Religious debate (split from main board)

#478
#478
turambar85 said:
Well, that is a curious place to start, as a theory or origins is not seen valued very highly among either scientists working in evolutionary biology, or in lay atheists. But, anyway, if you want to talk origins, by all means do so. The problem is, it is all going to be highly speculative and rife with metaphysical nastiness.

But, do you mean "what is the origin of life" or do you mean "what is the origin of the universe" or do you mean "what is the origin of life as we know it"?
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We have, that was a general statement, that was directed toward, why anyone believes what they do.
 
#484
#484
OrangeU said:
while i admit i was lazy last night, i probably should've worded aristotle and newton differently to say "disprove"and done more research, so I apologize and hope that doesn't discredit everything I've said. however i was drawing that statement from a few classes I took in college and thought i remembered early christianity accepting a lot of what aristotle theorized so i looked it up and here's what i found:

History
Preserved by Aristotle's followers in the Peripatetic school, and elaborated by other ancient commentators on Aristotle, Aristotelianism began its modern history with its reception by Islamic, Jewish and Christian philosophers. The most famous of these philosophers are Averroes, Maimonides and Thomas Aquinas. Averroism was particularly influential in reconciling Aristotelianism with the Islamic and Jewish faiths, while Aquinas argued that the truth in Aristotle’s philosophy is complemented and completed by the truth revealed in the Christian tradition. Aquinas further established the foundations of metaphysics by offering an account of key issues surrounding existence which were not addressed fully by his predecessors. The Roman Catholic Church has reasserted a Thomistic Aristotelianism since the 1870s.


in response to your last statement, i assert that we are created in His image and while many may feel they are descended from primates or a shared organism, I bare the image of my Creator. "I ain't from no ape". lol. I do, however, believe in direct adaptation to environment and have studied/read multiple examples of adaptation/evolution of animal and man(most notably those human beings living in extreme climates).
What's more far fetched? We are all evolved, by accident, from a singular organism with a "master genetic code". OR We were intelligently designed by One Creator who knew EXACTLY what He was doing?

I'll also admit the Flood does seem far fetched, but so does One Man fulfilling hundreds of prophecies foretold, in some cases, thousands of years before. If you don't believe Jesus did all that, then the Flood absolutely seems like a fable. I've seen God do some crazy sounding things in my life and in those around me, though. Those moments (and especially those in the Bible) are supposed to prove that ONLY God could do such a thing.
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This is one of the trickiest parts about the science of evolution. Evolution on a grand scale is no accident. Sure, individual mutations are accidents, but individual mutations alone are not the entirety of evolution. If you took the genome of our ancestors and our own, and took all the mutations that separate them, it would be statistically laughable to say we randomly got all of them.

The key to evolution that makes it not only likely but inevitable, is natural selection. Natural selection weeds out the bad mutations and keeps the good. Because advantages lead to greater rates of reproduction, these advantages (the genes) spread throughout the population. No design is required. You might say that it's hard to imagine how such complexity can come with no designer, but there are plenty of things in nature that can be "complex" without a designer.

The Sun and the stars are one. Did you know that each star is constantly in a balancing act? The gravitational force from all that mass tries to pull the star in and collapse it, but the force of the star's nuclear fusion keeps blowing it outward. It's a balance between controlled nuclear explosion and gravity. And yet there is no design required, if you take any sufficiently large ball of gas and let it gather under its own gravity, you will get a star.

In fact, you might say here "But who fine-tuned the constants of Nature so that this was possible?" Well the answer is that the constants don't seem very fine-tuned at all. The fine structure constant, for instance, is approximately 1/137. And pi is around 3.141592654... There's no reason why pi couldn't be 3 exactly. Nor is there a reason why the fine structure constant can't be exactly 1/137. In fact out of the dozens of constants of nature, it's very possible that all of them could be much different and yet a universe with life would be still result. Asking why the constants are exactly as they are may be just like asking why the winning lottery numbers are what they are. They could just as easily be some other numbers and nothing would change, just which person would win, and in our case, which universe would exist.

But let's talk about the human brain. The human brain is a awesome example of evolution, even though at first glance it looks like one of those things that had to be designed. It is made of layers. The bottom layer is the brain stem, responsible for basic life functions. It is similar to the neurochord found in invertebrates and other basic life forms. On top of that layer is something called the r-complex. It is so named because it resembles a reptilian brain. It is responsible for anger, agression, all those things we associate with reptile behavior. On top of that layer is the limbic system, which resembles the mammalian brain. And on top of that is the neocortex.

The surface of the human brain itself is folded, so that there is more total surface area. This is required because human skulls couldn't get much larger then they were, and the surface of the brain is responsible for abstract thought and the "higher traits" of man. There's no reason why our heads couldn't be a bit bigger, or our brains couldn't be designed more efficiently. The reason why we have folds on our brain is because if our heads got any bigger we would be unable to give birth (which is already quite a pain, because of the size of the human head).

Evolution is so widely accepted because we arrive at its conclusions through multiple different lines of evidence. This consilience could easily be explained by a god that wanted things to look like the evolved on their own, but such a god would be unnecessary to explain any part of the process so why bother? The entire reason of a god is that that god is supposed to resolve some problem that we don't understand (like why does the sun rise and set, where do we go when we die).

Some other evidences for common descent:

Every vertebrate land creature has the same body plan. Two eyes, one nose, four legs, a mouth. (sometimes they also have a tail, in species without the tail the evidence of a tail stub is there, like in humans with the tailbone). Why is this? You might say that god had one plan in mind, but then why did he create arthropods with many legs, and so on? The true answer is that we all evolved from a common ancestor, a tetrapod which in turned evolved from a fish.

Chickens have the genes for teeth. This suggests that their ancestors at one point had used teeth. The gene really is there, it's been "turned off" by stop codons, so the teeth are never actually produced. In fact you could turn on this gene and get chickens with teeth if you wanted.

Horses have the genes for multiple toes. Again, why would this gene be present if they didn't have multiple toes at some point in their ancestry.

The set of proteins used by all living things is more or less the same. Hence, the proteins human cells use to get a job done are the same as fish ones - even if the proteins aren't the best a human could theoretically use. Why would god insist on having humans use the same proteins as fish, if the proteins weren't the best a human could use?

Junk DNA. Every genome is filled with so-called "junk DNA", which is seemingly useless nonsense mutations. Some junk DNA is later found to have a use, but conservative estimates put Junk DNA as composing a majority of the human genome. Why would God have so much junk cluttering the genome? Of course the evolutionary explanation is obvious - junk DNA is the result of millenia of nonsense mutations, and keeping it around is good because it might mutate into useful DNA. Curiously, vast sections of Junk DNA are identical across species, with the closely related species sharing more Junk DNA than the less related ones.

I could go on but that's enough for now. In conclusion: Evolution is true if you just look at the evidence, without a doubt.
 
#487
#487
Something can't come from nothing - There are two answers to this:

1. Something never did come from nothing. The universe as we know it could be "closed" in time. Think about a circle. A circle has no beginning or end, but it has a finite length. Perhaps time is a closed loop.

2. Yes, something can come from nothing. This is been proven to happen in physics in a way. Say you had a box, and you wanted to take all the air out of it, so that it would be completely empty space inside. Well in quantum mechanics, the physics of tiny particles, there is a principle known as Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. It states that certain pairs of quantities can never be known with any given precision, because the more accurately you know one (for example, position), the less accurately you know another (for example, velocity). This isn't just something to do with how stupid we are, or how good our detectors are, but it's actually a fundamental property of nature, because it has consequences that affect how atoms work.

Now, how does this relate to the box? Well one of those quantity pairs is position and energy. If you were to empty that box and so that you could say there was no particle in that box, you would be making a precise statement about the position of particles - that they were all outside of the box. But this would mean that you would not accurately know the energy inside of the box.

But this is absurd. If there are no particles in the box, how can there be any energy? But it's true. This base energy that you can never extract is called the zero-point energy. Since you can't know the energy, you might imagine that it fluctuates. Occasionally, it fluctuates enough to produce a so-called "virtual particle". You might say this violates conservation of mass or energy, but it doesn't, because energy can become mass, and vice versa. This is the basis of E=mc^2, and the reason why nuclear reactions work (a little bit of the nuclear mass is converted into energy). What it does violate is conservation of baryon number. So an antiparticle is also created. These particle-antiparticle pairs either wink out of existence or annihilate each other. So yes, "something" can come from "nothing". But that's only because the human mind doesn't really understand what "nothing" is.
 
#488
#488
IPorange said:
So I guess the existence of God is not any more definite than the nonexistence of God for you.
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where God came from has nothing to do with my belief in him. The feeling that we are something more than an accident and there is an all knowing, loving, and caring God watching us is with me and I'm sorry you can't experience the same. It's cliche, but its the truth.
 
#490
#490
IPorange said:
Why is it that everyone with open hearts has closed minds?
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Admit the fact of the matter, you are afraid to open your own mind and make a spiritual experiment by praying a little prayer yourself and see what happens.

I could suggest some simple prayers but why not make up your own?

If you are afraid to make such an experiment, why ignore and hide that fact from your own self??

You speak of the truth of science but isn't scientific experimentation the root of all scientific discovery??

Why would not that be the same in the realm of the spiritual??

You may say that science trumps all things spiritual but then science in no way approaches the point that it can even slightly prove the non-existance of the spiritual realm.

Do we agree on that much??
 
#491
#491
vols_dat_team said:
where God came from has nothing to do with my belief in him. The feeling that we are something more than an accident and there is an all knowing, loving, and caring God watching us is with me and I'm sorry you can't experience the same. It's cliche, but its the truth.
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No one says that we are an accident. See my post on evolution. Evolution is the opposite of accident.
 
#492
#492
IPorange said:
So I guess the existence of God is not any more definite than the nonexistence of God for you.
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IP, dude, you can't have this argument without considering a person's faith.

I am really trying to follow along, I promise I am, but I honestly can't tell if y'all are just being argumentative or if you are really expect an answer that will satisfy you?
 
#493
#493
gsvol said:
Admit the fact of the matter, you are afraid to open your own mind and make a spiritual experiment by praying a little prayer yourself and see what happens.

I could suggest some simple prayers but why not make up your own?

If you are afraid to make such an experiment, why ignore and hide that fact from your own self??

You speak of the truth of science but isn't scientific experimentation the root of all scientific discovery??

Why would not that be the same in the realm of the spiritual??

You may say that science trumps all things spiritual but then science in no way approaches the point that it can even slightly prove the non-existance of the spiritual realm.

Do we agree on that much??
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You do realize that all scientific studies of prayer have concluded that it doesn't work right?

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/31/health/31pray.html

Yes it's the NYT. No I don't care.
 
#494
#494
vols_dat_team said:
where God came from has nothing to do with my belief in him. The feeling that we are something more than an accident and there is an all knowing, loving, and caring God watching us is with me and I'm sorry you can't experience the same. It's cliche, but its the truth.
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Have you studied the psychology of religion? There are psychological and biological things at play behind the concept of spirituality. Or do you think you are having a more spiritual experience than a Buddhist Monk, or a suicidal Jihadist?
 
#495
#495
vollygirl said:
IP, dude, you can't have this argument without considering a person's faith.

I am really trying to follow along, I promise I am, but I honestly can't tell if y'all are just being argumentative or if you are really expect an answer that will satisfy you?
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I would expect some sort of satisfying answer, but have yet to receive them. Usually, people back away at a certain point when they can't GIVE a good answer. I am not trying to have an argument for the sake of it, but would like to understand why there is such a disconnect between two large segments of the population.
 
#497
#497
IPorange said:
I would expect some sort of satisfying answer, but have yet to receive them. Usually, people back away at a certain point when they can't GIVE a good answer. I am not trying to have an argument for the sake of it, but would like to understand why there is such a disconnect between two large segments of the population.
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Because one group chooses to have faith and believe and the other doesn't.
 
#498
#498
gsvol said:
Admit the fact of the matter, you are afraid to open your own mind and make a spiritual experiment by praying a little prayer yourself and see what happens.

I could suggest some simple prayers but why not make up your own?

If you are afraid to make such an experiment, why ignore and hide that fact from your own self??

You speak of the truth of science but isn't scientific experimentation the root of all scientific discovery??

Why would not that be the same in the realm of the spiritual??

You may say that science trumps all things spiritual but then science in no way approaches the point that it can even slightly prove the non-existance of the spiritual realm.

Do we agree on that much??
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Also I'd like to add that prayer is the biggest example there is of confirmation bias. If your prayer comes true, no matter how much you have to stretch your criteria to make it so, god gets credit (Even though it would have happened anyway). If it doesn't happen, then God is either saying "no" or "wait". At no point in the study do you ever allow for an outcome to indicate that god isn't there. In science you can't set out to prove something's right and discount all possibilities of it being wrong. You have to prove something is either true or false, not simply that it's true and you don't have enough faith if it doesn't look like it.
 
#499
#499
IPorange said:
I would expect some sort of satisfying answer, but have yet to receive them. Usually, people back away at a certain point when they can't GIVE a good answer. I am not trying to have an argument for the sake of it, but would like to understand why there is such a disconnect between two large segments of the population.
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And I just realized I called you "dude". Sorry about that. Apparently I'm turning into one of my kids. RUN!!!!!!
 
#500
#500
IPorange said:
I would expect some sort of satisfying answer, but have yet to receive them. Usually, people back away at a certain point when they can't GIVE a good answer. I am not trying to have an argument for the sake of it, but would like to understand why there is such a disconnect between two large segments of the population.
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That is on both sides tho IP.
 
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