Questioning Society discussion
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What Happens When You Die?
Mod
Can I get some sources to back that up?
Mod
If you read my many posts on the previous page, I've already stated them.
Typing in "Bible contradictions" on Google is a good idea.
Mod
You weren't there to see the Big Bang, and I wasn't there to see creation. Neither of us can prove it. Unless one of us is omniscient or a liar.
Mod
That doesn't sound like what the Big Bang says:
One of the most persistently asked questions has been: How was the universe created? Many once believed that the universe had no beginning or end and was truly infinite. Through the inception of the Big Bang theory, however, no longer could the universe be considered infinite. The universe was forced to take on the properties of a finite phenomenon, possessing a history and a beginning.
The mass energy couldn't be infinite, since there was a beginning of some sort. The energy had to come form somewhere, as stated, it can't be considered infinite.
Mod
Well put, "so far". And yet some are pushing for Intelligent Design to be taught, along with evolution.
"You weren't there to see the Big Bang, and I wasn't there to see creation. Neither of us can prove it. Unless one of us is omniscient or a liar."No one can see ultraviolet. But we can feel it's effect (like the faint big bang waves in space).
"One of us is a moron. I'm going to let you guess which one. "hahaha<3
"One of the most persistently asked questions has been: How was the universe created? Many once believed that the universe had no beginning or end and was truly infinite. Through the inception of the Big Bang theory, however, no longer could the universe be considered infinite. The universe was forced to take on the properties of a finite phenomenon, possessing a history and a beginning."
Well, this universe can no longer be infinite. The Heartbeating Universe solves that problem, however.
Mod
I already got two lists that from this topic. So far everything can be explained.
And someone else will reply to this post,
"Explained AWAY. By stuff that's not too and can't be proven and yada yada."
Ya, I get it, no one believes me here.
Reply: "Exactly! Because you have no proof and no evidence whatsoever! The Bible is a myth."
Then why do I feel like I have found a lot of evidence and proof and given sites to back it up?
Reply: "Because you're an idiot who chooses to block out everything and everyone that doesn't believe the same things you do!"
Thanks, I came here to be insulted for what I believe.
Mod
One of us being a moron doesn't prove the Big Bang, does it?
"I already got two lists that from this topic. So far everything can be explained."So, insects really do have 4 legs?
"Reply: "Because you're an idiot who chooses to block out everything and everyone that doesn't believe the same things you do!""
Harry Potter is my new proof that magic exists.
ownd! Nathan, sorry, but Ninja owned you right there.
Mod
The Bible separates the legs that jump (the two back ones) from the ones that they use for walking. The verse:
Leviticus 11:20–23
All flying insects that creep on all fours shall be an abomination to you. Yet these you may eat of every flying insect that creeps on all fours: those which have jointed legs above their feet with which to leap on the earth. These you may eat: the locust after its kind, the destroying locust after its kind, the cricket after its kind, and the grasshopper after its kind. But all other flying insects which have four feet shall be an abomination to you.
Meaning that they could eat grasshoppers, who can fly, but not dragonfly's, which sometimes walk on plants.
Well, everyone had jointed legs directly above their feet. That doesn't make 5 and 6 appear.
Mod
"
But it also says: "with which to leap on the earth". It didn't matter if they were jointed, if they were the back legs used for hopping then they were okay.
I disagree, however. Do I really need to be the adult here and so no personal insults? It's a rule of debating. If your evidence is good enough you don't need to.
Mod
"
I don't understand what is not logical and provable about the numerous sites and facts I have given you.
Mod
Do I really need to be the adult here and so no personal insults? It's a rule of debating. If your evidence is good enough you don't need to. "
Thank you! I am so tired of being insulted! If I insulted someone first, I'd like to know, and I'm sorry if I did because I really didn't mean to insult anyone.
Mod
And it doesn't matter what evidence I give you, you just ignore it or explain it away with evolution. And if the Big Bang weren't true, I would at least settle for Intelligent Design.
Ninja wrote: "Nathan wrote: "It doesn't matter what we do or say. It doesn't matter what evidence we give you. It doesn't matter if we point out that it is a logical fallacy to conclude that even if the Big Bang..."Here would be something good for you to do: go to a more scientific website and then find flaws in the Big Bang Theory then tell us those flaws YOURSELF! If we question you link the website that you used to figure this out. But we want to click on something NON-CHRISTIAN!
"Arguments and rebuttals are supposed to involve factual information and/or valid, defendable opinions."But, as you know, not everyone has facts to support them, and are trying to make it work. When people are grasping at straws here, they know that they don't have facts. We don't need to beat it into them.
Ninja wrote: "You weren't there to see the Big Bang..."My dear man (or woman as the case may be:-), I realize that you've been living in a Bible-induced fog all of your life, but surely even you know that there was a Nobel Prize awarded to Penzias and Wilson for -- seeing the Big Bang.
You see, the thing about space is that it is mostly empty, and therefore one can see very, very far away. Far away equals very, very far back into the past. Penzias and Wilson discovered the 3 degree K blackbody radiation that IS the light of the Big Bang, cooled as it diluted into then rapidly expanding space, arriving from 13.5 or so billion years ago in the past.
Since then, of course, we've gone far beyond that. Satellites have been launched that have mapped out the actual structure that is visible in this radiation. If one has a religious or poetical bent, one might consider this to be a photograph of the face of God (taken from the inside of the Universe, God's mind). Or not. Either way, it is what it is, an actual picture, formed with actual light, of the actual event. Now show me YOUR actual evidence for the world being created in six days. Show me some credible explanation in Genesis for the microwave background and a Universe that is obviously far, far larger than the tiny imaginations of those Bronze Age superstitious tribesmen could conceive as they made up stories to explain their world.
Because that's what you are worship as "perfect truth". Stories. Stories that were made up in every culture on the planet when it passed through that stage, stories that are all different, stories that always involve gods. The truly amazing thing is that you were born (I presume) in the twentieth century in one of the most intellectually advanced cultures that has ever existed, and you still haven't managed to step back and ask yourself why your particular set of myths is any more believable than the myths of the Hindus, or the Sumerians, or the Graecoromans, or the Norse, or the various Amerindians, or the many, many African cultures, or the Japanese and Chinese cultures.
Every one of these cultures has a creation myth. They are all equally absurd (except, arguably, the Hindu creation myth which is suspiciously like the Big Bang, but Vedantic Hindu philosophers were actually not bad mathematicians and had worked out a bit of science). They all involve some form of FSM making the Earth out of something, or something out of nothing or doing some form of magic that is not supported by any sort of evidence. Yours is just one of many, and is no better than any of them.
But we're not done with "seeing" the Big Bang (which was originally the hyptothesis, ironically enough, of a Roman Catholic Priest-scientist who was a bit of a heretic and felt that when God's word written in the heavens conflicted with the Bible, so much the worse for the Bible). Since Penzias and Wilson, the Hubble has accumulated enormous numbers of photographs of the Big Bang and the early Universe immediately afterwards. There are actual photographs of the first protostars forming from the slowly coalescing clouds of hydrogen and helium produced by the actual event, a few hundred million years afterwards (the amount of time required for the gravitational wells to deepen enough to concentrate the gas enough for fusion ignition). I am proud to say that I have an ex-student, Mark Jackson, who is a young postdoc who is working with the data being continuously collected on the event to try to see if there is macroscale filamentary structure in the distribution of matter that can be connected to string theory (he's a string theorist).
There is still more evidence. The abundance of primordial elements -- notably the ratio of hydrogen to helium -- is in excellent agreement with a single parameter model where that parameter can be independently predicted by nuclear physics data that has nothing to do with the big bang. The agreement isn't "perfect" for past H-He, but it is order of magnitude good, and we haven't yet succeeded in unifying field theory (that's what my student is working on, basically) and there are likely other parameters or physics that will eventually explain the discrepancy.
The distribution of galaxies, star clusters, galactic clusters, the overall distribution of momentum and angular momentum, the Hubble shift, all are things that are seen and can be measured and we have abundant, extremely accurate data on all of them. The Big Bang is a "theory" at this point about as much as gravitation is a "theory", and you too can see it if you simply visit this link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:WMA...
See? The FSM is laughing at you, and if you look closely and kind of fuzz your eyes a bit, you can see His Noodley Appendages reaching out to embrace the world. Although I have to admit, the dark patch in the middle does remind me of the Virgin Mary...
Faces in the clouds. The human mind wants so badly to see patterns in things. That's why it is so important to use actual mathematics and systematic Bayesian reasoning, building a network of interconnected, consistent beliefs instead of accepting glib, simple, poetic, and wrong explanations for things.
OK, I think that has met your challenge. Yes, I have seen the Big Bang. Everybody on the planet who hasn't had their head firmly buried in the sand has seen the BB at this point. People are way past the "Did the Big Bang actually happen" stage and science is now exclusively concerned with the details of the event, and the clues it provides us to guide the continued development of physics on its outermost frontiers. It is an exciting time to be alive, as it is rather likely that we will unify field theory in my lifetime, or if not, in the lifetime of my sons, and that by mid-century we'll have a complete, consistent picture of microscopic physics that explains all observable phenomena at the level of our ability to compute the answers (which is itself a time varying quantity). We can already explain well over 90% of it (more like 98% of it in patches), and the remaining puzzles are basically how to fit the patches together, to finish stitching the gravitation and nuclear forces together with the electroweak force in a way that unifies quantum and general relativity theory (and, we hope, explains the last little bit of disparity in things like cosmological abundance).
What has Genesis or the Old Testament to offer that can compare in any way to this truly amazing and majestic model that is quite literally based on the evidence accumulated by our eyes, electronically enhanced and otherwise? God creating the heaven and the earth. No, he didn't. We can see the process of creation of stars and planets out there in the sky, and the Hubble doesn't reveal any trace of God, only the trace of gravity.
The earth had no form and was void (whatever that means) and it was dark, and God moved above the waters.
No, he didn't. The first thing that happened was light (well, that's not strictly true, as the strong nuclear force split off from the electroweak first, but light happened quite early in the process when the weak nuclear split off from the electromagnetic force and electromagnetic waves generated by the violently accelerating elementary particles). The light that we can still see, that is still visible, that is visible to you in the photograph linked above.
Water did not exist for hundreds of millions of years; the oceans of earth did not exist for roughly eight billion years. We could go down the list, verse by verse. Light divided from darkness, day and night -- completely meaningless. Myth.
Time to take your head out of the sand.
rgb
Ninja wrote: "Can I get some sources to back that up?"I already sent you a link with a few zillion contradictions between objective science and objective history and the Bible. Here it is again:
http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com...
This time you might actually follow it and spend a day reading your way through it instead of replying at the speed of light with blocks a crap from apologist websites that "refute" the science with absurd "models" for geology that have the surface crust of the world even now "floating" on water, that had a canopy of water overhead. Why do these models exist? Is there some compelling evidence for them? No, but if BICCs don't come up with their own models, no matter how absurd, and attach the word "science" to them, they risk losing young minds in the battle of epistemologies that is being fought in every school around the world.
It comes right down to this. There are two ways to determine the truth. One is to use your eyes and look at the world, and use human reason (where mathematics is basically distilled, purely consistent reason) and a systematic process of evidence based Bayesian reasoning to arrive at our best guess for how things are, creating an interlocking network of beliefs that are all mutually consistent, that can all be independently checked, as well as checked against each other. This is the process of science, but it is really just common sense.
Or you can presume that the truth is already in a silly book written by silly men (well, they weren't silly, they were ignorant and superstitious and didn't know any better) and you can ignore the evidence of your own eyes, you can try to pretend that the network of tediously built interconnected knowledge is somehow weaker than the Power of your Amazing Book, you can convince yourself that you personally have the Truth in that Book which makes you smarter than the really, truly smart people who have built that web of knowledge through a lot of observation and hard work, and you got to be smarter without the work required to actually use your common sense to assess the alternative approaches to truth.
Eventually you're going to realize, my dear Ninja, that I am your worst nightmare. I am the anti-apologist. I have a very broad knowledge of science and history. I have a very deep knowledge of science and history and philosophy (physics and philosophy major, math almost major, physics Ph.D., I teach physics and computer science, I invent advanced statistical models, I test random number generators, I have built neural networks and written advanced genetic optimization algorithms). Where I'm am weak, Google, Wikipedia, the Duke library and all of its journals stand behind me, a few clicks away, enhancing my brain with the entire knowledge of the world at my fingertips.
If you want evidence, I will provide you with evidence for every single thing that is required to demonstrate that the Bible is not perfect knowledge, or even a particularly good book on scientific, historical or moral grounds. Not even Jesus exhibits good moral behavior, and the morality of the Old Testament is despicable.
However, you have to do me a favor before we proceed. It is quite pointless for you to issue a challenge statement such as "You've never seen the Big Bang", for me to refute it with a picture of the Big Bang, and for you to not move your degree of belief in the Bible. If you aren't willing to pull your head out of the sand and agree that maybe this picture of the Big Bang indicates that the book of Genesis is at the very least not literal truth, there is no point in our proceeding, and I've got better things to do with my time.
So, are you willing to be convinced if I continue to provide you with direct examples of complete contradiction? You stated the Big Bang challenge as if it were true that if I could answer it, maybe you'd change your mind.
Can your mind be changed? If not, then why bother?
rgb
My favorite part of astronomy was always the idea that you can look back in time by looking out. We need to show everyone who doesn't believe it some Carl Sagan videos, they can explain this stuff quite well.
As do I. It is fun. But they have no one else to back them up, it's too cruel. It's 1 against 5.
Mod
Did you not read my posts on the page 6? I gave this website, http://www.umich.edu/~gs265/bigbang.htm , which clearly does not look in the least like a Christian website, and I highly doubt it is. And then went through it pointing out many flaws in the Big Bang Theory. Go take a look, I gave lots.
Mod
Can your mind be changed? If not, then why bother?"
Convince me.
My mind probably cannot be changed. I have as strong of faith in my God as you do in science.
We don't have faith in science. Faith implies a lack of proof. We have trust.
faith-confidence or trust in a person or thingtrust-reliance of a person or thing.
Faith is confidence while in trust, you rely on someone or something.
faith |fāθ|noun
1 complete trust or confidence in someone or something : this restores one's faith in politicians.
2 strong belief in God or in the doctrines of a religion, based on spiritual apprehension rather than proof.
trust |trəst|
noun
1 firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of someone or something : relations have to be built on trust | they have been able to win the trust of the others.
Ninja wrote: "GreenDaisy BlackStem wrote: "Here would be something good for you to do: go to a more scientific website and then find flaws in the Big Bang Theory then tell us those flaws YOURSELF! If we question..."Type them yourself! Did you not read my post!!
As Richard Dawkins has put it, to deny evolution, you would have to be either ignorant of how it works, or insane. http://www.natgeochannel.co.uk/progra...
<3333333
Mod
I did! I copied stuff from the site AND THEN added in my own comments on it. If I summarized it I feel I would be taking it out of context.
Ninja wrote: "Did you not read my posts on the page 6? I gave this website, http://www.umich.edu/~gs265/bigbang.htm , which clearly does not look in the least like a Christian website, and I highly doubt it is."Did you not actually read this website? It shows in detail the reasoning that demonstrates that the Universe is approximately 15 billion years old (although current research AFAIK pegs it at 13.5 billion +/- 1 billion). Please also note that the use of the term "creation" here does not refer to "creation of mass-energy from nothing" as there is no evidence that any such thing occurred. It means "expansion of existing mass-energy from a very dense unified field state", or "initiation of the current yuga". There is absolutely nothing in this article that permits one to infer a creator, and as I've pointed out repeatedly there is no evidence for any actual creation of mass-energy in the observed range of our most powerful telescopes or our most powerful microscopes and colliders. There is no way TO obtain evidence for the prior state of the Big Bang -- it functions as an eraser of any prior state information.
Think of our spacetime continuum as a bomb. No bomb you've ever seen or heard about was "created". It was assembled out of various elements that already existed at the time of assembly. When the bomb explodes, it destroys nearly all the details of its assembly -- it's very difficult to take the final state of the explosion, long after the event, and track all of the gases and bomb fragments and other leftover matter and energy and deduce the precise structure of the original bomb, let alone make some statement about when and how the bomb was assembled. Now multiply the difficulty of that "CSI" problem by a really, really big number, make the "bomb" the entire visible spacetime continuum, and you will see that it is truly amazing how much information we have obtained about the original bomb that exploded into our visible spacetime.
Because the bomb is literally still exploding, we know when it exploded. We know a lot about what it consisted of from studying the fragments it left behind (fragments that eventually turned into ourselves), mostly at a microscopic level, the level of quantum field theory and elementary particle physics. I have colleagues and friends here at Duke that study the "quark-gluon plasma" that represents the very early state of our spacetime, before even the electromagnetic interaction split off. After the BB but before there was "light" in other words. They are searching for a posterior "signature" of the BB in current nuclear physics measurements at extremely high energy that would illuminate yet another corner of the BB's microscopic process.
So whether or not you realize it, you've posted a link that directly refutes the story of "creation" told in Genesis. Perhaps you should take the time to actually read through it and study it, and see what it really talks about. Looking at the wikipedia page on the big bang is also a very good idea.
To be highly specific, verse by verse:
1:1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
He absolutely did not create the heaven and the earth at the beginning. The evidence consistently indicates that the earth was formed by gravity from the ashes of a prior supernova in which the heavy elements were forged, between five and six billion years ago IIRC (too lazy to look it up). "The heaven" is a meaningless term, especially given that humans are elsewhere supposed to join God "in heaven", rain is poured down through "the gates of heaven", and so on. It is a reference to a mythical place that doesn't exist.
1:2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
The first bit is meaningless. And darkness was absolutely never on the face of the deep. There is no deep. The deep refers to an ocean, the only deep Bronze Age humans knew about (to them the sky was the firmament, a solid bowl overhead hung with lights that could be shaken down by earthquakes). The last bit absolutely confirms that the intended meaning is ocean waters.
Genesis describes God moving over dark waters as actual fact, not any sort of silly poetic metaphor. This did not happen. There were no waters to move over until roughly five billion years ago when the earth cooled enough to support liquid water, and the earth was extremely substantial and shaped like a ball, not formless, long before the water came into existence.
1:3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
Don't make me laugh. As noted, light came into existence in the first second of the BB, and the earth was formed along with the sun as a second generation star. The light shown in the photograph of my previous post of the microwave background is a picture of the light of the BB, and it was already ancient indeed at the time of the earth's forming.
Wrong events, wrong sequence. Genesis describes God lighting up the ocean. This never happened.
1:4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
There hasn't been "darkness" anywhere in the Universe from the first second after the BB. There is always a measurable amount of light, everywhere, all the time. We quite literally cannot make a place that is truly "dark". FWIW, one cannot divide light from darkness -- this is a meaningless sentence. This never happened.
1:5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
Here it is absolutely clear that Genesis describes God moving over the face of the oceans, making "light", and turning into night and day. This never happened. A day is a diurnal cycle of the earth's revolution. The earth has always turned. The mass of gases from which it coalesced were rotating as it formed. It has always been bathed in the light of the nearby first protostar, then star. "Day" and "night" were not created at any moment in time, and entirely natural physical forces were entirely responsible for the assembly of all the matter and energy involved.
1:6 And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
Here, Bronze Age tribesmen imagined God, hovering over the ocean with "day" and "night" going on in the background, causing the earth to be formed and separating the waters on which it floated. The floating is obvious later. As we've already seen, the earth already existed long before there was any water, any idiot can look at the Earth today and see that it is a vast solid ball that supports the "waters" as a very thin skin on part of the Earth's crust, and that at no time was there a "deep" ocean from which the "firmament" of solid soil emerged. This never happened.
1:7 And God made the firmament and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
There are no waters above. There were never any waters above. What is, and was, above is mostly nearly empty vaccuum, stretching out so far and so thinly that we can see all the way back to a couple hundred years after the BB before we hit the big clouds of diffuse hydrogen and helium from which the first stars formed. There are some lovely Hubble pictures of the earliest protostars emerging in this gas cloud, but the gas cloud itself is part of the erasure of detail I referred to above. There wasn't much detail, until the stars began to accumulate in the gravity wells amplified by accretion of matter from the primordial cloud.
Note well the "firmament" that is heaven above. Solid bowl of sky. Flat earth. Water poured down from heaven. Never happened.
(cont)
rgb wrote: "Ninja wrote: "Did you not read my posts on the page 6? I gave this website, http://www.umich.edu/~gs265/bigbang.htm , which clearly does not look in the least like a Christian website, and I highly..."Thank you I thought there was something not quite right about her claim. BEcause I actually read it and is not capable of understanding much after 9:30ish
(cont)1:8 And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.
There is no firmament overhead. It is not called heaven. And there was no "second day" recorded in a diurnal cycle of night and day illuminating the waters. This never happened.
1:9 And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.
Please. "Dry land" preceded waters under heaven by a billion years or so, during which time the earth went from an accreting white hot ball of condensing gas to a red hot ball of molten iron, silicon, and various other elements. It had to cool to a temperature where liquid water could condense before there was any, and it probably rained for an age or two, rain bursting into steam, to transport the heat out to where it could radiate away and oceans could form. It is during this hot, wet, and chemically "interesting" environment, roughly four and a half billion years ago, that life spontaneously emerged.
Anyway, obviously the events described in Genesis in this verse never happened. They are contradicted by direct evidence, just as are all the other verses above.
1:10 And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.
Nonsense.
1:11 And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.
This is absolutely incorrect. The fossil record, radiometrically dated and dated by layering both, consistently (together with a bit of common sense) demonstrate quite clearly that fruiting plants and grass are less than 200 million years old. That "coal layer" your websites are so proud of in Antarctica and elsewhere on the planet contains no fossil traces of grass or flowering plants, only spore-reproducing ferns. Gee, why is that, I wonder?
Wrong events, wrong order, directly contradicted by evidence you wish to offer for a big flood that happened long after God supposedly made plants and trees. Really is miraculous that none of those trees made it into the coal field fossils isn't it?
1:12 And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
1:13 And the evening and the morning were the third day.
Three days, 13 billion years. But who's counting? This never happened.
1:14 And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:
1:15 And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.
1:16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.
1:17 And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth,
1:18 And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.
1:19 And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.
Are you getting this yet? Genesis has God making the Sun and the Moon and the stars on day four after the grass and fruit trees. This doesn't make any sense at all. If you open your eyes (or your browser) and look out at the Universe you can see stars in the process of being formed in the earliest Universe.
Let's see, God made the moon as a "lesser light". But the moon is actually not a "light" -- it is illuminated by the sun. Oops. He made the stars as a sign for day and night and seasons. So the "reason" there are stars is so primitive Bronze Age man can tell when to plant crops and when to harvest them. They are tiny lights hung on the solid bowl that is heaven above the solid, flat earth God has made and uplifted from the Deep of the ocean and covered with grass before there was a sun to keep the grass alive. The bible fails to mention that the reason for the seasons is the Earth's axial tilt and the reason for the variation in the constellations -- stars that are not hung in a solid sphere, many of which are far larger and hotter than our relatively wimpy Sun -- is that the Earth is going around the Sun.
Thousands of years after these words were written by Bronze Age superstitious tribesmen, Galileo was tried, convicted, and sentenced to a lifetime of house arrest because he had looked with his telescopes and seen the mountains on the moon, that the planets were worlds like our world, round, going round the Sun, that Copernicus was correct. Genesis was thereby proven wrong. He was lucky that they didn't burn him at the stake.
What's your excuse, hundreds of years later, for holding on to this silly myth? This never happened, not even metaphorically or poetically. Genesis (so far) is point by point contradicted by all the evidence every collected and by the evidence you too can see if you would just open up your eyes and mind. In the 1500's, one could conceivably blind yourself to it. In the 2000's, with all the world's science including photographs at your digital fingertips, you can only hold to it by building websites filled with lies, populated by those desperate to not to have to face the truth. Genesis is wrong. It isn't hermeneutically rescueable. It is refuted, verse by verse, by observation, by evidence, by reason. You must literally disbelieve the evidence of your own eyes (or refuse to look) in order to hold onto it as any approximation of truth.
It is false. It is myth. It is not even good poetry or good myth, as it makes up a false story of human creation that is just as big a lie as its story of cosmological creation, but this story portrays humankind as a perfect being who fell into sin, not as an imperfect being, one that is not yet "finished", whose earlier mistakes are utterly forgiveable just as we don't throw our own babies onto the grill in the back yard when they make a mess in their diapers or draw pictures in ink on the walls. It is an evil myth.
That's why I'm working so hard with you, Ninja. It is part of your salvation. As long as you cling to falsehood, to attractive lies, you are not on the path of truth. Your worldview is false and distorted. You will make poor decisions politically, socially, and intellectually. Your moral standards of those of a false and ancient book filled with wickedness portrayed as "good". This is a bad thing. Think it over.
I could, and will, if necessary, continue on the verse by verse deconstruction of Genesis. It is false, lock, stock and barrel, contradicted by evidence. Any objective jury would condemn it as false out of hand (and the entire scientific "jury" of the world has done just that).
rgb
And the truth is so mind-blowingly wonderful, so vast and beautiful. To think, we are a product of a millions of years process.
Billions of years, and one that isn't finished. Humans are taller, stronger, smarter than they were even a couple of hundred years ago. The settlement of the New World was evolution in action. Every war is evolution in action. The coming pandemic is evolution in action -- the virus that causes it was created from the same old swine flu by random mutations, mutations that occur all of the time. Most of the mutations result in a virus that cannot reproduce. Some of them lead to a virus that can reproduce but is no more virulent than the virus it mutated from, making it possible for the flu to continue to spread and circulate in a population that would otherwise become resistant to it. And, rarely, there is a mutation that makes the virus both more deadly and more contagious.What happens then is pure evolution. Where its less mutated cousins mostly encounter resistant hosts, those hosts have no resistance to the mutant variation. In the case of things like swine flu where some mutations can jump to humans, you can have a mutation that jumps to the human population, is more deadly and contagious, and can be transmitted from human to human. The actual "staged alert" tree for pandemics used by the CDC is an evolutionary one, marking out the stages of viral mutation into a deadly form.
Once in a form with a relatively high value of R naught, the average number of new cases each infected person infects before they either die or clear the virus, the virus is highly fit to survive and reproduce, and does so with devastating consequences.
The great Spanish Flu pandemic had a value of R naught estimated between three and four -- every case infected three to four new people. The current neo-pandemic has R naught of at least two, which basically means that it is out of the box and that the number of new cases is doubling every four or five days.
At this point almost nothing can stop the pandemic. The virus has nucleated infection sites all over the world already, and of course people don't actually get sick until after they've infected their 2+ people more. There simply aren't enough fingers to plug all the dykes, and the overpopulated warrens of Mubai or Mexico City are epidemiologically "hot" places where humans live in close proximity to each other and to animals that can serve as further reservoirs for the virus.
And viruses aren't even technically "alive". Evolution is a process that occurs everywhere. There is evolution of ideas -- human knowledge advances through a memetic optimization process that is structurally very similar to genetic evolution, and memetic-genetic co-evolution has dominated even animal evolution for eons -- animals with social structure can increase or decrease their survival potential depending on the comparative quality of its MEMETIC structure and thereby propagate the genes of its members favorably over less memetically fit societies. Human history is mostly about superoganismal memetic co-evolution.
If you haven't read The Lucifer Principle, I strongly recommend it. It is a truly amazing read, one of the best nonfiction books I've ever read. It gives you real insight into the historical process and how biology and language driven reason and social structure combine in a macroscale process of "mutation plus reproductive selection".
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P.S. to Ninja -- you say that your faith in God is as strong as my faith in science. Please understand, that this is not about faith in God. This is about faith in the Bible. It is not only difficult to make inferences about God on the basis of observation, it is fundamentally impossible. I myself have demonstrated in this conversation that it is possible to believe in God and not contradict fact or reason, if and only if you identify God and the Universe.
I personally am a deist and rather like the idea of a God/Universe, while scrupulously avoiding any sort of anthropomorphization of the Deity thus represented. God is nothing like a man, in other words, and when you look out at the world you are God looking out at God, looking back. If you look at some of the gnostic texts there is at least a chance that Jesus, if he actually ever existed and e.g. the Gospel of Thomas is actually a record of his words, completely understood this and that this was the deepest insight he was trying (without much success) to communicate to an ignorant and superstitious community.
God cannot be tested by experiment, in other words, because for every event there can always be a natural and a supernatural explanation, and to be honest you will never actually test to see if even the promises of Jesus in the New Testament are true (others have tested them and they have proven to be false, but you won't acknowledge that and will pretend that it never happened or if it did you will cite some contradictory verse in another part of the Bible as an explanation of why it didn't happen. The mythical Jesus is a liar either way, but you will turn your face away from the evidence of the lie to hold onto your "faith" in spite of a direct contradiction and demonstrated impossibility of perfect truth.
The point is that the Bible can easily be tested for truth or falsehood using the same sort of common sense you'd use sitting on a jury.
Sitting on a jury is a sacred sort of thing. You can't do it if you are biased one way or another in the case. If you are asked before any evidence is presented "Do you think that this man is guilty or innocent" and answer "yes", you are removed from a jury -- you have demonstrated that you cannot be objective and judge the case on its merits.
If you can manage to honestly state that you really don't know, and are willing to be convinced either way on the basis of evidence, then you might be seated, provided there isn't any evidence in your own life that gives your statement the lie, such as being the brother of the accused, or having a business deal with him so that you'd lose money if he were convicted.
Once seated, it is your sworn task to sift through the evidence not on the basis of your preconceptions and prejudices in the case, but on the basis of the evidence alone. Forget the story told to you by the prosecuting and defense attorney. Be cynical about the tales told by witnesses -- witnesses are notoriously unreliable and can have hidden agendas (deals with the state, connections with the accused) of their own. Look at the physical evidence and ignore all of the words.
If you look up at the sky with the eyes of an educated child but the instruments of an enlightened age, you would never infer the sequence of events described in Genesis. If you look at the evidence dug up from the ground, sift it and weigh it, you would never conclude that it is consistent with the sequence of events in Genesis! That's all "faith in science" is. It is using your eyes, ears, and common sense, and ignoring the clamor of the DA and the defense attorney, paying no attention to their words for words can deceive, and men are often liars.
The stars don't lie. The rocks don't lie. Our genes don't lie. Pure common sense tells you that a rain that covers the earth to the tops of the mountains is impossible -- you've never seen any such thing and trivial calculations of volume and area show that it could never happen or ever have happened.
Your problem is that you consistently perjure yourself. You turn away from the truth before your own eyes in favor of the arguments of some rotten attorney, one that died a hundred generations before you were born. You can't even question the witnesses; they're all dead, and yet you accept their testimony on "faith" and against all logic.
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And the people in the events they describe, died before the recorders were born.
If they existed at all. We have no way of knowing.BTW, my thirteen year old son is a big MCR fan. I'm grading physics papers and in your honor I put on The Black Parade (nicely ripped onto my laptop). It goes well with giving out grades, and I used the phrase "the black parade" in a poem years and years ago...
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<3333333333333333333333333333333333 I r special. I <3 him. MCR is the most beastly band ever. But the first two CD's are more like what they truly are. Black Parade was a big experiment with storytelling.
Ninja,Sorry it took me so long to get back to you, but I was away for a few days, and it seems I have a lot of posts to get through.
Well, no, the faith doesn't go away. But that would make the Bible have a flaw, therefore not being fully trustworthy.
What this says to me is that you've decided in advance not that the bible doesn't have any flaws, but that the bible can't have any flaws. Do you see the difference? You decide the bible can't be flawed, so you let that guide you in interpreting the bible and science. You see evidence, for example, that the flood didn't actually happen, and rather than judging that evidence objectively, you say, "Well, that stuff can't be true, because that would mean the bible was wrong about something, and I've already decided that the bible is never wrong."
You should never start with the conclusion and use the conclusion to judge the evidence.
This is going back to the original topic here, but might I suggest a book, Ninja? It's really quite a popular non-fiction book:
Spook Science Tackles the Afterlife
. I think that book will answer a lot of your questions regarding what happens when you die. She not only addresses what physically happens to you (disposal methods, etc.), but she also discusses things like near death experiences and supposed ghostly phenomena. She explains, in a manner that's highly accessible, even if you don't have any previous knowledge of neurology, what happens to the brain at the end of life. She's very sensitive to all sides. I really think you would learn a lot.
Mod
Then may I suggest you read 23 Minutes in Hell by Bill Weise?
Mod
Sorry it took me so long to get back to you, but I was away for a few days, and it seems I have a lot of posts to get through.
Well, no, the faith doesn't go away. But that would make the Bible have a flaw, therefore not being fully trustworthy.
What this says to me is that you've decided in advance not that the bible doesn't have any flaws, but that the bible can't have any flaws. Do you see the difference? You decide the bible can't be flawed, so you let that guide you in interpreting the bible and science. You see evidence, for example, that the flood didn't actually happen, and rather than judging that evidence objectively, you say, "Well, that stuff can't be true, because that would mean the bible was wrong about something, and I've already decided that the bible is never wrong."
You should never start with the conclusion and use the conclusion to judge the evidence."
Well it seems you've decided science is never wrong. Well, not science, exactly, since we already see that science has made mistakes and it does correct them, though not always in the expected way. But it seems that nothing can penetrate what you believe to be true.
Ninja wrote: "Dan wrote: "Ninja,Sorry it took me so long to get back to you, but I was away for a few days, and it seems I have a lot of posts to get through.
Well, no, the faith doesn't go away. But that wou..."
No he has decided that MOST of the time science is right
Well it seems you've decided science is never wrong. Well, not science, exactly, since we already see that science has made mistakes and it does correct them, though not always in the expected way. But it seems that nothing can penetrate what you believe to be true.This isn't at all true. As you've pointed out, science points out its own mistakes. I don't deny these mistakes, and I admit that science will continue to make mistakes and that some of what we hold to be true will be disproved or modified in the future.
The problem you make is assuming that science and the bible are equivalents. They're not. The bible is a book. It is a list of claims, and it is functionally static. Science is not a book, it is not a list; it is a method. It's not that I don't believe that science is never wrong (I believe that it sometimes is wrong); it's that I believe that science is the best method for finding the truth.
Here's something I do that it seems you don't: when I hold something to be true, even if it's "from science," I still consider the possibility that it might be wrong, and when I see new evidence for a new truth, I take it into consideration. I change my mind. To give you an example, I recently read an interesting article suggesting that natural selection might not have been the primary driving force behind evolution in the very early years of evolution. This is different from what I previously "believed," but I didn't dismiss it because it contradicts my beliefs. I still don't know much about it, but I consider it to be at least possible, and quite interesting to think about.
Also, science is not based on personal testimony. It's not a matter of "This is true because science says so." Because of this, just because some scientists make a mistake, this doesn't invalidate the whole process, and it doesn't undermine other scientific truths. We could be wrong a million times over about what foods are healthy to eat and it wouldn't change the reliability of scientific claims about the age of the Earth, for example.
The bible, on the other hand, is based on personal testimony: such and such is true because the bible says so. So, as you pointed out, if we start finding mistakes in the bible, it undermines the whole thing. This is one reason why science is a better method for understanding the world. It is also why you are biased when judging science: you want the bible to be true, so you only see things that support its reliability and ignore things that discredit it.
Again, you have responded to me with a (hollow) retort, and haven't addressed my questions. Do you see the source of bias in presuming the bible to be true while determining if it's true?
Ninja wrote: "Then may I suggest you read 23 Minutes in Hell by Bill Weise?"I believe I've actually seen a video enactment of 23 Minutes in Hell, actually. I'm a bit of an insomniac, you see, and religious programming is one of the few that is on no matter what time it is.
This is it, correct?
If I can find it at the library, I'll read it (I'm poor). But the above is the gist of it?
It sounds like he had a very vivid dream.
I'll let you in on something about me. I was raised Southern Baptist. Nothing in that story above is new to me. I am now a skeptical agnostic atheist. I also have sleep problems, problems that include vivid nightmares as well as hypnogogic and hypnopompic hallucinations (hypnogogic are hallucinations that you sometimes have when falling asleep, hypnopompic are the ones you have while waking up). In those states, I have felt demons crawl into bed with me and sit on my chest and suck the air from my lungs. I've seen decomposing corpses, mouths lolling open, standing at the foot of my bed. I've seen disembodied heads floating directly in front of me, their dead eyes glowing red.
I've also been to hell. I was in bed when suddenly I felt an enormous sense of movement and heard the wind rushing past my head. I felt the hair on my head being tousled by the air. I didn't experience what he did. I was pulled deeper and deeper into a darkness that seemed more immense than the darkest caves on earth. I heard screaming, I heard demonic laughter, I felt meat hooks on the end of chains stab me and pull me further down. I couldn't breathe.
I've also been to heaven. I've seen the feast. I've seen all my friends and relatives sitting there in a golden cathedral, enjoying themselves, laughing, and in pure peace. But I didn't get to stay, even though I wanted to.
I am an agnostic atheist still. Because I know what I experienced was all in my head. It was every inch real to me when I was experiencing it, and I was both terrified and felt dead inside in hell and beyond exhilarated in heaven. But it was still just dreams and hallucinations. The remnants of bits of stories from my childhood.
Mod
I've checked the Bible. If someone says there is a flaw, I look into it. And they all have an explanation. I can't find flaw with the Bible because it doesn't have flaws.
Questioning Society
Books mentioned in this topic
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (other topics)Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife (other topics)
The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History (other topics)
The Upanishads (other topics)
Reverse, and we're onto something.
"Generally, it is very easy for us to distinguish between natural and created items. Even the staunchest evolutionists admit that living things appear designed. That is why evolutionist Richard Dawkins wrote the book titled “The Blind Watchmaker.”"
If you read that book, you would know that Dawkins was using that metaphor to make it simple enough for these watchmaker nuts to understand.
"The Male - Female Problem"
The entire post can be destroyed by the obvious fact that there are more then one type of mutation. Substitutions, which replace and amino acid, and addition/deletion, which shifts the whole chain down. And example is having 6 fingers. That is a neutral mutation. 6 and 5 fingered people can still have kids. The only time two animals cannot reproduce fertile offspring is if they have evolved too far away from each other. Animals with mutations can have offspring, the type of mutation is all that matter. Evolution is basically taking good mutations and passing them on.