Talk Elections

This (https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=158801.msg3415315) inspired me to create this poll.

Concidering the fact that the Internet is dominated by atheists, the winner is obvious, but I wanted to do it anyway.

I've had a 1st grade science education, yes.

     Humans evolved from other life forms. More or less advanced is a value judgment and altogether irrelevant to the question at hand.

Is it 100,000 years or 10,000 years?  I guess I've heard the question posed both ways. There are quite a few young earth creationists who believe it's been only 6 or 7 thousand years - but many others that allow for both those cave paintings made tens of thousands of years ago and also believe in Adam and Eve.
I'll vote neither, as I think there may be a great deal of truth in both ideas: that humans have evolved and that they have been in some sense specially created by God.

I worded it the same way the survey did, so don't complain to me.

I answered with option 3, but I don't necessarily think that there has never been evolution in some form or that the earth is only a few thousand years old.  I also don't think the six days of Creation were necessarily literal 24-hour periods.

Lol, creationists on the Atlas Forum.

Lol, elitism on the Atlas Forum.

Is science now elitist?

No, but believing that someone having a different idea of the creation of the earth and refering to all of them as back asswards cavemen is.

Well if someone thinks human beings were placed on the earth fully formed as recently as the poll suggests you are backwards as it is contrary to every science that concerns itself with us, the earth and time.

Either way I sound like a moron and you sound like a fundie. No wonder Mikado left the atheism "faith".

sure it is, most top scientists are of the elite, and have historically been men, etc.

Nearly everyone uses the internet, so it can't be dominated by atheists.

Considering the small percentage of atheists in America is so small, most Americans who believe in evolution are theists.

Let's put it another way. Is the truth 'fundamentalist'? Should evolutionary science, genetics, biology, geology, archaeology, history and IIRC about 100-200 branches of science that support evolution and the age of the earth be thrown under a bus to satisfysome Christians who choose not to engage their brain when trying to reconcile our understanding of the world with their faith?

     Every significant branch of science has generated findings that require that the universe be millions if not billions of years old. If the fundamentalist Christians realized the implications of their world view, they'd forgo the use of modern technology and the rest of us would be spared the bother.

Either way, you are treating them in an intolerant way. Fundamentalists always look upon those who believe differently as inferior, and they hate everyone but themselves.

There only seems to be Fundie Christians and Fundie Atheists. Are there Fundie Jews/Hindus/Buddhists/Tribal Religions/Bahai'/Rastafarfians/Pagans?

Again I ask you; what is fundamentalist about truth? Is seeking to argue for that truth against ignorance 'intolerant'?

It's not truth from the perspective of much of the world.

It doesn't cease being truth because some people don't believe in it. When man was a hunter-gatherer it was true even though we had no comprehension of it.

Your choices aren't exactly mutually exclusive.

There are still people who think the Earth is flat, even though evidence to the contrary is widely available to them. The roundness of the world is not truth from their perspective - would you give the same defense to their ideas as you are giving creationists?

Whether or not they believe in evolution isn't the same as this. There are Christians that engage their brain a certain way and believe they can reconcile it by questioning the science behind evolution. There are others who just say "because the Bible told me so."  There are Christians that try to understand how their faith can make room for evolution. And then there are others who believe in evolution and don't think deeply about how to reconcile it with their faith. And still others who don't know if evolution is true and don't care.

That's essentially what I said. There are Christians who can reconcile every new understanding of the world with their faith and there are those who try to think around the issues because they choose not to. Therefore we have a number of Christians who invent their own 'science' - evolution isn't real, global warming isn't real, gays can 'change', women aren't 'legitimately raped', studies say this, studies say that. This extends into the social sciences too resulting in the contorting of history and archaeology to suit their means.

Essentially if there is a god and human beings reveal more and more about the world, then these Christians are collectively saying 'f-ck you' to their own gods creation.

Is Obamanation aware that a lot of the people who get bashed for believing in Creationism are also the people who openly say the Earth is only 10,000 years old?  A view so crazy that out of the hundreds of christians I've met less than a dozen of them believe it?

I think what is often missed by some christians regarding the whole evolutionary vs. creationist debate is that supporters of evolution aren't attacking them for believing in a supreme being in the cosmos who created everything.  That isn't a radical belief.  What is radical however is the belief that the Earth was created in 8,000 BC and that people were riding dinosaurs and other sh*t.

That, from what I gather, is what pro-evolution people bash the hell out of.  These people aren't made fun of relentlessly for suggesting a God made universe, they are made fun of for saying lunacies like the Earth is younger than some agrarian societies, among other things.  Creationism wouldn't be so made fun of it merely stated "God created the universe", which I consider a sensible view.  What isn't sensible is the conclusions Creationists come to defend such an idea (which includes taking the biblical account of "days" literally and again acting like the Earth is 8,000-10,000 years old) against what they assume to be a unanimously atheist evolution theory.  I never recalled reading anything about evolution theory itself in high school that suggested it precluded the existence of a Supreme Being, only that lifeforms evolved from other lifeforms.  Considering the order of the Creation in Genesis, I wouldn't consider it at all contradictory for one to believe in God and that evolution did take place.

I believe God created humans, yes, but I also believe in evolution completely.  And that the universe is billions of years of old, that there may be a multiverse and who knows how far back existence goes.

     These people have decided a priori that everything in the Bible is true in a literal sense. If their own experience contradicts their understanding of the Bible, they feel that they must reassess their experience rather than their interpretation, because they don't consider the possibility of misunderstanding the Bible. If God appeared before them and said "the Earth is actually 4.6 billion years old", they'd probably just assume that He was actually Satan in disguise.

I thought you said though they are not engaging their brains. By "thinking around the issues", they are engaging their brains.  If may be nonsense, but it requires a great deal of creativity.

Are you saying that global warming skepticism is an extension of Christian fundamentalism?  I think any correlation there has to do with the effects of political coalitions.

I believe God created everything we see today.

Your views are unacceptable in the year 2012. You need to be seriously educated.

Blonde Artist, if there is no God, our current model fails because it implies matter and energy created themselves ex nihlio.

     Not really, since atheism makes no claim about how they were created and there is no reason to suppose that creation by nothing and creation by God are the only two options.

Sure, I merely suggest that "God is the creator of the universe" is both respectable and plausible.

     I wouldn't disagree, though when you have an event whose causes are unknown, probably unknowable, and have no other apparent candidates for agent causes, it is difficult for "God did it" to not be both respectable and plausible.

With every year that passes Science gets closer to that moment. Our lifes are insignificant. The Universe is so big it would take 10m to the power 25 to reach the end of the Universe. Its unimaginable. It makes zero sense for an experiement to be created for something smaller than a crum.  

you are 0.0000000000000000000000001m^2 compared to the size of the Universe.

No.

There is the concept of the 'zero energy universe'

The formation of the universe from nothing does not violate the conservation of energy (Energy and mass cannot be destroyed; they can only become converted from one form to another) As I understand it, the gravitational potential energy of a gravitational field is what is called a  'negative energy'. When all the gravitational potential energy is added to all the other energy in the universe, it may in fact sum to zero. Alan Guth used this analogy; A rocket traveling into orbit uses thrust to overcome the gravity of the Earth’s mass. So in a way, the effect of the thrust is positive energy and the effect of gravity is negative energy.

Gravitational potential energy still requires matter. Your answer does not address the old Leibniz question: Why is there something rather than nothing?

Let's say we don't know the answer to that question - in what way does that make "God did it" an acceptable answer? Do you have any evidence for this claim? Do you even have evidence to suggest that this God thing exists in the first place? To the point, how is that answer fundamentally any different than "a wizard did it" or "Puff the Magic Dragon did it"?

Believing in a higher power and accepting evolution for the fact it is aren't mutually exclusive.

Evolution supposedly comes from random mutations, but where do these mutations come from? Suppose it comes from God. Suppose that human beings weren't finished mutating in their present form until 10,000 years ago.

More than the creation of man, I'm puzzled by Genesis's implication that the sky was created to separate land from water, implying that above the sky, there should be a sea. Perhaps the end of the universe is liquid? That would be a fascinating possibility.

I'm going to quote from William Lane Craig, since he can put this more eloquently than I can.

Ironically the quote you posted actually backs up Dibble's argument rather than yours. But I'll come to that. I'd forgotten about William Lane Craig. Him being disarmed in debates is usually a joy to watch :) If you look at the quote you posted, Craig has essentially set up his own condition which he then confirms. He says 'So what properties must such a cause of the universe possess?'

He is therefore assuming that the universe has a cause. Why assume that? Why not say the universe just 'is'? Cause is a human construct; it is our conscious desire to place purpose on events when sometimes events do not have a purpose. The universe does not have a conscience (perhaps...) Materials in a large mollecular cloud form the Sun and Earth and because the Sun undergoes fusion which generates heat and light which just so happens to make Earth livable so that we are here and we can all chat on the Atlas Forum doesn't need a cause for us. And it is a cause just for us as we are the only fully advanced conscious beings (that we know of) and therefore are the only assembly of molecules that hypothesises 'cause' in the first place. Some things simply are.

He then says; 'As the cause of space and time, it must transcend space and time.' Again, why make that assumption? Why are space and time even relevant prior to the Big Bang when there was no space and time prior to it?  So Craig sets up his own little hypothesis that he accepts as correct from the onset therefore he can run with it.

Look at it this way. Our understanding of 'cause' (or reason, or purpose or anything else) is a product of thought. Thought comes from the brain which is matter, and electrical impulse, which is energy. Thought exists as a process of the interaction of matter and energy. How can there be thought, and therefore cause without matter or energy or before it came into being? What about the 'unembodied mind' that Craig talks about? Well he's got rid of the matter if it's technically unembodied but he hasn't got rid of the energy. And of course Einstein's law says you can't technically get rid of either or one at the expense of the other as both are mutual.

Unembodied minds are not however entirely outside the concept of theory. There is the 'Boltzmann brain' for example which could be a by-product of an ever expanding universe in an infinite number of years from now. The idea being that on Earth we have an infinitely small proportion of the matter and energy in all the universe yet this has assembled itself into thinking beings capable of thought. In an infinitely large and expanding universe it is likely that particles, atoms, energy and so on could 'bounce' off each other or collect in such a way that it randonly creates a star, a pencil or a duck. It could create a 'brain' capable of consciousness and interaction with its surroundings that could possibly create a universe. Therefore we could have our 'god', but our god would still be formed out of pre existing energy and matter and not, as Craig tries to argue, transcend all this (because hey, god can do that right?) That 'god' could in fact be that duck, or that wizard or that magic dragon as Dibble argued.

There-in lies the problem that William Lane Craig has been taken to task on repeatedly; honesty. You can argue for the existance of a god. Indeed I gave a perfectly good reason above why you could. You can argue that from a deist point of view and apply science and theory and everything in between to make your point. But what Craig does (and needs prompting to even admit) is that he always argues from a theist point of view. He argues that the end result of all of this reasoning is that the cause of everything is the lone god of the Hebrews who impregnanted a virgin and tells people what to do with their penis. That is faith and faith alone. Don't disguise it as anything else.

This is the problem. People are just uneducated.

In rainforests with thousands of different species of trees you would expect thousands of predators yet each tree only has one predator. Why because the plant has adapted to survive through natural selection while the predator has evolved itself to become adaptive for that plant. By trying to survive the plant and predator have become dependent on each other as without they can't survive. The predator can't eat anything else. While the plant can't reproduce without the predator speading its seed.

Afleitch's response is good, but I'll give my own.

Craig makes a number of assertions for which he has no evidence. Most importantly, we can't be sure something without time is unchanging. If something it timeless, causality itself as we understand it may break down and it could change without cause. The essential problem is that we have not observed something that is 'timeless', and it's hard to state what something timeless would actually be like.

However, even if we accept his premises he violates his own mention of Occam's razor by adding intelligence to the first cause. An intelligent entity is extremely complex, and as such a personal intelligent entity makes the explanation quite complex. There isn't any evidence to suggest an intelligence is necessary for our universe to have come into existence - all you'd need is, for lack of a better term, a mindless 'quantum universe factory' based on our current scientific understanding.

It's also arguable that transcendence is the wrong term. A state of 'timelessness' may be simpler than a state that includes time. If you look at the world, complex things are built upon simpler things. Take any large animal for instance - the animal is made up of a number of different organs which have complex interactions, but with each organ only having specific functions that on their own are less complex. Each organ is made of cells, which are even less complex than the whole of the organ. Each cell is made of parts which again are less complex than the total cell. Eventually you get down to molecules, which are more complex than individual atoms, which are in turn more complex than the subatomic particles that they are built on. When you get to the bottom would you expect to find something complex or something that is fundamentally simple?

Finally, the plausibility of an answer has nothing to do with the acceptability of an answer. It is only the evidence indicating that an answer is true that matters in that department. If no answer has evidence, then the only acceptable answer is that we don't know. Until one such answer is found then any other answer is tantamount to guessing.





I think you're confusing predator/prey relations with symbiosis. Prey can very much survive and reproduce without predators, and in fact generally fare better without predators. The relation you're talking about describes a situation where both species benefit, which is symbiosis.

@afleitch

You misunderstand the word cause. Craig simply means cause in the sense that one thing makes another thing happen. Lightning starts a forest fire. There is no intelligent decision to start a fire, but lightning is the cause nonetheless.


From the Oxford English Dictionary: Transcend:be or go beyond the range or limits of.
Existing outside of space and time, is by definition transcending space and time.

As for the mind argument, I'd suggest that enough people have "experienced God" to suggest that the cause of the universe is some sort of mind and therefore minds can be immaterial. Of course that is getting way off topic, so we might want to start another thread on that one.

Yet countless numbers have not 'experienced god'. Or interpret it in countless ways. Given that human experience is limited by the very matter I talked about, then what's to say god isn't a human construct?