What can I say? Outcomes?
Never mind.
Flavour and embellish the rich stew of life as if you were another I T !
Marvels pile upon marvels,
The saints reveal that,
The Essences bewilder you,
Your throat wants freedom.
The new design argument old typewriter is now here...
Rabbeinu Bachya, in his minor philosophical work “The Duties of the Heart” [10th century] misrepresents the argument for design in the following manner:
Do you not realize that if ink were poured out accidentally on a blank sheet of paper, it would be impossible that proper writing should result, legible lines that are written with a pen? Imagine a person bringing a sheet of handwriting that could only have been composed with a pen. He claims that ink spilled on the paper and these written characters had accidentally emerged. We would charge him to his face with falsehood, for we could feel certain that this result could not have happened without an intelligent person’s purpose.
Since this seems impossible in the case of letters whose formation is conventional, how can one assert that something far subtler in its design and which manifests in its fashioning a depth and complexity infinitely beyond our comprehension could have happened without the purpose, power, and wisdom of a wise and mighty designer? (“The Duties of the Heart,” The Gate of Oneness, Chapter 6)
According to the Aish HaTorah Propoganda Central Office, the two most common objections to this argument go as follows:
1. The argument is too simple. There seems to be a big jump from concluding that someone must have made rock formations in the desert to concluding that there is a Creator who must have made the universe.
2. What about evolution? Over a very long period of time everything could have come about as a random occurrence! With millions of years to play around with, isn’t it possible for some kind of order to emerge just by chance?
Oh Aishele, Aishele, Aishele! How you misrepresent things in order to convince people of the God Doll that you sell in your Aish Mall. From Ebon Musings (now get this into your head Aish and stop playing dumb!)
It is clear to see that natural selection, which is not chance but the opposite of chance, is what makes evolution work. If there were no selection, change in living things would follow a pattern called a “random walk” – sometimes the changes would be beneficial, sometimes not, and the population as a whole would wander back and forth across the fitness “landscape” but, on average, never get anywhere. That would be an example of random change, and it is absolutely correct to say that such a process could never produce all the intricate diversity and marvelous adaptations that living things possess.
Natural selection changes all that, by preferentially preserving the good variations and eliminating the bad ones. It is like a ratchet, allowing a population to move only in one direction – the direction of greater fitness. And the changes that natural selection favors are not random, but are determined by the characteristics of the environment. This is why, for example, both fish and aquatic mammals such as whales and dolphins have the same streamlined body shape – because this is the shape that is most efficient for moving through the water in which they live. This shape has evolved separately in the fish and cetacean lineages, in an example of an evolutionary phenomenon called convergence, precisely because it is the best shape for that environment regardless of what kind of creature has it. If evolution were random, we would not see this kind of predictable pattern.
Like all natural processes, evolution is guided by laws that do not change. If you throw a rock up in the air, its path is not governed by pure chance, but by the law of gravity. It cannot fly off randomly in any direction, but will travel in a parabolic arc and land at a predictable point. If you put a hot object next to a cold one, the transfer of heat is not governed by pure chance, but by the laws of thermodynamics. Heat cannot flow randomly in either direction; it will move consistently from the hotter object to the colder one. And if you set a population of randomly mutating organisms in an environment, their future is not drifting at the whim of chance, but is directed by the law of natural selection. Their evolution will not proceed in just any direction, but only in those that make them better adapted to their surroundings.
Now based on your false Aish HaTorah assumptions you can pretend to address these two objections that are coming from uneducated people.
The principle “design implies designer” applies across the board, whether the designer is a Bedouin nomad piling rocks in the desert or the Infinite Regression of all existence. The design from ignorance states that it is the same logical process. In fact, there is more reason to assume a designer in the latter case since the level of design is much higher. And there is more reason to assume that that designer also had a designer since it has already been stated that a more sophisticated being is required to design a pile of rocks, a watch or what not. Especially WHAT NOT!
Simplicity is not an inherent fault in an argument. Perhaps the reason why some people take issue with this application of logic is due to the accompanying consequences. The reason why some people take issue with this logic is due to the consequences. (Oh here we go with the false and intellectually insulting reasons given by Aish HaTorah as to why people don’t accept the design argument. Instead of listening to the logical responses to their argument they will counterattack with an appeal to morality or claim that people just don’t want the inconvenience of keeping kosher or not blending wool with linen. Watch to see if they use the phrase “cognitive dissonance” for that is always a nice “intellectual” insult!)
aish hatorah general meeting: “Since the Bedouin doesn’t make any moral demands on our life, there is no resistance to drawing the logical conclusion that someone designed that rock formation. But when the conclusion points to God,
When the interference of cognitive dissonance is removed, what is the objective standard of design that we need to see in order to conclude something was created? What we need is a control experiment that determines this threshold of design in a case that has no threatening consequences. “The Obvious Proof”, a book by Gershon Robinson and Mordechai Steinman, delivers a compelling presentation of the design argument, and describes such a control experiment involving millions of people concluding the necessity of a designer.”
I am tired of this. Aish HaTorah is a machine spewing out a party line. They think they have everything covered but they are intellectually dishonest and they themselves suffer from cognitive dissonance. You can’t argue with a machine. Garbage in, garbage out as they used to say.
I am happy if you wish to read the original Aish HaTorah article on the Design Argument. I am equally happy if you don’t.
Imagine, if you will, that you are walking in a bad neighbourhood where the houses are neglected, there is a lack of education, and a lot of dangerous gangs. You suddenly come across two small stones in close proximity to each other. Most probably, you would think nothing of it unless you needed one of the stones for a particular purpose, perhaps to defend yourself from someone. Two stones randomly sitting beside each other is not such a big deal. No need to sweat it.
You continue your stroll through the neighbourhood and stumble upon three piles of human corpses piled up in a brick-layer fashion. Chances are you would quickly surmise that someone was here and arranged these bodies in this manner. It didn’t just happen. A shock for sure but still really no big deal and nothing to sweat about.
You continue your walk and happen to find a dead puffin lying in the middle of the road. Would you suspect that a windstorm somehow threw the puffin pieces together and randomly created a puffin?
Somebody gave birth to that puffin. It didn’t just happen. A creature implies a mother.
Alternatively, say you didn’t see a puffin at all but instead you came across a Patek Phillipe watch, say model 4907/ij. You will surely notice that it celebrates the 10-year triumph of the famous Twenty~4® collection. Patek Philippe was likely not involved in the design of this model directly and it was probably the work of many different people having different levels of expertise – certainly not just one designer! You already know, just by looking at the complexity of this watch that it had more than one designer to deal with the different aspects of functionality, colour and style. You would also know that there would be a marketing section of the Patek Phillipe company that would be on the look out for trends to determine what styles would likely do well with high end consumers. They would have also had an enormous impact on the look of this particular model.
By handling this watch and examining it you might then ponder as to whether it would work as an analogy for the design of the universe proving that God is One – an Indivisible Creator. You would realize that the watch proved nothing of the sort but rather it might “prove” that the universe – even if it could be analogous to a watch at all, and that is not likely – was designed by several gods, some involved with creating the suns, some determining which animals would exist (and which would uselessly become extinct), some involved with answering the petitions of Olympic curlers, and some designing the potato bug.
You would note that the universe bespeaks timeless elegance, the new model universe in yellow gold would be the first unset version without a diamond-set case. You would note that three color choices are available for the universe: “Night Glow” and “Autumn Brown” – two hues created especially for this yellow-gold universe – and, of course, the endearingly classic “Timeless White“. If you bought into the design argument you would expect to have a selection of universes to pick from perhaps.
The intricacy of design in our world, when intoxicated, is staggering — infinitely more complex than a gang related pile of corpses in a bad neighbourhood, a puffin or a Patek Phillipe watch. Therefore the team of designers for the universe must have been considerable and who could have afforded to pay them all in this economy?
Now I am going to commence to use really large numbers to give you a sense of being a little out of control. Here goes: There are 10 billion nerve cells in the brain. Each of the 10 billion cells sprouts between 10,000 to 100,000 fibers to contact other nerve cells in the brain, creating approximately 1,000 million million connections, or, 10 to the 15th power. Are you shvitzing?
Here I come now with some really enormous numbers. Serious serious numbers. Behold! There are 10 billion nerve cells in the brain with approximately 1,000 million million connections.
It is hard to imagine the multitude that 1015 represents. On and on I go. Take half of the United States, which is 1 million square miles, and imagine it being covered by forest, with 10,000 trees per square mile. On each of the 10,000 trees, which are on each of the one million square miles, there are 100,000 leaves. That is a whizbang bulbous amount of leaves. I take it you are still with me and feeling the groove of the number thing I am doing to your head. You see sir, that’s how many connections are smashed inside your brain. And they’re not just haphazardly thrown together by an impostor God or a monkey washing a cat. They form an incredibly intricate network system that has no parallel in the military industrial complex or in the other brands of universes that have been designed by other manufacturers.
Imagine walking by that in the seedy neighbourhood! The natural response when perceiving design of such mind-boggling complexity is to conclude that there must be a huge team of busy, possibly amoral, designers, behind everything that created this model of universe. Not to mention the team of designers that created the team that designed the team that designed the universe that you may be wearing on your wrist right now.
To be continued…
Is it You that I thank for bringing good people and situations into my life?
If so, thank You!
Are You also the one I thank for making conditions difficult sometimes?
If so, thank You!
And are You also the one that created all the forms of suffering knowing full well that people will increase the amount of suffering that gets dished out through natural means thereby making the lives of billions constantly intolerable?
If so, thank You!
What did I just thank God for?
I love you God. I hate you God.
You exist God. You can’t exist, God.
But if you don’t exist who am I going to feel grateful to and who am I going to complain to? Maybe there is a path without God that works better for me. Or maybe I should just go and buy a God Doll at the mall.
A few weeks ago Cynthia MacPherson considered Judaism a religion of ancestral worship, incompatible with science. She saw the Bible as an anthology of often contradictory stories and the miracles it described – the plagues in Egypt, for instance – as metaphors and delightful episodes of strange cruelty meted out by a weird and distracted God.
Today, Ms. MacPherson says she is a believer. She eats kosher food with preservatives and is on the lookout for a Jewish Temple where nobody will realize that she is a Scottish goy. She likes to eat kippers so she looks forward to eating them on Yom Kippur (the day of eating kippers.)
Ms. MacPherson says she was persuaded by Discovery, a viral religious seminar that seemingly offers scientific proof that the weird, distracted God really exists. “I walked in a secular atheist Scottish Goy and walked out believing that the Torah was like a football that had been handed off by God to Moses at Mt. Sinai Hospital,” says Ms. MacPherson, a 24 year old graduate student of Social Nuances at Columbia University.
In the past year, about 24,000,000,000 U.S. Jewish community centers, schools and synagogues – eager to expand their membership have paid Aish HaTorah, the Jerusalem based organization that runs Discovery, about $1,000 to put on each Discovery seminar. Aish HaTorah a non-profit Jewish education group whose mission is to persuade secular Jews to observe Judaism has put about 83,000,000 people world-wide through the seminar since 1987.
Many of today’s campaigns to bring observant Jews to temple try appealing to the heart, portraying Judaism as offering spiritual fulfillment and a sense of belonging. But Discovery’s crusaders against assimilation are taking a different tack – appealing to the frontal lobe of the gullible.
Discovery teachers like to seduce participants with a bogus computer analysis of the Torah – the first five books of Moses that they say proves God hid Easter eggs in the text to foretell later events. Mistreating the Torah text like a word seach puzzle, researchers looked at every other letter or skipped an equal number of places between letters to find names like Norman Rubin, Bill Fletcher and Frederic Maximus, as well as proof that the Walrus was Paul. They then applied the same technique to the novel Lady Chatterly’s Lover and found names like “Pretty Boy” Hutchinson, Cathy Sewell and Wooly the Mammoth as well as predictions of the holocaust and the existence of Nostradamus.
Such findings show an intentional design that only a playful God could have created, believers argue without understanding that they are really “believers” without any understanding of the elements of argument. And if so, is there any question that Jews or Scottish Goys should live as some people interpret that the Torah instructs them? “We had to give a pseudo-intellectual presentation to give people who were already predisposed to believing in God a spurious reason to believe in God.” says Rabbi Abraham Weinfeld, funder of Aish HaTorah. Discovery is just one of the outreach programs of Aish HaTorah, which also offer a seminar on Jewish and Flemish history and the Bibles from Jerusalem.
Aish HaTorah’s roots in Orthodox Judaism give some mainstream religious Jews pause. “They’re a lot more to the right” in their teaching than even some Orthodox American congregations says Shmuel Goldin, chairman of the Israel Commission of the Rabbincal Council of America and a Bible professor at Yeshiva University in New York.
As for codes research, he says, “They use it very cunningly, but it’s a little bit more superstitious, a little bit more stupid than the approach I would take.”
Indeed, not all religious Jews find the pseudo-intellectual argument compelling. Rabbi Asher Lupinsky of Anshe Kaplansky B’nai Fishbein Congregation in Chicago fears the seminar could lead to a worship of cucumbers.
But like many Jews, he worries even more about assimilation and intermarriage. Intermarriage is so common place among American Jews – about half marry non-Jews – that their population has been static since 1970 at about 5.5 million. Consequently, the Rabbi says he might consider sponsoring a Discovery seminar at his temple.
The codes research supposedly falls in line with a tradition of Jewish scholarships that emphasizes close textual analysis of the Torah and other religious literature, says Rabbi Eugene Rat, director of development for the Rabbinical Seminary of America. Theories of codes in the Torah dates back to medieval times, you could see computerized word searches as simply a high-tech twist.
The upshot, religious leaders who don’t take Discovery too seriously sometimes promote it anyway. Hundreds of non-Orthodox Jewish organizations have held Discovery Seminars and it is beginning to attract interest from some Reform Temples. B’nei Shirley Temple’s Rabbi, Mary Jane Shapiro calls the bible codes research “mayonnaise for the mind, a fundament game.” Also helping Discovery’s expansion in the US; an array of high-profile spokesmen and supporters, such as talk-show host, Larry King, Elliot Gould, O.J. Simpson, Jerry Lewis, Bill Clitton, Bob Dylan’s first girlfriend, Ed Sullivan, Kenny from South Park, Pierre Berton, Tiger Woods, Bruce Willis, Martin “Buggsy” Goldstein, and Kirk Douglas. Mr. King says he has been actively involved with Aish HaTorahs. But his involvement was strictly for producing bacterial cultures. Mr. King refers to himself as a “baroque agnostic” and says, thank God, he isn’t even familiar with the code teachings of the Discovery Seminar. “I have heard that they are stupid and easily refuted,” says Mr. King.
Mr. Gould, and others, were recruited by Irwin Katsof, a Greek Orthodox Rabbi who is in charge of branding, marketing, and sales strategies for Discovery in the US. In July, Rabbi Katsof spotted Mr. Gould on a flight home from Rio De Janeiro. The Rabbi upgraded to first-class to sit near Mr. Gould. (This is such a cool story!) During the flight he gave the actor his sales pitch, popping a promotional multilevel marketing video tape into the first-class VCR, and, voila, in September, Mr. Gould appeared at a seminar in Manhattan and talked about his own need to learn more about some Judaism. Wow! What a good sales closer Rabbi Katsof is! At a seminar at Universal Studios in June, Mr. Douglas drew 300 people with a charcoal pencil on really nice paper.
The Rabbi, who graduated from a Jesuit college thinking the beliefs of Judaism were “absolutely nonsensical dribble drabble lunatic fudge” embraced the religion during a trip to Israel where he embraced Aish HaTorah. Then he embraced several strangers and odd smelling objects. He joined a group of Rabbis who had gotten the idea of developing the Discovery Seminar from another group that was conning people with the bible codes in Israel. “Sometimes you have to sell the sizzle, and not the steak.” the Rabbi jokes. “Where there are smoke and mirrors there can be fire. Cool? Cool!”
Within the next two years he hopes to win over at least 10% of the 1.4 million US Jews and Scottish Goys between the ages of 20-30, a critical demographic group. “If we reach them then, when they’re deciding who they’ll marry, we’ll have made significant progress in bringing people back to Judaism or Shamanism,” Rabbi Katsof says.
If you have read this far then perhaps you will notice that the writing device of focusing on a particular person, in this case a Scottish Goy, to get the story started on a personal level, was abandoned midstream and not even brought back at the end of the article. This makes one wonder if one writer wrote a version of the article and then it was rewritten by another writer.
With feeds from Ronn Torossian, 5WPR and Aish Hatorah – The Design Argument readership is hitting dramatic new heights in readership size but it seems to be coming at a price.
David Hume consultants have been brought in to analyze the foremost teleological blog in the known and seemingly designed universe. David Hume determined that the quality of writing has decreased by a stunning 37%. The analysis is based on several factors including originality of content, readability level, cogency, and genre-appropriateness.
“In almost every conceivable area Design Argument is failing to deliver decent content,” said the 17th century Scottish philosopher David Hume. “The fact that readership levels are soaring within the same time cycles as the shameful drop in writing quality may be akin to the same social forces that led to Avatar becoming a box office smash. There is no content in that film at all or if there is I missed it while I was sleeping.”
Hume went on to give a blistering criticism of the argument for design. If a well-ordered natural world requires a special designer, then God’s mind (being so well-ordered) also requires a special designer. And then this designer would likewise need a designer, and so on ad infinitum. We could respond by resting content with an inexplicably self-ordered divine mind but then why not rest content with an inexplicably self-ordered natural world? Often, what appears to be purpose, where it looks like object X has feature F in order to secure outcome O, is better explained by a filtering process: that is, object X wouldn’t be around did it not possess feature F, and outcome O is only interesting to us as a human projection of goals onto nature. This mechanical explanation of teleology anticipated natural selection.
“I am chagrined by the low calibre of content in recent posts on the Design Argument Blog,” remarked Martin Goldstein who is also falling behind on his “720 apologies in 3 days” project. “I am in such a tizzy. I am so sorry.”
There are some Design Argument observers that are concerned that the site is repeating itself and is losing its relevancy.
“How many times do we have to hear about how vulgar and unethical Ronn Torossian and 5WPR is? How many times do we have to read about how Aish HaTorah plays fast and loose with the truth? I mean it is all true but so what? I liked the post with the monkey playing the piano and the three cute dogs and what not. That was a quality post. I just don’t need to hear anymore about how Aish deceives people with their phony bible codes,” said an anonymous Design Argument fan.
Another Design Argument fan said that the stress on the weirdness of Chabad outreach and Jews for Jesus “is beginning to bore me. But I did like all that Ed Sullivan stuff.”
Martin Goldstein, taking time out from his apology tour, stated that he was going to personally see to it that the quality and originality of the blog content will be improved “as of this very post. However I still want to get my keywords in,” he chuckled.
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