Evolution vs. Intelligent Design discussion
Why Intelligent Design is not Science
Mod
11. It teaches a number of logical fallacies, such as circular reasoning and confirmation bias, which are the exact opposite of science.
12. It does not rel..."
For those that wish to stubbornly hold onto Genesis, meditate for a moment on the following:
If you did not already kno anything about the Bible, and had never heard of Genesis, and had no choice but to examine the natural world to figure out how everything works -- what the natural history of the Universe is, where life came from, what the history of the world is and how the staggering diversity of life came to be -- would one ever examine all of this evidence without any prior bias and conclude that the Universe was created, that plants with fruits and seeds were created before the Sun and the Moon, that the Moon glowed with its own light, that the heavens were a solid ball, that the earth was flat and floated on "the deep" of a great ocean. Would one ever infer from the evidence that humans came from just one male-female pair that were mated to produce the entire human race via a process of systematic incest?
The answer is so obviously "No!" that it really ends the mental experiment right there. We have never observed a single act of "creation" in all of science. All we observe is preexisting stuff being moved around. There is no reason to believe that creation ever occurs or has ever occurred.
To be fair,
12. It does not rely on the scientific method. It makes no testable, falsifiable hypotheses.
isn't quite true. Intelligent Design postulates the existence of an Intelligent Designer. We can falsify this hypothesis two ways.
One is by looking for such a designer and failing to find any direct evidence for their existence. Building species by non-magical means requires advanced technology. ID proponents could engage in a search for signs of advanced technology in billion-year old rock. None has been found so far, however, so the cumulative evidence is against the hypothesis so far, just as there is no direct evidence for the existence of magnetic monopoles.
The second way it can be falsified is construct specific models that can be falsified. Note that the models must be constructed so that they don't beg the question. One cannot say silly things such as "the eye looks designed" and thereby "prove" the existence of a designer. One has to provide a concrete mechanism through which the designer came into being (which has to be falsifiable). Note well that any hypothesis that terminates in "God" is not testable or we wouldn't be having this discussion in the first place, and any attempt to ring God in simply justifies the observation that ID is "stealth religion", not science. So if you hypothesis "aliens" or "advanced beings" who engineered life, how did they come into being? You've got fourteen billion years starting from a state with no macroscopic structure at all (not even atoms) plus the laws of physics to play with. For ID to become a "theory", it has to postulate a complete sequence of natural events that lead from this structureless initial state to what we now observe, that could not have happened at least equally likely compared to the current gapless model based on physics, chemistry, biochemistry, and literally a Universe's worth of observations back in time as we look out at the stars.
Don't forget, we can see the natural history of the Universe by simply looking back in time as we look further away, collecting and magnifying the ancient light of the early stages of the Universe by means of instruments such as the Hubble telescope. ID "theories" must be consistent with what we can see or the can and should be summarily rejected.
And they are.
Here's how long a scientist takes to consider ID.
"Hmmm, gee, maybe life on Earth came about because a race of supremely intelligent space aliens came here four and a half billion years ago and created the original cell(s) of life, then hung out here for almost the entire time subsequent to that, manipulating comets, asteroid collisions, and the genomes of all living species over billions of years to arrive at the human race. They then hung out, pretending to be gods (which was easy, given their superhuman five billion year old technology) and causing tribes to fight wars with one another out of sheer boredom or as the moral equivalent of dogfighting (maybe the entire purpose of the Earth all along was to be a gambling parlor for an intergalatic civilization).
Now that we have technology of our own, they have to be more subtle about their interventions, but they cleaned up the planet of all evidence of their presence a few thousand years ago, sinking Atlantis and Mu, so that the only trace of their presence is in mythicized legends like the OT and the obvious description of nuclear war in the Mahabharata."
Ooo, shades of Von Daniken! The scientist thinks for about ten seconds, laughs hysterically, and says "Not!"
End of story.
rgb
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.
Mod
rgb
Good points. One thing that should be well noted is that the theory of evolution in no way discredits the existence of God. One can believe in God and still accept the theory of evolution as a sound explanation to the history of life.However, if one takes a literal interpretation of the bible, then they may find difficulty with it.
Every single big Christian religion, including LDS, Baptist, Catholic, Methodist, Protestant, Lutheran, etc. do not see a contradiction with evolution and their faith.
And 99% or so (I can't remember the exact number) of all the smaller Christian religions accept evolution as well. there are a few that are die hard against it, and those few are the ones that are causing all the problems.
Mod
First, sure there is no reason one cannot believe in God and evolution. What one cannot easily do is believe in a theistic God whose thoughts, moral precepts, historical interactions with humans, miracles, cosmology, etc. are recorded in a work of myth and legend called "Holy Scriptures".
Many modern Christian churches don't acknowledge the contradictions between Genesis and their continuing faith, agreed, but it doesn't stop the contradictions from existing. It just means that they live on a shifting sand of belief, waiting for the next contradiction to expose yet another "core belief" that they have to give up.
Remember, to believe in the primary Christian myths at all (as opposed to the Hindu myths, the Judaic myths, the Pagan myths, the Norse myths, the manifold African myths, the native american indian myths, the Aztec myths, the Inca myths, the Mayan myths, the Chinese myths, the Wiccan myths, and Gods know I'm leaving thousands of tribal myths and legends out) one has to believe that there is something "special" about them, that they (unlike all the rest of the alternatives) are divinely inspired truth and not simply stories that people made up.
Worse, to accept any one of these, one must accept that all of the others are false. In order to make the best possible choice between all of the mythologies, any form of non-scriptural deism, and complete atheism, one must therefore examine the mythologies -- I mean "holy scriptures" of the faiths and compare what they say to contemporary knowledge and contemporary ethical standards (the latter because these texts without exception claim to establish God given divinely communicated standards of morality and ethical behavior that transcend human reason and common sense, usually accompanied by threat of horrendous and gruesome punishment for non-compliance with the standard, which includes -- also without exception -- the rule that disbelief in the holy scriptures themselves is grounds for that punishment). The only safe thing to do is reject at least those mythologies that prove to be, well, mythologies. That manifestly and overtly contradict science, history, and contemporary standards of morality, that are internally inconsistent so that we cannot tell what is right or what is wrong anyway.
In that case, granting that Genesis is from beginning to end pure mythology, Christianity is finished. It expects us to believe the unbelievable, that God created the world, then created to perfect individuals. These perfect individuals could have lived happily with God forever, but they disobeyed God, committing a sin that justifies the existence of Evil in the world. How many Christian writings do I need to dig up to prove this to you? Evil exists without contradiction in a Good creation because and only because we used our free will to sin against a perfect creation and hence deserved being cursed with pain, sickness, and death. It says so right in the Bible, many, many times. It says so right in the New Testament.
Genesis is pure myth -- and a wicked, evil myth at that, one that promotes a picture of a nasty, jealous, petty God, one that denigrates women in favor of men, one that portrays mankind as a race created perfect who fell from grace because we chose evil over good at some point. The historical and scientific truth isn't just different, it is radically different. Evolution is a process of becoming more perfect from humble beginnings. Pain, suffering, and death, are just part of a natural process that is utterly indifferent to our perception of these things as "evil". Big fish eat little fish. We eat big fish. We fall in the water, big fish eat us. Where is the evil in this, given a biological necessity to eat, a wish to survive and reproduce, to live in a real, hostile world?
The truth, then, is that "sin" is largely a human invention, not a Godly invention, one that regulates our association in large groups so that we don't kill each other and can minimize pain, maximize survival and our ability to reproduce. Do dogs sin? We are like dogs. Do tigers sin? We are like tigers. Do sheep sin? We are like sheep. We are animals that happen to be more evolved than other animals, and looking at the accidents of birth that occur amongst us, we can see that. My brother has Down's syndrome. Can he sin, be held accountable for his actions in a world he cannot perceive at a level much higher than that of a dog or monkey? Half the world's population has an IQ less than 100 -- when they make poor choices because they are stupid (through no fault of their own, really) do they "sin" against God, presuming that God is somehow responsible for all chances and hence predestined them to be too stupid to make good choices? Even smart people make mistakes -- to err, as they say, is human. Do smart people sin when they make mistakes? And who gets to dictate what is "a mistake" and what isn't, when it comes to human behavior?
So much for Genesis. It is an evil myth, not one to be tolerated by a divine being seeking to communicate perfect truth to an ignorant people.
But Paul directly endorsed Genesis as being true. He used the Eden myth, specifically, to blame women and formally establish that they are inferior to men. Paul was mistaken, because Eden is a fantasy, a myth. Paul's writings were not divinely inspired, they were inspired by an evil, incorrect myth. His morality was not perfect, he was deluded by an evil, incorrect myth into arriving at immoral conclusions. We cannot trust anything Paul wrote as being "truth" because we have caught him out in a lie, or rather, in a mistake that is incompatible with the assertion that he is any more divinely inspired than I am. In fact, we are led to see him as what he is -- a man, creating a new superorganism he more or less led and thereby becoming powerful in a fantasy he set up in his own mind and successfully "sold" to many other credulous and ignorant fools of his era.
Jesus did no better. Jesus directly endorsed the truth of Genesis in Matthew 24:37-24:39. (He also promised to return to cleanse the earth and wreak a floodlike doom on everyone on earth in before this generation passes in 24:34 -- that's the context of his endorsing Noah -- and most of this chapter is describing horrible things Jesus is going to do to pretty much everybody including a lot of believers and babies giving suck on the day he comes back.)
Fortunately, since we know that there was never any world-spanning flood and that Noah and his ark are myth, we know that either Jesus was not divine -- for if he were he surely would have known this -- or that Matthew is just making all of this crap up! The fact that the end times did not come before the passing of that generation is just icing on the cake, as is the open contradiction between the Matthew nativity and the Luke nativity -- different Herods, at least ten irreconcileable years, and absurd stories either way. Matthew copied Mark, and embellished it to where it is no longer believable. It is false testimony, fiction, legend, myth. It is not truth.
If the New Testament and the words of Jesus as recorded there are proven to be false witness, why should anyone take this mythology seriously? What reason is there to believe that any of the other events recorded therein aren't just stories people made up? They contradict other contemporary stories from the same mythology in the apocrypha and gnostics.
There is no good reason left to believe.
rgb
Mod
rgb
Rgb, your attack on the bible has less to do with scientific observation and more to do with your beliefs, or more accurately, your faith. 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. This type of talk distorts science and changes it from being a mere observation of facts to a belief, a belief that religion is wrong and impeding the progress of humanity. This system of belief is just as narrow minded and unfounded as those who trump Intelligent Design.
If we are to use the scientific method in this debate, which is what makes the theory of evolution so credible, 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.
To state that Genesis is an evil myth, is your opinion, and has nothing to do with science. This is the type of arguing that is adding fuel to the fire, and it is a primary cause for the Intelligent Design fraud, because many people have mistakingly believed that to accept the theory of evolution means to throw the bible away. If we truly want to help others realize the credibility of Darwin's theory, we must use the scientific method and that method alone in discussion.
However, your final statement: "There is no good reason left to believe." has stirred me somewhere deep inside and I wish to talk about my beliefs and opinions of the bible, as well as the purpose of belief in general.
My faith in the bible has absolutely nothing to do with science, but rather personal feelings I get through meditation and reading of its words. 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.
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. While one can use logic and reason to justify His existence, in the end, it does not "prove" that God exists. This proof can only come through a spiritual experience. One that is very personal and unique to each individual who has experienced it. I have had such an experience, and it is something that is stronger than any feeling of confidence gained from observing the data performed from thousands of experiments can give. This is an experience that all can receive. Once received, the question of "is the bible true" changes to "what is the truth that I can gain from the bible story?" Validity of factual explanation of events in the bible become meaningless and the "truth" from the bible is found on a personal, spiritual level. The understanding of spiritual truths come more from feelings of the heart rather than logic from the mind.
Some things to think about: you state there is no good reason left to believe, I say there are many good reasons to believe. Some things we should believe in just because they are worth believing in.
There is a movie I watched which inspired me greatly. It was Second Hand Lions. If you have not seen it, I highly encourage watching it. It is a story about a boy who is abandoned by his mother to live with two elderly men. The men tell the boy fantastic, amazing stories of what they did in their past. The stories are charged with wonderful feelings of adventure, courage, and love; but while they emulate these important principles, they are incredibly hard to believe. The boy asks if the stories are true, and the man, Hub says: (I got this quote from this website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0327137/q...)
"Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to believe in the most. That people are basically good; that honor, courage, and virtue mean everything; that power and money, money and power mean nothing; that good always triumphs over evil; and I want you to remember this, that love... true love never dies. You remember that, boy. You remember that. Doesn't matter if it's true or not. You see, a man should believe in those things, because those are the things worth believing in. "
Science can only take us so far, but it is belief that gives us purpose to our life, and sometimes 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.
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.
Mod
Oooo, really, really good one. I like that.
In fact, great reply. Saves me ever so much work repeating myself.
Let me add that I'm perfectly happy with the notion that we can learn from myths and fables and fiction and literature and poetry. I write fiction. I write poetry. I craft myths in my fiction to communicate points.
However, as an adult writing to other presumed adult readers (and well educated children) it is my expectation that the reader is capable of discerning the difference between fact and fancy, my fictions and inventions (even as they possibly portray Noble Truths) and reality, this world in which we actually live.
When I read Lord of the Rings I can be moved by the beautiful tale of heroic sacrifice, friendship, brotherhood, an imperfect and seemingly weak good pitted against a perilous and unrelenting Evil and yet not be confused into thinking that Orcs lurk outside my door at night or that I should be careful when putting on rings that strangely glitter at flea markets.
If you are suggesting that the Bible is fiction and should be viewed (at best) in this way, I agree! My point above is that the Bible is bad fiction. Because it is not presented as fiction and enormous numbers of absolute idiots think that it isn't fiction. I tormented myself by watching a God channel TV show presenting "The Power of God" by portraying pictures derived from science interspersed with voiceovers and interviews from "scientists" who spoke of "mass-energy of the Universe running out" while only God is Eternal. Who spoke (correctly) of our Galaxy containing hundreds of billions of stars and the visible Universe containing hundreds of billions of galaxies and how nifty it was that all of this was Created for Adam and Eve, how all of it was evidence of God's Awesome Power.
Um, let's see. A sphere, 6000 light years across (the event horizon of the Genesis Universe). Volume 10^12 cubic light years. Given a trillion visible galaxies, each with an average of only 10^11 stars, that's, um, 10^11 stars per cubic light year.
Gee, I guess it's getting hot in here, isn't it? All those stars (each one of comparable power output to the sun) in one itty bitty cubic light year? But the thing about believers is that they are stupid and cannot do simple arithmetic.
This sort of show makes me furious. It is, basically, a pack of lies, half-truths, distortions of facts, pure fable, all mixed up and presented to be "convincing" so that yet another credulous human can have some basis for clinging to a work of bad fiction.
A few specific comments:
Rgb, your attack on the bible has less to do with scientific observation and more to do with your beliefs, or more accurately, your faith.
Piffle. My "attack" on the Bible consists of nothing but pointing out that scientific observations contradict the Book of Genesis, which has nothing to do with my faith or belief, it is simply a true statement. The rest of this "attack" consisted of pointing out that the rest of the Bible, not at all unreasonably given its history, is derived from the myths of Genesis and so unsurprisingly is revealed to be myth as well. Jesus believed in a flood. There was no flood. Therefore, even if you believe that Jesus actually was a human who actually lived, Jesus was either not divine or he was a lying divinity or the New Testament is inconsistent and flawed.
This isn't "faith", it is a logical argument based on facts and observations, all backed up in the presentation, chapter and verse. But it's a lot easier to ignore the actual argument and pretend that I'm just stupid, or ignorant of the "right" way to reason about the Bible, or to imply that my statements were just as much a matter of opinion as your statements.
This is not correct, although it is a typical tactic used to defend the indefensible. Faith is (as defined in the Bible itself) belief in what you cannot see, in what you cannot know. What I presented above is the opposite of faith, it is knowledge, knowledge derived from observation and experience and reason. Fact: Genesis is wrong, with accompanying evidence (and I have LOTS MORE if that wasn't enough for you). Fact: The New Testament contains Paul's presumed words clearly believing that Genesis was true. Fact: The New Testament contains Jesus's presumed words clearly believing that Genesis was true. Conclusion: Either Paul and Jesus were mistaken or the New Testament contains errors and it is therefore not a reliable witness.
It is worth mentioning that for roughly 1400 years (from perhaps 325 CE to the mid-1700s) it was worth your life to publicly claim that Genesis was a pile of crap and not divinely inspired truth. You were auto-excommunicated from the Catholic faith for daring to believe in Darwinian evolution instead of Genesis until the middle of the last century, and the current Pope is on record as saying that the Church was too hasty in actually apologizing for imprisoning Galileo and banning his works.
I have had such an experience, and it is something that is stronger than any feeling of confidence gained from observing the data performed from thousands of experiments can give.
Nonsense. I daresay that your "feeling of confidence" that you'll fall to the ground and splatter if you jump from the top of a tall building down to the sidewalk below is much stronger, because it is derived from data from thousands of experiments. You've never done this, I'm sure, so you have no direct experience of it, but believe it anyway with far, far greater confidence than you believe your "feeling". In fact, you know this, even though you personally have never tested it.
This is an experience that all can receive.
Horseshit. My brother has Downs syndrome. He cannot receive it. He wouldn't even understand what you are talking about. You're just spouting words that sound poetic while ignoring the fact that babies die before they can receive it, people living in distant countries can't or don't receive it, that there is, in fact, nothing that is "received" -- just a wash of feel-good chemicals in your brain.
Once received, the question of "is the bible true" changes to "what is the truth that I can gain from the bible story?"
You mean like "what truth can I gain from Lord of the Rings? From the Mahabharata? From the Vedas? From the Book of Five Rings? From the collections of Buddhist Sutras? From Steven Hawkings A Brief History of Time? From the poetry of Yeats? Or do you mean the Bible story, for example Numbers 31 where Moses commands the a genocidal slaughter that would have made Himmler proud, permitting only young, female virgins to be spared so his men would have something to rape in addition to a pile of loot (that takes pages to list)? That's a good one. Or the part where Jesus refers to a Gentile woman seeking a miracle as a dog? Or the antisemitic crap in John, in Paul, that even today is used as the basis of hatred and certainly contributed to the Holocaust?
One has to really work hard to get good stuff out of the Bible. I agree that there is some -- I even like a few of Paul's lines in e.g. Corinthians (and generally I can't stand Paul). But there are plenty of books out there -- even religious books -- with far more wisdom-per-line.
Validity of factual explanation of events in the bible become meaningless and the "truth" from the bible is found on a personal, spiritual level. The understanding of spiritual truths come more from feelings of the heart rather than logic from the mind.
Get thee behind me, Satan! Truth comes from reason. Unreason is the source of all evil, and there is plenty of it in the Bible.
rgb
I thought about whether I should or should not add my personal beliefs into the argument, especially after stating that such things are unnecessary to the discussion. Well noticed, R.C. I chose to add it, to counter the things that Rgb said. Rgb, I find you to be an interesting character. You are strongly against the bible arguing that it is a bunch of poor fiction, but yet you call me Satan and use the terminology of “get the behind me” so attached to the bible.
If this debate is going to be done from a purely logical and skeptical viewpoint, then I admit,my arguments are not very convincing. There have been many horrible things down in the name of the bible, and the bible talks about many things that are immoral, like what it says in Numbers that RGB brought up. However, these things are not used in Christianity today, and true, they are in there and excellent points of attack to discredit the bible,BUT there are many other things in there, things that if followed would solve humanities problems; such as the be attitudes that Jesus taught; to stay humble and meek; to be kind and gentle to others. Jesus taught us the golden rule, to love one another, something that is clearly beneficial for all to follow, regardless of their spiritual belief.
I stated that Rgb’s attack on the bible had less to do with science and more to do with faith because of his accusation of it being evil literature. In his reply he states that his argument is based on scientific observation, but in the fact of calling it evil, it goes outside the realm of science. Science knows nothing of right or wrong, and determining whether something is evil or not is definitely outside its realm. When placing these types of claims in a scientific argument, science in and of itself becomes bigger than what it is, and turns into a philosophy or religion all in itself. I like to call it the religion of science. To me the religion of science is when individuals revere it, look upon it as their savior of truth, and credit it to things that are outside its realm. When one labels the bible as evil, they are placing their belief, or more accurately, their faith upon their assumption.
I am still convinced that Rgb’s argument has less to do with science and more to do with belief. While he does use reasoning to conclude the bible is not true, in the end, it is based upon his opinion, something that he collects from his reasoning.
Rgb says that since a flood could not have occurred and the scriptures say Jesus spoke of it, then Jesus must not be God. But what if a flood did occur? Or perhaps a more convincing argument to the skeptic, what if the scripture was written down incorrectly? What if Christ did not talk about the flood, but someone wrote down that he did? Or maybe he was speaking in a parable.
I agree that if one tries to use logic and reasoning to understand the bible, they will fall short. The bible was not written in that manner. I also understand rgb’s frustration with people who try to trump it around as a scientific document. But however, this does not change the fact that it has helped a lot of people, and still continues to help people.
Correct me if I am wrong RGB, but the argument you have against the bible is that since the words in it do not match up with the facts, it must be a fallacy… and in your belief an evil one at that. I think I responded quite well to it. The bible should not be looked at through a factual, but rather a spiritual lens. It is something that has helped a lot of people and continues to do so. Perhaps the bible does not help you, and that is fine, but a rational person would observe the fact that it does help many people throughout the world.
My statement that what you say is based more on your faith, is because you have placed a belief that the bible is not true. In order for anyone to come to a conclusion to form any opinion, it is done through an act of faith. You have laid down a reasonable argument to void the truthfulness of the bible, and I have asked you a few questions to counter that argument: (Whether Jesus was speaking a parable, scripture written incorrectly, etc.) In the end though, when you come to a conclusion, you are taking an act of faith. I explained the reason why I believe in the bible, and it is based on a spiritual experience I have had. While this knowledge is gathered from outside of empirical evidence, it is still knowledge, nevertheless, and equally as valid to use in concluding the bible is true.
You juxtapose knowledge as being the antithesis of faith. That is incorrect. Faith is what comes about as a result of knowledge. It is a decision we make, when presented with information. Now some people place their faith on founded knowledge, but knowledge of some sort is needed in order for one to have faith. As for the bible, some people decide to believe it because everyone else believes it. They are going off of the maxim that if others believe it, then it must be true. Others decide to believe it because it makes their life better, and some choose not to believe it because it does not makes sense to them logically. But regardless of how one comes to their conclusion of faith, it is based upon knowledge of some sort.
You state that my feeling of God is nonsense and that I have a stronger belief that I will fall to the ground if I drop off a building than I do of an existence of God. That is your opinion, and you are wrong. The feeling I have is something you cannot comprehend. It is something outside of your realm, and forever will be, unless you seek for it. For us to debate about whether my feeling is nonsense or not, would be similar to trying to explain calculus to a pony.
You used a rude and offensive counterargument to my claim that all can receive this experience of God. (calling it horse shit) I recommend using less passionate terms in your discussion, for it makes you look childish.
However, I have pondered that my claim that all can receive this experience of God could be wrong. Perhaps those that are impaired cannot, but then again maybe they can. I would bet to believe that your down syndrome brother grasps the idea of god much more easily than theories of science. But alas, I am speculating and my bet is just as ridiculous as your claim that my spiritual experience was nonsense. But I challenge you and anyone else to seek for a spiritual experience. Experiment on it.
In conclusion, I am not saying that we should not use reason in seeking for spiritual things. But I am saying that we cannot come to know God through reason alone. It comes from something else, something that is not understood by the skeptic. I am also saying that the Bible is a good book. It helps many people. Yes, it is frustrating that some take it out of context and try to say it is a scientific document, but it is still a good book.
I want to address that if we truly want to enlighten people of the dangers of ID, then we should keep our opinions of the bible outside of it. Most, if not all of the people who follow the ID argument follow the bible. And they follow ID because they have a miscontrued belief of what the bible is. Throwing it out as a evil document does help the problem. It is better to show that one can believe in the bible, accept it as spiritual truth, and move on.
R.C. wrote: "The understanding of spiritual truths come more from feelings of the heart rather than logic from the mind.
A classic example of argument from convenience, and special pleading. So again, not convincing to the skeptic."
What is not convincing about my statement?
I can use logic to convince my mind that I do not exist, as philosophers have thought up clever arguments to do so, but I still know that I exist, regardless of what the logical argument states. This knowledge is based more on a feeling from the heart, rather than what my mind says. Do you disagree?
R.C. wrote: "Faith is what comes about as a result of knowledge
Not objective knowledge. Objective knowledge requires no belief, no faith. Objective knowledge is just the observation that all observers see the same result, using the same protocol, within a predetermined margin of error, no matter how many times the observation is made, and regardless of whether they "believe" in the result or not.
Faith is what comes about as a result of subjective knowledge. When one result cannot be differentiated reliably from another, and one wishes that result to be correct one, then you have faith.
Faith is indistinguishable from wishful thinking -- which can be helpful in getting through life on a personal basis, but not universally applicable."
Aww, but you forget, RC, we never know what will happen in the future observations. We may have millions of personal experiences that the sun will rise tomorrow and all the evidence points towards that, but when we say that it will rise tomorrow, we are making a statement of faith.
R.C. wrote: "Rgb says that since a flood could not have occurred and the scriptures say Jesus spoke of it, then Jesus must not be God. But what if a flood did occur? Or perhaps a more convincing argument to th..."
R.C., I couldn't agree with you more. It is very sad that people get so caught up in their beliefs that they go about forcing others to do so, and history displays that sad fact that when a man uses belief to justify all kinds of immoral acts. We must always respect others and not fall into the fallacy that just because we think one thing is a universal truth does not give us the right to force others to believe the same.
However, I would like to make some remarks about skepticism.
Skepticism is a great way to rationalize and discern the world that we live in. But however, it can only take us so far. There are things where we have to use faith to move forward with, such as any future decision we make.
Back to the subject of evolution...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.
Mod
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."
Sigh.
It is completely unreasonable to think that.
Show me one, single example in the entire Universe of your experience where something was created. Just one. Tell me one, single, well-documented time something was created out of nothing with humans watching. This you cannot do, because there isn't one.
The meaning of the word "Universe" is everything that exists. It is unitary -- there is just one set of everything that exists. If God exists, God is either a part of, or all of, the Universe. In neither case can God "create" the Universe. That's a direct contradiction of the meaning of the term.
Everything we observe that is capable of complex function is made up of lots of little parts, interacting with one another. Simple things, like electrons, don't have thoughts, only complex things composed of many, many electrons are capable of things like thoughts. We are enormously complex in this way in order to achieve awareness. What are the component parts of God that provide him with awareness? What was the source of their substance? How did they come to be assembled in the complex way necessary to produce complex function? That's what makes no sense.
If the theory of evolution is correct -- and there is no doubt that it is, really -- it does indeed make God unnecessary. It is an unguided process. It works all by itself. I can easily imagine evolution working without God; it is a theory in which God does not appear. When I simulate evolution on a computer, it works just fine with all decisions made by a random number generator with an arbitrary seed. Are you arguing that God is somehow toying with my random number generator, that evolution wouldn't actually work if it were truly a random process? Empirically that is just false, and demonstrates a profound ignorance of the process and meaning of randomness.
You also do not understand the meaning of the word faith relative to the meaning of the word inference, and you're simply not telling the truth when you assert that you have more faith in God than you do in the functioning of gravity. You cannot predict one single concrete thing that will happen in the next day of your existence based on your belief in God.
On the other hand, you can and do predict what will happen with gravity every time you take a step. You literally couldn't walk, couldn't act, couldn't perform the simplest tasks, without contant and abiding faith in gravity. God you can and do forget and when you do nothing different happens because what happens to you has nothing to do with whether or what you think of God. Forget gravity (if your body will let you) and you'll fall flat on your face.
Skepticism is a great way to rationalize and discern the world that we live in. But however, it can only take us so far. There are things where we have to use faith to move forward with, such as any future decision we make.
You are confusing definitions of the word faith. There are several. One of them is: "The belief in the historic truthfulness of the Scripture narrative, and the supernatural origin of its teachings, sometimes called historical and speculative faith." (Webster 1913). This is clearly the sense of the term "faith" when you justify having faith in the veracity of the Bible.
To make decisions and move forward, we do not use this sort of faith. We use inference and reason. Inference and reason are, as I said, the opposite of faith in supernatural beings of any sort, because "supernatural" is an oxymoron, a silly self-contradictory word. The way they work in the case of gravity is that everywhere we look, everywhere we measure, all the way out to the farthest distances our telescopes can see, Newton's theory of gravitation is an excellent, quantitative theory that permits us to compute the motion of bodies moving under the primary influence of gravity. Our predictions are uniformly and consistently in agreement with experiment and observation. Belief that gravity is in fact a natural law and holds universally is not a matter of faith. We do not believe it on authority. You cannot remember a time you did not believe in gravity, even before you knew what the word for the thing that made you go fall boom was. You experience gravity.
Aww, but you forget, RC, we never know what will happen in the future observations. We may have millions of personal experiences that the sun will rise tomorrow and all the evidence points towards that, but when we say that it will rise tomorrow, we are making a statement of faith.
This is simply not correct. We do not state that the sun will rise tomorrow because in 2147 BCE a Bronze Age shaman prophecied "And the day will come when the sun will rise on the morrow, and that day shall be after a babe known as Emmanuel is born to a young woman, which is a sign that you need not fear defeat at the hands of Israel and Syria". That requires something, be it extraordinary gullibility or faith as the case may be.
We believe that it is very, very probable that the Sun will "rise tomorrow" because we understand that the diurnal cycle arises because the Earth is a big ball that is spinning on its axis once time every 24 hours as it revolves around the sun. We understand why its axial tilt leads to seasons. We understand that its large mass and size correspond to an enormous amount of rotational kinetic energy and angular momentum, and we understand the nature and magnitude of the forces that would be required to alter it. We do not believe that the Sun will rise tomorrow just because it has risen in the past, in a vacuum of related knowledge. Our knowledge that the Earth will almost certainly keep spinning and that the Sun will almost certainly keep burning as part of a deep understanding of how everything works lets us estimate that it is nearly certain that the Sun will "rise" tomorrow.
We can even imagine circumstances whereby it might not. For example, the Sun might go nova and explode, vaporizing the Earth. Oops, I guess there won't be a tomorrow for the Sun to rise in. I don't think this is particularly likely, but it could happen.
In conclusion, I am not saying that we should not use reason in seeking for spiritual things. But I am saying that we cannot come to know God through reason alone. It comes from something else, something that is not understood by the skeptic.
Reason has this little problem. It is based on these nifty rules. For example, the Law of Contradiction, the Law of the Excluded Middle. Faith, especially theistic scriptural faith in a supernatural deity, is not so constrained, and is inevitably self-contradictory and contradicts evidence, experience, experiment, common sense, knowledge.
You cannot use reason only "part way" -- say, up to the first inconvenient contradiction -- and then say "well, I'm going to believe this result anyway because I have faith that it is true". That is unreason, and yeah, it is evil. Satan is the father of lies, right?
This is why you seem unable to confront the arguments I make. Do you agree that Genesis is false? Do you agree that the New Testament quite clearly has Jesus referencing a supernatural flood that never happened? Do you agree that both of these taken together demonstrate that there are errors in the Bible, proving that it is not divinely inspired, divinely preserved perfect truth? By what means or standard are you going to winnow out the wheat from the chaff, the truth from the myth from the lies?
Bard Ehrman began as a born again Christian and devoted his life to it. He couldn't do it. He's an agnostic today.
Are you a way smarter biblical scholar or something?
rgb
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.
Mod
... because science is utterly devoid of evidence that any single object within it was created, and contains numerous empirical conservation laws that basically state: "We never see the following quantities created or destroyed."
We never see mass-energy (or momentum, or charge, etc) created or destroyed. We have to work quite hard to observe mass and energy not being separately conserved.
All humans have ever seen in experiments or direct observations of nature is stuff that already exists moving around and assembling or disassembling in different ways. No "creation". The word "cause" in physics doesn't mean cause as in cause of being, it means cause as in cause of process. Religious persons consistently abuse the term because they do not understand this. We have no reason to believe that cause of being has ever happened, and excellent reasons based on consistency and plausibility not to believe it.
So there is no evidence of God's hand visible in the form of a process of creation, which is quite consistent. As I pointed out above, if God exists, then God is a member of the set of all things that exist, a.k.a. The Universe.
If you want to reason about God instead of sift a dusty old mythology, start with that. God could be part of the Universe, although in that case God is a being much like ourselves (but bigger). God could be all of the Universe -- which would actually be consistent with certain aspects of the Godhead but which does leave one with a bit of a problem as far as "sin" and "evil" are concerned. God could be none of the Universe -- God could not exist. These are the only possibilities, and in no case could God "create" the set God is contained in as either the full set, a strict subset, or the empty set.
To reason further is rather difficult. When we look into "causes" of things (the rules that govern the arrangement and rearrangement of already existing "stuff") we find that those causes are sufficient to explain all that we observe. The laws of physics do not have many gaps in which one could hide a sentient God working in egregious ways with matter and energy. We can understand, in predictive detail, almost everything that we observe.
That isn't to say that physics is error free or complete -- far from it. It is simply to say that physics is enormously successful at explaining things such as the processes that build and destroy stars, planets, galaxies on the large scale, physics is very very successful at explaining chemistry and electromagnetic structure and complex structure in many particle systems from a relatively "simple" set of rules for elementary particles (quarks and leptons and their associated field particles, gluons, electrons, heavy vector bosons).
We do not need to infer the hand of God to explain the rainbow -- a rainbow can be completely, quantitatively understood as being the inevitable result of the laws of nature. The same laws that are responsible for it are responsible for the formation of atomic structure, chemistry, biology, life. No stable atom could exist without rainbows also existing. Every atom casts a small "rainbow" of light differentially scattered by frequency when illuminated.
At the time the Bible was written, the gaps were enormous. Thus the superstitious, ignorant men who made up the myths of Genesis to explain things they observed in the world attempted to explain the rainbow as a direct creation of God in Genesis:
9:13 I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth.
9:14 And it shall come to pass, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud:
9:15 And I will remember my covenant, which is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh.
This, in a microcosm, is why Intelligent Design is not science. A complex and beautiful phenomenon is observed. A rainbow! How lovely! Where does it come from, what "causes" it to be? A rainbow clearly appears to be designed. It is (after all) perfectly curved, a smooth arc in a world where almost all objects lack that sort of smooth geometric symmetry (and the exceptions -- round moon, round sun -- get "intelligent" explanations of their own). It contains all the distinct visible colors, laid out neatly in a consistent order. Elsewhere in nature colors are always mixed and muddy and disordered, only humans with their paints and pigments and working very carefully can make anything like a rainbow. It is clear that a rainbow could not possibly have come about by "chance" the same way a tree does, growing randomly here instead of there as the mindless winds dictate when they scatter their seeds. If there is any further need for wonder, a rainbow cannot be grasped. It moves as you move, and you can never reach its ends. For all its semblance of solidity, it is ephemeral and wispy, made in some manner altogether beyond the means of men or accidents of nature (or so it appears at first glance).
The Bible adds an ID hypothesis to Genesis to explain this obvious sign of design in the cosmos. Rainbows are there because God writes them, one at a time, on the heavens as part of a promise he made never to wipe out the earth by means of a mythical flood. God is intelligent, the rainbow appears designed by intelligence, this is clearly a sufficient cause and explains even the "magical" ephemerality and association of rainbows with rain.
This explanation leaves a lot to be desired, of course. It simply takes our ignorance of the answer to our question: "What makes a rainbow" and wraps it up in a sort of universal "I Don't Know" symbol called "God" that can do anything He wants for reasons known only to Him; any mechanism, any observation of order or cause can thus be attributed to this ID(K) symbol without fear of contradiction, because we cannot probe the nature of God by reason or observation. We can make up any silly story such as this story about a flood without fear of being gainsaid, because it cannot be disproven. You don't know either, after all. You just have "faith", and all faith is equal, right? Belief has no reason, so mine is as good as yours!
Except that this is not true. Beliefs supported by evidence and reason are better than ID(K) explanations. And when we look more deeply into the causes of the rainbow, we find them! We come to understand exactly how a rainbow forms. We learn to make rainbows of our own with garden hoses when it isn't raining. We make prisms, diffraction gratings. We come to understand why the sky at sunset forms a "rainbow" of colors on the horizon (caused by the differential scattering from individual molecules of the air in between the sun and the observer). This is science, and we come to believe in Maxwell's equations very strongly because they explain the rainbow and many other things quantitatively and without any "ID(K)" gaps.
How is "ID theory" vs evolution theory any different from "The Flood" ID(K) theory vs electrodynamic theory?
It isn't. Intelligent Design equals "I Don't Know". ID(K) God is not taught as an explanation of rainbows in schools.
I think that the most offensive aspect of ID and "God of the gaps" explanations is that they are sheer laziness. They justify the most egregious mental sloth on the part of the student and are the natural intellectual haven of the stupid. "IDK God" did it, so I don't need to bother to understand, and my lazy inconsistent scripture-given faith is as good as your consistent plausible explanation derived from a lot of hard work.
Metaphorically, Satan indeed. A grade of F.
rgb
Nathan wrote: "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.Nope. Not true. There doesn't need to be someone s..."
Sure there doesn't have to be a creator to get it all started, however I find it hard to believe that everything just magically came out of nowhere and things got started, but even so, evolution could be done by a creator.
Dan wrote: "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 bib..."
Dan, the point I am making about faith is that anything we do is based upon it. Any act you make is based on your faith that it will cause of certain outcome. When you get up in the morning you have faith that if you eat some food, it will take care of your hunger. Faith is something that is greater than knowledge. Knowledge is the tools, but faith is way to act with the tools.
Something to think about in regards to faith... every field of study, whether science, religion, or philosophy can be broken down into assumptive rules or axioms. Even logic uses assumptive rules. In order for us to use these methods, we have to, at some point place faith in the asumptions that are made. Somewhere we have to stop questioning and say this is the foundation and move forward. That is where faith begins. And as far as the bible is concerned, I have written much about how evolution and the bible can be placed hand in hand, based upon one's interpretation of it. I talked about it in another blog, here:
http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/6...
post number 95.
RC, I don't know very many athiests, and if you don't mind, I have some questions for you. This also applies to anyone else who is athiest.What are your beliefs in things of the supernatural? Do you believe there is a spiritual side of humanity?
Also, if there is no creator, then where did everything come from?
I don't ask these questions to debate, but because I am curious. I would like to see the athiest perspective
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 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.
Mod
Faith is greater than knowledge? What in the world does this mean? I know what it means to way that 7 is greater than 5, but I was unaware of a commonly accepted scale of "greatness" wherein belief in the invisible, unknowable supernatural is greater than our concrete experience of the real world.
But really, you're just taking common words and assigning your own special meanings to them to validate the terms and ordinal ranking you wish to establish, then use the terms with an entirely different meaning to arrive at your desired conclusion.
In fact, here is your argument:
* Faith (meaning 1) = the reasonable expectation that, given the evidence of our past experience, the future will be "like" that past instead of wildly, randomly, unpredictably different.
* Knowledge = memory of the past observations and experiences plus inferences of rules that seem to consistently explain them, including a lifetime of experience that acting upon those inferences -- having "faith" (meaning 1, above) that the future will be like the past -- permits us to stay alive, seeking pleasure and avoiding pain.
Faith (meaning 2): Belief in absolutely any absurd hypothesis, but especially in the set of hypotheses laid out in truly ancient writings that we know only from manuscript copies of copies of copies (to the nth power) on the basis of its self-asserted divine authority.
Assertions:
* There is no reason, really, to believe that the future will be like the past even though according to our knowledge this works and our ongoing experience instantaneously and consistently validates this belief second by second for our entire lives.
* Action invariably is based on the expectation that the future will be like the past plus our knowledge of the past and inferred rules that appear to "work", and is impossible without Faith(1). We all act on this unjustifiable basis, therefore we have Faith(1).
* Faith(2) is therefore better than mere knowledge, because knowledge cannot provide a basis for action where Faith(1) does. And after all, aren't they the same words?
Conclusion:
Faith(2), especially Faith(2) in the 2 to 3 thousand year old scriptures known collectively as "The Bible", is justified and better than mere common sense and knowledge of the world. It transcends reason and can be safely used to learn of the "supernatural" rules that really make Faith(1) incorrect.
No matter what scientific inference has to say, it is trumped by God's Will, which cannot be observed or inferred, only learned from The Bible. The Bible clearly demonstrates that that will is whimsical and arbitrary and perverse -- stopping the sun in its tracks, creating flowering plants and trees on a primordial earth before creating the Sun that would keep them alive, violating the laws of mere nature according to the plot of a story that only The Bible can provide you insight into.
Hopefully this makes it clear just how wrong this argument is, how much it relies on your audience being too stupid to see you palm the card and switch Faith(2) for Faith(1). Nobody here is that stupid. It also makes it clear how the argument is self-contradictory because after using the fact that you (like everybody else) do have Faith(1) in the law of universal gravitation, the second law of thermodynamics, Maxwell's Equations (whether or not you know that you do, you do, trust me), after making this Faith(1) greater than the knowledge that is its basis in some bizarre semantic and performing the switch to Faith(2), you arrive at the conclusion that Faith(1) is untrue.
Which of course means that Faith(2) is unjustified as well. When you throw out Faith(1), you see, all that you've done is you've uncovered the pit of Hell (where in case it isn't obvious, I'd adopting the metaphorical language of religion as a deliberate device to get my point across, something you seem to miss and so I'll be quite explicit about it this time).
You see if Faith(1) is false, if the future need not be consistently "like" the past in accordance with the rules inferred from experience and observation, then anything can happen. At any instant, the earth might stop rotating on its axis without any external force being applied or sequellae expected from the laws of physics. I might change into a butterfly. A village full of people could change into a herd of pigs and run off to drown themselves.
A pitcher of water could violate every law of physics and spontaneously convert from dihydrogen oxide into a mix of dihydrogen oxide plus ethanol (which contains carbon) plus a mix of pigments and compounds containing trace heavy elements, all entirely absent from the original vessel). A long dead body -- filled with billions of ruptured cells, broken mitochondria, with all of the invisible and visible signs of thermodynamically irreversible decay -- could suddenly have every molecule restored to the right place for normal function to occur and be "restarted" as a living body, absent the original cause of its demise.
Or it is equally possible that in the next three seconds the entire Universe will spontaneously become chaotic, cease to exist altogether, become an enormous pile of blue cheese. All humans might suddenly be transformed into marble statues. There is no hypothesis, no matter how absurd, that can be discounted, is there? You have removed the connection between Knowledge and Faith(1) and (by the very inheritance you originally created by palming the card) thrown Faith(2) out as well, and are now left staring naked chaos in the face. There is no reason to believe anything, so there is equal reason to believe everything.
This is the Pit of Existential Despair that is uncovered by any process that breaks the connection between Knowledge and Faith(1). I personally grant the first part of your argument -- I make it myself, far more carefully, in the book Axioms that I've been working on for years now (an early version is very popular online). As Hume pointed out, it requires the unprovable assumption that the future will be like the past in order to transform experience into knowledge and knowledge into a capacity to act and live in the real world.
However, Hume was incorrect when he stated that the process of inference cannot itself be derived from a small set of metaphysical axioms. It can be so derived. It has been so derived. And if you read Probability Theory: The Logic of Science, especially the first five chapters, you will learn what those axioms (Jaynes' "disiderata") are and how they work to provide a consistent theory of plausible reason where what we believe is in fact the best thing to believe on an actual ordinal mathematical scale, not some ill-defined semantic scale of "greatness".
Unreason is the Devil. Your argument above puts you and anyone who buys it straight on the slippery slope down to Existential Hell, where all knowledge is suspect, where a screaming chaos lurks at every instant to transform all sense into madness.
Fortunately, this need not happen. Faith(1) contradicts Faith(2) because they are different things. Faith(2) is inconsistent with Faith(1) and knowledge, and hence is incorrect. Reason, and only reason, closes the Pit of Existential Despair with its "devils" of supernatural whimsy.
rgb
Dan wrote: "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 s..."
Those are some good points, Dan. It does seem that it would be easier to believe that the universe has always existed, since one can assume God has always existed. If I had not had a personal spiritual experience of the existence of God, I would be convinced by your argument.
Dan wrote: "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 evi..."
look at my last few messages from the Evolution vs Intelligent Design, Debate here forum read messages 95 and 100. The story of Genesis can be seen as figurative and in that interpretation, the theory of evolution does not contradict it.
My point about faith is that we all have it. No offense. My faith based upon the existence of God is based upon evidence I received from a spiritual experience. It is a knowledge I have which is different than the knowledge I get from science. I don't know how else to explain it. I base my faith in God upon that experience. Even as I write now, I am reminded of that experience, and my knowledge of it becomes more confirmed. I can empathise with your frustration, because it sounds like a cop out, but it is what it is. I understand where you guys are coming from. For a while, I thought there was no God, because logically it did not make sense. If I had not had this experience, I would still not believe in Him.
RGB's post. I think I am beginning to understand where our differences is arising from in our definition of faith. Thanks for your patience guys. My definition is faith (1), and my belief in the bible is based upon that. It comes from the spiritual expereince I have had. I look at the bible as a figurative text, and it is made to teach us how to be better people, not to explain how the earth was made, or how god can stop the sun from rotating or that plants can live without a sun. 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)
From what I get, you think that all people who follow the bible are of the faith (2), believe in anything absurd. I hope what I have said shows that not everyone who believes in the bible is like that.
As far as faith being greater than knowledge, I am just saying that we use faith in order to make any action.
Hume said that "it requires the unprovable assumption that the future will be like the past in order to transform experience into knowledge and knowledge into a capacity to act and live in the real world." I agree with that and I am saying the "capacity to act" is faith.
I enjoy debating about stuff, for I learn from them. I hope all I said can be taken respectfully and while things do get heated from time to time, I mean no offense.
Proposition 8. I did not follow that too much, but from what I understand, it was to allow people of the same sex to be legally be married. I am not sure why the church said no against it.For me personally, I think that people can be joined together in a same sex partnership if they choose to do so, and they should be treated equally before the law as those of heterosexual marriages do.
Mod
Then you can completely understand why those of us who have not had that personal spiritual experience remain convinced by the logic. And since I've presented the logic as well that demonstrates that God creating a Universe is a contradiction in terms, even those who believe in God cannot believe that God created the Universe, only that God is the Universe.
rgb
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...
rgb wrote: "Dan wrote: "Why Intelligent Design is not science:
11. It teaches a number of logical fallacies, such as circular reasoning and confirmation bias, which are the exact opposite of science.
12. It ..."
Dan wrote: "Why Intelligent Design is not science:
11. It teaches a number of logical fallacies, such as circular reasoning and confirmation bias, which are the exact opposite of science.
12. It does not rel..."
rgb wrote: "Dan wrote: "Why Intelligent Design is not science:
11. It teaches a number of logical fallacies, such as circular reasoning and confirmation bias, which are the exact opposite of science.
12. It ..."
i'd just like to say this: you wrote,
"If you did not already kno anything about the Bible, and had never heard of Genesis, and had no choice but to examine the natural world to figure out how everything works...Would one ever infer from the evidence that humans came from just one male-female pair that were mated to produce the entire human race via a process of systematic incest?"
i suppose that would not be one's guess at first sight. HOWEVER, we DO have the book of Genesis. There's a REASON God had it written down for us - so that we wouldn't believe the lies that evolutionists tell us.
11. It teaches a number of logical fallacies, such as circular reasoning and confirmation bias, which are the exact opposite of science.
12. It ..."
Dan wrote: "Why Intelligent Design is not science:
11. It teaches a number of logical fallacies, such as circular reasoning and confirmation bias, which are the exact opposite of science.
12. It does not rel..."
rgb wrote: "Dan wrote: "Why Intelligent Design is not science:
11. It teaches a number of logical fallacies, such as circular reasoning and confirmation bias, which are the exact opposite of science.
12. It ..."
i'd just like to say this: you wrote,
"If you did not already kno anything about the Bible, and had never heard of Genesis, and had no choice but to examine the natural world to figure out how everything works...Would one ever infer from the evidence that humans came from just one male-female pair that were mated to produce the entire human race via a process of systematic incest?"
i suppose that would not be one's guess at first sight. HOWEVER, we DO have the book of Genesis. There's a REASON God had it written down for us - so that we wouldn't believe the lies that evolutionists tell us.
Abby wrote: "i suppose that would not be one's guess at first sight. HOWEVER, we DO have the book of Genesis. There's a REASON God had it written down for us - so that we wouldn't believe the lies that evolutionists tell us."Actually, God was just screwing with you. Separating the wheat from the chaff, as it were.
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.
Mod
Not at first sight, second sight, or ten thousandth sight. The evidence is completely incompatible with Genesis. Look, I'm a physicist. I'm sure that doesn't mean a thing to you, because you've got the book of Genesis and I'm obviously a liar just like the evolutionists, but you're just about 400 years late to save the Bible from infallibility.
I'm fairly certain you haven't visited the website I linked in on radiometric dating, and if you do I'm sure you'll figure out some way of convincing yourself that the Christian geologist who wrote it is just a stupid man who has allowed himself to be fooled by all of those lies he was taught in school, all of the "facts" and "graphs" he presents -- what do numbers tell us about anything, anyway? You obviously can't understand them, so they cannot have any meaning for anybody else, can they? Or perhaps mathematics and experimental science is all just a tool of Satan, used to turn us away from the truth of what the Bible says, which we must believe even when it makes no sense and violates our everyday experience and knowledge.
So what do you do with the rest of the lies in the Bible? What do you do about the infamous letter from "Saint" Bellarmine to Galileo? Read it here:
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/16...
So not quite four hundred years late. -- only three hundred ninety four. As Bellarmine points out (more or less citing chapter and verse) the Bible clearly states -- and all the scholars and philosophers of his day agreed that the Earth was fixed, immobile, at the center of the Universe and that the Sun went around the Earth every day. Galileo's outrageous observation that the Earth in fact goes around the Sun and not the other way around contradicted the word of Genesis, the Psalms, Ecclesiastes, and Joshua. It was considered heresy to assert otherwise and contradict the "obvious" truth of the Bible. The Church arrested Galileo, and under threat of torture and a horrible death, forced him to recant and live under house arrest for the rest of his life. His works were banned, his books were burned lest they lead innocents away from belief in the perfect truth of Genesis.
Too bad for Genesis. Galileo was right! Or are you so foolish that you don't actually know that the earth goes around the sun and not the other way around, that the earth spins on its axis once a day, and that our solar system is a mere flyspeck in a Universe of a trillion trillion stars that are rather obviously not there to mark the seasons, as only a few thousand of them are visible to the naked eye and most of them are invisible to all but the most powerful of telescopes.
Not only was the Bible wrong about the Earth being fixed and in the center with all revolving around it (oh, the arrogance of those Bronze Age Bible-writing tribal shamans) but you cannot look at photographs of the most distant galaxies -- so distant that they are mere pinpricks to even the enormous power of the Hubble -- and realize that they are all like our own galaxy, consisting of hundreds of billions of stars like our own star (which is a million miles across and not a small ball like the moon orbiting the earth) and not understand that they are very, very far away -- billions of light years away. The Sun and the Earth did not even exist when the light of those stars began its journey to the telescopes that photographed them, and the Universe is much, much older than 6000 years. Very probably infinitely old, in fact, but 14 billion years old in this cycle of its existence.
As for evolution versus creation (a moot point, since the Bible of a pack of lies, or more charitibly "myths" or "errors", either way as Galileo clearly showed) -- once you bother to actually learn some science and how to do arithmetic, you can study the evidence yourself instead of relying on the "authority" of a handful of idiots who want to control you politically through your faith in a mythology they control and "interpret" for you. They just want political power and are too stupid and venal to get it the honest way, and you're an easy mark. Grow up.
rgb
rgb wrote: "Too bad for Genesis. Galileo was right! Or are you so foolish that you don't actually know that the earth goes around the sun and not the other way around, that the earth spins on its axis once a day, and that our solar system is a mere flyspeck in a Universe of a trillion trillion stars that are rather obviously not there to mark the seasons, as only a few thousand of them are visible to the naked eye and most of them are invisible to all but the most powerful of telescopes."If you get a Bible out and scour it from cover, you will not discover a single reference to the Earth's supposed "fixed" position. If you find otherwise, let me know and I will be much obliged. Oh, and please don't make yourself look naive by quoting some reference to the sun rising, setting or standing still. To my knowledge, people continue, to this day, to use the technically inaccurate words "sunrise" and "sunset". They describe the physical appearance of an everyday phenomenon.
The Bible is not a science textbook. Science is not its main point. But it's amazing how accurate it is.
In conclusion: rgb, you're absolutely right. The geocentric universe was exactly what you called it -- a "myth" -- a sad example of the ridiculous scholastic thought system of the time. As we all know, Galileo was right on that point (though not on others; nobody's perfect). Maybe he got his ideas from the Bible itself!
The Bible is not a science textbook. Science is not its main point. But it's amazing how accurate it is.Accurate? So bats are really birds? Insects really have four legs? Gimme a break. Leviathan? Satyrs? Unicorns? Oh yes, it is just swimming with accuracy.
Mod
In conclusion: rgb, you're absolutely right. The geocentric universe was exactly what you called it -- a "myth" -- a sad example of the ridiculous scholastic thought system of the time. As we all know, Galileo was right on that point (though not on others; nobody's perfect). Maybe he got his ideas from the Bible itself!
Surely you are joking. The Bible says the Earth is fixed repeatedly, and the general picture it paints is absolutely of a fixed earth with sun and stars moving around it.
Genesis 1 has God creating the Earth before he creates the Sun and the Stars. The Earth is a firmament that emerges from and divides "the waters" that existed even before the Earth. So is heaven -- a firmament above the earth (a large, solid dome). He then proceeds to populate this solid land with flowering seed bearing plants (still no sun, no moon, but there is darkness and light by golly). On the fourth day he gets around to creating the Sun and the Moon and the stars and "set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth".
Without bothering to continue with the rest of the rot, what is it that is so far described? That would be a flat earth that rests over the waters of the ocean (a model that is explicitly supported later when God commands these waters to "rise up" during the Flood), covered by a solid bowl of sky on which are hung the sun and the moon (glowing with its own light) and the stars. This is clearly a geocentric model.
It bears absolutely no resemblance to a 13.6 billion light year in radius visible Cosmos (with no boundary in sight) filled with stars 99.99999999999999999999999% or so of which are invisible to the naked eye, where the Sun as a second generation star and the earth are a mere 5+ billion years old (with the earth a bit younger than the sun, not older, with the oceans considerably younger than the earth, and with flowering plants and trees and land animals way, way younger than the oceans).
As for further biblical support for a geocentric model:
Joshua 10:12-13 (the sun stood still -- not "the earth ceased to rotate").
Habakkuk 3:11 (The sun and the moon stood still -- ditto.)
Psalms 19:4-6 (The sun rises at one end of the heavens, sets at the other end -- clearly in accord with a finite "heavens" with ends and a stationary, central earth.)
Ecclesiastes 1:5 (The sun rises and goes down and hastens to the point where it rises once again -- hard to get more explict than that.)
So the sun moves, the earth (being in the middle) does not move. In case there is any doubt:
1 Chronicles 16:30 (The world stands firm, never to be moved. -- oops.)
Psalms 93:1 (The world is established, never shall it be moved.)
Psalms 96:10 (Ditto!)
Not only is the earth not a ball, it has a foundation, one that was sometimes laid bare and visible:
2 Samuel 22:16 (The foundations of the earth were laid bare -- only just what is the earth supposed to be resting on, exactly?)
Psalms 18:15 (Ditto, word for word.)
Psalms 102:25 (God "laid the foundation" of the earth and heaven -- sounds like a bricklayer, doesn't he?)
Proverbs 8:27-29 (Wow. God drew a circle upon the face of the sea, made the skies above firm, established fountains in the deep, assigned boundaries to the sea, all while laying out those foundations of the earth. Of course none of this happened, none of it is even a good metaphor for what happened.)
Of course the Bible isn't even vaguely consistent. After establishing that the earth never moves (so that things move around it) it is conceded that it does move, indeed it shakes to its very foundations when an earthquake occurs. And the exact nature of those foundations are uncertain -- sometimes they are pillars, sometimes not. And a few bright thinkers, such as the author of Job 38:4-6, actually thought for a moment about the problem of where to actually put the bases of those pillars...
It is absolutely clear that the authors of the Bible thought that the world was flat and bounded:
Job 28:24, Psalms 19:4-6, Matthew 4:8, Isaiah 40:22, Psalms 136:6, Isaiah 44:24, Psalms 103:12 (unless you think that the east meets the west in a spherical model, in which case God doesn't remove our transgressions from us at all, oops), Deuteronomy 28:64, Deuteronomy 33:17, 1 Samuel 2:10, Job 28:24, Job 38:13, and really too many to bother citing that refer to the "ends of the earth". Spherical planets, like wedding rings, ain't got no ends...
So there isn't the slightest shred of doubt that the Bible describes, in great and consistent detail, a flat geocentric earth that rises out of a circumscribing sea that is has a water circulatory system and is itself bounded by a solid bowl of sky upon which the lights of heaven are hung and through which water is poured to make it rain. It describes a flood that supposedly covered all dry land in 40 days and then remained in place for 150 more, causing the entire surface area of the earth to be covered by 9 kilometers of water that is too fresh for saltwater species, too salty for freshwater species, for over half a year, where the land at the bottom would be subjected to 900 atmospheres of pressure.
Its science isn't "accurate" at all. It is a joke. And Galileo absolutely did not get his ideas "from the Bible" -- he go them from Copernicus and from looking though his telescope and seeing that the Bible was wrong. Galileo was prosecuted by a Saint of the Catholic Church for daring to assert that geocentric model of the Universe put forth in the Bible might not be literal truth, and was forced to recant the truth or else be burned alive in public as an example, because it was feared -- quite correctly -- that once the Bible was clearly demonstrated to not be divinely inspired perfect truth on any single point, people with mere common sense would begin to doubt all of its outrageous claims and assertions everywhere else.
Which is precisely what has happened, and what should happen. The Bible is not a reliable witness to anything at all. Perhaps it contains some historical truths mixed in with its many myths and legends -- perhaps not. Who can ever know (and how can we know, save by finding corroborations outside of the Bible since it is not a reliable source of truth). Who really cares, when we have to do all of the work of assessing truth anyway outside of the Bible as soon as it is clear that it is not a reliable witness.
So I'm perfectly thrilled to note, Pansy, that you have come into the seventeenth century and agree that Galileo was ill used for his discovery that the Bible was fallible, which ultimately opened the door to the clear demonstration by scientists seeking the truth that it is indeed openly incorrect on pretty much every single "scientific" pronouncement it makes. Note well that for 2/3 of the history of the Christian church you would have been burned alive or hung for making such a pronouncement, so the Enlightenment hasn't been completely wasted on you.
Now it is time to take the next step. If one examines the Bible in careful detail (since clearly you haven't done any such thing or I wouldn't have to point out the many places it supports a geocentric flat-earth model to you and the ZERO places it supports anything else, let alone the correct model) you will find that its history is little better -- for example, Tubal Cain is supposedly an iron artificer, but alas, the time frame of Eden is far back in the Bronze age. Clear evidence that the entire story of Eden was written in the iron age, thousands of years after the events supposedly occurred, by people who pretty much just made all that stuff up. You can see, if you look objectively, that its morality is terrible -- Moses was a genocidal murderer rivalling Hitler in his own small way, for example (see e.g. Numbers 31) and yet was somehow suitable to appear with Jesus during the Ascension. Jesus, of course, openly confessed to preaching in parables so that his listeners wouldn't understand him and would thereby end up being damned, Jesus called a gentile woman who sought a miracle from him a dog, Jesus cursed a fig tree to death for failing to provide him with a fig out of season, Jesus lost his virtue if a woman so much as touched his robe (because it is perfectly obvious that women are intrinsically unclean -- it says so repeatedly throughout the Bible).
The Bible is precisely what it appears to be -- a collection of myths and legends written by many ordinary humans over many centuries ranging from the early iron age (somewhere in the range 1200 BCE at the earliest) to 200 CE, depending on what and where you want to draw the line at the ever changing New Testament, that was still morphing a thousand years after it was supposedly written. Its science is nonexistent -- it is nothing but tribal superstition, not science at all. Its "history" ranges from pure myth (the bulk of it) through legend (which might have a historical basis buried under layers of myth) with only teensy amounts of actual verified plausible history peeking through. The ethics and morality it encodes, in addition to being awesomely inconsistent with all sorts of actions being loved and hated by the Lord depending on just where you read, are for the most part simply terrible -- openly endorsing slavery and murder and rape and theft by both law and example, are at best inferior to modern secular morality, where the best of it is represented by at most a handful of very specific (and often quoted!) examples while the rest of it is quietly ignored so that people can pretend that it doesn't exist. And then there is the supernatural.
In order to accept the supernatural accounts of the Bible -- miraculous healings, creations, floods and fires and famines and plagues, deaths and raisings from death, one truly does have to have really good reason to believe that the Bible isn't just a good witness sometimes, but an extraordinary witness all the time. If a man is placed on the witness stand and asked to describe a murder he is supposed to have seen, and the first thing that he does is start to talk about the pink Unicorns and angels singing that danced around the site, healthy sane people will say to themselves -- "This guy is loony-tunes, we cannot believe a word that he says." We say that because nobody has ever seen a pink Unicorn, and nobody would think that such a thing exists at all if it weren't for the Bible. Nobody I know has ever seen a dancing angel, either. Whether the man is merely deluded or is actually lying isn't important -- the main point is that his testimony cannot be trusted, and must use other, more objective methods to determine the truth of the matter. And this is in the case of a "mere" murder -- matters like the "right" thing to believe are weightier still, with many religions all loudly claiming that they are the one TRUE religion and believe it or be damned to eternal torment, something far worse than merely hanging the wrong man for a crime he did not commit.
For extraordinary claims of the greatest import, one requires extraordinary evidence, not just a good witness but a damn near perfect one. The Bible is obviously nothing of the kind. It is even more deluded and filled with falsehood than the worst wino off of the street, beginning with the very first words in the very first book it contains:
"In the beginning..." -- what beginning? All of the evidence of science with its many conservation laws suggest that there has never been a beginning.
All the rest of the lies, myths, and fables in Genesis are a mere anticlimax.
rgb
it was feared -- quite correctly -- that once the Bible was clearly demonstrated to not be divinely inspired perfect truth on any single point, people with mere common sense would begin to doubt all of its outrageous claims and assertions everywhere else.Of course, the way people continue to try to shoehorn scientific discoveries into Bible stories that they baldly contradict perhaps demonstrates that those fears of the Church were overblown. It seems that no matter how much of the Bible you can shoot down with fact, people will persist in believing that it is "essentially" true.
Mod
a) To obtain knowledge of any sort, engage in a strictly mental practice that is supposed to result in the direct insertion of knowledge into your mind. This practice (across many ages and cultures and religions) involves things like:
* Praying. If you want to know something, pray to your deity and/or deities and if you pray hard enough or sacrifice enough goats or lead a good enough life, your prayer may be answered in the form of direct, preternatural knowledge that is true. The answers "just appear in your head" (or in rare occasions, on stone tablets)" and you don't even have to look at the world, you know that they are true because your god(s) put them there.
* Meditation (as a practice that is distinct from prayer). If one chants one's mantra while sitting zazen for long enough, with enough lovingkindness and devotion to your guru or simply with enough discipline, answers once again just appear in your head -- you obtain direct preternatural knowledge of the true nature of the world that is so sound you don't even have to look to see if it is true, it is true because your mind is in harmony with all things, making direct perception possible.
* Various ascetic practices, usually mixed in with the first two. Prayer or meditation work best if accompanied by sacrifice and starvation and sexual abstinence and sometimes with actual deliberate self-infliction of pain. It seems that a sufficient dose of self-abnegation and suffering creates the right conditions for petitions for direct preternatural perception to occur, especially if accompanied by prayerful petitions for that knowledge or meditative practice that erase any directed activity of the mind.
* As the ultimate shortcut, don't bother to actually do these prayerful and meditative knowledge-seeking activities yourself, as they require a lot of discipline and often involve a certain amount of pain and self-denial -- just read books known as "holy scriptures" filled with supposed knowledge that was produced by means of this process. All the gain, none of the pain.
In other words, method a) is direct and involves various versions of contemplating your own navel and engaging in strictly mental activities that are not in any way systematic attempts to understand anything at all so that the knowledge "just comes", presumably from a higher spiritual repository of knowledge that you can plug into and tap or from a higher spiritual power that confers it upon you as a volitional act, pleased by your sacrifice and prayer.
Then there is:
b) Get off of your ass, stop meditating, praying, starving and otherwise depriving yourself. Or (as is far more likely) if you are one of the many people who are simply accepting the authoritative declarations of directly perceived knowledge so you don't actually have to even try to obtain this kind of knowledge by yourself, wake up and stop being lazy and doubt that direct knowledge of this sort is indeed possible. Either way, obtain knowledge of the world by looking at the world itself and trying to figure it out using reason!
Look at the world. Question authority. Doubt. Engage in critical thinking. Experiment. Test every conclusion you arrive at against what you actually see in the real world around you. Insist on explanations that are consistent: Consistent with the evidence, consistent internally, consistent with other related explanations that are consistent with evidence and internally. Do not pretend (even to yourself) that these explanations are all Truth (with the capital T) -- accept the fact that they are simply the best explanations one has so far, given the data, where the word "best" is used in the specific sense that they are what we should believe the most because we can doubt them the least, given the evidence of our own eyes and trying very hard to doubt.
To me it is simply amazing that anybody could ever think that method a) is a valid way to obtain knowledge. If one tries method b), even a little bit, the first thing one can do is apply it to method a). Take something you'd like to know -- the winning lottery number. The correct mathematical description of unified field theory. How to cure cancer. Sit down, meditate, pray, starve yourself, appeal to God or plug yourself in to the cosmic spiritual internet and google up the answer by blanking your mind completely so that it can appear. See how far it gets you.
Then try looking, using reason, based on rules that we so far doubt the least out of all the rules we have tried out as explanations of the phenomena, as reasoned solutions of the problems based on these explanations.
One approach leaves you with a Bronze Age level primitive culture, filled with violence, disease, misery, and death. The other approach actually does make blind men see, makes crippled men walk, heals the sick, cures the insane, restarts the stopped heart, and moves mountains.
Faith does not move mountains. Large earth moving machines built using the precepts and knowledge derived from science can and do move mountains. Faith does not result in reliable knowledge of any sort. Science leads to the most reliable (while still imperfect) knowledge we can reasonably have, given the evidence and the best efforts of our collective ability to reason. Faith does not heal the sick, feed the hungry, create peace out of war. Reason heals the sick every day. Reason grows and rationally distributes the food that feeds the hungry. And if we are ever going to succeed at putting war behind us as a species, it is going to be Reason that motivates and guides the process, where most of the wars that are actively occurring on the planet at this very moment are caused by Faith.
So please, please, please. Think (even if it pains you to do so even more than mere sexual abstinence, meditation, and prayer would) about just where pretty much all of the knowledge you have of the real world came from. Think about how you know that it is (probably) true. Think about the process called "using judgement" or "using your common sense" to weigh alternative explanations. Test method a) against method b) and see which one leads to actual knowledge, and which one to extended and elaborate fantasies or to answers that do not work when you actually try both methods yourself instead of relying on hearsay thousands of years old and pretending that just because "it is written" that it must be true.
rgb
Wow, rgb, that sounds exhausting. Wouldn't it be easier for me to just ask a bunch of people what they think is true, and then pick whatever ideas appeal to me most and believe those?
Mod
After all, who has ever heard of an inspired person such as myself lying or being mistaken? Unless, of course, they happen to be Hindu, or Jain, or Sikh, or Muslim, or Pagan (whatever that is) or Wiccan, or just plain spiritual -- in which case they are clearly inspired only by Satan Himself so that their knowledge is all false.
So I'm telling you -- and you should believe this, as it is straight from the FSM himself -- that you should close out your life savings (in small bills, please), place it into one of those prepaid postage boxes (insured) and mail it to me at the physics department. If you do this you will without the slightest possibility of doubt be rewarded with 72 virgins in heaven when you die, while if you fail to follow these instructions exactly, you will end up in the company of demons who look and behave exactly like Sarah Palin for eternity. If you want to enjoy those virgins in a paradise-like garden (complete with a built in bar unit that dispenses Mai-Tais and Tropical Punch) then convince at least four of your wealthiest friends to send me their money as well.
So what will it be, Dan? Virgins and unlimited Planter's Punch in a tropical paradise or bowhunting moose in the frozen Alaskan wilderness with not-so-virginal Sarah?
The choice is yours...
rgb
Mod
The FSM has revealed to me that he is very worried about global warming and its effect on pasta production, so the world needs more pirates. Mojitos seem sort of like a pirate drink, so that part is all right. However, to earn heavenly postmortem Mojitos served by scantily clad virgins, you have to become a pirate and significantly increase your contribution to Its holy coffers (which strangely enough are located at my mailing address). I'd think that the ransom from a single oil tanker should do it, and I hear that Somalia is lovely this time of year.
Under the circumstances, small bills may not be feasible given the size of such a ransom, but I -- I mean "His Holy Noodliness" -- would accept treasury bonds, diamonds, negotiable securities as well. Especially if they were deposited to my account in the Cayman islands...:-)
rgb
Charity wrote: "The Bible is not a science textbook. Science is not its main point. But it's amazing how accurate it is.Accurate? So bats are really birds? Insects really have four legs? Gimme a break. Leviathan? Satyrs? Unicorns? Oh yes, it is just swimming with accuracy."
Context might help a bit in interpreting things like this. Bats are "flying creatures", not birds. Insects are "creeping things". Leviathan appears to match the dinosaur fossils we have found. Satyrs and unicorns are nowhere mentioned in the Bible.
rgb wrote: Genesis 1 has God creating the Earth before he creates the Sun and the Stars. The Earth is a firmament that emerges from and divides "the waters" that existed even before the Earth. So is heaven -- a firmament above the earth (a large, solid dome). He then proceeds to populate this solid land with flowering seed bearing plants (still no sun, no moon, but there is darkness and light by golly). On the fourth day he gets around to creating the Sun and the Moon and the stars and "set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth".
Actually, the firmament is the "heavens" -- the sky. Where did the idea that the firmament was the earth come from?
Dictionary definition of firmament (I am obsessed with words, being a writer by trade :D)...
firmament: n.
The expanse of the sky; heavens
[from Late Latin firmāmentum sky (considered as fixed above the earth), from Latin: prop, support, from firmāre to make firm]
As for further biblical support for a geocentric model:
Joshua 10:12-13 (the sun stood still -- not "the earth ceased to rotate" [I assume you meant to imply "the earth ceased to orbit, because a rotating central earth doesn't make much sense.:]).
Wouldn't you agree that's your interpretation of the verse? It doesn't say anything about the earth ceasing to rotate; it only describes the physical appearance of the phenomena (which I don't try to explain scientifically; as previously mentioned, I believe in more than just the physical world). You could just as easily take from that same verse, "The earth ceased its orbit around the sun." That doesn't have to be what happened, but it could be. Once again, everyone is biased, myself included. It depends on your perspective what you deduce from any given verse or scientific fact.
Not only is the earth not a ball, it has a foundation, one that was sometimes laid bare and visible:
2 Samuel 22:16 (The foundations of the earth were laid bare -- only just what is the earth supposed to be resting on, exactly?)
Here is your answer, located in Job 26:7 (please do look it up; I have been reading your links too). Once again, this is poetic language, as are most of the passages you quoted. Poetic literature abounds in metaphor and simile, as I'm sure you are aware. You can get almost anything out of such a verse if you are bent on proving a certain point. Or you can look at it in context. It's your choice.
And for your choice for me, I definitely prefer option "B". :) It is what I strive to do, every day, and though I am not perfect, I hope never to stop learning new things! That is one of the reasons why I find the origins controversy so fascinating.
Sincerely,
Pansy
P.S. -- I found this article interesting and wonder what you think of it? (Don't laugh at the name of the website; just read the article.)
http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/...
Context might help a bit in interpreting things like this. Bats are "flying creatures", not birds.Context? They are lumped in with all the other fowls (the Bible's word) in Lev 11:13-19.
Insects are "creeping things".
Doesn't mean insects have 4 legs...no matter what they are called.
Leviathan appears to match the dinosaur fossils we have found.
How so?
Satyrs and unicorns are nowhere mentioned in the Bible.
Oh really?
Unicorns: Deu 33:17; Num 23:22; Num 24:8; Job 39:9; Job 39:10; Psa 22:21; Psa 29:6; Psa 92:10; Isa 34:7
Satyrs: Isa 13:21; Isa 34:14
Satyrs and unicorns are nowhere mentioned in the Bible.Numbers 23:22 - God brought them out of Egypt; he hath as it were the strength of a unicorn.
Deuteronomy 33:17 - His glory is like the firstling of his bullock,and his horns are like the horns of unicorns
Job 39:9-10 - Will the unicorn be willing to serve thee, or abide by thy crib? Canst thou bind the unicorn with his band in the furrow? Or will he harrow the valleys after thee?
Psalms 22:21 - Save me from the lion's mouth: for thou hast heard me from the horns of the unicorns.
Psalms 29:6 - He maketh them also to skip like a calf; Lebanon and Sir'i-on like a young unicorn.
Psalms 92:10 - But my horn shalt thou exalt like the horn of a unicorn: I shall be anointed with fresh oil.
Isaiah 34:7 - And the unicorns shall come down with them, and the bullocks with the bulls; and their land shall be soaked with blood, and their dust made fat with fatness.
Isaiah 34:14 - The wild beasts of the desert shall also meet with the wild beasts of the island, and the satyr shall cry to his fellow; the screech owl also shall rest there, and find for herself a place of rest.
Actually, the firmament is the "heavens" -- the sky.
Actually, no it's not. The "heavens" and the "firmament" were created on two different days in Genesis. They are clearly not the same thing. The firmament is some feature of the atmosphere that separates the waters above (whatever those are) from the waters below (presumably the seas). The stars are hung in the firmament.
Once again, this is poetic language, as are most of the passages you quoted. Poetic literature abounds in metaphor and simile, as I'm sure you are aware.
How exactly do you arrive at the conclusion that certain parts of the Bible are poetic, or metaphor, and certain parts are literally true? Where in the Bible is the guide that tells you which parts should not be taken at face value and which should?
Mod
Ah, sure -- just how do you stretch out the north over an empty place? When the world is flat, of course. Look, you personally are really "stretching" here -- you claimed that the Bible doesn't state that the earth is fixed. It does, repeatedly. You claimed that it doesn't state that the sun literally goes around it -- it does, repeatedly. You claim above that the word "firmament" doesn't refer to a solid bowl -- note well that firmament is an English translation of a Hebrew word that absolutely referred to a solid bowl of sky, one that separated the waters above from the waters below, one that God poured waters through to make it rain, one that bounded and held in the seas. Now we know that the sky isn't solid -- it is the opposite of solid, something we call "vacuum", something that cannot be "spread out", something that cannot be "made firm", and firmament has poetically become equivalent to "sky" so you interpret backwards that it didn't originally mean a solid bowl.
But it did. Not only a solid bowl, but a solid bowl hung with stars that earthquakes could shake down as anything that shook the earth could shake the sky hard enough to make it fall. The ancient Hebrews (like the ancient Sumerians they were descended from and inherited their creation myths from) believed in a flat earth with a Chicken-Little sky. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firmament
So oops, guess all of that isn't just poetry, it is simply incorrect mythology. BTW, the point about the sun standing still is that in order for this to occur the earth's ROTATION has to stop, not its revolution about the sun. The rotation makes the sun appear to come up and go down, remember? In fact, if you build yourself a little model solar system with a beach-ball sun and a (not to scale) tennis-ball earth, and make a little mark with a felt tip pen on the tennis-ball for "Jericho", you can convince yourself that the ONLY way for the sun to appear suspended overhead for any extended time is to stop the earth's rotation cold. Well, or make the sun suddenly start whirling about the earth at a thirteen million miles per hour, which if you made your solar system to SCALE with a beach ball sized sun and an earth the size of number six bird shot located 100 feet away might impress upon you just how silly that is.
Now of course, you believe in a God that can and does make anything he wants to happen on a whim. It doesn't have to be rational, it doesn't have to make sense. So if the Bible says that the sun stopped in the sky, and the Bible is perfect truth and the events it describes always happened the way they are described (when it isn't speaking "poetically", a polite way of attempting to excuse its many, many blatent mistakes and errors) then of course God could just make the earth stop rotating -- why not?
Of course in the real world -- not the fantasy world you insist on inhabiting -- the earth has angular momentum, and in order to stop the earth's rotation a torque has to be applied. In the real world, there are no interactions capable of exerting a torque on the world -- gravity (to within a tiny perturbation linked to tidal effects) is a radial force and conserves angular momentum, electromagnetic forces are tiny and disorganized, and nuclear forces have too short a range. The earth also has an enormous amount of rotational kinetic energy -- bear in mind that you are travelling at roughly 700 miles an hour (points on the equator are travelling at close to 1000 miles an hour) relative to the axis of rotation. Stopping "cold" is like slamming the entire earth into a solid wall, going from hundreds of miles per hour to rest all at once. This kinetic energy, released as heat in the inelastic collision, would vaporize the earth. Poof. Gone.
So sure, believe what you want, but don't pretend that it makes the slightest bit of sense or that it doesn't make God out to be a bit of a batshit crazy liar, violating the natural laws that God himself made in a terrifyingly whimsical and inefficient way. After all, this same God that supposedly stopped the earth's rotation in such an enormously implausible way did this instead of just doing something much simpler -- such as making the enemies of the Hebrews just poof out of existence, or drop dead of myocardial infarctions, or instead of being nice and just appearing Monte Python style in the sky and saying "Hey, Dudes, leave my pet Hebrews alone" and sending a plague of fleas to drive them out of the city and torment them until they behave. In fact, anyone can imagine a few million ways to accomplish any desired (by God) outcome more efficiently than by whimsically altering natural laws in "impossible" ways. But God's impossible/miraculous actions don't have to make sense, do they?
The flood story makes no sense at all in exactly the same way. Let's see, simply make all the people that offend me poof out of existence with my awesome magic, make the entire Universe poof out of existence with my awesome magic and start over, this time building a Universe in which the inhabitants I make won't offend me in the first place (gee, how did I deliberately make that happen), make the people that are offending me see reason and stop by communicating directly with them and asking them very nicely to stop in a way that only God can ask (that is to say, as a personal offer they really can't refuse) -- no, no, no. I know! I'll create an enormous volume of water out of nothing (I'm God and can do anything I want) and I'll drown them all like rats, along with all of the plants and animals too! Bu-u-u-t, it is too much trouble to start over again altogether, so I'll preserve just one family and all of the species of plants and animals on the planet that I want to save in a mathematically impossible way, just so I can be sure that only the complete idiots among their eventual descendants get into heaven -- smart people who can do arithmetic are way too annoying, and besides I want them to fear me and my terrifyingly whimsical ways.
Anybody who can believe that a single family could pack a couple or three million species of land animals (including the hundreds of thousands of insect species) collected from ecological niches and remote Pacific islands and the middle of the Siberian Taiga and the South American tropical rain forest and the backs of remote caves, and all of the saltwater fish and all of the freshwater fish and all of the sessile reef life and every ocean or land plant species -- each in its own necessary ecology, with its own food, with its own fresh water (or salt water!) supply -- into a Wal Mart sized wooden boat ventilated by a single window around 20" square and keep them there, alive, while I flood the earth with a five-inch-a-minute rain for forty days and nights and then float around for over half a year before the flood goes down and then -- when they finally come to ground, but everything back in every ecosystem, every remote island, every polar ecology, plants and animals restored to a sterile ocean and sterile planet, all using Bronze Age technology, those are the people for whom I reserve the Kingdom of Heaven!
Right... as I said, once you throw the rules out the window, you can believe anything you want to! Just don't bother even trying to pretend that it is reasonable. It isn't, it is silly and impossible. In every case you will have to just say "and then a magical impossible miracle happened" that just happened to have left the earth in a state where it doesn't look like what happened happened at all. God is deceptive, God is a liar.
P.S. -- I found this article interesting and wonder what you think of it? (Don't laugh at the name of the website; just read the article.)
Sure, I wouldn't ever laugh at something like this. On the one hand it makes me very, very sad. Why would people deliberately deceive themselves and others? On the other, it makes me very angry, because it politically preserves the power of a group of individuals that wish to control the lives of others by shamelessly exploiting the gullibility of people who should know better -- God knows you've been to school and people there tried to teach you some science and reason -- but who prefer to invert all of their reasoning and try to explain ex post facto a conclusion that they've already arrived that the actual data and reasoning doesn't support at all.
The short answer can be found here, in a reliable account of the actual science, not a silly piece of arithmetic:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbit_of...
The earth and the moon interact via tidal forces (this part the article has right) but that force is rather complicated and required efforts by some of the great mathematicians and physicists of the past to work out. See also (or instead):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_ac...
which is largely devoted to just this phenomenon. The biggest problem with the article is simple arithmetic. If the moon is receding at (say) 4 cm a year, that's a meter every 25 years. In 6000 years its mean radius would have changed 240 meters, a completely negligible amount. Over geological time -- real geology, mind you, not make-up pretend "Biblical" geology -- the changes are not negligible but they are still small. Over geological time the change has averaged out to be smaller -- closer to an inch a year, a meter every forty years instead of twenty five, but hey, let's ignore that and use the bigger figure of four meters per century.
Then 100 million years ago -- a time that never existed according to the Bible -- the moon would have been around four million meters closer. This sounds like a lot, but it is only 4000 kilometers out of roughly 385,000 km. That is, back in the Cretaceous, the moon would have been 381,000 km away, a difference of roughly 1% (and remember, it really would have been less than this as we are exaggerating the effect). A billion years ago it would have been 345,000 km. Extrapolating back to when the moon was actually formed is obviously not possible with a simple linear model, but assuming formation at or about the time the earth was formed (current models for formation suggest that it was formed out of a massive collision with the still-molten earth in the earliest days of the solar system some 4.5 billion years ago -- there are some lovely computer models that simulate such a collision and that seem to work out decently) the moon would still have been no closer that 200,000 km, an entirely plausible number. In actual fact, I would guess that (since tidal acceleration relies on a trailing oceanic bulge and hence is very sensitive to the existence and placement of continents relative to the ocean, disappearing entirely if there are no continents) the actual minimum distance was probably no less than 300,000 km, but that is probably model dependent and I'm too lazy to see what other people have worked out.
BTW, note will -- if one examines fossil silt layers (laid down 620 million years ago, a mere hundred thousand times as long ago as you think the earth has existed at all) there is actual evidence that the day was indeed shorter then in excellent agreement with the model.
Again, the preponderance of evidence overwhelmingly supports a 13.6 billion year old cosmos. The Bible is flat out wrong. If you really use method b), that is...
rgb
How do you explain dragons in almost ever culture. Every evolutionist I have asked, always comes with no answer or a illogical one. Also evolution is not science.
I will put this simply. The human DNA has 3 billion, base pairs. These consist of information that tells our bodies what to make and do. If we assume evolution is true, where did this information come from, or better yet which organ evolved first, the brain, the heart or the eyes. Evolution is not a law, but a theory don’t forget it.
Evolution vs. Intelligent Design
Books mentioned in this topic
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (other topics)Your Inner Fish: a Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body (other topics)
Why Evolution Is True (other topics)
Probability Theory: The Logic of Science (other topics)
Mahabharata: Buku A (other topics)
11. It teaches a number of logical fallacies, such as circular reasoning and confirmation bias, which are the exact opposite of science.
12. It does not rely on the scientific method. It makes no testable, falsifiable hypotheses.
13. It consists, as far as I can tell, of little more than the above-mentioned logical fallacies and efforts to poke holes in evolution. Basically, people who ask that science teachers teach ID are asking them to teach evolution, and then turn around and undermine what they've just taught. Furthermore, in order to poke holes in evolution, ID always relies on dishonesty and distortion, if not outright lies.
14. It undermines the basic scientific principle that truth is determined through methodical examination of data, and replaces it with the asinine idea that truth is a matter of opinion. The idea that we should throw a bunch of ideas at students and let them pick which one is true is ridiculous. How can students be expected to simultaneously learn what is true and decide what is true?
It boggles my mind (or it would, if I believed the people who claim that ID isn't religiously motivated) that evolution is the single subject about which we demand that teachers be purposefully vague and deceptive. We do not demand of history teachers that they "teach the controversy" about whether or not the Holocaust actually happened, and then let the students decide.
15. ID is an attempt to reconcile an increasingly arcane belief system with an expanding body of evidential knowledge. Science is under no obligation to reinforce or validate your personal beliefs. Its obligation is to truth.