Satan’s pride
Homosexuality-obsessed charity blackmailer Stephen Green and his followers mounted the “first-ever organised Christian witness against London’s ‘Gay Pride’” yesterday.
The purpose of our witness was two-fold. Firstly, we had to make clear that even in politically-correct Britain, Christians are still prepared to stand up for their Lord and deplore the sin of Sodom being paraded, in all its obscenity, and with the support of police parading in it in full uniform, through the streets of London. The Bible says: ‘Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.’
says Green, who recently demonstrated that he has no rational basis for this bible belief.
Secondly, I was deeply saddened by the sight of so many men and women celebrating their involvement in a sinful lifestyle characterised by deceit, degradation and death. We just had to reach out in the love of Christ with the message that Jesus died to save sinners like us and like them.
Sadly, all we got back from ‘the gays’ was hatred, expressed in screaming and obscene gestures, and threats of violence – actual violence on those four occasions during our hour of witness. I did not see any tolerance from the supposedly tolerant, nor any respect for the right of free speech. It is as if Satan cannot bear one word of dissent.
You are so right, Stephen.
According to the Independent on Sunday, one of the CV placards read “God gave them (sodomites; lesbians) over to a reprobate mind. Romans 1:28”. This is a rather problematic quote, as it implies that it was God’s will that “they” became homosexuals. In which case, who are CV to protest?
Hi Andrew
Ive heard as many stories about Darwin’s deathbed as about Elvis’s. The annoying thing is that all the perpetrators are sure they are right. What can one do ?!
Christopher – re the Deathbed stories: ignore them. It doesn’t matter whether or not an old man got afraid when he was close to death in a predominantly christian time or not.
The lady who claimed to have heard the story has a very colourful past (to say the least), but either way, any recanting wouldn’t invalidate the scientific theory one iota.
Christopher: re point 48 – I would suggest that you look at the link mark c provided. I believe that it may even contain references to larger scale evolution having been witnessed (I can’t remember).
Either way, it’s not about anomalous bits of evidence showing evolution to have happened.
It’s about repeated and repeatable experiments, as I explained in great detail, showing consistent patterns of results that provide the basis for acceptance of any scientific theory.
Christopher, regarding point 50 – many people come up with theories, then they test them.
There isn’t a scientist alive who wouldn’t love to be the originator of a theory as startling (as then was) and revolutionary and uiniversally accepted and important as evolution.
Indeed, there are people all over the world working to show how it isn’t as we think to try to become rich and famous and well respected.
The theory of evolution was hotly contested when it came out. As the years passed the evidence mounted up in favour of it and against all other theories.
That the general principles of evolution are now accepted de facto is not because of laziness on the part of the global scientific community, but because it is clearly the best explanation of how we came to be.
Of course all theories are looked at and the theories assessed in light of the current evidence, both for and against, and the theories accepted, revised or scrapped as necessary. You clearly don’t know what you’re talking about here, and it shows.
Regarding intelligent design, it is not a proper theory. It doesn’t even tally with the evidence that we have. It is demonstrably wrong.
It is a creative way of saying not evolution. The inexplicable has no place in science whatsoever. That’s for religion. Scientists try to explain things they don’t understand, to clear the fog of ignorance.
ID is a theory of dogma, inherently accepting that there are things we cannot understand. For that reason it is anti-scientific, just dressed up in scientific clothes.
Religion requires people to believe in miracles just happening and being because of god, rather than being events due to some earthly prosaic reason. It obfuscates and clouds the mind, the same way it’s always done, just look at Gallileo or Copernicus or almost any great mind before the enlightenment. You can’t ask us to accept such tnigs have any place in understanding, it is all about misunderstanding and control through ignorance.
The best description I heard of “Intelligent” Design is that it is simply creationism with a good lawyer. As it’s basically illegal to teach creationism in the USA, they call it intelligent design, dress it up in a white coat, and hey presto! it’s legal to teach it.
Not only is it not valid scientifically, but the entire principles behind the “theory” can be debunked using the logical reasoning skills of an 8 year old.
The scientific approach is to say “We don’t quite know how this happens/works, let’s find out.”
The ID approach is to say “We don’t quite know how this happens/works, let’s just say some magical being did it, and forget about it”. It’s a “God of the gaps” style philosophy.
Hi Andrew-
Your central point is certainly incorrect. The whole point about open-mindedness is that one keeps options open and takes longer to come to a conclusion, if indeed one does so at all. This requires specialist knowledge far beyond that of an 8-year-old – even I (a non-scientist) know that.
You characterise the proper scientific approach (indeed, the rule of all proper enquiry into anything) correctly.
Hi Tom-
(1) When you say all theories are looked at, cd you elaborate? Which non-evolutionary theories are customarily looked at by evolutionists?
(2) Surely the church opposition to Galileo and Copernicus was dogmatic rather than scholarly. Obviously, whatever is dogmatic not scholarly is anathema to me. Doesnt it show a misunderstanding on your part, or an over-generalisation, to lump me (with my so different views) with their opponents?
(3) ID, as I mentioned, is not an anti-theory or negative theory, but the expression of the view that the complexity we see could not be as it is merely through the natural laws of a single closed-system universe within the allowable time-constraints – and therefore it is more sensible to posit that our universe is simply part of a bigger whole (and we certainly dont know that it isnt), and is not necessarily where the buck stops.
(4) ‘You clearly dont know what you are talking about’ – if you mean I have no scientific training, what is the point of making that point when I have already repeatedly made it myself? But enquiry is not compartmental but wholistic. No-one is trained in all the disciplines, and people trained in different disciplines can almost always shed interesting light on forgotten angles of each other’s subjects.
What point am I making that is incorrect? The enitre principles behind Intelligent Design can be debunked with the logical reasoning skills of an 8 year old.
Christopher – re: Andrew – he characterises the scientific approach entirely correclty.
Intelligent Design is not a scientific theory, it is an anti-scinetific (religious) one.
Regarding your questions to me:
(1) (a) Intelligent Design – It is a load of nonsense, and has been shown to be so by the evidence that was already there when the theory was made. You have to look at a theory to be able to debunk it. (b) Irreucible complexity – The clotting cascade example already provided showed it to be incorrect (the clotting cascade is a very convoluted and complex biological mechanism, which would be a prime candidate for being seen to be irreducibly complex, but it’s been shown not to be. Both of these points have been addressed at length above.
(2) Yes. And the fundamentalist christian (which seems pretty much the mainstream in america) opposition to evolution is just that too. They can’t ban science on the basis of religion thanks to their constitution, but they can lie and obfuscate and confuse stupid & or uneducated people on the school boards into thinking that their religious mumbo jumbo is proper science, putting god into science by the back door by creating imaginary gaps.
My problem with what you’re saying is that you’re critiquing science from a religious perspective without actually having studied science, even from a perspective of looking at the way science works holistically (note the lack of a w). You imagine that it works dogmatically like a big con because that’s what you’re used to in your field of interest, then set about taking down the straw man.
I didn’t actually lump you in with the catholic church of the 16th & 17th century (or even of the 19th and early-mid 20th centuries, for that matter), however I could have made it a little clearer that I was talking about organised religion, rather than specifically about you.
(3) But you’re incorrect on this. It’s junk pseudoscience that has only been posited to provide a route for god to enter american science classes. I’ve explained why, and there’s more information and further explanation why on the link that mark c gave and in many, many other placeson the t’internet. PZ Myers’ pharynglua.org is very good for information, clearly written and well explained, on why such things are wrong. He’s a (proper) professor and he knows of what he talks.
(4) I wasn’t meaning that you have no scientific training. It would be churlish, counter-productive and utterly pointless of me to mock you for something you freely admit not to have. Like a child mocking another for not having a bike. I was essentially what i was trying to say in (2) para 2 of this post – you don’t need to be scientifically trained, and indeed a look at the way science is conducted from outside by someone who has actually taken the time to learn how it is conducted might be useful. But you haven’t. You don’t even seem to have read what I’ve written here to give you a rough understanding of the basics, you just waded in with your assumptions. That was what got my goat.
I’ve steered clear of the discussions on who wrote what when in the bible, ‘cos it’s an area I know nothing about and have no interest in. I’m happy to discuss scientific theories (and non-theories) with you, but please don’t presume to tell me why science is wrong and foolish and dogmatic without actually undertaking some research into it first to see if it even is any of these things.
Thanks for replying in such detail. I think my central question concerns how we know that the universe and its mechanisms are to be explained only in terms of themselves.
(a) Isn’t this circular, and therefore explaining nothing?
(b) Isn’t it lacking any demonstration? Youve not mentioned why people would believe that the universe (and its processes) is the bottom line, not pre-planned, and not to be explained in terms of anything else. I was under the impression that the anthropic principle (or simply the consideration that our universe is improbably suited for intelligent life) might reasonably be said to point either to some ultimate designer, or else to some interim designer who had been part of a previous universe, which in turn would point back to the ultimate designer.
We’re in danger of returning from biology to physics here – but let’s imagine a possible universe which actually was designed – for example, by you in a laboratory. Why would it be inadmissible for the inhabitants of that universe to point to evidence that their universe might have been designed by the great Tom Parsons (or whatever your name is?). Surely they would have to examine all evidence and all options even-handedly. And in a uiniverse that was improbably well-designed (as opposed -perhaps- to one that wasnt, though even the existence of that one would need to be accounted for by something beyond itself), is it any surprise that a certain amount of the evidence would weigh in favour of there being a designer?
I was reading an intersting article the other day, which, in passing, explained the difference between philosophical naturalism and methodological naturalism
(paras 2-5 of this piece: http://www.newhumanist.org.uk/rationallyspeaking_more.php?id=1651_0_7_0_M).
God has been definitively removed from all areas of science following the big bang purely because of methodological naturalism. We’ve found out how things work, so there’s no room for the supernatural.
The universe is infinitely huge, and there’s an infinity of stars, it’s not at all surprising that some life eventually flourished on one planet or another. There may be plenty of other inhabited planets out there for all we know.
Nobody has ever said that it is not permissible to posit that the universe is designed. That was the prevailing view until the last century, and still is in some backwards places (like the southern states of the USA). It’s just that Intelligent Design is a bullshit theory full of more holes than a fisherman’s net.
In your hypothesis, it is quite possible that there would be large bodies of evidence pointing towards a designer, but there isn’t any evidence on earth or that we have found extraterrestrially that points towards a designer.
Oh, and it’s not Parsons, it’s far more in keeping with your hypothesis.
Also, the anthropic principle isn’t appropriately reduced to state that “our universe is improbably suited for intellignet life”.
Wikipedia provides definitions of the following 3 anthropic principles:
Weak anthropic principle (WAP): “The observed values of all physical and cosmological quantities are not equally probable but they take on values restricted by the requirement that there exist sites where carbon-based life can evolve and by the requirements that the Universe be old enough for it to have already done so.”
Strong anthropic principle (SAP): “The Universe must have those properties which allow life to develop within it at some stage in its history.”
Final anthropic principle (FAP): “Intelligent information-processing must come into existence in the Universe, and, once it comes into existence, it will never die out.”
Ultimately, they’re all truisms (except the Final, which makes a prediction), and of little use to anyone really, unless you’re trying to design a universe that would produce life. and even then they’re not that useful, since they’re axiomatic.
Finally, the anthropic principle is not some major guiding force behind civilisation and science as we know it, it’s just one bloke (Brandon Carter)’s attempt to state the bleeding obvious in scientific jargon.
So you’re a subscriber to the monkeys and Shakespeare theory then (given enough time, anything is possible)?
Which of course is a truism, except that the levels of probability in some cases (even given the time available) are so very minute that they equate to more or less zero.
Our own universe strikes many top scientists as improbably fine-tuned – e.g. the Astronomer Royal.
Re: holistic/wholistic: I first encountered the first option, but have since encountered both repeatedly. Isnt it true that they are alternative spellings, like enquire/inquire, judgment/judgement?
‘Monkeys and shakespeare’ is about complete randomness (hence monkeys, rather than a machine which could be said to only ever have pseudo-randomness), whereas evolution is not random (survival of the fittesst and all that). The only random would be in the initial coming together of the appropriate molecules, but I’m not sufficiently versed in the science and theories around this to be able to comment sensibly on it. The only thing I would say is that one wouldn’t need to fine-tune an entire universe to create the conditions for life, these can emerge locally in an otherwise hostile universe (think of cake mix, where you can have a clump of chocolate chips together in one cake or none in another).
The effectively zero line reminds me of the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy, which said that since the universe is infinitely big, then the average population must be zero, therefore nobody exists (or significantly more amusing words to that effect).
You might find this site interesting and amusing: http://user.tninet.se/~ecf599g/aardasnails/java/Monkey/webpages/
Some people may see the universe as improbably fine tuned, others not. You wouldn’t happen to have a quote or source for that the astronomer royal assertion would you? I’m not accusing you of dissembling, it’s just that many creationist organisations use quotes out of context, and, if you saw this from them, then you may have been misled. I’d just like to check it out for myself.
According to the OED: The traditional distinction between enquire and inquire is that enquire is to be used for general senses of ‘ask’, while inquire is reserved for uses meaning ‘make a formal investigation’.
Also, the OED doesn’t have wholistic as a word, and under holistic it’s not listed as an alternative spelling. This is unsurprising since it derives from the Greek holos meaning whole (like hologram, which also lacks a leading silent w).
That’s the problem with the internet, one starts off spelling something correctly (because one reads properly proofed documents like books and newspapers), but the reading a load of poorly typed misspellings by random punters leads to all sorts of errors later on. My mum used to be a primary school teacher, and she found her spelling got worse the longer she taught, ‘cos of reading the stuff that the kids wrote.
Ok – I think Martin Rees is the present astronomer royal – one of those ultimate boffins who has been a prof since the age of 30, and is frequently discussed in tandem with Hawking.
He did a tv programme to this effect about a year ago. I didnt see it, but gather that he is one of the increasing number of physicists inclined to posit multiple universes (generally: zillions of the things) partly so that the improbable excellence of this particular universe would be less remarkable than it would be if it were the only universe.
I wonder whether I should allow you to get away with your remark on fine-tuning. (Of course, lack of awe is always the first thing I am suspicious of, since of all the things one might lack, awe is the strangest and most unaccountable when one lives in a universe like ours.) The stats I have seen in anthropic principle publications (and when discussing the feasibility of intelligent design in general) tend to involve odds of many millions/billions to one, tho’ of course Im not the best person to assess them.
The drop in spelling standards I would reckon is the greatest change since my schooldays (not that long ago, after all!). One feels the pinch when 75% of the time one spends correcting essays is spent correcting spelling and grammar.
Of course, spelling is not rigid anyway (cf. introvert/intravert: one is correct etymologically, the other lexicographically. Your ‘inquire/enquire’ is a simnilar example, since etymologically they are virtually identical, but not so, apparently, lexicographically. But there is flexibility here, surely.).
Maybe ‘wholistic’ came into being in circles where ‘wholeness’ was a buzzword – or else to avoid any confusion of ‘holistic’ with ideas of ‘holy’ or even ‘holes’.
Is the universe really infinitely big? I always thought it was finite but unbounded – with a finite number of stars and so forth.
The chance of winning the lottery is effectively so small that it is zero. And yet nearly every week, someone does – because lots of people try. And thus, with an infinate number of universes, the chances are very good indeed that a universe would form our conditions by pure chance.
If the number of universes really were infinite, then the chances would be 100%.
But infinity is quite a concept, isnt it. Qualitatively altogether different from zillions upon zillions.
Where is the evidence for an infinite number of universes just so happening to exist for no particular reason?
Where is the evidence for there not being an infinite number of universes? It’s at least as plausible as positing that there’s a god, something with absolutely no evidence.
The universe maybe be finitely big, but it’s so enormously huge as to be effectively infinite, since putting a number on its size is essentially meaningless ‘cos we can’t comprehend the awesome enormity of it. Claiming that because I seek to discover why things are, rather than just assuming that they must be the work of God, means that I lack a sense of awe is absolutely ridiculous. It’s one of the stupidest things I’ve ever seen anyone write about anything ever. What goes on in that little head of yours? eh? Does having an imaginary friend mean that you’re the only person who can be overwhelmed by the beauty and mystery of the unvierse?
Just because I’m interested in finding out why the universe is so incredible, rather than just saying that “it must be the work of god, ‘cos I’m too stupid to comprehend anything else” doesn’t mean that I lack a sense of the magnificent. It’s what inspires people to understand it.
Just because you have an imaginary friend who is a giant sky-pixie that according to your special book of demented ramblings, made the universe 6,000 years ago, I don’t go around saying you inherently lack intelligence or a healthy degree of scepticism.
We’ve agreed that ‘How come the universe(s) exist(s)? ‘ is a meaningful question – as opposed to the ‘why’ question. Im not sure what your answer would be to this. And all things being equal, an infinite number of universes require more explanation than one universe would.
I think the ‘awe’ point is an important and central one. Awe (even, one might say, a kind of clear-eyed innocent astonishment) is the common denominator of most of the best people I have met. When I come across a group of effing and blinding humanists, then I wonder: Isnt it clear that the effing and blinding associates them with either (a) adolescents, or (b) disillusioned people whose horizons have been narrowed & who have lost their vision of beauty, the ability to be humble before the beauty they see in the world (and indeed in the English language).
Of course, there are other explanations. Sometimes ppl swear as (c) a sort of code to let everyone else know they are one of the lads!! Well, good for them – but why do they need to let ppl know that?
There’s probably a (d) which I have forgotten.
On the topic of 6000 years (surely such a small period decreases rather than increases one’s awe?) the magnificent tome of Archbishop Ussher has just been republished after hundreds of years, & my copy arrived yesterday.
Regarding multiple universes, if we knew how one could happen, then that may well explain how many could happen.
We don’t, and your claims that you do know how ‘cos of your imaginary friend are entirely false and groundless.
Regarding your risible points on awe, firstly there is little swearing here. Calling us effing and blinding humanists betrays your own obsession with the swearing of others. Also, an atheist is not necessarily a humanist.
Your attempts to claim that because we are not afraid to use the full range of vocabulary offered us by the english language, rather than pruriently self-censoring means we lack the ability to feel awe (or even a clear-eyed innocent astonishment) are baseless.
To claim that not being afraid to swear means we are blind to the beauty in the world is just the kind of sanctimonious twaddle I’ve come to expect from you and your fellow deluded smug gullibles.
You’re totally inappropriately drawing conclusions from one facet of someone’s life over into another.
Gulp!!! For me to claim I knew how the universe began – now, that is a big claim. I dont think anyone knows precisely how it began – granted that the Big Bang cannot be called in any real sense a ‘beginning’. Even if one hypothesised that God was involved, one still wouldnt know just how it happened or just what took place in what order. Or what one would have seen if it were on video. Nobody knows that – yet.
But it would have been ‘awe’some.
Having theories is not the same as knowing. Whereas it may be intelligent to hypothesise that spontaneously existing or sponatneously generating beings may (a) exist and (b) remain unknown to science (granted that everything we now see is neither of the nature to be spontaneously existing nor of the nature to be spontaneously generating) that is just a theory, not knowledge.
In the absence of knowledge, theiories are all we have – but not all theories account equally well for the evidence. Theories with some scientific foundation may theoretically account for so little of the evidence (ie they can describe, but cannot fundamentally explain) that we need to conclude that we must await a scientific advance before we can come up with a worthwhile theory at all.