Dan's comments (member since May 19, 2009)

Dan's comments from the Evolution vs. Intelligent Design group.

God is not a liar.

Unless you count, for example, that time that Jesus, who is also God, sort of, said that he would return to Earth within a generation of his crucifixion.

To suggest that we humans "know" how God does things is the height of arrogance.

I agree. And I assume that you will not, within the next few sentences in your post, do the very thing that you claim is arrogant.

Evolution is God's creation, to be admired and understood.

Oh well. I guess I was wrong.

The Bible was never intended as a natural science textbook.

Baseless claim. The Bible explained how things work for Bronze Age people who didn't know any better. It only "isn't intended" to do this if you begin with the presupposition that it is inerrant and realize that, clearly, it would be a horrible textbook.

There are two views of God: as a magician who snaps His fingers and bingo everything is done, or the artist who builds a painting slowly and lovingly over time, gradually. Unfortunately most unthinking people adopt the magician view.


They are both magician views. To have created the universe, to have guided evolution, and to have violated the laws of physics are all pretty good magic tricks, whether done quickly or slowly.

As far as my belief in the LDS religion, it is based upon the feelings I got when I prayed and asked God if the Book of Mormon came about the way that Joseph Smith claims it did: by him translating an ancient record.

When you conducted this experiment, did you also pray to all other possible gods to ask them if their particular holy books were also divinely-inspired and inerrant? Or did you just pray to the Mormon God?

Aharonsmith,

Dan wrote this
You're a moron. You didn't hit a nerve, you just made me realize you have zero logic skills and near to zero intelligence. Therefore, moron.

No I didn't. Nate wrote that.

You have failed several times to see my argument and I don’t know how to spell it out any more for you.

I haven't failed even once to see your argument. I see it and reject it. Your argument is that if believing in something benefits you, you should believe it to be true, even if it is demonstrably false. Several of us have stated that this is illogical and unethical, and have repeatedly clarified our position that there is no evidence to support biblical claims. You seem to be the one who is not understanding.

I even tried to use your word of “positive benefit” to explain. That is a word you yourself criticized as being redundant. A very moronic thing to do.

"Positive benefit" is not my word. It's not a word at all; it's two words. And it is redundant. How is pointing this out moronic?

In other words, according to him.. for us to be a free people, we have to follow the golden rule. (kind of scary to think about) The golden rule is the message of the bible.

Post hoc ergo proctor hoc. You may as well say that both the Bible and the Constitution were written using complete sentences, therefore the Constitution is based on the Bible. The Golden Rule predates Jesus by centuries if not millennia.

Your claims about the founding fathers are hardly accurate or honest, but even if they were, it wouldn't make anything in the bible true.

Abolitionists during the 18th and 19th century used the bible to denounce slavery. Yeah its true and horrible that others have used it to support it. But the fact is that it was used to denounce it as well.

This simply demonstrates that the Bible is a bunch of incoherent nonsense that can mean anything to anyone, anywhere anytime. The fact that sometimes people are simultaneously good and Christian hardly proves that any of it is true.

Aharonsmith,

Religion has given us a foundation for our morals and ethics.

No it hasn't, and this is easy to demonstrate. The Bible is chock full of immorality. Slavery, rape, murder, etc., are everywhere in the Bible. If this was the foundation of our morality, then we would think all of these things were acceptable, but we do not. We are able to judge the Bible and separate the good from the bad; so, we must have some other source of morality that allows us to judge the Bible.

I'm not going to address your "finding the keys" miracle, because it's a clear instance of confirmation bias, and as an experiment for proving anything it's horribly designed.

Did you know that the basis of alcohol annonymous is that there is a higher power?

Yes, I know that, and I think it's despicable. To prey on people in need of real help and foist religion on them is reprehensible.

I am not arguing that the bible is true or not.

Then, a few sentences later you say:

RGB says there is no good reason to believe the bible to be true. I say otherwise and I use the evidence that it has bettered people's lives as a result of their belief in it.

Make up your mind! To believe something is to hold it to be true. As there is no evidence that the Bible is true, and there is plenty of evidence contradicting its supposed truth, there is no reason to believe it is true. Being "useful" and being "true" are not the same thing. No one has argued that faith in make-believe has never helped anyone; we are simply saying that there is no evidence that it is true, and there is no reason to hold things to be true if they lack evidence.

Let's say that instead of praying to God to find your keys, you killed a kitten as a sacrifice to God, and then you found your keys. Would this be a good reason to believe that animal sacrifice is good, that there is a god who gives you what you want if you sacrifices animals to it?

But the thing about God is my claim of him being real is just as valid as your claim that he is not.

No it isn't. Your claim of him being real is the same is my claim that there are invisible unicorns living in your attic. Neither of us has any proof. Absent proof, the default position is to believe that something does not exist; otherwise, we'd be required to believe anything anyone could think up.

It is the same process used in science. Scientists use what works best to progress and advance our society. Newton's laws, although false, are still used today in solving phyics problems. Why? Because it gets you a credible answer.

No it isn't. Your method is to say, "This makes me feel better, so it must be true." This is the opposite of science. For certain calculations, you can treat the Earth as being flat, round certain constants, use simplified equations, etc., and still get usable results. This does not prove that the Earth is flat, and no one believes that the Earth is flat based on this method.

They seek for the most probable explanation not because it is right but because it is the most beneficial way to explain phenomenom and is congruent with the evidence.

No they don't. "Beneficial" has nothing to do with it. Consistent with the evidence is the only thing that matters. In the case of the Bible, there is no virtually no consistency with the evidence.

Now as RGB has pointed out, there have been bad things done in the name of God. Maybe what we can conclude is that for some it is a good reason to believe and for some it is not a good reason. But this doesn't cancel out the benefits that have come to society from it.

Of course it cancels it out. If you're defending religion on the basis of its benefit, the only thing that matters is its net benefit. If I create a vaccination that inoculates 20% of the people who use it against some disease, but kills 25% of the people who use it, could I say that the vaccination is ultimately good, because the deaths don't cancel out the successes? Of course not. And if I marketed this vaccination as being beneficial despite knowing about its fatal side-effects, I'd go to prison. By your logic, it doesn't matter that religion is almost certainly the single biggest cause of warfare, genocide, discrimination and oppression in human history, because it helped you find your keys, maybe.

You are saying that the definition of 'positive benefit' is different than 'good reason' They mean the same thing.

No they don't. When was the last time you saw a health product marketed as providing lots of "good reasons?" Also, "positive benefit" is redundant: there's no such thing as a negative benefit.

Use the theory of evolution as your basis of morality (social darwinism) and see how far that progresses society. No thanks!

Use the Bible as your basis of morality - the whole Bible, every last word - and see how far that takes society. I predict lots more war and genocide, the return of slavery, the subjugation of women, etc. No thanks!

no evidence to show God exists? Plenty! Everything had to come from something. Where did all the stuff come from?

If everything had to come from somewhere, then God had to come from somewhere. If God can be exempt from this criterion, then so can the universe. We have never witnessed an act of creation, so we have no reason to believe that one is possible. Basically, you're saying that it's impossible for the impossible to not have happened. Not a sound logical argument.

I also base it on personal experience, for when I pray, I get answers to prayers.

This method of "proof" would be soundly rejected by any scientist for any number of reasons. First of all, have you kept track of every single time you prayed, and determined the percentage of the time you received the desired outcome? And have you also kept track of the number of times you've wanted something and not prayed for it, and still gotten it? Have you randomly chosen when to pray or not pray, in order to prevent data collection bias? Have you compared these percentages using statistical methods? Have you prayed to all possible gods during these experiments - again, randomly chosen - in order to prevent confirmation bias, including the thousands of ancient gods in which no one still believes, and hypothetical gods that could exist but are not (yet) believed in on Earth? I highly doubt it.

So prove to me that God does not exist. You can't man, and thats the whole point. It is relative.

I'm not making a claim. The burden of proof is not on me to prove or disprove your claims.

Let's try it this way: I claim that there is a god named Blintork who lives in the clouds and has chosen me as his conduit to the human world. In the year 2011 he will begin destroying the human race in a horrible, painful way, unless you send me $100,000 so that I might begin construction of a temple to honor him. Prove me wrong.

the thread of your argument is that for there to be good reason to believe in something, then it has to exist.

Well of course it has to! We should believe things that are true, and not believe things that are not true. This is not a controversial statement.

You seem to not understand the difference between something being beneficial and something being true.

The benefits you mention are basically the placebo effect. And here's the thing about the placebo effect: doctors consider it unethical, because it only works if you lie to the patient. Most doctors aren't willing to lie to patients for the sake of a modest benefit. But here's the other thing about the placebo effect: you don't have to take a placebo to get it, you're just as likely to get it while taking real medicine, in addition to the positive benefits of that medicine. Just because people might benefit from being lied to about God, it doesn't follow that they can only benefit from being lied to. They might also benefit from being told the truth.

You're also making the mistake of "post hoc ergo proctor hoc." Any time someone overcomes an addiction, that's a good thing, but this doesn't prove that religious delusion is necessary for these outcomes. It's preposterous to think that the only way to overcome addiction is through religion. And the fact that people are helped by it doesn't make any of it true. Furthermore, you could look at the situation from the other angle, which is that religious organizations prey on people in a vulnerable state (such as addicts), using their need as an opportunity to indoctrinate them into religion.

Given the choice between helping people by lying to them and helping people by telling them the truth, why should we ever choose the lie?

I will tell you exactly why I believe the Bible, and it is not - as I know you all will be thinking - because I am not mature enough or educated enough to see the "facts", as you call them. It is because of what the following verse states.

Psalm 17:17 "...your word is truth."

So you believe the bible because the bible tells you to? But why do you believe that? Oh, because the bible tells you to. But why do you believe that? Oh, because the bible...?

Do you not see what a ridiculous circle this is? Other religious texts also claim to be true. Why don't you believe those?

I've already got more knowledge than all of you put together!

Well, sure, if you start by assuming that you're right about everything and that anyone who disagrees with you is automatically wrong, then you're the smartest person in the universe. Also, the most ignorant and arrogant.

They gave me a choice. I could believe that my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great(and as many as it takes) was a monkey, or I could believe that God created Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. It's a choice, not a brainwashing.

You don't get to choose what's true; you have to follow the evidence where it leads. I would prefer to believe that my hair is made out of gold, so I could cut it, sell it and buy a mansion, but there's no evidence for this, and plenty of evidence to the contrary. Truth isn't a matter of choice.

Actually, I believe that Christianity is the most persecuted - and I will be fair and say "at least in the United States" - because Satan - the devil - has no use in killing the other religions. He does not need to hurt them, because they are all wrong in the first place.

So your "proof" that Christians are the most persecuted isn't based on facts, but on the presupposition that Christianity is true, and your own logical extrapolation from that. Maybe you should try being a Muslim for a while before you come to this baseless conclusion.

You force the theory of Creation OUT of the public school system, and do not even let your children make a decision for themselves!

Because creationism is not science! Why is this so hard to grasp? There is no body of empirical evidence for creation. There is no scientific proof for creation. There are no peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals proving any aspect of creation. In fact, creation violates the most basic laws of physics. It is not the obligation of the public school system to deliver religious propaganda to children. For all the noise Christians make about presenting students with all the theories and letting them choose for themselves, I never hear any Christian claim that we should teach the theory that the world was created on the back of a giant turtle, or that Prometheus made men out of clay.

Furthermore, telling kids about evolution and creation, and letting them choose which one is correct is not education. Do we let students choose between geocentrism and heliocentrism? Do we let students decide for themselves what 2+2 equals? Of course not. To claim that the teaching of Intelligent Design is about anything other than indoctrinating students into Christianity is simply dishonest.

You are right, there is no testable way to find out if there is or is not a God, and that is the way he made it. He wants us to BELIEVE in him, not to find scientific proof of his being.

And how do you know these things? You dismiss mountains of evidence for evolution and declare it unreliable for lack of proof, and then assert to know the thoughts and desires of a being that you cannot even demonstrate to exist! The logical inconsistency of your arguments is sublime.

every piece of "evidence" that evolutionists have brought out have been proven FALSE

This is absolutely not true. It is pretty much the opposite of truth. Evolution is one of the most rigorously tested theories in all of science. It is supported by mountains of evidence. Paleontology, embryology, genetics, biogeography and laboratory experiments all support evolution.

I can only assume from your statements that everything you think you know about evolution you were told by people in your church, or read on creationist websites. Read some of the actual science on evolution.

creation has plenty of logical evidence of its TRUTH!!!!!

Such as...?

HOWEVER, we DO have the book of Genesis.

We have a lot of books with a lot of different origin stories. Why choose the Genesis account over Prometheus? The point is that observation and investigation don't lead you to anything resembling Genesis, unless you're already there and are selectively interpreting evidence to support your preconception. And this is not science, and should not be taught as such in a classroom.

hey let me tell u something guys.u dont have any idea wat re u talking about.So just be careful in things tat u dont understand liked this one.So if u do me a favor can un please shut up!!!we re talking here about mu God(Dios)nd he is almighth enough 4 defensed himself.
so just be quiet.If u doesn't kno wat re u talking about
thank u

Translation:


Hey, let me tell you something, guys. You don't have any idea what you're talking about. So just be careful discussing things you don't understand, like this topic. Could you do me a favor and please shut up? We're talking about my God (Dios), and he is mighty enough to defend himself. So, just be quiet if you don't know what you're talking about.

Thank you.


Your logic is horrible. God is powerful enough to take care of himself, and can deal with literally anything, and so, you have to take care of him by telling us to stop talking about him, because apparently he can't deal with that himself. God is all powerful, but is simultaneously caused grave injury by discussions on an Internet forum. No, you're right, that makes perfect sense.

They think it contradicts the Genesis story. Unfortuneately, instead of looking at the story of Genesis as being more figurative than traditional dogma has allowed, they have chosen to create a false theory, known as "intelligent design" and reject evolution altogether.

I agree with you here. Back when I was still religious, I had no problem believing in evolution. Of course, I was Catholic, and the Catholic church made its peace with evolution a long time ago and instead focused on trying to get kids to not masturbate. I suppose I took Genesis as metaphor or something, I'm not sure; I was young.

If we are to stop the ID movement, the focus has to be more on how evolution does not threaten religion.

I disagree here. Or, at least, I don't think this should be the focus of every ID opponent. For a religious/spiritual ID opponent such as yourself, this is a fine goal. But personally, I don't spend too much time trying to convince people that evolution is compatible with religion, because that implicitly supports the premise that science and public education have some sort of obligation to be compatible with or friendly to religion. They don't. We study evolution because it's true, regardless of whether it's compatible with religion. I don't care if it's compatible, it's just good science. ID is not. It's not science at all. This is what I think the focus should be on. We should be demonstrating that ID is not science. The rest is window dressing.

If you do not want to accept the fact that anything is possible, then that is fine.

Anything being possible is not the issue; the issue is everything being equally probable, of all possibilities being credible.

In conclusion, the point I made, whether you want to accept it or not, is that one can believe in a God and that the theory of evolution is credible.

I agree, too, but as RC pointed out, this wasn't your original assertion. You asserted that evolution and Genesis were compatible. They are not. They are if, as you suggest, you take Genesis as metaphor, which is basically the same as not believing it at all. To this I reply that if we arbitrarily take certain portions of the bible as metaphor with no justification other than to inoculate the bible against falsification, then really there's no justification in not taking the entire bible as metaphor.

The way one can find out if God exists is through meditation and prayer.

When you conduct this experiment, do you pray to every god equally? Do you pray to Jesus, and Allah, and Vishnu, and Zeus, and all the gods you've never even heard of, and then wait to see which one answers you? Or did you just pray to the one god?

When there are things in there that contradict scientific theory, (like the sun stopping) I think of the verse as being meant figuratively and follow the scientific thoery. (the earth rotates around the sun)

This is confirmation bias. You begin with a desired conclusion (the bible is correct), and then interpret the evidence in such a way as to validate this conclusion. Where the bible appears in error, you conclude that it must be metaphorical, but only in these particular instances, because you've already concluded that it is true, so the only way to reconcile these errors is to assume that the offending passages are metaphors. The rest of the passages, the ones not (yet?) contradicted by science, you assume are literal. But the bible provides no clues as to which passages are metaphorical and which are not, so how does one choose? If you're going to go taking arbitrary passages as metaphor willy nilly, then really the only justifiable thing to do is to take the entire bible as metaphor, and treat it as nothing more than a work of fiction.

When backed into a corner by facts, people love to say that they don't worry about the bible's factual accuracy and that they just take it is metaphor, but this is pretty much never true. They selectively and arbitrarily take it as metaphor in order to inoculate it against falsification so they can continue to take as much of it as possible literally.

As for your claims that all people have faith, I'm going to continue to point out that this is a disingenuous claim.

Faith is belief that is not based on proof. Knowledge of gravity, the sunrise, basic nutrition, etc., is not faith.

Religious people like to use this logic:

1. All things require faith, whether belief in something completely fantastical like a magic sky man, or belief that gravity will not spontaneously stop working as it always has.

2. Since all things require faith, there is no factual basis for believing one thing over another, and there is therefore somehow an equal probability of any of these things being true.

3. My belief in God is therefore just as justifiable as belief in, say, gravity.

4. We all know gravity exists. Therefore, my beliefs are true.

This logic, or any logic resembling it, is absurd. I have never met a religious person who hasn't had at some point in his/her life some sort of doubt about religious faith. I have never met a person who has had even the briefest, slightest momentary doubt in gravity.

You are equivocating the real definition of faith and your own made-up definition. Obviously no one knows the future, and so, in a sense, anything is possible. But there are a lot of things that are, for all intents and purposes, impossible. Gravity isn't going to stop working tomorrow. The sun isn't going to not rise tomorrow. Your digestive system is not going to mutate so that it requires marbles instead of protein and carbohydrates. Equivocating these two different senses of "possible" is dishonest. The logic is that since we don't know the future, no knowledge is 100% certain, therefore anything is possible, therefore all possibilities have an equal probability of being true. It is bad logic, it is dishonest, and it is not fooling anyone.

Anyway, back to Intelligent Design...

What are your beliefs in things of the supernatural? Do you believe there is a spiritual side of humanity?

I have never known of a genuinely "supernatural" event. I don't believe in spirits or souls or whatever. As RC said, I believe that things such as art can affect us in a way that is more emotional than intellectual, and that there are things we value but do not understand. I would not describe this as "spiritual," though.

Also, if there is no creator, then where did everything come from?

This question presupposes that there was a before, and that in this before, everything that exists now did not exist. I don't know that this was the case. When nothing existed, did time exist? If not, then how could it be "before"? If time did exist, was time the only thing that existed? Why did time exist but nothing else? Can time exist without space?

As Nathan, I, and probably others have pointed out, to answer this question by saying that a god created it simply moves the question over one place. Who created God? Why is it okay to simply accept that God has always existed, but not okay to postulate that perhaps the universe always existed? We at least have evidence that the universe does exist now, if not always, which puts it one up on God.

Dan, the point I am making about faith is that anything we do is based upon it.

I understand the point you are making, but the point you are making is wrong. Faith is belief despite a lack of evidence. Science is based on evidence. I'll repeat, comparing the "faith" in a sunrise to faith in God is dishonest. It borders on offensive to compare my abilities to make tangible observations to someone's belief in fairy tales.

I find it amusing that religious people always accuse scientists of having faith, but scientists never accuse religious people of having evidence.

And you also don't answer the repeated claim that since the bible contains and endorses Genesis, and Genesis is clearly false, then the bible is useless as a document of fact.

what if the scripture was written down incorrectly? What if Christ did not talk about the flood, but someone wrote down that he did?

Sure, that's possible. But if, in order to not dismiss the bible as fiction, we have to assert that parts of it were written down incorrectly, then why believe any of it? Is it the case that all of the parts of the bible that are contradicted by science happened to be written or copied incorrectly, and all the other parts were written correctly? This would be a large and convenient coincidence.

We can come to the conclusion through science that the Genesis story is not true. This means that either the bible is a false document, or a true document written down falsely. Either way, it renders the bible functionally useless as anything other than a work of fiction, albeit an inspirational one.

There are things where we have to use faith to move forward with, such as any future decision we make.

Name one. We make decisions based on evidence, and predictive confidence based on fact. Comparing "faith" that the sun will rise and faith in God is outrageously dishonest. If we had 1/1000 as much evidence for God's existence as we do for the sun rising, we would need no faith to believe in God.

Evolution does not make God unnecessary. For there has to be somewhere, a creator that got it all started. It is very reasonable to think that.

First of all, the beginning of life is not the subject of evolutionary theory. Evolution explains changes from one form of life to another. It is a process that operates completely without direction or interference, therefore it requires no God, rendering him unnecessary. If there has to be a creator somewhere who "got it all started," then there has to be a creator somewhere who created the creator who got it all started, and a creator who created the creator who created the creator... and so on. If you assert that God can just exist without having been created, then why can't the universe just exist without having been created? Science does not explain how the universe was created because science does not assert that the universe was created.

I cringe when I hear those who support the theory of evolution talk so vehemently about the bible as you have, for it discredits their objective ability to seek for truth and replaces it with their biased agenda.

Rgb is simply making factual observations about the bible, demonstrating its stunning inaccuracy and, therefore, its failure as any sort of divine, perfect word. Your statement implies that "objective" analysis of the bible must, out of deference, be blind to its obvious shortcomings.

one realizes that the argument to prove the "truth" of the bible, or in your case the non truth of it, is outside the realm of science.

Why? This claim is always tossed out in a last-ditch effort to evade analysis. The bible can't be wrong, just "outside the realm of science." But why is it "outside the realm of science"? It makes claims about events that have supposedly happened. It claims to describe the way the world works. This is outside of the realm of science? Biology, astronomy, geology? These things are outside the realm of science? If the bible is outside the realm of science, it got there by running as far and as fast as it could from scrutinizing scientists.

If one tries to use logic and reason as their primary tool in the understanding of the bible, or even their quest for God, they will inevitably fall short.

No, it's the bible that falls short.

Speaking of God, philosophers of all ages have tried to use reason to prove that he exists, and they have all fallen short. The reason why is that God is something that cannot be proven by reason.

Or, it could just be that he doesn't exist. Jon Stewart once said of George Bush that he "gets off the elevator at the wrong floor and blames the building for being confused." This is a perfect description of Christians. When the bible doesn't stand up to scientific critique, the scientific method is to blame. When religious claims don't stand up to logic, it's because logic is flawed. When God cannot be proven to exist, it's because the very idea of "proof" is flawed. People make excuses for God the way battered wives make excuses for their abusive husbands.

The understanding of spiritual truths come more from feelings of the heart rather than logic from the mind.

So, in other words, it only makes sense if you don't use your brain. Well, I agree 100%.

Some things we should believe in just because they are worth believing in.

I don't necessarily accept this premise, but just for kicks, why is a clearly false creation myth worth believing in?

stories, such as the ones from the bible, are told not so much to explain historical facts from times long ago, but rather to teach us the truth of who we really are.

Who we really are? Wicked, stupid beings who are inherently flawed, fallen from grace, and who are responsible for all the evil in the world but none of the good, who exist simply to stroke the ego of a cruel, petty, erratic megalomaniac? No, you're right, that's definitely something "worth believing in," and even more, something we should be teaching as science.

I think the group had died a month or two ago. Natural selection, I guess.

isn't quite true. Intelligent Design postulates the existence of an Intelligent Designer. We can falsify this hypothesis two ways.

I suppose. But the postulated hypothesis is quite plastic. When the existence of the designer is falsified, they will simply adjust the definition of the designer to incorporate the new evidence. A fancy pants version of the "Well, he's God; he can do what he wants" argument. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that ID doesn't make testable, falsifiable hypotheses and then stand behind them. Or to say that ID doesn't principally rely on testable hypotheses, but simply throws a few out as an afterthought to placate rational people.