So I’m pretty drunk right now. And I wanted to retain my experience with this state while I asked a question, because I think (although…what does that mean right now?) I can present my question accurately: is this state immoral?
Keep in mind that I’m asking this question as someone who has fought to stay alive through surgery and for whom alcohol (in theory) creates problems with maintaining that live. But what is life? And what is the correct way to face such a issue
Physicists typically think they “need philosophers and historians of science like birds need ornithologists,” the Nobel laureate David Gross told a roomful of philosophers, historians and physicists last week in Munich, Germany, paraphrasing Richard Feynman.
…
The crisis, as Ellis and Silk tell it, is the wildly speculative nature of modern physics theories, which they say reflects a dangerous departure from the scientific method. Many of today’s theorists — chief among them the proponents of string theory and the multiverse hypothesis — appear convinced of their ideas on the grounds that they are beautiful or logically compelling, despite the impossibility of testing them. Ellis and Silk accused these theorists of “moving the goalposts” of science and blurring the line between physics and pseudoscience. “The imprimatur of science should be awarded only to a theory that is testable,” Ellis and Silk wrote, thereby disqualifying most of the leading theories of the past 40 years. “Only then can we defend science from attack.”
I have closed comments on two recent threads, The War Against Barry A. by Mung, and Barry Arrington’s Bullying, by stcordova.
I am more than happy for people to discuss here views expressed in OP’s at Uncommon Descent, not least because one of the functions this site serves is a place in which people can continue conversations started at UD, or discuss issues raised at UD, if they are banned at UD. However, I do not want it to dominated by discussions of the rights and wrongs of UD moderation policy. UD is Barry’s site and he is entitled to select who posts and what is posted there. We have a different set of policies here, and so a different style of discussion.
Salvador Cordova recently posted in Noyau the contents of a private email he received from Barry.
Administrator Neil Rickert thanks Salvador for posting it and suggests an OP.
Administrator Alan Fox suggests an OP.
Administrator and site owner Elizabeth Liddle suggests an OP.
None of them call into question the wisdom of posting the contents of private emails on the site.
Extremely poor judgment by them all.
This is essentially the heart of the complaints by Sal, and Lizzie and co.
I say no, it is not. We have a situation here where Lizzie and Patrick can chose to remove any post they don’t like, for any reasons they create, without explaining why, and relegate it to a garbage dump section. And then they claim, that because technically someone could go into the dump and read the banished posts, that this is somehow ethical moderation.
This is absurd of course, because the post is then taken completely out of context, and it does not show what the post was in reply to. It really is just a smokescreen technique for the site to fight their war on ideas, without admitting they are practicing censorship.
Three powerful commentaries on the nature of our existence:
The first is a BBC programme called The Secret Life of Waves. My father, who died earlier this year, was very keen that we should all watch it, and it helped us hugely after his death, to know that this was what he thought, and wanted to share with his children and grandchildren.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kmllm1dAug4
The second is a lecture someone introduced me to recently by Alan Watts, It Starts Now.
Barry Arrington, owner of the pro-ID blog, Uncommon Descent is alleged to have written the following in an email to a contributor:
We are in a war. That is not a metaphor. We are fighting a war for the soul of Western Civilization, and we are losing, badly. In the summer of 2015 we find ourselves in a positon very similar to Great Britain’s position 75 years ago in the summer of 1940 – alone, demoralized, and besieged on all sides by a great darkness that constitutes an existential threat to freedom, justice and even rationality itself.
In this thread I don’t want to discuss the rights and wrongs of the email itself, nor of whether or not TSZ constitutes a “great darkness”. Barry is entitled to decide who posts at UD and who does not; it’s his blog.
What interests me is the perception itself, which I suspect is quite widely shared.
Cordova knows that by breaking this unstated rule he is in for a heap of trouble. (He was correct.)
Joe Felsenstein, like other population geneticists, holds a special place in the Creation/Evolution controversy because his works are regarded highly by many creationists who are familiar with genetics. This is a thread for all of us (myself included) to try to learn and understand one of the key concepts in his book Theoretical Evolutionary Genetics, namely absolute fitness. He has generously made his book available on his website (a book of this calibre could sell for hundreds of dollars).
Continue reading
Hi everyone!
A while ago over at AtBC I had the notion of using dice to try and show how fitness and luck combine during the selection process. I (with the Help of Wes Elsberry) thought that using dice might be a good way to explore this and other concepts such as mutation, sexual selection etc.
So.. here we go.
Imagine a die. It has 6 sides. Let’s call these [A,B,C,D,E,F]. In the dice we all know and love each side has a number associated with it, let’s write that as [1,2,3,4,5,6]. So far so good? – so the “B” face is 2. The “E” face is 5.
Now let’s imagine the life of dice is gladiatorial and to “win” a die must roll higher than another competing die on a single trial of one on one dice combat. If he (I think of them like little people, I can’t write “it” any more) rolls a high number, his odds are better, so fitness clearly scales with numbers. So for our normal die, We’ll call him Norm, his fitness (total) is 1+2+3+4+5+6=21 and his average fitness is 21/6 sides = 3.5. Let’s imagine the Lord of the Dice is a nerdy dungeonmaster called KeithS. He hasn’t decided what happens if two dice roll “The dreaded tie” yet. Maybe dice purgatory? I just really wanted KeithS in this.
Now there’s no reason why a dice has to be [1,2,3,4,5,6]. Norm is, but let’s compare him to the other challengers:
Norm [1,2,3,4,5,6]
Uptight BiPolar [1,1,1,6,6,6]
Low SD [3,3,3,4,4,4]
IDist [1,1,4,5,5,5]
They all have the same average fitness (3.5) as I described above. How do you think they fair in head to head match ups? I’ll reveal the answers via the power of EXHAUSTIVE ENUMERATION in a while. If no one cares then You’ll never know and KeithS wins. No-one wants that!
Let’s Roll!
On the ‘Problem of Evil revisited’ thread, Kantian Naturalist says:
And I’ve become increasingly disgusted by the Islamophobia of “the New Atheists” — especially the odious Bill Maher, who has become their spokesperson in the US media. I think that people who rightly reject the fascist tendencies of contemporary Abrahamic religiosity (whether in the guise of Marco Rubio, Benjamin Netanyahu, or Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi) are rarely aware of how fascistic their own atheism sounds.
I don’t watch Maher regularly, but I often enjoy him when I do. What has he said that demonstrates Islamophobia? (And what does Islamophobia mean? Being phobic of the jihadists seems sensible to me.)
Are scientists, engineers and technologists (over-represented on this site) relatively easy prey for terrorist exploitation? Has the ‘engineering mindset’ dehumanised vast swathes of people with an obedient, unquestioning, uncritical ‘scientistic’ worldview? If so, how can we make a change and “‘humanise’ the teaching of scientific and technical subjects”?
“to question authority, whether scientific, political, religious or scientific.”
Oh, yeah, that’s known as the ‘scientific’ self-importance stutter, audible and visible across a range of professions in today’s society! 😉
“[I]n Isis-controlled territory, university courses in archaeology, fine art, law, philosophy, political science and sports have been eliminated, along with drama and the reading of novels.”
A couple recent comments here at TSZ by Patrick caught my eye.
First was the claim that arguments for the existence of God had been refuted.
I don’t agree that heaping a bunch of poor and refuted arguments together results in a strong argument.
Second was the claim that IDCists do not understand cumulative selection and Dawkins’ Weasel program.
The first time I think I was expecting more confusion on Ewert’s part about the power of cumulative selection (most IDCists still don’t understand Dawkin’s Weasel).
In this OP I’d like to concentrate on the second of these claims.
Bruce Gerencser was a pastor for 27 years until he started reading books with non-Christian viewpoints. One of the 5 most influential books in his conversion to atheism was Jerry Coyne’s book, Why Evolution is True. Bruce’s kids are no longer evangelicals and left the faith that he once taught them. He openly says he hates Jesus now.
This is a temporary post so I can discuss the design tool with fmm, as trying to have a conversation across multiple threads is impossible.
The late Mennonite theologian, John Howard Yoder (to be sure a fallen man himself), crtitiqued theodicy with the following questions. I’d like to hear from both the theists and atheists on this site what their responses are to his questions:
a) Where do you get the criteria by which you evaluate God? Why are the criteria you use the right ones?
b) Why [do] you think you are qualified for the business of accrediting God/s?
c) If you think you are qualified for that business, how does the adjudication proceed? [W]hat are the lexical rules?
ETA 2015/12/05: “Rubik’s Cube Is a Hand-Sized Illustration of Intelligent Design,” featured in the Discovery Institute’s Evolution News and Views, illustrates clearly the fallacious “conservation of information” reasoning discussed in a post of mine, “The Law of Conservation of Information Is Defunct.”
Subtle is the Lord, but malicious He is not.
….
I have second thoughts. Maybe God is malicious.Albert Einstein
If one accepts the hypothesis of intelligent design, one might reasonably conclude there are malicious intelligent designs.
Intelligent Design is NOT Anti-Evolution
In order to have a discussion about whether or not Intelligent Design is anti-evolution or not we must first define “evolution”. Fortunately there are resources available that do just that.
Defining “evolution”:
Finally, during the evolutionary synthesis, a consensus emerged: “Evolution is the change in properties of populations of organisms over time”- Ernst Mayr page 8 of “What Evolution Is”
Darwin in a well known challenge in his book defied anyone showing that anything in biology could not be explained as to its origin by small steps from start to finish. Modern evolutionists also insist , however complex, that all biological entities at any point can be seen as coming from small changes in populations and from there in lineages from start to finish for anything.
It always bothered me that this line of reasoning was so important to darwins claim.
It was up to creationists to prove why accumulating small changes could not turn fish could not become fishermen or bugs into buffaloes . WHY NOT ? Darwin asked and ever since. however extreme the claim mat seem to so many.
I say lets turn the argument around on them. The line of reasoning works against them as follows.
I will use two improbable, impossible9did I say impossible) lineages of a finale creatures evolutionary origin.
ONE. to start you have a fish, then a fish breathing on land with crab legs, then it has horse legs, then its got a t-rex head, then its a ground bird with flippers, then a primate monkey, then a rabbit type creature with horns and crab legs, then a bird again, then a mouse. All this happening in about 200 million years of evolution.
TWO. you start with a fish, then a duck like creature, then a fish with flippers, then a land breathing reptile creature with a trunk, then a cat like creature with long giraffe legsm then a primate, then a shrew, then a primate again and finally a bird. 200 million years start to finish.
This is impossible by any common sense, intelligence, of any human being. never mind the intermediates. this sequence of these two creatures evolving this way from start to finish is self evident nonsense.
For evolutionists THEN explain why not BY small steps could these lineages not happen?? Why not, if small populations could be selected on to account for our real biology glory, could not my examples easily, equally, be accounted for bu evolutions mechanism.
if evolution can explain anything we have then why not anything we can imagine??
iF you say no. then the absurdity of bugs becoming buffaloes and fish becoming fishermen makes the creationist point solid and Darwins reply worthless.
