PROBABILITY, GOD, EVOLUTION, AND MY LOGIC PROFESSOR

Perhaps no cars and roads, but pepper would have played a much larger role in the lives of early humans.

Then while the mastodon sneezes, Jim will be able to walk up to it and cut its throat with a dull knife with no danger to himself. No! Jim, YOU weren't supposed to breathe in the pepper!

once again, joining a thread at a late stage, when most of the issues have already been thoroughly discussed, i'll just add my 2 cents. Nietzsche, you're doing your class a favor by questioning your prof. if your prof doesn't see it that way, he's not much of a philosopher. i once had a similar experience, in a music appreciation class of all things, where i was frequently challenging the prof. at one point, he asked, "does anybody have any questions?" several times, so i finally took the bait and raised a question, to which the prof replied, "why am I not surprised?" and got a big laugh at my expense, but he gave me an A for the course anyway, so perhaps he was at times trying to provoke a reaction by asserting positions on the basis of flimsy evidence like your prof; who knows.

Thank you for all your responses. I've been upset with this professor for some time, beginning from one of the first class sessions in which he claimed to hear the "president of American Atheists" on a local radio show say, "I don't know God exists, therefore he doesn't." He went on to, in the context of the lecture, talk about how such a statement was logically invalid.

A student asked, "Wouldn't somoene like that know ..." and he interrupted, "No, no," smug and condescending. This was one of the only other times I spoke up in class. I said, "I know the atheist rhetoric pretty well, and that's absrud." He said, "I know it is!"

I said, "No, I mean the suggestion such a person would say that is absurd." He didn't seem to understand I was calling him a liar to his face.

I let it go at that, but the event bothered me for some time. Dude just slandered a public figure to make a point in his class. Highly disappointing. Makes you wonder how often this sort of thing happens around the country, and the world for that matter.



I feel a bit conceited agreeing with this, but I've made much the same observation.

I would add this sort of behavior is understandable to a certain extent. For all the heat he's taken in this thread, I've found myself sympathizing with him on several occasions when he's forced to answer question after question that is utterly irrelevant and often downright stupid.

Moreover, what it must do to a person's ego to have all these kids telling you how amazingly smart you are day after day. If your students are rarely, if ever, challenging, I would think you'd have the tendency to go a little soft. Certainly not an excuse, but he is human.



I appreciate your optimism in the educational system :wink: but there's no chance. He's a Christian (Catholic, I believe), and has said many things consistent with him being a proponent of ID, including: "Darwinism is dying," and "anthropology has corrupted minds."

Those quotes don't quite refute the above (they could be more of what you're suggesting), but I doubt it. That is, I just think I would know by now if that were the case.

Well, if he's a Catholic, he seems to have a rather flawed grasp of The Church's position on Creation, Evolution, Anthropology, Philosophy, Theology, and science in general. Wonder if he's ever heard of an old, now-deceased Jesuit named Teilhard De Chardin? I think I might enjoy tanglin' with this professor fella you got there.


Then again. ain't much satisfaction to a war of wits when one's opponent is half-armed.

BM, and in the interim I am considering the relationship between "logic", "reality" and "semantics".

Well, if ya wanna go there, fresco, pretty much anything that don't involve overwhelmin' weaponry comes down to semantics in the end, don't it?

:wink:

timberlandko,

Agreed !.....you correctly home in the point that "semantics" is about behavior co-ordination
without obvious coercion. The so-called logic of the "Design Argument" exists in an epistemology of "control" as an a priori. If we remove "control", then alternatives such as "evolution" become much more attractive.

I can see myself resuming my efforts to finally complete reading The Phenomenon of Man timber - it's taken me years so far

well, it seems that your prof is serious in his spoutings, too bad. I wish to give him the benefit of the doubt. Seems that , if hes Catholic, he comes from the "Holy Roller branch " that has developed a Pentacostal answer to everything scientific even though the Church itself has promoted research in evolution and paleo. (Despite the setbacks from ole Teilhard and his fraudulent friends).

Keep chipping away, unless hes a vindictive bastid who deals grades in a direct proportion to obeisance.

In applied geophys and econ geology, I like to take Creationist arguments to their extreme and apply that as a tool in getting my students to think outside the normal circle of field problems.(eg pleichroic structures in micas, rapid changes in magnetic declination, evaporitic deposits ) All these have standard answers and assumptions, sometimes the assumptions break down, why? and why not?

By the way, just to put a face to the character, guy looks like Ryan Seacrest with glasses.

Chardin can be tough wadin' - he has a way of makin' ya really think about what he's sayin'; there's a lot more there than the words on the page. I've read most of him, books, articles, essays and commentaries, and sometimes it was a struggle. He don't come easy, thats for sure, but he sure makes a helluva buncha sense - once ya figure out what he's sayin