I came across an article which suggests that morality and altruism might actually be hard-wired in our genes

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Topic:	Religions > Atheism
User:	"V"
Date:	07 Sep 2007 09:11:33 AM
Object:	I came across an article which suggests that morality and altruism might actually be hard-wired in our genes

AT writes:
I came across an article which suggests that morality and altruism
might actually be hard-wired in our genes.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/27/AR2007052701056.html
" ...neuroscientists at the National Institutes of Health, had been
scanning the brains of volunteers as they were asked to think about a
scenario involving either donating a sum of money to charity or
keeping it for themselves.
The results were showing that when the volunteers placed the interests
of others before their own, the generosity activated a primitive part
of the brain that usually lights up in response to food or sex.
Altruism, the experiment suggested, was not a superior moral faculty
that suppresses basic selfish urges but rather was basic to the brain,
hard-wired and pleasurable...
Grafman and others are using brain imaging and psychological
experiments to study whether the brain has a built-in moral compass.
The results -- many of them published just in recent months -- are
showing, unexpectedly, that many aspects of morality appear to be hard-
wired in the brain, most likely the result of evolutionary processes
that began in other species...
What the new research is showing is that morality has biological roots
-- such as the reward center in the brain that lit up in Grafman's
experiment -- that have been around for a very long time...
Joshua D. Greene, a Harvard neuroscientist and philosopher, said
multiple experiments suggest that morality arises from basic brain
activities. Morality, he said, is not a brain function elevated above
our baser impulses. Greene said it is not "handed down" by
philosophers and clergy, but "handed up," an outgrowth of the brain's
basic propensities... [emphasis not mine]
Marc Hauser, another Harvard researcher, has used cleverly designed
psychological experiments to study morality. He said his research has
found that people all over the world process moral questions in the
same way, suggesting that moral thinking is intrinsic to the human
brain, rather than a product of culture. It may be useful to think
about morality much like language, in that its basic features are hard-
wired, Hauser said. Different cultures and religions build on that
framework in much the way children in different cultures learn
different languages using the same neural machinery..."
AT writes - In other words, religion doesn't create morality. If
anything, it is the other way round. Religion can only exploit and
modify to a degree what is already there.
*********** REPLY SEPARATOR ***********
V writes:
Humans need moral guidance or a moral conscience since they have a
'free will' of sorts.
Actually it is like this.
We are free to do what we want -- but are not free to want what we
want.
All our actions have consequences, and many of our actions produce
consequences that end up destroying peace. (both ours and other's
peace).
This is what separates us from the animals that run solely on
instinct.
Humans run by instinct as well as moral guidance.
Whether this moral conscience in divinely inspired or from Nature I
don't know - that is why I am an agnostic.
But If I had to guess I would lean towards the atheistic view of
Nature based, since I have not found any evidence of a God such as the
monotheists claim.
.....my discussion of this topic from an earlier post.
http://jesusneverexisted.org/jne/forum/index.php?topic=504.0
Take care,
V (Male)
Agnostic Freethinker
Practical Philosopher
AA#2
.

User: "Chuck Stamford"
Title: Re: I came across an article which suggests that morality and altruism might actually be hard-wired in our genes	07 Sep 2007 11:14:24 AM

"V" <vfr44@aol.com> wrote in message
news:1189174293.026581.172830@r29g2000hsg.googlegroups.com...

AT writes:

I came across an article which suggests that morality and altruism
might actually be hard-wired in our genes.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/27/AR2007052701056.html

" ...neuroscientists at the National Institutes of Health, had been
scanning the brains of volunteers as they were asked to think about a
scenario involving either donating a sum of money to charity or
keeping it for themselves.

The results were showing that when the volunteers placed the interests
of others before their own, the generosity activated a primitive part
of the brain that usually lights up in response to food or sex.
Altruism, the experiment suggested, was not a superior moral faculty
that suppresses basic selfish urges but rather was basic to the brain,
hard-wired and pleasurable...

Grafman and others are using brain imaging and psychological
experiments to study whether the brain has a built-in moral compass.
The results -- many of them published just in recent months -- are
showing, unexpectedly, that many aspects of morality appear to be hard-
wired in the brain, most likely the result of evolutionary processes
that began in other species...

What the new research is showing is that morality has biological roots
-- such as the reward center in the brain that lit up in Grafman's
experiment -- that have been around for a very long time...

Joshua D. Greene, a Harvard neuroscientist and philosopher, said
multiple experiments suggest that morality arises from basic brain
activities. Morality, he said, is not a brain function elevated above
our baser impulses. Greene said it is not "handed down" by
philosophers and clergy, but "handed up," an outgrowth of the brain's
basic propensities... [emphasis not mine]

Marc Hauser, another Harvard researcher, has used cleverly designed
psychological experiments to study morality. He said his research has
found that people all over the world process moral questions in the
same way, suggesting that moral thinking is intrinsic to the human
brain, rather than a product of culture. It may be useful to think
about morality much like language, in that its basic features are hard-
wired, Hauser said. Different cultures and religions build on that
framework in much the way children in different cultures learn
different languages using the same neural machinery..."

AT writes - In other words, religion doesn't create morality. If
anything, it is the other way round. Religion can only exploit and
modify to a degree what is already there.

*********** REPLY SEPARATOR ***********

V writes:

Humans need moral guidance or a moral conscience since they have a
'free will' of sorts.

Actually it is like this.

We are free to do what we want -- but are not free to want what we
want.

All our actions have consequences, and many of our actions produce
consequences that end up destroying peace. (both ours and other's
peace).

This is what separates us from the animals that run solely on
instinct.

Humans run by instinct as well as moral guidance.

Whether this moral conscience in divinely inspired or from Nature I
don't know - that is why I am an agnostic.

But If I had to guess I would lean towards the atheistic view of
Nature based, since I have not found any evidence of a God such as the
monotheists claim.

....my discussion of this topic from an earlier post.

http://jesusneverexisted.org/jne/forum/index.php?topic=504.0

Take care,

It's interesting this article, and your reaction to it. You say you're an
agnostic, and I certainly don't doubt that you are, but this article wanders
into an area where it is difficult to find any objective justification for
either atheism or agnosticism, or any "theological" belief that denies the
existence of a personal Creator of the universe. For example:
1.) Given that there is no known universal "cause - effect" relationship
between belief and behavior, it seems impossible to construct even one of
those "just so" stories that can take this "hard-wired altruism" into
consideration and still explain a possible evolutionary pathway a
"hard-wired" tendency toward altruistic behavior in human beings. Of all
the animals competing for survival in the world, human beings are remarkably
unfit physically, relatively speaking. Just taking into account our
physiques and physical abilities relative to virtually every predator in the
world, there seems to be no place on earth where the human species could
survive today, or a million years ago.
Thus the mental evolution of human beings becomes critical to explaining our
survival as a species. So unless one can integrate into this hypothesized
evolutionary pathway how it is that a tendency to believe altruism is
"good", and have that tendency be strong enough and pervasive enough within
the entire species to be acted upon much more often than it is not (again,
there being no known hard and fast "cause/effect" relationship between
belief and action), and demonstrate how such a tendency toward altruism fits
into the already well-established "framework" of Neo-Darwinian theory, this
tendency, whether "hard-wired" or not, presents the atheist and agnostic
with a real quandry.
2.) And even before one gets to trying to sort through #1 above, because a
significant part of any attempt to do that hinges on the relationship
between "belief" and "behavior", one needs to sort through that first, and
that's not as easy as one might first think. The problem here seems almost
insurmountable. The question that needs to be answered here is, do beliefs
"cause" (in the strict sense of "cause" here) behavior in a consistent
enough fashion so that we can say that observable behavior is adequate
evidence for belief held, and I don't see any way to make such an
assessment. In fact, even if we could determine that belief is or isn't
such a cause of behavior in the less cognitive creatures than us (there is
not much doubt there isn't this solid, consistent cause and effect
relationship between belief and behavior in us!), we're still not there. We
still wouldn't know whether or not behavior, so caused, was caused by TRUE
beliefs about the world external to the creature.
For example, the baby monkey sees mom go stiff with fear at the first whiff
of lion scent, grab him/her, and sprint up the nearest tree. The baby
monkey takes the belief that the scent of the lion is dangerous with him/her
into adult life, and by acting upon it consistently, lives to reproduce
(let's say). But has the monkey come to believe what is true? Is it true
that the scent of a lion is the danger? No; it's the LION that's the danger
to the monkey, not its scent, or its roar, or anything else about the lion
any living monkey has ever experienced. The monkey is responding with fear
behavior to a sensory perception of a property the lion posseses (its scent)
that cannot possibly harm it, but yet helps keep it alive to reproduce. So
here is an example from nature where we can see that natural selection AIDS
in producing a tendency in animals to form and hold onto false beliefs about
the world external to themselves. At the very least we can begin to see
that Nature, taken as the "blind" operation of natural laws, has no inherent
tendency to produce animals who tend to form mostly true beliefs, even if we
can discover some causitive link between the CONTENT of any belief and
behavior in the animal who holds that belief.
And yet here we are, and one of our more cherished and fundamental beliefs
about ourselves is that we tend to form mostly true beliefs in our "normal"
(in the sense of well suited from a design perspective, as opposed to some
"median" type view of "normal") epistemic environment. Who can we point to
who doesn't believe that most of their beliefs are true? And given all the
above (which I've just brushed up against here, this being even too cursory
to be called a summary!), how could we possilbly arrived at where we are
today as a species? It doesn't look like it's even POSSIBLE that this could
have occurred by means of blind natural processes, let alone any
evolutionary theory discovered so far.
I'm sure you're familiar with the term "boot-strapping", which refers to
overcoming an obstacle by means of something you need to overcome the
obstacle to get! The only way anyone knows to get around a problem of this
sort is by indirect steps. What is important to see here is that currently
there are no indirect steps hypothesized for "boot-strapping" our way from
the kind of cognition most mammals display to the kind of cognition all
humans display. There are no indirect steps to explain how we humans
arrived at a speciated belief that our beliefs are mostly true, when in fact
the beliefs of most mammals are mostly false. Those mammals all have
physical abilities that help them survive in spite of the fact their beliefs
are mostly false, while human beings do not; while we have always depended
almost entirely on our beliefs being true for our survival. There is an
"obstacle" between these two facts that any "theory" of how we got over it
has to explain. When one really LOOKS at naturalistic explanations for how
we got over this hump in the biosphere, they seem remarkable impotent to
deal with the actual problem.
Chuck Stamford

V (Male)

Agnostic Freethinker
Practical Philosopher
AA#2

User: "Sanitys Little Helper"
Title: poot the typical Christer's bait-and-switch deception	07 Sep 2007 12:43:59 PM

"Chuck Stamford" <shell__stamford@cox.net> wrote in
news:lOeEi.156938$zz2.71336@newsfe12.phx to alt.atheism:

"V" <vfr44@aol.com> wrote in message
news:1189174293.026581.172830@r29g2000hsg.googlegroups.com...

AT writes:

I came across an article which suggests that morality and altruism
might actually be hard-wired in our genes.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/27/AR2007
052701056.html

" ...neuroscientists at the National Institutes of Health, had been
scanning the brains of volunteers as they were asked to think about a
scenario involving either donating a sum of money to charity or
keeping it for themselves.

The results were showing that when the volunteers placed the
interests of others before their own, the generosity activated a
primitive part of the brain that usually lights up in response to
food or sex. Altruism, the experiment suggested, was not a superior
moral faculty that suppresses basic selfish urges but rather was
basic to the brain, hard-wired and pleasurable...

Grafman and others are using brain imaging and psychological
experiments to study whether the brain has a built-in moral compass.
The results -- many of them published just in recent months -- are
showing, unexpectedly, that many aspects of morality appear to be
hard- wired in the brain, most likely the result of evolutionary
processes that began in other species...

What the new research is showing is that morality has biological
roots -- such as the reward center in the brain that lit up in
Grafman's experiment -- that have been around for a very long time...

Joshua D. Greene, a Harvard neuroscientist and philosopher, said
multiple experiments suggest that morality arises from basic brain
activities. Morality, he said, is not a brain function elevated above
our baser impulses. Greene said it is not "handed down" by
philosophers and clergy, but "handed up," an outgrowth of the brain's
basic propensities... [emphasis not mine]

Marc Hauser, another Harvard researcher, has used cleverly designed
psychological experiments to study morality. He said his research has
found that people all over the world process moral questions in the
same way, suggesting that moral thinking is intrinsic to the human
brain, rather than a product of culture. It may be useful to think
about morality much like language, in that its basic features are
hard- wired, Hauser said. Different cultures and religions build on
that framework in much the way children in different cultures learn
different languages using the same neural machinery..."

AT writes - In other words, religion doesn't create morality. If
anything, it is the other way round. Religion can only exploit and
modify to a degree what is already there.

*********** REPLY SEPARATOR ***********

V writes:

Humans need moral guidance or a moral conscience since they have a
'free will' of sorts.

Actually it is like this.

We are free to do what we want -- but are not free to want what we
want.

All our actions have consequences, and many of our actions produce
consequences that end up destroying peace. (both ours and other's
peace).

This is what separates us from the animals that run solely on
instinct.

Humans run by instinct as well as moral guidance.

Whether this moral conscience in divinely inspired or from Nature I
don't know - that is why I am an agnostic.

But If I had to guess I would lean towards the atheistic view of
Nature based, since I have not found any evidence of a God such as
the monotheists claim.

....my discussion of this topic from an earlier post.

http://jesusneverexisted.org/jne/forum/index.php?topic=504.0

Take care,

V is an alcoholic and a psychopath. If, and I don't doubt that they are,
altruism and empathy are biologically hardwired into human nature, they
are not, and probably never were, hardwired into V. If they were, they
have been damaged beyond repair.

1.) Given that there is no known universal "cause - effect"
relationship between belief and behavior, it seems impossible to
construct even one of those "just so" stories that can take this
"hard-wired altruism" into consideration and still explain a possible
evolutionary pathway a "hard-wired" tendency toward altruistic
behavior in human beings.

Only if you're predisposed not to. If you have not predispositions but a
desire to reveal the objective truth without regard to mythology,
superstition or the supernatural, it is extremely easy.

Of all the animals competing for survival
in the world, human beings are remarkably unfit physically, relatively
speaking. Just taking into account our physiques and physical
abilities relative to virtually every predator in the world, there
seems to be no place on earth where the human species could survive
today, or a million years ago.

Thus the mental evolution of human beings becomes critical to
explaining our survival as a species. So unless one can integrate
into this hypothesized evolutionary pathway how it is that a tendency
to believe altruism is "good", and have that tendency be strong enough
and pervasive enough within the entire species to be acted upon much
more often than it is not (again, there being no known hard and fast
"cause/effect" relationship between belief and action), and
demonstrate how such a tendency toward altruism fits into the already
well-established "framework" of Neo-Darwinian theory, this tendency,
whether "hard-wired" or not, presents the atheist and agnostic with a
real quandry.

No, it doesn't, we just ignore the theists red herrings and non-
sequiturs.

2.) And even before one gets to trying to sort through #1 above,
because a significant part of any attempt to do that hinges on the
relationship between "belief" and "behavior", one needs to sort
through that first, and that's not as easy as one might first think.
The problem here seems almost insurmountable. The question that needs
to be answered here is, do beliefs "cause" (in the strict sense of
"cause" here) behavior in a consistent enough fashion so that we can
say that observable behavior is adequate evidence for belief held, and
I don't see any way to make such an assessment. In fact, even if we
could determine that belief is or isn't such a cause of behavior in
the less cognitive creatures than us (there is not much doubt there
isn't this solid, consistent cause and effect relationship between
belief and behavior in us!), we're still not there. We still wouldn't
know whether or not behavior, so caused, was caused by TRUE beliefs
about the world external to the creature.

If you actually studied the subject instead of making ***** up about it
you would see your presuppositions disappear before your eyes.

For example, the baby monkey sees mom go stiff with fear at the first
whiff of lion scent, grab him/her, and sprint up the nearest tree.
The baby monkey takes the belief that the scent of the lion is
dangerous with him/her into adult life, and by acting upon it
consistently, lives to reproduce (let's say).

So you can only support your argument by brazenly constructing strawmen.

But has the monkey come
to believe what is true? Is it true that the scent of a lion is the
danger? No; it's the LION that's the danger to the monkey, not its
scent, or its roar, or anything else about the lion any living monkey
has ever experienced. The monkey is responding with fear behavior to
a sensory perception of a property the lion posseses (its scent) that
cannot possibly harm it, but yet helps keep it alive to reproduce. So
here is an example from nature where we can see that natural selection
AIDS in producing a tendency in animals to form and hold onto false
beliefs about the world external to themselves. At the very least we
can begin to see that Nature, taken as the "blind" operation of
natural laws, has no inherent tendency to produce animals who tend to
form mostly true beliefs, even if we can discover some causitive link
between the CONTENT of any belief and behavior in the animal who holds
that belief.

You're full of *****, Chuck. You just wildly suppose things, and then
demonstrate how they support your point of view.

And yet here we are, and one of our more cherished and fundamental
beliefs about ourselves is that we tend to form mostly true beliefs in
our "normal" (in the sense of well suited from a design perspective,
as opposed to some "median" type view of "normal") epistemic
environment.

You just love making ***** up, don't you?

Who can we point to who doesn't believe that most of
their beliefs are true?

Me, for a start. Beliefs are there to be struck down, tested against
evidence and replaced with knowledge and comprehension. It's what honest
people do.

And given all the above

I just took it away, sorry.

(which I've just
brushed up against here, this being even too cursory to be called a
summary!), how could we possilbly arrived at where we are today as a
species? It doesn't look like it's even POSSIBLE that this could have
occurred by means of blind natural processes, let alone any
evolutionary theory discovered so far.

Only if you're determined to believe otherwise, and have little if any
grasp of honest thinking.
Next, Chuck will set fire to his straw men:

I'm sure you're familiar with the term "boot-strapping", which refers
to overcoming an obstacle by means of something you need to overcome
the obstacle to get! The only way anyone knows to get around a
problem of this sort is by indirect steps. What is important to see
here is that currently there are no indirect steps hypothesized for
"boot-strapping" our way from the kind of cognition most mammals
display to the kind of cognition all humans display. There are no
indirect steps to explain how we humans arrived at a speciated belief
that our beliefs are mostly true, when in fact the beliefs of most
mammals are mostly false. Those mammals all have physical abilities
that help them survive in spite of the fact their beliefs are mostly
false, while human beings do not; while we have always depended almost
entirely on our beliefs being true for our survival. There is an
"obstacle" between these two facts that any "theory" of how we got
over it has to explain. When one really LOOKS at naturalistic
explanations for how we got over this hump in the biosphere, they seem
remarkable impotent to deal with the actual problem.

Chuck Stamford

Why is it that the only detailed arguments you christers ever put forward
to support your pathological anathema to science nature and the
identified processes that drive it, is to tell a pack of lies?
Lies about science.
Lies about logic.
Lies about how much you know and understand about the above two things.
Lies about what other people think.
I suppose it's because you are too stupid or too lazy to do anything
else.
--
David Silverman C.B.E.
aa #2208
Not authentic without this signature.
Not necessarily authentic with it, either.
.

User: "Chuck Stamford"
Title: Re: poot the typical Christer's bait-and-switch deception	07 Sep 2007 07:29:29 PM

"Sanity's Little Helper" <elvish@noshpam.org> wrote in message
news:Xns99A4BE901B544mxyzptlk@194.177.96.26...

"Chuck Stamford" <shell__stamford@cox.net> wrote in
news:lOeEi.156938$zz2.71336@newsfe12.phx to alt.atheism:

"V" <vfr44@aol.com> wrote in message
news:1189174293.026581.172830@r29g2000hsg.googlegroups.com...

AT writes:

I came across an article which suggests that morality and altruism
might actually be hard-wired in our genes.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/27/AR2007
052701056.html

" ...neuroscientists at the National Institutes of Health, had been
scanning the brains of volunteers as they were asked to think about a
scenario involving either donating a sum of money to charity or
keeping it for themselves.

The results were showing that when the volunteers placed the
interests of others before their own, the generosity activated a
primitive part of the brain that usually lights up in response to
food or sex. Altruism, the experiment suggested, was not a superior
moral faculty that suppresses basic selfish urges but rather was
basic to the brain, hard-wired and pleasurable...

Grafman and others are using brain imaging and psychological
experiments to study whether the brain has a built-in moral compass.
The results -- many of them published just in recent months -- are
showing, unexpectedly, that many aspects of morality appear to be
hard- wired in the brain, most likely the result of evolutionary
processes that began in other species...

What the new research is showing is that morality has biological
roots -- such as the reward center in the brain that lit up in
Grafman's experiment -- that have been around for a very long time...

Joshua D. Greene, a Harvard neuroscientist and philosopher, said
multiple experiments suggest that morality arises from basic brain
activities. Morality, he said, is not a brain function elevated above
our baser impulses. Greene said it is not "handed down" by
philosophers and clergy, but "handed up," an outgrowth of the brain's
basic propensities... [emphasis not mine]

Marc Hauser, another Harvard researcher, has used cleverly designed
psychological experiments to study morality. He said his research has
found that people all over the world process moral questions in the
same way, suggesting that moral thinking is intrinsic to the human
brain, rather than a product of culture. It may be useful to think
about morality much like language, in that its basic features are
hard- wired, Hauser said. Different cultures and religions build on
that framework in much the way children in different cultures learn
different languages using the same neural machinery..."

AT writes - In other words, religion doesn't create morality. If
anything, it is the other way round. Religion can only exploit and
modify to a degree what is already there.

*********** REPLY SEPARATOR ***********

V writes:

Humans need moral guidance or a moral conscience since they have a
'free will' of sorts.

Actually it is like this.

We are free to do what we want -- but are not free to want what we
want.

All our actions have consequences, and many of our actions produce
consequences that end up destroying peace. (both ours and other's
peace).

This is what separates us from the animals that run solely on
instinct.

Humans run by instinct as well as moral guidance.

Whether this moral conscience in divinely inspired or from Nature I
don't know - that is why I am an agnostic.

But If I had to guess I would lean towards the atheistic view of
Nature based, since I have not found any evidence of a God such as
the monotheists claim.

....my discussion of this topic from an earlier post.

http://jesusneverexisted.org/jne/forum/index.php?topic=504.0

Take care,

I'm really not very interested in run-of-the-mill Usenet slander, thank you.

Only if you're predisposed not to. If you have not predispositions but a
desire to reveal the objective truth without regard to mythology,
superstition or the supernatural, it is extremely easy.

Actually, it's the other way around. If your predisposed to a world view
that denies any possibility of a transcendent reality interacting with this
one, then it becomes singularly important for the maintenance of that
philosophy that there be a simplistic connection between behavior and
belief, and so, coincidently enough, those with this predisposition about
the external world have this simplistic view of that relationship.
If, however, one actually looks at what behaviorists have to say, it becomes
rather quickly apparent that the relationship between belief and behavior is
both complex and or the most part, not well understood. What is clear,
however, is that examples abound in which there is no direct cause/effect
relationship between the two, and this presents a monumental problem for any
evolutionary explanation for human cognition being what it is, including our
virutally universal belief that our cognitive faculties deliver to us mostly
true beliefs.

No, it doesn't, we just ignore the theists red herrings and non-
sequiturs.

I'm sure as an atheist or agnostic you've become practiced in ignoring a
great deal. It's a requirement, I would think.

If you actually studied the subject instead of making ***** up about it
you would see your presuppositions disappear before your eyes.

If you knew anything at all about what I'm saying, you'd know it comes from
having studied the problem.

So you can only support your argument by brazenly constructing strawmen.

You're full of *****, Chuck. You just wildly suppose things, and then
demonstrate how they support your point of view.

Wildly supposing things? Is it your contention that in supposing that baby
monkeys learn their fear of lions from watching their mother's reaction I'm
"wildly supposing" anything? Or how about the suppposition that a baby
monkey "learns" in this instance by making some mental link between the new
scent it smells and its mother's abnormal reaction? Is that a "wild"
supposition? Or how about the supposition that what the baby monkey
actually learns from this repeated experience is to be afraid of the SCENT?
Is that also "wild" imaginings?
You just don't like where this is going, and so you react to it emotionally
instead of intellectually.

You just love making ***** up, don't you?

None of this is made up or original with me. If you knew much about the
subject, you'd have recognized that already.

Who can we point to who doesn't believe that most of
their beliefs are true?

Me, for a start. Beliefs are there to be struck down, tested against
evidence and replaced with knowledge and comprehension. It's what honest
people do.

You? You're going to sit there and tell me that you don't believe your
beliefs are true for the most part. Right. I'll tell you when I'll be able
to believe that is true, okay? When you can write out a proposition for me
that you currently believe to be true, but don't believe to be true.
You see, this is the problem I and others have getting through to people
like you. You're so terrified by the prospect that you may not be the
random accident of a universe that doesn't know you exist and never designed
you, that if anyone brings up ANYTHING that even SMELLS like it might
challenge that idea, you're in a big rush to crush it as quickly as
possible, regardless of what you have to resort to to do it.

And given all the above

I just took it away, sorry.

Only if you're determined to believe otherwise, and have little if any
grasp of honest thinking.

Next, Chuck will set fire to his straw men:

Dave, I seriously doubt there is even a misstatement in anything I've
written above, let alone a "lie". Or are you one of those who can't, or
won't allow the difference between a "lie" and a "false proposition"?
Please tell me you're not THAT typical.

Lies about science.
Lies about logic.
Lies about how much you know and understand about the above two things.
Lies about what other people think.

I suppose it's because you are too stupid or too lazy to do anything
else.

Dave, you've just been exposed to the beginnings of a logical argument for
metaphysical naturalism being self-refuting. The whole argument is here:
http://www.calvin.edu/academic/philosophy/virtual_library/articles/plantinga_alvin/an_evolutionary_argument_against_naturalism.pdf
Now I can't help it if you have an emotional need to get rid of this
argument by saying truly stupid things like: the man who wrote it is stupid
or can't think straight because of his faith in God, or whatever lies you
soothe yourself with in cases like this, so don't blame me for your
reaction. The truth is there exists a very good logical argument for
naturalism being self-refuting, which is to say that if you believe
naturalism has the best chance of describing the world as it actually is,
that belief, in and of itself, gives you a defeater for that belief!
I have never in my life lied about science or logic, and there are a couple
of philosophers who I've made a hobby. I have never said how much I know
about logic or how much I understand it beyond some first principles I've
elucidated from time to time, and I've never lied about what anyone thinks.
That is not to say I've never been wrong about some scientific data or
theory or research, or have never proposed a logical argument with a fallacy
in it, or never thought I understood someone else's line of argument only to
find later that I didn't. It IS to say I've never done any of these things
knowingly, or refused to correct them when they became clear to me.
Chuck Stamford
.

User: "Al Klein"
Title: Re: poot the typical Christer's bait-and-switch deception	08 Sep 2007 06:45:21 PM

On Fri, 7 Sep 2007 17:29:29 -0700, "Chuck Stamford"
<shell__stamford@cox.net> wrote:

I'm sure as an atheist or agnostic you've become practiced in ignoring a
great deal. It's a requirement, I would think.

How about as an atheist AND agnostic? Or don't you understand what
the words mean?
.

User: "Chuck Stamford"
Title: Re: poot the typical Christer's bait-and-switch deception	08 Sep 2007 07:51:24 PM

"Al Klein" <rukbat@pern.invalid> wrote in message
news:9sc6e31q7bre5v5hpckqr9m3a89tnk0ga7@4ax.com...

On Fri, 7 Sep 2007 17:29:29 -0700, "Chuck Stamford"
<shell__stamford@cox.net> wrote:

I'm sure as an atheist or agnostic you've become practiced in ignoring a
great deal. It's a requirement, I would think.

How about as an atheist AND agnostic? Or don't you understand what
the words mean?

It's clear you don't. And I'm okay with that.
Chuck Stamford
.

User: "Al Klein"
Title: Re: poot the typical Christer's bait-and-switch deception	08 Sep 2007 10:25:36 PM

On Sat, 8 Sep 2007 17:51:24 -0700, "Chuck Stamford"
<shell__stamford@cox.net> wrote:

"Al Klein" <rukbat@pern.invalid> wrote in message
news:9sc6e31q7bre5v5hpckqr9m3a89tnk0ga7@4ax.com...

On Fri, 7 Sep 2007 17:29:29 -0700, "Chuck Stamford"
<shell__stamford@cox.net> wrote:

I'm sure as an atheist or agnostic you've become practiced in ignoring a
great deal. It's a requirement, I would think.

How about as an atheist AND agnostic? Or don't you understand what
the words mean?

It's clear you don't.

I don't know what I am? I'd killfile you, but for the humor you
provide.
.

User: "Chuck Stamford"
Title: Re: poot the typical Christer's bait-and-switch deception	09 Sep 2007 12:21:04 AM

"Al Klein" <rukbat@pern.invalid> wrote in message
news:osp6e3hfltbar9stdm41qhr8d0lasne291@4ax.com...

On Sat, 8 Sep 2007 17:51:24 -0700, "Chuck Stamford"
<shell__stamford@cox.net> wrote:

"Al Klein" <rukbat@pern.invalid> wrote in message
news:9sc6e31q7bre5v5hpckqr9m3a89tnk0ga7@4ax.com...

On Fri, 7 Sep 2007 17:29:29 -0700, "Chuck Stamford"
<shell__stamford@cox.net> wrote:

I'm sure as an atheist or agnostic you've become practiced in ignoring a
great deal. It's a requirement, I would think.

How about as an atheist AND agnostic? Or don't you understand what
the words mean?

It's clear you don't.

I don't know what I am?

Obviously.

I'd killfile you, but for the humor you
provide.

Same, except I don't find you quite that humorous.
.

User: "Al Klein"
Title: Re: poot the typical Christer's bait-and-switch deception	09 Sep 2007 06:29:35 PM

On Sat, 8 Sep 2007 22:21:04 -0700, "Chuck Stamford"
<shell__stamford@cox.net> wrote:

"Al Klein" <rukbat@pern.invalid> wrote in message
news:osp6e3hfltbar9stdm41qhr8d0lasne291@4ax.com...

On Sat, 8 Sep 2007 17:51:24 -0700, "Chuck Stamford"
<shell__stamford@cox.net> wrote:

"Al Klein" <rukbat@pern.invalid> wrote in message
news:9sc6e31q7bre5v5hpckqr9m3a89tnk0ga7@4ax.com...

On Fri, 7 Sep 2007 17:29:29 -0700, "Chuck Stamford"
<shell__stamford@cox.net> wrote:

I'm sure as an atheist or agnostic you've become practiced in ignoring a
great deal. It's a requirement, I would think.

How about as an atheist AND agnostic? Or don't you understand what
the words mean?

It's clear you don't.

I don't know what I am?

Obviously.

But you do.
SOMETHING sure is obvious.
.

User: "Chuck Stamford"
Title: Re: poot the typical Christer's bait-and-switch deception	10 Sep 2007 03:09:09 AM

"Al Klein" <rukbat@pern.invalid> wrote in message
news:7e09e39m1iud9g06uapmm4p7jjjg8er9li@4ax.com...

On Sat, 8 Sep 2007 22:21:04 -0700, "Chuck Stamford"
<shell__stamford@cox.net> wrote:

"Al Klein" <rukbat@pern.invalid> wrote in message
news:osp6e3hfltbar9stdm41qhr8d0lasne291@4ax.com...

On Sat, 8 Sep 2007 17:51:24 -0700, "Chuck Stamford"
<shell__stamford@cox.net> wrote:

"Al Klein" <rukbat@pern.invalid> wrote in message
news:9sc6e31q7bre5v5hpckqr9m3a89tnk0ga7@4ax.com...

On Fri, 7 Sep 2007 17:29:29 -0700, "Chuck Stamford"
<shell__stamford@cox.net> wrote:

I'm sure as an atheist or agnostic you've become practiced in ignoring
a
great deal. It's a requirement, I would think.

How about as an atheist AND agnostic? Or don't you understand what
the words mean?

It's clear you don't.

I don't know what I am?

Obviously.

But you do.

We finally agree on something!

SOMETHING sure is obvious.

That's because you put it in all capital letters like that. It tends to
make something obvious when you do that. I could do the same thing...look:
YOU'RE A MORON. Now that's obvious as well. See how that woks?
.

User: "bob young"
Title: Re: poot the typical Christer's bait-and-switch deception	10 Sep 2007 11:15:05 PM

Chuck Stamford wrote: