The science thread - Controversial

[Arden]

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."

 

[donkey]

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?

 

[Arden]

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.

 

[pds]

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?

 

[chevy]

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.

 

[pds]

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...

 

[donkey]

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?

 

[chevy]

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.

 

[Arden]

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.

 

[Cat]

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.

 

[toast]

"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.

 

[MDLarson]

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.

...

 

[chevy]

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

Not too serious here...

 

[Cat]

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.

 

[chevy]

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

This is a good point.

 

[Arden]

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.

 

[Darkshadow]

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

 

[MDLarson]

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.

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.

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.

 

[Arden]

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.

 

[Giaguara]

[...]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.