OgreMkV
Posts: 3668
Joined: Oct. 2009
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| Quote (timothya @ May 15 2013,06:11) | KF has posted another of his summaries at UD, in which appears a set of questions that he has designed to uncover whether you (yes, you materialists; we now who you are) are psychotic, Machiavellian or narcissistic (or some combination of these maladies). Here are his questions:
1] Your empirically grounded evidence that blind chance and mechanical necessity are plausibly adequate to form a life friendly cosmos, trigger OOL and then body plans (including our own with the crucial linguistic ability) is: ?
3] Your adequate reason for dismissing the reality of God . . . is: _ ? [Cf. here.]
4] In that context [of evident evolutionary materialism], your grounding of the credibility of the human ability to reason and know (note here onlookers) is: _, and it is best warranted as ?
Your task, should you choose to accept it, is to:
1. treat KF's questions as rational propositions, and to provide rational answers
2. explain why any of his questions are irrational
3. propose alternative questions that address the underlying epistemic problems correctly
And, by the way, Moldova is going to win the Eurovision Song Contest this weekend. Go Moldova! Power ballads rule! Iceland will go down!!!!
This post will self-destruct in polynomial time. |
1) it's a good thing that I don't think that only blind chance was responsible. BTW Gordo, fundamental mistake. The human body plan is not unique to humans. Every vertebrate has the same body plan. I think you mean something different, but 'liguistic ability' is not a 'body plan'.
2) Can this guy not count?
3) I don't dismiss it, I see no evidence for it. If something is real, then it affects or is affected by the natural world. Therefore there will be evidence of the thing's interactions with the real world. Despite millions of claims, no evidence actually exists.
That being said, I might be willing to allow that some people think god(s) is/are real... TO THEM. In that case, they are welcome to whatever they want to believe or think. But it has no impact on me whatsoever.
4) I'm not I understand his poorly worded question... as a professional writer of questions, I grade this one slightly below an 'F'. But I think he's asking what is the evolutionary mechanism of reason. I have two responses. The first is, what is the Christian explanation of reason (i.e. how did god 'speak and make it so')?
The second is that reasoning is evolutionarily advantageous. It should be obvious to anyone who thinks about it a moment. What single species has taken over the world? What single species has modified themselves and the entire planet? What single species has changed other species to benefit themselves?
Obviously, it's Homo sapiens. We are not the strongest, even among primates. We are not the fastest. We can't see the best, we can't eat just anything, etc. etc. etc. But because we evolved the ability to remember and process information, we can do all the things we've done... like create religion.
As far as the actual mechanism, I would suggest beginning here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki....ligence and actually reading the books and papers involved.
As a side note, I mentioned that these were terrible questions and they are. First, they are leading questions. They expect the person answering to defend a proposition that modern biologists don't actually hold.
Second, they are poorly worded (as mentioned previously).
Third, they really don't identify the response that the questioner is wanting. Without delving into Gordon's mind (and no one wants to do that), I can't determine what he's really wanting.
Here are the ways I would ask questions that are close, but better, than Gordon's.
1) Describe the empirical evidence for the Big Bang, Origins of Life, and formation of body plans.
3) What is the evidence for and against the God of the Christian Bible?
4) What evidence supports the development of human intelligence? (NOTE: this is the toughest one, because all organisms with a brain 'reason' so that trait isn't unique to humans. I think he means sentience, but he'd need to define that. By some measures, dolphins, chimps, bonobos, and gorillas are sentient too.)
And BTW: I believe Cascada (Natalie) is singing in Eurovision for Belgium or Germany and she bloody well better win. Or however it is that Europeans do things like that.
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Ignored by those who can't provide evidence for their claims.
http://skepticink.com/smilodo....retreat
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