Yes, everyone knows that a complex, wholly perfect, omniscient, omnibenevolent being eternally existing (yet without leaving good empirical evidence) is much more likely than a universe that has always existed, or a random quantum fluxuation producing the universe. Oops, pardon me, my tongue appears to have gotten wedged in my cheek. We do have evidence of “causeless events”, and spontaneous creation of electrons in a vaccuum. We are trying to figure out the beginnings of the universe; this does not take anything away from God.
Please provide evidence that all investigation into the beginning of the universe is done by anti-theists. You know (or you should) that science can say nothing about a creator that does not leave any empirical trace of his interference. Evolution or even abiogenesis does not deny God; God is simply an unneccesary entity in scientific theories. Good science does not try to either prove or dispove an entity that leaves no empirical evidence of its existence; if there can be no scientific evidence of a thing, science has nothing to say about it. We have yet to see sufficient good evidence of “intelligent design” that it is a plausible theory (I have to wonder what sort of intelligent design would produce the panda’s thumb, or put the prostrate in a position where it will likely cause trouble later, but I daresay you will just dismiss me as “anti-theist”). If He has not left scientific evidence that we can discover, then science has nothing to say one way or the other.
I am perpetually confused by theists who think that evolution, abiogensis or research into the origin of the universe must somehow be anti-theistic. Particularly when I know quite a few theists who accept current scientific theories on these very things, with no harm to their faith or love of God.
You make a good point there, thanks. Especially your line “When did we decide that the cool folks among us get to form a consensus of correct beliefs that everyone must buy into, or shut up?”
Now, as you made pains to repeat, I am NOT going to act upon my Creationist beliefs. Because I feel that Creation does not belong in schools, etc. (Yadda yadda yadda) I also feel it is extremely important to not impose religious beliefs on anyone. (Yadda yadda yadda)
But I think there is a certain amount of arrogance in this assumption among some people that their viewpoint is “Correct”, and they need to enlighten and “save” anyone who doesn’t share this viewpoint. Which is what I think motivates many people in this Creation/Evolution debate. (On both sides.)
It is almost like some of you think I haven’t thought about this…like if I was more educated to “reason”, I’d change my mind. Let me tell you, I have thought about it. I have thought long and hard about my religion, and how Creation fits into it all for me. And I believe what I believe. I don’t go around telling anyone “Well if you just read this book you’d see that my religious viewpoint is right”. The reason is because I figure most people have decided on their own, and have come to their own conclusions for a damn good reason. Same with me.
To answer someone else’s question - I started this OP to ask, (or rather challenge) people to come up with a good reason why a person who was minding their own business, but had different beliefs, was someone that some folks felt the need to “save” and argue with anyway. Or why they couldn’t just let it alone, and go on to fighting bigger battles? I had hoped that most people would say “Well, as long as you are minding your own business, no skin off my nose.”
I could tell that Evolution/Creation was a very hot topic on this board, and apparently Real Life, so discussing this in the context of Creation/Evolution seemed like a good bet. And yeah, of course I started this thread partly as a cathartic rant against busybodies and people who can’t “let it go” - just like I started the Classical Music thread.
The posts on this thread have been really enlightening, and most people had some really good responses. However, most of peoples’ objections were really about the active Creationist - someone who was going to vote, etc. Or, the arguments involved a lot of “what ifs”. (What if you were polled?" “What if you change your mind in a few years and become active?” Yadda yadda.) I could find none of these reasons to be sufficient to give a damn about me and what I am doing now (which is nothing, believe me.) But, interesting posts, enlightening debate.
The conclusion I have come to is that some people:
a) are busybodies, who won’t mind their own business.
b) are unable to cope with the “different”, feel the need to argue and debate with anyone different. Because, God Forbid anyone else be allowed to think something that they find weird or different.
c) Want to Save the World. Yeah, I was young too. I remember that feeling. Now I’m not that young now, I know you can’t save 'em all. You pick your battles. And I think a person who is enlightened enough to know not to impose their views on others is low on the list of things to “save”.
Well, this thread has taken on a life of it’s own! But I really don’t see that I have that much more to offer.
Polydactyl Cats Unlimited
“A Cat Cannot Have Too Many Toes”
I hope I didn’t imply that you should be forced to change your views. Of course you should not be. But again I must say that I am personally astonished that an intelligent person like you would have read and thought through the evidence and come away a creationist. The only conclusion I can draw is that you did not read closely enough. I am sorry if you find that offensive or insulting. it is not meant to be. The simple fact is that evolution is such a well established scientific theory that there would be no debate at all if certain persons were not threatened by it.
I know you feel that we are going in circles and I will certainly respect you if you choose not to respond in this thread anymore. Again I find you one of the more pleasant and intelligent posters on this board, and am certainly willing to agree to disagree if you find this discussion tiresome.
SouthernXYL,
[sarcasm on] Oh yeah, evolution is definitly something we “cool kids” insist you believe if you’re going to be part of our hip crowd. The last time I was partying in Enwye at the limelite and the palladium, everyone was sitting around reading Darwin and arguing about punctuated equilibrium vs. gradualism. [sarcasm off]
sorry. couldn’t resist. nothing personal.
seriously, I don’t know how I can put this more clearly. This isn’t a question of accepting people’s differences, or allowing for a minority view. There is just no rational ground for debate. Creationism isn’t even weak science, it isn’t science at all. Even to debate this point grants creationists more than they deserve. Creationism is the 20th century equivalent of the condemnation of Gallileo. I would never reject someone solely for being a creationist. I don’t reject Yosemitebabe, and I hope we can be on good terms in this board. But I cannot accept creationism as a valid intellectual position.
Califboomer,
thank you for making my own point better than I could possibly have made it myself.
Try not to confuse religious with religion. You can be religious in your attendance to Astro baseball games; however, that does not make baseball a religion. Teachings about unsubstantiated claims and the supernatural (e.g. religion) are what I wish to keep out of science classes. OTOH, religious devotion to your studies is a good thing.
My personal vendetta against ignorance proceeds in several ways. First and foremost, I try to educate myself on a continuing basis by reading both on-line and off-line(e.g. books, magazines) material. I try to take part in my daughter’s education by tutoring her and her friends, primarily in science and mathematics. I also occasionally post to message boards such as this one so that others such as yourself might possibly be enlightened.
You should be careful about the implications you make when trying to use sarcasm. Being poor and/or Christian does not equate to being ignorant. I have many poor Christian relatives who are definitely not ignorant.
yosemitebabe:
IMO, this is not a good point. Being hip or cool doesn’t factor into a scientific consensus - evidence does. And there is no incentive to be quite and play along. Science welcomes new ideas if they can better explain the available evidence.
How presumptuous of people to feel that if all the available evidence falls on one side of an issue, their viewpoint is probably correct. I guess I must be arrogant for believing that 2+2=4, the earth is spherical and evolution describes our natural heritage. But you draw a false dichotomy between religion and science. You do not have to disregard reason and science in order to believe in a deity.
Let’s draw a parallel between Yosemitebabe’s belief in creationism and the genetic flaw that causes sickle cell anemia. (No offense, Yosemite.)
Now.
Sickle cell anemia appears to us to be a bad thing. Why does it affect so many people when it looks like a bad mistake? Well, as I recall from the genetics class I took 100,000 years ago, it appears that a particularly deadly form of malaria developed somewhere around the Mediterranean, and people were dying before they had the usual number of children. Somebody had a mutation that affected his/her blood in such a way that he/she wasn’t vulnerable. Because this person was able to have the usual number of offspring, and so did the offspring who inherited this mutation, and those who didn’t have it continued to die off, this mutation became more and more prevalent in the population. Unfortunately, if a person inherited it from both parents, he had sickle-cell and died. However, apparently in this pop it was, on balance, a positive thing for the species, or else we wouldn’t have it around today on the scale that we do. I hope I remembered all that correctly.
Do we like sickle cell anemia? Of course not. If we could wipe it out with a wave of a magic wand, would we? Of course we would. But what if there was a HUGE outbreak of this kind of malaria, and no genetic defense against it?
The tradeoff that is required by natural selection (and democracy, freedom of thought, and the free market) AS WELL AS the reason why eugenics is a bad idea, is that diversity is necessary. It really is. And we can’t know in advance, and sometimes don’t know at the time or shortly thereafter, exactly what differences are necessary for getting to the next step. What if evolution, as we understand it today, is in need of some enhancement or some downright adjustment, as classical physics was before Einstein came along? If we are too intimidated by the COOL people who think they know everything, to debate and have differing points of view, we’ll never know.
And for this to be true, Yosemite doesn’t have to be right. She just has to have the right to have her opinion and to discuss it without people telling her to shut up. People exchange differing ideas, and like recombinant DNA, new ways of looking at things develop.
Maybe you just haven’t been paying enough attention. As with all sciences, evolution fosters debate to explain the available evidence. Currently there is much debate in the scientific community about punctuated equilibrium vs. gradualism, the dinosaur-to-bird transition, and whether Neanderthals are ancestral to Homo Sapiens. These are but a few of the ongoing evolutionary debates which exemplifies the strength of the theory.
Well, I think it is the simple fact that people think that everything they know is right. I am an evolutionist. I do not, however, try to force ideas upon others. We are but humans, be us created by God or the Big Bang. As such we are imperfect. Try to tell someone that 2+2=5 and see what they say. It is so deeply rooted in them that people cannot simply convert or become open to discussion. So to answer your question, some don’t like others just because their views are “wrong.”
Larry, you seem like such a nice guy that I have to respond.
It’s OK that you find it baffling that I believe in Creation. Frankly, if you were to delve into my private thoughts, I find it baffling that people can actually not believe in a God. It seems so obvious to me that God exists. But, there are plenty of people who don’t believe, and I can deal with that. I don’t think they are dumb, I don’t think they are nuts, I don’t think they are bad or ignorant. They’ve just had different life experiences than me. I think that is what this is about to me. Being able to accept the “differentness” of someone else, and just letting it go after a while.
hardcore, the theory of relativity came out of folks sitting around and discussing the finer points of classical physics? Don’t think so. I think Einstein was thinking totally out of the box, and the scientific community thought he had lost his mind.
Also, folks keep bringing up 2 + 2. I can count on my fingers and see that, and so can Yosemitebabe. I think natural selection is responsible for most of what I see in the natural world, but I’m not 100% on that because I’ve never seen it in action, and really don’t expect to. In fact, everything I know about it I read in a book, reporting what somebody else claimed to observe, theorized, or just plain cooked up. It makes sense to me, but if I found out I was mistaken, it wouldn’t blow my whole day.
And I think it’s sad when people know they are right and dislike other people because they are wrong. It’s the complaint I hear most about fundamentalist Christians.
SouthernXYL, maybe you should investigate Einstein a little further. His recognition started in 1905 with 3 papers published in Annalen der Physik, a German science journal. These papers were 1)the test for the existence of atoms, 2)the photoelectric effect (or the intro of photons) and 3) special relativity. By the fall of 1909 he accepted a faculty position at the University of Zurich followed by positions at the German University in Prague and then at the Zurich Polytechnic. In 1913, Max Planck gave him the directorship of the Institute of Physics at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, the best position in Europe for a theoretical physicist. He was also offered a chair at the Prussian Academy and a professorship at the University of Berlin. Hardly evidence of an incredulous scientific community!
Of these papers, the photon concept was resisted the most by the scientific community until 1923-24 when independent experiments by Compton and Debye confirmed the hypothesis. It was for this he won his Nobel Prize, not relativity. All of his work was confirmed by experiment and better explained the existing evidence. His 1915 paper on general relativity was soon thereafter confirmed by the 1919 solar eclipse. This began his public notoriety.
Einstein generally worked on his own, but he did recruit help with the arduous math required for his relativity treatise.
To compare Einstein’s incredible ground-breaking discoveries to the misguided rantings of Creationists does a disservice to his memory.
Without reading all 3 pages of the debate…pleasssse! In answer to your real question, and forgive me if it’s already been said…people like to believe they are right! That’s why they argue with you and try to convince you. They really don’t care about what you think, they just want to win by getting their point across.
Without reading all 3 pages of the debate…pleasssse! In answer to your real question, and forgive me if it’s already been said…people like to believe they are right! That’s why they argue with you and try to convince you. They really don’t care about what you think, they just want to win by getting their point across.
Um, you do know where you are, don’t you? You have seen the slogan used by The Straight Dope, haven’t you?
Funny how you posted your little whine to Hardcore but didn’t address all the errors I pointed out to you… Of course, they were so blatant the only real way you could address them is by apologizing.
“Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection is, to my mind, the most beautiful in all of science.”
– Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine
First I’m glad that you picked up that my disagreements with you were purely intellectual, and were not directed to you as a person. Thanks.
One final point. please don’t take my attacks on creationism as attacks on religious beliefs. Religious belief seems to me a purely personal matter, to be worked out between an individual and the Universe. i myself fall somewhere between Agnostic and some vague sort of deism, depending on what day of the week it is. I’ll admit I don’t really understand religious belief, but a lot of people I respect have it so I don’t have to much against it unless someone tries to shove it down my throat.
creationism on the other hand is nothing more than an attack on Evolutionary Biology. Since the theory of evolution is one of the most well supported theories in all of science, these attacks seem absurd to me. I don’t understand why people can’t accept evolution and maintain there religious beliefs. For Jews and Christians all it means is that the first few chapters of Genesis have to be read as metaphor.
In the long run, I think people will accept evolution the same way they accept Heliocentrism. It requires a bit of humility and maturity on the part of humans to realize we do not stand above the natural world but are a part of it. Creationism is just the pride that wont accept a diminished part in the natural world. But it really isn’t that hard.
I just read this whole topic today and wondered, YB, if your original question wasn’t really a result of being attacked by some really devious, hostile people. May I give an example?
I had an obnoxious boss who insisted on discussing at length his bi-sexual friend who while married with teenaged children, carried on numerous affairs with his gentlemen friends. He knew this topic would be offensive to me. (He didn’t know the reason it offended me was not only the deliberate flouting of marriage vows but was as much his expressed envy of the lifestyle. Also, the fact that his wife also worked for the same company in the same office made it extremely hard for me to complain to his boss.) I don’t give a ruddy flip what people do in their own lives but I really don’t want to hear the details of a complete stranger’s sex life being forced on me at work by my boss. It did not matter how I tried (politely) to avoid the subject or not discuss it, he would bring it up every time he could. I finally realized that he was using this topic as a way to deliberately make me uncomfortable. The topic wasn’t important. He did the same thing to other people with other sneaky little hostile acts. He was pure and simple, a jerk, who was expressing his hostility in a way that made him seem very liberal and modern and made it hard for me to complain without embarassing myself and his wife, a fairly nice person.
Could it be that the people who try to force you to discuss your beliefs in creation vs. evolution are really not as much interested in the subject as they are in expressing their hostility to you in a socially acceptable fashion? I can’t see what benefit anyone else would get from discussing evolution vs. creation with someone who has your views. What do you think?
I think the point here is that you admit that don’t really understand religious belief.
Not everyone wants to do that. Not everyone feels like they ought to do that, or are obligated to do that…to take several chapters out of the Bible and say “This I won’t believe in the same way I believe the rest.” They see no reason to not believe it. If they believe in all the science-defying miracles and happenings in the Bible, why not the first few chapters as well? I don’t really want to go into detail about why religious folk believe this - there are umpteen Creation/Evolution threads (that I avoid) that can go into that.
You make a lot of assumptions about why some of us believe what we believe. Oh, I’m sure your assessment fits some Creationists, I don’t think it fits my feelings. I think this comes down to, as I mentioned before, you not understanding why a religious person believes what they do. We just aren’t on the same wavelength on this. Simply put, I am “different” from you, always will be. This is not going to change - no amount of “maturity” or “humility” is going to make a difference in changing someone’s core religious beliefs. (And gee thanks for putting that part in! We just need to grow up, huh? Simple as that, huh?)
No, I’m not really mad, or trying to rag on you. But I think I’ve been trying to tell everyone all along - you don’t really get it, and it’s not required that you do. I don’t care if the rest of you get it, as long as y’all don’t pester me about it!
He was a lot older than I, but he was rich, so I married the old geyser.
Authentic Sig line by Wally!
Polydactyl Cats Unlimited
“A Cat Cannot Have Too Many Toes”
Hmmm…I consider myself guilty of being bugged by people bugging me, etc., and their motivations for doing so. But I am avoiding, for the most part, discussing the actual theory of Creationism. (Do you see me fighting it out on the plethora of Evolution/Creation threads that regularly crop up on Great Debates? Nope.)
Smilingjaws - thanks for your input…interesting. But no, the people I encounter are like I described in my previous list. Busybodies, people who cannot accept “differentness”, or who Want To Save The World.
To :David B.
What am I to apologize for? The Bible? God Himself? Or just daring to have beliefs that you don’t like? Never.Yosemitebabe,stay strong.We must recognize that the spirit of anti-Christ is hard at work today!