Joe Heschmeyer — Sam Harris : 10—0 (With Some Sidenotes of Mine)

The Lazy Dogmatism of Sam Harris
Shameless Popery Podcast | 21 Nov. 2024
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyqSpO64d7g

Sam Harris

Religious people can't verify the claims on the afterlife on this side of the grave.

Joe Heschmeyer

Ingeneers can't verify the stability of a bridge before they die, not always.

8:32 Not to mention that Dinosaurs having died out 65 million years ago of alpha Centauri being 4 Light Years away are also claims one will not check this side of the grave.

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Sam Harris

[had appealed to Popper]

Joe Heschmeyer

[describes Popper's Black Swans and mentions "Swedes are nice" as a potentially false universal]

18:00 As a Swede having been bullied in school (largely for not believing what Sam Harris believes) ... I think I have some "black swans" ...

Sam Harris

[wrote a book]

Joe Heschmeyer

[Introduces its critic as a Latvian or Norwegian named Jonas Čeika, pronouncing the latter as Cheeka]

32:29 Jonas Čeika is Lithuanian but based in Norway. And it's prononced Cheyka, not Cheeka.

Shameless Popery Podcast

@shamelesspopery

Thanks! I looked up a pronunciation guide for it, but wasn't sure how reliable it was. (Apparently, not very).

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@hglundahl

@shamelesspopery You are welcome!

Sam Harris

[quoted on what he based his view on ethics of]

Joe Heschmeyer

[Notes all subjects are easy to those who haven't studied them.]

38:35 In the case of Creationists, there are lots who do not try to work out the implications of "this Neanderthal is carbon dated to before the world was actually created, which is obviously not how old he is, because there was a lower level of C-14 in the atmosphere back then" ...

Since 2016, I'm the exception. You will find claims like "carbon 14 is being produced faster and faster all the time, that's why we have more and more of it" ... no, that's not how it works. We don't just need the Neanderthal to be within Biblical timeline, but also the carbon date of a Rembrandt to be accurate. Speaking of Rembrandt, there is a story they (other YECs) tend to circle around to prove the fatuity of coming to terms with carbon dating as something accurate. A painting made in a contemporary art class was carbon dated to 10 000 years old.

Thing is, they probably dated a sample with acrylic paint on it, and acrylic paint involves fossil carbon, not carbon straight from the atmosphere.

My own position is, no, if carbon 14 had been all the time produced as fast as now, since the Flood, we'd have half the stable amount, or just 45 %, and carbon dates would be either inflated very close to the present, or, more probably, the dates conferred with historic dates would have given us a shorter halflife. Theoretically, one could have a rise from 80 to 100 pmC between Fall of Troy and the present, but only if the real halflife was 11460 years instead of 5730. If we have a stable halflife, we have had c. 100 pmC since the Fall of Troy, but that means most of the time between Flood and Fall of Troy, we need a much faster production of carbon 14 than we have now. C. 5 times faster on average, and the earlier parts way faster than the later ones. As I believe in Angelic movers, I also believe in angels regulating the production of cosmic radiation from their stars (and that's how they were hitting Sisera's army, as per the Bible), but some YECs want purely naturalistic astro-physics from after the creation and whatever initially caused far star light to arrive to us fast .... and obviously, they are against Geocentrism, usually.

JI80

@ji8044

No physics has been used in the making of this comment.

A comment of mine

is invisible.

It involved mathematics being done before it.

38:35 bis. In the case of Evolutionists, including some Theistic Evolutionists in the Catholic Church, who want to imagine before God made Adam into His image, He could have allowed apelike creatures to evolve into something more or less like us, including language.

Those people are not seriously grappling with linguistic basics.

And they are seriously trying to disprove my (non-extant) claim to be a professinal linguist. One quora qualification (on quora you chose what qualifications you answer a question with, ideally one appropriate to the question), one quora qualification of mine is amateur linguist. I can obviously be an amateur linguist and not know how Italian influenced Romanian (or languages ancestral to these influenced) in the time before the Bulgarian invasion. And I can also obviously be an amateur linguist and be more knowledgeable on some basics and on some random stuff that interested me, than someone who is not a linguist at all. Including, but not limited to, Pascal Picq and nearly all Evolutionary Linguists. I said nearly all, because Jean Aitchison is an obvious exception, I highly respect her book on language change, I haven't read much of her book on Evolutionary Linguistics, but the sample chapter attributes "double articulation" to birds, which as linguists normally understand the term, vocal communications having three levels interconnected by two "articulations" is not what birds have.

Language Change: Progress or Decay? is a book by her I read for a failed minor exam.
The Seeds of Speech: Language Origin and Evolution. — that's where I've only read the sample chapter.

Other guys who reason about Evolutionary Linguistics, like Tomasello and Tecumseh Fitch, are not linguists. They are not dealing with the problem of getting double articulation, that is a three-tier system, into place.

Now, on youtube I saw an Atheist who knows even less than they. Sir Sic in his video description said: "its not like we invent new sounds to mean thing all the time or anything" in response to a Theist claim "God invented language" ... well, God gave us language, in a clearly non-Evolutionist way; but as to us inventing new sounds to mean things all the time, that is only true of those of us who actually already learned a language. Feral children who were away from human contact in all of the appropriate time for basic learning of a first language, they simply don't do that. Including those who were with apes and monkeys. Their way of communicating is too different. Now, there is a girl who was saved at age 5 from monkeys, but she had already learned to speak before getting among them. A case like Mowgli is impossible. As to Romulus and Remus, they were obviously saved before the critical age for language learning was over.

You may see how this makes even real people but inheriting only ape communications unable to invent language.

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Sam Harris

[mentious "creatures with consciousness"]

Joe Heschmeyer

[brings up "consciousness" of insects and asks whether swatting mosquitos is licit.]

40:18 I'm very well satisfied that my lice are NOT created in the image of God and I am.

That settles the question.

JI80

So you think God is balding with bad breath and knees that hurt?

A comment of mine

is invisible.

It involved my knees not hurting, my lice not yet affecting the hair line, and my breath would have been better if homlessness had been less pushing me to overconsume sugar.

Sam Harris

[Joe Heschmeyer cites even more of his book.]

Joe Heschmeyer

[Proves even better how Sam Harris is a prime example of the Dunning Kruger effect in his approach.]