The Religion Debate Thread

[Pirog]

Ok, the thing about the dinosaurs...what?! What kind onf question is that....how do you know he DIDN'T have them on the ark and they just died later? It's extremely possible...besides, if you READ the Bible, you will see that it took hundreds of years to build the ark...that's a big ark...

So the carbon-14 method is just a hoax then?
And how come the dinosaurs aren't mentioned in the bible?

Faith is what you say it is. Believing without seeing or evidence. That means that atheists and evolutionists have the most faith of anyone. I find it more logical that a Supreme Being designed and created the complex world and universe we know today. You believe that an explosion did it.

But I would never have the same faith in science that you do in god.
Science is simply to stick with the most believable theory until a better one comes around. I would never claim that I'm sure that the big bang created the world.

But how come god didn't mention the marvellous things that modern science has discovered? From a non-believing view it seems pretty strange that god didn't say anything about space and other planets...or that he had created cultures in parts of the world that wouldn't be discovered for decades.
Don't you find that strange?

Code: Select all

Don't start talking about how silly we are for believing something that's impossible and hasn't been proven by science.

Well...I do think it is silly to believe in Noah's ark.
Mankind has (or at least should have) come far enough to understand that it wouldn't be possible to do such a thing with the technology they had back then.
It may be very arrogant and narrow minded, but I must be honest about it.

Lenseth>>

And I don't serve God. I consider God more like a friend or even family. I think that is the difference between God and Satan. Satan wants you to serve him and become his slave while God wants you love him and be your own person. God might try to tell me this is the best way to go but in the end he lets me choose the path.

Fair enough

kroner>>>

I find this discussion interesting, and I hope I don't come off as angry or upset...because I'm not.
I save that for when I talk about American foreign politics

[Meh]

But you seem to have faith, Pirog and Kroner. In the lack of a higher power.

Life is a joke. A cruel joke pretty much of the time.
Belive what you will.
I don't belive in a punch lines without author.

[kroner]

i don't. a higher power is possible, i'll concede that. faith is blinding.

[Sho]

The ark's dimensions are clearly stated in the Bible. The ark was 300 cubits by 50 cubits by 30 cubits (length, width and height respectively), as stated in Genesis 6-11. The Biblical cubit is estimated to have been somewhere between 17 and 20 inches (45 to 50 centimeters). http://www.keyway.ca/htm2002/20020226.htm You're welcome to draw your own inferences, but I don't think too many animals could have been loaded on an ark that size. By the way, where do you see that it took hundreds of years to build the ark?

Okay, the Methuselah thing defeats me completely. The calendar would seem to be roughly equivalent to ours, as a man is said to have begat a son at 30 and lived another 430 years after that. Assuming human physiology to have been the same back then, Methuselah years would therefore seem to be at least half our years, so if the Bible is to be believed on this matter, people did live to their 200th birthdays. By the way, this was after the Flood. I must say I have great doubts that the Bible tells the full truth on this matter.

[Pirog]

Meh>>>

But you seem to have faith, Pirog and Kroner. In the lack of a higher power.

I'm with Kroner on this one....as usual
I would never rule out the possibility of a god creating us, but as a theory I find it much less believable than the scientific ones.

Some sort of life giving power or energy that could be labeled god is even quite possible in my view, but an active god like the ones in the more established religions is in my eyes highly unlikely.

Sho>>>

I must say I have great doubts that the Bible tells the full truth on this matter.

Yeah, according to science and logic the human bodies must have been very different for people to reach such ages.
The human body is actually not very balanced, so if can't support the body weight for much longer then our current life span before breaking down entirely...

[Meh]

I would never rule out the possibility of a god creating us, but as a theory I find it much less believable than the scientific ones.

Just remember it is not an "either or" kind of thing. Just because you do accept sceince does not mean you do not reject god. Science has not proven that god does not exist. Nor will it ever. That is not sciences' goal. Sciences's goal is to figure out HOW things work. The WHY question is totatally seperate.

Above all else that is the most important. Not seperating the HOW from the WHY leads to confusion such as zealots have.

Of course the non-belivers can get the same blinders.

Scientific evidence points to a planet wide upheaval of the planet venus. It sort of boiled over on a plantary scale.

Most Geologists cannot accept this because they belive that by accepeting this they are opening the door to the global flood on earth. Geology is dominated by the thought of gradule shifts and sedimentations.

Then you have the zeolots on the other side saying this proves the global flood on earth.

Both sides confuse the HOW with the WHY. Rational people can look at the sistuation and draw the conclusion that there is a different set of rules for Venus than Earth. Becuase Venus is Venus and Earth is Earth. Venus is hot and Earth is not.

So keep faith and the scientifc method VERY seperate or you just and anti-god primitive rather than a pro-god primitive.

[kroner]

Yeah, I agree completely with that.
But....
The WHY is a question we can never really answer because we will never have the necessary info. It's beyond the scope of our observations. There are many many possibilities. My argument is that organized religion assumes a very specific answer. In most religions, the explanation given is possible, but that doesn't make it right. We can't know if it's right. To assume it is leads to false conclusions. Sometimes those false conclusions can lead to terrible consequences.

[Pirog]

Meh>

Good point. Science and religion can function side by side...but I believe science and the bible can't...at least not for the ones taking the bible as 100 % truth.

The bible offers explanations to things that modern science has pretty much ruled out. Therefore the is a conflict.
You don't have to make something out of the conflict, and I for one respect people with faith as long as they respect me.

[Meh]

Most scientific journals offer explanations to things that modern science has pretty much ruled out. Therefore there is a conflict.

And I am referring to poor editing not disporving of previous theroies. Most journals have a hard time getting the story straight.

So all sceintfic journals should be reagarded as trash?

There are few writers. And even fewer good editors.

By picking on one book called the bible and pointing it out amoung all other works and saying it is wrong when you are looking at something that is not it's intended purpose is very one sided and poor analysis.

It is a waste of time to keep saying it because it is like saying that a car has poor dental habits.

[west]

i don't. a higher power is possible, i'll concede that. faith is blinding.

I don't think faith is blinding. I think it's liberating. Faith is believing something even if you can't prove it...not to be confused with ignorance, which is a wilful lack of comprehension.

The existentialist in me says that one needs an extraordinary amount of faith just to get through the day...even if you don't realize it.

When you perceive a chair, you implicitly trust your senses, which seem to tell you the chair is there, and what you perceive or assume is logic, which tell you that the chair is something you can sit on because it appears to be something solid, similar to things whose function appears to be for sitting upon. You also have faith in what you assume is your memory or past precedent, telling you that that looks like something upon which you have sat previously, or seen someone else sit upon previously.

You assume all these things without consciously acknowledging them, yet none are necessarily obvious or true. That takes faith.

[kroner]

there's a difference there. the chair, and the rest of the world as you percieve it, have time and time again followed certain laws. each time the chair continues to be as expected, it's another piece of experimental evidence that you've got the rules down correct. the likelyhood that the chair will suddenly cease to act as you expect decreases each time. by this point in your life, the probability from your perspective that the world around you follows all the laws you expect it to is very high.

in addition, assuming that the chair will behave is your best course of action even if you take into acount that maybe it suddenly won't. what's your other choice? there isn't really a course of action you could take to gaurd yourself against the chair's sudden misbehavior, so you'd best just assume in this case.

this is different from assuming a specific interpretation of god which has no significantly higher probability than anything else because you have no experimental evidence like you do with the chair. in addition there are times when assuming your beliefs are true can cause you to follow a harmful or at least unproductive course of action, like opposing gay rights, or killing those non believers, or not eating pork, or praying, the list goes on.

[Der Zauberer]

in addition there are times when assuming your beliefs are true can cause you to follow a harmful or at least unproductive course of action, like opposing gay rights, or killing those non believers, or not eating pork, or praying, the list goes on.

I hate to barge in on this developed world of discussion so abruptly, but you've got to start somewhere, I guess.

Anyway,

I wouldn't say praying is unproductive; at least according to popular science, prayer (and meditation) have significant mental and physical health benefits.

Not that that's an important point.

But, more relevantly, I don't agree that religion is the only "bad paradigm" for existence. (Actually it turns out I believe it's the perfect paradigm when the religion is perfect, which it unfortunately never is). Science is also a bad paradigm, because it ignores love and the protection of the weak and innocent. (If science were entirely your pardigm, in fact, opposing gay rights would probably be very heartily part of your wide agenda.) Love is a bad paradigm, too, because humans can't fully understand the nature of Love; at some point in our lives "love" as we understand it will fail us, as at another point, we will fail one or many whom we love.
The problem with all of these paradigms is that none of them fully explains life accurately. The only thing that does this is Truth.

That's where faith comes in. Neither science, nor any other human institution, can fully or accurately describe the mysteries of the world. So, whatever you belive, as long as it's human-created, you're going to make mistakes when you base your actions on those beliefs.

It is therefore useful to have beliefs that come from not from men, but from God, the Creator, if there is one (and I believe there is). Being a more or less traditional Presbyterian, I believe that what God tells us is found in the Bible (as well as other places, like nature, less explicitly of course). Now, the Bible can be misread--it has in fact never been read perfectly since Jesus himself interpreted the Scriptures (which was obviously before the Bible was recorded). That is why that particular source of the Truth is not successful in creating perfect human beings: the people who read it come to it with prejudices and pre-beliefs that corrupt their reading, and twist it into ill-messages, like Crusades or hate or non-pork-eating (though that might not be such a bad idea).

In short, whatever a person believes, it will lead him or her to do wrong things sometimes. If it is entirely earthly or temporal, there isn't a chance for perfection, because earthly and temporal things simply cannot explain everything. If it comes from God, then there still won't be perfection in the case of imperfect humans, but at least there will be a paradigm based on an objective and subjective Truth that can positively orient behavior in consideration to that Truth. And what better is there to which to orient one's behavior, than to the Truth, which cannot be provided by earthly sources alone?

That's my opinoin.

[Der Zauberer]

I meant to spell "opinion" wrong too.
Gosh there's been a lot in this discussion.
Priog's thing about the risk of preaching to Satan looks like an interesting question, though I didn't see the question itsself.

[swymir]

My personal opinion on religion. It's just a way to control ignorant masses.

With that said I know there is a name for this, but I'll be damned if I know what it is. I believe god created the universe than sat back and laughed as things folded out. God just wanted a really big reality TV show. Can't blame him immortality has to get pretty boring after awhile you need things to spice it up.

As for the bible I would never trust a damned thing in there. It is impossible to disipher the bible because it completely contradicts itself. You can interpret it in any way depending on what line you read. I'm sure if I looked har denough I could prove that penguins came to earth from a bowl of soup and sheep could fly.

[kroner]

Science is also a bad paradigm, because it ignores love and the protection of the weak and innocent.

If you believe that science fails to explain everything then you fail to understand what science is. Science is the process of finding the most probable explanation of the universe around you. Therefore by definition the scientific explanation is the one that's most probably true and best explains things. Any scienctific model which fails to explain certain things (such as our current one) is simply incomplete or containing errors.

Now we get to truth. There are many (nearly infinite) explanations for the universe many of which are plausible. The existence of a god is one of these possible configurations. unfortunately, there is only one correct explanation, one that is true. but by the very nature of the problem, it's impossible to know which one this is. now by believing uncompromisingly in a god is to accept this one possibility as truth. in doing so, you deny every other possibility. now of course this sets you up to probably be wrong.
now all of that was just talking about religious beliefs which do not contradict science. religious beliefs do have even a much smaller chance of being true, simply by merit of that fact that science is by definition the most probable explanation.

to clarify what you said, no i don't think that our scientific model is perfect, no i don't think that the existence of god is impossible, and no i don't claim that the truth knowable. my arguement doesn't rest on any of these points, simply on the fact that religion is a load of assumptions that's going to get you in trouble.