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Dec 20th, 2005 06:01 PM
ziggytrix http://www.cnn.com/2005/LAW/12/20/in...ign/index.html

Bush appointed judge says "ID" is not science.
Dec 13th, 2005 01:13 PM
kahljorn Buddhism and yoga is great, I love how they have a common sense approach to almost anything(especially yoga).
Dec 12th, 2005 12:13 PM
ziggytrix Addiction to happiness is an unnecessary attachment. :om
Dec 12th, 2005 11:50 AM
kahljorn "The common belief in extraterrestrial life fits this pattern, too"

Um? I don't know so much that people believe in extraterrestrial life so much as they believe in the possibility of extraterrestrial life( i think believing in your own life kind of makes the belief in other life a logical step) . Same with evolution. It seems alot more likely and alot more logical than anything else. If your argument is that people act on what they assume is correct or more logical are ignorant or whathaveyou, than that's just fine, but I'm sure it's the exact same thing you are doing now.

"I'd venture to say most people don't spend a whole lot of time investigating this argument or questioning common descent."

I don't think they care, and why should they? According to you it's all bullshit (and I use that term loosely) anyway.

"We find many different ways to think of ourselves and our actions as meaningless or immaterial. Doing so takes a lot of moral pressure off our every day decisions. "

I agree, but I don't think the belief in evolution fits this pattern, if anything it supplies the exact opposite. Especially when you start to look at dawkins use of memotics as some type of evolutionary component you can see this pattern.

"Well, that's not the common conception of our existence is it? "

How could it be? Regardless of what consequences our lives have on this little planet, the universe is alot bigger (and existence even bigger) . Lying to yourself isn't going to make anything better-- if anything it creates more problems. The fact of the matter is, our life here is inconsequential to eternity, and it doesn't really matter what we do here because some day it will all be wiped away; whether if it's by God and his Rapture or the Universe collapsing into itself (or the sun turning into a red giant and engulfing the earth) the result will be the same.
Even if you were to argue all that, the universe was still built on nothingness-- that's just something that needs to be accepted by any observer of the universe.
You rely too much on the universe outside of us(for no good reason). The items you stated were all outside of humanity except the first one which I agree with. You need to start thinking more on the here and now (selfishness is a great tool for the selfless and the poor, I think). To some extent maybe what you said is true, however, the effects of things outside of us also have 'universal consequence' which essentially negates our own(like the space outside of us that we can't really breath or survive in for example, or ET life if you want to take it to that length-- there's just too many other influences or POSSIBLE influences, really). I don't know, what you said is pretty much just stupid. Humanity isn't the only force in the universe. Assuming we are God's favorites is rather arrogant. God loves all his children.

How would we be lucky to be here? If anything it's just a natural part of the universe that life exists in certain enviroments. It's just as insignificant as mold appearing on old bread. The only reason to feel "Special" is if God or something like that put us here. Is that what you're turning your argument towards?
In a religious sense that's a horrible way to think. Embracing the devil, are we?

"I choose happiness because it is the only thing over which we each have individual sovereignity."

Maybe in some pure form, sure, but this isn't a pure world. There's alot of unhappy people out there who think all the time. If anything, happiness is a product of unthought.
Dec 10th, 2005 08:15 PM
derrida
Quote:
The reason I started looking at ID vs. evolution critically was because it fits a pattern of behavior that interests me. The common belief in extraterrestrial life fits this pattern, too. We find many different ways to think of ourselves and our actions as meaningless or immaterial. Doing so takes a lot of moral pressure off our every day decisions.

Were we to believe instead that we and our actions were important, that all of the universe was created entirely for the benefit of the few of us lucky enough to exist here on this planet, that our lives were important in a universal sense, that every decision we made carried the weight of universal consequence... Well, that's not the common conception of our existence is it?
It should be a given that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but for fuck's sake, man, no one had more of a hard on for responsibility than motherfucking Sartre, and the two most influential materialists during the 20th century, Marx and Freud, were both arch-moralists.

Now I get it. When you refer to "ID vs. evolution" yaren't talking about the positivist endeavors of a scientific community (and its critics) so much as the masturbatory rants of self-appointed "advocates" commonly streamed over AOL chat rooms. Putting aside whatever, uh, personal reasons you have for attacking this most pressing issue, I have to say that you aren't giving the psyche nearly enough credit. I've known good and bad people, and can't say that the nitty gritty of their personal cosmologies had anything to do with the essential quality of character. The human mind is incredibly facile at inventing justifications for theft and deceit. I'll give you this: usually, the louder someone talks about their precious beliefs, the more ways they manage to fail at achieving any semblance of compassion or honor, thus rendering their professed ideals even more hollow.

Question: of the two groups I mentioned, scientists and masturbators, only one is concerned with absolute truths. Can you guess which?
Dec 10th, 2005 01:36 PM
Preechr
Quote:
Originally Posted by Big Papa Goat
As long as the topic of motives for supporting different positions is there, I think it's worthwhile to point out that most, certainly many of the most important political theorists that work from an evolutionary or biological perspective are conservatives. The big book of biopolitics was actually written by a student of Strauss. James Wilson wrote a fairly prominent book The Moral Sense that was at least in part about the biological basis of moral sentiments, and it was explicitly about refuting amoral philosophy on the basis of evidence for natural human moral senses.
I have no more of a Moral Sense than I do a Fashion Sense. Not to make light of something I've never read, but based solely on your description, I'm just not digging that idea too much.

I'm not sure this is a right vs. left argument at all. There are plenty of religious leftists (almost the entire black voting base of the Democratic Party for a considerable example) as well as plenty of atheistic or agnostic conservatives. Of the science/math oriented professionals I've met, I'd be reluctant to say there's any clear pattern to their ideas about God.

Aside from that, I'd venture to say most people don't spend a whole lot of time investigating this argument or questioning common descent. My original impression of the debate wasn't probably too much different than any of yours.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Big Papa Goat
Maybe I'm wrong, but it would seem the last time evolution was ever seriously used to undermine morality was with social darwinism, and that was something like a hundred years ago, and is explicitly rejected by modern theorists.
The reason I started looking at ID vs. evolution critically was because it fits a pattern of behavior that interests me. The common belief in extraterrestrial life fits this pattern, too. We find many different ways to think of ourselves and our actions as meaningless or immaterial. Doing so takes a lot of moral pressure off our every day decisions.

Were we to believe instead that we and our actions were important, that all of the universe was created entirely for the benefit of the few of us lucky enough to exist here on this planet, that our lives were important in a universal sense, that every decision we made carried the weight of universal consequence... Well, that's not the common conception of our existence is it?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Big Papa Goat
Well, I guess we'll just have to get the philosopher kings in power to see that happen.
I'm a libertarian. I don't believe impostion of morality will ever work top down. Authoritarianism, the opposite ideal, only ever succeeds in dictating over disaster.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Big Papa Goat
Didn't Plato conclude that such a government would never actually happen? Wasn't it pretty much entirely allegorical anyway? In any case, I guess the Republic would be too off tangent.
It will never work the way he conceptualized it. Rights, liberties, morality and consequences all originiate from the individual. Governments gain their power from their citizens. We give our rights to government in trade for peace among each other. There is a balance point, however. When we give too much of our responsibilities away to another entity, our citizens become responsible for nothing.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Big Papa Goat
Without getting too much into what happiness is, a more pressing question regarding such a position in the context of this debate is how does the your own purpose of happiness explain the purpose of the entire biosphere, which is really what an intelligent design theory would have to state.
Again, if we are a creation, our creator had a purpose in mind. Had our creator been able to satisfy this need without us, we would not have been necessary. Happiness is liberty, peace and coexistence in perfect balance. Were we all to achieve this state simultaneously, maybe we would complete the design.

I choose happiness because it is the only thing over which we each have individual sovereignity. Happiness is a product of thought, and thought is all we have. As I said though: it's a big word.
Dec 10th, 2005 01:25 PM
Big Papa Goat Say, have you ever read any of Stanley Fish's work?
Dec 10th, 2005 12:55 PM
Preechr
Quote:
Originally Posted by derrida
"Numerous," "slight," and "complex" are all relative terms, right?
I didn't say it was a good basis for argument, just that that's what ID proponents reference when they discuss it.
Dec 10th, 2005 12:51 PM
Preechr Well, being faggish is a religion.
Dec 9th, 2005 10:49 PM
Big Papa Goat I also might point out that Origin of the Species is not the bible of evolution.
Not saying anything about that irreducibility jazz, just pointing it out to certain people who like to call everything a religion.
Which is a faggish thing to do, by the way.
Dec 9th, 2005 10:47 PM
derrida
Quote:
Originally Posted by Preechr
Quote:
Originally Posted by Darwin
If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such case.
That's from Origin. That's probably why irreducible Complexity became an issue to creationists at all; the idea being that the argument could be won using the framework set out by the Devil himself...
"Numerous," "slight," and "complex" are all relative terms, right?
Dec 9th, 2005 10:31 PM
Big Papa Goat
Quote:
Originally Posted by Preechr
My direct interest in the debate comes from the point of view that those that treat science as a religion (not all science fans do this, but it is my contention that many folks do) use the admittedly flawed anti-religion aspect of the evolution debate in addition to similar functions of ecological science, some parts of cosmology, psychology and politics (as well as many other parts of modern culture) to create a dysfunctional alternate reality, a religion, for themselves that let's them live entirely free of any sort of moral ties to any of the rest of us.
As long as the topic of motives for supporting different positions is there, I think it's worthwhile to point out that most, certainly many of the most important political theorists that work from an evolutionary or biological perspective are conservatives. The big book of biopolitics was actually written by a student of Strauss. James Wilson wrote a fairly prominent book The Moral Sense that was at least in part about the biological basis of moral sentiments, and it was explicitly about refuting amoral philosophy on the basis of evidence for natural human moral senses.

Maybe I'm wrong, but it would seem the last time evolution was ever seriously used to undermine morality was with social darwinism, and that was something like a hundred years ago, and is explicitly rejected by modern theorists.

Quote:
A society which will endure, a formal example of this does not yet exist, will be based on the characteristics of the sort of morality and ethical considerations found in the life of a happy individual
Well, I guess we'll just have to get the philosopher kings in power to see that happen.

Didn't Plato conclude that such a government would never actually happen? Wasn't it pretty much entirely allegorical anyway? In any case, I guess the Republic would be too off tangent.

Quote:
My purpose for life is to be happy. That's a remarkably difficult thing to do, though, obviously, self-preservation is a big part of that.
Without getting too much into what happiness is, a more pressing question regarding such a position in the context of this debate is how does the your own purpose of happiness explain the purpose of the entire biosphere, which is really what an intelligent design theory would have to state.
Dec 9th, 2005 09:30 PM
Preechr
Quote:
Originally Posted by Darwin
If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such case.
That's from Origin. That's probably why irreducible Complexity became an issue to creationists at all; the idea being that the argument could be won using the framework set out by the Devil himself...
Dec 9th, 2005 09:02 PM
derrida Preechr, why assume that the Neo-darwinian model is going to be as simple an explanation as "this shit was put here by an agent" (which, I guess isn't even unique to ID as evidenced by the tendency of evolutionary models to personify genes) (and why assume that either has any bearing whatsoever on normative truths?)

Yeah, the fact that only a very small number of the organisms in history ever became fossils fucks with the hope that any deductive truths confirming the abiotic generation of life on this particular planet are ever going to be found. Furthermore, the scale of time we are talking about completely motherfucking dwarfs any frame of reference most normal folk have ever needed to use. Irreducibility is an intuition for which no formal proof has been derived, not even by it's proponent Dembski, a mathematician. Is there not a calculable possibility that an amoeba might undergo a mutation that leaves it's DNA indistinguishable from that of your own? Genetics says so.

The thing about inductive arguments is that, while essentially probabilistic, they can be evaluated and classed as "strong" or "weak."
Dec 9th, 2005 08:18 PM
Preechr
Quote:
Originally Posted by Big Papa Goat
think about languages. language was never planned, and it's complex and diverse. society was never planned either. Am I mistaken to think that you're pro-market, anti-communist? Because then you're probably aware that communist, command economies are planned, and they tend to have a single purpose, and lack diversity or complexity. Market economies have diversity, because they arise from the spontaneous interaction of constituent elements. Kind of like evolution.

And I know you won't tell me that the plan the intelligent entity came up with is so complex that it just approximates spontaneity in all observable ways, and that the purpose He had in mind in designing everything is so infinitely complex that it can't be observed or known either.

I know you're not going to say anything like that, cus thats what some redneck would say.

You may say that it's pretty dumb to base that whole theory seemingly only on human institutions like market and command economies. Seems pretty petty, when talking about such universal issues to use such insignificant examples. Except, supposing there isn't an intelligent design to the entire universe, human beings are in fact the only things to ever intelligently plan things. So the only examples we can reliably have for what planned systems look like have to come from systems we've come up with ourselves.
I missed this one.

Yep. Pro-liberty. I believe all of our decisions are self-interested, whether in a destructive way or not. It's the combination of these decisions that make society and culture. I believe the goal of the individual life is happiness, a big word. Communism as a government style is mass self-destruction. Capitalism as a government style is also self-destructive. "Free-markets" are a form of human interaction, and the concept emulates natural activity. We interact with one another naturally using an intelligent mixture of both types of transaction. Good government should emulate natural activity.

A society which will endure, a formal example of this does not yet exist, will be based on the characteristics of the sort of morality and ethical considerations found in the life of a happy individual. Keep in mind, I have a narrow view of happiness which does not include happy-crazy or happy-cruel. I'm hoping to avoid a big tangent on that, but I'm not too optimistic on that.
Dec 9th, 2005 07:55 PM
Preechr My purpose for life is to be happy. That's a remarkably difficult thing to do, though, obviously, self-preservation is a big part of that.
Dec 9th, 2005 07:52 PM
Preechr In addition, one of the items I latched onto in the ID formulary was the idea that the various cogs and wheels in the watch are as simply designed as they could be to allow the diversity of life we enjoy. Make minute changes to something like the pull of gravity, a weak force, and the window closes.

Look at it backwards. I think they're saying that the universe functions like a watch, so it must have a purpose.
Dec 9th, 2005 07:50 PM
Big Papa Goat Christians and other people obviously believe life has a purpose, but you might notice that the meaning of life is a remarkably difficult thing to define.
The evolutionary 'prediction' for the purpose of life is self-preservation and propogation, and if you look at how much effort every organism puts into surviving and reproducing, it seems to have some explanatory power.
Dec 9th, 2005 07:47 PM
Big Papa Goat think about languages. language was never planned, and it's complex and diverse. society was never planned either. Am I mistaken to think that you're pro-market, anti-communist? Because then you're probably aware that communist, command economies are planned, and they tend to have a single purpose, and lack diversity or complexity. Market economies have diversity, because they arise from the spontaneous interaction of constituent elements. Kind of like evolution.

And I know you won't tell me that the plan the intelligent entity came up with is so complex that it just approximates spontaneity in all observable ways, and that the purpose He had in mind in designing everything is so infinitely complex that it can't be observed or known either.

I know you're not going to say anything like that, cus thats what some redneck would say.

You may say that it's pretty dumb to base that whole theory seemingly only on human institutions like market and command economies. Seems pretty petty, when talking about such universal issues to use such insignificant examples. Except, supposing there isn't an intelligent design to the entire universe, human beings are in fact the only things to ever intelligently plan things. So the only examples we can reliably have for what planned systems look like have to come from systems we've come up with ourselves.
Dec 9th, 2005 07:47 PM
Preechr Christians obviously believe that life has a purpose. I tend to agree with them on that, NOT THAT I AM A CHRISTIAN.

I'm used to pissing off religious people. I'm new to pissing off those that are going to Hell. If life has a purpose, then it's creator was necessarily looking for something it did not already have, creating to fulfill that goal. A goal oriented creator is imperfect or at best, incomplete.
Dec 9th, 2005 07:37 PM
Big Papa Goat isn't the basic argument for intelligent design the evidence for 'planning' because life is too compex to arise naturally?
I think I said some sarcastic off topic stuff about that earlier, but let me explicitly say now, that complexity and diversity arises spontaneously, not from planning. Thats whats so stupid about that fukin watchmaker analogy. A watch is there to tell time. Thats the purpose, everything about a watch can be traced back to the way the watchmaker wanted it to tell time. If you could point to the same kind of intention and purpose in an organism, then you'd be saying something. Complexity has never been a hallmark of planning, purpose has. Biology has complexity, not purpose.
Dec 9th, 2005 07:35 PM
Preechr Oh, and I thought I might be able to discuss that sort of stuff here.
Dec 9th, 2005 07:34 PM
Preechr
Quote:
Originally Posted by Sethomas
I'm not going to read the previous pages to find out, but what exactly is Preechr's substitution for evolution? The evolution debate tends to dichotomize between science and scripture, and he's rejecting both. So, really, what's your deal, Preechr?
Jesus.

Ok. I posted that last bit with the goal of not trying to explain myself one last time. Thanks, Seth.

I feel the creationism vs ID debate is a valid discussion to have.

It pisses me off to see otherwise intelligent folks treating the discussion as always-right scientists vs. inbred hicks.

Throughout my spotty interest in the debate, as I am not a christian nor a parent nor a person that's all that concerned in any way in a direct sense, I have seen the ID folks punch some pretty good holes at least in some of the examples that evolutionists have used, a good example being the Miller experiment.

My direct interest in the debate comes from the point of view that those that treat science as a religion (not all science fans do this, but it is my contention that many folks do) use the admittedly flawed anti-religion aspect of the evolution debate in addition to similar functions of ecological science, some parts of cosmology, psychology and politics (as well as many other parts of modern culture) to create a dysfunctional alternate reality, a religion, for themselves that let's them live entirely free of any sort of moral ties to any of the rest of us.
Dec 9th, 2005 07:23 PM
Preechr I did not call you a mystic... and the website I was talking about was the other one, which wasn't as helpful.

I honestly left out the main part of that self-quote where I used "Trust me" just so I wouldn't piss you off again.
Dec 9th, 2005 07:22 PM
Sethomas I'm not going to read the previous pages to find out, but what exactly is Preechr's substitution for evolution? The evolution debate tends to dichotomize between science and scripture, and he's rejecting both. So, really, what's your deal, Preechr?
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