The Holy Trinity

[Magnificat]

[QUOTE=Pabmusic;387775]
Then there’s his most recent book, which drew this from the Telegraph:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/7979211/Has-Stephen-Hawking-ended-the-God-debate.html

But – what does it matter what Steven Hawking believes? There are some genuinely theistic scientists, the Catholic Ken Miller for instance, who was the main expert prosecution witness in the Kitzmiller –vs- Dover trial in America in 2005 (the last creationist attempt to teach the Bible as science, masquerading under Intelligent Design, in American schools. It failed miserably, with outright accusations from the judge that creationists had lied.)

What anyone says or believes about anything can never have evidentiary value. It doesn’t make it true - or even more believable - because it comes from an ‘authority’.

However, authority figures can stimulate our thinking and lead us to new ideas. And someone who has been proved right (or almost right) many times is someone to listen to.

Here’s a short address (25 minutes or so) by Richard Dawkins to an audience of mainly science-literate people in Oxford in 2005. It seems to cover many of the things we have explored in this thread (and I truly wasn’t aware of this at the time!):QUOTE]

Pab

The link to the telegraph article you supplied is very interesting.

The second comment on the article contains a link to an American site which purports to disprove evolutionary theory. To me it seems very authoritative and quotes many authorities in support. Frankly, I can't understand most of it but it does seem to be a very impressive debunking of Darwin.

What do you think of it? Do you know anything of the authors? They don't seem to be unthinking Fundamentalist Christians that's for sure.

VCC

[Miles Coverdale]

The second comment on the article contains a link to an American site which purports to disprove evolutionary theory. To me it seems very authoritative and quotes many authorities in support. Frankly, I can't understand most of it but it does seem to be a very impressive debunking of Darwin.

What do you think of it? Do you know anything of the authors? They don't seem to be unthinking Fundamentalist Christians that's for sure.

VCC

Yes, it looks impressive (superficially at least), but I think the clue comes in phrases such as this one: 'Either every part of every living thing arose by random chance, or an intelligence designed them.' It seems to me that this is a false dichotomy. And in any case the term 'intelligent design' is just code for creationism. I think they believe that if they don't mention religion in their argument, others won't believe them to be creationist. Don't be fooled. Unless you want to be. Try following some of the links at the top of the page if you don't believe me.

[Magnificat]

MC

Scientists widely accept that the laws of physics do, in principle, make it possible to create universes in the laboratory and indeed it has just been shown that the idea of cosmic inflation does seem to be correct and that the starting point of the Big Bang was far smaller and its expansion far more rapid than had been assumed. So this could have already happened even if you don't accept that it was a God figure who did it i.e. an intelligent designer monitoring and shaping all aspects of life.

Evolution by natural selection and all the other processes that produced our planet and the life on it are believed by many to be sufficient to explain how we got to be the way we are given the laws of physics that operate in our universe. However, as I understand it, scientists think there is still scope for an intelligent designer of universes as a whole.

As I understand it even God, as a very advanced intelligent designer, would have to tinker with His laws of physics ( or main principles of creation ) to get a perfect universe before its Big Bang, after this it would be entirely on its own.

It doesn't seem that God wished to create a perfect world in view of all the problems we experience existing in it including disasters.

As far as I can see, God cannot take any action to prevent things like this or anything else that went against the rules of His creation but that doesn't mean that He cannot intervene in other areas where it is entirely within His power to do so and if we request Him to do so. This would not have been understood at the time the Bible was written and could explain why some prayers are answered and some are not.

I don't see that the prayers for the Malaysian airlines flight are at all irrational. You were asking Him to protect all those who travel if it pleased Him ( if it was possible for Him to do so ). If the crash turns out to have been caused by mechanical failure of some sort He may not have been able to prevent it as it could have been against His laws of physics to do so. If it was a terrorist attack it would have been against, I believe, His principle of granting humans the choice as to whether they act for good or evil and in this respect He did, after all, give us the chance, through Jesus Christ, to know that He wishes us to love one another. You were also praying for God to be with those who have, apparently, perished and I am sure He was as He was with Jesus on the Cross ( although I don't fully understand this Christian doctrine ).

An imperfect answer I'm sure but I'm doing my best to understand a universe and existence so complex that, in my humble opinion, it has to be designed monitored and shaped by an intelligence far superior than anything we can hope to fully understand.

VCC.

[Bryn]

Come on. Answer the question. How was this here God created?

[Pabmusic]

...The link to the telegraph article you supplied is very interesting.

The second comment on the article contains a link to an American site which purports to disprove evolutionary theory. To me it seems very authoritative and quotes many authorities in support. Frankly, I can't understand most of it but it does seem to be a very impressive debunking of Darwin.

What do you think of it? Do you know anything of the authors? They don't seem to be unthinking Fundamentalist Christians that's for sure.

VCC

I can't open the comments, so can't read what you've seen. Do you recall the website's name (Answers in Genesis? The Discovery Institute? The Templeton Foundation? - there are many very well funded organisations dedicated to proving Darwin wrong. The Templeton Foundation has assets that compare favourably with a small country. And their leading lights are far from being ‘unthinking’.)

Since the 1960s there has been a deliberate move to link fundamental religion with science so that it could be taught as science in American schools. First was Creation Science, rejected as 'science' by the US Supreme Court in 1987, then came Intelligent Design. Now I think it's "Teach the controversy".

Intelligent Design (ID) was a rebranding of Creation Science. Its most famous 'alternative' text book for schools is "Of Pandas and People" and featured in the Kitzmiller -vs- Dover trial in 2005. The defendants (a creationist-run school board) argued that ID has nothing to do with religion - it's just better science than evolution. The prosecution subpoenaed all the early drafts of “Of Pandas and People” from the publishers which showed that it had begun (pre-1987) as a Creation Science book, but that immediately after the Supreme Court ruling, all references to ‘Creator’ and Creation’ were replaced with “intelligent designer’ and ‘design’ (note the lack of capitals). This is just one of the many things that led the right-wing, Republican, Bush-appointed (and therefore superficially sympathetic) judge to call the defendants liars.

If you’re interested in this fascinating case, here’s a talk by the devoutly Catholic Kenneth Miller, the main prosecution expert witness, debunking Intelligent Design:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4r2J6Y5AqE

My answer to any attempt at disproving evolution is this. We’ve known about it since 1859. It has been constantly attacked but is still going strong. It may well be the best-attested scientific theory of them all, supported by mountains of evidence that come from (and this is very important) many different disciplines. Strong evidence from geology, palaeontolgy, zoology, anatomy, comparative anatomy, molecular biology, population genetics, biochemistry, nuclear physics, cosmology, geography, plate techtonics and more come together in a synthesis of mutually supporting independent facts that lead to the same conclusion. Our ability to read DNA has strengthened it all by orders of magnitude, because we carry within us the record of our reptilian, amphibian, fishy and earlier past.

This alone suggests that the theory evolution rests on stronger foundations than the germ theory of disease (ie, that diseases are caused by micro-organisms acting in various ways), atomic theory (that all matter is composed of atoms, which themselves are made up and interact in particular ways) or the heliocentric theory of the solar system (that the sun is at the centre, orbited by the planets).

So what is the theory of evolution? Here are the propositions, all of which must be supported by evidence:

1) Evolution happens (populations change over time)
2) Change usually happens very gradually
3) Speciation occurs (one species splits into two or more species)
4) As a result of 4, all species share common ancestry (name any two species – dog* and dandelion, for instance, and we can now through DNA tell when the common ancestor lived).
5) Most, but not quite all, of this change is caused by natural selection, which itself is the sole cause of adaptation (the appearance of things being designed for their environments).

*[Which would also have been our ancestor, since it would be so far back that it would encompass all mammals]

It might have been different. (3) need not occur, for instance, in which case there’d be a single highly-evolved species now.

And yet it would be so easy to disprove. Darwin himself pointed this out in On the Origin of Species and it’s been repeated many times since. If any single one of the things below could be shown to exist, Darwinian natural selection would crumble immediately (I’ve lifted a lot of this from Professor Jerry Coyne of Chicago University):

a) Fossils in the wrong place (J S B Haldane famously said, when asked what would disprove Darwinian evolution, “Rabbits in the Precambrian”)
b) An adaptation in one species that would be good only for another species (giving a land-based ancestor of whales a blowhole on the top of its head because it will be useful in future generations)
c) A general lack of genetic variation within all species
d) An adaptation that could not have evolved by steps that were useful every time. (This is the one most beloved of creationists and supporters of Intelligent Design, so I’ll say more separately.)
e) An adaptation good for the species, but not necessarily for individual members.
f) Evolved “true” altruistic behaviour among non-relatives in non-social animals
g) Complete discordance between phylogenies based on morphology/fossils and on DNA. (No, I don’t either .)

A word about (d). This has been the basis of most challenges to evolution. It is sometimes called the ‘argument from design’ (basically - it looks designed so it is designed) and is an offshoot from the argumentum ad ignorantam – the argument from ignorance. - “I cannot understand how (or believe that) … therefore God did it”.

It’s a poor argument (though superficially attractive) and ID-ers have developed a whole notion of “irreducible complexity” based on it.

The eye has often been used as an exemplar to show that evolution must be wrong. You either had to have a whole, complex, beautifully crafted eye, or no eye at all. It just couldn’t have evolved by small steps. What use is half an eye? Well, I wear glasses and have done since I was young. My eyes are not 100%. Some people undergo cataract operations in which their lenses are removed. Their vision must be very poor, but I’d doubt they’d agree that they might just as well have their eyes removed, since they now can’t see at all. Half an eye is better than none at all, and there are creatures alive today that demonstrate a range of eye types, from light-sensitive cells to full camera eyes like ours. We don’t know if they constitute stages through which we passed (eyes rarely fossilize) but the stages must have been similar.

[Incidentally, our eye – the vertebrate eye, since we share it with all mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and bony fish – is seriously flawed. The retina is back-to-front, with the light-sensitive cells facing away from the light, which has to pass through a maze of wires (blood vessels and nerves) to hit the rods and cones from behind. (It also causes the ‘blind spot’, since the wires have to pass through the retina to get to the brain.) Our brains sort out the confusion very well, but little thanks to our eyes. Octopuses and squids have camera eyes, too, but theirs must have evolved separately since their retinas are the right way round!]

What a long reply based on comments I couldn’t read! Remember this, the person who can show Darwin was wrong will (I absolutely guarantee) pick up a Nobel Prize and become very rich from the likes of the Templeton Foundation.

[Pabmusic]

Yes, it looks impressive (superficially at least), but I think the clue comes in phrases such as this one: 'Either every part of every living thing arose by random chance, or an intelligence designed them.' It seems to me that this is a false dichotomy. And in any case the term 'intelligent design' is just code for creationism. I think they believe that if they don't mention religion in their argument, others won't believe them to be creationist. Don't be fooled. Unless you want to be. Try following some of the links at the top of the page if you don't believe me.

One of the most frustrating things about creationists is their inability (or wilful refusal) to understand that natural selection is the antithesis of "pure chance". Randomness ('chance' if you like) enters into it only in the probability of a mutation that is useful arising in the first place. Once one has, natural selection takes over and adaptation will inevitably occur. It cannot fail to because if the mutation is useful (that is, aids more successful reproduction) then over time the number of organisms carrying the mutation will increase, precisely because reproduction for them has been more successful than for those who don't carry the mutation.

[Richard Tarleton]

I think this thread should be accredited as an OU course, with extra credits if you've tossed in the odd bit of coursework along the way It's outgrown its original raison d'être though, probably a bit late but shouldn't it be in Ideas and Theory?

I loved the Dawkins lecture, thank you for that link Pabs.

[Pabmusic]

I think this thread should be accredited as an OU course, with extra credits if you've tossed in the odd bit of coursework along the way It's outgrown its original raison d'être though, probably a bit late but shouldn't it be in Ideas and Theory?

I loved the Dawkins lecture, thank you for that link Pabs.

Yes, I thought it was excellent too.

As far as the OU is concerned, I no longer own any polyester shirts (brown or orange, probably) bought at C & A in 1974.

[Miles Coverdale]

I don't see that the prayers for the Malaysian airlines flight are at all irrational. You were asking Him to protect all those who travel if it pleased Him ( if it was possible for Him to do so ). If the crash turns out to have been caused by mechanical failure of some sort He may not have been able to prevent it as it could have been against His laws of physics to do so. If it was a terrorist attack it would have been against, I believe, His principle of granting humans the choice as to whether they act for good or evil and in this respect He did, after all, give us the chance, through Jesus Christ, to know that He wishes us to love one another. You were also praying for God to be with those who have, apparently, perished and I am sure He was as He was with Jesus on the Cross ( although I don't fully understand this Christian doctrine ).

If you're going to use the free will argument for things like terrorist attacks, then why didn't God leave Saul to go on persecuting the early Christians? If God can intervene in human affairs (as in the case of Saul on the road to Damascus), why didn't he do so with Hitler, Stalin etc?

An imperfect answer I'm sure but I'm doing my best to understand a universe and existence so complex that, in my humble opinion, it has to be designed monitored and shaped by an intelligence far superior than anything we can hope to fully understand.

Most people try and understand the world in which they live. In my case, that process is made rather easier without the a priori assumption that a god is involved.

[eighthobstruction]

You seem to be the types that might like to have a read of this (posted by Calum yesterday)....you may have missed it....http://www.theguardian.com/books/201...-consciousness

[Richard Tarleton]

You seem to be the types that might like to have a read of this (posted by Calum yesterday)....you may have missed it....http://www.theguardian.com/books/201...-consciousness

Hmmm, yes, thanks both for this, Mary Midgley a new name to me I must confess, I even printed it off to read it more thoroughly (as the highlight pen makes a mess of the screen ). Apart from her being fuelled with dislike for Dawkins, I'm not sure that her problems are, actually, problems, and are rather based on some major misunderstandings and an incomplete understanding of what Dawkins is actually saying. Remarks like "I don't quite understand how Dawkins has become such a sage, and so prominent", and the comparison with AJ Ayer (who apparently "spent the rest of his career taking back what he'd written in "Language, Truth and Logic") - "This hasn't occurred to Dawkins. He goes on saying the same thing" - tell us more about her than they do about Dawkins, and leave me with the feeling she doesn't have a sufficient knowledge of the subject matter, let alone the range of Dawkins' work.

Apparently in her latest book "Are you an illusion?" she sees Dawkins as

a leading representative of ...a kind of self-deceiving fatalism, namely the convisction that the universe has no purpose, that it contains at bottom, as Dawkins has written, 'nothing but blind, pitiless indifference'. Our planet [she argues] "is riddled with purpose...full of organisms, beings that steadily pursue their own characteristic ways of life, beings that can be understoood only by grasping the distinctive thing that each of them is trying to be and do.

Organisms trying to be and do things? And what are mass extinctions if not "pitiless indifference"? On the next page, the journalist asks her what she takes consciousness to mean. Her reply:

Well, one's got to know in what terms one's talking. I don't think that it's a thing on its own, a spirit that comes and is put into people. I think it's a faculty that animals including us have. And it's gradually developed out of other faculties.

She

cites examples of plants that respond dramatically to their environment [ well, er, yes] , before cautioning that it's not possible to say at what stage in evolution consciousness kicks in".

I'd like to have asked her whether she thought consciousness extended to self-knowledge, knowledge of the future, death etc., the sorts of things I thought were the preserve of us but which she appears ready to attribute to plants and animals.....

But jolly interesting....

[eighthobstruction]

I thought the Crick quote was very concise...."You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact [her italics] no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their attendant molecules."

[Pabmusic]

...But jolly interesting....

Quite agree. Mary Midgely (aka Mary Scrutton) has been gunning for Richard Dawkins ever since The Selfish Gene was published in the 1970s. Her writings are peppered with ad hominem attacks. Wikipedia has this, which includes a section on her views of Dawkins:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Midgley

Colin Dexter might have incorporated such personal rivalry between academics in a Morse book...

[Bryn]

I must admit that the only Midgely book I have read, and that nearly three decades ago, is her Evolution as a Religion, which I thought well targeted. Let's face it, if Dawkins titles a book in a way that suggests rank anthropomorphism at the level of the complex molecule, he can't really complain when someone like Midgely goes rooting around in the book and finds reflections of just such anthropomorphism in his thinking. Dawkins protests that she misunderstands, but it is he who chose the title.

[Magnificat]

Come on. Answer the question. How was this here God created?

Bryn

The answer seems to be that He was created by an even more technologically advanced civilisation in another universe and so on ad infinitum.

Frankly, I think we can only ever concern ourselves with trying to understand our creator's plans for us and our place in our universe.

It may be, of course, that the answer is much simpler and staring us all in the face but we just cannot see it.

At least I don't believe that something can be created from nothing!

VCC