The Faith & Religion mega Thread

While I agree with your overall assessment and characterization, hazel, I take some issue with word choice. "Ruthless" and "fitness" are fluid, subjective value judgment expressions largely based on perspective. One of my favorite college professors who taught various Psychology classes related what I suppose must've been an old cliche,

"To the worm, the robin isn't singing 'Cheerup'"

While it is true that an apocryphal environmental event like an asteroid impact wiped out millions of monstrously ruthless predator dinosaurs (and incidentally also many that depended on sheer size to resist predators while remaining somewhat meek) favoring what at first glance might appear meek to we humans, mainly those who spent much of their lives hiding underground. In fact many such lifeforms such as arachnids and insects continued even to the present exhibiting vastly more cruel and ruthless survival techniques than quick murder, many slowly consumed, eaten alive from the inside while they toiled to protect the offspring planted inside them by some predator. I don't see evidence that the Universe plays favorites. It's just the roll of the cosmic dice.

It remains to be seen if, for example, intelligence can mitigate extinction by sufficiently improving survival odds.

Originally Posted by enorbet In fact many such lifeforms such as arachnids and insects continued even to the present exhibiting vastly more cruel and ruthless survival techniques than quick murder, many slowly consumed, eaten alive from the inside while they toiled to protect the offspring planted inside them by some predator.

Ah, the ichneumon fly! Dawkins is obsessed with them too. But consider: the only thing in the universe that we definitely know to be conscious is the human brain. It is reasonable to believe that other mammals are conscious too because they have brains similarly constructed to ours, though somewhat smaller. The brains of birds and cephalopods have a different structure but they are just as complex, so they are probably conscious too. I doubt if fish are conscious but here the precautionary principle comes into play: they may be, so we ought to treat them humanely, just in case.

But the central ganglion of a caterpillar is so inferior to even the simple kind of brain that a fish has, that the whole idea of it having a quality like consciousness in common with us is ridiculous. The computer on which I'm typing this is more likely to be conscious than a caterpillar. And if a caterpillar isn't conscious, then it can't suffer any pain while being eaten alive. There's no cruelty involved because nobody is at home.

Well, hazel, the way I see it is that if I stomp full on, on a caterpillar it is just dead, but if I stomp on say half of it the unstomped part writhes in what appears to be agony. Even fish struggle against the hook, line and sinker. I don't care if some calls that "merely instinct" or autonomic muscle action. I'll leave it to others to argue the semantics of consciousness until it is understood. I am a hunter so I accept that I can't survive on rocks and basically must kill to live. I didn't "make the rules". I just choose to do it respectfully, thankfully, and as swiftly as possible, and fairly often, give back. In particularly heavy winters I have often laid out feed for deer and elk and whatever other animals might gain from it.

Incidentally, I learned about "zombie" insects long before I ever knew who Richard Dawkins is, and there are roughly a dozen different animals who engage in such ruthless cruelty. That doesn't even include the many higher life forms that eat their prey while still alive. Homo Sapiens are responsible for many extinctions. I suppose we could be viewed as ruthless. Actually and currently, since I've recently watched a long documentary on the so-called "Great War" I might be easily convinced of such a judgment. Again, I don't see any evidence that "meek" is any sort of insurance, but I am rather fond of thoughtful and just.

From the POV of someone who eats many raw insects, I lean towards Hazel's low enough on the consciousness totum to not feel the same feeling that I would feel if I preyed upon other mamals or even upon geese, with their joyous laughter.

However, I have learned that the energy in the hornet's head last for sometime after decapitation, as it still bit my finger when I was preparing to swallow it like a capsule of unknown beneficial medicine... so I've modified my practice to lightly salted and a day on the dehyrdrator tray, and thank the universe that I didn't get bit in the throat by the decapitated hornet: whew

A hornet's bite wouldn't damage you, not even if you got it in the throat. It's the sting that's dangerous and that's at the other end. But why do you eat the heads of decapitated insects? I can understand people eating roasted crickets because that's not so different from eating shrimps. But hornets' heads???

Originally Posted by hazel But consider: the only thing in the universe that we definitely know to be conscious is the human brain. It is reasonable to believe that other mammals are conscious too because they have brains similarly constructed to ours, though somewhat smaller. The brains of birds and cephalopods have a different structure but they are just as complex, so they are probably conscious too. I doubt if fish are conscious but here the precautionary principle comes into play: they may be, so we ought to treat them humanely, just in case.

Hello again hazel. I thought you might enjoy this but you may know of it already

Originally Posted by Psychology Today The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness The scientists went as far as to write up what's called The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness that basically declares that this prominent international group of scientists agree that "Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Non-human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates." They could also have included fish, for whom the evidence supporting sentience and consciousness is also compelling (see also).

Full Article here - https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/b...nscious-beings

BTW, as I'm supposing you know, there are mammals in the seas that not only have larger brains than humans but also have a greater density of neural connection. Some in the Porpoise and Dolphin families do and their behaviour ranges from beneficently altruistic to horrific cruelty and apparently for the fun of it.

While some pet owners WAY overstate their pets' "person-ality" others have actual evidence of extremely abstract awareness in their cognitive behaviour. The definition of Life and Consciousness is still rather elusive. One of the beautiful saving graces of Science is the constant updating process, much like more advanced PC operating systems.

I also thought, especially since you too have a truly Judaeo-Christian background blend, you might find this video indeed this whole anthropolgy-archaeology channel, quite thought provoking and at the very least interesting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cgku-koMiLM

I've never heard of cetaceans being cruel, though there are apparently humpback wales that kill great white sharks purely for their livers and let the rest of the body rot. That seems to me remarkably close to human behaviour.

For a Christian, one of the more interesting questions is at what point in evolution sin becomes possible. For example, when a new group of male lions takes over a pride, they will kill the cubs to bring the females into oestrus because they want to father their own cubs as soon as possible. But however distasteful this may be to us, you can't really call it sinful because lions can't possibly know that killing cubs is bad for them or that it upsets their mothers. I feel rather differently about a wild female chimpanzee whom Jane Goodall caught stealing and eating the babies of other females (and sharing them with her daughter too!). One thing we know about chimps is that they have "theory of mind". In other words, they recognise that other chimps have an internal life similar to their own. There are ingenious experiments to test for this. So Passion (that was what Goodall called her) knew exactly what those females felt like when she stole and ate their babies, and she clearly didn't care. I would call that sinful.

The biblical writers assumed that sin started with homo sapiens but it may be that we just developed a capacity which was already there.

Originally Posted by enorbet If you don't realize what the current state of evidence, that's on you....Again if you don't research that promising new data, that's on you, not on Science.

That goes both ways. You rule out in advance anything coming from another world view than your own as invalid on its face. Your responses force me to think there is significant evidence, and evidentiary evaluation, by scientists, that you have no clue about, due to its messengers. I'm oblivious to neither technological advances and discoveries, nor to the bias involved in collecting, evaluating and presenting them.

Originally Posted by enorbet objective repeatable evidence.

Evidence isn't subject to being objective. It simply is what it is. It's the evaluation of the evidence, including whether it is evidence of anything at all, that must be objective. When there are multiple perspectives possible for evaluating evidence, the evidence will be perceived differently from each perspective. Your so-called objectivity rejects the possibility of any other perspective, ie. miracles don't happen, and is thus biased. Some people recognize miracles as miracles, while you see them as something else. Life is zillions of miracles all happening at once. We are surrounded by miracles. It's a lot easier to believe in what the Bible says than to believe anyone but God can say what, or whether, anything even existed more than 6,000 years ago, much less what happened, when it happened, or how it happened, when the proposition starts with the bias that no other perspective is acceptable or scientific.

The Bible is not a fairy tale. Nothing in it has ever been disproven. It's a combination of history, prophecy, and instruction. Over the centuries, before and since the life of Christ, its prophecies have mostly been proven. The time hasn't yet arrived for those few that haven't been proven, but their number is few. The vast increase in knowledge of the prophesied end times has been here for at least several decades.

Old earth isn't science. It's a religion, faith that the evidence we have proves anything happened more than 6,000 years ago.

Why is helium found in diamonds? All the natural diamonds we find should have lost all their helium by now if they were a mere 30,000 years old.

the greatest problem you face is that poking holes in competing arguments does not prove yours.

When none of competing theories or analyses of actual evidence are provable, some people go with the most believable. You believe DNA came from rock and the happenstance of millions of years. I believe as the Bible describes, and as life appears: it was designed by, and created by, a designer with more power than you are capable of imagining.

advance human knowledge

We still don't know how the humans who built what they built thousands of years ago, Stonehedge and other monoliths, were able to calculate so accurately positions with regard to the sun's position, or move the multi-ton masses without any evidence of use of wheels or giant cranes or excavators. We don't know as much as some think we know.

Originally Posted by mrmazda Evidence isn't subject to being objective. It simply is what it is. It's the evaluation of the evidence, including whether it is evidence of anything at all, that must be objective. When there are multiple perspectives possible for evaluating evidence, the evidence will be perceived differently from each perspective.

He has a point. Belief is something that exists between two extremes of knowledge. On the one hand, there are things we know are true: no one says he believes that the earth is round. And there are things that we know are untrue: no adult believes in Santa Claus. But all the really interesting questions require the evaluation of conflicting evidence, and people will come to different conclusions depending on what weight they put on different kinds of evidence. And that will depend on what they already believe, what they think is likely to be true, and who they think is likely to be trustworthy. So of such things one says "I believe.". Which is short for "I believe this to be true but I recognise that equally honest people might come to a different conclusion."

Originally Posted by mrmazda We still don't know how the humans who built what they built thousands of years ago, Stonehedge and other monoliths, were able to calculate so accurately positions with regard to the sun's position, or move the multi-ton masses without any evidence of use of wheels or giant cranes or excavators.

The stones at Stonehenge weigh up to 30 tons. For comparison, the Egyptians have left us an illustrated account of how they moved one statue that would have weighed twice that. On Easter Island, Thor Heyerdahl re-errected a fallen 25-ton statue with just 12 men.

As for the alignment to a solstice, finding a solstice is easy — all you need is a long pole and careful observation. Now finding the equinoxes is a very different affair, which is why ancient monuments are never aligned to them.

Originally Posted by hazel I've never heard of cetaceans being cruel

Maybe stuff like this?
https://www.discovermagazine.com/pla...u-need-to-know

In some places, male bottlenose dolphins form coalitions to isolate females and coerce mating - sometimes kidnapping the females for weeks at a time - but it's not known if this is common behavior in all pods around the world, let alone if similar behaviors occur regularly in other [marine mammal] species

Originally Posted by mrmazda Why is helium found in diamonds? All the natural diamonds we find should have lost all their helium by now if they were a mere 30,000 years old.

Interesting, I hadn't heard of helium being found in diamonds so I looked this up.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-22860-3

the important terms that control the contents of He are r^2/D for both 3He and 4He (where r[L] is the diamond radius and D[(L^2)/T] is the diffusion coefficient) and 1/λ for 4He (where λ [1/T] is the decay constants of U and Th isotopes).

3He and 4He are isotopes of helium; the digits should be superscripts but I unfortunately ended up with mojibake when I tried to enter it that way.

At D values applicable to monocrystalline diamonds (10^(-20) - 10^(-21) cm^2 s^-1 [46]), 4He is almost immobile over hundreds of millions to billions of years [...] For example, the total loss of 4He and 3He after 500, 1000, and 3000 Ma is 4%, 5%, and 9%, and 5%, 7%, and 13%, respectively,[...] At D > 10^-19 cm^2 s^-1, on the other hand, He loss is significant, with the effect that substantial 3He is permanently lost from the diamond by diffusion, while substantial 4He is lost by diffusion and added by radioactive decay. [...] At D >= 1 * 10^18 cm^2 s^-1, He loss by diffusion is fast[...]

If you look at the graphs in figure 3, "fast" still means it takes around 1 billion years for all the 3He to be lost.

Originally Posted by mrmazda That goes both ways. You rule out in advance anything coming from another world view Evidence isn't subject to being objective.

Absolutely untrue. Even as a child I was reading History and Science. I knew before I was 10 what Phlogiston was and Piltdown Man by age 13 for two examples so I not only accepted that the scientific method depends heavily on falsification I saw that peer review was actually practiced and error correction, though sometimes slow, is being enforced.

As for your point claiming evidence isn't "objective" you left out the "repeatable" part that I always include. If you say it is 3000 miles from NYC to LA anyone can repeat the measuring process and come up with the roughly same answer within similar significant figures. That is repeatably objective in that it does not depend at all on who is doing the measuring.

OTOH, if you say "God created the Universe in seven days" and someone else says "God created the Universe in sixty days" and we ask each "Why do you believe that?" all each can say is somebody else said so. That is the only event that can be repeated and checked, falsified or verified - that it was said or written. WHAT was said or written is NOT repeatable. The objectivity is inherent in the fact that anyone and everyone who cares can fact check the actual concept or event.

Casually dismissing that things we, anyone, can measure accurately and objectively repeat like the relationship between seasons and tree rings also corresponding to radioactive decay as an accurate measure of time, doesn't make it so. THAT is what it is - Objective, Repeatable Evidence, absolutely different from Faith and Dogma. I realize you wish that people would believe Science and Religion are essentially equivalent, but "if wishes were horses....". The preponderance of evidence refutes that assertion.

If you missed these you really should see them. Whether you view such events and experiences as a wonderful example of "What hath God wrought?" or a "Triumph Milestone of Human Science and Intellect" is perfectly valid. Welcome to the 21st Century.... it's just begun!

https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/12/2...es-nasa-reveal

One can also go direct to the source: https://www.nasa.gov/webbfirstimages

That page includes links to full size versions (i.e. web version is 150KB 1041x1062 JPG, but 26.7MB 4537x4630 TIF can be downloaded).

The first three images have links to Hubble's images of the same subjects.

NASA press release: https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-reveals-webb-telescope-s-first-images-of-unseen-universe

Thanks boughtonp. I posted a common link to the tiny ones figuring we geeks would be the only ones to insist on tiffs