Where do you start?

POSTED BY: citizen
UPDATED: Wednesday, January 8, 2025 02:57
VIEWED: 8803
PAGE 7 of 8

Not to be the thread police, but I also think that this threadjack about the existance of God is boring, imho (No offense intended). It's all theocratic posturing, and Chrisisall nicely created another thread for it.

Now back to the subject at hand, which is where do we begin, I said my piece on the Earth, and on people, who I said were essentially no different than the oversize monkey-like mice which were munched on by dinosaurs a couple hundred million years ago, with the major exception that we have written language. Someone trounced this as discrediting me, that we are decended from such a creature, but that's accepted fact. I simply think there is nothing *unique* about humans, and that we do not posseess a special soul, or any special thing at all, save one: A written language.

Now I know a few people violently disagree with me, but I'm curious. Does anyone think I'm in the right general direction?

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Originally posted by Dreamtrove:
He plays basketball?

Hmmm. I thought he was a reasonable man. I still do. I think he's misguided on this one. I invite him to weigh in here.

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No dribbling as in what people in padded rooms do.

As for reasonable man, bollocks. Reasonable when you echo his comments exactly, disagree with his world view and all of a sudden your sub human scum not worth talking or listening too, which is what happened to me.

I disagreed with Cartoons Christian Fundamentalist website that said by definition Islam and Muslims are evil (the definition, one assumes, is that they aren't Christian) and should all be put in camps and murdered.

He violently disagreed with my assertion that Islam was in essence a split from Christianity: how dare I say another religion is related to his one true divine one. I must be a heathen deserving of death.

So no, Dream, he's not a reasonable man, not even close. He is ignorant and stupid and he reveals in that, he even thinks his ignorance and stupidity vindicate him, prove he's on the right path. Look at his comments here, the way he says he's over his depth oozes that attitude. I can imagine him sitting there, a little smirk on his face thinking how he's fighting the good fight of the common man against the intellectual scum.

Fuck him; he's not worth talking too. He hasn't brought anything too any conversation here, except his smug self satisfied attitude and unwarranted superiority complex. Ignore him and you lose nothing.

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More insane ramblings by the people who brought you beeeer milkshakes!
No beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity. But I know none, and therefore am no beast.

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Originally posted by dreamtrove:
Usually your less of an ass. This was an assinine response. You completely miss my point.

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I’m not sure you have a point. You’re all over the board – from Bush to the asteroid belt to OJ to rogue planets to Bush again. You can call me an ass if you want, but I’m just calling it like I see it, and I see this as bullshit.

You start off stating that it’s a fact the earth is 3.3 billion years old (unsubstantiated) and claim that anyone who disagrees with you is part of some “pseudo-creationists theory” bias, whatever that is. Then you go on to tell us all that science is unable to give a competent answer so you'll tell us all how it is because we’re just all parrots anyway, and you've researched this, unlike all those scientists. And all throughout this, all these wild theories, this attack on science and calling us all parrots and the occasional Bush-hater remark (for some strange reason gets tossed in there) you have not offered a single piece of corroborating evidence, a single source, a link to a site, anything. You’re just bullshitting.

So in the famous words of Vincent Gambini:

“Everything that guy just said is bullshit.”

I don’t know what you expect me to do. You’re speculating so broadly that I don’t even know where to start.

And of course this is a gem: It conjures up the good old days of Vizzini running wild on this board.
“Science is not an exact science.” -- Dreamtrove

But you know, Vizzini, for all his rhetorical blundering, actually had a good deal of scientific understanding; he reminded me a lot of myself when I was young and full of shit.

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Nihil est incertius vulgo, nihil obscurius voluntate hominum, nihil fallacius ratione tota comitiorum.

Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system.

-- Cicero

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It’s possible that there were super intelligent rodents running around the Jurassic, but there’s certainly no evidence of it, and I would say nothing particularly probable about it. The assumption that there is nothing unique about humans, I think, is a poor one. Indeed the intelligence capability that humans possess would seem to be very unique.

Human intelligence is a powerful tool that has made humans the dominate life form on the planet, but it is a hard won victory. Humans are so highly specialized that without their ingenuity they are weak and completely incapable of competing with other life forms of similar mass or even smaller. Compare a full grown human male against a German Shepard half the weight. This would seem to be a powerful disadvantage with the ability to completely wipe out the species if for any reason intellect wasn’t sufficient. Furthermore, human offspring are born with large skulls that make birthing complicated and dangerous, and once born human offspring are completely dependent and helpless for years. Most other life forms give birth to much smaller offspring, relatively speaking, and these offspring are able to move and begin caring for themselves within weeks, not years. This is another powerful disadvantage for humans. Human ingenuity has certainly proven to be a trait that is powerful enough to overcome these enormous disadvantages, but if macroevolution is responsible for creating humans then one imagines that it must have been an extremely thin margin of error to make it through the tens or hundreds of thousands of years it took to arrive at a state where human intellect could begin making up for humans’ many, many other disadvantages. In order to believe that you have to be willing to concede that there was good deal of luck involved for humans to have even survived at all. So I think that humans are a very unique species that evolved only because a very tightly constrained set of circumstances allowed it to happen, whether one believes these circumstances were designed by a creator (which I do) or just happened by accident.

Also intelligence is not by itself necessarily a useful asset. It must be accompanied by a physical capability that permits the use of tools. For instance, dolphins are considered to be highly intelligent, so why have they not evolved human type intelligence? The answer, perhaps one of many, is that dolphins have no ability to capitalize on such an intellect. Fins do not serve well for using tools, engineering buildings or writing. So there is a limited number of species that even possess a capacity to put intelligence to use. Rodents may be among them, I don’t know, but even among animals with similar physical traits as humans, such as apes, human type intelligence is rare. The most intelligent of apes and monkeys are Chimpanzee; they seem to possess some human intellectual traits: they use tools, they socialize, the fact that they can be taught some degree of sign language suggests a capability of abstract thought, yet they also eat their own freshly defecated feces, and you’re not likely to find a chimp writing a sonnet or engineering a bridge.

So considering the many disadvantages human intelligence brings to humans compared to other animals, the dependence on physical tool-usage characteristics and the lack of any other species of similar intellect among the earths many thousands of mammals, much less other animals, I would say that the development of human type intellect is a very rare event.

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Nihil est incertius vulgo, nihil obscurius voluntate hominum, nihil fallacius ratione tota comitiorum.

Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system.

-- Cicero

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I’m not sure you have a point.

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I'm never sure myself.

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You’re all over the board – from Bush to the asteroid belt to OJ to rogue planets to Bush again.

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I was trying to relate that the same type of dogmatic thinking prevails in each case. The press ,and probably to some extent the procecution, made a failure to correctly analyze *why* OJ was guilty, as a result, there was a mass feeling he was innocent, and also he was aquitted. The failure was one of dogmatic thinking.

Similarly Creationism and this pseudo creationism persist through dogmatism. I can follow to the point where I get all their facts, but then would argue that those fact by no means mandate the conclusions they draw, and my extensive study of the field led me to the not too subtle information that they didn't draw the conclusion from the facts at all, but were already working from the conclusion before they started. This, in essence, is the same as the creationists have done.

The same dogmatic thinking tells people Bush is a republican, you're a republican support him. My own pragmatic thinking leads me to think 'i want republican policies, if Bush can't deliver that, I'd like to see him gone and replaced with someone who will.'

If I have a point it's that dogmatic thinking isn't thinking at all, it's being an amplifier to the already extant thought, but not actually thinking for yourself.

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You start off stating that it’s a fact the earth is 3.3 billion years old (unsubstantiated) and claim that anyone who disagrees with you is part of some “pseudo-creationists theory” bias, whatever that is.

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I think this is a drastic mischaracterization of my position. I was saying IMHO, I have evidence that the Earth is 3.3B years old. It's probably older, sure, I conceded. But I don't have evidence that it's 4.6 B years old. Other people can think what they want. The whole idea of pseudo-creationism is this instant universe mix theory which was cooked up before there was any evidence at all, and sold by crackpots long before it was ever scientifically or scientifically investigated. The whole idea is suspect. The fact is, we don't know. There is what you say, which is 'what they tell us' but the reality is the universe might be quite different from what the scientific establishment tells us. Which I say, objectively with no motive whatsoever, just an inherent mistrust. The way when you go in to see the doctor and he gives you lots of reassuring words. The fact is he's afraid to say he doesn't know. Science is the same way. People are a lot less sure than they pretend. All of this "the universe was created in 3 minutes 16 billion years ago" is not fact supported by evidence, it's random speculation based on unproven mathematical theory, which, and here's what I mean, is suspiciously reminiscent of religion doctrine.

[qupte]Then you go on to tell us all that science is unable to give a competent answer so you'll tell us all how it is because we’re just all parrots anyway, and you've researched this, unlike all those scientists.

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This is blatantly unfair to me. This is not what I said at all. I'm saying you're holding scientists to a standard of gods, and other people to be dog ticks, because 'scientists' know everything, and other people therefore know nothing. This isn't reality. Scientists are actually on the exact same level as everything else. Anyone can read this stuff, do the research, make calculations, and come to conclusions. There's nothing special about scientists at all. They're random people with PhDs. Lots of other people have PhDs, lots don't, but have working brains. I by no means think they're morons, and that I'm smarter, but they aren't gods either, they're just people.

I was mostly using it as a an example of dogmatic thinking, and to state my answer to the question, "where do you start" which was the thread topic. Wasn't looking to argue the point. I gave plent of evidence. The age of continental rocks on the earth, the chemical composition of the Earth being more jupite

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It’s possible that there were super intelligent rodents running around the Jurassic, but there’s certainly no evidence of it, and I would say nothing particularly probable about it.

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Again you're mischaracterizing my remarks.

1. No one said they're super intelligent. Well, okay, you did, just now. But no, I think they're probably no smarter than mice today. Neither for that matter are humans.

2. The existance of these creatures are ancestors, is far from my idea, it's the currectly accepted evolutionary history of man. I've read it nuberous places, and there was one discovered quite recently, monkeyish mouse rat thing about 1 foot tall, lives 150 milion to 200 million years ago or so. This isn't my theory.

3. There's tons of evidence for it, not just the fossil record, but there's real strong evidence that intelligence is not an endless assent, but is a random oscilator.

4. Would these ancestors of people be capable of making a scientific study of the solar system? Of course not. Neither would most humans. And I said, most humans. I mean, folks in trailors who eat sleep and mate. These creatures could probably form simple societies, and likely had such things as civil unrest, possibly even laws, and sure, language. This is not earth shaking stuff, monkeys and some mice today have these, as do far simpler life forms such as several species of insect. If an insect with a total mental capability of about .001% that of man has these things, then it says is nothing special about about man that he has them.

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The assumption that there is nothing unique about humans, I think, is a poor one.

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Not nothing. We have written language.

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Indeed the intelligence capability that humans possess would seem to be very unique.

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Not at all. Problem solving like that of humans is seen in many species, and some exceed our ability to a small degree. What we have is written language, which means that each human does not have to start at scratch. For instance, I can read all about what other people have found about the age of the Earth and the structure of the solar system and the universe, then I can read the problems other people have pointed out and then the solutions that still more people have come up with to explain those inconsitancies and drawn my own conclusions and even add a little of my own. If an octopus had my situation and wished to persue it, he would be starting from square one, which is probably, are those objects in the sky painted on? And he would maybe get as far as basic religious notions if he were lucky.

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Human intelligence is a powerful tool that has made humans the dominate life form on the planet, but it is a hard won victory. Humans are so highly specialized that without their ingenuity they are weak and completely incapable of competing with other life forms of similar mass or even smaller.

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Partly as a result of that evolution. But humans are not so horridly weak physically.

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Compare a full grown human male against a German Shepard half the weight.

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Compared to a dog, sure. But we're more fit to survive in the wild than many other omnivores and herbavores.

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This would seem to be a powerful disadvantage with the ability to completely wipe out the species if for any reason intellect wasn’t sufficient.

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Not really. Dogs would never on mass attempt to wipe out humans, in fact, dog-man symbiosis predates modern society, technology and a written language by at least 100,000 years. This again, is not theory, but well recorded in the fossil record.

Another scientific reality is that dogs are pretty smart, and a wild dog has about half of the cognitive power of an uneducated human, or similar to that of a neanderthal. An elephant, an octopus, a dolphin and a whale all have similar mental cognitive abilities to that of man. But they have no written language.

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Furthermore, human offspring are born with large skulls that make birthing complicated and dangerous, and once born human offspring are c

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