There’s a comedian who has a bit about the 10 commandments - wish I could remember who it was - but the butt of the joke is that god’s a little full of himself writing down 10 commandments and the first 4 are all about him.
Edit: No, not Carlin’s bit.
That’s the weakest proof of anything, and doesn’t convince me because I’m not 6. I don’t care how good of a mathematician Cantor was, that doesn’t make him a particularly good philosopher.
When people make statements about God and Religion that really only apply to some specific gods and some specific religions, it shouldn’t startle anyone when people from other religions who are being unfairly categorized by these statements start speaking up.
Meaning no disrespect to you personally, I have to say you’ve perfectly delineated an argument I think is utterly retarded. But I can call it by some other name - as long as that name means the opposite of advanced!
If someone insists on using a parochial definition of God that allows divinity to be easily disproved, when there is a far more globally acceptable definition that cannot be disproved, they aren’t arguing with me. They are arguing with someone from their own childhood, most likely - some preacher or politician. I only believe in the provably extant God that billions of other people worship* along with me, the God that has been known and written about for thousands of years, who has an inordinate fondness for beetles.
You’re right. Chesterton said poets don’t go mad and kill themselves, but mathematicians do. Wallace said that Chesterton was wrong, but then Wallace went mad and killed himself. Personally I think Spinoza was pretty sharp, although I don’t agree with him on several key points.
* Edit: I regret using the word “worship” but I’ll let it stand, with the understanding that pantheists and panentheists approach divinity as participants rather than as supplicants. This is clearly non-standard usage, and it’s why most of us don’t use that word much.
Seriously Wallace, you had one job…
Yes, this is true. Or rather, for some, it’s a deliberate, disingenuous straw-man they’re presenting to convince other people (proselytizers are fond of this), a straw-man accepted on faith that precludes any sort of examination, and those who have honestly been bamboozled into accepting the straw-man and have thought about and rejected it, rightly, as nonsense, not recognizing its nature - but they’re very much in the minority.
Words don’t have global definitions, they have meanings within a language. In Danish the letters “god” correspond to our notion of good or comfortable. In English, as the examples I gave show, the common meaning covers entities like Zeus and Sithrak. I expect more often than it covers totality, however other languages happen to map their letters to concepts.
In any case, though, I completely agree that someone taking “god” to mean the former isn’t really arguing against what you mean by it. And while I might have objected to your math, I certainly haven’t meant to suggest you were wrong to use the word as the latter, which is still a normal if less common English meaning. Indeed, I expect it’s really annoying for pantheists to get told over and over they can’t use the word the way they normally do, that it’s stupid because everyone should conform to this other definition that isn’t theirs.
Rather I’m suggesting that cuts both ways. Consider that on this thread, the first person to make fun of someone else’s entirely standard use of the word “god” has been you, in the post I replied to.
Naw, it’s worse than that! Words don’t even have immutably fixed meanings within a language. But people need to agree to use shared definitions within a conversation, or at least to try to understand each others’ definitions, if they actually care about exchanging ideas with each other.
I can say Красная площадь means “Red Square” or I can say it means “Beautiful Square” and I’ll be right either way. The city of Buffalo is named from Beau Fleuve, the beautiful river, or maybe it’s named after the American Bison. The word light refers equally well to a lamp, a source of ignition for my seegar, the act of illumination, paleness, the relative absence of weight, and many other things. On Smith Island descriptive words are used in their reverse when referring to people, so saying “she’s bad” means “she’s good” and saying “she’s fat” means “she’s skinny”.
Or as @GilbertWham once said, “What? It’s me native argot, innit?” That’s really a good defense for both of us, as you’ve already pointed out.
Well, in any conversation where one claims the existence or non-existence of anything, it doesn’t seem kosher to claim that there’s an extant entirely standard use for the term you’ve used to reference the thing you’re trying to claim does or doesn’t exist. It’ll be necessary to ensure that others understand what you’re referring to, if you want to make your point - and I think it’s good form to explain why you used the terms you did, if that’s not too longwinded.
But I’ll plead guilty to making fun of people, rather often without good cause. It’s a character flaw.
It would have behooved us well to have furnished them with a far leakier boat, however… 
I also like how they write off Sithrak’s explanation as him just trolling them - “He’s SO evil!”
He only seems that way, because they somehow manage to find families that are even dumber than he is.
I read the headline to mean, “How far can our species really have evolved if it includes someone as idiotic as Steve Harvey?”
That’s not a proof that any god exists anyway. It’s an argument for what a god’s nature would be with the prior assumption this god exists in the first place.
If you want to prove god exists that way, then I can use the exact same logic to prove that Cool Ranch Doritos are the perfect food.
I first heard the “why are there still monkeys?” line from Sarah Palin. My first reactions were “?!?!?!?huh?” and “Because we haven’t eaten them all yet”, but the real question behind it is “Evolution is supposed to be progress, and humans are better than monkeys, so why didn’t all the monkeys evolve into humans?”
Evolution isn’t just taught badly by creationists who think it’s wrong, it’s taught badly by people who think evolution’s Great! but don’t actually have a clue what it is so they fit it into their own worldviews, whether they’re hostile Social Darwinists who want to kill off the inferior races or happy Progressives who believe the affirmations on their bathroom mirror about We’re All Getting Better And Better Every Day!
Are you one of those folks who uses “evolved” to mean “better” and “more advanced”? Please step away from the argument, and go read Darwin (or at least Stephen Jay Gould.)
Sadly too many people don’t get that evolution is more about what simply doesn’t fail rather than what is the best/works/improves.
(Post can’t be empty, apparently.)
Be wary about comedians’ shticks, sometimes people end up saying “it’s funny because it’s true!”
Oh, that too, definitely.
Lowell and Berryman for starters.
Evolution has no bias towards more intelligence, only to what works. It may well be that from a mid term survival-of-my-genes point of view a low IQ is advantageous, though too much low IQ in the population may work against the long term survival of the species as a whole.
Better [suited to their environmental niche, assuming that niche has been unchanged for a sufficiently long period following a speciation event] and more advanced [along an evolutionary diagram such as a phylogenetic tree or cladogram or whatever] is almost what evolved means, in the same sense that “wet” mostly means being relatively full of water compared to the immediate surroundings and doesn’t imply any additional value judgements [unless you’re a salamander].
Evolution means change over time, enough of which means speciation. So “more evolved” means “more changed” when compared to an older common root. Religions evolve, and are believed to come from a common root (there is much argument over whether the common root is external to or emergent from the human mind, but that doesn’t matter if your religion is sufficiently evolved). Baha’i is more evolved than the Islam of the Prophet’s era, to give an example.
I have read much of Darwin, and own nearly all of Gould’s monographs and books. I’ve also read Patrick Matthew, on Darwin’s recommendation - Matthew is the original publisher of the theory of evolution through natural selection (commonly credited to Darwin) and also the original publisher of the theory of punctuated equilibrium (commonly credited to Gould). If you are interested in wood and historical arborculture Matthew is worth a look, but his treatise on Naval Timber is pretty dry for most people.
Which is an excellent response! I’m going with that from now on. Thanks!
