Over at WEIT, reader Ben Goren asks: “Why doesn’t Jesus call 911?”

DillyGill @384 that should really be 'all seen evolution happen' '(which could just be adaptation and devolution) ' [oh I feel inadequate using such a holy word as evolution it means so many things to so many people]DillyGill

September 26, 2016

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Ben comes across as standing on a rock of logic and truth, luckily he his backed up by thousands, ney tens of thousands of scientists (witnesses) who have all seen evolution happen. However when you dig deeper you find that it is built on out and out lies (Piltdown man anyone) and over exaggerated truth claims about how complex information arises from nothingness with fervored imaginings by his very own high priests about what the scientific evidence means. It is such a giant pile of stinking crap that very few can be bothered to wade through it anymore and keep these people honest. So he knows already (I hope) that his entire belief system is crooked to the core and yet he wants to criticize the Bible for use of witness testimony from people under threat of death and still testified to that which they believed to be true. Your very own religion Ben is built on nothing but the shifting sands of mans pride against God. I certainly won't be wading in your bs bible of philosophical materialism with you. The scientism priests have lost the ability to distinguish where the evidence stops and their imaginations take off. There is no hope for them and so they abuse and torture the general population with their truth claims to try to comfort themselves about their own idiotic belief system.DillyGill

September 26, 2016

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Ben Goren @ 136 I too am a fan of the Matrix. I would like to offer an frame of interpretation for your consideration the next time you watch it. That is that Agent Smith is in fact Jesus, and Neo is the Anti-Christ. The battery area is the spiritual captivity area that the satanists see as Gods' holding pen for our spirits as we duke out this life business with the final battle being held over Zion (of all places) and there being a secret weapon (something like cern) with which Neo and his crew hope to win the final battle. You are theologically sound so I am sure you will see the significance of this frame of interpretation (even with neo storming the gates of heaven at the end!) Understand that it was most likely made by (non honest non confessing) Satanists in the whole Hollywood agenda (witches wands are made from such material) They see God as the evil one Just an interesting way of looking at the characters, for your consideration.DillyGill

September 26, 2016

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Interesting points, and so was my very quick look at the Talbott site. I've got a whole backlog of projects today, but I may entice myself into writing more later. :-)Aleta

September 20, 2015

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Thank you Aleta. I don't quite understand your position. You acknowledge the elephant in the room — *why in the blue blazes do elementary particles organize into functional wholes?* — which you would like to tackle :) with evolutionary theory, a little Kauffman and some of your own thoughts about neo-Taoism, meanwhile keeping things within the realm of utterly blind purposeless physical processes. Maybe one day you will elaborate on this. // edit: Again, Stephen Meyer on Kauffman:

In 2007, I participated in a private meeting of evolutionary biologists and other scientists who shared the conviction that a new theory of biological origins is now needed. In attendance were several prominent advocates of the self-organization approach. During the meeting, these scientists presented intriguing analogies from physics and chemistry to show how order might have arisen “for free”—that is, without intelligent guidance—in the biological realm. Yet the order they described in these analogies seemed to have no direct relevance to the complexity—indeed the specified complexity—of genes or cell membranes or animal body plans. Other scientists at the conference challenged the advocates of self-organization to cite known processes that could produce biologically relevant form and information. Near the end of the meeting one advocate of self-organization privately acknowledged to me the validity of these critiques, admitting that, for now, “self-organization is really more of a slogan than a theory.” Stuart Kauffman, perhaps attempting to make a virtue of the necessity of accepting this explanatory deficit, has recently celebrated the self-organizational perspective for embracing what he calls “natural magic.” In a lecture at MIT, he concluded: “Life bubbles forth in a natural magic beyond the confines of entailing law, beyond mathematization.”45 He went on to explain that one benefit of the self-organizational perspective is that it allows us to be “reenchanted” with nature and to “find a way beyond modernity.”46

Box

September 20, 2015

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OK, sounds like I do understand your position, and I appreciate the points you made about Barnham, Shapiro, and Kaufman. As I said, I don't agree or disagree with Kaufman (and know very little about his current position), and am not convinced that the problem they see exists. But I'm not interested in pursuing the whole origin of life/evolution issue, so I think I'll leave things as they stand. Thanks for the civil discussion.Aleta

September 20, 2015

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Aleta:

Aleta: If I understand you correctly, I think this is a key difference: I believe that the physical processes that take place in me do function as a whole, and that as such I am an agent of my own. You believe, I think, in a dualism whereby a human being has to have an additional, non-physical component to provide the agency and coherency that makes the physical processes a whole. I don’t think such an agent exists, nor is necessary to explain the functioning of the “organism as a whole.” (Please correct me if you mean something else by “agent.”

You have accurately summarized my position.

Aleta: To some extent, perhaps, I think you have an overly reductionistic view of the physical world. The atoms in my body are made of elementary parts, the molecules made of atoms, my cells made of molecules, and I am made of cells. The fact that elementary particles are the basis of all this does not prevent those particles from organizing into functional wholes at a “higher level”.

Why would they do that? Why would elementary particles organize into functional wholes? Why? And once the parts have miraculously done that, what force prevents them from falling apart? Those are my key questions.

Aleta: Your quote from Barnham is interesting, but I think only the first paragraph is from Barnham, and the other paragraphs are from you – is that correct?

Correct. Here is a link to Barnham’s article.

Aleta: I ask for clarification here in part because Barnham is, or at least was 10 years ago, a “naturalist” (materialist), (…) With that said, the big question – one of the elephants always in the room, is how did organisms come to be organized wholes. I believed they evolved to be that way, and I know that the residents of this site believe we were designed.

We need an explanation for why elementary particles organize into functional wholes. Barnham is an admirer of Shapiro who is the inventor of the concept of "natural genetic engineering"; which refers to the cells' ability to "reprogram" their genomes as necessary —that is to say, purposefully — in order to meet changed environmental conditions. IOW Shapiro proposes that the cell can adjust it parts — true downward causation from the level of the whole. How Shapiro (and Barnham) squares that concept with naturalism is beyond me. The only naturalistic part of Shapiro’s concept is in the name he assigned to it. Here Shapiro argues that something as basic as cell division cannot have a bottom-up (mechanistic) explanation and something else must be involved:

Shapiro: (…) it is hard to consider the entire integrated cell cycle-checkpoint system purely mechanical. This is because the network is capable of responding to completely unpredictable events, such as external damage or experimental interventions. It displays reliability enviable in any complex human manufacturing process. Note that a dividing cell has far more components than any man-made device.

Exactly when Shapiro talks about “the network is capable of responding to completely unpredictable events”, he rules out a mechanistic and an evolutionary explanation for the cell’s response ability. This responsiveness to new obstacles is pervasive in nature and is an important point to appreciate and an important argument against your position. Stephen Talbott puts it like this:

S.L.Talbott: Scientists can damage tissues in endlessly creative ways that the organism has never confronted in its evolutionary history. Yet, so far as its resources allow, it mobilizes those resources, sets them in motion, and does what it has never done before, all in the interest of restoring a dynamic form and a functioning that the individual molecules and cells certainly cannot be said to “understand” or “have in view”. We can frame the problem of identity and context with this question: Where do we find the context and activity that, in whatever sense we choose to use the phrase, does “have in view” this restorative aim? Not an easy question. Yet the achievement is repeatedly carried through; an ever-adaptive intelligence comes into play somehow, and all those molecules and cells are quite capable of participating in and being caught up in the play. [my emphasis]

Aleta: This is not a topic I want to debate. What I want to say is that, following Barnham somewhat, and congruent with my own thoughts about neo-Taoism, the possibility exists that life is “designed” by some as-of-now unidentified forces or principles (along the lines of thought of people like Kaufman) and still be thoroughly and completely embedded in physical processes. That is, design in this sense does not necessarily imply or require a dualistic, supernatural agent in order in order to create wholeness.

If Stuart Kauffman could indeed come-up with some materialistic self-organizing principle relevant to biology, then organisms could still be "thoroughly and completely embedded in physical processes". However, this is not the case. Meyer on Kauffman:

S.Meyer: Self-organizational theories have clearly failed to provide a vera causa for the origin of biologically relevant forms of “order”—the functional complexity and specified information present in living systems. Instead, they either beg the question as to the ultimate origin of biological information or point to physical and chemical processes that do not produce the specified complexity that characterizes actual animals. Viewed in this light, Kauffman’s recent discussion of natural magic and calls for a “reenchantment” with nature sound less like a bold new initiative to reconcile science and spirituality (which is what he intended) than a tacit admission that self-organizational theories have failed to identify known physical and chemical processes capable of generating the form and information present in actual living systems. Indeed, after years of attempting to solve the problem of the origin of form, Kauffman’s recent ruminations about “natural magic” sound a lot like an admission that a profound mystery remains.

Thank you.Box

September 20, 2015

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Hi Box - thanks for returning to this discussion. I think I will find it useful to both hear your thoughts (it already has been) and to articulate my own. We won't agree on some key points, I think, but clarifying our respective perspectives will most likely be instructive. You write,

The point I’m trying to make is that if there is indeed nothing over and beyond physical processes than there is just parts and no whole.

, and later you say,

My postion is that when we encircle things in this sense we have to include an agent

I believe this is a key place where we differ. A biological organism functions for the sake of itself, not for some other purpose, and a biological organism is an agent. For instance, focusing on human beings, I, as a biological organism, am an agent. I am constantly acting in ways that further my purposes and needs, from basic survival needs to activities (such as writing this post, caring for my grandchildren, working at a service-oriented job, etc.) that meet higher order needs, some of which I share with other organism and some of which are unique to human beings. If I understand you correctly, I think this is a key difference: I believe that the physical processes that take place in me do function as a whole, and that as such I am an agent of my own. You believe, I think, in a dualism whereby a human being has to have an additional, non-physical component to provide the agency and coherency that makes the physical processes a whole. I don't think such an agent exists, nor is necessary to explain the functioning of the "organism as a whole." (Please correct me if you mean something else by "agent." To some extent, perhaps, I think you have an overly reductionistic view of the physical world. The atoms in my body are made of elementary parts, the molecules made of atoms, my cells made of molecules, and I am made of cells. The fact that elementary particles are the basis of all this does not prevent those particles from organizing into functional wholes at a "higher level". Your quote from Barnham is interesting, but I think only the first paragraph is from Barnham, and the other paragraphs are from you - is that correct?

James A. Barham:How can living systems be so robust (dynamically stable), when they consist of thousands of chemical interactions that must all be coordinated precisely in time and space? From the point of view of physics, cells (not to speak of more complex organisms) should not exist, and yet they do. How is that possible?.

and then I think you added,

By “from the point of view of physics”, Barham means, IMO, that a purely bottom-up explanation — causality only upwards from the level of the parts — cannot explain that things don’t fall apart, as they in fact do at the moment of death. In order to make sense of functionally subservient behavior of parts we need a whole that compels the parts to be so. The whole needs to have real existence and real (downward) causal power to make sense of it all.

I ask for clarification here in part because Barnham is, or at least was 10 years ago, a "naturalist" (materialist), In 2005, at the Kansas "Science Hearings", he said,

On the one hand, we use the word naturalism to mean that the natural world, the universe as a whole is complete and that we should not look outside of it to some transcendent realm for a causal explanation in short. Naturalism is opposed contrastably with the supernatural, theism. ... I myself am a naturalist in [this] sense.

I like Barnham's statement, and would probably consider myself a naturalist in that sense. He, like some others (Stuart Kaufman, for instance) believe that there are organizing principle in the material world that add structure. I neither agree nor disagree with this - it's interesting theory, but I don't think Barnham woud agree with you that "if there is indeed nothing over and beyond physical processes than there is just parts and no whole." With that said, the big question - one of the elephants always in the room, is how did organisms come to be organized wholes. I believed they evolved to be that way, and I know that the residents of this site believe we were designed. This is not a topic I want to debate. What I want to say is that, following Barnham somewhat, and congruent with my own thoughts about neo-Taoism, the possibility exists that life is "designed" by some as-of-now unidentified forces or principles (along the lines of thought of people like Kaufman) and still be thoroughly and completely embedded in physical processes. That is, design in this sense does not necessarily imply or require a dualistic, supernatural agent in order in order to create wholeness. In summary, I, and all other other organism, am a biological whole consisting of organized physical processes, and I see no need to posit some additional agent "that compels the parts to be so ... [that has] real existence and real (downward) causal power to make sense of it all." [To quote your very good description of your position.] Thanks, AletaAleta

September 20, 2015

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//warning: OFF-TOPIC conversation// Aleta,

Aleta:

Box: Please, define “whole organism” under materialism/physicalism. Are the parts of the organism functionally subservient to the interests of the “whole organism”, as you suggest? Is “the whole organism” something over and beyond the physical processes which constitute it? If so, what is it? If not, then there is nothing but parts that cannot possibly “work together in the interests of the whole organism” because there is no such thing. IOW if there is no whole that causes the parts to behave as they do, then the functional subservience of the parts has no explanation in the whole.

“Whole organism" just means the totality of my biological being, yes the parts are subservient to the whole (but not in the way you imply in your last sentence), and no, there is nothing beyond physical processes. This is standard biology.

The point I’m trying to make is that if there is indeed nothing over and beyond physical processes than there is just parts and no whole. In what sense is there a whole when we consider a watch? From a purely materialistic view there are just parts. However the functions of those parts are subservient to the function of the watch which is to tell you the time. In #355 you correctly point out that — opposite to an organism — a watch doesn’t function for the sake of itself. IOW we cannot encircle the watch and say: “this is a functionally coherent whole thing”, because the function of a watch refers to something outside itself. My postion is that when we encircle things in this sense we have to include an agent. Similarly the letters you read here and now are functionally subservient to words, which in turn are subservient to sentences, which in turn are subservient to the “whole post”. However, we did not reach a point labeled “last stop” — again we cannot encircle anything yet — , because obviously there is in reality not something like a “whole post” that wants to tell you something. The agent who attached meaning and functionality to the post you are reading is over and beyond the letters, words, sentences and the “whole post” — obviously I’m referring to myself.

Aleta #355: The difference I see is that a living organism is functioning for the sake of itself – it is breathing, digesting, moving, etc. in order to keep on living. It has an internal, self-sufficient purpose – it is acting for the benefit of itself. The watch is not like that.

I couldn't agree more. And I think this means we can draw a circle around an organism, since it is functionally coherent — which means there is no functional reference to something outside the organism.

Aleta: What I gather is your view is that there is something, the whole, that is somehow separate from the parts and causes the parts to function for the benefit of the whole. That doesn’t seem to me to need to be the case.

When we encircle an organism does that mean that an agent is included — similar to a watch and any post on this forum? I believe this must indeed be the case. If the organism “wants to keep on living”, as you mentioned, then its parts — the atoms, the molecules — cannot be all there is, because they don’t have the organism in mind and don’t give a hoot about it being alive or not. IOW if there are just parts, there is nothing that compels those parts to be functionally subservient to a non-existing whole. Barnham puts it like this:

James A. Barham: How can living systems be so robust (dynamically stable), when they consist of thousands of chemical interactions that must all be coordinated precisely in time and space? From the point of view of physics, cells (not to speak of more complex organisms) should not exist, and yet they do. How is that possible?.

By “from the point of view of physics”, Barham means, IMO, that a purely bottom-up explanation — causality only upwards from the level of the parts — cannot explain that things don’t fall apart, as they in fact do at the moment of death. In order to make sense of functionally subservient behavior of parts we need a whole that compels the parts to be so. The whole needs to have real existence and real (downward) causal power to make sense of it all.

Aleta: Let’s think of a simpler animal – say a bird (although we could easily pick something much simpler than that). The various parts of the bird work together in order for the bird to go about the business of being a bird: to find food, to reproduce and raise young, to escape predators, etc.

I hope that my question "what is the bird?" makes sense to you now.Box

September 20, 2015

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Vaal and Ben Goren, I'll make a quick final comment regarding a question you both raised regarding St. Joseph of Cupertino's levitations. Vaal, you wrote:

If you were to go through all the claims for Sai Baba and pile on naturalistic upon naturalistic explanation, his devotees will make the SAME type of responses you will make to atheists “You are exhibiting a clear bias in rejecting a mass of eyewitness testimony to miracles.” More important, you will necessarily start undermining all sorts of Christian apologetics for your miracles. “Legends of resurrections don’t arise so soon after the death of a religious figure.” “People don’t just become convinced they’ve seen a bodily resurrection.” Except, oops, they do – with indian God men. The more miracles you explain away for the God-men, the more you simply high-light the gullibility, the tendency toward error, of purported “eyewitness testimony” and so appealing to that very type of evidence is shown to be dubious... This is the NATURE of eyewitness testimony – unreliable, and never more so than when it comes to extraordinary claims. It doesn’t matter HOW impressive some claims sound, when you have direct access to the people making the claims – when you can actually cross-examine them – stories begin to falter and change. Why do you think this happens in court all the time? And worse, when you get direct access to the figure at the centre of supernatural claims, he/she doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

1. What you don't seem to understand is that my position is half-way between yours and that of the credulous believer in Sai Baba. Like you, I accept that extraordinary evidence. Unlike you, I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is, and say exactly how extraordinary the evidence has to be. If the combined probability that the eyewitnesses were mistaken is below 1 in 10^120, then we can accept the miracle report as credible. What I've tried to show is that the miracles of St. Joseph of Cupertino meet this standard, while the miracles of Sai Baba don't. 2. In any case, your argument is self-defeating. If eyewitnesses to an event can be mistaken, even on repeated occasions, then we can't trust reports about the results of scientific experiments, either. And claiming that these experiments can be replicated completely misses the point. The whole purpose of replication is to reduce the probability of self-deception and other forms of error. By the same token, the miracles of St. Joseph of Cupertino were performed at many different locations over a period of thirty years and had thousands of witnesses. The miracles of Benny Hinn were due to obvious fraud: the Wikipedia article on his life says that quadriplegics and people with muscular dystrophy are never allowed on stage. There was no way to fake a levitation at a height of several meters, over a period of several hours, in the seventeenth century. Got to go now. Thanks for the exchange.vjtorley

September 19, 2015

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Axel @370. Thanks for your comment.StephenB

September 19, 2015

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rtkufner, since you are such a church library hound, perhaps you would like to reference the specific ancient manuscripts that substantiate this outlandish claim of yours? "compilation edited by an order of serial child rapists from Rome!" Personally, I think you should be banned from UD for making such a outlandish remark about the Church fathers who gave us the new testament. Hopefully Mr. Arrington sees it and does so.bornagain77

September 19, 2015

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Oh no, I got my information about christianity from the Roman Catholic Church, you may have heard of it... You know, oldest and largest christian organization in the world, whose leader is said to be the vicar of Jesus Christ on earth and whose founder is said to be Peter, one of the twelve apostles of Jesus Christ. Why watch random YouTube videos when anyone can easily research the history of the development of the christian biblical canon by themselves just by visiting the nearest church library. Get off YouTube and try it sometime. Just don't forget to make sure you're over 14 years of age before going there, to be on the safe side.rtkufner

September 19, 2015

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"And listen up people: you can all trust StephenB on this – he got the info first hand from a 1600 years old semitic mythology compilation edited by an order of serial child rapists from Rome!" Says the man who apparently gets most of his mis-information about Christianity from youtube comments from his fellow militant atheists

Werner Heisenberg vs. the New Atheists https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzu8as5sanY Why I Am a Christian (David Wood, Former Atheist) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DakEcY7Z5GU

bornagain77

September 19, 2015

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"God has created a moral universe of soul making. That is one of many reasons why He decided to work through people as the primary means of achieving his purposes. Accordingly, He has dialed 9-1-1 millions of times to those creatures of His who wield worldly power, commanding them to serve the needs of those less privileged. For the most part, the former group has failed the test of love and will, someday, have to pay for their hardness of heart. By contrast, those who suffer without mercy in this world will find peace in the next." And listen up people: you can all trust StephenB on this - he got the info first hand from a 1600 years old semitic mythology compilation edited by an order of serial child rapists from Rome!rtkufner

September 19, 2015

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An eloquent, 'no nonsense' apologia, Stephen. And a beautifully apt epilogue. What could be more compelling than the very beauty of the Beatitudes? There are more things in heaven and on earth than were ever dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio Vaal.Axel

September 19, 2015

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Ben Goren, As a tribute to a thread created in your name, I will make my final response to you very brief. God has created a moral universe of soul making. That is one of many reasons why He decided to work through people as the primary means of achieving his purposes. Accordingly, He has dialed 9-1-1 millions of times to those creatures of His who wield worldly power, commanding them to serve the needs of those less privileged. For the most part, the former group has failed the test of love and will, someday, have to pay for their hardness of heart. By contrast, those who suffer without mercy in this world will find peace in the next. "Blessed are they who mourn, for they shall be comforted."StephenB

September 18, 2015

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Vaal

All the purported “virtues” you want to ascribe to “agape love” are there by understanding “love” and “Morality” separately, for all the reasons I’ve already given.

To practice agape love is to practice all the virtues, including humility, courage, prudence, justice, and temperance. When St Maximilian Kolbe stepped forward in a Nazi prison camp to offer up his life for another inmate, his act of agape love would have impossible had it not been tied to other virtues: the courage to sacrifice his life, the humility to put someone else first, the prudence to know that it was not a simple reckless act, .and the love of God to fortify his will.

Love is a good thing to be promoted to the extent anyone can experience it, as love is not only a good in of itself, but also increases moral behavior.

No question about it.

All the purported virtues you are trying to claim for your “agape love” are there with my description. EXCEPT my description does not make the mistake of entangling moral prescription WITH love and entailing peril and evil as being necessary FOR LOVE. This is where you went off the rails, and haven’t gotten back on

Feelings” of love can exist in the absence of virtue. Agape love cannot exist in the absence of virtue.

On my understanding, if I’m experiencing love just by being with my family, that is a completely legitimate concept of love – one accepted by the majority of people. And IF my family is put in peril, both my love and my understanding of morality will compel me to sacrifice for their safety if necessary.

Feelings of love can exist in the absence of virtue. Agape love cannot exist in the absence of virtue. If your family is in peril, and if you are willing to endure pain of lay down your life for their sake, then you have the virtue of courage and, are to that extent, capable practicing agape love. Without those virtues, you will not endure and overcome the pain. On this earth, real love (agape) is inseparable from suffering. There is no way around it. When Adam Walsh’s son was missing, he suffered terribly. After discovering that his son had been murdered and decapitated, he suffered more. If he had no children to love, he would not have suffered in exactly that way. He had the virtue of courage and patience, but he increased in virtue by learning not to hate in spite of his feelings. Love cannot be divorced from morality. Indeed, the first moral commandment is to love, not necessarily to have loving feelings, although that is great, but to perform loving acts no matter how you feel. In the next word, love can exist without suffering. That is one of the reasons you ought to strive for heaven and dispense with your nonsensical atheism. .

Whereas your conception takes the FURTHER implication that sacrifice/peril/evil are NECESSARY for love – that it MUST be demonstrated in such situations in order to be “real” love.

Of course. Love is as love does. It is the action that counts, not the sentiment. You can feel love for the starving children in Africa all day long, but if you don’t send them any money, you don’t love them.

THIS, as I’ve shown when applied to my family situation, is based on no principle you have been able to actually establish. When it is tested against our morality for consistency, as in my family example, it results in contradicting what we’d actually, morally accept. It suggests my wife and child MUST be put in peril or my love is not demonstrable or genuine. And that is monstrous.

That is not an accurate account of what we are discussing. Of course, you can have agape love in the absence of peril or suffering. That is not the point, which is this: If you do love, then you will experience peril and suffering, and will be required to face it and overcome--it in a moral context. If you fail to act, you fail the test of love. The moral test of love cannot be avoided.

Not to mention you still are unable to answer the free will arguments we’ve given. You claim it’s a contradiction for God to grant free will, but then interfere with it.

Yes, and my argument is unassailable. It is not logically possible to grant free will and take it away at the same time.

But I have pointed out that it’s logically possible for God to create nobler creatures with free will whose nature it is to choose The Good far more reliably than we do.

And I have already pointed out that, according to Christianity, God already did create nobler creatures than we are, whose free will had not been compromised as ours have been. Nevertheless, they failed to pass the test of love. As a result, we suffer. Every sin produces a debt of suffering and guilt. Now, we are being tested again. Will we cooperate with God to find our way back? Or, will we fail the test of love once again?

You replied God did this, but that now we aren’t so noble.

Precisely.

But never resolved that contradiction – why did noble creatures with the nature of choosing the good choose to sin, and if so how does this make sense of their nature not to sin????

I explained that as well. If free will cannot be misused, that is, if it automatically chooses God, that is, if it is not subjected to the temptation of choosing self and embracing worldly values at the exclusion of God, then it cannot choose love of God over love of self. In other words, one cannot choose to love God unless the alternative choice is available. There is no charm in a yes unless a no is possible.

You also fail to answer the problem of heaven. In heaven apparently we are morally relevant beings who have free will but who don’t sin. God Himself is also this way. Therefore free will is NOT logically necessary for goodness.

Again, I have already answered this.

You can’t say “but it IS necessary to pass the test to get into heaven” but you can’t establish that as anything but an arbitrary rule because heaven itself UNDERMINES any claim to the necessity of evil for free will.

How can heaven itself undermine the conditions for entering heaven? That isn’t even a rational statement. Just because something is not necessary in heaven doesn’t mean that it is not necessary on earth.

I don’t expect you to provide a cogent answer anytime soon; I’ve seen Christians try in every way possible and never get there.

I try to answer all your questions in a timely way. I think I have made a successful case against your anti-Christian claims.StephenB

September 18, 2015

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Quantum processes have been invoked by all sorts of people trying to explain mystical, theistic, occult New-Age, and other types of phenomena. All of these are making huge and unwarranted leaps from phenomena which can be teased out in experiment to unsupported metaphysical assertions. Quantum processes show that the world is, at it's most basic level, probabilistic, and that we can't know what it is "really" like because measuring the phenomena causes it to become certain, in our eyes, which is different than it was before the measurement. This is all fascinating, but thus declaring that "materialism is dead" and "In the Beginning was the Word" is true is exploiting the science in order to try to support religious dogma. The world is not at all the way we used to think it was, and it is really beyond our comprehension to imagine what it might be like from a non-human perspective, but that doesn't mean there is a god that is behind it all - it's still just the world, as it is. Perhaps some day people will conclusively, verifiably show a relationship between quantum processes and consciousness, either ours or at the cosmic level ... but, as Aragorn said, today is not that day. However, if they do, my money would be on a cosmic consciousness such as is conceived by the eastern religions, not the active, willful God of Christianity.Aleta

September 18, 2015

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daveS, that you, an atheist who won't even defend neo-Darwinism or clearly state what his alternative to neo-Darwinism is, constantly try to find mathematical technicalities to imply that you are smarter than ID proponents gets very old (i.e. a one trick pony) and is very disingenuous and dishonest to the evidence at hand. The evidence from quantum mechanics is unambiguous in its refutation of reductive materialism. That you would try to take away from that development in science with your stupid game makes you a intellectual jerk on par with Krauss in my book. i.e. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_O-QqC9yM28bornagain77

September 18, 2015

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Aleta, it is clear you have no clue what quantum mechanics implies or is about.

Written by a guy who doesn't know a bra from a ket. loldaveS

September 18, 2015

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Aleta, it is clear you have no clue what quantum mechanics implies or is about. Materialism is dead. Your ignorance as to the state of evidence is not evidence to the contrary. Perhaps you would actually like to overturn the Leggett's (or Wheeler's) experiments with actual scientific evidence to the contrary instead of spouting your ignorance of the situation? "hidden variables don’t exist. If you have proved them come back with PROOF and a Nobel Prize. John Bell theorized that maybe the particles can signal faster than the speed of light. This is what he advocated in his interview in “The Ghost in the Atom.” But the violation of Leggett’s inequality in 2007 takes away that possibility and rules out all non-local hidden variables. Observation instantly defines what properties a particle has and if you assume they had properties before we measured them, then you need evidence, because right now there is none which is why realism is dead, and materialism dies with it. How does the particle know what we are going to pick so it can conform to that?" per Jimfit https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/mathematician-planck-data-disappoints-multiverse-claims/#comment-548632 Of note: That is my absolute last reply to you personally in this thread. I will only expose you for the benefit of others.bornagain77

September 18, 2015

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ba77 writes,

Aleta, as was pointed out to you and you, since you are a dogmatic atheist, completely ignored, quantum mechanics is not compatible with materialism. You need a non-local, beyond space and time, cause to explain quantum entanglement/information in molecular biology.

The fact that quantum processes (and relativity) have caused us to revise our classical Newtonian and Cartesian notions of space and time doesn't mean that quantum processes are not material processes. In the modern world, when we speak of a "material world" we are referring to all our understandings about how elementary particles work, which includes quantum and relativistic phenomena. We now know the material world has properties that we never dreamed of in our classical world view, and that force us to realize that our macroscropic sense of space and time doesn't apply at the most elemental level, but we are still talking about properties of the material world. So I think you are wrong to say that "quantum mechanics is not compatible with materialism."Aleta

September 18, 2015

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Stephen, I'll leave all y'all with this summary. Your god created us defective, condemns us for our imperfections, abandons us to our misery, and taunts us with a perfect alternative that could have been ours had he wished but that we can't possibly be found deserving of -- and then has the nerve to disclaim all responsibility because he dangles his invisible carrot infinitely beyond our reach. Your god is pure evil -- the very definition of ultimate evil. I couldn't possibly design a more over-the-top cartoon caricature of an evil supervillain if I tried. Its only saving grace is its nonexistence, its purely imaginary nature. You deserve great credit for being, best I can tell from where I sit, a decent person despite your devotion to an imaginary monster. But you would be a much more fruitful contributor to society, and, I think, far happier personally, were you to abandon persistence in this immature fantasy. I don't expect to have convinced you with this exchange. But I do hope that you'll question why you're so eager to apply double standards to your gods -- why your expectations are inversely proportioned to their abilities, when it should be the opposite. We expect the least from the least of us, the most from the most of us...and, yet, your gods are greater than any whilst doing the least of all. Never mind winning debates; to thine own self be true. To tie it all back to the beginning, I asked a simple question: Why doesn't Jesus call 9-1-1? Pair it with a similar question, a favorite of Christians: What would Jesus do? And, its parallel: What would you do? Would you really call 9-1-1 in a crisis? If so, you are a far better person than Jesus. When you understand why you would call 9-1-1 but Jesus not only wouldn't but doesn't, you'll understand why you have no business calling yourself a Christian. To be a slave to an evil alien god such as Christ is something deserving of shame, not pride -- and your actions are not even remotely a mirror of those of Christ (which, again, is a very, very, very good thing). You do act in a crisis and you do try to make this world a better place -- and that's this world, not some imaginary fantasy in another dimension, but this very world we all share for our whole existence. For that at least I thank you, and again commend you for doing so despite your devotion to the Christ daemon. Thanks for the discussion, and may reason prevail. Cheers, b&Ben Goren

September 18, 2015

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Vaal (and other atheists) "This is what the atheist is saying: IF Yawheh existed as depicted in the bible THEN he would be immoral. IF a being created this world, THEN he would be evil or at least amoral." I say: IF God exists THEN you cannot fathom his behavior IF God doesn't exist THEN there is no need to guess his behavior IF you are not sure God exists THEN you have to cover your insecurities with lots of talk I think you atheists are not confident, you are not real atheists. Maybe 90% confident atheists?Eugen

September 18, 2015

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Aleta, as was pointed out to you and you, since you are a dogmatic atheist, completely ignored, quantum mechanics is not compatible with materialism. You need a non-local, beyond space and time, cause to explain quantum entanglement/information in molecular biology. I have a beyond space and time cause to appeal to. You, as a reductive materialist, don't. John 1:1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Aleta, since it is clear you are not really interested in seeking truth but only in playing stupid games to maintain your atheism, I will limit my responses to simply exposing you as a liar whenever you interact with Box or any other ID commentator. I have much better things to do than waste my time on dogmatists Other than that have a nice weekend.bornagain77

September 18, 2015

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to ba77: When I asked, "Does the bird, and perhaps all living things, have “something over and beyond the physical processes which constitute it”?, you answered, "Yes!", and then went on to discuss quantum processes such as quantum entanglement. My response: quantum processes, including entanglement, are just a deeper level of the physical processes that make up a living organism. I don't see how invoking quantum mechanics removes you from describing life in materialistic terms.Aleta

September 18, 2015

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Moreover, I hold quantum computation to solve the enigma of protein folding:

Physicists Discover Quantum Law of Protein Folding – February 22, 2011 Quantum mechanics finally explains why protein folding depends on temperature in such a strange way. Excerpt: To put this in perspective, a relatively small protein of only 100 amino acids can take some 10^100 different configurations. If it tried these shapes at the rate of 100 billion a second, it would take longer than the age of the universe to find the correct one. Just how these molecules do the job in nanoseconds, nobody knows.,,, Their astonishing result is that this quantum transition model fits the folding curves of 15 different proteins and even explains the difference in folding and unfolding rates of the same proteins. That’s a significant breakthrough. Luo and Lo’s equations amount to the first universal laws of protein folding. That’s the equivalent in biology to something like the thermodynamic laws in physics. http://www.technologyreview.com/view/423087/physicists-discover-quantum-law-of-protein/

That ‘non-local’ quantum entanglement, which conclusively demonstrates that ‘information’ in its ‘quantum form’ is completely transcendent of any time and space constraints (Bell, Aspect, Leggett, Zeilinger, etc..), should be found in molecular biology on such a massive scale, in every DNA and protein molecule, is a direct empirical falsification of Darwinian claims, for how can the ‘non-local’ quantum entanglement ‘effect’ in biology possibly be explained by a material (matter/energy) cause when the quantum entanglement effect falsified material particles as its own causation in the first place? Appealing to the probability of various ‘random’ configurations of material particles, as Darwinism does, simply will not help since a timeless/spaceless cause must be supplied which is beyond the capacity of the material particles themselves to supply!

Looking beyond space and time to cope with quantum theory – 29 October 2012 Excerpt: “Our result gives weight to the idea that quantum correlations somehow arise from outside spacetime, in the sense that no story in space and time can describe them,” http://www.quantumlah.org/highlight/121029_hidden_influences.php Closing the last Bell-test loophole for photons – Jun 11, 2013 Excerpt:– requiring no assumptions or correction of count rates – that confirmed quantum entanglement to nearly 70 standard deviations.,,, http://phys.org/news/2013-06-bell-test-loophole-photons.html etc.. etc..

In other words, to give a coherent explanation for an effect that is shown to be completely independent of any time and space constraints one is forced to appeal to a cause that is itself not limited to time and space! Put more simply, you cannot explain an effect by a cause that has been falsified by the very same effect you are seeking to explain! Improbability arguments of various ‘special’ configurations of material particles, which have been a staple of the arguments against neo-Darwinism, simply do not apply since the cause is not within the material particles in the first place! Besides providing direct empirical falsification of neo-Darwinian claims as to the generation of information from a materialistic basis, the implication of finding ‘non-local’, beyond space and time, and ‘conserved’ quantum information in molecular biology on a massive scale is fairly, and pleasantly, obvious:

Quantum Entangled Consciousness – Life After Death – Stuart Hameroff – video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjpEc98o_Oo Does Quantum Biology Support A Quantum Soul? – Stuart Hameroff – video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIyEjh6ef_8

Verse and Music

Colossians 1:17 He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. ROYAL TAILOR – HOLD ME TOGETHER https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbpJ2FeeJgw Royal Tailor - Make A Move https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbELfw2H_Xc

bornagain77

September 18, 2015

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Aleta, you are completely failing to grasp the enormity of the question being asked of you by Box. To bring the question into sharper focus for you it is good to point out that the human body is conservatively estimated to be composed of something like a billion-trillion protein molecules.

HOW BIOLOGISTS LOST SIGHT OF THE MEANING OF LIFE — AND ARE NOW STARING IT IN THE FACE - Stephen L. Talbott - May 2012 Excerpt: “If you think air traffic controllers have a tough job guiding planes into major airports or across a crowded continental airspace, consider the challenge facing a human cell trying to position its proteins”. A given cell, he notes, may make more than 10,000 different proteins, and typically contains more than a billion protein molecules at any one time. “Somehow a cell must get all its proteins to their correct destinations — and equally important, keep these molecules out of the wrong places”. And further: “It’s almost as if every mRNA [an intermediate between a gene and a corresponding protein] coming out of the nucleus knows where it’s going” (Travis 2011),,, Further, the billion protein molecules in a cell are virtually all capable of interacting with each other to one degree or another; they are subject to getting misfolded or “all balled up with one another”; they are critically modified through the attachment or detachment of molecular subunits, often in rapid order and with immediate implications for changing function; they can wind up inside large-capacity “transport vehicles” headed in any number of directions; they can be sidetracked by diverse processes of degradation and recycling... and so on without end. Yet the coherence of the whole is maintained. The question is indeed, then, “How does the organism meaningfully dispose of all its molecules, getting them to the right places and into the right interactions?” The same sort of question can be asked of cells, for example in the growing embryo, where literal streams of cells are flowing to their appointed places, differentiating themselves into different types as they go, and adjusting themselves to all sorts of unpredictable perturbations — even to the degree of responding appropriately when a lab technician excises a clump of them from one location in a young embryo and puts them in another, where they may proceed to adapt themselves in an entirely different and proper way to the new environment. It is hard to quibble with the immediate impression that form (which is more idea-like than thing-like) is primary, and the material particulars subsidiary. Two systems biologists, one from the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in Germany and one from Harvard Medical School, frame one part of the problem this way: "The human body is formed by trillions of individual cells. These cells work together with remarkable precision, first forming an adult organism out of a single fertilized egg, and then keeping the organism alive and functional for decades. To achieve this precision, one would assume that each individual cell reacts in a reliable, reproducible way to a given input, faithfully executing the required task. However, a growing number of studies investigating cellular processes on the level of single cells revealed large heterogeneity even among genetically identical cells of the same cell type. (Loewer and Lahav 2011)",,, And then we hear that all this meaningful activity is, somehow, meaningless or a product of meaninglessness. This, I believe, is the real issue troubling the majority of the American populace when they are asked about their belief in evolution. They see one thing and then are told, more or less directly, that they are really seeing its denial. Yet no one has ever explained to them how you get meaning from meaninglessness — a difficult enough task once you realize that we cannot articulate any knowledge of the world at all except in the language of meaning.,,, http://www.netfuture.org/2012/May1012_184.html#2

Aleta, exactly what is the organizing principle that keeps those billion-trillion protein molecules focused on the singular task of keeping your temporal body alive for precisely a lifetime?

The Unbearable Wholeness of Beings - Stephen L. Talbott - 2010 Excerpt: Virtually the same collection of molecules exists in the canine cells during the moments immediately before and after death. But after the fateful transition no one will any longer think of genes as being regulated, nor will anyone refer to normal or proper chromosome functioning. No molecules will be said to guide other molecules to specific targets, and no molecules will be carrying signals, which is just as well because there will be no structures recognizing signals. Code, information, and communication, in their biological sense, will have disappeared from the scientist’s vocabulary. ,,, the question, rather, is why things don’t fall completely apart — as they do, in fact, at the moment of death. What power holds off that moment — precisely for a lifetime, and not a moment longer? Despite the countless processes going on in the cell, and despite the fact that each process might be expected to “go its own way” according to the myriad factors impinging on it from all directions, the actual result is quite different. Rather than becoming progressively disordered in their mutual relations (as indeed happens after death, when the whole dissolves into separate fragments), the processes hold together in a larger unity. http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-unbearable-wholeness-of-beings picture - What power holds off that moment — precisely for a lifetime, and not a moment longer? http://cdn-4.spiritscienceandmetaphysics.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/harvardd-2.jpg

Aleta, What power holds off that moment — precisely for a lifetime, and not a moment longer? Flippant answers and brushing it off as 'standard biology' is totally disingenuous to the question being asked of you by Box! Aleta, you simply have no evidence whatsoever that the singular form/shape of an organism, that is maintained for 'precisely a lifetime', is reducible, and/or explainable, to a reductive materialistic basis. In fact, it is now empirically shown, directly contrary to the neo-Darwinian thought that you champion, that the 3-Dimensional shape of an organism is not reducible to the sequential information on DNA, (or to any other conceivable materialistic basis for that matter). https://uncommondescent.com/human-evolution/latest-evo-theory-features-shoulder-not-hand/#comment-580688 If you were concerned with the scientific evidence, instead of just maintaining your atheism no matter what the evidence says to the contrary of your atheism, that evidence should make you drop neo-Darwinism in an instant. Aleta, you then go on to ask:

Does the bird, and perhaps all living things, have “something over and beyond the physical processes which constitute it”?

Yes! In fact, years ago Erwin Schrodinger speculated that quantum mechanics plays an organizing role in life.

“To paraphrase, (Erwin Schrodinger in his book “What Is Life”), he says at the molecular level living organisms have a certain order. A structure to them that’s very different from the random thermodynamic jostling of atoms and molecules in inanimate matter of the same complexity. In fact, living matter seems to behave in its order and its structure just like inanimate cooled down to near absolute zero. Where quantum effects play a very important role. There is something special about the structure, about the order, inside a living cell. So Schrodinger speculated that maybe quantum mechanics plays a role in life”. Jim Al-Khalili – Quantum biology – video (6:52 minute mark) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOzCkeTPR3Q

And indeed, Erwin Schrodinger's speculation about quantum mechanics playing an organizing role in biology has now been empirically verified. Quantum mechanics, specifically quantum entanglement, is now found to be in molecular biology on a far more massive scale than Jim Al-Khalili highlighted in his video. In fact, Quantum Entanglement is now found to be in every DNA and protein molecule:

Quantum entanglement holds together life’s blueprint – 2010 Excerpt: When the researchers analysed the DNA without its helical structure, they found that the electron clouds were not entangled. But when they incorporated DNA’s helical structure into the model, they saw that the electron clouds of each base pair became entangled with those of its neighbours. “If you didn’t have entanglement, then DNA would have a simple flat structure, and you would never get the twist that seems to be important to the functioning of DNA,” says team member Vlatko Vedral of the University of Oxford. http://neshealthblog.wordpress.com/2010/09/15/quantum-entanglement-holds-together-lifes-blueprint/ Classical and Quantum Information in DNA – Elisabeth Rieper – video (Longitudinal Quantum Information along the entire length of DNA discussed at the 19:30 minute mark; at 24:00 minute mark Dr Rieper remarks that practically the whole DNA molecule can be viewed as quantum information with classical information embedded within it) https://youtu.be/2nqHOnVTxJE?t=1176 Classical and Quantum Information Channels in Protein Chain – Dj. Koruga, A. Tomi?, Z. Ratkaj, L. Matija – 2006 Abstract: Investigation of the properties of peptide plane in protein chain from both classical and quantum approach is presented. We calculated interatomic force constants for peptide plane and hydrogen bonds between peptide planes in protein chain. On the basis of force constants, displacements of each atom in peptide plane, and time of action we found that the value of the peptide plane action is close to the Planck constant. This indicates that peptide plane from the energy viewpoint possesses synergetic classical/quantum properties. Consideration of peptide planes in protein chain from information viewpoint also shows that protein chain possesses classical and quantum properties. So, it appears that protein chain behaves as a triple dual system: (1) structural – amino acids and peptide planes, (2) energy – classical and quantum state, and (3) information – classical and quantum coding. Based on experimental facts of protein chain, we proposed from the structure-energy-information viewpoint its synergetic code system. http://www.scientific.net/MSF.518.491

Of related note: quantum information and quantum entanglement are basically equivalent:

Quantum Entanglement and Information Quantum entanglement is a physical resource, like energy, associated with the peculiar nonclassical correlations that are possible between separated quantum systems. Entanglement can be measured, transformed, and purified. A pair of quantum systems in an entangled state can be used as a quantum information channel to perform computational and cryptographic tasks that are impossible for classical systems. The general study of the information-processing capabilities of quantum systems is the subject of quantum information theory. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-entangle/

bornagain77

September 18, 2015

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Ben

Still missing the point, Stephen. You’ve now just agreed that Free Will is, in fact, not the cause of evil on Earth;

Sorry, but it is you that is missing the point. Also, you are, again, misrepresenting what I say. Contrary to your claims, I said the very opposite. It is the misuse of free will that introduced sin, pain, and guilt into the world. It is the misuse of free will that adds to the pain that is already there.

now, you’re blaming temptation in its place.

No, I am not. Man can use his free will to resist temptation, primarily through the help of God, and on a natural level, through the practice of virtue.

But your god is also the one who created both the temptations themselves and our desire to partake of them —

No, God is not the author of temptation. Why would a good God tempt man to do bad things. That makes no sense at all. Temptation comes from uncontrolled appetites and passions, unhealthy influences in the world, and adversarial spirits.

ot to mention that it absented itself from us, removing (so you claim) the prime motivation to disregard temptation.

God never absents himself. God is present to every living human being at every hour of the day. That is what prayer is all about. You are confusing God's presence with God's unwanted intrusion.

There’s a term for the type of vindictive petty games you’re describing your god as playing with us: NIGYSOB, an initialism for, “Now I’ve Got You, you SOB.” Google it for details. Psychopaths play that game all the time; sane people don’t.

Nothing I have said comes even remotely close to that hateful characterization of God. For some reason, you feel the need to read into my comments your own anger and frustration, rather than to read out of them what is there. You are practicing what is known as eisegesis, "which is the interpretation of a passage based on a subjective, non-analytical reading." It is the act of reading "into" a passage what you want to find there. What you should be striving for is exegesis, which reads "out of" the text what is really there. Exegesis is concerned "with discovering the true meaning of the text, respecting its grammar, syntax, and setting."StephenB

September 18, 2015

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