Monday, February 22, 2010

John Piper throws down the blam

13 comments:

Blobfish said...

I'm sure your God will find Mr. Piper here awful hilarious.

ExPatMatt said...

I agree with Blobfish.

Let's go through what he says in this little rant of his, shall we?

'There's a plant in a jungle somewhere...'

I assume he's talking about the pitcher plant here?

'spider drops down it's little silver cord and eats the dead insects from the pool'

Yes, that's how that spider eats. Nothing wrong so far, just a very impoverished description of a fantastic part of the natural world.

Then we get;

“Let us all bow down and worship mindless matter... you just need to know where I’m coming from”

Where is he coming from? Mars? Who is he talking about? Who worships 'mindless matter'? Totally off the deep-end!

'Dawkins...Hitchens...just thought it was 'nothing' and 'just kind of happened''

Oh really? You mean Richard Dawkins hasn't written a number of books detailing how natural processes work?

The guy isn't even talking in coherent sentences anymore, he's just tossing together a word salad for his sycophantic audience to lap up.

"the voices are everywhere"

It would not surprise me if he heard voices.

'atheism is a wasted life'

Glad to know how you really feel there, sir. And what would be the alternative?

'join Him (God) in his own self-glorification'

Sounds brilliant. But you still haven't shown how just pointing at the ocean is somehow meant to magically 'prove' that the God of the Bible exists and created everything in 6 days 6,000 years ago.

We're left with what we're always left with; a guy who already accepts the Bible as God's Word saying that because the Bible says that God created the world, therefore the world is evidence of God's creation and you should believe what the Bible says.


Pathetic.

Azou said...

So it's all about glorifying an omnipotent deity? Man, that would be a pointless existence, eh?

The rest of the video is argument from incredulity. "Truth is stranger than fiction" as the saying goes, which is why empirical evidence is so important.

Carnivorous plants ARE interesting, however.

zilch said...

Two comments on this video, Trish:

One- Mr. Piper tells the story of a spider that lives entirely by snatching poisoned insects from a jungle plant. He is obviously amazed at this, as am I- who wouldn't be? But he goes on to say, sarcastically, "Let us all bow down, and worship mindless matter". I presume this is what he imagines atheists do, but he is wrong: one, we don't "worship" anything, and two, there are a few steps left out between "mindless matter" and "the mind-bogglingly complex world of life on Earth today".

The picture evolutionary science gives us of the development of such amazing lifeforms is inconceivably complex, incomprehensibly ancient, but still very incomplete. To dismiss even the little bit that we know, much more knowledge than any one person can comprehend, as "worshiping mindless matter", is not only misinformed, but is rather arrogant, coming from someone who obviously doesn't know much science, or many scientists, who are also captivated by the beauty of life- at least the scientists I know are, and I know a good number of scientists.

Two- Mr. Piper imagines God's reaction to Dawkins' and Hitchens' not having seen evidence of His Hand in the Creation as being hilarious laughter. Piper did not go on to add that, from his fundamentalist perspective, God's next action, after laughing at the atheists, must be to toss them into eternal torment, for the sin of having used their reason to try to see how things were on the Earth.

I can tell you truthfully, as an atheist, that I have no hatred towards God, or desire to sin, but merely want to seek truth. And while there are many gods that different people worship, and many different, and conflicting, religions and laws and morals based on belief in those gods, there is only one real world. And what the real world tells me is this: evolution happened, and it is happening, and it is beautiful and wonderful and complex beyond understanding. One of the great joys of my life is learning at least a little about evolution, the greatest story ever told.

cheers from thawing Vienna, zilch

Jenny said...

I LOVE IT!!!! "Man pool... God pool!" ;)

Whateverman said...

I don't really understand why people in the audience are laughing. He seems like an angry person.

It's telling that he's incapable of finding the words to describe the opinions of people like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens...

Nohm said...

So, John Piper can beat up a straw man.

Let me know when he deals with the actual scientific claims that he's trying to mock.

Thank you for posting the video, though; I am always fascinated by listening to the language of manipulation.

I hope that everyone is only getting some "atheists are silly" giggles, and not actually buying into his caricatures of the actual scientific claims.

zilch said...

One more brief comment. The argument Piper is using here is known as the Argument from Personal Incredulity. In other words, he's basically saying, "I, John Piper, with no background in science, simply cannot imagine how something as complex as a spider who fishes insects out of a pitcher plant could have evolved. Therefore, God must have created all living things as they are."

Needless to say, this is not a very convincing argument to anyone who has taken the trouble to learn a bit about the subject at hand. Imagine if someone told you that the Sun, the Moon, and all the other heavenly bodies must be mounted in crystalline spheres surrounding the Earth, because otherwise they would fall down. "I, John Doe, simply cannot imagine how something can stay above the ground without falling. Therefore God must have created crystalline spheres to hold up all these lights in the sky".

I don't suppose I need to mention that people used to believe this? But now we know better, and we know better about evolution too.

ExPatMatt said...

What is 'blam'?

Reynold said...

Trish's weak attempt to sound "cool" and to make her man seem tough maybe?

He sure doesn't sound intelligent, so I guess "blam" is all he's got.

Or is it "bluster"?

Whateverman said...

In the interest of full disclosure I'd like to confess that, although I criticized this clip, the whole "man pool - God pool" thing made me smile.

Fish With Trish said...

"man pool - God pool"

That was my favorite part.

ExPatMatt said...

Trish,

""man pool - God pool"

That was my favorite part."


Unsurprising that this is the only part you have decided to comment on then, eh?

Was there any other part that was worth a mention? At all?