The Faith & Religion mega Thread

Originally Posted by enorbet Also the title of that video is "Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro: Religion, Trans Activism, and Censorship" (moderated by and with Dave Rubin) so the very wide and important subject matter deserves at least 2 hours in the "hands" of 3 intelligent men. Most importantly I think it is only natural, right and proper, that I would be interested in well-constructed, informed and intelligent argument that opposes my current conclusions because that is the nature of the scientific method. From my POV being "locked down" by dogma, unwilling to even entertain opposing views, is possibly the major fault I find in Organized Religion.

My physical situation isn't a lot better - 67 and disabled with epilepsy. But we never knocked off being busy, so I don't have 2 hours. Instead of going door to door, we're writing letters while chatting on Zoom. Our meetings never stopped - Zoom again. I have to study for them, or the best points get missed. I try to get a walk when I'm able and was good for 5km (3 miles) without a break which was ok for someone decrepit. But that loses me 2 hours if I rest.
I don't have cable tv either. It's soul destroying punishment, and I am aware it's punishment in the Excited States. Here we don't have 'thought police' or 'copyright police' so I can grab an hour on tv, stream stuff, or torrent things to watch later.

I'm glad to see you open to contrary opinion. Scientists generally SAY they are open-minded until they are challenged to act on it. JK Galbraith wrote the following axioms:

• Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.
• In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.
• It is far, far better to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled sea of thought.

So if you have two hours one day, you'll probably have 20 minutes another day. Go to http://www.darwinsdoubt.com and watch the video on the Information enigma. That is a good case for a Creator and against evolution. Stephen Meyer has nothing to do with us, btw.

Originally Posted by YesItsMe You must be one of those Loki tricks!

Evolution will stop "Loki" from, not only killing but existing; obviously... unless of course that's your given name, until you can't prove or read-into nothing!

Or, you don't believe religions like languages(-or, do they even(?)) evolve so are still praying to who knows what?!. Uhg? Rock? Sludge? Cake!

Ping business_kid - I watched that video and though almost instantly I was struck with how your 3 very valid points above could be applied to the PhD guys who seemed to be squirming for legacy Creation. I kept watching. Soon I discovered what I view as a glaring flaw beyond the fact that DNA discovery had the potential to stop the Theory of Evolution akin to dumping an entire lake on a lit match, but instead bolstered it in a massive quantum leap.

Machine learning has been absolutely verified at fundamental levels. Programs have been written with as few as 3 elements plus random trials to reach a simple goal of mobility. Often it takes a very long time to connect the 3 elements in a manner that can even stand up without falling down, but once that bit is achieved things begin to progress much faster and very soon many novel and interesting means, ever more efficient, begin to evolve and the resulting combination can be highly mobile.

If you haven't seen this, imagine 3 lines with one end each joined and the other ends dangling free. By flexing from the fulcrum for what is usually a very long time at one point, once the program learns to operate 2 in tandem and one separate but in league, it arranges itself in a bipedal fashion where the triangle shape of the 2 in tandem provide stability and standing like an open ended pyramid is utterly common. Then the 2 can stand still while swinging the 3rd followed by attaching the free "foot" of the 3rd and alternately swinging the tandem 2. Repeat and stable mobility follows.

That video makes the mistake of essentially starting with The Cambrian Explosion and ignoring the BILLIONS of years that it took for simpler life forms to reach that "standing and swinging" stage. Those PhD guys seem to make the same mistake as so many do in that other LQN thread about UFO/UAPs - "It's Unidentified therefore it must be aliens" and that quite simply is a non sequitur as is Creation.

At best we are many generations away from being able to gather ANY information, the key element btw in that video, from before Big Bang. Even if we disallow Big Bang we are still attempting to gather not only any data but data that we can possibly relate to from what amounts to another Universe, the one the Creator existed/exists in, in order to create this one (turtles all the way down?). That information may well be impossible to ever gather and analyze from here, but it is surely and irrevocably beyond our grasp now, and to assume that things were somehow better ~2000 years ago is folly. To even attempt to prove an ancient myth by Science in this case is far more of a stretch than proving Atlantis was real, let alone that Phlogiston is essential for fire.

Originally Posted by enorbet If you haven't seen this, imagine 3 lines with one end each joined and the other ends dangling free. By flexing from the fulcrum for what is usually a very long time at one point, once the program learns to operate 2 in tandem and one separate but in league, it arranges itself in a bipedal fashion where the triangle shape of the 2 in tandem provide stability and standing like an open ended pyramid is utterly common. Then the 2 can stand still while swinging the 3rd followed by attaching the free "foot" of the 3rd and alternately swinging the tandem 2. Repeat and stable mobility follows. That video makes the mistake of essentially starting with The Cambrian Explosion and ignoring the BILLIONS of years that it took for simpler life forms to reach that "standing and swinging" stage. Those PhD guys seem to make the same mistake as so many do in that other LQN thread about UFO/UAPs - "It's Unidentified therefore it must be aliens" and that quite simply is a non sequitur as is Creation.

It might be the time here, but You have something in your mind on that illustration that didn't come across here. You knew what you were talking about; I didn't.

As for the Cambrian, that's a point Meyer highlighted because it suited him, where everything happened together. Without the Cambrian, his point still stands. Just like computer programming or any design form requires intelligence, much more so does design of living things, including the first cell. If you want to go back to the origin of life, (A subject you found uncomfortable the last time we visited it) spot the flaw in this 23 minute video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4sP1E1Jd_Y He's a little OTT, but you probably have a thick skin You'll have 23 minutes.

Hello again business_kid. Here's hoping you and your loved ones are reasonably happy and healthy

I'll watch that video shortly but I wanted to clear up what I figured might present a problem, namely understanding my poor explanation of an animation video I saw. Rather than try to simply expand on what I said before (beyond noting the device was actually tripedal and just ended up locking 2 together for stability... so a sort of tripod that can alternately swing one leg, then 2 together and repeat) here is a similar video. This one is more complex but should be much easier to grasp. The programming is quite simple at base level but the program learns to adapt and adapt differently given different elements.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gn4nRCC9TwQ

In the case of biology it similarly doesn't take a lot of base programming beyond "That which sustains you (adds energy) = Good. That which depletes energy (in net values) = Bad" to get quite far. Given that some things are absolutely inherent to lifeforms, like sunlight, it takes very little for those fundamentals to form and to evolve... especially given vast lengths of Time. Nature has many built in affinities to start such processes given basic physical attributes, chemistry, physics, etc. Heat always flows from hotter to colder. Electrons flow from Negative to Positive, etc.

In the Universal case we don't know anywhere close to everything but we do know quite a lot. We know that very early on there was only One Fundamental Force and that the cooling that naturally resulted from expansion reached a tipping point where that one split into two... then 3, then 4. We don't yet know exactly why but some minor imbalance in matter and anti-matter resulted in matter "winning out" and the material Universe began. The Universe itself has evolved and is still evolving and for all intents and purposes will apparently most likely die a thermal death.

Even if we have dice with 100 sides and we wish to calculate how many rolls will be required to roll "snake eyes" with 100 of those 100 sided dice. the answer is finite. So given enough dice rolling enough times it will happen eventually. Since there are likely septillions of planets in the Universe the likelihood that repeated combinations over billions of years will result in a living thing (and exactly what does it mean to be alive?) is nearly absolute, eventually, somewhere at some time. So any assumption that intelligence is a required starting point is not a given. Chance does exist.

I can't recall if it was you that posted that video but I've seen that before. I actually looked him up and did a bit of research. On the scientific side he does not ever say in effect that Intelligent Design is a better explanation than random mutations. He notes that there can be no scientific way to "prove" Intelligent Design". He is merely skeptical that we know enough yet to account for how Life began on Earth in any testable, meaningful way and I have to agree. Evolution is a scientific Theory in that it has undergone an endless barrage of tests for nearly two centuries... nearly 200 years in which I should add the greatest acceleration of technology, communication and knowledge occurred. Th beginning of Life is but a hypothesis since we have no means yet to test it. However, no matter how it started, Evolution still obviously exists.

I truly don't understand the perceived need of some religious folk to deny Evolution. I could understand people assuming "God made Evolution" far easier than denying obvious, testable facts.

There's money in it.

Originally Posted by enorbet I truly don't understand the perceived need of some religious folk to deny Evolution. I could understand people assuming "God made Evolution" far easier than denying obvious, testable facts.

Steven Gould had a theory about that which I find very convincing. He pointed out that Christian opposition to evolution (especially in the US) was largely a twentieth-century development and relates it to the fact that, in the early twentieth century, there was a strong "social Darwinist" movement in America which used a distorted form of Darwin's theory to prove that rich people deserved their good fortune and that the poor were failures who deserved to starve. Not surprisingly therefore, poor but devout Christian folk concluded that Darwin must be the spokesman of the devil.

Incidently, Darwin never used the phrase "survival of the fittest" because, as a good Manchester liberal, he knew how easily it could be misused.

If we had evolved, I expect that's what would have come down to us from earliest times, because every generation is raised by the previous one. In fact what came down was direct creation. Without wishing to start on that endless debate, I expect evolution to be seen for what it is sooner or later.

Your comments on that video ignore the fact that this organic chemist is better qualified than nearly anyone else who to say that life did not come about through random chance, as any investigation into the matter will tell you. He does say so extremely emphatically. So if life didn't come about by chance, there was nothing to evolve.

It's obvious you have a filter in place simply looking for information to suit your viewpoint, so I'll terminate this discussion and clear off here, enorbet, because I am diagnosing in you a case of Invincible Ignorance. Goodbye.

Originally Posted by William James A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

Wherever there's humans there's opinions...

Some opinions that perpetuate us being at the center of it all, would be: religion, the big bang theory, creation theories...

just the facts.

Originally Posted by business_kid It's obvious you have a filter in place simply looking for information to suit your viewpoint, so I'll terminate this discussion and clear off here, enorbet, because I am diagnosing in you a case of Invincible Ignorance. Goodbye.

Please notice what I clipped out from the quote. I am respecting your wish to not pursue discussion about Evolution and the corollary of "How Life Began". That doesn't mean you can't at least say here if you watched any of the last two videos I posted for you or even any other videos expressing a POV contrary to your own.

Naturally in my own defense against the claim of "Invincible Ignorance" I have to point out that this latest discussion began because I posted a video containing not 1, but 3 views contrary to my own that I found interesting and compelling enough to share... so "Invincible Ignorance"?... Hmmmm.

if you did watch, not even necessarily the entire 2 hour one but even 10-20 minutes of either (I watched all of yours) please do comment. I promise to bite my fingers rather than counter those comments and just let your body of work stand or fall to whomever views it so.

Thanks hazel. It has been so long since I read "On the Origin of Species" I had forgotten your correct observation that Charles didn't use those words. I suspect Steven Gould whom you mentioned is accurate at the very least as an important party of the reaction. As if it wasn't already enough that Elites conflated Darwin to justify their position while condemning those "below", by the late 1920s the foundations of National Socialism, among others (in Turkey, Germany, and many other nations including some in the US), were already justifying oppression, even "racial (and other undesirables) cleansing". It does make sense that such spin doctoring would "leave a bad taste" associated with Darwin.

My thanks is not only genuine but rather passionate. That corrupted association with Evolution needs to be corrected. He feared such reactions which is why he delayed publishing for so long. He's already seen it taken in a manner in which it was not meant by his wife. Little did he realize that Victorian "Gentlemen" would be so offended by attributing so much power to females throughout all time.

Originally Posted by jamison20000e There's money in it.

and Power or Both.

I wonder which primate had created God though...