Intelligent Design / Evolution podcast

[fuddam]

Yes but using fuddam's eg, of been in love, then if i truely believed i was in love with someone, not needing any evidence or proof, i'd be in prison for rape/stalking.

when you're in love, and it is reciprocated, you are full of joy. I am. Not in a nutty sense, but in a deep, soul-satisfying way.

i mean how do you know which religion is right, and tolerance only goes so far, if your tolerant of someone having views, which often are opposed to yours diametrically, how can you be tolerant?

there is a difference to being tolerant of a person and tolerant of their views.

if someone said they believed in murder for theft, I would reject that view; at the same time, I would tolerate their right to their own beliefs and opinions.

which religion is right? if you sit down and compare, not in a superficial sense, one should be able to reduce them to a few sentences - their core doctrine / principles / values etc

yep, a few sentences

Christianity is essentially about love (regardless of how some Christians might practice it), and the intrinsic value of each person to the God that created them.

I personally do not know of anything more profound or meaningful.

[fuddam]

But you can't say scientologists don't have a personal relationship with their alien spirit posessors?

And it would be hard to be more personal than the realtionship between a cult member and his alien anal prober...

What makes you different?

I wrote a long reply, then my adsl collapsed and I lost it in the muddle.

well, in a nutshell, a relationship is two-way. I have not met a scientologist yet who can illustrate that / vouch for that. Nor is scientology about love, which is a further deficiency.

furthermore, with scientology, one has to spend a great deal of time and money to progress. That, to me, can in no way compare to Christianity that offers it all free of charge.

[fuddam]

or that the universe is split between what is spiritual (and therefore good) and what is physical (and therefore bad).

just for clarity's sake, I assume you were not talking about Christianity in that regard.

[fuddam]

I just scrolled up this thread.

it sure looks like I'm spending too much time here - virtually a thread of my own - lol

[Auran]

no, it's not the same.

it's not just intuition, or 'feelings'.

I assume you've been in a relationship. When you're in one, you know about it.

Is the fundamental difference between Christianity and all other religions - the personal nature of the relationship between Creator and created.

You'll have to forgive me for saying this but it is this sort of statement that demonstrates what I find so very amusing about people with faith. They cannot see the inherent flaw in their flawless logic, founded on a premise taken without any argument and based on something that is inherently questionable. To what do I refer? Our own perception of reality.

The very act of emoting clouds our perception of reality. I am not suggesting that all we see is an illusion, or as Bishop Berkley would have it “that ordinary physical objects are composed solely of ideas, which are inherently mental”. But that occasionally we may see or feel things that are beyond that which is truly there.

Now you yourself have admitted that this may be the case;

am quite happy to be deluded, though, if it means I am full of joy, that I feel love for strangers, and want to help them in any way I can, that I feel cleansed of my sins, and AFAIK, there isn't anything else on the planet that comes close.

However, you still choose to surrender the logic of the situation due to the emotion that you feel and it is this that illustrates my point. I don’t deny that what you feel may fill your entire being and as you say, “fill you with joy”. In fact having had a special relationship with someone else I can understand, to some degree, the all-encompassing nature of the experience. But as I said in an earlier post, it is an illusion. Perhaps not in the sense of it not being real, because there is obviously something happening, more in the sense that it is not as it appears. That there is no rational explanation for the phenomena is merely a matter of our current understanding being lacking. One could hypothesise based on some of the more esoteric theories being espoused at present; the information theory for example, as it relates to the data encoded with the fundamental particles of the universe. Perhaps large numbers of particles may contain enough data such that it interacts with similar data in a profound way.

Or it could just be that our genetics have evolved various chemical interactions with our brain to ensure our survival, and then as we have grown increasingly social as a species it has evolved further to include other features such as ideological compatibility. That way ensuring the survival of both your genetics and way of life.

In either case it is not something that concerns me any more. What I am more interested in is evolving beyond the bounds of this state of affairs. Not in a physical sense but a philosophical one, no longer bound by the needs of my own survival through this or future generations of my progeny. Of course I may get an answer when time or events create my demise, but I doubt it

[fuddam]

One could hypothesise based on some of the more esoteric theories being espoused at present; the information theory for example, as it relates to the data encoded with the fundamental particles of the universe. Perhaps large numbers of particles may contain enough data such that it interacts with similar data in a profound way.

didn't need to quote all of it, but essentially this be it:

you reduce life to materialism. maybe that is flawed.

how one can actually reduce 'love' to a chemical experience is irrelevent. People fall in love. they experience it. end of story.

[G4Z]

to be honest fuddam, it is a chemical recaction, its fairly easy to demonstrate, just go munch some MDMA (and I am not advocating this, just making a point) or other such drugs. These drugs flood your brain with dopamine and seratonin, there is no feeling like it, euphoric IS the word for it. The chemicals occur naturaly in your brain, these drugs just stimulate its production, so to the user it feels completely natural. When you can alter brain chemistry so easily and produce such dramatic results, I think that shows how it can be possible to reduce love to a chemical reaction, thats really all it is. End of story.

[nichomach]

Crap; a brief chemical reaction doesn't begin to explain a lifetime of devotion and respect, nor does it come close to explaining the grief that one feels at the death of someone that one loves. All that you can show via a chemical reaction is one of the possible physical mechanisms by which sensations in common with those experienced at some point during love may be replicated.

[G4Z]

Well, there is more than a chemical reaction, Im sure the interconnections between neurons synapses and axons that form assosiations in your mind have somthing to do with it.

Point is, our brains are a physical system, we understand a lot about how it works however at the moment there is far more we dont understand.

I fully expect it to be possible to simulate a human brain at some point in future.

[nichomach]

That sounds an awful lot like faith, G4Z - "We don't understand it fully now, but I believe we will at some point in the future. I have no rational basis for that belief, but I fully expect it to happen". Of course a Christian might similarly say "Now, I see through a glass darkly, but then I shall see clear". Of course, in present company, the Christian would be derided for saying that, but someone who sticks the word "science" on their unproven belief is clearly eminently rational...

[G4Z]

Nich, I do have a basis for saying that and that basis is the science that has been done and the exponential technological progress that is being made in those areas.

Besides, that is just a prediction I am making, in no way can you compare that to an irrational belief in a god beacuse I am not making an assumption.

[fuddam]

That sounds an awful lot like faith, G4Z - "We don't understand it fully now, but I believe we will at some point in the future. I have no rational basis for that belief, but I fully expect it to happen". Of course a Christian might similarly say "Now, I see through a glass darkly, but then I shall see clear". Of course, in present company, the Christian would be derided for saying that, but someone who sticks the word "science" on their unproven belief is clearly eminently rational...

touche



everyone has faith in something

[fuddam]

to be honest fuddam, it is a chemical recaction, its fairly easy to demonstrate, just go munch some MDMA (and I am not advocating this, just making a point) or other such drugs. These drugs flood your brain with dopamine and seratonin, there is no feeling like it, euphoric IS the word for it. The chemicals occur naturaly in your brain, these drugs just stimulate its production, so to the user it feels completely natural. When you can alter brain chemistry so easily and produce such dramatic results, I think that shows how it can be possible to reduce love to a chemical reaction, thats really all it is. End of story.

you misunderstood me. I was not denying the chemical processes that take place

what I WAS saying is that if you want to reduce your life to such, that's your business. If consider yourself simply the sum of a number of chemical processes and that's all, go ahead. thus you are a random amalgamation of atoms, that purely by chance have come to exist, and to nothing will return.

enjoy the hedonism.

[RedPutty]

Isn't it interesting how "Intelligent Design" appears as another gambit to get people to believe a supreme entity created everything. Suddenly all around the world others are repeating verbatim what is essentially marketing

The intelligent design movement arose out of an organized neocreationist campaign directed by the Discovery Institute to promote a religious agenda calling for broad social, academic and political changes employing intelligent design arguments in the public sphere, primarily in the United States. Leaders of the movement say intelligent design exposes the limitations of scientific orthodoxy and of the secular philosophy of Naturalism. Intelligent design proponents allege that science shouldn't be limited to naturalism, and shouldn't demand the adoption of a naturalistic philosophy that dismisses any explanation that contains a supernatural cause out of hand.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelli...ign_in_summary

I hit that article to try and get it summed up in a sentence what ID is but didn't really succeed, would a proponent care to give me the gist of it in a sentence or two?

[nichomach]

Nich, I do have a basis for saying that and that basis is the science that has been done and the exponential technological progress that is being made in those areas.
Besides, that is just a prediction I am making, in no way can you compare that to an irrational belief in a god beacuse I am not making an assumption.

Well, yes, you are, actually, a rather large one; the assumption being that a method that has produced desirable results in the past will always continue to do so. You're also assuming the result of such experimentation before it even occurs, and regardless of whether it proves practicable to conduct it. You say you fully expect that to happen, but there is no sound basis for that expectation; that's a pretty good example of a belief without a proveable foundation. Note; I don't deny that it may well happen, but it hasn't happened yet, and there is no guarantee that it ever will, or that in the event that it does, it will provide the answer that you're assuming prior to such an experiment being performed.

Consider this; you construct a perfect simulacrum of a human brain. Now, how do you observe whether it loves anything to start with? Do you wait for it to tell you? What if its experience of love is markedly different to our own? What if it never experiences it?

[G4Z]

When did i say it was guaranteed to happen, when did I say I was assuming the result?

I know full well that we may hit a limit, however as explained, based on the exponential progress being made I expect that we can model a human brain in future. There is no assumption, that is prediction. I know I may be wrong and it may never be explained. I dont expect it to even be possible within my own lifetime, however i could be wrong there as well because when you look at what has happened in the last 50 years or even the last decade it is not hard to imagine a future that seems pretty inconciveable today.

But, its a guess, its not the same as an irrational faith in a supreme being, that I "know" to exist without any evidence to suggest it does.