You're not quite right, unless you're giving consideration to the differences between "God" and "god". Darwin was a deist but clearly did not believe in the Christian "God", or any other specific god. Nobody's perfect. :grin:
True, but the nation has a much wider demographic. This board consists mostly of people (I'm guessing 16-30 year old males) who are considerably less likely to be religious than the "average American". Tough to make a comparison.
As a Christian (however, I'm finding it harder and harder to label myself as such due to a lack of evidence for a personal God who wants a relationship with His creation)... it seems that you're using 1 Peter 3:8 in a very self-serving manner to blend creation with evolution. Let's look at the quote with the next verse as well: "With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance." To me, it seems clear that the point of this phrase isn't to be literally taken as "whenever the Bible says 'day' you can change it to 'a thousand years' if it makes more sense". It is saying that time is nothing to God. We all expect Him to return during our lifetime, but He is so big and lives so beyond our idea of time that a thousand years could pass by and it is still not a long time to Him. Plus, if you take the six time periods view on creation with long, expanded time frames... it just doesn't add up. How does vegetation, created on the third day, survive for a thousand years (or whatever length of time you want to give it) without the Sun which wasn't created until the fourth day. Creationists who take this stance need to back up and say 'anything is possible with God'. And yes, anything is possible with an almighty figure that you can use to explain anything you don't understand. But why wouldn't God provide a scientifically accurate story of creation to validate His power and authenticity rather than add to the confusion?
I would argue that the creation accounts in Genesis are poetry that were never intended to be read literally...particularly since there are 2 separate accounts.
Max. I really respect you and your views. You've always come across as well-founded in your beliefs and principles. I don't want to put you on the spot or anything of the sort... but as a Christian that is looking for something concrete to hold onto, can you answer a question for me: Do you know there is a God? And I don't expect you to prove it scientifically or anything: but have you experienced him in a way that you simply know he exists without a doubt? I mean, I've spent my entire life as a Christian and I can honestly say I've never "experienced" God in a way that I know He is truly there. Have I been blessed? Of course! In many ways! But can these blessings only be described "though God"? Nope. So many Christians describe God as "good" and Satan as "bad"... so whenever something bad happens the devil is really trying to get at them, but whenever something good happens God has blessed them. Isn't it more realistic that good and bad things just happen? And then the issue of "miracles" that can always be explained without the existence of God. Yes, they survived a car accident... but that's not a miracle. It's great, but it isn't a miracle. I dunno man... I'm searching, I really am. But if He isn't there I don't want to pretend or hope in something illogical the rest of my life. I choose truth, whatever that might be. And I should clarify - I don't think I'd ever go full-Atheist. There is so much that cannot be explained that there could be a God. But I'm starting to doubt the idea of a "personal" God who wants to play a role in our lives and return to take His followers to heaven with Him.
I'm a deist, I think God created some basic laws of science, then just kind of watched it unfold, sent a couple of prophets, came down himself, died, and is now some sort of spirit that we will ultimately become one with when we die.
I've experienced things I believe to be God. I have faith in God. But I certainly have my doubts...any thinking person should. If you're reading the Bible or thinking of God and not ever having doubts, then you're really not thinking, you're just going through the motions. There's religion in that...but there's very little of what I'd call real faith. If you want to email me, feel free. Happy to talk about it with you...and I promise not to be the Church Lady if you decide you don't believe!
Hey I am a brother in faith there! I got pretty self-righteous in an argument with a Twins fan last week about if Jeff Bagwell used roids.
Can God make a boulder so big even he can't lift it? Science doesn't 'prove' things. That's for maths. One of the things that is good about science is that it IS testable and changeable. It doesn't start with first principles and work backwards as religion attempt to. It's two different ways of looking at things, but being able to add new information to refine viewpoints is a positive to me, not a negative. I suppose there is safety and comfort in immutable beliefs, but it seems both lazy and arrogant to me.
I'll side with Jefferson on Pascal's Wager - "Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear."
Paradoxes are awesome. It's a worthy endeavor to scratch that layer of perception that we consider real. We can build foundations of definition and consider that progress, but let's not get full of ourselves. Self definition is the best fit for a collective definition if we allow ourselves to grow and let go.
1) Does gravity even apply to God? In any case, God doesn't exist IN the creation IMO. The laws of creation (in this case, physics) therefore don't really apply. This question is more open-ended with Christians, which is why people have been regurgitating it for a few thousand years now. FWIW, this is kind of what me and DonnyMost are talking about. Such questions can be never ending and yield very little information. Just that he thinks it's valuable to restrict the discussion to 'known reality' and I think that kind of restriction renders the discussion worthless. 2) Not quite sure what you're trying to say there.
I see what you're saying now. If you're talking about mainstream mass organized religion, then yes, that's how you can deal with it I guess (recognized scriptures). These are well-defined, therefore you can compare contrast with other theories. If you're talking about different belief systems and God, that's where I don't think you can have a useful discussion. God is not really a definable concept and theoretically transcends the rules/laws/theories of science. Trying to compare/contrast here would be either useless or biased to a specific side IMO.
This isn't true actually. It's true that if you weren't raised in a Jewish household you would not be Jewish. But many millions of people all over the world convert to Christianity every year. And a large segment of people who were raised in a Jewish household do not hold to Jewish faith. Your faith is an active and personal choice regardless of what you were born as. Christianity seems to rely a lot on social proof however. The more people around you who believe, the easier it is for you to believe. And people are oriented in their perceptions of Christianity based on cultural reference. In the US Christianity is for hillbillies and losers who cause wars and take your money. In Africa and Asia it's seen as a modernist movement that professors and Presidents proscribe to. So I guess it depends on where you were born. If you were some Filipino kid your chances would be much greater than for a middle class white kid growing up on South Park and Daily Show here in the US. As for the poll. 1) Most American Christians believe in both. Most American Jews believe in both. The idea that they are incompatible is a pretty modern concept and one that crusading atheists seem to try to push to "force" some point of intellectual reckoning. 2) Most rational people believe implicitly in science. Most scientists say things evolve. Most rational people implicitly believe in evolution. 3) Most rational people seek purpose in their lives. Religion provides the most accessible (mostly) rational framework with which to live their lives. Most rational people are religious. 4) Adopting Evolution as a sort of didactic philosophical counterpoint to faith is asinine. First of all most atheists dont understand how evolution works. They think it's about "survival of the fittest" which it is not. Dinosaurs didn't die out because they weren't "evolved" enough to deserve to live but probably because some giant rock smashed the Earth. Then a bunch of unfit species took over. Reproduction (thus passing your genes) isn't a matter of fitness beyond a basal point for many species but could be as simple as which of 5 beavers heads in the right direction to find a female beaver and nesting ground. Scientists only have the most rudimentary understanding of evolution and basically 0% of the fossil record to decode it. All evolution can definitely establish as a theory is that species change over time due to genetic variation. That's not enough to hang your entire life philosophy on. The most logical approach to an incomplete but credible theory is to understand it's a work in progress only until a better idea comes along. Then move along. 5) How did we get here? That's the most basic question that religion answers, and more importantly gives context to. How can a rational person be okay with a faith system that cannot provide a specific set of credible reference points. So how did we get here? Why are we here and other homo species are not? Scientists told you it's because our brains were more developed than say the neanderthals. Now we know this is not true, their brain capacity was probably bigger in some ways than ours. They told you it's because our tools were more adapted to hunting in Europe. This is not true, anthropologists now think their stone tools were as efficacious as ours. Scientists told you it's because our social network was stronger. This is not true, as scientists have found skeletal and teeth records of much earlier homo species that they took care of their sick and weak and might have even chewed food for their sick for 2 years. Now they say it's because they matured faster than we did... well science says it... you better beat some religious person over the head with it before it changes. Five years ago you'd be a r****d if you "believed" that part of your DNA is neanderthal, yet now the Neandertal Genome Project tells you that unless you're African up to 5% of your distant ancestry is in fact Neanderthal. So what are you going to say when someone asks you to explain precisely step by step how "we got here" using your faith system. A Christian can tell you. A Jew can tell you. The most honest answer an atheist can say is "I am not sure..." Great faith system. Especially one supposedly based on cold calculation and logical proof. Science does not answer the questions that religion does. It's like some ******* asking you to give him a recipe for cake using music instead of words. UR doing it rong. That's not what that's for. Now you got no cake. In 200 years basically everything you believed about evolution will be obsolete, starting with we got here, but there will still be billions of people who still live life by the words of the Bible.
But the idea is not to get the most compelete picture immediately. The idea is to get the most correct picture as long as it takes. The fact that what your faith system tells you DOESN'T change does not add any credibility to its argument. I don't think this is the best reasoning out there.
So you say god's power is limitless and then you limit him by placing him outside of creation? Could god define himself in terms that we mere mortals could understand? I don't get it. It seems like an awfully convenient way out of the argument to me. Couldn't god, in his limitless power, place himself inside of creation for a bit to see how that whole gravity thing was going? And how would move the discussion towards the unknown unreality (or however you wish to view the opposite of known reality)? I'm truly curious about that. It's one of my pet peeves when people use the word 'prove' in conjunction with science. That's not what science is or what science does. The rest is simply faith vs. reason and starting with evidence and working your way towards a conclusion vs. starting with your conclusion and working to make the evidence fit it.
