Posted: Jun 11, 2014 4:26 pm
And there you go again pretending to familiarity with what I have been trying to say while at the same time exploiting a pretended ignorance of it. Actual familiarity would need to reflect the range of claims I have made, on Richard Dawkins’s old chat site and this one, spreading from human evolution to the human condition.
The Australopiths were created when a bipedal ape abandoned defensive biting in favour of using sticks and stones.
The conditions that needed to exist for an animal to adopt such a strategy were narrow, corresponding to a small patch on the fitness landscape. From this small patch a route of adaptive changes led that have had great impact on the world, including the internet, space telescopes and an already-occurring 6th extinction.
This path followed by our ancestors is a mapping of creative structures in the fitness landscape. There are many such structures, I recently cited EO Wilson’s thoughts on the scarce emergence of eusociality in insects. The theory of evolution just explains how populations are able to blindly feel out these creative structures.
The creatively structured fitness landscape is one way to render or visualize The Creator.
Atheist ideology has influenced the way biologists understand and present evolution, generally away from being able to see the Creator.
Calilasseia wrote: Oh wait, when did any mythology fetishist provide any real evidence for his pet magic man? NEVER, that's when. We don't need to point to biology to tell us that made up magic men are precisely that, we only have to point to the abject failure of supernaturalists to deliver something other than the usual apologetic shit sandwiches.
When one of them comes up with real evidence, then it's time to start talking.
You are doing a lot of talking anyway. By anathematizing the notion of God like this you trap yourself in the terms of a dialectic that has brought much smoke and little light.
Calilasseia wrote: As a corollary, your peddling the "further the cause of atheism in biology" bullshit is precisely that, because what biologists do, in case you never read the memo, is point to the data, and demonstrate how said data either supports or refutes a given hypothesis. Biologists don't even bother with the irrelevance of made up magic men, because wait for it, no evidence for the existence of made up magic men has ever been presented.
It was DavidMcC who brought up the biologist Dawkins failing to further the cause of atheism, showing that he hasn’t sold out his intellect to this ideology. The evidence of structure in the fitness landscape is suggestive not definite. An atheist might reasonably say, these creative structures are just the way reality is. In fact one would use the laws of physics and existing characteristics of living things (e.g. of alternative prey for the hyena, leopard and sabretooth predators on the australipiths) to delineate the patch where it was adaptive to swop hitting for biting. I hope we might agree that the ontological proof of God doesn’t actually establish anything, and nor would an ontological disproof of God. "Proofs" only work with that part of the world we can experiment with and intellectually own, not with what owns us.
Dawkins’s point apparently misfired on DavidMcC.
Calilasseia wrote:Jayjay4547 wrote:Seems to me Dawkins does do that and he isn't alone; he is in a tradition going back to Darwin, of using biology as a canvas for developing and presenting an atheist vision of the world.
Oh no, it's the "atheist doctrine" bullshit yet again. Yawn, yawn, fucking yawn. Play another record, JayJay, this one's not only broken, it was reduced to its constituent quarks ages ago.
What part of "NOT introducing superfluous and irrelevant entities isn't a 'doctrine', despite the bleating to this effect by mythology fetishists" do you not understand?
We have the empirical evidence telling us a magic man isn't needed, not only in biology, but in every other scientific discipline that exists. Suck on it.
That’s a disturbingly crude remark Calli. One way that atheist ideology has presented and understood evolution, is by denying opportunity to use the word “created”. For example, suppose one plays with the idea that a swop from defensive biting to defensive hitting removed compromises that the hominin skull had to reflect, and that eventually led to more intelligent hominins, then one can might say “African land predators created the australopiths”. Or you could say that “Africa” created them. But if on the other hand you take the more established view that homins took up using sticks and weapons because they were intelligent enough then it’s impossible I think, to use the word “created”- even when referring to a hyena as agent, let alone “God”
Calilasseia wrote:Jayjay4547 wrote:Darwin used it when he said "I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars."
Oh, and apparently, the inherent contradiction in a magic entity being purportedly "benevolent", and at the same time, purportedly fabricating organisms whose life cycle involved eating other organisms alive from the inside out, isn't manifest to you? Please explain what definition of "benevolence" bestows consistency upon this? Likewise, what definition of "benevolence" makes guinea worm, river blindness, and dozens of other excruciating afflictions of humans, a product of said "benevolence"?
You are getting ahead of my response to Darwin’s point. I can’t see evidence that the biological creator is “benevolent” at least not in the sense of protecting all humans from any harm. The Creator is creative , the products of creation are wonderful and beautiful, we are generously equipped by the creator, all that stuff Paley and his cohort had to say at the start of the 19th century.
Calilasseia wrote:Jayjay4547 wrote:He was taking an opposite tack to that of Richard Paley so we are all heirs to one or other side of a 19th century forking in the understanding of the world.
Actually, it's William Paley. That you can't even present an elementary fact such as this correctly, speaks volumes about the effects of religious apologetics upon discoursive ability.
Yes, stupidslip. But you read too much into it.
Calilasseia wrote:Jayjay4547 wrote:The god-believing branch may have withered and the atheist branch has become triumphalist but that is just a fashion.
Er, no. It's game over for imaginary magic men. It doesn't matter how much mythology fetishists bleat and whinge over this, they'll have to suck on it sooner or later. Because, wait for it, every supernaturalist pseudo-explanation for vast classes of observable entities and phenomena, has been tossed into the bin, and replaced with a proper explanation in terms of testable natural processes. This has happened precisely because those natural explanations, unlike wibbling about magic men, were testable, and passed the requisite tests. Something that has never happened to "Magic Man did it".
Game. Fucking. Over.
That’s triumphalist like I said.
It’s implicit in Darwin’s position. If the Creator exists but isn’t benevolent then “he” isn’t actually God, Darwin can deny him that status. Or, because God “must” be benevolent and the creator evidently isn’t benevolent then that shows that there isn’t a creator-God at all.
Calilasseia wrote:Jayjay4547 wrote:Or, if Darwin’s conception of what God should be like is something that cannot exist then God cannot exist
Actually, he wasn't referring to any conception he dreamed up, he was referring to what might be termed the "standard supernaturalist model" within the relevant mythology-based doctrine. Which, as he informs us, the evidence tells us is a crock. Unless of course you can square the apologetic circle, and tell us all how conjuring up Onchocera volvulus into the world, constitutes an act of "benevolence" on the part of this entity.
I see there is an Onchocerca volvulus, causes river blindness.. Sure, hardly anything anyone says has been “dreamed up” out of nothing, including dreams. Darwin was quite capable of thinking Gosh, maybe the Creator isn’t so all fired benevolent towards humanity. Maybe the Creator is more OT. That possibility should be even more prominent today, seeing how humanity is polluting and destroying nature, and might well face cruel consequences.
Calilasseia wrote:Jayjay4547 wrote:is something that cannot exist then God cannot exist. Either way it boils down to an assertion about the standing of the human intellect, which in earlier ages was thought to be unhealthy.
Oh this is going to be good ...Jayjay4547 wrote:It is unhealthy if triumphalism is unhealthy.
Excuse me, but if the FACTS tell us that mythology is a crock of shit, then it doesn't matter how much mythology fetishists whinge and bleat about this, or invent bullshit fantasies about "atheist conspiracies", "atheist ideology" and all the rest of it, in a desperate attempt to put off the day when they have to suck on it, because the FACTS are screaming at them to suck on it, the'll have to suck on it. Just as people who think gravity doesn't exist have to suck on it, especially if they're stupid enough to try jumping off tall buildings in the insane belief that they'll simply float in mid air.
Once again, Jayjay, paying attention to the FACTS isn't "ideology". Suck on it.
What is this “suck on it” you stick in wherever you can? It’s hugely offensive, please stop it.. Mythology – e.g. Noah’s Ark- is far from a load of shit, it organizes our mind about our relationship with that part of the world we can’t experiment with- and that includes our creator. We might be able to hurt our creator, even destroy it on this planet- and in doing so, hand ourselves over to slavery for all time.