Are there any people here who don't believe in evolution?

Interesting. I did not know that, and obviously the author of the article didn’t either. That kind of blows up that one section of the article. I wonder how reliable the rest of it is.

 

I’m not saying that evolution is magic, or more specifically that the appearance of matter from nothing is magic. For me just because something is unexplained doesn’t mean that it’s magic. I was referring to what others have said and making the point that one can’t criticize the theory of Creation by saying that a belief in God is a belief in magic, and then try to duck questions about the appearance of all the matter in the universe out of nothing by saying that they are outside of the scope of the discussion. The same rules have to apply to both positions. I’m not following your shifting of the goalposts comment, but perhaps that’s because of the misunderstanding about the reference to magic.

What I’m saying is that if you want to leave the Big Bang out of the discussion then you also have to leave the question of the existence of God out of the discussion. You would have to accept the existence of God as a precondition and then talk about whether God created earth, how he created earth, whether the Biblical account matches the historic record, and other such questions. But if you’re applying the same rules to all theories, if we’re going actually start at the point where life begins on earth, then questions about the Big Bang are out and questions about the existence of God are out. We would begin that discussion with all the matter in the universe existing, and with God existing.

 

Well,

a) I can’t conceive of it
b) therefore it can’t exist

would be a logical fallacy as well.

“The greatest flaw in the character of man is an inability to accept uncertainty.”
-But ... without this we wouldn’t have science. I think that curiosity and a desire to understand are very good things.

 

Is is it rational to think that you know the limits of what could exist in the universe? And we should be careful about the definition of rationality. There are lots of rational reasons to have faith, and there are lots of personal experiences that people have that rationally lead them to believe in God.

 

I'm not sure what made you think that is what I'm saying. That is exactly opposite of what I said. I'm saying, "I don't know, and neither do you, and if you claim to know you are full of excrement."

Not at all. Scientists are good at understanding when they don't have an answer - the open questions are what define them. If we didn't figure out what we don't know and devised experiments to find the answers, that would be when we didn't have science. We would have people talking about turtles holding up the world, and stars rotating around the Earth on a giant clockwork mechanism.

 

The problem though is that you are shifting the goal posts by trying to call all of science into question. This is one of the fundamental problems with the Creationist / ID position is that its central proposition is based on the issue of God or some other supernatural power to explain speciation. Evolution taken on its own doesn't rely upon an outside agency to explain speciation so in that sense it is self-contained. In this situation where you are bringing up the existence of matter to criticize the theory of Evolution you are providing a going beyond Evolution as technically the existence of matter isn't an issue central to Evolution while the existence of a deity or some other supernatural agency is central to Creationism / ID.

The difference is that you don't need to know where matter came from to accept Evolution but you need to consider the existence of God to accept Creationism.

This goes to heart of why I say Creationism and most forms of ID is unscientific, I will reserve judgement on the possibility of aliens, because there is no empiracal test or falsibility to determine the methodology of God(s) or other supernatural agents where as the methodology of Evolution is empiracally testable and falsifiable. Further the problem with Creationism is that it presents itself as a theory of everything and therefore can only stand as a theory of everything. Evolution doesn't work that way. It isn't a theory of everything nor pretend to be. You are trying to use the nature of one to criticize the other.

 

I'm not sure its so much what you know but what you can prove.

 

Yeah, that wasn’t very clear of me at all. I was referring to Dubious’ post, which DFWRocket responded to and then you in turn responded to his post. You were saying that DFWRocket used a logical fallacy and I was pointing out that Dubious used one initially.

Ah, so you’re talking about some sort of denial of uncertainty. Well, most of the time, or at least much of the time, people have reasons for their faith. For these people it’s not a way to deny the uncertainty of the world but rather more like an expanded understanding of the world. The Catholic church of the Renaissance period often gets held up as anti-science for its rigid positions on the stars rotating around the Earth and the like, and it was to a significant extent, but that was all about politics and power. It had nothing to do with faith or the Bible. There’s nothing inherently anti-science about Biblical Christianity, or Islam or Judaism for that matter.

 

I never, ever said a & b. I was commenting on someone saying that because of a, b = God must NOT exist. That to me is an argument from ignorance.

my statement was because the other poster couldn't imagine that there was a being large enough to control the vastness of the Universe, that doesn't mean that God does NOT exist, or that he is NOT large enough to control the Vast complexities of the Universe.

 

I don't believe this at all. Like I said earlier, you have to remember that the bible was written with a lot of metaphors and colloquialisms that made since to the writers of the day. Many people today can't grasp many of the metaphors in Shakespeare and that was only written a few hundred years ago.

It takes a good knowledge of the bible and its history to truly understand what is said in it & unfortunately, many Christians do NOT have that knowledge, and very few, if any athiests do.

We have to remember that the bible is the Inspired word of God, Written down by man. With that in mind, we have to remember that man infused their politics, morals, etc.. into the book. That is why God gives us the Spiritual Gift of Discernment.

This is a saying - The Winner of the war writes the History of the War. This means that we usually see the winners of wars in history as the Good Guy in the history of those times..and that is the history that has survived the ages. The Bible is no different in that it includes the Writers interpretations of things and events.

 

It is irrational to say one knows all the limits of what is possible. It is completely rational to declare that limits exist, that there are significant constraints on what is possible. Plato/Socrates spent their lives trying to build a bridge between plauralism and Parmenides singularity. The difference being precicely the invariant laws of the universe and the local spacetime expressions of matter and energy best described by differential equations.

 

Uhhhh.....Yeah......what he said

 

litsen to yourself, you cite the age old "God created it" isn't science argument.

With Newton, science proved how and why the planets orbit the way they do yet it still couldn't disprove that God is what made them orbit in the first place.

You see the point, God and science can coexist but the real problem is manmade theories describing God known as religion.

If you wish to argue manmade religion vs science then I'm with you on the side of science but I cannot deny the existence of God as the master and creator of the universe.

 

What he's saying is that scientists can't rely upon a known quantity of "God's influence" in order to add upon their findings.

Newton did alright describing gravitational pull without putting in a God variable.

 

To me, Newton did a Great Job of seperating Science from Religion while believing in both. He uses Scientific principles and equations, but believes that it was God who set them in motion.


"Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who set the planets in motion. God governs all things and knows all that is or can be done"

-Isaac Newton
John H. Tiner. Isaac Newton: Inventor, Scientist and Teacher, Mott Media, ISBN 0-91513406-3.

Also, it was a Roman Catholic Priest (Georges Lemaitre) who first introduced the idea we now Call the Big Bang Theory. He was also a Physics and Astronomy Professor. I'm sure he had no problem distinguising, and believing in both science and God.

 

I'm beginning to think that we simply misunderstanding each other...we seem to be saying similiar things now.

I'm all about seperating the two when it comes to Scientific observations and theories. I know you can't use God in Scientific Theories, and I never thought or said otherwise.

I'm just saying that the two are not mutually exclusive...the Science does not cancel out God, and that God does not cancel out science. You CAN be religious and believe in Evolution. The bible does NOT discount evolution, not if you really understand the bible. Like I said earlier:

2 Peter 3:8 (New International Version)

But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.

Now, understand, I'm NOT using the bible here to prove science...I would NOT do that. I'm simply saying that the Bible does NOT GO AGAINST Science when it come to the 6 day Creation. because 1 Day to the lord is LIKE a thousand years. So I don't think that Creationists should interpret a day as one 24-hour cycle.

 

Not everything can be explained by science... but more unexplainable things are getting explained by science everyday...