Religion II

[Actor]

Originally Posted by boxcar

And even if that were so, it would represent an infinite improvement over the idiotic idea of an accident.

On the other hand, if you insist on using the word design, natural selection is not accidental and it effectively produces a design without a designer.

[HalvOnHorseracing]

Originally Posted by boxcar

No we don't. True born again believers will stick within the bounds of divine revelations and not go beyond. On the other hand the imaginations and fantasies of the high priests of scientism are seemingly infinite.

One thing that the ignorant love to do is to diminish the knowledge and the expertise of people in other disciplines that cause them to reconsider misguided, internally held beliefs. It is somewhat ironic that you use the term "high priests of scientism" as if it was a cult of misdirected conjurers. You are a Luddite on technology, acting like a backwoods Bubba on the use of that there computer simulatin' machine. You purposely choose not to educate yourself on science as if God was looking down on you with the sternness of the same guy who had a whim about killing everything in the world in a flood, putting the thought into your head that if you understand the cosmological arguments, that goes down on the big balance sheet as a negative. How do you expect to have an intelligent argument with someone when you want to sell rocks from the planets flying off into space as your explanation for how they got to earth?

I've watched debates between Christopher Hitchens and Christian Apologists (their word, not mine) and I can honestly say the Christians attempt to be intellectually honest in their refutation of Hitchen's arguments. I watch to understand the arguments that Christians make for why there must be a supreme being. Without knowing their positions, it would be like bringing your gun to a battle, but having no bullets to shoot, and that is precisely what you do.

Interestingly, many of the Christian Apologists - also very well educated as theologians - completely avoid trying to defend the literal arguments of Genesis. In fact, some of them will take pains to point out they are not Calvinists. You are a member of a sect that is even a minority within the denomination, and one that is rejected far and wide by the educated in both science and theology. To understand God's work you have to be able to see God's work, and that is what he has given us - the ability to see and understand what was created and how it was created. To reject that as the equivalent of voodoo is to reject the essence of the universe we were given, and to accept a fairy tale in the place of all we can see and understand could not please a vain God.

[boxcar]

Originally Posted by Actor

On the other hand, if you insist on using the word design, natural selection is not accidental and it effectively produces a design without a designer.

Most biologists would strongly disagree with you. Furthermore, what is the cause of "natural selection". Or is natural selection the uncaused cause?

Also, Natural Selection does not precede the big firecracker. And that explosion was certainly an accident. Natural Selection didn't cause it.

[boxcar]

Originally Posted by HalvOnHorseracing

One thing that the ignorant love to do is to diminish the knowledge and the expertise of people in other disciplines that cause them to reconsider misguided, internally held beliefs. It is somewhat ironic that you use the term "high priests of scientism" as if it was a cult of misdirected conjurers. You are a Luddite on technology, acting like a backwoods Bubba on the use of that there computer simulatin' machine. You purposely choose not to educate yourself on science as if God was looking down on you with the sternness of the same guy who had a whim about killing everything in the world in a flood, putting the thought into your head that if you understand the cosmological arguments, that goes down on the big balance sheet as a negative. How do you expect to have an intelligent argument with someone when you want to sell rocks from the planets flying off into space as your explanation for how they got to earth?

I've watched debates between Christopher Hitchens and Christian Apologists (their word, not mine) and I can honestly say the Christians attempt to be intellectually honest in their refutation of Hitchen's arguments. I watch to understand the arguments that Christians make for why there must be a supreme being. Without knowing their positions, it would be like bringing your gun to a battle, but having no bullets to shoot, and that is precisely what you do.

Interestingly, many of the Christian Apologists - also very well educated as theologians - completely avoid trying to defend the literal arguments of Genesis. In fact, some of them will take pains to point out they are not Calvinists. You are a member of a sect that is even a minority within the denomination, and one that is rejected far and wide by the educated in both science and theology. To understand God's work you have to be able to see God's work, and that is what he has given us - the ability to see and understand what was created and how it was created. To reject that as the equivalent of voodoo is to reject the essence of the universe we were given, and to accept a fairy tale in the place of all we can see and understand could not please a vain God.

Man will NEVER understand the HOW of creation. Only the utterly delusional think they can. God's ways are past finding out.

[boxcar]

Originally Posted by HalvOnHorseracing

When I find a sillier, less intellectual argument, I'll let you know. To say it makes no sense is as kind as I can be.

We found a rock 4.5 billion years old. We tested it with our own eyes applying the known laws of nature, the same laws that everyone agrees drive the universe. We also found rocks of that age on the moon. When you can explain how a 4.5 billion year old rock managed to get on the oldest celestial body in the universe, earth, which is only 6,000 years old, you'll have something. To date, your explanations for that rock are laughably dumb.

The "rock" was created as mature as the rest of the planet. Problem solved.
You don't get it do, you? Radiometric dating is grounded in circular reasoning. The only way we can know for certain if this planet is really 4.5 billion years old is to compare the age of this planet with an earth that is not mature and functional.

And by the way, how can earth be the oldest celestial body in the universe when the universe is far older than the earth and, presumably, our entire solar system? What about other galaxies? Would they not be much older than a mere 4.5 billion years?

[HalvOnHorseracing]

Originally Posted by boxcar

Man will NEVER understand the HOW of creation. Only the utterly delusional think they can. God's ways are past finding out.

We may someday understand the how of the beginning, but until then we can content ourselves with having a pretty good understanding regarding the how of everything since the Big Bang.

[HalvOnHorseracing]

Originally Posted by boxcar

The "rock" was created as mature as the rest of the planet. Problem solved.
You don't get it do, you? Radiometric dating is grounded in circular reasoning. The only way we can know for certain if this planet is really 4.5 billion years old is to compare the age of this planet with an earth that is not mature and functional.

And by the way, how can earth be the oldest celestial body in the universe when the universe is far older than the earth and, presumably, our entire solar system? What about other galaxies? Would they not be much older than a mere 4.5 billion years?

The earth is not the oldest body in the universe except in the mind of people like you. I've said on multiple occasions the universe is 14 billion years old. You're the one who thinks the earth is the oldest body in the universe. Don't be a dolt. You know my position and I know yours.

Perhaps the only way you can know is to find another earth, but science is way ahead of you. We HAVE compared rocks from other bodies to the age of rocks on the earth, and despite your inability to see what is plainly in front of your face, there is an answer and it is 4.5 billion years old.

[Actor]

Originally Posted by boxcar

Most biologists would strongly disagree with you.

Name one.

[Actor]

"If we take something like any fiction, any holy book and any other fiction and destroyed it, in a thousand years time that would not come back just as it was, whereas if we took every science book and every fact and destroyed them all, in a thousand years they'd all be back because all the same tests would be the same result." - Ricky Gervais

At about 3:40.

YouTube

[HalvOnHorseracing]

Originally Posted by boxcar

The "rock" was created as mature as the rest of the planet. Problem solved.

If there is somebody, other than boxcar, who can explain what this means I'd love to hear it. It sounds like the explanation for 4.5 billion year old rocks on an earth that is ostensibly 6,000 years old is that God made the earth appear to be 4.5 billion years old, much like an art forger tries to make the art he did last week appear as if it was done in the 15th century.

[boxcar]

Originally Posted by HalvOnHorseracing

The earth is not the oldest body in the universe except in the mind of people like you. I've said on multiple occasions the universe is 14 billion years old. You're the one who thinks the earth is the oldest body in the universe. Don't be a dolt. You know my position and I know yours.

Perhaps the only way you can know is to find another earth, but science is way ahead of you. We HAVE compared rocks from other bodies to the age of rocks on the earth, and despite your inability to see what is plainly in front of your face, there is an answer and it is 4.5 billion years old.

You're the one who claimed the earth is the oldest celestial body in the universe. Try to remember what you write.

We found a rock 4.5 billion years old. We tested it with our own eyes applying the known laws of nature, the same laws that everyone agrees drive the universe. We also found rocks of that age on the moon. When you can explain how a 4.5 billion year old rock managed to get on the oldest celestial body in the universe, earth, which is only 6,000 years old, you'll have something. To date, your explanations for that rock are laughably dumb.

Meanwhile...at the end of the day...the rock is just as mature as the planet on which it was found.

[boxcar]

Originally Posted by HalvOnHorseracing

If there is somebody, other than boxcar, who can explain what this means I'd love to hear it. It sounds like the explanation for 4.5 billion year old rocks on an earth that is ostensibly 6,000 years old is that God made the earth appear to be 4.5 billion years old, much like an art forger tries to make the art he did last week appear as if it was done in the 15th century.

Bad analogy since divine revelation doesn't tell us how old the earth is. But scripture is very clear that God created a mature, fully-functional universe in six days. Also, if God is a "forger" than the forged Adam, Eve, plant life, animal life, etc.

[boxcar]

Originally Posted by Actor

Name one.

Will this suffice?

"Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were his achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labour of the ages, all the devotion, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins - all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation be safely built" - Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, 3:220

But here is one by one of the world's leading biologists:

"We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism...It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door." [Geneticist professor Richard Lewontin of Harvard Uniersity, Billions and billions of demons (review of The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan, 1997), The New York Review, p. 31, 9 January 1997, Emphasis in original.]

[Actor]

Originally Posted by boxcar

You're the one who claimed the earth is the oldest celestial body in the universe.

I did a search for all the times that Halv has used the word "oldest" and came up with seven hits. In none of those does he make such a claim.

Originally Posted by boxcar

Try to remember what you write.

Try to understand what people write.

[HalvOnHorseracing]

Originally Posted by boxcar

You're the one who claimed the earth is the oldest celestial body in the universe. Try to remember what you write.

You are a chucklehead. I'm referencing you. Get this straight. The earth is 4.5 billion years old, and the universe is 14 billion years old and I've never wavered from that position. Anytime I said 6,000 years old I was referencing your perverted view of the age of the earth and the universe. You're the one who thinks it's the oldest body in the universe because that's what Genesis says. First God made the earth. You can go through every post I've made, and if you think I've ever supported a 6,000 year old earth, you have completely misconstrued me. I will never, ever take your position on that.

Originally Posted by boxcar

Meanwhile...at the end of the day...the rock is just as mature as the planet on which it was found.

Finally, you are right. The rock is 4.5 billion years old and so is the earth.