The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.”

Originally posted by alfa1

Originally posted by ImaFungi
For those who dont believe in God... Why do you think the universe can be explained without God?

As much as science has gone good ways towards explaining the nature of the universe, it should also be recognised that there are probably many questions about it that will never be answered, mostly due to lack of data.

But you cant just go and say.... "Science cant explain it all, therefore : God"

I never said that should be done...

There is truth...

The truth doesnt care about our opinions or feelings... our opinions and feelings are inconsequential regarding the matters of whether or not a god created the universe..

you cant just go and say " Science can explain it, there fore : no God"

There is no separation,,we both inhabit the same universe, we both live in the same truth... My logic and reason have led me to ponder the potential that an intelligence had something to do with the implementation of this universe... either my supposition is true or false.... if it is true.. Science is the study of this intelligences work, therefore cannot be used to disprove God...

if false... Then I dont know... equal opportunities eternal public propertied, capitalistic cosmic casino....

so either god or no god...... there is one truth.... noone knows the truth.... it is interesting to see what people believe and why.. the motives....

how would you feel about existence, yourself and others if you knew for a fact an intelligence created this universe? do you not want this to be true? what would it mean?

Originally posted by redtic

Originally posted by ImaFungi
For those who dont believe in God... Why do you think the universe can be explained without God?

what is the significance of whether or not a god created the universe, what would that change for you and others?

God is a human construct. The rest is irrelevant.

How do you view the universe? what do you think it is? how do you feel about it? how long do you think existence (somethingness) has existed? why was there an exact quantity of energy, and why were the laws of physics in favor of a universe that turned out the way we view it, are it, and exist within it, allowing us to do all we have ever done and can ever do?

We come from the universe, we weren't made for it.

human is a Gods construct. You didnt say anything relevant.

We come from the universe, and were made for it. considering the earth, more specifically your environment is the universe. yes you were made for it.

reply to post by ImaFungi


Look, as is with all threads like this, no minds are going to be changed and no arguments are going to be won. I think your belief system is total bunk, but I respect your right to have it - I suspect (hope) the converse is true. Tell you what - if you're right and when I die, I don't totally cease to exist, I'll buy you a beer in heaven (if I'm not burning in hell)

reply to post by alfa1

Dowloaded and scanned through the first one to get an idea of what he had to say.

His argument was a very long winded way of putting forward two tired old chestnuts...
- The "watchmaker" argument, first proposed by William Paley in 1802.
- The "its all too improbable to have happened by chance alone", therefore : God.

Bit of which sound lovely but dont stand up to any scrutiny at all.

Considering you probably don't believe in intelligent atoms, I'd like to see you come up with a better answer.

Interesting the reference to 'heart' and not 'head'.

People are so adamant to say God doesn't exist when their brain can't comprehend all on this planet, let alone the universe and everything in it ... and that's just in our own little dimension. Then we start to explore the other dimensions and .... well they go nuts because the brain cannot understand things that are not physical because the brain is only a physical thing.

Evolution is not a 'head' thing either because no one in their right mind could say, we - who only use 5% of our brain and can travel to the moon with stuff we created ourselves from stuff that came out of the ground - evolved from a microbe that somehow 'began' on a planet that came together from a swirling mass of matter that existed after a big bang of something from nothing..... without outside help.

Whoa... I'm in absolute awe in the faith those people have to believe that. Absolute serious awe!.

And while back I was once told.. Just because you don't believe in God does not mean God doesn't believe in you...... And now I'm a little older and I realize that saying really is backwards to the true nature of the meaning...

reply to post by iSHRED


The concept of Intelligent Design that has been attempted to be taught in schools in the U.S. has been banned due to it's complete and total lack of any scientific evidence or even intelligent thought. I have read one of the books designed for children and it is beyond stupidity.

Now one could say that they believe a GOD created the Multiverse through the processes of both the Quantum Evolution of Matter and Energy as well the Biological process of Evolution that is Natural Selection...but that tripe I read that was called Intelligent Design was thankfully banned.

Split Infinity

reply to post by iSHRED

the problem is you nor anyone else can prove ID wrong.

Correct, because creationism posits a supernatural explanation and is therefore, by definition, unfalsifiable and is therefore, by definition, not science.

Or can you show where creationism or "intelligent design" has made a real prediction that differs from modern evolutionary synthesis and has been shown to be right while modern evolutionary synthesis has been shown to be wrong?

Originally posted by iterationzero
reply to post by iSHRED

 

the problem is you nor anyone else can prove ID wrong.

Correct, because creationism posits a supernatural explanation and is therefore, by definition, unfalsifiable and is therefore, by definition, not science.

Or can you show where creationism or "intelligent design" has made a real prediction that differs from modern evolutionary synthesis and has been shown to be right while modern evolutionary synthesis has been shown to be wrong?

how is... "an intended creation of a system" .... a supernatural explanation?

This Jeffress guy is a Baptist pastor correct? It seems biased, I mean what else is he going to do, but to try and prove that God exists or rather I should say try to convince others that God exists. I don't have any problem saying there is most likely some sort of intelligent design or god of some sort, but I don't believe in Christianity.

To be honest I have some very negative experiences with baptists so I automatically discredit anything said by a baptist. I know that is not logical and I have to stop myself and think the information through myself and then decide, but it's still a gut reaction. I clicked the link and saw it was a christian site with a baptist preacher and alarm bells went off in my head. LOL

These talks are never really about ID vs evolution. It's about people keeping their egos up, particularly these closed-minded know-it-all Darwinian evolutionists. One moment people say that abiogenesis is completely separate from evolution, only to turn around and say that ID is complete BS, as if it's some sort of contradiction to evolution, or as if they are mutually exclusive.

How can evolution and ID be contradictory or exclusive when ID tries to tackle how life began, the very thing that you people try so hard to say evolution is not about..?

How can abiogenesis be separate from evolution, when evolution requires abiogenesis to be complete? Don't you think it's important to know if it was a single cell that evolved into everything, or if multiple cell types emerged in different places and there are multiple unrelated life trees?

Why are you being so overly critical for the other view while blindly accepting the common one? For people who claim to base everything on evidence, you sure have great ways to ignore the lack of evidence for your own arguments. You have to show evidence that inanimate physical matter can give rise to intelligence by purely physical mechanisms. Until then, there is no evidence to support the basics of abiogenesis, and even evolution. Evolution in this sense meaning 'simple' cells giving rise to intelligent animals like us, over a gazillion years if you wish. And having an excuse as to why there's a lack of evidence (like 'we lack fossils because they're rare' or 'we don't have enough time to notice big changes in species') does not suddenly make it evidence, just like explaining why you murdered someone does not make them live again. It's still a lack of evidence.


This is the basic nature of most people who argue against ID...

Dawkins on Junk DNA: "Heads I win, Tails ID Loses"
Thanks to Scootie Royale's recent video, I googled and found Rabbi Klinghoffer's recent post about a debate between Richard Dawkins and Britain's chief rabbi, Lord Jonathan Sacks. Apparently Dawkins was willing to accept the ENCODE project's conclusion that most of our DNA is not junk, and responded that this is exactly what a Darwinist would expect. Yet, as Klinghoffer pointed out, this is exactly the opposite of Dawkins' position as recently as 2009, when he stated that the existence of junk DNA is exactly what Darwinism would predict and Intelligent Design could not explain.

Thanks to professor Larry Moran's vehement challenge to the conclusions of the ENCODE project I remain an agnostic regarding those conclusions and the question of how much of our DNA is junk and how much isn't. But if it turns out that most of our DNA is in fact not junk, but plays an integral role in our lives, then I think it is more of a challenge to the non-design hypothesis, since there is that much more that needs explaining.

If junk DNA counts against ID, then the absence of junk DNA must count for it. Dawkins can't have it both ways.

Source (follow the links there)

And that's the exact problem. Your minds are already made up. You pretend you already know the answer, so you've stopped looking, the exact same thing you criticize religious people of doing. You're not interested in having a debate. You want to convert people, pretty much like religious zealots, the very thing you hate so much. Any argument that people throw at you, will be dismissed by some shallow bs rebuttal with no evidence to support it, even though you claim to have all the evidence in the world for your own perspective. And even worse, you're in denial about it, because now I'm gonna get a rant about how science is always looking for answers and I'm some retard blah blah. But you are not science nor scientific. You sure love to pretend that you're being scientific by being dismissive, the exact opposite of what science actually is, which is gathering knowledge and increase understanding. In actuality.. You are an individual repeating what you're told, because it makes you feel good and smart about yourself, so you can pretend to actually be smart and superior to the rest, while actually being a repeater instead of a thinker.

reply to post by vasaga


Evolution is a FACT and has been so for some time. There is no possible way to disprove it as it is reality. All life is encoded with the same Viral DNA that had infected the very first Single Celled Organizm. This is 100% Proof Positive.

A Virus is NOT a living thing and it is an example of how something can have DNA and not be a life form. A Virus is just a step below a Living Organizm and is an example of Evolution.

Split Infinity

The question is not an intelligent hand vs evolutionary systems dichotomy, but rather a finite vs infinite dichotomy.

If we are living in an infinite universe (cosmos, multi-verse, multiple dimensions, etc...), then by the rules of probability, everything can happen, has already happened an infinite times in the past, and will be repeated an infinite amount of times in the future. Thus the possibility for a complex structure like the eyeball to spontaneously appear on a little rock orbiting a little star in a remote corner of a galaxy is perfectly acceptable. So too is the possibility that an entity creates themselves out of nothing, being omnipotent and omniscient - this benevolent watchmaker kick starts a process on an isolated little rock in hopes of someday generating creatures which will worship him. Finally the possibility that inert chemicals organize themselves to such an extent that they participate in an evolutionary system out of a soup of amino acids on a little rock is also there.

If we, however are living in a finite universe, well then all bets are off. Looking at the edges of science today, this may be the case (finite energy in the universe, discrete levels of energy, discrete lengths and spans of time, expansion and waveform limited by a bounded cosmos). What this does mean, however, is that the system is bound by set rules - and of those the existence of an omnipresence force or guiding hand could be one of them - with the converse being that by the fluke of the rules of the system an evolutionary system of chemicals can exist.

This isn't to say that the reality we live in is not a finite defined realm existing in an infinite (non discrete) cosmos.

Science is science because we have defined it against a hard set of logical positivism rules. Even in science, the definition of the word Theory is very specifically defined. (Thus right now we do not have an ID theory, we have an ID hypothesis. ES is not a hypothesis but a theory because the results of repeated tests have shown that a specific pattern to be reproduced)

Regardless of your stance (ID vs ES), both sides need to be more flexible.

ID proponents need to understand that in the current system of science, un-testable theories need to remain in the realm of philosophical until such time they can produce reproducible evidence of such. Because our thinking paradigm is logical positivism, they can only do this by proving a positive instance of, rather than disproving the non-existence of.

On the other hand ES proponents need to realize that by focusing specifically on logical positivism as their only route to the truth they are overlooking a huge realm of possibilities - and should focus on taking a more myth buster approach to scientific problems (ockham's razor isn't the only way to build a mousetrap).

Thus until ID can produce scientific evidence it will never, and should never, be accepted as science - however, at the same time, as scientists, one should not limit their pursuit of ideas which they think are controversial just because they are controversial. Additionally, science shouldn't be setting itself to mock hypotheses they can not disprove (impossible in logical positivism - you can only prove something you can not disprove but only prove a negative - but then again I can't prove Unicorns do not exist so ...).

Originally posted by SplitInfinity
reply to post by vasaga

 

Evolution is a FACT and has been so for some time. There is no possible way to disprove it as it is reality.

Being unfalsifiable = Being unscientific.

Originally posted by SplitInfinity
All life is encoded with the same Viral DNA that had infected the very first Single Celled Organizm. This is 100% Proof Positive.

Really? Where's your evidence? Look below for the whole virus thing..

Originally posted by SplitInfinity
A Virus is NOT a living thing and it is an example of how something can have DNA and not be a life form. A Virus is just a step below a Living Organizm and is an example of Evolution.

What is your point exactly? You're basically saying that DNA does not equal life, and well, that's not exactly an argument in favor of evolution. Well, maybe it is.. If you assume that they are random purposeless DNA chunks that somehow do random things. But that means you're assuming what you're concluding... And actually, it has also been argued that viruses are living things that have evolved beyond needing a 'body' of their own. In reality, no one knows what viruses really are..

To date, no clear explanation for the origin(s) of viruses exists. And so viruses could have arisen from mobile genetic elements that gained the ability to move between cells or they may have descended from previously free-living organisms that adapted a parasitic replication strategy or may have existed before, and led to the evolution of, cellular life.

Source

What you just said, your whole post actually, is another example of pretending you already know what's going, without it being the case..

Originally posted by boymonkey74
reply to post by jeramie

 

Ahhh that's fine then, I assume your God is the Christian god? He doesn't care for Hindu's though nor Muslims because they have not bought into his club.
We have to accept him to get all the goodies though, bit forceful isn't it? accept or you are screwed? nah mate the real God wouldn't go for that idea only people who want control of your mind want that and you fell for it.

That is blatently false to say that God doesn't care about muslims or hindu's.. I am a Christian, but I don't go around saying who God can save, and who he can't, because only he has that authority. I know there are indeed a lot of Christians out there who think they can say to others, who God won't save or who he will save based on people with different beliefs other than Christian ones, but this is not God speaking, it is some person who thinks because they are saved by their faith, that they somehow have been granted the power of judgement because they feel special because they know God..

All of the radical islamic people in the mideast think that when they kill an infidel, or some other offender, that they are doing God a favor! Those are some seriously stupid people.

Half the population does this all the time... gets tiring after awhile.
Whenever non believers run in to these kinds of roadblocks, they shut off their mind and refuse to try and understand what is really going on..

reply to post by kamebard


It's nice to see some actual well thought out posts from time to time, even though I do not agree with everything, I can respect the post. I personally am not saying ID is science. However, I am saying that some premises that science holds as true, might actually not be true, and one should embrace these possibilities for progress instead of dismissing them. The problem with 'evolution' is that the word is used in so many senses by so many different people, that it's hard to define what people are actually talking about at any specific time, especially in these forums. This turns the 'discussions' into violent attacks rather than a good debate, because neither side understands each other, nor wants to understand. The boundaries of the definition (including the definition of ID) are what people actually most often are arguing about, because this is where the main problem is. They use different definitions and think the other person is stupid.

But like we've seen in the past, science is not infallible, and theories are superseded all the time. To cling so violently to the current view is something I will never understand, other than it being another religious-like expression that happens to be based on some science, but is ultimately scientism rather than science.

Originally posted by SplitInfinity
reply to post by vasaga

 

Evolution is a FACT and has been so for some time. There is no possible way to disprove it as it is reality. All life is encoded with the same Viral DNA that had infected the very first Single Celled Organizm. This is 100% Proof Positive.

Evolution is not a FACT but a theory. It is no more a FACT than the theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, or thermodynamics. It is a proven theory, but a theory none the less. Although we see what appears to be an evolutionary process in the laboratory and we can describe the facts of the experiments, we do not say we have a FACT of evolution, but a theory (tested over and over again) that this is the explanation for such a process. Just as newton's laws of motion were replaced by relativity to be replaced by quantum mechanics, evolution will follow the same scientific evolutionary process from one theory to the next.

reply to post by vasaga


I brought up Virus' because all the Genomes we have been able to map contain the same original Viral encoding. I also was showing how DNA was not exclusive to just living things.

The fact that you refuse to admit that Evolution exists is laughable. We know Evolution to be a reality...we see it in all living things and can quickly follow the Evolutionary path of various Bacteria as they adapt through Natural Selection to be resistant to Antibiotics.

The only one being unscientific here is you.

Split Infinity

reply to post by kamebard


Evolution stopped being a Theory some time ago. Ask any one who works in the field of Genetic Manipulation.

Split Infinity

Originally posted by vasaga
reply to post by kamebard

 

However, I am saying that some premises that science holds as true, might actually not be true, and one should embrace these possibilities for progress instead of dismissing them...

But like we've seen in the past, science is not infallible, and theories are superseded all the time. To cling so violently to the current view is something I will never understand, other than it being another religious-like expression that happens to be based on some science, but is ultimately scientism rather than science.

This is becoming more and more of a problem today. Science is becoming more and more dogmatic and a "religion" in its own right. As a society we have severely deviated from our ability to question as we have in the past.

What is interesting, however, that most of the "scientists" up until around the turn of the 20th century were scientists, but also philosophers. The whole tradition of the PhD (Doctor or Philosophy) is still around to this day. Only recently did we invent the BS degree (Bachelors of science), up to that point it was simply a Bachelors degree, as a stepping stone to higher degrees (occultism anyone?) culminating in a doctor of "philosophy" - with the aim of being able to "free-think" about the objects of their studies.

Unfortunately, somewhere around the 1940's there was this radical shift and science and philosophy started radically diverging to the point where today's PhDs are but a shadow of the spirit of the PhDs in the past. Dogmatism made its way into the realm of science (partially because of the violent attacks from the religious), and unfortunately this has pushed a lot of the questioning out of the discipline. Supporters shouting FACTS and LAWS rather than observations and theories.

All in all wholly unhealthy on both ends of the spectrum. The speculation of science in the past has been replaced by pillars of dogma (something the early scientists were trying to rebel against coming out of the church).