Hi Tony,

Yes, and all that water came from .... well, not from the oceans, otherwise they would have been emptied, while the mountains were being covered with water - otherwise, what would have been the point of gathering all those pairs of animals, if there was going to be any dry land anywhere ?

And afterwards, the water flowed away to ..... to the oceans ?

I guess God giveth and God taketh away. Maybe Heaven is actually made up of half a billion cubic miles of water, and more, and God used that. Or perhaps matter cannot be created or destroyed except by God ?

And if it rained for forty-odd days non-stop, how long would it take all that water to evaporate away, from 29,000-foot mountains, at, say, a foot a day ? Well, I suppose 29,000 days, or about eighty years, not counting winters when evaporation might have slowed down. Lucky that Noah and all those old guys lived for two and three hundred years, don't you think ?

Speaking of old guys, where was Mathuselah by this time ? Yes, he lived for 960 years or so, but was he knocked off by the Flood ? I'll have to check back all the begats and life-spans.

So how much food would Noah need to keep his multitude of pairs of animals, no doubt breeding at their usual rates, for a few days PLUS forty days PLUS eighty years ? Did he cull the numbers so that he always had just the two of each ? Did he chuck the rest over the side ? The multitude of mosquitoes and blow-flies included ?

A charming fairy story, the point of which was more important than the details, i.e. that people should be faithful to their gods, otherwise they will be stuck in a stinking boat for eighty years or more, constantly feeding filthy and complaining animals.

It's all great fun !

Cheers,

Joe

"....Similarly, postmodernism has administered the kybosh to philosophy! Do you really think all those great thinkers and mystics, whom Ditchkins has never read, whose learning you would struggle to fathom, devoted their lives and conceived their absolute convictions based on nothing more than flagrant conceit?..."

Quite so, Squeers, and I reprise your passage above after reading D.C. Shindler's essay on the French Catholic poet, Paul Claudel....This passage on the human paradox:

"Claudel....sets into relief the fascinating human paradox: man infinitely surpasses himself. There is something beyond the human 'in' the human, and man thus exists as open in his core to the supernatural. This radical duality is the source of both the wretchedness and grandeur, the ridiculous pretension and the sublime humility that make equal claim on human life. But Claudel approaches this rich paradox specifically in connection with the poetic act, the moment of inspiration. The essential point to note in the way he characterises this moment is in the fact that the most genuine creativity arises not from the deliberate concentration of [merely] human effort but in the quiet, almost incidental attunement to what is greater in man. The voice of God is manifest in a hushed whisper, glory appears in the vulnerability of a baby."

Poirot, you’ve pre-empted me and I like the quote, though according to modern lights I’m meant to despise it.

Luciferase,
I’ve just reviewed your post of Tuesday, 10 April 2012 9:57:00 PM that I was unable to respond to at the time; I will now.
I said “whose learning you would struggle to fathom” because one thing I’ve realised is that the thinkers of yore were far more accomplished and rounded in their learning. Learning today is specialised and much less intensive, and we’re bombarded with distractions such that it’s nearly impossible to accumulate, let alone meditate, upon the vast “data” available in and across fields. Moreover nearly everything, it seems, has already been thought and commodified—this is Jameson’s conception of postmodernism in the link I cited.
So it wasn’t a put down, except in as much as it applies to all of us; nor was I suggesting it was, “because of transmission or receiving problems?”, as you wittily-sarcastically proffer. Dawkins is in fact a good instance of the kind of postmodern myopia I’m talking about—his philosophical/theological illiteracy, paradoxically, gives him the confidence he professes in his shallow materialism!
Thus when you say, “Mystics can not be helped, I've met enough to know”, you make the mistake of supposing today’s pot-smoking mystics are the template. Hegel is one of my heroes and he was inspired by the mystic, Jakob Bohme. I don’t say that Hegel was “right”—but then neither is modern science—but at least he didn’t rule on what was permissible and what wasn’t. One of the problems with modern science is precisely that it did come out of mysticism, ergo it’s hyperbolic aversion, such that it arbitrarily rules out a vast dimension of the human condition.
Your last paragraph of that post is pure tosh, and dishonest, for you cannot possibly infer your denunciations from anything I wrote, and you’re too intelligent (flattery has its uses) to be innocently-capable of such a distortion of my position.
I’m still very busy, but if you wish to thrash any of this out further I’ll find the time.

George,
It is reasonable for Krauss to refer to the metaphysical nothing for his book title. He maintains "nothing" is unstable. A particle and its anti-particle spontaneously appear from nothing. At another instant a particle annihilates its anti-particle so there is nothing. What comes first, nothing, or a particle and its anti-particle? For the purpose of his argument, Krauss says the former while his detractors maintain the latter for the purpose of theirs.

Who is right? It's unknowable, so Krauss' has not won a great argument but has brought his detractors' to claim physics supports the status-quo, i.e. the existence of a creator has not been disproven, so they relax in the satisfaction their belief remains impregnable to science. Much ado about nothing, really, but when I introduced Krauss to this thread I was inviting posters to make of it what they will, not entering deep into the history of the metaphysics of nothing, although it has been interesting sideline. That's all I've got left to say.

Squeers,
To what "knowledge" do you refer when you say: "...the surely obvious fact that no knowledge is original or spontaneous; it's all derivative and proceeded out of mysticism..!".

It seems that over your last few posts since re-entering the fray you are setting empiricism at one end of a scale with mysticism at the other. I may be reading you incorrectly but you elucidation will be an interesting read when you can fully rejoin us.

Luciferase,

>> It is reasonable for Krauss to refer to the metaphysical nothing for his book title. <<

I agree with this, and more or less with the rest. I am not going to repeat myself for the fourth time but still: my original objection was not about your or Krauss’ use of the word “nothing” but about the use of “redefine”.

George, George, George,
Love to share a red with you.

The metaphysical "nothing" we agree upon is as pure a nothing as nothing can be.

Krauss agrees but, he says, metaphysical nothing is "unstable".

"No" his detractors say, "the metaphysical nothing is a separate entity to the physical nothing." In making this distinction they redefine Krauss' "nothing" and make it their argument against him.

Detractors would say they "dispute" his nothing rather than "redefine" it, with the semantic argument that Krauss' "unstable nothing" is meaningless because "nothing" cannot be meaningfully joined with any adjective (red nothing, smooth nothing, sweet nothing).

I think I've covered it from all angles, George