Nah, but I've seen this and the one about the socialist grading system far too many times. I usually want to laugh at the person passing it along. In this case, I'm mostly just disappointed not to see Dicky's head explode.
This is an Appeal to Fallacy fallacy. In point of fact, it is possible to reach a valid conclusion despite an invalid premise or analysis, even if only by accident.
Btw, the concept buried deep inside that ill-written nonsense about evil being not a positive entity, but an absence of good, which started off with Aquinas I believe, is quite interesting, whether you add God to the mixture or not. Just saying.
Absolutely. A worthwhile discussion, if it hadn't been introduced with such a childishly transparent fabrication. I'm not even sure at this point which side I would defend, or if I would defend either side absolutely. I would need to think about this.
It's fairly easy to discredit the notion that "evil" is the absence of God. The Abrahamic God is described, several times, as being omnipresent. Therefore, evil can't be the absence of God because (for the sake of argument) God is nowhere absent. That leaves us with the Professor's position -- that God, if it exists, is the source of all evil. Bumper sticker version: All the praise comes package-deal with all the blame.
Started out interesting, ended up being logic-bending evangelism. Evolution is not faith and supposition, it's based on over a century of evidence and analysis. You CAN see the professor's brain, using a number of non-lethal examinations.
I think the absolutist duality of good and evil is inherently tied to the duality of gods and devils. Without them, good and evil are measured only by how actions satisfy the relative interests of we mortals.
Absent the presumption of a "God" to tell us which is which, might one also likewise argue that "good" is nothing more than the absence of noticeable evil. If one is to strictly observe human nature, the generally accepted reality is that ALL are flawed (even the Bible says all sin and fall short) so the working hypothesis probably makes more sense to say "all of us are evil to some degree, the extent to which one is perceived to be "good" is only a measure of a lesser quantity of evil than might be found in another. Eh?
My bullshit flag was at the tip-top of the pole about ten seconds in. If an anecdote sounds as if it is something idealistic, unrealistic and made up to prove a point, it most likely is one of those things people want to be true so bad they can taste it.
