The inconstancy of Christian morality

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In the fifties, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel released records as that most familiar American duo, Tom & Jerry. It was the sixties before their now famous Jewish names were allowed an airing. A similar thing happened with Jesus. Truth is, without Paul, Jesus may have been simultaneously too Jewish, too old fashioned, and too radical to make it big. Jesus in the Gospels is not quite the laissez faire hippie that many Christians want him to be. He is quoted as saying

Whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, and shall marry another, committeth adultery

(Matthew 19:9)

yet good Christians divorce for reasons other than infidelity all the time. Society’s moral values have changed, and the moral values of Christians have changed with them. Jesus says nothing against slavery whereas a modern Christian placed in his situation and time might feel compelled to speak out.

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BIGGER THAN PHIL: When did faith start to fade?

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And here we arrive at what the noes, whatever their numbers, really have now, and that is a monopoly on legitimate forms of knowledge about the natural world. They have this monopoly for the same reason that computer manufacturers have an edge over crystal-ball makers: the advantages of having an actual explanation of things and processes are self-evident. What works wins. We know that men were not invented but slowly evolved from smaller animals; that the earth is not the center of the universe but one among a billion planets in a distant corner; and that, in the billions of years of the universe’s existence, there is no evidence of a single miraculous intercession with the laws of nature. We need not imagine that there’s no Heaven; we know that there is none, and we will search for angels forever in vain. A God can still be made in the face of all that absence, but he will always be chairman of the board, holding an office of fine title and limited powers.

Linkey

This article seems to capsulize much of what we’ve been discussing. Everything from evolution and scientism to atheism and creationism.

 

 

VJ Torley’s itchy trigger finger

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At UD, vjtorley has posted a bizarre, 5,000-word “rebuttal” of Jerry Coyne. It begins:

Over on his Why Evolution Is True Website, Professor Jerry Coyne has posted a short passage on the papal condemnation of Galileo, excerpted from Andrew Dickson White’s A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom(New York, NY: D. Appleton and Company, 1896). However, all the passage proves is that neither White nor Coyne understand the theological doctrine which they are attacking: they are all at sea about the dogma at which they are aiming their barbs.

One slight problem: Coyne isn’t attacking anything. VJ Torley is tilting at windmills.

Coyne doesn’t express agreement or disagreement with the passage. He merely points out a funny proofreading edit pencilled into his copy of the book by a previous, seemingly obsessive reader:

Now I don’t even know if that correction is grammatically necessary, but I had to smile at the anonymous reader who got annoyed and took the trouble to add the proofreader’s transposition symbol.

VJ is evidently so sensitive to any attack on Catholic doctrine, real or imagined, that he’ll fire off a 5,000+ word “rebuttal” without even reading the post he’s responding to!

Science and Metaphysics

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A perennial theme of my philosophical peregrinations is the difference between (and relation between) science and metaphysics.   This bears directly on the arguments made by creationists and design proponents.

Design proponents often try to distinguish themselves from both creationists and Darwinists by arguing that they alone are faithful to empiricism — “following the evidence wherever it leads” — whereas both creationists and Darwinists interpret the evidence through the lens of some a priori conceptual framework, a metaphysics.   (I take it to be false, and importantly false, that one can only hold metaphysics in a dogmatic fashion, and that empiricism is the enemy of metaphysics — though of course empiricism is the enemy of dogmatism, if one’s empiricism does not itself become dogmatic.)

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[Fill in the Blank] Won the Great Debate. Discuss.

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My take (not original) is the Bill Nye framed the debate as between evolution and young earth creationism.

As long as he wasn’t trounced, evolution wins.

Because ID is a big tent and allows YECs a free pass, it is associated with this debate. Unless it publicly distances itself from Ken ham, it has allowed the evolution debate to be framed as between science and biblical literalism.

A Quiz for ‘Intelligent Design’ Theory Proponentsists

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A Quiz for ‘Intelligent Design’ Theory Proponentsists

(Even for those IDist outliers like nullasalus at UD who don’t think IDT is scientific, but who think they are tricking people that logically & responsibly reject IDT)

 Another simple YES/NO exercise.

Acronyms:

IDM = Intelligent Design Movement

IDist = Intelligent Design ideologue

DI = Discovery Institute

IDT = (Uppercase) Intelligent Design theory

USA = United States of America = )

 

Questions:

 1. Is the DI-led IDM making a concentrated, dedicated effort to distinguish good science from bad science by actively and publically rejecting the outdated ‘young Earth’ views of many undereducated, anti-science, evangelical Christians in the USA?

2. Have IDM leaders Michael Behe, Stephen Meyer, William Dembski and Phillip Johnson *all* linked their own version of IDT to their personal Christian faith in public statements, interviews and/or articles?

3. Have several prominent Abrahamic theists (particularly those active in science, philosophy & theology/worldview conversations) openly rejected IDT on the basis of distinguishing Uppercase ‘Intelligent Design’ Theory (the Discovery Institute’s ‘strictly scientific’ theory) from lowercase ‘intelligent design’ (aka the non-scientific, theological/worldview ‘design argument’)?

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Quizzes, EleP(T|H)ants, Methods and Burdens of Proof.

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Over in the ID Quiz thread at Uncommon Descent, Mark Frank asks;

“Here’s quiz on ID for you ID proponents:
On page 21 of “Specification: The Pattern That Signifies Intelligence” William Dembksi defines the context dependent specified complexity of T given H as -log_2[M\cdot N\cdot \varphi_S(T)\cdot P(T|H)]
Consider the context of the bacterial flagellum.
1. What is T?
2. What is the function \varphi_S(T)?
3. How is \varphi_S(T) estimated?
4. What is H?
5. How is P(T|H) estimated?
6. M\cdot N\cdot \varphi_S(T)\cdot P(T|H) is meant to be a probability. Under what conditions might the answer exceed 1?”

This seems a fair question, asking IDists to use their own proposed methodology to detect design, empirically.
But instead of heartily embracing this opportunity to show the power of ID, he is set upon.
Joe moans that

“Really Mark? Then tell us how to determine the probability wrt unguided evolution. If you know the answers to your questions you should be able to do that.”

Sorry Joe, it’s your methodology, do your own work, if you can.
KirosFocus has a length moan from large numbers and incredulity, finishing with;

“We cannot stop such from those tactics but we can expose them and red ring fence off those who insist on such tactics.”

STOP. RIGHT. THERE.
If you can’t employ your own design detection methodology it is no ones fault but your own.
Either the methodology is unusable,
OR non of you are smart enough to use it,
OR you’re all secretly supports of Darwinian evolution and are making ID look as ridiculous as possible.

All Mark Frank has asked is for you to employ your own methodology. You can’t. ID is intellectually bankrupt, and only addressing the required calculations will change that.

 

[Edit: symbols latexed by Lizzie]

A Quiz for Intelligent Design Critics

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At UD, nullasalus has written a post in which he complains that critics of intelligent design often misrepresent ID.

In the near decade that I’ve been watching the Intelligent Design movement, one thing has consistently amazed me: the pathological inability of many ID critics to accurately represent what ID actually is, what claims and assumptions are made on the part of the most noteworthy ID proponents, and so on. Even ID critics who have been repeatedly informed about what ID is seem to have a knack for forgetting this in later exchanges. It’s frustrating – and this from a guy who’s not even a defender of ID as science.

But I’m interested in progress on this front, and I think I’ve come up with a good solution: let’s have an ID quiz. And let’s put this quiz to critics, in public, so at the very least we can see whether or not they’re even on the same page as the ID proponents they are criticizing.

Here are the questions:

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Who would die for a lie?

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In a comment at UD, Sal Cordova says:

One could of course argue the New Testament is a fabrication and exaggeration, but then it is well attested that the Romans inflicted cruel deaths upon Christians, some of whom claimed to be eye-witnesses of Jesus. Why die such a horrible death for a lie?

It lends too much credibility to the New Testament.

Sal seems to be unaware of phenomena such as cult suicides and suicide bombings.

The “who would die for a lie?” Christian trope confuses conviction with truth. It is a persistent apologetic, since the confusion of conviction and truth is the fundamental error of the religious. It is something all humans are vulnerable to. Hence we always have to be wary of con artists and other charismatic people, governments, authority figures, and the media.

Over to you. Who would die for a lie?

Atheists are bad people – discuss

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This comes up from time to time, so I felt it merited its own thread. Here in the UK, atheism is typically a mark of nothing more than disbelief in gods. I have few friends who attend church, which is less a reflection of my choice of friends than the demographic of the country I live in. I tend not be exposed to bigotry as a result of denoting myself as such. I go online for that!

I don’t wear a badge or steer the conversation towards the subject, but it’s no secret either. No-one cares. If I wanted to run for public office it would be no barrier; people don’t appear to trust me any less, or assume amorality or a lack of goodwill on my part.

But other countries are different. Atheism is the ‘state religion’ in some, in others it can still be a reason to put you to death (surely one of the densest ideas ever dreamed up). I am interested in experiences, and in how you view ‘the other side’. Over to you.

A dilemma for Christians – is there free will in heaven?

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Why would an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent God knowingly create a world containing the evil we see all around us? That, in a nutshell, is the well-known theological “problem of evil”.

A standard Christian response runs as follows: God, being omnipotent, certainly could have created a world without evil. However, a world without evil would be a world without free will, because free will implies the ability to choose to do evil. In a world without evil, we would effectively be robots preprogrammed to do only the good. God values free will so much that he chooses to grant it to us despite knowing that we will misuse it. In short, God chooses to create a world containing free will, at the expense of some concomitant evil, rather than creating a pristine world full of robots.

Now consider heaven, a perfect place in which there is no evil. Do believers have free will in heaven?

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A quick question for Dr. Liddle and other skeptics

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[Vincent Torley has posted this at Uncommon Descent. As many people who might like to respond, not the least among them Dr. Liddle herslf, are unable to do so directly, I reproduce it here. The rest of this post is written by Vincent Torley]

Over at The Skeptical Zone, Dr. Elizabeth Liddle has written a thought-provoking post, which poses an interesting ethical conundrum about the morality of creating sentient beings. Continue reading →

Ari Brynjolfsson’s Plasma Redshift

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This essay will outline some of the work of Ari Byrinjolfsson. He says some things I don’t agree with regarding eternal universes, but if Brynjolfsson is right then it has some negative impact on ID and creationism and the UPB, etc. So, let me be clear, Brynjolfsson’s paper is generally bad for ID, creation, and the Big Bang. That said, his papers most definitely got my attention, and there is much that I like about his work. Wikipedia has this entry on Ari Brynjolffson:
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Counting generations of M&Ms

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Allan Miller’s post Randomness and evolution deals with neutral drift in the Moran model applied to a bag of M&Ms. Much of the discussion has focused on the question of counting generations in a situation where they overlap. I think it’s a good idea to divert that part of the discussion into its own thread.

Here are the rules. Start with a population of N M&Ms. A randomly chosen M&M dies. Another randomly chosen M&M gives birth to a child M&M. Repeat.

Because the focus of this thread is generation count and not fixation, we will pay no attention to the colors of M&Ms.

How do we count generations of M&Ms?

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Naturalism and Materialism

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According to the dim vagaries of recollection, my furtive efforts to be taken seriously over at Uncommon Descent were frustrated due to the perception that I am an atheist.  (Curiously, when I explicitly said that I’d stopped referring to myself as an atheist, this was met with utter silence.)   I had read Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, and despite my criticisms of the book, I thought it was promising in certain respects, and said as much.  (I also pointed out that some reviews were much more favorable than others, but they didn’t want to notice the favorable reviews, because that would disrupt their martyr-narrative.)  And more generally, I emphatically distanced myself from what I call the “Epicurean” interpretations of Darwinism, e.g. Monod and Dawkins.  But for the occasional exchange with a visitor to UD, this was met with silence or scorn from the UD regulars.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I see today “Making common cause with non-materialist atheists“.   Dembski is now seeking to make common cause with Nagel by distinguishing between naturalism and materialism in terms of two different distinctions: naturalism/theism and materialism/teleology (“teleologism”?).   Interestingly, that’s pretty much the very same set of distinctions that got a distinctly chilly reception from the UD regulars, because I’m not a theist, let alone a Christian, and because I’m a pragmatist and not a rationalist.

It amuses me that Dembski is willing to countenance an intellectual alliance that the rank-and-file UD participants rejected.

 

Facts as human artifacts

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BruceS suggested that I start a thread on my ideas about human cognition.  I’m not sure how this will work out, but let’s try.  And, I’ll note that I have an earlier thread that is vaguely related.

The title of this thread is one of my non-traditional ideas about cognition.  And if I am correct, as I believe I am, then our relation to the world is very different from what is usually assumed.

The traditional view is that we pick up facts, and most of cognition has to do with reasoning about these facts.  If I am correct, then there are no facts to pick up.  So the core of cognition has to be engaged in solving the problem of having useful facts about the world.

Chicago Coordinates

I’ll start with a simple example.  I typed “Chicago Coordinates” into Google, and the top of the page returned showed:

41.8819° N, 87.6278° W

That’s an example of what we would take to be a fact.  Yet, without the activity of humans, it could not exist as a fact.  In order for that to be a fact, we had to first invent a geographic coordinate system (roughly, the latitude/longitude system).  And that coordinate system in turn depends on some human conventions.  For example, the meridian through Greenwich was established as the origin for the longitudes.

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