Call me obtuse if you’d like, but what are these obvious implications? Single-authorship does not imply ANY of the following:
(1) Self-Consistency
(2) Truth
(3) Hi Opal [ok, maybe that’s implied 
]
(4) The existence of YHWH
So what are the implications that are “obvious”?
Quix
Double hijack!
After I read Greg Bear’s book Darwin’s Radio, I read an article in Nature about a human protein (syncytin) that was laterally inherited from a retrovirus (now called HERV-W) during the Old World Monkey radiation. I decided to write an abstract for my grad school qualifying exam. I emailed Greg Bear about this, and he emailed me back that he had read the article and also found it cool (it directly related to the premise of Darwin’s Radio). To segue back to the OP, HERV-W and syncytin is just another perfect example of how evolution explains the variety of life, and actually serves as a beautiful example of speciation at some point during the evolution of man.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Ben *
Ben: No-no-no-no. Rephrasing the question is a good thing. Seriously. Any jackass can deliver a fact. Posing a good question -one that is both answerable and tells you something if answered- takes some skill.
So let me, um, rephrase the question. :o Has scientific progress turned people away from the Christian God? In 1914 psychologist James Leuba thought that it would. To follow up he surveyed scientists (ok, not the general public) on whether they believed in (1) “a God in intellectual and affective communication with man… to whom one may pray in expectation of receiving an answer” and (2) Personal immortality. You can only say “yes”, “no”, or “don’t know or agnostic”.
Hey, I didn’t design the questionnaire. The exercise was repeated in 1933, 1996 and 1998. Is the Christian God dying amongst the scientific brethren? Did the ideas of the agnostic Darwin drive them away? Stay tuned for Flowbark’s next post…
Share of scientists believing in a Christian God in 1914 as defined by Q1 of Leuba’s questionaire: about 40%
1933: about 40%
1996: about 40%
1998: ditto.
Belief in an afterlife, Leuba’s day: 50%
Belief in an afterlife, 1990s: ok, more like 40%.
So there’s apparently a somewhat lower chance in believing in heaven, hell, whatever. Other than that, there was no measurable change during the 20th century.
Among the scientific elite, the pattern may be somewhat different. In 1933 more than 80% of “top natural scientists” said no to both questions. Among contemporary members of the National Academy of Sciences the figure tops 95%.
According to Ernst Mayr, atheistic scientists (that he knows) are driven away from theism because, 1) they can’t believe in “all that supernatural stuff” and/or 2) the problem of evil.
[sub]Source: Larson and Witham, Scientific American, 9/99. I’ve been wanting to post this for months, but I kept losing the article.[/sub]
Correction: “Disbelief among NAS members responding to our survey exceeded 90 percent”. That share may include agnostics in the total.
Even if we could show a steady increase in the number of professed atheists along with scientific progress, that wouldn’t prove that the latter is the cause of the former. It’s possible that scientific progress has led to an increase in atheism. However, it is also possible (and, IMHO, more likely) that an increase in reported atheism is caused by a greater tolerance of atheism by society, leading those who hold atheistic beliefs to feel more free about expressing those beliefs in public. Five hundred years ago, they burnt heretics at the stake, so it just made sense to go along and pay lip service to the prevailing beliefs of your society. As time has gone along, treatment of those with belief systems that are not society’s norm has become less and less harsh, so more people are willing to admit to their true beliefs.
So here is the question is one of the main reasons you don’t believe in evolution God?
Second part, if God was proved absolutely WRONG would you be more inclined to believe in Evolution?
If you say no, how would you explain everything and you being here?
Thanks.
As long as they don’t ask too many questions. A person who asks too many questions is someone who doesn’t want to find out the answers for themselves, who doesn’t want to do research, which can be hard work.
How many questions is “too” many? I dunno. It’s a judgment call.
It suggests to me that there was editor who tried to merge the different stands into one cohesive document, with IMHO limited success. I say limited success because if you look at the story of Noah, it seems that there are two stories that are cut and pasted together. This leads to repetition and a few inconsistencies. A more skilled editor (such as one from Reader’s Digest) should have fixed these problems.
Hmmm… I’m certain I didn’t make myself clear on this one.
First, conservative Christians with an adherence to a strong Bibliocentric doctrine, along with Orthodox Jews, are insistent on the direct authorship of the whole Torah (except for the short passage at the end of Deuteronomy) by Moses (whose death was added by Joshua, on this school of thought). While there is clear evidence of the J, P, E, and D strands in the documents as they stand, in my opinion, the longstanding reverence given the Jews to the Torah, even in O.T. times, militates, IMHO, against the “bunch of oral traditions written down and then shuffled together with poor editing” theory of modern textual criticism. Note that I’m not saying it disproves it; it’s merely counter-evidence one must weight in deciding whether to subscribe to it.
My personal “take” for some time, based on the clear presence of JPED texts and that reverence, is for four strands of text focusing on local-interest matters handed down from earliest times in separate locales (e.g., Judah, Ephraim, the early priestly centers and then Jerusalem) and then merged – with sufficient sanctity surrounding them that there was little or no “editing” but simply a “Harmonization of the Torahs,” so to speak, akin to the conservative Christian “Harmonizations of the Gospels” that report the text of all four but attempts to weave them into a single narrative. The E strand, for example, would preserve the Joseph traditions, the J strand the Judah ones, the P one the cultic ritual and the genealogies used as a “frame story” to the individual stories of patriarchs in Genesis.
Such an original text might (but need not) be ascribed to Moses but would vary according to what was preserved, the oral traditions surrounding the specific text, and so on. But it would have come from a single original source.
To me the computer analysis, if accurately done, supports this sort of interpretation. I do find it very suspect that the texts in question would have moved from “oral tradition subject to change” to “sacred Scripture to be preserved to the letter” in as short a time as the textual critics suggest happened.
There were athiests long before the theory of evolution. Hume and Voltaire, for example. Not to mention the Greek atomists and their Roman epicurean followers. I believe it was Lucretius who said “If the gods exist, they are far away.”
[hijack]
Perhaps you should go with your first instinct. If the author’s information is incorrect, biased, etc. in 90% of the cases, it’s likely to be in others, and it is entirely appropriate to be skeptical of the rest of the claims. When the same author neglects to cite sources, it is even more appropriate. Much of the information at the URLs above is just plain factually incorrect. The rest is biased and slanted, selectively presented, and lifted from the same tired anti-Mormon material that has been debunked over and over again for 100+ years–of course there’s not a single citation to let the reader check the veracity of the claims. If you want to invesigate that more, please contact me directly, start a new thread, or go to the newsgroup soc.religion.mormon.
[/hijack]
That link didn’t work for me.
If you want to debate Mormonism, start a new thread, but I won’t be joining until after I take care of other threads I’ve posted on. I’ve been on a lot of them and you know how slow this board has been lately!
One thing you should consider is the whole Lucifer=Satan mistake. The name Lucifer appears in the Bible one time, in Isaiah 14:12. Contrary to popular belief and the assertions of Joseph Smith, this verse does NOT refer to Satan. It refers to whichever king was ruling Babylon at the time Isaiah was written, probably Nebuchadnezzar.
Are you saying Joseph Smith didn’t translate an unknown Eqyptian dialect inscribed on golden plates that no longer exist?
I think the problem is we can play around with evolution, dig stuff up, theorise, simulate etc.
BUT we can’t dig up god, simulate it etc.
The questions that remain are.
Where is god ?
If he exists why does he hide so much ?, why no ads on telly with a phone number eh ?
Newton beleived there was a god but he only intervened now and then in the laws of the universe, i reckon he is right.
BUT WHY ?
Well as a true scientist I cannot be an atheist since I cannot believe that anything is more than 99.9% certain (or in this case 99.9% unlikely). Thus, I am as close to an atheist as an agnostic can be. Though I am sure that many atheists will hate to admit it, being an atheist takes faith. You must believe, on faith, that the evidence you have been shown is factual. It most likely is. I believe in evolution. I am 99.9% sure that it is right. To be 100% sure would take faith. But I don’t mean to nit-pick. I realize that most “atheists” are just agnostic people that are sure as they can be about anything that God does not exist. I believe that God may exist. Then again, I also believe that I may be a woman, but have such a strong case of “penis envy” that I have never allowed myself to see the truth. Both are possible. Neither is likely.
Science in general leads to a disbelief in God much of the time, not evolution in particular. The reason that science can have such an effect is because it teaches you that you should require evidence to believe something. When I was in 4th grade, I took science on faith right along with God. By the time I reached high school and college, I questioned both. The scientists had answers based on logic, the Christians did not. I studied other religions and could not come up with any good reasons why I should believe one over the other (other than the sheep theory {i.e. I should follow the one that the most people follow}). This disturbed me. Even if I wanted to accept one on faith, there is no reason to pick one over the other. I suppose Christianity is a good choice since the punishment for being wrong is less severe in other religions so I better go with the one with the harshest punishment. But that got me to thinking…if I wanted to control people’s lives, what better way than making up a story about a god you could never know and making the punishment for disbelief so severe that people would believe just out of fear? The idea was so profoundly evil (and downright brilliant) that I felt that only a man could come up with it.
Some here have mentioned that they will never take anything on faith. I said that before, but realized the futility of that statement when confronted by Christians with the love arguement. They said, “How can you believe in love? There is no proof that it is real.” I argued that love is the name given to the release of chemicals and the series of nerve impulses that occur under certain conditions. I still believe this to be true, but long after that arguement ended I realized that love, for me at least, does involve faith. When the wife said she loved me, I believed her…at least until she carved, “Got ya sucker” on my back with an ice-pick in my sleep. It takes faith to believe that anything that anyone says is true. If you have ever done or said anything based on information that was not proven to you then you have exercised faith to some degree. You may have been open minded to the possibility that the information was not true, but you still acted as though it was. Many Christians question God’s existance, but they still choose to say that He probably exists. That is faith.
We can all go on about there being ‘no god’ until he appears and says ‘here i am !’.
I suppose its all about faith.
Have you faith in the idea that the world is round and not flat ?
Very few people have actually been round the world on a boat and said ‘yes it is, checked it out !’, we have to take it on faith.
Why does god require us to have faith without providing miracles, if he provided them before then why stop ?
Perhaps god has gone on holiday.
This is an excellent post, but I disagree with one part:
I believe the evidence for evolution or the expansion of the universe is valid but not because of faith. If all (or even most) of the evidence is false, the only possibilities are that the scientists presenting the evidence are either lying or fools. If they are lying, this would mean there is and has been a vast, world-wide conspiracy to keep the lie going. If they are fools, the errors in their presentation should be detected by any person of reasonable intelligence. It does not require faith to come to this conclusion, it requires common sense and reasoning. (And I think Christian creationists truly do believe most naturalistic scientists are either fools or liars.)
Tell me this is not a true story!!
Oh, and welcome to the SDMB.
You don’t need to sail around the world to see that it’s round. The clues are all around you. (Pun not intended.) If you drive toward a large city or a mountain range, and if the air is clear enough, you will see the tops of the tallest buildings or mountains first. The same thing happens in reverse when you see a tall ship sail beyond the horizon; the highest part of the ship will be the last thing you see. Or consider sailing toward or from land with a high shore.
The ancient Greeks were among the first to realize the Earth is round, more than 2,000 years ago. Eratosthenes figured out the circumference with mathematics, using shadows and the distance between two Egyptian cities. Unfortunately, his unit of measure was the stadia and no one today knows exactly how long this, so it’s difficult to know how accurate he was.
I grew up Catholic so I was never taught that evolution, the big bang, etc. was not true (after being burned on the Galileo thing I guess they learned).
Were evolution disproved tomorrow, it wouldn’t make a believer out of me because that wouldn’t rule out another naturalistic explanation for the shape and diversity of life.
When I think of the track record of supernatural explanations for the world versus the natural explanations of the world, I’m inclined to follow the naturalistic view.