Dear Jon,

I was speaking from a general perspective.
However - you of course are entitled to make
judgements about me from your own. We have seen
that people in different walks of life may
interpret the same phenomenon - whether it is
a prime minister's policies, or a religious doctrine, -
in very different ways. In other words, people tend
to see the world from a viewpoint of subjectivity -
an interpretation based on personal values and
experiences. Even scientists themselves can
adopt varying perspectives on the same problem and
can come to different and even contradictory
conclusions as a result. This fact raises a very
important issue. Is it possible to understand
lets say - society - from a viewpoint of objectivity -
an interpretation that eliminates the influence of
personal values and experiences?

If the world consisted simply of some self evident
reality that everyone perceived in exactly the same
way, there might be no disagreement among observers.
But the truth of the matter is that what we see
in the world is shpaed by what our past experience has
prepared us to see and by what we consciously or
unconsciusly want to see. Knowledge and belief
do not exist in a vacuum; they are social products
whose content depends on the context in which they
are produced.

A fundamentalist preacher will tend to view pornography
in one way; the owner of a strip-club, in another way.
Each is inclined to perceive facts selectively and to
interpret them accordingly.

We are therefore all guilty of some measure of bias -
the tendency, often unconscious, to interpret facts
according to our own values.

Well said Lexi I agree.

Now I hope you have kept a copy of your post. Just to remind yourself of what you have said when you get in another huff about someones different point of view. Ouch!

Dear Jay,

Definitely. And you do the same. ;-)

Dear Lexi
My apologies for only just know stealing a moment to see if you had responded to my post. I should have responded earlier. It will serve me right if you never return to read this.
At the risk of sounding patronising, may I thank you for your good posting manners. Not all posters display them. But you missed the point when you responded, "You're taking Adam and Eve literally by the sound of your post. I have always assumed that they represented "everyman". Recall that I said, "With no Adam and Eve, OR ANYONE ELSE, suddenly materialising as completely formed modern day humans,…". Did you miss the words I've capitalised?
Here's the argument I was making. It's based on what was drummed into me in my twelve years in Catholic schools. Every human has an eternal soul but lower animals don't and humans have always been exactly as we are now because God made the first ones (whether it was Adam and Eve OR ANYONE ELSE is immaterial) and that's how he made them, soul included — in his own image, in fact. Evolution blows that out of the water because we now know that humans have NOT always been as we are now. In fact, we developed from lower forms that did not have souls. So where did our souls come from? If you argue that every animal that qualifies as a human has a soul, then, as evolution rang its is painfully slow changes on what species were like, there must have been a creature who was the first to qualify as a human and that creature, that first human, must have had parents who did not qualify. And that creature, that human, must have got a soul from somewhere. Presumably God issued one. So there must have been a human who had a soul but whose parents didn't.
Continued…

… The reason I played the good news and bad news game with how God could explain to that human why her parents weren't about on the day of general judgment was to highlight how evolution has made highly improbable the whole Christian belief about eternal souls and life everlasting. Of course, my argument does not prove that there is no God but it is another in the huge and growing list of reasons that open minded people have for concluding that while they can't prove there is no god, the probability that there isn't one is compelling. And that's got a lot to do with why non- believers really resent it when Christians AND OTHER believers claim a special status for themselves including the right to have huge slabs of taxpayer money diverted to help them propagate their highly implausible and utterly non-verifiable beliefs and the right to dominate the decisions governments make in the moral domain that, once enacted in law, force non-believers to behave according to rules make no moral or logical sense.

On re-reading my last post, I'm reminded that in the Pell v Dawkins Q&A debate, Cardinal Pell actually agreed that all animals have souls. He made this concession to get himself out of a logical bind he could see was about to envelop him. It would be interesting to know if he changed his mind back the next day when the immediate danger had passed. Imagine what heaven would be like if every animal that ever lived is going to be there, pointing to its blameless immortal soul when challenged by St Peter. Well, they must be blameless because, as the church says, things with souls cannot sin until they have reached the age of reason and most lower animals cannot reason. Or can they?
Another of Cardinal Pell's errors in that debate was claiming that evolution by natural selection is an instance of determination by random chance. His making this error (again) was especially interesting given that he was publicly and privately corrected for making the same false claim in his opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald on October 30, 2007. Is he a very slow learner or just somebody prepared to say whatever it takes to win a given instant? Surely he has not turned his back on the Vatican and thrown in his lot with Runner in declaring that evolution is a myth.