Design

[rossum]

Should not have to explain to you that I am still me even if I change by having children.

The word “me” refers to a series of causally connected, but different, entities. When you were ten years old you were “me”. Now you are older than that and have obviously changed, but you are still “me”. The word is unchanged, but the referent has definitely changed. It is an error to project the immutability of the word onto the referent of the word. You are not the same now as you were when you were ten.

You should perhaps be very careful about the presumption that you can judge God’s actions, and more careful about how God will judge your actions?

The Argumentum ad Baculum is a logical error. Besides, I have sixteen hells, which beat your mere one.

It is the Lord’s right to give life and take it away. The Lord can never be charged with irrational murder, as you seem to imply.

If it was not irrational, then please give me a rational justification for killing the Firstborn Egyptians who had nothing to do with God hardening Pharaoh’s heart. What was God’s rational reason for the slaughter?

YHWH’s actions in this were certainly immoral from the point of view of Buddhist morality. Gods do not get a pass on morality in Buddhism; karma applies to both gods and men.

rossum

 

[tonyrey]

“the first rational being” is a misnomer because it implies the Creator is in the same category as creatures located in time and space. God is not a member of a finite series but the Necessary Being without whose ontological support nothing would exist. The alternatives are to believe in an infinite regress of physical causes - which evades the problem of contingency - or a universe which emerged from nothing - which violates both the principle of causality and the law of conservation of energy.

You will forgive me if I do not find those explanations convincing.

One Supreme Being is the most adequate, coherent, intelligible, economical and fertile interpretation of reality because it corresponds to the way we think and behave in a orderly universe which enables us to live as creative, rational, purposeful beings with a capacity for love, moral discernment and self-determination.

It is significant you have omitted the last sentence of my post which is impossible to refute.

Creatures in time and space exist. Your God is not in the same category, therefore your God does not exist.

An obvious non sequitur. Do Buddhists not believe there are spiritual beings?

You have already implicitly asserted that your God is not rational.

Another non sequitur. Please explain the logic which leads to that conclusion.

Some creatures are alive; are you telling us that your God is not alive?

Surely you don’t believe physical existence is the only form of existence?

Humans are designers and creators, so you God can be neither designer nor creator.

Another false deduction. All descriptions of God are analogous.

You will have to ditch your Bible as well, since all the words used in that book to describe your God are categories located in time and space, since all human languages are located in time and space.

There are many words in the Bible which refer to spiritual reality beyond time and space, e.g. “My kingdom is not of this world”. Do Buddhists restrict themselves to physical attributes?

You have just destroyed all possibility of discussing God. Anything that humans can do, and has a word attached, is impossible for your God.

The same argument could be applied to Buddhist gods and spiritual reality.

You need to think this point through more carefully.

You certainly do!

• Do humans exist: yes or no?

• Does God exist: yes or no?

• Did you give the same answer to both questions?

It is indeed the same answer which refers to different modes of existence. Do Maras, Devas, yakkhas, devas and other supernatural beings exist** in exactly the same way **as human beings? Western materialism seems to have influenced your Buddhist beliefs and eliminated spiritual reality…

 

[tonyrey]

If you claim that an ultimate truth exists, show me your ultimate proof that your claimed ultimate truth actually is an ultimate truth and that you are not mistaken.

It seems your ultimate proof is that there is no ultimate proof… :ehh:

 

[Aloysium]

:twocents:

What we are dealing with in these discussions is personal, having to do with the reality of one’s existence, its awareness and how we understand our being in the world ultimately in relation to what lies at its Ground. Spiritual “proof”, that which convinces us is found in the resonance of particular ideas within ourselves. Their meaning typically is something we seem to have known but were unable to or hadn’t yet conceptualized, and is now obvious. Reading eastern philosophies we come across such words as enlightenment and realization. More correctly because it addresses the reality of the Divine’s otherness to us in our journey, is talk of revelation. The ultimate proof is revealed to us within our relationship with God, however we may frame it.

There are many snares, lies and illusions along the way, but it is our faith in love, through God’s grace that carries us Home.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

YHWH’s actions in this were certainly immoral from the point of view of Buddhist morality. Gods do not get a pass on morality in Buddhism; karma applies to both gods and men.

rossum

Ah, now I get it. Karma is your God!

 

[Charlemagne_III]

The word “me” refers to a series of causally connected, but different, entities. When you were ten years old you were “me”. Now you are older than that and have obviously changed, but you are still “me”. The word is unchanged, but the referent has definitely changed. It is an error to project the immutability of the word onto the referent of the word. You are not the same now as you were when you were ten.

My memories of myself when I was ten, am I remembering someone else, or me?

 

[tomarin]

How do we distinguish between what is intentional ‘design’ and what is the product of natural selection? Are giraffe’s long necks a designed feature or just something that came about being it allowed them to feed off higher vegetation, which allowed certain giraffe ancestors to breed more, spreading that trait in the proto-giraffe population?

 

[Aloysium]

How do we distinguish between what is intentional ‘design’ and what is the product of natural selection? Are giraffe’s long necks a designed feature or just something that came about being it allowed them to feed off higher vegetation, which allowed certain giraffe ancestors to breed more, spreading that trait in the proto-giraffe population?

We may have difficulty distinguishing between an act and its consequence given that they are simultaneous. Animals are created integral to their environment, transforming/evolving together. I’m not sure we’d agree as to what constitutes “natural selection”. Rather than going into some long and tedious dissertation, I will cut to the chase and suggest that what is meant is that it is not planned. It would make sense that while the basic structure of nature and animal beings is fixed, the end result is a wondrous array of diversity and surprise. There is clearly more to the emergence of giraffes than being able to reach higher vegetation, or else we would see that trait to be far more common. I’d say that giraffes like their look. They seek a mate that best exemplifies giraffeness. This is instinctual and part of being an animal - feeling about things they are built to perceive, in their own way. It’s something along those lines.

 

[rossum]

It is significant you have omitted the last sentence of my post which is impossible to refute.

What is there to refute? You describe something which you claim “corresponds to the way we think”. Not something which corresponds to the way the world actually is. You will no doubt have noticed that humans can make errors in the way they think.

An obvious non sequitur.

It is your own non-sequitur in your assertion that God is outside all worldly categories. I merely listed a few categories, which you claim God is outside. Humans exist, so your God is outside existence: i.e. He does not exist according to you. It is your own earlier claim which is producing the non-sequiturs. You have been tripped up by your own faulty argument.

Another non sequitur. Please explain the logic which leads to that conclusion.

Humans are rational beings. God does not fall into any worldly categories (according to you). Hence God is not in the category of rational beings (according to you). I am merely working out the implications of your earlier error in your post #630: “‘the first rational being’ is a misnomer because it implies the Creator is in the same category as creatures located in time and space.”

There are many words in the Bible which refer to spiritual reality beyond time and space, e.g. “My kingdom is not of this world”.

You are making too large a leap. “Not of this world” may just mean “on the planet Zargon III, not on planet Earth.” It is your interpretation which says “beyond time and space”.

Do Buddhists restrict themselves to physical attributes?

Nothing to do with Buddhists, more to do with your earlier error denying that God shares any category with entities in time and space. I am merely picking categories which apply to some entities in time and space and denying that they apply to your God. The results are the logical consequences of your initial error.

rossum

 

[rossum]

My memories of myself when I was ten, am I remembering someone else, or me?

That depends. Are you ten years old? If you are ten years old, then memories of yourself at ten are memories of you. If you are older than ten, then the memories are of a different person in the causally connected chain of different people that constitute the ensemble known as Charlemagne III.

rossum

 

[rossum]

How do we distinguish between what is intentional ‘design’ and what is the product of natural selection? Are giraffe’s long necks a designed feature or just something that came about being it allowed them to feed off higher vegetation, which allowed certain giraffe ancestors to breed more, spreading that trait in the proto-giraffe population?

So far nothing has been found that cannot be explained through evolution. Some things are still awaiting an explanation, but those are “we don’t know” rather than “it certainly didn’t evolve” category.

The Discovery Institute has proposed various methods of design detection, but so far all of them have failed. Currently the best they have is a variant on the subjective, “it sure looks designed to me”. That is obviously not sufficient for scientific purposes.

A sufficiently powerful designer could make thing look evolved when they are actually designed: Loki/Trickster as designer. Alternatively a different sufficiently powerful designer could have designed the universe and its initial conditions such that evolution would inevitably happen with forseeable results.

Both those last types of design are probably going to be impossible to detect. The DI is only looking for the type of design where its designer has to tinker with natural processes, and that unnatural tinkering can (in principle) be detected.

AIUI the Catholic Church seems generally to favour the “universe and initial conditions” style of design. Once the process starts then no further intervention is required to get to the foreseen outcome.

$0.02

rossum

 

[Charlemagne_III]

How do we distinguish between what is intentional ‘design’ and what is the product of natural selection? Are giraffe’s long necks a designed feature or just something that came about being it allowed them to feed off higher vegetation, which allowed certain giraffe ancestors to breed more, spreading that trait in the proto-giraffe population?

Well yes, necessity can be the mother of invention.

But whose to say the necessity itself was not designed?

That is to say, how do we know that Natural Selection was not a product of Intelligent Design?

 

[Charlemagne_III]

That depends. Are you ten years old? If you are ten years old, then memories of yourself at ten are memories of you. If you are older than ten, then the memories are of a different person in the causally connected chain of different people that constitute the ensemble known as Charlemagne III.

rossum

My genes are the same now as they were then, except much older.

Have my genes become the genes of someone else since the age of 10?

If so, should I change my name?

 

[Charlemagne_III]

So far nothing has been found that cannot be explained through evolution. Some things are still awaiting an explanation, but those are “we don’t know” rather than “it certainly didn’t evolve” category.

rossum

Correction. To the best of my knowledge, no sane biologist has said the first living organism evolved into existence.

To evolve is to change from one living organism into another. There was no living organism before the first single cell creature appeared on Earth.

And yes, “we don’t know how” certainly applies to the miracle of life appearing all of a sudden.

But we are not supposed to argue evolution, so let’s drop it!

 

[Charlemagne_III]

Nothing to do with Buddhists, more to do with your earlier error denying that God shares any category with entities in time and space.

rossum

I guess you could say God does share at least one category with entities in time and space.

God tells us in Genesis that we were made in his image and likeness.

 

[rossum]

My genes are the same now as they were then, except much older.

Your chromosomes have shorter telomeres than they used to. That is in addition to the accumulated random damage over time which can appear anywhere. A DNA test would find differences.

Correction. To the best of my knowledge, no sane biologist has said the first living organism evolved into existence.

To evolve is to change from one living organism into another. There was no living organism before the first single cell creature appeared on Earth.

Thanks for the correction. I did not define my terms narrowly enough.

And yes, “we don’t know how” certainly applies to the miracle of life appearing all of a sudden.

Better to say, “we know parts, but not all”. Some progress has been made on abiogenesis, though there is still a lot of work to do.

I guess you could say God does share at least one category with entities in time and space.

God tells us in Genesis that we were made in his image and likeness.

Well noticed. I didn’t think of that point.

rossum

 

[Charlemagne_III]

Your chromosomes have shorter telomeres than they used to. That is in addition to the accumulated random damage over time which can appear anywhere. A DNA test would find differences.

Am I wearing someone else’s jeans?

 

[Aloysium]

That depends. Are you ten years old? If you are ten years old, then memories of yourself at ten are memories of you. If you are older than ten, then the memories are of a different person in the causally connected chain of different people that constitute the ensemble known as Charlemagne III.

rossum

We are reborn on our own authority. By failing to attain nirvana in our previous life, we were born again into our current life. Everything that is born dies; if you want to avoid dying then you need to avoid being born.

Is gravity due to the authority of Newton or Einstein? The Buddha discovered the way the universe works; he did not make it.

The Buddha enlightened himself. He assured himself that it was a fact by remembering his previous lives.

If you want to assure yourself of the same fact, then you can remember your own previous lives. The instructions are given in the Visuddhimagga, Chapter 13:

1. So a bhikkhu who is a beginner and wants to recollect in this way should …

That is on page 406 of the PDF I linked to. The general section on Recollection of Past Lives begins at paragraph 13, on page 404.

rossum

Let’s see if we can make sense of this.
If I remember the personal experience of someone aged ten, I am not remembering me.
But, I can recall past lives.
I’m going to need some heavy duty proof for this.

There is no need for consistency and integrity, or planning for the future, when it will be someone else who reaps the benefits or suffers any consequent karma.

Perhaps the bottom line for those who believe there is no ultimate truth, is that one can make up whatever one chooses and it is as true as anything else.

 

[tonyrey]

Let’s see if we can make sense of this.
If I remember the personal experience of someone aged ten, I am not remembering me.
But, I can recall past lives.
I’m going to need some heavy duty proof for this.

There is no need for consistency and integrity, or planning for the future, when it will be someone else who reaps the benefits or suffers any consequent karma.

Perhaps the bottom line for those who believe there is no ultimate truth, is that one can make up whatever one chooses and it is as true as anything else.

I used to associate Buddhism with moral progress but all this paraphernalia has diminished my respect…

 

[Bradski]

My memories of myself when I was ten, am I remembering someone else, or me?

You are remembering a different you.

You are the product of much more than your genetic make-up. Just look up 1 Corinthians 13-11. You are now a completely different person to the child you once were.