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William Provine Reveals The Real Implications Of Darwinism

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Mung: "The real implications of Darwinism are that nothing Will Provine says ought to be trusted." Indeed, and as has been known for 150 years. Mung: "Did he tell that to his students?" What a silly question!Ilion
June 25, 2011
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Back now. Bandwidth headache? Anyone else with unstable vid?kairosfocus
June 25, 2011
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Hey, vid has vanished for me. The top right vid is there but the top of post has naked embed code showing. F/F 5.0b7 beta -- where I had to go to get stability. Gkairosfocus
June 25, 2011
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Sounds like Will has been reading The Republic again. People are bad but all we need to do to make them good is have the State brainwash them. Note: the state. Everyone must comply. It's worth repeating that Darwinism/Nihilism leads to totalitarian ends by negating being for the same of pure nothingness. People like Provine and Brooks are pretending to be your friend when in fact they want to control you. Of course, it's all a pipe dream. Call it the rosy hyposthesis. Darwin's optimism about ameliorative evoution has taken a behavioral turn, but a pig is still a pig even with fancy new lipstick. Meanwhile, what kind of egotism wants to remake the world in its own image?allanius
June 25, 2011
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H'mm: A light bulb goes on! (THAT's the context for the 1998 Evo Day remark at U of Tenn . . .) Let's focus on the U of Tenn Darwin Day keynote 1998, clipping the abstract: ________________ Provine: >> Naturalistic evolution has clear consequences that Charles Darwin understood perfectly. 1) No gods worth having exist; 2) no life after death exists; 3) no ultimate foundation for ethics exists; 4) no ultimate meaning in life exists; and 5) human free will is nonexistent . . . . The first 4 implications are so obvious to modern naturalistic evolutionists that I will spend little time defending them. Human free will, however, is another matter. Even evolutionists have trouble swallowing that implication. I will argue that humans are locally determined systems that make choices. They have, however, no free will . . . . Without free will, justification for revenge disappears and rehabilitation is the main job of judicial systems and prisons. [[NB: As C. S Lewis warned, in the end, this means: reprogramming through new conditioning determined by the power groups controlling the society and its prisons.] We will all live in a better society when the myth of free will is dispelled . . . >> _________________ Will Hawthorne's remark on the is-ought gap moral absurdities of such evolutionary materialism are a telling counterpoint: _______________ Hawthorne: >> Assume (per impossibile) that atheistic naturalism [[= evolutionary materialism] is true. Assume, furthermore, that one can't infer an 'ought' from an 'is' [[the 'is' being in this context physicalist: matter-energy, space- time, chance and mechanical forces]. (Richard Dawkins and many other atheists should grant both of these assumptions.) Given our second assumption, there is no description of anything in the natural world from which we can infer an 'ought'. And given our first assumption, there is nothing that exists over and above the natural world; the natural world is all that there is. It follows logically that, for any action you care to pick, there's no description of anything in the natural world from which we can infer that one ought to refrain from performing that action. Add a further uncontroversial assumption: an action is permissible if and only if it's not the case that one ought to refrain from performing that action . . . [[We see] therefore, for any action you care to pick, it's permissible to perform that action. If you'd like, you can take this as the meat behind the slogan 'if atheism is true, all things are permitted'. For example if atheism is true, every action Hitler performed was permissible. Many atheists don't like this consequence of their worldview. But they cannot escape it and insist that they are being logical at the same time. Now, we all know that at least some actions are really not permissible (for example, racist actions). Since the conclusion of the argument denies this, there must be a problem somewhere in the argument. Could the argument be invalid? No. The argument has not violated a single rule of logic and all inferences were made explicit. Thus we are forced to deny the truth of one of the assumptions we started out with. That means we either deny atheistic naturalism or (the more intuitively appealing) principle that one can't infer 'ought' from [[a material] 'is'. >> _______________ Kyle Butt made a direct reply to Provine in 2005 that we should also attend to:
Provine’s . . . [[address] centered on his fifth statement regarding human free will. Prior to delving into the “meat” of his message, however, he noted: “The first 4 implications are so obvious to modern naturalistic evolutionists that I will spend little time defending them” (Provine, 1998). It is clear then, from Provine’s comments, that he believes naturalistic evolution has no way to produce an “ultimate foundation for ethics.” And it is equally as clear that this sentiment was so apparent to “modern naturalistic evolutionists” that Mr. Provine did not feel it even needed to be defended . . . . [[However, i]f it is true that naturalistic evolution cannot provide an ultimate foundation for determining the difference between actions that are right and ones that are wrong, then the door is wide open for subjective speculation about all human behavior. [[Rape and Evolution, Apologetics Press, 2005.]
I don't know about others, but this alone is sufficient to me to say that evolutionary materialism is fatally counter-factual; to the point that to try to keep on accepting it or even imposing it as a controlling a priori is self-evidently absurd. I have known rape victims, and rape is wrong, period. Hitler was demonic, unmitigated evil. Period. OUGHTNESS is real. Therefore only a worldview grounded on an IS that can support the weight of ought, is reasonable enough to be worth considering. The only such serious class of worldviews are grounded in a Creator God who is essentially good as to character. (Cf discussion here.) And, a civilisation that, under the false colours of science ideologically controlled by the amoral absurdities we just saw, wishes to monopolise education and the media on the terms we saw, is insane in the face of mortal danger. Period. GEM of TKI PS: Evidently it has not dawned on Provine that if we have no genuine choices, we cannot have a genuinely logical mind.kairosfocus
June 25, 2011
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Check these for implications: The Finnish high school tragedy once again shows that ideas have consequences http://creation.com/inside-the-mind-of-a-killer and http://www.conservapedia.com/Young_mass_murderersNZer
June 24, 2011
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Well, I welcome Will Provine's honesty. Deriving objective morals values in a materialistic only world is indeed a hopeless task. My personal feeling are that I would enjoy rape, playing shoot-em-up video games with real bullets, and living to excess. Tom cats rape all the time, and we are just animals. Since I have good feelings about these things, then all is well with my soul. Thanks Will !NZer
June 24, 2011
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Isn't it funny how evolutionists claim they don't want religion taught in science class...unless of course it's THEIR religion of atheism/materialism....then it's not only fine and dandy, but mandatory. And the wonder why so many of us reject their evolution fairytale.Blue_Savannah
June 24, 2011
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OT: Mantis shrimp eye could improve high-definition DVDs, holographic technology - June 2011 Excerpt: The eye of the peacock mantis shrimp has led an international team of researchers to develop a two-part waveplate that could improve CD, DVD, blu-ray and holographic technology, creating even higher definition and larger storage density. Peacock mantis shrimp are one of only a few animal species that can see circularly polarized light -- like the light used to create 3-D movies. Some researchers believe the mantis shrimp's eyes are better over the entire visual spectrum than any man-made waveplates. http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-06-mantis-shrimp-eye-high-definition-dvds.htmlbornagain77
June 24, 2011
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The real implications of Darwinism are that nothing Will Provine says ought to be trusted. Did he tell that to his students?Mung
June 24, 2011
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idnet.com.au, The interesting factor in all of this, however is that Darwinism isn't gaining much ground outside of academia. Could it be because of the implications? I gather that the young man who asked the question regarding how Provine "stays nice," fully understood his argument, and was disturbed. Yes, it's a staged event, but I gather that it reflects some reality. Some students are disturbed by the implications, so when Provine states that a society can educate students to have the same "good feelings" he has, the odd student will take the implications to their logical conclusions and recognize that he's dead wrong. He's trying to derive an "ought" from an "is." So yeah, perhaps we don't have free speech always, but we do have the freedom to think for ourselves; which is why in the end, unless we end up with some sort of totalitarian state based on Darwinism (which is a real possibility), Darwinism will ultimately fail in the minds of thinking people.CannuckianYankee
June 24, 2011
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Evangelical Materialist religion is allowed in US schools but they exclude any competition. You kid yourselves if you think you have free speech.idnet.com.au
June 24, 2011
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I dare say if Provine is teaching the implications of Darwinism to young impressionable minds, he's turning some of them into Darwin doubters, so I guess it's not all that bad.CannuckianYankee
June 24, 2011
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I bet Provine will never shows this new DVD to his students: Metamorphosis: The Beauty & Design of Butterflies - trailer http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZk6nZGH9Xobornagain77
June 24, 2011
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Neil, I guess you'd really like to think that. Of course it probably was for this film, but I gather that Provine has no hesitation in teaching this to students, which is what is appalling. His thinking is not in the least scientific here, it is philosophy, but he's absolutely right on the implications. He's wrong on the idea that raising children to have "good feelings" can be the basis for morality for a society. The young man who asked him how he stays a "nice man" should have stated, "well that's all fine and good for you, but what about those who don't have "good feelings"?CannuckianYankee
June 24, 2011
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Whether or not it was staged, it is still a propaganda session. And whether or not those poor kids agreed to be involved, they should hear an opposing view. And I still would love to have been there.mike1962
June 24, 2011
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"I’d love to join his little propaganda session there." I would hesitate to call it a "propaganda session." If Provine is regularly going into classes and imposing this on students, then you might call it propaganda. But this was likely a staged event involving students who agreed to be involved.Neil Rickert
June 24, 2011
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I'd love to join his little propaganda session there.mike1962
June 24, 2011
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