Is religion inherently dangerous?

[_LifeOnaPlate]

Moniker,

Your choice of words carries a certain connotation with it, and I've had my fill for the day with the condescension from you usual suspects. Antishock expresses "disappointment," JSM projects his own ignorance of ID onto me, and now you're acting like you're "dealing" with me as if I'm a problem that needs to be "dealt" with.

I didn't' catch your post before you deleted it, but you were apparently responding to my posts on this page dealing with arguments from design, after you already admitted you haven't really read anything on the anthropic principle and don't understand the arguments. that's not surprising. People who talk about how science has pushed them towards atheism generally don't read arguments from the other side.

I didn't see your response to my last post until just now - we turned a page and I thought your post above was the response.

Why is it always a tag team match with you guys? You're always talking condescendingly, acting like you've actually refuted something I've said by reasserting yourselves one after another in waves. This is de ja vue all over again. Three years ago it was at the same thing at MAD. It is like you're Juliann, Antishock is Zakuska, EA is Pahoran, and StuartMill is Will Schryver. EA has the sense to back out once he realized my position on ID, but amazingly the rest of you kept beating the straw.

You sum it up nicely, I agree with what you've said. I've also seen you do the same things they do to you, so for what it's worth I thought I'd mention it.

[_LifeOnaPlate]

PS- I find McLuhan a very interesting guy.

[Guest]

Moniker,

Your choice of words carries a certain connotation with it, and I've had my fill for the day with the condescension from you usual suspects. Antishock expresses "disappointment," JSM projects his own ignorance of ID onto me, and now you're acting like you're "dealing" with me as if I'm a problem that needs to be "dealt" with.

I was using your terminology, dart. You said this, "Moniker, go read a book not written by Dawkins, and then try pretending you're "dealing" with me, OK?"

I don't think I started with any condescension, yet, most definitely read it into your words above.

I didn't' catch your post before you deleted it, but you were apparently responding to my posts on this page dealing with arguments from design, after you already admitted you haven't really read anything on the anthropic principle and don't understand the arguments. that's not surprising. People who talk about how science has pushed them towards atheism generally don't read arguments from the other side.

Actually, my prior post I deleted was where I linked to a thread where you went on for pages (hey, LOAP you were in that thread, too) attacking the theory of evolution that you didn't even understand. I decided to delete it because I figured maybe you've learned more since then.

Why is it always a tag team match with you guys? You're always talking condescendingly, acting like you've actually refuted something I've said by reasserting yourselves one after another in waves. This is de ja vue all over again. Three years ago it was at the same thing at MAD. It is like you're Juliann, Antishock is Zakuska, EA is Pahoran, and StuartMill is Will Schryver. EA has the sense to back out once he realized my position on ID, but amazingly the rest of you kept beating the straw.

I have replied to most of your statements made to me. Not to others. I'm not in alliance with anyone else in this thread and have no interest, really, in what they have to say unless I can learn something from it.

I've shown that your claims on the previous pages are not "science," and that yes, you are essentially repeating the same lines that Dawkins and Dennett offer. Whether you mean to or not, doesn't change the fact that you are. If you want to keep calling it science, you need to demonstrate the science, not assert it.

What precisely are you referring to? The bit about the brain? The bit about sociobiology (which is not that controversial in the animal kingdom outside of humans)? The bit about out of body experiences? If you would tell me what I need to go further into then spell it out. I don't know which statement of yours, I refuted, that you want me to delve into.

And why the heck would I want to argue about evolution when I don't disagree with it? How many times had I said I do not disagree with evolution?

I've been on this thread with you and you did argue against evolution and stated very simple myths:

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=6057

I disagree with desperate attempts to explain things like altruism via evolution, saying it is based on "survival" needs without a shred of evidence, and then pretend its actual science because that is what the four horsemen said (yes you referenced Dennett). It isn't science by any stretch of the imagination. It isn't observable nor verifiable, but it is falsifiable and that is precisely what I did with my examples from my immediate family. If you want to believe it anyway, then be my guest. But it isn't science. You're simply rejecting one faith based philosophy for one of your own preference. It isn't a matter of science vs. religion. And yes, I understand societies work in large numbers (duh!) but if the theory doesn't work for small groups, why are we obligated to assume it works for larger ones? Because Dawkins says so! Out the window with the scientific method.

it does work in small groups and we can make case studies and make observations. For instance sociobiology delves into altruism in the animal kingdom and it is observable. The issue becomes one of applying it to humans.We can ask questions and look for answers. What is your explanation for why things are the way they are? God? That's it????

Again, there is no sense behind saying everything about us is a result of natural selection, adaptation, etc. This is a perfect example of a presupposition driving the evidence. If you cannot even admit the fact that evolution doesn't explain everything about us, and that there are many assumptions with evolution theory, then there isn't much I can do for you.

I have not stated that everything about us is a result of natural selection, adaptation. I have mentioned cultural aspects (nurture), as well, as biological evolution (nature) and that is how many in the field approach it.

Regarding the brain, you have not shown that perceptions of God are brain produced, nor can you. So to argue that they are is not science. Looking at a light shown on a monitor tells us nothing about the source of the perceptions, it simply tells us what parts of the brain are processing them. I brought up the issue of the half brain to prove a point that there is more to us than our brains.

You are attempting to say God exists and you say you know he does. Others say they do. How do we know? I am suggesting the place to look is in the brain. I've asked you a few times what organ is responsible for knowing God? Is it the heart? I mean, spit it out. Theists point to this research as proof of God. I was merely saying there is research. I'm not going to ignore it. Does it answer everything? No! Yet, what's the problem with asking questions and attempting to find answers? Are you just going to assert God IS and that's that?

What else is there that makes us who we are outside of our brain? I don't know what you're getting at, truthfully.

Incidentally, Dennett's "explanation" for consciousness is idiotic by comparing it to computers, because computers only operate as they do because they were built and programmed by an intelligent source: human programmers. Saying we process information like computers does nothing to refute God as he thinks. And the fact that we are conscious of or own existence, and computers are not aware of their own existence, is proof in and of itself that consciousness has yet to be "explained" in his materialistic paradigm.

I don't think consciousness refutes God, so, I don't even know why you're bringing this up, at all.

[_Mercury]

I can't wait till that day when we can put a bullet in the head of every corn pone faith-based bigot out there when they try to take america "for god". You are one of those individuals.

What a paranoid (Moderator edit by harmony: delete personal attack). Theocratic revolution![/quote]

Where did I state that I would personally put a bullet in your (moderator edit by harmony: delete personal attack)faith-based (Moderator edit by harmony: delete personal attack)head? I did not state that I Would perform this act.

Who is the paranoid git waiting for their imaginary friend to return and usher in a power grab?

(Moderator edit byharmony: delete personal attack).

[Guest]

This is kind of a fuzzy area. It is true that the ID movement is heavily associated with a specific class of design arguments that are based in either the origin or development of life, often coupled with an attack on evolutionary theory or some aspect of it. ID grew out of (or more accurately, is a relabeling of) creationism which itself is deeply tied to religious anti-evolutionism. It would be easy to just call those "ID" and be done with it. I'd like to do that myself, but at the same time many of those ID advocates includes forms of fine-tuning arguments as part of "ID" or even creationism (see Hugh Ross). Worse still, one of the more prominent intelligent design movement arguments, namely the "Privileged Planet" case by IDists Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards, is explicitly a fine-tuning argument. That is part of the pseudoscience trying to weasel its way into schools and popular culture Kevin is referring to just the same. This adds a level of fuzziness where different people come down on opposite sides about whether cosmic design arguments should be called "Intelligent Design" or if that should just be left to the more traditional creationist aspect of it. I lean towards the latter, but I don't begrudge the former.

------------

Oh well. I didn't back out of anything, by the way. Kevin, you bought biological ID arguments, defending Behe, Dembski, et al., not that long ago. In fact, if you've dropped the argument that the natural origin of life is unlikely, therefore it was designed argument, that's new to me. Likewise, you also bought into a lot of very, very bad anti-evolution arguments acquired from creationist writings. In the thread linked on this page, I caught you blatantly passing along quotemines from creationists, for instance.

[_JohnStuartMill]

So, dartagnan, you're saying that you don't believe in Intelligent Design, you believe in intelligent design (no capitalization) instead? Sure, whatever. The arguments are of the same invalid structure: "science can't currently explain X, therefore God created X, therefore there is a God". The only difference between the two is that Intelligent Design thinks X is biological complexity, while intelligent design thinks X is cosmological coherence. Both are God-of-the-gaps, arguments-from-ignorance fallacies.

Question, by the way: does evolution's purported failure to explain altruism factor into your belief in God in any way? Because if so, you definitely subscribe to Intelligent Design. (I want to add, as you could have guessed, that evolution can account for altruistic tendencies quite nicely. Any halfway-decent anthropology 101 textbook published in the last five years will feature an explanation of this.)

[_EAllusion]

Slimy indeed.

Why would you take Roy's word for it? Either Oppenheimer was lying about numerous straightforward facts about Flew or Roy Varghese is a slimeball who would lie here just the same as he would use a mentally declining Flew for his name. In either case, someone here is not telling the truth. What makes Varghese so much more trustworthy to you? I lean towards Opphenheimer on this account, if only because the history of mendacity among apologists of Varghese's type is notorious, but I really haven't felt the need to commit to any view. After all, if Flew, for inexplicable reasons, bought some trash ID arguments he once was capable of showing fault in and no longer seems capable of carrying on a decent argument, then so what? That's life. One can patiently show what's wrong with such attempts.

[_Droopy]

At some point, the intellectual tactic of conflating ID with Creationism in an attempt to do one or both of the following:

1. Confuse ID with Protestant Fundamentalist creationism and thereby poison the well of discourse before any arguments have been made.

2. Call every criticism of Darwinism they don't like pseudoscience (and many of those who take this approach buy AGW hook, line, and sinker, by the way) in an attempt to establish scientism as a place holder for science.

is going to have to be brought to task.

LDS theology, as well as most other theologies, requires some kind of concept of intelligent design because the core of religion, and to the point, LDS theology, is creation and teleology; God is the creator, architect, engineer, and, by extension, designer of the universe. We don't need to specify, and LDS theology does not specify, how creation was accomplished. It does specify, however, that without God, no organized, coherent reality would exist; without God bringing order out of chaos, form, movement, structure, and dynamic process out of inertia, there would be no coherent universe at all.

The ideas of ID, in philosophical form, date to the work of James Jeans, Arthur Eddington, and Alfred North Whitehead at Cambridge in the thirties. All of these men were materialists, positivists, and believers in what could properly be called metaphysical naturalism. All were believers in evolution, and all remained so, as far as I know. All of them, however (as did Einstien), came to the conclusion that the highly ordered, highly symmetrical, finely tuned and calibrated universe was mathematically (and I think, with Jeans at least, conceptually) impossible without what we would today call a designer; an overarching intelligence organizing, guiding, controlling, and determining both the structure of the whole system as well as the fine structural details, the control mechanisms, sub-systems, and precise calibration of energies and forces (cosmic constants) that make both the universe and life within it conceivable.

This is why the non-religious Jeans said that, in the post Newtonian world of the new physics, the world looks much more like a "great thought" than a great machine, the template of the materialist positivism of the 18th and 19th centuries.

The universe is "mind stuff", not just Sagan's "star stuff". There is quite simply too much high order, finely calibrated complexity in the universe and the improbabilities of such ordered complexity coming into being by pure, random chance process far too vast for a strictly mechanistic view of the universe to retain tenability.

Many other eminent scientists, including Fred Hoyle, himself never a religious believer per se and a lifelong believer in evolutionary theory, have come to the same conclusion. Hoyle simple understood that, while evolution was, for all intents and purposes, a generally correct understanding of the development of organic life on earth, the claim of pure, blind, random chance processes as the sole driver of such processes could not possibly, according to the laws of physics and the constraints of mathematical reality (the universe is constructed upon mathematical rules and principles, and all phenomena within it are ultimately delimited and conditioned by these rules--the laws of nature) be correct.

A number of mathematically trained scholars have been showing for decades now that the old chestnut about monkeys typing randomly on typewriters, if given enough time, could type out all the books in the British Museum, is wishful nonsense. Hoyle, Denton, Foster et al have shown, using fairly simple mathematics, that given millions of years, millions of monkeys couldn't type a single moderately complex sentence of sense, let alone a paragraph, page or entire book, or many thousands of books.

The continuing conflict between science and religion continues to be, at a deeper level of analysis, a conflict between two religions: scientism, or science as religion, and religion qua religion, many times expressed in extreme, intellectually narrow forms such as that displayed in Christian fundamentalism. The argument is always presented as Jerry Falwell vs. Stephen Gould or John Hagee vs. Richard Dawkins.

Two fundamentalist religions, one secular, the other theistic, colliding head on in an argument of polar extremes wherein no possible middle gourd can be broached.

As long as the ID/Darwinism argument is presented in this manner, serous dialog is going to be impossible, and so long as Darwinian fundamentalists insist on derailing the debate at the outset by conflating ID as a concept with Creationism, little is ever going to be accomplished intellectually.

[_Droopy]

Why would you take Roy's word for it? Either Oppenheimer was lying about numerous straightforward facts about Flew or Roy Varghese is a slimeball who would lie here just the same as he would use a mentally declining Flew for his name. In either case, someone here is not telling the truth. What makes Varghese so much more trustworthy to you? I lean towards Opphenheimer on this account, if only because the history of mendacity among apologists of Varghese's type is notorious, but I really haven't felt the need to commit to any view. After all, if Flew, for inexplicable reasons, bought some trash ID arguments he once was capable of showing fault in and no longer seems capable of carrying on a decent argument, then so what? That's life. One can patiently show what's wrong with such attempts.

This is too classic for words to express.

[_antishock8]

Slimy indeed.

Why would you take Roy's word for it? Either Oppenheimer was lying about numerous straightforward facts about Flew or Roy Varghese is a slimeball who would lie here just the same as he would use a mentally declining Flew for his name. In either case, someone here is not telling the truth. What makes Varghese so much more trustworthy to you? I lean towards Opphenheimer on this account, if only because the history of mendacity among apologists of Varghese's type is notorious, but I really haven't felt the need to commit to any view. After all, if Flew, for inexplicable reasons, bought some trash ID arguments he once was capable of showing fault in and no longer seems capable of carrying on a decent argument, then so what? That's life. One can patiently show what's wrong with such attempts.

I think Mr. Flew is very old, his mental faculties aren't what the used to be, and he wasn't involved in a reasonable way with the book. It's clear he's being used for propaganda purposes. That's sad.