Evolution is wack;God is the only way that makes sense! - Part 2

One thing that I can take away from this thead has been the following notion or idea:

Pantheism:

"The more science learns about the universe the more science learns about God"

for some reason this rings well for me... even if it don't make much sense.. it satisfies the religious "grudge match" and allows science the freedom to do what they do best...with out religious nuts getting all heated up.
a grand act of diplomacy...

 

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If I define God as the Universe then this is a truism.
It adds nothing.

I find Pantheism to be a rather weak position... a form of atheism for those ,through logical fallacies such as argument from emotion, personal incredulity etc, or through other reasons, that aren't willing to say "I don't know" and want to cling on to some vague notion of spirituality.

The difference between Pantheism and Agnostic Atheism is merely one of aesthetic and emotion, both of which merely add complexity and answer nothing, and also actually raise more questions.

If you feel the need to appease the theists, if you wish to feel that you have a better "fit" with a theistic society and want to consider yourself diplomatic rather than admit to the positions you actually hold, then perhaps Pantheism is the best position to take.
Remove the emotion, remove the aesthetic appeal, and all you're left with is agnostic atheism.

 

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I think we are now seeing that many people who firmly believe in God are accepting that evolution is indeed correct and that also it doesn't in any way weaken the position for the idea of believing in God. But you've got some people who want to believe in a fight between theism and science, that somehow the two are at odds and the true answers are theological not scientific. I think the problem problem with this is they are trying to limit the scope of God, they unwilling to recognise the fact that if God is all powerful then all the creations of man including science come under his domain, there is no fight there.

What science serves to do is show theists that if God exists just how powerful he would really be, not limited by archaic notions and concepts of hundreds or thousands of years ago.

So evolution indeed does make sense, creation myths seem to make our existence seem easy and without any real effort which is extremely far from the truth. Our evolution, to get us to where we are today, has taken billions of years of struggle and effort, not a mere click of the fingers and we were made!
It is that which makes us so special and important that struggle to become who we are today.

 

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"Agnostic Atheism" is such a tired term. Atheism is not an irrational position to hold, and is by nature agnostic on the question of absolute knowledge. There is no need to qualify atheism with it.

 

Well I think since nobody can know sure whether God exists, anyway people have so many different ideas of what God is, the true answer is we should all be Agnosics. But then again I suppose that is a bit of a cop out from actually making a choice in what we want to believe. I guess my concern with theism is the notion of heaven, my idea of a nice after life is probarbly considerably different from alot of others, so who's version of heaven is correct? and besides it will probarbly take me ages to learn to play a harp.

 

I would omit the "want" part, but otherwise you're absolutely right. Agnosticism, in my view, is a cop-out. It wasn't always, but it certainly is today. And as I said, it's implied in atheism. Atheism in its most active sense is "I don't believe that there is a god, but I do not believe it's possible to say for certain either way."

That sure is one flaw in it. The idea that this species with such diverse interests and desires would all suddenly realize we love non-stop and eternal worship seems far-fetched. I would say that this is pretty far down the line of problems I have with theism, though.

 

That's where the problem arises though. I can imagine a line of infinite length rotated around an arbitrary point through 360 degrees to sweep out a circle of infinite area and infinite circumference. I can imagine that circle rotated around an arbitrary diameter through 360 degrees to sweep out a sphere of infinite volume and infinite surface area. But do those "shapes" make any sense? How would you tell the difference between an infinite sphere and an infinite cube?

I already poined out that an infinite "thing" can have borders. An infinite line only needs to be infinite at one end. It can be bounded at the other. An infinite plane could have parallel borders and infinite ends - i.e. an infinite strip - or it could have intersecting borders - i.e. an infinite plane with a finite corner. An infinite plane could also have a finite hole cut in it.

So an infinite "sphere" or "cube" or "ellipsoid" or whatever could have a finite hollow in it or it could have a cutout of any shape with infinite borders.

I don't see how any of this helps your argument (presumably an argument for God?). The idea of an infinite "thing" having a center doesn't make any more sense than it having a shape.

 

It's really just heartburn for Christian fundamentalists. For the non-fundie Christians, and just about everyone else, the fundies are not affirming God at all. They're merely affirming their ignorance.

I wouldn't call a fundie a theist. They have a religion that promotes pathological traits like denial, lying and narcissism. As for the fight, it can be marked in time as beginning with the Scopes trial, and most recently punctuated at the Republican convention, after several recent legal attempts to interfere with the teaching of evolution.

That may apply for just about any religious person except the fundies. They are so heavily steeped in pathologically lying that they need to invent science all their own, which has no basis on Nature, and to do so to merely justify throwing centuries of knowledge out the window, knowledge about how Nature works, simply because they've been checked--proven wrong, and their denial is so deep seated that this becomes a crusade for them.

This probably only applies to fundies as well. Their particular version of Christianity was invented only recently, having grown out of the Anabaptist tent revivals that sprang up in the mid to late era of American pioneering. It has spread like an insidious disease because they've preyed on the vulnerable minds of weaker people around the world, who they've contaminated with their narcissistic missionary drives. Their sheep tend to have have little or no education, so the science issue is moot for them. For every naive person they win over, they score credibility, which is the area where they've been brought to their knees by academia.

By relegating all of the effort to a cosmic magician, they can wiggle out of this, without remorse.

That requires (among other things) that they understand that radiometric dating corroborates this. But the liars and deceivers go out of their way to invent false testimonials against geology and dating methods, and they sell this fertilizer to their sheep by the trainload.

By contrast, the fundies are so self-absorbed that they invent geo/ego-centric models of time and space that have been discarded by academics ages ago, merely to harp on how special they are. In the most obsolete of egotistical religious views, they're dedicated to the principle that the whole universe revolves around them. And their cosmic magician merely suspends the Laws of Nature, as needed, to combat any practical problems with ideation like this.

 

The political agendas behind these movements are not obvious to many, and some of the points you made about them are reflective of that.

I would not say that their campaign does not have any appeal to the intelligent or scientific community, because nature does reveal ID.

However, their ultimate goal, probably not realised, is to allow the churches to regain their lost and much coveted power again.

Animal farm, where the take over is worse than the previous rule.

I don't support evolution in education, and neither do I support ID with an agenda. Both persuations have political sources, and will probably result in a revolution in favour of the latter.

The false consepts of how God creates, snapping fingers as you would call it, does not agree with processes observed in nature and capitalised on by evolution. However, evolution has gone too far by dismissing ID altogether, and resorted to lengths of time to do the job, which it doesn't.

The more time allowed, the less probability of getting it right, let alone of surviving.

 

I find that there is a need to qualify the term - as otherwise people assume that you hold the belief that God does not exist - which I do find an irrational philosophical position, even if practically both atheisms may be the same. The term avoids confusing between "Hard" and "Soft" atheism that would otherwise be wrapped up in the single term.

 

no It is a discussion about infinitey and not God ....
I would suggest quite strongly that you are referring to a conditional or qualified infinity and not an [ absolute infinity ] that my original question referred to.

If the universe is infinite in size where would you find it's center of gravity?
there are no boundaries implied in the question..agree?

Which actually makes the question easy to answer....IMO

 

I'll post the answer and show reason for it ok...

If the universe is infinite in size where would you find it's center of gravity?

You would find the centre of gravity at any point you choose.

Now imagine I choose the salt shaker on my kitchen table to be the center of the infinite universe.
how so?

well imagine that in all direction [omni directional] infinite distance exists.

now move the shaker into another room same exercise..
no matter where you put that shaker infinite distance exists in all directions

so the answer is :

The centre of an infinitely big universe is anywhere you want it to be...

btw,
The centre of time eternal is also any where you choose to make t=0
because no matter where you put your NOW there is always infinite time past and infinite time to go...

does that make sense?

IMO it was the main reason for why the Earth was originally considered as the center of the universe centuries ago [ it was considered flat at the time too I might add :m:]
as Christian and Islamic religion attempted to understand and incorporate the philosophy of many ?? years before. [Hermetic philosophy - Hermes Trismegistus ]
see: heliocentricism
so to answer Balerions question:
Where is this God?
answer: "Where ever we choose him to be"

like inside my salt shaker in the kitchen perhaps or maybe somewhere else ... now let's see...hmmmmm no over there...[ if you get my point ]
thus defining freewill... maybe...
"the freedom to believe as you wish to believe..."

 

but shhhh! don't tell them that.....

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ref: http://dialinf.wordpress.com/2008/04/03/a-circle-with-the-center-everywhere/

 

I just wonder at times is it because it's easy that people choose to believe in God, I mean you have these religions and churches that have been around for hundreds of years, this whole mythology, bibles stories, creation myth's etc.... It just seems so easy to buy into the idea of God without ever really having to think about it. I wonder if most religions were centred around the idea of worshipping the Son or Moon or maybe even just a big rock if people would still so easily buy into and derive comfort from that belief.

I like science because it doesn't ask you to make things up or buy into what someone else has made up, it say's right we're going to take the evidence we have and come to the most logical conclusion of what we know, but also science moves on, when something new is learned it's willing to change it's position, you don't see that very often in religion.

 

Yeah, probably. It's not the details that comfort people, it's the notion that there's some higher power at work. I mean, worshiping a rock (which is kind of what Muslims do) or the sun and moon isn't really any more strange than worshiping a god-man and his immortal Enormous Interdimensional Human father. The ideas are all equally ridiculous, at least when you really think about them. I mean, is the idea of Body Thetans more out there than demons and devils invading your body? Is Xenu's nuclear bomb in a volcano less plausible than a universe created in six days? Maybe because one is more ingrained in society, sure, but only on the surface. In reality, they're both just as stupid as the other.

Precisely. Idiots will argue otherwise, but there's never any evidence for their claims.

 

In fairness to Islam, it's a magical stone. After all they had a few more centuries to dig deeper into absurdity. It's the cornerstone of the even more magical Kaaba, the big box at Mecca where they equally absurdly circle it, in what looks from the air like the stirring of human molasses. The idea is to go around it the magical seven times. And at least they had an even more magical prime number, more than twice as magical as the Trinity's.

The Kaaba was probably built as a sanctuary for warring tribes to worship.

In her book, Islam: A Short History, Karen Armstrong asserts that the Kaaba was dedicated to Hubal, a Nabatean deity, and contained 360 idols that either represented the days of the year, or were effigies of the Arabian pantheon.

By the time Islam had infected them, and at the time heretical Christians had wandered through and set up their own magical huts, they invented the legend that the magic stone was from the Garden of magical Eden, and Abraham had used it to build this place to worship Elohim - which they mangle as Allah. Forget that they didn't know their geography, that the search for the confluence of the Tigris-Euphrates would take you into the mountains of Turkey (an awful long way to go to fetch a cornerstone). But of course magic is like that, it just renders all fact moot.

In their favor is that the ritual kissing of the sacred stone is devoid of the sadism of torturing a man to death, only to cling to ideas like a sacred tee, a sacred cloth, Holy Grail, Holy Communion, Holy Oil, holy bones, and, worst of all, a Holy Scripture.

Anyone who would ever worship words just because they're committed to writing, which is also magical, ought to recognize the paradox in disputing that the only time humans were capable of producing written truth was in this one obscure era in a remote and barren place occupied by goatherds.

Fundies, Christian and Muslim alike, build their entire world view on this magical endowment of written stories, albeit by unknown authors and collators, merely by inventing as much magic as they need to prop it up as infallible. That would be plausible in a village that had only one literate person with one set of stories, who could siphon off the magic of written words and render them orally without fail. But today? No, there's no parallel. Fundies have no excuse.

Today it's the superstition about magical words that sets fundies apart from everyone else. Magical words are capable of programming the mind in ways that magical objects, like stones and crosses, barely achieve. It would be fine if the hypnotized robots were living in cloisters thumping their magic words all day long.

But when they bring this crap into the real world, and disturb the public peace, the game changes. Then we have to be a little more strident and treat them like the morons and nuts that they are.

 

Gorlitz,

Your first error is thinking that people ''choose'' to ''believe in God''.

Secondly, you make it seem like you've given a variation of different religious traditions, when in reality you've only given one,
namely the Christian one. Is this (seeming) habit caused by delusion (thinking you're saying something, but actually not), and is all your reasoning based
on this stylee.

''Buying into the idea of God'' isn't the same as 'believing in God'', theism, or being a theist, because such designations require actual belief.

Science and theism are two entirely different things. The very fact that you compare them in the way that you have, shows that you don't really understand either, and just see it as two warring factions, most probably because you have been told this is correct.

Rather than take a dumb-ass view of science and religion, why don't you look into them for yourself, then you'll realise what I mean.

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jan.

 

Many problems with this drivel. One, it's drivel. Wait, I already said that. Okay, let's start again. One, Science and theism are different, but there is overlap in what they try to explain. All religions have a kind of creation story, and many posit explanations for natural phenomenon, and neuroscience is learning more and more about what makes religion work on a biological level. In that sense, they kind of are warring factions, even though science is pitching a shutout. They don't have to be opposed in practice, but certainly anywhere religion attempts explain the natural world, science debunks it.

So I think the person having trouble understanding these concepts is, as usual, you. You owe an apology to Gorlitz.

 

There is nothing political about getting an education. It's just a matter of wrestling with the tendency to be lazy. With the most basic exposure to learning, the underlying premise of this thread evaporates.

ID is a fraud designed by narcissistic idiots and perpetrated on weak minds, naive under-educated folks, morons and nuts. Other than that, it's completely irrelevant, and it has zero appeal to anyone with half their wits about them, much less people with actual training in science.

There's a kind of self-aggrandizing envy in this that seems to want to justify individual absurdity rather than the collective version.

A pig on his own will still run to the slop.

That's simply because you lack the education to make an informed decision about it, and because you've substituted what you lack with your own fantasies of what knowledge encompasses. Remember, it's never too late to learn. The facts you lack are only a mouse-click away.

All ID comes with an agenda. First and foremost is the agenda to wallow in ignorance and to rail against knowledge and education.

Science has nothing in common with politics. It involves the study of natural laws, and doesn't concern itself with any of what you're talking about. You would know this if you'd ever studied science.

Ignorance will never be completely wiped out. It will hang on, kicking and screaming, and railing against knowledge. But that's its nature. If you call that revolution, that's your prerogative. But nothing will ever go in the favor of ignorance.

All concepts of how God creates are false. Evolutionary biology isn't capital. It's knowledge. Lacking that knowledge, you may feel inclined to recast it as something it's not. That's also your prerogative. As for observing the processes of Nature, this is evidently not one of your strengths. This is why you should be willing to leave the observations in the hands of the experts, or else belly up to the bar and do some science work yourself. I think it's fundamentally absurd to criticize something you neither understand nor study, and to criticize it to the point of casting aspersions on the people who do bother to do the difficult work. If you can entrust your car to a mechanic or your food to a food preparer, by what logic would you dismiss the expertise of all the world's scientists? The consequences of driving with a leaky brake line or eating contaminated food are far greater than those of simply reading a science text book. Besides, like I said, you are free to do all the cross-checking you want. The problem is, it's equivalent to banging your head into a wall. You're simply not going to outsmart the world with naive and absurd assertions about Nature.

The reverse is true. ID simply dismisses science. And ID dismisses history. ID dismisses the cumulative knowledge of the world. Worst of all, ID dismisses Nature. It does so by lying, by simply re-creating Nature in its own image. ID dresses up stupidity and parades it as if it were insight. This is why under-educated folks fall for it. They simply don't know better. The key to curing this defect is education. This is why ID is nothing more than a thinly veiled attack on knowledge and learning. Education inherently poses a threat to stupidity. But ID is a losing proposition. Humans are intelligent, and, though it may take a very long time, we will eventually climb the learning curve as a species. ID will fade into the past with all the other long-gone disavowals of reality.

Nature doesn't "resort" to anything. And there is no job. These are all imagined, based on a lack of information about how nature works.

The amount of time for a species to evolve is not magical. It takes a moment, or it takes eons. You simply don't understand how evolution is occurring. Even as you speak, the microbes attacking your body are evolving, and your own immune system is evolving defenses against them. Write down the dates between two different bouts with a cold or flu, and you can measure the evolution of the processes within yourself. It happens as fast as it happens. Time between morphing a group of creatures depends entirely on initial population size, rate of reproduction, rate of drift or mutation, and rate of die-off on account of natural selection. Darwin spoke of the knowledge of animal breeders in England, and described some very elaborate ways breeders select their breeding pairs. These were people who needed immediate results. So that's about as fast as sheep or dogs can evolve. E. coli bacteria reproduce 13,000 times faster than dogs. This is why it's rather simple to prove the main premise of Darwin's theory with a microbial culture. All you need is the power of deduction to see that what a lab tech can do very quickly, causing bacteria to evolve by introducing an anti-microbial agent, is no different that the way animal breeders and farmers have changed the genetics of plants and animals very drastically, usually very slowly, even over hundreds or thousands of years. Compare maize to corn, for example, and try to figure out how long it took, simply by the fact that some people figured out that the better ears would yield better offspring. All Darwin did was to remove artificial selection from this picture and to introduce the fact that natural selection is at work all the time. Here, the rates of change can be extremely slow, since the evolutionary pressures are not always as drastic as the hand-picking that goes in artificial selection.

Before you can legitimately characterize a theory you would at least have to be able to state the theory. Your inability to do so renders this moot. Contrary to your denial of reality, evolutionary biology is one of he most prevailing threads that links all the sciences together. Again, you would already know this if you'd ever bothered to read science.

In complete counterpoint to your belief of how evolution happens is the actual way that it happens. Since creatures evolve purely as a result of surviving long enough to reproduce, then the probability that their descendants will also survive that long increases statistically as well. You would need some training in statistics to comprehend this, but it would also be evident to you if you ever had any experience raising plants or animals. Traits are inherited, but they are also conferred in a randomly scrambled manner. Every population has evolved, and will continue to evolve whenever the odds of surviving with the present traits becomes so severe that the individuals no longer live long enough to reproduce. When this happens to a substantial percentage of the population, then the survivors become the new gene pool, and the traits they possess will automatically dominate, and a new longer-living version of the creature will tend to emerge. In many cases there are phenotype changes, which are the only thing you're addressing - the noticeable physical changes which set creatures apart by appearance or function, whereas they may be closely related genetically. Rats and humans are genetically much more similar than the form and function comparisons can detect. This is why rats are used extensively in testing for organic causes of human disease. They are that similar to us genetically.

The world of science is out there just waiting for you to dip a toe in and actually learn something.