Out of the last 3 or 4 days, yes, it's the best example and atheists are still fighting to upkeep this nonsense.
Thank you for answering the question. Even if I squint and try to interpret his words in the least charitable way, I don't think 'nonsense' is really the word I would use and I don't think it is comparable to being a factor of 1 million out on the age of the earth.
Are you suggesting that as an atheist I know what he said was nonsense, but am deliberately trying to cover for him because he may or may not be an atheist? (I have no idea what metaphysics he subscribes to incidentally, have you seen him declare somewhere?).
I read the post and made sense of it. Either I am lying to you, or the post wasn't nonsense, or I am deluding myself into thinking it makes sense (like the opposite of God-goggles, I presume). It seemed to me that Capt Stormfield was simply expressing that there is nothing 'magic' happening in life, from an atomic point of view. It was essentially an argument
against vitalism, vis its relationship to emergence.
quote:
"there is a very important difference between the vitalists and the emergentists: the vitalist's creative forces were relevant only in organic substances, not in inorganic matter. Emergence hence is creation of new properties regardless of the substance involved." "The assumption of an extra-physical vitalis (vital force, entelechy, élan vital, etc.), as formulated in most forms (old or new) of vitalism, is usually without any genuine explanatory power. It has served altogether too often as an intellectual tranquilizer or verbal sedative”stifling scientific inquiry rather than encouraging it to proceed in new directions."
Quoted by wiki, source
here.
You may or may not agree with the argument, as you will, and you might think the argument irrelevant to the point you were trying to raise, but if I blanket labelled everything I disagreed with or thought irrelevant as 'nonsense', I'd be calling a heck of a lot of things nonsense.
If the Admins suspended on this basis, there would be a very small membership here, or at any forum, and the membership would consist purely of sycophants.
I appreciate I am not going to convince you that it isn't nonsense, I just thought I would at least explain to you why I didn't think it was.
I can dig more, but this is not a good tactic to sweep some nonsense under the rug, as if it didn't exist, or as if it wasn't that much of a nonsense. If i had posted more quotes with stupidity from the past, it would only serve to distract me from the debate by going back and forth between a dozen topics, its details, its wording, its dictionary definitions, semantics, etc. all into oblivion.
I have no desire to do any of that. That is why I refused to get into an in depth discussion with you, on this thread, about what an emergent property actually was. I simply want to see what kinds of things you think are examples of atheist nonsense as per the OP.
If you can dig up some more, I'd be keen to hear them. There will be no sweeping under the rug - your opinion is imprinted on this thread time and again. It would be a shame to spend 300 posts arguing over this one single incident - it certainly wouldn't show any trend of atheists treating one kind of nonsense differently. For all we know - it might evidence that atheists are more charitable to new posters than to older ones.
Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.
Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.