Haiti and the law of karma

pam,
the arctic grasshopper poses "problems" for evilutionists: there are no transitionals "leading up" to this species. of course, fossilization of arctic grasshoppers is thought to be extremely rare...

btw...i DID see that "suck-o-meter" commercial. made me growl/chuckle.

"a new species of arctic grasshopper was discovered today"

Report it to the Smithsonian!

I can't believe you got those legs to stand like that without collapsing!

peter, pam,
a new species of arctic grasshopper was discovered today:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/58171957@N00/

PH: “That is because you have not experienced that relationship with Him or had His Spirit confirm the truth of His Word. You presuppose His non-existence because of the slant of the information you are fed and because of your nature.”

You’re right, I haven’t experienced a “relationship” with God. It’s tough to do that when the other party is invisible and silent. Furthermore, I’ve never met anyone who has experienced such a thing, and those who assert such cannot tell me how it is to be distinguished from a mental aberration or a delusion brought on by wishful thinking.

Along those lines, have you ever noticed how many religious “visions” and alien sightings take place in the privacy of the bedroom, and at night? Doesn’t this even slightly suggest to you that dreaming might be involved?

And what information have I been “fed”? By whom? I actively searched out all of it – none was forced on me, or even suggested to me. As for my nature…well, in your view, how did I come by that?

PH: “How do you arrive at truth? Your scientific worldview keeps adjusting. One subjective opinion of the facts follows another. That has been the course of human history and scientific history.”

What’s subjective about it? It’s based on discovered facts. Yes, the picture grows clearer with each new discovery, but it’s certainly not subjective.

Me: There is no evidence that this is the case. We know the bible to have been written by a large collection of normal, fallible, and possibly prevaricatious human beings from a particularly ignorant era.

PH: “No, you don't know it. That is what you suppose based on your own fallible human mind and its various influences.”

Of course I know it. It didn’t drop from the sky, engraved on golden tablets. It had authors – human ones. In the NT, some of them even have names (although only one of those is known for sure).

Me: You are taking the word of another group of normal, fallible, and possibly prevaricatious human beings who compiled these various writings (sometimes incoherently, viz. Genesis 1 & 2) and declared them, on no one’s authority but their own, to be the word of God.

PH: “Again, that is your OPINION, based on other subjective opinions with a particular bias and a propensity for human wisdom as the final and ultimate reference.

Again, not opinion, but fact. The council of Nicaea was made up of humans. Humans who fought bitterly over what should go in, and what should stay out. Humans, some of whom split off into various sects of Christianity when their favored documents didn’t make the cut.

Hi Walter,
Glad to hear that you're persevering.

I know it sucks right now, but it won't forever. (Have you seen the Nicorette commercial with the Suckometer?)

You won't notice the improvements right away, because they happen gradually, but one day you'll notice that food tastes better than it ever did before, and you can smell things you hadn't noticed before.

The biggest thing, though, is lungpower.

Like you, I quit in January, so it was spring before I hiked a trail off Skyline Drive that had always been a favorite of mine. It was a circuit hike that was downhill out and uphill back. I used to have to stop to catch my breath three times on the way back (and at least at one stop, have a cigarette), but when I did the hike for the first time after quitting, I found that I didn't need to stop at all! It was quite a revelation.

I'm looking at leaden skies and the first few snow flurries...

pam,

i too was struck by peter's reading list from his supposed atheist days: "....Whitehead, Friedrich Nietzsche, Alan Watts, Freud, Jung, Darwin, Alister Crowley, Confucius, The Noble Way..."

it's so bizarre to include dawin with all those other guys...

hi guys,
just checked in today. glad to see you guys are still going at it. i'm still busy not smoking. it still totally sucks (as the kids would say). i sure don't feel any healthier (but then, i didn't feel unhealthy before....).

i'll start "playing" again really soon. i read your recommendations below to peter on evolution books. you recommended Your Inner Fish. what a great title...

today, i'm taking my mom to the doctor, then, hopefully, finishing my latest snow sculpture - if it gets WARM enough to work the snow... weird that i'm rooting for warmth... and, pam, as you know, we're due for more snow this afternoon/evening and possibly a BIG one this weekend...

I think we need Walter to start asking his flood questions. Are you still with us, Walter?

Boy, Peter, for someone who wants to put off the evolution discussion for a while, you sure are determined to keep it going.

Link one - Lecture.

I really wanted to be in that room to interject a few things when he came out with his errors.

The main error? That no one has ever discovered a code that wasn't designed by someone. [Sound of buzzer] Wrong! We discovered DNA (and its simpler cousin, RNA). Those things can chemically organize just as can as snowflakes and tornados.

Just because humans have also developed codes, using human selection, doesn't mean that nature can't do the same, using natural selection.

Link Two - Mutation Generator

Yeah, cute, but again it overlooks the important part - natural selection.

If, in this example, reproductive fitness depended on the coherence of the sentence, all of those mutations would be rejected. But keep applying the mutation generator for long enough (resetting each time) and, if it's programmed to be truly random, eventually you will come up with a meaningful, but slightly different sentence - perhaps something like "The quiet brown fox jumped over the lazy dog." This is precisely how evolution works.

Most of us wouldn't have the patience to do that long enough, but nature has nothing but time. She's presented with a choice as large as the number of individuals in any given generation (no two are alike), and those choices are reflected in the generation that follows.

Link Three - Behe

He's not refuting the refutations of his specific objections, flagella, eyes, etc., but only generalities - and not very well at that. Some of it was beyond absurd - like claiming that all mainstream scientists are doing creationist work - ha!

It’s stuff like this that gives me such a low opinion of philosophy as a field of study. It seems to me to be just people examining the insides of their own minds, which they’re allowing to run wild, and then pretending that this has some relevance to other people and the real world.

The problem for this line of reasoning (and I use the term loosely) is that we humans have language. We not only know why we run from tigers, and what we’re thinking and feeling, but we can also talk to others about their reasons and feelings. So we know that we’re all alike.

Any early hominid or human that didn’t have these feelings of fear and avoidance, would soon have become tiger breakfast and any descendants that he had managed to produce (if any), to the extent that they inherited his predilections, would also meet rapid demises.

This is evolution at its most basic. It ain’t philosophy. The guy that ran lived to make love – and babies.

THREE

And even crazier with this:

”Beliefs don't causally produce behavior by themselves; it
is beliefs, desires, and other factors that do so together. Then the problem is that clearly
there will be any number of different patterns of belief and desire that would issue in the
same action; and among those there will be many in which the beliefs are wildly false.
Paul is a prehistoric hominid; the exigencies of survival call for him to display tiger
avoidance behavior. There will be many behaviors that are appropriate: fleeing, for
example, or climbing a steep rock face, or crawling into a hole too small to admit the
tiger, or leaping into a handy lake. Pick any such appropriately specific behavior B. Paul
engages in B, we think, because, sensible fellow that he is, he has an aversion to being
eaten and believes that B is a good means of thwarting the tiger's intentions.
But clearly this avoidance behavior could result from a thousand other belief-desire
combinations: indefinitely many other belief-desire systems fit B equally well. Perhaps
Paul very much likes the idea of being eaten, but when he sees a tiger, always runs off
looking for a better prospect, because he thinks it unlikely that the tiger he sees will eat
him. This will get his body parts in the right place so far as survival is concerned, without
involving much by way of true belief. Or perhaps he thinks the tiger is a large, friendly,
cuddly pussycat and wants to pet it; but he also believes that the best way to pet it is to
run away from it. Or perhaps the confuses running towards it with running away from it,
believing of the action that is really running away from it, that it is running towards it; or
perhaps he thinks the tiger is a regularly reoccurring illusion, and hoping to keep his
weight down, has formed the resolution to run a mile at top speed whenever presented
with such an illusion; or perhaps he thinks he is about to take part in a 1600 meter race,
wants to win, and believes the appearance of the tiger is the starting signal; or perhaps . . .
. Clearly there are any number of belief-cum-desire systems that equally fit a given bit of
behavior.”

Comment follows

TWO

Then he goes completely crazy with this:

”(a) maybe their beliefs do not cause their behavior. (Epiphenomenalism: T H Huxley) Ifso, they would be invisible to evolution; and then the fact that they arose during theevolutionary history of these beings would confer no probability oat all on the idea that they are mostly true, or mostly nearly true, rather than wildly false. Indeed, the
probability of their being mostly true would have to be estimated as fairly low; the
probability that a randomly chosen large set of propositions contains vastly more true
beliefs than false beliefs is low. (It could be that one of these creatures believes that he is
at that elegant, bibulous Oxford dinner, when in fact he is slogging his way through some
primeval swamp, desperately fighting off hungry crocodiles.) JM Smith: "A few years
ago, he wrote that he had never understood why organism have feelings. After all,
orthodox biologists believe that behavior, however complex, is governed entirely by
biochemistry and that the attendant sensations - fear, pain, wonder, love - are just
shadows cast by that biochemistry, not themselves vital to the organism's behavior . . . .”

Again - it's not about beliefs.

If you believe that you're someplace that you're not, you're not mentally functional, and you won't last long without the help of others.

Peter,
OK, I read Plantinga’s lecture from Biola U. It was a little incoherent, probably because it was spoken, and I was reading the transcript. Most of us don’t speak the way we write.

I find this type of thinking difficult to follow – again trying to turn science into philosophy, and on top of that, relating it to an algebraic formula (at least I assume that’s what that is).

He begins with this:

“Most of us think (or would think on reflection) that at least a function or purpose of our cognitive faculties is to provide us with true beliefs.”

Maybe I’m just not one of the “most of us,” but I don’t think nature cares a fig about our “beliefs.”

He says:

”One possibility: perhaps Darwin and Churchland mean to propose that a certain
conditional probability is low: the probability of human cognitive faculties' being
reliable, given that human cog faculties have been produced by evolution (Dawkin's blind
evolution, unguided by the hand of God or any other person). If (naturalistic) evolution is
true, then our cognitive faculties will have resulted from blind mechanisms like natural
selection, working on sources of genetic variation such as random genetic mutation. And
the ultimate purpose or function (Churchland's 'chore') of our cognitive faculties, if
indeed they have a purpose or function, will be survival - of individual, species, gene, or
genotype. But then it is unlikely that they have the production of true beliefs as a
function.”

If they have a purpose or function??? Well of course they do. You don’t get something as expensive as a brain for no reason. And that reason is not survival. It’s reproduction. Of course, reproduction requires a certain amount of survival, and the longer one survives, the more reproduction one can accomplish, to a point.

Hi Pam, Walter,

The lecture starts out slow but I think you will find it gets better. Go to the top of the screen and click on the video presentation.

http://www.evolution2100.com/

Here is an interesting tool that ties in with information verses random selection producing anything of value,

http://www.randommutation.com/

You made the comment the most of Behe's arguments had been refuted. He is refuting his refuters here, along with other tidbits,

http://www.uncommondescent.com/faq/

Hi Pam (January 28, 2010 12:51 PM),

PAM: "Ah, so many books, so little time… Probably the best ones for an overview of the entire subject are Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution is True, or Carl Zimmer’s Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea. For something shorter, and more limited in scope, with in-depth science, I’d recommend Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin."

I'll see what I can pick up at Chapters. Give me a couple of months before we tackle this subject again.

PH: ”My arguments are based on God's word in the respect that He has stated how the world and man came into being and from this we can deduct the general timeframe.”

PAM: "Only after you presuppose that God exists, and the bible is his word."

That is because you have not experienced that relationship with Him or had His Spirit confirm the truth of His Word. You presuppose His non-existence because of the slant of the information you are fed and because of your nature. You want evidence that can be observed through the empirical senses, but the very thing you use to test empirical evidence - the laws of logic - are not empirically verifiable. But try to make sense with using logic. The same is true for God.

PAM: "I see no justification for such a presumption."

As I see no justification for your justification. How do you arrive at truth? Your scientific worldview keeps adjusting. One subjective opinion of the facts follows another. That has been the course of human history and scientific history.

PAM: "There is no evidence that this is the case. We know the bible to have been written by a large collection of normal, fallible, and possibly prevaricatious human beings from a particularly ignorant era."

No, you don't know it. That is what you suppose based on your own fallible human mind and its various influences.

PAM: "You are taking the word of another group of normal, fallible, and possibly prevaricatious human beings who compiled these various writings (sometimes incoherently, viz. Genesis 1 & 2) and declared them, on no one’s authority but their own, to be the word of God."

Again, that is your OPINION, based on other subjective opinions with a particular bias and a propensity for human wisdom as the final and ultimate reference.

PAM: "Aahh, now I understand why you always want to equate science to philosophy. The two are poles apart. And so much> has been learned/discovered since Darwin!"

Darwin is not my ultimate authority, God is. These issues of science is something I settled a long time ago, but I will read one of your recommended books since it appears that I need to brush up in order to better understand your particular viewpoint.

Hi Pam (January 28, 2010 12:51 PM),

PAM: "Probably the best ones for an overview of the entire subject are Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution is True, or Carl Zimmer’s Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea. For something shorter, and more limited in scope, with in-depth science, I’d recommend Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin."

I'll see what I can pick up at Chapters. Give me a couple of months before we tackle this subject again.

PH: ”My arguments are based on God's word in the respect that He has stated how the world and man came into being and from this we can deduct the general timeframe.”

PAM: "Only after you presuppose that God exists, and the bible is his word."

That is because you have not experienced that relationship with Him or had His Spirit confirm the truth of His Word. You presuppose His non-existence because of the slant of the information you are fed and because of your nature. You want evidence that can be observed through the empirical senses, but the very thing you use to test empirical evidence - the laws of logic - are not empirically verifiable. But try to make sense with using logic. The same is true for God.

PAM: "I see no justification for such a presumption."

As I see no justification for your justification. How do you arrive at truth? Your scientific worldview keeps adjusting. One subjective opinion of the facts follows another. That has been the course of human history and scientific history.

PAM: "There is no evidence that this is the case. We know the bible to have been written by a large collection of normal, fallible, and possibly prevaricatious human beings from a particularly ignorant era."

No, you don't know it. That is what you suppose based on your own fallible human mind and its various influences.

PAM: "You are taking the word of another group of normal, fallible, and possibly prevaricatious human beings who compiled these various writings (sometimes incoherently, viz. Genesis 1 & 2) and declared them, on no one’s authority but their own, to be the word of God."

Again, that is your OPINION, based on other subjective opinions with a particular bias and a propensity for human wisdom as the final and ultimate reference.

PAM: "Aahh, now I understand why you always want to equate science to philosophy. The two are poles apart. And so much> has been learned/discovered since Darwin!"

Darwin is not my ultimate authority, God is. These issue of science is something I settled a long time ago, but I will read one of your recommended books since it appears that I need to brush up in order to better understand your particular viewpoint.

Hello Walter and Pam,

Sorry for the delay in responding. I will sit down this weekend and do my best to give an answer for these and other questions and concerns. I got snagged on another forum.

@ThorGoLucky

Namaste friend.

You have a valid point regarding Law of Karma - it seems so, if one has understanding of Law of Karma at surface level. However, if you read the article carefully, this article is CLEARING the doubt you raised.

Hence, another point of view could be - if one is suffering due to their past life karma, it gives us opportunity to improve upon our THIS life Karma by being compassionate to that person. Being compassionate is Good Karma, Being indifferent to a sufferer is BAD Karma.

AUM SHANTI SHANTI SHANTI
(God give me peace from thing I can control, things I can not control and from my ego)
Namaste!!

My 2 cents

TWO

ME: I can tell you that I do read on the other side, and I read the Bible.

PH: “May I ask who and what you have read in the form of creation literature? Have you read old earth as well as young earth authors?”

Yes, both; but of course it’s the YE that is the most intellectually disturbing. It’s almost like the Flat Earth Society – one wonders how, in this day and age, anyone can hang on to such antiquated ideas. Although I know that the answer is that you simply bury your heads in the sand.

My Seventh Day Adventist friend was watching a TV program about China, and she told me that “it was interesting, but when they started talking about fossils, I turned it off.” There is none so ignorant as he who will not learn.

As for who and what, I mainly read creationist and other religious Web sites. I did read Behe’s book, Darwin’s Black Box.

ME: Sadly, I find most of the anti-evolution stuff to be appallingly naive and uninformed....they're arguing with a cartoon version - what they think evolution says. If they would actually try to read and understand it, they might come up with some more sophisticated arguments.

PH: ”What would constitute a more sophisticated argument in your opinion?”

Since I’m not a believer, it’s impossible for me to come up with one, but it would surely have to based on a real knowledge of what science says about evolution, and would have to refute it in some undeniable way. This was Behe’s aim, of course, but he failed. Still, his was the best try to date.

Hi Peter,
To continue our conversation:

PH: ”I would be curious to see how you go about tackling Alvin Plantinga. He is one of the foremost Christian philosophers in the world at present. Unfortunately it is not a one to one confrontation. You only have little old me with my outdated knowledge of evolution to challenge your basic assumptions.”

Sorry I’ve taken so long to get back to you – busy week. I will check out Mr. Plantinga later today. For now, I’ll answer the rest of your post.

ME: Read one or two actual books on evolution - not just the Christian anti-evolution screeds.

PH: ”What would you recommend?”

Ah, so many books, so little time… Probably the best ones for an overview of the entire subject are Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution is True, or Carl Zimmer’s Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea. For something shorter, and more limited in scope, with in-depth science, I’d recommend Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin. Shubin is the man who discovered Tiktaalik, and in this book, he recounts that discovery, and shows in very specific ways how we owe many of our own physical properties to an ancestor like Tiktaalik – and even earlier ones. I think you should read this one and one of the first two, but if you can only manage one, any of the three will do.

PH: ”My arguments are based on God's word in the respect that He has stated how the world and man came into being and from this we can deduct the general timeframe.”

Only after you presuppose that God exists, and the bible is his word. I see no justification for such a presumption. There is no evidence that this is the case. We know the bible to have been written by a large collection of normal, fallible, and possibly prevaricatious human beings from a particularly ignorant era. You are taking the word of another group of normal, fallible, and possibly prevaricatious human beings who compiled these various writings (sometimes incoherently, viz. Genesis 1 & 2) and declared them, on no one’s authority but their own, to be the word of God.

PH: ”The last time I read a book on evolution was Darwins Natural Selection and before that The Origin of Species some thirty or so years ago. That was when I was living as though God did not exist. I had a friend who was heavily into philosophy and eastern religions, so naturally we read a lot of what was popular back then like Whitehead, Friedrich Nietzsche, Alan Watts, Freud, Jung, Darwin, Alister Crowley, Confucius, The Noble Way, and a whole bunch of other bazaar, mind bending stuff.”

Aahh, now I understand why you always want to equate science to philosophy. The two are poles apart. And so much> has been learned/discovered since Darwin!

The concept of karma has horrible ramifications. Why strive for justice and equity when there's a magical cosmic punishment-and-reward system in place to do if for us? Poverty and malnourishment is okay because they cosmically deserve it for being naughty in a previous life, while the obscenely wealthy fat man on the hill deserves his just rewards in this life. Karma can help you feel better about tragedy, but it stunts the growth of a compassionate society.

Ramdasji, you have articulated clearly and carefully the nature of karma, as well as the rhythm of cosmic events that enable us to grow and become wiser.