Intelligent Design vs. Casino Universe

That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. I didn't think anyone could top Herald's post.

It's amazing really. I post a simple and obviously true statement and I'm told by two guys who had a very long-winded and expensive education that I have "run out of steam" and that what I said was the most ridiculous thing he has ever heard.

Neither being true. I would think they were being disrespectful if I didn't know they couldn't be as fully paid up Casino Universe Natural Theologians.

It has to be stupidity.

Don't be so hard on yourself. Id say it was just ignorance.

Believe in whatever you wish but don't turn off your pacemaker.

Those member deserve and acronym as the organization's name is a bit unwieldy...

FM, you are just beating around the bush ... and not answering the actual question. I was asking why do the people (or creatures, or whosoever) with a vision system that is not 'flipping the image' but accept it as an 'imprint' on the mirror have disappeared (owing to the lack of adaptation, as the theory of evolution claims), and the people (or creatures, or whosoever) with a vision system that is 'flipping the image' (notwithstanding that it is in contradiction with any laws of math logic) 'survived due to adaptation'. Where is the adaptation here?
It is this very point of evolution that misses me most.

I once saw a video of two men who set about fencing with mirrors fixed to their heads so that their respective opponent appeared upside down. At first they were parrying high for low shots and low for high shots. After a while they got better and with considerable practice they were able to fence normally.

Another film I saw tried to depict what lions see. They didn't see objects as clearly as we do but were very sensitive to movement. Or certain kinds of movement.

Such things suggests that the brain adapts whatever image reaches the retina for its efficient use.

The question you pose might be simply because the effects you report have not been subjected to practice.

I had a cat which would watch the TV screen sometimes when horses were racing and it used to chase the stationary objects (to us), posts and things, as they flashed past. The running horses looked stationary to the cat.

I would guess that all normally functioning eyes are more or less perfectly adapted. A heron is adapted to the refraction in water.



Which a heron won't know. Evolution has done the work for it. Fishing with a spear from above the water will have to be practiced.

Your thought experiment has left out the important element of practice. Which raises an interesting question of a young heron on its first fishing expedition. Has the millions of years of practice caused the correction to be instinctive? Is Lamarkian inheritance a possibility then?

I suppose we should leave it to our resident evolutionary experts.

I had a dog that used to preen in front of a mirror. He died.Maybe you have something there.
Have a nice Christmas, Ill se ya tomorrow. Im still wrapping presents

The danger is that we select items from nature which our human arrogance finds suitable to derive teleological conclusions from. More often than not the teleology serves the purpose of an arrogance which seeks to set aside Christian teachings on sexual prohibitions.

And it is a solipsistic arrogance unless it covers everybody setting them aside. The street furniture vandal has nowhere to go if we all copy his behaviour.

Is that an instinctive behaviour pattern fm? Or are you like a Pavlovian dog ringing a bell for a reward?

Not that I am too much interested, but in the capacity of being top net atheist what exactly are you celebrating on Christmas?

It is understandable H given the dynamic forces in play in his social whirl.

What is odd is his admission of performing such Christian chores, assuming he denies the Pavlovian explanation, as the exemplar of atheism on A2K.

It might be a potlatch performance to condescend to the lesser gifted or to induce people to listen to him rabbiting for a longer period than they otherwise might.

I wonder what the wrapping paper design consisted of.

BTW--I haven't wrapped one single Christmas present since I was about 20. It took another 20 years before incoming had dribbled away to nothing. Same with cards.

I wish everybody a merry day every day.

This is a very good question. Let's try to make some meta-guesses:
Option No.1: Oil platform off the Brazilian coast, hitting the depth of 2 km of oil drilling.
Option No.2: The triumph of CO2, hitting the height of 400 ppm.
Option No.3: The periodic table of the chemical elements, with illustration which fish how much lead, cadmium ... and mercury has - even when coming from 'organic' fish farms.
Option No.4: Applied physics - how to burn the water from the well in your backyard ... when the cracking facilities are over the hills.
Option No.5: Fundamentals of evolution - how do the mirrors that flipped the image survived ... and those that didn't made it, get extinct.
What we are celebrating now on Christmas (the triumph of greed, stupidity and selfishness) is somehow a little bit aside from we should (IMV) celebrate. We should celebrate the option for the humanity to achieve immortality (if this option is still available). Instead of that we are celebrating the options of polluting the planet with as much electronic (and non-electronic) junk, as possible. Ho, ho, ho ... Merry Christmas.

Why do you wish to know? what is your purpose in having this information especially since you've stated that you are "not too much interested"?

being the self appointed lickspittle of the religious you've been not too active during the Christmas break. We had a great day with family and friends , most of whom have similar beliefs as us, although several are practicing Chistians.

I wonder how many Jesuits are agnostic? I wonder how many are atheist?

I wonder whether Spendi got gloriously drunk by himself since most pubs were closed?

I wonder whether Herald ever found a dictionary ?

Ask me if I too really give a ****?

Wow . . . you're like, a big-time celebrity, huh? Can i have yer auty-graph?

I KNOW, I shall carry out my duties as "Atheist in Chief" in concert with Filbis's Venn Diagram , viz:

All of them I imagine are one or the other. Not everybody chooses to be a needle in a barn full of straw. It's the loins of the masses that is the real subject. Your focus on The Flood and rock sediments is beside the point.

What's your policy on the loins?



My pub was not closed and I'll admit I got a bit tiddly at the Christmas dinner on some Full Dry Barbadillo Oloroso and a couple of spliffs. The main topic of conversation was the word "meniscus" and how it might be used in informal conversations. I had the ladies hooting in derison just like you do fm and trying to change the subject just like you also do.

I bet you couldn't get ladies doing that on such a subject. I began by saying that a Grauniad lady feechewer writer had spotted the word when looking up "men" in the dictionary and thought it would be a good word to use in another of her pointless pieces of pretentious prose. As a result the word appeared at dinner parties of the sort that Grauniad readers are used to as a oneupwoman gambit which the slapper who used it for us was riding the last fling of the coat-tails of due to the trickle down effect.

You have a battery of such words fm.

She had been swirling her glass and the word popped into her head and she set about explaining to us how the height of the best wine's meniscus, or meniscussies, is a guide to the quality of the drink. She's such a snob!

Who isn't eh in a classless society?

During the ensuing debate, which had more than a few discursive meanderings, I raised the question of whether science, starting from scratch, could have created the vast range of beers, wines and spirits that the monastic orders did. There was general agreement, and with very good reason, that science could never have created the specific characteristics of the Full Dry Barbadillo Oloroso however many holes it had in its aggregate of arses. Science would come at such a task from the wrong end. It can't do the spectrum of transcendent moods. It would have the one mood--pissed. Which is the only mood a scientist dare risk when boozing because if he tried a transcendent mood he might start getting horrid doubts. And we don't want any of those now do we old boy? One needs to have no doubts to be convincing. One has to start up with that "I really don't give a ****" excuse when horrid doubts get a hold.



I suspect science would ban alcohol but if it didn't it would supply water, dyed and flavoured, in a range of 10 ccs of ethyl alcohol (laboratory grade) per litre ($1), 20 ccs ($2), 30ccs ($3) and so on, all with sexually inviting labels carefully tailored to suit the various rungs on the ladder of the social scale, and with the 100% only available to Party Members in their Special Shops. Like with Nigella Lawson.

That is an interesting claim Herald. What evidence do you have the such creatures existed at all?
Since the lens of a camera does the exact same thing that the lens of the eye does there is no evidence that any lens on an eye ever violated the laws of physics. If you have such evidence please feel free to provide it.