768 thoughts on “I lost my faith in ID”
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The Skeptical Zone
"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken."
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Thank you for supporting my point earlier regarding how Behe has given up.
You could have linked to some research of his, but you did not.
You could have linked to some research relating to ID, but you did not.
Instead you decided to point out how little relevance ID has in the scientific world, making my point for me. If the best you have is that some popular science books are trending and that most americans are religious, well, whoopie doo.
Remind me, what % of the Jewish population accepts Jesus as their saviour? If truth is decided by percentages you had better accept that, right? But of course you don’t.
Also, remind me what opinion that general population has regarding evolution when they study and become scientists?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Steve
Does that not matter more than what the general population thinks? Or is ID only for the rubes then?
Alan Fox,
There is evidence it is the Physician Luke is a companion of Paul. He is mentioned in Paul’s letters. His writings are claimed to have extreme historical accuracy. This leaves us with a conundrum about accepting the parts of the story you consider “embellishments”.
I found it interesting that you were confident enough in you ability to understand what went on in the early 1st century to make this claim. This tells me the heavy filter you are bringing to the subject. Luke was considered by scholars to be a detailed accurate writer yet he wrote of miracles occurring around the apostles.
Once your filter discounts this there is no going back to analyze this without prejudice.
Another approach is to say that Luke may have been embellishing or what was going in this Messianic age was very different then what we experience today. Let’s continue to study before we conclude.
OMagain,
One of the books in the top 5 is Darwins black box.
Why do you continue to discuss the subject?
When was that book published?
Who first came to the tomb on Sunday morning?
http://glanglab.com/papers/Evolution2019.pdf
Amusingly dismal review.
It has been 2,000 years, I expect most Jews feel their religion does not need enchantment by a Christian interpretation of their sacred text. But arguments about religion always work out well, good luck.
Would that lack of a World wide flood falsify the resurrection, not seeing how one could falsify the Bible. One could show that how the book was assembled and sourced was questionable. Obviously that was done by design, An omnipotent being could do otherwise in choice of place and time, and the means of transmission of the message if He chose. It was meant to be uncertain.
Understandable, that would guarantee Bible to be unfalsifiable. The issue is it makes the message subjective to what one already believes or want to believe. . Confirmation bias.
Sorry , that is a logic I do not follow. As long as Jesus was aware of his dual nature, no other human has that perspective. He never sinned.
This is a good point.
colewd,
Was there a worldwide flood where all but those on the Ark perished?
Simple question….
newton,
This is a very interesting question. This is why I enjoy discussing with you. The Bible is both story and History. The life of David the proceeding Kings and prophets appear to be history. The discussion between God and the snake in genesis appear to be story. The parable about prodigal son is story. The mixture between history brings an interesting dynamic. I think falsification could occur if you could show Isaiah made a false prophecy. Not in the detail of words but a prediction that an event prophesied in fact did not occur.
If the story of Jesus life could be shown to be story this would be very problematic. This is what motivates Jesus mysticism.
From that point on God now had the perspective of being human. Jesus had compassion for humans per the Gospels.
OMagain,
I don’t know. You can quote me on that 🙂
colewd,
Hi Bill,
Just to let you know that the quality of your argument for the reality of your god is of much lower quality than what I heard when I was much younger and believed in that stuff. You presented variations on a few of the very same arguments I heard before. So, sorry. Nothing I never heard.
As I told you time and again. This is not about proving that the magical being in the sky doesn’t exist, or that your evidence is not evidence. It doesn’t look like evidence, and lowering standards is not something I’m willing to do, let alone for the sake of an absurd fantasy.
See ya around.
Entropy,
What is your “standard” of evidence?
What is your “standard for declaring something “magical”?
As the discussion goes on we only have what amounts to your subjective opinion.
Oh, that settles it then! 😉
I’ll just repeat, I am not particularly motivated to back-and-forth with you on fact versus faith. If faith works for you then fine.
What do you mean you don’t know? You made a big song and dance about evidence in the bible and early parts supporting later parts. Are we now finding out that some of it is not true? What does that do for your case? How do you differentiate true and untrue?
Except it’s you doing your level best to achieve that.
It’s very simple. Imagine if there had been a global flood that killed all humans except a small group. What evidence would see for that and where would we see it?
Given the timelines implied, mere thousands of years, is it likely a global flood was not noticed by civilisations at the time?
If these thoughts have never occurred to you before, then they have now. So I ask again, is the story of Noah as told in the BIble true?
You realize how absurd it is that you can’t say an obviously untrue thing is untrue? What do you think it does to the rest of your argument? There’s nothing too absurd that colewd won’t say ‘never’ to.
Some parts of the bible are evidence for prophecy. Some parts, for some reason, colwd, “does not know” if they are true or not.
If you don’t know if the story of Noah is true, what else are you unsure about the truth of in the bible colwed?
Who was first?
OMagain,
Surely Bill doesn’t think Noah actually saved all living things in the ark? 😯
More sources then a single one that is used to provide ‘evidence’ for later chapters.
When pressed Behe admitted that ‘poof’ was all he really had. You pretend not to even see my questions regarding how different an omnipotent mind must be to ours which you yourself even see by noting it had to become one of us to understand us.
So I think it’s ‘magical’ how you simply don’t see things that you know are fatal to your argument, such as it is. It’s magical because wishing does not make those objections go away.
If you want to claim god made the universe, fine, but until you come up with some actual science with regard to biology claims about the bible seem to be about your limit. Can’t wait to see your paper on why the ‘mind’ behind biology must be Jesus’.
He does not know if that happened or not, apparently! He can’t form an opinion either way.
I wonder if he has one of those bibles with all the true bits underlined?
Alan Fox,
You need to define your terms. What is fact, what is faith, and what is evidence. Pauls documentation of Luke is a fact. It is evidence of Luke’s existence and authorship. Faith is the belief that all this adds up to the validity of the Bible.
Your unsupported doubt is subjective. Especially given your very powerful materialist filter.
Should be at the level of the claims Bill. If you want me to believe something as extraordinary as an absurd, yes, note it: absurd, story about some god that comes to earth as his own son to be sacrificed to forgive the sins of people that the very same god made in a way that they would be unable to avoid sinning, then the evidence has to be unavoidably extraordinary. Not some washed down “oh, you know, the evidence is extraordinary for the times”. No sir, it has to be extraordinary for the claims. The times are irrelevant. The humungous size and absurdity of the claim is the problem.
My subjective opinion matters if you imagine that you have some actually convincing evidence. If I look at it, and it doesn’t look like evidence, let alone as evidence as extraordinary as the claim, then, asking me to consider that this is about “history” and that the “standards” have to be shitty, that’s but your subjective credulity, and I’m not for it.
I wonder why not. Let’s consider that for historians, the standard is so shitty for something happening four thousand years ago that we should be able to believe that this ark thing happened! Extraordinary claims you say? That nobody else noticed the flood? That’s but your subjective opinion.
OMagain,
-There is documented evidence of the resurrection from several sources.
-The ancient Jewish prophets predicted a Messiah among other verified prophecies
-Jesus filled that description.
-It is very unlikely that a human would sign up for pretending to be the Messiah of Isaiah 53. It is even more unlikely that the torture and death would occur consistent with the time predicted in Daniel 9. It is unlikely Christianity would survive the Roman persecution if it was false.
-We cannot explain the existence of the universe without a mechanism at least if not more powerful then the human mind.
-The story of the Bible has a consistent theme from beginning to the end despite 40 authors.
This adds up to me that the Christian or Messianic Jewish story is the truth.
It’s up to you how you want to synthesize the evidence. Entropy has synthesized the evidence differently and that’s fine. So far no challenge to my argument is anything but subjective mostly based on materialist bias.
Entropy,
What is your objective standard for labeling something “absurd”. If you say it is absurd to you that’s fine. It is far from absurd to me based on the evidence that we are in a created universe and the consistency of the Biblical story.
I believe it is absurd to you because of your Materialist or Physicalist filter. Alan is struggling with the same thing and this is a condition of how our minds work.
Text is fact. Content of text is, on its own, not evidence of an event, especially when it involves defying the laws of nature
Texts exist, fact. Claims made in text need consilient evidence.
As I said, text needs consilient evidence. Could be there was a historical Luke, could be he was a follower of Paul, could be this Luke was the author of the gospel attributed to him.
Well, I make a different distinction – that between emotion and intellect.
Here’s the thing, Bill. I have no issue if you insist on deluding yourself. That is your right and I will defend it if called upon.
Not sure what I’m filtering out. Have you given your cloak away?
Sorry to disappoint you Bill but I didn’t get the God gene. As I remarked a while ago, I’m mildly curious why other humans need to cling to superstitions when it is so clear that they serve mostly to keep the status quo (any status quo) in order.
Alan Fox,
So you are saying you should discount this 100% because it is an event outside the laws of nature. OOL is outside the reach of the current known laws of nature but it happened.
Which exist in this case.
Only if you are talking about blind faith. Your intellect has limitations based on bias as all of ours have.
A subjective claim based on your material bias.
. All evidence that does not conform to your worldview. If you can show me an exception to my claim here I am interested.
Alan Fox,
I didn’t think I did either at one point 🙂
Abiogenesis does not violate the laws of physics.
This claim is meaningless.
Alan Fox,
How would you explain this event from you current worldview?
https://www.livescience.com/29290-fatima-miracle.html
Kantian Naturalist,
The claim is outside the reach. This is because of all the information required for it to take place.
Why do you consider the other statement meaningless?
Suppose I write to you telling you I am the messiah. You would agree presumably that I wrote to you. You might disagree with my claim to be the Messiah.
Have you even read the frigging article? Are you trying to outdumb nonlin?
Your “argument” is nothing but subjective bullshit founded on immaterialist bias that gets you to accept flimsy pseudo-facts about the bible, make believe that it’s not tampered with, ignoring the glaring incoherences of the biblical crap and the Jesus story in particular, etc.
So, sorry, but my subjective bias is supported by being a bias towards what’s here and now, rather than the incoherence of believing in the “immaterial” without any actual evidence for it.
Incoherence. Internal contradictions. I have repeated an important absurdity about twenty times, and twenty times you have preferred to ignore it. I suspect that’s because you cannot handle the incoherence yourself, so you’d rather ignore it. Maybe you make excuses for it, as usual. I cannot accept those excuses. They’re insulting to anybody with a bit of self-respect.
It’s absurd to you too, only you accept lame excuses for the absurdities.
Nothing to do with physicalism. All to do with me having no need to justify incoherences in the biblical narrative. Since I’m ok looking at is as it is, I see it, you’d rather accept lame, maybe merely rhetorical, excuses.
I haven’t seen Alan struggling with anything you’ve said so far. He just reads unconvinced, and there’s a huge difference between unconvinced and struggling.
No it isn’t. If the OOL was outside the reach of the known laws of nature then life itself would be outside the reach of the laws of nature. So far, everything about how life works falls well within what we know about how nature works (life is part of nature after all).
For example, in biochemistry we learn how reactions couple with each other allowing biochemical pathways to run towards one direction or another, gated by catalysts. Catalysts change the speed of reactions, but the reactions and their individual equilibriums cannot be changed. IOW, their thermodynamics cannot be changed. Thus, life works with thermodynamics. Well within physical/chemical laws. New life forms arise by reproduction by chemistries and physics that follow natural laws. Today life arises, originates, via predetermined catalysts in their parental life forms. Since catalysis can happen by many means, OOL could happen by inorganic/non-live catalysis too.
That might sound complicated, but it’s very simple if you think about it carefully. There’s nothing unnatural about OOL, for the same reasons there’s nothing unnatural about life’s working and reproduction. The only barrier against OOL is in your mind, in you bias against nature in favour of fantasy.
Now, dazz, you and I know that Bill carefully read and understood the article he linked and that it represents the best evidence for the ‘miracle’ at Fatima as well as the best explaination he has found to support his faith and belief in that ‘miracle.
aaah, he didn’t read it since if he did he would have never asked the question he posed……the article supplies the answer in a nicely written fashion!
What information is required at the origin of life?
It seems to me to now that would require insight you cannot possibly possess.
Firstly, please define life.
Secondly, please detail the exact information required for something to be considered alive.
You are just doing what IDers always do, assume that the modern cell is required at the origin of life. And making the argument that it had to come together in a single moment, entire and intact, or it would not function. Counting up the components and insisting each and every one is necessary or it would die.
When of course what you are describing there is your conception of how the origin of life occurred, not something any serious OOL researcher would recognise.
Who was first at the tomb?
I think we should answer the question as asked. From my worldview, colewd, that you link to that article shows that you are unable to process information at any meaningful level, instead relying on a surface skim looking for keywords and assuming that once those keywords are found the link supports your claims.
The fact that the article demolishes the credibility of the miracle does not matter to you, it’s the fact that it’s being discussed at all that matters. And whatever the objections are in the article can be dismissed by you as the materialist filter in action.
When in fact it’s your filter in action. preventing you from even seeing that the sense of the article you linked to is entirely opposite in it’s effect re: support for miracles.
And given that ineptitude, where does that leave the rest of your claims?
OMagain,
What is the current model of the simplest cell that can process energy and reproduce?
Of course it was. I posted the materialist version as I find it interesting how they filter out non materialist claims just like you guys do. It appears that Alan was smart enough not to lead with his chin as Dazz did. Whats interesting is that this town is not too far from Dazz and Alan. They could check it out. If you remember several years ago VJ Torley wrote a post on this miracle. It turns out the story is much more complex than the article I posted as I watched to the Catholic Church version on Amazon last night. Eventually Pope John Paul 11 and the oldest girl had an encounter much later in her life. According to the documentary she performed a miracle that saved his life.
I don’t have a firm opinion about the validity of this miracle but it would be interesting to explore especially as a few of our local skeptics could visit the town. Maybe Phoodoo would be willing to join.
Alan Fox,
I would be skeptical. You win this point 🙂
I really don’t know what would be the simplest. However a hurricane uses energy and spawns smaller storms.
colewd,
I don’t need to go there. Marian apparition stories are dime a dozen in my neck of the woods. It’s silly, no one in their right mind would believe them, and it has nothing to do with “materialist” bias.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Marian_apparitions
I corroborate Alan’s story. He’s the messiah.
Now you have two independent written accounts. How many more do you need to notice you have a double standard?
dazz,
How did you come to this conclusion?
Why are you not asking yourself why you believe what the Bible says considering that you don’t know how the authors came to their conclusions?
dazz,
People in they’re “right mind” immediately discount a story about seeing the Virgin Mary? On what basis do they immediately discount this story? If they are a dime a dozen then I assume a lot of different people have this hallucination?
dazz,
We know how they came to their conclusions. Did the resurrection of Jesus and the prophecies slip your mind 🙂
As with most things, your arrogance is only comparable to you ignorance. Pretty much every village here has a virgin they worship, and there’s often some miraculous story behind them.
It’s not necessarily that they hallucinate, they’re just gullible people, like you.
And you’re back to assuming your preferred source of myths is credible. It’s your cute double standard on display again.
dazz,
They have a vision or they don’t?
I just point out you provided a clear false equivalence. Unless there is an ancient prophecy of Alan that I missed :-). At least I think both Alan and Jesus have facial hair 🙂
Alan is descended from King David (wrong side of the sheets, mind you) and he was born of a young woman.
Can you really not see the rank stupidity of touting an author’s claim that a prophesy has been fulfilled, when the author is aware of the nature of the prophesy?
It’s also a false equivalence because we have very good reasons to believe Alan exists
Why? What relevance does that have to the origin of life?
DNA_Jock,
Are you claiming that the book of Isaiah was written after Christ was crucified?