Pajamas Media

73 Comments

1. G Alston:

Like far too many on the christian side, you see secularism as your enemy just as much as islam is. You would conclude that the solution to the islam problem is to replace secular politicians with christian leaders. You conclude this by positing that secular leaders (your enemy) are too vapid to truly comprehend the threat of the islamics. This article is merely variation #753 of that idiotic contention.

Meanwhile, claiming that islamic belief is 1000 years behind the west conveniently ignores the fact that to be a real christian you have to deny the reality of evolution. They’re not 1000 years behind the west. They’re on your page. Christian belief that god is the source of morals is utterly at odds with science, yet western civilisation hasn’t imploded.

Fortunately the leaders of the free world are a great deal smarter than you are. They perceive your argument for the call to a return of the crusades for what it is. They also understand that the islamic world is fragmented and offers no credible military threat between states. George Bush was widely reviled for taking the fight to them. On the other hand setting Iraq up as a western styled secular state democracy is/was a cultural WMD of the type the crusaders wouldn’t have even dreamt of. Secularism is not your enemy. Rather, it’s the only system that actually works.

Mar 18, 2009 - 4:40 am 2. David P:

Solutions: Execute the Saudi Royal Family, knock out ALL Iranian military installations, nuclear facilities & force regime change, liquidate Gaza of it’s impure elements by force, dislodge Hezbollah from Lebanon. Unless these critical steps are taken we’ll continue down our same dangerous path.

Mar 18, 2009 - 5:11 am 3. Canuckistani:

`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Mar 18, 2009 - 6:01 am 4. Jerry:

Re G Alston: Secularism does NOT work. There is no progress without acting on assumptions. So it turns out that it is the worth of the assumptions that determines outcome. Viewing the world as without direction or meaning is a poor assumption for making progress.

Religion does not work, either. Assumptions about God’s needs and intentions are what has made for much death and destruction in the world, not unlike secularism, which in many cases mimics communist nihilism.

Curiosity works, modesty works, good cheer works, emotional attachments to others works, not doing to others what you do not want done to yourself works, cooperation and competition short of war works, self-criticism works (when done in private).

One of the things that works best is sitting quietly with your hands folded in front of you. The human need to do something, as in the case of Obama, presumes that working toward an end will achieve that end. Sometimes not doing anything will better achieve a certain class of ends. The problem in the modern world is that we elect people or pay people to solve problems which by their nature cannot be solved in a reasonable way. Then, we presume that we have wasted our vote or our money. Worse, we have changed the “system” with no obvious benefit.

Mar 18, 2009 - 7:28 am 5. yo:

How many ways does g alston above have it wrong.
Well, how about all of them.
Science proves God is not the author of morality? Anyone who believes that is so far off the reservation that there is actually very little hope that anything can be done for them. Period.
Secularism is the answer? Has this dolt never even heard of the USSR? Wow. Incredible that people this stupid are even allowed to vote.

Mar 18, 2009 - 7:29 am 6. tanstaafl:

Middle Eastern “dialogue”…The truth is off to the side, part of another taxonomy of discourse; the purpose of “dialogue” is to keep it there.

And inside the Islamic view of the world, any formal agreements with the enemy can be viewed as pragmatic, temporary, non binding. (thus Iran pursues a nuclear weapon with impunity, despite being a signatory to the nuclear ban treaty.) While taqiyaa (lying to the infidel) is an approved method of negotiating with the enemy in Islam.

So while we occupy ourselves self-righteously expounding politically correct views on the detainment of prisoners at Guantanamo (and our President decides to abolish the term “enemy combatant”) or while we are offering the Constitutional right of habeas corpus to individuals who don’t know a habeas from a corpus and while we are delicately inveighing against rendition and “torture”, those individuals who consider us Satan and would gleefully slaughter us given the slightest opportunity…have got to be terribly amused and, even, heartened at their potential for success against such a stupid enemy.

Instead, our fate is now in the hands of one-dimensional, small men and women without vision, knowledge of history, or the courage to act, except insofar as they are prospecting for votes.

Yes, and many purporting to keep us informed in “the news” (aka journalists) suffer the same limitations.

Mar 18, 2009 - 7:31 am 7. solicitr:

G Alston:
“to be a real christian you have to deny the reality of evolution.”

Absolute piffle. You might, for one among many instances, look over the Vatican’s salute to Darwin this month. Only fundamentalists and scriptural literalists deny evolution. No mainstream church does so.

Mar 18, 2009 - 7:49 am 8. Saltherring:

G Alston,

The “reality of evolution”? What reality? That the universe and all that exists within it came into being spontaneously and by pure coincidence?…or in a big bang? Utter lunacy….

Belief in the false religion of evolution requires much more faith than belief in Almighty God.

Mar 18, 2009 - 7:50 am 9. tanstaafl:

And another problem with the American mind…the thrust and impact of a significant piece like this article can become diluted as people spin off into the hashed and re-hashed topic of God v. Evolution.

Mar 18, 2009 - 8:06 am 10. G Alston:

#7 — Absolute piffle. You might, for one among many instances, look over the Vatican’s salute to Darwin this month.

Evolution says that man is the result of natural processes. If you accept that this is real then you also accept that morals, ethics etc are also natural and are the result of natural processes. If you assume morals come from god than you deny evolution. Can’t be both. Pick one and only one.

Yes, even the pope realizes the conundrum and that the church has been in a losing battle with science for years. So in recent years the pope has said evolution is real EXCEPT for man. It makes the church seem science friendly.

This is why they’re celebrating Darwin, to **appear** as if church and science are on the same page. They’re not. Your “piffle” is likely because you simply took what they were doing at face value. Look a little deeper, and THINK.

#4 Secularism does NOT work. There is no progress without acting on assumptions.

The secular state has worked in the case of our little republic since 1776. That seems like a reasonable track record proving that it DOES work.

Mar 18, 2009 - 8:40 am 11. G Alston:

#9 — And another problem with the American mind…the thrust and impact of a significant piece like this article can become diluted as people spin off into the hashed and re-hashed topic of God v. Evolution.

Learn to flipping read. Do you understand the concept of illustration?

The evolution comment was to illustrate that the christians are also living in the middle ages like the islamics, thus voiding the author’s contention of some imagined difference or that western civilisation would fold.

(The article isn’t significant, either. It’s just another variant of an older argument.)

Mar 18, 2009 - 8:45 am 12. G Alston:

#8 — The “reality of evolution”? What reality? That the universe and all that exists within it came into being spontaneously and by pure coincidence?…or in a big bang? Utter lunacy…

That you can post this in 2009 on a western message board is proof that Solway’s assertion is wrong: a medieval belief system by some will not destroy western civilisation.

Thank you for proving my contention for me.

Mar 18, 2009 - 8:54 am 13. Race Inc.:

Or, as Jesse Jackson would put it: “First, we take Jerusalem, then we take Hymietown. (Then I cut Barack’s nuts off….)”

Mar 18, 2009 - 9:38 am 14. tanstaafl:

Can’t be both. Pick one and only one.

There’s more to the world G Alston than the either/or circuitry of your own dichotomous “thought” processes.

God willing, your current hugely limited capacity for understand & analysis will evolve with time.

Burp.

Mar 18, 2009 - 10:00 am 15. Charles:

David, for the most part I agree with your central thesis however I find that I must take three exceptions to what you’ve written:

1) “the so-called “war on terror,”…is really a war of attrition between two competing civilizations…”

Actually, it is a war between civilization and barbarism; between enlightenment and illiteracy; between secularism and islamofascism.

2) “As he himself wrote in The Audacity of Hope…”

I am not at all convinced the empty suit you refer to as the “Unidentified Flying Obama” but frequently referred to as “The Teleprompter President”, actually authored that book; by all appearances, he is not at all capable of a work even of that simple magnitude.

3)”…A man without a discernible core identity has been given a free pass by a majority of bedazzled Americans…”

Unequivocally false. He was elected by approximately 26% of eligible voters and only 32% of registered voters. He was ’selected’ by 52% of those who supposedly participated in the election but deselected by 57 million Americans. This election was, to say the least, tainted by the likes of Acorn and the mysterious and unaccounted for $750 million campaign fund.

Unfortunately the “silent majority” has once again remained silent…until now. But that majority is becoming aware as the incompetence of this dreadful administration and the clear danger it is presenting to the people of this great Nation becomes increasingly apparent and that majority will act. As Melville once said: “There is sobbing of the strong, and a pall upon the land; But the People in their weeping bare the iron hand, beware the People weeping when they bare the iron hand.”

Mar 18, 2009 - 10:28 am 16. truepeers:

G Alston,

You fail to understand what the Pope believes:

Evolution says that man is the result of natural processes. If you accept that this is real then you also accept that morals, ethics etc are also natural and are the result of natural processes. If you assume morals come from god than you deny evolution. Can’t be both. Pick one and only one.

Yes, even the pope realizes the conundrum and that the church has been in a losing battle with science for years. So in recent years the pope has said evolution is real EXCEPT for man. It makes the church seem science friendly.

-you fail because you don’t see the third choice, the science of man, which is important to Benedict’s thinking: his contention that a proper, Christian, understanding of man requires a specifically *anthropological* form of science. Morals or ethics cannot be explained by the natural sciences because they are not rooted in the origin of physics, chemistry, or biology, but rather in the origin of language. Once one begins to take seriously questions into the nature of the origin of language, one may begin to appreciate that language, being an inherently public, shared phenomenon, could only have happened in some kind of memorable event, in other words in some kind of act of Creation. Now the pure scientist has no way of knowing whether this was an event in which man created God or God created man. That question can be left to faith, but the point is that a proper anthropological sciences evacuates most of the presumed differences between the two, making discourses like yours, obsessed with some phony evolution vs. creation debate, into a thoughtless ritual propagated by second-tier public intellectuals to entertain the masses for big bucks.

Furthermore, it is only when we understand better how culture or language is generated, anthropologically, that we can hope to find the mix of reason and faith that we will need to move beyond the present crisis. There is a discipline of Generative Anthropology, somewhat distinct from the Pope’s anthropological Christianity that is taking up this task. There is also the Christian anthropology of Rene Girard. Any reading in these areas will take you beyond your current either/or impasse.

Mar 18, 2009 - 1:09 pm 17. Mike O'Malley:

You know G. Alston it would help if you weren’t quite so clueless. You mock Christians as follows:

“Meanwhile, claiming that islamic belief is 1000 years behind the west conveniently ignores the fact that to be a real christian you have to deny the reality of evolution. They’re not 1000 years behind the west. They’re on your page. Christian belief that god is the source of morals is utterly at odds with science, yet western civilisation hasn’t imploded.”

However:

1 – Christian doctrine does not require that one deny the “reality” of evolution. See the Catholic Magisterium.

2 – There would be no modern science, no modern technological society, no modern medicine if it were not for Western Christianity. You G. Alston would most likely be deprived of modern human, civil and democratic rights without Christianity for that matter either. Try figuring our just what scientific advances were given to the modern world by scientist and Roman Catholic priest Father Georges Lemaître or scientist and Augustinian Roman Catholic priest Gregor Johann Mendel for that matter.

3 – Christian doctrine does not conflict with science. Neither is the Christian belief in G-d as a source of morals at odds with science. In fact modern science has been built upon basic Christian doctrines such as the Universe in knowable and the Universe obeys rational laws. Christian doctrine and belief are however in conflict with Philosophical Materialistic Determinism, Nihilism and barbaric Social Darwinism masquerading as “science”.

4 – And perhaps not surprisingly you conveniently ignore the obvious. Craven and weak, secularized Western Europe, hostile to its Christian heritage, is undergoing demographic, cultural and institutional collapse … a civilizational implosion!

Mar 18, 2009 - 1:11 pm 18. truepeers:

I might add that the dichotomy between Christian civilization and secular civilization is also largely an intellectual house of cards. Western secular modernity is the outgrowth of a Judeo-Christian world view (for reasons I won’t list now) and not something clearly distinct from it. And that lack of a black and white historical rupture is why we have all these contrived evolution vs. creation debates from people who cannot accept that there is not some clear-cut historical distinction between Christianity – the religion which minimizes the difference between god and man to the point that it almost erases the difference between the religious and the secular – and secular modernity. Judeo-Christianity is radically different from other religions because it reveals the sacrificial processes by which the other religions work; and in doing so, it makes sacred the person, which is key to understanding how a secular, free market modernity evolved from out of the ritualized social hierarchies of the classical world.

Mar 18, 2009 - 1:17 pm 19. truepeers:

belief that god is the source of morals is utterly at odds with science

-but what science must be able satisfactorily to explain is why we have a god concept in the first place. None of our present crowd of professional atheists can do this, which should be clear to any truly critical thinker. As I have implied, I think that our god concept is best understood in terms of our experience of language. Once one understands the reasons for this, then one can see that the source of morals is rooted in our experience of language, whose mysterious guarantee – the fact that language works to bring a new kind of human order into being – is conceptualized as “god”. And once once sees this, one has not answered the question of whether god really exists, but one has minimized the difference between faith in g-d and faith in “god”.

Mar 18, 2009 - 1:31 pm 20. Mike O'Malley:

Kudos truepeers!

I was about to introduce you to the work of Rene Girard, and what do I find? You yourself recommend Girard two lines above my initial post! Well done!

I’ll add that Girardian theory explains how the Gospels themselves desacrilize the world and make rational science and secularism possible. Christianity functions as a demystifiying (demythifying) anti-religion without which the Modern World would be impossible. Wouldn’t you agree?

Mar 18, 2009 - 2:34 pm 21. G Alston:

#16 — You fail to understand what the Pope believes:

I understand it fine, and it’s not science.

…could only have happened in some kind of memorable event, in other words in some kind of act of Creation.

Science doesn’t make conclusions and look for data to fit.

#17 — There would be no modern science, no modern technological society, no modern medicine if it were not for Western Christianity.

False. The Enlightenment was all about the rediscovery of the classical world and the rejection of the religious explanation.

You get points for repeating this canard for the 900th time on this board though. Just think, if you say it enough times maybe it may come true: proof by repeated assertion.

And perhaps not surprisingly you conveniently ignore the obvious. Craven and weak, secularized Western Europe, hostile to its Christian heritage, is undergoing demographic, cultural and institutional collapse … a civilizational implosion!

Last time I looked Europe was still there. Seems to me their problems have a lot to do with the guilt trip from killing millions in world wars, but hey, you’re the expert here.

I will say I love your logic though: Europe has problems, and Europe is secular, therefore Europes problems are caused by being secular. Reductio ad absurdum much?

Mar 18, 2009 - 2:37 pm 22. Mike O'Malley:

Last time I looked Europe was still there? Look again without you intellectual blinders and you may well see emerging Eurabia…

Secularism in death … and Secular Europe is but a dead man walking…

Mar 18, 2009 - 2:49 pm 23. Mike O'Malley:

#21 False. The Enlightenment was all about the rediscovery of the classical world and the rejection of the religious explanation.

Here is a clue, by Dr. Richard E. Rubenstein:

Aristotle’s Children: How Christians, Muslims, and Jews Rediscovered Ancient Wisdom and Illuminated the Dark Ages

http://www.amazon.com/Aristotles-Children-Christians-Rediscovered-Illuminated/dp/0151007209

Mar 18, 2009 - 2:53 pm 24. truepeers:

I understand it fine, and it’s not science.

-What do you understand? Care to show us what Benedict “really” means when he says that Christianity’s truth claims can be proven through the human sciences? Care to show how ethics or morals can be explained by the natural sciences? I know how people try to do this, but I mean care to try to show it in a way that would bring forth something other than wry smiles in those of us learned in anthropological sciences?

Science doesn’t make conclusions and look for data to fit.

-science certainly makes hypotheses and looks for data. And all sciences depend on the articulation of intellectual paradigms that make new questions and hypotheses possible. All I am suggesting is that you are not up to date on the latest paradigms and hypotheses concerning the kind of science Benedict values.

However, there is a fundamental difference between natural and human sciences: the latter must take into account that the observer is existentially and ethically involved in the human behaviours he observes and values. One’s values cannot be separated from one’s way of seeing. A “value free” human science of the kind Max Weber proposed doesn’t work because it cannot allow itself to recognize – at least not openly, honestly – in setting out to study the human, what kinds of values, what kinds of politics, work and are more deserving of study. If you don’t come to “conclusions” about what works before you begin to study, you end up in a sea of ethical relativism, full of countless discrete observations, pretending to treat neutrally all human phenomena as equally important, so that you can never add up the massive data piles of the human sciences in achieving any usable vision of the human as a whole.

Human sciences, not in all respects but in many, are not open to the same tests of proof, or disprovability as are the natural sciences. The human sciences are proved by their market success over time, in other words in terms of their ability to provide useful information and ethical paradigms to the art of living with other people.

And to fail to see this difference between the sciences, however much that difference may be diminishing with time, is not the mark of scientific purity, but intellectual arrogance.

Mar 18, 2009 - 3:14 pm 25. truepeers:

Mike O’Malley:

I’ll add that Girardian theory explains how the Gospels themselves desacrilize the world and make rational science and secularism possible. Christianity functions as a demystifiying (demythifying) anti-religion without which the Modern World would be impossible. Wouldn’t you agree?

- I would indeed; and I rather suspect that Benedict himself has read Rene Girard and has to some degree been influenced by him and certainly by others, like von Balthasar, who have made of Christianity an anthropological science.

Mar 18, 2009 - 3:20 pm 26. Mike O'Malley:

opps … my dyslexia, my bad …

I’ll re-edit and repost:

“Last time (you) looked Europe was still there”? Look again without your intellectual blinders and you may well see emerging Eurabia…

Secularism is death Secularism is sterility … and Secular Europe is but a dead man walking…

Mar 18, 2009 - 4:31 pm 27. G Alston:

22 — Secularism in death … and Secular Europe is but a dead man walking…

You have to stop this; I’m laughing too much.

Indeed, Europe has turned its back on god who will smite them all for doing so.

Don’t people like you have witches to burn or something?

Mar 18, 2009 - 5:02 pm 28. G Alston:

#24 — Care to show how ethics or morals can be explained by the natural sciences?

Evolution.

Mar 18, 2009 - 5:12 pm 29. G Alston:

#24 — However, there is a fundamental difference between natural and human sciences: the latter must take into account that the observer is existentially and ethically involved in the human behaviours he observes and values.

Heisenberg is well understood in science. Application of a copycat analogue in a soft science isn’t a breakthrough. Sorry to rain on the parade.

I know how people try to do this, but I mean care to try to show it in a way that would bring forth something other than wry smiles in those of us learned in anthropological sciences?

I’d like to hear how learned “those of us” are. My daughter is an anthropologist. (She’d love this place, no doubt.)

And to fail to see this difference between the sciences, however much that difference may be diminishing with time, is not the mark of scientific purity, but intellectual arrogance.

Anyone not drinking YOUR koolaid is a poopy head. I get it.

Mar 18, 2009 - 5:17 pm 30. Marie Claude:

I appreciate the well written article, though I would like to add that is more a youth phenomenon, youngs like to have a cause, before this was the communist internationale, nowadays, that the communism has shown its failures, they need to get to get a new cause for their rebellous energy, that is where the Hamas supposed fight for an indepandant country subtilly infiltrated its propaganda among the students, generally lefty. Though our governments must survey that these movement don’t degenerate into future terrorist associations, like some did in the early eighties, but were anti-capitalism

Mar 18, 2009 - 6:56 pm 31. Marie Claude:

Mike O Malley, I wonder who got the su glasses, cuz, last time I checked

Aristote was translated in Mont-St-Michel, according to a specialist in the kind of history, Mr Gouggenheim

I made a reply on the subject with links saying that

http://www.sudanesethinker.com/2009/03/14/second-chance-at-renaissance/#comments

Mar 18, 2009 - 7:07 pm 32. Marie Claude:

Eurabia, Americabia, who knows, until we still get the right infos, nothing to worst can happen

Mar 18, 2009 - 7:08 pm 33. truepeers:

Evolution (i.e. biological, not cultural evolution) cannot explain ethics because whatever biological evolution we needed in becoming language-using humans this necessary condition is not sufficient to explaining culture. Culture is fundamentally scenic; it is historical. It requires shared events and memory to exist: not biological events, human, ethical events

You’re not a poopy head because you disagree with me. But instead of being defensive you might take the opportunity on offer to see the limits of your claims. What are you scared of? Human sciences are not “soft”, though many social scientists are softheaded, in comparison to natural sciences: they are different though they share some things in common.

Mar 18, 2009 - 8:12 pm 34. Mike O'Malley:

Marie Claude, my dyslexia is forever, my new lenses are at my optometrist’s!

You can locate a video and a audio file of Dr. Rubenstein here:

http://www.aei.org/events/filter.all,eventID.1478/event_detail.asp

These are lecture details derived from the book:

Aristotle’s Children

John Courtney Murray Lecture Series
Start: Thursday, March 22, 2007 5:30 PM
End: Thursday, March 22, 2007 7:00 PM
Location: Wohlstetter Conference Center, Twelfth Floor, AEI
1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036

The rediscovery of Aristotle’s works in Spain by twelfth-century Roman Catholic monks was one of the most significant events in Western intellectual history. The subsequent upheaval in philosophy, theology, and science transformed Christian thinking, unleashing the West’s first scientific revolution and putting a unique stamp on Europe’s new universities and its rising intelligentsia. In this lecture, marking the return of the John Courtney Murray Lecture Series, Professor Richard E. Rubenstein will explore the causes and nature of this achievement and why it still goes largely unrecognized. He will pay particular attention to why the “Aristotelian Revolution” took place with so little violence, and what we have to learn from these events in an age of religious terrorism.

Rubenstein, a specialist on religion and conflict, is the author of seven books, including Aristotle’s Children: How Christians, Muslims, and Jews Rediscovered Ancient Wisdom and Illuminated the Middle Ages (Harvest Books, 2003) and Thus Saith the Lord: The Revolutionary Moral Vision of Isaiah and Jeremiah (Harcourt, 2006).

Mar 18, 2009 - 8:28 pm 35. Frank:

ATTENTION THOSE WHO SAY EVOLUTION IS “JUST A THEORY”

Some scientific explanations are so well established that no new evidence is likely to alter them. The explanation becomes a scientific theory. In everyday language a theory means a hunch or speculation. Not so in science. In science, the word theory refers to a comprehensive explanation of an important feature of nature that is supported by many facts gathered over time. Theories also allow scientists to make predictions about as yet unobserved phenomena.

Theories are falsifiable, meaning it is logically possible they can be proved wrong. This is an essential feature of science since anything that cannot logically be proved wrong (sound like anyone you know?) is absolutely useless to use within the scientific method because it leads to tautology and truism which is what science is trying to avoid.

That something is falsifiable doesn’t mean there isn’t evidence (or proof even) for it, just that it is theoretically possible to discover evidence that *could* require the theory to be altered.

There is more evidence for the theory of evolution (much, much more) than there is for the theory of relativity, or the theory of gravity, but you take no issues with those because they don’t clash with your preconceived religious notions. Furthermore, chances are that everything you learned about evolution was creationist ignorance or outright falsehood.

Mar 18, 2009 - 10:46 pm 36. G Alston:

#31 — Aristote was translated in Mont-St-Michel, according to a specialist in the kind of history, Mr Gouggenheim

Your link is interesting; a young Sudanese who agrees that secularism is how to defeat islam.

Mar 19, 2009 - 12:09 am 37. Mike O'Malley:

Frank says: Some scientific explanations are so well established that no new evidence is likely to alter them.

Mike O’Malley asks:
How do you know this Frank? How could you know this Frank? From what god like perspective do you come to this “knowledge”?

.

Frank says: There is more evidence for the theory of evolution (much, much more) than there is for the theory of relativity, or the theory of gravity,

Mike O’Malley says:
This seems misleading. The quality of the volumes of evidence for evolution differs from that for Special and General Relativity. Museums full of bones constitute much, much more evidence at times for descent between species which has on occasion been disproved by recent molecular genetic work. The quality of the evidence for Special and General Relativity may indeed be better. Moreover, the empirical evidence for different parts of the different flavors of Neo-Darwinist evolutionary theories vary. Recall that Common Descent in Classical Darwinism is “in the bag” so to speak, put there by modern molecular genetics which ironically disproved other aspects Classical Darwinism.

.

Frank says: There is more evidence for the theory of evolution (much, much more) than there is for the theory of relativity, or the theory of gravity, but you take no issues with those because they don’t clash with your preconceived religious notions.

Mike O’Malley asks:
And you don’t dismiss certain arguments made by advocates for Intelligent Design out of hand because they clash with your preconceived religious (or irreligious) notions. Moreover, do not many physicist speculate about “multiverses” because the implications of the Big Bang clash with their preconceived religious notions aesthetic preferences?

.

Frank says: Furthermore, chances are that everything you learned about evolution was creationist ignorance or outright falsehood.

Mike O’Malley wonders: why the insult? … why the degrading presumption? Is this based upon some stereotype of knuckle-dragging benighted religious believers? One would hope not. … and why not present one’s arguments like a gentlemen?

Mar 19, 2009 - 4:25 am 38. Marie Claude:

Mike

“The Syriac [Christians] were in effect the essential intermediaries of the transmission into Arabic of the philosophical texts of the ancient Greeks,” who generously gave far more than the reluctant takers took. Obtuse westerners betray their lack of discrimination and their poverty of real knowledge in failing to differentiate between Syriac culture and the Arabic-Muslim culture that, by means of the Jihad, conquered and cruelly stamped out Nestorian (and Coptic and Byzantine) society.

Unlike their Muslim beneficiaries, however, the Syriac Christians could assimilate the full range of Greek logic and speculation. The Johannine Logos stemmed from the Greek Logos and the Christianity of the Patres – whether Greek, Latin, or Syriac – therefore comported itself as a rational theology; already in Late Antiquity, Cappadocians and Syrians stood out as the chief developers of Neo-Platonism; emperors both Pagan and Christian sought counsel from the professors of Antioch’s renowned Daphnaeum. In a chapter on “Islam and Greek Knowledge,” Gouguenheim notes that for Muslims, on the other hand, the Logos constituted an inassimilable scandal, subversive of the absolute submission to Allah’s commands, as articulated in the Koran, that the name Islam denotes. Islam kept of Greek thought “in general [only] that which could not come in contradiction with Koranic teaching.” Furthermore, “Greece – and so too Rome – represented a world radically foreign to Islam, for reasons religious, but also political”; and, unlike the Latinate and Frankish peoples, “Muslims did not interest themselves in the languages of those whom they had conquered” because “Arabic was the sacred language par excellence, and that of revelation.”

from my first link in my sudanese’s friend blog

and

Le rôle de l’abbaye du Mont Saint-Michel au cours du Moyen Age ne se limite pas au domaine religieux, artistique, militaire ou politique1. Elle joua également un rôle important dans l’histoire littéraire de l’Europe occidentale. En effet, nous devons reconnaître en cette abbaye un des centres les plus importants de diffusion de la littérature aristotélicienne pendant la seconde moitié du XIIe siècle

and

La poésie populaire hispano-arabe, tout comme celle des troubadours de la plus
haute époque, n’est pas uniquement, comme on a trop souvent tendance à le
croire, tournée vers la glorification de l’amour courtois. L’“amour courtois”, ou spiritualisé
ou platonique, est exactement l’équivalent de ce que les Arabes d’Espagne
appelaient le hubb al-muruwa. Je crois même de plus en plus que cette glorification
d’un amour spiritualisé, qui caractérise tant de productions poétiques de l’époque
médiévale, a été empruntée par l’Europe à l’Espagne musulmane.

So I am not entering in the debate “who’s right”, though I tend to bend on Mr Gouggenheim, often when such questions are set the American anglo saxon version is privilegied, but that doesn’t meen it’s reality, it also often a question of media means (ie who discovered AIDS virus the first )

Well Al Andalous was a brillant civilisation, kinda unbelievable when we know how the muslim world evolved, there were many exchanges between the artists , litterators, scientists of the european countries and the Califfat, though seems that Aristote philosophy didn’t impress their mind exept the aristotelian scientist part

Mar 19, 2009 - 6:07 am 39. G Alston:

#33 — Human sciences are not “soft”, though many social scientists are softheaded, in comparison to natural sciences: they are different though they share some things in common.

Soft as in opinion driven rather than fact driven. Psychology comes to mind as an example. Astrophysics is a hard science, purely data driven.

Evolution (i.e. biological, not cultural evolution) cannot explain ethics because whatever biological evolution we needed in becoming language-using humans this necessary condition is not sufficient to explaining culture.

Evolution can’t explain a lot of knowledge gaps at the present time, either, so the anti-Darwin crowd has invented an entire industry based on trying to upset the entire thing. That this has been labeled the God-Of-The-Gaps-Argument is telling.

The fact that as time proceeds that gaps get filled — and never by the supernatural — says that the general theory is correct despite the obvious fact that some of the details are or may be wrong for a while.

Evolution has one underlying and unifying assumption, which is that what we are is the result of natural forces. That means ethics and morals are assumed to be a natural development even if we don’t yet understand how this happened.

As for any discomfort that we don’t understand something in full at present, I have none. Religion has been around for millenia and has never once been proved correct about any natural real world phenomenon. e.g. science and reason have been handing religion its lunch for 500 years going and I see no change in this.

Mar 19, 2009 - 7:58 am 40. G Alston:

#37 — And you don’t dismiss certain arguments made by advocates for Intelligent Design out of hand because they clash with your preconceived religious (or irreligious) notions.

I’ll dismiss them out of hand then, and laugh loudly while I’m doing it. And this has sod all to do with preconceived notions about religion or the religious.

Science lies in the ability to create a hypothesis and use this to predict experimental results. In science you don’t know the results. You hope for certain results (if your idea is correct) but that’s not the same as KNOWING. And if you’re wrong in the results you get, you figure out why. Rinse. Lather. Repeat.

ID meanwhile is essentially the invocation of magic, and the only possible prediction is more magic. ID isn’t a theory, and since it can’t predict it’s not even a usable hypothesis. As with all forms of “christian science” it’s backwards, assuming the conclusion and using cherrypicking attempts to divine supporting data.

Advocates of ID are little more than rabidly anti-science types cloaking their God Of The Gaps argument with scientific sounding cachet like “theory” and giving tautalogical names to that which they don’t understand e.g. “Irreducible Complexity” in an effort to be perceived as doing serious scholarship. Obviously it does fool some of the laymen accordingly, but practioners of science view it as the silliness that it is and rightfully ignore it.

And yet the whole thing is very sad. These are the people who are causing religion to lose favour. Science/evolution doesn’t know how things came to be but the working assumption is that it’s natural. Religion doesn’t know either but ID adherents are trying to pretend that it does. There needn’t be this division, though. If religion would simply say “we don’t really know either but we’ll assume that god designed the universe to use evolution to create sentient beings and their properties” this would be acceptable to all. We could all rejoice in finding out how it works and the faithful would smile knowingly that god’s design was indeed masterful. There isn’t a need to clash with science. Religious based “alternative science” will NEVER win any argument with real science, and the only thing it does is unfairly paint all religious belief in a bad light. It doesn’t need to be that way.

Mar 19, 2009 - 8:28 am 41. PatriotUSA:

tanstaafl wrote:

And inside the Islamic view of the world, any formal agreements with the enemy can be viewed as pragmatic, temporary, non binding. (thus Iran pursues a nuclear weapon with impunity, despite being a signatory to the nuclear ban treaty.) While taqiyaa (lying to the infidel) is an approved method of negotiating with the enemy in Islam.

Accurate I would like to add that in islam a treaty, or any “deal” is indeed temporary. The best one can get is Hudna, a temporary truce good for the maximum of ten years. During these ten years the are provisions within islam that allow the continuance of waging jihad, to convert, subjecting thoise under the Hudna to the dhimmi way of life via paying the poll tax,
or destroying them. There is no way one can ever be at peace with an ideaology like islam. Need examples, there are hundreds of them going back to the 7th century. Islam is responsible for more innocent deaths than any other ideaology, religion or society. The wholesale ruination of cultures and classes of people is well documented. There is no peace in islam nor can there be peace with islam. Take a look at the majority of global conflicts and the one commom denomenator is islam. If it is not given to them, they will take by force and that force can be by “stealth jihad” as Robert Spencer so documnted in his book of the same title.

Those who think that being nice, apologizing, making treaties with, assisiting with tons of aid and funds and pretending islam is not a threat, like our current administartion are truly on a ship of fools. ANY deal making, appeasement or agreeing with, is seen as WEAKNESS by islamofacists and islam. They will not stop attacking us. On the contrary, they will increase the attacks and pressures to achive their goal of world domination under an islamic caliphate.

The current President who is walking in the same failed policies as Carter did will only garner worse results. Diversity and multiculturalism are the toxic stews that are undoing Eurarbia, Britainistan and next us, the USA. Current world leaders do not truly understand the global threat from islamofacism. It is ass backwards to feed the hands that would like nothing more than to convert you. If that fails, then will gladly kill us as the infidels that they hold us to be. It is good vs. evil. The OBUMA administration with it’s racist and anti-semitic cabinet appointments is so busy tossing our allies under the bus they cannot see the threats right under their collective noses.

Mar 19, 2009 - 9:21 am 42. bear:

21:Science doesn’t make conclusions and look for data to fit.

What about AGW or Climate Change or whatever you want to call it. I really don’t think you want to get into a debate about the history of science on this blog.

Mar 19, 2009 - 10:51 am 43. truepeers:

Evolution can’t explain a lot of knowledge gaps at the present time, either, so the anti-Darwin crowd has invented an entire industry based on trying to upset the entire thing. That this has been labeled the God-Of-The-Gaps-Argument is telling.

The fact that as time proceeds that gaps get filled — and never by the supernatural — says that the general theory is correct despite the obvious fact that some of the details are or may be wrong for a while.

-I’m sorry but you are not countering my argument because you don’t understand it. Mine is not a god-in-the-gaps argument, trying to put god where science can’t yet explain something about the cosmos. Rather I am interested in why humans have a god concept in the first place and I am assuming that we must have a science to explain this, even if that science can never evacuate the question of whether there really is a god.

It is an anthropological argument pointing out that there is no way a purely biological theory of evolution will ever be able to explain the ethical. The ethical is an *event*, in historical time, that is categorically unlike a genetic mutation. Ethics require a shared consciousness of a memorable event: whatever the biological requirements for that, our explanation of the ethical will always be primarily concerned with the scenic or historical conditions for this event for that is what ethics are primarily about: human organization in time (culture has clearly evolved much more quickly than any theory of biological evolution would allow: so cultural evolution has to be explained by something else).

In writing off the “supernatural” what you fail to appreciate is that belief in the supernatural is a human phenomena that needs to be explained. And it can be explained, in terms of our experience of language, but this explanation is not reducible to biological explanation: “god” is a phenomena of human interaction on a shared scene of language.

Religion has been around for millenia and has never once been proved correct about any natural real world phenomenon. e.g. science and reason have been handing religion its lunch for 500 years going and I see no change in this.

-only someone particularly uninterested in all the claims religion makes about humanity could be so silly as to say this. Religion is ethics; it is a form of anthropology and as such is full of insights into the human, as well as limits in how far it understands. How could you possibly be so arrogant as to think all the people of religious faith are involved in something completely meaningless and useless, as if they were fooled by something only a few brights are capable of seeing clearly? You need to look up “gnosticism” because that is your religion.

Mar 19, 2009 - 11:02 am 44. bear:

Why is it that many if not most Physicists are religious or at the least believe in a creator?

Mar 19, 2009 - 11:38 am 45. bear:

“conveniently ignores the fact that to be a real christian you have to deny the reality of evolution”.

So it was written(it must be so)…I honestly don’t remember learning this…I thought it was to accept Jesus as your savior…

Mr. Alston has an axe to grind with the fundamentalists.

Mar 19, 2009 - 11:47 am 46. G Alston:

#43 — It is an anthropological argument pointing out that there is no way a purely biological theory of evolution will ever be able to explain the ethical.

I’d give that one about 50 – 100 years before enough experience with AI and simulation allows man to model well enough to determine if moral behaviour is emergent. If true in the theoretical sim world this isn’t proof that this is what happened in the real world, but says that this COULD happen (and probably did.) From there Ockham’s Razor takes care of the rest of it.

It’s still a biological evolution explanation.

And yes knowing this is why the pope’s separation of man vs the rest of the planet re evolution being reality was such a surprise. Surely the pope knows that his was a proclamation that would and could be disproved sooner rather than later? Answer? No. I think the pope thought he was buying another 500 years of standoff.

Mar 19, 2009 - 1:49 pm 47. truepeers:

I’d give that one about 50 – 100 years before enough experience with AI and simulation allows man to model well enough to determine if moral behaviour is emergent.

-how can AI simulate morality or ethics, the foundation of which is our fear of our fellow man and knowledge of our mortality? How are you going to make an AI machine that fears its own death or inability to reproduce? What do you think human consciouness is? Not sure what you mean by “moral behaviour is emergent”: why do we distinguish morality and ethics? We tend to assume something minimal and universal about the former – a golden rule, say – while the latter is relative to the demands of time and place. But in either case, I don’t see how they could have emerged absent a specifically human consciousness of living and dieing at the hands our fellows.

In other words, while you might be able to program a machine to play a game, like chess, the difference between human intelligence and that is that we place the finite game in a larger consciousness of when, or not, to play the finite game, as we struggle with our larger attachment to an open-ended human history that has, we hope, no end game.

Mar 19, 2009 - 2:08 pm 48. G Alston:

#43 — In writing off the “supernatural” what you fail to appreciate is that belief in the supernatural is a human phenomena that needs to be explained.

I did not fail to appreciate this. There’s some pretty good books out there that discuss the invention of religion. A summary form of the basic current thinking can be found in a book by sci-fi author and scientist Stephen Baxter called, simply, “evolution.”

Mar 19, 2009 - 2:21 pm 49. G Alston:

#42 — I really don’t think you want to get into a debate about the history of science on this blog.

Science is a leftist plot, I’m sure.

#45 — So it was written(it must be so)…I honestly don’t remember learning this…I thought it was to accept Jesus as your savior… Mr. Alston has an axe to grind with the fundamentalists.

Many of you here simply cannot read English. Here’s a synopsis: People claim modernity and yet reject the idea that evolution also includes natural development of morals. They reject reality. They are no more modern than the muslims.

I actually prefer fundamentalists in some respect. They’re up front about their rejection of science and evolution. They don’t try to hide it, and they don’t try to dream up new forms of science. They don’t rationalise or make up excuses. They’re not fooling themselves; they *know* they reject science. Some of you here ought to consider the implications.

Mar 19, 2009 - 5:03 pm 50. Mike O'Malley:

G. Alston
Many of you here simply cannot read English. Here’s a synopsis: People claim modernity and yet reject the idea that evolution also includes natural development of morals. They reject reality. They are no more modern than the muslims.

You seem rather full of yourself G. Alston. It seems to me though that you don’t actually consider or even pay attention to what your interlocutors tell you. Your responses doesn’t really address what you have been told. It seems as though much of the time you are making straw man arguments laced with ad hominem abuse.

BTW: if you are referring to evolutionary psychology (EP) above … well, even Steven Pinker conceded privately that much of (EP) comes across as little more than “parlor game” speculation. Informed critics question the scientific nature of evolutionary psychology and view much of EP as fanciful “just-so stories”… “just so stories”, much like the credulous folk tales one might find in the Hadith.

.

G. Alston wrote:I’d give that one about 50 – 100 years before enough experience with AI and simulation allows man to model well enough to determine if moral behaviour is emergent. If true in the theoretical sim world this isn’t proof that this is what happened in the real world, but says that this COULD happen (and probably did.) From there Ockham’s Razor takes care of the rest of it.

Ockham’s Raxor! You shouldn’t play with sharp objects G. Alston. You could hurt yourself. I’ve got to say though that you seem rather over confident given that Dr. Roger Penrose applied Gödel’s incompleteness theorem to this very same issue and found your position wanting perhaps impossible, if I understand you correctly.

Mar 19, 2009 - 6:26 pm 51. G Alston:

#50 — I’ve got to say though that you seem rather over confident given that Dr. Roger Penrose applied Gödel’s incompleteness theorem to this very same issue and found your position wanting perhaps impossible, if I understand you correctly.

I wasn’t talking about modeling the human mind, which really has nothing to do with it anyway. The point would be to create models that allow “something” to evolve to the point where one can observe that which would be interpreted as moral or ethical decisions.

Re Penrose the counter is Kurzweil and his discussions re the singularity. Kurzweil is more focused on computing rather than physics. I’m not convinced that Dr. Penrose was in his element re Emperor’s mind writings. He’s a physicist.

The 50-100 year timeframe I gave earlier is somewhere in the neighbourhood of singularity initialisation.

Mar 19, 2009 - 8:46 pm 52. truepeers:

I actually prefer fundamentalists in some respect.

-Indeed! It seems to me you are so attached to a certain idea of science that if some significant reality does not lend itself to being analyzed by just this kind of science, then to hell with reality. A certain metaphysics, a way of modeling the universe, must be upheld regardless of its limits in respect to human ethical realities. But this attitude is not really scientific. Of course, ultimately, nothing we can say briefly here is likely to shift deeply-held beliefs. But the true scientist knows when to keep an open mind and explore the explanatory power of alternative theories and forms of logic.

But aren’t we supposed to be discussing Islamic imperialism? My apologies to David Solway who has written many fine essays on this topic; but i hope this hasn’t been a completely useless debate.

Mar 20, 2009 - 12:19 am 53. Mike O'Malley:

Regarding G. Alston’s response #51:

Notwithstanding your facile dismissal, Dr. Penrose seems to be on point as he demonstrates that AI is a chimera. You seem to fancy science fiction and futurism, I’d recommend however, that you read Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness, by Dr. Penrose. By the way, Sir Roger Penrose is a mathematical physicist renowned for his work in mathematical physics, in particular his contributions to general relativity and cosmology. He is also a recreational mathematician and philosopher. As a philosopher, Sir Penrose can bring things to the discussion which many scientists can not. I also recommend that you treat others and their ideas with civil respect particularly in light of your apparent preference for science fiction and futurism. You seem to have misrepresented the qualifications of Stephen Baxter, who you recommended above. Baxter is an accomplished hard line science fiction author with degrees in mathematics and engineering, but he appears to be no scientist.

And allow me to offer some friendly criticism:

1)– you have no idea of what you are talking about regarding the relationships between religion, faith, science and reason. Every man has got to know his limitations so I’ll recommend for you books by John Polkinghorne, KBE, FRS, British particle physicist, theologian and ordained Anglican priest . He has written extensively on matters concerning science and faith, and was awarded the Templeton Prize in 2002. You would also do well to read: How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization, by historian Thomas E. Woods Jr. You might do well to consider scientist and Roman Catholic priest Georges Lemaître as well.

2) – the models you tout above “that allow “something” to evolve to the point where one can observe that which would be interpreted as moral or ethical decisions” would not demonstrate what you expect. They would demonstrate Intelligent Design, with Raymond Kurzweil et al in the role of intelligent designers. . .

Mar 20, 2009 - 4:21 am 54. G Alston:

#52 — But aren’t we supposed to be discussing Islamic imperialism?

Yes.

What drove us off track was my saying that christians are not 1000 years ahead of the muslims, and everyone went ballistic at that point to denounce me. e.g….

-Indeed! It seems to me you are so attached to a certain idea of science that if some significant reality does not lend itself to being analyzed by just this kind of science, then to hell with reality.

I simply said that evolution is real and that attempts to bypass this natural explanation to invoke “new ways of thinking etc” is a fancy way of saying that evolution (a natural explanation that doesn’t require gods) isn’t real.

If you assume evolution isn’t real then the difference between you and muslims is merely academic, hence proving my point.

Evolution = natural.
Everything Else = invocation of something not natural.

Any explanation of the human condition that invokes anything other than purely 100% natural forces is equivalent to any and all other explanations starting with the same assumption.

I’m actually very consistent here despite being accused of being close minded.

Mar 20, 2009 - 8:07 am 55. tanstaafl:

21:Science doesn’t make conclusions and look for data to fit.

What about AGW or Climate Change or whatever you want to call it. I really don’t think you want to get into a debate about the history of science on this blog.

Bear speaketh truth, particularly in this observation.

Way too much of what is labelled scientific inquiry these days is tainted with the brush of an agenda.

We can call all this going on (not only in the climate change debate) scientism, not science.

Evolution is fine. However, we should still stand in utter awe at how matter assembled and re-assembled itself over time to make the human hand, or, for that matter, the human brain, sometimes described as the most complex structure in the universe.

And, placing the whole of evolution into one year’s time, he who appeared one second before midnight on December 31st should show some humility in attempting to assess all of these matters.

It is arrogant to be more sure of your theories than the unfolder of some of the greatest mysteries of the behavior of matter, Albert E.

Mar 20, 2009 - 9:17 am 56. truepeers:

G Alston

Any explanation of the human condition that invokes anything other than purely 100% natural forces is equivalent to any and all other explanations starting with the same assumption.

-i’m sorry but that is puritanical thinking that quickly will fall on its face.

Just to clarify, I believe in biological evolution; i also believe in cultural evolution; it’s clear to me the former cannot explain the latter: any student of history can tell you there is no way to explain history biologically. But, you avow, in 50-100 years advances in AI will provide the keys, none of which we presently have.
That’s magical thinking, surely.

Anyway, I’m curious what you think these words that we are sharing are, in terms of a natural or physical phenomenon. When my mind reads the letters on the page, or hears a voice making sounds, it can associate the vowels and consonants and come up with the word. For example, S-c-r-ee-n is a collection of letters or sounds that has a physical or natural reality; but “screen” is something that is truly transcendent: it does not physically reside anywhere; it’s not imprinted on our neurons. Our minds fire a lot of neurons to associate s-c-r-ee-n and come up with “screen”, but “screen” like God, is really something transcendent; it’s among us, not physically in us or anywhere… it is an arbitrarily chosen collection of sounds that has meaning only in the context of a shared community of language rooted in a memorable historical event where some kind of screen, some physical object was pointed to while someone made the sign “s-c-r-ee-n”. The sign works only in a certain kind of ethical context; it is not indexical to nature like an animal signal.

Mar 20, 2009 - 12:30 pm 57. Linda Rivera:

ALL Land STOLEN from JEWS in 1948 ISLAMIC INVASION Must be Returned.
The inalienable rights of Jews to the Biblical heartland must not be violated! No one is demanding Muslims surrender THEIR top religious areas of Mecca and Medina!

In 1948, Egypt invaded Gaza, ethnically cleansing all Jews and in 1948, Jordan invaded Judea, Samaria and east Jerusalem, ethnically cleansing all Jews.

In violent opposition to G-D, Muslim Jordan destroyed 58 synagogues in Jerusalem. The jihad is against the Holy One.

When Israel won the Arab war of aggression in 1967, Jews returned to the areas of their ancestral homeland they had been ethnically cleansed from for 19 years. Anti-Israel propaganda DECEITFULLY calls Jews’ legitimate return “occupation”.

Jews have had a continuous presence in physical and spiritual homeland Israel for 4000 years.

Jewish ownership of the land, homes and buildings stolen from the Jews in the 1948 Islamic invasion must be restored!

END the ARAB OCCUPATION of the Jewish HOLY LAND

Mar 20, 2009 - 12:48 pm 58. Linda Rivera:

In UK, VIOLENT Muslim demonstrators chase police for blocks: “Cowards!” “Run!” “Run you cowards!” “Run you swine!” – Is this what brave Britishers sacrificed and died for in the world wars? They died for our freedom – a freedom which Western leaders no longer guard. With many no-go Muslim areas in the UK, Europe, Israel and India where it is too dangerous for non-Muslims to enter – we are neither safe or free.
Metropolitan Police humiliated at the hands of Muslim demonstrators in London 1/2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97hyDRjdXCE&NR=1

Anti-Israel demonstrators in the West support Hamas:
Hamas declares Jihad to America and Europe
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQE8bf1T5H8&feature=email

The Koran demands every non-Muslim is subjugated under merciless Islamic law – pro-Islam Western leaders and the present, huge Muslim colonization of the West will achieve Islamic conquest.

In a few decades, the EU policy of massive Muslim immigration into Europe will bring to fruition the EU plan: a Muslim majority in Europe and the total destruction of Western civilization. Will the dark era of Europe’s suffering return? When Muslims ruled Eastern Europe, as a tax, one out of five non-Muslim European children were taken from Europe as slaves.

Without firing a single shot, Islam is quickly and easily conquering the Free World with the full cooperation of Western leaders.

Mar 20, 2009 - 12:55 pm 59. G Alston:

#56 — Anyway, I’m curious what you think these words that we are sharing are, in terms of a natural or physical phenomenon.

You’re making Noam Chomsky’s argument but ascribing the supernatural as the explanation. Chomsky may have been proven wrong recently:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/04/16/070416fa_fact_colapinto?currentPage=all

But, you avow, in 50-100 years advances in AI will provide the keys, none of which we presently have. That’s magical thinking, surely.

Darwin was able to go in the correct direction despite not knowing that DNA existed. That technical development took well over 100 years and would have been held to be magical in his day.

#55 — Way too much of what is labelled scientific inquiry these days is tainted with the brush of an agenda.

Agreed. Special interests, religion, and politics abuse scientific inquiry. In medicine insurance companies and government agencies want to use genetics (are you prone to being overweight? etc) to make you pay. That doesn’t mean we ought to shut genetic studies down or that DNA is a socialist plot (although I’m sure socialists would prefer it to be one!)

#55 — It is arrogant to be more sure of your theories than the unfolder of some of the greatest mysteries of the behavior of matter, Albert E.

I didn’t invent evolution, so I have no attachment whatsoever.

Mar 20, 2009 - 1:12 pm 60. G Alston:

#56 — Just to clarify, I believe in biological evolution; i also believe in cultural evolution; it’s clear to me the former cannot explain the latter: any student of history can tell you there is no way to explain history biologically.

I’m not as sure as you are. For instance there’s this:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465002218?ie=UTF8&tag=thrasymachuso-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0465002218

…which explains how biological evolution of the human brain is still happening.

If the above link fails try this:

http://gc.homeunix.net/home/page/Book

The point being that since we’re still evolving biologically it would be difficult for you to separate the point at which you assume cultural evolution takes precedence. Note that I didn’t say “impossible.” I said “difficult.”

Mar 20, 2009 - 1:24 pm 61. Oscar the Grump:

New Islamist tactics in France

http://israelmatzav.blogspot.com/2009/03/where-are-police.html

Mar 20, 2009 - 6:22 pm 62. truepeers:

You’re making Noam Chomsky’s argument but ascribing the supernatural as the explanation. Chomsky may have been proven wrong recently

-low blow! I’m not making a Chomskian argument, not at all; and I’m sympathetic to his critics in that article, not that I think they have quite grasped how language must have evolved from a first, single sign. Maybe you’re confusing Generative Anthropology, which I mentioned above, and CHomsky’s generative grammar… not at all the same thing.

Anyway, I’m not ascribing the supernatural as explanation for anything; I’m noting that people have the idea of the supernatural from the way that language works (which is not biological)…

Darwin was able to go in the correct direction despite not knowing that DNA existed. That technical development took well over 100 years and would have been held to be magical in his day.

-but Darwin had many good reasons to anticipate genetics; you have yet to offer yours for believing that the biological explains the cultural… surely not every science fiction can be justified by Darwin or any genius…

The point being that since we’re still evolving biologically it would be difficult for you to separate the point at which you assume cultural evolution takes precedence. Note that I didn’t say “impossible.” I said “difficult.”

-I believe we are indeed still evolving biologically; and I believe this is now a co-evolution with language and/or culture. I don’t worry about precedence in a general sense, knowing I am both animal and human in some degree. But when it comes to ethics, I’m sure this is the human side of me, the human being defined as the species with language.

Anyway, Michael Tomasello was mentioned in your link on Chomsky: here is a great paper on T’s work that I think you might find interesting as it will tie you into the school of thought I’m indebted to, and it also touches on questions of co-evolution: http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap1301/1301vano.htm

cheers

Mar 20, 2009 - 9:34 pm 63. Another Chuck:

I don’t give a worm muffin about evolution one way or the other. Can we all point our rifles, metaphorically speaking for now, at the subject of this article?

I have a hunch that this economic hole we’ve all falling into will prove a blessing in that the bread and circuses with which our elites have numbed us will end.

Mar 21, 2009 - 6:48 am 64. G Alston:

#62 — Anyway, Michael Tomasello was mentioned in your link on Chomsky: here is a great paper on T’s work that I think you might find interesting…

I read it, thanks. Interesting. I’ve seen other such over the years. Doesn’t seem to me that the good Dr is really saying much other than arguing that sentience is an emergent property. This all seems quite consistent to me.

#62 — -but Darwin had many good reasons to anticipate genetics; you have yet to offer yours for believing that the biological explains the cultural…

Emergent property? Doesn’t seem to require explaining. I’ll visit your site and we can talk more.

#63 Chuck — Can we all point our rifles, metaphorically speaking for now, at the subject of this article? ?

Depends on what you think it says. Reads like old testament smiting prelude to me. e.g. wicked secular Europe and so on, caving in to the muslims.

Solway: would that be the same France that seems clever enough to have already anticipated and solved their energy problem by having over 80% of their energy derived from nuclear power? They’re bright enough to create nuke plants but too stupid to grasp the idea that maybe just maybe the muslims might be bad guys? You have to believe a lot that just ain’t so to buy the premise of this article.

Mar 21, 2009 - 8:52 am 65. Bob Campbell:

PatriotUSA and tanstaafl had it right..

the rest of you are busy making intellectual agruments FOR or AGAINST religion.. or sucking up to science and evolution..

In the mean time we are dealing with Islamic war as prophesied both in the Koran and the Bible.. Islam is a “satanic” religion. Satan does not negotiate, he takes no prisoners — he kills the spirit with hate — this is a war against God. The secular world doesn’t have the guts to do anything about Islam.. if anything, they play right into the hands of the devil.

You need to wake up people. All the intellectual babel in the world will not stop this impending march of evil. Allah will have his day in the “sun” with armies upon armies.. the only Nation that will survive is Israel and it won’t be because of anything any of you said or did.. the universe belongs to God, not man.. God will decide everything in the end!

Mar 21, 2009 - 9:33 am 66. G Alston:

#65 — The secular world doesn’t have the guts to do anything about Islam.. if anything, they play right into the hands of the devil.

Hi, Bob. What you’re seeing doesn’t appear to be a lack of guts. Rather, it appears to be patience. One needn’t be dogmatically religious to understand that evil exists. The only real argument to be had is what ought to be done. You can argue that patience is the wrong approach; at least that seems to be a rational viewpoint.

#53 — They would demonstrate Intelligent Design, with Raymond Kurzweil et al in the role of intelligent designers. . .

Despite your amusingly ironic attempt at a takedown, that’s precisely the point of models. They exist to teach us, and learning what doesn’t work is just important (actually, moreso) as learning what does.

Even as primitive as computing is today, pharma companies are using models as a way to do gauge likely responses. Imagine the “designer” drugs that will be able to be made in the future when computing has enough horsepower to be more accurate; e.g. better modeling of cellular level response. Modern airframes are now almost entirely modeled from the ground up; this saves a great deal of time chasing ideas that aren’t likely to work.

Mar 21, 2009 - 11:50 am 67. Bob Campbell:

@ G Alston — patience is a cop out. It is an excuse to do nothing. Give me one example where a secular movement has STOPPED radical Islam. You simply cannot give me the example because it doesn’t exist. Was it a secular movement that won in Iraq? Certainly NOT! You cannot negotiate with the devil. You can join him, but you cannot change Satan’s goal of world domination, especially with secular beliefs.

Mar 21, 2009 - 9:19 pm 68. Marie Claude:

ah Oscar, you like to make us some promo LMAO

Mar 22, 2009 - 1:37 pm 69. Mike O'Malley:

Marie Claude:

“Muslims did not interest themselves in the languages of those whom they had conquered” because “Arabic was the sacred language par excellence, and that of revelation.”

Yet these arrogant supremacists fail, for well over a millennia, to notice that their sacred revealed Qua’ranic text is not written in Classical Arabic but in a blend of a lost Arabic and Syriac!

I think we may be on the same page here Marie Claude. And I think I can help you understand why the “brilliant civilization” of Al Andalous was so “kinda unbelievable”. It never happened. So don’t believe it. The Myth of the Golden Age of Andalusia Tolerance is a fraud, a myth, a social construct of the European Enlightenment. Islamic Spain was a place of fear, terror, massacre, oppression and genocide; a horror much like the rest. I refer you to Dr. Bernard Lewis, (Dr.) Bat Ye’or and Dr. Andrew Bostom in this regard.

Dr. Rubenstein, who I referred you to above, opened his lecture describing the debt of the “great” Islamic civilizations of the past owed to the Nestorian Christians, who preserved and transmitted to Islam the best of Classical Greece (and the Nestorians were repaid with expropriation, brutalization, humiliation, rape, massacre, slavery, jizya to impoverishment, genocide and finally with negation).

Mar 24, 2009 - 4:00 am 70. Marie Claude:

one can’t say that Al Andalous califfat was unsignificative, if you’d visited the place of Granada, then you would have acknowledged the brillant side of it, architectures are beautiful and technically in advance on what could be compared in the western Europe, even individual houses remains are stil there and priced from the upper spanich calss population.

They were opened to what wasn’t in contradiction to islam beliefs, therefore to philosophy.

Mar 24, 2009 - 3:32 pm 71. Marie Claude:

well I ment, philosophy didn’t enter into their agenda

Also, I suppose that Aristote is determinating for the new architecture gothic style in France, which is called the “french style”, where cathedrals never were so high and innovative as a building science.

Mar 24, 2009 - 3:36 pm 72. Mike O'Malley:

And upon a visit to Winged Victory in Germania, Berlin, one “would have acknowledged the brilliant side of it, architectures are beautiful and technically” advanced… I’d guess so, but I’ve visited the slave markets of Charleston, South Carolina, and I find they mar any idealization of the Antebellum Southern aristocracy …

Here is a taste of what Bat Ye’or and Andrew G. Bostom have to offer.

By the end of the eighth century, the rulers of North Africa and of Andalusia had introduced Malikism, one of the most rigorous schools of Islamic jurisprudence, and subsequently repressed the other Muslim schools of law. Three quarters of a century ago, at a time when political correctness was not dominating historical publication and discourse, Evariste Lévi-Provençal, the pre-eminent scholar of Andalusia, wrote: “The Muslim Andalusian state thus appears from its earliest origins as the defender and champion of a jealous orthodoxy, more and more ossified in a blind respect for a rigid doctrine, suspecting and condemning in advance the least effort of rational speculation.”

The humiliating status imposed on the dhimmis and the confiscation of their land provoked many revolts, punished by massacres, as in Toledo (761, 784-86, 797). After another Toledan revolt in 806, seven hundred inhabitants were executed. Insurrections erupted in Saragossa from 781 to 881, Cordova (805), Merida (805-813, 828 and the following year, and later in 868), and yet again in Toledo (811-819); the insurgents were crucified, as prescribed in Qur’an 5:33*.

The revolt in Cordova of 818 was crushed by three days of massacres and pillage, with 300 notables crucified and 20 000 families expelled. Feuding was endemic in the Andalusian cities between the different sectors of the population: Arab and Berber colonizers, Iberian Muslim converts (Muwalladun) and Christian dhimmis (Mozarabs). There were rarely periods of peace in the Amirate of Cordova (756-912), nor later.

Al-Andalus represented the land of jihad par excellence. Every year, sometimes twice a year, raiding expeditions were sent to ravage the Christian Spanish kingdoms to the north, the Basque regions, or France and the Rhone valley, bringing back booty and slaves. Andalusian corsairs attacked and invaded along the Sicilian and Italian coasts, even as far as the Aegean Islands, looting and burning as they went. Thousands of people were deported to slavery in Andalusia

and

The Muslim Berber Almohads in Spain and North Africa (1130-1232) wreaked enormous destruction on both the Jewish and Christian populations. This devastation- massacre, captivity, and forced conversion- was described by the Jewish chronicler Abraham Ibn Daud, and the poet Abraham Ibn Ezra. Suspicious of the sincerity of the Jewish converts to Islam, Muslim “inquisitors” (i.e., antedating their Christian Spanish counterparts by three centuries) removed the children from such families, placing them in the care of Muslim educators. Maimonides, the renowned philosopher and physician, experienced the Almohad persecutions, and had to flee Cordoba with his entire family in 1148, temporarily residing in Fez — disguised as a Muslim — before finding asylum in Fatimid Egypt.

Indeed, although Maimonides is frequently referred to as a paragon of Jewish achievement facilitated by the enlightened rule of Andalusia, his own words debunk this utopian view of the Islamic treatment of Jews: “..the Arabs have persecuted us severely, and passed baneful and discriminatory legislation against us…Never did a nation molest, degrade, debase, and hate us as much as they..

It sounds far more brutal than brilliant …

One may read more here:

http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/archives/001665.php

Thanks for your response Marie Claude.

Mar 25, 2009 - 9:28 am 73. Marie Claude:

thanks for the complement of infos, these are not in our school books, I’ll try to not forget them

Mar 25, 2009 - 10:27 am

Write a Comment

Name:	(required, displayed)
Email:	(required, not publicized)
URL:	(optional, displayed)
Comments: