At UD, vjtorley has posted a bizarre, 5,000-word “rebuttal” of Jerry Coyne. It begins:
Over on his Why Evolution Is True Website, Professor Jerry Coyne has posted a short passage on the papal condemnation of Galileo, excerpted from Andrew Dickson White’s A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom(New York, NY: D. Appleton and Company, 1896). However, all the passage proves is that neither White nor Coyne understand the theological doctrine which they are attacking: they are all at sea about the dogma at which they are aiming their barbs.
One slight problem: Coyne isn’t attacking anything. VJ Torley is tilting at windmills.
Coyne doesn’t express agreement or disagreement with the passage. He merely points out a funny proofreading edit pencilled into his copy of the book by a previous, seemingly obsessive reader:
Now I don’t even know if that correction is grammatically necessary, but I had to smile at the anonymous reader who got annoyed and took the trouble to add the proofreader’s transposition symbol.
VJ is evidently so sensitive to any attack on Catholic doctrine, real or imagined, that he’ll fire off a 5,000+ word “rebuttal” without even reading the post he’s responding to!
The anonymous editor is correct, except for the unforgivable error of defacing a book he doesn’t own.
I make a lot of goofy typos and spelling errors, but I had the fear of god drilled into me in ninth grade regarding parallel structure.
It could be:
“this opinion must neither be taught nor be advocated…”
or
“this opinion must be neither taught nor advocated…”
If you imagine someone speaking the words, it helps.
JoeG has just agreed with KeithS.Tthe 5th seal of the tardpocolypse is broken..
Joe, commenting on grammar, did manage to write a completely incoherent sentence.
Joe doesn’t understand the transposition symbol (or the word “transposition” itself, evidently). He thinks the proofreader was excluding “neither” from the sentence altogether, leaving
…which sounds a lot like something Joe would write.
The fifth seal is intact. Phew.
He sees it as an example of “conflict thesis” which – according to Torley – is summed up by this paragraph from John William Draper:
And I’m pretty sure that Coyne agrees with Draper, so even though this particular thread from Coyne was just a throwaway about marking up a book, the conflict is indeed a theme running through his website and WEIT.
So, Torley is shadowboxing against a phantom in this particular case. But what’s that meme — it’s not paranoia if they’re really out to get you ?
I think that anyone who still defends the filthy Catholic Church on anything, even on the least controversial points of doctrine, should be thrown in the shitter. I had no idea Torley was catholic. My opinion of him has gone from mere lack of respect to outright hatred.
Yes, Torley should be “paranoid” and sensitive to attack, because he and his kind are detestable and rightly detested.
I give Joe credit for noticing that Coyne was just amused by the proofreading mark and not endorsing or reviewing a book. But he managed to cock it up.
Rude letter to follow, no doubt.
🙂
Reading further into Torley’s stupid post, gah, what a waste.
He “proves” that there isn’t an inherent conflict between science and religion because: Gould’s NOMA. Yep, because of course Gould was the Pope of Scientism, and speaks for all of us.
And then, science came from religion to begin with. Barf..
Oh, and that litte misunderstanding with Galileo, well, that can’t possibly be evidence that the Church was in conflict with science, because:
— quoted from some pro-catholic book; who know how accurate it it. But it’s orthogonal to the “conflict thesis” anyways. So what if the 12th century church establishment built cathedrals with a secondary purpose as astronomical observatories, expecting the results to be in service to the glory of god in the heavens? So what? When it turned out a few centuries later that the results didn’t support the doctrine of the church, they were happy enough to incarcerate, torture, and burn astronomers.
The modern Church has abandoned any previous efforts to officially support science (assuming arguendo there were actually any previous efforts) — how much money did the Church donate to construct CERN or Aricebo ? — and no member of the existing catholic community deserves a cookie for the fact that they’re not burning heretics nowadays.
vjt’s reply at UD :
Phases of Venus.
Which of course is a morally-sufficient reason for the Pope to threaten his devoutly-Catholic friend with torture and death. Because the “best science of the day was against {Galileo]”. Because. Reasons.
Do you have any idea how immorally complicit that makes you sound, attempting to justify the filthy behavior of the Church?
Why would anyone perpetuate the lie tat the best science of he day was against Galileo? That is more morally perverted than the original error.
Torley’s link to Coyne broke when ColdCoffee pasted the quote.
“Are science and Christianity at war?”
And here’s the link to that wonderful essay “What Galileo Saw, in the New Yorker
I think I’m in love with Adam Gopnik. 🙂
vjtorley:
Come on, Vincent. You of all people should know that Coyne is not shy about expressing his opinion, particularly when it concerns religion and the church. If his purpose was to highlight the passage, he would have said so, and he wouldn’t have cropped the photo the way he did. Take another look.
:You are assuming Coyne believes that the condemnation of Galileo was ex cathedra, but you’ve provided no evidence for that claim.
hotshoe,
I don’t think Vincent deserves your hatred. Yes, he supports the Church, but I also think he has a conscience and is genuinely troubled by some of what the Church asks him to believe.
For example, I remember a discussion of some Old Testament atrocity in which innocents were slaughtered by the Israelites at God’s command. Torley was disturbed enough by this injustice to suggest, in all seriousness, that God must have intervened during the slaughter to prevent the innocent victims from feeling any pain.
That’s a desperate attempt at justification, to be sure, but it shows that Torley is actually wrestling with the issues instead of just shrugging them off as most Christians do.
He also cares more than most about the quality of the arguments offered in defense of Christianity. I think he recognizes that they are poor, and that his epically long and detailed posts are in part an effort to compensate with sheer volume for what the arguments lack in quality.
He is my pick for the ID supporter most likely to deconvert. The cognitive dissonance is building in him, and one day the dam may just break.
keiths,
Well, I appreciate your making room to be fair to Torley as apparently more moral and humane than the religion he belongs to.
Would this be your suggested treatment for anyone with views different than your own? Or is this vitriol reserved mainly for Catholics? Maybe it’s just your strong sense of poetic justice – since Galileo was threatened with jail hundreds of years ago for challenging Catholic doctrine, today anyone who supports Catholicism should be threatened with jail.
Unfortunately, the persecution of Christians is an all-too-common occurrence in many parts of the world. The UN Secretary General recently remarked on the challenges facing the world today and included among them “the persecution faced by many Christian communities and the intolerance that plagues us.”(http://www.un.org/sg/statements/index.asp?nid=7161)
Two pairs of words for you, Piltdown: “Child rape” and “Magdalene laundries”. Under the TSZ site rules, I have to presume that you are making a good-faith effort to communicate your views… and the only way anybody could, in good faith, assert that vitriol directed towards the Catholic church can only be due to intolerance for differing views, is if that assertion is made in blissful ignorance of all the nasty crap the Catholic church has done to earn that vitriol.
When the Pope hauls the greatest scientist of his day (or anyone else for that matter) before the Inquisition, forces him to recant his beliefs on pain of God-knows-what-hell and then imprisons him in his own house for the rest of his life, comments about whether Papal Infallibility was turned on or off at the time constitute an enormous non sequitur.
Preaching against condoms in Africa was another sphincter-eyed action of the previous Pope.
So when you think “child rape” you think of the Catholic Church? Really? Ever hear of NAMBLA? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nambla) Not a hint of Catholicism there.
I’m in no way defending atrocities committed by the Catholic Church over the last 2,000 years. But I’m not blind to the commendable things the Church has also done. Check out http://catholiccharitiesusa.org/. There’s a link where you can donate to help them out.
Throughout history, there have always been problems like this when religion and government get intertwined. As to “whether Papal Infallibility was turned on or off”, this was something I had not heard of until reading Dr. Torley’s post, and it seems awful convenient to invoke it in hindsight after being proven wrong.
Yeah, honestly, I hate that the most. The Church is guilty of – at minimum – the deaths of 10 million AIDS patients, and the lifetime grief of about 10 million AIDS orphans. The problem is not so much their preaching to their own faithful, although that was bad enough. That did have lethal results for the innocent spouses of adulterers in the congregation who compensated for guilt about one sin which they could not resist – extramarital sex – by strictly obeying the prohibition against a second sin – condom use.
The real tragedy is that the Church controls so much of the worlds’ healthcare; 25% of AIDS patients have been treated at Catholic hospitals/clinics. These patients have been systematically lied to and denied appropriate techniques to prevent transmission. And there was an ever-present threat that, if an African national government publicly contradicted the Church’s anti-condom policy, the Catholic charity healthcare could be cut back. The Church deliberately chose to create a public health disaster that is really nothing less than genocide.
Pope John Paul was particularly guilty and Pope Rat was hardly better. At least he finally conceded that it might be a bit more moral to choose to use a condom than to choose to transmit a lethal infection to your intimate partner.
You know why domestic abuse victims so often find it impossible to leave their abusers? I mean, besides the “I’ll cut you, bitch” and “I’ve got the children; you’ll never see your children again if you walk out of here”? Because the abusers do nice things afterwards. There’s not an actual apology, but there’s a promise to be more careful in the future, there’s taking the kids to McDonalds for a treat, there’s bringing home a small bouquet,, maybe there’s some loving forgive-me sex …
and each time the victim tells themselves their partner really didn’t mean to hurt them, really is good at heart ….
I collect and cherish moments of hopeless optimism.
davemullenix,
To us, it’s a ridiculous quibble. To someone like Torley, who (I suspect) is struggling to maintain his faith, it’s a crucial distinction.
Torley is well aware of the many bone-headed things done by the Church over the centuries. If he can blame all of them on fallible humans, then his faith in God need not be marred. Apparently God will allow all kinds of evil and ridiculous things to be done in his name, even by the Pope, but the one thing he won’t allow is for the Pope to promulgate a falsehood while claiming papal infallibility.
It’s a “get out of jail free” card for the Catholic faith. Any mistakes the Church makes, like the persecution of Galileo, or the modern-day coverup of sexual abuse by priests, can be laid at the feet of church officials who were not acting infallibly. God, and Catholic dogma, remain pristine and blameless.
What I would like to hear Torley (and other Catholics) explain is God’s peculiar choices about what to communicate to us infallibly. Apparently it is so crucially important for us to believe in theological inanities like the Assumption of Mary that it merits an infallible declaration by the Pope. Yet God can’t be bothered to give infallible guidance on the torture and burning of heretics, bureaucratic coverups of sexual abuse, or the prohibition of contraception in a world where population control and sexually-transmitted diseases are huge social problems.
Why is that? Does God have his priorities straight?
hotshoe,
Yeah, given the byzantine church hierarchy, is the following hierarchy of sin really too complex for the Church to manage?
From worst to best:
1. extramarital sex without condom
2. extramarital sex with condom
If STDs absent:
3. no extramarital sex; marital sex with condom
4. no extramarital sex; marital sex without condom
If STDs present:
3. no extramarital sex; marital sex without condom
4. no extramarital sex; marital sex with condom
“Sometimes the Pope says things he doesn’t really mean” – Father Ted
Rings a bell.
Here, Jan. 31
The chances?
Glen Davidson
“I don’t know what happened with the whole Jesus thing after the crucifixion.”
Me neither, but for an interesting perspective on that, find a book of Elvis sightings. There are a lot of parallels. I lost my Elvis book, but I remember one story where a youngish self effacing man spends a half hour singing ballads in a bar. There’s something familiar about the man, but the witnesses can’t put their finger on what it is. It is only after he leaves that the people there realize they’ve been listening to Elvis. They rush outside to look for him, but he’s vanished.
Compare that to this Bible story from Wikipedia:
“The author of the Gospel of Luke, at Luke 24:13-35, writes that Jesus appeared to two disciples who were walking from Jerusalem to Emmaus, which is described as being 60 stadia from Jerusalem (10.4 to 12 km depending on what definition of stadia is used), after his resurrection. One of the disciples is named as Cleopas in verse 18, while his companion remains unnamed.
The author of Luke places the story on the evening of the day of Jesus’ resurrection. The two disciples have heard the tomb of Jesus was found empty earlier that day. They are discussing the events of the past few days when a stranger asks them what they are discussing. “Their eyes were kept from recognizing him.” He soon rebukes them for their unbelief and gives them a Bible study on prophecies about the Messiah. On reaching Emmaus, they ask the stranger to join them for the evening meal. When he breaks the bread “their eyes were opened” and they recognize him as the resurrected Jesus. Jesus immediately vanishes.”
My all time favorite Elvis resurrection story tells the tale of a man who was taking a shower when, out of the corner of his eye, he saw Elvis walk past his window. He ran outside to get a better look, forgetting that he was naked and covered in soap suds. He didn’t see the rake until he stepped on it and knocked himself out. When he awoke, to his intense dismay Elvis had vanished.
Maybe I should start a new religion.
If you’ve spent some time with an intelligent schizophrenic, you would be disinclined to accept eyewitness testimony without corroboration.
Silly Galileo. If he had just proven his ideas, the Church wouldn’t have needed to punish him.
I think I’m in love with Glen Davidson, too 🙂
A truly jaw-dropping WTF comment from Torley. Goes on to write:
Noah, really? A literal ark? Non-negotiable?
I’m so shocked and dumbfounded.
Dog, what a fargin’ idiot.
Or had any experience of eyewitness reports.
Or even read and indeed seen various well known psychological experiments on both attention and eyewitness recall. Psychologists do all the best experiments.
People, depending on what they are doing, often miss a man in a gorilla suit, or a clown on a unicycle, let alone less obvious details that might provide mundane explanations of various phenomena. Also, if you insert extraneous information into a question about a car accident (e.g. ask about the stop sign when there was no stop sign), people will usually include the information in their recall.
BRIAN: There was this man, and he had two servants.
ARTHUR: What were they called?
BRIAN: What?
ARTHUR: What were their names?
BRIAN: I don’t know. And he gave them some talents.
EDDIE: You don’t know?!
BRIAN: Well, it doesn’t matter!
ARTHUR: He doesn’t know what they were called!
BRIAN: Oh, they were called ‘Simon’ and ‘Adrian’. Now–
ARTHUR: Oh! You said…
EDDIE: Ohh.
ARTHUR: …you didn’t know!
BRIAN: It really doesn’t matter. The point is there were these two servants–
ARTHUR: He’s making it up as he goes along.
In those days scientists believed Earth was the center of our solar system and Galileo couldn’t prove that Sun was the center of solar system. Punishment for various transgressions were severe in those days, so treatment meted out to Galileo might feel excessive to us.
Most of Torley’s comments are – i believe- directed at Mapou (a UDer who has radical view of first male and female. He talks about androgyny, snake being metaphorical reference to Lucifer etc. ).
As for the Ark, Check out Calculations by Dr.Max D Younce
1. The ark was not shaped like a ship, but was shaped as a rectangle, like a three-story barge. It was never built to sail, only to float.
2. Size of the ark: The length was 450 ft., the width was 75 ft., and heighth was 45 ft. (Genesis 6:15). The cubit was approximately 18 in., which was the measurement taken forearm the elbow to the end of the middle finger.
3. Capacity. There was 33,750 sq. ft. on each of the 3 floors, making a total floor space of 101,250 sq. ft. This is equivalent to 1,518,750 cubic ft.
4. Capacity equivalence. The area of the ark is equal to approximately 522 standard stock cars or 8 freight trains of 65 cars each.
Note: one stock car can hold about 25 cattle. A double deck car can haul about 250 pigs or sheep. With this carrying capacity there would be no problem transporting the original species. Two trains hauling 73 cars each could carry about 35,000 animals, to give some idea of the ark’s carrying capacity.
Hmm. So you think Noah’s ark is not just a story for children do you? And when you say “original species” what do you mean? How many is that?
Tell me just one thing then. Can you describe the story of the Koala bear to me? You know, what happened when it got off the ark and how it made it to Australia?
Could someone not banned at UD ask VJT if we must accept the world is flat, assuming that the story about the devil tempting him from a mountain came from Jesus?
coldcoffee,
The Ark. Never existed.
Global repopulation from 2-individual genetic bottlenecks in completely destroyed ecologies? Prey species reduced to 2 also, hardly sustenance for the predators. How many bees? What about termites? 40 days rain at the rate of 6 inches a minute? No record in ice cores? Or anywhere else?
You find evolution dubious, but the Ark you find plausible?
Just think about trying to do it. I’ll give you a boat of any size and shape you like, and 6 mates.
Perhaps you could give Ken Ham some advice. I’m sure between you you can get a good seaworthy vessel built for a few sheqels.
If you can believe Great pyramids, Stonehenge etc can be built by humans, why can’t the Ark ?
How can you be so sure?
No I can’t. I don’t have the skill to build ships 🙂
Some explanations from here:
When Krakatoa erupted in 1883, the island remnant remained lifeless for some years, but was eventually colonized by a surprising variety of creatures, including not only insects and earthworms, but birds, lizards, snakes and even a few mammals. One would not have expected some of this surprising array of creatures to have crossed the ocean, but they obviously did. Even though these were mostly smaller than some of the creatures we will discuss here, it illustrates the limits of our imaginings on such things.
Evolutionists acknowledge that men and animals could once freely cross the Bering Strait, which separates Asia and the Americas.[1] Before the idea of continental drift became popular, evolutionists depended entirely upon a lowering of the sea level during an ice age (which locked up water in the ice) to create land bridges, enabling dry-land passage from Europe most of the way to Australasia, for example.
The existence of some deep-water stretches along the route to Australia is still consistent with this explanation. Evolutionist geologists themselves believe there have been major tectonic upheavals, accompanied by substantial rising and falling of sea floors, in the time period which they associate with an ice age. For instance, parts of California are believed to have been raised many thousands of feet from what was the sea floor during this ice age period, which they call “Pleistocene” (one of the most recent of the supposed geological periods). creationist geologists generally regard Pleistocene sediments as post-flood, the period in which these major migrations took place.
In the same way, other dry-land areas, including parts of these land bridges, subsided to become submerged at around the same time.[2]
There is a widespread, but mistaken, belief that marsupials are found only in Australia, thus supporting the idea that they must have evolved there. However, living marsupials, opossums, are found also in North and South America, and fossil marsupials have been found on every continent. Likewise, monotremes were once thought to be unique to Australia, but the discovery in 1991 of a fossil platypus tooth in South America stunned the scientific community.[3] Therefore, since evolutionists believe all organisms came from a common ancestor, migration between Australia and other areas must be conceded as possible by all scientists, whether evolutionist or creationist.
Creationists generally believe there was only one Ice Age after, and as a consequence of, the flood. The lowered sea level at this time made it possible for animals to migrate over land bridges for centuries. Some creationists propose a form of continental break-up after the flood, in the days of Peleg. This again would mean several centuries for animals to disperse, in this instance without the necessity of land-bridges. However, continental break-up in the time of Peleg is not widely accepted in creationist circles.
KOALA BEAR:
Some problems are more difficult to solve. For instance, there are creatures that require special conditions or a very specialized diet, such as the giant panda of China or Australia’s koala. We don’t know, of course, that bamboo shoots or blue gum leaves[4] were not then flourishing all along their eventual respective migratory paths. In fact, this may have influenced the direction they took.
But, in any case, there is another possibility. A need for unique or special conditions to survive may be a result of specialization, a downhill change in some populations. That is, it may result from a loss in genetic information, from thinning out of the gene pool or by degenerative mutation. A good example is the many modern breeds of dog, selected by man (although natural conditions can do likewise), which are much less hardy in the wild than their “mongrel” ancestors. For example, the St. Bernard carries a mutational defect, an overactive thyroid, which means it needs to live in a cold environment to avoid overheating.
This suggests that the ancestors of such creatures, when they came off the Ark, were not as specialized. Thus they were more hardy than their descendants, who carry only a portion of that original gene pool of information.[5] In other words, the koala’s ancestor may have been able to survive on a much greater range of vegetation. Such an explanation has been made possible only with modern biological insights. Perhaps as knowledge increases some of the remaining difficulties will become less so.
Such changes do not require large time periods for animals under migratory pressure. The first small population that formed would tend to break up rapidly into daughter populations, going in different directions, each carrying only a portion of the gene pool of the original pair that came off the ark.
Sometimes all of a population will eventually become extinct; sometimes all but one specialized type. Where all the sub-types survive and proliferate, we find some of the tremendous diversity seen among some groups of creatures which are apparently derived from one created kind. This explains why some very obviously related species are found far apart from each other.
The sloth, a very slow-moving creature, may seem to require much more time than Scripture allows to make the journey from Ararat to its present home. Perhaps its present condition is also explicable by a similar evolutionary process. However, to account for today’s animal distribution, evolutionists themselves have had to propose that certain primates have traveled across hundreds of miles of open ocean on huge rafts of matted vegetation torn off in storms.[6] Indeed, iguanas have recently been documented traveling hundreds of miles in this manner between islands in the caribbean.[7]
The Bible suggests a pattern of post-flood dispersal of animals and humans that accounts for fossil distribution of apes and humans, for example. In post-flood deposits in Africa, ape fossils are found below human fossils. Evolutionists claim that this arose because humans evolved from the apes, but there is another explanation. Animals, including apes, would have begun spreading out over the earth straight after the flood, whereas the Bible indicates that people refused to do this (Genesis 9:1, 11:1-9). Human dispersal did not start until Babel, some hundreds of years after the flood. Such a delay would have meant that some ape fossils would be found consistently below human fossils, since people would have arrived in Africa after the apes.[8]
We may never know the exact answer to every one of such questions, but certainly one can see that the problems are far less formidable than they may at first appear.[9] Coupled with all the biblical, geological, and anthropological evidence for noah’s flood, one is justified in regarding the Genesis account of the animals dispersing from a central point as perfectly reasonable.[10] Not only that, but the biblical model provides an excellent framework for the scientific study of these questions
Oh? You seemed to be confident of the seaworthiness of a 450ft three story wooden boat for 35,000 animals.
So much for christian pretense of god-given morality.
Unless, by “god-given” the christians mean torture and threats of burning at the stake.
Me, I’ll take my chances with “human-given” morality any day.
The Ark is pretty much equivalent in size and structure to modern ships. Why won’t it float ?
I believe God gave every one of us a moral inbuilt compass, that’s the reason both atheist and theist respond alike to moral questions. This is proven by moral test statistics. Test yourself at Harvard wesite