[RickJ]

Millions of us in the world are just fine with that.

And the majority of the planet is fine with otherwise :)

























NK.[/QUOTE]

[classyT]

Hello again, asking:

That's the question!

The simple answer is YES. It turns them away, the same way growing up, turns people away from Santa Clause or the Tooth Fairy.

Indeed, when faced with objective evidence to the contrary, most people give up their childish notions - except when it comes to religion.

excon

Yes, I think I see what you mean. Look out your window. All that you see just happened?? Talk about a fairy tale. If it is a childish notion to look at the mountains, the ocean, the stars and to conclude there IS a creator.. then so be it. You say I have childish notions... I say you are being foolish.

By the way... I haven't met a grown adult who still believed in the tooth fairy or santa claus... I have met brilliant men and women that believed in a creator. It isn't childish at all. It is the beginning of wisdom.

[NeedKarma]

And the majority of the planet is fine with otherwise

I've never been one to go with the majority just because it's the majority - that whole 'thinking for yourself' thing y'know. ;)

[RickJ]

I've never been one to go with the majority just becasue it's the majority - that whole 'thinking for yourself' thing y'know. ;)

Good for you. I'm the same way; no kidding.

I'm not with the majority of the US (or the world, I might guess) on MANY issues.

I'm sure that if you and I were on my back porch having a nice beverage, we'd find we have much more in common than we disagree about :)

[NeedKarma]

I'm sure that if you and I were on my back porch having a nice beverage, we'd find we have much more in common than we disagree about :)

There is absolutely no doubt about that! I have friends of every belief (or lack of), the topic of religion rarely comes up. That pretty much in keeping with a plan to keep fanatics away from my inner circle in real life.

[RickJ]

If you're ever in Ohio, let me know: I'll feed and lubricate you and we'll have a good time :)

[NeedKarma]

I'll be flying over it in a week's time. I'll raise a drink box to you (yes it's a family vacation). :)

[RickJ]

Order a Tomato Juice and I bet you could slip the stewardess a 10 spot to secretly slip you one of those little bottles of Vodka to help the juice ;)

[asking]

yes, i think i see what you mean. Look out your window. All that you see just happened????

From my perspective, an argument for special creation is just that.

It all just appeared one day 6000 years ago. It all just happened.

That just seems like a fundamentally uninteresting proposition. I'm more interested in how and why things happened--mechanistically. For me, God isn't an interesting answer to any interesting questions.

How and why did photosynthesis come into existence?
Why do humans have hands that can wrap around a ball shaped object, unlike other primates?
Why do sediments vary in thickness and composition?

If the answer to every question is the same (God did it), it's like being in an intellectual prison.

[asking]

Maybe it is pride?

To believe in ones self or intellect alone leaves no room to consider the Creator.

Use to be doctors thought themselves as god, or so the stereotype went, but over the past several decades that is less true.

I think pride could be one factor.

Doctors used to present themselves as more godlike, which made doctors feel good, AND also contributed to the placebo effect, which is very effective. If your doctors knows all and says "you will get better," very often patients do.

But, as you say, the status of doctors has dropped a lot in the last few decades. I think many things have contributed to that, including an influx of women into the profession; patients' right and the movement toward putting the responsibility for medical decisions onto the patient (no matter how ignorant); the increasing role of insurers in dictating not only the number of patients seen in a day, but what they can prescribe, and what tests can be done; and of course the "evidence-based medicine" that results in strict guidelines, which comes from the work of the CDC and large clinical trials funded by the government. Doctors of 50 years ago were cowboys compared to today.















G&P[/QUOTE]

[Akoue]

From my perspective, an argument for special creation is just that.

It all just appeared one day 6000 years ago. It all just happened.

That just seems like a fundamentally uninteresting proposition. I'm more interested in how and why things happened--mechanistically. For me, God isn't an interesting answer to any interesting questions.

How and why did photosynthesis come into existence?
Why do humans have hands that can wrap around a ball shaped object, unlike other primates?
Why do sediments vary in thickness and composition?

If the answer to every question is the same (God did it), it's like being in an intellectual prison.

For whatever it's worth, I think it is also theologically stultifying. If theology is obliged to stop at the surface contours of the text, if no more probing question can be asked than "What does the Bible say?", any attempt at a deeper understanding of the Bible, or God, or of the spiritual life and its prospects and projects, is pre-empted before it can really begin. Theology is then limited to endless recapitulations of Biblical sound bites, quotes rolling off the tongue almost mechanically. This strikes me, at least, as a profound lack of respect, respect for--among other things--the integrity of sacred texts and the traditions that honor them.

There is a tendency in some quarters to greet with a suspicious gaze the desire to plumb whatever depths may be plumbed. There is, I mean to say, a tendency for some to stifle theological, and not just scientific, inquiry if it appears to threaten to do anything other than to parrot the texts themselves. This not only breeds contempt for science and scientific inquiry; it breeds its own contempt for religion and for the humanistic drives and urges that make religion meaningful. I will put this problematically, or hypothetically, in deference to those here who don't believe that there are genuinely sacred texts: If a text is sacred, it isn't itself an object to be worshipped; it is an invitation to a conversation in which the questions don't stop while there is breath in the questioner. To suppose otherwise is to back into the notion that the text itself cannot withstand interrogation; it is to make of the text not the beginning of a conversation but the end of all conversation.

It is worthy of note that we have come to learn a great deal about the composition of the Bible, about the conflicts that raged within the earliest Christian communities, about the ways in which the Bible was itself produced and transmitted, and about the transformations it has undergone. It was not penned by God's own hand, of course, and its transmission and diffusion has been the work of many very deeply flawed human beings. We've come to learn a great deal more about this over the last hundred years. These have to be part of the conversation, not juest between Christianity and science, but between Christianity and itself.

[Tj3]

From my perspective, an argument for special creation is just that.

It all just appeared one day 6000 years ago. It all just happened.

Actually, other than the timeframe, that sounds like the explanation for the big bang. The difference is that the big bang omits God from the event, and assumes the all this complex design occurred by chance.

That just seems like a fundamentally uninteresting proposition. I'm more interested in how and why things happened--mechanistically. For me, God isn't an interesting answer to any interesting questions.

Personally, I find God very interesting!

How and why did photosynthesis come into existence?
Why do humans have hands that can wrap around a ball shaped object, unlike other primates?
Why do sediments vary in thickness and composition?

You are working on a computer. You would make no sense to say I would like to know how this computer (a complex design) came to be, but I don't want to know anything about how it was designed or manufactured. That is not scientific - good science does not start saying "I will accept any answer except the ones that I find boring".

[asking]

Actually, other than the timeframe, that sounds like the explanation for the big bang. The difference is that the big bang omits God from the event, and assumes the all this complex design occurred by chance.

I don't about chance. But see my comments about the big bang earlier. To be frank, I'm fairly ignorant about the details of big bang theory, which may be one reason it doesn't compel my interest. But it's also because it has this "it just happened" aspect to it.

You are working on a computer. You would make no sense to say I would like to know how this computer (a complex design) came to be, but I don't want to know anything about how it was designed or manufactured. That is not scientific - good science does not start saying "I will accept any answer except the ones that I find boring".

But it would be really boring if I said "How does the computer work?" and you said, "IBM and Microsoft designed and built it." And if I asked any more questions, you got testy and said, "Microsoft works in mysterious ways. Do not question the CreatorTM." End of discussion. THAT's how religious explanations appear to me. There's no mechanism. There are certainly no design plans. No corporate history, no reason given for one design over another. Not so much as a patent application.

I really like Akoue's last post. This makes so much sense to me.

[inthebox]

From my perspective, an argument for special creation is just that.

It all just appeared one day 6000 years ago. It all just happened.

That just seems like a fundamentally uninteresting proposition. I'm more interested in how and why things happened--mechanistically. For me, God isn't an interesting answer to any interesting questions.

How and why did photosynthesis come into existence?
Why do humans have hands that can wrap around a ball shaped object, unlike other primates?
Why do sediments vary in thickness and composition?

If the answer to every question is the same (God did it), it's like being in an intellectual prison.

Photosynthesis, the genetic code, human hands, vision, life on earth:

For those that don't believe in God the answer to every question is nature or evolution or the big bang anything but the possibility of God.


Show me the proof that man and ape have the same ancestors:

You can't, because that cannot be reproduced, it can't be measured, it can't be observed.
Only ASSUMPTIONS can be made. You can't create an experiment to prove evolution because the process of coming up with an experiment requires INTELLIGENCE and forethought. Evolution is self -refuting.




That is not scientific.









G&P

[inthebox]

For whatever it's worth, I think it is also theologically stultifying. If theology is obliged to stop at the surface contours of the text, if no more probing question can be asked than "What does the Bible say?", any attempt at a deeper understanding of the Bible, or God, or of the spiritual life and its prospects and projects, is pre-empted before it can really begin. Theology is then limited to endless recapitulations of Biblical sound bites, quotes rolling off the tongue almost mechanically. This strikes me, at least, as a profound lack of respect, respect for--among other things--the integrity of sacred texts and the traditions that honor them.

There is a tendency in some quarters to greet with a suspicious gaze the desire to plumb whatever depths may be plumbed. There is, I mean to say, a tendency for some to stifle theological, and not just scientific, inquiry if it appears to threaten to do anything other than to parrot the texts themselves. This not only breeds contempt for science and scientific inquiry; it breeds its own contempt for religion and for the humanistic drives and urges that make religion meaningful. I will put this problematically, or hypothetically, in deference to those here who don't believe that there are genuinely sacred texts: If a text is sacred, it isn't itself an object to be worshipped; it is an invitation to a conversation in which the questions don't stop while there is breath in the questioner. To suppose otherwise is to back into the notion that the text itself cannot withstand interrogation; it is to make of the text not the beginning of a conversation but the end of all conversation.

It is worthy of note that we have come to learn a great deal about the composition of the Bible, about the conflicts that raged within the earliest Christian communities, about the ways in which the Bible was itself produced and transmitted, and about the transformations it has undergone. It was not penned by God's own hand, of course, and its transmission and diffusion has been the work of many very deeply flawed human beings. We've come to learn a great deal more about this over the last hundred years. These have to be part of the conversation, not juest between Christianity and science, but between Christianity and itself.

What you say, is can be said for the Darwin religion, the global warming religion.
No contrary oponion or evidence can be tolerated.








G&P

[Akoue]

What you say, is can be said for the Darwin religion, the global warming religion.
No contrary oponion or evidence can be tolerated.


G&P

Why stop there? What about the gravity religion?

I think many of us would not take too seriously someone who denied gravitational force on the grounds that it is not mentioned in the Bible.

And if the gravity-denier produced as evidence photos of astronauts floating in the space shuttle while orbiting the earth, we still wouldn't take his denial of gravity seriously.

Why? Because it isn't *evidence* that there is no such thing as gravitational force.

The problem with contrary evidence that is proposed in order to expose the falsity of evolution is that it isn't *evidence* of any such thing.

I've seen people at ths very site propose an unusually warm summer or mild winter as *evidence* that there is no global warming. But, of course, it isn't *evidence* of any such thing.

You might think that evolutionary theory and global warming are bunk. You might think proponents of these views are fanatical in their defense. But even so, and even if you're right and they're all wrong, that doesn't make what they believe a religion. That would make it an ideology.

[Akoue]

that cannot be reproduced, it can't be measured, it can't be observed.

Neither can God's existence. So, by your own reasoning, that has no place in science either.

Only ASSUMPTIONS can be made. You can't create an experiment to prove evolution because the process of coming up with an experiment requires INTELLIGENCE and forethought. Evolution is self -refuting.

That is not scientific.

This doesn't show that evolutionary theory is self-refuting. At most it would show it to be an empirically unverified hypothesis.

Moreover, while it is true that experimentation requires intelligence, evolutionary theory does not propose that evolution was or is an experiment. There's nothing "self-refuting" or contradictory about it. At worst, it's just false.

Of course, it isn't that either.

[classyT]

From my perspective, an argument for special creation is just that.

It all just appeared one day 6000 years ago. It all just happened.

That just seems like a fundamentally uninteresting proposition. I'm more interested in how and why things happened--mechanistically. For me, God isn't an interesting answer to any interesting questions.

How and why did photosynthesis come into existence?
Why do humans have hands that can wrap around a ball shaped object, unlike other primates?
Why do sediments vary in thickness and composition?

If the answer to every question is the same (God did it), it's like being in an intellectual prison.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to understand and question things. Like how it all works, why it does. We were given brains for a reason and believing in a creator doesn't make someone stupid or in a intellectual prison. I believe you can have faith and also wan to understand photosynthesis... or why sediments vary in thickness. Having faith doesn't make people 'fundamentally uninteresting."

[Capuchin]

I don't about chance. But see my comments about the big bang earlier. To be frank, I'm fairly ignorant about the details of big bang theory, which may be one reason it doesn't compel my interest. But it's also because it has this "it just happened" aspect to it.

I think it's important to stress that this is not what Big Bang theory says. It's very easy to think of the big bang happening and then moving forward in time from there, and you're right that it seems magical if you look at it from that point.

But the whole point is that if we trace the evidence backwards, then at some point it must have all been at a singularity. It says nothing about the state of the universe before the singularity because that's as far as the evidence can lead us (at the moment).

It's the same with evolution, we trace life back and we find a point where life *just appeared*. It doesn't mean that it actually just appeared from nowhere, it just means we don't have the evidence or we need to look at the evidence in a different way. We need hypotheses so that we can make predictions and search for the evidence to show that it came about through a natural process. Same deal with the big bang.

[asking]

I think it's important to stress that this is not what Big Bang theory says. It's very easy to think of the big bang happening and then moving forward in time from there, and you're right that it seems magical if you look at it from that point.

But the whole point is that if we trace the evidence backwards, then at some point it must have all been at a singularity. It says nothing about the state of the universe before the singularity because that's as far as the evidence can lead us (at the moment).

Thanks for reminding me. I guess I should read about it again. I think it's the idea of a singularity that I don't get. I have heard this word used lately to argue that in the future all matter will become information. (And not far in the future, but soon, which I can't accept.) So this isn't personally helpful, but I get your point anyway.

In contrast, I know enough about cells to be able to envision a stepwise beginning for life. But that's what knowledge does. It gives you the tools to be able to imagine or conceptualize something amazing, which is sort of my point. If I understood the math behind big bang theory, I probably wouldn't find it so unimaginable. A lot of people think that knowledge is just about believing something or not, when understanding is needed for it to be more than just belief in one thing or another.