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In America, 46% of People Hold a Creationist View of Human Origins
An anonymous reader writes "The latest Gallup poll is out, and it finds that 46% of Americans hold the view that God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years. According to Gallup, the percentage who hold this view has remained unchanged since 1982, when they first started asking the question. Roughly 33% of Americans believe in divinely guided evolution, and 15% believe that humans evolved without any supernatural help."
Thereâ(TM)s a big difference between what people tell pollsters because they think thatâ(TM)s what they *should* say, verses what they actually do or believe. For example most people say they go to church on a regular basis, yet other polls say church attendance is down, and the truth is that most people sleep in on Sunday. Most Americans say they are Christians because they think itâ(TM)s the âoerightâ thing to say, but most probably canâ(TM)t accurately quote a single significant paragraph of the Bible, new or old, nor articulate any significant bible theory. The truth is that most people are basically agnostic.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Who actually answers these polls?
I bet even in 1982 it was mostly old people.
in other words, 46% of americans are dumb
It doesn't have to be either "take the Bible literally" or "science and evolution".
Some are perfectly fine with believing the science and the process of evolution, but also see religion as a framework of stories. Someone once said, "The Bible says what God did; science explains how He did it."
What if you believe in evolution as a divine creation?
Sure it is.
Who created the devine creator?
In fact the idea of a devine creator is 2x as silly, since it requires that the devine creator was created and from nothing.
46% of americans are dumb sheep..
How does "divinely guided" work?
"Let's see, longer legs, smoother teeth, less fur,....um....fuckit man, let's go Vegas-style tonight: Be There a Random Mutation!"
Table-ized A.I.
Yes. it really is far sillier.
There is no evidence to support the idea of a divine creator. There is a growing body of evidence that the Universe could have been created from nothing (aka a quantum vacuum).
So, roughly 79% of Americans believe in some form of a divine entity, yet we have to sanitize all public places from anything remotely religious so as to appease the ~21% that either don't believe or haven't decided?
Sounds about right.
My belief is that Human where created by advanced extraterrestrials, when I look at our progress as a species over past 50 years, I think that as long as we dont kill ourselves in the 50 years we should be at a place where we can create new humans from scratch, or from genetic modification. I believe us humans on earth where created by such a seeding operation, either as an experiment or a pay it forward or just that as a seeding exercise. So my creationism is based entirely on the notion that science and technology created us.
Alan Devine was created by his parents.
Of course it is. One idea can, and is being, modeled, simulated, and tested by some of the most complex devices ever created. The other was written in a book.
And people still wonder why this country is in such a mess....
...be so wrong?
"False hope is why we'll never run out of natural resources!" - Lewis Black
A devoted Recursionist, I see
Table-ized A.I.
Yeah, this one just blows unless you're into sensationalism. Anyone can have an opinion on it and no one will leave smarter than when they came in.
Not necessarily. I don't think Netanyahu, Hitler, the Pope, Negroes, Presbyterians, Gays, or Albanians are/were dumb either, in an intelligence sense.
They may be ignorant or have a lower rate in tests due to social reasons, but that is not necessarily the same as dumb, as in low intelligence. Uneducated may be cause. BTW, the Pope and Netanyahu are not uneducated, so, they must be stupid, or dumb as you put it.
Can you change America for United States in the title? As a canadian and a resident of the continent named America, I don't want to have anything to do with this bunch of retarded idiots.
Thanks
is bumming me out... I mean, really? Only 15%? Come on people!
The idea of a divine creator is no sillier than the idea of creation from nothing.
I'm tempted to agree with that statement. The problem I have with religious belief systems is when questioning the system is forbidden. A (good) scientist is willing to change his theory to suit his observations. Non-religious types "mock" those who are so attached to what they've been told to believe they can't accept new information.
Where's my spaceship.
The nothing that can be defined (as a quantum vacuum) is not the true nothing.
I'm ashamed to be an American when polls like this are being discussed. Belief in angels is another one that really gets me... George Carlin covered this one at length.
Evolution is not about the origin of matter. Further, we know the process of evolution exists, observed it (in part), and know how it works. We don't know a (different) process that makes creators out of nothing (or simpler stuff).
Table-ized A.I.
You'd think this is actually just the ignorance of 'Dumb Americans.' That isn't so. The reason is evolution is a deal breaker due to the structure of the Christian religion.
Kalinka told me the following.
It doesn't have anything to say about the existence or non-existence of any gods. It is a problem with the way the Mythos of Christianity works in particular.
The Mythos of Christianity absolutely depends on a a literal understanding of Genesis. In Judaism, Genesis can be metaphor, it changes nothing. But the Sacrifice of Jesus is contingent on an event called the fall of man, where Eve and Adam ate the fruit from the tree of knowledge, angering Yahweh (God) and damning all Humans to Hell save for a few Jewish Prophets and anyone who accepts Jesus as the Savior.
The fall of man is considered the *Primary Sin* which sends us to Hell. (The main Reason.)
If The Book of Genesis is metaphorical, then Jesus died for nothing because no fall of man ever occurred for Yahweh to have a reason to send us to Hell to begin with. Ergo, Christianity is collapses because Saint Paul was a liar.
This is why Christians have a problem with Evolution and Jews do not.
The real reason that this doctrine that Paul created was put into place was to exclude the Jews from Salvation.
He didn't for see the evolution problem. That came along later.
If the Garden of Eden never happened, the fall never happened. then there would be no need for the death of Jesus Christ. Which means that Christianity was wrong all along. Biological evolution collapses a core foundation of Christianity.
Get busy right now! First step, get out of the basement. Second step, take a shower. Third step, get intoxicated in a bar. From there, viable opportunities for procreation will be viable and numerous. Go forth young fellow, spread your seed!
They are living embodiments of social Darwinism, just don't tell them that!
A single photon with a frequency of 10^98Hz has enough energy to create all the matter in the universe.
Photons are popping in and out of the quantum soup all the time.
No sig today...
If they ask "Do human beings share a common ancestor with present day apes?" a lot more people say would say yes.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
What if the universe always existed for eternity? Sure, in our little flash in a pan lives we can't comprehend it since everything we experience has a beginning and end, especially ourselves, but that doesn't mean it can't be. If I had to bet I would just say the universe was always there and always will be there and all these scientists trying to come up with wacky scientific creation theories still have religious residue warping their minds.
The idea of a divine creator is no sillier than the idea of creation from nothing.
Both ideas are silly. Life do not come from nothing, it comes from combinations of elements that compose the universe. There is nothing magic at work, only chemistry.
So the universe started as a quantum vacuum.
If that's the case, prove it's not a divinely created quantum vacuum.
If I'm wrong, I loose nothing. If I'm right, you lose everything.
A man was eating pizza one day when suddenly a guy eating a double cheeseburger approaches him and says, "You know eating pizza will make you fat."
You say that it is silly to believe in an uncreated creator while believing in an uncreated universe/multiverse/etc...
Not that it matters, but your logic is flawed anyway. The definition of a divine creator is an entity that just is and was never created. Since such a creator would have created even time itself, it is nonsensical to ask who created the creator since that would imply that time existed before creation.
In any case, it doesn't matter if you're a theist or atheist; at some point you have to believe in the absurd notion that everything came from an uncreated something.
In related news, 46% of Americans believe themselves "above average".
Gallup and a few others have consistently gotten numbers between 40-48% for this data, but for reasons I don't fully understand, CBS polls on the same issue get slightly higher results. They get routinely in the 50-55% range http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-500160_162-965223.html. I'm not sure why this discrepancy exists, but it isn't a single yearly issue and it doesn't seem to be connected to how the questions are phrased, which suggests there's some more subtle issue going on.
The data for both this years Gallup poll and previous years does show some fairly predictable patterns. For example, by most of the previous polls, around 60% of Republicans are Young Earth Creationists while a little under 40% of Democrats are Young Earth Creationists. http://www.gallup.com/poll/108226/Republicans-Democrats-Differ-Creationism.aspx. This should not however be taken as general evidence that Republicans or conservatives are dumb or uneducated. The GSS as part of their regular survey does a set about general science knowledge, and that data suggests that when not asking questions about evolution or age of the Earth, progressives and conservatives look very similar, and there's some evidence that the people with the least science knowledge are self-identified moderates http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2011/03/the-republican-fluency-with-science/ although exactly what is going on is not clear. http://religionsetspolitics.blogspot.com/2011/04/political-affiliation-and-scientific.html. This is part of a general trend which suggests that moderates in the US are often not very well informed.
Also, while Gallup says that the fraction of people who reject evolution has stayed roughly constant, there's a potentially more interesting trend in the data, over the last 30 years there's been a steady increase in people who say that evolution occurred with God taking no part in the process. http://www.gallup.com/poll/108226/Republicans-Democrats-Differ-Creationism.aspx. Most of that is movement not from the strict creationists but from a reduction in the size of the group that thinks that evolution happened with God guiding it. This may reflect the general decline of the moderately religious, especially so called "mainline Protestants" or it may be due to other effects such as general increases in partisanship.
Slightly less than half the population has below average intelligence.
so you're saying "this is not the nothing that i'm looking for?"
More telling, religions don't deal with formal proofs and require that you show your work.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Your logic is flawed, because the onus is not on science to prove them wrong; the burden of proof is upon the creationists to show evidence supporting their position. Science needs only present evidence that its side is right, which is it doing. Your holding an irrational belief does not create obligation for others.
No, it means the +/- 4% poll error is grossly understated. Look, we all know that the selection methodology used to generate the sample size leads to that sort of minimum percentage error. What people don't talk about is what the OP is - the difference between:
a) what people say they do and what they actually do.
b) whether people answer with the dogma of their faith vs. what they actually believe.
Throw in things such as:
a) weak wording in the questions conflating or confusing two ideas: "God created human beings pretty much in their present form within the last 1,000 years or so" or "most closely represents your beliefs".
b) problems with interviewees not understanding the question or not giving a shit
c) inability in the survey to record whether the interviewee has been educated in evolution or basic science classes, let alone not failing them
d) strange slant towards Christianity
And there is no where near a 95% confidence the margin of error is 4% or less.
But the hokey bullshit talking about the results of the survey will continue and well end up with another 2000+ post thread with 90% "LOL, thems are idiots" comments, just like what happened earlier in the week.
Oh, shut up. You are not the first person to make this observation, and it's just as stupid now as it was the last ten thousand times. While technically correct that nearly everyone born in the Western Hemisphere is from one of the American continents, the use of the descriptor "American" is used pretty exclusively, worldwide, to reference citizens of the United States. And you know it. So, shut up.
As an American, I prefer to ignore your statistic for so many of us being creationists, and I am not interested in your so-called evidence that the figure is correct. The number just feels wrong, therefore it must be a lie. My gut tells me there aren't nearly that many creationists around here, because neither I nor the people I know, are anything like that!
Furthermore, I don't understand how many people could be creationists, so that's another argument that not nearly many of them could be.
Finally, your poll is biased and invalid, because .. because .. I want it to be.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
since it requires that the devine creator was created and from nothing.
Not really. Something "outside the universe" cannot be assumed to exist as what we know as "matter" or "energy", nor would it be subject to what we know as "time".
To argue that it would need to be "created from nothing" itself is making all sorts of assumptions.
Its absurd as a Princess Peach saying the Mushroom Kingdom universe must have been spontaneously created from nothing because its 2x as silly to think there is some sort of creator.
In the beginning was very low entropy and a lot of energy. Then it went downhill from there.
Ad Populum, or the fallacy of appealing to popularity.
What X number of people believe in no way affects whether or not God exists / created mankind / etc..
wrote that summary? Whenever there are statistics, you really must say how many people were polled. Otherwise it's completely meaningless. And yes, it belongs to the fucking summary! Jesus!
Sure it is.
Who created the devine creator?
In fact the idea of a devine creator is 2x as silly, since it requires that the devine creator was created and from nothing.
Ah, excuse me, but what in the hell are you doing bringing logic into a discussion about religion?
If I'm wrong, I loose nothing. If I'm right, you lose everything.
So, you believe in God "just in case"? At least have a backbone about it, that's the worst reason you can have. At least those with *faith* are at about a level 5 of human motivation ("finding a higher purpose"), you haven't even climbed past level 1 ("survival").
... how many Slashdotters really believe Gallup polls?
Or do they believe Gallup polls because it just reinforces the prevailing Slashdot prejudices?
I guess the most interesting thing about this is that America isn't slowly going insane, as one might think. The religious nuts have just gotten louder and more obnoxious in the last several years, making it seem like they're taking over. Doesn't exactly fill me with confidence, but at least my perception that people are abandoning reason left and right in this country is incorrect. That's a good sign. I guess...
I've watched debates on this topic for almost two decades and they never seem to go anywhere. People who believe in supernatural entities tend to justify their beliefs through less logical arguments, and people who do not believe in them have logical reasons to support their view; ergo there's no satisfactory middle ground - there's no common language between believers and non-believers.
This is a case of a belief that'll die with their adherents, as new generations seem to hold less superstitious world-views than their parents. Hallelujah to that.
I can't believe there are 16% of people who do not believe that our evolutionary progress is not guided by His Noodly Appendage. How else can you explain midgets?
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
46% of the US population rejects the entire foundation of modern life (science), and you wonder why it's news for nerds? It shows exactly how small a space the technologically literate occupy in this world.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
That's actually a good point. Chicken and Egg, whatever laid the first chicken egg, wasn't a chicken. (It was probably a feathery dinosaur.)
If there was a god, who created it? It just came into existence? How is that any different from life just coming into existence on it's own?
The real answer about why people believe in gods or other superstitious beliefs is because they need something to fear to push them into doing the right thing. We know how well this works in reality, you can't tell me all criminals are agnostic. There are agnostic people who believe there is some kind of after-life, just not "heaven and hell", and there is no way to prove or disprove of an afterlife, particularly once you start taking quantum mechanics into account.
We may see just a three dimensional world and operate in a 4th dimension of space-time, but who's to say that maybe there isn't some kind of "life consciousness" 5th dimension that drives organic life. But the opposite can also be stated, that since we can create computer programs, their termination results in their erasure,and there is no "afterlife" for computer programs at all. Yet at some point in the future we may have AI systems that rival living beings, and I'm sure they don't want to be told they cease to exist upon termination either. There is no "point" to life. People and machines may self-terminate if they feel there is no purpose to living, especially if there is no penalty to you (though people who care about you would say otherwise.) I could easily say the only reason I don't off myself is because it would make someone unhappy.
So going about telling people that when they die, they just become wormfood, is very dickish in nature. It doesn't matter if it's true, I'm sure you wouldn't go around telling small children waiting in line to see Santa that Santa doesn't exist either. Let people believe what they want as long as they aren't forcing it on others.
That's where the problem with Westboro, LDS, Jehovas and some Islamist sects, is that they are very dickish about trying to convert or celebrate the death of non-believers. You are dead, you don't care, but your friends and family might, and you're not going to reach beyond the grave to tell them to ignore the assholes.
Rome is burning.
the use of the descriptor "American" is used pretty exclusively, worldwide, to reference citizens of the United States.
So just like British and English all mean the same group of people as well?
So it is 2x as silly to believe that something (the creator) existed before the creation of the universe but only just silly to believe that something (all matter) existed before the creation of the universe. I is confuse
Sure it is.
Who created the devine creator?
In fact the idea of a devine creator is 2x as silly, since it requires that the devine creator was created and from nothing.
*THIS, when trying to come up with this answer it seems incredibly stupid for this exact reason: the best answer yields the same exact question, so we get nowhere.
Personally i don't care either way, we just need to do science, we see exactly what we can gain from it everyday, and should god exist, we'll all see him/her/it eventually, he's not going anywhere.
The Chicken?
The more I learn about science, the more my faith in God increases.
The idea of a prime mover has existed in the minds of very intelligent men(much more intelligent than either of us) for millennia, and the prime mover doesn't mean that there are no movers above it in level, just that it's the prime mover of this instance of reality.
I refuse to believe 46% Americans hold the view that God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years. A small fraction might, but not 46% no way.
you are a moronic dick.
You are happy to called people from the United State of Mexico "Mexicans"
but have a problem with referring people from the United States of America "Americans"
There is *NO* continent called America - so you are one of the "dumb people"
...where'd the energy come from, cap'n?
::trollface::
Bits of code, random ramblings: jakimfett.com
No afterlife for computers? But where do all the calculators go?
OK, let's see you mix up a few chemicals and create a kangaroo ... or even a bacterium.
The pastor has always said that the beginning of the bible is to be interpreted as an allegory. Consider the times it was written, with limited scientific understanding. Back then when people didn't understand something, they attached a supreme being to the idea (Thor or Zeus created lightening and thunder when they were mad) and explained it that way. The Universe may have been created in 7 days, but are those 7 days the same as our current understanding of 7 days. Seven days may equal 14 billion years in "supreme being" time. The same type of number distortions have been cited throughout history. Xerses didn't have a million-man army when he invaded Greece, it was more like 200,000. But back then 1 million was like saying a "gazillion."
Fast forward to today, and we understand larger numbers better, along with Math and Science. Therefore I'd argue that if the Bible was created today, it would have a more accurate depiction of events because we understand the Universe better, along with any potential beings out there. I like to look at it as the Bible did the best it could at the time. We know some of the stories to be true, we know others to be distorted due to the limited view of the original writers.
sudo make me a sandwich
...and thanks for playing.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I think the atheistic point of view means that it's OK to say that you don't know, you don't have to believe in anything and that saying that you don't know is preferable in circumstances like these to just simply "making shit up".
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
Honestly, the Mythbusters need to do as an episode and end this "debate" once and for all.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
...It was probably a feathery dinosaur...
that tastes like chicken
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Uh... so basically, you're willing to think the universe always existed because that makes sense; however, it's nonsensical to assume that there is a God that has always existed, because He would have needed to be created? ...
46% is a lot of stoopid (sp intended) people.
Based on my personal experience. That number seems about right.
Dumb is "in" in the US nowadays . . .
-- Mean People Suck
The question really is, why are you?
brandelf -t FreeBSD
Dumb X insane X clever X Psycho still = dumb : )
Makes my lips itch to even think about it.
The difference is that following scientific method, once you find the answer of "what started the universe" you will naturally begin searching for what came before that, whereas in religion, you have to stop there, or else you end up in the recursive question: "Who created the creator?"
You identify yourself as "American" rather than someone from your country e.g. "Canadian"? That's got to be confusing when you go through customs and they ask your nationality.
The who created the divine creator argument is almost as old as the chicken and egg paradox which, if you apply naive logic, shows that chickens and eggs, and other birds for that matter, do not exist, and cannot exist, because the question of which came first has no logical answer.
As for the distant past, the idea that it is illusory is a rational and logical one, and is as plausible as your Linux box being installed from a DVD by a user at a fixed point in its history, vs everything having been compiled from scratch though the C compiler.
The truth is we cannot be sure about our distant origins, and we cannot even be sure that the distant past may even be deduced from evidence. Whether the apparent distant past is virtual or real is one for philiosophers, not everyday people, who just need a workable explanation to get the question answered to their satisfaction. Divine origins do this better than a rough principle (which is all the lay person will grasp from evolution) and to be honest, there is no single person alive who fully appreciates the complexity of evolution, let alone who can use it to explain our origins in terms of it to sufficient detail to rule out other alternatives (as is the case in physics for example.)
Those who believe that science can do more than offer a theory that fits the evidence do not understand the philosophical foundations of science or the limitations of inductive methods. Sooner or later on your philosophical and metaphysical travels, you will find, as I did, that you have to make a leap of blind faith. One cannot reason around this, and ignorance and scientifistic hand-waving do not provide an alternative, though they may be convincing to some.
Some of a religious persuasion have the arrogance to believe that they hold Divine Truth in their hands; too many followers of science are treating the scientific pronunciations of the day in the same way, and this is a tragic, as is the ignorance of the antireligious of the scientists, mathematicians and other rational people who see no problem with a religious faith. Think things through before making pronouncements on the silliness of someone who believes other than you do, or else appear silly yourself.
John_Chalisque
It's actually less prevalent in non-English languages-- some of them use the equivalent of 'American' for 'resident of the Americas' and a more specific word for 'resident of the United States'. That said, 'America' and 'American' in English have referred to the United States since before 1800 (see English sources on impressment of American sailors during the Napoleonic Wars), and anyone complaining about 'American' while speaking English is being pedantic or trying to score cheap anti-American karma.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ImvlS8PLIo
brandelf -t FreeBSD
"It's turtles all the way down."
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Actually, the idea of a single entity pre-existing - and creating everything else - seems much more logical than *everything* existing for no particular reason. For example, which makes more sense: a single chicken, when you can see no reason for its existence, or a multitude of chicken eggs and baby chicks - again, with no visible cause for their existence?
That is a poor comparison, but I couldn't think of a better one in the few seconds allotted between things at work :)
Further, if the divine creation idea is correct, then we can't actually impose the logic we are used to in this universe on the origin of that creator. He / it would have made this universe, and hence exists outside it. We cannot posit anything about what such existence would be like.
William George
Then you don't believe humans were created IN THEIR PRESENT FORM WITHIN THE LAST 10,000 YEARS. You only believe the very first part, humans were created and therefore SHOULD answer no on the poll.
If the op jumped to conclusions as such, how many people on this survey did the same either not wanting to be bothered, not understanding or not giving a single shit?
TLDRTP - Too Long Didn't Read The POLL
If I had to bet, I'd be better of blowing my stake on lottery tickets. At least then I'd know if I won the bet or not.
John_Chalisque
It's with stupid shit like "USA = Americans" that we end up with "America = Americans".
Canadians are not Americans yet they live in America.
There's no way 46% of Canadians are stupid, that's a USA thing.
How long have you got? B^>
Rgds
Damon
http://m.earth.org.uk/
Sure it is.
Who created the devine creator?
In fact the idea of a devine creator is 2x as silly, since it requires that the devine creator was created and from nothing.
What came before the Big Bang?
The agnostic point of view means that it's OK to say you don't know.
The atheistic point of view means you know there isn't a God.
"If God had intended us to walk he would not have invented roller skates." -- Willy Wonka
That people who assume the opinions of ~1,000 Americans, who fall within a particular demographic dependent on the intended outcome of the pollster, somehow magically represents the entire population of around 360,000,000, are fucking imbeciles.
Period. End of discussion.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
If only 100% people believed the truth that we share a common ancestor with a certain species of primate, then we'd all be on IPv6 and have cold fusion generators eliminating our dependence on fossil fuels!
Not that it matters, but your logic is flawed anyway. The definition of a divine creator is an entity that just is and was never created. Since such a creator would have created even time itself, it is nonsensical to ask who created the creator since that would imply that time existed before creation.
I think the problem is in the inability of religious people to come to terms with the fact that adding a "creator" into the equation only complicates things, it doesn't simplify them. Arguing against the notion of the relatively simple entity that was the primordial universe just springing up into existence, with the idea that universe was created by another entity "just existing", only much more complex, capable of human-like mental processes combined with vast knowledge and abilities, seems somewhat redundant and ridiculous to me. Ultimately, you are facing an even more difficult question.
Ezekiel 23:20
No, eggs predate chickens. Dinosaurs which lead to chickens laid eggs.
I personally don't hold the truth on the origin of the universe, anyone who claims otherwise should be mocked.
If there were a nothing with less something than the quantum vacuum it is statistically unlikely that there hasn't been a single instance of our nothing collapsing into the true nothing inside our Hubble volume. And if that happened we'd know all about it, because it would have spread here at the speed of light and erased off of existence.
The argument from superior intelligence doesn't hold water either. Newton was one of the most intelligent men who ever lived but he had some strange ideas, arising from the application of a very high IQ to false premises. As per his own quote, we are standing on the shoulders of giants, and so despite our inferiority, we can see further than they can.
Incidentally, as a good laugh, Wikipedia references Prime Mover as primum movens. The author of the article doesn't seemingly know that Aristotle wrote Greek, not Latin.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
It's creators all the way down!
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
Sorry, I *think* I've met a few folks who think that way... but not 95+% of the folks I've met in my life, and that includes living around the country, east coast, midwest, and Texas.
I just do not believe those results.
Like to see the form of the question, and whether there was a bias in the way they were phrased.
mark
Then on what grounds can you claim that the phrase "the true nothing" has a referent?
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
I like that that we've been able to quantify the silliness of creationism.
We have maybe a few decades of serious measurements about our universe to work on. Sensible practice means not extrapolating too far into the past and expecting accurate results. Sure running the physics clock back to an apparent origin makes sense from the sense of testing a theory for internal consistency and consistency with other theories (this shows an incompatibility between QM and relativity, hence the need for something such as string theory.) But if you believe you can extrapolate a few million years into the past from data gathered in a few recent decades, you need to check your thinking carefully. There is probably an assumption that basic principles as understood now and which can be verified to work now have always been that way, without variation. There is probably the assumption that a theory about the past that is consistent with the evidence you see in front of you actually happened, as is necessary to make progress in many areas, but which needn't hold true for the distant past. The problem comes when you try to eliminate such assumptions: you bump headlong into circularity.
John_Chalisque
Actually, if you're wrong, you lose everything you spent working toward that religion during your mortal life. If an atheist is wrong -- well, that depend religion ended up being right. You could be right about there being a divine creator, but maybe you chose the wrong one, so now you go to their version of hell, anyway. In which case, you lose on both the mortal and post-mortal levels.
In a book of fairytales about a magic daddy in the sky, mostly written by illiterate goat herders centuries ago.
I am soo glad to know that ignorance and stupidity is a constant in the US - look at the up side - it least there is no growth factor.
The egg.
I saw this on a different article quite some time ago and clipped it. The link to the article doesn't work any more so author "unknown"
Why, if Christianity is for fools and idiots and the Bible is a compendium of myths and fairy stories, are the atheists here so acrimonious and malevolent in their condemnation simply because Christians don't share their "superior enlightenment"? Christians are indeed saddened by the fact that not everyone has accepted the gift of Faith but they do not wish them any ill-will nor mock or insult them nor seek to persecute them on account of this. Rather they pray for their conversion for their benefit and for the glory of God and not for Christians to be able to gloat or feel self-satisfied.
From the article in the above /. story, 78% believe God had a hand in human development. 15% believe no "God" had a role in where we are today... We have a lot of people calling others stupid for what they believe... who is ridiculing who.
Lets all play nice, shall we?
if (it != oneThing) it = another;
In the early eighties, less than 20% of the college students in the USA (not America) could point where their home state was in a map.
So, let's make the survey again. In America (the continent) how many people are creationists?
There is no evidence to support the idea of a divine creator.
Your opinion suggests that you haven't discovered Google
(Or at least didn't use it before posting this...)
Bits of code, random ramblings: jakimfett.com
Its divine creators all the way down!
Word game?
This is a logical fallacy, one heavily promoted by Carl Sagan among other atheists, but still just plain wrong. Science doesn't hold that everything must have an origin. If it did, the Steady State theory of Cosmology would have never been seriously considered and the Big Bang would have won out automattically before anyone ever actually gathered evidence. Instead of giving Penzias and Wilson a Nobel, we would have just yawned. The real issue is, for the particular way we think the universe works now, it has a first moment of creation. That doesn't mean the alternate theory wasn't scientific.
Further, most people who believe in God specifically believe He is eternal and has no first moment of creation, so if your proof was actually logical, all you would have proved is that the kind of God most people don't believe in cannot exist. That's about like proving that people are wrong to believe in four sided triangles. Who actually does? But, hey, this is slashdot, where you can get a +5 insightful for devastating a straw man.
Who is John Cabal?
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
-- George Carlin, US comedian and actor (1937 - 2008)
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
The real answer is the egg. Given how evolution works the first what we would call a modern chicken would have come from an egg. Previous to that egg was not modern chickens. Of course this supposes evolution is real, if you believe in creationism then the chicken came first as the bible clearly states that god created the animals.
Time to offend someone
Incorrect. What if it was divinely created, but you believe in the wrong deity? Moreover, say it was created by a deity who absolutely hates those who worship other gods, but doesn't give a damn if you worship nobody.
Now you lose and agnostics/atheists win. Unless you beg the question and presuppose a particular god (in which case your argument is not logical), there's no way to know whether you should or should not believe.
The way which can be pointed to is not the true Way.
Who is John Cabal?
I've questioned everything to death, come to the conclusion that you can't do better then a good, open minded religious faith (where questioning is welcome). Unquestionable dogma is one of the worst features of much of religion, though the complexity of current science gives it, de facto, a similar level of unquestionability: consider how much training and qualification you need just to get a frontline scientific researcher to consider your views seriously without being dismissed as naive. As such, you have to draw on mainstream belief systems as resources for inspiration, voting with your feet where necessary, and ultimately convince yourself against your scepticism that you have a good belief system for living life by. Science in its present state provides little of this, just as the biblical text provides very little in the way of scientifically accurate models of our reality. What bemuses me is people who expect that one can provide a substitute for the other,
John_Chalisque
That's called Pascal's Wager. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal's_Wager
And if there is a god, I hope that it has an especially hot and violent place in hell where intellectually dishonest assholes like you are put through especially brutal torture for all eternity.
apropos captcha: bondage
Evolutionists reject what is essentially the Prime Directive of Biology: Life cannot come from nonlife.
It is not that we reject science. We don't think that macro-evolution has been experimentally proven. We expect that when someone makes a statement of science, that it have actually been tested using the methods of science.
"If God had intended us to walk he would not have invented roller skates." -- Willy Wonka
Not really. Something "outside the universe" cannot be assumed to exist as what we know as "matter" or "energy", nor would it be subject to what we know as "time".
So here things can't "just exist" and "somewhere else" (where the "creator" was before his alleged act of creation) they can? Again, you're proving the utter lack of qualification on part of most human beings to ponder on all things cosmological. I guess our brains are simply too small and the body of knowledge we have amassed still leaves a lot to be desired and we'll just have to wait for many questions to be answered, at least a few decades, if not centuries. But I'm still waiting to be presented with any sort of rational argument on behalf of the superstitious crowd as to why they are more likely right than the others, since all of their arguments smell of emotional pressure and inability to distance oneself from the problem.
Ezekiel 23:20
Bollocks.
People can be agnostic or gnostic atheists, just like some are agnostic or gnostic theists.
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
Thar's trivial, I just grab some chemicals that have already self assembled into an opposite sex pair of adult kangaroos, add some booze and Barry White music as a catalyst and the reaction will given enough time produce additional kangaroos.
Or did you forget that biology is just applied chemistry?
So we know it has a role to play in some of the small changes in our recent past. Besides that 'can't see anything else' argument, how does one conclude that it is the only mechanism?
One would expect most things to be beyond human understanding, so why not the nature of a creator if one exists?
I raise such questions because I believe that evolution and naive science are the new religious dogmas of the world, and represent a trend in the following of scientific progress that needs opposing. People should take real care with their thinking when it comes to making deductions from the evidence (and you don't need to point out the oxymoronic aspect of that previous statement: I'm well aware of it.)
John_Chalisque
WHO CARES?!
Believe what you want, just don't tell others what to believe. If believing in the spaghetti monster makes you a good neighbor, great!
That's the same percentage of people in the US who are complete fucking morons! Weird...
I'm a software engineer who has Faith. I sit near a guy who has his cube decorated in Catholic icons and a picture of him meeting the Pope. My boss is a practicing Catholic. My other cube neighbor has a Lord Ganesha figure on his desk. All of us are Software Engineers, so I'd say we are technologically literate.
Also, I'm a huge nerd... Heck I once even wore a pocket protector (it was cool! shuddup!). Don't paint with such a broad brush.
if (it != oneThing) it = another;
this is no news to nerds. Its been more than a suspicion for generations of nerds.
It often does not make sense to talk/think about USA as one country...
Ask this in Seattle or Minneapolis. And then try again in the countryside of Texas.
For how many states in USA is the figure 40-50% ?
What is the percentage of americans living in states where the figure is 40-50% ?
Silly?
More silly than faith in the idea that all creation sprang into existence from a single point that existed inside....nothing....and became the universe due to a giant explosion that just spontaneously occured?
More silly than faith in the idea that the while universe is expanding, there isn't some larger "something" that it is expanding into?
More silly than faith in the concept that observation dictates reality (re: idea that given two fundamentally equal routes and equal probability, which route a photon takes when its path is bent around a gravity well (star) is determined by the observer) ?
I say faith because faith and understanding are two different things. And for the vast majority of the population, these concepts are unexplainable dogma. Just like the 10 Ccommandments being largely self-explanatory but the more esoteric areas, such as an uncreated creator, are unexplainable dogma, ie, articles of faith.
Flamebait, it's what sells!
I do find it funny that people can be so radically against the idea of a 'divine guidance' in relation to evolution and creation of the universe. You can't really 'disprove' it... can you? Does it make me unrational to be skeptical of the idea of a bunch of random particles coming together in perfect order to create everything we experience? Doesn't the statistical odds lead a logical person to assume that there is something going on that is beyond our comprehension?
He's paraphrasing Pascal's wager, and Pascal was one of the first people thinking logically about probability. Pascal wanted an example of how you should treat situations where one outcome was infinitely better or worse than all the others. Even though Pascal was religious, no one is really sure if he came up with the argument to try and convert people, or just as an example of the kind of situation where infinity was part of probability calculation. Hopefully, people don't change their beliefs because of Pascal's Wager anymore, if anyone really did.
Now Kurt Godel, who was probably a better mathematician than Pascal, had three great proofs. The second is famous for showing, as just one interpretation, how Provability in a formal system is different than Truth, and people often say that proof alone revolutionised the 20th century in the same way as Einstein. Godel's third proof is a demonstration of the existence of God, using Modal Logic. It avoids the glitches in Pascal's proof. Anyone who passed a good college course in Symbolic Logic can spend about a year studying some of the detailed areas of Modal Logic, really just picking up all the notation basics and such, and then follow Godel's proof and come to their opwn conclusion. I don't recommend bothering, as once you don't need faith to know there is a God anymore, you just need yet more faith to believe that Heaven is not just a place for six or seven old guys who were very good at math, and nobody else.
Who is John Cabal?
The idea of a prime mover has existed in the minds of very intelligent men(much more intelligent than either of us) for millennia...
So did sex drive and survival instinct. There is a body of evidence that this is simply some sort of a biological mechanism that has evolved to shape our thought processes into something that is tangibly beneficial to our individual or group survival. It does not immediately imply that this idea has any value as far as the objective truth about our existence is concerned.
Ezekiel 23:20
We can observe species changing over time, i.e. evolving. We can even observe the creation of new species
We can observe complex molecules being created from simpler ones, in chemical reactions.
We can observe complex atoms being created from simpler ones, in nuclear reactions
When was the last time you saw people popping out of thin air?
May Peace Prevail On Earth
Not really,
The atheistic point of view is to say that you believe there isn't a god. I understand the limits of epistemology, and I also recognize that many definitions of "god" are carefully constructed to be untested and non-falsifiable, thus making it obviously false to "know" its truth or falsity.
That said, I find the existence of God to be roughly as likely as the existence of dragons, unicorns, and flying reindeer and slightly less likely than the existence of the Chupacabra. I think that level of disbelief separates my point of view from those of the agnostics, justifying the use of a different term.
That is why the bible says 'without beginning and without end' because where there is no time there is no beginning or end.
Seriously? Has slashdot finally succumbed to "old man" disease, and can't resist rehashing the same old boring "news"?
We have the beginning of a face-eating (zombie) up-rising, the incipient demise of the euro, and a daily barrage of advances in science, medicine, and technology -- and all slashdot can come up with is that a whole bunch of Americans are weird? The fact is that the US is economically, culturally, and militarily the world's superpower. When you're not only #1, but #1 over the next two or three *combined*, only a fool would sneer at your "stupidity". For all anyone knows, the qualities that make the US insanely great require "irrational" optimism and exhuberance.
So, how about them zombies?
Meanwhile Monkey Boy scratches his head and lopes off back into the jungle...
For the record, this seems to be a terribly abbreviated version of Pascal's Wager. It's worth reading about it, to understand the logic behind the actual argument.
I don't think so. I think when I find a pocket watch on the ground, it is less complex for me to believe that it was intelligently designed than to believe that it came about through a mathematical (not necessarily random) process. This does not give me any insight into the nature of the designer. Was it a computer? Human? Aliens? I don't know. Nor does it give me insight into how it was designed. Was it an iterative process? Was it carefully planned? Was the designer just plain gifted? In any case it would not be extraordinarily irrational for me to assume that the pocket watch was designed.
Likewise, when I exist in such an unnatural state as life. When I have the extraordinary supernatural ability to self determine what I do, how I think, etc... When all of the animals on this earth use this database system that somehow determines how it looks and behaves. When I can love a woman and be rewarded with tiny new humans that grow... something beyond what we as humans can create. It is not more complex for me to believe that life is designed. It does not prove nor disprove a deity, but it does prove that it is not irrational to think that life is designed by a deity.
Now I'm not trying to tell you what to believe other than theologians may not be idiots since there exists the possibility that they may very well be correct.
Sure it is.
Who created the devine creator?
In fact the idea of a devine creator is 2x as silly, since it requires that the devine creator was created and from nothing.
Your logic shows a child-like mystification regarding the concepts of Zero and Infinity.
The concept of a Divine Creator is actually much more compatible with the nature of human consciousness than the concepts of Zero and Infinity, or; everything created from nothing. The simple truth is that the scientific method is ill-equipped to deal with "nothingness". Nor does it have the capabilities/formulas to describe pre-extant "time". If the Standard Model in reverse reverts our Known Universe to "nothing", a Divine Creator is a perfectly good explanation for the origins of said Known Universe.
Unless of course you can explain how everything can be created from nothing. Please describe the scientific model that logically and reasonably explains how all energy and matter can spontaneously exist (exist without a cause).
If you can use the scientific method to explain how all known matter and energy spontaneously formed in the absence of anything extant; you win at life, the universe, and everything. I further postulate that If you can do that, you would be indistinguishable from a Divine Creator, and I would most likely worship you as one.
Scientists often beat around the origin bush, and in doing so they, on occasion, stumble upon enlightening (pun intended) formulas. However, the constant/unchanging position of Atheist scientists that the Origin (of the Universe, and species) is less than miraculous therefore must lack Divinity, is thoroughly disheartening to this humble hominid.
If I'm wrong, I loose nothing. If I'm right, you lose everything.
If God is going to send me to Hell, Limbo, or eternal suffering for merely doubting his existence, then I want nothing to do with Him anyway. Why would I ever want to spend an afterlife in the company of people who rejected science and logic?
I don't want to live on this planet anymore.
It cannot explain how human culture developed. There is no biological reason to create culture, art, or anything in excess of purely surviving. If you found an ape that drew pictures, how does it drawing picture fit into evolution's idea of survival of the fittest? I see alot more evidence of creationism than evolution. I see more people that spout off on evolution are believing it more by blind faith than I see of Christians do creationism.
But theories are not hypotheses either. They are at least the best explanations for the data (facts) that we have available.
"No evidence", except for the fact that we live in an ordered universe, that the universe has a beginning, and that there are historical claims of a divine creator.
Not that this small set of evidence stops you from listing counter-evidence or alternate explanations, but claiming "no evidence" is plain wrong.
Unpersuasive or insufficient, sure. None? Wrong.
from a country where idiots seem to have the biggest yaps.
No problem. You supply the funding, and I'll have it done in approximately four billion years.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
In any case, it doesn't matter if you're a theist or atheist; at some point you have to believe in the absurd notion that everything came from an uncreated something.
Actually, it's closer to "we don't know enough to answer that question...yet." Maybe a Sky Wizard did it. Maybe the universe is cyclical, maybe it's the result of n-dimensional experimentation, who knows? Maybe through investigation we can find out how the Universe was created and be able to build our own Universes. Sitting back and saying "God did it, He's ending the world this weekend, no need to plan for the future!" does a dis-service to everything that's ever existed on this little rock.
As to how much how I was created affects my daily life, that's irrelevant. We might exist because of random chance, or by the whim of a creator, or if I'm an avatar in an MMORPG, or any of a million possibilities, each more ridiculous and miraculous than the last.
What we do know is that we think we exist, and that we are the only sentient species we have encountered. What we have to do is stop eating pie and masturbating and get on with making our planet and our species better than it is.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
The total energy in the universe is zero. All the matter and energy is balanced out by the negative gravitational energy. This is all supported by the observational scientific evidence. There is no need for a creator, because there is nothing to be created. Read Lawrence Krauss's "A Universe From Nothing" if you want to know more about this.
I just had to get in on this epic comment thread... Polls almost always rely on relatively small samples from certain areas.. 100,000 , 1,000,000, even 10,000,000 individuals in a poll cannot speak for 300,000,000... show me a poll where I actually got to put my 2 cents in and I'll believe it.. Point being, Why has Gallop never asked me about this stuff?? o.0
Who created the devine creator?
In fact the idea of a devine creator is 2x as silly, since it requires that the devine creator was created and from nothing.
That's at the same time insigntful and completely off the mark.
Oddly, science and (some) religion end up at pretty much the same spot here: that our universe was created by some event outside our universe.
The question of "well then, what came before God" is hardly new, centuries of thought have gone into this, and the most common answer is "God's time is not the same as our time, and his personal life is otuside the scope of my religion" (technically, "eternal" means "outside of time" or "in a different timestream", not "forever").
To my understanding, the mainstream answer to "well, what happened before the big bang" is "time started with the big bang, so in a sense that's outside the scope of what we can study, but it's possible that the big bage was a result of brane collisions in a time that's not the same as our time".
There's also the half-joke scientific answer that "we might just be a simulation running in a larger universe, and so effectively the timestream of the guys running the simulation is different form ours, and there personal lives are outside the scope of what we can possibly study".
I'm sure you see the pattern. Religious or scientific, you have to postulate some larger environment with some seperate timestream in which our universe was somehow sparked off. As such ideas go, some entity (let's label him "god" for convenience, it's a nice short word) is far from the most wacky, and in an odd way it's the easiest of the theories to test (and thus perhaps the most scientific): if it's right, you'll know soon enough.
TL;DR - all competing theories are at least 2x silly as well.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The god is pretty elusive concept though. It keeps running away from the science.
Once it was a stone then an animal, then human, then he became a spirit and moved to the sky, but now it is evicted even from there.
May Peace Prevail On Earth
Philosophy here: Both ideas are silly. Everything comes from something unless it always was. Math: Infinity. So a divine creator is maybe not as silly since we have evidence that the universe had a beginning and maybe therefore an end. So if there is a divine creator then it always was and always will be infinite. So yes in fact it can be both ways.
Pascal's wager is bullshit. What if you happen to believe in the wrong god, and the true god happens to be a vindictive psychopath?
Be wary of any facts that confirm your opinion.
I'm willing to place a large wager that if you do a real examination of yourself you'll find a large portion of your life is not based upon reason but on faith. It may not be faith of a religious kind, but it is faith nonetheless. It's in your nature, you are human, not machine, you can't know or observe everything.
You love your wife / husband / family member? Ok. Prove it. Do they love you? Prove it. Bob your manager has got your back because he has never given you a bad review or stabbed you in the back, right?
Are you married? That takes a hell of a lot of faith.
If faith is a disability, then we are all disabled. Only some of us are too blind to see it, let alone their own hypocricy or the damaging effects of an un-tamed ego.
To spit on religious belief, no, check that, one portion of religious belief because of the concept of faith alone while standing on the pedestal of "reason" not only damages your credibility, but also spits in the face of "reason" and "truth".
Why? Your premise is Bullshit, something that is more insidious than a lie because it cares nothing for the "truth".
Learning that 46% of american's don't accept modern science as they're young earthers is important. It means that roughly half the time instead of explaining something in a reasonable manner we can just say 'it's magic' and it'd be accepted. Think of the time savings! I wish I knew this when I was in school, forget show your work, it was divine intervention!
Unfortunately, evolution is theory, not fact, and has yet to deal with some rather hairy issues like irreducible complexity and entropy.
"Hairy issues"? You mean "fictional issues made up by people who don't actually understand science but feel qualified to talk about it"? The rhetoric itself ("irreducible complexity") is a shibboleth of creationists ignorant of the methods of real scientific inquiry, since actual scientists took their time to analyze that notion and found it wanting.
Ezekiel 23:20
Have you ever programmed a genetic algorithm for optimization of a physical process? Ever wonder where we got the idea from?
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I agree the universe was created from nothing, but how?
If the universe wasn't ordered, we wouldn't be here trying to figure out what created it.
There have been many historical claims that have been abandon in the light of science, like geocentism or the idea that there should be an equal amount of land north and south of the equator. This one should be too.
--The problem I have with religious belief systems is when questioning the system is forbidden.--
That's the difference between believing there is a God and religion which almost all of which you can't believe.
"Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones."
Remember that being a good believer means making huge sacrafices in your life - the path to heaven isn't paved by attending church once or twice a year and professing belief in Jesus. If you are wrong, you have wasted your opportunity at life and happiness. You will have lost everything.
You're making a fallacy of accident. Whenever you are looking at polls, you can't infer anything beyond the exact words of the poll. If the US population was polled as to whether they "reject the entire foundation of modern life (science)," you'd likely have a very low number of affirmative responses. That's not what they were asked. You might as well be inferring that a poll where 99.9% of people say that murderers should be punished is the same as saying that "99.9% of people say that anyone who gets an abortion should be punished." Regardless of what you may believe regarding abortion, if the US population was polled as to whether anyone who gets an abortion should be punished would not result in anything approaching 99.9% affirmative responses.
The singularity that exploded in the big bang. It's like black hole. It's possible that there was other stuff around when it exploded, but that really hard to tell considering there was this really big explosion that wiped the slate clean.
But of course a few people have some ideas.
Some people think that literally everything was compressed into the singularity. In such a case, if there's no difference from one second to the next, then that's essentially end of time.
Another idea is that the big bang literally changed the nature of physics. It's like how iron can cool trapping carbon in it and forming steel. How it cools determines the properties. Same thing with the universe cooling. Change the game and who knows how shit worked before the event.
One idea is that the big bang kick-started time itself and that the phenomena we know of as "now" is the blast-wave of that event, and that if you could magically go back in time, before the big bang, you'd see a mirror image of our universe. That's pretty metaphysical sci-fi though.
As for what caused the big bang, that gets labeled under "damn good question" category. Any ideas?
The atheistic point of view means you know there isn't a God.
I'm sorry, but that isn't true. Atheists like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Dan Dennett, Sam Harris, A. C. Greyling - all have quite clearly said that they can't rule out the possibility that some kind of god exists.
Can you name any well-known, modern atheist (other than P. Z. Myers) who is completely certain that all gods are impossible?
Ah, but who created ANDY Devine?
There IS a logical answer to the question "which came first, the chicken or the egg?"
A couple of correct, non-contradictory, answers. Here they are:
1) Egg-laying creatures existed before chickens evolved. Hence, eggs came first.
2) Both eggs and the creatures that lay them evolved simultaneously from simpler, more primitive forms (which do not qualify as their modern day, more-evolved counterparts). So, they both came at once.
This is inaccurate. Remember, like the label "Muslim," the label "Christian" is a blanket category encompassing a host of specific religions that are united by a common thread.
The reason for the necessity of a redemption is independent of the origins of humanity - if we choose to simply assume a conservation law for ethics exists, clearly some balancing force is needed to counter the simple fact that humans screw up and do some nasty things, then get away clean. For Christians, the assumption of that conservation law is termed faith, and further, the balancing force is attributed to the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth. Further development of the framework defines a religion that falls under the "Christian" label.
I currently believe the Creation story is metaphorical and evolution is real. My views will further evolve in time as I continue to learn. Being related to a monkey isn't scary. I like my cat pretty well; maybe we're 10^7th cousins. The creation account in Genesis closely parallels the prevalent Babylonian creation accounts of the era, and that account contains metaphors useful for teaching ethical concepts to the ignorant, recently freed slaves who made up the original Jewish culture back when it happened. Is Santa an evil lie or a nice story? That's today, not 4000+ years ago.
Evolutionists reject what is essentially the Prime Directive of Biology: Life cannot come from nonlife.
Science is finding it increasingly difficult to draw the line between life and non-life. Viruses have just DNA replication ability without anything else needed for life. They borrow these from others. People were arguing whether viruses are alive or not. Now prions are basically chemicals (mis folded amino acids) with replication ability without DNA, not even the single stranded version of DNA called RNA. In fact there is a such a gradual chain of things linking life with non-life, it is not impossible to construct a sequence of events where life could emerge from non-life.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
If you are wrong, you still lose everything, because you believed in the wrong god, and the right one will send you to hell for it.
I don't think so. I think when I find a pocket watch on the ground, it is less complex for me to believe that it was intelligently designed than to believe that it came about through a mathematical (not necessarily random) process.
The last time I looked into a mirror, I didn't look like a pocket watch, I did, however, look like a bag of organic molecules. Now we know that nuts, bolts, cogs, and wheels don't spring up in nature by themselves, but on the other hand we have observed complex organic molecules arising when simple elements are banged together using some energy. Doesn't that at least nudge you into realizing how flawed your analogy is?
Likewise, when I exist in such an unnatural state as life.
You don't know that life is an unnatural state. Scientists operate with the idea that it actually may be perfectly natural, if not inevitable, given the laws of physics around here. So far, the results look promising to me. Don't expect this problem to be solved overnight.
When I have the extraordinary supernatural ability to self determine what I do, how I think, etc...
Sounds like wishful thinking to me. How do you know that this "ability" is not an illusion caused by our way of perceiving things?
Ezekiel 23:20
I like that that we've been able to quantify the silliness of creationism.
Except that anything having to do with a Transcendent Creator requires a cardinality greater than aleph two. Even at aleph null, x == 2*x if x is transcendental.
Austrian Monk named Gregor Mendel?
if (it != oneThing) it = another;
There are different levels of a-theism, the discussion of which is not one that should really be held in this forum since you can easily look them up elsewhere. Whilst almost agreeing with you, my point on your remark would be that it is far safer not to say "I believe that there isn't a god", but to say "I don't believe that there is a god". The difference being that the latter is careful not to shift burden of proof onto the premise that "there isn't a god". It's only words, but I think the specific words chosen here are important. It's up to the theist to define what he believes, not the a-theist.
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
If I'm wrong, I loose nothing. If I'm right, you lose everything.
Pascal's Wager. Cute. Actually, what you lose is a life of working towards building a better world and what you get is a life dedicated to proping up a lie. You'll be remembered as a fool, one of many, who held his peers back. You'll be listed next to the Easter Islanders who cut down their trees, the french nobles who decided to let their children pay their debts, and the segregationists.
Unless you don't think that believing a lie really affects the world all that much. In which case, what's the point? If you're doing it because you think it makes you a good person, but it doesn't actually affect the world, then it doesn't really have an effect on you.
No, Pascal's wager is an overly narrow view of the effects of such a decision. It ignores the life a person lives and focuses only on what comes after. (which is nothing).
Furthermore, I'm not sure I'd want to chum about eternally with a bunch of people that wouldn't let me in just because I tried to be rational.
The Puritans (the ones who were "escaping persecution") only founded the New England colonies. They immediately set up their own theocratic governments and began their own vicious persecution, most famously the Salem Witch Trials. Religious persecution caused BY the Puritans was one of the main reasons for the Religious Test clause of the Constitution and the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.
The Continental Congress, the Revolution, and the eventual establishment of the Constitution was a completely different event than the Puritans founding a colony and happened around a hundred years after. Historically speaking, this is about as big a miss as confusing the Revolution and the Civil War.
You seem to be abusing the word "logical."
"Logical" does not mean "seems to make sense." It means "conforms to the established rules of logic."
you need to shut-up and quit mocking them. The idea of a divine creator is no sillier than the idea of creation from nothing.
Well perhaps it is not the answer to the question "Did creation come from nothing" that is silly; perhaps it is the question itself.
There are certainly other questions we could ask that clearly presuppose ordering events in impossible ways. What's colder than absolute zero? What's north of the North Pole? What has a higher elevation than directly overhead? What happens when you shrink a balloon to less than zero volume?
Asking whether creation came from nothing presupposes our notion of time and space can be extended before the Big Bang. It assumes that time is a fixed, universal measurement framework in which events can be unambiguously placed. But we already know that time is not like that. Special relativity has been pretty well corroborated by now. If time isn't a universal dimension but a set of paths along which events occur, it is no more repugnant to reason for those paths to lead back to a point than it is for them to go back endlessly.
This problem of trying to extend our understanding back before the beginning of the universe is not resolved by assuming a pre-existing God. Did anything happen before "the moment of creation"? If so, then the moment of creation is just an arbitrary point in time. So what was God up to in the eternity before that? If there is no beginning to time, there is no reason for God to perform the act of creation when he did. He had an eternity to work his way up to it. Possibly He has done this an infinite number of times, in which case time is as Eastern religions often conceive it: circular. Note that this conception of God doing things in an eternity before creation is no longer really transcendent. God may not be part of creation, but he is part of "existence" and does things because conditions in existence him cause him to, just like you or I put on a coat when it's cold. This version of God is not so different than you or I, just longer lived and more complex.
On the other hand, let's suppose God has the transcendent role religion assigns him, that he is indeed the First Cause. That means things didn't happen before the moment of creation. That brings us back to the same situation we have with the Big Bang. Does it make sense to talk about time in which events don't occur? Event he ticking of a clock is an event; a beat of the pulse; the vibration of an atom.
Perhaps it would be best to think of the beginning of the universe not as a limit to the Universe per se, but a limit to any kind of extrapolation from experience. The laws of physics as we know them came into being in first 10^-12 seconds. As we go back further to the Planck Epoch before 10^-43, intuition begins to break down. And as we push further back in that 10^-43 seconds, there will come a point earlier than which we can't even extend our deductive frameworks. Let's say the earliest event we can discern by deduction occurs at 10^-X. In the time between 0 and 10^-X our understanding completely breaks down. That tiny sliver of time is for all purposes an eternity, since we can't put any definite limit on events that occur in it.
I have often wondered whether intelligent life (obviously not as we know it) might have existed in the epoch of the Universe, only living on a vastly faster time scale. To that life our epoch of the Universe would look like the future heat death of the Universe does to us.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
So here things can't "just exist" and "somewhere else" (where the "creator" was before his alleged act of creation) they can?
So, I program a virtual world on a computer. In that world things can't "just exist". I have to create them.
However, where the "creator" (that's me!) is...well, what do you say?
You say I can't "just exist" and need a creator too? Or in my "somewhere else" am I allowed to "just exist"?
Igor Presnyakov stole my hat
Its absurd as a Princess Peach saying the Mushroom Kingdom universe must have been spontaneously created from nothing because its 2x as silly to think there is some sort of creator."
The bold sections are messing you up. If we assume she has no evidence one way or the other, it makes perfect sense for PP to use Ockham's razor and favor spontaneous creation, even though she'd be wrong. Suggesting a creator as a hypothesis would be fine, but it really would be silly for her to insist that there must be one, or even to favor that hypothesis over the other.
Here is some RNA: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/05/ribonucleotides/ Just give it a little more time, and it will get higher up.
It seems relevant to point out that even if we can infer the existence of a creator from the level of intelligent design that is evident in the universe, that alone tells us nothing about what the creator is like.
It is one thing to say "the universe was created." It is quite another to say "the creator of the universe wants you to fly an airplane into a building" or "the creator wants you to give me ten percent of your income."
Yahweh, the god of the bible is who they believe did this.
Not Shiva.
Not some random god.
They may wave hands a bit on "Allah" but the fact is most christians beliefs are exclusive of islamic beliefs. The islamics will go to hell or purgatory. The christians will go to a lower level of heaven (at best) or hell.
---
They willfully ignore mountains of hard facts which they could observe themselves directly in order to maintain this belief. Even tho the conclusion from that is that Yahweh for some unknown reason decided to create all kinds of false evidence of an older earth and to create dna patterns which are very similar to apes.
---
There is a huge gap from "a god created the universe" to "the god of the bible created the universe and wants us to worship it, ordered hebrew tribes to slaughter men, women, "suckling babies", and old people, ordered them to not mix two types of cloth, and had a few dozen kids attacked by bears for mocking elijah. Killed 99% of humans at least once- perhaps twice, and then repeatedly engaged in infanticide and genocide.
Sure-- an unknown god may have created the universe-- but that doesn't mean it is yahweh.
Most Theists disbelieve every god but one. Atheists just beleive in one less god than theists.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Sooner or later on your philosophical and metaphysical travels, you will find, as I did, that you have to make a leap of blind faith.
Fair enough, however when making a leap, isn't wiser to make the smallest leap possible? That’s what science(even eveloution) is all about.
For me to expend effort during my lifetime to believe something purely as an insurance policy against a hypothetical unpleasant afterlife sounds like a bad deal. Life is too precious to spend it on something so uncertain when I have so many other demands on my time that are very real. If you find it rewarding, that's fine. But what I've seen of religion makes it look like a huge time sink. We all have limited lifetimes, and if there is nothing to worry about after life, then religion would turn out to be a colossal waste of that limited time budget. If you're wrong, there's what you're losing: time during your life that could have been used doing things other than worshiping something that does not exist. If you're dead, you can't get that time back. If you get benefits during your lifetime for yourself and others from the process, then maybe religion is a net positive after all, but only getting a net payout after death makes it a risky proposition.
It's like you're sitting there at the religious slot machine, pumping it with quarters your whole lifetime, and you only find out if there's a payout *after* you're dead. And for all you know, the "one true" religion was one slot machine over, and the one you are playing your whole life may never pay out. No thanks. The best deal here may be not to play, or at least to keep all options open. I'll keep my money and invest it in other things during my life. Furthermore, I don't need a threat of doom to try to do the right thing during my lifetime.
This question is sidestepped with the idea that God always was. That there was no point before which there wasn't a god and suddenly there was. God would be ageless and eternal. Without beginning and without end. Since we cannot directly observe God, there is nothing to contradict this assumption.
The universe, however, very clearly did have a beginning, so we cannot attribute agelessness to it.
What intelligent person can imagine that there was a first “day,” then a second and a third “day”—evening and morning—without the sun, the moon, and the stars? [Sun, moon, and stars are created on the fourth "day."] And that the first “day”—if it makes sense to call it such—existed even without a sky? [The sky is created on the second "day."]
Who is foolish enough to believe that, like a human gardener, God planted a garden in Eden in the East and placed in it a tree of life, visible and physical, so that by biting into its fruit one would obtain life? And that by eating from another tree, one would come to know good and evil? And when it is said that God walked in the garden in the evening and that Adam hid himself behind a tree, I cannot imagine that anyone will doubt that these details point symbolically to spiritual meanings, by using an historical narrative which did not literally happen. (p.71)
-- Origen (c.185-254 CE) “De Principiis“
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
I thought we were created by the apes...
Whether humanity evolved due to purely natural forces, was guided in a prolonged form of creationist evolution, or popped into existence 10,000 years ago is wholely irrelevant to daily life. It's one of those Big Questions which everyone has pondered at some point in their life, but since it has no bearing on how they wake up, make breakfast, get the kids to school, commute to work, perform their job, go home, cook dinner, watch TV, and go to sleep, they don't think much about it. Therefore, everyone believes something regarding the subject, but very few people care enough to really study the subject and form a conviction.
It's the same as most people's view on politics. I can spend several hours every evening studying the issues, researching each candidate's political actions on any given topic, and form a conviction about which candidate I should vote for in every political race I am permitted to vote in. Or, I can listen to the occasional advertisement and watch / read a news segment every once in a while, and still have time to play with my kids, wash the dishes so my wife doesn't nag me, and fall asleep watching a sporting event. To be honest, whether I vote for candidate A, B, C, etc. for Sheriff has little to no impact on my life, and not worth the time spent thinking about it.
Does that mean people are stupid? Hardly. In fact, it may mean they are even more intelligent than those who spend a lot of time thinking about such things, because they may be making a better economical decision about how to use their time. Then again, by wasting their time answering some irrelevant poll negates that somewhat.
You may do that, I wouldn't. And I don't know anyone retarded enough to do that.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Psychiatrists must be right in prescribing 46% of Americans some kind of prescription!
People really do have some sort of mental illness.
I mean if you have faith in an invisible man in the sky that banish's people to hell for the simple act of not believing, and controls all the wrongs and faults of the world because somehow it makes sense only to him, like illness, natural disasters, crime, poverty, eat or be eaten system of nature, etc etc then yeah you are definatly crazy in my opinion.
A thousand years from now I predict a total Inquisition against religion, complete with marooning them to their own private island. And it can't come soon enough.
Those evolving stick with science and what we can prove, and recognizing the fact we don't have the answer for everything (which is what religion partly tries to accomplish).
This contains a pronouncement of truth "The truth is that we cannot...." which isn't really true, and/or terms (such as "distant past", "virtual", and "real" are so poorly understood or undefined that the pronouncement fails to communicate something which actually is true.
Also, the egg did, in fact, precede the chicken, (as another poster pointed out, there were animals that laid eggs, and one of them laid the egg of the first chicken).
The statement about people "who believe science can offer more than a theory" appears to capitalize on misunderstanding of the scientific method, as if a "theory" were a "hypothesis". This statement (and the rest of the post) also appears to completely discount empirical evidence, (without which, oddly enough, "faithful" people could not learn or develop "divine" explanations.)
You know what the weirdest part is? So many people believe in a literal creation story. If you ask those people they say the Bible is literally true and not metaphorical in any parts. But the question remains, if the Bible is literally true and to be followed literally, why do all those people not follow this:
Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
Sell all that you own and distribute the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.
So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not renounce all your possessions.
Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.
As for what was sown among thorns, this is the one who hears the word, but the cares of the world and the lure of wealth choke the word, and it yields nothing.
Sell your possessions, and give alms. Make purses for yourselves that do not wear out, an unfailing treasure in heaven, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
You prove that the universe was created by a divine being.
What is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
Coincidentally 46% is also the amount of Americans without education.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
You loose your one chance to do all the things your non-existent god prohibits for no good reason.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
ack, should be lose.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
So, in order for your analogy to work: there must be something to contrast your watch with. Something not-created, so you can demonstrate the qualities of creation.
That inherently proves you wrong, because it acknowledges there are things without creators. It's a stupid argument reserved for stupid people.
God created the universe last Tuesday and any memories of earlier times were also created at that point.
Prove me wrong.
All these atheists... so closed minded.
Your opinion suggests that you mistake irreducible/specified complexity for science and argument from ignorance for evidence.
You're religious, that's nice. Unfortunately, that doesn't tell us anything about whether or not you believe in either evolution or a young earth. Overzeetop is assuming that all or most of the technologically literate fall within the 54% that DO believe in evolution, but that's not nessesarily true. Sure, there's a correlation with technological literacy and being informed and intelligent, so hopefully you're part of it. But at this point, we don't know.
(Presuming you're in the USA.)
> The idea of a divine creator is no sillier than the idea of creation from nothing.
That's because the notion of the creation of the universe is senseless.
Science: time is a coordinate inside the universe or inside a local (suitably defined) part of the universe. Thus a time is a measurable (in principle) part of the internals of the universe.
The notion of the universe is therefore outside of time. What do we know about the universe? We just know that it is. There's no (before, after) pair of times concerning its change in existence. That would require an outside-of-the-universe containing time.
Confusion about this could appear from e.g., "what if there's something before the big bang", say. But we can include any such potential extras now or in the future inside the definition of 'the universe', i.e. keep the meaning universal.
The underlying confusion about creation comes from applying everyday thinking about time to the wider situation, as if time is outside the universe. We don't think of spatial coordinates outside the universe. But experience of time is different, because internally, at a local spot in the universe there is a past and future.
There IS a question to answer: why does anything exist? However, the answer is not that it was created, in any usual sense of that term. And redefining 'created' would simply be an attempt to adjust the brain, not solve the problem.
So here things can't "just exist" and "somewhere else" (where the "creator" was before his alleged act of creation) they can?
That would be the assumption. I'm not saying I subscribe to a divine creator, but I can observe that the argument that one can't exist because then it would need a creator itself is deeply flawed.
But I'm still waiting to be presented with any sort of rational argument on behalf of the superstitious crowd as to why they are more likely right than the others, since all of their arguments smell of emotional pressure and inability to distance oneself from the problem.
That falls to faith I think. There isn't going to be a rational argument for what we can't know about. And spontaneous creation of the universe isn't really much better than a different kind of superstition.
I suppose its simpler... you just accept on faith that the universe spontaneously created, and you don't have to ponder the existence and motivations of God.
I think the main thing though when evaluating a divine creation argument is to remember that subscribing to the existence of God doesn't mean you have to believe in pregnant virgins, baskets of endless fish, crying statues, or that Jesus appeared in your french toast...
This whole issue may become moot if the Mars Science Laboratory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Science_Laboratory) turns up evidence of life on Mars come this August. Can't wait. I, for one, welcome our new bacterial Martian overlords.
Lots of heads will explode, but I bet there are ready answers for/from the "faithful".
I'll believe you once you show me where you got your quantum mechanics and your initial vacuum!
Look folks, science can't answer these questions. That's why there's a whole field of Philosophy called "META-Physics".
This is where Science, Philosophy, and Religion intertwine. The best proofs of God are not scientific; they are metaphysical.
Until you understand this, well, to put it bluntly, you're just going to continue to look like a clueless apologist for atheistic science.
When I was at university, it was a rare scientist and a rare philosopher who tried to deny the whole metaphysical realm and,
even the spiritual realm. And usually, their philosophy cohorts never wanted to go drinking with them because they found
them to be incredible boors; you know, the mechanical, know-it-all, Sheldon Cooper types from TBBT who cannot intuit outside
of their own tiny, ego-centric universe.
Religion comes from, not primarily from deductive logic but rather, primarily, from intuition.
The problem with the "Christian Scientists" [sic] is that they think that they can "prove"
that God exists from experiential knowledge [ex. "life is rare, and the Physical laws must be
*just* right for life; so there must be a creator"]; the atheistic scientists rightly reject
them on that front.
is not evenly distributed. Apparently 46% of the American people have a ways to go yet.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
They dug it out of the gravitational well.
There is actually a school of thought that speculates that if you summed all the energy in the universe (radiation, kinetic, and mass-energy) and then subtracted all the gravitational potential energy (which is always negative and approaches zero only at an infinite distance from all other matter), the total would be exactly equal to zero. That is to say the entire universe could have quite literally arisen from nothing, the trick was just in getting nothing to separate out into interesting patterns for a while.
This actually underpins a number of current cosmological theories where various phenomena in an existing universe could spawn new, possibly similar universes in an ever-expanding metaverse, without having to contribute any energy to the creation.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
There are absolutely NO human beings who are in their right minds who can believe human beings can have arrived where we are today without Divine Guiding, and there are not that many who are total fruit-loops.
No human being can name one single human historical event in which Gods and concepts of Gods has not played a significant part.
What Human Beings have done, to each other and to their human environments, and to the natural environments around them, cannot be blamed on Nature or natural causes.
Nor can Gods be., Nature does not care about human prejudices and does not create Gods or any other Divine Beings for human beings to ascribe their prejudices to, to justify them, or to "order" human beings to do the vicious things they want to do.
So let's stop blaming Nature for what we, ourselves, are and do. Let's admit we make Gods for ourselves, make ourselves Gods and make our God-inventions "make" us do what we want to do.
These numbers make sense when you think of the demographic of who has a land line and bothers to answer surveys.
Godel's proof fails to prove the existence of God.
1) It begins by re-defining God to mean something quite different (and containing far fewer attributes) than the common meaning. Even if such a thing can be proven to exist, what has been proven to exist is not "God." This is the logical fallacy of ignoratio elenchi"
2) The premise "necessary existence is a positive property" is not an a priori truth, but an interesting equivocation. It translates to "something that actually exists is morally superior to something that is merely imaginary," which might make sense to some people but is ultimately based on opinion rather than logical necessity.
3) As Hume astutely pointed out, it is impossible to demonstrate the existence of any concrete thing from purely a priori truths. This includes God. To summarize: a priori truths can only be proven if their opposite necessarily implies a contradiction. Any concrete thing that exists could also not-exist without there being a contradiction. So, to prove that a real thing exists one must include at least one relevant a posteriori premise in the argument.
Fun fact: Godel was an atheist, and delayed the publication of this "proof" for fear that people might think he believed in God.
Oh My God!
Oh, yes: in theory, as it hasn't been found.
I've always hated the "I believe 'just in case' and you should too!" argument because it's like you're pretending you can trick God.
If you end up being right but you only "believe" because you're scared of what will happen if you're wrong, you don't actually believe so you're screwed anyway.
So, I program a virtual world on a computer. In that world things can't "just exist". I have to create them.
That is a universe you defined by saying you created it. By definition the stuff in it was created by you. At the very least, we'd have to imagine a universe you didn't create, perhaps that has always existed.
However, where the "creator" (that's me!) is...well, what do you say?
I'm saying that you yourself aren't bound by the rules of your virtual world. And that would be an error for someone inside your virtual world to think that you were.
I'd like to see the calculations for the necessary energy required to separate the two...
Bits of code, random ramblings: jakimfett.com
Source please
Bits of code, random ramblings: jakimfett.com
I used to be a Prime mover. But I haven't taken Optimus off the shelf in a while.
Long? What do you mean the signature at the bottom of every comment I post on Slashdot is too lo
An agnostic is just an atheist trying to hedge his bets
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
That's because you obviously haven't study or understood the survival value of societies, culture, altruism, cooperative behaviors, cultural memory and learning, etc.
On the flip side, the impact and extensiveness of cultural influences, societal behaviors, etc is far, far more intricate and developed than any original religious teachings have ever specified. So unless you are going to invoke the notion that God is surreptitiously guiding the life of every single individual, including all the "non-believers" (and I understand that many religions might claim this), including the believers of other religious traditions than your own, the overt ORIGINAL religious sources are insufficient to explain human cultural development and impact.
Like the poster above said, no evidence. Those links have about as much evidentiary value as the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Long? What do you mean the signature at the bottom of every comment I post on Slashdot is too lo
I don't think so. I think when I find a pocket watch on the ground, it is less complex for me to believe that it was intelligently designed than to believe that it came about through a mathematical (not necessarily random) process.
The last time I looked into a mirror, I didn't look like a pocket watch, I did, however, look like a bag of organic molecules. Now we know that nuts, bolts, cogs, and wheels don't spring up in nature by themselves, but on the other hand we have observed complex organic molecules arising when simple elements are banged together using some energy. Doesn't that at least nudge you into realizing how flawed your analogy is?
I'm not sure how it proves my analogy is flawed. After all, it is an analogy. No one believes that I am suggesting that people are watches. Now as far as banging molecules together, other than me having sex with my wife (or other life forms mating for that matter), I can think of no examples of humans banging two things together that result in something as complex as life. Life is a prerequisite to life.
Likewise, when I exist in such an unnatural state as life.
You don't know that life is an unnatural state. Scientists operate with the idea that it actually may be perfectly natural, if not inevitable, given the laws of physics around here. So far, the results look promising to me. Don't expect this problem to be solved overnight.
In the "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" Douglass Adams humorously and accurately concludes that the universe is unpopulated. His reasoning for such a conclusion is solid and I agree with it. That being said, since only the tiniest fraction of the whole Universe has life, then using Occam's Razor, it would be easy to conclude that life is indeed unnatural.
When I have the extraordinary supernatural ability to self determine what I do, how I think, etc...
Sounds like wishful thinking to me. How do you know that this "ability" is not an illusion caused by our way of perceiving things?
Is it just me or do you also see the contradiction in what you just said?
1. It is wishful thinking - Implies choice
2. This ability could be an illusion - Implies no choice
Since you're arguing with yourself, let me help you out. If it is no choice then this argument is like the bot Alice arguing with the bot Alice. So why care? If it is a choice then your argument that it is not a choice instantly invalidates itself.
So in your point of view theists are silly because of your contradictory "logic"?
Then why can't the universe just exist? A creator explains nothing.
Ok...so...entropy? Any answer for that one?
Not that I accept the offhanded dismissal of ID and irreducible complexity...but I'm obviously not going to get anywhere following that line of thought here...
Bits of code, random ramblings: jakimfett.com
Except that it does in fact deal perfectly well with 'irreducible complexity' and entropy, and is a 'theory' in the same sense that gravity is a 'theory.' To point to the creationist's favorite misunderstanding, an eye is not 'irreducibly complex' because it is perfectly possible for structures necessary to reach the current state to evolve away after their function is superseded by later development. Try watching a little PBS.
Long? What do you mean the signature at the bottom of every comment I post on Slashdot is too lo
We now know that 85% of americans are egregiously superstitious, i.e. very stupid. Explains a lot: reaganomics, Bush, Iraq war, Viet Nam war, war on drugs, faith-based economics. I could go on but...
That is a universe you defined by saying you created it. By definition the stuff in it was created by you.
Well, yes, of course. I'm defining what I'm saying. Why do you think this strange?
At the very least, we'd have to imagine a universe you didn't create, perhaps that has always existed.
Why would I have to do this? Is this a reference to something I said, or something K. S. Kyosuke said? It doesn't seem to make any sense.
I'm saying that you yourself aren't bound by the rules of your virtual world. And that would be an error for someone inside your virtual world to think that you were.
This at least seems to touch on the point I was making, but you seem to be missing it.
Igor Presnyakov stole my hat
And who created the Big Bang?
In fact the idea of big bang creator is 2x as silly, since it requires that the big bang was created and from nothing.
21st Century Renaissance Man
So 46% of people believing that God created humans in the past 10,000 years seems about right.
Actually there are hosts of interesting theories, some with growing evidence to suggest their validity. One set of theories suggest this universe is the white whole side of the formation of a supermassive black hole in a universe to which we no longer have access, and that our universe inflates into other universes by the formation of black holes here. Another suggests that our universe is a holographic projection on the surface of a black hole. Still another suggests that this universe is a simulation in an incredibly huge computer someplace. In which case, God could be described in equal parts as the researcher, the operating system and the simulation control system. Conjecture into the eternal and infinite are inherent aspects of being human. Thee difference between science and religion is in one, a really creative guy makes up a great story and people choose to believe that because it means they don't have to stare into the naked maw of eternity wondering what happens to themselves and everything they know. In the other a really creative guy makes up a great story, then looks for a way to test whether the universe itself likes the story. The universe is a really hard test. Most made up stories to describe the nature of natural phenomena, fail the universe test. That doesn't mean people shouldn't believe whatever they feel like. They just need to acknowledge one set of beliefs is base purely on hope and faith, and the other is based on validation by the final test, agreement with the physical universe. Some things are probably untestable, in which case you get to play as you choose. Just be clear that it has no ground in physical reality and please stop going around paving your beliefs on the souls of other people. Its the height of hubris, and leads to holy wars, and we've had far too many of these already thank you.
Yes, the general egg came first.
The first Chicken Egg was laid by a chicken.
The first chicken hatched from a non-chicken egg tho.
When I have the extraordinary supernatural ability to self determine what I do, how I think, etc...
Sounds like wishful thinking to me. How do you know that this "ability" is not an illusion caused by our way of perceiving things?
Actually it sounds like rational thinking - if you don't possess the capability of self determination then you cannot even influence your own behavior, including your belief, and all further action becomes pointless. In the face of such a proposition the only logical reaction is to assume that you do in fact possess self determination. Either you are right, or you have no choice in the matter and the question is irrelevant.
As for the divine watchmaker, I think what throws a lot of people is that they see an intelligent design, and presume it implies an intelligent designer. They haven't accepted that, while mindless, evolution is actually an incredibly brilliant designer that harnesses blind chaos in the service of the most effective design technique possible in the face of an incomprehensibly vast and complicated system: trial and error.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Ok...so...entropy? Any answer for that one?
Answer to what? What's the problem with entropy? I don't see any, you'd first have to present one.
Ezekiel 23:20
Lots of heads will explode, but I bet there are ready answers for/from the "faithful".
Of course apologists are already planning for this, it won't be the first (Or last) time that they have to come up with something. They did the same when it was proven that the Earth isn't flat, when it was proven that the Earth isn't the center of the universe, the discovery of dinosaur bones, the discovery of radiocarbon dating, the discovery of the age of the Earth, the discovery of the age of the universe, the ability to see galaxies billions of light years away, the discovery of global warming, the theory of evolution, and countless other discoveries. It will probably be something as simple as "God put those bacteria there to test us!" I'd be willing to bet that Ken Ham already has some new ridiculous exhibit planned for his "museum" to cover this situation too.
statistically unlikely
Statistics is nonsense when talking about the origin of everything. Something obviously happened, and a low probability doesn't mean that it is impossible.
Like the poster above said, no evidence. Those links have about as much evidentiary value as the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Ah, I should have linked to something on Amazon, as he did...many apologies, let me fix that...
Bits of code, random ramblings: jakimfett.com
and where did the quantum soup come from?
In a lot of physical cosmology theories there isn't a "before the big bang." The big bang itself is zero, and we work our way back from the present to the earliest possible time just after the big bang.
Since the big bang is time==0 asking what happened before it makes no sense, there is no before.
Hectice, baby, Mercator says hello to you
Looks like an overwhelming majority has consensus in creation or divine evolution.
The debate is over.
The only reason to dispute evolution is because you are a racist.
*Isn't debating like a liberal fun?
People like to trot out such statistics to show that Americans are less scientifically literate, but that's not true. When you test adults with actual scientific questions that require understanding, percentage of basic scientific literacy is low in both the US and Europe, but it is still about twice as high in the US than in Europe.
Europeans tend to mistake belief in the veracity of scientific results with scientific literacy. But believing in quantum mechanics doesn't make you literate in quantum physics. Believing that Shakespeare was a great author doesn't mean you know Shakespeare.
Both the US and Europe have a long ways to go until their populations are scientifically literate. But Europe has an uphill battle not only because people are even less scientifically literate, they don't even realize it.
"If that's the case, prove it's not a divinely created quantum vacuum. "
I don't need to prove it is not a divinely created quantum vacuum because that is not my assertion, that is yours, so why don't YOU prove it?
What *I* need to do is:
1) Work towards defining the source of that vacuum by forming a hypothesis, seeking evidence, distilling that into a theory, testing that theory in a way that can falsify it and making predictions, test those predictions in a way that can be falsified, have other scientists do the same, and when new evidence shows my theory to be inaccurate I have to think about why that is, come up with an explanation, and start testing all over again.
2) I need to NOT make up a source of the quantum vacuum and then stop all rational thought because well, "a supernatural being did it so why bother asking any more questions or seeking any more answers."
"If I'm wrong, I loose nothing. If I'm right, you lose everything."
Actually that is not true, Descartes was wrong. As another great philosopher said:
"And what if we picked the wrong religion? Every week, we're just making God madder and madder!" --Homer (aka Simpson)
You see, easy as it might be to dismiss my comment because of the source quote, that fact is Homer's logic is 100% just as valid as Descartes'
OH and you DO lose something if you believe and you are wrong ... you lose your entire life living by someone else's mandates, possibly eschewing relationships with an out-group, possibly hating yourself if you are not like the in-group, wasting time (church and prayer) and money (tithe), and pretty much avoiding a whole lot of fun based on things called "sin".
If there is a god I still don't lose anything because I believe that if there actually is a supernatural being that created everything we know, that being 1) doesn't give a crap about me, what I think, or what I do. I also don't think that being will judge me for using my free will and critical thinking to demand evidence before blindly following what another human tells me. Because like it or not, there is no actual evidence that any religious texts were anything more than the result of human thought and action.
If you can't be good, be good at it!
In America, 46% of the 1012 people asked hold a creationist view of human origins
I wish I hadn't already posted on this topic because I can't use up some mod points on your comments. I don't understand why the young earth / old earth / premillennial / postmillennial / whatever folks can't seem to rest until they have convinced everyone that their view is the only right one.
N.B. The following is directed at people who believe in God. If you do not, feel free to ignore this part because it hinges on a premise that you have already rejected. Cheers!
Did Jesus tell us, "The greatest commandment is to make sure every living creature accepts that the earth is 6,000 years old"? No. Point is, it just bloody doesn't *matter* that much alongside the whole "love your neighbor" bit. "But Lord," the apostles did NOT say, "When did we fail to convince you how the earth was created and life either created or evolved from that point on?" No, their focus was on feeding the hungry, supporting the poor, or if you want to get really crazy maybe even teaching other people how to avoid burning in hell.
Given the starting premise that I accept an omnipotent, omniscient being then it follows that I must accept the *possibility* that such a being could, if he wished, create an entire universe out of nothing in six 24-hour periods and populate it with artifacts that appear to be much, much older. If he wanted. I also accept that it's possible for such a being to spend billions of years carefully placing each proton in its appointed path and giving nudges here and there to ensure that the Rube Goldberg device we call a universe clanks along in exactly the right way to produce life here (and possibly elsewhere). Who am I to argue the implementation details with a being who can do all that? What I do know for sure is that I was given two basic instructions, both of which start with the word "love", and I have enough trouble even TRYING to manage that much without getting bogged down in arguments about what happened more than a few days ago, much less thousands or billions of years.
Is a 46-Percenter.
The concept of entropy is that there is a measurable tendency from order to disorder in isolated systems. Evolution would require entropy to be fundamentally broken (or to have been broken at some point in the past) for it to work.
Bits of code, random ramblings: jakimfett.com
Spiritual people. There is something absolutely amazing about life and death. One minute a person is there and then suddenly, all that remains is a husk. Yes, I understand fully the mechanics of the process, right down to the baryons. That doesn't change the fact that in my experience, something profound and ineffable has vanished from my perception, my grasp, and has left the world that I can comprehend.
None of this is an excuse for willful ignorance and stupid, stubborn, hubris. No matter how hard I believe, the world will not stop. If it did, the thin skin of the planet would tear free from the mantle and continents would slide over one another. Life on the planet would evaporate in a magmatic cataclism that would make the eruption of Mt. St. Helens look like a popcorn fart in a hurricane. If there is a creator, I'm guessing she doesn't go around suspending physics to mess with the creation. Just a guess (having created a few virtual worlds of my own, I'm supposing we're well past the beta.) Our world is chock full of mythologies. Its a human penchant to come up with stories to explain what we don't understand. Its also a penchant to attempt to describe nature and observe its inner workings. Folks who have at an early age divorced themselves from reality are missing something. We live in a truly remarkable universe. Even more disconcerting is that some people who choose to ignore reality seem to treat reality as though it bends to their opinions. The harsh conservative element in our government seems to have faith that a government that gives all its money away to the wealthy and takes no taxes can work and its people (at least the ones that matter) can thrive. This is the danger of faith based thinking, policy, society. The belief is more important than the fact, and those who have faith in driving straight on a crooked road endanger themselves and all others on the road.
A wise person surrenders to reality that which is real, and leaves that which untestable, unexplainable, or just humanly ineffable to faith. In these people I have no problem, I find myself among them. I simply know where to draw the line, and as our science improves, so the line moves.
The bold sections are messing you up.
I'd have bolded "2x as silly". That 2x is crucial.
If we assume she has no evidence one way or the other, it makes perfect sense for PP to use Ockham's razor and favor spontaneous creation, even though she'd be wrong.
Why do I feel hunger? I don't think Occam's razor would ever favor "Spontaneous hunger".
So I'm not sure Occam's razor argues for spontaneous creation. It favors the simplest explanation. spontaneous action is not an explanation... its another way of saying "there is no explanation, it just happened."
Suggesting a creator as a hypothesis would be fine, but it really would be silly for her to insist that there must be one, or even to favor that hypothesis over the other.
I agree with you.
I'm only arguing that discounting the creator hypothesis because its "2x as silly as believing in spontaneous generation is deeply flawed". The reason it is flawed is because the original poster asserted that not do you have to believe in a creator, but you also need to explain where they came from and you are back to spontaneous creation... hence 2x as silly.
Guardian:
Science News
Not necessarily. Just because we don't have valid data (or more precisely, the ability to collect valid data) on the "beginning" of the universe doesn't mean there's not a logical explanation*.
As a thought experiment: What does Pluto smell like? When we meet our first alien ambassador, will his name be Franklin? How many sperm whales, living or dead, have had precisely 22 freckles on their dorsal fins? If your car was a chick, would she have nice tits? Does your observation of a rainbow over North Dakota cause greater than or less than 4 electrons to move across Tennessee to Kentucky? What happened before the dawn of time? Would an ancient Egyptian prefer to use Chrome, Firefox, or Opera? Can you brush a mammoth's tusks without pissing it off? (writing this paragraph was loads of fun, FYI).
Without a useful way to experiment and gather data from a solid observational frame of reference, all of those questions are nonsense. It's silly to even pose them, let alone answer them, until you have both the desire *and* the ability to do so empirically (this could mean mathematically, too, assuming you can prove the laws of physics are still in play, but I digress).
The corollary to the above is we absolutely MUST gather and interpret all of the empirical data we can, without tainting it with supposition, myth, or fantasy. When we do this, our hypotheses are born from an ever expanding frame of reference, from which we are able to ask better questions and get better answers.
*By logical I mean a model that doesn't need to use the phrases "POOF!!", "In the beginning....", or "turtles all the way down".
The concept of entropy is that there is a measurable tendency from order to disorder in isolated systems.
That is very much true. Fortunately, planet Earth is not one of these (i.e., isolated systems), as a single view of the Sun by day tells you - there's been a lot of of energy flowing over us in the past few billions of years, fueling winds, the water cycle, and ultimately the chemical processes that caused us to be here. This localized and temporary decrease of entropy of Earth is naturally paid for by the increase of entropy of the Sun. The sum total of the change of entropy is still positive, though.
Ezekiel 23:20
Because there is no presumption that "all matter" existed before the birth of the universe. Under most theories all matter, energy, and the space and time it occupies all came into existence at the same instant. To speak of things "before" the birth of the universe is to use very shaky language - there *may* have been events causally preceding it, but time as we know it is an attribute of the universe and didn't yet exist. Discussing time before the universe is rather like discussing how tall you were before you were conceived, or how cold something below absolute zero would be.
Under many theories the sum total of the universe is zero (all matter and energy cancel out as all gravitational energy is negative), the trick is not in making the "stuff" of the universe, but to make nothingness come apart in a way that makes interesting patterns. Rather like an immensely complicated variation on virtual particles in quantum mechanics - they exist and have measurable effects, but spontaneously spring from and return to nothing pretty much anywhere there's room for them.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Sorry for the AC post, but i'm in a hurry.
your statement:
>In fact the idea of a devine creator is 2x as silly, since it requires that the devine creator was created and from nothing.
I just want you to understand the theological perspective here because your argument doesn't hold any weight in that perspective. The creator can not have been created from nothing, the creator can not have been created at all. This is why the Christian will understand God to have _ always _ existed (has no beginning) which is a completely different than understanding that a creator had a beginning and came from nothing.
Well, yes, of course. I'm defining what I'm saying. Why do you think this strange?
Because your virtual world can't possibly have the properties I'm supposing are possible.
I am talking about the possibility of something not needing a creator. Your example virtual world can't possibly apply, because it is defined as having been created by you!
This at least seems to touch on the point I was making, but you seem to be missing it.
I think you missed mine as well.
I'm checking this out; thanks for the referral.
As it stands, I only have a brief history of time spent researching the subject.
You say I can't "just exist" and need a creator too?
If this world was somehow created, like your virtual world, then either that creator's world "just exists", or it was created in turn. At some point you either have a world which was not created, or you have a cycle or infinite series of worlds, each creating the next. In the former case, there is no evidence to suggest that we are not in that original, uncreated universe; in the latter, there is no uncreated creator.
If you can postulate a world where it is possible for things to "just exist" without being created, then our universe can be one of those things which "just exists". That is a far simpler answer than claiming that there must be an all-powerful creator who "just exists" and who, in turn, created the universe.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
>Universe could have been created from nothing (aka a quantum vacuum).
If a quantum vacuum is a thing - then it's not nothing.
Depends on what type of evolution you're talking about. For example, micro-evolution (the provable, observable kind) involves things like people in the USA growing fatter over time because of excessive access to food, or the famous different beak sizes of Galapagos finches.
Macro-evolution (the kind that is supposed to make a human from an ape) isn't quite so provable. The forces of nature (presence or lack of a specific food or predator) don't change the DNA of the individual animal at all. They only change the total gene pool of a species by eliminating unfit individuals.
Only reason I bring this up is because the article you linked to relies heavily on mutation and natural selection (i.e. the slower/less aware prey escaped the predator, causing only positive mutations to be carried forward). If you feel like reading some research supporting the other end of it (that mutations aren't all they're cracked up to be), take a look at this article.
Bits of code, random ramblings: jakimfett.com
Unless you somehow could BE EVERYWHERE and KNOW EVERYTHING you can't say "FACT There Is No God"
besides Friedrich Nietzsche most famous for saying "God is Dead" is ... drumroll please
Dead Himself
besides as far as Lack of evidence lets talk about the ORDER in all things.
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
I was joking around with a college buddy about this story.
He asked me, as per usual, "Who created that crazy lady's turtles, then?" The only proper answer, of course, is: one-third Splinter, one-third Radioactive Ooze, one-third April in a yellow jumpsuit, and three- or four- more thirds Ninjitsu Justice, depending on how old you were from 87 - 96. Ain't NOBODY but the Foot gonna argue with that theory.
There is no such thing as micro-evolution. The term is only used by creationists.
Conservatism is a disease which once it infects its host society beings to destroy it from within. Global warming denial, evolution denial, the magical thinking of senators and congresspeople.. the Sarah Palin-ing of America.. it's a disease that either we'll arrest through any means necessary or it will kill the country.
Oh good, another religious/political flame magnet on Slashdot.
Bow before me, for I am root.
I can appreciate your most articulated argument and I too see how religion, faith or the simple philosophical aspects of reality do not directly conflict with math and science. It can almost be mind blowing to even think about. Probably why so many math and science people are still religious loonies.
Math and science didn't turn me away from the Church, the Church and the people however did.
I really don't care if my Linux box is a virtual of a virtual installed from a USB cloned from a DVD original compiled by a 5 year old in Tibet, I'm still not rejoining a cult. Getting out as a kid was hard enough and I can assure you neither religion or science know the real answer but I do know which one is still trying to figure it out.
I am a religious guy who believes in empirical observation. I find it interesting that the account in Genesis is roughly the story of evolutio: a progression from simpler to more complex creatures. If you interpret the word "day" as "period of time" then there is no conflict at all with the Geneis account of creation and conventional scientific views of evolution.
There is no such thing as micro-evolution. The term is only used by creationists.
Wikipedia and Berkeley University disagree with you.
Bits of code, random ramblings: jakimfett.com
That's where Occam's Razor comes in - given two equally viable explanations the simplest is more likely to be correct.
So here's two potential starting points:
An un-created Creator with the will and ability to create and shape a universe exists.
A single tiny, incredibly smooth region of low entropy and high energy exists.
Either one is sufficient to give rise to the universe we see now, for my money a mote of perfectly uniform, energetic space seems far less complicated than even a bacterium, much less a God.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
...what focus group do they keep asking to get these results? I don't know a single damn creationist.
Samples are weighted by gender, age, race, Hispanic ethnicity, education, region, adults in the household, and
phone status (cell phone only/landline only/both, having an unlisted landline number, and being cell phone
mostly). Demographic weighting targets are based on the March 2011 Current Population Survey figures for
the age 18+ non-institutionalized population living in U.S. telephone households.
It's easier to read one children's book than a bunch of hard ones.
MC
/. finds me to be 20% Troll, 80% Funny
We don't even know a good process for defining what a creator might be like. Considering a creator would most logically exist outside of our Universe we have no way of knowing anything at all about one.
This used to be my logical argument for still going to church when I was 9 years old.
Soon I quit church and I adopted the idea...
"If God really is that great he won't mind if I don't kiss his ass everyday but live a true good life and try and help people."
"What God would damn someone for being good even if they do not believe in or know of him and if he would I want no part of him."
You are asking someone to prove a negative. There has been quite a bit of historical discussion about why this is essentially impossible. For instance I cannot prove that pigs do not fly. There is a large amount of evidence that they don't but that is not a proof. So if your level of "religious nut job" requires simply taking a lack of ANY evidence for something as sufficient to not believe in it then I don't see how anyone doesn't fall into that category. Do you believe pigs fly?
I think Lawrence Krauss would not agree with you. With citations.
kurzweil_freak
5th Kyu Genbukan Ninpo/KJJR student
Be the darkness that allows the light to shine.
While you're talking about things being illogical, explain to me how (there is matter) and at the same time (matter can not be created or destroyed). Since everything in science is true and proven. And if you're going to say it just hasn't been proven yet or we just haven't seen it all yet, then the same could just as easily apply to God.
Physics disagrees.
kurzweil_freak
5th Kyu Genbukan Ninpo/KJJR student
Be the darkness that allows the light to shine.
I'm actually pleasantly surprised that a majority of people in this country accept evolutionary theory. While its a little scary knowing that 46% are young earth creationists and thus pretty much have eschewed everything that science has taught us, at least I can say in any political debate that the majority of Americans believe in evolution and science and have found a way to reconcile that with their spiritual beliefs.
This is, at least, a step in the right direction.
Like I tell anyone on either side (theist/atheist, conservative/liberal, star trek/star wars, etc), you aren't doing yourself and your belief justice if you just piss off and insult and alienate yourself from the opposing view. You have to accept first, present later, and slowly over time allow the other side to come around. This is how christianity has spread so far.. by accepting people and assimilating them. Its why Jesus, no matter what else you believe, was at least one thing for certain: a brilliant marketer.
-- Senior Software Engineer, Attorney appearance services, locallawyerapp.com.
They know about these issues. Their business depends on correcting for them. Good pollsters have included cell phones for a long time now, for example. This poll is no exception.
Interviews are conducted with respondents on landline telephones and cellular phones, with interviews
conducted in Spanish for respondents who are primarily Spanish-speaking. Each sample includes a minimum
quota of 400 cell phone respondents and 600 landline respondents, with additional minimum quotas among
landline respondents by region. Landline numbers are chosen at random among listed telephone numbers, cell
phone numbers are selected using random-digit dial methods. Landline respondents are chosen at random
within each household on the basis of which member had the most recent birthday.
Samples are weighted by gender, age, race, Hispanic ethnicity, education, region, adults in the household, and
phone status (cell phone only/landline only/both, having an unlisted landline number, and being cell phone
mostly). Demographic weighting targets are based on the March 2011 Current Population Survey figures for
the age 18+ non-institutionalized population living in U.S. telephone households. All reported margins of
sampling error include the computed design effects for weighting and sample design.
I live in Argentina, and I always see the same pattern.
Analyzing the way people vote, how they define themselves politically and the overall way they behave, it seems that at least recently, all societies are divided in two halves.
Liberals vs conservatives - religious vs non religious - populists vs realists, etc, etc...
It's not only here, it's everywhere. If you see the latest elections in the US, in France, etc... societies are all divided in two parts.
Percentages vary slightly because of independents, pragmatics and people who change their mind according to each situation.
Am I the only one who see this pattern?
Have you proven this or are you just saying your religion is the one true one? And (please try to take the question seriously) how do you know the creation of the universe by a "prime mover" wouldn't take on the form of a "quantum vacuum"?
micro-evolution (the provable, observable kind) involves things like people in the USA growing fatter over time because of excessive access to food
That's not "micro-evolution", that's overeating. That has nothing to do with genetics, which is what evolution is about. In addition, what "micro-evolution"? Once a reproductive barrier is established, the two populations will necessarily diverge, and the differences will continue accumulate. There's no "micro" in it, the scale of eventual differences is just a matter of waiting long enough.
Ezekiel 23:20
And do you belive the Earth is 10k years old? TFA was not about "religion" in general.
Rethinking email
This really evokes in me a sense of pride that the way of life (termed religion in other parts of world) I am leading: Hindu.
Here is the Wikipedia entry about what Hinduism says about evolution: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu_views_on_evolution
"In a survey, 77% of respondents in India agreed that enough scientific evidence exists to support Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, and 88% of God-believing people said they believe in evolution as well "
Although we do have the theory of "Creator" crap, we are free to include current established theories that make sense.
No, Mendel only discovered part of it. The most important bit is recombination, and I have no idea who was the first one to get this.
Rethinking email
Let people believe what they want as long as they aren't forcing it on others.
Therein lies the problem: they are trying to force it on others. Like my child, in biology class. Like my wife, being denied contraception.
This is not about some radical atheist activists who are going out to interrupt church services just to be dicks (although that would be hilarious). This is about not wanting to be forced to live under the rules and regulations of someone's particular brand of batshit crazy superstition. "Moderate" religionists are just as much to blame, for they create the very environment of tolerance for such crazy views that enable the extremists to climb to positions of power in the polity and support their extremist views because "as long as they believe in something" they're comfortable with that.
kurzweil_freak
5th Kyu Genbukan Ninpo/KJJR student
Be the darkness that allows the light to shine.
Atheists *do* consider the question settled. So do "religous nutjobs." They both *believe* with insufficient evidence.
I don't think you understand atheism.
There's both strong and weak atheism - strong asserts that god doesn't exist (which is consistent with your statement), weak only asserts that there's insufficient evidence to believe in a god - that a god is improbably, not impossible. Similar to most people's position on the Loch Ness monster or abominable snow man - they're just unlikely but not impossible.
Almost every atheist I have ever met or heard of is a weak atheist, including people like Dawkins - I've never heard anyone who claims that the concept of a god is impossible.
As such ideas go, some entity (let's label him "god" for convenience, it's a nice short word) is far from the most wacky, and in an odd way it's the easiest of the theories to test (and thus perhaps the most scientific): if it's right, you'll know soon enough.
Actually I'd say it's quite difficult to test, short of God dropping in for tea the only way to know is to.
1. die
2. discover you have an immortal soul ( a question completely independent from the existence or non-existence of God)
3. end up in heaven (or some other afterlife visited by God)
4. assume the being claiming to be God actually is the Creator
- perhaps it didn't really create anything, it was just the first to arrive and made the claim to all who came after. Maybe it even believes it.
- perhaps it's actually Satan, Descarte's evil demon, or the avatar of a deranged scientist who copied your dying consciousness into a computer simulation, and is deceiving you for nefarious reasons.
And of course all of that presumes a personal God - i.e. a god that possesses personhood, something that even most serious theologians find divisive. A non-personal God might be difficult to recognize - for example Taoism replaces the concept of God with the non-personal Tao which is omnipresent and creates not through intent but through it's nature as a subtle organizing force.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
The answer "we don't know yet" is perfectly acceptable and much preferred to "you don't know so it was [$DEITY]!"
kurzweil_freak
5th Kyu Genbukan Ninpo/KJJR student
Be the darkness that allows the light to shine.
Well we do also have a little evidence that the universe exists. The point is you can't say that everything must have a creator, including the universe, and then make an exception for your creator but denying making an exception for the universe.
kurzweil_freak
5th Kyu Genbukan Ninpo/KJJR student
Be the darkness that allows the light to shine.
Genesis also says everything was created from nothing. Even the order of creation in Genesis matches evolution's version of events. The only thing Science hasn't proven about Genesis is that God did it and that he went back to dirt to create man, he didn't grab a couple apes.
Work Safe Porn
I read Pascal's Pensées in my late teens, so the details are fuzzy, but one of the book's recurring themes is man's hopelessness without God. Read in context*, the wager is very much an exortation to the reader (and humankind in general).
*The context itself isn't exact, as the book is actually a collection of aphorisms and short essays written on paper and placed on cards, which could be re-arranged for editing purposes. The work was unfinished at the time of Pascal's death.
They're going to have to put their stuff over there...
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
46% is a minority of the population. The not particularly important minority. Oh, if you think this matters when it comes to elections, think again. When a man casts a vote that could go to either a Republican or a Democrat, only the lizard people win...
(unrelated note, PiCraft sounds neat! I may check it out soon. :)
kurzweil_freak
5th Kyu Genbukan Ninpo/KJJR student
Be the darkness that allows the light to shine.
Just when I start thinking there's hope for America, this crap proves me wrong *sigh* I'm going to go watch a Dawkins documentary to cheer me up.
That's not "micro-evolution", that's overeating. That has nothing to do with genetics, which is what evolution is about.
Overeating results in those with weight related health issues to die off sooner...resulting in a species that has a genetic code which is overall more "resistant" to the effects of overeating...sound familiar?
This page does a decent job of defining micro-evolution.
Bits of code, random ramblings: jakimfett.com
Especially if you believe evolution. What others believe is then of no consequence. What there is, is a lack of respect by everyone. Everyone simply wants to be right to feed their egos and its a shame. Personally? I have absolutely nothing against a person wanting to believe a fairy tale that is more beautiful than reality. Can you blame them? Nope. Everyone wants fantasy, and for those lucky enough to be allowed to believe it more to em. Evolutionists have formed their own religion and they are just as scary as the creationists. Threatening, always derogatory, and the source of so much vitriol its a wonder no one wants to believe in it. Heck, even other evolutionists that I talk to are all assholes. Bar none. I understand the frustration with having to wade through lies probably for more then your life but come on. Is it really that important?
If I'm wrong, I loose nothing. If I'm right, you lose everything.
It is not inconceivable that the so-call god rewards conviction and the full exercise of the intellect that he bestowed as the ultimate virtue? The way I see it, religion, Abrahamic religions in particular, is precisely the kind of quick-and-easy way for a deity or deities use to rule out dumb and uninquisitive people . Promise people reward in the unforeseeable future and see how many people open their wallets. Not much different from your run-of-the-mill direct-marketing scheme. Probably what I would use if I were an omnipotent god. People who believes they are right without evident lost the ability to investigate whether it is so.
The only possible interpretation of any research whatever in the 'social sciences' is: some do, some don't
I'd pretty much characterize that not just as a failure of democracy , but of a failed democracy outright.
In the past, when the religious conservatives took over a society and crashed it, people were able to survive and civilization elsewhere went forward.
This time these suicide bombers mean to take us all with them. It's written in their holy book , this is the End Times and the Rapture is nigh, and they're not the least bit afraid to drive all of civilization straight off that cliff.
Democracy has failed and I authorize the President, the heads of the armed forces and the national security apparatus to do whatever it takes it do what needs to be done. If it means suspending the Constitution, then do it. If it means conducting a covert war on conservatives, taking out their "thought leaders", channels of communication and funding sources, then do it. If it means releasing a virus that wipes out denier states and their populations then do it. Democracy has failed and now it's not about rights and freedoms, it's about survival and who is going to survive and that is sure as shit not going to be conservatives no matter what else happens.
Do it Mr. President. Do it.
Government and Religion are both the same barbaric mind control products with different labels.
Neither product would exist if there was no demand for them.
What needs or wants are these products satisfying?
Your citations assume that we don't know what intelligent design is, why it's bullshit, or how it was found to be nothing more than creationism in Dover vs. Kitzmiller. We're very familiar with intelligent design and its origins. It's still bullshit and there's still no evidence for it.
(unrelated note, PiCraft sounds neat! I may check it out soon. :)
Eh, that bit was just responding to exactly what I quoted, where he stated there was no evidence. Evidence exists, the decision of whether or not it's valid remains up to you. (and a court decision on something can have exactly squat to do with reality, take the case of kim.com). I wasn't meaning that ID is the only "evidence" out there, I could just have easily pulled from druidic traditions or some research about how evolution is statistically impossible.
And as for PiCraft...good to hear you're planning on taking a look. I'm the owner/admin/sysadmin, my ign is the same as my username here (jakimfett). (and I normally tell people to keep political and religious opinions out of ingame chat, so no worries that you're going to get proselytized)
Bits of code, random ramblings: jakimfett.com
One doesn't have to conclude that it is the only mechanism - one simply has to conclude that it's a *sufficient* mechanism to get from hot lifeless rock to thriving planet wide ecosystem. At that point it falls upon any other explanation to explain why it should be taken seriously and provide evidence for its existence. So far additional refinements of the mechanisms of natural selection have been proposed and broadly accepted (namely genetics and more recently epigenetics), but no independent theory has arisen with sufficient evidence to be taken seriously.
Perhaps there is a god that meddles in the development of species or even creates them wholesale. And perhaps there are also invisible fairies that gets their thrills pulling massive objects together. But gravity does a sufficient job of explaining the behavior of falling objects, so if I want anyone to take my invisible fairy hypothesis seriously I'm going to need some pretty compelling evidence to back me up. So far no one has offered such evidence with regards to alternatives to evolution.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
"Sooner or later on your philosophical and metaphysical travels, you will find, as I did, that you have to make a leap of blind faith"
That's an asserted conclusion. YOU had to do that. I'm not you, and there are others not you.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
In any case, it doesn't matter if you're a theist or atheist; at some point you have to believe in the absurd notion that everything came from an uncreated something.
Not true. An atheist can say, "I don't know." Which is the truth.
Some privacy policy Slashdot.
I don't think so. I think when I find a pocket watch on the ground, it is less complex for me to believe that it was intelligently designed than to believe that it came about through a mathematical (not necessarily random) process.
Perhaps you should read The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design
Some privacy policy Slashdot.
I had a preacher try to scare me into church on Wednesday with just this argument. "But what if you're wrong?!?"...
The agnostic point of view means that it's OK to say you don't know.
The atheistic point of view means you know there isn't a God.
I think most scientifically-minded atheists would say that there is no way to prove ("know") there isn't a God (not even to prove that the traditional, bearded, old-wise-male in the sky (if you're Christian) does not exist). I don't, and I still consider myself an atheist. It's just extremely unlikely that he exist, and it's not logically consistent that a traditional Christian God can have all the attributes christians claim. From another perspective, the human incentive to believe in higher powers is well understood. From there it's easy to draw the conclusion that actual existence of deities does not follow from human belief in deities. Most religions contradict other religions, thus most of them must be wrong. Saying with certainty that there is no higher power whatsoever is, however, pretty much attributing omniscience to yourself.
Are you a grammar Nazi? I'm trying to improve my English; please correct my errors!
This response is not directed at you personally, but is intended as a general commentary to people that like to play with this argument. There's a logical flaw that always seems to get missed with your final statement.
It's slipped snugly between "If I'm wrong" and "I lose nothing". See it? Right there? No, it's not the comma! Geez! It's the shifty little sneak assumption that when the "maybe" coin lands OMG! side up, your god is the correct god. Hate to tell ya, but even after you've been granted the get-out-of-logic-free card that permits discussion of a supreme being, he's just as likely to be a bunch of Egyptian or Norse or Greek or Hindu deities, or any of the various mono-theistic gods. If it isn't your god, you are SO boned, brah.
If you distill it down, your best "hedge" bet is actually to live a good, happy life, doing good work, accomplishing what you can, raising productive members of society should you activate your baby-making bits, and generally striving to learn, grow, and succeed, and to help those close to you do the same. Take care of your responsibilities and enjoy your existence. But wait a second here... I magically avoided any sort of religious affiliation! Amazing!
If you can get to the point where you do those all of those things, not because your god wants you to, or will smack you silly if you don't, but because you've learned that it actually makes you happy, congratulations! You've leveled up and can choose a new class: "Atheist Good Person", or you can dual class as a "Spiritual Good Person / Non Judgemental Good Person". You can now proceed with being totally happy, with absolutely no fear of death or a stint in hell at the end of the road (also, "see hidden" has received a permanent +4 bonus). Please proceed to your nearest life event with your head held high.
If having spirituality and the love of a higher being helps you, have at it, but chill the hell out with the preaching and the ramming-it into-rules-for-everybody-else bit. Let people do the things that make them happy, so long as they don't hurt anybody, and let the cards fall where they will. Even if your god exists, and he's not 12 greek warlords, and he thinks you're a pretty sweet dude, and your interpretation of his instructions for living a good life is the same as yours, and the bouncer lets you into the afterlife club, it's still not *your* job to point fingers, Mr. Judgey pants.
I, obviously, don't buy into the whole "Oh, DUDE! God's gonna be SO pissed when he finds out I dented his Altima!" thing, but even if I did, I'm pretty sure that living a good life because it makes me happy, by my own standard of happiness, is preferable to living a prescribed but very confusing and often conflicting "good life" because I hope god has my allowance waiting.
The administrative meetings must be a b1tch; oh the egos
Table-ized A.I.
Pascal's wager is bullshit. What if you happen to believe in the wrong god, and the true god happens to be a different vindictive psychopath than the one you believe in?
FTFY
And to carry that further, what if the real God hates people that believe stuff without evidence and rewards rational thinkers with eternal paradise?
Some privacy policy Slashdot.
By the way I write this from the US, so the subject line is not
a slur against Americans. The statistical distribution of IQ
means that 50% of people anywhere have an IQ of 100 or less.
Stupid people like simple explanations even when a simple
explanation is not true. It's more comfortable for them. Those who
use propaganda to their advantage are very much aware of this.
However, such bullshit as creationism can be useful as a litmus test. If you know
someone who believes in creationist doctrine, you can be reasonably
sure that person is not the sort of person who engages in serious critical
thought, and you can then deal with them on that basis. In other words,
don't trust them with anything important. Like high political office, for example.
There is no evidence to support the idea of a divine creator.
Your opinion suggests that you haven't discovered Google (Or at least didn't use it before posting this...)
Um, there is no evidence of intelligent design. There is evidence of billions of years of random mutations and natural selection. You should be able to google that, if not, delete all your cookies and try again.
Some privacy policy Slashdot.
and where did the quantum soup come from?
Satan?
Some privacy policy Slashdot.
That's not the issue. Evolution is the best theory/model we have so far. Until it has real competition, it is the "defending champion".
And it's the only one that has any real evidence behind it so far. If human babies were born with "Made in Heaven, Copyright 6000 B.C., God" on their tushies, then creationism would get some points.
Perhaps, but that's speculation and should be labelled as such.
Table-ized A.I.
I think Pascal's wager takes waaaay too much as a given up front to be taken seriously.
;), but.... Man! Just..... I don't even know why I hang out with you anymore.
a) Infinite gain (wtf does that even MEAN?)
b) 50/50 chances? Uh, based on.... err? How fancy my pants are? Just cuz it's either/or doesn't mean it's 50/50, sir.
c) I cannot defend either proposition? Well.... that sort of means I can't have an opinion on the morality of either stance, or at least a stated opinion, right? So... you are assuming ends are worth the means, no matter what? Sketchy, man, sketchy.
e) I must wager? No I mustn't, douchebag, and fuck you for saying I do. I can just as easily say "Mr. Pascal, I'm just here to collect on your beer tab. Can you try to get it to me on time next month?"
e) Ok so I finally wrapped my head around "infinite gain" sort of... something to do with a giant sky party? Whatever. I still don't get this "lose nothing" by not believing in god bit. I think you skipped a couple things, Blaise. On the Pro-God side, I "lose" by having to do what people tell me god wants me to do, often when my gut doesn't agree that it's the right thing to do. On No-God side, I "gain" by not being restricted or worried that I'm playing the good person game wrong and gonna burn for it. I think those are pretty important, good buddy.
f) "Wager, then, without hesitation that He is." WTF? DUDE! I thought God was a CHICK this whole time. I can see following a bunch of stupid rules and playing your dumbass game if it's gonna get me a chance with the ladies (hey ladies!
It's an ok thought exercise, but it would have served much better if presented in a gambling sense, as in "if you stand to gain infinity dollars, it's always worth buying a lottery ticket". Of course, since "infinity" is inherently non-quantifiable, we then have to determine at which point the probabilities involved take a lottery ticket from "sucker bet" to "good idea".
A single photon with a frequency of 10^98Hz has enough energy to create all the matter in the universe.
Photons are popping in and out of the quantum soup all the time.
Let there be light, eh?
Who cares about the margin of error, exact number of years, agnostic versus atheist, church versus state separation or any of the other hair splitting. We're talking that somewhere round 40% of Americans completely discount all fact and science (the proven stuff, no theories involved) and believe that God automagically created humans as they are now. Holy craps Batman! This is 40% of a population that controls the world's only superpower. Give me a minute while I breath into a paper bag. It's one thing for nutcases in Iran to run around screaming Allah is great. It's a totally different case when a substantial portion of the US voting population effectively believes the same thing. I gotta go back to my paper bag......
I just wonder what is meant by "they vote and are ruining things for the rest of us."
My child will be well-schooled on the Theory of Evolution no matter what the government decides to teach him, and he will know that ID is bullshit. And, I will make sure he understands evolution, unlike, I would estimate, 75% of the people who say they "believe" in evolution.
Nothing is being "ruined" until Christians are allowed to start killing heretics, Taliban-style. I don't think we're there yet.
You all piss on creationists, yet you are completely comfortable eating your genetically engineered food and receiving your genetically engineered skin, organs, and medications. I don't understand you people. You are the only species on the planet with language. You have no means to survive in your natural state, unlike every other species that evolved. And yet you think it's just an accident we jumped ahead millions of years beyond everything else crawling around, including what you think are our cousins.
Really? You gonna go there weak hairless ape? Your bone mass is half that of your nearest relative. You need to make clothing or else you die. What species other than homo sapiens evolved that way? Please tell me. I'd really like to know how our traits evolved when the thing in the Zoo, who is our cousin, has none of them- because it gets you killed in 12 hours.
You enlightened morons can't seem to put two and two together. We don't belong here. We never have.
Well when you redefine nothing, it all works out, doesn't it. Everything came from nothing because nothing is something doesn't get you anywhere. In fact it reiterates my point that you must believe the absurd notion that there is an uncreated something to which everything came from.
Either life always was, or life came from nonlife.
This thread is too much fun. The funny thing about you neoatheists is that you're just as emotional as Pentecostals. Here let me break it down for you:
Something cannot be created from nothing (and I'm talking about real nothing (ex nihilo), not Krauss's "nothing" (the quantum soup))
Stuff exists
Therefore something is uncreated.
If you want to argue that the quantum soup always has existed, that's fine. If you want to argue that God has always existed, that's fine. But it is impossible to come to a conclusion where "something" is uncreated. That's why you hear about multiverse theories, big crunch/big bang cycles, etc... Because no rational person thinks that there was nothing ex nihilo and then there was something. There's nothing fantastical about the above.
I'm a former YEC (Young Earth Creationist). The fact that I was a YEC was not really my fault -- I was taught that from the time I was a child and all through adolescence. I was taught that there is virtually no compelling evidence for evolution and that scientists were obviously being guided by the hand of Satan. I was always interested in science and technology so my parents actually sent me to "Christian Science Camps" where I was taught about creation and all of the 'evidence' for it (different post for a different day). In my small town high school I can clearly recall three students walking out of our 10th grade biology class as soon as the teacher mentioned the word evolution.
I'm actually in my mid-30's now, so how did I find my way to truth?
Well, it starts with doubt. The doubt that I saw was honestly the Iraq war. I saw people travel down to Florida to protest Terry Schiavo having her life support pulled and those same people standing and waving flags and cheering when we invaded Iraq without just cause as required by Christianity. These were people that I had honestly respected and that placed enough doubt in my mind that I began to question everything I had ever been told about our faith. Then my brother-in-law gave me a National Geographic issue titled "Was Darwin Wrong?". I read the article and was floored. Everything I had ever been told was wrong. BTW, that issue continues to sit on the nightstand by my bed, and he gave that to me about 4 years ago.
I started reading -- seriously reading. I've read at least 15 books on evolution, including all of Richard Dawkins' books and several others. I say that now the evidence for evolution is overwhelming -- even staggering -- and if you read about the evidence with an open mind you would pretty much need to be a blithering idiot to continue to deny the fact of evolution.
I think the problem in our country boils down to basically the following: We have lots of people that go to church each and every Sunday and are taught about Adam and Eve, creation, etc. People get one, maybe two semesters of high school biology and that's it...and that's probably taught by a YEC if living in the Bible Belt! So basically it's no wonder people believe in creationism over evolution -- you're (maybe) taught evolution once in high school and get you creationism the rest of your life.
I guess what I'm saying is don't judge these people too harshly, you simply turn them off. They aren't stupid -- just ignorant as I was. Most YEC's are certainly close-minded and unwilling to listen, but occasionally you will find one that will actually remove their fingers from their ears and listen to what learned people have to say.
It's a tough row to hoe. My mother would probably disown me if she knew what I were writing right now (yeah, that's why I'm posting as AC). There are lots of societal pressures here. It's really easy to be an open rationalist if your parents and all your friends are rationalists...it's a little more difficult when every aspect of your life including family, friends. I mean, my mother honestly believes people that think like me are going to Hell, and I don't want her to believe that about me as she'd probably have a stroke.
The trouble is, you can do that for some of the big questions in science too.
There was no time before the big bang. How did the big bang actually start if there was no time?
I'm not sure what you're arguing. It sounds like you're agreeing with me. Something (universe, God, computer, whatever) is uncreated.
Scientist also hate to be questioned. Read some of the ClimateGate mails.....
If you've got something solid and real in your hands then it truly does exist, so in a lot of cases they are right.
The problem here is we are being dragged into a stupid argument by people on the fringes of religeon that won their little fight over non-educated versus educated clergy and then to gain extra political power went after another target. The science vs religeon argument makes as little sense about arguing about plumbing versus carpentry. Both apply for different situations. Darwin, Dawkins etc are the soft target even though most of the opposition to evolution can be disproved by what Mendel did, but since he he excelled in both spheres the loonies leave him alone.
I am talking about the possibility of something not needing a creator.
Well K. S. Kyosuke wasn't, and I wasn't in my response to him. That's why your arguments make no sense to me: they're nothing to do with the conversation we were having.
Igor Presnyakov stole my hat
Given that some of the current best cosmological estimates put the total energy content of the universe at zero, a single red photon would have the same capacity. I see, though, where you're going with this (though underestimating by about 5 orders of magnitude from a back-of-the-envelope critical density * volume of observable universe calculation).
If you can postulate a world where it is possible for things to "just exist" without being created, then our universe can be one of those things which "just exists". That is a far simpler answer than claiming that there must be an all-powerful creator who "just exists" and who, in turn, created the universe.
My virtual beings in my virtual world could make exactly the same argument. Since I know they would be factually wrong, I have to conclude that the argument is bad (even should it happened to be correct in this case).
I'm not sure that the argument that things therefore can not "just exist" is any better though.
Igor Presnyakov stole my hat
I agree, it's fun as a thought exercise.
:). Second, the best part of atheism is you no longer have to be emotional about things like god or the afterlife or all the rest of it. It's pretty freeing, actually.
I think it's amusing that you say I'm neoatheist and emotional. First, I don't know what "neoatheism" means; atheism is just the absence of belief in the supernatural; it's sort of hard to redefine a new generation of atheism. I suppose you could say us "neoatheists" are pushing a new wave of atheism on the world, but I can promise you we've always been here. Maybe many of us are more vocal about our atheism these days, with the advent of easier ways to communicate our lines of thought, with some of us rising to proselytizing levels, but most of us just like to chat about our thinking and, yes, our beliefs (the snark is fun, but optional
To your point on quantum soup, ex nihilo, and "always existed": we're not equipped to define the "before". That's all. Can you teach an infant to roll out an enterprise level network solution? Of course not; the infant has the rather large task of development and learning to accomplish first. My position on the whole thing is that it's all nonsense until we get a chance to see, and actually understand, what the man behind the curtain is up to, so to speak.
In other words, by definition, reality before "stuff" simply plays by rules we are not privy to. Maybe we will be, someday, and maybe not, but until then, we're all participating in an astrophysical circle-jerk. Defining the pre-universe is really a lot like applying logic to a belief in the supernatural; without solid empirical data, one can claim anything at all, but it's all nonsense, even when packaged up all sexy-like.
Sure, we can observe and interpret data and create models and theorize and experiment, but the fact remains, we're akin children playing with daddy's tools when it comes to universal theory. If "daddy" is god, so be it, but he's a damn deadbeat if you ask me.
It didn't live to the age of five million so is not currently hanging around the subway waiting to be found.
Just move on and understand that science and religeon deal with different things. Science has no answer as to whether evolution is the way God is continuing creation or not and doesn't care. Whether you believe your God built everything and then abandoned it all or is still doing things is not a question for science but for your own faith.
I just realized I contradicted myself, with my last comment. I simply do not KNOW what's pulling the strings, or even if the strings can just pull themselves along all happy like, or even what the hell the "strings" are! I am certainly, CERTAINLY not equipped to infallibly understand the cosmos and the fact of creation, and I simply do not really care. It's all amazing, and it's all a happy, badass, and interesting life.
Anything is possible. The truth is that no one can be certain about our existence, and that does not set well with most people. Many people throughout history have lived on the edge of death with little hope of most things we now take for granted. Religion has offered hope and spurred trust which brought fellowship and collective progress. It reduced the infinite number of possibilities to a common vision. If it is completely wrong, then only the dead know. So far, I've heard no complaints from them.
Of course, religion has brought with it a lot of ugly. However, power tends to get abused, no matter the source. You take the good with the bad. One thing is undeniable, religion has staying power. Hate it or love it, but it is not going away.
Given the enormity of reality, it might be possible that no one could comprehend it if given the opportunity, and any recognizable abstraction might be too limited to accurately represent its truth.
Here is one possibility -- you are a simulation running in some future version of what we now call a computer. Long ago, when you died, you were frozen. Later, your brain was non-invasively scanned (read CIty of Bits) and mapped into a system that simulated all your neural activity. Now, you are running in a system that models all your sensory inputs like a virtual holodeck. Since you are no more than the simulation (a Matrix or TRON without the real humans), you cannot be aware of anything outside the simulation. Therefore, it would be as real as you are. Here's the kick -- they thawed your body out and reanimated it to run your simulation, making you the SysOp. Or another way of saying it - you are your god. Be sure to say your prayers, because you might answer them.
Unlikely? Yes. Impossible? Hardly.
The chicken and the egg question is ridiculously easy to answer. The proto-chicken laid the egg that hatched into the first chicken - that is, a bird arbitrarily close to being a chicken that for whatever reason wasn't actually a chicken.
Don't worry. You'll have your generation devoid of conscience soon enough.
If the universe wasn't ordered, we wouldn't be here trying to figure out what created it.
You can try to explain it, but an ordered universe is still evidence for a creator. This refutes your claim that there is no evidence for a creator.
After all, nothing creating something has not ever been observed; we have no evidence to think the universe pops itself into existence.
There have been many historical claims that have been abandon in the light of science, like geocentism or the idea that there should be an equal amount of land north and south of the equator. This one should be too.
For any mathematical equation, there are an infinite number of wrong solutions. For any given crime, there are billions of people on the planet who are not guilty.
By the metric you suggest, we should give up on solving math problems or crimes, because the wrong to right solution ratio is extremely lopsided.
We shall ignore the fact that not all historical claims are created equal; your metric would toss out the entirety of human history because no historian is completely reliable, and there are some that have been debunked!
The fact is that 99% of Americans (and 99.9% of the world) should be removed from the gene pool. They (aka, most of you) simply do not have what it takes to survive in this harsh, unforgiving universe. Those who believe in supernatural x y or z are dead ends and a waste of my ATP. Let those of us who get it take the remnants of this dying world and build the foundations for the next. Sol c will be uninhaitable in 500e6 years. Please. I'm begging you. Just let us, so we can get over this hump. That's all I ask. Once we find other homes in the galaxy you can start dreaming of obviously nonexistent omnipotents again. But we can't afford to just yet.
who cares what people believe in.. evolution is incomplete.. has many holes, or simply guesses to fill int he blanks.. pretty much like religion.. id say the truth is probably a bit of both, so many years past by when nobody was around to say NOBODY came down to earth and messed with our dna.
Yes, but isn't this potentially just a matter of these individuals choosing not to use the agnostic label for themselves?
I find that most people I talk to are confused about the differences between agnostic and atheist. Many get the terms completely reversed or believe they "mean the same thing". At what point do you simply accept that more people get the basic idea of "atheist" (as one who chooses not to practice or participate in any of the organized religions) than agnostic, so you use the label more readily understood?
I once talked to a self-proclaimed agnostic with what I thought was an interesting take. He said being agnostic was about "simply knowing that it's impossible to know" any specifics about a god/creator. So essentially, he was agnostic because he felt there was no compelling reason to accept any one religion as more likely "correct" as another. To him, atheist didn't fit his views as neatly, since atheists tend to take a more pessimistic view about a creator or god. Perhaps not an absolute "There is no god!" statement, but a "I won't believe one exists unless new evidence comes to light and compels me to do so." attitude.
People tend to have only their self-interest or those they care about enough to spend money on or even die for. Otherwise, ultimately, you are seen as just a resource to be exploited and discarded once you are no longer useful to them.
I don't want to be that way so I try to be helpful and non-confrontational to others. This is mostly viewed as being an idiotic doormat or a clueless sheep. It is either that or I play this 'dog eat dog' game to the best of my abilities which I consciously struggle to refuse to due so becase, in the end, such conduct is eventually pointless and CAN lead to a violent death at the hands of others.
In the end, you can live your life like you have to answer to nobody...or Somebody like I do....
The rest is up to you....
CAPTCHA: safely [How apt!]
Just sterilize them already. What are we waiting for? Are we gonna let these stupid fucksticks hold us back? My, and our collective, genome deserves better.
Fuck anyone who refuses to accept objective reality. It's time we eradicate these slow-as-molasses shit-for-brains.
Lol, what? I'm sorry, did you just say 'god' in a serious context? Are you a fucking genetic defect? Why yes, you are, step into my booth for a sec so I can fix your little 'problem' (your unfortunate ability to reproduce).
The reason for equating neoatheism with emotionalistic responses is this:
1.) I state that everyone believe an uncreated something must exist, but not everyone agrees what that uncreated something is (universe, quantum soup (what Krauss calls "nothing"), God, whatever).
2.) I conclude that therefore using the argument, "Theists are stupid because who created God" is a silly argument since both the theist and atheist must agree that there exists something uncreated. They disagree only on what that is. There really isn't a dispute here.
3.) I get dozens of response arguing about the existence or non existence of God.
See, I wasn't trying to even prove God, but rather that the argument used against the theist was invalid since the theist and the atheist believe the same thing. Namely, something has always existed. But just as a nominal Catholic or your average Pentecostal will get super emotional when they halfway kinda sorta not really suspect someone might be dissing their God, the neoatheist response similarly. It's like an over emotional religious atheist.
This seems to be the nature of neoatheists. Take this video for example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Np0nrxbGQik I'm annoyed at the editing a bit (it's a bit over the top), but it demonstrates my point. My brother and I were discussing this the other day. I'd love to listen to a challenging, thought provoking atheist pod cast that is on the level of a Dr. Craig, but I can't seem to find one. Atheist appear to use emotion rather than logic to illustrate their point. I'd be happy if someone could prove me wrong and provide me a podcast that uses logic rather than emotion to argue an atheistic position.
Ah, but what about the entropy? That's always increasing, where's all that coming from?
Who ordered that?
Is the world really all that RATIONAL? what with people eating peoples faces in the news and war in afghanistan? I mean, COME ON!
Are on the left half of the bell curve.
When I can love a woman and be rewarded with tiny new humans that grow... something beyond what we as humans can create.
Beyond what we can create? I'm glad that god hands them out as rewards then, otherwise the human species would have died out.
Who ordered that?
In any case, it doesn't matter if you're a theist or atheist; at some point you have to believe in the absurd notion that everything came from an uncreated something.
Wrong. You don't have to believe that. You can simply acknowledge that there are some things we might never know, and leave it at that. That's honest. That's the simple truth. It's a gap in our knowledge now and possibly forever.
Just because there is a gap doesn't mean get to fill that gap with whatever fairy tale makes you feel good.
It's prime-movers all the way up!
Who ordered that?
If so, that "quantum vacuum" would be part of the universe. If you can name or describe something, then by definition it must be part of the universe.
I find it interesting that atheists cannot explain how matter came into existence or the universe, yet they always ask Christians about the origin of God. The problem is quite simple actually. You either believe in the eternal existence of matter/energy or you believe in the eternal existence of some intelligent being(s). Both evolution and Christianity require faith.
False.
Agnostic means that you don't believe it's possible to know. Atheist means you hold no belief.
No he is saying the Tao that can be named is not the real and eternal Tao. If you can name the infinite it is by definition no longer infinite.
Taoism is a relgion founded on binary, trigrams, cellular automata, fractals, paradox, super position, and nothingness. From nothing came the one, from the one came the two, from the two came the three, from the three came the thousand myriad things. From nothing came -god- from -god- came the binary nature of the universe, valence/nucleus, space/matter, light/dark & ying/yang etc. The three are binary trigrams that function as mathematical seeds for rules based systems, and from rules and initial conditions everything can be created. *see "A New Kind of Science" by Wolfram; not new by any means but pretty cool.
While you're talking about things being illogical, explain to me how (there is matter) and at the same time (matter can not be created or destroyed).
People are still exploring the inbalance between matter and anti-matter. You might want to read about CP-Violation.
Who ordered that?
By new religion. If it would take most of the mass of the universe being devoted to storage to quantum teleport a human around I think the universe is the computer that allows god to me omni-present. Boom! Stick that in your pipe and smoke it non f34norians!
That's assuming we really need more.
A leap of blind faith? Blind faith in what?
An alternative to what? I get the feeling you're suggesting I'm "missing" something, but I'm not sure what.
The One was and was-not, combined, and desired to separate the was-not from the was. So it generated a diploid sac which contained, like an eggshell, a pair of twins, each an androgyny, spinning in opposite directions (the Yin and Yang of Taoism, with the One as the Tao). The plan of the One was that both twins would emerge into being (was-ness) simultaneously; however, motivated by a desire to be (which the One implanted in both twins), the counter-clockwise twin broke through the sac and separated prematurely; i.e. before full term. This was the dark or Yin twin. Therefore it was defective. At full term the wiser twin emerged. Each twin formed a unitary entelechy, a single living organism made of psyche and soma, still rotating in opposite directions to each other. The full term twin, called Form I by Parmenides, advanced correctly through its growth stages, but the prematurely born twin, called Form II, languished.
The next step in the One's plan was that the Two would become the Many, through their dialetic interaction. From them as hyperuniverses they projected a hologram-like interface, which is the pluriform universe we creatures inhabit. The two sources were to intermingle equally in maintaining our universe, but Form II continued to languish toward illness, madness and disorder. These aspects she projected into our universe.
It was the One's purpose for our hologramatic universe to serve as a teaching instrument by which a variety of new lives advanced until ultimately they would be isomorphic with the One. However, the decaying condition of hyperuniverse II introduced malfactors which damaged our hologramatic universe. This is the origin of entropy, undeserved suffering, chaos and death, as well as the Empire, the Black Iron Prison; in essence, the aborting of the proper health and growth of the life forms within the hologramatic universe. Also, the teaching function was grossly impaired, since only the signal from the hyperuniverse I was information-rich; that from II had become noise.
The psyche of hyperuniverse I sent a micro-form of itself into hyperuniverse II to attempt to heal it. The micro-form was apparent in our hologramatic universe as Jesus Christ. However, hyperuniverse II, being deranged, at once tormented, humiliated, rejected and finally killed the micro-form of the healing psyche of her healthy twin. After that, hyperuniverse II continued to decay into blind, mechanical, purposeless causal processes. It then became the task of Christ (more properly the Holy Spirit) to either rescue the life forms in the hologramatic universe, or abolish all influences on it emanating from II. Approaching its task with caution, it prepared to kill the deranged twin, since she cannot be healed; i.e. she will not allow herself to be healed because she does not not understand that she is sick. This illness and madness pervades us and makes us idiots living in private, unreal worlds. The original plan of the One can only be realized now by the division of hyperuniverse I into two healthy hyperuniverses, which will transform the hologramatic universe into the successfull teaching machine it was designed to be. We will experience this as the "Kingdom of God."
Within time, hyperuniverse II remains alive: "The Empire never ended." But in eternity, where the hyperuniverses exist, she has been killed—of necessity—by the healthy twin of hyperuniverse I, who is our champion. The One grieves for this death, since the One loved both twins; therefore the information of the Mind consists of a tragic tale of the death of a woman, the undertones of which generate anguish into all the creatures of the hologrammatic universe without their knowing why. This grief will depart when the healthy twin undergoes mitosis and the "Kingdom of God" arrives. The machinery for this transformation—the procession within time from the Age of Iron to the Age of Gold—is at work now; in eternity it is already accomplished.
Photons are popping in and out of the quantum soup all the time.
Unfortunately, neither the quantum soup nor time existed prior to the Big Bang, so....
Not trying to claim a divine creator here, just saying that this logic seems pretty circular. The best we can do with current knowledge is say we don't know what caused the Big Bang, but we wouldn't be around to wonder had it not happened, so we shouldn't read much into that lack of knowledge.
After all, nothing creating something has not ever been observed; we have no evidence to think the universe pops itself into existence.
Yes it has; Yes we do
Who ordered that?
If Gallup's pollsters call only land lines and no cell phones, then they're going to reach an older and poorer sample than they should. I suspect a high fraction of college grads under 40 don't even own land line phones any more. I don't.
Biasing the sample downward in this way could help to explain the poll's rather bizarre results.
Nobody that isn't a pedantic douchebag calls themselves American unless they are from the USA. The United States of America is the only country in either the North American or South American continents with America in the actual name of the country. A Chilean telling someone he's an American isn't really being very honest when the only useful information he's conveying is that he's from somewhere in the western hemisphere.
Your analogy doesn't really fit anyway because whether an Englishman calls himself English, British, or European there's no reason for confusion since most people aren't idiots and they can tell the difference between the nation, kingdom and continent because they have completely different names.
The only reason this keeps coming up is some people are too stupid to put the answer in the context of the question. If you ask me what my nationality is and I say American and you take that to mean "from somewhere in the western hemisphere" then you're a fucking idiot because there are no other countries named America. If I ask you your nationality and you say American but you're a citizen of Peru then you're still a fucking idiot because I asked what country you're from.
Tree falls in a forest. No one sees it happen. Did it make a sound when it hit the ground? Of course it did.
"There is no evidence for the existence of god, point. There doesn't have to be an evidence for non-existence of something to rationally assume it doesn't exist. See Russel's teapot." - by alendit (1454311) on Friday June 01, @07:00PM (#40188043)
Just because you didn't see it fall or hear the tree I noted above crashing to the ground (to get your "evidence") didn't mean it didn't make a sound during its fall to the dirt.
* Natural laws still hold true even IF/WHEN no one sees or hears it happening - the landing would have made a sound, due to rationality & assumptions of it.... even if/when nobody witnesses it happening. No questions asked.
APK
P.S.=> So, your referring to "Russel's teapot"? It's about as "clever" as Schroedinger's cat & superpositional wave states - mere games, no real proof... apk
I think when I find a pocket watch on the ground, it is less complex for me to believe that it was intelligently designed than to believe that it came about through a mathematical (not necessarily random) process
Well, maybe, but a watchmaker implies a mother and a father. Watchmakers don't just spring into existence. So proposing that some watchmaker was required then begs the question, "Who made the watchmaker?"
This is yet another example of how religion does nothing to answer any of the big questions. It's just mental masturbation that ultimately serves to enrich and empower the con artists running the churches, an intellectual shell game.
2) Agreed. It is a silly argument. Attempting to argue logically for the existence of god in the first place is the same kind of silly, and, of course, silly arguments degenerate into silly discussions. Removed of snark and used correctly, the question "Who created God?" is not intended to "prove" anything, but rather to highlight how illogical assigning all of existence to an act by a single supreme being is (see more below). There is *absolutely* a dispute here. I can't state whether reality has always existed with certainty, and even if I could, the reality prior to our observable universe is, by definition, unfathomable to us. It could be God, or it could be turtles, but more likely (WAY more likely) it's something that functions an order of magnitude outside our perception, and our notions of time, space, beginnings, and ends simply fall short of understanding it. Sure, I guess one could define something we don't understand as "supernatural" the same way a caveman would view a cell phone, but it *proves* precisely nothing, just as the caveman can't *prove* god is a cell tower. More importantly, I don't care whether something has always been there or not, other than as an occasional way to say "If God created this existence, someone must have created God, ad nauseum. If the universe has always existed, then God had nothing to do with it. If the universe snapped itself into existence from a zero-sum state of un-reality, it's a neutral point, neither supporting nor refuting either position." Period. Any other comparisons are incidental and irrelevant to the "Are you there, God?" discussion, as are suppositions on the overall nature of the the universe.
3) Of course you did. You inserted yourself into a discussion about which is sillier: god's existence or POOF.... Universe! The logic train had already left the station, and the ensuing shit storm was your reward for your diligence. It should be obvious that we simply don't know the answers yet, and to an atheist, it's pointless to go further than that (unless there's a bone to pick).
In any case, I'm really not very *emotional* about it at all. I really don't care who's an atheist and who's not, so long as the conflict stays purely theoretical. I'm just having fun with the discussion and trying to dispute your claim that atheists and theists find themselves on on equal ground when discussing the origins of the universe on a nebulous "But, both think something has always existed!". It's really rather simple, from a logical standpoint. If something has always existed and is undergoing naturally occurring phenomena, then it hasn't really changed it's nature. This is a difficult concept to understand (indeed, I don't believe it's possible for us to fully understand it with what we know right now), but at least we have the "out" of missing or unattainable data. On the other hand, by saying a supreme being changed the nature of something that already existed by His force of will alone, we now have to accept that such a being (and possibly his predecessor, and so on) could exist, in addition to the same difficulties in accepting the former situation. Definitely, a much more complex proposition than "they're both uncreated somethings!"
Not that it matters, but your logic is flawed anyway. The definition of a divine creator is an entity that just is and was never created. Since such a creator would have created even time itself, it is nonsensical to ask who created the creator since that would imply that time existed before creation.
This gem, especially, is a good on
"There is no evidence for the existence of god, point." - by alendit (1454311) on Friday June 01, @07:00PM (#40188043)
QUESTION: Who/What created the construct we live in (Universe) then?
* Whatever/Whoever did, they qualify as "GOD" to myself @ least... because I surely know I couldn't do it, and neither could you.
APK
P.S.=> Answer the question above (who/what created the cosmos we live in)... apkquote
that old chestnut. Here's something for you to read instead of parroting creationist nonsense
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_theory
and now something for you to watch
Irreducible Complexity (bacterial flagellum) debunked by a christian
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_HVrjKcvrU
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Let's assume for a moment that most people didn't really believe in this creationist crap but were conformist enough to respond this way. Now let's assume that the same radical-christian-creationist-freaks who spew this creationist crap all over the place would like to burn some scientist because in their opinion he's a heretic ? What would this "silent majority" do ? Would they be conformist like in this poll ? Would they show enough determination to stop radical idiots from killing others for their misguided beliefs ? How does it differ from casual good muslims becoming conformist or passive to actions of radical isamists ? Why is majority of people passive to something that might push us into dark ages once again ?
We are entering dangerous times. Someone is investing lots of money in order to make hard facts and beliefs blend. See all those mega-churches that are in fact nothing more than just dangerous sects, see all those "museums", publications. See lobbyists and their money pushed to politicians in order to make creationism credible and taught in schools. Such big money does not come from nowhere. Who needs it and for what purpose ?
Here's a start
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17769529
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
You don't need science to disprove god - logic is sufficient. If he explores all forms and substances Straight homeward to their symbol-essences; He shall not die.
I really love club dresses ,
That's where Occam's Razor comes in - given two equally viable explanations the simplest is more likely to be correct.
So here's two potential starting points:
An un-created Creator with the will and ability to create and shape a universe exists.
A single tiny, incredibly smooth region of low entropy and high energy exists.
Either one is sufficient to give rise to the universe we see now, for my money a mote of perfectly uniform, energetic space seems far less complicated than even a bacterium, much less a God.
Occam's razor doesn't say anything about correctness - it just states that it is more useful for the purpose of discussion to assume that the simple hypothesis is the correct one.
People like you are the reason why we have to deal with batshit-crazy creationists in the first place - by misrepresenting your own views in ways that can be easily refuted you give them just the ammo they need.
"15% believe that humans evolved without any supernatural help"
Wow, I would say this 15% is a pretty noisy group given all the concessions granted to them then.
I guess this places you (i.e. the "rest of us") firmly in the 15%?
Are you then saying all of them are actually agnostics rather than atheists?
Are you then saying all of them are actually agnostics rather than atheists?
No, I'm saying that they're both agnostic and atheistic - they are both, to loosely translate, "without knowledge" and "without gods".
"I won't believe one exists unless new evidence comes to light and compels me to do so."
Not believing in gods is atheism - full stop.
All of the people I listed previously are agnostic atheists, meaning that they don't know for certain, but they don't believe. They don't use 'agnostic' on its own because they are willing to make the best guess they can, or are willing to defend atheism as the default position (i.e. the side advocating belief has the burden of proof). They also don't call themselves 'agnostic atheists' because it's pretty much redundant, the number of gnostic atheists, the ones that claim to know as an absolute that there isn't a deity, are such a small minority as to be nearly non-existent.
Why do I feel hunger? I don't think Occam's razor would ever favor "Spontaneous hunger".
I don't know. For a newborn it might literally be the only explanation that exits.
spontaneous action is not an explanation
Spontaneous pair creation is a basic part of quantum mechanics. You could argue that they're created by the laws of physics, but that's a cop out, since those laws are merely our description of what 'just happens'.
The reason it is flawed is because the original poster asserted that not do you have to believe in a creator, but you also need to explain where they came from and you are back to spontaneous creation... hence 2x as silly.
They shouldn't have said that the cause for the creator would have to be spontaneous creation, but adding a creator does take you from having a big problem to having a big problem and a big messy assumption. In a certain sense, you really do have twice as much of a mess.
Amekian over crowding birther bible third world is coming - it will soon become like uneducated Muslim country and pollution third world. North Europe Green socialism no god is the only model that respects human, living being and planet.
Anything from Wikipedia to any good, in-depth news coverage of the Dover trial will explain what science is, and why the ideas offered by ID don't meet those standards.
"Thou shalt have no other gods before me" - to me it is an acknowledgement that there are other gods. Why is this one is better than others (for non Jews, who he saved and led to promised land)?
We expect that when someone makes a statement of science, that it have actually been tested using the methods of science.
Where your definition of science includes that it must not contradict your a priori beliefs. A lot of Christians hold a "no true scotsman" view of science when it comes to evolution. Thats not true science because.... GOD DID IT
Americans are stupid, the sky is blue.
Yes it has; Yes we do
Would you like to explain how the first 3 links to a description of vacuum forces show how matter can spontaneously come into existence? Have I missed the news that scientists can create matter (and energy) at will now?
As for the 2nd 3 links, none of those suggest that the universe pops itself into existence. The universe expanding is proof towards a "Big Bang" that starts off the universe. It's evidence that supports the claim the universe has a beginning, but does not tell you if the beginning was "self-started" or otherwise.
Irreducible complexity has been shown to be baseless and nothing more than an argument from incredulity ("I can't imagine how this may have formed, therefore intelligence!" , and entropy has nothing to do with evolution.
kurzweil_freak
5th Kyu Genbukan Ninpo/KJJR student
Be the darkness that allows the light to shine.
Reading TFA, you can have a look at the curve showing the evolution of believes (lets call it like that) over time. Only Q3 denies evolution ; question 1 merely shows that about 35% of US citizens believe in evolution AND in god - thus they cannot deny that god could have an influence on the evolution. Thus Q1 and Q2 should be counted together when speaking about believes in evolution. A simple first-order (y=ax+b) curve fitting over the 3 possible answers (A gives an estimated fraction of people in 82, and B the rate of change over time) gives these results: -Q1: a: 38.54%, b: -0.08% (RMSD= 1,99) -Q2: a: 7.72%, b: 0.23% (RMSD= 1,19) -Q3: a: 45.80%, b: -0.06% (RMSD= 1,86) What does it tells us? To cheer up, lads! In 82 there were 46,2% of evolutionists against 45,8% of creationists. Without having computed the error bars, we could only say that they were on equal terms at this time. From then on, the proportion of evolutionists increased by about 1% every 7 years, and now the proportions are 50,9% evolutionists against 44,0% of creationists. This is most probably statistically significant, given the relative mean square deviations over the fits. Thus, evolution theory is winning! That's why the 44 remaining % are starting to be nervous... Moreover, these results support the fact that people are less and less religious - Q1 and Q3 are decreasing overtime - while the fastest growing population are the scientifically literate agnostics. And this population almost DOUBLED since 1982, from 7,7% to 14,6% today! Always do you stats lads, always do your stats...
That's just BS. There's no way that even stupid people could still believe that. Nobody that went to public school in the US could believe that. I wonder how they did the poll to get such bad data. Did they only call folks that went to Catholic school?
Even Gallop does bad work sometimes.
If you can postulate a world where it is possible for things to "just exist" without being created, then our universe can be one of those things which "just exists". That is a far simpler answer than claiming that there must be an all-powerful creator who "just exists" and who, in turn, created the universe.
My virtual beings in my virtual world could make exactly the same argument. Since I know they would be factually wrong, I have to conclude that the argument is bad (even should it happened to be correct in this case).
They would not be factually wrong. The argument is not that their world must "just exist", but rather that there is no evidence either way, and that the model without a creator is the one with fewer assumptions. Both of those statements are factually correct. The burden of proof is on those postulating the existence of a creator to come up with actual evidence supporting the more complex model.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
The survey sample was of adults, not registered voters or likely voters. Samples like this tend to be skewed toward the less-educated and toward those who vote Democrat.
Why do you say they are ruining things for the rest of us? What does it matter to you? Do you need unanimous agreement with your beliefs, in order to feel good about yourself?
evidence of billions of years of random mutations and natural selection.
This bit kinda shows your ignorance of the actual processes behind micro-evolution and genetics (the very things that *might* make it possible for life to be as varied as it is without a "designer")
Macro-evolution (the kind that is supposed to make a human from an ape) isn't provable, at least not yet. The forces of nature (presence or lack of a specific food or predator) don't change the DNA of the individual animal at all. They only limit the total gene pool of a species by eliminating unfit individuals. Take a look at the "Positive Mutations" section of this article for a bit more on this. Mutations aren't all they're cracked up to be, once you take a look at it from the genetics standpoint.
I could care less if you think there is evidence for ID, or any other alternate explanation for that matter....as long as people who believe in the hypothesis of Evolution are realistic about the problems with what is being proposed in their own theory of how things came to be.
Bits of code, random ramblings: jakimfett.com
entropy has nothing to do with evolution.
Well...what about how evolution is about order (like cell structure, limbs, eyesight, intellegence, digestive systems, etc) coming from chaos (random chemicals, randomly in the right place, at the right time, millions of times over millions/billions of years)? The concept of entropy is that there is a measurable tendency from order to disorder in isolated systems. Evolution would require entropy to be fundamentally broken (or to have been broken at some point in the past) for it to work.
Bits of code, random ramblings: jakimfett.com
The problem is...a lot of the principles of Evolution don't always meet the standards either. Take a look at the disconnect between mutation as presented by the chapter on Evolution in a biology textbook and how mutation is presented in a genetics textbook.
Bits of code, random ramblings: jakimfett.com
after taking their Workplace Survey or whatever they call it now. That one is used by the ivory tower types to paper over deep-seated issue in an organization, attempting to measure engagement at the workplace, all the while tap-dancing around and accomplishing very little of any substance; kinda like Six Sigma.
So are we evolutionists a majority or are more than 5% undecided if they evolved from dinosaurs?
I see your "creationist nonsense" and raise you a "both sides are biased".
I could care less who believes what...as long as both (or all three, or however many) sided are realistic about the problems that their own pet theory has. (and, you know, stops being jerks to anyone who has a different opinion than they do...)
For example, evolutionists ignore the issues with the dating methods that they use, and creationists assume that their bible can be used to prove something. Both sides need to get their crap together, stop ignoring the scientific method, and just do science. (article deals specifically with evolution, but all the principles apply to creationists)
http://naturalselection.0catch.com/Files/ancientice.html
http://naturalselection.0catch.com/Files/radiometricdating.html#Different Dating Methods Agree
http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/filesDB-download.php?command=download&id=6841
Bits of code, random ramblings: jakimfett.com
"We shall ignore the fact that not all historical claims are created equal"
Some historical claims are supported scientific evidence (or are at least consistent with how we now understand the Universe). This claim is not.
It isn't proven. It's just a theory that is consistant with our current understanding of physics. However that understand is supported by evidence. That is why it not a religion.
I don't know what the quantum vacuum was, but if it did create the Universe there is no reason to think that it has any of the attributes commonally associated with word God, there it would not be God.
You don't seem to really understand entropy. Entropy is the tendency for a closed system to move from order to chaos. A closed system is one in which energy neither enters or exits. Fortunately for us, the Earth is not a closed system. If you go outside on a nice day and look up, you'll see a giant energy factory in the sky: the sun. All the energy that evolution has ever needed comes from the sun. (It could also be argued that energy also comes from deep inside the earth, such as deep thermal vents at the bottom of the ocean.)
kurzweil_freak
5th Kyu Genbukan Ninpo/KJJR student
Be the darkness that allows the light to shine.
Take a look at the disconnect between mutation as presented by the chapter on Evolution in a biology textbook and how mutation is presented in a genetics textbook.
I've heard this charge before, but never with any detail. I'm afraid you're going to need to be more specific if you want a meaningful response.
The finding on creationist belief is just the tip of the iceberg. A large protein of Americans believe many things that are flatly wrong. These things thing get purple killed. A lot of people. WMD in Iraq? The lies a Guns make people safer, despite 30,000 being killed every year? bout nukes in Iran? Neo-liberal economics? The list goes on and on.
Only boring people are ever bored.
So postulating about multiverse, quantum soups, etc... is wrong? You simply can't ever believe in anything other than everything came from an uncreated something unless you're willfully ignorant. To believe otherwise would be like believing that 6 == 7. It's just not true. This isn't opinion either. Here let me point out the various example scenarios:
1.) God created it - God is the uncreated something
OR
2.) Universe came from quantum soup (Krauss's position) - Quantum soup is the uncreated something
OR
3.) Reality did not exist and then it did. Reality is the uncreated something.
OR
4.) Something else entirely.
You simply cannot believe that everything was created. At some point, you get to an uncaused uncreated something. Whether that's an infinite number of multiverses in the past (an eternal uncreated something) or the universe just popped into existence one day (a finite uncreated something). All of you highly emotional neoatheists have not provided one piece of logic to even support the whole "I don't know" answer. I don't know if 6 == 7? Really? That's your best response? Let me know when athiests can debate logic. Every example of "I don't know" possibilities have been uncreated somethings.
So my arguments stands - you cannot ridicule the theist for believing in an uncreated something when everyone believes (though knows not necessarily what) in an uncreated something.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aether_theories
What's wrong? You can't project what seems like common sense to you onto the universe. It's even possible that the human mind cannot conceive of what the universe is actually like and any models we build will be flawed.
Just because there's a gap in our knowledge, even one that may be permanent, that doesn't mean you can fill that gap with God. Such arguments even have a name because they're ubiquitous and known fallacies. They're called God IN the Gaps arguments. Look it up.
I'm not suggesting God nor am I trying to prove God. I'm suggesting anything. Since stuff exist, it's always always been here, or came into existence. There really isn't an in between here. There is no gap in this logic. If so, I'd love to hear it, but all you neoathiests do is go back to God which is not even being argued here.
The problem is that I'm an engineer. I think in logic, not fantasy, emotion, and politics. So people like Dawkins don't appeal to me. I'd like to hear more p's and q's and less political emotional nonsense.
If he believes "just in case", then that's not genuine faith, and he's in for an eternal roasting if his Imaginary Friend is indeed real.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
If anyone can PROVE their Sky Fairie exists I will recant and suck its Noodly Appendage.
Ideas without evidence merit no respect.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
. The definition of a divine creator is an entity that just is and was never created. Since such a creator would have created even time itself, it is nonsensical to ask who created the creator since that would imply that time existed before creation.
So you are arguing for a God just not calling it that.
Also, in above, you yet again make assertions about how the universe has to be, this time involving time. So instead of rebutting me, you again confirmed my previous observation which is, you can't make assertions about the nature of reality using only folk logic.
Here is your folk logic:
Since stuff exist, it's always always been here, or came into existence. There really isn't an in between here.
You have no way of knowing even that your common sense notions of existence map to any true proposition about reality at all. It may be that the human mind cannot grasp how the universe is and we're forever trapped by our inability to conceive of how things really are. It may be that scientists, contrary to our folk intuition , will prove that things neither exist nor don't exist in the way we understand them. It is already true that the way in which you're using time is outdated and there is not such a thing as time but rather space-time.
All these thing s are highly counter-intuitive. OTOH intuitive things that seem like they could never be wrong to people are proved wrong.
So your assertions are unsupportable, and yes, you are trying to argue for god , just through the device of redefining god to be something more nebulous, as your comment which I quoted clearly shows.
I believe in God. I enjoy science. There is no contradiction between science and the belief in God.
If those volumes weren't themselves pieces of pseudoscientific junk, then that might have helped.
Long? What do you mean the signature at the bottom of every comment I post on Slashdot is too lo
Most excellent post. Moderators take note.
If "How could something come from nothing?" is the kind of question that proves the necessity of a creator, then in an equal fashion the question of "Can God make something so big he couldn't pick it up?" proves the impossibility of an all-powerful entity.
Some questions are just wrong, even though they can be framed in human speech.
Obviously the rooster cum first!
This should be more than enough proof for the rest of the world to stop fawning to this bankrupt - morally and financially - state and isolating them to the their continent where they can't hurt anyone but themselves. Coventry time.
Some historical claims are supported scientific evidence (or are at least consistent with how we now understand the Universe). This claim is not.
How the universe was created is a historical claim. Our current scientific knowledge can point in certain directions, but controlled experiments in a lab do not tell us what happpened a really long time ago. At best, they tell us what is likely; but they really only say what is possible given human constraints. A divine creator would not be subject to things like the laws of physics, by definition.
As such, one cannot use science to debunk the historical claims of a divine creator starting everything off and then leaving us to our own devices (to varying degrees, depending on who you ask).
False.
Agnostic means that you don't believe it's possible to know. Atheist means you hold no belief.
False.
Agnostic means that you believe it's impossible to know. There's a distinction. Agnosticism is a positive statement of a belief in a particular philosophical truth about this particular matter.
A person may not believe that it's possible to know simply because he has never considered the question. But an agnostic has actually thought about the question and has acquired a positive belief that he cannot know. Some philosophers have created distinctions about these sorts of things (varying types of "atheists" and "agnostics"), but generally most who use the word "agnostic" assume that there is actually a positive stance on the matter, and not simply ignorance of the matter.
Would you like to explain how the first 3 links to a description of vacuum forces show how matter can spontaneously come into existence? Have I missed the news that scientists can create matter (and energy) at will now?
The wiki explains it. Perhaps this article about virtual particles will help.
As for the 2nd 3 links, none of those suggest that the universe pops itself into existence. The universe expanding is proof towards a "Big Bang" that starts off the universe. It's evidence that supports the claim the universe has a beginning, but does not tell you if the beginning was "self-started" or otherwise.
It's evidence that supports the universe has a beginning. The common definition of the universe implies that its beginning has no cause.
Who ordered that?
People believe all sorts of absurd and ridiculous fictions to get through their booing and banal day to day lives.
Too much emphasis is placed on a supposed controversy between the so-called "scientific" and people with almost equally superstitious and cop-out beliefs based on crap that has no practical significance to 99.999% of the population anyway.
Then again, there's something to be said for statistics that make you feel all smug and outraged and superior. There's a value there, but I wouldn't exactly consider it something to strive for.
The agnostic point of view means that it's OK to say you don't know.
The atheistic point of view means you know there isn't a God.
No it doesn't. I am an atheist. I am also an agnostic. These two things are not mutually exclusive.
My book about LSD and Self-Discovery
Also on facebook as: DroppingAcidDaleBewan
What if your god doesn't like your opportunistic approach?
I'm sure a lot of Christians do, but all I am asking for is experimental evidence for life from non-life. That request has nothing to do with my a priori beliefs.
"If God had intended us to walk he would not have invented roller skates." -- Willy Wonka
Neither viruses nor prions are capability of reproducing themselves. They both interfere with the reproduction process of healthy cells. I don't know why you think they even apply to my statement. They are obviously not a stepping stone in the life-from-non-life scenario because they assume life is already in place. Show me a protein sequence which is able to actually reproduce itself chemically and we might have something.
"it is not impossible to construct a sequence of events where life could emerge from non-life". In hypothesis only, show me an experiement in a peer-reviewed journal which has worked out these sequences. This is exactly what I mean when I say "We expect that when someone makes a statement of science, that it have actually been tested using the methods of science." What you claim (that there is a sequence of events) is a claim of science, but which has not been proved using the method of science (experimentation). It is just a bald assertion.
"If God had intended us to walk he would not have invented roller skates." -- Willy Wonka
That is quite easy and done all the time. Stick a bacterium or yeast cell in a culture medium such as agar or sugar water. Come back a x hours/days later and look at the volume of living material versus nonliving. All that life was previously dead matter, but is now "living."
The obvious explanation is that "life" is not a thing or quality, but a thermodynamic metabolic process that transforms energy and matter, but there is nothing that makes molecules "alive" versus dead other than how they interact.
In short, I think "life cannot come from nonlife" will turn out to be less a fundamental principle than an accident of history. The complete story of how that process got started may never be known, but we're closing in on some good possibilities. Eventually it will be demonstrated and since you put all your eggs in one basket, then where will you be??
What is there to say to this other than the obvious: 46% or some similar number of Americans are ignorant and/or stupid. No surprise there.
Yes, science can only tell us what likely happened a really long time ago, but that is no reason to believe in one of the infinite number of things that could have happened, but isn't supported by evidence and can't be debunked, just because it was a historical claim.
Everyone seems so shocked and upset at this but no one is actually doing anything about it. I challenge all of you to spread logic and show everyone that it's okay to be atheist.
An Atheist who acknowledges the possibility of God is an Agnostic.
So, for convenience, why don't we just abbreviate it to 'Cre'ti'n's'?
The point is that we evaluate historical claims by historical evidence. You seem to think that only scientific evidence counts as evidence.
How do we know that the Romans actually existed, for example? We examine documents, we examine artifacts, and we can look at all of that evidence and conclude that they support the historical claim that the Romans existed, and played a certain part in human history.
When it comes to the historical claim of a divine creator, one is evaluating documents, not laboratory experiments. Those documents are the evidence. The claim that god exists and created humanity is not a recent invention, but has been prevalent since humanity was literate. They're the accounts of people who claim to have interacted with god. If god actually exists and interacted with his creation, then one would reasonably expect humanity to write about it.
Perhaps they're lying or mistaken, but those claims are the evidence. Until you've debunked every single one, your claim that "there is no evidence" is not true. You can say that it is disputed evidence, or that is untrustworthy evidence (if you believe everyone who lived more than 100 years ago was an idiot). The one thing you are not (yet) justified in saying is that there is no evidence.
TLDR: Stick to what you've actually proven. You have a grand (but incomplete) theory that the universe existed without a creator. It has not yet disproven the opposing claim the universe does have a creator. Perhaps it will in the future, but right now it has not.
Would you like to explain how the first 3 links to a description of vacuum forces show how matter can spontaneously come into existence? Have I missed the news that scientists can create matter (and energy) at will now?
The wiki explains it. Perhaps this article about virtual particles will help.
It helped me understand what you were talking about, but it's not really "something from nothing" as I was asking. Virtual particles are observed from our manipulation of "real" matter. In addition, these particles are described as virtual precisely because their existence is temporary.
The virtual particles existed because matter was manipulated in a certain way; that is a cause. If the virtual particles persisted, then it would be an example of "something from nothing". It would also violate our current understanding of entropy, since matter is energy and the creation of new matter is equivalent to introducing new energy.
It's evidence that supports the universe has a beginning. The common definition of the universe implies that its beginning has no cause.
I am confused why you felt a need to link that evidence, since our positions both agree that the universe has a beginning. Our disagreement is whether the universe's beginning had a cause or not.
The wiki page you link has no common definition. However, there is a "broadest definition" which states:
"The broadest definition of the universe can be found in De divisione naturae by the medieval philosopher and theologian Johannes Scotus Eriugena, who defined it as simply everything: everything that is created and everything that is not created."
Accepting that the definition you stated used to be on that wiki page, the implication needs further explanation on why it is justified and how it qualifies as evidence for a universe that has a beginning but no cause.
So your actually saying that life metabolized non-living molecules and therefore life comes from non-life, and that we don't even need to bother how life started in the first place?
"Eventually it will be demonstrated". At least you admit that it hasn't yet.
Creationists ask for experimental evidence and we get hypothesis, then we are called anti-science for not buying the "good possibilities".
"If God had intended us to walk he would not have invented roller skates." -- Willy Wonka
Science isn't about proving things true or not true. It's about finding the theory that is best supported by the evidence.
I guess I shouldn't say there is no evidence, but the evidence is weak for a long list of reasons and no rational person would be justified in believing it.
You might really enjoy Stephen Pinker then. He deals largely in psychology, so there's that little bit of voodoo going on, but I've found he constructs his arguments really, really well. I also liked that a lot of the common atheist snark was absent, or at least I didn't notice it. The Blank Slate was one of the most informative and interesting books I've ever read.
Actually I'd say it's quite difficult to test, short of God dropping in for tea the only way to know is to.
1. die
Yes, that was my point, you got it in 1 - you'll know soon enough.
I swear there ain't no Heaven
But I pray there ain't no Hell
But I'll never know by living
Only my dying will tell
Only my dying will tell
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I like how the poll says only 46 believe in creationist view and yet there is another category that believe evolution occurred but with divine intervention. Isn't the two the same? If the poll was speaking towards Evolution only and Creation only the percentage would be 79% believe in creationist view and 21% believe in evolution. To me that seems more accurate for this poll.
My point is that, no, you won't. At best you'll die, enter something possibly resembling your concept of heaven, and meet some being that claims it is the Creator. None of that is even remotely conclusive evidence. How would you possibly tell if a godlike being was lying to you? (Let's be clear here that God and The Creator are not synonymous, and the existence of the former does not imply the latter)
You might also die and "poof" that's the end. No answer at all, after all the existence of God does not depend on you having a soul.
Or you might have an immortal soul, but it doesn't carry enough of your "selfhood" (which seems to be largely a biological construct) for the answer to be relevant.
I suppose there is one outcome that might get pretty close to proof, at least on an individual level - you could achieve Nirvana and rejoin God, becoming one with that which created (or not) the universe and know for sure. Of course achieving Nirvana is generally understood to require releasing your selfhood, so strictly speaking the being that asked the question would no longer exist to appreciate the answer, which I guess brings us back to the previous case.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I will check it out. Thanks.
Science isn't about proving things true or not true. It's about finding the theory that is best supported by the evidence.
True, though we'd also have to define whether we're talking about science as all human knowledge, or science as what we've learned through use of the scientific method.
If we're talking about science as knowledge, then the basis for thinking something is true is much broader than if we limit it to what's (not yet dis)proven by the scientific method.
I guess I shouldn't say there is no evidence, but the evidence is weak for a long list of reasons and no rational person would be justified in believing it.
That was the only point I wished to press. I'll disagree that the evidence is so weak that no rational person ought to believe it - I consider myself rational, I believe one of those accounts is true based on my personal study of history, and I hope our conversation shows that I am dedicated to the proper understanding of concepts and ideas.
Thanks for the discussion.
What we have learned from applying scientific method is the foundation of all knowledge.
On top of that is what we can deduce by applying logic to what we have learned from applying the scientific method, but those thoeries remain provisional until tested by the scientific method.
Many of the things we think we know, like economics and religion, has little to no basis in the scientific method. That doesn't automatically make them wrong, but they aren't really knowledge.
What we have learned from applying scientific method is the foundation of all knowledge.
Can you prove this claim with the scientific method?
Because that's a philosophical statement, in the realm of philosophy. That undermines the statement - the scientific method is supposed to be the foundation of all knowledge; but you rely on philosophy to even take the first step towards knowledge.
On top of that is what we can deduce by applying logic to what we have learned from applying the scientific method, but those thoeries remain provisional until tested by the scientific method. Many of the things we think we know, like economics and religion, has little to no basis in the scientific method. That doesn't automatically make them wrong, but they aren't really knowledge.
There is truth in your claim, in that all things that are claimed to be true must be able to withstand scrutiny and be consistent with all the evidence. But you're using the wrong tool as the ultimate arbiter of knowledge.
One does not use the scientific method on mathematics/logic, yet there is much knowledge in those disciplines.
One cannot use the scientific method on one's own personal memory; yet can you not truthfully describe where you grew up, how you learned all you know, and who taught you the skills you possess?
They would not be factually wrong.
Yes they would.
The argument is not that their world must "just exist", but rather that there is no evidence either way, and that the model without a creator is the one with fewer assumptions.
And that's where they're wrong. The massive assumption they are making there is: it is possible for their world to exist without a creator. I've no idea where they got that idea from. ;-) That assumption is factually incorrect.
The burden of proof is on those postulating the existence of a creator to come up with actual evidence supporting the more complex model.
In this case, which of the models is more complex depends on your initial assumptions.
Igor Presnyakov stole my hat
"Can you prove this claim with the scientific method?"
I think there is strong evidence that the scientific method has been the most successful at determining how the universe works, compared to Aristotlism.
Math is not knowledge by the definition I'm using. Math is a tool we invented to help us describe the universe. It has been designed to work follow how the universe works. One could, some some people do, come up with mathematical system that do not describe how the universe works.
Personal memory is a source of evidence, although not as good as others. If your memory is consistent with other evidence and our scientific knowledge, then one can reasonably believe it.
"I believe one of those accounts is true based on my personal study of history"
Studying history can tell out a lot about how humans work, but not very much about how the universe works.
What this really proves is that 85% of those who do not believe in God are rude and hung up on the callers.
HAHAHA!
I think there is strong evidence that the scientific method has been the most successful at determining how the universe works, compared to Aristotlism.
But to even take the first step of using the scientific method, one must first accept by belief that the world is understandable. One also assumes that this is a consistent world, so that we can investigate the world, find something to be true now, and find it to be true at some later point in time.
Logic and philosophy are the first steps we take when trying to gain knowledge. The scientific method is a tool that builds on those premises and is useful for observing constant characteristics of the world we live in.
To say that we know how anything works requires logic and belief, because the scientific method really only tells us how things *don't* work. We can make reasoned conclusions about how things work based on what does not work; but that is using logic.
I'll also disagree that math is just an invented tool. Constants like pi and e and i are not arbitrary. They are not human inventions, or we'd have the ability to redefine them as we wished.
Language can be said to be a human invention; but the concepts and ideas we discuss using language cannot. They are beyond human ability to change.
Studying history can tell out a lot about how humans work, but not very much about how the universe works.
When you cite the experimental results and conclusions of a long dead scientist, is that not in the past? That is history. No individual has the time or capability to re-do all past experiments to verify the results still hold true. We all stand on the accumulated work of previous generations.
All we think we know about the universe is the product of human work, much of it done in the past. If not yet in the past, it will be, and future generations will build upon it.
It avoids the glitches in Pascal's proof.
Pascal's proof of the game-theoretic result that, in the game he describes, the winning strategy for player A (the human) is to believe? Or did he also have a proof of the existence of God?
"the world is understandable"
If the world is wasn't understandable, we would run out of theories to test and that would be it for science. So far, so good.
"a consistent world"
Science would be able to identify an inconsistency. Quantum physics has a random element to it, but science has been able to handle that.
Language and math are both human inventions that can be used to describe the Universe or something imaginary. pi is a mathematical description of an element of the Universe. You could still do math if you redefined pi, but you wouldn't be describing the Universe any more.
If results from the past where wrong, which happens quite often, it would show up in the failure experiments in the present. Eventually the cause would be found and corrected.
It is an interesting philosophical question: if you die, and there is no "soul", do you now know there is no soul?
Anyhow, once you start postulating a god who is lying to you, you undermine all of science and reason. Any practical rational belief systm requires this leap of faith: that our senses are basically reliable, and that logic is basically reliable, most of the time. Without those two assumptons, you've got nothing.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Evolutionists reject what is essentially the Prime Directive of Biology: Life cannot come from nonlife.
It is not that we reject science. We don't think that macro-evolution has been experimentally proven. We expect that when someone makes a statement of science, that it have actually been tested using the methods of science.
Evolution has nothing to do with the origin of life. That would be abiogenesis. Evolution only concerns itself with the time after life first started. In other words, you don't actually know anything about the science involved and are just making things up as you go.
"the world is understandable" If the world is wasn't understandable, we would run out of theories to test and that would be it for science. So far, so good.
So the world is understandable so that humans can understand it? How did you determine that fact through the scientific method?
"a consistent world" Science would be able to identify an inconsistency. Quantum physics has a random element to it, but science has been able to handle that.
I'm not talking about probability. I'm talking about the existence of constants. Our scientific knowledge is based on the assumption that the laws of physics of don't change. Why should the laws of physics be unchanging?
By the way, who's Science? Funny how you treat scientific knowledge like some omniscient deity that all must defer to.
Language and math are both human inventions that can be used to describe the Universe or something imaginary. pi is a mathematical description of an element of the Universe. You could still do math if you redefined pi, but you wouldn't be describing the Universe any more.
Mathematical language is a human invention. There's no particular reason why 0 has to mean zero or 5 has to mean five. But the abstract concept of mathematics, which we describe with mathematical language, is most definitely not a human invention. If it were, you could define 1+1 = 3. What humans invent, humans can change.
Pastafarians are under represented in these polls, so no wonder it's pretty skewed towards the book burning crowd.
Test -MC
Seems like a pretty straightforward question - if there is no soul, then once you die there is no longer any "you" to know anything at all. You'll start to die, possibly have a near-death experience where you feel yourself being welcomed into the divine Presence, and then, well, lights out. Fin. Nothing more left of you but a pile of meat and the ever-expanding ripples of causality of your actions while you lived.
A much more interesting question is if there *is* an immrotal soul, then how much of "you" makes the transition? Our current understanding of the brain makes a good good argument to be made that memory, personality, etc. are, at least in large part, neurological effects - in which case there's no particular reason to believe they make the transition, though perhaps the soul will carry with it the shape of its erstwhile container.
Another interesting question is if there is a soul, is there any particular reason to believe it is immortal? Perhaps a complicated brain allows a metaphysical... "something"... to concentrate and come into focus, much as a prism can shape and concentrate passing light to form a rainbow. But while the rainbow is something separate from the prism, when the prism crumbles so does the rainbow, and there is once again simply light passing by.
As for undermining science and logic, I'd say your problems start from the moment you postulate a god possessing personhood. Apes, ravens, dogs, pretty much every creature we've ever studied that demonstrates some level of reasoning and empathy, also engages in deception to influence the behavior of others. The logical extrapolation is that a god would do so as well, though we might well not understand the motivations behind it. To preserve science and reason you must therefore also postulate that this god lacks the motivation and/or inclination for deception - and given how strongly most churches have insisted that their God requires that we all obey seemingly arbitrary rules on ritual behavior, social structure, diet, mating habits, etc., there certainly seems to be plenty of motivation for behavior modification. As for inclination, well I can think of plenty of reasons why even a benevolent God might lie to us, and sacred texts never seem to make any particular claim of honesty when describing It. Of course that conflates God and Church, which is probably a bad idea. Then again the Church seems to be the only one really spreading the idea of a monotheistic God. Where gods are the domain of the populace, polytheism thrives, and creation myths tend to be much more colorful and organic, and quite often lack intent as a driving force.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
We don't yet know if the Universe is understandable to us or our cybernetic decedents. We'll know when we completely understand the Universe.
Science can still work if the laws of physics change. Science could identify and quantify the change. For example, the laws of physics work totally differently at the sub-atomic level, yet we are making progress in understanding them.
Science is a method, so I used shorthand to suggest science is acting on its own when I mean people applying science. Science is the method of discovering the laws of the Universe, which we all must defer to. The laws of the Universe aren't a deity any more then the tax code is.
We don't yet know if the Universe is understandable to us or our cybernetic decedents. We'll know when we completely understand the Universe.
That we have science at all and are having this debate is reasonable proof that we can understand parts of the universe. This is not a conclusion arrived at by the scientific method, but one by logic.
A correct philosophy is far more important to knowledge than a dogmatic belief that the scientific method will reveal all.
Science can still work if the laws of physics change. Science could identify and quantify the change. For example, the laws of physics work totally differently at the sub-atomic level, yet we are making progress in understanding them.
The laws of physics are not working totally differently at the sub-atomic level. At the sub-atomic level, we can observe physical laws at work whose effects are drowned out when interacting with larger objects. Those physical laws do not toggle themselves on or off; they are always in effect.
You don't seem to grasp what I mean of changing natural laws; in such a system, the exact same experiment can yield completely different results. If effect does not reliably follow cause, the scientific method becomes worthless. ex: The experiment that demonstrates conservation of momentum will no longer do so tomorrow.
The scientific method is incapable of proving that this is a world with unchanging physical laws such that the results of the scientific method can be considered valid. Understand the limitations of your tool, or your understanding will be wrong.
None of these are new questions, of course. Descarte, when he more-or-less invented rationalism, sort of gave up on true skepticism, and asserted that a benevolent God exists, and therefore we can mostly trust our senses. Adding a benevolent God to the picture actually makes a lot of things easier (which, umm, is completely unsurprising, now that I say it).
But the questions "does the soul (personality, identity, whatever) continue after death", and "does God define the good, or is he defined by it" each have a Socratic Dialog, so I can only conclude that after 2600 years of thinking about them, we're not going to find the answers to those questions by thinking about them.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Oh yeah, talk about a cop out on that one. Come on,
I have a clear concept of infinity (I really doubt that)
Therefore God must exist (pretty shaky reasoning)
And being benevolent God wouldn't deceive me (how does that follow?)
And thus the world is as I perceive it.
It would appear that Socrates, having successfully deconstructed the universe was so appalled at what he had done that he slapped a hasty patch on the problem before running away to hide in the corner. Or perhaps someone else "fixed" it for him later, or he felt pressured to "sanitize" it and did so in a manner so flimsy that any decent student of logic would see it for what it was. Honestly from what little I know of the man the middle option seems the most plausible.
As for the Benevolent God wouldn't deceive me bit - I certainly don't buy that. Seems perfectly reasonable to me that a benevolent god might very well deceive us if, for example, the universe were just too strange for a mortal mind to grasp. And we know from quantum mechanics that the universe is almost certainly not at all like we perceive it to be, and the consensus among the preeminent experts in the field seems to be that, so far at least, there is nobody on Earth who actually understands it.
Actually a great deal of progress has been made on the discussion of the continuation of ____ beyond death, just not within the context of Western philosophy, I think some of our fundamental assumptions create logical inconsistencies on the subject. Eastern philosophy on the other hand has a very elegant answer, and no end of interesting essays on the subject. Unfortunately pretty much all of them read like pile of paradoxical gibberish until you grasp the central unspoken tenet that forms it's foundation, at which point you realize the essays are largely clearly written as recreational reading sharing thoughts about the details between those who already know the fundamental answer, sort of the rational analogue to a hymnal, which I suppose is really what most philosophical essays are in any culture, except that most philosophies don't involve a core truth that's apparently completely immune to language, requiring any sort of conversation to be held around the topic rather than about it.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
46% of people consider 2+2=5. It is actually 6.
We can observe species changing over time, i.e. evolving. We can even observe the creation of new species
We can observe complex molecules being created from simpler ones, in chemical reactions.
We can observe complex atoms being created from simpler ones, in nuclear reactions
Evolution is a pretty useless theory if all you can do with it is observe. Can you use the theory to make something useful?
Yo, @bitt3n, I suspect that @Stellian is either 1) outside the Anglosphere, or 2) fat fingered. Obviously, you're banking on #2.
Both sides, religion and science, are external memory ignorant. They do not separate themselves from what was installed into them.
So many posts I may repeat what is already said. Both sides of this discussion are based on THEORY. It is unproven, based on some facts but can't be observed directly. Me - I go for the creation theory. But I don't put down those who are of the other view. But each view does create a worldview philosophy that do conflict. But saying people like me are 'morons' and such makes the discussion about people, not the theory. let's keep it about the theories. I am cool with that.
You shall know The TRUTH, and THE TRUTH will set you free.
are a moronic race...
Grar II
You don't need to believe in evolution to believe in science in other methods. People can pick and choose the science that they want to use. Evolution doesn't have any products that can be made from it so who gives a shit. On the other hand, real science likes physics and chemistry can produce products... so people do believe in that. Asking people to think more about science is just asking them to believe in your own f'd up religion. The only reason science is good is because it is useful, and the way that we prove things are useful is that people are willing to pay for those things. Anything else is just nonsense just as much as noah's flood was.
This is my sig.
I find this survey immoral, as its main aim seems to be testing the intelligence (not the beliefs) of USAmericans.
The verdict is that 15% pass the test, 46% prefer to believe than think, they may retake in a few years, and 33% are plain stupid and fail the test.
It would be interesting if Gallup coupled this survey with one asking the education level, including the performance in the highest degree obtained.
They may be correct, although it beg the question of: Where did this power force called by so many names come from?
"Evolution' is almost never explained properly, and there are several different forms postulated.
In order for events to unfold as the creationists believe, laws of physics, determined by experimental observation, would need to be changeable. They may well be, every 'Big Bag' theory requires the laws of physics to have been different during some part of the process. Observation tells us that if a thing transforms once, it may do it again.
Religion states that: Such and such is how things began. It offers security, in that dogma seldom changes, and is always stated as ridge and eternal truth fact. In a world full of change and threats, such certainty makes things much easier.
Our court system came out of church courts, Courts regarding theology are simple--you are either a believer or a hertic.
Unfortunately, the real world, things aren't as simplistic.
Just as economics is not required to be a zero-sum system by any natural law. There are multiple possible situations in a court case. For starters, both sides could wrong, and the actual event doesn't fit either side's story. Both could be partially correct.
Human law is in fact, a guide rather than a rigid blueprint...this is why we have judges and juries--so that the law can be interpreted in context with the intent of modifying the results tailored to the current incident.
I have no problem with people believing that the universe was recently created by some sentient entity. Anymore than care about the flat earthers. Of themselves, such beliefs are of little danger even to the believer--until their beliefs take the form of actions which infringe upon others rights.
We've found, over the past few centuries, that observation, experimentation, and a willing to drop/change a belief if experience shows it unable to fit our observed Universe, works far far better to predict future events than consulting the invisible unknowable creator.
And knowing what will happen, is one of the most valuable types of information we can have to help us survive,
Religion offers TRUTH./ The price is that you must believe without evidence.
Science offers, this is the way we currently think things happen--subject to change if conflicting data appear.
I'd have far less quarrel with organized religion if they bothered to follow their own rules--but usually they say one thing and do the opposite. For instance; the Christian Bible (that religious 'pocket reference' created to reduce the large magnitude of religious documents, says that God gave Mankind dominion over living things. It doesn't say "Do whatever you want with them."
The first commandment is "Don't kill." Note it doesn't say 'don't kill others of your kind.' It doesn't say 'Except for others who you dislike."
But the people who wish to force all fetuses to term, an usually object to sex w/ birth controls, are applying rules which worked well up until the Industrial Revolution. Because both rules make sense when your numbers are limits, and your infant mortality rate is huge. We are capable, like all life we know, of creating far more offspring than needed to replenish te population...life does thinks because if it doesn't the species will dissapear quite rapidly, because in nature the majority offspring don't survive.
These rules apply when you loss large proportion of the population regularly.
They stop make sense when your population is growing rapidly because you've lowered the death rate, because under those circumstances you will inevitably reproduce to the point that your food supply can't keep up. As omnivores we can and do eat nearly anything that was alive, so we will not run out of food until we've eaten everything but ourselves--whereupon we will devour each other until enough die to permit the environment to support the population. If we have, in fact eaten all life the environment can no longer support us
Haha! Stupid americans. //Russian guy
That is simply nonsense, a virus is non life . Science does not draw lines, scientist do, and those who practice the religion of naturalism love to try and intimidate their students into believing that all scientists believe in evolution and reject the bible. Jerry Bergman, Ph.D. "Viruses have none of the characteristics of life—they do not grow, they lack cells, and they come only in standard models with few, if any, variations of standard parts. They lack most of the cell enzymes and organelles needed to live, and consequently must exploit their host’s organelles. For this reason, viruses are called obligate intracellular parasites, and are ‘infectious particles’ rather than organisms. The complete infectious unit is called a virion. The few enzymes they possess (such as integrase) are usually related to the mechanisms they use to enter their host cell. They are usually only able to multiply in their specific host, and often in only a specific organ within the host (such as the liver). All members of one viral type are usually almost identical in every way except for the glycoprotein antigens on their protein coat.13 It is this signal that can trigger an immune system response in a host." Jerry Bergman has taught biology, genetics, chemistry, biochemistry, anthropology, geology, and microbiology , he has 98 degrees and will soon complete number 9.
Yes there are people so stupid they still believe in spontaneous generation and transmutation and lack the fainest clue as to how Information Theory works. They are so blinded by their religious beliefs they just assume something as incredibly specifically complex as a self replicating organism arose by itself from matter. It was "JUST THERE" . Then they imagine that copying mistakes write previously non-existant code that produces features likes livers, lungs, and eyeballs that never before existed in the biosphere and reject science which knows of only one source of information, an intelligent mind. They accept the teachings of the lawyer Charles Lyell who was described by world famous geologist like Steven J. Gould and Derrick Ager {both Marxist/Atheist/Evolutionists} as a con-man {Goulds Words} who BRAINWASHED {Agers Words} ALL secular scientists for 150 years as absolute fact. To top it off that worship Charles Darwin despite the fact modern geologists have disproved all his nonsense about the Santa Cruz River and proven that all Galopagos finches interbreed and their beak sizes vary back and forth with weather patterns. They claim that "dating" rocks proves the earth is billions of years old yet cannot tell you what assumptions are required to "date" rocks or why in every case when we knew the age certain rocks formed they were "dated" as tens to billions of times older than we observe . Despite the fact we have witnesses rocks form in a few months and stalagtites and stalagmites form in less than 10 years they still claim these things PROVE millions of years. Yes there are a lot of stupid people .
Evolutionists reject what is essentially the Prime Directive of Biology: Life cannot come from nonlife.
Funny, I was never taught that prime directive in Biology class. Maybe that's because it's COMPLETELY MADE UP DRIVEL? The prime directive for life is to replicate. Your statement sounds like the kind of thing that would be written by someone who rejects science.
It is not that we reject science. We don't think that macro-evolution has been experimentally proven. We expect that when someone makes a statement of science, that it have actually been tested using the methods of science.
There is no such thing as macro evolution. It's just evolution. The only difference between macro evolution and micro evolution is that you will consider anything demonstrable over your lifetime to be micro evolution and any evolutionary process that takes longer to be "macro". Micro evolution used to just be things like gray moths turning black, now I'm sure it includes scientifically proven changes like a microbe developing the ability to consume. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nylon-eating_bacteria_and_creationism
IDK, upon inspection, it does seem like you reject those parts of science that do not match your a priori beliefs.
You are incorrect. Predictive properties are essential to test theories. This does not mean something profound like "predicting the future" or anything like that--it simply means 'if theory X says the universe works in such a way, then if we do Y, we should see the physical world respond in some manner Z. Does it? Then that's evidence for the theory." Essentially, I can observe gravity as propose a 1/r^3 rule for the force. That would be consistent with my earthbound observations of falling apples. However, studying the heavens--well, I'd have to conclude 1/r^2. Then later I could note some things inconsistent with my old Newtonian observations. Then Einstein could come along a make a new theory. However, his theory would make predictions of things I have not seen. I could test them and discover that frame dragging is real. Not only did he explain what I've already seen, but he PREDICTED new things I haven't, and sure enough, I go to test them and I do see they are real.
Key word: PREDICTED.
I was looking at my related links on another page, and I see these two stories right next to each other: "1342 In America, 46% of People Hold a Creationist View of Human Origins" and "1226 Debate Over Evolution Will Soon Be History, Says Leakey" So which is it?
46% of americans should be considered legally retarded.
If you are in the US, yes they do. At least as far as the vast majority of the population is concerned.