DARWIN VS. GENESIS

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You did not repeat my point accurately. I never said that religion was more appropriate than science. My point was about supernaturalist religions not interfering with scientific subjects and being concerned with ethics. Scientists, even those who do not belong to supernaturalist religions, can also have views on ethics, and I never said whether I thought their views were better or worse.

Well, I will end this discussion now, as I need to get to bed.

Good luck to you.

aight peace.

and i disagree with any religion teaching ethics. mainly because they have no ethics. only rules that can be changed or broken as seen fit by the guy in charge.

You appear to be missing my point entirely. Why would any given subject be "appropriate for supernaturalistic religions" (as you put it) at all?

i already pointed that out and he said that he's not commenting either way on it....yet listing it as a potential option. sounds like doublespeak to me.

The question of why we are here assumes intrinsically that we were created like some machine part to function within a preconceived construction. I do not doubt that all life discovers a niche which permits it to live but it seems that this niche is not a preconceived place but rather the space which makes life possible and which the basic nature of protoplasm fills. It is more sensible to ask how rather than why.

It is not double-speak. It is an attempt to stay focused on my original point without going off into tangents.

However, I have said all I care to say on this subject.

That is doubleplus ungood.

Ok. Note that I do consider the basic idea to be unfounded. There is no reason at all to consider the world's religions to be valid methods of discovery in any realm whatsoever, so far as I can determine. Anyone who would care to claim otherwise is quite free to do so. Their claims amount to this, and nothing more: "Some guy made a metaphysical claim of X in the past!! !! So it's true!! !"

IMO evolution did happen naturally without outside intercession. Science shows this time and time again. I don't think that carte blanc blows away the existence of a higher power, just that it does blow away a lot of the establishments views on the literalism of the Bible or whether you should really adhere to it as strictly as we've thought we should in the past. For me I'll take reality for reality, any new facts that show up I'll take them on their merits.

But, some part of me still feels that there is something outside of all of this, like we do have a seed of something over and above the sum of our parts. The relative evidence and credibility of some of the stories and people I've heard tends to lend to much circumstantial evidence that it is real.

Actually, that's not the case. There is literally nothing in evolutionary theory (or in the evidence for evolution itself) which demonstrates that evolution wasn't guided by some sort of deity. Speaking as an atheist, I consider an entirely natural version of evolution to be far more parsimonious, but I still can't claim that the evidence shows that some sort of supreme being couldn't have shaped the evolution of various species over time. This being science, I'd have to note that anyone who claims such divine intervention would have to bring some sort of positive evidence forth to demonstrate that, and that nobody has done such a thing so far.

Of course, the important part is that the evidence shows overwhelmingly that evolution is fact, regardless of one's views concerning god(s).

Well, we at least have overwhelming proof that Intelligent Design is completely bunk. I watched the Nova special on the court case in Dover, really depressing about how a lot of fundamentalist Christians were acting the fool over it, but it is rather funny how ID's 'machines or irreducible complexity' really just pivoted off from other uses rather than being truly irreducible.

On the other end though your right in a sense, there's no proof that some higher power didn't guide the available chemicals and energies at specific places and times to allow jumps - I'm still one to debate that the ideas of evolution more or less just clash with Genesis literalists, they don't necessarily disprove a higher power (though I think it does go to show that if that higher power does prefer to hide itself as neatly behind science that it probably prefers we just live our lives, do our best, etc. rather than making dogmatic structures around it).

Yes, ID is really just the 'god of the gaps' all over again. "We can't currently explain this particular thing, so god did it!"

Then, we explain how that thing works, and the reply is usually, "Well, we can't explain how that other thing works, so god must have done that!! !"

Then we explain that, etc. Ad infinitum. After a while, it becomes tedious and depressing.



Oh, I am not saying that the theory evolution doesn't negate a literal interpretation of the bible. It certainly does that. Hell, the only way one can take the bible literally is to refuse to accept physics, biology, history, anthropology, geology, astronomy, genetics, and mathematics. The bible has a lot of contradictions and errors in it. None of which provides any evidence that an all-powerful being exists, or does not. By definition, ANYTHING whatsoever is consistent with the idea of an all-powerful being.

So, is there a god? Maybe. I'd certainly like to see evidence that goes beyond "well, it's written in this old book, see?" or "well, lots of other people believe it too." Heh.

Yep, and that factors in the notion that it is supposedly Gods word but....its also written by man, man has tremendous capacity for self-delusion, and so that leaves it all back at square one.



I think for me the evidence to that end just comes from unexplainably strong, pretty much compulsary, urges to try and find something higher than just eating breathing f'ing and dying. I think the very outlets of art, music, philosophy, almost any kind of creative endeavors, that strange consensus of urgency that has people feeling like our race has to move forward rather than backward, stuff like this seems like the core of who we are hates what we are and wants us to be something far greater.

Then again that could be primal but still, its the kind of thing where when it hits a certain threshold it doesn't cause animal advantage - in fact it causes great disadvantage. At the point we've hit we want to have fewer kids for the quality of life, we want to have bigger and better things in our own personal lives, and consequently those who live in the third world, those who are lucky enough to have 3, 4, or 5 kids on welfare and have no inherent emotional gene that actually cares how these kid's lives end up - they're actually evolutionarily superior to us in the sense that they're far more functional as animals where as all the smarty-artsy people are driving themselves practically extinct (yet give those people another dozen generations and they'll start going the same exact way probably). That constant and direct friction between the sentient being and our animal side really seems to put the two in almost diametric opposition.

Not saying all this is proof, but these are the things that, for me at least, make it harder to believe that there isn't some form of higher power and like the more Gnostic view of things would entail - that through pain, misery, and struggle, we're going through something like purification of spirit where we really are forced to let our stronger parts shine in the face of adversity.

If God had his hat on straight why would He not immediately create a creature that required no purification of spirit in the first place? Is He just trying to cover up His mistakes by blaming them on humanity?

It's amazing how much energy goes into religion here on WP. Einstein is rolling his eyes on us, brethren.

It's not really amazing. There seems to be a high proportion of intelligent people in this group and a system of belief based on the lack of close examination of the premises seems very peculiar to people that take it for granted that thinking should be logical. AS people, like any group that is not accepted by what are considered normal people, think a good deal about why they are rejected and have problems. Clear thinking becomes a habit and that conflicts with beliefs based almost completely on authority.