A believer writes in

January 22, 2014 • 1:20 pm

Maybe one reason I get so angry at people like Damon Linker and Terry Eagleton—who maintain that New Atheists attack simplistic and unsophisticated versions of religion that nobody really  believes (i.e., seeing God as an anthropomorphic being)—is because I see examples of “literalist” belief virtually every day.  As more readers come to this site, it also gets infested with the religious, and a quotidian task is purging the new (and therefore held-up) comments by believers who have nothing to contribute beyond faith-soaked ranting.  If you think that most people see God as a “ground of being”, you should have a look at this site’s inbox.

Here are  two comments by one “Walt,” for example, that appeared within a few minutes of each other yesterday afternoon.

Walt commented on Bill Nye talks about his upcoming debate with Ken Ham  

But yet you accept the probability of the Big Bang event though it is astronomically improbable mathamatically that it is possible. Also you accept the ” theory” of evolution when science has no proof of even a one called organism being mutated into a completely different organism. I promise you one day God will get you by your tail and you ” ain’t” gonna like it.

Oh man, I hope God doesn’t get me by the tail! And another:

Walt commented on Bill Nye talks about his upcoming debate with Ken Ham  

Don’t you ever wonder why everything in this universe has a mathematical equation tied to it? Do you really believe an explosion of particles could lead to a creation that can be solved mathematically isn’t of a divine nature? Take the time to study the Bible the way you have studied your secular books and you too will know God. There is still time to make amends. Just because you don’t have the brainpower to fathom eternity doesn’t mean you aren’t going to be miserable there.

Needless to say, you won’t see Walt’s posts on the site.  I put them up here not because they’re unusual, but because they’re common. Do you suppose that people like Walt see God as an ineffable essence beyond space and time, or, as Damon Linker said,

On the contrary, according to the classical metaphysical traditions of both the East and West, God is the unconditioned cause of reality — of absolutely everything that is — from the beginning to the end of time. Understood in this way, one can’t even say that God “exists” in the sense that my car or Mount Everest or electrons exist. God is what grounds the existence of every contingent thing, making it possible, sustaining it through time, unifying it, giving it actuality. God is the condition of the possibility of anything existing at all.

Now I don’t know “Walt,” but I suspect he wouldn’t recognize that paragraph as having anything to do with his religion. Hell, I don’t even recognize that paragraph as intelligible prose! The fact is that most believers don’t sing that line of jaw-music, and there’s no reason why we should give someone like Terry Eagleton extra credibility for truly homing in on the nature of God.  How does he know?

One day I’d love to see a fairly eloquent semi-literalist debate a Ground-of-Being-ist, e.g. Ray Comfort or Al Mohler vs. Terry Eagleton. Let the believers fight it out and thereby settle for once and for all the nature of God!

117 thoughts on “A believer writes in”

  2. Just because you don’t have the brainpower to fathom eternity doesn’t mean you aren’t going to be miserable there.

    I think most atheists have the brainpower needed to imagine eternity, we just don’t want to spend that hypothetical afterlife with such a petty being.

    1. I love the brainpower part. As if “the magic fairy man in the sky” requires REAL brainpower.

    2. I think maybe he meant “horns.” A lot of these fundies really, truly, honestly believe that Jews have horns. When my mom went to college (in the 60’s), her roommate (from the south) asked if she could see her horns.

  5. Jerry, with the advances in modern surgery you can get your tail removed and God won’t be able to grab you. Problem solved!

    Actually, if there is a God, I think he’d say to you, and to most atheists, “Thank you for pushing your brain to the limits instead of being a mindless follower. Those guys really piss me off.”

    1. Raymond Smullyan had a scenario in a book I read years ago that is a fun take on Pascal’s wager: there really is an all-powerful god who created the world and all that. But this god is also a logical positivist, thus he is pleased with all the humans who correctly conclude based on the available evidence that there are not any supernatural entities mucking around with the world, and he condemns to hell all those credulous religious folk who believe in him despite the evidence being overwhelmingly against it.

      1. Yeah. Why would the creator of human beings, to whom critical reasoning is so important to survival, turn around and reward credulity?

    2. “Thank you for pushing your brain to the limits ”

      You’re setting the bar kinda low.

    1. Yes, we can go with less Walts and their coccyges. I just wanted to use the plural of coccyx. 😀 You don’t get the opportunity every day.

    1. I suspect that Walt, being a fundamentalist, and hence sexually repressed, was using “tail” as a euphemism for balls, gonads, testicles, nuts, rocks, cojones…

      Fundamentalist “ethics” are based around inflicting pain. Which is why so many of them are such miserable people. Furthermore, it makes their “arguments” reduce, in many cases, to the argumentum ad baculum fallacy.

  9. What I can .still. never figure out ? IF ‘ the great beyond ’ is so awesomely spectacular ‘nd fore’er ‘nd e’er and ever to literalists, actually to any believers, then why do they not do everythin’ in their power to hasten themselves … … to git ‘the ‘eLL ‘ ( figuratively, o’course ) o’er ” there ” ? !

    Why idn’t — as with Jonestown and as with the heaven’s gate folks and other such gangs of literalists — why isn’t there just a freakin such ‘ mass exit ’ OUT from This Ol’ Carnal World — in order to get themselves … … ” there ” ? ! All of the Time. Over all of the World.

    Yet. There isn’t.

    My thinking is, of course: NO one could possibly .truly. be literal about anything “religious.” No. Not anymore.

    What is really going on with such folks ? ! What is really going on with such folks is: power and control over. Dominion Over.

    Blue

    1. The flip side of this is also telling. If eternal suffering awaits those who reject Jesus then why don’t Christians kill their children before they can be held accountable for decision making (age of accountability doctrine)? It would be a sin to kill one’s child but they can be forgiven just like serial killers can be forgiven in prison. In fact this should be enough for them to become full on abortionists. Why is it wrong to send a child to a perfect place while the child also avoids the predations of this life including the chance that they might rebel and end up in hell?

      1. Ooooo, what an excellent citation you give: As .evidence. of whackadoodleism for brain waves of such folk, for sure !

        But: what a .wholly. disgusting statement … … thereat !

        Blue

        1. Agreed. They can’t even be consistent with the own beliefs (Luke 14.33 is the go to verse here), and yet they want to impose it on everyone else.

      2. Andrea Yates, the woman who drowned her five kids in a bath tub used this exact reasoning. She was “saving her kids from hell.”

        I have analyzed this line of logic many times before and even with “sophisticated theology” I can’t really come up with a compelling argument against her actions, if you truly believe that kids before the “age of reason” have no chance of damnation if they die.

        Analyzed mathematically, no matter how strident one is in raising their kids in a religious manner, there’s always some risk they will fall away. Increasing a 0% chance of infinite suffering to any chance at all should be seen as infinitely immoral.

        Taken further, one could argue that by killing their kids they are then being infinitely immoral by eternally damning themselves. And, if one truly has a selfless love for the children, isn’t it the ultimate act of selflessness to suffer eternally to allow one’s children to enter into eternal paradise? At that point, wouldn’t God’s hands be tied? After all, this parent just gave up eternal life, a far greater sacrifice than what Jesus did by giving up this horrible earthly life for 3 days. This should be deserving of the highest reward.

        Now, I’m sure people could go back and forth all day about whether or not this parent would logically be tortured or rewarded under this system. But, I don’t see any argument that can wiggle away from the fact that the children would be saved; even William Lane Craig has used this as justification for Biblical genocide. If one does argue that the children wouldn’t be saved in this situation, what kind of loving God would damn the children for being heinously murdered but leave the only alternative as still having to hope they aren’t damned later anyway?

  10. Maybe you should make an offer to the Ground of All Being people to make a guest post here, and then let them experience the flood of anthropomorphic Abrahamic God lovers comments first hand. Really, I think most of these people don’t go to church, or haven’t talked with a lot of normal believers in a long time, and it would be good for their perspective.

    Didn’t some accomodationist writer at the Guardian do that, and find that he was wrong, and that believers were just as big a fans of the Sky Fairy style God as Atheists always make them out to be?

    1. No, he isn’t. They are out there in multitudes. They want to believe the nonsense so bad that they can not see any alternative.

  12. Watching debates between religious types is amusing in theory but gets boring very quickly in practice. Catholic Answers has some details on a debate between a Catholic and protestant about what “really” happens during communion.

    http://www.catholic.com/blog/tim-staples/is-the-eucharist-truly-jesus-body-and-blood

    It looks like an audio version of the debate is available for only $9.95!

    http://shop.catholic.com/catholic-digital-media/mp3-this-is-my-body-did-jesus-mean-what-he-said.html

    Catholic Answers has page after page of this stuff. Someone should send the sophisticated theologians a link.

    1. Just remember, unfalsifiable = literal, falsifiable = metaphor.

      As for transubstantiation, the argument is, Jesus said, “This is my body,” what else could he have possibly meant even a child can understand this! For the rest of the Bible, don’t try to interpret it yourself, only the church can explain it and it takes a lifetime of study to understand the finely tuned metaphors throughout these books. See, I can do sophisticated theology too!

      1. Fortunately followers of Anaxagoras weren’t around to say, pointing back, “this is the bread from yesterday”.

        (Would be an neat interpolation in the myth though. :))

  13. What would Jesus say about this god as “ineffable essence”?
    How nice it would be to resurrect his corpse and ask him (sigh) …
    Oh no, sorry, that already happened a long time ago.

    So: “Mr Jesus, what do you think of this god as ‘ineffable essence'”?
    “Well, frankly, haven’t heard crap like that in two thousand years!”

  14. Hi, you wrote: “…I suspect he wouldn’t recognize that paragraph as having anything to do with his religion….”
    Methinks he would.
    I’m not sure why, though.
    Maybe it would be just a lie or it would be a case of cognitive dissonance. Could be even both, alternating.
    I haven’t figured out by now. But if you assume you could get Walt to think things through, bad luck for you.

  15. Don’t you ever wonder why everything in this universe has a mathematical equation tied to it?

    And don’t you ever wonder why everything has a name? I’m looking at these things in front of me, it’s not just like “Whoa, things!” – it’s like “that thing is a table, and that thing is a chair, and that thing is a letter opener shaped like an owl!” God is amazing!

    1. What amused me about that sentence was that he slams scientific facts and then uses math as a way to prove his revelations! Sorry dude, you can’t reject science then use science to disprove science.

      1. Yes, but math is deductive and science is inductive. And we all know about the problem of induction. Theists seem to be in love with deductive reasoning because, they believe, it provides certainty. That’s really what they want and need in life: certainty. It’s kind of sad, really.

        1. “math is deductive and science is inductive”

          This dichotomy is not right. Science employs both both of these.

          1. Okay, but would you be willing to say that science is mostly inductive?
            If science was math we might use it like this:
            Take the sum of consecutive odd integers,
            1+3=4=2^2
            1+3+5=9=3^2
            1+3+5+7=4^2
            A scientist would notice a pattern, and after several months of observation, and seeing the pattern hold and continue time and time again, he might reasonably conclude that he has discovered something about nature. He could be wrong, but as the evidence accumulates year after year, his confidence will grow.
            A mathematician, however, would be unimpressed. A mathematician would need a deductive proof that the pattern will hold true forever and ever. (By the way, I don’t even know if there is a proof for this).
            It seems to me that theists all want to be mathematicians (do mathematicians tend to be more religious?). Even if the pattern holds over a billion times over, they’ll still reject it unless it can be proved to be an eternal truth. That’s why science doesn’t impress many theists. most science is not amenable to deductive proofs, to eternal certainties.

          2. No, I wouldn’t. I don’t think there is a way to say that science is X% induction or deduction. Both play a role. Like this (quick example from Google.)

          3. A mathematician would need a deductive proof that the pattern will hold true forever and ever. (By the way, I don’t even know if there is a proof for this).

            There is, and ironically, the method of proof is (mathematical) induction!

            Since I didn’t easily find a good proof on the internet, here’s mine:

            Prove: The sum of the first n odd integers equals n^2.

            Base step: 1 (the sum of the first one odd integer) = 1 (1 squared). So far, so good.

            Induction step: Suppose 1 + 3 + 5 + 7 + … + (2n – 1) (this represents the first n odd integers) = n^2.

            Then the claim is that 1 + 3 + 5 + 7 + … + (2n – 1) + (2n + 1) = n^2 + 2n + 1. The left-hand side is now the sum of the first (n + 1) odd integers; the right-hand side factors into (n + 1)^2. QED

            A less crabbed proof using a different idea is here.

            A graphic heuristic (I hope this works):

            zzzz
            yyyz
            xxyz
            wxyz

            Note that this is four squared. Now, notice also that it is the sum of first four odd numbers, which you can see by taking first the lower-left x, then the three touching it, then the five just to the outside of the three, then the seven just to the outside of the five (each odd integer is represented by a different letter). Analogously for any integer.

  17. On the contrary, according to the classical metaphysical traditions of both the East and West, God is the unconditioned cause of reality…
    God is the condition of the possibility of anything existing at all.

    The Christian god is an unconditioned condition?

    Oh, how the mighty has fallen.

    2. “I just dropped in to see what condition my condition was in” (the Sophistimicated Theologian™ take on the incarnation).

  18. Have you ever considered saving a representative collection of such messages from you inbox and forwarding them to the next apologist who pulls the ‘haha nobody believes that, god is really an abstract ground of being’ card?

      1. Wait there, bro… one can be rational and still be a sociopath. A defective empathy module doesn’t necessarily damage the reasoning device. At least not completely.

  19. Do you suppose that people like Walt see God as an ineffable essence beyond space and time(?)

    Yes and no. If God as the “ineffable essence beyond space and time” is not supposed to logically exclude God ALSO being a Personal God, then people like Walt will be just fine with it. They will like Linker’s passage and quote it perhaps during a Bible study or sermon or witnessing session. There’s no contradiction because the manifestation of the essential nature takes place on a different level. Sometimes water is hard … and sometimes it is not. Duh. Welcome to Bad Analogy Land, where the faithful beat their intuitions into pretty shapes which resemble everything and nothing.

    But if God as the “ineffable essence beyond space and time” is being put forth as logically inconsistent with the Personal God, then people like Walt will react like a member of the tribe attacked by the enemy. They will deny that this is what they mean. Instead of supporting their beliefs, it has been framed into undermining them.

    As you can see, the problem here is that the Sophisticated Theology-speak is — let’s be charitable — “adaptable.” It’s fluid enough to play every side. Hart was right when he credited Aquinas with speaking a lot of vague waffle about God. He did indeed. But you are right when you point out that Aquinas had a pretty damn concrete idea of a Personal God. So he did.

    Because God is so ‘ineffable’ and mysterious and beyond our comprehension, it gets to be BOTH. It gets to contradict itself … and there is no contradiction. Why not? The power of God. Contradictions melt miraculously and the person who ties themselves in knots calls it humility.

    Although I understand the temptation, I think it’s a bad idea to play right into the theologians’ wet dream and meet so-called sophisticated arguments for God with “okay, but most people don’t believe that.” They don’t — and they do. There’s always incoherence language when speaking about God, along with references to God being “pure actuality” or whatever the phrase du jour is. And the Ground of Being advocates always sneak in anthropomorphisms.

    Degree, not content.

    2. Short version: magic magic is magic.

      There’s nothing stopping theists from asserting any old mess of contradictions. They’re talking about magic! The logic ship has sailed.

      But we should of course continue to make our arguments, in the hope that the ship might come back to pick some of them up.

    1. I kind of suspect that (depending on who the debaters were) they’d be so extremely careful to be considerate of each other’s faith (so as not to present a schism in front of the heathens) that they’d barely say anything of any substance at all (could possibly be why, to my knowledge, such a thing hasn’t happened). It would either be mind-numbingly dull or very entertaining 🙂

      1. I suspect it would be the former. Unless of course there was a suitable moderator to stir things up by providing some suitable quotes from each and then asking them to fight, sorry, elaborate.

  21. Sophisticated theologians are thoughtful enough to know that to preserve their god (for whatever reason they deem it important), they must retreat into pseudo-philosophical depths. The greatest mass of believers, by contrast, are not thoughtful enough to deduce that their simple and traditional beliefs cannot be saved, and are beyond infantile.

  22. “The fact is that most believers don’t sing that line of jaw-music(..)”

    I must say, I love this bit, gotta remember and use it,

  23. So if most Muslims go for this ground-of-being notion instead of an interventionist-type god, then they have no reason to object to drawing pictures of a man who didn’t actually ride off on a magic horse after all, right? We just need to gently point out that all this self-righteous indignation makes no sense given what we know they really believe. No doubt they will snap right out of it and thank us for setting them straight about their own religion.

  24. The WLC versus Terry Eagleton body-slam! Live on Fox! With commentary by Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly for WLC, and Francis Collins and Karl Giberson for Eagleton! Buy your tickets now!!!
    (We should be so lucky)

  25. It’s a reasonable enough argument – for deism, that is.

    But it makes no sense whatsoever when applied to Christianity, given the bible is full of accounts of Yahweh interacting with people in some way or another – not to mention manifesting himself in human form as Jesus. That’s completely at odds with the ‘ground of being’ deity Linker at al espouses.

    But it’s good a reminder of just how facile and oleaginous so-called ‘sophisticated’ theology is. Because you know as soon as they’re away from the keyboard and with their congregation, the nebulous ‘ground of being’ god makes way for the one who answers prayers and performs miracles.

  26. That wouldn’t be a re-animated Walt “Fairy tales can come true, they can happen to you…” Disney, would it?

  27. I have a friend who keeps telling me that no really believes all the things they say they do. She doesn’t believe it, (what she believes is so amorphous and vague I still don’t actually know what it is) so it’s impossible that they should. It’s just a form of narcissism. I am the world and the world is me. If I don’t believe it then no one else does either. It’s very frustrating to deal with. In fact I mostly don’t bother.

      1. Indeed, it is, but I don’t think there is a “solipsistic personality disorder”. I was in psychology mode rather than philosophy mode.

  28. When I was at school I don’t remember ever being presented evolution as a ‘maybe’- so presuming the Walts of the world went to the same schools we did, what happened to them?

  29. To the best of my knowledge, Terry Eagleton isn’t a believer of any sort. He’s just a Defender of the Faith™.

    1. Exactly, Ken. Trying to work out what Eagleton believes is almost impossible. He’s happy to snipe at Dawkins et al. whilst leaving the content of whatever religious belief he has completely obscure.

      He reminds me of the common worship of The Big Thing among contrary intellectuals during the Cold War: admiration for and ambiguous cosying up to Mao’s Revolution, the Warsaw Pact. The ex-editor of the mis-named ‘Marxism Today’, Martin Jacques, is still metaphorically exploring the nether regions of China.

      You don’t even need the definite article in your rather good description of Eagleton. The Defender of Faith.

      Slaínte.

  30. Don’t you ever wonder why everything in this universe has a mathematical equation tied to it?

    And if they didn’t, that too would be evidence of God, because objects would move at his whim.

  31. Does this “ineffable essence” care that I used to beat-off through my early teens, 50 – 60 years ago?

    These guys!

  32. The scare quotes around “theory” were priceless. I guess he doesn’t think evolution is a theory.

    1. For each their own, I started to laugh helplessly when he claimed that the observed cosmology is “astronomically improbable mathamatically [sic]”.

      Because it is precisely astronomic observations that makes anything else but the observed expansion (the process of, or originating from, a “big bang” however you define it) improbably by way of of the mathematics of statistics and big numbers.

      We have observed ~ 10^10 galaxies, which all except some locals have an increased redshift with distance. That is mathematics for you: there is a (1/2)^(10^10) ~ 10^-(10^10) chance for no “big bang”. I doubt we can get closer to improbability by observation if we want to.

      [So maybe _this_ is the best observation of all of science, beating Theobald’s odds of 10^-2000 against a UCA. Oops.

      Also, seems physics beats biology despite my hypothesis on generic complexity vs likelihoods after tests. But it is an odd case of a mass observation (as is Theobald’s).]

      1. I am of course simplifying with assuming independent odds, since the redshift is increasing with distance.

        The real odds are even more towards practical improbability.

      2. Yes, that part was funny too but mostly for me, besides the inaccuracies, the syntax was hilarious. I can’t decide if “astronomically improbable mathematically” means it’s really really improbably or astronomy is improbable through math (which is funny that one disses science then uses science (badly but still). There are so many levels to this one! 😀

  34. Ha, old troll Walt. Still spewing nonsensical, poorly written, ‘arguments’ that has been answered everywhere many times over.

    Some people detest learning but adores trolling. :-/

    God is the unconditioned cause of reality

    No existence claim (observation and/or theory) is unconditioned, because reality.

    That is a generic condition. QED.

  35. Don’t you ever wonder why everything in this universe has a mathematical equation tied to it?

    “Mathematicians, how do they work?”

    1. =D

      Else I would answer Walt that everything has an observable tied to it, hence a quantifiable parameter, hence our invention of mathematics pertain.

      Nothing mysterious but mundane as soon as you have invented science, which is what puts the numbers into it. And there was never a gap to put magic into there (never mind that all the historical gaps has gone now).

  36. @ Walt

    Just because you don’t have the brainpower to fathom eternity doesn’t mean you aren’t going to be miserable there.

    This is almost poetic in a miserabilist, Morrisseyesque kind of a way. (And believe me, I hate Morrissey).

    There are about four people on the planet who can fathom eternity, one of whom is Lawrence Krauss. Contra Walt, I’m quite happy being miserable in the life I have.

    Misanthropes of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your complaints.

    Slaínte.

      1. Just because you don’t have the brainpower to fathom eternity

        doesn’t mean you aren’t going to be miserable there

        la la-la, lat dat da-a-a-a, da la la-la

  37. “Needless to say, you won’t see Walt’s posts on the site.”

    But we just did see his post on the website. Is it the sheer volume of such comments that necessitates editorial edicts? These comments don’t seem overly malicious (although they do betray the Walt’s animosity.) Just wondering.

    As a nonbeliever who has had comments posted on Catholic websites, I can see how any website can become an echo chamber of sorts without opposing views posted once in a while.

    1. I’m sorry, but I don’t allow anyone to tell me how to moderate. I will allow believers to post if it will further the discussion started by a post. By no stretch of the imagination do “Walt’s” comments do that.

      I’m sorry, but I’m not going to allow religious craziness to infest this site, and I won’t allow readers to tell me who should and should not be approved. If you think this site is an echo chamber, you are free to read other sites.

      1. Fair enough, no need to apologize. I read every one of your posts, agree with mos of them, and I’m certainly not rendering any opinion on your moderation…I’m sincerely curious about how many Walts are out there.

        I’m heartened that the site is not infested with religious craziness and did not characterize this site as an echo chamber.

  38. @ Walt

    Take the time to study the Bible the way you have studied your secular books and you too will know God.

    This is so depressing: I have studied the Bible the way I study secular books. And I do know God.

    There are 2 OT Gods: El is from Israel in the north, written before BCE 722 probably. Yahweh is from Judah in the south from the early 8th century BCE: there is no early concept of a covenant of YHWH with his people. After BCE 722 when Israel fell to the Assyrian Empire, the Law (in the El source) was brought south to Judah. Two centuries later, the Deuteronomist historian(s) interpreted Jewish history as rising and falling in concert with the people’s doing as God decreed (now, not two Gods, but one). The priests in the Temple succeeded in ritualizing that belief.

    It’s easy to know the Iron Age Jewish God: mythology, superstition, synthesis, propaganda, power and fear.

    FFS, these weird religionists don’t give a flying one for knowledge: they really just want to threaten people. They disgust me. More power to your elbow, Jerry.

    Slaínte.

    1. Excellent points. It might help people like Walt if they actually new anything about the bible. (Well, on second thought, maybe not…) It was facts such as the ones you mention above, and many more, that I learned in religion courses at the Lutheran college I went to as an undergraduate that helped convince me I was an atheist! Well, that and the science I started learning there, which convinced me there was no need for a sky fairy.

      2. I can recall being allowed to take a look at some of the biblical commentary that our Baptist minister had in his study. IIRC it was a large, multi-volume set called ‘The Anchor Bible’. As a 13-year-old nerd, I was delighted by all that detailed scholarship, & gave a little talk at the Wednesday night prayer meeting, about, I think, the multiple authors of the book of Isaiah. This was badly received, & I think the reverend himself took some heat, not only for letting me look at this questionable material, but for having it in his possession in the first place.

        1. No wonder you got into trouble, Hopalong.

          The first attestation of monotheism appears in Isaiah, dated as late as the 530s BCE. The second problem with the book is that Isaiah lived in the late 8th century BCE. What happened is that someone two centuries later added a second Isaiah to ride on the back of the authority of the first Isaiah.

          In other words, the original testimony of Jewish monotheism appears in a forgery.

          Why this nugget is not more widely known I do not know: it’s what got us into all this grief in the first place.

          Slaínte.

  39. Don’t you ever wonder why everything in this universe has a mathematical equation tied to it?

    No. Just as I don’t wonder that human language can produce a description for everything (we know about) in this universe. This is a testament to the flexibility of human-invented descriptive systems, not some metaphysical deepity.

    There is clear proof of this, too. Math (like language), doesn’t always fit well. If it always fit perfectly, that would indeed be remarkable. But it doesn’t. We observe phenomena which are hard to describe in either system. In some cases we have to change our descriptive systems to get a more accurate description (i.e., invention of calculus). These are not the characteristics of a perfect fit; there are exactly what you would expect if we had an invented system that worked reasonably well most of the time.

  41. Such bile-soaked language from these believers – they should go away & contemplate taking the dirty great planks out of their eyes…

  42. I was hoping some of the more nutty comments would get posted after mentioning all the religious comments submitted that don’t go with the “ground of being” thing.

    I like how in each of those Walt has nothing to add so just ends with an imaginary threat to feel good.

  43. This is one of the reasons why I usually use a pseudonym – it’s painful to see someone with my name think like that (not to mention the congressman Walter Jones who came up with Freedom Fries).

Comments are closed.