Prayers to Jake

I've been too busy lately to post on topics when they might actually be fresh (novel concept, I know), but I really wanted to touch on the Pope Benedict soliloquy on sex. Having read Humanae Vitae myself, I am quite familiar with the subject at hand. The Catholic Church, while progressive in some areas, most notably science, still clings to these archaic beliefs about sex and birth control. I guess that's not surprising considering that sins "of the flesh" are considered to be more grave than others, but even within the bounds of marriage, birth control of any sort other than Natural Family Planning (which differs from the commonly known Rhythm Method and is more effective, but not by much).  The HV also addresses euthanasia and abortion, rules for fair and justified war, and other issues that pertain to the creation or destruction of life.

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It's been a little while, and the Crazy Australian has in fact conceded that chance can at least produce something which we recognise as information. This Australian says, good on him.

This question is a common creationist approach. The application there is that information in a genome is not seen to increase after random recombinations. The response is that new information can take the form of a decrease in data as well as an increase (my usual example is that the valuable information each week on Big Brother is who will leave the house) so a recombination, which is partly both, is definitely an increase in information.

Completely random threads of information would indeed be unlikely to come to anything meaningful. Consider that, by the way: information, as defined in a computational sense by those who wish to manipulate, compress and optimise it, need not be meaningful in any sense other than representing the data of which it is comprised.

A bit of real-world pressure makes all the difference; this is the very core of natural selection. Changes to a genome which are harmful, ambiguous or negligible tend to die out when the living beings carrying them are outbred by beings carrying directly beneficial changes. It doesn't matter what the information in the genome means as such. Only survival value is of importance, and as it happens, information coherent enough to represent blueprints for complex structures like wings and stomach acid has substantial survival value.

You know, the real answer to this question is really extremely simple. Yes, chance can produce information, if there is such a thing as information. Chance can produce anything, given the right conditions. That's what chance means.

Applied to anything real, though, the true question is, "Can chance consistently produce information?" That's a little hairier, but it's moot when applied to evolution. Natural selection is not a chance process. It mines the random element of mutation for new genetic material, but the selection itself is the original Survival of the Fittest.

It's like rolling fifty dice and only picking out the fours, fives and sixes. You're guaranteed a fairly high average score per selected die. The game of evolution is rigged in favour of life.

- SmartLX

How's that headline? Do I have everybody's attention now? Good. Because a headline like that should get your attention. Would anybody tolerate "Gay Bashing Week" or "Woman Bashing Week?" The very idea is ludicrous. Yet, Dinesh D'Souza can print an article entitled "Atheist Bashing Week" and hardly anybody bats an eyelash. There's certainly not public outrage and condemnation for such blatant bigotry. He was just joking, you say? Even in all of our stunts, which are regularly criticized by atheists (often quite vehemently), we've only dared to tell people that their god doesn't exist or encourage others to say so and post it to YouTube. Even the mind disorder controversy doesn't encourage physical harm or even allude to it. If we haven't had "Christian Bashing Week," you can bet it's because we find the notion repugnant, even in jest.

D'Souza's piece may have been tongue-in-cheek, but that is of little consequence to the typical reader who barely scans headlines and will be even subliminally influenced by this, much less those who don't have the reading comprehension to detect his almost imperceptible sarcasm. Could any of you imagine a "Muslim Bashing Week?" Even if a "Ha ha! Just kidding!" is added at the end, it is still extraordinarily offensive, and the fact that he isn't facing scorn for this piece is evidence that people are still permitted to discriminate against those evil godless heathens.

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Sorry - this is a long one. For my next blog post, I'll be taking a break from Vox so I can kick somebody else's ass and all of you who keep telling me to drop the Vox project will shut up.  As to the length--I know it's taking absurdly long and I still have 13 chapters to go. I just wanted to do a critique that was so detailed that nobody would need to read the book to know what it says. I may have to go with the more concise plan, though, so I can finish this sometime, oh....before I die.

Vox Day seems to have a proclivity towards using odd anecdotal evidence gleaned from the writings of Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens in order to formulate his arguments against atheism, and he continues in the same vein in chapter three. In short order, we discover that “New Atheists” harbor outright hatred for religion and that we “science fetishists” believe that science “dictates” human behavior, rather than merely describing or explaining it.

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Hey folks, this is Sapient.  Just wanted to get a copy of some segments we recorded of a recent interview Kelly did.

Feel free to comment right here.

ETA: The link to hear the entire interview is here.

One of the projects we've been stewing is a debaptism challenge.  Ex-Priest Dr. Stephen Uhl has committed copies of his book Imagine No Superstition as prizes as we gather more info on how we want to run it.  While researching the idea I came upon this video series of a Sally Jessy Raphael episode from 1988 featuring the St. Louis Rationalists and a few fundies.  As for our own debaptism challenge, we're still a while away.  If anyone who participated in or led a debaptism with the St. Louis Rationalists is reading this please drop me a line, I'd like to have you on our radio show.

Check out this show, I think you'll enjoy. 

Gah--this is taking so much longer than I thought. I’m going to attempt to keep this brief and only address major points so that I can move on to chapter 3. I already have people bitching that I should just “ignore Vox,” but I have no intentions of doing so. His fan-boys would only claim victory, so plod along with me here. (Pretty please?)

Quote:It is perfectly understandable, but unfortunate, that Kelly is so wedded to an oppositional context that she tends to blindly fall into applying hostile and incorrect interpretations to various parts of the text in which no opposition is required. This does not appear to be a problem of basic reading comprehension, but rather, the result of reading with a critical filter that causes her to react rather than think through her response to what she is reading. This filter, combined with her failure to read the entire book before beginning the chapter-by-chapter review, leads her into a number of completely unnecessary errors in her critique of this chapter.

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I am honored to be hosting the 89th Carnival of the Godless, but before we begin, I need to tell the readers something.

All of the following people are bad representatives of atheism.

At least in somebody's opinion. Every person here adheres to a particular viewpoint, methodology, or philosophy with which some other atheist disagrees. Every single one of them. Yet, here they are, spewing their ideas all over the internet with impunity. The horror! What kind of arrogance would compel these people to voice their ill-informed opinions as if they speak for all atheists? You know, they're doing more harm than good.

At least, that's what we're told. That's what "they" (cue spooky music) want us to believe. But how much truth lies in those accusations? Are those statements not also an opinion that may offend somebody else, likely the person at whom they are directed? Might not that also be perceived as detrimental to "the cause?"

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I am officially announcing that the next Carnival of the Godless will be hosted here, on my blog, beginning April 13. Be on the lookout for that. I have gotten a bunch of good submissions already.

The following is a "response" from a Vox Day fan. It is relatively devoid of anything intelligent, but I address it because everybody cries if I don't.

Quote:I have some agreement with your comment. However we are not talking proof here, just a suggestion. Correlation implies causation. It is hypothesis generating.

No, correlation does not imply causation, and a hypothesis should be generated before any experimentation is undertaken. The hypothesis comes from pure observation, and is then proven or not by experimentation. Perhaps you should study the scientific method.

Quote:But a brief survey with biases may still be hypothesis generating, it is the more detailed study that confirms or rejects this. And my comment about the onus being on the person denying it is because no matter how good a study is there will always be flaws, and your suggestion allows people to continually say that correlation does not equal causation.

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WE'RE ASKING ALL RATIONAL RESPONSE SQUAD MEMBERS TO ATTEND THIS CONVENTION!! 2008 Atheist Alliance International Convention

~ Unsinkable Atheism ~

Please visit the AAI website to sign up-on line. Follow the 2008 AAI Convention...

www.AtheistAlliance.org

Unsinkable Atheism," the 14th Annual Atheist Alliance International (AAI) Convention, will be held the weekend of September 25—28, 2008 on the beautiful and historic Queen Mary, which is permanently docked in Long Beach, California.

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Starting off chapter two, which is entitled “Defining Science,” is a brief description of the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow, unknown to most, but a troupe of traveling masochists (or so it seems) who represent his caricature of science. These little side stories can have more of an effect than the reader understands, though. Right off the bat, science is seen as either freakish or trivial due to the association with that particular experience of his. Because of this, I find it necessary to give you the actual definition of “science”: 

1. a branch of knowledge or study dealing with a body of facts or truths systematically arranged and showing the operation of general laws

2. systematic knowledge of the physical or material world gained through observation and experimentation…

4. systematized knowledge in general.

5. knowledge, as of facts or principles; knowledge gained by systematic study.

6. a particular branch of knowledge.

7. skill, esp. reflecting a precise application of facts or principles; proficiency. (from dictionary.com)

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Let's get ahead in our knowledge of the movie expelled before it actually comes out...

Keep checking Expelled Exposed for the National Center for Science Education's official response to the Ben Stein movie Expelled; for now, we hope you will find this collection of resources helpful. (all info from ExpelledExposed)

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Well, in response to the OP, when people say such things in that manner, it usually means that they are unfamiliar with evolution in its entirety, and are employing intuitive and naive notions in order to attempt to discuss complex scientific theories. Since our intuition is often at odds with said complex scientific theories, they will run into some problems doing this. Several days ago I decided to read the mission statement of the Flat Earth Society. It was only a few paragraphs, not enough time for me to vomit, and the spelling and grammar were, um...different. Anyway, they railed on for a bit about the evil scientific conspiracy and the supposed dogmatic, quasi-religious nature of science, and then presented their argument for the Flat Earth (if the Earth is round then how come Australians stand upright? They should be upside down).

Obviously this is complete nonsense. There are no "directions" in space. The notions of "up" and "down" are meaningless. They are applied in daily life only relative to the ground on which one is standing. It is a non sequitur to say that people on the North pole should stand upright and those on the south one upside, and everyone else should stand at some slanted angle. Yet intuition tells us so. I wouldn't listen to intuition however, it's useless. Relative to the ground on which an Australian is standing, he is upright. Relative to the ground on which an American is standing, he is also upright. So is everyone else, because that is all motion and position are, they are relative concepts that are only judged in a frame of reference relative to other bodies. The argument the FES put forth above is identical to arguing that if the Earth was moving relative to the Sun at thousands of miles per second, why we do not feel this. The answer is obvious, because if we are standing on the Earth, we are travelling at precisely the same speed, and hence relative to the Earth, are not moving at all.

I picked the most ludicrous example I could find to illustrate a point. When people use intuition to try and understand scientific ideas, they will fail, and this will usually result in using childish language to attempt to mock something regarding which they have precisely zero understanding. In the irritating moving Expelled, Michael Ruse and Richard Dawins explained, in simple language that even someone with cognizance deficiences on the order of magnitude that Ben Stein possesses could understand, which is impressive. They were explaining how elaborate molecular synthesis could form on the backs of rocks, and how piezoelectricity could allow for the assembly of small scale elabore metabolism. They also explained Autocatalysis and clay theory, and the possibility of the synthesis of organic molecules in mud, or water, because of the dipole effect and the high concentrations of organic molecules. Of course, Ben Stein, who knew precisely nothing about primordial biochemistry, electrical organometallic chemistry, or molecular biology , laughed and returned to the point throughout the movie. "MUD"!! (Laughing) "ROCKS"! It was all very Hovindesque in delivery. Of course, this ridicule was all the man could muster, because he was relying on intuition and childish language to try and understand (actually, that's not true. He obviously wasn't trying to understand at all. He was trying to ridicule) something that clearly shot straight over his head. How can one present a serious critique of that which their sum knowledge total is negative (in addition to no knowledge, being in possession of disinformation)? It is incredibly easy to try and fuck up when trying to understand complicated scientific concepts. ("If Relativity is true, how come I can't go and visit my dead relatives?" ).

With respect to evolution, the problem is in some cases greatly exacerbated. There is a lot of potential for complete misunderstanding here. An equally stupid argument could be concocted by reversing the currently employed "Second Law of Thermodynamics" argument to become "If SLOT is true, how come we have all these ordered systems like biology"? One way I find that misunderstanding often springs forth is when people try to use metaphorical ideas and concepts to try and explain ideas. If the laws of thermodynamic are to be understoon in terms of "progressing towards disorder" and evolution, which despite having no implicit direction has, as a general rule of thumb, constructed more complex entities as a function of time, is creating "order", then someone naive can imagine that there is a problem. Such explanations rely on childish and metaphorical understanding of thermodynamics concepts that cannot be understood in any way whatsoever without complete familiarity with the equations. My point is, when people either try to rely on intuition, or a very meager amount of knowledge, the idea that they can "critique" a concept based on this foundation is ludicrous. THe brutal and undeniable fact is that the number of creationists who can give me a single sentence, working, accepted scientific definition of biological evolution, without consulting wikipedia, is utterly negligible.

- Deluded God
Rational Response Squad (more responses posted here)

Alright - I had posted this as a comment under my previous blog post, but it's too damn long to not make it separate. So, without further ado...my response to his response to my response to The Irrational Atheist.

Quote:Actually, we're only supposed to make sure you have heard the Gospel, if you're not inclined to listen, we're permitted to shake the dust from our sandals and move on in good conscience. Moreoever, I never claimed to be a particularly good Christian, the reason I'm less annoying than the door-knocking fundamentalist who wants to talk to you about Jesus is because I care less about your fate. My libertarianism pretty much goes to the bone.

I prefer your more subdued form of proselytization, but I think that the bible clearly indicates that as one of the “elect,” you should in fact feel sorrow for the fate of our heathen souls. People like Paul even wept for the lost. At any rate, this is a trivial point that is not written out plainly as a command, so I won’t press it further.

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