Creationists

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Now this is passing strange. Pass lightly, since others are tackling that aspect, over the amazing factoid that you, knowing, even if you know something of Christianity - and I would have to run through your writings to see if there is any evidence you do, do not get why and how Angelrho let alone Yrs Trly is Christian, pick wizards out of thin air.

Move to the very strange expression "damage Christianity".

Look you, if Christianity IS and if it be what it says it is and what it is said to be by those who have perceived it, it cannot be damaged. Even if [I will mention no name] pretending to be a Christian said incredibly stupid and false things, it would not be damaged. Its reputation might be - but anybody who knows anything is aware Christianity has no reason to expect a good reputation.

And if, on the other hand, Christianity is no more nor less than what it is said to be by certain ones for their own reasons or another's, then it is nothing that can be damaged. It is hard to damage or mess with the reputation of a lake of sewage.

We have seen it on the Bounty and on the playground, in the media and in the party congresses, how that the little can for a moment feel big by belittling those identified as Green Monkeys.

Sanskritists and Indologists in general [my Sanskrit is rusty] - what exactly is the opposite of Mahatma?

It's a forum. We are expressing opinion. That was my opinion. That's how it works.

You don't have to give two f*s about my opinion. I give none for yours.

Augustine wrote a long time ago (circa 400 A.D.) about the danger of Christians making ignorant assertions about the natural world that nonbelievers can easily see are false, that doing so damages the credibility of Christians on spiritual matters. I think THAT may be what the statement meant about "people like you damage christianity."

I have often asked the question, why, since young earth creationists are so obviously so very wrong about something such as evolution that has so much evidence of so many different types clearly showing they are wrong on that subject, how anyone can possibly trust their opinion on spiritual matters not so easily verified. Yeah, young earth creationists, or anyone who denies that the evidence for evolution exists, really makes Christianity look ret*d and out of touch with reality.

Most of those who deny the fact of evolution do so because they have been LIED to about it. I would hope, for humanity's sake, that if those people were made acquainted with the vast amounts of evidence of so many different types all clearly pointing to the same reality, that those people would say "Duh, maybe my principles of interpretation need re-examination. Why would God say one thing to us in His book and something different in His creation?"

Last edited by TheBicyclingGuitarist on 17 Jun 2011, 12:22 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I'm glad you told me this was in Sanskrit. Otherwise I wouldn't have known how to translate it.

I can't get any meaning out of most of it but as for "damaging christianity" I of course mean contribute to it's decline as a religion. By that I mean that I hope that extreme or silly views will drive more people away from it. By people I mean homo sapiens. I'm sure you can look up the other words in a dictionary. By dictionary I mean a text that contains the definitions of words.

I'll refrain from asking what the rest of your comment meant as I believe the sun has only a few billion years worth of fuel remaining.



Of course. I'm just parsing it from the perspective of the special creation set.

Nor for anyone's opinions if they are heretical to your own. Yes, your type of mindset is known.

Oh, is that your opinion? That's fascinating.

But it's also a forum concerned with philosophy and religion. The expectation is that opinions are intellectually supported. If you cannot show that someone is wrong about something, then you either have to concede either that person is correct OR you have to reevaluate your approach.

What you cannot do is attack a straw man. You can't, in other words, build up your opponent's case FOR your opponent in such a way that the words you put in your opponent's mouth do not represent what the opponent has actually expressed. I have never said anything even remotely resembling "Evolution is wrong, thus spake the bible." Those are your words, not mine.

And when you can't get the reaction you want by attacking a straw man, you don't do yourself any favors by resorting to ad homs.

I'll be honest here: One of the initial problems I had when I first started posting here was I knew I couldn't accurately represent a true Christian viewpoint by using personal attacks--yet others here didn't exercise the same degree of consideration. I just assumed that was the norm and learned to live with it until I took some time to brush up on my philosophy--meaning in my rereading I came across the term "ad hominem," which I'd forgotten about since I took philosophy in college. So I don't bother getting upset or angry about it, I just call it for what it is.

I also repeatedly fell for strawmen because, likewise, I'd forgotten how to recognize them. I just figured that was a normal, acceptable tactic and fell into the habit of using it myself until someone called ME on it, at which point I brushed up a little more on my philosophy knowledge. I actually was not aware of the problem up to that point. I now make every effort not to build straw men.

What I DO instead, though, if I genuinely don't understand something that someone is saying, I'll give them a chance to clarify by asking questions about that statement according to how I understand them. If I'm wrong, I give a person a chance to demonstrate that I'm wrong so that if I refute a view I'm refuting a view the other side actually holds--not something I just made up.

The problem I had with the statements you made was how poorly they represented my ideas, and I quoted my specific objections:

"Biblical accounts are 'objective'" I happen to believe they are, but I never indicated that belief prior to your straw man. If you'd even tried to use that, though, I'd have accused you of poisoning the well.

Since you brought it up, though, and given what I do happen to believe: In support of Biblical objectivity, take Kings/Chronicles. The writers couldn't have lived for the entire kingdom period and so would have relied on documents accessible in perhaps a palace or temple library (which are cited in the books). The standard by which the kings were judged by the Chronicler had to do with how well they held to keeping Torah. So you have pre-existing sources (that existed at that period of time) together with objective standards by which to rate the kings. Kings/Chronicles, therefore, show objectivity.

My other objection to this statement is your use of quotes, which suggests to me (correct me if I'm wrong) that you're using the word "objective" loosely. Even if I had made that claim prior to THIS response, I would have done my best to use a clear and established definition of "objective." That you hint I'd be so careless even further misrepresents views that I happen to hold but hadn't even expressed before now.

"Only the supernatural can explain the biblical claims." I never said that, or if I did this seems to me vastly out of context of anything I would say. More appropriate is "Only the supernatural can explain certain Biblical events." If, for example, a bush is on fire, it will eventually "burn up." The sign that got Moses attention indicated something far out of the ordinary--even then people knew that fire reduced plant material to ash. Jesus praying over baskets of bread and feeding 4000+ people on two separate occasions and having plenty left over has no physical explanation. Good luck testing that one!

I also have no problem understanding that God has the power to work through natural means and timing. There is a plausible hypothesis that links the events preceding the exodus from Egypt to a massive volcanic eruption, though I don't see how that explains ALL of the plagues. But if it is true that God used the timing of a volcanic eruption to get the Israelites back to the Promised Land, I have no problem with that.

"Evolution is wrong, thus spake the bible." I've NEVER said that. If it really were in the Bible, I would have. But it isn't. What I said was that I favor special creation but do not think it's necessary to inflexibly read the first chapter of Genesis. I'm only speaking from what I know from a religious text. It's very simple reasoning:

1. God is all powerful.
2. God created the universe.
3. Because of 1, God COULD HAVE created the universe in 6 days.
4. Therefore, the Genesis account as written is plausible.

Is that what REALLY happened? I don't know. I wasn't there. But if you go line-by-line there are gaps in the account that also make it plausible that a vast amount of time could have passed, which explains material evidence of the age of the earth, evolution, and so forth. It's wonderfully open-ended; while that doesn't make for great scientific scholarship in the present day, it shows incredible restraint in that the writer seems to make a conscious effort not to stray into areas of creation he and his contemporaries had no possible way of understanding at that point in time.

So, to recap: If you're going to attack a viewpoint, attack one that the person you oppose actually holds and has actually stated as such. Building a straw man and attacking that is just lazy. And if you can't win by attacking a viewpoint, don't try to win with ad hominem attacks. They have nothing to do with your case and thus cannot be used to prove a point--not to mention it's actually in violation of TOS (that's not a threat--I'm just pointing out a fact. It's an almost unwritten rule among us that we police ourselves here and not go straight to the mods).

Yes, I remember you skirting the edges of creationism back six months ago. "Evolution is just a theory", evolution can't prove monkeys to humans, etc. You then opt out and say you don't really know but my impression was that classic creationism has informed your views to some extent.

As for your latest wall of text, I don't care. Sheer force of typing doesn't make the bible strong evidence for the Jewish god and Jesus. The bible says... The bible is... The bible was... Ok, got it. You like the bible.

From an empiricist standpoint: Metaphysics is a bunch of crap.

Once you start down the allegory path, it starts looking less like a bronze age artifact with no modern relevence and more like brilliant insight by people who took a good careful look at the world around them and figured out some things that do line up with science.

Take the story of Adam and Eve: they were relaxing and enjoying a good life but ate from the Tree of Knowledge and suddenly they were cast out of the Garden of Eden and life became more difficult in general and birth specifically became very difficult for women. But isn't that just exactly what happened? Once we (evolutionarily) ate from the Tree of Knowledge, we had to leave behind the Edenic state of mind of living in the eternal now and traded that in for worry, worry, worry that comes with abstract thinking skills. And of course childbirth is pretty painful and difficult when babies have to have giant heads to accomodate their giant baby brains yet also women have to have narrow hips to accomodate walking. It's the story of the evolution of human consciousness from the less refined pre-human primate consciousness. If you look at it as allegory rather than two literal people.

Original Sin? Brilliant insight again. Babies are born innocent in the sense that they haven't done anything yet. But they are also born human, which means inheriting (from Adam, in a sense) the propensity for aggression, jealousy, and all the other human sins that we humans have to keep on a really short leash in order to live with each other.

"Let there be light"= Big Bang, of course. I don't know how they knew that, but I think they may have intuited that a burst of energy (anthropomorphised into God) would be necessary to create the universe.

I think the most fascinating thing to do is to look at the places where different religions tell similar stories. It's not like the writers of the bible were the only ones who figured this stuff out, it's just that that's the source material I'm most familiar with. One problem of my own that I try to work around is that when I look at the religious writings from cultures I'm not a part of, I tend to take it literally and then think "that's silly, it's not turtles all the way down". It's easier to see allegory when you are immersed in it from your own culture. But if you start looking for allegory cross culturally, you start to see the same themes pop up since we all share the same evolutionary history and all make observations and educated guesses about the earth and the universe.

Irrelevant. Maybe I changed my mind? Maybe I saw new and better information? Trying to discredit someone or manipulate the opinions of others against someone based on past statements is called "poisoning the well." Sure, it happens all the time, but that doesn't make it right. Showing that someone has made incorrect statements in the past or that they hold a view you strongly disagree with has nothing to do with the discussion at hand. So a cheap shot irrelevant to what's going on here and now shows poor reasoning.


While irrelevant to this discussion, this is true. But on the other hand, I make an effort to understand other views as much as I can given the time I have. While I've been "informed" by classic creationism, I've also been "informed" as to the quote mining and willful misunderstanding that goes on. So, no, despite my own claims about myself being a creationist, I'm probably not what you would call a "classic" creationist in that I don't reject evolution wholesale. If you can demonstrate an ongoing process either in a lab or in nature, I'm likely to believe it. But evolution does not by necessity rule out special creation, either. Guitarist is the local PPR pro-evolution lobbyist here, and even HE will admit this--and he will probably appreciate that I don't have to quote-mine him out of context to make that point.

But I'm also honest about my weaknesses. I do not work in a scientific area. I teach music and play piano for a living. Among my students are two politicians and a scientist (oddly enough). My knowledge of evolution is not as extensive as that of those who regularly work in that area. And as smart as these three students of mine are, vastly outweighing me in knowledge of law/legal procedure (one of them is a trial court judge) and chemistry, they can't even BEGIN to match me in my music theory and piano playing skillz. It's not their JOBS to. I'm the one with pwnership in my studio. All I care about is getting enough information to make good decisions. Science is often abused to take shots at religious beliefs, crossing a line it was never meant to cross. So just like BicyclingGuitarist is on a crusade to spread the truth about evolution and the LIES spread about it, so I am, among other reasons, to inform people of the reliability and truth of the Bible. If you make a challenge in regards to it, I'll find the best answer I can and give it to you.


So why even bother?


Ad hominem and straw men don't make your arguments any more convincing.

Lie. i did no such thing. I just went with previous information. I'm not your mother, I don't keep up with your every position on subjects or how they change from month to month.

It's just obvious that you were sympathetic to creationism in the past. Now you are touting special creation. Special creation is often used to imply no common descent and the handcrafting of mankind or all species. Maybe you have your own definition but given your previous comments I believe my estimate of your sympathies was accurate. You just admitted that. If you no longer accept it fully, good for you, but I can see it informs your views to some degree.



This is a thread about creationism. Check the title. You mentioned special creation and have previously espoused creationist sounding views. I think you need to look up the definition of relevant.



Four lines to your wall of text isnt much bother.



Right back at you. That's all you do. You are simply more passive aggressive about it. It doesn't advance your point.

Oh? Evidence please. Where in this thread have I belittled you or called you names? Where did I deliberately misrepresent your views in order to take a cheap shot at you? If I did, then I do apologize, but before I do that with any degree of sincerity I think I at least deserve to see exactly where it is I took such a swipe at you. The most I did was point out strawman arguments where they occurred. I wan't compelled to even respond after that, but I thought the least I could do is show you your mistakes and advise you to avoid them in the future. Less friendly people than that have pointed out the same in my own arguments.

simon says:

Given the length of your posts I suspect you have no trouble with the words of mine, though some ideas likely will not fit through the door. If you know the story, you rotate the plank.

If you know anything about Christianity [around here you can't tell] then you know that it is not the silliness or otherwise that brings people in, or that edges them away. Same as for engineering, or backing your football team, or running for Congress.

Not that it matters, but had I run across this interchange in my atheist days I would have had to take a closer look at my reasons for atheism.

Remember Gamaliel: says it better than i can: "If this counsel or this work [Christianiy] be of men, it will come to nought: But if it be of God, ye cannot overthrow it."

No, I stand by what I say. Long winded rants don't add validity to a claim and frankly someone who admits in no uncertain terms that they are completely ignorant about the science they are trying to debate is not worth my time.

"I have nothing more than a rudimentary idea about evolution/m-theory/relativity/statistics but in my (arrogant) opinion it's wrong"
Translated to:
"I don't know how to bake, and haven't baked anything before, but you should take my cake recipe seriously"

And yea, it's good to see that arm-chair philosophy is still alive in all it's worthless glory. Because let's face it, a mamilian brain can totally figure out the greatest insights by just thinking about them, no need for math and science, right?

Let's face it, on a scientific gunfight like evolution, philosophers and theologians don't really bring much more than the plastic butter knife of unqualified opinion (in the form of long-winded word play) against the bullets of fact from the machine guns of evidence.

Well, setting aside your suggestion that I'm poisoning the well by mentioning things you said both today (special creation) and in the past (various creationist sentiments).

You are passive aggressive in that you rely on using terms like straw man or ad hominem where none exist. I have honestly attempted to paraphrase your views, without relying on a wall of text, in short phrases to suit my level of interest. For example you spent an entire post stating that biblical miracles must be supernatural (and not natural) because people would have known better than to mistake them. I included that in a short paraphrased list and it was labelled a straw man. Honest attempts to paraphrase are not straw men. There are other examples of this, I don't care to dig up your text walls.

Also, insults and negative opinions about someone are not a logical fallacy. Ad hominem results when you attempt to logically construct an argument which depends on an insult to establish itself. If you supply an argument and then offer a seperate opinion about someone, or even directly name call without supplying an argument, it's not ad hominem in the sense of a logical fallacy. It may fall under the category of ad hominem as a synonym for the word "insult" in a general sense, but not in the sense of a logical fallacy.

Abusing the term ad hominem is itself a kind of ad hominem.

http://plover.net/~bonds/adhominem.html