New Orleans Modern Day version of "Sodom and Gomorrah"

[WSUCougar]

Originally Posted by DaddyTorgo

CAN WE PLEASE BURY THIS THREAD NOW!! OR AT LEAST STOP POSTING RELIGIOUS DEBATES IN IT!?!

please maybe?

I was recently told by a Catholic that Lutherans "are a lot like Catholics."

Topic for Religious Debate: is this as dumb a statement as I think it is?

[st.cronin]

Originally Posted by WSUCougar

I was recently told by a Catholic that Lutherans "are a lot like Catholics."

Topic for Religious Debate: is this as dumb a statement as I think it is?

No.

I lived in Wisconsin for 4 years. They're pretty much the same animal.

[Honolulu_Blue]

Originally Posted by albionmoonlight

Let's all just stop posting in this thread now. It will only go downhill from here.

Truer words have never been spoken (or written).

[Honolulu_Blue]

Originally Posted by SkyDog

No one did. I am, and you're done here. No, not for any specific post. You are done because you are divisive, add nothing to the community, and have done nothing but stir up controversy since you got here.

The kittens thank you, SD. They thank you.

[RendeR]

Originally Posted by Cuckoo

If this is the criteria, you have a lot of banning to do.

Actually I'd love to hear who else you think fits this criteria? Honestly, who else fulfills those items, and within their first 100 posts to boot?

[Groundhog]

These threads never have a happy ending.

I don't normally contribute to religous debates on internet forums, and probably shouldn't here either, but jeez, I spent the last hour reading this entire thread (for some unknown reason), so I might as well...

As was said pages and pages ago, there is a massive gulf between the believers and non-believers that will never be bridged in conversations like this. It's that simple. Please people, think of the potential RSI injuries and give it a rest.

Secondly, the banning and the like, well, I come to this message board for random & zany threads centering on video game, sports and other random (hopefully not religious or political) topics. Anything that increases those threads and decreases ones like this gets my vote.

Go Cavs!

[MrBigglesworth]

Originally Posted by Franklinnoble

Perhaps this disaster will shift people's attention from carnal lusts and towards the things that are a little more important in life.

I think there is plenty of time in life for both sex AND football.

[sterlingice]

Originally Posted by Franklinnoble

She's read my post history.

That means she's read every post history that he's read the post history of, too! "Milhouse, we're living in the age of cooties! I can't believe the risk you're running"

(EDITED for formatting)

SI

[Glengoyne]

Originally Posted by SkyDog

No one did. I am, and you're done here. No, not for any specific post. You are done because you are divisive, add nothing to the community, and have done nothing but stir up controversy since you got here.

I actually thought she was relatively well behaved, well improved at least. If you had just banned her when you suspended or rather re-suspended her, I I'd not had any problem with it. I think she was just strongly advocating her position in this thread.

I'm apparently finicky. Cause I thought you should have apologized to her for banning and then just suspending her before you lifted the suspension....Then I'm reasonably happy that you boxed her. Now I'm disappointed because you've banned her, when compared to her previous actions, she was on relativley good behavior. I do tend to agree with your last sentence there, but still would rather err on the side of inclusion rather than exclusion.

I certainly don't relish your position as moderator here.

I also consider FN's likely departure a loss as well. He is inflamatory, but he is a contributor here as well.

[sterlingice]

Originally Posted by WSUCougar

I was recently told by a Catholic that Lutherans "are a lot like Catholics."

Topic for Religious Debate: is this as dumb a statement as I think it is?

Depends on how irreverant you want to be. As a Lutheran, I say the difference is that they get a few more sacraments, are slightly more uptight, and we make jokes about them but they don't make jokes about us (that I know of). From what I've seen Lutheranism, particularly the more conservative branch (LCMS) is as close to Catholics as Protestants get. Catholics probably feel a bit differently- they're probably still bitter about the whole nailing up of theses thing and split in the church

Originally Posted by WSUCougar

1. Anyone else picture a certain husband and wife tag team banging away zealously on their respective computers, leaning over to slap some sloppy high-fives as they w00t their way through another greeeeeeeeat evening doing the Lord's work online?

*snicker*

SI

[ThunderingHERD]

Wow at this thread. I rarely if ever go into political and/or religious threads here (only linked into this one from SkyDog's other post) and am absolutely astounded by the lack of reason in some people on this board.

[ThunderingHERD]

as for my own opinions:

I can't fully trust nor fully respect those with devout religious beliefs because, to me, it reveals a distrust in one's own moral compass. As for someone who believes God would advocate the hurricane or the holocaust (!), fuck that--I don't worship murderous tyrants of any stripe, even if you capitalize their pronouns.

[Ajaxab]

Originally Posted by RendeR

Honestly? I would need an introduction and some personal first hand verifiable examples of his power. I'm a real skeptic, it would take a lot.

If this is what counts as evidence, what is the evidence for the proposition "we need personal first hand verifiable examples" to believe something to be true? It would seem that there are a lot of things we believe without personal first hand verifiable examples. I'm trying to understand this 'lack of evidence' argument from the atheist/agnostic perspective.

[Ksyrup]

I didn't read much of this thread, but now that FN's SO is banned, I just hope some good can come out of this thread...like FN re-joining me over at the Child Molester thread. I posted like 5 or 6 articles yesterday and received hardly any comments. It's lonely over there.

Come back, FN, come back! Google News Alert beckons you!

[Honolulu_Blue]

Originally Posted by Ajaxab

Just curious. What would count as evidence for God's existence? I know I'm splitting hairs here, but what exactly counts as a fact? Would it be fair to say that a fact is that which can be verified empirically by the scientific method through the senses?

Well, that would be a good start, since that's what you rely on in every other aspect of life, why should there be a special category for supernatural claims? Why should they not be held up to the same standard? There should be no cognitive disconnect.

As for facts that I don't know about (eg, some scientist telling me about the surface of Mars/Jupiter), I trust scientists because they put their theories out there, publish them in journals for peer review, and things are tested time and time again, by a wide range of people. Science is self-correcting and based on observation and the logical conclusions that follow.

Let's say a the earth passed through a trail of a comet and everyone on earth suffered from amnesia. We forgot everything. As we started to rebuild our minds, I am sure we would still have science and religion, but our science text books would eventually look quite the same; because people would observe the same phenomena and base logical conclusions on them. Our, bibles, however would probably look a bit different because religious thought contains no such self-correcting method it would just be a matter of chance of what type of stories we would come up with and what early manuscripts would be accepted as gospel.

Here's a good piece by Carl Sagan on this very topic.

The Dragon In My Garage
by
Carl Sagan


"A fire-breathing dragon lives in my garage" Suppose (I'm following a group therapy approach by the psychologist Richard Franklin) I seriously make such an assertion to you. Surely you'd want to check it out, see for yourself. There have been innumerable stories of dragons over the centuries, but no real evidence. What an opportunity!

"Show me," you say. I lead you to my garage. You look inside and see a ladder, empty paint cans, an old tricycle--but no dragon.

"Where's the dragon?" you ask.

"Oh, she's right here," I reply, waving vaguely. "I neglected to mention that she's an invisible dragon."

You propose spreading flour on the floor of the garage to capture the dragon's footprints.

"Good idea," I say, "but this dragon floats in the air."

Then you'll use an infrared sensor to detect the invisible fire.

"Good idea, but the invisible fire is also heatless."

You'll spray-paint the dragon and make her visible.

"Good idea, but she's an incorporeal dragon and the paint won't stick."

And so on. I counter every physical test you propose with a special explanation of why it won't work.

Now, what's the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If there's no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists? Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true. Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value they may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder. What I'm asking you to do comes down to believing, in the absence of evidence, on my say-so.

The only thing you've really learned from my insistence that there's a dragon in my garage is that something funny is going on inside my head. You'd wonder, if no physical tests apply, what convinced me. The possibility that it was a dream or a hallucination would certainly enter your mind. But then, why am I taking it so seriously? Maybe I need help. At the least, maybe I've seriously underestimated human fallibility.

Imagine that, despite none of the tests being successful, you wish to be scrupulously open-minded. So you don't outright reject the notion that there's a fire-breathing dragon in my garage. You merely put it on hold. Present evidence is strongly against it, but if a new body of data emerge you're prepared to examine it and see if it convinces you. Surely it's unfair of me to be offended at not being believed; or to criticize you for being stodgy and unimaginative-- merely because you rendered the Scottish verdict of "not proved."

Imagine that things had gone otherwise. The dragon is invisible, all right, but footprints are being made in the flour as you watch. Your infrared detector reads off-scale. The spray paint reveals a jagged crest bobbing in the air before you. No matter how skeptical you might have been about the existence of dragons--to say nothing about invisible ones--you must now acknowledge that there's something here, and that in a preliminary way it's consistent with an invisible, fire-breathing dragon.

Now another scenario: Suppose it's not just me. Suppose that several people of your acquaintance, including people who you're pretty sure don't know each other, all tell you that they have dragons in their garages--but in every case the evidence is maddeningly elusive. All of us admit we're disturbed at being gripped by so odd a conviction so ill-supported by the physical evidence. None of us is a lunatic. We speculate about what it would mean if invisible dragons were really hiding out in garages all over the world, with us humans just catching on. I'd rather it not be true, I tell you. But maybe all those ancient European and Chinese myths about dragons weren't myths at all.

Gratifyingly, some dragon-size footprints in the flour are now reported. But they're never made when a skeptic is looking. An alternative explanation presents itself. On close examination it seems clear that the footprints could have been faked. Another dragon enthusiast shows up with a burnt finger and attributes it to a rare physical manifestation of the dragon's fiery breath. But again, other possibilities exist. We understand that there are other ways to burn fingers besides the breath of invisible dragons. Such "evidence" -- no matter how important the dragon advocates consider it -- is far from compelling. Once again, the only sensible approach is tentatively to reject the dragon hypothesis, to be open to future physical data, and to wonder what the cause might be that so many apparently sane and sober people share the same strange delusion.

[Subby]

Originally Posted by SkyDog

No one did. I am, and you're done here. No, not for any specific post. You are done because you are divisive, add nothing to the community, and have done nothing but stir up controversy since you got here.

I give this thread 5 stars.

[WSUCougar]

Originally Posted by sterlingice

Depends on how irreverant you want to be. As a Lutheran, I say the difference is that they get a few more sacraments, are slightly more uptight, and we make jokes about them but they don't make jokes about us (that I know of). From what I've seen Lutheranism, particularly the more conservative branch (LCMS) is as close to Catholics as Protestants get. Catholics probably feel a bit differently- they're probably still bitter about the whole nailing up of theses thing and split in the church

I said it mainly to tease Daddy Torgo.

But to clarify, the person in question said it to me as if this were a surprising new fact. I was raised Lutheran as well, and found it amusing since (a) most everything Lutheran derived from Catholic roots; and (b) it's ironic to make such a statement, given that little thing called the Reformation.

[Ajaxab]

Originally Posted by Honolulu_Blue

Well, that would be a good start, since that's what you rely on in every other aspect of life, why should there be a special category for supernatural claims? Why should they not be held up to the same standard? There should be no cognitive disconnect.

As for facts that I don't know about (eg, some scientist telling me about the surface of Mars/Jupiter), I trust scientists because they put their theories out there, publish them in journals for peer review, and things are tested time and time again, by a wide range of people. Science is self-correcting and based on observation and the logical conclusions that follow.

So you're suggesting that we rely on empirically verifiable sense data in every other aspect of life to make decisions and that this is the evidence we use to act in the world. Does this test apply to the foundation of science itself? How is the idea that 'we need evidence from our senses' evident to our senses? Can we walk around in the world and find physical, scientifically verifiable proof that 'we need evidence from our senses in order for something to be true'? It would seem that the answer would be something like 'that's just the way things are.'

Sagan asks us to test assertions through a conceivable experiment. What scientific experiments have been performed to test the assertion that 'we need scientific, physical verifiable evidence to to know if something is true'? Does Sagan reference any?

[flere-imsaho]

Edit: Removed because I should really read the rest of threads before posting in them.

[sachmo71]

Originally Posted by Honolulu_Blue

Well, that would be a good start, since that's what you rely on in every other aspect of life, why should there be a special category for supernatural claims? Why should they not be held up to the same standard? There should be no cognitive disconnect.

As for facts that I don't know about (eg, some scientist telling me about the surface of Mars/Jupiter), I trust scientists because they put their theories out there, publish them in journals for peer review, and things are tested time and time again, by a wide range of people. Science is self-correcting and based on observation and the logical conclusions that follow.

Let's say a the earth passed through a trail of a comet and everyone on earth suffered from amnesia. We forgot everything. As we started to rebuild our minds, I am sure we would still have science and religion, but our science text books would eventually look quite the same; because people would observe the same phenomena and base logical conclusions on them. Our, bibles, however would probably look a bit different because religious thought contains no such self-correcting method it would just be a matter of chance of what type of stories we would come up with and what early manuscripts would be accepted as gospel.

Here's a good piece by Carl Sagan on this very topic.

The Dragon In My Garage
by
Carl Sagan


"A fire-breathing dragon lives in my garage" Suppose (I'm following a group therapy approach by the psychologist Richard Franklin) I seriously make such an assertion to you. Surely you'd want to check it out, see for yourself. There have been innumerable stories of dragons over the centuries, but no real evidence. What an opportunity!

"Show me," you say. I lead you to my garage. You look inside and see a ladder, empty paint cans, an old tricycle--but no dragon.

"Where's the dragon?" you ask.

"Oh, she's right here," I reply, waving vaguely. "I neglected to mention that she's an invisible dragon."

You propose spreading flour on the floor of the garage to capture the dragon's footprints.

"Good idea," I say, "but this dragon floats in the air."

Then you'll use an infrared sensor to detect the invisible fire.

"Good idea, but the invisible fire is also heatless."

You'll spray-paint the dragon and make her visible.

"Good idea, but she's an incorporeal dragon and the paint won't stick."

And so on. I counter every physical test you propose with a special explanation of why it won't work.

Now, what's the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If there's no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists? Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true. Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value they may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder. What I'm asking you to do comes down to believing, in the absence of evidence, on my say-so.

The only thing you've really learned from my insistence that there's a dragon in my garage is that something funny is going on inside my head. You'd wonder, if no physical tests apply, what convinced me. The possibility that it was a dream or a hallucination would certainly enter your mind. But then, why am I taking it so seriously? Maybe I need help. At the least, maybe I've seriously underestimated human fallibility.

Imagine that, despite none of the tests being successful, you wish to be scrupulously open-minded. So you don't outright reject the notion that there's a fire-breathing dragon in my garage. You merely put it on hold. Present evidence is strongly against it, but if a new body of data emerge you're prepared to examine it and see if it convinces you. Surely it's unfair of me to be offended at not being believed; or to criticize you for being stodgy and unimaginative-- merely because you rendered the Scottish verdict of "not proved."

Imagine that things had gone otherwise. The dragon is invisible, all right, but footprints are being made in the flour as you watch. Your infrared detector reads off-scale. The spray paint reveals a jagged crest bobbing in the air before you. No matter how skeptical you might have been about the existence of dragons--to say nothing about invisible ones--you must now acknowledge that there's something here, and that in a preliminary way it's consistent with an invisible, fire-breathing dragon.

Now another scenario: Suppose it's not just me. Suppose that several people of your acquaintance, including people who you're pretty sure don't know each other, all tell you that they have dragons in their garages--but in every case the evidence is maddeningly elusive. All of us admit we're disturbed at being gripped by so odd a conviction so ill-supported by the physical evidence. None of us is a lunatic. We speculate about what it would mean if invisible dragons were really hiding out in garages all over the world, with us humans just catching on. I'd rather it not be true, I tell you. But maybe all those ancient European and Chinese myths about dragons weren't myths at all.

Gratifyingly, some dragon-size footprints in the flour are now reported. But they're never made when a skeptic is looking. An alternative explanation presents itself. On close examination it seems clear that the footprints could have been faked. Another dragon enthusiast shows up with a burnt finger and attributes it to a rare physical manifestation of the dragon's fiery breath. But again, other possibilities exist. We understand that there are other ways to burn fingers besides the breath of invisible dragons. Such "evidence" -- no matter how important the dragon advocates consider it -- is far from compelling. Once again, the only sensible approach is tentatively to reject the dragon hypothesis, to be open to future physical data, and to wonder what the cause might be that so many apparently sane and sober people share the same strange delusion.

Demon Haunted World was such an excellent book. Thanks for posting that, HB!

[Gary Gorski]

Originally Posted by Solecismic

It just seems so convenient. Present the inexplicable as fact - throw in a father sacrificing his son and a world begun with the ultimate sin - someone searching for knowledge. It just doesn't make sense to me. I suppose it never will.

It's fun to discuss, really. I get a kick out of it, because it seems like such a manipulative system. Ultimately, it doesn't matter.

I too like to discuss things like this - I hate how the ineveitable flamefest occurs but my goal is to have a discussion, to converse with an opposing viewpoint and not to try and beat people who don't agree with me over the head with a Bible.

The thing is Jim that we don't know how the world started. There is no proven fact - you have beliefs just like me - you just believe in different things. I believe that God created the world, I assume you believe in a scientific explanation. You can say that organized religion seems like a manipulative system but I can say the same for science. No scientist can prove that the world began with a big bang just as no religious person can prove that God created the world.

Originally Posted by Solecismic

I'm okay with saying, "I don't know" sometimes. I prefer that to inventing a supreme being that's essentially a cover for everyone else's "I don't know" in addition to mine.

I don't know. No one was praying in that room, that much I do know. I think it's more attributable to the skill of the doctors and his general strength than any mystical explanation.

But there has to be an answer doesn't there? When I put my faith in God that there is a reason some event happens that I don't understand I believe there is a reason for it - just one I am not meant to know.

Since you didn't answer one thing I wanted you to I will ask again. Why do some children in the same situation as your son not survive? There's not some doctors who always save the child and some doctors who never do. Why is the doctor skilled enough to save one child and yet not another under the same conditions?

Thankfully your son survived and I'm very glad he did but what if he wouldn't have. How would you have come to grips with that? Would you have blamed the doctor for being unskilled or wondered if you and your wife were cursed with bad luck? Could you go through life being ok with saying "I don't know"? If in my world God is allowing the death of an innocent child then who or what is allowing it in your world while others are able to live through the exact same situation?

I guess I just find myself in the same struggle trying to look at things from the other side - what factor can cause one child to live and one to die when they suffer from the exact same problem and are treated by the same doctor and is that factor something that cannot be explained? Isn't believing in luck or karma the same as believing in a supreme being? Its like the age old intangibles question - sports fans believe they are there but they can't be measured so are you foolish to think that sports outcomes are determined by more than simply the physical abilities of the players on the field? Is it foolish to think that the life or death of a child in that situation is determined by something more than the physical ability of a doctor or scientist?

Originally Posted by Solecismic

Yes, I feel there are bad doctors, good doctors who make mistakes, and unlucky parents. Some are very unlucky, like my brother-in-law. Just when they were starting to hope that maybe Noah had beaten the odds, he died.

There's just no evidence of a supreme being. There are people like Franklin's wife, who can quote a lot of scripture that talks about this. But ultimately it's only scripture, and it has to be taken as fact entirely on faith. I don't have that faith. I never will.

First, I'm very sorry for your brother-in-law and all your family at the loss - I can only imagine how devastating that must have been for your entire family.

But you mentioned that he didn't "beat the odds". Religious faith is not based on probability whereas science and math are. So what are the odds of surviving? How can you possibly calculate such a thing and does the fact that with the enormous complexity of the human system you could never calculate the true odds of such a thing give you any unrest? When I play poker I know I have a A:B chance of catching the card that will win the hand. Those odds can be calculated because I know how many possible cards could come up so when I play poker I don't "pray" or "have faith" that my card is going to come up - I play the odds. But in a situation like Noah's I don't need to calculate anything - all I can do is trust that God has a plan and that whatever the result it was the way it was meant to be - that gives me peace.

I respect your stance and opinions as I hope you respect my beliefs. My questions are because I'm curious as to how someone else sees things. I also know that for someone who isn't religious or doesn't believe in religion its very difficult to understand how someone could place so much trust in something they never will see and can never scientifically prove exists but if you did understand that then you would probably be religious.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Gary Gorski

The thing is Jim that we don't know how the world started. There is no proven fact - you have beliefs just like me - you just believe in different things. I believe that God created the world, I assume you believe in a scientific explanation. You can say that organized religion seems like a manipulative system but I can say the same for science. No scientist can prove that the world began with a big bang just as no religious person can prove that God created the world.

i'm gonna stop you right there, before i read further. science *has* proven many things, and has shown how various wonders are possible. religion hasn't. science is black and white, religion lies in the grey matter of "sometimes God works in mysterious ways", that all too popular brush that's used to make broad strokes to paint over lack of evidence or compelling arguements.

think of it this way:

Michael Jordan scored 63 points in one game once (i believe it was against the Celtics in a playoff game). over the course of his career, he's had many 40+ scoring games, including 55 points against the Knicks one time. he's a proven explosive scorer. you're a fan of Vlade Divac, one-time Lakers and Kings center, who over the course of his career has generally topped off at the 20 points per game range.

someone tells us that either Jordan or Divac scored 100 points in one game in a game that wasn't ever witnessed by anyone - no one attended the game and it wasn't televised. based on Jordan's track record if you were to tell me he was the one who scored 100 points i would believe you. he's proven himself to be a highly potent scorer. you believing Divac could have scored the 100 points requires a lot of faith. he doesn't have a history of being that kind of player, so yes, while it's *possible* he could have scored 100 points it's so highly unlikely that it's foolish for you to entertain such notions.

this is the difference between science and religion. when religion, like science, can use hard facts and evidence to prove its claims i'll probably be more religious.

[Honolulu_Blue]

Originally Posted by Ajaxab

So you're suggesting that we rely on empirically verifiable sense data in every other aspect of life to make decisions and that this is the evidence we use to act in the world. Does this test apply to the foundation of science itself? How is the idea that 'we need evidence from our senses' evident to our senses? Can we walk around in the world and find physical, scientifically verifiable proof that 'we need evidence from our senses in order for something to be true'? It would seem that the answer would be something like 'that's just the way things are.'

Sagan asks us to test assertions through a conceivable experiment. What scientific experiments have been performed to test the assertion that 'we need scientific, physical verifiable evidence to to know if something is true'? Does Sagan reference any?

Arguably, every scientific experiment that's ever been done confirms the assertion that science needs to be based on empirically verifiable data.

The modern scientific method didn't come about because some guy came up with it one day and everyone took his word for it. The scientific way of doing things evolved out of countless early observations and experiments. Hypotheses that did not stand up to testing were weeded out - this is what I meant about science being self-correcting.

The implied hypothesis "I do not need to base my scientific experiments on empirically verifiable data" would not have stood up to scrutiny because experiments based on other kinds of "data" would not have had cohesive results and could not have been repeated by other scientists.

For example, pretend we're both ancient scientists testing a cure for a disease. You decide to base your experiments on observations you have made about this disease in the past, and I base mine on revelations from my dreams. Whose patient is more likely to die? And thus whose method is more likely to be repeated by other scientists?

Thousands of years of human curiosity and its consequences have honed and perfected the scientific method to be the way it is now; there is no one experiment you can point to to "prove" it. Very few ideas in science work on the "smoking gun" principle - instead they rely on a preponderance of the evidence. And I guess sometimes that evidence is so well-established and overwhelming that it appears to be "just the way things are".

[Gary Gorski]

Originally Posted by Hell Atlantic

i'm gonna stop you right there, before i read further. science *has* proven many things, and has shown how various wonders are possible. religion hasn't. science is black and white, religion lies in the grey matter of "sometimes God works in mysterious ways", that all too popular brush that's used to make broad strokes to paint over lack of evidence or compelling arguements.

I didn't say that nothing has been scientifically proven - I said it can be used to manipulate people the same way religion can.

Tell me what is black and white about how the world was created? Tell me what is concrete black and white proof that man evolved from ape? Science has its theories about those things as religion has its beliefs and those who believe in religion tend to believe God created the world and man - those who don't believe in religion I would imagine lean towards the big bang and man came from ape theories. Either way the followers of each group are basing their beliefs on what others say happened without any proof.

[Honolulu_Blue]

Originally Posted by Gary Gorski

I didn't say that nothing has been scientifically proven - I said it can be used to manipulate people the same way religion can.

Tell me what is black and white about how the world was created? Tell me what is concrete black and white proof that man evolved from ape? Science has its theories about those things as religion has its beliefs and those who believe in religion tend to believe God created the world and man - those who don't believe in religion I would imagine lean towards the big bang and man came from ape theories. Either way the followers of each group are basing their beliefs on what others say happened without any proof.

Ok. Here's my bit on evolution. The sentence in bold is ricockulous. Yes, evolution is a theory, but this whole debate (evolutionary theory versus intelligent design/creationism) is predicated upon scientific illiteracy.

“Theory” when used by scientists means something very different than when it is used in casual conversation. People hear that evolution is a theory and they think it means “conjecture” or “guess. This is simply not true.

A scientific theory is an established paradigm that explains the available data and offers predictions that can be tested. (By this definition, “intelligent design” is not even a theory.) Theories can develop and change to incorporate newly uncovered data, (like the theory of dark matter) but they will always be theories - there is no further advancement. It’s not like they are just failed or immature facts.

Do you know what else is a theory ? Gravity. That things fall when we drop them is a fact – but the explanation of the force behind it is a theory . Let’s say I believed that invisible gnomes held everything to the ground with invisible strings, and I wanted to challenge the “theory” of gravity that says massive bodies exert gravitational force on each other. Should I be able to peddle this crap on schoolchildren, with recourse to the disingenuous argument that gravity is “just a theory”?

Or take the atomic theory of matter. Could I successfully argue that for a long time people believed that everything was made of the 4 essential elements, and after all no one’s ever seen an atom, so let’s take it out of textbooks?

It’s so infuriating to see so many people arguing from a position of such profound ignorance. People rely on scientific theories every day – they put their lives in their hands. Would you fly on an airplane that had been designed by an engineer with an “alternative” theory of gravity, or who had a “different understanding” than the theory of aerodynamics?? Would you take a medicine that had been formulated by someone who dismissed the germ theory of disease as “just a theory”?

Yet the same people who see how ridiculous the foregoing is think that evolution can be cynically challenged with vague pseudoscientific bullshit, with no consequences. Fer fuck’s sake. Evolution is not just some footnote in a ninth grade textbook – it’s the grand unifying theory of biology. It can explain phenomena and make accurate predictions in diverse fields like biology, sociology, behavior, pathology, etc. And nothing in biology makes sense without it.

If we as a people had a resonable grasp of the most basic principles of science, this would not even be a public debate. Science is a brutal competition of ideas, not a tea party. You don't just get to believe whatever makes you feel good. If you want to believe that you were magically poofed into existence by some omnipotent being, I have no problem with that. But it's not science and it never will be science.

[Telle]

Originally Posted by Gary Gorski

Since you didn't answer one thing I wanted you to I will ask again. Why do some children in the same situation as your son not survive? There's not some doctors who always save the child and some doctors who never do. Why is the doctor skilled enough to save one child and yet not another under the same conditions?

Thankfully your son survived and I'm very glad he did but what if he wouldn't have. How would you have come to grips with that? Would you have blamed the doctor for being unskilled or wondered if you and your wife were cursed with bad luck? Could you go through life being ok with saying "I don't know"? If in my world God is allowing the death of an innocent child then who or what is allowing it in your world while others are able to live through the exact same situation?

I think the most obvious thing is that you're never going to have the exact same situation. Every instance of a baby not breathing at birth is going to be different. There are thousands of variables that could not possibly all be exactly the same in multiple situations. Thus my answer would be that it is those differences that lead to a life saved in one instance and a life lost in another.

[Anthony]

because 1+1=2 is fact. there is no manipulation involved with that. Jesus walking on water, ehhhh...now that's a different story.

my statement is this - given the track record of sciene (has been able to make statements and hypothesis' and prove them true or false), and that of religion (relies not on facts, but faith, and hasn't proven any claim at any time), if i were to hear a theory on something regarding how the universe was started i'm going to believe what science says because it's currently a more consistently credible source. you don't have to believe in 2+2=4, it's there where you like it or not. faith gets checked at the door.

your arguement is this: nevermind all the things that science has proven and discovered, because we can never really know (in our lifetime) how the universe started the theories of science are as likely as the theories of religion.

[sachmo71]

Perhaps the invisible gnomes also had magic powers to make all sorts of different monkeys that made us THINK we evolved from them? Hmmm?

[Honolulu_Blue]

Originally Posted by sachmo71

Perhaps the invisible gnomes also had magic powers to make all sorts of different monkeys that made us THINK we evolved from them? Hmmm?

Fucking gnomes...

[Gary Gorski]

Originally Posted by Honolulu_Blue

It’s so infuriating to see so many people arguing from a position of such profound ignorance. People rely on scientific theories every day – they put their lives in their hands. Would you fly on an airplane that had been designed by an engineer with an “alternative” theory of gravity, or who had a “different understanding” than the theory of aerodynamics?? Would you take a medicine that had been formulated by someone who dismissed the germ theory of disease as “just a theory”?

Faith is about believing in things you cannot see or understand, correct? My faith in God is not rational because I believe in a higher being that I can show no scientific proof that exists, right? Science isn't about faith - its about testing theories and then when they are proven to be true they are real, concrete things you can believe in, right?

I know without a shadow of a doubt that an airplane can fly - its been proven - people fly in airplanes every day. Everyone accepts the fact that an airplane can fly. I don't see anyone going around saying airplanes can't fly. Where is the proof that man evolved from ape? Im not saying there aren't people who have attempted to prove such a thing but I am saying that its not fact. Regardless of how many theories there are about it or what potential links there may or may not be there is no 100% proof that man evolved from ape. If you believe that man did then you are believing in something that may seem reasonable but is not proven fact just the same if you believe that God created man you are beliving in something that is not a proven fact.

Originally Posted by Honolulu_Blue

If you want to believe that you were magically poofed into existence by some omnipotent being, I have no problem with that. But it's not science and it never will be science.

I don't for one second claim religion to be science - they are completely opposite. Science means nothing is accepted until proven - religion means accepting things on faith alone knowing full well you can never "prove" them. I am just saying that not everything has been proven scientifically nor do I feel everything can be proven scientifically.

[Honolulu_Blue]

Originally Posted by Gary Gorski

Faith is about believing in things you cannot see or understand, correct? My faith in God is not rational because I believe in a higher being that I can show no scientific proof that exists, right? Science isn't about faith - its about testing theories and then when they are proven to be true they are real, concrete things you can believe in, right?

I know without a shadow of a doubt that an airplane can fly - its been proven - people fly in airplanes every day. Everyone accepts the fact that an airplane can fly. I don't see anyone going around saying airplanes can't fly. Where is the proof that man evolved from ape? Im not saying there aren't people who have attempted to prove such a thing but I am saying that its not fact. Regardless of how many theories there are about it or what potential links there may or may not be there is no 100% proof that man evolved from ape. If you believe that man did then you are believing in something that may seem reasonable but is not proven fact just the same if you believe that God created man you are beliving in something that is not a proven fact.



I don't for one second claim religion to be science - they are completely opposite. Science means nothing is accepted until proven - religion means accepting things on faith alone knowing full well you can never "prove" them. I am just saying that not everything has been proven scientifically nor do I feel everything can be proven scientifically.

Gary,

I'd reccomend you check out the following site for more on this topic:

http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/faqs-qa.html

It's probably the single best popular resource on evolution there is.

[Gary Gorski]

Originally Posted by Hell Atlantic

because 1+1=2 is fact. there is no manipulation involved with that. Jesus walking on water, ehhhh...now that's a different story.

my statement is this - given the track record of sciene (has been able to make statements and hypothesis' and prove them true or false), and that of religion (relies not on facts, but faith, and hasn't proven any claim at any time), if i were to hear a theory on something regarding how the universe was started i'm going to believe what science says because it's currently a more consistently credible source. you don't have to believe in 2+2=4, it's there where you like it or not. faith gets checked at the door.

your arguement is this: nevermind all the things that science has proven and discovered, because we can never really know (in our lifetime) how the universe started the theories of science are as likely as the theories of religion.

I agree 1+1 = 2. This has become to be universally accepted as true. How the world was created has not been proven. You are arguing that because science has proven some things to be true that its much more likely to have the correct version of how the world was created than religion. That's like saying because I know how to change a tire I know how to build a car engine from scratch. Just because science has proven some things to be true doesn't make anything unproven any more likely to be true than anything else.

Religion isn't about proving things to be true - its about having faith knowing full well that what you believe in is not something you can setup a scientific study to prove. All the things science has discovered and proven true do not let either of us know how the universe was created. You believe it to be one way based on things you have read and have been told - those things make sense to you and so you believe it. I believe it to be created another way based on things I have read and have been told - things that make sense to me. I don't really see how not being able to prove one thing is any different than not being able to prove another.

[Raiders Army]

Sometimes when I fart it smells really bad, other times there is no smell at all. Why?

[Ajaxab]

Originally Posted by Honolulu_Blue

Arguably, every scientific experiment that's ever been done confirms the assertion that science needs to be based on empirically verifiable data.

The modern scientific method didn't come about because some guy came up with it one day and everyone took his word for it. The scientific way of doing things evolved out of countless early observations and experiments. Hypotheses that did not stand up to testing were weeded out - this is what I meant about science being self-correcting.

The implied hypothesis "I do not need to base my scientific experiments on empirically verifiable data" would not have stood up to scrutiny because experiments based on other kinds of "data" would not have had cohesive results and could not have been repeated by other scientists.

For example, pretend we're both ancient scientists testing a cure for a disease. You decide to base your experiments on observations you have made about this disease in the past, and I base mine on revelations from my dreams. Whose patient is more likely to die? And thus whose method is more likely to be repeated by other scientists?

Thousands of years of human curiosity and its consequences have honed and perfected the scientific method to be the way it is now; there is no one experiment you can point to to "prove" it. Very few ideas in science work on the "smoking gun" principle - instead they rely on a preponderance of the evidence. And I guess sometimes that evidence is so well-established and overwhelming that it appears to be "just the way things are".

Thanks for the response HB. So every scientific experiment ever done confirms the assertion that science needs to be based on scientifically observable data. Later experiments might confirm the 'truth' of the original idea requiring scientifically observable data but these experiments are already assuming the original idea to be true. Isn't that a bit circular? I would expect later science to confirm a scientific method as the assumption of its truth is inherent in any experiment. I guess I'm still struggling to see where the scientific data comes from for the original idea that we need physical, empirical evidence for something to know that it it is true.

[Honolulu_Blue]

Originally Posted by Gary Gorski

If you believe that man did then you are believing in something that may seem reasonable and supported by overwhelming scientific evidence but is not proven fact just the same if you believe that God created man you are beliving in something that is not a proven fact.

Fixed.

Gary, remember what I said in my earlier post: science isn't based on 'smoking gun' principle.

The FACT is that the preponderance of observable evidence OVERWHELMINGLY supports the theory of evolution. The claim that there is no difference in the factual supports for creationism and evolution is DEMONSTRABLY FALSE. If people want to believe in creationism, fine, but why do they feel they need to disparage science to do it?

[Honolulu_Blue]

Originally Posted by Gary Gorski

I don't for one second claim religion to be science - they are completely opposite. Science means nothing is accepted until proven - religion means accepting things on faith alone knowing full well you can never "prove" them. I am just saying that not everything has been proven scientifically nor do I feel everything can be proven scientifically.

Sorry about that. I went off on a tangent there. You're right, you didn't make that claim at all. My bad.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Gary Gorski

I agree 1+1 = 2. This has become to be universally accepted as true. How the world was created has not been proven. You are arguing that because science has proven some things to be true that its much more likely to have the correct version of how the world was created than religion. That's like saying because I know how to change a tire I know how to build a car engine from scratch. Just because science has proven some things to be true doesn't make anything unproven any more likely to be true than anything else.

Religion isn't about proving things to be true - its about having faith knowing full well that what you believe in is not something you can setup a scientific study to prove. All the things science has discovered and proven true do not let either of us know how the universe was created. You believe it to be one way based on things you have read and have been told - those things make sense to you and so you believe it. I believe it to be created another way based on things I have read and have been told - things that make sense to me. I don't really see how not being able to prove one thing is any different than not being able to prove another.

proven "some" things? quite and understatement, don't you think?

for the record, i say my prayers every nite. i pray for being thankful for what i have, i ask for a long life, and i pray for God to keep my wife safe, on top of saying one Our Father and one Hail Mary. i'm not a Godless person. just not a blind believer.

[Tigercat]

My comments on all of this comes from a brief thought: What would Jesus Do?

I am an unorganized, sort-of-Christian(but maybe not). I think Jesus was/is the greatest example of living in the harmonic and loving way that God would want us to live in. It is in my heretic belief that we can certainly all be saved by learning from his actions. You can accept Jesus as your savior all you want, but its not going to do you any good if you don't accept his actions as the good for you to live by, and don't cast away basic evil intentions like murder and hate as bad.

So WWJD. I love the phrase when it is actually really thought out and carried out. Who could not love people who advocate peace love and tolerence? Lets make an assumption, big or small, that gays, the city of New Orleans, or any other number of controversal groups of people are committing sins in the eyes of God. Would God and Jesus want us casting stones of hate and anger at them in God and Jesus's name? Ridiculous. And how some people can so miss the boat that is seemingly so fucking obvious is beyond me.

Anyway I guess that is far from the religious warfare this thread turned into, but I enjoy getting on my soapbox and yelling at an empty crowd, relieves stress.

[Ksyrup]

Since I see CraigSca lurking around the board, let me just add to this discussion:

Science fails to recognise the single most
potent element of human existence
letting the reigns go to the unfolding
is faith, faith, faith, faith
Science has failed our world
science has failed our mother earth
Spirit-moves-through-all-things

[Gary Gorski]

Originally Posted by Honolulu_Blue

Fixed.

Gary, remember what I said in my earlier post: science isn't based on 'smoking gun' principle.

The FACT is that the preponderance of observable evidence OVERWHELMINGLY supports the theory of evolution. The claim that there is no difference in the factual supports for creationism and evolution is DEMONSTRABLY FALSE. If people want to believe in creationism, fine, but why do they feel they need to disparage science to do it?

Well explain to me why religious beliefs are held to a smoking gun principle then? How does one know that God does not exist? What of the cures to people that there is no medical explanation for? What about the sites where people have documented miracles taking place? I realize there are debates over how the Bible is translated but did none of those things ever happen?

People come up with many reasons why miracles and visitations and the like do not exist but they cannot prove those reasons. They just chalk them up to being unexplainable because they have to do with God and they can't see God so God cannot exist so there has to be some reason for those things - just one they can't figure out yet.

Yet for science you're willing to accept that. The research and theories produce things they can prove that support their argument that man evolved from ape but they can't say with 100% certainty that it happened that way, can they? But for science like you said, you don't need a smoking gun. I'm asking why do you need a smoking gun then to believe in God?

I'm not trying to disparge science - I don't believe that one day an airplane just magically flew off the ground. I'm only trying to point out that an opposition to religion is that you can't prove it - that things we believe to be miraculous events are just dismissed as odd occurances because there is no readily available scientific explanation for it. Those things are our proof that God exists just the same way as fossils and DNA studies and whatnot are the way a scientist proves evolution. I'm not saying thier studies are invalid and complete rubbish - I just don't see or accept a concrete link between ape and man just the way you don't accept that God created man.

[Subby]

Nice post by Tigercat there.

[Tigercat]

Originally Posted by Hell Atlantic

proven "some" things? quite and understatement, don't you think?

for the record, i say my prayers every nite. i pray for being thankful for what i have, i ask for a long life, and i pray for God to keep my wife safe, on top of saying one Our Father and one Hail Mary. i'm not a Godless person. just not a blind believer.

God gave us free choice right? I doubt he would want faith entered blindly. True faith should be blind once its achieved, but faith entered blindly, before realizing what is at stake, is nothing at all.

It seems to me that if you never fully question the aspects of the beliefs upon which faith is built you are not giving yourself up to God, but rather the circumstances of your socialization and birth. Unfortunately, I think that is quite often what people do.....

[Gary Gorski]

Originally Posted by Hell Atlantic

proven "some" things? quite and understatement, don't you think?

for the record, i say my prayers every nite. i pray for being thankful for what i have, i ask for a long life, and i pray for God to keep my wife safe, on top of saying one Our Father and one Hail Mary. i'm not a Godless person. just not a blind believer.

I'm not a blind believer either - I don't disregard science. When I'm sick, I take medicine. When I'm hurt, I see a doctor. If I have to go far away I get on an airplane - I don't just sit there and wait to be miraculously transported to the next city.

But I do believe that there are things science cannot prove and that those things are works of God.

[Raiders Army]

Originally Posted by Gary Gorski

I'm not a blind believer either - I don't disregard science. When I'm sick, I take medicine. When I'm hurt, I see a doctor. If I have to go far away I get on an airplane - I don't just sit there and wait to be miraculously transported to the next city.

But I do believe that there are things science cannot prove and that those things are works of God.

There are things science cannot prove today.

Are there not examples of things throughout history that people attributed to a higher being that were eventually borne out to be scientifically explained?

[Gary Gorski]

Originally Posted by Tigercat

So WWJD. I love the phrase when it is actually really thought out and carried out. Who could not love people who advocate peace love and tolerence? Lets make an assumption, big or small, that gays, the city of New Orleans, or any other number of controversal groups of people are committing sins in the eyes of God. Would God and Jesus want us casting stones of hate and anger at them in God and Jesus's name? Ridiculous. And how some people can so miss the boat that is seemingly so fucking obvious is beyond me.

I think that's a great post and therein lies where the difference in this thread started. Some people feel that because the church pastor put that sign up that he was being hateful to the people of New Orleans despite the fact that the actions of his church were the exact opposite in that they were not only praying for those people but also doing things to help the relief effort. His words, to me anyways, were meant as a wake up call to get our lives in order and stop committing sins before we face a tragedy like that in our own lives and not as some pretentious comment meant as a silent rejoicing that a city had been flooded and its people were dead or displaced.

[Peregrine]

Originally Posted by Honolulu_Blue

Ok. Here's my bit on evolution. The sentence in bold is ricockulous. Yes, evolution is a theory, but this whole debate (evolutionary theory versus intelligent design/creationism) is predicated upon scientific illiteracy.

“Theory” when used by scientists means something very different than when it is used in casual conversation. People hear that evolution is a theory and they think it means “conjecture” or “guess. This is simply not true.

A scientific theory is an established paradigm that explains the available data and offers predictions that can be tested. (By this definition, “intelligent design” is not even a theory.) Theories can develop and change to incorporate newly uncovered data, (like the theory of dark matter) but they will always be theories - there is no further advancement. It’s not like they are just failed or immature facts.

Do you know what else is a theory ? Gravity. That things fall when we drop them is a fact – but the explanation of the force behind it is a theory . Let’s say I believed that invisible gnomes held everything to the ground with invisible strings, and I wanted to challenge the “theory” of gravity that says massive bodies exert gravitational force on each other. Should I be able to peddle this crap on schoolchildren, with recourse to the disingenuous argument that gravity is “just a theory”?

Or take the atomic theory of matter. Could I successfully argue that for a long time people believed that everything was made of the 4 essential elements, and after all no one’s ever seen an atom, so let’s take it out of textbooks?

It’s so infuriating to see so many people arguing from a position of such profound ignorance. People rely on scientific theories every day – they put their lives in their hands. Would you fly on an airplane that had been designed by an engineer with an “alternative” theory of gravity, or who had a “different understanding” than the theory of aerodynamics?? Would you take a medicine that had been formulated by someone who dismissed the germ theory of disease as “just a theory”?

Yet the same people who see how ridiculous the foregoing is think that evolution can be cynically challenged with vague pseudoscientific bullshit, with no consequences. Fer fuck’s sake. Evolution is not just some footnote in a ninth grade textbook – it’s the grand unifying theory of biology. It can explain phenomena and make accurate predictions in diverse fields like biology, sociology, behavior, pathology, etc. And nothing in biology makes sense without it.

If we as a people had a resonable grasp of the most basic principles of science, this would not even be a public debate. Science is a brutal competition of ideas, not a tea party. You don't just get to believe whatever makes you feel good. If you want to believe that you were magically poofed into existence by some omnipotent being, I have no problem with that. But it's not science and it never will be science.

Great post, HB. I agree with this 300%. The fact that supporters of creationism are allowed to get away with presenting their view (or their New Coke formulation of their view, ID) as basically some vague generalities about things evolution has problems with, and this is accepted as a valid alternate theory, amazes me. Where's the scientific evidence? Where's even the attempt to scientifically validate their beliefs? People say that scientists don't like to accept challenges to their closely held theories, maybe so, but science has been changing in relation to new discoveries for hundreds of years. If ID supporters can provide at least some kind of scientific proof for their claims, or at least a scientific framework under which such claims could be proved, I think they'd make a lot more headway.

[Honolulu_Blue]

Originally Posted by Ajaxab

Thanks for the response HB. So every scientific experiment ever done confirms the assertion that science needs to be based on scientifically observable data. Later experiments might confirm the 'truth' of the original idea requiring scientifically observable data but these experiments are already assuming the original idea to be true. Isn't that a bit circular? I would expect later science to confirm a scientific method as the assumption of its truth is inherent in any experiment. I guess I'm still struggling to see where the scientific data comes from for the original idea that we need physical, empirical evidence for something to know that it it is true.

On the surface I see how it could seem circular, but to my understanding that's how science works. You hypothesize something, and then you set out to disprove that hypothesis. At the outset you have to assume your working hypothesis is true in order to set up your experiment, but this isn't really circular reasoning because you don't really accept any of your assumptions as true until thy have survived testing.

I agree that it's hard to imagine an experiment in which "I need empirically verifiable evidence for something to know that it is true" is acutally set out as the hypothesis - you're right that it's an assumption that is inherent in any experiment. But that's exactly my point - by being contained in every successful experiment ever done, this assumption has withstood some pretty rigorous testing, albeit indirectly. Like I said, prepoderance of the evidence

Stupid example: let's say I've done 50 experiments on the boiling point of a liquid, and for each one I've used the same beaker. Those experiments have indirectly confirmed that my beaker can withstand high temperatures, even though that wasn't the actual point of the experiment. Does that make sense?

This is just my understanding: I might be way off base and I am certainly being very simplistic. (I hasten to add that I'm not a scientist, though I'm sure that's obvious.)

[Raiders Army]

WWJD...well, look what happened to him. I don't want to end up like that.

[Gary Gorski]

Originally Posted by Raiders Army

There are things science cannot prove today.

Are there not examples of things throughout history that people attributed to a higher being that were eventually borne out to be scientifically explained?

So as long as science might prove it sometime down the line that's good enough for you to prove that God does not exist?

Couldn't I turn that around and say because science may never prove something that it is proof that God must exist or that someday someone may disprove a scieintific theory accepted today so I should not accept any scientific theories as truth because the opposite cannot be proven today?

[Klinglerware]

Originally Posted by Subby

Nice post by Tigercat there.

I agree. When I was a young'n back in Catholic school, we were definitely taught that Jesus' message and actions were essentially ones of kindness and compassion.

I haven't practiced for years, but I think this is the takeaway that most mainstream Christians get. This really stands in contrast with the beliefs of some of the more conservative elements in Christianity--I sense very little kindness or compassion from many of those who profess the faith.

It certainly demonstrates that you can't just lump Christians together, since it is apparent that different sects within Christianity believe in wildly different things...