ROFLROFL yoo tink dets beddd....Rememba tha time Hegamboa said Einstein was a creationist and 6 people instantly replied to him from ChumpDumper to Gtownspur telling him what a giant he was?
*****calling Hegamboa For A Dense, High Vocabulary, Scientifically Sound Comeback*********
*****calling Hegamboa For A Dense, High Vocabulary, Scientifically Sound Comeback*********
*****calling Hegamboa For A Dense, High Vocabulary, Scientifically Sound Comeback*********
Religion 101: Zeitgeist
Religion, the biggest bunch of bull to ever be followed by sooooooooo many ing SHEEP!
BAAAAA BAAAAA
The truth is constant.
How you percieve it, is the variable.
There is a God. If you want to define God as a ball of energy, fine. If you want to call God Yehew, or Allah, whatever. It still doesn't change what God is. God is still God. God will always be God. If you want to place your head in the sand, and pretend that nothing beyond ourselves exists, by all means. It doesn't change the existance of God. Somethings in life are just true. I don't know why or how,nor will I attempt to expain them beyond my life expierences. The only thing I can do is let my actions speak for themselves.
Last edited by remingtonbo2001; 05-14-2008 at 02:16 PM.
Is this how you start intellectual conversations?
Your genius shines.
Don Quixote started with a hostile post to begin with, others responded in kind.
We could have a very good conversation about all this, but there is too much passion on both sides to have a rational conversation.
I believe! If that makes me childish, then all for the better!
you might want to go check commandment #1.
Am I the only one who found calling God, Ali, funny?
No
Am I the only one who found calling God, Ali, funny?
Am I the only one who found calling God, Ali, funny?
Oh com'n guys. It was 5 AM. Cut me some slack.
I couldn't sleep due to storms passing through.
Ok, I changed it. Are we happy now?
Us smart fellers, knew what you were talkin about
Oh com'n guys. It was 5 AM. Cut me some slack.
I couldn't sleep due to storms passing through.
Ok, I changed it. Are we happy now?
aren't you a sikh?
never thought athiest would used a faith based argument against religion.
I've been mulling your post for a few days now, and thinking of how to respond. I tend to agree with much of it. Judging from it, you seem to be in the "fideist" camp -- you begin with faith, and work outward from there. This is not a bad thing, for you would join Kierkeggard and Luther in this school. My own approach tends to be more evidential -- I start with the rational reasons for belief and go from there.
I do have a couple of questions, though. (1) Given your skepticism over our ability to "prove" God (beyond a reasonable doubt), how can you justify your first statement, "there is a God"? What makes you so sure?
And (2) What is your basis for knowing that something outside ourselves indeed exists? You and I agree that there is "something out there," namely God, but how did you come to know this? Did you travel outside the universe? Who told you?
I expect a 3-page typed response on my desk by Monday morning.
I've been mulling your post for a few days now, and thinking of how to respond. I tend to agree with much of it. Judging from it, you seem to be in the "fideist" camp -- you begin with faith, and work outward from there. This is not a bad thing, for you would join Kierkeggard and Luther in this school. My own approach tends to be more evidential -- I start with the rational reasons for belief and go from there.
I do have a couple of questions, though. (1) Given your skepticism over our ability to "prove" God (beyond a reasonable doubt), how can you justify your first statement, "there is a God"? What makes you so sure?
And (2) What is your basis for knowing that something outside ourselves indeed exists? You and I agree that there is "something out there," namely God, but how did you come to know this? Did you travel outside the universe? Who told you?
I expect a 3-page typed response on my desk by Monday morning.
It took you 10 days to respond to that?
Einstein's atheism doesn't prove or disprove God, that would be indeed a fallacy. Einstein's letter, among other quotes from him, is relevant in the context of the theism vs atheism debates, where theists persistently tried to claim Einstein as one of their own, as a way of saying that highly intelligent, educated, logical people could also be theists.
I don't think that's quite so. There are different reasons to have some kind religious belief. Science won't comfort you in difficult times or ease your fear of dying, if you have it. But if you are looking for answers about how the universe works or how to interact with it, science will work much better for you than religion. There are some religious claims that may very well fall outside of science's scope, but that's not because those claims are based on faith. Other claims fall right into the scientific field, how can the origin of the universe, the solar system or life on earth, for example, not be scientific questions?
About faith being immune to all proof, one thing is to believe in something without any backing evidence and another, very different, thing is to believe in something against existing evidence. There are many fields in which religion had to back down in face of contradicting evidence provided by science. But imagine the opposite, imagine that science comes up with strong evidence for the existence of God, its role in creation and his involvement in everyday life. Do you think that religion would dismiss this evidence as biased, or irrelevant, because religion and science are “non overlapping magisteria”?
Scientists do not claim to have proven that God doesn't exists. They say that resorting to the idea of a God doesn't answer any question (in fact it increases the number of questions), that there is no need for a God to explain the universe and there is no evidence of a God. But they don't say that is a scientific fact that God doesn't exists because such a claim would be unscientific. Absence of evidence does not imply evidence of absence.
Off course, that doesn't mean that you can only be a theist or a 50-50 agnostic, you can assign different probabilities to each hypothesis.
Another thing, a bit off topic: Einstein didn't discover that the universe is expanding. It was Edwin Hubble (perhaps some others as well) that noted the red shifting in the electromagnetic spectra of the stars in other galaxies. Einstein, in fact, refused at first to believe that the universe was not static. He even theorized about a new force, a kind of anti gravity that would maintain the universe static and prevented it from collapsing under its own gravity.
If anything, science thrives in explaining the HOW's of nature. It is in this very field that it blows religion out of the water, both explaining and predicting.
Science doesn't claim to have a complete and definite knowledge of the universe, that at ude is more prevalent among mystics. It acknowledges the gaps and it works in closing them. It also accepts that tomorrow it can come upon an observation that disproves some previously firmly held idea, and scientists will be willing to modify or throw away that idea if the evidence requires it. A certain bit of knowledge is not nearly as important as the way that knowledge is constructed, the scientific method, because that's what enables science to advance.
And, off course, even if science couldn't explain a single thing, that would never “prove” that religion can.
Saludos.
Overall, a good post. Allow me to make a couple of comments.
(1) I did not mean to say that scientists believe they have disproven God. I was writing in response to people (non-scientists) that think that science has done indeed done so. I am skeptical of that claim, or even of our ability to know when or if science has finally disproven his existence.
(2) I've always been ambivalent about Einstein's beliefs -- I've heard both that he was a believer and an agnostic. In the end, it doesn't matter. For every atheistic scientist out there, I can produce an equally smart and talented theist. So I would advise theists against "claiming Einstein as one of us." What is relevant, to me, is the ramifications of the expanding universe (which he predicted, not discovered, thanks for the clarification).
and (3) I don't mean to defend all religion. Indeed, there is a lot of bad religion and bad theology out there. My intent is to defend good religion based on the Christian Bible. Mankind has misinterpreted the Bible, and put their flawed understanding of it against new scientific discoveries -- this happened when Galileo was tried for heresy by the Catholic Church in the 17th century. Did Galileo's work contradict prevailing theology of the time? Yes. Did he contradict the Bible? No. In fact, Galileo was a believer! So, my task is not to defend every strange view held by every religious group. My task is to look at the results of science and interpret them against the backdrop of God's creation and Word.
A good, thoughtful post.
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