My Beliefs- GDR

The world is evolving, but evolution has no end purpose for organisms other than to make more of themselves. The reason we know this is because 99.9% of all species that have ever lived are extinct. It's pure hubris to consider this enormous waste to have a design behind it. That is a false choice. Any decent god would actually care for its creation, not leave it to chance and suffering. But I can show you. When you're dead you have no brain activity. Without brain activity there can be no consciousness. It's a really obvious physiological fact. It's absolutely, without question or doubt, the emotion itself. If it isn't where is it? Er, yes, it is exactly that. The emotion of anger is triggered by something in the enviroment - me or a memory, I care not - which causes our brain to react in a particular way so that we feel it. Again, if it is not our brain, then what and where is it?

That's the way evolution works - but it's messy, wasteful and inefficient; it's not the way any designer would work if the intended output was us. There was absolutely no guarantee that mammals would exist at all; without the mass extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs mammals as a group probably would never have risen. Did you know that 96% of all live on earth was killed in the 'mass dying' in the Permian. That's not design or intent with a purpose.The way evolution works tels us that it isn't part of a plan with and end purpose, because there's no way to predict an end product. Now if you tell me that God CAN predict it or that he nudges it so that he gets the right outcome, then I'm going ask why he just didn't do it a simpler way to start with? This is pure woo and wishful thinking. I have no idea what that is supposed to mean and I don't think you do either. Yes it is and consiousness is generated by our brain. When our brain is dead we are no longer conscious. That is what is called a non-controversial fact. There is no evidence of anything else is there?

Yes, faith and the rationalisation of the facts to suit that faith. There are thousands of men of science that believe in Tom; so what? Correct. Newton had a whole load of weird metaphysical ideas about magic and alchemy - he was very badly wrong about them too. Bloody right it is, it makes no sense at all does it?But you haven't answered the main question - where is consciousness if it's not in the brain?

It isn't black and white, good and evil is it? We're all both selfish and altruistic depending on circumstaces, upbringing and temperment. For some the choices are simple to make, for others they're harder and a few have no choice.All this is perfectly explicable given what we know of our history and impossible to explain if you believe in a god.(I mean a real god of course, not the crippled version you subscribe to - a flawed, impotent god can, of course, cock things up this badly.)

I want you to accept the fact that you have no facts - what you have is a belief Science does not, and can not, say that God doesn't exist.What it does is say that there is no evidence for a God and also that there are natural explanations for the things that religious believers ascribe to god - such as morality and how the universe began and how species come about.Additionally, it has shown that the stories in the books that various religious believers hold dear, are in fact, false.The obvious conclusion is that God is highly unlikely - or at least the sort of god which most Christians believe in. I think this answer shows that you don't have an answer.As a reminder, I asked if consciousness doesn't exist in the brain and die when the brain dies, where is it? Science's well evidenced and factual answer is that consciousness in a brain function which ceases when we die - what is your counter evidence?

If we're going to specify an organ can we at least agree that it's the brain? This is a misrepresentation of my position.I do not believe in things the way you do. I accept evidence and lack of evidence and form conclusions which I am prepared to change if new evidence is presented. I do not hold any beliefs that I then fit facts to.You have a belief and everything you see after that will inevitably fit that belief no matter how force fitted it has to be.But although you can abandon some key principles of your traditional religion - such as the need to be a Christian to enter heaven, you inevitably you hit a few road blocks every now and then - like you have with suffering, the imperfection of a god tha allows it, morality having a natural origin and consciouness not being supernatural.Face it, you believe because you believe - no shame in that, most people do.

Yes but it's wishy-washy, churchy language which has no real meaning, plus you seem to believe that consciousness exists somewhere outside the brain but haven't explained where or how. Faith is barking mad but she hasn't changed her beliefs to match reality, which is a position I can at least follow. My problem is understanding how you can still believe in the same stuff that she does, having accepted at least some parts of reality. It's ALL faith, GDR, all of it.

Have you read about Fred?EvC Forum: Biology is Destiny?

Ok, so the brain affects behaviour, both good and bad.[just as a btw, Tom created the desease that affected Fred.]They certainly can and they do. Yup - given that I've said that several times, I'm not about to change my mind now. Yup, most, most of the time. But not all, all of the time - if we're lucky. I really have no interest at all in what Paul is supposed to have said. That's funny. Have you noticed that you can make anything fit your model without really trying?However, you have also noticed that brain state affects behaviour. Not Tom, not Satan but the brain.You should also have noticed that some behaviours are not under the control of our - for want of a better word - self. If fact, we know that the vast majority our what we are and what we do is run by our autonomous nervous system without our knowledge and quite small changes to our brain state can make big differences to how we think and act.Because genetics, parental values, societal values, chemistry, disease and so on have such a large and random effect on our personality, it's absurd to believe that we can be held ultimately responsible for our actions to the Tom that is supposed to have given us this mysterious free will thing.

Sure he is. If Tom interacts with our world he will leave a trace that should be detectable. Eg Prayer would work and we'd be able to show that it did, the brain has Tom receptors that allow it to hear the whispering etc etc.We obviously find no evidence of that but we simultaneously have evidence that the things you say Tom causes to happen supernaturally are occurring perfectly naturally.Of course you can say that Tom intervenes magically and makes it look as though it's all natural but we had all that with evolution and only the absolute weirdos still claim it. (Tom creates fossils so that we are forced to think the earth is old and species evolve.)You're not in a good place here.

Like I keep saying, you've put your god in an unassailable place. Absolutely nothing that we discover about the world can touch your personal beliefs - the discoveries just push your God further away from your religion.A some time in the future, we'll have a pretty thorough understanding of how the brain creates consciousness and we won't find Tom there either. But it won't matter because you'll have invented some other mystical way he can influence us that can't be measured.Why bother with all this nonsense? Why not just believe it and call it miraculous? What Miller and Kushner and CS Lewis and anybody else says about 'the spirit' is utterly irrelevant. Until something puts a spirit in a bottle and shows it us, it's just preaching.Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

Absolutely not - completely arse about face.Science increases our knowledge of reality; your knowledge of God stays exactly where it was - that is no-where - and our knowledge that religions are wrong about the facts of reality increases. We gain new information about reality - neither science nor you learn anything about God by it (except that what you thought about him before science came along was wrong.) Of course you do.

Well yes, exactly. It's been shown to be wrong over and over. It's got to the point where there's very little left to be wrong about. And you'd be bang on right.But it has absolutely nothing to do with god and everything to do with reality. Religions and believers have been able to tell us nothing new about god for thousands of years. Science is informing us everyday about what's real.Stick around, we're building a brain:
Why we're building a 1 billion model of a human brain | New Scientist

Where?

That would be a really stupid thing to do wouldn't it? Tomorrow I KNOW it will be raining; I know it because it's pissed down all day and the forecast for tomorrow is worse.If I 'believed' that it would be sunny regardless of real facts available to me I'd be behaving stupidly wouldn't I?