exchemist

I didn’t cross the equator until I was into my 30s. But I think I had by then realised that water in the N hemisphere doesn’t always turn the same way, i.e. in all plugholes. My grandfather was a civil engineer and liked to tease me because I was studying science at school. His chemistry terminology was Edwardian and flummoxed me completely. He would speak of “muriate of potash”, which at the time I had no idea was just KCl. He was an eccentric and entertaining man.

Well it's not one I really believed, but my maternal grandfather once tried to con me into believing that the reason his dining room carpet used to gradually move anticlockwise so that it periodically needed straightening, was due to the Coriolis Effect. And I think I did for a while believe that one about water swirling down the plughole in opposite directions in the northern and southern hemispheres.

Well we all have to survive, so that hardly narrows the field much.

Yes I think “God-fearing” needs to be read in the context of language at the time of the Authorised Version. Fear of God meant awe and respect as well as being frightened or being in terror. I have never bought the argument of some that, but for this “fear” , they would go around murdering, raping and stealing. What kind of monsters are they claiming to be? It’s ridiculous.

Well that’s true.😁

In my experience of (European mainstream) Christianity, fear of eternal damnation plays a vanishingly small role in moulding people’s attitudes and behaviour. Preaching is mostly about the love of God and our obligation to love one another and what that means. Hellfire sermons seem a rather quaint, c.19th concept. But I admit I do not have experience of wacky sects in the US Bible Belt. The examples of notable hellfire preachers in the Wiki article seem to bear this, being either from long ago or in the USA. It was different in medieval times, I think. In those days life was short and uncertain, and death could come at any moment, so people may well have felt divine judgement was just around the corner.

Oh I read his comment as making the opposite point: that the moral code of atheists owes nothing to religion but comes out the same.

I think you two are agreeing, and also agreeing with me. Religions are (were) one way of expressing and formalising moral codes that already existed in more or less inchoate form in the societies in question.

You speak of "cognition or even consciousness" as an "agency". That would be mysterious, would it not?

And in fact there are quite a lot, according to my Gen Z son, who are voile et vapeur so resist any such simple pigeonholing.

I didn't say that. I look forward to reading what Pigliucci has to say.

This is Godwin's Law in operation. I suggest we stop this line of discussion and get back on topic.

Not at all. The evidence being uncovered suggests no mysterious "agency". It is just a more subtle process than purely simple mutation followed by natural selection. There is no evidence of any mechanism at work that is not explicable by means of biology. If you think there is, you are mistaken. If you care to cite a specific example, we can go through it and explain it to you.

There are not one but two religious points of view on this. One is intelligent and recognises that Man is an animal, albeit one with particular special knowledge, attributes and and responsibilities. The other stupidly tries to deny evolution.

Lenski did that famous piece of work showing how bacteria evolve over generations, which was challenged by that Conservapaedia idiot Schlafly: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Lenski_affair. It's worth a read if you want a chuckle. The correspondence with Schlafly was in 2008, so it could be this same work that @Luc Turpin 's LLM is referring to. As far as I recall there was nothing in that to suggest the bacteria anticipated the environmental challenge that Lenski exposed them to. It would have been newsworthy, to say the least.

That’s AI for you.

What is your evidence that these questions are hotly debated? And by whom?

I think he is the “God is dead”( oh and by the way Zeig Heil) man, isn’t he?

I’ve answered that for you. Would you care to go on from there( if and when you return)?

Surely the point about the Ten Commandments is that they are an example of a society formulating a body of law. Law is a systematising of your codes of behaviour, designed to enable a society to function smoothly and fairly, with agreed ways of settling disputes. This is also one of the (several) functions of religion in society. It is no accident, surely, that historically many societies have had religious laws and looked to religious leaders for dispute resolution. So when religious people say they get their morality from their religion, that's a bit naïve: their religion codifies the moral principles of the society, principles that were probably in large part already in implicit use before religion codified them.

Nitrates from fertilisers or manure are one issue in rivers, but these are not long-lasting. DDT was a persistent insecticide, but I don't recall it being a particular issue in rivers.

It's what would be expected in any country with a sense of national identity. In Iran's case their c.20th experience was of the US and the UK meddling in their politics to remove their popular leader Mossadegh and replace him with the puppet Shah Pahlavi. Such things leave a scar in collective national memory, just as American meddling in the Mexican Revolution has given that country a lasting distrust of the US.

My son read Ancient History, I’m afraid.

Answer my question, then.

Article in today’s FT says sentiment on the street in Iran is one of national solidarity against outside aggression (they have 627 dead thanks to Israel’s attacks), not one of rising up against the regime. They are particularly incensed by outside aggressors telling them what to do about their own politics, apparently. Well, well, what a surprise, eh, who could have predicted that? - apart from just about anyone with an ounce of feeling for history. So this operation has probably set back the cause of the moderates and modernisers.