Posted on 08/16/2005 11:23:20 AM PDT by woodb01
So, again I ask (and sincerely), why bother?
Perhaps to distract Man's uniquely powerful and conscious thinking mind from worrying too much about the apparent endless purposelessness of his existence as a species, in a journey through time, religion was invented by almost all, if not every, human culture.
OK, I admit I'm drunk.
If God is omniscient and omnipotent, as generally depicted, then everything we do and ever will do is already known. In the mind of God we as static as butterflies pinned to a museum display for amusement -- perhaps the amusement of other gods and demigods and angels. All our hopes and fears, all our ambitions, all our joys and sufferings are like a two dimensional tapestry in the eyes of God, who is outside time, and can see the whole of time -- past, present and future -- at once.
How does it feel to be a museum display? What is the point of your life and your sufferings?
Free will? You might imagine it, but what does it mean to a being who can see all of time at once?
Science has always been an activity aimed at acquiring knowledge. Scientists have pretty much ignored philosophy for a couple of centuries.
You are wrong. I believe in God, and I accept the ToE.
So my question is, why is it that you spend any time at all either defending your position or attacking alternative positions? Not just on evolution/creation but on any subject? In other words, why do you care?
Because our advancement -- our ability to live in something other than mud huts and misery -- is directly due to our use of the scientific method to gain knowledge about the world, and to invent ways to make life better. There is a neo-Luddite streak in creationism which would reject scientific knowledge. I have no real desire to slip back into the dark ages.
So, again, why do care about anything? All is vanity. I fail to see how existence is preferable to non-existence.
Since I'm not an atheist, this doesn't apply to me. But I see no evidence from actual atheists that atheism = nihilism. Their lives seem no less full of meaning and purpose than do those of theists.
Back to specifics, what do you hope to achieve by coming on FR and debating?
I am concerned that ID/creationism will be used by the left to paint conservatives as a bunch of knuckle-dragging anti-science religious fundamentalists. This debate has real-world political ramifications.
If we create silk in the laboratory, does that mean it isn't made by spiders? If we model the workings of a volcano in supercomputers, does that mean volcanos are designed?
Your comments may adequately display your lack of theological training and study but they do little to answer my original question.
"Science is still a very flawed study."
Whereas of course the science that the Church wanted was never wrong was it?
Yes, and they replaced that with politics.
Sounds good to me. I'm retired and the pay is pretty much token. I'd make a lot more doing just about anything else.
And I get to ask how much the DI rakes in.
Wouldn't it be fascinating to hear what Steven Jay Gould or Julian Huxley or even ol' Charles Darwin have to say about evolution now?
In other words, intelligent design is unfalsifiable, and thus isn't science. QED
"evolution is based on superstitious religious secular fundamentalism for the week of August 15, 2005"
I like this quote. I wonder what it'll be next week?
I guess you are'nt hear. You are very improbable (basically impossible, though that phrase means nothing).
I do believe in probabilties as a tool. But only valid ones. To construct a probablity you need to understand what you are modeling. Just making up probabities about a process that is not understood means NOTHING. Anybody who would hang an arguement on such sophistry is no scientist.
Evolution is a theory. As such it can be proven false (just find REAL human footprints next to a dinosaurs) and is well supported by the fossil record, DNA studies etc etc.
ID is a not even a valid hypothisis. How would you disprove it?
ID isn't a scientific theory.
If you disagree, please offer some testable hypotheses made by ID.
"No, I do not remember wrong. I was taught that in my science class that we evolved from gases. "
Nonsense. What gases were they?
Dataman! I haven't seen you around in forever! How've you been?
Two wrongs don't make a right. Science is not the "end all" of knowledge. History has shown a lot of garbage to come out of science. Science is not perfect, and it often gets the wrong answer. Even the scientific method assumes that any answer or theory may be overturned by later findings, etc. Evolution is just a guess. Pure and simple.
"To say that gravity brought all of the material of the universe together into a tiny ball before the Big Bang is to say that before that tiny ball there was a different kind of universe with all kinds of material scattered about, and therefore the universe didn't begin with the Big Bang."
Correct me if I’m wrong, but that isn’t necessarily out of the question is it? The Big Bang only really accounts for our 'current' universe.
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