Wild Guess: Would it be more accurate to say, perhaps, that your parents are somehow so connected with their religious culture(not believes), that they simply ignore the thoughts on the implausibility between evolution and the old testment ? ------Original Message------ From: "Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" To: sl4@sysopmind.com Sent: October 31, 2000 11:08:43 PM GMT Subject: Re: Introducing the Singularity Spudboy100@aol.com wrote: > > Frum Sci-Fi fans? (And the Moderator saith: "THOU SHALT NOT QUOTE THE ENTIRE MESSAGE.") Yes, my parents are observant Orthodox Jewish sci-fi fans, who know that the Earth is 4.55 gigayears old and that human biology is the result of evolution, and who see no logical conflict between this and the Old Testament, which they believe to be literally and factually true. To say that "they just don't think about it" would be understating the complexity of the issue; it would be a better approximation to say that they focus on surface inconsistencies and resolve them using various sleights-of-hand, and that this appearance of activity substitutes for dealing with the fundamental inconsistency and creates a plausible illusion that all issues have been resolved. Incidentally, this describes people other than my parents. -- -- -- -- -- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://intelligence.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence ______________________________________________ FREE Personalized Email at Mail.com Sign up at http://www.mail.com/?sr=signup