How did pre-Darwin atheists explain the existence of animals?
Evolution. Misguided atheists believe themselves to be following the “new discoveries” of something called “the Science”, but they’re really following the ancient philosophy of Democritus and Epicurus.
>>18629530Atheism as we know it today didn't really exist then. They were deists who believed God created a universe with natural laws and doesn't intervene with supernatural miracles
Charles Darwin doomed humanity by exposing them to forbidden knowledge. >>18629562 is right; the idea that there is no god or soul or supernatural world at all is quite recent
>>18629530>pre-Darwin atheistsDarwin wasn't an atheist and never shilled atheism yet chriskeks still seethe about him. He simply conceded that much of what he observed in the natural world challenged Christian dogma and died an agnostic.
Left Hand Path practicer here. A Christian just came on /x/ saying how he is posessed as per his beliefs and hearing voices. After some time, I noticed what was wring from my side, do naturally I told him stuff that I knew would work. Naturally, he jumped at the unusual suggestions because of xir religion. Even tough he had done (1) one thing I said and it was helping. I have some questions thus fir Christians. 1. Why do you seek for help from outsiders? 2. Why isn't your God or flock helping? 3. Why do you spit on helping hands though your religion failed you?
>>18629562>>18629568This is in error. See >>18629537Now properly an “atheist” is not one who believes God does not exist, since no such persons truly exist. Rather, an atheist is one who denies the existence of God, which have existed in every age of man. But when we speak of the atheist or secular worldview of today, it is substantially the same thing as the Epicureanism of ancient times.
>>18629569>Darwin wasn't an atheist and never shilled atheism That’s also wrong>died an agnostic.Agnosticism is atheism
>>18629562Atheists absolutely existedhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Meslierhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazimierz_%C5%81yszczy%C5%84skihttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baron_d'Holbachhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julien_Offray_de_La_Mettrie
>>18629569>and died an agnostic.Holy shit so he prefered to willingly go to hell in the end? He had faith and yet decided to insult God right at the end? That seems so fucking foolish
>>18629577>everything that isn't my religion is atheismNot everyone is an 80IQ Mexican like you who can't grasp abstract ideas.>>18629579>he went to hell because he went to an island and saw some tortoises and that somehow challenges the fabric of my beliefsSounds pretty humiliating on your end.
>>18629562It definitely existed. The guy in the attached image was literally an atheist and so was Baron d'Holbach
>>18629596Tortoises don’t challenge the fabric of my beliefs, very stupid atheists convince themselves it does.
>>18629613Christianity hasn't been cool since like the 1740s lol give up please
Anaxminader believed in evolution 2000 years before Darwin
>>18629622Never, you will have to kill us all.
>>18629530You couldn't be an intellectually fulfilled atheist before Darwin. - Richard Dawkins
>>18629623Picture related is Hippocrates speaking on an early version of evolution theory. The African tribe sexually selected for long headed men since long heads were associated with divinity. Thus long heads began arising naturally from selecting for this trait whereas initially they were only created from skull binding.
>>18629623Empedocles too
>>18629530It was not necessarily an atheist thing but they believed in change but it was not based upon the environment. For example, Maximus the Confessor (c. 580–662) advocarted for a type of internal change. His doctrine of the logoi holds that created beings possess intelligible principles or possibilities grounded in the divine Logose aka Jesus as Incarnation. THe idea is that internally there was an essential principle to individual organisms and natural laws. This was read with here was also an Aristotelian vocabulary of generation (genesis), corruption (phthora), alteration (alloiōsis), growth, and natural transformation that Byzantine intellectuals inherited. This allowed them to conceive nature as continually producing and transforming individual organisms and substances based upon internal pressures such as moisture or heat. Not evolution again. They associated static essences with Islam and types of pluralism. This lead them for example to burying cancers that grew in people because they thought they were new organsisms generated by the human body.
Buddhists for certain believed in something like an evolutionary process but they themselves left it to dfiferent accounts. Traditional Buddhist cosmology describes world-systems undergoing repeated expansion and contraction across immense spans of time, with beings continually reborn into different modes of existence according to causal and karmic conditions. They focused on a type of evolution of mentation in their views but left open but believed clearly that organisms changed and had a evolutionary path. Sometimes they tried to reason about how the two aligned. This is built of a general account like that found in the Aggañña Sutta (Dīgha Nikāya 27). It describes beings initially existing in a subtle form and gradually acquiring increasingly differentiated bodily characteristics as environmental and behavioral conditions change in a kinda complex causal picture. When they often countered the west they often contested colonalism and statements of western superioity basically saying they could fill in the blanks of the theory and seeing parallels to it to Buddhist accounts of metaphysical antifoundationalism.
>>18630451Some of their accounts basically did hold that the enviornment was the source of change but did not think in terms of genes or evolutionary processes. Rather, it reflected the composition of the enviornment in a material sense. A type of elemental theory that then connected to accounts of dharmas, qualiative atoms that connected mental qualities to physical qualities in a deeper sense.
Islam did not have an account of evolution or traditional change. Instead organisms are willed to exist as they are such as being created in pairs. Humans did change but because God willed them to. Adam sixty cubits tall. A cubit varies historically, but using roughly 45–50 cm would make Adam approximately 27–30 meters (89–98 feet) tall. The same report says that humanity “continued to diminish” in stature after Adam as a punishment. This is found independently in both Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī and Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, which gives the tradition very high authority within Sunni hadith schoarship but also exists in Shia collections. Here are some examples. Organisms in this account are otherwise fixed unless Allah punihses them such as transforming certain beings into pigs or apes.https://sunnah.com/bukhari%3A3326?https://sunnah.com/bukhari%3A3327?
>>18629625The fact that boi butt doesn't make babies means Christianity won't last much longer
>>18629530Either they said they didn't know or they ascribed it to fortuitous combinations of atoms or matter
An interesting detail also in Islam is that current larger organisms are implied to be larger so that they can be punished more harshly including the giants of Yaʾjūj and Maʾjūj being hidden behind a wall sealed by Dhu al-Qarnayn, a Syraicized Alexander the Great Here is an example. They alluded to in Sūrat al-Kahf 18:93–99. Here is a link to a hadith on them.https://sunnah.com/muslim%3A2937a?l-Tirmidhī describes the body of an unbeliever in Hell as enormously enlarged: the skin is forty-two cubits thick and a molar is compared with Mount Uḥud. That is not evidence for prehistoric terrestrial giants; it concerns the transformed resurrection body in Hell.
In the early modern period there wree a lot of explicit atheists who sought to account for it. Some theists offered similiar accounts as well with Anglicans especially trying to defend such accounts. Michael Ruse has some interesting works on them. Amongst the atheists Denis Diderot, Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Baron d’Holbach, and Benoît de Maillet are especially important for developing naturalistic ideas that resemble later evolutionary theory. Diderot was atheistic materialist who speculated that living forms were historically variable rather than eternally fixed. In D’Alembert’s Dream, he portrayed matter as active and capable of producing increasingly complex forms of life through natural processes, making him one of the clearest philosophical precursors of transformism. Maillet offered a secular account but was meant to be friendly to theists as well. he proposed an extremely ancient Earth, argued that terrestrial life originated in the sea, and suggested that aquatic organisms gradually transformed into corresponding terrestrial forms as environments change. His theory appeals to the environment. It was really only a strand of Cartesian-influenced thinkers including Cartesian influenced reformed Christians at the time who found variable change a problem.
Here is a good stanford encycloepdia of philosophy entry. A major precusor of general theistic and athesit thought was St. Augustine. His idea of a literal genesis, really not very literal, referred to a creation occuring extended in time rather than a simple fall into created existience in time. This meant that organisms came into being in time. Change occured due to the various natural processes with their own telos. This lead to a medieval view influenced by Aquinas in which evolution selected for telogical centers like the ability to chew. Unlike contemporary accounts where the environment selects, this meant the ability existed and then selected for the organism in an environment. This creates for example, things like a chicken or egg problem. Anglicans used these features to eventually defend evolution. When the Catholic church started reasoning about it they approached it in a secular way rather than the Anglican religious influenced way that eventually also morphed.https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/evolution-before-darwin/?
There is evidence that Islamic views did adapt and detheologized and dephilosophized their account as well.>>18630465An example connects to this actually. Here there is no causal explanation provided. It is grouped with medicine of the prophet genre of hadith, which often includes presocratic material. Here though, we have something that could be read as implying the creature arose because of a mixture of dirty moisture that creates new life forms. Tapping into Byzantine accounts like that with cancer as a new organism.
>>18630490I should point out that this source is from a Sirah but you can find the original hadith elsewhere warning about putting the siwak, something like a tooth brush in your ass.
>>18629569A relatively small contingent of Christians take issue with the works of Darwin, his theory of Evolution, or even the entire field of evolutionary biology. The churches and messaging associated with this rejection of Darwin were amplified intentionally. This is for two reasons, the first and most important one is an attempt to discredit any religiously informed skepticism. You cannot exactly discredit the laws and beliefs that inform a religion's understanding of the natural world, creation, or morality directly, but you can make it appear to be unreasonable. The second and less important reason is that Darwin does not really challenge Christian theology, but if you create the belief that he does, then you will create an anti-intellectual and ignorant environment in institutions that have traditionally competed with the state for authority and legitimacy.
>>18629530Easy. Animals were made by Darwin time traveling to the Eoarchian period sticking his dick in the volcanic rock.
>>18629530Darwin was a freemason.
>>18629530They all had their pet theories, a few simply didn't think about it, I presume.
>>18629530There were different types of beliefs that influenced one another. For example gnostics probably got their whacky ideas of self generation generation from some schools of platonism that were concerned with first principles, some other schools if not the same thought about numbers generating successive steps of complexity leading to us existing, that inspired numerology etc... From these ideas people like Aristotle probably thought about some sort of generation from basic elements that would lead to lesser form of animals appear, that would then lead to more complex animals.Atheists of the past had thousands of corpuses to pick from as an origin for animals. And we have to think what defines an atheist really. Because atheists nowadays don't really know how the world was created either, they may even be in some part deistic. They're all just people who pick the ideas of the time and mix em up without a care for bible bs. But what counts as a non atheist is also a shady conception, nowadays you have those who take things literally, apologetics, and faggots, but back then you had crazy mystics who couldn't settle for any epistemology they just took any tradition they liked and made it their own
>>18630465You mean that means atheism won’t last much longer.
>>18630861those desperate people fleeing on overcrowded boats, was it atheists who forced them out of their countries?
>>18630861Atheism leads to chuddery while Christpillers import gorillion browns
>>18629530When you're not mentally primed to use Goddidit as a false answer to every question, you find that it's perfectly possible to hold "we don't know" as a position on open questions. It's usually an important step on the path to finding the right answer.
>>18630653You are a fool and your opinion is worth little, but this is such a commonly repeated error it worth refuting.The assertion that few Christians object to evolutionism is abjectly false, both historically and in modern times. If we take the grand scheme of history into account, the number of people which called themselves Christians who would accept the Epicurean dogma of evolutionism is vanishingly small, being only a modern phenomenon and one which only exists because of a modern cultural pressure to begin with. And in the modern era, even though there may be many people who call themselves Christians who affirm this doctrine, incredibly few have any legitimacy to that self-identification, being members of heretical sects, especially liberalism and Romanism, which are not correctly called Christian. The second error is that Darwinism doesn’t challenge Christian theology. I don’t know that you’ve ever cracked the spine of a bible, but the scriptures teach and teach plainly that the living creatures were created by God. It is not exegetically possible to reconcile the dogma of evolutionism with the testimony of the holy bible, it is simply the denial of the authority of holy scripture. This impiety is epistemologically untenable because the revelation of God is central to the possibility of human knowledge to begin with, and theologically untenable because of the inspiration, infallibility and inerrancy of scripture. The apostle Paul warned us against being taken captive by vain human philosophy, which is not according to Christ.(cont.)
>>18630653>>18630898You are deeply concerned with being respected by the world, as you even admit you fear being “discredited”, which is not at all a legitimate impulse. The cross is foolishness to the gentiles, and if I were seeking to please men, I would not preach Christ. They will never respect you as long as you hold the Christian faith, nor are you to value their respect remotely, but only the respect of God who is not pleased to see you concede to the foolish wisdom of the world and choose the doctrines of men over the teachings of His word. 2 Corinthians 11:3 “But I fear that, as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness, your minds will be corrupted from the simplicity and purity of devotion to Christ.”
>>18630865>Atheism leads to chuddery
>>18630869Wew you managed to frame absolute unwillingness to consider the existence of God under any circumstance as open mindedness and reasonableness
>>18630902
>>18630920Catholics aren’t Christian.
>>18630922Cope
>>18630933You may as well show me some muslim imam, chief.
>>18630898>>18630900Inerrancy of Scripture, according to the largest branch of Christianity both historically and presently, is explained through Dei Verbum. If you look into that you'll note that the interpretation of scripture is a right conferred by Jesus to the Church through episcopal succession, and the living spiritual tradition of the Church and its fathers is aided in its contemplation by the Holy spirit. The meandering word salad of one man (You) is in fact neither dogma nor doctrine, and it actually exemplifies the epistemologically untenable nature of your impiety. As to the rest of your point, I never said I wanted the respect of this world or anyone in it, nor do I engage in this spiritual pride over having decided to believe. I just correctly pointed out that institutions of man do attempt to fight the institutions of God and have for nearly all of Church history. On a personal note, work on your condescending tone, it really fucking irks me and probably also bothers everyone else who speaks with you.
A better question is how retarded were people that they didn't notice the 50 thousand species of beetle popping up every year. How did it take this long for one guy to study animals long enough to disprove God lol
>>18630777Oh no e dint!
