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GENOMES TO JESUS
No particular reason why this should upset people, but it probably will:
The scientist who led the team that cracked the human genome is to publish a book explaining why he now believes in the existence of God and is convinced that miracles are real.
Francis Collins, the director of the US National Human Genome Research Institute, claims there is a rational basis for a creator and that scientific discoveries bring man “closer to God”.
Collins was an atheist well into adulthood.
Who knows really?
We can stand over an Earth-Worm, and if the worm holds any awareness high enough to know that a giant creature, capable of destroying it, looms above, it may label us as God.
In fact, the worm doesn’t see us at all, yet we are still God-like to it, capable of it’s survival or death, whether it knows it or not.
I once had a conversation, when I was still a young hard-core lefty-agnostic, with a young right-wing Christian, and said to her that even though you dont understand how a transmission works, that doesnt make it divine. Transmissions are a product of man alone.
Now, as a right-wing agnostic, the creation of the transmission by man, seems a possible sign of divinity.
#4 - That’s ok - you’ll go to hell and us believers will be farting through silk - :)
Posted by Islam/cancer-Chuck Norris/answer on 2006 06 12 at 02:54 AM • permalinkThen again, there’s no reason why we should believe him either. He appears to have no more convincing reasons than any other religious writer, and it looks to me like another emotional conversion.
Posted by Blithering Bunny on 2006 06 12 at 02:57 AM • permalink#4 ekb87 “Science and religion are two seperate arenas.”
You’d think so, wouldn’t you? And yet I have (very expensively) educated friends and acquaintances that are agnostic, areligious, or even anti-religious who not only believe in global warming, etc., they’ll gullibly accept anything that lands in their email inbox warning of ‘environmental dangers’!
I don’t recall exactly whether it was St Augustine or St Thomas Aquinas who wrote on the primacy of Faith to get a person “through the weeds” and that Faith was sort of it’s own State of Grace.
That’s the type of thinking I encounter from these self-congratulatory eco-swampies, e.g. have Faith in Al Gore, smoking bans, recycling, and that Faith itself (without reflection or serious thought) is Grace (or ‘Smug’ as South Park called it).
To question the Faith using the scientific method is to deny the Faith and that is heretical. Sinners are tricked by the demons of Big Tobacco, Big Oil, etc, and must be cast out. The Swampy’s faith in Gaia is as devout as any 19th Century Irish nun’s was in Catholicism.
But if you ask these people why they don’t go to church or synagogue, they answer, “(Capital ‘R’) Religion has killed more people than anything in history” or some such thing.
Getting to the point (I do have one!), I think ‘religious belief’ is hardwired into our brains. Whether there is a Deity or not, it doesn’t even matter to human beliefs; we didn’t create God as the Marxists would say; we just need to believe in something.
Personally, I find the Catholic Church less oppressive than being a Green and that’s saying something.
By the way, Best of Luck to the Socceroos today vs Japan!
Religious belief all stems from the fact that humans are self aware - meaning that a human is aware that he is alive and knows that he will die. Many people can’t deal with this and turn to religion.
To be religious however, is to cast aside reasoning and its alarming when seemingly intelligent and educated men like Francis Collins decide to cast aside logical reasoning and embrace unquestioning belief in - what i can never really understand since no religious person can give any clear definition…
In my oppinion there is really nothing more nonsensicle in the 21st century than people turning to the superstitions of the past in search of answers.
...us believers will be farting through silk.
Flatulence in Paradise? You’ll be on your way downstairs before the angels have you fitted for wings!Posted by SwinishCapitalist on 2006 06 12 at 04:33 AM • permalinkTo be religious however, is to cast aside reasoning
To be a confirmed agnostic is to cast aside reasoning. (Don’t know. Can’t be bothered trying to find out.)
I was an agnostic for about 6 months, 27 years ago. Before that I was an atheist and then I went to a biochem lecture on insulin and lost my faith. I simply could not believe that the process happened by chance, didn’t know what else might account for it and couldn’t just let sleeping dogs lie so, unlike confirmed agnostics, I went looking for answers.
I write, “lost my faith,” deliberately. Atheism is just as much a religious, faith-based world-view as any kind of theism. Science can’t demonstrate the non-existence of God any more than it can demonstrate otherwise. It is precisely because science, as a practical activity, is necessarily conducted within a materialist framework (since, after all, it is the material world that science is investigating) that it can go no way towards proving that matter is all there is. As soon as scientists try to do so they are stepping beyond their area of expertise into philosophy. Of course that has never yet stopped a committed propagandist.
But I can understand why lots of people might not want to think about this stuff or might prefer to think that answers can’t be found. While I don’t miss my former life in the slightest I do remember it very well.
o/t One of Britain’s most senior Military strategists Rear Admiral Parry says pirates may be attacking holiday makers in the Mediterranean in ten years time. Britain has become the most popular destination in Europe for immigrants and reverse colonization -from within could likely occur as these groups have no loyalty and do not identify with their host country….
He talks of Rome being destroyed by Goths and Vandals.He says the internet and cheap flights will keep immigrants linked to their countries of origin.#16
Science can’t demonstrate the non-existence of God any more than it can demonstrate otherwise.
That right Janice, because you cannot prove a negative. Science cannot prove the existence of unicorns either but that does not mean that unicorns exist.
To believe in the existence of unicorns you must have “faith” ie you must suspend all reliance of the use of evidence and logic which are indispensible in the living of your everyday life.
You would probably say that believers in unicorns or the like are a bit ignorant but they are no more ignorant than the believers in supernatural beings.
I hope I have not caused too much offence.
#18, Amortiser
I’m not the tiniest bit offended.
But the thing is that for a long time science has been purported to have explained a negative, i.e., that one does not need to postulate the existence of God to explain our own existence and that of the whole universe. The point I was trying to make is not that science (or anything else) can’t prove a negative but that science can’t say anything at all about the immaterial. It can’t say anything about a possibility that isn’t within the range of possibilities that it can investigate. Yet scientist proselytisers for materialism (i.e., the impossibility of the immaterial) do that frequently and expect everyone else to believe them just because they’re scientists.
As for unicorns I don’t believe that there is any evidence that even borders on reliable to say that they ever existed. However I (and you) do know that we exist and the universe exists. If you choose to believe that we and it just happened to come into existence due to forces that are purely naturalistic then that is your right. But science can’t prove it. Scientists only assume it in much the same way that believers in unicorns assume that unicorns once existed.
He says the internet and cheap flights will keep immigrants linked to their countries of origin.
So, unless they can sing “We love football, meat pies, kangaroos and holden cars” with an ozzie accent and more or less in tune, use the internet to book a cheap flight home for them.
And ... cosmologists are regularly in awe of the Grandeur of God.he now believes in the existence of God and is convinced that miracles are real.
Understandable. After all, western religion has magnificent churches and cathedrals, fine organs and (Catholics excepted) stirring music. Hard to compete with theatre like that. You’d have to pretty hard to to stand in the aisle of, say, St John the Divine, and not be moved.
Posted by walterplinge on 2006 06 12 at 07:38 AM • permalinkI find it difficult to believe in a loving God when Hershey’s Syrup still exists.
I hear you brother, I hear you. That and drywall screws.
Posted by joe bagadonuts on 2006 06 12 at 08:30 AM • permalinknobody is ever going to win this one - it comes down to one bunch saying there is a god & the other side daying is not, or more honestly who knows, or even more honestly who cares
must be slow day at tim’s if he has to drag this one out of the toy box
#24 & those disgusting dove bars - caffeine & burnt caramel flavoured grease pretending to be chocolate
#25 I feel the same way about the existence of Cheez Whiz.
Posted by Not My Problem on 2006 06 12 at 08:42 AM • permalinkThis isn’t exactly new news. The argument that understanding the nature of the universe through science brings us closer to God has been around since Copernicus, Newton, Galileo etc. But to argue that science “proves” an unprovable assertion is fallacious. However, as I said in this post on “intelligent design”:
…there’s nothing wrong, philosophically, to believe the entire universe is designed by an intelligence (namely God) - a masterful programmer who has written intricate laws which govern our existence. But this is a hypothesis which is unable to be tested, one that does not offer any mechanism or precise predictions etc. Ie, it is not science. It is a metaphysical belief. Science and theology are both branches of metaphysics but to try and prove God’s existence through science is an ontological error. (On top of which is the problem that it’s not possible to prove anything, in the strict sense of the word, except mathematical/logical truisms based on the acceptance of a priori axioms/premises.)
I just use Hume’s razor to make such decisions: “No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle unless that testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish.”
A universe created by God seems to fulfil the definition of a miracle. Unfortunately, so does the existence of a universe created as a freak accident via a quantum vacuum fluctuation. Even more unfortunate is that the evidence (testimony) for both versions is equally strong… debating it is fun, but ultimately pointless.
Okay, Socceroos are about to beat Japan, time to watch TV. (Also fun, but ultimately pointless.)
Posted by Humblogger (the Younger) on 2006 06 12 at 08:58 AM • permalinkWell, I’m looking forward to that double-sized issue of Skeptical Inquirer.
Methodology aside, political motivations aside, trying to mix science and religion is a bad idea, because they address two completely differnt areas of life.
All the science in the world will not help you make a moral decision; at best, science and its offspring (technology, medicine, etc.) make it easier to implement a moral decision. Science is about the ‘how’. But that has its drawbacks: science makes it easier to implement ANY moral decision, whether draining the malarial swamps or firing up the ovens at Auschwitz. And science’s ability to negate a poor moral choice is limited: all the economic and sociological evidence to date that socialist systems are destructive of the people who live under them seems to be unable to convince a lot of people to stop trying to implement them. But intruding religious concepts into scientific debate corrupts the scientific debate. If one accepts the ‘scienctic’ basis of intelligent design, for example, one surrenders the perspective necessary to question ‘Vehdic science’ or ‘Islamic physics’, and once you start down that path, you might as well re-embrace phlogiston and the luminiferous ether, or devils in the gunpowder.
Religion, and its child philosophy, are, in the ultimate sense, concerned with ‘why’ science should be applied. But both have their limits as well; we have in the past century, for example, seen people with equal moral conviction choose to feed the hungry and march with sonderkommandos. Intruding science into religion seems only to corrupt both, whether you look at the ‘ant-like communism’ (per Heinlein) of Plato’s Republic, the various and uniformly failed ‘utopian’ experiments of the Age of Enlightenment, or the various cults of socialism and communism, or the blatant frauds of scientology and intelligent design.
Leave both to their strengths: science to what man and the world are; religion and philosophy to what they could be. Both can change the world, but those changes are best made with a lapidary chisel rather than a jack-hammer… or a blender.
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2006 06 12 at 09:44 AM • permalinkSometimes I liken the issue to those fits of reality when some worm/fish/bird/plant/moth that had been believed long gone is suddenly “discovered” all over again and people “realize” how much we need the thing we didn’t even know about.
Any more quotation marks and I’ll be writing about “terrorists.”
And I’m not saying we’ll find a unicorn any moment now.
#30 Richard; just a side note:
all the economic and sociological evidence to date that socialist systems are destructive of the people who live under them seems to be unable to convince a lot of people to stop trying to implement them.
You’re forgetting that the appeal of socialism is From each according to his ability, to each according to his need, which is understood by the socialist-wannabe as, And, brother, do I need—and since I have no ability, why, someone else can pick up the tab!!
Just so you don’t fool yourself into thinking that any of these “communists” have any real sense of “community”....
#16 Janice
To be a confirmed agnostic is to cast aside reasoning. (Don’t know. Can’t be bothered trying to find out.)
Not quite, Janice. “Don’t know. Can’t be bothered trying to find out.” may be one definition of atheism, but it is not the only one. It also means “One who believes that it is impossible to know whether there is a God.”
Your later comments mirror my own “confirmed agnostic” views:
“Science can’t demonstrate the non-existence of God any more than it can demonstrate otherwise. It is precisely because science, as a practical activity, is necessarily conducted within a materialist framework (since, after all, it is the material world that science is investigating) that it can go no way towards proving that matter is all there is.”
“The point I was trying to make is… that science can’t say anything at all about the immaterial. It can’t say anything about a possibility that isn’t within the range of possibilities that it can investigate.”
Ditto.
I have no definite belief that there is NO God(s) - I’m not an atheist.
I simply believe that this is logically unknowable - it has nothing to do with “not being bothered”.
It’s all about faith people.
...us believers will be farting through silk.
Then, as a child, why did I get smacked in the head for farting in church? If you can fart in heaven, I mean….
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2006 06 12 at 02:57 PM • permalink4 Ekb87
the comments in the article dovetail perfectly with agnosticism (or ‘fideism’ may be a better word.)
I sincerely don’t get how agnosticism and fideism even approach being synonyms. Biggest batches of straight-out fideism I ever saw came from Vantillian theologians.
11 Iampeter
To be religious however, is to cast aside reasoning
No sale. To be fundamentalistically religious, yeah, that’s a negation of reason. But there’s plenty of religious folks doing plenty of high-quality reasoning; one sees it all the time. Even here.
16 Janice
Science can’t demonstrate the non-existence of God any more than it can demonstrate otherwise.
That’s “agnosticism,” right there, neatly summarized. You no longer think of yourself as an agnostic, okay, but at least you get it. Or maybe not…
To be a confirmed agnostic is to cast aside reasoning.
That’s a problem common to all oxymoronic positions. How many “confirmed” agnostics do you know?
Posted by Huck Foley on 2006 06 12 at 04:50 PM • permalink1 Surly, do you jest?
The only proof I need is the non-existence of the Babel fish.
Can you prove the non-existence of the Babel fish?
23 Walterplinge
After all, western religion has ... (Catholics excepted) stirring music.
J.S.Bach was Catholic.
30 Mr McEnroe:
Too many highlights to single out a money quote there. That’s frikkin’ excellent, sincerely.Posted by Huck Foley on 2006 06 12 at 05:05 PM • permalinkI agree that science and religion are mutually exclusive, but that science and the belief in God are not. Religions are man-made constructs attempting to explain God. Belief is something more.
I didn’t find Francis Collins’ thesis particularly persuasive, but I personally think that the very complexity of everything speaks for the existence of God. That’s just my private belief, and I don’t care who else believes in what (except for certain beardy-weirdies who are using their religion as an excuse for murder).
Besides. How long, given nanotechnology, will it be before somebody invents a Babel fish?
39 Isumbras
Huck… Bach was Lutheran but sometimes composed for Catholic settings….
Another D’oh! moment here at ... hm ... here at the Foley ... here at the Huck Hilton, no ... damn ... “stately Stoop Manor” had more of a ring to it ... here at ... well darn it anyhow! You’re right and I’m wrong, is what it boils down to.
But they got some bitchin’ music out of the deal, them Catholics, is alls I’m sane.Posted by Huck Foley on 2006 06 12 at 08:09 PM • permalink#11 To be religious however, is to cast aside reasoning
Thanks for the insult iampeter.
—Nora
Posted by The Thin Man Returns on 2006 06 12 at 09:45 PM • permalink#9 cuckoo,
There is probably no one leftist stupidity gene. I suspect it is what geneticists call a quantitative trait, that comes about through the interaction of several genes, like height. Judging by the fact that lefty parents can have smart children and vice versa, I’d say the inheritance pattern is non-Mendelian. I suppose if it was a single gene we could call it intellectless, by analogy with the fruitfly mutation distalless for the gene controlling initial leg growth. (/joking)As for the existance of God, I’m inclined to think the answer is yes. If not, then we would expect that the average moral character of those denying revealed religion would be no worse than that of believers. The history of the 20th century shows me, at least, that this conclusion is not true. That history can be seen as a revolt against God, and the results of that revolt have been uniformly horrible. It has resulted in social breakdown and sweeping criminality, even in the mild form of revolt of the Western welfare states. Where the revolt went further the crimiality did too.
Exact doctrines and details I am less sure of, except to note that the Islamofascist jihadis look very much to me like a bunch of Satan worshippers trying to hijack Islam. Muslims should beware of this. The antisemitism is a dead giveaway, and I do mean dead.
Posted by Michael Lonie on 2006 06 12 at 09:49 PM • permalink23 Walterplinge
After all, western religion has ... (Catholics excepted) stirring music.
Mozart’s Magnificat, which I can still sing from memory.
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2006 06 12 at 10:15 PM • permalink...western religion ... stirring music…
So who exactly do we thank for Kumbayah?Posted by SwinishCapitalist on 2006 06 12 at 11:51 PM • permalink“To be fundamentalistically religious, yeah, that’s a negation of reason.”
Now there’s a long swear word! What can be more ‘fundamental’ than the idea of an intelligent creator, which is all Collins is claiming, I suspect, using his God-given reasoning to deduce that the huge complexity of the genome didn’t come ‘by Chance, out of Chaos’.
Tim was dead right about upsetting people with the ‘God’ word.
Gee, the narrow minds came out of the woodwork here.Even the most influential atheists are inconsistent. Albert Camus ended his Outsider character’s life with the atheistic words ‘the benign indifference of the Universe’.
Why ‘benign’?Philosopher Antony Flew is over 70 and an icon to generations of Atheists - except that he recently declared his reason had forced him to become a theist.
Now he’s considered an idiot by those who iconised him!
#11 “Religious belief all stems from the fact that humans are self aware - meaning that a human is aware that he is alive and knows that he will die. Many people can’t deal with this and turn to religion.”
In my case it’s the opposite. That there is nothing after death does not worry me, it’s the thought of having to account for everything I’ve done and not done that makes me very uneasy.
47 Barrie
What can be more ‘fundamental’ than the idea of an intelligent creator,
“Fundamentalistically” is a neologism based (not very subtly) on “fundamentalism,” which is a well-known word, in common usage, with a well-known meaning. It may be that this meaning was somehow unclear in my comment. Hmp.
“Fundamentalism” is a known quantity, a well-defined category, a word with a meaning, which meaning you here seem to me to be attempting to blur.
“Fundamentalism” means, in ordinary discourse, the belief that the entire Bible is literally true, throughout. Anyone affecting to not know this, frankly, seems to me to be up to something.
The commonly-used definition of “fundamentalism” is a more narrow and distinct definition than the “the idea of an intelligent creator.”
So your semantic argument thus seems to me to be more of an evasion than a refutation.
Please present a better one.Posted by Huck Foley on 2006 06 13 at 05:14 PM • permalinkHuck,
If you look here you will see that the author has said of fundamentalism that “if there is one single thing which binds Fundamentalists together, it is their insistence that the Bible is to be understood as literally true”.
However, if you look further down you will see that there are 4 types of fundamentalism - theological, political, cultural and global. Some of that is interesting but what I’m interested in right now is what people think it means to say that other people say the Bible “is to be understood as literally true”.
For instance, Isaiah 11:12 says, “He will ... gather the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth.” When people think of Christian fundamentalists do they think that these fundamentalists think that the earth must therefore be a square rather than an oblate spheroid? Or does “literally true” have some other meaning?
Perhaps it means that Christian fundamentalists believe things that other people (agnostics, atheists, liberal Christians, people who follow other religions) don’t believe. Some liberal Christians don’t believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus. Does that mean that Christians who do so believe are fundamentalists? Maybe not.
What about Christians who believe that Abraham was a real person and that the stories about him that are in the Bible truthfully portray important incidents in his life? Now we’re really starting to get into the area that lots of academics speak of as ‘mythos’. That’s a word they use when they want to say stories are ‘spiritually true’ but not actually true. Pardon me while I go and vomit.
But I think I’m just wasting your time. I think what you really object to are people who believe that the stories from Genesis 1 to, ooh, about 11 - from Adam and Eve to the Tower of Babel - are ‘literally’ true. How can they be???? Don’t we all know that science ‘proves’ this, that and the other thing and that materialism is the only true philosophy, blah, blah, blah, and therefore evolution is true and there is no God?
No, mate. We don’t all know that. I’m tempted to give you a list of my (science-based) qualifications but that wouldn’t prove anything. There are people with PhDs all over the place who are as dumb as doorknobs. Especially these days.
So you can take me as a fundamentalist. But don’t assume that means I think that the force of the state should be brought to bear on people who believe otherwise, to make them conform. I love Jesus too much for that and He said, “My kingdom is not of this world.” Grace is an immeasurably wonderful thing and I know my own need of it so I’m not willing to deny it to any other human being. May the Lord bless you and keep you. May He make His face shine upon you and be gracious to you. May the Lord look cheerfully on you and give you peace.
#37 Huck Foley
ekb87… I sincerely don’t get how agnosticism and fideism even approach being synonyms. Biggest batches of straight-out fideism I ever saw came from Vantillian theologians.
Fideism - “Reliance on faith alone rather than scientific reasoning or philosophy in questions of religion.”Agnostic - “One who believes that it is impossible to know whether there is a God.”
I would agree they are not synonyms, but there is some overlap, and my own position lies within that overlap. I do not believe a deity can be logically proven OR disproven.
Another point, this article about Francis Collins, the director of the US National Human Genome Research Institute, has the headline: “I’ve found God, says man who cracked the genome” which kind of suggests his work on the genome led to his conversion.
He actually became a christian 29 years ago, a long, long, loooooong time before the genome project.
Atheism is just as much a religious, faith-based world-view as any kind of theism.
Janice - atheism is the absence of belief and the absence of faith. It’s the absolute antithesis of any religious or faith based world view.
Atheists don’t think about a “belief”, they don’t examine or adhere to a “faith”; the activity of being an atheist takes no time, no devotion, no special clothes, no revered texts, no rituals, no symbols, no unifying groups or associations, no history, no ceremony, not even the most passing level of commitment.
If you understood religion, even at the most rudimentary level, you would not have been able to make such an intellectually unsustainable assertion.
Challeron, that’s the classic “Prime Mover” argument first proposed by Aristotle 2500 years ago. It’s also called the “Cosmological argument”.
Essentially, it goes:
1. Everything has a cause(s).
2. Nothing can cause itself.
3. Therefore, everything is caused by another thing(s).
4. A causal chain cannot be of infinite length.
5. Therefore, there must be a first cause.Theists will then suggest that this “first cause” is “God”. There’s only one problem… what caused God?
As we have already declared “2. Nothing can cause itself”, therefore if we claim that God did cause himself, then we have a paradox.
And if we try and make an exception and claim that God was the only thing that does not require a cause, then by what logic do we arbitrarily declare this? It is logically no more valid than claiming that the Big Bang is instead the only thing that does not require a cause.
No matter which way you cut it, it’s a classic logical fallacy. It collapses in on itself, does not provide a logical proof of anything, and all people can do is fall back on their pre-existing positions and faith (or lack thereof).
PS: Also note that even if you accepted the argument, there is no reason why the “Prime Mover” could not have been an Australian Aboriginal Rainbow Serpent, Allah or the Flying Spaghetti Monster. This is rarely mentioned by the person using it…
52 Janice
If you look here you will see that the author has said of fundamentalism that “if there is one single thing which binds Fundamentalists together, it is their insistence that the Bible is to be understood as literally true”.
I like that part. Validation is good.
However, if you look further down you will see that there are 4 types of fundamentalism - theological, political, cultural and global.
I agree that there are at least that many versions of the same problem, which is fundamentalism.
Some of that is interesting but what I’m interested in right now is what people think it means to say that other people say the Bible “is to be understood as literally true”.
Except (I’m reminded) for the parables of Jesus, which are generally understood to be stories that Jesus made up and told, in order to make some good points about things. Moses, in a fundamentalistic view, didn’t make up and tell any stories, for that motive or for any other. Neither did Abraham.
There are a minority of Christians who sincerely do think that way; I’ve met them, and so have you. They believe in the historical factuality of Noah’s Ark, and it bothers them if you don’t. Common nomenclature for those folks is “fundamentalists,” a term of their own coinage, not mine. I will cop to “fundamentalistically,” though.For instance, Isaiah 11:12 says, “He will ... gather the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth.” When people think of Christian fundamentalists do they think that these fundamentalists think that the earth must therefore be a square rather than an oblate spheroid?
Not likely, although I have seen atheists affect to think so, in arguments online. Not a seemly sight, for real. On the opposite hand, I’ve also seen that passage used to base a fair argument. Which would be to point out that the authors and translators of Isaiah were using poetic language, in a clever way, to make a point. One would then point to similar language in Genesis, and make the same allowance, unless one were a fundamentalist. We could bore each other with a tour of the creationist websites and their counterparts, but we already both know that those folks are out there, and in large numbers.
Or does “literally true” have some other meaning?
“Literally true” means “an accurate description of historical events, including sun-stoppages, parted seas, one world-wide flood, and a 6 - to - 10 thousand - year - old world. As in, “I assert that it is literally true that there are such people as fundamentalists.”
~ ~ ~ we’ll be back with more assertions in a moment ~ ~ ~Posted by Huck Foley on 2006 06 14 at 10:11 PM • permalink53 Ekb
I would agree they are not synonyms, but there is some overlap, and my own position lies within that overlap. I do not believe a deity can be logically proven OR disproven.
Well, okay. I guess. But ... well, I don’t in the provability nor the disprovability of deity either, but every Vantillian swami I ever encountered online asserted that a deity CAN be logically proven. But then their arguments were so circular and arbitrary that even the “mainstream” theologophiles would complain about them, and sneeringly dismiss them as “fideists.” Maybe it’s an “inside baseball” kinda thang; I couldn’t say.
Posted by Huck Foley on 2006 06 14 at 10:34 PM • permalink58 Ekb
It’s also called the “Cosmological argument”.
Essentially, it goes:A longtime favorite, that Cosmological Arg.
There’s two important and unbreakable rules undergirding it.
1/ Causality always prevails.
2/ Causality breaks down.
But, see, if causality isn’t always a rule, then it isn’t really a rule in the first place.Posted by Huck Foley on 2006 06 14 at 10:47 PM • permalink52b Janice
Perhaps it means that Christian fundamentalists believe things that other people (...) don’t believe. Some liberal Christians don’t believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus. Does that mean that Christians who do so believe are fundamentalists? Maybe not.
Not. Definitely not.
You’re trying that same thing Barrie was, to blur the distinction between a narrowly-defined set of beliefs and a broadly-defined set. It’s an older and smoother-worn version of Bongoman’s basic tactic, but it is what it is.What about Christians who believe that Abraham was a real person and that the stories about him that are in the Bible truthfully portray important incidents in his life? Now we’re really starting to get into the area that lots of academics speak of as ‘mythos’. That’s a word they use when they want to say stories are ‘spiritually true’ but not actually true. Pardon me while I go and vomit.
Compelling. That argument worked on the President of Harvard, right?
But I think I’m just wasting your time. I think what you really object to are people who believe that the stories from Genesis 1 to, ooh, about 11 - from Adam and Eve to the Tower of Babel - are ‘literally’ true.
You do or you don’t, so if it’s that important to you, you should say so.
Do you believe that the Tower of Babel story is true or not?How can they be???? Don’t we all know that science ‘proves’ this, that and the other thing and that materialism is the only true philosophy, blah, blah, blah, and therefore evolution is true and there is no God? No, mate. We don’t all know that. I’m tempted to give you a list of my (science-based) qualifications but that wouldn’t prove anything. There are people with PhDs all over the place who are as dumb as doorknobs. Especially these days.
If you say so.
So you can take me as a fundamentalist.
If I must.
But don’t assume that means I think that the force of the state should be brought to bear on people who believe otherwise, to make them conform.
What the irrelevant fuck are you suddenly talking about?
And what’s your estimate of the size of the population of “confirmed agnostics”? You never did say.Posted by Huck Foley on 2006 06 14 at 11:10 PM • permalink#61 Huck
But…well, I don’t in the provability nor the disprovability of deity either…Well,
HuckStoop, that sentence makes no sense, so it seems you’ve made yet another trivial error. (Remember when I dyslexically mispelled atheist and you kept harping on it for a couple of weeks? I suppose I could do the same, but that would be petty, wouldn’t it?)I have a suggestion for your tombstone, if you decide to stick with your atheism. (Not hoping for your early demise, but we all know we’re going to die one day.)
Here lies an atheist - all dressed up and nowhere to go.
You must realize that if you’re just going to die and decompose like a tree or an animal all the activities you’re currently engaging in are futile, including the
garbled prosebrilliant comments you’re constantly posting. It’s all for nothing and about as enduring as vapour. Think about it.Ahh Newman, it’s good to see you’ve still got that laser-like focus on the substantive issues at hand. Your spelling and timing have both improved, too. Unfortunately, you’ve still got a liar’s memory.
Posted by Huck Foley on 2006 06 17 at 12:03 AM • permalink
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The only proof I need is the non-existence of the Babel fish.