Do you accept the theory of evolution?

[hopefuldreamer]

A great number of people are killed everyday in the name of religion, money, sex, drugs, pride, anger, hatred, jealousy, pettiness, stupidity, bad luck, etc. etc. etc.

What's your point?

You just lumped religion in with all those things and you DON'T see the point?

Everything you kill 'in the name of' is bad. And there are already tonnes of reasons why people kill each other without also having a world wide one, which people think they can morally justify.

At least people who kill for money, sex or drugs have no dellusions that what they are doing is 'right' or 'just'.

 

[Bill]

Is that all? Belief in God requires certainty. That's what faith is.

Faith is belief in things not seen. No matter how much we explore and experiment, there will be things outside of our physical realm of understanding.

These two statements are contradictory. How can you be certain of what you claim is a belief in something not seen?

I believe that God is benevolent based on the evidence of our existence. He created this perfect machine that is man. He gave us this world that could be a paradise. It's only our fear, stupidity and arrogance that causes us to destroy our world and ourselves.

No, it was out of ignorance. As the story goes, God did not grant us the ability to know good and evil. We had to eat fruit from the tree of good and evil to gain that knowledge. So, how did we have arrogance, stupidity and fear before that moment if we were created to be perfect? Why was a creature, that was obviously knowledgeable about these things, allowed to run free and trick humans, who were obviously not? And then God comes along and curses the entirety of humanity for not knowing what we should have been given in the first place. And the ringer is that He knew this would happen before he willed the first atom into existence.

 

[Llama_Shepherd]

Is that all? Belief in God requires certainty. That's what faith is.

No one denied that, however belief in a deity requires no proof evidence or knowledge. It is also counter-intuitive to the pursuit of knowledge

Faith is belief in things not seen. No matter how much we explore and experiment, there will be things outside of our physical realm of understanding.

Incorrect. The physical realm, is all of existence. If something lies outside the realm of existence, eg an idea, it doesn't exist.

I believe that God is benevolent based on the evidence of our existence. He created this perfect machine that is man. He gave us this world that could be a paradise. It's only our fear, stupidity and arrogance that causes us to destroy our world and ourselves.

How can a benevolent God create anything that is less than benevolent in of itself. This is a juxtaposition.

I have objective reasons. I believe that God is loving and benevolent. That he values all of us. So any part of the bible that suggests we should destroy each other, or devalue each other is wrong as far as I'm concerned.

But God/Yahweh is omniscient. He cannot possibly make a mistake. It goes against his nature. Therefore, you are wrong. God himself killed rude children with bears in Exodus.

And because it can't be falsified, that means it's not valid? Again- evolution will never provide answers for where we came from.

That's exactly what it does.

Why we're here.

Pass on your genes.

Why we humans have cognitive thought, identity- if we have a spirit- the beginnings of the universe.

Like the apes, Elephants, dolphins and other higher mammals, we evolved cognitive thought. The beginning of the universe is explained thoroughly in the context of the Big Bang theory.

If there is a God.

No one can answer that question.

Belief in God does answer those questions. For me at least.

Belief answers those question to those who are happy enough to not pursue anything different. Faith is fine for you, but many people prefer knowledge. God did not create medicine or hospitals, God did not put a man on the moon, God did not help us understand the beginning of life, the Earth, and the universe itself. That was all us.

The universe is finite?

It certainly appears so.

Where did it begin?

Everywhere. Space is a piece of the universe.

Where does it end?

We can't quite be sure. Both because of inflation and light having a finite speed of c. The farthest we can see is around 13.7 billion light years, and because of relativity we know those are the first stars to be made in the universe, so roughly 13.7 billion light years could be the "edge" of the universe. But trying to describe the shape of existence is very very very absolutely insanely monumentally difficult. One physicist, whose name escapes me at this point said, "If I've explained it, and you've understood, you haven't really understood at all".

What came before?

This question doesn't make sense, time began at the beginning of existence.

What's outside of it?

We don't know. There are many theories.

This doesn't apply to my beliefs, since I know they're not false. You may suspect that they are, but that's your choice.

You are using the wrong words. Knowledge implies facts, facts require proof. You have no proof. You have faith, faith doesn't require proof, however, it is not knowledge.

I'm not looking for a gap to fit God into. I believe in God and seek to deepen my connection to him- and by extension- other humans and ultimately the universe itself.

Why do you need God to do that? You are connected to the Earth because you and it were both born out of the sun, you are connected to every person through sharing 99% of your genetic code, to every living thing on the planet by having a shared ancestry, to existence itself, because the energy that made it and you, were born in the same instant.

IF evolution can't answer all of man's questions then it is by your standards, no more valuable than belief in God.

It has answered the one question we asked: "How did life begin?"

Now to me, evolution is a valuable way of understanding how things work. Belief in God is the way to understand why things work.

Not everybody needs a why. You do, and that's okay, to me, it's amazing, believing in a god requires more faith than it ever did before. But just because you do, you can't expect people to just suddenly have an epiphany and go "of course!" and fall in line with your beliefs. Especially not in the modern world, where we can explain the very nature of existence in minute detail.

 

[Sentinel X]

You can't separate religion and gods. Just like you can't seperate society and ethics. People want to all the time, but you just can't. People are doing things in your god's name.


And don't give me that about survival of the fittest. Yes, it's legal to protect yourself if someone is trying to kill you. No, you can't kill homeless people. That would be unethical.

Ethics.

Wait ...yes, yes you can. Its called Deism. Agnostics can also fit into this category as well.

Anyways, to me there is no denying evolution. There is just so much evidence: fossil record, genomics, proteomics, etc.
My main gripe is if there is such thing as abiotic genesis?

 

[Schlosser85]

Believing in a higher power doesn't necessarily mean you're religious.

 

[Dragon]

You just lumped religion in with all those things and you DON'T see the point?

Everything you kill 'in the name of' is bad. And there are already tonnes of reasons why people kill each other without also having a world wide one, which people think they can morally justify.

At least people who kill for money, sex or drugs have no dellusions that what they are doing is 'right' or 'just'.

And? Dead is dead. The person is no less dead if killed over greed than over religion.

 

[Thundercrack85]

Believing in a higher power doesn't necessarily mean you're religious.

Then what would you call it?

 

[Dragon]

These two statements are contradictory. How can you be certain of what you claim is a belief in something not seen?

By having faith. Anyway. God has touched my life too many times for me not to believe.

No, it was out of ignorance. As the story goes, God did not grant us the ability to know good and evil. We had to eat fruit from the tree of good and evil to gain that knowledge.

That's not correct at all. It was the Tree of Knowledge. And it was placed there to allow man to exercise free will.

So, how did we have arrogance, stupidity and fear before that moment if we were created to be perfect? Why was a creature, that was obviously knowledgeable about these things, allowed to run free and trick humans, who were obviously not? And then God comes along and curses the entirety of humanity for not knowing what we should have been given in the first place. And the ringer is that He knew this would happen before he willed the first atom into existence.

Who said we were perfect? If we could fail, then we weren't perfect. And Satan was allowed to present man with a choice to- again- allow man to exercise free will. Great things have come from man's having free will. If we didn't have it, then we'd simply be robots and wouldn't accomplish anything other than what were ordered to do. God obviously didn't want that.

 

[Dragon]

Then what would you call it?

Life.

 

[Thundercrack85]

Life.

If you believe in a higher power, you are religious. Unless that higher power is an alien or something.

 

[Optimus_Prime_]

Wait ...yes, yes you can. Its called Deism. Agnostics can also fit into this category as well.

Anyways, to me there is no denying evolution. There is just so much evidence: fossil record, genomics, proteomics, etc.
My main gripe is if there is such thing as abiotic genesis?

There is such a thing as Abiogenesis, that is to say it happens and in principle should be able to produce the building blocks necessary for life. Whether it is the thing or the only thing that led to the first self replicating molecule considered "life" is another. Some people prefer the notion of panspermia (or variations of that), and some people have other hypothesis, however we know that molecules were forming bonds and replicating on the primative Earth.

 

[Optimus_Prime_]

If you believe in a higher power, you are religious. Unless that higher power is an alien or something.

I disagree. You can believe in all sorts of mysticism or simply be a diest and you wouldn't be "religious". Fideism is the term that refers to beliefs in matters of faith, or placing faith beliefs as seperate from and or greater than deductive reasoning based on evidence. All religious people are fideists but not all fideists are religious.

 

[Thundercrack85]

I disagree. You can believe in all sorts of mysticism or simply be a diest and you wouldn't be "religious". Fideism is the term that refers to beliefs in matters of faith, or placing faith beliefs as seperate from and or greater than deductive reasoning based on evidence. All religious people are fideists but not all fideists are religious.

If you're a deist, you are religious.

Believing in anything supernatural, makes you religious.

 

[chaseter]

That's not correct at all. It was the Tree of Knowledge. And it was placed there to allow man to exercise free will.

You technically don't have free will if God has a plan for your life.

While I am a Christian, I don't see God as a person who maps out your life. I hate it when something awful happens to someone like a kid being gunned down and then someone saying that God had that planned that way. That's pretty f-ed up. It's also f-ed up to give men a perfect and innocent existence in Eden and have temptation led by Satan as a way to test you by already knowing outcome and the fact that nobody can be perfect. It's a false dichotomy.

Plus Eden, I mean chamon naw. Adam and Eve's children had sex with each other if they were the first two humans? So we are a product of incest?

 

[Sentinel X]

There is such a thing as Abiogenesis, that is to say it happens and in principle should be able to produce the building blocks necessary for life. Whether it is the thing or the only thing that led to the first self replicating molecule considered "life" is another. Some people prefer the notion of panspermia (or variations of that), and some people have other hypothesis, however we know that molecules were forming bonds and replicating on the primative Earth.

Yes, that is exactly what I am talking about. The Miller and Urey experiments definitely corroborates abiotic genesis of organic compounds. However, somehow these non-spontaneous organic compounds came together to create the first precursors of life, probionts. The perplexing thing to me is how did these biological precursors conveniently find all the necessary building blocks. Surely it would need a rudimentary membrane (of course nothing like an actual cell membrane but one nonetheless), genetic material, and protein-like molecules. The chances of of having all these already non-spontaneous organic molecules in an already primative Earth then utilizing them to create a probiont must have been extremely slim, dare I say virtually zero.
And that aside, how did these probionts even manage to remain stable long enough to replicate itself? Better yet how did it replicate itself in the first place? Or even expand its genetic material to get the ball rolling for evolution to take over?

Its quite a mystery. I get evolution and the journey we took to finally become human beings...I'm just always lost when I try to think about how this journey started out in the first place.

 

[Sentinel X]

If you're a deist, you are religious.

Believing in anything supernatural, makes you religious.

Dude, it does not. I am a deist. I don't believe in Jesus, Allah, or anything in between. I don't attend a church or follow a school of thought. I don't have a book or any guidelines to follow. I just believe that there is a much higher consciousness than people can imagine. I am not religious. at all.

By your definition someone who believes in ghost, ufos, etc are also religious? Those are surely considered 'supernatural' as well, are they not?

 

[Thundercrack85]

Dude, it does not. I am a deist. I don't believe in Jesus, Allah, or anything in between. I don't attend a church or follow a school of thought. I don't have a book or any guidelines to follow. I just believe that there is a much higher consciousness than people can imagine. I am not religious. at all.

By your definition someone who believes in ghost, ufos, etc are also religious? Those are surely considered 'supernatural' as well, are they not?

Religion does not have to be organized. Yes, if you believe in ghosts you are religious. UFOs, assuming you believe they're alien spacecraft, that does not make you religious per se. Since there is nothing supernatural about aliens.

You are religious if you believe in the supernatural.

 

[Dragon]

No one denied that, however belief in a deity requires no proof evidence or knowledge. It is also counter-intuitive to the pursuit of knowledge

Not at all. Certainly my search for a connection with God required knowledge. And the proof is in my life's experience. I know that God is with me.

Incorrect. The physical realm, is all of existence. If something lies outside the realm of existence, eg an idea, it doesn't exist.

Incorrect. Ideas are not physical, yet they exist. Concepts are not physical, yet they exist. Spirits are not physical, yet they exist.

How can a benevolent God create anything that is less than benevolent in of itself. This is a juxtaposition.

He wanted us to have free will. To chose to do right or wrong.

But God/Yahweh is omniscient. He cannot possibly make a mistake. It goes against his nature. Therefore, you are wrong. God himself killed rude children with bears in Exodus.

I didn't say that God was wrong. I said the BIBLE was wrong. And you're right. God doesn't make mistakes.

That's exactly what it does.

No it it doesn't. Evolutionists hope that it will- but they haven't accomplished this yet.

Pass on your genes.

That's not WHY we're here. It's just something we do. We also kill and steal. That's also not why we're here.

Like the apes, Elephants, dolphins and other higher mammals, we evolved cognitive thought. The beginning of the universe is explained thoroughly in the context of the Big Bang theory.

Evolution hasn't proven that we evolved cognitive thought. It's just a theory. And The Big Bang explains nothing. It just theorizes that an explosion happened. Not why it happened, where the super-mass came from, how living organisms grew from the material.

No one can answer that question.

I can.

Belief answers those question to those who are happy enough to not pursue anything different. Faith is fine for you, but many people prefer knowledge. God did not create medicine or hospitals, God did not put a man on the moon, God did not help us understand the beginning of life, the Earth, and the universe itself. That was all us.

Exactly. God wanted us to accomplish something on our own. That's the very meaning of life.

And you're no one to judge me or what my pursuits are (Again, very unscientific). You ASSUME that I don't pursue knowledge. I do. I wouldn't be having this discussion if I didn't. It's just that knowledge of evolution doesn't change my belief in God.

It certainly appears so.

You must have an amazing telescope. t:

Everywhere. Space is a piece of the universe.

Which means it isn't finite.

We can't quite be sure. Both because of inflation and light having a finite speed of c. The farthest we can see is around 13.7 billion light years, and because of relativity we know those are the first stars to be made in the universe, so roughly 13.7 billion light years could be the "edge" of the universe. But trying to describe the shape of existence is very very very absolutely insanely monumentally difficult. One physicist, whose name escapes me at this point said, "If I've explained it, and you've understood, you haven't really understood at all".

Which means it's infinite. If it ends somewhere, then there's something else outside of it.

This question doesn't make sense, time began at the beginning of existence.

And since something has always existed- the universe is infinite.

We don't know. There are many theories.

You're not helping to sell Evolution as the Be-All and End-All, dude.

You are using the wrong words. Knowledge implies facts, facts require proof. You have no proof. You have faith, faith doesn't require proof, however, it is not knowledge.

I have proof. It's simply not proof that will satisfy you.

Why do you need God to do that? You are connected to the Earth because you and it were both born out of the sun, you are connected to every person through sharing 99% of your genetic code, to every living thing on the planet by having a shared ancestry, to existence itself, because the energy that made it and you, were born in the same instant.

Because God creates the connection of love. Minus God, your above paragraph makes our existence nothing but random happenstance. From that perspective it doesn't matter if we live or die.

It has answered the one question we asked: "How did life begin?"

No it hasn't, it's offered theories that start in the middle of the story. No explanation of the actual first spark of life or how the lifeless mass was able to yield life.

Not everybody needs a why. You do, and that's okay, to me, it's amazing, believing in a god requires more faith than it ever did before. But just because you do, you can't expect people to just suddenly have an epiphany and go "of course!" and fall in line with your beliefs. Especially not in the modern world, where we can explain the very nature of existence in minute detail.

I never said I expected or cared whether anyone else believed what I do. I don't think you're a bad person because you don't believe in God. I think you're missing out on something, but again, free will.

 

[Dragon]

You technically don't have free will if God has a plan for your life.

Who said God has a plan for your life? I believe God knows what we'll do but doesn't necessarily plan it. That's our job. In fact that's the very meaning of life IMO.

While I am a Christian, I don't see God as a person who maps out your life. I hate it when something awful happens to someone like a kid being gunned down and then someone saying that God had that planned that way. That's pretty f-ed up.

I don't believe God is responsible for such things. The one who killed the kid is responsible. He had a choice not to pull the trigger. I don't believe "God lets bad things happen to good people".

It's also f-ed up to give men a perfect and innocent existence in Eden and have temptation led by Satan as a way to test you by already knowing outcome and the fact that nobody can be perfect. It's a false dichotomy.

It's free will. We'd have never found love, created art or scientific innovation without free will. So God allowed man to fail so that he could expand.

Plus Eden, I mean chamon naw. Adam and Eve's children had sex with each other if they were the first two humans? So we are a product of incest?

Yes. Sometimes you've gotta work with what you're given. Onward

 

[Dragon]

Religion does not have to be organized. Yes, if you believe in ghosts you are religious. UFOs, assuming you believe they're alien spacecraft, that does not make you religious per se. Since there is nothing supernatural about aliens.

You are religious if you believe in the supernatural.

But God isn't supernatural. He created nature in the first place. So anything he does is natural.

 

[random_havoc]

I'm sorry. Are you saying that a great number of people AREN'T killed everyday in the name of religion?

You lumped all religions in as saying that. First of all, many do not say that at all. Second of all, just because people abuse something that does not make it bad. Just because some natural parents sexually abuse their kids doesn't mean that kids being raised by their natural parents is bad. Love is good but is abused every day. Generosity is good but is abused every day. Anything good can be abused, doesn't mean that it's bad. The assertion that religion is bad because some choose to abuse it to use it to their own ends of gaining power/wealth.

More particularly, Christianity has been abused and used to kill, despite Jesus' clear teachings such as "love your enemy and pray for those that persecute you". Meanwhile, the contributions of Christianity in general have been overwhelmingingly positive. Even some atheists are willing to admit this (http://creation.com/atheists-credit-christianity). The ignorance of those who claim otherwise boggles my mind. For example, many in North America take for granted that it's basic human notion that we should help those in need. Not so! We get that teaching from Christianity (a notion actually contradictory to evolutionary perspective I might add). Consider that in India the native perspective was that those in need were born poor for a reason and so it's actually not right to help them. It was Christian missionaries that have for years been working at changing that perspective.

For an entire book's worth of the positive ways that Christianity has changed the world read http://www.amazon.ca/How-Christianity-Changed-The-World/dp/0310264499

I could go on.

 

[Sentinel X]

Religion does not have to be organized. Yes, if you believe in ghosts you are religious. UFOs, assuming you believe they're alien spacecraft, that does not make you religious per se. Since there is nothing supernatural about aliens.

You are religious if you believe in the supernatural.

There are plenty supernatural things about ufos and alien visitations: telepathy, telekinesis, space travel that completely breaks down the known laws of physics, teleportation, inter-dimmensional travel, etc.

All 'supernatural' means is that is can't be explained by science (...yet). So being that none of these have been explained by science for the time being, then yes, belief in UFOs/alien visitation is certainly supernatural and by your logic, makes you a religious person. So what religion are those two group of people in?

Religion is in a way a culture. It involves things such as prayer, reading religious text, attending church, etc. These are things that a deist or agnostic do not do. I don't know if you have made up your own meaning of religion but I don't know any legitamate source that actually considers deism and agnosticism to be a religion but feel free to point me in a direction.

 

[Thundercrack85]

There are plenty supernatural things about ufos and alien visitations: telepathy, telekinesis, space travel that completely breaks down the known laws of physics, teleportation, inter-dimmensional travel, etc.

All 'supernatural' means is that is can't be explained by science (...yet). So being that none of these have been explained by science for the time being, then yes, belief in UFOs/alien visitation is certainly supernatural and by your logic, makes you a religious person. So what religion are those two group of people in?

Religion is in a way a culture. It involves things such as prayer, reading religious text, attending church, etc. These are things that a deist or agnostic do not do. I don't know if you have made up your own meaning of religion but I don't know any legitamate source that actually considers deism and agnosticism to be a religion but feel free to point me in a direction.

Well, I assume you meant UFO's, as in the vehicles. Alien abduction, gets more into wild claims. There are a number of plausible theories about interstellar travel (just look up the Alcubierre drive).

Aliens by definition are not supernatural. If we assume they are simply intelligent beings who evolved on a habitable planet like we did.

People can turn it into a religion though. Raelism is a good example. Since they make claims of being telepathically communicated to by an alien. But I consider that to be separate from UFO's.

Agnosticism is not religion. Deism certainly is. Have you looked up what the word "religion" means? As for direction, Merriam-Webster perhaps? Or Encyclopædia Britannica?

 

[Dr.]

Believing in a higher power doesn't necessarily mean you're religious.

Technically, this is true. It's possible to be a "philosophical deist" - in that a creator god seems conceptually necessary. But such a person need not be religious at all (e.g., believe in the afterlife, believe in prayer or think that this god takes any particular notice of us).

 

[Optimus_Prime_]

Yes, that is exactly what I am talking about. The Miller and Urey experiments definitely corroborates abiotic genesis of organic compounds. However, somehow these non-spontaneous organic compounds came together to create the first precursors of life, probionts. The perplexing thing to me is how did these biological precursors conveniently find all the necessary building blocks. Surely it would need a rudimentary membrane (of course nothing like an actual cell membrane but one nonetheless), genetic material, and protein-like molecules. The chances of of having all these already non-spontaneous organic molecules in an already primative Earth then utilizing them to create a probiont must have been extremely slim, dare I say virtually zero.
And that aside, how did these probionts even manage to remain stable long enough to replicate itself? Better yet how did it replicate itself in the first place? Or even expand its genetic material to get the ball rolling for evolution to take over?

Its quite a mystery. I get evolution and the journey we took to finally become human beings...I'm just always lost when I try to think about how this journey started out in the first place.

Miller/Urey as far as I know is completely out of date, and there have been several labs I've read by future theorists that yielded much more promising results. I disagree that the probability is virtually zero. In my opinion at least very basic self replicating molecules ought to be commonplace provided the planet has a stable atmosphere, water, a hot core and isn't constantly being pelted by rocks. The depths of our oceans provide an environment where you have constant chemical reactions heaped upon other chemical reactions, and considering what I know about the properties of emergence you run enough "calculations" (you can look at chemical reactions in a mathematical sense) eventually you're going to end up with the pretty complicated equations.