DescentBB

Foil wrote:

CUDA wrote:...in a court of law they are considered eyewitness and first hand accounts which BY LAW meet the requirements of Evidence for his existence

This is back to the question about types of "evidence". For your definition of "evidence" (from courtroom law), personal accounts which can be confirmed to be from the proper time/place setting suffices. But for folks who mean rigorous scientific proof when they say "evidence", it's something entirely different.

Foil wrote:Yes, Cuda, I'm familiar with the historical accounts. They do support the place/time/culture/etc. of the Christian scriptures, and they do certainly support that Jesus existed. Unfortunately, they don't support the more specific events (e.g. the resurrection).

snoopy wrote:If you read the text, it doesn't give you the latitude to take that step.

snoopy wrote: "freedom" (which is really an illusion, because the enslavement of sin takes that and more)

roid wrote:CUDA, eyewitness testimony isn't considered reliable

, and the Bible contradicts itself (yes even in the Gospels).

roid wrote:Do you mean it explains how and why this isn't the case? The mechanism of Abraham's caller ID?
When one is questioning the validity of a text, they have the latitude to compare it to reality. I'm saying what i think would have happened in this situation, and thus why the text is questionable for not addressing the point.

CUDA wrote:[ then answer the question. there is a lot of "UNKNOWN" that science takes as fact. why the double standard?

I suggest you read them before you dismiss them, it's kind of self defeating to dismiss something that you haven't read don't you think??
in a court of law they are considered eyewitness and first hand accounts which BY LAW meet the requirements of Evidence for his existence

callmeslick wrote:

CUDA wrote:[ then answer the question. there is a lot of "UNKNOWN" that science takes as fact. why the double standard?

I was a scientist my whole career. That is simply an untrue statement. 'Highly likely' is not 'takes as fact'.

I suggest you read them before you dismiss them, it's kind of self defeating to dismiss something that you haven't read don't you think??
in a court of law they are considered eyewitness and first hand accounts which BY LAW meet the requirements of Evidence for his existence

I've read the first and third of those already. Some of it more than once. I am not claiming Jesus(the man) did not exist. You were supposedly answering the matter of the proof of the existence of GOD.

CUDA wrote:...answer the question. where did the matter that created the universe come from. it could not have always existed. that is a circular reasoning.

Cuda, I still don't understand why you're insisting that there are only two answers ("God created it" or "It's always been there") ?

Foil wrote:From a scientific standpoint, the answer is simply, "We don't know." / "That's outside the scope of any measurements or model we have."

preponderance of the evidence

n. the greater weight of the evidence required in a civil (non-criminal) lawsuit for the trier of fact (jury or judge without a jury) to decide in favor of one side or the other. This preponderance is based on the more convincing evidence and its probable truth or accuracy, and not on the amount of evidence. Thus, one clearly knowledgeable witness may provide a preponderance of evidence over a dozen witnesses with hazy testimony, or a signed agreement with definite terms may outweigh opinions or speculation about what the parties intended. Preponderance of the evidence is required in a civil case and is contrasted with "beyond a reasonable doubt," which is the more severe test of evidence required to convict in a criminal trial. No matter what the definition stated in various legal opinions, the meaning is somewhat subjective.

Foil wrote:

CUDA wrote:...answer the question. where did the matter that created the universe come from. it could not have always existed. that is a circular reasoning.

Cuda, I still don't understand why you're insisting that there are only two answers ("God created it" or "It's always been there") ?

From a scientific standpoint, the answer is simply, "We don't know." / "It's outside the scope of any measurements or model we have." Even if you're referring to the Cyclic Model (multiple bangs), that model still makes no claim about the ultimate origin of the energy/matter in the universe.

snoopy wrote:

Foil wrote:

CUDA wrote:...answer the question. where did the matter that created the universe come from. it could not have always existed. that is a circular reasoning.

Cuda, I still don't understand why you're insisting that there are only two answers ("God created it" or "It's always been there") ?

From a scientific standpoint, the answer is simply, "We don't know." / "It's outside the scope of any measurements or model we have." Even if you're referring to the Cyclic Model (multiple bangs), that model still makes no claim about the ultimate origin of the energy/matter in the universe.

I'll pile on, too: Saying the God created it only defers the problem to God's existence. You have to start with "at the beginning _____ existed."

Proving or disproving that God exists can't be a scientific exercise because God's a volitional being that won't respond predictably to any sort of scientific test that you might try to create. Moreover, scientific study, by definition, excludes unpredictable behavior... the answer to unpredictability in science is either to bound it (Ala valence levels) and/or develop a better model that exposes the predictability of behavior that appears unpredictable.

On a full-time scale, God's behavior is very predictable, but on physically specific & micro-time scale, His behavior is basically unbound-ably unpredictable, especially when you consider that any action He might take these days is unmeasurable. I.E. by objective standards, God's M.O. these days appears to be total inaction.

All that being said, on a subjective level, there many people out there that will attest to their conviction that God exists and is present & active in the world.

It comes down to recognition.... and those to whom God hasn't given the ability to recognize His action are utterly unable to recognize it.

John 10 wrote:
New International Version (NIV)
The Good Shepherd and His Sheep

10 “Very truly I tell you Pharisees, anyone who does not enter the sheep pen by the gate, but climbs in by some other way, is a thief and a robber. 2 The one who enters by the gate is the shepherd of the sheep. 3 The gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep listen to his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. 4 When he has brought out all his own, he goes on ahead of them, and his sheep follow him because they know his voice. 5 But they will never follow a stranger; in fact, they will run away from him because they do not recognize a stranger’s voice.” 6 Jesus used this figure of speech, but the Pharisees did not understand what he was telling them.

7 Therefore Jesus said again, “Very truly I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep. 8 All who have come before me are thieves and robbers, but the sheep have not listened to them. 9 I am the gate; whoever enters through me will be saved.[a] They will come in and go out, and find pasture. 10 The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.

11 “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. 12 The hired hand is not the shepherd and does not own the sheep. So when he sees the wolf coming, he abandons the sheep and runs away. Then the wolf attacks the flock and scatters it. 13 The man runs away because he is a hired hand and cares nothing for the sheep.

14 “I am the good shepherd; I know my sheep and my sheep know me— 15 just as the Father knows me and I know the Father—and I lay down my life for the sheep. 16 I have other sheep that are not of this sheep pen. I must bring them also. They too will listen to my voice, and there shall be one flock and one shepherd. 17 The reason my Father loves me is that I lay down my life—only to take it up again. 18 No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again. This command I received from my Father.”

19 The Jews who heard these words were again divided. 20 Many of them said, “He is demon-possessed and raving mad. Why listen to him?”

21 But others said, “These are not the sayings of a man possessed by a demon. Can a demon open the eyes of the blind?”

snoopy wrote:Proving or disproving that God exists can't be a scientific exercise

CUDA wrote:

, and the Bible contradicts itself (yes even in the Gospels).

show me

Pandora wrote:

snoopy wrote:Proving or disproving that God exists can't be a scientific exercise

right on. I wish more people would appreciate this. Science and religion cover separate domains of human existence. I don't think both should overlap. Leave finding out about the world to science. Leave finding out about morals and our purpose and so on to religion (and philosophy, etc.)

snoopy wrote:

roid wrote:Do you mean it explains how and why this isn't the case? The mechanism of Abraham's caller ID?
When one is questioning the validity of a text, they have the latitude to compare it to reality. I'm saying what i think would have happened in this situation, and thus why the text is questionable for not addressing the point.

Like I said, if you're just making things up, we're done here.

Pandora wrote:

snoopy wrote:Proving or disproving that God exists can't be a scientific exercise

right on. I wish more people would appreciate this. Science and religion cover separate domains of human existence. I don't think both should overlap. Leave finding out about the world to science. Leave finding out about morals and our purpose and so on to religion (and philosophy, etc.)

roid wrote:Science prettymuch just destroys religion, it's what it does. Religion can do nothing but retreat.
And even that implies a false level of legitimacy to religion - as if it's claims can by now be taken seriously by anyone (let alone science). Religion lost it's legitimacy and authority in describing the world long long ago.

I want to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know His thoughts; the rest are details.

Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind.

My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.

The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge.

Every one who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe-a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble.

The scientists’ religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection.

There is no logical way to the discovery of elemental laws. There is only the way of intuition, which is helped by a feeling for the order lying behind the appearance.

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious; It is the source of all true art and science.

We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.

Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the Gods.

When the solution is simple, God is answering.

God does not play dice with the universe.

God is subtle but he is not malicious.

A human being is a part of the whole, called by us Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest-a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison,

restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole nature in its beauty.

Nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.

The man who regards his own life and that of his fellow creatures as meaningless is not merely unfortunate but almost disqualified for life.


The human mind is not capable of grasping the Universe. We are like a little child entering a huge library. The walls are covered to the ceilings with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written these books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. But the child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books—-a mysterious order which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects.

The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity.

What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility. This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism.

The finest emotion of which we are capable is the mystic emotion. Herein lies the germ of all art and all true science. Anyone to whom this feeling is alien, who is no longer capable of wonderment and lives in a state of fear is a dead man. To know that what is impenetrable for us really exists and manifests itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, whose gross forms alone are intelligible to our poor faculties - this knowledge, this feeling ... that is the core of the true religious sentiment. In this sense, and in this sense alone, I rank myself among profoundly religious men.

The real problem is in the hearts and minds of men. It is easier to denature plutonium than to denature the evil spirit of man.

True religion is real living; living with all one’s soul, with all one’s goodness and righteousness.

Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelationship of means and ends. But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to form in the social life of man.

Top Gun wrote:And unfortunately for Einstein, it turned out that God does play dice with the universe. I don't think he was ever very comfortable with some of the ramifications of quantum mechanics.

"It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."

Einstein said, "In view of such harmony in the cosmos which I, with my limited human mind, am able to recognize, there are yet people who say there is no God. But what really makes me angry is that they quote me for the support of such views.

"The fanatical atheists...are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who—in their grudge against the traditional 'opium of the people'—cannot bear the music of the spheres."

Science pretty much just destroys religion, it's what it does

roid wrote:I disagree. Every aspect of existing science at one stage had a religious alternative explanation. All the way back to cro-magnon holding something up from her environment and asking "where did this thing come from?", some religion always had an explanation. Either local (ie: "That rock is a God's tear") or overarching (ie: "God made all matter").

Science was formalised as an alternative to that nonsense strategy, and it is by it's very nature destined to overlap everything that any religion has ever laid claim to.

Pandora wrote:Religion simply does not provide any methods that would help us learn about the natural world, make predictions, and develop new technologies from our theories. Similarly, there is no way in which science can offer us any morals, ideals and so on (without committing the naturalistic fallacy).

Pandora wrote:Vision, by the way, could you summarize the argument in the TED talk. Sorry, I really can't stand watching videos for information. I'd much rather read.

Pandora wrote:...I was talking about the core functions both have, and that can't be fulfilled by the respective other. Religion simply does not provide any methods that would help us learn about the natural world, make predictions, and develop new technologies from our theories. Similarly, there is no way in which science can offer us any morals, ideals and so on (without committing the naturalistic fallacy). Historically, of course, one of the two might overreach and fill the void if the other is not well developed, but will soon need to withdraw when it does.

Pandora wrote:

Science was formalised as an alternative to that nonsense strategy, and it is by it's very nature destined to overlap everything that any religion has ever laid claim to.

I think you are underestimating science here. Science is part of human nature, from early on. Infants learn about the world using scientific methods of predict, test, revise, etc. Watch a boy figure out the rules of when something swims. But it goes even deeper. Our brain uses scientific principles for almost all computations. Even basic vision uses it. You come up with an idea of what the image is. You check other aspects of it (often by acting, like moving your eyes, shifting your angle on the object). Then you either confirm or try out a new hypothesis. Of course, all this happens so quickly that we are not aware of it, but nevertheless the scientific method is present in all of us from the outset.

Pandora wrote:agreed, Vision. Religion can propose morals that groups of people can subscribe to, but of course this can come from other sources as well (I mentioned philosophy in my original post as an example), and individuals can make up their own morals (I am pretty much atheist myself, but do find me a pretty good person overall ). On the other hand, I think it is easy for us to say that now, given that we have been living with Christian morals for several hundred years. We have had training, so to say.

What religion achieves, and that goes beyond what individuals can do, is create morals that a large group of people subscribes to. That's no small feat. Also, it also comprises work ethics and so on. I do believe that religion is to a large part responsible for the rise of the big cultures we have now. In a way, I don't think science would have worked out all so well, if it had not been couched in the flourishing religious societies.

If you want to put it in scientific terms, I think religions are memes in the strongest sense. Mental states, beliefs, that, when taken up, confer some survival advantage to the individual (and thereby to the group they belong to). Think of it like this. If you know somebody else is a believer, too, then you can be pretty sure he won't f*ck you over too much, giving you a very good basis for cooperation.

roid wrote:Do we need it though? It's like asking religion what colour shirt to wear. Morality is simply not something we need to consult an absolute authoritative source on, we do just fine consulting our genetic inherentance and millenia of built up cultural baggage.
I mean in what way do you we need to consult a God to help us answer the trolley problem? We can make these decisions ourselves, even study them.
Hell dude, you're the one studying mirror neurons, i'd have thought you'd be the first to bring up the evolutionary basis for morality in social animals.

Pandora wrote:This is why i talked about it in terms of a "FORMALISATION" of science, to seperate it from our instinctive and fallacy prone common-sense. If our common sense wasn't so prone to fallacies, we wouldn't have ever needed to formalise science into a seperate thing at all, our common-sense would have sufficed.

What of non-Abrahamic cultures, like China? At the end of the day millennium we all seem to settle into very similar ethical frameworks regardless. I wonder if it may have to do with the maturity of a culture, you reach a certain critical mass of collective written works (and scholarship of it), and everything else starts falling into place as lessons from your history become increasingly undeniable. The same lessons seem to be learned independently in many cultures, like convergent cultural evolution.

They found people put nearly three times as much in [to pay for a drink they they could take] when a poster of a pair of eyes was put above the box than when the poster showed flowers.

Pandora wrote:I think of it in this way. If religions were not useful (at least during human history), they would have died out already. That's just basic natural selection logic. Given that all the dominant societies nowadays are also religious, they must confer a quite substantial benefit on those who follow them. My problem with calls for replacing religion is that we have not quite figured out what these advantages are. My hunch is that if we would get away with religion we would find out very quickly - and painfully - how efficient tools they have been.
...

My hunch is that religion is something very similar. We might not know yet how it works, but it might be a very effective control parameter for the smooth operation of large scale societies. Do we really want to replace it and start fiddling with all the hundreds of single control parameters? Religions have similarly evolved over thousands of years to be as effective as they are, in the same way as our motor system.