Honesty and Socrates

Honesty was what Socrates instructed. He came up with the refrain "I know nothing" but in the course of conversations demonstrated that it was the partner in the conversations that knew nothing that they said they did. [Others wrote down the dialogues or conversations. It was a skill highly prized in those days to be able to repeat verbatim entire conversations, whole speeches, or sets of instructions while someone else could write it down.] The famous were confronted in public and the public listened while Socrates would very politely but very thoroughly demonstrate that though he claimed to know nothing that it was the famous-for-something who had no good nor sufficient reason to be famous for anything. They were publicly shown to be mendacious in their claims of skills and abilities and knowledge. Thus publicly humiliated they walked away angry. They eventually managed to kill the become old man, Socrates, at 72. It was not just personal. The power depended on the hoi polloi being duped and kept that way. 2500 years later we learn ... something!

Believe it ... or not !!

Science is not a rejection of Religion. Science is not a rejection of God. The notion of our human physical origin from other life forms is derived from the fact that we are made of the same stuff, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and other atoms, and are made of living cells, and so on, that we do physically require substenance, and that we can reproduce our selves. It is not based on a belief in that. Since we were not always here we must have started somehow and what of but out of the material we are made up of. If God stuck us here fully formed then God made us all made up of that same stuff all other life is made up of. Now I really do not care, personally, if "God did it" or if "it" was a result of "nature" or "something else". We are made up of the same stuff.
We act rather differently than other life forms. And other life forms act differently from each other which is how we know there are different forms of life. But we are physically made up of the same materials.
God is not made up of any of that stuff. That is why science can not study God as a physical thing. God can be studied only as a study of beliefs, as a study of one out of the very many beliefs human beings have. Since God is not made up of atoms and not made up of any physical "stuff" we cannot study God as if God was a frog in dissection class.
I do not know how we got here except as a phenomenon of one of a variety of sexual acts, the several that leave male sperm in a female vagina, although, actually, sexual action on the part of the human participants is not necessary: all that is required is the introduction of sperm and egg and that THEY join. God is not involved in any of that. God is not necessary in any of that.

Believe it or not!

Teaching evolution is useless in the teaching of physical reality. Seeing animals fornicate and knowing that such behavior is what human physical creatures also do is shocking enough. "WOW! That is what mommy and daddy did!"
The evolutionists are not "wrong", just irritating. The God made us people are not "wrong", they are just not useful. And: who, really, cares, anyway? Is it evolution that f'd in the bedroom or the back seat or was it God back there f'ing around? Sorry folks, neither one works. "God wasn't there and there were no apes! Honest, honey, it WAS mommy and it WAS daddy!"

What does love have to do with it? That's another story.

If the universe is required to have a creator

If the universe is required to have a creator it is we ourselves for there is no universe unless we ourselves experience it and we ourselves experience ourselves living as a part of it and come to know that. If we are not then there is no universe for there is no knowing it nor knowing anything. If any universe-creator exists within the universe then any universe-creator will of necessity be known as we come to know the world we are a part of. If any universe-creator does not exist within the universe then there can be no knowledge of any universe-creator and there is nothing to say about the unknown and the unknowable except that the unknowable is never to be known and the unknown is already unknown. Arguments to the contrary are necessarily arguments and are not knowledge. Arguments for or arguments against the existence of that which is unknown and, or, or unknowable yield no knowledge.

Belief, opinion, point of view, argument, faith, assumption, and conjecture: none of these are knowledge.

There is the assertion that there was that which predated our human presence in the universe and that that makes us as the creators of the ALL an impossibility. There is further the assertion that since we came of non-knowing materials, such as carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, to name an atomic three, or from non-knowing living entities, such as microbes, animals in general, and some pre-human or simply definitely non-human living material, that therefore we are not our own creators and not the creators of the universe, and that there is “something else” “somehow” “involved” in the creation of humankind and the creation of the universe and not human kind at all.

Even the theologians of the so called dark ages knew better than to give an “intelligent design” “answer” to the existence of the universe, life, or human life. I INSIST THAT IT REQUIRES HONESTY. Honest people know what honesty is and work to be aware of their ignorance and know the limits to their knowledge. Since god was assumed to have created the universe, god then of course created life in all its forms, including, if there is a question, human life. Either version in the Christian book of genesis will do. NO further inquiry is required. Honest theologians even of the so-called dark ages knew the difference between knowledge and belief and faith. God did not “cause” the universe. God CREATED cause and intelligence as god created the ALL, which includes “causes” and "intelligence". Only in human terms is god a “cause”. Since god is not a measly human, ascribing human intelligence and other mere human qualities to god is absurd and done only because we pathetic earthlings are so limited. Honest people know they are being anthropomorphic and know better and that they cannot know god.

Honest people will admit that creationism and intelligent design would be defining the universe in terms of human written versions of creation and of god, to the belief in those writings, and to the faith in the authority, backed by the sword, and that such can yield no answer to any honest question.

The “moments of existence” of human life is yet to be discovered. It is not an answer to say “god did it”. That is a dishonest answer for it assumes that it is an answer and it is not. It is dishonest for it gives no detail as to the how. If the human written version in the Christian books of genesis, or any other, is accepted as a sufficient answer, then, though accepting this as an answer would be dishonest, that is all the acceptor needs and there is nothing more for them to say: they believe and have stopped asking. Such an acceptance is dishonest because it assumes belief is knowledge. Most believers are dishonest for that reason. If this describes any reader as mendacious, if the shoe fits, maybe such a dishonest reader can wear the mendacity shoe.

The universe has the intelligent design only if there are human beings. For humans have the mind to know design. Humans are the intelligence in the universe. There was no intelligent anything before intelligence came to be. As far as we earthlings are aware there is no other intelligence than we ourselves: and none more is required than we ourselves for there to be the “proof” of intelligence: and if there is more, then any of that “more” have their “earth” to deal with, and we two or more have yet to know more than the selves we know.

Honest people stop “iffing” around and get on with living.