[...] However, our ability to preserve specific information passing it on to successive generations is useful in other areas of life. Like for example, how to plant crops and raise animals.
Nefariously hidden on the next page, it appears that you are already in fairly close accordance with my view on the 'byproduct' issue. Oh well.

Nefariously hidden on the next page, it appears that you are already in fairly close accordance with my view on the 'byproduct' issue. Oh well.
The byproducts are part of what makes us who we are. You seem to be under the illusion that we are rational creatures. But your efforts to be rational are admirable.

In answer to your previous question, in undergraduate Biology courses that I took (my degree is actually in Chemistry, but I took a number of Bio and Biochem courses) I read parts of the Origin of Species. I have not read all of it. I am a terribly lazy reader and only tend to read what I suspect will get at the information that I think I will find interesting. I am often disappointed, and my pessimism in that area makes me reluctant to pick up many books. I am more interested in language (hehehe, oh the irony) and human behavior nowadays and have sadly forgotten much of the Biology and Chemistry that I studied many years ago.

I'm starting to get the feeling I might enjoy reading The Selfish Gene. Not that I would be sold on all of Dawkins' ideas, but I would probably find it interesting. I'll look it up (when the eternity passes that will be required for me to get through the current book that I am reading).

personally I don't think it is only religion that is a problem,

I think that that is one aspect of the real problem and that is teaching kids to think in extremes.

religion does this, defines everything in terms of "good and evil" and "right and wrong".


in life there are not many social instances where you have such extremes.

this isn't only about religion.

I think teaching a kid certain fairy tales and fantasy that promote such single minded extremes only thinking makes them less likely to analyze real issues. granted, children aren't born with the ability to deal with things the way we do.

but through star wars and lord of the rings, that even though it doesn't have to, frames things in a more "good vs. evil" kind of light.

I think it is more the line of thinking that comes with bieng literally faithfull to religion that tends to accept only "black and white" when in reality, there are not always (or even mostly) things that are going to be that way, most of the world is grey.

The byproducts are part of what makes us who we are. You seem to be under the illusion that we are rational creatures. But your efforts to be rational are admirable.
I think this is rather illustrative, really -- of course evolution has not made us any more rational than it is profitable and economical for us to be, in an evolutionary sense, and even then only insofar as we didn't get stuck on a local maximum (and given enough time -- but that rarely seems a problem with evolution). We have some ability to be rational, and we can check this by comparing our mental processes with truly objective processes. This is what scientific experiments are all about, after all! But we are not perfect; hence we must beware of 'intuition' that is superstition or pure imagination. And my efforts to rise above our genetic irrationality, admirable or not in quantity, are precisely the intellectual quality that I think we need; version of Dawkins's "rebelling against the tyranny of our selfish genes" (to paraphrase from memory, but closely paraphrase, I wager).l


In answer to your previous question, in undergraduate Biology courses that I took (my degree is actually in Chemistry, but I took a number of Bio and Biochem courses) I read parts of the Origin of Species. I have not read all of it. I am a terribly lazy reader and only tend to read what I suspect will get at the information that I think I will find interesting. I am often disappointed, and my pessimism in that area makes me reluctant to pick up many books. I am more interested in language (hehehe, oh the irony) and human behavior nowadays and have sadly forgotten much of the Biology and Chemistry that I studied many years ago.
My degree is (or my degrees are) in computer science; I haven't done biology since highschool, but I enjoy reading articles and I enjoy reading Dawkins, who manages to write accessibly without dumbing the subject matter down to the point where I feel condescended to -- as I did when reading Hawking's A Brief History of Time, which was a long list of "Thus it is:"-es with few discussions or motivations of why we should believe it is so. Dawkins communicates in prose with few inaccessible technical terms (except in The Extended Phenotype, which was explicitly aimed at biologists -- yet I, a non-biologist, still managed to read and enjoy it, albeit with more effort). In physics, John Gribbin is almost at the same level of clarity.

Darwin actually wrote in a pretty accessible manner, too, but Origin tends to get long-winded because he presents so many examples for every assertion he makes. I suppose he had to: Evolution didn't have an accumulated body of evidence back then.


personally I don't think it is only religion that is a problem,

I think that that is one aspect of the real problem and that is teaching kids to think in extremes.

religion does this, defines everything in terms of "good and evil" and "right and wrong".

in life there are not many social instances where you have such extremes.

this isn't only about religion.
Personally, I think the problem is dogmatic thinking, religion being an example thereof. Never mind teaching children that things are either right or wrong -- many things, after all, are either correct or incorrect; the moon is either made of cheese, or it is not. ("Epistemological relativism may be true for you, but it isn't true for everyone." --From here (http://jesusandmo.net/2007/07/05/reply/).) I think that the more pernicious thing is the failure to teach people to critically evaluate sources and evidence -- I think I'm right in being convinced that the moon just is not made of cheese, but I should be prepared to change my mind in the unlikely event that somebody shows me convincing images through a lactoscope and presents me with samples of Moonzarella.

This also requires us to accept that anecdotal evidence has quite low reliability, and that even our most firm convictions, if based on 'inner feelings', are, alas!, much less reliable than knowledge gathered through repeatable and objective experiments. It requires us to accept that our very firmest knowledge of empirical things -- and virtually all interesting things do rely on empirical observation -- is no more than beliefs assigned a very high probability, but it makes no sense to assign it a probability of exactly 1.0 (=100%). Hell, even Richard Dawkins called a chapter of The God Delusion "Why there almost certainly is no God"! (Emphasis mine.) We must use caution and good judgement when allowing beliefs into our minds, and we must be willing to change them. (Be the Real Life (http://www.esoterically.net/log/images/Bizarro.jpg) guy.)

A corollary to this is the Skeptic's Creed (invented here -- forgive me if it coincides with something pre-existing): "If you can show me no evidence, I must presume it does not exist." By this I reject Yahweh, Vishnu, Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, Russell's Teapot, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, chakras, auras, homeopathy... If I accept one, then what rationale have I not to accept the others also?

Now that I am home, I can answer this one properly.

To your first point, standards of living have not risen in all areas of the globe - according to Jeffrey Sachs in The End of Poverty, the economic growth in developing countries has been rather stagnant, leaving them in roughly the same position as they were in 1820 (the start of 'modern economic time'), while the west has enjoyed a stead 1.7% growth rate during that period, resulting in a 25 fold increase in living standards.

In The End of Poverty, Jeffery Sachs also quotes the World Bank figures for the number of people living in extreme and moderate poverty. He gives the figure of 1.1 BILLION people living in extreme poverty (defined as chroncially hungry, unable to meet basic needs for survival) and 1.6 BILLION in moderate poverty (defined as basic needs are met for some or all of a family, lacking some needs such as safe drinking water or sanitation). So in total, there are 2.6 BILLION people in the world who are dying - some faster than others, but all in a situation not conducive to survival. Add in a famine, tsunami, or genocidal war here and there, and it's a pretty ugly picture for much of the world's popluation.

There, does that sound more rational now?

So.. uhm, the other 4.4 or so billion people on the planet are going to live forever?

It's all irrelevant anyways. This tangent has nothing to do with God. So far, God has not miracle'd the starving any food. If their situation was affected by divine will... pretty obvious that that particular God does not like them. That's a far cry from the touchy-feely Christian god that mellowed out after he had a kid.

If it was so easy, why is it so uncommon?

Most people don't choose to. :( They'd rather kick, scream, and get their way than actually have a reasonable debate.



Anyway, the point I was trying to make was not that we should all join the Luddites and greet every dawn with a hym of praise to the Great Supreme Being, of Whatever Gender and Aspect We Imagine Him/Her/It/Them To Be, after which we go out and destroy machinery and machine users with our weapons of stone and wood.
My point is that, while Religion has lead to some Great Moments in Dumbassery, Science isn't exactly squeaky clean in this regard either. (Eugenics et al)

Never said it was. :) I just think it's a more viable alternative that getting our ways to live from old books about sheep herders.

It's all irrelevant anyways. This tangent has nothing to do with God.

Agreed. I wasn't putting that info up as a proof/disproof for the existence of God and his/her tendency to involve itself in human affairs. It was in response to this..



The arguement that humans are too stupid to figure it out is ridiculous, and a poor cop-out. The sun used to orbit the Earth. The world used to be flat. The world used to only be a few thousand years old. Now we regularly send people into space, use telescopes to look back into time, and are in route to building computers with more processing power than the human brain. Not bad for some hairless apes.

...where you seem to be patting humanity on the back for being so smart as to have gotten as far as we have. If you consider the global situation, we've done a very bad job indeed.

Yes this a morality question, which is seperate from the debate at hand. Carry on!

You're already assuming the existence of an unprovable, supernatural being, which all gatherable evidence strongly suggests does not exist. If you were to make it fuzzy logic, the non-existence would be .99, and the existence .01 (being generous). You're saying that the acceptance of the .01 is as equally rational and valid as the acceptance of the .99.

I just gotta disagree with that.


You are welcome to your disagreement, but seriously, honestly, you are flat out wrong. It is logically impossible to gather proof of nonexistence. And that isn't how fuzzy logic works. Ditto probability. You find nonexistence more credible, but that is just because it meshes in better with your precoceived notions. Not because you are smarter, and not because you have evidence that god does not exist. because it is logically impossible for such evidence to exist. The most you can say is that science has made it necessary to believe that a god who produces miracles either does so very rarely or cleans up after himself very well.



The arguement that humans are too stupid to figure it out is ridiculous, and a poor cop-out. The sun used to orbit the Earth. The world used to be flat. The world used to only be a few thousand years old. Now we regularly send people into space, use telescopes to look back into time, and are in route to building computers with more processing power than the human brain. Not bad for some hairless apes.

And yet, we know nothing more about god than we did when we were cavemen painting on the walls with antelope blood. Why, because we have no faculties that are capable in any way shape or form of seeing a divinity that doesn't chose to show itself to us. Our logic fails, our senses fail, our science fails, and it always will. There are hard fundamental limits to what is knowable by humans. We are pretty bright at stuff that is observable and verifyable, but god (by most conceptions) isn't.

And by the way, none of the things you mentioned were religous beliefs, other than the specific few thousand years claim that I assume you are referring to. But there were plenty of silly observational/logical proofs over the years that have said silly things about the age of the world.

And yet, we know nothing more about god than we did when we were cavemen painting on the walls with antelope blood.
At least if you assume, a priori, that there does exist a god. If you compare the beliefs of a 'modern' theist and a caveman of twenty thousand years ago, you would probably find something rather different -- not just the fact that monotheism seems a more recent trend, but that the vision of gods has become less and less concrete. Gone are the Greek deities that bodily descended to this or that battlefield and actively took part in the action. Gone are the sun gods whose brightly glowing chariots were the sun; gone are the beliefs in souls or spirits as stars -- now that we know that the sun, and all stars, are nuclear fireballs not mere little lights on a heavenly dome.

Of course this does not disprove the vague conception of god that's unassailable by logic -- he has become a god of such little gaps that perhaps we cannot peer any deeper. However, I think it is highly suggestive that gods in primitive cultures seem to have been invoked in order to ascribe conscious agency and explanations for various phenomena -- rain, thunder, lightning, the sun, the moon. These entities once being postulated, the problems they were used to solve have gone, but people were so emotionally and culturally attached to the ideas that new problems were sought to fit existing answers.

You say "we know nothing more about god"; I say we know much more about things in general and therefore have much reason to postulate the existence of any such entity.

At least if you assume, a priori, that there does exist a god. If you compare the beliefs of a 'modern' theist and a caveman of twenty thousand years ago, you would probably find something rather different -- not just the fact that monotheism seems a more recent trend, but that the vision of gods has become less and less concrete. Gone are the Greek deities that bodily descended to this or that battlefield and actively took part in the action. Gone are the sun gods whose brightly glowing chariots were the sun; gone are the beliefs in souls or spirits as stars -- now that we know that the sun, and all stars, are nuclear fireballs not mere little lights on a heavenly dome.

Of course this does not disprove the vague conception of god that's unassailable by logic -- he has become a god of such little gaps that perhaps we cannot peer any deeper. However, I think it is highly suggestive that gods in primitive cultures seem to have been invoked in order to ascribe conscious agency and explanations for various phenomena -- rain, thunder, lightning, the sun, the moon. These entities once being postulated, the problems they were used to solve have gone, but people were so emotionally and culturally attached to the ideas that new problems were sought to fit existing answers.

You say "we know nothing more about god"; I say we know much more about things in general and therefore have much reason to postulate the existence of any such entity.

Your perception of how the greeks viewed their gods is incorrect. It seems that way to you because you were taught their myths as cute stories from a dead religion, but not their theology. It would be like learning christianity just from the miracle stories. Not to say that they didn't have their mythical literalist idiots, but they were probably less prone to that than silly modern book based yokels. The notion that gods exist to explain natural phenomena is something of a red herring. It is true, and it is true that that role is pretty much closed out, but that has never been the main purpose of religious belief.

The notion that gods exist to explain natural phenomena is something of a red herring. It is true, and it is true that that role is pretty much closed out, but that has never been the main purpose of religious belief.

Right, it's also to keep the masses in check.

Your perception of how the greeks viewed their gods is incorrect.
That's very possible. I'll accept it, but please bear in mind that I was just using this as one particularly extreme example of how gods seem to become more and more vague and undetectable the more science discerns how various mysterious phenomena really work.


The notion that gods exist to explain natural phenomena is something of a red herring. It is true, and it is true that that role is pretty much closed out, but that has never been the main purpose of religious belief.
I'd be curious to hear your argument here -- with respect to early history in particular. (The furtherance of religion, once established, doesn't seem to require much of an explanation.) What do we really know about early religion, that you feel justified to make such a strong assertion?

At least if you assume, a priori, that there does exist a god. If you compare the beliefs of a 'modern' theist and a caveman of twenty thousand years ago, you would probably find something rather different -- not just the fact that monotheism seems a more recent trend, but that the vision of gods has become less and less concrete. Gone are the Greek deities that bodily descended to this or that battlefield and actively took part in the action. Gone are the sun gods whose brightly glowing chariots were the sun; gone are the beliefs in souls or spirits as stars -- now that we know that the sun, and all stars, are nuclear fireballs not mere little lights on a heavenly dome.

Of course this does not disprove the vague conception of god that's unassailable by logic -- he has become a god of such little gaps that perhaps we cannot peer any deeper. However, I think it is highly suggestive that gods in primitive cultures seem to have been invoked in order to ascribe conscious agency and explanations for various phenomena -- rain, thunder, lightning, the sun, the moon. These entities once being postulated, the problems they were used to solve have gone, but people were so emotionally and culturally attached to the ideas that new problems were sought to fit existing answers.

You say "we know nothing more about god"; I say we know much more about things in general and therefore have much reason to postulate the existence of any such entity.

You're right, though I suspect it's slightly more complicated than this. Often, the general principles of myth or religion form the basis of new philosophy and science, or remain singularly important in inspiration or influence.

For a good example in the archaic and classical context, see Paul Seligman, The Apeiron of Anaximander: A Study in the Origin & Function of Metaphysical Ideas (London: U. of London P., 1962).

For explorations of this in the modern age, see God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science, D.C. Lindberg and R.L. Numbers eds. (Berkeley: U. of California P., 1986).

You are welcome to your disagreement, but seriously, honestly, you are flat out wrong. It is logically impossible to gather proof of nonexistence. And that isn't how fuzzy logic works. Ditto probability. You find nonexistence more credible, but that is just because it meshes in better with your precoceived notions. Not because you are smarter, and not because you have evidence that god does not exist. because it is logically impossible for such evidence to exist. The most you can say is that science has made it necessary to believe that a god who produces miracles either does so very rarely or cleans up after himself very well.



And yet, we know nothing more about god than we did when we were cavemen painting on the walls with antelope blood. Why, because we have no faculties that are capable in any way shape or form of seeing a divinity that doesn't chose to show itself to us. Our logic fails, our senses fail, our science fails, and it always will. There are hard fundamental limits to what is knowable by humans. We are pretty bright at stuff that is observable and verifyable, but god (by most conceptions) isn't.

And by the way, none of the things you mentioned were religous beliefs, other than the specific few thousand years claim that I assume you are referring to. But there were plenty of silly observational/logical proofs over the years that have said silly things about the age of the world.

You're totally backwards. I do not have to prove non-existence.

If you say something exists, the burden of proof is on you.

Look at it this way. I say you killed somebody. You're a murderer and should be put on death row. According to your logic, because I don't have a body, murder weapon, or any evidence what so ever to substantiate my claims, I'm still probably right.

You have to define God, then you have to prove it. So far, this has never been done satisfactorily anywhere. In all of your posts you have the same dogmatic belief in the supernatural, forces beyond our comprehension. You believe that without any proof what so ever, other than what you feel.

I'd be curious to hear your argument here -- with respect to early history in particular. (The furtherance of religion, once established, doesn't seem to require much of an explanation.) What do we really know about early religion, that you feel justified to make such a strong assertion?

It's not early religion, it's religion in general. Religion performs all sorts of tasks in peoples lives. It is a social glue, it helps us to resolve our conflicts with death and other tragedy, it provides us with universal ethics, it defines us. I have no more idea than you do whether the first guy to invent god was answering, "where does the thunder come from" or "what happens when we die" but the roles of religion (functional, sociological, psychological) are documented to hell and back in cultures all over the world. It's noteworthy that "belief" is not actually all that important in most cultures. That's not so much about the religion as it is the role of religion in a multi-religious society.

I wasted a perfectly good post in an angry spastic thread linking to my favorite foucault essay, so I'll just add the link to the essay here. http://www.thefoucauldian.co.uk/tself.htm

Which always puzzles me especially with intelligent people who are not merely "vaguely spiritual", but Christians. To believe there is "something greater" is, after all (and for all I may take objection to it) something radically different from believing there is One God, and Jesus is is Prophet, or---well, you know. Saying that you are a Christian implies belief in a number of fairly specific things, ranging from the raging lunacy of biblical inerrancy to a relaxed belief that (at the very least, to qualify as a Christian) Jesus was the son-cum-avatar of Yahweh and died for our sins on the cross. Whatever your beliefs may be---my point is that if you are a Christian, you do believe in a subset of the claims made by the Bible.

However, no sane person argues that the Bible is exactly accurate. It contains everything from good moral lessons to vicious atrocities, divinely inspired genocide, and militaristic bragging over apocryphal conquests. Maybe (some Christians say) there's some divinely inspired material in there, but some of it is just political.

My question is how some people go from a vague sense that there's "something greater" to using this vague sense to cherry-pick those beliefs they agree with from a larger collection of beliefs in the Bible. I mean, if you know that the Bible is not reliable -- and we know it isn't -- then without independent corroboration, none of its claims can reasonably be held as reliable, and a vague sense of "something greater" hardly serves as corroboration of the fact that although the Israelites may not have razed quite so many cities and slaughtered every man, woman and child as the Bible says they did, still, at least Jesus turned water into wine.

I realize this is a few pages back, but I don't think you got an answer. I am also not sure I can provide one, but here goes...

I am aware that discussing the veracity of the Bible is not the same as discussing the existence of God, so no one paste me, K?

I have only rarely encountered bilbical literalists, and yes, they are off their collective rocker. To believe that failable humans somehow got the word directly from God himself, wrote it down cogently and then kept it true to the original through all those centuries is absurd, and most Christians agree. That is the means by which different sects of Christianity can 'cherry-pick' their ideology - the Catholics say homosexuality is a sin because the Bible says so, the United folk say that was a function of the society at the time of writing, so is not applicalble today. This is the same rationale that allows the Catholic Church to declare speeding a sin - that the Bible was a function of it's time and could not account for cars and freeways. Yes, it's all extremely subjective and pretty much a bunch of hooey, if you ask me.

I haven't got my hands on it yet, but some guy has written a book called "The Year of Living Biblically" where he actually tried to follow all 700 rules set out in the Bible while living in an apartment in Manhattan. He did everything from not wearing mixed-fibre clothing to stoning an adulterer (he used pebbles). I would love to read how that worked out!