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Why Are Some Hell-Bent On Teaching Intelligent Design?
Funksaw writes "Here's an op-ed by first-time politician, long-time Slashdotter Brian Boyko, where he talks about his experiences testifying at the Texas Board of Education in favor of having real science in science textbooks. But beyond that, he also tries to examine, philosophically, why there is such hardened resistance to the idea of evolution in Texas. From the article: '[W]hat is true is that evolution tests faith. The fact of evolution is incontrovertible and supported by mounds of empirical evidence. Faith, on the other hand, is fragile. It is supported only by the strength of human will. And this is where it gets tricky. Because to many believers, faith, not works, is the only guarantee that one can pass God's litmus test and gain access to His divine kingdom. To lose one's faith is to literally damn oneself. So tests to that faith must be avoided at all costs. Better to be a philosophical coward than a theological failure.'"
Um, no. God only shrinks if you're explanation for every problem is "God did it". If that's why you believe in a deity, then you miss the point of faith.
To make the point differently, just because I know exactly how a chair was built, it doesn't mean that I stop believing that a carpenter built it.
The point of faith is to believe that God cares about you, or that at least there is some kind of meaning or justice in the universe. Otherwise it's just the cold, unfeeling place that science tells us it is.
The problem is that every time science figures out some natural process and shows that it is in fact governed by hard, unfeeling laws or simple randomness it detracts from the idea that God cares. People start to realize that instead of just having faith that he will make things work out they have to try to understand the world and control it as best they can.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Biblical creationists believe that evolution undermines the idea of divine creation, specifically the idea that man is created in God's image. This is a very important belief for them. Without it, their world crumbles.
When you present them with facts and evidence supporting evolution, they're not dispassionately evaluating the evidence, but desperately trying to avoid confronting it, to the point of profound intellectual dishonesty.
They are what used to be called neurotic, irrational and disturbed in one specific area or about one specific thing, but otherwise relatively functional human beings, able to work, raise families, etc, etc.
The answer to the question of why Biblical Creationists are like this is the same as the answer to the question of why some people are holocaust deniers, or Marxists, or followers of any other ideology or belief that is in obvious defiance of objective reality. They have invested their sense of self into this belief, and they cannot abandon that belief without sacrificing their sense of self along with it.
So they hold on to that belief, no matter what.
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
If your faith cant stand a test. It wasn't very strong.
I still can't believe we don't treat religion as a mental illness. You go around tellin everyone an invisible guy watches you all the time and tells you what to do.... They lock you up. You call that invisible guy god... And that's just a ok fine. Here have some tax exempt status.
Religion is one of the major things holding back the human race. The faster we wise up the better.
The same paradigm was the first thing that popped into my mind when I saw this topic.
From since my childhood, I was raised religious ( Baptist, Pentecostal ), and I was of the observation that the whole purpose of the Church was to teach obedience to authority. We were supposed to be sheep and "turn the other cheek". As far as I was concerned, Christianity was something like a mental computer virus which was crafted to enrich the coffers of the church and religious leaders at the expense of anyone who they could convince to take their teaching seriously. The centerpiece of the whole thing seemed to be the great ceremony of the passing of the plate, as well as getting out there and converting others to the faith. It seemed to me that being a Christian meant: 1) I would not steal anyone else's stuff, 2) I would not fight back if someone else took my stuff, and 3) I would pay a 10% tithe on everything I make to the people who taught me to do this.
What got me was this faith thing.
From personal experience, "faith" seemed to have little correlation to reality. As far as I was concerned, "faith" was what I had if I went-a-gambling; and I was told gambling was sinful. I have had faith in a lot of things. Things that should have worked, and didn't because of some unforeseen element - which became apparent to me after the fact the thing did not work as intended. Due diligence seemed to have far more effect on a positive outcome than hope.
From what I can tell of religions, it appears the ones I have been influenced by seemed that God was some sort of another word for Statistics. Maybe I would get what I prayed for, maybe I would not. I still lack conclusive evidence that God is some sort of businessman who has accounts payable and a big bag of blessings and curses which he levies on those who pay up in Church and those that drank beer on Sunday. Maybe God is Statistics. More like "What goes around comes around."
From the Bible: "In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, the word was God." ( John 1:1 ). The Word in my understanding is the basic physical laws that runs this universe. The same stuff scientists study. It was science who convinced me that there is some sort of intelligence out there which resulted in the formation of me and everything I observe. The religious people call this God, Spirit, and all sorts of other names, but it seems to be a universal human observation that we are likely not the top in the chain of command in the Universe.
I would venture to say that every religion I have encountered is very destructive to my faith in God, as they seem to try in every conceivable way to lead me into some sort of belief system where creation is some sort of business, with all sorts of freeloaders needing to be paid off in order to keep the God they refer to happy. I try to think of myself as an ethical person - and there are things I have to know for sure, not faith, before I feel comfortable trying to influence anyone else with it. I do not give investment advice for the same reason. I am often wrong. I felt very uncomfortable counseling people in grief that some tooth fairy was going to swoop down and take care of their problems. Nor could I believe that God was a force I can bargain with. The Bible has God referring to himself as: "I am that I am" ( Exodus 3:14 ).
As far as I am concerned, science verifies God. For years I have had the tagline:."Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21].
That one line of scripture, taken right out of the Bible, summarizes my whole take on it. Incidentally, it was a preacher on "The Simpsons" that turned me onto it.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
From the article: '[W]hat is true is that evolution tests faith. The fact of evolution is incontrovertible and supported by mounds of empirical evidence.
1. It is not a fact that human beings evolved from primordial goo. That would be an unsubstantiated assertion based on an extreme extrapolation of limited evidence of small-scale phenomena.
2. Therefore, "evolution" only tests misguided faith. In fact, even the idea that humans evolved from goo is not ultimately incompatible with faith in God or in intelligent design. This is because the point of ID/Creationism is not how God created, but that God created.
The idea that the Creation stories in Genesis are meant to literally describe how God created is another matter entirely, and it is the blind insistence upon this presupposition that results in so much hot air being expelled on both sides of the issue.
Faith, on the other hand, is fragile. It is supported only by the strength of human will. And this is where it gets tricky. Because to many believers, faith, not works, is the only guarantee that one can pass God's litmus test and gain access to His divine kingdom. To lose one's faith is to literally damn oneself.
That's because that's what Christ said. "Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned." Mk 16:16
So tests to that faith must be avoided at all costs. Better to be a philosophical coward than a theological failure.
Many people's faith is, sadly, based on fragile ideas like Creation stories being literal, or every word written in the Bible being intended literally. To those people, their faith would be quite jeopardized by atheists yelling loudly that there is no God, that the Bible is wrong, that we evolved from goo, etc.
Other people's faith may be based on rational thinking, such as the ideas that the universe or living beings are too complex to have happened randomly, or that the evidence of Christ's resurrection is strong. Such faith can handle Creation stories not necessarily being literal, and the idea of evolution, and the idea of the Bible being inspired by God yet composed by humans and therefore not literally perfect (or always literal).
It is a popular--and recent--misconception that faith and reasoning are incompatible. Many, if not most, of the great minds of the ages were believers in God or in other forms of religion. The idea that religious people are necessarily irrational fools is simply a lie; there are plenty of both religious and atheistic people who are irrational fools.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
"Hell-bent" doesn't mean "bent by hell", it means "bent to hell", as in "directed towards hell". The overall idiom means "fixated on achieving a goal to the extent that it causes one's ruin". This particular usage of the word "bent" has fallen out of favour, but the idiom "hell-bent" hasn't.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
This idea that an impersonal universe must be one without warmth, feeling, meaning or justice is one of the great PR success stories of religion. It's complete bollocks though.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Another point from the creationist / young earth / Intelligent Design side, ignoring any argument based on the story of creation or Adam. The young earth creationist who takes the story of Noah literally, doesn't agree with your interpretation of the fossil record and evolutionary history at all. Picture Japan's violent tsunami multiplied to a global scale, eroding away practically everything. The majority of the fossils and layered geological records then deposited as the turbulent ocean calmed down and the water receded from the land. The large flow of receding waters carved out river basins and canyons quite quickly from the soft sediments.
For someone with this world view, the "Facts" of evolution are not incontrovertible. The story of evolution, as derived from the fossil record, is based on assumptions that the creationist doesn't agree with.
That's not to say that the creationist disagrees with the facts of biology, as derived from examining living animals and how they change over time. It's the extrapolation of currently observed processes into the unknowable past that they disagree with.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
The problem is that we created god - and we obviously weren't very good engineers because the god we created seems to be a bit of an arsehole.
I occasionally interact with people who are convinced that "evilution" is taught out of a desire to attack religion and make people into amoral monsters. And they will go on, at length, about their beliefs about the "motives" of scientists. And somehow, none of the motives they invent actually fit very well with anything I see when I talk to scientists. I mean, yes, I occasionally encounter people who really do seem to have those motives, but in general they're not particularly regarded well by the scientific community.
And I occasionally interact with people who have all sorts of really strange beliefs about the "motives" of religion, and similarly, what they say has very little to do with what I mostly encounter among religious people. Although I do occasionally encounter people who appear to have those motives, but they are not regarded well by the religious community.
It seems interesting to me how well these groups parallel each other, and how well each of them plays into the other's narrative of persecution or abuse. And how much both of them rely on the assumption that you can't ask people what they think, or why they think it. Slashdot tends to have more of the people who have a very naive view of what religious faith is, or why people have it, but I've hung around on other sites that tended towards the very naive view of science, and it was just as funny there.
So far as I can tell, in the real world, the majority of religious people have beliefs that are a lot more complicated, and a lot more coherent, than the strawmen that I mostly see attacked on Slashdot. But since they don't usually go around trying to get on TV news and insist that they are the only representatives of their faith, people are less aware of them. In general, most of the time if you know someone's religious beliefs, it's because they're jerks; the non-jerks won't generally get pushy about it and tell you all about it unless you actually ask what they think. And, of course, if you've made up your mind that they're all idiots and you don't want to know, then you're the jerk whose opinions they will take as representative of people who hold your beliefs. (This goes both ways.)
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Not quite right. According to canonical Christian scriptures, God requires perfect sinlessness. The damnation comes because we are imperfect, i.e., sinners. The point of the crucifiction and resurrection was Christ acting as a substitute for the sins of humanit, defeating death, and ascending to heaven as a mediator between God and humanity. Since the price for imperfection had already been paid, those who accept it are freed from damnation. The book of Romans in the New Testament lays it all out. In your defense however, Western Christianity, particularly American Christianity, has a tendency to forget that and uses Scripture as political football (normally conservative but there is a growing liberal evangelical movement) or completely waters down the message of crucifiction in favor of therapeutic sermons and feel-good platitudes. I expect most people, even in the church, don't truly understand what Christian Scriptures actually teach.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not entirely sure about the universe - Einstein