Evolution and Mind/Body Dualism

[Riverwolf]

Yeah, unnatural stuff...and that is what macroevolution is...unnatural stuff.

Didn't think so.

Voodoo is a combination of African Tribal religions that were practiced by Hatian slaves, with Catholicism.

 

[Riverwolf]

I am getting everything but an answer to the analogy. Must be on the right path.

You still have yet to show your work on that kind of reasoning. Besides, you use an awful lot of analogies, and I'm honestly not sure which one you're referring to this time.

Thing is, until you recognize the possibility that you're wrong, you won't even realize that what you're looking at is the answer. You don't have to agree with the answer to recognize it as such.

 

[Riverwolf]

"Time of the gaps" reasoning.

"Time of the gaps"...? That doesn't even make sense. I've never heard time being called "of" anything.

You can't just replace the "God" in "God of the Gaps" with any noun you want and have it make sense.

 

[AndromedaRXJ]

When you answer my "infinity-birth" analogy, I will answer his question about the animal.

Riverwolf is the one who asked you the question though. Why do I have to answer your question for you to answer his? Why not just admit that you can't tell what kind of animal it is? I doubt you even know.

But whatever, what even was your infinite birth analogy?

 

[Sapiens]

Yeah, unnatural stuff...and that is what macroevolution is...unnatural stuff.

No ... macroevolution is the most natural stuff there is.

I am getting everything but an answer to the analogy. Must be on the right path.

You may think it's a path but you are wandering in the dark.

...we only have 3 options...

1. The universe was created by a supernatural, timeless, external being (God)
2. The universe popped in to being uncaused out of nothing
3. The universe is eternal...all space, matter, energy, and time is eternal (in whatever naturalistic realm you can think of).

Those are the ONLY 3 options. Now, for the sake of eliminating the BS, lets just take #2 out of the equation...as neither one of our sensical minds can come to believe that this can ever happen, right?

So now we are down to 2 options...#1, and #3. Since these are the only two options, to negate one is to grant the other...when you only have two options and one is negated, the other one wins by default...automatically.

Now, lets examine the two options...lets start with #3, which is the eternal-universe alternative. If the universe is eternal, for any event to take place, an infinite number of events preceded it. To give a thought analogy, one that I gave many times before;

Imagine you are building a brick house which takes an infinite amount of bricks before it is "complete"....and of course, your goal is to complete building the house. Would you ever complete building the house? No, because for every brick that you lay, you have infinitely more bricks to lay...so the house will never be complete...and it doesn't matter how many bricks you have, or how fast you lay the bricks, or how much time you spend laying the bricks, the house will never be complete.

Now, if we live in a past-eternal naturalistic realm (universe/world), for every single event that takes place, there had to have been an infinite number of events that preceded it....so how would we "arrive" at any event, if we had to traverse an infinite number of events prior...we would not get to the point of "today" if an infinite number of "todays" preceded it.

This concept is quite absurd, in fact, so absurd that there is no possible world at which this can be accomplished. You cannot imagine a possible world at which you could complete building the brick house, can you? And if you can, well gosh darnit, enlighten me.

If you apply this concept to the universe in general, you will get the same absurd results, and there is no escaping this because we live in a world full of events, full of cause/effect relations, and if time is past eternal, then quite frankly the same absurdities will apply.

The only way to rid ourselves of these absurdities is for us to posit a past-boundary to time..a beginning of all beginnings...something that initiatied the entire cause/effect chain...and the only thing capable of initiating time itself can be God...and God himself could not exist in a temporal realm, otherwise the same absurdities would apply to God, thus, the cause had to be atemporal. Had to be.

And there is no way out of this, cot...no matter what you do you cannot negate the existence of God, and yet posit an alternate cause without presupposing time, and while presupposing time, you giving birth to the illogical concept of infinite regression.

So thus, the existence of God is necessary, due to the impossibility of a past-eternal universe..The God hypothesis is the best explanation (more rational) than the other two..and therefore, we should appeal to the best explanation, that God exists.

Now, with respect to your objection...I don't see the issue here. It seems to me that it is logically coherent for a man that was sitting perfectly still in a chair for eternity, to suddenly begin to move and thus initiating physical time. I can see it happening...but I cannot see infinity being traversed whatsoever, under absolutely no circumstances whatsoever, and as I said, if you think otherwise, enlighten me.

Actually number three is the most likely from any perspective, any option that requires a step of magic to be accomplished should be discarded out of hand.

 

[cottage]

Not that there are any Eienstein's lurking in these forums, and I will include myself with that...but I tend to at least generally understand what folks on here are saying..but for some reason, recent interactions with you have lead me with more questions than answers, on a consistent basis...

So I am beginning to think it is YOU.

And I say it is you! I give you a good argument which you are unable to understand, or pretend not to understand, and then so often you respond with incredulity, shouted capitals and sneering remarks. And it isn’t a recent thing either, but has been the case with almost every exchange.

I am still NOT quite sure how this is a problem. However, I will respond to that by saying this: what is the other alternative? As I said before, and I will say again, and continue to say...we only have 3 options...

1. The universe was created by a supernatural, timeless, external being (God)
2. The universe popped in to being uncaused out of nothing
3. The universe is eternal...all space, matter, energy, and time is eternal (in whatever naturalistic realm you can think of).

Those are the ONLY 3 options. Now, for the sake of eliminating the BS, lets just take #2 out of the equation...as neither one of our sensical minds can come to believe that this can ever happen, right?

So now we are down to 2 options...#1, and #3. Since these are the only two options, to negate one is to grant the other...when you only have two options and one is negated, the other one wins by default...automatically.

Now just hold on! We are not ‘down to 2 options’. I have given you a properly logical argument for the second possibility on numerous occasions and not once, not once, have you refuted it. It is true that things in existence can be shown to have an explanation in terms of some other thing. So we say if things in the world have a reason or explanation, then the world itself must have a reason or explanation for being what it is, and we presume to extend this principle to things that can’t be shown to exist. But in that case the reason or explanation for the world must by the same argument have a reason or explanation to explain itself in terms of explaining the world. And the God hypothesis falls down spectacularly in that respect as I made clear to you in a previous (unanswered!) argument to purpose.

But anyway we agree that the world began with the Big Bang, and that is taken to mean that there was nothing before it. And obviously if causality began with the world then it can’t be argued that some external cause brought the world into being, the result of which is that God is taken out of the equation.

David Hume sums the matter of an uncaused cause rather well.

“Whatever has a beginning has a cause. But here is an argument that proves at once that the foregoing proposition is neither intuitively or demonstrably certain. We can never demonstrate the necessity of cause to every new existence, or new modification of existence, without shewing at the same time the impossibility there is that anything can ever begin to exist without some productive principle; and where the latter proposition cannot be prov’d we must despair of ever being able to prove the former. Now that the latter proposition is utterly incapable of a demonstrative proof we may satisfy ourselves that as all distinct ideas are separable from each other, and the ideas of cause and effect are evidently distinct, ‘twill be easy for us to conceive any object to be non-existent this moment and existent the next, without conjoining to it the distinct idea of a productive principle.”

And here Hume shows how supposing a cause begs the question:

“’Tis sufficient only to observe that when we exclude all causes we really do exclude them, and neither suppose nothing nor the object itself to be the causes of the existence; and consequently can draw no argument from the absurdity of these suppositions to prove the absurdity of that conclusion.”

To expand on Hume’s comments, if there was once nothing at all then there would have been no contingent laws such as causation but also no logically necessary truths or mind dependent principles of thought. And thus with no demonstrable law of causation no objection can be made to a thing being uncaused because the very concept of causation itself is rejected; and for the same reason the objection that a thing cannot come from nothing is also made irrelevant as the entire causal principle is without meaning in prior nothingness.

In the case of the Big Bang we can certainly allow the idea of a prior nothingness, which nullifies an external cause of the world. But if we reject the idea of a prior nothingness and propose a pre-existing cause of the world then the laws of thought apply to that cause just as they apply to the world, but that leads to an absurdity since, as previously mentioned, not only will that First Cause be dependent upon the world and its contingent features but also upon the logical laws that enable their denial i.e. that there is no necessity in causality, for if there are no worlds other than this, the actual world, then necessity and contingency and cause and effect will only have meaning as concepts within the world and cannot therefore be an explanation for beings external to the world.

Now, with respect to your objection...I don't see the issue here. It seems to me that it is logically coherent for a man that was sitting perfectly still in a chair for eternity, to suddenly begin to move and thus initiating physical time. I can see it happening...but I cannot see infinity being traversed whatsoever, under absolutely no circumstances whatsoever, and as I said, if you think otherwise, enlighten me.

That is William Lane Craig’s argument, and it’s a poor one because it doesn’t answer the core objection. The analogy of a man sitting still and then beginning to move doesn’t answer the charge; the problem isn’t God acting per se but acting in a changed state. Now it is not problematic (at least for many philosophers) for God to be temporal but everlasting, existing in each moment of time. But that’s not what you are advocating. If God is unchanging and unchangeable then he cannot alter what he is, i.e. an atemporal being, so as to come into a temporal existence to bring about a temporal effect. The argument has comical undertones for it is saying God had to invent time and contradictorily alter his unchanging and unchangeable self in order to enter the time he’d invented before he could create the world, when he could have simply invented time, space and matter all in one hit. From the point he entered time God was in one respect evidently no longer what he was before the change. The logic of that is indisputable.

And if the world is finite and the world and causality began with the Big Bang then self-evidently there is no infinite regress because there was nothing at all prior to the world - including time itself!

 

[Call_of_the_Wild]

Didn't think so.

Voodoo is a combination of African Tribal religions that were practiced by Hatian slaves, with Catholicism.

As If what I said was inaccurate...I said that voodoo is some "unnatural" stuff, and I could care less the politically correct way to describe it...for example, having dolls made in human likeness at which if you stab the doll, you stab the human that it resembles (Childs Play) is "unnatural", and it is voodoo, thus "unnatural stuff".

I understand you wanted to showcase your knowledge, but don't make it seem as if what I said was incorrect or something.

 

[Call_of_the_Wild]

You still have yet to show your work on that kind of reasoning. Besides, you use an awful lot of analogies, and I'm honestly not sure which one you're referring to this time.

LOL you made a post to me, at which you quoted me telling another person to "answer the infinity/birth analogy".

If you felt the analogy was awful, then you shouldn't have quoted me when I gave reference to it...and I was talking to someone else, btw, not you.

Second, what you said in response to that quote wasn't even relevant to what the quote was, so I wasted precious time responding to it in the first place.

Thing is, until you recognize the possibility that you're wrong, you won't even realize that what you're looking at is the answer. You don't have to agree with the answer to recognize it as such.

I will recognize the possibility that Im wrong when you can demonstrate how I am wrong..which you've failed to do thus far.

 

[ImmortalFlame]

and I was talking to someone else, btw, not you.

You do understand the difference between a forum and a private chat room, right? You can't just ignore objections to your argument on the basis that they aren't coming from the person you were previously responding to, and this kind of attitude just makes you look stuck up when the whole point of a forum is that people can post and respond to whatever they wish.

Not that it matters. All you really tend to do anyway is ignore objections and never address facts that render your arguments worthless.

 

[Call_of_the_Wild]

Riverwolf is the one who asked you the question though. Why do I have to answer your question for you to answer his? Why not just admit that you can't tell what kind of animal it is? I doubt you even know.

But whatever, what even was your infinite birth analogy?

First off, I am talking about the infinity/birth analogy...after all, you were the one that kept asking "how is it absurd" (infinite regression), you asked this question at least 3 times and I finally showed you why it is absurd...then your next post you responded to practically EVERYTHING BUT the analogy. The post is #413, and until you can refute it there is really nothing to talk about.

 

[Call_of_the_Wild]

You do understand the difference between a forum and a private chat room, right?

You can't just ignore objections to your argument on the basis that they aren't coming from the person you were previously responding to, and this kind of attitude just makes you look stuck up when the whole point of a forum is that people can post and respond to whatever they wish.

Not that it matters. All you really tend to do anyway is ignore objections and never address facts that render your arguments worthless.

Reading comprehension is important...so let me break it down for you nice and slow.

1. I was having a conversation with a specific person using a specific analogy

2. A third person jumped into the conversation by quoting me when I told the original person that he failed to address the analogy

3. Despite quoting my reference to the analogy, the third person did not directly address the analogy, leaving me to question why was that particular quote actually quoted in the first place.

4. I responded by pointing out the fact that the analogy was still not addressed, not by the third person, nor the person that it was orginally addressed to.

5. The third person then stated that because my past analogies were bad, this one is bad as well.

6. I then asked "well, why did you quote my reference to it in the first place if you thought it was bad, and you didn't even respond to it...so WHY WAS IT QUOTED?"

See how that works? Reading comprehension is important...and not only that, but what you are saying in factually incorrect, because I am not "ignoring objections to my argument on the basis that they aren't coming from the person I was previously responding to".

So how can I "ignore objects to my argument"...when the whole point was "there wasn't any objection to the argument, thus the analogy went unanswered??" That was my whole beef.

Makes no sense. Again, reading comprehension is vital.

 

[Call_of_the_Wild]

"Time of the gaps"...? That doesn't even make sense. I've never heard time being called "of" anything.

You can't just replace the "God" in "God of the Gaps" with any noun you want and have it make sense.

Basically, you are using time to fill in the gaps. Same thing. You are basically saying "given enough time, anything could happen"...thus; "time of the gaps".

Seems pretty simple to me.

 

[Call_of_the_Wild]

No ... macroevolution is the most natural stuff there is.

I understand that that is the theory, but that isn't the observation. There is a disconnect between the theory and the observation..which is something that evolutionists would not like to admit.

Actually number three is the most likely from any perspective, any option that requires a step of magic to be accomplished should be discarded out of hand.

You believe that matter was inanimate, then it suddenly/gradually "came to life". How is that any less magic than the God hypothesis?

 

[idav]

Basically, you are using time to fill in the gaps. Same thing. You are basically saying "given enough time, anything could happen"...thus; "time of the gaps".

Seems pretty simple to me.

Time isn't being used as an excuse. Evidence corroborates the timelines being proposed. YECs like to say it's impossible and not enough time, Science says there was enough time and it is possible. Still even given enough time, what they say happened, did in fact happen.

 

[ImmortalFlame]

Reading comprehension is important...so let me break it down for you nice and slow.

1. I was having a conversation with a specific person using a specific analogy

Open forum. People can respond to any post they want to, and in return people can respond to those posts. If you wish for a private conversation in which you do not wish others to interject, there is PM function on this forum.

2. A third person jumped into the conversation by quoting me when I told the original person that he failed to address the analogy

Irrelevant. Open forum.

3. Despite quoting my reference to the analogy, the third person did not directly address the analogy, leaving me to question why was that particular quote actually quoted in the first place.

Irrelevant. Open forum.

4. I responded by pointing out the fact that the analogy was still not addressed, not by the third person, nor the person that it was orginally addressed to.

Irrelevant. Open forum.

5. The third person then stated that because my past analogies were bad, this one is bad as well.

6. I then asked "well, why did you quote my reference to it in the first place if you thought it was bad, and you didn't even respond to it...so WHY WAS IT QUOTED?"

See how that works? Reading comprehension is important... and not only that, but what you are saying in factually incorrect, because I am not "ignoring objections to my argument on the basis that they aren't coming from the person I was previously responding to".

So how can I "ignore objects to my argument"...when the whole point was "there wasn't any objection to the argument, thus the analogy went unanswered??" That was my whole beef.

Makes no sense. Again, reading comprehension is vital.

I agree, reading comprehension is vital. Which is why my objection was SOLELY to do with you dismissing someone else on the basis they they were somehow "butting in" on a conversation when this is an OPEN FORUM. It had absolutely nothing to do with the content of your posts or the conversation you were having. It was purely an objection to the attitude you displayed in your lack of understanding of how forums don't just function as your own private chat room, but a place were people can discuss their views OPENLY and have their views responded to OPENLY.

But apparently your firm grasp of reading comprehension prevented you from seeing that extremely obvious point, and so you decided to patronize me instead.

I also take issue with your extremely poor analogy, which only looks at time from a very limited, sequential view, and the fact that you don't understand the nature of infinity. To see exactly how your analogy is both inaccurate and irrelevant, for a start, please try and answer the following question:

How many sequential events can occur within the span of one second?

 

[ImmortalFlame]

Basically, you are using time to fill in the gaps. Same thing. You are basically saying "given enough time, anything could happen"...thus; "time of the gaps".

Seems pretty simple to me.

"God of the gaps" is when a supernatural cause is used in lieu of an explanation. As in "How did this occur?" "God did it". "Why did it occur this way?" "Because God wanted to do it that way." "How did God do this?" "Because God is God and God can do anything." And so on.

With evolution, we HAVE the explanation of exactly what occurs within that time frame. We know what causes things to evolve over time, so there is no "gap" being filled with baseless assumptions - it's just a simple fact that evolution takes a long time to produce large changes in species that reproduce slower. That's just common sense. So your argument that this is a fallacy fails.

 

[Call_of_the_Wild]

And I say it is you! I give you a good argument which you are unable to understand, or pretend not to understand, and then so often you respond with incredulity, shouted capitals and sneering remarks. And it isn’t a recent thing either, but has been the case with almost every exchange.

I only shout certain words to place emphasis. Have a backbone, will ya?

Now just hold on! We are not ‘down to 2 options’. I have given you a properly logical argument for the second possibility on numerous occasions and not once, not once, have you refuted it.

I distinctively remember you saying that #2 was not possible, and now you are saying that you gave me a "properly logical argument" for #2...again, it sounds like you are double talking yet again and as I said before, I don't have the patience needed to try and figure you out. If you are officially saying that it is possible for the universe to POP IN TO BEING (emphasis) uncaused....out of NOTHING...then simply say it.

It is true that things in existence can be shown to have an explanation in terms of some other thing. So we say if things in the world have a reason or explanation, then the world itself must have a reason or explanation for being what it is, and we presume to extend this principle to things that can’t be shown to exist. But in that case the reason or explanation for the world must by the same argument have a reason or explanation to explain itself in terms of explaining the world. And the God hypothesis falls down spectacularly in that respect as I made clear to you in a previous (unanswered!) argument to purpose.

I disagree with "But in that case the reason or explanation for the world must by the same argument have a reason or explanation to explain itself in terms of explaining the world".

Again, the argument is "everything that begins to exist has a cause". The cause of the world never began to exist, therefore, it doesn't have a cause...and in light of the infinity argument, it only flows logically with the fact that whatever gave the universe its beginning could not itself be within the universe, or OF the universe.

But anyway we agree that the world began with the Big Bang, and that is taken to mean that there was nothing before it. And obviously if causality began with the world then it can’t be argued that some external cause brought the world into being, the result of which is that God is taken out of the equation.

Again, you can't just admit the universe began with the Big Bang, and just leave it at that...there had to be a cause of the universe, cot. And if you take God out of the equation, and you admit that there was nothing before the universe began, then you are saying that the universe popped in to being uncaused out of nothing...and I must say, I refuse to believe that you would take such an irrational position such as this. Please, don't prove me wrong.

David Hume sums the matter of an uncaused cause rather well.

“Whatever has a beginning has a cause. But here is an argument that proves at once that the foregoing proposition is neither intuitively or demonstrably certain. We can never demonstrate the necessity of cause to every new existence, or new modification of existence, without shewing at the same time the impossibility there is that anything can ever begin to exist without some productive principle; and where the latter proposition cannot be prov’d we must despair of ever being able to prove the former. Now that the latter proposition is utterly incapable of a demonstrative proof we may satisfy ourselves that as all distinct ideas are separable from each other, and the ideas of cause and effect are evidently distinct, ‘twill be easy for us to conceive any object to be non-existent this moment and existent the next, without conjoining to it the distinct idea of a productive principle.”

I don't get it.

And here Hume shows how supposing a cause begs the question:

“’Tis sufficient only to observe that when we exclude all causes we really do exclude them, and neither suppose nothing nor the object itself to be the causes of the existence; and consequently can draw no argument from the absurdity of these suppositions to prove the absurdity of that conclusion.”

I don't even need a reason, because negating a first-cause would mean either infinite regress or things popping in to being uncaused out of nothing...which the latter two are demonstrably absurd and false.

To expand on Hume’s comments, if there was once nothing at all then there would have been no contingent laws such as causation but also no logically necessary truths or mind dependent principles of thought.

But you already admitted that the universe began to exist, cot. Either the universe' existence was a contingent possibility, or a necessary possibility...if it happened, either either happened necessarily or contingently...so how could there have been no contingent laws? Makes no sense.

And thus with no demonstrable law of causation no objection can be made to a thing being uncaused because the very concept of causation itself is rejected; and for the same reason the objection that a thing cannot come from nothing is also made irrelevant as the entire causal principle is without meaning in prior nothingness.

So, the universe popped in to being uncaused out of nothing...gotcha. The lengths some people will go through to deny the Creator.

In the case of the Big Bang we can certainly allow the idea of a prior nothingness, which nullifies an external cause of the world. But if we reject the idea of a prior nothingness and propose a pre-existing cause of the world then the laws of thought apply to that cause just as they apply to the world, but that leads to an absurdity since, as previously mentioned, not only will that First Cause be dependent upon the world and its contingent features but also upon the logical laws that enable their denial i.e. that there is no necessity in causality, for if there are no worlds other than this, the actual world, then necessity and contingency and cause and effect will only have meaning as concepts within the world and cannot therefore be an explanation for beings external to the world.

I don't get it.

That is William Lane Craig’s argument, and it’s a poor one because it doesn’t answer the core objection. The analogy of a man sitting still and then beginning to move doesn’t answer the charge; the problem isn’t God acting per se but acting in a changed state. Now it is not problematic (at least for many philosophers) for God to be temporal but everlasting, existing in each moment of time. But that’s not what you are advocating. If God is unchanging and unchangeable then he cannot alter what he is, i.e. an atemporal being, so as to come into a temporal existence to bring about a temporal effect. The argument has comical undertones for it is saying God had to invent time and contradictorily alter his unchanging and unchangeable self in order to enter the time he’d invented before he could create the world, when he could have simply invented time, space and matter all in one hit. From the point he entered time God was in one respect evidently no longer what he was before the change. The logic of that is indisputable.

God's change from timeless to temporal was a contingent change and I fail to see any contradiction here, especially if going from atemporal to temporal doesn't effect his power or will. Unless you can demonstrate how an atemporal God is any "less" of a God than a temporal one, or vice versa, then this objection, in my opinion, is VERY miniscule.

 

[Call_of_the_Wild]

"God of the gaps" is when a supernatural cause is used in lieu of an explanation. As in "How did this occur?" "God did it". "Why did it occur this way?" "Because God wanted to do it that way." "How did God do this?" "Because God is God and God can do anything." And so on.

With evolution, we HAVE the explanation of exactly what occurs within that time frame. We know what causes things to evolve over time, so there is no "gap" being filled with baseless assumptions - it's just a simple fact that evolution takes a long time to produce large changes in species that reproduce slower. That's just common sense. So your argument that this is a fallacy fails.

You gave examples of "God of the gaps". Now I will give examples of "Time of the gaps".

"Why can't we see this large scale changes in evolution?" "Because it takes millions and millions of years for these changes to occur".

Same "crap"...different toilet.

 

[Call_of_the_Wild]

Time isn't being used as an excuse. Evidence corroborates the timelines being proposed. YECs like to say it's impossible and not enough time, Science says there was enough time and it is possible. Still even given enough time, what they say happened, did in fact happen.

Right, and Christians believe that "given enough time, Jesus will return". You find that as absurd as I find evolution.

 

[idav]

God's change from timeless to temporal was a contingent change and I fail to see any contradiction here, especially if going from atemporal to temporal doesn't effect his power or will. Unless you can demonstrate how an atemporal God is any "less" of a God than a temporal one, or vice versa, then this objection, in my opinion, is VERY miniscule.

And if the world is finite and the world and causality began with the Big Bang then self-evidently there is no infinite regress because there was nothing at all prior to the world - including time itself!

[/QUOTE]
You once argued to me, that matter and energy can't being timeless cause then it would never move to become the big bang. Same question applies to god, in a timeless state, he would never move to make anything happpen. Therefore it is possible that any finite thing now wasn't always finite, despite your insistence that their was a beginning.