- Happy birthday Canada! Back in Montreal, I seem to visit only at 25-year intervals-beginning with Expo67. Not often enough. Tempted to just stay this time. #CanadaDay
Saturday, June 30, 2018
Gone to Canada
for holiday vacation!
Friday, June 29, 2018
Rebecca Goldstein's 36 Arguments
Appendix: 36 ARGUMENTS FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
1. The Cosmological Argument
1. Everything that exists must have a cause.
2. The universe must have a cause (from 1).
3. Nothing can be the cause of itself.
4. The universe cannot be the cause of itself (from 3).
5. Something outside the universe must have caused the universe (from 2 & 4).
6. God is the only thing that is outside of the universe.
7. God caused the universe (from 5 & 6).
8. God exists.
FLAW 1: can be crudely put: Who caused God? The Cosmological Argument is a prime example of the Fallacy of Passing the Buck: invoking God to solve some problem, but then leaving unanswered that very same problem when applied to God himself. The proponent of the Cosmological Argument must admit a contradiction to either his first premise — and say that though God exists, he doesn't have a cause — or else a contradiction to his third premise — and say that God is self-caused. Either way, the theist is saying that his premises have at least one exception, but is not explaining whyGod must be the unique exception, otherwise than asserting his unique mystery (the Fallacy of Using One Mystery To Pseudo-Explain Another). Once you admit of exceptions, you can ask why the universe itself, which is also unique, can't be the exception. The universe itself can either exist without a cause, or else can be self-caused . Since the buck has to stop somewhere, why not with the universe?
FLAW 2: The notion of "cause" is by no means clear, but our best definition is a relation that holds between events that are connected by physical laws. Knocking the vase off the table caused it to crash to the floor; smoking three packs a day caused his lung cancer. To apply this concept to the universe itself is to misuse the concept of cause, extending it into a realm in which we have no idea how to use it. This line of skeptical reasoning, based on the incoherent demands we make of the concept of cause, was developed by David Hume.
COMMENT: The Cosmological Argument, like the Argument from the Big Bang, and The Argument from the Intelligibility of the Universe, are expressions of our cosmic befuddlement at the question: why is there something rather than nothing? The late philosopher Sydney Morgenbesser had a classic response to this question: "And if there were nothing? You'd still be complaining!"
2. The Ontological Argument
1. Nothing greater than God can be conceived (this is stipulated as part of the definition of "God").
2. It is greater to exist than not to exist.
3 . If we conceive of God as not existing, then we can conceive of something greater than God (from 2).
4. To conceive of God as not existing is not to conceive of God (from 1 and 3).
5. It is inconceivable that God not exist (from 4).
6. God exists.
This argument, first articulated by Saint Anselm (1033-1109), the Archbishop of Canterbury, is unlike any other, proceeding purely on the conceptual level. Everyone agrees that the mere existence of a concept does not entail that there are examples of that concept; after all, we can know what a unicorn is and at the same time say "unicorns don't exist." The claim of the Ontological Argument is that the concept of God is the one exception to this rule. The very concept of God, when defined correctly, entails that there is something that satisfies that concept. Although most people suspect that there is something wrong with this argument, it's not so easy to figure out what it is.
FLAW: It was Immanuel Kant who pinpointed the fallacy in the Ontological Argument: it is to treat "existence" as a property, like "being fat" or "having ten fingers." The Ontological Argument relies on a bit of wordplay, assuming that "existence" is just another property, but logically it is completely different. If you really could treat "existence" as just part of the definition of the concept of God, then you could just as easily build it into the definition of any other concept. We could, with the wave of our verbal magic wand, define a trunicorn as "a horse that (a) has a single horn on its head, and (b) exists." So if you think about a trunicorn, you're thinking about something that must, by definition, exist; therefore trunicorns exist. This is clearly absurd: we could use this line of reasoning to prove that any figment of our imagination exists.
COMMENT: Once again, Sydney Morgenbesser had a pertinent remark, this one offered as an Ontological Argument for God's Non-Existence: Existence is such a lousy thing, how could God go and do it?
3. The Argument from Design
A. The Classical Teleological Argument
1. Whenever there are things that cohere only because of a purpose or function (for example, all the complicated parts of a watch that allow it to keep time), we know that they had a designer who designed them with the function in mind; they are too improbable to have arisen by random physical processes. (A hurricane blowing through a hardware store could not assemble a watch.)
2. Organs of living things, such as the eye and the heart, cohere only because they have a function (for example, the eye has a cornea, lens, retina, iris, eyelids, and so on, which are found in the same organ only because together they make it possible for the animal to see.)
3. These organs must have a designer who designed them with their function in mind: just as a watch implies a watchmaker, an eye implies an eyemaker (from 1 & 2).
4. These things have not had a human designer.
5. Therefore, these things must have had a non-human designer (from 3 & 4).
6. God is the non-human designer (from 5).
7. God exists.
FLAW: Darwin showed how the process of replication could give rise to the illusion of design without the foresight of an actual designer. Replicators make copies of themselves, which make copies of themselves, and so on, giving rise to an exponential number of descendants. In any finite environment the replicators must compete for the energy and materials necessary for replication. Since no copying process is perfect, errors will eventually crop up, and any error that causes a replicator to reproduce more efficiently than its competitors will result in that line of replicators predominating in the population. After many generations, the dominant replicators will appear to have been designed for effective replication, whereas all they have done is accumulate the copying errors which in the past did lead to effective replication. The fallacy in the argument, then is Premise 1 (and as a consequence, Premise 3, which depends on it): parts of a complex object serving a complex function do not, in fact, require a designer.
In the twenty-first century, creationists have tried to revive the Teleological Argument in three forms:
B. The Argument from Irreducible Complexity
1. Evolution has no foresight, and every incremental step must be an improvement over the preceding one, allowing the organism to survive and reproduce better than its competitors.
2. In many complex organs, the removal or modification of any part would destroy the functional whole. Examples are, the lens and retina of the eye, the molecular components of blood clotting, and the molecular motor powering the cell's flagellum. Call these organs "irreducibly complex."
3. These organs could not have been useful to the organisms that possessed them in any simpler forms (from 2).
4. The Theory of Natural Selection cannot explain these irreducibly complex systems (from 1 & 3).
5. Natural selection is the only way out of the conclusions of the Classical Teleological Argument.
6. God exists (from 4 & 5 and the Classical Teleological Argument).
This argument has been around since the time of Charles Darwin, and his replies to it still hold.
FLAW 1: For many organs, Premise 2 is false. An eye without a lens can still see, just not as well as an eye with a lens.
FLAW 2: For many other organs, removal of a part, or other alterations, may render it useless for its current function, but the organ could have been useful to the organism for some other function. Insect wings, before they were large enough to be effective for flight, were used as heat-exchange panels. This is also true for most of the molecular mechanisms, such as the flagellum motor, invoked in the modern version of the Argument from Irreducible Complexity.
FLAW 3: (The Fallacy of Arguing from Ignorance): There may be biological systems for which we don't yet know how they may have been useful in simpler versions. But there are obviously many things we don't yet understand in molecular biology, and given the huge success that biologists have achieved in explaining so many examples of incremental evolution in other biological systems, it is more reasonable to infer that these gaps will eventually be filled by the day-to-day progress of biology than to invoke a supernatural designer just to explain these temporary puzzles.
COMMENT: This last flaw can be seen as one particular instance of the more general and fallacious
Argument from Ignorance:
1.There are things that we cannot explain yet.
2. Those things must be caused by God.
FLAW: Premise 1 is obviously true. If there weren't things that we could not explain yet, then science would be complete, laboratories and observatories would unplug their computers and convert to condominiums, and all departments of science would be converted to departments in the History of Science. Science is only in business because there are things we have not explained yet. So we cannot infer from the existence of genuine, ongoing science that there must be a God.
C. The Argument from the Paucity of Benign Mutations
1. Evolution is powered by random mutations and natural selection.
2. Organisms are complex, improbable systems, and by the laws of probability any change is astronomically more likely to be for the worse than for the better.
3. The majority of mutations would be deadly for the organism (from 2).
4. The amount of time it would take for all the benign mutations needed for the assembly of an organ to appear by chance is preposterously long (from 3).
5. In order for evolution to work, something outside of evolution had to bias the process of mutation, increasing the number of benign ones (from 4).
6. Something outside of the mechanism of biological change — the Prime Mutator — must bias the process of mutations for evolution to work (from 5).
7. The only entity that is both powerful enough and purposeful enough to be the Prime Mutator is God.
8 .God exists.
FLAW: Evolution does not require infinitesimally improbable mutations, such as a fully formed eye appearing out of the blue in a single generation, because (a) mutations can have small effects (tissue that is slightly more transparent, or cells that are slightly more sensitive to light), and mutations contributing to these effects can accumulate over time; (b) for any sexually reproducing organism, the necessary mutations do not have to have occurred one after the other in a single line of descendants, but could have appeared independently in thousands of separate organisms, each mutating at random, and the necessary combinations could come together as the organisms mate and exchange genes; (c) life on earth has had a vast amount of time to accumulate the necessary mutations (almost four billion years).
D. The New Argument from The Original Replicator
1. Evolution is the process by which an organism evolves from simpler ancestors.
2. Evolution by itself cannot explain how the original ancestor — the first living thing — came into existence (from 1).
3. The theory of natural selection can deal with this problem only by saying the first living thing evolved out of non-living matter (from 2).
4. That non-living matter (call it the Original Replicator) must be capable of (i) self-replication (ii) generating a functioning mechanism out of surrounding matter to protect itself against falling apart, and (iii) surviving slight mutations to itself that will then result in slightly different replicators.
5. The Original Replicator is complex (from 4).
6. The Original Replicator is too complex to have arisen from purely physical processes (from 5 & the Classical Teleological Argument). For example, DNA, which currently carries the replicated design of organisms, cannot be the Original Replicator, because DNA molecules requires a complex system of proteins to remain stable and to replicate, and could not have arisen from natural processes before complex life existed.
7. Natural selection cannot explain the complexity of the Original Replicator (from 3 & 6).
8. The Original Replicator must have been created rather than have evolved (from 7 and the Classical Teleological Argument).
9. Anything that was created requires a Creator.
10. God exists.
FLAW 1: Premise 6 states that a replicator, because of its complexity, cannot have arisen from natural processes, i.e. by way of natural selection. But the mathematician John von Neumann showed in the 1950s that it is theoretically possible for a simple physical system to make exact copies of itself from surrounding materials. Since then, biologists and chemists have identified a number of naturally occurring molecules and crystals that can replicate in ways that could lead to natural selection (in particular, that allow random variations to be preserved in the copies). Once a molecule replicates, the process of natural selection can kick in, and the replicator can accumulate matter and become more complex, eventually leading to precursors of the replication system used by living organisms today.
FLAW 2: Even without von Neumann's work (which not everyone accepts as conclusive), to conclude the existence of God from our not yet knowing how to explain the Original Replicator is to rely on The Argument from Ignorance.
==
(continues here)
1. The Cosmological Argument
1. Everything that exists must have a cause.
2. The universe must have a cause (from 1).
3. Nothing can be the cause of itself.
4. The universe cannot be the cause of itself (from 3).
5. Something outside the universe must have caused the universe (from 2 & 4).
6. God is the only thing that is outside of the universe.
7. God caused the universe (from 5 & 6).
8. God exists.
FLAW 1: can be crudely put: Who caused God? The Cosmological Argument is a prime example of the Fallacy of Passing the Buck: invoking God to solve some problem, but then leaving unanswered that very same problem when applied to God himself. The proponent of the Cosmological Argument must admit a contradiction to either his first premise — and say that though God exists, he doesn't have a cause — or else a contradiction to his third premise — and say that God is self-caused. Either way, the theist is saying that his premises have at least one exception, but is not explaining whyGod must be the unique exception, otherwise than asserting his unique mystery (the Fallacy of Using One Mystery To Pseudo-Explain Another). Once you admit of exceptions, you can ask why the universe itself, which is also unique, can't be the exception. The universe itself can either exist without a cause, or else can be self-caused . Since the buck has to stop somewhere, why not with the universe?
FLAW 2: The notion of "cause" is by no means clear, but our best definition is a relation that holds between events that are connected by physical laws. Knocking the vase off the table caused it to crash to the floor; smoking three packs a day caused his lung cancer. To apply this concept to the universe itself is to misuse the concept of cause, extending it into a realm in which we have no idea how to use it. This line of skeptical reasoning, based on the incoherent demands we make of the concept of cause, was developed by David Hume.
COMMENT: The Cosmological Argument, like the Argument from the Big Bang, and The Argument from the Intelligibility of the Universe, are expressions of our cosmic befuddlement at the question: why is there something rather than nothing? The late philosopher Sydney Morgenbesser had a classic response to this question: "And if there were nothing? You'd still be complaining!"
2. The Ontological Argument
1. Nothing greater than God can be conceived (this is stipulated as part of the definition of "God").
2. It is greater to exist than not to exist.
3 . If we conceive of God as not existing, then we can conceive of something greater than God (from 2).
4. To conceive of God as not existing is not to conceive of God (from 1 and 3).
5. It is inconceivable that God not exist (from 4).
6. God exists.
This argument, first articulated by Saint Anselm (1033-1109), the Archbishop of Canterbury, is unlike any other, proceeding purely on the conceptual level. Everyone agrees that the mere existence of a concept does not entail that there are examples of that concept; after all, we can know what a unicorn is and at the same time say "unicorns don't exist." The claim of the Ontological Argument is that the concept of God is the one exception to this rule. The very concept of God, when defined correctly, entails that there is something that satisfies that concept. Although most people suspect that there is something wrong with this argument, it's not so easy to figure out what it is.
FLAW: It was Immanuel Kant who pinpointed the fallacy in the Ontological Argument: it is to treat "existence" as a property, like "being fat" or "having ten fingers." The Ontological Argument relies on a bit of wordplay, assuming that "existence" is just another property, but logically it is completely different. If you really could treat "existence" as just part of the definition of the concept of God, then you could just as easily build it into the definition of any other concept. We could, with the wave of our verbal magic wand, define a trunicorn as "a horse that (a) has a single horn on its head, and (b) exists." So if you think about a trunicorn, you're thinking about something that must, by definition, exist; therefore trunicorns exist. This is clearly absurd: we could use this line of reasoning to prove that any figment of our imagination exists.
COMMENT: Once again, Sydney Morgenbesser had a pertinent remark, this one offered as an Ontological Argument for God's Non-Existence: Existence is such a lousy thing, how could God go and do it?
3. The Argument from Design
A. The Classical Teleological Argument
1. Whenever there are things that cohere only because of a purpose or function (for example, all the complicated parts of a watch that allow it to keep time), we know that they had a designer who designed them with the function in mind; they are too improbable to have arisen by random physical processes. (A hurricane blowing through a hardware store could not assemble a watch.)
2. Organs of living things, such as the eye and the heart, cohere only because they have a function (for example, the eye has a cornea, lens, retina, iris, eyelids, and so on, which are found in the same organ only because together they make it possible for the animal to see.)
3. These organs must have a designer who designed them with their function in mind: just as a watch implies a watchmaker, an eye implies an eyemaker (from 1 & 2).
4. These things have not had a human designer.
5. Therefore, these things must have had a non-human designer (from 3 & 4).
6. God is the non-human designer (from 5).
7. God exists.
FLAW: Darwin showed how the process of replication could give rise to the illusion of design without the foresight of an actual designer. Replicators make copies of themselves, which make copies of themselves, and so on, giving rise to an exponential number of descendants. In any finite environment the replicators must compete for the energy and materials necessary for replication. Since no copying process is perfect, errors will eventually crop up, and any error that causes a replicator to reproduce more efficiently than its competitors will result in that line of replicators predominating in the population. After many generations, the dominant replicators will appear to have been designed for effective replication, whereas all they have done is accumulate the copying errors which in the past did lead to effective replication. The fallacy in the argument, then is Premise 1 (and as a consequence, Premise 3, which depends on it): parts of a complex object serving a complex function do not, in fact, require a designer.
In the twenty-first century, creationists have tried to revive the Teleological Argument in three forms:
B. The Argument from Irreducible Complexity
1. Evolution has no foresight, and every incremental step must be an improvement over the preceding one, allowing the organism to survive and reproduce better than its competitors.
2. In many complex organs, the removal or modification of any part would destroy the functional whole. Examples are, the lens and retina of the eye, the molecular components of blood clotting, and the molecular motor powering the cell's flagellum. Call these organs "irreducibly complex."
3. These organs could not have been useful to the organisms that possessed them in any simpler forms (from 2).
4. The Theory of Natural Selection cannot explain these irreducibly complex systems (from 1 & 3).
5. Natural selection is the only way out of the conclusions of the Classical Teleological Argument.
6. God exists (from 4 & 5 and the Classical Teleological Argument).
This argument has been around since the time of Charles Darwin, and his replies to it still hold.
FLAW 1: For many organs, Premise 2 is false. An eye without a lens can still see, just not as well as an eye with a lens.
FLAW 2: For many other organs, removal of a part, or other alterations, may render it useless for its current function, but the organ could have been useful to the organism for some other function. Insect wings, before they were large enough to be effective for flight, were used as heat-exchange panels. This is also true for most of the molecular mechanisms, such as the flagellum motor, invoked in the modern version of the Argument from Irreducible Complexity.
FLAW 3: (The Fallacy of Arguing from Ignorance): There may be biological systems for which we don't yet know how they may have been useful in simpler versions. But there are obviously many things we don't yet understand in molecular biology, and given the huge success that biologists have achieved in explaining so many examples of incremental evolution in other biological systems, it is more reasonable to infer that these gaps will eventually be filled by the day-to-day progress of biology than to invoke a supernatural designer just to explain these temporary puzzles.
COMMENT: This last flaw can be seen as one particular instance of the more general and fallacious
Argument from Ignorance:
1.There are things that we cannot explain yet.
2. Those things must be caused by God.
FLAW: Premise 1 is obviously true. If there weren't things that we could not explain yet, then science would be complete, laboratories and observatories would unplug their computers and convert to condominiums, and all departments of science would be converted to departments in the History of Science. Science is only in business because there are things we have not explained yet. So we cannot infer from the existence of genuine, ongoing science that there must be a God.
C. The Argument from the Paucity of Benign Mutations
1. Evolution is powered by random mutations and natural selection.
2. Organisms are complex, improbable systems, and by the laws of probability any change is astronomically more likely to be for the worse than for the better.
3. The majority of mutations would be deadly for the organism (from 2).
4. The amount of time it would take for all the benign mutations needed for the assembly of an organ to appear by chance is preposterously long (from 3).
5. In order for evolution to work, something outside of evolution had to bias the process of mutation, increasing the number of benign ones (from 4).
6. Something outside of the mechanism of biological change — the Prime Mutator — must bias the process of mutations for evolution to work (from 5).
7. The only entity that is both powerful enough and purposeful enough to be the Prime Mutator is God.
8 .God exists.
FLAW: Evolution does not require infinitesimally improbable mutations, such as a fully formed eye appearing out of the blue in a single generation, because (a) mutations can have small effects (tissue that is slightly more transparent, or cells that are slightly more sensitive to light), and mutations contributing to these effects can accumulate over time; (b) for any sexually reproducing organism, the necessary mutations do not have to have occurred one after the other in a single line of descendants, but could have appeared independently in thousands of separate organisms, each mutating at random, and the necessary combinations could come together as the organisms mate and exchange genes; (c) life on earth has had a vast amount of time to accumulate the necessary mutations (almost four billion years).
D. The New Argument from The Original Replicator
1. Evolution is the process by which an organism evolves from simpler ancestors.
2. Evolution by itself cannot explain how the original ancestor — the first living thing — came into existence (from 1).
3. The theory of natural selection can deal with this problem only by saying the first living thing evolved out of non-living matter (from 2).
4. That non-living matter (call it the Original Replicator) must be capable of (i) self-replication (ii) generating a functioning mechanism out of surrounding matter to protect itself against falling apart, and (iii) surviving slight mutations to itself that will then result in slightly different replicators.
5. The Original Replicator is complex (from 4).
6. The Original Replicator is too complex to have arisen from purely physical processes (from 5 & the Classical Teleological Argument). For example, DNA, which currently carries the replicated design of organisms, cannot be the Original Replicator, because DNA molecules requires a complex system of proteins to remain stable and to replicate, and could not have arisen from natural processes before complex life existed.
7. Natural selection cannot explain the complexity of the Original Replicator (from 3 & 6).
8. The Original Replicator must have been created rather than have evolved (from 7 and the Classical Teleological Argument).
9. Anything that was created requires a Creator.
10. God exists.
FLAW 1: Premise 6 states that a replicator, because of its complexity, cannot have arisen from natural processes, i.e. by way of natural selection. But the mathematician John von Neumann showed in the 1950s that it is theoretically possible for a simple physical system to make exact copies of itself from surrounding materials. Since then, biologists and chemists have identified a number of naturally occurring molecules and crystals that can replicate in ways that could lead to natural selection (in particular, that allow random variations to be preserved in the copies). Once a molecule replicates, the process of natural selection can kick in, and the replicator can accumulate matter and become more complex, eventually leading to precursors of the replication system used by living organisms today.
FLAW 2: Even without von Neumann's work (which not everyone accepts as conclusive), to conclude the existence of God from our not yet knowing how to explain the Original Replicator is to rely on The Argument from Ignorance.
==
(continues here)
Wednesday, June 27, 2018
Science and spirituality
Michael Shermer:
...Does a scientific understanding of the world erase its emotional impact or spiritual power? Of course not. Science and spirituality are complementary, not conflicting. The physicist Richard Feynman reflected on this in a 1981 BBC interview, “The Pleasure of Finding Things Out,” recalling a conversation with an artist about appreciating a flower: “The beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. … At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. … The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: Does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower.”
Spirituality is a way of being in the world, a sense of one’s place in the cosmos, a relationship to that which extends beyond ourselves. I call this sciencuality, a neologism that echoes the sensuality of discovery. “Our contemplations of the cosmos stir us,” the astronomer Carl Sagandeclared, waxing poetic in the opening scene of his documentary series “Cosmos,” one of the most spiritual expressions of science ever produced. “There is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation as if a distant memory of falling from a great height. We know we are approaching the grandest of mysteries.”
Spirituality is a way of being in the world, a sense of one’s place in the cosmos, a relationship to that which extends beyond ourselves. I call this sciencuality, a neologism that echoes the sensuality of discovery. “Our contemplations of the cosmos stir us,” the astronomer Carl Sagandeclared, waxing poetic in the opening scene of his documentary series “Cosmos,” one of the most spiritual expressions of science ever produced. “There is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation as if a distant memory of falling from a great height. We know we are approaching the grandest of mysteries.”
The most respectable academic critic of evolution?
Philip E. Johnson has been described in Steven Weinberg’s book Dreams of a Final Theory as “the most respectable academic critic of evolution.” Johnson is not so sure this is a compliment.
In his book, Darwin on Trial, he asks, in academia where criticism of established opinion is admired, why is the criticism of evolution so unusual. He professes not to take sides in the Bible-science debate but strives to understand what the unbiased scientific investigation tells us about how the vast and complex organs of animal and plants came into existence. He understands the concept of breeding groups isolated on an island would differ from their counterparts on the mainland due to inbreeding, mutation, and selection. These changes come about to a pre-existing life and are understandable, but the notion that they came into existence by this process is debatable. The question he raises is how much do we really know about this process called evolution.
Johnson’s argument is that we know a great deal less than what is claimed. Darwin’s theory points out the accumulation of adaptive micro-mutations by natural selection is responsible for biological complexity, but this assumption has never been demonstrated and the fossil evidence is inconsistent with the claims. With this being said, Johnson summarizes by saying, “in brief, what makes me a critic of evolution is that I distinguish between naturalistic philosophy and empirical science, and oppose the former when it becomes cloaked in the authority of the latter.”
I agree with Johnson that so much about evolution is unknown and we need to learn more and investigate more options, which leads to one of my discussion questions for this week. Should intelligent design be taught in public schools along with evolution?
Essay Jun 27
Matthew Chapman’s observation, “On winter nights in New York, I
pass by the churches along Park Avenue and Fifth and marvel at the sight of
homeless people freezing to death on the steps. The doors of these, the richest
churches in America, are locked. The heat is on the inside, so in the morning
wives of investment bankers and stockbrokers can come and pray in comfort
without the stench of poverty reaching their depilated nostrils. God is dead
and it’s the church who killed him,” seems to reveal the disconnect between
followers of Christ and those who call themselves “Christians,” but don’t
practice his teachings.
Christ’s message seemed to be simple, love thy neighbor as
thyself, feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, cloth the naked, visit the
sick, and those in prison. In other words, be kind to all in need. I remember
leaving Nashville years ago in the bitter winter and walked by a man curled up
in a sleeping bag on one of the grates with steam coming out. I stopped and
handed him a twenty for which he was very grateful. I often wonder how many of
these individuals would be welcomed in any of our churches of any religion.
Homeless people probably wouldn’t be familiar with the Sunday
rituals, their clothes and their smell would be offensive to regular attendees.
Except for Sunday, the rest of the time the building would be closed or secure
against having someone enter. They might have day school and justify the denial
of access by arguing about potential threat to the children. This heartens back
to the 1860s when thousands of immigrants came to American and lived in slums
in New York. Areas infested with lice, fleas, and rats. Shanties without heat
and food and no health care. Those people have long ago died and who cared then
or now. For some Darwin’s natural selection offered an explanation to what
happens when the population exceeds the available resources. What happens in
the animal kingdom also happens in the human family. While it happens in some
parts of the United States, in general, we live a very sheltered existence when
compared to some parts of the world where survival is a daily event for
millions of people.
It is interesting to read how the Origin was viewed differently by those who read it, not unlike the
Bible. Some interpreted the Origin as a confirmation of Darwin’s
thoughts on natural selection applied to human beings and on his suggestion
that all humans came from one prototype which would mean that we were all
related and therefore that slavery was wrong. Others reading the same book
would look at slavery as justification for survival of the fittest. Have we
progressed that much today with our current attitudes?
Tuesday, June 26, 2018
I find that she makes an interesting point about Buchanan's landmark public choice theory at [42:20] when she notes that Harvard Professor Steve Kelman wrote a piece about this in 1986 saying
“that public choice economics was not only descriptively wrong about why public actors make the choices that they do, it could be proven wrong empirically (even though Buchanan never showed interest in empirical confirmation of his theories) but Kelman also said that it's those ideas threatened to undermine the very norm of public spiritedness on which good governance and a decent political culture depend.”
This is us
Live (2018) NASA Earth from Space - "International Astronomy Day", ISS HD Video is presented. NASA Live stream of Earth seen from space powered by NASA HDEV cameras aboard the International Space Station. Watch the Earth roll Captured by HDEV cameras on board the International Space Station. YouT
"The Genius of Charles Darwin"
In the first episode Richard Dawkins explains the basic mechanisms of natural selection, and tells the story of how Charles Darwin developed his theory.
He teaches a year 11 science class about evolution, which many of the students are reluctant to accept. He then takes them to the Jurassic Coast in Dorset to search for fossils, hoping that the students can see some of the evidence for themselves.
Dawkins also visits the place of his birth, Nairobi, where he interviews a prostitute who seems to have a genetic immunity to HIV, and talks to microbiologist Larry Gelmon. He goes on to predict that genetic immunity is a trait that will become more prevalent in the community over time.
Quiz July 11
SG 7-8, TM 17-23. Let's all officially commit to our final report topics and nail down our presentation dates today (Jy 11). You can post edited, in-progress drafts of your final blogs at any time, if you'd like to solicit early feedback.
“If you believe in evolution,” the science teacher told my son when he had asked about the relationship between gorillas and humans. After writing this book, I am no longer so surprised at her answer, not at the ability of antievolutionists to influence what our children are being taught in their science classes..." In the Beginning: Fundamentalism, the Scopes Trial, and the Making of the Antievolution Movement
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More for the Scopes/Evo-bibliography:
1. Why did Scopes return to the courtroom late on Wednesday afternoon? (170)
2. How did the New York Times characterize the court debate? (180)
3. What did Darrow tell H.L. Mencken about his cross-examination of Bryan? (190)
4. What was Darrow's view of immortality? (197)
5. What was Edwin Mims' view of Darrow as a champion of enlightenment and science? (207)
6. What was different about the case on appeal, with respect to both the public and the attorneys, according to one reporter? (217)
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7. Whose grave did Chapman almost inadvertently desecrate? (197)
8. With what adjective does Chapman imagine his family's view of his return to Tennessee? (207)
9. What's the least one generation can do for the next, according to Malone, and what does the truth not need? (216-7)
10. What's the "redneck's" response to Chapman's statement that there does seem to be some evidence for evolution? (227)
11. What's TULIP? (237)
12. What was "the high point of the trial"? (247)
13. What impresses Chapman about "a cop"? (257)
14. Of what are drugs symptomatic, according to Chapman? (269)
... [add yours in comments below]
DQ
- Would the "cordiality among participants" likely be replicated in a modern-day Scopes trial?
- Have there been any "good" debates on science and religion in recent years?
- Jefferson's statute of religious freedom says "no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever..." Are you surprised that "modernist Bryan" would ever have endorsed it? 172
- Did Darrow's cross-examination of Bryan succeed in the way Darrow thought it did?
- What's your view of immortality (compared with Darrow's)?
- Was there anything in Darrow's approach that should embarrass a humanist? (What was Edwin Mims' problem with it?)
- Does the truth need defenders?
- What's your view of Calvinism, and specifically the doctrine of predestination?
- Do you agree with Chapman's view of why many people abuse illicit drugs? [btw: Michael Pollan's new book How to Change Your Mind is very interesting on this topic.]
- Darrow's personal character has been impugned by critics, but what's your impression of him? (Consider, for instance, the Curtis anecdote below*...)
- add yours please
* "One night after dinner, zoologist W. C. Curtis adjourned with Darrow to the mansion porch, where they continued a conversation begun at the table about mortality. Curtis had been diagnosed with cancer and told he had no more than a year to live. He was living with 'the expectation of death,' he recalled..."====
"'Do you need any money?'' he asked W. C. Curtis, after hearing the news that the zoologist's son had contracted polio... Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned
* "In our talk around the table after dinner that first night at Dayton, I must have said something that interested Mr. Darrow for as we left the table, he and I continued the conversation and sitting down alone on the veranda of The Mansion continued our talk until almost midnight. When we parted he remarked, 'There aren't many who think about these things as you and I do. It's too bad we can't see each other often.'" Winterton C. Curtis in D-Days at Dayton: Reflections on the Scopes Trial, ed. by Jerry R. Tompkins [excerpt here]
"As to science, [WJB's] mind was an utter blank. He was willing to believe with Genesis that the earth was less than six thousand years old.
Mr. Bryan did not know that the monuments of Egypt... ran back more than seven thousand years... neither did he know of the millions of ages when the earth sped in its path around the sun before it was fitted for any life, animal or vegetable. About all of this his mind was void... he was frightened out of his wits lest, after all, the illusions of his life might be only dreams.
On the other hand, I had been reared by my father on books of science. Huxley's books had been household guests with us for years, and we had all of Darwin's as fast as they were published... For a lawyer, I was a fairly grounded scientist... All in all, that was a summer for the gods... fundamentalism, which was the State religion of Tennessee...
Tennessee cannot much longer be led by the ignorant country preachers, the Holy Rollers, and the other weiurd sects that flourish... I prophesy tnat it will be only a few years before the senseless statute will be wiped from her books." The Story of My Life by Clarence Darrow==
“If you believe in evolution,” the science teacher told my son when he had asked about the relationship between gorillas and humans. After writing this book, I am no longer so surprised at her answer, not at the ability of antievolutionists to influence what our children are being taught in their science classes..." In the Beginning: Fundamentalism, the Scopes Trial, and the Making of the Antievolution Movement
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More for the Scopes/Evo-bibliography:
- In the Beginning: Fundamentalism, the Scopes Trial, and the Making of the Antievolution Movement by Michael Lienesch
- American Genesis: The Evolution Controversies from Scopes to Creation Science
- The Monkeyville Case: The Famous Trials Series
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