Rick, I actually was referring to the fourth way.

"One must do everything one can and then say 'God have Mercy!' " ---G. I. Gurdjieff

The idea of the fourth way is strongly associated with Gurdjieff, who appears to have been the first to use this phrase. The bulk of his discussion of this idea is to be found in Ouspensky's record of his teaching in Russia, "In Search of the Miraculous." In his own writings, the idea is implicit but never mentioned as such. In Russia, he referred to three traditional ways:

1. Way of the Fakir, involving effort in the body
2. Way of the Monk, involving devotion and concentration of feeling
3. Way of the Yogi, involving largely mental attention.

In the fourth way, effort is made in all three: body, feeling and mind. This is harmonious development, as in Gurdjieff's Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man. To some degree, his series of movements or 'sacred gymnastics' epitomised this approach (in the learning of them rather than their performance). His inner exercises, insofar as these are reported, usually involved an act of mental concentration combined with physical effort; the feelings are also involved, but spontaneously, in the 'I am' state.

The fourth way is also called "The Way of the Sly Man."

None of this may have anything to do with evolution vs. creation, but I wanted to call it to your attention.

The question of evolution vs. creation may be like a Zen koan. When the question finally becomes transparent, one may realize in a flash (satori?) they are the same thing.

David123

whoa my friend, you are starting with a falsehood, or an error, or a misread.
"The problem is Rickmaven and others assume the Genesis account is a scientific account of creation."

i have posted several times that the bible is a written collection of the myths handed down from generation to generation. it is not science.

"The probability of everything coming into existance without a Creator is impossible." if i were designing humans i could have done a better job, and i'm not omnipotent or impotent for that matter.

dogs have a better sense of smell. owls have better sight. leopards can run faster, fish can stay underwater longr. birds can fly by flapping their arms. rabbits **** in little round balls so they don't need toilet paper.

we are able to control our enviornment and as a result we are soon to destroy the planet that we live on.

"No one has proven evolution, do you evey wonder why there is no example of creatures between the stages of evolution?" scientists have proven it as much as is possible given the remains that are found and continue to add to the information. humans did not evolve from dinosaurs as birds did so we don't have any evidence of men with wings, except of course the angels.

"To have true knowledge you have to know both exhaustively and comprehensively." one works with what one has. toby just won a four team parley in last weekend's football pool and she didn't know who was sick or had a sprained knee.

i am not hostile to the bible at all, i have spent as much time reading and studying the bible as i need to and i accept it for what it is, man's attempt to codify the stories that have been handed down rom as far back as early man became interested in something other then finding food.

did you miss my point?

"evolution is a fact, because I BELIEVE IT TO BE."

eleltea

too complicated. i use self hypnosis.

man is nothing more then a mass of protoplasm capable of feeling emotions. the more time man feels good, the more time he spends in peace.

damn, i was out the door and started the car to head home and i let myself get called back to the party.
i hope toby made a pot of fresh coffee for me before she went to sleep.

morning, gent's:
CP, fruit flies to mice? i can make a pretty picture, too, with lots of colors, but it does not make it true. wouldn't that take a HUGE amount of new information in the string? so you are saddling up on the 'hopeful monster' theory?
"disinformation about disinformation?"
settling on definitions is the first start, along with narrowing down your hypotheses.
so, CP your definition of biological evolution is the development upward, to more complex form of living organisms through mutation? do i have this right?

good luck on you exams, btw. i doubt you'll need luck anyway, as 1) you're a sharp dude ( or dudette, as i don't assume your biological gender) and 2) there's no such thing, anyway, right?

rc, I didn't make the picture, nature did. It's a map of hox genes from flies to mice that tells us its own story. I'll post it later when I get time. See it, then come to your own conclusions. I'm not out to make conversions, buy I believe even a nay sayer like yourself will find it interesting.

And you're right, settling on definitions will eliminate a lot of the sound and fury and tame these arguments down to their simple, and often beautiful meanings. Nature is there alike for us all to see. If we can suspend our fantasy machines for a minute or two and hear what she has to say, we'll be taking a stab at a kind of objectivity.

So, again, the biological definition of evolution, not mine mind you, is: "the change in the allele frequencies in a population over time." If we can stick to that, some good discussion about evolution might ensue. We can examine the various steps later.

Cheers

You can, and many have, made great rational and scientific arguments for either side and I am a scientist but in this case it's really simple.

Grace is by faith. Either ya got it or ya don't. If ya got it thank God, if ya don't I pray for you.

Amen to that.

ELELTEA

i thought this was one of my better ones and no one noticed. maybe to subtle.

"as for your second question about the fly and the mamooth and jones, god only knows."

So Rick, you must be the only person to buy a Dodge Aries and have it morph into a Cadillac. How's the complete dismissal of thermodynamics goin?

cp et al:
Here's a small quip from just one camp of evolutionists who do/did not agree with classic Darwinian evolutioanry theory.

"Of the many lines of debate now current, however, it seems to me, that two, or perhaps better three, constitute such fundamental challenges [to Darwinism]: (1) neutral mutation theory, (2) cladism, and (3) a protest from the perspective of ontogenesis and sometimes also of morphology. . . . That mutations are random even the most fervent selectionist admits: indeed, it is necessary to the structure of a neo-Darwinian, non-Lamarckian account that this be so (see Rensch's essay, for example). But that alleles wholly unconnected with fitness should persist for long periods and in great numbers is a thesis that selectionists find difficult to accept. Yet despite selectionist arguments to the contrary, the view persists (Kirmura, 1976: King and Jukes, 1969)."

your quoted definition:

"the change in the allele frequencies in a population over time."
i may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but isn't that "

accursed wrong key -

as i was copying, "the development upward, to more complex form of living organisms through mutation" ?

David Limbaugh
Tuesday, Dec. 14, 2004

Don't get all nervous, but this new "discovery" of a God gene that finally gives us a scientific explanation for those whacked-out believers in God started me thinking about the sin of pride.

Romans 1:20 says: "For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities - his eternal power and divine nature - have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse."

In other words, human beings have to reject what their senses and intellects tell them in order to arrive at any other conclusion than that God created them and the universe.

Many learned scientists reject this idea, preferring to believe just the opposite: that a belief in the Divine Creator is counterintuitive, devoid of reason, blind to the facts and insufficiently deferential to science.

You wouldn't believe the condescending e-mails I received from self-described scientists following my column on the book "I Don't Have Enough Faith To Be an Atheist," telling me, essentially, what a moron I am.

I wonder what these smug critics would tell Britisher Anthony Flew, one of the world's leading proponents of atheism, who has now abandoned his disbelief in God. Flew observed, quite rightly, that the latest biological research "has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce (life), that intelligence must have been involved."

When anticipating the inevitable shock of some of his co-atheists to his transformation, Flew said, "My whole life has been guided by the principle of Plato's Socrates: Follow the evidence, wherever it leads."

That's precisely the point. Contrary to the position of many atheists, especially those who believe that Christians are reality-challenged and science-averse, theism - particularly Christianity - is supported by reliable evidence.

Which gets us back to the subject of pride. I have always believed that among the obstacles to belief, human pride is the leading culprit. Pride is responsible for the notion that no God was necessary to have created life from no life, the material world from the immaterial world, something out of nothing.

Instructively, "Humanist Manifesto II" bears this out, declaring, "As nonthesists, we begin with humans, not God, nature, not deity. … But we can discover no divine purpose or providence for the human species. While there is much that we do not know, humans are responsible for what we are or will become. No deity will save us; we must save ourselves."

It's hard not to conclude that such pride is responsible for the above-mentioned bizarre theory of American molecular geneticist Dr. Dean Hamer ("The God Gene: How Faith Is Hard-Wired Into Our Genes"), that a person's capacity for believing in God is genetically determined.

Those with VMAT2 - the God gene - apparently have freer-flowing mood-altering chemicals in their brains, making them more inclined toward spiritual beliefs. Environmental influences, such as growing up in a religious family, supposedly have little effect on our beliefs.

Uninhibited by humility, Dr. Hamer doesn't limit his conjecturing to his area of expertise. He ventures out into the spiritual and historical realms as well, telling us his findings aren't antithetical to a belief in God because "Religious believers can point to the existence of god genes as one more sign of the creator's ingenuity … Buddha, Mohammed and Jesus all shared a series of mystical experiences or alterations in consciousness and thus probably carried the gene."

Perhaps Hamer's pride obscures from him the pitfalls in over-generalizing and presuming to lump together believers of different faiths. How could Christ, who claimed to be God in the flesh, have shared any mystical experiences with Buddha and Mohammed, neither of whom asserted their own deity?

Perhaps Dr. Hamer's conceit prevents him from recognizing that a God-gene is hard to square with Biblical Christianity. How could Christians subscribe to the idea of a God gene when the God of the Bible, if nothing else, is a god of accountability and judgment?

Surely even Five-Point Calvinists would consider the notion a grotesque twist on the Doctrine of the Elect. But these distinctions are doubtlessly lost on the likes of Hamer, whose theories necessarily elevate the concept of determinism and demote personal responsibility.

Indeed, perhaps it is pride that leads the anti-theistic among us to reduce everything to deterministic molecules and DNA because such things are within their eventual grasp and control. To acknowledge that there may just be certain things beyond their eventual comprehension and, thus, control could be tantamount to recognizing that there is something - Someone - greater. Such blasphemy cannot stand.

Perhaps the good doctor's arrogance precludes him from considering that for many Christians, believing is not a matter of some chemically induced emotional state. It is based on things far less vulnerable to the vicissitudes of our emotions, such as a belief in the Bible as the unchanging, inspired Word of God.

Here in the backward parts of York County, PA we have the first "Intelligent Design" curriculum proposed in the country. One only needs to look at the school board to see that "Intelligent Design" is a falsehood.

DrMaddVibe

the caddy is almost at the end and has wrapped itself in a cocoon. i eagely wait to see what will emerge.

David Limbaugh

Romans 1:20 says: "For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities - his eternal power and divine nature - have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse."


when an argument re god begins with a quote from the bible to prove the bible is correct, one's point falls flat. you cannot win an argument using the thing being argued as a basis of fact.

the is a red ball.
it is red
it is a ball
therefore all thing red are balls and all balls are red.

Rick, at least you have the right color!

DrMaddVibe

when i was younger and dting, many times they were blue.

So THAT'S the reason!

I respect others' beliefs -- but not rhetoric, misunderstanding, and misinformation.

Don't invoke the law of thermodynamics if you don't understand it. (You'll end up looking like the proverbial man who defends himself in court.)

Pride is actually one of the reasons that humans have a need to believe in a personal creator. "We are so special that we have a purpose; it took an omnipotent being to make us; there's a special place reserved for us later," etc. Letting go of pride, however, allows one to accept that maybe we are not that special (in that sense), and we wouldn't have been missed by anyone in the universe if that very, very unlikely chain of events that happened on earth had failed to produce US.

I don't know anything about the famous atheist Flew (I don't worship other atheists, either), but if someone is overcome by the complexity of nature and has to have a final explanation for it, that is also a personal problem. There are things we will never know, and that's just the way it is; a lack of understanding has never been the proof of anything.

The fact that evolutionists bicker over details and theories doesn't mean that evolution is not inherently a viable mechanism. (To say that is comparable to saying that since there are so many disagreeing religious sects they must all be wrong and so there is no god.)

Missing links in the fossil trail don't prove or disprove anything. Fossil formation is a haphazard process, and so is finding them. (If I could find every penny ever dropped by someone in a parking lot, I'd be rich.)

If you're going to cite modern genetic evidence, you'd serve best to break it down into syllables that most folks can understand, regardless of how brilliant and fascinating it is. (Many will still miss the point, however.)

The fact that something was very, very unlikely does not mean that it didn't happen. (Sit down one day and flip a coin 100 times, and write down the sequence of heads and tails you get. Now, the probability of getting that exact sequence you just wrote down was about 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Very improbable -- does that mean it didn't happen? C'mon!)

You're less likely to change someone's beliefs in this thread than you are to get that same heads/tails sequence a second time.

Finally, I admit that atheism is as much a belief as any religion is.

PS. A friend at work (in a federal government building, no less!) has set up a nativity scene in his office. My only issue is finding a cat to put in with the other animals.

Folks love to delve into thermodynamics and quantum physics because, although they're straight forward if you're familiar with them, a lot of people don't use those principles regulary and get thrown by them; so some try and insert spooky dookie behind thermodynamics & quantum physics as some cockamamee kind of proof for the big Kahuna. In thermodynamical terms, entropy, the increasing disorder of any natural system, can be reversed (with the input of energy, say, from a battery), and hence we get ordered systems like solar systems or genomes; both quite consistent with physical law. Quantum physics goes back to Max Planck (a religious man), Einstein (an atheist despite his frequent use of the noun god), and others physicists. Quantum mechanics essentially describes how electrons exist in orbitals around an atomic nucleus; they can either be in one orbital or in another, but never in between: electrons appear here or there, but never cover the middle gound in between. It's not mysterious, it has to do with electrical waves being in or out of phase. In either case, it's just everyday physics which have always governed the behavior of matter and always will, and implies no supernatural force at work. Physics describes the nature of things, it's metaphysics you want to consult with when describing the nature of the supernatural. (natural/supernatural - physics/metaphysics - of this world/of the beyond).