The debates of the evening had run their usual course of everything from gay marriage to human atrocity in the Bible. Somehow, the subject came around to application of the scientific method to inferring there was a god. AppleGirl based this claim on a single quote from Stephen Hawking as proof:
AppleGirl : WarriorVisions hawking: "So long as the Universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator." If this is correct, then testing is possible, if we use inferential methods in forensics, there is no reason it could not be applied to ANYTHING that exists.
What she neglected to post was the entire quote, taken from Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time”:
The idea that space and time may form a closed surface without boundary also has profound implications for the role of God in the affairs of the universe. With the success of scientific theories in describing events, most people have come to believe that God allows the universe to evolve according to a set of laws and does not intervene in the universe to break these laws. However, the laws do not tell us what the universe should have looked like when it started - it would still be up to God to wind up the clockwood and choose how to start it off. So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundaries or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?
In this statement, Hawking is stating much of the obvious in that what we suppose can be linked in various ways to what we know of the universe. More specifically, Hawking’s use of the “god” is no more of a personal god than the one referenced by Einstein, i.e. Spinoza’s God.
The introduction of Spinoza got AppleGirl atwitter with excitement and she made it quite clear that unless one agreed with her take on him, then one was simply faking knowing anything at all about Spinoza.
To make a long story short, AppleGirl made the statement that Spinoza was akin to Islamic metaphysics, hence the ignorance on the part of the rest of us present. When pressed, she finally offered up a link to the page she was getting such a ridiculous notion from.
I pointed out, in return, that Spinoza advocated an impersonal “everything is god” type of approach whereas Islam very much posits a personal god in the form of Allah. When asked to respond to this simple but wholly factual puncture to the premise of the article, she responded with vehement statements defending the credibility of the researcher who made the claim. Apparently, if one has a Ph. D. behind their name, that’s good enough for AppleGirl.
But, hey. Don’t take my word for it. Read the logs for yourself in the form of the attached Word document.
(click Baruch to download)
The end result of the evening was an exercise is self-righteous anger on the part of AppleGirl. Instead of being able to respond to the point, she issued an ultimatum to retract my “lies” and the subsequently banned me.
As an update to the above post, here is the transcript of the private chat which occurred between AppleGirl and I following her dismissal of me from the channel for no other reason than her own insulted ego.
Tuesday, November 14, 2006 - 08:33 PM
applegirl.doc 63.5KB
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