Umm, somewhat. You've got the right idea, just not expressing it right I think Faith in something that you're 'forced' (I use that term loosely) to believe is something that is far easier than to believe in something that has been conjectured, proven, tested, and actually fits all the facts we have. Science is revisable, where as creationism isn't as it is a belief. I don't believe in evolution, I just accept that it may be one possible answer. It just happens that I understand that the idea that earth was created 6000 years ago by some magical being that came out of nowhere is a little far fetched. We as a people have got many many hundreds of years into this whole science thing, and science is unique in that it is always proving itself wrong, and always coming to a better, more fitting truth. Unfortunately for religious people in general, the world is dynamic, and only a dynamic system will ever be able to explain it. This amazing world of ours shouldn't be just whimed away on some belief that this thing created it without any reason, we should be able to appreciate it, and maybe attempt to understand it, see its beauty for what it is. People dictating to you what you should believe in is just silly, as it strips away your individuality and makes you into something you are not.
Like most religions, Christianity inspires. Sometimes to do bad things, sometimes to do amazingly good things. I have seen down-and-out homeless people being fed and sheltered by Christians. I have seen destitute psychotics who nobody wanted to know be befriened by church groups. I've seen dying patients who have nothing left to hang on to, comforted by religion. I may knock door-to-door bible-bashers as much as the next person, but I won't knock the Salvation Army, or the people of the Jesus Army I bumped into last week, or the local black church community who I saw a few months ago taking a whole community centre of people with learning disabilities out on a trip. At least they try. They have faith. I challenge anyone of us to do what they do; then you can knock them. Malfoleo, by the way, is right about the AA 12-step programme. It works for some and I've seen it work for some of sorts, but it does move from a therapeutic approach into a religious belief (as herapeutic approaches are wont to do --I can't be bothered to explain the dynamics behind this, but there are plenty). Professionally, I have many issues with the 12-step programme, the labeling of an addiction as "illness" rather than behaviour, and externalising the locus of control (while at the same time emphasising personal responsibility --confusing or what?) and buying into unhealthy attachment dynamics to name a few. In the end, the addiction is not resolved, it is just replaced: from alcohol to ongoing dependency on the AA support group. Remember, you never recover from alcoholism... Yeah, that works... Semantics. Ideas/beliefs cannot exist without people, obviously. But you are right: we mustn't forget that human factors are at the basis of it all. Malfoleo already answered your question. I've been here many times, and I can't really be bothered to go there again... suffice it to say that people find it hard to get their heads around principles like non-linear dynamics and chaos theory, Critical Dependence on Initial Conditions, re-iteration, emergence phenomena, probability and chance and various other things that are so abundantly at work in the physicla world every day, including physics, evolution and natural selection. People often think they understand the principles of evolution and natural selection because they had a bit of Darwinism at high school. People think they understand physics and chemistry (the recent 9/11 thread being a painful example). Like we think we understand computers because we're all l33t modders with a nice overclocked rig on our desk --until we talk to a guy who designs motherboards or CPUs for AMD and we realise that we actually know very little about all the really complex stuff that goes on inside the box... Of course creationists don't bother to study the argument. They like their ideas simple, clear cut. And so they think they expose holes in scientific theories everywhere, while in fact they only expose their own ignorance on the subjects.
Ah and nexxo puts his word in, wait nexxo... GOD!!!!!!!!!!!! Nah jokes, but mayby... Well as someone said before, how was life created from nothing? Well I read an article a while back about scientifical experiments on creating life. They had specific conditions they thought would be ideal for life, and put a naturally occuring phenomenon electricity. They sent some electricity through the chamber and carbon and oxygen came together with a few other elements to become a somewhat primitive lifeform, it could move and was structured (from a single cell type view) and died rather quickly. This could or could not be taken as an actual life form but boasts a view point that it could be possible to have life created randomly. As for mathematical formulae and physics theories, they are just our way of trying to explain to ourselves what is going on around us. Religion ah the cause of and solution to many of the worlds problems. I personaly dont beleive in a superior being that created us for his sadistic pleasure of us waging war and killing each other, along with the being freindly and helping each other. One of my best freinds is christian I think, but he steadfast believes in his religion, I do not hold that against him, it makes him more interesting than alot of other people just because his beliefs are different to mine. We have rather good disscusions about religion and to him it helps his understanding of his religion, and for me it helps me see their point of view. Now I dought I will ever sucome to a religion and have asked this so called god to show himself, I say "Yo god, if you do exist, i'll beleive in you if you come down here and hit me over the head with a 4 by 2" But he never does. And if a god does exist and decides to do what I ask, please dont let it be Ganesha, all those arms could hold alot of 4 by 2s.
Hey, I have no problem with a belief in God. I certainly don't have indesputable proof that He does not exist, so I will never argue that He doesn't. What I do have a problem with though, is dodgy reasoning and science trying to prove (badly) that He does. The primordial soup experiment. It did nicely demonstrate that apparently raw and random processes in nature could form complex amino acids (the building blocks of DNA and proteins, and hence, life). The only problem with it was that it created molecules of both "handedness" (i.e. mirror-image constructs of the same molecule) while in order for long complex DNA strains to form, you need an environment predominantly filled with amino acids of one handedness only... We don't yet know how one handedness came to predominate. By the way, that experiment never actually produced anything alive or moving. But it didn't have to. It just had to demonstrate that the first (and most tricky) step was possible. Not exactly. They are models (i.e. simplified or symoblic representations of the real thing). Things happen around us in certain patterns and stick to certain principles. These are so immutable and absolute that we call them "laws" or "rules". Of course, simple "rules" can still give rise to complex and apparently unpredictable patterns and processes, but that is about limits of our knowledge and comprehension more than a randomness of nature. Not to mention he is a heavy dude. Thing is though, God (and religion) are a matter of faith. Faith = belief. To seek proof for the existence of God is to reject faith in Him. So I would argue that the Intelligent Design people are the ones who lack faith, not the scientists who acknowledge that the existence of God cannot be proven. If you believe, you don't need proof.
I'm dead late to this thread, which is a shame 'cos its an intresting one. Anyway, when I read that, I wanted to add something. Mother Theresa is only considered to be this wonderfull person in the western world, in the east, where she did much of her work, she would help people, on the condition that they converted to her religion(christianity). So while some people see her as a missionary who gave food and aid to new converts, many in the east view her as someone who made people give up their faith in exchange for the food they needed to live.
hrm yes, my friend showed me that at school today seemed stupid, i was like thats so stupid and got back to reading bit-tech LOL
No, you've seen down-and-out homeless people being fed and sheltered by decent people. Atheists and agnostics can be decent people too. Lions Clubs International, the world's largest voluntary service organisation, has a rule in the Code of Objects, "partisan politics and sectarian religion shall not be debated by club members". A member's personal faith is his personal business, no one else's. If he's ready "To Aid others by giving my sympathy to those in distress, my aid to the weak, and my substance to the needy" that makes him eligible to join, whatever his religious beliefs. As the old gardener said when a visitor admired the wonderful garden God had created, "God wasn't doing so well here before I came along".
Swings and roundabouts... Mother Theresa indeed had some less enlightened qualities about her, such as a firm belief against birth control in an impoverished, overpopulated country, and she was not adverse to converting people, althoough I'm not sure she ever used that as practical, rather than just moral, blackmail. Her beliefs would not have got on with mine, that's for sure. She has also been criticised for how she supported people but this has been done by Westerners who did not appreciate the realities of access to health care (or lack thereof) by poor people in a Third World country which does not have a National Health Service. On the other hand, there she was all her life, toiling away in the dirt and filth looking after the lowest of the low, the outcast and the abandoned, at least giving a damn. Again, we may judge her, but I want to see any of us do better.
Yes, but so can Christians, and that was the point of the argument. DivineSin was implying that by definition, they could not. Christians are not better than agnostics, atheists or humanists, but they are not per definition worse either.
I hate the way people seem to see "God" as a person or 'supreme being'. What if you stop to think that god is not physical, that god IS the mathematical and physical properties governing hte universe. What if God is just one big equation that makes everything as it is today. We might as well forget about the big bang and why, because it is just so uncomprehendable to a human being. All the answers we would get are what we want them to be.
As you say, there's absolutely no way as humans we can even begin to understand the reasons behind our existance. I've often thought it'd be like trying to explain quantum physics to a goldfish. Regardless of how much people argue about God and organised religion, the funny thing is, there is no answer. Certainly not one that we will ever know in our life times. All I know, is that I look at myself, my life, the planet and everything in it and I know deep down that there is no possible way that this all came, by chance, from a few bits of space dust. No way. That doesn't explain why different musical notes can inspire different emotions or why the Monarch Butterfly has a more accurate biological navigation system than GPS.
Are you suggesting that when a person does a good thing, it is because he is a good person; but, if he does a bad thing, it is because he is Christian? As were the things I stated. Again, if someone does something bad in the name of God, Christianity is to blame; but, if he does something good in the name of God, Christianity doesn't get any credit? If you really wanted to be pedantic you could find fault in anybody. But instead of continually looking for the bad in people, we should instead start looking for the good in people. Only then can we begin to understand one another. And if we begin to undersand one another, we can start to change our points of view to things that make more sense. We can admit when we were wrong. Even Christianity, in all of its alleged evilness, is starting to come around. The Vatican recently made an announcement to Catholics that we should start paying attention to what science is saying about life around us. Apparently the Catholic church thinks that turning a blind eye to science can lead to fundamentalism. Hopefully that made sense. Sometimes I have a hard time translating my thoughts into words. -monkey
Well, actually there are pretty good explanations within a scientific framework for those two examples, without invoking some sort of supernatural powers... As has been said before: we interpret things from our current framework of knowledge. What seems magical or supernatural now may have a pretty mundane explanation tomorrow. One theory for our appreciation for music, for instance, is that it is really sort of a by-product of our brain being wired for analysing strings of tones within a timed/paced framework --a prerequisite for making sense of the metacommunicative aspects (tone of voice, intonation and cadence of words, loudness, pacing) of vocal communication. Those metacommunicative aspects tend to convey affective rather than factual information (you can get an idea of how a person feels by how they say things, rather than the words they use), and as such they tap into the emotion circuits of the brain. Music instinctively appeals to us because it addresses those same systems and this is why we create music. I can't say I'm an expert on the migratory patterns of the Morarch butterfly, but like all insects it has a circadian rythm and like most it probably sees polarised light (bees do) so it can "see" the position of the sun even on a cloudy day. Temperature fluctuations and variation in lenght of day probably tell it when to start flapping South (or North). It may sense Earth magnetic fields --pigeons and other animals do-- but apart from that it's probably no more mystical than you being able to find your way to London without a map just by walking in roughly the right direction and adjusting your course along the way, aided by environmental cues. I also suspect that it is by no means a perfect process and that for the many millions who make it, there are a good few million who don't... How the Monarch got to be that way is down to evolution again. I suspect that rather than evolving the impetus to find a warmer place in the Winter, they originated South and spread North as their numbers increased, but naturally tended to drift back South to the land of their ancestors when things got nippy up North. It's a valid, opportunistic way of optimising an area of resources you cover.
thats the kind of theroy I have liked the most to explain god etc. biggest reason being that if you say that god is some large intellegent being then it begs the question "well who made god?" and im afraid the awnsers "he/she/it has existed for ever" and "maby god made himself" just don't cut if for me. the only way that i could see god being an intellegent being is if god is the being that reached furthest in evolutionary terms in the time our universe exists, then went back in time and created the universe, and caused some crazy pardox. that also nicly explains what caused the big bang, and what was befor the big bang.
Couldn't it possibly be that Satan, described as the ruler of this world, is pushing many of us into confusion? Therefore what we think we know as "fact" really isn't based on a reality of truth. Many who believe in a creator aren't fundamentalists or fanatics. We're people who understand/belive (from the bible) that we as humans have a purpose and in that we must have been created. If there is no purpose for our lives then it doesn't matter if we were created or evolved from some single celled organism that somehow came about from a big bang. To us it's like a box of metal that is shaken forever will not turn into something that is meant for anything. There is no reason why it should turn into say a motorcycle. For us we build and create, it inborn and innate. The bible says we were created in god's image, or likeness. If so then shouldn't that mean that he as well creates or enjoy's creating? Both can neither be conclusively proven. Although the belief of a creator has a lot to do with feeling, reason, faith it doesn't mean it neccessarily wrong just because science thinks it's proven something with amino acids and a beaker tube. Man will ever create a machine that is "intelligent". Capable of distinguishing right from wrong or fashioning real emotions. It's too complex for our brains to understand it, no matter how many "highly educated" scientists are put on the job to make it. Shouldn't that tell us something? Couldn't this be plausible... God created a first set of species of mammals, amphibians, insects, etc. Then used the "holy spirit", or his active force behind his power, to persuade dna through adaptation or evolution to create these seperate type's within the species. Although the bible doesn't mention this nor do I want to speculate it is plausible. Could it appease the evolutionists and the creationists?
I think the thing is its fairly one sided though. Evolutionists don't need appeasing, as the theory of evolution is basicly accepted, its just the creationists that need appeasing. I see no reason why evolution can't be worked into any believe in god though. You have to be taking in the bible things far too literally to actually not be able to fit evolution into your belief set.
Alright, for you people now arguing (well, reaching for straws?) that it's possible that god created the first set of rules, and then things evolved from there, stop it! You're going against the bible, you are no longer following your own religion. You've now formed your own belief system, stop working on our side! Remember: religion is about fitting in and conformity. If you are going to start coming up with reasons and excuses (sorry, didn't mean for that to come off so negative, I'm just stating a point) that may make parts of the bible true in some cases, then you've just taken the material out of context that you're trying to prove! In genesis it is stated that god created the heavens and the earth, he also created all the creatures, mountains, trees, ect. Now you're saying that maybe he created these rules that evolution and life in general follows, and that everything else just sort of happened naturally?! I'm offended for your religion for you! Remember: if you're going to take your religious beliefs seriously, and conform to the church/book/deity/"rock" (don't ask) that you so idolize, then you must follow it down to specifics. Alright, say we forget the bible altogether, and just say that something with an agenda created the first basic laws and introduced matter and such into the universe, and just sort of let things go from there. Yeah, sure, I could conceive it, but honestly, what is more plausible? Saying a being that can create a design for a universe, or that this matter just suddenly appeared out of nowhere? No matter which way you look at it, we've either got some dude sitting there making things up, or we've got an arse load of crap suddenly popping into existence. It's crap either way. Here, gaze at darwins all knowingness:
Sigh....I've never heard such trash. Each of these variations on definition might apply to people in different ways. For instance, I myself consider myself to be Christian given the common maxims: a belief in The Holy Trinity and the teachings of the Bible. However, I believe that large portions of the First Testament (baring in mind they were written before Darwin and practically before science was recognised at all), are merely a metaphor for evolution. I believe God put us here because he created everything and thus created the process of evolution. These views might not perfectly correlate with those of Methodist, Catholic or Baptist churches but I'm a still a Christian. I'd love to see you explain evolution to an Isralite, two-thousand years ago Malfoleo. In my opinion, the Bible is metaphorically anecdotal and that's what vividly separates 'followers of religion' from 'fundamentalists' - a willingness to understand and adapt your understandings. The main points of the Bible that are really core are the lessons it teaches. The Ten Commandments and the general morals that Jesus preaches. They have never, nor will ever, change. That is what Christianity is about.
^^ This The bible is just a guideline. If the bible was written today then people of 2000 yearfs from now would be having htis same discussion
