Well I was talking about Ken Ham's concept of promoting creation "science" as a way of giving fundamentalist morality a strong foundation (in his view).
Well it was my argument.... I thought "anything goes" implied that there are more versions of their morality but that might not be true.
Well I just thought his castle analogy, etc, was interesting. I am quite familiar with it (since I used to believe in it and still sometimes see Ken Ham talk) and thought I'd play devil's advocate here (perhaps that is a somewhat odd thing to do). So this is about Ken Ham's arguments and I don't necessarily agree with him.
Just because a behavior is common certainly doesn't make it good or desirable. I'm sure we agree on that. Obesity is growing in popularity. Is it right to just accept that obesity is the new norm and treat obese people as healthy humans? Should doctors start ignoring the condition in their patients? We have lots of people practicing lots of destructive behaviors that are common but we certainly shouldn't encourage the behavior.
You're free to encourage anything you like among your community, my point is that religiosity isn't a mental defect or the result of a mental defect.
You are spending an inordinate amount of time taking up a Devil's Advocate position. And it is more of a contrary Devil's advocate position you have taken, somewhat ignoring arguments against those positions.
Ken Ham's argument complains that the atheist position is inconvenient, therefore it is false. Quite possibly the dumbest science argument that could be made.
That's what we see in the world: there are different sets of rules for every species, or at least for mammals. Other primates have rule sets that are different in detail but still enough like ours that it's clear they're genetically related. (When we get out to animals like wolves, their societies also have their own sets of rules, but they're so different from ours they may have evolved completely independently, so it's not clear it makes sense for us to think of their rules as a moral system.)
That's a whole new argument from "He has a right to do that because he owns us, because he created us.". If the reason for saying we owe him obedience is his superiority rather than his having created us, that's prima facie a better argument.
Yeah, I get that. I didn't mean the Sims could figure out the actual code; I meant they could figure out some hypothetical code that if it had been the actual code would have led to the events they observe. For any computer program there are an infinite number of other programs with the same observable functionality; the functionality divides the space of possible programs into equivalence classes. So if they're smart enough, the Sims could in theory identify some program that's in the same equivalence class as the real one. For example, maybe the actual Sim implementation sorts some things. Then the Sims could observe that those things are always sorted, and deduce that the real code for themselves must contain a sorting function, but they'd never be able to tell whether it was a merge sort or a bubble sort or whatever.
So that's the sort of pattern that scientific investigation of anomalies might turn up, that could allow the Sims to eventually deduce the existence of a larger world than what they can directly perceive.
How could they be sure there was any code? I mean theists would usually believe the universe is physical and God interacts without the need for computer code....
I mean that Ken Ham would have counter-arguments, not that they are necessarily valid. Sorry for annoying people.
Related Bible verses:
My intention was to share the castle analogy that I find interesting. And that it is saying that fundamentalists need a strong foundation with creationism rather that evolution. People didn't like that sometimes I didn't respond to some arguments but that is due to me not intending to fully defend Ken Ham. Me trying to explain myself might not be helping....
