Cisco ....
Your response is more than its weight in words: "I don't know exactly what your point is but I'm participating in a debate entitled "Evolution vs Creation". How about you?"
Well ... okay. You start out railing against evolutionists in a manner unseen since the Missouri Synod walked out of the Lutheran Convention over the Scopes trial. And then the posts move over to this forum and you've given us a list of scientists who believed in God or believed that "God" created the world.
I'm wondering what your point is inasmuch as you've posted the list at all. What does it demonstrate? If there's some inherent point to its presence, I've utterly missed it.
I mean, if all of that work went toward demonstrating the validity of Creationist theory, that would be something. But all it demonstrates is the validity of the systems, theories, and classifications developed by those people. Sum total: I fail to understand the significance of the fact that, until recent years (historically speaking), most of the world believed in creation requiring an intentional act of God.
Furthermore, you seem to be hung up in the way "atheists" and "evolutionists" like to "belittle" those who believe in godly Creation.
This sounds like a version of AWM Syndrome. Angry White Male Syndrome is a social condition (not medical) describing a sense of frustration known by statistical majorities. The Promise Keepers were a great example (Angry Christian Syndrome?), as well as the 1995 push for prayer in public schools. (On a social level, various anti-affirmative action initiatives were directly inspired by notions that the majority was somehow being "cheated".)
And, frankly, that's how I see evolution and creation. As independent concepts, without political or faith considerations, they're neutral ideas which bear philosophical and scientific insight. But their significance has been moved to the forefront of defining the public spirituality, as has Free Speech, abortion, homosexuality, drugs, taxes, and guns. Strangely, we all need to be celibate, drug-free heterosexuals who like to use our tax money to shoot people who say things we disagree with in order to achieve our national spiritual potential--this, at least, is the manifestation of that philosophy.
In the context of evolution and creation ... yes, there are people who saw evolution as the "Death of the Bible" ... but that's what you expect when you polarize cultures to dual opposites. When an alternative arises that is condemned by the majority, it finds a place among the canon of the minority, right or wrong. Frankly, I would have no problem agreeing with you if the Scopes trial had been about a man being fired for teaching Creationism. But from the word "Go", evolution has been condemned (much as the idea of a heliocentric solar system was) by undereducated religious conservatives who never tried to work the idea into their notion of God.
In that sense, I admit a political prejudice. Much like revolutionary situations around the world (N. Ireland, E. Timor, &c) I have a hard time sympathizing with a majority that never tried to avert the crisis. As such:
* (For illustrative purposes only) It's hard for me to sympathize with the British in Northern Ireland. Four-hundred years of heritage--forced at the point of a sword--inspires little sympathy in me when I hear modern complaints of terrorism and chaos. After all, we could have avoided this situation if the people complaining of chaos hadn't invoked it in the first place.
* Likewise, it's a hard thing for me to sympathize with a cultural majority (say, a church) whose complaints about the way society regards them all have to do with fights the cultural majority chose to have.
Furthermore, evolution works well within almost any notion of God. (Once again ... Only you can prevent evolution from working in harmony with God. Creationist theory makes some definite points about God's workings in the Universe. To that notion, I submit:
* A book you haven't had the misfortune of my bombarding you with is Lucifer: The Devil in the Middle Ages, by Jeffrey Russell Burton. (I've littered other posts with it.) One of the things about which the author is very careful is the idea that when you attribute certain powers to the Devil, you might accidentally proscribe God's authority in the Universe, making the idea of an Immutable Divine Will or Knowledge, and the idea of an all-encompassing God impossible. The Cathars, as such, were wiped out for the simple heresy of believing in a Kingdom of Light and a Kingdom of Dark. Specifically, the heresy came in the notion that the Cathar notion of dualism (for Catholic response, see the Fourth Lateran Council) created a situation in which either A) God did not create all of creation; or B) portions of creation exist outside God's dominion. Both these possibilities were unacceptable if God was logically to be what It is.
All I want to convey from that is: what happens to evil in a "created" Universe? What happens to the rest of the Godly formula, as such? When you assign an attribute to God, how does that affect the whole of how one perceives God? Creation, I think, limits God; but that's part of a grander idea I have that God is anything but the interactive cheerleader with a spanking fetish we've come to know and love/revile (circle one, as necessary).
I also wanted to comment on a notion of yours: Hitler and Stalin killed for political reasons. They did not kill "for atheism" or "for evolution" (well, Hitler arguably could fall under a eugenic paradigm). However, atheism and evolution were not the motivating causes of the terrors these men wrought.
The Crusades, however (including the 20,000 Muslim women and children slaughtered in the desert outside Accre after the Christians had guaranteed them safe passage as a settlement to hostilities), as well as the Inquisitions (including the Bishopric of Trier, where two neighboring villages were left with a single childbearing female apiece) ... hey, these murders, rapes, tortures and other atrocities, were most definitely committed in the name of God ... and, as the Cathar heresy indicates, Creationism by proxy. (Their theory affected the "method" by which God would have created the Universe.)
So I might advise against your condemnation of atheist countries. Sure, they get it wrong. Infuriatingly so. But the one thing for sure is that when it's over, because it's not "God", the system will undergo some sense of change. But if you've got God, you can write off those tragedies, 'cause hey, we're all sinners, right?
Have you ever read Facing Mount Kenya by Jomo Kenyatta? You mentioned African clitoridectomy; yes, it's a bad tradition, in my view. But when you consider the basic "Creationist" story that goes into it, hey, it works. Essentially, the story goes that, after the creation of the world, societal guardianship was entrusted to the women, for they held the power of life. But, in time, the women grew lazy and the society declined, until the men held a revolt to stave off future agonies. Sexual promiscuity being blamed as one of the primary causes of the women's indifference to the state of the society, clitoridectomy emerged from that as both a punative measure and as a safeguard against future disaster. Now, it's not so much that I agree with it, but the myth itself is no different in principle from the belief that Eve is the cause of womens' suffering in childbirth.
You know, I recall seeing Bakunin's name around anarchist circles. One might recall Emma Goldman, in her essay "Anarchism": "Religion, the dominion of man's soul ... creating a tyranny such that naught but blood and gloom and tears have ruled the earth since gods began." In the libertarian, social sense, such a statement as Bakunin's abolishing of God makes sense.
By the way, the "Double-sixes" probability calculations only work in a consistent environment. If the environment is not pure, as such, variations will appear in the results. Rolling dice is a cool analogy, but the universe is such that I'm inclined to ask what happens if you weight the dice for cheating. Throws off the 1:36 ratio, doesn't it? Were the universe a single density, were life capable of happening under any conditions (we cannot rule out that such is the case, but for now ....) we might see a standard diversity pattern resembling the "Double-sixes" example ... of course, I can almost guarantee that we wouldn't be here at this point in time and space to argue the point, were those the conditions. Let me reiterate that the Universe seems to be infinite. Thus, infinite diversity is possible. You can call it a game of chance, but the odds-game changes when infinity is a factor. Suddenly, we are not so much a statistical chance as a statistical inevitability.
* Quick potshot: Atheists only disprove God by setting up rules within which He must fit because that's the way the faithful have done it for millennia. The only thing that motivates the D'Holbach quote that God "must be comprehensible ..." is weakness. On the one hand, it's true, except it will be a million generations at least before humanity has the tools of comprehension; in this case, why do Creationists work to hamstring the effort? On the other hand, it's an idiocy if the statement applies to anything short of the duration of the human presence in the Universe. For if we comprehend God, the rest of the Universe ceases to make any sense, even in the idea that God created it.
When humanity kills itself off (rather, If ...), what does God do? Does It move on to the next planet that gives life and run the experiment again? Does it go home and leave this Universe to decay? Or is it a triumph of God's will that we've all come home, and the Universe ends when we do? (Other answers are appropriate; it's not like it's multiple-choice, or anything.)
You told me I seem to be supporting elitist notions when I wrote "The smarter one is, the less they know about God."
Tell me ... have you ever found out a fact, about anything, and discovered that it only begged more questions? Only a fool is secure that he knows enough about God. The secret is that the more we know, the more questions arise, and we can know those answers, and work through the next set of questions. But God cannot be known in a set period, else we see the fact that nobody--Christ included--has figured God out yet; there's no point to going on with the charade otherwise.
And I'm sorry you don't find challenging logical problems beautiful. I think that anything humans do that, say, deer or raccoons, don't ... well, it's quite unique when we reach the pinnacle of that act. If logical thinking is something that raccoons don't have, then there is a certain beauty in the ultimate logical paradox.
Answers are like art ... the good ones take time. Anything short and prefab is bound to look just that--prefab and cheap as hell.
But the Universe is infinite. Its potential for diversity is infinite. Creationism denies this by its traditional rhetoric. In that sense, show me a Creation story that accounts properly for the Universal mysteries we call God, and I'll show you the most brilliant anthropological manifestation of the human conscience ever.
The first clue is found in the fact that every Creation story sets the culture that invented it foremost in God's eyes. You never heard the Cherokee say, "Well, God liked the Jews better, so He put us out here until it's time for Him to like someone else, who will destroy the Jews, and then will destroy us." With a motivation like that, I wouldn't get out of bed in the morning.
Is "soda pop" Coca-Cola, or is Coca-Cola "soda-pop"?
Creationism and evolution are not mutually exclusive. All the Coca-Cola fans have attempted to declare a monopoly on the definition of soda-pop, and they're upset because Pepsi is trying to steal their definition. (Or could it be that Pepsi's just trying to sell some soda-pop?)
The schism between evolution and creationism is purely left to the creationists to reconcile. After all, the creationists dug it. Maybe if it hadn't been for all the condemnations, excommunications, rebukings, ad nauseum that went with believing God created the heavens and the earth, people wouldn't have been so quick to see evolution as an "alternative"--as such--to God.
But it's all in the past now. Can you reconcile the two? Or will you peel slivers from the cross and stab them through the shell of theological credibility?
thanx,
Tiassa
***This message has been removed from the post The Nth Round and placed here, where it is more appropriate and where it was intended to be in the first place. Apologies to all. Some typographical errors have been fixed. Take a note kids: stay away from mind-altering substances while computing. Thank you, The Brain of the Tiassa***
------------------
The whole business with the fossilized dinosaur eggs was a joke the paleontologists haven't seen yet. (Good Omens, Gaiman & Pratchett)
Your response is more than its weight in words: "I don't know exactly what your point is but I'm participating in a debate entitled "Evolution vs Creation". How about you?"
Well ... okay. You start out railing against evolutionists in a manner unseen since the Missouri Synod walked out of the Lutheran Convention over the Scopes trial. And then the posts move over to this forum and you've given us a list of scientists who believed in God or believed that "God" created the world.
I'm wondering what your point is inasmuch as you've posted the list at all. What does it demonstrate? If there's some inherent point to its presence, I've utterly missed it.
I mean, if all of that work went toward demonstrating the validity of Creationist theory, that would be something. But all it demonstrates is the validity of the systems, theories, and classifications developed by those people. Sum total: I fail to understand the significance of the fact that, until recent years (historically speaking), most of the world believed in creation requiring an intentional act of God.
Furthermore, you seem to be hung up in the way "atheists" and "evolutionists" like to "belittle" those who believe in godly Creation.
This sounds like a version of AWM Syndrome. Angry White Male Syndrome is a social condition (not medical) describing a sense of frustration known by statistical majorities. The Promise Keepers were a great example (Angry Christian Syndrome?), as well as the 1995 push for prayer in public schools. (On a social level, various anti-affirmative action initiatives were directly inspired by notions that the majority was somehow being "cheated".)
And, frankly, that's how I see evolution and creation. As independent concepts, without political or faith considerations, they're neutral ideas which bear philosophical and scientific insight. But their significance has been moved to the forefront of defining the public spirituality, as has Free Speech, abortion, homosexuality, drugs, taxes, and guns. Strangely, we all need to be celibate, drug-free heterosexuals who like to use our tax money to shoot people who say things we disagree with in order to achieve our national spiritual potential--this, at least, is the manifestation of that philosophy.
In the context of evolution and creation ... yes, there are people who saw evolution as the "Death of the Bible" ... but that's what you expect when you polarize cultures to dual opposites. When an alternative arises that is condemned by the majority, it finds a place among the canon of the minority, right or wrong. Frankly, I would have no problem agreeing with you if the Scopes trial had been about a man being fired for teaching Creationism. But from the word "Go", evolution has been condemned (much as the idea of a heliocentric solar system was) by undereducated religious conservatives who never tried to work the idea into their notion of God.
In that sense, I admit a political prejudice. Much like revolutionary situations around the world (N. Ireland, E. Timor, &c) I have a hard time sympathizing with a majority that never tried to avert the crisis. As such:
* (For illustrative purposes only) It's hard for me to sympathize with the British in Northern Ireland. Four-hundred years of heritage--forced at the point of a sword--inspires little sympathy in me when I hear modern complaints of terrorism and chaos. After all, we could have avoided this situation if the people complaining of chaos hadn't invoked it in the first place.
* Likewise, it's a hard thing for me to sympathize with a cultural majority (say, a church) whose complaints about the way society regards them all have to do with fights the cultural majority chose to have.
Furthermore, evolution works well within almost any notion of God. (Once again ... Only you can prevent evolution from working in harmony with God. Creationist theory makes some definite points about God's workings in the Universe. To that notion, I submit:
* A book you haven't had the misfortune of my bombarding you with is Lucifer: The Devil in the Middle Ages, by Jeffrey Russell Burton. (I've littered other posts with it.) One of the things about which the author is very careful is the idea that when you attribute certain powers to the Devil, you might accidentally proscribe God's authority in the Universe, making the idea of an Immutable Divine Will or Knowledge, and the idea of an all-encompassing God impossible. The Cathars, as such, were wiped out for the simple heresy of believing in a Kingdom of Light and a Kingdom of Dark. Specifically, the heresy came in the notion that the Cathar notion of dualism (for Catholic response, see the Fourth Lateran Council) created a situation in which either A) God did not create all of creation; or B) portions of creation exist outside God's dominion. Both these possibilities were unacceptable if God was logically to be what It is.
All I want to convey from that is: what happens to evil in a "created" Universe? What happens to the rest of the Godly formula, as such? When you assign an attribute to God, how does that affect the whole of how one perceives God? Creation, I think, limits God; but that's part of a grander idea I have that God is anything but the interactive cheerleader with a spanking fetish we've come to know and love/revile (circle one, as necessary).
I also wanted to comment on a notion of yours: Hitler and Stalin killed for political reasons. They did not kill "for atheism" or "for evolution" (well, Hitler arguably could fall under a eugenic paradigm). However, atheism and evolution were not the motivating causes of the terrors these men wrought.
The Crusades, however (including the 20,000 Muslim women and children slaughtered in the desert outside Accre after the Christians had guaranteed them safe passage as a settlement to hostilities), as well as the Inquisitions (including the Bishopric of Trier, where two neighboring villages were left with a single childbearing female apiece) ... hey, these murders, rapes, tortures and other atrocities, were most definitely committed in the name of God ... and, as the Cathar heresy indicates, Creationism by proxy. (Their theory affected the "method" by which God would have created the Universe.)
So I might advise against your condemnation of atheist countries. Sure, they get it wrong. Infuriatingly so. But the one thing for sure is that when it's over, because it's not "God", the system will undergo some sense of change. But if you've got God, you can write off those tragedies, 'cause hey, we're all sinners, right?
Have you ever read Facing Mount Kenya by Jomo Kenyatta? You mentioned African clitoridectomy; yes, it's a bad tradition, in my view. But when you consider the basic "Creationist" story that goes into it, hey, it works. Essentially, the story goes that, after the creation of the world, societal guardianship was entrusted to the women, for they held the power of life. But, in time, the women grew lazy and the society declined, until the men held a revolt to stave off future agonies. Sexual promiscuity being blamed as one of the primary causes of the women's indifference to the state of the society, clitoridectomy emerged from that as both a punative measure and as a safeguard against future disaster. Now, it's not so much that I agree with it, but the myth itself is no different in principle from the belief that Eve is the cause of womens' suffering in childbirth.
You know, I recall seeing Bakunin's name around anarchist circles. One might recall Emma Goldman, in her essay "Anarchism": "Religion, the dominion of man's soul ... creating a tyranny such that naught but blood and gloom and tears have ruled the earth since gods began." In the libertarian, social sense, such a statement as Bakunin's abolishing of God makes sense.
By the way, the "Double-sixes" probability calculations only work in a consistent environment. If the environment is not pure, as such, variations will appear in the results. Rolling dice is a cool analogy, but the universe is such that I'm inclined to ask what happens if you weight the dice for cheating. Throws off the 1:36 ratio, doesn't it? Were the universe a single density, were life capable of happening under any conditions (we cannot rule out that such is the case, but for now ....) we might see a standard diversity pattern resembling the "Double-sixes" example ... of course, I can almost guarantee that we wouldn't be here at this point in time and space to argue the point, were those the conditions. Let me reiterate that the Universe seems to be infinite. Thus, infinite diversity is possible. You can call it a game of chance, but the odds-game changes when infinity is a factor. Suddenly, we are not so much a statistical chance as a statistical inevitability.
* Quick potshot: Atheists only disprove God by setting up rules within which He must fit because that's the way the faithful have done it for millennia. The only thing that motivates the D'Holbach quote that God "must be comprehensible ..." is weakness. On the one hand, it's true, except it will be a million generations at least before humanity has the tools of comprehension; in this case, why do Creationists work to hamstring the effort? On the other hand, it's an idiocy if the statement applies to anything short of the duration of the human presence in the Universe. For if we comprehend God, the rest of the Universe ceases to make any sense, even in the idea that God created it.
When humanity kills itself off (rather, If ...), what does God do? Does It move on to the next planet that gives life and run the experiment again? Does it go home and leave this Universe to decay? Or is it a triumph of God's will that we've all come home, and the Universe ends when we do? (Other answers are appropriate; it's not like it's multiple-choice, or anything.)
You told me I seem to be supporting elitist notions when I wrote "The smarter one is, the less they know about God."
Tell me ... have you ever found out a fact, about anything, and discovered that it only begged more questions? Only a fool is secure that he knows enough about God. The secret is that the more we know, the more questions arise, and we can know those answers, and work through the next set of questions. But God cannot be known in a set period, else we see the fact that nobody--Christ included--has figured God out yet; there's no point to going on with the charade otherwise.
And I'm sorry you don't find challenging logical problems beautiful. I think that anything humans do that, say, deer or raccoons, don't ... well, it's quite unique when we reach the pinnacle of that act. If logical thinking is something that raccoons don't have, then there is a certain beauty in the ultimate logical paradox.
Answers are like art ... the good ones take time. Anything short and prefab is bound to look just that--prefab and cheap as hell.
But the Universe is infinite. Its potential for diversity is infinite. Creationism denies this by its traditional rhetoric. In that sense, show me a Creation story that accounts properly for the Universal mysteries we call God, and I'll show you the most brilliant anthropological manifestation of the human conscience ever.
The first clue is found in the fact that every Creation story sets the culture that invented it foremost in God's eyes. You never heard the Cherokee say, "Well, God liked the Jews better, so He put us out here until it's time for Him to like someone else, who will destroy the Jews, and then will destroy us." With a motivation like that, I wouldn't get out of bed in the morning.
Is "soda pop" Coca-Cola, or is Coca-Cola "soda-pop"?
Creationism and evolution are not mutually exclusive. All the Coca-Cola fans have attempted to declare a monopoly on the definition of soda-pop, and they're upset because Pepsi is trying to steal their definition. (Or could it be that Pepsi's just trying to sell some soda-pop?)
The schism between evolution and creationism is purely left to the creationists to reconcile. After all, the creationists dug it. Maybe if it hadn't been for all the condemnations, excommunications, rebukings, ad nauseum that went with believing God created the heavens and the earth, people wouldn't have been so quick to see evolution as an "alternative"--as such--to God.
But it's all in the past now. Can you reconcile the two? Or will you peel slivers from the cross and stab them through the shell of theological credibility?
thanx,
Tiassa
***This message has been removed from the post The Nth Round and placed here, where it is more appropriate and where it was intended to be in the first place. Apologies to all. Some typographical errors have been fixed. Take a note kids: stay away from mind-altering substances while computing. Thank you, The Brain of the Tiassa***
------------------
The whole business with the fossilized dinosaur eggs was a joke the paleontologists haven't seen yet. (Good Omens, Gaiman & Pratchett)