Debate on God argument

this debate was with a guest commentator, an atheist who challenged me to debate. He was a nice guy and I liked this debate. It's one of my favorite so f those I've had with atheists. So I want to save it as it is about to go off the board and be lost.
it was 12/13/05

This guest commentary was sent to me by a well known bloger, JDHURF. I thank him for his contribution and am happy to offer it as it is very reasonable and reasoning. I like the idea of creation understanding rather than more anger:

Metacrock,

I enjoyed reading your post on atheism, although I do not agree with all of
it. I am a secular humanist hence I am also an atheist so this post was
certainly relevant to me. I do not believe in a god, a supernatural entity,
or any form of supernatural phenomena. I believe you are mistaken with
large portions or your diatribe; I would like to show you in what ways I
believe you are mistaken and how and why you are mistaken.
However, let me begin with armistice; I do agree with your definition of
atheism: the rejection of a belief in god, not merely the lack of belief,
for as you said that would be agnosticism. Atheism is merely an epithet
used by people to define and describe ones disbelief in a god, or
supernatural entity. Atheism is also a negative-reactionary belief it does
not affirm anything rather it repudiates. Atheism relies on theism to
exist; without a belief in god, there cannot be a disbelief in god, in this
manner atheism is reactionary.

“Atheists love to think that all people are born natural atheists, which is
obviously disproved by the recent studies about brain structure and innate
ideas of God.”

Most atheists, that I know, do not assert that individuals are born atheists
naturally; this cannot be true. The newborn infant has not yet been exposed
to the idea or notion of god and therefore cannot reject and/or disbelieve
such and idea or notion. What atheists and theists alike do say is that
infants are born with out the belief in god, not that they are atheists and
reject the idea of god rather that they do not believe nor disbelieve such
an idea or notion; for they are infants and have not yet developed the
cognitive capability to do either. You mention that the idea of natural
atheists has been disproved by recent studies regarding brain structure and
an innate idea of god. What are these studies? Who has conducted them?
Where can I review these studies and view the results myself? For I am
aware of modern research into such topics through psychology and
neuroscience and I have never heard of such a study and outcome.
I would also like to address your assumption that Big Bang cosmology either
contradicts itself or needs a supernatural force or god to justify it. The
Big Bang does not require the belief that before it there was nothing or
merely a supernatural existence, all it explains is the beginnings of the
universe, as we know it today. The Big Bang theory postulates that the
universe originated in an extremely dense and hot state, and since then
space itself has expanded with the passage of time carrying the galaxies
with it. The theory does not, however, force one to assume that before this
extremely dense and hot state there was nothing or only a supernatural
existence, it is surely fair to assume that material or “real natural”
existence is in effect eternal and has no beginning nor ending in time
meaning that there was no “creation” of the universe merely a growth and
transormation. A few scientific proposal to submit this theory would be as
lined out as follows: 1) chaotic inflation 2) brane cosmology models,
including the ekpyrotic model in which the Big Bang is the result of a
collision between branes 3) an oscillatory universe in which the early
universe’s hot, dense state resulted from the Big Crunch of a universe
similar to ours. The universe could have gone through an infinite number of
big bangs and big crunches. The cyclic extemsion of the ekpyrotic model is
a modern version of such a scenario.
Obviously there is no reason to assert that Big Bang cosmology either
contridicts itself or requires supernatural explanations to justify iteslf.
The theory certainly can be interpreted as the beginning of the magnificent
explosion and expansion of the material universe, that before this extreme
change there was the dense-hot state of a gravitational singularity, and
that prior to this singularity and explosion there was an eternal state of
natural existence; that in any case matter-energy is eternal and
indestructible as defined by the Law of the Conservation of Mass and
requires absolutely no supernatrual force or miracle. Here is a quote from
the humanist Corliss Lamont: “Thus creative matter needs no ultimate
theistic power to sustain it, no Divine Principle to impregnate it with the
capacity of flowering as a whirling nebula containing billions of stars, as
a warming and light giving sun or as a fertile planet that produces all the
wondrous forms of life, and at their apex the human race and it’s
indomitable powers of the mind. Matter is self-existent, self-active, self
developing, and self-enduring. It is auto-dynamic. Intellectually, there
is nothing to be gained and much to be lost for philosophy by positing a
supernatural Creator or First Cause behind the great material universe. If
everything has a definite cause, the God, too, must have a definite cause
and so on ad infinitum. The fact is that regardless of how far we push our
inquiries, at one point or another we are compelled to assume something self
existent that possesses certain powers and potentialities. Otherwise we
become involved in a never ending regress of explanations and assumptions.
God as a First Cause simply constitutes a large-scale miracle gratuitously
intruding at the alleged starting point of everything. Furthermore, the
argument form a First Cause takes for granted that there must have been a
beginning of the cosmos. However, no logical necessity forces us to the
conclusion that there is a beginning in time, and indeed it would seem more
sensible to accept Aristotle’s opinion that the universe is eternal. In
fact, those who postulate a supernatural God as Creator or First Cause
usually attribute to it a state of eternal being and are therefore assuming,
like most nontheists, an eternally existing reality.”
Obviously, there is no reason to assert that Big Bang cosmology or
naturalism is contradictory or reliant upon supernaturalism and theism to
justify itself and ultimately make coherent sense.
I am a secular humanism and an atheist, I believe that the universe is
entirely natural and requires absolutely no supernatural definitions in
order to understand it. Scientifically there is no reason to resort to
supernatural and occult postulates. You put forth one of the most
intelligible arguments against atheism, naturalism, and for theism that I
have read, however, it was flawed and does not, in any case, make a solid
case or prove your thesis. Again I would ask what studies and experiments
you where referring to in the beginning? I want very badly to review these
studies for myself and view the procedures and results, please share.

Sincerely

Jeremy








I would like to think JD for his kind and thoughtful commentary. I do have a few comments just by way of observation, but I have no inentino to "beat him" or "show him up."


JD:I enjoyed reading your post on atheism, although I do not agree with all of
it. I am a secular humanist hence I am also an atheist so this post was
certainly relevant to me. I do not believe in a god, a supernatural entity,
or any form of supernatural phenomena. I believe you are mistaken with
large portions or your diatribe; I would like to show you in what ways I
believe you are mistaken and how and why you are mistaken.


Meta: I know atheits in real life and we don't sit around putting each other down. But, certain borads seem to create an atmosphere of hatred. The banners, the services offered, the tone of the posts, what people get away with, these things are a clear and dead give away. The first time I went on the board that started all of this one the very posts I made, which was very modeate and with just enough infor to let them know I was a christian, was met with "haul your self reightous ass out of here!" I labared for days on long posts with plenty of facts and thoughtful arguments and all they would say is "you are pathetic, you could not have been to gradate school if that's how you reason." They actaully never attacked the arguments themselves, just my personality. This is a major board and I'm told one of the cheif offenders is a doctroal student at Ruttgers!

So I think its clear there is a subculture of hatred. They dehumanize christians and talk about us like we aren't people. The signature of the Rutters guy (I am not saying he doesn't go there just because he disagrees with me) basically implises that Christians are Nazis and we would send Anne Frank to the gas chmaber. The other guy said in a blaket stament, "all christians are machiavellians." These may be extreme cases by they are by no means the only one's like them. But I do realize not all atheists act this way. The one's I know in real life don't. I balme the net more than atheism per se.

JD:However, let me begin with armistice; I do agree with your definition of
atheism: the rejection of a belief in god, not merely the lack of belief,
for as you said that would be agnosticism. Atheism is merely an epithet
used by people to define and describe ones disbelief in a god, or
supernatural entity. Atheism is also a negative-reactionary belief it does
not affirm anything rather it repudiates. Atheism relies on theism to
exist; without a belief in god, there cannot be a disbelief in god, in this
manner atheism is reactionary.


Meta: It's rare I find an atheist who agrees about it being a rejetion rather than just a lack.




(Meta--before)“Atheists love to think that all people are born natural atheists, which is
obviously disproved by the recent studies about brain structure and innate
ideas of God.”

JD:Most atheists, that I know, do not assert that individuals are born atheists
naturally; this cannot be true.


Meta: You should go on message boards more often


JD: The newborn infant has not yet been exposed
to the idea or notion of god and therefore cannot reject and/or disbelieve
such and idea or notion. What atheists and theists alike do say is that
infants are born with out the belief in god, not that they are atheists and
reject the idea of god rather that they do not believe nor disbelieve such
an idea or notion; for they are infants and have not yet developed the
cognitive capability to do either.


Meta: I agree




JD: You mention that the idea of natural
atheists has been disproved by recent studies regarding brain structure and
an innate idea of god. What are these studies? Who has conducted them?
Where can I review these studies and view the results myself?


Meta: Many researchers. The best way to chatch up on the evidence is to see the book Why God Wont go Away by Andrew Newberb who may be the top reseracher in the field. The basic findings are that we are wired for God talk. When expossed to many different kinds of statments the only one's that excite certain areas of the brain and get "warm fuzzies" for respondents were "God talk (religious words)" and "sex talk." Newberg says an actaul phsyical change takes place in the brain when we hear talk about God. Of course you are right babbies are not born being christians or believing, but the capacity is there innately. That's all I was really suggesting when I said what I did about innate belief.






JD:For I am
aware of modern research into such topics through psychology and
neuroscience and I have never heard of such a study and outcome.


Meta: Perhaps my satement was a bit Hyperbalic.

I would also like to address your assumption that Big Bang cosmology either
contradicts itself or needs a supernatural force or god to justify it.



Meta:Not really what I said. I said it contradicts iself if we assume the notion of something from nothing and use quantum particles to suggest evidence for that. I didn't say it needs a supernaturl force to justify it (what would that mean to "justify it?"). I said it is indicative of the cosmological argument for God's existence.



JD: The
Big Bang does not require the belief that before it there was nothing or
merely a supernatural existence, all it explains is the beginnings of the
universe, as we know it today.

Meta: True, but it does leave open the possilbity since the engery in the Big Bang is thought to have been created in the big band, and there seems to be no real evidence that anything did come before it. But the major point is that shows the univese is contingent. Why? Because it came into being and it requires the prior conditoins since the elements that make it up are contingencies themselves.


JD:The Big Bang theory postulates that the
universe originated in an extremely dense and hot state, and since then
space itself has expanded with the passage of time carrying the galaxies
with it. The theory does not, however, force one to assume that before this
extremely dense and hot state there was nothing or only a supernatural
existence, it is surely fair to assume that material or “real natural”
existence is in effect eternal and has no beginning nor ending in time
meaning that there was no “creation” of the universe merely a growth and
transormation.


Meta: why would it be fair to assume that natural existence is an eteranl effect? The universe has a beginig, we know of beyond that event horizon, the elemetns that make it up are not eternally existing, but finte and contingent. Moerover, scientists tell us the universe has an end, therefore it must have a begining. The ened is the result of heat death wihch eventually will result even blacks holes leaking and all energy becoming radent and useless for work. Thus the universe as whole will disove into a cold of space. IF material universe was some sort of eternal becoming woulnd't it have met this heat death eons ago? In fact there are mechinsms working to hasten us to that end:

(1)Lambda force which speeding up expanding of the cosmos

(2) angular momentus

(3) flat universe

(4) missing mass.

All of this means we will continue to expland, we don't have the g forces to pull it all back, and eventually all energy will burn up in heat death and we find ourselves in the ciy cold forever. The thing is, if the universe were eternal it woudl have gone to this end a long long time ago. In other words, it couldn't be eternal because it's an open sysetm.


2) Cyclial Universe The concept that the universe is eternallay ocillating between big bangs and big crunches. When the matter from the explosion of a Big Bang reaches a certain point the gravitational pull draws it back, it callapses into superdense black hole and pops back out again. This notion does not require an initial cause, the cyclical universe is just always there always going through its cycles.



a) Universe continuing to expand

Evidence from three recent studies reveals that the final fate of the universe will be to drift apart and cease all useful functions capable of supporting life due to missing mass, which can't produce gravitational pull to bring it all back together and start again, and heat death in which case energy is useless for work. Several major studies show this to be the case.

[New Scientist Magazine, archive 11, April 98, archive; originally Oct. 96] you should be able to click here, but here's the url just in case) [http://www.newscientist.com/ns/980411/features1.html


"ON THE night of 5 March last year, the huge telescope of the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile intercepted a message from deepest space. Transmitted a billion years before the Earth was born, its contents have proved to be of truly cosmic significance. The message was barely readable after its journey halfway across the Universe, and an international team of experts laboured for months to decode it. In January, Saul Perlmutter of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in California and his colleagues revealed to the world what they believe to be its gist: "The Universe will never end." A month later, a team led by Brian Schmidt of the Mount Stromlo and Siding Spring Observatories near Canberra in Australia published the decoded contents of more of these cosmic missives, which arrive as bursts of light from supernova explosions in far-flung galaxies. The message was the same. Now Chris Kochanek and his colleagues at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, are about to publish more evidence, this time from light that has been bent and sculpted by the gravity of unseen galaxies."



* Omega force = Continued expansion forever (no Big Cruch)


"These three sets of cosmic missives all suggest that instead of collapsing in on itself in a big crunch, our Universe will go on expanding forever. And that's not all. They also hint that the expanding Universe is in the grip of a mysterious force that is fighting against gravity--a force that pervades the entire cosmos and springs literally from nothing."(Ibid.)


[mysterious force = "omega" ie the equasion of gravitational force vs. mass needed to close the universe; omega must = 1 to close]


* Missing Mass.


[New Scinentist article April 1999] "If it [the universe] contains enough matter, gravity will eventually slow its expansion, stop it, and reverse it--producing a cataclysmic big crunch billions of years hence. But if there is too little matter--or if there is an extra source of "oomph" at work in the cosmos--then the Universe will expand forever.... Cosmologists call the ratio of the actual density of matter in our Universe to this critical density 'Omega.' And whole armies of astronomers have spent decades trying to work out if Omega is less than, more than or equal to 1.,... "Studies of the gravitational effects of clusters of galaxies have revealed that there must be at least 10 times as much mass tied up in invisible "dark matter" in the Universe as there is in the familiar form of luminous stars and gas. Yet even when all this dark matter is thrown into the equation, it still doesn't make the theorists happy. Despite searching every cosmic nook and cranny, astronomers have never found anything like the amount needed to make Omega equal to 1."

"So the take-home message looks the same as that now emerging from the supernova and quasar surveys: the Universe is going to expand forever, and it may yet prove to be flat. Certainly the idea of the big crunch seems to have gone for good, but the exact values of Lambda and Omega, and the fate of the cosmologists' theories, are still up for grabs. These values may finally be nailed early in the next century, with the launch of NASA's Microwave Anisotropy Probe (MAP) and the European Space Agency's PLANCK missions. These will use the heat left over from the big bang to try yet another way of measuring Omega and Lambda, which may lay the question to rest for good ("Genesis to Exodus", New Scientist," 19 October 1996, p 30).



Flat Universe means no contraction

Andre Linde, Scientific American, Sept 1997



"A second trouble spot is the flatness of space. General relativity suggests that space may be very curved, with a typical radius on the order of the Planck length, or 10^-33 centimeter. We see however, that our universe is just about flat on a scale of 10^28 centimeters, the radius of the observable part of the universe. This result of our observation differs from theoretical expectations by more than 60 orders of magnitude." [Messuer is a leading physicist and one of the first to invent the inflationary universe theory]


ABC News.com: Scientists: Universe is Flat another link Physics. ucsb.edu


Wayne Hu of the Institute for Advanced Studies, School of Natural Sciences in New Jersey said "temperature maps of the CMB form a snapshot image of the Universe when it was extremely young." "The...result supports a flat universe, which means that the total mass and energy density of the universe is equal to the so-called critical density," Wu wrote. "A perfectly flat universe will remain at the critical density and keep on expanding forever, because there is not enough matter to make it recollapse in a 'big crunch.'"



c) End of Universe reveals begining--universe would have already ceased.




Energy of the universe is being expended, as it burns up,it becomes useless for work. The fate of the universe will be eventual death in ciy darkness as all of its suns burn out and their energy disipates][New Scientist, April 1999, oct. 96


"But even if the Universe lives forever, its inhabitants will not be so lucky. A mere thousand billion years from now, all the stars will have used up their fuel and fizzled out. There will still be occasional flashes in the perpetual night: the death throes of stars so large that they have collapsed in on themselves to form black holes. Even these will eventually evaporate in a blast of radiation. For the next 10122 years, this Hawking radiation will be the only show in town. By then even the most massive black holes will evaporate, leaving the Universe with nothing to do for an unimaginable 10 to the power of 1026 years. Quantum theory then predicts that atoms of iron--the most stable of all elements--will undergo "tunnelling" and disappear into tiny black holes, which will themselves end in a final fizz of Hawking radiation. In the beginning there may have been light, but in the end, it seems, there will be nothing but darkness. ".[New Scientist April 1999]


Given infintie time and possibility all potentialities would have already come to fruition, the chain would have already been broken before our universe came into being. This just illustrates the impossibility of an infinte series of events. (being a series of events it would be "in time" so it's really redundant to say "an infinite series of events in time.") In other words, if this universe drifts apart because it lacks mass to produce omega, than the last universe would have too because energy and matter would be the same amount, just formulated differenlty (energy cannot be created or destroyed). The absurdity of the notion of an infinite series of big bang/cruches is driven home; how could there be an "infinite" series if one of the links in the chain can't make it? It can't "already be infifinte" and then stop because infinite means no begining and no end.

Note: If the Skeptic does not agree to this principle, that given infinite time every possibility comes to fruition than he can neither argue infinite chances nor multiple universes against the Antrhopic argument.


d) Universe contains finite stock of order, connot be eternal (because it would have burned out by now)

*Scientific conesnsus:


Paul Davies, in his article, "Space-time Singularities and Cosmology," says,"If we extrapolate this prediction to its extreme,we reach a point when all distances in the universe have shrunk to zero. An initial cosmological singularity therefore forms a past temporal extremity to the universe. We cannot continue physical reasoning, or even the concept of space-time, through such an extremity. For this reason, most cosmologists think of the initial singularity as the beginning of the universe. On this view, the Big Bang represents the creation event; the creation not only of all the MATTER and ENERGY in the universe, but also of space-time itself."[ P. C. W.Davies, "Space-time Singularities in Cosmology," in The Study of Time III, ed. J. T. Fraser (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 1978), pp. 78-79.]



* Laws of Physics break down at singularity

The laws of physics break down at the singularity. 1st Thermo. would apply after the Big Bang, then the fixed amount of energy that is "put in" to the universe (as Davies puts it) would be finite (in quantity) and subject to 1st and 2nd Thermo.


* 1 LTD applies to matter also. Thirdly, the 1st Law of Thermo. applies to matter ALSO. If you argue that energy is eternal, you've got to argue that matter is eternal, which goes against all the empirical evidence we have for the Big Bang.

* 2 LTD Energy burn to heat death

Fourthly, if you opt for 1st Thermo. before the Big Bang, try being consistent and applying 2nd Thermo. as well. If the energy (AND matter) of the universe is eternal, it would have reached MAXIMUM heat death an INFINITE amount of time ago.

Theoretical physicist Paul Davies, in his book God and the New Physics, states:



"If the universe has a finite stock of order, and is changing irreversibly towards disorder - ultimately to thermodynamic equilibrium - two very deep inferences follow immediately. The first is that the universe will eventually die, wallowing, as it were, in its own entropy. This is known among physicists as the 'heat death' of the universe. The second is that the universe cannot have existed forever, otherwise it would have reached its equilibrium end state an infinite time ago. Conclusion: the universe did not always exist."


If you deny that the universe has a finite stock of order, you are essentially denying the 1st law of thermodynmics, as it requires a fixed finite amount of matter and energy. (check your Encyc. Britannica)

In your wider universe, does the 1st law of Thermodynamics apply WITHOUT the second? What reversed the entropy of this eternally existent universe? As we saw above, a universe containing eternal matter and energy would have reached maximum entropy an INFINITE amount of time ago. What organizing principle intervened 11-15 billion years ago and organized all that energy and matter that was no longer available for work? What or who (or Who) woundthe universe up?

Fifthly, we observe that the universe is expanding uniformly in all directions. Had the universe existed for an infinite period of time, the density of matter would have become zero. (Koons) How do you explain the observable expansion of the universe? We measure the recession velocity of distant galaxies by using Cepheid variables, type Ia supernovas, and now Red Clumps as standard candles. And the microwave background radiation and redshift (doppler effect that skews the red portion of thespectrum of starlight in proportion to the distance of the star) confirm this expansion also. Futhermore, within the very field equations of General Relativity, is embedded the fact of the expansion and decceleration of the universe. There are now 19 proofs of General Relativity in 12 isolated areas of Physics,making it the most exhaustively proven principle. Are you saying that General Relativity does not apply to our universe as a whole?!! It is accurate to better than a trillionth of a percent precision. Where is your scientific evidence for A) seperate portions of the universe which General Relativity does not describe B) seperate universes? If its not falsifiable, and there's no evidence for it, then its just not a threat to the standardBB model as it is not scientific.




JD:A few scientific proposal to submit this theory would be as
lined out as follows: 1) chaotic inflation 2) brane cosmology models,
including the ekpyrotic model in which the Big Bang is the result of a
collision between branes 3) an oscillatory universe in which the early
universe’s hot, dense state resulted from the Big Crunch of a universe
similar to ours. The universe could have gone through an infinite number of
big bangs and big crunches. The cyclic extemsion of the ekpyrotic model is
a modern version of such a scenario.



Meta: Sorry, the cyclical universe, or the "inifnite number of bangs and cruches" has been basically disproven and is all but abandoned. It is disproven by the lambda force and the other three things I spoke of. Chaotic inflation is just a theory with no facts to back it up. None of those theories really disprove the necessity of prior conditions meaning the universe is contingent upon an eternal origin, not that is etneral itself.




JD:Obviously there is no reason to assert that Big Bang cosmology either
contridicts itself or requires supernatural explanations to justify iteslf.



Meta: Again I didn't say eihter of those.




JD:The theory certainly can be interpreted as the beginning of the magnificent
explosion and expansion of the material universe, that before this extreme
change there was the dense-hot state of a gravitational singularity, and
that prior to this singularity and explosion there was an eternal state of
natural existence; that in any case matter-energy is eternal and
indestructible as defined by the Law of the Conservation of Mass and
requires absolutely no supernatrual force or miracle.



Meta: Sorry, you could say that, but no scientific theory postulates that mater-energy sat around in the singulairty etenrally; the major idea is that it was created in the Big bang itself, see Odewald from NASA. Also I suggest that an the idea of a natural contignecy being eternal is a contradiction in terms. All natural existants are contingencies, the very meaning of naturlism is contingnecy.



JD:Here is a quote from
the humanist Corliss Lamont: “Thus creative matter needs no ultimate
theistic power to sustain it, no Divine Principle to impregnate it with the
capacity of flowering as a whirling nebula containing billions of stars, as
a warming and light giving sun or as a fertile planet that produces all the
wondrous forms of life, and at their apex the human race and it’s
indomitable powers of the mind. Matter is self-existent, self-active, self
developing, and self-enduring. It is auto-dynamic. Intellectually, there
is nothing to be gained and much to be lost for philosophy by positing a
supernatural Creator or First Cause behind the great material universe.



Meta: And this source you are quoting is authoritative why? What are the scientific credentials here?



JD: If
everything has a definite cause, the God, too, must have a definite cause
and so on ad infinitum.



Meta:I've this babby to rest so many times I neglect to give it much work. Suffice to say: God is a necessity, thus needs no cause since "he" is eternal. Mater-energy is contingency and thus need a cause.M/E could fail or cease to be, and require dependence upon something ontolgocially prior (which is gravitational field) but God is eternal, meaning, cannot cease or fail or be.






JD: The fact is that regardless of how far we push our
inquiries, at one point or another we are compelled to assume something self
existent that possesses certain powers and potentialities. Otherwise we
become involved in a never ending regress of explanations and assumptions.


Meta: That's not really an argument for your side, because it's frank admittion that we need something like God, and that you have to demonstarte a neger neding regerss of explanation, which you haven't done; you try to leave it all rest in the hot dense gas of the singulairty.


Actually, my own cosmolgoical argument has moved beyond the concept of "cause." I argue "prior conditons." But I put up an early page on why God doesnt' need a cause and the universe does. I would be obliged if you would read it.



JD:God as a First Cause simply constitutes a large-scale miracle gratuitously
intruding at the alleged starting point of everything.


Meta: and that's bad? Why? What do you have to compre it to prove it's bad?



JD: Furthermore, the
argument form a First Cause takes for granted that there must have been a
beginning of the cosmos. However, no logical necessity forces us to the
conclusion that there is a beginning in time, and indeed it would seem more
sensible to accept Aristotle’s opinion that the universe is eternal.

Meta: the Big bang is beging of time and is predicated upon the idea that the universe, space/time began at a single point.

Most scientists see it this way.

Terry Herter, Cornell University, says:
"The present location and velocities of galaxies are a result of a primordial blast known as the BIG BANG. It marked:

THE BEGINNING OF THE UNIVERSE!
THE BEGINNING OF TIME!"



Astronomy 101/103 Lecture 29: Cosmology


It's real tempting to look at the singualrity like a seed with a little universe inside it just eternally wating to open. That's not the way scientiss see it, and it's not even logical because its contradiction in temrs. It can't sit around eternally and suddenly change and not be eternal anymore.

JD: In
fact, those who postulate a supernatural God as Creator or First Cause
usually attribute to it a state of eternal being and are therefore assuming,
like most nontheists, an eternally existing reality.”



Meta: But eternally existing anything would have to be ontologically necessiary, but naturlism requires ontolgocal congingency for all natursiltic phenomena.




JD:Obviously, there is no reason to assert that Big Bang cosmology or
naturalism is contradictory or reliant upon supernaturalism and theism to
justify itself and ultimately make coherent sense.



Meta: As I've already discussed, that's a rather inaccruate way of putiting it.


thanks for your views, your contribution to the blog. Rebuttle is welcome.



Read about my legs

Comments

I am debating one on one at CARM

My debate with Simple Theist.

we are debating the "women's Issue" (egalitarian). I hope you will all check it out.

I shall return to regular blog articles tomorrow at some point.

Tasty Wellness, You NOT on a Diet

My latest blog

nothing about religion, just nutrition, how I learned the proper relationship to food and lost a hundred pounds.

Love the Basis of Everything

I don't feel very loving right now, but I don't have to feel any way to talk about love, because love is not merely a feeling. A lot of people think that love is just the special way of feeling about a person, or the warm fuzzy that comes from being with a certain person. Love is much more than just a special way of feeling. It is also a value, a commitment, a sense of orientation toward others, a philosophy, a way of being in the world (an existential engagement).




There are degrees of love and kinds of love. The Greeks called sexual and romantic love Eros From which we get our word "erotic." The kind of love friends feel they called Phileo or "brotherly love" (as in "Philadelphia"). The highest form of love they called Agape. That is usually the kind of love the Bible speaks of when it speaks of God's love for us. 1 John tells us "He who loves knows God for God is love."

Agape Means: the will to value the other, or the will to the good of the other; the desire for the other to have the best. It entails the idea of according the other all rights and human dignity. It is not personal, it's a commitment to all people. Agape is sometimes translated Charity (as in kJ trains 1 Corinthians 13 "if I speak with the tongue of men and of angles and have not charity") but this is more condescending and patronizing than the actual meaning of the term. Charity can be paternalistic in the negative sense, controlling, colonizing, derogatory. Agape is a totally positive thing; one must actually seek the good of the other whatever that may be, even against one's own interest.

Now I will start saying "crazy stuff," these are things that I have theorized about and I guess they make up the radical edge of my own philosophy because they have been scoffed at plenty of times on these boards. But I don't care I'm saying it anyway.


Basis of everything: connection with Being

When I say love is the basis of everything, I mean it really is. I believe that when the Bible says "God is love" it means it literally. In other words, we should put an "itself" there. God is "love itself,": the thing that love is actually the essence of what God is. Now you may ask how can God be both being itself and love itself? Because these two are inextricably bound up together.

Love is giving, the idea of seeking the good of the other, according the other full human dignity equal to one's own, these are ideas that entail give over, supplying the other with something. It's a positivity in the sense that it supplies an actual thing to someone. Being also shares these qualifies. Being is giving in the sense that it bettors itself upon the beings and they have their existence. It is positive in the sense that it is something and not taking something away, it's not a void as nothingness is, but moves in the direction of filling a void; nothingness becomes being, the existence of things.

So love and being are really the same impulse and they both unite in the spirit of God. God is the basis of all being, of all reality. God's character is love; that is God seeks the good of the other and bestows upon us the ultimate human dignity of being a child of God.


Motivating force behind creation

Love is the basic motivating force behind creation. God's motive urge to create was not out of a need due to looniness, but out of a desire to create as an artist, and desire is fueled by love. Art is love, artists love art, as revolutionaries love. Revolutionaries are in love and their revolutions are often expressions of love, what He Guava called "a strange kind of love, not to see more shiny factories but for people." So God creates as a need to bestow love, which entails the bestowing of being.

Now let's not have a bunch of lectures about "perfection" based upon not knowing what perfection is. Let's not have a buck of Aristotle thrown in as though it were the Bible. There is no base line for comparison from which one can really make the judgment that need is imperfection; especially the sort of need one feels to be creative or to bestow love; that is a different sort of need than the need for food or shelter.

Basis of morality

Love is the basis of morality. Love is the background of the moral universe, as Joseph Fletcher said. Austin said it too. That means all moral decisions are made with ultimate reference to God's love which is the driving force behind morality. Many people think Christian morality is about stopping impurity. These people regard sex as the greatest offense and think that basically sin = sex. But nothing is further from the truth. Sin is not sex, sin is an unloosing nature, or a selfish desire to act in an unloosing manner.

Love requires selfless giving over OT the other for the good of the other. That means all moral actions must ultimately evaluated with reference to their motivational properties. That's why Jesus spoke as he did in the sermon on the mount: if you hate you are a murderer. Because the motivation itself is the true essence of the sin, the rejecting of love and acceptance of self as the orbit creates the motive that eventually leads to the act. He is not saying that the act sin OT sinful of course, but that the sin begins with the motive not just with the act. In that sense morality is somewhat teleological, although I normally eschew teleological ethics. I am not saying that the morality of a given act is based upon outcome, but that the end toward which moral motions are given is the goal of doing love.

help

Well the time has come to ask. I hate doing it, but I have to. I was without work for two weeks. I can't buy bandages or pay my light bill, food is getting pretty scarce too. I do provide the this blog and the research on Doxa, and all I ask for it in return is bandages. Seriously, I would do it anyway of course. I do it because I believe in it. But we are up against the wall and need hlep.

anything would be appreciated.

read about my leg problem below.

Read about my legs

Critique of Hector Avelos's End of Biblical Criticism

[Editor's note: part 1 of Joe Hinman's critique can be found here. Joe's original critique of an article by Dr. Hector Avalos on the same topic, along with some subsequent commentary discussion, can be found here.]


Dr. Avalos charges that errors have been intentionally made in the standard translations of the Bible to cover up theological difficulties stemming from the Bible's (alleged) irrelevance. In this section I will be exploring some of these charges, and also some of the problems Avalos charges to the sub disciplines. Before going into this, however, I feel it necessary to discuss my views of Biblical revelation. This is because Avalos's criticisms really don't stack up against most theologies except the verbal plenary version--and only a strict interpretation of that!


Biblical Revelation

This issue really cuts to the heart of the relevance issue, because most of Avalos's understanding of "relevance" has to do with an understanding of verbal plenary inspiration, or the view that the Bible is totally inerrant in every word. "Inerrancy" is really important to atheists because the more literal they can force the demand for all interpretations to be, the easier it is to find problems with it. Now, my views on this subject are not like those of the CADRE at large. I'm the group token liberal so my views are much more liberal than those of the group. I do not represent the standard view of the CADRE on this issue.

The standard view of many Evangelicals is something like this: Scripture is "God breathed" meaning God communicated word for word to the authors and they put it into their own words, but basically very close or exactly what God gave them to say. Some Evangelicals of this sort might tolerate a minor scribal error such as inaccurate numbers being copied, but basically word for word God delivered to us the Bible he wanted us to have. My problem with that, is that it is based upon a model of what I call "memo from the boss." It basically understands God as "the big man upstairs" who is going to send a memo to the factory workers: it's up on the bulletin board just the way the he dictated it. That's the crass version. There are Evangelicals with more sophisticated views then this (see the link above). But basically this is the model being discussed by Avalos.

What I find that this model doesn't address, is a much more human point of view in much of the Bible. This is at the heart of the relevance issue because it is the difference between Avalos using outmoded purity laws as the basis of his attack, vs. a theologian (even among Evangelicals) understanding general principles that can be extrapolated from the outmoded areas and translated into modern context. In other words Avalos can demand that every word be demonstrated as relevant: we must show that it matters in modern society not to cook a goat in its mother's milk. But my view would say: that sort of thing is outmoded, but it is not the main thrust of the Bible. Similarly, one of these more sophisticated Evangelicals (such as any member of the CADRE) would say those kinds of laws were obsolete with the coming Christ, and they served some purpose for desert nomads but we need not worry about them.

I see the Bible as a collection of works that are all indicative of and influenced by divine-human encounter. It is a diverse collection, and the inspirational factor varies from work to work. Some texts are borrowed from pagan mythology and reworked to turn that mythology on its head. This is how I see the Genesis creation story. Mythology is not a lie; it's a genre. It uses psychological archetypes to speak to the psyche. So mythology is a form of truth, but it's a form of truth that does not require literal history. I would draw an analogy to the writings of Tolkien, which make use of Christian and universal themes, but is not a flat out allegory. Other writings are directly inspired, such as those where the prophet says "this is what the Lord says." Or "The word of the Lord came to him saying." They are reflective of the human side of the encounter, told from the human point of view, but there are instances where God did speak directly. As the book of Hebrews tells us, he spoke most directly through Jesus. Jesus is the revelation of God to humanity. The Bible is the record of human encounter with that revelation, and its unfolding in the history of a certain people. I see the Hebrew scripture as serving the primary purpose of setting up a framework in which the mission of "Messiah" is meaningful. That means the little purity laws and all the oddities and what I call "fiddly bits," are unimportant. God commanded the Israelites to wipe out certain people?--I think some of those are errant readings, bad redaction.
Others are idealized history told from a certain point of view, but for me they are not important and they are not the point.

I really don't have time to explain my views in full here. I will try to say more about it in the comments; please read my views of Biblical revelation. For an in depth look at a view that has influenced me the most, see a book by Cardinal Avery Dulles which is: Models of Revelation.


a few of Avalos's examples:


Starting out we need to observe that Avalos is charging intentional bad translations. He does talk about problems of Dynamic/functional Equivalence (aka "DE"). "The basic principle... is to use readings that would make sense in the reader's culture rather than exact word equivalents.” (p 41) Now I do not claim to be a big deal Greek Scholar. I have not studied Hebrew. I have read the entire New Testament in Greek, but when I say "I read it" I mean I sloughed through it in a living nightmare that lasted three years. Every morning at I-hop with my coffee and oat meal I would meet with a friend who is a linguistic whiz (now studies Coptic at Tübingen) and tortured this patent soul with my attempts at conjugation. But I’ve also discussed dynamic equivalence with a Wycliff translator. From my experience and point of view, I think it is not problematic. I find most of the major English translations of the New Testament to be pretty good; none of them suffer from any major errors. There are some infamous exceptions, such as the (incidentally non-orthodox) Watchtower reading of John 1:1, which was denounced by my Greek professor. (I took classical Greek at a secular University from a Yalie who couldn't give a rat's hind quarters about Christian doctrines.) The translations on the passages (NT) about women keeping silent and other things, are notoriously biased. I do not rely primarily upon standard reference books printed for Biblical helps, in my study. I mean works like Strong's, or Art, Bower, and Gingrich. I use them as secondary material, but primarily I rely upon Liddell and Scott. That's how I got my hernia. L&S is classical Greek done by Classicists and has no doctrinal bias. The unabridged version requires a fork lift.

But Avalos spins this issue to make it seem as though "DE" is an attempt to cover something up. He calls it "the primary modern example of the effort to suppress the actual meaning..." (p 40) Of course the rationale for it is the need to bring ancient world concepts into the modern world. One would think that would be the job of a good translator. The problem is it is an ancient book, and it is not the only source of the Christian tradition. It's the bedrock, in terms of textual sources it is the foundation, but it's not the whole house. Yet Avalos is conducting what the postmodernists call "a hermeneutics of suspicion." You start from the standpoint of assuming your opponent is bad until SHE/ he proves HERSELF/himself worthy. This is what Al Sharpton does in starting from the assumption, all whites are racist, you have to prove to me you are not racist (by backing me politically). This is identity politics. Avalos is going to suspect the motives of Christians until they are proven benign. The only difference is, Sharpton might actually allow one to prove one is not a racist. I don't think any evidence will ever count for Avalos against his thesis.

But this is actually a double bind. The Wycliff Translator with whom I discussed this question (this discussion took place years ago in my old Greek study days), noted that standing behind the urge to use DE as a tool is Noam Chomsky and modern linguistic realizations of the importance of generative grammar and the need to represent whole chunks of thought rather than each individual word. One wonders: if they did not use this technique wouldn't Avalos be castigating them for not being modern enough in their translations?!


Specific issues: Hebrew Polytheism; Most High vs "the LORD"

One of the most radical and potentially faith destroying issues (for some people) that he brings forth is the amazing, earth shattering evidence of Polytheism in the origins of the Hebrew culture.

According to Avalos the Jews began by worshiping many gods, and J (Y) emerged as the major one (some think in relation to the political triumph of some faction). In reality this view has been around a long time. The information he gives is not amazing or secret, but let's look at how Avalos uses that information: the terms translated "Most High," and "The LORD" are not only two different proper names in the original, but (says Avalos) represent two different Gods. (p 43) Most High = "Elyon." The LORD is translated in place of J.

But here Avalos does something of a bait and switch. He turns to the discovery of Ugaritic texts which show that Elyon is mentioned among different Ugaritic gods as a separate entity. "Some of the Israelites deities probably derived from Ugaritic" (Ugaritic is related to Hebrew). So the assumption of Hebrew Polytheism is actually made prior to this data. But, no matter. "In other West Semtic cultures," Avalos informs us, "Elyon is more clearly a separate deity." (ibid.) So, not actually having any such examples from Hebrew culture, he has to turn to examples of other cultures to prove his point, merely extrapolating and assuming that the Hebrews also used those names in this way. El/elyon can't be a descriptive loan word adopted as a name/title to speak of J, even though we see this same term used in descriptive ways in the OT such as speaking of angels and judges--but because of the hermeneutics of suspicion we must assume otherwise. Of course El was a separate deity from other Urgaritic gods. This does not prove that El was separate from J for the Hebrews.

He also gives a second example, the "sons of God." (p 44) This is the translation of the NAB. Avalos writes,

"The Dead Sea Scrolls...still preserve the probably older reading of the 'sons of Elohim. The sons of El would be the gods fathered by the god named 'El.' The fact that ancient editors recognized the polytheistic nature of this expression ('sons of El') probably led the editors of the standard text (Masoretic) of the Hebrew Bible to change 'gods' to 'sons of Israel.'" (Ibid.)

Several things to say about this: First, notice there is no evidence given here as to why the DSS editors see this as indicative of other gods. This is not proven, because he doesn't even footnote another source. He is asserting it. But that is really no big deal because there is no evidence at all anywhere that the Hebrews actually worshiped more than one god, and since they were using the term "EL" as a borrow there is no reason to assume they didn't realize it referred originally to other gods. That doesn't mean they worshiped other gods. Secondly, this translation is in other versions rendered "sons of God." Thus it doesn't make sense to think the translators willfully tried to deceive when half a dozen major translations already spilled the beans. More likely it really is just what the translators thought. Thirdly, this is hardly big top secret evidence that is kept from the public. I have read scholarly articles which document the DSS use of that phrase and even show the reading comes from a Ugaritic passage. I could give him documentation on that point which his book is sorely lacking! I first came upon this problem of El and J in a book called The Pictorial Bible Dictionary, published by Wheaton college in 1965. It was a nice coffee table sort of book that one might buy to back up Bible study or just look nice on the table. It was clearly intended for laymen, yet drew upon scholarship of the day. I remember quite clearly it made no bones about the fact that El was the name of a Ugaritic god and was borrowed by the Hebrews to use of their God. If I am not mistaken I belief the Bible Almanac by Packer, Tenny and White (circa 1981) also deal with this information.

Fourthly, even if it could be demonstrated to me that Hebrew monotheism evolved out of a prior Hebrew polytheism, and that J. was just one of many Gods in their pantheon who became the major god, this would not affect or damage my faith one iota. First, because we know that Abraham came out of a polytheistic culture. We know that the Hebrews, if they were in bondage in Egypt, probably were exposed to polytheism. We know Israel and Judah throughout their time as nations were largely polytheist. Every other day Israel fell away from God and worshiped other gods. It doesn't mean God was pleased, it doesn't mean the prophets condoned it, but they were polytheistic to a large degree at the "folk religion" level. It's only natural that they would borrow words from surrounding peoples. It may be disputed that they were ever in Egypt, there is a good chance that they just came up out of Canaanite culture. But they are so affected by the idea of slavery in Egypt, preserving it in their major ceremony for thousands of years, it seems obvious they were. But who are "they?" Israel took people not of their own blood when they left Egypt (according to the Exodus literature) and they picked up the Midionites along the way. They also absorbed Canaanites once they took over the land. So if a segment of Israel were descendents of Abraham and came through Egypt, they also had copious infusions of other bloods and other cultures and with that they would have much exposure to other Gods.

Moreover, it just doesn't matter if they were polytheistic. Logic tells us, courtesy of Occam, that one God is enough ("do not multiply entities beyond necessity"). We experience the divine at the "mystical" level, meaning beyond word, thought or image. To make sense of it we translate that into cultural constructs. This is the way it must be to even speak of these experiences. This means that we have one reality behind all religions; the rest is just a filtering process. This is basically what Paul is telling us (Rom 2:6-14; Acts 17-12-29). But the difference is Jesus was a real guy, not a cultural construct. Of course what we think about him is laden with many constructs, as needs must be. Jesus himself was not a metaphor and not a construct but a real guy. This is the crucial focal point of the Bible; it’s what makes it true and what makes it relevant. Everything else is just "fiddly bits." Many of the fiddly bits are not relevant to modern life. I grant him that. But it is not these aspects that make up a life of faith for the modern Christian.


Textual Criticism

Avalos attacks all the sub disciplines of Biblical studies, such as Biblical archeology. But I will only focus on Textual Criticism. Textual Criticism is central to the project of inerrancy, even though many Evangelicals mistrust it, because it’s the only way to recover the original reading. Evangelicals will often assert that the autographs (the original texts written by the author) were inerrant but some error has crept in of a minor sort due to scribal error. The problem is, if we don't have the original what good does it do to know that?

Avalos, however, argues that restoring the original is a hopeless task. He indicts the Masorectic text. This is the prototype for all modern texts of the Hebrew Scriptures; it was compiled between the fourth and eleventh centuries by Rabbis. The Masoretic text has many problems when compared to older texts found at Qumran (i.e. the Dead Sea Scrolls). (p 73)

In this section Avalos uses a lot of well-known evidence as though it were new and dramatic. He establishes the superiority of the Hebrew parent texts of the LXX over that of the Masoretic. This is common knowledge. The scholarly world as a whole has to embrace the idea that the Hebrews had multiple texts all of which floated around at the same time and it didn't bother them because they were not hung up on every single word being literally inspired. I have been arguing this for years. I myself have argued for the superiority of the LXX Hebrew parent texts for years.

James Sanders tells us:

"There are remarkable differences between the LXX and MT of 1 and 2 Sam., Jeremiah, Esther, Daniel, Proverbs and Ezekiel 40-48, and on a lesser level numerous very important differences in lesser books such as Isaiah and Job. Before the discovery of the Scrolls [Dead Sea] it was difficult to know whether most of these should be seen as translational, or as reflecting the inner history of the Septuagint's text, or all three. [sic?] Now it is abundantly clear that the second period of text transmission [which is BC], actually that of the earliest texts we have, was one of limited textual pluralism. Side by side in the Qumran library lay scrolls of Jeremiah in Hebrew dating to the pre-Christian Hellenistic period reflecting both the textual tradition known in the MT and the one in the LXX without any indication of preference. So also for 1 and 2 Sam." (James A. Sanders, Inter-Testamental and Biblical Studies at Clairmont, Cannon and Community, a Guide to Canonical Criticism. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984, 15-16.)

Avalos winds up arguing for the impossibility of arriving at a final text. I wont go into the "ins" and "outs" of that argument. That would be too time consuming. A lot of what goes into Avalos arguments on textual criticism are really just stories about people's careers in connection with it, and the political games that professionals play in "the paper chase." They don't call it a "chase" for nothing. Really I don't see argument he makes that explodes the science of textual criticism, that aren't already made by textual critics. All one need do is study carefully the current struggle between the valiant little anti-Q faction, led by people like Mark Goodacre and the late Bill Farmer, vs. the rest of the scholarly world, to see those assumptions questioned all the time.

Avalos tells stories such as that of John Allegro (aka "the mushroom man"). Allegro was the only non-believer on the original Dead Sea Scroll committee. He wrote a wonderful little book called The Dead Sea Scrolls (circa around 1964). It had a lot of material that uses DSS material to dislodge conventions about Jesus and the nature of early Christian belief. When I was an atheist I found that little book and thought it was a gold mine of disproving the Bible. Then I went back to it in internet debate with Tovia Singer's Anti-missionaries, and found it to be a gold mine of Christian apologetics!

Avalos decries how the publication of subsequent works by Allegro about the early church as a secret mushroom cult (hallucinogenics) destroyed his career. But Avalos never comes to terms with the fact that it was not textual criticism or the injustice of the propaganda machine that ruined it for Allego--it was a stupid thesis. The things Allegro said about the early church that were DSS based didn't hurt his career. He really didn't say anything that damaging. But the thesis that the church was a mushroom cult was a wacky idea.

Be that as it may, it has nothing to do with textual criticism. But that's the kind of thing Avalos peppers throughout the book: a pervasive spin to conduct a hermeneutics of suspicion always casting a pall over the motives of believing scholarship.


But the issue is only important if we have to have every single word intact. I don't believe we need to reconstruct an original. It would be impossible to verify it anyway! One reason we don't find any textual fragments of Q, for example, is because people stopped copying it when it was incorporated into Matthew. The original copies just rotted away and thus Q no longer exits. The original autographs have probably rotted away, even from Revelation and later NT works. Thus we can never verify the original. But we should not have to. It doesn't matter. Salvation is not so fragile that unless we get every single word right we will go to hell. We the have the basic gist of Jesus' teachings, they are verified by the manuscripts, by the witnesses, by extra Gospel writers such as Paul**, and by the teachings of the so called "fathers."

Textual criticism is a valid science. It is not prefect, but anyone who thinks that means it can't be a science has never studied social sciences. I do consider sociology to be a science; it was my major as an undergraduate. If you can accept sociology as science, there is no reason not to accept textual criticism. What we have to do is to narrow the focus of what we expect to achieve with textual criticism. We don't need to recover the original text, and that doesn't need to be a goal.

Overall we have a tradition, a community. The community preserved the basic gist of the teachings. The need to fill in the fiddly bits is unimportant. That is what Luther called "Minutia." The Christian tradition is interactive, it has served as the basis of western culture, even modern thought. No issue in modern life is really devoid of some kind of Biblical influence, save highly technical things such as scientific research. But even in terms of modern science, the ethical ramifications are replete with Biblical issues: free will vs. determinism is just an updated version of free will vs. predestination. All struggles for political justice are foreshadowed in the exodus. All one needs do to, under the possibility of how a Biblical understanding interplays with modern intellectual life, is to read Bonhoeffer's Letter's And Papers From prison. He discusses the prophet Isaiah and philosophers Nietzsche and Hegel in the same breath with no trace of any kind of incongruity.

The living Christian tradition is informed by both its foundation in Biblical revelation and the precedence of interpretation by councils, popes, saints, theologians, philosophers, mystics and all manner of faithful from every walk of life. It is only if we have to see it as the tablets in stone that we have to reconstruct the originals. I don't think the Bible was ever meant to be the tablets God carved for Moses on the mountain. To understand the tradition we need to have the base, the foundation. Jesus is the foundation, and the Bible is the best framework in which to understand Jesus.

Avalos is isolating one aspect of the vast tradition, attaching a spin that would make suspect any motive, casting a pall over the works of believing scholars, and then declaring the whole thing irrelevant. In so doing he is supporting the trend which has ripped the heart out of western culture and seeks to destroy the inner life of modern humanity and create in its place Marcue's one-dimensional man.



**Helmutt Koester argues that Paul must have had one of the original saying sources available to him; he alludes to many of Jesus' teachings and events in the Gospels. Koester concludes that Paul either knew a narratival Gospel or tried to write one himself. See link above.



Read about my legs

Atonement and salvation:Dialouge with an Atheist

Quote:
Originally Posted by Metacrock View Post
I said the history of it not the mythology.
You cannot prove the resurrection of Jesus with any historical accuracy.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Metacrock View Post
Romans
And why would I accept Paul's idea that we're in rebellion?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Metacrock View Post
of course you return it. if you don't accept the solidarity of someone there is no solidarity. God is already working with us. like it says in Acs 17-21 he put people where they live on the earth so they would seeking him and find him. Like Paul told the Greeks "you already worship God as the 'unknown God" but what you worship as unknown I will make known to you."
You're comment from a couple of posts earlier is this thread was that solidarity provided a basis for forgiveness. It appears to me (and please correct me if I'm wrong), that you're saying that in order to accept the symbol of solidarity, that we need to admit that we're in rebellion and that we need forgiveness.

What I don't see is why you need to make that connection. Consider the following example. I can say to you that a particular attack against your character is wrong and that the person who made it was being spiteful and intolerant. At this point, I have now expressed solidarity with you, in that we could bond together against this person.

You seem to be suggesting that, at this point, you would need to ask for my forgiveness in order to accept my offer of solidarity. As opposed to just saying 'thanks' and moving forward.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Metacrock View Post
where?
It was when I asked "where does it say that we're sinning".
Quote:
Originally Posted by Metacrock View Post
there is no absence of God.
While you have argued for the lack of absence of a ground of being, you have never convinced me that there is a connection between GOB and the Christian version of God.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Metacrock View Post
solidarity is necessary for salvation. you can't have a covenant without it. The whole concept of covenant is essentially based upon a solidarity between the two parties.
Again, why the salvation. Solidarity is, at a minimum, an unspoken covenant, yes. But there is no reason for salvation to be necessary.

All of this conversation seems to boil down to the idea of sin. Why is it that you believe that we need salvation? Pointing to Romans isn't enough, because at best that is saying that Paul is right without providing any foundation for that opinion.



answer part 1:


Quote:
Originally Posted by Metacrock View Post
I said the history of it not the mythology.


You cannot prove the resurrection of Jesus with any historical accuracy.
Yea that's ture. but I don't have to I said the history not the mythology. Resurrection is a tenet of faith, not history. I can prove the evidence warrants belief.



Quote:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Metacrock View Post
Romans

And why would I accept Paul's idea that we're in rebellion?

I don't know. you didn't ask me that. you ask me for a place where it says that.


Quote:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Metacrock View Post
of course you return it. if you don't accept the solidarity of someone there is no solidarity. God is already working with us. like it says in Acs 17-21 he put people where they live on the earth so they would seeking him and find him. Like Paul told the Greeks "you already worship God as the 'unknown God" but what you worship as unknown I will make known to you."


You're comment from a couple of posts earlier is this thread was that solidarity provided a basis for forgiveness. It appears to me (and please correct me if I'm wrong), that you're saying that in order to accept the symbol of solidarity, that we need to admit that we're in rebellion and that we need forgiveness.

no that's that's back asword. we need a foundation in solidarity to accept forgiveness.



Quote:
What I don't see is why you need to make that connection. Consider the following example. I can say to you that a particular attack against your character is wrong and that the person who made it was being spiteful and intolerant. At this point, I have now expressed solidarity with you, in that we could bond together against this person.
The infant church sought to explain Christ's crucification in terms relevant to Messianic expectation. They understood it as atonement. That brings up the need to explain atonement, how does it work, what is it? Is it merely primitive notion of human sacrifice that replaces the temple sacrifice system?

Paul says "no" it replaces it but it is not another version of it. It's a entre into Christ's death (Roms 6)

*Christ dies for us
*we enter into his death when we commit to him
*we share in his resurrection as hope and future for us.

how does that work? Does it work like sympathetic magic, is it like the witch doctor sticking a pin in a doll? No, it's a symbol. It's a symbol of the relationship God is willing to die for you. In response we say "we are wiling to place ourselves into Christ's death, metaphorically, we know belong to Christ, we live for him.

the metaphor is exchanged for concrete results, we are spiritually renovated and we live in relationship with God.

that is the historical explanation ala ST. Paul. It's the history of Christian doctrine its a modern understanding of the way the question was answered in history by the most important theologian the church ever saw.


here's how the Great Paline Schoalr DEH Whiteley expalined it:


Whiteley: "If St. Paul can be said to hold a theory of the modus operandi [of the atonement] it is best described as one of salvation through participation [the 'solidarity' view]: Christ shared all of our experience, sin alone excepted, including death in order that we, by virtue of our solidarity with him, might share his life...Paul does not hold a theory of substitution..." (The Theology of St. Paul, 130)An example of one of the great classical theologians of the early chruch who held to a similar view is St. Irenaeus (according to Whiteley, 133).



2) Scrtiptural


...all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were Baptized into his death.? We were therefore burried with him in baptism into death in order that just as Christ was raised from the death through the glory of the father, we too may live a new life. If we have been united with him in his death we will certanly be united with him in his resurrection.For we know that the old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be rendered powerless, that we should no longer be slaves to sin.--because anyone who has died has been freed from sin.Now if we have died with Christ we believe that we will also live with him, for we know that since Christ was raised from the dead he cannot die again; death no longer has mastery over him; the death he died to sin he died once for all; but the life he lives he lives to God. In the same way count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Chrsit Jesus.(Romans 6:1-5)


In Short, if we have united ouselves to Chrsit, entered his death and been raised to life, we participate in his death and ressurection thourgh our act of solidairty, united with Christ in his death, than it stands tto reason that his death is an act of solidarity with us, that he expresses his solidarity with humanity in his death.



part 2



Quote:
You seem to be suggesting that, at this point, you would need to ask for my forgiveness in order to accept my offer of solidarity. As opposed to just saying 'thanks' and moving forward.
no. if I accept solidarity with you the ground for forgiveness is established and forgiveness is tacit. you are getting it backwards. You can't forgive or accept forgiveness if there still enmity.


Quote:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Metacrock View Post
where?

It was when I asked "where does it say that we're sinning".
I pointed to Romans

Quote:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Metacrock View Post
there is no absence of God.


While you have argued for the lack of absence of a ground of being, you have never convinced me that there is a connection between GOB and the Christian version of God.
Unfortunate for you



Quote:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Metacrock View Post
solidarity is necessary for salvation. you can't have a covenant without it. The whole concept of covenant is essentially based upon a solidarity between the two parties.

Again, why the salvation. Solidarity is, at a minimum, an unspoken covenant, yes. But there is no reason for salvation to be necessary.

yes of course it is. I think perhaps you don't understand the concept (no offense, few people do). The term "salvation" in Greek is two words:

(1)Soteria

Original Word Word Origin
soteria feminine of a derivative of (4990) as (properly, abstract) noun
Transliterated Word TDNT Entry
Soteria 7:965,1132
Phonetic Spelling Parts of Speech
so-tay-ree'-ah Noun Feminine

Definition
deliverance, preservation, safety, salvation
deliverance from the molestation of enemies in an ethical sense, that which concludes to the souls safety or salvation
of Messianic salvation salvation as the present possession of all true Christians future salvation, the sum of benefits and blessings which the Christians, redeemed from all earthly ills, will enjoy after the visible return of Christ from heaven in the consummated and eternal kingdom of God. Fourfold salvation: saved from the penalty, power, presence and mostimportantly the pleasure of sin. A.W. Pink


Verse Count: 5


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ro 1:16 For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.
Ro 10:1 Brethren, my heart's desire and my prayer to God for them is for their salvation.
Ro 10:10 for with the heart man believes, resulting in righteousness, and with the mouth he confesses, resulting in salvation.
Ro 11:11 I say then, they did not stumble so as to fall, did they? May it never be! But by their transgression salvation has come to the Gentiles, to make them jealous.
Ro 13:11 And this do, knowing the time, that it is already the hour for you to awaken from sleep; for now salvation is nearer to us than when we believed.



(2) Sodzo


Original Word Word Origin
sozo from a primary sos (contraction for obsolete saoz, "safe")
Transliterated Word TDNT Entry
Sozo 7:965,1132
Phonetic Spelling Parts of Speech
sode'-zo Verb

Definition
to save, keep safe and sound, to rescue from danger or destruction
one (from injury or peril)
to save a suffering one (from perishing), i.e. one suffering from disease, to make well, heal, restore to health to preserve one who is in danger of destruction, to save or rescue to save in the technical biblical sense
negatively 1b to deliver from the penalties of the Messianic judgment 1b to save from the evils which obstruct the reception of the Messianic deliverance

Verse Count: 8


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ro 5:9 Much more then, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from the wrath of God through Him.
Ro 5:10 For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life.
Ro 8:24 For in hope we have been saved, but hope that is seen is not hope; for why does one also hope for what he sees?
Ro 9:27 And Isaiah cries out concerning Israel, "Though the number of the sons of Israel be AS THE SAND OF THE SEA, IT IS THE REMNANT THAT WILL BE SAVED;
Ro 10:9 that if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you shall be saved;
Ro 10:13 for"Whoever will call upon the name of the Lord will be saved."
Ro 11:14 if somehow I might move to jealousy my fellow countrymen and save some of them.
Ro 11:26 and thus all Israel will be saved; just as it is written, "The Deliverer will come from Zion, He will remove ungodliness from Jacob."

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1Co 1:18 For the word of the cross is to those who are perishing foolishness, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.
1Co 1:21 For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not come to know God, God was well-pleased through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe.
1Co 3:15 If any man's work is burned up, he shall suffer loss; but he himself shall be saved, yet so as through fire.
1Co 5:5 I have decided to deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of his flesh, that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.


Let's generalize these defintions together to say the concept he's getting at is to have one's life made sure, to be rescued. to be put in a safe place.

what goes with that are other concepts such as "born again" to be regenerated. so I say salvation is a process of spiritual healing and the end result (played out over a lifetime) is emotional healing and safety from the vicissitudes of life, and knowledge of God.

this is what we all need. Life is filled with pain, we get screwed up.




Quote:
All of this conversation seems to boil down to the idea of sin. Why is it that you believe that we need salvation? Pointing to Romans isn't enough, because at best that is saying that Paul is right without providing any foundation for that opinion.

I can assert Paul's rightness because that's in the canon. That's a mainstay of the belief system I've committed to. But just observing life I say it's true. We do sin, we fall away,we miss the mark. We need healing and renew and to be made safe.
__________________




Read about my legs

What is the Deal with the Old Testament?

Atheists are always trying to invalidate Christianity by the OT. Nothing could be more useless. I agree that there are some good arguments to be made against the fundamentalist doctirne of inerrency (verbal plenary inspiration) but this does not mean that problems of the OT in any way diminish the truth of Christianity.

Atheists are always arguing the OT shows that God as a character of mean oppression, and that means the roots of oppressive thinking are going to rub off on Christianity (and have done so all along). But this is poppy **** and is empirically disproved. All we need to do is examine the motivations of all the socially progressive Christian movements that fought for Justice, such as the peasant revolts, abolition movement, civil rights movement to see that the Christian faith has always motivated people to fight for justice. Scoundrels have taken refuge in it to justify their self interest, but that in no ways proves that they became scoundrels because of it.
see my critique of Hector Avalos (scroll half way down, paragraph beginning with "we know that the Civil rights movement).



but I want to set that aside because that's not really my point. My real point is to deal with the issue of "what is one to make of the OT given it's ancient world nature?"

The Evangelicals would have us believe that Jesus sanctioned the entire OT every single words. But he did not. First of all, there was not a closed canon in Christ's time; even though the Jews did reverence the Torah, they did not have a closed canon at that time. Jesus never mentions never mentions anything called an "Old Testament." The Evangelicals assume that his speaking of the "law and the prophets" means that he's saying the entire OT as we know it today is inspired. But that is a conjecture. yes he clearly mean Torah and probably major prophetic books like Isaiah, he red from Isaiah so we know he valued Isaiah. Moreover, he did not say everything is to be taken literally or all the verbs are inspired or anything like that.

Essentially I see the OT as providing the cultural context in which Jesus mission as Messiah becomes meaningful. Nothing more. It is not a message for us to live by today except in so far as it point points tot he coming mission of Messiah.

that is not that different from Orthodox views which quote Paul in saying "the old law was nailed to the cross." Paul also says the Mosaic law was "a school master to bring us to Christ." He say it was a barometer to show us how bad bad was, but not the major cure. see Romans 4-6.

The Hebraic author says that in former times God spoke through the prophets but now he has spoken through his son. The implication being that the more perfect revelation is Jesus not the OT.Hebrews 1:1-2

I've said time and time again that we experince God beyond words and we filter that through our cultural constructs. So the ancient Hebrews were violent people living in a dangerous world. Everyone around them was wiping out their enemies and so on. They experienced God, so they assumed God was for them because they experienced him, thus he must be against their enemies.

so they piped into idealized history a bunch of nationalistic propaganda. They have God leading them to wipe out the "bad guys" because after all, they experienced God so God is for them he must against those who would destroy them. For example the command to wipe out even Amalekite babies might be seen as redaction. The text of 1 Samuel is one of the most heavily redacted in the Bible. As we will see, it's very presence in the canon has been brought into question, but the version we have is probably a corrupted second rate copy, and the LXX is closer, and Q4Sama at Qumran closer still, to the actual original.

Institute Biblical Scientific Studies:




Biblical Archeology, Dead Sea Scrolls and OT



"1&2 Samuel"

"For the past two centuries textual critics have recognized that the Masoretic Text (MT) of 1&2 Samuel has much textual corruption. The Samuel MT is shorter than the LXX and 4QSama. The Samuel MT has improper word division, metathesis, and other orthographic problems. Certain phrases and clauses go against the Hebrew grammar rules. Parallel passages vary from each other" (See Charlesworth, 2000, pp.227-8).

"In 1952 Roland De Vaux and Lankester Harding found manuscripts of Samuel under three feet of debris in Qumran Cave 4. 4QSama shows that the Old Greek Bible (LXX) was based on a Vorlage similar to 4QSama. Josephus agrees with 4QSama in 6 places against the MT and LXX. Josephus, 4QSama, and LXX share about three dozen readings against the MT" (See Charlesworth, 2000, pp.229).

"Where the book of Chronicles parallels 1 Samuel, the readings of Chronicles follow 4QSama rather than the MT 42 times. Only one time does Chronicles agree with the MT. Over 100 times 4QSama does not agree with any ancient reading" (See Charlesworth, 2000, pp.230-31).

The Book of Samuel varies widely and frequently from the Masoretic Text. 4QSama preserves a number of superior readings that help correct errors in the Masoretic Text (DSS Bible, 213). Let's look at some of these.

One dramatic example is in I Samuel 11 where the MT and KJV left out the first paragraph. The Longer reading in the DSS explains what happens in this chapter. It says:

"Nahash king of the Ammonites oppressed the Gadites and the Reubenites viciously. He put out the right eye of all of them and brought fear and trembling on Israel. Not one of the Israelites in the region beyond the Jordan remained whose right eye Nahash king of the Ammonites did not put out, except seven thousand men who escaped from the Ammonites and went to Jabesh-gilead" (The Dead Sea Scroll Bible translated by Abegg, Flint, and Ulrich page 225). Then verse one of I Samuel 11 starts.

1 Samuel 14:30
There is a mis-division of words here in the MT. The 4QSama divides it differently which makes better sense. The MT has hkm htbr rather than hkmh hbr in the 4QSama.

1 Samuel 14:47
There is a singular instead of a plural noun in 4QSama. 4QSama is the better reading.

1 Samuel 15:27
There is an omission of the subject in the MT. According to 4QSama Saul is the subject who grabbed the garment, not Samuel.

The Place of 1st Sam in Canon


Revisited Albert C. Sundberg, Jr
Thomas J. Sienkewicz and James E. Betts
"The Old Testament of the Early Church"
published by Monmouth College
in Monmouth, Illinois in 1997.

department.monm.edu/class...bergJr.htm

The Prophets collection was canonized about two centuries after the Law, i.e., about 200 B.C.E. This collection is divided into two sections, the Former Prophets (the historical books): Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, which were in circulation about 550 and reached their final form before the Latter Prophets. Except for minor editorial changes made later, the Chronicler utilized the Former Prophets in their final form. However, apparently he did not regard them as canonical because he took great liberties with them, especially with Samuel and Kings, in his rewriting of the national history.

The Latter Prophets (Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Isaiah and the Twelve12) contain sections undoubtedly from the third century (cf. Isa. 24-27; Pfeiffer 1941:61, 441-443). This places the terminus a quo after the Chronicler. On the other hand, the absence of the Book of Daniel (dating 164 B.C.E.) from the collection indicates that the collection was already closed at its writing, otherwise it would have been included. Thus, the Prophets collection must have been canonized about 200 B.C.E. Sirach13 44-49, a list of famous men in Jewish history, is a summary of the Law (ch. 44-45) and Prophets (the Former, 46-48.18; 49.1-50; the Latter, 48.20-25; 49.6-10, even naming the Twelve). H. J. Cadbury found that Septuagintal language has influenced the Greek of Sirach. He says, "That the translator knew the prior Greek translations of some of the canonical books is not only implied in the preface. . .

but is sufficiently proved by his use of identical Greek with the Septuagint in the same context" (Cadbury 1955:219-225). This is shown in verbal coincidences that are most striking in the catalogue of famous men and their respective parallels in the Old Testament and in detailed descriptions of the accouterments and service of the High Priest. In some cases these coincidences are striking because of the unusualness of the words, or the transfer of a word in the same context where Sirach and the Septuagint agree against the Masoretic text (1 Sam. 13.3), or where the translator shows a knowledge of Greek Chronicles. This evidence that the translator of Sirach knew a standard Septuagint text tends to confirm the judgment that the statements in the prologue testify to the canonical status of the Prophets. Thus, it is evident that the canon in Sirach consisted of the Law and the Prophets. Daniel (9.2) cites Jeremiah (25.11 ff.) as "the word of the Lord to Jeremiah."


This tells us that the place of Samuel in the canon was by no means assured. Because the redactor didn't feel the former prophets were canonical, great libertties were taken. We also see differences between the Ms which form the parent of the LXX translation, and those of MT. What all of this amounts to is that 1 Samuel is a very corrupt text, and the likelyhood is quite high that the passage is redacted. This is even more certain when we consider that the infant passage itself has been redacted.

James A. Sanders, Inter Testamental and Biblical Studies at Clairmont, Cannon and Community, a Guide to Canonical Criticism. Philladelphia: Forterss Press, 1984, 15-16.

"There are remarkable differences between the LXX and MT of 1 and 2 Sam. Jeremiah, Esther, Daniel, Proverbs and Ezekiel, 40-48, and on a lesser level numerious very important differences in lesser books such as Isaiah and Job. Before the discovery of the Scrolls [Dead Sea] it was difficult to know wheather most of these should be seen as translational, Or as reflecting the inner history of the Septuegent text, or all three. Now it is abundantly clear that the second period of text transmission [which is BC], actually that of the earliest texts we have, was one of limited textual pluralism. Side by side in the Qumran library lay scrolls of Jeremiah in Hebrew dating to the pre-Chrsitian Hellenistic period reflecting both the textual tradition known in the MT and the one in the LXX without any indication of preference. So also for 1 and 2 Sam."

Redaction of Infant Slaughtering Passage


Notes in the New Oxford Annontated Bible on 1 Sam 15:1-35

"Another story of Saul's rejection: The late source. Compare this section with 13:7-15, Samuel, not Saul is the leading figure once more."

This is the very passage in which Samuel relays God's command to wipe out the infants. So even though I still need to find more speicific evidence for that very passage, there is a good chance of proving redaction. While its true that I can't produce an actual MS showing no infant slaughter command, the passage in whcih that command is given has been redacted. The odds are very high that this command was not part of the orignal passage, or we can regard it as such. We know that slaughtering infants in evil, and we have no obligation to accept a command as divine that we know to be totally at odds with God's law and God's moral code.




But if we read Isaiah and also Leviticus we see God told them to accept the alien and give him the same rights as the sons of Israel. He also told them "it is not enough I redeem Israel...you will be a light to the Gentiles." I see that as a statement that the purpose of Israel, and therefore of the OT is to set up a framework in which Jesus' mission as messiah is meaningful to the world.

thus, we may find oppressive things in the OT, that in no way means that the character of God is oppressive nor can it be used to justify oppression.


I try to accept the events of the OT as true, in general outline as much as I can. But it would not make a great deal of difference to my faith to find that the entire thing is mythology.

Read about my legs

Materialism Vanishes

The Argument:Science works by paradigm shifts, paradigm shifts have occurred, and are still occurring, which include into naturalistic understanding idea that only 100 years ago would have been excluded as "magic" or as "supernatural." Thus we can see that scinece cannot be used to rule out the Sueprnatural because more and more it incorporates ideas of it into the naturalistic schemeatta.


Many see a new Dualism emerging which is compatible with either SN or Naturalist assumptions.

Many atheists seem to think that science exclusive domain of atheism, and that it's function is to get rid of religion. But science is neutral, science is no more a creature of atheism than it is a creature of theism.Ontological judgments, that is ideas about the major structure of reality, are beyond the domain of science.
The argument turns on the basic historical fact that atheists have lost the ground upon which they dismissed God from science in the first place. In their book God and Nature Lindberg and Numbers demonstrate that the moment at which this happened was when La Place said "I have no need of that hypothesis," meaning the idea that God created the universe. What he meant was that God was not needed as an explanation because we now have naturalistic cause and effect, which explains everything. But the atheist has cashed in cause and effect to over come the Big Bang. Materialists are now willing to consider ideas like the self caused universe, Hawkings unbounded condition which removes cause completely as a consideration; or based upon quantum theory they are willing to accept the notion that causality is an illusion, that the universe could just pop up out of nothing. With that commitment they lose the ground upon which they first removed God from consideration.

Now perhaps they still do not need God as a causal explained, but in the Religious a priori argument, and in the innate religious instruct argument I say that belief was never predicated upon a need for explanation in the first place. Nevertheless, the fact still remains, the reason for dismissing God was the sufficiency of natural causation as explanation, with that gone there is no longer any grounds for dismissing consideration of God from the universe.

I will argue that more than that is going. There is a paradigm shift underway which demonstrates a total change in scientific thinking in many areas and over many disciplines. That change demonstrates that the materialist concept is wrong; there is more to reality than just the material world. There are other aspects to the material world wich are non-deterministic, non-mechanistic, and which call into question the whole presupposition of excluding the supernatural from consideration.


1)Materialism is the antithesis of belief in God, it rules out any such belife on the grounds that a deterministic, reductionist, or mechanistic understanding of the natural world is all that is needed to explain the natural world.


2) Materialism is wrong on all these counts; it is not based upon scientific objective or "ultimate" proof, but is culturally constructed.


3) Materialism is simply inadequate--from the standpoint of modern physics.


4) Paraigm shifts in many different field have led to the inclusion of concepts that once would have been anti-materialist.


5) Therefore, materialism is inadequate and Reductionism is misguided (at best).


6) "Bigger" views of the universe have emerged, and are being accepted/developed by the academic community.


7)These "bigger universes" include fundamental mechanisms (non-mystical ones!) for mind to 'exist' and to interact with 'matter'.


8) materialism is wrong, therefore, the door is open to the possibility of God and the supernatural.

Now this argument doesn't prove the Christian God, it could open the possibility to a supernatural without God, or a Buddhist concept of reality, but the step away form total materialism brings us closer to some sort of belief in God.


B. Paradigm Shifts.

1) Thomas S. Kuhn.


Kuhn's famous theory was that scientific thought works through paradigm acquisition, and that paradigms change when they can no longer absorb anomalies into the model and must account for them in some other way. This theory entails the idea that science is culturally constructed, but Kuhn was not "hard project," that is he did not think that science was totally a construct or that it didn't describe true states of affairs in the world. However, our ideas about science are culturally rooted and our understanding of the world in a scientific fashion is rooted in culture. For this reason he thought that science is not linear cumulative progress.




a. Scientific progress not cumulative.


"scientific revolutions are here taken to be those non-cumulative developmental episodes replaced in whole or in part by a new one..." (Thomas kuhn The Structure of scientific Revolutions," (92)



b. Paradigm Shifts.

"In section X we shall discover how closely the view of science as cumulating is entangled with a dominate epistemology that takes knowledge to be a construction placed directly upon raw sense data by the mind. And in section XI we shall examine the strong support provided to the same historiographic scheme by the techniques of effective science pedagogy. Nevertheless, despite the immense plausibility of that ideal image, there is increasing reason to wonder whether it can possibly be an image of science. After the pre-paradigm period the assimilation of all new theories and of almost all new sorts of phenomena has demanded the destruction of a prior paradigm and a consequent conflict between competing schools of scientific thought. Cumulative anticipation of unanticipated novelties proves to be an almost nonexistent exception to the rule of scientific development.The man who takes historic fact seriously must suspect that science does not tend toward the ideal that our image of its cumulativeness has suggested. Perhaps it is another sort of enterprise."(Ibid,94)

c. P shift not based rationally upon data.

"The choice [between paradigms] is not and cannot be determined merely by the evaluative procedures characteristic of normal science, for these depend in part upon a particular paradigm, and that paradigm is at issue. When paradigms enter as they must into a debate about paradigm choice, their role is necessarily circular. Each group uses it's own paradigm to argue in that paradigm's defense...the status of the circular argument is only that of persuasion. It cannot be made logically or even probabilistically compelling for those who refuse to step into the circle." (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (96).

Kuhn is not alone in these observations, major scientific thinkers have questioned scientific 'pretense of objectivity' thoughout the century:


This 'bigger' aspect can also be seen in Rosenberg's 'liberal naturalism' [CS:JCS:3.1.77]:

"The question of scientific objectivity becomes more compelling when one considers that doubts about the reductive paradigm are by no means new. William James (1890), Charles Sherrington (1951), Erwin Schrodinger (1944, 1958), Karl Popper and John Eccles (1977)--among others--have insisted that the reductive view is inadequate to describe reality. This is not a fringe group. They are among the most thoughtful and highly honored philosophers and scientists of the past century. How is it that their deeply held and vividly expressed views have been so widely ignored? Is it not that we need to see the world as better organized than the evidence suggests?

"Appropriately, the most ambitious chapter of this section is the final one by Willis Harman. Is the conceptual framework of science sufficiently broad to encompass the phenomenon of consciousness, he asks, or must it be somehow enlarged to fit the facts of mental reality? Attempting an answer, he considers the degree to which science can claim to be objective and to what extent it is influenced by the culture in which it is immersed. Those who disagree might pause to consider the religious perspective from which modern science has emerged.

"There is reason to suppose that the roots of our bias toward determinism lie deeper in our cultural history than many are accustomed to suppose. Indeed, it is possible that this bias may even predate modern scientific methods. In his analysis of thirteenth-century European philosophy, Henry Adams (1904) archly observed: "Saint Thomas did not allow the Deity the right to contradict himself, which is one of Man's chief pleasures." One wonders to what extent reductive science has merely replaced Thomas's God with the theory of everything."

2) Paradigm Shifts in last 30 years change materialist conceptions.


a. Medicine.


Medical paradigm shift *Medical Schools and Doctors accept Healing more readily.

Christian Science Monitory, Monday, Sept. 15, 1999

http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/1997/09/15/us/us.6.html "Research Starts to Bridge GAp Between Prayer and Medicine.


"The growing dialogue between the disciplines of faith and medicine, was probed this past weekend at the Religion Newswriters Association's annual meeting here. Increasingly, medical institutions are exploring the role of prayer in healing. Three years ago, only three US medical schools in offered courses on spirituality and health. Today, there are 30."


This quotation is old, it's now 120 schools or so.

*Most Doctors Have experience with healing and medical opinion changing.

Ibid.

Larry Dossey, author of several books on the subject, says that he, like most doctors, has witnessed "miracle cures." But the quality of research on the subject varies greatly.

US TOO International, Inc.

Prostate Cancer Survivor Support Groups

US TOO Prostate Cancer Communicator Article
Volume No. 1, Issue No. 6 (January ­ June, 1997)
Survivor's Corner - Issue 6

"I am motivated to write about the healing power of prayer because many men I talk with are not only asking questions about prostate cancer statistics but have a feeling of being depressed after being diagnosed. Some are in a quandary as to what to do if PSA rises after treatment."

"A recent article was titled, "Physicians believe in the power of prayer," and stated that 269 doctors were surveyed and 99% said they were convinced that religious belief can heal."We've seen the power of belief," said Dr. Herbert Benson, author of Timeless Healing which offers scientific evidence that faith has helped to cure medical conditions. Prayer helps and the prayers of others can help in your recovery and healing."

* Good Studies Exist, Skeptics Pick On Worst Studies. Ibid. Skeptics, [Larry Dossey] says, tend to point to the weakest studies. Good scientific method, he says however, requires the medical community to look at the best work to "see what it shows us." Dr. Dossey adds that "I'm not trying to hold prayer hostage to science. I don't think prayer needs science to validate it."

b. Cosmology (end of cause and effect).

Physicists are now embroiled in integrating metaphysical notions into science and in atheists assume them as though they were fact. The self causing universe, something from nothing, multiple universes, all beyond the pale of scientific investigation, all assumed as totally proven facts by the materialists.


*No Physics to explian something from nothing.



John Mather, NASA's principal investigator of the cosmic background radiation's spectral curve with the COBE satellite, stated: "We have equations that describe the transformation of one thing into another, but we have no equations whatever for creating space and time. And the concept doesn't even make sense, in English. So I don't think we have words or concepts to even think about creating something from nothing. And I certainly don't know of any work that seriously would explain it when it can't even state the concept."[John Mather, interview with Fred Heeren on May 11, 1994, cited in his book Show Me God (1998), Wheeling, IL, Searchlight Publications, p. 119-120.]
That is describing the excepted theory, that the universe seems to pop up from nothing, yet physicists just accept it and assume that its possible even with no physics to explian it. That is a total paradigm shift.

*Multiverse is unscientific metaphysics.

Sten Odenwald, Gaddard, Nasa: http://image.gsfc.nasa.gov/poetry/ask/a11215.html

"yes there could be other universes out there, but they would be unobservable no matter how old our universe became...even infinitly old!! So, such universes have no meaning to science because there is no experiment we can perform to detect them."


Some physicists, such as Oldenwald, are aware of this, but that doesn't stop the the materalists from continuing the assumption. So if it is religious metaphysics its bad, but if its metaphysics the materialist can use it's "ok."



c.Consciousness--re-entry of dualism.

There is a revolution in thought about consciousness underway that may include several paradigm shifts at once. It includes an interdisciplinary mix of Philosophers, psychologists, cognitive sciences, physicists, and other disciplines. Some of the more radical theories being advanced by physicists include the notion that consciousness is Quantum, that it is located non-spacilly and non-physically. see the consciousness argument for further details. But the most exciting aspect of this controversy is the fact that it has led to a reemergence of dualism. Glenn Miller does an excellent job researching this topic, most of his evidence comes form the Journal of Consciousness Studies. He also does a good job of putting into persecutive the new dualism and its implications: : http://www.webcom.com/ctt/hmosoul.html


"Now, given this turbulence, re-evaluation, and re-definition going on the field, what is the status of DUALISM?

"Well, the first thing that comes to MY mind is that 'dualism' simply changed its public relations firm and won acceptance!

Strangely enough, the way this was accomplished was simply by defining reality 'bigger'. As one allows consciousness or mind INTO 'nature' as a fundamental 'thing' itself (with causal powers), the dual-worlds were simply collapsed into one 'bigger' world that has both elements in it! Dualism (in most, but not all, senses of the term) was simply given a new name, such as "naturalistic dualism" (Chalmers) or "liberal naturalism" (Rosenberg). No one puts this as clearly as Todd Moody, in responding to someone's 'fear of dualism' [JCS:2.4.371]:

"It's true that I am not troubled by this, in part because I don't find such a sharp line of demarcation between dualistic and materialistic metaphysics in the first place. If we cannot escape the conclusion that the physical description of the world is incomplete (as Elitzur states and many others agree), the main thing is to try to find a more complete one and not worry about whether it resembles previous versions of materialism or dualism"

The New York Times,April 16, 1996Arizona Conference Grapples With Mysteries of Human ConsciousnessBy SANDRA BLAKESLEE[T] UCSON, Ariz.
http://www.as.wvu.edu/~tmiles/myster.html

"The next major group of consciousness seekers might be called modern dualists. Agreeing with the hard problem, they feel that something else is needed to explain people's subjective experiences. And they have lots of ideas about what this might be.According to Chalmers, scientists need to come up with new fundamental laws of nature. Physicists postulate that certain properties -- gravity, space-time, electromagnetism -- are basic to any understanding of the universe, he said. 'My approach is to think of conscious experience itself as a fundamental property of the universe,' he said. Thus the world has two kinds of information, one physical, one experiential. The challenge is to make theoretical connections between physical processes and conscious experience, Chalmers said.Another form of dualism involves the mysteries of quantum mechanics. Dr. Roger Penrose from the University of Oxford in England argued that consciousness is the link between the quantum world, in which a single object can exist in two places at the same time, and the so-called classical world of familiar objects where this cannot happen.Moreover, with Hameroff, he has proposed a theory that the switch from quantum to classical states occurs inside certain proteins call microtubules. The brain's microtubules, they argue, are ideally situated to perform this transformation, producing 'occasions of experience' that with the flow of time give rise to stream of consciousness thought.The notion came under vigorous attack."

Glenn Miller.

"It is very difficult to avoid this conclusion of 'emergent dualism' (chortle, chortle)with all the proposals floating around (reviewed above). The mind as 'immaterial'--in the sense of classical matter--is also accepted as a brute fact! Consider some of the statements and concessions (bold, my emphasis; italics, their emphasis):"

The introductory chapter in CS:TSC (p.1) opens with this statement: "This volume begins with a series of philosophical chapters devoted mostly to the explanatory chasm between reductionist mechanisms and the subjective phenomenon of conscious experience. The chasm is do daunting that many support 'dualism', the notion that the mind is distinct from the brain and merely interacts with it."

Erich Harth, (Univ. of Syracuse, Dept. of Physics) [CS:TSC:611ff] notes that dualism is "not quite as dead as some would have us believe" (p.619), and then goes on to show that the most common objection to old-style dualism just doesn't wash [p.620]:

Miller

"Physicists, predictably [in a quantum wave probability sense, of course..;>)], are very open to this interpenetration of mind/matter: Compare the free-floating quote of noted physicist Feynman:" "Mind must be a sort of dynamical pattern, not so much founded in a neurobiological substrate as floating above it, independent of it" [cited in CS:DP:24]

Hameroff's model [CS:JCS:108] claims to be both reductionist AND dualist:

"As a model of consciousness, quantum coherence in microtubules is reductionist in that a specific molecular structure is featured as a site for consciousness. It is seemingly dualist in that the quantum realm (which is actually intrinsic to all of nature) is seen to act through microtubules."

Atmanspacher gives his view that the dual-world is just this 'bigger' one-world [JCS:1.2.168-9]:

"One of the hot topics in this respect concerns the question of whether material reality and its non-material counterpart can indeed be considered as independent from each other as the concept of Cartesian dualism assumes. The most precise and best formalized indications for a negative answer to this question can be found in quantum theory."

"Two important concepts that present evidence against any ultimate relevance of the corresponding dualism are the concepts of complexity and meaning. In addition to quantum theory, these concepts reflect tendencies to bridge the Cartesian cut from both realms, that of physics as well as that of cognitive science..."

Grush and Churchland [CS:JCS:2.1.10-29] express amazement at how many 'intellectual materials' seem to have 'strong dualist hankerings' (p.27). They talk about these 'residual dualist hankerings' as being a rather widespread phenomenon.

An interesting possible example of this is in Hodgson' book The Mind Matters. In the review of the book [JCS:2.1.93], Squires makes this comment:

"Often I find in this book that the author is almost saying that within a person there is something that is in its essence not physics, but then he realises that this is dualism, which he feels should be avoided, so he tries to escape. These escapes are unsatisfactory."

Chalmers actually refers to his position as 'naturalistic dualism' and says that it does qualify as a type of dualism, but an innocent dualism [e.g. CS:JCS:2.3.210]

McGinn notes that "recent philosophy has become accustomed to the idea of mental causation" [CS:JCS:2.3.223]




d. Psychology of Religion.

See the Religious Instrict argument where I show that a whole discipline arose, transactional analysis, based upon Abraham Maslow's theoires of mystical experince. Documentation on that page demonstates that phychology no longer approaches religion as suspect, but understands it as healthy and normative for human being, and approches unbelief as suspect. There are also studies presented showing the benfits of religion for metal health.,



3) New laws of Physics.



In the NYT Quote from Chalmers above he proposes coming up with a new law of physics to explain the basic property of nature known as "consciousness." He is not the only one to propose this, as one can see from quotations of physicists in the consciousness argument. When theorists start proposing new laws of physics one can be fairly sure that a paradigm shift is underway. This is even more the case when the new law of physics is proposed to explain something that the old paradigm had reduced practically out of existence. The old reductionist/materialist paradigm reduced consciousness to mere epiphenomenal status and located it as brain function. It is the inadequacy of this understanding which has led some scientists to call for a new law!


Read about my legs

Whitman's Ghost Takes a Tour of the City

Ony nine people looked at the table of contents on the poetry site. And they did not look at any poetry.

thanks but come on man. at least rad one!


Whitman's Ghost Takes a Tour of the City*



The goddess sits in the axhandle park:
she would give more grain, but corn won't grow
in our streets.
The trees can lift their arms skyward,
but their hands and hair sprout flames.
Indidolons time,
when the old shade goes loafing (though evening
can't come any closer). Could he manage disembodiment
before now, the fire of the flower would still
be there by chance.


But you, knowing the richer reds
and deeper blues appear briefly at dusk
then withdraw into their own flame...
He goes out at evening, shirt long, baggy as a coat,
his white beard flows from the sack-like face,
the outstretched hat-brim;
he has made himself bewildered: Where are the poets
chanting to the multitude? The headlong, vulgar, robust
freedoms of the crowd? Is there only you?
Bleating out this quick-flaring image? You chant
the gawk-shuffle, art-patter, and wonder how the plant


ever let you in. The inferno of the city blazes
around us, we detail its hidden lights.

*This Selection was originally in both A Rule of Three, the Chapbook and the poems used in Negations.


_______________

go to the site and read at least one poem ok? sign guest book



http://www.geocities.com/ray.hinman/index.htm




Read about my legs

my brother's poetry

I have a twin brother. He's a genius, but things haven't worked out for him. i truly believe he is a literary genius. At least I know he has loads of talent. He's a fine poet. I read one of his to a class in graduate school and the professor, a published poet and a poetry critic cried. Professors don't cry easily and this woman was a holocaust survivor. She said "it's a beautiful poem." Imagine Hungarian accent.

I don't have them all up yet, but enough or up to give an idea. please at lest go there and look at it! I really want to be able to show him that people all over the world can read his poetry. He needs to know this.

Artifacts: Poetry by Ray Hinman

Ray knows poetry. this is not a "roses are red violets are blue" kind of thing. His major influences are Yeats and Wallace Stevens.