@spyman, Because it only affects the atheist, not the theist.

@yellowjacket: I did not say science was meaningless. If I believed that, it would be silly of me to spend my life working in and around that field. Of course science isn't meaningless.

It would be meaningless if ahteism were true, however.

"I'll settle for applicable, predictive models, thanks, rather than worrying about things that are utterly outside the sphere of relevance."

They are only predictive if you assume things are true that you could never have reason to believe if your worldview is true.

"Guess which line of thinking leads to progress in the real world?"

It wouldn't, though, if theism were false. Because then there would be no reason to suppose that the real world would keep following any of the scientific laws we've detected for one more day, and so no reason to suppose that there was any further predictive power in any of our laws (as opposed to any other random assumption).

"And just why am I suppose to meet the requirements of induction as you've explained it?"

You use induction all the time. My point is that your doing so is not justifiable or rational in your atheistic worldview. You are supposed to meet the requirements of being able to say why there is any rationality to what you do if you want to be considered a rational person.

@spyman, I should say, it only affects the atheist, not Christians. There are branches of theism that would be affected by such analyses, such as deism.

"Sometimes truth requires a careful reading of the scripture in the context of the time, but always, truth requires the desire to find it."

Or sometimes it requires absurd spin doctoring when it's obvious that the NT is replete with antisemitism.

Oh? And when did I say I was an atheist? Now your arguments make a great deal more sense, if they are based on a false assumption. I still don't understand your claim that an inductive process supports either theism or atheism more. I would, however, agree with you that there is no more evidence for no-god than there is for god, if that's the heart of your argument.

Is that the only thing we've been really disagreeing on?

That being said, you're waxing far too philosophical. Saying that "science without god doesn't lead to progress," and is "meaningless," is absurd. Belief in the existence or nonexistence of god has no bearing on the fact that I can start my car in the morning. And I'm just going to roll my eyes a bit in your assertion that our models are anything but outstandingly predictable regardless of my worldview, whatever it may be. Yes, they only work ASSUMING the universe will act as it always has, but really that's good enough for a practical person. This is the point of a model, after all.

"Oh? And when did I say I was an atheist?"

Umm... right here:

"OK, I'm not an atheist (or maybe I am in the spyman sense),"

Sorry, I should have clarified. "In the spyman sense" is perfectly adequate for the argument to succeed.

So no, that's not the only thing we're disagreeing on.

"Saying that 'science without god doesn't lead to progress,' and is 'meaningless,' is absurd."

Well, there is a God, so science does lead to progress, that is true. The point is that if the atheist worldview were TRUE, then science would not lead to progress; and if you took the worldview seriously, you would have to conclude this.

"Yes, they only work ASSUMING the universe will act as it always has, but really that's good enough for a practical person."

Hmm. Only (I would argue) if the practical person has good reason to believe the universe is likely to keep acting as it always has. Otherwise, there would be NO point to a model.

"Belief in the existence or nonexistence of god has no bearing on the fact that I can start my car in the morning."

If you don't believe in God, then you would have no cause to expect it to start.

Regards.

semck83 - Correct me if I'm wrong but your point is, if you don't believe in God then there's no reason to believe that the physical laws of the universe remain constant. I guess my question is, what reason is there to believe that the physical laws of the universe will remain constant if there is a God? Essentially my question is, what reason do you have to believe that God won't decide to change them, or indeed, what reason do you have to believe that God intended said laws never to change in the first place?

@Mafiallagator, outstanding question. I would base that on verses such as the following:

"“As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.” (Genesis 8:22)

as well as those that indicate such things as that God made man to work in and have dominion over the world. Given that God made man (and His mind) and also the world, and made them for each other, and then said things like the above, and similar things in many places, it follows naturally that it would indeed be regular and causal, as humans' minds are designed to expect it.

"@spyman, Because it only affects the atheist, not the theist."

Well I guess that settles it. I guess the really is a god after all.... hang on... no wait...
Why does it only affect the atheist and how does it this support the Christian argument?

@spyman, because the Christian can account for his knowledge of the world and the reliability of reason, induction, etc. (See also my response, above, to MA).
How does this support the Christian argument? Well, it means atheism is incompatible with reason -- that whenever you do science or reason inductively, you are using assumptions that don't hold up on your worldview, but do in another. Christianity does not have this inconsistency, and is thus coherent, unlike atheism.

How convenient for the Christian then. Case closed.... sounds like total sophistry to me.

@spyman, I confess I thought the same when I first heard the argument. I had to think it over quite awhile.

But, that's fine. If it's total sophistry, you'll be able to think it over and come back and refute it.

As for it being convenient.... yeah, well, it is, but then, that's usually how it is for the position that's correct, isn't it? There's an argument supporting it, and that's convenient.

Okay let's say my science is based on faith - faith in probability.
I have faith in the probability that the sun will rise tomorrow...
I have faith in the probability that laws of physics are mostly true...
I have faith in the rules of logic and mathematics etc...
I have no argument with that. After all I did say that all knowledge is contingent on certain assumptions.

@spyman, as I already indicated, though, you can't really even assign positive probability to the sun rising tomorrow. There are just far more possible disordered than ordered universes; there are even far more possible disordered than ordered universes that have acted ordered up to this point.

(This requires a little careful handling, since there are actually infinitely many of both, and comparing sizes of infinities is always tedious. I can expand on that argument if you want me to terribly much).

Unless you're just saying that you have a kind of totally blind faith. In which case, well, OK, but you can't really criticize anybody's beliefs anymore after that (about anything). I mean, they may just have chosen different things to arbitrarily believe in.

The problem with knowledge, for an atheist, is that knowledge is contingent on certain assumptions (as you say), and those same assumptions are ruled extremely improbable by his worldview. It's fine to say you're OK with just having faith that the universe will keep being regular. But a priori, this is just terribly, terribly unlikely.

@semck: The argument, that if a person doesn't believe in God, they have no valid cause to expect the world to act the way it dies is total bullshit. I'm personally divided on the whole God issue, but the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge's sake is a worthy goal. It benefits the Human condition regardless of whether God exists or not. Also, we can take the laws of physics as constant until they change.
This is because, as far as we know, they haven't changed in the past. Induction is just as useful for the non-theist as it is for you.
On a separate note, how do you explain the vast differences in punishments demanded of ancient Jews and modern day Christians. Especially if you're living a "higher" law than the Law of Moses.

Also, I will confess to only having read this page of the thread so far, so excuse me if my question has already been addressed.

@Warden, the point is not that induction isn't useful. It's that it wouldn't be if atheistic assumptions were true. Knowledge is a great goal, I agree, but there would just be no way to have any if God didn't exist. (Note: I am NOT saying we can't have knowledge. We can. God does exist).

"Also, we can take the laws of physics as constant until they change.
This is because, as far as we know, they haven't changed in the past. Induction is just as useful for the non-theist as it is for you."

I have already responded to this at length. If you wish to engage my specific arguments, please do so. I am not going to reproduce them, though. Suffice to say, no, you cannot. There is no way to assign positive probability to induction being true, and the past has nothing to do with it until it is.

"On a separate note, how do you explain the vast differences in punishments demanded of ancient Jews and modern day Christians. Especially if you're living a "higher" law than the Law of Moses."

The ancient Jews were living in a Theocracy, Christians are not. The punishments served several purposes. Rigidly keep them a separate people; picture (both to them and to us) the seriousness of sin; etc. Christians, being only a religion and not a political institution, simply have no pretense to the kind of governmental authority that existed then. It's a completely different system.

Of course, punishments still exist, but they are by and large not temporal.

Regards.

@Warren, Ah, OK, sorry then. It was. Find my really long post involving Frank and Joe on the prior page.

So in other words, you have faith that it won't. I mean, you're basing this position on the Bible, and the position that the Bible is inerrant is a faith based position.

While I do see what you're getting at, I think your argument is specious. You seem to be confusing empiricism with rationalism, a common mistake in the public eye. A rationalist would, you are correct have to assume that anything can change at any time. The strong nuclear force could suddenly vanish without warning and the nucleus of every single atom in the universe could be torn asunder. The problem with rationalism however is that it can be used to show almost anything, and at the same time really the only thing you can show for certain is that your own consciousness exists. Not terribly useful. Therefore, most atheists are not rationalists, we are, by and large, empiricists. Empiricism is the idea that in order to believe something is the case we must have consistent, observable evidence to back it up. In the absence of positive evidence for the physical laws of the universe changing, we have no reason to believe that they do. You might try and argue the reverse. That in the absence of evidence to show that physical laws of the universe don't change, we have no reason to believe that they won't. Except that proving that would require evidential proof of a universal negative, which is impossible. Thus the burden of proof is on those claiming that changing of physical laws of the universe is possible. The other thing about science is that it doesn't claim to prove anything. It can provide evidence for things, and there are some things for which enough proof has been accumulated that they are unlikely ever to be contradicted. However should contradictory evidence arise, we would have to reject the previous theories. In other words, science is prepared to admit that it is remotely possible that the universe will collapse in on itself at any time as a result of the universal gravitational constant increasing by a factor of 5 billion, but in the absence of evidence that such a thing would be possible, we can decide that such an occurrence is extremely unlikely.

Now, you could argue that this idea that the nature of the universe is knowable through observation is a faith based position and I suppose that's hard to refute, but certainly saying that "the nature of the universe is knowable through observation" is no more reliant on faith than the statement "I know the physical laws of the universe will not change because the Bible told me so." At, the same time, I think your argument that we have to be prepared to admit that the physical laws of the universe may change is tantamount to saying that we have to be prepared to admit that absolutely anything and everything we can conceive of, (as well as an infinite number of things that we cannot conceive of) may exist. And, on a theoretical rational level, I do concede that possibility. It is not outside the realm of possibility that an invisible, purple, orbital, opera singing, space giraffe exists in orbit of Mars. However, for practical purposes this is not a reasonable, or useful, stand to take, so I make the assumption, that the physical universe can be understood through observation, and am able therefore to not seriously consider the possibility of anything that does not have sufficient evidence to warrant believing in it. It is of course possible that this assumption is wrong, but I can still adopt a purely empirical, scientific standpoint and have this way of understanding the world remain internally consistent.

Okay semck, I've read that post now.
What about mathematics. Given that human beings have defined mathematics in a strict way, by your logic a person cannot take 2+2=4 as truth. It has been true in the past, but that means nothing. At this particular moment, 2+2 may actually be 17. That just seems absolutely impossible.
Is it unreasonable to assume that all matter acts in the way it does simply because it must in order to be realized within our universe?
If induction is so inherently flawed, and I am certainly moved to think so by your argument, then why does it work so well in practice? Or would you make the argument, that it only holds true within rigidly defined sets such as mathematics.
I'm just curious on that point.

Now if, God does not exist, and the universe formed the way it did on its own, how is it unreasonable to assume that this universe has to obey certain laws in order to continue to exist? And in fact, just as an idea, how can we know whether or not this particular universe has no "God" but perhaps others are formed with, and for some divine being.
Now, I'm exhausted, and I have to be up for classes in 4 more hours, but if I've made even a semblance of sense rattling these things out, I'd love to hear your response.

One last thing to add, how does my disbelief in a god mean that I cannot believe in an ordered universe that obeys certain laws? I have no more evidence for that than anyone has evidence of the existence of God. Of course, I don't hold my disbelief to be morally superior to belief in a god, so maybe I'm in the minority there.

OK semck, I've been thinking, and it occurs to me, your argument that in the absence of God, a disordered universe is more likely than an ordered universe because there are infinitely more ways in which a universe can be disordered than ordered hits a stumbling block. When you're discussing that kind of probability, there are two factors that matter. One, the number of different possibilities, and two the likelihood of each possibility actually existing. You've essentially assumed that the likelihood of each possibility existing is roughly the same. But I put it to you that this can by no means actually be the case. If we discount for the sake of argument the possibility of a conscious creator, there are two factors that affect the probability of something existing. The first is the ease with which such a thing can spontaneously create itself, and the second is the ability something has to sustain itself. Naturally a fundamentally disordered universe has virtually no ability at all to sustain itself. Almost as soon as it creates itself it would be destroyed. Thus, a fundamentally ordered universe is infinitely more likely to exist at any given point in time than a fundamentally disordered universe.

It's a little too late at night for me to try and wrap my head around the implications of order and disorder for spontaneously creating a universe, but if a fundamentally ordered universe was more likely to be spontaneously created than a fundamentally disordered one that would also buttress my argument.

Finally that leaves us with the possibility of a universe that has been fundamentally ordered up until a given point, at which point it would spontaneously become fundamentally disordered. Since a fundamentally disordered universe is extremely unlikely to exist for any length of time, we can be reasonably certain that such a thing has not happened to our universe yet, because of the simple fact that our universe exists. This leaves us to face the possibility that our universe will at any moment become fundamentally disordered and simply cease to exist. I'm not sure what the probability of that is. What I am sure of however is that we cannot discount this possibility simply because we don't like the implications of it. We can't say "Since I don't want the universe to suddenly stop existing, there must be a God" that is obviously a fallacious argument.

So yes, hopefully this post actually makes sense, and isn't just a bunch of incoherent, rambling nonsense.

Whew, two very interesting responses. I'm going to respond to these now. Just to warn, this will _probably_ be my last response tonight. It's getting late here, and I still have a couple hours of work to do. I will try to respond though, tomorrow hopefully. Thank you both for the responses, by the way.

Anyway.... @Mafialligator. You've pretty much already put your finger on my response to you. You say,

"Empiricism is the idea that in order to believe something is the case we must have consistent, observable evidence to back it up."

Of course, the problem is that this is not an observable rule, it's just a postulate. In fact, it was empiricism, not rationalism that Hume was critiquing when he came up with his argument against induction in the first place, and it has more or less continued in that context.

To even speak of evidence already presumes order and induction. If there's no order, evidence is meaningless. So you're just assuming this, still. It is this assumption I am taking issue with.

"Now, you could argue that this idea that the nature of the universe is knowable through observation is a faith based position and I suppose that's hard to refute,..."

Right, I would. Of course, you go on to point out that I have my faith too. Also true. Here's the crucial point, though: in my Christian world view, I can understand and make sense of why I would be able to know things, and even why I could come to faith.

On the other hand, in your atheist empiricism, there is absolutely no reason to believe that the human brain should be gifted in coming to good hypotheses about the nature of the universe, or that its faith (in induction, say) is likely to be actually true. That is, within your own worldview, your knowledge is completely inexplicable. Mine is not.

I'll be more specific. Where, in your world view, does knowledge come from? Well, undirected evolutionary processes crafted the human brain. What could go into these processes? By their nature, the past. So we agree that the past has been uniform, and we agree (arguendo) that unguided evolution crafted the human brain. And of course we can both agree that, AS LONG AS the past keeps on being uniform, it will be extremely adaptive for the human brain to believe in induction. So that's all fine.

The problem is, none of this says anything about the actual liklihood of induction being TRUE. All of this is true in any of the universes that are regular up till now, doing all the crazy things they may do later. So here you are, an atheist empiricist, with this faith commitment to induction, and it's just based on nothing. You can't account for how your having it could be tied to its truth or falsity at all, or say why it's actually likely to be true.

(None of this is confusing rationalism or empiricism either, by the way. As you more or less acknowledge, I think, on this point.)

Your world view is in this sense incoherent. You believe some things (induction, regularity of the world, the universe having a "nature" to know) that other things you believe (atheism) render unknowable and improbable: a totally blind faith. (And to dispute the burden of proof, of course -- as I read you to have acknowledged -- already requires this assumption). In other words, reason is defeated in your world view.

On the other hand, in mine -- faith based, also, by the way, I agree -- my knowledge and beliefs cohere, and reason is not defeated at all. It's a gift of God, an ability He put in my mind to reflect and know the order that He also put in the world; and then He told me all this. Thus, reason is fine in my world view, and not in yours.

"However, for practical purposes this is not a reasonable, or useful, stand to take, so I make the assumption, that the physical universe can be understood through observation, and am able therefore to not seriously consider the possibility of anything that does not have sufficient evidence to warrant believing in it. It is of course possible that this assumption is wrong, but I can still adopt a purely empirical, scientific standpoint and have this way of understanding the world remain internally consistent. "

You say it is not a useful stand to take. That, of course, already assumes it's false. If my armchair is about to turn into a 747 and take off for Monaco, contra all the laws of physics, then knowing THAT would be incredibly useful to me, because I could go hop on it and go there with it. (Assuming that the laws remained otherwise the same -- but that's one of the possibilities, obviously). Assuming induction is only useful if induction is actually true.

So in saying you can assume induction and everything will be fine for practical purposes, you're really just reaffirming your faith in induction.

A faith I happen to share, of course, but unlike you I can account for why.

Thank you again, MA, for a thoughtful post. I do appreciate actual engagement with what I'm saying.

@Warren, Mathematics is a really interesting question. First, you kind of bring up a lot of thorny side-issues about the nature of mathematics. Much of mathematics is based on deductive, not inductive reasoning. But it also works in the real world, and there are lots of debates among philosophers of mathematics as to whether it's really empirical and yet can be reduced to logic, or really ethereal and yet interacts with the empirical world.

Cutting through all that, anyway, mathematics does of course have an empirical side: 2 apples plus 2 apples equals 4 apples. And yes, I do think that it would be unreasonable to believe mathematics, either, in an atheistic world.

A key point to remember is that our brains are inside the world and have a physical history (unguided evolution, guided evolution, creation, what have you). We may feel we have a grip on ultimate truth -- 2 + 2 = 4, say -- and be unable to imagine this being false, but does our world view / cosmology explain how we could have? In the case of materialistic evolution, no. There is no reason to believe that there is some abstract set of mathematical truths, if one is a materialist. How could there be? Similarly with induction, as I outlined above, there's no reason to see how the history of our minds gave us any grip on the future or the ultimate nature of the universe; just on its behavior at the time they happened to evolve.

Of course I agree that it seems absolutely impossible to really take seriously the idea that 2 + 2 is not 4, and in fact one can't and be rational, and this is just why I'm advocating turning to God and the Bible and accepting the worldview that does not entail the absurd.

"If induction is so inherently flawed, and I am certainly moved to think so by your argument, then why does it work so well in practice? Or would you make the argument, that it only holds true within rigidly defined sets such as mathematics. "

Well, of course, I would say it works well because God _does_ exist, and upholds the world just as He promises in His Word. As long as this is true, it will work great, and people will be able to go along using it no problem even with world views that make using it absurd.

"Is it unreasonable to assume that all matter acts in the way it does simply because it must in order to be realized within our universe?"

That is of course a possibility. The problem is just that, if atheism is true, we would never have any way of knowing that. I mean, lots of things are possibilities. It's a possibility that matter acts the way it does up until Thursday because it can't be in our universe otherwise, and then it starts acting radically different, for the same reason. What would "can't" even mean, anyway? Wouldn't there just be "doesn't"?

The problem, anyway, like I say, is just that, sure, matter MIGHT just happen to be regular, but we would have no reason to know it, and no way to accord that positive probability. It might do anything at all, and we're just not privvy to the information.

"Now if, God does not exist, and the universe formed the way it did on its own, how is it unreasonable to assume that this universe has to obey certain laws in order to continue to exist?"

Same question I think, more or less -- anyway same answer. It's unreasonable because we have no way at all of knowing it to be true or even probable. What would laws mean? Just regularities in how it behaved. And sure, we could assume that the regularities existed, but that wouldn't make it probable, or mean we had any real source of knowledge like that. We could assume anything else, too.

"Now, I'm exhausted, and I have to be up for classes in 4 more hours, but if I've made even a semblance of sense rattling these things out, I'd love to hear your response."

Man, I know that feeling all too well. I hope this was responsive. Please let me know if not, or if you have further thoughts on it. As with Mafialligator, I really appreciate the thoughtful response here.

Regards.

@Mafia, I'll go ahead and respond to your one last thought, which is also very interesting. It's true that I've been assuming (more or less) uniform probability, which I think is the reasonable thing to do in the absence of all information. (The "real distribution" might be different, but you just average over those).

But you raise an interesting question: perhaps some universes are so chaotic as to be short-lived. This might happen. But I don't see why a chaotic universe would have to be short-lived at all, a priori. That seems to assume some kind of law, which is just what we wouldn't have in such a universe. I can imagine a universe, for example, that exists a long time, with matter just moving around, appearing, and disappearing completely randomly. Heck, you could even model this, kind of: take a 4-dimensional space, and then take a "random" subset. (Yes, that would actually be a little hard to define, but you hopefully get the point). Make one dimension time, the other three space, and say that there's matter at that point in spacetime if that point is in the subset. The universe would go on forever, chaotically. Again, I think that to talk about "couldn't exist" presupposes law.

I'm not sure if you're familiar with calculus -- I suspect so, but I apologize for the following example if not. But suppose you have on your hands a "random" continuous function, and you're learning it slowly -- as x advances at some slow rate, the graph of f(x) appears in infinite detail (i.e., you can zoom in all you want on what's been revealed).

Now it turns out that of all the continuous functions, 100% of them (but not all of them -- such are the tedious properties of uncountable sets) are nowhere differentiable. So, it's almost certain that this would be an extremely chaotic function that would never have a defined tangent line.

Similarly, if it had been differentiable up till now, there would be 100% probability that it would stop being differentiable at the next moment and would never be differentiable again.

The same is true with continuous functions among all real-valued functions. The continuous functions are "nowhere dense," which again, roughly corresponds to 0% of them being continuous.

I hope these illustrations were on point.

"What I am sure of however is that we cannot discount this possibility simply because we don't like the implications of it. We can't say 'Since I don't want the universe to suddenly stop existing, there must be a God' that is obviously a fallacious argument. "

True, as so presented. However, I'm more inviting you to compare our worldviews as wholes, and realize that yours does not support reasoning or science, while mine does. That, so far as it went and in an odd way, would constitute a proof.

Of course, you might choose to be a skeptic instead. One is free after any successful argument, after all, to decide that perhaps reason is not valid and to reject the conclusion. My point is that this is what is required to maintain atheism.

After the maelstrom of yesterday I think that this post rather got lost. Spyman, I wonder if you might respond as you seem to have a good background in biology, I would be interested to read your views.

Spyman writes:
''I thought maybe if you did believe in evolution but not natural selection you might have some interesting ideas - I was curious. ''

Spyman are you perhaps refering to Lewinton? If so he is a very interesting guy indeed.

What Darwin got wrong - http://www.sciy.org/2010/05/16/what-darwin-got-wrong-by-jerry-fodor-and-massimo-piattelli-palmarini-review-by-richard-c-lewinton/

Have you read it, if so what did you think?

Ful wrote:
"Putin do you say Huxley and Haekel were brilliant scientists. Did i read this correctly? "
Putin replied:
Yes. Only someone committed to smearing them would think otherwise. You think Huxley's work on anatomy was poor just because you disagree with his position on evolution? How typically sectarian of you.

On Haekel
The Editor,
The recent article "Haeckel's Embryos and Evolution" (Wells, ABT, May 1999) is
a timely reminder that significant parts of Haeckel's diagrams of embryos were forged, as Haeckel himself publicly admitted in a letter to the Berliner Volkszeitung on 29th
December 1908 (Assmuth & Hall 1918). In fact nowadays, for young biology students, it
is more relevant to introduce Haeckel and his "biogenetic law" as one of the worst
examples of scientific fraud, the consequences of which can still be detected, particularly in the fields of human embryology and molecular biology (Freeman 1987). Indeed, it is remarkable how major contemporary textbooks continue to reproduce Haeckel's forgeries and thereby perpetuate the myth of the "biogenetic law" (e.g., Alberts et al. 1994, p. 33, p. 1049). Even the subsequent letter to your journal (Sonleitner, ABT, September 1999), criticizing the May article, persists with the erroneous terminology of "branchial" (i.e., gill) arches for a mammalian embryo. Here I am not merely nit-picking over terminology: when our language is based on fraudulent concepts, then our thinking is clouded and a discipline cannot progress. For example, extensive studies of early human embryos (Blechschmidt 1978) have shown that the folds on the ventral side of the embryo's head-neck region have nothing whatsoever to do with gills; the same applies to the chick and pig embryo. They are simple biomechanical flexion folds, caused by the embryo's head growing around the heart to which the neural tube is anchored biophysically via tension-bearing blood vessels. Such folds occur throughout life on the flexion side of all bends in the body, no matter whether the body belongs to an embryo or an adult. To retain the generic term "branchial" for the head folds of all embryos is to conceal the special nature of the folding in any one animal. Today, all we need to know of Haeckel's "law" is that it is false and that it cannot be rescued by subtle rewording, or by claims that it is only partially true. Once this mental straightjacket is cast aside, along with its inaccurate concepts and terminology, it is possible to open our students' minds to the unique ontogeny of each species, and to recast evolution in a totally different and exciting framework.
Brian Freeman
Senior Lecturer in Anatomy, UNSW, Sydney, NSW, Australia 2038
([email protected])
References
Alberts, B., Bray, D., Lewis, J., Raff, M., Roberts, K. & Watson, J.D. (1994). Molecular
Biology of the Cell (3rd ed.). New York: Garland Publishing.
Assmuth, J. & Hull, E.R. (1918). Haeckel's Frauds and Forgeries. Bombay: Examiner
Press.
Blechschmidt, E. (1978). Anatomie und Ontogenese des Menschen. Heidelberg: Quelle &
Meyer Verlag.
Freeman, B. (1987). Zur Diskussion. Naturwissenschaften, 74, 348.
[published in: American Biology Teacher 63, 2001, 230]

Huxley to follow

On Huxley
From Emancipation--Black And White (http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/23119/) A word for word copy:

The intersting thing is that this essay was written in the immediate aftermath of the American Civil War in 1865. Was Huxley then just perhaps then a ''man of his time, should we excuse him on this basis?'' Were there no descenting voices to this racism, even among those who fought for the Union? I wonder if we have might ask contemporary Black people how they feel about Putin's ''brilliant scientist?''




Quashie's plaintive inquiry, "Am I not a man and a brother?" seems at last to have received its final reply--the recent decision of the fierce trial by battle on the other side of the Atlantic fully concurring with that long since delivered here in a more peaceful way.

The question is settled; but even those who are most thoroughly convinced that the doom is just, must see good grounds for repudiating half the arguments which have been employed by the winning side; and for doubting whether its ultimate results will embody the hopes of the victors, though they may more than realize the fears of the vanquished. It may be quite true that some negroes are better than some white men; but no rational man, cognizant of the facts, believes that the average negro is the equal, still less the superior, of the average white man. And, if this be true, it is simply incredible that, when all his disabilities are removed, and our prognathous relative has a fair field and no favour, as well as no oppressor, he will be able to compete successfully with his bigger-brained and smaller-jawed rival, in a contest which is to be carried on by thoughts and not by bites. The highest places in the hierarchy of civilization will assuredly not be within the reach of our dusky cousins, though it is by no means necessary that they should be restricted to the lowest. But whatever the position of stable equilibrium into which the laws of social gravitation may bring the negro, all responsibility for the result will henceforward lie between Nature and him. The white man may wash his hands of it, and the Caucasian conscience be void of reproach for evermore. And this, if we look to the bottom of the matter, is the real justification for the abolition policy.

The doctrine of equal natural rights may be an illogical delusion; emancipation may convert the slave from a well fed animal into a pauperised man; mankind may even have to do without cotton shirts; but all these evils must be faced, if the moral law, that no human being can arbitrarily dominate over another without grievous damage to his own nature, be, as many think, as readily demonstrable by experiment as any physical truth. If this be true, no slavery can be abolished without a double emancipation, and the master will benefit by freedom more than the freed-man.

What an impressive pile of manure.

@Fielder
''What an impressive pile of manure.''

Absolutely, and from such a ''brilliant scientist'' too.

OK semck, I see what you mean by that. Then I guess what I'm saying is that presented with this argument I remain unconvinced that God, particularly as described by any of the world's major religions is the ONLY available explanation or solution to your dilemma. It just happens to be a solution. I suppose my position on the matter is similar then to Hume's. We don't know that any form of reasoning is in any way valid, but for practical purposes I will continue to use it because it seems to work. So, on philosophical grounds I guess agnosticism is the best position. But for my day to day purposes I'll consider myself a de facto atheist, because it just won't get you anywhere to constantly be prepared for a fundamentally disordered universe at any point.