Afterlife stuff

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Ok like I said earlier we could do this all year, so I'll just make one last point.

You're also the chemist, so you probably understand better than me. But surely order or chaos is relative ?

Some systems do tend towards equilibrium others to chaos, some are cyclic.

Ok so there is entrophy, it seems to indicate chaos right ?

Doesn't gravity create large scale 'order' in the universe ? Our earth goes round the sun pretty regular doesn't it ? If it didn't would we be here ?

Evolution, biology, the various chemical processes ? A plant growing, is that not order out of chaos ? The biological processes working together to create order ? Only as we age an die do we slowly again once lose to entrophy, but by reproducing we again get to create order no ?

Some chemical processes are fairly ordered no ? The rate of radioactive decay ? Inert elements like gold ?

So it depends on your definition or perspective. Are you arguing everything is chaos ?

Of course you can say god created the laws of physics and therefore he created order, but thats another unproveable self referential statement that again adds no value. Its a self fullfilling prophercy, we exist, so god must exist. What if we are just one toss of a billion dice ? What if there are a trillion parallel universes with different rules of physics ?

 

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Has anyone seen Bill Maher's movie "Religulous" ?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdkyLrDpaUg

Or George Carlin's sketch ?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeSSwKffj9o
and
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lm-Mi1_lLo0

I am going to put my gloves away because no matter what arguments or facts and logic you throw in to believers, they always play the faith card.

So I will have fun watching these vids and hope you guys have fun too.

*eats popcorn*

 

No, not really... all systems left on their own tend towards chaos, including cyclic things.

And eventually, the earth will likely fall into the sun, fall away from the sun, or the sun will change to consume the earth.

Gravity is one of the "weak forces".

That's my point! It's order where there ought to be chaos.

Still, even chaos will eventually break things down, including us. But the fact that there was order to begin with logically points towards a Creator. That's part of my "logic" that you don't/didn't see.

Yes, and that order and design is what I find fascinating.

No; everything tends towards chaos, not order. Everything ISN'T chaos... everything moves towards chaos - becomes more chaotic.

True... but if you were to study those laws and processes, you'd see the amazing order and design there seems to be. At least, I think so. And you'll find plenty of scientists who agree with me on that basis, despite what you might have heard from the media.

 

Ah, throwing out the videos instead of addressing what's been discussed, eh, m3lt? Fail.

That's because you can't present any facts that disprove the existence of God... no more than I can prove His existence.

Go ahead, m3lt... make fun of Him (as well as me). You don't have to answer to me, and if He doesn't exist, you don't have to answer to anyone.

 

"Scientists" believing in intelligent design ?

Well, we need to know what kind of "scientists" we are here talking about first.

And for the intelligent design theory, that is presuming that something complex and orderly has its origin from something more complex than it that designed and stablished its order and functions...
So... who designed the designer ?

Because if something complex has to be from a higher complexity source, then its ad infitum rule also applies and we go back to square 0.

I must resist now to post more... arghh...

Fight more me brothers!
*faints due to mixing popcorn and ketchup*


EDIT: You posted before me. But I will ellaborate a better post then.
*raises from the dead*

 

This is my all time fave !

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3ztfU7WbH0

or here at 17:00
http://www.stewartlee.co.uk/youtube/tmwrnj2-1.htm

 

Oh, there are plenty. There are also quite a large number who don't believe ID and evolution are mutually exclusive.

Your question is logically flawed; you assume all things need a creator.

 

I was reading your link and it quotes:

"Since God is before space, time, and matter, the issue of causality does not apply to Him."


Short, easy and digestible for the average joe. God does not need explanation because... well, he is god!
And if you want to dispute, the bible also confirms it!
Who would thought that the bible, the word of god would confirm all those things ?

______________________________________________

Consider this piece of naan bread... Genius! rofl!

 

This is an article from Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne about Intelligent Design in schools and in general terms.
___________

It sounds so reasonable, doesn't it? Such a modest proposal. Why not teach "both sides" and let the children decide for themselves? As President Bush said, "You're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes." At first hearing, everything about the phrase "both sides" warms the hearts of educators like ourselves.
One of us spent years as an Oxford tutor and it was his habit to choose controversial topics for the students' weekly essays. They were required to go to the library, read about both sides of an argument, give a fair account of both, and then come to a balanced judgment in their essay. The call for balance, by the way, was always tempered by the maxim, "When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly half way between. It is possible for one side simply to be wrong."
As teachers, both of us have found that asking our students to analyse controversies is of enormous value to their education. What is wrong, then, with teaching both sides of the alleged controversy between evolution and creationism or "intelligent design" (ID)? And, by the way, don't be fooled by the disingenuous euphemism. There is nothing new about ID. It is simply creationism camouflaged with a new name to slip (with some success, thanks to loads of tax-free money and slick public-relations professionals) under the radar of the US Constitution's mandate for separation between church and state.
Why, then, would two lifelong educators and passionate advocates of the "both sides" style of teaching join with essentially all biologists in making an exception of the alleged controversy between creation and evolution? What is wrong with the apparently sweet reasonableness of "it is only fair to teach both sides"? The answer is simple. This is not a scientific controversy at all. And it is a time-wasting distraction because evolutionary science, perhaps more than any other major science, is bountifully endowed with genuine controversy.
Among the controversies that students of evolution commonly face, these are genuinely challenging and of great educational value: neutralism versus selectionism in molecular evolution; adaptationism; group selection; punctuated equilibrium; cladism; "evo-devo"; the "Cambrian Explosion"; mass extinctions; interspecies competition; sympatric speciation; sexual selection; the evolution of sex itself; evolutionary psychology; Darwinian medicine and so on. The point is that all these controversies, and many more, provide fodder for fascinating and lively argument, not just in essays but for student discussions late at night.
Intelligent design is not an argument of the same character as these controversies. It is not a scientific argument at all, but a religious one. It might be worth discussing in a class on the history of ideas, in a philosophy class on popular logical fallacies, or in a comparative religion class on origin myths from around the world. But it no more belongs in a biology class than alchemy belongs in a chemistry class, phlogiston in a physics class or the stork theory in a sex education class. In those cases, the demand for equal time for "both theories" would be ludicrous. Similarly, in a class on 20th-century European history, who would demand equal time for the theory that the Holocaust never happened?
So, why are we so sure that intelligent design is not a real scientific theory, worthy of "both sides" treatment? Isn't that just our personal opinion? It is an opinion shared by the vast majority of professional biologists, but of course science does not proceed by majority vote among scientists. Why isn't creationism (or its incarnation as intelligent design) just another scientific controversy, as worthy of scientific debate as the dozen essay topics we listed above? Here's why.
If ID really were a scientific theory, positive evidence for it, gathered through research, would fill peer-reviewed scientific journals. This doesn't happen. It isn't that editors refuse to publish ID research. There simply isn't any ID research to publish. Its advocates bypass normal scientific due process by appealing directly to the non-scientific public and - with great shrewdness - to the government officials they elect.
The argument the ID advocates put, such as it is, is always of the same character. Never do they offer positive evidence in favour of intelligent design. All we ever get is a list of alleged deficiencies in evolution. We are told of "gaps" in the fossil record. Or organs are stated, by fiat and without supporting evidence, to be "irreducibly complex": too complex to have evolved by natural selection.
In all cases there is a hidden (actually they scarcely even bother to hide it) "default" assumption that if Theory A has some difficulty in explaining Phenomenon X, we must automatically prefer Theory B without even asking whether Theory B (creationism in this case) is any better at explaining it. Note how unbalanced this is, and how it gives the lie to the apparent reasonableness of "let's teach both sides". One side is required to produce evidence, every step of the way. The other side is never required to produce one iota of evidence, but is deemed to have won automatically, the moment the first side encounters a difficulty - the sort of difficulty that all sciences encounter every day, and go to work to solve, with relish.
What, after all, is a gap in the fossil record? It is simply the absence of a fossil which would otherwise have documented a particular evolutionary transition. The gap means that we lack a complete cinematic record of every step in the evolutionary process. But how incredibly presumptuous to demand a complete record, given that only a minuscule proportion of deaths result in a fossil anyway.
The equivalent evidential demand of creationism would be a complete cinematic record of God's behaviour on the day that he went to work on, say, the mammalian ear bones or the bacterial flagellum - the small, hair-like organ that propels mobile bacteria. Not even the most ardent advocate of intelligent design claims that any such divine videotape will ever become available.
Biologists, on the other hand, can confidently claim the equivalent "cinematic" sequence of fossils for a very large number of evolutionary transitions. Not all, but very many, including our own descent from the bipedal ape Australopithecus. And - far more telling - not a single authentic fossil has ever been found in the "wrong" place in the evolutionary sequence. Such an anachronistic fossil, if one were ever unearthed, would blow evolution out of the water.
As the great biologist J B S Haldane growled, when asked what might disprove evolution: "Fossil rabbits in the pre-Cambrian." Evolution, like all good theories, makes itself vulnerable to disproof. Needless to say, it has always come through with flying colours.
Similarly, the claim that something - say the bacterial flagellum - is too complex to have evolved by natural selection is alleged, by a lamentably common but false syllogism, to support the "rival" intelligent design theory by default. This kind of default reasoning leaves completely open the possibility that, if the bacterial flagellum is too complex to have evolved, it might also be too complex to have been created. And indeed, a moment's thought shows that any God capable of creating a bacterial flagellum (to say nothing of a universe) would have to be a far more complex, and therefore statistically improbable, entity than the bacterial flagellum (or universe) itself - even more in need of an explanation than the object he is alleged to have created.
If complex organisms demand an explanation, so does a complex designer. And it's no solution to raise the theologian's plea that God (or the Intelligent Designer) is simply immune to the normal demands of scientific explanation. To do so would be to shoot yourself in the foot. You cannot have it both ways. Either ID belongs in the science classroom, in which case it must submit to the discipline required of a scientific hypothesis. Or it does not, in which case get it out of the science classroom and send it back into the church, where it belongs.
In fact, the bacterial flagellum is certainly not too complex to have evolved, nor is any other living structure that has ever been carefully studied. Biologists have located plausible series of intermediates, using ingredients to be found elsewhere in living systems. But even if some particular case were found for which biologists could offer no ready explanation, the important point is that the "default" logic of the creationists remains thoroughly rotten.
There is no evidence in favour of intelligent design: only alleged gaps in the completeness of the evolutionary account, coupled with the "default" fallacy we have identified. And, while it is inevitably true that there are incompletenesses in evolutionary science, the positive evidence for the fact of evolution is truly massive, made up of hundreds of thousands of mutually corroborating observations. These come from areas such as geology, paleontology, comparative anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, ethology, biogeography, embryology and - increasingly nowadays - molecular genetics.
The weight of the evidence has become so heavy that opposition to the fact of evolution is laughable to all who are acquainted with even a fraction of the published data. Evolution is a fact: as much a fact as plate tectonics or the heliocentric solar system.
Why, finally, does it matter whether these issues are discussed in science classes? There is a case for saying that it doesn't - that biologists shouldn't get so hot under the collar. Perhaps we should just accept the popular demand that we teach ID as well as evolution in science classes. It would, after all, take only about 10 minutes to exhaust the case for ID, then we could get back to teaching real science and genuine controversy.
Tempting as this is, a serious worry remains. The seductive "let's teach the controversy" language still conveys the false, and highly pernicious, idea that there really are two sides. This would distract students from the genuinely important and interesting controversies that enliven evolutionary discourse. Worse, it would hand creationism the only victory it realistically aspires to. Without needing to make a single good point in any argument, it would have won the right for a form of supernaturalism to be recognised as an authentic part of science. And that would be the end of science education in America.
Arguments worth having ...
The "Cambrian Explosion"
Although the fossil record shows that the first multicellular animals lived about 640m years ago, the diversity of species was low until about 530m years ago. At that time there was a sudden explosion of many diverse marine species, including the first appearance of molluscs, arthropods, echinoderms and vertebrates. "Sudden" here is used in the geological sense; the "explosion" occurred over a period of 10m to 30m years, which is, after all, comparable to the time taken to evolve most of the great radiations of mammals. This rapid diversification raises fascinating questions; explanations include the evolution of organisms with hard parts (which aid fossilisation), the evolutionary "discovery" of eyes, and the development of new genes that allowed parts of organisms to evolve independently.
The evolutionary basis of human behaviour
The field of evolutionary psychology (once called "sociobiology") maintains that many universal traits of human behaviour (especially sexual behaviour), as well as differences between individuals and between ethnic groups, have a genetic basis. These traits and differences are said to have evolved in our ancestors via natural selection. There is much controversy about these claims, largely because it is hard to reconstruct the evolutionary forces that acted on our ancestors, and it is unethical to do genetic experiments on modern humans.
Sexual versus natural selection
Although evolutionists agree that adaptations invariably result from natural selection, there are many traits, such as the elaborate plumage of male birds and size differences between the sexes in many species, that are better explained by "sexual selection": selection based on members of one sex (usually females) preferring to mate with members of the other sex that show certain desirable traits. Evolutionists debate how many features of animals have resulted from sexual as opposed to natural selection; some, like Darwin himself, feel that many physical features differentiating human "races" resulted from sexual selection.
The target of natural selection
Evolutionists agree that natural selection usually acts on genes in organisms - individuals carrying genes that give them a reproductive or survival advantage over others will leave more descendants, gradually changing the genetic composition of a species. This is called "individual selection". But some evolutionists have proposed that selection can act at higher levels as well: on populations (group selection), or even on species themselves (species selection). The relative importance of individual versus these higher order forms of selection is a topic of lively debate.
Natural selection versus genetic drift
Natural selection is a process that leads to the replacement of one gene by another in a predictable way. But there is also a "random" evolutionary process called genetic drift, which is the genetic equivalent of coin-tossing. Genetic drift leads to unpredictable changes in the frequencies of genes that don't make much difference to the adaptation of their carriers, and can cause evolution by changing the genetic composition of populations. Many features of DNA are said to have evolved by genetic drift. Evolutionary geneticists disagree about the importance of selection versus drift in explaining features of organisms and their DNA. All evolutionists agree that genetic drift can't explain adaptive evolution. But not all evolution is adaptive.
Further reading
www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc
User-friendly guide to evolution
www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/jacNR.pdf
Critique of Intelligent Design movement, published in New Republic
Climbing Mount Improbable
Richard Dawkins (illustrations by Lalla Ward), Penguin 1997
Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design
Barbara C Forrest and Paul R Gross, Oxford University Press, 2003
· Richard Dawkins is Charles Simonyi professor of the public understanding of science at Oxford University, and Jerry Coyne is a professor in the department of ecology and evolution at the University of Chicago

___________

Hope it was a good read and since I am not that able to explain myself past some points, I hope it made sense to you.

 

That could not be more difficult to read through without proper spacing.

You're not able to explain yourself past some points because you aren't thinking it through with your own brain - you're just regurgitating others' words to speak for you. Do you know what you believe, m3lt? Not just so you can point to a link... but do you KNOW it enough to speak about it intelligently??

EDIT: I did read through it, and I will comment on his main point:

If you've been reading the thread... which, considering your responses, I'm not sure you have... then you know that there's no published proof for ID because you can't prove or disprove the existence of God. But... we've said that plenty of times already.

 

I dont believe in god, superior beings or other forces around. So this is what I believe.

How can I explain it ?

Well, coming from a family of baptist ministers I went around every church around my area during the week and sundays, and I observed in and out what was going on.
My feeling was that these people needed something to hang on to.

Now for the reason I believe what I believe, it was from a chain of events in my personal life which did not had any reasonable explanation in the bible. It just did not made sense to me, so I went to "understand" the why, how and what for's of the world we live in.

I cant simply spew out my whole life experience here and what I have read and studied, but there are plenty of books in the subject that I can recommend to you if you wish to read of course.

Its not that easy when we talk in the first person, I am more comfortable of being presented with a point of view and then showing you through other means how wrong/right it might seem.
My knowledge of things is limited and I tend to avoid talking too much about things I do not fully understand, at least to some degree.

But basically, everything around me and everything I do in life makes more sense to me from a scientifical point of view than a religious one.
A religious one is too simple, everything is explained through a book that auto-confirms and approves itself and the rest is all due to personal "faith".

Sorry mate, but that just does not make sense.

The book I am reading now: Climbing mount improbable, is the one mentioned there, and it is so amazing in all sense that it explains with a wonderful beauty how things work and how they evolved.

By the way, do you believe in Noah's Arch ?

 

These are again relative terms, it is weak on the scale we experience it compared to the other forces yes. Across the vastness of space it is a dominant factor.

These are subjective terms, you see the plant as more ordered than the soil. You determine that there 'ought' to be chaos.

How do you know there was order to begin with ? How do you know there will not be order at the end ? How do you know there is a beginning or an end ? None of this is 'logic', it is assumption. Your logic is that the only thing that can create order is a creator, how do you know this ?

If the sun rises every day for a millenia, and I understand that it does this because of gravity and the same rules hold sway, then I can be reasonably confident it will rise again tommorrow by the same logic.

So what about black holes, do they not reduce entropy ? Do stars and galaxies not both reduce and increase entrophy at different times in their lives ? Its entirely dependent on your frame of reference, hence its relative.

Yes I agree with you, but I beleive that systems can create order. Isn't that what we try to do in IT ? I also believe that evolution is far far far more powerful than design.

Nearly all designs evolve.

How do you square that one ? Did your god create the world perfect in seven days or not ? Did he design everything in seven days ? If thats true why did he let us evolve hudreads of millions of years later from rodents, then apes, yada yada ? Why create less optimal solutions which don't even include us, (created in his image according to your book ?) and hope that we turn up later ? Why bother with the millions of backward steps, mistakes and dead ends that occur along the way ?

 

Didn't know there was an Arch named after Noah.

 

Non-english native speaker mistake...

It's ARK.

 

Despite that, gravity doesn't "create" order.

Uh, no... I don't 'determine' anything. Not gonna argue whether systems tend toward chaos or not, because that IS a fact you can read about.

You misunderstand me. I didn't say there was order "in the beginning". I mean, because there is order AT ALL logically points towards the existence of a Creator.

In the beginning, there was nothing but God. Or a big bang (also ordered, quickly moving towards disorder). Or whatever you will believe. Still, none of this can be proven; it's just theory and hypothesis and... belief.

Okay... but the universe, OVER TIME, will tend towards disorder. Not tomorrow. Over time.

Again, I'm not gonna argue with you about things you can figure out with a little reading... link

You can believe whatever you want. But in this, science is pretty clear.

WE can create order because we are intelligent beings who can create order. That's my point; it takes an intelligent force acting on a system to cause it to tend toward order.

And we have yet to cause evolution to happen (or witness it!), despite multiple attempts. Note that I'm not saying that creatures didn't evolve. But attempts at deliberately causing evolution have resulted in failure. And despite a substantial fossil record, there's yet to be found a single transitional creature. In truth, your belief is as unproven as mine:

"After having chided the theologian for his reliance on myth and miracle, science found itself in the unenviable position of having to create a mythology of its own: namely, the assumption that what, after long effort could not be proved to take place today, had, in truth, taken place in the primeval past." Loren Eiseley, Ph.D. Anthropology, The Immense Journey, Random House, NY, 1957, p. 199

Plus... I have mentioned before that many scientists do not see ID and evolution as mutually exclusive. Some believe that God is the force behind successful evolutionary mutations (for the reasons given in my preceding paragraph). Not saying I believe that... just saying what some people believe. So your argument isn't doing much to disprove the existence of God.

It is absolutely amazing to me that you can believe in something that hasn't yet been proven that supposedly happened millions of years ago... but you can't believe in something that hundreds of people saw with their own two eyes about 2,000 years ago.

I'll end today with a quote from Sir Francis Bacon: "A little science estranges a man from God; a lot of science brings him back."

 

Why shouldn't I believe in Noah's Ark?

Oh, wait, you're about to throw out some more links and videos, right?

 

Nah, this time I will stick to the basics.

How was it possible to safeguard the thousands of mammal species alone from the great flood that hit the world at that point ?
Did divine intervention called upon the animals, one male and female each and tamed them to lead to the ark ?
How about food for them ?

Some of the questions I wanted to know what you think of.

 

What is our solar system then ? What if there was a big crunch ?

Link ? First i've heard of it.

Again this is a statement without reason or proof. It is meaningless on its own.

Certain evidence does exist, background radiation, redshift etc.

Depends if we have a big crunch, continual expansion or something else. Depends on your definition of 'order'.

I'm not a physicist but I am aware of hawking radiation yes.

Still your link says :-

Not when you explain it !

Who says it takes an inteligent force to create order ? If iron fillings get attracted to a magnet is the magnet 'intelligent' ? Is a black hole 'intelligent' ? Is a bacteria 'intelligent' ?

What do you think dog, cat, plant, horse, sheep, cattle, etc breeders have done for 200+ years ? Have they not bread and evolved their stock and performed artifical selection ? What about inbreeding ? Doe this not happen ? The evidence for evolution is huge, its certainly better than anything you've brought up from you book. Supernatural impregnation, Arks full of every animal, men living in whales, dead men walking ?


"After having chided the theologian for his reliance on myth and miracle, science found itself in the unenviable position of having to create a mythology of its own: namely, the assumption that what, after long effort could not be proved to take place today, had, in truth, taken place in the primeval past." Loren Eiseley, Ph.D. Anthropology, The Immense Journey, Random House, NY, 1957, p. 199

I never said we had all the answers, just that we have managed to at least find some answers which on balance seem more rational then anything that religions from primitive people have dreamt up.

I'm on about what you beleive. If you believe in literal creationism as described in the bible you do not beleive in evolution. I'm not trying to disprove god, i'm merely asking you to at least try to present a coherent argument.

I cannot beleive in either for certain. Its the fuzzy logic or the shades of grey. I have to weigh the evidence and if forced chose what I think is most likely. We have redshift, we know there is expansion in the universe, hence it seems logical that running the process backward would involve a crunch or singularity.

I know that it is highly likely that an individual called Jesus existed who was very charismatic and did good deeds and was a philosopher. There is no evidence for miracles other than scripture, peoples interpretations and methods of communication are subjective. Many men are philosophers and healers, no miracles have ever been proven. Given that people have been known to talk in metaphor, write fiction, embelish, forget, lie, be unreliable, etc, it seems far more reasonable to assume that many sections of the bible are not literal, or are out of context, or fictional.

Why not beleive that pixies power your computer ? Why demand higher evidence for everything else than your religious belief ?

 

... hasn't this thread been locked yet?!

When people start nit-picking to an extent where they feel obliged to post twelve quotes, surely it's time to just agree to disagree?

Qs

 

Oh, it was simple. First, Noah...

...pfft! How the heck should I know? I wasn't there!