Dawkins made a challenge, on knowing the past.
On Reading The Greatest Show by Dawkins - Parts of it!
Overlooked in Previous, about Dawkins' The Greatest Show on Earth
Medieval Matters for Richard Dawkins
Do evolutionists ever make unfalsifiable claims?
Two bishop Richards in dialogue (tongue in cheek)
Dawkins said Edgar Andrews had his book "well written" and that is one true word from him
Assortedretorts : ... on "Science Works" quote c/o Dawkins
... on Side issue to "Science Works"
It is from a video series from a debate held in Oxford between Richard Dawkins and Edgar Andrews, here:
Overall problem with this series, it is badly recorded. It is also less well recorded on Edgar Andrews' microphone than on Dawkins'. I hear Dawkins so much that I even suspect that the videos have been made by people who scrapped the parts where Edgar Andrews talked continuously and only took those where Dawkins did so or when Dawkins and Edgar both spoke. But here are anyway the links, and after each link there is a footnote to my comments on the video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2f0TPd01fJs (1)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LP06ow2or4k (2)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqkTG4PPLgM (3)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iguW8OXDM4 (4)
(1) Dawkins: His point of knowing the Roman Empire has been answered by me, basically saying that "records" in the historic sense are eyewitness records preserved, and so totally different from an absense of eyewitness records and a mere reconstruction (as with Proto-Indo-European and not Latin):
http://filolohika.blogspot.com/2012/05/dawkins-made-challenge-on-knowing-past.html
(2) His major point in favour of evolution, genetic similarity, was answered by a rebuttal by Edgar Andrews that there are similarities that are quite unrelated to common descent, like between two boxes.
His point that most genes of chimps and men are held in common is a valid point. It is not genetics, but metaphysics which preclude our supposed descent from something closer to chimps than to us, mentally:
(3) Here they discuss a supposed "orderly progression of species" in the fossile record, which is a bit bypassed by wikipedia. Do use the articles:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagerstatten
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fossil_sites
Then look up these articles of mine:
http://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2012/11/do-evolutionists-ever-make.html
http://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2012/12/feedback-to-tas-walker-on-geological.html
His pleading that Darwinism is worthy of an expanding universe, a universe thousands of million years old, a universe of which earth is not the centre, is one I have answered by saying that his "universe we now live in" is not the true one, that the universe is comparatively small (though much huger than earth) and centred on earth:
http://triv7quadriv.blogspot.com/2012/11/distant-starlight-problem-answered-by.html
(4) It is possible to derive something from something slightly different, which arose from something slightly different, which arose from something slightly different ... so with enough steps, with enough generations, we can derive man from something like a bacteria.
Point answered by the fact that we are not just dealing with loci mutations, that is with mutations of genes on location within a chromosome, but with different numbers of chromosomes.
http://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2011/11/letter-to-nature-on-karyotype-evolution.html
His peroration was unfortunately very emotional. He called Creationism Blasphemy. I do not find that Christians should bow down to every Muslim who calls any Criticism whatsoever to Mohammed and to his supposedly divine revelation Blasphemy, but neither should we accept that Dawkins wants Oxford University to be the Evolutionist variety of Pakistan./HGL
(1, 2, 3, 4) Videos are no longer available (for some reason ...) - but my notes on them were written while they were so. You'll have to take that on faith from me./HGL
Affichage des articles dont le libellé est andrews. Afficher tous les articles
Affichage des articles dont le libellé est andrews. Afficher tous les articles
mardi 19 mars 2013
AronRa gets something right I suppose ...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5kckGxwJr4
Dawkins once said - in a book I cannot find, but I think it was The Greatest Show on Earth, because that I did read about half of, when once I was guest of its possessor, whom I left the day after, since he was more interested in hashish than in food, fine for him, but not quite my style - that the fossiles are not actually needed. They are a plus, but Evolution is (if I recall this correctly) sufficiently proven by phylogony. Or phylogeny. Or whatever.
Evolution does not need the Taung skull and Evolution does not need the Piltdown man. Evolutionists usually do not use the Piltdown man any more. It was either discovered or fabricated by one Jesuit Father Pierre Theilhard de Chardin, whose spirituality was closer to New Age than to St Ignatius of Loyola. Funnily enough, when they speak of it, they use it as evidence not that Evolutionists are fraudsters, but that clerics are. But, after all, whether he was himself the fraudster or his nonclerical and equally Evolutionists friend in that dig was the fraudster, that cleric was very clearly an Evolutionist. His spirituality is since then flooding the Catholic Church in France, so that you need one of the guys who celebrate Latin Mass or even who call the last Popes since 1958 or 1978 frauds in order to get a Catholic priest in France who does not want to positively foist evolution on a Catholic convert from Protestantism.* Because, to them, Kent Hovind and Jonathan Sarfati were the guys that Trent Council condemned, and insisting on Seven Sacraments or Sacrifice of the Mass, or Special Priesthood, or 73 books (as opposed to 66), are merely minor points compared with accepting evolution, as accepted by modern "Church Fathers" like Theilhard de Chardin or Abbé Pierre. Neither of whom has the credentials of a Church Father**, since neither of them is a canonised saint.
But, still, to mainline Evolutionists (as opposed to clerical ones), Theilhard de Chardin's Piltown Man fossile is a fraud and a clerical fraud. Never mind that it is an Evolutionist fraud as well.
Is that stopping either Evolutionist clerics or Evolutionist atheists? No.
So, not saying Ica stones are a fraud, not saying sandal footprints beside dinosaur footprints are a fraud, but simply admitting they could be each or both be frauds, that does not make Young Earth Creationism any less credible to me. Nor does it make Evolutionism any more credible.
AronRa and myself up to age 9 have pretty similar intellectual histories. 11 is the age he found Creationism and did not accept it. 12 is the age I read Edgar Andrews' From Nothing to Nature (in the Swedish translation "Ur Intet") and accepted it.
AronRa is actually - or was then - wrong about Native Americans not wearing sandals but only moccasins. First of all, if he goes down to Perú, native Americans do wear sandals. Moccasins are as far as I know a North American, possibly or probably pre-Columbian invention. Second of all, supposing this was pre-Flood, we need not suppose the clothing styles of later Native Americans were inherited from back then. Later Native Americans, on any Creationist recconing, have branched out from Mount Ararat, like the rest of present humanity. And third, he was right about something. A human footprint plus a dinosaur footprint need not be considered Adam's just because they were pre-Flood.
But that also cuts both ways. Like dating methods - something which Edgar Andrews discussed in more detail than the footprints, though they were in that edition of his book** (I don't know if they are in second edition or not) - they just might not be any more accurate than the "dating" of those footprints to back 6000 years ago and thus to Adam himself.
But thank you so much for vindicating St George by pointing out how much some depicted dragons look like varanas. It is funny to consider this compared to people who want to say St George and the Dragon legend developed from Apollo Sauroctonus or from Perseus or something.
Now, unfortunately you do follow these people in accepting Job as "the oldest" book of the Bible. Now, if Moses wrote Job, it is contemporary, roughly speaking, to the Pentateuch. There are however people who place the Pentateuch way later saying it developed from Zoroastric Monotheism.
Now, Genesis being one of the "books of Moses" (excluding Job) does not mean all its content is contemporary with the Exodus. Moses did use older documentation. You see, when it comes to Theogony, or Qur'an or Book of Mormon, you have some human author who only follows a supernatural inspiration. When it comes to Genesis, all there is of that is the work of the Six Days, up to creation of Adam. From then on, or let us add the creation of Eve, since Adam was asleep then, and maybe a few more passages, Genesis is recorded history.
Origin of the Species is not.
Speaking of History and record: Centaurs seem to have been recorded a few years before the War of Troy, and they were seen again in Egypt in the time of Sts Paul the First Hermit and Anthony the Great. You said yourself that evolution offers no explanation for them. So, what is your conclusion on that?
Hans-Georg Lundahl
Bibliothèque Mouffetard
St Joseph's day
19-III-2013
*This complaint is not as if I were against Latin Mass, but because FSSPX and Sedevacantists are minoritarian here.
**Speaking of faking evidence, I seem to have written "the credentials of a Church Fathers" which is ungrammatical and "in that edition of his books" which is wrong since there was only one I was speaking of. But my grammar is usually very good. How come? Slip of the "pen" (or keyboard)? Had one or two or three or four other such "slips of the pen" which usually do not happen to me, but corrected them before it became apparent. This one slipped my vigilance. I can think of some explanations: post-hypnotic suggestions, kabbalah (my bonnet was "lost" or stolen yesterday plus one Roumanian guy I met yesterday may have "reestablished" my communion with Iasy so as to make his bishop able to excommunicate me). Or, less spectacular: I may have had some medication administered to me without knowing it (some Communists prefer thinking of YECs as Mental Cases than as frauds, and there are Communists in Paris), or simply some admin fidgeting with my screen sicne he can watch it from his. Either case of all these, someone is trying to fake, before me, evidence that I am mad and need "medication" - the kind which makes slips of the keyboard more frequent since concentration less possible. Now, "in that edition of his books" is a fault in English which a Frenchman would commit more readily than anyone speaking a Germanic language or even Spanish. You see, I pronounce the plural s. Seems this fault was planted by someone less able than myself to figure out what faults I could commit when writing English after all.
Dawkins once said - in a book I cannot find, but I think it was The Greatest Show on Earth, because that I did read about half of, when once I was guest of its possessor, whom I left the day after, since he was more interested in hashish than in food, fine for him, but not quite my style - that the fossiles are not actually needed. They are a plus, but Evolution is (if I recall this correctly) sufficiently proven by phylogony. Or phylogeny. Or whatever.
Evolution does not need the Taung skull and Evolution does not need the Piltdown man. Evolutionists usually do not use the Piltdown man any more. It was either discovered or fabricated by one Jesuit Father Pierre Theilhard de Chardin, whose spirituality was closer to New Age than to St Ignatius of Loyola. Funnily enough, when they speak of it, they use it as evidence not that Evolutionists are fraudsters, but that clerics are. But, after all, whether he was himself the fraudster or his nonclerical and equally Evolutionists friend in that dig was the fraudster, that cleric was very clearly an Evolutionist. His spirituality is since then flooding the Catholic Church in France, so that you need one of the guys who celebrate Latin Mass or even who call the last Popes since 1958 or 1978 frauds in order to get a Catholic priest in France who does not want to positively foist evolution on a Catholic convert from Protestantism.* Because, to them, Kent Hovind and Jonathan Sarfati were the guys that Trent Council condemned, and insisting on Seven Sacraments or Sacrifice of the Mass, or Special Priesthood, or 73 books (as opposed to 66), are merely minor points compared with accepting evolution, as accepted by modern "Church Fathers" like Theilhard de Chardin or Abbé Pierre. Neither of whom has the credentials of a Church Father**, since neither of them is a canonised saint.
But, still, to mainline Evolutionists (as opposed to clerical ones), Theilhard de Chardin's Piltown Man fossile is a fraud and a clerical fraud. Never mind that it is an Evolutionist fraud as well.
Is that stopping either Evolutionist clerics or Evolutionist atheists? No.
So, not saying Ica stones are a fraud, not saying sandal footprints beside dinosaur footprints are a fraud, but simply admitting they could be each or both be frauds, that does not make Young Earth Creationism any less credible to me. Nor does it make Evolutionism any more credible.
AronRa and myself up to age 9 have pretty similar intellectual histories. 11 is the age he found Creationism and did not accept it. 12 is the age I read Edgar Andrews' From Nothing to Nature (in the Swedish translation "Ur Intet") and accepted it.
AronRa is actually - or was then - wrong about Native Americans not wearing sandals but only moccasins. First of all, if he goes down to Perú, native Americans do wear sandals. Moccasins are as far as I know a North American, possibly or probably pre-Columbian invention. Second of all, supposing this was pre-Flood, we need not suppose the clothing styles of later Native Americans were inherited from back then. Later Native Americans, on any Creationist recconing, have branched out from Mount Ararat, like the rest of present humanity. And third, he was right about something. A human footprint plus a dinosaur footprint need not be considered Adam's just because they were pre-Flood.
But that also cuts both ways. Like dating methods - something which Edgar Andrews discussed in more detail than the footprints, though they were in that edition of his book** (I don't know if they are in second edition or not) - they just might not be any more accurate than the "dating" of those footprints to back 6000 years ago and thus to Adam himself.
But thank you so much for vindicating St George by pointing out how much some depicted dragons look like varanas. It is funny to consider this compared to people who want to say St George and the Dragon legend developed from Apollo Sauroctonus or from Perseus or something.
Now, unfortunately you do follow these people in accepting Job as "the oldest" book of the Bible. Now, if Moses wrote Job, it is contemporary, roughly speaking, to the Pentateuch. There are however people who place the Pentateuch way later saying it developed from Zoroastric Monotheism.
Now, Genesis being one of the "books of Moses" (excluding Job) does not mean all its content is contemporary with the Exodus. Moses did use older documentation. You see, when it comes to Theogony, or Qur'an or Book of Mormon, you have some human author who only follows a supernatural inspiration. When it comes to Genesis, all there is of that is the work of the Six Days, up to creation of Adam. From then on, or let us add the creation of Eve, since Adam was asleep then, and maybe a few more passages, Genesis is recorded history.
Origin of the Species is not.
Speaking of History and record: Centaurs seem to have been recorded a few years before the War of Troy, and they were seen again in Egypt in the time of Sts Paul the First Hermit and Anthony the Great. You said yourself that evolution offers no explanation for them. So, what is your conclusion on that?
Hans-Georg Lundahl
Bibliothèque Mouffetard
St Joseph's day
19-III-2013
*This complaint is not as if I were against Latin Mass, but because FSSPX and Sedevacantists are minoritarian here.
**Speaking of faking evidence, I seem to have written "the credentials of a Church Fathers" which is ungrammatical and "in that edition of his books" which is wrong since there was only one I was speaking of. But my grammar is usually very good. How come? Slip of the "pen" (or keyboard)? Had one or two or three or four other such "slips of the pen" which usually do not happen to me, but corrected them before it became apparent. This one slipped my vigilance. I can think of some explanations: post-hypnotic suggestions, kabbalah (my bonnet was "lost" or stolen yesterday plus one Roumanian guy I met yesterday may have "reestablished" my communion with Iasy so as to make his bishop able to excommunicate me). Or, less spectacular: I may have had some medication administered to me without knowing it (some Communists prefer thinking of YECs as Mental Cases than as frauds, and there are Communists in Paris), or simply some admin fidgeting with my screen sicne he can watch it from his. Either case of all these, someone is trying to fake, before me, evidence that I am mad and need "medication" - the kind which makes slips of the keyboard more frequent since concentration less possible. Now, "in that edition of his books" is a fault in English which a Frenchman would commit more readily than anyone speaking a Germanic language or even Spanish. You see, I pronounce the plural s. Seems this fault was planted by someone less able than myself to figure out what faults I could commit when writing English after all.
jeudi 15 novembre 2012
thunderf00t, did you really say that? (part 2)
| series: | |
Creation vs Evolution : thunderf00t ... did you actually say that? (part 1) thunderf00t, did you really say that? (part 2) Trivium, Quadrivium 7 cætera : Thunderf00t on futile questions Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere : ... against Thunderf00t on Dembski ... on Thunderf00t having a point on feminism - and then a few not so on Ken Ham |
"thunderclouds can hold up to about four inches, that is about ten centimetres of water"*
No more? Where do we get that from? How is it measured? By rain fall after it? I would like to know, because this is one of the facts that may be facts although they sound phoney.
I am actually methodologically curious. Not just what science is saying about nature, like in this case the thickness of a cloud counted in water level - you said four inches - but how come science is justified in saying it. If it is, that is. You see, when I was still an evolutionist, and mistook evolution for science, at age eight and somewhat beyond, I got an evolutionist book on the origins of man with not a little information both on what makes scientist believe Australo-Habilis-Erectus-Heidelberg-Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon form a series (brain volume deduced from inner cavity of skull), but also on its investigation techniques like 14C. Then at age twelve, when already a Creationist, ma gives me this gorgeous book by Edgar Harold Andrews, a Swedish translation of an earlier edition than the latest of his From Nothing to Nature. It has the standard creationist debunking of radioactive dating techniques as applied to the pre-historic. Look it up if you ignore it. Since then I am pretty wary of bad techniques of investigation.
Now, how do you deduce that a cloud has four inches of water if you compress theoretically the aerosol to a running level collection of liquid?
One method I could imagine would be to measure the downpour, which is done with those rain-metres or whatever you call them in English. Such and such a contraption catches rain as it is falling without letting it escape into the water source layers below the ground. It is transparent or has a transparent side. It has a scale in either millimetres or in inches and lines. Such and such a very heavy storm cloud looses all its water over a determined area of land and at any point you measure "four inches" and note it as a record.
Now, for one thing it is not a record, except locally, in so far as there are floods.
For another there is the displacement of the cloud which thus spreads its rain over a greater area than its own horizontal limitations.
And then there is the question whether the cloud really lost all of its water onto the ground or if some stayed rather in the air, even after it clears up. I am not at all sure this last thing is a valid refutation of this measure of the "four inches of water", but I would like to know your answer to it.
And as to previous, that may be one of the things that have been taken into account already by meteorologists. People whom, excepting the forecasts, I respect as scientists. When it comes to forecasts, they are not knowers, only, at best, good guessers.
But you maybe thought it was something you could calculate from "thickness of aerosol as compared with height of cloud as compared with thickness of water as pure liquid without the aerosol gives ..." by the Regula de Tribus. I am very far from sure that approach is very good. However, your point could be made (or unmade) by measuring the background radiation on sunny and cloudy days.
However, even if so, I recall pretty much not being councelled to put on sun screen lotions on cloudy days, preserving it for the sunny ones.
Even if he was in error, it was not an unfathomable one, nor incompatible with teaching high school science for fifteen years.
Every teacher has his forte and other areas where he will rely on hearsay if his professional training does not send off his factoid alarm bells ringing.
I am not quite convinced about your speculation in order to refute another point by Hovind though: that falling ice would be burning hot before it reached the ground. I mean if it heats, it melts, and dissolves into an aerosol and if it still heats after that it evaporates fairly high up, and at least then slows down, right?
The point about gas pressure in blood vessels being higher before the flood than after, as made by Hovind (something he deduced from the water canopy theory as an explanation of beings growing larger and partial explanation of them growing older before flood), was supposedly refuted by you insofar that "if so all would have had blood vessels just bursting out of the body as soon as water canopy was removed", but the adherents of the Hovind theory do usually hold that the Arc, apart being a device for floating above the sea rather than drowning below it, was also a pressure chamber, ensuring that the gas pressure in the blood vessels evened out without any divers disease in any being present inside the box it actually formed.
I suppose you were so eager to refute mister Hovind, that you did not wait until posting your refutation until after he had on same video answered it: or that he did not answer it on that video but on another one.
By the way, you are making this answer to some of his arguments while he is in prison, but do you happen to have videos posted on youtube while Kent Hovind was making these points? And while he had the full freedom to answer "your" answers? "Your" meaning not specifically answers by you, thunderf00t, but by anyone in Atheist-Evolutionist or even Theistic-Evolutionist communities who was obviously as shocked back then at Kent Hovind's arguments as you are?
Hans-Georg Lundahl
Public Information Library
Georges Pompidou, Paris
St Albert the Great
15-XI-2012
*From, I think, still this one:
Why do people laugh at creationists? (part 6).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKdfeP1sGIg&feature=channel&list=UL
mardi 13 novembre 2012
Kent Hovind, Dear Sir!
I am currently watching a video of thunderf00t about stupidities by creationists. Obviously he cites you. And he mentioned you are in prison for tax fraud "currently", which of course means I wanted to know if you still are.
Which seems to be the case.
I was reminded of St Peter in Chains. St Peter was in prison on two occasions, once in Jerusalem as described in Acts 12, once in Mamertine prison in Rome. Empress Eudocia found the chain relic in Jerusalem, brought it to Rome under Pope St Leo I, who already had the chain relics from the Mamertine Prison. He compared the chains, which miraculously fused. They are still there. A better attested fusion than that of hydrogen into oxygen or carbon, don't you think?
I owe you.
First of all, collecting evidence for dinosaurs - as such skeletons are called (sometimes petrified sometimes even with blood vessels in them) - living side by side with men or being sighted as "dragons" and Nessies is a boost to one aspect of Creationism, which Edgar H. Andrews had failed to provide. I was twelve when reading his "From Nothing to Nature" (Swedish translation of an edition previous to his last one of that book: "Ur Intet").
Second, though you have not provided my main argument against macroevolution, you provided a handy reminder of the fact on which I base it.
Karyogrammata
http://creavsevolu.blogspot.fr/2009/08/karyogrammata.html
I had a dream one night ...
http://creavsevolu.blogspot.fr/2010/11/i-had-dream-one-night.html
Another possibility
http://creavsevolu.blogspot.fr/2011/06/another-possibility.html
I tried to send links to all of the above essays as well as to my refutations against P Z Myers to Nature (something) Genetics. Just to make sure I got it peer reviewed - or that peers felt too superior to review it.
Letter to Nature on Karyotype Evolution in Mammals
http://creavsevolu.blogspot.fr/2011/11/letter-to-nature-on-karyotype-evolution.html
The first of above articles contains a link to the page where I got the facts from, the one where you spoke about chromosome numbers in different creatures. Apparently tobacco has more of them than man, but tobacco is irrelevant to my argument. Tobacco is a plant and such creatures simetimes have high polyploidy. Mammals gone polyploid have so far not been directly attested.
Though the rodent known as Red Viscacha Rat, which is not red, not a viscacha and not a rat, is supposed to descend from a tetraploid version of some other rodent from the area.
I hope you don't mind me telling you I agree a little with your critic about the water canopy covering Earth before the flood. At least if you really did describe it once as being made of ice. But that might be him making it up. Waters above the firmament to me anyway mean the H2O you find so generously throughout the Universe in non-liquid form. Your critic mentioned himself, when someone else misstated that argument as Earth being the only place where you find water at all, that water is the second most common molecule in the Universe. A k a "Ha-Shamayim" in Hebrew, "Oi Ouranoi" in Greek and "Coeli" in Latin. With the Hebrew word as very much punning on "Ha-Mayim", the Waters or Seas, as I heard from someone better in Hebrew than I when I was young.
Now, to the tax fraud issue. I am reminded of the LaRouche affair. Certain people stoned prophets long ago. Now it's a question of tax fraud imprisonment rather than stoning, if you ask me. Of course, if I were writing to him in prison - but he is released - I would tell him that my opposition to depending on electricity does not mean opposing the Haber process while we have electricity. Now I am writing to you. I think you and he are visibly outside the Church for not being Catholic, but I have neither in him nor in you seen vehement attacks on Catholicism. What you generally attack, either of you, Evolutionists or Malthusians, I think Catholics should attack also.
My solution to the so called Starlight Problem was written already before I left Sweden on my Yahoo Message Boards, on Netscape Message Boards, or on Both. I left Sweden in March 2005 and Christopher M. Sharp, whom I should be able theoretically to adress as a fellow Catholic ignores my solution.* If parallax is made by the angelic spirits such as those guiding the stars (or such as those in that psalm you quoted guiding waters in the heavens), rather than a parallactic view from a supposedly moving earth, then stars need not be very distant at all.
Which is one case for being thankful for the Galileo case. As far as I can tell, you have not been treated as well as he was, but that is not demonising your detention officers, that is just refusing to demonise unduly the Inquisition.
Hans-Georg Lundahl
Bibliothèque Audoux, Paris
St Didacus and St Brice
13-XI-2012
*Here is my answer to him:
Distant Starlight Problem - Answered by Geocentrism
http://triv7quadriv.blogspot.fr/2012/11/distant-starlight-problem-answered-by.html
By the way here are the links I was watching/reading about you:
http://www.kenthovindblog.com/?cat=40
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjFeVwuJB7I&list=PLAC3481305829426D&index=4&feature=plpp_video
samedi 13 octobre 2012
Overlooked in Previous, about Dawkins' The Greatest Show on Earth
Dawkins made a challenge, on knowing the past.
On Reading The Greatest Show by Dawkins - Parts of it!
Overlooked in Previous, about Dawkins' The Greatest Show on Earth
Medieval Matters for Richard Dawkins
Do evolutionists ever make unfalsifiable claims?
Two bishop Richards in dialogue (tongue in cheek)
Dawkins said Edgar Andrews had his book "well written" and that is one true word from him
Assortedretorts : ... on "Science Works" quote c/o Dawkins
... on Side issue to "Science Works"
Overlook A:
That is, if exactly where a potassium compound ion or a potassiu ion is expected instead an argon atom or argon ion is found each time, then it speaks for the evolutionist interpretation, and a creationist could concentrate on disputing rather half life or molten state.
If on the other hand argon atoms or ions - even argon 40 - are trapped between the grids of the crystal, or if one cannot tell the exact position of argon atoms as related to the grids of the crystal, then Edgar H Andrews had a very legitimate point.
Overlook B:
Getting back to pressure of natural selection and microevolution: Wendy, I think she was called, was so much into Hitler, Eugenics, Racism when criticising that. THere is another side of it that also could be morally relevant.
One man is said - in Dawkins' book - to have very much approved of the experiment with cichlids. Until he heard it was based on the theory of "natural selection by survival of the fittest" as per Darwin. Now, Dawkins calls this man narrow minded. That is a possibility. But I see another possibility: he first approved of it because he did the like with humans, then was very annoyed because he discovered what he did with humans was a Darwinian thing. You see, in the US some Republicans are very Darwinian up to the point where Darwin is mentioned. Do not take this as endorsement of Obamacare with abortion, by any means, but that is a fact.
To G K Chesterton, Hitler was disgusting as a Prussian barbarian (he was Austrian by birth but identified with Prussian culture to the point of hating the Habsburgs) rather than as an evolutionist. He had another axe to grind with them.
And conditioning who is likely to survive among your "inferiors" (including human ones) if you are superior can be done strictly on individual trait basis, without singling out any group, or so it would seem. And that is exactly what Chesterton dreaded from Evolutionism, not in the hand of Nazi tyrants but in the hand of Big Capital, Big Finance and Big Companies. Making it likelier to reproduce if you can stay at work for fourteen hours on end without once peeing and with only a quarter of an hour for lunch is a thing which might be fashionable once things get confortably international and evolutionist for the "Big Fish".
Would Mr. Dawkins contribute to that? I think not. If he quoted Belloc, I think he is not quite into that moral culture.
Hans-Georg Lundahl
Paris (a cyber café)
St Gerald of Aurillac
13-X-2012
On Reading The Greatest Show by Dawkins - Parts of it!
Overlooked in Previous, about Dawkins' The Greatest Show on Earth
Medieval Matters for Richard Dawkins
Do evolutionists ever make unfalsifiable claims?
Two bishop Richards in dialogue (tongue in cheek)
Dawkins said Edgar Andrews had his book "well written" and that is one true word from him
Assortedretorts : ... on "Science Works" quote c/o Dawkins
... on Side issue to "Science Works"
Overlook A:
The scenario depicted by Edgar Harold Andrews is like "how do we know there was no argon to begin with", but argon atoms featuring at random distances in crystals in positions precisely where we would expect a potassium compound as everywhere else in the crystal does seem awkward.
That is, if exactly where a potassium compound ion or a potassiu ion is expected instead an argon atom or argon ion is found each time, then it speaks for the evolutionist interpretation, and a creationist could concentrate on disputing rather half life or molten state.
If on the other hand argon atoms or ions - even argon 40 - are trapped between the grids of the crystal, or if one cannot tell the exact position of argon atoms as related to the grids of the crystal, then Edgar H Andrews had a very legitimate point.
Overlook B:
Getting back to pressure of natural selection and microevolution: Wendy, I think she was called, was so much into Hitler, Eugenics, Racism when criticising that. THere is another side of it that also could be morally relevant.
One man is said - in Dawkins' book - to have very much approved of the experiment with cichlids. Until he heard it was based on the theory of "natural selection by survival of the fittest" as per Darwin. Now, Dawkins calls this man narrow minded. That is a possibility. But I see another possibility: he first approved of it because he did the like with humans, then was very annoyed because he discovered what he did with humans was a Darwinian thing. You see, in the US some Republicans are very Darwinian up to the point where Darwin is mentioned. Do not take this as endorsement of Obamacare with abortion, by any means, but that is a fact.
To G K Chesterton, Hitler was disgusting as a Prussian barbarian (he was Austrian by birth but identified with Prussian culture to the point of hating the Habsburgs) rather than as an evolutionist. He had another axe to grind with them.
And conditioning who is likely to survive among your "inferiors" (including human ones) if you are superior can be done strictly on individual trait basis, without singling out any group, or so it would seem. And that is exactly what Chesterton dreaded from Evolutionism, not in the hand of Nazi tyrants but in the hand of Big Capital, Big Finance and Big Companies. Making it likelier to reproduce if you can stay at work for fourteen hours on end without once peeing and with only a quarter of an hour for lunch is a thing which might be fashionable once things get confortably international and evolutionist for the "Big Fish".
Would Mr. Dawkins contribute to that? I think not. If he quoted Belloc, I think he is not quite into that moral culture.
Hans-Georg Lundahl
Paris (a cyber café)
St Gerald of Aurillac
13-X-2012
On Reading The Greatest Show by Dawkins - Parts of it!
Not Blueprint but Recipe
Rock around the Clock ...
The Great Chain of Being
Bacteria and Irreducible Complexity
Selection
A Turkish Creationist was mentioned
Dawkins made a challenge, on knowing the past.
On Reading The Greatest Show by Dawkins - Parts of it!
Overlooked in Previous, about Dawkins' The Greatest Show on Earth
Medieval Matters for Richard Dawkins
Do evolutionists ever make unfalsifiable claims?
Two bishop Richards in dialogue (tongue in cheek)
Dawkins said Edgar Andrews had his book "well written" and that is one true word from him
Assortedretorts : ... on "Science Works" quote c/o Dawkins
... on Side issue to "Science Works"
Not blueprint but recipe.
Saying as Dawkins does that our genes do not give a blueprint but a recipe for our bodies, one that is followed step by step during pregnancy, does not dispense of a wisdom ordering the process.
If such a thing as a recipe with moderate complexity can give us a thing as simple as a piece of cake, we may possibly say the connection is a huge bonus in the way of nature, even if it be blind. We may possibly be grateful for the chance that made man discover cake baking.
But if a cake bakes itself, so to speak, and ends up with more nobility, not just than cakes, but than machines for which there are blueprints, if it in the end involves a high complexity subsumed in a higher unity, and if the "cake" is conscious, well, then the fact of such a recipe - written in four letters of the DNA - requires an intelligent designer.
Whether it be pregnancy or termite hive building or bees or birds in their swarms, it staggers belief that a chance of individually predetermined and very simply ruled behaviour should produce beauties like the things mentioned by repetition on a collective scale. It does explain things if we assume that either it was planned by God much more intricately and still with much more precision and correction than I plan a composition and break it down to tablatures*, or it is - alternatively or rather also - directed by God during process or - in the non-pregnancy cases - directed by angels during process.
A hive of termites is, like the cake, dead matter, except for builders. But the end result of a pregnancy (or whatever the corresponding development is called in non-mammals) is alive. Baking kills something that did not become alive due to baking: yeast cells. But pregnancy enhances life in what was barely alive when as yet just two gametes.
Now, I am not saying that an embryologist is likely to see God bending down over the fœtus moulding it. For the reason that God is not matter, but spirit. But I say what Dawkins has to say about embryonic development as order emerging from a recipe rather than from a plan makes a spirit guiding and a spirit producing the process to start with indispensable. Actually for that matter, unlike Laplace, I very much doubt the feasability of orbits getting on rotation after rotation and billions of them, without a spirit to guide them, all by blind "co-pressure" of gravitation and inertia on planets or satellites.
When I plan the tying of a complex decorative knot, like a three lead five bight Turk's head, I start out with the end of the process before me, then copy the diagram with successive turns of the strand taken away so as to end up with a series of diagrams starting with a simple crossing of the strand. Without that there is no chance in the world I could have found a recipe leading to a three lead five bight Turk's head. Now, whether it be a hive or a swarm or a living being that is being made, the order covers a far greater complexity than that covered by a common order in the three lead five bight Turk's head - and Dawkins wants me to suppose there was no intelligence behind it?
Does Dawkins even believe it himself, or is it a formula to which he ties himself? In the same book he says "if [such and such a fish] takes the trouble to grow two extra eyes - don't be a pedant, you know what I mean" ... that is he speaks and maybe also imagines as if he believed the populations themselves were producing voluntarily their mutations, though he knows very well that that is not the case.
Rock around the Clock ...
A sundial is not inaccurate as to portion of day, if it is made on the spot for that spot and has at least three different scales, one for equinoxes, one for each solstice. It will show, God willing and weather permitting, each evening and each morning and each noon accurately in such a case, as well as the six hours between morning and noon or between noon and evening. But it is true, it will not show each hour at same length of time each day over the year. It is quite useless as a stop watch, the nearest the ancients came to that was the clepsydra or burning wax candles.
Now, Dawkins compared dendrochronology to daisy-chaining. Sounds very accurate in theory. I have however last year or the one before read about the German Irish pine chain of tree rings, and seen diagrams of the periods that only recently tied up. I must see after seeing those diagrams I am considerably less impressed by dendrochronology. Up to that recently it was my one major misgiving about Young Earth Creationism as per Bible.
However, Dawkins is behind his adversaries. His Greatest Show on Earth came in 2009 and for the work From Nothing to Nature a later edition than the one I read came in 1993. Its author is Edgar Harold Andrews. He dealt, pretty properly on my views, with C14 and other clocks, not to mention the relative time scale of Permian and Devonian and so forth.
Dawkins sets forth the case of that relative time scale as in essence "everywhere we find rocks of unmistakably Devonian type below those of unmistakably Carboniferous type." That makes it sound as if many finds included many such "rock periods" on top of each other. Do we? I actually looked up the fossile finds in wikipedia, and most of them were, very precisely only one of such periods. I do not know how much non-devonian fossiles you find in Devonshire. I suspect it is pretty little. As little as, for instance in Hunsrück Slates in Taunus or Gauja in Latvia. On the list of fossile sites most are only one "rock period" and a few are two, but hardly many enough to warrant a complete relative chronology by daisy-chaining unless evolutionist assumptions are made about faunas being in development between "rock periods" rather than contemporary different geographic faunas. Dawkins does admit there are places where fossiles are out of the expected order, precisely as Andrews said, but says that is only where there is other evidence the rocks were slanted out of original position. May I suggest that there has recently been shed new light on how sediments form and that such evidence comes from sediment being formed "the wrong way" according to standard evolutionist assumptions?
Now, to the exact chronology or supposedly such.
Carbon 14 is renewed all the time. Which means it is being produced all the time (and an organism that dies is cut off from it, but the atmosphere and organisms living in it are not), which means that there can be an initial buildup. Which means that there can have been a time with so little C14 in atmosphere that an organism having breathed that and died can 7000 years later be dated as one having lost nearly all of its initial C14. If LXX Bible is correct that 7000 years after would be now, but obviously if earth is "very old" (like billions of years) this scenario would be totally irrelevant for C14: only, we have no reliable "clock" saying that the earth is "very old."
Unless it were for the non-organic radioactive clocks. Now, I do admit I am stumped by potassium 40 argon 40 dating "having its stop clock freeze" by crystallisation. The scenario depicted by Edgar Harold Andrews is like "how do we know there was no argon to begin with", but argon atoms featuring at random distances in crystals in positions precisely where we would expect a potassium compound as everywhere else in the crystal does seem awkward. If that be the case. E. H. Andrews did (the edition I read in Swedish translation, which is not identical to the later 1993 edition) also state that in igneous rock we cannot be sure all is from molten lava, since in eruptions solids come up unmolten.
But I came across another thought about radio-active volcanic dating. What if the half lives have not been independently measured accurately, but measured thanks to presumed at least relative ages of certain finds where they are found close to sediments of certain "rock periods"? Which would very well explain the harmony if "independent" dating methods and the supposed special pleading for each of the dating methods to be younger.
I am relieved Dawkins admits that a sedimentary layer of rock is seldom if ever sandwiched between two layers of igneous rock.
Going back to daisy-chaining, I think historical such is very much more reliable than archeological or paleontological such.
There is a fine daisy-chain going back from Bishops to Apostles who saw Christ risen - which Dawkins presumably does not wnat to know about, or has not hitherto wanted to know about.
The Great Chain of Being
Dawkins calls it a Medieval Myth. He also says that in it men come between angels and beasts, but not all men on the same rung. Well, in the Medieval case of it, they did. St Thomas Aquinas believed all men to be by nature equal, or at least inequalities to be opaque and non-hereditary before acting of the person. No man is by him seen as what Aristotle considered "naturally a slave", unless he first proves it by base actions. But this is not the first time Dawkins shows a slighter grasp on history than historians have.
Now, the fact is that "intermediate species", like Tiktaalik according to Dawkins' account, fit very well into The Great Chain of Being, even if Evolution is a fraud on the macroevolutionary scale.
As to apes and men, Dawkins says there is evidence on the human side but not on the chimp side. And I am not adverse to calling Australopithecus Hemianthropus either. Not speaking for other creationists, I am satisfied there is, apart from the dating problem alrady dealt with, archeological evidence for trolls having lived - and possibly alongside men. The Beowulf poet would have thought of degenerated Cainites.
Now, Dawkins obviously believed there were intermediate skeletons on the chimp side too - but that they disappeared. The explanation is not impossible, but it leaves the argumentation from fossiles in the air. And indeed Dawkins would prove all of evolution independently of fossile finds, just by diversity and today's intermediate forms along with continental or geographical distrubition of the species. That is where I would plead for the Great Chain of Being.
Bacteria and Irreducible Complexity
I am not sure why Dawkins says the experiment on Escherischia coli by Lenski et al. was hated by Creationists. I love it.
The "tribe" that evolved a capacity to consume citric acid (in air) by two independent mutations do indeed give a hunch of what we mean by irreductible complexity. Mutation A gives no benefit (or not the one we are concerned with) until there is also mutation B. Only the two together give a real benefit.
Now there is trouble for the thesis insofar as the real benefit depended on only two mutations. Between non-eye ancestor and eye developing, for instance, there would be many more mutations necessary. And for eye, I am not at all sure that the light-sensitivity for sleep regulation is improved by a lense. I am not even sure it can be seen as sight. Does a creature which sleeps at night see light and darkness or only sense agility and sleepyness?
But another case of irreducible complexity is what Dawkins explains with coevolution, like the pollination of the Orchid bee, which really looks very much designed as a practical joke, harmless but annoying no doubt, on that bee. It is lured into the orchid, it cannot get out where it fell in (Dawkins, that article would have made your fame in a Creationist Biology Publication!), it must get through a hole its own size, which closes in on it, then it is hammered against the flower walls, and only after taking or giving away the pollen on its back is it finally released to repeat the process on next flower. Of course, there are examples of what can well be coevolution, like arms race - prey and predator both faster or both getting better camouflage and so on. But fastness and colour are continuous spectra, the precise process of pollination is hardly that. I wonder if Dawkins has a plausible "coevolutionary" scenario for how orched bee and bee orchid developed their interdependence.
With bacteria, the irreducible complexity is reducible to just one mutation being preserved while apparently of no use until the next one takes on. But there is another reason I love this: Escherischia coli remains Escherischia coli. Unless of course this is a parallel of how salmonella evolved (capability to consume citric acid in air is a diagnostic test of salmonella vs E. coli), in which case we would have an example of how sicknessgiving bacteria arose. Salmonella and Escherischia share the bacillus form of the bacteria.
Selection
Dawkins has a very good chapter on what amounts to observed microevolution by natural (or experimental) selection.
In Silver Foxes it concerns tameness. In certain fish, cichlids, I think he called them, either camouflage or females attraction painting. And in maize, also known as corn, oil content. In that latter context Dawkins makes it very clear that there are natural limits to what can be done by selection. A very important admission.
Dawkins - like "the other Dawin" Darwin - makes a leap of faith in assuming macroevolution is just a prolongation of microevolution. And that continuities of the type he assumes to prove the latter should be explained by it rather than by God producing a Great Chain of Being.
A Turkish Creationist was mentioned
Dawkins mentioned some of what he called the latter's inaccuracies. Muslims may whether evolutionist or not have a knack of misrepresenting what they argue against. Atheists may have taken over their unfair way of criticising Christianity from Muslims. But in one particular, the Turk was actually on spot:
Where is the intermediate between a fish and a starfish?
Why so? A starfish is invertebrate and a fish whether cartiliginaceous (is that the word or am I adding to the dictionary?) or with real bones is vertebrate. Now, the transition from invertebrates to vertebrates is one of the transitions that on my and presumably other creationist views gives a headache to an honest evolutionist.
Another one, not sure if the Turk mentioned it, is the transition from animals without thought or speech to man who has thought and speech.
A third, not seen so far in your book (not read all chapters yet) is transition from one number of chromosomes to a higher one, specifically in mammals. You know the neat packaging of the genes. They don't just need to be there, they need to be properly packaged as well. No problem for flowers or salamanders that can go octoploid, but mammals most likely cannot. Unless Red Viscacha Rat arose as tetraploid of Viscacha Rat (neither of those are either Viscachas or Rats, btw). I have been nagging about this one and debunking P Z Myers' answer as inadequate.**
Not yet read all of the book, skipped first two chapters (rabbits lacking in Devonian faunas may however be due to climactic reasons, or simple stench of certain kinds of swamp) and not yet read far beyond half. Might be back later if I get a chance to finish it.
Hans-Georg Lundahl
Médiathèque des Halles
St Faustus of Cordoba
and St Gerald of Aurillac
13-X-2012
*I made an unusually unusable tablature last Sunday:
(links on http://hglundahlsmusik.blogspot.com/:)
bad tablature
my excuses for it
God makes a very great many "recipes" if you like that do not fail. Those that do arise as mutations in those that do not. Not said as an argument, but as a praise.
**Here is the link to the challange I have given so far, and yes it has been sent to a paper that did not take it and to an evolutionist of Gouldian type as well:
Letter to Nature on Karyotype Evolution in Mammals
http://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2011/11/letter-to-nature-on-karyotype-evolution.html
vendredi 17 février 2012
Ethics of Creationist Writings ...
... for instance mine.
A Creationist may be a Priest, like the Italian Padre Giuseppe Sarto, a k a Pope Pius X (later: "Pope" was not what he signed up for when becoming a priest, he only became that later, because he was a good priest - like so many other Popes and like most Bishops not from Aristocratic families).
A Creationist may also be a Protestant Preacher or Pastor. Kent Hovind, who talked not just to convince people there is a Creator, but also that His Only Begotten Son died for our sins and that you should therefore serve him happens to be a Protestant or Evangelical of some sort. He also happens to be in prison.
A Creationist may also be a layman. I already mentioned the Creationist whom I read avidly for his critique of several Darwinist points when I was young was and is still a Scientist, though not in biology. Why not in biology? Probably because of the heavy Darwinist domination of such institutions as Science Institutions of Biology. Edgar H. Andrews is Emeritus Professor of Materials, in engineering sciences.
But on the other hand a Darwinist who is a scientist need not be a biologist either. "AronRa's" Darwinist Apologetics, which I am on the way of answering, says he is majoring in, not biology, but Geosciences.
And, like H. G. Wells was a Darwinist neither priest nor scientist but just writer, H. G. Lundahl is neither priest nor natural scientist (I am linguist and historian mainly and without a real degree), and Creationist.
Now, the thing about Darwinism and Creationism is that there is an argument. There may be Darwinists who say there is no such argument, but that is only a way of denying that Creationists do have arguments.
And the thing about arguments is that they make for essay writing that has some kind excitement because there is something at stake. Even a dedicated Darwinist who would never look at a Creationist writer (believe me, that occurs), would at least prefer his Darwinist writers to write well, that is in such a case, to argue well and state their arguments clearly and not too drily. And the same is about what a Creationist can expect from me.
He cannot expect me to get his soul clean from sin, that is for Christ, that is for his priests (for instance, St Pius X), but he might hope I get his mind cleared from some reminiscent Darwinist nonsense. And maybe the minds also, if not of most dedicated Darwinists, at least of some previously undecided.
But in order to do so, these undecided, who may not be searching out Creationist pages by themselves, might want to have the Creationist writings presented to them by someone they know, and maybe in some readable format, such as text printed on a paper.
And in doing their undecided, maybe even Darwinist friends the favour of providing that, they might also be making money themselves, as printers and booksellers, and if so they might also possibly send me some money.
It is a bit useless to argue about how disgusted some people are with Evangelical Pastors whose wives and children have swimming pools in the villa because they are well paid, when I am simply not a pastor at all, and when I am simply trying to earn some money for what is anyway a hobby: arguing against Darwinists, when- and whereever I think they are wrong.
It is also useless to say I should be a monk rather than a Creationist writer. If I were a monk or monastic vocation, this were like saying "this monk should be a monk and not a book copier" or "this monk sould be a monk and not a baker" or whatever, but since I am not a monk, nor a monastic vocation, it involves saying "this man should be a monk instead of preparing for family life", and I happen to find that somewhat hard. Giuseppe Sarto, as mentioned, signed up for living without a wife or children, I have not done so finally, and the preparatory moves in such direction, half hearted as they mostly were, came to and end in 5th of February 1998. I was put in a position of either turning the other cheek or legitimate self defense, and I did chose legitimate self defense, which is not what a monk should do.
There is another part of ethics involved: arguments should be honest. In my case they are so. If you want to check that out, argue. Comment case is free, except to spammers. And I am not considering someone a spammer because of disagreeing with me. Just as atheists should not consider me a spammer for writing disagreeing comments on their blogs.
Hans-Georg Lundahl
BpI, Georges Pompidou,
Beaubourg of Paris
17-II-2012
Some PS like stuff:
| 1 Lent and Genesis Reading Time Approach 2 Hitchens and Blair, what are you up to? 3 Ethics of Creationist Writings | ||
| Now to this essay: |
A Creationist may be a Priest, like the Italian Padre Giuseppe Sarto, a k a Pope Pius X (later: "Pope" was not what he signed up for when becoming a priest, he only became that later, because he was a good priest - like so many other Popes and like most Bishops not from Aristocratic families).
A Creationist may also be a Protestant Preacher or Pastor. Kent Hovind, who talked not just to convince people there is a Creator, but also that His Only Begotten Son died for our sins and that you should therefore serve him happens to be a Protestant or Evangelical of some sort. He also happens to be in prison.
A Creationist may also be a layman. I already mentioned the Creationist whom I read avidly for his critique of several Darwinist points when I was young was and is still a Scientist, though not in biology. Why not in biology? Probably because of the heavy Darwinist domination of such institutions as Science Institutions of Biology. Edgar H. Andrews is Emeritus Professor of Materials, in engineering sciences.
But on the other hand a Darwinist who is a scientist need not be a biologist either. "AronRa's" Darwinist Apologetics, which I am on the way of answering, says he is majoring in, not biology, but Geosciences.
And, like H. G. Wells was a Darwinist neither priest nor scientist but just writer, H. G. Lundahl is neither priest nor natural scientist (I am linguist and historian mainly and without a real degree), and Creationist.
Now, the thing about Darwinism and Creationism is that there is an argument. There may be Darwinists who say there is no such argument, but that is only a way of denying that Creationists do have arguments.
And the thing about arguments is that they make for essay writing that has some kind excitement because there is something at stake. Even a dedicated Darwinist who would never look at a Creationist writer (believe me, that occurs), would at least prefer his Darwinist writers to write well, that is in such a case, to argue well and state their arguments clearly and not too drily. And the same is about what a Creationist can expect from me.
He cannot expect me to get his soul clean from sin, that is for Christ, that is for his priests (for instance, St Pius X), but he might hope I get his mind cleared from some reminiscent Darwinist nonsense. And maybe the minds also, if not of most dedicated Darwinists, at least of some previously undecided.
But in order to do so, these undecided, who may not be searching out Creationist pages by themselves, might want to have the Creationist writings presented to them by someone they know, and maybe in some readable format, such as text printed on a paper.
And in doing their undecided, maybe even Darwinist friends the favour of providing that, they might also be making money themselves, as printers and booksellers, and if so they might also possibly send me some money.
It is a bit useless to argue about how disgusted some people are with Evangelical Pastors whose wives and children have swimming pools in the villa because they are well paid, when I am simply not a pastor at all, and when I am simply trying to earn some money for what is anyway a hobby: arguing against Darwinists, when- and whereever I think they are wrong.
It is also useless to say I should be a monk rather than a Creationist writer. If I were a monk or monastic vocation, this were like saying "this monk should be a monk and not a book copier" or "this monk sould be a monk and not a baker" or whatever, but since I am not a monk, nor a monastic vocation, it involves saying "this man should be a monk instead of preparing for family life", and I happen to find that somewhat hard. Giuseppe Sarto, as mentioned, signed up for living without a wife or children, I have not done so finally, and the preparatory moves in such direction, half hearted as they mostly were, came to and end in 5th of February 1998. I was put in a position of either turning the other cheek or legitimate self defense, and I did chose legitimate self defense, which is not what a monk should do.
There is another part of ethics involved: arguments should be honest. In my case they are so. If you want to check that out, argue. Comment case is free, except to spammers. And I am not considering someone a spammer because of disagreeing with me. Just as atheists should not consider me a spammer for writing disagreeing comments on their blogs.
Hans-Georg Lundahl
BpI, Georges Pompidou,
Beaubourg of Paris
17-II-2012
Some PS like stuff:
- Who is "AronRa"?
- Not the shaved man with a guitar but his friend big picture left, long hair, goaty, drooping moustaches
- Is it true that his "videos focus on the scientific evidence for evolution, normally avoiding the theological discussion"?
- I have made three answers centered on theology and philosophy, from his Foundational Falsehoods 1-6 (might be coming back to unanswered parts) and part of 11. My scientific evidence only begins in the third of them. And there I am linking back to answers made in general or to others. Of course he might say philosophy does not count as theology if he likes.
- What are the conditions for commercial use of your writings?
- Stated here:
Be My Unwin or Hooper if you Like
http://hglsfbwritings.blogspot.com/2011/09/be-my-unwin-or-hooper-if-you-like.html
(This applies to my other writings too, unless otherwise stated, not just creationism).
- Has any atheist treated your creationist blog as spam?
- Andrew Copson, British Humanist Society, Chief Director, has so on his blog.
- Which messages on his blog?
- I detail the messages in my letter to them:
Here I commented, here too, not here (so far), but here, and here, and here.
Comments include links to my blogs, notably the creationist one, in my signature,
Hans-Georg Lundahl
PS: while looking at the messages where I commented, I no longer see my comments. Does Andrew Copson somehow not believe in freedom of comment?
- If E H Andrews wrote so well, why do you write?
- In part to restate some of his points on the internet, in part to make a few others, including especially Patristics and Chromosome numbers.
jeudi 2 février 2012
George Harrison, the guitarist for the Beatles was a Bhakti Hindu. He believed in a personal god, and he said that if one chants the mantras with devotion, Lord Krishna would visibly appear and speak ,to him in an audible voice. Many pagans are similarly convinced of having met their deities too. For example, a cat fancier in Texas insists he began worshipping Bast only after the Egyptian goddess dramatically appeared physically manifest, having personally chosen him to become her disciple. ... So its not like any “one true god” is really guiding all these people they way they all insist he/she/they, or it is.**
- We believe the devil exists.
- George Harrison and the Bast worshipper probably do not believe the devil exists, and they are probably noy insisting all people receiving Theophanies receive them from God rather than the devil.
If any god exists, and it happens that there’s only one of them, then surely every spiritually enlightened and visionary holy man from any nation or tribe should be able to sense it, if men can sense such things at all. And their scribes would write the scrolls seeking to make sense of it –however feeble an attempt that may be.
- Thank you for mentioning Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.
- Sensing something is however different from witnessing a Revelation by the one true God.
- Which is why we put Revelation above Greek Philosophy.
Perhaps that’s why there are so many different religions; because no man can know the true state of God.
- By himself no - except for the One Who is himself God,
- But by God, yes.
There can only be one truth, and only one version of it. But rather than coming together, as everyone’s search for the one truth should, religions continuously shard further and further apart into more divided factions with mutually-exclusive beliefs, -and there are as many wrong interpretations as there people claiming theirs as the “absolute truth”.
- Or as many, minus one.
Which brings us to the third foundational falsehood of creationism; the assertion that any human's understanding of their various internally-conflicting and inter-contradictory beliefs should, -or even could- be considered infallible or inerrently accurate.
- If God does reveal himself, He does so accurately, and guards His revelation accessible in an infallible and inerrant way.
- We believe that is precisely what God has done.
- We believe the evidence goes far beyond George Harrison, far beyond the Bast worshipper, far beyond the dialogue between Arjuna and his charioteer, as far as evidentiality is concerned.
- Gassing on about how many have how differring views with far too little evidence does not change that in any way whatsoever.
But convincing yourself however firmly still can’t change the reality of things. Seeing is believing. But seeing isn’t knowing. Believing isn’t knowing. Subjective convictions are meaningless in science, and eyewitness testimony is the least reliable form of evidence.*
- Seing, under conditions where hallucination and subjectivity are reasonably excluded, is not just believing, but knowing.
- For the rest of us, we believe those who have seen, whether it be Christ Resurrected or the skull of Lucy being digged out by Leaky.
- And, no, there are no more reasonable possibilities for Apostles Hallucinating than for Leaky hallucinating - even if he was not taking the drugs appropriate to the Beatles song that he named Lucy after.
- Being convinced that the skull of Lucy was digged out, and that Jesus of Nazareth was seen alive after dying, I nevertheless find a certain difference in ulterior evidentiality, also known as good logic, between the two: a resurrection involves a miracle very clearly, a skull with very little Carbon 14 (or none at all) does not as clearly involve 3 millions of years.
Most people really don’t understand science; what it is, how it works, what hypotheses and theories are, or even the purpose behind it. Sadly even those on your school faculty or state Board of Education often need an education themselves before they can be trusted to govern how or what our kids will be taught, and that’s why I thought I should speak up and do what I can to help.***
- How generous of this knowledgeable person to help us out then?
- What about letting each pair of parents decide for themselves if they want their children to have the one or the other or neither kind of science when it comes to human and animal origins?
Professional creationists are making money hand over fist with faith-healing scams or bilking little old ladies out of prayer donations, or selling books and videos at their circus-like seminars where they have undeserved respect as powerful leaders. All of them feign knowledge they can’t really possess, and some of them claim degrees they’ve never actually earned.
- Claiming unearned degrees - sounds like Hovind. Or what he is claimed to be, by his opponents, by the people putting him in jail.
- Feigning knowledge they cannot really possess - sounds like Evolutionists. To me and to anyone else, who is not an evolutionist.
- Our Texas Geoscience Major* has made the point that the Six days, at least before creation of man, are no eyewitness accounts.
- They are certainly no eywitness accounts by men, because men were not created yet.
- But if angels seing it reported to Moses, it is pretty impressive, and not in the wrong way, if Moses delivered a people from virtual slavery - working miracles to glorify the Lord.
- Neither does the billions of years involved in fish turning into amphibian, turning into ... et c. ... turning into one ape, et c. ... turning into man rely on eyewitness, either human, or, as reported, angelic either.
- Divine testimony is stronger than lack of human or divine testimony:
- Especially if the divine testimony is corroborated by miracles, which was not the case with George Harrisons communication with Lord Krishna, as far as we know.
From the creationist’s perspective, the method or mechanism of creation which these mystical beings use is nothing more than a golem spell where clay statues are animated with an enchantment. Or its an incantation in which complex modern plants and animals are "spoken" into being. That’s right, magic words which cause fully-developed adult animals to be conjured out of thin air. Or a god simply wishes them to exist; so they do. That’s it! There really is nothing more to it than that; pure freakin’ magic –by definition. Remember that the next time you hear anything from a creation “scientist”.***
- Some people believe Rabbis using the name of the creator, can give life to a Golem,
- Some people do not believe that, nor that the creator could give life to anything,
- Between the two views, there is one, according to which a Creator can very well do what this Geoscientist calls magic, giving existence to what did not exist and life to what was lifeless, whereas a man, even using or abusing the name of the creator, cannot.
- This latter view is the one of a Christian Creationists, and it is actually compulsory on every Catholic and Orthodox Christian, whether he be a Creationist or a Christian Evolutionist, whether he sells cars or teaches science at a University.
- Remember, next time you hear someone argue against creationism by an appeal to scientific consensus, it might be the consensus of people regarding creation ex nihilo as a "Golem spell".
- In the same essay our Geoscience Major at Texas University* also says that Geocentric intellectuals generally are not scientists, I studied, at age twelve in my own time at home, the creationist view of precisely a scientist, the first of the two mentioned in following quote:
Its first president was Edgar H. Andrews, Emeritus Professor of Materials at Queen Mary, University of London, where he was a long-serving head of department and later Dean of Engineering.[7] He is described by historian of creationism Ronald Numbers as the United Kingdom's "most respected creationist scientist of the late twentieth century", a Reformed Baptist, and a convert to Whitcomb and Morris' flood geology since the 1960s. However, he rejected some elements of their views, particularly dogmatic acceptance of a young Earth (even going so far as to suggest that the first day of creation "might be of indefinite length").[8] Another prominent member, David C. Watts (Professor of Biomaterials Science at the University of Manchester),[9] went even further in diverging from the American view, described giving primacy to the question of the age of the Earth a "great mistake" and admitted the possibility that life existed before the Edenic creation. His views slowly moved to progressive creationism.[10]°7 http://www.christianity.com/home/christian living features/11636300/page3/ 8 Numbers, Ronald (November 30, 2006). The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design, Expanded Edition. Harvard University Press. pp. 624 pages. ISBN 0674023390. - p. 358 - note 10, same and following page. 9 Chemistry, Manchester, David Watts http://www.chemistry.manchester.ac.uk/aboutus/staff/show.html?ea=David.Watts
- British and American, US and UK people are supposed to talk the same language, except that these neighbours across the Atlantic delete a letter U from "neighbour" because they pronounce the following letter R. Very logically, especially as the Irish both pronounce the R and keep the U.
- The Geoscience Major* nevertheless ignores the Biblical Creation Society and focusses on Kent Hovind, who is in prison.
- Anyone care to guess if he is anything like partial?
Of the couple hundred different, and often violently-conflicting denominations of Christianity, the largest of them by far is Catholicism followed by Orthodoxy. Both of these have stated support of evolution and denounced creationism.***
- 1 It is quite true that Roman Catholics (Latin or Uniate), or people counted as such, constitute about half of the people described as Christian. Also, Eastern Churches not Uniate consitute the largest group outside Roman Catholics, as this count goes. But our dear
littlebig friend from Texas University has not grasped all there is to grasp about this. True, most US residing Catholic or Eastern Christians are Evolutionist. True, the Pope and Ecumenic Patriarch many of them of either group refer to, advises evolution. BUT: - Coptic Monophysites and Nestorians (Christians of Egypt and Iraq, excepting Catholics and Orthodox Calcedonians) are usually Creationist,
- According to the Church lore of Eastern Orthodox, the Ecumenic Patriarch is a stand-in for the Pope, because the Pope is considered heterodox since agreeing to filioque in Nicene Creed, and so any Bishop claiming Ecumenic Patriarch is heterodox for advising Evolution can claim a precedent, some do.
- Even among Roman Catholics, there is only so much a Pope can do. Benedict XVI may indeed "advise" evolution. But he cannot dogmatise it. And Catholics are not bound to each and every advice given by the Pope, but to Papal dogmas;
- if on the other hand the Pope should make a bull, saying "sorry, we were wrong about Genesis, nobody can from now on take its first chapters literally" then lots of Traditional Catholics (not necessarily from US) would as Young Earth Creationists, well based on Church Fathers and on Pope St Pius X, say: "well, if he's a hardline Evolutionist, maybe he's a heretic, and so maybe he never was a Pope". To be eligible as a Pope one has to be a quite Orthodox Catholic. It's not like "Heretics need not apply" - nobody applies to be Pope - it is: should a conclave chose a heretic, quite probably there was something fishy with the conclave, but even if not, a heretic is not a Pope even if he fools a conclave.
Hans-Georg Lundahl
Bibliothèque Georges Pompidou
Candlemass of 2012
*See:
Fourth Foundational Falsehood of Creationism http://darwinwasright.homestead.com/4thFFoC.html
**See:
Third Foundational Falsehood of Creationism http://darwinwasright.homestead.com/3rdFFoC.html
***See:
First Foundational Falsehood of Creationism http://darwinwasright.homestead.com/1stFFoC.html
°See:
Wiki: Biblical Creation Society http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_Creation_Society
mercredi 5 août 2009
What I did not write, and where you can find it
In English, I find no utility in writing myself about some things since it is all in E. H. Andrews' From Nothing to Nature, which I read at age twelve (I read books about evolution by evolutionists from age six and on). It's Swedish translation is called Ur Intet.
Same arguments are sometimes also available on Kent Hovind's drdino site (whose theology I am not bound to share beyond literal truth of Genesis), where he adds cryptozoology and "living fossiles" for non-exstinction of "fossile species". Links in parentheses are to categories of this site, since it is no use linking to chapters in an absent book. If I reread it, I can give chapter numbers).
Same arguments are sometimes also available on Kent Hovind's drdino site (whose theology I am not bound to share beyond literal truth of Genesis), where he adds cryptozoology and "living fossiles" for non-exstinction of "fossile species". Links in parentheses are to categories of this site, since it is no use linking to chapters in an absent book. If I reread it, I can give chapter numbers).
- stratigraphy see Fossils and Ancient Man Series
- C14 dating see Radiometric articles
- Uranium-Lead dating,
- Thorium-Lead dating,
- apart from these four, see here, Dr Dino Age of Earth related articles
- nor about irreducible complexity of eyes, (see here)
- and impossibility or so of life coming into existance from the non living, (see here)
- nor about fossilic non-existence of intermediate forms between fish, quadrupede, bird, biped as forms of locomotion, (I did not find this on drdino)
- nor about Flood Geology, (see here)
One more thing: it is for creationism - rebuttals of Darwinism, possible explanations of scientific problems in Bible account, not for evangelical theology that I turn to these authors. Nor for complete religious meaning of Genesis, which I rather seek in relation to Christ, in the Church Fathers. Light was created on a Sunday, because Resurrection and Pentecost were to happen on Sundays. Man was created along with irrational beasts, on a Friday, because on Good Friday Christ remade what went wrong with man's creation, but some refused to be remade and knew not what they did. Eve came from Adam's side when he slept, as the Church from the side of Christ opened by the lance, when he had given up his mortal life for us.
I may very well have repeated things stated by Chesterton about Monkey trial et c.:
- On Darwinism and Mystery From The Illustrated London News 21st August, 1920. -- text (8K)
- The Persecution of Religion From The Illustrated London News 8th March, 1924 -- text (9K)
- American Fundamentalists and the English Journalists From The Illustrated London News 1st August 1925 -- text (9K) -- html (10K)
- Compulsory Education and the Monkey Trial From The Illustrated London News 8th August 1925 -- text (10K) -- html (10K)
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