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Author Topic:   What we must accept if we accept evolution
jar
Member (Idle past 394 days)
Posts: 34026
From: Texas!!
Joined: 04-20-2004


Message 91 of 318 (280711)
01-22-2006 11:17 AM
Reply to: Message 90 by robinrohan
01-22-2006 11:14 AM


Still need some questions answered?
Where in what I presented was sentiment expressed?
If you cannot point out what I presented from "sentiment" as opposed to logic, how can you stand by your assertion?

Aslan is not a Tame Lion

This message is a reply to:
 Message 90 by robinrohan, posted 01-22-2006 11:14 AM robinrohan has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 94 by robinrohan, posted 01-22-2006 11:33 AM jar has replied

robinrohan
Inactive Member


Message 92 of 318 (280713)
01-22-2006 11:25 AM
Reply to: Message 89 by PaulK
01-22-2006 11:14 AM


On the contrary it is relevant that the same problem applies to positions that reject evolution. Because it shows that evolution itself is not the problem.
Paulk, there are various reasons for rejecting the concept of a good God. But evolution is one of them. And because it's scientific and not merely philosophical, it is a very strong reason.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 89 by PaulK, posted 01-22-2006 11:14 AM PaulK has not replied

PaulK
Member
Posts: 17822
Joined: 01-10-2003
Member Rating: 2.2


Message 93 of 318 (280714)
01-22-2006 11:26 AM
Reply to: Message 90 by robinrohan
01-22-2006 11:14 AM


If your beleif that there is a logical contradiction is absed on "faith, whim or sentiment" then that - and not logic - is the true basis of your position. And until you can actually show that there is a logical contradiction your position is not truly based on logic.r

This message is a reply to:
 Message 90 by robinrohan, posted 01-22-2006 11:14 AM robinrohan has not replied

robinrohan
Inactive Member


Message 94 of 318 (280715)
01-22-2006 11:33 AM
Reply to: Message 91 by jar
01-22-2006 11:17 AM


Re: Still need some questions answered?
Where in what I presented was sentiment expressed?
You make a good point, jar. My attribution of "sentiment" to the belief of Christian evolutionists is my own speculation about the reason they would believe what they do. I think it's logically inconsistent to be a Christian and to also believe in evolution, so I thought perhaps the reason why people would believe such an idea is for sentimental reasons. It makes them feel good to believe it. But that's just my speculation.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 91 by jar, posted 01-22-2006 11:17 AM jar has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 95 by jar, posted 01-22-2006 11:36 AM robinrohan has replied
 Message 96 by Faith, posted 01-22-2006 11:39 AM robinrohan has replied

jar
Member (Idle past 394 days)
Posts: 34026
From: Texas!!
Joined: 04-20-2004


Message 95 of 318 (280716)
01-22-2006 11:36 AM
Reply to: Message 94 by robinrohan
01-22-2006 11:33 AM


On to the next step.
Okay, on to next step then.
Did I present logical reasons to believe Evolution happened as a fact and that the TOE was the best explanation available so far?
Did you agree with those reasons?

Aslan is not a Tame Lion

This message is a reply to:
 Message 94 by robinrohan, posted 01-22-2006 11:33 AM robinrohan has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 97 by robinrohan, posted 01-22-2006 11:51 AM jar has replied

Faith 
Suspended Member (Idle past 1444 days)
Posts: 35298
From: Nevada, USA
Joined: 10-06-2001


Message 96 of 318 (280717)
01-22-2006 11:39 AM
Reply to: Message 94 by robinrohan
01-22-2006 11:33 AM


truth vs. sentiment
...so I thought perhaps the reason why people would believe such an idea is for sentimental reasons. It makes them feel good to believe it. But that's just my speculation.
What makes it sentimental to my mind is that it has nothing to do with whether it is true or not. If you can believe something without also believing it true, just that you like believing it, that's sentimentality. Or at leaast that's what I thought you meant by the idea. That is, some people profess a belief in Jesus Christ or profess to follow him and yet can say it doesn't matter whether he really existed or not. That makes the belief completely a matter of wishfulness. Maybe sentimentality isn't quite the right word then, but this is how I thought you'd been using it.
Sorry if I missed the context here. Just saw this last message on my way out the door.
This message has been edited by Faith, 01-22-2006 11:40 AM
This message has been edited by Faith, 01-22-2006 11:41 AM

This message is a reply to:
 Message 94 by robinrohan, posted 01-22-2006 11:33 AM robinrohan has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 106 by robinrohan, posted 01-22-2006 1:30 PM Faith has replied

robinrohan
Inactive Member


Message 97 of 318 (280719)
01-22-2006 11:51 AM
Reply to: Message 95 by jar
01-22-2006 11:36 AM


Re: On to the next step.
Did I present logical reasons to believe Evolution happened as a fact and that the TOE was the best explanation available so far?
Did you agree with those reasons?
Absolutely.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This message is a reply to:
 Message 95 by jar, posted 01-22-2006 11:36 AM jar has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 98 by jar, posted 01-22-2006 11:58 AM robinrohan has replied

jar
Member (Idle past 394 days)
Posts: 34026
From: Texas!!
Joined: 04-20-2004


Message 98 of 318 (280720)
01-22-2006 11:58 AM
Reply to: Message 97 by robinrohan
01-22-2006 11:51 AM


one more baby step.
We believe that among God’s good gifts are human minds capable of critical thought and that the failure to fully employ this gift is a rejection of the will of our Creator.
The above quote is from An Open Letter Concerning Religion and Science which was referenced earlier. Do you think that it is something which could be supported logically?
If man does have a mind that is capable of critical thought, should it be employed?

Aslan is not a Tame Lion

This message is a reply to:
 Message 97 by robinrohan, posted 01-22-2006 11:51 AM robinrohan has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 102 by robinrohan, posted 01-22-2006 1:22 PM jar has replied

robinrohan
Inactive Member


Message 99 of 318 (280725)
01-22-2006 12:11 PM
Reply to: Message 88 by Modulous
01-22-2006 11:14 AM


Re: A magical story (a SUPERnatural history of life)
Very interesting post, Modulus. I enjoyed it. I will respond later. Right now I have to grade some papers.

This message is a reply to:
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Brad McFall
Member (Idle past 5033 days)
Posts: 3428
From: Ithaca,NY, USA
Joined: 12-20-2001


Message 100 of 318 (280727)
01-22-2006 12:15 PM
Reply to: Message 62 by robinrohan
01-22-2006 9:44 AM


Re: which ISM??
In my first physics course in high school, the teacher's understanding of causality was no better than Sheldrake's
Rupert Sheldrake - Author and Biologist
and as an aside he had introduced me to "morphic resonance". I began to read Sheldrake's book
(new science of life) All Books
and I thought it possible to avoid his conclusions if one supposed the physical (teleology) of resonances of imperfect forms to be influenced IN THE DIRECTION from the soma to the nucleus via gravity waves. I in the past I found this easier to understand than "acceleration" itself but that was simply the effect of popular science on a nascent mind. With that thought however I was able to THINK about the brain in ways that made discussion of invertebrate nervous physiology seem elementary. I had had the thought that memory ITSELF might be stored NOT in Hofstadter's "grandmother" cell
quote:
Schrdinger's Headache
It's been said that we all have a “grandmother cell”: a single brain cell ...
Godel, Escher, Bach: An eternal golden braid by Douglas Hofstadter (seeing it ...
http://www.disenchanted.com/dis/technology/quantum.html
but in patterns of gravity waves interacting with cascades of (kinase) physphorylation. This is an *internal* mental thought (and before there was as much attention on cyclic AMP) and one that could be recalled and worked upon subjectively. I have yet to meet anyone with this kind of personal view on how the mind and brain interact. This thought caused me to beCOME critical of much of the notions of personal identity and the philosophy of mind. I worked out the non-computer science aspects of this thought in a class with Shoemaker at Cornell about 5 years later.
Back in the 70s when I was first thinking like this after trying to imagine a Penrose twistor it was still something very real that physicists *might* find evidence for the thing itself. This has not occurred. Since then my thinking advanced or retarded through discussion of the 5th force and now it hinges only on the difference of kinematics and dynamics. Needless to comment the notion of a g-wave soliton being the SOURCE of biological memory arrays, avoids all of the discussion sprit vs materialism in the brain substance of any bat's mind say, but in reality Narnia makes better visual sense than the perfect form this thought avoided.
Page Not Found | PhysicsCentral
BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Gravitational wave detector all set
I had had to have thought that instead of the mass of two rotating stars the mass of a past descendent lineage was kept waving in the environment (outside the grade's niche) and the amount of monphyletic prior biomass was sufficient to create dissipative sustenance of parameters that affect physical chemistry differences. Anyway, less the dissipation, I wrote up an independent study in high school chemistry on this basis and used this thought to compare the contributions of Cornell biologists to Bohr's insistence and Mayr's denial that anything like this exists in the discipline. So it is not wise to use this thought for determinative purposes but it IS helpful in comparing reflections that strech beyond science fiction and touch the same firmament that D-Vinci kept high up on the ceiling. That’s all.

This message is a reply to:
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crashfrog
Member (Idle past 1467 days)
Posts: 19762
From: Silver Spring, MD
Joined: 03-20-2003


Message 101 of 318 (280728)
01-22-2006 12:26 PM
Reply to: Message 56 by iano
01-22-2006 8:21 AM


Re: Me or 'Me'
If words mean anything choice means being able to pick one of two options.
But what does that mean? For almost every choice, the choice is actually pretty simple. There's always at least one choice that you simply wouldn't ever choose, either out of moral concerns, or practical, or the like.
You haven't actually proved that choice is possible in the first place. Either our choices are determined by the states of our brains, or by the states of our souls. I don't really see what the difference is. You draw some kind of distinction between the brain and the self - you suggest that anything the brain does is seperate from what "I'm" doing - but you don't draw the same distinction for the "soul", whatever that is, even though the brain is just as much "me" as a soul would be.
Your model fails in that is flies in the face of a convention universally assumed.
Well, in fact, the existence of choice is not universally assumed; the original developers of determinism, or another way to describe that would be "predestination", were religions.
Whether or not we actually have a soul, in fact, speaks almost nothing to the question of choice. Just because we have souls doesn't make our wills any more free, if the actions of those souls was determined all along. In that case there's no real difference between having our decisions determined by rational, physical brains and having our decisions forordained by God, except that the first is much more likely to "feel" free.
How can a random jumble of matter and energy comforming deterministically or operating by chance (the brain) come to the objective conclusion that it is made up of matter and energy.
Since that's what it is, what other conclusion would it come to?

This message is a reply to:
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robinrohan
Inactive Member


Message 102 of 318 (280733)
01-22-2006 1:22 PM
Reply to: Message 98 by jar
01-22-2006 11:58 AM


Re: one more baby step.
Do you think that it is something which could be supported logically?
I seriously doubt it, but give it a whirl if you like.
If man does have a mind that is capable of critical thought, should it be employed?
Men don't have minds; they just have brains (thus saith evolution).
Whether they employ them or not doesn't matter in the least, objectively speaking, any more than it "matters" whether or not the leaves fall from the trees. Such happenings are of equal significance or insignificance. Of course it matters to THEM, but that's just subjective.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 98 by jar, posted 01-22-2006 11:58 AM jar has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 103 by jar, posted 01-22-2006 1:26 PM robinrohan has not replied
 Message 105 by PaulK, posted 01-22-2006 1:29 PM robinrohan has replied
 Message 182 by nator, posted 01-26-2006 9:07 AM robinrohan has replied

jar
Member (Idle past 394 days)
Posts: 34026
From: Texas!!
Joined: 04-20-2004


Message 103 of 318 (280734)
01-22-2006 1:26 PM
Reply to: Message 102 by robinrohan
01-22-2006 1:22 PM


Re: one more baby step.
Do you agree that man is capable of thought?

Aslan is not a Tame Lion

This message is a reply to:
 Message 102 by robinrohan, posted 01-22-2006 1:22 PM robinrohan has not replied

nwr
Member
Posts: 6408
From: Geneva, Illinois
Joined: 08-08-2005
Member Rating: 5.1


Message 104 of 318 (280735)
01-22-2006 1:26 PM
Reply to: Message 71 by robinrohan
01-22-2006 10:01 AM


Re: ONLY scientific results as "true"
quote:
You are presupposing that there is such a thing as ultimate meaning.
If there were a God, there might be ultimate meaning.
"Ultimate meaning" is our expression, and references our experience. If there exists a God who does not in any way impact our senses, that existence could have no bearing on whether there is such a thing as "ultimate meaning".

This message is a reply to:
 Message 71 by robinrohan, posted 01-22-2006 10:01 AM robinrohan has not replied

PaulK
Member
Posts: 17822
Joined: 01-10-2003
Member Rating: 2.2


Message 105 of 318 (280736)
01-22-2006 1:29 PM
Reply to: Message 102 by robinrohan
01-22-2006 1:22 PM


Re: one more baby step.
quote:
Men don't have minds; they just have brains (thus saith evolution).
Evolution says no such thing. O

This message is a reply to:
 Message 102 by robinrohan, posted 01-22-2006 1:22 PM robinrohan has replied

Replies to this message:
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