CalvinDude.com

Over on Triablogue, Steve made some comments on evolution, which resulted in the cowardly anonymous freaks showing up. (Note: I’ll modify my Why-Steve-Should-Ban-Anonymous-Comments Argument slightly…it’s impossible to tell them apart now!!!  At least with a pseudo-name, you’d have something beyond “Anonymous said X, Anonymous disagreed, then Anonymous said both of the previous Anonymous posters were idiots…etc.”)

Anyway, on the point of this blog entry.  Why is it that the evolutionist assumes that if you disagree with evolution it must be that you don’t understand evolution?  For instance, after I asked this question regarding the evolution of gills to lungs:

When the marine critter began to come up on land, he had to be able to breathe both in and out of water. What survival advantage would there be to losing one of those two methods.

Anonymous responded with:

I strongly suggest you look at Tiktaalik Rosae and lungfish to help you understand what you’re trying to get at here.

Listen, anonywuss: I already know and fully understand what I’m “trying to get at here.”  I know far more about evolution than the average person in America (not that that is an achievement).  I probably know more about it than the vast majority of scientists.  After all, evolution doesn’t affect anything in physics, chemistry, astronomy, etc.  It doesn’t even actually affect anything in biology aside from theoreticals–everything else is simple observation.  Thus, scientists don’t actually use evolution and they’ll defer to the so-called experts.

I, on the other hand, have read plenty on evolution.  I have studied the philosophical implications of the theory.  I’ve actually invested the time and energy into understanding what it teaches.  Frankly, the more you know about it the less appealing it is (especially in terms of Darwinism).

So, anonycoward, I am not the one who needs to understand what I am getting at; you are the one who needs to understand.

And I have no problem re-explaining the problem.

An Organism is going to move from:

A: Gills

to

B: Gills & Lungs

to

C: Lungs only.

First note: B -> C looks to me more like devolution than evolution.

Second note: B -> C does not seem to logically provide a survivability advantage to the organism.  After all, logically speaking an organism that had both lungs and gills would be more adapted to the environment as a whole than those organism with only one of those.

Consider it.

Option 1: if you have only gills and there is a drought that dries up the pond you live in…you die.  If you have gills and lungs, you survive.

Option 2: if you have only lungs and there is a flood that swamps you…you die.  If you have gills and lungs, you survive.

Under either option, the organism with both lungs and gills will survive.  But perhaps there is a survivablity disadvantage to having both gills and lungs…

In which case one must ask how A -> B happened.  That is, if there’s a disadvantage to having both that does not occur with just having gills, why would any organism evolve both?  (By the way, this would also be a problem for the theory that it would cost more in terms of food needed for the Organism to have both lungs and gills, which is why the gills were then dropped.)

In short, either A -> B breaks, or B -> C breaks.

Anonydork’s arguments don’t address this issue.  Instead, s/he argues:

Once a fully functional tetrapod appears, there is no selective pressure to retain systems like gills for terrestrial vertebrates. … Therefore, freely (without cost to survival), mutations then may occur that change gill-features into pharnygeal pouches, eustachian tubes, earbones, etc.

The problem is that in the two illustrations I gave (Option 1 & 2), there remains a survivability advantage for the one with both gills and lungs.  Selective pressure would remain every time there was a drought or a flood (things that occur quite frequently in nature).  The simple fact is that something that can live in multiple environments will always have a survivability advantage over the organisms that can only live in one environment in the long run.  If one environment becomes hostile (as it invariably must at some point) the first organism can escape; the second must die.

Secondly, the above is nothing more than a say-so story by anonyfreak.  This is how it could have happened…if one assumes that this is how it could have happened in the first place.  Forgive me for demanding the evolutionist prove this, not just state this.

I wanted to put this in a post by itself instead of including it in the previous blog post since it’s the closest I think Daniel Morgan gets to a good argument in his responses :-)

Daniel wrote in response to Part 2:

i) The sky is purple
ii) Those who do not see the sky as purple have been blinded by The Great Filter Snake (TGFS)
iii) God told me this in a dream, after I dug up an old book in my backyard that God told me was inspired that confirmed this [from some interpretation work, of course]
iv) Anyone who denies the sky is purple is incoherent — the very basis of observation is eyesight, and eyesight depends upon light, and light is filtered by TGFS before it hits the eyes of unbelievers. Once God chooses you, you will see because God breaks the power of TGFS over unbelievers.
v) Light presupposes “not-light” (eg, light can either exist or not exist), and neither of these can be “accounted for” without the TGFS actions and God.What, you want me to support that argument? I just did — if you use other premises than mine, you’re begging the question against my worldview. I can show you you’re incoherent via (v), and any explanation you give me to explain how light/not-light can exist without the TGFS and God is incoherent. Go ahead, try! ;)

Here Morgan has attempted to formulate an opposing Presupposition in an attempt to disprove Presuppositionalism.  Of course the first thing we should note is that Morgan is asking me to disprove something he himself does not believe in.  After all, Morgan doesn’t believe in TGFS.

Be that at it may, Morgan’s approach fails for several reasons.  The most blatant problem is that Morgan isn’t distinguishing between objective and subjective truth here.  His first premise is “The sky is purple.”

But colors are subjective.  I happen to know this because my father is color blind.  Purple is meaningless to my dad.  I remember many times riding in the car with my parents, and my dad would point to some flowers and say, “That’s a pretty blue” while my mom responded, “Those are purple.”

So the concept of “purple” doesn’t even come close to the concept of “logic.”  The analogy has fallen apart and we’ve only looked at the first premise.

It also fails on the last point:

v) Light presupposes “not-light” (eg, light can either exist or not exist), and neither of these can be “accounted for” without the TGFS actions and God.

But light, in the analogy, exists independent of TGFS and God.  Thus, Morgan has not given us how light is dependent upon either of them.  In fact, his argument has been that light does exist for everyone, it’s just filtered for some and not for others.  Once again, this breaks down as being analogous to the Presuppositional view of God.

Morgan, obviously, doesn’t think that the above is valid, of course.  He requires it not to be, for the assumption is that if his argument is invalid, so too must the Presuppositional argument be invalid.  But as we have shown, the analogy isn’t a proper one in the first place.  Thus, the incorrectness of Morgan’s faux-Presupposition in no way provides any evidence against the Christian Presupposition.

In Part 2 of the Witmer series, Daniel Morgan comments:

The most terrible thing I’ve experienced, and learned a lot from, is that 95% of these conversations end up placing a huge burden on the atheist to justify every aspect of his metaphysics and ontology.

Indeed, this is true but hardly “terrible.”  In point of fact, atheist is not simply a rejection of something.  Atheism has positive assertions as well; and as such, atheism needs to be justified.  In essence, Daniel is here complaining that it’s not fair that he has to justify his position while he deamns that the theist justify the theistic position.  But turnabout is fair play.

Daniel continues:

That isn’t a positive argument of any sort, and showing the atheist to be stupid or incoherent does not show that your premise (2) is correct or supported.

Actually, “my” “premise (2)” is actually a premise Daniel came up with, which is “If logic, then God.”  (Despite the fact that this premise didn’t really have to deal with the point of contention I had with Witmer to which Daniel was responding, it’s still worthwhile to address it so I shall do so.)  Let’s demonstrate (using general terms, as Daniel did):

1) Either God exists or does not.

2) Logic is valid

3) If God, then Logic is valid.

4) If not-God, then Logic is invalid.

5) .: If Logic, then God must be valid.

As such, demonstrating that the atheist is “stupid or incoherent” actually does establish the idea that If Logic, then God.  After all, if there is no atheist position that can demonstrate Logic then 4) in the above stands.

Naturally, Daniel could argue that at some future point the problem might be sovled; but as I have argued before, I already have If God, then Logic.  Why would I have to give up that premise on the blind faith that atheism might come up with a way to validate logic in the future?

Daniel says:

Seriously, though, you seem to have missed a larger point — falsification of Daniel Morgan’s ontological/metaphysical justification of logic doesn’t lead to:
1) Logic [generally] does or does not exist
2) God [generally] does or does not exist

True; but undercutting your position does demonstrate that your ontological/metaphysical justification of logic is flawed.  YOU still cannot account for it.  YOU are still up a creek without a paddle.

I, on the other hand, am still waiting for an atheist to actually present a claim that doesn’t self-destruct.  Surely, if there was one out there, a smart atheist such as yourself would be able to come up with it, right Daniel?

In reality, Daniel, you should recognize that at this point my argument is no different than the vast majority of atheist arguments I’ve heard against the existence of God.  Let’s put it in the Flying Spaghetti Monster analogy.

There could be a Flying Spaghetti Monster somewhere, just like there could be an atheistic justification for logic and morality.  But barring any evidence for it, why should I accept it?

In short, you want me to prove a universal negative after I have already disproven the specific concrete examples given to date.  Why should I change my beliefs if you’re not going to offer any more evidence that atheism can account for these things?

Oh, and since the atheist commentators like to use this one so much, I can’t resist.  Daniel wrote:

But instead, the real philosophers, like Plantinga, don’t make the same claims you guys do.

  In other words, NO TRUE SCOTTSMAN….

I had hoped that Daniel Morgan would respond to parts 6 & 7 of my Witmer series (which I have now made it’s own page at http://calvindude.com/dude/responding-to-witmers-critique-of-presuppositionalism/) before I began to make a comprehensive response to his comments, but it appears that he does not have time at the moment.  (Actually, I’m going to assume he’s forgotten that he hasn’t responded to those parts since I recall reading a comment from him on a different blog about how he had responded to all my posts.)

In any case, since Daniel’s responses were (for the most part) quite lengthy, I am going to trim up the “fat” so to speak and deal with what I consider the most pertinent issues, with this caveat–if Daniel thinks that I missed something that he would really like me to respond to, he merely needs to point it out again and I shall do so.

Let us start in Part 1 where Daniel wrote:

Why hold any particular premise? Especially this one? What good reason do you have to suppose this?

Daniel is responding to my claim that Presuppositionalism is a largely Reformed-only apologetic.  Daniel asks why I hold to the premise found in my sentence: “Therefore, demonstrating the truth that men are not autonomous in thinking is going to create an automatic knee-jerk reaction (especially among non-Calvinists) against the position, regardless of the strength of the position.”  The premise being: “Men are not autonomous in thinking.”

This, however, is not a presuppositional foundation.  That is, I do not start with “men are not autonomous in thinking.”  Instead, my first presupposition regarding men’s thinking is that men are totally depraved.  This I explained in the opening section where I pointed out that Presuppositionalism begins with: “tak[ing] the doctrine of Total Depravity seriously (that is, the idea that all men are born depraved in all aspects of their being, including their thinking).”

Thus, the reason that I argue men are not autonomous in their thinking is because I have begun with the presupposition that men are depraved in their thinking.  This depravity, of course, means that a person is sinful even in his thoughts.  Now, if Daniel would like for me to establish this, I certainly can do so.  It is actually fairly simple to establish this concept, and I shall do so with two examples:

1. Everyone has done something that he or she thinks is wrong.  That is, regardless of whether the action actually is objectively right or wrong, the person who does it thinks that it is actually, objectively wrong.  Question: Would someone who is good do something that they thought was wrong?  (Note: I am not speaking of people who do something that they consider wrong under duress, or because of mitigating circumstances.  I’m speaking of an all-things-being-equal concept.  For a simple example: you visit your grandmother and she has baked some cookies.  She says you can have one.  You take three, despite your thinking that taking more than one is wrong because of what your grandmother said.  Would a good person actually do that?  Even if the argument becomes that it’s a trivial case–would a good person violate his morality in such an easy-to-obey trivial case?)

2. Suppose that we have twins.  One of the twins is raised in a home and given a strict moral code to live by.  The other twin is told to operate freely, with no moral restrictions.  Which child is going to be the better behaved?  Naturally, the first will be.  The second child, without a taught morality, is going to be the terrorist in the playpen.  This is demonstrated quite simply by the fact that while you never have to teach a child to hit another kid in the head with the Legos, you do have to teach him to not horde all the Legos and to share.  Or put it this way: if an adult did the behavior that children do, he would be rightly condemned and probably jailed.  It is only tolerated in children because “they do not know better.”  This means that the default mode of children is intrinsically evil, not good.

So I have many reasons to conclude that men are depraved.  And if men are depraved in their thinking, then one must acknowledge the affect that that depravity has on his thinking, which is that he is not autonomous in thought.  Instead, he is bound to his sinful nature.

Daniel then argues:

Is this premise a bit self-undermining? Can the premise be proven wrong? Any argument I try to bring against you, even if sound, is “just the result of corrupted thinking” if it contradicts your committed “standard” — the Bible. But what basis can you stand on to say that you know what you know (uncorrupted thinking)? You have to assume that human beings are able to “detect” truth in the one case (in the BIble) and not elsewhere (things that are contrary). Therefore, their “reasoning faculties” cannot really be at fault, can they?

There are a couple things wrong with this.  First, the epistemological questions that begin this paragraph are a problem for the atheist as well as for the Christian.  How does the atheist know that our minds evolved to correctly reason through what is objectively true?  After all, our minds evolved primarily for us to survive.  And if our survivability is increased due to useful fictions, then wouldn’t that mean our minds are incapable of determining which “truths” are objectively true and which are merely the ones our minds need to be true in order for us to survive?

Secondly, athiests likewise believe in standard that people ought to hold to in their thinking.  If this were not the case, then it would be impossible for the atheist to argue with the schizophrenic.  After all, if there is no standard of “correct” thinking, then who’s to argue that the schizophrenic is actually wrong?  So the atheist likewise has a burden to establish what that standard of “correct” thinking is.

Finally, it is merely semantic quibbling to argue that it is not their “reasoning facualties” to blame.  Indeed, ultimately I would level the blame at the entirety of the person, not just his reasoning ability.

I’m starting a semi-regular “feature” type thing (for as long as I like it, subject to change, blah blah blah) about taking back words.  I don’t mean by this that I’m going to “take back” something I’ve said as if I didn’t mean it :-)  Instead, what this means is that we are going to look at some words that have been hijacked and forced into different meanings from what they originally had.  In virtually every instance, it’s to make something that otherwise would be unappealing to the general public more palatable.  In short, hijacking the term is useful for the hijacker because he can then paint a picture using false assumptions, thus allowing him to skirt the actual philosophical issues that are in debate.

The first word that I’ve chosen to examine is the word tolerance.  Tolerance is a word that used to mean the fair-minded look at another person’s views that disagreed with your own.  To use a trivial example: John says, “I like the color blue so I’m going to pain the fence blue.”  Bill, his next door neighbor, says, “I despise the color Blue, but I will tolerate your painting the fence blue because I know you like it.”

But this is not how the term is used today.  Today, what happens is this: John says, “I like the color blue.”  Bill says, “I despise the color Blue and if you paint your fence blue, I’ll sue you.”  John says, “But it’s my fence!”  Bill responds: “You’re intolerant of my dislike for the color blue!”

As I said, it’s an admittedly trivial example.  Where this most often comes into play is when conservatives deal with pomos (that is, Post Moderns).  To take a specific instance, homosexuality:

Conservative: I think homosexuality is wrong.

Pomo: You’re an intolerant bigot.

Conservative: I haven’t even said you couldn’t practice your homosexuality!

Pomo: It doesn’t matter.  You disagreed with my position, so you’re intolerant.

At this point, the conversation is over.  The very fact that one group disagrees with the other is seen as evidence of intolerance, when in fact, tolerance cannot occur without disagreement!  Remember, tolerance begins with a reasoned response to something that people disagree on.  You cannot tolerate something you agree with!  If you agree, it’s hardly tolerating it!

But if we press it further, the Pomo is just as intolerant as he claims the Conservative is.  After all, using that same definition, we could re-write this as:

Pomo: I think that homosexuality is right.

Conservative: You’re intolerant of my position that it’s wrong!

Used in this manner, however, we can see the utter absurdity of the misuse of the term!  After all, the redefinition of the term only works one way.  It only works when the Pomo is leveling the charge against the Conservative.

In short, the word tolerance now means little more than being “lock step with the politicaly correct vision of the world.”  The term “intolerance” is now used merely as a conversation-stopper.  Stripped of its actual meaning, it can now only function as a bat to beat over the head of any who would disagree with the establishment.  Thus demonstrating, once again, the utter intolerance of those who claim the banner of tolerance.

That’s right, half way through November…

I’ve jumped out of my current novel to start another one.

Can’t stop the muse though.  I’ll finish the hockey one eventually since A) I like the story and B) I’ve put over 11K words into it already.  But before I get there, I gotta finish the one that’s baking my noodle at the moment.

This next story which I haven’t gotten a title for yet (I have one tentatively but until I firm it up in my mind I’m not gonna say what it is) is one that I actually can trace back to several distinct moments that all came together last week.

First, back on November 4, I was in channel with a character named Wonky.  The relevant portion (I was lurxing at the time, so I was CalvinLURX).

[19:18] [wonkwrk] My mouse button is going wonky[19:25] * CalvinLURX pounds wonkwrk during gaming…

[19:25] [wonkwrk] bah..

[19:26] [wonkwrk] Download the FEAR multiplier and lets find out :)

[19:26] [CalvinLURX] multiplier? Or multiplayer?

[19:26] [wonkwrk] player

[19:26] [CalvinLURX] :-P

[19:26] * CalvinLURX almost bought FEAR

[19:26] [wonkwrk] It rocks da hizzy

[19:26] [CalvinLURX] But I didn’t

[19:26] [wonkwrk] Going to play it all the way through again once I get my new rig

FEAR, for those who do not know, stands for “First Encounter Assault Recon” and is a First Person Shooter (FPS).  Anyway, I’d seen it at the store and had considered buying it but never did because I didn’t know anything about it.  But Wonky’s recommendation was in the back of my mind.

Then, Thursday afternoon as I wrapped up the day, my mouth began to hurt in the cavity that used to hold my upper left wisdom tooth.  At the same time, I could feel my sinuses acting up, which meant one thing: low-grade sinus infection in progress!  It was the most irritating pain I’ve felt for a while.  For one thing, I have a filling in the molar, and my gums started to swell which made the bite off just a bit so everytime I bit down my molar was killing me.

So I stopped by the Target that’s by my house to see if they had something that could numb my gums.  While I was there, I “accidentally” noticed that they also had FEAR, so I picked it up.  Unfortunately, they didn’t really have anything for my tooth.  So then I got home and started to play FEAR (after installing it, which took forever plus the multiplayer download which was 600 megs!!!).

Anyway, we had Friday off from work for Veterans Day and since my sinuses were still acting up, I lounged around and played FEAR.  Let me just say that it is one of the best FPS I’ve played in a long time.  Unfortunately, I pulled a Wonky and broke my mouse.

That’s right, I was trying to clean it since it was kinda lame trying to swing to shoot a bad guy and having your cursor stop about three pixels short of the character and, while you’re trying to pull it over, you get shotgunned.  Anyway, after I was finished cleaning out the track ball area and put the ball back in, I broke the plastic cover. :-(  So I headed back to Target (since it’s by my house) and picked up a new mouse.  On the way there, I passed by a drainage ditch area that I’ve always thought was kinda creepy looking since it would make the perfect place to ditch a body.  (Yes, playing FEAR will creep you out so you notice things like that.)

All that to say that between FEAR, my sinus infection, and the creepy drainage ditch, I have a new novel plot…  More details will follow later, if I feel like it.

Oh yeah, I still have my sinus infection, but at least now my teeth don’t hurt…

One of the ballots that passed in Colorado on Tuesday was an increase in the minimum wage.  I also saw that Pelosi wants to have the Federal minimum wage boosted (which would knock it up a dollar more than the increased CO level).

Yesterday, I spoke with a co-worker who voted for increasing the minimum wage.  I gave him my reasons why I disagreed with his decision, and at the tail end of our friendly discussion, a different co-worker came by.  She caught the topic and asked, “Did the mimimum wage initiative pass?”

I told her it had, and her face dropped.  She said told me that she and her husband own a couple of small businesses.  I asked her, “Do you have any employees?” and her response was a very telling: “Not anymore.”

There are two things that raising the mimimum wage will do to the economy.  The first is that it will directly harm small businesses.  This is rather easy to demonstrate with a little math.  Suppose you own a bakery.  You have an employee who gets you $6.00 every hour in income.  You have to pay this employee $6.15 every hour.  This means that you are losing $0.15 every hour.

You have two options: you either increase the prices of everything or you fire your employee.  Here’s the problem with increasing the prices of everything: most people don’t earn minimum wage, and therefore their income is going to remain the same.  As such, they won’t have as much disposable income (unless or until a cost of living adjustment happens during their raises) but everything will cost more.  This means that, at least right off the bat, people will buy less; and if they are buying less then the employee that used to get $6.00 an hour for his employer is now making less.

This leaves the unpleasant option for many small businesses that they will have to axe their employees.  Thus, unemployement will go up.  However, buisnesses have to have a mimimal level of employement in order to provide services; so when all the jobs that can be cut are, the prices will then go up to compensate.

This brings us to the second point.  The stores that are least affected by this will be the mega-stores, like Wal-Mart.  They have enough products that they can spread around the cost of the increased pay raise.  As such, their prices will not go up nearly as much as those of the small buisnesses.  This will create even more of a gap between what the mass-producers can charge and what small businesses can charge.  In short, more small businesses will be forced to close.

In other words, those who claim to support small businesses, and those who claim to hate Wal-Mart, are seeking to enact legislation that will benefit the very thing they hate at the expense of those they are trying to spare.  Yet most people sit there and think, “Ooh!  Pay raise!”  They do not realize that money doesn’t grow on trees–it comes from the sale of goods and services.  And simple economics are in play: if expenses go up, the price must go up too.

Okay, so last night I loaded up my Acid 5.0 program and realized that my old loops were all on my old external harddrive that died last year (it’s been a while since I used Acid).  So I did what any self-respecting person who owns Acid would do: I downloaded free loops from the internet!

Then I spent about 45 minutes making this.  As SpideyGeek told me in channel when I first released the mp3 upon the world: “DJ CeeDee is in da house!”

W3rd up, y0.

Ken Mehlman sent me an e-mail.  Apparently I’m on a list.  Anyway, normally it goes straight to el spamo and is then deleted when I delete that folder every evening, but today I read it since I happened to see it as it came in.

Now for those who don’t know, Mehlman is the head of the RNC.  Here’s, in part, what he had to say (my comments in bold):

Over the last two years, you and millions of others from across our great nation banded together to support our Party. I am well aware how much each and every one of you dedicated yourselves to this cause, and I know that yesterday’s results included many disappointments. On behalf of the President and the Party, I thank you. You mean, thank you for letting us disappoing you.I want to tell you something I believe with all of my heart: you made an important difference. Our Party and our cause were worth the effort in 2006. Yes, worth every single thing I didn’t do.

Our messages of expanding freedom at home and defending freedom abroad persist as the right answers for our nation. Indeed, many of the Democrats who won yesterday embraced our platform and our values. Too bad we didn’t. Last night, however, the voters sent a message, and we need to make sure we receive that message loud and clear. We need to recommit ourselves to conservative reform. That would be a pleasant change; I won’t be holding my breath. Our leaders must work to provide bipartisan solutions to the challenges facing our country…. Yup, already dropped the whole “conservative reform” bit for this illusive idea of bipartisanship, which really means “doing whatever the Democrats tell us to do.”

[W]e faced an historic challenge - and we were not able to overcome it yesterday. But adversity is no excuse. Sure it is. But let’s look for reasons instead of excuses. Reason you lost: you abandoned your principals. Our party is built on ideas and values that transcend any one election. They transcend them so far that we haven’t even been able to find them since Reagan left office. The principles of Lincoln and Reagan were polar opposites and yet somehow remain alive and well in the policies of our President just like any other contradictory idea he’s held. Like, say, vetoing stem cell research while also funding it in already existing lines… Your commitment is about more than politics. It is about more than Party. Which is why I’m not in your party anymore. So please accept the thanks of a grateful President and a grateful party. It’s time to regroup. And then let’s get back to work. Back to work? How about starting to work?

I read an interesting quote from John Calvin this morning:

If I wanted to weave a whole volume from Augustine, I could readily show my readers that I need no other language than his.  But I do not want to burden them with wordiness.

(Calvin, John (1960). Institutes of the Christian Religion Volume 2 (III. xxii. 8) F. L. Battles Trans.,  Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press. (p. 942))

Yes, that’s right.  On PAGE NINE HUNDRED FORTY TWO Calvin starts to worry about being wordy…

I showed one of my co-workers today; he had just recently read this in a textbook for a class he’s taking:

At the farthest extreme, death is the ultimate sign of poor health.

(Berger, Kathleen (2005). The Developing Person Through The Life, NY: Worth. (p. 498).)

All I can say is…what would we do without writers in this world? :-D