Christians should be eradicated?

_{Denyse O'Leary

January 29, 2015

Academic Freedom, Intelligent Design, News}

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One should perhaps be posting other news on a Thursday, but Barry Arrington’s interesting item about the slight lessening of persecution of Christians in Canada here prompts me to say, many Christians worldwide have lived with irrational hatred of Christians for a long time.

Most Americans rarely notice what is happening in Canada (or any other country). So it might not hurt to suggest that American Christian readers will presently face what Canadian (serious) Christians and (observant) Jews have struggled with for some years. We fought the battle for you. Our compliments.

Now you must join: Here we learn that Christians are a waste of good air in the United States, apparently:

The sociologists, who define Christianophobia as “unreasonable hatred or fear of Christians,” argue that it’s worth exploring potential intense bias against Christians, as it helps readers understand the “social dynamics” that exist in the U.S., according to an official book description.

As far as how prevalent the problem truly is, Yancey told the Christian Post that it’s really a small group of people that hold strong hostility, though that group is comprised of elite individuals with more societal power than the average person.

Yancey said that he and his co-author were motivated to explore potential Christianophonia after they began collecting qualitative data from interviews with liberal activists and noticed a troubling trend among a certain subset of these respondents.

By the way, I don’t think people should be dealing with a Canadian bank that sponsors persecution of Christians.

The good news: The problem created in the world’s most beautiful country (where we welcome all who come in – actual – peace) by the joint attack of Islamists and new atheists forged meaningful links between modern Jews, Christians, and Muslims.

It finally became possible to talk beyond the secular burkha of political correctness.

Specific convictions divide us but, it turned out, what unites us is the promise of a new country, a way to walk away from an oppressive past. Maybe all this means nothing to you:

And maybe this means more:

But note to visiting Yanks: If you do NOT understand what we mean by “the True North strong and free,” please sober up and then take the next flight out.

We will help if we can. It has meant a lot to us, but of course we would never presume to detain you for just being too dumb to get what is at stake.

Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose

Comments

AS: By the way, the word is "rankle" not "wrankle." And if you want to know what "rankles" me, aside from intellectual dishonesty, it's bad spelling. Our schools are so rotten these days that one can have a Ph.D. in engineering or the like, yet never have learned how to spell. That's what comes from putting liberals in charge of the school system. If rvb were half as worried about the *curriculum* of the American schools these days -- the fact that most American kids graduate from high school without learning the rules of English grammar and spelling and are utterly helpless to calculate simple products such as 3 x 17 or 4 X 13 without electronic aids -- as he is about alleged religious activities in the American schools, his criticism of American education might be of some use. What is harming American kids is not school prayers (assuming that they happen, a claim for which rvb has not provided a shred of evidence), nor any criticism of Darwinism in the schools (we should be so lucky as to have high school students literate enough to read and criticize literature as advanced as the writings of Darwin, as opposed to teen "social consciousness" novels written in a dumbed-down Basic English of 1500 words); what is harming American kids is the educational philosophy put in place in the 1960s by liberals. The liberals hated the formal teaching of spelling and grammar and arithmetic and demanded their abolition or reduction. They also promoted a wide-open options system in the high schools so that students could avoid all the hard subjects and choose all the easy ones. So you get high school students who should be forced to learn French and Latin and Chemistry and European History and English Composition taking "sociology" and "the modern family" and "driver's ed" instead. The idea that allowing high school students to read the biochemical arguments of Michael Behe would throw American graduates behind those of other nations is too stupid for words, and only someone with an IQ lower than that of a fish could believe that. Any high school student bright enough to follow Behe's discussion of the various types of proteins and how they are manufactured would be any American science teacher's dream, and students keen to read such books should be encouraged, not discouraged, by teachers. What is throwing American graduates behind the world is not that this or that is taught or not taught in biology class; what is holding American graduates back is that the educational standards are low across the board, not just in science but in every subject, in every high school in the country, except the ones in rich suburbs populated mainly by left-wing Democrats, who make sure that their kids get the best resources, so they can go on to Harvard and Cornell, while the inner-city and Southern kids get the leftovers -- and are then mocked for being backwards and religious by the aforementioned Blue State suburban left-wingers. But rvb isn't actually interested in offering constructive criticism of American education. He's only interested in reflexive America-bashing. That's what passes for educated conversation among the New Zealanders and Europeans of his generation -- bashing everything American.Timaeus_{February 4, 2015
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skram: Good of you to spend 15 minutes on a quick lookup of a very partial set of relevant considerations, and pit that against hours and hours of study I did on every aspect of the case at the time it was happening. Your data is partly wrong. It was agreed by all that Gonzalez had published 64 or 68 peer-reviewed papers since graduating, and more than 15 of those papers during the tenure-review period. (15 was considered the minimum acceptable by ISU, and Gonzalez met it with some to spare.) So your search somehow missed something. Perhaps you don't know how to use the article databases fully? No one at IS used, as an argument against Gonzalez, that he had not published enough peer-reviewed work; or if they did, that charge did not find its way into the President's final public statement of the reasons for tenure denial. The President's main excuses for the denial were that Gonzalez had not brought in enough research grants, and that he "had been denied" much telescope time. The second reason makes no sense at all; if he had been denied telescope time, that is not his fault, but the fault of the people who wouldn't let him use the observatory. To deny a man tenure because he didn't use the facilities in a room he was locked out of makes no sense at all. So basically, the only legitimate *formal* reason was that he didn't bring in enough research bucks. But it doesn't follow that this formal reason was the real reason; and in no university that is seriously committed to the life of the mind and of truth-seeking should "research bucks" be such an overwhelming criterion that it justifies setting all other considerations (academic competence, teaching ability, etc.) aside. There was no doubt about his talent, both as researcher and teacher. You seem to have forgotten that he was in on the discovery of several extrasolar planets. He already had more papers published in the 8 years since graduation than some of this older colleagues had in their entire lifetimes. His citation index was notably higher than almost everyone else in the department. (One outsider, no friend of ID, raised his eyebrows in surprise when hearing how good Gonzalez's citation record was, and thought it very suspicious that G. should not get tenure with a record that good; in his own field of science such a citation record would make a man a shoo-in for tenure.) It was admitted even by his opponents that he was a good teacher. No one charged that he had neglected his undergraduate students or his departmental, administrative duties. One of the people voting on the tenure committee openly admitted, after the process was over, that Gonzalez's personal views on ID were a factor in his voting against Gonzalez. They should not have been a factor at all, given that he never taught ID in the classroom and that none of his peer-reviewed publications championed or mentioned ID. You are pretending that his views on design had nothing to do with the decision. I contend that his views on design were a major factor in the decision, and that the alleged, public reasons cannot be trusted, given the *known* prejudice against his ID views -- a prejudice generated on campus by the activities of professors from other departments, before his tenure review was completed. There was a definite attempt to influence the decision of the tenure review committee by atheists on campus -- that is documented. This is of course a violation of professional university ethics. If a similar attempt were made to influence the jury in a criminal trial, the trial would have to be scrapped and restarted to ensure a fair outcome to the accused. But at ISU, the atheists got away with poisoning the waters, trying to make negative noise about Gonzalez to the general public, to put pressure on his department not to give him tenure (lest the public associate ISU with antiscientific creationism, etc.) This was a low, dirty trick, as Gonzalez had not taught ID or made an issue of it in his research. If the same dirty tricks campaign had been waged against Gonzalez, not on the grounds of his ID sympathies, but on the grounds that he was a Democrat, a Catholic, a Jew, a Muslim, a feminist, or a homosexual, civil rights people would have screamed discrimination and demanded a restart of the tenure hearing. But it's apparently OK to be prejudiced against someone for sympathizing with ID, and to take that into account in deciding whether he should be allowed to keep his job, even where his ID sympathies never were a factor in the contents of his teaching or research. Anyone who denies that Gonzalez' personal, after-hours, private support for ID was a factor in the decision is either uninformed, or deliberately dishonest. Finally, if Carl Sagan had been in a non-tenured situation, and had been denied tenure after a long campus outcry by Christian professors and students about his atheist popular books, then, even if the university denied that his private views and popular books had any bearing on the tenure denial, and gave some faked-up "objective" reasons for the denial, you can be sure that the various humanist and skeptic societies would be on the case, charging that Christian faculty both on and off the tenure review committee were discriminating against Sagan for disbelieving in design, and that was the real reason. But when the shoe is on the other foot, when a leading young astronomer in the extrasolar field writes a popular book that goes the other way from Sagan's, he is punished for it. It is very, very clear who has power, and who doesn't, in the Ivy League and state universities of the nation. And it is very clear what views are career killers that you must be silent about, at least until after you get tenure. This, in a nation which prides itself on freedom of speech and imagines that it encourages rather than discourages dissident and original thought. The people -- and there were at least some -- at ISU who did campaign against and vote against Gonzalez because he dared to accept ID should be ashamed of themselves for their tyrannical intellectual attitudes, which are alien to the spirit of the real university.Timaeus_{February 3, 2015
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Timaeus:
There is not a shred of evidence that G. neglected his day job to write his book. His publication rate, as I’ve already said, was already better than that that of most of his departmental colleagues during the relevant period. He published far *more* than the ISU standard for tenure (which was only 15 articles). And he also squeezed in writing a good undergrad astronomy textbook! So his popular book did not halt his productivity. Further, you have not even bothered to get dates for when he was writing and researching the book, versus his tenure probation period. How do you know the book wasn’t mostly written and researched before the probation period even started? Did you even bother to check?
This question was not addressed to me, but I can answer it. I have looked up Gonzalez's publications between 2001 and 2008 (while he was at ISU) on Web of Science. Excluding opinion pieces and sections of his textbook, we have the following distribution of papers by year: 2001 0 2002 2 2003 7 2004 0 2005 5 2006 4 2007 2 2008 1 He just became an ISU faculty in 2001, so no ISU-affiliated publications in that year. He started at ISU in September of 2001, so a couple of 2002 papers submitted that fall had ISU affiliation. Those reflect his work conducted elsewhere (U Washington) as a postdoc. 7 papers in 2003 are mostly old collaborations with people at U Wash. 3 of these are papers in conference proceedings, which typically are not given the same weight as standalone papers. No publications in 2004. This is, in fact, typical of new faculty. They have to start a new lab, build a group, and get things off the ground. 5 publications in 2005 (2 of them in conference proceedings). That's a start, albeit a slow one. This is the point where the publication rate of the young faculty member needs to take off. It doesn't, tapering off instead: 4, 2, 1 in the subsequent years. The dynamics is no good. The best year (2003) was coasting on old stuff. Gonzalez never got his group off the ground. In fact, he hasn't graduated a single student with a PhD at ISU. He had no group in effect. He had essentially no funding at ISU (aside from Discovery's pocket change). This is not a good record.skram_{February 3, 2015
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Aurelio Smith: To start off with, I demand that you retract *a lie*: "I see the fact that he raised very little money in sponsorship and neglected his day job to write a book as pretty good reasons not to award him tenure." This is an outright lie, either one you originated, or one that you picked up uncritically from some other liar. (And if you don't critically examine what is probably a lie, you are as morally guilty as if you lied yourself.) There is not a shred of evidence that G. neglected his day job to write his book. His publication rate, as I've already said, was already better than that that of most of his departmental colleagues during the relevant period. He published far *more* than the ISU standard for tenure (which was only 15 articles). And he also squeezed in writing a good undergrad astronomy textbook! So his popular book did not halt his productivity. Further, you have not even bothered to get dates for when he was writing and researching the book, versus his tenure probation period. How do you know the book wasn't mostly written and researched before the probation period even started? Did you even bother to check? Finally, your double standard is the usual atheist double standard. When Carl Sagan was publishing Cosmos, constantly appearing on Johnny Carson, etc., and thus taking all kinds of time off his day job, do you think Cornell should have fired him? Or is it OK for atheists to take major time off teaching and research to promote their world view, but not Christians? Is it your view that university professors should have no leisure time at all, that every moment not spent sleeping and eating must be devoted to work -- no movies, family time, etc.? Do you know any professor who takes no leisure time, no summer vacation, etc.? If P.Z. Myers spends his leisure time blogging or watching a movie, doesn't Gonzalez have the right to spend his leisure time writing a popular book? Either prove that Gonzalez "neglected his day job" (a very serious charge) specifically to write the popular book -- show what hours were stolen and that they weren't legitimate leisure hours such as any professor would take -- or retract your statement as a lie. Your accusation of a man you don't even know is utterly dishonorable. You continue to be stupid about Seversky. I never denied that he was banned. I said that he had time to answer me before he was banned. Your brainless repetition of "he was banned, he was banned" shows that you cannot even comprehend a simple point that is being made to you. Did you even pass high school? I'm beginning to doubt it. You asked me my qualifications to judge the justice of a tenure process. I asked you first. Give me a full statement of your qualifications, and then you'll have mine. Not until. Regarding religiously affiliated universities, it is totally legal, constitutional, moral, and right for them to require statements of faith of their professors -- provided they receive no public subsidy. They are private organizations. No atheist has the "right" to teach in a privately owned, privately funded educational institution. There is no illegal discrimination involved in such cases. And there are plenty of secular universities in the USA -- probably more per capita than in any nation in the world -- where atheists can ply their atheist trades. You'll have to drop that weak objection. You wrote: "Well, as I said, I see no reason for a teacher’s personal beliefs to intrude on the curriculum unless unless it be apologetics." The fact that you could say this indicates that you are so utterly clued out about the nature of academic subjects -- history, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, literary criticism, etc. -- that you have no business talking about university education at all. You are a complete ignoramus regarding such subjects if you don't understand that a teacher's personal beliefs ramify outward and affect *everything* -- from choice of subjects to be covered and omitted, through choice of certain biased textbooks, to the way dissident students are handled. Even the job advertisements for a new person, when a professor retires, often are loaded with personal ideological or religious bias. I've seen many academic job advertisements that are deliberately slanted so that only an ideological feminist could apply for the job -- and that is in subject matters that have no intrinsic relation to women's issues! In such cases, the radical feminists in the department have been able to assert control and get the job defined the way they want it. Personal beliefs -- religious, ideological, philosophical, call them what you will -- permeate modern university life, and the faculty is demonstrably biased to the left. If you don't know this, you don't know anything about the modern university, and shouldn't be debating here or anywhere else on the subject. I never asked for positive discrimination for Christians. I asked you to explain the statistically wildly unlikely dominance of atheists and agnostics. You won't even try -- probably because you know there is a bias there, but it's a bias you like, and therefore don't want to speak against. The problem here is not the moderation. The problem here is that you are obviously intellectually unequipped to discuss the subjects you are arguing about. I would suggest that you get at least *one* university degree (your lack of coherent reasoning suggests you have none yet) in a subject related to ID, before you pursue any more arguments with the very well-prepared people on this site, many of whom hold Ph.D.s in related fields. I would also suggest that you refrain from telling lies about people like the one you told about Gonzalez.Timaeus_{February 3, 2015
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velikovskys: There is a difference between cutting and pasting legal texts off the internet, and having an understanding of law. The texts you have cut and pasted are almost certainly old statutes no longer in force; or, if they are still on the books in some states, *every single one of them* can be challenged by an appeal to the US constitution, and *not one of them will survive a constitutional challenge when it comes.* So, tell me, did you even bother to check if these statutes are still on the books when you cut and pasted them? And did you even bother to determine if anyone in recent years has actually invoked them to block any atheist from any right or privilege held by other Americans? That is, did you do some *research*, or did you just mechanically pull quotes off the net?Timaeus_{February 3, 2015
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timaeus: You say discrimination is rife in the USA. Do you mean there are legal and constitutional barriers to atheists? If so, name them. Done, any statues which restrict Christians likewise? Arkansas Article 19, Section 1 "No person who denies the being of a God shall hold any office in the civil departments of this State, nor be competent to testify as a witness in any Court."[89] Maryland: Article 37 "That no religious test ought ever to be required as a qualification for any office of profit or trust in this State, other than a declaration of belief in the existence of God; nor shall the Legislature prescribe any other oath of office than the oath prescribed by this Constitution."[90] Mississippi: Article 14, Section 265 "No person who denies the existence of a Supreme Being shall hold any office in this state."[91] North Carolina: Article 6, Section 8 "The following persons shall be disqualified for office: First, any person who shall deny the being of Almighty God."[92] South Carolina: Article 17, Section 4 "No person who denies the existence of a Supreme Being shall hold any office under this Constitution."[93] Tennessee: Article 9, Section 2 "No person who denies the being of God, or a future state of rewards and punishments, shall hold any office in the civil department of this state."[94] Texas: Article 1, Section 4 "No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office, or public trust, in this State; nor shall any one be excluded from holding office on account of his religious sentiments, provided he acknowledge the existence of a Supreme Being."[95]velikovskys_{February 3, 2015
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Aurelio Smith: Yes, you are wrong about Seversky. I have looked at the dates of his posts. *He was still posting on this site for several days after my last challenge to him.* That is fact. Whether he has been banned since *is entirely irrelevant to that fact*. The point is that before his latest ban he was capable of replying to me, and did not. My challenge to him thus stands unrefuted. Why can you not follow such elementary logic? Your remarks about the appeals process in the Gonzalez matter are absurd. Your logic seems to be: "Gonzalez' appeal failed, so the original tenure verdict must have been just." That hardly follows. Innocent men have been found guilty before, and their appeals have failed before. I cannot find my lengthy previous discussions of the Gonzalez case. I don't have time to repeat all the arguments, which involves not only reciting many facts which you are leaving out (e.g., you apparently have no clue that Gonzalez's *publication volume* and *citation rates* were higher during the relevant period than those of anyone in his department including the Chair -- yet he was let go and they all kept their jobs), but also included an analysis of how universities work (which I know from the inside), and a detailed discussion of the background atheist agitation at ISU which successfully poisoned the waters for Gonzalez before his tenure hearing even began. (If you know anything about universities you would know that it is considered unethical for professors from an unrelated department to be trying to influence professional decisions in other departments by behind-the-scenes machinations or other pressures.) What personal experience do you have of serving on university committees? What personal experience do you have in publishing academic articles? What university degrees do you hold? What are your qualifications to comment intelligently on a tenure battle in an American university? You dare accuse me of "xenophobic" remarks about New Zealand, when anti-US "xenophobia" is the entire motivation of rvb's childish scenario about poor lonely atheist little girls in a sea of narrow-minded fundamentalists who force their religion into the American schools? Of course, the very fact that you appeal to a term like "xenophobia" marks you out as someone of the younger generation; people of my generation never needed such emotional trigger-words to score debating points. We used reason and evidence to win our arguments, not labels such as "xenophobic" or "homophobic" or "fascist." I wasn't seeking your validation for my story about the journal. I know what happened because I know the participants personally. Your opinion is of no importance to me. And the fact that you didn't immediately recognize the situation I was talking about tells me that you are a novice in these matters; *everyone* who knows a great deal about the history of the design/Darwin debates in the USA would have recognized the situation I was talking about; a hint in the right direction should have been enough. (For example, if I alluded obliquely to a certain emigre physicist associated with Princeton who used to be a patent clerk, would I have to spell out for you whom I was talking about? Not if you knew the slightest bit about 20th-century physics, I wouldn't.) Anyhow, I don't need that particular example of intellectual discrimination by atheists to make my case. Any competent observer of the USA knows that The New Republic and The New York Times and other major media in the Blue States are staffed and run largely by atheist/agnostic secular humanists and that the stories are strongly slanted to promote that sort of world view. If you knew anything about how university hiring works, you would know that faculty tend to hire people who reinforce their own prejudices. Very few faculty members say: "I think we should hire some people who believe the exact opposite of what I believe, in the interests of intellectual fair play and intellectual diversity." The vast majority of faculty are looking for followers and allies when they vote on new hirings. Now 200 years ago, that would have meant that young atheist scholars would have been discriminated against; the then-Christian faculty would have wanted only Christian new faculty. Today the case is the opposite. Most faculty are atheist or agnostic, left-wing, and secular humanist, and they want to keep their numerical majority in their departments, and they use their votes at hiring time and tenure review time to maintain the status quo. It might be too much of me to expect you to ask simple questions such as, "Why, if the majority of the US population is Christian, are the majority of the philosophy professors atheists and agnostics? Don't any Christians get philosophy Ph.D.s? Don't any Christians apply for philosophy jobs? And if so, why are so few successful in getting those jobs?" Now, ask that same question for: religious studies professors, English literature professors, sociology professors, psychology professors, biology professors ... Do you notice any pattern? Does the pattern you notice not strike you as statistically unexpected, if there is *no* willful manipulation in the hiring process to keep religious believers out and keep atheists in the majority position? Would you not expect that by sheer chance, the proportion of Christians in the departments would, over the long run, *roughly* correspond with the proportion of Christians in the population? I realize that you may not be used to thinking about such things, any more than a young, politically correct, left-wing New Zealand pup like rvb is used to learning about the USA before he makes ignorant comments about it. But maybe you could make more of an effort to think about what someone is saying before you object to it.Timaeus_{February 3, 2015
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Aurelio Smith @ 32 -
We must live in different worlds, Bob. Do you really encounter many people who “have an unreasonable hatred or fear of Christians” where you live? How does the phenomenon manifest itself?
Certainly not many, but a few (obviously what one judges as "unreasonable" will vary). But online there are quite a few: see the comments section of Pharyngula (in the past at least, I don't read PZed's blog any more). Atheism, like most other causes/movements, will have a few members with extreme views. Just as in other causes, I think they will be rare, but unfortunately they do exist.Bob O'H_{February 3, 2015
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Aurelio Smith: I won't re-argue the Gonzalez case with you. On this site I have crushed in argument, to the tune of thousands of words, a more informed person than you who tried to defend Iowa State in the Gonzalez case. It was a travesty of justice, and the atheism/materialism of Gonzalez's astrophysics colleagues, plus that of some other interfering parties from other departments, are established factors in the firing, whether you naively believe the Iowa State propaganda or not. I was guarded about the identity of the magazine in NY in order to avoid further hurting the author involved should anyone retaliate for my remarks; the fact that you don't recognize the case tells me that you don't follow these matters in great detail. I will drop the example, but the facts were as I stated. "Feminists" and "women" are not co-extensive terms; still less are "radical feminists" and "women." Radical feminists are a minority even at the universities, but they exercise immense power there, and create a chilly atmosphere regarding freedom of speech and thought on a whole range of issues. They are known to be doctrinaire bullies on committees etc. If you were actually in a university setting, especially in the humanities or social sciences, or in a semi-biological science such as psychology, you would know this; I gather you are an outsider to such subjects, probably in some branch of the IT world. How you could take my remark on Sagan etc. as possibly a call for censorship is beyond me. It should be obvious that I was contrasting the freedom of atheists/materialists in cosmology and astrophysics to write popular books promoting their atheism/materialism, without any career punishment for doing so, with the non-freedom of Christians in those same fields to do the same thing. The double standard is obvious to anyone but an atheist or materialist -- which I take you to be. I do not think Sagan etc. should be censored for their atheism, or suffer any job punishment for it. Gonzalez should not have been punished for his Christian views, either. The university should be indifferent to the religious views expressed in a professor's popular book, and take no notice of them in tenure or hiring decisions. This principle of non-censorship and religious neutrality was not followed in the Gonzalez case. He was punished for his religious views because he did not yet have tenure. Had he never published that book he would have tenure at IS now, and would have the same impunity to publish it that Sagan, etc. had for their books. I grew up surrounded by theater people. I know something of the religiosity of the people who run the theater world. Their secularity is generally very well known. So is the secularity of most Hollywood directors and producers. Even in the Golden Age of Hollywood atheism was rife among directors and producers, but there were exceptions such as DeMille. Nowadays the dominance of unbelievers among the directors and producers is virtually complete, though as always individual actors may be believers. I don't have statistics. I've heard these people interviewed on television, and I can also tell from the contents of the art they produce what they believe. Hollywood and Broadway are overwhelmingly dominated by atheists/secular humanists at the level of high command. If you don't accept this, I don't really care. (An example of a Hollywood product that falsifies historical reality for atheist ideological reasons is the movie *Inherit the Wind*, based on the play, which lies about the Scopes Monkey Trial in numerous places.) As for the general atheism/materialism of the academic world in the USA, you seem to partly grant that. You ask what effect it has. That is astounding. I can only infer that you have never thought about how "world view" affects things. The atheism/materialism of the sociologists, literary critics, religion scholars, historians, philosophers, etc. affects all their teaching and research, shapes everything they do, and shapes the students to the extent that biased or slanted presentation of material alters the perception of the material. And when graduates taught by these profs go out into the world as lawyers and high court judges, their views and rulings on abortion, same-sex marriage, etc. are shaped by the philosophies they learned as undergraduate students. Educational curricula, too, are shaped by the ideologies these grads picked up at Harvard and Cornell and Iowa State etc., because many of them go on to work as teachers, school superintendents, in state educational offices, etc. The Dover Trial judge was prepared for his stupid ruling on ID (his secondary broad ruling, I mean; his primary narrow ruling was a good one) by his naive conception of what natural science is, a modern mythological conception he learned from the intelligentsia as an undergrad, a conception which we now know, from the studies of Feyerabend, Kuhn, etc. to be based on wishful thinking. The expert witnesses for the plaintiffs fed him this triumphalist, Whig history of science, and he ate it up, because his education did not prepare him to be critical of that Whig history. He ended up mouthing the exact words of the Whig-conditioned expert witnesses (Padian, Pennock, Forrest -- three of the most robotic advocates of naive history of science on the planet) for about 80% of his final judgment. You probably believe numerous false things about both Galileo and Darwin as historical figures, due to atheist/materialist/humanist slanting of the facts (and non-facts) concerning them. You probably are not aware that Newton and Boyle championed intelligent design (though without the capital letters). You probably also are not aware that the co-discoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace, believed in intelligent design. (The intelligentsia never celebrates *that* on "Darwin Day" each year, does it? The "news blackout" on Wallace is not accidental. And did you ever ask why there isn't an annual "Newton Day" celebrated with all the hoopla of "Darwin Day"? Richard Dawkins knows the answer to that question, but you apparently don't.) Rvb's portrait of the sad little atheist girl in the school corridor is a joke, given that thousands of little girls whose parents are Christian don't have academic jobs or incomes because secular humanists have terminated their academic careers; I'm sure those little Christian girls would appreciate a new bicycle or set of clothes now and then, such as their atheist friends' parents, who are, say, tenured profs of evolutionary biology and women's studies, can well afford. I'm sure the atheist little girls are very happy in New Zealand; their daddies and mummies are probably all well-heeled university profs and civil servants. But Rvb doesn't know the first thing about America. He should keep his New Zealand sneering against America where it belongs, in his protected, middle-class, white-collar, socialist island state. He's lucky America existed in the 1940s, or he would now be under the flag of the Rising Sun, not that of New Zealand; but of course it's so politically correct of nations whose feet America has pulled out of the fire to bash America. But America's a good deal more important in the world than New Zealand is, so I assume it is the usual *ressentiment* of the small and non-influential that motivates rvb. You are wrong about Seversky. I wrote an extensive comment to him a while back, and he has posted several times on this site since then. He had plenty of chance to reply to me even if he was later banned again. I would guess he has no rebuttal to my charge of a double standard. But Seversky is a puzzle; he can be fair and reasonable, or he can be an ideological atheist thug, depending on what mood he is in on any given day. Possibly he never saw my post. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt on that single post. I won't give the benefit of the doubt to any of the others I've mentioned. I think they were basically BS-ing, and when challenged, judged it more prudent to back out in silence than try to defend indefensible claims. But if I'm wrong, they can all still respond. Rvb, where are you? Hrun, where are you? Kohoutek, where are you? I'm here. Bye, AS.Timaeus_{February 2, 2015
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BA77, I appreciate the collage, but where's the usual music?Piotr_{February 2, 2015
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Fifth, even if genetic similarity had been almost identical between Chimps and Humans, neo-Darwinian processes are still grossly inadequate to account for those differences:
Human Evolution: A Facebook Dialog - By Ann Gauger - Nov. 12, 2012 Excerpt: PM:Is it also possible that the mechanism that you refer to in your video clip is not the only/main one at play? Biologic: The mechanism I refer to is based on the standard Darwinian model for evolution. Published population genetics estimates for how long it would take to make *and fix* a single base change to a DNA binding site in a 1 kb segment of DNA are prohibitively long—six million years. To get a second mutation in the same DNA binding site would take in excess of 200 million years. Now to go from hominid to human requires many changes, most of them to gene expression patterns. It is much easier to change the DNA binding site than to change the transcription factor’s specificity. And all these mutations must work together and be beneficial to the evolving organism. The window of time available according to the fossil record and phylogenetic estimates is too short for known mechanisms to be sufficient. So do I think there are are other things at play? Yes. http://www.biologicinstitute.org/post/35586805901/human-evolution-a-facebook-dialog?og=1 Science & Human Origins: Interview With Dr. Douglas Axe (podcast on the strict limits found for changing proteins to other very similar proteins) - July 2012 http://intelligentdesign.podomatic.com/entry/2012-07-24T21_33_53-07_00
Moreover, mutations to DNA do not even produce changes to body plans in the first place as is presupposed in Darwinism:
Response to John Wise - October 2010 Excerpt: A technique called "saturation mutagenesis"1,2 has been used to produce every possible developmental mutation in fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster),3,4,5 roundworms (Caenorhabditis elegans),6,7 and zebrafish (Danio rerio),8,9,10 and the same technique is now being applied to mice (Mus musculus).11,12 None of the evidence from these and numerous other studies of developmental mutations supports the neo-Darwinian dogma that DNA mutations can lead to new organs or body plans--because none of the observed developmental mutations benefit the organism. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2010/10/response_to_john_wise038811.html Body Plans Are Not Mapped-Out by the DNA - Jonathan Wells - video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meR8Hk5q_EM Stephen Meyer - Functional Proteins and Information for Body Plans - video https://vimeo.com/91322260 Dr. Stephen Meyer comments at the end of the preceding video,,, ‘Now one more problem as far as the generation of information. It turns out that you don’t only need information to build genes and proteins, it turns out to build Body-Plans you need higher levels of information; Higher order assembly instructions. DNA codes for the building of proteins, but proteins must be arranged into distinctive circuitry to form distinctive cell types. Cell types have to be arranged into tissues. Tissues have to be arranged into organs. Organs and tissues must be specifically arranged to generate whole new Body-Plans, distinctive arrangements of those body parts. We now know that DNA alone is not responsible for those higher orders of organization. DNA codes for proteins, but by itself it does not insure that proteins, cell types, tissues, organs, will all be arranged in the body. And what that means is that the Body-Plan morphogenesis, as it is called, depends upon information that is not encoded on DNA. Which means you can mutate DNA indefinitely. 80 million years, 100 million years, til the cows come home. It doesn’t matter, because in the best case you are just going to find a new protein some place out there in that vast combinatorial sequence space. You are not, by mutating DNA alone, going to generate higher order structures that are necessary to building a body plan. So what we can conclude from that is that the neo-Darwinian mechanism is grossly inadequate to explain the origin of information necessary to build new genes and proteins, and it is also grossly inadequate to explain the origination of novel biological form.’ Stephen Meyer - (excerpt taken from Meyer/Sternberg vs. Shermer/Prothero debate - 2009)
Sixth, the is also no evidence for the gradualism of Darwinism as to the sudden appearance of the 'image of God' that so markedly separates man from the other animals:
Evolution of the Genus Homo – Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences – Ian Tattersall, Jeffery H. Schwartz, May 2009 Excerpt: “Unusual though Homo sapiens may be morphologically, it is undoubtedly our remarkable cognitive qualities that most strikingly demarcate us from all other extant species. They are certainly what give us our strong subjective sense of being qualitatively different. And they are all ultimately traceable to our symbolic capacity. Human beings alone, it seems, mentally dissect the world into a multitude of discrete symbols, and combine and recombine those symbols in their minds to produce hypotheses of alternative possibilities. When exactly Homo sapiens acquired this unusual ability is the subject of debate.” http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.earth.031208.100202 Leading Evolutionary Scientists Admit We Have No Evolutionary Explanation of Human Language - December 19, 2014 Excerpt: Understanding the evolution of language requires evidence regarding origins and processes that led to change. In the last 40 years, there has been an explosion of research on this problem as well as a sense that considerable progress has been made. We argue instead that the richness of ideas is accompanied by a poverty of evidence, with essentially no explanation of how and why our linguistic computations and representations evolved.,,, (Marc Hauser, Charles Yang, Robert Berwick, Ian Tattersall, Michael J. Ryan, Jeffrey Watumull, Noam Chomsky and Richard C. Lewontin, "The mystery of language evolution," Frontiers in Psychology, Vol 5:401 (May 7, 2014).) It's difficult to imagine much stronger words from a more prestigious collection of experts. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2014/12/leading_evoluti092141.html
Thus, the Darwinian belief that humans gradually came to be from some chimp-like ancestor is found to be devoid of substantiating evidence!bornagain77_{February 2, 2015
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Third, the best, most recent, and thus most trustworthy, fossil and genetic evidence that we do have indicates that humans are degenerating instead of evolving into something better as Darwinists imagine we are:
If Modern Humans Are So Smart, Why Are Our Brains Shrinking? - January 20, 2011 Excerpt: John Hawks is in the middle of explaining his research on human evolution when he drops a bombshell. Running down a list of changes that have occurred in our skeleton and skull since the Stone Age, the University of Wisconsin anthropologist nonchalantly adds, “And it’s also clear the brain has been shrinking.” “Shrinking?” I ask. “I thought it was getting larger.” The whole ascent-of-man thing.,,, He rattles off some dismaying numbers: Over the past 20,000 years, the average volume of the human male brain has decreased from 1,500 cubic centimeters to 1,350 cc, losing a chunk the size of a tennis ball. The female brain has shrunk by about the same proportion. “I’d call that major downsizing in an evolutionary eyeblink,” he says. “This happened in China, Europe, Africa—everywhere we look.” http://discovermagazine.com/2010/sep/25-modern-humans-smart-why-brain-shrinking Cro Magnon skull shows that our brains have shrunk - Mar 15, 2010 by Lisa Zyga Excerpt: Using new technology, researchers have produced a replica of the 28,000-year-old brain and found that it is about 15-20% larger than our brains. http://phys.org/news187877156.html Human face has shrunk over the past 10,000 years - November 2005 Excerpt: Human faces are shrinking by 1%-2% every 1,000 years. What’s more, we are growing less teeth. Ten thousand years ago everyone grew wisdom teeth but now only half of us get them, and other teeth like the lateral incisors have become much smaller. This is evolution in action." http://www.stonepages.com/news/archives/001604.html of related note: “Neanderthals are known for their large cranial capacity, which at 1600cc is larger on average than modern humans.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal#Anatomy Human Genetic Variation Recent, Varies Among Populations - (Nov. 28, 2012) Excerpt: Nearly three-quarters of mutations in genes that code for proteins -- the workhorses of the cell -- occurred within the past 5,000 to 10,000 years,,, "One of the most interesting points is that Europeans have more new deleterious (potentially disease-causing) mutations than Africans,",,, "Having so many of these new variants can be partially explained by the population explosion in the European population. However, variation that occur in genes that are involved in Mendelian traits and in those that affect genes essential to the proper functioning of the cell tend to be much older." (A Mendelian trait is controlled by a single gene. Mutations in that gene can have devastating effects.) The amount variation or mutation identified in protein-coding genes (the exome) in this study is very different from what would have been seen 5,000 years ago,,, The report shows that "recent" events have a potent effect on the human genome. Eighty-six percent of the genetic variation or mutations that are expected to be harmful arose in European-Americans in the last five thousand years, said the researchers. The researchers used established bioinformatics techniques to calculate the age of more than a million changes in single base pairs (the A-T, C-G of the genetic code) that are part of the exome or protein-coding portion of the genomes (human genetic blueprint) of 6,515 people of both European-American and African-American decent.,,, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/11/121128132259.htm Critic ignores reality of Genetic Entropy - Dr John Sanford - 7 March 2013 Excerpt: Where are the beneficial mutations in man? It is very well documented that there are thousands of deleterious Mendelian mutations accumulating in the human gene pool, even though there is strong selection against such mutations. Yet such easily recognized deleterious mutations are just the tip of the iceberg. The vast majority of deleterious mutations will not display any clear phenotype at all. There is a very high rate of visible birth defects, all of which appear deleterious. Again, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Why are no beneficial birth anomalies being seen? This is not just a matter of identifying positive changes. If there are so many beneficial mutations happening in the human population, selection should very effectively amplify them. They should be popping up virtually everywhere. They should be much more common than genetic pathologies. Where are they? European adult lactose tolerance appears to be due to a broken lactase promoter [see Can’t drink milk? You’re ‘normal’! Ed.]. African resistance to malaria is due to a broken hemoglobin protein [see Sickle-cell disease. Also, immunity of an estimated 20% of western Europeans to HIV infection is due to a broken chemokine receptor—see CCR5-delta32: a very beneficial mutation. Ed.] Beneficials happen, but generally they are loss-of-function mutations, and even then they are very rare! http://creation.com/genetic-entropy
Fourth, the genetic differences between Chimps and Humans are far more different than people have been falsely led to believe
Comprehensive Analysis of Chimpanzee and Human Chromosomes Reveals Average DNA Similarity of 70% - by Jeffrey P. Tomkins - February 20, 2013 Excerpt: For the chimp autosomes, the amount of optimally aligned DNA sequence provided similarities between 66 and 76%, depending on the chromosome. In general, the smaller and more gene-dense the chromosomes, the higher the DNA similarity—although there were several notable exceptions defying this trend. Only 69% of the chimpanzee X chromosome was similar to human and only 43% of the Y chromosome. Genome-wide, only 70% of the chimpanzee DNA was similar to human under the most optimal sequence-slice conditions. While, chimpanzees and humans share many localized protein-coding regions of high similarity, the overall extreme discontinuity between the two genomes defies evolutionary timescales and dogmatic presuppositions about a common ancestor. http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/arj/v6/n1/human-chimp-chromosome The Myth of 98% Genetic Similarity (and Chromosome Fusion) between Humans and Chimps - Jeffrey Tomkins PhD. - video https://vimeo.com/95287522
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as to:
"the “first” man and the “first” woman are purely mythical to begin with."
Actually that claim is not true in the least. The belief that unguided processes produced man from some lower animal is what, upon rigid examination of the evidence, turns out to be pure mythology: In establishing this fact, first, the anatomy of chimps and humans is far more different than many people presuppose:
The Red Ape - Cornelius Hunter - August 2009 Excerpt: "There remains, however, a paradoxical problem lurking within the wealth of DNA data: our morphology and physiology have very little, if anything, uniquely in common with chimpanzees to corroborate a unique common ancestor. Most of the characters we do share with chimpanzees also occur in other primates, and in sexual biology and reproduction we could hardly be more different. It would be an understatement to think of this as an evolutionary puzzle." http://darwins-god.blogspot.com/2009/08/red-ape.html In “Science,” 1975, M-C King and A.C. Wilson were the first to publish a paper estimating the degree of similarity between the human and the chimpanzee genome. This documented the degree of genetic similarity between the two! The study, using a limited data set, found that we were far more similar than was thought possible at the time. Hence, we must be one with apes mustn't we? But…in the second section of their paper King and Wilson honestly describe the deficiencies of such reasoning: “The molecular similarity between chimpanzees and humans is extraordinary because they differ far more than sibling species in anatomy and way of life. Although humans and chimpanzees are rather similar in the structure of the thorax and arms, they differ substantially not only in brain size but also in the anatomy of the pelvis, foot, and jaws, as well as in relative lengths of limbs and digits (38). Humans and chimpanzees also differ significantly in many other anatomical respects, to the extent that nearly every bone in the body of a chimpanzee is readily distinguishable in shape or size from its human counterpart (38). Associated with these anatomical differences there are, of course, major differences in posture (see cover picture), mode of locomotion, methods of procuring food, and means of communication. Because of these major differences in anatomy and way of life, biologists place the two species not just in separate genera but in separate families (39). So it appears that molecular and organismal methods of evaluating the chimpanzee human difference yield quite different conclusions (40).” King and Wilson went on to suggest that the morphological and behavioral between humans and apes,, must be due to variations in their genomic regulatory systems. David Berlinski - The Devil's Delusion - Page 162&163 Evolution at Two Levels in Humans and Chimpanzees Mary-Claire King; A. C. Wilson - 1975 Why Keith Blanchard really doesn’t understand evolution - August 9, 2014 Excerpt: The anatomical differences between humans and chimpanzees, which are quite extensive, are conveniently summarized in a handout prepared by Anthropology Professor Claud A. Ramblett the University of Texas, entitled, Primate Anatomy. Anyone who thinks that a series of random stepwise mutations, culled by the non-random but unguided process of natural selection, can account for the anatomical differences between humans and chimpanzees, should read this article very carefully. What it reveals is that an entire ensuite of changes, relating to the skull, teeth, vertebrae, thorax, shoulder, arms, hands, pelvis, legs and feet, not to mention the rate of skeletal maturation and method of locomotion, would have been required, in order to transform the common ancestor of humans and chimps into creatures like ourselves. Given the sheer diversity of changes that would have been required, it is surely reasonable to ask whether an unguided process, such as Darwinian macroevolution, could have accomplished this feat over a period of a few million years. https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/why-keith-blanchard-really-doesnt-understand-evolution/
In fact so great are the anatomical differences between humans and chimps that a Darwinist, since pigs turn out to be anatomically closer to humans than chimps are, actually hypothesized that a chimp and pig might have mated with each other and that is what ultimately gave rise to humans:
Human hybrids: a closer look at the theory and evidence - July 25, 2013 Excerpt: There was considerable fallout, both positive and negative, from our first story covering the radical pig-chimp hybrid theory put forth by Dr. Eugene McCarthy,,,By and large, those coming out against the theory had surprisingly little science to offer in their sometimes personal attacks against McCarthy. ,,,Under the alternative hypothesis (humans are not pig-chimp hybrids), the assumption is that humans and chimpanzees are equally distant from pigs. You would therefore expect chimp traits not seen in humans to be present in pigs at about the same rate as are human traits not found in chimps. However, when he searched the literature for traits that distinguish humans and chimps, and compiled a lengthy list of such traits, he found that it was always humans who were similar to pigs with respect to these traits. This finding is inconsistent with the possibility that humans are not pig-chimp hybrids, that is, it rejects that hypothesis.,,, http://phys.org/news/2013-07-human-hybrids-closer-theory-evidence.html
Second, despite the cartoon drawings depicting an ape gradually turning into a human i.e. 'march to man', there is actually a sharp discontinuity in the fossil record between man and ape fossils:
“We have all seen the canonical parade of apes, each one becoming more human. We know that, as a depiction of evolution, this line-up is tosh (i.e. nonsense). Yet we cling to it. Ideas of what human evolution ought to have been like still colour our debates.” Henry Gee, editor of Nature (478, 6 October 2011, page 34, doi:10.1038/478034a), “A number of hominid crania are known from sites in eastern and southern Africa in the 400- to 200-thousand-year range, but none of them looks like a close antecedent of the anatomically distinctive Homo sapiens…Even allowing for the poor record we have of our close extinct kin, Homo sapiens appears as distinctive and unprecedented…there is certainly no evidence to support the notion that we gradually became who we inherently are over an extended period, in either the physical or the intellectual sense.” Dr. Ian Tattersall: – paleoanthropologist – emeritus curator of the American Museum of Natural History – (Masters of the Planet, 2012) Man is indeed as unique, as different from all other animals, as had been traditionally claimed by theologians and philosophers. Evolutionist Ernst Mayr (What Evolution Is. 2001) In the following podcasts, Casey Luskin, speaking at a recent Science and Human Origins conference, discusses why the fossil evidence doesn’t support the claim that humans evolved from ape-like precursors. 2014 - podcast - Casey Luskin - On Human Origins: What the Fossils Tell Us, part 1 http://www.discovery.org/multimedia/audio/2014/12/on-human-origins-what-the-fossils-tell-us/ podcast - Casey Luskin - On Human Origins: What the Fossils Tell Us, part 2 http://www.discovery.org/multimedia/audio/2014/12/on-human-origins-what-the-fossils-tell-us-pt-2/ podcast - Casey Luskin - On Human Origins: What the Fossils Tell Us, part 3 http://www.discovery.org/multimedia/audio/2014/12/on-human-origins-what-the-fossils-tell-us-pt-3/ podcast - Casey Luskin - On Human Origins: What the Fossils Tell Us, part 4 http://www.discovery.org/multimedia/audio/2014/12/on-human-origins-what-the-fossils-tell-us-pt-4/ Human/Ape Common Ancestry: Following the Evidence - Casey Luskin - June 2011 Excerpt: So the researchers constructed an evolutionary tree based on 129 skull and tooth measurements for living hominoids, including gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans and humans, and did the same with 62 measurements recorded on Old World monkeys, including baboons, mangabeys and macaques. They also drew upon published molecular phylogenies. At the outset, Wood and Collard assumed the molecular evidence was correct. “There were so many different lines of genetic evidence pointing in one direction,” Collard explains. But no matter how the computer analysis was run, the molecular and morphological trees could not be made to match15 (see figure, below). Collard says this casts grave doubt on the reliability of using morphological evidence to determine the fine details of evolutionary trees for higher primates. “It is saying it is positively misleading,” he says. The abstract of the pair’s paper stated provocatively that “existing phylogenetic hypotheses about human evolution are unlikely to be reliable”.[10] http://www.evolutionnews.org/2011/06/following_the_evidence_where_i047161.html#comment-9266481
bornagain77_{February 2, 2015
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PaV,
Now, where is the mythology in all of this?
Since you ask, the "first" man and the "first" woman are purely mythical to begin with. Personifying the unknown as a deity would qualify too. After all, you didn't find it all out on your own. People you loved and trusted told you so in good faith, so you accepted the explanation (the added bonus for the parents is that they can stop a child from asking questions endlessly). It was a perfectly natural process. Some people remain under the spell of such formative influence all their lives, others change their minds later on. I don't think there's anything wrong with their reason either way.Piotr_{February 2, 2015
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Aurelio: When I was four or five, I was in the backyard having a great time on the swing. My greatest joy came when I could swing myself up high enough to look over the top crossbar. On a day when there were no clouds in the sky, a crystal-clear blue-sky day, I decided to lean all the way back when I got up onto the top. When I did that, I couldn't see a thing: only a big, uniformly blue sky, filled with nothing. I did this over and over again because of the inward feeling it gave me. I felt like I was alone in the universe---though I didn't know what that word meant. What I felt was my own personal existence---I existed even though nothing else did (a big, empty sky---a blue screen). Having come to the experience of my existence, I wondered where this reality came from. Where did my existence come from? That is, what 'caused' my existence? I couldn't really answer the question. So, when my Dad got home I asked him. I asked him: where did I come from? He was a little startled by my question, but then answered that I came from my mother and him. So I asked him where he came from. He said from his mom and dad. And where did they come from? So we quickly got to the 'first' man and the 'first' woman. And where did they come from? God created them? Who is God? He is the Creator Who made all things. Who made Him? No one made God. God always existed. Where does God live? Heaven. Where's heaven? Up above the skies. How far up? Way, way up. I chewed on this for awhile, and it made sense to me in some way. Then, that evening, I asked my Mom about God. Does God exist? Yes. Where does He live? Heaven. Why can't we see God? Because He is too great for us to see and not die (or something to this effect IIRC) How do we know God exists? We just know. God lets us know He exists. Then she taught me how to pray. Days later, when I found out the next door neighbor didn't say the "Hail Mary," I was confused. So my Mom told me that we were Catholics, and that others were Christians (Yes, we're all Christians---but I was four or five; probably closer to four). Now, where is the mythology in all of this? My fundamental experience, outside of all religious discussions(I hadn't had any yet), led me inexorably to God. I didn't 'learn' about religion, and then believe in God; I believed in God, and then was given a religion. Which is to say that our reason is fully capable of leading us to God. Religion is consonant with reason. Yet, our free will is fully capable of rejecting God, and thus acting 'unreasonably.' (Atheist scientists want to tell us that if you believe in God, then something is wrong with our reason. Yet, the problem is is that something is probably wrong with their 'will,' which, in fact, causes them to 'reason' faultily. The Left in America is, to a great degree atheist/agnostic. And if you bother to look up almost anything the Left hangs their hat on, you'll find that when you trace it back, you come up with nothing but mythology. How ironic.)PaV_{February 2, 2015
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AS, you do not have a right to insistently slap the unjustified dismissive label, “myth” across either the worldview of theism, or the narrower frame of the Christian faith.
Heh. I am pretty sure that this is a right AS quite certainly has.hrun0815_{February 2, 2015
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BTW, hrun and Seversky have recently mentioned elsewhere that they can no longer post comments here.
Nope. I can still post. It's just hard to find my computer what with all that snow!hrun0815_{February 2, 2015
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Aurelio Smith: You say discrimination is rife in the USA. Do you mean there are legal and constitutional barriers to atheists? If so, name them. Or do you mean that there are non-constitutional, non-legal, *social* barriers to an atheist President? Well, what if there are? Those things change over time. Years ago they said a Catholic could never be President of the USA, and then there was Kennedy. Then they said a black man could never be President, and then there was Obama. They said there was discrimination against women Presidents, but the Republicans have had two female Vice Presidential candidates -- and those women could have become President had they won the election and the President died. They said the Supreme Court was closed to women, but then Ronald Reagan appointed a woman. If there is no legal or constitutional barrier to an office, then eventually anyone can hold that office -- woman, homosexual, Hispanic, Jew, atheist. It's only a matter of time. Of course it is likely that the first atheist Presidential candidate will euphemistically call himself "agnostic" to avoid jarring traditional sensitivities too much. But I expect to see some openly nonbelieving candidates, probably within the next 20 years. As the culture changes, what people vote for changes. (Up in Canada, their biggest province has an openly lesbian premier. It would have been unthinkable for her to have been elected even 30 years ago. Now there is no barrier.) It would also help increase the potential number of atheist candidates, women candidates, etc., if Americans had enough political imagination and daring to support more than two parties. So maybe the atheists should get busy starting up some new parties, or supporting some minor third parties already in existence but not doing so well. But again, there is no constitutional or legal barrier. No one can stop an atheist from getting nominated, putting up the necessary money, and running. And no one can stop you from voting for an atheist in the privacy of the voting booth. And if your candidate doesn't win, that doesn't prove that he lost because he was an atheist. Maybe he just wasn't a very good candidate. Find a better one. Get a Rhodes Scholar with degrees from Oxford and Harvard, with years of successful business experience, a likable personality, a record of unscrupulous honesty, years of service in charitable organizations, happily married, etc. Such a person could win. An angry, belligerent literary atheist with the personality of dirty dishwater, like Chris Hitchens -- not so much. A nut case like Peter Singer, not so much. A science nerd with a chip on his shoulder like Larry Krauss, not so much. No atheist has the right to be President just to prove that an an atheist can be elected. The candidate has to be worthy of the office. Find such a person. Put money behind him or her. Stop whining about discrimination, and act, the same way that the people behind Kennedy and Obama acted. Regarding the TSZ personnel, I have debated every major one of them here on this site, including Elizabeth, Alan Fox, KeithS, etc. And the debates were long and detailed. We did not of course reach agreement on most things, because the programmatic atheism and materialism of most of the TSZ gang precluded getting very far. But there was some productive give-and-take; Elizabeth was capable of granting points, and she made a point of reading ID literature at length before criticizing it, which I respected. Alan Fox was always polite and I respected that. Kantian Naturalist was great because of his philosophical training; he was no partisan yahoo for reductionist scientism. I have not signed up at TSZ because I see no fresh ideas there at all, and arguments would just be rehashes of arguments already held here, which anyone can look up. My basic position on most of the issues has not changed. Why do you need bulleted points? My original claims here were made in #9 above. I asked rvb, then hrun, then you, to refute those claims, or concede them. Just about every sentence in #9 is a proposition which is either true or false. Example: "School prayers of the kind you describe have been illegal and unconstitutional in the USA since the early 1960s. If there are any public (as opposed to parochial) schools in the USA that hold such exercises, they are in violation of federal and usually also state constitutions." Are those claims true or false? If true, you should concede them. If false, show where the error is. Go through the rest of #9: lather, rinse, repeat. You shouldn't need bullet points. The prose is clear, and so are the claims. Don't just *say* that I'm wrong -- *show* that I'm wrong. If you can. :-)Timaeus_{February 2, 2015
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AS, you do not have a right to insistently slap the unjustified dismissive label, "myth" across either the worldview of theism, or the narrower frame of the Christian faith. Neither of these is a myth, first in philosophical terms then in terms of core historical warrant and warrant from the world of direct life-transforming experience of millions -- including the simple fact that I am alive to respond as the result of miraculous answer to prayer. (Kindly cf the onward links at 20 above.] And in fact you are resorting to a selectively hyperskeptical dismissal in order to justify supporting exactly the sort of irrational hostility to Christians the OP speaks of. T has already addressed the issue of institutional and cultural dominance and agenda, I add that the pretence of cornering the market on reality and intelligent views put up by evolutionary materialism leads to exactly what one would expect of a view that has in it no access to an IS capable of soundly grounding OUGHT: might and manipulation make 'right' and 'truth/knowledge' etc. In fact, evolutionary materialism is inherently self-refuting by undermining the credibility of responsible & rational warranting & knowing mind, responsible freedom and responsible conduct . . . if it were true such things could not exist. But such things do exist so it cannot be right, and it depends on such things when it tries to justify itself, falling into self-refutation. KF PS: Onlookers, as just one of the ways evolutionary materialism self refutes, here is J B S Haldane, noted evolutionary theorist:
"It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms. In order to escape from this necessity of sawing away the branch on which I am sitting, so to speak, I am compelled to believe that mind is not wholly conditioned by matter.” ["When I am dead," in Possible Worlds: And Other Essays [1927], Chatto and Windus: London, 1932, reprint, p.209.]
PPS: I jusy note on using the 20 min feature that claims about hippos and whales need to be addressed on showing empirical observation that supports the claim that a hippo ancestor or the like or Darwin's bear or the cow as discussed some years ago, can be incrementally transformed in body plan in realistic pops with realistic generation spans to make a whale by chance variation and differential reproductive success, creating requisite functionally specific complex organisation and associated info. Berlinski's count for a cow was 50,000 steps and counting. The contrast between swallowing a body plan origination mechanism that cannot pass the vera causa test and insisting on brushing off a serious worldview as a myth, as well as the history of the founding of the Christian faith, speaks volumes on the problem of selective hyperskepticism.kairosfocus_{February 2, 2015
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AS & BA, Let me clip Simon Greenleaf on the subject of made up stories:
Every event which actually transpires has its appropriate relation and place in the vast complication of circumstances, of which the affairs of men consist; it owes its origin to the events which have preceded it, it is intimately connected with all others which occur at the same time and place, and often with those of remote regions, and in its turn gives birth to numberless others which succeed. In all this almost inconceivable contexture, and seeming discord, there is perfect harmony; and while the fact, which really happened, tallies exactly with every other contemporaneous incident, related to it in the remotest degree, it is not possible for the wit of man to invent a story, which, if closely compared with the actual occurrences of the same time and place, may not be shown to be false. [Testimony of the Evangelists, Kregel Reprint 1995, p. 39.]
We can make up stories yes, but not in the face of such a test. I again invite a look here on. And on the main point of this thread -- note I have picked up the side-issue elsewhere -- if one cannot see the significance of a small but influential faction seizing power to make the shadow shows in Plato's Cave and to force many to be indoctrinated thereby in the name of education and science etc, then something is wrong. KF PS: Note, the comparison is to the ACTUAL reality, not the message that dominates an institution or community . . . as we see from Lewontin. As in, ex falso, quodlibet. Which is not just a principle of explosion on a contradiction in an argument, but a warning on how accepting falsehood for truth and refusal to be corrected or even questioned leads to loss of ability to recognise the real truth, and to loss of discernment leading to . . . the march of folly. The blind can lead the blind -- straight into the ditch. (And all along the way to the edge, they will denigrate the credibility of sight.)kairosfocus_{February 2, 2015
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AS @ 21:
People love stories and are very good at making stories up.
If your irony meter didn't just redline you should have it checked out. Darwinists have long been masters of the "just so" story (does anyone remember the bear turning into a whale story from early editions of Origin). Amusing.Barry Arrington_{February 2, 2015
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Aurelio Smith (21): Whether religious beliefs are true or false is entirely irrelevant to what we were debating here. What we were debating was the relative cultural power of atheism versus Christianity in the USA. My point was that though Christians are certainly more numerous than atheists, atheists have huge cultural, political and social power because they control most of the intellectual levers of the society. In an agrarian society, intellectual levers are much less important, but in a society based on modern methods of communication and information-sharing, intellectual levers are much more important. When 1% of the population goes on for education past high school, it probably does not matter that 85% of the university/college faculty are atheist-agnostic; when 40% of the population, including all of those destined to become schoolteachers, civil servants, journalists or professionals of any kind, and most of those destined to become corporate and union leaders, goes on for education past high school, an 85% dominance in the faculties of higher educational institutions gives the secular humanist religion (and that's what it is) huge shaping power over the thought of the current and future society. It appears that you and a couple of others here do not have the sociological imagination needed to grasp this; well, as I said, if that is the level of intellectual ability of the anti-ID crowd around here, I don't much fear their ability to impair the progress of ID. If you can't follow what I just explained, it is unlikely you could follow, let alone refute, even a chapter of any book by Behe, Denton, or Dembski, where the material to be grasped is more difficult. I look forward to your refutation of my arguments in the earlier posts above -- if you have one. But I no more expect you to be able to stay on topic than I would expect rvb, hrun, kohoutek, polistra, gmilling, Seversky or any of the others to have the spine -- or the knowledge of science or theology -- to defend their positions against my criticisms. The jackals always flee when the lion appears. And it doesn't appear that there are any anti-ID lions around here any more, so I seem to have no serious rival. I guess the "lions" are all hiding out at Panda's Thumb, licking their leonine wounds as they gaze at the climbing sales figures of Meyer's latest book, and wondering why their usual "dirty tricks" campaign at Amazon and Borders etc. wasn't enough to stop the tide.Timaeus_{February 2, 2015
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AS, When your view reflects a broad-brush across the board dismissal, it needs to be replied to. I notice, onwards that you have diverted to talking about folklore. The pivotal worldview level case for ethical theism is a philosophical one, and the grounds for the Christian Faith cannot be properly, honestly, dismissed as "folklore" or anything in that line of themes. As for "myths," here is the Apostle Peter, facing execution by Nero on false accusation of leading a cult that set fire to Rome, c 64 AD:
2 Pet 1:16 For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty . . . 19 And we have the prophetic word more fully confirmed, to which you will do well to pay attention as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts, 20 knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone's own interpretation. 21 For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.
There is a substantial issue on the table [in fact there are several], such is not to be brushed aside with contempt-laced rhetorical talking points. KF PS, added: On there isn't any evidence, I can start with the fact that I am here at all, as noted above. I already linked a discussion on evidence regarding the cluster of miracles at the foundation of the Christian Faith. What you really mean is something else, that you are unwilling to respond to evidence of miracles other than via selectively hyperskeptical dismissal, probably driven by the error that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." That means in praxis that if something challenges my worldview, I am not going to allow any reasonable standard of adequate evidence to be used. That's a question-begging double standard of warrant.kairosfocus_{February 2, 2015
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AS, headlined. KFkairosfocus_{February 2, 2015
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AS: I saw Timaeus commenting, who is always worth a read. In your exchange with him you tossed this atheistical talking point, which drips with contempt and inadvertent revelation:
The simple fact is that religious dogmas are made up. They have no existence in reality beyond human imagination.
On what grounds do you know that "religious dogmas" -- loaded and neatly vague terms -- are "made up"? With all due respect and on fair comment, you come across here as inappropriately contempt-filled, dismissive and ignorant, if you can pardon direct words that are as direct as your own. I will explain. First, we all have worldviews which at core have faith commitments that are unprovable. Otherwise the quest for certainty or "proof" leads to infinite stepwise regress and/or circularity. The issue is what faith-point we hold, why. Second, ethical theism is at first level philosophical, not a matter of a "dogma." That is, it is a reasonable and defensible faith-point on comparative difficulties, to hold for first pre-theistic instance that the best explanation of a fine tuned cosmos and of life that from cells on up is chock-full of coded information, organised algorithm executing machines, and functionally specific complex organisation is design. Where too -- in a world where there is no more reason to doubt the general testimony of conscience that we are under the government of ought than to doubt our ability to access mathematical realities and to perceive the external world -- the only serious candidate for a foundational IS that grounds OUGHT is the inherently good Creator-God, a necessary and maximally great being. (Cf. here and here on what this is about.) Next, you need to face the dogmatic implications of the sort of a priori evolutionary materialist scientism that has been drummed into the zones of our civilisation that hold intellectual pretensions. For instance, here is Lewontin's frank acknowledgement, which your cited remark quite directly echoes:
. . . the problem is to get them [hoi polloi] to reject irrational and supernatural explanations of the world, the demons that exist only in their imaginations, and to accept a social and intellectual apparatus, Science, as the only begetter of truth [--> NB: this is a knowledge claim about knowledge and its possible sources, i.e. it is a claim in philosophy not science; it is thus self-refuting]. . . . It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes [--> another major begging of the question . . . ] to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute [--> i.e. here we see the fallacious, indoctrinated, ideological, closed mind . . . ], for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door . . . [From: “Billions and Billions of Demons,” NYRB, January 9, 1997. In case you imagine this is "quote-mined" I suggest you read the fuller annotated cite here.]
This declares a cultural agenda and triumphalistic narrative, rooted in a priori -- thus, dogmatic in the bad sense -- imposition of evolutionary materialism, contempt to those who differ and adherence to the notion that "science" so defined is the fountainhead of truth and knowledge. Implicit, is the view that if one dares to differ (especially on theistic grounds) one can only be ignorant, stupid, insane or wicked. That theme starts in the title for Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World . . . given the loaded nature of that term in our time. It continues through the dismissive notion that theism is delusional, and it culminates in a triumphalism that is at best ill advised and question-begging. Fail. Fail, precisely because of ill-advised contempt for serious worldviews level reflection driven by naive and self-referentially incoherent scientism:
scientism . . . 2. the belief that the assumptions and methods of the natural sciences are appropriate and essential to all other disciplines, including the humanities and the social sciences. [-Ologies & -Isms. Copyright 2008 The Gale Group, Inc.]
You will also note that I have focussed on a worldview approach so far, as opposed to that broad-brush dismissive term, "religion." That is to emphasise the first level of the issue. I am not letting slide that the above is primarily meant to attack the Judaeo-Christian worldview, and particularly the faith of Christians who have not compromised with the dominant atheism of the intelligentsia. I suggest on this, that you may find here on a useful first level, a summary of the historically anchored warrant for Christian faith and discipleship. (Including a useful introductory video.) While many Christians -- as are most people in general -- not particularly academically sophisticated or inclined, the Christian Faith is not merely a matter of imaginary notions imposed by priestcraft. For me, at first level, the mere fact that I am sitting here to type this is a reminder that apart from a miracle of guidance in answer to prayer I would have died of a chronic disease decades ago. Millions across the ages have a similar direct experience of encounter with the living God, which is not going to be surrendered in the face of mere skeptically dismissive notions, even those that are dressed up in the lab coat. A reality beats a rhetorical talking point every-time. And, the failure of the dismissive skeptics to seriously engage with the broad reality of experience of God in life for millions across time and across the globe (ironically, a failure to be adequately empirical), is a red flag sign to many of these same ordinary people. A sign that they are dealing with closed minded indoctrinated selective hyperskepticism backed up by glib talking points. And, too often by intimidation in institutions, as Timaeus has aptly summarised. I further put it to you, that there is indeed a fairly aggressive radically secularist agenda at work across our civilisation, one that has rewritten history to make "religion" out to be the enemy of "progress." One that imagines that dressing up in a lab coat and taking science hostage to materialism is the vanguard of progress. One that fails to realise the fatal flaws in such materialism that have been on record since Plato's warning in The Laws, Bk X, 2350 years ago -- yes, the pagan philosophers took the measure and found materialism sadly wanting long ago, even before theism was a major force in our civilisation:
Ath. . . .[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.] 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], these philosophers inviting them to lead a true life according to nature, that is,to live in real dominion over others [ --> such amoral factions, if they gain power, "naturally" tend towards ruthless abuse], and not in legal subjection to them
Domineering, dogmatic factionalism driven by ideologies that have in them no foundational IS capable of grounding OUGHT precisely describes what we face today, to the detriment of our civilisation. I close with a warning from one of the Hebrew prophets, Isaiah, a warning that looks likely to become the epitaph of our civilisation, on current trends:
Isa 5:18 Woe to those who draw iniquity with cords of falsehood, who draw sin as with cart ropes, 19 who say: “Let him be quick, let him speed his work that we may see it; let the counsel of the Holy One of Israel draw near, and let it come, that we may know it!” 20 Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter! 21 Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes, and shrewd in their own sight! [ESV]
KFkairosfocus_{February 2, 2015
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Bigotry is a strong word for dismissing religions as having reality only to the extent of being created by human imagination.
That's not what I was calling bigotry. It's one thing to say that religions are wrong, quite another to have an "unreasonable hatred or fear of Christians". Unfortunately some people do (just as some people have an unreasonable hatred or fear of atheists, Muslims, Hindus etc.).Bob O'H_{February 2, 2015
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hrun0815: True to form, you again reply with sarcasm -- which cannot cover up the fact neither the new reply nor the old reply deals with any claim in my comments. Either admit that I stated the facts correctly, or refute my account with empirical data. But stop with the childish sarcasm.Timaeus_{February 1, 2015
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Aurelio Smith: I never said or implied that KN was not respectful. But his respectfulness or lack thereof has nothing to do with my point. My point was about his intellectual competence to engage on the subject-matter. I don't see that in current commenters here on UD. They appear to know nothing about what ID actually claims (i.e., they know about ID only from rumors and hearsay), they appear to know very little about natural science (i.e., they simply repeat the pop-science cliches of journalists like Mooney), and they appear to know nothing about religion (except that they hate it). And they don't respond to rebuttals or questions of clarifications; when challenged, they just back out (e.g., polistra, rvb8, milling, etc.). ID will have no trouble at all in the world with opposition on this level. As for E Liddle, yes, she was banned, but the bans have been lifted and several formerly banned people are now posting here again, sometimes under altered screen names. So she can come back. But she hasn't posted anything even on her *own* website for months now -- no columns, no comments. It's lack of interest on her part -- or perhaps lack of time -- that is keeping her away, not any ban. I don't know whether she is weary of arguing about evolution and ID, or is busy giving cello concerts, or is doing her own scientific research, or something else, but she clearly no longer wants to spend the time she used to spend wrangling on web sites. You seem to have problems understanding my writing. I don't know why; most people tell me it's rather clear. But in response to my post you accuse me of talking about religious dogmas and you launch into a soapbox speech about religion having nothing to do with reality (tell that to Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, Charles Townes, etc.). I didn't make claims about such things. If I discussed religion above, it was in the context not of the truth or falsity of religion, but to rebut the claim that little atheist girls are weeping all over the USA because of the repressions of religion. In fact, religion has been on the defensive for quite some time, and only someone who doesn't pay attention to the news and to legal and constitutional developments and to general cultural trends could think otherwise. The intelligentsia of the USA -- which has control of the major media, much of the civil service machinery, and the university chairs -- is largely atheist-leaning. Reality for a culture is shaped by those who control the means of communication. (Read 1984 if you don't understand this.) Young lawyers in training, journalists in training, teachers in training, etc. are systematically indoctrinated in secular humanism at all the universities and colleges except those controlled by religious groups. If you don't know this, you don't understand the cultural reality of the USA. You must live in Bangladesh or someplace far from life on the ground. This has nothing to do with whether or not Christianity is true. The point is that, in the USA, while probably 40% of the population holds to a fairly narrow Protestant sort of religion, the intelligentsia is largely atheist/agnostic. I made this point, and the response I got was sarcasm. No data, just sarcasm. I await the statistics showing me how many Harvard biology professors and Stanford astrophysics professors are devout Presbyterians and Baptists. I await the statistics showing me how many PBS producers are devout Adventists or Baptists. I await the statistics showing me how many writers at the New York Times and The New Republic are devout Orthodox Jews or devout Roman Catholics. But I guess I'm a fool to expect little things like "facts" influence the ideology of the current crop of ID critics who post here. I note that you are the second person who has jumped in to defend the first person I replied to -- who himself has cut and run, like all intellectual cowards, leaving others to defend what he himself wasn't man enough to defend. But that's smart-alecky internet secular humanism for you -- all mouth, no spine. Must be a developmental deformity in the body plan.Timaeus_{February 1, 2015
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Re #13: That's what you call 'facts and analysis'? If I were you I'd look at that when considering the state of ID.hrun0815_{February 1, 2015
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hrun0815: You answered my detailed list of facts about current US reality with sarcasm. I gather that means you have no refutation for either the facts or the analysis. And rvb8 has chickened out as well, I see. In fact, of about 6 different people I've engaged with here over the past few weeks, none of them has responded to any of my rebuttals. In the old days, I would have met with vigorous and sometimes competent argument against my claims. Often I would be attacked by 5 or 6 people at once, and the debates would go on for weeks. Now the people I oppose fold up after the first blow. I must infer that the anti-ID folks posting here these days are of less intellectual substance than were Kantian Naturalist, Elizabeth Liddle, etc. We seem to be getting a lot of people here nowadays with a very superficial knowledge of the issues, who want to cruise through, deliver a cute one-liner on a subject, then duck out and join another discussion. We seem to be getting people with no intellectual stamina, no intellectual courage. If this is the opposition to ID these days, ID is in very good shape.Timaeus_{February 1, 2015
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