Not so fast there, Manny!

[Raulgr]

Manuel,

Before you pick up those cards, let's have a look at them, shall we? I took your thesis of EYEWITNESS GOSPELS to the biblical criticism and archaeology forum of the Internet Infidels discussion board. As it turns out, many scholars of biblical text, Christians among them, flatly reject the notion that any of the four gospels of the new testament were authored by APOSTLES of Christ, the consensus being that their authorship is, at best, UNKNOWN.

I guess one man's TESTIMONY is another man's STORY. My original observation (actually Joe's) STANDS. Better luck next time!

Here's the real deal (my thread "gospels according to eyewitnesses", with responses):

Manuel asserts that the GOSPELS are eyewitness accounts of Jesus the Resurrected Jewish Messiah (JRJM):

Each eyewitness to JRJM (persons who saw him alive after resurrection and gave their Testimony) were arrested and tortured during the decades following the incident and none of them ever recanted under extreme duress of their Testimony. They had remained visible public figures in their communities for all those years, and some, like John, even went to write several books on their first hand experience with JRJM and died of old age. Interestingly, John's book on JRJM, which was written decades after the three previous books on JRJM made by the other eyewitnesses, has surviving fragments from 30 years after he published it. No other books in history have so many existing ancient copies, partial or complete, yet no other books are so much slandered, grilled or excoriated than them.
__________________
Manuel Alonso desde el jurutungo de Bairoa

OK, scholars, a bible 101 question:

I recall no discussion of the gospels as being eyewitness accounts, that is to say, written by the ORIGINAL DISCIPLES of Christ. To the contrary, what I have read and heard on the matter has led me to believe that the gospels are sourced in oral tradition - HERESAY, NOT TESTIMONY. What's the real deal here?

[This message has been edited by soulofdarwin (edited March 18, 2001).]

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Tercel
Secular Web Visitor posted March 18, 2001 03:58 AM

It's the traditional Christian position (Going right back to Papias who lived early 2nd century AD) that the GoMatthew (Gospel of) was written by Matthew the disciple. The GoMark by Mark a friend of Peter. The GoLuke by Luke a friend of Paul, and the GoJohn by John the disciple.
Most non-Christians aren't prepared to accept the idea that the Gospels record eyewitness accounts, or they insist on later heavy editing.

There's certainly nothing against them being eyewitness accounts (apart from not wanting them to be). The account of Jesus writing on the ground (See John 8:6-8) serves absolutely no purpose whatsoever. It is purely and simply descriptive. Either the author is making up a completely and utterly purposeless detail or he is recording an eyewitness account of what happened, and includes it simply because he saw it. Thus this particular bit of John looks to me like an eyewitness account... of course that doesn't necessarily mean the rest is.

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offa
Secular Web Regular posted March 18, 2001 06:26 AM

John was completed before the Saul of Tarsus
showed up (37 CE) and Jesus dictated most of
what was written. Everybody says John was written last because another writer also called John (for this very reason) made a few additions after the other three gospels were completed. Oh, Jesus was quite human and survived the crucifixion. That is why St. Paul was able to become an apostle and, also, St. Paul was able to claim Jesus talked to him. The only way the myth could survive is to make Jesus a puka (Harvey the rabbit).
thanks, offa

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rodahi
Moderator posted March 18, 2001 06:47 AM

Originally posted by Tercel:
It's the traditional Christian position (Going right back to Papias who lived early 2nd century AD) that the GoMatthew (Gospel of) was written by Matthew the disciple. The GoMark by Mark a friend of Peter. The GoLuke by Luke a friend of Paul, and the GoJohn by John the disciple.
Most non-Christians aren't prepared to accept the idea that the Gospels record eyewitness accounts, or they insist on later heavy editing.

"Christian tradition" came over a hundred years after Jesus' death and there are good reasons for not accepting the words of the so-called church fathers.

Furthermore, it is not "non-Christians" only who question the authorship of the narratives. Christian scholar, Francis Wright Beare, writes: "All the gospels are anonymous documents, and nothing is known of the authors. The traditional names attached to them are second-hand guesses. If we continue to speak of them by the names of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, it is simply for the sake of convenience." The Earliest Records of Jesus, P. 13.

There's certainly nothing against them being eyewitness accounts (apart from not wanting them to be).

This is simiply not true. There are problems with every narrative. THAT is the reason scholars, Christian and non-Christian, question their authorship.

The account of Jesus writing on the ground (See John 8:6-8) serves absolutely no purpose whatsoever.

If Jesus practiced magic, and there is a large body of evidence suggesting he did, it serves a very real purpose. Jewish magicians wrote or drew on the ground in some instances.

It is purely and simply descriptive. Either the author is making up a completely and utterly purposeless detail . . .

It would make no sense for the writer to make up an irrelavant detail.

. . . or he is recording an eyewitness account of what happened, and includes it simply because he saw it. Thus this particular bit of John looks to me like an eyewitness account... of course that doesn't necessarily mean the rest is.

The writer could be merely repeating things others believed and said about Jesus.

rodahi

[This message has been edited by rodahi (edited March 18, 2001).]

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aikido7
Secular Web Regular posted March 18, 2001 06:12 PM

Originally posted by Tercel:
Most non-Christians aren't prepared to accept the idea that the Gospels record eyewitness accounts, or they insist on later heavy editing.

The majority of mainstream biblical scholars agree that the gospel accounts are a complex blend of historical (oral) memory and theological "faith-language."

There is a scholarly consensus that Mark is the earliest gospel to have been written. If one reads the four accounts in parallel--side-by-side--one can clearly see how both Matthew and Luke had a copy of Mark in front of them when they wrote their gospels and one can then pay attention to how they both adapted his gospel to fit their own early Christian communities.

The differences are sometimes glaring, and interestingly highlight the "spin-doctoring" each gospel brings to the words and deeds of the historical figure of Jesus.

So, Matthew and Luke are not primary gospels; they are variations of Mark.

The textual relationships between and among the gospels have been known for nearly 300 years and have been taught in seminaries and divinity schools for a century, but the pastors in the pulpit have not seen fit to disemminate such truths to the people in the pews. This may be due to a fear of "rocking the boat," but may also be the result of a vague sense that the average churchgoer has no real need of such knowledge.

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SingleDad
Moderator posted March 18, 2001 06:59 PM

Also, making up "purposeless" detail is a common fictional narrative technique, seen often in Homer.

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Tercel
Secular Web Visitor posted March 18, 2001 10:52 PM

Originally posted by rodahi:
"Christian tradition" came over a hundred years after Jesus' death and there are good reasons for not accepting the words of the so-called church fathers.

The obvious answer is that within the hundred years there was no need for a 'tradition'. There would have been then people alive who either had firsthand or secondhand accounts of what happened, Especially the Church leaders. One hundred years is the expected length of time for something to become a tradition rather than a memory. By then all those who saw the event are dead, and few are alive who talked to those who saw the event. The event is now history or a tradition rather than memory.

Why ignore the writings of the Church Fathers??? They were in a position to be knowledgable about there subject and I see no reason for them to lie. They would have access to hundreds of times the number of records and documents which have survived to us. What actual evidence is there that they were not capable of writing the truth?

Furthermore, it is not "non-Christians" only who question the authorship of the narratives.

Of course. I simply gave the tradition Christian position and the Athiest position.

If Jesus practiced magic, and there is a large body of evidence suggesting he did, it serves a very real purpose. Jewish magicians wrote or drew on the ground in some instances.

Jesus did magic? Is that like miracles but without God? Or is it like modern magic without any actual miracle?
Even given that Jesus might have been a magician who drew on the ground:

1) Why is he doing it in a passage where no miracle takes place?
2) Why doesn't he do it when miracles do take place?

It is purely and simply descriptive. It would make no sense for the writer to make up an irrelavant detail.

Duh, that was my point!

The writer could be merely repeating things others believed and said about Jesus.

The whole point is that in repetition through many people the details are lost. The fact that there is such an apparently irrelevant detail described suggests that the account is either eyewitness or at the most second-hand. It seems to me unlikely that such a detail would survive in a worse than second-hand account.

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lpetrich
Secular Web Regular posted March 19, 2001 12:05 AM

Check out http://infoweb.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/home.htm
Earl Doherty on the Jesus Puzzle.

He proposes that the Gospels were anything but eyewitness accounts, that they were essentially allegories with collections of sayings added in.

In fact, he concludes that there never had been a historical Jesus Christ. This solves a lot of puzzles, such as why Paul had shown no interest in JC's (supposed) earthly career. As only one example, Paul presents JC as someone who had risen from the dead -- *without* mentioning the raising-the-dead miracles in the Gospels.

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Writer@Large
Moderator posted March 19, 2001 10:13 AM

Originally posted by Tercel:
Jesus did magic? Is that like miracles but without God? Or is it like modern magic without any actual miracle?

The latter, I think he meant: magic as a combination of psychology and sleight-of-hand. Magic that works because we believe it does.

The whole point is that in repetition through many people the details are lost. The fact that there is such an apparently irrelevant detail described suggests that the account is either eyewitness or at the most second-hand. It seems to me unlikely that such a detail would survive in a worse than second-hand account.

Wrong, and you're guilty of an Either/Or fallacy. There are other options than a) someone made it up and b) it's so trivial it must be true. I am not the best student of Biblical Criticism--I quickly found that one has to be able to argue in Hebrew and Greek for that--but I am an astute student of folklore, myth, and oral tradition, and when one knows the nature of oral tradition, one sees a much more likely possibility for this apparently trivial detail.

You yourself said that "in repetition through many people the details are lost." This is absolutely true. So why wasn't this detail lost? One answer could be that all the detail that went with it, that made sense of it, was lost, and that this curious oral remnant is all that remained when it was written down. In the original tale, maybe Jesus was more like a Hebrew magician, and he did indeed scribe some warding symbol, or maybe a prayer, or the name of God, on the ground to protect the woman. Another possibility is that the tale originally featured someone other than Jesus, and that Jesus was simply put in as the main figure; it is a common happening in myth and legend (for example, the shift in Arthurian legend between Percival and Galahad). As the story was told and retold, with Jesus as the central figure, the sorcerous elements were lost--perhaps because the Church didn't like them, perhaps because it would have been obvious to both teller and listener what such gestures meant, and thus it didn't need repeating. By the time it was written down formally, only the strange physical action remained.

--W@L

[El_Jibaro]

Dear Raulito, herr Puerto Rican führer:

I am an Engineer, an Aerospace Engineer by trade, and a Mechanical Engineer by training (for those who don't know, Aerospace Engineering is a subset of Mechanical Engineering ). Therefore, as a man of science I am not a philosopher, I work with FACTS. Ideas per se are not what hold an aircraft up in the air, air pressure does, which is a physical FACT. Anyone can dream up anti-gravity engines and flying saucers, or even a flying carpet, but these are not the stuff that can fly anyone from San Juan to Philadelphia in the 1:00 PM Contenintal Airlines schedule (not even in the year 2500 AD by a "make up your own schedule airline").

I grew up in a skeptic home, Marxism was our dinner-side politics, the Occult was our metaphysical ideal and plenty of conjecture our everyday bread. So I have seen plenty of ideas in my life, even conjectured myself plenty more. But one thing I learned as an Engineer is that reality is not a matter of conjecture. I can hold in my head billions of ideas but only the truth matters in solving everyday life problems. In fact, many ideas are blatant denials of the truth, and even though one may consider himself a free spirit one must be careful not to confuse pure drinking water with pure hydrogen peroxide when quenching your thirst .

About Jesus and events surrounding Him I rather trust the Gospels themselves and Archeology than the plethora of "scholarly clowns" who have conjectured on its origins for the last two hundred and plus years. The Gospels say one thing, the "scholarly clowns" usually assert the contrary and Archeology proves the clowns wrong every single time. Plus, I have yet to see a drug addict or a prostitute have their lives changed by the power of the "scholarly clowns'" teachings, but I have seen personally many people bound to the most dirty of sins be liberated and become productive citizens by the power of the Gospel.

After having tried the Gospel myself and seen its power in my own life, why should I return to worthless theories of "scholarly clowns" (whose lives bound to shameful immorality are the very reason why they spew out all sorts of silly speculations) and whose conjectures have never had any weight in reality except on their grandiose minds? So if you want me to waste my time answering your army of mercenaries (who have to bail you out of your sheer ignorance ), I will not. Go find yourself another victim to exploit.

[Raulgr]

Originally posted by El_Jibaro
. . . as a man of science I am not a philosopher, I work with FACTS.

. . .one thing I learned as an Engineer is that reality is not a matter of conjecture.

Manuel,

I was glad to see your reference to science. SCIENCE is MY LIFE! Science is what I BELIEVE. Science is ALL that I believe! Take, for example, the science of biology and its sub-discipline, dealing with the development of the biological organisms of this planet, EVOLUTIONARY SCIENCE. Evolutionary science chronicles the step by step process of minute change that has resulted in all of the "life" forms known to us.

While we do not know every detail of the journey from oil slicks on water to skyscrapers, we know enough to know that it can and DID happen in the course of our planetary development. Now, my question for you is this: Exactly where in that long road of minute steps did "non-life" become "life"? Is there really any reason to suppose a bright line of demarcation in that evolutionary process of abiogenesis? I think not. Clearly, we, just as all of the "living" organisms around us, are automatons - "better living through chemistry".

Science, therefore, points to the REALITY that we are no more than candles in the wind. For us, there is no eternity, only a brief moment in time. The difference between you and me, Manuel, is that, much as I would like to have it otherwise, I ACCEPT that reality! There is no refuge in SCIENCE for YOUR METAPHYSICS.

As for science and philosophy, I call your attention to the following from my essay on the General Theorem of Existence:

It seems to me that philosophy, sociology and science devolve to a single arena of human inquiry, as I make no distinction between philosophy and science and I am too optimistic to believe that our planetary society will remain forever uninformed. I do not separate philosophy and science because I am of the opinion that knowledge does not exist apart from that body of knowledge which comprises universal law. Clearly, we, as thinking beings, are capable of formulating ideas that have no connection to reality, and which, therefore, have nothing to do with knowledge. Because both philosophy and science have as their objective the pursuit of knowledge, and because there is only one body of knowledge in existence, these two realms of intellectual endeavor are indistinguishable in my view. When we, as individuals, speak of our philosophy, we refer to the collective ideas which constitute our perception of the universe and of our relationship to it. These ideas are either correct, in which case they are knowledge, or incorrect, in which case they are only ideas. History is replete with lessons which demonstrate that attempts to conduct one’s affairs in contravention of universal law do not end well. I believe, therefore, that it is essential to our societal well being that we examine and consider “social issues” in the context of knowledge and not merely of ideas.

Regards, Raul



[Edited by Raulgr on 22nd March 2001 at 10:42]

[El_Jibaro]

Just like yourself, my musician Dad thinks he is a scientist too, since he can read Popular Mechanics, and he enjoys reading Von Deineken, and all the host of bright dreamers from the "Welcome to the Brave New World" era. Then again he thinks that there are people living on the sun called "helio-ites", and that the Earth gave birth to the Moon. He also ignores the difference between earth's magnetic field and earth's gravity (mind you, he has gone to university and obtained a BA, and he used to poke fun at Abuelita because she thought that the sun rotates around the earth).

The first thing we learn in Engineering and all real sciences is that matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed, they can undergo transformations but not come out of nothing or turn into nothing.

There, you think that you got me cornered, but lets take this fundamental principle seriously. I hope you know that each living being has a blue-print, most of them in the form of DNA, and some viruses in the form of RNA (prions don't count, since they are just single proteins). Well, those DNA blue-prints are of the same nature as computer programs: encoded information packets. Therein lies the rub when I mentioned "real sciences" before, since most biologists are poorly trained in math and logic they think everything in the universe is possible naturally. Well, it is not. Just like perpetual motion machines are impossible, many things that biologists take for granted are not real, but fictional entities, one of them "natural evolution". Anyone who has ever written a computer program that works well will tell you that such a piece of coded information can never by its very nature create itself, it takes dedicated hard work and intelligence to do this.

Lets put this in simpler terms: if you take a factory that produces alphabet letters and blow it up with dynamite, you will never obtain a full Webster's Dictionary from cover to cover; not even if you blew up a trillion of those factories.

The same can be said for living beings, which depend absolutely on encoded information for their very existence.

If we were to fill a hall with world renowned Physicists and ask them to seriously ponder the question on the probability that INFORMATION could increase in complexity by itself, they will invariably tell you that it is impossible, INFORMATION can degrade, but not increase in complexity by itself. Knowing that life is by its very nature INFORMATION, if I were to ask a serious genius in Physics, Einstein himself, about the probability of life arising by itself and evolving in complexity, he would laugh and tell me that it has the same probabilities as "spontaneous generation", the old notion that Greek philosophers had that mud by itself on a rainy day could turn into tadpoles and frogs.

So, if "natural evolution" is possible, "spontaneous generation" by itself would be possible. You ponder that one.

About evolutionary biologists, they are doomed in academia nowadays, though they may survive in Hollywood making documentaries. Yep, academia still churns out a huge many of them, just like at the end of the Cold War universities were still churning out Nuclear Physics PhD's by the thousands.

You may ask, how about fossils, geology and dating methods? My answer to you for now is: have you ever heard about tautology? I think that these fields of knowledge are too deep for you to waddle across without drowning sonny.

Oops, I forgot to answer your philosophizing about Existence. I don't care for sheer conjecture of the same nature as the famous idiotic question: "if a tree fell by itself in the jungle, does it make any sounds?" Let's say that ants, roaches, monkeys, elephants, whales and aardvarks never sit down to ponder why and how they exist, only we do. I myself don't want to place myself at the same dignity level of a roach .

[conciencia]

Jibaro and Raul,

One small detail you may have missed. About 300 to 400 AD there were no particular or define science. Philosophy was the main subject in clase rooms. Remember Aristotle and Theophrastus they basically broke it down into different philosophy subjects known today as sciences. Remember Plato and his metaphysics believes in mathematics well guess what it was considered a philosophy too.

The problem you guys have is called the dicernment between belief and faith.

Belief is the process of making a commitment to an idea in order to make that idea work for you.

faith in the other hand, is the act of commiting oneself to an idea after having "processed" it, that is, after raising doubts about it, analying it, applying it. Then the idea, having been tested in the trenches, continues to stay alive; what one does with it is to have faith in it. It may not be proven or it may be temporary useful but one continues to invest in it. That's faith.

Evolution was even discarded by Darwin himself. Creation of these complex code is the only answer. Evolution does exist in that our human species have changed to survive in the environment of the earth we dwindle, but evolution from a totally different category or simple earthly specie to a more complex, well that is a I do not think so factoid. The fact that one acknowledges the existance of a superior being that should entice your hunger to find out more about him.

[Raulgr]

Originally posted by El_Jibaro
I hope you know that each living being has a blue-print, most of them in the form of DNA, and some viruses in the form of RNA (prions don't count, since they are just single proteins). Well, those DNA blue-prints are of the same nature as computer programs: encoded information packets. Therein lies the rub when I mentioned "real sciences" before, since most biologists are poorly trained in math and logic they think everything in the universe is possible naturally. Well, it is not. Just like perpetual motion machines are impossible, many things that biologists take for granted are not real, but fictional entities, one of them "natural evolution". Anyone who has ever written a computer program that works well will tell you that such a piece of coded information can never by its very nature create itself, it takes dedicated hard work and intelligence to do this.

Lets put this in simpler terms: if you take a factory that produces alphabet letters and blow it up with dynamite, you will never obtain a full Webster's Dictionary from cover to cover; not even if you blew up a trillion of those factories. The same can be said for living beings, which depend absolutely on encoded information for their very existence.

If we were to fill a hall with world renowned Physicists and ask them to seriously ponder the question on the probability that INFORMATION could increase in complexity by itself, they will invariably tell you that it is impossible, INFORMATION can degrade, but not increase in complexity by itself. Knowing that life is by its very nature INFORMATION, if I were to ask a serious genius in Physics, Einstein himself, about the probability of life arising by itself and evolving in complexity, he would laugh and tell me that it has the same probabilities as "spontaneous generation", the old notion that Greek philosophers had that mud by itself on a rainy day could turn into tadpoles and frogs.
__________________
Manuel Alonso desde el jurutungo de Bairoa

Manuel,

Here’s what Richard Dawkins has to say about your ill-fated argument from design:

We animals are the most complicated things in the known universe. The universe that we know, of course, is a tiny fragment of the actual universe. There might be yet more complicated objects than us on other planets, and some of them might already know about us. But, this doesn’t alter the point that I want to make. Complicated things, everywhere, deserve a very special kind of explanation. We want to know how they came into existence and why they are so complicated. The explanation, as I shall argue, is likely to be broadly the same for complicated things everywhere in the universe; the same for us, for chimpanzees, worms, oak trees and monsters from outer space. On the other hand, it will not be the same for what I call “simple” things, such as rocks, clouds, rivers, galaxies and quarks. These are the stuff of physics. Chimps and dogs and bats and cockroaches and people and worms and dandelions and bacteria and galactic aliens are the stuff of biology.

The difference is one of complexity of design. Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose. Physics is the study of simple things that do not tempt us to invoke design. . . .

I said that physics is the study of simple things, and this, too, might seem strange at first. Physics appears to be a complicated subject because the ideas of physics are difficult for us to understand. Our brains were designed to understand hunting and gathering, mating and child rearing: a world of medium-sized objects moving in three dimensions at moderate speeds. We are ill-equipped to comprehend the very small and the very large, things whose duration is measured in picoseconds or gigayears, particles that don’t have position, forces and fields that we cannot see or touch, that we know of only because they affect things that we can see or touch. We think that physics is complicated because it is hard for us to understand, and because physics books are full of difficult mathematics. But, the objects that physicists study are still basically simple objects. They are clouds of gas or tiny particles, or lumps of uniform matter like crystals, with almost endlessly repeated atomic patterns. They do not have, at least by biological standards, intricate working parts. Even large physical objects like stars consist of a rather limited array of parts, more or less haphazardly arranged. The behavior of physical, non-biological objects is so simple that it is feasible to use existing mathematical language to describe it, which is why physics books are full of mathematics.

Physics books might be complicated, but, like cars and computers, they are the product of biological objects – human brains. The objects and phenomena that a physics book describes are simpler than a single cell in the body of its author. And the author consists of trillions of those cells, many of them different from each other, organized with intricate architecture and precision-engineering into a working machine capable of writing a book. Our brains are no better equipped to handle extremes of complexity than they are to handle the extremes of physics. Nobody has yet invented the mathematics for describing the total structure and behavior of such an object as a physicist, or even of one of his cells. What we can do is understand some of the general principles of how living things work, and why they exist at all.

This was where we came in. We wanted to know why we and all other complicated things exist. And we can now answer that question in general terms, even without being able to comprehend the details of the complexity itself. To take an analogy, most of us don’t understand in detail how an airliner works. Probably its builders don’t comprehend it fully either: engine specialists don’t in detail understand wings, and wing specialists understand engines only vaguely. Wing specialist don’t even understand wings with full mathematical precision: they can predict how a wing will behave in turbulent conditions only by examining a model in a wind tunnel or a computer simulation – the sort of thing a biologist might do to understand an animal. But, however incompletely we understand how an airliner works, we all understand by what general process it came into existence. It was designed by humans on drawing boards. Then other humans made the bits from the drawings, then lots more humans (with the aid of other machines designed by humans) screwed, riveted, welded or glued the bits together, each in its right place. The process by which an airliner came into existence is not fundamentally mysterious to us because humans built it. The systematic putting together of parts to a purposeful design is something we know and understand, for we have experienced it at first hand. . . .

What about our own bodies? Each one of us is a machine, like an airliner, only much more complicated. Were we designed on a drawing board too, and were our parts assembled by a skilled engineer? The answer is no. It is a surprising answer, and we have known and understood it for only a century or so. When Charles Darwin first explained the matter, many people either wouldn’t or couldn’t grasp it. I myself flatly refused to believe Darwin’s theory when I first heard about it as a child. Almost everybody throughout history, up to the second half of the nineteenth century, has firmly believed the opposite – the Conscious Designer theory. Many people still do, perhaps because the true explanation of our own existence is still, remarkably, not a routine part of the curriculum of a general education. It is certainly very widely misunderstood.

The watchmaker of my title is borrowed from a famous treatise by eighteenth-century theologian William Paley. His 'Natural Theology – or Evidence of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity Collected from the Appearances of Nature', published in 1802, is the best-known exposition of the “Argument from Design”, always the most influential of the arguments for the existence of a God.

Paley begins 'Natural Theology' with a famous passage:

“In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there. I might possibly answer that, for anything I knew to the contrary, it had lain there forever; nor would it perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But, suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place. I should hardly think of the answer which I had before given, that for anything I knew, the watch might have always been there.”

Paley here appreciates the difference between natural physical objects like stones and designed and manufactured objects like watches. He goes on to expound the precision with which the cogs and springs of a watch are fashioned, and the intricacy with which they are put together. If we found an object such as a watch upon a heath, even if we didn’t know how it had come into existence, its precision and intricacy of design would force us to conclude

. . . “that the watch must have had a maker, that there must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers, who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer, who comprehended its construction and designed its use.”

Nobody could reasonably dissent from this conclusion, Paley insists, yet that is just what the atheist, in effect, does when he contemplates the works of nature. . . .

Paley’s argument is made with passionate sincerity and is informed by the best biological scholarship of his day, but, it is wrong, gloriously and utterly wrong. The analogy between telescope and eye, between watch and living organism, is false. All appearances to the contrary, the only watchmaker in nature is the blind forces of physics, albeit deployed in a very special way. A true watchmaker has foresight: he designs his cogs and springs, and plans their interconnections, with a future purpose in his mind’s eye. Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind, and no mind’s eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.

I shall explain all this, and much else besides. But, one thing I shall not do is belittle the wonder of the living “watches” that so inspired Paley. On the contrary, I shall try to illustrate my feeling that here Paley could have gone even further. When it comes to feeling awe over living “watches”, I yield to nobody. I feel more in common with the Reverend William Paley than I do with the distinguished modern philosopher, a well-known atheist, with whom I once discussed the matter at dinner. I said that I could not imagine being an atheist at any time before 1859, when Darwin’s Origin of Species was published. “What about Hume?”, replied the philosopher. “How did Hume explain the organized complexity of the living world?”, I asked. “He didn’t”, said the philosopher. “Why does it need any special explanation?”

Paley knew that it needed a special explanation. Darwin knew it, and I suspect that, in his heart of hearts, my philosopher companion knew it too. In any case, it will be my business to show it here. As for David Hume, it is sometimes said that the great Scottish philosopher disposed of the Argument from Design a century before Darwin. But, what Hume did was criticize the logic of using apparent design in nature as positive evidence for the existence of a God. He did not offer any alternative explanation for apparent design, but left the question open. An atheist before Darwin could have said, following Hume: “I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn’t a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one.” I can’t help feeling that such a position, though logically sound, would have left one feeling pretty unsatisfied, and that, although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. I like to think that Hume would agree, but some of his writings suggest that he underestimated the complexity and beauty of biological design. The boy naturalist Charles Darwin could have shown him a thing or two about that, but Hume had been dead 40 years when Darwin enrolled in Hume’s university of Edinburgh. . . .

Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter. The essence of life is statistical improbability on a colossal scale. Whatever is the explanation for life, therefore, it cannot be chance. The true explanation for the existence of life must embody the very antithesis of chance. The antithesis of chance is nonrandom survival, properly understood. Nonrandom survival, improperly understood, is not the antithesis of chance, but chance itself. There is a continuum connecting these two extremes, and it is the continuum from single-step selection to cumulative selection. Single-step selection is just another way of saying pure chance. This is what I mean by nonrandom survival improperly understood. Cumulative selection, by slow and gradual degrees, is the explanation, the only workable explanation that has ever been proposed, for the existence of life’s complex design.

The whole book has been dominated by the idea of chance, by the astronomically long odds against the spontaneous arising of order, complexity, and apparent design. We have sought a way of taming chance, of drawing its fangs. “Untamed chance”, pure, naked chance, means ordered design springing into existence from nothing, in a single leap. It would be untamed chance if once there was no eye, and then, suddenly, in the twinkling of a generation, an eye appeared, fully fashioned, perfect and whole. This is possible, but the odds against it will keep us busy writing noughts (zeros) until the end of time. The same applies to the odds against the spontaneous existence of any fully fashioned, perfect and whole beings, including – I see no way of avoiding the conclusion – deities.

To “tame” chance means to break down the very improbable into less improbable small components arranged in series. No matter how improbable it is that X could have arisen from Y in a single step, it is always possible to conceive of a series of infinitesimally graded intermediates between them. However improbable a large-scale change might be, smaller changes are less improbable. And, provided we postulate a sufficiently large series of sufficiently finely graded intermediates, we shall be able to derive anything from anything else, without invoking astronomical improbability. We are allowed to do this only if there has been sufficient time to fit all the intermediates in. And, also, only if there is a mechanism for guiding each step in some particular direction. Otherwise, the sequence of steps will careen off in an endless random walk.

It is the convention of the Darwinian world-view that both these provisos are met, and that slow, gradual, cumulative natural selection is the ultimate explanation for our existence. If there are versions of the evolution theory that deny slow gradualism, and deny the central role of natural selection, they might be true in particular cases. But, they cannot be the whole truth, for they deny the very heart of the evolution theory, which gives it the power to dissolve astronomical improbabilities and explain prodigies of apparent miracle.

Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, W. W. Norton & Company, London – New York, 1996

Your statements, Manuel, indicate a complete lack of understanding of evolutionary theory. I recommend that you first read The Blind Watchmaker, then tell me whether or not you have an argument. By the way, Dawkins explains his computer modeling of natural selection in his book.

Five-hundred years ago, Christians wanted us to believe that the earth was flat. Today we have a nicely rounded earth, and tomorrow . . . TA! DA! . . . abiogenesis:

One of the most important science discoveries last year sheds light on origin of life
Article by George Johnson
In the past year, science has made important progress on one of the truly big questions in biology: the origin of life.

Most scientists accept - tentatively - the theory that life arose spontaneously here on earth from inanimate matter, as associations of molecules became more and more complex.
The logical way to test the spontaneous origin theory is to repeat the process. In 1953, Stanley Miller and Harold Urey assembled in a glass flask an atmosphere similar to what the early earth's atmosphere is thought to have been like. It was a smelly sort of atmosphere, composed of hydrogen-rich molecules like hydrogen sulfide ("rotten eggs"), methane ("swamp gas"), and ammonia ("smelling salts").
Bombarding the mixture with lightning in the form of sparks, Miller and Urey found that within a week 15 percent of the carbon originally present as methane gas had been converted into other carbon compounds, including amino acids (the building blocks of proteins) and nucleotides (the building blocks of nucleic acids like DNA and RNA). They concluded that the basic building blocks used in the construction of living organisms could indeed have arisen spontaneously.

The next step predicted by the spontaneous origin theory has not been so easy to test - that these building blocks spontaneously linked together to form the large molecules of which cells are made. Somehow, the individual amino acids produced in the Miller-Urey experiment must have linked together in chains to form proteins, like pearls coming together to form a necklace.

This linking-together presents what at first seems an insurmountable problem: Theory tells us that it is chemically impossible for amino acids to aggregate spontaneously in water. The basic problem is that water will tend to push the chemical reaction backward, toward breaking up proteins rather than forming them.

One way out of this quandary is to imagine that life first arose away from water, say within a clay or mineral. While a little zany, this idea has attracted serious consideration, at least to some degree because it is hard to think of other water-free alternatives.

Another way out of the quandary is to step back and look at the problem from a different perspective. There is lots of water in each cell of your body, and yet proteins get assembled in your cells with no difficulty. Water presents no problem there, because in cells the process of protein assembly does not actually occur out in the water. Instead, it is carried out within great contraptions called ribosomes, and there is no water inside a ribosome.

Ribosomes are very complex cellular machines. Each ribosome is made of more than 50 different proteins, as well as three chains of RNA composed of about 3,000 nucleotides. RNA is a nucleic acid similar to DNA, but single-stranded.

It has been traditionally assumed that the proteins act as enzymes to facilitate the amino-acid assembly process, with RNA providing a scaffold to position the proteins properly.

But if proteins in ribosomes bring about the linking together of amino acids to form new proteins, then where did the ribosome proteins come from? Last year we learned the answer to that chicken-or-egg question, and a surprising answer it turned out to be. Over the past 12 months, several research groups have used powerful X-ray diffraction to determine the complete detailed structure of a ribosome at atomic resolution.

The researchers found that the many proteins of a ribosome are scattered over its surface like decorations on a Christmas tree. The role of these proteins seems to be limited to stabilizing the many bends and twists of the RNA chains. The proteins act like spot-welds between the RNA strands they touch.

Importantly, there are no proteins on the inside of the ribosome where the chemistry of protein synthesis takes place - just twists of RNA. This was totally unexpected. The ribosome's RNA, not its protein, must bring about the joining of amino acids. Science, the most widely read scientific journal in the United States, chose this revelation as the second-most-important scientific discovery of 2000 (runner-up to completion of the Human Genome Project).

This discovery that RNA facilitates protein synthesis dissolves the quandary of spontaneous protein assembly. RNA nucleotides produced in Miller-Urey experiments can link together to form chains, and these chains can act as enzymes to bring about the linking together of amino acids to form proteins. There is a great deal we don't know, but the theory of spontaneous origin seems to have passed another hurdle.

George Johnson is a biology professor at Washington University.

So, researchers have now determined that it is the RNA, not the proteins, that act as enzymes in linking amino acids to form proteins. This discovery that RNA facilitates protein synthesis dissolves the quandary of spontaneous protein assembly. RNA nucleotides, such as those produced in the Miller-Urey experiments, can link together in chains, and these chains can catalyze protein from amino acids. While much remains to be known, the proposition of abiogenesis has been advanced significantly. I’ll say it again, Manuel. There is no refuge in science for your position!

Now, here is the $64,000 question. If, in fact, “life” has evolved from “non-life”, exactly where, in that gradual, step-by-step process, is the bright line of demarcation between those two alleged states of existence? Of course, as presented in my thread General Theorem of Existence, the question is rhetorical. The answer is the obvious one – the line of demarcation is non-existent. Our separation of the “living” from the “non-living”, and our fascination with the former, is nothing more than egocentric nonsense of the sort that, at one time, placed us at the center of the universe.

In view of that, I propose the following epitaph for the tombstone of the metaphysical:

THE KNOWN UNIVERSE IS COMPRISED OF A CONTINUUM OF SYSTEMS THAT HAVE BEEN HERETOFORE INCORRECTLY DIVIDED INTO TWO CLASSES, “ LIVING” AND “NON-LIVING”, BUT WHICH HAVE NO ASPECT IN REALITY THAT SUPPORTS SUCH DIVISION.


Books at the top of my recommended reading list are:

THE IMMENSE JOURNEY Loren C. Eiseley (1959)
Paperback: Biblio $3.00; Amazon $9.00

WATCHERS OF THE SKIES Willy Ley (Viking, 1966)
Paperback: Biblio $7.50

MICROCOSMOS Lynn Margulis/Dorion Sagan (1997)
Paperback: Biblio $7.50; Borders $13.95

THE BIOLOGY OF COMPUTER LIFE Geoff Simons (Birkhauser, 1985)
Paperback: Biblio $10.00

IS MAN A ROBOT? Geoff Simons (Wiley & Sons, 1986)
Hard Cover: Biblio $42.00
(no paperback ed. – try state university library system)

THE BLIND WATCHMAKER Richard Dawkins (1996)
Paperback: Biblio $4.50; Borders $12.71

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD Carl Sagan (Ballantine, 1997)
Paperback: Biblio $7.00; Borders $11.90

Biblio = Bibliofind [www.bibliofind.com]


The lessons of history demonstrate that mysticism is not nearly so benign as mystics would have us believe, that, in fact, the mindlessness of mysticism is a clear and present danger to humanity. Mankind is now locked in a “life or death” struggle of ideology. Science, Manuel, against your hope that it holds the proof of “God the Creator”, is the saber by which truth will prevail.

Regards, Raul

[El_Jibaro]

Dear Puerto Rican führer, I see you have ran out of your own words again and have to rely on "mercenaries" to do the fighting for you. Any 14 year old kid can do that (are you 14 years old ?).

Well, I however have no time for that silly childish manner of debate. My time is too expensive for debating ignorant kids .