”PETA media liaison Jane Dollinger told The Daily Caller in an email that ‘most of the animals we take in are society’s rejects; aggressive, on death’s door, or somehow unadoptable.’Yet PETA does not try to adopt out the animals.
2. A proposed initiative by Britain’s MI5, MI6, and the GCHQ will monitor every phone call, email and text message, keeping the data for up to a year.
3. Scientists have created human eggs from stem cells. What could possibly go wrong?
4. Richard Dawkins claims a probability of God of 1.42857%. OK, he actually claimed 6.9 out 7.0 chance for no God, thereby being an Agnostic. A quote:
“What I can’t understand is why you can’t see the extraordinary beauty of the idea that life started from nothing – that is such a staggering, elegant, beautiful thing, why would you want to clutter it up with something so messy as a God?”Dawkins has confirmed the idea that life came from nothing. And he considers that to be “staggering, elegant, and beautiful”. Elegant and beautiful are not really firm descriptors, they are opinions, viewpoints. Staggering does describe the belief that life came from something like minerals, or nothing, as Dawkins says, and did it only once. Dawkins doesn’t calculate the probability of that, though. It’s part of his worldview, so it had to have happened by definition and is therefore likely considered 100% probable, by definition, from his perspective. From my own perspective, the idea is staggeringly preposterous. It's an Atheist, Materialist's miracle: no explanation, just awe.
Richard Dawkins
That the opposition in this debate didn’t call him on that is understandable. Dawkins debates only weak opposition, not intellectual heavyweights. This opponent apparently allowed Dawkins to hog the mike, and then pretty much agreed with him, except for shoehorning God, of course.
5. Law Schools, Deans, and News Mags as Felons? According to TaxProf blog,
” Morgan Cloud (Emory) & George B. Shepherd (Emory), Law Deans In Jail:
A most unlikely collection of suspects -- law schools, their deans, U.S. News & World Report and its employees -- may have committed felonies by publishing false information as part of U.S. News' ranking of law schools. The possible federal felonies include mail and wire fraud, conspiracy, racketeering, and making false statements. Employees of law schools and U.S. News who committed these crimes can be punished as individuals, and under federal law the schools and U.S. News would likely be criminally liable for their agents' crimes.
Some law schools and their deans submitted false information about the schools' expenditures and their students' undergraduate grades and LSAT scores. Others submitted information that may have been literally true but was misleading. Examples include misleading statistics about recent graduates' employment rates and students' undergraduate grades and LSAT scores.”
6. Obama hires the director of Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” to film a movie about: Obama. It will be a 30 minute movie to be released soon. A blockbuster, no doubt.
7 comments:
I can't stand PETA. They ruin an otherwise potentially good cause, the cause picked up CORRECTLY by the SPCA.
Dawkins has confirmed the idea that life came from nothing.
This is why I think it is important to read Feser. Or at least Thomism and Aristotelianism in general. ID and people related to ID if not IDists directly often make these claims that life cannot arise from non-life, but they are unclear what that means and it often comes off sounding like an argument from personal incredulity. I don't blame atheist materialists for being underwhelmed.
But Aristotelian-Thomism brings this whole picture into sharp focus: the modern scientific movement eschews final causes, or end-directedness. This was brought about by Descartes, Hobbes, Bacon, and the other founding fathers of modern science. End-directedness can't be mathematically quantified, and so they decided it was better to focus science only on matter and motion, the aspects of nature that CAN be quantified.
So modern science implicitly or explicitly says that final causes either do not exist, or that we can't know about them if they do.
But life, or even just self-replicating molecules, clearly exhibit end-directedness. So it presents a fundamental issue for materialism.
I can't stand PETA. They ruin an otherwise potentially good cause, the cause picked up CORRECTLY by the SPCA.
Dawkins has confirmed the idea that life came from nothing.
This is why I think it is important to read Feser. Or at least Thomism and Aristotelianism in general. ID and people related to ID if not IDists directly often make these claims that life cannot arise from non-life, but they are unclear what that means and it often comes off sounding like an argument from personal incredulity. I don't blame atheist materialists for being underwhelmed.
But Aristotelian-Thomism brings this whole picture into sharp focus: the modern scientific movement eschews final causes, or end-directedness. This was brought about by Descartes, Hobbes, Bacon, and the other founding fathers of modern science. End-directedness can't be mathematically quantified, and so they decided it was better to focus science only on matter and motion, the aspects of nature that CAN be quantified.
So modern science implicitly or explicitly says that final causes either do not exist, or that we can't know about them if they do.
But life, or even just self-replicating molecules, clearly exhibit end-directedness. So it presents a fundamental issue for materialism.
There are several Atheist miracles, of which this is one:
1. Immaculate Conception of the entire universe.
2. Immaculate Conception of Life.
3. Immaculate Conception of Intelligence.
4. Immaculate Conception of Agency.
5. Immaculate Conception of Meaning.
"Immaculate Conception of the entire universe"
Immaculate conception is a state of being filled with "sanctifying grace" (the kind you get during baptism) when you are conceived. Catholics believe this was given to Mary by the Holy Ghost so that Jesus wouldn't be infected with orginal sin.
What is "Immaculate Conception of the entire universe" meant to mean?
SloMo,
Stan is poking fun at the rejection of the principle of sufficient reason by naturalists. Basically, everything has an explanation for why it exists, except nature. A naturalist must of course reject that there is anything other than nature, and so must reject that nature has any explanation, lest they be forced to postulate a reality that transcends nature.
It is, quite possibly, an ad hoc position to take.
And ++Slo Mo++ is pointing out that Stan does not know the correct meaning of "Immaculate Conception".
(hint: Immaculate Conception and Virgin Birth are two different concepts)
Well, I'm not surprised that the concept is being ignored in favor of critiquing the terminology.
But you are right, I was unaware of the Catholic dogma behind the term, thinking it referred to the conception within the virgin sans the mess and fuss of having a material creating reason involved. Actually it seems to refer to the conception of Jesus to be in a virgin who is without sin, which, to my knowledge is non-biblical, and if so, then is heretical.
I'm sure this confused the Catholics no end, and rendered the sarcasm involved totally incomprehensible.
So feel free to change the Immaculate to "materially uncaused", and proceed from there to justify the Atheist belief in these miracles (effects without material causes).
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