Speaking as a scientist, I have to comment that a hundred scientists at a dozen universities doesn’t make something crap or not crap. The science can be bad. The results can be a dead end. The theory can fall to bits. They can find nothing. Or the science can be excellent, and there can still be nothing worthwhile at the end of it. Science involves going down a hell of a lot of blind allies, sometimes for years - even decades. So just because it is being investigated doesn’t mean it’s true, or valid, or anything really.
I don’t know. Seriously I have tried to prove or disprove the existence of God for 20 years now with no luck, let me know if you do any better.
Yeah this is a sticky problem because if God has a morality that distinguishes between the baby born with original sin and Charles Manson’s level of sin then why do babies die of starvation while Charles Manson gets three hots and a cot in prison? Then is this a God we can rationally love or one that we can only rationally fear? Sure it might all even out in heaven and hell but if God’s ways are so mysterious then how can we say we know anything of God’s will at all. Perhaps he wants us to abort babies to fill up heaven faster, who the hells knows. I didn’t reach my faith after studying the issue and deciding that I would believe in God and the Christian God in particular, it was kind of thrust upon me.
That might be right. If I could provide concrete proof of God’s existence, I wouldn’t need faith.
Maybe i need to say this slower… I…don’t… know. I suppose if it could be proven man and life on earth was created by aliens tampering with the primordial soup and then periodically dropping by to tweak the genes of a species of a hairless monkey to make them sentient enough to become servants or allies in the future, then I think it would shake my faith. I really don’t know. If you come up with anything, let me know.
You think I haven’t thought of that. I thought perhaps I took some religious references out of my childhood and had a hallucination that my sub-conscience felt I needed to have (kind of like a psychotic break with reality that was disturbed by someone tapping me on the shoulder). I tell myself that all the time but like I said, I was pretty hedonistic in my youth and I have had vivid hallucinations before and it was never like this.
I’m addressing the consciousness=brain issue, this post has nothing to do with ghost stories.
I don’t have time right now to read the rest of the thread, but I think that you’re misunderstanding the question, Diogenes. I could be wrong, but I think Cisco is asking, where does the concept of art come from? Yes, from a bunch of raw materials, you can make a painting. But where did you get the idea for that painting? Your response will no doubt be along the lines of, synapses fired in your brain. But the point here is why did those synapses fire the way they did? Where does the inspiration for an artistic/musical/scientific idea come from? I think the answer is that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Individual synapses fire, sure, but their firing is organized somehow on a higher level.
Meditators often say that they “watch” their thoughts, which implies that there is something in our consciousness or soul or whatever that is not just the mind. I would agree with you that the mind is purely in the brain, and it is perfectly possible for the mind to go away. But the watcher? I’m not so sure the watcher goes away.
By the way, while it is perfectly possible that some of the “ghost stories” are imagined or made up, I really don’t find “you imagined it” to be a convincing debunking of a story. Not if we use debunking as it is defined in the dictionary.
Like through sheer force of will? I don’t know, I wasn’t there, but mostly I think God is an explanation for an experience I once had.
I suppose that a zippo lighter might look like magic to primitive man, an airplane might look like magic to mideival man, does the fact that we can’t explain it mean that it didn’t happen, of course not. But I am not as committed to the creation myths as I am to the notion of deism. I don’t understand why everything is the way it is.
The religious right does not represent religion. Other than the abortion issue, I don’t see a whole lot of daylight between the Democratic Platform and Christianity. The Democratic party is much more in line with Chirsitan values than the REpubican party (if we ignore the abortion issue). I live in DC and I know a lot of folks at the National Institute of Health (a pretty scientific group) and I would say that most of them are religious. When I lived in Los Angeles, I lived in Pasedena and JPL had a pretty active Christian contingent. I think science is wholly compatible with religion (not just Christianity but all religion).
Didn’t that poster come back and reveal that his brother admitted he set it up when he was confronted?
Where do you get axiom 2 from? I said that 90% of humanity believes in higher power, not the same one and they may all be wrong but between 90% of humanity that believes in higher power.
Don’t the Hindu’s believe we are all part of Vishnu’s dream
Why do spiritual manifestations never appear to non-believers?
Well we know enough about aerodynamics to know that you can’t fly by flapping your arms. We know that perpetual motion machines require the absolute elimination of friction which we can prove is impossible. We know that ghost (the disemodied essence of a once living human being) cannot exist because…?
…there has never been any objective, falsifiable evidence produced to support their existence.
Yeah, like I said, I wonder that sometimes too but you seem to leave no room for the possibility that you are wrong.
I think that the closer we get to understanding God, the harder he becomes to understand.
To some extent this is true. One of the last lessons of Jesus Christ was when he appeared to his disciples after his resurrection and Thomas stuck a finger in his wound (hence the phrase doubting thomas) and Jesus exhorted faith without proof.
I’m not trying to convince you of anything. I mentioned Jesus and got ganked by half a dozen folks who seemed ot take it as a personal insult that I have faith.
Because the government would have found some way to tax them by now.
How about this?
Trees (or whatever, it doesn’t really matter much what) exist.
Our abstract mental representations of trees (including the word “tree”) exist. They exist as structures and processes in our brains. But the abstract mental representation of a tree is not the same thing as a tree.
Nor does the existence of a representation imply the existence of the thing it represents. We have mental representations of hobbits, but hobbits don’t actually exist.
Yeah, I only got off on the religion tangent because I was wondering if Jesus counted as a ghost.
Most of them become believer afterwards?
So we know that intelligent life does not exist anywhere in the universe except here on earth as well right?
There is no evidence that it does.
Not all that much evidence of it here on earth either.