of years ago. But that is exactly what you atempt to do.

As a case in point, in your post above you speak again of allruism in species TODAY. This is irrelevant. Evolution demands that these traits developed over long period sof time, from non-existence in the first life forms, to what you obsevre today.

Can you not understand that the challenge is to explain how species survived while this trait evolved?

[quote=“The_Other_Waldo_Pepper, post:827, topic:551952”]

If evolution is assumed, earlier life forms MUST have lacked this aversion, if this aversion evolved! My comment about this “lack of aversion” is not an assumption under evolution, it is a given.

Gods, you really are willfuly ignorant.
You are actively ignoring answers.
Watch a bloody nature documentary once in a while.

These “pre-aversion-to murder”, “claw-and-tooth-societies” species still exist today and have existed for millions and millions of years.
Have a look at insects, spiders, even fish.

Someone recently made reference to the expression ‘the selfish gene’. Of course this was the title of Richard Dawkins 1970’s book. It is interesting to note that the Hamilton rule was made famous by Richard Dawkins. The Hamilton rule states simply that an organism will sacrifice to help another organism so long as they share enough genetic material. In other words, if they don;t, they won’t. Of course this has since been discredited by the discovery of events such as the interspecies adoption of oryxes by lionesses in Kenya.

I’m just not seeing the conceptual problem, here.

You’re saying the wild is, TODAY, a place where both altruism and red-in-tooth-and-claw fierceness can be observed. You’re saying there must have been less altruism and more ferocity millions of years ago; why? Why not figure the first breakthrough was altruistic rather than fierce? Why not figure on simple life-forms that lacked both, and then ask whether organisms in that context would benefit by taking an interest in, say, the survival of their offspring?

::shrugs:: Okay, there ya go.

You say they must have lacked said aversion – because, otherwise, there would have been no check on the indiscriminate ferocity you’re assuming they had. I say it’s just as easy to figure they lacked said ferocity while lacking said aversion; there are single-celled organisms that still lack both today, so why assume life back in antiquity had ferocity from the get-go?

Are you serious, or was this just a comment made in haste?

Well, not exactly. The idea is that a general trait which often enough produces selfish-gene benefits will persist even though it may also lead to outcomes that don’t produce selfish-gene benefits. Like, if you typically hang out among kinfolk, and have a general willingness to “adopt orphaned babies”, it’ll often produce selfish-gene benefits, since you often adopt your sister’s kids or your brother’s kids or whatever – even though “adopt orphaned babies” is overly broad and so can also lead to stuff like interspecies adoption. The question is whether it’s a successful enough approach to stick around by dint of not running too far afoul of selfish-gene purposes – not whether it always advances selfish-gene purposes.

1> I take your point about the altruism/fierceness ‘matrix’, however the claim we are discussing is that altruism has ‘evolved’, not that ‘fierceness’ has evolved.
2> One of the pillars of evolutionary theory is an assumption that organisms and species either progress or die. Would you define a change from altruism to firceness as progress?

I’m gonna make a prediction here and say that Aigonz will not understand what you’re saying and dismiss it out of hand.

What is the motivation, in a purely naturalistic view of the world, for a lioness to adopt an oryx?