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ancient wing, archaeopteryx, birds, chromosomes, clawed wings, differences between scales and feathers, dinosaurs, dinosaurs into birds, feathers, fossil, fossils, genes, lower layers, punctuated equilibrium, scales, strata, teeth
“Paleontologists have tried to turn Archaeopteryx into an earth bound feathered dinosaur. But it’s not. It is a bird, a perching bird. And no amount of ‘paleobabble’ is going to change that.” Alan Feduccia – a world authority on birds from UNC Chapel Hill, quoted in “Archaeopteryx: Early Bird Catches a Can of Worms,” Science Feb. 5, 1994, p. 764-5.
They tell the kids we have proof for evolution because dinosaurs turned into birds!
“Dinosaurs alive – as birds – scientist says”. (Seattle Post-Intelligencer, May 28, 1999)
“Birds are today’s dinosaurs”, says renowned Canadian Paleontologist Philip Currie, and “even the fearsome Tyrannosaurus Rex likely sported feathers.”
“Currie, who spoke yesterday at the University of Washington on ‘Feathered Dinosaurs from China’, is one of the world’s leading proponents of the controversial theory that birds are the direct descendants of dinosaurs. In that sense, dinosaurs are still alive today, he said.”
It may have escaped your attention, but there are a few differences between a dinosaur and a bird.
You don’t just put a few feathers on them on and say “Come on man, give it a try. It won’t hurt too badly.”
Dinosaurs did not turn to birds.
If dinosaurs turned into birds, somewhere along the line, when his front legs were developing into wings they’re going to be half-leg / half-wing–which means he can’t run and he can’t yet fly.
1. Clawed Wings
They say we have proof that they did because of Archaeopteryx.
Archaeopteryx means “ancient wing”
They say, “See boys and girls? He has claws on his wings!”
Yeah, so?
12 birds today have claws on their wings including the ostrich, swan, hoatzin, emu, and ibis.
“Strahl adds that some ornithologists call the hoatzin ‘primitive’ because of its archaeopteryx-like claws; but he prefers to think of it as ‘high;y specialized.’ Swans, ibis and many other birds, he notes have wing claws; they just never make use of them.” (“What’s a Hoatzin?” Scientific American, vol. 261 December 1989, p. 30)
This fraud was exposed in 1986–that’s 15 years ago!
Why is this lie still in the textbooks?
2. Teeth
They say, “Look children, he’s got teeth in his beak. That proves he has reptilian features.”
Now wait a minute.
Some reptiles have teeth. Some don’t.
Some mammals have teeth. Some don’t.
Some fish have teeth. Some don’t.
Some of you have teeth. Some don’t.
Doesn’t prove a thing.
3. Strata
Birds are found in lower layers than Archaeopteryx. Therefore, if you believe in evolution and the geologic column, it does not make sense that the Archaeopteryx would be found in layers higher than birds if birds supposedly evolved from them.
“In western Colorado’s Dry Mesa Quarry, Brigham Young University archaeologists have come upon the 140-million-year-old remains of what they are calling ‘the oldest bird ever found.’ … It is obvious that we must now look for the ancestors of flying birds in a period of time much older than that in which the Archaeppteryx lived,’ says Yale University’s John H. Ostrom who positively, identified the specimen.” “Bone Bonanza: Early Bird and Mastodon,” Science News, vol. 112 (September 12, 1977), p. 198.
4. Difference between scales and feathers
They say bird feathers evolved from scales.
A. They come from different genes on the chromosome.
B. They develop totally differently
C. A scale is a hard wrinkle in the skin—a feather is not a wrinkle of skin.
D. They attach to the skin very differently
E. Feathers are incredibly complex and unbelievably complicated.
They are both made from the same protein, Keratin and there is where the similarity stops.
So what?
Battleships and forks are both made of iron. It doesn’t prove they both evolved from a tin can.
It proves the same Engineer is using the same materials for different functions. God used Keratin for finger nails and hair and scales and feathers. So? Same Designer, that’s what it proves!
“Fossil remains of a bird which lived between 142 and 137 million years ago were recently found in the Liaoning province of northeastern China. The discovery, made by a fossil-hunting farmer and announced by a c Chinese/American team of scientists, including Alan Feduccia (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) and Larry D. Martin (University of Kansas), provide the oldest evidence of a beaked bird on Earth yet found. … The Chinese bird, claim its discoverers, probably lived at the Jurassic-Cretaceous boundary–prior to the arrival of Deinonychus and Mononykus–and could not possibly be descended from them.” “Jurassic Bird Challenges Origin Theories,” Geotimes, vol. 41 (January 1996), p. 7
Across the Fruited Plain 
Excuse me, velociraptors had feathers. *ahem*
Hi Anna – Where is your evidence?
Fossils. There are feathers in the fossils. I know, god left them here to trick us, right? Also, our half leg half wing therefore could not fly comment just shows how little you understand basic biology. As for teeth, by switching on a single dormant gene, we can get birds to have teeth again, it is in their genes already. Now why would they have genes for TEETH if god made them as they are today? Another trick by god? No. They had teeth in the past, and now they don’t. That’s called evolution, baby, no matter how you spin it.
Hi Linda,
Thank you for stopping by and sharing your thoughts.
1) “Fossils”
No fossil is evidence for evolution. https://sepetjian.wordpress.com/2011/09/29/refuting-fossil-evidence-the-data-is-not-in-the-strata/
2) “There are feathers in fossils”
I know. How do feathers in fossils prove the unobserved belief that a dinosaur became a bird?
3) “I know, god left them here to trick us, right?”
Wrong. God is not a trickster, nor can He lie. (Numbers 23:19, Hebrews 6:18, Titus 1:2, 1 Samuel 15:29)
You misinterpreting the evidence does not mean that anyone is trying to trick you.
4) “Also, (y?)our half leg half wing therefore could not fly comment just shows how little you understand basic biology.”
Well, if the evolutionary changes you subscribe to did not happen slowly over time which would necessitate a slow and gradual formation of a wing, I take it you believe in punctuated equilibrium? In other words, since there is no proof of transitional forms, it must have happened too quickly to have been preserved in the strata. Believing that a dinosaur laid an egg and a bird flew out does not add any more credibility to your position than believing that a rock turned into a human over the course of 3.4 billion years.
5) “As for teeth, by switching on a single dormant gene, we can get birds to have teeth again”
So in other words, change requires intelligent input, it doesn’t happen automatically?
6) “They had teeth in the past, and now they don’t. That’s called evolution, baby, no matter how you spin it.”
There are at least 6 different definitions to the word evolution. https://sepetjian.wordpress.com/2011/09/22/what-is-evolution/
1. Cosmic evolution: the origin of time/space/matter from nothing in the supposed “Big Bang”
2. Chemical evolution: all the elements “evolved” from hydrogen
3. Stellar evolution: stars formed from dust clouds
4. Organic evolution: life formed from non-living matter
5. Macro-evolution: plants and animals produce offspring different than their ‘kind’
6. Micro-evolution: variations develop within the kind such as big dogs and little dogs; bacteria becoming resistant to drugs; etc.
Micro-evolution which is scientific and observable is a variation within a kind. The first five are purely religious. A bird with teeth and a bird without teeth are still birds.
I fail to see how this buttresses your point or proves that birds evolved from dinosaurs.
I tried leaving a comment to this article a couple days ago, but it didn’t go through. If it’s simply held up in moderation, then I apologize for being redundant.
I have a question for you, but first some background. Ignoring evolution, most people agree that organisms can be grouped into nested hierarchies. For example, there are prokaryotes and eukaryotes, with animals being one group of eukaryote, and then vertebrates as one type of animal, and mammals as one type of vertebrate, etc, etc. So, for example, in the group we call mammals, there are animals as diverse as whales, bats, platypuses, dogs, elephants, people, etc. These are all very different animals, but share common traits that are unique to mammals, so they all get grouped as mammals. Personally, I think that evolution is the best explanation for these nested hierarchies, but maybe that’s just the way that a god/gods (depending on your religion) liked to create things.
So, if you look at say, a chicken, a deinonychus, and an ornithischian dinosaur like a stegosaurus, it seems that the chicken and deinonychus have much more in common than either does with the stegosaurus. They’re bipedal, have feathers, hollow bones, an air sac respiratory system, etc. And if you pick a bird like archaeopteryx, then it has even more in common with the deinonychus, right down to the sickle claw.
So my question is, ignoring evolution, would you at least classify birds as a type of dinosaur?
In a comment thread on a separate post, you wrote:
I followed the link, and it appears to be this very article. When I click on the ‘comments’ link on that page, it brings me here. So, I don’t see that the link has added anything to the conversation. And as I wrote in that other thread, I don’t feel like getting involved in a long discussion on epistemology, when your own posts were originally about evidence. Can we please just accept that evidence exists, and argue about what that evidence is and how to interpret it?
If you would like me to respond in detail to this entire post of yours, I can, but I really just wanted to focus on birds being dinosaurs. You wrote in your comment that birds and dinosaurs are “two creatures, who could not be more biologically different”. I’m curious where you get that idea from. In the post, you have a comic picture of a sauropod with feathers tied to it, but sauropods aren’t a type of dinosaur particularly closely related to birds. That would be about like comparing foxes and whales, and claiming that whales couldn’t be mammals because they were so different from foxes.
Let me pose one more question. Do you consider archaeopteryx to be a bird or a dinosaur? I’ll assume from what you wrote in this entry that you think it’s a bird. If I’m mistaken, please let me know (though then I’d be curious what characteristics you would require to call something a bird).
So, assuming archaeopteryx is an early bird (not the first bird), let’s compare some other dinosaurs to archaeopteryx. Take a look at deinonychus. Compare the hands of deinonychus to the those of archaeopteryx. Do they look particularly different to you? What about feathers? Wikipedia has a good entry on Feathered Dinosaurs, from direct feather impressions in dinosaurs like Sinosauropteryx, to quill knobs on the forearms of dinosaurs like Velociraptor. The picture you have at the top of this entry shows another similarity – the air sac breathing system, as opposed to a bellows like lung in us mammals. There are also the hollow bones, foot anatomy (the Thermopolis specimen of archaeopteryx shows just how similar its foot was to that of Dromaeosaurs), sleeping posture (see Mei long, the ‘sleeping dragon’), nesting behavior, etc.
As an interesting anecdote, the the Solnhofen Specimen of archaeopteryx was originally mistaken for Compsognathus, a type of theropod dinosaur. Clearly, if archaeopteryx could be mistaken for a dinosaur because their anatomy was so similar, then dinosaurs and birds can’t be so very different.
So, to return to my original question, ignoring evolution, would you at least consider birds to be a type of dinosaur, in the same manner that bats, kangaroos, whales, dogs, etc. are all considered to be types of mammals?
Hi Jeff,
Thank you for your thoughts.
You’ve accused me of moving the goal posts, but if the person I’m engaging cannot even account for the constituents of evidence, namely truth, knowledge & logic, what is the point of discussing evidence with them? To do so would be like arguing the value of sentence structure to someone who denies words.
“Can we please just accept that evidence exists”
You have misunderstood my entire point. I can account for evidence according to my worldview. However, you are the one who cannot account for it, which is probably why you refused to go near a single question I asked you.
You deny certainty but then go on to write paragraphs of certain knowledge claims regarding quill knobs, feathers and lungs. If you could be wrong about everything you claim to know, then you don’t know THOSE things either.
No. A bird is not a dinosaur.
But since you deny knowledge and certainty, you couldn’t know either way.
Rejecting absolute certainty is not the same thing as rejecting knowledge altogether. Rather, it’s recognizing the limits of our knowledge. A good analogy is court trials. Absolute certainty is not required to convict somebody of a crime, not even to sentence them to death. All that is required is being sure beyond a reasonable doubt. All I’m saying is that other aspects of life are the same way.
Really, if this was the conversation I wanted to be having, I would have commented on your entry, Certainty, Logic, & God: When Worldviews Collide. But I see how that conversation went round and round without really resolving anything, and I didn’t really feel like getting drawn into a similar conversation.
Look, let’s pretend I was conducting an experiment, and I measured the pressure of something. And you’ve done work on something similar, and you don’t think my results are correct. Now, as I’ve said before, I admit that, philosophically speaking, I can’t even be absolutely positive that I made the measurement (I could be living in the Matrix). But practically speaking, would you use that philosophical point to argue against my experiment, or would you question my methodology, or whether I’d calibrated my pressure transducer accurately, or whether I had the pressure transducer located properly, or any other manner of reasonable objections?
I think there’s a common ground that we can all be at least reasonably sure that the world exists, and that our senses are more or less reliable. If we met in person and shook hands, I might then say that I’m very, very, very certain that we did just indeed shake hands, while you might say that you were absolutely certain. Why quibble over that small degree of certainty when we’d both agree, using the everyday usage of ‘certain’, that we’d just shaken hands?
So, I made “certain knowledge claims regarding quill knobs, feathers and lungs.” On the first, here’s a blog entry written in plain English summarizing a paper about quill knobs found on a Velociraptor: Living the Scientific Life – Quill Knobs Reveal that Velociraptor Had Feathers. You can go look at actual photos on that site. It shows the Velociraptor fossil, and compares it to the wing of a turkey vulture.
On feathers, here is a photo of a Sinosauropteryx fossil on Wikipedia: Wikipedia – File:Sinosauropteryxfossil.jpg. The filamentous feather imprints are clearly visible. Here’s a photo of another fossil of a different type of dinosaur: Wikipedia – File:Caudipteryx zoui….
The evidence for the air sac respiratory system in dinosaurs is more indirect (i.e. not as certain, and just one more example of knowledge being provisional). A good discussion of this is in Wikipedia, Physiology of Dinosaurs – Respiratory System
Are you really unwilling to discuss this evidence, some of it actual photographic evidence, because I won’t admit that absolute certainty is possible? How would you categorize the photographic evidence? Can you claim absolute certainty that they’re photos of actual fossils?
Oh, I couldn’t resist. Since you brought up sentence structure, I would say that it would be like a prescriptivist arguing sentence structure with a descriptivist. Personally, I lean more towards descriptivism.
Hi Jeff!
I am really glad that I have not run you off yet, because that isn’t my intention, neither am I intending to be obtuse. I am simply holding you accountable to the statements you have made and trying to demonstrate that you have zero basis for any of your claims according to your atheism, or what the Bible calls, your suppression of the truth.
Since my explanation between the terms knowledge and belief seems to have been missed or ignored, I’m including it again to relieve hopefully one area of confusion:
“In paragraph two, you make mention of “varying degrees of confidence.” It sounds like you subscribe to the notion of “degrees of certainty” which, like a “false fact”, is a tautology. You can have varying degrees of confidence regarding things you BELIEVE, but not things that we KNOW. If the confidence is anything less than 100%, it is not knowledge. It is belief. Therefore, when I speak of knowledge, I am referring to something which is justified, absolutely true or 100% certain. We, as humans, can believe things which are not true, but we could not KNOW something that was not true. So when I speak of knowledge, I’m speaking about things with which we have certainty.”
Therefore, I maintain once again that if you are not certain about something, then you do not know it, you believe it.
You wrote:
“I think there’s a common ground that we can all be at least reasonably sure that the world exists, and that our senses are more or less reliable. ”
But once again “reasonably sure” is BELIEF, it is not knowledge.
Furthermore, in order to appeal to senses, you would need to sense that your senses are reliable, just like you reason that your reasoning is reliable. In other words, you use them to prove their validity and that is viciously circular. Is everyone’s senses and reasoning reliable? Therefore, how do you know you’re not one of those people?
You keep coming back to the matrix reference but that is exactly my point. You are making assumptions that you are not in a matrix of which you cannot justify. Of the two if us, I possess the epistemological basis to know reality from the matrix, but as far as you know, you could be strapped face down to a bed in a psych ward someplace and your senses or reason could never detect it.
You say that you “lean more toward descriptivism.”, as though your atheism provides you both options. If evolution is true, then it tells us what IS the case, not what OUGHT to be the case. You cannot derive an “ought” (prescriptivism) from an “is” (descriptivism). Look into that.
The Christian God declares that without Him, you cannot know anything. Therefore, when you deny certainty about anything, you are proving that my absolute authority claims are correct and that you are suppressing the truth about Him. Until you repent and trust in Christ, you will continue to borrow the capital of truth, knowledge, and logic from my worldview in order to attack it, all the while acknowledging through your truth claims that you are in fact, an image-bearer of God.
I see you’ve gone looking at my blog, because I don’t think I’ve actually brought up atheism in this conversation. But, even when I was still a Christian, my views were largely similar on the issue of absolute certainty.
I agree with some of what you wrote, but disagree with other parts.
To start, I’ll admit that maybe I was wrong in saying that absolute certainty is completely impossible in all cases. For example, I know that I’m experiencing qualia right now, and I don’t think it would be a stretch to say I was absolutely certain. However, much beyond that, absolute certainty breaks down.
I disagree with your definitions of ‘know’ and ‘believe’, but now the conversation is degrading into semantics. If ‘know’ meant absolute, 100% certainty, then there would be very few occasions to use that word. But that’s not the way language works. We use the word ‘know’ when we mean very confident. That’s why we even have phrases and modifiers to express when we’re even more confident, for example, to say that you ‘know something beyond the shadow of a doubt’. Why would we even need that qualifier if ‘know’ meant complete and utter certainty?
For example, I know the hospital I was born in. My parents told me which one it was, and I have the birth certificate to prove it. Does that mean I’m absolutely, 100% certain? Can I completely rule out the possibility of some dark secret in my parents’ past that would have caused them to forge my birth certificate and lie to me my whole life? Of course, it’s very unlikely, but not completely outside the realm of possibility. But I would still say that I ‘know’ the hospital I was born in, rather than just ‘believe’ it. (Though, depending on how you use ‘believe’, I’d also say that I ‘believe’ my parents about the hospital I was born in.)
You wrote, “We, as humans, can believe things which are not true, but we could not KNOW something that was not true. So when I speak of knowledge, I’m speaking about things with which we have certainty.” But how could you know the difference? If you had a mistaken belief, but felt positive you were right, you might use the word ‘know’, even if you were wrong. For example, when I was younger, I ‘knew’ that airplane wings worked because the upper surface of a wing was was curved and that Bernoulli’s principle then explained that the upper surface would have a lower pressure. Now that I’ve actually studied aerospace engineering, I’ve learned that that old explanation is at best misleading, and at the very least incomplete (how do stunt planes fly upside down, or why aren’t wings just a continuous series of bumps). But at the time, I thought I ‘knew’ how airplane wings worked, could point to several books and other sources that explaiend it that way, and would have expressed a high degree of confidence in that explanation. So, how do you differentiate between things you think you know that actually are true, and things you think you know that later turn out to be incorrect? Or do you reserve the word ‘know’ for a very select group of concepts?
(I suppose an alternative would be to always use a lot of modifiers, but then conversation would be cumbersome. e.g. I’m very confident that I recall correctly that my history book in elementary school said that the Delcaration of Independence was signed in 1776, and I also have a very high degree of confidence that my history book in middle school said the same thing, and also my history book in high school, as well as several other books I’ve seen, and seeing images of a document that the Library of Congress claims to be the Declaration, with a 1776 date in the upper right corner that they claim is original to the document, so therefore, I propose, with a level of confidence commensurate with these numerous sources, that the Declaration of Independence was most likely signed in 1776. Wouldn’t it be easier to simply use the word ‘know’?)
You wrote, “You are making assumptions that you are not in a matrix of which you cannot justify.” I keep using the Matrix example because, although it’s extreme and unlikely, it illustrates the problem of trying to be absolutely certain. However, as I’ve written before, lacking absolute certainty is not the same thing as having no level of certainty. Let’s consider the possibility that we’re trapped in the Matrix. What evidence is there to support that idea? As far as I’ve seen – no evidence at all. The idea is something imagined up by philosophers and thinkers at least as far back as Descartes’s ‘evil demon’. So, it’s a product of people’s imagination with no evidence to suggest that it’s real. That’s a pretty good justification for not taking the idea very seriously, if not an absolute, concrete proof that it’s not real. I’m sure you’ve heard of Occam’s Razor. It’s not a way to conclusively determine the truth, but it is a good rule of thumb.
Either you or I have missed the point on prescriptivism vs. descriptivism. I don’t see what evolutionary biology or atheism have to do at all with grammar, other than in the very loose sense of people having had to have evolved before we could develop grammar. I was trying to make a light-hearted comment since you’d brought up grammar, and since strict prescriptivism is one of my pet peeves. When were the rules developed, and who’s the authority who determines the rules? Was Old English correct? Middle English? Are we speaking incorrectly now because we don’t follow the Old English grammar rules?
I disagree strongly with your last paragraph. Even the first sentence, “The Christian God declares that without Him, you cannot know anything,” is something I don’t agree with in a literal sense. The ‘Christian God’ has not declared anything, any more than Zeus, Odin, Osiris, or Quetzlcoatl. Imaginary beings cannot make declarations. Rather, there is a collection of scriptures now known as the Bible, with a passage stating that Yahweh has made that claim. But just because something appears in the Bible doesn’t mean that it’s true. Even if Yahweh were to exist, it wouldn’t logically follow that the Bible was divinely inspired or inerrant. In fact, if you have visited my blog, you might have noticed that I’m in the process of reading the Bible cover to cover again, only this time as an atheist. It makes for an interesting perspective. But one thing it makes very clear is that this is a cobbled together collection of writings from different Earthly sources of questionable reliability.
Your second sentence is a false dichotomy. In no way does denying absolute certainty indicate that Yahweh exists or that he is the only source of certainty in the universe.
I don’t see how I’m borrowing anything from your worldview. As I’ve written before, our varying degrees of certainty are built on a foundation of being reasonably sure that the world exists, and that our senses are more or less reliable, and then going from there. It may not give absolute certainly, but it’s pragmatically very useful. And I do think this is common ground among everybody – not anyone borrowing from anyone else.
And I certainly don’t agree with your last sentence, “acknowledging through your truth claims that you are in fact, an image-bearer of God.” Doing my best to determine the nature of reality is not acknowledging the existence of Yahweh or any of the other gods I listed up above. It’s simply doing my best to figure out the world.
And there you have it – you’ve managed to drag me into this conversation I never intended to have, when I’d much rather be talking about birds, dinosaurs, and evolution. Actually, one of my questions from my previous comment still stands. If you claim that absolute certainty is possible in your worldview (which I still don’t agree with), how do you interpret the photographic evidence I provided in my previous comment? Can you tell with absolute certainty what those structures are on the fossil of the Velociraptor arm that appear for all the world to be quill knobs?
As a follow up question, you wrote, “Of the two if us, I possess the epistemological basis to know reality from the matrix…” How? How can you be absolutely, 100% positive that you’re not in the Matrix? Because really, I tend to agree with something that S.C. wrote in that other thread on this site, “My inability to know is also your inability to know. ” Just because you can make a claim to certainty doesn’t make your claim right. It’s like you wrote, “We, as humans, can believe things which are not true…” How are you positive that your belief in your own absolute certainty is true, and not one of those mistaken beliefs?
Hi Jeff!
Thank you again for your thoughts. I am excited and anxious to address your questions regarding the basis for my certainty claims, but please, permit one question first:
Is it impossible for the Christian God to exist?
Also, you made the statement that you used to be a Christian. My question is, as a Christian, who was the Lord over your reasoning?
I think you should already know what my answer to the first question is going to be. The existence of Yahweh is a remote possibility, like being stuck in the Matrix or like Zeus, Odin, Osiris, Quetzalcoatl, or any of the other gods people have believed in existing.
I don’t understand your second question. Do you mean, did I believe in free will and think my thoughts were my own vs. being controlled directly by some other power / preordained by God? Are you asking if I prayed for guidance in my reasoning? I really don’t understand exactly what you’re asking.
Just in anticipation, I notice that when you asked S.C. this same question in your other post, you followed up with the question, “Ok, so if it is possible for the God of the Bible to exist, would it be possible for that God to reveal certain things to us, such that we could know some things for certain?”
My answer is that nothing can be ruled out entirely (like all the other outlandish examples I’ve been using), but I highly doubt that a God could reveal something to me such that I’d know it for certain. There are so many possibilities that I wouldn’t be able to eliminate. First, I’d have to rule out the most obvious possibilities, like deceiving myself into thinking I was experiencing something divine. With the numerous religions and numerous people who all think they’ve personally felt their god(s)’ presence(s), this is the most likely scenario. Then there would be hallucinations or mental illness to rule out.
Assuming that all Earthly explanations were ruled out, the next question would be to ask if this really is a god, or is it just a very technologically advanced organism that’s able to influence my brain chemistry to make me think I’m experiencing transcendent experiences (is it just another simulation in the Matrix)? Is it some type of super powerful organism that came into existence after the universe began, ala Star Trek V? Even if it was some type of being we’d conventionally call a deity, what is its nature? Is it honest? How do I know I can trust the revelations and that this deity isn’t deceiving me? Even accepting the Christian mythology, how would I know if I was dealing with Yahweh or Satan? After all, Satan is supposedly very powerful as well, and didn’t get the nickname “The Great Deceiver” for nothing. But even if it was one of Yahweh’s emissaries, how would I know it wasn’t a lying spirit such as mentioned in 1 Kings 22.
Still, if I was to receive revelations in a highly convincing form (preferably among an entire group so that the story could be corroborated, and not just a personal one-on-one revelation that would leave me suspicious of a hallucination or self deception), I’d entertain the idea that they were coming from a deity, and look for further evidence that the deity was real. But, I have never seen nor heard of any well-documented, convincing revelations myself, or I probably wouldn’t still be an atheist.
Anyway, knowing my reservations as discussed above, I’m still curious as to how you feel you can attain absolute certainty.
Thank you, Jeff.
You asked how I can have certainty while you cannot. The answer is that the Christian God, whose existence you admit is possible, reveals certain things to us, His creation, such that we can know them for certain. Therefore, when you admit its not impossible for the Christian God to exist, you have granted me an avenue to certainty. Therefore, according to our truth claims, I can have certainty, while you admittedly cannot since you admit that you could be wrong about everything you claim to know.
And that’s exactly what the Bible says about us. That to reject God leaves you without the capacity to know anything. Therefore, the entire time that you are attempting to discredit the Bible, you are actually living exactly according to what it says about you. You say you agree with S.C. that if you cannot know anything, then neither can I. But I’ll ask you what I asked him. If you don’t know anything, how can you know what I can know? You would first have to know what YOU know, before you can begin to cast aspersions regarding what I can know. Also, your overture is known as a Tu Quoque Fallacy meaning you do not escape the responsibility of validating your own truth claims simply by saying, “Well, you too!” To answer your hanging question, I would not make absolute certainty claims based on a photo.
Secondly, you say that you used to be a Christian, (which is a claim you couldn’t know if you could be wrong about everything you claim to know). But since there are no “former Christians”, I reject your claim. My question to you was who was the Lord over your reasoning when you were a “Christian”? In other words, was God the Lord over your reasoning as a “Christian” or were you the Lord over your own reasoning? So for instance, Proverbs 3:5-6 says:
“Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways, submit to Him and He will make your paths straight.”
Therefore, as a Christian, when you came across something that didn’t make sense regarding your faith or the Bible, did you trust God or did you lean on your own understanding?
In other words, I think it’s pretty obvious from what you wrote that you were always the Lord over your own reasoning. Jeff called the shots regarding what was reasonable and rationale, not God. Which is why you couldn’t immediately answer that God was the lord over your reasoning–because He wasn’t. If God was the Lord over your reasoning, I’d like to know how you could reason out of that position. Therefore, if you are not a Christian now, you never were a Christian. Which is also why your “views were largely similar on the issue of absolute certainty.”
Thirdly, since I have been unable to convince you that belief and knowledge are not synonyms, would you at least acknowledge that your knowledge claims are assumptions?
Fourthly, you purport that you have truth and I do not. Would you say that our thoughts are the by-product of chemical reactions? If so, what makes one fizz “true” and another fizz “false?” In other words, if I shook up a bottle of Coke and you shook up a bottle of Sprite, would it be reasonable to call one of those fizzes true and one false?
Fifthly, you state that you are experiencing qualia, but you can’t be absolutely certain of it. Therefore, you DO NOT KNOW that you are experiencing qualia.
If you disagree, then please justify this claim according to your worldview.
Sixthly, if expressions or figures of speech underpin your truth claims, then why didn’t you appeal to them when I asked you how you know what you know? By that rationale, “Going to hell in a hand basket.” demands that hell is real and hand baskets are the mode of delivery. Therefore, according to your evidence you need to repent and trust in Christ to avoid hell, otherwise, why would we use that expression?
Seventhly, you posit a myriad of false deities saying that The ‘Christian God’ has not declared anything, any more than “Zeus, Odin, Osiris, or Quetzlcoatl.” Oh really? Please give me the references where those false gods make this statement:
“Before me no god was formed, nor will there be one after me. I, even I, am the Lord, and apart from me there is no savior. I have revealed and saved and proclaimed— I, and not some foreign god among you. You are my witnesses,” declares the Lord, “that I am God. (Isaiah 43:10-12)
Because that is what Yahweh has declared. Now, if you would like to become an Odinite and posit Odin as your absolute authority, I would be happy to debate our respective authorities, but you would need to abandon your atheism in order to do so.
I left a comment anticipating your response of, “The answer is that the Christian God, whose existence you admit is possible, reveals certain things to us, His creation, such that we can know them for certain.” I listed many reservations for why I would doubt that even revelation (especially personal revelation) could be absolutely certain, but you haven’t addressed any of those. You merely made a claim with nothing to substantiate it. Even if I have somehow “granted [you] an avenue to certainty”, you jumped right to the final destination without revealing anything from the trip.
It’s kind of convenient, but not especially surprising, for a book like the Bible to have a passage saying that people that don’t believe it are wrong, and then invoke some superstitious reason for why the unbelievers can’t even be right. It’s a very effective way of insulating the faith.
You accuse me of a Tu Quoque Fallacy. I see it like arguing with an Indian Yogi who says he can levitate. I’d list all the universal reasons why humans can’t levitate, and he’d come back saying that just because I can’t do it doesn’t mean he can’t do it. It’s the same thing with absolute certainty. I’m not merely saying, ‘you, too’. I’m saying it applies to everybody. It’s a universal limitation of knowledge. And I’ve explained, repeatedly, that even though absolute certainty may not be possible, it doesn’t mean all possibilities are equally likely.
You wrote, “But since there are no “former Christians”, I reject your claim.” I was wondering if, but kind of hoping that you wouldn’t, use the No True Scotsman argument. It’s actually rather insulting, almost implying lying on my part. I can assure you that I was sincere in my belief of God, prayed throughout the whole day asking for guidance and offering thanksgiving, and even thought I could feel God’s presence when I prayed. Now, I realize that what I thought was God’s presence was merely self-deception, in a similar way to people in other religions being convinced they’re experiencing their god(s).
Your question, “as a Christian, who was the Lord over your reasoning?” was not very clear. I asked for clarification, and you somehow took my request for clarification to mean, “Which is why you couldn’t immediately answer that God was the lord over your reasoning–because He wasn’t.” And at another point, you wrote, ” If God was the Lord over your reasoning, I’d like to know how you could reason out of that position.” At the time, I did believe that I was praying to God for guidance. However, as an atheist, I now realize that there was no God to pray to. I could ‘reason out of that position’ because there was/is no god to ‘Lord over my reasoning’. From my perspective, you’re in that same position. You think you’re praying to God, but there is no God. If that’s too personal, consider it with a different religion. A Hindu may sincerely believe that they’re praying to Vishnu, but from our perspective (mine as an atheist, yours as a Christian), Vishnu does not exist. So, no matter how sincere the Hindu’s belief, we think that they’re mistaken and praying to an imaginary being.
You wrote, “…I have been unable to convince you that belief and knowledge are not synonyms…” I’ve already covered this at length, so you’re either misunderstanding my point, or deliberately misrepresenting it. I never said that ‘believe’ and ‘know’ are synonyms. I only argued with your threshold of confidence to consider something ‘known’ or as ‘knowledge’. ‘Know’ still implies a very, very high level of confidence – much more confidence than simply believing, just not 100% absolute certainty. I even used possible real-world examples that aren’t so outlandish as the Matrix. Do you really propose that I’m erroneously using the word ‘know’ when I say that ‘I know what hospital I was born in’? By your definition, the only people who would be allowed to use the word ‘know’ are True Christians™, since us scientific-type atheists admit a certain level of uncertainty about everything, and people of other religions and even false Christians are not getting their certainty from the One True Source, so their beliefs are mistaken and not ‘known’.
You’re being reductionist to the point of absurdity in talking about how the brain works. As an analogy, computers are just electrons flitting about in semiconductors, so their results are just a by-product of the electron’s interactions. So, what makes one buzz true, and one false? If I took a flashlight powered by Duracell, and you took one powered by Energizer, would it be reasonable to call one of those electron buzzes true and one false? How can you trust that your calculator is giving you correct answers to math questions? Reducing a computer to just electron movements without considering emergent properties is just as absurd as reducing a brain to just chemical reactions without considering emergent properties.
“Fifthly, you state that you are experiencing qualia, but you can’t be absolutely certain of it. Therefore, you DO NOT KNOW that you are experiencing qualia.” My goodness. If you’re denying that even the experience of qualia something I can’t be certain of, then this discussion is worse than discussing solipsism. There is no justification other than experience. And it is the one aspect of my life about which I can have the most certainty, to where I’d even consider saying absolutely certain. If you posit that even experiencing qualia is not a certainty, then absolutely nothing can be certain, not even believing I was getting a revelation from a god.
I used figures of speech to show how language was used, not to make truth claims. Specifically, I was showing that ‘know’ doesn’t mean absolute certainty, because we have modifiers to illustrate higher levels of certainty. ‘Going to hell in a hand basket’ is a metaphor, not a truth claim about Hell. And I even made a point in one of my earlier comments that this part of the conversation was degrading into semantics.
You missed my point when I wrote, “The ‘Christian God’ has not declared anything, any more than Zeus, Odin, Osiris, or Quetzalcoatl.” I wasn’t saying that the Bible doesn’t have unique statements in it claiming to come from Yahweh or Jesus. I was saying that a god never made the statements credited to it in the Bible. Yahweh is just as imaginary as those other gods. The passage you provided from Isaiah didn’t come from Yahweh. It came from some scribe writing down a story. (Yes, yes. There I go again making ‘truth claims’ without using cumbersome language like ‘high possibility of’ or ‘seems most likely that’, even as a non-True Christian who apparently has no basis to believe anything.)
And you continue to make snide comments like “which is a claim you couldn’t know if you could be wrong about everything you claim to know”. How many times do I have to repeat that lacking absolute 100% iron-clad certainty is not the same thing as 0% certainty. You keep implying that ridiculous conclusion.
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Anyway, I’m done discussing epistemology. If you want to leave one more response to get in the last word, you’re welcome to it. But I don’t see this as a fruitful discussion. I’ll keep on making arguments of the sort, ‘In nearly all cases, absolute certainty is not possible, but we can still still have a very high degree of confidence in various claims, and the pragmatic approach to life is to not worry about the most outlandish, unlikely claims. We can always be mistaken, and your claim to absolute knowledge through Yahweh is just one example of people being mistaken in their beliefs.’ And you’ll keep making arguments of the sort, ‘Aha! You admit you don’t have absolute certainty, therefore you can’t know anything. Whereas I believe in God, and can therefore have absolute certainty.’ It’ll just be longer, use more examples, longer words, and maybe even a bit more Latin, but the conversation won’t go anywhere. It’s fruitless.
If you do want to continue a conversation, I’d be happy to discuss the original topic of this blog post – birds, dinosaurs, and evolution. Even if you think I lack the epistemological basis to ‘know’ things, you believe that you don’t have that handicap. So, unless you’re going to imply that I really am living in the Matrix and this world isn’t real, you at least should accept that the real world exists, and that the fossil and other evidence I’m trying to show you exists. So, you should be able to comment on your interpretations of that evidence. Otherwise, it seems like you’re trying to evade the conversation.
And, just as a reminder, the questions I posted on your other entry, Refuting Fossil “Evidence” for Evolution: The Data is NOT in the Strata, still stand. You made several claims about evolutionary biology, geology, paleontology, etc. So, ignoring my supposed inability to ‘know’ things, what is your interpretation of the objections I posted? Do you have any evidence-based arguments against what I wrote, or are you just going to go back to arguing the nature of evidence and imply that my worldview doesn’t allow me to know anything, thereby avoiding my questions?
Jeff,
I’m not interested in having the last word with you. You are not some debate conquest to me. You may have studied some of my past responses in order to try to head me off or to establish an advantage over me, but that has not been my approach toward you because I’m not interested in winning an argument with you. According to my worldview, there is much more at stake here than winning a verbal tennis match.
You’ve accused me of being insulting and snide, but that was not my heart or intent at all. The truth is that you’ve been on my heart and mind since your first message. I care deeply for you and have prayed for you with my family. If I have truly offended you through my delivery, that was not my aim and I apologize. Please forgive me.
From my perspective, you arrived at my site, challenged my claims and asked some good questions. I have been doing my best to answer you and in so doing, believe I have demonstrated that my truth claims are unassailable, while yours are unjustifiable. With every objection you’ve made to my position, you have consistently borrowed timbers from my lumber pile in order to erect your foundation for knowledge, logic and truth. First, you claimed observation was your ultimate authority, then you abandoned observations for evidence. Next you appealed to figures of speech to underpin your truth claims and now you say, “there is no justification other than experience.” Are all experiences reliable? If you cannot know what is true, how can you determine what is real via experience? Once again, your worldview has collapsed. I don’t expect you to like that, but I hardly think I owe you an apology for maintaining my position and holding you to the your own professed truth claims.
I would be interested though, since you mentioned it, what moral obligation you think one bag of highly evolved, bipedal, meat/bone protoplasm
has to another? In other words, I can only imagine that to make mention that I was rude, insulting and insinuating, infers that I should not do those things. Otherwise, why mention it? Therefore, if you’ll permit one more question: By what objective standard of morality are you appealing to when you express that those things are wrong?
To clarify, I didn’t study some of your past responses just to try to head you off or to establish an advantage over you. I was acquainting myself with your writings, just like I invited you to do over at my blog (www dot jefflewis dot net /blog, with all the dots replaced with ‘.’s – I even mentioned our conversation). Had I been trying for a ‘gotcha’ moment, I would have held on to my replies until after you posted what I was anticipating based on your other entries. Instead, I put them up as soon as I guessed which way the argument would be heading, to give you more of a chance to see what my objections would be so that you could respond to them.
As far as objective morality, this is a topic that’s been debated ever since there’s been philosophy, so I doubt you or I will say anything that hasn’t already been said. In other words, I don’t foresee this as a very fruitful discussion, either, but I’ll briefly indulge your question.
I don’t think there is an objective morality. Morality is based on values, which are in the realm of the subjective. I know some people have tried to make a case for an objective morality based on science, such as Sam Harris in his book, The Moral Landscape. And while I haven’t yet read the book, I don’t understand how he could get there. Rather, I think you must start with givens that come from our human values, for example, that causing pain is wrong, or that increasing positive emotions is good. You start from your givens, and build from there. And sometimes, single actions can cause conflicting effects, so you have to weigh the good and bad consequences. For example, I already wrote that one of my givens is that causing pain is wrong. But sometimes, the beneficial effects of causing pain outweigh the negative ones, such as spanking a misbehaving child to improve their behavior or keep them from repeating a dangerous action, or putting criminals in jail as a deterrent to crime. But all this weighing and considering is subjective. It depends on how much you value the positive aspects you want to promote, or how much you oppose the negative aspects you want to curtail. While I only spanked my daughter a handful of times because I thought inflicting physical pain was a pretty big negative that needed a very substantial positive to justify it, I know other people who spank their kids on a daily basis, and have even heard of people that whip their kids with switches.
I can guess that you think God is a source of objective morality, but I wouldn’t agree, even if Yahweh existed. I’m sure you’ve heard of the Euthypro Dilemma, which I think sums up my stance pretty well. Appeals to God’s authority like Divine command theory are merely dictating obedience to authority, not true morality. And I can further guess that you might accuse me of trying to put myself above God, but how can you truly be considered to be a moral agent if you abandon the up front work of trying to determine what’s moral and fall back on a divine version of the excuse ‘I was just following orders’.
I’ll use an example. I can think of no inherent reason why homosexuality is immoral, yet Yahweh obviously doesn’t like it. Now, just imagine that we were having this conversation 3000 years ago, before Jesus supposedly came along and told people to stop throwing stones. If I found out that somebody was homosexual and had engaged in homosexual acts, I’d be in a quandary. The Law makes the punishment quite clear, that they should be stoned to death. But according to my own moral compass, I’d think that stoning the person to death would be horrible – I’d basically be committing murder, since the person had done nothing wrong. So, do I attempt to follow my moral compass, or do I abandon my moral compass in place of obedience and a selfish fear of being punished by Yahweh. Is it more moral to do what you think is moral, or what you’re told?