Malevolent Design

[Asimov]

You say Pascal is a tchotch, even though yesterday you asked...

 

"Is this the same Pascal who came up with that 'wager'?"

 

So? His "wager" is almost as bad as Lewis' "Lunatic, Liar, or Lord" argument. He was a tchotch before you quoted him, and he's even more of a tchotch afterwards.

 

 

And what's a tchotch? (Canadian, no doubt.)

 

It's derived from tchotchke, which is a little trinket. So someone who is a tchotch is someone of little importance and value.

 

Maybe there's some miscommunication here, Rev. You brought up the problem of evil quote...wasn't that by epicuris?? And then Nicole said in a classic dodge saying "Trying futilely to determine God's character, or lack, by what we see, and often narrowly, on the finite terrain of a temporal existence." Which is what I was responding to.

 

Oh, I see. Your wording was confusing. This is what had me confused:

 

To dodge a simple question like what (I think his name is) Epicuris stated by saying "oh, you're too dumb to know the character of God, blah blah blah" is dishonest.

 

I thought you were saying that Epicurus stated, by saying, "you're too dumb," but you were speaking of what she said in response to Epicurus. My mistake. I just didn't want Epicurus blamed for Pascal's mental inadequacies.

 

Pascal was a tchotch.

 

lol... Is that Jewish insult?

 

It was my mistake as well for the bad wording. I ramble sometimes.

 

As far as I'm aware it's not a Jewish insult, the kids these days have started using it as an insult. I wonder if they even know what it means.

[Fweethawt]

Pascal was a tchotch.

For us idiots on the sidelines here, would you mind breaking that down to show how it's pronounced?

 

 

I'm serious.

[Reverend AtheiStar]

It's derived from tchotchke, which is a little trinket. So someone who is a tchotch is someone of little importance and value.

 

Ah, I see. But I must second what Fweethawt said, how do you pronounce it? Is it "totch" or "chotch?"

 

As far as I'm aware it's not a Jewish insult, the kids these days have started using it as an insult. I wonder if they even know what it means.

 

I guess I must be out of the loop because I've never heard that before.

[Asimov]

choch.

[Reverend AtheiStar]

choch.

 

Does that mean that the the fictional restaurant in Office Space, Chotchky's, was meant to be a joke? Or is that just a coincidence?

[Reverend AtheiStar]

This essay is archived on my site here.

[Guest Perry]

The quest for answers to the reason for life in general and

one person's life in particular has gone on and will go on

forever. At the moment of death, what has gone but life

force? The atoms and molecules are all still there. But the

vivifying force/energy has departed. Where? Why? Will

it return?

 

What chnges with the break down of a car? All the atoms and molecules are still there. As with the car, an animated mechanical object, so it is with the animated biological object. When our parts stop working the machine shuts down. To inject supernaturalism into the equation only complicates a simple equation. There's absolutely no need for a "soul" to explain anything.

 

Who mentioned soul? Not I. Mechanics and biology

are only distant cousins. A mechanical object functions

according to physics & chemistry & mechanics, etc.

 

A biological object deals in those things only to a slight

degree. Which is why - I presume - that the disciplines

differ. The main aspect is "life force" or whatever else

you may want to call it. "Soul" isn't an available option

to me. It has too much baggage, too many adverse

connotations.

[Reverend AtheiStar]

Who mentioned soul? Not I. Mechanics and biology

are only distant cousins. A mechanical object functions

according to physics & chemistry & mechanics, etc.

 

Generally, "life force" and "soul" are interchangeable -- much like "creationism" and "Intelligent Design" in the Panda books they were pushing in Dover.

 

A biological object deals in those things only to a slight

degree. Which is why - I presume - that the disciplines

differ. The main aspect is "life force" or whatever else

you may want to call it. "Soul" isn't an available option

to me. It has too much baggage, too many adverse

connotations.

 

I agree they differ. But they are similar in the fact that they both can stop working due to either defects or breakdown. If you have a major part or enough small systems go down and the whole thing can go down. A doctor and a mechanic aren't really that far apart.

[Guest Perry]

I agree they differ. But they are similar in the fact that

they both can stop working due to either defects or

breakdown. If you have a major part or enough small

systems go down and the whole thing can go down. A

doctor and a mechanic aren't really that far apart.

Similar, perhaps. But you need to consider the inception;

the conception; the beginning. Anyone can create a

mechanical object. No one can create a biological object.

All they can do is foster or contrive a set of circumstances

whereby life force expresses itself. E.g. place a viable

seed in soil with appropriate temperature and moisture

levels and plant growth results. No scientist can duplicate

that with just a collection of physical and chemical

materials. So far. Whether cloning or hybridising or

whatever, the scientist must have a germ, a speck, a stem

cell, an object with viable life force to start with.

 

There are analogies, correspondences, I agree. But life

force is unique to biology. That some people choose to

refer to it as "soul" is just their parlance. Or prejudice.

The name is irrelevant. Humanity knows not what it is,

where it comes from, nor where it goes. It is a profound

enigma, one that seems to have puzzled thinkers forever.

The others, the non-thinkers, simply gave up the quest for

understanding and called their default guess "religion."

Of many names.

[Reverend AtheiStar]

"Once you have made intelligence supreme, you have

elevated science to the highest form of knowing. And

with that move, the self-appointed champions of

religious tradition paint themselves into the same

corner that they would like to lead us out of. Using

intelligent design as a buttress against scientific

hegemony is, to borrow from a Yiddish proverb, as

outrageously selfdefeating as murdering your parents

and then pleading for leniency on the grounds that

you're an orphan."

 

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commen...omment-opinions

From the Los Angeles Times

The divine irony of 'intelligent design'

By Garret Keizer

GARRET KEIZER is the author of "Help: The Original

Human Dilemma."

 

February 24, 2006

 

ADVOCATES OF teaching "intelligent design" aren't

giving up, no matter the recent setbacks in California

and Pennsylvania. In Utah, Texas, New York and

elsewhere, they persist in trying to make science

education subservient to a religious worldview. And

yet the longer the controversy continues, the more it

illustrates their own subservience to science.

 

As its name suggests, the major premise of intelligent

design is that the existence of a supreme designer can

be inferred by evidence of his, her or its

"intelligence." And that premise rests in turn on an

even more basic assumption: that intelligence is the

most important, perceivable and telling attribute of

God and of the creature supposedly created in God's

image.

 

Minus the references to deity, this comes amazingly

close to the same hierarchy of value on which the

scientific worldview makes its case. Sense perception

and logic - not sensuousness and emotion - are the

keys to authentic understanding. Rationality will

point us to God, if there is one. I think, therefore I

am. He thinks like you can't even begin to think,

therefore he is God.

 

According to this mind-set, if we can discover a big

wooden boat on Mt. Ararat and carbon date it to the

sixth millennium BC, then the story of the flood in

Genesis might be "true." The authoritative shift is

self-evident. It's not a matter of "what the Bible

says," as authenticated by generations of shared

cultural experience. It's a matter of what science

says - or can be forced to say - about the Bible, as

verified by a body of data. If you're a bit lost here

as to whose mind-set I'm describing, that's my point.

 

For the advocates of intelligent design, the

loveliness of nature is a second-class road to truth.

It is "merely" aesthetic. In that regard, one notices

that there is no campaign afoot to teach "divine

inspiration" as the basis for the sacred works of Fra

Angelico and Bach. "That's next," you say, and maybe

it is next. The point here is that it wasn't first,

and it wasn't first for a very good reason.

 

Once you have made intelligence supreme, you have

elevated science to the highest form of knowing. And

with that move, the self-appointed champions of

religious tradition paint themselves into the same

corner that they would like to lead us out of. Using

intelligent design as a buttress against scientific

hegemony is, to borrow from a Yiddish proverb, as

outrageously selfdefeating as murdering your parents

and then pleading for leniency on the grounds that

you're an orphan.

 

The irony extends from means to ends. The motivating

force for many advocates of intelligent design, as for

the advocates of school prayer who preceded them, is

the perceived need for kids to have "some exposure" to

religious ideas. If they don't get a taste of that

stuff in school, they may never seek it elsewhere.

 

This is where the dismissal of intelligent design as

"bad science" doesn't go far enough. It can also be

dismissed as bad evangelism. The supporters of

intelligent design betray a sadly compromised

understanding of their own underlying mission. "The

knowledge of the living God" is apparently not to be

taught by lives of exemplary service but by fossil

evidence. "Let your light shine before others, so that

they may see your good works and give glory to your

father in heaven," Jesus says in the Sermon on the

Mount. Is it now to be understood that by "light" he

meant the kind that shines in a specimen case?

 

Finally, the supporters of intelligent design betray

their own secularist assumptions through their

insistence that Darwinian evolution be taught with the

disclaimer that it is "only a theory." One would

assume that, from the perspective of faith, a great

deal is only a theory. To apply that label exclusively

to evolution suggests otherwise. It suggests that we

inhabit a world of ubiquitous certainty. No one could

walk on water in such a world because the molecular

density of water is (unlike evolution, apparently)

beyond the theoretical. Of course, that is the view of

science, and the only proper view of science. One is

amazed, however, to find it promulgated in the cause

of religion.

 

This is not to make light of a serious threat posed by

the advocates of teaching intelligent design. I happen

to share the fears of those who see a theocratic

agenda at work in their campaign. At the same time, I

can't help but be amused by the notion of the entire

edifice of the Enlightenment crumbling beneath the

assault of a "religious" crusade. The barbarians may

be battering at the gates, but the gates are mostly

their own.

[Reverend AtheiStar]

No one can create a biological object.

 

From scratch? No, not yet. But that's right around the corner. Science is very, very close. The quest to create life this way has spawned a new scientific field known as Synthetic Biology. It promises to be just as interesting and exciting as Evo-Devo!

 

"It's a very important technical advance," says Gerald Rubin, a molecular geneticist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. "You can envision the day when one could sit down at a computer, design a genome and then build it. We're still inventing the tools to make that happen, and this is an important one."

 

http://www.usatoday.com/news/science/2003-...life-usat_x.htm

 

More than 100 laboratories [are studying] processes involved in the creation of life, and scientists say for the first time that they have just about all the pieces they need to begin making inanimate chemicals come alive. Unlike any other technology invented by humans, creating artificial life will be as jarring to our concepts of ourselves as discovering living creatures on other planets in the universe would be. It also would bring into sharper focus the age-old questions of "What is life?" and "Where do we come from?"

 

http://atheism.about.com/b/a/075868.htm

 

They are working to construct a simpler version of the bacteria known as Mycoplasma genitalium, a single-cell bacterium with just one chromosome and 517 genes. The researchers believe their version will be able to survive with only 250 to 400 genes -- each of which they are making themselves, one chemical piece at a time.

 

http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/003908.html

[Reverend AtheiStar]

Recently our swordtail gave birth to 10 babies. There could have actually been more as this species likes to devour their young as soon as they come out. We separated her as soon as possible! Anyway, our little babies, about a week ago, developed a common parasitic disease known as Ich, or Ichthyophthirius multifilis. It's a protozoan that likes to feast on fish blood. It causes little white cysts to form everywhere where these nasty little creatures burrow in.

 

I feel so bad! I thought that things would just work themselves out. Then one of the fish died. That day I went to our local fish store and bought a much better filter and something called Quick Cure that contains malachite green. So far they don't look any better.

 

I read that adding marine salt will eradicate the parasite. I'm going to check on getting some of that tomorrow. I've also raised the tempeature as this speeds up the life cycle so it'll come out of the fish. That's the only time the little bastards are vulnerable.

 

The point of all this? Well, it ties right into MD. If there be a deity(s) than he/she/it/them created these little monsters currently torturing my fish. Why would a benevolent deity do this? How does the Christian reconcile these beings with a loving god?

 

I asked a Christian who emailed me out of the blue, after finding out a bit about her, why her god would allow/cause her fiance to get and suffer tremendously from kidney cancer. She had no answer.

[andyjj]

of course this *is* all due to the fall of man. This caused God to rewind the previous History of the world (as outlined in Genesis) and to restart the universe to make it look like it was all down to natural processes - hence all the evolution stuff. Simple.