LinkBack URL
About LinkBacksoh please, your being a bit condescending saying that I don't understand my own philosophy don't you think? I would write a more complete answer but I have to get back to work.
oh please, your being a bit condescending saying that I don't understand my own philosophy don't you think? I would write a more complete answer but I have to get back to work.
HEXUS FOLDING TEAM It's EASY
Interesting post Zhaoman, mind if I ask you if in all your sincere prayers you had any conversations with the big man like Fuddam describes or is he really just nuts?
HEXUS FOLDING TEAM It's EASY
I asked him for good exam results because I didn't revise... I offered to give the next beggar on the street some change. A few weeks later...
My results were indeed good! And I put change into the McDonalds charity thing now
On a more serious note: I have attended church events and youth events where you were meant to "feel" God but honestly you feel good anyway because you've had such a great time. It's a pretty good strategy I guess.
I hear you, truly. It brings up the fundamental point I made/always make: to be a Christian is to have a relationship with Him. Not imagined, not simple a conceptualisation of Christ, not simply theorising.Originally Posted by Zhaoman
Someone who claims to be Christian yet does not have the relationship (two-way), is not a Christian. They are religious, tradition-followers, something else.
And yes, around the world people have always conceived of beings beyond themselves. Why? Someone may speculate that it's to provide meaning, to give substance to life etc, but from a Christian perspective, it's because God has created a God-shaped hole within us, and we are drawn to filling that hole. It's unavoidable. Some TRY to fill it with drugs/alcohol/sex/sport/love/academics/other religions, but only Christ suffices. There can only be one truth.
Until one surrenders to Christ, invites Him in, makes the choice, one is removed from Him. He can speak to you, but He is not yet IN you.
and I really understand the molten gold ideasame for me.
but not sufficient. Becoming a Christian is not a feeling. It is a sober, conscious choice. I don't think *anyone* can appreciate the ramifications or impact of that decision until after it's made.
not at all. He hit the nail firmly on the head. So many atheists on this forum (and elsewhere) seem to view atheism as a position of non-belief. Bollocks.
Do you really want me to believe that you are belief-less on the existence of God? That would be akin to saying you have no belief about Santa, or the Easter Bunny, or Star Trek or......... - thus mediaboy's notion of an empty vessel.
old dictionary.com puts it quite eloquently: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/atheism
atheism – noun
1. the doctrine or belief that there is no God.
2. disbelief in the existence of a supreme being or beings.
Atheism is not a default position of "no belief".
Certainly and easily. I shall also be using logic, to supply a reasonable argument.
Very simply the supernatural cannot exist within a scientific world view. The purpose of science is to identify natural laws which apply to the world around us. If we witness a phenomenon, it must either be explainable within the laws we have, or our laws are wrong and we have to study the phenomenon and make new laws. In this way everything is a natural process and can be investigated in a scientific method.
This, of course, allows no room for a 'supernatural' or anything which exists outside of natural laws. We don't understand everything, our laws aren't perfect, but nothing exists to which some laws do not apply.
This world view would allow for an advanced race of aliens who appear like gods, with technology well beyond our understanding, but just because it's outside our natural laws, doesn't make it supernatural, just beyond our current thinking.
While the supernatural is incomptible with science, from an evidentiary perspective, the best evidence that gods don't exist is simply the absence of any evidence at all. There is nothing 'supernatural' that doesn't have a far more simple natural explanation.
Is athism a belief? Based on the evidence above, it's a logical conlusion. fuddam himself is an atheist towards all gods but one.
Does fuddams experience prove everything about the god of the bible? Or is this the classic example of childhood brainwashing resulting in psychosis and the suspension of critical thinking? That's a fairly easy question, and reveals one of the most evil aspects of religion.
Wow TeePee you know your Richard Dawkins inside out!
I think religion isn't necessarily a bad thing, it gives people stability when they haven't been educated about the way the world works. And I don't mean school either, I had to fully understand natural selection and had a good stab at relativity as well before I could break out of the mould. That's the kind of education you need.
The fact that most "intellegent" people in the world are atheists also proves a point: anyone who is of a reasonable calibre of intellect (I would think that includes everyone reading this post!) should only have to step back and think about the god or gods they have been talking to before they realise it is the equivalent of having an imaginary friend.
Knowing about the history of "science vs religion" (I like to think of it as "common sense vs tradition") is also very useful as science has come up with very valid arguments so many times. The story of the big bang theory is one in particular where scientists warred between themselves to explain how we could be here. I think they have reached a very pleasing conclusion.
'What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?' – Comparing Dawkins' Blind Faith with Flew's Evidence - by Peter S. Williams
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
At the start of 2005, online magazine ‘Edge The World Question Centre’ posed the following question to a number of scientific intellectuals:
‘What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?’
This is an excellent question, to which many responses can and have been given. However, of the 120 responses garnered and published by The Edge, the answer given by Oxford University’s ‘Professor for the Public Understanding of Science’, Dr Richard Dawkins, has received the most attention (at least within the British media). Dawkins’ Credo has been reported by news.telegraph and Guardian Unlimited, and Dawkins was interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s Sunday-morning current affairs magazine Broadcasting House (09/01/05), where he said:
Darwinism is the explanation of life on this planet, but I believe that all life, all intelligence, all creativity and all ‘design’ anywhere in the universe, is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection. It follows that design comes late in the universe, after a period of Darwinian evolution. Design cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe.[1]
As Roger Highfield observes in the Telegraph, Dawkins’ belief that evolution explains all life, creativity, intelligence and design anywhere in the universe: ‘means that there is no need for a god to design the universe.’[2]
Dawkins thinks he can prove that evolution accounts for all life, intelligence, creativity and (crucially) all design on earth, but he says he cannot prove that it accounts for all life, intelligence, creativity and design in the universe. Therefore, whatever we make of evolution as an explanation of life on earth[3], we need to recognize that only from the unproven generalisation that Darwinian evolution accounts for all life, intelligence, creativity and (crucially) design in the universe does it follow that: ‘Design cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe.’[4] Indeed, that particular conclusion only follows from the premise that evolution must (rather than does) account for all life, intelligence, creativity and (crucially) design in the universe. Such an a priori assertion is clearly metaphysical in nature rather than scientific. It seems clear, then, that Dawkins believes both that evolution must explain any and all ‘design’ in the universe and that there is no divine designer because he believes that metaphysical naturalism is true. As Phillip E. Johnson notes: ‘A theory of biological origins that is in a general way like Darwinism follows fairly straightforwardly from the proposition that God is an illusion and nature is therefore all that exists...’[5] Hence: ‘Darwinism is the answer to a specific question that grows out of philosophical naturalism... The question is: How must creation have occurred if we assume that God had nothing to do with it?’[6] Answering this question is not at all the same as answering this question: ‘How did creation occur?’ A naturalist like Dawkins has to give the same answer to both questions, whereas an agnostic or a theist may or may not give the two questions quite different answers, as the evidence dictates.[7]
Moreover, since it is the Darwinian generalisation Dawkins relies upon to prove that design ‘cannot underlie the universe’[8], his admission that the Darwinian generalisation is something he believes even though he cannot prove it, shows that Dawkins’ belief that design does not underlie the universe is something he believes even though he cannot prove it. This is as much as to say that metaphysical naturalism is something Dawkins believes even though he cannot prove it.
How extraordinary to find Dawkins, who regularly uses evolution as a stick to beat belief in a designer (such as God), admitting that his stick is a conjecture, and his belief in it a matter of the kind of faith without evidence that he attributes to, and scorns in, religious believers. For example, during a lecture at the Edinburgh International Science Festival Dawkins said: ‘If you ask people why they are convinced of the truth of their religion, they don't appeal to evidence. There isn’t any... I will respect your views if you can justify them. But if you justify your views only by saying you have faith in them, I shall not respect them.’[9] (This is, of course, not what religious believers usually mean by ‘faith’. As Alban McCoy writes: ‘there is no reason without faith, and no faith without reason: they are inextricably connected. They appear disjointed and opposed only when reason is understood in the narrow sense of positivism and faith is understood in the narrow sense of fideism.’[10])
In an open letter written to his daughter Juliet on her tenth birthday (and published in A Devil’s Chaplain), Dawkins advises her to only accept beliefs supported by evidence. ‘Have you ever wondered how we know the things that we know?’[11], asks Dawkins. The answer, he says (and he does seem to mean the answer), is ‘evidence.’[12] Dawkins advises Juliet:
Next time somebody tells you something that sounds important, think to yourself: ‘Is this the kind of thing that people probably know because of evidence? Or is it the kind of thing that people only believe because of tradition, authority or revelation?’ And next time somebody tells you that something is true, why not say to them: ‘What kind of evidence is there for that?’ And if they can’t give you a good answer, I hope you’ll think very carefully before you believe a word they say.[13]
However, when Dawkins says that evolution shows that design cannot precede evolution (and so cannot underlie the universe) - which certainly sounds an important claim - and we ask him ‘What kind of evidence is there for that?,’ we discover that there isn’t any! Instead, Dawkins’ argument against design depends upon a hypothesis supported, not by evidence, but by the assumption that naturalism is true. And while Dawkins may seem to argue for naturalism and against God by arguing for evolution and then arguing that evolution ‘reveals a world without design’[14], he actually begins with the assumption that naturalism is true, deduces the generalisation that evolution must account for any and all purported design, and then presents this generalisation as if it justifies naturalism! The whole argumentative procedure begs the question.
The most that might be said for Dawkins’ conjecture about the truth of generalised evolution is that it is a simpler explanation than any explanation involving design, and that, by Occam’s Razor, it should therefore be tentatively favoured as long as it appears adequate. However, even if this is the correct way to assign the burden of proof[15], even if we exclude arguments besides the design argument that might support a belief in design[16], and even if we exclude a host of considerations that might lead us to question the sufficiency of evolution as a scientific theory[17], we cannot ignore the fact that evolution can have no pretence to address or explain its own preconditions. The preconditions of evolution, which include biological macromolecules[18] and the finely tuned basic physical laws of the cosmos[19], cannot be explained by evolution. As philosopher Antony Flew observes:
It seems to me that Richard Dawkins constantly overlooks the fact that Darwin himself, in the fourteenth chapter of The Origin of Species, pointed out that his whole argument began with a being which already possessed reproductive powers. This is the creature the evolution of which a truly comprehensive theory of evolution must give some account. Darwin himself was well aware that he had not produced such an account. It now seems to me that the finding of more than fifty years of DNA research have provided materials for a new and enormously powerful argument to design.[20]
Indeed, this new design argument is so powerful that Flew, ‘an icon and champion for unbelievers for decades’[21], a man who has been called ‘the world’s most influential philosophical atheist’[22], has changed his mind because of it, letting it be widely known in December 2004 that he is now a theist[23] because: ‘the case for an Aristotelian God who has the characteristics of power and also intelligence, is now much stronger than it ever was before.’[24]
In Flew’s assessment, the scientific data indicates that one can’t argue, as he used to argue, that there isn’t ‘any good evidence [to] postulate anything behind or beyond this natural universe’[25] and that therefore ‘the most fundamental laws of nature, must. . . be taken as the last words in any series of answers to questions as to why things are as they are.’[26] Instead, Flew now argues that there is good reason to postulate something beyond the natural universe precisely because the fundamental laws of nature cannot be taken as the last word in all series of answers to questions about why things are as they are. Specifically, this can not be done with regard to the origin of life. On the one hand, says Flew, naturalistic efforts have failed to provide ‘a plausible conjecture as to how any of these complex molecules might have evolved from simple entities’,[27] and ‘It has become inordinately difficult even to begin to think about constructing a naturalistic theory of the evolution of that first reproducing organism.’[28] On the other hand: ‘The enormous complexity by which the results were achieved look to me like the work of intelligence.’[29]
Richard Dawkins has made it clear that he argues against God on the basis of a generalised evolutionary assumption which he believes although he can’t prove it, while Antony Flew has made it clear that he now argues for God on the basis of scientific evidence that evolution is in principle unable to explain. Dawkins gives the impression that God belongs in a box marked ‘Things people believe even though they cannot prove it’, but the past month has seen Dawkins place atheism in the very same box, just as Flew took God out.
That's an interesting quote, and well done on finding an article which totally - and quite deliberatly - misses the point.
There is, of course, myriad evidence for darwinism (Link should get you started.) as the mechanism for life on earth. Dawkins is rather in-elegantly applying darwinian concepts to the formation of the universe. It's his belief that the same darwinian theories can be applied. It's an interesting idea, but he's no astrophysicist.
I agree with the argument, that we cannot prove that natural selection, or gravity, or any scientific law or theorem for that matter, actually exists. Indeed we cannot even prove an external reality outside of our conscienceness exists; a fact popularised by a certain trilogy of films.
But the important part of the matter for me is that the laws and theorems which we have come up with so far appear to be true, because when the apple falls from the tree it goes down instead of up. This is reason enough to "believe" that the theorem is true, "evidence" if you like, and that is the best way of describing the motion of the apple we have so far.
The problem with the rest of the argument above is that the author has deliberately hand-picked convenient "facts", rather than address the question as a whole. The number of scientists who take an atheist stance is far more than the handful who remain religious for example.
I absolutely agree that scientists have no idea how the first "primordial being" came to existance. Right now we can only say it is down to chance, that the right ingredients were at the right place at the right time for a clump of atoms to start to assimilate others and build copies of itself.
But the beauty of science (curiosity is a far better representation of what I mean) is that we never stop in the search for truth. Just because we don't know something doesn't mean we should give up. Science does involve faith, faith of a large degree. Think about the time when everyone believed the Earth was flat, and Magellan set off to the West and came back from the East. Think about when everyone believed Mars did loops around the Earth, and Copernicus came up with a much simpler explanation: both Earth and Mars went around the Sun. This doesn't mean Copernicus is right, Mars may indeed revolve in a loopy fashion around the Earth along with the Sun and the rest of the planets; but Copernicus' model is arguably the more beautiful way to describe it.
This I think is the crux of the matter that so many people don't realise. No, we don't have "hard evidence" to prove that the Earth goes around the Sun. And yes all of the convoluted answers the R.E. teachers give may well be true. But using logic and reason to explain the world, instead of myth and prophesy is arguably a far better way to grasp the wilderness that exists in front of us.
I went looking for some epic fail pictures, but there weren't any epic enough to show the degree of your failure. As has been pointed out so many times it's not true and atheists certainly don't believe in nothing, nothing is a broken concept. Atheism is simply a lack of belief in god(s). That's it. You may also like to know that agnosticism and atheism are NOT mutually exclusive. I am an agnostic-atheist (weak atheism) with regard to a non-specific god(s), but I'm a strong atheist with regard to the Christian/Muslim/Jewish god, because I can show that it's incoherent and contradictory given it's definitions - Epicurus is a good start.
Atheism is a belief just as not collecting stamps is a hobby. If you can understand that then you will finally get it.
I am an atheist and I believe the Earth orbits the Sun, therefore a) I do not believe in nothing and b) it does not stop me from being an atheist. I suggest that before you accuse others of not understanding their position or philosophies that you actually learn the correct meaning of those words and how they relate to the position before embarrassing yourself on a public forum.
"Reality is what it is, not what you want it to be." Frank Zappa. ----------- "The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." Huang Po.----------- "A drowsy line of wasted time bathes my open mind", - Ride.
I think people who are agnostics are just as confounded as religious people. It should be clear to see that we are made up of small lumps swirling around each other and that there is no place for a god; because if there is a god then he/she/it must be made of the same lumps so must adhere to the same rules.
If we do discover a being that is not made up of lumps then he/she/it must be made of something else and the scientific process of describing that begins again. Emotion, or spirit, or soul does not qualify as a "thing" because it exists only in our minds. We dream them up and they disappear when our lumps fall apart.
Dawkins' belief in evolution occurring outside of the Earth is simply an extrapolation of what we already have evidence for. Once again Fuddam is misreading or is being dishonest because the rest of what he posts is dribble. The ToE in no way tries to explain the origin of life, that is a COMPLETELYdifferent subject called abiogenesis. Therefore this paragraph is nonsense.
I'm tied of your cut and paste dishonesty Fuddam. Darwin was fully aware because his theory does not address that matter, never has and never will. It's like asking the theory of gravity to account for heat transfer. Darwin's argument never presupposed a singular entity capable of reproduction it's simply where the evidence lead him. Again DNA will not be able to address the matter any more than being able to identify the DNA of the flying-mud-snarflet because said creature doesn't exist anymore and there are no remnants of it just like the first singular celled organisms. DNA is evidence that ties in perfectly with ToE and simply gives us better understanding, which points us in the right direction. We are getting very close to abiogenesis in the lab, it won't be too long until the breakthrough is made but even then you can bet your bottom dollar that it will be dismissed by the creationists because it a) they won't be able to understand the science and b) it conflicts with a book.It seems to me that Richard Dawkins constantly overlooks the fact that Darwin himself, in the fourteenth chapter of The Origin of Species, pointed out that his whole argument began with a being which already possessed reproductive powers. This is the creature the evolution of which a truly comprehensive theory of evolution must give some account. Darwin himself was well aware that he had not produced such an account. It now seems to me that the finding of more than fifty years of DNA research have provided materials for a new and enormously powerful argument to design.[20]
Having read your story in post #267 it's plainly obvious that you were indoctrinated from a very early age and that your experience, including talking in tongues, was part of that final indoctrination. You have effectively been brain-washed. It's like teaching a child that the colour green is actually yellow, constantly reinforcing it until that child and hence the adult can't even fathom the argument let alone have any possibility of acknowledging that what he calls yellow might not be yellow at all. No matter what anyone else would say it simply wouldn't compute even in the face of mountains of evidence. You've reinforced the notion through behaviour to such a degree that it's clear that your are quite delusional. Perhaps you have a genetic propensity for such behaviour because you certainly have a number of the signs that point towards a mental illness. I suspect if it wasn't Christianity you latched onto it would be crystal healing or homoeopathy or astrology or some other woo.
What I'd love to ask you is my final question and one I hope you'll answer honestly.
If you had been born in a country such as Saudi Arabia to Muslim parents, visited the local mosque and never read the bible or had any contact with Christianity, would you be likely to be a Christian or a Muslim?
I propose to anyone else that you can't get a particular religion until you are introduced to it and therefore there is no true or correct religion. To back that up here's a nice graphic.
http://www.wadsworth.com/religion_d/...nt/map_01.html
It's simple really, you can't get the STD unless someone with the infection f*cks you. Wear the condom of critical thinking peeps.
"Reality is what it is, not what you want it to be." Frank Zappa. ----------- "The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." Huang Po.----------- "A drowsy line of wasted time bathes my open mind", - Ride.
^Siggied.
And as for embarressing myself on a public forum, I can do that as much as I want. I'll respond to the post when I have a spare 10-20 minutes and some spare brain power.... if I have brain power at all. It could be a mishappen belief.
Kids are getting smarter, eventually no amount of parental controls will be able to stop themI guess we're expected to do quite well
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
