Creation, Evolution, and faith

Hi kbertsche,You seem genuinely perplexed that Acts 17 is not being accepted as an example of reason in action, despite containing phrases like "he reasoned with them". Let's take a closer look at Paul's attempts at reason.

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24"The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands.

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This is a baseless assertion.

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25And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else.

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Another baseless assertion.

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26From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live.

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Several baseless assertions.

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27God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us.

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More baseless assertion.

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28'For in him we live and move and have our being.' As some of your own poets have said, 'We are his offspring.'

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Another baseless assertion, with added appeal to authority.

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29"Therefore since we are God's offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stonean image made by man's design and skill.

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False premise.

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30 In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent.

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Does he really?

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31For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead."

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That's nice.

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32When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some of them sneered, but others said, "We want to hear you again on this subject." 33At that, Paul left the Council.

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That's it? That's his proof? An appeal to an event he never witnessed? Paul is simply appealing to the authority of scripture here.If this is supposed to be an example of reason in action, I would hate to see what Paul wrote when he was speaking from faith. It's nothing but a string of logical fallacies, so poor that any student of logic could see through it in an instant. Colour me unimpressed. Then they were wrong, if that is, they ever existed at all. Surely you're not going to appeal to the authority of a group of nameless and likely fictional dead Athenians? Is that what you call reason?Also, were you planning to answer Taq's question? If you can't answer that, you have no argument, so I really feel that you should take a stab at it.Mutate and Survive

Ad hominem. Looks like Paul's love of logical fallacy is contagious.I do not reject your description of Paul's long string of logical fallacies as "reason" because I am an unbeliever. I reject it because it is a long string of logical fallacies. That is not reason. That is fallacy. There is a difference. Point it out then. You cite Acts 17 as an example of reason, yet when I read it it gives nothing but a series of baseless assertions and appeals to scriptural authority. Where is the reason? Are you kidding me? Seriously, I find that hard to believe. Look again. Appeal to authority. There is no reason there, only fallacy.You speak as if you have blinded yourself to reason. Try taking off your Jesus-tinted sunglasses for a while.Mutate and Survive

Hi kbertsche,You refer me to message 70, where you say; I agree with this. Paul's words are not reason, but rhetoric. Now there's nothing intrinsically wrong with that - we all engage in rhetoric on these boards - but it is not reason, certainly not in the sense that scientists use reason. In science, rhetoric has an extremely limited influence; indeed there are safeguards against it (peer review, repeatability, etc.). Not so in religion. Rhetoric must be backed with reason and evidence for it to be valid. Here's an example; Exactly my point. Paul cites as evidence an event that he did not witness, for which only a handful of mutually contradictory accounts exist. If this is to be regarded as the kind of "reason" that backs up your faith, I have to say that I am not impressed. No reputable scientist would accept evidence this weak. Firstly, No-one claimed that criminal trials are based on logic and reason. I would not claim that, certainly not in the case of a trial that relied entirely on a witness, with no physical evidence.Second, do you really imagine that science uses uncorroborated eyewitness testimony as evidence? You know as well as I do that's not how it's done. Science does not and must not take anyone''s word for anything. I can claim to have cracked cold-fusion and I might make my testimony as believable and apparently reliable as Paul's rhetoric, but that won't win me a Nobel. Science depends upon observable repeatable evidence, not rhetoric or persuasion. If you want to draw comparisons between religion and science, you will not find any here.It seems to me that you originally objected to Dawkins' claim that religion is based on what you call "blind faith". You claim that religion is based upon reason as well as faith. That's fine, but when you can only cite examples of flawed reason (such as your criminal trial example or Acts 17), we are left with the conclusion that religion is based on more than faith; it is also based upon logical fallacies.Personally, I think Dawkins did you a favour in not mentioning that.Mutate and Survive

Hi kbertsche,Here is the only relevant or meaningful part of your message; Now you can make whatever linguistic arguments you like, but ultimately, you are only making an appeal to the authority of the Bible. Your whole argument amounts to nothing more than a convoluted version of the words "Titus claims". This is not equivalent to scientific practise in any way.If you want to demonstrate that Christianity is not based on a simple appeal to scriptural authority, you need to show us the underlying basis for believing in, say, Christ's divinity. Saying "Titus claims" is no use unless Titus has something to back it up, something external to scripture, something tangible, something objective. If you can't provide that, you are merely blowing smoke.When scientists cite the works of other scientists, there is always a chain of references, a link to the original observation. You need to show us that link for the divinity of Christ, or admit that science and religion are not equivalent.Mutate and Survive

Hi Flyer, but Theo is right; the New Testament was not written by contemporaries of Jesus. None of the authors ever met him. Okay, let's go with that and try to get the conversation back on course.We all agree that some of the information in the Bible has been historically verified. I suspect that it may well be a good deal less than you think, but that's by the by. Historical evidence is not that best comparison here. History is not a science.Let's look at a concrete example; the divinity of Christ. How can we test the truth of this statement?By straightforward appeal to scripture? That would simply be an appeal to authority, a clear logical fallacy. Clearly no scientist would ever claim "X is true because Y says it is!".By appeal to the historical accuracy of scripture? Well, it is obviously possible for scripture to be accurate on some issues and wrong on others. You can't provide logical evidence for one part of the Bible by appealing to another. If there is no way of historically verifying a claim (a as for the divinity of Jesus), the general accuracy that you ascribe to the Bible is not relevant.By appeal to the evidence for the historicity of Jesus? Not really. We might prove that Jesus was a real man, who really lived, but that leaves us no wiser as to whether he was divine or not.By appeal to worshippers' personal experiences of "feeling the love of Christ" and suchlike? No. These experiences, though powerful and profound, are entirely subjective. They cannot be replicated.By appeal to revelation? Hardly. Again, these experiences cannot be replicated and are wholly subjective.So how can we test the divinity of Jesus? Can you show me how? Because if not, it looks very much as though this central tenet of Christian belief is to be taken entirely on faith. Perhaps you're okay with that. If so, good luck to you. Still, you should recognise that it contrasts starkly with the scientific method. Certainly, you should be honest and admit that you have no reason for this belief other than blind faith.Whilst some of the historical ideas associated with Christianity might well be based upon solid historical evidence (again, far fewer than you seem to think), many important beliefs are not. The divinity of Jesus, the existence of heaven, the soul, the existence of God himself; these things are all taken on faith. Science on the other hand, takes nothing on faith. There is no equivalence. If you want to base your beliefs on faith, go ahead. I would discourage it, but it is your right to believe as you see fit. Just please be honest about why you believe what you do.Mutate and Survive

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"A curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it." - Jacques Monod

Hi slevesque, So what? They believed it. They were not witness to it. Paul never met Jesus, except arguably in his Road to Damascus vision. That's not much to build a historical account upon. This in no way counts as a contemporaneous account.Mutate and Survive

CS, I disagree.Every Christian who I have ever heard cite one of these experiences seems to believe, often without any shadow of doubt , that the experience they had was of Jesus. THE Jesus. The same Jesus that every other Christian encounters in these enraptured moments. There is absolutely no basis for this belief.How do they know that it is Jesus? Faith.How do they know it wasn't a Satanic trick? Faith.How do they know it wasn't Krishna? Faith.If the interpretation of the experience is based upon faith, then all arguments that rest upon that interpretation are faith-based as well. Given that there is no way of empirically demonstrating that the interpretation is correct, that leaves the faith essentially blind.We know that there was a real experience, but we do not know that it was Jesus. That belief is taken on blind faith. Also, we are none the wiser as to whether Jesus is divine. We might conclude (very tentatively) that there is some sort of supernatural entity called Jesus that is in communication with the believer, but it does not prove that he is actually divine.Mutate and SurviveEdited by Granny Magda, : No reason given.

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"A curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it." - Jacques Monod

Slevesque, you shock me, really you do. What possible reason could you have to suppose that he did? Or maybe they played baccarat together every third Wednesday.Seriously, in your attempts to show how well founded Christian beliefs are, you have wandered into the territory of simply making shit up. Now if you're going to start suggesting convenient possibilities for which no evidence exists, then that's your right; you go ahead and believe what you please. Just don't pretend that what you are doing is in any way akin to science.Can you imagine a physicist saying "Well, how do you know I didn't achieve cold fusion in my kitchen?"? I think not.Mutate and Survive

Hi kbertsche,In lieu of replying to your earlier message, I'll reply to this, since we're still in very much the same territory. Let's see if we can get to the core of this one. We have two possibilities; "Titus 2:13 claims x" and "Titus 2:13 claims y". Suppose we resolve the linguistic conundrum that is the subject of your reasoning; let's say it's "x". Where do we go from there?Working out exactly what the text says is all well and good, but at best, it leaves us with "Titus says x". What are we to do with this statement? Appeal to it's authority as holy writ? What else might we reasonably do with it?Throughout this thread you have attempted to show that the reasoning employed by religion is equivalent to that used in science. I believe this is false. With your example of religious reasoning, all we can do is ascertain what the opinion of the author of Titus was. At best. It leads us nowhere, except to a bald assertion, with no data to back it up. This is wholly different from scientific reasoning, which always leads back to an original set of empirical observations.You have demonstrated that theists can apply reason in interpreting a text. That is all. Anyone can do that, it's nothing special. What your sparring partners on this thread are trying to get at is that the central claims of religion are not of the same nature as some matter of linguistic interpretation. We are talking about some of the defining beliefs of religions. In the narrow case of Christianity, we're talking about things like the resurrection, original sin, the afterlife, the divinity of Jesus, etc. These are the kind of truth-claims that Christians make, often with a startling degree of certainty. These are claims of great magnitude, yet they appear to the outside observer to be wholly unevidenced.If there truly is any similarity between scientific and religious reasoning, you should be able to either;a) provide examples of reasoning and evidence for these kinds of claims, such as might be accepted in scientific circles, or;
b) provide examples of extremely important ideas within science that are as unfounded as the religious ideas I have outlined.*Note that I'm not talking about foundation assumptions about reality and objective observable universe; those assumptions underpin all philosophies, by necessity. I'm talking about big important ideas, equivalent to the risen Christ or such.Or you could just admit that science and religion don't employ actually share that much similarity after all. Mutate and Survive*If anyone says "The Theory of Evolution!", I will kill a kitten. Please, think of the kittens.

Hi slevesque, All very plausible. It is however still speculation. It could have happened, but you have no reason to suppose that it did, other than wishful thinking. This is typical apologetics; it would convenient for you to be able to say that Paul was a witness to a flesh and blood Jesus, so you start to suppose... It's all very nice, but you have no real reason to suggest it in the first place.It's like the suggestion that Shakespeare wrote one of the psalms. He was certainly in the right place, at the right time and had the right skills. He had the right connections to the royal court, the right flair with poetry, it's all very plausible. Apart from one thing; there's no evidence to suggest it in the first place. It's just whimsy. Without evidence, that's all your Paul theory is. Fair enough. I think this partly because there is no tradition of Paul having met Jesus. It's not a mainstream part of Christian thought. There's no historical basis that I know of. But mainly, it's just because Paul doesn't mention it. Not once. He mentions a great many events, some of which reflect poorly on him, but he never mentions meeting his hero? Seriously? He just skipped that bit? That stretches credulity.There are other arguments. Here is a link that discusses some of them; Blogger (tips hat). The argument that Saul does not recognise Jesus' voice during his Damascus vision is interesting.All told, it is hard to believe that Paul met his idol yet failed to mention it and with no evidence whatsoever to suggest that he did, it seems like you're going out on a limb, just for the sake of being able to call Paul an eyewitness to Christ.Mutate and Survive

Hi kbertshce, Assuming Paul is truly the author of Titus, yes This is disputed in some circles. I don't want to derail the topic into a debate on this, but basically, we are in agreement here. And there you have it. Christian faith depends on what the Bible teaches. Christian faith is based on a set of ancient texts.Science is not based upon any text in any comparable way.Frankly I see little reason to continue. You have admitted that here that all Christian faith is based on the Bible. You cannot make any such assertion about science. Science has no central text, no scriptural authority.Nonetheless, let's look at some of your other claims. How similar? 1% similar? Because I might be willing to go for that. !00% similar? You say not. So how similar? Yes. One field accepts only logically valid evidence, the other accepts logicically invalid evidence. No, I think you are completely wrong here. the two are not comparable.Science uses reason and evidence to study nature. Agreed.Religion uses reason and evidence to study alleged holy texts as a proxy for nature.Both are attempting to describe reality. The difference is that science tries to study reality as directly as possible, it cuts out the middle man (and to paraphrase Bill Mahr, when I say man it usually seems to mean someone with a penis). Religion seeks to study reality through a murky lens, that of it's chosen scripture (which it invariably places on a pedestal, another notable difference with science). The fact that in the case of Christianity, the scripture in question is written by multiple, often anonymous authors, that it is frequently in error and internally contradictory, undermines any attempt to study reality through this method. It also fatally undermines your comparison. I have to say, I find it pretty sad that you bring this up. It's pathetic.Religion also must assume that reality is consistent, that we are not in the matrix, etc. Without such an assumption, none of its claims would be meaningful.In truth, you have only uncovered another yawning gulf between the two methods. Science does not make these kind of assumptions, except as methodological assumptions. They are not philosophical assumptions, scientists do not need to assume that solipsism is false, they only need take it as a working assumption from which further assumptions follow. Religion, by contrast, is blas about making claims of philosophical truth.This difference can be clearly seen in the distinction between methodological naturalism and philosophical naturalism. There are many scientists who believe in the supernatural, yet they work as though there were no supernatural when they're doing science. They need not disbelieve the supernatural to do valid science.The answer to solipsism works the same way; the scientist need not believe or disbelieve in a consistent reality. they only need use it as a pragmatic working assumption. Because there is nothing intrinsically religious about interpreting a text. Anyone can do this, whether religious or not. It's just reading comprehension. It is not religion itself. You are not even applying it to religious beliefs themselves, you are applying it to a text. The alleged sacredness of the text is irrelevant.Analysing what a book says has nothing whatsoever to do with why we should believe it. Again, this is far more of a difference than you are trying to imply. Your friend may doubt the existence of quarks as much as he likes, he's still a scientist. It doesn't matter. This is not the case when it comes to the existence of god(s) or the resurrection of Christ. Religions have many such beliefs, science has none. Worse, many theists hold the entire spectrum of their beliefs to be absolutely true, with any variance amounting to heresy. No scientist thinks this way, it is alien to science. False. There is a major difference. It's about the framework within which each claim is judged.Science can prove it's ideas to a very high degree - within the framework created by the assumption of a consistent observable reality.Religion cannot do this. Religion cannot prove the reality of the Trinity, even with the framework of an observable reality.Science can prove its claims within the framework created by methodological naturalism.Religion must, almost by necessity, cast this aside when making claims about supernatural entities (like the Trinity). This leaves it open to the possibility of supernatural outside interference, even within the framework of a consistent observable reality.The only claims made with any degree of confidence by scientists can be demonstrated within the consistent reality world view. religious claims very often cannot, yet they are made with a much greater degree of certainty. The contrast is clear. Scientists may take reality itself on faith (although to a lesser extant than most theists), but religion takes many more claims on faith on top of this. Feel free to mention them. Why exactly? I'm asking for logically valid evidence for religious claims, something that you have conspicuously failed to provide. Meaningless. Analogy is not reality. Again, meaningless, since I have already explained how religion makes many more and greater assumptions than science and does so with a degree of confidence that need not exist in science. They are not! they are claims about reality, about whether certain things exist or not. The existence of God is a claim about reality. It is not supported by any logical evidence. Where science makes a claim about reality, it is supported by logical evidence. But no scientist need believe in quarks, not even physicists.Quarks have been experimentally confirmed (albeit indirectly) many times, and the predictions which they make have been experimentally confirmed. This cannot be said of the divinity of Jesus or the Trinity, which make no predictions and cannot be verifiably observed, not even indirectly.Further, mathematical models underpin the idea of quarks. This provides a strong internal logical consistency to the idea, which can then be compared to the external world, where it is validated. The same cannot be said of the Trinity, where there is no initial observable, verifiable and measurable observation upon which any such mathematical or logical proof can be based or checked against.Further, the existence or non-existence of quarks is basically irrelevant to most scientists. Does a biologist studying the social lives of badgers need to believe in quarks? Does a particle physicist need to believe in them? Or need he only assume their existence as a useful part of his model?Now let's try that again, with a religious example. Does a Christian need to believe that Christ died for our sins? Does a Christian need to believe in God? I think that most theists would answer yes to these kind of questions. I have addressed this already, but frankly, I suggest that you grow a spine and stop taking refuge behind solipsistic nonsense.Mutate and Survive

Hi slevesque, Dude, I'm not sure where you got that from, that was not what I was trying to say. It is merely my view that before we make a statement about history (and let's be clear, any statement about history must be at least a little tentative) there should be some reason to think that in the first place. Evidence should always be our starting point, not our destination. Still, the fact that Paul is contemporary is not relevant in the first place, unless we can show that he had some meaningful knowledge and some basis for that. This is not really the case with Paul, whose sources for the life of Jesus must almost certainly have been second hand.We are all contemporaneous with Obama, but that doesn't stop people making up lies about him. I realise that you only bring this up in answer to criticisms of Paul for writing after the event, but it is important to remember that just because a text is contemporaneous does not suggest in and of itself that it is accurate. Perhaps, but it strikes me as unconvincing. Paul was an evangelist. If he had met Jesus, he would surely have mentioned. That would always be a more convincing sales pitch than a supernatural vision when talking about the life of Jesus and his works. The vision is good for convincing an audience that Jesus is Christ, is divine, but that was not all that Paul had to say of Jesus. He also wrote of his life and works. These arguments would be far more convincing if Paul was able to cite himself as an eye-witness. It just seems like a really weird omission. Again, perhaps, although it seems out of character for him to withhold it. Also, it strikes me that Paul's arguments would have even more rhetorical weight had he been an active persecutor of Jesus. He could say "See, even I, who persecuted Jesus, have been forgiven of my sins. Even I have been convinced of his holiness.". That seems like a good angle to me.You're right though, it's a side issue. I suggest that you switch to admin mode and ban the pair of us for being so grossly off-topic. Mutate and Survive

CS, I appreciate where you're coming from and I think I understand your argument, but (surprise!) I can't quite agree with you. I agree that there is a distinction. Person B's belief is certainly more reasonable, but it is still not very reasonable. The claim of ghosts is so extraordinary that it requires some pretty strong evidence. Seeing one apparent apparition does not seem sufficient to me. Personally, I would suspect that I had seen a hallucination. An insubstantial ghost certainly bears much similarity with a hallucination. The possibility that I was hallucinating seems at least as strong as the possibility that I saw a ghost. Clearly, there is still a very large element of faith going on here. I don't think that one person seeing something is very strong evidence that it exists, even if that person is me. At least, not in the case of extremely unusual claims.Another important distinction is that in your example, the person sees the ghost, in the sense of vision. People don't normally claim to have actually seen Jesus or God. Placing the experience in the realm of physical sensory perception already gives the experience more validity than one that takes place entirely in the theist's mind, with no reference to the commonly acknowledged senses.Overall, I don't think that the example is a very good fit. Seeing what appears to be a ghost might provide evince for the narrow claim that ghosts exist (excluding the obvious possibility that the sighting could have been valid, but not a ghost). What it does not provide evidence for is the whole panoply of supernatural thought. If the person saw a ghost and then used this as evidence for vampires, werewolves and leprechauns, this would be invalid. Nonetheless, this is exactly ho many theists behave. The "experience of the divine" that we have been discussing is used to back up a much wider spectrum of claims than can really be justified from it. It ought not, for instance, be used as evidence for the physical resurrection of Jesus, but frequently, Christians will use these experiences as a kind of catch-all answer that backs up the whole raft of Christian thought.Ultimately, it's all about what we consider to be valid evidence and what we consider invalid. I don't consider these kinds of experiences to be valid evidence of anything. They are too vague, entirely subjective and indistinguishable from fantasy. I think that any belief so poorly founded is effectively faith-based. Whether you want to call this blind faith or not becomes a matter of personal preference, but I feel that it is justified.Mutate and Survive

Hi kbertsche, Are you kidding me? Nature is real kbertsche. No-one wrote, composed, edited or redacted nature. Books can be made-up, imagined. They can be full of lies. They can be written in honest error. Nature cannot. Your retreat into solipsism does not solve this problem. Even in the internally consistent world of the matrix, your book could still be fiction. You must worry not only that reality is fictional, but that the book is fictional, even within that reality. Science need worry about neither. I am noting that one is logically valid, the other is not. This undermines your claims that religion and science use logic and reason in comparable ways. First, this is nonsense. The presence of creationists on this very board who deny evolution and claim that the world is 6000 years old is enough to refute this piffle. Religion does make claims about the natural world. About its history, its cosmology, its origins. I could go on.Secondly, you posit the existence of a "spiritual world", but you do so with no reason. WI ask you what spiritual world? Where or what is it? How do we know it's not a figment of theist imaginations? Science does not concern itself with studying what cannot be evidenced. Religion does and your "spiritual world" is a prime example. This is another huge difference between the two and it undermines your contentions of similarity. Addressed above and completely untrue. You must know that this is not true. You know perfectly well that religion does make claims about physical reality, you have simply chosen to ignore it. The claim that Christ rose bodily from the dead is a claim about physical reality. You are only deceiving yourself. Except that the evidence for quarks is experimental, repeatable, observable, falsifiable, etc. The evidence for God is non-existent. Bullcrap. I have already addressed this and you ignored it. No scientist need believe in quarks, not even those who study them. Christians must believe in God. There is a major difference which you seem to want to ignore. And there is your problem. You must assume a divine Bible, which assumes a divine. you must assume a God to find evidence of your god. You must assume that the Bible is accurate and appeal to its authority. Science need do no such thing. You have failed to show any similarity. But both, you claim, use logic and reason in comparable ways. It seems though, that the only logic and reason that you can show us is appeal to the authority of your sacred text of choice. This is pathetically short of the levels of logic and reason employed by science.Mutate and Survive

Hi kbertsche, Not as many times as it has been answered and addressed, so you needn't act as though your point is being ignored. It is not. But this has nothing -absolutely nothing - to do with the logical basis for religious ideas. Sure, you use reason to interpret the book. What we keep pointing out to you is that you are not using reason as the basis for the actual religious beliefs themselves. Interpreting a book is one thing. Deciding whether or not to believe what the book says is quite another. That is the distinction that undermines your comparison. A false analogy. Compare and contrast;A scientist studies reality in order to find out what exists in reality.A Christian studies the Bible, not merely in order to find out what the Bible says. He studies the Bible to find out about reality.Example; the divinity of Jesus. You can study the Bible. You can see what it says about the divinity of Jesus. Let us suppose that we reach the conclusion that, yes, the Bible does say that Jesus is divine.This would be fine if Christians claimed only that "The Bible says that Christ is divine.". But that is not what Christians claim. They claim that Christ actually is divine. That he is absolutely real, that he really is divine, that this is all much more than some story in a book.If Christians restricted themselves to drawing conclusions about what the Bible says, your comparison would be valid. In practice though, they do not. They use the Bible as a springboard for making claims about actual reality. No Christian I have ever met regards Christ as merely a character in a book. They regard him as real, not just historically real, but usually real and contemporary, a very real divine presence. That is clearly a claim about reality, not just a claim about what it says in a book.Scientists on the other hand study reality directly. They make claims about reality (usually far more tentatively than theists do), but this is justified, since they are studying reality. Science has cut out the middleman.In summary, science makes claims about reality based upon observation of reality.Religion makes claims about reality based upon observing what it says in a book.If you can't see the distinction there, then I despair for you kbertsche, I really do.Mutate and SurviveEdited by Granny Magda, : typo