One other thought to add. As I said above, if you asked most Christians what could make them lose their faith in God, the answer would be “nothing”.
If you asked me what would make me believe in God, I can think of all sorts of things that would.
Now, who is not trying hard enough?
[tangent]
I’ve subscribed to Newsweek for several years but I find myself increasingly dissatisfied with it: More and more feature and fluff articles and less and less news. I don’t intend to renew this time around . And, from what I can see, Time is much the same way.
Can anyone recommend a good news, real news, magazine?
[/tangent]
I’m making no such assumption. On a personal level, I happen to agree with you. I’m simply arguing that a willingness or lack of to reconcile the two usually is the sole determining factor in one’s success. Would you agree with this?
This is ignoring your chicken/egg paradox, of course, which is an excellent point.
One comment on gobear’s suggestion to throw out religion altogether – when one comes to an impass, one must either keep trying for a solution or discard one or the other. Unfortunately, a huge segment of the population has chosen to discard science, as their beliefs preclude them from any other course of action. Sad.
What, exactly, are you accusing me of? Or are you accusing atheism in general? Or am I completely misunderstanding the question? I would remind you that a great many atheists have put a great deal of effort into coming to the conclusions that they have.
It was my discovery of the non-literality (sorry) of Genesis that triggered my abandonment of my faith, and my slide (up or down, you can pick) into weak atheism. The problem I had was not with the ensoulment at a particular time, although that is somewhat troubling that it took God 3.5 billion years to His image to appear after balling up the dust, but rather that the doctrine of orginal sin, which is quite important to Evangelicals, was nullified by an evolving humanity. It is highly unlikely that an entire population of ensouled humans would commit a sin collectively, or all individually, which would allow sinful natures to be handed down to their progeny.
Excellent point. Never thought of that.
This is one huge problem I have with religion – the assumption that we need redemption in the first place, so that clerics can continue to draw a paycheck. It’s like the ads that convince you that you have bad breath, and lucky for you they can save you from that affliction, for a price.
I like this idea.
But then I’m also part of the tiny group who does not believe in souls, heaven or hell, god or satan. I believe we don’t really know HOW we got here and it obviously is something the 90% (or whatever the number is) of the brain we don’t use holds the key to. I believe in doing good and treating others kindly, bottom line.
I guess some would call me a humanist, I call it being a realist. I try not to make a decision on things until I see concrete evidence and I just haven’t been convinced of anything yet. I think the ONLY thing we should be teaching in schools is what has been shown with science, not mythology. My father used to say “those who wrote the Bible must have been smoking some serious $hit”. I tend to agree. But that’s just me.
Not to hijack this thread (he said, as he hijacked the thread), but that 10% of the brain thing is a myth. Just thought you’d like to know.
Eh? Punctuated equilibrium doesn’t argue for a radical change in any number of generations. It isn’t a theory about evolution per se, it’s a theory about the appearance of the fossil record (namely, that it isn’t complete not only because of the vagueries of the fossilization process itself, but because of the nature of speciation events). Nothing more, nothing less.
At the risk of driving you back into the fold, there apparently was a single human female ancestor to all current living humans, who maybe sort of coulda commited the original sin. Of course, contrary to the bible she wasn’t the only human alive at the time, she was just the progeniator of all humans living today cite
As John said, while evolution doesn’t provide much need for God, if xtians are willing to abandon the literal 7 days interpretation of genesis, then evolution doesn’t necessarily need to contradict the rest of the bible.
My bad. And I am a woman. Carry on.
I’m not accusing you of anything. You said, above, that I probably wasn’t trying hard enough if I hadn’t been able to reconcile religion and evolution. I simply wanted to point out that that was only one possibility.
I don’t really make much of the fact that many religious people have reconciled their beliefs with any particular scientific discovery. By and large, they start out with the assumption that God exists, and then modify their definition of God to fit the data. At some point, it seems to me, you end up modifying Him out of existence.
Me too, which is why I mentioned the part about a soul needing to be saved when I started talking about a soul earlier in this thread.
The “he” I referred to was me. You woman. I man.
So, how you doin’?
Reading skills not on par today, my apologies. :smack:
I’m doin good. How YOU doin?
I hate my job today. You wanna get outa here, get a drink maybe?
Huh, you too?
Drinks sound good to me.
Uh, well, grumble grumble, polls told me that Kerry was going to win the election quite handily…
Oh, bitch bitch.
Look, hippie, if evolution was true, then we should have seen Dubya transform into a human before our very eyes over the last four years.
But he hasn’t, has he? Therefore, evolution is bunk.
-Joe, doesn’t do drugs because if you do drugs you’re a hippie, and hippies suck
Well, you can rule out fleeing to Great Britain, m’man.
Half of them have never heard of Auschwitz. For the under-35 crowd, it’s 60%.
Except that absent regular use of certain dental hygiene consumer products, most of us do in fact have really crappy breath. 
Of course, shooting your analogy down proves nothing about the need (or lack thereof) for redemption.
Just from experience and observation, though, there are frequent moments when I don’t love my neighbor (or even myself), and the same seems to be true of most of humanity. Call it what you will (the Christian term of art for that is ‘sin’), and call the need for forgiveness and healing of that far-too-frequent condition what you will (‘redemption’), we’re talking about a genuine human phenomenon here, not just something to keep clerics employed.
The controversial part is the question of whether any divine being, let alone the Christian God, exists to grant such forgiveness and administer such healing. (I’d say “the debatable part” except the existence-of-God debate pretty much boils down to “He exists!” “Does not!” “Does too!” “Does not!” ad infinitum, which isn’t much of a debate really.)
But there’s nothing that intellectually tricky about being a Christian who regards certain Biblical stories (e.g. the book of Jonah, the first 11 chapters of Genesis) as mythology, not history. And if one is such a Christian, recognizing the scientific validity of evolution is no problem.
And I’ve got no strong opinion either way on whether other primates, dolphins, dogs, etc. have souls. (I’m sure about cats, though: any species that regards humans as ‘staff’ is one level up from us, as far as these things go. And no, they don’t need to be able to operate can openers; that’s what God put us on this planet for. :))
That’s what you think. Just remember, you won’t be expecting it. 