At 08:34 AM 2/11/00 -0500, David_Bowman@georgetowncollege.edu wrote:
>Regarding Glenn's comments:
>
>>Yes I am advocating a sort of Turing test for the image of God. If someone
>>who doesn't look like me, acts human, prays, speaks, uses tools, and other
>>things like this, then he is human regardless of how differenly he looks.
>>If it looks like a duck, acts like a duck and quacks like a duck then for
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>>goodness sakes it is a DUCK!!!
>
>So looking like a duck is part of the duck test. How does this square
>with your preference for a Turing test then?
You have pointed out an excellent example for future English texts on how
not to write a paragraph. :-)
Basically one must define what one means as 'looks like.' I look like a
tetrapod because I am descended from them. So to a certain point, if a
tetrapod came up to me speaking, praying and using tools, I would probably
have to posit that he has the image. When applied to fossil men, the
looking different from me is based on subtler details of the morphology.
If I recall correctly Blacks have straighter femurs than Whites; obviously
darker skin, kinky hair etc. But over all we look quite similar. But in the
past, people didn't think that such trivial differences were minor. Thus
in the past such differences were used to disqualify certain racial groups
from humanity. The Pawnee of the midcontinent believed that they were the
only people. In fact, Pawnee means people. All others weren't people. Thus
they had the right to kidnap and sacrifice young women from other tribes.
And as I said when applied to fossil man, the differences between us and
them are very small yet many apologists want to exclude them from humanity.
I simply don't see a difference between what we do with fossil men and
what the Skidi Pawnee did with other tribes.
While I did a lousy job of writing, looks simply can't be part of the image
of God except incidentally.
glenn
Foundation, Fall and Flood
Adam, Apes and Anthropology
http://www.flash.net/~mortongr/dmd.htm
Lots of information on creation/evolution
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