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Posted 2007-12-18, 09:09 AM
in reply to D3V's post starting "I'll second that, I didn't really mean..."
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A little late, but whatever. I'll start at the beginning of where the student begins to ask the professor questions.
At the beginning what we see is the student slips the professor up. But the problem is with linguistics. There were subtle errors in the students line of questioning that a professor of philosophy should have the perspicacity to pick up on. Heat is a quantitative measure of energy. Cold and hot are qualitative descriptors of different levels of heat energy. So do hot and cold exist? They have no physical manifestations, but that's not what we're looking for. They're simply subjective descriptions. The entire argument the student makes lies on the imperfections of the English language in describing the physical world.
The same argument can be extended to the student's light and dark argument, except this time the inherent deception of the English language is even more subtle. The student plays on the double-meaning of the word light. Yes, light and dark are opposites. But light can also be a quantitative measure of energy. The lack of energy is what darkness is, not the lack of the qualitative descriptor 'light.'
Now on to the evolutionary argument. There is a huge difference between 'believing' in the theory of evolution and believing in God. Though you may not have seen the evidence for the theory of evolution with your own eyes, you are accepting that the evidence is there. If you want to be shown the evidence, go to a museum, go to a university, go to a myriad of different places and it's all there for you. While the student may not have seen the evidence, I certainly have. On top of that, the theory of evolution makes sense. It is so damned obvious that I would say that in essence, all the theory of evolution is is four simple observations about the world. The rest is the natural, obvious, extrapolation from these observations.
When believing in God, on the other hand, you are accepting that no evidence for his existence exists, except for subjective revelation. You don't believe in God because people tell you we have the evidence for God, and then describe to you what it is, you believe in him because other people believe in him and they told you to. And that is a terrible reason. Not only that, when specifically talking about the Christian God, you must reject the plethora of evidence piled on against his claims. On top of that, the God hypothesis doesn't even make sense. "He exists outside of space and time." WHAT?!?!?!
"No one has observed the process of evolution at work?" I have. I worked with a grad student last semester as an undergrad assistant. Many people have. That statement is the pinnacle of ignorance.
And once we reach the point where the student is asking whether or not the professor has a brain this whole thing just becomes too ridiculous? The idea that the professor has a brain is pure observation. Every living human has had a brain that we have tested. Over, and over, and over again. The professor, belonging to the set HUMAN, therefore has a brain. It's not faith. It's science. There's a difference. And since the professor could not make an appropriate retort to this, I was forced to conclude he was an idiot, and he got his degree online.
Faith should be better defined here. I wouldn't call ideas based off of empirical data faith. Such as the professor having a brain. The belief in God does not require that sort of a faith. It requires blind faith. So much blind faith if you're a Christian, in fact, that you would need to believe that downtown New York and downtown San Francisco are 30 feet apart. After being in downtown New York. Honestly, that is how off the bible is on the age of the Earth.
Now, I can accept the student's argument that evil is the absence of God. But we already have a word for this without all the metaphysical bullshit. Evil is the absence of goOd. You have to add an extra o. We can't quantitatively measure evil and good, but I suppose here "good" would have to take on dual-meanings as well. To say that evil is the absence of God is just to be presumptuous.
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