Theory of Evolution Cage Match

[Notabull]

[jon]

I don't personally believe in the 6000 year old world, so I won't speak to that, but the geocentric model did not originate in religion. Aristotle developed it, and Ptolemy completed it. Their authority was so great that no one challenged that theory for 1000 years. Of course religious leaders made some serious mistakes, so serious it is hard to imagine how they could have been Christian, but being the dominate institution in the world at that time, they are the ones who would be in a position to make the biggest mistakes.

[Notabull]

[jon]

Copernicus developed the heliocentric model in 1514. Galileo was not persecuted until 1633, so it is not like the Church clamped down hard and prevented thought. What they did was wrong, and the Roman Catholic Church has admitted it. But their first error was to assert the authority of scientists, such as Pythagoras.

I don't think you can really blame religion for supressing thought, or even certain religious people, without also noticing that suppression of thought that comes from people who bash religion. The most flagrant example of this is the claim that Christians believed once believed in a flat earth:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth

My own belief is that Intelligent Design is in fact true, but that we will never find scientific proof of it, because that is not how God will choose to reveal himself beyond pure faith. But I do find it quite interesting how vehemently ID is attacked, when in reality it is the epitome of the scientific method to consider alternative explanations and perform experiments to resolve the issue. ID has a compelling conceptional foundation that is extremely worth considering seriously. When one considers the huge number of physical parameters that have to be just right in order for life to exist, it is just astounding.

[Alan]

What I find interesting about ID and Science Creationism is that they attempt to incorporate God into natures physical laws. My own personal view is that God transcends nature in ways we are incapable of understanding. He (she? it?) does not need to be a part of nature for it to work any more than I need to be a part of the software I write.

I also think God transcends mathematics (and in fact created mathematics). Christians believe in the holy trinity: The Father, The Son and The Holy Spirit. These are not three "parts" of God. They are all separate and yet they are all completely God. How else could this be possible unless God wasn't constrained by such concepts and "one" or "three".

To insist that God must have left evidence of a 6000 years past creation kind of implies a belief in limts on God's abilities. Maybe the world was created 6000 years ago with the appearance that it is billions of years old. Maybe it was created last week. It doesn't matter within this cave of shadows. We are supposed to do what we are supposed to do -- whatever that is. If that means creating theories about what God intended us to see before the creation event then great. If that means questioning those theories based on theological grounds then great. To each their own and life and let life and all that and more.

I stand by my claim that the real litmus test is "is it useful"?

[Notabull]

[rose-colored-coolaid]

[jon]

[Alan]

Oh, man. I really want to hear how an atheist converted to religion. Most of the atheists I've know have been pretty dogmatic about the non-existence of God. I would even say that they are have more confidence in the non-existence of God than most believers have in his existence. Having been raised to believe and God and accepting it as sort of a form of brainwashing, I'm curious what the belief looks like to someone who came to it on their own.

[jon]

Alan,

Since you ask, I didn't believe in God until my 40s. I remember in 1st grade I had already decided that the science in school made a whole lot more sense to me that what I was being taught in Sunday School (Reformed Jewish). The more I learned the more convinced I became, although I knew I couldn't prove it. I saw a lot of poorly thought out philosophy based on God, but I enjoyed studying various areas of science and math for enjoyment. However, I began to feel emotionally disconnected and decided to focus my reading on that issue, and found Buddhist reading satisfying for a while because it has a lot of insight into how the mind behaves. I finally married a woman who happened to be a Christian, and started attending Bible studies reluctantly and quite sceptically, although by then I knew how valuable those ideas were historically in bringing about freedom. I also had begun to understand how for many critical questions science simply excluded from those topics from its consideration because experiments are not possible. People with a scientific inclination seem start to consider those areas themselves suspect, when really the limitation is in scientific framework itself. BF Skinner was perhaps the worst in that regard.

After a while we moved to another location and started attending a church that happened to follow a Calvinist teaching. At that point I began to realize that most of what I thought I knew about Christianity was wrong. I found that if you simply ignore the incorrect cruft that has built up, there is a core that is logical and amazingly perceptive.

Coming from a Jewish background, I had learned about many of the atrocities that had been committed by Christians over the centuries. I saw how completely un-Christian those were, and simply separated them from Christianity. I can understand that until someone learns enough about real Christianity, they will be very hostile to it.

So I remain a Calvinist, which is numerically a small percentage of Christians. But I find great comfort in reading Protestant Reformed works, (for anyone who doesn't know, it is totally different from Jewish Reformed). Predestination is a topic I find fascinating, because it says that every moment of my life was designed by God to achieve a purpose. That is so deeply satisifying to me that I have no desire for scientific evidence for it. Calvinism is consistent with ID, but has no need for it.

[rose-colored-coolaid]

[jon]

[jon]

[Notabull]

[Notabull]

RCC said: "My challenge is what evidence would prove ID? What evidence would even suggest it if you don't start a priori with "God did it"? The fact is, religion was not interested in how we got here (beyond "God did it") until evolution came along. They finally had strong competition for that gap, and ID is just a way to shove the cat back into the bag."

That's exactly right. ID is a pretty desperate and weak attempt to explain something that's already been very adequately explained by another long existing, very well respected, and peer reviewed scientific theory. The conclusion of ID was known from the start as the Creator, oops, no, "Designer", did it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Of_Pandas_and_People

See this article for an example of the weak attempt to disguise Intelligent Design as science. Note that the book started off as clearly a religious book, which is fine by me as it discusses a religious explanation for the beginning of the world. However, when it was ruled that teaching a particular religion in schools was, umm, not legal n' stuff, the creationists needed to find another method to get creationism into schools.

They did this by attempting to morph creationism into science (which it never was), because the ruling allowed for teaching scientific explanations in schools. So they put their heads together, came up with some pseudoscience, attempted to a poke a few holes in evolution, changed a few words in their Panda book and the rest is history.