why are blobs of a few dozen cells of sacrosanct importance to the GOP, but once that baby is born it can go fuck itself?
It's just this wacky fundamentalist principle that you shouldn't be able to kill another human being with due process. It doesn't matter if the person currently has thoughts or feelings. If it did, it would be open season on sleeping people.
As for why the GOP doesn't give every baby $5,000 when its born, like Hillary suggested, it's because we're not complete morons.
In every one of the categories that you listed, things of amazing complexity were created by less than a few thousand people in a few hundred years or less. Evolution has taken quadrillions or more organisms, and billions of years to arrive at the complexity of our modern ecosystems and the human species. And yet you insist that they are comparable!
Yes, I think that similar processes and completely different scales can be comparable.
If you don't think that directed intelligence vs. random mutation accounts for the difference in time taken, how do you account for the time discrepancy if you expect a directed intelligence to have been involved in human evolution? Is God a directionless slacker pot-head or heroin addict? Is his omnipotence and omnipresence just too busy guiding evolution on other planets in the universe? Nope, can't be the last one since God is omnipotent, can it? It's got to be a motivational issue.
I didn't suggest that evolution was directed by some kind of direct intervention by God. Metaphysically, I believe that everything in the universe exists through continual influx from God. In keeping with that, I think a likely explanation is that the influx of life causes all living things to tend towards the divine form, and this tendency over time, caused the evolution of things with human parallels, such as plants, then animals, eventually mammals, and finally an animal that was capable of manifesting freedom and rationality.
However, I wouldn't object to the completely natural explanation that there is some unknown mechanism that ties a life form's "aspirations," for lack of a better word, to directional DNA mutations. So fish that continuously wriggles up on the land to eat bugs, doesn't grow legs because every possible mutation was tried, and the all the leg-direction mutations were beneficial and accumulated, but because there is some mechanism that ties the fish's struggling on land to a pro-leg mutation directionality, that over time, with the help of with natural selection, finds morphological expression.
This is a perfectly God-free theory, but science would reject it because it is incomplete. I think that is the biggest source of irrationality in science today, that it prefers complete theories that are improbable, irrational, or fanciful, to incomplete theories that are otherwise simple and probable. It is the same problem in quantum physics. Without getting into details, I find that it is only the fact that we must assume that things are no more complex than we imagine, that ultimately dictates that we must conclude that a particle can be spread indeterminately over a region, and then collapse to a point when observed.
Or put another way, if you want an example of another evolutionary process that uses a completely random process, you're going to have to travel to another planet, because every organism on this planet is already too busy involved with the one that produced us. The problem is that totally random evolutionary processes take thousands to millions of years to show any progress and I don't see either you or me being patient enough to wait for the result.
Ignoring all the randomly-driven systems to observe in nature, just look at randomly-driven genetic algorithms in computer science. They are modeled directly on the concept of random evolution over many generations. And they are very useful in some optimization problems. (As I'm sure random mutation and natural selection is useful for optimizing a bird's beak length and width.) However, all they do is optimize. They don't develop novel complexity. I've read efforts to try show otherwise, but these have universally been laughably baseless claims.
I'm not sure who was driving and directing the evolution of languages. Perhaps the illuminati sat down and thought "Hey, wouldn't it totally rock to change all the Ps to Fs?!?!
The fact that there are such laws that defined the direction of the evolution of language over an extended area, pretty clearly shows that the evolution of language was directional and not random. Why did certain generations over an extended area, across numerous languages suddenly start preferring Fs to Ps in certain contexts? I don't know, but my best guess is that it was because of accompanying psychological evolution of the people of the region.
That is a direct contradiction to everything you've said so far. If someone walks up to me and says the Tooth Fairy exists, and I say that there is no Tooth Fairy, you've stated that I need to show evidence for my assertion, and you have never indicated that the person asserting the existance of the Tooth Fairy needs to show any evidence.
I didn't mention the person making the positive assertion until now. You apparently strongly assumed the non-existence of my requirement for evidence due to lack of evidence for my requirement for evidence. Funny, that.
If you think that both must show evidence, shouldn't the one making the initial assertion (that there is a God/Tooth Fairy) make the first display of evidence?
Both have an independent burden to back up their assertion with evidence regardless of who goes first. The presumable reason to want the person making the positive assertion to go first, is that so you can argue that his evidence is insufficient. But even if you can adequately prove that that person's evidence is insufficient for belief in the existence of X, you haven't offered evidence sufficient for the belief in the non-existence of X... unless you plan to demonstrate that every possible evidence of the belief in the existence of X is inadequate, including people who have seen and touched X.
Yes, and I'm sure the "evidence" you'll accept will have to fit what you believe to be sufficient. God/Tooth Fairy/UFOs don't exist. Evidence? Occam's razor. There, done. And there has never been a shread of evidence that God exists other than stories so old they are unverifiable and "we can't explain it so it must be God."
Occam's Razor is a justification for you to find Y a better explanation of a particular phenomenon than X. The only way that Occam's Razor amounts to evidence in favor of the non-existence of X, is if you are applying it to the totality of evidence in favor of the existence of X. If X is the Tooth Fairy, that's fairly easy to do. If X is God, it would probably take a lifetime to gather the totality of evidence for God. You'd have to look at millions of individual personal accounts of interactions with God, and apply Occam's Razor to each one. You'd have to do the same with many hundreds of accounts of PERSONAL PHYSICAL interactions with God and/or with the afterlife, in recent times and throughout history -- from the hundreds in modern times who have experienced "Near Death Experiences" to Swedenborg, who spoke with God directly and who was shown and recorded great detail from heaven and hell, to Joan of Arc, to the Apostles of Christ, to Pythagoras and Plato who derived God's existence and nature rationally, to Moses, to Zarathustra and to and Enoch, who, like Swedenborg, recorded details from the afterlife in their times, to countless other priests prophets from the far east, to India, to ancient Egypt who did likewise, and described in similar terms the infinite, timeless, creator, who is Being itself.
Anyone who claims to have shown every one of these sources to be baseless, is either lying, insane, or both.
I agree that that is excellent evidence for the mere fact of evolution. What I have a problem with is the assumption that evolution takes place by means of mutations that are random, rather than possibly directionally driven. I also have a problem with the idea that evolutionary changes are necessarily gradual. While there is no doubt that some simple linear changes are gradual, assuming that all changes are gradual does not seem consistent with the evidence, and appears to me to be done merely to accommodate the theory that all change is driven by random mutation + natural selection.
Okay, so if everybody were atheist, your proof would no longer work, but you wouldn't need a proof, because no one would be thinking about God. What would happen if God then appeared to one those atheists, and sent him to evangelize the world? One person would have first-hand proof, and everyone else would have second-hand proof of God. Would your proof of non-God work then, or would it take some number of generations for this proof to become too old to be valid (and thus requiring a new advent)?
Physical, to me, means it's made of matter and/or energy, and thus that is within the constraints of space and time. A spirit that no longer lives through a physical body, is none of those things. So while a spirit may perceive what to him is space and time, they don't have the same properties as natural space and time, and is not comprised of matter and energy. So a spirit can be real, and "substantial," but not "physical." It exists at a more fundamental level than the physical world.
First of all, legitimate spiritual beliefs are almost never legitimate bases for the prediction of natural events, such as the end of the natural world, etc.
As an aside, in the field of archeology, there is a long and embarrassing record of failed prediction by the secular archaeologists of non-existence of biblical cities. The bible has proved superior to anything else for predicting archaeological finds. But it is largely irrelevant, except to point out the silliness and arrogance of those who in the name of "science" tout the superiority of any system of thought that rejects whatever is in the Bible.
Second of all, the statement that "in almost every single case" science makes the right prediction, is absurd. Science is almost always wrong. For example there is currently something like 10 versions of String Theory. There are only two possibilities: 9 of them are wrong, or 10 of them are wrong.
Legitimate spiritual understanding is no more considered perfect and infallible than legitimate scientific understanding. There are people who have claimed infallibility or perfect knowledge in both religion and science, and they are all abominations to reason and thought. The difference is that most religions, for example Christianity, explicitly teach that, though we should strive for perfection, no one can ever be perfect but God. Science, on the other hand, has no such guiding principle, and as a result is nearly constantly under the delusion that the last-discovered degree of matter is the fundamental level, and that perfect knowledge is now within grasp. It happened with the molecule, with the atom, with the fermion, and now it's happening with the string.
If you want a prediction of natural events from spiritual understanding, here's one: There is no most fundamental particle of nature, but as long as there are scientists who are atheists, they will believe (without evidence) that the most fundamental known particles in nature are THE fundamental particles of nature, and that they are therefore close to perfect understanding of the natural world.
When I say 'there is no god', what I mean is that I havn't seen anything to suggest there is one. Much like if I'm looking at an empty table and say 'there is no spoon'. I think it comes down to human learning and culture. If a human is told 'x is true' by everyone around them since birth, then that person tends to hold to that truth quite dearly, even when they come of age and begin thinking for themselves.
Based on my admittedly limited experience, when a person comes of age they begin questioning everything they've been taught, and generally rejecting whatever they can't confirm for themselves.
Do you say "there was no Socrates," and "there was no Pythagoras"? Only a few people are on record having interacted with these people, but millions claim to have interacted with God. Hundreds claim to have seen him in person, and at hundreds more claim to have seen some aspect of the afterlife in person. If this isn't a "suggestion" of the reality of the existence of God and the afterlife, why do you presumably have a radically different standard for what suggests historical reality? I'm not saying these things should constitute proof, but they certainly constitute the "suggestion" to which you allude, meaning that to claim God's non-existence, you must presumably have some counter-evidence to override the eye-witness accounts.
Years ago, before scientific method and the knowledge we have today, people tried to explain what they didn't/couldn't understand. Various cultures have passed these beliefs down in such a way that people grow up with a belief in things they can't prove (or that others can't disprove ie. invisible flying spaghetti monsters).
So where should I be looking? books written by men in an age when superstitions were rampant and general education/intellect were far less than today? or somewhere else?
I reject the notion that there was some time in human history when intelligence was generally lessor or when superstition was generally greater. Accumulated knowledge of the natural world does not imply greater intelligence. When was this time of lessor intelligence? I assume it was well before the time of Pythagoras and Confucius? Was it also before the Egyptian Old Kingdom? If so, it was prehistoric, so how can there be evidence of lower intelligence. If not, how do people of lessor intelligence build structures of superior imagination, and at least equal engineering as us? Superstition is and was always tied to our knowledge of causation in the natural world. Science emerged out of superstition, and superstition today expresses itself largely in terms of pseudoscience. Both science and superstition are largely orthogonal to spiritual understanding, i.e. the understanding of the human spirit, of God, and of the afterlife.
For "suggestion" of the reality of God, as I suggested, you need only look to the mountain of hearsay. If you want proof, then yes, it will be necessary to start with the sacred texts themselves, or else some other guidance. As it is difficult for modern humans, with their complete inexperience with thinking outside the bounds of space and time, to understand these text, some guidance or gradual introduction is usually required for them to make sense. Regardless of the sacred text, but especially if it's the Bible, I recommend Swedenborg. His 12-volume Arcana Celestia lays down the foundation for understanding how spiritual concepts can be expressed through natural language, using the book of Genesis and half of Exodus as an example. Fair warning though, the idly curious of today can not make it through the first volume. Compared to many times in our past, today is a time virtually devoid of intellectual discipline.
The faith you claim to defend (in ghosts or other invisible entities) is immutable. Scientific knowledge is.
How could you possibly conclude that "faith" in the supernatural is immutable? Some Buddhist monks spend their entire lives in meditation trying to perfect their conception of the supernatural. Theologians and many philosophers spend their lives studying, contemplating, and praying, to perfect their understanding of the supernatural. I've spend much of my life so far doing the same. There is nothing that even approaches immutability in my understanding of God, or the spiritual world. Nearly every experience I have adds in some way to my comprehension. We Christians pray and meditate on the word of God for the purpose of further enlightenment, including the correction of our many misconceptions. And to the extend that we are willing, God obliges.
And that's just plain stupid. You can *never* prove something doesn't exist, but can easily prove something does. Why should those that make the initial assertion that something does exist need no evidence at all, but anyone that calls bullshit on their fabricated assertions must prove the absence when such proof is impossible?
It sounds like you are just trying to support having beliefs in ghosts/UFOs/gods/unicorns/whatever without having to think. Thinking must make you hurt.
To assert that something exists requires evidence. To assert that something doesn't exist also requires evidence. If you make any assertions without evidence you are making assertions without thought. There is a difference between evidence and proof. No, thinking doesn't make me hurt; listening to you trying to think on the other hand...
You left out the issue where Democrats deny science more strongly than any modern ideology on the planet opposes any aspect of scientific knowledge: Abortion.
According to science, at conception a zygote is a new and distinct organism, that organism is human, and that human is alive. There is no way around it. There is no scientific disagreement. Abortion apologists just make up their own realities that contradict every basic premise of biology.
Hardly. Republicans seem to be the only ones interested in science, rather than spouting the feel-good consensus pseudo science like the global warming clap-trap. Sen. Inhofe, for example, is probably the only national politician capable of debating climatology intelligently. People don't want scientific understanding, they want politicians who parrot their own prejudices, scientific or otherwise.
On issues of stem cell research there is no scientific debate, there is only a moral and ethical debate.
On evolution, similar to global warming, those on the Democratic side, refuse to acknowledge the limits of science and insist on treating it like a religion. Those who treat science like its about receiving blessed truths from an anointed elite, are the enemies of scientific thought. The scientific establishment is filled with many strains of thought that are purely products of imagination or ideology, with no foundations in evidence or scientific method. Without people willing to challenge such ingrained beliefs, it would be the end of science. The more people who demand evidence for "scientific" assertions, the healthier science will become.
How can a religious book be understood correctly? Everyone has a different interpretation. Everyone has a different (but one and only) path to heaven. No matter what you do, if you're destined for your heaven, you'll end up in someone else's hell. And then there are other Books, each of which also claim to be the one and only true Book.
Everyone has a different conception of reality itself. Yet there is only one objective reality. So some conceptions must therefore be closer to the truth and others further. Because all conceptions are different does not imply that there is not a reality.
There is tremendous overlap between the teachings of, e.g., Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, and ancient Egyptian religion, for one willing to look at their meanings, and not just the superficial things. Not just overlap regarding how one should live one's life, but overlap as to the nature of God himself, and the nature of judgment and the afterlife.
Saying that everyone has "a different (but only one)" path to heaven is false. Christianity has become largely like that since the reformation. While there was also good done by the reformation, the introduction of the concept that salvation is because of only belief and, not life, was a perversion, and caused the exclusivity that predominates in Christianity to this day. Most other religions don't have this degree of exclusivity, because salvation is dependent upon how you live your life, and the prescriptions for how to live your life are very similar across major all religions, excluding particular ritual. Schools of Hinduism even say that all religions are equally good, which is the other ridiculous extreme from saying that all religions are evil except for one. I am a Christian, but I follow the school of Swedenborg, which says that everyone can be saved who lives a life of repentance according to his own religion; that all in heaven acknowledge Jesus, but don't necessarily have to do so during their natural lives in order to be saved.
If a vendor I use is making a 15% markup, that may well be completely fair and just. If he's making a 75% markup, I want to know about it, and I'll certainly try to prevail upon his better nature or take my business elsewhere.
Do you haggle with cotton candy vendors? They mark up their product by around 5,000% over the cost of the raw materials.
Then you are just broken. You think that all things exist until they are defined and proven to not exist. You necessarily belive that your father rapes you every night while you are asleep and no one is watching. After all, if you think that's not the way it is, you are the one required to prove it isn't true.
I didn't say that I think everything exist until it is proven not to. I said that if you are going to claim that something does not exist, the burden is on you to supply evidence to back up your statement.
I am at the point where I have almost given up, except to always ask people to examine how they know what they proclaim to know without resorting to their feelings.
"Search your feelings, Luke. You know it to be true."
The knowledge system of Star Wars is necessarily trumps any suggested alternative on/.
Science says "we don't know the complete origin of the universe, but here are some parts we do know from observation... Again, science doesn't "guess", neither does it yet claim to know the whole picture
Science does guess. That's the scientific method. Guess, and then see how well your guess conforms with observation. It is the nature of induction. It doesn't deduce anything directly from observation. Furthermore, science can say nothing about the actual origin of the universe, or its cause; it can only form conclusions about the things that happened immediately after the origin.
Religion claims to know the whole picture, and each denomination has a completely different story that they claim as the one true story. There's nothing to support the guess that the Christian God created the universe and a Hindu god did not, but yet Christianity says "no, ours is the real story". My point being, why claim faith that Christianity proposes the true God when there's no observable proof to support it (especially only any other religion?) Shouldn't belief in a specific God require some form of proof?
First of all, all denominations of Christianity, as well as Islam, Judaism, and Hinduism, acknowledge that the one infinite, timeless God created all of nature and humanity. There is no disagreement whatsoever on that point. There is observable proof of God, and of God's influence, which is why these religions have so many adherents. However, it is internal rather than external proof. It cannot be measured by machines or even quantified, so it is outside the reach of science.
It is impossible to rationally reconcile the Bible (especially the Old Testament) with science. I presume then you don't interpret the Bible literally. Then what good is the Bible? Is it a history book? A science book? A how-to book? Or merely another work of fiction?
Although sections contain both ancient history and ancient law, it is, in its entirety a religious book. That is, when understood correctly, it informs the reader about the nature of God, the nature of man, and the nature of the relationship between the two.
Whose definition of ghost do we use when we argue about this?
Based on the phenomenon of ghost-hunting, I believe that a "ghost" would be a physical, natural, manifestation of a spirit (i.e. a dead person).
Therefore, the way I understand reality, there are no ghosts, but there are spirits. A person might see a spirit, because a person is simultaneously spiritual and natural. Even while we have a natural body, we are occasionally capable of seeing purely spiritual things or people. But we see them with the mind, not with the eyes, even though we might not be able to tell the difference. A camcorder will never see a spirit, because a camcorder is just there for the photons. So ghost-hunters relying on technology are wasting their time.
Science is a method, it requires no faith. In fact it is a method through which provides it's own falsifiable test of itself.
Any axiom is proof of its own truth, regardless of if it is true or not. Science takes a huge leap of faith that the existentialist third of the spectrum of philosophers refuse to take.
This is a rather stupid statement. Science doesn't require any faith at all; it's just a method for gaining knowledge where models are created and tested using evidence, and thrown out if contradicted by evidence.
Nonsense. Science takes enormous faith: It takes faith in an objective reality; faith in the permanence and universality of physical laws; faith in the foundations of mathematics; etc. Math is the same way, the axioms are, and must always be, a matter of instinct/intuition/perception/faith. It's quite appropriate, as "thinking" brain is built on the foundation of our "feeling" brain. People who love logic would love to find a logic proof of the foundations of math or science, but the fact that it is impossible is good for us, as it reminds us that there is a whole lot more to thinking than just logic. After all, even a computer can do logic; it's really a specialized and limited task compared to the rest of thinking.
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It's just this wacky fundamentalist principle that you shouldn't be able to kill another human being with due process. It doesn't matter if the person currently has thoughts or feelings. If it did, it would be open season on sleeping people.
As for why the GOP doesn't give every baby $5,000 when its born, like Hillary suggested, it's because we're not complete morons.
Yes, I think that similar processes and completely different scales can be comparable.
I didn't suggest that evolution was directed by some kind of direct intervention by God. Metaphysically, I believe that everything in the universe exists through continual influx from God. In keeping with that, I think a likely explanation is that the influx of life causes all living things to tend towards the divine form, and this tendency over time, caused the evolution of things with human parallels, such as plants, then animals, eventually mammals, and finally an animal that was capable of manifesting freedom and rationality.
However, I wouldn't object to the completely natural explanation that there is some unknown mechanism that ties a life form's "aspirations," for lack of a better word, to directional DNA mutations. So fish that continuously wriggles up on the land to eat bugs, doesn't grow legs because every possible mutation was tried, and the all the leg-direction mutations were beneficial and accumulated, but because there is some mechanism that ties the fish's struggling on land to a pro-leg mutation directionality, that over time, with the help of with natural selection, finds morphological expression.
This is a perfectly God-free theory, but science would reject it because it is incomplete. I think that is the biggest source of irrationality in science today, that it prefers complete theories that are improbable, irrational, or fanciful, to incomplete theories that are otherwise simple and probable. It is the same problem in quantum physics. Without getting into details, I find that it is only the fact that we must assume that things are no more complex than we imagine, that ultimately dictates that we must conclude that a particle can be spread indeterminately over a region, and then collapse to a point when observed.
Ignoring all the randomly-driven systems to observe in nature, just look at randomly-driven genetic algorithms in computer science. They are modeled directly on the concept of random evolution over many generations. And they are very useful in some optimization problems. (As I'm sure random mutation and natural selection is useful for optimizing a bird's beak length and width.) However, all they do is optimize. They don't develop novel complexity. I've read efforts to try show otherwise, but these have universally been laughably baseless claims.
The fact that there are such laws that defined the direction of the evolution of language over an extended area, pretty clearly shows that the evolution of language was directional and not random. Why did certain generations over an extended area, across numerous languages suddenly start preferring Fs to Ps in certain contexts? I don't know, but my best guess is that it was because of accompanying psychological evolution of the people of the region.
I didn't mention the person making the positive assertion until now. You apparently strongly assumed the non-existence of my requirement for evidence due to lack of evidence for my requirement for evidence. Funny, that.
Both have an independent burden to back up their assertion with evidence regardless of who goes first. The presumable reason to want the person making the positive assertion to go first, is that so you can argue that his evidence is insufficient. But even if you can adequately prove that that person's evidence is insufficient for belief in the existence of X, you haven't offered evidence sufficient for the belief in the non-existence of X... unless you plan to demonstrate that every possible evidence of the belief in the existence of X is inadequate, including people who have seen and touched X.
Occam's Razor is a justification for you to find Y a better explanation of a particular phenomenon than X. The only way that Occam's Razor amounts to evidence in favor of the non-existence of X, is if you are applying it to the totality of evidence in favor of the existence of X. If X is the Tooth Fairy, that's fairly easy to do. If X is God, it would probably take a lifetime to gather the totality of evidence for God. You'd have to look at millions of individual personal accounts of interactions with God, and apply Occam's Razor to each one. You'd have to do the same with many hundreds of accounts of PERSONAL PHYSICAL interactions with God and/or with the afterlife, in recent times and throughout history -- from the hundreds in modern times who have experienced "Near Death Experiences" to Swedenborg, who spoke with God directly and who was shown and recorded great detail from heaven and hell, to Joan of Arc, to the Apostles of Christ, to Pythagoras and Plato who derived God's existence and nature rationally, to Moses, to Zarathustra and to and Enoch, who, like Swedenborg, recorded details from the afterlife in their times, to countless other priests prophets from the far east, to India, to ancient Egypt who did likewise, and described in similar terms the infinite, timeless, creator, who is Being itself.
Anyone who claims to have shown every one of these sources to be baseless, is either lying, insane, or both.
I agree that that is excellent evidence for the mere fact of evolution. What I have a problem with is the assumption that evolution takes place by means of mutations that are random, rather than possibly directionally driven. I also have a problem with the idea that evolutionary changes are necessarily gradual. While there is no doubt that some simple linear changes are gradual, assuming that all changes are gradual does not seem consistent with the evidence, and appears to me to be done merely to accommodate the theory that all change is driven by random mutation + natural selection.
Okay, so if everybody were atheist, your proof would no longer work, but you wouldn't need a proof, because no one would be thinking about God. What would happen if God then appeared to one those atheists, and sent him to evangelize the world? One person would have first-hand proof, and everyone else would have second-hand proof of God. Would your proof of non-God work then, or would it take some number of generations for this proof to become too old to be valid (and thus requiring a new advent)?
Physical, to me, means it's made of matter and/or energy, and thus that is within the constraints of space and time. A spirit that no longer lives through a physical body, is none of those things. So while a spirit may perceive what to him is space and time, they don't have the same properties as natural space and time, and is not comprised of matter and energy. So a spirit can be real, and "substantial," but not "physical." It exists at a more fundamental level than the physical world.
First of all, legitimate spiritual beliefs are almost never legitimate bases for the prediction of natural events, such as the end of the natural world, etc.
As an aside, in the field of archeology, there is a long and embarrassing record of failed prediction by the secular archaeologists of non-existence of biblical cities. The bible has proved superior to anything else for predicting archaeological finds. But it is largely irrelevant, except to point out the silliness and arrogance of those who in the name of "science" tout the superiority of any system of thought that rejects whatever is in the Bible.
Second of all, the statement that "in almost every single case" science makes the right prediction, is absurd. Science is almost always wrong. For example there is currently something like 10 versions of String Theory. There are only two possibilities: 9 of them are wrong, or 10 of them are wrong.
Legitimate spiritual understanding is no more considered perfect and infallible than legitimate scientific understanding. There are people who have claimed infallibility or perfect knowledge in both religion and science, and they are all abominations to reason and thought. The difference is that most religions, for example Christianity, explicitly teach that, though we should strive for perfection, no one can ever be perfect but God. Science, on the other hand, has no such guiding principle, and as a result is nearly constantly under the delusion that the last-discovered degree of matter is the fundamental level, and that perfect knowledge is now within grasp. It happened with the molecule, with the atom, with the fermion, and now it's happening with the string.
If you want a prediction of natural events from spiritual understanding, here's one: There is no most fundamental particle of nature, but as long as there are scientists who are atheists, they will believe (without evidence) that the most fundamental known particles in nature are THE fundamental particles of nature, and that they are therefore close to perfect understanding of the natural world.
Based on my admittedly limited experience, when a person comes of age they begin questioning everything they've been taught, and generally rejecting whatever they can't confirm for themselves.
Do you say "there was no Socrates," and "there was no Pythagoras"? Only a few people are on record having interacted with these people, but millions claim to have interacted with God. Hundreds claim to have seen him in person, and at hundreds more claim to have seen some aspect of the afterlife in person. If this isn't a "suggestion" of the reality of the existence of God and the afterlife, why do you presumably have a radically different standard for what suggests historical reality? I'm not saying these things should constitute proof, but they certainly constitute the "suggestion" to which you allude, meaning that to claim God's non-existence, you must presumably have some counter-evidence to override the eye-witness accounts.
I reject the notion that there was some time in human history when intelligence was generally lessor or when superstition was generally greater. Accumulated knowledge of the natural world does not imply greater intelligence. When was this time of lessor intelligence? I assume it was well before the time of Pythagoras and Confucius? Was it also before the Egyptian Old Kingdom? If so, it was prehistoric, so how can there be evidence of lower intelligence. If not, how do people of lessor intelligence build structures of superior imagination, and at least equal engineering as us? Superstition is and was always tied to our knowledge of causation in the natural world. Science emerged out of superstition, and superstition today expresses itself largely in terms of pseudoscience. Both science and superstition are largely orthogonal to spiritual understanding, i.e. the understanding of the human spirit, of God, and of the afterlife.
For "suggestion" of the reality of God, as I suggested, you need only look to the mountain of hearsay. If you want proof, then yes, it will be necessary to start with the sacred texts themselves, or else some other guidance. As it is difficult for modern humans, with their complete inexperience with thinking outside the bounds of space and time, to understand these text, some guidance or gradual introduction is usually required for them to make sense. Regardless of the sacred text, but especially if it's the Bible, I recommend Swedenborg. His 12-volume Arcana Celestia lays down the foundation for understanding how spiritual concepts can be expressed through natural language, using the book of Genesis and half of Exodus as an example. Fair warning though, the idly curious of today can not make it through the first volume. Compared to many times in our past, today is a time virtually devoid of intellectual discipline.
How could you possibly conclude that "faith" in the supernatural is immutable? Some Buddhist monks spend their entire lives in meditation trying to perfect their conception of the supernatural. Theologians and many philosophers spend their lives studying, contemplating, and praying, to perfect their understanding of the supernatural. I've spend much of my life so far doing the same. There is nothing that even approaches immutability in my understanding of God, or the spiritual world. Nearly every experience I have adds in some way to my comprehension. We Christians pray and meditate on the word of God for the purpose of further enlightenment, including the correction of our many misconceptions. And to the extend that we are willing, God obliges.
To assert that something exists requires evidence. To assert that something doesn't exist also requires evidence. If you make any assertions without evidence you are making assertions without thought. There is a difference between evidence and proof. No, thinking doesn't make me hurt; listening to you trying to think on the other hand...
You left out the issue where Democrats deny science more strongly than any modern ideology on the planet opposes any aspect of scientific knowledge: Abortion.
According to science, at conception a zygote is a new and distinct organism, that organism is human, and that human is alive. There is no way around it. There is no scientific disagreement. Abortion apologists just make up their own realities that contradict every basic premise of biology.
Hardly. Republicans seem to be the only ones interested in science, rather than spouting the feel-good consensus pseudo science like the global warming clap-trap. Sen. Inhofe, for example, is probably the only national politician capable of debating climatology intelligently. People don't want scientific understanding, they want politicians who parrot their own prejudices, scientific or otherwise.
On issues of stem cell research there is no scientific debate, there is only a moral and ethical debate.
On evolution, similar to global warming, those on the Democratic side, refuse to acknowledge the limits of science and insist on treating it like a religion. Those who treat science like its about receiving blessed truths from an anointed elite, are the enemies of scientific thought. The scientific establishment is filled with many strains of thought that are purely products of imagination or ideology, with no foundations in evidence or scientific method. Without people willing to challenge such ingrained beliefs, it would be the end of science. The more people who demand evidence for "scientific" assertions, the healthier science will become.
Everyone has a different conception of reality itself. Yet there is only one objective reality. So some conceptions must therefore be closer to the truth and others further. Because all conceptions are different does not imply that there is not a reality.
There is tremendous overlap between the teachings of, e.g., Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, and ancient Egyptian religion, for one willing to look at their meanings, and not just the superficial things. Not just overlap regarding how one should live one's life, but overlap as to the nature of God himself, and the nature of judgment and the afterlife.
Saying that everyone has "a different (but only one)" path to heaven is false. Christianity has become largely like that since the reformation. While there was also good done by the reformation, the introduction of the concept that salvation is because of only belief and, not life, was a perversion, and caused the exclusivity that predominates in Christianity to this day. Most other religions don't have this degree of exclusivity, because salvation is dependent upon how you live your life, and the prescriptions for how to live your life are very similar across major all religions, excluding particular ritual. Schools of Hinduism even say that all religions are equally good, which is the other ridiculous extreme from saying that all religions are evil except for one. I am a Christian, but I follow the school of Swedenborg, which says that everyone can be saved who lives a life of repentance according to his own religion; that all in heaven acknowledge Jesus, but don't necessarily have to do so during their natural lives in order to be saved.
Do you haggle with cotton candy vendors? They mark up their product by around 5,000% over the cost of the raw materials.
Okay, fine, it proves it beyond any shadow of a doubt. Have fun with your comic book science.
I didn't say that I think everything exist until it is proven not to. I said that if you are going to claim that something does not exist, the burden is on you to supply evidence to back up your statement.
No, you should be charged with treason. (Since you obviously don't know what treason is, you can't possibly object.)
"Search your feelings, Luke. You know it to be true."
The knowledge system of Star Wars is necessarily trumps any suggested alternative on
Science does guess. That's the scientific method. Guess, and then see how well your guess conforms with observation. It is the nature of induction. It doesn't deduce anything directly from observation. Furthermore, science can say nothing about the actual origin of the universe, or its cause; it can only form conclusions about the things that happened immediately after the origin.
First of all, all denominations of Christianity, as well as Islam, Judaism, and Hinduism, acknowledge that the one infinite, timeless God created all of nature and humanity. There is no disagreement whatsoever on that point. There is observable proof of God, and of God's influence, which is why these religions have so many adherents. However, it is internal rather than external proof. It cannot be measured by machines or even quantified, so it is outside the reach of science.
Although sections contain both ancient history and ancient law, it is, in its entirety a religious book. That is, when understood correctly, it informs the reader about the nature of God, the nature of man, and the nature of the relationship between the two.
Based on the phenomenon of ghost-hunting, I believe that a "ghost" would be a physical, natural, manifestation of a spirit (i.e. a dead person).
Therefore, the way I understand reality, there are no ghosts, but there are spirits. A person might see a spirit, because a person is simultaneously spiritual and natural. Even while we have a natural body, we are occasionally capable of seeing purely spiritual things or people. But we see them with the mind, not with the eyes, even though we might not be able to tell the difference. A camcorder will never see a spirit, because a camcorder is just there for the photons. So ghost-hunters relying on technology are wasting their time.
Any axiom is proof of its own truth, regardless of if it is true or not. Science takes a huge leap of faith that the existentialist third of the spectrum of philosophers refuse to take.
Nonsense. Science takes enormous faith: It takes faith in an objective reality; faith in the permanence and universality of physical laws; faith in the foundations of mathematics; etc. Math is the same way, the axioms are, and must always be, a matter of instinct/intuition/perception/faith. It's quite appropriate, as "thinking" brain is built on the foundation of our "feeling" brain. People who love logic would love to find a logic proof of the foundations of math or science, but the fact that it is impossible is good for us, as it reminds us that there is a whole lot more to thinking than just logic. After all, even a computer can do logic; it's really a specialized and limited task compared to the rest of thinking.
So if everyone in the world were an atheist, you would lose your proof that God doesn't exist? Now I'm getting confused.