Monday, July 18, 2016

Debating the Contents of a Book: The stupidity of arguing objectively verifiable facts



I find it curious that many Bible believing Christians, instead of discussing something like the linguistics of translation, or interpretation based on cultural context, or the metaphysical ontology of the nature of God, or any other legitimate form of religious or philosophical inquiry, only discuss the very simple, and objectively verifiable, issue of the modern Bible's contents.

How many of the comments regarding this issue include statements such as, " . . .if you read the Bible . . ." or, " . . .what the Bible says, is . . .?"

There seems to be a basic assumption that no one has actually read the Bible in its entirety, and that there will always be parts of it that one is not familiar with. Hogwash and projection, I say. It's easy to assume that no one's read the whole thing if one has not, and has no real intention of, reading the whole thing.

These "debates," that often conclude only with an insistence that one read this or that passage,(because one could not possibly have completed the unthinkably difficult task of simply reading the book, ALL of it) are completely and utterly meaningless, and amount to nothing more than pointing out the blatantly obvious. It's like trying to debate what the actual color of the sky is in an attempt to explain the causation of its color, and might sound something like this:

"Why is it blue? How did it get there? What does it taste like?"

"Well, if you actually go outside and look, you will see that the sky is blue. It is not yellow or red. It's blue. Yeah, maybe idiots like you should just go outside and actually look up."

Responding to Alien DNA

In response to assertions that Rh- blood types are descended from extraterrestrials, and that reproduction between an Rh- woman and an Rh+ man is fundamentally impossible.

First, I'll say that I'm not here to argue or to prove myself write and you wrong. I wish only to illustrate the sheer complexity of these issues, and how they can almost never be reduced to a "true or false," statement of fact. In biology, we take an "it depends," approach instead. 

 The rhesus factor (Rh factor) was named after the experimental subjects in which it was first identified, the monkey of the genus Rhesus (not an ape, like us). It was later found to present in some humans as well. Not that we inherited this trait from monkeys, but that both humans and the monkeys inherited this trait from the same, now long extinct, common ancestor. 

The Rh factor is what we call a dominant phenotypic trait. This means one only needs a single working copy of the gene to have Rh+ blood. Humans have two copies of the chromosome, and potentially two copies of every gene. This means that everyone has either two functionally expressive Rh+ genes, two Rh- genes, or one of each. We inherit only one chromosomal body from each of our parents, with each parent passing on only half of a randomly determined set of genes. If you have two parents that are heterozygous (each of them has both one Rh+, and one Rh- each) both parents will have Rh+ blood. Due to dominance of the Rh+, and the fact that both parents also carried an Rh- allele, it is probable that 75% of their children will be Rh+, and 25% of them will be Rh-. This is the same phenomenon that accounts for two brown eyed parents to have a blue eyed baby.