Predict the 1st Banning for uncivil behavior in the new Religious Threads...

[Timjoebillybob]

I sincerely appreciate it, but I will decline. I'm not in the same place I was in those days, I've found what I sought and am quite happy with my current faith.

I've avoided it because it is irrelevant to the larger discussion, but there are contradictions..

If you have found peace in your currant faith that is okay. But the offer still stands. It's coming up on summer so they are most likely doing grilling and picnic food. I make okay bbq beans, pretty decent potato salad (if you like the northern style) and a damned good strawberry shortcake. The meats they provide which will probably be burgers and hotdogs. Let me know if you wish to come and what of the above you and you family would like. Or heck come to my house, I and my wife will cook (Well I'll cook and she will help). She's Catholic raised I'm Lutheran raised, although we both currently attend for the most part a Methodist church. If you and your wife and family have any dietary restriction let me know.

And yep there are contradictions, but you are a police officer. How often do witness accounts match up exactly? But does the general account usually prove true?

Oh well. Time to take the gloves off I guess

1) If this was an adult conversation neither of us would feel the need to resort to condescension

3) It's spelled 'farce' and reread my post. I said the argument is over root cause. I did not say it was necessarily human driven

4) I do keep up with science. The preponderance of evidence indicates the universe is most definitely expanding. Do you have a citation for this new particle
'they' are 'looking into'? What month's Popular Mechanics was that in?

5) So, for example, building the LHC to search for the Higgs wasn't a 'new' idea? How many burgers did those scientists flip at the CERN canteen to fund it?

Compare #1 to #3, 4 and 5. Taking the gloves off means being childish?

And we were doing so good too

I think we still are, considering it at a whole.

. Failed, filthy, unworthy humans reached out to by an all powerful, righteous and all loving God could not be done without God also being full of Grace and being long sufferingly patient. Praise, ALL my praise is to the only one worthy of it,

I don't believe we are failed, filthy, unworth. Some umong us may be, but not as as a whole. God made us in his image, for us all to be what you said, what does that say about God.

 

[D-Ric902]

This is where you and I differ greatly:

Example:
What were Jesus' actual last words?
If the "gospel" stories are to be seen as reliable at all, shouldn't they at least agree on the details?

Also, since Jesus was supposed to be God incarnate, why didn't He write His message down Himself? Would that not have saved some trouble down the road? A book penned by the literal hand of the incarnate God? Even better if He did if after the "resurrection".

Speaking of the ressurection: why didn't He stay? Why didn't He usher in the Kingdom of Heven Then?

It makes sense if it is fiction.

I thought you tried religion.

Any time in bible study and doctrine would answer these questions.

it seems (with respect) like you never got past Sunday School

 

[Timjoebillybob]

This is where you and I differ greatly:

Example:
What were Jesus' actual last words?
If the "gospel" stories are to be seen as reliable at all, shouldn't they at least agree on the details?

Also, since Jesus was supposed to be God incarnate, why didn't He write His message down Himself? Would that not have saved some trouble down the road? A book penned by the literal hand of the incarnate God? Even better if He did if after the "resurrection".

Speaking of the ressurection: why didn't He stay? Why didn't He usher in the Kingdom of Heven Then?

It makes sense if it is fiction.

For Jesus last words. See this What were Jesus' last words on the cross? Although it could also be explained by asking any LEO about witness acounts. The general story is the same the exact details of them may differ. Why should he, he didn't come to earth to write the gospel, he came to earth to sacrifice himself to save us. And why didn't he stay to usher in the Kingdom of Heaven? God gave man free will. It's up to us to do so, and IMO at least were failing miserably. At least until he feels it's failed and brings upon the apocalypse which will probably be done by man's hand.

 

[CathyInBlue]

Here is an important point about probability. If there are enough
possible events with very low probability then it is likely that at
least some of them will occur. Or, if an event with low probability
is given a large number of opportunities, then its chance of happening
at some time may be quite large. What would be really unusual is if
nothing unusual ever happened.

Consider this example. Let's say that something has a 1.0E-10
probability. If there are 1.0E+10 such independent events, then the
probability that none of them happens is only about 1/e, or about 0.37.

Does that make sense? Write again if you need more help.

- Doctor George, The Math Forum
The Math Forum - Ask Dr. Math

To put his numbers in the more common mathematic vernacular, if something has a 1 in 10,000,000,000 (ten billion) chance of happening in a given reaction in a given environment, but the reaction happens ten billion times, it's true probability approaches 1 chance in e, e being one of those strange universal constants, like Pi, that keeps proving itself useful across multiple disciplines. e's value is 2.71828, so, for simplicity's sake, we can call it 3. A 1 in 3 chance is pretty good for a single phenomenon in a single environment.

Now, consider that the phenomenon we're talking about is life arising from random chemical reactions in a primordial soup on a primitive planet in a newly formed solar system. The fact that we're discovering exoplanets by the hundreds doesn't make extra-terrestrial life less likely. It's making the probability of extra-terrestrial life (UFOs) more likely, to the point of titanium plated, iron clad assurity. See, it's not that the one in ten billion chance phenomenon gets ten billion chances to planet A and if it fails (2/3 chance), the phenomenon ceases to try there and moves on to planet B, where if it fails (2/3 chance), the phenomenon moves on to planet B, etc., etc. It's that the phenomenon which has a 1 in ten billion chance to happen in a given reaction that happens ten billion times on a single planet, but the environment that hosts that reaction is shared simultaneously across not that one planet, but ten billion planets, so it's not just 10 billion reactions in which the one in ten billion phenomenon might happen, but a 100 billion billion (1.0E20, 100,000,000,000,000,000,000, or 100 quintillion) reactions. It's probability is not 1/e. It's probability is now a statistical assurity. You can play in the margins of those exponentials all you like, adjusting how much time the primitive planet can have before its oceans can no longer host those particular chemical reactions, the probability of the self-replicating phenomenon assuming critical mass and not being destroyed immediately, the amount of the necessary ingredients the primitive planet could have, and all you're doing is statisticly arguing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

And we know that life did happen on one planet, ours. The probability that opponents of materialism and a mechanistic origin for life are truly arguing against is that it couldn't possibly have happened anywhere else in the vast universe, ever., that life absolutely could not have arrisen anywhere at anytime… except here. Because we're special. We told ourselves so.

It's the exact same kind of special we believed we were, when we believed our sun revolved around our Earth, and proponents of divine absolutes murdered people in attempts to preserve that religious truth.

To be sure, there are similar statistic expoentials mitigting against finding extra-terrestrial life, the speed of light (radio waves), the period of technologic developement leading to interstellar travel and not to self-destruction, etc. It's all in the Drake Equation. So religious folks can salve their faith that though a statistical assurity on par with the sun rising tomorrow in the east, statistics also provides all humanity with blindfolds that allow them to deny that the sun is even there.

 

[CathyInBlue]

Why the insistence on making it science vs religion?

Hmmm. This is a good enough question to warrant a thread of its very own, but I'll give it a shot… right after breakfast.

 

[T.Lex]

But given the civility I think INGO has demonstrated that prohibition is unnecessary.

So - we can start drinking again?

(But please, not vinegar. Unless we can get some EVOO, some pepper and garlic, and a nice tossed salad.)

(No, not THAT tossed salad.)

(Unless that's what you're into. And we can start drinking again.)

Anyway, the science v. religion thing is funny. At some levels, science is as much dependent on articles of faith as religions. Complete with patron saints.

 

[jamil]

If only all religion were history.

Cathy, this isn't directed at you, but since you brought it up, I have to ask the atheists, why do so many of you want all religion to end? Why do you hate freedom? (couldn't help myself)

Seriously, have you had such negative experiences with religion that you've developed a grudge against it? I don't think I've encountered many atheists who don't have a "they did me wrong" story. I can't think of any I've encountered that have utter contempt for religion, especially Christianity, that doesn't have one of those kinds of stories. So what? Blame the individuals who did you wrong. It's been my experience that, irrespective of belief, unless they are psychotic, there is a decision people must make to hurt people. And people hide behind a veil of 'belief' to do it. If those people did not have religion to hide behind, they'd invent some other kind of belief. Idunno, like Stalinist communism. It's not 'belief' I blame, but the individual who wields it for greedy purposes.

I'm not a believer, but I don't call myself an Atheist for a couple of reasons.

1) Definition. I don't loathe religion, and many of the more militant atheists have created a defacto definition of themselves as, not just "non-believers" but religion haters. I value belief as the ultimate execution of individual sovereignty. It's not my business what you believe or to approve or disapprove of your belief. My nose is too damn big to be able to see you while looking down upon you.

Religious, or not religious, I don't care what you think or why you act. I only care about whether actions negatively impact me or others. I don't hate religion, I hate caring too much that someone else dares to believe something that I don't. That means, if you want to believe the world would be so much better without some particular belief, okayfinewhatever. Believe that. Just don't act on it.

2) though I don't think a supernatural being created everything, and I don't believe there is life after death, I wasn't there when everything came into being, and I haven't yet died. Since it's not possible for me to look everywhere god could be to say he doesn't exist, I'm not gonna completely rule it out, but I strongly suspect we're on our own. To me, there doesn't NEED to be a meaning to life. I don't care why I am; I don't need an answer to that. So, for me, 42 is indeed an adequate answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything.

 

[BehindBlueI's]

And yep there are contradictions, but you are a police officer. How often do witness accounts match up exactly? But does the general account usually prove true?

That's why I said it's irrelevant to the larger discussion. It certainly doesn't disprove the faith or the general narrative. It does show the book is not infallible nor 100% literal truth, though, which was my larger point. Some folks insist it is, and they must either ignore these or they must do some odd mental gymnastics to square them. Once you move past the insistence its a strictly literal and 100% factual account, those issues disappear. "It was a scribe's error" is a perfectly legitimate and acceptable answer if you do not need 100% accuracy.

In the end, I don't really care what anyone believes (and not in the "I could care less" dismissive but in the "it doesn't really matter much" vein). Debates on othodoxy seldom lead anywhere that is helpful. Orthopraxy is of much greater concern. Do you look after the weak? Are you charitable in act and deed? None of us lives up to our ideals, but do you try?

If you go to a church or a synagogue or a temple or a mosque, all is irrelevant to me. Have you taken the universal lessons of how to behave toward your fellow man and attempted to apply them to the best of your ability? Again, something I routinely fail at, but that's the goal.

"Do not argue with the followers of earlier revelation otherwise than in a most kindly manner-unless it be such of the as are bent on evil-doing-and say: "We believe in that which has been bestowed from on high upon us, as well as that which has been bestowed upon you; for our God and your God is one and the same, and it is unto Him that we all surrender ourselves."

 

[IndyDave1776]

So, for the sake of argument let's say every single piece of science we know is wrong. Would that mean religion is right? Which one?

Why the insistence on making it science vs religion?

To me there is no reason to choose between the two. Science is merely a mechanism by which God allows us to understand His creation

Interesting thoughts. BBI raises a good rhetorical question demonstrating that the hypothetical condition of all science being wrong does not prove any religion any more that establishing that a certain suspect did not commit a crime proves that I did it. This leads into the excellent response from mbills.

What is not really addressed is the fact that (here, again, all generalizations break down) there are a number of atheists often including some of the more prominent scientists in our society, who treat faith with open contempt. Regardless of the quality of the message, it tends to be rejected, especially when written by the messenger himself, when it comes pre-loaded with hostility. Case in point, I had the occasion to encounter Carl Sagan in person. I walked in understanding that he and I held beliefs which are not fully compatible. I walked out thoroughly despising the man. He was just that nasty and mean-spirited. Unfortunately, to most people of faith, that is what an atheist is--someone who treats them like mental midgets for believing in 'fairy tales', much in the same way that several among us have had the absence of faith reinforced by preachers and church folk who are in need of a major attitude correction.

To put his numbers in the more common mathematic vernacular, if something has a 1 in 10,000,000,000 (ten billion) chance of happening in a given reaction in a given environment, but the reaction happens ten billion times, it's true probability approaches 1 chance in e, e being one of those strange universal constants, like Pi, that keeps proving itself useful across multiple disciplines. e's value is 2.71828, so, for simplicity's sake, we can call it 3. A 1 in 3 chance is pretty good for a single phenomenon in a single environment.

OK, let me tackle this from a religious layman's perspective. Please note that I am not disagreeing with your statement per se, but rather addressing its plausibility to someone who honestly doesn't understand it in any but the most vague of terms.

1. It is counterintuitive to suggest that as the odds of something happen get astronomically small they improve to 1/3. I am not even saying that it doesn't work out that way in practice, just that to my ear it sounds like borrowing your way out of debt. I would also point out that there is much in the realm of faith that works the same way. I discovered that after developing faith thing that just don't make sense in the realm of conventional reason work in practice, which, incidentally leads me to be more incline to accept what you said here than I otherwise would have been, especially when I would consider science to be the study of God's creation in a technical rather than theological sense.

2. Even taking away the astronomically small odds of any particular beneficial change happening and improving it to 1/3, I am left to wonder how it is that on one hand we are routinely told that we will destroy the world if some obscure microbe goes extinct, yet we are also told that things evolved slowly over an incomprehensible span of time. How is this even possible? To oversimplify, if one takes creation literally (which I do, but that is irrelevant to teh discussion at this point) the plants at most had to survive a couple of days without insects to pollinate them. How could interdependent life forms have gone for millennia without those other forms on which they were dependent, and then how would having the ability to be self-existent and devolving into a dependent state square with natural selection and the improvement which is considered to be part and parcel of darwinism?

3. Why do we not see evolution still taking place? Why do we not see any offspring taking on traits of ancestors which presumably should still be found within their genetic code?

There are some things I will likely not be willing to accept on account of faith but on the other hand that doesn't mean that I reject science either, much in the same way that automobile owners who do not understand their cars well enough to work on them themselves do not necessarily believe that their cars run on black magic and the mechanics are practitioners thereof.

 

[IndyDave1776]

That's why I said it's irrelevant to the larger discussion. It certainly doesn't disprove the faith or the general narrative. It does show the book is not infallible nor 100% literal truth, though, which was my larger point. Some folks insist it is, and they must either ignore these or they must do some odd mental gymnastics to square them. Once you move past the insistence its a strictly literal and 100% factual account, those issues disappear. "It was a scribe's error" is a perfectly legitimate and acceptable answer if you do not need 100% accuracy.

Personally, in this case, I find the mental gymnastics to be easy.

With the amorphous numbers, I rest on my understanding of the history of Biblical translation, and conclude that it is a translation or clerical error. There are also points where, especially in the Old Testament, some of the Hebrew expressions can offer pitfalls in translation that remind me of a friend whose property is between two highways (with just enough space for one property facing each highway back to back), and if surveyed measuring from one you get different results than surveying from the other. I would not argue that every Bible you may pick up is free of error. I would argue that the original is free of error, subsequent translation and copying foibles notwithstanding. Of course, I could probably get a pretty long thread going on the subject of proper methods and quality of Bible translation. The bottom line is that this is a very good reason to be picky about the translation you use and understanding the proper criteria about which to be picky.

As for things like the last words of Christ, I find it easy enough to conclude that the last thing one person heard Him say may not have been the absolute last thing He said. After all, He most likely was not speaking in clear, authoritative tones as when speaking to the crowds of thousands when drawing His last few breaths making it entirely possible for each witness to have failed to hear everything He said.

 

[T.Lex]

There are some things I will likely not be willing to accept on account of faith but on the other hand that doesn't mean that I reject science either, much in the same way that automobile owners who do not understand their cars well enough to work on them themselves do not necessarily believe that their cars run on black magic and the mechanics are practitioners thereof.

Clarke's Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Also, I recently revisited some of the apocryphal gospels. This from Thomas resonated with me (again):

77. Jesus said, "I am the light that is over all things. I am all: from me all came forth, and to me all attained.

Split a piece of wood; I am there.

Lift up the stone, and you will find me there."

Think about the context and the LHC. At the time the gospels were written, the smallest anything could be is a grain of sand or a mustard seed. Moreover, the polytheistic world had god and goddesses that could basically only be in 1 place at a time. That was what was revolutionary about Judaism - God was everywhere. (I think other monotheistic groups like Zoroastrianism still had a "bodily" or 1-place-at-a-time type god.)

The idea expressed in the Thomas quote is that God is everywhere that we might look for him. Is there a "smallest" particle? Just when we think there is, we discover something smaller. Or something new is discovered that changes whether we think it is "smaller" or not. Can that continue forever?

I dunno, but on another internet forum a long time ago, a discussion similar to this resulted in a scientist friend ridiculing me (and other believers) by saying a "God of the Gaps" was foolish. Instead, I'm ok with that.

Science has always had gaps, and always will. There's nothing wrong with exploring those gaps - in fact, we probably have an obligation to do that. I love me some science. But science and religion are not mutually exclusive (including evolution). In fact, I find that the complexities that science reveals can be proof of God's wonder. But that's me. And I'm not angry about it or anything.

 

[BugI02]

To put his numbers in the more common mathematic vernacular, if something has a 1 in 10,000,000,000 (ten billion) chance of happening in a given reaction in a given environment, but the reaction happens ten billion times, it's true probability approaches 1 chance in e, e being one of those strange universal constants, like Pi, that keeps proving itself useful across multiple disciplines. e's value is 2.71828, so, for simplicity's sake, we can call it 3. A 1 in 3 chance is pretty good for a single phenomenon in a single environment.

Now, consider that the phenomenon we're talking about is life arising from random chemical reactions in a primordial soup on a primitive planet in a newly formed solar system. The fact that we're discovering exoplanets by the hundreds doesn't make extra-terrestrial life less likely. It's making the probability of extra-terrestrial life (UFOs) more likely, to the point of titanium plated, iron clad assurity. See, it's not that the one in ten billion chance phenomenon gets ten billion chances to planet A and if it fails (2/3 chance), the phenomenon ceases to try there and moves on to planet B, where if it fails (2/3 chance), the phenomenon moves on to planet B, etc., etc. It's that the phenomenon which has a 1 in ten billion chance to happen in a given reaction that happens ten billion times on a single planet, but the environment that hosts that reaction is shared simultaneously across not that one planet, but ten billion planets, so it's not just 10 billion reactions in which the one in ten billion phenomenon might happen, but a 100 billion billion (1.0E20, 100,000,000,000,000,000,000, or 100 quintillion) reactions. It's probability is not 1/e. It's probability is now a statistical assurity. You can play in the margins of those exponentials all you like, adjusting how much time the primitive planet can have before its oceans can no longer host those particular chemical reactions, the probability of the self-replicating phenomenon assuming critical mass and not being destroyed immediately, the amount of the necessary ingredients the primitive planet could have, and all you're doing is statisticly arguing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

And we know that life did happen on one planet, ours. The probability that opponents of materialism and a mechanistic origin for life are truly arguing against is that it couldn't possibly have happened anywhere else in the vast universe, ever., that life absolutely could not have arrisen anywhere at anytime… except here. Because we're special. We told ourselves so.

It's the exact same kind of special we believed we were, when we believed our sun revolved around our Earth, and proponents of divine absolutes murdered people in attempts to preserve that religious truth.

To be sure, there are similar statistic expoentials mitigting against finding extra-terrestrial life, the speed of light (radio waves), the period of technologic developement leading to interstellar travel and not to self-destruction, etc. It's all in the Drake Equation. So religious folks can salve their faith that though a statistical assurity on par with the sun rising tomorrow in the east, statistics also provides all humanity with blindfolds that allow them to deny that the sun is even there.

Exceptionally well said. I will mention that scripturally, god in no way limited himself to creating life only here. The book only deals with his relation to us. My Faith tells me that what I choose to believe can/will never be 'proven', thats why it's faith. Some people find that bewildering and some find it infuriating. I hope most of them will just accept it and move on.

 

[BugI02]

Cathy, this isn't directed at you, but since you brought it up, I have to ask the atheists, why do so many of you want all religion to end? Why do you hate freedom? (couldn't help myself)

Seriously, have you had such negative experiences with religion that you've developed a grudge against it? I don't think I've encountered many atheists who don't have a "they did me wrong" story. I can't think of any I've encountered that have utter contempt for religion, especially Christianity, that doesn't have one of those kinds of stories. So what? Blame the individuals who did you wrong. It's been my experience that, irrespective of belief, unless they are psychotic, there is a decision people must make to hurt people. And people hide behind a veil of 'belief' to do it. If those people did not have religion to hide behind, they'd invent some other kind of belief. Idunno, like Stalinist communism. It's not 'belief' I blame, but the individual who wields it for greedy purposes.

I'm not a believer, but I don't call myself an Atheist for a couple of reasons.

1) Definition. I don't loathe religion, and many of the more militant atheists have created a defacto definition of themselves as, not just "non-believers" but religion haters. I value belief as the ultimate execution of individual sovereignty. It's not my business what you believe or to approve or disapprove of your belief. My nose is too damn big to be able to see you while looking down upon you.

Religious, or not religious, I don't care what you think or why you act. I only care about whether actions negatively impact me or others. I don't hate religion, I hate caring too much that someone else dares to believe something that I don't. That means, if you want to believe the world would be so much better without some particular belief, okayfinewhatever. Believe that. Just don't act on it.

2) though I don't think a supernatural being created everything, and I don't believe there is life after death, I wasn't there when everything came into being, and I haven't yet died. Since it's not possible for me to look everywhere god could be to say he doesn't exist, I'm not gonna completely rule it out, but I strongly suspect we're on our own. To me, there doesn't NEED to be a meaning to life. I don't care why I am; I don't need an answer to that. So, for me, 42 is indeed an adequate answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything.

To me it seems like the two extremes of the Bell curve, the militantly religious and the irreligiously militant. Because I am Christian some people want to automatically count me on their side, because I can an do quote science some people cannot fathom how I can be a believer. I'm much happier in the middle of that curve, where people accept ME, a life signifying very little to anyone except me and mine. To the extent that I touch other peoples lives, I can only hope the effect is positive.

 

[BugI02]

If you have found peace in your currant faith that is okay. But the offer still stands. It's coming up on summer so they are most likely doing grilling and picnic food. I make okay bbq beans, pretty decent potato salad (if you like the northern style) and a damned good strawberry shortcake. The meats they provide which will probably be burgers and hotdogs. Let me know if you wish to come and what of the above you and you family would like. Or heck come to my house, I and my wife will cook (Well I'll cook and she will help). She's Catholic raised I'm Lutheran raised, although we both currently attend for the most part a Methodist church. If you and your wife and family have any dietary restriction let me know.

And yep there are contradictions, but you are a police officer. How often do witness accounts match up exactly? But does the general account usually prove true?



Compare #1 to #3, 4 and 5. Taking the gloves off means being childish?



I think we still are, considering it at a whole.



I don't believe we are failed, filthy, unworth. Some umong us may be, but not as as a whole. God made us in his image, for us all to be what you said, what does that say about God.

Compare #1 to #3, 4 and 5. Taking the gloves off means being childish? Has to do with what I was responding to, but mea culpa. ALWAYS need to work on that 'turn the other cheek' thing and the 'soft words turneth away wrath thing'.

 

[BugI02]

For Jesus last words. See this What were Jesus' last words on the cross? Although it could also be explained by asking any LEO about witness acounts. The general story is the same the exact details of them may differ. Why should he, he didn't come to earth to write the gospel, he came to earth to sacrifice himself to save us. And why didn't he stay to usher in the Kingdom of Heaven? God gave man free will. It's up to us to do so, and IMO at least were failing miserably. At least until he feels it's failed and brings upon the apocalypse which will probably be done by man's hand.

"How long shall they kill our prophets, While we stand aside and look?
Some say it's just a part of it,
We've got to fulfill de book." - Mr Bob Marley in Redemption Song One of my favorite ways to answer his question

 

[Doug]

"Do not argue with the followers of earlier revelation otherwise than in a most kindly manner-unless it be such of the as are bent on evil-doing-and say: "We believe in that which has been bestowed from on high upon us, as well as that which has been bestowed upon you; for our God and your God is one and the same, and it is unto Him that we all surrender ourselves."

This quote sounds like it may be from the Koran; is it?

 

[JettaKnight]

Good golly, where has this thread come from? (TL/DR) And where is it going? But since it went this way, I'll add to the fray...

For those that struggle with the young earth vs. science vs. old earth vs. gap vs. new fangled theory, I present to you:
The Lost World of Genesis One

Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate


It does a really good job of explaining the creation story using sound hermeneutics in a way that disconnects Genesis One from a scientific explanation of creation, yet makes the account so much more meaningful to Christians (and I'm pretty far on the literal fundamentalist end of the scale).

Basically, the creation account is not an exact account of the physics, botany, biology, etc. We, in our physical matter, scientific method, driven culture have taken the creation account to a level of detail it was never intended to provide. Perhaps this is driven from our ego that we know everything and our interpretation is right and the everything in the future will prove we're right - despite epic failures in the past of men with that mindset.

The ancient Israelites weren't looking for the physical origins of the world, but a functional explanation. While all of the Bible is for everyone and all time, we must remember that Genesis was written to the those Israelites, we need to read it that way and not try to pretend it was written to us and our way of interpreting text.* In other words it explains, why was the world created and by who, not how was the world created. When read in the right context, the passage becomes clearer, deeper and more profound. You can see how it relates to many other passages and isn't just a dry story with all sorts of, "wait? how does that work?" question that I had before.

So how was the world created? 6 days? Millions of years? The Bible doesn't say. Which is liberating, really. Now there's no religion vs. science, no young earth vs. old earth. Science and religion should never be at odds - God gave us scientific reasoning! Furthermore, Christianity has and always will stand up to scientific scrutiny.

The creation account gives us what we need to know - the relationship of God to the world. The details of creation is a mystery, like so many other things.


* This is the basis of hermeneutics.

 

[BehindBlueI's]

This quote sounds like it may be from the Koran; is it?

Yes.

 

[BugI02]

Interesting thoughts. BBI raises a good rhetorical question demonstrating that the hypothetical condition of all science being wrong does not prove any religion any more that establishing that a certain suspect did not commit a crime proves that I did it. This leads into the excellent response from mbills.

What is not really addressed is the fact that (here, again, all generalizations break down) there are a number of atheists often including some of the more prominent scientists in our society, who treat faith with open contempt. Regardless of the quality of the message, it tends to be rejected, especially when written by the messenger himself, when it comes pre-loaded with hostility. Case in point, I had the occasion to encounter Carl Sagan in person. I walked in understanding that he and I held beliefs which are not fully compatible. I walked out thoroughly despising the man. He was just that nasty and mean-spirited. Unfortunately, to most people of faith, that is what an atheist is--someone who treats them like mental midgets for believing in 'fairy tales', much in the same way that several among us have had the absence of faith reinforced by preachers and church folk who are in need of a major attitude correction.



OK, let me tackle this from a religious layman's perspective. Please note that I am not disagreeing with your statement per se, but rather addressing its plausibility to someone who honestly doesn't understand it in any but the most vague of terms.

1. It is counterintuitive to suggest that as the odds of something happen get astronomically small they improve to 1/3. I am not even saying that it doesn't work out that way in practice, just that to my ear it sounds like borrowing your way out of debt. I would also point out that there is much in the realm of faith that works the same way. I discovered that after developing faith thing that just don't make sense in the realm of conventional reason work in practice, which, incidentally leads me to be more incline to accept what you said here than I otherwise would have been, especially when I would consider science to be the study of God's creation in a technical rather than theological sense.

Here goes. Some models in physics suggest its possible for a proton to decay into a neutron. The half life of this decay is estimated at 10E32 years. The universe is not nearly old enough to see it IF YOU'RE WATCHING ONE PARTICULAR PROTON. But there are a REALLY large number of protons in the universe. Given that sample size, if the prediction for this type of decay is correct, it is happening all the time. The Drake equation and the likelihood of life on other worlds deal in smaller numbers but lead to the same statistical certainty

2. Even taking away the astronomically small odds of any particular beneficial change happening and improving it to 1/3, I am left to wonder how it is that on one hand we are routinely told that we will destroy the world if some obscure microbe goes extinct, yet we are also told that things evolved slowly over an incomprehensible span of time. How is this even possible? To oversimplify, if one takes creation literally (which I do, but that is irrelevant to teh discussion at this point) the plants at most had to survive a couple of days without insects to pollinate them. How could interdependent life forms have gone for millennia without those other forms on which they were dependent, and then how would having the ability to be self-existent and devolving into a dependent state square with natural selection and the improvement which is considered to be part and parcel of darwinism?

Lets take ocean acidification and reef death. The organisms that make up coral reefs developed the ability to efficiently create their carbonate skeletons in a narrow range of ocean pH using certain chemical pathways. Evolution will have optimized this process over a long period of time. As we pump more CO2 into the air, the oceans are absorbing some (actually, a lot) and the ocean pH is dropping (becoming more acidic). The reactions pathways these creatures have come to depend on no longer work as well, leading to more fragile skeletons and greater mortality. If evolution preserves these creature, selection pressure will push them towards a different set of reaction pathways IF THEY HAVE TIME. The evolution that optimized them for a given pH would have occurred in small steps over thousands of years. The changes we are making have occurred in less than one hundred and they are having trouble keeping up. Same thing would happen if vulcanism pumped massive amounts of sulfur aerosols into the atmosphere, its one of the reasons we can and do have mass extinction. The ability to observe evolution in a life form is inversely proportional to its generational span. The only organisms we can hope to see evolve in realtime live very short lives indeed

3. Why do we not see evolution still taking place? Why do we not see any offspring taking on traits of ancestors which presumably should still be found within their genetic code?

​Just one of many places you could see this, relative to taking on the traits of ancestors, look at the street dogs in any third world city. Without man interfering in their breeding they home in on a few geno- and phenotypes that are more ancestral dog. Depending on who you believe, it took btw 20 and 40000 years to create todays dogs from wolves, so its a little early to look for them to devolve into wolves

There are some things I will likely not be willing to accept on account of faith but on the other hand that doesn't mean that I reject science either, much in the same way that automobile owners who do not understand their cars well enough to work on them themselves do not necessarily believe that their cars run on black magic and the mechanics are practitioners thereof.

Cant Let CIB do all the work

 

[CathyInBlue]

Ugh! Anyone tried those "Mile-High Bacon, Egg, and Cheese Biscuits" as Hardees? Give `em a pass. It's definitely not a mile of bacon, but it is at least a half-mile of fat and gristle. Bacon meat content is utterly unchanged from their regular BEC biscuit. I'll have to take a nap before tackling that religion vs. science thing.

1. It is counterintuitive to suggest that as the odds of something happen get astronomically small they improve to 1/3. I am not even saying that it doesn't work out that way in practice, just that to my ear it sounds like borrowing your way out of debt. I would also point out that there is much in the realm of faith that works the same way. I discovered that after developing faith thing that just don't make sense in the realm of conventional reason work in practice, which, incidentally leads me to be more incline to accept what you said here than I otherwise would have been, especially when I would consider science to be the study of God's creation in a technical rather than theological sense.

Okay, what you're missing is the time and space aspect. If I roll a 10 billion-sided die one time, the chances that it will come up 4,562,893,559 (or any other specific number between 1 and 10 billion) is incredibly small. In fact, it's one in 10 billion. If I increase the size of my die to 100 quintillion, my odds of rolling 4,562,893,559 do not improve. In fact, they become markedly worse, one in 100 quintillion. However, with my 10 billion-sided die, there are three things I can do, three courses of action I can take, to markedly improve my chances of rolling 4,562,893,559 at least once. 1) I can roll that 10 billion-sided die 10 billion times and stop as soon as I get a 4,562,893,559. 2) I can roll 10 billion identical copies of that 10 billion-sided die, all at once and look for just one that landed on 4,562,893,559. 3) I can send those 10 billion copies of the same 10 billion-sided die to 10 billion different places and have each one of them rolled 10 billion times in succession and stop the whole experiment when any one of them lands on 4,562,893,559. No. 1 takes a lot more time, but can be done in very little space. No. 2 takes a lot more space, but takes almost no time. No. 3 takes a lot more time and a lot more space. The universe has time and space in abundance, so it's exercising option 3, and it doesn't have to stop after it rolls 4,562,893,559 just once, so it's rolling lots and lots of 4,562,893,559s.

Consider the Birthday Paradox. (May not actually be a paradox.) You, Indy Dave, have a birthday. Let's say it's X. (Precisely what X is is not relevant.) There are 365 (366 in a leap year) days in a year, so X can have any one value from a pool of about 365 values. If we put you in a room with Joe Smith, You know nothing of Joe Smith, and Joe knows nothing about you, what are the odds that you and Joe Smith were born on the same day? That question is mathematicly identical to the question of, "What are the odds that Joe Smith has a birthday that is one specific, pre-determined day out of the 365/366 possible?" Your birthday. That's easy. The odds that you and Joe Smith, two random people, have the same birthday is 1 in about 365.25. Now, we place you in a room with Carl MacDugahan and Mary Jones. None of you knows anything about the other two. NOW, what are the chances that some pair of three random people share the same birthday? It's the exact same phenomenon, which has a 1:365.25 chance of happening for any comparison, but now, you're running it twice, once with Carl and once with Mary. Simplisticly, you now have a 2:365.25 chance of having the same birthday as either Carl or Mary, however, what if Carl and Mary are the ones who share the same birthday and it's not yours? That actually drops your chances of having the same birthday as either of them to 1:365.25, but the chances of that happening is itself 1:365.25, so your odds of having the same birthday as two other random individuals is 2:365.25 less 1:133,407.5. To simplify, we simply ask the question, "What are the chances that any two people in a room of N people share the same birthday?" Now, let's ask a degenerate version of that general question by picking a specific value for N. Let's say, N=366.

What are the chances, in a room filled with 366 total strangers, that there is at least one pair of people who share the same birthday, whatever that birthday may be?

Pretty damn high.

There might be some weirdo with a birthday of Feb. 29 that would make it possible for everyone to have different birthdays, but if we bump N up to 367, I think we can all see that the probability in question doesn't just approach 1, it is one. There is zero possibility that, in a group of 367 random individuals, no one shares a birthday with anyone else. We can prove this by exhaustively polling the 367 random people. Even with someone born on a leap day, after polling the 366th person, we will have listed every possibility in our Earth-bound calendar and have the 367th person yet to poll. That person would have to give a day that has already been given by at least one other person.

No matter how astronomicly improbable a thing such as life arising mechanicly from purely materialistic natural law, the universe has the time and the space in which to run the experiments randomly. The probability of life happening at all becomes 1, if the universal constants are finely tuned to allow it. The idea that they would be so finely tuned as to allow it only once is the impossibility.

2. Even taking away the astronomically small odds of any particular beneficial change happening and improving it to 1/3, I am left to wonder how it is that on one hand we are routinely told that we will destroy the world if some obscure microbe goes extinct, yet we are also told that things evolved slowly over an incomprehensible span of time. How is this even possible? To oversimplify, if one takes creation literally (which I do, but that is irrelevant to teh discussion at this point) the plants at most had to survive a couple of days without insects to pollinate them. How could interdependent life forms have gone for millennia without those other forms on which they were dependent, and then how would having the ability to be self-existent and devolving into a dependent state square with natural selection and the improvement which is considered to be part and parcel of darwinism?

Simple. Good enough.

Life does not have to be perfect. Life just has to work well enough.

The first life-like molecules were nothing like the DNA. They were just molecules that could self-replicate well enough.

The first single-celled organisms were nothing like our modern bacteria. They were just sacks of protoplasm that were able to self-replicate well enough.

Even today, there are aspects of every animal that we can find examples of in other animals that function better, but for that animal, living in its niche/environment, that feature works well enough. Our own eyeball has a blindspot where our optic nerve attaches and there are no rods or cones to detect light from a specific direction. The octopus's eyeball has an optic nerve that attaches from the back of its retina. It has no blindspot. It can see better than we can. Does that mean homo sapiens fails as a species? No, because our eyes work well enough for us in our land-dwelling environments.

Did you know that we are all symbiotic organisms at the cellular level? There are two basic kinds of single-celled organisms: eukaryotes and prokaryotes. The most basic difference? Eukaryotes have mitochondria. Prokaryotes do not. There are still prokaryotic microbes living on Earth today, but they are out competed to a huge degree by their more biologicly evolved cousins, the eukaryotes. Why? What advantage does the mitochondria give to eukaryotes? The mitochondria is called the powerhouse of the cell. It takes in the raw material of the nutrients the cell as a whole feeds on and gives the rest of the cell the energy it needs to function. A euke (for short) can feed off more and more varied food sources, and so spends far less of its time moving around (expending energy) looking for some specific food source. A proke is less active because it can only function while it is in an environment that makes obtaining its nutrients easier. Where did this mitochondria come from? It's a prokaryote itself. The mitochondria has its own DNA, separate from that of its host cell. The mitochondria long ago figured out that by forming a symbiotic relationship with another cell, the two are greater than the sum of their parts. The mitochondria gets the protection of living inside another cell, and that cell gets the benefit of a much larger energy budget, allowing it to do more things.

The human animal is made up of specialized, eukaryotic cells. Our DNA is primarily that of the encapsulating cells, not of the mitochondria. The father only contributes that outer DNA, not the mitochondrial DNA. Your mitochondrial DNA comes almost completely unchanged from your mother who formed you in her womb. For this reason, humans (and other relatively highly evolved species) have within us a ticking biologic clock in our mitochondria DNA. Changes in this DNA happen slowly. Since they've given up sexual reproduction themselves and only live an asexual existence in us, their only means of genetic diversification is mutation. It is tracing back the generations upon generations of human mitochondrial DNA mutations that we can say that homo sapiens separated from all other branches of the simian family tree 100,000 to 200,000 years ago, because we can see our present day cousins, the great apes, have a similar, but different, lineage back to some common ancestor.

It's like looking at Fords and Dodges. It's not at all straight forward to take modern Dodge parts and put them on a Ford or vice versa. Bolts and screws are different. Electronics modules have different plugs and the plugs that perform the same functions are wired differently. But, if you run the clock backward, you'll see them get more and more similar, back to the time that the Dodge brothers worked for Ford and built Ford cars and trucks. Chimpanzees are not going to further evolve into humans any more than a Dodge is going to continue to evolve into a Ford. We're all on our own evolutionary arcs into our individual futures, no matter how much we appear similar now, we will only ever be cousins.

The vast majority of mutations are not beneficial. Human medicine is now replete with known gene mutations which cause disease. The Peltier girl held hostage by DCF thugs has a mutation in her mitochondria that means her body does not function as well as it otherwise could. In the past, all such people with disadvantageous mutations would simply die young and not have the opportunity to pass faulty genes on. Our bodies do not work well enough because of genetic mutation, but largely despite it. One element of evolution as described by Darwin is superfecundity. Far more creatures are born than can live. This includes entire species. Through random mutation, two species are created from one, and they now compete against each other. One species got a random mutation. The other did not. The species with the mutation might be benefitted by their mutation and compete better than the parent species, killing off the parent species by out-competing it. More likely, the species with the mutation is inhibitted by their mutation and the parent species competes better against it, killing off the mutated species by out-competing it. We see the most vibrant specieation in places where this competition is muted, Galapagos, Australia, because these competition pressures are lesser with fewer individuals competing.

Sometimes, the speciation isn't even via mutation, but through cooperation of different species. We are symbiotes at the genetic level with our mitochondria hitching a ride, but we're also symbiotes at the cellular level. There are fauna living in our guts, completely unrelated to us in any genetic fashion, without which, we would starve and die. One of the mechanisms of death by radiation poisoning is that the radiation kills off these microbes that live in our intestines that help us digest the wide range of foods that we can subsist on. Once our intestinal fauna are all gone, killed off my radiation, we can no longer finish digesting our food into a form that can be taken up by our blood stream and thereby delivered to our cells from which our mitochondria can derive energy. In the final analysis, you can starve to death with a full belly.

Sometimes, a mutation or symbiosis that was at first beneficial and allowed a species to out compete its competitors becomes a hinderance if, as in the case of the dodo and mastadon, a species that has evolved different competition tactics is introduced. Sometimes, it's just a general climate shift that mitigates against a species. Species that were formerly unrelated, fat and happy in their niches become a new symbiotic species, change to become more dependent, and are then screwed when the climate changes. C'est la vie. C'est la mort.

3. Why do we not see evolution still taking place? Why do we not see any offspring taking on traits of ancestors which presumably should still be found within their genetic code?

There are some things I will likely not be willing to accept on account of faith but on the other hand that doesn't mean that I reject science either, much in the same way that automobile owners who do not understand their cars well enough to work on them themselves do not necessarily believe that their cars run on black magic and the mechanics are practitioners thereof.

We do still see evolution taking place. There are mutations called atavism, wherein modern individuals express genetic traits that were endemic to their ancestors. Again, DNA is not perfect. It just works well enough. Just like your hard drive gets full of cruft as you install, uninstall, upgrade, create, and delete files, some bits of old data gets left behind. It's not used anymore, but if you knew were to look, you could still find it. This is why you never just donate an old computer to charity without thoroughly wiping the hard drive in software first. In an atavistic individual, some of that old genetic cruft, called junk DNA, got turned on when it shouldn't have. A case that for me proves that humans and cromagnon man interbred when homo sapiens immigrated across Europe is some of the old European aristocracy.

The nobility thought themselves something of a separate species from the hoi poloi, and so they should only interbreed with themelves and not with the common man. This gave rise to inbreeding, which gives rise to all kinds of genetic diseases getting a chance to express themselves. Some of the old portraits of European aristocracy look like plates from a paleontology textbook demonstrating what cromagnon man would have looked like. Hairier bodies, protruding brow ridge and overbite even an English dentist couldn't begin to address. Look at what that individual's parents looked like, and they'd fit right at home on the street in any place on Earth today. Their kid, like Og of the Hill People. That's evolution. It still happens today.

Mostly, evolution takes place on time scales beyond the span of man. Given 100,000s of years, we'll look markedly different than we do today, and humans from 100,000 years hence will probably not be able to geneticly interbreed with an example of a modern human, assuming something like cryogenics actually works. Certainly humans and chimps can't interbreed and we're 99.99% (or some such) identical on the genetic level. We don't even have compatible blood types.