How many people here believe in God, Heaven and angels, Hell and Satan and his demons

[Dion]

Originally Posted by Hemi-Cuda

when you boil it right down, every religion has about as much credibility as Scientology, everyone's favorite whipping post

It's garbage like this that keeps me out of these discussions.

Surely we discuss the issues without mocking people for thier beliefs. It's in poor taste and insulting.

[Thor]

[FireFly]

Originally Posted by photon

What feels right in your heart though is a result of your life experiences, if you had been raised in a different area of the world, what felt right would be different. Which is why what religion a person is is determined primarily by where they are.

Possible. And yet all over the world people convert to various things. Christians in China, etc. I've taken a number of religious studies courses to expose myself to various religions. I like the philosophies of many. My being Christian is a result of my beleiving in Jesus Christ. Not because I don't think the others are wrong.

Please don't take a lack of understanding of something and turn it into a shortcoming in that thing.

I've also taken a number of courses in geology, archaeolgy, etc. I understand the theories quite well, thank-you. I also understand the reasons scientists say there are holes. I don't think it fills in the holes. If you beleive that the explaination is sufficient, good for you. Alas, 'good enough' doesn't mean it's correct.

You say there is too much that science will never be able to explain.. never is a long time, that's a very bold claim, you should provide some support for that.

Where does science ever say "you'll just have to trust us"? If science doesn't know something it clearly says "I don't know". Are you uncomfortable with the answer "I don't know"?

Maybe that's a root cause of religion in some, the inability to deal with "I don't know" as an answer?

There's a lot of stuff I don't know. There's a lot of stuff I don't care about as well. It doesn't bother me. You seem to have a lot of faith that science will indeed eventually answer your questions. Again, it boils down to the same thing. For a very long time, scientist held fast to the indisputable truth that the earth was flat. They were proven wrong. There are things we know now that will be proven false in the future.

I never claimed to KNOW there's a God. I believe it. Science tells me to trust it when it says that it's explainations are sufficient to fill the gaps.

[RougeUnderoos]

Originally Posted by alltherage

OK so by your logic if you are confident in your sexuality, you don't mind being called a f*ggot. If you are confident in being chinese you don't mind being called a chink. If you are a woman you don't mind when someone says "get back in the kitchen".

I'm a gay Chinese short-order cook, so that entire paragraph is offensive to me.

ANYWAY, since this has veered off into a certain direction, maybe you can tell us why the picture is specifically offensive and/or wrong. What parts of it don't at least some Christians believe (ignoring the word zombie)?

[photon]

Originally Posted by FireFly

Possible. And yet all over the world people convert to various things. Christians in China, etc. I've taken a number of religious studies courses to expose myself to various religions. I like the philosophies of many. My being Christian is a result of my beleiving in Jesus Christ. Not because I don't think the others are wrong.

True people do covert from one thing to another, but I didn't say that where someone is is the sole indicator of what religion they will be, just the primary one.

Originally Posted by FireFly

I've also taken a number of courses in geology, archaeolgy, etc. I understand the theories quite well, thank-you.

Your questions would seem to indicate otherwise. For example, you say "And isn't it fantastic how each species fills a niche perfectly?", that you would even put this up as an example of a hole in evolution demonstrates you do not understand evolution.

You talk about huge holes like they weaken science, but the opposite is true.. the holes are usually very well understood, the questions that the new theory must answer are very well defined.

Originally Posted by FireFly

I also understand the reasons scientists say there are holes. I don't think it fills in the holes. If you beleive that the explaination is sufficient, good for you. Alas, 'good enough' doesn't mean it's correct.

I don't get what you are trying to say here. If there is a hole that just means there is a lack of information, or a lack of understanding, or insufficient imagination with respect to creating a new hypothesis. It's not like science just throws up its hands and says "we'll never understand this".

Science is never "correct", not in the sense of being right or being True. Science is accurate or inaccurate.

There was a time when gravity was not understood, and now we understand it a lot better, if you lived in a time when gravity was not understood do you look at that and say "there's a hole science will never fill therefore... what? God?"

Originally Posted by FireFly

There's a lot of stuff I don't know. There's a lot of stuff I don't care about as well. It doesn't bother me. You seem to have a lot of faith that science will indeed eventually answer your questions.

No, it's not faith. Because science had demonstrated repeatedly over time that it can "answer" any question about the natural world, given enough information and imagination. That's not faith, that's trust based on a demonstrated history. You don't have faith that the airplane you are boarding will fly, you trust it will because every other airplane properly built and piloted flies.

Originally Posted by FireFly

Again, it boils down to the same thing. For a very long time, scientist held fast to the indisputable truth that the earth was flat. They were proven wrong. There are things we know now that will be proven false in the future.

Of course there are.. gravity as we know it is wrong, and we KNOW it's wrong. We even know how it is wrong, and we know how a new theory of gravity must look to address the current theory's deficiencies.

There's two problems with what you say here. First is you use the words "indisputable truth". Science makes no claims to be "indisputable truth". In fact quite the opposite, science fully admits that all knowledge is transient, every theory is simply the best theory available at any time to explain a given phenomenon. That is it's fundamental strength.

Second, you seem to think that when things are shown to be wrong in science, that somehow the old theory gets tossed out. This is not true.

The earth is not flat, but if you are working with a small enough area of its surface, you can safely treat it as flat and still come out with accurate answers to questions. The earth is not a sphere, but for some things you can safely treat it as a sphere.

Gravity again is a good example. Einstein completely changed how gravity is viewed, however Newton's theories about gravity are still very much valid, as long as you don't go too fast or space doesn't curve too much. You can put up satellites or go to the moon without Einstein, but for GPS to operate or to calculate the orbit of Mercury Newton isn't enough.

More on this here: http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScien...ityofWrong.htm

Originally Posted by FireFly

I never claimed to KNOW there's a God. I believe it. Science tells me to trust it when it says that it's explainations are sufficient to fill the gaps.

But you claim to know that there are things that science will never be able to explain... again care to support that?

I don't see how science is telling you to trust it in saying that its explanations are sufficient to fill in the gaps. As I said it's quite the opposite, gaps are very much understood and defined in science, and science doesn't say "trust us", it says "I don't know, good question, lets try to find an answer".

To fill a gap with God in my mind does two things.. it limits God, confining God to an ever smaller set of roles, and it presumes an answer that isn't necessary (every other physical phenomenon has been explained through natural processes, why does this one all of a sudden get God plugged in).

[Antithesis]

Originally Posted by photon

So really since science doesn't have a good answer for the process or the bigger picture, to be disquieted by characterizing it as a random accident is premature; wait until they call it a random accident first

Very much appreciate your contributions to these threads photon. I guess I was more searching to say, "I find the possibility of all of this being a random accident troubling" (like ... basically Thor's posted image), rather than, "I find the belief or statement that everything is a random accident is troubling ..."

I guess in a way, to me, when you keep asking the 'up one level' questions ... it starts becoming unanswerable or "filled with holes" on each side. I guess you could always go with cognito ergo sum and leave it there ... takes a lot off the mind!

[photon]

That's very true, both sides lead to an infinite regress at some point.. I guess the difference for me is that while on one side the infinite regress is stopped with special pleading (i.e. God has no creator), science doesn't deny it it just keeps going up the levels figuring things out, and reserving any kind of comment on the next level until there's enough information to comment.

[Thor]

Originally Posted by Antithesis

Very much appreciate your contributions to these threads photon. I guess I was more searching to say, "I find the possibility of all of this being a random accident troubling" (like ... basically Thor's posted image), rather than, "I find the belief or statement that everything is a random accident is troubling ..."

I guess in a way, to me, when you keep asking the 'up one level' questions ... it starts becoming unanswerable or "filled with holes" on each side. I guess you could always go with cognito ergo sum and leave it there ... takes a lot off the mind!

I'm far from a reliable opinion on this, but with my broad obsession of reading science blogs on various fields, I get a feeling that something like the multiverse theory and what Photon touched on that our known galaxy is a drop of water in infinate drops of water might be where we are headed in regards to making some sense of these things.

Its postulated that in our particular galaxy the conditions are exactly as they are because in other multiverses there are infinate possibilities as regards to laws of physics. So even though our universe might seem to some to be 'finely tuned' to allow life to exist, its only one of infinate others where they would be hostile to such life.

Remember our planet, solar system and universe are not friendly to life, but because of the vastness of our galaxy we can even imagine millions of planets with life, even moons.

To me a creator would have made a completely different galaxy than the one we live in, its very illogical and messy to suggest its all created for our glory.

But for me, I'm often asked by religious friends how I can live without the inspiration of God, and I'm equally curious as to why they don't see the massive wonderment of physics, biology, chemistry and all the amazing questions we are trying to tackle.

I get goosebumps talking with my friend about our shared passion, study of mind. The depths to which wonder exists in that search for knowledge is simply underappreciated and unkown to so much of our world.

That to me is sad, and my hope is more that instead of defeating religion we focus on educating and inspiring more people into science because ultimately its one of the most rewarding things in my life and for those close to me who also share this passion its constanly changing, exciting and endlessly challenging my everyday beliefs and preconceptions of everything.

[Sample00]

since we are having this discussion, I'll post this link here that was just sent to me by a business colleague.
Interesting stats or fear mongering?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-3X5hIFXYU

[FireFly]

I was going to quote photon and pick it apart, but it jumps around so I'll just say this...

The holes I was talking about are actually the large gaps in evolution that we can see to which science says "well, we just haven't found the things that fill those yet, or there was erosion or some such other thing that destroyed our ability to find it." Also the things which seem to come out of nowhere and are lightyears ahead of evolution in some cases, or lightyears behind in others...

There's a humanoid specimen, I can't rightly remember the name of right now, near the Phillipines that was found to be with higher thought, (archeological evidence has them using tools and fire and such before others,) yet a smaller brain than other humans. Those are the kinds of holes in the theory I am talking about. I don't doubt that species evolve at all... I doubt that it explains everything science thinks it does or should. And I know they aren't throwing out the theory of evolution, nor should they.

When I was taught evolution, I was taught that the earth created us out of nothing basically, and that we all evolved from the same gunk to fit our different niches. I just think it's rather amazing that they still teach that (or I guess they did 5 years ago,) when there are glaring issues with that. (Don't worry, they acknowledged the holes, but also sluffed them off with the excuses I gave previously.) They also acknowledged their ability to recreate the scenario based on what they know of the earth's atmosphere at the time result in ZERO sucess. Yet they still said it must've happened. (Qualifying it with we can't be positive of the makeup of the atmosphere a billion years ago.) Strange, eh? When I questioned my prof on it, (So what you're saying is that knowing that the atmosphere contained XYZ elements, regardless of the composition you give to those elements, there is no way that you can create a life giving/sustaining atmosphere such as was required for earth to develop life as it did?) he told me that no, there was no way, (yet,) that they could do so. Thousands of experiments, and there is NO WAY that the earth, with the atmosphere it contained at the time, could have developed life. Interesting. New theories are needed indeed.

[RougeUnderoos]

Originally Posted by Sample00

since we are having this discussion, I'll post this link here that was just sent to me by a business colleague.
Interesting stats or fear mongering?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-3X5hIFXYU

"Fearmongering" doesn't quite do it justice.

I think I've seen that before. Maybe in this here OT board.

Whoever put that together can't even count.

[photon]

A gap in the fossil record isn't a gap in evolution, it's just a gap in the fossil record. No one expects to find a record of every different form, fossilization is a rare process, so I'm not sure how that classifies as a gap or an excuse.

And I see what you mean, yes the specific details of how something happened, ho much brain mass impacts intelligence, etc are always being explored and revised, but that's not really a problem with evolution as a whole.

When you talk about the earth creating us out of nothing, that's not evolution, that's abiogenesis, and that's still a very young and fluid field so I wouldn't expect a general school education to be very strong in that area. But to say there's been zero success is quite incorrect, even the Miller-Urey experiment in which they recreated the atmosphere resulted in 22 different amino acids, and that was 60 years ago. There are quite a few different ideas about abiogenesis, your characterization of it having zero success or that there was no way it could have happened is very misleading.

And once you have a self replicating molecule, evolution can take effect.. so I still don't understand how evolving to fit a niche is a problem; descent with modification and natural selection predicts that's exactly what should happen. Remember everything has a common ancestor, it's not like every organism that's filling a niche has to evolve from inanimate matter on its own. Abiogenesis only has to occur once.

EDIT: And of course it must have happened, unless you are claiming we aren't here. Now you can have different hypothesis on HOW it happened (aliens, special creation, natural combination of chemicals), but you can't deny that it happened.

[Hemi-Cuda]

Originally Posted by Knalus

This is a close second for making the world a worse place to live. It's real fun to mock people's beliefs, isn't it? Feel big now, I assume? What did that win you, making a post like this? Respect? Bonus points? An intellectual leg-up on the discussion? Now I can see why it seemed surprising to other posters yesterday that the site was civil - posts like this weren't around. See that? People were proud this wasn't here. But you thought you should put it up anyways.

you don't win 10 internets by just sitting around doing nothing

[FireFly]

Originally Posted by photon

A gap in the fossil record isn't a gap in evolution, it's just a gap in the fossil record. No one expects to find a record of every different form, fossilization is a rare process, so I'm not sure how that classifies as a gap or an excuse.

And I see what you mean, yes the specific details of how something happened, ho much brain mass impacts intelligence, etc are always being explored and revised, but that's not really a problem with evolution as a whole.

When you talk about the earth creating us out of nothing, that's not evolution, that's abiogenesis, and that's still a very young and fluid field so I wouldn't expect a general school education to be very strong in that area. But to say there's been zero success is quite incorrect, even the Miller-Urey experiment in which they recreated the atmosphere resulted in 22 different amino acids, and that was 60 years ago. There are quite a few different ideas about abiogenesis, your characterization of it having zero success or that there was no way it could have happened is very misleading.

And once you have a self replicating molecule, evolution can take effect.. so I still don't understand how evolving to fit a niche is a problem; descent with modification and natural selection predicts that's exactly what should happen. Remember everything has a common ancestor, it's not like every organism that's filling a niche has to evolve from inanimate matter on its own. Abiogenesis only has to occur once.

Yes but abiogenesis in the experiment only worked when they went outside of the known facts about our atmosphere at time. So when going within the confines of our atmosphere, they had zero success. It's like on Mythbusters when they get the result they want, but they have to use bigger explosives than what the myth said. The myth itself still fails.

[Thor]

Talkorigins response to this common abiogenesis question.

The most primitive cells are too complex to have come together by chance. (See also Probability of abiogenesis.)

Response:

1. Biochemistry is not chance. It inevitably produces complex products. Amino acids and other complex molecules are even known to form in space.
2. Nobody knows what the most primitive cells looked like. All the cells around today are the product of billions of years of evolution. The earliest self-replicator was likely very much simpler than anything alive today; self-replicating molecules need not be all that complex (Lee et al. 1996), and protein-building systems can also be simple (Ball 2001; Tamura and Schimmel 2001).
3. This claim is an example of the argument from incredulity. Nobody denies that the origin of life is an extremely difficult problem. That it has not been solved, though, does not mean it is impossible. In fact, there has been much work in this area, leading to several possible origins for life on earth:
   • Panspermia, which says life came from someplace other than earth. This theory, however, still does not answer how the first life arose.
   • Proteinoid microspheres (Fox 1960, 1984; Fox and Dose 1977; Fox et al. 1995; Pappelis and Fox 1995): This theory gives a plausible account of how some replicating structures, which might well be called alive, could have arisen. Its main difficulty is explaining how modern cells arose from the microspheres.
   • Clay crystals (Cairn-Smith 1985): This says that the first replicators were crystals in clay. Though they do not have a metabolism or respond to the environment, these crystals carry information and reproduce. Again, there is no known mechanism for moving from clay to DNA.
   • Emerging hypercycles: This proposes a gradual origin of the first life, roughly in the following stages: (1) a primordial soup of simple organic compounds. This seems to be almost inevitable; (2) nucleoproteins, somewhat like modern tRNA (de Duve 1995a) or peptide nucleic acid (Nelson et al. 2000), and semicatalytic; (3) hypercycles, or pockets of primitive biochemical pathways that include some approximate self-replication; (4) cellular hypercycles, in which more complex hypercycles are enclosed in a primitive membrane; (5) first simple cell. Complexity theory suggests that the self-organization is not improbable. This view of abiogenesis is the current front-runner.
   • The iron-sulfur world (Russell and Hall 1997; Wächtershäuser 2000): It has been found that all the steps for the conversion of carbon monoxide into peptides can occur at high temperature and pressure, catalyzed by iron and nickel sulfides. Such conditions exist around submarine hydrothermal vents. Iron sulfide precipitates could have served as precursors of cell walls as well as catalysts (Martin and Russell 2003). A peptide cycle, from peptides to amino acids and back, is a prerequisite to metabolism, and such a cycle could have arisen in the iron-sulfur world (Huber et al. 2003).
   • Polymerization on sheltered organophilic surfaces (Smith et al. 1999): The first self-replicating molecules may have formed within tiny indentations of silica-rich surfaces so that the surrounding rock was its first cell wall.
   • Something that no one has thought of yet.

http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB010_2.html

[Thor]

Originally Posted by FireFly

Yes but abiogenesis in the experiment only worked when they went outside of the known facts about our atmosphere at time. So when going within the confines of our atmosphere, they had zero success. It's like on Mythbusters when they get the result they want, but they have to use bigger explosives than what the myth said. The myth itself still fails.

This is still 'God of the gaps' approach, where you find something that has yet to be understood or explained and say 'Aha! See God is in that gap of understanding.'

But we continually keep filling in gaps in science, and god has less of them now than he did last year

Abiogensis is something I'm confident we'll understand and even be able to replicate in the future, how far into the future I have no idea.

But because we don't know, I personally feel inserting God as the answer is no answer at all.

[photon]

Originally Posted by FireFly

Yes but abiogenesis in the experiment only worked when they went outside of the known facts about our atmosphere at time. So when going within the confines of our atmosphere, they had zero success. It's like on Mythbusters when they get the result they want, but they have to use bigger explosives than what the myth said. The myth itself still fails.

Source? This sounds like a common claim on creationist websites.

And I disagree with the claim that when going with different mixtures of the early earth's atmosphere they had zero success.. what I've read shows that different mixtures of the atmosphere result in MORE amino acids and such, not less.. the only scenario I know of that would result in less would be in a much more oxygen rich atmosphere, but there's little evidence that that was the case 4 billion years ago.

And even if you could completely discount the Miller-Urey experiment, that's only one avenue of research. Do some reading on current research on abiogenesis, there's a great number of places it could have taken place, clay, thermal vents, crystals, many different environments.

More info: http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB035.html

Heck, a metorite was found that contained 90 different amino acids (including 19 which are used in life on earth), and many organic compounds are detected in deep space. So even if conditions were never right to form the necessary organic compounds on earth, they still could have come from space.

So I still really don't understand your position here.. there's currently no good theory of abiogenesis, so you are saying what exactly? That God started life and then all the forms of life we see evolved from there? What happens if in 10 years they completely reproduce a natural process which leads to life that looks just like ours?

EDIT: Too slow!

[flamingreen]

Originally Posted by FireFly

Yes but abiogenesis in the experiment only worked when they went outside of the known facts about our atmosphere at time. So when going within the confines of our atmosphere, they had zero success. It's like on Mythbusters when they get the result they want, but they have to use bigger explosives than what the myth said. The myth itself still fails.

That is not true at all. They used the components that they believed were present during early earth's atmosphere. They didn't go outside of the known facts, like you just did.

Edit: Even slower.

[Thor]

From the ongoing science thread, this latest key work on Abiogenesis:

Life's first spark recreated in the labratory

A fundamental but elusive step in the early evolution of life on Earth has been replicated in a laboratory.

Researchers synthesized the basic ingredients of RNA, a molecule from which the simplest self-replicating structures are made. Until now, they couldn’t explain how these ingredients might have formed.
“It’s like molecular choreography, where the molecules choreograph their own behavior,” said organic chemist John Sutherland of the University of Manchester, co-author of a study in Nature Wednesday.

RNA is now found in living cells, where it carries information between genes and protein-manufacturing cellular components. Scientists think RNA existed early in Earth’s history, providing a necessary intermediate platform between pre-biotic chemicals and DNA, its double-stranded, more-stable descendant.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/20...bonucleotides/

[FireFly]

Originally Posted by flamingreen

That is not true at all. They used the components that they believed were present during early earth's atmosphere. They didn't go outside of the known facts, like you just did.

Edit: Even slower.