I was just wondering how many determinists—people who believe that human free will is an illusion, because everything is determined by physical law—would describe themselves as “pro-choice.”
Turtles all the way down...
Michael Shermer of Skeptic magazine vs. “turtles all the way down ....
September 14, 2011 - Posted by kairosfocus
[...]
To put it simply, he has a “turtles all the way down” problem:
The image of course comes from the old story of the lady who told the scientist that the world rests on the back of a turtle. The scientist challenged her, and where does that turtle stand? On another one. And that one? “It’s turtles all the way down . . . ”
The same problem holds for warranting a given claim. As I noted in a comment in Mrs O’Leary’s thread (which Mr Arrington suggested be promoted to a full post):
Take any given claim of consequence A. Why accept it?
It has grounds of some sort B.
Why accept B?
C.
And so forth.
You will then have the choice of:
(i) infinite regress ["turtles all the way down . . . "],
(ii) a circle ["turtles in a loop . . . "] or
(iii) stopping at some set of first plausibles F that are accepted as that, plausible without further demonstration. ["The last turtle stands on something, hopefully something solid"].
The first two are absurd and fallacious in turn.
Since many such sets F are possible, the matter now turns to comparative difficulties on factual adequacy, coherence and explanatory power across live options F1, F2, F3 etc.
Have a look here on.
But, every such set F, is a Faith-point. Faith and reason are inextricably intertwined in the roots of our worldviews.
This brings us to the real issue: not whether we live by faith — we must — but in what do we put our trust, why.
That is, we seek to have a reasonable faith.
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Permalink Reply by James Robertson on -
Quod erat demonstrandum (QED) - Which was to be shown or demonstrated
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September 13, 2011 - RenewAmerica
Imagine there's no God.....only evolution
By Linda Kimball
Karl Popper (1902-1994) was a British philosopher and a professor at the London School of Economics. Because he is regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of science of the 20th century, what Popper had to say about Darwinism is of utmost importance to the desperate political struggle fought between creationists and methodological and ontological naturalists. This is because the America of the Founding generation is firmly grounded in the Genesis account of creation, Old and New Testament morality and Christian theism, yet the original meaning and intent of U.S. law — as now controlled and defined by anti-God naturalism — has been radically changed so that it now reflects the doctrinal decrees of imperialist atheist evolutionary naturalism.
Whereas the Founding generation esteemed the Bible and used it to teach their children to read, comprehend and think logically as well as to properly train them in morality and self-discipline, in contemporary America, God, Bible, and moral absolutes have been banned in favor of evolutionary science, atheism, moral relativism, and self-gratification. The still-unfolding consequences of all of this are destructive and terrible, adversely affecting every level of society from the individual to the family, community, and cultural institutions to local and national politics.
In post-Christian America atheist evolutionism is taken for granted throughout the college curriculum, just as it is in all aspects of modern thought and experience, especially within the progressive liberal community. Evolution not only undergirds biological and earth sciences, but also Freudian and Jungian psychology, anthropology, law, sociology, politics, economics, the media, arts, medicine, and all other academic disciplines as well.
Evolution-believers range from atheists and scientists to esoteric Free Masonry, Hollywood insiders, occult New Age spiritists, Satanists, powerful Transnational Progressives, and large numbers of people who call themselves Christian. Among this last group are Liberal Christians, Roman Catholics, Protestants, Emergent Church leaders Brian McLaren and Rob Bell, growing numbers of the Evangelical contemporary Church, and an increasingly vocal community of Christian scholars and scientists such as Dennis Venema. Venema is a senior fellow at BioLogos Foundation, a Christian group that tries to reconcile the Bible with evolutionary science, and as a consequence teach that humans emerged from apes.
Evolutionary naturalism is poisoning and destroying America's traditional foundations, and when the foundations have finally been destroyed, all that is built upon them will be destroyed as well.
Americans have been deceived, and are needful of learning the truth about Darwinism — and all other evolutionary theories, by whatever name they are called.
Evolutionism: Spiritual...not Empirical
Though Popper esteemed evolutionary theory and natural selection, he also forthrightly stated that Darwinism is not a testable scientific theory but rather a metaphysical research program. By this he means that not only is Darwinism metaphysical (spiritual), but so are its' two most important foundations, classical empiricism and the observationalist philosophy of science that grew out of it.
Empiricism is a theory of knowledge that contradicts itself by asserting that human knowledge comes only or primarily via sensory experience rather than the mind while observationalism asserts that human knowledge and theories must be based on empirical observations....instead of the mind. For this reason, Popper argued strongly against empiricism and observationalism, saying that scientific theories and human knowledge generally, is conjectural or hypothetical and is generated by the creative imagination.
In other words, all three theories originated in the mind, a power of which is imagination. As mind is a power of soul, then Darwinism, empiricism, and observationalism are spiritual. In short, all three theories are frauds. They claim to be what they are not in order to obtain an advantage over the Genesis account of creation by imposition of immoral means.
In Noah Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language, 1828, soul and imagination are respectively defined as:
1. Soul: "The spiritual, rational and immortal substance in man, which distinguishes him from brutes; that part of man which enables him to think and reason."
The Founding generation knew that mind is a power of soul, and imagination the power by which mind conceives:
2. Imagination: "...the power or faculty of the mind by which it conceives and forms ideas of things communicated to it by the senses....The business of conception (and the) power of modifying our conceptions, by combining the parts of different ones so as to form new wholes of our own creation...(imagination) selects the parts of different conceptions, or objects of memory, to form a whole more pleasing, more terrible, or more awful, than has ever been presented in the ordinary course of nature."
In conclusion, evolutionism is an invention of imagination, an invention more terrible and more destructive than has ever been presented in the ordinary course of nature. It imagines that God is dead, that life somehow emerged out of nonlife, that man is not created in the spiritual image of God the Father but is rather a soulless, mindless ex-ape of evolution. It imagines there is no sin, no "hell below us, and above us only sky."
Evolutionism is an invention of imagination, and it has taken the post-Christian West by storm.
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Permalink Reply by Dave Gosse on -
Just how many monkeys = Shakespeare?
A recent blogger has announced that a few million simulated monkeys really could reproduce Shakespeare. This is such a hoary chestnut, that of course, everyone had to go and read just exactly what the fellow actually did, if only to ridicule it. Here's how he describes his project,Instead of having real monkeys typing on keyboards, I have virtual, computerized monkeys that output random gibberish. This is supposed to mimic a monkey randomly mashing the keys on a keyboard. The computer program I wrote compares that monkey’s gibberish to every work of Shakespeare to see if it actually matches a small portion of what Shakespeare wrote...
The bit about well-behaved monkeys is necessary, because the actual experiment reported,
For this project, I used Hadoop, Amazon EC2, and Ubuntu Linux. Since I don’t have real monkeys, I have to create fake Amazonian Map Monkeys. The Map Monkeys create random data in ASCII between a and z. It uses Sean Luke’s Mersenne Twister to make sure I have fast, random, well behaved monkeys. Once the monkey’s output is mapped, it is passed to the reducer which runs the characters through a Bloom Field membership test. If the monkey output passes the membership test, the Shakespearean works are checked using a string comparison. If that passes, a genius monkey has written 9 characters of Shakespeare. The source material is all of Shakespeare’s works as taken from Project Gutenberg.
In 2003, scientists at Paignton Zoo and the University of Plymouth, in Devon in England reported that they had left a computer keyboard in the enclosure of six Sulawesi Crested Macaques for a month; not only did the monkeys produce nothing but five pages consisting largely of the letter S, (the full text may be found here:), they started by attacking the keyboard with a stone, and continued by urinating and defecating on it.
Which would be my reaction too, if at two years old I had been given a toy that was tactilely boring, visually structured for no apparent reason, acoustically monotone, hopelessly inedible and smelled like old coffee. But people aren't as rational as monkeys, and so they spend hours with that thing, banging on it interminably, writing parables about monkeys on keyboards when everyone knows it is really about people. But is it true that a genius monkey could type nine letters of Shakespeare?
Well, of course, but fitting those 9 letter fragments back into a jigsaw puzzle of Shakespeare takes a bona fide human. As one blogger put it, this is just Dawkin's Weasel program all over again--comparing a partially completed solution to the final solution, and modifying only the parts that are wrong. Not a very random way of using those monkeys at all! Imagine taking an MedCat exam where the professor told you which multiple choice problems were wrong and to go back and change them. Even without knowing anything, how long would it take you to score a 100%?
But what would it take to get Shakespeare without any human intervention at all? How long long would it take to collect, say, a page of Shakespeare, say 500 words or 2500 letters completely randomly?
I wouldn't hold my breath for the genius monkeys. This one has been around for a long, long time. From the 2003 internet we can find the software for running it on our own computer. And the blog forums report the progress (cached versions from original site that went down 7 years ago). This comment from Evan Kirschbaum at HP Laboratories:
That seems about right. I'm getting 6 characters about every four or five seconds and there appear to be about 70 characters in the set, so a back of the envelope calculation shows that you should get 7 letters after about 5 minutes, 8 letters after about 6 hours, and 9 letters after about 18 days. (And as I was typing that, I got my first seven letter match: "1. When" from the beginning of Macbeth .) Ten letters would take about three and a half years, and you won't live to see eleven letters (239 years). If a million of us work on this, it'll take two hours to get eleven letters, 14 months to get thirteen, and 82 years to get fourteen. (Got my second seven letter match: "DukeE." from Measure for Measure .)
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De nihilo nihil - Nothing comes from nothing. (Lucretius)
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October 6, 2011
by Dr. Benjamin Wiker
Professional skeptic Michael Shermer's new book The Believing Brain is typical of the mind=brain, thoughts=chemistry genre. The approach is, of course, not new, but goes back to the 17th century philosopher Thomas Hobbes who declared that all human thought was the result of a chain of mechanical reactions that begins in the sense organs, runs through the nerves, and finally makes its way "inwards to the Brain, and Heart." Shermer's book adds new ammunition from the latest neuroscience to this centuries old argument. If there is a great load of ammunition from the latest "brain science" supporting the materialist, reductionist position that our thoughts are merely neuro-chemistry, shouldn't we give the palm of victory to the likes of Hobbes and Shermer?
No. And the reasons for it being "no" are inadvertently given by Shermer himself (as they were by Hobbes). The first reason is that every materialist argument about thoughts and beliefs being reducible to chemistry would itself be reducible to chemistry. There would no longer be truth as we understand it, just chemistry.
The second, related reason is that the materialist, reductionist position of Hobbes and Shermer is not the result of science; it is their starting point, their paradigm, their fundamental unquestioned belief that defines and determines their view of science.
Let's look at Shermer's argument and see how the materialist position undermines itself (and ultimately the existence of the very materialist who puts it forth).[...]
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Permalink Reply by Dave Gosse on
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(I)t is the charge against the main deductions of the materialist that, right or wrong, they gradually destroy his humanity; I do not mean only kindness, I mean hope, courage, poetry, initiative, all that is human. For instance, when materialism leads men to complete fatalism (as it generally does), it is quite idle to pretend that it is in any sense a liberating force. It is absurd to say that you are especially advancing freedom when you only use free thought to destroy free will. The determinists come to bind, not to loose. They may call their law the "chain" of causation. It is the worst chain that ever fettered a human being. You may use the language of liberty, if you like, about materialistic teaching, but it is obvious that this is just as inapplicable to it as a whole as the same language when applied to a man locked up in a madhouse. You may say, if you like, that the man is free to think himself a poached egg. But it is surely a more massive and important fact that if he is a poached egg, he is not free to eat, drink, sleep, walk, or smoke a cigarette. Similarly, you may say, if you like, that the bold determinist speculator is free to disbelieve in the reality of the will. But it is a much more massive and important fact that he is not free to raise, to curse, to thank, to justify, to urge, to punish, to resist temptations, to incite mobs, to make New Year resolutions, to pardon sinners, to rebuke tyrants or even to say "thank you" for the mustard.
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More Evidence that the Theory of Evolution is Falling Apart
Atheists argue that they’re all about reason, logic, and rational argumentation. In fact, they had a big “Reason Rally” in Washington proclaiming these bedrock atheistic principles. Atheists extend their paradigm by claiming that if you are not an atheist and do not believe in evolution then you are anti-science. They seem to forget that some of the world’s greatest scientists were Christians – from Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle to Johann Kepler to Michael Faraday and a whole lot more in between.Dr. Loren Eiseley (1907–1977), a Professor of anthropology, a science history writer and evolutionist, concluded that the birth of modern science was mainly due to the creationist convictions of its founders.
“It is the CHRISTIAN world which finally gave birth in a clear articulated fashion to the experimental method of science itself. . . . It began its discoveries and made use of its method in the faith, not the knowledge, that it was dealing with a rational universe controlled by a Creator who did not act upon whim nor inference with the forces He had set in operation. The experimental method succeeded beyond man’s wildest dreams but the faith that brought it into being owes something to the Christian conception of the nature of God. It is surely one of the curious paradoxes of history that science, which professionally has little to do with faith, owes its origins to an act of faith that the universe can be rationally interpreted, and that science today is sustained by that assumption.”These facts are well known to anyone who has the inclination to learn the truth, but there are few hard-core atheists who take the trouble to research the history of the relationship between the Christian religion and the origin and development of modern science. It’s there for anyone who has the guts to study the subject.
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