This is really a tangent here - my comment is more so that I believe I recognize the specific christian sect the poster belongs to - and that helps me to frame my understanding of his arguments…
I know I’m wasting my time responding to someone who is so closed-minded, but are you saying you are completely unaware of the fossil record in sedimentary rocks, to name just one blindingly obvious thing that demonstrates evolution exists?
Meanwhile, there is a theory of electricity. As far as I can tell, I do not have to have blind faith in it for a light to work when I switch it on. Likewise, I do not have to have a blind faith in evolution to see that there were once numerous lifeforms on this planet that no longer exist, that others only seem to have existed in geologically recent times, that at some point in the relatively distant past there appear to have been only single-celled lifeforms present on Earth, and that before that there were, as far as we can tell, no lifeforms at all. If that is not evidence of evolution, what exactly do you call it?
Evolutionary theory will always be a theory. There is no controversy in science; the controversy lies within those that are ignorant to the facts and/or have an agenda. You seem to believe that a “theory” in science is something that needs more “proof” to be accepted as true. Please click on the link below and read. It’s not that long.
Yes, there is. We are continually fighting battles to prevent “teaching the controversy” from being a mandatory part of biology classes.
Fighting battles, yes. So far, we are (science is) winning all of them.
And wasting far too much time, energy and money doing so.
Yes, but the fact that we have to keep fighting them means that there is a problem. If every day at your office building you needed to start the day with a coordinated velocoraptor hunt to secure the building, it’d probably be fair to say that was a problem even if your team managed to cull the cagey buggers before they eviscerated anybody.
Ahem.
But yeah, let’s be clear here, there are still plenty of biology teachers in the nation who refuse to teach evolution or deliberately give it short shirt. And that’s even when school boards don’t, themselves, try to get their teachers to “teach the controversy”. The fact that we have to keep fighting against this shit does, indeed, show that it’s a problem. It may be one that we’re currently dealing with, but it’s still a major problem.
Brilliant factual refutation.
(Using the Argument From Nuhn Uhhnh! is terribly convincing. Boy howdy.)
We don’t have to falsify anything. The null hypothesis stands until falsified.
No, it means that we should assume it’s “unreal” until there’s evidence presented to prove otherwise. Besides, you are simply positing, without evidence, that such “non observable” things even exist. How would you know if we can’t observe them? Even things we can’t observe directly, like dark matter, are being analyzed through observation of material interactions.
No, you don’t get to claim that there are “non-observable things”, without any proof to that effect and in the teeth of reason itself, to boot… and then claim that because you’re alleged such phenomena, that we must accept them.
No.
Until you prove that there’s a single real thing that doesn’t fall under that metric, you’re just blowing smoke. “Ah hah! Sure you see the 32 pieces on the chess board, but how do you know that I don’t have an invisible, intangible queen that’s got you in check right now? That’s right, you can’t be sure, so you have to accept that you don’t know if you’re in check right now or not.”
Actually, you could falsify it quite easily by showing us an objective way to test, falsify, and predict such “non-observable” phenomena. But as they’re not real and don’t actually exist, that might be a hard sell for you.
Whose life does our society value more - Osama bin Laden or that cute gorilla baby in the zoo? The guy who shot Osama through the eye is a hero. A guy who would shoot a baby gorilla through the eye is a monster. I’m just saying things are a bit more complicated than your religious view allows for.
I thought I had answered that. Nothing is unstable. The vacuum of space is filled with virtual particles.
Which morality? And how come we don’t all get the same morality? Sociopaths don’t get it. How come our definition of morality has changed over time?
And what gives God his morality? Is it random, or are there rules? Was killing almost everyone on earth moral? (Even if you don’t believe in the Flood, the Bible never says that God was wrong.) I know he supposedly created us, but if we created intelligent robots we would be wrong to disconnect them for no reason.
[quote]
Granted there are ethicists who do this. but no scientist is using his test tubes and microscopes to try to find out if causing people pain is evil.
/quote]
Good and evil are tags we put on certain behaviors. Science can tell us how much pain an action causes, and even which actions cause pain, but it doesn’t try to claim something is good or evil. That is commentary, not science. The difference between religion and ethics is that religion pretends to have access to the real answer, while ethics knows that the discussion is the important part. Religion’s one true answer changes depending on the religion and changes over time, so I see no reason to give religion special treatment in this area.
Demonstrate that a soul exists. Define mind. If mind is a collection of characteristics, we can change the mind through physical means. There are millions of examples.
A program is a set of instructions sitting in a computer memory. A process is that program running. It is dynamic, it can change itself, it gets affected by its inputs, it gets affected by the state of the computer hardware. Our brain is the computer, our mind is the process, and our neurons are the program.
When we turn off the computer the process goes away. When we destroy a brain, the mind goes away, never to return.
Back to the OP,
As others have said it really depends on your definition of God. There are a number of versions of god which I think most scientists would agree exist, some for which science can’t say one way or another and others for which scientists are confident that he doesn’t
For example:
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I have a pencil on my desk which I have named God. I am confident that any experiment performed by any scientist would validate this God’s existence, but I assume that this isn’t the sort of God you are talking about.
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God is a concept that exists in the minds of many people some of whom find comfort from it, and some use to justify certain actions. Again I think that this God would be said to exist by pretty much all scientists.
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God in an entity outside of space and time that in no way influences our world. Scientists would say they can’t disprove that such a god exists but that such a god is irrelevant.
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God is an ultra powerful entity that takes an active role in the universe but does so in such a way that it is indistinguishable from natural phenomena. Again scientists would grudgingly say that they can’t prove such a god does or does not exist , but since there by definition is no evidence of such a god we see no reason to believe that such a god exists, any more than we should believe that Leprechaun’s do.
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God is an all powerful, all seeing, entity who only desires the good of humanity. The existence of suffering and evil in the world pretty much proves this god doesn’t exist.
Probably a better way to approach the question is what conclusions one draws based on the existence of god, and can those conclusions be justified. If you want to believe in a god of style 3, I think most scientist would say go right ahead. The existence of such a god is as irrelevant as a teapot orbiting Jupiter so this doesn’t bother us.
Most theist however are actually leaning in the direction of something like version 3. The problem is they then take a next step to say, such a god exists, so therefor we should worship him every Sunday. Or worse, such a god exists therefor we should prevent gay’s from marrying. But in truth we have no evidence of whether the god in question is like a the Christian God who likes being worshiped and dislikes homosexuality. God could be a shy, tolerant god who actively hates those who try to worship it or discriminate against gays, and will sentence them to eternal suffering.
What science has tended to show is that there in no necessity for a god with particular characteristics to exist, therefor drawing conclusions on the basis of the existence of God is flawed reasoning. Most atheists don’t have any problems with theists believing in god, it is the theists using this belief to justify their actions that bother atheists.
On the issue of morality, you are correct that science doesn’t have much to say about this. That is not because it falls in the realm of religion, but rather because it like religion falls into the realm of culture. What is good and evil for a given person is a mixture of nature and nurture. Science can say something about the nature part in that there is evidence that altruism provides a survival advantage, but the nurture part is based on a long complicated history of chance happenings and personal interactions that basically defies concrete scientific description. But that doesn’t mean that it therefore comes from God, and that atheists therefor can’t have morality. There is no good scientific explanation for why English speakers use the word “cat” to describe a particular animal, while Italians use the word “gatto” but that doesn’t mean that words were handed down by god, and that atheists don’t speak.
I doubt it. Any science fiction writer whose story contained as much scientific ignorance as your posts would have his work rejected in a flash.
[quote=“Voyager, post:310, topic:673301”]
Whose life does our society value more - Osama bin Laden or that cute gorilla baby in the zoo? The guy who shot Osama through the eye is a hero. A guy who would shoot a baby gorilla through the eye is a monster. I’m just saying things are a bit more complicated than your religious view allows for.
I thought I had answered that. Nothing is unstable. The vacuum of space is filled with virtual particles.
Which morality? And how come we don’t all get the same morality? Sociopaths don’t get it. How come our definition of morality has changed over time?
And what gives God his morality? Is it random, or are there rules? Was killing almost everyone on earth moral? (Even if you don’t believe in the Flood, the Bible never says that God was wrong.) I know he supposedly created us, but if we created intelligent robots we would be wrong to disconnect them for no reason.
Subjective views of morality change, the objective standard does not. Your morality and logic come from an intelligent source, not a puddle of soup or hydrothermal vent (abiogenesis).
I assume that you have never been a father. Because when you hold a newborn baby, that baby, wonderful as she is, has no mind to speak of. She has no self-awareness, she responds to stimuli, she is hungry, she cries.
My daughters’ wonderful minds arose over time. They emerged from their brains. We had something to do with shaping them, but they were inherently very different - and still are.
If this does not count then I invite you to define what an experiment you mean looks like. Even if we build an AI that passed the Turing Test I’m not at all sure you’d concede we created a mind from matter. Science is all about rigor.
Define the objective standard of morality. Is it the one some of us in the West use today, is it the one my ancestors in Israel used, or is it one we’ll use in 100 years?
But I do agree morality comes from an intelligent source - humans.
There is no such “objective” standard. And for every one that’s ever been claimed by any religion? Lo and behold, their “objective” standards change between regions and ages among the same religions.
Quite true. They come from human cognition. Thermal vents don’t generally do my thinking for me.
And, of course, sociopaths’ morality simply doesn’t exist. What, is God pickin’ on 'em?
If you don’t mind, could you lay out a couple examples of the evidence you seem to think you have that morality could not have been developed by humans?
Could God invent an argument so circular even she couldn’t believe it?
Didn’t God sculpt life from inanimate matter?
Or is it that God is alive and has always existed and we’re just pieces of the greater whole? In which case I just proved God. It’s us!
Correct. But neither can religion, which states that actions that God doesn’t like will result in future punishments. So instead of morality being a collection of human opinions it’s God’s opinion. And since God is unaccountable this amounts to a celestial dictatorship. It would be wise to follow the received wisdom, but it’s never clear to me why God is made of morality.
Idealistically, I would hope people’s morality is independent of whether punishment is possible.
So…Beautiful…
They…
They
Should
Have
Sent
A Poet
Unfortunately, many of our great theist scientists have been hindered by their belief, at one point or another believing they had reached the upper limit of understanding possible for humans and that from that point onwards the only explanation could be “God did it”.
This is the great harm religion does that many people don’t think about. Moderate religion is considered harmless because it doesn’t involve burning people at the stake or blowing up buildings. But this is exactly why it still continues to hinder humanity greatly, and exactly why even “harmless” religious ignorance should be fought.
The idea that morality comes from religion - especially Abrahamic religions - is one of the most ludicrous claims religious people make. It’s true that science can’t disprove God, but it really doesn’t take much knowledge of the world, or much intelligent thought, to come to the conclusion that religion and morality are two completely separate things that are far too often in direct opposition.