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Everyone’s Crazy Except You and Me…

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Atheism of the Gaps – Part Two

Friendly reminder: There are men and moments for which reading almost anything with the word “atheism” is detrimental.

(This essay is clearly imperfect and is not intended to be final.)

Atheism of the Gaps – Part One is here.

Here’s just one example of how to escape religious argument: even the popular, teleological “Argument from Design” is invalid.

What is the Argument from Design (AFD)?

It is commonly introduced thus:

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.

— William Paley, Natural Theology (1802)

Why isn’t it valid in your opinion?

Let’s keep this interesting. Meanwhile, I’ll try to argue in favor. Firstly, the word “design” is too laden. Let’s call it Argument from Order, instead, and restate the argument my own way:

Assuming we both accept order is both (1) possible and (2) recognizable as such, you must concede order was “ordered” by the “Great Orderer”: God.

Perhaps man myopically finds order where there is none? You beg the question, assuming order in order to prove an Orderer.

See Part One regarding shifting standards of proof. Your own life reflects many “basic beliefs“.

But man can only discern something by distinguishing it from its reverse? What point of reference can there be for the claim the universe is ordered, if the universe is all we have to observe? Moreso, in the original example, a man finds a watch enfolded by a forest, that is, he recognizes order in the midst of disorder. Yet you try and prove the forest itself is ordered!

Again, although “the universe is all we have to observe”, man acts as though it isn’t (and there is adequate reason for this feature of man’s nature, but that doesn’t concern us here). So what’s it going to be?

In the original parable, man differentiates between varying degrees of order (relative order in the pocket watch and relative disorder in the rock, above). Indeed, the original version is a form of “Argument from Assertion”, but this is not always invalid. “Give me a break!”, for instance, is often an appeal to the knowledge we both share, which you purportedly forgot or stifled.

Wait. Maybe specific phenomena are orderly because of natural laws, as we see occurring in the wild; mechanistic “order out of chaos” (sorry, I mean “anarchy”!)?

You will notice I didn’t reference rocks and flowers in the rephrased argument… Are those “natural laws” you appealed to “orderly” or not? Yes? Again, Order is there – with a vengeance. There is no non-purposeful ordering.

For the sake of argument, maybe the universe’s order comes from polytheism or aliens?

Polytheism is mutually contradictory. If there are two forces, they necessarily infringe upon each other’s sovereignty, so neither is “God”. And who ordered such well-ordered aliens?

What of natural disasters and dastardly disease?

This is not about theodicy. Good or bad, the universe shows great order.

What of apparent exceptions to order?

The argument stands on the great majority. “Ordering” is man’s job, too, as much as possible (Tanchuma Tazri’a 5).

Evolution…

Some Kosher Jews accept [some of] it; other Kosher Jews don’t. Objection: Irrelevant.

I give up. How do atheists get out of this one?

Hume’s first objection here is correct: We might know that which is in the universe, but we cannot know anything at all of the universe itself.

Then how can we know anything at all?

We supposedly cannot, but see this here.

The Feminist Fib

Old Lies

By 

August 9, 2016

We expect to hear a lot of lies during an election year, and this year is certainly no exception. What is surprising is how old some of these lies are, and how often they have been shown to be lies, years ago or even decades ago.

One of the oldest of these lies is that women are paid less than men for doing the same work. Like many other politically successful lies, it contains just enough of the truth to fool the gullible.

Women as a group do get paid less than men as a group. But not for doing the same work. Women average fewer annual hours of work than men. They work continuously for fewer years than men, since only women get pregnant, and most women are not prepared to instantly dump the baby on somebody else to raise.

Being a mother is not an incidental sideline, and being a single mother can be a major restriction on how much time can be put into a job, either in a year or over the years.

People like Hillary Clinton can simply grab a statistic about male-female income differences and run with it since her purpose is not truth but votes. The real question, however, is whether, or to what extent, those income differences are due to employers paying women and men different wages for doing the very same jobs, for the very same amount of time.

We do not need to guess about such things. Many studies have been done over many years — and they repeatedly show that women and men who work the very same hours in the very same jobs at the very same levels of skill and experience do not have the pay gaps that people like Hillary Clinton loudly denounce.

As far back as 1971, single women in their thirties who had worked continuously since high school earned slightly more than men of the same description. As far back as 1969, academic women who had never married earned more than academic men who had never married.

People who are looking for grievances are not going to be stopped by facts, especially if they are in politics. But where are our media pundits and our academic scholars? Mostly silent, either out of fear of being denounced as anti-women or because they have chosen to take sides rather than convey facts.

Nevertheless, there are enough scholars, including women economists, who have done enough honest studies over the years that there is no excuse for continuing to repeat a discredited lie, based on comparing apples and oranges. A book written by two women and titled “Women’s Figures” shows the results when you compare women and men with comparable qualifications.

It is much the same story with black-white comparisons. More than 40 years ago, my own research turned up statistics on black and white professors who had Ph.D.s from equally high-ranked institutions in the same fields, and who had published the same number of articles.

When all these things were held constant, the black professors earned somewhat more than white professors. But, since all these things are not the same among black and white professors in general, there is a racial gap in pay that allows some to loudly denounce racial discrimination among academics.

Those who wish to check out my statistics can get a copy of my 1975 monograph, “Affirmative Action Reconsidered.” It has not been updated because not all the same statistics will be released now. This is not unusual. Statistics that might undermine some other popular conclusions — whether on affirmative action, global warming or whatever — have been kept under wraps when other researchers tried to get them.

Too many people in the media and in academia abandon their roles as conduits for facts and take on the role of filterers of facts to promote social and political agendas.

In all too many educational institutions, from kindergartens to postgraduate university programs, students may never hear any facts that contradict the prevailing groupthink.

How many students taught by Keynesian economists will ever learn about the 1921 recession, when the Harding administration did nothing — and unemployment dropped steeply as the economy recovered on its own?

There are many reasons why old lies, refuted long ago, are still heard every election year, and in all too many other years.

From Lewrockwell.com, here.

Straight from the Horse’s Mouth – Some Myths of War

Milley: Future wars will be long, they’ll be fought on the ground, and spec ops won’t save us

By: Meghann Myers

July 27

Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley wants the American public to stop fooling itself when it comes to war, so he’s drawn up five ”myths” he says we need to let go of, pronto.

Milley shared his thesis with an audience at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, and his take on it has evolved since he first started speaking about four slightly different myths of warfare back in 2015.  The myths:

1.  Wars will be short

“There are wars that have been short in the past, but they’re pretty rare,” he said. Most of the time, wars take longer than people think they will at the beginning of those wars.”

Leaders tend to gloss over conflicts, he said, describing them as a ”little dust-up,“ assuring everyone that victory will be quick.

“Beware of that one,” he said. “Wars have a logic of their own sometimes, and they move in directions that are highly unexpected.”

2. You can win wars from afar

Dropping bombs has become an increasingly popular way for the U.S. military to fight enemies overseas, but in Milley’s view, few wars are decisively ended until troops come face-to-face.

Continue reading…

From Army Times, here.

Hyehudi: Radical but Read!

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