Oh, and you're damned right I'm a troll, but I do have an art for drawing out real discussions of what would have otherwise probably been sheer stupidity. Look at every post before my first little bit of raconteurism for examples :)

Yeesh replies coming in too fast! I believe that everyone is inherently bisexual in terms of possible ranges of future behavior, but that some combination of genetic/physiological predisposition and and social conditioning causes most people to feel they are supposed to choose one way or the other, and most do so. That makes it a very good analogy really, because I believe that most people have at least a LITTLE doubt about their cherished beliefs in their hearts, and thus truly could be affirmed as agnostic, but social conditioning causes them to make a choice and then stick with it adamantly even as their subconscious mind continues to wonder if they mightn't be wrong.

I agree with moros

wow, this was an interesting thread, didnt realize something like this could generate this many responses in a short amount of time. Ill throw my 2 cents in. Im a Christian, I wholly believe that God exists, and that there is plenty of evidence to prove his existence. Ask me a question about anything, ill answer it (im better at formulating responses, than thinking of stuff on the spot.)

Here's where I differ slightly than other Christians, I believe Dickens was right to a point with his theory of evolution. He was right in the fact that animals do chance characteristics periodically, adapting to their environments, but he used the data he found from his experiments and blew it out of proportion. Animals dont evolve from one species to another, you wont ever see a lizard evolve into a bird.
Another thing is that Dickens was a Christian before his experiments, and that by converting into an atheist, and using science to 'prove' his theory of evolution, he actually opened the door for science to help prove the existence of God. Science helps explain how the world works, and by doing that, and showing how complex everything is, it actually is showing that there was someone behind the creation of the universe, that someone being God.

Perrin3088 wrote:
|> RvW, it is irrelevant on if the thing wants to be proven or not.. the pure fact of the matter is, is that next to nothing can be proven not to be, while things can be proven to be... in order to prove john doe is not on a moving train you must simultaneously view every portion of said train at the same time to prove john does lack of existance on said train, but to prove john doe is on said train, all you have to do is find him.

If God *is* on that train (exists), even if we view every portion of the train simultaneously and observe God to not be there, he/she/it might still be there; that's one of the neat things about omnipotence... you get to cheat all the rules whenever you want.

To but it into logic (assuming God doesn't want to be found):

E: God Exists
P: Proof of God's existence can be found

E implies not P
not E implies not P

All we have is the knowledge that (so far) "not P" holds. It's utterly impossible to conclude (with certainty, probabilistically we still have Russell's Teapot) anything at all about whether or not "E" holds.

---

I'm the first to admit all of this is rather theoretical and I honestly don't think a God actually exists, but:

- To a lot of people, this is very important
- I am not **sure** there's no God

For me, that means the only possible course of action is to tread lightly and stick to "probably not". That also means that when people (ab)use science to (attempt to) show there *definitely* is no God, I feel compelled to object.

RvW completely hit the spot about how I feel.

*(can't even write a reply without the tread getting longer in the meantime...)*

@Nighthawk
|> you wont ever see a lizard evolve into a bird

Not within a lifetime, not within a couple dozen generations, but what makes you so sure it won't happen eventually? Remember, even if you stretch the definition as far as it'll go, "science" has only been around for a couple thousand years. If we start keeping detailed track of every species, for millions of years (and without losing those records every few millennia of course), do you really think that all those species will merely adapt to their environments, without any new ones, well, "evolving"?

|> Another thing is that Dickens was a Christian before his experiments, and that by converting into an atheist, and using science to 'prove' his theory of evolution, he actually opened the door for science to help prove the existence of God.

Ehm, how do you figure that? Are you claiming there to be a scientific proof for the existence of God...?

|> Science helps explain how the world works, and by doing that, and showing how complex everything is, it actually is showing that there was someone behind the creation of the universe, that someone being God.

This sounds a lot like "intelligent design".

The argument goes something like this: 'I refuse to prove that I exist,' says God, 'for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.'
"'But,' says Man, 'the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED.'
"'Oh dear,' says God, 'I hadn't thought of that,' and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
"'Oh, that was easy,' says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next pedestrian crossing.
"Most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of dingo's kidneys, but that didn't stop Oolon Colluphid making a small fortune when he used it as the central theme of his bestselling book, Well That about Wraps It Up for God.

@RvW, to your first comment, what makes me sure is the lack of evidence whatsoever that there ever was any links. There is no fossils that show a (to continue on my example from earlier) lizard turning into a bird. Evolutions claim that there are links, which they say would take millions of years to go from one species to another, then why are there no fossils?

'Are you claiming there to be a scientific proof for the existence of God...?'
Ill admit, I do not claim that there is straight scientific proof (yet) for the existence of God. Its more, I can look at the world, see a process of something, know what science says the process does, and it reinforces my belief that God exists.

This sounds a lot like "intelligent design"

Doesnt intelligent design imply that there is a Creator or God behind the intelligent design? Its hard for something, say a book, to be complex and intelligent, without a God designing it.

'That also means that when people (ab)use science to (attempt to) show there definitely is no God, I feel compelled to object.' I was intrigued by this statement. Its rare to hear someone say something like this, when they dont believe that there is a God (or in your case, believe that there is probably not a God).

@Oranos, What the hell is the Babel fish?

Nighthawk, a quick aside: Dickens was a very popular British author. You're thinking of Charles Darwin, which is an understandable mixup considering the similarity of their names...

Anyways, to review: The theory of evolution holds that as an environment changes, the lifeforms that live within that environment adapt to the new environment through natural selection. Life is always in flux, recombining and mutating. Most of the new results are not well-adapted to their environment and will not prosper, but occasionally a mutation will by rare (but over a long period of time inevitable) chance be actually better suited to the new environment. The outcome is that the new better suited lifeform increases in population and begins to outcompete the lifeforms that previously thrived there, so the population of the former (and the chance for their newly adapted genome to be passed down to descendants) increases, while the population of the former decreases, possibly all the way down to extinction as has happened to the vast majority of lifeforms that we find in the fossil record. There have also been some mass die-offs as a result of extremely precipitous changes in environment, such as what happened at the end of the Permian epoch when almost all land-based life died, and much of what was in the ocean as well.

Now, can you say that intelligence is not a survival trait? The same mechanism of natural selection that could cause an Ur-armadillo to grow armored plates could cause an Ur-human to become more intelligent through successive generations, as the more intelligent primates use their burgeoning intellect to outcompete those less intelligent. That is why the idea that there MUST be a god for intelligence to exist does not seem to be true in light of the mountain of evidence for the theory of evolotion that we see in the fossil records, in human and mitochondrial DNA, in computer models, and in lab experiments on organisms that have very short lifespans and thus can literally evolve right before our wondering eyes.

None of this disproves the concept of intelligent design, it just goes to show that ID isn't the ONLY way to describe how the world we see today came to pass.

devilnis do you know Charles Darwin was Christian

The problem with with invoking an omnipotent creator to explain the complexity of biological life is that it doesn't at all explain how complexity arises.

In other words, the argument is supposed to be something like: We see that all complex things are created by something more complicated. Thus, life was created by something more complex: God. It is highly unlikely that the extraordinary complexity of life would arise by mere natural processes.

The problem with this is that an omnipotent God is necessarily more complex than the life it created. So you don't "solve" the problem of figuring out how the complexity of life can exists, you just replace it by the bigger problem of how the greater complexity of God can arise to create life in the first place. If it is unlikely than something as complex as life would "just be", then the existence of a more complicated deity is way more unlikely.

On the other hand, evolution does provide an answer to how complexity can arise from simpler structures/beings.

The more general problem to a divine alternative to evolution is that it is not falsifiable: Any observable empirical fact would be compatible with creationism/ID.
A "theory" that can explain any conceivable observation has no explanatory power at all (i.e.: The point of an explanation it to know what things could happen and which ones couldn't).

@Nighthawk: Reference to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, an awesome book.

Yes, Ironheart, I did know that. Like Darwin, I don't believe that the theory of evolution is at odds with the possibility of the existance of God, I just believe that it is a more likely explanation for what we see than the creationism story of the bible, for instance.

There are computer programmers now that work in evolutionary systems, neural networks and the like, basically attempting to model life to achieve outcomes that are difficult to explicitly code. Look up fuzzy logic, for example - well-trained neural networks have the capability to make decisions that are intuitive instead of deductive, like an educated guess. It's a fascinating subject in part because it plays out very much like intelligent design, with the programmers playing the part of "God" - They start it out with predefined rules (akin to the laws of nature such as conservation of momentum and the like,) and they may tweak the rules or the state of the universe they have created from time to time, but mostly what happens is millions of uncontrolled, unguided interactions between different "neurons" in the network that actually lead to very interesting results that the programmer could never have predicted in the first place. Couldn't God have done much the same, starting the game in motion and then sitting back and merely tweaking it here and there and being amazed by the results? I don't believe it, really, but it's very interesting to consider :)

Lol, I always get the names mixed up. Thanks for the clarification, Ill try to remember that from now on

To review your argument, I dont dispute the theory of evolution to a point. Darwin was right in his experiments, animals will change to suit their environment. Darwin's experiments showed that as winter came, the shells around the nuts (the primary source of food) got harder, some of the birds grew tougher, thicker beaks, allowing them to crack the nuts, and get that food. As summer came around, the nuts shells got thinner, so the larger beaks were basically useless, and the birds beaks got smaller. Where I disagree with evolution is the mutation part. Darwin said, based on only the birds beaks changing, that is was possible for animals to change there entire characteristics, and evolve into a different form. Like you said, it is a rare chance, and would take a very long time to even happen. The species would most likely die off before that mutation would happen.

To the second point, your right, Intelligence is a survival trait. I was more thinking along the lines that, when the scientific explanation is that the The Big Bang happened(which I do believe happened, just in my own interpretation, There was nothing, then God created everything, so the Big Bang did happen, it just wasnt the Big Bang :) ). It seems highly unlikely that the Universe could manifest, and contain and control itself, without any guiding by a Intelligent Creator, a.k.a, God.

Also, in response to the lab experiments on organisms, I havent heard about the results of experiments, so if you could expand a little on that part, I would appreciate it. But my point about it is, from what I would expect the experiment to start out, the Scientists would have created the organism, which would have no direction by itself, would have to be guided by the Scientists, who themselves (to the organism) gods, having created the organism, and are guiding it to a specific point in its lifespan.

@FD, I have never gotten a chance to read that book, Ill keep an eye out for it.

And as for God just being there, and where he would come from, shockingly an episode of Family Guy (if it was at all accurate) would explain it. A Causality loop is a loop where you are destined to do something, and are unable to change it(which after researching, am still not sure if its a real thing), which, in the episode of Family Guy, Brian and Stewie get knocked out of the space-time continuum, overload the reactor in Stewie's time machine. After getting back in the present, stewie finds out that he created the Big Bang. The Universe created Stewie, who in turn created the Universe, which created him again, and so on and so on. When you think about it, there appears to be no start point, because if there was, then one of the two required actions would not happen. Time would have to be infinite, with no start point, otherwise the Universe would cease to exist. How this wraps around to God existing is that He has always been, and always will be. He is outside time, He created Time, and if He was never there, Time would not have been created. Its hard to wrap your mind around, I still have trouble with it sometimes.

It's not a real thing.

Shockingly, Family Guy is not a reliable source.

Just a note, it's not correct to simply say that atheism is "another form of religion masquerading as critical thought." (Sorry for bringing this up again but I don't think it was addressed fully).

The argument can be made that atheism is not an assertion in its own right. Therefore there is no knowledge that atheists claim to have. There is simply the absence of belief like that of a newborn baby or someone completely .

Not that this is my personal position but I feel it should be acknowledged. Oh Dev you troublemaker :P

Muahahahah IT HAS BEGUNNNZ!