I have not made any assumption about what the true interpretation of the Bible is whatsoever, instead I have argued against Rise's interpretation of the Bible which is that one day there will be no more physical death
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"Only God can judge me!" Religious debates rerun
- Thread starter danieldemol
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- islam secularism
firedragon
Veteran Member
Alright. I think you are associating claimant of a religion as religious. That also could be a definition so its your prerogative. Cheers.
firedragon
Veteran Member
Your argument is fine Daniel. I am only saying that you have not understood this death the Bible speaks of due to sin.
For starters they do teach it to be false, for seconds they are paid to teach scientific consensus, not personal opinions. Refusal to teach it as scientific consensus is failure to undertake conditions of employment and very fair.
I don't reject any (infallible) revelation from God because there is none, God only inspires people with truth in accordance with their capacity. It is like looking at God through a lense coloured by our own individuality. The truth you, me or Muhammad or anyone else recieve is simply tainted by our own limitations. That Muhammad refused to admit such limitations is the connection with arrogance IMO.
Where is @Subduction Zone when you need him lol.
They can date rocks using known rates of radioactive decay.
'...Unlike relative dating methods, absolute dating methods provide chronological estimates of the age of certain geological materials associated with fossils, and even direct age measurements of the fossil material itself. To establish the age of a rock or a fossil, researchers use some type of clock to determine the date it was formed. Geologists commonly use radiometric dating methods, based on the natural radioactive decay of certain elements such as potassium and carbon, as reliable clocks to date ancient events. Geologists also use other methods - such as electron spin resonance and thermoluminescence, which assess the effects of radioactivity on the accumulation of electrons in imperfections, or "traps," in the crystal structure of a mineral - to determine the age of the rocks or fossils.'
Source: Dating Rocks and Fossils Using Geologic Methods | Learn Science at Scitable.
It wasn't merely an "accusation"- it was a demonstrated fact that your claims and accusations were false.
To merely call it an accusation is to try to diminish it's significance and claim it is not a fact.
Saying you "submit to an accusation" also doesn't make any sense. What do you think that even means?
You're either acknowledging your claim was wrong or you're not, in light of the arguments and evidence I presented. And it's not entirely clear what you're trying to do.
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Logical fallacy, strawman.
I said "professionally excommunicated and burned at the stake", not literally.
Professors have been denied tenure and blackballed if they express belief in creation over evolution.
Scientists have been fired from their positions if it's known they hold creation views.
There's several problems with your statement:
1. Fact is not established by consensus. That's the fallacy of appeal to popularity.
2. You assume it's ok for people to be fired from teaching positions if they teach things outside of the scientific consensus. But the reason tenure exists is precisely to protect academic independence from the tyranny of popular opinion.
That is wrong because that is not how legitimate science has ever been advanced, where intimidation and silencing of opposition is used to reach consensus.
That has more in common with the burning of heretics and threats of excommunication that the catholic church historically used to intimidate and control dissent.
You are then advocating for professionally burning people at the stake and excommunicating them because they won't submit to the orthodoxy.
Which raises the question of what are you so afraid of that you aren't willing to let people of differing viewpoints debate this issue?
If the truth is really on your side then you don't need to fear disagreement and debate.
3. Your statement isn't even true. People get fired from their non-teaching jobs for not believing in evolution too:
Biologist fired for beliefs, suit says - The Boston Globe
Your statement is a strawman fallacy for two reasons:
1. You are falsely trying to reframe the issue into something more narrow than what it really is. We aren't just talking only about the government employing people. Nor are we only talking about employing teachers of something that deals specifically with biology. We aren't even talking about just teachers in general. We're talking about people involved with private institutions like universities, jobs, or even teaching jobs that aren't related to biology. All examples where individuals in these positions have all been persecuted for believing or speaking anything contrary to evolutionary dogma.
Richard Sternberg, Caroline Crocker, Guillermo Gonzalez, Michael Egnor, and Robert J. Marks II are examples.
2. You are falsely claiming that anyone was fired or not hired for trying to teach creation. In many cases they are persecuted for belief in creation without having even attempted to teach anything contrary to it in the classroom.
You missed or ignored the point.
You have no logical basis for telling people it's a delusion - if you're an atheist who believes in minerals to man evolution by natural selection.
You can't prove to people it's a delusion just by asserting it is. That's a fallacy of argument by assertion. You need to give reasons and evidence for why it's a delusion.
But how are you going to give them reasons if you're an atheist who thinks everything is shaped by natural selection alone?
The fact is you have no logical basis from that worldview for telling them they are morally wrong - because what they have concluded is logically consistent with what you claim is true about the world. Their conclusions are a logical extension of the premise behind atheistic natural selection.
Even though you don't like it, you can't refute it logically given your worldview as a natural selection atheist.
You can only say it feels wrong to you but you can't logically argue or prove it's wrong.
There's two big problems with your statement.
1. Your statement doesn't refute what I said.
Which is that you have no logical basis for saying that what they did was morally wrong if you operate from a viewpoint that natural selection alone has given us humanity.
Nothing you just said would allow you to tell the Nazis prior to WW2 that what they were advocating was wrong and be able to logically defend your claim as true.
2. The implications of your statement are both things you don't really believe to be true and illogical nonsense.
Consider the implications of what you're saying with your statement:
a) If the nazis had been successful, you say they would be morally right.
Well Gengis Khan was successful by any measure of natural selection. So logically you have to conclude what he did was morally right.
Obviously that's false logic. Success of an action doesn't prove it's moral. Moral is a value judgement. But natural selection is incapable of making value judgments by definition. It can only measure your success at performing a particular activity: Passing on your genes.
b) You still only define "success" by whether or not you pass on your genes. So you're saying if the nazis had killed more people than they lost then they would have been a success as far as natural selection is concerned.
I don't believe you think that is what defines someone as successful in life.
But if you're a natural selection atheist then you have no other way to objectively define success.
c) You have no capability to tell the nazis in 1933 that their ideas are morally wrong. Because by your standard the only way to measure the rightness or wrongness of an action is to try it and let natural selection decide whether or not it works.
If they had been successful you'd be forced to deem their actions to be morally right.
You have no basis for telling anyone that something is inherently morally wrong prior to them doing it. And you have no basis for telling them what they did was morally wrong after they succeeded at doing it.
4. You put undue and baseless faith in natural selection. You just assume that the nazis would have to lose because what they did was evil and natural selection would not let it happen.
That presumes no group has ever succeeded at accomplishing evil. Which we know is historically false.
You are not refuting the point the made.
Which is that natural selection by itself gives you no basis for saying what Gengis Khan did was wrong.
That raises the question of what basis do you have for believing you can say what Gengis Khan did was wrong?
It sounds like you have a theistic reason. A reason not based in the evolutionary hypothesis.
Which only proves what I said.
firedragon
Veteran Member
It seems like you are looking for argument by hook or crook. You will pursue someone until you get it.
I did not say fact is established by consensus, I said one may not teach that which is outside scietific consensus as if it were fact on public money. If we allowed teachers to do that we would open the doors to all sorts of personal superstitions being taught as fact. Want to indoctrinate young minds into astrology? Claim it as a factual alternative opinion and do it on public money? That is what we have scientific consensus for. If you don't agree with consensus, overturn it with your own money and time, but don't bother trying to hijack a public teaching position to indoctrinate young minds with your personal beliefs.
I don't know anything about tenure and how it works, but if you want to teach my kids about the flatness of the earth, don't expect to be paid government funds to do it.
There is no silencing of the opposition, they are free to voice there opinions from there jobs in non-relevant fields.
It has nothing in common with burning people thats for sure, and as for excommunication, google defines it as 'officially exclude (someone) from participation in the sacraments and services of the Christian Church.'1
If thats what you mean by excommunication that they are banned from public teaching positions I don't see the problem with it.
1 https://www.google.com/search?ei=BZ...hUKEwizt_jHh6zrAhWAzTgGHY9zA50Q4dUDCAw&uact=5
Nope, they are free to take up roles outside of the public teaching proffesion.
Who said they are not allowed to debate the issue? Has anyone stopped you from debating evolution on RF or in real life?
I don't fear either disagreement or debate, but our children would quickly be ovverun by superstition if we were to allow anything to be taught to them as truth in public schools. Therefore such disagreement and debate both can and should be held in the appropriate places. If the school kids want to debate it amongst themselves, thats fine however the role of the teacher remains to present the scientific consensus regardless of how they feel about it.
Have you read the article? It says that the person in question was hired to do evolutionary research, he was breaching his employment conditions - fair grounds for dismissal. Why apply for a job doing evolutionary research when your religion forbids you to do the job?
I don't have the time at the moment to google these cases individually, perhaps you could provide links to their cases and the fine folks of RF could help review them.
They cannot date rocks using radioactive decay.
There are assumptions behind the process which they cannot establish are true to begin with. And if the assumptions behind their process are not true then their method doesn't work.
We can also go beyond just saying they can't prove their assumptions are true. We can show evidence today that proves their assumptions are false.
Those assumptions are:
a) That you know, for instance, how much potassium 40 started in the rock when it was formed.
b) That you know there has been no contamination of the source by weathering and erosion.
c) That the rates of radioactive decay have always been constant.
Without even the need to get into B and C, we can show that A is not even a true assumption to start with. And if A isn't true then the other two don't matter as far as accurate dating of the rocks goes.
Logically it's impossible to know. They can't observe it's formation to measure how much it had to start with.
So they try to guess and infer how much it might have had.
But does experience and testing show their guesses to have any validity? No. In fact, they disprove their assumptions.
Because the conditions under which the rock forms, what it's parent source material is, and how quickly it cools, will all alter the amount of material that is measured for dating rocks.
Some examples why the dating method is proven to be based on false assumptions:
1. Lava flows and rock formations of known origin in history memory give dates of hundreds of thousands of years or millions of years when tested. Such as the lava dome on mount St Helens and Hawaiian lava flows.
2. If you break a given rock down into it's components, each component will test at different ages compared with testing the whole rock. The difference can be millions of years.
3. Different measurement methods, testing for different elements, will all yield different times. With hundreds of thousands or even hundreds of millions of years difference between them.
4. If you test the outer edge of an underwater lava pillow, the outer edge may test over 30 million years old while the inner area 1 million years old.
5. Some rocks have returned ages of about 6 billion, which is older than the earth is suppose to be.
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Logical fallacy, Ad Hominem.
Unwilling to address the points and issues I raised, you instead try to deflect by attacking me and accusing me of having wrong motives when you don't even have a logical basis for doing such a thing.
Logical fallacy, "Strawman"
None of the situations I referred to involved people teaching things outside of scientific consensus on public money. Which makes any point you would try to make based on such an example irrelevant
You also are committing the fallacy of "argument by repetition", because you ignored the point I made which refuted your argument and simply restated your argument again.
I refuted your argument by pointing out that the reason tenure even exists as a concept is precisely to protect teachers allowing them to diverge from popular viewpoints without losing their job.
Clearly.
It refutes the entire premise of your claim.
Tenure is meant to encourage free thought and academic freedom to explore new ideas without the orthodoxy crushing dissenters under foot and excommunicating them.
I proved your claim wrong already by citing those who lost tenure, employment, or were intimidated and attacked by various non-physical means, for even modest dissent from the evolutionary orthodoxy.
If you don't think that constitutes silencing of opposition, then you are either gravely ignorant of what the consequences of intimidation tactics are (which are meant to silence opposition, by definition), or you're being purposely intellectually dishonest by denying the reality that such moves are calculated to either make individuals be quiet with their dissent or to deny them a greater platform from which to voice that dissent.
Both would be the very definition of silencing an opposing viewpoint.
Let's unpack the horrendous lack of self awareness and hypocrisy exhibited by your statement here.
1. You just tried to deny that silencing of dissenters exists.
2. You think it's a good thing to remove dissenters from their position of teaching. Which is, by definition, trying to silence their ability to influence others with their dissent.
3. You are trying to exclude them from academia and influence.
4. You have professionally executed them. If you have your way they'll never work in that capacity again.
So let's put this together.
-Professor dissents from orthodox position held by other academics.
-You want him to stop having a platform to tell others about his ideas. You want to silence his voice from the debate. You don't even want there to be a debate.
-You would exclude him from ever teaching again, publishing, or being involved in anything that would give him a platform or authority from which to voice such dissent.
-In order to ensure he is never able to voice his dissent in a meaningful or effective way again.
Now let's see how this analogy holds up:
-Catholic leader dissents from orthodox position held by other catholic leaders.
-You want him to stop having a platform to tell others about his ideas. You want to silence his voice from the debate. You don't even want there to be a debate.
-You would excommunicate him to strip him of his authority, position, and relationship to the church, and make it a crime for others to associate with him, in an effort to silence his ability to dissent by denying him a platform to do so.
-If that isn't enough you'd burn him at the stake to ensure he'll never be able to influence anyone with his dissent again.
If the shoe fits, wear it.
If you find murder and excommunication offensive then you should find what is happening to dissenting professors by the high priests of academia to be equally as offensive where they try to commit professional murder and institute academic excommunication.
You just admitted to what I said.
I said they were professionally burning people at the stake.
To which you responded: "yeah, I don't want them in academia anymore. They need to go get a job somewhere else, not teaching".
There's no other way to describe that other than professional murder.
And we don't institute the death penalty to people without sufficient cause.
The hypocritical problem with your position is that you're trying to have it both ways. On the one hand you're trying to say there is no silencing of dissenters, but on the other hand you're openly advocating that dissent from orthodoxy on this matter is sufficient cause for the professional death penalty. And then have the gall to try to claim that isn't silencing someone's dissent.
Your claim is easily disproven by simply asking: What is the effect of the professional death penalty on someone?
It's meant to have two distinct effects:
1. To stop them from dissenting in the first place. Ie. To silence them.
2. To limit their ability to influence others with their dissent. Ie. To silence them.
You, when you said the penalty for dissent on evolution is the professional death penalty.
As I pointed out, there's only two things a policy like that can be meant to achieve:
1. To make someone not want to debate the issue in the first place, because they are intimidated into silence for fear of losing their career.
2. To prevent someone from being effective at debating the issue or influencing the debate over it, because they are denied a professional platform from which to speak (teaching, publishing, researching, etc), and have more limited ability to influence the next generation of thinkers who would then take up the debate.
Logical fallacy, "irrelevent conclusion".
Your statement is not relevant to disproving the points I made.
Which is that professionals are being professional intimidated and/or murdered to silent their dissent on evolution.
To say that they could continue to speak on the street after being professionally murdered and excommunicated from academia is irrelevant to the point I made that the academic institutions are seeking to silence dissent.
You don't deny the fact that academic silencing is taking place by pointing to the fact that the government isn't also trying to silence them from speaking on a public street.
You're conflating two entirely different issues together.
The later is not relevant to the former whatsoever for the purposes of the points I was making.
If the academic institutions had the power to reach into public life and silence you from talking to the man on the street, they probably would judging by their behavior. But thankfully they don't have that power.
If that were true you wouldn't advocate for the professional murder of professors who dissent from the orthodoxy of evolution.
Logical fallacy, "Red Herring".
Public school curriculum for children was never the issue in contention.
From the very start we were talking about professionals and professors being intimidated and silenced to prevent them from dissenting on evolutionary orthodoxy.
Public schools for children, by their very nature, don't necessarily have curriculums based in truth, because of all the political factors involved which sway what should be taught.
Adult academic institutions, by contrast, at least put up the pretense of claiming to be a bastion for free thought and academic exploration.
That was never the purpose of children's educational institutions. Teaching children, by definition, is always going to be just telling them what you want them to believe. Because up to a certain age they really don't even have much capacity for critical thought. They are designed to just take in whatever you give them like a sponge and not question it.
So, where public schools are concerned, it becomes a social and political issue to fight over what you want to indoctrinate children to believe. Which may or may not have anything do with what is true, but may have to do with what is popular, because it's the voters who ultimately are deciding what gets on the curriculum.
But that also points out why you can't compare a child's public school to an private adult university: The later is ostensibly trying to pursue truth regardless of popularity, while the former is beholden to only do what is popular.
And what is popular is not always what is true.
That has never been the definition of a professor. Which is why the concept of tenure exists.
If you know one thing about scientific history (and I question at this point if you do), it's that new understandings of the world are rarely received with open arms by the majority. Theories often have to endure great attack and ridicule and popular rejection long before they are eventually accepted as the consensus. Examples would be the Big Bang and Plate Tectonics.
But this shift isn't always because the facts warrant it. As Dr. Stephen Meyer puts it (PHD Philosophy of Science); Science often only advances upon the deaths of the previous generation of scientists.
You missed the point, and part of why you're missing the point is because you think it's ok to professionally murder professors for dissenting from unproven evolutionary orthodoxies.
I'll explain why you missed the point:
He didn't refuse to do the research.
He just wasn't able to draw the conclusions they wanted from the research because he wasn't going to operate from the unproven assumptions of evolution.
So what you're effectively doing at that point is denying an academic researcher the freedom to reach his own conclusions based on the data.
You are demanding adherence to an evolutionary orthodoxy for which you have no proof. That's a religious stance. A faith stance. Faith in that which you cannot prove or observe, but which you nonetheless insist must be true.
For his refusal to reverse his heresy he was professional burned at the stake.
Now you may be of the opinion that that's a good end result - but you're missing the point that you are silencing free thought and academic dissent by various means of intimidation and threats of loss.
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I suspect these unsourced claims have been debunked elsewhere.
Consider this response here for example
CD013.1: K-Ar dating of Mt. St. Helens dacite
Nope, I just want it to be a private platform, not a public teaching platform.
False and false. There are plenty of spaces to debate evolution, RF being one such place, there are others
You outright lie here.
Nope, there are other privately funded platforms he may do so from.
You are lying here
firedragon
Veteran Member
More.
firedragon
Veteran Member
Abiogenesis is not part of the theory of evolution. You created a straw man by saying "they need it". That was the deflection so you are imposing it upon someone else and now are looking for some side argument you will never get from any decent person.
The whole point was "Abiogenesis is not part of the theory of evolution" as we know it. So telling others they "need it" is a straw man. Thats your first logical fallacy that I saw in this discussion.
I dont agree with Atheists, but Atheists are not "idiots" by default, and neither are any others. If someone showed you the "need" to believe in Abiogenesis due to the fact that they must explain origin of life itself that's not general to all. An educated Atheist would say that he doesn't know but can speculate with a hypothesis called Abiogenesis and others would do all kinds of falsifications which is a good thing.
I dont know what you are trying to argue about but this is it. Cheers.
Logical fallacy, "irrelevant conclusion".
The truth or falseness of your statement is not relevant to refuting any point I made.
You will not be able to quote a single point I made that your statement would refute.
Your claim is false. You will not be able to quote a single thing I posted that qualifies as a straw man fallacy.
If you tried to post an actual quote then I would be able to show why your accusation is false.
Your claim is baseless. It won't hold up if you quote actual things I said instead of making up your own false interpretation of what I said.
It's not even clear what you're trying to say with this statement.
But considering the premise of your statement was false (ie. you can't point to an actual quote of me supposedly committing a strawman), every other conclusion that depends on your premise being true is rendered null.
Your statement is not relevant to anything I said.
I never called atheists idiots.
It's not clear to me what point you're trying to make.
Probably because whatever you're trying to say is not relevant to any point I actually made. So I can't connect what you're trying to say with anything I actually said.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make, but there are three things you say here which are false and are worth correcting:
1. You can't falsify abiogenesis.
Go ahead and try to explain how you could. You won't come up with an answer.
2. Speculation is also not the same as a hypothesis, so you're conflating those two terms together incorrectly.
A hypothesis implies you have something you can test.
3. You cannot logically say you "don't know" what to believe if you believe in materialistic determinism and atheism. And for the context of the western world, generally any atheist is going to believe in materialistic determinism by default.
So your worldview has forced you into an a priori conclusion that organic life emerged at some point from inorganic matter without the intervention of any transcendent intelligence or spiritual aspect. There is literally no other conclusion your worldview will allow you to draw if you hold to materialistic determinism. That worldview makes any other alternative literally impossible by definition.
You might say you don't know the mechanism by which life arose out of inorganic matter, but you can't say you don't believe life arose by chance from inorganic matter because that conclusion is baked into your worldview of materialistic determinism combined with atheism. It's literally logically impossible by definition to have any other conclusion with that worldview as your starting premise. To do otherwise would contradict the very premise you started with.
Your lack of understanding is plainly evident in your post, when almost nothing you are saying is relevant to the points I made.
Saying the word "more" doesn't refute the fact that you committed an Ad Hominem fallacy, nor does it refute any other point I made in this thread.