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For Ron Dean: it's not either/or

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broger...@gmail.com

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Aug 1, 2021, 1:26:13 PM8/1/21
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Ron, like many ID supporters, argues that if there's no natural explanation for some phenomenon, then there is a supernatural explanation. The phenomenon in question might be the values of the physical constants, the origin of life, the origin of the bacterial flagellum, or the origin of homeobox genes or just about any open scientific question.

One response is simply to say that if there is no known naturalistic explanation then there are at least two options (1) a supernatural explanation or (2) a naturalistic explanation nobody's thought of yet. But I'd say that this response makes the mistake of granting that supernatural and natural explanations are mutually exclusive. Here's a story to explain why that need not be true.

God (I'll use "God" instead of "an unspecified intelligent designer"; it's more direct) was sitting around one day in His infinite wisdom. He decided to create a universe. Since He's omniscient He cast about in his mind for sets of natural laws, physical constants and initial conditions that would make interesting universes and, omnisciently could see the whole history of each of an infinite number of such possible universes. These universes could differ greatly, or they could differ only to the extent of slight quantum scale differences, or anything in between. He decided He would choose one out of all these possible, divinely imagined universes, to become physically real. Omnisciently, of course, He knew the whole time course and evolution of that universe down to the smallest fall of a sparrow and chose it because He thought it was good.

Regardless of which of the universes He chose, any being living in that universe would only observe the action of natural laws in that universe. And yet, everything that happened, happens, or will happen in that universe was ordained by God, because God considered an infinite number of possible universes working out their histories under the influence of an infinite set of different natural laws, physical constants, initial conditions, and random (quantum) events and chose just the one to make physically real. In such a universe everything has both a natural and a supernatural cause. There is no either/or about it. Everything that occurs in that universe is what could be called part of God's Providence, and that's true whether anyone in that universe has figured out the natural cause of that thing or not. Nobody in that universe could conclude that God existed or had chosen that universe simply by making observations of the universe; and yet nothing stops someone in that universe from coming to faith in a provident, loving God. It's just not a question that observations of the universe can answer. Just like here in this universe.

This story, I think paints a more impressive picture of God than does the idea of Him as a tinkerer unable to make a universe that suited Him without sneaking back in once in a while to get life going, or to fix up the right sequence of a homeobox gene or what have you. And, unlike Deism, it allows for God's Providence to be seen in everything that happens.

So I'd say, Ron, stop trying to get scientific support for God; if God is any good at His job, you won't find it. And you'll just be wasting time you could better spend on prayer, meditation, kindnesses, or whatever seems important to you.

jillery

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Aug 2, 2021, 1:11:13 AM8/2/21
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Not only does your story paint a more impressive picture of God, it
removes his worshipers from having to distinguish between what is
supernatural and what is natural.

--
You're entitled to your own opinions.
You're not entitled to your own facts.

RonO

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Aug 2, 2021, 7:16:13 AM8/2/21
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Denton keeps claiming something like this. He claims that his
intelligent designer got the ball rolling with the Big Bang and it all
unfolded into what we have today. No claims about IC, CSI or any other
type of interference after the initial creation. Denton claims to be an
agnostic, but he admits that he "may" be a back sliding Christian, and
he only seems to be agnostic about other creationist beliefs.

Ron Okimoto

Bob Casanova

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Aug 2, 2021, 12:26:13 PM8/2/21
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On Mon, 02 Aug 2021 01:07:15 -0400, the following appeared
in talk.origins, posted by jillery <69jp...@gmail.com>:
....and will therefore be ignored.
>
--

Bob C.

"The most exciting phrase to hear in science,
the one that heralds new discoveries, is not
'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'"

- Isaac Asimov

jillery

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Aug 2, 2021, 12:51:13 PM8/2/21
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Bill Rogers' story is classic Deism. The downside with it for many
people is that it doesn't support interventionist prayer.

broger...@gmail.com

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Aug 2, 2021, 1:26:13 PM8/2/21
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> >Ron Okimoto
> Bill Rogers' story is classic Deism. The downside with it for many
> people is that it doesn't support interventionist prayer.

I do not think that the story really is classic Deism, or at least the emphasis is different. Since God chooses one out of an infinite number of potential worlds to make real, then God is in a real sense controlling everything that happens, rather than simply winding up the watch and letting it run. A Deist God, if you gave Him omniscience, would also know everything that would happen, but the classic Deist story does not emphasizing God's choosing a detailed, specific outcome. Also, since God would know who would end up praying for what and what would happen, the story would support interventionist prayer as well as anything would. There are all sorts of theological problems unresolved by the story, but they are the same ones that are unresolved by other versions of theism.

jillery

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Aug 2, 2021, 3:36:13 PM8/2/21
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On Mon, 2 Aug 2021 10:21:20 -0700 (PDT), "broger...@gmail.com"
I don't care about any particular label. So if Deism gets your
knickers in a twist, I'm fine with using whatever label you prefer.
After all, it's your story and your God. Perhaps "Spinoza's God" is a
better label. But just to be clear that I'm not the only one who uses
Deism to mean your story God:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deism>
**************************
Deism is the philosophical position that rejects revelation as a
source of religious knowledge and asserts that reason and observation
of the natural world are sufficient to establish the existence of a
Supreme Being or creator of the universe.
**************************

The takeaway here is that a Deist God is necessarily and entirely
consistent with the natural world as revealed by science. So for
example a "plain interpretation" of the Genesis Noah's Flood is at
best a wrong-headed misinterpretation, and the real meaning of those
passages is hidden.

And since you mention it, you say your story God knows all that will
ever happen. So even though he knew people would pray for X, it still
wouldn't matter whether they prayed or not, as X was foreordained.
Unless you mean to say your story God would set the initial conditions
based on what It knew people would pray for. If so, I can think of at
least two problems with that: 1) different people pray for different
and mutually exclusive outcomes, so which prayer is Goid going to set
the initial conditions for? 2) people often pray for supernatural
outcomes. This necessarily means your story God would still have to
violate Its own rules, even if those rules were set in the beginning.

Zen Cycle

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Aug 2, 2021, 3:46:13 PM8/2/21
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On Sunday, August 1, 2021 at 1:26:13 PM UTC-4, broger...@gmail.com wrote:

> Ron, stop trying to get scientific support for God; if God is any good at His job, you won't find it.

I don't have a problem with people looking for scientific support for god, I have a problem with people who claim there _is_ scientific support for god (and there are a vast number of them).




RonO

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Aug 2, 2021, 7:21:13 PM8/2/21
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Denton doesn't claim to be a deist, but he obviously is one.

Ron Okimoto

peter2...@gmail.com

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Aug 2, 2021, 11:01:13 PM8/2/21
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On Sunday, August 1, 2021 at 1:26:13 PM UTC-4, broger...@gmail.com wrote:
> Ron, like many ID supporters, argues that if there's no natural explanation for some phenomenon, then there is a supernatural explanation. The phenomenon in question might be the values of the physical constants, the origin of life, the origin of the bacterial flagellum, or the origin of homeobox genes or just about any open scientific question.
>
> One response is simply to say that if there is no known naturalistic explanation then there are at least two options (1) a supernatural explanation or (2) a naturalistic explanation nobody's thought of yet. But I'd say that this response makes the mistake of granting that supernatural and natural explanations are mutually exclusive. Here's a story to explain why that need not be true.
>
> God (I'll use "God" instead of "an unspecified intelligent designer"; it's more direct) was sitting around one day in His infinite wisdom. He decided to create a universe. Since He's omniscient

I don't think Ron Dean thinks of God as omniscient. I certainly don't think that if there is a God, he is omniscient.

Is there anyone in talk.origins who thinks of an omniscient God as something other than a concept they hope
someone will espouse, giving them an easy time in arguing with them? Hints of how that is done are given below.


<snip for focus>


> and yet nothing stops someone in that universe from coming to faith in a provident, loving God. It's just not a question that observations of the universe can answer. Just like here in this universe.

Ah, but observations do answer it, by showing us untold suffering in the world. Atheists' favorite reason
for disbelieving in God is what "stops someone in that universe from coming to faith in a provident, loving God."


> This story, I think paints a more impressive picture of God than does the idea of Him as a tinkerer unable to make a universe that suited Him without sneaking back in once in a while to get life going, or to fix up the right sequence of a homeobox gene or what have you.

And one that you don't believe for one moment, even apart from all the suffering in the world.
Otherwise you'd show more respect for a less-than-omniscient designer
who has powers and intelligence far beyond anything humans will ever be capable of.


> And, unlike Deism, it allows for God's Providence to be seen in everything that happens.

Yes, including the Holocaust, the coronavirus pandemic, and Donald Trump's Presidency. By concocting a God who creates
a deterministic universe, you make Him responsible for every evil and exonerate humans from it.

Unfortunately for you, fortunately for me, quantum mechanics throws a spanner into the works of your tidy world.

>
> So I'd say, Ron, stop trying to get scientific support for God; if God is any good at His job, you won't find it. And you'll just be wasting time you could better spend on prayer, meditation, kindnesses, or whatever seems important to you.

Said the fox, again telling the farmer how to design his henhouse, as I've caught you doing several times before.


Peter Nyikos

jillery

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Aug 3, 2021, 12:51:13 AM8/3/21
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On Mon, 2 Aug 2021 19:59:01 -0700 (PDT), "peter2...@gmail.com"
<peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:

>On Sunday, August 1, 2021 at 1:26:13 PM UTC-4, broger...@gmail.com wrote:
>> Ron, like many ID supporters, argues that if there's no natural explanation for some phenomenon, then there is a supernatural explanation. The phenomenon in question might be the values of the physical constants, the origin of life, the origin of the bacterial flagellum, or the origin of homeobox genes or just about any open scientific question.
>>
>> One response is simply to say that if there is no known naturalistic explanation then there are at least two options (1) a supernatural explanation or (2) a naturalistic explanation nobody's thought of yet. But I'd say that this response makes the mistake of granting that supernatural and natural explanations are mutually exclusive. Here's a story to explain why that need not be true.
>>
>> God (I'll use "God" instead of "an unspecified intelligent designer"; it's more direct) was sitting around one day in His infinite wisdom. He decided to create a universe. Since He's omniscient
>
>I don't think Ron Dean thinks of God as omniscient.


Neither does Bill Rogers. A takeaway from Rogers' story is that an
interventionist God necessarily presumes God is either whimsical or
not omniscient.


>I certainly don't think that if there is a God, he is omniscient.
>
>Is there anyone in talk.origins who thinks of an omniscient God as something other than a concept they hope
>someone will espouse, giving them an easy time in arguing with them? Hints of how that is done are given below.


The same could be said of any Deity, including the one presumed by
cdesign proponentsists.


><snip for focus>


You never focused on Rogers' point. But thanks for the precedent. You
never learn.

peter2...@gmail.com

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Aug 3, 2021, 9:56:13 AM8/3/21
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On Monday, August 2, 2021 at 7:21:13 PM UTC-4, Ron O wrote:
> On 8/2/2021 11:49 AM, jillery wrote:
> > On Mon, 2 Aug 2021 06:15:12 -0500, RonO <roki...@cox.net> wrote:
> >
> >> On 8/2/2021 12:07 AM, jillery wrote:


> >> Denton keeps claiming something like this. He claims that his
> >> intelligent designer got the ball rolling with the Big Bang and it all
> >> unfolded into what we have today.

This is true of Kenneth Miller also. But Miller is a darling of the atheists,
because of his anti-ID fanaticism which he has never really explained,
while Denton is under mild but muted suspicion in the way you say towards the end below.


> >> No claims about IC, CSI or any other
> >> type of interference after the initial creation.

Nor by me, although I do bring up the remote possibility from time to time.
But I am *persona* *non* *grata* here because I make a distinction,
of the utmost importance, between "creationism" and "creationists."

Your kind loves to blur the distinction, even to where at least two people
post flagrantly insincere and fallacious "suspicions" that I am a closet creationist,
and yourself, [1] who include me in your OP's with the devil-quoting-scripture title "By their fruits" OP's.[2]
.
You three do not realize that I am far better equipped than most people here are to fight creationism,
because I do not promote the ideological fiction that it is unscientific to say "X is a prime candidate for direct ancestry to Y,"
even if it does not have any apomorphies not shared by Y. And so your kind uses phylogenetic trees, which put every
species at the tips of branches, unlike evolutionary trees, which put prime candidates at the nodes.


A great example of the latter is in Kathleen Hunt's tree in her excellent Talk.Origins Archive FAQ on the horse superfamily.
It features a tree with no less than ten genera in a direct ancestry line, from Hyracotherium to Equus. That
tree is an embarrassment to the ideologues who dominate systematics ever since they won "the cladist wars."
But it's a great weapon against creationism, as is the text of the whole FAQ.


[1] and others, who have never interacted with me but believe what they see
from others, including you three, without bothering to find out the truth for themselves.

[2] You refuse to believe that I am an agnostic, despite my consistent frequent explanations of WHY I am one,
and so I cannot be a creationist by ANY accepted use of the term. It's just too convenient for you
to keep on being mired in your delusions about that.


> >> Denton claims to be an
> >> agnostic, but he admits that he "may" be a back sliding Christian, and
> >> he only seems to be agnostic about other creationist beliefs.
> >>
> >> Ron Okimoto
> >
> >
> > Bill Rogers' story is classic Deism.

The story, which I snipped because it is both fallacious and farcical, is a caricature of Deism.

> > .The downside with it for many
> > people is that it doesn't support interventionist prayer.

That's one of the MINOR downsides, and is easily explained away. Not so the major downside
of blithely ignoring the existence of untold suffering. Whole books have been devoted to trying to come to grips
with that downside, because it is such a stumbling block to belief in Christianity.

> Denton doesn't claim to be a deist, but he obviously is one.
>
> Ron Okimoto

You don't claim to be an atheist, but that is where your sympathies lie, seeing as how you
disparage all arguments that rationally support the existence of an intelligent designer of our universe.

No wonder your biggest benefactors in talk.origins are atheists and others who obviously have
no use for the Christian God. The three biggest are the militant atheists jillery and Oxyaena, and someone
who is just as tight-lipped as you are about what he believes: Hemidactylus.


Peter Nyikos

*Hemidactylus*

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Aug 3, 2021, 10:11:13 AM8/3/21
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Oh really? What I believe:

https://youtu.be/DF7d-HdjBvE

peter2...@gmail.com

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Aug 3, 2021, 10:41:13 AM8/3/21
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DATUM: you completely ignored this, perhaps because you really don't care
about these issues, only about making sure you have RonO's back.


> > No wonder your biggest benefactors in talk.origins are atheists and
> > others who obviously have
> > no use for the Christian God. The three biggest are the militant atheists
> > jillery and Oxyaena, and someone
> > who is just as tight-lipped as you are about what he believes: Hemidactylus.
> >
> Oh really? What I believe:
>
> https://youtu.be/DF7d-HdjBvE

Ignoring the context of what I wrote, with a comedy routine by "The Jerk," the role
that also suits Steve Martin in the routine.

Does the following also describe some more things that you believe?

I majored in philosophy. Something about non-sequiturs appealed to me. In philosophy, I started studying logic, and they were talking about cause and effect, and you start to realize, 'Hey, there is no cause and effect! There is no logic! There is no anything!' Then it gets real easy to write this stuff because all you have to do is twist everything hard—you twist the punch line, you twist the non-sequitur so hard away from the things that set it up.[17]
--https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Martin

If so, I think it is safe to say that you are a "none," someone who cares too little about
the ultimate questions to think hard about whether he is an atheist or not.
Steve Martin's YouTube performance tends very strongly that way already.


Peter Nyikos

Ron Dean

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Aug 3, 2021, 11:46:14 AM8/3/21
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On 8/1/21 1:25 PM, broger...@gmail.com wrote:
> Ron, like many ID supporters, argues that if there's no natural explanation for some phenomenon, then there is a supernatural explanation. The phenomenon in question might be the values of the physical constants, the origin of life, the origin of the bacterial flagellum, or the origin of homeobox genes or just about any open scientific question.
>
> One response is simply to say that if there is no known naturalistic explanation then there are at least two options (1) a supernatural explanation or (2) a naturalistic explanation nobody's thought of yet. But I'd say that this response makes the mistake of granting that supernatural and natural explanations are mutually exclusive. Here's a story to explain why that need not be true.
>
Of course it's possible that the explanation lies beyond the philosophy
of naturalism
>
> God (I'll use "God" instead of "an unspecified intelligent designer"; it's more direct) was sitting around one day in His infinite wisdom. He decided to create a universe. Since He's omniscient He cast about in his mind for sets of natural laws, physical constants and initial conditions that would make interesting universes and, omnisciently could see the whole history of each of an infinite number of such possible universes. These universes could differ greatly, or they could differ only to the extent of slight quantum scale differences, or anything in between. He decided He would choose one out of all these possible, divinely imagined universes, to become physically real. Omnisciently, of course, He knew the whole time course and evolution of that universe down to the smallest fall of a sparrow and chose it because He thought it was good.
>
Infinite numbers of universes is totally outside any empirical evidence.
They obviously serve as an escape for the some people who recognize the
extreme odds of a universe which rest on very long odds against its
existence.>
> Regardless of which of the universes He chose, any being living in that universe would only observe the action of natural laws in that universe. And yet, everything that happened, happens, or will happen in that universe was ordained by God, because God considered an infinite number of possible universes working out their histories under the influence of an infinite set of different natural laws, physical constants, initial conditions, and random (quantum) events and chose just the one to make physically real. In such a universe everything has both a natural and a supernatural cause. There is no either/or about it. Everything that occurs in that universe is what could be called part of God's Providence, and that's true whether anyone in that universe has figured out the natural cause of that thing or not. Nobody in that universe could conclude that God existed or had chosen that universe simply by making observations of the universe; and yet nothing stops someone in that universe from coming to faith in a provident, loving God. It's just not a question that observations of the universe can answer. Just like here in this universe.
>
All this and infinite numbers of universes is purely hypothetical!
>
> This story, I think paints a more impressive picture of God than does the idea of Him as a tinkerer unable to make a universe that suited Him without sneaking back in once in a while to get life going, or to fix up the right sequence of a homeobox gene or what have you. And, unlike Deism, it allows for God's Providence to be seen in everything that happens.
>
> So I'd say, Ron, stop trying to get scientific support for God; if God is any good at His job, you won't find it. And you'll just be wasting time you could better spend on prayer, meditation, kindnesses, or whatever seems important to you.
>
I don't know which God this in reference to. Is it the God of
Christianity,the Jewish God, the Moslem God one of the Mormon Gods or is
it one of the Hindu Gods?
>

Ron Dean

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Aug 3, 2021, 11:51:13 AM8/3/21
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Here again which of the various religion's Gods are whe talking about?
You should say!

broger...@gmail.com

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Aug 3, 2021, 12:06:13 PM8/3/21
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On Tuesday, August 3, 2021 at 11:46:14 AM UTC-4, Ron Dean wrote:
> On 8/1/21 1:25 PM, broger...@gmail.com wrote:
> > Ron, like many ID supporters, argues that if there's no natural explanation for some phenomenon, then there is a supernatural explanation. The phenomenon in question might be the values of the physical constants, the origin of life, the origin of the bacterial flagellum, or the origin of homeobox genes or just about any open scientific question.
> >
> > One response is simply to say that if there is no known naturalistic explanation then there are at least two options (1) a supernatural explanation or (2) a naturalistic explanation nobody's thought of yet. But I'd say that this response makes the mistake of granting that supernatural and natural explanations are mutually exclusive. Here's a story to explain why that need not be true.
> >
> Of course it's possible that the explanation lies beyond the philosophy
> of naturalism
> >
> > God (I'll use "God" instead of "an unspecified intelligent designer"; it's more direct) was sitting around one day in His infinite wisdom. He decided to create a universe. Since He's omniscient He cast about in his mind for sets of natural laws, physical constants and initial conditions that would make interesting universes and, omnisciently could see the whole history of each of an infinite number of such possible universes. These universes could differ greatly, or they could differ only to the extent of slight quantum scale differences, or anything in between. He decided He would choose one out of all these possible, divinely imagined universes, to become physically real. Omnisciently, of course, He knew the whole time course and evolution of that universe down to the smallest fall of a sparrow and chose it because He thought it was good.
> >
> Infinite numbers of universes is totally outside any empirical evidence.

Of course the existence of infinite potential universes is outside empirical evidence. I should think that was quite obvious. But it's certainly not beyond the abilities of an omniscient, omnipotent intelligent designer to imagine an infinite number of possible universe and to choose from them the one which He wants to create.

> They obviously serve as an escape for the some people who recognize the
> extreme odds of a universe which rest on very long odds against its
> existence.>

Who's escaping and from what. Certainly not from God. The story is about how the existence of not only any old God, but even a provident, living God, is compatible with whatever observations you make about the universe. My story says, specifically, that the universe we have is the way it is *because God wanted it to be that way.* I really don't see what you think I'm running away from here.

> > Regardless of which of the universes He chose, any being living in that universe would only observe the action of natural laws in that universe. And yet, everything that happened, happens, or will happen in that universe was ordained by God, because God considered an infinite number of possible universes working out their histories under the influence of an infinite set of different natural laws, physical constants, initial conditions, and random (quantum) events and chose just the one to make physically real. In such a universe everything has both a natural and a supernatural cause. There is no either/or about it. Everything that occurs in that universe is what could be called part of God's Providence, and that's true whether anyone in that universe has figured out the natural cause of that thing or not. Nobody in that universe could conclude that God existed or had chosen that universe simply by making observations of the universe; and yet nothing stops someone in that universe from coming to faith in a provident, loving God. It's just not a question that observations of the universe can answer. Just like here in this universe.
> >
> All this and infinite numbers of universes is purely hypothetical!

Of course it's hypothetical. That's the point. God could imagine an infinite number of possible universes and choose the one of them which He wanted to create. Seems just the sort of thing that a omnipotent, omniscient supernatural designer would do.
> >
> > This story, I think paints a more impressive picture of God than does the idea of Him as a tinkerer unable to make a universe that suited Him without sneaking back in once in a while to get life going, or to fix up the right sequence of a homeobox gene or what have you. And, unlike Deism, it allows for God's Providence to be seen in everything that happens.
> >
> > So I'd say, Ron, stop trying to get scientific support for God; if God is any good at His job, you won't find it. And you'll just be wasting time you could better spend on prayer, meditation, kindnesses, or whatever seems important to you.
> >
> I don't know which God this in reference to. Is it the God of
> Christianity,the Jewish God, the Moslem God one of the Mormon Gods or is
> it one of the Hindu Gods?

Take your pick. I think the story above is compatible with the theologies of many mainstream religions.
> >

jillery

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Aug 3, 2021, 1:01:13 PM8/3/21
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On Tue, 3 Aug 2021 11:46:21 -0400, Ron Dean <rdhall...@gmail.com>
wrote:
I did say, and so did Bill Rogers. He and I are talking about his
story's God. Not sure how even you didn't catch that.

Based on your replies, you seem to think the only Gods worth
considering are the ones associated with "various religions". Why is
that?

jillery

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Aug 3, 2021, 1:01:13 PM8/3/21
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On Tue, 3 Aug 2021 06:51:33 -0700 (PDT), "peter2...@gmail.com"
<peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:

>On Monday, August 2, 2021 at 7:21:13 PM UTC-4, Ron O wrote:
>> On 8/2/2021 11:49 AM, jillery wrote:
>> > On Mon, 2 Aug 2021 06:15:12 -0500, RonO <roki...@cox.net> wrote:
>> >
>> >> On 8/2/2021 12:07 AM, jillery wrote:
>
>
>> >> Denton keeps claiming something like this. He claims that his
>> >> intelligent designer got the ball rolling with the Big Bang and it all
>> >> unfolded into what we have today.
>
>This is true of Kenneth Miller also. But Miller is a darling of the atheists,
>because of his anti-ID fanaticism which he has never really explained,


By no stretch can Miller be considered fanatical, so he has nothing to
explain about there. OTOH his numerous articles, lectures, and
website do a good job of explaining his opposition to teaching ID as
science.


>while Denton is under mild but muted suspicion in the way you say towards the end below.
>
>
>> >> No claims about IC, CSI or any other
>> >> type of interference after the initial creation.
>
>Nor by me, although I do bring up the remote possibility from time to time.
>But I am *persona* *non* *grata* here because I make a distinction,
>of the utmost importance, between "creationism" and "creationists."


<cough> bacterial flagellum <cough>

<cough> blood-clotting cascade <cough>

<cough> genetic code <cough>

<cough>...<cough>...<cough>...<cough>...


>Your kind loves to blur the distinction, even to where at least two people
>post flagrantly insincere and fallacious "suspicions" that I am a closet creationist,
>and yourself, [1] who include me in your OP's with the devil-quoting-scripture title "By their fruits" OP's.[2]


If it quacks like a Creationist...


>You three


Three???? Are you wearing mittens?


> do not realize that I am far better equipped than most people here are to fight creationism,
>because I do not promote the ideological fiction that it is unscientific to say "X is a prime candidate for direct ancestry to Y,"


And so you jump the rails into yet more mindless noise.

<snip remaining mindless noise>

Athel Cornish-Bowden

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Aug 3, 2021, 3:01:13 PM8/3/21
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Golly. You're not only an expert on biological evolution, you're also
an expert on astrophysics. Why don't you familiarize yourself with the
arguments astrophysicists use for reaching their conclusions before
concluding that they're "obviously" wrong?
--
Athel -- French and British, living mainly in England until 1987.

broger...@gmail.com

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Aug 3, 2021, 3:56:13 PM8/3/21
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Well golly gee. I'd say that if a theory predicts many different things, one of which is the existence of multiple universes, and that if the observable things that theory predicts are correct, then it's not wrong at all to accept the likely existence of multiple universe. That still does not make them empirically observable. And there'd be no way to choose between two theories whose predictions about, say, the distribution of inhomeogeneities in the CMB and the rate of expansion of the universe, but differed about the existence of multiple universes. But perhaps you meant your snark for Ron rather than for me.

peter2...@gmail.com

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Aug 3, 2021, 7:46:14 PM8/3/21
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On Tuesday, August 3, 2021 at 11:46:14 AM UTC-4, Ron Dean wrote:
> On 8/1/21 1:25 PM, broger...@gmail.com wrote:
> > Ron, like many ID supporters, argues that if there's no natural explanation for some phenomenon, then there is a supernatural explanation. The phenomenon in question might be the values of the physical constants, the origin of life, the origin of the bacterial flagellum, or the origin of homeobox genes or just about any open scientific question.
> >
> > One response is simply to say that if there is no known naturalistic explanation then there are at least two options (1) a supernatural explanation or (2) a naturalistic explanation nobody's thought of yet. But I'd say that this response makes the mistake of granting that supernatural and natural explanations are mutually exclusive.

Au contraire, this is not a mistake at all, given that Bill is indulging below in
a purely academic exercise that he shouldn't expect anyone to take seriously, least of all himself.


>> Here's a story to explain why that need not be true.
> >
> Of course it's possible that the explanation lies beyond the philosophy
> of naturalism

That depends on how broadly you interpret the word "naturalism." If there is a parallel
universe to ours within a multiverse, [1] it could encompass that parallel universe
if is based on laws of a purely physical nature.

[1] possibly (but not necessarily) having some interaction with ours. I don't think we know enough
about dark matter to rule out the possibility of it being in a parallel universe that is interacting
with ours, with only gravity -- no other properties -- to connect the two causally.


> > God (I'll use "God" instead of "an unspecified intelligent designer"; it's more direct) was sitting around one day in His infinite wisdom. He decided to create a universe. Since He's omniscient He cast about in his mind for sets of natural laws, physical constants and initial conditions that would make interesting universes and, omnisciently could see the whole history of each of an infinite number of such possible universes.

Here, Bill Rogers introduces a colossal constraint. His academic exercise has to assume that God
would limit Himself to only those universes which required Him to have no further interaction with it.
This begs the question of whether a universe like that should be better than one that
called for interaction by God with His universe. Why should God deprive Himself of some fun?


> > These universes could differ greatly, or they could differ only to the extent of slight quantum scale differences, or anything in between. He decided He would choose one out of all these possible, divinely imagined universes, to become physically real. Omnisciently, of course, He knew the whole time course and evolution of that universe down to the smallest fall of a sparrow and chose it because He thought it was good.


> Infinite numbers of universes is totally outside any empirical evidence.

Bill might go along with the greatest question-begging in the whole Philosophy of Religion
of which I know, Hume's claim that "the universal experience of mankind is that miracles do not happen."
Hence he might claim that the existence of God is totally outside any empirical evidence.

> They obviously serve as an escape for the some people who recognize the
> extreme odds of a universe which rest on very long odds against its
> existence.

Yes, Ron, but they can say the exact same thing about a supernatural designer.
Haven't you ever heard the village atheist question, "Where did God come from?"


> > Regardless of which of the universes He chose, any being living in that universe would only observe the action of natural laws in that universe. And yet, everything that happened, happens, or will happen in that universe was ordained by God, because God considered an infinite number of possible universes working out their histories under the influence of an infinite set of different natural laws, physical constants, initial conditions, and random (quantum) events

... but with God completely uninvolved with His creation, by the constraint Bill Rogers imposes on his story.

> and chose just the one to make physically real. In such a universe everything has both a natural and a supernatural cause. There is no either/or about it. Everything that occurs in that universe is what could be called part of God's Providence, and that's true whether anyone in that universe has figured out the natural cause of that thing or not.

This, a kissing cousin of Omphalism, is the point of Bill Rogers's purely academic exercise.
He does not, of course, endorse his scenario.

Nor should he expect anyone to take it seriously. So the three last lines are a case of "garbage out"
after all the "garbage in" that preceded it.


But that was sanitized "garbage in", completely unlike the garbage below that stinks to the high heavens.
It is so patently absurd, I can hardly believe Bill posted it in good faith:

>Nobody in that universe could conclude that God existed or had chosen that universe simply by making observations of the universe; and yet nothing stops someone in that universe from coming to faith in a provident, loving God. It's just not a question that observations of the universe can answer. Just like here in this universe.


> All this and infinite numbers of universes is purely hypothetical!

Did you read where I demolished those last three lines, and undermined the three that follow?

> > This story, I think paints a more impressive picture of God than does the idea of Him as a tinkerer unable to make a universe that suited Him without sneaking back in once in a while to get life going, or to fix up the right sequence of a homeobox gene or what have you.

If you've read my comments above about what jillery thinks of as Bill's "point," you can see why I,
who was getting close to my bedtime, decided to snip it. This rather smelly new garbage needed to be addressed
along with the stinking part before dealing with purely academic, basically sanitary garbage.

> > And, unlike Deism, it allows for God's Providence to be seen in everything that happens.

No better than Omphalism does. Agreed, Ron?

> >
> > So I'd say, Ron, stop trying to get scientific support for God; if God is any good at His job, you won't find it. And you'll just be wasting time you could better spend on prayer, meditation, kindnesses, or whatever seems important to you.
> >
> I don't know which God this in reference to. Is it the God of
> Christianity,the Jewish God, the Moslem God one of the Mormon Gods or is
> it one of the Hindu Gods?

I don't think Bill knows much that is worth knowing about these Gods. His God is a medieval adaptation
of some non-Christian gods, such as Plato's. The idea of an omniscient God is not to be found in the Bible.
It *a* *fortiori* is not in the book of Mormon. I don't know enough about the Koran to say something about
whether Islam has such an idea. It certainly pictures Allah as being far more remote than the Christian God,
and considers it blasphemy to speak of a Trinity the way Christians do.


Peter Nyikos

RonO

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Aug 3, 2021, 8:41:14 PM8/3/21
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On 8/3/2021 11:57 AM, jillery wrote:
> On Tue, 3 Aug 2021 06:51:33 -0700 (PDT), "peter2...@gmail.com"
> <peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Monday, August 2, 2021 at 7:21:13 PM UTC-4, Ron O wrote:
>>> On 8/2/2021 11:49 AM, jillery wrote:
>>>> On Mon, 2 Aug 2021 06:15:12 -0500, RonO <roki...@cox.net> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> On 8/2/2021 12:07 AM, jillery wrote:
>>
>>
>>>>> Denton keeps claiming something like this. He claims that his
>>>>> intelligent designer got the ball rolling with the Big Bang and it all
>>>>> unfolded into what we have today.
>>
>> This is true of Kenneth Miller also. But Miller is a darling of the atheists,
>> because of his anti-ID fanaticism which he has never really explained,
>
>
> By no stretch can Miller be considered fanatical, so he has nothing to
> explain about there. OTOH his numerous articles, lectures, and
> website do a good job of explaining his opposition to teaching ID as
> science.

Miller claims to believe in an interactive God, and someone posted a
video of some event where Miller was being taken to task for his notion
that God could jiggle atoms in order to get things done and make it look
like it does now because the previous generation did exist, but was just
altered a bit using biology and atomic jiggling.

>
>
>> while Denton is under mild but muted suspicion in the way you say towards the end below.
>>
>>
>>>>> No claims about IC, CSI or any other
>>>>> type of interference after the initial creation.
>>
>> Nor by me, although I do bring up the remote possibility from time to time.
>> But I am *persona* *non* *grata* here because I make a distinction,
>> of the utmost importance, between "creationism" and "creationists."
>
>
> <cough> bacterial flagellum <cough>
>
> <cough> blood-clotting cascade <cough>
>
> <cough> genetic code <cough>
>
> <cough>...<cough>...<cough>...<cough>...

All his antics aren't in this post so it isn't a self consistent lie.

>
>
>> Your kind loves to blur the distinction, even to where at least two people
>> post flagrantly insincere and fallacious "suspicions" that I am a closet creationist,
>> and yourself, [1] who include me in your OP's with the devil-quoting-scripture title "By their fruits" OP's.[2]
>
>
> If it quacks like a Creationist...

More likely cracks like a Creationist.

>
>
>> You three
>
>
> Three???? Are you wearing mittens?
>
>
>> do not realize that I am far better equipped than most people here are to fight creationism,
>> because I do not promote the ideological fiction that it is unscientific to say "X is a prime candidate for direct ancestry to Y,"

Poor guy do you think that he doesn't understand what he is doing or
that he does stupid things on purpose?

Ron Okimoto

Oxyaena

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Aug 3, 2021, 9:01:13 PM8/3/21
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On 8/3/2021 7:42 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>
> I don't think Bill knows much that is worth knowing about these Gods. His God is a medieval adaptation
> of some non-Christian gods, such as Plato's. The idea of an omniscient God is not to be found in the Bible.
> It *a* *fortiori* is not in the book of Mormon. I don't know enough about the Koran to say something about
> whether Islam has such an idea. It certainly pictures Allah as being far more remote than the Christian God,
> and considers it blasphemy to speak of a Trinity the way Christians do.
>

https://www.al-islam.org/islamic-doctrines-simplified/allah-omniscient

>
> Peter Nyikos
>

jillery

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Aug 3, 2021, 9:56:13 PM8/3/21
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On Tue, 3 Aug 2021 16:42:21 -0700 (PDT), "peter2...@gmail.com"
<peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:


.... an incoherent train wreck. It's as if Ron Dean and the peter are
competing to see who can be more irrational.

The following is left uncommented and unaltered, for purposes of
documentation.

peter2...@gmail.com

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Aug 3, 2021, 10:01:13 PM8/3/21
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On Tuesday, August 3, 2021 at 1:01:13 PM UTC-4, jillery wrote:
> On Tue, 3 Aug 2021 06:51:33 -0700 (PDT), "peter2...@gmail.com"
> <peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >On Monday, August 2, 2021 at 7:21:13 PM UTC-4, Ron O wrote:
> >> On 8/2/2021 11:49 AM, jillery wrote:
> >> > On Mon, 2 Aug 2021 06:15:12 -0500, RonO <roki...@cox.net> wrote:
> >> >
> >> >> On 8/2/2021 12:07 AM, jillery wrote:
> >
> >
> >> >> Denton keeps claiming something like this. He claims that his
> >> >> intelligent designer got the ball rolling with the Big Bang and it all
> >> >> unfolded into what we have today.
> >
> >This is true of Kenneth Miller also. But Miller is a darling of the atheists,
> >because of his anti-ID fanaticism which he has never really explained,

I stand by what I wrote here. If you can find any place where Miller explains
why he is such a zealous foe of ID in general and Behe in particular, I'd certainly like to see it.


> >while Denton is under mild but muted suspicion in the way you say towards the end below.
> >
> >
> >> >> No claims about IC, CSI or any other
> >> >> type of interference after the initial creation.
> >
> >Nor by me, although I do bring up the remote possibility from time to time.
> >But I am *persona* *non* *grata* here because I make a distinction,
> >of the utmost importance, between "creationism" and "creationists."


> <cough> bacterial flagellum <cough>
>
> <cough> blood-clotting cascade <cough>
>
> <cough> genetic code <cough>
>
> <cough>...<cough>...<cough>...<cough>...

I can't decipher what all that coughing is about. These are phenomena that pose
serious challenges to find evolutionary paths that conform to the neo-Darwinist theory of evolution
that account for their existence. If Kenneth Miller has conned you into thinking that Behe
is a creationist because he's publicized the first two, and Stephen Myer is one because
he has publicized the third, then I rest my case for Miller being an anti-ID fanatic.

Your fit of coughing, and your flagrant deletion of something I'm reposting below,
have inspired me to give a new name to the closest counterpart to "God of the Gaps"
that the anti-creationist fanatics have. It isn't as concise as "Goddidit," but it's short enough.

***************************** * * * jillery of the gaps * * * ***************************

Who cares HOW it evolved? It evolved. End of story.

********************************************************************************************

If the shoe fits, then your coughin' is building a coffin for evolutionary research; and to anyone
who swears by Dobzhansky's slogan, "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution"
it is a coffin for all of biological research.

> >Your kind loves to blur the distinction, even to where at least two people
> >post flagrantly insincere and fallacious "suspicions" that I am a closet creationist,
> >and yourself, [1] who include me in your OP's with the devil-quoting-scripture title "By their fruits".[2]

> >You three
>
>
> Three????

The other two are the ones I had in mind when I wrote "at least two people." Would you like to
know who they are? I needn't name them right now, because I've found two more: yourself and Hemidactylus,
who has really put himself out yesterday to dishonestly create that impression over on the thread,
Re: A riposte of fine-tuning
I don't have the time to respond to his bilge today, but I do plan to do so this week.


> > do not realize that I am far better equipped than most people here are to fight creationism,
> > because I do not promote the ideological fiction that it is unscientific to say
> > "X is a prime candidate for direct ancestry to Y,"

...whereas the guru of evolutionary biology in talk.origins, John Harshman, has adopted that ideology
lock, stock, and barrel. I keep telling him he is fighting creationism with both hands tied behind his back,
for reasons that you cravenly (and Harshman-servingly) snipped:

_________________________________ repost of reasons ___________________________________
And so your kind uses phylogenetic trees, which put every
species at the tips of branches, unlike evolutionary trees, which put prime candidates at the nodes.


A great example of the latter is in Kathleen Hunt's tree in her excellent Talk.Origins Archive FAQ on the horse superfamily.
It features a tree with no less than ten genera in a direct ancestry line, from Hyracotherium to Equus. That
tree is an embarrassment to the ideologues who dominate systematics ever since they won "the cladist wars."
But it's a great weapon against creationism, as is the text of the whole FAQ.

==================================end of given reasons ===========================

There are other reasons: Harshman also goes along with the reigning ideology in wanting paraphyletic taxa
to be banned from peer-reviewed scientific papers, despite the fact that the word "paraphyletic"
specifically denotes a taxon from which one or more clades are known to have EVOLVED.
And the clades are *identified*.

I believe that resentment by Harshman about me pointing out how he is promoting the fighting of
creationism with both hands tied behind one's back is part of what motivates him to allege
that he has "suspicions" that I am a closet creationist.

And now you know half of the rest of the story behind my use of the word you echoed with "Three????"


Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--
University of South Carolina
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

Ron Dean

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Aug 3, 2021, 10:41:13 PM8/3/21
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You have a great gift! A gift of twisting comments to the degree that
they are unrecognizable even to the person who first expressed the comment.

jillery

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Aug 4, 2021, 1:51:13 AM8/4/21
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On Tue, 3 Aug 2021 19:00:54 -0700 (PDT), "peter2...@gmail.com"
<peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:

>On Tuesday, August 3, 2021 at 1:01:13 PM UTC-4, jillery wrote:
>> On Tue, 3 Aug 2021 06:51:33 -0700 (PDT), "peter2...@gmail.com"
>> <peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> >On Monday, August 2, 2021 at 7:21:13 PM UTC-4, Ron O wrote:
>> >> On 8/2/2021 11:49 AM, jillery wrote:
>> >> > On Mon, 2 Aug 2021 06:15:12 -0500, RonO <roki...@cox.net> wrote:
>> >> >
>> >> >> On 8/2/2021 12:07 AM, jillery wrote:
>> >
>> >
>> >> >> Denton keeps claiming something like this. He claims that his
>> >> >> intelligent designer got the ball rolling with the Big Bang and it all
>> >> >> unfolded into what we have today.
>> >
>> >This is true of Kenneth Miller also. But Miller is a darling of the atheists,
>> >because of his anti-ID fanaticism which he has never really explained,
>
>I stand by what I wrote here. If you can find any place where Miller explains
>why he is such a zealous foe of ID in general and Behe in particular, I'd certainly like to see it.


You say you stand by what you wrote, yet you provide no basis for your
characterizations of Miller, while at the same time you conveniently
deleted without attribution what I wrote which answers what you
pretend you would "certainly like to see".


>> >while Denton is under mild but muted suspicion in the way you say towards the end below.
>> >
>> >
>> >> >> No claims about IC, CSI or any other
>> >> >> type of interference after the initial creation.
>> >
>> >Nor by me, although I do bring up the remote possibility from time to time.
>> >But I am *persona* *non* *grata* here because I make a distinction,
>> >of the utmost importance, between "creationism" and "creationists."
>
>
>> <cough> bacterial flagellum <cough>
>>
>> <cough> blood-clotting cascade <cough>
>>
>> <cough> genetic code <cough>
>>
>> <cough>...<cough>...<cough>...<cough>...
>
>I can't decipher what all that coughing is about.


Really? Not sure why you pretend to not recognize your own cited
examples of "interference after the initial creation", especially
since you admit to recognizing them in your very next paragraph.


>These are phenomena that pose
>serious challenges to find evolutionary paths that conform to the neo-Darwinist theory of evolution
>that account for their existence. If Kenneth Miller has conned you into thinking that Behe
>is a creationist because he's publicized the first two, and Stephen Myer is one because
>he has publicized the third, then I rest my case for Miller being an anti-ID fanatic.


You act as judge, jury, prosecutor, and executioner of Miller based on
Trumped-up charges from your own deluded imagination. You can't rest
a case you never presented.

The phenomena I identified have been proclaimed by cdesign
proponentsists like you to be evidence for Design. The arguments of
Behe and MEYERS are similar, that they are too complex to have evolved
by unguided natural processes alone, and instead their origin required
a purposeful Designer, one whose presumed actions by definition are
supernatural interventions, ie Creationism.



>Your fit of coughing, and your flagrant deletion


Your flagrant deletions disqualify you from complaining about my
flagrant deletions. Tu quoque back atcha, asshole.

<snip remaining willfully stupid spam>

jillery

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Aug 4, 2021, 2:01:13 AM8/4/21
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On Tue, 3 Aug 2021 22:38:25 -0400, Ron Dean <rdhall...@gmail.com>
Really? So was it someone not you who asked "which religion's Gods
are whe[sic] talking about?" Or did someone force you to write
something you know is mindless noise?

And why don't you back up your baseless accusations against me? Is it
because you know they are made-up crap and you have nothing
intelligent to say?

Athel Cornish-Bowden

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Aug 4, 2021, 2:56:13 AM8/4/21
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Zen Cycle

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Aug 4, 2021, 8:26:13 AM8/4/21
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On Tuesday, August 3, 2021 at 7:46:14 PM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:

> Yes, Ron, but they can say the exact same thing about a supernatural designer.
> Haven't you ever heard the village atheist question, "Where did God come from?"

It isn't a "village atheist" question, you asshole. It's been asked (and ostensibly answered) since the god concept first originated by _theists_. Aristotle posed a first-cause question, even Aquinas addressed the issue. Googling "where did god come from" returns following on the first page of results, all from theistic websites:

https://www.blueletterbible.org/faq/don_stewart/don_stewart_289.cfm

https://biologos.org/common-questions/what-created-god/

https://www.biblestudytools.com/bible-study/topical-studies/where-did-god-come-from.html

Of course, they all have the same answer 'god always was, is, and always will be', with biologos going so far as to state 'you shouldn't even bother with that question' ("Asking for a cause of a necessary being is like asking how much the color blue weighs—it is a category mistake.")

> The idea of an omniscient God is not to be found in the Bible.

And you keep digging yourself deeper...

https://www.openbible.info/topics/omniscience

It lists 100 bible versus which are all interpreted as affirming omniscience. Simply because they don't use the word 'omniscient' doesn't mean the concept is not there.

You wrote somewhere else that you were 'uniquely qualified to argue against creationism', or something like that.

You very clearly are not. Not only did that place your incredible general arrogance on display, but every time you post, you make specious claims - usually demonstrably false - rooted in your arrogamce. Stick to math.

Athel Cornish-Bowden

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Aug 4, 2021, 9:21:13 AM8/4/21
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Apologies. I did think I was replying to Ron Dean, as you surmised.
It's not always easy to see who wrote what, and in this case your
comment seemed to be in his style.

Mark Isaak

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Aug 4, 2021, 11:21:13 AM8/4/21
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On 8/3/21 7:00 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> [...]
> I stand by what I wrote here. If you can find any place where Miller explains
> why he is such a zealous foe of ID in general and Behe in particular, I'd certainly like to see it.

Perhaps it is because Miller is a scientist, and ID in general was
conceived as an attack on science, and Behe actively supported that attack.

--
Mark Isaak eciton (at) curioustaxonomy (dot) net
"The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred
to the presence of those who think they've found it." - Terry Pratchett

jillery

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Aug 4, 2021, 12:06:13 PM8/4/21
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On Wed, 4 Aug 2021 08:17:42 -0700, Mark Isaak
<eci...@curioustaxonomyNOSPAM.net> wrote:

>On 8/3/21 7:00 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>> [...]
>> I stand by what I wrote here. If you can find any place where Miller explains
>> why he is such a zealous foe of ID in general and Behe in particular, I'd certainly like to see it.
>
>Perhaps it is because Miller is a scientist, and ID in general was
>conceived as an attack on science, and Behe actively supported that attack.


The peter's posts show he has no real interest in seeing any
explanation.

peter2...@gmail.com

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Aug 4, 2021, 12:16:14 PM8/4/21
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On Wednesday, August 4, 2021 at 8:26:13 AM UTC-4, funkma...@hotmail.com wrote:
> On Tuesday, August 3, 2021 at 7:46:14 PM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>
> > Yes, Ron, but they can say the exact same thing about a supernatural designer.
> > Haven't you ever heard the village atheist question, "Where did God come from?"

> It isn't a "village atheist" question, you asshole.

What I meant was that it is such a no-brainer that it doesn't take more than a village atheist
to come up with it without consulting any sources, let alone the batch that you googled.


> It's been asked (and ostensibly answered) since the god concept first originated by _theists_. Aristotle posed a first-cause question,

...to which his "Prime mover" answer has been refuted, but it takes more than the understanding of the
average village atheist to refute it.


> even Aquinas addressed the issue.

With the same results. In fact, wasn't he just giving Aristotle's answer but adding "and this is God"
or words to that effect.

> Googling "where did god come from" returns following on the first page of results, all from theistic websites:

>
> https://www.blueletterbible.org/faq/don_stewart/don_stewart_289.cfm
>
> https://biologos.org/common-questions/what-created-god/
>
> https://www.biblestudytools.com/bible-study/topical-studies/where-did-god-come-from.html
>
> Of course, they all have the same answer 'god always was, is, and always will be',

It seems you found a sorry lot who were put on the first page by Google based on them being
such "easy reads" that the readers didn't bother to search for professional theologians. I could
have put them into touch with some professional Thomists. But those aren't such "easy reads."

Unfortunately, this distortion is not confined to creationists. Science journalists who write
popularizations for such elite sources as the ones whose names you see in the urls below...

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/07/do-these-fossilized-structures-belong-earth-s-first-animals

and

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02066-9

...sometimes make demonstrable mistakes that are, in some ways, worse than what you've quoted.

The headlines of the two articles that I've linked got the same thing backwards from the peer-reviewed paper
in _Nature_ that they were ostensibly reviewing. You can find the details in the following post I did over
in sci.bio.paleontology:

https://groups.google.com/g/sci.bio.paleontology/c/d2CPSwaFx14/m/X1y0gQd9AgAJ
Re: Possible Neoproterozoic sponge fossil.



> with biologos going so far as to state 'you shouldn't even bother with that question' ("Asking for a cause of a necessary being is like asking how much the color blue weighs—it is a category mistake.")

This has to do with another fallacy of which Aristotle and Aquinas were guilty: a false dichotomy between
"contingent being" and "necessary being."


> > The idea of an omniscient God is not to be found in the Bible.

I meant "omniscient" in the absolute sense that Bill Rogers used it in his OP,
not the down-to-earth uses that one actually reads in the Bible.

> And you keep digging yourself deeper...

You keep underestimating me. But I'm used to it. People have been underestimating
me ever since before I was born.


Concluded in next reply to this post, to be done later today.


Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--
Univ. of South Carolina at Columbia
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

peter2...@gmail.com

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Aug 4, 2021, 12:36:13 PM8/4/21
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On Wednesday, August 4, 2021 at 11:21:13 AM UTC-4, Mark Isaak wrote:
> On 8/3/21 7:00 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > [...]
> > I stand by what I wrote here. If you can find any place where Miller explains
> > why he is such a zealous foe of ID in general and Behe in particular, I'd certainly like to see it.

> Perhaps it is because Miller is a scientist,

Irrelevant, unless Miller is such a prize jerk that he is actually motivated by the kind of crap
you post next:


> and ID in general was
> conceived as an attack on science,

Construed to be, you mean. But a man of Miller's stature should know not to confuse
an attempt to argue for a wider concept of science with an attack on common descent
-- data-based science as opposed to theoretical science such as the Modern Synthesis,
a.k.a. neo-Darwinism, or the under-construction EES (Extended Evolutionary Synthesis).
.

> and Behe actively supported that attack.

Equivocation "that attack" noted.


On another thread, you posted a self-serving falsehood about what on can conclude
from me interrupting you several times in the middle of a sentence. What one CAN
conclude is that you are such a seasoned polemicist that you can load a single
sentence with several misleading pieces of innuendo.

However, by way of compromise, I have reposted your sentence below, sans interruption,
so that people can gawk at your mastery of polemic in its full glory.


> Perhaps it is because Miller is a scientist, and ID in general was
> conceived as an attack on science, and Behe actively supported that attack.


Peter Nyikos

peter2...@gmail.com

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Aug 4, 2021, 1:41:13 PM8/4/21
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The two short quotes it gives from the Koran weren't meant for sophisticated theologians
or philosophers, and give no hint of the kind of omniscience that Bill Rogers talks about:

Quote one: “Say: Do you instruct Allah about your religion? But Allah knows all that is in the heavens and on the earth; Allah is Knowing of all things” Holy Qur'an (49:16)

"all things" seems, in context, to be speaking about all things in our physical universe,
as opposed to all possible things and all possible events in all possible universes,
which was Bill Rogers's meaning.

To do it credit, the commentary sticks to this down to earth meaning and doesn't
hint at grandiose concepts like that of Bill Rogers. If you disagree, please
quote something that you think might be about that grandiose concept.


Quote two: “Read! In the name of your Lord Who created. Created man of a clot. Read! And your Lord is the Most Bountiful, who taught man what he knew not...” Holy Qur'an (96:1-5)

What Allah "taught man" falls so short of omniscience, as to be hardly worth describing.


Peter Nyikos

Ron Dean

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Aug 4, 2021, 2:51:13 PM8/4/21
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On 8/4/21 12:34 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Wednesday, August 4, 2021 at 11:21:13 AM UTC-4, Mark Isaak wrote:
>> On 8/3/21 7:00 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>>> [...]
>>> I stand by what I wrote here. If you can find any place where Miller explains
>>> why he is such a zealous foe of ID in general and Behe in particular, I'd certainly like to see it.
>
>> Perhaps it is because Miller is a scientist,
>
> Irrelevant, unless Miller is such a prize jerk that he is actually motivated by the kind of crap
> you post next:
>
>
>> and ID in general was
>> conceived as an attack on science,
>
I think the exact opposite is the case. William Paley's "Natural
Theology" was required study for Charles Darwin, while in college. Paley
used, an analogy, the design of a watch, which required a watch maker.
Darwin was influence by Paley and had admired the man's logic, but while
Paley used design as evidence of a designer (God), It's highly probably
that Darwin became obsessed with finding an alternative explanation, for
what is observed in nature and in contrast to Paley's use of design as
evidence of his God.
Consequently, and over time evolution became the alternative of design.
And for some people evolution became fulfilling and is virtually the
same as a religion.

Athel Cornish-Bowden

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Aug 4, 2021, 3:01:13 PM8/4/21
to talk-o...@moderators.individual.net
On 2021-08-04 18:51:03 +0000, Ron Dean said:

> On 8/4/21 12:34 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>> On Wednesday, August 4, 2021 at 11:21:13 AM UTC-4, Mark Isaak wrote:
>>> On 8/3/21 7:00 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>>>> [...]
>>>> I stand by what I wrote here. If you can find any place where Miller explains
>>>> why he is such a zealous foe of ID in general and Behe in particular,
>>>> I'd certainly like to see it.
>>
>>> Perhaps it is because Miller is a scientist,
>>
>> Irrelevant, unless Miller is such a prize jerk that he is actually
>> motivated by the kind of crap
>> you post next:
>>
>>
>>> and ID in general was
>>> conceived as an attack on science,
> >
> I think the exact opposite is the case. William Paley's "Natural
> Theology" was required study for Charles Darwin, while in college.
> Paley used, an analogy, the design of a watch, which required a watch
> maker. Darwin was influence by Paley and had admired the man's logic,
> but while Paley used design as evidence of a designer (God), It's
> highly probably that Darwin became obsessed with finding an alternative
> explanation,

How do you know that? What did Darwin write to support your contention?

> for what is observed in nature and in contrast to Paley's use of
> design as evidence of his God.
> Consequently, and over time evolution became the alternative of design.
> And for some people evolution became fulfilling and is virtually the
> same as a religion.

I don't know of anyone for whom evolution is a religion. People accept
evolution as a reality because the evidence is overwhelming. Of course,
your "virtually the same as" are weasel words. Do you mean that it _is_
a religion -- evidence please -- or just that it's "virtually the same
as" one?
> >
>> Construed to be, you mean. But a man of Miller's stature should know
>> not to confuse
>> an attempt to argue for a wider concept of science with an attack on
>> common descent
>> -- data-based science as opposed to theoretical science such as the
>> Modern Synthesis,
>> a.k.a. neo-Darwinism, or the under-construction EES (Extended
>> Evolutionary Synthesis).
>> .
>>
>>> and Behe actively supported that attack.
>>
>> Equivocation "that attack" noted.
>>
>>
>> On another thread, you posted a self-serving falsehood about what on
>> can conclude
>> from me interrupting you several times in the middle of a sentence.
>> What one CAN
>> conclude is that you are such a seasoned polemicist that you can load a single
>> sentence with several misleading pieces of innuendo.
>>
>> However, by way of compromise, I have reposted your sentence below,
>> sans interruption,
>> so that people can gawk at your mastery of polemic in its full glory.
>>
>>
>>> Perhaps it is because Miller is a scientist, and ID in general was
>>> conceived as an attack on science, and Behe actively supported that attack.
>>
>>
>> Peter Nyikos


Zen Cycle

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Aug 4, 2021, 3:06:13 PM8/4/21
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On Wednesday, August 4, 2021 at 12:16:14 PM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:

> What I meant was that it is such a no-brainer that it doesn't take more than a village atheist
> to come up with it without consulting any sources, let alone the batch that you googled.

Very bad attempt at a CYA answer, even for you.

> > It's been asked (and ostensibly answered) since the god concept first originated by _theists_. Aristotle posed a first-cause question,
> ...to which his "Prime mover" answer has been refuted, but it takes more than the understanding of the
> average village atheist to refute it.

The answer to the question is the point of the discussion, captain goalpost. I'll let you reread my post to try to figure it out.

> > even Aquinas addressed the issue.
> With the same results. In fact, wasn't he just giving Aristotle's answer but adding "and this is God"
> or words to that effect.

Again, you completely miss the point - or more likely, you're dodging to cover for the fact that your "village atheist question" was just as much a load of bullshit as most of the rest of your posts here.

> > Googling "where did god come from" returns following on the first page of results, all from theistic websites:
>
> >
> > https://www.blueletterbible.org/faq/don_stewart/don_stewart_289.cfm
> >
> > https://biologos.org/common-questions/what-created-god/
> >
> > https://www.biblestudytools.com/bible-study/topical-studies/where-did-god-come-from.html
> >
> > Of course, they all have the same answer 'god always was, is, and always will be',
> It seems you found a sorry lot who were put on the first page by Google based on them being
> such "easy reads" that the readers didn't bother to search for professional theologians. I could
> have put them into touch with some professional Thomists. But those aren't such "easy reads."

Again, you're attempting to evade the point. Theologians of all calibers - even those whom you denigrate as 'the sorry lot' (though I'm sure they could run circles around you in a theological discussion) - have been asking the question regarding the origin of god since well before atheism was even a concept worth statistically recognizing.

<snipped blatant self-aggrandizing and more attempts at distraction>

what you posted in sci.bio.paleontology has absolutely no relevance to this discussion

> > with biologos going so far as to state 'you shouldn't even bother with that question' ("Asking for a cause of a necessary being is like asking how much the color blue weighs—it is a category mistake.")
> This has to do with another fallacy of which Aristotle and Aquinas were guilty: a false dichotomy between
> "contingent being" and "necessary being."

Another attempt at distraction duly noted. Your opinion regarding alleged conflation of 'contingent' with 'necessary' isn't relevant. Just an FYI - Aristotle and Aquinas will be long remembered for their 'contributions' long after we are both gone. No one gives a rats ass about your opinion now and will give even less the minute your dead.

> > > The idea of an omniscient God is not to be found in the Bible.
> I meant "omniscient" in the absolute sense that Bill Rogers used it in his OP,
> not the down-to-earth uses that one actually reads in the Bible.

Ah, so we have
" The idea of an omniscient God is not to be found in the Bible."
followed by
"not the down-to-earth uses that one actually reads in the Bible."

Nice try, captain goalpost. You can't claim the idea of omniscience isn't in the bible because you think it's contextually different. The idea is very clearly discussed in the bible. You're wrong, it's time for you to be an adult and admit your mistakes.

> > And you keep digging yourself deeper...
> You keep underestimating me.

We aren't underestimating you sparky, we're criticizing you based on your actions. The two are very different things.

> But I'm used to it. People have been underestimating
> me ever since before I was born

Before you were born? Is this like the old joke "when you were born, the doctor took one look at you and slapped your mother instead"? Or was there some inkling that people knew how much of an arrogant asshole you were while you were in the womb?

> Concluded in next reply to this post, to be done later today.

Again, stick to math.


Mark Isaak

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Aug 4, 2021, 5:01:13 PM8/4/21
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On 8/4/21 9:34 AM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Wednesday, August 4, 2021 at 11:21:13 AM UTC-4, Mark Isaak wrote:
>> On 8/3/21 7:00 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>>> [...]
>>> I stand by what I wrote here. If you can find any place where Miller explains
>>> why he is such a zealous foe of ID in general and Behe in particular, I'd certainly like to see it.
>
>> Perhaps it is because Miller is a scientist,
>
> Irrelevant, unless Miller is such a prize jerk that he is actually motivated by the kind of crap
> you post next:
>
>
>> and ID in general was
>> conceived as an attack on science,
>
> Construed to be, you mean.

Yes, construed by such people as Philip Johnson, William Dembski,
Michael Behe, Stephen Meyer, and Paul Nelson.

> But a man of Miller's stature should know not to confuse
> an attempt to argue for a wider concept of science with an attack on common descent
> -- data-based science as opposed to theoretical science such as the Modern Synthesis,
> a.k.a. neo-Darwinism, or the under-construction EES (Extended Evolutionary Synthesis).
> .
>
>> and Behe actively supported that attack.
>
> Equivocation "that attack" noted.

I said nothing about an attack on common descent (so you're the one
equivocating). ID's attack was on science's reliance on methodological
naturalism in general and on the theory of evolution in particular.

Mark Isaak

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Aug 4, 2021, 5:21:13 PM8/4/21
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On 8/4/21 11:51 AM, Ron Dean wrote:
> On 8/4/21 12:34 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>> On Wednesday, August 4, 2021 at 11:21:13 AM UTC-4, Mark Isaak wrote:
>>> On 8/3/21 7:00 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>>>> [...]
>>>> I stand by what I wrote here. If you can find any place where Miller
>>>> explains
>>>> why he is such a zealous foe of ID in general and Behe in
>>>> particular, I'd certainly like to see it.
>>
>>> Perhaps it is because Miller is a scientist,
>>
>> Irrelevant, unless Miller is such a prize jerk that he is actually
>> motivated by the kind of crap
>> you post next:
>>
>>
>>> and ID in general was
>>> conceived as an attack on science,
> >
> I think the exact opposite is the case. William Paley's "Natural
> Theology" was required study for Charles Darwin, while in college. Paley
> used, an analogy, the design of a watch, which required a watch maker.
> Darwin was influence by Paley and had admired the man's logic, but while
> Paley used design as evidence of a designer (God), It's highly probably
> that Darwin became obsessed with finding an alternative explanation, for
> what is observed in nature and in contrast to Paley's use of design as
> evidence of his God.

Your belief contains a grain of truth, in that Darwin read Paley. But
don't forget that Charles Darwin had a famous grandfather, Erasmus, who
also wrote about origins. I don't know for sure, but it seems likely
that C. Darwin read E. Darwin's work, or at least was familiar with it.
C. Darwin was also familiar with the work of Lamarck, who proposed his
own hypothesis of origins. The idea was in the air, even without Paley.

Incidentally, have you ever read Paley's _Natural Theology_? It is full
of details about biology (which is probably why it was college reading),
but as a design argument, it sucks. It says, basically, "A watch is
complicated but still works. Life is even more complicated. Look at
all these features that do not appear in anything that's designed.
Wouldn't it be wonderful if a watch were like that?" Paley invites the
reader to answer yes, but the sane answer is no. Nobody wants a watch
that has its own digestive and reproductive system.

> Consequently, and over time evolution became the alternative of design.
> And for some people evolution became fulfilling and is virtually the
> same as a religion.

Only in your dreams.

broger...@gmail.com

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Aug 4, 2021, 5:51:13 PM8/4/21
to talk-o...@moderators.isc.org
On Wednesday, August 4, 2021 at 2:51:13 PM UTC-4, Ron Dean wrote:
<snip>
> I think the exact opposite is the case. William Paley's "Natural
> Theology" was required study for Charles Darwin, while in college. Paley
> used, an analogy, the design of a watch, which required a watch maker.
> Darwin was influence by Paley and had admired the man's logic, but while
> Paley used design as evidence of a designer (God), It's highly probably
> that Darwin became obsessed with finding an alternative explanation, for
> what is observed in nature and in contrast to Paley's use of design as
> evidence of his God.
> Consequently, and over time evolution became the alternative of design.
> And for some people evolution became fulfilling and is virtually the
> same as a religion.
<snip>

Have you really met people who find the theory of evolution as fulfilling as a religion? Seriously? I've known hundreds of professional biologists and I never met one who thought evolution was fulfilling in the same sense as a religion, say in terms of giving meaning and purpose to life, consolation in the face of troubles and all the rest.

You are the one who sets up religion as a mutually exclusive alternative to the theory of evolution. It's not. I've given you one way in which they can be reconciled, but there are many others. Many religious people and many sects of major world religions see no need to choose between evolution or religion any more than they see a need to choose between electrodynamics and religion. You're the one who's boxed in by a limited imagination.

Burkhard

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Aug 4, 2021, 6:06:14 PM8/4/21
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Ron Dean wrote:
> On 8/4/21 12:34 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>> On Wednesday, August 4, 2021 at 11:21:13 AM UTC-4, Mark Isaak wrote:
>>> On 8/3/21 7:00 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>>>> [...]
>>>> I stand by what I wrote here. If you can find any place where Miller
>>>> explains
>>>> why he is such a zealous foe of ID in general and Behe in
>>>> particular, I'd certainly like to see it.
>>
>>> Perhaps it is because Miller is a scientist,
>>
>> Irrelevant, unless Miller is such a prize jerk that he is actually
>> motivated by the kind of crap
>> you post next:
>>
>>
>>> and ID in general was
>>> conceived as an attack on science,
> >
> I think the exact opposite is the case. William Paley's "Natural
> Theology" was required study for Charles Darwin,

Eh, no. Which you have been told before. Moral and Political Philosophy
and the Evidences of Christianity were required readings, "Natural
theology" had been taken off the mandatory syllabus quite a bit before
Darwin did his degree, he read it out of interest, together with
treatises that were highly critical of it, such as Thomas Wakley's and
the others in the Lancet group who saw Paley as obstacle to scientific
progress.


while in college. Paley
> used, an analogy, the design of a watch, which required a watch maker.
> Darwin was influence by Paley and had admired the man's logic, but while
> Paley used design as evidence of a designer (God), It's highly probably

i.e stuff that Ron Dean has made up, and for which there is no shred of
evidence in Darwin's contemporary notebooks, sketches or other writing

> that Darwin became obsessed with finding an alternative explanation, for
> what is observed in nature and in contrast to Paley's use of design as
> evidence of his God.

Only that pretty much everything that Darwin wrote at the time
contradict this - again, we've been over this before, and I gave you
copious quotes form Darwin at the time .You seem to have accepted your
error then - but it is your normal mode of operation to make unfounded
claims, and when corrected simply disappear for a while and the repeat them.

Darwin held Paley in high regard throughout his life, there is no
evidence whatsoever that he was "motivated" by refuting Paley, let alone
refuting him because of the religious implications. On the contrary,
everything points to the opposite direction.

He had however read also John Herschel's "Preliminary Discourse on the
Study of Natural Philosophy" which advocated the inductive method as the
new gold standard for science, and Alexander von Humboldt's "Personal
Narrative of scientific travels in 1799–1804." Both highly popular books
at the time showed a new way to do scientific inquiry: empirical, based
on copious observations and fieldwork, and building theories from the
ground up. Paley's account by contrast was the last battle cry of the
old system. While he had excellent knowledge of the research others had
done at the time, Paley never did systematic field studies or
experiments. Natural theology, as all treatise of this type, were
deductive, not inductive, that is they started with the general
proposition (here that biological entities are designed) and then tried
to find supporting evidence.

So it was quite natural for Darwin, and many others at the time, to
realize that one of the most interesting questions in biology, that of
origin (to which his grandfather had also contributed) had not yet
received this "modern" treatment, which he then set out do contribute to.


> Consequently, and over time evolution became the alternative of design.
> And for some people evolution became fulfilling and is virtually the
> same as a religion.

So you once again do the very same thing that you always excuse others
of. You use (provably false) speculations about the motives of a
researchers to cast doubt on the validity of the arguments and results
that they promote.

*Hemidactylus*

unread,
Aug 4, 2021, 6:21:14 PM8/4/21
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Darwin was also familiar with Richard Owen and historicized his archetype
via common ancestry.

So Paley’s watchmaker argument for design was supplanted by natural
selection and Owen’s archetype (allied with homology) by common ancestry.

https://archive.org/details/originofspecies00darwuoft/page/n541/mode/2up



*Hemidactylus*

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Aug 4, 2021, 6:36:13 PM8/4/21
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Peter has an amazing capacity to captivate people with his charming
personality.

Ron Dean

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Aug 4, 2021, 6:56:13 PM8/4/21
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No, I have not.
>
> but as a design argument, it sucks.  It says, basically, "A watch is
> complicated but still works.  Life is even more complicated.  Look at
> all these features that do not appear in anything that's designed.
> Wouldn't it be wonderful if a watch were like that?"  Paley invites the
> reader to answer yes, but the sane answer is no.  Nobody wants a watch
> that has its own digestive and reproductive system.
>
I would think reproduction would have been incidental to Paley's
argument for design. The watch would not exist had there not been
a designer. You have to disallow the analogy in order to discredit
Paley's argument.
>
>> Consequently, and over time evolution became the alternative of
>> design. And for some people evolution became fulfilling and is
>> virtually the same as a religion.
>
> Only in your dreams.
>
Recall what Richard Dawkins stated?

broger...@gmail.com

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Aug 4, 2021, 7:41:13 PM8/4/21
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Dawkins (just one guy, anyway) said that Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. **Intellectually fulfilled**. The sort of fulfillment that religion offers is so much more than merely intellectual that calling them "virtually the same" is just silly.

John Harshman

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Aug 4, 2021, 7:51:13 PM8/4/21
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On 8/4/21 2:50 PM, broger...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Wednesday, August 4, 2021 at 2:51:13 PM UTC-4, Ron Dean wrote:
> <snip>
>> I think the exact opposite is the case. William Paley's "Natural
>> Theology" was required study for Charles Darwin, while in college. Paley
>> used, an analogy, the design of a watch, which required a watch maker.
>> Darwin was influence by Paley and had admired the man's logic, but while
>> Paley used design as evidence of a designer (God), It's highly probably
>> that Darwin became obsessed with finding an alternative explanation, for
>> what is observed in nature and in contrast to Paley's use of design as
>> evidence of his God.
>> Consequently, and over time evolution became the alternative of design.
>> And for some people evolution became fulfilling and is virtually the
>> same as a religion.
> <snip>
>
> Have you really met people who find the theory of evolution as fulfilling as a religion? Seriously? I've known hundreds of professional biologists and I never met one who thought evolution was fulfilling in the same sense as a religion, say in terms of giving meaning and purpose to life, consolation in the face of troubles and all the rest.

I have. Roger Sperry, Nobel prize winner in physiology and medicine,
told me (and several other students present at the time) that he had a
religion of biology. And he meant that literally.

Nobody else, though. Sperry was in some ways a bit of a nut. He also
thought that life violated the 2nd law of thermodynamics.

As you were.

*Hemidactylus*

unread,
Aug 4, 2021, 7:56:13 PM8/4/21
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I was thinking more of:

“[The Blind Watchmaker] takes its title from a famous sentence in William
Paley's Natural Theology (1802), which Dawkins calls "a book that I greatly
admire..."

Not only does he profess admiration, he even concedes that he might once
have been convinced by Paley. "I could not imagine being an atheist at any
time before 1859, when Darwin's Origin of Species was published," he
volunteers.”

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2010/apr/30/richard-dawkins-blind-watchmaker

peter2...@gmail.com

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Aug 4, 2021, 8:41:14 PM8/4/21
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On Wednesday, August 4, 2021 at 3:06:13 PM UTC-4, funkma...@hotmail.com wrote:

Might you be Jon Richfield? You've got the same knack for posting empty repartee
with nothing to back it up.

You aren't even curious as to the meaning of my parting shot. I'm sure you know that your
guesses are pure BS.

However, the state of talk.origins has sunk so low that you might find someone who
would like to team up with you. You might try Wolffan, for instance.


The ball's in your court, regulars. Almost. I'll still post my concluding remarks just to give
this loser a chance to post more empty repartee.


Peter Nyikos

PS just so y'all don't have to scroll up to read the post to which I am replying and decide
it isn't worth the effort, I've left everything intact below.

*Hemidactylus*

unread,
Aug 4, 2021, 8:51:13 PM8/4/21
to talk-o...@moderators.isc.org
peter2...@gmail.com <peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wednesday, August 4, 2021 at 3:06:13 PM UTC-4, funkma...@hotmail.com wrote:
>
> Might you be Jon Richfield? You've got the same knack for posting empty repartee
> with nothing to back it up.
>
> You aren't even curious as to the meaning of my parting shot. I'm sure you know that your
> guesses are pure BS.
>
> However, the state of talk.origins has sunk so low that you might find someone who
> would like to team up with you. You might try Wolffan, for instance.
>
>
> The ball's in your court, regulars. Almost. I'll still post my concluding
> remarks just to give
> this loser a chance to post more empty repartee.
>
>
> Peter Nyikos
>
> PS just so y'all don't have to scroll up to read the post to which I am replying and decide
> it isn't worth the effort, I've left everything intact below.
>
Have you ever considered that if so many people converge somewhat
independently upon negative evaluations of your interpersonally obsessed
behavior here that the problem lies more within than without?

peter2...@gmail.com

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Aug 4, 2021, 9:21:13 PM8/4/21
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Paley had no idea how right he was about that. Modern biochemistry has shown
just how much MORE complicated life is than anyone before 1950 suspected.
And with the tremendous organization of which the complication is only
the tip of the iceberg, much stronger arguments than Paley's are possible.

Even in his day, Paley was a worthy opponent to any atheistic contemporary of his.
Richard Dawkins, who rehabilitated Paley, admitted that only with Darwin's theory
did Paley's argument lose its force.


> > Look at all these features that do not appear in anything that's designed.
> > Wouldn't it be wonderful if a watch were like that?" Paley invites the
> > reader to answer yes, but the sane answer is no.

Correction: the sane answer between 1859 and 1959 was no. Now it's a whole new ball game.


> >Nobody wants a watch
> > that has its own digestive and reproductive system.

This silly non sequitur could only appeal to a Steve Martin fan like yourself, Hemidactylus,
and here you come as if on cue.

> Darwin was also familiar with Richard Owen and historicized his archetype
> via common ancestry.

You seem to have become infatuated with the word "archetype." You could have said
the point behind this in much clearer and simpler language.

> So Paley’s watchmaker argument for design was supplanted by natural
> selection and Owen’s archetype (allied with homology) by common ancestry.
>
> https://archive.org/details/originofspecies00darwuoft/page/n541/mode/2up

Oh, lookee! You found a page with a glossary where Darwin defines "archetype" in a way that
is obsolete biologically. As one paleontologist put it, "An animal can't just hang around being
a generalized ancestor. It needs to adapt to the environment around it." [very close paraphrase
from memory]


Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--
Univ. of South Carolina in Columbia
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

peter2...@gmail.com

unread,
Aug 4, 2021, 10:41:13 PM8/4/21
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On Wednesday, August 4, 2021 at 8:26:13 AM UTC-4, funkma...@hotmail.com wrote:
> On Tuesday, August 3, 2021 at 7:46:14 PM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:

> > The idea of an omniscient God is not to be found in the Bible.

> https://www.openbible.info/topics/omniscience
>
> It lists 100 bible versus which are all interpreted as affirming omniscience.

Are they any closer to Bill Rogers's grandiose version than the two verses for the Koran
that Oxyaena found for me?


> Simply because they don't use the word 'omniscient' doesn't mean the concept is not there.

Your use of the definite article "the" shows that you have no idea what the issues here are.
Take a look at the website Oxyaena linked, and you will see a long commentary about those two
verses in the Koran. It is very different from Bill Rogers's idea of omniscience.

That is, unless you want to bury your head even deeper into the sand than it already is.


> You wrote somewhere else that you were 'uniquely qualified to argue against creationism', or something like that.

Something very unlike it. I was just comparing myself with the sorry lot who have come to dominate
talk.origins. And I gave very specific reasons why they are such a sorry lot: even the best of them
fight creationism with both hands tied behind their backs, and I explained why.

"In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king."


>
> You very clearly are not. Not only did that place your incredible general arrogance on display, but every time you post, you make specious claims - usually demonstrably false - rooted in your arrogamce.

You are really amusing when you try to kick me with your head buried deep in the sand.


This concludes my interaction with you for the rest of this month. I dislike spending time with Black Knight
lookalikes, as you turned out to be in your counter-counter "argument," complete with the royal "we".


Peter Nyikos

Ron Dean

unread,
Aug 5, 2021, 12:01:14 AM8/5/21
to talk-o...@moderators.isc.org
On 8/4/21 1:56 AM, jillery wrote:
> On Tue, 3 Aug 2021 22:38:25 -0400, Ron Dean <rdhall...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> On 8/3/21 12:57 PM, jillery wrote:
>>> On Tue, 3 Aug 2021 11:46:21 -0400, Ron Dean <rdhall...@gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On 8/2/21 1:07 AM, jillery wrote:
>>>>> On Sun, 1 Aug 2021 10:25:51 -0700 (PDT), "broger...@gmail.com"
>>>>> <broger...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> Ron, like many ID supporters, argues that if there's no natural explanation for some phenomenon, then there is a supernatural explanation. The phenomenon in question might be the values of the physical constants, the origin of life, the origin of the bacterial flagellum, or the origin of homeobox genes or just about any open scientific question.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> One response is simply to say that if there is no known naturalistic explanation then there are at least two options (1) a supernatural explanation or (2) a naturalistic explanation nobody's thought of yet. But I'd say that this response makes the mistake of granting that supernatural and natural explanations are mutually exclusive. Here's a story to explain why that need not be true.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> God (I'll use "God" instead of "an unspecified intelligent designer"; it's more direct) was sitting around one day in His infinite wisdom. He decided to create a universe. Since He's omniscient He cast about in his mind for sets of natural laws, physical constants and initial conditions that would make interesting universes and, omnisciently could see the whole history of each of an infinite number of such possible universes. These universes could differ greatly, or they could differ only to the extent of slight quantum scale differences, or anything in between. He decided He would choose one out of all these possible, divinely imagined universes, to become physically real. Omnisciently, of course, He knew the whole time course and evolution of that universe down to the smallest fall of a sparrow and chose it because He thought it was good.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Regardless of which of the universes He chose, any being living in that universe would only observe the action of natural laws in that universe. And yet, everything that happened, happens, or will happen in that universe was ordained by God, because God considered an infinite number of possible universes working out their histories under the influence of an infinite set of different natural laws, physical constants, initial conditions, and random (quantum) events and chose just the one to make physically real. In such a universe everything has both a natural and a supernatural cause. There is no either/or about it. Everything that occurs in that universe is what could be called part of God's Providence, and that's true whether anyone in that universe has figured out the natural cause of that thing or not. Nobody in that universe could conclude that God existed or had chosen that universe simply by making observations of the universe; and yet nothing stops someone in that
>> universe
>>>>> >from coming to faith in a provident, loving God. It's just not a question that observations of the universe can answer. Just like here in this universe.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> This story, I think paints a more impressive picture of God than does the idea of Him as a tinkerer unable to make a universe that suited Him without sneaking back in once in a while to get life going, or to fix up the right sequence of a homeobox gene or what have you. And, unlike Deism, it allows for God's Providence to be seen in everything that happens.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> So I'd say, Ron, stop trying to get scientific support for God; if God is any good at His job, you won't find it. And you'll just be wasting time you could better spend on prayer, meditation, kindnesses, or whatever seems important to you.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Not only does your story paint a more impressive picture of God, it
>>>>> removes his worshipers from having to distinguish between what is
>>>>> supernatural and what is natural.
>>>>>
>>>> Here again which of the various religion's Gods are whe talking about?
>>>> You should say!
>>>
>>>
>>> I did say, and so did Bill Rogers. He and I are talking about his
>>> story's God. Not sure how even you didn't catch that.
>>>
>>> Based on your replies, you seem to think the only Gods worth
>>> considering are the ones associated with "various religions". Why is
>>> that?
>>>
>> You have a great gift! A gift of twisting comments to the degree that
>> they are unrecognizable even to the person who first expressed the comment.
>
>
> Really? So was it someone not you who asked "which religion's Gods
> are whe[sic] talking about?" Or did someone force you to write
> something you know is mindless noise?
>
> And why don't you back up your baseless accusations against me? Is it
> because you know they are made-up crap and you have nothing
> intelligent to say?
>
Gods worth considering! That's twisting what I said. I made no such
comment, nor did I imply anything of the sort.

I'm taking a hiatus for a few days.

jillery

unread,
Aug 5, 2021, 2:26:14 AM8/5/21
to talk-o...@moderators.isc.org
On Wed, 4 Aug 2021 23:59:36 -0400, Ron Dean <rdhall...@gmail.com>
What I quoted came from the text above, and still preserved there.
That's why I refreshed your convenient amnesia.

The word that has your knickers in a twist, I never said you said. To
the contrary, I explicitly identified it as what "seems", again still
preserved in the quoted text.

You really should stop posting stupid lies trivially proved false. It
only shows you're not even trying to make any sense.

You re-assert your baseless accusations against me. You don't even
try to back them up. Your question explicitly refers to "which
religions", as if that's somehow relevant to the discussion.

My impression is your question is related to your PRATT defense that
ID's Designer doesn't have a name and isn't associated with any
organized religion. Why mention these things as if you think they're
relevant to the discussion, only to accuse me of twisting your words?


>I'm taking a hiatus for a few days.


Take however long you need to calm down and recover whatever
rationality remains between your ears.

jillery

unread,
Aug 5, 2021, 2:46:14 AM8/5/21
to talk-o...@moderators.isc.org
On Wed, 4 Aug 2021 18:20:47 -0700 (PDT), "peter2...@gmail.com"
<peter2...@gmail.com> wrote nothing scientific:


Is anybody surprised.
Incorrect. You allude to life's "complexity". In fact, what has been
discovered post 1959 is life's OVER-complexity, the very opposite of
purposeful design, but exactly what to expect from the contingent
design of unguided natural processes, which has no foresight and can
only modify the current state. Not sure how even you *still* don't
understand this.


>> >Nobody wants a watch
>> > that has its own digestive and reproductive system.
>
>This silly non sequitur could only appeal to a Steve Martin fan like yourself, Hemidactylus,
>and here you come as if on cue.


You don't even try to refute the argument. Instead you just post more
of your mindless noise.

Paley's watch is a classic single-function device, its only designed
purpose to represent to some arbitrary degree of precision the current
time. Any biological process so limited would never be considered
"alive". Not sure how even you *still* don't understand this.


>> Darwin was also familiar with Richard Owen and historicized his archetype
>> via common ancestry.
>
>You seem to have become infatuated with the word "archetype." You could have said
>the point behind this in much clearer and simpler language.
>
>> So Paley’s watchmaker argument for design was supplanted by natural
>> selection and Owen’s archetype (allied with homology) by common ancestry.
>>
>> https://archive.org/details/originofspecies00darwuoft/page/n541/mode/2up
>
>Oh, lookee! You found a page with a glossary where Darwin defines "archetype" in a way that
>is obsolete biologically. As one paleontologist put it, "An animal can't just hang around being
>a generalized ancestor. It needs to adapt to the environment around it." [very close paraphrase
>from memory]


I deleted your .sig, since you say it signals you made scientific
comments, and you didn't. You're welcome.

Burkhard

unread,
Aug 5, 2021, 8:31:14 AM8/5/21
to talk-o...@moderators.isc.org
peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Tuesday, August 3, 2021 at 9:01:13 PM UTC-4, Oxyaena wrote:
>> On 8/3/2021 7:42 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>>>
>>> I don't think Bill knows much that is worth knowing about these Gods. His God is a medieval adaptation
>>> of some non-Christian gods, such as Plato's. The idea of an omniscient God is not to be found in the Bible.
>>> It *a* *fortiori* is not in the book of Mormon. I don't know enough about the Koran to say something about
>>> whether Islam has such an idea. It certainly pictures Allah as being far more remote than the Christian God,
>>> and considers it blasphemy to speak of a Trinity the way Christians do.
>>>
>> https://www.al-islam.org/islamic-doctrines-simplified/allah-omniscient
>
> The two short quotes it gives from the Koran weren't meant for sophisticated theologians
> or philosophers, and give no hint of the kind of omniscience that Bill Rogers talks about:


Don't know why that would matter, asy our question was about the Qur'an,
not the theological systems build on it, but for omniscience you could
try Muhammad Iqbal's analysis of classical formulations of Divine
Knowledge in chapter 3 of his "Reconstruction of Religious Thought in
Islam." Omniscience there has been derived from the Names of Allah, in
particular Al-‘Aleem, which is normally translated directly as The
All-Knowing, or The Omniscient, but also As-Samee, The All-Hearing
and Al-Baseer, The All-Seeing, al Wajeed, the perceiver, al-bateen,
knower of the hidden, and ar-rasheed infallible teacher (assuming that
one can't derive omniscience anyway from omnipotence, as I'd argue)

Iqbal in particular identifies God with time, and from this reasons:

“omniscience in the sense of a single indivisible act of perception
which would make God immediately aware of the entire sweep of
history regarded as an order of specific events in an eternal now,”

which is really close to what Bill described.

Burkhard

unread,
Aug 5, 2021, 8:46:13 AM8/5/21
to talk-o...@moderators.isc.org
This all gave me reasons to re-read Iqbal, and to get reminded what an
interesting thinker he was. His concept of creation and what it means to
be "creative" is in this context also interesting:

“Divine Knowledge must be conceived as a living creative
activity to which the objects that appear to exist in their own right
are organically related [....] The future pre-exists in this organic
wholeness of God’s creative life but as an open possibility,
not as a fixed order of events with definite outlines.

so God did not create at one point in his life, during the course of
history, but creation itself is an ongoing process of God's knowing. A
mirror image if you like of reality as Vishnu dreaming

He developes this notion of knowledge as creation furhter

"The act of knowing and the act of creating are identical. Divine
Knowledge must be conceived as a living creative activity to which
the objects that appear to exist per se are organically
related to Omniscience. The future pre-exists in organic wholeness
of God’s creative life but as an open possibility, not as a fixed order
of events with definite outlines.”

peter2...@gmail.com

unread,
Aug 5, 2021, 9:56:14 AM8/5/21
to talk-o...@moderators.isc.org
Yes, that gift (one that keeps giving, as they say) is why I've suggested that jillery would
make a skilled interrogator for the KGB.

By the way, did you know that the German word for poison is Gift? There's poetic
justice in your choice of words, whether you knew it or not.

> >
> > Really? So was it someone not you who asked "which religion's Gods
> > are whe[sic] talking about?" Or did someone force you to write
> > something you know is mindless noise?
> >
> > And why don't you back up your baseless accusations against me?

Note the "inability" to name these alleged baseless accusations.
With her next comment, jillery gives the probable reason for this 'inability',
while projecting it onto you:

> >Is it because you know they are made-up crap and you have nothing
> > intelligent to say?

This "inability" is a theme running through an awful lot of posts by jillery,
and I repeatedly called her out on that here:

https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/ppq8H2SA2Yo/m/ePZpWBTIAQAJ
Re: A riposte of fine-tuning
Jul 29, 2021, 10:36:12 PM



> Gods worth considering! That's twisting what I said. I made no such
> comment, nor did I imply anything of the sort.
>
> I'm taking a hiatus for a few days.

I hope you aren't letting jillery's flamboyant shredding of her earlier mask of civility get you down.

I suppose you saw her tirade against you in "Re: A riposte of fine-tuning" in which the same
'inability' was there all through the self-righteous questions in her first paragraph, and resumed
in the latter part of the second paragraph. OTOH there was no doubt (in my mind, at least)
about what jillery was talking about in the third and final paragraph, in which
she despicably exploited your state of health.

Did you see how jillery admired her handiwork so much that she followed up to herself and made hay out
of your failure to reply to her load of swine swill?

I called her out on the whole wagonload, and also the manufactured hay, but without being specific like I am now.


I hope you will return from your hiatus re-energized. I'll be praying for you -- a rarity for me,
based on slim hopes rather than sober intellectual assessment. I usually preface such silent
petitionary prayers with "O God, if there is a God..." as in Voltaire's intellectually honest prayer.


Peter Nyikos

peter2...@gmail.com

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Aug 5, 2021, 11:51:13 AM8/5/21
to talk-o...@moderators.isc.org
Like jillery, for whom he has a deep respect, did on another thread yesterday, Burkhard admires
his own handiwork so much that he follows up to himself. Spoiler: it wasn't worth the
strangely redundant effort.

On Thursday, August 5, 2021 at 8:46:13 AM UTC-4, Burkhard wrote:
> Burkhard wrote:
> > peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> >> On Tuesday, August 3, 2021 at 9:01:13 PM UTC-4, Oxyaena wrote:
> >>> On 8/3/2021 7:42 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>> I don't think Bill knows much that is worth knowing about these
> >>>> Gods. His God is a medieval adaptation
> >>>> of some non-Christian gods, such as Plato's. The idea of an
> >>>> omniscient God is not to be found in the Bible.

Your failure to take into account what I wrote in the above four lines is noteworthy, Burkhard,
in assessing what you wrote below.

> >>>> It *a* *fortiori* is not in the book of Mormon. I don't know enough
> >>>> about the Koran to say something about
> >>>> whether Islam has such an idea. It certainly pictures Allah as being
> >>>> far more remote than the Christian God,
> >>>> and considers it blasphemy to speak of a Trinity the way Christians do.

The following link was helpfully provided by Oxyaena:

> >>> https://www.al-islam.org/islamic-doctrines-simplified/allah-omniscient

And the beginning of my response follows:

> >> The two short quotes it gives from the Koran weren't meant for
> >> sophisticated theologians
> >> or philosophers, and give no hint of the kind of omniscience that
> >> Bill Rogers talks about:
> >
> >
> > Don't know why that would matter,

Ask your buddy Hemidactylus to explain if the colossal distinction between what
your ally Bill wrote and what you write below is beyond your understanding of philosophy.


> > asy our question was about the Qur'an,
> > not the theological systems build on it,

You missed the point of my "whether Islam has such an idea."
But it looks like Oxyaena didn't, because that website that she linked
expounds not only on the two verses but also on what the authors, at least,
take to be mainstream Islamic understanding of omniscience -- a far cry from that of Bill Rogers.

Iqbal, on the other hand, reads more like a Sufi with strong Hindu influences
than someone in the mainstream of Islam, which I take to be broad enough to include Sunni and Shiite.


<snip of things to be dealt with in a separate post, to be done soon after this one>


> This all gave me reasons to re-read Iqbal, and to get reminded what an
> interesting thinker he was.

"May you live in interesting times." -- ancient Chinese curse.

> His concept of creation and what it means to
> be "creative" is in this context also interesting:

> “Divine Knowledge must be conceived as a living creative
> activity to which the objects that appear to exist in their own right
> are organically related [....] The future pre-exists in this organic
> wholeness of God’s creative life but as an open possibility,
> not as a fixed order of events with definite outlines.
>
> so God did not create at one point in his life, during the course of
> history, but creation itself is an ongoing process of God's knowing. A
> mirror image if you like of reality as Vishnu dreaming

Also the Red King dreaming in _Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There_.

"Well, it's no use *your* talking about waking him," said Tweedledum, "when you're only one of the things in his dream. You know very well you're not real."


> He developes this notion of knowledge as creation further.

Here comes the redundancy I wrote about in my preamble. Two sentences, the rest overlapping.

Iqbal's main accomplishment in what you add is to contribute to further satire from Lewis Carroll's book.
The rest is typically inchoate pantheistic talk.


> "The act of knowing and the act of creating are identical. Divine
> Knowledge must be conceived as a living creative activity to which
> the objects that appear to exist per se

"I hope you don't suppose those are *real* tears?" Tweedledum interrupted in a tone of great contempt. [ibid.]


> are organically
> related to Omniscience. The future pre-exists in organic wholeness
> of God’s creative life but as an open possibility, not as a fixed order
> of events with definite outlines.”

Specifically, the possible futures of our young [a mere 13.7 gigayear] universe,
in a form reminiscent of one piece of offbeat speculation by some quantum physicists
in which our universe multifurcates endlessly to realize all possible outcomes
of each indeterminate quantum event.

Still, it is our universe, not all possible universes of which Bill Rogers wrote.


> >>
> >> Quote one: “Say: Do you instruct Allah about your religion? But Allah
> >> knows all that is in the heavens and on the earth; Allah is Knowing of
> >> all things” Holy Qur'an (49:16)
> >>
> >> "all things" seems, in context, to be speaking about all things in our
> >> physical universe,
> >> as opposed to all possible things and all possible events in all
> >> possible universes,
> >> which was Bill Rogers's meaning.
> >>
> >> To do it credit, the commentary sticks to this down to earth meaning
> >> and doesn't
> >> hint at grandiose concepts like that of Bill Rogers. If you disagree,
> >> please
> >> quote something that you think might be about that grandiose concept.

I extend this challenge to you, Burkhard, as to Iqbal's works.


Peter Nyikos

peter2...@gmail.com

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Aug 5, 2021, 12:11:14 PM8/5/21
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On Wednesday, August 4, 2021 at 8:51:13 PM UTC-4, *Hemidactylus* wrote:
> peter2...@gmail.com <peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Wednesday, August 4, 2021 at 3:06:13 PM UTC-4, funkma...@hotmail.com wrote:
> >
> > Might you be Jon Richfield? You've got the same knack for posting empty repartee
> > with nothing to back it up.
> >
> > You aren't even curious as to the meaning of my parting shot. I'm sure you know that your
> > guesses are pure BS.
> >
> > However, the state of talk.origins has sunk so low that you might find someone who
> > would like to team up with you. You might try Wolffan, for instance.
> >
> >
> > The ball's in your court, regulars. Almost. I'll still post my concluding
> > remarks just to give
> > this loser a chance to post more empty repartee.
> >
> >
> > Peter Nyikos
> >
> > PS just so y'all don't have to scroll up to read the post to which I am replying and decide
> > it isn't worth the effort, I've left everything intact below.
> >
> Have you ever considered that if so many people converge somewhat
> independently upon negative evaluations of your interpersonally obsessed
> behavior here that the problem lies more within than without?

Not when this kind of question comes from someone like you.


Peter Nyikos

peter2...@gmail.com

unread,
Aug 5, 2021, 12:56:14 PM8/5/21
to talk-o...@moderators.isc.org
On Thursday, August 5, 2021 at 8:46:13 AM UTC-4, Burkhard wrote:
> Burkhard wrote:

The following is my response to the part I snipped in the middle in my first reply.

> >but for omniscience you could
> > try Muhammad Iqbal's analysis of classical formulations of Divine
> > Knowledge in chapter 3 of his "Reconstruction of Religious Thought in
> > Islam." Omniscience there has been derived from the Names of Allah, in
> > particular Al-‘Aleem, which is normally translated directly as The
> > All-Knowing, or The Omniscient, but also As-Samee, The All-Hearing
> > and Al-Baseer, The All-Seeing, al Wajeed, the perceiver, al-bateen,
> > knower of the hidden, and ar-rasheed infallible teacher (assuming that
> > one can't derive omniscience anyway from omnipotence, as I'd argue)

Thanks for reinforcing what appears in the webpage by the Al-Balagh foundation,

https://www.al-islam.org/islamic-doctrines-simplified/allah-omniscient

about which I wrote in my first reply.


> > Iqbal in particular identifies God with time,

Is it because "Time is." identifies a completely undeniable thing, second only
to "I exist" and far more certain than "the universe exists" or "God exists." ?

If answering this question is beyond your pay grade, perhaps Hemidactylus can help us here.

[By the way, the first example is from a very early piece of science fiction, the rest from Descartes's
first two mediations.]


> > and from this reasons:
> >
> > “omniscience in the sense of a single indivisible act of perception
> > which would make God immediately aware of the entire sweep of
> > history regarded as an order of specific events in an eternal now,”

One could personify Time like that, with the appropriate poetic license.
Hawking also had that kind of "block-universe" concept of Time,
in which the arrow of time conveniently disappears.

But to give the devil its due, special relativity has each photon dwelling in an eternal now.
But the notion that there is only one photon in our universe has lost traction among physicists.

A good thing, too, otherwise Iqbal's "God" would seem to the average person to be a throwback to
Akhenaten's sun-worship.

> > which is really close to what Bill described.


Nonsense. What it is close to is the "block universe" against which William James
argued at length in The Dilemma of Determinism.

http://www.uky.edu/~eushe2/Pajares/JamesDilemmaOfDeterminism.html

The above version omits all footnotes, which is a shame, because it leaves off some
of the best material in the essay. But I found a complete version, along with a lot of
other essays by James, here:

http://sqapo.com/Complete_Text__William_James__The_Will_to_Believe.htm

And here is what I find most relevant to Iqbal's inchoate musings:

"[10]This of course leaves the creative mind subject to the law of time. And to any one who insists on the timelessness of that mind I have no reply to make. A mind to whom all time is simultaneously present must see all things under the form of actuality, or under some form to us unknown. If he thinks certain moments as ambiguous in their content while future, he must simultaneously know how the ambiguity will have been decided when they are past. So that none of his mental judgments can possibly be called hypothetical, and his world is one from which chance is excluded.

Is not, however, the timeless mind rather a gratuitous fiction? And is not the notion of eternity being given at a stroke to omniscience only just another way of whacking upon us the block-universe, and of denying that possibilities exist?--just the point to be proved. To say that time is an illusory appearance is only a roundabout manner of saying there is no real plurality, and that the frame of things is an absolute unit. Admit plurality, and time may be its form."


I don't think Hemidactylus is going to like the above footnote. It is too down to earth,
too unambiguous, too much like the voice of Socrates in Plato's dialogues.
And too much in harmony with the Bible's depiction of God and His workings.


Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics
Univ. of South Carolina -- standard disclaimer--
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

jillery

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Aug 5, 2021, 1:01:14 PM8/5/21
to talk-o...@moderators.isc.org
On Thu, 5 Aug 2021 06:54:17 -0700 (PDT), "peter2...@gmail.com"
<peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:

>On Thursday, August 5, 2021 at 12:01:14 AM UTC-4, Ron Dean wrote:
>> On 8/4/21 1:56 AM, jillery wrote:
>> > On Tue, 3 Aug 2021 22:38:25 -0400, Ron Dean <rdhall...@gmail.com>
>> > wrote:
>> >
>> >> On 8/3/21 12:57 PM, jillery wrote:

<snip for focus>

>> >>>>> Not only does your story paint a more impressive picture of God, it
>> >>>>> removes his worshipers from having to distinguish between what is
>> >>>>> supernatural and what is natural.
>> >>>>>
>> >>>> Here again which of the various religion's Gods are whe talking about?
>> >>>> You should say!
>> >>>
>> >>>
>> >>> I did say, and so did Bill Rogers. He and I are talking about his
>> >>> story's God. Not sure how even you didn't catch that.
>> >>>
>> >>> Based on your replies, you seem to think the only Gods worth
>> >>> considering are the ones associated with "various religions". Why is
>> >>> that?
>> >>>
>> >> You have a great gift! A gift of twisting comments to the degree that
>> >> they are unrecognizable even to the person who first expressed the comment.
>
>Yes, that gift (one that keeps giving, as they say) is why I've suggested that jillery would
>make a skilled interrogator for the KGB.
>
>By the way, did you know that the German word for poison is Gift? There's poetic
>justice in your choice of words, whether you knew it or not.


Your irrelevant opinions are noted.


>> > Really? So was it someone not you who asked "which religion's Gods
>> > are whe[sic] talking about?" Or did someone force you to write
>> > something you know is mindless noise?
>> >
>> > And why don't you back up your baseless accusations against me?
>
>Note the "inability" to name these alleged baseless accusations.
>With her next comment, jillery gives the probable reason for this 'inability',
>while projecting it onto you:


Really? So when you wrote "that gift" above, you had no idea what
you're talking about? If so, then you are willfully stupid, If not,
then you are a willful liar. Pick your poison.

<snip your remaining made-up crap>

Zen Cycle

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Aug 5, 2021, 1:21:14 PM8/5/21
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and usually upon initial interaction.

Zen Cycle

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Aug 5, 2021, 1:31:14 PM8/5/21
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On Wednesday, August 4, 2021 at 8:41:14 PM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Wednesday, August 4, 2021 at 3:06:13 PM UTC-4, funkma...@hotmail.com wrote:
>
> Might you be Jon Richfield? You've got the same knack for posting empty repartee
> with nothing to back it up.

funny how you equate me posting links and references with "empty repartee with nothing to back it up." Do you do that with your students as well? No wonder you spend so much time in a newsgroup unrelated to your career.

>
> You aren't even curious as to the meaning of my parting shot.

True, I'm not interested

> I'm sure you know that your
> guesses are pure BS.

oh, gee, did you figure that out all on your own?

>
> However, the state of talk.origins has sunk so low that you might find someone who
> would like to team up with you. You might try Wolffan, for instance.

Face it sparky, you're the one posting bullshit without backing it up, then moving the goalposts.

>
>
> The ball's in your court, regulars. Almost. I'll still post my concluding remarks just to give
> this loser a chance to post more empty repartee.

Like this post from you? Gawd what a fucking hypocrite....


jillery

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Aug 5, 2021, 1:36:14 PM8/5/21
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On Sun, 1 Aug 2021 10:25:51 -0700 (PDT), "broger...@gmail.com"
<broger...@gmail.com> wrote:

>Ron, like many ID supporters, argues that if there's no natural explanation for some phenomenon, then there is a supernatural explanation. The phenomenon in question might be the values of the physical constants, the origin of life, the origin of the bacterial flagellum, or the origin of homeobox genes or just about any open scientific question.
>
>One response is simply to say that if there is no known naturalistic explanation then there are at least two options (1) a supernatural explanation or (2) a naturalistic explanation nobody's thought of yet. But I'd say that this response makes the mistake of granting that supernatural and natural explanations are mutually exclusive. Here's a story to explain why that need not be true.
>
>God (I'll use "God" instead of "an unspecified intelligent designer"; it's more direct) was sitting around one day in His infinite wisdom. He decided to create a universe. Since He's omniscient He cast about in his mind for sets of natural laws, physical constants and initial conditions that would make interesting universes and, omnisciently could see the whole history of each of an infinite number of such possible universes. These universes could differ greatly, or they could differ only to the extent of slight quantum scale differences, or anything in between. He decided He would choose one out of all these possible, divinely imagined universes, to become physically real. Omnisciently, of course, He knew the whole time course and evolution of that universe down to the smallest fall of a sparrow and chose it because He thought it was good.
>
>Regardless of which of the universes He chose, any being living in that universe would only observe the action of natural laws in that universe. And yet, everything that happened, happens, or will happen in that universe was ordained by God, because God considered an infinite number of possible universes working out their histories under the influence of an infinite set of different natural laws, physical constants, initial conditions, and random (quantum) events and chose just the one to make physically real. In such a universe everything has both a natural and a supernatural cause. There is no either/or about it. Everything that occurs in that universe is what could be called part of God's Providence, and that's true whether anyone in that universe has figured out the natural cause of that thing or not. Nobody in that universe could conclude that God existed or had chosen that universe simply by making observations of the universe; and yet nothing stops someone in that universe
>from coming to faith in a provident, loving God. It's just not a question that observations of the universe can answer. Just like here in this universe.
>
>This story, I think paints a more impressive picture of God than does the idea of Him as a tinkerer unable to make a universe that suited Him without sneaking back in once in a while to get life going, or to fix up the right sequence of a homeobox gene or what have you. And, unlike Deism, it allows for God's Providence to be seen in everything that happens.
>
>So I'd say, Ron, stop trying to get scientific support for God; if God is any good at His job, you won't find it. And you'll just be wasting time you could better spend on prayer, meditation, kindnesses, or whatever seems important to you.


I am torn between posting the following in this topic, or to start yet
another topic for it. I post it here because it addresses many of the
same issues mentioned here and in other topics about ID and
Creationist claims.

Although the author titled his video "5 Animals That Disprove God",
it's theme is really closer to disproof of the Design Inference and
Natural Theology. It's a 37-minute video from a former Jehovah
Witness expressing one of the most cogent, comprehensive and coherent
arguments I have witnessed. Fair warning, don't embarrass yourself
posting criticisms about it without listening to it first.

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lO-GjEFrCd8>

The narrator almost immediately addresses the elephant in the room:
"Which god?" A reason why I posted this in reply to you is because he
acknowledges your story God above is unfalsifiable. But he goes on:
********************************
@2:20
But chances are you have never believed or you don't currently believe
in a god like that. The god that you believe in or did believe in
goes by a specific name, whether you refer to him as Yahweh, Jehovah,
Lord, or Allah. He is The God, the abrahamic god of modern day
monotheism.

Now, if you took a jew, a christian, and a muslim, and put them in a
room together (don't worry it's not the start of a joke), and you ask
them to collectively come up with a list of specific personality
traits, and perhaps one superhuman ability of the abrahamic god that
they all believe in, their list might look a bit like this: a god of
love, kindness, justice, and empathy, who also crucially has the
superhuman ability of foreknowledge, to be able to instantaneously
and accurately foresee future events before they happen. Whether a
jew, a christian, or a muslim wants to cite verses from the old
testament, the new testament, or the quran, this will be an undeniable
list which binds their beliefs together into one god, the abrahamic
god.
********************************

With that elephant escorted from the room, the narrator introduces the
5 animals which he says disprove *that* God, and explains how. To the
best of my recollection, no cdesign proponentsists have even tried to
address the implicit challenge identified here.

jillery

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Aug 5, 2021, 1:46:13 PM8/5/21
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On Wed, 4 Aug 2021 17:37:48 -0700 (PDT), "peter2...@gmail.com"
<peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:

>On Wednesday, August 4, 2021 at 3:06:13 PM UTC-4, funkma...@hotmail.com wrote:
>
>Might you be Jon Richfield? You've got the same knack for posting empty repartee
>with nothing to back it up.
>
>You aren't even curious as to the meaning of my parting shot. I'm sure you know that your
>guesses are pure BS.
>
>However, the state of talk.origins has sunk so low that you might find someone who
>would like to team up with you. You might try Wolffan, for instance.
>
>
>The ball's in your court, regulars.


Since you asked, you don't even post empty repartee, nevermind
anything that backs up your claims. You're welcome.

Mark Isaak

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Aug 5, 2021, 1:46:13 PM8/5/21
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The excessive complexity of life is so immensely greater than designed
complexity that only fools use it as an argument for design.

--
Mark Isaak eciton (at) curioustaxonomy (dot) net
"The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred
to the presence of those who think they've found it." - Terry Pratchett

Mark Isaak

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Aug 5, 2021, 1:56:14 PM8/5/21
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Reproduction is the most important aspect of biology, so of course Paley
needs to address it. And his book is about analogy to human design, so
of course he presents reproduction in light of that analogy.

>>> Consequently, and over time evolution became the alternative of
>>> design. And for some people evolution became fulfilling and is
>>> virtually the same as a religion.
>>
>> Only in your dreams.
>>
> Recall what Richard Dawkins stated?

Do you know what religion is? I suspect not, but that you instead think
of any vaguely abstract thinking as religion.

Religion is difficult (perhaps impossible) do define with precision, but
central to most definitions is a concept of sacredness which is
recognized in ceremonies, some of which are periodic, and usually some
of which have community involvement. I.e., nothing to do with evolution.

Zen Cycle

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Aug 5, 2021, 2:16:14 PM8/5/21
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On Wednesday, August 4, 2021 at 10:41:13 PM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Wednesday, August 4, 2021 at 8:26:13 AM UTC-4, funkma...@hotmail.com wrote:
> > On Tuesday, August 3, 2021 at 7:46:14 PM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>
> > > The idea of an omniscient God is not to be found in the Bible.
> > https://www.openbible.info/topics/omniscience
> >
> > It lists 100 bible versus which are all interpreted as affirming omniscience.
> Are they any closer to Bill Rogers's grandiose version than the two verses for the Koran
> that Oxyaena found for me?

Again missing the point. You wrote "The idea of an omniscient God is not to be found in the Bible." The links I posted (which you refused to read, yet judged as empty repartee) show your claim to be false.

> > Simply because they don't use the word 'omniscient' doesn't mean the concept is not there.
> Your use of the definite article "the" shows that you have no idea what the issues here are.

The issue is that you claimed "The idea of an omniscient God is not to be found in the Bible." _That_ is the issue I am addressing. The links I posted show your claim to be false. Try and keep up, sparky.

> Take a look at the website Oxyaena linked, and you will see a long commentary about those two
> verses in the Koran. It is very different from Bill Rogers's idea of omniscience.

Hey sparky, we aren't talking about the Quran, we're talking about your claim "The idea of an omniscient God is not to be found in the Bible." Attempt to move goalposts duly noted, AGAIN. what the Quran says about omniscience isn't relevant.

>
> That is, unless you want to bury your head even deeper into the sand than it already is.

It's called staying on topic. I'm not going to play your game of trying the change the subject because you know you're wrong. At any it's better than you with your head firmly up your ass.

> > You wrote somewhere else that you were 'uniquely qualified to argue against creationism', or something like that.
> Something very unlike it.

In https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/ZeYE62JZtGo/m/C6XkVYInAwAJ you wrote:

"I am far better equipped than most people here are to fight creationism"

yeah, that's _so_ different than 'I am uniquely qualified to argue against creationism'.

> I was just comparing myself with the sorry lot who have come to dominate
> talk.origins.

There are a dozen people in this forum "better equipped" than you to argue against creationism, especially when you make such ludicrous claims as "The idea of an omniscient God is not to be found in the Bible." All you do it make yourself look like ADD addled nutbag who can't stay on topic.

> And I gave very specific reasons why they are such a sorry lot: even the best of them
> fight creationism with both hands tied behind their backs, and I explained why.
>
> "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king."

A one-eyed man is just as helpless as anyone else when his head is shoved as far up his ass as yours.

> >
> > You very clearly are not. Not only did that place your incredible general arrogance on display, but every time you post, you make specious claims - usually demonstrably false - rooted in your arrogamce.
> You are really amusing when you try to kick me with your head buried deep in the sand.
>
>
> This concludes my interaction with you for the rest of this month.

omg I'm so hurt. Tell ya what, sparky, I'll allow you further interaction when you admit:
- asking questions about the origins of god is not a "village atheist" question, but something addressed by intelligent theologians for centuries.
- The idea of an omniscient God is found in the Bible
- "I am far better equipped than most people here are to fight creationism" is indistinguishable from 'I am uniquely qualified to argue against creationism'.


> I dislike spending time with Black Knight
> lookalikes, as you turned out to be in your counter-counter "argument," complete with the royal "we".

nope, I'm not the black night in this interaction sparky. You're the one who made the claim that origin questions were the domain of the villiage atheist - which is wrong, and that "The idea of an omniscient God is not to be found in the Bible.", which is also wrong.

How about you just "run away"....


Burkhard

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Aug 5, 2021, 3:21:14 PM8/5/21
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And he is aware of the problem, and discuses it briefly. His argument,
in a nutshell, is that yes, this is a genuine objection to his argument,
and watches differ from biological entities in this crucial aspect, BUT
that as a thought experiment, we could imagine even better designers
that build machines that replicate themselves, and we would consider
this even more ingenious design.

Mostly a cop-out I'd say, but then again we are now getting to the point
where we build robots that build other robots in their image. Homer
Jacobson made some interesting thought experiments on this with the aim
to show the strength of the ToE, von Neumann and his universal
constructor and the Neumann probe , and Erwin Drexler more recently -
Jacobson and Drexler also interesting as their work has been quote-mined
extensively by creationists, to the extend that Jacobson withdrew 2
sections of his 1955 paper.

3d printing is one of the more recent developments, here a video of a
partly self-replicating robots, some of my collaborators here in
Edinburgh look into this for space exploration

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZX-iJLHZt8M

While developments like this weaken a bit the criticism against Paley, I
don't think they ultimately rescue its analogy, for the reason you give,
nobody would mistake any of these systems as being alive

Burkhard

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Aug 5, 2021, 3:26:14 PM8/5/21
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Zen Cycle wrote:
> On Wednesday, August 4, 2021 at 10:41:13 PM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>> On Wednesday, August 4, 2021 at 8:26:13 AM UTC-4, funkma...@hotmail.com wrote:
>>> On Tuesday, August 3, 2021 at 7:46:14 PM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>>
>>>> The idea of an omniscient God is not to be found in the Bible.
>>> https://www.openbible.info/topics/omniscience
>>>
>>> It lists 100 bible versus which are all interpreted as affirming omniscience.
>> Are they any closer to Bill Rogers's grandiose version than the two verses for the Koran
>> that Oxyaena found for me?
>
> Again missing the point. You wrote "The idea of an omniscient God is not to be found in the Bible." The links I posted (which you refused to read, yet judged as empty repartee) show your claim to be false.
>
>>> Simply because they don't use the word 'omniscient' doesn't mean the concept is not there.
>> Your use of the definite article "the" shows that you have no idea what the issues here are.
>
> The issue is that you claimed "The idea of an omniscient God is not to be found in the Bible." _That_ is the issue I am addressing. The links I posted show your claim to be false. Try and keep up, sparky.


But but but but...there is no mention of omniscience in the Narnia
Chronicles, and Aslan is definitely not omniscient, that's proof
positive that it's not a Christian concept, no?

*Hemidactylus*

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Aug 5, 2021, 4:01:14 PM8/5/21
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Maybe he will answer you indirectly by piggybacking through my post. That’s
kinda what he does…mangling the flow of a thread discussion worse than
top-posting Nando could ever muster by his long preambles and replying to
multiple people through piggyback posts. Hard to keep attributions straight
when that happens. But that’s his forte.

Zen Cycle

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Aug 5, 2021, 4:46:13 PM8/5/21
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On Thursday, August 5, 2021 at 3:26:14 PM UTC-4, Burkhard wrote:
> Zen Cycle wrote:
> >
> > The issue is that you claimed "The idea of an omniscient God is not to be found in the Bible." _That_ is the issue I am addressing. The links I posted show your claim to be false. Try and keep up, sparky.
>
> But but but but...there is no mention of omniscience in the Narnia
> Chronicles, and Aslan is definitely not omniscient, that's proof
> positive that it's not a Christian concept, no?
> >

Now now, Peter isn't going to like it when he sees you mocking him like this...

Burkhard

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Aug 5, 2021, 4:51:14 PM8/5/21
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peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> Like jillery, for whom he has a deep respect, did on another thread yesterday, Burkhard admires
> his own handiwork so much that he follows up to himself. Spoiler: it wasn't worth the
> strangely redundant effort.
>
> On Thursday, August 5, 2021 at 8:46:13 AM UTC-4, Burkhard wrote:
>> Burkhard wrote:
>>> peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>>>> On Tuesday, August 3, 2021 at 9:01:13 PM UTC-4, Oxyaena wrote:
>>>>> On 8/3/2021 7:42 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I don't think Bill knows much that is worth knowing about these
>>>>>> Gods. His God is a medieval adaptation
>>>>>> of some non-Christian gods, such as Plato's. The idea of an
>>>>>> omniscient God is not to be found in the Bible.
>
> Your failure to take into account what I wrote in the above four lines is noteworthy, Burkhard,
> in assessing what you wrote below.

Not really, your ad hominems are just not worth a reply. And in any case
they were about Christian theology, not Islam

>
>>>>>> It *a* *fortiori* is not in the book of Mormon. I don't know enough
>>>>>> about the Koran to say something about
>>>>>> whether Islam has such an idea. It certainly pictures Allah as being
>>>>>> far more remote than the Christian God,
>>>>>> and considers it blasphemy to speak of a Trinity the way Christians do.
>
> The following link was helpfully provided by Oxyaena:
>
>>>>> https://www.al-islam.org/islamic-doctrines-simplified/allah-omniscient
>
> And the beginning of my response follows:
>
>>>> The two short quotes it gives from the Koran weren't meant for
>>>> sophisticated theologians
>>>> or philosophers, and give no hint of the kind of omniscience that
>>>> Bill Rogers talks about:
>>>
>>>
>>> Don't know why that would matter,
>
> Ask your buddy Hemidactylus to explain if the colossal distinction between what
> your ally Bill wrote and what you write below is beyond your understanding of philosophy.
>
>
> > > asy our question was about the Qur'an,
>>> not the theological systems build on it,
>
> You missed the point of my "whether Islam has such an idea."

You asked specifically about the Qu'ran. You got an answer, you just
didn't like it, so you moved the goalpost to Islamic theology. You got
an answer on that from me, you just didn't like it as neither fitted
your preconception of Islam. Though, but not really my problem


> But it looks like Oxyaena didn't, because that website that she linked
> expounds not only on the two verses but also on what the authors, at least,
> take to be mainstream Islamic understanding of omniscience -- a far cry from that of Bill Rogers.

First, nothing in the text contradicts anything Bill wrote. What Bill
wrote does go considerably beyond this, sure, as you'd expect if the
text in question is a basic introduction. But your claim was not that
not everyone within the Islamic tradition thinks like Bill, but that it
is not part of any Islamic tradition. which my quotes flatly refuse.



>
> Iqbal, on the other hand, reads more like a Sufi with strong Hindu influences

Let's see. In one corner we have a writer who has acquired the honorific
"Allama", i.e. "most learned", given to exceptionally impressive
scholars of Islamic fiqh in Sunni and Shia Islam, especially in South
Asia and Iran. He studied philosophy first under Sir Thomas Walker
Arnold the first English editor for The Encyclopaedia of Islam and
professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the SOAS. He then did a BA at
Trinity in Cambridge, studying with Reynold A. Nicholson, then the
leading authority on Sunni Maturidi philosophy (a school that emphasizes
rationality and rationalism) Among the philosophy teachers there who
influenced his later work was in particular McTaggart

His PhD on Islamic metaphysics, "Die Entwicklung der Metaphysik in
Persien", was supervised by Fritz Hommel in Munich. Hommel's "Grundriss
der Geographie und Geschichte des Alten Orients" remains a classical
text, one of the first to use modern linguistic methods systematically.
Hommel was also supervisor of Gershom Scholem and Adam Falkenstein.
Iqbal's PhD was translated into English, Urdu, Arabic and Persian. His
second book, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam" remains
highly influential in Iran (and even more so the exile community) but
also received praise from Christian theologians such as William Owen
Carver who said "His aim was to reconstruct Muslim religious philosophy
with due regard to the philosophical traditions of Islam and the more
recent developments of human knowledge.".

The lasting importance of Iqbal for Islamic thought has also been
recognized by the creation of the Muhammad Iqbal Forschungsstelle
(Research Centre) at the Westfälischen Wilhelms-Universität Münster led
by Ahmad Milad Karimi, multiple-award winning scholar and "one of the
most prominent Islamic scholars in Europe"

On the other corner, we have a mathematician whose understanding of
Christian theology comes mainly from an author best known for his
children's books (whom he gets also frequently wrong, but that's another
story), and no discernible training in or knowledge of Islam, apart from
what one can find on the back of cereals maybe. I wonder, whom should I
follow for an account of what Islamic theology is?

> than someone in the mainstream of Islam, which I take to be broad enough to include Sunni and Shiite.

This makes no sense whatsoever and shows your confusion wrt Islam. As
for Sufism, yes, especially in his youth Iqbal was influenced by Rumi in
particular. And so what? You contrasting Sufism with "Sunni and Shia"
makes no sense whatsoever, Sufism is not a third competing sect of
Islam, its a method or practice that has been influential across
schools. Most Sufis are Sunni Muslims, but there is also a sizeable Shia
following.

What you write is rather like saying "monasticism isn't Christian
mainstream in the way protestants and Catholics are". Only that Sufism
was much more prominent in Islamic thought. Sufism is as old as Islam,
and between the 13th and 16th century arguably the most dominant form,
essential to the golden age of Islam and its spread to Africa and India
( for reference a book published by your university press, Arthur F.
Buehler, Sufi Heirs of the Prophet: The Indian Naqshbandiyya and the
Rise of the Mediating Sufi Shaykh)

Some of the most important thinkers of that time were linked ot Sufism
or practiced it on form or the other, Al-Ghazali maybe the most
prominent (unless you go for Saladin, him of the Crusades) or Abdul
Qadir Gilani. It was only in the late 18th and 19th century that some
fundamentalist schools of Islam began to denounce Sufism as heretic, in
particular in Wahhabism. But again to treat these as the mainstream and
not the Sufis as you do is akin to saying Catholics are not proper
Christians because the Amish disapprove of them. And of course there has
been a massive contemporary Sufi revival throughout the Islamic world,
Ahmed el-Tayeb endorsing it as one of the foundations of Sunnism,or
thinkers like Bawa Muhaiyaddeen or Nuh Ha Mim Keller

As for Vedic influences, unsurprisingly, there have been
cross-fertilization between Islamic and Vedic thinkers in India,
inevitable given the close geographical proximity, and some convergence
between world religions is anyway to be expected. He studied Vedic
philosophy, just as he did with western philosophy and Christian
theology , and he discusses explicitly the similarities but also
differences. In the context relevant here, omniscience, as I said he
paints a sort of mirror image - he talks in this context about passive
and active omniscience, so despite some superficial similarities comes
to a very different account.
Firstly, no as a question of simple interpretation "The future
pre-exists in this organic wholeness of God’s creative life but as an
open possibility" With other words, possible future worlds are also
known by God

But more important, your entire "argument" above makes no sense. God is
omniscient. That means he knows all there is to know. What this means
for us will change as our knowledge changes - so IF multiple universe
theory is true, God knows them all, if it isn't he doesn't, obviously.
We are talking about a theological doctrine here, not a contribution to
physics.

Having said that, Iqbal references the physical thought of his time
extensively, in particular Einstein whom he admired greatly, and while
he accepts his work as a description of the physical universe, he has
objections for its suitability for a philosophy of time:





>
>
>>>>
>>>> Quote one: “Say: Do you instruct Allah about your religion? But Allah
>>>> knows all that is in the heavens and on the earth; Allah is Knowing of
>>>> all things” Holy Qur'an (49:16)
>>>>
>>>> "all things" seems, in context, to be speaking about all things in our
>>>> physical universe,
>>>> as opposed to all possible things and all possible events in all
>>>> possible universes,
>>>> which was Bill Rogers's meaning.
>>>>
>>>> To do it credit, the commentary sticks to this down to earth meaning
>>>> and doesn't
>>>> hint at grandiose concepts like that of Bill Rogers. If you disagree,
>>>> please
>>>> quote something that you think might be about that grandiose concept.
>
> I extend this challenge to you, Burkhard, as to Iqbal's works.

If you don;t see it from what I quoted already, not sure how I can help
you further. Maybe you point out any long words that give you
difficulties, and I can try to explain them?
>
>
> Peter Nyikos
>

Zen Cycle

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Aug 5, 2021, 4:51:14 PM8/5/21
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On Thursday, August 5, 2021 at 4:01:14 PM UTC-4, *Hemidactylus* wrote:
> Zen Cycle <funkma...@hotmail.com> wrote:

> >
> Maybe he will answer you indirectly by piggybacking through my post. That’s
> kinda what he does…mangling the flow of a thread discussion worse than
> top-posting Nando could ever muster by his long preambles and replying to
> multiple people through piggyback posts. Hard to keep attributions straight
> when that happens. But that’s his forte.

I haven't quite figured out his forte. He isn't very good at bullshitting, because we see right through it. Same goes for irrelevant distractions and moving goalposts - he does it, but it doesn't help him. He might be good at math though.....

peter2...@gmail.com

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Aug 5, 2021, 4:56:13 PM8/5/21
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Do you mean redundant complexity, as opposed to irreducible complexity?

If you were not so flip about everything, I'd interpret the next two lines of yours as a No answer:

> of life is so immensely greater than designed
> complexity that only fools use it as an argument for design.

By "designed complexity," do you mean, "things we've designed up to August 5, 2021"
or do you mean "everything humans can design, given enough time
[e.g. by a thousand centuries from now] and money"?

Or something in between?

Are you such a postmodern anti-rationalist that you think your little comment should be accepted
by anyone without you resolving this ambiguity?


Can you see the relevance of my questions to the one I ask at the end of this post?

IMO, the really foolish ones are those who laugh at the idea that biologists (especially
biochemists) need to do any research or deep thinking in OOL to establish
what "every sane person knows":

Mother Earth did it, this I know;
For Ockham's Razor tells me so.

You agree with this ditty, don't you, Mark?


Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--
University of So. Carolina at Columbia
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

Burkhard

unread,
Aug 5, 2021, 5:26:14 PM8/5/21
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peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Thursday, August 5, 2021 at 8:46:13 AM UTC-4, Burkhard wrote:
>> Burkhard wrote:
>
> The following is my response to the part I snipped in the middle in my first reply.
>
> > >but for omniscience you could
>>> try Muhammad Iqbal's analysis of classical formulations of Divine
>>> Knowledge in chapter 3 of his "Reconstruction of Religious Thought in
>>> Islam." Omniscience there has been derived from the Names of Allah, in
>>> particular Al-‘Aleem, which is normally translated directly as The
>>> All-Knowing, or The Omniscient, but also As-Samee, The All-Hearing
>>> and Al-Baseer, The All-Seeing, al Wajeed, the perceiver, al-bateen,
>>> knower of the hidden, and ar-rasheed infallible teacher (assuming that
>>> one can't derive omniscience anyway from omnipotence, as I'd argue)
>
> Thanks for reinforcing what appears in the webpage by the Al-Balagh foundation,
>
> https://www.al-islam.org/islamic-doctrines-simplified/allah-omniscient
>
> about which I wrote in my first reply.

If you need a "simplified" version of Islamic doctrine to know about the
99 names of Allah, then that explains indeed a lot
>
>
>>> Iqbal in particular identifies God with time,
>
> Is it because "Time is." identifies a completely undeniable thing, second only
> to "I exist" and far more certain than "the universe exists" or "God exists." ?

No. That would be the entirely wrong intellectual tradition. That's
essentially Kant, with time a category of pure reason, that then enables
synthetic a priori truth of the type above.

Iqbal discusses Kant extensively, but only to reject him. The western
philosopher most congenial to his account of time in Islam is Henry
Bergson and his concept of Duration. Duration is unextended yet
heterogeneous (unlike space, which is homogeneous) and so its parts
cannot be juxtaposed as a succession of distinct parts, with one causing
the other.

Natural science only pretends to measure time, it is actually only
measuring movement in space, i.e. the successive changes in the spatial
position of the objects. Such a physically understood time is
"fragmented". "La durée" or duration on the other hand cannot be divided
into sections so Bergson; but the indivisible movement itself, the
constant, unpredictable and irreversible becoming different. He
illustrates this through the thought experiment in which sugar is melted
in a glass of water. Bergson tries to understand this as a temporality
beyond mechanized time measurement: an excited waiting and
concentration on what is happening, which is to be interpreted as
passivity, but rather an active moment in the form of adaptation
includes the rhythm of the event. This for Iqbal becomes the way in
which God attention to the world should be best understood

>
> If answering this question is beyond your pay grade, perhaps Hemidactylus can help us here.
>
> [By the way, the first example is from a very early piece of science fiction, the rest from Descartes's
> first two mediations.]
>
>
>>> and from this reasons:
>>>
>>> “omniscience in the sense of a single indivisible act of perception
>>> which would make God immediately aware of the entire sweep of
>>> history regarded as an order of specific events in an eternal now,”
>
> One could personify Time like that, with the appropriate poetic license.
> Hawking also had that kind of "block-universe" concept of Time,
> in which the arrow of time conveniently disappears.

Again nothing to do with the question, which was whether or not Islam
has a notion of omniscience, or theological issues of time in Islam

>
> But to give the devil its due, special relativity has each photon dwelling in an eternal now.
> But the notion that there is only one photon in our universe has lost traction among physicists.
>
> A good thing, too, otherwise Iqbal's "God" would seem to the average person to be a throwback to
> Akhenaten's sun-worship.
>

No idea why that would follow
>>> which is really close to what Bill described.
>
>
> Nonsense. What it is close to is the "block universe" against which William James
> argued at length in The Dilemma of Determinism.

Nothing in Iqab has any similarity to the block universe, I have no idea
why you bring this concept in

>
> http://www.uky.edu/~eushe2/Pajares/JamesDilemmaOfDeterminism.html
>
> The above version omits all footnotes, which is a shame, because it leaves off some
> of the best material in the essay. But I found a complete version, along with a lot of
> other essays by James, here:
>
> http://sqapo.com/Complete_Text__William_James__The_Will_to_Believe.htm
>
> And here is what I find most relevant to Iqbal's inchoate musings:

Wow. Here we have a philosopher you didn't even know exposed before
yesterday, whose work you haven't read, and the short quotes I gave you
mangled in a failed attempt to somehow make sense of them in the light
of what you remember from highschool philosophy, yet confidently you
declare him inchoate.

Mark Isaak

unread,
Aug 5, 2021, 6:11:14 PM8/5/21
to talk-o...@moderators.isc.org
>> The excessive complexity of life is so immensely greater than designed
>> complexity that only fools use it as an argument for design.
>
> Do you mean redundant complexity, as opposed to irreducible complexity?

No, I meant excessive complexity.

> By "designed complexity," do you mean, "things we've designed up to August 5, 2021"
> or do you mean "everything humans can design, given enough time
> [e.g. by a thousand centuries from now] and money"?
>
> Or something in between?

Good design aims for as much simplicity as possible. (Art is sometimes
an exception.) Granted, many designs in the distant (and perhaps
not-so-distant) future will be excessively complex, too, but that's
because they will use evolutionary design, not intelligent design.

peter2...@gmail.com

unread,
Aug 5, 2021, 8:21:14 PM8/5/21
to talk-o...@moderators.isc.org
On Thursday, August 5, 2021 at 4:51:14 PM UTC-4, Burkhard wrote:
> peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > On Thursday, August 5, 2021 at 8:46:13 AM UTC-4, Burkhard wrote:
> >> Burkhard wrote:
> >>> peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> >>>> On Tuesday, August 3, 2021 at 9:01:13 PM UTC-4, Oxyaena wrote:
> >>>>> On 8/3/2021 7:42 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> I don't think Bill knows much that is worth knowing about these
> >>>>>> Gods. His God is a medieval adaptation
> >>>>>> of some non-Christian gods, such as Plato's. The idea of an
> >>>>>> omniscient God is not to be found in the Bible.
> >
> > Your failure to take into account what I wrote in the above four lines is noteworthy, Burkhard,
> > in assessing what you wrote below.

> Not really, your ad hominems are just not worth a reply.

This ad hominem of yours fails to delimit your concept of "ad hominems."

Is your definition so broad that you consider the two lines to which you are responding above
as "ad hominem"?"

> >
> >>>>>> It *a* *fortiori* is not in the book of Mormon. I don't know enough
> >>>>>> about the Koran to say something about
> >>>>>> whether Islam has such an idea.

This was intended to be the first step towards finding out whether there is
a contrast between the Islam of the Koran as to what "omnipotent" means
and any modifications that became entrenched in Islamic theology.

In particular, I would like to know whether any are as radical as the medieval-origin Thomistic one,
which can be construed to be the same concept as that of Bill Rogers. If so, we would have:

Koran : Bible :: Some School of Islamic Theology : Thomistic theology

This is because it seems that the Islam of the Koran is anchored in our own universe, just
as that of the Bible is. Yes, there is also an invisible-to-us heaven and hell in both,
but God's ominpotence is neither
(1) construed to extend to all possible universes, nor
(2) does it preclude interaction by God with the physical world.


Take away the "neither" and (1) goes with Thomism and Rogers's concept; take away the
"nor" and (2) goes with Rogers's concept and an uncompromising Deism.


> >>>>>> It certainly pictures Allah as being
> >>>>>> far more remote than the Christian God,
> >>>>>> and considers it blasphemy to speak of a Trinity the way Christians do.

> > The following link was helpfully provided by Oxyaena:
> >
> >>>>> https://www.al-islam.org/islamic-doctrines-simplified/allah-omniscient
> >
> > And the beginning of my response follows:
> >
> >>>> The two short quotes it gives from the Koran weren't meant for
> >>>> sophisticated theologians
> >>>> or philosophers, and give no hint of the kind of omniscience that
> >>>> Bill Rogers talks about:

and, as I said, the commentary in the webpage by the Al-Balagh foundation,

https://www.al-islam.org/islamic-doctrines-simplified/allah-omniscient

also gives no such hint.


> >>> Don't know why that would matter,
> >
> > Ask your buddy Hemidactylus to explain if the colossal distinction between what
> > your ally Bill wrote and what you write below is beyond your understanding of philosophy.

I delineated the distinction in discussing (1) and (2) above.

> >
> > > > asy our question was about the Qur'an,
> >>> not the theological systems build on it,
> >
> > You missed the point of my "whether Islam has such an idea."

> You asked specifically about the Qu'ran.

See above about the direction in which I was headed. I didn't know whether
the Koran itself gave anything approaching Bill Rogers's concept, and evidently it does not.

<ad hominem snipped here>
> > But it looks like Oxyaena didn't, because that website that she linked
> > expounds not only on the two verses but also on what the authors, at least,
> > take to be mainstream Islamic understanding of omniscience -- a far cry from that of Bill Rogers.

> First, nothing in the text contradicts anything Bill wrote.

Sure, just as Elon Musk's space capsule docking with the International Space Station in earth orbit
does not contradict Apollo 11's lunar lander docking with the command module in lunar orbit.


> But your claim was not that
> not everyone within the Islamic tradition thinks like Bill, but that it
> is not part of any Islamic tradition.

Your last clause, with "your claim" understood, is a false ad hominem and is not worthy of any further reply.

> which my quotes flatly refuse.

They may refuse assent, but I saw no refutation of the claim when stripped of its false connection with me.


> > Iqbal, on the other hand, reads more like a Sufi with strong Hindu influences

> Let's see. In one corner we have a writer

<credentials irrelevant to whether Muhammad Iqbal endorsed (1) with "neither" removed, snipped>

I'll grant you one thing: they helped me to narrow me down to "Muhammad Iqbal" as to whom
you are talking about, and to disambiguate him from 4 others by that name, and 3 others whose
names include his as a subset. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Iqbal_(disambiguation)
>

<snip partially false ad hominem reminiscent of the description of Tweedledum's interruption of Alice>


> I wonder, whom should I
> follow for an account of what Islamic theology is?

Anyone who can steer you to some Islamic theologian whose concept of omnipotence is
of comparable magnitude to that of Bill Rogers.

Perhaps something Iqbal wrote will do that, but you haven't found such a statement yet.


<I stand corrected about what I wrote about Sufism; demonstration snipped>


> As for Vedic influences, unsurprisingly, there have been
> cross-fertilization between Islamic and Vedic thinkers in India,
> inevitable given the close geographical proximity, and some convergence
> between world religions is anyway to be expected.

Yes. Efforts have been made, especially in the second half of the 20th century,
to produce a convergence with Christianity, but these efforts have been in decline for about three decades now.
Bishop J.A.T. Robinson was one person pushing for it, in _Honest to God_, in its heyday.

> He studied Vedic
> philosophy, just as he did with western philosophy and Christian
> theology , and he discusses explicitly the similarities but also
> differences. In the context relevant here, omniscience, as I said he
> paints a sort of mirror image - he talks in this context about passive
> and active omniscience, so despite some superficial similarities comes
> to a very different account.

From Bill's. Yes. Probably also from the Biblical concept of omnipotence. So far, Zen Cycle
hasn't lifted a finger to explain which of the hundred or so biblical verses corresponds
to Bill Rogers's concept.

> >
> > <snip of things to be dealt with in a separate post, to be done soon after this one>
> >
> >
> >> This all gave me reasons to re-read Iqbal, and to get reminded what an
> >> interesting thinker he was.
> >
> > "May you live in interesting times." -- ancient Chinese curse.
> >
> >> His concept of creation and what it means to
> >> be "creative" is in this context also interesting:
> >
> >> “Divine Knowledge must be conceived as a living creative
> >> activity to which the objects that appear to exist in their own right
> >> are organically related [....] The future pre-exists in this organic
> >> wholeness of God’s creative life but as an open possibility,
> >> not as a fixed order of events with definite outlines.
> >>
> >> so God did not create at one point in his life, during the course of
> >> history, but creation itself is an ongoing process of God's knowing. A
> >> mirror image if you like of reality as Vishnu dreaming
> >
> > Also the Red King dreaming in _Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There_.
> >
> > "Well, it's no use *your* talking about waking him," said Tweedledum, "when you're only one of the things in his dream. You know very well you're not real."
> >
> >
> >> He developes this notion of knowledge as creation further.
> >
> > Here comes the redundancy I wrote about in my preamble. Two sentences, the rest overlapping.
> >
> > Iqbal's main accomplishment in what you add is to contribute to further satire from Lewis Carroll's book.
> > The rest is typically inchoate pantheistic talk.
> >
> >
> >> "The act of knowing and the act of creating are identical. Divine
> >> Knowledge must be conceived as a living creative activity to which
> >> the objects that appear to exist per se
> >
> > "I hope you don't suppose those are *real* tears?" Tweedledum interrupted in a tone of great contempt. [ibid.]

I alluded to the part beginning with "in a tone ..." in one of my snips above.

> >
> >> are organically
> >> related to Omniscience. The future pre-exists in organic wholeness
> >> of God’s creative life but as an open possibility, not as a fixed order
> >> of events with definite outlines.”
> >
> > Specifically, the possible futures of our young [a mere 13.7 gigayear] universe,
> > in a form reminiscent of one piece of offbeat speculation by some quantum physicists
> > in which our universe multifurcates endlessly to realize all possible outcomes
> > of each indeterminate quantum event.
> >
> > Still, it is our universe, not all possible universes of which Bill Rogers wrote.

> Firstly, no as a question of simple interpretation "The future
> pre-exists in this organic wholeness of God’s creative life but as an
> open possibility" With other words, possible future worlds are also
> known by God

The last bit is editorializing by you. Can you find anything in Iqbal's writings to prove it?
If not, any widely accepted mainstream Islamic scholar will do.


> But more important, your entire "argument" above makes no sense. God is
> omniscient. That means he knows all there is to know.

According to a definition Bill will probably endorse, despite his restriction
that ruled out all universes with which God reacts after creating them.

But that is not the issue. If you are tempted to press your claim on
the basis of literal etymology, I offer the example of the Holy Roman Empire for your inspection.

> What this means for us will change as our knowledge changes - so IF multiple universe
> theory is true, God knows them all,

That assumes that existing multiple universe theory can meaningfully write
about the actual multiverse, which can include whole multiverses completely
sealed off from each other.


> if it isn't he doesn't, obviously.
> We are talking about a theological doctrine here, not a contribution to physics.

It needn't involve physics. If Heidegger didn't get deep enough into the concept of Being
to envision realms of Being completely sealed off from each other [1], he is over-rated as a philosopher of Being.

[1] many of them with a God who knows all there was to know about His realm, and able to theorize about
all possible realms, yet oblivious to the existence of the others.


> Having said that, Iqbal references the physical thought of his time
> extensively, in particular Einstein whom he admired greatly, and while
> he accepts his work as a description of the physical universe, he has
> objections for its suitability for a philosophy of time:

You put a colon here, and if you meant to put a period and say no more,
this is just another statement that is completely beside the point.

> >
> >>>>
> >>>> Quote one: “Say: Do you instruct Allah about your religion? But Allah
> >>>> knows all that is in the heavens and on the earth; Allah is Knowing of
> >>>> all things” Holy Qur'an (49:16)
> >>>>
> >>>> "all things" seems, in context, to be speaking about all things in our
> >>>> physical universe,
> >>>> as opposed to all possible things and all possible events in all
> >>>> possible universes,
> >>>> which was Bill Rogers's meaning.
> >>>>
> >>>> To do it credit, the commentary sticks to this down to earth meaning
> >>>> and doesn't
> >>>> hint at grandiose concepts like that of Bill Rogers. If you disagree,
> >>>> please
> >>>> quote something that you think might be about that grandiose concept.
> >
> > I extend this challenge to you, Burkhard, as to Iqbal's works.

> If you don;t see it from what I quoted already, not sure how I can help
> you further.

You can help by trying to figure out what the issue is. If you don't see
it from what I wrote, I will do my best to try and explain it to you.


Peter Nyikos

Bill

unread,
Aug 5, 2021, 10:26:14 PM8/5/21
to talk-o...@moderators.isc.org
How can you know any of that? Are these merely opinions you've set in
concrete or is there some special insight involved? Human history reveals
the development of thought and that only reveals how humans think and how
most of those thoughts reveal nothing important. People have always believed
their beliefs, that is the essence of human reality after all, but is this
knowledge or arrogance?

Bill


Bob Casanova

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Aug 5, 2021, 11:16:14 PM8/5/21
to talk-o...@moderators.isc.org
On Thu, 05 Aug 2021 21:23:52 -0500, the following appeared
in talk.origins, posted by Bill <fre...@gmail.com>:
Good point, since according to a self-styled genius who
posts here no one can know anything, everything is
subjective, and therefore good design practices are merely a
figment of the imagination.
>
--

Bob C.

"The most exciting phrase to hear in science,
the one that heralds new discoveries, is not
'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'"

- Isaac Asimov

*Hemidactylus*

unread,
Aug 6, 2021, 12:56:13 AM8/6/21
to talk-o...@moderators.isc.org
He’s actually written a book on creationism. What exactly have you ever
done, faux Socrates?

https://www.amazon.com/Counter-Creationism-Handbook-M-Isaak/dp/0520249267

> Human history reveals
> the development of thought and that only reveals how humans think and how
> most of those thoughts reveal nothing important.

Ironic *you* would say that. You have nothing important to say at all. But
you keep on insisting on saying it like some foaming soapbox ranter who
doubts the cardboard sign on his chest scribbled in black Sharpie is real.

>People have always believed
> their beliefs, that is the essence of human reality after all, but is this
> knowledge or arrogance?
>
Arrogant you are. Knowledgable not. A faux Socrates too empty to know
anything. A botfly.



jillery

unread,
Aug 6, 2021, 1:11:14 AM8/6/21
to talk-o...@moderators.isc.org
Since you asked, good design is a matter of definition, a definition
even you could look up for yourself.


>Human history reveals
>the development of thought and that only reveals how humans think and how
>most of those thoughts reveal nothing important. People have always believed
>their beliefs, that is the essence of human reality after all, but is this
>knowledge or arrogance?


Since you asked, the above is nothing more than more of your willfully
stupid word games.

You're welcome.

*Hemidactylus*

unread,
Aug 6, 2021, 6:06:13 AM8/6/21
to talk-o...@moderators.isc.org
jillery <69jp...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 05 Aug 2021 21:23:52 -0500, Bill <fre...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
[snip]
>
>> Human history reveals
>> the development of thought and that only reveals how humans think and how
>> most of those thoughts reveal nothing important. People have always believed
>> their beliefs, that is the essence of human reality after all, but is this
>> knowledge or arrogance?
>
>
> Since you asked, the above is nothing more than more of your willfully
> stupid word games.
>
> You're welcome.
>
Merriam-Webster's definition of "botfly"
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/botfly

“any of various stout dipteran flies (family Oestridae) with larvae
parasitic in cavities or tissues of various mammals including humans”

But one wonders how anyone could have ever known botflies lay eggs that
produce parasitic larvae given Faux Socrates’ self-negating skepticism.

Oh video can’t be trusted as it merely confirms our preconceptions:

https://youtu.be/dEWD-mZSuKk

An apt nickname for Freon who has an annoying way of getting under your
skin. And his faux method falls short of the original gadfly. His method is
myiatic not maieutic.

https://www.cdc.gov/parasites/myiasis/index.html

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/maieutic

*Hemidactylus*

unread,
Aug 6, 2021, 6:36:14 AM8/6/21
to talk-o...@moderators.isc.org
As a landlord he isn’t great. Yeah many of us have been living rent-free in
his head for years, but the conditions are the stuff of nightmares.

Zen Cycle

unread,
Aug 6, 2021, 9:51:14 AM8/6/21
to talk-o...@moderators.isc.org
A truncated version of a very old joke - speaking to complexity of design:

If Microsoft ran an airline:
MS-DOS Airlines: Everybody pushes the airplane until it glides, then they jump on and let the plane coast until it hits the ground again, then they push again jump on again, and so on.

Windows Air: The terminal is pretty and colorful, with friendly stewards, easy baggage check and boarding, and a smooth take-off. After about 10 minutes in the air, the plane explodes with no warning whatsoever.

Windows NT Air: Just like Windows Air, but costs more, and uses much bigger planes. Much less likely to explode mid-air, but when it does it takes out all the other aircraft within a 100-mile radius.

jillery

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Aug 6, 2021, 10:16:14 AM8/6/21
to talk-o...@moderators.isc.org
On Thu, 5 Aug 2021 20:19:19 +0100, Burkhard <b.sc...@ed.ac.uk>
wrote:
Pedantically, tools have been used to make other tools for a long
time. In fact, that step, to make tools that makes other tools, is
regarded as a sign of greater cognition, a step other species besides
ourselves have taken.

ISTM screw machines that make screws that go into screw machines
aren't fundamentally different than the 3D printer your video
describes. I would be more impressed with a machine that produced
without assistance a functional copy of itself, not just the parts.
That would be closer to what life does.


>>>>> Consequently, and over time evolution became the alternative of
>>>>> design. And for some people evolution became fulfilling and is
>>>>> virtually the same as a religion.
>>>>
>>>> Only in your dreams.
>>>>
>>> Recall what Richard Dawkins stated?
>>
>> Do you know what religion is?  I suspect not, but that you instead think
>> of any vaguely abstract thinking as religion.
>>
>> Religion is difficult (perhaps impossible) do define with precision, but
>> central to most definitions is a concept of sacredness which is
>> recognized in ceremonies, some of which are periodic, and usually some
>> of which have community involvement.  I.e., nothing to do with evolution.
>>

Mark Isaak

unread,
Aug 6, 2021, 5:31:14 PM8/6/21
to talk-o...@moderators.isc.org
On 8/5/21 7:23 PM, Bill wrote:
> Mark Isaak wrote:
>
>> [...]
>> Good design aims for as much simplicity as possible. (Art is sometimes
>> an exception.) Granted, many designs in the distant (and perhaps
>> not-so-distant) future will be excessively complex, too, but that's
>> because they will use evolutionary design, not intelligent design.
>
> How can you know any of that? Are these merely opinions you've set in
> concrete or is there some special insight involved?

As an engineer in a family of engineers, I have acquired some knowledge
of design both from study and from practice, each of which is a far
better guide than your own epistemological nihilism. As for designs in
the future, evolutionary algorithms are old enough to have proved their
worth and new enough that they have not saturated all possible applications.

> Human history reveals
> the development of thought and that only reveals how humans think and how
> most of those thoughts reveal nothing important. People have always believed
> their beliefs, that is the essence of human reality after all, but is this
> knowledge or arrogance?

You may believe however you want. I will continue to base my beliefs on
reality.

Martin Harran

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Aug 6, 2021, 6:06:14 PM8/6/21
to talk-o...@moderators.isc.org
I like this one; targeted at software developers but has general
principles of *unintelligent* design ;)

https://imgur.com/a/tLfF37E

Bill

unread,
Aug 6, 2021, 6:31:14 PM8/6/21
to talk-o...@moderators.isc.org
Mark Isaak wrote:

> On 8/5/21 7:23 PM, Bill wrote:
>> Mark Isaak wrote:
>>
>>> [...]
>>> Good design aims for as much simplicity as possible. (Art is sometimes
>>> an exception.) Granted, many designs in the distant (and perhaps
>>> not-so-distant) future will be excessively complex, too, but that's
>>> because they will use evolutionary design, not intelligent design.
>>
>> How can you know any of that? Are these merely opinions you've set in
>> concrete or is there some special insight involved?
>
> As an engineer in a family of engineers, I have acquired some knowledge
> of design both from study and from practice, each of which is a far
> better guide than your own epistemological nihilism. As for designs in
> the future, evolutionary algorithms are old enough to have proved their
> worth and new enough that they have not saturated all possible
> applications.
>
>> Human history reveals
>> the development of thought and that only reveals how humans think and how
>> most of those thoughts reveal nothing important. People have always
>> believed their beliefs, that is the essence of human reality after all,
>> but is this knowledge or arrogance?
>
> You may believe however you want. I will continue to base my beliefs on
> reality.
>

Reality once again is invoked to prove what is believed. But whose reality?
There have been around 118 billion humans since the species emerged and each
one had a unique view of reality. Sometimes one of these views influences
other human and religions and ideologies and philosophies arise. These views
will rarely agree with all the others yet each will claim to be the Truth,
the real reality.

If someone stumbles upon some fundamental Truth, absolute reality, why do
people disagree? Why is no view ever universal so that perfect consensus
allows us all to live happily ever after? In this generation, we claim that
Science is the answer and amass the evidence to prove it but, if the future
is like the past, our confidence is premature; we're kidding ourselves. By
doubting our inevitable omniscience we become epistemological nihilists,
heretics of the basest sort. But that has always been how reality works.


Bill


Bob Casanova

unread,
Aug 6, 2021, 6:36:14 PM8/6/21
to talk-o...@moderators.isc.org
On Fri, 6 Aug 2021 14:29:52 -0700, the following appeared in
talk.origins, posted by Mark Isaak
<eci...@curioustaxonomyNOSPAM.net>:

>On 8/5/21 7:23 PM, Bill wrote:
>> Mark Isaak wrote:
>>
>>> [...]
>>> Good design aims for as much simplicity as possible. (Art is sometimes
>>> an exception.) Granted, many designs in the distant (and perhaps
>>> not-so-distant) future will be excessively complex, too, but that's
>>> because they will use evolutionary design, not intelligent design.
>>
>> How can you know any of that? Are these merely opinions you've set in
>> concrete or is there some special insight involved?
>
>As an engineer in a family of engineers, I have acquired some knowledge
>of design both from study and from practice, each of which is a far
>better guide than your own epistemological nihilism. As for designs in
>the future, evolutionary algorithms are old enough to have proved their
>worth and new enough that they have not saturated all possible applications.
>
>> Human history reveals
>> the development of thought and that only reveals how humans think and how
>> most of those thoughts reveal nothing important. People have always believed
>> their beliefs, that is the essence of human reality after all, but is this
>> knowledge or arrogance?
>
>You may believe however you want. I will continue to base my beliefs on
>reality.
>
And, to coin a phrase (and as another engineer, a retired
EE), "Ne'er the twain shall meet".

*Hemidactylus*

unread,
Aug 6, 2021, 9:01:14 PM8/6/21
to talk-o...@moderators.isc.org
More Faux Socrates the botfly with his myiatic method.

peter2...@gmail.com

unread,
Aug 6, 2021, 9:46:14 PM8/6/21
to talk-o...@moderators.isc.org
On Friday, August 6, 2021 at 5:31:14 PM UTC-4, Mark Isaak wrote:
> On 8/5/21 7:23 PM, Bill wrote:
> > Mark Isaak wrote:
> >
> >> [...]
> >> Good design aims for as much simplicity as possible. (Art is sometimes
> >> an exception.) Granted, many designs in the distant (and perhaps
> >> not-so-distant) future will be excessively complex, too, but that's
> >> because they will use evolutionary design, not intelligent design.

Mark, you were just writing this to sound consistent. You had gone out on a limb
by saying that anyone who thinks design can outdo evolution is a fool. Now you
seem to be suggesting that machines will evolve by themselves without the input of human designers.

But you forget that by the time machines might be ready to do that, they might start
intelligently designing machines very different from themselves. You are a big believer in AI, are you not?

You believe that human minds are physical machines without immaterial souls, so you
can't take refuge in claims like "But, but,...but machines cannot know what they are doing,
because they aren't conscious."


By the way, it also sounds like you think machines will far surpass us in intelligence and power.

Do you relish the idea of them making humans extinct?


> > How can you know any of that? Are these merely opinions you've set in
> > concrete or is there some special insight involved?

If you didn't know who wrote the above, there is no reason why you would
write what you do next:

> As an engineer in a family of engineers, I have acquired some knowledge
> of design both from study and from practice, each of which is a far
> better guide than your own epistemological nihilism.

So much for the idea of responding to statements on their own merits.

You never had any use for that, did you? You just acted like that because you
decided you had a dandy stick to hit me over the head with. I had been asking
who had written a certain text, and then you jumped on me with another one
of your pieces of polemical opportunism.

And you would have never gotten away with it, if people like Casanova and Hemidactylus
and jillery didn't have your back.


> As for designs in
> the future, evolutionary algorithms are old enough to have proved their
> worth and new enough that they have not saturated all possible applications.

What a wishy-washy comment after the opening paragraph from two posts earlier!


> > Human history reveals
> > the development of thought and that only reveals how humans think and how
> > most of those thoughts reveal nothing important.

That's true of your thoughts in this post already.

> > People have always believed
> > their beliefs, that is the essence of human reality after all, but is this
> > knowledge or arrogance?

It is arrogance the way you act, Mark. You have hardly changed in two and half decades
in that respect. Don't forget, the two of us go a long way back.


> You may believe however you want. I will continue to base my beliefs on reality.

Oh, do you think you used reality as a base for the allegation that I want to take fundamental
human rights away form gays because I want licenses for civil union of same-sex couples
to carry a clarification like the following?

"This license grants to the couple it unites all the legal rights and privileges of married couples,
but it is not a marriage license."

Or did you know you were spewing bullshit contrary to your own beliefs, which ARE based
on reality, but which are kept hermetically sealed off from what you post on talk.origins?


Peter Nyikos

Bill

unread,
Aug 6, 2021, 10:06:14 PM8/6/21
to talk-o...@moderators.isc.org
I'm sure you have some pithy rebuttal lying in wait but you just forgot to
include it. Try to respond to what was actually said so we can know you're
paying attention and not just filling some quota for bits transmitted.

Bill

*Hemidactylus*

unread,
Aug 6, 2021, 11:01:13 PM8/6/21
to talk-o...@moderators.isc.org
Rebuttal of crap is a fools errand.

Burkhard

unread,
Aug 7, 2021, 10:41:14 AM8/7/21
to talk-o...@moderators.isc.org
peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Thursday, August 5, 2021 at 4:51:14 PM UTC-4, Burkhard wrote:
>> peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>>> On Thursday, August 5, 2021 at 8:46:13 AM UTC-4, Burkhard wrote:
>>>> Burkhard wrote:
>>>>> peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>>>>>> On Tuesday, August 3, 2021 at 9:01:13 PM UTC-4, Oxyaena wrote:
>>>>>>> On 8/3/2021 7:42 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> I don't think Bill knows much that is worth knowing about these
>>>>>>>> Gods. His God is a medieval adaptation
>>>>>>>> of some non-Christian gods, such as Plato's. The idea of an
>>>>>>>> omniscient God is not to be found in the Bible.
>>>
>>> Your failure to take into account what I wrote in the above four lines is noteworthy, Burkhard,
>>> in assessing what you wrote below.
>
>> Not really, your ad hominems are just not worth a reply.
>
> This ad hominem of yours fails to delimit your concept of "ad hominems."
>
> Is your definition so broad that you consider the two lines to which you are responding above
> as "ad hominem"?"

My definition of ad hominem is the one normally used in argumentation
theory: an attack on an attribute of the speaker that has no bearing on
the truth of the position that the speaker argues.

You try, as usual when failing to make a cogent point, to derail a
discussion by making irrelevant claims about the interlocutors. I'm not
playing.

>
>>>
>>>>>>>> It *a* *fortiori* is not in the book of Mormon. I don't know enough
>>>>>>>> about the Koran to say something about
>>>>>>>> whether Islam has such an idea.
>
> This was intended to be the first step towards finding out whether there is
> a contrast between the Islam of the Koran as to what "omnipotent" means
> and any modifications that became entrenched in Islamic theology.

if that was what you want to find out, you have an odd way to go about
it. I can't second guess what's going on in your mind, only answer
questions as formulated.

>
> In particular, I would like to know whether any are as radical as the medieval-origin Thomistic one,
> which can be construed to be the same concept as that of Bill Rogers. If so, we would have:
>
> Koran : Bible :: Some School of Islamic Theology : Thomistic theology
>
> This is because it seems that the Islam of the Koran is anchored in our own universe, just
> as that of the Bible is. Yes, there is also an invisible-to-us heaven and hell in both,
> but God's ominpotence is neither
> (1) construed to extend to all possible universes,

no idea what you mean with this. Do you mean "possible universes" the
way modern physics uses this? Then yes, neither Qu'ran nor Bible nor any
theologian from the middle ages to early modernity explicitly discuss
the theological implications of a theory that was only discovered
hundreds of years after their time. Trivial, but so what?

Or are you talking about the type of multiverse theory that Leibniz
proposed, and if it has been discussed in Islam, or if there has been a
similar approach? Not as far as I know, but then Leibniz was very clear
that these possible worlds do not really exist. If one really wanted to
re-read classical philosophers through modern conceptual lenses, then
the closest one in Islam would be Avicenna and his discussion of the
semantic of universals (the meaning of a term is the set of objects it
designates across all possible worlds, the way it does in the
Leibniz-inspired Kripke semantics of today)

Or do you mean possible universes the way some of the Greek atomists may
have understood them (what they really meant is difficult to say, given
the scarcity of sources), in particular Anaximander's notion of the
Apeiron, or later the nascent multiverse theories of Leucippus and
Democritus and Epicurus?



nor
> (2) does it preclude interaction by God with the physical world.
>
>
> Take away the "neither" and (1) goes with Thomism and Rogers's concept; take away the
> "nor" and (2) goes with Rogers's concept and an uncompromising Deism.

or 3, imminentism and occasionalism, which feature prominently though
the ages in Islam. That is God is efficient cause of everything, which
again from our perspective makes it indistinguishable from the laws of
nature
>
>
>>>>>>>> It certainly pictures Allah as being
>>>>>>>> far more remote than the Christian God,
>>>>>>>> and considers it blasphemy to speak of a Trinity the way Christians do.
>
>>> The following link was helpfully provided by Oxyaena:
>>>
>>>>>>> https://www.al-islam.org/islamic-doctrines-simplified/allah-omniscient
>>>
>>> And the beginning of my response follows:
>>>
>>>>>> The two short quotes it gives from the Koran weren't meant for
>>>>>> sophisticated theologians
>>>>>> or philosophers, and give no hint of the kind of omniscience that
>>>>>> Bill Rogers talks about:
>
> and, as I said, the commentary in the webpage by the Al-Balagh foundation,
>
> https://www.al-islam.org/islamic-doctrines-simplified/allah-omniscient
>
> also gives no such hint.

and why would one expect them to anticipate Bill?
>
>
>>>>> Don't know why that would matter,
>>>
>>> Ask your buddy Hemidactylus to explain if the colossal distinction between what
>>> your ally Bill wrote and what you write below is beyond your understanding of philosophy.
>
> I delineated the distinction in discussing (1) and (2) above.
>
>>>
>>>>> asy our question was about the Qur'an,
>>>>> not the theological systems build on it,
>>>
>>> You missed the point of my "whether Islam has such an idea."
>
>> You asked specifically about the Qu'ran.
>
> See above about the direction in which I was headed. I didn't know whether
> the Koran itself gave anything approaching Bill Rogers's concept, and evidently it does not.

To be more precise, the Qu'ran does not talk explicitly about the many
worlds interpretation of quantum physics that you for some unexplained
reasons read into what Bill wrote.


>
> <ad hominem snipped here>
>>> But it looks like Oxyaena didn't, because that website that she linked
>>> expounds not only on the two verses but also on what the authors, at least,
>>> take to be mainstream Islamic understanding of omniscience -- a far cry from that of Bill Rogers.
>
>> First, nothing in the text contradicts anything Bill wrote.
>
> Sure, just as Elon Musk's space capsule docking with the International Space Station in earth orbit
> does not contradict Apollo 11's lunar lander docking with the command module in lunar orbit.

Yes, and so what? That is all Bill needs for his argument to work.
Consistency is all that is required for that. I've no idea what you
think Boll's argument tries to do, but given your general inability to
understand the structure of arguments others are making, I'm not even
going to speculate.

>
>
>> But your claim was not that
>> not everyone within the Islamic tradition thinks like Bill, but that it
>> is not part of any Islamic tradition.
>
> Your last clause, with "your claim" understood, is a false ad hominem and is not worthy of any further reply.

As per above, and ad hominem requires an attack on a characteristic of a
speaker that has no nearing on the truth of the conclusion of the
argument/ Where is the attack here, just for starters? It shows that
what you are arguing (that some thinkers in Islam might disagree with
Bill) is too weak to support your argument, for which you would have to
show that no Islamic thinker could endorse his view.


>
>> which my quotes flatly refuse.
>
> They may refuse assent, but I saw no refutation of the claim when stripped of its false connection with me.

No idea what that sentence is supposed to mean
>
>
>>> Iqbal, on the other hand, reads more like a Sufi with strong Hindu influences
>
>> Let's see. In one corner we have a writer
>
> <credentials irrelevant to whether Muhammad Iqbal endorsed (1) with "neither" removed, snipped>

credentials relevant for your rather pathetic attempt to dismiss an
obvious counter example to your claim as "not being a proper Muslim" or
part of a fringe tradition.


>
> I'll grant you one thing: they helped me to narrow me down to "Muhammad Iqbal" as to whom
> you are talking about, and to disambiguate him from 4 others by that name, and 3 others whose
> names include his as a subset. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Iqbal_(disambiguation)
>>
>
> <snip partially false ad hominem reminiscent of the description of Tweedledum's interruption of Alice>
>
>
> > I wonder, whom should I
>> follow for an account of what Islamic theology is?
>
> Anyone who can steer you to some Islamic theologian whose concept of omnipotence is
> of comparable magnitude to that of Bill Rogers.

We were talking about omniscience. If you want to move the goalpost
again, maybe you should say so explicitly. And again, the only thing
that Bill needs, if at all, is that his concept is consistent with
conceptions of god across religions, not that this specific idea was
espoused in that form. He is after all talking with Ron, who for all I
know isn't a Muslim.


>
> Perhaps something Iqbal wrote will do that, but you haven't found such a statement yet.

Oh, it did, you just dismissed it
without reasons
>
>
> <I stand corrected about what I wrote about Sufism; demonstration snipped>
>
>
>> As for Vedic influences, unsurprisingly, there have been
>> cross-fertilization between Islamic and Vedic thinkers in India,
>> inevitable given the close geographical proximity, and some convergence
>> between world religions is anyway to be expected.
>
> Yes. Efforts have been made, especially in the second half of the 20th century,


Not what I mean, I'm not talking about interfaith dialogue as an
intentional project, just the inevitable cross-fertilization of ideas -
both Islam and Christianity e.g. incorporated large parts of
neoplatonism, so will have some similarities, in addition of course to
being monotheistic etc . Similar conceptual borrowing happened in India,
the emergence of the bhakti movement within Hinduims in the 15th century
e.g. is normally seen as a response to Islamic influences, especially in
the work of Kabir (who I think was born into a Muslim family)

That's not a systematic effort of aligning religions, that is merely
seeing that your neighbour is doing something that works for a problem
you have too (e.g. here how to reconcile omniscience and free will) so
it gets borrowed, or it's simply a case of convergent thinking



> to produce a convergence with Christianity, but these efforts have been in decline for about three decades now.
> Bishop J.A.T. Robinson was one person pushing for it, in _Honest to God_, in its heyday.
>
>> He studied Vedic
>> philosophy, just as he did with western philosophy and Christian
>> theology , and he discusses explicitly the similarities but also
>> differences. In the context relevant here, omniscience, as I said he
>> paints a sort of mirror image - he talks in this context about passive
>> and active omniscience, so despite some superficial similarities comes
>> to a very different account.
>
> From Bill's. Yes. Probably also from the Biblical concept of omnipotence. So far, Zen Cycle
> hasn't lifted a finger to explain which of the hundred or so biblical verses corresponds
> to Bill Rogers's concept.

again, why do they need to "correspond" when consistency is all that is
needed for Bill's argument?
How could anyone prove anything "to you". I gave you a quote that I
think speaks for itself, you reject it. I furthermore explained why the
quote shows what I say it does, in case it isn't obvious after all. Lots
of possible futures, they all exist in God - just the way Bill
described it, parallel to each other as possible worlds You dismiss the
explanation as "editorializing". That way you can always protect your
hermetically sealed mind, and equally dismiss anything else I or anyone
else could find, so why bother?

> If not, any widely accepted mainstream Islamic scholar will do.

Iqbal is a widely accepted mainstream scholar, that's why I gave the
credentials you snipped.

But here is a contemporary discussion of multiple universes from an
Islamic perspective - though I have no doubts that you will again find
reasons to reject it

https://aboutislam.net/muslim-issues/science-muslim-issues/aliens-alternate-dimensions-allah/


>
>
>> But more important, your entire "argument" above makes no sense. God is
>> omniscient. That means he knows all there is to know.
>
> According to a definition Bill will probably endorse, despite his restriction
> that ruled out all universes with which God reacts after creating them.
>
> But that is not the issue. If you are tempted to press your claim on
> the basis of literal etymology, I offer the example of the Holy Roman Empire for your inspection.

sure, sometimes words are misleading. Normally however they aren't,
that's what communication works. So it would be up to you to demonstrate
how the plain text reading (no etymology involved, btw) is false.

I.e. you, or anyone else who thinks there are hidden exceptions implied
in the word would have to give a theological argument why in Islam,
when Allah is called Al-‘Aleem, or omniscient, this really means not
what is seems to mean, but rather

- knows everything with the exception of what's going on on other planets
or
- knows everything with the exception of what's going on in other universes
or
- knows everything with the exception of what might happen in the future
or
- knows everything with the exception of what Mrs Smith of 32 Wildesmere
road had for tea

For the last, that seems to be what Avicenna, whom I mentioned above in
connection with Leibniz, was arguing. God only knows universals, and
not particulars, and again in the terminology of possible world
semantics that would mean he knows all possible worlds, but before his
eyes they are all equal, so he does not "know" which one is the one we
are in.(because that is a meaningless anthropocentric notion, so there
is nothing "to" know)

For the first, there is quite a bit of direct discussion. One of the
attributes of God "Cherisher and Sustainer of the worlds,” and that has
often been interpreted as a claim that there is extraterrestrial life.

But as I said, this is really your job, you'd need to give a
theologically sound reason why God's knowledge is more limited than the
plain term omniscient would indicate. And not just an argument from
absence or silence of the text about such other universes, you'd have
to state some theological principle that contradicts the notion


>
>> What this means for us will change as our knowledge changes - so IF multiple universe
>> theory is true, God knows them all,
>
> That assumes that existing multiple universe theory can meaningfully write
> about the actual multiverse, which can include whole multiverses completely
> sealed off from each other.


Eh, no? Why would that assume anything like this? I'm not saying God
knows multiverse theory, he knows all universes IF MV, or any similar,
theory, is true. God's knowledge is not limited by what a given physical
theory can or cannot express.

>
>
> > if it isn't he doesn't, obviously.
>> We are talking about a theological doctrine here, not a contribution to physics.
>
> It needn't involve physics. If Heidegger didn't get deep enough into the concept of Being
> to envision realms of Being completely sealed off from each other [1], he is over-rated as a philosopher of Being.

I'm sure he is vastly overrated for lots of reasons, but not for that
one. No, I don't think he considers realms of being totally separated
from each other, but why would he?
>
> [1] many of them with a God who knows all there was to know about His realm, and able to theorize about
> all possible realms, yet oblivious to the existence of the others.

And you think that last version is something you find in mainstream
Islam or Christianity? Lots of gods in different universes, all
omniscient only for their realm? I'd like to see the evidence for this.


>
>
>> Having said that, Iqbal references the physical thought of his time
>> extensively, in particular Einstein whom he admired greatly, and while
>> he accepts his work as a description of the physical universe, he has
>> objections for its suitability for a philosophy of time:
>
> You put a colon here, and if you meant to put a period and say no more,
> this is just another statement that is completely beside the point.

There was meant to be a direct quote, don't know why it didn't work. And
the point was that he discussed and responded to the physics that was
known at his time, but not, as you seem to require, physics that was
only developed about 20 years after his death. And it also described his
concept of time, and I thought it made it clear that he is not talking
about the block universe that you brought for some reason into the
discussion.

>
>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Quote one: “Say: Do you instruct Allah about your religion? But Allah
>>>>>> knows all that is in the heavens and on the earth; Allah is Knowing of
>>>>>> all things” Holy Qur'an (49:16)
>>>>>>
>>>>>> "all things" seems, in context, to be speaking about all things in our
>>>>>> physical universe,

it may seem to you, but that's about it. Already invoking "heavens"
9note the plural) does not fit to the physical universe, and even
without that, that the sentence does not stop "earth" but then has a
categorical statement that says Allah is knowing of all things, without
any limitation mentioned, does really not fit your interpretation for
which you haven;t really given any reasoned support, apart from tah it
"seems to you" so


>>>>>> as opposed to all possible things and all possible events in all
>>>>>> possible universes,
>>>>>> which was Bill Rogers's meaning.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> To do it credit, the commentary sticks to this down to earth meaning
>>>>>> and doesn't
>>>>>> hint at grandiose concepts like that of Bill Rogers. If you disagree,
>>>>>> please
>>>>>> quote something that you think might be about that grandiose concept.
>>>
>>> I extend this challenge to you, Burkhard, as to Iqbal's works.
>
>> If you don;t see it from what I quoted already, not sure how I can help
>> you further.
>
> You can help by trying to figure out what the issue is. If you don't see
> it from what I wrote, I will do my best to try and explain it to you.

That might be a good idea. As far as I can make out, you shift goalposts
continuously and nothing what you ask or say has any bearing on Bill's
argument

>
>
> Peter Nyikos
>

Mark Isaak

unread,
Aug 7, 2021, 11:26:14 AM8/7/21
to talk-o...@moderators.isc.org
The one nobody owns.

> There have been around 118 billion humans since the species emerged and each
> one had a unique view of reality.

Note: unique *view* of reality, not unique reality.

Study epistemology.

Mark Isaak

unread,
Aug 7, 2021, 11:26:14 AM8/7/21
to talk-o...@moderators.isc.org
On 8/6/21 6:43 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Friday, August 6, 2021 at 5:31:14 PM UTC-4, Mark Isaak wrote:
>> On 8/5/21 7:23 PM, Bill wrote:
>>> Mark Isaak wrote:
>>>
>>>> [...]
>>>> Good design aims for as much simplicity as possible. (Art is sometimes
>>>> an exception.) Granted, many designs in the distant (and perhaps
>>>> not-so-distant) future will be excessively complex, too, but that's
>>>> because they will use evolutionary design, not intelligent design.
>
> Mark, you were just writing this to sound consistent. You had gone out on a limb
> by saying that anyone who thinks design can outdo evolution is a fool. Now you
> seem to be suggesting that machines will evolve by themselves without the input of human designers.
>
> But you forget that by the time machines might be ready to do that, they might start
> intelligently designing machines very different from themselves. You are a big believer in AI, are you not?
>
> You believe that human minds are physical machines without immaterial souls, so you
> can't take refuge in claims like "But, but,...but machines cannot know what they are doing,
> because they aren't conscious."
>
>
> By the way, it also sounds like you think machines will far surpass us in intelligence and power.
>
> Do you relish the idea of them making humans extinct?

Yes, anyone who believes that excessive complexity is a sign of design
is a fool. And to go out even further on that limb, I'll add that the
earth is not flat, and that surgeons can reduce infections in their
patients by washing hands.

I did not say that machines will evolve themselves without human input,
much less that they will surpass us in intelligence and power. Peter
Nyikos is suggesting *that*.

Evolutionary algorithms today require human input, not only to create
the algorithms, but to provide a goal. Actual evolution, of the sort
that would allow self-creating machines to evolve, has no goal. I do
not rule out that humans will someday create robots that evolve into
their own species, but I expect it will be a couple centuries away if it
happens at all. And if it drives humans extinct, they have only
themselves to blame. (Frankly, I think there are more likely causes of
human extinction, also with humans to blame. Some of the charities I
contribute to work to make such an eventuality less likely. How about you?)

Note that I deliberately did not address your distraction about souls
and consciousness.

>
>>> How can you know any of that? Are these merely opinions you've set in
>>> concrete or is there some special insight involved?
>
> If you didn't know who wrote the above, there is no reason why you would
> write what you do next:

That ranks among the stupidest things you have written. The question
"how do you know?" is among the most valuable questions one can and
should ask. It deserves an answer. I know responding to Bill is
largely futile, but I was (mainly) not responding to Bill, I was
responding to what he asked.

>> As an engineer in a family of engineers, I have acquired some knowledge
>> of design both from study and from practice, each of which is a far
>> better guide than your own epistemological nihilism.
>
> So much for the idea of responding to statements on their own merits.
>
> You never had any use for that, did you? You just acted like that because you
> decided you had a dandy stick to hit me over the head with. I had been asking
> who had written a certain text, and then you jumped on me with another one
> of your pieces of polemical opportunism.
>
> And you would have never gotten away with it, if people like Casanova and Hemidactylus
> and jillery didn't have your back.

I cannot detect any sanity in the above.

Since the rest of your post is little better, I see no point in
responding to it.
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