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Circumcision
Family Values in The Bible
Evolution: Do you Get it?
Why Believe in Jesus?
Islam: tolerating intolerance?
Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and
then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's
eye.
Oh yeah, that.
It really annoys me when people quote a chapter and verse at me WITHOUT
THE TEXT, as if they expect me to look it up and somehow find a treasure
of wisdom speaking to me. Can't they see what my opinion of the Bible
is? If something makes sense it makes sense, if it doesn't it doesn't.
Being in the Bible has no bearing on that one way or the other. So sometimes
I quote one back at them, just to annoy them.
Ezekiel
23:20
I see you have the mark 1 variation of the laws of thermodynamics being
incompatible with evolution, the simple version. But you don't really
seem to know what it means. There is plenty of external energy being
introduced into the Earth's ecosystem all the time in the forms of chemical
energy and sunlight. 5 million tons of solar mass being converted into
energy per second, and of course the energy output is equivalent to
the mass multiplied by the square of the speed of light. The sun ouputs
63 million watts per square metre of its surface. That's quite a significant
effect, quite a lot of external energy supplied to the system, in case
you hadn't noticed.
Individual organisms consume energy and food and overcome entropy in doing
so. Reproduction allows information to be manipulated and exchanged. The
genetic material is capable of combining in new ways and creating greater
complexity. DNA strands sometimes come apart and are stuck back together
in reverse sequence or with multiple copies, these perfectly allowable
and "legal" natural variations give fuel to the process of evolution.
To a first approximation all species are extinct. 99% of all the species
there have ever been are now extinct. Extinction is normal. But it cannot
be the whole story because for all the bleating on a typical TV wildlife
program we do not live in a seriously denuded environment. New species
have come into existence. They are doing it all the time. New species
are being evolved now.
http://www.solarviews.com/eng/sun.htm
The sun is getting lighter with time as hydrogen is converted into helium.
At the moment the sun is 92.1% hydrogen. The difference between the weight
of hydrogen and helium is very small, 0.7% weight loss when four protons,
hydrogen nuclei, fuse to become one helium nucleus. It's difficult to
try to grasp such concepts easily, our common sense was not evolved to
handle such concepts. We cope better with simple ideas such as gods.
Your understanding of the odds of fossilization leave a lot to be desired.
Very few bones stand a chance of being preserved in ways conducive to
long term fossilization. Most bones are destroyed at the surface. As one
believer in Bigfoot once told me, there are thousands of bears in the
woods of America, but hardly any skeletal remains are ever found, but
we do believe in bears despite the paucity of archaeological evidence
for their existence.
There are human bones to be found in a few rare places conducive to their
preservation. Cave sites are especially good because they can remain undisturbed
for long periods.
You didn't answer the question, how many fossilized human remains would
you expect to find, give your reasoning.
As for transitional forms they are all about us. There are living transitional
forms today in the form of ring species, animals and plants that form
two distinct species living side by side at one part of a ring and going
one way around the ring one form slowly changes into the other until they
meet again as two distinct forms.
The family tree of mankind is full of transitional fossils but science
doesn't like to call anything a transitional form, science likes neat
demarcation, so all fossils have to belong to one species or another.
The idea that the earth has hosted life for billions of years but mankind
for only a few million (or a less than a hundred thousand, depending how
tightly you draw your definition) is falsifiable. It is testable. Usurping
the crown of Darwin is a great prize that many scientists have striven
for but they have failed. Biology only makes sense in the light of evolution,
still. Of course there are many areas of difficulty and controversy within
science, that is the way science works, and we are a very long way from
knowing all the answers, or probably even half the questions, but the
alternative ideas of Young Earth Creationism do not fit the observed reality
and they offer no power to predict anything. If Young Earth Creationism
is true physics is subservient to magic. I don't believe that and neither
does anybody outside the Abrahamic religions. There are no atheist, agnostic,
Hindu or Buddhist scientists who believe the Earth is only a few thousand
years old. None at all.
Martin Willett
http://mwillett.org/
|
Ring species! That is supposed to be proof that evolution is taking place today? I could use that as proof that members of the same species are losing genetic material vital to the survival of the species. A gull is a gull and a salamander is a salamander, even if they don't find other members of the same species attractive. No new genetic material is produced. Your last correspondence indicated that you subscribed to Karl Popper's epistemology, however he reached a different conclusion about evolution, stating that it didn't even deserve to be called a theory. Obviously you have great faith. Since you cautioned me not to send you links to other sites or quote religious texts please follow those guidelines yourself. Yes, I did not give an exact figure as to
how many sets of fossilized human remains should have been found. James Thompson |
Popper didn't believe in evolution? So? Jesus was circumcised
and celebrated the Passover. Newton had some pretty harebrained ideas
about alchemy. Nobody says you have to swallow every idea that a man put
forward because you agree with one point he made.
The issue about the sun isn't an issue, as the links I gave you demonstrate.
You seem to labouring under the impression that the sun is in some way
very old and has "burned up" a huge proportion of its original
size. This is not so. The sun is barely into middle age and has burned
up a small fraction of its original mass. When the Earth was new the sun
would have been around 2% more massive than it is today, in mass terms,
what would that be in terms of radius? Who cares, it is clearly nothing
like your hunch of an object the size of the orbit of Pluto! The human
brain and common sense are no match for numbers such as the square of
the speed of light, the mass of the sun or the distance to the sun. If
you are up to your neck in yoghurt a teaspoon isn't much use, when faced
with numbers that are too big for our savannah ape brains to comprehend
intuitively we are better served by not trying to use intuition. An animal
that is extraordinarily lucky to live a hundred years cannot comprehend
a million years directly without breaking it down into steps of multiplication.
The same goes for a distance so vast it takes light eight minutes to traverse.
Such numbers cannot be perceived directly and can only be comprehended
by the systematic use of algorithms, techniques such as putting a comma
after every digits in a number help to give us the impression that we
understand numbers but we don't as is evidenced by how often people will
talk about millions and billions as if they were virtually interchangeable,
in a way they are, both fill our minds to overflowing and we need analogies
and models to begin to comprehend them. Trying to picture a big ball of
gas burning for five billion years is going to throw up incorrect ideas
and intuitions. Seriously big numbers cannot be intuited!
To our brains the size of the sun is
Number overflow. System unstable. Reboot required, data held in unsaved superstitions will be lost
Of course if there was a God we should not expect to be able to comprehend
him, anything capable of designing the universe would be impossible to
know or appreciate directly with the brains we have, even with the help
of gurus and the finest drugs.
In what way do ring species prove genetic material is being lost? All
the members of ring species are valid and fit individuals, some clearly
fit into one species, some clearly fit into another species and those
geographically between the ends vary between one form and the other.
Nothing is lost. Species are not winding down into some inevitable death
by mutation, a state of entropy in which everything dissipates away into
uniform non-living chaos. Nothing could be further from the truth.
A direct analogy of species can be seen in faster forms of evolution.
Language is the classic example. Languages are constantly evolving. New
languages are being formed and old languages are dying. But very few
languages are in any way designed. I have no doubt that you have noticed
language evolution in your own lifetime. Language evolution differs from
biological evolution because there is more than one method of transmission
of pattern and information, but despite this some interesting parallels
can be drawn. Two thousand years ago Latin was a single living language.
Now it is no longer anybody's mother tongue, it has evolved into Romanian,
Italian, French, Portuguese and Spanish. Of course these languages have
also diverged into dialects and accents. The Spanish spoken in Los Angeles
is different to the Spanish spoken in Texas, which differs from that
spoken in Mexico which differs from that spoken in Madrid. All these
languages and accents have to be fit for the purpose, they have to allow
free and fluid communication, and they do, but differently. They have
absorbed mutations that do not affect their fitness, they have not mutated
into meaningless grunts and lost the original purity of their designers,
because their designer is their users and the users ensure that the evolved
entity remains fit.
Herring gulls and black headed gulls are slightly different solutions
to the problem of living, but they are designs that work, and so do the
intermediate forms, but perhaps at some time in the future the intermediate
forms may lose out and disappear, just as the intermediate forms between
Italian and French have disappeared. And the intermediate forms between
apes and men and birds and reptiles. Specialized designs in the human
designed world often start as an intermediate design or a single modification
to an existing design, then further developments soon hit on the winning
design for the new type and the intermediates are never produced again.
The intermediates work only when trying the new trick compared to the
old type that couldn't manage the new trick at all, but once a type exists
that can do the new trick well there is no place for the old intermediate
form, or indeed a new intermediate form. There was a time when military
aircraft were all scouts and reconnaissance aircraft, then a few started
to carry guns for protection and some carried hand thrown bombs for ground
attack. As long as no better designs existed there was a place for these
first attempts at a specialization. But as soon as aircraft began to
be designed to be bombers or fighters the niche for the plane that had
a bag of hand-grenades or shotgun behind the seat had vanished for ever.
Now reconnaissance aircraft just fly fast and high, fighters fight and
bombers bomb. Just as now reptiles sun themselves on rocks and leave
flying to the birds and apes don't bother to make spears, plant yams
or try to claim welfare.
It takes no great faith to imagine a small group of individuals making
a living as an intermediate form and remaining at small population numbers
until they find themselves being attracted to a new stable design, a
new way of making a living. I can easily imagine a few apes walking upright
and venturing out into the open savannah and living as scavengers and
hunters. If the same thing happened now the apes would simply (and probably
rightly) be shot for acting unnaturally and feebly trying to encroach
on our living space.
I would be curious to know how a creationist or intelligent design enthusiast
(a creationist who doesn't shop at Wal*Mart?) would explain a ring species
forming. A gull is a gull but then it is also apparent that there are
intermediate forms between species, species which are distinct in some
localities and yet not in others. I can't understand why an intelligent
designer would do that, but it presents no issues at all for a theory
of evolution.
Why would an intelligent designer design a panda to eat bamboo and design
bamboo to try to starve pandas? Bamboo synchronizes its growing cycle
to engineer a crash in its own population before it regenerates from
seed. Why would an intelligent designer go to such lengths to design
an animal to eat nothing but bamboo and at the same time engineer a devilish
defence mechanism against the panda? Evolutionary theory can predict
mechanisms such as that used by the bamboo. A similar strategy is used
by locusts and cicadas who time their populations to explode in (relatively)
high prime numbered years in order to minimize the chances of any predator
being able to evolve in synchronization and so stand a good chance of
keeping up with the numbers produced in the swarm years. From basic evolutionary
theory we can predict that such mechanisms are likely to exist even before
we come across them. In contrast the theory of intelligent design offers
no prospect of anticipating or predicting anything. If the intelligent
designer/wilful quixotic never to be understood god wants unicorns there
will be unicorns, if not there won't, the same goes for mermaids, space
aliens and dragons.
If you are serious about defending the number of fossils there "should
be" please go ahead, explaining what proportion of skeletons should
be expected to be found and in what types of site. What population
size are you estimating, and why? What proportion of skeletons should
expect to end up in a place conducive to preservation, and of those
what proportion should be expected to be fossilized. Perhaps you could
compare and contrast that number to the number of human and other mammal
remains you have personally uncovered while digging your garden and
the numbers of skeletons of abundant animals that are found fossilized
or simply preserved. It would also be instructive to estimate how many
skeletons should be expected to be dug up per year during prehistoric
periods and more recently. Should we assume that all bones survive,
all bones are buried, all bones remain buried until the current era,
when they get dug up? I think not.
The reason there will never be the announcement of the finding of a missing
link is that every fossil needs to be allocated to a species, if a species
cannot be found it becomes the first example of a new species. Taxonomy
does not allow a fossil to classified as transitional. Fossils which
could be regarded as transitional forms will be shoe-horned into an existing
species by the refusal of rival scientists to accept the claims for a
new intermediate species. When new bones are dug up there is often scientific
controversy as to whether they belong in a new species or are just a
poor example of a species that has already been accepted. Just because
species labels are all or nothing do not believe that the all or nothing
categories actually exist in the real world. The discipline of taxonomy
insists that divisions are sharp, that there are no shades, something
is either blue or it is green, reality is not like that.
Sorry for delay, I getting snowed under with emails.
Martin Willett
http://mwillett.org/
|
I do not believe that the sun is very old.
My argument is that if the sun were as old as current accepted theory
[4-5 billion years ], consuming 700 million tons per second of hydrogen
and helium for that length of time would require it to have had
a much greater mass and energy output in the relatively recent past
[ 2 billion years ago ] than it does now. Jim Thompson |
My brief research shows that the energy output of the sun has not reduced over time, it has increased by about 40% since the beginning of the solar system.
Try this page for some info about the sun, I am sure you have got one or two of your premises wrong:
http://solar-center.stanford.edu/FAQ/Qshrink.html
My mathematics runs out at long subtraction so I cannot check the figures about the age, consumption rate and energy output of the sun. The reason why I am not worried by such matters is because I am unaware of anybody claiming to be a young sun creationist based on astronomical observations. Astronomers have huge numbers of stars to look at and compare, I see no good reason to expect there to be any fundamental problems with the sums that nobody else has investigated. If you think there is a problem with the figures write a book about it, anything remotely scientific-sounding that bolsters the fairy story in the Bible is guaranteed to be a massive best seller in the USA. If you haven't got a doctorate in astronomy go and buy one, that is the Christian way.
Your dual standards of credulity are staggering. You show a breathtaking willingness to believe in an old book and the tribal traditions of an alien tribe even if it requires postulating a world-wide conspiracy between scientists brought up in different cultures across the planet, many decades apart.
Of course science has got some things wrong. Every decade reveals mistakes of the past and it would be idiotic to imagine that this process has now stopped and nothing new will be discovered and no current theories will be overturned. The death of evolutionary theory has been declared by the Christian right and their small number of scientific allies in every decade since 1859. In every decade more people believe in evolution and more evidence is uncovered to support it. Evolution is the most thoroughly tested and challenged theory in science. We do not fully understand it and there are gaps in the theory. The same is true of the theory of gravity, which is also just a theory.
Sherlock Holmes was supposed to have said when he has discounted the impossible whatever remains, however unlikely, must be the truth. In contrast the "Christian scientist" approach is to discount the unthinkable and cobble together whatever remains, however unlikely, and declare it to be The Truth.
Discussing scientific controversies without detailed knowledge and with entrenched attitudes and prejudices is a complete waste of time. There is no point in me addressing your points because you cannot accept defeat on any issue. You cling to your prejudices and will not be budged from them.
If people address your issues they are thereby portrayed as fanatics and obsessed with disproving your religion. If people ignore you they are running away from The Truth. If they dismiss you they are portrayed as arrogant and closed minded and if they defeat you in argument they have cheated and been blinded by Satan.
Even if you give your prejudiced theories the benefit of every doubt and wholeheartedly embrace the concept of a designer where does it take you? If the universe was created and life was designed what could be inferred from that? The nature of the hypothetical designer would be clear in the design. It seems like a designer that wants to allow possibilities and allow life but has no concept of justice. In Britain this month a convicted multiple rapist was released on licence shortly before completing his sentence, he bought a lottery ticket and won a fortune. It is difficult to imagine this as proof of a designer who is interested in the personal lives of individuals or of justice.
Why would the creator of the universe have a thing for Jews? Just imagine yourself as God for a few moments and work out how much sense this makes. You create the entire universe, you engineer things so that life happens and you set everything up for human life and then you pick on one small tribe and tell them nothing but the truth and let all the other tribes on Earth imagine similar stories that are all wrong. It is totally farcical, isn't it? You imagine the rest of humanity can make up religions and get them wrong, often those ideas show clear evidence of copying ideas, themes and stories from one culture to another and yet at the same time there is one special culture that is inerrant, methodically having the The Truth revealed to it over time, accepting some prophets and rejecting others and always getting it right. Right up to the point at which the creator of the universe comes down to Earth himself in human form to reveal the truth, at that point most of the tribe turn against this most true prophet and see that he is put to death. As credible stories go that is on a par with the sun being a giant dung ball being rolled across the sky by a beetle.
Disproving evolution (which you haven't done) does nothing to prove the Case for Christianity. If there is a designer we have no way of knowing what, if anything, the designer wants us to do. Proving a designer does nothing to prove the existence of a soul, an afterlife, a purpose for life or the concern of a designer. If there is a great designer outside the universe we know we have no way of knowing what, if anything, would motivate him. We have motivations because we have evolved. We have things we need to do that kill us if we do not do them but don't bring us a great deal of satisfaction in themselves and we have other things which we gain satisfaction from, these are things which are essential for the survival of our genes. We don't get a lot of pleasure from breathing but we have to do it, lack of opportunities to breathe causes us great distress but there is no joy to be obtained from breathing per se. Most of the time and energy we expend is aiming to fulfil more subtle purposes, such as gaining prestige, success in the subtle things gives us the greatest pleasure. For us gaining prestige makes us feel good because it is behaviour our genes want to reward us for because it is behaviour that is likely to benefit our genes. Health, wealth, happiness and prestige are what we need to be successful in life. Being really successful means bringing up a family of winners, winners are genetically fit because they have what it takes to fit into a human community. Most people have a very peculiar idea of what fitness means, as if the fittest man is the winner of the decathlon or the marathon. Nonsense. Fit men are like Joseph Kennedy or those sickeningly virtuous immigrants who set up as tailors in New York or London in 1910 but now have 60 great grandchildren, most of whom are university educated professionals living in the suburbs.
What we think of as basic motivations are in fact very complex motivations very far removed from basic survival which we have developed because we have evolved he way we have. Everything that we think of as basic human motivations is shaped by our evolutionary history. We cannot assume anything that motivates us is in any way a form of natural inherent motivation that comes with intelligence. If there is a great designer he must have wisdom, but it would be wisdom devoid of experience and devoid of motivation. Alien wisdom.
The fiction of the pre-computer-literate age is full of ideas that simple complexity and intelligence will naturally develop personality. Now we have built machines with enormous power to compute we have found it is very difficult to get them to do what we think of as natural. Computers have no ambition or survival instinct. What we consider to be the simplest aspects of life are in fact incredibly difficult to create. A holy word dropped into the head will not turn a clay man into a golem, and it takes a lot more than a wave of a wand to make a wooden boy real. This realization makes the idea of the great designer, the supreme architect or God so much less attractive. No longer can you simply postulate a force of goodness and wisdom and think that is enough. A force of love would just sit there and love just as the most powerful computer ever built would just sit there and do nothing without a boot program. God would have to pre-exist the universe and be wise, wisdom without experience, and he would have to have a desire to create. Just as big a question as where does the universe come from is where does God come from and behind that is an equally big question: where does God's motivation come from? Motivation has to be designed. Our motivation comes from our evolutionary history. What designed the designer? What made the designer want to design? If nothing can come from nothing there must be a bigger god behind your God and so on ad infinitum.
There is a mechanism that can create complexity out of simplicity and can create motivation out of nothing at all. That force is evolution by natural selection.
You might think that your God is love, but love too is a product of evolution and not in any way in need of any form of supernatural explanation. Love is a thoroughly rational emotion and like all other emotions is built into us to help us make the right decisions despite our chronically poor logical faculties. In its strongest forms love is seen between parents and children and between members of couples, potential and actual co-parents. Please be aware that to explain something does not explain it away or make it less beautiful. Mystery is just ignorance with good public relations. I know that my love for my wife and children is real and I know how and why it works. There is no conflict there, understanding love no more negates love than understanding gravity makes you immune to it. By being in love with my wife I am able to freely and easily make the right decisions which strengthen our partnership and so make us more effective and reliable parents. It is not an effort to look after my wife's feelings any more than it is an effort to eat up that piece of cheesecake, because my mind has been constructed by evolution to want to do certain things such as to enjoy sex, companionship, children and so on just as my mind and body have been constructed to want to eat certain calorie-rich foods. My point here is that much of what we think of as natural and normal motivations are in fact nothing to do with being intelligent but are in fact all due to having evolved. If there was a designer of the universe who did not evolve he would be in every sense totally alien and needless.
A designer god would have no jealousy because he (it?) would have no personality, it would not need one, unless it decided to adopt one, literally on a whim. It would not need a sense of identity or a focus of identity or anything to be proud of or for. Personality is something we develop because our interests are subtly different from those of our parents and siblings, we develop a sense of self to defend the self and to define the self as something distinct.
Worship would not be required because it would do no good because such a designer would not have human weaknesses and so would have no need to feel appreciated. If there really was a designer god he would have no need to design because he would have no needs. Anything with the power to create the universe and design life would have no reason to want to do so because reason and motivation themselves only arise in complex systems.
Postulating a designer with needs and motivations is absurd. Postulating that such a designer would be a jealous or loving god is absurd, as both jealousy and love require complex social species in which to develop. Postulating that such a god would care about our lives to the point at which he decides to prolong them infinitely is absurd. Postulating that worshipping that designer for all eternity is in itself a purpose for such an eternal life is absurd. Postulating that such a designer would try to communicate with us through mortal prophets is absurd. Believing those people who act as if they are prophets is thoroughly absurd.
Prophets were not universally accepted in their own time. They never are. In the here and now people never act like they do in "biblical times" because they do not know they are living in biblical times, and they never did. Only history and myth gives such a perspective. When they were alive the prophets were no more accepted universally than Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain were accepted universally. Kurt who? Some dead guy all the kids think is wonderful, especially those too young to have known anything about him when he was alive. It takes time and a touch of myth before people adjust their minds to the idea that great men or deities have been walking among us. People who worship living prophets are rightly derided as fools and fanatics.
It does not matter where you look at the religious "explanation" for the universe absurdities abound. Of course science cannot explain everything, only the religious constructing their strawman make out that science should be able to explain everything at this moment. As Donald Rumsfeld said, of other things, there are things we know that we don't know and there are things which we don't know that we know and there are (almost certainly) things that we don't know that we don't know. The big difference between science and religion is that science does not rejoice in ignorance, to the scientist a mystery is a Bad Thing, an affront and a challenge not a reason for simple-minded praise of the lord of the unknown.
Martin Willett
http://mwillett.org/
|
Mr. Willett, It seems that you misunderstood
my arguments. I did not state that evolutionary theory has been
disproved , I agree with Dr. Popper that no evidence ever existed
for that theory, and there is no need to disprove something that
has no proof. The biggest lie is that it is even a credible theory.
Of course impressionable children believe their teachers when they
are told over and over that something is a fact, regardless of the
truth. Yes, more people believe it, but that belief is based on
faith in their teachers, not evidence. I don't think this is a conspiracy,
just a humanist refusal to consider the facts. |
"Of course impressionable children believe their teachers when they are told over and over that something is a fact, regardless of the truth."
Does that phrase have any resonance with you? You wrote it. Christianity spreads by people talking to children and by talking to adults as if they were children. Grown up people do not come to believe in the story of Genesis by studying rocks and fossils. It has never happened. In contrast millions of people who have been brought up to believe that the accounts in Genesis were true have rejected them as the myths they are and have accepted the account of science.
The evidence for evolution having happened is simply overwhelming. Evolution allows people to make predictions. Armed with a knowledge of evolution, theory and practice, that is the basic concept of how evolution must work plus knowledge of the history of life on Earth, real predictions can be made about things which are not known. For example, armed with evolutionary theory scientists can make reasonable deductions about the possibility of mysterious animal sightings being real or hoaxes. The believer in Genesis just has to accept that if Noah found a heffalump or a dragon then they could be real and as for the seas, God alone knows what may lurk there. Biology only makes sense in the light of evolution, without an understanding of evolution biology is just cataloguing, nothing can ever be understood, only boggled at.
I find it quite amazing that you could think that young people who want to disprove everything would willingly accept the theory of evolution without evidence simply because they are gullible. I have lived my entire life from the age of about 12 and up seeking to find the answers and to separate out truth from dogma. I loved finding absurdities in the beliefs of my teachers. Even today I take quite a delight in spotting prejudices, mistaken logical steps and errors even in the writings of people I admire and agree with.
You are suffering under the illusion that there is a great movement for non-evolutionary biology out there somewhere. There isn't. It exists only in the form of an endless debate between 99.9% of science and a few very canny scientists who know where their lecture tour income comes from.
For evolution not to be real would require the universe to be run by a perverse intelligence. An intelligence that wanted to appear not to exist or be necessary. The idea that there really is a designer of the universe who wants people to believe in him but goes to such lengths to appear not to exist is a madness I will not embrace.
How can you go from imagining the sun stretching out to the orbit of Pluto one week and then finding the output of the sun has increased 40% and see both as evidence that science has been lying to you? This is behaviour that smacks of a mental illness. Life can adapt. That is what evolution is all about! When life first arose on this planet there was no oxygen in the atmosphere, that is a much more fundamental challenge than a 40% increase in energy output from the sun over many billions of years. Life coped.
Those who cannot, will not allow themselves to, accept evolution always characterize it as random. This is a gross misrepresentation. Evolution is the very opposite of a random process. The odds against any particular bunch of atoms arranging themselves into a living cell is indeed astronomical. But why does it have to be one particular bunch of atoms? The formation of replicating chemicals only needed to have happened once and it could happen anywhere and anytime. It is a lottery with a very low probability of coming up with a winning match, but with several trillion draws per second for five hundred million years. Once there is replication then everything changes. Evolution is born and nothing has to rely on randomness again.
"The very concept of justice presupposes a morality that could not come from survival of the fittest." That is typical of a theist, imagining that everything good must be from God. Morality can easily evolve, which is evidenced by the fact that it has. No human culture is devoid of a value system. The bigger and more elaborate the culture the more complicated that morality becomes. Justice is a result of the way our brains work, the thing that our brains are best at working out is whether we have been wronged, whether somebody has cheated. That is a direct result of evolution. We developed large brains before we developed sophisticated tools and language. A million years ago members of our species were living as little more than glorified apes with a few simple tools and fire. It was justice that helped build our brains, social living. Species with sophisticated societies need larger brains. Our social systems are by far the most elaborate in the animal kingdom.
I totally disagree with you about morality and justice. I cannot conceive of any way in which morality and justice could be created without a process of evolution in a social organism. A child can understand when things are unfair to him. An older child can see when things are unfair on others. A man can devise a philosophy and system of justice. I cannot imagine how a god could invent justice unless that god was the creation of a being who lived in a social setting. The nature of God as described by theists clearly shows the work of human type minds. Nature does not show any evidence of being interested in justice. Nature is pitiless. Rats and snakes introduced to remote islands will mercilessly catch and eat whatever they come across and do not show any compunction in eating endangered species. Fleas, ticks, tapeworms and the like show no compassion or sense of justice. It rains upon the just and the unjust. The only justice in the universe is human (or created by the actions of other animals with some sense of justice). There is no divine justice, not the slightest trace of it.
"Doesn't humanist philosophy teach that what one believes is right for them is right regardless of other's beliefs?" There's a single humanist philosophy? Really. No shit. I am not a humanist. I am somebody who does not believe in gods. I think that philosophy you sketched out is crap. Reality is not democratic.
[Update 2009, yes, I am a humanist]
"Doesn't the rapist increase the odds of his progeny's survival by impregnating multiple women?" Yes, just as the thief increases his disposable income. What of it? Both rape and theft are wrong. My understanding of evolution does not generate my beliefs in what is right. You cannot deduce an ought from an is. Rape is understandable, logical and at times rational. It is always distasteful, immoral and thoroughly wrong. Rape is wrong because it denies the personhood of the victim. It is a violation of the golden rule of do as you would be done by. It can never be right to use a person for your ends against their will. I don't need to go much further than that before I find more than sufficient grounds to declare rape to be a sin. The fact that it can be viewed as logically to be in the interests of the rapist is only to be expected, why would somebody be tempted/driven to do something that was illogical and against their interests?
The idea that you don't know what motivates God is a get out. It allows you to make your god invulnerable to logical probing. It is an article of faith that he exists, that he is good, that he is worthy or worship and if necessary to defend those dogmas that his ways are beyond human probing. As a tactic in debate it is similar to those childhood games in which the slightly bigger boy chose to be the hero and defined the superpowers of the hero incrementally as the game progressed. In other words it looks like a cheat.
"As a devout humanist, you probably don't believe that sin exists" Will you allow me to define my beliefs myself?
I do not believe in the Christian concept of sin as being actions defined as bad by a deity, actions which form a pattern of behaviour which can be projected into a force of nature or the person of Satan. I do accept that there are sins, actions which are wrong because their consequences contain foreseeable harm to other people. No action is bad just because it is declared to be bad. There is no force for sin. Actions are sins if they have sin-like properties, but there is no sin-central, Satan or force for sinning any more than there is a unified force for speed or blue. Things have the property of speed if they move quickly but all things that are fast are not governed by the Lord of Speed. I believe that sin is as real as speed, but harder to define objectively. Do you believe in sin in a concrete form?
You claim to have believed in evolution. Therefore you would have no difficulty in describing how it works, in your own words. Go ahead.
Can you explain how forbidding the seething of a kid in its mothers milk is justified in scientific terms? And why that is now interpreted as forbidding the eating of a Big Mac by some True Believers while others declare that the laws of the unchanging everlasting God have changed and do not carry any force any more. Or perhaps you can explain why it is an abomination to grow two crops in one field or wear clothes of mixed fibres. Or perhaps you would like to explain to me in what way menstruation and childbirth make a woman unclean, or what that means, or why a woman is worth half the amount of a man. Or perhaps you would like to reveal why God would need cities (villages with walls) destroyed and all their people killed. Or why that genocide inspired by your loving God would sometimes include livestock as well. Any explanation mentioning the mysterious ways of God will elicit an answer inviting you to partake in a self administered theology suppository.
Can you explain to me what would be considered reasonable grounds for showing the Bible to be a multi-authored work of myth of no significance. What would count as proof? How much would be required to demonstrate that the Bible was just a book? I will assume that to declare the miracles to be physically impossible would be laughed off, as would the idea that there is no independent evidence to back them up or that the Bible flatly contradicts itself in many ways. Is the lack of any archaeological or historical evidence of the Hebrew people ever being in either Egypt or Sinai a non-issue? Is the dismissal of 99.9999999999999999999999% + of the universe in a sub-clause (he made the stars also) not a wee bit problematical?
How can you explain the notion of God making the sun stop in the sky? What happened here? If God wanted to stop time why didn't he just do so without revealing the Bible authors' misunderstanding of astronomy?
The Bible is to be read as history, as myth, as science, as allegory and as metaphor. Whichever way best upholds the central dogma. Implausibility in science is a point for the Bible, implausibility in the Bible is a point for the Bible too, it shows how great God is. Heads God is Great, tails Man is Evil.
How can you explain the fact that despite this great work of science (ha!) being left in hotel rooms across the world it is only in the Christian community of middle America that anything above a handful of certifiable lunatics takes the biblical account at all seriously? Universities in Japan are not beating off eager creationist students with sticks, but they are happy to learn about evolution. When the Berlin Wall came down there was not a great movement for belief in the Bible as a work of science. There are probably less than 100,000 creationists in the whole of Europe. You will find more Satanists, pagans, witches and believers in grey aliens, and they are marginally more respectable, and certainly less of a threat to our children.
People accuse me of being obsessed with religion. Is it any wonder? There is a country full of people who believe in this stuff in a way that is impervious to reason. They are 100% convinced of their possession of divine blessing and there is categorical evidence that they also possess weapons of mass destruction and many of them believe mankind has only weeks to go before rapture. I would say that under the circumstances that my approach is probably too reasonable and complacent.
Martin Willett
http://mwillett.org/