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Censored Religious Debate Video Released After Public Outrage
First time accepted submitter tkel writes "On October 12, 2011 Theologian John Haught publicly debated prominent evolutionary scientist and atheist Jerry Coyne at the University of Kentucky. Although both agreed to a videotaping of the event, Haught later prohibited its release because he felt he had been treated unfairly. Coyne released blog posts addressing the matter as an offense to free speech. Reviewing their new status in the blogosphere, Haught and his associates at the University of Kentucky have decided to release the video."
What happens to people who don't know about Jesus? For example, anyone born before Jesus or raised without knowledge of him? Do they still get into Heaven when they die? Or do they go elsewhere?
I've also wondered about this and I've even asked some priests and theologists about it, and the most common answer is that they still don't get to Heaven. Now, when I then follow with the question "So basically God doesn't even give them people a chance to get into Heaven, they're doomed to go to Hell already way before they're even born into this world?" their answers usually just fall flat on their faces. Then the people who say those people will get to Heaven as they are innocent of the condition of not knowing about God don't know what to answer when I ask them the question: "Why do you people then even tell others about God? If you never went out to teach about God we'd all get to Heaven, whereas by telling them about God you're deliberately exposing them to Hell."
Nothing Coyne said had anything to do with science, reason or argument. He just made a big rant online with zero intellectual content whatsoever. He even cites the fact Slashdot featured his retarded rant as evidence he "won" the argument. Won the debate? So being featured on slashdot proves God doesn't exist? Seriously editors, what is this stupidity you're posting?
Many modern atheists have bad theology. They think: How does an all powerful and good God let bad things happen?
No, generally not. This isn't a question that we struggle with, or wonder about. It's like asking if Alice is going to go to the store tomorrow. If I don't believe that Alice exists, then I won't ask her to pick anything up for me, and so if Alice is presumed to be going to the store or not is completely irrelevant to me. However, the question is interesting to believers, and that's why we bring it up in debates with believers.
It's not even like we invented the question, Christians came up with it themselves. "Why does God let bad things happen to good people?" It's been asked longer than before the Book of Job was written. Except now there is an alternative answer to creation. Even if one of the people in the age of the Founding Fathers of the USA were to not believe in Christianity, there still wasn't any good explanation for the origin of life. They believed in a "Creator" because there just wasn't a better answer available to them.
But now we have no need for the hypothesis of a god. So, really now the situation becomes one of pure personal opinion. God/Religion is the why, and Science is the how. The problem is that there are still people out there asserting that God/Religion is the how, and that their holy scriptures are the infallible word of a deity.
So, in short, atheists don't have "bad theology", they don't have to deal with theology at all. Beyond simple, "there are in all likelihood no gods." We bring up these horribly difficult questions of theology, because you theists have been struggling with them for centuries, and the more we can get people to ponder them, and see the most rational explanation accounting for the apparent absence of any deity at all... the more converts we win.
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
So, what I'm understanding you to say, is that your wild-ass GUESS about the origin of man is better than someone else's wild-ass GUESS, just because they may believe that the Flying Spagetti Monster or some other Deity is responsible for creating us?
No, because the evidence we have available supports our "guess", and thoroughly debunks the religious one.
It's a guess at first. You always start out with a guess. Say you and I don't know what the weather is like in Norway today. We both make a guess. Now we part ways. Religion starts to write a book about it, explaining why the weather is as it guessed it is, and burning everyone who says otherwise. Science, on the other hand, tries to find out whether or not the guess is right. Assume we can't get to Norway within a day, so we can never find out for sure what the weather was. But we can go there and see what the weather is tomorrow. And ask the people who live there. And check the ground for signs of recent rain or snow. We can gather all kinds of evidence that either supports or refutes our initial guess. Using that, we may modify our initial "guess". It now becomes what scientists call a "theory". The more our evidence converges, the stronger our theory gets. If the ground is dry, locals are saying it has been sunny all week, it is sunny today - it becomes very, very likely that it was indeed sunny on the day in question.
Problem is, both sides have no PROOF of their position.
See above. Your request of absolute proof borders on the psychotic. We regularily send people to prison for life based on evidence, not proof. A lot of conclusive evidence all pointing to the same result is very often as close to proof as we can get in the real world.
Yes, both sides do not have 100% proof. But one side has a mountain of evidence on their side, and the other has a badly written book of folk-tales.
someone will find a bone fragment (not even a whole bone), yet conceptually render what that person looked like.
It's called inference. It's a perfectly normal process. In fact, you do it yourself every day. You see a small part of a human body, say a leg under a table, and you assume that there's a whole body attached to it. Scientists do the same, just a lot more complicated. But we have enough knowledge about anatomy to be able to make those "guesses". For example, if you have a leg, you can usually assume that there's at least a second leg and that it looks a lot alike, because almost all the animals we know work that way.
Either way, there is no scientific PROOF as you are requiring, and in my opinion, all there will ever be are Wild-Ass Guesses. Then again, maybe the FSM will show itself tomorrow, and prove that we're all descended from bees.
No, we know that it's not bees. The FSM didn't have a license for winged flight.
Look, you have an extremist binary definition of proof. You ignore that the real world isn't binary, that proof is just the name we use for conclusive evidence, and that not every guess is a "wild-ass" guess. There are different qualities of guesses. If we both were to guess about where exactly Barack Obama is at this very moment, a guess of "in his bed" would be a likely guess at this time, while a guess of "on a small moon orbiting one of the planets of Betelgeuse" would be a very unlikely guess. The point being that not all guesses are equal.
It's a stupid trick. "You have no proof, so your guess is as good as mine! Nanana". Sorry, no. Obama may not actually in bed right now, but the two guesses are not equally likely.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Well, yes. Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this incident was the way that so many people automatically jumped to a wrong conclusion, without even considering that there might be another side to the story. In the last Slashdot discussion, nobody asked what Haught's opinion was. Nobody cared. They just assumed that the nasty creationist theologian had lost the debate and was trying to censor the result, which is a shameful conclusion to jump to.
You're an immobile computer, remember?
The one you want to be quoting in this debate would be Thomas Aquinas who, ~800 years ago, defined a set of rules that would allow Christianity and scientific inquiry to happily coexist. Which, apart from the odd extremist, they have been doing ever since.
sigs are hazardous to your health
I saw the video and I must recall my previous post. I see no science in Coyne's part, this is Michel Moore's 'science'. E.g. you never can draw conclusions on "A truth" from some poll difference between population and scientists in US (the picture can be completely opposite in some states in EU btw). E.g. he treats the article from Nature like religious truth --- science is great because it doesnt afraid of failure - ANY theory can be falsified by new findings and everybody must be happy of it, because it is a pure gain. Superluminous neutrino ? if yes, it is not a shame for articles in Nature, it is a big leap forward.... Very big loss for science, if somebody uses its name to backup his hates. As he said, he did, this was a destructive monologue and other scientists look like idiots now.
Although I'm sure many of the listed scientific luminaries were fully sincere in their faith, it's worth noting that it's only very recently that Atheism as a concept, let alone a life choice, came about. It would never have occurred to a number of these scientists that non-belief was even an option.
It is through their work however that our knowledge of the universe has grown to a degree where belief in a deity IS strictly optional and the number of serious scientists who profess faith in a Creator has diminished accordingly.
I watched the video and I want my hour back. I thought I was going to get a Creationist being roasted but instead got a reasonable sounding theologian being attacked somewhat irrationally by Coyne. Coyne mentions stuff like the belief in angels etc ... what? Haught wasn't talking about any of that stuff. I think Coyne wrote his talk wanting to counter Creationism irregardless of its relevance to the actual talk. Lame. I thought Haught made reasonable (but sadly incorrect) arguments.
I thought most of what Coyne said was obvious and he went on and on and overdid it. He was wrong about the necessity of having to talk fast etc. Gees.
I was going to say more but have decided it is a waste of time.
Bitter and proud of it.
Does science answer the question, "what is the purpose of the universe?"
Why does it even need one? Why does there have to be purpose at all? What is the purpose of a volcano? Not it's function, we all know what a volcano does and what it is a reaction to, but what is it's purpose? Purpose assumes some weird sort of sentience, an ambition or drive that exists beyond the physical: "A volcano's purpose is to prevent buildup of pressure in the Earth's crust." That's ridiculous, obviously, a volcano is caused by these things, it has no purpose, there is no 'meaning' in a volcano, it is what it is. We can study volcanoes, and we can predict how they will behave, but it is purely scientific...
What is the 'purpose' of anything? What is the purpose of a rock? What is the purpose of oxygen? What is the purpose of the planet Mars? What is the purpose of heat rising? What is the purpose of snow? There's no purpose in any of these things, they are natural reactions based on the physical laws of the universe, laws which we are just barely beginning to understand, but laws nonetheless. The fact that ice floats doesn't have some grand cosmological 'purpose', but it sure is handy, and convenient to the development of life. However, that doesn't imbibe it with some sense of purpose, it's just a natural reaction to the fact that water ice is less dense than liquid water.
There's nothing wrong with drawing a big question mark on the things we don't yet understand. I have no idea why so many people are so afraid of that question mark that they need to fill in the blanks with some magical, intangible cosmic being...
I'm a staunch atheist, but the letter reads to me like Haught had some valid criticisms. In particular, the list of "evils" associated religion. You could easily come up with such a list for science. It's not pertinent to a debate on the compatibility of religion and science.
It'll be interesting to see the video. I'm glad Haught changed his mind, and I give him credit for that.