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Time capsule?

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I am writing to draw the attention of anyone who may not have seen it to the NYT Magazine this past Sunday (March 4).

The cover story, “Darwin’s God,” by one Robin Marantz Henig, takes the NYT’s usual wide-eyed, credulous approach to all things Darwinian—in this case, giving us an atrocious farrago of self-contradictory Evolutionary Psychology Just-So Stories for the origin of relgious belief.

The badness of the article must be read to be believed, but just as a sample, my favorite non sequitur is on page 43. There it is recounted how 5-year-olds are already able to make the vital distinction between what people believe to be the case and what really is the case. This legitimate and very interesting finding is then combined with the fact that of course God, by His nature, must know what really is the case (i.e., an Infinite Mind is not prone to the fallibility of finite minds), and from this the following is concluded:

“The bottom line . . . is that children are born with a tendency to believe in omniscience, invisible minds, immaterial souls . . .”

So much for 2500 years of philosophical reflection on the nature of reality, the mind, the infinite, and God! Thank goodness the Darwinists have cleared all that up for us.

In this same issue of the NYT Magazine there is an article about the mainstreaming of hard-core pornography on U.S. college campuses, modeled and published by the students themselves. A two-for-one treat!

If someone were to put a copy of this issue of the NYT Magazine into a time capsule, archaeologists of the future would have at their fingertips almost all they would need to figure out why our civlization perished.

Comments
Hi Kairos: Kairos is indeed an interesting term, especially to those who view the cosmos in terms of nor only chance and necessity but also agency -- adn one that I suspect Mr Luce, founder of Time, understood . . .:
Kairos (καιρός) is an ancient Greek word meaning the "right or opportune moment" . The ancient Greeks had two words for time, chronos and kairos. While the former refers to chronological or sequential time, the latter signifies "a time in between", a moment of undetermined period of time in which "something" special happens. What the special something is depends on who is using the word. While chronos is quantitative, kairos has a qualitative nature . . . . In the Eastern Orthodox Church, before the Divine Liturgy begins, the Deacon exclaims to the Priest, "Kairos tou poiesai to Kyrio" ("It is time [kairos] for the Lord to act"); indicating that the time of the Liturgy is an intersection with Eternity. In The Interpretation of History, neo-orthodox Lutheran theologian Paul Tillich made prominent use of the term. For him, the kairoi are those crises in history (see Christian existentialism) which create an opportunity for, and indeed demand, an existential decision by the human subject - the coming of Christ being the prime example (compare Barth's use of geschichte as opposed to historie).
For that matter, cosmos is another very interesting word:
In its most general sense, a cosmos is an orderly or harmonious system. It originates from a Greek term κόσμος meaning "order, orderly arrangement, ornaments," and is the antithetical concept of chaos . . .
So, is it kairos or mere chronos, in a chaos or a cosmos? [In short, if only the public understood the key terms, the very force of language -- a quintessential functional and complex characteristic of agents in action -- speaks eloquently on hte underlying question.] So, let's have fun . . . GEM of TKIkairosfocus
March 10, 2007
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I see there is a kairos as well as a kairosfocus here . . .
And there is since many months ... After all kairos (favourable time) is a good name for a non-atheist person.kairos
March 8, 2007
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My step-mom recently recommended this article to me. She's an agnostic and we discuss religious topics sometimes. It's hard to understand how people could take these explanations too seriously without holding out some hope that religious belief could be explained this way. I'm glad to see someone else noticed the article.Ben Z
March 8, 2007
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re Dinosaur and bird DNA This is a classic exageration of data. We find fossil bone cells of a similar size. That is not very interesting so we say instead that we KNOW that the DNA of birds was derived from the DNA of dinosaus. There may be a rough correlation between bone cell size and DNA content/ genome size, but that does not justufy the headlines highlighting the extrapolation (DNA similarity) rather than the original finding (bone cell size correlation).idnet.com.au
March 8, 2007
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"I wondered where they got the dinosaur DNA from to compare it with birds?" I read it too. If I recall correctly, they made a rather large assumption (Darwinists making assumptions - go figure!). They determined the size of bone cells (osteocytes) correlate directly with genome size. Then they looked at fossilized dino bone, and concluded dinosaur genomes are small. So essentially, they have assumed dino genomes are small without having dino DNA.shaner74
March 8, 2007
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Borne: "Darwinists are actually members of species equus asinus - slightly evolved." Evolved??!gpuccio
March 8, 2007
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H'mm: I see there is a kairos as well as a kairosfocus here . . . Now, on the main point. Was it maybe 50 years or more ago that C S Lewis poked holes in this one, in his Miracles? [Not to mention his Surprised by Joy.] Namely, the psychology or social setting of the origin of a belief may be an interesting bit of personal history, but it has little or nothing to do with the warrant for the claim. That is, for every dewy-eyed five year old who uncritically takes his mom's "2 + 2 = 4" as gospel, there is an angry 16 year old who doubts that "2 + 2 = 4" because his father believes it! In short, some may say that God is a father-figure projected to the sky, to "explain away" theism, but such rhetoric opens the door to the rebuttal that atheism is teen rebellion writ large. That is, the argument here used by NYT acting as a mouthpiece for evolutionary materialists, is a strawman. [AKA: Why wasn't there equal space for a responsive view from the other side? Or, why wasn't the topic handled through a panel of credible experts on the various positions, maybe across several articles in an announced series? Or, am I missing something?] In any case, the real issue is warrant, and right now the evolutionary materialist paradigm is in serious and growing trouble to account for: 1] the evident functionally specified, complex information [FACI/CSI] in the nanotechnology of life at cellular level, without exhausting the probabilistic resources of the obsefrved cosmos; 2] the increments in such FSCI/CSI to create the observed biodiversity on earth, starting with the Cambrian Fossil Life revolution; 3] the evidence that habitable zones in the cosmos are evidently rare, so that earth may indeed be a quite privileged planet . . .; and 4] resorting to a quasi-infinite array of sub-universes to duck the probabilistic implications of the above, as well as those of the multidimensional [local] knife's edge finetuning that is observed in our cosmos to make it life-supporting. By sharpest contrast, we know that in all cases where we directly know the answer, FSCI beyond the credible probabilistic resources of the observed cosmos, is produced by intelligent agents. Thus, we have good reason to conclude that absent telling counterexamples, FSCI is a reliable sign of such intelligent action. SO, we can easily infer that the cell, biodiversity and the fine-tuning of the cosmos all point to intelligent agency. Then, we can roll up our sleeeves and get to work on [a] testing for counter examples if we so desire, but also [b] reverse engineering the world. [And if some, starting with the likes of a Copernicus, a Galileo or a Newton or a Faraday or a Maxwell put that: thinking God's thoughts after him, who are we to disagree if they do good science?] It is time for a serious, level playing field critical dialogue on the subject, and the NYT could even now begin to repair its increasingly shattered prestige by being a fair umpire. Finally, C S Lewis had a serious point when he highlighted that our desires, needs and basic tendencies tend to have an objective fulfillment: we hunger, there is food. We thirst, there is drink. So, if we ache as finite and fallible minds for the perfection of mind, is that not at least a pointer that there is indeed such an infinite, infallible mind? If we ache with a hunger for Joy, a joy that cannot be fulfilled in this world, is that not a sign that we are made to be happily, eternally surprised by Joy Himself? One who has, by grace, found Joy Himself . . . GEM of TKIkairosfocus
March 8, 2007
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I wondered where they got the dinosaur DNA from to compare it with birds?
Come on idnet! Why do you ask such a trivial question? Don't you know by Jurassic park movies that dinosaurs' DNA has been found, decode and used to clone them? ;-)kairos
March 8, 2007
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We just had a radio news item stating that bird DNA most resembles small dinosaur DNA showing how birds evolved by Darwinian Evolution from dinosaus. It was from the current Nature. I wondered where they got the dinosaur DNA from to compare it with birds?idnet.com.au
March 7, 2007
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Great comments. Darwinists are actually members of species equus asinus - slightly evolved. Nothing escapes the piercing eye of their infallible logic. ;-) They now claim that if there is an intelligent designer then the logical conclusion is that "your flu vaccine won't work, your car won't start, Hiroshima never happened...". Go figure! Such acute laser like misreasoning is only possible from a Darwinist. No wonder a much wiser man, foreseeing the existence of Darwinian fundamentalist fanatics, wrote many centuries ago, ...Instead, their thoughts were pointless, and their misguided minds were plunged into darkness. While claiming to be wise, they became fools. Rom 1:20 Or in another translation, ...they were given over to deception in their thought processes [or, they became futile in their speculations], and their foolish heart [fig., inner self...] was darkened. While boasting of their wisdom, they became utter fools Fits the case pretty nicely I would say. What is alarming is that these guys are allowed to use things sharper than crayons and write inane tripe for public consumption.Borne
March 7, 2007
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