[_ Old Earth _] Behold, the Big..... Bloom?

[SyntaxVorlon]

How convenient that your proof is completely unsubstatiatable.

 

[Eve777]

Not if you open your heart to things beyond your intellect. You can have an open mind but a closed heart.

"A closed heart sees no meaning in the words of the Bible.....a closed heart does not see its own shut doors! "

For, free will has two words and they are "yes" and "no." Say "yes" to God and in the moment of a "yes" the entire world becomes changed for you.

"Yes, Lord, Show me you exist.....Your Will, not mine.".....Let THESE be your words of Truth.

 

[SyntaxVorlon]

And now your proof is contingent on preexisting belief.
If you want to believe eve, fine do so. But don't think that you can substatiate that belief, it's pointless and unnecessary to religion.

 

[Eve777]

So is yours....no matter how objective science appears to be, there are generally two assumptions which musty be taken entirely on faith.

1) There exists an external objective reality
2) There exists some sort of uniformity through time
a) the universe has structure
b) predictions and generalizations are possible.

Even though these assumptions exist in science it should be noted, there is no way around them if we are to attempt to function without difficulty in this universe. Marvin Minsky (1985) has an interesting view of this problem. The limits to human knowledge are created when the questions being asked are circular. For example, asking what caused the universe is asking what causes a cause. This circularity indicates that the question is unanswerable by its very nature.
Other than those assumptions which are absolutely necessary, science rejects assumptions of faith. Science is a belief system which aims to minimize faith. Religion, on the other hand, is a belief system based completely on faith.

Either way, we are going on faith.

 

[SyntaxVorlon]

Science is a belief system which aims to minimize faith.

Science is not a belief system in that sense. It is the set of explanations that best explain the phenomena of our universe. And what I mean by best is that they explain the greatest part of the current evidence, without introducing numerous other unobserved/unobserveable elements into the explanation, and is the most plausible.
This is the whole of science, simply put the rational way the universe can be seen.

 

[Barbarian]

The driving force behind evolution today is the same as it has always been – a way to deny the existence of God.

The two men who discovered the way evolution worked were both Christians at the time. One of them (Wallace) remained a devout Christian to his death, although Darwin did, late in life say he tended to be an agnostic.

Most of us are theists of one sort or another. You've been lied to, I'm afraid.

I wonder at the sort of thinking that would induce a "Christian" to tell a lie of that magnitude, even if it was intended to "help God" by doing so.

 

[Eve777]

You've been lied to, I'm afraid.

If I am wrong, then I will just die and turn back to dust......and so will you....


But if I am right......I know where I will spend eternity! Do You?

Can you really be sure with all the scientific knowledge you have gathered to disprove God, that he doesn't exist?....Are you willing to bet your eternal soul on what you know so far? What if this was your last day on Earth? Are you really all that sure? One day it will be...it could be today!

 

[SyntaxVorlon]

You do understand that when Barbarian said he is a christian that means he believes in an afterlife don't you?

 

[Eve777]

A quote from Darwin:

This conclusion[6] was strong in my mind about the time, as far I can remember, when I wrote the Origin of species; and it is since that time that it has very gradually with many fluctuations become weaker. But then arises the doubt -- can the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe, been developed from a mind as low as the possessed by the lowest animal, be trusted when it draws such a grand conclusions? May not these be the result of the connection between cause and effect which strikes us as a necessary one, but probably depends merely on inherited experience? Nor must we overlook the probability of the constant inculcation in a belief in God on the minds of children producing so strong and perhaps an inherited effect on their brains not yet fully developed, that it would be as difficult for them to throw off their belief in God, as for a monkey to throw off its instinctive fear and hatred of a snake.[

Darwin's vison was a world in which natural laws, rather than God, govern life on Earth. Darwin saw in nature -- a relentless struggle between creatures, where individual life is of little value.

=================================

ON Wallace:
A little research shows this not to be the case:


Wallace spent most of his early days as an agnostic, but it appears that his broadening slant on things natural and social instilled in him a sense that there was, after all, something resembling a hierarchy of causal forces in the universe--a hierarchy extending beyond the physical, moreover, and into the realm of spirits and altogether unimaginable higher beings. But he would have nothing of a God who directly and individually manipulated the affairs of individual beings, and had equally little enthusiasm for organized religious belief. Wallace's was a universe operating under final, not first, causes: such influence as any conceivable "higher being" might have on lower beings was transmitted through the operation of natural laws, just as any other kind of natural process might take place. Wallace's spiritualism was thus a manifestation of his naturalism, and not of any religious belief. He often spoke metaphorically of God, but in so doing he was doing literally just that: speaking metaphorically.

 

[Featherbop]

You've been lied to, I'm afraid.

If I am wrong, then I will just die and turn back to dust......and so will you....


But if I am right......I know where I will spend eternity! Do You?

Can you really be sure with all the scientific knowledge you have gathered to disprove God, that he doesn't exist?....Are you willing to bet your eternal soul on what you know so far? What if this was your last day on Earth? Are you really all that sure? One day it will be...it could be today!

That is something I find very ironic about atheists. They say that they believe that this life is all there is, yet, they will spend a good sized portion of it trying to battle other religions, to convince them that they are wrong. If I was an atheist, and believed that this life is all there is, I would not spend much of my "only time" trying to debate about religions, or prove religions wrong, or attack other religions. I don't personally believe that atheists exist, because I have yet to see just 1 that is convincing.

 

[SyntaxVorlon]

Most of us atheists don't do this sort of thing, I do it because it's fun to antagonize fundies.

Darwin's vison was a world in which natural laws, rather than God, govern life on Earth. Darwin saw in nature -- a relentless struggle between creatures, where individual life is of little value.

Eve, do you have any back up for this at all?

 

[Eve777]

Quoted from author "Chris Davis" who has studied this a lot more than I have...Here is another quote from him..this is from an article he wrote in 1998.

Strip away from Darwin all that was developed or articulated by other people, and one must throw out the theory of evolution (Lamarck, and a hundred others), the theory of natural selection (Wallace), the laws of genetics (Mendel), the Struggle for Existence (Malthus, Lyell), the Survival of the Fittest (Spencer), and so on. All that remains in the end is Darwin's unique and dramatic vision of an all-embracing war of nature, an exterminatory, competitive fight for survival. It is a lurid vision of the process of evolution which has taken on a life of its own, and is still current, 150 years after the publication of Origin.

This vision of the process of evolution is a work of art, not science. Darwin brilliantly dramatised the process of evolution. But this dramatisation has now become an obstruction to the acceptance and development of the theory of evolution. Theories of natural selection do not actually require ideas of competition, war, and extermination. Idle Theory is a theory of natural selection, but it is not Darwinism. In Idle Theory, as the creatures multiply and their food resources dwindle, they simply work longer to find food, rather than become locked in deadly competition. Darwin's glamorous conflict is replaced by prosaic toil.

Some day, Darwin's advocates must make up their minds whether they wish to advance the theory of natural selection, or Darwin's dramatic version of it. It's one or the other, not both.

 

[Eve777]

Most of us Christians don't do this sort of thing either, I do it because it's fun to watch you atheists try and defend the unjustifiable; untenable;
indefensible, insupportable, unwarrantable, position you are in... :D

 

[Featherbop]

Most of us Christians don't do this sort of thing either, I do it because it's fun to watch you atheists try and defend the unjustifiable; untenable;
indefensible, insupportable, unwarrantable, position you are in... :D

Agreed, Its amazing how much jargon can be used to rationalize things

 

[SyntaxVorlon]

Yes like logic, we would never find you using that in good company would we, bop?

 

[Featherbop]

Yes like logic, we would never find you using that in good company would we, bop?

Is that all you have to say?

 

[SyntaxVorlon]

I can come back with more ad homenim attacks about your character, your opinions and the fact that your tie looks awful with that shirt, but I digress as this has gotten offtopic.

 

[Featherbop]

I can come back with more ad homenim attacks about your character, your opinions and the fact that your tie looks awful with that shirt, but I digress as this has gotten offtopic.

Yeah right, like you care about staying on topic.

 

[SyntaxVorlon]

I can come back with more ad homenim attacks about your character, your opinions and the fact that your tie looks awful with that shirt, but I digress as this has gotten offtopic.

Yeah right, like you care about staying on topic.

Stuff it Bop. You american pig-dog! You whose mother was a beta tester for soap and whose father was broken by falling stuffed animals. Now go away or I shall taunt you a second time-uh!

 

[Featherbop]

I rest my case.