Does Religion Have a Place in the Future of Humankind?

Ah, intelligent design. Why are there so many failings in our nature/nurture? Anything is possible in an environment that has existed for over 400 million years with the basic elements for protein.

A. Our environment hasn't existed for over 400 milliion years, it's been about 6,000, and B- If God just had a bunch of vegetables following him around, why would he need to create us in the first place?

lefty, Some scientists believe the earth is 4.5 billion years old. Don't take my word for it; read the following link. http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-age-of-earth.html

Let's assume that you are correct and a supreme being was behind the creation of the world as we now know it. Does that validate the beliefs and dogma of religion? Any religion? My argument is with the religious fanatics, yes fanatics who have the arrogance to believe that their religion is true and all else false. IMO all religion and religious practices originated in the fertile minds of men. Religion has been called the opiate of the masses. I can think of many less debilitating ways to get high.

amen. I do love wine and beer...

You're lobbing my belief compared to other views and my respect for other views into the same boat, and I don't appreciate it. Am I open to other views? Yes, but I still hold my fundamental beliefs, unless I decide to change them. Do I respect other peoples' beliefs? Yes, as I would be a hypocrit if I didn't.



Indeed. "Why" is a question that is always deeper than its answer. Which is why I value questions, yes, but that doesn't mean I can't have faith in a God that has all the answers to them.



Okay, I read it again, more carefully.

You said: Using reason to further faith is just a way of convincing yourself you are right without the need to test your assumptions.

All reasoning is based on faith-- faith in your senses, following the philosophy of cogito ergo sum. Saying you need to "prove" a faith through tests that have results based on faith is highly contradictory.



Taking stuff out of context again, and twisting it around. Judas Priest, do you have the capacity to be objective?

I never said the apple needs the will of God-- of any god-- to fall. I was proving, through science and philosophy, the point I made above. Obviously, since my statement was a further example of that point. That all tests are based on faith, and so needing them to "prove" another faith isn't logical.



But you have no justification for them, so no one else has to follow them. Thus the difference is with the way I believe there is a strict moral foundation, whereas your way basically does away with the whole moral code for civilization thing.



Please keep your claims for something that is "perfectly real" away from my objective knowledge that nothing is "perfectly real" outside of one's own existence.



No, actually, I never referred to the Straw Man argument, nor did I ever imply that the Straw Man argument was relavent here. Instead you falsely assume and derive this from my refutation of evolution.

I don't believe in the Straw Man argument. I believe in the orchard diversity.

Look here:

baramin, from Hebrew bara = create, and min]

You are quite a heartless jerk by stating that. You do not know me personally-- you do not know the medical struggles I have had in life, the fact that my own brother was born with immense heart problems and is more or less the result of a miracle that he's here today.

Yet both of us had an intelligent Creator make us.

Let me explain, with help from Jonathan Sarfati, Ph. D...

An important aspect of the creationist model is often overlooked, but it is essential for a proper understanding of the issues. This aspect is the deterioration of a once-perfect creation. Creationists believe this because the Bible states that the world was created perfect by an intelligent Creatorlocus, plural loci) coding for a particular characteristic. An organism can be heterozygous at a given locus, meaning it carries different forms (alleles) of this gene.

For example, one allele can code for blue eyes, while the other one can code for brown eyes; or one can code for the A blood type and the other for the B type. Sometimes two alleles have a combined effect, while at other times only one allele (called dominant) has any effect on the organism, while the other does not (recessive). With humans, both the mother's and father's halves have 100,000 genes, the information equivalent to a thousand 500-page books (3 billion base pairs).

The ardent neo-Darwinist Francisco Ayala points out that humans today have an "average heterozygosity of 6.7 percent." This means that for every thousand gene pairs coding for any trait, 67 of the pairs have different alleles, meaning 6,700 heterozygous loci overall. Thus, any single human could produce a vast number of different possible sperm or egg cells 2^6700 or 10^2017. The number of atoms in the whole known universe is "only" 10^80, extremely tiny by comparison. So there is no problem for creationists explaining that the original created kinds could each give rise to many different varieties. In fact, the original created kinds would have had much more heterozygosity than their modern, more specialized descendants. No wonder Ayala pointed out that most of the variation in populations arises from reshuffling of previously existing genes, not from mutations. Many varieties can arise simply by two previously hidden recessive alleles coming together.

Those numbers, coupled with lefty's, more than steer me in the direction of creationism as opposed to evolution.



Read my reply to your previous, if rather insulting, post regarding this aspect of intelligent design.



And others don't. Especially those who realize the flaws in things such as carbon dating.



You bring up a very valid point, au, even if you aren't reading this because you're ignoring me. Like I was going to say in responding to your anti-Semitism in Europe post, it is these such fanatics that are responsible for many, if not all of the heinous acts committed in the name of religion.

In fact, so strong are my feelings for such fanaticism that I actually wrote a screenplay-- set in the Middle Ages, during the time of the First Crusade, which attributes to some of my extensive knowledge of the period-- about the Christian siege of Antioch against the Muslims in the mid-1090's. The film is a dramatic epic about one simple man caught up in it all who takes a step back and realizes the horror of two religions killing innocents, plundering villages, and purging "infidels" (in their opinions) all in the name of their God. The slaughtering of Jews during the campaign is included in the overall message of the movie. Hopefully one day you'll get the chance to see it on-screen, and maybe then you can get a better picture on my views regarding this particular subject.

All reasoning is NOT based on faith. It's based on logic and knowledge of the world around you.

Faith is something you believe it to be true such as a belief in god.

Yes, it is, if you had been reading at all through the past few pages of this discussion. There is only one thing that can be proven in all the universe-- that you exist, proven through the philosophy of Descartes' cogito ergo sum. Everything else-- everything else is based on faith.

Let me break it down for you-- cogito ergo sum is a Latin phrase that basically means "I think, therefore I am." The philosophy that is usually summarized as "cogito ergo sum" appears first in Descartes' Discourse on the Method, where he attempts to build an entire philosophical system with no prior assumptions. He reasons that since all his beliefs have been derived from potentially misleading sense data or potentially fallacious logic, he can trust nothing that he has hitherto taken to be true. That is to say, he decides to systematically doubt all that could conceivably be doubted.

He discovers the one thing that he cannot doubt is his own existence. After all, he claims, something nonexistent is incapable even of the act of doubting. Thus the formulation, "I think, therefore I am", was the starting point of his philosophy.

Thus, everything is based on faith except one's existence. Reasoning and logic included.

Your quote, "All reasoning is based on faith-- faith in your senses, following the philosophy of cogito ergo sum."

Hey Rex, I will respond more fully when I have more time...but just to clarify something, we are talking about two different "straw man" arguments. In my usage, a straw man argument seeks to discredit one's position by buidling a ridiculous mock image of my position (a straw man) and then showing how easy it is to knock it down. It is an argument that deliberatley oversimplifies my position. You are talking about a specific theory I was not refering to. But since you brought it up, the creationist orchard picture looks exactly like the evolutionist tree...with the bottom cut off. Exactly what you'd expect to find if you had no way of knowing what happened before.

One final thing, if you are going to respond to multiple people in a single post, please mark our quotes with names. I have not been rude to you at all, but it looks like I have because some-one else was rude and you have responded to them as thought it was me.

Otherwise,I'm enjoying this lively debate!

Rex is right. Think of a dream, specifically a nightmare. You see Kieth Richards, you hear yourself yell, you feel the wind as you flee, you may smell something, you may taste something, but none of it exists. Your senses fail you, as they tell you things are there that really aren't. Thus, faith is what we rely on day to day to accomplish anything.

Hebrews 11:1: Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

Words inspired by the God that made us all.

Lefty if you suddenly found out for certain that this was your only life, and when you are dead, that's it....would it change the way you live it ?

Oh, I see, you didn't mean the common "Straw Man Theory" against creationism. Ironic that my misconception actually fit into the argument somewhat, along the lines of that Abraham Lincoln quote you gave earlier.



No, the timeline starts at the beginning of time on all of the models-- the issue is whether animals were created by an intelligent Creator as outlined in Genesis and then "reproduced after their own kind" to be what we know today or whether they spawned from a common ancestor of a common ancestor of a common ancestor of a single-celled organism and...yeah, you can get the gist of it.



Did I really? Where?

If I did I must wholeheartedly apologize to you. A misunderstanding, and I apologize.

Oh, and all of the quotes in this post are yours, just so you don't think I wasn't following your advice.



I know this question wasn't directed toward me, but if I may, I would like to answer. If I did indeed suddenly find out, for certain, that this was my only life, and when I was dead, that's it-- thus proving my belief in God and everything void-- it would definitely change the way I live my life. I try to base my life on Jesus my Savior and the existence of God, so if suddenly I found out, for certain, that it was all false, I would obviously change all of that.

Purely a "what if", of course, but I am not above at least enteraining some hypothetical "what if's".

Here is the bit, since you ask, where our discussion jumps to someone elses.

Rex, since you did respond to my question to lefty, let me ask you to take that hypothetical further.... would you still want to be nice person? Would you help people out? Would you care about your family and friends? Would you love? Would you want to kill or steal? Would you suddenly enjoy hurting people?

Yeah, see, I was indeed quoting someone else and replying to them. I'll put names above them next time.



Only if it served my own purposes. If I'm nothing more than a piece of meat, I'll treat them as such too.



Love? No. Love leads to a quick downfall. Have sex? Rampantly. Reproduction of my genes would be the only thing left after I'm gone-- my only real legacy.



Again, if it served my own purposes, yes.



Who knows? I might get a knack for it.


In other words, I'm not going to stand here and claim that I'm some born-righteous person to be put on a pedestal. I have feral instincts, like every person in the world, but I keep them under control-- without religion, the justification for keeping that control, there's no reason I shouldn't let those instincts flourish. Afterall, who's gonna care? They'll all be gone and dead in due time anyway.

To answer your question, Eorl, of course I would, just like Rex would. To your follow-up questions, I don't know what I would be like. That's why I'm very thankful to be a christian and have God on my side. I'd be lost without Him, as I believe you are, whether you do the bad things listed or not.

I'm not attributing to this discussion, I just want to clear up some quotation confusion. Many people have been using the "quote" tag without names, which lead to confusion.

To quote somebody (with their name), type the following:


Here's the code in action:


Hopefully this will clear up some confusion. I, too, am enjoying this lively debate, and will continue adding to it myself when I get more time.

nope, doesn't work for me!