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Old 2009-09-26, 12:19   Link #2081
Xrayz0r
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Please could you write your retort in solid paragraphs? I'm trying to keep up, but it's hard when you guys respond to each sentence with a sentence of your own.
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Old 2009-09-26, 12:22   Link #2082
Cipher
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Originally Posted by Xrayz0r View Post
Please could you write your retort in solid paragraphs? I'm trying to keep up, but it's hard when you guys respond to each sentence with a sentence of your own.
But that would be, in turn, inefficient for us. Separating different topics, creates a better organization that leads to better understanding (IMO).
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Old 2009-09-26, 12:24   Link #2083
MeoTwister5
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Actually I'm pulling out of this discussion for now. My brain is shot and I have exams on monday.

I need a beer....
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Old 2009-09-26, 12:25   Link #2084
Xrayz0r
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What are you guys fighting about when you're both believers?


I'm sure you knew what I meant by "believer"
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Old 2009-09-26, 12:28   Link #2085
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Originally Posted by Xrayz0r View Post
What are you guys fighting about when you're both believers?
*EVERYONE* is a believer. It depends on what they believe on though. But yeah, we're both Abraham-ic monotheists, so I really don't understand how it led to this.
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Old 2009-09-26, 13:05   Link #2086
Xrayz0r
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Originally Posted by MeoTwister5 View Post
I think that with enough faith, faith will be rewarded with its confirmation eventually.
So if I have a shitload of faith in the tooth fairy, she will eventually pop into existence?

If not, you must have some sort of basis for your belief that your faith will eventually be rewarded by in fact having been reality all along. Otherwise it is no different from any other kind of faith, which is commonly defined as belief without evidence.

No offense to your belief, just curious.

Last edited by Xrayz0r; 2009-09-26 at 13:18.
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Old 2009-09-26, 13:06   Link #2087
ChainLegacy
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Originally Posted by Cipher View Post
Pardon my perhaps rude commentary, but I really suggest you look at things more flexibly. This is not the only issue that lacks definite answers. There are limitless other indefinite answers---science probably having most of them.

The only way we can find the more *reasonable* answer is by creating a ratio between its negatives and positives. Thus, my last "draw".

We have society, order and peace now because of that *natural* "goodness" of man. Yes, It is definitely true that some are "evil", but that does not remove the fact that *most* people are "good".(the fact that we're still retaining society and order, and not the other way, is clear evidence of this).

My only explanation to as to how humans become evil is either through *some* "bad" *nurture* or a mental illness.(I'm not so sure about this, I'm hoping someone else could share their ideas, thank you.)
I've never stated there to be a lack of definite answers at any time. Reread my posts if you think so. You're telling me to look more flexibly, yet you were incapable of doing so in examining the Earth a few pages back, so I'm not sure where you're coming from.

But why create a ratio when you've just admitted this is an indefinite area? By definition humans are neither 'good' nor 'evil,' if they were then the words themselves would not exist because we would have no comprehension of the opposite.

We do not have society, order, and peace. You've been feeding me the poverty line for a while, we're far from a harmonious perfect human organization. Civilizations prosper and fail at different times, and humans' nature to socially organize is what tends to bring it back again and again.

This isn't a comic book where people are 'good' or 'evil,' so trying to understand the root of the problem will get you nowhere. Humans are way too complex to be dichotomized in that manner.
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Old 2009-09-26, 13:14   Link #2088
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These logical paradoxes are often created by human speech and thinking. Using them in actual arguments I think actually creates little discussion of merit.

For example I could argue that if I throw a dart at a wall, it will never reach the wall.

My reason for saying this is the dart will always travel half of the distance left to the wall. If it keeps traveling half the distance, it will never end as you can always take half of a distance even if it is infinitesimally small.

I think we can already establish that humans cannot know something past 99.999999%. It is impossible to get to that 100%. You should read Edge's post a couple pages back as he elaborates on this.

When humans do take that leap of faith in reality (That extra .00001 is covered by this) we are able to find mutual understanding.

However, using that the logic of this leap of faith to argue one's point is silly as you are basically shaking the foundations of existence. If you do that, you are implying to me that your own beliefs might not even really be there. You cannot even be certain about yourself because what really is yourself?

Look I can say that everyone in this forum is a figment of your imagination and you could not argue differently (And even if I allowed you to under your logic, you wouldn't be able to seeing as your own thoughts are uncertain already).

Anyways, all I am saying is that this leap of faith you point out to is a very silly discussion point.

Humans are not absolutely certain about everything, but we are more certain about somethings than others. I'm more certain about the existence of us human beings that some supposed omnipotent force we like to call "God."
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Old 2009-09-26, 14:00   Link #2089
SeedFreedom
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Thank you to monstert and Cipher for your responses, but i think i'm going to try to simplify my original message and meaning and start over because i think it got lost among my metaphors. (oh, and i may be updating this post so if it changes in a bit i apologize)

First off, lets assume there is a god, who is all powerful, for the sake of argument.

I was born into a family of science and grew up with science. I have been taught to only believe those things that have been explained and can be proven. Fact. Out of my control.

One who learns something at an early age incorporates that into his core beliefs and it is very difficult as an adult to reject it and adopt a new set of beliefs. Debatable, but accepted by many people.

According to some religions, no matter what i do and no matter how good i am, i will never get to heaven for being an atheist. Fact. Out of my control.

I am willing to accept god, if i can see something that convinces me he exist and wants me to believe in him. He has not done so. Fact. Out of my control.

Thereby, the chances of me believing in god are slim, and would be very hard. Most of the circumstances surrounding it are out of my control. Even taking me out of the equation, there are people far removed from society living in remote regions of the world who have never heard of these religions. So is god really that unforgiving that we don't deserve salvation for circumstances that are (mostly) out of our control? Even taking the argument i could change, if god is so powerful but refuses to help me by giving me some small amount of proof, why does he deserve my praise?

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Originally Posted by Cipher View Post
Which is basically my point.
I don't understand how we "differ" in this. I've basically said that "I don't believe that proof and evidence can't be found by *mere* logic *alone*"---which implies that it needs both. In order to have faith, you must have *some* logic first.

Your getting the wrong idea again. I *also* believe that faith *will* reach an evident conclusion, but I don't think that our *current* state of being would *logically* prove faith's result. Faith will logically reach a conclusion but its not self-evident yet in its *now* current form.

It's a win argument for me. I'm merely suggesting that there is no logical evidence towards "reality".
Actually, you are arguing the impossible based on the definition of the words you are using. Faith, by definition, is the belief in something without proof. Thereby using faith as a proof is logically incorrect. Nobody can prove what is "existence" so to say you are correct because of his inability to do so is incorrect, because you cannot prove it yourself.

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Originally Posted by Reckoner View Post
These logical paradoxes are often created by human speech and thinking. Using them in actual arguments I think actually creates little discussion of merit.

For example I could argue that if I throw a dart at a wall, it will never reach the wall.

My reason for saying this is the dart will always travel half of the distance left to the wall. If it keeps traveling half the distance, it will never end as you can always take half of a distance even if it is infinitesimally small.
Sorry, i know this is a bit off-topic but i see this mistake all the time. The problem with the "Paradox" is not the misuse of language, but the misuse of math. As time between distances becomes shorter and shorter along with the distance, determining the actual time remaining leads to a calculation of 0/0, an undefined, not infinite.
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Old 2009-09-26, 14:02   Link #2090
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I don't have a religion. I'm not opposed though.. While I like supernatural stories, I've never had any reason to believe in God, ghosts, or anything else like that.
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Old 2009-09-26, 14:21   Link #2091
Cub-Sama
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Originally Posted by SeedFreedom View Post
Thereby, the chances of me believing in god are slim, and would be very hard. Most of the circumstances surrounding it are out of my control. Even taking me out of the equation, there are people far removed from society living in remote regions of the world who have never heard of these religions. So is god really that unforgiving that we don't deserve salvation for circumstances that are (mostly) out of our control? Even taking the argument i could change, if god is so powerful but refuses to help me by giving me some small amount of proof, why does he deserve my praise?
In Christianity if people have never had the chance to hear about Christ and God they are pardoned I think but those who do hear and refuse to accept are not pardoned. Also if you were raised with science then in my opinion it is all the more reason for someone to believe in God, because my knowledge of science strengthens my belief; because I think the chances of this happening randomly and all these complex things happening by accident is less than 0.001%, it is much more logical IMO to believe in a higher power with knowledge and power so great that it could create all this rather than randomly energy came together created matter, atoms etc... then finally creating beings and objects as complex as we are.

If you think about it the Big Bang Theory and Theory of Evolution makes less sense than the belief of God, I mean how did evolution create language, independant thought, conscience, abilities such as art etc...

Charles Darwin himself said that if irreducible complexity was ever proven his theory would be shattered
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Old 2009-09-26, 14:26   Link #2092
Vexx
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Originally Posted by Cub-Sama View Post
In Christianity if people have never had the chance to hear about Christ and God they are pardoned I think but those who do hear and refuse to accept are not pardoned.
I'd be interested to hear where you got that idea of "pardoning"... I've not seen anything Biblical that supports it. (However, the phrase Jesus actually uses in the early Aramaic that is the basis for "my way or no way" ideology actually can be interpreted more than one way.... its just that it was useful to the aggressive early imperial church to assert the "my way or no way" interpretation).
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Old 2009-09-26, 14:29   Link #2093
Proto
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it is much more logical IMO to believe in a higher power with knowledge and power so great that it could create all this rather than randomly energy came together created matter, atoms etc...
Ok, let's analyze this in the logical form you seem to favor. Define "God".
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Old 2009-09-26, 14:30   Link #2094
SeedFreedom
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Originally Posted by Cub-Sama View Post
In Christianity if people have never had the chance to hear about Christ and God they are pardoned I think but those who do hear and refuse to accept are not pardoned. Also if you were raised with science then in my opinion it is all the more reason for someone to believe in God, because my knowledge of science strengthens my belief; because I think the chances of this happening randomly and all these complex things happening by accident is less than 0.001%, it is much more logical IMO to believe in a higher power with knowledge and power so great that it could create all this rather than randomly energy came together created matter, atoms etc... then finally creating beings and objects as complex as we are.

If you think about it the Big Bang Theory and Theory of Evolution makes less sense than the belief of God, I mean how did evolution create language, independant thought, conscience, abilities such as art etc...

Charles Darwin himself said that if irreducible complexity was ever proven his theory would be shattered
Ok, I'll except that those who weren't given a chance are pardoned. And if Vexx is correct even they are not spared. But is god so vain and so fickle that if i was born without religion and become near unable to accept it that he won't spare me, even if i was a good person? If so my chances of following everything he wishes to a tee, (Which is also impossible as religion is often contradictory even within their own text) are so infinitesimally small, that i have more important things to focus on like improving me life on earth knowing I'll likely be damned anyways. And for an all powerful being i would think he would have better things to do than worry about one person not praying to him every night even if they were good. If he is that vain, why should i pray to him and believe him.

As far as Science having a shaky understanding of the fundamentals of the universe, that may be true. But science grows and science changes and adapts when it is wrong. Religion is supposedly never wrong and what is true a thousand years ago should still be true today, even when proven otherwise.
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Old 2009-09-26, 14:56   Link #2095
Anh_Minh
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Originally Posted by Cub-Sama View Post
In Christianity if people have never had the chance to hear about Christ and God they are pardoned I think but those who do hear and refuse to accept are not pardoned. Also if you were raised with science then in my opinion it is all the more reason for someone to believe in God, because my knowledge of science strengthens my belief; because I think the chances of this happening randomly and all these complex things happening by accident is less than 0.001%,
The truth is, we don't know that much about the chances of us cropping up. Do we even have a frame where speaking of the probabilities of such an event make sense? We can talk about the probabilities of rainfall in a given day and place, but the probabilities of something human-like arising from a Big Bang? Or the probabilities of a Big Bang occurring in the first place, and producing an inhabitable universe? Who the hell knows?

Quote:
it is much more logical IMO to believe in a higher power with knowledge and power so great that it could create all this rather than randomly energy came together created matter, atoms etc... then finally creating beings and objects as complex as we are.
You merely add a level of mystery without any benefit to our understanding of the universe. What are the origins of that entity and its knowledge? How do his powers work?

Quote:
If you think about it the Big Bang Theory and Theory of Evolution makes less sense than the belief of God,
How so? When is "God did it" ever more than a fancy way of saying "stuff happens"? It's not an explanation, it's a placeholder.

Quote:
I mean how did evolution create language, independant thought, conscience, abilities such as art etc...

Charles Darwin himself said that if irreducible complexity was ever proven his theory would be shattered
Good. Go find some "irreducible complexity", then, because you haven't cited any.

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Originally Posted by Vexx View Post
I'd be interested to hear where you got that idea of "pardoning"... I've not seen anything Biblical that supports it. (However, the phrase Jesus actually uses in the early Aramaic that is the basis for "my way or no way" ideology actually can be interpreted more than one way.... its just that it was useful to the aggressive early imperial church to assert the "my way or no way" interpretation).
Maybe he's talking about the Harrowing of Hell?
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Old 2009-09-26, 17:10   Link #2096
Cub-Sama
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Originally Posted by SeedFreedom View Post
But is god so vain and so fickle that if i was born without religion and become near unable to accept it that he won't spare me, even if i was a good person? If so my chances of following everything he wishes to a tee, (Which is also impossible as religion is often contradictory even within their own text) are so infinitesimally small, that i have more important things to focus on like improving me life on earth knowing I'll likely be damned anyways. And for an all powerful being i would think he would have better things to do than worry about one person not praying to him every night even if they were good. If he is that vain, why should i pray to him and believe him.
If someone has given you the chance to know and you dont accept it then you made your choice, choices have consequences and rewards depending on which you take. Also no one can follow everything that it says in a religion it is impossible however in Christianity (the way I was taught) because it is so hard to get to heaven by ourselves, God gave us a bridge which is Christ so through him we are made pure so we can go to heaven.

It isn't being vain and fickle, you all-powerful created an entire race you didn't have to and after giving them life you ask a few things: Appreciate that I created you and worship me as your God, then go on and do whatever you like and dont break a few of the laws Im about to give you because doing so can lead to chaos.

Then that race cant even do that, most people get frustrated when something they built can't do what it was intended so they destroy it and start from scratch I think God is being quite patient.

However this is all matter of belief and opinion so if you don't want to believe then I can't change your opinion and you cannot change mind so in the end we have to agree to disagree. To add to that you are all much older than me and have a lot more knowledge than me and for all I know you might be an expert at philosophy etc...
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Old 2009-09-26, 17:52   Link #2097
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I'm very strongly Christian, but that doesn't mean I go around 'hating' on everyone who's not.
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Old 2009-09-26, 18:54   Link #2098
Ledgem
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However this is all matter of belief and opinion so if you don't want to believe then I can't change your opinion and you cannot change mind so in the end we have to agree to disagree. To add to that you are all much older than me and have a lot more knowledge than me and for all I know you might be an expert at philosophy etc...
Very impressive... perhaps my standards have been lowering lately, but I'm very impressed not only by your reasoning abilities, but by that last statement of respect and humility.

On the topic that you've mentioned, it's hard to say where everything came from. On one hand, I (as a scientist) do not buy the argument that "life evolved from nothing through evolution." Evolution makes a whole lot of sense (and there's an abundance of evidence for it at this point), but why did things come about? People like to claim that things that replicated themselves simply continued to do so, and over time they built up in complexity because that guaranteed their ability to replicate over everything else. Yet replication - life itself - requires energy. All forms of life, all processes of life, revert to the lowest energy level as they possibly can. It's an effort to expend as little energy as possible while gaining as much energy as possible (which also makes sense), but why should life have existed in the first place? Why did certain chemical processes build up and attempt to subvert others?

Then again, it's almost impossible for us to comprehend what can happen on the scale of time that the Earth has existed. It's a concept known as "deep time," if you're interested in evolutionary biology. We have no innate sense about it, and comprehending the changes that can take place are also very difficult. It seems impossible for something like a single-celled organism to evolve over the course of thousands of years, but there were many more than that involved in the formation of life. Beyond single thousands of years, I find it difficult to comprehend the span of time. This may be the reason for my skepticism.

Given how wonderfully life operates, and how beautiful life systems are in their mechanisms, it's also very difficult to imagine that such things came about by random chance. Or perhaps, just as we view and appreciate a work of art and revel in knowing that it has a creator, many of us would like to credit someone or something for the artwork that is life. Of course, if life were not as efficient or well-put together ("designed") as it is, it likely would not exist in the first place. Knowing how evolution works, combined with the idea of deep time, it's quite possible that everything could have arisen from random chance.

I'm not an evolutionary biologist - my training area is immunology. Interestingly, an immunology journal club of mine recently chose "evolutionary biology" as a topic. Even within immunology you can find the concepts of evolution at work. I'd expected it to be relatively boring, yet our first paper was an example of convergent evolution - that is, an example of an immune system that operates and is set up very similarly to how ours (and those of other mammals) does, but the specific mechanisms that govern it are rather different, indicating that it forked away from ours very early on...
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Old 2009-09-26, 19:07   Link #2099
Cub-Sama
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I'm very strongly Christian, but that doesn't mean I go around 'hating' on everyone who's not.
If you did go around hating on everyone who's not then you wouldn't be very christian anyway now would you?
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Old 2009-09-26, 19:53   Link #2100
Anh_Minh
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On the topic that you've mentioned, it's hard to say where everything came from. On one hand, I (as a scientist) do not buy the argument that "life evolved from nothing through evolution." Evolution makes a whole lot of sense (and there's an abundance of evidence for it at this point), but why did things come about?
IIRC, Evolution isn't concerned with the origin of life itself (abiogenesis). It assumes that there's life going around already, and says things about how it changes itself.

Quote:
People like to claim that things that replicated themselves simply continued to do so, and over time they built up in complexity because that guaranteed their ability to replicate over everything else. Yet replication - life itself - requires energy. All forms of life, all processes of life, revert to the lowest energy level as they possibly can. It's an effort to expend as little energy as possible while gaining as much energy as possible (which also makes sense), but why should life have existed in the first place? Why did certain chemical processes build up and attempt to subvert others?
The laws of thermodynamic aren't a problem. Plenty of energy going around to feed life, after all (sunlight and volcanoes). You might as well wonder why there are clouds, instead of the water staying put in the ocean.

I understand that nothing I've said is an actual answer to the question "Where did life come from?". AFAIK, our present answers to that still involve a lot of hand waving.

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If you did go around hating on everyone who's not then you wouldn't be very christian anyway now would you?
Not so sure. The Christian thing is to love your neighbour... but also to believe he deserves to suffer in hell for all eternity if he's an infidel. So, yeah.
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