Sunday, February 24, 2013

Augustine -against science

 Despite the out of context quote of Augustine about his outlook on Genesis, he was indeed a literalist! Non-fundamentalists then vainly quote him.
  As one who hated dissent from Christ=insanity, he favored burning dissenters at the stake. How could he ever favor science?
  Besides, as Dawkins and Stenger advocate, mechanism rules, and thus, teleology contradicts science-Lamberth's mechanism argument- and thus, cannot complement it, and thus theistic evolution is no more than an oxy-moronic obfuscation!
   Both scientists urge others to learn real science. Science eviscerates theism= reduced animism, and thus, reduced animism is as superstitious as full animism and polytheism!
   How could he ever have accepted evolution which denies in effect original sin? Despite Michael Ruse, theology and science cannot mix from the side of science.

Buy-bull: An Examination of Augustine’s Commentaries on Genesis One and Their Implications on a Modern Theological Controversy - Answers in Genesis

Buy-bull: An Examination of Augustine’s Commentaries on Genesis One and Their Implications on a Modern Theological Controversy - Answers in Genesis

Wednesday, February 6, 2013

Our moral sense

I think that overall our moral sense provides more for altruism and empathy than for those bad           activities.. Everyday most people help each other, whilst few engage in those bad activities.
 I agree with Paul Kurtz  in " Forbidden Fruit' and Quentin Smith in his book on ethics and religion that the common decencies are universal.
To concentrate on those bad activities is what the immoral ethicists do. We are not evil by nature as Ellis Albert in " The Myth of Self -Esteem," notes but rather more good than bad.
 As Sam Harris in " The Moral Landscape"  and Alonzo  note, science can inform us about how to proceed with our choices
Theists beg the question that God gave us the moral sense. over the millennia, humanity has refined the sense with  better ethics, and  putative God did not give an evolving ethic!
  Why, as S.T. Joshi  in  " God's Defenders"   notes, even the religious don't favor all their God's commands!
   My covenant morality for humanity -the presumption  of morality is similar to Richard Carrier's in his " Sense and Goodness without God: a Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism."

Top 10 Myths About Evolution – with Downloadable PDF | Atheism Resource

Top 10 Myths About Evolution – with Downloadable PDF | Atheism Resource

Friday, February 1, 2013

That big soul-man!

  God is that big soul-man, and like souls, science finds no  evidence for His soul: it finds that all minds depend on brains, so that notion of disembodied mind of God  instantiates the  argument from physical mind and [Matt] McCormick's why God cannot think or act.
    Theologians then are using the argument  from ignorance for their  belief that He's have a disembodied one; they and most atheists  know that to claim an embodied one would affirm what only a very few atheists think that, as the Soviet cosmonauts claimed, that they didn't find Him- no physical body- no God!
       McCormick's argument carries the notion that His omniconsciousness and omnipresence  preclude His thinking and His doings and why, He'd not have any kind of mind at all! To be able to think and act,  beings must be aware of themselves as distinct from the  rest of the world.This if omnipresent, He would not be distinct to do either.
           He states:" [A]being must be limited in time and place  in order to be  conscious of objects and itself, being aware of their representations as representations, and form judgments about them.

.... The impossibility of omniconsciousness  also has some serious  implications for omniscience."
         How then could one have a  relationship with  a being not able to respond?
        This  and the  one from physical mind affirm perforce ignosticism/igtheism, theological non-cognitivism!

Neuroscience and the soul

Neuroscience and the soul