The Faith & Religion mega Thread

Originally Posted by enorbet Good one, sundialsvcs. That is the valid logical concept in the quote "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence". Just because we don't know a thing yet does not mean we can never know it.

Likewise, the fact that we cannot "disprove" an assertion to the satisfaction of the person who is making that assertion, does not make the assertion true.

However, "truth and falsehood" means very little in a pure-religious argument, because the persons "accept 'on faith'" the premises that they are arguing for or against. They are fully in line with the famous quote: "Faith is the evidence of things not seen." (Never mind that "faith" cannot logically be "evidence." They say that it is, and that's that. "Logic" really has nothing at all to do with it.)

Originally Posted by enorbet Frankly I do see that recognition as derogatory when we are referring to ancient explanations of natural phenomena so I don't consider that "writing off". They didn't know any better because they couldn't know any better. They had neither the tools nor the history of use of appropriate tools. It's only derogatory when applied to anyone who thinks that explanation is valid AFTER such tools and history exist that falsifies that concept/event.

Well, let the records show that Galileo very nearly lost his head. He had to "officially recant" his "blasphemous" views, because the Church "knew" that the earth was in the center of all things – "because, Genesis."

Originally Posted by mrmazda 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.

Nonsense. We find fluids and gasses in diamonds ALL THE TIME as predicted and expected. It only means it got isolated before (volcanoes being a prime example) being able to release all isotops.

Originally Posted by mrmazda When none of competing theories

Name one.

Originally Posted by mrmazda You believe DNA came from rock and the happenstance of millions of years.

No sane being believes that.

Originally Posted by mrmazda 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.

... and that's OK. But how does it make evolution untrue? We see it happening on a daily basis.
Evolution doesn't explain our beginning (neither does it claim that).

Originally Posted by jens But how does it make evolution untrue? We see it happening on a daily basis. Evolution doesn't explain our beginning (neither does it claim that).

We observe species-level evolution quite readily, serving as an adaptation mechanism as the environment changes. Yet we also observe that everything reproduces "after its own kind." There are mechanisms that we don't fully understand which serve to prevent outcomes that are "too different."

The simple truth of the matter is that we do not know "most things," but we do not even yet suspect them. I am entirely certain that we still have no idea what could cause the diversity of life as we witness it today. Endless generations of creatures are consistent, not diverse.

Geez sundialsvcs! Still? OK, yes it is true that a dog is never going to give birth to a cat, and yes that's because of "after it's own kind" with minor variations BUT save a penny every day for long enough and you have a million dollars... it just takes 100 million days. Obviously no human can currently live that long but Humanity and every other species DO. How different does a species have to get before you call them a new one? It is known for example that Humanity at one time could have been mistaken for a mouse, that whales left the sea and became land creatures and then returned to the sea.

Please note that we have discussed that the term "species" is a construct much like Dewey Decimal Classification. Such terms can be a bit arbitrary but useful to describe similarity.

Skepticism is generally a good thing, sometimes a very good thing but it also becomes a convenient, condescending (if not silly and counterproductive) impediment to the progress of knowledge when it only serves to inflate one's ego (eg: "Experts don't fool ME... I know better") as a blanket reaction instead of a response.

As you recently pointed out...

Originally Posted by sundialsvcs Likewise, the fact that we cannot "disprove" an assertion to the satisfaction of the person who is making that assertion, does not make the assertion true.

Reality does not depend upon opinion or human individual satisfaction. Once again we are "in the gaps". Just because we don't know everything about Quantum Mechanics or Gravity doesn't mean Quantum Mechanics is a fail nor we won't fall back to Earth when we jump or fall. Whether anyone believes it or not makes no difference in reality. You jump... you fall. You don't fly off into orbit... oh wait... "orbit" is gravity in action, too! whatever it is

@enorbet: Essentially, you are appealing to "random chance." Just insert "billions and billions of years," and eventually your hat-band will turn into a white rabbit and then jump out to greet you. But I submit that, no matter how much time you allow, an oak tree will never turn into a dolphin, nor a slime mold.

For any "new creature" to happen, several remarkable events must occur. First, a radical change of genome must occur and it must not be miscarried by the host female. Then, both male and female copies of this change must be successfully and simultaneously produced, then prove capable of mating with each other and producing viable offspring which correctly express the desired new genome with acceptable variations. Finally, this new creature must drop back into "after its own kind" so that eventually an entire population is produced consisting of the same type of creature.

And so, to me, "evolution is not enough of an answer." It cannot go the entire required distance, no matter how much time you allow. And, I have utterly no idea what that thing might turn out to be. I feel that I know intuitively what the answer isn't, but I have no idea what it is.

Nonetheless, I aver that there must be "something else" that is capable of "radically changing the rules" in this way, yet capable of arriving at viable male and female offspring which are then capable of sustainable self-reproduction. Without "the rules" changing again and effectively destroying the thing that it has just made: the chaos must occur but then stop. We have never observed this process in action, nor has our growing understanding of genomics yet suggested what – who? – it might possibly be.

Originally Posted by enorbet Reality does not depend upon opinion or human individual satisfaction. Once again we are "in the gaps". Just because we don't know everything about Quantum Mechanics or Gravity doesn't mean Quantum Mechanics is a fail nor we won't fall back to Earth when we jump or fall. Whether anyone believes it or not makes no difference in reality. You jump... you fall. You don't fly off into orbit... oh wait... "orbit" is gravity in action, too! whatever it is

Richard Bach: "seek your limitations, and sure enough, you will find them" (roughly paraphrased from memory of reading Illusions)

Douglas Adams: after jumping, if while falling, you notice your beloved backpack lost so long ago, right the way you left it by a tree, it is a surreal coincidence strong enough to distract you from falling, and so distracted, falling turns to flying... it was something to that effect: "throw yourself at the ground and miss". (paraphrased from memory of reading Hitchiker's Guide")

Reality does depend on opinion and individual consicousnesses, whether satisfied or unsatisfied--we, "in the gaps", create. Schroedinger's cat is the real deal: the measurer affects the measurements... your physical measured reality from science experiments is the mere physical state of a universal conscious field from which individual consciousnesses can't actually be all the way separated.

Thus spoke Zarathustrium, the congregate of gut bacteria consciousness, interacting with my own via the force.

Then again, I am a mutant, so perhaps it's not that way for everybody. The teller at my bank once said: Have we been serving your financial needs? I said, no: to serve my financial needs you would have to just give me money. She laughed. As I was leaving, I looked down at the receipt for the deposit I had just made: it was a hundred dollars over. I didn't want to waste quantum indetermination on a hundred bucks, so I showed her the error; her supervisor had to comeout and enter her code to correct the transaction--I told them it wasn't the teller's fault, I had been experimenting in quantum indeterminacy. They started looking nervous, so I left.

We are "in the gaps"... a state of infinite quantum indeterminacy that only gets shaped into physical stuff by the conscious field: you get what you pray for. Why pray for dead whirling particles? Why pray for the severance between individual and reality?

Originally Posted by sundialsvcs @enorbet: Essentially, you are appealing to "random chance." Just insert "billions and billions of years," and eventually your hat-band will turn into a white rabbit and then jump out to greet you.

Surely "chance" is involved but not necessarily "random". If "by chance" and instead of small "in the idiom", steps a bird was born with gills instead of lungs it wouldn't survive long enough to get out of the nest let alone pass on it's mutated genes. That bird offspring would be even more unlikely to be born with lungs for methane suitable for living on Jupiter. All life on Earth is bound to develop and mutate in ways that are influence by the Earthly environment, not random.

As I have stipulated several times here, certainly it is possible to use terminology and conditions vastly greater than human lifespan to attempt to deceive but that is not the purpose of Science nor any decent scientist. Such cart-before-the-horse predisposition is anathema to Logic and Science and is soon falsified. The Theory of Evolution has withstood falsification, with only minor revision and refinement, for over 160 years... 160 years of the greatest explosion of technology and educated people to employ it. The discovery of DNA alone was fundamental enough to just destroy Evolution entirely in "one swell foop" but instead it only deepened and validated the theory by explaining HOW it works to complement THAT it works.

Early Evolution Theory is somewhat similar to Gravity, with Gravity being less understood than Evolution. We know THAT it works to an incredible level of precision, and a wee bit of what influences Gravity, but we do not yet know WHAT it is or exactly HOW it works.

Originally Posted by sundialsvcs But I submit that, no matter how much time you allow, an oak tree will never turn into a dolphin, nor a slime mold.

Already stipulated and irrelevant.

Originally Posted by sundialsvcs For any "new creature" to happen, several remarkable events must occur. First, a radical change of genome must occur and it must not be miscarried by the host female. Then, both male and female copies of this change must be successfully and simultaneously produced, then prove capable of mating with each other and producing viable offspring which correctly express the desired new genome with acceptable variations. Finally, this new creature must drop back into "after its own kind" so that eventually an entire population is produced consisting of the same type of creature.

That isn't how it works. If you insist I will attempt to go point by point, but as example, before we can explain why and how a four stroke gasoline engine works, the listener needs to understand combustion and at least some of the Physics and Mechanics involved more than just Suck! Squeeze! Pop! Phooey! even though that is true in general. So I suggest you look into how Darwin's finches, plants in Hawaii at different elevations, whales, and some previously mentioned squirrels and gulls have speciated.

Originally Posted by slac-in-the-box Douglas Adams: after jumping, if while falling, you notice your beloved backpack lost so long ago, right the way you left it by a tree, it is a surreal coincidence strong enough to distract you from falling, and so distracted, falling turns to flying... it was something to that effect: "throw yourself at the ground and miss". (paraphrased from memory of reading Hitchiker's Guide")

...and that worked out so well for the whale

Originally Posted by slac-in-the-box Reality does depend on opinion and individual consicousnesses, whether satisfied or unsatisfied--we, "in the gaps", create. Schroedinger's cat is the real deal: the measurer affects the measurements... your physical measured reality from science experiments is the mere physical state of a universal conscious field from which individual consciousnesses can't actually be all the way separated.

That's not so in almost every way.

It is entirely woo woo speculation that reality depends on consciousness since there is zero evidence that consciousness (whatever it is) even existed for the VAST bulk of the Universe's existence. If you meant Earthly consciousness, AND we assume some form of life on Earth fits some defiinition of "conscious" that only increases the percentage from considerably less than 1% to about 19%. What about the other 81% of Time?

Schroedinger's Cat is very often so misinterpreted. Shroedinger agreed with Einstein that the Copenhagen Interpretation was dead wrong (pun only slightly intended) and the Cat's predicament was possibly less than Copenhagen's since it demonstrates the fallacy of paradox in superposition. It was to refute Copenhagen, not the other way around.

As soon as you say "measurer" or "observer" you need to specify a precise definition. Is a camera an observer or measurer? a dog? bacteria? This junk is as old and fallacious as "does a tree falling in the wood still make a sound when nobody is there?" Note that question was posed as a thoughtful question before audio recording was invented.

Originally Posted by slac-in-the-box We are "in the gaps"... a state of infinite quantum indeterminacy that only gets shaped into physical stuff by the conscious field: you get what you pray for. Why pray for dead whirling particles? Why pray for the severance between individual and reality?

You have every right to believe that on faith but the evidence refutes the assertion. Magick, incantations, potions, etc etc etc won't bring you health, let alone immortality, wealth, a lover, or anything else any more than shouting Shazam! will transform you into Captain Marvel.

Originally Posted by enorbet Magick, incantations, potions, etc etc etc won't bring you health, let alone immortality, wealth, a lover, or anything else any more than shouting Shazam! will transform you into Captain Marvel...

I notice you wisely left prayer off your list.

When I was a wee lad, I used to step into the swimming pool over and over again trying to walk on water; saying a prayer before each attempt (just let me walk on water and I'll be good, I promise)... after falling in the pool all week, I got pissed at God, and challenged my Grandma, who had given me the book that got me trying, and she said I wasn't ever to bargain with God, nor to test him...

Eventually I learned to hang ten on a surf board. Prayer answered.

Faith, maybe, but it's based on a relationship. Prayers for power, wealth, retribution, and the like, do not honor that relationship (break covenant), and thus are not legitimate prayers.

There is plenty of evidence of consciousness as unseen, unknown, perhaps yet undiscovered, or perhaps undiscoverable mechanism of communication between organisms that are considered individual from one another.

How do those gut bacteria create cravings and alter our moods and behavior?
Why are there so many parallel accounts of the same patterns from so many insular cultures?... like, native americans looking at sunrise and sunset in tranquil meditative repose, or a Persian yogi doing the same thing... Why would so many diverse cultures have prayers, incantations, potions, etc., in the first place? Kahil Gibran. So many poets from so many places giving so many diverse expressions to the same thing! Whatever it is that interacts with those individuals, each on their own "narrow road", has made enough impact on all those individuals to try music, painting, sculpture, books, poetry, chanting, dancing, and everything else demonstrating their participation with the big chorus... even the geese laugh with audible joy and glee: this is all evidence.

Not trying to interact with the Universe; never praying, or incanting, or meditating, or potioning, or shouting shazzaam for fun, for whatever motive--perhaps because it all seems too silly and absurd: that's not ever dancing at the party

Well slac-in-the-box, we disagree excepting "You cannot petition the lord with prayer" since that begs the question "Which Lord?" just for starters unless you imagine "Chosen People" always win against all reality. Prayer and Master Plan are at odds, seems to me. None of that practical logic prevents anyone from enjoying Art, Music, Poetry, Dancing... whatever. Those actually serve a purpose. If prayer serves some purpose for you or anyone, go for it. It's just useless to me.

Originally Posted by slac-in-the-box I notice you wisely left prayer off your list. When I was a wee lad, I used to step into the swimming pool over and over again trying to walk on water; saying a prayer before each attempt (just let me walk on water and I'll be good, I promise)... after falling in the pool all week, I got pissed at God, and challenged my Grandma, who had given me the book that got me trying, and she said I wasn't ever to bargain with God, nor to test him... Eventually I learned to hang ten on a surf board. Prayer answered.

In my experience prayer often works like that. We get what turns out to be the right answer, the one we really needed, but it wasn't the answer we were expecting. At BRE where I worked, there was a devout fundamentalist Christian whose job was to ride around the site in a truck delivering the post to the various buildings. He really enjoyed his work.

He told me that when he was a little boy, the one thing he had wanted was a toy car, not a dinky toy but a car that you could climb into and drive. There were some cars like that which were electric but he would have been quite satisfied with one that you paddled with your feet. He kept praying for one (and asking for one from his parents around Christmas and birthday times) but he never got what he wanted. His parents couldn't afford such an expensive toy. Eventually he just forgot about the car.

Then one day when he was tootling around the site, he realised that his truck was the car he had prayed for. It was an electric one (Yay!!) and he could play with it all day long and never have to leave it and go to school. And they even paid him for playing with it.

Originally Posted by enorbet Well slac-in-the-box, we disagree excepting "You cannot petition the lord with prayer" since that begs the question "Which Lord?" just for starters unless you imagine "Chosen People" always win against all reality. Prayer and Master Plan are at odds, seems to me. None of that practical logic prevents anyone from enjoying Art, Music, Poetry, Dancing... whatever. Those actually serve a purpose. If prayer serves some purpose for you or anyone, go for it. It's just useless to me.

Yeah... I checked the what are you listening to now thread to see if you ever shared any music links, and whew; you had, putting my mind to ease at once. I liked the links I clicked on: a song about sinning and praying; another song about music and love; and a soulful song about not wanting to fight anymore. When you listen to them, what are you feeling? To me, the singer of the soulful song seemed like she was praying... for peace.

the dance is the evidence... but religions become absured with: waltzing is the only way; no its the tango; no its the square dance; gotta do the do-si-do to see god... bah to religions: but I wouldn't give up dancing just cause some of the clubs are uptight.

@enorbet: First, tell me how that "four-stroke engine" evolved.

One day, by chance, you walked up on the beach and saw this thing sitting there. Nearby, also the product of "evolution," was not only a steel can, but a steel can filled with gasoline. It was just the most remarkable thing ...

... and yet, what you are asserting as "established, scientific fact" is a "random" turn of events infinitely more complicated than this. To "evolve" a gasoline engine would be considerably simpler than what you now describe.

No, let's just face reality: "we don't know." Not yet!

And, personally, @enorbet, I think that you're "just picking a [scientific] fight." Science is the leftmost lane on the highway; religion, prayer, and so on, are the rightmost lane. All part of the same road of human experience, and going the same way. All of them by now very old. I think that it is rather pointless to say that one of them must "conquer" the other, and that "neither can live while the other survives." This is not Harry Potter.

The people who look at a sunrise and "feel" the presence of someone to pray to, and "feel" the urge to do it and then do so, are not 'wrong.' They might, in fact, be scientists. Yes, real ones.

Originally Posted by slac-in-the-box When you listen to them, what are you feeling? To me, the singer of the soulful song seemed like she was praying... for peace.

When dealing with such subjects I think precision with words is important. There is a difference between longing for something even if it seems out of reach and praying for someone to intervene and make it happen for us. Everyone has longing. Not everyone keeps imaginary friends.

As for Art, Music, etc it seems common to think of those like me with an affinity for Logic, Science and critical thought to be expected to be emotionally cold. That doesn't necessarily follow. It can follow, but many deep scientists are extremely passionate and love all manner of passionate Art. Feynman actually went to Mongolia to record Throat Singers. Oppenheimer read Bhagavad Gita. For me Carl Sagan embodied Passion, and Compassion as much as he also did Science. I love Blues-based Music and William Shakespeare levels of literature, Poetry as well as Prose, and Arthur C. Clarke and Gene Rodenberry on what some view as polar opposites. I made much of my living in the Music business.

Atheists are not uniquely soulless. I just define Soul in human ways not requiring a Creator. I don't speak for anyone else.