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nfq wrote:
It's not so uncommon among New Age people to believe in spiritual worlds and beings, while still being atheists, in the sense that they don't believe in "god/gods".
Yeah, it is funny. Pussycat and Bill Nye have noticed the same trend that you have. Some people seem to use nonsensical or irrelevant words like "The Universe" or "The Energy Vortex" in the exact same manner that some theists use the word "God". Those speech acts are not descriptive. They are expressive. The words do not describe anything. Instead, they express a feeling like OH! and WOW! So, the inner state of the speaker is expressed, but no other information is delivered. Those expressive speech acts are used in situations where the speaker has no resources to find more detailed explanations for important events in their lives.
1. Wow, the Universe helped me find my car keys!
2. Wow, God did it!
3. Wow, I am nicely aligned with the Energy Vortex to find my car keys!
These are expressive speech acts. They deliver no information other than the inner state of the people who found their car keys.
GOD!
THE UNIVERSE!
OH!
WOW!
*meow*
Expressive speech acts. Mostly irrelevant.
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I merged the "ask an atheist" thread into this topic - I don't think the forum needs multiple threads to argue about differences in religion (or lack thereof) - this religious debate thread does that well enough already.
Please keep up your discussion in this topic.
http://www.youtube.com/Noxxa
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<Masterjun> I'm just a guy arranging bits in a sequence which could potentially amuse other people looking at these bits
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Aqfaq wrote:
Thanks for delivering some in-depth literary analysis, Nach. That is always interesting.
You're quite welcome, but all I did was just quote the various commentators who have elucidated the important points long ago. Nearly every major commentary on Genesis besides explanation will provide charts of during what ages the key personalities lived and point out the cross reference to Jubilees or Major-Genesis which explains these passages more plainly than Genesis itself does.
Aqfaq wrote:
Nach wrote:
Shoot whoever wrote your translation.
Something pussycat never understood: Why would the most powerful being in existence use the crappiest possible human-invented medium — a medium that is known to be fallible by anyone who ever tried writing or reading anything — to deliver the most important message imaginable?
The Bible says that the medium for conveying its various message was spoken words. You can thank humans for writing it down, copying it, miscopying it, "correcting" it, censoring it, and mistranslating it.
Look how humans messed up the rest of everything else on the planet, why should these words be any different?
Aqfaq wrote:
so let's just praise our favorite copy of our favorite version of our favorite parchment that tells us God doesn't have to make sense and let's also shoot the stupid versions of our most favorite scholars and shoot the intelligent versions of our least favorite scholars.
The only person you have to blame for not understanding the Bible is yourself. If you wanted to understand it, you could go learn Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, and not rely on translations for everything. Even if you don't want to learn new languages, there are plenty of readily available commentaries in English which would point out things easily missed in translation, or cross reference to the same topic in other books which provide additional information.
If you believe in free will, and you take an edition which is commonly known to be severely flawed and have the hubris to think you can make heads or tales out of ancient works without any kind of assistance, whose fault is it when you misunderstand it?
If you just want a superficial idea of what's in the Bible, by all means, just grab the easiest English translation you can get a hold of and read it. But if you want to really understand it (or believe in it religiously), then you need to get a hold of the most accurate editions available, dictionaries, concordances, commentaries, legal works of context, historical works of context, and today - search engines, so you can start getting a picture of the setting it was conveyed in and cross reference like mad.
Josephus writes that in his day, everyone knew the entire contents of the Bible by heart, could cross reference it themselves, and all studied the accepted explanations of the text as passed down from their parents. If one ever hopes to understand it as much as the people who lived it, one has no choice but to acquire and learn all the material I just mentioned. It's also precisely what every serious biblical scholar has been doing for the past thousand years.
Now that being said, shoot the translators for not placing warning labels prominently on their books as to how inaccurate they are.
(It's a metaphor - shoot the messenger)
Aqfaq wrote:
No, no, no, I am not a narcissist, even though the prevalence of narcissistic personality disorder in non-clinical populations has been shown to be at least 1%
I don't know half of what you're saying, but if you'd like a narcissistic response to your above question, I could easily provide you with one:
The most powerful being provided you with a lousy translation because he likes me, and wanted to give me the opportunity to set you straight.
(The above is an adaptation of a quote from a commentary on Judges-Kings which I doubt anyone here is going to get, but I find it funny nonetheless.)
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
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Bisqwit wrote:
On my own I have eventually come into the conclusion that intelligence in a closed system cannot increase, and that it is a natural law much akin the law of entropy.
A closed system can not exhibit more intelligence than what was originally put into it.
I know it's been a while since you posted this, but could you explain how you got to this conclusion? Assuming, of course, evolution is false, I've thought about the following situations:
There 2 people in a closed system, and they procreate, having 2 kids.
So, after, lets say, 10 years, there will be 4 rational beings instead of 2 rational beings. Would the intelligence increase here?
Another example: there're 2 people in a closed system, and one of them (maybe the most intelligent one, for the sake of the example) has his brain smashed and dies. Would the intelligence decrease here?
And lastly, one example that doesn't involve people dying or being born: A closed system has only a 3 years old kid, and it is is plenty of resources so that he or she can survive and get old. After 20 years, when this little kid is already and adult, has the intelligence increased?
Sorry for eventual grammar/cohesion mistakes. I just want with this post to understand better your point of view. I personally agree with evolution (and consequently, with 'intelligence' increase or decreasing), but it is tough to even define intelligence, so it's something difficult to discuss, and you might have really good points here.
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Amaraticando wrote:
Aqfaq wrote:
Amaraticando wrote:
Is there any evidence for atheism?
Evidence for what exactly?
People sometimes remember the christian God when they proclaim atheistic views. While I'm pretty convinced that Bible's God doesn't exist, this doesn't exclude all sorts of possible Gods.
Specially a God that isn't benevolent (the problem of evil) or isn't omnipotent/omniscient (to avoid possible ontological problems). For this kinds of God, I think atheist can't provide arguments against.
I think what mostly matters here is the lack of an evidence for a God existence, and not the opposite. There're many metaphors that describe well why 'proving' a God doesn't exist doesn't make much sense (search for Invisible Pink Unicorn). Also, if there is no rule for how a God must act (like answering to every pray, intervening in a specific certain way in people's life) a God existence just has no point of falsifiability, which means it can't be probed if a God exists or not. This discussion will be always philosophical, not scientific: I believe Gods don't exist simply because I didn't find evidences for such thing, and giving the little I know about our universe, I don't think there is a 'reason' for a extraordinaire creature like a God to exist. I might be absolutely wrong, though; and giving other people life experience, if they think about this the same way I did, they might come up with completely different conclusions.
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Keep in mind that evolution is not about getting more intelligent. Intelligence requires resources, so natural selection favors genes that don't waste energy for too much intelligence.
Here is a recent example of a species that has evolved to be less intelligent than its ancestors, entropy doing its job over generations: Blind cave fish evolved a shrunken brain to save energy.
It is clear that many people have misconceptions about evolution.
Don't worry, these things are nothing to lose your sleep over. Evolution does not disprove our unfalsifiable claims about God. However, rest assured that evolution is a fact. It is not a belief or an opinion. It can be discovered by anyone who looks. The more carefully we look, the better, right?
Even Bisqwit's area of expertise benefits from evolution: Evolutionary algorithms are now used to solve multi-dimensional problems more efficiently than software produced by human designers, and also to optimise the design of systems. (How could anyone deny this?)
Naturally, every evolution simulator works. (How could anyone deny this?)
It would be interesting to see an evolution simulator coded by Bisqwit. It ought to clear up some misconceptions. There are limitless ways for making one and I'm sure Bisqwit's program would have a very interesting approach as usual.
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Aqfaq wrote:
Keep in mind that evolution is not about getting more intelligent. Intelligence requires resources, so natural selection favors genes that don't waste energy for too much intelligence.
Here is a recent example of a species that has evolved to be less intelligent than its ancestors, entropy doing its job over generations: Blind cave fish evolved a shrunken brain to save energy.
It is clear that many people have misconceptions about evolution.
Don't worry, these things are nothing to lose your sleep over. Evolution does not disprove our unfalsifiable claims about God. However, rest assured that evolution is a fact. It is not a belief or an opinion. It can be discovered by anyone who looks. The more carefully we look, the better, right?
Even Bisqwit's area of expertise benefits from evolution: Evolutionary algorithms are now used to solve multi-dimensional problems more efficiently than software produced by human designers, and also to optimise the design of systems. (How could anyone deny this?)
Naturally, every evolution simulator works. (How could anyone deny this?)
It would be interesting to see an evolution simulator coded by Bisqwit. It ought to clear up some misconceptions. There are limitless ways for making one and I'm sure Bisqwit's program would have a very interesting approach as usual.
Indeed, evolution is an algorithm that can be applied anywhere, not only in life beings (we can see examples such as MarI/O and some other softwares). I might have not been clear with what I said about intelligence. Of course, evolution doesn't necessarily creates 'more intelligent' individuals (we can't even define what intelligence means), but it doesn't mean it can't create them. Doesn't matter what is you concept of intelligence, you will agree that mammals are more intelligent than bacteria, right? That's why if you 'believe' (I know this term is wrong but whatever) in evolution, you have to believe that intelligence can be 'created' or 'erased'. It means it's not something like energy or matter that can be measured, contained or etc, in a way that if you 'close' the system, it will always be constant.
I think we're conflating Information with Intelligence again.
I'm not a physicist, but I'd conflate intelligence with, ultimately, entropy.
Of course "intelligence" is an ill-defined, subjective notion. However, it can be argued to be closely related to ordering and patterns, which are directly related to entropy.
Total entropy never decreases, but locally it can (as long as it increases by at least that much somewhere else) and it does. There is zero controversy here.
If anybody can't believe evolution, you should watch some technology channel like Discovery and National Geographic channel. I remember BBC create some animals programs too, like walking with beasts. They all base on evolution.
If you can't find these videos on web or on TV, you could buy some technology magazine, like Scientific American. I didn't find any these technology magazines oppose evolution.
"This makes me feel good, therefore it must be true" is a surprisingly common argument.
Just count how many times the word "feel" is uttered in that video.
In interesting question is, of the traits that had some variability that could be explained partially by gender, which ones are caused by genetics and which ones are caused by nurture (eg, being taught to be "masculine" or "feminine"). (I seem to recall reading a study on identical twins that claimed that some macroscopic characteristics of the brain are influenced by experience.)
Build a man a fire, warm him for a day,
Set a man on fire, warm him for the rest of his life.
While that article was a very very interesting read, I would like to point out that a significant amount of the emotional and physical (potentially cognitive, but I'm not a biologist or a doctor so whatever) differences between men and women seem to come from hormone levels rather than the structure of the brain itself. Transgendered individuals especially are expected to go through a variety of physical and emotional changes during their transition as their bodies adjust to the changing hormone levels.
I scrolled up this page and didn't even see where you were quoting that from, so I don't necessarily know the context. I did just want to point out that the differences between sexes in a species don't lie exclusively within the brain, even if they are behavioral characteristics.
Again, not a psych/doc/bio so feel free to ignore this entirely opinion/personal observation based post.
Hormones do indeed make a big difference.
For example, testosterone not only causes physical differences (which the major reason why men are on average larger and stronger than women) but also psychological ones. Testosterone causes men to be, on average, more aggressive and have more propensity to taking risks, among many other things.
There are, however, many behavioral and psychological differences which might or might not be attributed to hormones. For example, startle a man, and observe the reaction. Startle a woman, and observe the reaction. Do this with hundreds of people, and a clear pattern emerges. (Of course there will be variation, but on average the reactions will be rather different.) On average men tend to be more silent when startled than women, who on average tend to scream loudly. (This might, in fact, have an evolutionary background behind it.)
That's just one example.
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Yes. Woman screaming at a snake makes sense, because if a pregnant one gets bitten, then the genes of more than three individuals (mother/father/fetus + the fraction from possible twins) are endangered. It doesn't even need to be deadly venom to ruin a pregnancy. If a man gets bitten, then only the male's genes are endangered even if it is the deadliest possible situation. Letting the male always handle the snake wins 2/3 of the time. There would indeed seem to be a strong pressure to select for genes that cause such behavior. I wonder if this behavior has been observed in other animals?
Generally, women also produce more noise during copulation. I don't think anyone taught them to do that, so the explanation must be of ancient origins. This book has more to say about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_at_Dawn (I haven't read it, though.)
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Our brains, just as the rest of our bodies, were fearfully and wonderfully made.
Praise the Lord :)
"But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him." - 1 Corinthians 2:9
Our brains, just as the rest of our bodies, were fearfully and wonderfully made.
Yeah, except all those flaws that cause all kinds of congenital diseases and other kinds of problems that wouldn't need to exist, as well as all kinds of imperfect "design" that wouldn't need to exist either (but which are completely consistent with evolution. Basically evolution blindly and aimlessly causes hacks over older hacks over older hacks, without ever starting from scratch in an optimal manner. As long as the species barely survives, it's enough.)
I just love this concept that it has to be perfect to be designed. Then again, I'm of the opinion that evolution is a tool used by God to develop life, so...
