Any religious people watch the Wonders of Life last night?

[m4rk84]

Again, it's a pantheist viewpoint. It doesn't concern Christianity so stop trying mix them together in your vain attempt to disprove God.

My point had nothing to do with Christianity (and neither does this entire topic tbh) so stop getting your knickers in a twist. It involves humanity, and whether you want to believe it or not some of our ancestors at some point believed a god made the sun rise each morning.

 

[Raz]

Just interested what you think about the scientists theory that all life came from the same place and how it doesn't really make us special; just a stage in evolution.

As you go from species to species, apparantly our DNA code is 60% that of a chicken, up to 99% of a chimp.

BTW I'm athiest but I am jealous of religious folk and their beliefs of happy endings. I'm not being patronising, I genuinely am.

I missed the program and haven't read all of the posts in the thread. However, I don't think there's neccesarily a contradiction between religion and 'evolution'. Also, since all life came from God anyway (if you're a believer) then you'd expect the coding to be similar...

 

[Jason2]

My point had nothing to do with Christianity (and neither does this entire topic tbh) so stop getting your knickers in a twist. It involves humanity, and whether you want to believe it or not some of our ancestors at some point believed a god made the sun rise each morning.

I'm guessing you also believe the majority of people in past believed the earth was flat too? Which we know is a lie played by the atheists.

 

[m4rk84]

I'm guessing you also believe the majority of people in past believed the earth was flat too? Which we know is a lie played by the atheists.

There you go again, putting words in peoples mouths. I said some I never used the word majority. To be honest my point had little to do with how many believed it so keep on preaching brotha.

 

[Jason2]

My point was you keep thinking because past people didn't have the knowledge we do now then it means God doesn't exist, which is absurd. You also underestimate people from the past, they knew a lot more than was is sprouted from the atheist corner.

 

[m4rk84]

My point was you keep thinking because past people didn't have the knowledge we do now then it means God doesn't exist

I think nothing of the sort. I think it's almost certain god does not exist because there's nothing to suggest he does exist.

I think that just because it's one of an unlimited amount of explanations it doesn't give us the right to stop searching for the truth.

It's naive to accept the first answer offered to you, but that is your choice.

 

[RDM]

No. When I quoted Darwin himself it mentioned phyla.

So the multiple divisions after phylum don't count? Every variation in the Chordates are irrelevant because a Chordate evolved sometime during the 60m years of the Cambrian period?

I assume the plant divisions don't count either? Quite a few of those occur after the Cambrian.

 

[Robosapien]

The problem with the Cambrian is that it completely reverses Darwins ideas that things would develop slowly over time and then become more pronounced, larger changes more quickly. The Cambrian fossils showed the complete opposite. These weren't similar creatures, these all had fundamentally different body plans.

Instead of slow, gradual -> fast, larger changes the Cambrian shows fast, large -> slow, gradual changes.

If the Cambrian was 530 million years ago then why do some of the Cambrian creatures still exist today. Has evolution slowed down since then?

Why can't it move at different rates? I see it as a dam bursting. The underlying process continues until it hits the right mechanism and then the dam bursts and we see the observable consequences. I mean, the chances of hitting the right mechanism for various stages is probably similar to that giving rise to life in the first place, it seems inevitable that you would get pockets of apparent latency.

This is where the advantages of Wikipedia are really evident. This will give you access to a broad and varied range of examples of various arguments from Godel and so on, as well as criticism of them. While it is very limited it should give you a springboard to research yourself and explore more compex arguments based on other methodologies such as various forms of logic and Epistemology.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existence_of_God



Strangely I suppose, Science. More specifically Lingustics, Hermeneutics, Exegisis and the application of higher criticism, also known as the historical-critical method. You basically study the language(s) how they relate to the historical period, the context, syntax and so on across a range of sources, texts, languages and historical record. Sometimes a single word can alter the entire meaning of a passage, the Pauline Epistles are often subject to such criticism.




Rarely is anything black and white, least of all arguments of Faith or Interpretation. The Bible isn't a single book, it is a collection of texts that seek to teach and inform a particular worldview, in many ways it is exactly a form of lifestyle guide, whether it is outdated or not is subjective and a matter of opinion, but ultimately it is about a message, not about a strict adherence to some literal interpretation of the words, Genesis for example isnt about literally creating the universe et al in a week and making men out of dust, but is an allegory about mans relationship with God and the Universe around him, not a literal 'how to make a Universe...' manual as many young Earthers etc would believe. The earliest Christian Theologians from Philo of Alexandria to Augustine of Hippo expressed this theological position and it is a common and original theme within Christianity (and Judaism, which has no concept of literalism within scripture anyway).

I am not insulted, I am not religious.



Simply put, the relevance of scripture is not what it says about the World, but what it teaches about oneself.

Totally agree (well, not totally because I'm not fully versed in half of what you said, but still, I can infer/discern the meaning). If only scripture was as explicit as your posts. Why is it allegorical then? Because they lacked adequate descriptive language back then/the meaning has become diluted as language evolved/it was wasn't intended to be written allegorically?

he just wants to see a frankenfish or something incredulous, again showing that he has no clue about the topic or what he is even asking for,

Hey, even I want to see that. It sounds cool.

 

[[FnG]magnolia]

Jason2, what was the event in your life that changed you from an atheist to a theist?

 

[Jason2]

Atheists: What is the evolutionary origin of sex?

"With respect to the origin of sexual reproduction, two challenging questions present themselves. First, in what kinds of organisms did sex first arise? And second, what was the adaptive advantage that caused sexual reproduction to become predominant in higher organisms?"

"Sex is not only unnecessary, but it ought to be a recipe for evolutionary disaster. For one thing, it is an inefficient way to reproduce.... And sex carries other costs as well.... By all rights, any group of animals that evolves sexual reproduction should be promptly outcompeted by nonsexual ones. And yet sex reigns... Why is sex a success, despite all its disadvantages?"

The evolutionist has no answer. Yet if we believe in creation then sex becomes nothing short of incredible!

Lewis Thomas, wrote his book, The Medusa and the Snail, he wrote about the "miracle" of how one sperm cell forms with one egg cell to produce the cell we know as a zygote, which, nine months later, will become a newborn human being. He concluded:

"The mere existence of that cell should be one of the greatest astonishments of the earth. People ought to be walking around all day, all through their waking hours, calling to each other in endless wonderment, talking of nothing except that cell.... If anyone does succeed in explaining it, within my lifetime, I will charter a skywriting airplane, maybe a whole fleet of them, and send them aloft to write one great exclamation point after another around the whole sky, until all my money runs out."

Sexual reproduction is not mere chance, but rather the product of an intelligent designer.

 

[estebanrey]

So Jason2 are you bigger and more complex now than you were when you were a baby? Doesn't that mean you've broken the second law of thermodynamics under your logic?

 

[RDM]

Atheists: What is the evolutionary origin of sex?





The evolutionist has no answer. Yet if we believe in creation then sex becomes nothing short of incredible!


Sexual reproduction is not mere chance, but rather the product of an intelligent designer.

Even as a relative layman (my biology knowledge is HNC level) I can see a serious evolutionary advantage of sexual reproduction over asexual reproduction, it gives additional diversity to the gene pool.

A topical example would be Ash dieback, it is pretty much devastating the asexual Ash population.

 

[The Running Man]

jason2

The evolutionist has no answer, yet.

Choice edit for you.

 

[batsy]

Pure comedy cold. Some atheist sitting in a bra. What's that all about? Is it one of you guys? LOL

*takes off bra* What you lookin at?

 

[Angilion]

Sir Francis Crick one of the co-founders of DNA and a Nobel peace price winner is famously quoted as believing in Transpermia/Panspermia .

He concluded that Transpermia was unlikely due to the lack of scientific knowledge, but that has been proven more then likely a possibility now.

Directed Panspermia is another thing indeed, but i believe that it is more then likely a possibility. This theory he proposed was that an intellectual species from outside Earth brought life to the planet.

Both of the above in my opinion is more likely then the luck of correct evolution.

1) Why do you have that opinion? I see no evidence.

2) All you have done is moved the issue to some other part of the universe so you can ignore it - you've moved it from Earth to the hypothetical origin of the hypothetical "intellectual species from outside Earth" that you've pencilled in as the creators of life on Earth. You still have exactly the same starting point, just moved to a different planet. You also still have the inconvenient fact that there is a superabundance of evidence of evolution occuring on Earth. Creationism by aliens is no different to creationism by gods. If the aliens are so powerful that they can create all life on Earth and fake all the evidence of evolution then you may as well call them gods anyway.

 

[craptakular]

If God exists why does he allow famine and rape etc?

Is this the work of the Beast?

Jason2 do you believe satan exists? If so, who is winning?

 

[Robosapien]

If God exists why does he allow famine and rape etc?

Is this the work of the Beast?

 

[Urgannagru]

If God exists why does he allow famine and rape etc?

Is this the work of the Beast?

Jason2 do you believe satan exists? If so, who is winning?

Satan, he's got Keith Moon and Bon Scott

 

[Castiel]

I think the other issue with your argument is that christians cannot believe that genesis is allegorical. Most writings seem to use evidence from the NT to assert that jesus referred back to genesis and the OT as a factual resource. Therefore, it stands that if jesus said it was true, then to a Christian it must also be true.

You are confusing Literal Creationists with Christianity in a broad sense. The vast majority of Christianity believes in the allegorical nature of Genesis and accepts and incorporates modern Evolutionarily Knowledge within their belief structure, it is not in anyway contradictory or in conflict with their Faith.

Conservative Evangelicalism and other minority movements such as the Millennial and Restorationist movements of The Latter Day Saints and Jehovah's Witnesses (Which I suspect Jason2 belongs to) largely maintain a Literalist approach to Genesis, but that is not the mainstream position and for the major Established Churches never was, as I explained earlier with references to Thomas Aquinas, Origen and Augustine.

 

[Castiel]

Totally agree (well, not totally because I'm not fully versed in half of what you said, but still, I can infer/discern the meaning). If only scripture was as explicit as your posts. Why is it allegorical then? Because they lacked adequate descriptive language back then/the meaning has become diluted as language evolved/it was wasn't intended to be written allegorically?

The position that Genesis is allegorical has a specific name, it is known as The Accommodation View. Simply put, it is the position that Genesis 1-2 was written in a simple allegorical fashion to make it easy for lay people of the time to understand complex ideas and concepts and also at the same to allow a more educated and interpretative state with the potential for complex theological discourse on the nature of existence and Man's relationship with God and the Universe around him.

Interestingly, one of the most influential theologians of Contemporary Conservative Evangelism and supporter of Biblical Inerrancy (upon which doctrine stands Creationism) was a man called Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield who said this;

“I do not think that there is any general statement in the Bible or any part of the account of creation, either as given in Genesis 1 and 2 or elsewhere alluded to, that need be opposed to evolution.”

Even one of the men most influential in US Conservative Christianity doesn't contend that Evolution is false, which significantly undermines the notion that Evolution is or even was in conflict with Christian belief.