Theory of Evolution Should have never been a part (Civ3)! Part 2

[Ethelred]

Originally posted by monkspider
WHAT?!!!?! Ethel never said that word for word, but it was implied several times, and he essentially affirmed that he believed this to be correct in his last post.

I did NO SUCH THING. I told you that you made it up the first time you posted that nonsense.

You aren't one to let reality get in the way are you?

[Ethelred]

Originally posted by DinoDoc
How does causality apply to something that would by definition have to be outside of space-time?

The same question applies to the beginning of the Universe. How can causality be apply to how it came about?

[Jack the Bodiless]

Well we seem to have drifted off the topic of evolution again. I guess there isn't much more that can be said.

As for the Biblical stuff:

1. Nineveh would be destroyed, permanently
Bible passage: Nahum 3:19
Written: perhaps 614 BC
Fulfilled: 612 BC

Written perhaps 614 BC? Maybe it was 611 BC?

2. Babylon would rule Judah for 70 years
Bible passage: Jeremiah 25:11-12
Written: sometime from 626 to about 586 BC
Fulfilled: about 605 BC to about 538 BC

Already addressed by Urban Ranger.

3. Tyre would never again be found
Bible passage: Ezekiel 26:21
Written: between 587-586 BC
Fulfilled: after 332 BC

This one is actually listed in the SAB's FalseProphecies section: both Jesus and Paul visited Tyre.

4. Babylon would be reduced to swampland
Bible passage: Isaiah 14:23
Written: perhaps between 701-681 BC
Fulfilled: 539 BC

As previously noted by Urban Ranger, this isn't a particularly remarkable prophecy. Except that Isaiah actually got it right, which is itself pretty unusual for any Biblical prophecy.

5. The Jews would regain control of Israel
Bible passage: Amos 9:14-15

A self-fulfilling prophecy. The Zionists rejected Uganda and insisted on Palestine because they wanted to fulfil this prophecy.

6. Ezekiel predicted when Israel would be re- established
Bible passage: Ezekiel 4:3-6
Written: between 593-571 BC
Fulfilled: 1948

As previously noted: no.

7. Babylon's captive Jews would be freed by Cyrus
Bible passage: Isaiah 44:28

Nobody actually knows when Isaiah was written. It could easily have been more recent than this event.

8. The Messiah would be born in Bethlehem
Bible passage: Micah 5:2
Written: sometime between 750-686 BC
Fulfilled: 5 BC

I recently started a thread on this topic: "...at the Church of the Nativity, the Birthplace of Jesus..." The prophecy refers to the wrong guy, there's no reason to believe Jesus actually was born in Bethlehem, and John says that he wasn't.

9. God will save the Jews and destroy their enemies
Bible passage: Jeremiah 30:11
Written: sometime from 626 to about 586 BC
Fulfilled: Throughout history

YHWH was originally a war god, his function was to destroy the enemies of the Jews. But he seems to have been spectaculary inept at it. "But, the empires of the Nazis, Romans, Babylonians and Assyrians have vanished"? So did the Jewish kingdom of Solomon and David. The Jewish people have survived, but so did the populations of Nazi Germany, Rome, Babylon and Assyria. One reason why the Abrahamic religions have such profoundly sado-masochistic overtones (obsession with "sin" and divine punishment) is that the Jews were defeated by just about everyone they encountered, and the priesthood had to keep explaining why.

10. God's servant would be crucified with criminals
Bible passage: Isaiah 53:12
Written: perhaps between 701-681 BC
Fulfilled: 32 AD

This "prophecy" does not specifically refer to Jesus. It appears to be another masochistic spiel, retrospectively applied to Jesus because it seemed appropriate for him.

So we have TWO genuine fulfilled prophecies here (4 and 5), neither of which is particularly remarkable.

You have then followed this with a clearly fallacious argument, summarized thus:

1. If God does not exist, then objective moral values do not exist.
2. Evolution can account for the existence of certain objective moral values.
3. Objective values exist: "we all know it".
4. Therefore God exists.

Premise 2 directly contradicts premise 1: evolution explains the existence of certain moral values independently of the existence of God.

As for the Problem of Evil: there is a clear contradiction between the supposed divine attributes of omnipotence and omnibenevolence. ALL attemps to resolve the problem involve some form of denial of at least one of these premises: that God is omnipotent, or that God is omnibenevolent. Yours is no different. For an omnipotent being, there is no moral justification for permitting evil: it is NOT required (becuse God, if omnipotent, can achieve his aims without it). You are implying either that God doesn't have a better way of doing things (non-omnipotence), or that we have no right to expect better (non-omnibenevolence).

The Biblical God was neither omnipotent nor omnibenevolent anyhow. Christian theologians have created this problem by making over-inflated claims about their God: "MY god is better than YOUR god" carried to the ultimate extreme.

[Ethelred]

God's omnibenvolence provides the best explanation for the existence of objective moral values in the world.

There is not one sign on Earth on in the Bible that Jehovah is omibenevolent. Exodus shows him as a pretty petty and viscious killer of innocents. His morals are suspect at best.

He wrote, "It is easy to explain this moral sense as a natural product of biological and social evolution." Professor Michael Ruse, a philosopher of science at the University of Guelph, agrees. He explains:

Well it may not be easy but it can be done. You sure can't do it with the Bible as Jehovah is about as a bad an exemple of behaviour as can be found.

On the atheistic view, some action, say, rape, may not be socially advantageous and so in the course of human evolution has become taboo. But that does absolutely nothing to prove that rape is really wrong

Nor does the Bible. It doesn't even come close to what most modern people think of rape.

Thus, without God there is no absolute right and wrong which imposes itself on our conscience.

There are no absolutes so whats the problem with that. There is no absolute right and wrong in the Bible either. Just look at the punishments for rape.

But the fact is that objective moral values do exist, and we all know it.

Nonsense. Just ask a Serb what is moral to do to a Croate.

Actions like rape, torture, and child abuse aren't just socially unacceptable behavior. They're moral abominations.

Not in the Bible. Jehovah demands at one point for the Jews to kill everone in a city. Children as well. If that isn't child abuse what the heck is?

But if objective values cannot exist without God, and objective values do exist, then it follows logically and inescapably that God exists.

Boy and you have the gall to say I use bad logid. That was excreable. There are no objective moral values especially in the Bible.

This is as bad as the time a guy was saying god exists because we the word god in our language. He had obscured what he was doing and didn't even notice what he was he was really doing.

In regards to God's Omnipotence, God provides the best explanation for the existence of abstract entities In addition to tangible, concrete objects like people and trees and chairs, philosophers have noticed that there also appear to be abstract objects, things like numbers, propositions, sets, and properties.

I though the previous claim was about as nonsensical as a believer could get. This is worse. Abstract ideas are human inventions. Even the term is a human invention.

It seems plausible to think of numbers as dependent upon or even constituted by intellectual activity.

Its even more plausible to think that number exist whether we notice them or not. In case you haven't noticed we weren't around for the most of the Universes existance. There were only so many planets in the Solar system before we evolved. We assign a word to how many there are. Yet the number of them was still the same before we showed up.

We should therefore think of them as... the concepts of an unlimited mind: a divine, omnipotent mind.

Actually they would exist even without a universe. Just nothing would notice.

You are getting more illogical with each post.

[Ethelred]

Originally posted by Anunikoba
I already did say what I thought. I just wanted to post these links because I found one of the articles I found through them to be interesting.

You posted two links. One was broken. The other led to at least a dozen links not an article. That is one reason why you should at least give a clue as the relevance of a link. I have no idea what you thought was of interest there. I still don't.

And I am glad to see that you have been elected Debate Regulator of Apolyton; I will have to be more careful not to deviate from your prescribed guidelines in the future.

If you want to be dificult go ahead. I made a reasonable request. If you don't like than go ahead. I too can post links without giving reason for doing so.

I think you will find these links of interest

http://battle1066.com/index.html

http://pearl1.lanl.gov/periodic/

http://www.cnn.com/

http://www.xterror.com/

http://www.civfanatics.com/

But in truth, I am not trying to convince anyone anyhow (as doing that here at Apolyton is nigh an impossibilty).

Well thats good. It is only very difficult though. Sometimes its impossible. Other times it only appears that way. The catch is deciding which is which. I personally don't care. I like argueing anyway. It just nicer to know why a link is posted and what specificaly is relevant about it.

Where I go to check what the Bible actually says including in the original Hebrew and Greek.

http://www.blueletterbible.org/

[DaShi]

Re: Re: Theory of Evolution Should have never been a part (Civ3)! Part 2

Originally posted by LordAzreal


Sounds more to me like a war of words, rather than an argument. I'm guessing that the creationists might be hatching a plot to try and denounce evolution as wrong. Don't forget the Trojan Horse.

Anyway, I'm nothing more than a neutral observer of this, and I can say thus far that I am impressed by the effort everyone involved has made. What I believe is a hybrid of creation/evolution theory, and that neither can either be 100% proven/disproven.

It also seems that my previous comment has remained unnoticed...



There hasn't been much (if any) SCIENTIFIC proof on the Creationists side about Evolutionism's shortfalls. All that they have thrown at Evolutionists is bible-thumping drivel. Look out there, and you're bound to find scientific evidence pointing towards creation. A place to start might be the Creation Science website at http://emporium.turnpike.net/C/cs/index.htm

But don't dismiss Creationist scientists as less intelligent than evolutionist scientists. That is simply an arrogant generalisation. Most of them do have university degrees.

55

Oooh, a hard one.

[loinburger]

Originally posted by DinoDoc
I asked first though.

I'm not the one who believes in entities that exist outside of space-time that create more entities that exist outside of space-time. That's only the theists. However, once you've started believing in two entities that exist outside of space-time, what's wrong with believing in three, five, or an infinite number?

[DinoDoc]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger
Theological definitions that are based on the bible do not put the Judeo-Christianity god outside of spacetime.

Theological definitions that are based on the Bible actually do put God outside of spacetime "he" would have to have been in existance "before" spacetime in order to create it. Now the issue of whether or not he set up shop in "his" creation after "he" was finished with it is another matter altogether.

[DinoDoc]

Originally posted by loinburger
I'm not the one who believes in entities that exist outside of space-time that create more entities that exist outside of space-time.

Nether am I. UR was the one that posted that.

[loinburger]

Originally posted by monkspider
God's omnibenvolence provides the best explanation for the existence of objective moral values in the world.

As has been pointed out, you still need to provide evidence of these objective moral values. And no, saying "We all agree that there are objective moral values" is not evidence.

If God does not exist, then objective moral values do not exist.

Not true. Objective moral values can be functions of, for example, human communication--a process that does not require divine intervention.

Many theists and atheists alike concur on this point.

Note many, not all. I certainly don't agree, as explained in my previous paragraph.

Friedrich Nietzsche, the great atheist of the last century who proclaimed the death of God, understood that the death of God meant the destruction of all meaning and value in life.

He did no such thing. He understood that meaning and value could not be derived from religion if we had no religion--he pointed out the hypocrisy of those who questioned God but did not question the morals that they derived from God. But, since God is not the only source of morals, (and for that matter since there are many superior sources of morals than God), belief in God is hardly a requirement for meaning--this is typically only the case for people who are waiting to die in order to achieve meaning in the afterlife in lieu of finding meaning in their current lives.

Rather, the question is, "If God does not exist, do objective moral values exist?"

They certainly can. Do you mean to use the term "absolute"? Because I agree that absolute moral values cannot exist without a magical source for them.

After all, if there is no God, then what's so special about human beings?

Well, we're smarter than amoebas, for one thing. You don't need a God to figure that out.

They're just accidental by-products of nature which have evolved relatively recently on a infinitesimal speck of dust called the planet Earth, lost somewhere in a hostile and mindless universe, and which are doomed to perish individually and collectively in a relatively short time.

Spoken like a good post-modernist.

On the atheistic view, some action, say, rape, may not be socially advantageous and so in the course of human evolution has become taboo. But that does absolutely nothing to prove that rape is really wrong. On the atheistic view, if you can escape the social consequences, there's nothing really wrong with your raping someone.

Even without objective morality, you can still have an atheistic teleological moral view in which rape is wrong regardless of whether or not you're caught. You're grossly oversimplifying ethics--it's not all cookies and spankings.

Thus, without God there is no absolute right and wrong which imposes itself on our conscience.

Whenever you feel angry, do you assume that God made you angry? Whenever you feel sad, do you assume that God made you sad? Whenever you laugh, do you assume that God made you laugh? If not, then why are you assigning a divine source to some emotions (like indignation) and not all emotions?

But the fact is that objective moral values do exist, and we all know it.

Like I said, this is a dismal proof.

There's no more reason to deny the objective existence of moral values than to deny the objective reality of the physical world.

Oh, so morals are tangible objects now? Can I go down to the store and buy me a jar of morals?

Actions like rape, torture, and child abuse aren't just socially unacceptable behavior. They're moral abominations.

How do you know that you don't call them moral abominations merely because you've been conditioned by society to believe that they are?

Even Ruse himself admits, "The man who says that it is morally acceptable to rape little children is just as mistaken as the man who says two plus two equals five."

Where's this quote from? I'd be interested in the context.

But if objective values cannot exist without God, and objective values do exist, then it follows logically and inescapably that God exists.

You've yet to show that objective values exist, all you've done so far is assert that they exist.

In regards to God's Omnipotence, God provides the best explanation for the existence of abstract entities

First off, abstract entities are the result of human intelligence, and do not provide any evidence that God exists. Secondly and more to your point, "Provides an explanation for the existence of abstract entities" is a far cry from "Is able to hurl lightning bolts from the sky" or "Is able to declare that Black is White and make it be so." I hardly see how providing an explanation for the existence of abstract entities constitutes omnipotence.

The theist has a plausible answer to that question. They are grounded in the mind of God.

The theist has yet to show that God is plausible. Furthermore, the atheist has an even more plausible explanation: abstract entities arise from human intelligence. The plausibility of God is severely questioned, while the plausibility of human intelligence is not.

It seems plausible to think of numbers as dependent upon or even constituted by intellectual activity. But there are too many of them to arise as a result of human intellectual activity.

I've never heard that particular piece of tripe before.

[loinburger]

Originally posted by DinoDoc
Nether am I.

If you don't believe in God, then UR's question probably wasn't directed at you.

[DinoDoc]

Originally posted by loinburger
If you don't believe in God, then UR's question probably wasn't directed at you.

I do believe in God. I was just wondering where he got the assumption that; If one argues that this Universe needs a creator, the same logic will demand that this creator needs a meta-creator, the meta-creator needs a meta-meta-creator, ad infinitum. It seemed odd.

[loinburger]

Originally posted by DinoDoc
I do believe in God. I was just wondering where he got the assumption that; If one argues that this Universe needs a creator, the same logic will demand that this creator needs a meta-creator, the meta-creator needs a meta-meta-creator, ad infinitum. It seemed odd.

Well, if we need a Creator that exists outside of space-time in order to create a singularity that also exists outside of space-time, then it makes sense that we ought to have a Creator for our Creator for our Creator etc.

[DinoDoc]

Originally posted by loinburger
then it makes sense that we ought to have a Creator for our Creator for our Creator etc.

How so? We are talking about something that happened "before" the existance of spacetime and the Law of Causality, so why would the same rules apply?

I should note for the record that I have absolutely no interest in proving the existance of God on this board because I have seen enough of those threads to know how such an endeavor turns out. It was just the post by UR that caught my interest.

[loinburger]

Originally posted by DinoDoc
How so? We are talking about something that happened "before" the existance of spacetime and the Law of Causality, so why would the same rules apply?

If you've already done it once (if you've already made a God to create a singularity), why stop there? Why only once? I could understand "not at all," i.e. no creator outside of space-time, or I could understand "infinite," i.e. infinite creators, but using one creator strikes me as completely arbitrary.