Actually, KSMB is correct. Mathematically, we can demonstrate this is probabalistically impossible. Here, I shall show you:

Religion and False Anthropocentricism

If you need an incentive to open that link, it has some quite nice pictures. 

As I have stated before, I need only good evidence, and I shall accept the proposition you put forward. Without it...I shall reject it. This is how epistemic rights work. However, you are implicitly stating that we should reject this and instead have faith. The notion of "faith" is nonsense. It is a rejection of epistemology and is hence philosophically absurd and nonsensical. 

Why does every Christian talk about how good Jesus is and then go to Paul for the details?

The Jesus of the Gospels and the Christ Paul describes are different enough (accoding to my reading) to be considered two different characters. Paul tried to connect God to his Christ-concept and the Gospel writers tried to personaliza Paul's Christ by adding some Jesus tales but neither does it well.

You do realize what an ass you reveal yourself to be by doing this. It reveals your education in epistemology is nil.

1) The idea that a claim should requiring "backing up" is close minded is a stolence concept fallacy

2) The phrases "faith in science" and "faith in reason" refute themselves.

3) "Intuition" is not a valid epistemilogical model

4) "Faith" which you wear on your sleeve, is a rejection of epistemology, and hence the holding of your position means you are outside your epistemic rights. From a position of knowledge claims about the universe, you have no right to hold your positions unless you can fulfill the requirements

5) Why do you continue to make a personality claim about me which I have already refuted in a post you ignored? This is the same tactic as Meph...to the letter. You two would be great fuck buddies.

6) Why do you continue to make a linguistic and emotional/loaded fallacy against materialism whnich I have already refuted?

7) Please acknowledge the rules, you charlatan: Proposition, rebuttal, refutation, counterrefutation.

If you cannot grasp these principles then you are simply not ain a position where you have the right to have such discussion. So leave. I want to have a discussion with you, but not when your posts are so utterly ridiculous and so utterly lacking in argument and substance that they are in essence merely whining.

Finally, dawn has come...for Venk has (poorly) (attempted) to make an argument. True, the argument was for a fallacious philosophical position refuted 150 years ago if I am chronologically correct...but it is definitely a start (rolls eyes). Please understand this reply will be very angry in no unsubtle way. Why? Because I actually offered you refutations to this position (which you have not acknowledged) half a dozen goddamn times! I was desperately trying to get you to read and discuss the matter. And now you are wasting my time since I have to respond to something I already took the time to take apart but that you refused to look at. What is the root of your astounding dishonesty? Is it a taught thing, or is it just natural for you to be so incredibly asinine and dishonest?

How could you possibly know this. You have not read anything I have written. This is where yourarrogance is projected onto me. You cannot possibly make claims about that which you know nothing. You never read anything I wrote. Not once. In fact, I would call into serious question your capacity to read at all.

Get out. I am sick of your lies and your dishonesty (and your incoherency)

Lie. I did not "trash" intuition in the Descartesian fashion. I merely pointed out that "I feel" is not a valid epistemological model.

Claps hands. Neuroscience 101 basics: A thought is a combination of sensation and memory.

Also, if you are going to use induction and deduction in such contexts...perhaps you should check what they mean.

Also, your language is almost impossible to understand in a coherent fashion.

Could you write that in the Queen's English, sir? This sentence appears to missing its Object. It is just a half sentence.

What assumption? You left out the object in the last sentence.?

Please, really, stop. There is no need to tell me what I learned so many years ago. This is not Phil/Pysch 101. I already know this.

This is so basic and dreary. Lets see...basic subject/object principles. Basics of entity discretion...check. Zzzzzz

The "knowledge" is from the outside-in, not vice-versa. Come on, that is really, really basic stuff. All knowledge (everyone should know this), is underlied by the two most basic brain functions

-Sensory processing

-Memory

Which culminate in thought in animals with third-tier brain structures.

Empericism/rationality dichotomy. Wow! This totally wasn't worked out...400 years ago.

It is obvious to any and all who study it, not merely a handful of men, of the illusion of subject/object. Indeed, it is a basic tenet of contemporary phil that the suibject/object dichotomy is false.

But this is irrelevant to our current point. You are making a red herring fallacy by refusing to answer my arguments and going off in an irrelevant tangent.

By the way...this is no longer epistemology. I thought you should know. This is now Ontology.

Please, stop, really. I don't need Phil 101...again....again...again. I've already done it.

Come on, now you are just showing your imbecility. You have not refuted a single thing I said. I pointed out the following:

1) The idea that a knowledge claim about the empirical universe should require proof is inherent. Without this, we have no knowledge claims. Theism is hence irrational

2)

You responded with

1) THe human sub/ob dichotomy is false

Care to share the relevance of this fascinating and incredibly obvious point from first year phil?

The answer to that is at the bottom of this:

Please, PLEASE tell me this is not going to lead to a fallacy of composition, an idiotic, egregious and irrational attack against naturalism. Please...

Ugh. Yep. Fallacy of composition.

Now you have definitely demonstrated your knowledge is nonexistent. Nil. Nject. Allow me to call you the poorest debator in history. The worst. Your understanding of metaphyiscs is none.

Here, perhaps I shall prime you, with my own writing on the matter:

 The crux of all this is that the dualist who asserts that materialism cannot account for X abstraction is that they are making a fallacy of conflation between reductionism and materialism. Reductionism is merely one arm of the materialist school of thought. We also have to take into account, for this exercise, emergentism, which materialism does indeed encompass. Emergentism is the doctrine that properties emerge from systems that are not necessarily reducible to their constituents. They exist only when the system is in place, and are hence not reducible to the sum of their parts. This is the schism in materialism between reductionism (whole=sum of parts) and emergentism (whole>sum of parts). The point is, these are both materialist positions. Neither invocates dualism or magic. So when the dualist is asserting that the materialist is denying the existence of X because it can be reduced to smaller constituents, they are making the greedy reductionist fallacy. Regardless of whether the system in question is emergentist or reductionist, the fallacy holds. It is analogous to saying:

1. The clicking on hyperlinks can be reduced to electrons being fired across LCD electron guns and photons through ethernet and fiberoptic cables. Therefore hyperlinks do not actually exist, only electrons and photons.

2. An atomic nuclei can be reduced to individual protons and electrons, which in turn can be reduced to quarks, which in turn can be reduced to bosons and fermions. Therefore, atoms do not actuallly exist, only bosons and fermions.

You will find that many materialist systems are indeed emergentist. That means that they cannot be reduced to their constituents, they only emerge when the complexity of the system reaches a certain point, but, the crux: They are still materialist. Emergentism is an arm of materialist philosophy. Many naturalists regard consciousness and the mind as an emergent property of the brain. Some others hold that the mind can be divided and is hence, with respect to the whole brain, reductionist, not emergent. I am sympathetic to a middle ground position . Obviously when we reduce the system to a certain degree, we find the property which we were examining in the first place disappears. Hence to some degree the two positions of emergentism and reductionism are valid and mutually reconcilable in much the same way that empiricism and rationalism are reconcilable. In fact, I do not think there has been a “pure” empiricist or rationalist since the days of Immanuel Kant. Likewise, the materialist philosophy does not usually find one taking a pure stance on emergentism or reductionism.

So, when the dualist makes the greedy reductionist fallacy by whining that the materialist is denying the existence of X by invoking reducibility, they are invalidated by both schools of materialism. Reductionism does not say that X does not exist, merely that it is a lower ontological category than its constituents Y and Z. Emergentism says that X exists of its own accord due to a synergistic effect between Y and Z. The latter can be invoked to explain many phenomenon from a materialistic perspective, especially consciousness and the mind. Regardless, any dualist asking for a materialist to explain abstract X is revealing their own unsurprising ignorance of materialist philosophy. Abstractions in this context are merely what a reductionist would call lower ontological categories that result from increasingly complex systems, or what an emergentist would call the result of synergistic effect in the system. Emergentist materialism is extremely important in my work, since one of the things I study is enzyme kinetics, drugs and medicine, where synergistic interplay is extremely important. The same logic which causes a Calcium Channel blocker and a Beta Blocker to work better together to lower blood pressure than the mathematics of their individual workings would have us believe is the same logic that may give rise to abstractions from material systems. In other words, this may cover thoughts, emotions, rationality etc. To a reductionist however, we can explain these in terms of direct reducibility to their electrophysiological activity in corresponding neurons. Regardless of which position you take, the abstract, the thought, is still generated. And hence for the dualist to accuse the materialist of denying said abstractions is just, well, stupid. And can only be described as immensely foolish. We shall soon see how easy it is to flip this on its head.

The rest of your post is a continuation of this fallacy which you seem to have the inability to understand.

also, linguistically, your posts are well-nigh impossible to read.

Linguistic incoherency. Indecipherable. For irony I shall say Does Not Compute

Allow me to cure you, sire, of your ignorance:

Before delving into to inheritable trait and chemical encoding, we must understand this principle of the struggle for resources. Essentially, organisms struggle to survive. They fight. It is intrinsic to the nature of organisms that, being that they are the vehicle for a code whose sole purpose is self-proliferation, that they survive, which requires they gain the resources they need for survival and reproduction- food, water, shelter etc. Organisms are in competition with other organisms for resources and the variability inherent in the passing of inheritable DNA from parent to progeny means that some organisms may be better at the exploiting the environment for the gaining of resources than others, hence allowing more reproduction and the proliferation of this trait. Without this there can be no evolution. The precise molecular mechanisms by which this variability may generate the structures of complex life which allow the organisms to better exploit the environment are the subject of another essay, and unfortunately, that explanation does require some tertiary education in molecular biology to understand.

It is not merely that a functional trait becomes more pronounced in its concentration in the pool of organisms due to the survival benefit it offers, and hence the increased reproduction, (which in turn leads to a greater increase in concentration of the trait with every generation. So, between F-1, F-2, F-4 etc, there is a calculable rate at which the trait will proliferate in the population. However, ecology is not my field, so I cannot discourse on that). But the other factor which we must look at is that the new phenotype becomes much more pronounced as a trait with the move from F-1 to F-2 and so on, until the accumulation develops into a fully fledged and distinct physiological and morphological change in the organism via speciative mechanisms we will be examining later. A wing does not spring forth overnight. Its development is gradual, perhaps the exaptation recombination from pre-existing functions (Again, zoology, not being my field, I cannot comment on this. However, I will comment on the evolution of the wing as a genetic process in the next essay). There are also physiological and natural checks on the refinement of a single morphological trait, the physiological being simply that after enough refinement, increase in size etc, the continuation of growth is no longer advantageous, and the natural being, as we shall soon see, that should the refinement of trait provide the organism sample in question with such a massive advantage that it begins to overpopulate, then crashes and burns. We shall explore this later.

We must remember that this process is not occurring with one but hundreds of trillions of organisms over tens of millions of years. There will be hundreds of thousands of animals who are all refining the same trait. But mutation is random. How is this possible? The answer is that mutation is random, but the process which forces it in one direction, ie natural selection, is not. All variable traits begin in the most humble fashion: From a single progeny. This single organism holds the key to the continuation of trait. If the advantageous mutation (as it must be) is contained within the DNA of a gamete, then the mutation in question will be copied into every cell of the progeny in utero (there are mechanisms to stop deleterious mutations from entering the equation, and we shall study these in the next essay). As generations accumulate, from F-1 to F-100 to F-100,000, we shall see that presuming the trait in question is advantageous enough to warrant survival advantage to the organisms carrying it such that they will have a reproductive advantage, then this trait will accumulate, and then we will have vast numbers of organisms carrying it. But I return to the original question: How does it progress from there? For how can mutations act in synchronicity when they are random? The answer is that they do not. The environment, the factors which put pressure on the population, simply force the continued development of trait in one direction, since the whole population is experiencing the same natural pressures. When the population is not experiencing the same pressure, that is when, as we shall see soon, a phylogenic break-off may occur.

We must remember that this is occurring over vast eons with incalculable numbers of organisms, and it is not a clean-cut process as I may have construed, with one mutation being proliferated and developed by natural selection, and then another....etc. Think of it more like this: Genetic mutations are occurring in vast numbers all the time, are being passed on to progeny. The deleterious ones are weeded out by ribosomal mechanisms and then by natural selection. The good ones are being propagated. Now, this may be (or usually is) occurring for many different traits simultaneously over many different organisms in the same population, but the whole process simply converges in the eventual refinement of phenotypes into better symbiosis with the environment the organism is inhabiting . Evolution is a vast process with a huge amount of information to work with because they are so many organisms. This is why it works. It simply is the struggle for existence of biology which forces the random replications of non-random replicators in a direction where the random replications which may occasionally produce a beneficial trait will be propagated, and as a result, beneficial traits in the random replicators such that the organisms whose phenotype they express may become better adapted to the environment. The result? The genome is improving in continuum such that the codes held within form increasingly more diverse and complex and ingenious methods of exploiting the environment. As a result, as time passes, the diversity of the overall genome (by which I mean the genomes of all organisms in the biosphere) increases too (since it is expanding in size), and since the phylogenic tree depends on branching off, the variations and diversity of biological structures such that more and new ways of exploiting the environment in the struggle for resources amplifies exponentially.

There is no “magic” or “unseen force” which guides evolution. We are not talking about Smith’s invisible hand. Rather, the fittest organisms will survive. Nature is not “selecting” anything. It is simply that if a trait is favourable, the organism will survive, replicate and the trait will be propagated, and vice-versa for deleterious mutations. It is truly that simple.

This is the crux of evolution. The process by which the favourable traits are selected and the deleterious ones removed. As such, it is forced in one and only one direction: towards the organisms being in better symbiosis with the environment. And there must be selective pressure all the way. Evolution is best described as raw, brute force which sieves favourable traits. However, there is no one doing the selecting. What “pushes” evolution is simply that organisms must survive by any means necessary, and the genetic code provides the traits by which they may better survive and reproduce. It is a struggle between biology and the environment, where biology is struggling for survival and nature is forcing an improvement in biological structure.

We must understand (and we will) that all life is based on the same chemical code of replication, and that the random variation in this code is forced to develop and accumulate into more advantageous sequences for the survival of the organism whose phenotype it expresses. This is called gene level selection. All life is based on just one code, which we are about to explore. This code is the interface which expresses the phenotype of the organism, as such it is the master key for any evolutionary change. From a single-celled foundation 3.8 billion years ago, the process of evolution has been the expansion of this code via homology, and the constant refinement in as many ways as possible . In this way, it is possible to look at the entire of biological life as a single, massive, set of genetic information struggling towards refinement and improvement such that the information expresses better ways for the organisms for which it is expressing to better survive in the environment. This raw force of the struggle for existence is what allows the generation of all the complex life we see around us, as a mutating continumm being expressed in the form of an ever-changing set of replicators buried within which is a drive for replication and hence the survival of the carriers (this was unknown until it was discovered by Richard Dawkins in 1976). Indeed, the refinement of the genetic code by means of the prorogation of the variation which the code exudes is surely a vastly more powerful technique for creating complex biological structure than is a loving creator assembling pieces of a flagella motor as though it were a jigsaw puzzle. The real reason that evolution, then is so appealing as a theory for the explanation of these structures (in addition to the ridiculously massive amount of evidence available for it a tiny chink of which was presented in my other essay) is that it is simply so powerful because there is simply such a vast number of organisms and such a vast amount of replication and hence such a vast and hyperbolically multiplying amount of variation, all being forced in the same direction by the struggle for existence. As Darwin realized, the process requires this vastness. The drive is so fundamental and instinctive, so utterly ingrained even down the the biomolecules which we are about to examine...

This is not a simple process, it occurs over perhaps 100,000 generations. Charles Darwin was the first to understand this. He understood that complex biological structures like wings, eyes, etc, must develop incrementally by means of slight variation which causes an accumulated pronunciation of trait. He also understood that massive amounts of death cycles are required for this to occur, say 100,000 generations, for many structures and functions.

Now, new evolutionary-developmental biology has mounted challenges to the traditional incremental view of biological structures in multicellular Eukaryota developing this way, and this will certainly be taken into account in the essay about Hox genes, but no one could deny, still, that incremental phenotype change is a fundamental and underlying mechanism of evolutionary biology.

So, you see? It is intrisic, not to consciousness, but to DNA that life struigles for existence. Sheesh. This is not new information, you know. DNA is a self-replicating code whoe sole purpose is replication and survival.

Your fallacy seems to be equivalent linguistically to those who fallaciously interpret "natural selection" as some sort of "invisible hand". There is no magic here, only the intrisic nature of the molecules on which all life is based.

And then, your argument can be demonstrated neurologically false, too:

This brings me full circle back to the interaction problem. All of the processes of the brain are fluid continuum processes which change appropriately based on precise arrangements of neurons and concentrations of chemicals and neurotransmitters. They can be altered directly using drugs, chemicals, or injury. They can be switched on or off by the body and by chemical pathways have a direct effect on physical health. By cutting the physical connections in the brain, one can induce an effect whereby the mind is divided. Yet the soul is acausal and indivisible, and also fixed and unchanging. The functioning of the processes of cognition, emotion, consciousness and the mind is antithetical to the dogma which surrounds the “soul”. We know have incomplete biological understanding of many of these things, but like I said, we do know enough about the neural networks and chemical pathways to rule out immaterialism.

The continuum nature of these processes raises interesting questions. Firstly, we don’t have a test for consciousness, which is problematic and raises ethical questions. For instance, until recently it was believed that those in a permanent vegetative state had no consciousness at all, until neuroangiograms confirmed that they actually respond to music, language etc (a neuroangiogram is where a radioactive isotope is injected into the brain which allows the neuroscientists to track blood flow to specific areas of the brain which in turn will show the amount of brain activity in those corresponding parts).

Since we don’t have a test for consciousness and it appears that we are the only animals which have developed language, there is no way to know as of yet whether any of our cohorts in the animal kingdom are conscious. The two best candidates are gorillas and dolphins since they have all passed the self-awareness test and have reasonable (although extremely primitive compared to our own) methods of communication. If consciousness is a process which exists in degrees, whereby there is no clear-cut line for conscious and not conscious unless neurologists draw an arbitrary line based on electrical activity, then at what point in the evolutionary continuum did consciousness develop? Is it with one of our deceased Homo genus ancestors? And, on that same token, at what point in human embryonic development does the conscious process switch on so to speak? These are the questions which the next generation of embryologists, neurologists and neuroscientist can look forward to. I believe the case has been closed on this silly nonsense of the “soul”.

nd humor and logic and rationality...if only Descartes had known, he would weep in shame.

On the “problem” of “free will” and “volition”

The dualist assertion, as supported by the religious dogma it complements, is that the soul is the domain of all things mental, that mental states are a seperate reality from the glands and gristle of the brain (but then...what does the brain do? Surely then it would be vestigial, which is absurd). However, neuroscientists have been shooting those off like flies on a windshield. Even the most ardent or ignorant dualist will be forced to admit that there is physical and causal grounding for mental states. We now have convincing neurological explanations for emotion, reason, cognition, pain, perception etc, and those phenomenon which we cannot (as of yet) explain, we can at least to deduce the physical nature of such phenomenon (consciousness, self-awareness and thoughts). The deductions of physicality are obvious, you tweak a physical thing in the brain, and you get a corresponding change in mental state. An electrode at X produces a physiological effect at Y and a corresponding mental state, chemical X in neuron group Y produces mental state Z and so on. We have a slew of cerebrovascular, genetic, neurodevelopmental, congenital neurophysiological, neurotoxic and neurobiological diseases to attest. Depression (serotonin VGIC channel malfunction and limbic-cortic dysregulation), which causes, well, depression. Alzheimers (amyeloid fatty plaque accumulation), which causes dementia, senile dementia, which does the same, Wilson’s disease (accumulation of copper in the brain causing dementia and Kayser-Fleischer rings), OCD (subcortical circuitry malfunction) causing obsessive-compulsive behaivor, Lesch-Nyhan’s (autocannibalism and insanity, caused by a missing copy of the functioning hypoxanthanine-guanine ribulotransferanse), autism (miswiring of mirror neurons) causing, in extreme cases, total antisocial behaivor, inability to speak, general inability to interact with others, eating disorders are caused by frontotemporal synaptogenesis malfunction, hallucination by cytokine storms in the retinogeniculocalcarine tract, the list goes on and on.

So, in the face of 200 crushing years of neurological evidence, many turn to the icky and hopelessly unscientific notion of “free will”. This is appealling because the brain is a physical machine and hence causal, but “free will” as the name denotes, is indeterminate. Many neuroscientists hence reject the notion of “free will”. I am not here to argue for or against such a notion, except to say this:

The question of free will is merely the other side of the coin of consciousness, the existence of a being which is aware of its existence (subject/object) in relation to the world, and has a concept of “I” and hence is able to make decisions about the the world pertaining to the accomplishment of some goal. Neurologists call this executive function. There is a part of the brain responsible, the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), although we are not absolutely sure of the precise mechanism involved. Regardless, we can be quite sure of the organic biophysical nature of the decision making process. As I explained before, this is merely the other side of consciousness, which through a series of very easy deductions, we can, as I have shown, prove to have organo-physical grounding. The “free will” and control you excercise over your actions can be altered, controlled, lost, and switched on and off by physical actions in the brain, as evidenced by the poor Lesch-Nyhan sufferer.

But the term “free will” implies your ability to make decisions is...free. It is surely not. There are a host of factors, both acknowledged and programmed, which influence decision making. It is a highly causal and determinate process, depending on the tempermant of the subject in question (which is partially genetic and partially environmental), the electrical signals which knit together to form your cohesive worldview, this is the science of perception, which I shall cover now, memory, the pattern-recognition engines of the brain, the precise neuroelectrochemical concentration at time of the decision being made, and so on. There is no such thing as “free will”, because the processes by which decisions are made are as causal and hence physical as any biological process we care to name. The dichotomy we must entertain is this: Is there a “you” commanding and controlling your thoughts, or are “you” the sum total of your thoughts? Most of neuroscience, as do I, lean towards the latter. There is no mental control room, and it is most certainly not external of the brain. You cannot control your thoughts. Try it. You are your thoughts, and these thoughts are caused by....a guess, anyone? I would suspect, along with the bulk of evolutionary cognitive neuroscientists, that the subject/object self-perception of higher organisms which generates the illusion of “free will” is a by product of the evolutionary expansion of the neocortex along the Pan/Homo genus. After all, humans are not the only animals to possess this capability, although ours is certainly most fine-tuned. At present, great apes, chimps, macques and dolphins are also among this small set of organisms which acknowledge their existence as a defined being from the world they inhabit, and hence they do not behave like mere automata, as Descartes would have us believe.

In preperation for the next section of discussion, we must turn the science of perception. In scientific terms, this is the mechanism by which the electrical signals from the external and internal world are arrayed and read to assemble a picture of reality for the brain to interpret. That’s what the brain does, it runs a first-class simulation of reality.

This simulation is based on thousands and thousands of data hard points inside and outside the body. First, there are the five exoperceptive senses, which we all know, sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing, which depend, respectively, on the eyes and optic, trochlear, abducent and oculomotor nerves, the olfactory and glassopharyngeal nerves, the tongue and hypoglossal nerve, the thousands of recepter neurons across the body and the auditory and vestibulocochlear nerves.

Then, there are the lesser known, but equally important introperceptive senses, which regulate balance and spatiotemporal relative position and geometric orientation in the world (inner ear and cochlear tubes) called proprioception, the tracking of movement and muscle memory called mechanoperception (this one is quite remarkable, it is controlled by grid neurons which array a lattice-like projection of external reality, dividing it into grid squares, such that grid neurons corresponding to said squares fire when movement is detected in said squares. Obviously, your brain does not project this onto your vision, as that would be extremely annoying. As a matter of fact, your brain, while efficiently organizing reality, tweaks a lot of things so as not to appear unsettling. For example, the eyes never stop moving, they, even when fixed on a point, are making a jerky motion called sacchares. However, this is extremely unsettling in appearance so the brain eliminates it from the visual projection. It can be detected only by watching someone else’s eyes in the mirror.

There are many introperceptive senses, but they keep inventing new ones as they are discovered, so I shall not mention them all here. The point is that the simulation which the brain runs based on this data is the fundamental requisite of existence for a conscious mind. The mind cannot exist without it. For some hitherto unexplained reason, perhaps psuedo-therepautical, the wealthy sometimes pay to be placed for short periods of time in a total sensory deprivation tank. This is dangerous. Overexposure to total sensory deprivation will cause insanity then death. The sensory processing units of the brain will begin to unravel, as experiments have shown. Imagine a person born more unfortunate than Helen Keller. Not only are they congenitally blind and deaf, but they have CIPA (Congenital insensity to pain with anhidrosis) and ageusia. If I presented this case to a neuroscientist, they would say the baby would die soon after exiting the womb, assuming it has not been born stillborn. The mind cannot exist without the senses.

In addition to the senses and the genetic factors of temperament and chemical concentration across the VGIC arrays, the mind cannot exist without the brain’s pattern recognition engines, without which we would be somewhat like Dory the fish in Finding Nemo, except that in addition to constantly forgetting our own name, we would be unable to walk, talk, or think at all.

Born without a brain

Of the most ludicrous attempts to prove the existence of the “soul”, surely, the so-called “born without a brain” is one of them.

Of course, it is possible to be born without a brain. The precursor to the neural clusters of the brain are called neural tubes, which open and develop around 25 weeks into embryonic development, and partition along the brain’s major longitudinal axis into the four major partitions (prosencephalon, mesencephalon, rhombencephalon and the cerebrospinal fluid duct. The first three then split again into the brain’s sub-partitioning, the prosencephalon develops along the optic ducts and into the precursor of the cerebrum, which contains all of the higer-level functions and partitions (temporal lobe, occipatal lobe, prefrontal cortex and parietal lobe), and the rest develops into the sub-structures of the primary and secondary tiers of the brain, the midbrain, the fluid ducts that run between the lobes, the pons medullas and hypothalamus, the cerebellum and the brain stem.

To be born without a brain is a classed neural tube defect, which occurs around 26 weeks of human embryonic development, with the failed closure of the neural tubes. The most serious of these is called anencephaly. An anencephalactic baby has no isocortex or cerebral hemisphere, in short, they are missing 85% of their brain, the part necessary for higher-level brain function.

Very few anencephelactic babies are born, since it can be detected in utero, and nearly all mothers who learn of the baby’s condition choose to abort it, many of those who are born are stillborn. A very tiny portion remain alive. It is possible to be alive in an anencephelactic state since the brain stem is present, and hence the cardioregulatory center, so the heart will beat. Eventually, however, with no brain, the body will die very quickly (Morpheus, in the Matrix, my favorite film, was correct when he said “the body cannot live without the mind”) the record, I believe, for an anencephelatic baby is one week outside of the womb.

Unsurprisingly, an anencephaltic baby is in a permanent vegetative state, unable to feel pain, unconscious, blind, deaf and dumb. In short, there is no higher level function to speak of. No consciousness develops, no mind etc. They just...exist, although there is no “I” to speak of in an anencephelactic baby.

Anencephaly is not to be confused with a much, much rarer condition called Acephaly, which is the absence of the entire head of a parasitic twin fetus, which appallingly, can survive for a few hours by leeching blood from the heart of its twin.

BASIC neuroscience. An entity can only have thoughts in the neurological sense once it has ganglion clusters and neurons. Basic cell bio 101: A cell is an information processing microprocessor:

Think of a cell. Just one cell. It is tiny, barely 50 microns across. It is a enclosed by a tough cell wall made of glycolipids. This wall gives the cell defined boundaries and separates it from the outside world, defining it against the background. Inside the cell is a watery gel which fills up the whole inside of the cell. This watery gel is called the cytosol, and it is the main stage on which cellular events take place.

This cell’s wall will be studded with transmembrane proteins which control things coming in and out of the cell (organic molecules in, waste gas out). Meanwhile, inside the cell, enzymes will be running the day-to-day operations of the cell. Structures inside the cell (usually made of proteins) needed to maintain it will be being broken down, assembled, and repaired in a series of complex pathways all controlled by enzymes. Meanwhile, the cell needs energy and raw materials, so it imports organic molecules (aka “food) and breaks it down into simple subunits (this process is controlled by enzymes) which are then used for energy (a process which is also controlled by enzymes) or used to construct large cellular structures (this is also controlled by enzymes). For all this to happen requires a lot of chemical messages to fly between lots of different parts of the cell so that the cooperative process keeps going, and all different cellular projects are in communication and taking cues from the environment for what to do (these processes are controlled by signal integrating proteins, signal amplifying proteins and signal transducing proteins).

Controlling all this is the genetic code. The genetic code holds the “master key” to all the proteins. The rate at which proteins are assembled from genes is controlled by other genes, which in turn usually end up being controlled by other genes. Since proteins work in teams, the concentration of each different protein, as controlled by the genetic code, affects the cell as a whole. Most of the time, the demand for various products operates on a feedback loop. If a product is needed, it triggers a stimulus which sends a message to the genetic template. This can result in a particular gene being switched on or off or increasing rate of production or decreasing or a host of other things.

In other words, the genetic code of a cell functions like a microprocessor. It takes input from the environment, processes it, and delivers an output. In this way, the whole balance of the cell can be controlled by the genes. However, this analogy is not entirely accurate since the relation between proteins and genes are reciprocal ie proteins can control genes (these are called DNA binding proteins).

A single cell cannot"think", it has no "knowledge" I have just demonstrated this false. It is an absurdly ignorant view of cell bio and basic biokinetics mechanisms. Life is defined as an autonomous agent. It struggles blindly to survive because of the nature of the code upon which it is based (these principles are so basic I am stunned you are ignorant of them). Not because it is "conscious" in any way.

This vitalist argument was refuted 150 years before you were born. There is no "conscious force" which pushes transcription, translation etc. There is nothing about biological machines that disobeys chemical laws. Life is because its code by definition QED is inherently struggling to survive. It does not "think" about it because it as an entity does not have the capacity to "think". The genes may generate beings which do have this capability, but for you to ascribe this to any biological and autonomous agent makes you a cretin of high order.

Your argument is so pathetic I am bent double with laughter, now shall we continue? Please stop with your fallacy of composition. Your argument is so bad I can barely speak. Only a being with a powerful neurological engine can develop consciousness.

And just in case you do not know the fallacy to which I refer:

Brains think

Brains are made of atoms

Atoms do not think

Therefore, brains are not made of atoms

Your argument for this was....so awful. You fail to understand what exactly biological life is. You obviously know nothing about the inherent nature of biological life. Your argument refers to a ridiculous philosophy called vitalism which was destroyed by scientific mechanism 150 years ago.

-Survival mechanisms in all biological life from prokaryota to animalia is due to the fact that it is based on a code whose sole existence is struggling for self-replication. Indeed, under your absurd argument (fallacy of conflation), I could make the following statements:

-Electron orbitals in atoms are always attempting to obtain full valency. Therefore, electrons consciously "want" full valency.

The second law of thermodynamics dictates that all things fall towards lower energy states. Therefore, there must be some conscious "want" of atoms to do this.

Please do not resurrect this nonsense. I will laugh myself into seizure.

Here is a really basic summary, so you don't explode:

Consciousness is a second-order characteristic of the persistance of existence in general, NOT vice-versa. To state the former is a FALLACY OF COMPOSITION, which shows NO understanding of neuroscience, since the direct implication is that inanimate entities can think, which is IMPOSSIBLE because a thought requires a neurological engine capable of sensation and memory

To claim that such a process must be immaterial is to show awful ignorance of functionalism, it commits a fallacy of composition which I am stunned you cannot understand.

This is basic etiology: The principle of something not occuring without prerequisities. Consciousness is such a process which requires very specific requisites as I already demonstrated. Hence, your argument for its universality fails because it is a stolen concept fallacy. Furthermore, it begs the question...

I actually proved this formally, in these two articles. Since you will not click the links, I shall place the necessary content here:

These arguments all fall under one category. They accuse the existence of “God” of committing the stolen concept fallacy. Namely, a specific kind of stolen concept, positing an entity whose attributes require the existence of system which is subsequent to its existence. An example of this (albeit a very silly example) would be:

1. The Earth appears to be designed by intelligent entities
2. Humans are intelligent entities
3. Therefore, it is logical to conclude that humans built the Earth

When we observe the universe’s history, it clearly goes from simple to complex, driven by free energy. Let us look at it in reverse order:

1. Consciousness
2. Eukaryotic life
3. Prokaryotic life
4. Terrestrial planets
5. Galactic clusters
6. Stellar formation
7. Plasma gas cooling
8. Hydrogenous ionization
9. Atomic organization
10. Universal expansion
11. Singularity collapse
12. Singularity state (literally ex nihilo)

Now, why not look at the same list, except with God inserted into it, in reverse order again?

1. Consciousness
2. Eukaryotic life
3. Prokaryotic life
4. Terrestrial planets
5. Galactic clusters
6. Stellar formation
7. Plasma gas cooling
8. Hydrogenous ionization
9. Atomic organization
10. Universal expansion
11. Singularity collapse
12. Singularity state (literally ex nihilo)
13. Consciousness

It’s absurd. Utterly absurd. Far from being an explanation of the universe, it merely creates superfluous epistemic baggage, unnecessary questions on the existence of the entity against the grain of natural law. So it should come as no surprise that it gets swiftly eliminated via Occam’s Razor.

From this we can also conclude that the cosmological argument commits the Pot/Kettle fallacy as well (fixing cause with an uncaused cause).

Any a posteriori argument for God will and always will commit the stolen concept fallacy. It is reflection of a discredited philosophical school called "trickle-down creation", the notion that a constructed object has to be created by a constructer more complex than the constructed object. And yet, counterintuitevely, scientific philosophy goes in totally the opposite direction. The necessary creative intelligence to create objects and put the trickle-down theory into practice can only arise from evolution from simpler origins.

So to conclude this point, God as described would break this by committing the stolen concept fallacy, as it too would require design thusly leading to an infinite regress of designers. The more obvious solution is to reverse the equation, from long-since outdated top-down creation to the new, more sensible philosophy of bottom-up evolution, which is firmly established scientific fact from all fields of scientific discipline, I can confirm the solidity of this philosophy.

[A short digression]

A common criticism is that this is hypocritical. Clearly complex machines like jet engines and nuclear reactors are “designed”, so why is it that much more complex biological machines (myosin-driven molecular motors, rotating ion-gradient flagella, serine cascades, neurogenesis, transcription, to name a very small sample) do not need design? This is the basis of Ray Comfort’s, er, ahem, “arguments”, as well as many assertions by Intelligent Design proponents starting from William Paley and continuing today.

So what makes biological systems special? Why is it they, while very complex, do not need design, while jet engines do. The answer is evolution, of course. Biological systems are special because the very definition of a biological system is a chemical self-replicating system. The very notions of biology and blind-guided evolution are inherently linked, intertwined, forever joined. Systems of information which self-replicate with random errors non-randomly selected for accumulation of adaptive functions is the very basis of the whole of biology. Biological systems do not need design because the very concept of biology is fixed to that of the non-random selection of randomly varying replicators. Biology and evolution are lockstep concepts. Biology cannot exist without evolution. It needs no design, it cannot have design. The very notion of a designer is antithetical to the whole field of biology.

See this for a better explanation:

http://www.rationalresponders.com/forum/sapient/atheist_vs_theist/7918

[End of Digression]

Biological systems, arising from the “bottom-up” system of complexity, give rise to entities, like us, which can put into practice the trickle-down philosophy. This is why evolution is so seemingly counterintuitive, because we are very used to trickle-down creation. Yet this, as I have shown, is riddled with logical fallacies.

Likewise, the Cosmological argument also commits a prior requisite fallacy because to account for natural laws, it has to posit an entity which is not bound by natural laws, but any attempts to explain the existence of such an entity are ultimately incoherent (given especially that human epistemology is limited, obviously, to the natural world).

To take another example, the Kalam Cosmological argument, instead of appealing to infinite regress, appeals to universal cause. The universe could just as easily have not existed as opposed to existed (a statement which every physicist on the planet would decry as utter falsehood), the existence of the universe demands an explanation, according to Kalam theology(and Craig).

Yet to fix this intractable, they posit a solution which fixes no more problems than it creates further problems, all of which are defended as being inherently unknowable. Why should such an entity terminate the regress? The universe demands an explanation, thusly there is an entity of maximal intelligence and power not bound by the universe? Presumably this entity demands an explanation for its existence as well? Perhaps a better explanation considering that such a being is highly improbable? God runs in direct opposition to natural laws, which state that simplicity begets complexity. The complexity of the universe could only have sprung from simplicity, and complexity increases in accordance with natural laws that provide systems with free energy, better known as evolution. A creative intelligence, not bound by these laws, but being the solution which does not demand an explanation, not having started from simplicity, and working up, but always existing in maximally perfect form, is more improbable than the quantum tunneling prisoner experiment.

A common criticism (repeatedly made by Swinburne and Plantinga) is that God is "simple". I have read and reread their treatises and cannot make head or tail of such a notion. I think it does not do well at all for a theist to call God simple. First of all, this is absurd (I showed thatin the M/I conjecture). Secondly, the very notions of simple and complex steal from naturalism, as they depend on physical attributes. To call God simple is a statement without a referent (it's contradictory to the notion that God is supernatural). Clearly, a maximal sentient intelligence must be complex. It is an abominable sleight of hand to insist God is simple (actually, it is an abominable sleight of hand to call God complex, as both of these notions imply naturalism). After all, the mysterious realm of the spirit is indivisible, which means it has no material composition and does not obey the laws of reductionism. But surely that is precisely how we measure simplicity and complexity? Hence, to say God is "simple" or "complex" is incoherent. I merely assumed God complex as part of the exercise of showing supernatural a meaningless concept. It is merely a thought exercise which I am positing to show how absurd the notion is. To assume God is "simple" is to be reduced to the absurd (unless you mean, of course, as a friend at the Max Planck Institute wryly pointed out, that the simplest possible concept is "nothing", and therefore, by extension, to keep within the logic of laws, we must assume that God is nothing). But all jokes aside, again I reiterate that to assume God is a "simple entity" is to be reduced to the absurd. in fact, to assume God has a nature at all is, as per this thought exercise, to be reduced to the absurd.

Honestly...this is not a debate. This is me teaching you philosophical tenets we worked out years ago that you could just read in a library.

Do you have any evidence for this apart from the linguistic fallacies of conflation and factual error you have made henceforth?

This position of yours, the idea that persistence occurs because it is being pushed by consciousness. However, philosophers and scientists have known for decades that this relationship is contra, it actually goes in reverse. The persistence of beings is necessary for consciousness (hence, your argument is a stolen concept fallacy, analogous to "property is theft&quot. Life persists in the struggle for existence because it is based on a molecular code whose composition makes it intrisic that it will struggle to survive because the chemistry of it dictates that it will replicate and it struggles solely to continue replication of its code. That is how and why evolution works. There is no "conscious" reason behind this, as that would beg the question...

THat is why biological life is defined as any autonomous agent. This can be expressed mathematically, as I showed here:

So, this is why a bacteria will swim upwards in a glucose gradient, why osmeotic fluids always move from a high to low concentration of water, why electrons always arrange quantum orbitals in mutual repulsion, why things always fall towards their lowest energy state. THere is no "consciousness" pushing any of these things. That is etiologically absurd. Once we developed mechanism, we understood this. It is simply inherent to the nature and property of the object in question. This is true for electrons, for DNA, for cells, for life.

So any "Example" you give which does not focus on a neurologically complex being capable of holding the concept of "I" will simply make the same causal fallacy I pointed out over and over and over and over again (PLEASE do not make this fallacy again, or I shall know you did not bother to read this, and then I shall be extremely angry).

Oh, and by the way, just to ensure that you are actually reading this part and doing me the identical courtesy I do you (reading your entire post and responding line by line), I have left you a message to ensure you are still focused:

HAHAHA I BET YOU ARE NOT READING THIS

If you have read the message, please acknowledge in some way.

Yep, and even that's a generous appraisal of your mindset. You seriously remind me of people I've met who have had their brains eaten by drug abuse. The only reason I can imagine anyone is still responding to you at any length is sub-threshold OCD on their parts (no offense, ya'll). You are one of the dullest, most repetitive, least interactive, least interesting, most tedious creatures ever to steal minutes from my day with your insipid drivel.

Oh yeah? Where?

DG,

Thanks for your reminder of why I hated biology class and a few other classes and also going to the doctor (not to be re-wired by a committee).

Let me ask you to turn your attention to a couple other subjects (I am honest in wanting to hear how you address these - not being manipulative).

How do you answer the question of justice? You have all this stuff in your head, and it all relates to everything and you try to get it out all at once.

What if some ignoramous drinks a dozen beers, is able to start down the road and hit you paralyzed such that you can't even tap a keyboard, looking up, motors disconnected not able to work because of this injustice. (I don't hope this at all don't think that because I don't, and don't bring up about stem cells) - what I want to know is how do you address the injustice of that? Is there any eventual payday?

There is a payday in my faith BTW.

Here'a another: Your best friends' little boy is shot by a stray bullet from a gang fight. How do you comfort them? What would you say at the funeral?

I believe the little boy will be with God.

Mephibosheth (waiting at the foot of the hill for wisdom)

What have they done for me lately?

It's not what the reptiles have done, its what they are not doing.

Um... What??

You never addressed my posts.

[Edit : Added (below)] 

Please look up what theory means in the scientific sense, it is very different than the lay man's terms. 

The lack of quality, coherency, or sanity in your posts leaves me no choice. If you do not start offering exactly the same courtesy to me as I to you, by which I mean:

1. Ensuring all posts have syntactical, linguistic and grammatical coherency, and are able to be understood

2. Quoting your opponent line by line and responding in the appropriate fashion.

3. Offering counterrefutations before assertions and reassertions

4. Researching posts

5. Lastly, you always, in any post I write, acknowledge (not even talking about refutation), about 10% of the material I write. Often everything you ignore is the actual content of the refutation of your post, by me. I have called you out on this dishonesty ten times now. Unless this practice stops, I will tell you to leave the room. In a formal debate, you would be banned five or six times over by now.

I will leave. Unless you do this. A debate must have a certain amount of caliber and quality before engaging in it is a meaningful exercise.

For now, it is really your “objections” (LOL) to evolution of yours I wish to focus on, since your pathetic hypothesis regarding consciousness was already refuted by me, numerous times, you just ignored it, and decided only to focus on the neuroscience section (which you did not understand anyway). I would also like to take the opportunity to point out that generally you are a condescending dullard, whose posts are poorly researched and incredibly sloppily written and put together. Half the challenge is deciphering your statements, most of which are half-sentences.

Firstly, you assert there being no evidence for evolution. This is refuted here.

· Proteomics and It's Applications For Evolutionary Mechanisms- Indisputable Proof of Evolution and Common Descent

· Reading the Common Descent- Endogenous Retrovirals and Mitochondrial DNA, A Very Short Page

I know you wont bother to read them, I just wanted to point it out.

The rest of what you wrote was so astonishingly, inane, ignorant of science, I was astonished anyone could be so willfully uncaring of biology. You must understand that your questions were of such a high order of absurdity that they were a personal insult to me as a research scientist. Truly, do you drink bleach?

Do you know that or are you guessing? Have you ever studied evolutionary biology? If I asked you what a Hox gene was, could you answer? If I asked you about Helix-Turn-Helix, or what cladogenesis is, could you answer? No, so why comment on it?

Why don’t you leave? Seriously, it is adorable when people who have no study in a subject thing they have the right to comment on it, but you go too far in your proud display of ignorance on your sleeve. Your argument is even worse and more idiotic than those I have seen from young Earth creationists (yes, I do mean the idiots who believe the Universe to be 6000 years old when in fact it is demonstratably 13.7 billion years old)

On the Incompleteness of the Fossil Record

It is surely one of the most popular absurdities to criticize the fossil record, not that animals are found in the wrong strata but rather that the record is woefully incomplete, and indeed, for the justification of this, they have invented a hitherto nonexistent term: “transitional fossils”.

One may ask, well, what is a transitional fossil. The response you will undoubtedly get from these simpletons is that it is a transitional morphology between two species during a speciative split. I have no idea whatsoever what this means. There is no such thing as a “transition” between species, because there is no fixed anatomical description of what a species actually is. In terms of physiology and anatomy, a species is a broad, encompassing taxanomical term which encompasses a range of slightly differing anatomy and physiology between a group of organisms whose only unifying definition is their ability to exchange genetic material and procreate to form progeny (at least in the case of organisms whose reproductive transfer is genetically vertical). Hence, the word species is a continuum term, the boundaries of which are marked only by the points at which the genetic differences underlying organisms X and Y are just too great to allow vertical transfer. So, presumably, by transitional fossil, they would mean an organism whose genetic material is at such a precise equilibrium between two species that it is very difficult to class it. Needless to say, the probabilities of finding such an organism are ridiculous, even without the incompleteness in the fossil record.

On the incompleteness of the fossil record, this is merely a state the obvious claim. The fossil record is not a videotape of evolution. The utterly vast majority of animals and indeed physiologically distinct species are lost forever to human knowledge for reasons that fossils are such a rarity anyway. It is pure happenstance than an organism may be trapped in an anoxic environment such that they will be fossilized. The utterly and truly vast majority of all organisms are being siphoned out of the ground and burned to power our machines including the one on which I am typing- they become oil (and coal). It is utterly unreasonable to expect that fossils will provide us with a complete account of evolution anyway, that is impossible. Fossils help us greatly by providing a general account of the phyla, anatomy and physiology of organisms in particular strata, they are not a book which utterly accounts for the steps of incremental change in biological life. That is why more research is being put into my field (this may be my bias as a molecular biologist, but...), of proteomics and molecular genetics, which is helping to provide a very accurate account of macroevolution.

Your next point was, if anything, worse. Firstly, the entire Homo genus is a deceased line except for us. Everyone knows that. Even children know that! This makes our closest relative unusually distant, but even so, in terms of faculties, we are extremely similar to Simians. The only genuine neurological difference is

a) Hox gene mutations in HBOX1 which causes increased neocortex size and power

b) Language, much more increased sophistication of frontal, temporal, parietal and occipital lobes.

If you knew anything about genetics, you would know that the neurogenesis mutations which cause the increase in faculty (since the Hominid line was one of incrementally increasing brain size and power) . Most neuroscientists believe that while the simians are self-aware, they are not conscious. In Epiphenomenalism, consciousness is simply a by-product of expanding brain size as is subject/object dichotomy. Only a handful of neurologically complex animalia may possess this.

Obviously, you know nothing about convergent evolution, or you would not be asking about this. The closest relative to humans is 99.6% identical if we eliminate junk DNA.

Convergent and divergent evolution are a distinct result in general anatomy and physiology of animals due to common descent. The principle of convergent evolution is simple: Animals which are not directly related have underlying common functions due to the fact that they can be traced to a common ancestor and that these functions have universal use. Hence, the closer relationship between the animals in question on the phylogenic tree will determine their anatomical relationship. Zoology is not my field, but evolutionary developmental biology, the study of Hox genes and the evolution of anatomy via the change in the mechanisms governing embryonic development- is, and in the next essay I will be giving a complete explanation of convergent evolution from the standpoint of the Hox genes. The simplest example I can think of is that all animals, with virtually no exception, share the structure of the “tube”, which is the tract from the mouth to anus, whether lateral or longitudinal, and hence all retain the Hox genes in question. Convergent evolution can extend right down the molecular level.

Phylogeny trees or sig sequence marks (like above) can be drawn up for virtually any protein, and the homology indicates the duplication and divergence was responsible for the entire spectrum, indeed the noise mutation on the divergence as tracked by a technique called molecular clock simply should not exist in the case of design. Being that the proteins are the direct interface between the genotype and phenotype, the duplications and homologous relationship between the entire protein spectrum is expressed by duplications in the exons in question. Duplicative mutations leave extremely distinct signs on the organism and as they become incorporated by cumulative mutation mechanisms, they provide a mark by which we can track macroevolutionary processes as easily as we can read a book. We do not need to observe macroevolution to know about it. We can read it.

Convergent evolution speaks to the principle of common descent. The simplicity of the principle is that the more diverged in terms of time and environment the organisms are, the more dissimilar they are, and the closer relationship between them on the tree, the more anatomically, physiologically and biochemically similar they are per the time relationship of their being. But all of them have fundamentals in common:

Now, these homologous mutations and recombination of the homologous copies are important for the generation of new proteins for phenotypic alteration, but the genome does much more than hold protein codes. A cell is much more than a protein factory. A cell must also decide when to manufacture proteins based on external and internal stimulus, and the rate of transcription and translation to determine how much protein is produced. In the case of multicellular organisms, it is exponentially more complex, since the genes must also decide where the proteins are manufactured. The latter is utterly critical to Eukaryotic evolution and is the key mechanism for the generation of complex biological structures such as the heart, the eye etc, since it is the basis of embryonic cell differentiation and positioning. This means that we cannot merely examine the effects of mutations which create and alter proteins, we must examine those of the regulatory DNA. Regulatory DNA is just that, it regulates. It codes for no proteins, rather it flanks the exons and controls their rate of transcription ,as well as where they are expressed in multicellular organisms, and when they are expressed based on internal and external stimuli. The result is a very complex Gene regulatory Node Pathway (GRNP), the alteration of which may produce new and innovative biological structures in multicellular Eukaryota, the precise mechanisms of which will be detailed later.

The genome is complex and intricate, but in Eukaryota, the way it is organized is just awful. It is in an alarming state of disarray. Exon chunks are strewn all over the place sandwiched between enormous and mostly useless strings of introns. What is the reason for this alarming lack of genetic housekeeping in Eukaryota? Simple, the common descent means that Eukaryota have not shed their excess baggage. They simply retain useless genetic information like a mass of old papers since it would take more energy to shed it than it would to simply retain it. Hence, Eukaryota simply retain much of their evolutionary "junk DNA" as dormant, nonexpressed strings of nucleotides which don't actually do anything, except, of course, help molecular biologists sort through evolutionary relationships. As evolution goes on, of course, this extra DNA just piles up, for there is no need for Eukaryota to shed it. This is clear indication of common descent of Eukaryota. Indeed, in humans, only 9% of our genome appears to have any function whatsoever, and thus far it has been confirmed that at least half of it is "safe for recombinative excision", which simply means that the deletion of it makes no change in the organism.

This contrasts prokaryota, which are small and energy efficient organisms for which small genomes are clearly advantageous. The result is that they have a much higher exon concentration and much less regulatory DNA (little regulatory DNA is required for a functional organism). The result is that they are much more genetically distinct and diverse than are Eukaryota.

Multicellular Eukaryota, being much bigger and much more complex than Prokaryota, are actually much less diverse. There are vastly more fundamental constraints and requisites on physiology, cell dynamics and anatomy in a multicellular organism than in a single-celled one. As a result, Prokaryota are vastly more diverse than multicellular Eukaryota, and are also much more diverse than Single-celled eukaryote (since Eukaryota are much more complex than prokaryota, and single-celled Eukaryota, in turn, are much more diverse than multicellular Eukaryota). This is evident if we examine the base-pair span relationship in different domains of life:

The majority of changes between multicellular organisms are quantitative for this reason. So, when cyou get starry eyed over the apparent phenotypic diversity over humans on grounds that we are "so different", it shows pure idiocy. Indeed, morphologically, phenotypically, phylogenically, in terms of everything the Homo Sapiens is much, much more similar to, say, the Fugu Rupribes (puffer fish) than two average soil bacteria, you are displaying ignorance since multicellular organisms are vastly more rigidly similar in biochemistry than are any prokaryota. I share a higher percentage of DNA with the potted plant on my desk than do two prokaryotic species picked at random. It is for this reason that bacteria account for 99% of all species on Earth, and will always be the dominant arm of the biosphere as long as sustainable life exists on the planet. This is also why for the bulk of geological time, our ancestry were single celled organisms. So, again, I iterate that when the creationist despairs over the apparent vast differences between animals, but then dismissed observed bacterial speciative events, their ignorance rises to surface in the most amusing way. In terms of the biochemical spectrum, all multicellular Eukaryota are extremely closely related and that the generation of new species is so incremental and in terms of time slower than bacterial change is merely because bacteria reproduce exponentially faster.

For this reason, the utterly vast majority of mechanisms common to life were in place by the time the transition to multicellular Eukaryota was made after the rise of the Eukaryotes during the Oxygen Catastrophe. And it is for this reason that scrutinizing multicellular evolution so heavily while dismissing the evidence from the more easily observable bacterial evolution, is deeply dishonest for creationists. Granted, we can observe animal evolution very well, and our molecular techniques allow us to read it just as well as we would bacterial evolution, however, we must remember that we share far more in common with say, tucans, than the average soil bacteria shares with the average bog bacteria, and when examining the phenotype diversity of animals, we tend to forget this.

In other words, your “argument” is refuted by a basic principle which everyone who studies bio understands: There is an inverse relationship between morphological, phylogenic, anatomical and physiological diversity versus anatomical and physiological complexity (hence divergent evolution). Hence, any question regarding the difference between the most complex known being (the Homo Sapiens) and the Simians is ignorance. The neurological changes in the frontal, temporal and medial lobes and the quantitiave increase in brain material between the Homo and Simian genii are nothing compared to the vast exon/rate change differences between prokaryota.

This shows ignorance of cosmology. First of all, biological life can only arise in a specific band of conditions for which we have discovered only a handful and one forming. Organic molecules for the creation of biological life require a permanent dipole and some for of natural Electrophosphoresis to form. Don’t you know anything at all about thermodynamics and biomolecular kinetics? About the sensititivy of low-entropy systems and the inverse relationship between temperature and Free energy after a certain point? Really, please stop talking about evolution and chemistry. You know nothing about it. Truly nothing. Biopolymerization requires specificity of temperature and stability in range. Please do not assert, ever again, about a subject regarding which your education is nothing. How dare you call me arrogant when you make this phenomenally stupid and ignorant comment flagrantly uncaring about the fact that you have never studied cosmology (I bet you could not even tell me what the phrase Goldilocks Zone means, anyway). Aren’t you aware in any way of the entropy-sensitivity of biomolecules?

Really, you don’t know any of this, do you?

This may be the most idiotic comment I have ever encountered. This is worse than anything any creationist ever said. You know nothing of science and basic biology. Please get out. Before it was different. Now I am just angry someone could possibly know so little, and be proud of it.

That is utterly ridiculous. There is no evidence for this, and hence it is ad ignoratium

Sir, truly this may be the worst and most ignorant thing you have ever said. Let us examine population cycles. The struggle for resources is intrinsically linked to population and environmental factors. Biotic and abiotic factors all come together to determine selective pressure on organisms, which determines how their morphology will change. There is no “invisible force” guiding evolution, as “natural selection” is sometimes wrongly misinterpreted as, but merely that the organisms which can best adapt to the environment will survive and propagate, hence, all the stops are pulled out to see how can survive in the struggle for resources.

The gleaning of resources by organisms is determined by traits. Some organisms may be faster, stronger, better sighted, better camouflaged, smarter, etc. The refinement of these traits and hence the biological structures underlying them is done only because they are advantageous ie they help the organism in question survive and therefore reproduce and therefore the trait proliferates. Along with Richard Dawkins, I take (in opposition to Stephan Jay Gould) a school of thought of evolution called gene level selection. Since all the actions of organisms in the struggle for survival may be reduced to the genes fighting for proliferation, the intrinsic nature of the self-replicating chemical system to reproduce as much as possible is borne out by the organism which houses it.

The debate between group selection and gene selection is irrelevant for this discussion. Neither side, obviously, is denying that evolution occurs, merely how it occurs at a macro level. Anyway, the struggle for resources often leads to the accelerating refinement of advantegous traits. For example, Sabertooth tigers of the Primordial human era were in competition with each other for the catching of prey, as a result, those with the sharpest teeth and greatest speed ate, survived, and proliferated. Of course, this led to sabertooth tigers being faster and deadlier, which invariably led to an accelerating arms race of evolution. The sabertooth tigers were in competition and continued to compete and compete until they were so fast and deadly that they killed all the prey, starved to death, and hence returned to being less lethal and less speedy so that they population of prey may return to normal.

Evolution is all about the natural control of population dynamics, which keeps the organisms in question in symbiosis with the environment. A species which is too successful will destroy itself, by hitting the “Malthusian limit” or what ecologists called the K-limit. In nature there are many “limiting factors” which keeps rapid evolution of a single trait in check, hence encouraging morphological diversity, as we shall see below. These limiting factors are often food limits, viruses, etc.

As a result, “arms races” for the increasing refinement of single traits are often accompanied by divergences, whereby populations of organisms often develop other successful traits by which they may stay in the struggle for resources. The result of this is a divergence whereby the development of a new successful trait obviously leads to a morphological change between the diverging group and the pre-existing set of organisms.

In the language of evolutionary biology, this accumulates into a speciative event. A new species arises from an old one by means of incrementally changing morphology, through which organism may better exploit the environment by developing new traits, instead of getting into an arms race over refining a pre-existing trait, which leads to crash-and-burn cycles.

The technical definition of speciation is a break-off where the break-off population may no longer exchange genetic material with its predecessor population. This almost always occurs when two populations of organisms become geographically separate, and therefore are subject to different evolutionary pressures and different gradients of morphological change. After all, animals in a pole environment have very different needs to those in a desert environment. The slightest and most subtle change in pressures can have far reaching consequences which is what makes evolutionary trajectories so complex. An interplay of factors will determine the shaping of the morphology of organisms, which include abiotic factors (food supply, weather patterns, geography) and biotic factors(predators in the area, disease vectors and predator/prey cycles).

This has led to some uncomfortable discussion of whether it was purely luck that the evolutionary trajectory came upon a self-aware being of consciousness. This has led to a debate on whether the huge advantage of sentience makes it mathematically inevitable that it will arise, and I tend to side with this position.

As I said before, but tha you lack the cranial capacity to understand, there are physiological constraints on evolutionary mechanisms. This is why the large mammals that dominated after the cataclysm 65 million years ago are gone. There are physiological and anatomical constraits, which are also checked by the K-Limit and Malthusian cycles, hence, large birds of prey are physiologically impossible and ecologically unsustainable. I am not your goddamn 5^th grade science teacher. GO to a library, read a real book, and then come back. But don’t make incredibly idiotic arguments to me, when all I will do is laugh so hard I will almost seize.

Please stop this NOW. You show huge ignorance of physiology, anatomy, population cycles, speciation and divergence of phyla and trait. Do not ever speak to me about evolution again, because not even from creationists have I ever been forced to deal with such idiocy.

You fool, scientists have already demonstrated this false. And please do not accuse me of failing to grasp anything (and providing one sentence en passent as evidence of that), because I actually refuted that, but you really were to lazy to read it. Only a select few entities have subject/object dichotomous distinction, self-awareness. However, this is not necessarily consciousness. You clearly show ignorance of neurophenomenology. What is consciousness? An odd question, and disarmingly difficult to answer. It is not necessarily tied to self-awareness. You can be conscious but not self-aware (this relationship is not reciprocal, however, you cannot be self-aware and not conscious), nor is it tied to language (this is difficult to imagine since higher cognition seems to revolve around language, and when we think to ourselves, we are thinking in language, nonetheless, a baby is still conscious, and language is not the only mode of transmitting higher cognition within the brain). Again, this relationship is not reciprocal. An animal which can construct a language will have to be conscious.

Since we don’t have a test for consciousness and it appears that we are the only animals which have developed language, there is no way to know as of yet whether any of our cohorts in the animal kingdom are conscious. The two best candidates are gorillas and dolphins since they have all passed the self-awareness test and have reasonable (although extremely primitive compared to our own) methods of communication. If consciousness is a process which exists in degrees, whereby there is no clear-cut line for conscious and not conscious unless neurologists draw an arbitrary line based on electrical activity, then at what point in the evolutionary continuum did consciousness develop? Is it with one of our deceased Homo genus ancestors? And, on that same token, at what point in human embryonic development does the conscious process switch on so to speak? These are the questions which the next generation of embryologists, neurologists and neuroscientist can look forward to.

If you do not know this, you have no right to be here and discuss this. So just get out.

Consciousness is intriscally tied to self-awareness and thought, and only a few beings have this. I already pointed this out, and you ignored it. Why, why, why do you to this? Shall I repost it so maybe this time you will be bothered to read it? I already pointed out the following:

“Pan-Consciousness” is ontologically absurd and begs the question: It was crushed by functionalism and epiphenomenalism. It has no ontological status. It is process, not entity, and hence the view of it being the underlying highest ontological status is absurdity of the highest degree. Having established the consciousness is a lower ontological status than the material, your point is destroyed by reductio ad absurdum.Pan-consciousness begs the question of existence since it does not answer the question of what it means to be conscious. Your assertion over this definition has already been crushed by me, and yet you did not breathe a word about it. How dare you even show your face here engaging in such dishonesty. Regarding consciousness being a higher ontological status, I have already established that the alternative is inherently absurd, which is why your assertion that an entity could be conscious without thought is equally absurd. While consciousness is not necessary for thought, thought is necessary for consciousness, and I have already established scientific evidence for this. You fail to understand such an astoundingly simple part regarding reciprocal relationship and causality, that I am stunned you are still showing your face. The notion of consciousness underlying the material instead of vice-versa was something which I spent 60,000 words refuting. You ignored all of this material and continued to assert. At any rate, I should not even need to refute your idiocy since you can provide no evidence of it. The evidence you offered I already refuted. Being that you offered no counterrefutation, your point is as of now reduced to absurd conjecture. The ball is in your court to establish how this process could possibly be a higher ontological status than the material despite that all the evidence points in the opposing direction. You are facing a vast leviathan of contemporary Western Philosophy of Mind and Neurophenomenology. This position is old and outdated and, ironically, two opposing schools crush it (functionalism and epiphenomenalism). Consciousness is a property which can only be held by neurologically complex beings. This is why only a handful of organisms have the property of being self-aware (please do not make another Affirming the Consequent Fallacy by misconsterueing this relationship as reciprocal again). If consciousness were a higher ontological status, such a view would inherently beg the question. If consciousness is C, then talk of ~C is absurd under this proposition, yet ~C clearly exists. There are entities whose existence is such that it cannot be conceived as to what it would be to perceive through this entity because this entity has no capacity to perceive itself as being. That function requires neurological complexity. I demonstrated this. You ignored it. I also pointed out that such an entity would require the ability to neurologically make the distinction between that which is perceiving and that which is being perceived. And I explained such perceptive mechanisms in molecular detail hence establishing that only certain neurologically complex beings could posess them. You ignored it for a third time. How dare you, you dishonest charlatan. AS I explained before, your argument can be destroyed by reduction ad absurdum since definining C requires a dichotomous distinction between that which is being perceived and that which is doing the perceiving. In this regard, your point about subject/object bias is a Red Herring since it fails to account for the absurd point you made. If there is no ~C, then the existence of C as ontologically discrete process begs the question. Hence, the idea of consciousness as a the highest ontological category is absurd since it denies, effectively, the existence of consciousness. (it begs the question as to what consciousness is, if it cannot be defined as C, since by that definition ~C=Ø, which means that the idea of consciousness being coherent at all is inherently absurd. We can conclude that consciousness requires the requistes of existence which you postulated as requiring consciousness, which I refuted, and you did not acknowledge, hence making your entire argument a stolen-concept fallacy. The idea of Pan-consciousness is easily reduced to the absurd because by it, C is not anything meaningful QED, It refers to nothing to say it is the highest ontological status. It is philosophically absurd, and indeed, refutes itself. Most functionalists and emergentists regard it as a lower ontological status than the material without which the process cannot be. The problem with ~C= Ø is the nature of the causal relationship of If ~A, then ~B, therefore if necessarily B, then necessarily A. For consciousness, the relationship has been established as reversed: It requires thought, self-awareness, and a powerful neurological engine. Furthermore, it is a process existing in degrees in entities or not at all. We do not know how it works but we do know that it is neurologically discrete, which is to say that obviously ~C= Ø is ridiculous. Allow me to remind you of the emergentist position:

One of the things I covered in the other essay (albeit not with this specific terminology) is the concept of ontological orders. We have higher ontological status and lower ontological status. The lower ontological status arises from the higher ontological status. A finger is a higher ontological status than a working hand. A fermion is a higher ontological status than a quark, and a quark higher than a proton, and a proton higher than an atom. In other words, the concept of an ontological status requisites materialism. Not necessarily reductionism because it can also encompass emergentism but it does necessitate that beings exist due to the existence of higher ontological status. Eventually, according to the grand unifying theory of physics, we keep going back and we eventually hit the highest possible ontological status, the absolute substance (or perhaps lack thereof) from which all is composed.

Emergentism is an arm of materialist philosophy. Many naturalists regard consciousness and the mind as an emergent property of the brain. Some others hold that the mind can be divided and is hence, with respect to the whole brain, reductionist, not emergent. I am sympathetic to a middle ground position . Obviously when we reduce the system to a certain degree, we find the property which we were examining in the first place disappears. Hence to some degree the two positions of emergentism and reductionism are valid and mutually reconcilable in much the same way that empiricism and rationalism are reconcilable. In fact, I do not think there has been a “pure” empiricist or rationalist since the days of Immanuel Kant. Likewise, the materialist philosophy does not usually find one taking a pure stance on emergentism or reductionism.

Reductionism does not say that X does not exist, merely that it is a lower ontological category than its constituents Y and Z. Emergentism says that X exists of its own accord due to a synergistic effect between Y and Z. The latter can be invoked to explain many phenomenon from a materialistic perspective, especially consciousness and the mind. Regardless, any dualist asking for a materialist to explain abstract X is revealing their own unsurprising ignorance of materialist philosophy. Abstractions in this context are merely what a reductionist would call lower ontological categories that result from increasingly complex systems, or what an emergentist would call the result of synergistic effect in the system. Emergentist materialism is extremely important in my work, since one of the things I study is enzyme kinetics, drugs and medicine, where synergistic interplay is extremely important. The same logic which causes a Calcium Channel blocker and a Beta Blocker to work better together to lower blood pressure than the mathematics of their individual workings would have us believe is the same logic that may give rise to abstractions from material systems. In other words, this may cover thoughts, emotions, rationality etc. To a reductionist however, we can explain these in terms of direct reducibility to their electrophysiological activity in corresponding neurons. Regardless of which position you take, the abstract, the thought, is still generated.

There are clearly entities for whom we can imagine have no concept of being. You also commit a fallacy of non sequitor by misconstruing neurological relationships as reciprocal (ie A then B therefore B then A), which is to say that while a being need necessarily not be conscious to have thoughts, it does require that it can have thoughts before it can be conscious, the same with the perception of subject/object. This is not a reciprocal relationship. A being requires preexisting neurological complexity before consciousness may arise, not vice-versa.

as Paul Drayper put it:

"Consciousness and personality are highly dependent on the brain. Nothing mental happens without something physical happening." Now Michael Tooley, a philosopher at the University of Colorado at Boulder, has stated five lines of evidence in support of this claim. Let me summarize just briefly that evidence. First, when an individuals brain is directly stimulated and put into a certain physical state, this causes the person to have a corresponding experience. Second, certain injuries to the brain make it impossible for a person to have any mental states at all. Third, other injuries to the brain destroy various mental capacities. Which capacity is destroyed is tied directly to the particular region of the brain that was damaged. Fourth, when we examine the mental capacities of animals, they become more complex as their brains become more complex. And fifth, within any given species, the development of mental capacities is correlated with the development of neurons in the brain. Thus, the conclusion that, "Nothing mental happens without something physical happening," seems inescapable.

Your “arguments” for Pan-consciousness were already refuted by me. You essentially ignored 2000 words of text. I already pointed out that these functions that you attributed to consciousness were not really consciousness at all. Why did you ignore this? Why the bloody hell do you keep debating if you are to ignore half your opponents goddamn post? Here, I shall show you:

This position of yours, the idea that persistence occurs because it is being pushed by consciousness. However, philosophers and scientists have known for decades that this relationship is contra, it actually goes in reverse. The persistence of beings is necessary for consciousness (hence, your argument is a stolen concept fallacy, analogous to "property is theft". Life persists in the struggle for existence because it is based on a molecular code whose composition makes it intrisic that it will struggle to survive because the chemistry of it dictates that it will replicate and it struggles solely to continue replication of its code. That is how and why evolution works. There is no "conscious" reason behind this, as that would beg the question...

THat is why biological life is defined as any autonomous agent. This can be expressed mathematically, as I showed here:

So, this is why a bacteria will swim upwards in a glucose gradient, why osmeotic fluids always move from a high to low concentration of water, why electrons always arrange quantum orbitals in mutual repulsion, why things always fall towards their lowest energy state. THere is no "consciousness" pushing any of these things. That is etiologically absurd. Once we developed mechanism, we understood this. It is simply inherent to the nature and property of the object in question. This is true for electrons, for DNA, for cells, for life.

So any "Example" you give which does not focus on a neurologically complex being capable of holding the concept of "I" will simply make the same causal fallacy I pointed out over and over and over and over again (PLEASE do not make this fallacy again, or I shall know you did not bother to read this, and then I shall be extremely angry).

If you do this again, ever again, simply ignore a refutation the way Meph does and continue to assert a proposition without offering a suitable counterrefutation, I will leave. I will walk out the debate. I refuse to debate anyone who acts in such a ghastly and flagrantly idiotic manner.

Honestly, I really don’t know why I am still here…

a small tangent, DG is like a damn biology textbook that can speak, just had to say it.

Thomathy,

This section of the forum comes under the heading of "introductions, conversation and humor" and with a conversation I can appreciate frankness such as you expressing to me to the limits of your ability what I am, what you think I am thinking, and what you think I would say though I haven't said, and framing what I meant though I didn't mean from your mental framework.

Another thing that is nice in conversation with guests is respect - even though the person might be from another faith or just another person - I think that is a good way to make the world a brighter place. You have given what you have in that as well.

You will notice as you go along in life that if you aren't certain things and don't do certain things it isolates you from pain in those areas. For example, if you don't slander people, others may slander you but it won't touch you. The same is true with disrespect (BTW, I know God respects you as well).

I'm not the paymaster and I don't know what payday will be, but you're right - I urge everybody to accept the grace of debt paid in Jesus. It might be a lie to you but it isn't to me. I said in the OP I accepted the sincerity of those on this site as well.

As for comfort in bad situations, I suppose we all would do the best we could and still fall short. I was just curious what an atheist would say in those situations, so, not knowing I ask.

Sanity is a hard thing to assess. Everybody might have a different perspective on that. You know, I heard from an old doctor here in town they ended up putting the first guy who said there was such a thing as bacteria/germs in an asylm after they kicked him out of the medical club. He looks pretty good now, huh. Time can sort.

Mephibosheth (not locked up at the moment)

I'm interested in the conversation in this blog, at least for the moment.  For me a debate, is something I often avoid when possible, but this could be some benefit to me. 

I can barely handle the text editor in this blog, having to pick heading, paragraph, etc is already discouraging me.  Can someone fix that? 

The reason I post is that I have a question for both the theists and the athiests in relation to this discussion. 

What do you care about?  What is something that you really care a large amount about?  If this someone or something was gone, you'd  be very pissed, upset, cry, laugh(instead of crying).  

A lot of what I read in this discussion is debates of which side is indeed correct.  Most of it is written in an intelligent manner, free from gramatical error, and hard to see flaw in some of the thoughts.  

From my point of view, the statement I have formed is hard to argue, the statement is “nothing is really anything. “ As I have examined and lived out that perspective, there are still a few things I care about.  At times I either advance towards having more things I care about or I advance toward having more things I care less about.  This is a personal perspective and life existence I am merely sharing.  Something I really care about is my family, I could post more details unless my post is blown way out of the water. 

The relationship between what I have shared and this topic is this:  The discussion in this topic seems to direct my thinking more towards apathy, caring about less things.  I have been down both paths, both feel pretty good at different times.  Apathy I enjoy, though unhealthy at times.  I think the type of thinking displayed here promotes apathy?  Who gives? 

I'm not on this earth for athiests into believers or believers into atheists (also featured in a recent Kanye West song).  I'm not really sure of my purpose, but life should be good/fulfilling.  I like looking on the Upside, hence the screen name. 

So what do you care about?  What do you really care deeply about?  I'd like to hear that from both sides.  I could care less who can type more punctual and error free.  No debates will ever really be won on this site, unless someone gives up.  Don’t break up my paragraphs and tear apart each one, please.  Rational thinking is applauded, then allow me to be real with all these words.

Too heavenly minded to be of any earthly good? 

First of all, read this (and take note, sir, this is the second article I have essentially written just to answer your idiocy, honestly, it is like talking to a child who understands nothing of science or logic, so I expect you to read it. It explains why your arguments are false. Then you will be so kind as to tell me where my faulty reasoning lies. If you can find a flaw in the watertight logic (since this is indeed just pure logic) I will stand down. Otherwise, you will stand down. It is here:

The Employment of the False Dichotomy Fallacy and Its Variants In Debate

Sir, while I had thought perhaps that you might be coaxed, perhaps even forced, into having some sort of sane discussion (one in which you wrote coherently, to start), I see now with your latest trash of a post, miscarraige of verse, that you are not to be dissuaded from dishonest, fingers-in-ears debate tactics which reflect immaturity and borderline obsession.

You would be so kind as to tell me where there is any fault or fallacy in my reasoning. You will do this properly and in a logical ,argumentantive fashion. Until then, you will stand down and cease your assertions. Of course, my request for you to do so, I have already resigned myself to, is to fall on deaf ears. Being that you have not read anything I have written (in fact, with this latest post, I would call into serious question your ability to read at all) how can you possibly accuse me of faulty reasoning?

And please do not use the phrase "I can see you hate God". Surely, even you can see that this is a non sequitur ad absurdum of a statement to make to an atheist. It contradicts the next paragraph. Were you drunk, or shot up with mephamphetamine or dimethyltriptamine when you wrote this? The quality of your posts would suggest so.

Also, "blasphemy" is a fictional notion, so do not employ it as if it were an insult to call someone a "blasphemer". You will get only cold laughter from the room.

Have I not already cleanly blasted, nay, destroyed, your claim that atheism requires faith? Have you responded. No! So stop making this claim until you commit to the proper counterrefutation.

Have I not already pointed out the fallacy of your previous request of how this "lack of faith" (which is the correct term) applies to life? Have you responded? You have not. I already itook the time to answer the question in the bottom line of your latest and worst post, and yet, you continue to imply that I have not... Time after countless time I blast, destroy, maul, savage, rent asunder your arguments and you ignore such refutations and continue to make the same arguments. Are you genuinely in possession of all of your mental faculties, or do you have serious OCD? As I suspect the latter, I recommend you check immediately into a neuropsychiatry clinic where they will administer the proper treatment for sub-cortical neural circuitry miswiring and malfunction which causes OCD.

Sir, I have never, ever, not online nor in person ever spoken to anyone as dishonest, vilitrolic, willfully ignorant as I am speaking to now. And considering that I spend a lot of my time dealing with creationists, that says a very great deal indeed.

Thanks JC for your response to my original post. 

If others had things to share of what they cared about that would be cool as well.  Point is to not get wrapped into spiraled thoughts and debate that shrink others as well as yourself at the same time, in advancing apathy.

I was in St. Louis 3 months ago when I pulled up at the BP gas station behind Busch stadium.  Pumping gas after the Cubs had just destroyed the Cardinals, something I was happy about.  I looked over and saw this picture painted on a garage, the picture that I have next to my name.

There are lots of colors in the mural and the overall picture is very cool as well.  Though I got some grief, I quit pumping gas and ran out in the middle of the 4 lane road so that I could get a good picture of the painting.  The road was clear, but my wife thought the painting was dumb at the time, has since then come around, but didn't like my initial idea of putting it on my background on my computer at work.  It was her first reaction to it. 

I think anything is a lot like this picture.  There are a lot of colors.  If I told you a specific color (green), that might be what stands out to you, that might steal the focus of your eyes.  In the big picture it isn't what color stands out the most, but the whole picture that defines the picture.  A person could represent a color, a situation/experience could represent a color, and when you look at a certain something your overall picture of that something is highlighted by those specific colors that steal your focus.  

Oh my it isn't a stretch to apply this comparison to religion, faith, or God stuff whatever you call it.  There have been so many colors in my life to this picture, and even some "who cares" applied to my vision or viewing of the full picture.  It's worth considering.  I was glad to have taken the picture and enjoyed the picture after I got home.  There were about 20 - 30 people that day including my wife who thought was I dumb for taking the picture, getting in the way of them trying to drive on the road as I snapped several pictures off, and others passing by who gave me a strong look of curiousity and envy, I think they too wanted a picture of the garage door.  

KSMB,

I am reading back through some of the rest of the posts in this blog.  Explain your stance a little more.  I read what you wrote to the guy who's picture is him as a child.

In talking about close mindedness, it is a pretty interesting topic.  Anytime I come to a confidence or conclusion that I make for myself, at that moment I am ruling out a lot of other options.  Last night I was really hungry late at night, I wanted cereal, I got cereal and I don't think anyone could have convinced me of eating something else.  

I think in life I have developed a perspective on a lot of things.  It could be said that I am close minded to others, or since there is still possibility of movement, I could be considered open-minded.  It's really a circular topic and like a fish in the water, hard to grab a real strong hold on. 

In talking about theists as inventors of a god, arrogant in that they actively pursue that God and call that a relationship, that is a perspective.  This would seemingly be a real slam to that person who pursued the God they feel so strongly about.  In fact if this God was so important that this theist felt that God was the ruler of the entire universe, I can see how your statements would really cause some anger.  

Unless an individual is truly open to anything I really struggle with how they can call themselves open-minded.  I am close minded, I go to Dairy Queen, I am ordering a large blizzard, the price is only 100 more than the small and 50 cents more than the medium.  If you were with me, you wouldn't convince me to do it differently.  Your way of saving the 1 dollar or getting the cone would be discarded as soon as you started talking about it.  When it comes to furniture, if I were to buy furniture which I haven't, I would buy leather.  It lasts the longest and cleans up the easiest.  You wouldn't convince me to get cloth unless you gave me an amazing deal on the cloth furniture, it would almost have to be free, and you'd have to bring it to my house. 

First, I support Magus' post:

But I'd also like to point out that being open-minded does not mean that we should necessarily give an equal amount of respect and merit to all claims or personal belief. For example, if someone still believed in the many gods of the Classical Greek tradition, I would not be required to be open-minded about that. If someone, in their adult age, honestly believed in Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny, I would not be required to be open-minded about that.

If we were talking about a difference of opinions in where the two of us think would be the better place to eat dinner, that would be one thing; but that's not the type of belief we're talking about here. If we merely had differing opinions on what made for a good Halloween costume, that would be one thing; but that's not the type of belief we're talking about.

I think I understand where you're coming from, and I agree that atheists/theists can sometimes let the hostilities get out of control in debates. I know that I can be overly aggressive myself at times, but there are some beliefs that are worth being aggressive about.

An opinion on restaraunts and halloween costumes is not worth the aggression---that would just be silly; but when faced with an adult who sincerely believes in the existence Father Christmas, it may be time to get serious. This is especially true if the person in question is saying that it's YOU who is the crazy person, meanwhile inserting his fingers in his ears while screaming christmas carols at the top of his lungs and reminding you that you'll only be receiving lumps of coal this christmas. This is especially true if this happens to be the belief of the majority, if it slows scientific progress, if it indoctrinates children against their will, and if it continues to spread unchecked.

In short, a mere difference of opinion is worthy of respect. An outright ludicrous belief about the nature of the world is not.

A mere difference of opinion is acceptable. An outright ludicrous belief about the nature of the world is not. 

"Mephibosheth (peace in the midst of war - in Christ. I know whose going to win. I read ahead.)"

You just contradicted the claim that caused you to create this massive thread. I figured I'd tell you since I doubt if you figured it out.

I will, however, let you see if you can figure out how you did it. 

Archeo/Magnus/DG/all,

It is almost Halloween, very current example, and the discussion of faith does have significant difference between outfits chosen or what restaurant or diner a person chooses to eat at after making a swift round of trick or treat.  

Some thoughts on Halloween.  Most years that I can remember it has rained on Halloween.  This year I visited my first Pumpkin farm, and it was a great experience.  There I was able to hand pick pumpkin.  There were live farm animals everywhere, one being a young donkey ass who was showing his dinger to all present.  A wild billy goat that had a jungle gym type facility built from straw that belonged to him.  An aggressive wild turkey was also on hand showing feathers and threatening.  I'm living in a city of 200,000, and to have this type of farm available so close was a real find.  

Point on close minded comments was the argument the guy with the pie chart made about someone on this blog being close minded.  I think we all are on this topic, so the suggestion that he remains open minded when discussing faith seems very questionable. 

DG - I am able to follow what you are saying.  Your response to fellow blogger reminds me of Rocky training on the speed bag prior to his big fight.  Left, Right, Left, Right jabs, high intensity, quick, smooth each time.  Very descriptive, over descriptive on the degree to which Christianity is fake.

DG-The suggestion you posed is to "provide you with empirical evidence," and you would be sold on faith in a God, etc.  Empirical, I admit I was forced to look this definition up, means derived from experience or experiment.  So what I am telling you now is that it is impossible for blogger meph to provide you with empirical evidence, if that word is truly what you are looking toward.  In order for him to do so, he would have to experience God/faith/spiritual event and then transfer that experience to you.  Kind of like an email, he would have to have this encounter/experience and then transfer like data to you as a person.  Impossible.  Please clarify this suggestion that you can be sold on Christianity/faith beyond a reason of a doubt, empirical, etc.  

One more confession here before I am spent.  Looking back 10 years I can realize once thing, if I knew then what I know now, meaning things I have learned, I would probably done some things different.  I don't have any regrets.  But since I can look back and say that, I can also say that I know that I cannot fully trust my own thinking all the time.  Sometimes I have emotions, feelings, distractions, women, idiots at work that distort my perspective and disrupt my reasoning.  Rational is great, I am very rational.  Thinking, being rational, perfectly sound, I don't want to give a percentage for the amount of time I can claim close to 100%.  This confession comes from what I have read regarding the suggestion that a person can rely on their own thinking and that's it.  It should be reviewed.  Doesn't matter if you have 30 disorders and 2 illnesses that plague your brain or body.   Making the claim to be able to rely on own thinking should be reviewed.   

I think its already there 

I'm going to go out on a limb and predicting his final "retort" is going to be "you're all going to hell" or something to that effect.

I'm trying to figure out how he can ignore this much evidence without consequence. My hypothesis is that he believes that silly things like "evidence" and "proof" don't apply to god because god is beyond human reason( which is also false claim, since he seems to be able to expound about the glories god quite well, and therefore not beyond his human reason). 

 anyone agree? disagree?

 I don't get it. It must be something I did, I mean there isn't an 'n' in my name right.  I don't blame you since hundreds of people put the 'n' in my name for some reason.   (not trying to be mean or sound angry, more confusion really). Anyway on the the guts of the post:

Care to prove the closed mindedness rather than state it?   I have yet to see your definition of the term.

This is why I despise Christian theology. It paints man as a worthless, vile creature incapable of saving himself save through utter submission, born condemned, marred without having done anything.

I assure you that despite my rather low opinion of your tactics, being that you are a human being, I consider you of great worth per se, Christ or no Christ. We are all human, and we are all worth something. The idea that you are worthless without a deity brings vomit to the corners of my mouth. This theology is vile. It does not matter whether you have found Christ, can you not wake up to the fact You are human, therefore, you are worth something. You are not born marked for damnation save for your will to submit to a deity. You are born free, and have nothing to lose, save your theological chains. I know there is no way I can convince you that an agent I believe to be utter fiction is working through me. I am speaking about what I believe.

The sheer joy of being alive and conscious ought be enough, but I find such things in what I do, my struggle that I may impart my positive mark on humanity by helping to slay the bastard, genetic disease. I have everything I could ever wish for in terms of joy which I and those around me create for myself, and which I do not falsely attribute to a deity. If my research my impact even a single person who, by nothing save pure accident of birth, happened to have nucleotide misslotting causing deformations unimaginable...I shall have all the joy in the world.

I believe it was Richard Dawkins who said look around you...what more do you want?

When I am not insulted, I do not insult. That is why I stopped.

Actually, Christian Theology claims that man is born marked for damnation except for his ability to save himself by begging and is hence worthless. Man is incapable of being a moral agent under Christianity since he cannot save himself except through faith. It commits, hence, an internal contradiction with the supposed notion of God "loving" man.

Being that Christian theology says that man is worthless from birth (as meph has established) per se and cannot save himself except through faith...I simply cannot see how on Earth you could claim that such theology could bring "joy", especially considering the mutual contradiction. See:

http://www.rationalresponders.com/the_fall_commits_an_internal_contradiction

Actually, Christian theology as I described it was accurate, and was something I was already aware of before Meph reminded me of such by saying he was worthless without Christ, unless you can correct me. How could a theology which reduces man to such be construed as bringing joy?

Magus - Ok, I understand your position.  I still think the same is true that I said to DG.  That is that an experience or evidence that is directly connected with personal experience cannot be directly transfered from one human to another human.  Since that is impossible, personal experience would need to occur to trigger or provide the evidence that you are requesting or demanding. 

DG - I do not think your sequence of reasoning is accurate.  I do not think that God or theology reduces man.  Instead I think that man feels reduced compared to God.  As an act of reverance or awe, a man can declare that he is nothing compared to the God he serves.  Meph - he can speak for himself....but I would say that Meph has come to the realization that compared to God he is such a small creature on this small planet.  Compared to God, Meph is not very powerful.  Compared to God, Meph is not very ____, you fill in the blank. 

The next question is why has Meph come to that realization or perspective?  1) Is it because he has applied the simple logic of:  we are small, God is big.? Or 2) has he come to this realization and perspective through a personal experience which has provided what he deems to be solid evidence that the God he believes in, is real, and is powerful?  Now, out of awe or reverance for how powerful he believes God to be, he as a Christians shows his this by humility in proclaiming his insignificance compared to God? 

The simple statement, there is no God technically refutes everything I have said.  And without the personal experience leading to evidence, it is hard for any of this to be real for anyone other than the human involved.