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HMS Beagle (Possibly) Found
With the Beagle 2 lander lost on Mars, good Beagle-related news has been lacking, until now. British paper The Observer is reporting that the original HMS Beagle, the ship Darwin travelled on during his famous voyage, may have been found. Marine archeologists believe they have found the ship, which has been resting at the bottom of some Essex marshes for the last century.
Now we just need to find the other Beagle. Wouldn't it be great if we found that one at the bottom of some ocean?
-twb
"Hooray! Oh. Wait. Crap."
http://www.questionablecontent.net
Snoopy was found dead in a Vegas hotel room, at the bottom of the tub. CSI Gil Grissom suspects foul play as several small, yellow feathers were found at the scene.
...and it was on this planet.
Massive by Design
It's *still* not responding to signals.
THINK
Spirit was obviously the alpha rover, since it survived and Beagle 2 did not. How appropriate!
Press any key to continue, any other key to quit.
Hang on. If European engineering can produce something that will survive 150 years in Essex, landing a buggy on Mars should be peanuts in comparison. What went wrong?
These sigs are more interesting tha
Apparently the ship has undergone some sort of specialization to allow it to be a marsh-submarine instead of its original function of water-floater. This is truly an acomplishment for Darwinian evolution.
Soon, I'm sure examples such as this will crop up all over, as ships start to pass on their abilities to survive under marshes to their offspring.
Darwin doing on Mars? Wait a second...did he come back from the Galopagos via the Bermuda Triangle? I think we may have solved the mystery of all the crap that goes missing down there.
People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them
into a higher form of ooze.
"who knows what remnants of Darwin's trip may still lie down there"
I doubt there will be anything of Darwins on board. It did many things after his travels in it and was eventualy stripped down by someone else. It's like getting a used car with several owners before you. Will you really find anything worth wild from the first owner. Maybe an old green fry in the seat. Who wants that.
Evolution or ID?
Well, after Darwin travelled on it, it went through a long period as a coastguard ship, and then was moored in a river and used as a houseboat and customs vessel for several more years. So it's quite likely there won't be much evidence left from Darwin's voyages.
It (the HMS Beagle) used to have a huge bank of guns, but they were gutted and replaced with diagnostic equipment.
Make science, not war!
I hope you are joking. Your post is the intellectual summation of 2000 years of fear of the truth. Not saying that Darwin is the end-all-be-all truth, however, it is and always has been the fundemantal Christian's way to hide the eyes and lash out at anything that doesn't support the ultimate in tall tales and outlandish theories.
Darwinism has been studied relentlessly by thousands of teams of scientists and skeptics. No one has yet been able to prove it wrong. Quite the contrary, actually; most times evidence is dicovered to support the theory of evolution. I have yet to see a scientist prove that the Red Sea was parted or the burning bush spoke or the bones of the whale that Jonah lived in for 3 days and nights were found.
Religion is necessary bullshit. Nothing more.
Is there any evidence of life in Essex?
Any right thinking Christian in this country knows that the whole Beagle voyage was a scam. There was no Beagle, Darwin was a heretic ponce at best, 'evilution' (sick) is self masturbation by atheists.
There can only be one nation under God. And if gays are allowed to marry, we might start a backwards evolution into snails and other amoral beings.
Thank you, amen and God bless America, Christian science and the GOP.
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
don't let James Cameron get anywhere close to this wreck! Don't give him any ideas!
Finding the Beagle is just historic curiosity. It remained in service for something like fourty or fifty years after Darwin's voyage, first as a coast guard ship, and was later permantly docked as a customs boat. I've heard it was even sold or rented as a houseboat for a while. Even if they recover the ship intact, there won't be any indication that Darwin ever set foot on it.
I'm not looking to start a theological debate here, but just make the statement that it bugs me when some of the more fundamentalist Christians outright oppose evolution in schools because they see it as a blasphemy. Same thing happened when folks were debating the planet being round or that it isn't the center of the galaxy.
I know your comments weren't on this extreme level at all, but it just made me think of others who have taken such stances.
Paul Lenhart writes words!
HMS Beagle was very successful, it only ended up at the bottom of a marsh after years of useful voyages.
Can we please not turn this into a religious debate.
" I hope you are joking. Your post is the intellectual summation of 2000 years of fear of the truth. Not saying that Darwin is the end-all-be-all truth, however, it is and always has been the fundemantal Christian's way to hide the eyes and lash out at anything that doesn't support the ultimate in tall tales and outlandish theories.
Darwinism has been studied relentlessly by thousands of teams of scientists and skeptics. No one has yet been able to prove it wrong. Quite the contrary, actually; most times evidence is dicovered to support the theory of evolution. I have yet to see a scientist prove that the Red Sea was parted or the burning bush spoke or the bones of the whale that Jonah lived in for 3 days and nights were found."
Evolution or ID?
"What's the Beagle look like?"
"There's a picture of it here."
"What's that coming out of it?"
"Lightning, Wrath of God type stuff."
"Bush is said to be a nut about this stuff. He's got teams out searching for it."
"The army that carries the Beagle in front of it is invincible"
I've never been a fan of gravity. I don't seem to be able to float off into space though...
Are you badmouthing our president?
I have reported you.
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
"Truly we can see God's works through this evolution. I feel my work can help all men have a better understanding of the ways of the Lord in Heaven and His divine plan." ... " I hope that these notes don't get separated or there might be quite a bit of a silly misunderstanding, what with the monkeys and all."
--Leo
Ok, so we have a ship that was designed to cross vast stretches sea that's been lost for centuries... so what do they do? Take a probe that is designed to cross vast streches of space and give it the same name!
Good plan. How about naming the probe set to visit the asteroid belt "Titanic"! :)
Blockwars: free, multiplayer gaming
"They do not preach that their god will rouse them, a little before the Nuts work loose." Kipling, 'The Sons of Martha'
lol @ christians
I have read Gerald Schroeder's work, which seems to be along the lines of what you are implying, I find the idea interesting though not thoroughly convincing. I tend to treat creation in much the same way as the end times. It did/will happen and God had/has it under control. In the face of inssuficient scientific evidence to explain evolution and the like I will go with the conservative literal creationist view until evidence suffices to make an alternative view thoroughly convincing.
Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree. -Martin Luther
I hear they parked it in some dock in a marsh, and it slowly sunk into the muck. By the way, what does RTFA stand for?
But there is another kind of evil that we must fear most... and that is the indifference of good men.
How long before it will be able to walk out of the swamp on it's own?
*
q: Why does the French Navy have glass-bottom boats?
a: So they can see the old French Navy
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
It's actually beyond fundamentalism.
When the Fundamentals were published, more than half of the people who worked on them believed in evolution. Christam Fundamentalism was primarily created to combat the rising notion in the early 1900's that there was no Virgin Birth, and that Jesus was no more the Son of God than any other man. It was the Hyperfundamentalism that Henry Morris and others stirred in the mid-20th century that really got the antievolutionary ball rolling.
Me, I agree with St. Augustine: If an unbeliever finds you inept in your explanation of the circuit of the sun in the heavens, how can he ever believe you on the important matters?
I have seen far more evidence that supports evolution than creation.... Funny how people can see such differences....
About the only thing creationists have as evidence is 'Because the book says so' and not so long ago it would be followed by 'and if you don't believe us were gonna burn ya'
Seriously, what evidence are you basing your creation theory on? The majority oppinion of the people around you?
My evidence is a bunch of skeletons showing the various stages of evolution, got anything better?
Jeroen
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
you state that no one has ever proved darwinism wrong and that most accounts of research into the subject support it. also that no one can prove the bible right.
let me add:
no one has ever proved the bible wrong and most accounts of research into the subject support it. also, no one has ever proved darwinism right.
I agree.
I am a conservative Christian (please hold your insults), and I have found the theory of evolution lacking for scientific reasons. It is a fascinating idea, but far from proven.
I've often marveled at the amount of faith it requires to accept evolution and the purely secular theory of the origin of everything. The idea that a superdense particle passed into being from nothingness for no reason and with no cause is pretty hard to swallow. Much moreso than God purposefully creating.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
He was brutaly beaten about the head with a camera tripod. Authorities are searching for an associate known as "Woodstock" who had been drinking with him in the hotel bar until 2 A.M.
Let's not undervalue history.
What value did Ballard's discovery of the Titanic and Bismark have? They wouldn't have been nearly as important if they had been some anonymous freighter that sank during a storm, even though the technological achievement would have been identical.
These are ships with history -- with stories that we deem important, interesting, or compelling. The stories that we value as a culture (species?) are part of what define who and what we are.
The value of the Beagle's discovery is purely historic. And in defining it as important or unimportant, we define something about ourselves as individuals and a society.
Darwinism is a Theory, nothing more. Nothing has proven it correct and nothing has proven it wrong.
Creationism is also a Theory, nothing more. Nothing has proven it correct (yet) and nothing has proven it wrong either. I say yet for creationism, because unlike Darwinish there's a chance that God may yet speak up and claim his wayward creations.
What I can't get over is why none of the Darwin advocates can accept that there's a chance that the wood cabin in the middle of the woods just happen and insist that someone had to have built it.
That most of those skeletons have been debunked? One was faked and one was shown to have crippling arthritis.
Which is not to say that evolution is wrong. Just that the skeletal evidence doesn't PROVE anything one way or the other.
Really, what do you base your arguments on? The majority opinion of people around you?
It went through a black hole parket just outside of mars, and rematerialised 150 years ago.
Next we'll here that it picked up a strange alien object on its travels.....
I agree with you. I was raised Catholic, and actually, most Catholics agree with evolution and most scientific findings about our origins, such as the big bang, because of the way they interpret the Bible. They believe that the creation story is a metaphore, and that seven days to God could be different than our notion of seven days, and that he may have created us by evolution, as that is just the way that he worked.
I hope I explained this so that you guys could understand.
thisnukes4u.net
I think you've misread Genesis.
Genesis I (v.11-24) states quite clearly that God created plants on the land on the third day, didn't get round to doing the Sun until the fourth day, created the swimming and flying creatures on the fifth and left the land animals (including Man) until the sixth.
Which is nothing like the order science has determined. So you have to say that Genesis managed neither the precise order nor the general themes correctly.
Of course that's just one of the Creation stories in Genesis. There is another in Genesis 2 which places Man as the first living thing followed by plants, animals and finally Woman.
At least one of the stories has to be wrong.
Best wishes,
Mike.
How is it that Darwinism (a theory) has to be proven wrong, yet Creationism (also a theory) has to be proven right. I call double standard. And don't try to give me the Darwinism is a theory in the mathematical sense and Creationism is a theory is a thory in the common sense. Evolution does have some evidence that SEEMS to suggest at it's correctness...but have you ever heard of epicycles?? Look it up. You'll see that the evidence fit the theory, but it was WRONG (at least we think now). Just because we have a suggestion of proof, doesn't make it true.
"As a long time moron that ignores scientific rational and puts my faith in a 2000 yr old book that only evolves only to suit those in power, I believe evolution is crap and fags are going to hell"
Is that what you really meant to say jwthompson2?
Jesus man, even the pope believes in the big bang -
Here is a quote on what he feels about evolution:
A 1996 quote from Pope John Paul II:
"Today, almost half a century after the publication of [Pius XII's] Encyclical, fresh knowledge has led to the recognition that evolution is more than a hypothesis. It is indeed remarkable that this theory has been progressively accepted by researchers, following a series of discoveries in various fields of knowledge. The convergence, neither sought nor fabricated, of the results of work that was conducted independently is in itself a significant argument in favor of this theory."
I know, you're not catholic, you're southern baptist like I was - before I got a clue. You are out of touch, even by christian standards. This would be a lot longer post if you wanted me to rip your stance completely apart using only Christian points, but trust me it is trivial. Progressive Christian's are seeing the problems associated with centuries of denial - I suggest you try some real critical thinking if you intend to continue being a christian, and not a fundamentalist relic.
ymmv
...but is there any news on the HMS Pinafore?
You've gotten my point exactly!
Both ideas require the same faith in something you can't necessarily understand or prove.
So people shouldn't look down on religion because of what they see as a fault for requiring this kind of faith.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
I'm going to kick myself for biting flamebait in the morning, but oh well. I have room for a couple more hooks in my mouth.
I am not opposed to teaching evolution in schools, I am in favor of treating it as a theory though.
The problem here is that you don't know what a theory is. A theory is not a hypothesis. The exact definition is fairly complex, but the rough meaning is that, by all emprical methods, a theory is as right as we can get with the data we have.
Newtonian gravity is "just" a theory. It's also been overthrown: The only way to overthrow a theory is to make one that A. mechanically encompasses explains all observations explained by the existing theory, B. by the same* mechanism encompasses, explains, and/or corrects observations not covered by the previous theory, or in conflict with the previous theory. Relativity covered everything the old theory of gravity did, plus it corrected for things like Mercury orbiting too fast and partially explained why Neptune and Uranus are all out of orbital-mechanical whack.
My biggest problem is that it is used as a defense to try and disprove the truth of the Bible and is treated as fact when it has yet to be and probably can not be proven.
I'm not going to get into the proof, but there's enough of it that Henry Morris as encorporated evolution (or what he calls "selective diversification") into his antievolutionary model. He dresses it up nicely, but in the end, he's showing you a Zebu and calling it a Nene, and banking on the fact that most people probably don't know the difference anyway.
Anyway, science has NEVER, and in fact CAN never attempt to use Evolution against any Theological construct, because the bible covers matter that is not proximate in nature. Science can cover the proximate all it wants, because it has access to the proximate within its means of action.
It can draw no conclusions on nonproxmiate or superproximate events or actions, and in fact has very clear boundaries set on just where it has to stop.
It is Christianity that bears full and complete responsibility for saying that Evolution means the end of Christianity, and all that other slippery slope gloom and doom. Christians published The Genesis Flood, God and Evolution, and The Fall of Noah. Not scientists, but Christians. They had help from a few secular philosophers like Sagan and Asimov, but for every secular attack on Christianity, there's a thousand self-inflicted wounds.
If you plan to talk to your kids about evolution, remember not to build a dam around your house in the river. The more parents attempt to protect, misinform, uninform, or isolate their children, the more those children learn about things for themselves, and when they do, they know nothing but their parent's determination that what they're told on Sunday disagrees with what they see the other seven days, and the more we drive our own children out of the Church forever.
It should be clear to any rational thinker that the most, if not all, of the Bible is intended to be metaphorical rather than literal. EG, the Book of Job is allegorical rather than a record of actual events. The basic problem with the literal interpretation theory is that even if you accept that the Bible is the result of Divine Inspiration, it is still a *human*, and therefore flawed, interpretation of God's word. (IIRC) According to (self-contridictory) Judeo-Christian tradition [Specifically Exodus 24:12-15], the only physical writing to come directly from God was on the first set of stone tables Moses carried down from the mountian.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Am I the only one who read the headline and knew what it meant? ;)
Believe me, I know where you're coming from - I went through a fundy stage myself once.
You could rewrite your sentence
"I have found the theory of creation lacking for scientific reasons. It is a fascinating idea, but far from proven."
Very little in this world is proven absolutely. Scientific theories are only theories. We hang onto them because (a) describe the world as we see it, and (b) can predict things we can't see.
It's not uncommon for one theory to be disproven only to bring others crashing down around it, but then it's always replaced by a better theory that explains more (eg. Newton vs. Einstein). Evolution predicts certain things, and these seem to be accurate, so it's the best model we have at the moment.
Moreover theories aren't 'secular' they're just theories. Imperfect people trying to describe their world. Many of these people are Christians.
Don't confuse science with scientism (the idea of science as a kind of religion.. common on trashy TV shows).
btw. the 'passing into being for no reason' betrays a lack of understanding of modern scientific theory (the belief in absolute time for example, has long been debunked, and that argument relies on it.. Hawking is a good read about that kind of stuff).
The babelfish is proof that god does not exist. (Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy)
Jonathanjk.com
Both ideas require the same faith in something you can't necessarily understand or prove.
And you've missed the point entirely. There is strong empirical evidence (viz, the cosmic microwave background) that the universe began in the Big Bang, around 11-12 billion years. There is no empirical evidence that the universe was created by an omnipotent deity. These two positions couldn't be further apart: one based on observing the natural world around us, the other based on unsupported conjecture regarding an invisible entity whose very existence is debatable.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
its amazing to me that it is considered insightful to RTFA.
Might I remind you that you are talking about Slashdot...
I live in Soviet Canuckistan you insensitive clod!
This is great! Now all they have to do is wipe its flush memory, and it'll be in tip-top shape.
You certainly can have two conflicting theories however. Particle/wave duality is a case in point. Neither theory replaced or expanded beyond the other. Both are still in existance. Both are accepted. And both are used. Yet they are fundamentally contradictory.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
I've thought of all three of those possibilities. To be honest, it doesn't bother me that I still believe any and all of them. (sic)
;)
And besides; that's my kind of humor.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
There are questions about both theories that I have that are the main reason why I don't have a firm opinion on either. Putting aside the evolutionary creation theory (that's a convenient mix of both)...
1.) Okay. Say we have evolved over billions of years through the evolutionary process I learned in school. Therefore, there has to be iterations of skeletal frameworks between the fossils that we dug up. If a bird and a dinosaur are even remotely related, there would have to be at least a few examples of some sort of dino-bird thing. To my knowledge these haven't been found in any great number than, well, either birds or dinosaurs. If such a transition happened, wouldn't there be many, many, many examples by now?
The alternative is that, okay, entire species evolved instantly. I'm not sure if the genetics supports this view, and this one doesn't hold as much water for me.
2.) There's a lot of really silly arguments that creationists base their thoughts on, mainly, "because it is." That's fine for some, but the scientific arguments I've found sort of... lacking. I guess it's a good thing to test the theory of evolution, though. One of the arguments I've read about is the one involving the difference between natural selection and evolution. Evolution creates. Natural selection eliminates. Unfortunately, the natural selection theory implies, okay, all species existed on the same earth at the same time and clearly not all of them exist now. For example, dinosaurs. Which then gets into silly arguments like "Is Carbon dating really accurate?" I dunno. Ask people that do it.
And please, no silly comments about "Does that mean dinosaurs were in Noah's Ark too?"
Anyways, I'll let the two sides keep fighting about it... it's not going away anytime soon and there's still a few decades of research to do... regardless, I don't think anytime soon that the creationist vs. evolutionary thing will be one of those faith-deciding issues.
-Rob
Marriage doesn't have to suck!
it had evolved into a yacht
(I know you said you didn't want to start a theological debate, but...)
:)
Few Christians have ever believed that the earth is flat. What they told us all in school about Christopher Columbus sailing around the world to prove it was round is a lie. Just do a little googling.
Second, the issue of heliocentricity was unfortunately blown all out of proportion. A great many educated people in the days of Copernicus and Galileo did believe that the earth was the center of the universe, but not because they were Christians. Certain Greek philosophies which were in vogue since the days of the scholastics held that the sun, stars, etc, were very pure and absolute, and that as you descended, things became more and more corrupt. The earth is at the center of the universe because it is a corrupt place. This view led to the idea (found nowhere in scripture) that hell is in the center of the earth (see Dante). The point is, heliocentricity was not an idea that people rejected because they were Christians (a great many Christians accepted it).
The persecution of Galileo (which, interestingly and tellingly, Copernicus never faced) so frequently cast as a war between theology and science, or religion and reason (whatever you prefer) was actually mostly political. A Roman Church beleaguered by the Reformation and desirous of reasserting its authority put Galileo on trial not primarily because of what he wrote (a great many Roman officials, including the pope himself, if memory serves, believed in the heliocentric model) but basically because he had the audacity not to keep his trap shut when told to. Obviously the Church doesn't come out smelling like a rose on this one, but my point is, there never really was a great "Science verses Christianity" debate about the position of the earth in the cosmos. It is an invention of later writers who were trying to prop up a scientific, rational basis for modern life by berating an imagined, monolithic old order.
I'm just about done.
Many Christians these days oppose evolution because (unlike a flat earth at the center of the universe) they see it as being distinctly denied by a plain reading of the relevant scriptures. This is actually a fact commonly agreed upon (if only implicitly) because other Christians who don't see the difficulty with evolution are frequently saying things like, "Don't take that so literally!" and appealing to certain exegetical nuances that seem to indicate that Genesis 1 and 2 are more like a literary framework than a natural history, or that what is being described are very long periods of time.
I have posted previously on my views of the relation between religion and science and got modded down for them.
I have been posting in this thread and also have been modded as flamebaiting and trolling for comments that clearly are not inflammitory. It shows how touchy this issue is. Simply stating that you don't accept evolution is seen as inflametory language! At the time of this post, nearly all the the posts critiquing or disagreeing with evolution have been modded down, regardless of their tone or merit. While nearly all the posts supporting evolution have been modded up as insightful. Clearly some underlying personal feelings are growing stronger then moderator guidelines. And that mirrors the larger handling of this issue. Both sides are quite passionate about it, and occassionally go overboard, which has painted the issue red.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
Look, If you want to bring up evolution on slashdot, make sure you bring it up in comparison to kmail, mutt, pine, etc, just so you can start two jihads at once ;)
Thanks!
-B
For the English.
Insert Essex girl's jokes here...
If it holds such important why was it sold for scrap?
It has historic value today. It didn't back then - it was only a tool.
A broken civil war rifle or a cracked native american clay pot might have been thrown away as garbage in their time, but today they are valuable artifacts worth $$$ and part of private collections or museums.
Obligatory Indiana Jones quote. "Look at this [holds up a pocket watch]. It's worthless, $10 from a vendor in the street. But I take it, I bury it into the sand for a thousand years and it becomes priceless, like the ark. Men will kill for it, men like you and me."
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Creationism generally is not approached as a theory, its advocates bring to the table a fully fleshed out explanation and then demand that it is the truth, to totally without any evidence or debate on the reasoning behind it. It is also not a testable tool. You can't go into a lab and use creationism to make predictions about what will happen in an experiment.
On the other hand, there is a lot of testable material in Darwinism: You can go into a lab and demonstrate evolution at work in a petri dish. So portions of Darwinism are provable (within scientific standards... that is you can never prove a theory, just demonstrate that it is the best one for the job at the moment...).
Now there are corollaries that are not provable (primal genertor being one of the more controversial), but there is a solid body of reasoning, and a lot active thinking going about this. The same cannot be said for Creationism.
Within your obviously biased post, you have done little to actually argue a point. If you want to convince people, take a side and then try to defend it with objective evidence... just as actual proponants of Science have done.
Now, as far as I see it, your preconceptions may be incorrect. Creationism and Evolution are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Yet while few now would argue against most of the concepts in evolution, many evolutionists (such as yourself) ardently argue against the concepts of creationism. However, answer for me this:
Assuming that the Scientifically-based theory of human history (evolution being recent, the big-bang being the oldest conjectured event), then where did the "Cosmic Egg" that started the whole process come from? Further, and more important, why did it come about? Answer these, and then you'll probably have an arguement against Creationism.
the "science proves the theory of evolution" statement is not accurate. I would be happy to answer any questions or continue this list.
How do you explain the remarkable genetic match between humans and chimpanzees, up to the point where diseases can make the leap between them and us? Was God just lazy and copy/pasting code?
See, the thing with evolution is that we don't have a complete map from the earliest life to any current species. Anti-evolutionists like to say "ha! no complete and fully detailed evidence means your theory is wrong!", but absence of evidence is not evidence in itself, and there is still a lot of evidence in support of evolution (or rather natural selection), though not necessarily related to humans.
Now, we can quibbly about the exact processes of evolution, but to deny that species evolve involves putting a very large blind spot in your science. Speciation is clear, and all around us. You can even make it happen experimentally in labs if you go through enough generations.
It's quite clear that the Old Testament is the collection of the writings of many plainly different Jewish authors from somewhat different periods of time, smoothed out slightly and rolled into one. You may believe it is divinely inspired if you choose, but God didn't come down to Earth and set pen to paper himself.
Fundamentalists are scary people - you can't reason with those of any faith who actively reject rational thought.
... we drive our own children out of the Church forever
Amen. The prime reason I am no longer a practicing Catholic. Man, what an "Ask Slashdot" question that would be. "How do you balance Science with Religion".
Sig it.
1) Because you can use god to explain everything... but doing so would bring science to a grinding halt.
2) There are no double standards, Darwinism has to be proven wrong because it's the theory everyone believes in (not without reason).
3) Darwinsm is the better theory of the two, it explains the most experimental data without invoking anything but easy to understand mechanisms. Creationism can be made to fit a few irregularities and the only explanation for the vast majority of data is "the hand of god".
4) Why should I choose to beleive the theory that involves some strange, complex omnipotent being that I dont understand, when I can can choose Darwinism that is simple.
I guess that Galilei could have explained everything by simply invoking god and accepting that the earth was the center of the universe like the bible said... but where would we be today?
"I don't know that Atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." -George H.W. Bush
The Victorian British were not a sentimental bunch about preserving their past. It was a time of enormous technological progress - much more akin to the US of today. Precious few of their technological triumphs still survive.
To give just one example, take the three ocean liners built by Brunel. Great Western, the first successful ocean-going steamship was broken up for scrap in 1856.
Her massive sister ship, Great Britain, the first entirely iron-built ship and the first to be powered by a screw was turned into a hulk for servicing whaling ships in 1886. She was allowed to rot until 1968 - when she was brought back to Bristol where she is being restored.
Brunel's utterly vast Great Eastern was quietly broken up in 1888, despite being by far the largest ship in the World and having laid the first global network of telegraph cables. No one mourned.
Best wishes,
Mike.
PS. Having thought about it - liners are a very good example of the British unsentimentality towards technology. The only surviving British ocean liner is Queen Mary (and then it was the Americans who wanted it, Cunard wanted to scrap her), all the other great liners such as Mauretania, Queen Elizabeth and Canberra all went to the breakers yards.
Yet they are fundamentally contradictory.
i eW avelength.html
That is just not true in any way, shape or form. Particle/Wave duality is a conceptual tool used to help understand the underlying mathematical model in easily visualized terms. There is no contradiction at all, and there is even a mathematical relationship that can be used to calculate the wavelength of any particle (the de Broglie wavelength).
http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/physics/deBrogl
There is in fact NO conflict here.
Conflicts in theory are do to two different models making different predictions. They are settled when one model gives more accurate predictions.
Creationism fails utterly as a theory because it has no predictive power at all.
Show them any real-world evidince that contridicts their beliefs and they either stick their fingers in thier ears and say "LALALALA I can't hear you", or grab the torches & pitchforks.
This is pretty obviously untrue, and not really worthy of response.
It should be clear to any rational thinker that the most, if not all, of the Bible is intended to be metaphorical rather than literal.
This is also pretty obviously untrue. Putting aside for a moment whether or not the bible is mostly "literal" or "metaphorical," it is a fact that "rational thinkers" have come down on both sides. Also, while a lot of the bible is in the form of poetry, allegory, metaphor, parable, etc, and EVERYONE acknowledges this, it is a mistake to say that "most, if not all" of it is intended to be metaphorical. The majority of the so-called "historical" books of the Old Testament (for example) read like history, and include the results of the occasional census, the strength of armies, personal correspondences, and explicit references to other extra-biblical historical annals.
The basic problem with the literal interpretation theory is that even if you accept that the Bible is the result of Divine Inspiration, it is still a *human*, and therefore flawed, interpretation of God's word.
This argument is so uncompelling that I doubt you've spent much time at all thinking about this subject. For the sake of argument, do you really think that God in the Judeo-Christian tradition is such a wimp that he couldn't manage to have written what he wanted? Bear in mind, we are talking about the same Being who spoke everything into existence. Wondering whether or not this God has the wherewithal to work around (and even through) human frailty to accomplish His ends seems like a trifle bearly worth worrying about. (The assumption that he does is practically foundational to Christian belief). You may as well argue that because chisels are prone to failure, God would have had a difficult time with the stone tablets, as well.*
*Please note that the majority of Christians do not believe that God used human authors in the same way that we might use a chisel. The analogy breaks down there, but still illustrates the point.
But CBR and the idea of the big bang doesn't hold up on its own without some assumptions and information taken to be correct. Your ideas only hold true if you take your own assumptions to be true. That is the point.
This is the same way republicans and democrats come to different oppinions using the same data. The only difference is the base assumptions. And you shouldn't say those who beleive in creation are wrong because they assume the existance of God, when your own ideas are underpinned by your own assumptions.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
"There is no empirical evidence that the universe was created by an omnipotent deity"
How would you/we know what that empirical evidence looked like?
"Personal ownership is a hallmark of conservative capitalism. And I don't believe I am entitled to anything that I did n
You are sort of both right.
There is no complete fossil record yet pieced together that goes step-by-step from homo-sapiens to another member of the primate family. We definitely have some links along the way, but in all probabilty we will never have a complete chain (and this begs the question of how complete the chain has to be).
As a process, evolution has been shown a good theory time and time again (you can do your own lab demonstrations with bacteria inside a week). We can demonstrate that the elements involved in evolution in bacteria are present in humans (eg. genes), and that they work the same way. Proving that humans are subject to evolution would require observing it... but this would require many generations... something that is a bit hard for individual humans to conduct.
Then there is the notion that you can never prove a theory in science. You can contribute support to a theory, but ultimately there are few theories that survive in science. Almost every theory gets overturned eventually: newtonian physics (gravity), atomic theory (supplanted by quantum theory), etc... Many of these theories are still being used in the practical world, as they work for most cases, but are insufficient for current research.
diseases can make the leap between them and us
Diseases jump between us and birds too. Not a good argument.
This baloney about evolution not being proven has to stop. The fact is that scientific theories are never proven. The concept of a proof is mathematical, not scientific.
Science is a process where theories are continually tested/refined to improve their predictive capacity. There is no 'proof' involved, ever.
Christians published The Genesis Flood, God and Evolution, and The Fall of Noah. Not scientists, but Christians.
Hmmm... That's funny, considering there were no "Christians" when those stories were first committed to text.
[FromTheMorning]
How do you explain the remarkable genetic match between humans and chimpanzees
If you observe two patterns with a statistical corrolation there are several possibilites:
A causes B
B causes A
C causes A and B
fact: Chimps look like humans and have similar DNA.
Is that proof that one evolved from the other? Or perhaps they were created with similar DNA which caused them to look similar. Your assumption determines the outcome.
and there is still a lot of evidence in support of evolution (or rather natural selection)
No contest there. I'm quite certain natural selection occurs. But while part of the idea of evolution, they are not one in the same.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
The theory of evolution doesn't predict anything.
Baloney. Evolution has predicted huge numbers of things. Here are some examples:
1. Darwin predicted, based on homologies with African apes, that human ancestors arose in Africa. That prediction has been supported by fossil evidence and genetic evidence [Ingman et al. 2000].
2. Theory predicted that organisms in heterogeneous and rapidly changing environments should have higher mutation rates. This has been found in the case of bacteria infecting the lungs of chronic cystic fibrosis patients [Oliver et al. 2000].
3. Predator-prey dynamics are altered in predictable ways by evolution of the prey [Yoshida et al. 2003].
4. Mayr predicted in 1954 that speciation should be accompanied with faster genetic evolution. A phylogenetic analysis has supported this prediction [Webster et al. 2003].
5. Several authors predicted characteristics of the ancestor of craniates. Based on a detailed study, the fossil Haikouella "fit these predictions closely" [Mallatt and Chen 2003].
You need to learn the difference between a theory, a hypothesis, and a fairy tale. You cannot pull any idea out of your ass and call it a theory -- until you have tested it and produced supporting experimental and/or observational evidence it's (at best) hypothesis.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
----marks as rqqrtnb as Friend. Nicely put.
This guy is way out there
People in our time lose sight of how radical a change Darwinism brought to the philisophical outlook of man. It was one of the great sea changes in modern thought.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwinism
You do not. Or along the same line "How do you balance Apples and Orange Alien Artefacts?"
I think it was Kant who said something like "Religion is by its nature undefined"
Sounds like the exact opposite of science.
"/Dread"
Or perhaps I should say evolution has no predictive power at all.
If you say that you are utterly wrong. Darwin himself used his evolutionary theory to succesfully predict that man evolved in Africa. A quick search of Google will turn up many other examples where theories of evolution have been used to make succesful predictions.
Of course, this means nothing to fundie Protestants, because they all know that the reason the Pope wears long robes and funny hats is to hide his tail and horns.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
There are folks out there who believe that the "scientific evidence" they are presenting on their websites and in the books they write refute the science you are talking about. I am not an expert of any kind, and I know very little about biology, but I have a hard time believing that what they are saying is at all correct. For one thing, when they venture off into areas I do know a little about, they frequently say things that are flat out wrong, or at least misrepresent what real scientists think. For another, very few of them have much in the way of formal scientific education themselves.
but only somebody choosing ignorance or suffering from insanity could interpret the vast amount of observational evidence as supporting a literalist interpretation of the Biblical Genesis.
There is some truth to that statement, but I think you are misunderstanding the approach of some Christians who hold a literal view but who are indifferent to what "science" says.
The application of the scientific method certainly yields useful information. But reasonable people disagree about the scope of its use and the certainty of the results. I remember a story about some Greek thinker who reasoned from some philosophical principles that women must have fewer teeth. He was married, but it never occured to him to actually count his wife's teeth to determine whether he was right. That's kindof a bad example, because a few observations would have been helpful in that case, but my point is, different people assign different levels of confidence to different types of evidence. If I have a good reason for thinking that the bible is inspired by God, then the question becomes, "Do I trust my literal interpretation of the bible more than the interpretation of nature made by the scientists, or vice versa?" I don't know whether I put that all that well, but hopefully it is clear.
It's quite clear that the Old Testament is the collection of the writings of many plainly different Jewish authors from somewhat different periods of time, smoothed out slightly and rolled into one. You may believe it is divinely inspired if you choose, but God didn't come down to Earth and set pen to paper himself.
I'll timidly agree, but still ask, "So what?" I already answered what I think you are saying in another post. Is God such a bumbler that he can't manage to have written down what he wants?
1. Darwin predicted, based on homologies with African apes, that human ancestors arose in Africa. That prediction has been supported by fossil evidence and genetic evidence [Ingman et al. 2000].
That is not a prediction. That is an observation made after the fact. Furthermore, it is recursive reasoning, since its assumes evolution to support itself. It appears as though the rest of your examples were similar. A prediction is an idea that can be tested with an empirical experiment that could indicate acceptance or rejection of the idea. The idea that we, and other organisms evolved from lifelessness into our present state cannot make testable predictions.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
I just can't wait to see the first post that says
IANAG (I am not a god) but I read something somewhere a long time ago about this topic, and I am determined to demonstrate my sloppy thinking with a long and flawed post.
but I thought it was relevant to the general conversation for you liberal, anti-war zealots out there who actually believe the theory of evolution.
What about conservative American patriots who actually believe the theory of evolution? Not all conversative American patriots are troglodytes, you know.
-kgj
-kgj
" have yet to see a scientist prove that the Red Sea was parted..."
You should watch Discovery Channel. They talked about the parting seas and what could have caused it. It was a while ago, so the details I remember are a little vauge. Something along the lines of a volcano erupting. This caused a geological disturbance that caused the waters to recede. After things settled down, the waters came rushing back. It's possible that during these events, a group of people could have crossed at the moment of the parting, and when the people chasing them started to cross, the water came back with a vengence.
It is not the point of my post to say it was proven, but rather there are investigations of events that might have inspired the bible.
I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if the truth were somewhere in the middle.
"Derp de derp."
When I first came here, this was all swamp. Everyone said I was daft to build a boat in a swamp, but I built in all the same, just to show them. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. And that one sank into the swamp. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, and then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one floated. And that's what you're going to get, Son, the strongest boat in all of England
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
These people could have just watched the intro cinematic in this game, they would have known where to look. I'm sure Angeline Jolie wouldn't mind taking them out to the site.
Now to save my karma: Questioning evolution is good. But a valid question would take the form, "If evolution is valid, how do you explain (insert observation here)?" Instead, most "questions" are taking the form "I don't think there's enough evidence," which is far to vague. What specific observation leads you to disbelieve evolution?
Also, a theory must do more than just explain observations. It also needs some predictive power - this both increases our knowledge and provides a path for revisions to the theory. This is where intelligent design fails: It can always explain observations ("God did it.") but if you ask "Will this bacteria become resistant," the answer is, "He didn't say."
. . to raise the Beagle and turn it into a space-faring vessel to search for the other Beagle on Mars, but instead encountering. . .
Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
- A valid scientific theory must be falsifiable -- it has to allow for some means for it to be proven false. Darwinism passes this test, Creationism does not. Your complaint that "Creationism has to be proven right" is because creationism does not allow for disproof -- any conflicting evidence is dismissed with the "it's that way because God made it that way" handwave.
- A valid scientific theory must have predictive value. Darwinsim has predictive value, creationism does not.
Because creationism is not scientifically testable, it is not a scientific theory. You could call Creationism a hypothesis if you were feeling generous (and a fairytale if you are not). It's not a theory and never will be because it lacks the defining attributes of a scientific theory.Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
It also needs some predictive power - this both increases our knowledge and provides a path for revisions to the theory.
I beleive both creation and evolution have similar predictive power, in that they both have some sloppy, cut-rate predictive power. But neither is really any good.
For instance, according to creation, the highpoint of all the earth was just after creation. It has been going downhill ever since. So according to creation, look for continued extinctions and loss of more and more species as time goes on.
While this is technically predictive, it isn't what we're looking for.
The evolutionary predictions are similar; shoddy half-predictions that don't really test the theory.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
A prediction can be tested with an empirical experiment that can either support or refute the prediction.
p l? group=aad
A prediction can also be satisfied by an observation. The famous curvature of light observation predicted by Einstein is exactly such an example.
If you don't like that, there are still experimental tests of evolution aplenty. It isn't hard to study evolution, all you need is to study a system of life forms that has a short generational period.
One Example:
http://myxo.css.msu.edu/cgi-bin/lenski/prefman.
IMHO you are deluded.
Evolution is not a theory. Scientists aren't trying to prove that evolution happened. It is accepted to be a real fact.
The THEORIES of evolution surround what the mechanisms of evolution are, was it genetic mutations, natural disasters, etc. HOW did evolution occur, not DID it occur.
It's a stupid point to argue about. If you need a single holy creator, than you need to work him into the scheme of the big things: millions of galaxies and galaxy clusters, a potentially life rich universe, why is there life at all? Don't argue the small points like the evolving body of genetics found on Earth.
Uh, yeah. Thanks for contributing.
For the sake of argument, do you really think that God in the Judeo-Christian tradition is such a wimp that he couldn't manage to have written what he wanted?
Your religion says that God does not use humans as puppets because he created us with free will. Therefore, even if God literally dictated his words to a human, that human could willfuly change what he was told in the course of writing it down. Even if the original author faithfully recorded God's word, subsequent transcriptionists could willfully change what was written, and translators could willfuly slant the words to their own ends. Finally, the reader can willfully misunderstand (or selectively quote) Gods word to support his own predjudices.
Contrary to your ad hominim attack, I've put a great deal of thought into this subject. I've examined the evidence and found it lacking in every specification. Christian mythology does not hold up to even the most elementary scientific or logical standards. It is not even internally consistent with itself -- the Bible is so self-contridictory in so many places that it boggles the imagination. (EG: "Thou shall not kill" vs. "thou shall not suffer a witch to live"; "There is no man that sinneth not" vs. "Whosoever abideth in him sinneth not." )
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
That is not a prediction. That is an observation made after the fact.
You are joking, right? Science is full of such, including the bending of light in gravitational fields, the existance of the Tau Meson, the positron and so forth. These are all considered to be important support for the theories that made these predictions.
An observation IS an experiment. If the result of the observation is predicted, i.e. that there should be an Ur-ant, or that light bends in a gravitational field, and in fact it is observed according to the prediction, then there is in fact a succesful test of the theory.
The idea that we, and other organisms evolved from lifelessness into our present state cannot make testable predictions.
Utter nonsense. Testable predictions based on the theory of evolution are made routinely. Succesful predictions go back to the very origin of the theory by Darwin.
There is a very real difference between the curvature observation and evolution. Einstein proposed a law, a universal, that would show itself in the curving of light.
The theory of evolution is more broad. In particular, even if you could somehow show species evolving at present, it doesn't show anything about the past. So I suppose we would have to split the discussion into ongoing and past evolution. Is evolution occuring today? Did evolution create life? The answer to either of these does not answer the other. Which is where the problem occurs. When we say evolution/creation, we are dealing with "Did evolution create life?". But your observations are all related to "Is evolution occuring today?". Whereas Einstein didn't have to deal with such a split. So I find your comparison lacking.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
To quote my Wise and Eloquent Friend:
"[it depends on whether you trust the scientists or the priests] and I would rather trust the scientists than the priests. They actually can work miracles, not just point to alleged past ones or promise future ones.
"Are we still living in caves and wearing tin pans for protection? You can have fire by lighting a match, light by flipping a switch. You will never have to worry about dying from pneumonia and the plague, and if you catch those you'll go to a hospital and get some antibiotics and get better. Your mother did not have a 30% chance of dying in childbirth. You did not have a 70% of dying by the age of three. Your parents will live into their eighties and you will live into your nineties. This weekend you will travel a distance which once took months of perilous journey in a matter of hours, and you will do it by FLYING THROUGH THE AIR. These are all MIRACLES. Science has accomplished in 150 years what religion cannot in thousands of years. That is because Science recognizes its mistakes and learns from them instead of adapting a head in the sand mentality to them."
IIRC, a lot of Nineteenth Century Europeans were more fond of Darwin's book than of Jews and their food.
Actually you CAN make experiments that prove that evolution takes place, fruit-flies easily evolve fast enought that you can turn one population of fruit flies into two seperate races by exerting two different evolutionary pressures on them.
It's been done... that's an experiment, and it proves the predictive power of the theory?
What more do you want?
"I don't know that Atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." -George H.W. Bush
Typically, theologians opposed to evolution have anticipated you in this idea, and come up with a rationale that makes it (to their minds) unacceptable. The essential point would be that God wouldn't tell fibs that way, by planting misleading evidence. That's the synopsis of the argument, anyway.
(Meanwhile most of the scientists I've ever met in the US, anyway, were practicing Christians. The basic point that evolution and religion aren't in opposition because they deal with different types of knowledge is just tooooo hard to get ahold of, isn't it? Scientific knowledge is falsifiable by definition, faith is not, and so on? Sound like something we've heard before?)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
The two superpowers had their various deep benthic submersibles that they've used for stuff like tapping each other's deep-sea cables and pulling up each other's dead subs and so on. (You might want to Read "Blind Man's Bluff" for an okay popular history of that stuff.) Now that the cold war's over, there are private markets for the technology, and the navy's happy to lend its stuff to Robert Ballard to poke around the Meditteranean, looking for history.
Underwater archaeology's taking off as a result. We've had an amazing run of shipwreck-finding, haven't we? Heck, let alone shipe -- we get Black Sea villages that've been preserved in anaerobic environments since "THE flood." All sorts of sailing vessels. Nazi subs. It's a great time to be looking for ships down there. Go down off of the canaries, and you almost have too many ships to choose from.
(William Broad's "The Universe Below" is a decent run through the military history of this stuff, and concentrates more on the shipwrecks side than, say, Richard Ellis's "Deep Atlantic." Broad also considers the legal and ethical problems -- who does a shipwreck from 1500 belong to? Ellis is more about the biology, which is cool too.)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
If god was so smart.
Why did he/she create Christian fundamentalists?
siggy played guitar
So I suppose we would have to split the discussion into ongoing and past evolution. Is evolution occuring today? Did evolution create life?
There is no reason to believe that what is going on today in observable evolution is any different from what occurred a billion years ago. Such a split has no justifcation.
As far as evolution addressing the origin of life, since when? Genesis is not addressed by evolution. There is a lot of speculation as to how life arose, but the science behind it is based on chemical thermodynamics.
Whereas Einstein didn't have to deal with such a split.
There is no such split.
Audience members heard stories of silver, gold and jewels salvaged in recent years from wrecks dating to the days of the Spanish galleons. Hess recalled his excitement at seeing real treasure chests bursting with pieces of eight." Story Continues
He said advances in scuba diving technology will make sunken ships around Kodiak more accessible. Hess foresees a time when diving could join fishing and hunting as a local economic asset. "I think you have the beginnings of a new industry," he said.
"Once something is found, the first thing that's asked is, 'Who owns it?'" he said.
Assuming that a ship's owners have abandoned a wreck, the basic principle of salvage law is simple: finders keepers. That still has validity in the maritime context, Hess said.
-cp-
> Reading the Old Testament certianly leaves the non-believer with the impression that Yahweh has the attitudes and manners of a spoiled, sadistic child.
Are you ignorant of what allegory means?
Gal 4 (NIV)
"21 Tell me, you who want to be under the law, are you not aware of what the law says? 22For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by the slave woman and the other by the free woman. 23 His son by the slave woman was born in the ordinary way; but his son by the free woman was born as the result of a promise.
24 These things may be taken figuratively, for the women represent two covenants."
In the words of St. Augustine: "What the apostle says pertains to this problem: 'For the letter killeth, but the spirit quickeneth', that is, when that which is said figuratively is taken as though it were literal, it is understood carnally. Nor can anything more appropriately be called the death of the soul than that condition in which the thing which distinguishes us from beasts, which is the understanding, is subjected to the flesh in the pursuit of the letter. He who follows the letter takes figurative expressions as though they were literal and does not refer the things signified to anything else"
Origen wrote in De Principiis
"Where the word found that things done according to the history could be adapted to these mystical senses, he made use of them concealing from the multitude the deeper meaning; but where in the narrative of the development of super-sensual things, there did not follow the performance of those certain events which were already indicated by the mystical meaning, the scripture interwove in the history the account of some event that did not take place, sometimes what could not have happened; sometimes what could but did not."
and
"But all the narrative portion, relating either to the marriages, or to the begetting of the children, or to battles of different kinds, or to any other histories whatever, what else can they be supposed to be, save the forms and figures of hidden and sacred things? As men, however, make little effort to exercise their intellect, or imagine that they possess knowledge before they really learn, the consequence is that they never begin to have knowledge; or if there be no want of a desire, at least, nor of an instructor, and if divine knowledge be sought after, as it ought to be, in a religious and Holy Spirit, and in the hope that many points will be opened up by the revelation of God -- since to human sense they are exceedingly difficult and obscure -- then, perhaps, he who seeks in such a manner will find what it is lawful to discover".
Peace
What I would want would be proof that you haven't proven natural selection instead of evolution. You would have to prove that you have created new species of fruit flies and not merely brought out different traits through environment. To my knowledge, that has never been done.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
I know this is veering even further off topic, but...
The behavior you refer to is attributed by biblical scholars to the polytheistic period of Judaism, where Yahweh Sabaoth was the god of war (think the plagues of Egypt and the exodus). This deity evolved into the one and only God, Yahweh, in post-Babylonian monotheism.
You should read Karen Armstrong's excellent book, A History of God, for a complete historical account.
There most certainly is a difference.
Such a split has no justifcation.
You need justification to show that the two are the same. Even if you could, through some miracle, observe evolution today, it would be a far stretch to assume that, based on that observation, evolution created life. That is stepping well beyond the bounds of science - inferring and conjecturing.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
What's your definition of race?
The biologists have defined it as the subpopulations that don't interbreed, and they've done created those...
Besides I can't see the difference between natural selection and evolution?
Surely you have to admit that mutations occur and that many of them are viable, right? This happens ALL the time... it has to DNA relpication isn't perfect, that been proven time and time again in the lab and by experiments with DNA and by examining the DNA of living families, and it makes sense from purely chemical arguments... no denying viable mutations.
And you apparantly don't think that natural selection is strange... why do you need to have a god to explain evolution?
mutations + natural selection = evolution
"I don't know that Atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." -George H.W. Bush
If your God thinks it's so important that we worship him and live by his rules, why has he hidden all evidence of his existance so completely? If he intended for there to be One True Faith, how come he did not reveal the same religion to all of his creations?
"The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities--his eternal power and divine nature--have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse." - Romans 1:18-21.
I assume that at least the possibility of these verses won't be overly difficult for you to swallow, seeing as how you later claim that translators, scribes, and every day Christians willfully distort the meaning of scriptures.
Your religion says that God does not use humans as puppets because he created us with free will
I'm genuinely puzzled. What could you possibly know about "my religion," seeing as how this is (so far as I know) the first time we have ever spoken? Advice for you: Never assume that the understanding you have of a world religion is agreed upon by all its adherents. You probably have a great number of convincing arguments against "Christianity" in your head, but unfortunately they only apply to your ideas about it, and are only interesting to you and those who happen to agree with you. You'd be a lot better off replying specifically to "Christianity according to X" where X is some person whose views you are very familiar with. You don't even know whether I'm Roman Catholic, some flavor of Protestant, Orthodox, or something else that defies neat categorization. Your argument, which seems plausible enough, misses the target because I don't hold the view of free will that it requires.
subsequent transcriptionists could willfully change what was written
Logically speaking, perhaps. In fact, they didn't. The evidence of accurate transmission is so surprisingly strong that even I am amazed. So far as I know, critical scholars make all sorts of arguments about the authors of scripture, but practically never worry themselves much over whether the text as we currently have it has been accurately passed down. The number of available ancient manuscripts, what we know about ancient scribal practices, etc in my mind puts the burden of evidence on the person who wants to insist that the bible has been changed.
and translators could willfuly slant the words to their own ends.
This is why scholars read the scriptures in their original languages. Even simple pastors usually have a take two or three semesters each of Greek and Hebrew.
Finally, the reader can willfully misunderstand (or selectively quote) Gods word to support his own predjudices.
For a fascinating example of this in action, see the part of your post about "Thou shalt not kill." Seriously, there is nothing to this charge that couldn't also be said of any other view of authority or source of knowledge, whether it's the book of some religion, natural phenomena, or mathematical proofs. Witness the global warming debate.
Contrary to your ad hominim attack, I've put a great deal of thought into this subject
I apologize for being rude. I'm sure you have thought a great deal about your ideas about Christianity, and I'm sure many of your arguments are sound. But as I said above, you appear to assume that your ideas about Christianity are also "my religion," when in at least one area we've seen they aren't.
It is not even internally consistent with itself -- the Bible is so self-contridictory in so many places that it boggles the imagination. (EG: "Thou shall not kill" vs. "thou shall not suffer a witch to live"; "There is no man that sinneth not" vs. "Whosoever abideth in h
"Do not drill any holes in your cat - it will not like it."
-- Nick Davies
All the theological apologism you can throw at the matter doesn't disguise the fact that bulk of the body of religious literature which eventually became "the Bible" was written by people who believed in its literal truth as the word of God. As science learns more about our world, the amount of religious belief that any intelligent, educated person can hold diminishes -- which is why so many very intelligent people spend so much time coming up with ever-more-elaborate justifications for beliefs based on ancient superstitions. But it doesn't work. Those stories weren't meant as allegory. They were told by people who believed every word of them. If modern, sophisticated believers have trouble dealing with that fact, then that's their problem.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Not to mention the QE2
True, but they're both in active service. It'll be interesting to see if they are preserved at the end of their lives.
My guess is this cloying sentimentality that we have in Britain is a reaction to the post-war clearances and modernisation. When Britain redeveloped its cities after World War II entire areas were levelled and many fine buildings and historical sites were trashed. Now we're terrified to change anything and are busy embedding the whole country in aspic.
When you have the Prince of Wales who thinks that there is Romano-Greek revival and Georgian styles of architecture and nothing else owning half of the country and the National Trust owning the rest there is precious little opportunity for Britain to rebuild and develop a modern style. No wonder so many of our architects and designers work abroad.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Have you listened to what modern Literalist Christians actually say? Take the Book of Job as an example. Most people would consider it to be an allegory designed to convey a theological point. However, there are a significant number of Christians (of the Falwell/Robertson brigade) would would maintain that Job is a literal and accurate transcription of actual historical events.
My personal observation is that the predominant view among anti-evolutionist Christians is that the KJV Bible is the literal and inerrant Word of God. Yes, there are educated and rational Christians out there who have a more realistic intrepretation of the Bible; but they generally aren't the ones foaming at the mouth about evil-loution or driving around with bumper stickers where the "truth" fish is eating the "darwin" fish.
My original observation, that the God described in the Old Testament is capricious, bloodthirsty, and sadistic remains unchanged. Leviticus in particular has God threatining dire punishments or commanding his followers to perform barbaric acts in every third verse. Deuteronomy has God repeatedly ordering his followers to kill every man, woman, and child of neighboring tribes -- although if he was feeling particuarly generous he let the faithful rape the women and bring them home as slaves. 1 Samuel has him killing 50,070 people just for looking at him funny, as well as more genocidal commands. 2 Samuel has him punishing his own people with a plague for the unauthorized genocide committed by the former king, and sending another one because David conducted a census. In 2 Kings he has a pair of bears eat 42 rude children who were mocking his bald buddy Elisha. And the list goes on.
Even taken allegorically, the messages of the Old Testiment are crystal clear: "Mercilessly kill everyone who worships another god (or who lives in the general vicinity of people who worship another god)", and "Do what I want or else I will do horrible things to you and everyone you know".
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
OOOO! Put THAT on eBay!!!!
Mom says my
Even if you could, through some miracle, observe evolution today, it would be a far stretch to assume that, based on that observation, evolution created life.
Let me say it again - evolution does not explain the genesis of life. Theories of the origin of life are based on chemical thermodynamics. There is no split whatsoever because evolution does not attempt to explain genesis.
And as far as observation of evolution today, that has in fact been done many times, both in lab experiment and in nature.
It is a characteristic of zealots that they want to believe that a) everyone is either with them or against them, and b) both sides hold easily categorized sets of beliefs. The idea that there are ideologies orthogonal to their own just doesn't fit into their worldview. Me, I'm a patriotic liberal anti-war pro-gun atheist evolution-believing veteran. The grandparent poster probably has never even imagined that people like me exist. ;)
... surely He can create evolution ....
Well put -- that's what I'm talking about.
Similarly, I've met professors of biology who believe in both Christianity and evolution. And why not? If God can create Everything
-kgj
-kgj
So, what you are saying is that God is somewhat akin to the typical manager/CEO/leader?
Hmm, that much be the smell of burning karma...
Well you have to realize that a large number of Christians pick and choose ideas from the bible simply to bolster confidence in their own personal beliefs, kinda like why people watch shows like O'Reily.
Picking and choosing makes sense. Taking the entire Bible straight-up at face value is tough: numerous contradictions, a shortage of connections to bind the pieces into a cohesive whole.
-kgj
-kgj
if you wanted to get an accurate interperation of genesis I suggest that you (plural) take a foundation year bible studies class where they get at the hebrew, themes, images, etc... and not from a faith perspective.
when you do this you (plural) pick up on themes that were invisible when you (plural) were reading it as a scientific report.
simon
And as far as observation of evolution today, that has in fact been done many times, both in lab experiment and in nature.
I don't think anyone has observed evolution. I beleive you are referring to observing natural selection. For instance, if you take a culture of bacteria/moths/fruitflies, divide it, and place separate environmental pressure on each group, you will end up with two different groups.
The question is whether you just observed evolution or natural selection. If it was evolution, there would have to be new traits that none of the original specemins had. That has never happened in the lab or in observation. What you do see is traits held by a few specemins becoming more dominant throughout the entire culture (natural selection).
I won't argue natural selection with you. I agree that happens contstantly. Evolution incorportates natural selection, but depends on much more to be true.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
And you apparantly don't think that natural selection is strange... why do you need to have a god to explain evolution?
..., I choose to have faith in God more than I have faith in this particular idea.
First off, I don't need a god
Secondly, as you mentioned, mutations + natural selection = evolution and I have no qualms about natural selection. Here's the problem. For this process to work, you have to have a viable mutation, as you mentioned. But if someone offered me a billion dollars to tweak one of my genes, I'd turn it down, because it would almost certainly kill or maim me. Now you're saying, "that's ok, because given billions and billions of years..." Large expanses of time are necessary for this idea to work as well. But there isn't enough time. Radiometric dating is crap. And even if it's correct, there wouldn't have been time for single celled orgs to evolve into humans.
And lastly, the definition of "viable" is quite at odds. Lets take the idea that dolphins evolved from something like a taiper. If a population of taipers had (over millions of years) undergone mutations that left them with half-legs-half-flippers. At this time they are neigher the fastest thing on land or in the water. The in-betweeness of the mutation makes them vulnerable. They would have been naturally selected to become extinct. Yet this stage is required to get to being fully dolphins. And what's more, they would have to be in this intermediate stage more millions of years! Or at least a couple hundred thousand.
And when I think of a theory and whether not one has sufficient proof, and whether it all makes sense, that one doesn't sit so easy with me.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
I wonder what the has ship evolved into by now.
Have you read my journal today?
ahok... so it's just because you have no idea how many mutations are actually viable and no comprehension of the time this has taken place? Do you wan't me to find lookup the information for you, can you do it yourself or would you prefer to continue living in ignorance?
"I don't know that Atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." -George H.W. Bush
I do know quite a bit about both points actually. In particular, I've studied the question of time quite in depth.
And it would be ignorant to assume that anyone who doesn't agree with your point of view is ignorant.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
I must be having a hard day, I can't help coming back to this thread for a little fish-in-a-barrel action.
I have seen human footprints that date to be 150 million years old, they have been found in Utah, Kentucky, Missouri, and in the country of Tanzania
Give me more details and I can probably show you where these "footprints" have been carefully debunked.
Fossil shoe prints with a crushed Trilobite under the heal were found in Utah by William J. Meister.
Aha! that's enough detail: Its a trilobite, but it's not a shoe print Frankly, your uh, "dedication" is impressive. Most creationists gave up on this one in the 80s. If you do a bit of searching you can find the pictures that made them do so; the ones that show a whole bunch of similar formations all over the area where someone carefully snapped the ones that looked most shoe-like. (And frankly, it's not all that shoe-like in the first place)
I always ask why these are disregarded.
It's disregarded because it's been carefully examined and found wanting.
The best thing I can come up with is a conspiracy
What would be the possible goal of such a conspiracy? Heck, I've looked at the evidence and concluded evolution makes sense, so I would have to be part of the conspiracy. But I have not received a secret decoder ring. You'll have to take my word for it: I won't participate in any conspiracy that can't spring for a secret decoder ring.
Please show me a living trans-species
Find a mirror.
> All the theological apologism you can throw at the matter doesn't disguise the fact that bulk of the body of religious literature which eventually became "the Bible" was written by people who believed in its literal truth as the word of God.
... ?
And your proof / reference is
> As science learns more about our world, the amount of religious belief that any intelligent, educated person can hold diminishes --
You DO know that Science is a Religion, right?
Re:what if theory didn't exist?
Peace
All of these predictions are testable. If we find life that isn't related to that life we know about, we'd need to change or abandon the theory. If there are large gaps we can't explain, we would need updated theories, like punctuated equilibrium, to explain how A can evolve into B. Evolution would be hard-pressed to explain life without self-preservation instincts or without proteins. But there haven't been, to our knowledge, any contradictions like this.
All of these predictions are based on historical evidence, which is expected because most evolution happens very slowly. But there really isn't anything wrong with "reactionary" theories - they're better than cop-out answers, which I consider creationism to be. But evolution predicts other things which can be verified in the lab - the natural selection of moths, development of antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria, and even speciation in fruit flies and the like.
Most interesting to me, evolution as a process can be applied in more ways than simply to explain life on earth. You can use it to describe market economics. You can even use it to design circuits, programs, and robotics.
well sorry then.. you made it sound like you didn't know anything about mutation rates, so what good will your knowledge of time do you?
I've tried to do a back of the envelope calculation to see how everything adds up... sure it took me half an hour (and you are probably not even serious about your claims, just trolling), and nobody else than you are going to read this.
But I think it was a healthy exercise for me anyway... you have to do this kinda thing once in a while.
Here we go:
For eukaryotes and procaryotes alike the mutation rate turns out to be one 1E-6 to 1E-7 mutations per gene per generation.
That's actually pretty fast; a laboratory petridish with a single culture can easily hold 1E9 to 1E10 e.coli bacteria... The cell division cycle in e. coli takes app. half an hour... you can probably do the math.... how many mutations is that per hour?
Lets assume a steady state population... thats 1E4 mutations per hour.
how many hours have passed since the the beginning of life (you've studied time, you would probably agree that 2.5E13 hours isn't a high estimate?)? It adds up to a darn lot of mutations... right?
2.5E17 mutations in a single petri dish.
Now that was one petri dish... how many more single celled organism do you think you can have in the WHOLE WORLD compared to *one* small petridish? well...
The volume of the earths oceans is approximately 10E21 liters... the volume of a 60mm petridish with a 1mm layer is app. 1E-2 liters... then we probably have to multiply that again by some large factor because some research actually suggests that the vast majority of earths biomass isn't actually in the oceans or on the surfase but buried deep in the earths crust... lets round a couple of orders of magnitude down... lets say 1E22.
Thats an incomprehensibly large number(!) multiply that by your extremely large number of mutations in e. coli in a single petridish from before... now you should get a compldetely incomprehensible number of mutations something like 2.5E39 mutations... try to comprehend this number!
It is absolutely e-bloddy-nourmous... you cannot begin to imagine how large that number is.
ok... this was a low estimate... e. coli has some pretty advanced mechanism for repairing DNA that definitely wasn't around in the begininning... add a couple of magnitudes.
How does this add up for more complex organism?
Lets go back to the original number of mutations for eukaryotes: 1E6 to 1E7 mutations per gene per generation... thats one mutation per gamete.
How many are viable?
Well... look around, with one mutation per gamete and a lot of living complex organisms all around you, most of the people you know have a viable mutation in their genome..
Good... so what can we use as an estimate for the life cycle of a complex organism... lets say 24hours... thats setting it really high. the first complex organisms that everything evolved from probably lived much shorter than this, and most of the complexity we're lugging around has probably just been fine tuned ever since.
thats approximately 2E11 generations of a single organism since the estimated emergance of complex life.
How many complex life forms are there on earth... I've got no idea... lets say 1e16 it's a shot in the dark, but counting everything it's probably not far off... that's 2E27 mutations (most of them viable) since the emergence of complex life... lets estimate a couple of thousand genes to a simple complex organism. That means that the entire genome could undergo 1E24 mutations of all genes since the emergence of complex life...
That's a lot of iterations... easily enough to explain darwinism, I'm sure you'll agree if you stop to ponder the size of that number.
So what about evolving from apes to humans... (that's replacing just a few percent of the genome as I'm sure you know).
well the earliest monkey skull is, what, 15 milion years old? thats 2 orders of magnitude shorter than since the emergence of complex life, apes live what 13-14 years before th
"I don't know that Atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." -George H.W. Bush
"No one who abides in Him sins; no one who sins has seen Him or knows Him." 1 John 3:6
"If we say that we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar and His word is not in us. My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. And if anyone sins, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous" 1 John 1:8-2:1
If there is a contradiction between the two statements you mentioned, than the situation is perhaps more dire for me than you first realized. Not only does John conflict with Paul, John contradicts something he very clearly said just a few verses earlier. Evidentally this John fellow was really a lunatic or a moron.
On the other hand, the distinct possiblity exists that the simplest understanding of English translations of 2000 year old Greek writings don't fully convey the author's intent, particularly when they are ripped out of context. But because out of necessity trying to get a handle on the meaning of an isolated verse such as this one can involve such semantic gymnastics as considering Greek grammar and idiom, the flow of an argument, the larger body of an author's work, and so on, it seems hardly worth trying to determine whether or not some alternate interpretation is at all more accurate.
If you change your mind, please google a little bit. You might try this.
Even if you translate the 6th Commandment as "Don't commit murder", how can you define the wanton killing of non-combatants by soldiers as anything else?
Principally, by allowing the bible to "speak for itself." You are importing ideas about morality into the bible and expecting the bible to match up with them. I can't answer the question, "Why does my view of killing during war not fit well with the bible's?"
Why would a god who doesn't want his followers to commit murder then command them to kill women and children and stone people to death for minor transgressions?
That's a pretty complicated question. Here is a short answer: People tend to have very limited perspectives. The important thing is the "here and now." People live a short while, then they die. But God sees the end from the beginning, and perhaps more significantly, sees things eternally, including the effects of human lives along with the lives themselves. Human lives are far more important to God than they are to us, but because we don't see things as he sees them, it is easy for us to imagine that God is a monster. In a similar fashion, everyone, but especially children, hate taking medicine, being operated on, or having a tooth filled. But the parents, who understand that these things are necessary to the health of the child, are required to inflict pain to accomplish good.
A huge amount of mental effort....
These comments are pretty subjective.
I'd really like to see the calculation you've done though... The numbers I come up with are at least 1E20 too high, even if you wanted to explain evolution as just random mutations, selective pressure is supposed to speed things up enourmously.
If you get a number that indicates that it absolutely can't be done then you would have to get a result that's a factor of 1E30 slower than my calculation...
Every estimate I made has to have been too high by 2 orders of magntude to make evolution as slow as nature shows us it is... I Can't really see that happening, so if you are right I have to have made some gigantic blunder somewhere... You say you've considered these things, so where is it?
"I don't know that Atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." -George H.W. Bush
Briefly,
:)
There is much reason to beleive that the world is not as old as the currently held 4.6 billion years. To begin with, the radiometric dating methods used do not work. They are based on two key assumptions, one of which is a critical weakness.
1. At the beginning of the earth there was 100% parent radioactive material, and 0% daughter material. And there is no other source of daughter material. -> Very large assumption that is wrong.
2. Radioactive decay occurs at a somewhat constant rate. -> I'm ok with this one. The rate changes slightly with pressure and heat, but not enough to significantly impact results.
This isn't just talk. There is a lot of data available that shows how innacurate this method is.
For example:
If you send one rock to a dating lab to be tested using uranium/lead, rubidium/strontium, and potasium/argon procedures, you will receive three different results, often differing by tens or hundreds of millions of years. Now put on your scientist hat and listen to this. For a normal test, they would look at what layer it came from to estimate its age, and through out the data that didn't fit their estimate!
If all three tests show different ages, it is obvious that the dating method is flawed in at least two of the tests, more likely all three.
And the flaws have been tested and shown to be egregious. Tests of samples with known ages have shown just how wrong they can be. Lava flows less than 200 year old have tested, using the popular rubidium-strontium isochron method, to be 1.34 +/- 0.04 billion years old! This is not an isolated result. You could google all day long and not run out of errant tests like this. The problem is that these tests are so sensitive to error, that having just a minute amount of extra daughter material inflates the measured age by hundreds of millions of years.
I'm assuming when you did your calculations, you assumed an earth age of at least 3.5 billion years, as that is the oldest radiometrically dated rock. But those ages were all acquired using these radiometric methods, which we know don't work even when we know the age of what we're testing.
As a side note: I don't mean to be rude, but I'll have to stop posting to this thread soon. I love talking about the issue - a fascinating one I think you'll agree. But I've already spent so much time posting that I'm not getting any work done!
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
The Bible is undeniably self-contridictory. If it were not, it would be unnecessary to create elaborate arguments to explain and justify the blatant contridictions which are apparant to anyone who hasn't had their bullshit sensors permently fried through a lifetime of indoctrination.
It's impossible for an intellectually honest person to reconcile the entire Bible with the post-Enlightenment interpretation of the philosopy attributed to Jesus; which is why Thomas Jefferson felt it necessary to compile his own bible. Jefferson spent the better part of his adult life in the process of, to use his own description, seperating the diamonds from the dunghill in order to produce what he felt was an accurate rendition of The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. Sadly, many modern Christians (particuarly those on the far right) denounce Jefferson's work as heretical and blasphemous. It has been my experience that the religion practiced by most people calling themselves "Christian" has precious little in common with the philosophy so masterfully related by Jefferson.
It occurs to me that the label "Christian" bears a lot in common to the label "Hacker", in that both are used by groups with diametrically opposed values to describe themselves. Script-kiddie "hackers" have almost exactly the same relation to classical MIT-style "hackers" as Jeffersonian "Christians" have to far-right bible-beater "Christians". Just as the real hackers have had their name sullied by the script kiddies of the world, the true followers of Jesus's philosophy have had their name sullied by misguided idiots. In a perfect world, it wouldn't be necessary to have to label oneself as a "white-hat hacker" or a "Jeffersonian Christian" in order to distinguish oneself from the the undesirables; but this is not a perfect world. By labelling oneself as a "christian" without providing any additional qualification, you allow an outsider to unconciously lump you together with the lunatic fringe.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Yes I used 3 billion years
;)
You are of course right, you can get enourmously wrong results with that dating method, but the relative error will probably be smaller for older samples...
But it doesn't really matter much for my argument.
Kelvin had vastly simplified model of the cooling of earth, he estimated estimated that the age of earth was 100-200 million years old.
The thickness of the sediments suggests that the age of earth is 1.6 billion years old.
Radioactivity gives from 500 million to 4 billion.
(studying the rate of evolution in fossils of marine mollusks actually gives some hints too - that lands us in the same order of magnitude as everything else, but I can't really use that argument if you don't beleive in evolution
So a lot of different methods and none of them gives us an estimate thats much more than an order of magnitude faster than the my 3.5 billion years.
And the ones that are are based on very simple models.
So I'm not really worried that THAT estimate is completely off. It would be really surprising if all the methods had systematic errors pointing in the wrong direction overestimating the age of earth by more than 2 orders of magnitude.
Anyway... my point is that even if they did and that number was off by a factor of 1000 it really wouldnt have an effect on my numbers... they are so big that you can easily dividide by that and still have an incomprehensibly large number.
And just to give you an idea of how fast mutation rates are in living organisms, look at this:
Luria and Delbruck. 1943. Genetics 28: 491-511]
The experiment is pretty cool, and (in my eyes) it actually makes it pretty clear that e. coli mutate to adapt to an outside pressure in much the same way that darwin described.
What really should get you thinking about how fast evolution is, is this:
The experiments were set up so that only a mutation in one specific gene could make the cells avoid being eaten by a specific T1 phage. The interesting thing is that the timescale for that mutation to occur is days... and that's just in a very small population in a lab. (and the paper proves that it's random mutations and not adaption).
With viable mutations happening THAT fast, I can't see how you can argue that mutations are too slow to give a sufficient diversity to drive evolution (over millions of years).
"I don't know that Atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." -George H.W. Bush
I can not understand ...
And I couldn't have said it better myself.
The truth of the matter is, as you pointed out, you don't understand. The ordinary and honest response to this is to try to understand. Your statements about the complexity of the arguments involved are bologna. Here is a summary of what you are saying.
1. The arguments used to demonstrate how apparent contradictions in some English translations of the bible can be resolved are complicated*.
2. Complicated* arguments never yield correct conclusions.
3. Therefore, complicated* arguments used to resolve the apparent contradictions in some English translations of the bible fail.
4. Therefore, the apparent contradictions are actual.
5. Furthermore, "contridictions.... are apparant to anyone who hasn't had their bullshit sensors permently fried through a lifetime of indoctrination"
*I reserve the right to decide when the arguments have become too complicated, and frankly you are confusing me with all this stuff about Greek grammar (even though the NT was written in Greek) and reading the bible on greater than an 8th grade level (even though the bible addresses very complex and abstract topics). I further realize that the verity of statements 3 and 4 depend directly on which arguments I arbitrarily decide are too complicated, as well as the very dubious nature of 2, but I'm ok with that because 5 is true anyway. No, I don't think that I only believe 5 because of some baseless preconceptions I have about how the bible should look if it was really inspired by God. Besides, I know some things about how Thomas Jefferson applied his philosophical biases to a book written by people from an entirely different culture, and I can respect that because he was a cool guy. This is clearly irrelevant, but you should respect my authority because I know things about the bible, and you should feel bad because Jefferson was obviously a lot more willing to randomly excise parts of the bible and you should be openminded like that, too. It's only because you have suffered from a lifetime of indoctrination that you aren't. Wait, you did say that you grew up in a religious home, didn't you?
1) I should believe in God because the Bible says so, and the Bible can't be wrong because it is the literal word of God.
Sorry, but that's a classical logical fallacy called begging the question. Basically, we can stop right here, because this simple fact renders all subsequent arguments moot; any further discussion is nothing more than mental masturbation -- enjoyable, but ultimately unproductive. Show me proof that the Christian Bible is the Word of God which isn't based on logical fallacies , and you'll have a willing convert. I'll even spot you one by stipulating that there is a supreme being (which is itself an unprovable assumption).
2) If I can't resolve the seemingly-obvious contridictions, it's because I'm too stupid or lazy to understand the explanations used to dismiss them.
Sorry, but that's another logical fallacy called an ad hominim attack. 3) Besides, there really aren't any contridictions because a bunch of very smart guys read the Ancient Greek and Hebrew versions and figured out what they really meant to say, instead of what they actually did say.
Yet another logical fallacy: appeal to authority.
4) The verses aren't contridictory because this word over used here doesn't mean the same thing as it does when it's used over there.
Equivocation is also a logical fallacy.
5) These are not the contridictions you are looking for. Move along.
Sorry, the Jedi Mind Trick don't work on me. The fallacy of exclusion doesn't work either.
8) If you don't believe as we believe, you will suffer eternal damnnation.
Wow! Three logical fallacies for the price of one: appeal to concequences, appeal to popularity, and untestability.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
I admit, I did put words in your mouth. I will illustrate:
"These are blatantly contridictory statements without resorting to major semantic gymnastics."
What is implied, though I admit not explicitly stated, is that the arguments we would have to resort to aren't convincing to you because they are "major semantic gymnastics." Translating what you allege is a straw man into plainer English:
"There is no reason besides major semantic gymnastics for believing that these statements don't contradict one another. I don't believe major semantic gymnastics provide a good argument [for a missing reason, presumably because of their complexity. I say so because of what you've said elsewhere and it seems to be implied by the word "gymnastics"]. Therefore, I conclude that the apparent contradictions are real."
Pardon me if this isn't what you meant.
I will apologize and admit that the substance of what I wrote is a straw man if you can objectively define "semantic gymnastics," reasonably explain why they aren't convincing arguments (having defined them, I assume this is the easy part), and show how arguments attempting to demonstrate that the bible doesn't contradict itself (in merely the verses in contention) are "semantic gymnastics."
In doing so, I think you should consider the following:
- Even very "obvious contradictions" (which really only exist in logic textbooks) in a translation are not necessarily reflective of contradictions in the original text.
- Words have different meanings in different contexts/grammatical constructs, and are to be determined not merely by asking what the most common meaning is, or by assuming that the meaning is identical in two instances, but by determining which of the range of meanings makes the most sense in that context/grammatical construct.
- The bible, like most non-technical writing, can reasonably be expected to make use of figures of speech such as hyperbole, metaphor, anthropomorphism, etc.
- Any determination of whether or not two statements contradict one another should be made with as much consideration as possible for how they would have been understood by the original author/audience.
- Even failing to find good, plausible means of reconciling apparent contradictions, the prudent (and even logical) thing to do is to admit that and go on, rather than claiming things like: "The Bible is undeniably self-contridictory. If it were not, it would be unnecessary to create elaborate arguments to explain and justify the blatant contridictions which are apparant to anyone who hasn't had their bullshit sensors permently fried through a lifetime of indoctrination." This is so for the simple reason that we don't have mathematical certainty in this matter, and it is not only inflammatory but dishonest to act like we do.
I say these things because while I acknowledge the possibility that logically viable arguments can be made that are yet unbelievable because they outstrip the real evidence, I gently suggest that you seem to be running to the opposite extreme in your haste to avoid this one - simplifying and generalizing to the point that the facts are trampled and ignored.
> You DO know that Science is a Religion, right?
You DO know that you are full of crap, right? Simple explanation for a simple mind:
Religion relies on faith of that which CANNOT be observed
Science relies on observation and NOTHING else (well, forming theories based on observation, too)
Capiche?
Regarding your "proof," Paradigms, Religions, Philosophy (which is not science at all, contrary to that post), etc are human concepts. In fact, that whole argument relies on you believing the argument to begin with.
It says that Science is not concerned with metaphysical/sensory proof, which is supposed to be the point of a religion. If it does not have this simple characteristic of religion, it is not one.