Modern Christianity, the bible and God's laws

That's a long story that began in 1976 and ended in 1990.

I could start a thread for atheists? How did you lose your faith?
Too long here

 

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No idea? I have posted 3 studies this month in Biology!

We know complex organics form in space quite happily, nothing mysterious there. Meteorites have been analysed for things like sugars, bases, amino acids or 1000 of other organics for years, all found.
Mechanisms have been put forward and I posted on glyceric acid, an important precursor.
RNA world mechanism and action demonstrated in the lab, very important.
Deep sea vent mechanism from JPL, I think Russell has retired now.
JWST is looking for signatures of life and precursors.
There are 1000s of scientists working on this and making progress.

 

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Oops, a bit off topic though. Although mentioning Tour and his lies there is good reason.

 

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That sounds like a good thread Pinball, be great if you started it!

 

Maybe I have got Tour wrong.

I don't have enough knowledge on the subject to discredit Tour, maybe I'll read the link James R provided earlier.

Tour does say he thinks we'll find out how life came about naturally, not for a while yet but still. To his credit.

 

No rhyme or reason tbh. Just happened. It felt like I had an empty hole in my heart one day, I just had no faith, no sense of God at all. I started to live a black and white existence.

Thing is is that I lost faith in myself too, it affected my confidence, my whole being.

I have started to regain faith in myself, and with that faith in God, but no where near as much as I had. I'm a work in progress.

Very weird, no trigger.

 

I think it's a mistake to overemphasise Darwin's impact on most people's religious faith. All he did after all was to propose a mechanism for the development of biological species, which has little if any relevance to Christianity. The advances in geology at the same time also contradicted the Genesis account. However the Genesis story has been viewed allegorically rather than literally for centuries, starting with Origen in 200AD. So it wasn't really that big a deal.

It's worth noting it was only some strands of c.18th and 19th Protestantism that made taking every word of the bible literally an article of faith. This was a consequence of the principle of sola scriptura combined, ironically enough, with the Enlightenment drive for scientific certainty (!) that drove some Protestants to try to read Genesis as a science textbook. I used to have a link to some lectures given in Rome in the 1850s (pre-Origin of Species) by Cardinal Wiseman, in which among other things he explained that the then recent advances in geological understanding of the age of the Earth need not be in contradiction with Christian faith. (These lectures set out some principles for reconciling science, which was by then advancing by leaps and bounds, and religion more generally.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Wiseman

That link, incidentally, also mentions Andrew Dickson White, a turn of the century American academic who is largely to blame for the false but still influential notion that religion and science are inevitably in opposition.

Newton was a Unitarian by the way, so had very atypical religious views.

 

Not for me.
We were also taught that much of the OT was not literal. We were also taught Evolution happened, just that god "allowed it to happen."
What my teachers seem to be vague about was which parts were allegorical and which parts factual.
The continual different answers or hand wavey attitude chipped away at my faith.
Say none of it is true?

 

Ok but there is a big difference between accepting that not every part of scripture is possibly not factual and claiming we evolved from ancestral apes.
Man being somehow special and separately created from and having dominion over all the other animals by is pretty much central.
The theory of Evolution destroyed that.

Creationists today cannot cope with:

One. The universe, the earth and life on earth does not require a creator.

Two. We evolved from and are great apes.

 

Man is considered special in that he knows right from wrong, i.e. has morality. That’s what the tree of knowledge of good and evil is all about. It’s an allegory of growing up really, the loss of childlike innocence.

The notion of dominion over other animals is not exactly central to either Judaism or Christianity, but as it happens our current worries about the state of the planet bear it out pretty exactly. Man does have the capability, uniquely, to screw it up for all other species!

 

I would check out the videos on Abiogenesis, do not take my word for it.

 

Unfortunately yes.

 

Tour has a considerable reputation as a synthetic chemist, but he has no expertise in abiogenesis chemistry. I rather despise him for abusing his authority as a synthetic chemist to impress susceptible audiences (generally of creationists) with his uninformed opinions about the origin of life.

As a Messianic Jew, Tour apparently has a vested interest in promoting some form of creationism, though he dials this up and down according to the audience he is addressing. A slippery customer, in my opinion.

 

It's still an issue.

50 years ago when I was about 16 years old, we had to skip several chapters in our Biology textbook because the school board wasn't comfortable with them. (That's when my beautiful mother made sure I saw the movie "Inherit The Wind". The Spencer Tracy version. Still a favorite of mine.)

It's still a driving force. Today, in Texas, we have a governor who is trying to pass laws to funnel public tax money away from the public school system and into religious schools. Which tend to be fundamentalist evangelical based.

 

There's certainly no denying that Bible Belt fundie Protestantism is still an issue in the USA. I recall it myself from the couple of years I spent living in Houston. Those bumper stickers with a fish, or amusingly a fish with legs, were quite a thing. My wife wouldn't let me get one, thinking that as outsiders we should not get involved in taking sides on local issues.

But US style fundie Protestantism is not representative of the whole of Christianity.

 

I agree. It's not even representative of the brand of Christianity I grew up with here in Texas. I was taught about a much more tolerant and loving Jesus than many of my friends were. I have been told many times how I am going to burn in hell for believing in evolution. I have always been aware that they are out there... and they're giving Christians a bad name.

 

How do you think the universe began?

 

Me? No idea, how could I know?

I can only read what modern cosmology is saying in terms of the possibilities.

Some of those.

The universe "began" 13.8 billion years ago, or rather a region of space expanded. That region could have been infinite which means it still is.

Or there is some sort of cyclic mechanism, Turok posits one, Penrose posits another.

There are others but like I said, I am not qualified in the field to discuss too deeply.

 

Tour, in his words(slippery as they might be...) believes in evolution as far as I know. He just thinks that the scientists and hobbyists working on abiogenesis are getting ahead of themselves, there is still a long way to go. Would you agree with that?

 

I know you wouldn't know, you'd have a Nobel prize!

I think most scientists would agree on the age. But if there is a region that is infinite, would that not mean that the universe is infinite? It's expanding we know, so it must of had a beginning, but an infinite region doesn't make sense to me.

Like a baloon?

I was just interested in your thoughts. I think it all came into being at once(because it is expanding, therefore must of had a beginning). And I think it will freeze when all the energy runs out(It only has a set amount of energy).