EVERYONE will take any conflicts over Pascal’s Wager and speculation about souls to separate threads.
They do not belong in this thread.
[ /Moderating ]
I’m out. It’s been great. no really. I mean it. I’ll even pray for you. I bet that just curls your toes, huh?
What I suspect that you fail to understand is that the majority of those religious people understand science, even while accepting a Creator, and that this include the majority of Christians. Only in the U.S. is there a specific Christian movement that denies science and even it only gets about half the Christians to go along with that denial of science.
And that is even without getting into the whole issue that the numbers of people who believe something has no bearing on the truth or falsehood of the thing believed.
You know what gets me about your type of posting? You wander into a place where people do not share your beliefs, making a big deal about a “loving God,” but you can’t wait to make snide remarks and express open hostility to anyone who does not bow down and worship the idol you have created out of a misunderstanding of two chapters taken from one of your books. (Even granting that God is real and loving, you seem more interested in creating a false idol of your interpretation than you do in following any commands to love your fellow humans.)
Deleted
Yeah, sure. this is the third time you have threatened to leave. :rolleyes:
If you do come back, can you perhaps respond to a single issue in my first post?
You claimed that eyes without brains were useless. Yet jellyfish have eyes, and jellyfish don’t have brains.
So did your god give jellyfish useless organs for no reason?
Or are you willing to admit that eyes without a brain work just fine?
This is simple issue couched in simple terms. Why can’t you respond to it?
Go ahead and pray for me. It’s the least you could do. Literally.
HK, the answer I usually hear trotted out to ‘solve’ a problem like Andromeda is that 6000 years ago, that light flashed into existences 6000 lightyears away from the earth, the dinosaur fossils were never live dinosaurs and a heck of a lot of rocks entered in the first act missing a lot of carbon. It’s not very satisfying and the only real motivation YECs seem to be able to ascribe to it is literally devilwork.
How can you tell which are lies?
The list appears to claim that dinosaurs are the earliest known fossils, which not only isn’t true, but isn’t even CLOSE to being true.
Yep, I used to know a girl who believed that dinosaur bones were a hoax because the world was only 6000 years old. I was a bit shocked because other than that, she seemed pretty intelligent and sane.
Sigh.
All righty then, we’ve got some common ground in talking about scientific evidence concerning the origins of the universe and of life. If you are comfortable with modern explanations of gravity, for instance, as a force that holds the earth together and keeps the solar system orbiting, you should have no problem with the part of the universe’s history that involves matter coalescing to form spherical stars and planets, because that’s just gravity plus the chemical bonding of particles that make up the matter.
That’s a misunderstanding of “belief” as it applies to scientific arguments. We don’t say “I believe in this scientific hypothesis and depend upon its being true, because it’s what gives my life meaning and without it everything I think will be wrong.”
Rather, we say “This hypothesis doesn’t explain everything perfectly, but it’s got more explanatory power than alternative hypotheses, and it’s the current best guess that science has come up with. So I’m provisionally accepting it as an accurate model of reality until and unless scientists discover serious flaws in it and/or discover a better, more accurate model.”
We don’t know where the laws of physics “come from” in the sense that we don’t know much about what the universe was like at the earliest moments just after the Big Bang. But that’s okay: science doesn’t pretend to have found the definitive final answers to every question already. (And in terms of definite detailed scientific knowledge, of course, saying “We don’t know” isn’t really any different from saying “We postulate that a supernatural deity did it in some way that we don’t scientifically understand”. So adopting a creationist explanation wouldn’t really get us anywhere as far as actually creating a comprehensible quantitative model of reality is concerned.)
We do know, though, that the Big Bang origin of the universe doesn’t require us to assume any logical impossibility like “something coming from nothing” in the philosophical sense.
Yes, time and space and matter as we know them in our universe did originate with the Big Bang, according to current theories. So it doesn’t really make sense to say that “before” the Big Bang there was “nothing”. We don’t have compelling reason to think that concepts like “before” or “nothing” even have any physical meaning without the Big Bang.
Hope that helps (and I welcome corrections and clarifications from scientists more skilled than I at explaining the physics and cosmology involved).
Never mind that shit. Was she a good lay?
And? Believing in a creator doesn’t mean one exists any more than believing that the world is flat will flatten the world.
American science eduction is pretty bad, yes; and people with beliefs like yours are a major reason why.
I’d guess no, 'cause of the whole Christian guilt thing, but it’s not a theory I can prove.
I teach physics in a small, religious town in Texas.
I no longer discount the power of willful ignorance.
Heh heh heh… this should be real intah-restin!! Or have they witnessed you in rare form??
You can’t be a Young Earth Creationist and subscribe to “the standard models of physics” - not unless you’ve misunderstood at least one of those two things.
It doesn’t, for whatever it’s worth. A creator always requires extra nonsense.
What kind of Christian tells you he’ll pray for you just to annoy you?
Maybe he meant that it would curl our toes with near-erotic bliss?
Anybody want to take bets that **supermegaman **was/is really a deep cover liberal, practicing his art? If so, I think he did a great job.
Moderators: this is not an accusation of trolling. If anything, it’s a compliment of the highest form.
What the Hell? There’s ten? More than ten since these are the top ten?
Imagine my skepticism. You can’t, that’s how big it is.