While this post is directed at most of the New Atheist's arguments, I was heavily inspired by Yehuda Mishenichnas's comments towards me in the article here:
I did my time with mishenechnas av, to absolutely no avail, and I've been wondering if it's just me but he is so clearly presupposed in his conclusion that he isn't arguing and thinking of you as a person with thoughts and arguments to deal with, rather as a person to refute and educate. There's no conversation. Many atheists are like that and you can see it when they project their experience onto you - "I used to be like you until I was so fortunately enlightened so if you'd only hear me out you'd get it too." They have no tzad that there can actually be an enlightened and reasonable response and you must be indoctrinated if you conclude differently than they. Nebach. Don't water your breath until you can get him to stop lecturing so much and actually discuss....
As far as this article goes, I love it (!) even though an argument can be made against it. But it actually does hold up to bring out the point you're constantly trying to make about people like Dawkins equating God to fairies, regardless of what Simon or any atheist might respond that to them it ultimately it's the same RL.
The reason these atheists want to project their experiences onto you is because they want to highlight that they too once held religious beliefs deeply and sincerely. They too held the same dogmas and believed the same proofs that you currently use in your arguments.
They were part of the same "indoctrination," convinced of the same truths, until they began to question.
I do not mean just addressing the big religious questions like free will and the existence of God, but really grappling with their core beliefs and their biases that resulted in their religious conclusions. This is a process that most people would want to avoid for fear of coming to insights that do not fit in the bounds of their societal norms.
I understand it often comes off as arrogance, but it's not about thinking that people are unenlightened. It is a genuine hope that people would consider that they may be mistaken, like they once were.
Rationality is a tool, not a goal in itself. The goal is to find the Truth.
I agree, but I could make the same argument back. I am very well read on the atheist viewpoint and share all the same info they are privy to that led them to atheism. Yet I am not an atheist. I contend that I have information that atheist hasn't properly considered and if he would, chances are he'd side with me. I would never go down that route precisely because that is preachy and unopen-minded and I understand that I don't know everything and I am giving it my best bet. Anyone arguing with an atheist who thinks screaming "if only you were exposed to more torah" would get him anywhere, even if he's right, that's not a discussion. That's a speech and it will get nobody anywhere and everybody nowhere.
The fact that you respond so quickly proves my previous point from our discussion on Mishenichnas' comment section.
This is not about having a reaction; it's about thinking critically and trying to understand opposing perspectives that are brought up.
Immediately assuming that your religious view is the only valid one, without giving real thought to possible rebuttals, is intellectually lazy. You clearly do not put much thought in trying to understand other peoples opinions, which is reinforced by the fact that you respond within seconds
So I repeat: Give yourself some time away from posting. Try to *really* ask yourself what you think you know and *how* you think you know it. I am certain (if you are really honest with yourself) that you will uncover some interesting new perspectives.
This is what is making me increasingly frustrated with atheism. To say that you have doubts about God is understable, but to mock those who are sure as having no proof? Did you know that if you unraveled your entire DNA it would stretch to two meters long? No, that's not a typo. You have 2 meters of DNA in every one of your somatic cells. Try doing that by hand. But somehow it's ridiculous to believe a creator is necessary.
Humans have about 3.2 billion base pairs per nucleus, which would extend about 2 meters if pulled fully apart.
A quick google search reveals that the Tmesipteris oblanceolata fork fern has the longest genome measured so far at around 160 billion base pairs. This would extend about 50 times the length of the human genome, or about 100 meters.
But I don't really see your argument here. Are you just saying that this is amazing? And that amazing = a god? And that a god = let's keep kosher?
"Paley finds a watch and asks how such a thing could have come to be there by chance. Dawkins finds an immense automated factory that blindly constructs watches, and feels that he has completely answered Paley's point."
Analogies are great because they can help us understand things in a better way. See things in a different way to better understand what we initially had trouble doing. But the two things being compared are never actually the same and the attempt to to get them to be very similar. But sometimes analogies are unhelpful because they don't fit properly and feel forced. This is one of those times.
Paley wrote: In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there; I might possibly answer, that, for anything I knew to the contrary, it had lain there forever: nor would it perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place; I should hardly think of the answer I had before given, that for anything I knew, the watch might have always been there. ... There must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers, who formed [the watch] for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use. ... Every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature; with the difference, on the side of nature, of being greater or more, and that in a degree which exceeds all computation.
Paley wants us to look at a tree and "see" the tree-maker behind it and he wants us to see a cat and "see" the cat-maker behind it just like when we see a watch we "see" the watchmaker behind it. But why not just say, "but suppose I had found a tree upon the ground."? Why compare a rock to a watch and not a rock to a tree? Because when you see a tree, you don't see apparent design like you do in a watch. Trees come about through natural means, as do rocks, and watches do not. That's the point of the analogy, but how do we know what to put into the rock category and vs. what goes in the watch category?
So I think Paley's analogy suffers greatly. According to Wikipedia, Paley "went on to argue that the complex structures of living things and the remarkable adaptations of plants and animals required an intelligent designer. He believed the natural world was the creation of God and showed the nature of the creator."
These relationship of these sentences #1 and #2 are not intended to be read as #1 informing #2. He didn't believe in creation because he found complex structures. He was a vicar and then an archdeacon who believed in the Christian god for very bad reasons, and then he backfilled this belief with an argument from design.
Furthermore, he misunderstands some fundamental things about the apparent design. He was not privy to Darwin's ideas of evolution by natural selection. I think you are similarly uninformed, which is why you think quoting Paley (and Hoyle) is a good idea. They are both bad ideas.
Dawkins dismantled Paley's argument because watches are not biological entities. Whereas a tree comes from a previous tree, which came from a previous tree (and cats have similar lineages, respectively), watches do not. Each watch comes directly from a watchmaker. Any updates in a new watch design come from the mind of the watchmaker, not from previous watches. In this way, the watch-tree-cat analogy is also not analogous. I think it is important for you (and all others) to better understand evolution by natural selection, and only then can it form in your mind as a superior candidate explanation for the great diversity and complexity in biologic life that we observe today.
>>>Boeing 747
And a comment about Hoyle. Hoyle might have been a great physicist, but he's not a biologist and his understanding of biology suffers greatly from this. In a sense, he's like Rabbi Meiselman, who takes his math degree and tries to use it to show that he can speak intelligently about biology, but that's not how science works. When you say good things, they are accepted, but not because you're smart. They are accepted because they are acceptable. When they are not acceptable, they are rejected, no matter how many letters you have after your name.
Fred Hoyle presented a junkyard tornado argument, where he calculated the probability of abiogenesis by comparing it to "a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard...assembl[ing] a Boeing 747 from the materials therein." He compared the chance of obtaining even a single functioning protein by chance combination of amino acids to a solar system full of blind men solving Rubik's Cubes simultaneously. The reason Hoyle's analogies can be immediately dismissed as bad is because it fails to take into account the vast amount of support that evolution proceeds in many smaller stages, each driven by natural selection, rather than by random chance, and over a long period of time, rather than in a single burst. The Boeing 747 analogy is therefore wholly un-analogous.
Scientists familiar with evolutionary biology immediately see the flaw here, but those who don't understand (or don't want to understand) evolutionary biology like to cite Hoyle. From the perspective of those informed about natural selection, anyone citing Hoyle is either ill-informed or acting in bad faith.
Like I said, analogies are nice. But they can only go so far. Sometimes they go astray and this is one of those times. Also, Dawkins can be wrong and he invites everyone to point those instances out to him.
>>>The fact that it is natural does not remove the implication it is designed
As science understands it, the design apparent in biological organisms and systems, from the cellular level to the way groups of species interact in ecological arrangements, needs no greater explanation than what we have already discovered. That being said, we can only understand what we see and not what we don't see. So the more we learn, the more we increased the denominator of unknown and the more we'll need to fill in the numerator of what we do know relative to that.
>>>as my story points out
And as I pointed out before as well, you are conflating design with design. In one sense, "design" means that we observe a pattern. It can be defined as "an arrangement of lines or shapes that form a pattern or decoration" but it can also mean "an arrangement of lines or shapes created to form a pattern or decoration." We use design loosely like this.
And you here construct a catch-22. If you are using the first sense I referred to above, then you can't get to the second sense without good evidence for a designer, a creator. And if you are using the second sense, then you are merely asserting that there's a designer, which is an illegal move.
How many creationists are irreligious? I don't doubt that there can be one, but it's informative, I think, that the vast majority are religious. I contend that the rationale for their creationist views are retroactive backfill of their religious presuppositions.
>>>watch making machine
I will concede that this was a mistake on the part of Dawkins. To continue the analogy, which was a bad one in the first place, only made it even more un-analogous.
I will not go into great depth here, even though you said that you are not turned off by my long responses, because you have already read the science (even if you haven't understood it), and if anyone else is interested, it would be better for them to message me directly so I could tailor the information to the voids in their understand. Broadly, though I will say this:
There are 6 uncontroversial statements that science makes. Of course, someone can always take issue with anything, but by and large, those who embrace science and do not make crazy religious assertions would agree that these 5 things are
1) Individuals of the same population differ. So some exhibit more X and some exhibit less X, while most are average. These differences are manifestations of the individuals genetic makeup, which is inheritable.
2) There are advantages and disadvantages related to these variations when it comes to reproduction. So being faster or stronger or more colorful can result in more instances of successful mating.
3) It follows from 1 and 2 that when organisms are better suited to reproduce AND it's inheritable genetic material that codes for these advantages, that transfer of this generations genetic material into the next generation is biased in favor of the better genes. This principle of evolution is referred to as non-random mating that leads to preferred genetic heredity.
4) Small genetic improvements can be accumulated over long periods of time to result in massive changes over time. Even at the time of Darwin, this wasn't fully understood because the field of genetics hadn't yet been fleshed out. Mendel was his contemporary and they did not share information in a bi-directional manner. The new perspective, referred to as neo-Darwinism ("new Darwinism") is the same ideas but with so much more explanatory power. So, for instance, a donkey and a manatee look very dissimilar. So do a mouse and a frog. For all their similarities, a chimpanzee and a human look very different. But the differences we see when we look at the organism are called phenotypic differences. It's hard to see how a wing and a flipper or a lizard body vs. a mammal body vs. a fish body are similar. But genetics is like a recipe, and a very small difference in the recipe can change a cake to a pie or a pie to a soup. The genetic code is apparently not infinitely malleable (see the amazing chapter on shells in Climbing Mount Improbable) but it's definitely more malleable than anyone would have imagined, and it has great explanatory power when it comes to variability between species.
5) The minor genetic differences (genotype) that manifest as minor body-plan differences (phenotype) can be compared and traced. Genetic segments can double or switch, reverse and be deleted to added. They can jump from one place to another, and I'm sure through additional methods we have yet to discover and understand. An analogy I like to use is construction. Someone can look at a ranch-style house and a 28-story building (or a 180-story skyscraper) and think that one is so different than the other. Yes, they are. Phenotypically, they appear vastly different. But what goes into making a 28-story building? I am obviously simplifying things massively, but for the purposes of this discussion, a 28-story building can be described as 28 ranch-style homes built one on top of another. And on some floors, they add some bathrooms. On other floors, they have no internal walls and it's a giant common ballroom or lobby. It's just a matter of moving bricks and steel, sheetrock and wires and pipes. If you don't have vision because you don't understand how plans are drawn up, it could seem that everything's so different, but if you understand how construction is done, it's a simple thing (at least conceptually) to see that construction is construction is construction. Take this back to the genetic code and flippers and tails and beaks and immune systems are all just different arrangements of the same A-C-T-G nucleotides. That's why evolution, when properly understood, is so elegant.
6) This will all take a tremendous amount of time. But the time is there. There's no good reason to think that the time available for the accumulation of genetic changes is around 6,000 years.
>>>The fact that it is natural does not remove the implication it is designed
Now, a word about this. Religionists, and the loudest have been the Catholics (Jews are generally quite by comparison), at first fought against all of these new idea. The question of what orbits around what and what causes earthquakes and volcanoes was a question. It's now still a question, but we also now have answers. Where does the rain come from and what causes disease. We don't have all the answers, of course. But that doesn't mean we should pretend that multiple layers of answers are necessary when fewer will suffice.
One can deny evolution by natural selection, or one can say, "God works in natural ways." One can deny the list of 6 things I just covered, or one can say, "Yes, he works through nature."
When we assert unfalsifiable things, we are (by definition) saying things that we can't know. That's not a secular claim I just made, but a claim of reason. When you keep things in the fridge, they spoil more slowly. But if I keep some in the fridge and keep some out of the fridge and they spoil at the same speed, what is the fridge doing? Just saying that it helps doesn't help the argument. It needs to be shown to help. If unfalsifiable claims are made, they are not deserving of consideration, other than to put them aside until some method of falsifying can be developed and performed.
When I say natural, I just mean that we observe it in nature. And we do not observe a master of the universe. And so the reasonable thing to do is speak of nature (that we observe) and not of the master of the universe (who we do not observe). It's really as simple as that.
So yes, we see patterns in nature. But they are not designs, if by design, you mean to smuggle in a designer of those designs. Rather, it refers to the first type of design, which is merely patterns of things, but not the intention of the patterns.
I don’t consider myself a creationist. I accept an old earth, natural evolution, and pretty much science as a whole. I think you keep conflating my arguments with the classic design arguments, because you would prefer to lecture instead of attempt to understand.
You also keep assuming I am trying to assert some sort of monotheistic Mosaic God while I am not. I freely assert that you could use my arguments for pretty much any God and the simulation hypothesis. It is merely from revelation that I know anything about God and his nature.
Can you attempt to argue from these constraints instead of LLMing into your old classic spiel how you are wise and enlightened and everyone else is wrong?
BTW, if I doubted revelation - and I have many times gone back and forth on this issue - I would be some sort of deist or simulationist. Definitely not an atheist, which is even more illogical.
I didn't want to edit the other response, and you didn't yet reply, so I will leave a new response.
>>>To say that you have doubts about God is understandable
That's all that most secularists will say. Their position is that there is doubt, but in such plentiful amounts that the god hypothesis is seen as no different than the mystical Indian guru hypothesis.
>>>but to mock those who are sure as having no proof?
I would like to dissect this comment of yours for greater clarity. What do you mean by "mock" and what do you mean by "proof"?
To mock would be to "tease or laugh at in a scornful or contemptuous manner," and I don't think that's what anyone here from the secular party was doing to anyone in the religious party, with some minor exceptions. In my very article, I write about how the ideas are fair game but that we ought not to attack people personally, especially since they are victims of their own indoctrination. After providing clear arguments against the god hypothesis and the religionists continue on with their same lame responses, the attacks get more sharp, but I really saw all attacks to be on the faulty thought process, not on the people having them.
Except for Ash, who got very rough and made personal attacks. Then people started attacking him personally. But is it a personal attack to call someone "childish" or "silly"?
And by proof, I figure you mean evidence. As stated in the article, and so I will not rehash it now, proofs are good for math because numbers and their relationships are constant. But we're not looking for proofs here; rather we are looking for evidence. When the evidence for outweighs the evidence against in a certain ratio, we begin to generalize and say that something is true. But we should always be open to new data and reinterpretation of the data. This is the way science works and this is the beauty of science. You win points by proving yourself wrong if you find sufficient evidence to overturn previously held firm understandings of the way things are or the way things work. Not so in religion, where nothing is known, nothing is investigated, everything seems to be declared into existence and no one is ever open to changing their minds about any of their core tenets and by extension, most of their thoughts related to these tenets.
>>>Did you know...
I wonder, True Settler, if you can appreciate the following comments in the manner in which they are being given: I am trying to be calm and compassionate, thoughtful and gentle. But you made a glaring error and I wanted to point it out to you.
You complain that conversation here between secularists and religionists are upsetting to you because it's fine to not believe in god, but it's not fine to mock those who do believe strongly as having no proof. And then you make the most ridiculous jump to a non sequitur. What does DNA have to do with god? Absolutely nothing. It's such a classic comment from a layman and it's so stale. And that's why secularists mock the positions of religionists so harshly...because their arguments are so transparently silly. And their grasp of science is as well.
DNA gets a lot of press. It's famous! But a lot of very technically complicated biological and chemical entities and reactions and phenomena are superbly wondrous, and yet you make no mention of them. To suggest that the length of the DNA in each cell is too magnificent a fact to behold without it pointing to a god is, in the mind of a secularist, a completely erratic and airheaded approach to understanding both cell biology and god. Secularists would expect such foolishness from someone like Rabbis Jonathan Rietti or Paysach Krohn, who are clearly ill-informed when it comes to science and came across this information in a children's science picture book published by Dorling Kindersley.
Now that you are aware that this was a silly move, will you retract? Will you continue this conversation? This is not meant as a brutish challenge, but as a sincere question. What does someone who says something ridiculous do when the ridiculousness of their comment is explained? If they apologize and pivot, then ok. If they back down and reorient and even change their position, then even better. I mean, if this was really the best reason you had, and you now see that's it's a bad argument, then shouldn't a change in evidence result in a change in your position, that was hopefully based on the evidence you were working with?
But if the person who makes silly comments continues to advance their silly position even after their silly rationale was undermined, what does it say about their position and what does it say about them? Is it still just ok to attack their position as silly? When can the person be labeled a silly person with a silly mind?
I don't know. I don't know you. And I really wasn't trying to hurt you here. I was, however, trying to explain how the conversation progresses from calm and kind to attacks. When someone does what you did, and thinks that talking about how we can fit so much DNA in a cell is at all indicative of the divine, it's not a serious conversation between equally prepared sides of the argument. And that's fine, all are welcome here. And I won't accuse you of being pretentious, or even arrogant, but there was arrogance in your post. Because instead of asking, you were telling. Instead of being open minded, you reported a finding and somehow jumped to some wild conclusion that doesn't at all follow, and then you wonder why it's so difficult for these two sides to have productive conversations.
When you remark about the wonder of the DNA in the nucleus, where precisely does that awesome magnificence turn into the need for magical thinking? Yes, human DNA is 2 meters long, but it's also 2 nanometers wide. Eukaryotic nuclei are about 5-20 micrometers. There are 1000 nanometers in a micrometer, so some rough math gives us 5,000-10,000 nanometer nuclei diameters, and DNA is folded up. Now I'm not a cell biologist, but I do know that DNA is folded up and coiled and supercoiled numerous times. I leave you and everyone else to read up on it on Wikipedia. Furthermore, diameters are 2D while nucleus volumes are 3D, and I am also not a mathematician, but you can find the information online to convert diameters to volumes of a sphere.
I wonder, do you think this is not possible? Are you questioning if the math works out? Or are you just baffled by how amazing it is that such a long thread, so to speak, can be bunched up into such a tiny box?
Yes, the universe is quite amazing. DNA, for some reason, is harped on, but someone in science can tell immediately when someone who doesn't really know about or understand science tries to talk about science because they talk about DNA. Another thing they talk about is astronomy. It's quite common to hear religious apologists talk about how fast the earth is spinning (1000 mph) or how fast the earth revolves around the sun (67,000 mph). You hardly ever hear about how fast the entire solar system is revolving around the center of the Milky Way galaxy (448,000 mph) because when you're dealing with non-science people, they don't even know what the Milky Way galaxy is or that we're a part of it.
And if your point was to show how necessarily magical (divine) it is to fit a 6' genome into a tiny cell is, why wouldn't you simply google if there are any longer genomes? It's not like the longest genome is 12% longer. It's a little less than 5000% larger! That's ridiculous!! It's a number so long that no one can comprehend it. If you think it's a puzzle to fit 6' of DNA into a nucleus, consider 300' of DNA. But then again, where do we get these numbers? Did you measure this yourself? Do you have a microscope and you just came up with this suspicious finding?
No, you can read about how long the genome is online, and you can read about the sizes of cells and their nuclei. You can also read, in the same place, explanations of how the DNA can fit. Do you think the science (meaning observation and documentation) is good and real here, but not there? If you don't think the genome can fit and science is full of garbage, then maybe the genome is not really 6' long in a human cell.
What a confusing thought process, from someone with an obvious belief in his own ability to argue.
Seeing as the author is a 'non-science person' (sic), his claims from DNA are just wrong. And his claims from DNA are wrong because he could have said better.
Seriously?!
Then I went over to his megilla against Judaism, and I was even more pleasantly surprised at the rank foolishness. It is impossible to even make this stuff up.
Example No. 1 - The story with Eliyahu and the Nevi'ei Haba'al didn't happen. Proof - there is no evidence for the existence of God, so it couldn't have happened.
To think that characters like these are allowed to vote, write on blogs, and masquerade as functioning humans is an affront to human intelligence the world over.
This was after he finished claiming that we shouldn't attack Dawkins personally, because we should just focus on his claims. He follows that by cheerfully telling us what 'Orthodoxy tends to do', with no explanation as to how he can backtrack so seamlessly.
It may not be required for a person to be a halfwit illogical peh tzadi to be an atheist, but in this case it certainly helped. (Yes, I did not pretend to be a nice guy and make accusations behind a veneer of civility. When you spew feces, anything but flies is inappropriate.)
>>>What a confusing thought process, from someone with an obvious belief in his own ability to argue.
Let's see if you spend at least as much time arguing the points as you do attacking me.
>>>Seeing as the author is a 'non-science person' (sic), his claims from DNA are just wrong. And his claims from DNA are wrong because he could have said better.
I don't understand your point here. Are you talking about vaccines here? I'm not saying that I accept bad arguments or refuse to accept good arguments. I'm saying that a) bad arguments in the science realm can be persuasive to non-scientists because they are full of sciency words and b) I'm not sufficiently informed about immunology to argue the points cogently.
>>>Then I went over to his megilla against Judaism, and I was even more pleasantly surprised at the rank foolishness. It is impossible to even make this stuff up.
More attacking me. When do we get to the issues?
>>>Example No. 1 - The story with Eliyahu and the Nevi'ei Haba'al didn't happen. Proof - there is no evidence for the existence of God, so it couldn't have happened.
Your reading comprehension suffers from religious delusion. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Where's the evidence that this happened, other than a story in a book? Claims made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
>>>To think that characters like these are allowed to vote, write on blogs, and masquerade as functioning humans is an affront to human intelligence the world over.
More attacks on me, and zero on the actual target.
>>>This was after he finished claiming that we shouldn't attack Dawkins personally, because we should just focus on his claims. He follows that by cheerfully telling us what 'Orthodoxy tends to do', with no explanation as to how he can backtrack so seamlessly.
More still.
>>>It may not be required for a person to be a halfwit illogical peh tzadi to be an atheist, but in this case it certainly helped. (Yes, I did not pretend to be a nice guy and make accusations behind a veneer of civility. When you spew feces, anything but flies is inappropriate.)
You're an even better foil than Ash, Zundel. Please make a substantive point.
The Mishna in Pirkei Avos, that we read in Shul after Mincha on summer Shabbasos, tells us ודע מה שתשיב לאפיקורס.
Yet the Mishna fails to continue and tell us what to tell them.
Why?
Because the kind of thing you are supposed to tell them is not the kind of thing you can say out loud in Shul.
The point here is that one might, with a certain trepidation born of propriety, observe that your claims and arguments have inadvertently aligned you with an archetype long celebrated in the annals of colloquial discourse—an individual whose comportment evokes, shall we say, a metaphorical allusion to that particular appendage of masculine physiology, which, in the vernacular of the less discreet, is oft invoked to signify a regrettable deficiency in both wisdom and refinement; a reference, I hasten to add, that I deploy only with the utmost reluctance and in deference to the exigencies of illustrative clarity.
Otherwise known as a peh tzadi.
If you could claim unequivocally that the story with the Nevi'ei Haba'al never happened, and base that claim on the proven non-existence of god, you have checked out of the debate. There is nothing further to be said, in a logical manner, to a character like you.
So yes, you are, as I wrote above, a peh tzadi. And that is the outcome of your longwinded obviation.
And this now brings our conversation back to the starting point. All of these things are amazing, yes. But where does any of this doubt come from? It's nothing more than religiously motivated conspiratorial thinking. You think the scientists are lying to you, tricking you. You think of course Noach lived to 950 years and of course Moshe Rabbeinu lived to 120 years, even without having any access to information about disease and nutrition and without any modern day medicine or surgical procedures. And when science says these things are just too crazy to consider as real, the religious mind thinks it's all a conspiracy. Of course evolution is false and of course vaccines are fake and of course the Grand Canyon couldn't just be worn away by a river and of course these dinosaur bones couldn't be 65 million years old. Why? Because of course my parents didn't lie to me. And of course my rebbe didn't either. Because his eyes are pure and his mind is pure and his beard is long and graceful and he is so thoughtful and gentle and spiritual.
Losing religion is terrible. It's worse than losing a parent. Your parents are here for a time, and you need them at first. But then you grow up and you don't really need them, but you want them. But then they leave. And it's sad because you will miss them, and you come to realize that sometime, your kids will lose you and miss you, even though you won't know about it, but you think about it now.
And so we invent all these ideas about how you don't need to worry because you're going to all meet up again. But my point here was that your parents are nothing compared to your identity. Losing your religion deserves so much more mourning than losing parents because your religion is who you are. It's everything. Maybe not when you just go to church once or twice a year, or you're Steven Spielberg or Steven Pinker and religion just means you have a Passover Seder and drink a lot of wine and eat matzah crackers. But when you are Orthodox, every single thing you do and don't do is filtered through the religious lens. It's all encompassing.
You want to eat a cookie? Wait, am I parve? Wait, is it a fast day? Wait, what's the brocha? Wait, which do I want to eat more, the cookie or drink the coke? Which brocha has kadima? Wait, am I being kove'ah seuda? Wait, did I hear kiddush? Wait, what day is it? Wait, is it after shkiah? Wait, did I eat an olive's bulk of cookie? Wait, did I eat the cookie within 2-9 minutes? Wait, am I allowed to eat while walking in the park?
This wasn't to mock Judaism here...these are all very serious OCD behaviors that are not seen as OCD by the religionists because if there is a god and he gave us the rules to follow the rabbis and this is what they told us to do, what could be more important? Nothing. So I won't marry that girl because she's not Jewish or religious. And I won't take that job because I will need to work late on Fridays. This is how we see ourselves and our lives...religion is everything. And to lose it is something that most do not want to do and many simply cannot see themselves doing.
But this was never about wanting. This is not an emotional discussion from the secularists perspective. It's not about revenge against overbearing parents or molesting rabbis or anything like that. Are there individual cases like that and do they number in the dozens or hundreds? Maybe, but that's not the thrust. Parents and mentors really want to know what is fueling the OTD crisis, and I'm sure it's multifactorial. But someone always overlooked is that Judaism is just not compelling. Socially, it's very compelling...being excommunicated is difficult. Losing your identity and your family and your friends and your community...those are very formidable obstacles to OTD. But if people want to be consistent and honest with themselves, they need to argue with their parents that this is not about being secretly gay or just wanting to eat cheeseburgers or sleep with the cute non-Jew girl who works at Starbucks. This is about what are we doing here, and the answer they find themselves with is simply "something very silly."
Quite frankly, you are lucky I value free speech. (Otherwise, I'd be totally in the right to ban you). And the reason I value free speech is because it exposed people for who they are and how they think.
What you have written are total non sequiturs. And Judaism is irrelevant when talking about the appearance of design. Yet you keep bringing it up.
Imagine an invisible person writing. You can analyze the ink, the splots, the speed, but you will not be able to see the writer, yet one can deduce he is there.
Imagine a set of rigged dice. When the odds are constantly being beaten you can assume someone rigged them, despite the possibility it was luck.
Now, let's journey into the past at the origin of life. There is no question in my mind if we would take a video camera and video it happening we would see a totally natural process, as God works through nature. But it is so unlikely we can deduce that there is someone doing the assembling. That is design.
If you do not understand the parable, please explain why. Why is God not inferable when an invisible writer is? We would not call it the writer of the gaps.
>>>Quite frankly, you are lucky I value free speech. (Otherwise, I'd be totally in the right to ban you).
It's curious to me that you think it matters if you have a right to ban me. Obviously, this page is your party and you can invite who you want and ask others to leave. And for some odd reason, you think allowing me to remain shows everyone else who I am and how I think. Isn't that the purpose to speaking? To reveal the way we think?
You've already revealed that you're not ready for these conversations, and everyone can see that. Just like Philosophical Jew wasn't ready, which was why he banned me. But wasn't that the thrust of my entire position? That those who argue find that they can't and then they either give up or run away. Blocking me would be akin to running away. And if you think running away is a reasonable thing to do, then there's nothing else to say because you've revealed who you are. Maybe one day you'll grow up.
So ban me if you think that's reasonable, and I'd like to see 100 comments from all of your readers responding to a new post about your ban. Threated them with bans if you think that's how you can get them to respond. I won't comment, obviously, because I'll be banned, but I am interested to know what everyone else here thinks. And I'm interested to know what they all think of how you think of me. Or you can post about banning me and not ban me, and then I can interact with those who respond. Whatever you'd prefer.
I don't know how Substack works, so if you decide to ban me but you post somewhere else, I will still try respond to your comments because you're a good foil. You say ridiculous things that un-ridiculous people think for unfortunate reasons, and when they hear good arguments against these positions, they can actually change their minds instead of dig in. But I'll never be talking to you...only to them, if that's what you want because you're too uncomfortable hearing differing views and keeping your cool.
I'm sorry, I messed up. I meant to write you accused me of calling others names falsely.
You did not call me name - you've been actually quite good at that, despite your snide accusations against my intelligence, biases, and open-mindedness.
Because you are looking at the smartest guy in the world, looking at the strongest company he built and you are uber impressed! So you are going back in time, trying to see what he did to get to where he is.
But if you do, that's cheating. You can't look back.
You need to go back to when he was a kid and see every step taken. You will not just watch him, but 1 billion kids. You will see some of them die when they are 5 months old, unfortunately, and some of them drop out of school in 8th grade. You will see some of them go to Princeton and Stanford and not become famous or rich. You will end up with 1 billion end points and when you focus on the smartest guy with the strongest company in that way, you will have no recipe for success because things he did were done by other people who didn't achieve his success and things he didn't do that could have conceivably resulted in even greater success. You will point to him as 1-in-a-billion and we could all marvel at him, but there are no miracles here. That's actually just what happens one out of a billion times.
Your misstep here is that, and also this: that you come up with a god concept that is completely unfounded. It's a story that you are bringing to life. It's an alternate parallel universe with witches and wizards that never ever shows itself.
And you keep talking about patterns. So what? Patterns exist in nature. The same thing will show up many times and different ways of solving the same problem will also show up many times. If you're unsophisticated and you've been told that it points to a god, you grow up thinking that. But if you didn't (like people who weren't indoctrinated) then you just grow up thinking, "Wow...you can fit a string 6' long in a super duper tiny box just 10 micrometers in diameter? Who would have thought!"
Neither you nor Thomas read or listen or understand because you are not interested in following a train of thought to see where it goes. You're afraid that if it leads in a direction you don't want you'll be stuck, so you decide where you want to end up first and then backfill. That's not being open minded and honest.
>>>We cannot posit that by the universe
I know. That's exactly my point...you cannot, but you are.
It's an illegal move and you need to recognize that you just don't know what you are pretending to know. Your desires and your emotions don't matter. We just don't have enough information to make a reasonable determination, and so affirming religious truths is bad reason.
OCD has nothing to do with caring about something. It has to do with the care being a loop that does not take 'care' of anything. Locking a door isn't OCD, checking if it is locked and then checking again is, because it does nothing for the locking of the door, or the person's worries.
Your association between the Torah's truth and anti-vax beliefs is another of your mendacious claims.
Basically, your thread shows a lack of clear thinking and the inability to take a matter seriously.
This is why we believe that an atheist is not merely wrong, they are bad-faith actors. It is not a simple miscalculation, it is an unwillingness to take the argument and topic seriously.
>>>Your mislabeling of OCD is insulting to everyone.
#1, you should approach with a little more understanding and grace. Why assume you know when you could ask instead?
#2, I find your selective moral outrage surprising, seeing how many times someone else has used the word 'retarded'
>>>It has to do with the care being a loop that does not take 'care' of anything.
Complying with halacha does not 'take care of anything.' It is doing things with and for your imaginary friend. Every day. Every week. Every year. With fervor and persistence.
I'll admit that I was using the term loosely and not giving a diagnosis, but let's look at the terms here:
Obsessions:
These are persistent, unwanted thoughts, urges, or images that cause significant distress or anxiety.
Common obsessions include fears of contamination, doubts, the need for things to be in order, and aggressive or horrific thoughts.
Compulsions:
These are repetitive behaviors or mental acts that a person feels driven to perform in response to an obsession.
Examples of compulsions include excessive hand-washing, checking things repeatedly, arranging objects in a specific way, and seeking reassurance.
The relative precision with which you'll find people performing religious rituals can be described as compulsion in order meet their obsessive needs. This can and does include:
- Repeating words while davening (especially in קריאת שמע)
- Arranging the הדסים on the right of the לולב and the ערבות on the left
- Shuckling
- Making sure to finish a ברכה abruptly so that no one responds with an אמן חטופה
And in a broader, less diagnostic sense, all ritual habits can be described as OCD because, as you said, "it does nothing for the [equivalent of] locking of the door, or the person's worries." When someone flushes the toilet multiple times, is that a problem? Well, not if something is stuck in the toilet. And persistent and repetitive hand washing is also not a problem if your hands are actually dirty. The problem is, as you said, when a person does things for no apparent reason other than a problem with their mind, not their hands.
That's what religion is. It's a problem in the mind. Reciting prayers to no one over and over, that's like washing your hands over and over even though they're not dirty. Making sure to be super careful that you recite this extra prayer on Tuesday but not before sundown, and that prayer on Friday, but only after sundown, serves no purpose other than to feed this problem of a person's mind. It accomplishes absolutely nothing. Just like flushing a toilet when there's nothing there but water.
>>>Your association between the Torah's truth and anti-vax beliefs is another of your mendacious claims.
I don't really get into anti-vax discussion because of a problem with the subject matter. Science is very difficult to understand, but it's easy for people to be confused when my opponent throws around bad science. It confuses the readers, who are generally not science-minded people, and if they are, they certainly aren't immunologists. I'm also not an immunologist.
When I debate topics against delusional opponents, I'm not arguing to change their minds. I am arguing so that the bystanders can benefit. Often times, the person in the debate with me is too difficult to convince because of their delusions, and so I use them as a foil to inform the less delusional and more open-minded audience. But when it comes to the anti-vax crowd, not only are they usually arguing intensely but they also learned some bad science, and I'll admit that I can't argue it properly. All reasonable people know that vaccines work. Go read the Wikipedia article on Edward Jenner and learn about smallpox. There is no controversy to teach; it's established fact.
Does that mean that Anthony Fauci never lied or misled the public? No. But don't the president and the generals also mislead the public when they hide some information to prevent widespread panic? I find anti-vaxxers so dopey.
I invite you to comb through all of these discussions and find the instances when someone criticizes my critique of Orthodox Judaism and responds to my request for good evidence with good evidence. I dare you to find even once instance. So before you get all hot and bothered about comparing those who defend Torah in a dopey way to those who defend anti-vaxxing in a dopey way, try defending Torah in a non-dopey way.
>>>Basically, your thread shows a lack of clear thinking and the inability to take a matter seriously.
This seems like you're trolling me, so I'll ignore it. I've been nothing but serious.
>>>it is an unwillingness to take the argument and topic seriously
I agree that you have little patience for either mainstream Orthodox or atheist dogma, but it seems that you have endless patience for your version of deistic or whatever theism.
And should you conclude something else is reasonable, I'll have patience for it as well. (Be it atheistic, Orthodox, or even Mormon.) It's when you get to "the one true way" and that "everyone who disagrees with you is an uneducated moron" is where i get testy.
There are a number of fields, such as parenting or business, where there are more ways than one to succeed, and this is because these endeavors are highly irregular with small sample sizes. There are so many variations in parent/child demeanor and ability, and so many variations in market conditions and timing, that these topics are best discussed under "optimal strategies for achieving success" rather than "we did this 10,000 times and let me show you my findings."
I would say that it's because these sorts of disciplines (business success and parenting success) involve so many social scientific factors (psychology, economics, sociology, etc.) that these fields remain in their infancy of thorough observation, documentation and generalizability of cause-effect relationships. Social science is not nearly as replicable or generalizable as pharmacological science, for instance, and so however strange it sounds, I imagine it's technically more simple to cure cancer or get to Mars than it is to figure out the perfect way to interact with people in marriage, parenting and business.
But religion is independent from its practitioners. It's trueness or falsehood does not depend on its rabbis or its priests or its practitioners and worshippers. There is no clear dividing line between cult behavior and religious behavior.
>>>and that "everyone who disagrees with you is an uneducated moron"
And it's not that all religious people are "uneducated morons." But it is the case that all religious people who do not think about these facets of their beliefs are highly gullible. They have been indoctrinated to carve out safe spaces for their religions to inhabit where they can flourish free from rigorous scrutiny.
And it's when religionists insist that regarding certain claims as sacred and holy and therefore exempt from scrutiny that secularists point out that the religionists are lying to themselves. And when discussions like this occur, the religionists either a) make bad arguments and b) think they have cosmic permission to adhere to and follow bad reasoning and c) get upset at the secular conversationalists who merely inform them that their commitments and are mere illusions. As Sam Harris wrote, there can simply be no debts if there are no creditors.
Again, it's evident to people who are interested in discussing the issues that peripheral comments such as the way arguments are discussed and the tone of the arguments frequently come up when the other side has nothing of substance to say.
Please don't take any of my comments as personal attacks. I am you and you are me. We are on the same side. We both want to defend Orthodoxy and save it from the secular onslaught. We both went to live peacefully in the religion we were raised in. But I have recognized that Judaism is no better equipped to defend it's silly positions than all the other silly positions on offer. If you live too close to the center of the bubble, you don't even know that you're in a bubble. And you are just 2 steps behind me, refusing to let go.
Truman wondered how it could be possible that he's living in the Truman Show because it just seems so crazy. "My entire life is an illusion?! Everything I know and love is fake?! How can that really be?!"
These are emotional cries of incredulity but they are not reasonable arguments.
Ivermectin does not cure Covid. There are not enough random, double blind studies to prove Ivermectin works. Besides, Ivermectin is for horses. If Ivermectin was effective there would be no EUA for a Covid "vaccine". Just because millions were cured does not mean Ivermectin works-- merely a coincidence, no scientific validity.
I haven't been following the comments on Yehuda's post, but I'm sorry that that either your exposure to the arguments you reference or your understanding of them has been so misguided. I know this sounds condescending, but so does your post. I really have to get around to writing about the teleological argument one of these days.
I was not responding to the parody. I was responding to your obvious underlying misunderstandings that you constantly pride yourself as having the high ground about. You don't and simply mocking your opponents arguments doesn't change that.
I'm not sure what you mean. I think there is a range of reasonable conclusions a person can draw. I think atheism can be one of them. I am responding solely to the claim it is unreasonable for someone to believe in God, as yehuda does.
I'm not following the back and forth on Yehuda's post, so if you're just responding to a specific thing he said I take it back. But the gist of this post together with other things I have heard from you/you have written suggest that you enjoy strawmanning those that disagree with your highly contentious approaches towards the teleological arguments.
Ok. Never mind. I already regret going to down the ad hominem route, and I'll just have to withhold until I actually work on a substantial response to the arguments from design.
People like ash and myself do not claim moral high ground. We are almost agnostic. We appreciate the atheist arguments and even struggle with some of them.
We just think atheists who claim to be so sure and dogmatistic are equally wrong and close-minded.
This is where you are mistaken. Thinkers like the New Atheists such as Harris and Dawkinsaren't atheists due to conviction or dogma. Frankly, I still don’t understand how you're confused after reading hundreds of Mishenichnas comments. A person becomes an atheist solely because there is no preponderance of evidence compelling enough to justify uprooting their prior assumption of the status quo. To me, that’s what this question ultimately boils down to.
Atheism is the default position just as the default assumption for anything else in the world is nonexistence until proven otherwise. The same way you assume ghosts and unicorns don’t exist without compelling evidence, atheists take the same approach to God. Even if some evidence emerged say, someone saw a horse-like creature with a horn late at night or an ink spill formed an odd, seemingly meaningful pattern you still wouldn’t conclude that belief is justified. The evidence would be ambiguous at best. Likewise, a person should default to non-belief unless the evidence for religion is significantly compelling. Even if the evidence were split 50/50, that still wouldn’t be a valid reason to leap into belief. If you can equally explain any outcome or hypothesis, you have zero knowledge.
It is unfair and frankly, disrespectful to equate atheism with religious dogmatism or closed-mindedness. If you believe there is better evidence in favor of religion, that’s a different discussion. But even Ash acknowledged, "I think there is a range of reasonable conclusions a person can draw. I think atheism can be one of them. I am responding solely to the claim that it is unreasonable for someone to believe in God, as Yehuda does."
This alone shows that there isn’t overwhelming evidence pointing definitively to one side. Would you not say that there is any tzad for the atheist side? Because if you acknowledge even the possibility of an atheist position, then belief becomes unreasonable since alternative explanations exist that you haven't ruled out. That’s why the New Atheists take the position of "I don’t know." Those three words seem incapable of being said by you. And that’s why serious intellectuals won’t take you seriously which might explain why Mishenichnas speaks to you as if you are an am ha’aretz.
The New Atheists most assuredly do not take this position.
I should pin your posts because they illustrate the absurdity of the position.
Agnosticism should be the default position. But there is evidence towards a God such as design, revelation, argument from consciousness, and others. You may have responses to those arguments, stronger or weaker, but it is deliberately dishonest to say there is no evidence towards a God. There os., and you and I disagree on whether that evidence is strong enough.
The parody expressed here illustrated that no evidence is strong enough, and matter how much the theist brings, he will always be dismissed by the new atheists of having no evidence.
What you expressed and what is received is the conundrum indeed, I'm finding myself liking both sides arguments.
I'm dismissive of jezeusian mythology due to it being used as an attack tool against Judaism and it's beyond easy to listen to Rabbi singer and disassemble it as it's presented.
Being religiously and observantly Jewish involves different mental gymnastics to juggle the juxtaposition of the suffering and the truth of Judaism which seem to be ongoing fulfilling a timeline and seemingly repudiating Christianity since 1948 specifically.
Everyone who concludes something based on logic and reasoning thinks *their* reasoning is correct. What makes it dogmatic is when you become so convinced that your position is true that anyone else must of missed it. I think the God hypothesis has some merit, but coupled with the kuzari argument, a strong mesorah and the teachings about this "spiritual world" (being understood beyond the babyish version of physical placeholders) has a lot of merit. That's not lack of evidence, that's lack of you trying to hear another side. We can argue if this case we make suffices, especially given the counter evidence from the undeniable scientific account, but that would be a discussion, not a dogmatic, close-minded finality.
And if you read my words at all you'd see i think atheism has a lot of merit. My issue here (and ash's) is the dogmatism and finality.
I'm not denying the validity of your God hypothesis arguments (although there is plenty to talk about). All I'm saying is that the mere existance of arguments in favor of God doesn't justify the belief in God if there are other plausible explanations out there. For every argument in favor of God there is one against it. Since not believing, or in other words being agnostic, is the default position, the burden of proof to escape the agnostic mindset requires more then simply positing various arguments in favor for God. The mere existance of arguments doesn't get you to belief unless you don't really start off as a non-believer/agnostic.
" The same way you assume ghosts and unicorns don’t exist without compelling evidence, atheists take the same approach to God."
This is simply not true. There is PLENTY of evidence.
I'll tell you about some I gathered myself.
I have an interest in long-distance infrared photography. I have equipment that can see Very Very Far. I post videos of my work on Youtube (I am behind).
From where I work in the Neve Tzedek neighborhood in Tel Aviv, I can record the two gas platforms off the coast of Ashkelon, 57km away. I am interested in further. These are practice.
Interestingly, from that distance and my elevation of ~80m, 50m of each platform should be obscured behind the curvature of the earth, yet it isn't. You can see the legs descend to the water.
Someone's model of our world is wrong, and it ain't mine. I gather actual evidence. They blather. So do you.
Those atheists have a real problem. But they will just repeat ad nauseam the same logic as displayed in this piece. The last thing they will ever say is some form of "I don't know." Scratch one and invariably you discover their opinions were formed in their youth and never reexamined.
Your argument was that by mathematical induction (!!!!), since there are so many things that we are able to explain naturalistically and we continue to do so, therefore we can predict that we will be able to explain the entire universe naturalistically. QED.
No that was just the discussion of God of the gaps. I explicitly conceded in that post that God of the gaps alone would not be sufficient to dismiss the appearance of design unless it's for a few particulars.
Putting aside the humor for a moment, do you really think that just because the ink spelled out “ghosts” as the cause, that’s reason to think a ghost did it?
What is the phrase? "Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action?" I'd say that if the ink spelled "ghosts are real" three times while a writer was trying to write about the non-existence of ghosts, it would be reasonable to say "this was done by ghosts."
Well, aliens would still have a spooky action at a distance problem. As for a sorcerer trying to trick everyone into thinking that ghosts are real, well, that's also a possibility, but why would the sorcerer only do it when someone tries to write that ghosts don't exist? Wouldn't the sorcerer's trick be better if they were trying to convince people that ghosts exist all the time? And what would the sorcerer have to gain by breaking the Masquerade in the first place? It seems like ghosts should be placed higher on the list of possible causes than sorcerers.
Why would ghosts only want us to know about them when we write about them?
Maybe sorcerera know people like you will mistakenly believe that ghosts did it more if they timed it well. Maybe they are just fucking around?
I don’t know but when we’re talking about new phenomenon that we barely know anything about, I think to assume it’s the thing that the words claim is a weak assumption.
Well, moving an object larger than an entangled quantum particle without directly acting on it is a problem with our understanding of physics. Then, you have to form it into a specific pattern. Quantum entanglement applying to objects larger than the quantum scale is like, Ant-Man and the Wasp level stuff, very soft sci-fi. Since "aliens" was the most sci-fi of the three explanations, I was presuming that aliens would fall into a scientific paradigm.
"Why would ghosts only want us to know about them when we write about them?"
Well, think of it from the ghost's perspective. You're invisible, you're trying to pass on, but you can't because you have unfinished business, and there's a respected scientist who is trying to write that you don't exist. The human reaction (ghosts are basically human unless specified otherwise, after all) is probably to be fairly annoyed at best.
"Maybe sorcerera know people like you will mistakenly believe that ghosts did it more if they timed it well. Maybe they are just fucking around?"
Breaching the Masquerade is still a problem for the sorcerer. I think it's safe to say, at least in the First World, that most people don't believe in sorcerers or ghosts. But if the possibility of ghosts is proven, then that opens the door to "everything supernatural that we previously thought impossible is possible," and brings a risk to a sorcerer, as governments are naturally going to attempt to destroy a power they can't control.
I said that the words were unnecessary that is all
To include sorcery in the category of ghosts which many people have seen and I know of no one who's had a sorcerer conjure up any spells though I've done it without consequence because it's not real but the phenomenon of ghosts is cross-culturally seen by many whereas you brought up the strawman of sorcery
While this post is directed at most of the New Atheist's arguments, I was heavily inspired by Yehuda Mishenichnas's comments towards me in the article here:
https://simonfurst.substack.com/p/universal-acid
I did my time with mishenechnas av, to absolutely no avail, and I've been wondering if it's just me but he is so clearly presupposed in his conclusion that he isn't arguing and thinking of you as a person with thoughts and arguments to deal with, rather as a person to refute and educate. There's no conversation. Many atheists are like that and you can see it when they project their experience onto you - "I used to be like you until I was so fortunately enlightened so if you'd only hear me out you'd get it too." They have no tzad that there can actually be an enlightened and reasonable response and you must be indoctrinated if you conclude differently than they. Nebach. Don't water your breath until you can get him to stop lecturing so much and actually discuss....
As far as this article goes, I love it (!) even though an argument can be made against it. But it actually does hold up to bring out the point you're constantly trying to make about people like Dawkins equating God to fairies, regardless of what Simon or any atheist might respond that to them it ultimately it's the same RL.
The reason these atheists want to project their experiences onto you is because they want to highlight that they too once held religious beliefs deeply and sincerely. They too held the same dogmas and believed the same proofs that you currently use in your arguments.
They were part of the same "indoctrination," convinced of the same truths, until they began to question.
I do not mean just addressing the big religious questions like free will and the existence of God, but really grappling with their core beliefs and their biases that resulted in their religious conclusions. This is a process that most people would want to avoid for fear of coming to insights that do not fit in the bounds of their societal norms.
I understand it often comes off as arrogance, but it's not about thinking that people are unenlightened. It is a genuine hope that people would consider that they may be mistaken, like they once were.
Rationality is a tool, not a goal in itself. The goal is to find the Truth.
I agree, but I could make the same argument back. I am very well read on the atheist viewpoint and share all the same info they are privy to that led them to atheism. Yet I am not an atheist. I contend that I have information that atheist hasn't properly considered and if he would, chances are he'd side with me. I would never go down that route precisely because that is preachy and unopen-minded and I understand that I don't know everything and I am giving it my best bet. Anyone arguing with an atheist who thinks screaming "if only you were exposed to more torah" would get him anywhere, even if he's right, that's not a discussion. That's a speech and it will get nobody anywhere and everybody nowhere.
1) It hasn't happened yet, it just leads to nihilism
2) Why should one find The Truth(r)?
The fact that you respond so quickly proves my previous point from our discussion on Mishenichnas' comment section.
This is not about having a reaction; it's about thinking critically and trying to understand opposing perspectives that are brought up.
Immediately assuming that your religious view is the only valid one, without giving real thought to possible rebuttals, is intellectually lazy. You clearly do not put much thought in trying to understand other peoples opinions, which is reinforced by the fact that you respond within seconds
So I repeat: Give yourself some time away from posting. Try to *really* ask yourself what you think you know and *how* you think you know it. I am certain (if you are really honest with yourself) that you will uncover some interesting new perspectives.
What a telling comment! You think this is the first time ash ever thought about this? The hubris man
I didn't come to the same conclusion as him, so I must be an ignorant deluded soul who just needs to think more.
lol
I take it from your lack of seriousness to my comments that you will not try the mental exercises that I suggested.
Pinning Happys version here:
https://open.substack.com/pub/irrationalistmodoxism/p/death-from-the-sky?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=33pit
I used to call Dawkins and Hitchens atheist kiruv workers.
This is what is making me increasingly frustrated with atheism. To say that you have doubts about God is understable, but to mock those who are sure as having no proof? Did you know that if you unraveled your entire DNA it would stretch to two meters long? No, that's not a typo. You have 2 meters of DNA in every one of your somatic cells. Try doing that by hand. But somehow it's ridiculous to believe a creator is necessary.
READ THIS FIRST
Humans have about 3.2 billion base pairs per nucleus, which would extend about 2 meters if pulled fully apart.
A quick google search reveals that the Tmesipteris oblanceolata fork fern has the longest genome measured so far at around 160 billion base pairs. This would extend about 50 times the length of the human genome, or about 100 meters.
But I don't really see your argument here. Are you just saying that this is amazing? And that amazing = a god? And that a god = let's keep kosher?
"Paley finds a watch and asks how such a thing could have come to be there by chance. Dawkins finds an immense automated factory that blindly constructs watches, and feels that he has completely answered Paley's point."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_Boeing_747_gambit?wprov=sfla1
Posting it for others here. I don't think you have the ability to read it unbiasedly
Is there a question here?
>>>Paley finds a watch
Analogies are great because they can help us understand things in a better way. See things in a different way to better understand what we initially had trouble doing. But the two things being compared are never actually the same and the attempt to to get them to be very similar. But sometimes analogies are unhelpful because they don't fit properly and feel forced. This is one of those times.
Paley wrote: In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there; I might possibly answer, that, for anything I knew to the contrary, it had lain there forever: nor would it perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place; I should hardly think of the answer I had before given, that for anything I knew, the watch might have always been there. ... There must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers, who formed [the watch] for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use. ... Every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature; with the difference, on the side of nature, of being greater or more, and that in a degree which exceeds all computation.
Paley wants us to look at a tree and "see" the tree-maker behind it and he wants us to see a cat and "see" the cat-maker behind it just like when we see a watch we "see" the watchmaker behind it. But why not just say, "but suppose I had found a tree upon the ground."? Why compare a rock to a watch and not a rock to a tree? Because when you see a tree, you don't see apparent design like you do in a watch. Trees come about through natural means, as do rocks, and watches do not. That's the point of the analogy, but how do we know what to put into the rock category and vs. what goes in the watch category?
So I think Paley's analogy suffers greatly. According to Wikipedia, Paley "went on to argue that the complex structures of living things and the remarkable adaptations of plants and animals required an intelligent designer. He believed the natural world was the creation of God and showed the nature of the creator."
These relationship of these sentences #1 and #2 are not intended to be read as #1 informing #2. He didn't believe in creation because he found complex structures. He was a vicar and then an archdeacon who believed in the Christian god for very bad reasons, and then he backfilled this belief with an argument from design.
Furthermore, he misunderstands some fundamental things about the apparent design. He was not privy to Darwin's ideas of evolution by natural selection. I think you are similarly uninformed, which is why you think quoting Paley (and Hoyle) is a good idea. They are both bad ideas.
Dawkins dismantled Paley's argument because watches are not biological entities. Whereas a tree comes from a previous tree, which came from a previous tree (and cats have similar lineages, respectively), watches do not. Each watch comes directly from a watchmaker. Any updates in a new watch design come from the mind of the watchmaker, not from previous watches. In this way, the watch-tree-cat analogy is also not analogous. I think it is important for you (and all others) to better understand evolution by natural selection, and only then can it form in your mind as a superior candidate explanation for the great diversity and complexity in biologic life that we observe today.
>>>Boeing 747
And a comment about Hoyle. Hoyle might have been a great physicist, but he's not a biologist and his understanding of biology suffers greatly from this. In a sense, he's like Rabbi Meiselman, who takes his math degree and tries to use it to show that he can speak intelligently about biology, but that's not how science works. When you say good things, they are accepted, but not because you're smart. They are accepted because they are acceptable. When they are not acceptable, they are rejected, no matter how many letters you have after your name.
Fred Hoyle presented a junkyard tornado argument, where he calculated the probability of abiogenesis by comparing it to "a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard...assembl[ing] a Boeing 747 from the materials therein." He compared the chance of obtaining even a single functioning protein by chance combination of amino acids to a solar system full of blind men solving Rubik's Cubes simultaneously. The reason Hoyle's analogies can be immediately dismissed as bad is because it fails to take into account the vast amount of support that evolution proceeds in many smaller stages, each driven by natural selection, rather than by random chance, and over a long period of time, rather than in a single burst. The Boeing 747 analogy is therefore wholly un-analogous.
Scientists familiar with evolutionary biology immediately see the flaw here, but those who don't understand (or don't want to understand) evolutionary biology like to cite Hoyle. From the perspective of those informed about natural selection, anyone citing Hoyle is either ill-informed or acting in bad faith.
The fact that it is natural does not remove the implication it is designed as my story points out. Even if your Daas Torah Dawkins says so.
A watch making machine implies even more design, even if it is natural
Like I said, analogies are nice. But they can only go so far. Sometimes they go astray and this is one of those times. Also, Dawkins can be wrong and he invites everyone to point those instances out to him.
>>>The fact that it is natural does not remove the implication it is designed
As science understands it, the design apparent in biological organisms and systems, from the cellular level to the way groups of species interact in ecological arrangements, needs no greater explanation than what we have already discovered. That being said, we can only understand what we see and not what we don't see. So the more we learn, the more we increased the denominator of unknown and the more we'll need to fill in the numerator of what we do know relative to that.
>>>as my story points out
And as I pointed out before as well, you are conflating design with design. In one sense, "design" means that we observe a pattern. It can be defined as "an arrangement of lines or shapes that form a pattern or decoration" but it can also mean "an arrangement of lines or shapes created to form a pattern or decoration." We use design loosely like this.
And you here construct a catch-22. If you are using the first sense I referred to above, then you can't get to the second sense without good evidence for a designer, a creator. And if you are using the second sense, then you are merely asserting that there's a designer, which is an illegal move.
How many creationists are irreligious? I don't doubt that there can be one, but it's informative, I think, that the vast majority are religious. I contend that the rationale for their creationist views are retroactive backfill of their religious presuppositions.
>>>watch making machine
I will concede that this was a mistake on the part of Dawkins. To continue the analogy, which was a bad one in the first place, only made it even more un-analogous.
I will not go into great depth here, even though you said that you are not turned off by my long responses, because you have already read the science (even if you haven't understood it), and if anyone else is interested, it would be better for them to message me directly so I could tailor the information to the voids in their understand. Broadly, though I will say this:
There are 6 uncontroversial statements that science makes. Of course, someone can always take issue with anything, but by and large, those who embrace science and do not make crazy religious assertions would agree that these 5 things are
1) Individuals of the same population differ. So some exhibit more X and some exhibit less X, while most are average. These differences are manifestations of the individuals genetic makeup, which is inheritable.
2) There are advantages and disadvantages related to these variations when it comes to reproduction. So being faster or stronger or more colorful can result in more instances of successful mating.
3) It follows from 1 and 2 that when organisms are better suited to reproduce AND it's inheritable genetic material that codes for these advantages, that transfer of this generations genetic material into the next generation is biased in favor of the better genes. This principle of evolution is referred to as non-random mating that leads to preferred genetic heredity.
4) Small genetic improvements can be accumulated over long periods of time to result in massive changes over time. Even at the time of Darwin, this wasn't fully understood because the field of genetics hadn't yet been fleshed out. Mendel was his contemporary and they did not share information in a bi-directional manner. The new perspective, referred to as neo-Darwinism ("new Darwinism") is the same ideas but with so much more explanatory power. So, for instance, a donkey and a manatee look very dissimilar. So do a mouse and a frog. For all their similarities, a chimpanzee and a human look very different. But the differences we see when we look at the organism are called phenotypic differences. It's hard to see how a wing and a flipper or a lizard body vs. a mammal body vs. a fish body are similar. But genetics is like a recipe, and a very small difference in the recipe can change a cake to a pie or a pie to a soup. The genetic code is apparently not infinitely malleable (see the amazing chapter on shells in Climbing Mount Improbable) but it's definitely more malleable than anyone would have imagined, and it has great explanatory power when it comes to variability between species.
5) The minor genetic differences (genotype) that manifest as minor body-plan differences (phenotype) can be compared and traced. Genetic segments can double or switch, reverse and be deleted to added. They can jump from one place to another, and I'm sure through additional methods we have yet to discover and understand. An analogy I like to use is construction. Someone can look at a ranch-style house and a 28-story building (or a 180-story skyscraper) and think that one is so different than the other. Yes, they are. Phenotypically, they appear vastly different. But what goes into making a 28-story building? I am obviously simplifying things massively, but for the purposes of this discussion, a 28-story building can be described as 28 ranch-style homes built one on top of another. And on some floors, they add some bathrooms. On other floors, they have no internal walls and it's a giant common ballroom or lobby. It's just a matter of moving bricks and steel, sheetrock and wires and pipes. If you don't have vision because you don't understand how plans are drawn up, it could seem that everything's so different, but if you understand how construction is done, it's a simple thing (at least conceptually) to see that construction is construction is construction. Take this back to the genetic code and flippers and tails and beaks and immune systems are all just different arrangements of the same A-C-T-G nucleotides. That's why evolution, when properly understood, is so elegant.
6) This will all take a tremendous amount of time. But the time is there. There's no good reason to think that the time available for the accumulation of genetic changes is around 6,000 years.
>>>The fact that it is natural does not remove the implication it is designed
Now, a word about this. Religionists, and the loudest have been the Catholics (Jews are generally quite by comparison), at first fought against all of these new idea. The question of what orbits around what and what causes earthquakes and volcanoes was a question. It's now still a question, but we also now have answers. Where does the rain come from and what causes disease. We don't have all the answers, of course. But that doesn't mean we should pretend that multiple layers of answers are necessary when fewer will suffice.
One can deny evolution by natural selection, or one can say, "God works in natural ways." One can deny the list of 6 things I just covered, or one can say, "Yes, he works through nature."
When we assert unfalsifiable things, we are (by definition) saying things that we can't know. That's not a secular claim I just made, but a claim of reason. When you keep things in the fridge, they spoil more slowly. But if I keep some in the fridge and keep some out of the fridge and they spoil at the same speed, what is the fridge doing? Just saying that it helps doesn't help the argument. It needs to be shown to help. If unfalsifiable claims are made, they are not deserving of consideration, other than to put them aside until some method of falsifying can be developed and performed.
When I say natural, I just mean that we observe it in nature. And we do not observe a master of the universe. And so the reasonable thing to do is speak of nature (that we observe) and not of the master of the universe (who we do not observe). It's really as simple as that.
So yes, we see patterns in nature. But they are not designs, if by design, you mean to smuggle in a designer of those designs. Rather, it refers to the first type of design, which is merely patterns of things, but not the intention of the patterns.
I don’t consider myself a creationist. I accept an old earth, natural evolution, and pretty much science as a whole. I think you keep conflating my arguments with the classic design arguments, because you would prefer to lecture instead of attempt to understand.
You also keep assuming I am trying to assert some sort of monotheistic Mosaic God while I am not. I freely assert that you could use my arguments for pretty much any God and the simulation hypothesis. It is merely from revelation that I know anything about God and his nature.
Can you attempt to argue from these constraints instead of LLMing into your old classic spiel how you are wise and enlightened and everyone else is wrong?
BTW, if I doubted revelation - and I have many times gone back and forth on this issue - I would be some sort of deist or simulationist. Definitely not an atheist, which is even more illogical.
READ THIS SECOND
I didn't want to edit the other response, and you didn't yet reply, so I will leave a new response.
>>>To say that you have doubts about God is understandable
That's all that most secularists will say. Their position is that there is doubt, but in such plentiful amounts that the god hypothesis is seen as no different than the mystical Indian guru hypothesis.
>>>but to mock those who are sure as having no proof?
I would like to dissect this comment of yours for greater clarity. What do you mean by "mock" and what do you mean by "proof"?
To mock would be to "tease or laugh at in a scornful or contemptuous manner," and I don't think that's what anyone here from the secular party was doing to anyone in the religious party, with some minor exceptions. In my very article, I write about how the ideas are fair game but that we ought not to attack people personally, especially since they are victims of their own indoctrination. After providing clear arguments against the god hypothesis and the religionists continue on with their same lame responses, the attacks get more sharp, but I really saw all attacks to be on the faulty thought process, not on the people having them.
Except for Ash, who got very rough and made personal attacks. Then people started attacking him personally. But is it a personal attack to call someone "childish" or "silly"?
And by proof, I figure you mean evidence. As stated in the article, and so I will not rehash it now, proofs are good for math because numbers and their relationships are constant. But we're not looking for proofs here; rather we are looking for evidence. When the evidence for outweighs the evidence against in a certain ratio, we begin to generalize and say that something is true. But we should always be open to new data and reinterpretation of the data. This is the way science works and this is the beauty of science. You win points by proving yourself wrong if you find sufficient evidence to overturn previously held firm understandings of the way things are or the way things work. Not so in religion, where nothing is known, nothing is investigated, everything seems to be declared into existence and no one is ever open to changing their minds about any of their core tenets and by extension, most of their thoughts related to these tenets.
>>>Did you know...
I wonder, True Settler, if you can appreciate the following comments in the manner in which they are being given: I am trying to be calm and compassionate, thoughtful and gentle. But you made a glaring error and I wanted to point it out to you.
You complain that conversation here between secularists and religionists are upsetting to you because it's fine to not believe in god, but it's not fine to mock those who do believe strongly as having no proof. And then you make the most ridiculous jump to a non sequitur. What does DNA have to do with god? Absolutely nothing. It's such a classic comment from a layman and it's so stale. And that's why secularists mock the positions of religionists so harshly...because their arguments are so transparently silly. And their grasp of science is as well.
DNA gets a lot of press. It's famous! But a lot of very technically complicated biological and chemical entities and reactions and phenomena are superbly wondrous, and yet you make no mention of them. To suggest that the length of the DNA in each cell is too magnificent a fact to behold without it pointing to a god is, in the mind of a secularist, a completely erratic and airheaded approach to understanding both cell biology and god. Secularists would expect such foolishness from someone like Rabbis Jonathan Rietti or Paysach Krohn, who are clearly ill-informed when it comes to science and came across this information in a children's science picture book published by Dorling Kindersley.
Now that you are aware that this was a silly move, will you retract? Will you continue this conversation? This is not meant as a brutish challenge, but as a sincere question. What does someone who says something ridiculous do when the ridiculousness of their comment is explained? If they apologize and pivot, then ok. If they back down and reorient and even change their position, then even better. I mean, if this was really the best reason you had, and you now see that's it's a bad argument, then shouldn't a change in evidence result in a change in your position, that was hopefully based on the evidence you were working with?
But if the person who makes silly comments continues to advance their silly position even after their silly rationale was undermined, what does it say about their position and what does it say about them? Is it still just ok to attack their position as silly? When can the person be labeled a silly person with a silly mind?
I don't know. I don't know you. And I really wasn't trying to hurt you here. I was, however, trying to explain how the conversation progresses from calm and kind to attacks. When someone does what you did, and thinks that talking about how we can fit so much DNA in a cell is at all indicative of the divine, it's not a serious conversation between equally prepared sides of the argument. And that's fine, all are welcome here. And I won't accuse you of being pretentious, or even arrogant, but there was arrogance in your post. Because instead of asking, you were telling. Instead of being open minded, you reported a finding and somehow jumped to some wild conclusion that doesn't at all follow, and then you wonder why it's so difficult for these two sides to have productive conversations.
When you remark about the wonder of the DNA in the nucleus, where precisely does that awesome magnificence turn into the need for magical thinking? Yes, human DNA is 2 meters long, but it's also 2 nanometers wide. Eukaryotic nuclei are about 5-20 micrometers. There are 1000 nanometers in a micrometer, so some rough math gives us 5,000-10,000 nanometer nuclei diameters, and DNA is folded up. Now I'm not a cell biologist, but I do know that DNA is folded up and coiled and supercoiled numerous times. I leave you and everyone else to read up on it on Wikipedia. Furthermore, diameters are 2D while nucleus volumes are 3D, and I am also not a mathematician, but you can find the information online to convert diameters to volumes of a sphere.
I wonder, do you think this is not possible? Are you questioning if the math works out? Or are you just baffled by how amazing it is that such a long thread, so to speak, can be bunched up into such a tiny box?
Yes, the universe is quite amazing. DNA, for some reason, is harped on, but someone in science can tell immediately when someone who doesn't really know about or understand science tries to talk about science because they talk about DNA. Another thing they talk about is astronomy. It's quite common to hear religious apologists talk about how fast the earth is spinning (1000 mph) or how fast the earth revolves around the sun (67,000 mph). You hardly ever hear about how fast the entire solar system is revolving around the center of the Milky Way galaxy (448,000 mph) because when you're dealing with non-science people, they don't even know what the Milky Way galaxy is or that we're a part of it.
And if your point was to show how necessarily magical (divine) it is to fit a 6' genome into a tiny cell is, why wouldn't you simply google if there are any longer genomes? It's not like the longest genome is 12% longer. It's a little less than 5000% larger! That's ridiculous!! It's a number so long that no one can comprehend it. If you think it's a puzzle to fit 6' of DNA into a nucleus, consider 300' of DNA. But then again, where do we get these numbers? Did you measure this yourself? Do you have a microscope and you just came up with this suspicious finding?
No, you can read about how long the genome is online, and you can read about the sizes of cells and their nuclei. You can also read, in the same place, explanations of how the DNA can fit. Do you think the science (meaning observation and documentation) is good and real here, but not there? If you don't think the genome can fit and science is full of garbage, then maybe the genome is not really 6' long in a human cell.
What a confusing thought process, from someone with an obvious belief in his own ability to argue.
Seeing as the author is a 'non-science person' (sic), his claims from DNA are just wrong. And his claims from DNA are wrong because he could have said better.
Seriously?!
Then I went over to his megilla against Judaism, and I was even more pleasantly surprised at the rank foolishness. It is impossible to even make this stuff up.
Example No. 1 - The story with Eliyahu and the Nevi'ei Haba'al didn't happen. Proof - there is no evidence for the existence of God, so it couldn't have happened.
To think that characters like these are allowed to vote, write on blogs, and masquerade as functioning humans is an affront to human intelligence the world over.
This was after he finished claiming that we shouldn't attack Dawkins personally, because we should just focus on his claims. He follows that by cheerfully telling us what 'Orthodoxy tends to do', with no explanation as to how he can backtrack so seamlessly.
It may not be required for a person to be a halfwit illogical peh tzadi to be an atheist, but in this case it certainly helped. (Yes, I did not pretend to be a nice guy and make accusations behind a veneer of civility. When you spew feces, anything but flies is inappropriate.)
>>>What a confusing thought process, from someone with an obvious belief in his own ability to argue.
Let's see if you spend at least as much time arguing the points as you do attacking me.
>>>Seeing as the author is a 'non-science person' (sic), his claims from DNA are just wrong. And his claims from DNA are wrong because he could have said better.
I don't understand your point here. Are you talking about vaccines here? I'm not saying that I accept bad arguments or refuse to accept good arguments. I'm saying that a) bad arguments in the science realm can be persuasive to non-scientists because they are full of sciency words and b) I'm not sufficiently informed about immunology to argue the points cogently.
>>>Then I went over to his megilla against Judaism, and I was even more pleasantly surprised at the rank foolishness. It is impossible to even make this stuff up.
More attacking me. When do we get to the issues?
>>>Example No. 1 - The story with Eliyahu and the Nevi'ei Haba'al didn't happen. Proof - there is no evidence for the existence of God, so it couldn't have happened.
Your reading comprehension suffers from religious delusion. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Where's the evidence that this happened, other than a story in a book? Claims made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
>>>To think that characters like these are allowed to vote, write on blogs, and masquerade as functioning humans is an affront to human intelligence the world over.
More attacks on me, and zero on the actual target.
>>>This was after he finished claiming that we shouldn't attack Dawkins personally, because we should just focus on his claims. He follows that by cheerfully telling us what 'Orthodoxy tends to do', with no explanation as to how he can backtrack so seamlessly.
More still.
>>>It may not be required for a person to be a halfwit illogical peh tzadi to be an atheist, but in this case it certainly helped. (Yes, I did not pretend to be a nice guy and make accusations behind a veneer of civility. When you spew feces, anything but flies is inappropriate.)
You're an even better foil than Ash, Zundel. Please make a substantive point.
The Mishna in Pirkei Avos, that we read in Shul after Mincha on summer Shabbasos, tells us ודע מה שתשיב לאפיקורס.
Yet the Mishna fails to continue and tell us what to tell them.
Why?
Because the kind of thing you are supposed to tell them is not the kind of thing you can say out loud in Shul.
The point here is that one might, with a certain trepidation born of propriety, observe that your claims and arguments have inadvertently aligned you with an archetype long celebrated in the annals of colloquial discourse—an individual whose comportment evokes, shall we say, a metaphorical allusion to that particular appendage of masculine physiology, which, in the vernacular of the less discreet, is oft invoked to signify a regrettable deficiency in both wisdom and refinement; a reference, I hasten to add, that I deploy only with the utmost reluctance and in deference to the exigencies of illustrative clarity.
Otherwise known as a peh tzadi.
If you could claim unequivocally that the story with the Nevi'ei Haba'al never happened, and base that claim on the proven non-existence of god, you have checked out of the debate. There is nothing further to be said, in a logical manner, to a character like you.
So yes, you are, as I wrote above, a peh tzadi. And that is the outcome of your longwinded obviation.
You should just write putz. I don't think Yehuda has the ability to figure out what a peh tzadi is.
Please make a reasonable argument. Your דברי תורה are unnecessary and irrelevant.
READ THIS THIRD
And this now brings our conversation back to the starting point. All of these things are amazing, yes. But where does any of this doubt come from? It's nothing more than religiously motivated conspiratorial thinking. You think the scientists are lying to you, tricking you. You think of course Noach lived to 950 years and of course Moshe Rabbeinu lived to 120 years, even without having any access to information about disease and nutrition and without any modern day medicine or surgical procedures. And when science says these things are just too crazy to consider as real, the religious mind thinks it's all a conspiracy. Of course evolution is false and of course vaccines are fake and of course the Grand Canyon couldn't just be worn away by a river and of course these dinosaur bones couldn't be 65 million years old. Why? Because of course my parents didn't lie to me. And of course my rebbe didn't either. Because his eyes are pure and his mind is pure and his beard is long and graceful and he is so thoughtful and gentle and spiritual.
Losing religion is terrible. It's worse than losing a parent. Your parents are here for a time, and you need them at first. But then you grow up and you don't really need them, but you want them. But then they leave. And it's sad because you will miss them, and you come to realize that sometime, your kids will lose you and miss you, even though you won't know about it, but you think about it now.
And so we invent all these ideas about how you don't need to worry because you're going to all meet up again. But my point here was that your parents are nothing compared to your identity. Losing your religion deserves so much more mourning than losing parents because your religion is who you are. It's everything. Maybe not when you just go to church once or twice a year, or you're Steven Spielberg or Steven Pinker and religion just means you have a Passover Seder and drink a lot of wine and eat matzah crackers. But when you are Orthodox, every single thing you do and don't do is filtered through the religious lens. It's all encompassing.
You want to eat a cookie? Wait, am I parve? Wait, is it a fast day? Wait, what's the brocha? Wait, which do I want to eat more, the cookie or drink the coke? Which brocha has kadima? Wait, am I being kove'ah seuda? Wait, did I hear kiddush? Wait, what day is it? Wait, is it after shkiah? Wait, did I eat an olive's bulk of cookie? Wait, did I eat the cookie within 2-9 minutes? Wait, am I allowed to eat while walking in the park?
This wasn't to mock Judaism here...these are all very serious OCD behaviors that are not seen as OCD by the religionists because if there is a god and he gave us the rules to follow the rabbis and this is what they told us to do, what could be more important? Nothing. So I won't marry that girl because she's not Jewish or religious. And I won't take that job because I will need to work late on Fridays. This is how we see ourselves and our lives...religion is everything. And to lose it is something that most do not want to do and many simply cannot see themselves doing.
But this was never about wanting. This is not an emotional discussion from the secularists perspective. It's not about revenge against overbearing parents or molesting rabbis or anything like that. Are there individual cases like that and do they number in the dozens or hundreds? Maybe, but that's not the thrust. Parents and mentors really want to know what is fueling the OTD crisis, and I'm sure it's multifactorial. But someone always overlooked is that Judaism is just not compelling. Socially, it's very compelling...being excommunicated is difficult. Losing your identity and your family and your friends and your community...those are very formidable obstacles to OTD. But if people want to be consistent and honest with themselves, they need to argue with their parents that this is not about being secretly gay or just wanting to eat cheeseburgers or sleep with the cute non-Jew girl who works at Starbucks. This is about what are we doing here, and the answer they find themselves with is simply "something very silly."
Quite frankly, you are lucky I value free speech. (Otherwise, I'd be totally in the right to ban you). And the reason I value free speech is because it exposed people for who they are and how they think.
What you have written are total non sequiturs. And Judaism is irrelevant when talking about the appearance of design. Yet you keep bringing it up.
Imagine an invisible person writing. You can analyze the ink, the splots, the speed, but you will not be able to see the writer, yet one can deduce he is there.
Imagine a set of rigged dice. When the odds are constantly being beaten you can assume someone rigged them, despite the possibility it was luck.
Now, let's journey into the past at the origin of life. There is no question in my mind if we would take a video camera and video it happening we would see a totally natural process, as God works through nature. But it is so unlikely we can deduce that there is someone doing the assembling. That is design.
If you do not understand the parable, please explain why. Why is God not inferable when an invisible writer is? We would not call it the writer of the gaps.
>>>Quite frankly, you are lucky I value free speech. (Otherwise, I'd be totally in the right to ban you).
It's curious to me that you think it matters if you have a right to ban me. Obviously, this page is your party and you can invite who you want and ask others to leave. And for some odd reason, you think allowing me to remain shows everyone else who I am and how I think. Isn't that the purpose to speaking? To reveal the way we think?
You've already revealed that you're not ready for these conversations, and everyone can see that. Just like Philosophical Jew wasn't ready, which was why he banned me. But wasn't that the thrust of my entire position? That those who argue find that they can't and then they either give up or run away. Blocking me would be akin to running away. And if you think running away is a reasonable thing to do, then there's nothing else to say because you've revealed who you are. Maybe one day you'll grow up.
So ban me if you think that's reasonable, and I'd like to see 100 comments from all of your readers responding to a new post about your ban. Threated them with bans if you think that's how you can get them to respond. I won't comment, obviously, because I'll be banned, but I am interested to know what everyone else here thinks. And I'm interested to know what they all think of how you think of me. Or you can post about banning me and not ban me, and then I can interact with those who respond. Whatever you'd prefer.
I don't know how Substack works, so if you decide to ban me but you post somewhere else, I will still try respond to your comments because you're a good foil. You say ridiculous things that un-ridiculous people think for unfortunate reasons, and when they hear good arguments against these positions, they can actually change their minds instead of dig in. But I'll never be talking to you...only to them, if that's what you want because you're too uncomfortable hearing differing views and keeping your cool.
I would be right to ban you because you called me names on my own stack - which I haven't done to you (yet). I won't though.
It has nothing to do with your arguments.
Oh...I'm sorry about that. Can you please remind me or show me? I actually do not recall.
I'm sorry, I messed up. I meant to write you accused me of calling others names falsely.
You did not call me name - you've been actually quite good at that, despite your snide accusations against my intelligence, biases, and open-mindedness.
Because you are looking at the smartest guy in the world, looking at the strongest company he built and you are uber impressed! So you are going back in time, trying to see what he did to get to where he is.
But if you do, that's cheating. You can't look back.
You need to go back to when he was a kid and see every step taken. You will not just watch him, but 1 billion kids. You will see some of them die when they are 5 months old, unfortunately, and some of them drop out of school in 8th grade. You will see some of them go to Princeton and Stanford and not become famous or rich. You will end up with 1 billion end points and when you focus on the smartest guy with the strongest company in that way, you will have no recipe for success because things he did were done by other people who didn't achieve his success and things he didn't do that could have conceivably resulted in even greater success. You will point to him as 1-in-a-billion and we could all marvel at him, but there are no miracles here. That's actually just what happens one out of a billion times.
Your misstep here is that, and also this: that you come up with a god concept that is completely unfounded. It's a story that you are bringing to life. It's an alternate parallel universe with witches and wizards that never ever shows itself.
And you keep talking about patterns. So what? Patterns exist in nature. The same thing will show up many times and different ways of solving the same problem will also show up many times. If you're unsophisticated and you've been told that it points to a god, you grow up thinking that. But if you didn't (like people who weren't indoctrinated) then you just grow up thinking, "Wow...you can fit a string 6' long in a super duper tiny box just 10 micrometers in diameter? Who would have thought!"
We cannot posit that by the universe, because only one universe exists. You can posit a multiverse without evidence but that is cheating
Neither you nor Thomas read or listen or understand because you are not interested in following a train of thought to see where it goes. You're afraid that if it leads in a direction you don't want you'll be stuck, so you decide where you want to end up first and then backfill. That's not being open minded and honest.
>>>We cannot posit that by the universe
I know. That's exactly my point...you cannot, but you are.
It's an illegal move and you need to recognize that you just don't know what you are pretending to know. Your desires and your emotions don't matter. We just don't have enough information to make a reasonable determination, and so affirming religious truths is bad reason.
Your mislabeling of OCD is insulting to everyone.
OCD has nothing to do with caring about something. It has to do with the care being a loop that does not take 'care' of anything. Locking a door isn't OCD, checking if it is locked and then checking again is, because it does nothing for the locking of the door, or the person's worries.
Your association between the Torah's truth and anti-vax beliefs is another of your mendacious claims.
Basically, your thread shows a lack of clear thinking and the inability to take a matter seriously.
This is why we believe that an atheist is not merely wrong, they are bad-faith actors. It is not a simple miscalculation, it is an unwillingness to take the argument and topic seriously.
>>>Your mislabeling of OCD is insulting to everyone.
#1, you should approach with a little more understanding and grace. Why assume you know when you could ask instead?
#2, I find your selective moral outrage surprising, seeing how many times someone else has used the word 'retarded'
>>>It has to do with the care being a loop that does not take 'care' of anything.
Complying with halacha does not 'take care of anything.' It is doing things with and for your imaginary friend. Every day. Every week. Every year. With fervor and persistence.
I'll admit that I was using the term loosely and not giving a diagnosis, but let's look at the terms here:
Obsessions:
These are persistent, unwanted thoughts, urges, or images that cause significant distress or anxiety.
Common obsessions include fears of contamination, doubts, the need for things to be in order, and aggressive or horrific thoughts.
Compulsions:
These are repetitive behaviors or mental acts that a person feels driven to perform in response to an obsession.
Examples of compulsions include excessive hand-washing, checking things repeatedly, arranging objects in a specific way, and seeking reassurance.
The relative precision with which you'll find people performing religious rituals can be described as compulsion in order meet their obsessive needs. This can and does include:
- Repeating words while davening (especially in קריאת שמע)
- Arranging the הדסים on the right of the לולב and the ערבות on the left
- Shuckling
- Making sure to finish a ברכה abruptly so that no one responds with an אמן חטופה
And in a broader, less diagnostic sense, all ritual habits can be described as OCD because, as you said, "it does nothing for the [equivalent of] locking of the door, or the person's worries." When someone flushes the toilet multiple times, is that a problem? Well, not if something is stuck in the toilet. And persistent and repetitive hand washing is also not a problem if your hands are actually dirty. The problem is, as you said, when a person does things for no apparent reason other than a problem with their mind, not their hands.
That's what religion is. It's a problem in the mind. Reciting prayers to no one over and over, that's like washing your hands over and over even though they're not dirty. Making sure to be super careful that you recite this extra prayer on Tuesday but not before sundown, and that prayer on Friday, but only after sundown, serves no purpose other than to feed this problem of a person's mind. It accomplishes absolutely nothing. Just like flushing a toilet when there's nothing there but water.
>>>Your association between the Torah's truth and anti-vax beliefs is another of your mendacious claims.
I don't really get into anti-vax discussion because of a problem with the subject matter. Science is very difficult to understand, but it's easy for people to be confused when my opponent throws around bad science. It confuses the readers, who are generally not science-minded people, and if they are, they certainly aren't immunologists. I'm also not an immunologist.
When I debate topics against delusional opponents, I'm not arguing to change their minds. I am arguing so that the bystanders can benefit. Often times, the person in the debate with me is too difficult to convince because of their delusions, and so I use them as a foil to inform the less delusional and more open-minded audience. But when it comes to the anti-vax crowd, not only are they usually arguing intensely but they also learned some bad science, and I'll admit that I can't argue it properly. All reasonable people know that vaccines work. Go read the Wikipedia article on Edward Jenner and learn about smallpox. There is no controversy to teach; it's established fact.
Does that mean that Anthony Fauci never lied or misled the public? No. But don't the president and the generals also mislead the public when they hide some information to prevent widespread panic? I find anti-vaxxers so dopey.
I invite you to comb through all of these discussions and find the instances when someone criticizes my critique of Orthodox Judaism and responds to my request for good evidence with good evidence. I dare you to find even once instance. So before you get all hot and bothered about comparing those who defend Torah in a dopey way to those who defend anti-vaxxing in a dopey way, try defending Torah in a non-dopey way.
>>>Basically, your thread shows a lack of clear thinking and the inability to take a matter seriously.
This seems like you're trolling me, so I'll ignore it. I've been nothing but serious.
>>>it is an unwillingness to take the argument and topic seriously
It's almost like you've read nothing I wrote here
That last line!
It's more like he read everything you wrote.
This post is excellent! Well argued!
I agree that you have little patience for either mainstream Orthodox or atheist dogma, but it seems that you have endless patience for your version of deistic or whatever theism.
It's what I conclude is reasonable.
And should you conclude something else is reasonable, I'll have patience for it as well. (Be it atheistic, Orthodox, or even Mormon.) It's when you get to "the one true way" and that "everyone who disagrees with you is an uneducated moron" is where i get testy.
>>>It's when you get to "the one true way"
There are a number of fields, such as parenting or business, where there are more ways than one to succeed, and this is because these endeavors are highly irregular with small sample sizes. There are so many variations in parent/child demeanor and ability, and so many variations in market conditions and timing, that these topics are best discussed under "optimal strategies for achieving success" rather than "we did this 10,000 times and let me show you my findings."
I would say that it's because these sorts of disciplines (business success and parenting success) involve so many social scientific factors (psychology, economics, sociology, etc.) that these fields remain in their infancy of thorough observation, documentation and generalizability of cause-effect relationships. Social science is not nearly as replicable or generalizable as pharmacological science, for instance, and so however strange it sounds, I imagine it's technically more simple to cure cancer or get to Mars than it is to figure out the perfect way to interact with people in marriage, parenting and business.
But religion is independent from its practitioners. It's trueness or falsehood does not depend on its rabbis or its priests or its practitioners and worshippers. There is no clear dividing line between cult behavior and religious behavior.
>>>and that "everyone who disagrees with you is an uneducated moron"
And it's not that all religious people are "uneducated morons." But it is the case that all religious people who do not think about these facets of their beliefs are highly gullible. They have been indoctrinated to carve out safe spaces for their religions to inhabit where they can flourish free from rigorous scrutiny.
And it's when religionists insist that regarding certain claims as sacred and holy and therefore exempt from scrutiny that secularists point out that the religionists are lying to themselves. And when discussions like this occur, the religionists either a) make bad arguments and b) think they have cosmic permission to adhere to and follow bad reasoning and c) get upset at the secular conversationalists who merely inform them that their commitments and are mere illusions. As Sam Harris wrote, there can simply be no debts if there are no creditors.
I think you are strongly strawmanning religious people here and that says more about you than the religious people.
Again, it's evident to people who are interested in discussing the issues that peripheral comments such as the way arguments are discussed and the tone of the arguments frequently come up when the other side has nothing of substance to say.
Please don't take any of my comments as personal attacks. I am you and you are me. We are on the same side. We both want to defend Orthodoxy and save it from the secular onslaught. We both went to live peacefully in the religion we were raised in. But I have recognized that Judaism is no better equipped to defend it's silly positions than all the other silly positions on offer. If you live too close to the center of the bubble, you don't even know that you're in a bubble. And you are just 2 steps behind me, refusing to let go.
Truman wondered how it could be possible that he's living in the Truman Show because it just seems so crazy. "My entire life is an illusion?! Everything I know and love is fake?! How can that really be?!"
These are emotional cries of incredulity but they are not reasonable arguments.
Hmmm...
Ivermectin does not cure Covid. There are not enough random, double blind studies to prove Ivermectin works. Besides, Ivermectin is for horses. If Ivermectin was effective there would be no EUA for a Covid "vaccine". Just because millions were cured does not mean Ivermectin works-- merely a coincidence, no scientific validity.
Sound familiar?
I haven't been following the comments on Yehuda's post, but I'm sorry that that either your exposure to the arguments you reference or your understanding of them has been so misguided. I know this sounds condescending, but so does your post. I really have to get around to writing about the teleological argument one of these days.
Do you lack a sense of humor? This was meant to be funny.
Furthermore, I am quoting the arguments as Yehuda cites them, not accurately. Some of the quotes therein are straight from him.
I was not responding to the parody. I was responding to your obvious underlying misunderstandings that you constantly pride yourself as having the high ground about. You don't and simply mocking your opponents arguments doesn't change that.
I'm not sure what you mean. I think there is a range of reasonable conclusions a person can draw. I think atheism can be one of them. I am responding solely to the claim it is unreasonable for someone to believe in God, as yehuda does.
I'm not following the back and forth on Yehuda's post, so if you're just responding to a specific thing he said I take it back. But the gist of this post together with other things I have heard from you/you have written suggest that you enjoy strawmanning those that disagree with your highly contentious approaches towards the teleological arguments.
This was a fun strawman, yes. No question.
It was in response to my arguments being strawmanned again and again and again. I have little patience for dogma, be it Orthodox or atheist.
Ok. Never mind. I already regret going to down the ad hominem route, and I'll just have to withhold until I actually work on a substantial response to the arguments from design.
BTW, the repetition of this sentence: "Dawkins knows there is no evidence for ghosts, just like there is no evidence for gods or unicorns"
Should tip you off to what inspired me to write this.
People like ash and myself do not claim moral high ground. We are almost agnostic. We appreciate the atheist arguments and even struggle with some of them.
We just think atheists who claim to be so sure and dogmatistic are equally wrong and close-minded.
I feel the same.
This is where you are mistaken. Thinkers like the New Atheists such as Harris and Dawkinsaren't atheists due to conviction or dogma. Frankly, I still don’t understand how you're confused after reading hundreds of Mishenichnas comments. A person becomes an atheist solely because there is no preponderance of evidence compelling enough to justify uprooting their prior assumption of the status quo. To me, that’s what this question ultimately boils down to.
Atheism is the default position just as the default assumption for anything else in the world is nonexistence until proven otherwise. The same way you assume ghosts and unicorns don’t exist without compelling evidence, atheists take the same approach to God. Even if some evidence emerged say, someone saw a horse-like creature with a horn late at night or an ink spill formed an odd, seemingly meaningful pattern you still wouldn’t conclude that belief is justified. The evidence would be ambiguous at best. Likewise, a person should default to non-belief unless the evidence for religion is significantly compelling. Even if the evidence were split 50/50, that still wouldn’t be a valid reason to leap into belief. If you can equally explain any outcome or hypothesis, you have zero knowledge.
It is unfair and frankly, disrespectful to equate atheism with religious dogmatism or closed-mindedness. If you believe there is better evidence in favor of religion, that’s a different discussion. But even Ash acknowledged, "I think there is a range of reasonable conclusions a person can draw. I think atheism can be one of them. I am responding solely to the claim that it is unreasonable for someone to believe in God, as Yehuda does."
This alone shows that there isn’t overwhelming evidence pointing definitively to one side. Would you not say that there is any tzad for the atheist side? Because if you acknowledge even the possibility of an atheist position, then belief becomes unreasonable since alternative explanations exist that you haven't ruled out. That’s why the New Atheists take the position of "I don’t know." Those three words seem incapable of being said by you. And that’s why serious intellectuals won’t take you seriously which might explain why Mishenichnas speaks to you as if you are an am ha’aretz.
The New Atheists most assuredly do not take this position.
I should pin your posts because they illustrate the absurdity of the position.
Agnosticism should be the default position. But there is evidence towards a God such as design, revelation, argument from consciousness, and others. You may have responses to those arguments, stronger or weaker, but it is deliberately dishonest to say there is no evidence towards a God. There os., and you and I disagree on whether that evidence is strong enough.
The parody expressed here illustrated that no evidence is strong enough, and matter how much the theist brings, he will always be dismissed by the new atheists of having no evidence.
What you expressed and what is received is the conundrum indeed, I'm finding myself liking both sides arguments.
I'm dismissive of jezeusian mythology due to it being used as an attack tool against Judaism and it's beyond easy to listen to Rabbi singer and disassemble it as it's presented.
Being religiously and observantly Jewish involves different mental gymnastics to juggle the juxtaposition of the suffering and the truth of Judaism which seem to be ongoing fulfilling a timeline and seemingly repudiating Christianity since 1948 specifically.
Everyone who concludes something based on logic and reasoning thinks *their* reasoning is correct. What makes it dogmatic is when you become so convinced that your position is true that anyone else must of missed it. I think the God hypothesis has some merit, but coupled with the kuzari argument, a strong mesorah and the teachings about this "spiritual world" (being understood beyond the babyish version of physical placeholders) has a lot of merit. That's not lack of evidence, that's lack of you trying to hear another side. We can argue if this case we make suffices, especially given the counter evidence from the undeniable scientific account, but that would be a discussion, not a dogmatic, close-minded finality.
And if you read my words at all you'd see i think atheism has a lot of merit. My issue here (and ash's) is the dogmatism and finality.
I'm not denying the validity of your God hypothesis arguments (although there is plenty to talk about). All I'm saying is that the mere existance of arguments in favor of God doesn't justify the belief in God if there are other plausible explanations out there. For every argument in favor of God there is one against it. Since not believing, or in other words being agnostic, is the default position, the burden of proof to escape the agnostic mindset requires more then simply positing various arguments in favor for God. The mere existance of arguments doesn't get you to belief unless you don't really start off as a non-believer/agnostic.
" The same way you assume ghosts and unicorns don’t exist without compelling evidence, atheists take the same approach to God."
This is simply not true. There is PLENTY of evidence.
I'll tell you about some I gathered myself.
I have an interest in long-distance infrared photography. I have equipment that can see Very Very Far. I post videos of my work on Youtube (I am behind).
From where I work in the Neve Tzedek neighborhood in Tel Aviv, I can record the two gas platforms off the coast of Ashkelon, 57km away. I am interested in further. These are practice.
Interestingly, from that distance and my elevation of ~80m, 50m of each platform should be obscured behind the curvature of the earth, yet it isn't. You can see the legs descend to the water.
Someone's model of our world is wrong, and it ain't mine. I gather actual evidence. They blather. So do you.
Those atheists have a real problem. But they will just repeat ad nauseam the same logic as displayed in this piece. The last thing they will ever say is some form of "I don't know." Scratch one and invariably you discover their opinions were formed in their youth and never reexamined.
Um, there's something called refraction?
If your stance on atheism is based on flatearth, you just might make me into Yehuda Mishenichnas faster than he can.
Is your channel name I am behind or shimshon.
Elaborate what phenomenon you're seeing?
"constantly pride yourself as having the high ground about"
Can you elaborate? Are you referring to my ironic cartoon? I do not believe I ever constantly pride myself in this.
I will not be engaging in this further and I take back my attack.
One of these days? You already did https://simonfurst.substack.com/p/the-gaps-debate-science-design-and
Your argument was that by mathematical induction (!!!!), since there are so many things that we are able to explain naturalistically and we continue to do so, therefore we can predict that we will be able to explain the entire universe naturalistically. QED.
No that was just the discussion of God of the gaps. I explicitly conceded in that post that God of the gaps alone would not be sufficient to dismiss the appearance of design unless it's for a few particulars.
Very entertaining read, gets me in the spirit of Purim
Great story. Very funny. And a reasonable characterization. Is the author Ash or AI-Ash? I must know!
Richard Dawkins has a prominent role in Vox Day's aptly-named The Irrational Atheist.
I wrote it. Hello my favorite Vox Day acolyte. Did you donate to his AI music fundraiser?
I figured. No way AI could write that. No. I am a bad acolyte.
Putting aside the humor for a moment, do you really think that just because the ink spelled out “ghosts” as the cause, that’s reason to think a ghost did it?
What is the phrase? "Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action?" I'd say that if the ink spelled "ghosts are real" three times while a writer was trying to write about the non-existence of ghosts, it would be reasonable to say "this was done by ghosts."
I agree to the idea of the phrase that there’s some purposeful cause here and not happenstance, but why ghosts? Why not a sorcerer? Or aliens? Or… or…
Well, aliens would still have a spooky action at a distance problem. As for a sorcerer trying to trick everyone into thinking that ghosts are real, well, that's also a possibility, but why would the sorcerer only do it when someone tries to write that ghosts don't exist? Wouldn't the sorcerer's trick be better if they were trying to convince people that ghosts exist all the time? And what would the sorcerer have to gain by breaking the Masquerade in the first place? It seems like ghosts should be placed higher on the list of possible causes than sorcerers.
What’s a “spooky action at a distance problem?
Why would ghosts only want us to know about them when we write about them?
Maybe sorcerera know people like you will mistakenly believe that ghosts did it more if they timed it well. Maybe they are just fucking around?
I don’t know but when we’re talking about new phenomenon that we barely know anything about, I think to assume it’s the thing that the words claim is a weak assumption.
"What’s a “spooky action at a distance problem?"
Well, moving an object larger than an entangled quantum particle without directly acting on it is a problem with our understanding of physics. Then, you have to form it into a specific pattern. Quantum entanglement applying to objects larger than the quantum scale is like, Ant-Man and the Wasp level stuff, very soft sci-fi. Since "aliens" was the most sci-fi of the three explanations, I was presuming that aliens would fall into a scientific paradigm.
"Why would ghosts only want us to know about them when we write about them?"
Well, think of it from the ghost's perspective. You're invisible, you're trying to pass on, but you can't because you have unfinished business, and there's a respected scientist who is trying to write that you don't exist. The human reaction (ghosts are basically human unless specified otherwise, after all) is probably to be fairly annoyed at best.
"Maybe sorcerera know people like you will mistakenly believe that ghosts did it more if they timed it well. Maybe they are just fucking around?"
Breaching the Masquerade is still a problem for the sorcerer. I think it's safe to say, at least in the First World, that most people don't believe in sorcerers or ghosts. But if the possibility of ghosts is proven, then that opens the door to "everything supernatural that we previously thought impossible is possible," and brings a risk to a sorcerer, as governments are naturally going to attempt to destroy a power they can't control.
I think you’re making a lot of unjustified assumptions about the desires of ghosts and sorcerers.
You use the first two words in your sentence as engagement but rather it's dismissal because you're not of that on this topic
You’re probably right. Care to show me where I’m wrong so I can learn how to think properly.
I said that the words were unnecessary that is all
To include sorcery in the category of ghosts which many people have seen and I know of no one who's had a sorcerer conjure up any spells though I've done it without consequence because it's not real but the phenomenon of ghosts is cross-culturally seen by many whereas you brought up the strawman of sorcery
I think that's a reasonable deduction
What if it spelled out “sorcerer”? Would it now be more reasonable to believe it’s a sorcerer?
Probably.
Seems strange to me. I wouldn’t trust the statements that mysteriously appeared. My instinct is to think they are actually lying.
Still a better response than saying it was random undirected natural processes.
That wasn’t my question though. I think we should say we don’t know the cause.