# The science thread - Controversial



## chevy (Nov 8, 2003)

This is what I was missing on macosx Café: a science thread. We have a lot of threads about all subjects from non-sense to politics... I would like to add my contribution: science.

I propose a first (controversial as we are in a Café) lecture... and let's speak about it.

Scientific American: 15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense Opponents of evolution want to make a place for creationism by tearing down real science, but their arguments don't hold up


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## Arden (Nov 9, 2003)

I loathe creationists, self-proclaimed modern Christian missionaries, and everybody of that ilk with a passion.  I'm not saying they're bad people or anything, but it's the mindset of "God is the ultimate power, etc." that precludes any other rational thought.



> Evolution is unscientific, because it is not testable or falsifiable. It makes claims about events that were not observed and can never be re-created.


_***********!!*_  This is the one that really gets to me.  What kind of nerve to Christian creationists have to proclaim evolution to be unscientific when they base their entire belief on a single book (well, a bunch of books bound togethernot the point)?  There is little if any proof that much of anything in the Bible actually happened the way it is described, while there is much proof supporting evolution... ugh, blind faith bugs me.

The book Space by James Michner really sums this kind of tragedy up well.  In one facet of the storyline, a scammer somehow manages to get much of the population of the US to reject evolution, despite all the evidence.  It's quite a good thing it didn't happen, I must say.

Unless it did, and I missed it... 

[edit: _arden, don't swear please. there are kids out there, and santa's little helpers, i don't want santa to not bring you a g5 only because he sees you swearing... -gia._]


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## chemistry_geek (Nov 9, 2003)

The creationists have significantly influenced the Ohio State Board of Education.  Up for review is the issue of including a creationist theory of the origin of life in science text books, and placing a sticker (a warning!) on the front cover of some science books that evolution is included in the text.  I think this is completely WRONG!  Science and Religion do not mix, just like Church and State, the two should be seperated from one another permanently.  I admit that I have had little exposure to religion, have attended a few Sunday sermons at local Lutheran churches, but I never once heard anything about evolution.

Peronally, I think that some people either do not understand the science (in general) behind these theories, or that they are "brainwashed", influenced, or willingly deny the theories.  The problem I see that most people have with science is that they think a theory is absolute, it IS the WORD of explanation.  A theory is just a hypothesis that has (some) evidence to support the idea, has been reviewed by the scientific community, and is accepted as a good explanation for the data.  That's all it is.

I have a really good friend who is VERY religious, goes on missions to South America, and helps spread The Word.  We had one very heated debate about the origin of life on Earth.  In his opinion to this day I AM WRONG!  I explained to him from a chemist's point of view that certain elements form with other elements under the RIGHT CONDITIONS to make molecules, that certain REACTIONS take place between molecules under the RIGHT CONDITIONS and make more complicated molecules, and that life will be present on other planets with similar conditions, providing the elemental makeup is similar to Earth.  He went ballistic!  He screamed that God created life and I agreed, but I also said that God created the universe, and laws of the universe, and life could very well exist elsewhere (that statement suggests that humans are NOT the center of God's attention, and that seemed to be problematic) provided the conditions are right for it.

Well, enough ranting, this is a very heated subject, but I think that science should be taught in the science class room and religion taught in either church or a religious class room.


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## chevy (Nov 9, 2003)

I have very religious frineds (I was very religious) who think that is scientists have good reasons to beleive that life came through evolution, that man is the result of an evolution (and probably not the final result), then this is probably the truth, and this does not endanger their religiosity neither does it endanger God's as creator of everything.


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## Arden (Nov 11, 2003)

My dad borrowed a Jehovah's Witness book (I think it was them) that basically tries to refute evidence pointing toward evolution.  I didn't read much of it, but it made points on very shaky ground.

I'm sorry if I seem emotional about this, but I really can't stand devout religiousness.  Yes, I am Jewish, and Jews have many of the same beliefs as Christians and Muslims, but I consider myself more of a social Jew and not a religious Jew.  I take science as the first possibility and religious explanations as secondary, unproven hypotheses, and I hate (yes, hate) it when people try to present stuff the other way around.



			
				chemistry_geek said:
			
		

> Well, enough ranting, this is a very heated subject, but I think that science should be taught in the science class room and religion taught in either church or a religious class room.


Most definitely.  Alas, we live under the spying gaze of the Bush administration, and they are unlikely to do much to improve this situation.


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## JohnnyV (Nov 12, 2003)

I am a somewhat religious man.  I still do not know what I believe about the creation of man.  Many parts of evolution are shakey and not totally explained, yet I don't believe that God just created life as we know it in a snap.  I think he allowed the laws of science that he set (like chem geek said) to do the dirty work.  I know many religious that believe in Evolution, including 3 priests and 2 nuns, so don't think that all religious think that evolution is BS.


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## Giaguara (Nov 12, 2003)

I think science should be taught in science class, and religion in church. 

I disagree with the policy that the kid has to be taught religionally whatever his/her mum believes in untill s/he is 18. so sorry if my post below this line goes to religious anything, questioning, rant etc, but it is just one more slow response to having been taught christianity as the truth in the school untill i was 18 .. the religious liberty for people under 18 at least in europe is an oxymoron. so you have to be taught whatever your mum or parents want. with no one (of the teachers etc) giving any satisfactory answers to any of your questions.

Anyway, I was curious. So I saw these 15 points, and just points of a complete religion-ignorant view. (In the sense: blieve in whatever you believe, just don't bug me with it. And keep even my funerals religionfree please). Sorry if my point hurt anyone's religious or other views, they are not meant to.

1. Evolution is only a theory. It is not a fact or a scientific law. 
# I assume that the bible is more than theory then? The (hi)story book itself does not make the things that are written in it to be 100 % true. Prove them to me.
2. Natural selection is based on circular reasoning: the fittest are those who survive, and those who survive are deemed fittest. 
# I don't see a controversy here. Where is it?
3. Evolution is unscientific, because it is not testable or falsifiable. It makes claims about events that were not observed and can never be re-created. 
# Please, re-create the stories of the bible. I am very curious, I would want to test and observe them.
4. Increasingly, scientists doubt the truth of evolution. 
# Maybe because there are no such things as a 150 y old theory that has remained the same? X rays have developed since they were invented, so has pasteur's techniques .. etc. 
5. The disagreements among even evolutionary biologists show how little solid science supports evolution. 
# Well, i still fail to see how religion, in the sense of litteral interpretation of the (hi)stories of the bible, could be supported by science either. 
6. If humans descended from monkeys, why are there still monkeys? 
# Well, humans created red potatoes and there still are normal potatoes. So? Or there are rabbits and jack rabbits .. or lions and tigers and housecats.
If god created the humans, why is the human body so buggy then? Isn't he ever going to fix his bugs, and release a new human?
7. Evolution cannot explain how life first appeared on earth. 
# bible does not explain the origin of the god. "eternal" or "has lived forever" are not satisfactory answers.
8. Mathematically, it is inconceivable that anything as complex as a protein, let alone a living cell or a human, could spring up by chance. 
# and mathematically, something as ... simple then?? as god, obviously exists.
9. The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that systems must become more disordered over time. Living cells therefore could not have evolved from inanimate chemicals, and multicellular life could not have evolved from protozoa. 
# well, humans are more disordered than amebas.. the use of the second thermdynamics law, the first really specified law, is interesting. well, as something letteral to point .. well, read apocalypse and explain it to me. it sounds like something written under substances, and on the same time old, meant to just scare the people so that they would not stand against the church.
10. Mutations are essential to evolution theory, but mutations can only eliminate traits. They cannot produce new features. 
# i disagree with this one. in a really long term, the mutations can create new features. like wings to the birds, they were kind of mutated hands .. but in a really, really long time.
11. Natural selection might explain microevolution, but it cannot explain the origin of new species and higher orders of life. 
# explain the higher orders of life, plese?
12. Nobody has ever seen a new species evolve. 
# nobody that i know, has ever seen god or jesus or moses or anyone described in the bible.
13. Evolutionists cannot point to any transitional fossils--creatures that are half reptile and half bird, for instance. 
# those who interpret bible litterally can't find noah's ark or a proof of mary's virginity either.
14. Living things have fantastically intricate features--at the anatomical, cellular and molecular levels--that could not function if they were any less complex or sophisticated. The only prudent conclusion is that they are the products of intelligent design, not evolution. 
# .. i've had enough of the bugs of the human body. when will the new version with bug fixes be released? don't tell me someone made just the human beta and left the programming on the beta level. you can sure love your appendix, fat, poor sight and intelligence, unwanted erections and periods etc etc etc but i want fixes to those and so many other bugs. as species, not individually. 
15. Recent discoveries prove that even at the microscopic level, life has a quality of complexity that could not have come about through evolution.
# they cite a few phrases of a research. i don't follow how they come to this point 15 from that part of the research they cite.


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## bobw (Nov 12, 2003)

I kind of remember my Great, Great, Great, Great Grand Parents being Apes.


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## chevy (Nov 12, 2003)

I sometimes feel like an ape myself. And I shall not disclose what I sometimes think looking at my boss


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## Giaguara (Nov 12, 2003)

Well, my dad is an ape .. in the chinese horoscope. And he is very ape.


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## chevy (Nov 12, 2003)

Huiiiiiiiick


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## Total Konfuzion (Nov 12, 2003)

i was brought up catholic and thoroughly brainwashed into believing and not questioning anything the catholic church taught me, until that is i went through confirmation and stopped going to church, heh.  Then i started questioning just about everything...which is sometimes a good thing, but now i'm more confused than I ever was...and that reason alone makes people just stick to what their religious backgrounds taught them...why question things when it just leads to more confusion? heh....


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## chevy (Nov 12, 2003)

having questions is more a sign of intelligence than having answers


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## Vard (Nov 12, 2003)

Sometimes I think that hardcore religious folks are their worst enemies.

Like TK, I was brought up pretty darn Catholic.  And even after I joined the military and met my future wife, we always talked about bringing our children-were we to have any-which we do-10 month old Jasmine, and one in the oven-up with Christian goings on.  Then I went back to college and studied history, with a bend for religious studies.  Man, that really messed me up...or freed me, whatever you want to call it.

Maybe it's my pragmatism, but religion is pretty much over in my life.  Spirituality isn't, which I consider to be very different, but religion is out.  Thankfully, while I was getting screwed up in college, my wife and I continued our discourse about this subject.  We still agree, but we agree that we'll deal with spirituality for ourselves and for our children how we see fit, not how someone else thinks it should be.

All that said, I still love my mom-sure, she believes and all that, which I am actually very happy for, for her sake.  I basically look at it like this:

Organized religion (or any religion) lost the battle for me...sorry.  But that doesn't mean that I expect others to feel like I do.  If it makes people better people to believe what they want, then good on them.  It might be hard for someone whom has always been told about life after death to think about nothing after death.  I understand that that would make people uncomfortable.  But I am ok with it.  Believe what you want so long as it doesn't (or you don't use your beliefs to) infringe or restrict others beliefs and liberty's.

Go to church/synagogue/mosque/etc...I'll still meet you for breakfast afterwards!


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## bobw (Nov 12, 2003)

I was also brought up Catholic.

The Catholic Church and the US Government are sort of alike now. They both have leaders that don't know what theyre doing.


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## Giaguara (Nov 12, 2003)

bobw, don't insult the pope


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## chevy (Nov 13, 2003)

bobw said:
			
		

> I was also brought up Catholic.
> 
> The Catholic Church and the US Government are sort of alike now. They both have leaders that don't know what theyre doing.



I've heart the same sentence, but it was about the Italian government.

For my part I think the US and the Italian governement know exactly what they are doing. The electors may not know.


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## Total Konfuzion (Nov 13, 2003)

I like people the same, whether they are religious or not(not fantatical religious people) and I love debating certain things with them. I do this often with my mother and I have at least opened up her mind to some things she never thought of, which is good, considering she's from the "old world" and has believed the bible for 60 years now....so i take that as a big step...i'm not trying to push things on people, but even a religious person should have an open mind to other theories and possibilities for certain things that are otherwise unexplainable.


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## bobw (Nov 13, 2003)

Gia

Wasn't meant as an insult.


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## Giaguara (Nov 13, 2003)

I know bobw. do i need to use only the  smile instead of all the others to indicate something is more in the humoric/sarcastic/light/justplaindumbhumoric sense?


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## Arden (Nov 15, 2003)

chevy said:
			
		

> having questions is more a sign of intelligence than having answers


 I fully agree with this statement.  Anybody can become brainwashed and recite rhetoric out one's ass for the rest of one's life, but that does not make one intelligent if one simply recites what one has memorized.  Intelligence is more than that:  question the supposed truth, doctrine, and canon for all it's worth, and if the apples stay in the tree, then take them as fact.  If you manage to knock a few theories on their asses with evidence to the contrary, then keep working at it.

Intelligent people learn new things and then question what they know.  They do not simply accept something as fact, but try to find the answers from every angle.  It's like being in the Matrix:  those trapped in the Matrix simply accept the world (religion, say) as fact and don't question it, probably not knowing that there is something outside.  Those outside the Matrix try to see a situation from every angle before accepting it as truth, and can be considered more along the lines of science.

Oh, and G, it's "humorous."


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## donkey (Nov 15, 2003)

it seems to be the consensus that creationists are wrong and some of you have gone so far to say that religion is somewhat of a hoax.  i have my doubts as well, but there is something to be said in favor it, i believe.

one of you mentioned that you hate that these people go on "blind faith".  that is what religion is all about.  heaven, hell, god, etc are all there via blind faith.  they are built on it.  to lack faith is to lack religion.  you can take that stand and say it is "wrong", but i would disagree with you.

some of you came with the arguments that since the creationists said, "prove to me these evolutionary theories" that the creationists should do the same.  see the above paragraph for an automatic response.  faith man.  that's what it is about.  you can't prove it.  neither can they.  but you know what?  they don't have to.  you do.

now i just want to make it clear that i am by no means a "creationist", but it does fill in some gaps in evolutionary theory.  not sure what i mean?  tell me how the eyeball evolved?


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## Arden (Nov 15, 2003)

And that is exactly the problem I have with religion, that it goes on blind faith and accepts magic & miracles as happenstance.  You can't prove a single word of it, much as it may seem to fill in a couple gaps, and I need something proven to me or I don't accept it as fact, scientifically speaking.

As for the evolution of the eye issue, check out this article.  Everything in nature can be explained rationally, even if it's just a guesswhich this, for one, is not.


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## pds (Nov 16, 2003)

The fact that religion and science are seen as either/or is the root of the problem. To me they are completely compatible, just they haven't been able to find the proper line between them. The development of deductive science is relatively recent in the whole scheme of things, whereas the religious parameters that we are working with are much older. 

Both science and religion are efforts of man to dispel his ignorance, ignorance that can be seen as being both internal (questions of why) and external (questions of how). How and why are compatible, even supportive of each other. "Knowing" one helps us to understand the other, or at least leads us to hypothesize something about the other. 

In the absence of good science, religion usurped some areas of knowledge that did not belong to it - i.e. how the universe is shaped, how the species evolved. As science explains those things, religion must yield, and hold to it's area of expertise - why? We needn't think that because it took God a long time to create the world that his talent and ability is any less. In fact it inspires me no end to think of the patient attention to detail that went into the forming of the cosmos.

The two disciplines have different methodologies, different reasonings, and that may be at the heart of the difficulty that adherents of either have trouble with the other. Still, the final "truth" is not known. The Bible, the Koran, the other sacred texts are not the "truth", but textbooks guiding us to the truth. (All of those books say that there is more to come at some future point.) We "know" that truth when we exhibit it as "godhead" (substitute your favorite icon here). I don't know of true aescetics (I know a few) who are anything less than unificationist in their outlook, all is one.   

The problem may well be the baggage that we hang on the word "religion" - as some posters have tried to draw a distinction between religion and spirituality. I had a friend who did missionary work in Italy. When he would ask people if they believed in God, they would answer no. After some time he came to realize they meant they didn't believe in the church, or more specifically they didn't believe the padre down the street with three illegitimate children and a live-in mistress. They didn't believe in the corruption.

Religion by definition is the search to re-bind with our source, with the original cause the cosmic "I"(re-ligo = to bind again). We can draw the distinction not as between religion and spirituality but between corruption and religion. Religious movements throughout history have become ossified and institutionalized, politicized by the mundane needs of the organization. In those cases, new revelation has come to prod the faithful to a higher practice, a higher (deeper) understanding. Sometimes that is incremental, sometimes it is revolutionary, always it expresses a move towards greater love and more personal responsibility. We witnessed it in the past 25 years in the person of the present pope. Not revolutionary, for me not enough, but the man is a beacon of love and reconcilliation.

There are fanatics on both sides, religious and scientific, those who have decided that their's is the only way. Scientists can also become ossified and dogmatic, although when they do they cease to be scientists, just as religionists who become dogmatic cease to be re-binders.

I think that the divorce of science and religion in the public discourse has lead to the polarization that can even be seen in the posts to this thread. We should understand that we seek together answers to both the how and the why and they are not antithecal. 

If we are on one side or the other, throwing stones, are we part of the solution or part of the problem?


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## chevy (Nov 16, 2003)

Religion and science are completely different, and both are very bad when they try to address the field of the other discipline.

Science answers to "how". Religion answers to "why". Some scientific people are religious, some religious people have a good science background. Some scientifique people thinks that the "how" can find an answer and the "why" not and are therefore not religious, some religious people think that the "why" is far more important than the "how" and therefore use pseudo scientific theories to support the "why". But religion has basically no clue about the "how" and cannot as its methodology is not based on the predominance of the open questions. And science cannot give an answer to the "why" as its methodology is not based on the study of a will.


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## pds (Nov 16, 2003)

As my young son once said, "if you take away all the differences, they are the same...!"   

Inasmuch as they both seek to dispel man's ignorance, the are the same, inasmuch as one uses the avenue of experimentation and the other of revelation, they are completely different.

But Aquinas enriched the depth of Christian understanding with his "methodical doubt", so the idea of the open question does exist in religion. True, major paradigms are revealed through certain figures. Our don't-deal-with-details image of those figures is that they walked a couple inches off the ground and never had to take a dump, but infact, they were doubters too. They doubted the status quo but accepted the idea of the transcendental being. It was their doubt, their question, that put them in line to get an answer. They expressed the answer as best they could in the lexicon of their cultural circumstances.

I agree Chevy that both are bad ("very bad") when they try to address a realm outside of their own, but in the final analysis, the "truth" will be both the how and the why. And the delineation of the boundary between them is not to be shouted out from the pulpit or from the lab or in the field, but in a closer cooperation and a fruitful dialog in the academy.

As much as different religions need to sit down and work out their issues, science and religion, perhaps the scientific religionists and the religious scientists at first, need to mutually and flexibly define the boundaries of their disciplines...


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## donkey (Nov 16, 2003)

in reponse to eye rebuttal, i looked at the page and the links, and that "scientific method" conjures up as much hand waving as the creationists.  good stuff.

in my mind, the ideas can coexist.  even if you can explain everything scientifically, who are you to say that some higher power didn't design it that way?


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## chevy (Nov 16, 2003)

We don't say "It is this way", we say "We think it is this way". In physics if you can eliminate a variable from an equation, you do so.


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## Arden (Nov 17, 2003)

The Bible and the Koran, and other religious texts of the same type, are nothing more than theories.  No, hypotheses.  The problem is that many people who follow such texts take them as truth, instead of trying to find a working model to test the hypothesis and remodel it to fit the evidence as with science.  In science, one does not say "This is the truth" unless it has been tested over and over by many, many people and come up with an insignificant deviation each time.  Religion does not do that, religion takes the hypothesis at face value as a fact which can not be disputed.  Even scientific laws, like gravity, may be disproven someday, somehow.

I always like to say "Nothing's impossible, just highly improbable."  The probability of disproving gravity is slim to none, but the possibility still exists.  People put the Bible, etc., as fact, with not even the possibility of it being the other way around.

And that is the root of the problem I have with religion.


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## Cat (Nov 17, 2003)

We need to distinguish a few things here: as arden pointed out, the problem is not religiosity or spirituality but THE BOOK. If it's not in the book it's wrong: evolution is not in the book, so it's wrong. This is not science but blind faith.
As pds pointed out, many people have a problem with the church, not with religion per se.
And finally, pure spiritual faith in souls, gods etc. rarely conflicts directly with science, because they mainly cover different grounds.

So we have the problem of the book, the church and spirituality. 

Creationists, specifically, pertain mostly to the first problematic category. The book says nothing about dinosaurs, but mentions the big flood, nothing about evolution, but only the creation of species. 
As onec we had Aristotelian physics, and they worked very well and still are an intuitive tool, now we have developed better theories: more elegant, more efficient, more simple, more applicable. REligion has developed nothing. However, creationists come in different flavors. Some take the bible as absolute and only truth, other admit degrees of interpretation and consider Genesis as a metaphor, or as an imperfect theory, only true as far as known at that time. On the other hand there are scientists which are amazed at the degree of correspondence and parallels in Genesis and evolution theory.

The church has always claimed: we have the truth, come to us. Science has begun with the stance: we don't know shit, let's try to figure out this mess. The church begins with an absolute revealed truth, science begins from ignorance. The church already has a book and an interpretation, science has the world and no "one truth fits all" interpretation. Looking for the truth is a better way to find it than claiming to already have it.

Spirituality and science both can be seen as stemming from the same seed: the thirst for knowledge. We want to know who we are, where we stand, where we came from and where we are going. Science, in general and as a whole, tries to answer these questions from within nature and man, spirituality tries to answer it from wothout, through gods and powers beyond the purely phisuical domain. Yet do not universal laws and truths like relativity and immortal souls belong to the same domain? We do not know, so it's a valid question. Science and spirituality share the quest for truth, but diverge in their methods. Their object is the same: understanding. But their ways are different. The book and the church try to interfere, spirituality does not.

Read Frazer's "The golden bough". You'll discover very interesting things regarding religion.


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## toast (Nov 18, 2003)

"I kind of remember my Great, Great, Great, Great Grand Parents being Apes. "

Good one, Bob ! 

"The Bible and the Koran, and other religious texts of the same type, are nothing more than theories. No, hypotheses."

Arden, please make sure you know what you're talking about before posting. The Quran surates contain thousands of historical examples of what practical education or law was at such or such period of time.

For instance, the eye for an eye law is not a muslim theory or hypothesis, although it is in the Quran (surate 5 "Table is dressed" if I recall well, or maybe surate 2). It is there as an illustration of the forms given by men to justice in some places (sacred land), at some time.

Creationists... What a laugh. If anyone knows people with biggest blindfolds than creationists, let me know.


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## MDLarson (Nov 19, 2003)

Man, I just feel like a piñata after reading this thread.  It's been a while since I threw myself into a religious thread.  (RacerX was my main debate partner)

I am one of those creationists you guys are bashing, and I don't 100% fit into your preconceptions of what a creationist is.  From my point of view, there is a lot of mis-speaking when it comes to what the Bible actually says (and the Quran, according to Toast).  For instance, I'm convinced that the Bible lists two dinosaurs in Job 40-something.  If you did a search for the word "dinosaur" in the Bible, it wouldn't have shown up because the word hadn't been invented yet.  Therefore, leviathan and behemoth were the best names / descriptions for these beasts.  And for those who actually want to follow up on this and look in their Bibles, the footnotes that say these animals are alligators or hippos or elephants are wrong.  They appear to be describing legitimate dinosaurs.

Anyway, I gotta get back to work... I wish I had enough time to give you Christian-bashers a run for your money, but I don't.  Just be easy on me, 'cause I'm not who you think I am apparently.  You don't know what *I* believe as a Bible-believing Christian.

...


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## chevy (Nov 19, 2003)

I may not accept a theory and still accept people who accept this theory.

Not too serious here...


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## Cat (Nov 19, 2003)

Dinosaurs in the bible? If the pope heard you, you'd be excommunicated ... 
Apart from that, dinosaurs, according to evolutionism, were extinct long before the ascent of humankind and are surely beyond historical reckoning. So how do we get actual dinosaurs in the bible? Nobody could have seen them or even have heard of them. The reconstruction of pre-historic earth wrt. dinosaurs started seriously in the 1800's. Bones were found an put together and inferences made. Then came the Carbonium dating and the astonishing results thereof. According to the "hard" line of bible interpretation, animals and people were created, not evolved, and the entire earth is just a few (~6) millennia old. The hardliners take the bible literally. This is more or less the stance that is being discussed (in the article and here).

You are free to believe what you want, of course, and I will respect that. I would like to hear from you what makes you believe in creation rather than evolution. 

Personally I trust the dynamics of 2000 years of rational inquiry and methodological doubt more than blind faith in the truth of an unchanging 2000 year old text.


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## chevy (Nov 19, 2003)

Cat said:
			
		

> ...
> Personally I trust the dynamics of 2000 years of rational inquiry and methodological doubt more than ...



This is a good point.


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## Arden (Nov 19, 2003)

Cat said:
			
		

> Personally I trust the dynamics of 2000 years of rational inquiry and methodological doubt more than blind faith in the truth of an unchanging 2000 year old text.


I think that sums up all of my arguments quite nicely.

Leviathans and behemoths could refer to the whales in the see, or possibly imaginary creatures like the Loch Ness Monster et al.  Doesn't mean they're dinosaurs.


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## Darkshadow (Nov 19, 2003)

Um...how can you believe in dinosaurs but not really believe in evolution?


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## MDLarson (Nov 19, 2003)

arden said:
			
		

> Leviathans and behemoths could refer to the whales in the see, or possibly imaginary creatures like the Loch Ness Monster et al.  Doesn't mean they're dinosaurs.


They _could_ be non-dinosaurs, but an honest look at the actual text would _probably_ change your mind on this...
Job 40 - Describing the Behemoth
Job 41 - Describing the Levithan
The footnotes on the NIV version suggest that these creatures are NOT dinosaurs, but rather some less "controversial" animal.  These footnotes were an effort to blend Biblical text with common evolutionary doctrine (that dinosaurs came-and went before humans ever showed up.)  Like I said before, it doesn't jive well.

For that matter, why do you believe that some modern-day dinosaurs are not around?  Perhaps there really is a "Loch Ness Monster"; a sea-dwelling "dinosaur."  With my young-earth worldview, I would have no problem believing that some small jungle dinosaurs are in the Amazon somewhere or that there are some deep sea dwelling plesiosaurs or something.

To strengthen this idea of "living fossils," I know of at least one species (the ceolethera or something - it's a fish) that scientists only knew from the fossil record.  Turns out when they found some living off Madagascar or something it was _exactly_ the same fish.



			
				Cat said:
			
		

> Personally I trust the dynamics of 2000 years of rational inquiry and methodological doubt more than blind faith in the truth of an unchanging 2000 year old text.


I'm glad to hear that you believe the Bible hasn't changed, but translation and interpretation differences are a problem.  I would contend that I do not live a contented life with *blind* faith.  I have _faith_ that God created, perhaps much like you have _faith_ that there once existed a Cosmic Egg or a Big Bang.  I also happen to believe that science upholds Bible history, not counters it.

Also let me remind you that the "dynamics of 2000 years of rational inquiry and methodological doubt" _is a result of evolutionary chance_, as you might put it.  How can you trust your own thoughts, if they're only a product of a brain that was, in the end, the result of billions and billions of _accidental mutations_?  This is getting pretty philosophical, but I'm only describing my point of view; which is that the human brain (and *reason*, for that matter) is a wonderfully _designed_ part of the human body.



			
				Darkshadow said:
			
		

> Um...how can you believe in dinosaurs but not really believe in evolution?


Do you know of any Creationists who deny the existence of dinosaurs?  To answer your question, I simply believe that neither dinosaurs nor humans evolved.

====
Footnote:  I've been through these types of discussions before.  I do not plan on exhausting myself in trying to convince forum-goers that I'm right and you're wrong - that doesn't satisfy anybody or solve anything.  I am, however, open to fair, honest, and *slow-paced* discussion (I am the minority on this board, remember).  Please don't make me feel like a piñata.  That way I won't think you are a stick.


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## Arden (Nov 19, 2003)

Okay, so the leviathan is nothing more than a whale and the behemoth is some sort of land creature, could be an elephant.

I believe there are modern dinosaurs around, and that we like to call them lizards and birds.  That's not to say there are no actual dinosaurs still around, but we've never found any since they presumably died out or mutated after the big, well, whatever that happened 65 million years ago.

Hey, it could be that God made evolution so he wouldn't have to monitor everything.


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## Giaguara (Nov 19, 2003)

MDLarson said:
			
		

> [...]To strengthen this idea of "living fossils," I know of at least one species (the ceolethera or something - it's a fish) that scientists only knew from the fossil record.  Turns out when they found some living off Madagascar or something it was _exactly_ the same fish.
> 
> [...]Do you know of any Creationists who deny the existence of dinosaurs?  To answer your question, I simply believe that neither dinosaurs nor humans evolved.




There are plenty of species around that have not changed at all in past hundreds of thousands or millions of years. You don't have to go to Madagascar to find those species. They are around you. A normal worm, hedgehog, the tree called gingko biloba (it may have another name in english?) .. they have been the same for millions of years.

Humans have not evolved? I think there has been a big change in the physical human body in the past 200 years. If you go to a museum, and see the beds of before, you will maybe see what I mean. If now the women are in average 5'4" and men 5'10" (or somewhere around there, depending on race, country etc), in the past the people were not so tall. Probably even your parents or grandparents were not as tall as you are. I am 5'9" and believe I am too tall .. and I remember I had several aunts that were 4'7" - 4'8" high. It was not uncommon one day. It is still not uncommon if you are old. But if you are a young person, lets say in your 20ies, being 4'7" is far, far more uncommon than it was 50, or 150 years ago. Even if the explanation would be such simple as the modern people have a better access to food than the people before, it still is a change in the human race. And I don't believe it can be explained only with the food theory - in many African coutnries the access to food is not better than what our grand-grandparents had. And I have never seen an emigrant of African countries (I haven't been to Africa yet, so I have to base my observations on Africans migrated to Europe and US) (Somaliaa, around Somalia, Mozambique, Madagascar, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, etc etc) that would have been of the height of anywhere even close to 4'7". They are all tall(er). Also, if you study the skull of the modern people and those who lived lets say 300 years ago, also the skull size is a bit bigger now.


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## MDLarson (Nov 19, 2003)

arden said:
			
		

> Okay, so the leviathan is nothing more than a whale and the behemoth is some sort of land creature, could be an elephant.


No, I don't think so.  Whales don't have scales, or "rows of shields" (verse 15-17) and whales don't breath fire (verses 19-21), as some dinosaurs have been speculated to do.  And elephants don't have tails like a cedar (verse 17), they have little tails.  And if the author of Job meant "snout" instead of "tail," that would mean there is a mistake in the Bible, and therefore *fallable*.

I don't want to belabor the point, but I think it's clear that these animals are something that we have not seen in recent years.  A straight-forward reading of the passage leaves little "wiggle-room" in interpretation.  Of course we don't know _exactly_ what they are, but they are most likely honest-to-goodness "dinosaurs."


			
				Giaguara said:
			
		

> Humans have not evolved? I think there has been a big change in the physical human body in the past 200 years.


Be careful with the term "evolution."  There are different kinds; micro-evolution and macro-evolution.
Micro-evolution:  Evolution _within_ a species.
Macro-evolution:  Evolution _between_ species.

The question should be, have humans been "changing species?"  200 years is a very small sample space to conclude that humans have "evolved."

There may well have been changes, and I don't dispute that.  I wouldn't call them "big" changes, however (given the context of mutational evolution.)  I think this is a case of micro-evolution.  I do think nutrition has a lot to do with humans generally being taller.  Maybe environmental factors like diseases are worth considering.

I remember in 5th or 6th grade my science teacher was teaching basic evolutionary theory.  She used this example:  The change in wing color of the peppered moths during the industrial revolution.  (This is from memory, so hold on...)
Nearly all of the moths had dark wings.  This allowed them to rest on the bark of dark trees and evade the feeding birds, but a small percentage of light-winged moths were produced out of the population due to the randominity of the gene pool (just like human eye or hair color.)  It was bound to happen _by chance_ that these light-winged moths exists in a predominately black-winged population.  The birds were able to pick these moths out very easily and kept this lop-sided ratio intact.
But, the factories in the vicinity began spewing out light-colored ash or something, which coated the tree bark a light color.  Now, the light-colored moths became much more safe then their dark-winged brethren, and the ratio between dark and light winged moths eventually flip-flopped as the birds chose the dark colored moths.
More time passed, factories became cleaner or went away, and trees regained their dark hue once again.  The ratio between dark and light flip-flopped *again*.

This is a perfect example of mis-application by evolutionists.  This is micro-evolution, or change within a species.  I think evolutionists now deny that this is true evolution, but I'm not sure if it's still used as a "textbook example."  It shouldn't be.


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## Arden (Nov 20, 2003)

MDLarson said:
			
		

> No, I don't think so.  Whales don't have scales, or "rows of shields" (verse 15-17) and whales don't breath fire (verses 19-21), as some dinosaurs have been speculated to do.  And elephants don't have tails like a cedar (verse 17), they have little tails.  And if the author of Job meant "snout" instead of "tail," that would mean there is a mistake in the Bible, and therefore *fallable*.


Okay, you caught me, I didn't read the passages very closely. 


			
				MDLarson said:
			
		

> Nearly all of the moths had dark wings.  This allowed them to rest on the bark of dark trees and evade the feeding birds, but a small percentage of light-winged moths were produced out of the population due to the randominity of the gene pool (just like human eye or hair color.)  It was bound to happen _by chance_ that these light-winged moths exists in a predominately black-winged population.  The birds were able to pick these moths out very easily and kept this lop-sided ratio intact.
> But, the factories in the vicinity began spewing out light-colored ash or something, which coated the tree bark a light color.  Now, the light-colored moths became much more safe then their dark-winged brethren, and the ratio between dark and light winged moths eventually flip-flopped as the birds chose the dark colored moths.
> More time passed, factories became cleaner or went away, and trees regained their dark hue once again.  The ratio between dark and light flip-flopped *again*.


It was actually the other way around, the trees were lightly covered, favoring light-colored moths.  The factories put out lots of dark stuff, turning the trees dark.  But the point remains.


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## Cat (Nov 20, 2003)

> Also let me remind you that the "dynamics of 2000 years of rational inquiry and methodological doubt" is a result of evolutionary chance, as you might put it. How can you trust your own thoughts, if they're only a product of a brain that was, in the end, the result of billions and billions of accidental mutations? This is getting pretty philosophical, but I'm only describing my point of view; which is that the human brain (and reason, for that matter) is a wonderfully designed part of the human body.


 If rationality has evolved instead of being created, I still fail to see why that would be a liability instead of an asset ... Through millennia of conscious thought the fittest thinkers, the more logical, rational, intelligent have propagated their methods and results by example and by teaching. Science as we know it today is a product of a long tradition and the critics thereof. We are constantly climbing on the shoulders of our predecessors, challenging what they did and adding to it. Methods have been refined from Aristotle, through Bacon and Newton and are being fine tuned as we speak. Like a tool our thought gets sharper and sharper being more and more capable of penetrating through the fog of ignorance and carving nature at her joints. Like the evolution of the microscope has been dictated by what we wanted to discover, wanted to be anble to see because we deemed it important, our physical lenses, our eyes have been constructed by evolution to bring forward those aspects of reality that matter to us most, for our survival. Rationality is a tool, like our fingers, that is becoming more and more specialized with the years. Evolution is constantly pushing us beyond, posing new challenges to which we must rise.
What has the bible and faith given us? Static, unchanging doctrine. Force used against rational thought and inquiry. Giordano Bruno was burned in 1600 for challenging the world view of the church. Newton and Galilei have suffered from idiots that took the bible literally: "stop o sun, and thou o moon do not proceed further". Spinoza and Cartesius had to adapt their text to repression of creative thought and advancement of science because of the faith in a fairy tale.
I believe in science because science admits doubt. You can always challenge the theories in a book and it is because of this that they change and we advance our knowledge. The bible and faith do not admit of similar ciritcism, so there is no advance, no evolution. Science and rationality evolve constantly on all levels. Religion is like astrology. 
You can claim that god is beyond what we can think and say, but my world consists solely of what I can see, know and think. I do not need any gods beyond me. I am my own god. I supply to myself the explanantions and theories necessary to understand reality. Science and reason are my intruments. I have no need for blind faith, because I can see my reality day by day before my eyes. Open your eyes and follow   the advice of St. Augustine: "Nole foras ire, rede in te ipsum." The truth is not out there. Est deus in nobis.


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## pds (Nov 20, 2003)

> If rationality has evolved instead of being created, I still fail to see why that would be a liability instead of an asset ... Through millennia of conscious thought the fittest thinkers, the more logical, rational, intelligent have propagated their methods and results by example and by teaching. Science as we know it today is a product of a long tradition and the critics thereof. We are constantly climbing on the shoulders of our predecessors, challenging what they did and adding to it. Methods have been refined from Aristotle, through Bacon and Newton and are being fine tuned as we speak. Like a tool our thought gets sharper and sharper being more and more capable of penetrating through the fog of ignorance and carving nature at her joints. Like the evolution of the microscope has been dictated by what we wanted to discover, wanted to be anble to see because we deemed it important, our physical lenses, our eyes have been constructed by evolution to bring forward those aspects of reality that matter to us most, for our survival. Rationality is a tool, like our fingers, that is becoming more and more specialized with the years. Evolution is constantly pushing us beyond, posing new challenges to which we must rise.



Who was it that said that neither of these disciplines are good on the other's turf. Present theological doctrine, espoused by modern prostestant churches are the product of the debate of 17th and 18th century theologians like Bart and Pendergast, influenced by philosphers like Kant and Jung, and spiritualists like Swedenborg which in turn grew out of the ideas of the reformation which was an attempt to re-capture the intellectual energy of Augustine. There is development and doubt and debate in the realm of religion.

Most laypersons today are unaware of the influence of process theology on their pastor's Sunday sermons, as well as of the conflict that trained clergy have dealing with modern concepts of the historical Jesus and the expectations placed on them by congregations that don't want to deal with those modern theological constructions. 

Cat, have you heard of the Bengali tradeswomen of the 17th century who could weave silk so fine a bolt of it could be easily drawn through a finger ring? The British, jealous of the competition in the garment industry, cut off the fingers of the tradeswomen and the art passed into history in one generation. Now if that ability were evolutionary, it would have been inherited by the crafts-daughters. It was training and not evolution that brought about the ability.

Same with the sharpness of the mind. Is reasoning an evolutionary trait? Can we really reason better today than Plato could? We have more facts at our disposal, that is true, but is the abiliy more developed because of evolution? I think it is training, not evolution that brings the sharpness to the tool of the mind. According to at least one constitutional scholar, the founding fathers of the US were decidedly more intelligent than (himself and) the professors of polisci of today. They were diligently trained and strove to understand their world as it affected them.

The development of science progresses on the basis of observation and experimentation. It deals with a concrete world of manipulable stuff. Our ability to manipulate it expands as our tools become more refined, not through evolution, but through practice. 

Religion also progresses, but through revelation. It is not as progressive, it advances in fits and starts. Still, the revelatory process is not unlike evolution itself - take MD's example of the moth.

There are quantum leaps of revealed truth - e.g. Jesus' gospel vis-a-vis the old testament or Mohamed's hadith vis-a-vis the dominant culture of the time. This is like the appearance of a new species. Then there is the minor adjustment within the species - e.g. Luther's reformation to rebuild the church. This is like the moth changing colors.

To take any of the texts from the past as exclusive of developments that may come in the future is somewhat arrogant IMHO. Take a simple quote from the mouth of the man, Jesus. He said clearly that Moses had told the people something (that divorce was acceptable under such and such conditions) because the people were too hard headed to accept the real bit, that there was no reason other than infidelity for divorce. (Please, this is an example, not a statement of social doctrine. The point is that "revealed truth" is always contextualized.)

More directly "I have many things to tell you, but you can not bear them now." So more info is to come, stay tuned.  

In fact, I welcome doubt of the scripture, because then we can find out what it really means, what it really meant. I don't think anything is true because it is in the Bible, I think it's in the Bible because it's true, but must be understood within the context. Faith (knowledge) is the found at the end of a process of doubt, not the denial of it.



> Open your eyes and follow the advice of St. Augustine: "Nole foras ire, rede in te ipsum." The truth is not out there. Est deus in nobis.



While the truth is not "out there", that does not mean there is no truth. In my experience, God is a reality - just as He was for St Augustine, who spoke with Him and even argued with Him. He advised us to seek for Him through our own soul and consciousness, but to find the real Him, the Father of you and of me. 

Since He is real, science, which is the study of that which he has made has to be in harmony with that existence. The point is, who should be the one to bend his understanding? Science is always sharpening it's tools, that is the task of methodical doubt. So religion has to keep up and be flexible in those things that are not its domain. 

While we are waiting to see "face to face", should we not be open to think that this scientific age we are in is perhaps propelled by the God of goodness. After all, is it not the work of the devil to keep people in ignorance and the work of God to dispel ignorance?

But if we are honest, we have to admit that science has not always brought us to a more healthful or harmonious environment. In its rush to find out "how" it has rejected the caution of "why" and developed things that are noxious to the human condition.

This antagonistic stance between science and religion is harmful to both sides of aisle. Religion suffers as young people, appropriately trained in the scientific method, want to see the same rigorous methodology applied to articles of faith. Dogmatic rejection of scientific discovery leads the young scientist to choose between one or the other and the physical senses win out, the youth reject religion. Yet we human beings live in two worlds at once. A material world and a metaphysical, moral world. Science guides us through the one, but religion guides us through the other. At the same time. In each decision we make, there are scientific considerations and moral ones. 

Society becomes the big looser as we look more and more at what separates us rather than what unites us. (Admittedly, this is a problem that is mirrored within the religious community, bringing no end of grief and hardship. Dogmatism is the problem, not religion.)


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## MDLarson (Nov 20, 2003)

arden said:
			
		

> Okay, you caught me, I didn't read the passages very closely.
> 
> It was actually the other way around, the trees were lightly covered, favoring light-colored moths.  The factories put out lots of dark stuff, turning the trees dark.  But the point remains.


Thanks for the correction arden, I couldn't remember.  

Cat, I think we both believe science has value, but you must realize that I am not _definitively opposed to science as a religious person_.  With the exception of genuine miracles / supernatural events, I believe the Bible is completely inline with science and nature.  The real difference between my point-of-view and yours is the worldview we start out in.

My worldview starts with God, a supernatural being who created natural laws and established these rules and laws as "the norm."  We all live according to the norm, but we shouldn't be surprised if God acts in supernatural fashion for specific purposes.

Your worldview starts without God.  Therefore, a *completely* scientific explanation must be reached, all without the help of a designer and/or supernatural events.  This is where evolution attempts to explain the workings of *everything*.

In a way, I think evolutionists have the harder job because they can't cop-out with a mystic miracle explanation for something.  But my point is simple; we both  have the same sample set of data to work with.  We both have necessary assumptions that go along with our interpretation (I have God, you have mathematical chance.)  The real reason we disagree is the *interpretation of the evidence*.  _My_ belief is that science actually points to creation, NOT evolution.

More later, of course, but I gotta get back to work.


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## chevy (Nov 20, 2003)

pds said:
			
		

> ... Dogmatism is the problem, not religion.



Hi pds,

Your whole post if of great value and I don't want to reduce it to one sentence but this sentence is so true that I want to emphasis it by acknowledging it here.


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## chevy (Nov 20, 2003)

How can anybody explain AIDS without the evolution theory ?

Did God decide to create it to kill the humans ?


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## Darkshadow (Nov 20, 2003)

You could ask the same about influenza - the flu.  It's only been around for a little over 100 years.


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## MDLarson (Nov 20, 2003)

chevy said:
			
		

> How can anybody explain AIDS without the evolution theory ?
> 
> Did God decide to create it to kill the humans ?


How does one explain AIDS _with_ the evolution theory?

Actually chevy, the question you ask is *the hardest* question to answer for Christians; Why would a _good_ and _all-powerful_ God allow bad things to happen in the universe?

"Why is my baby deformed?"  "Why did God allow my son to die to a horrible disease?"  "Why does AIDS affect innocent children, whose parents had AIDS?"  "Why is Microsoft Windows so prevalent?"  

First of all, I won't be able to give you a satisfactory answer.  But here's how I understand the problem; (if you can bear the Sunday School lesson)

Adam and Eve were created in the Garden of Eden.  This garden was the perfect environment, and there was no sin.  There was no disease, no jealosy, no shame, nothing was wrong.  Animals were probably all herbivores.  God was able to proclaim His creation as "very good."

Later however, Satan, for reasons of his own, deceived Eve who in turn persuaded Adam to disobey the *only rule there was*, and eat of the forbidden tree.  As punishment, God threw Adam and Eve out of the garden, and cursed humankind for good measure.  Among these curses are:
 Hard work (there was already some "easy" work for Adam in the garden)
 Death (we were originally designed to live forever)
 Pain in childbirth
 The fear of man was put into animals

I guess Genesis doesn't list AIDS or even "disease" as a curse, but I would consider it to be included in the "death" category.  The long and short of it is that humans, as sinning creatures, deserve death.  If Adam didn't eat, any one of us surely would have, as we have all indeed failed to make the grade of perfection.

Oh, and to directly answer your second question, AIDS is not specifically cited as a means for human destruction.  The two biggest apocalypses would be Noah's global flood (which is very important to creation-scientists), and Armageddon, which involves fire and brimstone (nuclear war, maybe?)  Don't know for sure.

My answer isn't necessarily perfect or thought out enough, and I'm sure it's spawning more questions than answers.  I'll do my best to answer the critics, and pds sounds like a good resource, but we're getting a little off topic...  What does everybody think?


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## Cat (Nov 20, 2003)

pds - truly a great post.
The possibility to train an individual in some craft, be it physical or mental, depends on the availability of knowledge and skill in the entire community. As individuals we are trained, as community (village, tribe, country, etc.) we evolve: as a whole we improve our chanches of survival, both concerning the quantity and the quality of our lives. One step further, as a species too the development of tools for the body and the mind counts as evolution. Man is the species that has found ways to adapt the enivironment to himself rather tha adapting (physically) to the environment. Our survival depended on the (relatively fast) development of tools: we have no huge pointy teeth, but a big axe. The possibility to produce these tools then is a step in evolution. This is expressed for the individual as training, but nevertheless as a whole for the community or species as evolution.
I think my post was probably too heavily biased towards the catholic church, but I want to remind you that the revolutionaries in religion have always been burned or excommunicated, while the reformists have achieved pretty little. It is true that there are schisms, but they establish a new order and then keep that one just as static as the old order. St. Augustine was a remarkable man, but he lived in a time where the church was still consolidating. MD Larson probably knows this better than me, but after Jesus death there wasn't  unitary view of his teachings, nor was there an official bible to which everyone looked: there was a plethora of small factions and sects, each with their own view and interpretation. The holy books were chosen and rejected at whim by these groups and there were fierce and vicious battles over what was the one and true interpretation. The bible as we know it now, is the result of endless bickering of what to accept and what to reject, often with very little attention to philology, history etc. but only to petty political battles among factions within the church or among faiths. So it is pretty arbitrary to call the bible a unitary consistent whole. Nevertheless it is the cornerstone of each church and the particular choice of texts counts as the one revealed truth. Religion with in a church does not evolve in leaps and bounds, it doesn't evolve at all. Jesus is not considered as son of god, but merely as a wise man or prophet among muslims, the revelation of Gabriel (or was it Michael?) to Muhammed is not considered authentic among christians, Jews still wait for the first coming of god, while christians wait for the second: how is this evolution? They reject and oppose each other without improving their respective positions. And they are based on interpretaion of given data, science, besides interpretation is also essentially creative. New methods, new hypotheses, new theories sprout every day and they are not merely a re-arrangement of previously given data.

MD Larson: explaining evil while believing in an absolutely good god is hard indeed, but consider the argument of Leibniz: we live in the best possible world. You may imagine better worlds (without HIV or SCO) but they are not possible. Even god is bound by logic and by the physical laws he created, so this entails that if the universe is to be, there are limitations, not to god himself but to his creation. Plato would wholeheartedly agree. These limitations are the cause of evil.

pds: by the way, we may not think different wrt. Plato, but consider this truly on a evolutionary scale: we do think better than neanderthalers or chimps.


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## MDLarson (Nov 20, 2003)

Well, there's a lot to think about and disagree about.    I don't have too much to say, but I will say that I respectfully maintain that the Bible is a unified whole.  True, we don't even know who wrote some of the books, but we rely on tradition and faith for true cannonical text.

Also, it is much easier to see the differences than the similarities, and Christianity is no different.  Denominations need not combat each other, and often they do not.  My church is officially Baptist, but we don't really draw lines in the sand within Christianity.  The test for us is whether or not something is clearly endorsed or condemned in the Bible.

But enough said from me for today.


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## Cat (Nov 21, 2003)

> we rely on tradition and faith for true cannonical text.


This faith is not faith in god but in the church. The church is fallible because it is made of men. Only in the 1880's the pope in conclave was pronounced infallible, which met with many protests within the church and clergy at that time. If it is in men that you trust, why trust men of Religion and not men of Science?


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## MDLarson (Nov 21, 2003)

Cat said:
			
		

> This faith is not faith in god but in the church. The church is fallible because it is made of men. Only in the 1880's the pope in conclave was pronounced infallible, which met with many protests within the church and clergy at that time. If it is in men that you trust, why trust men of Religion and not men of Science?


I can see how you think that; good point.  I'm not sure how to give an answer to that, but to be sure, God used men to write the books.  The writing and selection of these texts was directed by God.  If you want to press me on this point, feel free - I'll do the research and give a better answer.

However, I definately disagree with the belief that the pope has the final say in church doctrine - take for example, his recent endorsement of evolution.  Christianity and evolution are definitively incompatible.

On another note, I'm really wondering why people aren't challenging me more.  Like, giving me examples of alleged Bible vs. science incompatibilities and whatnot...


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## chemistry_geek (Nov 21, 2003)

This thread is getting very interesting indeed.  Much thought and consideration has gone into the responses I've read.  But I have to ask a question.  Has anyone here _REALLY_ read Darwin's Theory of Evolution?  I did read the entire text many years ago.  I've read that many creationists argue that micro evolution does indeed occur, but macro evolution does NOT occur.  I think that if humans lived long enough, we would observe macro eloution.  Who knows, given that rate of carbon dioxide we're dumping into the atmosphere (it's expected to rise 50% by 2020), we may indeed see macro evolution take place.  I will make several statements, but I cannot go into the detail I'd like due to time constraints.  There are several examples in the fossil record where many species were destroyed and incredible growth spirts creating new species.

I recall someone posting earlier a page or two back that s/he believed the human race was evolving today.  This question was posed to the class by one of my biology professors many years ago when I was in college.  The human race is NOT evolving, but our technology IS evolving.  Granted, geographical barriers are pretty much no longer barriers, but we are NOT evolving, and the SIZE of people today does not significantly distinguish us from generations long ago; there were NO significant (if any) changes in our chromosomes that would prevent us from mating with someone of the past.

To get an understanding of evolution, read Darwin's Theory of Evolution, and take freshman college biology, cell biology, and microbiology.  After understanding that simplier life forms are less complex than more complex organisms, it is easier to see and track changes in their genetic codes.  Bacteria reproduce significantly faster than mammilian cells because their enzymes read and replicate the DNA faster than eucharyotic DNA enzymes.  Bacterial DNA synthesis is VERY sloppy with the sole objective to get the job done as fast as possible with reduced accuracy of matching up base pairs.  Many bacteria develop resistance to antibiotics because they carry two type of DNA: cellular DNA and plasmid DNA.  The plasmid DNA is constantly being added to that contain the genes that were successful in producing proteins that rid the cell of the antibiotics.  Bacteria are also very "leaky", exchanging plasmid DNA with themselves; this is how antibiotic resistance is transferred from one strain of bacteria to another.

Another point I'd like to make:  Mitochondria and Chlorophyll, both organelles in animals and plants, respectively, CONTAIN THEIR OWN GENETIC CODE THAT IS CIRCULAR, just like bacterial DNA.  These organelles replicate on their own inside our cells (and plants) based on their genetics.  These organelles have a genetic code that is DIFFERENT from nuclear DNA; different codons code for different amino acids.  These organelles also make their own ribosomes which resemble bacterial ribosome more than eucharyotic (mammalian/plant) ribosomes.  Why is this?  These organelles were very likely bacteria that lived in different environments than their hosts, but worked out a sybiotic relationship that benefitted both.

Time's up!  More later on.  My apologies for the abrupt end of my discussion.


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## MDLarson (Nov 21, 2003)

And this is probably where I bow out.  I might have chatted with you before, chemistry_geek, along with BigHairyDog I think it was...  I just don't understand biology to the level that you do.

I guess if I was to debate the issue, it would have to remain in the logical realm or with more layperson examples.

I think I once heard a fellow Christian of mine say that the only place Creationists can really gain ground is when talking about the absolute beginning (Big Bang or Creation.)  I know I sound like a weenie, but that's the best I can do.

Edit:  no, I've never read "Origin of the Species".  I guess I always thought- since even the evolutionists of today don't believe in Darwin's original theory, I won't bother.


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## lurk (Nov 21, 2003)

chemistry_geek said:
			
		

> I recall someone posting earlier a page or two back that s/he believed the human race was evolving today.  This question was posed to the class by one of my biology professors many years ago when I was in college.  The human race is NOT evolving, but our technology IS evolving.


Why do you say that he humans are no longer evolving?  Doesn't the assertion that humans are somehow special and no longer under evolutionary pressure require a bit of hubris.  Now it may well be that we are no longer feeling evolutionary pressures to run away from bears but all that says is that the selective pressures on humans have changed.  



> Granted, geographical barriers are pretty much no longer barriers, but we are NOT evolving, and the SIZE of people today does not significantly distinguish us from generations long ago; there were NO significant (if any) changes in our chromosomes that would prevent us from mating with someone of the past.



How many generations?  100? 1,000? After say 2,500 you would be back to Cro-Magnon man.  250,000 generations back and you would be dating whatever was banging rocks together in Oldavi gorge ;-)

We can even see the effects of evolution in just the past 1000 years.  The black death only appeared during that that time and then ravaged Europe several times.  As a result of that selective pressure people of European descent are more resistant to the plague than other ethnic groups.  That does not make them a different species by any stretch of the imagination.


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## pds (Nov 22, 2003)

> However, I definately disagree with the belief that the pope has the final say in church doctrine - take for example, his recent endorsement of evolution.  Christianity and evolution are definitively incompatible.



Perhaps a more careful definition of terms may make it less incompatible. Christianity - a faith based on the salvific, providential role of the man Jesus of Nazareth. 
Evolution - a science that looks at the process and the mechanisms of speciation and the development of life on earth.

As a person with a deep faith in that salvific role and the development of providence even today, I don't see the incompatibility. I am no longer Catholic, but I have to respect the effort of this present pope to begin the undoing of many of the divisions caused by the overly dogmatic stance of the church through history.



> On another note, I'm really wondering why people aren't challenging me more.  Like, giving me examples of alleged Bible vs. science incompatibilities and what not...


 
Perhaps because that is not the point. I think we find ourselves on the horns of a dilemma. We are in a jamb. We are in hot water when we try to untie the meaning of a text that was written in another time and another language and taking it to be literally true. The descrepancies are more likely a misunderstanding of terms than proof of the incompatibility.

Some say the Bible should not be interpreted, that what it says is what is says. Anyone who understands Spanish will only smile at that assertion, in Spanish, they speak of a great "interpretacion" when someone sings a song well. Every reading is an interpretation.

Without becoming too long, I would like to take what some may see as a small twist in the conversation. Dogmatism is the problem as I said. But it is not only the religionists who can be dogmatic. I read the Scientific American article from Chevy's first post. I felt there was a sort of dogmatism in that article. They painted those who bring their faith to the question with a rather broad brush. There are those who hold to the 6 thousand year exclusion of evolution theory, which I find laughable. But they are not the only people in the argument and to dismiss the "intelligent design" people as "anti-evolutionists" is disingenuous. It only fuels the needless scism, focusing on things that divide us rather than finding common ground.  The "ID" folks that I know are by no means anti-evolutionists, and their point that there is not continuous fossil record of evolutionary speciation is not a demand for science to produce an unending string of examples, nor a request for the end of inquiry. It is only one of the logical tenets of their thesis. A talking point if you will rather than an accusation or a sword.

Again, it is the scism that concerns me, not the details which - as MDLarson has stated - are details that good people will come up with as they specialize in the training that the discipline requires. The antagonism between two noble pursuits of human intelligence is not helpful to the solution of the human condition, which is the commission to every human being.


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## Cat (Nov 22, 2003)

Just to wave my ignorance in everybody's face: species are defined thourhg the possibility of having fertile offspring, right? So horses and donkey can have offspring, mules, but mules are not fertile, there is no mule-race/species,  it's just a colelction of individuals, because they cannot have offspring. Hence horses and donkeys are considered different species. 
So technically, according to this definition, if I got it right, everything beginning with "homo x" would be part of our species, the "homo sapiens": hence erectus, habilis etc. would all be part of our species. Differences between us and them would have to be considered as micro-evolution, within a species and theoretically we could have fertile offspring. However, if I remember correctly, somewhere this stops: the neanderthaler or the cro-magnon man or somethign like that, wasn't cosidered a "homo x". So the human race ("homo x") obviously doesn't evolve, but maybe merely split off other species, but also obviously does evolve, since there are marked micro-evolutionary differences between us and the erectus and the habilis: look at skull capacity, fingers, spine, legs (bones is all we have, except with Ötzi, the iceman). 

So owing to the principle that nothing comes from nothing where did we come from? Creationists say: from god. Evolutionists say: our species evolved from (out of) another species. A good candidate would be more primtive primates: ape-like beings.

Spinoza argued that appealing to the "will of god" ultimately was simply an admission of ignorance: not to insult the believers among us, I will hasten to point out that also science knows the will of god in this sense, i.e. ignorance. While the creationists immediately points to god, the evolutionist takes a detour: homo sapiens -> monocellular organisms in the sea and then appeals to the will of god, i.e. ignorance, i.e. statistics. Given certain favorable conditions, self-replicating cells develop. Why? Chance.
There's a famous experiment by Miller (IIRC) who re-created the conditions on earth when life developed and indeed observed the arising of monocellular organisms (again IIRC).

So evolutionists ultimately appeal to chance, creationists to the will of god. Both cannot claim absolute truth, because who can fathom either the will of god or chaos? Personally I appreciate the heroic and tragic effort made by the scientist, rather than the unconditional surrender to ignorance sive "will of god" by the creationist.

EDIT: off-topic: Di you notice this thread is turning "Quick-Reply" into an oxymoron?


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## RacerX (Nov 22, 2003)

MDLarson said:
			
		

> On another note, I'm really wondering why people aren't challenging me more.  Like, giving me examples of alleged Bible vs. science incompatibilities and whatnot...



There were examples in another thread (Repent for being a Mac user!!) that we could reopen as examples.

I never did get what I thought were complete answers from you (or your connections with ICR).

Are you rested? Should we start down this path again?


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## pds (Nov 22, 2003)

Hey, I've been looking for that site for some time... I wanted to use it as an example of a hoax, which I think it is. It's a scream! But the link on the old thread doesn't work. Does anyone have an updated link?


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## Giaguara (Nov 22, 2003)

MDLarson said:
			
		

> On another note, I'm really wondering why people aren't challenging me more.  Like, giving me examples of alleged Bible vs. science incompatibilities and whatnot...



Well.. not challanging specificly you now - just asking in general from those who believe the bible is the truth to be taken literally -

Why the pre-jewism religions had so many goddesses? Why was the god more often a female god rather than the male god? Not talking about _one_ of the religions, just _generally_ the religions untill 8-6000 years ago. The jewism was invented more or less 6000 years ago, and that's when the male gods became more dominant (i.e. the religions started to have more often the main god to be a male, not a female god).  Well, as the jewism was invented very roughly 6000 years ago, and christianity is based on their culture (and stories), would that perhaps have to mean that the world was created 6000 years ago? Don't you believe e.g. in the cavemen that lived lets say 10 000 years ago, and that you _can_ see in the museums? They lived _before_ the jewism was born THUS before the jew/christian/muslim god created the world (or was it just the man?).

If it wasn't, why did all those other cultures (non-jew) exist?


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## MDLarson (Nov 22, 2003)

pds said:
			
		

> Hey, I've been looking for that site for some time... I wanted to use it as an example of a hoax, which I think it is. It's a scream! But the link on the old thread doesn't work. Does anyone have an updated link?


I think that website shut down shortly after they made a big splash.  I wish I saved the page... it was truly hilarious.

RacerX... I think that's the thread where I did indeed promise to find some answers!  Maybe I'll re-read that thread and see what I can do.

Anyway, good discussion so far... I'm impressed - I thought I was going to be eaten alive.   Another day, another reply...


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## Cat (Nov 23, 2003)

I'll take a bite if you really want me to! 
Let's see: the concept of god in itself is contradictory. How can you believe in an absurd, illogical and unreasonable entity? If you do clearly you think in an absurd, illogical and unreasonable way and it doesn't surprise me that you believe all kind of absurd things, like: the resurrection of the flesh after the apocalypse, a god with a human-like personality, that a human can be part man part god (tell me about his DNA, where did that come from), in the absolute and consistent truth of a self-contradictory book, composed by a variety of authors over several centuries, selceted by "princes of the church" because of mainly political motives, that you have an immortal soul, that we are marred by original sin at our birth, that bread and wine trans-substantiate into the body and blood of Jesus Christ. Cutting it short, the traditional beliefs of christian religion are all equally absurd to me: including the virginity of Mary, the immaculate conception, the resurrection of Christ, that he saved us by dying on the cross etc.

Now, who has to prove what? Do I have to prove that they are absurd or do you have to prove they are not? Why not keep on topic and save these for another thread? 
Let's keep on topic, shall we? Creationism versus evolutionism: 
- How old is the earth? How old are the species that inhabit it? What do you think of the Carbon dating method? What do you think about dinosaurs? How can even a flottilla of Ark's save the entire animal livestock of the earth? Where is the evidence of the huge migration to and from the Ark befor and after the flood? How do you explain that humans a re capable through breeding and genetic engineering to alter the god-given species? How do yo uaccount for the double creation in the Genesis and the other humans clearly existing outside the paradise? Where is/was the paradise? Did god create the entire ecosystem in one act and left it running by itself (possibly including evolution) or is he still creating (possibly including evolution)?

Have a nice stay on the BBQ and no hard feelings I hope ... you asked for it!


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## pds (Nov 23, 2003)

_Let's keep on topic, shall we? Creationism versus evolutionism: _

Yes, on topic... but there will be a little wandering here and there. To me, the problem revolves around the law of cause and effect. Everthing that exists (all effects) have a cause and the effect can never be greater than the cause itself. Is need (as in the white/black moth) a cause? Or is chance a cause? How does more order come out of randomness unless the order is the source of the randomness? Which is the subset of which?

The basic assumption that I make - though not really an assumption as much as a conclusion - is that god (without dogma or description yet) is the first cause of this world. It is simply a name given to that first cause. The consistency and harmony that is seen in the world as a whole (with the exception of human society as a whole) I take not as proof, but as an indication that there is consistency, harmony and intelligence in that cause. 


You did ask, so...

***How old is the earth? 
Last time I checked, somewhere in the neighborhood of 4.5 billion years old? About one third as old as the cosmos? When I look at the amazing canvases of the Dutch black oil masters, it doesn't matter to me that they took months to paint while van Gogh, an equally tremendous artist, churned out a masterpiece a day. To me, god is no less amazing for having taken time in the creation of something from nothing. 

***How old are the species that inhabit it? 
I can accept the timeline of present science, without being a specialist in it. I would say that the finger of god in the creation process was not unlike that lightning bolt in the primordial soup that folded the first amino-protein-life strand. I think we can agree that evolution takes place at a cellular or even a molecular level. 

***What do you think of the Carbon dating method? 
Amazing how clever man can be to figure that out. On a par with the discovery of coffee. Imagine! - how did the first guy figure out that if you take the coffee fruit, smash it, throw away the fruit and the skin, wash it, dry it, toast it, crush it, grind it, pour boiling water over it and add a splash of cream you could make breakfast a treat? 

***What do you think about dinosaurs? 
Amazing beasts, they were selected out long before the appearance of the earliest humans. I'd say they were planned as the main ingredient for petroleum, if it weren't for the fact that petroleum use is such a bad idea.  I don't know why they appeared or why they disappeared. Maybe God was doodling as he waited for the house's foundation to settle?  Certainly the type of adaptability found in humans would have kept them around a bit longer. But then, our level of adaptability is pretty amazing, isn't it? 

When Rembrant painted a canvas, he did several complete layers of each person's face. Any one of them could have been the last one, but he did them again and again till he was satisfied. 

***How can even a flottilla of Ark's save the entire animal livestock of the earth?
OK, here I guess I could be accused of selective belief, but I take the flood as a metaphor connected to an regional event. I have limited actual knowledge of the details, but there is anecdotal evidence of a regional catastrophe in the Near East, supposed hometown of Mr Noah Arquero. The flood story is not contemporaneous. Reportedly, Moses wrote down what was an oral tradition after it had been handed down for several hundred years. When did the oral tradition start? Was it contemporaneous? Probably not since it is told in the third person (no-one around but Noah after the flood ). The salient things about the story are the details that are clearly alegorical - three levels of the Ark, 40 days of rain, the raven that flew to and fro (could have just landed on the ark), the three doves, the olive branch (hell, even the fiction that two to five pairs (not just two) of every kind of animal was included). The whole thing sets the stage for a providential event, a replay of the previous alegory of the Garden. But this is a digression into the theme of a possible other thread.  

***Where is the evidence of the huge migration to and from the Ark befor and after the flood? 
There isn't one, since even if it was literally historical, it was regional. The time frames used in the Bible are more symbolic than literal. The time between the supposed Eden story and the flood is analagous to the time frame between the flood and the first Bible-guy with contemporary extrabiblical confirmation of his passage on the face of the green earth, Abraham. Both time periods are represented as 10 generations 1,600 years for one and 400 for the other. Again, the time is symbolic, remember that these guys had only just discovered the zero. (Convenient explanation perhaps, but consistent)

***How do you explain that humans are capable through breeding and genetic engineering to alter the god-given species? 
Here we enter the realm that is important. First off, since the process of created speciation is not some sort of magic, but a development from the molecular level, why wouldn't anyone with the keys to molecular manipulation be able to change/affect it? BTW, how do you explain that? How come tigers don't do it (other than making sure the toughest tiger gets the best wives)? We, different from any other species, have this ability. How and why? For me it is because of the intelligent design of man. Many different religious traditions have the concept of man as image of god. That concept is usually abused by people who say "we are this image, this chosen one" and neglect that the image is a universal image. I look at it as "you are the image of god." Then we become humble to each other and look for clues and cues in the other, bringing us to need each other more, producing a synergy that is beneficial to the development of society. We have god-like creativity, the ability to dominate (ooh that word) the physical world as if we were God himself. Some contend that I have an anthropomorphic God, I prefer to think that man is godthropomorphic.  There's room in that to discover ourselves and God.


***How do yo uaccount for the double creation in the Genesis 
When we create, we first plan, then we do. When we plan we start with the end result in mind. I want to build a nice home for my family, so I have an idea of what I want and where I want it. I hire an architect to work out the details of building the house that will become the home. When the building starts, I call in the backhoe first and then work from the least to the most complex. 

Man was conceived in the mind of God as an object for his love and a partner in his joy. He was the first thing thought of yet the last thing built. The "machinery" necessary for the building is the evolutionary malestorm that is genesis, the primordial soup that gave rise to life. 

The "double creations" in the Bible, while written by different people at different times with different political motivations still correspond en-macro to these two tracks - one book (Genesis), but two stories; one about the planning and one about the doing. 

***and the other humans clearly existing outside the paradise? 
Please allow me to beg off this one for right now. 

***Man Where is/was the paradise? 
Earth. The nursery may have been Oldivai, but the vacation spot was Hawaii - maybe RacerX's hometown for the hardier vacation Xers 

***Did god create the entire ecosystem in one act and left it running by itself (possibly including evolution) or is he still creating (possibly including evolution)?

No, not one act, by any means, although I think the basis for the process was set at the beginning and it is evidenced through the evolutionary record. I would maintain the principles of growth and development, both for the physical world and for the internal, moral, spiritual world, were formed and in place and that evolution took place in that context.


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## Cat (Nov 23, 2003)

PDS: a wonderful post and excellent answers. My questions were provocations for literal interpretations, the more metaphorical ones you give are answers I can definitely get alopng with, albeit with some small differences. I agree with your account of causes and effects, it's an old account, the same given by Aristotle and St. Thomas. The only part I don't fully agree with is the "... and this is god"-part. The first cause is a logical and philosophical necessity, but to call it divine goes a bit too far for me and to then consider this divinity as having a personality and being interested in our doings ... well, I don't think so.

Noah Arquero! LOL!  The sketch idea is familiar to me, girls use it all the time. "god first made a rough sketch [man] and then the masterpiece [woman]."  If you ever need an opening line or a nice compliment ... 

I like the topic of order and chaos. it is definitely important in current mathematics and ancient cosmology. In greek mythology, chaos is the creator and cosmos the result. I agree with this: order is a subset of chaos. Chaos can create cosmos, but not viceversa. A possible proof lies in the utter difficulty of generating a truly random sequence of numbers.
Then the matter of chance: is chance a cause? No, definitely not. Chance, chaos, time etc. describe certain events from the viewpoint of a model. There is ~80% chance you are righthanded. This does not mean that an abstract law causes your being righthanded. The figure describes facts within a model. So given certain parameters, we can calculate the likeliness of an event. The causes are the physical objects involved in the situation and the concepts of chaos, chance and time describe the changes that happen in the world, but they do not cause them: they describe. Like gravity: it isn't the LAW of gravity that causes bodies to fall, it is gravity itself, the physical force, which causes bodies to fall. It isn't statistics which causes events, it just describes them.


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## pds (Nov 24, 2003)

I dont experience the world as fundamentally chaotic, but as fundamentally ordered. Chaos always works its way into order, order doesnt occur to me as being a temporary lapse in the chaos. I used to organize seminars in the former Soviet Union. We would plan and prepare, (order) but once the participants arrived, they would completely undo any (most) of our arrangements and set things up themselves (housing, schedules, just about everything) it was always surprising, chaotic, random (or we could have planned for it), but it always happened. The result usually was a good base for our seminar, because most of the icebreaking was already done. So, the two things work together, but my experience is that the order (planning) comes first. There wouldnt have been an opportunity for that chaos, without the planning for the seminar.

_ I agree with this: order is a subset of chaos. Chaos can create cosmos, but not viceversa. A possible proof lies in the utter difficulty of generating a truly random sequence of numbers._

If chaos produces order - that would mean order is basically chaotic. Therefore random number generation should be doable. The other possibility is that order produces chaos, which makes chaos orderable. Since we have difficulty in producing truly random sequences, the latter would be more logical, wouldnt it? 

Chaos theory as I have dabbled with it is very much phenomenal - as you mention -recording and describing events. In that case, maybe order uses chaos to create. This of course is speculation born of faith, but that faith is born of experience and therefore part of my model. As I understand it, chaos theory looks at how things break out of confinement and over-ordination within the model. The Dr Malcolms explanation (Jurassic Park) comes to mind. So many variables (phenomena) affect an event (another phenomena) that predictability is a crapshoot. But orderly randomness would seem to be opportune to evolution given the timeframe and the sheer number of possible random mutations.

Dr. Malcolm, if youre reading this and I have it wrong, please chime in. 

Were in a real bind when it comes to explaining the origin of our world either scientifically or philosophically. The world is time and space. Every word we use has time and space contents. So (time) when (time) we (space) try (action = space through time) to understand (space) the origin (time), we use a vocabulary that is totally inadequate to the task. Time itself and space itself are phenomena of a created world. (Im aware that the word has a significant religious content, and it could be said that the SA article is based in part on a phobia of the term. Still, one way or another at one point it wasnt there and then it was, ergo it was created.) The best we can do is look to the phenomenal world and find the universal aspects of the world and understand that they are effects, caused either directly or indirectly by the original cause. That original cause must have the contents that are found in the result. 

A lot of our problems are ones of definition. Cat has trouble with calling the first cause god, saying the imputation of divinity is too much for him. OK, divinity is a definition that I wanted to leave off the name. Any definition should not be imputed or implied, but worked out. What do you mean by divinity that makes it so it cannot be accepted as part of the first cause? Many may say that divinity akin to power. I would contend that divinity is an internal quality, not a force. Without being animist, we can say that a rose possesses a certain divinity, cant we? Or a woman looks simply divine. 

St. Paul says that ever since the beginning of the world Gods invisible nature, namely his power and his deity have been clearly perceived in the things that He has made. So Paul defines divinity as a quality of all the things of the world (even cockroaches). To me that definition of divinity works much better than another that many seem to have of an old man in a beard and an magic wand (EdXs avatar ). I dont see God as some conjuror of cheap magic tricks, a miracle worker whos on vacation and just waiting for the right time to scare everyone into belief. But I do see him as the source of the power that is clearly the root of the material of the world as well as the source of the intellectual content of the natural and spiritual (moral) principles that we define using laws, the emotional content that all things of the world respond to and the willful defiance of stasis; the will to live, the determination to survive that pervades the world and wraps every living being in its embrace. My daughter keeps hamsters, and every one of them has a distinct personality. Diane Fossey found personality in her charges in the Rawandan hills. Jacques Yves found that groupers have a personality. The DeBeers will wax poetic about the personality of different diamonds. 

I take the cause and effect argument seriously. If its in the effect, does it not come from the cause?


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## Cat (Nov 25, 2003)

PDS said:
			
		

> If its in the effect, does it not come from the cause?


 That makes it hard for a believer to explain evil, dacay, imperfection. These are in the creation, but not in the creator.

I read St. Thomas proofs for the existence of god. If you see the world as an effect, there has to be cause, and a cause before that and so on up to the first cause: which he then proceeds to call god. I do not agree with the implications of this last step. Let me elaborate on this: the necessities of logic drive us into a dilemma, or rather a trilemma: either there is a first, uncaused cause, or there is an infinite chain of causes, or somwhere there is a circular chain of causes. This is called Agrippa's trilemma. All three possibilities are unsatisfactory for several reasons. St, Thomas opts for the first uncaused cause, which he calls god. My question is: why? By simply choosing one of the three options he does not in fact solve the problem. If you decide that there is one first, uncaused cause, then which one is it? Where will you stop looking for the first cause? What is an acceptable first cause? On which grounds can you say that it is uncaused and yet exists? Uncaused things normally don't exist ... Other bible interpretations assert that god came into existence by himself (circular option).

So if I go lookig for causes, I am happy to stop at the big bang. PDS would go one step further probably and find god. Where's the difference? We both stop at an arbitrary point. Scientists will say that either we don't know what caused the big bang, or the question is meaningless since the conditions before the big bang are unintelligible wihtin current physics. Creationists will say that gods existence cannot be questioned and he requires no cause (other than himself) and to ask for his caus is meaningless. 
However, I would not choose for the creationists option because of Ockham's razor: we intoriduce an otherwise superfluous entity (god) while still not explaining the problem.
Besides that, the regress from cause to cause to first cause, tells us nothing about god: how do we know he is "good", how do we know he is "infinite" (the creations is not), how do we know he is a "he"?

Moreover, this very abstract argument opens the door to other explanations. Why shouldn;t we believe that other theories are true: also Aristotle, Plotinus and Spinoza use the same argument but conclude very different things about the nature of god.

Regarding chaos and order:


			
				PDS said:
			
		

> I dont experience the world as fundamentally chaotic, but as fundamentally ordered. Chaos always works its way into order, order doesnt occur to me as being a temporary lapse in the chaos. I used to organize seminars in the former Soviet Union. We would plan and prepare, (order) but once the participants arrived, they would completely undo any (most) of our arrangements and set things up themselves (housing, schedules, just about everything) it was always surprising, chaotic, random (or we could have planned for it), but it always happened. The result usually was a good base for our seminar, because most of the icebreaking was already done. So, the two things work together, but my experience is that the order (planning) comes first. There wouldnt have been an opportunity for that chaos, without the planning for the seminar.


While I defintely agree with you on this, I have to point out some fallacies (it's the philosophers curse!  ). First of all, our world is phenomenologically ordered, but can nevertheless be seen as a product of chaos. In the universe everything tends to a state of affairs wherein the least energy is consumed. This decay produces stable, ordered substances. The more energy somethign contains, the less stable it is: e.g. the sun. The sun constantly leaks energy outward, decaying towards lower and lower levels of energy.
The world as we know it, is a product of this process.
The social mechanisms you mentioned are a bad example, because social dynamics are not the same as thermodynamics. Between pure matter (mechanic physics) and social interaction, we have biology and psychology. Each level is based on the former and constrained therby, but also has laws of it's own which cannot be reduced to those of the lower levels.

Regarding space and time, boy I hope Racer X joins the fray, since he seems to favour Kant, which had a lot of very interesting things to say about space and time. First of all, according to Kant space and Time are human means of ordering the phenomena of our experience, not something out there which act as an independent force and imposes an ordering of our experience on us. No, rather it something we project on the world and we couldn't even talk about or conceive a world without them. We order and categorise the phenomena, but he causes of this categorisation are not in the objects outside us, no, the causes of the categorisation are principles within us, in our thought.
This is why we recognise all kinds of properties in thigns, and why we can call things good and beautiful. The principles of morality and aesthetics are within us, not objectively present in the objects "outside". Hence god is also within us, in our thought ...

Have you ever thought about the far reaching similarities of the life of jesus, zeus, heracles, mitra, etc. All kinds of mythologies share a (very general) common template, I really would invite everyone to check out Frazer's "Golden Bough", if I ever read an enlightning book, it was that one. Of course I also like to make my relgious friends read Feuerbach ("the essence of religion"), Nietzsche ("the antichrist") and De Sade ("La philosophie dans le boudoir"), but mostly they respectfully decilne ...


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## toast (Nov 25, 2003)

Bad luck, chevy, your science thread is now Bible-based   

MD's right. Biblical texts are controversial. Science is different. Or maybe not. What did Einstein said about relativity ? What did Thomas Kuhn said about scientific revolutions ?

Kuhn proved science is religious, Latinally speaking (religio: to link, to create bonds). Kuhn (aside to Karl Popper) demunstrates that science is a question of paradigm, and that paradigms change. I'm waiting for the quantic one.


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## RacerX (Nov 25, 2003)

Okay, to jump in quickly...

Space and time as we conceive them are figments of our imagination. These definitions are just constructs to help us perceive our environment. We do the same thing with light that we see, we order it within us, we assign color, and we deal with it via our internal definitions.

To talk about the origins of the universe, the universe would have to deal with time the same way we perceive it, which it clearly doesn't. What we know is that the universe is (constant, no before, no after). We have the ability (within our own limitations) to view events (points in space time) which exist (_not_ existed, there really isn't a past tense when look at space time) with our past pointing light cone (which is a 4-dimensional cone in Menkowski space-time).

The beginning of our universe is a point in space-time, a place. time can actually be thought of in terms of distances rather than a forward flowing as we perceive it. The beginning of our universe is not that different from the universe around a black hole (inside the event horizon) and the end is going to look pretty much the same. The problem is that the beginning and end are only those with relation to our perception of time. They are actually just places in space-time with physical properties not that different from other places which are not the beginning and end.

As for us, we are 4-dimensional creatures. what you think you are now is not what you really are. You are the collection of all the events of your existence. You are events you don't know about, you are events you don't remember. Those collections of events touch others (who are also collections of events). We touch forward we experience backwards. Once you touch someone else, that event doesn't go away.

The thing about religion that I find funny is being forgiven for our sins. In space-time, those sins are there... un-erasable, part of what we are. When the realization of that is made, then it makes you realize that our sins made further on are unforgivable also. And you strive not to make them (if you care, of course).

Every moment of your life defines who and what you are. If you are doing something to hurt someone else, you can not erase that from your life, it is part of you.

The important thing about Kant is what constitutes a moral act. It is not the out come. The ethics and morality of anything we do is completely in the intentions. If we intend to help, but end up hurting, then the intension was good, the total sum was good. If we acted for gain (intentions being selfish) and the out come is good, the total sum was selfish.

Kant makes it very clear that a moral and ethical path is harder than a selfish one. It almost always cost more to do the right thing than the wrong thing during the act. Stopping to help someone in need is harder than passing them by.

My favorite example of this is the fast food drive thru window. When getting dinner on your way home you stop at some place for food, when the attendant hands you your food and change you continue on home. When you reach home you find that the attendant gave you a $20 bill instead of a $5 bill in your change. What do you do? The correct path would be to return to the the place and get the correct change. Why? A $15 difference at some places is enough for someone to lose their job. So not returning the money, you cost someone their job. Sadly, most people keep the money as if they were owed it, and happily continue on with their lives as if nothing had happened.

With Kant, getting away with something is as wrong as getting caught. Doing good to earn a place in heaven is just as good as not doing anything at all (you weren't good for the sake of being good, you were good for a place in the after life). That distinction is very important. Those who are good for gain, are not genuinely good people. If you avoid sin because you are a Christian and you do it for Jesus or God, then you may as well not avoid sin at all, because your intentions were not pure.

Following Kant doesn't require any additional mysterious governing factors. Kant believed that God built morality and ethics into the system and it didn't require any external justification (like the existence of God) for those values to be realized.

It is quite impressive when you think about the task that he set himself on to prove morality and ethics existed independent of an intervention by a deity.

... wow, that wasn't very quick.


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## chevy (Nov 25, 2003)

toast said:
			
		

> Bad luck, chevy, your science thread is now Bible-based



No problem, this one was supposed to be controversial...

The other one is kept scientific (more or less) but its subject is a bit too complicated. I'll launched a better one later this week probably.


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## chevy (Nov 25, 2003)

pds said:
			
		

> _Let's keep on topic, shall we? Creationism versus evolutionism: _
> 
> Yes, on topic... but there will be a little wandering here and there. To me, the problem revolves around the law of cause and effect. Everthing that exists (all effects) have a cause and the effect can never be greater than the cause itself. [...]



Why couldn't an effect be bigger than its cause ?

If I push a trigger, the effect may be much larger than the force used to trigger it, no ?


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## Satcomer (Nov 25, 2003)

chevy said:
			
		

> Why couldn't an effect be bigger than its cause ?
> 
> If I push a trigger, the effect may be much larger than the force used to trigger it, no ?



No offense but the trigger analogy doesn't wash. The powder in the shell is cause, the speed of the projectile is the effect.


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## MDLarson (Nov 25, 2003)

Ahh... after a couple days of thinking of something intelligent and worthwhile to say, I'm back!  

To be honest, I was feeling a little depressed trying to come up with an answer for everything Cat threw at me - plus it felt a lot like homework and school, and I *hate* school.  But you all will be happy to know that I'm not here to win you all to Christianity.  Instead, I am here to provide a defense to creationism and validate my own belief system.  It's  good for me and you, after all, to hear the other side(s) of the story. If I can convince you folks that being a Christian and creationist isn't nearly as "blindfolded" an existence as you thought, I will have succeeded in my goal.

On with my thoughts about dinosaurs and more Bible stuff.  
Yes, of course I believe that dinosaurs existed.  Actually, I considered the suggestion that anybody who didn't belive in their existence rather silly.  There is evidence that dinosaurs have co-existed with humans, and I'll tell you why...

The Bible, as I explained earlier in this thread, talks at length about two distinct creatures, the Leviathan and the Behemoth.  I've demonstrated how these animals, as recorded, are most likely some sort of dinosaur.  The Bible also mentions animals known as "dragons" several times.  Dragons?!?!  Why, they are the stuff of legends and fairy-tails!!!  Well, of course you would believe that if you have already made up your mind that they all died out millions of years ago.  But even if you believe in millions of years, it's not unreasonable to assume that some creatures would survive, *unchanged, I might add* to the present day (just like the Coelacanth.)  I propose that these legends involving dragons, while certainly subject to generous embelishment by their story-tellers, are talking about honest-to-goodness _dinosaurs_.  If you don't believe this theory, you must at least admit the similarities between "dragons" and some types of "dinosaurs."  Not to mention "sea-monsters," of course.

Another interesting fact I came across was from a Tyrannosoraus Rex with a leg bone that contained some parts that had not completely fossilized (including red blood cells.)  This could not have happened if indeed the T. Rex was some 65 million years old.  There is also a story about frozen (not fossilized) dinosaur bones in northern Alaska.  I can try to find some links if somebody's interested.

So, that's what I think about Dinosaurs.

Cat, you also asked me about the plausibility of fitting all the land animals on the ark.  Well, I'm just gonna post this link for those really interested.  Basically, the ark really would have had enough space (just apply the scientific method and do the math.)

One other note; I get the feeling that I need to _prove_ a lot of things, including the very existence of God.  Well, that's not quite fair, because, first of all, it's unprovable.  It's also like me asking you to prove the Big Bang happened, or even the existence of a Cosmic Egg or something.  It's a belief, plain and simple.  We simply interpret the evidence at hand differently.  Somebody was talking about how science was religious, and I think that's an accurate statement.  Everybody has "faith" at one level or another, and in one thing or another.

I'd like to end with this thought in mind:  The closer you look at something God-made, the better it looks; the closer you look at something man-made, the worse it looks.


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## RacerX (Nov 25, 2003)

MDLarson said:
			
		

> I'd like to end with this thought in mind:  The closer you look at something God-made, the better it looks; the closer you look at something man-made, the worse it looks.



Lets say, for argument, that there is a God and this God made the universe. What if God made the universe as scientific evidence has shown? What if God had no hand in the Bible.

You are faced with Gods creation every day, and it is asking you (all of us actually) to look at that work honestly. What would God think of you rationalizing his creation with some book written by man?

Quick counter to your next argument, I don't get all my information from books. I actively research my areas of study well beyond printed publications back to the original data (and sometimes beyond even that if the data collection seem questionable).

If God's method of creating the universe is not how it is described in the Bible but is in fact pretty close to what we know so far today, haven't you forsaken the creation of God for a book written by man? Right now you could be lead by other men believing that it is the will of God, all the while the truth of God's creation is all around you to see.

How do you answer for that? When God asks you why you followed these people when his creation was there for you to touch, experience and learn from, what would your answer be?

"The Bible was easier." "Seeing the truth would have taken too much of my time." "I wasn't that interested in nature."

I can think of no greater blasphemy then to deny God's own handy work.


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## pds (Nov 26, 2003)

Woah! I blinked and the thread came alive! anyway here are some thoughts, mostly what I had thought of  offline before the flood. 

Toast, I hope it doesn't become bible based (i.e. god said it I believe it, that settles it), but the question does break down to does god exist or not. The oxymoron of creation science hinges on that question. (btw, i think it's the term that is inaccurate. Evolutionary creationist might more accurately describe my take on things) 

Cat - several times you've used the exact same example I would use to hint towards the opposite conclusion that I would see...

=> difficulty to produce random numbers
    cat - chaos at the root
    pds - order at the root

=>similarity between cultural traditions
   cat - bogusness in religious affirmations (no unique truth?)
   pds - universality of thought born of a unifying principle that comes from god


Yes, the social example was cheezy, but it is phenomenology at it's best. 

Of course, I think there are other factors involved in man's social interactions, even in the evolution of the human character, and that those factors can produce evolution and de-volution depending on the challenge and response. In fact, once he appears, man seems to bend the rules that were in place to bring him about.

Speaking of philosophers...

Kant was very perceptive and played an important role in the history of philosophy. That history has been an interesting one of people focusing on one or another aspect of nature (or the nature of man). Eidos and hyle, ousse and esse, Philosophers have tried to understand the base of this world. They could all see an inherent subjective and objective content to the world around them.

In the 1700's Kant was dealing with a polarization between the trends of rationalism (only what _I_ think is real) and empiricism (only what I experience is real). Look at the title of his treatise, Critique of Pure Reason. He was also stuck in a small trap, trying to correct the excess of a thought process that only dealt with half of reality. How to bring about the unification of the two sides, how to set up the harmony of the viewpoints of subjective and objective reality. 

Since the discussion goes on, we have to assume he didn't do too well.

Perhaps it's because we need to extend his understanding of "ding en zich" to all beings. Certainly modern science has determined the sentinence (word?) of all things. Those a-priori forms that exist in man's mind (as apart from his brain), which is subjective, (may) also exist in the objective reality. There has to be some reason that roses are appreciated as an expression of intimacy in all cultures. 

If we look at Kant's cognitive imperative, we see his dilemma. He needs to objectify his a-piori forms in order to avoid the decay of morality. Although he is taken as a pillar of agnostic thought, an extension of his reasoning that is demanded by modern science (the consciousness of beings other than man) points to the existence of a 'sea of consciousness' that is - for me - the presence of the intelligence, emotion and will of that first cause.


(pre-post edit : I want to go through RacerX's bits, but will post these now anyway)


BTW, do you know how Rene DesCartes died?

He was in a bar at closing time and the bartender asked him if he wanted one more for the road.

Rene said "I think not."

And he wasn't.


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## Arden (Nov 26, 2003)

Cat said:
			
		

> That makes it hard for a believer to explain evil, dacay, imperfection. These are in the creation, but not in the creator.


Out of everything else posted thus far, I will pick on this.   How can you say that there is no evil, decay or imperfection in the creator?  Are we not humans made with some good and some evil, made to decay to nothing, made with imperfections both greatly noticeable and hidden beneath the surface?  Do we, as humans such defined, not make many, many creations, none of which can be truly perfect?

The whole Big Bang thing always makes my head spin.  What was before the Big Bang?  What will be after the next one?  What is beyond the edge of the defined universe?  How can we truly know?

God is the same as all of this.  Where did God come from?  Who made God?  Is God simply a force (like the Force) that is everywhere and stemmed from the Big Bang itself?  Is God a column of fire, a pillar of wind, and a burning bush, all at the same time?

I think Christians, etc., should have to prove that God exists before anybody has to prove that He/She/It/Whatever does not.  There is far too little proof that God exists to simply accept God, in my mind.


			
				MDLarson said:
			
		

> The Bible, as I explained earlier in this thread, talks at length about two distinct creatures, the Leviathan and the Behemoth.  I've demonstrated how these animals, as recorded, are most likely some sort of dinosaur.  The Bible also mentions animals known as "dragons" several times.  Dragons?!?!  Why, they are the stuff of legends and fairy-tails!!!  Well, of course you would believe that if you have already made up your mind that they all died out millions of years ago.  But even if you believe in millions of years, it's not unreasonable to assume that some creatures would survive, unchanged, I might add to the present day (just like the Coelacanth.)  I propose that these legends involving dragons, while certainly subject to generous embelishment by their story-tellers, are talking about honest-to-goodness dinosaurs.  If you don't believe this theory, you must at least admit the similarities between "dragons" and some types of "dinosaurs."  Not to mention "sea-monsters," of course.


Again, you are taking the words of a book, or a collection of smaller books, written and interpreted by men (whether they came from the word of God or not) as fact and not as simply a book.  Who's to say the Bible isn't just a novel some guys came up with one day, thinking, "I wonder if these suckers will buy this stuff!"?  Who's to say it wasn't written by some whacko who had just discovered what cannabis does to a person?

That's another point... someone, PDS I believe, mentioned something about coffee vs. carbon dating.  Both are very unusual phenomena; how did someone discover either?  How did anybody discover anything we can do, like milk?  The answer is that all of this, like evolution itself, takes time to work out and formulate into what we know and recognize.  Someone didn't just figure out that coffee beans are bitter/tasty and decide to brew them in water with boiled milk on top.  Someone noticed that animals consuming a certain plant were jumpier than usual, which led to the harvest of the coffee bean, which led... etc.  Thus it is with any invention.  People didn't just pull the G5 chip out of thin air, it came from refinements in processor architecture, which stemmed from the early days of vacuum tubes, which... etc.

Anyway, it's late, there's too much to discuss in just one post, and I have over 200 other threads to get to, so I'll leave you guys with that... feel free to call me on anything you wish.


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## Arden (Nov 26, 2003)

pds said:
			
		

> BTW, do you know how Rene DesCartes died?
> 
> He was in a bar at closing time and the bartender asked him if he wanted one more for the road.
> 
> ...


Hehe, funny stuff!  ::ha::  I missed your last post before I posted for some reason... I don't think I'd refreshed the thread before you posted.  It was open that long.


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## MDLarson (Nov 26, 2003)

RacerX said:
			
		

> If God's method of creating the universe is not how it is described in the Bible but is in fact pretty close to what we know so far today, haven't you forsaken the creation of God for a book written by man? Right now you could be lead by other men believing that it is the will of God, all the while the truth of God's creation is all around you to see.
> 
> I can think of no greater blasphemy then to deny God's own handy work.


You have already disqualified the validity of the Bible's creation account.  You do not approach the Bible with any respect, neither in matters of religion nor history nor science.  You're assuming you already know all the facts "...but is in fact pretty close to what we know so far today."  I'm telling you that you got the interpretation of the evidence wrong.

Case in point; dinosaurs and my very last post.  How can you deal with the possibility of dinosaur / human coexistence?  How do you deal with T. Rex bones that have not totally fossilized?  There is heaps of evidence for a young earth, but it is ignored or prematurely disqualified, all because "it doesn't fit the evolutionary model."

I'm telling you that the evidence fits better and can be explained better in the context of a global flood and a designer.  Therefore, the whole post you directed at me started with a false premise that indeed I was wearing a "blindfold" to "true science."


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## MDLarson (Nov 26, 2003)

arden said:
			
		

> That's another point... someone, PDS I believe, mentioned something about coffee vs. carbon dating.  Both are very unusual phenomena; how did someone discover either?  How did anybody discover anything we can do, like milk?  The answer is that all of this, like evolution itself, takes time to work out and formulate into what we know and recognize.  Someone didn't just figure out that coffee beans are bitter/tasty and decide to brew them in water with boiled milk on top.  Someone noticed that animals consuming a certain plant were jumpier than usual, which led to the harvest of the coffee bean, which led... etc.  Thus it is with any invention.  People didn't just pull the G5 chip out of thin air, it came from refinements in processor architecture, which stemmed from the early days of vacuum tubes, which... etc.


Your argument actually strengthens the case for design, not evolution, arden.  And the coffee process or the G5 chip is not evolution, in the sense that random forces eventually bring about a _better_ end product, but a very good example of what intelligent designers can do when they put their minds to something.

To beat a creationist argument to death, take a watch apart and put all the parts in the bag.  Let's just say these watch parts are immune to wear and tear, just for the sake of the argument.  The evolutionist might say that, shaken long enough, random forces would eventually assemble the watch to its original state.  If it's not a watch yet, shake longer.  Shake it for millions of years if it doesn't work!

With this method, it will never become the watch it once was.  But a watchmaker, someone who knows what he is doing can take these parts out of the bag and carefully assemble these parts, according to print, and make a watch again.  That is not "evolution."  That is creation.

Well, this can be applied to the biological realm as well, correct?  The ridiculous odds are far worse than winning the lottery, but, as the evolutionist reasons, we are here, so it must have happened!

Gotta run. - I'll be thinking about the whole Bible credibility issue; I haven't forgotten about it.


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## Cat (Nov 26, 2003)

MDLarson- Your trying to kill a straw puppet here, not your real opponent. Case in point: the watch. A watch is already an end product, take in apart and you will have pieces, which only fit to one design. Evolution works almost, but not quite, entirely unlike what you describe. 
Evolution is not random, but based on rules. E.g. animals living in the sea have different requirements than animals living in the air. Compare dolphins to bats. Both mammals and both very well adapted to their environment. The environment if anything models its inhabitants. The bag doesn't require the watch to re-assemble itself, but look at lizard's tails. They can regrow, because they enhance the lizard's chance for survival.
Take a primitive population of lizards, those who can detach their tails, prosper, because more can escape the predators. Hence more lizards with detachable tails are born. The mutation from fixed to detachable tail is not purely random. It is bound to happen indeed in a period of millions of years: all those amino-acids are far less stable in their organic environment than the metal parts of the watch. If a change in DNA enhances the organism, it will prosper, if not it will die. This is quite a strict law, and not totally random.

Think about the odds indeed. How many sperm does a male animal produce throughout his life? What are the chances one carries mutated DNA? How many males of that species exist now? How many have existed in all the million years past? Talking about odds ... even a chance in several billion can produce a gigantic variety of changes in an organism.

The watch was designed from the beginning, and it didn't design itself and cannot adapt itself to the environment it "lives" in. Organism, however, can. So your argument is entirely beside the point.



			
				MDLarson said:
			
		

> There is heaps of evidence for a young earth, but it is ignored or prematurely disqualified, all because "it doesn't fit the evolutionary model."


 We can all too easily turn that around, can't we? There is heaps of evidence from all kind of scientific disciplines (history, philology, geology, paleontology, paleobiology etc.) for an ancient earth, but it is ignored or prematurely disqualified, all because it doesn't fit the bible.



			
				MDLarson said:
			
		

> How can you deal with the possibility of dinosaur / human coexistence? How do you deal with T. Rex bones that have not totally fossilized?


 The possibility of coexistence has been considered and rejected. Fossils have never been found in layers that are even remotely close. There is a big gap between the last dinosaurs and the first human-like creatures. Incompletely fossilised remains of prehistoric animals have been found repeatedly in arctic zones and the explanation is very simple: the were in deep freeze. Like a fridge, the ice conserved the remains: didn't they also find a mammoth somewhere in siberia? The most famous example is the Ice-Man Ötzi, foun in the Alps. There is no explanatory problem at all here. Sorry, another miss.

Besides I found a good account of the various stages of the writing of the bible and some info on which parts were approved and rejected by whom and when, I'll post some later on. It's all in books, so no links for now.


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## RacerX (Nov 26, 2003)

MDLarson said:
			
		

> You have already disqualified the validity of the Bible's creation account.  You do not approach the Bible with any respect, neither in matters of religion nor history nor science.  You're assuming you already know all the facts "...but is in fact pretty close to what we know so far today."  I'm telling you that you got the interpretation of the evidence wrong.



On the contrary, I approached the Bible originally not knowing anything else. It was it's failings that made me turn to other possibilities. I've done the same with many areas of religion, philosophy and science.

Scientist have put forth a Steady State model of the universe, one of them was one of my professors in school. I liked that professor a lot, thought very highly of him, and came to the conclusion that it didn't work given what I knew.

Current Big Bang theory (known as Inflation Cosmology) is the most widely followed theory on the subject today. I looked at it very hard, I understand why they came up with that model, but I've came to the conclusion that it didn't work given what I know.

You assume that because you blindly accept what others give you, that the rest of us must be doing the same thing only from different sources. This is completely untrue in my case. I don't assume I know all the facts, I assume that all the facts are not known. I assume that models can be modeled with what facts are known. And I assume that models are going to be shown to have short comings and they'll need to be modified.

The problem with the Biblical view point is that the model is set and can not be modified. If the facts don't match the model, you throw out the facts. In science if the facts don't match the model, you throw out the model.



> Case in point; dinosaurs and my very last post.  How can you deal with the possibility of dinosaur / human coexistence?  How do you deal with T. Rex bones that have not totally fossilized?  There is heaps of evidence for a young earth, but it is ignored or prematurely disqualified, all because "it doesn't fit the evolutionary model."



I know of no evidence of the things you are talking about. I know that neither you nor the person who told you (nor the person who told them, etc.) probably have the ability to check those facts.

Plus, in science, people are looking for anything new. If something like this was uncovered, it wouldn't be an object of Creationist myth, it would be the subject of much debate.



> I'm telling you that the evidence fits better and can be explained better in the context of a global flood and a designer.  Therefore, the whole post you directed at me started with a false premise that indeed I was wearing a "blindfold" to "true science."



No it doesn't. Here is the problem with your logic, you are looking for anything that might fit your Biblical view, you dismiss everything else. You've been told of these few stray facts (which are hard to even find) and you are saying those make the Bible the best fit. The best fit would be a model that fits most of the evidence, not the smallest (unverified) parts of the evidence.

When I was back in San Diego, I sat down with a couple people from ICR and we made a puzzle together while talking on these issues. I had brought the puzzle, it was a picture of a seal in the snow (very hard, I'll tell ya), but I brought it in a box with a Polar Bear in the snow on the cover. Before we started, I removed about a quarter of all the pieces. I said we are going to build this with what we have and not use the box for a reference because that is very much what working in science is like.

Part way through the puzzle I asked them what they thought the end product was going to be, they said a polar bear (they were using the box, what I told them they shouldn't do). When we finished we had the head of a seal almost complete. I asked if that was the head of a polar bear, which they agreed it wasn't, they realized that it was a seal in the snow. 

They said I had tricked them by having a box with a completely different picture on it. I said that is the same thing as using the Bible as a starting point for science.

The whole premise of my post was possibilities. Not false at all. It was a completely valid question which you are now refusing as it asks you to ask what if. Faith doesn't let you ask "what if". Faith is a blind following without question. I have no faith. Not in science, not in religion, not in philosophy. Everything is open to possibilities, everything is open to questions.

Can you honestly look at that post and answer the question? Or is the possibility that the Bible's accounts are false to much for you as a person to handle. The possibilities that what I believe today is in fact false isn't hard for me to deal with. Why are you having problems with this? You asked us to open up to possibilities, you must give as much as we are here.


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## Giaguara (Nov 26, 2003)

The bible (old testament) was written appx._ 6 thousands of years ago_. Humanity is a lot older than that.

Before that .. what do you think about the religions older than jewism or christianity? _why is there the gap - a big cap - between the appearance of the human race and "the" religion?_ there were many other religions that time, but most of them have died now. Why did _those_ religions (and do the actual non-jewish based religions) exist? 

_What is the origin of god?_ was it (rather than he or she) a casual creation? who made it? (I never liked the answer "eternal", not even when I was three years old. It sounded already too much "we don't know the answer so we have to tell you something like this")

_Why did god chose _one_ nation as his favorite?_ Isn't taht called specism? if he chose one nation/population etc as his favorite, why did he create other populations? If god is supposed to love everyone, why did he choose a favorite population? (Of course the books of that population will continue tellign they were chosen...) And, _why did he choose some special people as his special favorites; moses, mary, jesus, all the saints, mohammed etc? And why is there such a thing as "inherited sin"?_ (Unless it was originally meant in the context of reincarnation, everybody being responsable for their past lives). Does the inherited sin make any sense? Everyone is born quilty - that does not sound right. If he made the humans, why did he decide everryone was born quilty then? Why do [the church] blame for the actual people for jesus' death? I was born 2000 years after he died, he would have died anyway. And, did I or any of us, ever ask to be born?

The origin of all, as explained in the bible, seems really to be written a few thousand years ago. I personally always liked more the (american) Indian explanations of the origin of the world: a big turtle egg and so on. Of course the people nowadays are telling that even the story in bible isn't supposed to be taken letterally .. well? _What does it matter _what_ is the origin of everything?_ I remember the history books of some populations trying to explain the origin of _that_and_that_ population, knowing that many people living in that country did not 100% fit to The ideal place some scientists had thorized as the origin of that population .. The origin of the world (or just existance) is probably like the moon .. even if The Real Reason (that everyone could agree) was ever found, what would be next? Have you ever read any stories about how the humanity would transform, a few years before reaching the moon? .. has the humanity really turned to that (to the new man of the era of aquarius ..)? The man went to moon..  and there still are wars around, people who do everything in their life for money and so on ..  

If the human [race] was made by god, when will he release the human 1.0 where all the bugs of the actual beta will be fixed? When will all we be blond, tall, thin [whatever you think ideal], without having to worry about the heart diseases, obesity, PMS, IBS, EDs, FMS, rheumatism, arthritis ...? and where even the shortages species-wise will be fixed - more tolerance, no one looking only on surface (i.e. not ignoring someone only because he's not white etc), more patience, less violence ...


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## MDLarson (Nov 26, 2003)

RacerX said:
			
		

> You assume that because you blindly accept what others give you, that the rest of us must be doing the same thing only from different sources.


I don't wear a freeking blindfold!  Why do you say that?  Have I not offered sound explanations for *why* I believe what I do?  I believe what makes sense to me, that's it.  Creationism makes sense to me, evolution doesn't.  Don't make assumptions about me that aren't true.

And a friendly note to everybody; I'm not a scientist.  I'm not good at debates.  I'm not trying to prove that you are wrong and I am right.  _All I'm trying to do is convince people that I have reasons for believing what I do_.  For people to say that I'm wearing a blindfold in any way is pretty insulting.  I'm a pretty self-aware kind of guy, and those who know me agree.

Cat, good point about the watch thing, but I was trying to point out the ridiculous odds of the possibility of evolution in general.

But here's a question for biology people:  let's just say an animal experienced a "good" mutation in its gestation period.  This particular animal was dominant over its peers because of this unique trait, and was the "fittest", so it survived.  Is this mutation permanent in all strands of DNA and / or genes?  Would this trait be passed on to its offspring no matter what?  Just a question - not trying to make a point.


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## pds (Nov 26, 2003)

I'm having trouble keeping up. I had a bit to post (heh heh a quick reply) and went to check a fact, came back and my point is no longer so sharp

or maybe too sharp.

MD - I thought Racer's point was not antagonistic, but well put. The Bible is full of many kinds of references, some historical, some political, some alegorical, all written in a language we no longer use and full of nuance we no longer have. It is almost certain that we will fudge the reading somehow.

Take for example the whole book of revelations. The references and alegories are clearly aimed at first century Rome. It was put in the book mainly as a political tool to leave the impression that the Bible was the last word, when Jesus had already clearly said there was more to come. The contradictions (apparent contradictions) in the text are legion. Some need to be seen as alegory and some as literal. But which ones?

So Racer's question is very valid. It echo's Jesus' challenge to those who say "lord lord, did we not prophesize... in your name" - he says "get away from me... I never knew you."

It is in the Bible because it's true means that we can find it out through study of God's world and add to our spiritual knowledge of His presence through our experience. Otherwise faith is not blind, but dead.


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## pds (Nov 26, 2003)

Quick Reply...

Yes Racer, moral goodness requires extra effort. It is there that man's true value, true freedom and lie. I agree that how we live our lives is the point, we stand at a crossroads at every minute, a choice between doing and not doing. I think it is sometimes a choice between good and evil, but more often a choice between good and better. I appreciate your position, I would call it a description of faith.


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## Cat (Nov 26, 2003)

Giaguara has now asked twice about religion before the Jews, I'll take the challenge.

Jews, Christians and Muslims are monotheistic, they believe in one single god, creator, infinite, perfect etc.
Before that we had faiths of many gods, one of which or three of which were the main, chief gods. These gods incorporated natural phenomena that were inexplicable at the time. These gods were definitely anthropomorphic, not only had they bodies like ours, but also moods, emotions etc. Most importantly they were not omnipotent or omniscient. This is the case with the mainstream well-known Nordic and Greek religions. E.g. Zeus is certainly not omnipotent/-scient, but just the most powerful god. There are sophisticated discussions whether he effectively governed faith, or was subject to it, but all agree that Zeus was not the creator. In Greek mythology Chaos is the creator of the earth and Ouranos (heaven) and Gaia (Earth) the creators of all the living species. Zeus is a more political god in this respect: not simply a primitive god of lightning and thunder, but the lord of cities, justice and laws. As the population grows more sophisticated, so do the gods. Before Greek civilisation, most religions considered almost everything inexplicable or beyond human control as divine (or demonic). With primitive populations the most important things are basic needs: food. Many religions originally derive from agricultural rituals and are bound to the seasons. The cycle of seasons inspired many mythology to thin of a deity that died and was reborn, in Greek mythology we still see this myth honoured with Persefone. This death/rebirth cycle was often enacted with a ritual and sacrifices to make sure that spring and fertility would come. The very first rites were developed to control the supernatural. Since in primitive cults most concerns went out to fertility, the divinities were often female: Gea or Gaia, Demetra and Persefone, Isis, etc. The Great Mother is omnipresent is primitive cultus. 
Besides this popular, mainstream religion, we also have mysteric cults, that claimed to go beyond the normal religion. Beyond apparences, to the truth behind the truth. These required a complex initilisation ritual, test, and were more focused on finding spiritual balance in oneself instead of in supernatural forces beyond us: to become like a god. Gnosticism, for example, but also mysteric rites inspired by the figure of Orpheus.

We see a lot of this back in christianity, since the christians have been so good to take over most primitive myths and adequate them to their needs and doctrine. All main religious celebrations are blatant ripoffs of prior art in christianity.

Jesus resurrection is derived from the agricultural rites: jesus hangs like ripe fruit at the tree (has been described as such by poets) and then transcends into heaven. On the cross he relinquishes eartly life to gain spiritual life: catholics seem to have focused excessively on the suffering and corporeal death. The oriental church has focused more on the transcending into eternal life part with a triumphing christ. In agricultural myth a natural spirit dies during winter and is reborn in spring (lets say around Easter ...  ) to bring life to the earth.

The motherly figure is preserved in Mary, obviously. She shares some of the characteristics of the virginal pure maid (like Artemis and Athena), and some of the mother (like Demetra).

Also jesus shares attributes with greek gods, mostly his hippy hairstyle: e.g. Hermes and jesus both have long flowing hair and a pointy beard. Jesus is the young consort of the Great Mother and will be sacrificed to bring life to the rest. Sound familiar? We find this theme in many many religions and cults.

Read Marion Zimmer Bradley's "the Firebrand" or some of the cyclus around the "Mists of Avalon" or Jane M. Auel's "Earthchildren" saga. Or better yet, try "The Golden Bough" by Frazer


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## RacerX (Nov 26, 2003)

MDLarson said:
			
		

> I'm telling you that you got the interpretation of the evidence wrong.



So you can question me but I can't question you?



> On another note, I'm really wondering why people aren't challenging me more.



Because you take challenges personally.



> (RacerX was my main debate partner)



I didn't join this thread right away because I didn't want to make you feel like you were being attacked. I know what you believe and you know what I believe. I respect you for that, but discussions are there to challenge our positions. I don't expect people to just except what I say. I _do_ expect to be challenged to make me think about these things. Without being challenged I'll only examine my beliefs as far as I am comfortable doing so. Being challenged makes me look at things deeper then I other wise would have.

You need to be ready to look harder at your beliefs. It is going to be uncomfortable, it always is... for all of us. 

But most importantly, you should know by now that I have no ill feelings for you in anyway. When you ask why you were not being challenged, I thought you wanted and were ready to be challenged. It was the only reason I joined in.


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## pds (Nov 26, 2003)

Cat you beat me to it. But this may be interesting too.
Damn, it's long...

Gia, this is the second time you post in a similar way. I skipped it the first time, because it goes into a lot of doctrinal stuff. The thread has since moved more into that area and you deserve a reply.
One of the points you bring up is the gender issue. As for me, I think God is both masculine and feminine. Every level of the world has some level of polarity. Men and women, male and female. So the cause has to be both too. Not dualist, but containing the contents of both masculinity and femininity. The Bible gives a clue. "... in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them." So the image of god is both male and female, Parents. 

_ The bible (old testament) was written appx. 6 thousands of years ago . Humanity is a lot older than that. _

Well, not really. Moses "wrote" the Pentateuch around the time of the exodus, the time of Ramsis. He worked with many oral traditions that were around for ages before that. The Pentateuch was edited and re-written many times to give it the flavor of "chosenness", a mostly human construction that has some root in truth. It speaks of human society as having started some 6,000 years ago. I have seen the footprints of ancient humans in a pit in Managua, Nicaragua that are at least 7,500 years old and I am sure that "Eve" lived many years before that. Knowing how many exactly is a curiosity, but not an imperative for me

_ Before that .. what do you think about the religions older than jewism or christianity? why is there the gap - a big cap - between the appearance of the human race and "the" religion? there were many other religions that time, but most of them have died now. Why did _those_ religions (and do the actual non-jewish based religions) exist? _

Many take it as some proof of the truth of the religion. I would say that due to man's fall, he became quite base and it took many many years to come to a point in the providence of restoration that could be receptive of the word of God (ten commandments). For what it's worth, civilization seems to have coalesced around the same time as the Biblical Abraham. Isaac Asimov wrote a very interesting analysis of the old testament and the dietary laws that he says are the basis for the survival of the Hebrews. His approach and conclusions are very secular, as one would expect, but the conclusions are rather interesting. I haven't read it, and can't remember the title, but I had a long talk with someone about it - and I respect Asimov, even if he did have a lousy barber.

In Gabon, the casava is the dietary staple. Malaria is the plague of the people and that presents a problem. Casava sweetens the blood and makes it more tasty to mosquitos. The religious tradition of Gabon calls the people to refrain from eating casava in September, a month before the main harvest, as an offering to the gods. The anopheles  is most abundant in September, so the Bible is not the only place where religious tradition protects physical health.

_What is the origin of god? _

I don't know. Maybe we are all living in collar around the cat's neck (MIB), and God has his own issues of who his God is but so what. This is our reality and for better or worse it is here that we make our mark.


_Why did god chose _one_ nation as his favorite?_

The concept of chosen one is, IMHO, one of the most abused in all of theology. The old testament says that God's blessing would flow from Zion like milk and honey reaching to all the nations of the earth. Being "chosen" is being cursed with the task of loving the rest of the world in God's stead. Chosen means chosen to serve and to love, not chosen to be served and loved. The real root of it is connected to the principles of creation and the providence of restoration.

_And, why did he choose some special people as his special favorites; moses, mary, jesus, all the saints, mohammed etc?_

Maybe because when he spoke to them, they listened...

_And why is there such a thing as "inherited sin"? _

If you are born in Italy, are you not Italian? (OK, in Europe, it depends on whether your parents were Italian or not) If there was an original sin, and that has not been solved, then are not all the people born in that state? The question then is "was there an original sin?" The easy answer is no. The truth may be otherwise.

_If he made the humans, why did he decide everryone was born quilty then? _

Here we have a conundrum. Does God define sin, or do we? God defines goodness. When we act away from that goodness, we do so against His will. That is why it is called sin. One of the problems with many religious traditions today is that they blame sin on God, saying he tempted man or he knew he would fall. Even the doubters do so when they ask how they can believe in a god of goodness when the world is so flocked up, as if they weren't part of the flocking. When He created man he gave him a most precious gift. Not free will, but perfect authority over the outcome of his life. Perfect authority to be true to the moral imperative that Racer describes. Not being true to that moral imperative is at root of sin. It is not the root itself, but damn close to it.

_Why does the church blame people of today for jesus' death? I was born 2000 years after he died, he would have died anyway. _
(hope the edit is correct)

See the space time bits that Racer describes. Sorry to use you unwillingly in this apologesis Racer, but there's a kernel of truth in every heresy.  
It is an allegorical thing, a catharsis for the believer, mixed with a bit of political maneuvering of guilt. (...cause the buyers and the sellers were no different fellers than what I profess to be...) 

The contradiction is that traditional Christianity holds that Jesus was supposed to die on the cross. They base their theory of salvation on Jesus being the sacrificial offering. Believers in the old testament could receive benefit by making an offering. So whoever crucified Jesus should have gotten the best benefit. They should be heavenly heros. But the ones who did it were (according to early Christian dogma)  punished and their nation destroyed. And then they use his crucifixion as that guilt trip to get you to believe. It was this contradiction that made me give up on Catholicism. There is a way to understand it all, but that gets too far off topic.

_The origin of all, as explained in the bible, seems really to be written a few thousand years ago. I personally always liked more the (american) Indian explanations of the origin of the world: a big turtle egg and so on. _

Perhaps because it is more clearly allegorical (or because no-one is around to try to say it should be understood literally.) Still, the Indian legend also deals with the origin of sin and the process of reconciliation between man and god (or at least the world that the first Indian came from.)

_What does it matter _what_ is the origin of everything?_

Great question. If there is an intelligent origin, a designer, then we have purpose that goes beyond our own determination of our life's goals. If that intelligent origin has been giving clues about man's purpose consistently through many different religions, we may need to pay heed to those clues.

_Have you ever read any stories about how the humanity would transform, a few years before reaching the moon?_

Hey, where would mankind be without Tang 

_ has the humanity really turned to that (to the new man of the era of aquarius ..)? The man went to moon..  and there still are wars around, people who do everything in their life for money and so on _

you're kidding, right? No external event will ever change anyone. No alignment of planets, celestial event. That's one of the reasons that religion is so necessary. It calls one to personal change, to a personal path on Racer's moral highway, the path of choosing to do good, at every moment. Again we are talking about religion, not some institution or organization.

_If the human [race] was made by god, when will he release the human 1.0 where all the bugs of the actual beta will be fixed? When will all we be blond, tall, thin [whatever you think ideal], without having to worry about the heart diseases, obesity, PMS, IBS, EDs, FMS, rheumatism, arthritis ...? and where even the shortages species-wise will be fixed - more tolerance, no one looking only on surface (i.e. not ignoring someone only because he's not white etc), more patience, less violence ... _

Oh, come on! You want to free of PMS!!??  

Now there we go blaming God again for the problems of this world. Sin is an act that violates the moral principles of the world and is completely man's doing. I think he already released the GM human. Man is perfectly capable to do good if he decides to make the effort. The point is our growth to be able to realize the potential is completely within our own control. We can do it or take the easy way out and not do it. When will wars stop? When we stop fighting  them. We, men and women. When we become Christians in the realest sense, we walk the way of taking responsibility; when we become Muslim in the truest sense, obedient to the moral principles of God, that we be absolutely responsible to be good; when we become scientists in the deepest sense, with a deep respect for the world that God created.


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## pds (Nov 26, 2003)

Cat, I will look for the Golden Bough, though without a lot of hope to find it here in Cairo. The censor here is seriously hardnose when it comes to matters of religion. It may have to wait for another visit to the states.

Still, if your post is running in that vein, I get the drift and it works for me. The similarities between the religious tendencies of dissimilar peoples is part of my path of faith. It confirms for me that there is some common root, some common being. 

The task is to find that root.


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## Giaguara (Nov 26, 2003)

Interesting answers, pds.

As talking about god, everyone uses "he" .. not only in english, but still the male form. If god included both sexes, in english the male form would not be correct, right? In italian if you have lets say ONE boy (ragazzo) and  100 000 girls (ragazza), you have to use the form 'boys' (ragazzi; if all were girls it would be 'ragazze') (there is no gender neutral term including both; similarly man (uomo) and woman (donna) plural if containing at least one male (and ANY number of females) becomes > men (uomini). If god contained both sexes, wouldn't ... require an otehr for? nor he or she seem correct. it? or a form used only about the god probably. It may sound only a terminology question but ...

Yes, I want to have the human 1.0 be free of a lot of bugs including PMS.


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## MDLarson (Nov 26, 2003)

Points taken.  I still think you use harsher language than you should, but maybe I just take it personally when I shouldn't.

I'm going to take a break from these types of threads though; I only frustrate myself and other people.  PM me if you have burning questions or whatever.


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## pds (Nov 26, 2003)

Si, en espanol tambien. Pero odio el termino PC, he/she. It is too impersonal for me, He/she is too real.

My brother gives me a hard time for my faith, especially since I moved to the Middle East. He blames the desert and harsh desert life for the overly judgmental masculine god that monotheism presents. He may have a point, and the only way around it is through love. I find God in my wife, and in my prayer and in my speaking with otheres but he is still he. 

She is she for my wife. Let him be her to you if that is where you find yourself more comfortable.


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## Arden (Nov 27, 2003)

Wow, after reading all these responses, I think I'm ready to renounce religion completely. 

I think religion has always been a quest to find answers to questions you don't know how to answer.  If you want to know how something works, either look it up or chalk it up to divine creation.  (That's not a very good explanation... oh well, it's close.)  However, in this age, I don't think people have a need for religion, especially in an enlightened country like the US.  Almost any question you might have has an answer, and if it doesn't, you can bet good money that there's someone out there working on the problem.  People turn to religion, I think, because they are too confused by scientific explanations or are too lazy or naïve to look it up.

Anyway, more to come on this if necessary... this thread seems to be coming to a close.


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## Cat (Nov 27, 2003)

About the chosen people thing ... well, notice how primitive populations tend to call themselves "the people" or "humanity"? Same thing with their gods: it's their god, they invented him, so obviously he/she protects them and strikes out at their enemies. Religious war is "my god is better than your god" etc.

Cicero (and others before him) argued that if beasts had gods, lions would make a lion-like god and horses a horse-like god: humans make a human-like god: men a He, women a She.
When the ruling cast is male, the gods thend to be male and occupy themselves with male-like activities: politics, justice, war for instance.
Where females casts rule, goddesses tend to represent female like things: fertility (both agricultural and childbearing), natural cycles, domestic arts (weaving, pottery etc.). This is not to offend females and press them in a corner, this is a recorded anthropological fact among primitive populations. In modern society things are surely ... ehm ... different, not better maybe, but different.


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## pds (Nov 27, 2003)

How about this...

Given God as first cause and therefore male and female, male characters, having more male characteristics than female ones, are able to be aware of masculine characteristics, while females are sensitive to her feminine aspects. War and politics won't carry a civilization far for long, if there're no kids and no wheat harvest. The two are complementary pairs. (well, maybe the war bit should go)

BTW justice is feminine in my lexicon.

Anthropomorphic (leopomorphic) fantasy or a simple fact of deopomorphism? 

What is masculinity anyway, and how is it related femininity? If we look at this world we see a kind of dualistic structure of things. Mankind (people kind) have mind and body, inner and outer aspects of their total self. The body has male parts and female parts. The mind also has male imperatives or operatives as well as female. When you say love, each one has a fundamentally different definition of the contents of the term. Mars and Venus are not pop-fiction, they represent a real state of affairs. One word, two definitions.

One voice of God, two interpretations of the word.

Arden, i think the only way you can renounce religion is via labotomy. Ever step you take is one more on your path to your ultimate home. Just outside of Houston, I10 takes a big turn south in order to continue west.


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## Giaguara (Nov 27, 2003)

Well well .. masculine and feminine. I could talk hours about yin and yang (maybe the next 2 peripherals to my mac) or tao .. or just eastern religions. there both are valid, and the desired thing is balance, not the overdose of one [the one considered better].

Have you guys read the 'men are from mars, women are from venus'? i read it once, over a ten years ago. I had hard time trying to understand how the female way of thinking works. I understood how the males act, why they say or do something, just the male ones.. So, "I feeel sooooooooo baaad tonigth" > when I hear that in a discussion etc, I assume I am being asked an advice .. so that I am supposed to listen to caarefully whatever the other person is talking about, and then if the [processing of the bad emotions by talking about them to other people] lasts for over 5 minutes and gets spred to life-wide rant of everything, I feel frustrated ("what can i do? what is the point of telling all that to me? change your life if you want something better, rather than just talking") .. "Does my butt look wide in this dress?" > Why aren't questions like that ever wanted to have answers that are honest? "No, but you look like a ridiculous 50 y old aunt who does not have any sense in dressing, thus dressing like a 13 y old girl would.." "It looks big anyway. You won't find a dress that makes it look like you were Naomi" and so on. In one house I lived in there was a girl who always had to ask "how do you feel?" and she expected a long, analyzative answer. I know if I feel a) particualrly good (you see that, no need to ask) b) neutral (relatively ok, not very bad at least, this is the boring state of being), c) bad (I cannot distinguish the states of being angry, nervous, frustrated, in pain, etc. They are all the same; and when I'm in this, I prefer to be alone so leave me alone...) and d) leave me alone, I don't want to talk. That felt frustrating, especially when on the non-good state. .. Plus, I never have understood the point of "this is a secret, don't tell it to anyone". If anyone tells me a secret or anything that is better not spread around, I keep it. But more than once some girls/women have really got pissed off with me because I did keep the secret - after that "this is a secret, don't tell it to anyone"-thing. No wonder why most of my friends are male.

Well, I don't like the male/female ideas of the god(s) .. i think whatever there is/if there is, is just some kind of 'supreme power' without human charachters.


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## Arden (Dec 1, 2003)

G, you almost sound like a man trapped in a woman's body.


			
				pds said:
			
		

> Arden, i think the only way you can renounce religion is via labotomy. Ever step you take is one more on your path to your ultimate home. Just outside of Houston, I10 takes a big turn south in order to continue west.


Whatever you say there, bud.  I'm sorry, whatever you believe.

Where did you get the idea that I live in Texas?


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## eph115 (Dec 3, 2003)

Here's a question for y'all; how can evolution be proven to be real?


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## eph115 (Dec 3, 2003)

Cat said:
			
		

> So evolutionists ultimately appeal to chance, creationists to the will of god. Both cannot claim absolute truth, because who can fathom either the will of god or chaos? Personally I appreciate the heroic and tragic effort made by the scientist, rather than the unconditional surrender to ignorance sive "will of god" by the creationist.



Christianity CAN claim absolute truth, because born again Christians CAN know the will of God.  



In the time before Jesus Christ, the will of God was known by the priests and by personal visitations by God.  After Jesus Christ died (sacrificed) Himself for us, the barrier was broken, and men could know God personally, and know His will.  The Comforter (the Holy Spirit) that was sent to us when Jesus returned to heaven shows the born again the will of God.

We are called the sons/daughters of the Father for good reason; we walk with Him as sons and daughters.

For a verse that talks about the Holy Spirit, go to John 16:12 NIV (Jesus is telling His disciples He has more He wants to tell them, but they aren't ready yet).

In John 16:13 NIV, Jesus talks about the Holy Spirit coming to lead the disciples in the will of God (The Holy Spirit will guide Christ's followers in truth; just a quick Greek note, the word guide seemed to have been used in the sense of to teach, to give guidance to, to "lead on one's way"
http://bible.crosswalk.com/Lexicons/Greek/grk.cgi?number=3594&version=nas This verse gives the Greek reference.

http://bible.crosswalk.com/Lexicons/Greek/freqdisp.cgi?book=joh&number=3594&count=1&version=nas
This verse gives the Bible verse in the book of John.
(the verses from the lexicon are from the New American Standard Bible.)

Therefore, the Holy Spirit was going to, and does, guide people by teaching them.

What is it He teaches Christians?  That's answered in John 16:13 as well;
Jesus says that He (the Spirit) will only speak to the Christian what He hears.  Direct quote from the Scripture (NIV, John 16:13, the last part of the verse; "; He will speak only what He hears, and He will tell you what is yet to come."  We can know the will of God, because the Spirit (who a person of the Triune God) communicates to us the will of God.


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## RacerX (Dec 3, 2003)

eph115 said:
			
		

> Here's a question for y'all; how can evolution be proven to be real?



I'd like to see you prove the Christian's God is real. 

I've seen evidence of evolution. I've seen proof of the process around me every day. The path of evolution is the part that is still theory, and will most likely always remain that way as we can not possibly have all the pieces. From what we know an image of the path is viewable. It is not completely clear, but the general picture we have today works nicely to help out in other areas of study.

But God (any deity for that matter) is something I have yet to see any proof of.

Do you have proof? Why is God unable or unwilling to provide even the simplest proof like _He_ supposedly did at one point in time? And why provide contrary evidence to the writing on creation within _His_ own handy work (the Universe)? Why is God steeped in human failings? Shouldn't he be above such things?

And who made God? Did God rest on Sunday out of respect for his God? Are you worshiping the right God? Is your God just a middle man?


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## Giaguara (Dec 3, 2003)

eph115 said:
			
		

> Christianity CAN claim absolute truth, because born again Christians CAN know the will of God.



But then, the _not born again_ but _RAISED_ as christians are TOLD what the truth is... - regarding what I casually read today about the Sikh religion - I want to know what the Sikh version of the origin of the world is. ... I never asked to be born or to be a christian, i was just raised as one, as the dad of my mother was one (he never questionized it) (and my never questionixed she was either). 

What is the will of the god to those that a) don't have a god that is impersonalized as a person (e.g. a sikh god) or b) just don't believe there is any god ?


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## Arden (Dec 4, 2003)

eph115 said:
			
		

> Christianity CAN claim absolute truth, because born again Christians CAN know the will of God.
> 
> In the time before Jesus Christ, the will of God was known by the priests and by personal visitations by God.  After Jesus Christ died (sacrificed) Himself for us, the barrier was broken, and men could know God personally, and know His will.  The Comforter (the Holy Spirit) that was sent to us when Jesus returned to heaven shows the born again the will of God.
> 
> ...


I'm going to go out on a fairly shaky and unstable limb here and call all of this a bunch of deer crap.  I'm sorry if I offend you, but that's what I believe.  You really can't come to a thread like this and preach religious doctrine as if it were truth and not expect to be flamed.

How do you know that God or Josh (Jesus is Greek for Joshua) actually speak to people?  How do you know that they aren't simply being influenced by (un)controlled substances or making stuff up?  The fact is you don't know.  No matter how much you want to believe, you can't provide a shred of evidence to the contrary, and this is where religion really falls apart in my mind, despite the blind faith of the masses.

Quite often I see people with bumper stickers and the like on their cars that say stuff like "Jesus saves."  Jesus saves what?  20% at Burlington Coat Factories?  His favorite mug from falling off the table?  Or is it something less likely, like he saves us all from the sin that we inherit from our ancestors (yeah, and I'm a green flying fish)?  Well, if he can do it, why can't I?  I mean, I'm made of nothing different than what he was made of, skin and bones and some stuff in between.  God has never spoken to me, just like he never spoke to Jesus.  Please provide quantifiable evidence to the contrary, and I may believe it.


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## Cat (Dec 4, 2003)

RacerX said:
			
		

> Is your God just a middle man?


That is what Gnosticism tells us.

eph115: you are assuming that the bible is true. Before you can convince me of something by using the bible as an argument, you have first to convince me that the bible is true. I do not think the bible is true, so appealing to what is written in the bible doesn't convince me in the least that a "born again" christian can know absolute truth, or the will of god, since IMHO there is no such thing.
I can quote scores of books which have been part of the christian bibles at some point in time which directly contradict what you claim. But you wouldn't believe me, you wouldn't believe they are true. 

AFAIK christianity doesn't claim any form of resurrection in this world (which would be reincarnation). Our souls go to heaven and after the apocalypse, when this world will be destroyed there will be resurrection. So what do you mean with "born again christian"?

When a priest or prophet had a dream or vision about god visiting him, that is exactly what happened: he had a dream or a vision. How can you tell whether a god indeed visited him or exists at all if all you have are visions or dreams? I dreamed a lot of stuff, but I wouldn't go around claiming it is the truth.


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## pds (Dec 4, 2003)

eph115 said:
			
		

> Here's a question for y'all; how can evolution be proven to be real?



Real is no big trick. There didn't used to be big animals and now there are. The underlying question that you want to ask is what is the force or the motor behind the process.


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## eph115 (Dec 4, 2003)

RacerX said:
			
		

> I'd like to see you prove the Christian's God is real.
> 
> I've seen evidence of evolution. I've seen proof of the process around me every day. The path of evolution is the part that is still theory, and will most likely always remain that way as we can not possibly have all the pieces. From what we know an image of the path is viewable. It is not completely clear, but the general picture we have today works nicely to help out in other areas of study.
> 
> ...



Responding to a question with a question ,eh?

Ok,

What is proof of evolution?  Define evolution for me.  
If the case of evolution is that, according to you, 


> I've seen evidence of evolution. I've seen proof of the process around me every day. The path of evolution is the part that is still theory, and will most likely always remain that way as we can not possibly have all the pieces. From what we know an image of the path is viewable. It is not completely clear, but the general picture we have today works nicely to help out in other areas of study.



the path is still theory......  Evolution is a theory; can it follow the Scientific Method ?  Remember:

I. The scientific method has four steps
(http://teacher.nsrl.rochester.edu/phy_labs/AppendixE/AppendixE.html

University of Rochester)

1. Observation and description of a phenomenon or group of phenomena.

2. Formulation of an hypothesis to explain the phenomena. In physics, the hypothesis often takes the form of a causal mechanism or a mathematical relation.

3. Use of the hypothesis to predict the existence of other phenomena, or to predict quantitatively the results of new observations.

4. Performance of experimental tests of the predictions by several independent experimenters and properly performed experiments.


Unless someone can point me otherwise.  

By Ken Bingman's own mouth.... (9th grade biology teacher)
(http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/11/1/quicktime/e_m_1.html)

"To qualify as science, it has to be observable, testable, and within the real of science"

Does evolution qualify?

I'd like to stay and talk, but I'm doing my homework for class, so I'll be back.

Here's something for you:

I'll continue on, but why doesn't someone take the opposite angle and show why God isn't real?

eph


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## RacerX (Dec 4, 2003)

> 1. Observation and description of a phenomenon or group of phenomena.
> 
> 2. Formulation of an hypothesis to explain the phenomena. In physics, the hypothesis often takes the form of a causal mechanism or a mathematical relation.
> 
> ...



Yes.

The process of evolution is scientific fact and has been shown so via your qualifiers. The theory of evolution uses an understanding of the fact of the evolutionary process along with evidence uncovered via other disciplines. The full course of prehistoric evolution shall always remain a theory as there are always going to be information we can't uncover or information that shows a part of the theory was wrong and need correcting.

Science is a quest for knowledge, in it's purest form it should be without bias. The average person who believe may want to hold it up as all conclusive, but that is not what it is. Nor is that the power of it. It is a theory. A model used to describe and understand nature. It is the best model we have and it will be replace with better models as time goes on.

That is how Science works.

I still want some proof of a God. Anything at all would be a good start. Any evidence?



> the will of God was known by the priests and by personal visitations by God.



Why doesn't God visit us now?



> we walk with Him as sons and daughters.



Why would he walk with some people and not others? Why doesn't he show himself in some way?

I can actively do science. I can actively study nature. I can fulfill all my questions in those areas by starting a process of solving those questions. 

But other than someone telling me that God exist, I have no other confirmation of it. And the people who say he exist don't seem to have any other confirmation either.

That is a pretty sad situation. Can you solve this problem for the rest of us?

And don't quote or refer to biblical passages. A book written by man is a book written by man. Today, here and now, is there any evidence that God exist?

Has god touched you or any one you know in an unmistakable way? Maybe growing an arm back or rising from the dead. These aren't big tricks for God I would imagine (happened before didn't it?).


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## pds (Dec 4, 2003)

eph115

What will you do if the spirit of truth comes and says things that don't fit your paradigm? You have expectations that he will confirm the things that you have already sussed out. Still, Jesus warns us that he may have to chastize the faithful. I realize that you count the "born again" as the ones who will escape that chastizement, but that is not by knowledge, only by faith.

Historically, it was the unwashed, the ones who were too busy with life who became J's disciples. The traditional religious guys were too sure of their doctrine to hear the word. Jesus had the deepest chastizement for those who were nominally the ones best prepared to receive him. Where will you be if the same thing happens again.

You do not know what the "spirit of truth" has to say, because you are not him. 

Unfortunately the "I'm right and you're wrong" approach does two things. It paints you (and by association faith) in a bad light and it nullifies the debate.

RacerX

You have become more strident as the conversation has polarized, and I find that unfortunate. 

And unfair too. You can do science. You can do nature. You can do religion too. There are methods and practices that can open one to the existence of a spiritual realm and there are "things" within that realm that solve questions and problems. They are not science in itself, but there are not inconsistent with scientific method within their sphere. They are of an intimate and personal nature but they are objectifiable within the context of that spirituality, they are applicable to people in different circumstances. The "doing" requires intellectual integrity and being consequent to our discoveries.

They do not include the quoting of scripture as infallible. They may include reference to texts for moral reasoning.

You do science, but do you put the same effort into spirituality? Possibly not, it seems it is not a calling. To me that is not a real problem, in the area that you do exert effort you have taken some of the lessons that even "faithful" people sometimes don't get. The extra change conundrum and the 4d conal light on space time are to me spiritual concepts that I can understand and are not inconsistent with my experience with god (though I'd like to hear more about space/time). In a complex way I agree that "original sin" can't be expunged and I agree wholeheartedly that the idea that Jesus' crucifixion atones for my "sins" tomorrow is laughable.

I have been meaning to point out the puzzle hoax is a bit disengenuous as proof of what science is and what the problem with religion is. In science we start with a premise of what we may find doing such and such. We start out with a glance at the box-top, an idea of where we are going. Unfortunately some religious people may say that the seal's face is a polarbear's, but that was not the case, was it. Some scientists also bend their facts to keep their grants, don't they? (BTW what is IDG or whatever the initials were).


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## RacerX (Dec 4, 2003)

I do not mean to say (or imply) that science and religion have to be mutually exclusive. The contrary seems true from what I've seen of many scientist. I've known quite a few scientist who were driven by a love of God's creation. The study of physics, chemistry, biology and even evolution was their way of getting closer to the only true possible link to a deity, the universe created by that deity. 

If what God (or whom ever) did while creating the universe doesn't match up with what was written, that which was made by the hand of God should rightly out weigh that which was written by the hand of man.

I have no evidence of a deity. So I study aspects of nature.

As for spirituality, I'm not fully sure how that is defined in my case. Does my studies of math and physics cross over into my study of philosophy? Yes. Does my study of philosophy influence my studies of music and art? Yes. Does my studies of music and art influence my studies of math and physics? Yes. Does any (or all) of these venture into the realm of metaphysics? Yes. Does that qualify as spirituality? I don't know.



> Some scientists also bend their facts to keep their grants, don't they?



Yes. There are honest and dishonest people in all walks of live. There are those who can accept the truth and those who can't. There are those who have banked on an outcome to the point of changing the facts to match that preferred outcome in many areas, including science.

Physics is one area I knew that both dogma and social interactions slowed progress because people with influence have banked on their theories.

Knowing this, having seen it in person, is why I am skeptical of most publicized scientific results. Until I have a chance to read the original papers and data, I assume the results are being reported are most likely exaggerated.

Quick example:

I read in the newspaper in the early 90's that scientist using the Hubble Space Telescope had determined that the universe was only 8 billion years old. This was quite a bit shorter life span than had previously been theorized. In fact it was so short that it made it hard to imagine our solar system (which is a little over 5 billion years old) would have been able to form from a previous generation of stars (which was needed to create the heavier elements we are made of). I dismissed it until I had a chance to research the basis of the report.

As it turned out, a 10-15 year long study of distant galaxies had been started to try and more accurately determine the Hubble constant (the expansion rate of the universe). It was to average the speeds (with relation to the distances) of thousands of galaxies to get the results. The first test galaxies (a group of about a half dozen) had yielded a Hubble constant that would have had the Universe's age at 8 billion years. Galaxies (like stars and planets) often revolve within systems, and this test group could have been moving towards us in relation to the system they were part of.

It wasn't a real result. But that didn't stop the press from publicizing it as one. Later progress reports had the Hubble constant at a more reasonable figure (the Universe being 12-16 billion years old).

Cold Fusion is another example which seemed bogus and turned out to be in the end.

Skepticism is healthy in an informed population, even of science reporting in the media.



> (BTW what is IDG or whatever the initials were).



ICR: Institute for Creation Research.

It is a small building in an industrial park in Santee California (right next to the Santee Drive-In Theater actually), that does _research_ to prove the Bibles version of creation.


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## eph115 (Dec 4, 2003)

pds said:
			
		

> eph115
> 
> What will you do if the spirit of truth comes and says things that don't fit your paradigm? You have expectations that he will confirm the things that you have already sussed out. Still, Jesus warns us that he may have to chastize the faithful. I realize that you count the "born again" as the ones who will escape that chastizement, but that is not by knowledge, only by faith.
> 
> ...



If Jesus had to chastize the faithful, it's because they have left their first love (look to the churches that are talked about Revelations; I can't remember which one was unfaithful).  Next, the Bible will confirm what the Spirit says, Third, the Pharisees were the ones who were chastised; the Pharisees and Sadducees rejected Jesus because He didn't fit what they wanted.  That's why He chastised them; they claimed to know truth, and because they claimed they knew truth, but didn't accept Jesus, Jesus chastised them.

Fourth, we can know what the Holy Spirit says, because Jesus says that His sheep know His voice; look at the traditional shepherd to understand that statement.  I don't have to be the Spirit; the Bible clearly states that God talks to His kids.  Even if He never talked to us again, we still have His will: the Bible.


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## RacerX (Dec 4, 2003)

> because Jesus says that His sheep know His voice;



Like I said, skepticism is healthy.



Makes me glad I'm not part of the sheep.


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## eph115 (Dec 4, 2003)

RacerX said:
			
		

> Like I said, skepticism is healthy.
> 
> 
> 
> Makes me glad I'm not part of the sheep.



Why are you so rude?

Have I insulted you?


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## RacerX (Dec 4, 2003)

eph115 said:
			
		

> Why are you so rude?



How was that rude? Please explain after showing proof of God.



> Have I insulted you?



Not to my knowledge. Were you considering it?  

Proclaiming your undying and unwavering faith in church or among the faithful is fine, but in a discussion thread a little discussion would be helpful.

How did you come by your faith?


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## guapagirl (Dec 5, 2003)

After trawling thru this thread, it seems to be religion v science.  They can exist together but, whislt I am emphatically NOT religious in any way, it does seem that science has become a religion in many ways.  It's like some one says "it's scientifically proven" so we have to accept it.  Over here in the uk there have been a lot of arguements over scientists saying stuff only to find that they have been pressurised by sponsors or government to toe the line.  Remember scientists have done a lot of bad things as well as beneficial stuff and they can lie just like the rest of us.


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## RacerX (Dec 5, 2003)

guapagirl said:
			
		

> After trawling thru this thread, it seems to be religion v science.  They can exist together but, whislt I am emphatically NOT religious in any way, it does seem that science has become a religion in many ways.  It's like some one says "it's scientifically proven" so we have to accept it.  Over here in the uk there have been a lot of arguements over scientists saying stuff only to find that they have been pressurised by sponsors or government to toe the line.  Remember scientists have done a lot of bad things as well as beneficial stuff and they can lie just like the rest of us.



Like I said, skepticism is healthy.

(hopefully you won't take that as being rude like eph115 did)

We should all be critical of everything. Sure, it requires more effort on our part, but at least we have a fighting chance of being informed. If we take what is handed to us as undisputed facts, we really have no one else to blame but ourselves.

One thing that we should all watch out for from others when they are passing on information is if they have an agenda. An agenda could be many things. Sometime it may be profit or self promotion, other times it may be insecurity (there are people who need others to believe what they believe to validate those beliefs).

This type of critical information gathering is important far beyond science and religion. Here in America we had a poll recently that asked three pretty straight forward questions. Here are the questions and the percent that got them wrong:

(1) Has the United States uncovered evidence demonstrating a close working relationship between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda?  (48% wrong)
(2) Have weapons of mass destruction been found in Iraq? (22% wrong)
(3) Did most people in other countries backed the U.S. war against Saddam Hussein?  (25% wrong)

What was surprising about the poll was that it also ask those polled where they got there news from. When that was broken down against what the answers were, this is what it showed:

Fox News: 85% got one wrong, 45% got all three wrong
CBS News: 71% got one wrong, 15% got all three wrong
PBS/NPR: 23% got one wrong, 4% got all three wrong

That is a surprising number of our population who have not taken the time to double check the facts which they believe to be true. Whose fault is it? It is their fault for not putting in the extra effort and not checking to see of those presenting them with the information have agendas.

It can't be said enough: skepticism is healthy.


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## chemistry_geek (Dec 6, 2003)

> Originally posted by *guapagirl*
> It's like some one says "it's scientifically proven" so we have to accept it.



"Scientifically proven" is an idea that lay people discuss when referring to scientific topics.  I would like to add that science CANNOT PROVE anything.  One cannot prove anything with science, one can only support a hypothesis or a theory with evidence, and disprove an idea/observation with science.  And I really hate it when I hear the press ask a scientist "Do you have any theories on the matter Dr. So-and-so?"  A scientist doesn't have any theories about anything.  The reporter should be asking the doctor if the scientistist has any ideas on a particular subject.  It really irks me when the press and the masses don't get the terminology right, because, this leads to confusion, misunderstanding, unnecessary heated discussions.  As someone pointed out earlier, I think it was Giagara, a theory is not the end-all-absolute trueth, it's just an idea that has been accepted by a large part of teh scientific community to explain an observation in the best way possible to date.

I'd really like to participate more in this thread, but due to time constraints and the lack or a *REAL* internet connection at my current residence I cannot join in this discussion.  RacerX brings up a lot of good points, ideas that I agree with completely, but could not put into words myself due to the constraints listed above.  Trust him when he says "question everything" and "don't be a lemming or a sheep".


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## pds (Dec 6, 2003)

RacerX said:
			
		

> Like I said, skepticism is healthy.
> ....
> This type of critical information gathering is important far beyond science and religion. Here in America we had a poll recently that asked three pretty straight forward questions. ... When that was broken down against what the answers were, this is what it showed:
> 
> ...



That is just plain scarey. (however that word is spellt ) 

I have never seen Fox News, but know that most TV news is infotainment seeking to sell soap. Do you suppose the misinformed are so because of their news preference or the preference is result of their tendency to be lax in their facts?


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## RacerX (Dec 7, 2003)

I think those numbers represent two groups of people who are misinformed. There are those who watch infrequently and get much of their news via sound bites, and then there are those who watch the news that matches what they want to hear. 

I would guess that CBS's audience falls into the range of those who aren't able to get the full story or the follow-up information. The failure is most likely unintentional on both the parts of the news providers and the audience, but clearly can be summed up by a lack of effort by both parties.

From what I know of Fox News, they seem to have an agenda in mind. They are quick to report any possibilities that match their agenda as facts and don't follow-up when those initial reports turn out to be wrong. They have a motto: "fair and balanced", which seems like an odd thing to need to state to begin with. In this case the failure may actually be more of a success. Fox News wants to project the news that supports their agenda (and appears to be doing a good job) and their audience is most likely watching to hear what they want to hear from their news.

Just as some people put effort into finding out the details of news events, there are others who spend as much effort in finding "news" that supports their preconceived views of the world. The internet actually has added to the problem of misinformation (disinformation) by supplying us with so many alternatives. It is not hard to find sites that present the news with a spin that appeals to us. It is a trap that (again) requires active conscious efforts on our part to over come. There may have been a time when journalistic standards protected the people from agendas, but in todays world people need to take more of that responsibility on themselves.

Back to the subject we've been looking at in this thread, both those who _follow_ science and those who _follow_ religion without active efforts to question either are generally staying within the bounds of what is comfortable for them.

I would like to believe that people can escape the _faith_ of science and in turn find the study of science even without spending years for an extensive education. It is hard for me to speak on this (being someone who has spent years on an education in science), but I would like to believe that actively questioning everything put before you with the label _science_ would make even the average person able to filter out the hype that is often a byproduct of publicized science.

In a world teaming with information, the quick and easy path is almost always the wrong path.


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## Cat (Dec 8, 2003)

Someone earlier asked to prove that god does not exist. Some thoughts:
1) proving the non-existence of something that is undefined is quite hard. First we need to carefully define the object under consideration. What is your definition of god?
2) The existence of some objects is self-evident (e.g. our own consciousness), the non-existence of others is self-evident (e.g. colour without extension). We need proof of the existence and non-existence of objects only if they do not fit one of the self-evident categories. Doesn't god according to the christians fit the first? Doesn't god according to the atheists fit the second? What is the sense of a discussion in these cases?
3) I do not require a god, so why would I need to prove or disprove his existence? Your faith presupposes a god, so why would you ask me to prove or disprove his existence if the outcome doesn't affect you?

There is a little Zen-story:
A famous westener scientist came to the Dalai Lama to learn. They had a cup of tea: the Dalai Lama started pouring in the cup until it was full and then continued until it overflowed. The westener asked: what are you doing? Can't you see that cup is full? The Dalai Lama said: You see, you are as full as this cup of prejudices. If you want to learn something new, first you have to become empty again.


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