Reply With Quote
We probably agree because we support the 2 best teams in the conference.
DD
I don't agree with you on much, but you are spot on here.
The issue is that many religious folk pretend to have a monopoly on truth. The reality is they can't prove anything and they are no closer to knowing the truth than anyone else. If they would humble themselves and admit that yes they don't actually know for certain that what they believe is true I reckon would have far less problems in this world. The problem comes about because Christianity, Judaism, Islam, etc. all have a need and desire to be right....to be the exclusive truth.....to be God's only chosen people.
We probably agree because we support the 2 best teams in the conference.
DD
I'm still undecided as to whom I will be voting for. I'm hoping to have some epiphany while in the voting booth and making my decision there. Doubt it will really happen like that, but if push comes to shove I'll likely vote third party.
I just feel, like many, that neither candidate truly has the solutions that are needed to secure the long term interests of this country.
I'm a social Democrat, but mostly conservative personally. My political views are such a mish mash of the candidates stances that it makes it hard to get a good grasp on things. Making priorities is tough though, considering I put so many things in high regard.
I'll hopefully be voting Friday morning.
We don't know yet. Actually we don't really know if there was a big bang at all. And that's the rational position to take when you don't know something.
So, what's your point again?
I don't know the definitive truth about God. I believe Christianity, and I know, broadly, what Christianity claims about God.
Christianity claims that people who reject the Gospel of Jesus Christ end up separated from him eternally. I can read the Bible and it says that. Essentially all Christians who have read the Bible over two millenia have come to the same conclusion. So, I know with high confidence that that is the orthodox Christian doctrine. And I believe Christianity, so I trust that doctrine is correct.
But I don't know it the same way that I know that the sky is blue.
Do you honestly believe that the majority of the world is going to because they don't follow Christianity?
Do you think the Hindus children who have never heard of Jesus are going to ?
What about the people who live on Islands in the pacific that have no contact with outside civilization and have never heard of Jesus, are they going to ?
This is why religion is such a joke....they are so concerned with making their own mythos.....RIGHT....that they fail to look inside at their own religious insecurities and inaccuracies.
DD
The statement that Christianity and Islam produce a stagnation of thinking reflects ignorance of history.
You are confused about science. Scientific theories are frameworks that both account for many observations and generate problems of how other observations can be accounted for. You think to discredit science by pointing out one of the problems, when instead, one of the triumphs of the scientific method is differentiating between what is and is not accounted for combined with a process for studying problems, often solving them and adding to our technology. A successful scientific theory is not one that explains everything, but one in which problems are clearly identified and successfully solved.
Are there problems? Yes, there are. Do they invalidate the theory? Not as long as progress can be made on the problems as a whole. Picking out an individual problem that hasn't been solved and that appears to be difficult isn't much of an argument.
Anyway, the entropy argument is dopey. The sun provides plenty of energy.
No it doesn't.....it vacilates based upon who is in power at the time, at one point Islam was leading the world in intellectual pursuits, but now that the far right of their party has taken such a strangle hold it is actually stopping intellectual pursuits if it contradicts the Koran.....
Christianity the same thing......remember the Dark Ages and the Spanish Inquisition?
Scientists were killed and persecuted as heretics.....
Religion is an outdated conduit to a time when man was ignorant....why in the world people would turn to the uneducated as knowing more about God 2000 years ago than we do now is beyond me and it is intellectually bankrupt.
DD
Man you're on a roll today.
It's exactly religion's incessant need to be the exclusive truth that causes so many problems around the world. ExtraStout is one of the few devoutly religious Christians I've met who has actually humbled himself to admit that he doesn't really know that what he believes is true. That's probably why he is so well liked on this board.
If you cannot admit that what you have faith in is not something you can say definitively is true there is no way you can have a rational discussion about anything important.
YES! YES! YES! Spread the word, brother! We need more nonbelievers.
Einstein said "God doesn't play dice with the universe". What does that dude know anyway?
Call me when the amazing discoveries in the unstable particle physics realm begin to impact the relatively stable interactions of molecules in the normal, observable, reaction set realm.
Hey I'm one of sciences' biggest proponents having largely dedicated my life to scientific endeavors. You're preaching to the choir with that ill-attempted jab. I'm the first to acknowledge that there are many things left to be discovered. IMO however, the closer we look, the more evidence we will find that it was designed.
The difference between us is that I don't accept other scientists conclusions as fact without questioning the data of their experiments myself. In certain fields I have the cognitive ability, and critical thinking skills to interpret the data myself. Many times the analyses are spot on but you know what? Other times the data does not support their claims... Why do you think so many preconceived notions are always being debunked by further studies??... Because someone, at somepoint made some unsubstantiated claims along the way.
Exactly.
Major religions as we know them today are perhaps an outdated conduit. We will likely see a shift in religious thought away from religions that rely on myths, fairy tales, and rituals. Science can never answer certain questions about life, and people will invariably look to something beyond themselves to explain those things.
Exactly the religions today are no different than the Romans, Babylonians, Egyptians, Summarians, Greeks, and Pagans that came before it.
In fact, they borrowed from the mythos in all of them to create their own mythos.
I mean it is ok for people to want to believe......but for anyone to sit back and claim something is the truth without actually knowing it is....is not faith....it is ignorance.
DD
You're not actually arguing a point here. Scientists don't accept other scientist's findings as facts. What the do you think the purpose of the scientific community is? It's to re-examine, re-investigate, and scrutinize the theories of others so we can come up with the best answer possible.
To summarize what I said earlier in the thread:
There is no definitive doctrine in Christianity regarding the fate of the unevangelized because the Bible is not clear about it. All there is is speculation. It is only clear about those who are evangelized and make a choice.
I do not believe that the unevangelized are condemned with no opportunity, but that is simply a personal belief with no support one way or the other in Christianity.
P.S. Your statement about the New Testament canon's being defined at the Council of Nicea is false. This is a very popular lie. The other popular lie is that Nicea was about Gnosticism, and that the Gnostic texts were thrown out of the Bible there. While I cannot show you objective truth about God, I certainly show you objective proof that those kind of statements are wildly inaccurate and demonstrate an ignorance of church history not written in a fiction book by Dan Brown.
Then what was done at the Council of Nicaea?
Wow, you're so far off I don't even know where to start.
Science accepts that we don't know how certain things work, and doesn't automatically assigns that unknown to an imaginary en y. There's no such thing as faith in science. You don't 'hope' something backs up your theory. Actual tests are conducted and either you prove or disprove your theory. If tests cannot be done at the present time, then you present your theory to the world, and wait for somebody to be able to either prove or disprove your theory. A theory is nothing more than an attempt to explain an occurrence with what we know so far. It's not a scientific law and not a fact, nobody tries to pass it as one. As we evolve, technology advances, or we get new elements to work with, theories scrutinized again and either rejected, or when all components of the theory are factually tested, promoted to a scientific law. That's why whatever you build from scientific laws, you're building over factual, verified, sound science.
Your DNA/RNA example is entirely erroneous, because you are pre-assuming that all the material we're working with is what's here on our planet. And all we know about those material is what we know in the present. And that's where you're going completely away from science.
Actually the real truth about the formation of the New Testament as we know it today would shock and astound many Christians.
I'm sure you still believe that there were no political motivations involved in its formation...
Easiest search ever
The LHC was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) with the intention of testing various predictions of high-energy physics, including the existence of the hypothesized Higgs boson and of the large family of new particles predicted by supersymmetry.
It is theorized that the collider will produce the elusive Higgs boson, the last unobserved particle among those predicted by the Standard Model. The verification of the existence of the Higgs boson would shed light on the mechanism of electroweak symmetry breaking, through which the particles of the Standard Model are thought to acquire their mass. In addition to the Higgs boson, new particles predicted by possible extensions of the Standard Model might be produced at the LHC. More generally, physicists hope that the LHC will enhance their ability to answer the following questions:[12]
Is the Higgs mechanism for generating elementary particle masses in the Standard Model indeed realised in nature?[13]
If so, how many Higgs bosons are there, and what are their masses?
Are electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force just different manifestations of a single unified force, as predicted by various Grand Unification Theories?
Why is gravity so many orders of magnitude weaker than the other three fundamental forces? See also Hierarchy problem.
Is Supersymmetry realised in nature, implying that the known Standard Model particles have supersymmetric partners?
Will the more precise measurements of the masses and decays of the quarks continue to be mutually consistent within the Standard Model?
Why are there apparent violations of the symmetry between matter and antimatter? See also CP-violation.
What is the nature of dark matter and dark energy?
Are there extra dimensions[14], as predicted by various models inspired by string theory, and can we detect them?
Of the possible discoveries the LHC might make, only the discovery of the Higgs particle is relatively uncontroversial, but even this is not considered a certainty. Stephen Hawking said in a BBC interview that "I think it will be much more exciting if we don't find the Higgs. That will show something is wrong, and we need to think again. I have a bet of one hundred dollars that we won't find the Higgs." In the same interview Hawking mentions the possibility of finding superpartners and adds that "whatever the LHC finds, or fails to find, the results will tell us a lot about the structure of the universe."[15]
Oh really?The Islamic civilization which had at the outset been creative and dynamic in dealing with issues, began to struggle to respond to the challenges and rapid changes it faced during the 12th and 13th centuries onwards towards the end of the Abbassid rule. Despite a brief respite with the new Ottoman rule, the decline continued until its eventual collapse and subsequent stagnation in the 20th century.
Tolerance about different ideas reduced and faded, with some seminaries systematically forbidding speculative philosophy, while polemic debates also appear to have been abandoned after the 13th century. A significant intellectual shift in Islamic philosophy is perhaps demonstrated by al-Ghazali's late 11th century polemic work The Incoherence of the Philosophers, which lambasted metaphysical philosophy in favor of the primacy of scripture, and was later criticized in The Incoherence of the Incoherence by Averroes. Ins utions of science comprising Islamic universities, libraries (including the House of Wisdom), observatories, and hospitals, were later destroyed by foreign invaders like the Crusaders and particularly the Mongols, and were rarely promoted again in the devastated regions.[208] Not only wasn't new publishing equipment accepted but also wide illiteracy overwhelmed the devastated lands, especially in Mesopotamia.
What the heck are you babbling about?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Council_of_Nicaea
Just because you don't like it does not make it true......
Thinking someone got the info from Dan Brown is beyond funny......maybe you should study the issue more and educate yourself.
For fun you can start here with some of the books that were not put into the Bible:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banned_from_the_Bible
DD
Last edited by DaDakota; 10-23-2008 at 11:03 AM.
Theories are not created on faith AT ALL. They're created from logical thinking and based on both sound science and/or another theory.
You missed the point of my analogy.
How big is your envelope?
You're suggesting the sun can preferentially focus the necessary entropic requirements to the micrometer scale? Again, there is a flux limitation inherent to the law of entropy... You wish it to disappear because it doesn't suit your argument? Ummm no.
This doesn't even address the pH reversals required in building the A,T,G,C,(U) bases, the sugar backbones and the addition of phospate groups. Nor does it address how such an unstable molecule is supposed to exist long enough for replication to proceed without the 20 plus stabilization enzymes that hold it together. Enzymes which are made from DNA itself! Enzymes which require about 90 other additional enzymes for the transcription/translation process to even proceed. Another chicken-before the egg dilemma.
What natural order Science defined? I don't follow you. Science is not a cult.
I don't subscribe to the idea that, currently, the Christian belief system wishes to suppress the Scientific movement. I mean, during Galileo days? sure. The inquisition? sure. But not today.
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)
Posting Permissions
