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Political Correctness and Darwin
- Thread starter 77zach
- Start date
jhfc
Regular Member
True to an extent, however various groups assign mutually exclusive properties to their beliefs - triune god or not, Jesus divine or not, Mohamed the last prophet or not and so on. So while there is a large amount of commonality, there are also radically divergent beliefs.
I would go a bit further and say one's choice of any religion is largely an accident of geography and the indigenous culture. Not many Hindus outside of India for example and yet close to a billion people think it has the "ring of truth".
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77zach
Regular Member
I would agree with this and is why I started the thread.
I find it odd that humans would invent the God of the Bible. In fact, it's different from all religions in that it proclaims a salvation by grace. All other systems require works to appease God or to get in touch with him.
marshaul
Campaign Veteran
I would rephrase it as "most commonly a product of", but, yes, you're absolutely correct.
This precise observation is the reason I abandoned religion many years before I eschewed faith itself in favor of skepticism (I was raised Presbyterian).
It's a tad arrogant to believe that one – belonging to a minority, no less – is so inherently worthy (i.e. valuable) compared to the rest of earth's billions as to be by pure happenstance the (comparatively) exclusive benefactor of God's grace and salvation. Upon having this thought, I immediately concluded (and still maintain) that God, if he exists, cannot reasonably be expected to care what your religion is, beyond how you act on earth and – possibly – whether you believe in him.
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OC for ME
Regular Member
What does my faith have to do with science? You present a false choice. God created all that there is and that includes evolution. Your zeal to denigrate religion and subsequently a citizen's faith is noted.
fini
marshaul
Campaign Veteran
I was wondering as to the object of that question.
Belief in God is certainly not mutually exclusive with belief in evolution ("intraspecial", "extraspecial" [sic], or for that matter cosmological). If God can create a universe, why can he not design such processes?
They may tend to oppose each other in some individuals, but many intelligent folks have reconciled the two. (Of course, holding both views probably means accepting Biblical fallibility, but such is life.)
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77zach
Regular Member
I do agree that in order for evolution ( birds to dinosaur kind of evolution) to occur God would have to do it supernaturally. The thermodynamics and mathematics involved make it necessary.
marshaul
Campaign Veteran
Your view of God's power is surprisingly limited.
You're asserting that God's power and insight are so limited as to render him unable to design a process which, once set in motion, could spontaneously (naturally) evolve dinosaurs into birds without his further ("supernatural") input.
This is a remarkable assertion.
What do you imagine thermodynamics have to do with it, anyway?
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marshaul
Campaign Veteran
There are numerous examples of processes which reduce entropy in a system utilizing energy external to that system. On earth, we have a sun.
Even if the second law of thermodynamics is universally valid (a proposition of which I am not convinced), there is no reason entropy cannot be exchanged by subsystems within that closed system. This is exactly analogous to (and equally misguided as) zero-sum economics. Earth is not a closed system.
Trivial obstacle.
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georg jetson
Regular Member
Indeed. It's the only belief system I know of that teaches salvation is free. It's not achieved by good works.
77zach
Regular Member
Even God can't do the impossible without changing the rules.
marshaul
Campaign Veteran
I'd ask you to elaborate, but it's already been done, and the obstacle lying in wait surmounted.
Trivially, as I said.
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georg jetson
Regular Member
I think it's hard to have a discussion about God/no-God when the term God is ambiguous. I understand that a certain degree of ambiguity is necessary because we're not going to be able to define an infinite being. However, we can attach some ideas to the term "God" that may have us agreeing more than not.
One attribute I give to the term "God" is knowledge and another is eternal.
While the eternal part doesn't take much explaining, lets talk about the knowledge part. Our senses tell us that there are rules of nature. We've discovered order and seeming chaos in these rules. However, in order to explain any particular thing in the natural world, we need to use these rules. I submit that these rules are the "knowledge". Even things that come from random chance still use the rules of probability. There is no way for anything to exist without first having the rules for existence.
Another attribute I give to the term "God" is self awareness. After all, he's all knowledge that exists and we see in reality that knowledge comes from and is contained in vessels that are self aware (ie people).
So... would those that think the big bang happens over and over without beginning or end agree with either of my other two attributes. We already agree on the first and perhaps even on the second. All knowledge is contained in the singularity.
One attribute I give to the term "God" is knowledge and another is eternal.
While the eternal part doesn't take much explaining, lets talk about the knowledge part. Our senses tell us that there are rules of nature. We've discovered order and seeming chaos in these rules. However, in order to explain any particular thing in the natural world, we need to use these rules. I submit that these rules are the "knowledge". Even things that come from random chance still use the rules of probability. There is no way for anything to exist without first having the rules for existence.
Another attribute I give to the term "God" is self awareness. After all, he's all knowledge that exists and we see in reality that knowledge comes from and is contained in vessels that are self aware (ie people).
So... would those that think the big bang happens over and over without beginning or end agree with either of my other two attributes. We already agree on the first and perhaps even on the second. All knowledge is contained in the singularity.
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georg jetson
Regular Member
marshaul
Campaign Veteran
Absolutely. And this may be "God". I'm 100% with you here, and I could elaborate further in a different vein, were this another discussion.
It doesn't, however, convince me that God is an individuality entity (and therefore capable of possessing will, much less power to act on will), nor that it's responsible for creation.
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Venator
Anti-Saldana Freedom Fighter
I denigrate nothing. It was a question you refused to answer.
My question about Christianity and evolution was a legitimate one. Why, because evolution suggests that there was no Adam and Eve, if so then there was no original sin, therefore no need for a redeemer (Jesus) to save us from that sin, therefore Christianity falls flat. That was the only reason I asked, evolution is at odds with Christianity.
Now if you believe an A god, but not the model of a Christian god, then I agree one can have it both way, EXCEPT that evolution has no need for a creator.
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Venator
Anti-Saldana Freedom Fighter
But science and religion are incompatible.
Faith is belief without evidence.
Science is belief with evidence. Or better yet probability/confidence.
Victor stenger wrote this:
"I don't deny that many scientists are also religious, but they have compartmentalized their brains into two sections that don't talk to each other.
Science and religion are fundamentally incompatible because of their unequivocally opposed epistemologies -- the assumptions they make concerning what we can know about the world. Every human alive is aware of a world that seems to exist outside his or her body, the world of sensory experience we call the natural. Science is the systematic study of the observations we make about the natural world with our senses and scientific instruments and the application the knowledge obtained to human activity.
All major religions teach that humans possess an additional "internal" sense that enables us to gain access to a realm that lies beyond the world we see around us -- a divine, transcendent reality we call the supernatural. Religion is a set of practices intended to communicate with the supernatural and apply the insights gained thereby to human needs.
The working hypothesis of science is that empirical data is our only reliable source of knowledge about the world. No doubt science has its limits. But it doesn't follow that religion or any other alternative system of thought automatically provides any insight into what lies beyond those limits.
The scientific community in general believes that science has nothing to say about the supernatural. However, if we truly possess this inner sense and it is telling us about an unobservable reality that matters to us and influences our lives, then we should be able to observe the effects of that reality. So far we see no evidence for and have no reason to rely on this inner sense of the supernatural. If such evidence or reason should show up, however, then scientists will have to consider it."
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slowfiveoh
Regular Member
Incorrect.
The belief system does append a price of human sacrifice to offer a PATH to metaphorical salvation by belief in said sacrificed individual.
I'm pretty sure every Christian on the planet has heard, "Jesus paid the price for y/our sins".