Whenever the subject of Intelligent Design turns up, it is always in the context of believers in ID attacking evolutionary biology. The ID’ers have a list of claims about “Darwinism” that they insist make evolution impossible. A popular one now, for example, is that there is not enough time for natural selection to produce enough gene mutations to explain the fossil record. A fair description of ID is that it is a list of arguments and assertions about evolution wrapped around a set of central claims.
One of those claims is that creation, as we observe it, must be the result of design and therefore a designer. They never describe the designer, as most people just assume they mean God, but the designer could be space aliens, in theory. A certain type of self-described Christian finds this appealing. They assume the designer is God, as they have an understanding of God that is much more personal. They believe God is highly involved in the granular details of human existence.
Now, it should be pointed out that this understanding of God is outside Christian tradition and perhaps even anti-Christian. Early Christians, like the Jews of the period, were highly influenced by the Greek understanding of the world. For them, the universe was an orderly place operating by fixed rules. You can’t have a covenant with God, after all, if the universe is a lawless place controlled by a fickle creator. That would make God’s covenant with man just another trick played by him on mankind.
Intelligent Design is occasionalism. While the natural world seems to operate along a set of knowable rules, God often intervenes to change results. He is always in that space between cause and effect, ready to alter the relationship according to his design. God created the platypus for reasons only known to God. If he chooses, he can make the Nile flow south or the sky turn pink. The proof of this, according to Intelligent Design, is the variety of species alive today, as well those no longer in existence.
In fairness to the ID’ers, occasionalism did creep into Christian theology in the Middle Ages, as the Christian West came into contact with Islam. Nicholas of Autrecourt was a 14th century French theologian, who was a critic of the orderly view of the natural world and a proto-occasionalist. David Hume dabbled in the ideas, but stopped short of claiming a creator or designer. Modern ID’ers can therefore claim they are not way outside Christian tradition, but they would have to defend against it.
Another central claim of Intelligent Design is that the natural world is either the result of chance or design. This is the keystone of their theory, as Intelligent Design is not an affirmative argument in favor of a designer. Instead, they frame the debate as between two competing theories. Therefore, if one is shown to be invalid, by default the other must be true. It is a bit of rhetorical sleight of hand to avoid the central problems of Intelligent Design, which of course is that it can never be proven.
This aspect of Intelligent Design relies on a characterization of natural selection as random chance, like rolling of dice. It’s the claim that a football game is either the result of random chance or the game is fixed by the officials, either in advance or as the game proceeds to its conclusion. Obviously, this is ridiculous. The result of a sports match is not random and it is not predetermined or fixed. The result of a sportsball game, is the result of the players acting and reacting to one another, within a known set of rules.
That’s the case with evolutionary biology. Random mutations in the genome are one aspect of the evolutionary process. Environment obviously plays a role here. Sexual selection is another. Human intervention is another. After all, people have killed off whole species. People have killed off whole groups of people. Like the sportsball game, there are multiple actors, acting and reacting, within a set of rules that science does not fully understand. Evolution is not an argument in favor of chance.
The point here is Intelligent Design is built, in part, on a false dichotomy. Natural selection is not random chance, at least not how most people understand what random chance means. Further, even if natural selection is unable to explain everything, there are other forces, like sexual selection, that come into play. Even if everything about evolutionary biology is wrong, it does not make Intelligent Design true. It simply means we have no good answer understanding the natural world.
This again comes back to the question as to whether Intelligent Design is at odds with Christian theology. The Sphynx cat exists and we know why. The ID’ers would argue that it is an example of design, but that presupposes the breeders were either directed by God or compelled by God to create the breed. That means man has no agency and that sin cannot truly exist. This argument for Intelligent Design comes dangerously close to the argument that man has no free will, which is heretical on its face.
This is why ID’er focus all of their energy on the negative argument, making various claims about evolutionary science. That way, the discussion is always on the science, rather than the theology. This rhetorical sleight of hand is also dishonest, which raises another theological problem for ID’ers. How can something be in line with Biblical teaching if it is based on a falsehood? Maybe the ID’er have a way to explain this, but it is not something they choose to address in their books and articles.
The most serious issue with Intelligent Design is what it implies about God. A designer that is endlessly tinkering with his creation is not a designer with foresight. Alternatively, it is a designer that is a fickle trickster, tinkering with his creation for his own amusement, without regard for his creation. It is a designer that purposely makes flawed creations that harm his other creations. This is a designer burning army men with a magnifying glass and blowing up the model train trestle. That’s not God. That’s the Devil.
From a mainstream Christian perspective, Intelligent Design has some serious theological problems, with occasionalism being the main one. The one way to solve the theological problems is to move the designer back to the beginning, where the Bible writers preferred to place him. The classic watchmaker model, where God sets the universe in motion, according to a fixed set of rules, with evolution possibly being one of them. That leaves room to debate evolution, but does not make God a villain.
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Z: “A designer that is endlessly tinkering with his creation is not a designer with foresight.” This is a mistaken perception of the nature of God. You are speaking from the perspective of a character in a movie, who does not know how the story will end, rather than from the perspective of the director, who has already finished the film and sent it off to Cannes. God is omniscient, and presumably sees the universe from an outside perspective. From God’s perspective, the whole history of the universe is already a done deal. God knows how the universe begins and… Read more »
The obvious implication of this is that the future is written. Therefore, man has no free will. Without free will, there can be no sin. For a thousand years they burned people at the stake for making such claims.
This doesn’t seem right. If God has seen the whole movie, that doesn’t mean he decided what all the characters would do. Create man, give him free will, watch and see how that works out. From our perspective it’s all still in the process of working out. From God’s perspective he’s seen all the choices we’ve made.
Not saying I’m a believer or anything, just a stickler for logic.
If the end of the movie has you winning the race, but my free will allows me to shoot you in the head before the race, how can there be a known end to the movie? The choices are a) my free will is in an allusion, b) something causes me to choose not to shoot you in the head or c) some actor intervenes to counter the exercise of my free will, in order to arrive at the predetermined ending. All of that sounds like hairsplitting to get around the fact that knowing how the movie ends, means the… Read more »
There is a difference between forknowing and forwilling, God being in the eternal present.
how can there be a known end to the movie? It can be known – just not by you and the other actors. If time is a dimension, and there are other dimensions above and outside time, then the ending can be known by someone outside of it, even though others inside of it act freely. Assume you are nothing but a two dimensional square, doing square things to your heart’s content in two dimensional space. A three dimensional cube can see that, in his dimension, you are really a cube, but because you exist (or only perceive) your two… Read more »
The latest physics bears this out:
https://www.southampton.ac.uk/news/2017/01/holographic-universe.page
What if this world is so awful that shooting someone in the head brings them to a Nirvana in another dimension? Wouldn’t that be an act of mercy? Look at all of the terrible things we have to do every day just to survive? Look at the act of defecation alone. Having to sit on a toilet, if you have one, over two billion of us (soon to be in this country) don’t, and have to stand above a trench. Having to expel dead cells and rotten food, then having to wipe that, and doing it all over sometimes two… Read more »
I have a list of people I’d like to Nirvanaize.
As Bohr said to Einstein, “Zman, stop telling God what to do.”
A movie is a poor analogy because it implies a script.
If I watch a football game on Sunday and you don’t but then we get together on Monday and watch a recording. I know what’s going to happen, but I’m not making it happen.
Not necessarily. If God is an infinite being in size and computational capacity, this means God exists outside of time, has no time and can see every possible outcome. It could be that there are multiple outcomes and when someone makes choices, many of the outcomes or in some cases all other outcomes collapse into one outcome. Think Schrodinger’s cat where one outside observer with x-ray vision can see into the box without affecting the uncertainty principle. He would see both the dead and alive cats and all the future events from both cases and the waveforms of the dead… Read more »
The Bible teaches that predestination is a mystery but that truth irks you but the bible also teaches free will and you reject that.
It’s all a bit humbling, isn’t it?
You are of course, correct. This is only one of the dozens and dozens of contradictions I am going nuts trying to get my head around the Old Testament. Others have too: “If God is all powerful – would it be possible for Him to create a boulder that was to big and heavy for Him to lift?” I will put a pin on them, but generally leave such things to biblical scholars to sort out. The people that wrote the original scriptures didn’t have science, and we cannot accurately transcribe all the ancient Hebrew texts. We don’t even know… Read more »
CS Lewis calls this “God making a boulder ….” a “non-entity” literally an abstraction of the human mind that doesn’t exist, a non-sensical string of words. http://www.ncregister.com/blog/steven-greydanus/the-rock-god-cant-lift
“If God is all powerful – would it be possible for Him to create a boulder that was to big and heavy for Him to lift?” They may not have modern science, but they had most logical laws worked out (or at least the Greeks did). First start with the characteristics of God – the first and most fundamental that God is pure Being. What is the fundamental characteristic of being? Existence. If something does not exist, then something has no being. So what would omnipotence entail? The power (potence) to create all things that have existence/being. A logical contradiction… Read more »
Well, of course, when the people you mention are smarter than anybody who has ever lived, then there is no need for them to study anything. They know that they are smarter than people like Augustine and Jerome and Aquinas because those guys are dead and didn’t even have smart phones. They didn’t even live in 20th- or 21st-century America, so how can they have known anything or have been as smart as people living now? The whole purpose of Darwin’s ramblings was to explain the astonishing existence of the glorious Victorian Englishman.
This comes from the false teaching that “God loves everyone.” Does he? I don’t think so. The “future” is a man made perception. Time only exists from the motion of matter through the curvature of space (God being spirit, and above and beyond this). It’s the music created at a precise point where the needle hits the spinning record. Move the record backward or forward with your hand and you’ll find the note to be embedded in that tiny groove. People are horrified to think that they’re automatons of a larger cosmic force, like something out of Blade Runner. I’m… Read more »
A great deal of needless human misery has been caused by careless use of the word “therefore.” It’s one of the most dangerous words known to man.
Why do you assume only one possible future?
I don’t
That man has no free will is not implied by the fact that there shall be just one future, which we know is true. What will be will be, a vast amalgam of nature and history and billions of individual choices made daily by people. Our exercise of free will now is all part off the process leading to that certain future. We don’t know what that future looks like, but it’s there, waiting to greet us, with all its admixture of human decisions made (I believe) freely. A Creator would know the outcome; would know, indeed, the choices made… Read more »
This is a good objection. I see it along the lines of a parent anticipating what their child will do, all the while with the child exercising their agency — similarly a higher power with great intelligence, perspective, and knowledge of us could possess a certain foresight of what choices we will make, without mitigating our making them.
No, that is not what predestination means but rather than address that here, I want see your reaction to Tom Wolfe’s “The KIngdom of Speech” in which he shows that language is not any part of evolution. On could say his argument against that claim language did develop is an argument that serves as a synecdoche of the entirety of arguments against Evolution. In Wolfe’s book he addresses the five standard tests for a scientific hypothesis (p 27) and he observes that Darwin failed all five tests. To get back to free will for just a moment. Darwinism can not… Read more »
I’m pro-Christianity but…
“God is omniscient, and presumably sees the universe from an outside perspective. From God’s perspective, the whole history of the universe is already a done deal.”
Then why the whole original sin testing of each man, the Judas betrayal and Christ crucifixion, and the micro-managing of ID? Why did He have to watch the whole bloody drama unfold if He knows how it will end?
If a man is eventually going to prove unworthy of God, why not just immediately consign him to Hell, instead of going through the whole drama?
Apparently, He enjoys the bloody struggle. The devastating diseases are quite a nice touch to the stage scenery.
Maybe God stepped outside for a quick smoke, and things got completely out of hand very quickly. 🙂
especially the sexually transmitted ones 😛
That’s why he provided us with rules in regards to sexual conduct which don’t follow and get a diseased pecker because of it.
He enjoys our spiritual growth as humans as we endure the bloody struggles. Otherwise we would be born in Heaven as very shallow, sheltered people, who turn to doing lines of coke by a crystal clear brook, dabble in Satanism, and crash new Acuras into trees up there because we wouldn’t know how good we have it, being totally unappreciative of our good fortune. In other words, my former prep-school.
Well, that doesn’t say much for angels, does it?
Different beings all together. No human nature there. Although we know of at least one that didn’t make the cut.
There is a section in Milton’s Paradise Lost where God sees Satan making his way up from hell toward earth. Basically The Son asks, “Aren’t you going to stop him?” But God is in one of his “moods” and decides to let Satan proceed. Just to see what will happen. I guess God gets bored, too.
Epa;
Milton is (I guess) great literature, but not scripture. Now, I ‘know’ you are joking…
If you are making sausage, the process may be unpleasant, and you know exactly what will happen and how it will end, but if you want sausage, you still have to make the sausage.
Because it is all in the eternal present from God’s perspective – the perspective of past, present, future represents our limited perspective. We make every free willed decision affecting our destiny all at once from God’s perspective.
Because, as explained above, He is outside time and it is His nature to perceive all time at once. Even those things which to us can only be perceived sequentially. If you are asking in the sense of what’s the point of it all, why not just save us all, bypass this sin testing thingy, etc., it is because if God is true Charity, and seeks true charity in return, then Charity demands the option of rejection. For Judas to truly love God, Judas has to have the freedom to reject God, otherwise his “love” is simply programming, not agency.… Read more »
Your questions assume that you know what is going on. But do you? If so, how? What if we are only stage props in a drama for observers that we know nothing of? Why do we have to be the center of the whole thing?
Isn’t that the point of creating something? To watch it work and unfold? I know I would personally love to set something in motion knowing how it all winds up, but get to enjoy all the twists and turns along the way that lead to that conclusion. I mean, I’ve done things in my life that I’ve known from the start were going to turn out a certain way (sometimes good, sometimes not), but that didn’t mean I stopped enjoying the journey. I mean at a real simple level, I drove my daughter to college last weekend for the first… Read more »
God created everything for His Glory and He created man to know Him, Love Him, serve Him in this world and to be happy with Him forever in the next world.
Man is created for Happiness but many men (apparently TheZ Man too) prefers the fiction of darwinism because it, supposedly, releases him for his culpability of sin.
If one is a product of evolution, then a man has no choice. That includes the Z Man.
He is what he is and believes what he does because he is just the product an outrageously long succession of mutations and adaptations.
When theology descends to this level of debate, which you see in both Catholic church fathers like Augustine and Aquinas and Prots like Calvin, it ceases to have any real meaning to those of us operating in “human scale logic.” It’s effectively saying “shutup, this is above your head, just do what we say.” It won’t work with modrens. Look at church attendance and belief. Those who can be satisfied with this mindset are a dwindling minority. It’s a reactionary mindset and negative identity that only serves to illuminate what you stand against rather than what you stand for –… Read more »
@Exile
“It’s effectively saying “shutup, this is above your head, just do what we say.” It won’t work with modrens. Look at church attendance and belief.”
“Those who can be satisfied with this mindset are a dwindling minority.”
LMAO. Have you observed any of the SJWs? The Climate Change True believers? Those who preach that “systematic racism” and “white privilege” mantras?
That nonsense, what Chesterton called “believing in anything,” has filled the void left by Christian theologians who had nothing better to say than “argle-bargle so STFU and do what we tell you.” We need to have better answers. If your strategy for beating globshlomo relies on SJW-AGW-grade propaganda, you’re going to need the Megaphone to make your nonsense more popular than theirs. And Shlomo’s not handing you the Megaphone. We have to think deeper than simply saying “the stupid public will believe anything.” They’re obviously not believing in Christ or any established Church, they’re making the churches believe in poz… Read more »
@Exile
The Churches of Poz (the Universities) are quite full because they have power and the dumb bovine masses will believe anything power tells them (as long as those in power avoid too many mistakes).
Christianity is now a shallow earth cult. Most churches have nothing going on.
The have nothing spiritual going on. It’s been replaced by cultural marxism
Hence why the first goal of public education is to dumb down the populace. It is not above the intelligence of the average human unless said human being has had the intelligence ground out of him.
Most denominations committed suicide by adopting modern progressive values that people like you advocate. It drove out many faithful and left people like yourself, nice progressives who embrace post Vatican-II values of anything goes. Then they watch their church curl up and die.
The faithful don’t want your gumbo of nihilism and scientism that so many moderns peddle, especially SJWs. If that stuff was attractive,Christians would embrace it. They don’t.
It’s not life affirming, it respects nothing , It’s the culture of death in a post-modern package.
Hard questions require hard answers. If you want to talk about the meaning of life, the universe and everything, it’s going to defy human scale logic. The first cause of time and space has to exist beyond time and space. Some Christians will not be interested in such things, but those who are find such explanations worth debating.
anyone who claims to know “god’s” intent can safely be ignored. All religious texts are the work of man, not god.
“Aunt Bee”
The Christian understanding is God is in the “eternal present” not the past or future.
There is a pretty wide spectrum of theories around intelligent design, from the watchmaker to the every aspect under His control, 6000 year old young earth creationism. I am not sure that a brief treatment like this does anything to shed any light on a very complex topic.
The Z-Man is really talking through his hat on this one. If you folks are interested in the origin of life the very best source I have found is a book that just happens to be written by Stephen Meyer, the real brains behind ID. It’s a bit of a slog at 628 pages but you’ll end up knowing more about microbiology and combinatorial mathematics than 99% of the kids at the malt shop. This link is to the Amazon Kindle page: You can click on the picture of the book for a look at the introduction and chapter 1.… Read more »
When creation is taken as God simply conjuring things from nothing then the idea of a process unfolding over time becomes anathema. When creation is seen as an act of organizing toward an ideal with God using the elemental building materials which are themselves eternal then the idea of “evolution” makes sense. The use of the word “day” in Genesis has led to all kinds of difficulties. If the translators had used “time” or “period” it could have led to a lot less pointless argument and contention.
We have to ditch the literalist interpretation of Jewish-plagiarized Mesopotamian creation myths and reassert a Christian, not Torah/OT-by-proxy concept. You’re using a good example of the rethinking process. If Christianity is going to survive modernity, and I hope it does, it has to break with the black-letter-Book (and much of the Chosen OT in general*) and take those ideas as what the understanding of that day permitted. *Judaic identity is almost entirely atheistic now but it’s chugging along pretty well compared to Christianity. Judaism by design is materialistic and can much better withstand the death of transcendent belief. Judaism can… Read more »
Couldn’t agree more.
They were Story thieves before they were land thieves.
The problem is not the use of the term “day” but the literal acceptance/interpretation of figurative expressions. The Bible is replete with such. Do folks really think that “7 x’s 70” or “40 days and 40 nights” just keeps cropping up? Look, the Bible was written (actually compiled) over the years by men inspired by God (at least that’s one interpretation/explanation). These folk had an ancient’s understanding of time and numbers—much less an ability to express such in writing. Look to the moral teachings, take the rest with a grain of salt.
The 7×70 is a good example of symbolic sense. It does not mean you don’t have to forgive the 491st transgression against you. The trick is figuring out when symbolic sense is intended, and when it is not.
As regards the new eisegesis of Yom
http://kolbecenter.org/meaning-yom-genesis/
Don’t biologists propose spontaneous generation themselves with life somehow appearing about 4 billion years ago out of molecules called organic that have some special property of becoming alive unlike the other atoms and molecules? When you think about it, what is a cell other than a machine, a computer with a self replication program? An extremely complex machine created by a chance series of chemical reactions in the right environment that take place just in the right sequence to make the machine come into existence and function. What are the odds of that? And this doesn’t even take into account… Read more »
The message of the Vedantists and the Buddhists is to look inward and stop getting tangled up in complicated theological arguments.–Epaminondas Then there are lots of folks like me who approach this subject by not…..and stay out of the deep weeds. “A woman uses her intelligence to find reasons to support her intuition.” ― G. K. Chesterton. So my arguments are screwed to begin with. Due to lack of exposure to church Christian teachings except for Micro) a Presbyterian neighbor kid got an Attaboy Ribbon for bringing me, a heathen, to vacation Bible school, and Macro) mainstream culture. Christian culture… Read more »
They’re onto something – damn those Aryans are some awesome ancestors.
Theology is the libertarianism of religion.
Orthodoxy is superior to Roman Catholicism for its greater appreciation of mysticism and de-emphasis on temporal hierarchies and glass-faerie-castle theologies, and snake-handling hillbilly Prots are superior to Marxist Methodism and Prog Baptists because they live in their faith rather than intellectualize and LARP it.
Hi Exile! Huh? Damn, I’m getting literal as I get older.
Science is a never-ending process that seeks a better understanding of the world in which we live. Nothing is ever “settled.” Some aspects of our understanding are quite useful because we have a very high probability that our knowledge corresponds accurately with reality. We like to call this kind of knowledge “laws of nature” simply as a shortcut for saying high probability of being an accurate perception or conception of reality. Religion is now, and always has been, a social institution that aids in passing down wisdom from one generation to the next. That is not a trivial thing, and… Read more »
what muddies the water is that religion *was* science in olde days. and now, science has become religion (for some)!
Z, I think this is the most wrong you’ve ever been. Not taking position for or against ID, where you are wrong is to think this is may be heretical. Also you are wrong that God does not affect outcome of football games or other events of the world. The Bible is littered with God’s interventions from small personal interventions, such as Sara being barren (Genesis 11:20)) and then God told Abraham that Sara would have a child (Genesis 17:15, 17:16). To more cataclysmic such as God destroying the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 19:24, 19:25), and of course… Read more »
what does the bible have to do with evolution?
Karl McHungus said: ” what does the bible have to do with evolution?”
What does evolution have to do with moral instruction?
TuNes’ citing the Bible to establish real world events/miracles, not as allegory or parable, etc… Relying on belief in miracles is a huge part of what’s killing Christianity today. When people don’t see miracles, they conclude that either a) God doesn’t exist or b) God doesn’t care enough about them to intervene with “small daily miracles” for them. It’s why preachers rightfully condemned Lou Holtz and others back in the day for “coaching God” in football games.
Let me ask you this then: If the miracles are only to be taken as allegory or parable rather than real world events, why bother? Why not just read Freud or Jung? Why not just skip the allegory and parable bs, and just get on with it?
By the way what are the allegories/parables the miracles supposedly represent? Sara having a kid late in life means what, allegorically?
“What does evolution have to do with moral instruction” nothing.
Karl McH; Your point is more subtle than maybe you intend. You’re very right that The Bible does not speak of evolution at all, much less either positively or negatively. The man behind the curtain is that *evolution* has been used for a 150+ years to speak negatively about The Bible. The materialists brag that since Darwin they have no need for God to account for the variability of natural world as though this is dispositive. For some reason, it is assumed that God could not work through evolution as well as through creation ‘ex nihilo’ (i.e. from nothing) if… Read more »
Juxtapose the current state of scientific knowledge about the creation and evolution of the universe, and more specifically earth, with the Genesis account of creation. Genesis identifies the exact correct sequence from the big bang, to the dark earth covered in water, surrounded by dense clouds, to the creation of the atmosphere, to plate tectonics, and finally to the evolution of life – from plant life and sea based creatures, to birds, to land based animals, to humans. How did the writer of Genesis get the exact sequencing correct 3000 years ago? It was not until the big bang was… Read more »
This is exactly the kind of argument that’s been progressively emptying churches of modrens since the 19th century. This is what we have to get past if Christianity is to live to the 22nd century and beyond. Love Christ enough to put the Jewish Torah down, please.
Do you see the Jews running around doing this? When’s the last time you saw a Jew argue in a public forum using their supposedly holy Torah? It’s Talmudism, all the way down, and they laugh all the way to the bank and the other corridors of power when Christians do this.
One early Christian section was Marcionism, which rejected the Old Testament and only used the Book of Luke and 10 books attributed to Paul. Marcion of Sinope’s argument was that wrathful god of the OT was not the same god as the all-loving and forgiving god of the NT.
I do some digging into NT-only/ascendant contra-Semitic Christian heresies when I can. All information appreciated, keep it coming. I think that’s one area we need to work on in the Dissident Right. We need to offer Christians a third way between going Odin and following noxious doxing XtiCucks like Katie McHugh right back into the (((fold))).
Muscular Old Testament Christianity would work if you can keep it from being infiltrated but it might not work on people who are lapsed and worse it still ties us to the Middle East. Personally I think a society full of Heathens, Asatru, followers of the Dodeca or any of the other Pagan pathways even more Conservative forms of Wicca would be perfectly workable. It would also have the advantage of greatly lowering the connection to the Semitic world which should reduce the amount of troubles our society has with that region and its peoples. Why would my Godi care… Read more »
Fourteen words are all the scripture I require. We can work the rest out among ourselves.
“We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” Steven McNallen, founder and former head of the Asatru Folk Assembly, has spoke out in favor of this statement and been called a racist for it.
James Russell wrote “The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity” about how the Catholic Church reinterpreted Jesus and the Bible to make it appealing to the Germanic people. Jesus as a warrior chieftain instead of a meek lamb dying for the sins of the world. You put your finger on one of the issues that I have with both Christianity and Islam – a believer is expected to identify with an alien people. Even as a child, I wasn’t interested in the history of a bunch of middle eastern nomads. On the other hand, I loved the stories of the old… Read more »
If it is true that Z-man attended Jesuit high schools in the early to mid 80s, then this corruption by the Jebbies is a given. Went through the same experience myself, and it has taken years of patient self-study to undo the damage. Rediscovering the scholastics whom the Jesuits revile is the ultimate redpill.
I’m not losing much sleep over Z’s “corruption” by the Jesuits. The Scholastics have their moments, but it’s mostly a similar mountain of sophistry to that produced by the dual-Loyolists.
The Scholastics are not easy reading. But then anything worthwhile rarely is. We are working off translations written in languages used 1000 years or more ago. Not an easy task. I like Ed Feser’s work on it – makes it accessible to even idiots like me.
Intelligent design and predestination suffer from similar assumptions and flaws. Interventionist, revision-prone, high-controlling gods who determine the fate of every human effort and every breeze that blows arise from an Eastern/Orientalist mindset, not a Western/Occidental one. As skeptical as I am of deified “Progress” as we see it used today, I’m not a trad-fanatic or NRX LARPer. The Western mindset is the one that’s given us a vastly more detailed mechanical understanding of the universe, significant health and quality of life improvements and that points the way to living on other worlds in the future. This is transendence in a… Read more »
That’s a really good post. I’m not a religious guy myself, but it sure seems to me that Christianity was a far more pro-civilizational religion than what has replaced it — cultural Marxism. I don’t see how it’s possible to reject the idea of natural selection and the survivorship principle, and remain a viable belief system — yet somehow the Left can make up all types of BS and the outer party never questions it. All the crazy stuff the left believes in now — are we sure it’s Darwin that stuck the knife in Christianity?
The biggest issue with evolution as currently taught in school is the species problem. We can take a bunch of wolves and selectively breed them for speed and end up with Greyhounds in a few hundred generations. Same way we can turn wild horses into Clydesdales and buffalo into heifers. But they are still genetically wolves, horses, and buffalo. They still have the same number of chromosomes and can still breed viable offspring with their wild ancestors. We’ve never created a new species and have no idea how it’s done. Maybe DNA and RNA runs like an actual computer through… Read more »
they used to say separate species could not produce viable offspring, then we get Ligers and so forth (and mules). Guess what, some mules are not infertile!
Something on the order of 1 in a million mules and hinnies are fertile. Lions and tigers are more closely related than horses and donkeys as they both have 38 chromosomes.
they have pictures of monkeys — in the wild — copulating with deer! so i think maybe what is possible through random boinking is a non-negligible part of speciation. and you know africans will fukk anything moving slow enough. evidently asians will fukk a shaved orangutan, too.
A Dachshund to a Great Dane in few dozen generations, at most. Dog to a cat, theoretically possible in a few tens of million generations. But only theoretically. Extinction events of all sizes put a crimp in such possibilities. Strangely enough, wiping the slate clean appears to open the gate for new designs, appearing out of a mysterious soup. That soup is so not understood that we can’t say the truth is between two things we do not know to be true.
I am not here to convert anyone or refute anyone. What our esteemed blog host says is doubtlessly true. As a new convert to the faith I struggle with classical Bible doctrine and mythology every single day. Often without success. All I know at this point is that there IS a God. I can feel it. You can too – but for many, they have been cultured, conditioned and indoctrinated not to. Much the same way that girls are growing up thinking they are boys and vice versa. We will see what happens when those trains derail. Despite its complexities… Read more »
Sincere question: When you say “All I know at this point is that there IS a God,” do you mean:
1. Creator of all things
2. Moral lawgiver and ultimate judge
3. Universal comforter
?
All of these roles are logically distinct. I am curious.
I can’t answer that, LITS. I am a new convert and believe me – as a former atheist/agnostic… the idea of a creator leaves me uncomfortable. I know He’s there, and that’s it. I know we are here for a purpose… and that’s it. I was raised by pozzed proggies and hurled into the void when I refused to accept their stances on stuff like socialism, homosexuality, feminism and all the BS that goes along with that As you can imagine our families all started to implode as reality met ideologies. I looked around and committed another crime by noticing… Read more »
John Smith: Beautifully said. I, too, was raised a liberal and was an atheist agnostic, and I, too, noticed that the best people I knew or met – the ones who could truly be relied upon in hard times, the ones who always conducted themselves with dignity (which is not to imply they were always serious, but had an inherent respect for themselves as made in God’s image) were Christians. Over the years things percolated in my head and my heart, and then I turned to an old college friend who sent me books and tracts. It was while reading… Read more »
Yep. I can see how Christians get frustrated with guys like these. Our Maker is in plain sight, right under our noses… and yet they can’t see. Or maybe it’s not that they can’t… but that they won’t. They get caught up in the minutiae and details and miss the forest for all the trees. Most will never be able to shed the blinders and chains that they put upon themselves. They see Christianity as limiting and constricting and fail to grasp the incredible power and freedom it gives. It’s like watching blacks blame Whitey for all their own failings… Read more »
The question I would pose to our illustrious host and fellow commenters here is, “How does the ID argument figure in to our current discussions centering about White survival in an increasingly non-White world?”. Are we being diverted by delving into this matter? Perhaps I’m slow on the uptake, but heretofore I have found postings and comments from (I assume) atheists, agnostics, and devote Christians which seemingly put aside such fundamental differences and agree on the above matter. I found this quite refreshing, since the history of man is often described as one of strife based on religious division. Hate… Read more »
Whenever a missionary comes in to raise funds for the African mission, I tell them I believe in the Curse of Ham, so it’s pointless to raise funds for this. I really don’t, but I like watching them turn purple.
It is tangential, and it is not. Have you ever seen Force Ten from Navarrone? Great flick. Spoliers: There is a scene where the heroes go to blow up a dam to take out an enemy bridge downstream. Two of the heroes set the charges deep within the bowels of the dam, thinking they will not survive the blast and ensuing wreckage. The charges go off, and although knocked down, the two heroes survive noticing no damage to the dam. They curse the engineer who designed the charges and where to place them. On the hillside, the engineer and another… Read more »
IMO, the Bible, a book of faith and morals, not science and history, is like an inkblot Rorschach test. It can be interpreted many different ways. There are Christian warriors and Christian pacifists, Christian Communists and Christian Capitalists, Christian feminists and Christian anti-feminists, etc. Albert Schweitzer published “The Quest for the Historical Jesus” in 1906 where he pointed out that previous quests for the historical Jesus dating back to the late 18th Century changed with the times and reflected the personal proclivities of the authors. Schweitzer was also the first to propose that Jesus was an end-of the-world prophet who… Read more »
I know what you’re saying. I tried so hard to be an atheist at one point, but the truth is right there, staring us in the face. The way I look at the bible, God knows that we’re creatures of myth and stories. This is why Jesus spoke in parables. He took mostly Jewish myth, which contained a historical sketch of the Jewish people, and built on all of that, completing all of the signs. It was the only way. So in a way, he allowed the myth to be created by humans, and then completed the promises of the… Read more »
All of this stuff falls under the umbrella of we really don’t know for sure. We can logically look at data, review history, study the current state of our existence. We hopefully make conclusions that are anchored in the reality of what we see. Usually in conjunction with what makes sense and what doesn’t. Free will and the not knowing for sure works within the framework of our thinking, our existence. If we knew everything it would not be much of a life. Discovery becomes knowledge. Knowledge should then become wisdom. The best part of our existence are the discoveries… Read more »
These arguments presuppose that we should have mandatory biology classes in public school and use those biology classes to attack the Christianity of the kids. There is absolutely no reason to do this. It is completely dishonest and the only reason 10th grade biology exists is to further weaken Christianity in America and Europe. You could teach a hell of a lot of biology without needing to harp on evolution. I am pretty sure this stuff just would not come up without this public school attack on Christianity. Christians use ID to defend against the harmful effects of secularism and… Read more »
Sorry, you can’t put the genie back in the bottle.
Agree. Just what I’ve said above on not driving conflict where it’s not needed and leaving the evo debate for the colleges of choice rather than public schools of compulsion. Anti-evo needs some space to either improve or die off, and the Darwinist crusade to pogrom all unbelievers reminds me far too much of the Yankee fanatics in the Civil War re: slavery.
Honestly haven’t looked at ID for quite a few years, but I believe that those who research ID at various institutes do put the creator at the beginning and do not posit that the creator intervenes after creation. If I remember correctly, they don’t claim that the creator is the Christian God or any god. And they do raise interesting and important problems with evolution. For example, how does evolution account for the creation of a complex system such as sight that relies on multiple types of cells that all need to be present and working together at just the… Read more »
If I remember correctly, they don’t claim that the creator is the Christian God or any god. Would they all happen, by chance, to be religious and, again by chance, happen to actually, on a personal level, believe that God is the designer? I am genuinely curious. Apart from one or two alien-proponents, I’ve never met an ID’er who was not religious, but then, I haven’t met many ID’ers. For example, how does evolution account for the creation of a complex system such as sight that relies on multiple types of cells that all need to be present and working… Read more »
I give some credence to the problem of natural selection accounting for structures like the eye that would require mutually supportive successive mutations which in and of themselves, step-by-step, would have no inherent survival, sexual selection or other adaptive value. We’re missing some very important subtle mechanisms in the process of evolution. But that doesn’t change the fact that ID relies just as much on non-falsification as pure deism does for “proof” – that is, solely.
One thing I find interesting is the idea (I think I read Michael Crichton talking about this) that maybe life is kind of like crystal – it organizes itself because of its nature…
I read a little bit of “convergent evolution” stuff years ago, I think that’s in his line of thinking – always liked that guy. I think there are deeper patterns, and that our present understanding of evo-biology is more on the Newtonian level than quantum. Lotta room for debate over the underlying mechanisms, but the overall effects are observable and verifiable.
what are the observable and verifiable effects?
@G P
Have you ever heard of light sensitive eyespots, directional cup eyes, pinhole camera eye?
The Creationist Eye argument was debunked decades ago.
It’s not a “creationist” argument, it’s a legitimate question about one part of Darwin’s theory. If the eye argument is right, it shows natural selection is an incomplete explanation for evolution – it says nothing about other theories. This is New Atheist-tier dualism and illustrates what Z says repeatedly here – he’s questioning ID, not “proving Darwin.” Attacking creationism is attacking the weakest critical basis for “anti-Darwinism,” which is itself an overstatement of legitimate critics’ intentions in raising these questions.
As for “debunked decades ago,” that’s in the eye of the debunker. Plenty of recent credible academic-grade science disagrees.
The sense I get from ID is that it is a criticism of certain assumptions of MACRO-evolutionary theory, not so much a theory in itself. But it is difficult, particularly for scientists, to say “I don’t know.”
I’ve always considered myself to believe in intelligent design, but not in a God who’s always fine tuning things. All laws of nature were set in motion at the beginning of the universe. All life came from one cell, containing every permutation that life allows, that was placed in the ocean through divine will. At some point, half assed monkeys developed big enough brains to look at their reflections in the water and say “what the hell am I doing here?” – And that was Adam and Eve. People gravitate towards “free agency” because they want to be in control.… Read more »
Christians, who feel hey need to reject evolution, are on solid ground if they view God as the first mover. They can doubt the certainty of evolution without embracing a heresy like Intelligent Design. It’s a bit of a cop-out, for sure, but avoiding eternity in Hell requires some corner cutting.
where would a life time of sex outside of marriage land a fellow? am asking for a friend.
Second circle I think. Could be worse.
Possibly grandfathered in under common law.
Dante has learned another circle to be added…the Circle of Having Your Brains Screwed Out until the end of time. How about settling for Woody Allen’s Orgasmatron 9000.
Mr Derbyshire is a proponent of ID, I believe. Clearly evolution exists, we just don’t know how it works. We know about some things, like inherited traits etc. But we don’t know how speciation occurs, or how life began. For me, Darwin is a distraction, would love to hear exactly what he contributed by way of new knowledge. What’s interesting to me, is how viruses act as a transport mechanism, moving genes from species to species. As a S/W engineer it is pretty clear to me that DNA is a ‘program, and the amino acid pairs are ‘code’. You see… Read more »
No he isn’t: https://www.google.ca/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://www.unz.com/jderbyshire/one-more-bout-with-the-intelligent-design-people/&ved=2ahUKEwigkdu9o5TkAhUtn-AKHbzdDTEQFjABegQIAhAB&usg=AOvVaw2s8QCgokrYHyx95CTCeGw1
thanks for the link. I guess I conflated him talking about it, into him believing it.
Intelligent Design? LOL, unworthy target. Not worth the time or effort.
But for a guy who produces high-quality content almost every day (more than every day if you count the podcast segments individually), we’ll give him a few mulligans.
Perhaps it would be helpful to think of evolution as we think of Newtonian physics. Newton answers 99% of the questions. But we needed relativity to complete the picture.
Micro evolution versus Macro.
Micro = breeding faster-growing corn and bigger cows.
Macro = Entirely new species quickly evolving. Primates to humans / dinosaurs to birds.
Micro is easy and has been proven for centuries. Macro is impossible to explain and has never been witnessed.
Perhaps that would be useful but from what I’ve seen evolutionary biologists and their followers are incredibly sensitive to any criticism. So any indication that you find their explanation incomplete will likely be met with an accusation that you’re an anti science medieval Jesus-fag.
It’s one of the more off putting aspects, a theory that’s adherents find perfect and settled. Sort of like the global warming crowd. I don’t know, maybe evolution explains the mechanisms for the creation of all life. It’s not very important to my daily life.
Except that relativity did not complete the picture either. A box in a box in a box. Science and religion may be the same quest but with dishonest practitioners everywhere to muddy it.
“No true Darwinist” indeed. Your talk about what ‘random’ “really” means would be more plausible if the Darwinists didn’t revel and gloat so much about chaos being so wonderful and how “brave” and “mature” they are to “face up to meaninglessness.” It’s just like SJW’s saying “of course, there’s no White replacement or genocide,” while simultaneously rejoicing in “our inevitable brown future.”
That’s not an argument in favor of ID or anything, for that matter. If we assume that evolutionary biology is nonsense and the practitioners are evil dickheads, Intelligent Design remains contrary to Christian theology in important ways.
I’m going to assume all this was finally brought to our general attention by Berlinski, Gelerenter, and Meyer, separately or together, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noj4phMT9OE Between them, they do make an impressive case that evolutionary biology between species is nonsense and it’s practitioners are religious fanatics. Like Puritans to Progressives, Darwinist only traded the old fanatical suit for a new one. Between them, the three amigos demonstrate Darwin’s old brainstorm is quite impossible, mathematically, biologically, and otherwise. Meyer has ID on his mind, the other two do not. Berlinski is an unparalleled skeptic, and completely at home not knowing a thing. Man is… Read more »
No, my post is about the irrationality of ID and it’s conflict with Christian belief. I’ll conceded that evolution is a giant hoax perpetrated by evil monsters. Intelligent Design is still anti-Christian nonsense.
OK.
“Random” in the truest sense means “Unknown”. If we were to know all of the causes imparted to a die roll (*all* as in *all* of the initial physical conditions), it wouldn’t be a random roll. We talk far too much about ‘random’ things as if they are somehow ‘uncaused’.
at least in statistics, random refers to selection without bias (each value in the event has an equal opportunity of being selected, to use pozzed terminology).
This idea that events can be ‘random’ is one of the reasons that stats has so many problems right now. Statistician WM Briggs wrote an excellent book on the subject called Uncertainty. There is *no such thing* as ‘selection without bias’ – essentially events that are treated as having ‘no cause’. Causality is real. All frequentists (and lots of Bayesians) forget this. In some constrained cases (e.g. gambling), the relative frequency of an event sometimes is close to the probability of an event. But there is nothing such as ‘randomness’ *except* in the sense that ‘we don’t know the cause,… Read more »
I’m trying to think of anything in this long running debate you failed to misstate. You do say ID doesn’t mention God which is accurate, then go on a bit about how it would be a bad God that would do occasionalism. And somehow Men were able to guide the Cambrian explosion a billion years before they existed. Have you read in depth either, much less both sides of the debate? And there are more sides! It is hard to find something to specifically criticize because nearly everything is simply wrong – strawmen made of strawmen. I would say you… Read more »
You wrote: “You do say ID doesn’t mention God which is accurate, then go on a bit about how it would be a bad God that would do occasionalism. And somehow Men were able to guide the Cambrian explosion a billion years before they existed.”
I never said such a thing, but thank you for reinforcing a point I made in the post. ID’ers relying on deception to frame their arguments.
When you find yourself in a tiny minority asserting a theory whose only refuge is “you can’t prove me wrong,” the burden’s on you. The “climate deniers” who oppose the modern AGW scam maintained by sham consensus can point to very strong evidence in their favor. AGW’s a strawman built on strawmen because evidence shows it. I can’t prove you’re not wrong, but that’s all you have to defend yourself on a shrinking island of non-evidence. The window of plausibility for your theory keep shrinking, and unlike climate realists, you have nothing to push back with except sophism & theology.… Read more »
https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/int/evolution.html
@tz1 The Bible writers wrote a lot more about men and women than they did on the Beginning. They and the Church Fathers would’ve easily passed the RedPill on women test. Let’s see if you can pass it. I’ve made it easier by making it multiple choice: “Complete the following the sentence: Women misbehave because ——————“ [A] Capitalism makes them misbehave, by economically incentivizing reckless high time-reference behavior over long-term planning. The capitalist class benefits from one night stands and sterility, as it benefits from third world immigration of spendthrift cheap labor to replace frugal whites. [B] The Jews make… Read more »
Too big a bite, Zman; the comments show you choking on it. Too many ways to beat it about like a pixelated piñata and watch the innards dribble out. No claim of, “You all did not understand ME,” is going to cut it as the topics have been wrassled with by folk with bigger feet than you or I. As another poster wrote above, this sort of topic is best avoided until we have our enthostate or what-have-you. Plenty of time then to stab identitarian allies in the neck. ============== As for the guts of the post, I am not… Read more »
The conversations come from watching the innards dribbling out of the pixilated piñata. A good blog host puts things out there that stir the pot. If there is one obvious correct answer, the discussion is not going to go anywhere. I like the mixing up of the topics, even though I don’t feel like I have much to add to the religious or JQ convos. They seem to quickly head on over to Monty Python skit territory.
there are worse places for a discussion to head to 😛
evolution proponents are wwwaaaayyyyyy down on my list of things to worry about. oops, they just fell off entirely!
Wow Z, last week the “Jew thing,” this week God and the origin of life on earth. I’m not sure what the cause is, but you are like a boy with stick looking for another hornet’s nest poke!
I’m going to mostly pass on this one, but I will take exception to one thing you said:
“The Sphynx cat exists and we know why.”
We know “how,” but I don’t think we know “why”…. 😉
I know people who think those things are wonderful, by my goodness. They give me the creeps.
They certainly are ugly.
In the future, all right-wingers will be 7-day young earth creationists. I say this based on demographic trends. Rightly or wrongly, these debates won’t be occurring much longer.
Here’s an exercise: everyone participating in this discussion starts his post with the number of children he has.
8 children (6 boys, 2 girls, ages 18 to 8 months). 44 years old, my wife wants more children and seems to have the fertility and reproductive health to pull it off.
@Red Forman
Based on present demographic trends, we will be Muslims… or members of some other religion that put women in their damned place in much the same way the Taliban does.
Don’t count the Mormons out – geographically they might control vast areas of the Western US – who knows?
Bingo! That’s why I’m coat-tailing on the Mormons. That’s why I moved to Utah. Back at EBMUD in the Bay Area, the best, kindest and Smartest IT guy who I’d call on graveyard shift to get the SCADA system up post crash/Mormon! Best Supervisor of Orinda Treatment Plant, fair, smart and knowledgeable and kind, a leader of men and women and I’d fight in a foxhole for that man/Mormon! Utah has an unemployment rate of 2.8% and people from out of state are filling up the Salt Lake Corridor to enjoy job growth and the hip urban lifestyle. Polygamy Porter… Read more »
This is probably true. They will also probably live at a vastly lower level of technology since the highest fertility group is Amish and our tech base is eroding
Also this doesn’t apply in Europe where even their Right, while it can be natal (FN’s Marine La Pen for example has three children) are seldom very religious even in places like France
Ireland for example went from devout Catholic to secular in a generation or so.
People’s Square (Striker) at TRS had a recent (8/9) long (4hr+) podcast with Irish Nationalist Keith Wood – good guy, interesting takes. He lays heavy blame for the wreck of Irish culture on Woke Capital. The Irish gov’t let Google, Faceberg et al turn Ireland into a tax-haven Port Royale for global pirate ships far too big for Ireland to influence, much less police, and gave them a stranglehold on their national economy. They moved cheap labor in, Irish kids moved out, Dublin became the world’s 3rd highest-rent city and any attempt by the Irish to resist globoshlomo was met… Read more »
Very much so. If there is to be an organized future, capital will have rigid controls on every facet of it and the entire economic structure will have to be forced away from finance to a steady state or something similar Harkets? Yes. Private ownership and production? Yes. Financialization? Hell no. This will be brutally difficult to plan and implement though especially when dealing with the nature of modernity where out technology essentially destroys good wages for productive work forcing people into finance and service BS Mind you this is not entirely a new problem , Medieval Guilds existed in… Read more »
To say that we can figure out the answer to the evolution/ID/??? question is a bit hubristic (by all means keep trying, I’ll hold your coat for you), but to give up and assume it is beyond our ken, that God knows and we don’t get to, is not what being human, asking the questions and looking for answers, is really all about. So here we are, stuck in the middle. Carry on.
Be prepared. If you get a good answer, it may be wildly different than your expectations.
Isn’t “occasionalism” another term for “miracles”? Christians believe that those happen, and that God does intervene in response to prayers. I don’t see why the idea that God might step back into the story after he’s set it going is so contrary to Christianity. Christians are not Greek pagans, no matter how influential those earlier ideas were.
Well, a miracle can simply be a long shot coming in. The 100-1 horse winning a race is not the same as the 100-1 horse transforming in an eagle and flying into the heavens. That said, that’s where Nicholas of Autrecourt comes into my post. IIRC, he was heavily influenced by an Islamic cleric, whose name escapes me. Ibn something or other.
Christian miracles have a certain “style”, especially the New Testament ones. They’re not just “anything goes”, they seem to follow a pattern of conforming to the rules of nature. It’s like Nature on steroids. When Jesus heals a leper, he doesn’t also give him wings, he returns him to his natural, healthy state. When he multiplies the loaves and fish, he doesn’t turn it into a multi-course banquet, he makes an abundance of the food that was there, like producing an extra-great harvest. But this is still in line with the same reality we all experience. Now, if you go… Read more »
There’s also the strong possibility that the writers of the Scripture were mature, well educated adults writing for intelligent readers. They used clever analogies, allegories and exaggeration to make subtle, complex theological points. Literal reading of the Bible turns the writers into robots and the intended audience into simpletons.
there’s an even greater chance that whatever the original text was, it has been edited for effect over the centuries. but yes, your take is most likely correct.
Agree. We need to appreciate that ancient Christians were just as capable of ancient Greeks of appreciating deeper meanings, subtleties and other literary devices. Homeric epics and Greek dramas were no less sophisticated than modern writings. You’re correct in stating that a literalistic reading is a dumbed-down reading that’s often going to miss the real point. The Catholics and “high church” Prots have been better about this than fundamentalist denominations of Protestantism, and it’s one legitimate reason why the Catholic Church was against letting laymen read and interpret scripture for themselves.
Literalism is the bane of the Reformation.
No doubt some passages are meant allegorically (the entire book of Revelations, for example). But no doubt others are not . Even Paul, the most scholarly of the bunch, admits that if Christ did not in fact for reelz rise from the dead, Christianity is in vain. Hard to allegorize that. The problem with “allegorizing” every miracle is that it makes the entire central claim of Christianity – the divinity of Christ – pointless. I know the Jesuits would love that. What the miracles show is that God, in the person of Christ, is in complete control of existence, confirming… Read more »
“Being divine is being able to miracle. God miracles, therefore he’s divine.” “Well educated adults writing for intelligent readers” are perfectly capable of and willing to make circular arguments. Every NYT is full of such (((Jesuitical))) stuff. Yes, the central idea of Christianity is that Christ rose from the dead. But it’s begging a lot of questions to go from that to demanding that every miracle in the New and Old Testaments are historic facts or that modern Christians must expect them in their daily lives. Believing that Christ was either divine or divinely inspired can mean a lot of… Read more »
“Being divine is being able to miracle. God miracles, therefore he’s divine.” That is not the argument wrt Christianity’s claim of divinity for Christ. The argument, which is not circular, is: Divine Being(s) can miracle Christ miracles Therefore Christ is a Divine Being If you want to dispute that divine beings exist or can miracle, that is a different issue. For a large segment of White people, believing Christ is divine is a big part of being governed in their ways. Whites should have our own “homeland” but part of being White includes religious beliefs. The Whites who settled here… Read more »
If you can’t work with people who don’t subscribe to your particular interpretation of Christianity for the good of your people, in good faith, without conflicting loyalties, anti-Whites will find a way to use your religion to separate you from us and possibly betray us. The people have to come before the religious beliefs. The kind of Christianity you want can only exist in a White nation. Make that happen first.
Christian miracles exist primarily to showcase the divinity of God, and with Jesus, the divinity of God in Christ. The healing is secondary. Lazarus had to die all over again months or years later. If you can multiply fish and bread, does a banquet really matter?
This is why I’m a minority of one in my church as I don’t see the value in praying for someone’s oncology appointment to go well. Our only prayer should be thank you and let your will be done.
“And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.”
Doc;
Important point re Christian miracles. And, the more you know about biochemistry, euro-anatomy, etc., the more amazing they are. To restore sight one must literally rewire the entire brain, for example.
every new life is a miracle.
Well, you know the old saying, “If it’s Ibn, it’s gotta be Khaldun.” Just don’t get the energy around these theology discussions. I agree that Intelligent Design is not compatible with Christianity, but that’s not the point. The point is to create a space to debate Evolution on behalf of some version of Christian theology without an appeal to religion, and without providing a better scientific alternative. I have no doubt that there will be refinements, perhaps revolutionary refinements, to Evolution, but in the meantime it’s where we are. Whenever anyone tells me Evolution is “only a theory”, my response… Read more »
Sadly, no one ever says “gravity is a social construct.”
Just wait until a minority owned and staffed engineering firm designs a bridge that collapses. Gravity will turn out to be yet another sinister aspect of White Supremacy….
@Fabian_Forge.
“Diversity Bridge Is Falling Down, My Fair Lady.”
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2018/03/no_author/diversity-bridge-is-falling-down-my-fair-lady/
Thanks! But in all fairness, who can keep up?
Nah. You just don’t realize that Newton was a Swahili Jew,
But you will……….
We can measure and predict gravity (F=(Gm1*m2/d^2)). What’s the formula for evolution?
I don’ think Occasionalism means “miracles.” It’s not a term I was familiar with (philosophy is not my bag), but I looked it up, and the idea doesn’t seem to be that “God ‘occasionally’ makes things happen.” I read other references, but I think this is a good place to start: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/occasionalism/ A quote from it: “A full-blown occasionalist, then, might be described as one who subscribes to the following two tenets: (1) the positive thesis that God is the only genuine cause; (2) the negative thesis that no creaturely cause is a genuine cause but at most an occasional… Read more »
This was very good, Zman. It tracks with what I’ve tried to explain to people about the god they worship. I have always refused to believe in a sadistic god who places humans in compromising positions or puts them under intense pressure in order to test them. To their credit, the Calvinists saw right through that and came up with the idea of predestination. But that makes their god even more sadistic, as he has purposefully placed defective humans on the world stage to interact with the “saved” ones. I think the 18th century Deists had it right: God created… Read more »
The traditional Church generally operates along similar lines – Orthodoxy and Catholicism both have a much more nuanced view of God than the fundamentalists and evangelicals. To the evangelical, God is constantly either ‘testing’ them himself, or allowing the devil to ‘test’ them. The problem of evil is a *huge* problem for the Evangelicals’ God “who has a plan for YOU”. Yes, there are strains of this in Orthodox Christianity, but I don’t think it’s nearly as pronounced as the some of the ridiculous things that show up in Protestantism. Like most other modern things, the problem of modern Christianity… Read more »
Pre-Protestant faiths have the advantage of not overly “personalizing” God in the bespoke, just-for-me sense. They have the disadvantage that when the hierarchy loses legitimacy, God loses legitimacy with them, thus Protestantism and its eventual logical end-point, loss of faith entirely. I worship as a Catholic but rage against the hierarchy like a Protestant and approach theology like a pagan. We need a new syncretism if Christianity is to survive.
Spot on!
This
Spot on about protestants. Its possible, that since the 60s, those who appear to be the Catholic Hierarchy are in fact protestants and have no authority over Catholics.
It is FAR worse with the Orthodox, especially their embrace of the gnostic Theology of Gregory Palamas who teaches that God is not a simple spiritual being (no parts) but a collection of various energies and it is those energies which we are called upon to worship. But it gets worse, far worse.. In Orthodoxy there is no such event as the eternal Beatific Vision as a reward for a life of Faith. In eastern orthodoxy, there is only darkness for God, according to Palamas, God its not to be identified with His will, His Intellect, His Love, His truth… Read more »
This is my position; the universe exists, and something (outside of the universe) created it. More than that is still unknown.
Deism defined.
I have always refused to believe in a sadistic god
That’s a pretty emotionalistic way to reach a conclusion. Why would you think that of all the ways reality might be organized, the true one would be one you would like?
I have no idea what the “true one” might be. I suspect there are many paths. And they all lead to the same destination. Excuse me if I don’t take that rocky path strewn with booby traps.
People think God is “testing” is. We’re not lab equipment. He’s developing us. No pain no gain.
The Knut Rockne Theory.
Free will . We make hell on Earth. We white males made it so our women and soyboys dominate us. No one else did. And all our side does is prey for a Pinochet to rescue our cowardly asses. Talk about being children and helpless. This wish for a a Pinochet encapsulates it nicely. BTW no one takes Calvinism seriously except atheists who use them as a club against Christianity. Also those Eastern religions you find so attractive have always been the watering hole of sexual deviant upper class whites with nothing better to do. Worse many are outright cults… Read more »
I am increasing skeptical of natural selection, while having no interest in ID. Fred Reed is strident on this, without the God element. David Berlinski’s remarks seem reasonable: evolution is both great science and incomplete on random mutation. I happened to see the wiki on the Cambrian explosion says it lasted 13–25 million years.
who’s to say that evolution isn’t hard coded into all DNA?
Who says it is, I’ve never heard that.
Excellent point. God programmed randomness.
And you laugh those who believe the Bible
I’ve been reading for years but never posted until now. Z, this is quite thin gruel. ID is posing questions like “irreducible complexity” which is a compelling enough argument for me to start questioning Darwin. but the bigger deal with ID is how it is VERBOTEN. if you speak of it as a scientist, you are run out of town on a rail. the inherent unscientific nature of most of science these days dovetails nicely with the silencing of conservatives. and also, as with every other lefty catechism, it’s the shutting down of debate. but obviously, the ever expanding explosion… Read more »
you’ve coerced me to buy Behe’s latest, “Darwin Devolves”! it’s off to a good start.
enjoy the view from the other side of the divide…
I love it when political analysts inevitably wade into scientific waters and stir up the mud. That’s when when we find out if the gas bags really know anything or not. The Zman has stirred up the mud, and the amateurs are jumping in to get dirty with him. Ostensibly, the Zman’s perambulations on Intelligent Design are meant to expose the contradictions between ID and traditional Christianity, and to expose the misunderstandings of ID as they relate to the meaning of randomness and natural selection. I’ll leave the theology to others, but I will comment on the ideas of natural… Read more »
@Homer Hinkley
You’re talking about abiogenesis, something that’s separate from natural selection.
You have proved the main point of my post. Thank you. I said ID’ers have no affirmative claims, so they are reduced to shifting the focus to their claims about evolution. Yours is exactly the example I would have used. After a bunch of hand waving and arm flapping, you settle into repeating the familiar ID’er claims about science.
In other words, you have to change the subject, because Intelligent Design is indefensible.
No. In fact, you proved my point. You’ve exposed yourself as a layman who wants and needs to avoid science, while at the same time taking pot shots at science as if you know something about science Thank you for admitting your limitations. There are scientific problems that exist, whether you believe in ID, or evolution, or anything else. As soon as I pointed one out, you assumed that I was defending ID, because to you it sounded like something you’ve heard an ID person say, and ID bugs you. As a layman, you don’t want to acknowledge that scientists… Read more »
“I was at a conference where someone recognized my name…” is priceless. Pull out the cork, bruv.
“As a layman…” Preach it to us, Reverend. A reading from the Gospel according to Me.
The point is that ID doesn’t “offer us anything intelligent about the true nature of how we got here.” It’s anti-Darwinism dressed up in a cassock with gaudy pseudo-scientific costume jewelry. It doesn’t have any provable claims. It’s an anti-theory which relies on some legitimate questions about Darwin’s theory to bait-and-switch that flawed theory with that of an intelligent designer. Actual ID doesn’t even limit itself to claiming an inherent/emergent pattern rather than “intelligent” design. Claiming ID isn’t scientific is not the same thing as “proving X variant of Darwinian evolution” but that’s the tire you’re trying to necklace him… Read more »
Exile, as I explained in my response to Zman, you too have made the mistake of thinking that I’m defending ID. You’ve been conditioned to believe that anything remotely sounding like a legitimate question to Darwinism is actually an “anti-theory” used to “bait-and-switch that flawed theory with that of an intelligent designer.” That’s nonsense. The explicit point of my post was that before you can even talk about Darwinism, you have to explain the origins of abiotic chemistry that produce the building blocks of life. This is a legitimate area of scientific research, where the answers are unknown. In fact,… Read more »
The IDers should study biochemistry. It’s hard to find the best way to put this, but life, as in carbon based life mostly revolving around RNA, is an inevitable result of water, energy and the physical reality of how the elements interact with each other. A lot of scientists get this, and their usual go-to is the multiverse idea. Every conceivable set of laws of physics exists in its own universe, we by happenstance happen to live in one in which the laws of physics dictate that water+energy+chemicals equals life. IMHO God created the universe such that life would exist… Read more »
A lot of scientists get this, and their usual go-to is the multiverse idea.
It is one theory among many, and a very fringe one, borderline non-scientific because there’s no way to falsify it.
IMHO God created the universe such that life would exist is a less kooky explanation.
And how was God created?
And how was God created?
Oh gee Felix, never contemplated that before.
Oh gee Felix, never contemplated that before.
Glad to be of help. Would you have a suggestion?
If you posit God as the Occam’s Razor of creation, you’ve just shifted the conundrum away from the real, scientifically observable world and into your hypothetical one, you have not made the problem itself less confounding.
Spot on. It’s theological can-kicking, and theologians have had to resort to some of their worst “logic” to account for it. The brutal truth is that even with our present quantum level understanding, we’re stuck with barely-informed speculations as to the “how,” and wholly uninformed guesses as to the “why,” of creation. The fallacy-ridden pretzel logic of the Scholastics on this is painful to try and wade through, worse than Marx, for all that I use them against “Prog Catholics” preaching kumbaya-Jesus when necessary.
Every time I try my head hurts. I await the second coming to fill in the blanks.
Felix, God is not a hypothetical, but rather a logical necessity. The scientifically observable (i.e., empirical) world is not the sum total of reality. Science itself relies upon non-scientific meta-physical presumptions (e.g., the law of non-contradiction, law of identity, etc.).
To ask how was God created is to demonstrate you do not understand the concept of metaphysical necessity. I would commend you to Ed Feser’s explanation of the argument from contingency, which is one of the most straight forward explanations I have encountered.
God is not a hypothetical, but rather a logical necessity.
Not at all. If you feel that a creator is a “logical necessity”, I could propose that, rather than a god, the universe was created by a giant, universe-building robot, and my hypothesis wouldn’t require magic.
“Logical necessity” doesn’t exculpate me from explaining where the robot came from.
We are asking/answering two different questions: (me) whether the g.u.b. robot exists, (you) how or why the robot is. If you want an answer to the second question, you are basically asking to be the mind of God. Good luck with that, even in the next life. Whether the g.u.b. robot or God exists is answered by the argument from contingency – God, a g.u.b. robot, or some non-contingent being (NCB) must exist: Contingent things exist: A contingent thing cannot be its own cause::A NCB must exist. While the how or why of the NCB is certainly interesting, it is… Read more »
Theology is the libertarianism of religion. Scholasticism is the Objectivism of religion.
you do realize that you are saying inanimate material can spontaneously become alive? now that is true faith! it is far more likely that a machine based “lifeform” would spontaneously arise, than what did come along (us).
I’ve never understood the metaphysical distinction between machines made out of atoms with lots of protons and machines made out of atoms without many protons. Study biochemistry, life is machinery.
“RNA, is an inevitable result of water, energy and the physical reality of how the elements interact with each other“
This is not my understanding, where are you getting this from?
Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”
At a baseline the experiments whereby you mix water energy and basic chemicals and the result is the more complex molecules that are the building blocks of macro molecules like RNA. At a more complex level the fact of how SN1 and SN2 reactions work, how the nature and structure of water perfectly facilitates them.
Don’t really care about ID or Darwinism as both are used by nerds to justify their agendas. All I do know that IQ is way over hyped and that a lot of bright people look like freaks and touched by sociopathy if not outright psychopathy. They definitely came from the shallow end of the gene pool. Look at Dorsey, Zucky, Gates, Brin, etc. Frail little men I could stuff in a suitcase without breaking a sweat. Yet by HBD standards they are apex whites. As a race, today’s white men are not of the same caliber as those in Athens… Read more »
“They assume the designer is God, as they have an understanding of God that is much more personal. They believe God is highly involved in the granular details of human existence.” Pardon my ignorance as I’m certainly no Biblical scholar, but in what way is this outside of the Christian tradition? Don’t Christians believe in a God who banished Adam, flooded the world, spoke to Moses through a bush, razed down Sodom and Gomorrah (salting a lady who looked at it), and sent Jesus as a personal emissary? Does it not sound like some pretty granular involvement in these instances?… Read more »
I didn’t notice this, but I think he is talking from knowledge
https://www.claremont.org/crb/article/giving-up-darwin/
“Now, it should be pointed out that this understanding of God is outside Christian tradition and perhaps even anti-Christian.” This is breathtakingly false. Observably false. Is the ZMan drunk? Did his evil twin write this? “Intelligent Design is occasionalism.” Oh, puh-leeze. An “-ism,” ZMan? From YOU? Unworthy. “It simply means we have no good answer understanding the natural world.” You can’t say “good,” but the point is well taken nevertheless. A bit of common sense. “A designer that is endlessly tinkering with his creation is not a designer with foresight.” Well, as far as you know, which is not at… Read more »
Above my pay grade and I don’t really care, but if I were concerned with the theological implications of Intelligent Design, I would explore this Thomist philosopher’s musings. https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/search?q=Intelligent+design Feser appears to lean towards Zman’s outlook of ID being outside Christian tradition. “The Thomist’s problem with the arguments of Paley and ID theory is not – NOT (See that? It says “not”) – that they are merely probabilistic, or that they don’t get you all the way to the God of classical theism. There’s nothing wrong with that. The problem with these arguments is rather that they don’t get you… Read more »
The core problem with ID is that it just moves the problem one step back. It says the universe is too complex to have just occurred, so it must have a Designer. “But then, who designed the Designer?” “Nobody designed Him, He just occurred.” Sorry, that’s not very convincing, for reasons that should be obvious.
For insight into how evolution (and much more) works by a combination of simple rules and random chance, I recommend the book The Laws of the Game: How The Principles of Nature Govern Chance by Manfred Eigen and Ruthild Winkler.
I feel about ID the way an early Russian critic of Lenin’s felt about Marx: Marxists, he said, are like astronomers, who are mathematically certain that an eclipse will happen… but then form a Party and start murdering people, to make sure it does. I prefer the metaphor of billiard balls on a table (apologies to David Hume) — there’s no way of predicting where all the balls will come to rest after the break, even though we understand every aspect of the physics involved.
that is a self-negating statement.
The Z Man has been hanging out with the Derb.
The Species Problem. Points out some of the giant holes in current evolutionary theory.
https://www.newgeology.us/presentation32.html
Would someone fill in what appears to be a missing part of the syllogism, please?
“The Sphynx cat exists and we know why. The ID’ers would argue that it is an example of design, but that presupposes the breeders were either directed by God or compelled by God to create the breed. ”
It looks to me like it’s saying:
A. Sphynx cat exists.
B. Sphynx cats were designed.
Therefore:
C. God intervened to, uh, convince people to design them?
–Steph
“A popular one now, for example, is that there is not enough time for natural selection to produce enough gene mutations to explain the fossil record.”
Geneticist JC Sanford of Cornell believes that mutations + selection cannot even maintain the genome (subject to “Genetic Entropy” the title of his book) let alone add more information to the genome to drive speciation. He believes we (and I assume other species) were created perfect by God and are decaying (I assume with some fortuitous mutations and “fine-tuning” built into the design).
The Earth has a natural history, recorded in the rocks. Things which happened that are beyond the scale of pre-scientific human understanding. But you can see them in the rocks. Folded-thrusts. Magnetic reversals recorded in the spreading sea-floor. Hotspots and island chains (Hawai’i). Impact craters. Speaking of which, there’s one in the Yucatan peninsual, Chicxulub. 65 mya a meteor or comet, greater than 11km diameter, slammed into the earth at 62 times the speed of sound at a 45 degree angle. Bad day for the critters on planet earth. In killing all the dinosaurs, once things settled down, it opened… Read more »
psshaw, whatever created the “hole” where the Pacific ocean is, now that was an impact!
The size of the impact is not important. It could have been volcanoes. What’s important is that a random event opened the path to human evolution.
Attention Z People! As it turns out, I’m quite the amazing fellow. With one brilliant stroke I solved the whole problem forever. Because I just invented, faith!
Matthew 16:4: “Only an evil, adulterous generation would demand a miraculous sign, but the only sign I will give them is the sign of the prophet Jonah.” Then Jesus left them and went away.” Creation Science and Archaeology that attempts to prove the Bible is historically accurate or that neo-darwinism and Christianity can be reconciled, are just make work projects for people who don’t really believe that God is a man of his word. Are these “miraculous signs” their looking for? No. But signs none the less. That’s just playing the worlds game. Are they sincere? No doubt. But sincerity… Read more »
I’m not sure this kind of belief satisfies modern thinkers in and of itself but it’s one way to declare a mutually honorable and lasting truce between religion and science. Trying to take science on in its own arena is bound to fail, just as futile and counterproductive as demanding belief in present day miracles. Love is the dangerous element in that scripture though – the primacy of love is what Pope Francis claims to lend scriptural authority to his Pozzed NuGospel. “Love over Justice” is what allowed Anthony Kennedy to kritarch us with gay marriage. Charlemagne’s Christianity was not… Read more »
Exile said: ” Our modern Aquarian interpretation of Love is being hijacked to destroy faith and hope for non-pozzed Christians. We have to push back against love.” Wow. If your talking about “The Aquarian Gospel” I haven’t thought about that kind of stuff since I was a teenager. The Fox sisters, Madem Blavatsky, Rudolf Steiner, Aleister Crowley. Man, that takes me back. When “The Aquarian Gospel” talks about love, it always sounded more like maudlin sentimentality, rather than a deep commitment to compassion forbearance and forgiveness. Anyway, like I say. I haven’t read that kind of crap in 50 years.
I have to be honest, I’m not at all clear what you’re talking about in “occasionalism”. I mean, I’ll look it up myself, but some sources you used for the day’s blogging could provide some context, too. Probably not your fault, I just don’t grasp it.
In Humani Generis (1950), Pope Pius XII had a good take on faith and evolution: “The Teaching Authority of the Church does not forbid that, in conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred theology, research and discussions, on the part of men experienced in both fields, take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter—for the Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God.”
http://w2.vatican.va/content/pius-xii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xii_enc_12081950_humani-generis.html
Having spent my school years in Catholic schools, I’ve never had a problem with the material domain operating by its own rules, either along side, in concert with or within the domain of theology. We can understand the rules of the natural world through science. We cannot understand why those rules exist through science.
That’s how I try to approach this. Religion is “a-rational” and “a-logical,” but doesn’t need to be “anti” either one. They’re separate spheres, not conflicting world-views. This view of science and religion reminds me of the Civil War. Science and religion don’t have to fight, they could co-exist, just like the North and South had for decades, but a band of fanatics is determined to negate all dissent to its own values. In the science-religion case, the determined fanatics seem to be on the atheist side. Slavery is ID. ID will fade in its own time as fewer and fewer… Read more »
Religion is “a-rational” and “a-logical
NO no no! It is logical/rational (or at least should be). What it is not is empirical. It is meta-physics, not physics. It still has to comply with logical laws such as the law of non-contradiction.
God is not necessarily incompatible with and might ultimately be part of a metaphysics governed by logic, but based on what we can presently know or empirically prove, that’s a faith-based opinion. Arational, alogical.
presently know or empirically prove Again, that conflates empirical proof with all knowledge. Forget empirical claims (we mixed these four chemicals together on 10 different occasions and got this compound with these characteristics, therefore on the 11th mixing we expect to get the same compound with the same characteristics). I am referring to logical proofs only – basically the Thomistic 5 ways. Those are not “faith-based” any more than logic itself is “faith-based.” Faith comes in AFTER God’s existence is logically demonstrated – e.g., whether God is the god of Islam, the Jews or the God of Christianity, some pagan… Read more »
You are logically and empirically demonstrating that Scholasticism is the Objectivism of religion.
Useful example for why Trad-Cath is a dead end for the Dissident Right, though.
People professing to believe that Our Guys should put Thomism over their people helped the Daily Beast dox dozens of Alt-Righters with the First-Thingers and Chronicles-clutchers of Con, Inc. cheering them on.
I just downloaded to my Kindle a copy of the Baltimore Catechism. Just to see how I have been doing.
(Hey Baltimore, you can probably pick up a copy anywhere near you )
When I was in High School, my biology teacher, an old-fashioned “hard shell” Baptist, very plainly told us that she considered the process of species adapting to changing environmental conditions (i.e. what is called “micro-evolution” 50+ years later) was established and verifiable fact. She went on to say that the process of single-celled organisms somehow evolving into complex organisms such as ourselves (i.e. what is called “macro-evolution”) was “bunk” (her exact word). I cannot accept an earth only 10,000 or so years old. Someone I knew and visited with and corresponded with told me he had once counted in excess… Read more »
SORRY ALL BUT, NO. (a) mutation rate != yardage (or any other linear measure) (b) some mutations (cortical scale) are profoundly differentiating – just one gene. (20% of neurons in the cortex are regulatory That number increases by region. The same is true for genes. It certainly appears that the vast majority are either dead (not expressed) or regulatory. We don’t know what percent are expressed. So all mutation rate tells us is time difference it does not tell us difference in genetic expression. (c) some are profoundly consequential (delay in maturity : neoteny – just hormonal development is largely… Read more »
The problematic math of fixation is simply on SNPs, not on phenotype expressions where yes SNP can have non-linear effects.
ID vs. TENS is a false dichotomy
They are both wrong.
More accurately, ID “isn’t even wrong”, since they don’t explain how to falsify a creator.
TENS is rapidly proving untenable given the last 10-20 years of genetic sequencing capabilities and chemical engineering + microbiology knowledge.
Our scientific establishment is utterly incapable of replacing TENS, since current science is indistinguishable from a religion. It’ll take something equivalent of Martin Luther to fix science in general.
“The Sphynx cat exists and we know why. The ID’ers would argue that it is an example of design, but that presupposes the breeders were either directed by God or compelled by God to create the breed. That means man has no agency and that sin cannot truly exist.” What the actual. You literally just argued that in order for something designated by humans to be designed, humans would have to be unable to design. The “logic” of this argument is an incestuous oxymoronic ouroboros. Obviously the IDers arguing from an example of something designed by man as being designed… Read more »
Manual pingback for the interested.
https://gunnerq.com/2019/08/22/intelligent-design-for-the-win/
agreed with the article. perhaps ID would not be so popular if the full-on atheistic theory of evolution was not prevalent in the mainstream, and if there were not on the other hand some dazed Young and Flat Earthers as the loudest opponents. ID is a flawed, if endearing, attempt at a middle ground, perhaps too secularized for its own good. (relatedly, its proponents tend to be or really like (((specials)))).
furthermore, in pro of the Watchmaker, the atheistic model still has to explain why evolution is limited “within a set of rules that science does not fully understand”.
Related – “Renowned Yale Computer Science Prof Leaves Darwinism”
https://stream.org/renowned-yale-computer-science-prof-leaves-darwinism/
Gene mutations in organisms are no more likely to produce improvements than a short-circuit in a motherboard producing a faster computer – much less multiple motherboards producing the same short-circuit that can be replicated.
Pythagoras was a genius, but he ended up living in a cave, convinced that beans were evil. Tycho Brahe was a brilliant astronomer. later in life he would hire a dwarf to sit silently under his dinner table. A little closer to home, Ted Kaczynski was a genius, but ended up in a shack, mailing bombs to people.
That said, I corresponded with David Gelernter back in the 1990’s about file systems.
He isn’t preaching ID, he’s using mathematics to blast holes in Darwinism that you could drive a truck through.
Microevolution happens, macroevolution has never been observed and consciousness can’t really be explained in an evolutionary framework.
Darwinian evolution is a crackpot theory.
Right, because poodles are an optical illusion. They are the same wolves God created at the beginning.
Poodles ARE an example of micro-evolution. Poodles that can’t breed with wolves would be Macro.
A female Chihuahua cannot breed with a wolf. Mechanical species barrier.
Senator Brundlefly said: “A female Chihuahua cannot breed with a wolf.” That depends on how drunk she is.
And how determined she is. See my reply above.
Senator Brundlefly blithely opined, “A female Chihuahua cannot breed with a wolf. Mechanical species barrier.” I wouldn’t bet my junk on that, Senator. I once worked with a guy whose female pekingese set her cap for a great dane mix that liked to run the neighborhood. According to my buddy, she positioned herself on the top step of the back porch and the dog figured out the rest of the geometry problem. When the two were locked together (a mechanism to ensure a proper semen transfer facilitated by the large knob at the base of a dog’s penis) the peke’s… Read more »