Evolution and the origine of the species debate

The bible is obviously not written by some all knowing higher entity with all the ridiculous crap in there.

Burning bushes, giant fish, stoning gays, midgets and lepers and adam/eve and noas ark are clearly aimed at a level that can be "understood" by children and even the most retarded.
Like it was written to be a fucking hand puppet show.

sure there was probably a jesus and I bet he was a compulsive liar/conspiracy theorist/conartist. Also im guessing he did shrooms, datura or some other hallucinogenics.

Its easy if you say it with a straight face people will believe you. Even someone like Glen Beck can do it. I for example always get asked questions about plants and sometimes I joke about it people will eat it up even if its complete BS.
YeAH thats eh... an old medicin plant it will cure your cold... and there I have people eating a plant from the onion family that tastes horrible making them stink like garlic, thanking me and telling me how they can really feel it working............ if I had a bit more of an asshole gene in me I bet I could grind up all kinds of shit with distinct tastes and sell it as overprised miracle juice.

 

The evidence for the existence of Jesus is indeed incredibly weak.

However, if we step past it and invoke a condition that he did indeed walk the Earth, there is still no reliable evidence whatsoever that he walked on water, was born of a virgin, or was resurrected from the dead. In fact, each of these things are accomplishments that we know we cannot achieve. We cannot walk on water with our feet, we cannot be born of virgins, we cannot be resurrected from the dead. These are just a few of the bizarre occurrences that the bible puts forth. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

I suggest you debate your beliefs with an individual of an opposing religion, such as Islam or Judaism. In such a debate, you will see the weaknesses of Christian arguments exposed by their Islamic and Jewish equivalent arguments. A cross-religion debate is more eye-opening than a creation-evolution debate.

What leads you to think that out of the many religions that each claim to be "the right one," that yours is indeed the right one? The others have their own flavors of holy scripture inspired by the word of their deities, filled with many of the same types of allegories as the bible. They make the same arguments from a different framework. They even have their own iconic characters akin to Jesus.

 

cris angel is jesus incarnate

 

exactly, because every religion would look like a bed time story wouldn't it?

if we would scientifically approach each and every religion from the silly god thing of the Mormons to weird ass object gods of elementalism to no gods but way of life buddhism

it would all make absolutely no fucking sense, everything could be deducted to "its almost certainly not true, the only reason why we cannot completely disprove it is because we cannot disprove a Chinese teapot is at the centre of the sun dancing "im a little teapot" like bill gates did on that famous speech because we never went inside the sun so we cant know for sure)

personally, i may be biassed, but id say the only religion that has absolutely had a positive effect on this world not only overall but also in every small event where its "teachings" where consulted is Buddhism

seriously, just read a bit about how its lived, that religion is one bunch of nice people and they even believe its wrong to convert someone to Buddhism for some reason... so they wont ever show up at your door trying to convert you
how good can you get? right?

not to confirm the "veryone against you" theme here

but lets assume there was... lets assume we go back in time and find out this christ person really was there and really did have some tricks on his sleeve

wouldn't it be more likely that this person was ether

-a con-man like the gazillion others that where at that time (ever seen "life of brian"? it makes fun of it but there's a lot of truth in that movie) and maybe he just was a bit more successful at it then everyone else

or

-a very nice guy that tried to get people to treat each other nicely and bring some order in the chaos that was during his life (a lot of the biblical texts terribly quoted out of context in your local churches these days where directly aimed at the Romans, and how they basically fucked shit up everywhere they conquered... they even have entire books dedicated to them (the "Romans" parts etc... and the last part talking about the Armageddon basically is a wrath curse cast upon all Romans that one day they will pay for fucking everyone shit up so bad... seriously just read it again with a "0 AD mentality of a scolar/leadership figure (fishermen could not write at those times... in fact even if they would dedicate there whole lives to "learning how to read and write" someone of that caste could not have been able to find the resources to learn it...) just kicked out of his function of power by some Roman bureaucrat and replaced by someone more "Roman minded")

and even if he was a "messenger of god" what we DO have proof of is that the bible is constructed by man and basically is a bundle of books taken together as one, in fact each chapter used to be a totally individual book, but was slimmed down, cut up mingled and mixed to suit the local powers that be at the times to keep the crouds under controle
(archives and stuff, its well documented because it happened in a far more sophisticated land and time then the actual writing of the bibles individual chapters)

what im going to here is that the religion you consider "Christianity" now might be quite a disappointment to Christ if he would resurrect right here and now, in fact what we have learned from the dead sea scrolls, Christ was extremely likely nothing like the person we see him described as in the current version of the bible

as he was originally described he was more like a west bank version of Buddha, in fact according to his own book (cut from the modern day bible, because of what he wrote from himself and how it did not fit into the political picture of times when it was cut) he was "just a man"

this is not Dan brown madness i'm talking here, but national geographic channel episodes dedicated to exactly this subject + a lot of history book reading

 

i beg to differ... extensively...
what you say here not only goes against everything i believe in, it is also just plain wrong

science is not a religion, science is not something you have to "believe in" for it to work
i do not "believe" in science, i do give all the scientists more slack if it comes to believable because i know that if they are wrong, they will get corrected and they will get bad results both scientifically as financially from being wrong while a priest for example can sprout bullshit for all his life and never ever be held accountable for it

correct, and thus as with any theory that cannot be disprove or proven it is rejected, since it makes no sense... if i would walk up to "science" magazine telling them i discovered invisible, untouchable monkeys somewhere in the deepest of the rain forrest they would send me walking for proof

saying "god cant be proven nor disproved, together with no evidence to support it so we must scientifically assume the possibility of god" aka the god hypothesis is totally ridiculous and unscientific...

true its a valid hypothesis, but as i explained before... bill gates dancing Chinese teapot in the centre of the sun hypothesis is also a valid hypothesis... its not really hard to create a good hypothesis that's also utterly ridiculous... and although hypothesis are a tool science uses, its not really scientific to spend more time into it other then "lets prove/disprove it and if you cant (teapot example) you automatically nullify it... on a scientific level at least (there might really be such a teapot in the sun, but we do not know, cannot prove or cannot disprove, so why bother putting any more resources and time in it until we can?

the black hole hypothesis is a nice example of how it should work

for a few years they where purely theoretical, in "theory" they should be there but there was nether proof that they were, nor that they were not...

only problem here was that we could assume that they did exist, because we had leads to support that they did exist... even very slim we knew how parts of matter and energy worked and if we were right about everything else, black holes should exist in some form or the other...

tadaaaa... in recent history we have observed a number of objects in space classified as "black holes" already... the hypothesis became a theory, then an observed phenomena

successful hypothesis is successful

yes it can, the god hypothesis can perfectly be analysed scientifically... anything can be analysed scientifically... does not mean science will be absolutely infallible about the subject, but as long as we stick to the constructs of what we know god is a pure contradiction and disproves himself out of existence

one might say maybe god lives out of our dimension? but then again, this dimension is then a construct to keep the god hypothesis alive... no other leads on this dimension exists besides "its the one to keep the god hypothesis alive" and in science that's part of the term "circular logic" and automatically discounted as bogus (as it should be)

i agree, but this proves nothing, and while lack of proof does not mean it is disproven, lack of ability to ether prove or disprove it does... or anyone could sprout nonsense and have it added as science

do you think there is a bill gates dancing Chinese teapot in the centre of the sun?

i honestly dont care what other people believe in, they can believe that a giant anus pooped out the universe in a gigantic fart with a match held next to... but as soon as organised religion comes in the picture it all falls back to "mass hysteria and exploitation of the weakest"

i agree whole-heartedly

he could be... but chances are astronomically against him...
still is a good thing to respect him though, even if he is believing pure bullshit doesn't mean you have to start bitching about it to him

its only when it starts to become a danger to others that i would intervene with a good debate to bring things back to earth

agnosticism and atheism pretty much overlap though, you are not going to tell me not a single person that disbelieves in god does not doubt the fact that you could be able to prove or disprove god

if you would conciser them 2 different groups (and they are not) all sane, reasonable and well read about the subject people are agnostics while everyone just saying "no, god does not exist" to piss off Christians and what not then i would be an agnostic person

ignosticism to me seems like a stream of atheism at first, possibly the middle of the atheism/agnosticism overlapping of some how, had to look it up when you said it so i could be very very wrong ofc

 

To be more precise, you are a toothfairy agnostic. That is to say, you believe there is a 50/50 percent chance that the toothfairy exists, because you cannot disprove it does not, can you? Same goes for unicorns, leprechauns and gods.

I know that all us atheists might seem ignorant or disrespectful towards "god", but really, you are doing the same with the Zeus, Athena and Thor. We just go one god further.

 

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this

this is my posts tl;dr

 

This is simply not true. Religion and belief in a creator allow people to be happy with no explanation, instead of pushing forward to understand the true reason why something happens.

Imagine if people did the same with diseases, crop failures or even fire. Think about that for a second. If cavemen just kept thinking "oh it's the magical man in the sky giving us a magical source of heat" instead of thinking "fuck me this is awesome let's try and do it ourselves", civilisation as a whole would never, ever have come into existence.

Let's take a more modern example (thank god for those cavemen eh): "Five young teenagers got pregnant after playing games with their school mates from a lower secondary school in the town of Ostroda, northern Poland" (source)

The reason: "Nobody talks about sex at school and there is no psychologist who would explain to the students that such games can lead to pregnancy".

This is in fact a step up from the previous example: instead of adult people telling the youngsters "it's magic", they just ignore the question as a whole. But the same issue remains: through supernatural belief, people are taught to be satisfied with nonsense. How are we ever going to get personal jetpacks with that kind of attitude? (Wait, nevermind.)

 

Right, after this I'm done with this discussion because it's like talking to a brick wall and I want to play Mass Effect

Oh, so you have these alternate timelines where people never believed in any type of religion? Because unless you do, it's pretty hard to say if it did or did not. All we can do is measure the current religiousness and the speed of technological advancement and compare it with previous (kinda hard with the Middle Ages not doing those measurements and all that) and future measurements.

I will most certainly take over that statement. I'm just saddened that you will use the subject of that statement as an explanation for any answers you can't be fucked to answer.

Yes, I do. I can't speak for blizzerd, but I'm certain he's not a moron and the concept of natural clocks is not exactly hard to understand. I have personally not made the measurements because they have been made by hundreds of people more qualified than me and they have all concluded the same thing. Unless you like to think that the scientific society as a whole is carefully making plans to misinform everyone that cares to listen, the chances of these parallel conclusions are rather minuscule.

So instead of attempting to find the final truth, you just say "Fuck it. I'm just going to assume that we all came out of the ass of some magical creature.". You are a disgrace everything mankind stands for and will stand for. Please do not have any children for fear of indoctrinating them with your utter asinine bullshit (I am certain your genes are fine so I have no biological problems with it). If you do, I hope you let them choose for themselves and don't try to muddle their minds with the Great Man In The Sky.

FUCK YEAH MASS EFFECT TIME

 

Someone tl;dr this thread for me.

 

I'm certain we could drop the personal insults here.

One thing is sure. We won't know for sure god cannot be falsyfied, saying it can't is just plain wrong. Do you have any idea what could be possible when (if) human race got to just Type II level? Solar system scaled synchrotron?
Chances for god to exist are slim.

Other thing. Believing that science is the only viable chance for getting some answers ain't a mistake. Believing that ideas it produces are absolute truth is.

I agree with what Zeke and you flashe, i am not going to live my life listening to some nuts guys going "herp derp contraception will make you burn in hell".
On the other hand idea of a god just misses me completely.

Answers that i can think of:
-Shit just happens. (Idea of Quantum Dynamics i can comprehend for now - its quite possible ill be studying it from now on)

-Anthropic principle - we are here because we are here, now we have to know how (not why)

 

there is no church of science...

there is only scientific ideas and knowledge, and non-scientific ideas and knowledge

for example, if the christians would come up with a valid scientific theory of how life originated, or how prayer should work or whatever

then i would be very willing to take it as valid, there are a lot of scientists in the Christian church some of them highly held in regards of notoriety

this is exactly what i am trying to make very clear to you

believing in some nonsense as an individual is not really a problem

when it becomes as organised as a church in a cult like Christianity is then yes... it becomes very dangerous especially when it starts to meddle with scientific progress and political debates

its not a secret that Christianity basically made us lose 1500 years of human social, political and scientific progression

Islam just the same, the only reason why the Persian region never really developed higher then villages and some medieval towns properly in the last 1000 years is because all the head-start that region had (it was once a Metropolis of science and culture, peaking far above the Roman or Greek empire in knowledge of the world and math... they invented our numeric system for gods sakes) was lost with the rise of Islam where it was a virtue to stay dumb and do as the preachers say

 

Maybe a religion that powerful should tell you something, eh.

 

+-750 years ago Christianity was far more powerful then it is now

+-750 years ago was possibly one of the most ungodly times of the human race...full of slavery and oppression

Christianity was one of the biggest forces trying to maintain this system of serfdom and castes because it brought good money

maybe that should tell you something about that church you love so much?

 

AFAIK it was roman Catholicism. Could be wrong.

 

yea, what are you then? protestant or something? i assumed you where Roman catholic because its the biggest and you where saying stuff about "a religion that powerful"

 

Flasche, the "science is a religion" argument isn't anything new, and it has been torn to pieces and dismantled by many. It's a very weak argument that is used to mold science into some kind of alternative faith-based belief system so that the religious can mock and denounce it. It's a counter to scientists' and philosophers' arguments that religion is dogmatic and that faith is a bad thing.

Suggested Readings (Dawkins' is longer and more in-depth, but Hrynyshyn's is quick 'n' dirty.):
The Humanist: Is Science a Religion? by Richard Dawkins (1997)
ScienceBlogs: Science is not a religion by James Hrynyshyn (2009)

Or, hell, even read this ludicrous argument constructed from fallacies that argues that Evolution is a religion and not a science. I'm sure that the Institute for Creation Research intended this to sway the religious, but it actually does a pretty good job of showing just how ignorant they are by completely misunderstanding science in general and evolution in particular:
Institute for Creation Research: Evolution is Religion--Not Science by Henry Morris (2001)