Creation vs. Evolution

[lamont]

So it often is with God: atheists often expect him to have provided MORE evidence and to have clearly defined evolution for us. They also expect God's followers to be perfect in each and every way.

Theists often expect God to suspend the rules of nature and all logic to help them believe. They also expect God to wreak some kind of vengeance on the miscreants who have the audacity to not believe in him.

Agnostics have no clue. There is too much evidence that they don't understand, and they wonder why this God guy just can't spell it out with stars or something.

So each of these three have developed a "faith" or a system of belief based on their perception of how God SHOULD be and whether or not s/he lived up to those expectations.

Well, I don't know what people who have faith in God actually experience. But my understanding of Faith would be that the person feels an internal connection and prescence at the very least. I have never felt anything like that, never seen any evidence of God, never had a need to believe in God, and my picture of the universe without God is like a jigsaw puzzle where all the pieces are put together perfectly well and there just isn't an open slot to stick God into. I don't really "expect" anything of God in order to believe in God. I don't have this mental image of God that God is failing to live up to, there just isn't anything there for me. In that mental file folder where you have God I simply have nothing (and a nothing which is up there with the total absence of the space-time continuum, not just empty space). It is true that if God jumped out from behind a tree and said 'boo' to me, that I'd have to rethink my whole perspective -- but it is not true that I've set that as a requirement for God to live up to and which God is failing at. The problem is that I very fundamentally do not believe in God and therefore there is no God to fail at anything for me. I never have felt any kind of connection to God, never needed God to explain anything, and when the entire concept of God was introduced to me my brain basically threw a syntax error on trying to compile. I don't even really get what God is supposed to be -- particularly since I don't expect God to do anything remotely like jumping out from behind a tree, I just don't understand the whole idea. There's the sort of First Cause / Prime Mover sort of God that I can kind of get a little bit of a mental picture of, but that's a pretty limited feature set of capabilities for an entire being to have. There's the idea that there might be a God of Blowing on Dice and that's starting to form more of a picture of an actual being being involved, but I seriously doubt it and its still a very fuzzy picture. There's a pantheistic God which is just the entirity of creation and we are all part of God, and I can kind of groove on that, but it just seems to be semantically identical to taking the scientific view of the universe and adding splash of mysticism (and its a little bit better than the cold hard scientific viewpoint in terms of picking up chicks). So really I have no expectations of God because I have no idea what anyone really means by the concept -- any discussion of religion, to me, is entirely symbolic manipulation with nothing concrete behind it (about like string theory -- symbols and math, but it ain't physics...)

 

[Soggy]

(about like string theory -- symbols and math, but it ain't physics...)

Hey now, Brian Greene wrote a book about it and had a Discovery Channel special on it, so it *must* be true.

(I agree...string theory is a little out there in terms of crazy conclusions to explain things...what is it, 11 dimensions that are required? Okily dokily.)

 

[lamont]

Hey now, Brian Greene wrote a book about it and had a Discovery Channel special on it, so it *must* be true.

(I agree...string theory is a little out there in terms of crazy conclusions to explain things...what is it, 11 dimensions that are required? Okily dokily.)

Well, it *is* really cool math, and math tends to wind up being physics in the end...

I can't remember which mathematician it was, but one of them had a lot of pride about the fact that the math he was working on had absolutely no practical applications... but it gets used all the time today...

 

[The Chairman]

NetDoc,

You are using two different definitions for the word faith.

There are at two types of faith: Evidenced and Blind (with no evidence). There may be more.

One is:
confidence or trust in a person or thing

That is the type of faith that we have in our brakes. Without this type of faith, people and society would be crippled, not knowing if the sky might fall today even though it didn't for the past 4 billion years.

This is evidenced faith. And you are correct that without it, we would be crippled as a society.

The other is:
belief that is not based on proof

This is blind faith and is quite rare.

That is the type of faith one has in religion and god.

No, you are wrong. Your outright rejection of the evidence used by theists does not relegate their belief in God to being merely a blind faith. Your quibble therefore is not whether this faith is evidenced, but rather in the qualities of that evidence. Quite often we can look at the same evidence and interpret it in different ways. However, it is your own bias that causes you to treat evidenced faith as being blind. It is incredibly easy to pigeonhole that which we do not understand, however that does not make it any less fallacious to do so.

This is a common technique used by politicians to sway an audience or win a debate.

Fortunately, I am not the one using this technique.

 

[The Chairman]

I have never felt anything like that, never seen any evidence of God, never had a need to believe in God,

Simply put, you have faith that there is no God. Your faith is no more or less evidenced than someone who has a faith contrary to yours. As I pointed out, we for some reason have denigrated faith into being something that is "bad". This shows nothing but our own arrogance.

It is human nature for us to hold OUR beliefs as superior to those who do not believe the same as we do. It's OK as long as we see that our beliefs, no matter how strong, are just as tenuous as the next guy's.

I have no issues with believing in evolution AND God. In fact it is my personal belief that God designed the parameters under which evolution operates. Anything therefore, that has been produced by evolution has really been produced by God, who created that wonderfully subtle mechanism we are only now beginning to appreciate. You may see evolution as proof that there is no God, and I see it as incontrovertible evidence that God not only exists, but is far far smarter than we could ever fathom.

 

[lamont]

Simply put, you have faith that there is no God.

not really. it goes a little bit beyond faith for me. the concept of God fundamentally does not make any sense at all to me, i have difficulty thinking that way. i can discuss the concept of God just like I can discuss the idea of having a space-time with two orthogonal time axes, but my picture of two time axes is much more concrete than my picture of God. my issue is more rooted in semiotics and language and meaning. my brain just doesn't work that way at all. to have faith that God didn't exist, I would first need to have a concept of God, and I lack that.

 

[shakeybrainsurgeon]

I agree with NetDoc, one can believe in evolution as a product of God.

One point about evolution: living things know they evolve and exploit the evolutionary process. Example: bacteria. The mutation rate of bacteria varies according to environmental stress. When times are good, mutation rate is low, when times are bad mutation rate is high. Like a football team that sticks to its gameplan when winning and throws out the playbook and takes chances when losing badly, bacteria in trouble take risks by destabilizing their genetic structure and rolling the dice, hoping some good mutant will bail them out.

Example: the human immune system. Antibodies are generated by genetic rearrangement and mutational changes in antibody genes and the resultant antibodies "compete" for antigens. The antibodies are the best fit survive, poor fits die out. The immune system is an internal ecosystem with foregin invaders serving as food and our white blood cells as species competing for that food. Antibody specificity arises by Darwinian selection of the best lymphocyte species.

Thus, life is aware of evolution and uses it, manipulates it. In a real sense, evolution has itself evolved and the simple Darwinian concept of a fixed mutation rate and plodding adaptation is simply the most rudimentary form of evolving. In fact, our brains think via a Darwinian competition among neurons, trying random solutions and picking the most adapted ones. All intelligence, at least all bio-intelligence, is darwinian. Life is simply intelligence implemented at the molecular level.

Evolution is a non-linear process, like computer design. The first computers were designed by hand--- now, computers design other computers. This has allowed compuational power to increase exponetially, not linearly. What Intelligent design and creation science advocates forget is this non-linear aspect of evolution. Bacteria adapt not by single point mutation alone but by wholesale transfer and modification of preformed gene blocks, like a software engineer using modules of devloped code or a computer designer using pre-formed logic circuits. If every piece of software had to be written line by line, or every processor built transistor by transistor, we would get nowhere. Yet, that's how people think evolution works, with every organ structure, every protein built by single mutations one at a time. There is an inteligence at work here, but an intelligence intrinsic to the biological machinery, a living, earthly intelligence which lifts itself by its own bootstraps.

By the way, why does a discussion of religion here puzzle people --- duh, the title of the thread is creation vs evolution, It isn't a sports discussion:11:

 

[The Chairman]

the concept of God fundamentally does not make any sense at all to me,

This indicates that the "concept" you have is flawed for you. Ergo, the concept exists and does not "work". We can mince the etymology of all of this, but the fact that you have a word that represents "God" means that you have some working definition. Now you must assert whether you have faith that he exists (theist), does not exist (atheist) or that you have no stinking clue (agnostic).

Contrary to some opinions, "Faith" is not a four letter word. We all must use it to some degree or withdraw into a shell doing nothing. While it sounds incredibly intellectual to deny that we use Faith or are subject to it, the reality of the situation proves otherwise. Our beliefs are no stronger than the fallacies we prop them up with. The search for truth entails the systematic removal of these fallacies with the result being a better understanding of what is really true. The denial of faith is one such fallacy.

 

[lamont]

This indicates that the "concept" you have is flawed for you. Ergo, the concept exists and does not "work". We can mince the etymology of all of this, but the fact that you have a word that represents "God" means that you have some working definition.

Nope, that's why it is a semiotics issue with me. You can have a word for something which has no attatchment to any meaning and is defined entirely by its syntax and surrounding context in the language.

Symbolically I can manipulate the word "God". But when I try to run "God" through a compiler to actually get something which ontologically exists I just get a syntax error.

Now you must assert whether you have faith that he exists (theist), does not exist (atheist) or that you have no stinking clue (agnostic).

It is not a question of existance or not. God does not compile for me. That sort of implies non-existance, but its a bit stronger than that. When you get right down to it, when you discuss God I really have no idea what you're talking about. I can understand the effects that God has on you from your reactions to the concept that you hold (everything you've posted in this thread is evidence that I can use to try to probe what God means to you), but ultimately the concept of God itself escapes me completely.

Contrary to some opinions, "Faith" is not a four letter word. We all must use it to some degree or withdraw into a shell doing nothing. While it sounds incredibly intellectual to deny that we use Faith or are subject to it, the reality of the situation proves otherwise. Our beliefs are no stronger than the fallacies we prop them up with. The search for truth entails the systematic removal of these fallacies with the result being a better understanding of what is really true. The denial of faith is one such fallacy.

I'm not dissing Faith here at all. I'm just pointing out that I don't have it. I couldn't choose to believe in God if I wanted to (if I suddenly had proof of God that would be highly inconvenient, but then I would start to build my definition of God up based on that proof -- I have no idea what would constitute proof as well, though, so I suspect there's a bootstrapping issue there). And I don't prop my views up with anything, I don't really have a belief in the non-existance of God, I don't even know what it would mean to believe in God...

And this is really where I think it breaks down -- we're not talking the same language. It isn't an issue over faith and belief and fallacies that we prop our beliefs up with. The constructs in my head just don't match to anything like the constructs in your head. You might want to call that Faith, but I look at it as a wiring and compiler design issue.

 

[Rainer]

Symbolically I can manipulate the word "God". But when I try to run "God" through a compiler to actually get something which ontologically exists I just get a syntax error.

No, you get a *semantics* error. You just said the symbol manipulation (syntax) is fine!