having read the article I would say
The “intellectual” we deserve
Nathan J Robinson’s popularity is the sign of a deeply impoverished political and intellectual landscape…
The “intellectual” we deserve
Nathan J Robinson’s popularity is the sign of a deeply impoverished political and intellectual landscape…
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The fitness effects depend on the context.
Most of those writing about human rape try to stress how bad it is and that such acts should be punished by the society. As long as there is a significant cost associated to the act (punishment), the acts may lower fitness rather than increase it. However, if there is no punishment and no abortions, those acts may increase fitness by increasing the number of offspring relative to those who do not rape. Studies on wartime rape have shown that in the rape cases, the probability of pregnancy is relatively high.
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I guess it is in reference to god’s omipotence that people call out his restriction of not being able to do something that people emphasise that him not violating logic is a matter of his will, not his limitations. I use that as an explanation to explain why God uses logic to interact with our world and not magic as to impress the gullible with violations of his own laws of nature.
Having asked Pill (the copilot) he came back with :“It is more logically coherent to say God does not do the illogical than to say God cannot do the illogical—because “cannot” wrongly treats the illogical as a thing that could be done, whereas “does not” preserves God as the ground of logic itself.”
Or more explicit on miracles:
"If God is the creator of the natural order, then demanding that miracles must be violations of that order is equivalent to demanding that God must contradict His own rational will.
That is not a test of omnipotence.
It is a test of self‑inconsistency.
Your Boris Johnson analogy is sharp:
A leader who constantly contradicts his own stated principles is not “powerful,” but unable to maintain coherent agency.
So the atheist demand is structurally:
“If God exists, He must demonstrate His power by acting irrationally.”
Which is like saying:
“If a mathematician is truly great, he must prove that 2 = 3.”
This is not a test of greatness.
It is a test of absurdity." and
“Because “cannot” implies a limitation imposed from outside, whereas “does not” reflects God’s nature as the ground of logic.”
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The war time rape conclusion is potentially based on the persistance of the rape (rape camps) and the choice of victims in their most fertile range. After all, as a weapon of war it is meant to disintegrate the occupied society and make the women kill themselves or get killed by their contemporaries.
The reason that courtship evolved is the benefit of joint parent investment in the offspring and the improved fitness by “natural selection” or female selection of the fathers qualities
For me it is about goodness and being being convertible and God as being itself or pure act (actus purus). God does not create round squares. God cannot create round squares. Both ways communicate a truth but both seem to be plagued by analogical deficiencies. In this case God would be roundness and its like saying can roundness square.
I don’t think this was meant for me but I’ll add my thoughts.
I don’t see miracles as violations or even God interfering with reality (not from the outside) God sustains and upholds all existence at all times. He is not some mechanic out there that comes to tinker with the universe. You technically can’t come in to interfere with what you are already actualizing at all times. Miracles are simply God improvising and going beyond how He normally sustains and upholds things. In fancier and possibly more confusing language, it is God producing an effect directly rather than through secondary, natural causes. This “problem” of miracles stems from humanizing God as a “super being” somewhere “out there” and and in my mind is plagued with an “occasional deism” I reject.
VInnie
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Joint parental investment increases the survival prospects of common offspring. However, extrapair copulations (in humans, we might call these adultery) and rape may give additional children with minimal investment by the male. Even if the survival of the ‘extramarital’ offspring would be worse than that of the children born in a marriage, every child that survives to adulthood and reproduction increases the fitness of the male.
In some birds, males may ‘cheat’ by trying to start a second breeding attempt with another female that is not aware that the male has already eggs with the first female. Some owl males may even have three simultaneous breeding attempts with different females. During the courtship and the start of the egg laying, the male brings enough of food to the second female. When the second female has laid the eggs and is tied to the nest, the male changes behaviour by investing in the first female and visiting the second female only occasionally. The second nest does not produce many fledglings but every produced offspring is a bonus for the male.
In birds where the male is physically capable to rape (like waterbirds), males use rape as an additional strategy to increase fitness. Paired males may do it but rape is more commonly done by males that do not have a female and nest to guard. For them, it is a choice between having zero offspring during that year vs. potentially managing to fertilize some eggs.
As sad as it is, some human males can use comparable tactics. If the society does not do anything to prevent such behaviours (through some form of punishment), these males may have a higher fitness than they would have without rape.
During wartime or violent conflicts, some forces use rape as a weapon. That happens even today, for example some militant groups in Africa rape women systematically in villages where Christians live. The intention is to disrupt the societies and drive the Christians away from those areas.
And by the way, the probability of pregnancy is relatively high even when the woman is raped only once. One reason may be that the raped women are often young adults that are at the biological peak of their fertility.
What increases fitness is not always ethically acceptable. Evolution is blind in the sense that it does not have moral values. Decisions of what is acceptable vs not acceptable must be based on something else than evolution, fitness or scientific observations.
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fitness isnt a personal propperty buy a population function. The reason that rape decreases fitness of a population is that it lacks the “natural selection” e.g. the feature of loving thy neighbour which is after all the evolutionary feedback loop.
Biological fitness is basically a genotype-level feature (propensity), relative to the other genotypes in the population. Natural selection acts at the level of phenotypes, so we can speak of fitness at the level of genotypes (heritable component, genes) or phenotypes (what the individuals with a given genotype look like). The fitness is strongly dependent on the environment and the quality of the other individuals in the population, so it is a relative measure that is tied to place and time.
A crude but perhaps understandable simplification might be that fitness is a measurement that compares quantitatively how many copies a genotype leaves from itself in successive generations, relative to the other genotypes in the population.
Because the basic fitness may be difficult to measure, researchers often use the relative number of offspring as an index of biological fitness. A more accurate index would be the number of grandchildren because that takes into account the fate of the offspring - only offspring that become part of the reproducing members of the population can pass the genes to the following generations.
What features are transferred to the successive generations has practically no relationship to moral values and only indirectly to behaviours we might label as ‘loving thy neighbour’. The indirect link goes through mutually beneficial cooperation between individuals, assuming that such a cooperation will increase the relative number of copies in successive generations.
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isn’t that what loving thy neighbour translates to, the ground rule as being a “really useful engine” is what helps the propagation of life?
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It appears to be.
What do you think it means?
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Yet also:
Have you actually looked at any geologic data other than that used by creationist organisations?
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I haven’t demanded that, and I don’t think I’m evil.[1]
Therefore you are wrong.
Cue redefinition of evil. ↩︎
IT IS A COMMON ATHEIST DEFINITION OF MIRACLES PROPOSED BY hUME. To me miracles are highly improbable events and signs that point at Gods existence - like the birth of a child. If we can’t see the miracle in that any more and need miracles that are not rationally explainable we have lost our connection with reality anyhow and live in the land of wishful thinking. A God that needs improvising doesn’t sound like an almighty God.
I would have thought it to be an illustration of the power of pitting the target using smaller grit.
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Are you saying that slow change does not happen? Mountains do not erode? River delta’s do not accumulate silt? Glaciers do not advance or retreat? Tectonic plates do not drift? What is supposedly ridiculous about slow change over long epochs of time?
Modern, evidence driven geology, tells us that both uniformitarian and cataclysmic processes can and have happened to shape the earth. The foremost catastrophe over the history of life for which we have detailed understanding was the chicxulub impact.
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Who’s talking about need, though? A miracle is an act of God that supersedes material determinism. In other words, there is the ordinary course of events, and then there is the extraordinary. Why would God occasionally transcending the ordinary contradict His almightiness?
Moreover, this doesn’t infringe upon the unbeliever’s “right” to disbelief. When confronted with miracles, skeptics usually cling to “promissory materialism” (a concept harshly criticized by Nobel John Eccles * ), that is, the belief that whatever cannot be rationally explained today will undoubtedly be explained by science tomorrow.
If we are being completely frank, consciousness itself is the greatest “ordinary miracle”, so much so that no convincing or comprehensive materialist explanation for it exists. Yet, the materialist clings to promissory materialism regardless. They will 1000% continue to do so even when artificial intelligence will possess more artificial neural networks than there are neural connections in the human brain while still remaining entirely devoid of the self-awareness and true personal agency of human beings. Even if that happens, they will still hold on to promissory materialism.
The only problem with “miracles” is that many modern believers have been influenced by secular rationalism.
*”Promissory materialism is simply a superstition held by dogmatic materialists” - How the Self Controls Its Brain, page 168.
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Just because you don’t think you are evil does not make you good. You probably have not demanded that because your mind has not been able to comprehend the vast and devastating effects of evil. God has an infinite mind that knows how one person’s choice to do something evil and thereby create evil will effect multiple people in a negative way and how long that effect will last as it cascades through time. In other words, you don’t demand justice because you don’t fully comprehend evil. Once you comprehend it then you will demand justice. It is the law of mind.
It doesn’t make me evil either.
So you were wrong when you wrote “as demanded by all sentient beings”, because now you say there are sentient beings who don’t demand anything because they cannot comprehend.
Not that it matters, because ‘your mind has not been able to comprehend’ is a transparent excuse for not justifying your claims.
You should change your nickname to Cndscnsnspkr.
I am sorry, but you have just crossed the line.
It is not our place to judge or to declare what someone does, or does not understand, be it about evil or anything else (Evolution?). You are talking down in a manner that is not befitting of a human.
Leave the rationalisation and judgement to God. Claiming someone does not have the full information, or ability to process it is insulting.
Richard