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Member (Idle past 1421 days) Posts: 1495 From: Framingham, MA, USA Joined: |
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Author | Topic: The Three Kinds of Creationists | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 312 days) Posts: 16113 Joined:
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There will be no genuine agreement between me and the evolutionists unless I totally give up any belief in a Higher Being; or they consider the possibility that a Higher Being may have orchestrated the creation of the universe. As dwise1 has pointed out, you are confusing evolutionists with atheists. The actual difference between evolutionists and you is that they adhere to a well-evidenced non-magical explanation for the origin of species, whereas creationists believe in an unevidenced magical explanation.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 312 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
You are right. It was narrow-minded of me to lump evolutionism within the same category as atheism. I should not have used it as an umbrella term.
It's good of you to say so, and I look forward to our future discussions.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 312 days) Posts: 16113 Joined:
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As far as religion offering science anything, no, it can't offer science anything in the means of a conventional, rigorous scientific method to discover new knowledge. Nevertheless, why discount it altogether, or "ignore" it (as an earlier poster put it), because it is an unconventional source of inspiration? Kekul figured out how benzene molecules were constructed by imagining snakes swallowing their own tails. Not exactly a conventional method. Certainly you can get your ideas wherever you like. You can draw them out of a hat, though I wouldn't recommend it. But then there's the business of finding out if they're true or not. If Kekul had stopped at dreaming of snakes, his name wouldn't be in the chemistry textbooks. After inspiration, the scientific method.
I think it is a common occurrence. Most new breakthroughs or new truths are faced with much opposition before becoming something that is accepted as self evident. In the past few centuries, religion was the main source of this opposition, and as a result, made the science and religion communities rivals. Now some scientists face opposition among the science community, or the 'authorities' rather, if a new concept disproves their currently believed 'facts'. Well, this is how it's meant to work. If there was no opposition to new ideas, we'd believe all sorts of things, most of them wrong and many of them mutually contradictory. A rigorous program of skepticism is required as a filter on our ideas, if we want to end up believing true things rather than false ones. Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 312 days) Posts: 16113 Joined:
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How can anything non-natural be studied? I don't see why not. If Buddhist monks really could fly, we could go and watch them do it, and if that was supernatural, we'd be studying a supernatural thing.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 312 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
What you would be studying is flying monks (or nuns). To say that you are studying the supernatural is to place the conclusion before the investigation. I didn't say they were. I said that if they were, we could still study them.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 312 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
How do you study "supernatural?" Well, if the monks were doing something supernatural, then studying them doing it would be studying the supernatural. Stop me if I'm going too fast for you.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 312 days) Posts: 16113 Joined:
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How do you study supernatural? Step 1: Find something supernatural.Step 2: Study it. It's actually step 1 which is the hard part.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 312 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
How do you know you have found something supernatural? That would depend on what it was. In some cases it might be rather easy to identify, a leprechaun that granted wishes for example. I'll let you know if I manage to catch one.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 312 days) Posts: 16113 Joined:
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If free will is one of his laws/principles, then he would not intervene in an individual's life unless a request for divine intervention was made. But this would make him rather different from the God of the Bible. Nebuchadnezzar, for example, didn't ask to go mad and eat grass like an ox. The Egyptians didn't ask for seven plagues. When the first few plagues made Pharaoh decide to accede to Moses' request, he didn't ask God to "harden his heart" and make him change his mind again --- how's that for an abrogation of free will? The armies of Sennacherib didn't ask to be struck dead by the "angel of the Lord". St. Paul, back in the days when he was Saul, didn't ask for his sudden Damascene conversion. Ananias and Sapphira ... well, need I go on? If God doesn't intervene in people's lives without asking, then most of the Bible is rubbish.
Sorry for not responding sooner, but I don't think it is childish. If God makes certain laws, and we accept the premise that God is perfect, then he would not hypocritically disobey the laws he designed. And this would argue against any sort of miracle, which definitionally breaks the laws of nature ascribed to the design of God. If your reasoning was sound, then Jesus wouldn't defy the laws of gravity and hydrodynamics by walking on water, he wouldn't have broken conservation laws with the miracle of the loaves and fishes, etc, etc.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 312 days) Posts: 16113 Joined:
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How in the hell can a theory defy evidence? By being wrong. For example: "Theory": All pigs have wings.Evidence: Lots of wingless pigs. Evidence is in the eye of the beholder. Perhaps when you wrote that you thought it meant something.
You have to make a convincing argument that your "evidence" can only support your favorite view to the exclusion of all other views. No, not really. No-one, for example, is required to exclude Last Thursdayism when accounting for the existence of last Wednesday's newspaper.
You people have fucked the word "evidence" all to bloody hell. You have rigged things so that "evidence" only means anything that supports the consensus view and anything that doesn't get peer review support is by definition "not evidence". Actually, that's not the reason why those of your beliefs which are wrong have no supporting evidence. It's 'cos of them being wrong.
You can all go to hell. Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 312 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
That's a decent explanation, thanks. But see my post #389. That may be a "decent explanation" for why a God neglects his children, but it is worthless as an explanation for why the biblegod does so, because the Bible is all about how the biblegod righteously overrides our merely human and sinful wishes; if the Bible has any central theme, it is that "Man proposes, but God disposes", in the words of the old cliche.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 312 days) Posts: 16113 Joined:
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What a load of crap but typical of the attitude here. Thank you for your detailed, well-argued, and well-evidenced critique, which you thoughtfully posted in an alternate universe. What a shame you couldn't have posted it in this one.
Shove it up your ass. Another load of crap from someone who is high on himself without realizing he has his head stuck up his ass. I see one huge fucking asshole... That would be you mutherfucker. I hate each and everyone of you assholes and I am not sparing any words about it. Every fucking one of you is a worthless piece of garbage. Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.
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