. . . and similar manipulative spin and mob-ocracy games masquerading as truth, news, knowledge/education, etc now clearly needs to be confronted — if we are to think straight and act soundly in good time to avoid going over the cliff as a civilisation:
Of Lemmings, marches of folly and cliffs of self-falsifying absurdity . . .
The Parable of Plato’s Cave (and the linked idea of the Overton Window):
. . . has much to teach us in a media-dominated age where manipulators keep trying to push/pull our window of acceptability through deceit, poison, accusation, polarising and more.
Especially if we ask ourselves: how does the shadow show come to be, and how is a community so manipulated that it loses contact with objective reality?
Acts 27 gives us a picture in miniature (once we realise that it was common knowledge that some seasons were dangerous for sailing in the Mediterranean basin of 2,000 years ago, but that many people can be induced to go along with those they look up to for leadership, power and expertise):
>>Ac 27:4 . . . putting out to sea from there [= Sidon] we sailed under the lee of Cyprus, because the winds were against us.5 And when we had sailed across the open sea along the coast of Cilicia and Pamphylia, we came to Myra in Lycia.6 There the centurion found a ship of Alexandria sailing for Italy and put us on board.7 We sailed slowly for a number of days and arrived with difficulty off Cnidus, and as the wind did not allow us to go farther, we sailed under the lee of Crete off Salmone.8 Coasting along it with difficulty, we came to a place called Fair Havens, near which was the city of Lasea.
9 Since much time had passed, and the voyage was now dangerous because even the Fast[a] was already over, Paul advised them,10 saying, “Sirs, I perceive that the voyage will be with injury and much loss, not only of the cargo and the ship, but also of our lives.”11 But the centurion paid more attention to the pilot and to the owner of the ship than to what Paul said.12 And because the harbor was not suitable to spend the winter in, the majority decided to put out to sea from there, on the chance that somehow they could reach Phoenix, a harbor of Crete, facing both southwest and northwest, and spend the winter there.
The Storm at Sea
13 Now when the south wind blew gently, supposing that they had obtained their purpose, they weighed anchor and sailed along Crete, close to the shore.14 But soon a tempestuous wind, called the northeaster, struck down from the land.15 And when the ship was caught and could not face the wind, we gave way to it and were driven along.16 Running under the lee of a small island called Cauda,[b] we managed with difficulty to secure the ship’s boat.17 After hoisting it up, they used supports to undergird [= frap] the ship. Then, fearing that they would run aground on the Syrtis, they lowered the gear,[c] and thus they were driven along.18 Since we were violently storm-tossed, they began the next day to jettison the cargo.19 And on the third day they threw the ship’s tackle overboard with their own hands.20 When neither sun nor stars appeared for many days, and no small tempest lay on us, all hope of our being saved was at last abandoned.
21 Since they had been without food for a long time, Paul stood up among them and said, “Men, you should have listened to me and not have set sail from Crete and incurred this injury and loss.22 Yet now I urge you to take heart, for there will be no loss of life among you, but only of the ship.23 For this very night there stood before me an angel of the God to whom I belong and whom I worship,24 and he said, ‘Do not be afraid, Paul; you must stand before Caesar. And behold, God has granted you all those who sail with you.’25 So take heart, men, for I have faith in God that it will be exactly as I have been told.26 But we must run aground on some island.”>>
Here, Mr Moneybags and his bought- and- paid- for technico manipulated the passengers and the Centurion into going along with a foolhardy voyage. That Jeremiah over there in chains with scars from three previous shipwrecks? Just ignore that half-mad idiot rejected by his own people. We are the experts and our consensus is, we can do it . . . it will only take an afternoon’s sail on a comfortable reach to go forty miles to a safe and commodious harbour. Of course, the predictable result of turning democracy into a manipulated de-mockracy, was shipwreck.
And, on many, many dimensions, that is exactly what we face today.
(BTW, I think we would all profit from reading and viewing this Melanie Philips article and video interview here.)
Our challenge is to de-spin the dominant agenda and its seven mountains/ commanding heights citadels, to come to a critical mass of prudence towards a sounder more sustainable alternative:
Oh yes, I doubt that it is a mere accident that the Limousine torched on Trump’s Inauguration day
. . . was rented for Wallnau, and that the bought and paid for “Anarchists” — a dead political movement if ever there was one — claimed to be “We the People.”
Where, it is worth the while to pause and unpack the old Soviet/Bolshevik term, agit prop.
Namely, it strictly/narrowly . . . per current dictionary definitions . . . speaks to twisting the theatre, arts, literature and the like into propaganda. However, on both the history and the inherent dynamics as work it readily extends to the mob-ocracy game, in which the streets and news media or institutions of intellectual leadership and education — notice the appeals to “consensus” on matters of controversy or where something is patently wrong with the dominant and too often domineering schools of thought . . . — are turned into a grand theatre projecting shadow shows confused for reality.
Often, such shadow shows are sponsored by governments, sometimes by powerful factions. And of course, such theatre too often becomes bloody, creating a horrific escalating spiral of chaos, confusion, retaliation and polarisation.
U/D, Feb 2 — it looks like live events are demonstrating my point:
Here is a girl being struck and pepper-sprayed at UC Berkeley for the thought crime of objecting to the riots:
(Ask yourself, what if she has a medical condition such as grand mal epilepsy or asthma or the like that could be triggered, sometimes with severe consequences? Do these rioters think or care about what fires they could be playing with?)
Likewise, people are being chased and struck to the ground by blackshirts (pardon language that pops up):
Here is some media coverage, in this case backgrounders leading up to a telephone interview with the proposed speaker whose speech event was shut down by the riot:
(I further understand her husband was beaten unconscious [which more or less implies concussion injuries] with several of his ribs being broken.)
U/D Feb 6th: The friend “pepper” sprayed during an interview also speaks out about the attack, indicating that it was the identification as My/Trump supporters that triggered the first and second attacks:
(And in case you think pepper spraying is minor, consider the implicit threat as something much more destructive up to a poison gas could easily have been used. BTW, why didn’t someone realise, assault with a potentially deadly weapon and tackle this suspect/perpetrator to the ground? ANS: People are not trained for that and by the time you observe, orient, decide and begin to react [cf. on John Boyd’s OODA Loop, here] it is over for good or ill; that is why trained security should have been right there, preferably law enforcement. It is also why a clear entry area protected by barriers with adequate separation should have been in place . . . another point of negligence by the authorities. Likewise consider how dazzling was used to initiate the second attack, which ended in mayhem: disorientation that could easily have prepared for anything from kidnapping to stabbing or shooting. If the pepper spray woman can be caught and interrogated, this would be important as she — it is likely to have been one individual — initiated the attack sequence. Given the hostile nature of the interview, perhaps it would be useful to interrogate the interviewer as possibly being complicit given what happened and what could all too easily have happened. Then, compare this sort of coverage with how the major media have treated the events at UCB last Wednesday evening, to see how street agitation and bully-boy tactics then feed into the theatre of narrative propaganda, spin tactics, gaslighting and outright brainwashing. Something truly ugly is going on.)
U/D Feb 5th: Meanwhile, we have a picture of police in riot gear inside the student union while riot-induced chaos was going on outside:
The poster of this very tellingly asks:
>>I was at UC Berkeley last night. Here is a pic I got after the speech cancellation of nearly 100 SWAT and campus police sitting inside the student union building doing NOTHING while people were getting beaten outside. WHO told them to stand down?>>
Further U/D Feb 5, pm: Notice — HT Zero Hedge, Feb 2nd — how the street theatre then gets projected by the media houses (CNN as an example, but take note of ZH’s own perspectives, too . . . ) to suit their particular agendas and narratives:
Under certain circumstances, agit prop becomes not just rioting but rebellion and guerrilla war — these days, 4th generation war [think of how the Palestinian Arab uprisings and declaratively genocidal terrorism campaigns have come to be viewed as “liberation” struggles by many across the world . . . ] — or even radical revolution.
I again point to the de-spinning framework I developed a decade ago:
Let us wake up to what is in front of us regarding not just design debates but ever so many issues and agendas across our civilisation. Plato’s grim warning from nearly 2360 years ago, is again all too apt:
>>
Ath [in The Laws, Bk X 2,350+ ya]. . . .[The avant garde philosophers and poets, c. 360 BC] say that fire and water, and earth and air [i.e the classical “material” elements of the cosmos], all exist by nature and chance, and none of them by art . . . [such that] all that is in the heaven, as well as animals and all plants, and all the seasons come from these elements, not by the action of mind, as they say, or of any God, or from art, but as I was saying, by nature and chance only [ –> that is, evolutionary materialism is ancient and would trace all things to blind chance and mechanical necessity] . . . .
[Thus, they hold] that the principles of justice have no existence at all in nature, but that mankind are always disputing about them and altering them; and that the alterations which are made by art and by law have no basis in nature, but are of authority for the moment and at the time at which they are made.-
[ –> Relativism, too, is not new; complete with its radical amorality rooted in a worldview that has no foundational IS that can ground OUGHT, leading to an effectively arbitrary foundation only for morality, ethics and law: accident of personal preference, the ebbs and flows of power politics, accidents of history and and the shifting sands of manipulated community opinion driven by “winds and waves of doctrine and the cunning craftiness of men in their deceitful scheming . . . ” cf a video on Plato’s parable of the cave; from the perspective of pondering who set up the manipulative shadow-shows, why.]
These, my friends, are the sayings of wise men, poets and prose writers, which find a way into the minds of youth. They are told by them that the highest right is might,
[ –> Evolutionary materialism — having no IS that can properly ground OUGHT — leads to the promotion of amorality on which the only basis for “OUGHT” is seen to be might (and manipulation: might in “spin”) . . . ]
and in this way the young fall into impieties, under the idea that the Gods are not such as the law bids them imagine; and hence arise factions [ –> Evolutionary materialism-motivated amorality “naturally” leads to continual contentions and power struggles influenced by that amorality at the hands of ruthless power hungry nihilistic agendas], these philosophers inviting them to lead a true life according to nature, that is,to live in real dominion over others [ –> such amoral and/or nihilistic factions, if they gain power, “naturally” tend towards ruthless abuse and arbitrariness . . . they have not learned the habits nor accepted the principles of mutual respect, justice, fairness and keeping the civil peace of justice, so they will want to deceive, manipulate and crush — as the consistent history of radical revolutions over the past 250 years so plainly shows again and again], and not in legal subjection to them [–> nihilistic will to power not the spirit of justice and lawfulness].
>>
To be forewarned is — if we are wise — to be forearmed. END
Comments
AJ, It is you and/or RVB8 and/or CR [elsewhere] who introduced the general issues of science in thread as part of what seemed to be an intended parthian shot. I responded correctively, and up to now you are unwilling to for instance acknowledge that one of the greatest works of modern science, the Newtonian Synthesis, did not actually address mechanism of causation and that even in the teeth of sharp challenge. Your constant distortions of the circumstances, suppression of facts on the table in front of you and repeated pattern of distractions, distortions and denigratory remarks does not speak well of your attitude to truth or the right, which is precisely an issue for evolutionary materialistic scientism and/or its fellow travellers. At this point, your track record above has made you into a poster-child of the sorts of problems we see coming from those unduly influenced by these dominant worldviews and cultural agendas. Finally, SB is dead right to point out that the unborn child develops, from conception, AS his or her own distinctly identifiable human being, it does not somehow evolve through Haeckel's stages from an amoeba to a fish then a monkey or the like then finally a human being at some stage -- oh, there is enough of a nervous system there or whatever [notice, how conveniently the fact of its own beating heart at 5 1/2 weeks or so, the point where some awareness that a pregnancy may be in progress is usually recognised, has been conveniently swept away by studious silence] -- that is convenient for those who are responsible for or are enabling the slaughter of 800+ millions in the womb over 40+ years, and now racing ahead at a million more per week. FYI, Haeckel's drawings were a fraud, and have been known to be such for a century and more. Wider haeckelism on oh there is not enough of a nervous system there or other such irrelevancy tot he distinct human nature and identity of the unborn child in the womb becomes little more than a rationalisation for dehumanisation. Which is one characteristic symptom of targetting victims of a holocaust. The other, being denigration, projection of blameworthy stereotypes, demonisation and scapegoating. As is plainly happening now with the agit-prop and media shadow show tactics playing out across our civilisation. KFkairosfocus
March 27, 2017
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Armand Jacks
Since it is my opinion, and that of objective knowledge, that early stage fetus’ are not fully human, I really don’t think your point carries any meaning.
No. A human being, which has DNA right from the beginning, does not develop into a human being, it develops as a human being.StephenB
March 27, 2017
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WJM, its just that your "sources" say this is part of PG "going mainstream" with a chain of "multiple arrests leading up the food chain" branching out into politics, and that the Oklahoma senator is "the latest".
You said it, so you must think it means something. The latest what? The latest example in the US of a person having sex with a minor? I'm sure its out of date by now.Pindi
March 27, 2017
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WM:
I’m not going to debate it or elaborate.
For very good reasons.Armand Jacks
March 27, 2017
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Pindi & AJ:
I'm providing some information KF asked about. I'm not going to debate it or elaborate. Those who want to check into it can do so.William J Murray
March 27, 2017
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Pindi:
WJM, is the Oklahoma State rep this guy?
Hmmm. This sounds like the 52 year old married Conservative Canadian Senator who, by the way, is also a Christian pastor nominated to the senate for his moral Christian values, who had sex with a 16 year old minor while being a senator. Claiming that he is being persecuted by racist liberals.Armand Jacks
March 27, 2017
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WJM, is the Oklahoma State rep this guy?
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/oklahoma/articles/2017-03-16/oklahoma-senate-punishes-senator-found-with-teen-in-motel
A conservative republican senator who is alleged to have had sex with a teenage boy.
What is the connection of this with PG?Pindi
March 27, 2017
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KF:
seen.life is the facebook alternative. It uses pretty much the same interface and software.
The PG issue went mainstream on the Dr. Phil show on March 21, you can find the whole show on Youtube. It wasn't referred to as PG but my sources say it's part of an acclimation effort to mainstream knowledge of the issue and how bad/pervasive it really is. It's a very disturbing show. When they cut to the faces of the audience - the shock and disbelief - you get a measure of how difficult it is to bring this issue into the light.
There have been multiple arrests heading up the food chain and branching out into multiple school networks (at all levels), law-enforcement (at all levels) and politics (the latest being an Oklahoma state rep.) Some mainstream coverage has recently been given to the fact that there is a nationwide epidemic of missing young black girls - probably because several celebrities have gotten involved.
It just gets worse and worse. Bringing it to light (what the community calls "red-pilling", from the movie The Matrix), is the hard part. It's very difficult for average people to believe how ugly, deep and widespread it is.
Political cartoon by Ben Garrisson - note the Podesta octopus in the upper left hand corner.William J Murray
March 27, 2017
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KF:
AJ, I see you on a tangent again;
All I did was respond to your comments so if I am off on a tangent it is because you took us there.
As in, years ago here at UD we took a look at how beavers create dams and lodges adapted to the particular circumstances of a given situation.
I wasn't aware that beavers wrote "text (not to mention the associated execution machinery) in such quantities — 100 to 1,000 k bits [OOL] to 10 – 100+ mn bits [OO body plans]? It looks like you are going off on a tangent. But let's go down that road. Can you provide supporting evidence that the beaver dams and lodges are intelligently designed? Or are they the result of instinct and reflex? Beavers raised from kit without ever seeing dams or lodges will still build them when released to the wild.
As well, without any knowledge of beavers and without seeing them build these structures, you would be very hard pressed to conclude that they were designed and not just the outcome of water movement and the fact that wood floats. There are plenty of instances of naturally occurring dams and piles formed by branches and sticks.
Indeed, given evidence of design of the physical cosmos, we cannot even confine design inferences to materially embodied designers.
Except that there is no compelling evidence that the universe is designed.
PS: On Newton, you apparently are unaware of the huge debates that he faced linked to for instance the notion of action at a distance.
No, I am not unaware of it. I just don't see where it is relevant to this discussion.
I again point to how Wilberforce dealt with an institutionally entrenched trade that commoditised human life, creating holocaust level slaughter in the process; illustrating his insight that reform of culture, heart, mind and soul must come first to lead to enforceable reform of law.
He was a man with significant influence in the most powerful country in the western world at the time. He laid the legal groundwork for the abolition of slavery. But that wasn't sufficient to make a permanent change in the western world. It still required people with less influence to take direct action, including violence. The underground railroad is an example. And, ultimately, it took one of the most violent eras in US history (the Civil war) to finally make it a thing of the past.
You are, relatively speaking, an insignificant little man from an insignificant little island, commenting on an insignificant little blog and web-site. And before you start screaming "ad-hominem", I am also an insignificant little man from an insignificant little country. Comparing what you do to what Wilberforce did is just self-delusion. Since you have no hope of influencing the abortion rate through political influence, the most effective approach would be direct action, which you refuse to do. Myself, on the other hand, have taken direct action on two occasions. I twice witnessed an aggressive pro-lifer harrassing women entering an abortion clinic. In both cases I physically stood between the woman and the pro-lifer so that the women could enter the clinic unmolested. I then called the police, after which the pro-lifer was arrested and sentenced to some jail time (repeat offender). Direct action does not always require violence.
But, even Wilberforce would have supported the charging and severe punishment of anyone caught continuing to profit from the slave trade after its abolition. Your hesitance to support the same thing for women having abortions after you succeed in making it illegal speaks volumes. And not in your favour.Armand Jacks
March 27, 2017
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AJ, I see you on a tangent again; here the hoary old fallacy that we may only infer to HUMAN design from empirical evidence. Not even wrong, wrong-headed -- as we all know that humans do not exhaust the list of either potential or actually observed much less potential designers. As in, years ago here at UD we took a look at how beavers create dams and lodges adapted to the particular circumstances of a given situation. Nor are beavers the only other things that may do designs. And obviously, we may distinguish secondary designers that show signs of being designed themselves (check out our DNA and the text therein) from primary, reality roots level designers. Indeed, given evidence of design of the physical cosmos, we cannot even confine design inferences to materially embodied designers. For that matter, given the huge gulch between computation and contemplation, we cannot even say that design is a computational process on a computing substrate. Not that I expect any of this to move you any more than the rest of the many correctives from multiple sources above. I suggest -- i/l/o the focus of this thread -- you and ilk ponder that there are two distinct types of ignorance, primary due to non-exposure or lack of a base, and secondary due to indoctrination that polarises and distorts. KF
PS: On Newton, you apparently are unaware of the huge debates that he faced linked to for instance the notion of action at a distance.
PPS: BTW, are you aware of the interaction between Wilberforce and Pitt, hinted at in the epitaph for Wilberforce on his statue in the Abbey? Do you understand the principle that the lessons of sound history were bought with blood and tears, so that those who ignore or dismiss them doom themselves to pay the same coin over and over again? (Your consistent attempts to dismiss the relevance of the leadership of the first great democratising reforms for today makes me wonder how history is being taught or not taught, today. I again point to how Wilberforce dealt with an institutionally entrenched trade that commoditised human life, creating holocaust level slaughter in the process; illustrating his insight that reform of culture, heart, mind and soul must come first to lead to enforceable reform of law. In his case, the same Royal Navy that started by viewing the slavers as a chief recruitment pool, stood guard at significant cost off the coasts of Africa for a full century to suppress the slave trade. And BTW, there are hints that something like this may need to be done again; slavery is in the shadows but for cause there is still an active anti-slavery society. While I am at it, could I suggest that the porn- prostitution- child sex abuse- perversion trade is yet another commoditisation of the human being that is a source of great corruption, one that is not exactly without casualties including fatalities? Indeed a recent case seems to indicate that the longstanding rumours of "snuff" porn -- to our horror -- have some truth to them. And of course where corruption is, dirty money, the power-class nexus and the SMICE strategy cannot be far away; the S tells us that cynical intel operators know the first lever of extortion connects to shady sex. Drugs are likely to be implicated. Money-laundering, is of course the next door neighbour to all of these things. Maybe WJM can give us an update.)
PPS: Rubbish dressed up in statistical clothes only manages to taint the statistics. The search space challenge tells us why FSCO/I is not going to come from blind search, and this is confirmed quite well by random document generation exercises that peter out a factor of 10^100 short of the FSCO/I threshold of complexity. Intelligently directed configuration is the only empirically warranted sufficient cause of FSCO/I and there is no good reason to lock down the scope of potential designers to humans, as the main comment notes.kairosfocus
March 27, 2017
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KF:
You have already been pointed to a direct historical exemplar, the reformation from the slave trade as led by Wilberforce especially.
And I have pointed out repeatedly that it still took extreme violence to actually end slavery. Larger death toll than all other wars combined. And, once the slave trade was abolished, people were charged and jailed for it. You have yet to respond as to why you don't think that women should be charged with first degree murder and jailed accordingly for the premeditated murder of a human being. To do otherwise either acknowledges that early stage abortions really aren't the same as killing a baby or you are being hypocritical. If you have another explanation, I am all ears.
Just remember, it is Wilberforce who lies next to Pitt in Westminster Abbey, not any of the champions of the West India Interest. KF
That is not an argument for the relevance of Wilberforce to this discussion. Darwin is buried in the abbey as well.
PS: Re Darwin, it is patent that artificial selection by breeding techniques is a means of intelligent design. So, Darwin used an example of ID to try to justify (or at least make plausible) the powers of blind mechanisms.
Did he or anyone suggest otherwise? All he did was posit the nature might act on natural variation in an undirected fashion in a similar manner that humans do with breeding. And then he also provided many examples from nature.
That is a bait-switch if this is then used to EXCLUDE ID from consideration.
That is not used to exclude ID. The lack of testing, predictions, evidence and a possible mechanism is what excludes ID.
Beyond, this system and its extensions fail as there is no adequate, empirically warranted blind mechanism for writing significant quantities of functionally specific text.
We have gone over this before. An extrapolation from zero degrees of freedom (human design) is statistically invalid.
The only empirically warranted, credible source of such text (not to mention the associated execution machinery) in such quantities — 100 to 1,000 k bits [OOL] to 10 – 100+ mn bits [OO body plans] — is HUMAN design;
There. I corrected it for you.Armand Jacks
March 26, 2017
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WJM, yup -- and meanwhile they cry up to the heavens about the censorship of old. It looks a lot like, their problem is not censorship but that they wanted to be the censors. So, they have a new cluster of scarlet letters to brand those they wish to lock out and having duly smeared, proceed to censor and de-platform away with apparent impunity. Some suggest, fork open source projects and create alternative platforms. For Youtube, is Vimeo a good alternative? What else? I see Gab for Twitter. I have heard of InfoGalactic as a Wikipedia fork, and know of New World Encyclopedia online. I know not what is there for Facebook, though Linked In may be useful professionally. I strongly suggest get into blogging, noting that Word Press can be hosted locally and that it is robust enough as a CMS to host online newspapers etc. I am suggesting the time has come to build cyber schools of all sorts. I use alternatives to MS whenever I can -- I highly recommend LibreOffice -- and will have nothing to do with Apple products. If you get a Kindle book you care about, convert it to a format you control, and print a PDF copy. I am suggesting go Android and go Linux for OS. (where is Ubuntu these days?) And so forth. But in the end I am saying that nothing beats print and radio, including shortwave radio. I have lived through a mini civil war and saw how a good newspaper and a good radio station can save a nation. KF
PS: How goes the investigation?kairosfocus
March 26, 2017
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YouTube is now eliminating the ability of people to monetize their uploads if their content is deemed "offensive" (meaning: conservative or otherwise not in line with approved thinking) and removing them from common searches. Google has already banned ads from some conservative websites they have classified as "extremist".
They are now attempting to re-establish their stranglehold on media information and choke off avenues of dissent.William J Murray
March 26, 2017
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F/N: Meanwhile, it looks like the narrative that we have "right wing" "fascists" and "extremists" taking over social media is now being used to impose a purge, through the key businesses being dominated by the progressivist narrative and through the notion that it is okay to do almost anything to a "nazi." Scapegoating and targetting work. Ironically, when bake shop owners -- equally private enterprises -- simply wish to give up jobs that would run counter to conscience [if you really just want a cake for a mockery of a wedding under false colour of law (marriage, properly is closely tied to our inherent nature as male and female and the linked requisites of sound child nurture), just go next door . . . ], they too are targetted as "extremists" and are hounded out of business. So, we see the game plan of slanderous labelling/ branding as extremists in order to delegitimise the target in the eyes of many, the better to rob of basic rights. More agit prop and media narrative games, it looks like. The march of folly continues, apace heading for the cliff edge faster and faster. KFkairosfocus
March 26, 2017
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PS: Re Darwin, it is patent that artificial selection by breeding techniques is a means of intelligent design. So, Darwin used an example of ID to try to justify (or at least make plausible) the powers of blind mechanisms. That is a bait-switch if this is then used to EXCLUDE ID from consideration. Which, it routinely has been for 150+ years. Beyond, this system and its extensions fail as there is no adequate, empirically warranted blind mechanism for writing significant quantities of functionally specific text. Which -- ever since Crick in 1953 -- is precisely what we find in the heart of the living cell, its DNA. The only empirically warranted, credible source of such text (not to mention the associated execution machinery) in such quantities -- 100 to 1,000 k bits [OOL] to 10 - 100+ mn bits [OO body plans] -- is design; esp. given that needle in haystack search thresholds for sol system and observed cosmos are conservatively 500 - 1,000 bits; and where the search space doubles for every additional bit, this is an exponential phenomenon. Such would not be even controversial, apart from the imposition of evolutionism that demands that somehow, copious text wrote itself from lucky noise filtered by incremental functional improvement leading to culling out the less successful varieties. The truth is, this begs the main question, how do we get to the shores of an island of function in a vast sea of non-functional configs, on sol system [body plan origin] or observed cosmos [OOL] scale resources including time. Consistently, this challenge will be ducked, diverted from, distorted into a strawman caricature and more, showing that there is no cogent answer on the actual merits.kairosfocus
March 26, 2017
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AJ, the rhetorical game continues. You have already been pointed to a direct historical exemplar, the reformation from the slave trade as led by Wilberforce especially. That trade [whether trans-Saharan, Trans-Atlantic or Trans Indian Ocean), as you were pointed to, was associated with a holocaust-scale death toll and was of genocidal character. The solution then as now as to win the recognition that a great evil was being carried out that was ruinous to us and to civilisation. After that was won, the Royal Navy stood off Africa for a century policing it as it had policed piracy. There are many direct parallels to the ongoing abortion holocaust [starting with commoditising human life and human rights], evident save to those suffering secondary ignorance due to indoctrination and blood guilt through direct participation and/or enabling. A glance at the thread above esp. at the attempts to denigrate, discredit and dismiss those pointing to awful facts speaks for itself. Speaks on record that is not going to go away. Speaks, exposing the agit-prop tactics and media shadow show games that are propping up what cannot stand on its own legs, a great evil. That is enough, and this case in point of the corruption of thought, reasoning, conscience and key responsible institutions all too aptly shows the force of WJM's point in the OP. Just remember, it is Wilberforce who lies next to Pitt in Westminster Abbey, not any of the champions of the West India Interest. KFkairosfocus
March 25, 2017
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Notice, you are the ONLY person who has suggested gaoling women for abortions?
I am not recommending it. I am simply pointing out the inconsistency in your beliefs.
Just as you persistently tried to do by suggesting we should be engaging in violent direct action while brushing aside the highly relevant historical paradigm case of reform from a major abuse, Wilberforce.
I have never recommended violence. I just said that if I witnessed an actual holocaust taking place, and I was in a position to do something about it, I would use violence if necessary to stop it. Wilberforce may have had much to do with the legal abolition of slavery in the western world, as did Darwin's grandfathers interestingly enough, but it took a civil war that killed more US citizens than all other wars combined to actually end slavery in the western world.
Similar cases of rhetorical enabling include the attempt to suggest that numbers of abortions have been lower in recent years, or to try to couple abortions to reduced levels of crime [note: the baby boom generation is aging (now past child-bearing with the first cohorts at retirement age) and incarceration rates have been quite high, much more direct causal factors for all of the above], trying to press us on support for activist led sexuality education etc.
I have never tried to couple abortion rates and the level of crime so I won't dignify this part of your comment with a response.. I have not suggested that the number of abortions are lower, just that the rate has decreased. This rate takes into account the demographics of women.
FYI, that pattern is a clear sign of attempted rhetorical justification of abortionism, and it is enabling behaviour.
How is pointing out that the rate of abortion is decreasing a justification of abortion? That statement just doesn't make sense.
Your obvious anger at our pointing out that we speak here of the mass killing of innocent posterity in the womb, amounting to 800+ millions in 40+ years and going at a million more per week in terms of holocaust, likewise speaks for itself.
Again, you are assigning emotions to me that do not exist. I simply point out to you that your over the top hyperbole in this regard hurts your argument rather than helping it. You can take my advice or leave it. It doesn't matter to me.
The reality is, we all once were as posterity in the womb now is, and we can confidently predict that once the hysteria whipped up and sustained by interests subsides, the mass killing of unborn children the womb will be seen for what it is, a crime against humanity. A holocaust that enmeshed a generation in mass blood guilt that then corrupted thought, conscience, rights, law, education, policy, politics and more.
And we charge and imprison people responsible for crimes against humanity. This is where your ridiculous hyperbole hurts your argument. You are trying to convince people who are sitting on the fence that abortion should be made illegal. Most people have a close friend or two who have had an abortion. Calling their friends the equivalent of war criminals and worse will only drive more people away. But as I mentioned above, you are free to continue alienating possible allies if you want. But it is definitely a failing strategy.
As for other things that catch my eye, it is simply not true that strengths and limitations of science and its methods on dealing with traces from and reconstructions of the unobservable deep past of origins are adequately addressed.
That is not the case in my country. I can speak from my own personal experience.
As for attempted goal-shifting on the significance of Newton identifying a major law without giving a mechanism...,
There was no goal shifting. Newton understood that mass and distance greatly affected gravity (i.e., mechanism). It was just how the force itself was created that he did not know. And we still do not fully understand.
the consequences of the simple conclusion that FSCO/I (or the like) beyond 500 – 1,000 bits of information is a reliable sign of design as cause speaks straight to D/RNA and proteins in the cell, thus origin and diversity of life.
This is all an extrapolation from a single source of design (human) to what we see in nature. Extrapolation from zero degrees of freedom is statistically invalid.
As for the attempt to deflect the observed fact of primitive gene and cell engineering as indicators of FSCO/I by design as fact, the deflection speaks for itself as to want of genuine substance.
As far as I am aware, genetic engineers have not created any FSCO/I. They have merely transferred it from one organism to another, or reduced it by excising it. Something that bacteria have been doing for billions of years.
And of course breeding and associated artificial selection are forms of intelligently directed configuration of life forms. Darwin’s adroit use of intelligent design as a model for imagined powers from first life up to the tree of life is a classic of successful bait and switch rhetoric.
Calling Darwin's arguments a bait and switch is just ridiculous. He used animal husbandry and breeding to demonstrate what selective reproduction can do and suggested that something similar could occur naturally, as has been demonstrated hundreds of times since then.Armand Jacks
March 22, 2017
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AJ,
Notice, you are the ONLY person who has suggested gaoling women for abortions?
In short, you here set up and knock over a strawman.
Just as you persistently tried to do by suggesting we should be engaging in violent direct action while brushing aside the highly relevant historical paradigm case of reform from a major abuse, Wilberforce.
Another similar exercise above was the attempt made to conflate deliberate killing of unborn children in the womb with the unfortunate miscarriage of a child.
Similar cases of rhetorical enabling include the attempt to suggest that numbers of abortions have been lower in recent years, or to try to couple abortions to reduced levels of crime [note: the baby boom generation is aging (now past child-bearing with the first cohorts at retirement age) and incarceration rates have been quite high, much more direct causal factors for all of the above], trying to press us on support for activist led sexuality education etc.
FYI, that pattern is a clear sign of attempted rhetorical justification of abortionism, and it is enabling behaviour.
Your obvious anger at our pointing out that we speak here of the mass killing of innocent posterity in the womb, amounting to 800+ millions in 40+ years and going at a million more per week in terms of holocaust, likewise speaks for itself.
The reality is, we all once were as posterity in the womb now is, and we can confidently predict that once the hysteria whipped up and sustained by interests subsides, the mass killing of unborn children the womb will be seen for what it is, a crime against humanity. A holocaust that enmeshed a generation in mass blood guilt that then corrupted thought, conscience, rights, law, education, policy, politics and more.
I say that because I can look on the fate of what was once a mainstay of the global economy: the slave trade.
I also spoke to a sort of mass delusion, with warped thinking sustained by media shadow shows, agit prop, interests and money. This is a reason why we need a truth and reconciliation commission in coming years, to face the truth together on how we became caught up in such a sad situation. And no, this does not need to be a Nuremberg, indeed the only custodial care envisioned is that some of the more responsible may need to go on long term suicide watch.
As for other things that catch my eye, it is simply not true that strengths and limitations of science and its methods on dealing with traces from and reconstructions of the unobservable deep past of origins are adequately addressed. As for attempted goal-shifting on the significance of Newton identifying a major law without giving a mechanism, the consequences of the simple conclusion that FSCO/I (or the like) beyond 500 - 1,000 bits of information is a reliable sign of design as cause speaks straight to D/RNA and proteins in the cell, thus origin and diversity of life. It does so by putting up a causal factor on inference to best, empirically anchored explanation that gives an observed adequate means of generating FSCO/I. The institutionalised ideological imposition of a priori evolutionary materialism in our day cannot pass this test of Newton's Rules.
As for the attempt to deflect the observed fact of primitive gene and cell engineering as indicators of FSCO/I by design as fact, the deflection speaks for itself as to want of genuine substance. And of course breeding and associated artificial selection are forms of intelligently directed configuration of life forms. Darwin's adroit use of intelligent design as a model for imagined powers from first life up to the tree of life is a classic of successful bait and switch rhetoric. But that is even more tangential to the purpose of this thread, which is why that commonplace point was not put in. (Isn't it ironic that if we are selective, tangents are dragged in to try to make us seem ignorant, and if we are more comprehensive, even by linking, we are accused of making long, pedantic screeds. Attacked if you do, attacked if you don't. Conclusion long since in place, just find a few talking points to virtue signal and "guide" to the predetermined conclusion.)
And so forth, this is enough to show the pattern relevant to the theme in the OP.
KFkairosfocus
March 21, 2017
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KF:
1: Your attempts to deflect or dismiss do absolutely nothing to change the fact that human life begins at conception and that each conceived human being is from the very beginning distinct from her or his mother.
Have I ever suggested that human life does not begin at conception? That would be a very silly claim to make.
2: Nor have you or others been able to justify the taking of 800+ million lives across a generation under false colours of law and rights.
I never attempted to justify it. I want to significantly reduce those numbers. But I am not willing to put women in jail to do it.
3: Your further moves above only show that you think you have enough rhetorical power to get away with dismissing and studiously ignoring the issue, while projecting accusations against those who insist on pointing to the ghost in the room.
Not rhetorical power. Just examining the scientific evidence, the historical evidence and applying logic to the issue. I have made no accusations against anyone.
4: You cannot answer the issue, so you attack the man.
Attacking the man's logic, assumptions and conclusions is not attacking the man. You would be wise to remember that.
5: False, Science routinely investigates the products of art. Science investigates the empirical world seeking to accurately describe, explain, predict and where applicable give means of influence and/or control. (For a current case notice how scientific counsel on environmental interventions is routinely sought.)
Are you suggesting that the arts are supernatural processes?
6: You have also brushed aside evidence of ideological censorship and imposition.
No I haven't. The fact that you don't accept my responses on this do not mean that I have brushed them aside.
7: Yet another strawman caricature.
Actually it is not. When they are prevented from teaching ID in the science class, many don't respond to the criticisms raised about ID, they cry censorship. That is just a fact.
8: This is after over 50 papers are in the literature in the teeth of great hostility and yes censorship — the investigations of several cases demonstrate that.
How many of those specifically mention ID? How many specifically provide testable hypotheses about ID and include results of these tests? How many are published in BioComplexity by one of the journal's editors? If you submit a paper that is logically sound and provides compelling supporting evidence for ID, it will be published. It may be strongly criticized, but it will be published. Given all of the thousands of words that you have published on the subject, how many papers on ID have you submitted to a peer reviewed science journal? Of all those who claim censorship, how many have posted these rejected papers on-line along with the reviewers comments so that others can judge the validity of the rejection for themselves? I would certainly be interested in reading these.
9: In the classroom, it is fair comment to note that the nature, strengths and limitations of science and its methods are too often poorly taught, especially on issues of the unobservable deep past of origins.
When I went through high school in the seventies and universities in the eighties, the limitations and weaknesses of science were dealt with quite thoroughly. More so in university than in high school, but that is to be expected. I can't speak for other school systems, but I have not seen this in the country I live in.
11: For telling example, when Newton identified the law of gravitation, he did not have a clue as to how it worked or how apparent action at a distance happened. This was the work that truly settled the cultural debates over science.
True. But he was able to model it to levels of accuracy sufficient to put a man on the moon (if you believe that nonsense). And he could support it with copious observations and measurements. He defined how it works, just not the underlying mechanism behind it. Even doing something like this would put ID on much firmer ground. Develop a model to explain how ID works (like evolutionary theory does) and back it up with examples ( as evolutionary theory does) with supporting evidence from different fields of science (as evolutionary theory does), etc.
12: The core design inference is based on the power of inductive logic, and it is open to falsification. Namely, we can readily identify observable characteristics and can trace their observed causes and make the appropriate connexions in thought.
Which is known to work quite well for human designed artifacts. But has not been demonstrated to work for biological structures. All you have is, 'wow, that looks complicated. Must be designed'.
13: In this case, functionally specific complex organisation and associated information is obvious from trillions aof cases. It is characteristic as a result of intelligently directed configuration, is readily observed to come about by this means, and it is never seen to come about by any combination of blind chance and mechanical necessity, justifying an inductive inference that it is a reliable sign of design as cause of FSCO/I (or other related abbreviations).
Yes, it is obvious in trillions of man made things. I concede this. But we already know that man made things are man made. Statistically speaking, you are not talking about trillions of cases. You are talking about one. Human designs. That would be zero degrees of freedom. You can't make any statistical inferences with zero degrees of freedom.
16: To test, simply provide a case that breaks this threshold. To date eg random documents generation exercises are a factor of 10^100 short of the lower end of the threshold zone.
Not when you include a feedback system. And evolution has feedback galore.
17: And, thanks to Venter et al, we know some adequate though primitive means to get to FSCO/I in the world of life, by genetic engineering. So there are known mechanisms also.
I was wondering when the have your cake and eat it too argument would surface. One of the arguments used by ID against a natural origin of life is that we have not been able to create life in a lab. Now you are arguing that the fact that humans can genetically engineer life tat that is evidence for ID. You do realize that many of the examples used in Origin of Species were examples of genetic engineering.
18: Your parthian shot side track fails and fails in a way that exposes the projections involved in your attempt to attack the man.
Again, provide me with an example where I have attacked the man. As I said above, an attack on a man's logic and conclusions is not an attack on the man. Even an attack on a man's ideology is not an attack on the man.Armand Jacks
March 21, 2017
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Wiki on Moon landing conspiracism makes a telling admission against interest:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_landing_conspiracy_theories#Origins
>>An early and influential book about the subject of a moon-landing conspiracy, We Never Went to the Moon: America's Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle, was self-published in 1976 by Bill Kaysing.[8] Despite having no knowledge of rockets, or technical writing[9] Kaysing, a former U.S. Navy officer with a Bachelor of Arts in English, was hired as a senior technical writer in 1956 by Rocketdyne, the company which built the F-1 engines used on the Saturn V rocket.[10][11] He served as head of the technical publications unit at the company's Propulsion Field Laboratory until 1963. Kaysing's book made many allegations, and effectively began discussion of the Moon landings being faked.[12][13] The book claims that the chance of a successful manned landing on the Moon was calculated to be 0.0017%, and that despite close monitoring by the USSR, it would have been easier for NASA to fake the Moon landings than to really go there.[14][15]
In 1980, the Flat Earth Society accused NASA of faking the landings, arguing that they were staged by Hollywood with Walt Disney sponsorship, based on a script by Arthur C. Clarke and directed by Stanley Kubrick.[Note 1][16] Folklorist Linda Dégh suggests that writer-director Peter Hyams' 1978 film Capricorn One, which shows a hoaxed journey to Mars in a spacecraft that looks identical to the Apollo craft, might have given a boost to the hoax theory's popularity in the post-Vietnam War era. She notes that this happened during the post-Watergate era, when American citizens were inclined to distrust official accounts. Dégh writes: "The mass media catapult these half-truths into a kind of twilight zone where people can make their guesses sound as truths. Mass media have a terrible impact on people who lack guidance."[17] In A Man on the Moon,[18] first published in 1994, Andrew Chaikin mentions that at the time of Apollo 8's lunar-orbit mission in December 1968,[19] similar conspiracy ideas were already in circulation.[20
--> If the mass media are so powerful at manipulation, we must ask, who guides the guides?
--> As a counter to all such games and agendas, let me cite, again, Simon Greenleaf:
Evidence, in legal acceptation, includes all the means by which any alleged matter of fact, the truth of which is submitted to investigation, is established or disproved . . . None but mathematical truth is susceptible of that high degree of evidence, called demonstration, which excludes all possibility of error [--> Greenleaf wrote almost 100 years before Godel], and which, therefore, may reasonably be required in support of every mathematical deduction. [--> that is, his focus is on the logic of good support for in principle uncertain conclusions, i.e. in the modern sense, inductive logic and reasoning in real world, momentous contexts with potentially serious consequences.]
Matters of fact are proved by moral evidence alone; by which is meant, not only that kind of evidence which is employed on subjects connected with moral conduct, but all the evidence which is not obtained either from intuition, or from demonstration. In the ordinary affairs of life, we do not require demonstrative evidence, because it is not consistent with the nature of the subject, and to insist upon it would be unreasonable and absurd. [--> the issue of warrant to moral certainty, beyond reasonable doubt; and the contrasted absurdity of selective hyperskepticism.]
The most that can be affirmed of such things, is, that there is no reasonable doubt concerning them. [--> moral certainty standard, and this is for the proverbial man in the Clapham bus stop, not some clever determined advocate or skeptic motivated not to see or assent to what is warranted.]
The true question, therefore, in trials of fact, is not whether it is possible that the testimony may be false, but, whether there is sufficient probability of its truth; that is, whether the facts are shown by competent and satisfactory evidence. Things established by competent and satisfactory evidence are said to be proved. [--> pistis enters; we might as well learn the underlying classical Greek word that addresses the three levers of persuasion, pathos- ethos- logos and its extension to address worldview level warranted faith-commitment and confident trust on good grounding, through the impact of the Judaeo-Christian tradition in C1 as was energised by the 500 key witnesses.]
By competent evidence, is meant that which the very-nature of the thing to be proved requires, as the fit and appropriate proof in the particular case, such as the production of a writing, where its contents are the subject of inquiry. By satisfactory evidence, which is sometimes called sufficient evidence, is intended that amount of proof, which ordinarily satisfies an unprejudiced mind [--> in British usage, the man in the Clapham bus stop], beyond reasonable doubt.
The circumstances which will amount to this degree of proof can never be previously defined; the only legal [--> and responsible] test of which they are susceptible, is their sufficiency to satisfy the mind and conscience of a common man; and so to convince him, that he would venture to act upon that conviction, in matters of the highest concern and importance to his own interest. [= definition of moral certainty as a balanced unprejudiced judgement beyond reasonable, responsible doubt. Obviously, i/l/o wider concerns, while scientific facts as actually observed may meet this standard, scientific explanatory frameworks such as hypotheses, models, laws and theories cannot as they are necessarily provisional and in many cases have had to be materially modified, substantially re-interpreted to the point of implied modification, or outright replaced; so a modicum of prudent caution is warranted in such contexts -- explanatory frameworks are empirically reliable so far on various tests, not utterly certain. ] [A Treatise on Evidence, Vol I, 11th edn. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1888) ch 1., sections 1 and 2. Shorter paragraphs added. (NB: Greenleaf was a founder of the modern Harvard Law School and is regarded as a founding father of the modern Anglophone school of thought on evidence, in large part on the strength of this classic work.)]
KFkairosfocus
March 21, 2017
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AJ:
>>I have addressed the over the top hyperbole of statements like this on numerous occasions.>>
1: Your attempts to deflect or dismiss do absolutely nothing to change the fact that human life begins at conception and that each conceived human being is from the very beginning distinct from her or his mother.
2: Nor have you or others been able to justify the taking of 800+ million lives across a generation under false colours of law and rights.
3: Your further moves above only show that you think you have enough rhetorical power to get away with dismissing and studiously ignoring the issue, while projecting accusations against those who insist on pointing to the ghost in the room.
>>I have no desire to continue this discussion any further as it obvious that you have no desire for an honest and open discussion. >>
4: You cannot answer the issue, so you attack the man.
>>The scientific process is only capable of examining and postulating on natural processes. That is what it was designed to do. There has always been resistance to change, as there is in every human endeavour, but it is not censorship.>>
5: False, Science routinely investigates the products of art. Science investigates the empirical world seeking to accurately describe, explain, predict and where applicable give means of influence and/or control. (For a current case notice how scientific counsel on environmental interventions is routinely sought.)
6: You have also brushed aside evidence of ideological censorship and imposition.
>>Censorship claims are too often the fall back for ID proponents who are not allowed to teach their ideas in the science class. >>
7: Yet another strawman caricature.
>>Start doing real science on ID instead of simply identifying gaps and weaknesses in current evolutionary understanding. Gaps and weaknesses, I might add, that are identified and published by scientists doing work in the field. >>
8: This is after over 50 papers are in the literature in the teeth of great hostility and yes censorship -- the investigations of several cases demonstrate that.
9: In the classroom, it is fair comment to note that the nature, strengths and limitations of science and its methods are too often poorly taught, especially on issues of the unobservable deep past of origins.
>>Without postulating the nature of the designer and the mechanisms used by the designer to take the designs from the drawing board to the display room floor (earth), you do not have a scientifically testable and falsifiable theory.>>
10: Rubbish. Rubbish sustained in the teeth of repeated correction because it sounds good to the ill-informed.
11: For telling example, when Newton identified the law of gravitation, he did not have a clue as to how it worked or how apparent action at a distance happened. This was the work that truly settled the cultural debates over science.
12: The core design inference is based on the power of inductive logic, and it is open to falsification. Namely, we can readily identify observable characteristics and can trace their observed causes and make the appropriate connexions in thought.
13: In this case, functionally specific complex organisation and associated information is obvious from trillions aof cases. It is characteristic as a result of intelligently directed configuration, is readily observed to come about by this means, and it is never seen to come about by any combination of blind chance and mechanical necessity, justifying an inductive inference that it is a reliable sign of design as cause of FSCO/I (or other related abbreviations).
14: Just to compose your objection, you composed yet another case in point. It is THAT plainly obvious.
15: Such is then backed up by search challenge for islands of function in configuration spaces, yielding the obvious reason for the empirical observation: blind search cannot search enough on available resources at sol system or observed cosmos scope, for 500 - 1000 bits as threshold.
16: To test, simply provide a case that breaks this threshold. To date eg random documents generation exercises are a factor of 10^100 short of the lower end of the threshold zone.
17: And, thanks to Venter et al, we know some adequate though primitive means to get to FSCO/I in the world of life, by genetic engineering. So there are known mechanisms also.
18: Your parthian shot side track fails and fails in a way that exposes the projections involved in your attempt to attack the man.
KFkairosfocus
March 20, 2017
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KF:
AJ, the dehumanisation of our posterity in the teeth of the evidence has led to holocaust under false colour of law. KF
I have addressed the over the top hyperbole of statements like this on numerous occasions. As you refuse to address this, I have no desire to continue this discussion any further as it obvious that you have no desire for an honest and open discussion.
PS: You have fallen into exactly the trap the NSTA did, preloading evolutionary materialistic scientism into your understanding of science as a controlling ideological commitment, leading to grand question begging and censorship.
I haven't fallen into any trap. The scientific process is only capable of examining and postulating on natural processes. That is what it was designed to do. There has always been resistance to change, as there is in every human endeavour, but it is not censorship. Censorship claims are too often the fall back for ID proponents who are not allowed to teach their ideas in the science class. There is a very simple solution to this problem. Start doing real science on ID instead of simply identifying gaps and weaknesses in current evolutionary understanding. Gaps and weaknesses, I might add, that are identified and published by scientists doing work in the field.
Without postulating the nature of the designer and the mechanisms used by the designer to take the designs from the drawing board to the display room floor (earth), you do not have a scientifically testable and falsifiable theory. I know that these words are difficult for you to hear, but sometimes tough love is necessary.Armand Jacks
March 19, 2017
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AJ, the dehumanisation of our posterity in the teeth of the evidence has led to holocaust under false colour of law. KF
PS: You have fallen into exactly the trap the NSTA did, preloading evolutionary materialistic scientism into your understanding of science as a controlling ideological commitment, leading to grand question begging and censorship. The key claims end up being beyond empirical test through that question-begging and censorship. Which instantly shows they are not scientific. In that context, "pseudo-scientific" does little more than indulge in branding the heretic.kairosfocus
March 19, 2017
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KF:
You have actually managed to confirm the dehumanisation of our posterity in the womb and how that contributes to the ongoing holocaust under false colour of law.
Since it is my opinion, and that of objective knowledge, that early stage fetus' are not fully human, I really don't think your point carries any meaning.
PS: BTW, i am not speculating about conspiracies, I have spoken to quite well known agendas and impositions driven by worldviews.
Your clip centres around the fact that the US National Science Teachers Association states that science teaching should be limited to naturalistic concepts and that pseudoscience should not be taught. Given that science, by definition and limitations, can only address naturalistic processes, your objection is rediculous. If you have compelling scientific evidence for something, it could be taught in the science class. Your objection to not teaching pseudo-science made me laugh. A "loaded word""? Maybe we should teach pseudo-math in math class, pseudo-chemistry in chemistry class and pseudo-physics in physics class. Pseudo-science is a well understood term. Examples include astrology, phrenology, numerology and scientific creationism.
The couple concise :) examples you have detailed in several hundred words and links to several thousand more words as a response to my request have been responded to on WM's thread.Armand Jacks
March 19, 2017
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PS: As for the no [compelling] evidence gambit above, that classic selectively hyperskeptical dodge not only fails to address the implications of subjectivism (as Ruse and Wilson overlooked) but also it simply brushes aside a very specific argument linked several times in this thread that starts with a yardstick self-evident moral truth. Cf. here: http://nicenesystheol.blogspot.com/2010/11/unit-2-gospel-on-mars-hill-foundations.html#u2_morals Your response as to how this fails to provide ADEQUATE evidence that we are under moral government rather than the general delusion of morality is: _____________, and if you are right, a "compelling" reason why we should trust arguments leading to such a conclusion, reasoning in general, purported experiences of a real world, etc is: ________ .kairosfocus
March 19, 2017
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F/N: Will Hawthorne of Atheism is dead weighs in on amorality of such physicalist schemes:
Assume (per impossibile) that atheistic naturalism [= evolutionary materialism] is true. Assume, furthermore, that one can't infer an 'ought' from an 'is' [the 'is' being in this context physicalist: matter-energy, space- time, chance and mechanical forces]. (Richard Dawkins and many other atheists should grant both of these assumptions.)
Given our second assumption, there is no description of anything in the natural world from which we can infer an 'ought'. And given our first assumption, there is nothing that exists over and above the natural world; the natural world is all that there is. It follows logically that, for any action you care to pick, there's no description of anything in the natural world from which we can infer that one ought to refrain from performing that action.
Add a further uncontroversial assumption: an action is permissible if and only if it's not the case that one ought to refrain from performing that action . . . [We see] therefore, for any action you care to pick, it's permissible to perform that action. If you'd like, you can take this as the meat behind the slogan 'if atheism is true, all things are permitted'.
For example if atheism is true, every action Hitler performed was permissible. Many atheists don't like this consequence of their worldview. But they cannot escape it and insist that they are being logical at the same time.
Now, we all know that at least some actions are really not permissible (for example, racist actions). Since the conclusion of the argument denies this, there must be a problem somewhere in the argument. Could the argument be invalid? No. The argument has not violated a single rule of logic and all inferences were made explicit.
Thus we are forced to deny the truth of one of the assumptions we started out with. That means we either deny atheistic naturalism or (the more intuitively appealing) principle that one can't infer 'ought' from [a material] 'is'. [Emphases and paragraphing added.]
kairosfocus
March 19, 2017
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F/N: On amorality and/or morality as delusion, Ruse and Wilson in a 1991 essay:
The time has come to take seriously the fact [--> This is a gross error at the outset, as macro-evolution is a theory (an explanation) about the unobserved past of origins and so cannot be a fact on the level of the observed roundness of the earth or the orbiting of planets around the sun etc.] that we humans are modified monkeys, not the favored Creation of a Benevolent God on the Sixth Day . . . We must think again especially about our so-called ‘ethical principles.’ The question is not whether biology—specifically, our evolution—is connected with ethics, but how. As evolutionists, we see that no justification of the traditional kind is possible. Morality, or more strictly our belief in morality, is merely an adaptation put in place to further our reproductive ends. Hence the basis of ethics does not lie in God’s will … In an important sense, ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate. It is without external grounding… Ethics is illusory inasmuch as it persuades us that it has an objective reference. This is the crux of the biological position. Once it is grasped, everything falls into place.
[ --> And everything instantly falls apart as this would set grand delusion loose in our mental lives. Even logical reasoning is guided by the conscience-driven urge to truth, right and justice, so once such a grand delusion is let loose it undermines the general credibility of conscious mindedness, setting up a cascade of shadow-show worlds. The skeptical spider has enmeshed himself in his own web. Thus, any such scheme should be set aside as self-refuting.]
[[Michael Ruse & E. O. Wilson, “The Evolution of Ethics,” Religion and the Natural Sciences: The Range of Engagement, , ed. J. E. Hutchingson, Orlando, Fl.:Harcourt and Brace, 1991. (NB: Cf. a separate discussion on the grounding of worldviews and ethics here on, which includes a specific discussion of the grounding of ethics and goes on to Biblical theism; having first addressed the roots of the modern evolutionary materialist mindset and its pretensions to the mantle of science. Also cf. here on for Plato's warning in The Laws, Bk X, on social consequences of the rise of such a view as the philosophy of the avant garde in a community.]
The attempt to dismiss such serious concerns in the context of a discussion of our holocaust of our posterity, should give pause. Especially after we saw the dictators, totalitarians and revolutionists of the last century and the havoc they wreaked, racking up over 100 million victims.
In short, in this context AJ's dismissive appeal to conspiracy theorising simply reveals yet another fallacious agit prop and media shadow show tactic.kairosfocus
March 19, 2017
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PPS: Alex Rosenberg inadvertently lets the cat out of the bag on the self-referential incoherence and self-falsification of evolutionary materialistic scientism:
Alex Rosenberg as he begins Ch 9 of his The Atheist’s Guide to Reality:
>> FOR SOLID EVOLUTIONARY REASONS, WE’VE BEEN tricked into looking at life from the inside. Without scientism, we look at life from the inside, from the first-person POV (OMG, you don’t know what a POV is?—a “point of view”). The first person is the subject, the audience, the viewer of subjective experience, the self in the mind.
Scientism shows that the first-person POV is an illusion. [–> grand delusion is let loose in utter self referential incoherence] Even after scientism convinces us, we’ll continue to stick with the first person. But at least we’ll know that it’s another illusion of introspection and we’ll stop taking it seriously. We’ll give up all the answers to the persistent questions about free will, the self, the soul, and the meaning of life that the illusion generates [–> bye bye to responsible, rational freedom on these presuppositions].
The physical facts fix all the facts. [--> asserts materialism, leading to . . . ] The mind is the brain. It has to be physical and it can’t be anything else, since thinking, feeling, and perceiving are physical process—in particular, input/output processes—going on in the brain.We [–> at this point, what "we," apart from "we delusions"?] can be sure of a great deal about how the brain works because the physical facts fix all the facts about the brain. The fact that the mind is the brain guarantees that there is no free will. It rules out any purposes or designs organizing our actions or our lives [–> thus rational thought and responsible freedom]. It excludes the very possibility of enduring persons, selves, or souls that exist after death or for that matter while we live.>>
And, Martin Cothran shows how Sam Harris chimes in:
The materialist, said Chesterton, "is not allowed to admit into his spotless machine the slightest speck of spiritualism or miracle." Materialists like Harris keep asking why we make the decisions we do, and what explanation there could be other than the physiological. The answer, of course, is the psychological, the philosophical, the whimsical, and about a thousand others.
But these violate the central tenets of his narrow dogma, and so are automatically rejected.
There is something ironic about the position of thinkers like Harris on issues like this: they claim that their position is the result of the irresistible necessity of logic (in fact, they pride themselves on their logic). Their belief is the consequent, in a ground/consequent relation between their evidence and their conclusion. But their very stated position is that any mental state -- including their position on this issue -- is the effect of a physical, not logical cause.
By their own logic, it isn't logic that demands their assent to the claim that free will is an illusion, but the prior chemical state of their brains. The only condition under which we could possibly find their argument convincing is if they are not true. The claim that free will is an illusion requires the possibility that minds have the freedom to assent to a logical argument, a freedom denied by the claim itself. It is an assent that must, in order to remain logical and not physiological, presume a perspective outside the physical order.
And this is not only a mortal consequence for Harris as the one trying to prove his point, it is also problematic from the reader's perspective: If we are convinced by Harris's logic, we would have to consider this conviction as something determined not by the rational strength of his logic, but by the entirely irrational arrangement of the chemicals in our brains. They might, as Harris would have to say, coincide, but their relation would be completely arbitrary. If prior physical states are all that determine our beliefs, any one physical state is no more rational than any other. It isn't rational or irrational, it just is.
If what Harris says is true, then our assent to what we view as the rational strength of his position may appear to us to involve our choice to assent or not to assent to his ostensibly rational argument, but (again, if it is true) in truth it cannot be any such thing, since we do not have that choice -- or any other.
Indeed, it is hard to see how, if free will is an illusion, we could ever know it. ["The Medial Pre-Frontal Cortex Did It: Sam Harris's Free Will" by Martin Cothran at ENV (echoing C S Lewis and J B S Haldane etc) on November 9, 2012, HT the too often underestimated BA77, cf. here.]
kairosfocus
March 19, 2017
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AJ, pardon, but we can scroll up for ourselves and see what has been going on, including the quite plain subtext. You have actually managed to confirm the dehumanisation of our posterity in the womb and how that contributes to the ongoing holocaust under false colour of law. The driving worldview and cultural agenda roots behind that are quite well known, in some respects for over 2300 years. KF
PS: BTW, i am not speculating about conspiracies, I have spoken to quite well known agendas and impositions driven by worldviews. As a further illustration beyond Lewontin, try this from an official declaration of the Board of the US National Science Teachers Association in 2000, as affecting science education:
The principal product of science is knowledge in the form of naturalistic concepts and the laws and theories related to those concepts [--> ideological imposition of a priori evolutionary materialistic scientism, aka natural-ISM; this is of course self-falsifying at the outset] . . . .
[S]cience, along with its methods, explanations and generalizations, must be the sole focus of instruction in science classes to the exclusion of all non-scientific or pseudoscientific [--> loaded word that cannot be properly backed up due to failure of demarcation arguments] methods, explanations, generalizations and products [--> declaration of intent to ideologically censor education materials] . . . .
Although no single universal step-by-step scientific method captures the complexity of doing science, a number of shared values and perspectives characterize a scientific approach to understanding nature. Among these are a demand for naturalistic explanations supported by empirical evidence that are, at least in principle, testable against the natural world. Other shared elements include observations, rational argument, inference, skepticism, peer review and replicability of work [--> undermined by the question-begging ideological imposition and associated censorship] . . . .
Science, by definition, is limited to naturalistic methods and explanations and, as such, is precluded from using supernatural elements [--> question-begging false dichotomy, the proper contrast for empirical investigations is the natural (chance and/or necessity) vs the ART-ificial, through design . . . cf UD's weak argument correctives 17 - 19, here] in the production of scientific knowledge.
Is it any surprise that in the years since, NSTA joined with the NAS in Kansas to threaten to lock out of good jobs and colleges students taught a more traditional (and historically much better warranted) understanding of science and its methods? I call that holding students hostage through ideological imposition backed up by media shadow show games that frankly willfully distorted the truth.
And, the beat goes on.kairosfocus
March 19, 2017
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KF:
With all due respect, you clearly do not realise that evolutionary materialistic scientism (and its fellow travellers) holds a dominant position backed by many elite power centres.
A little heavy on the hyperbole, but not entirely inaccurate. But, you forget to mention that small bit of information that evolution is also supported by mountains of evidence.
Thus instantly it is where we should see the opportunity for manipulation.
If you are suggesting that scientists and researches are subject to the same human failings that we all have (greed, envy, resistance to change, etc.) then I don't disagree. But to suggest that there is some sort of coordinated conspiracy behind it, then you will have to provide evidence to support this. Forgive me if I don't just accept your claims on this.
Then, you miss the readily demonstrated points that such is both self-falsifying through self-referential incoherence and has long been known to be utterly amoral, thus a gateway to nihilism.
I certainly have not missed your assertions that evolution and materialism are self referrentially incoherent, I simply say that your repeated attempts to demonstrate this have failed. I am not interested in reading another link to one of your multi thousand word tomes on the subject, but if you are willing to concisely (emphasis on the word concisely) present one or two examples of how it is self referrentially incoherent, I will gladly respond to them.
Your statement that evolution is amoral is moot. All science is amoral. Morality only comes into play when people use the discoveries of science.
Moreover, despite your denials just above, you have clearly argued or implied that morality is only subjective.
I have never "implied" that morality is subjective. However, I have claimed that there is absolutely no compelling evidence that it is objective. So, it is more of a conclusion than an implication. But that is not what you claimed that I was implying.
This entails that conscience-guided reason is pervaded by grand delusion and lands you in the infinite regress of Plato’s Cave worlds.
Then you have no idea what the implications of subjective morality are. I will give you a hint as to why your oft repeated Plato's cave allegory is inappropriate for your so-called debunking of subjective morality. If a subjective moral value is based on objective observations, evidence, experience, logically extrapolating possible consequences, etc., is this subjective moral value based on a grand delusion? If your answer is yes then you would have to do a lot of explaining as to why you are not lying.
You also know full well what you intend by dismissively referring to “your” [small-g] “god.”
Yes. I explained it. Your god's name is not God. The word "god" is a common noun. As an atheist I do not capitalize the word because it would would be hypocritical for me to do so. Nothing more, nothing less. That you read some other intention into it is your problem, not mine.
An all to common move by atheists who do not wish to face the fact that the reality of God is the only serious candidate explanation of a world in which we find ourselves as morally governed, responsibly and rationally significantly free individuals in community — a worldview issue not merely a matter of blind adherence to “religion” .
I'm sorry. I have not seen any compelling evidence to conclude that any gods exist.
. . usually (and foolishly) equated with blind, stupid, dangerous ignorant superstition in such a rhetorical context.
Since I have never suggested any such thing, your point is irrelevant to our discussion.
Of course, that leaves the door open to much trollish mischief that cynically seeks to exploit, manipulate and denigrate.
Again, since I have not tried to exploit, manipulate and denigrate you or anyone else here with my comments, I fail to see your point.Armand Jacks
