Creation vs. Evolution

[H2Andy]

Andy said [snip]

What Proof would really convince you?

my point is that you CAN'T offer *any* proof of God's existence.

Your statement sounds alot like Epicurus. If you raised your Children by giving them everything they desired, then what would be the outcome?

except you can't prove that we are God's children. that's just your belief.

you're talking about this imaginary being (God) as though he were real, without any evidence that he exists at all.

you can certainly believe that, but you can't prove it, scientifically.

Andy,
Would you post your informational source please concerning the work at the Jericho sites?
Thanks

read "real" archeology studies and not the Christian "let's prove the Bible is right" writers who aren't actually scientists.

i got most of my info from (where else?) Wikipedia

 

[lamont]

1) Can any mod out there tell me which post in the history of the board has had the most counts? Excluding chat threads and word association games...

Check the surface interval forum (you'll need to be a member of it in your user CP) for the MOFNMOF threads. If you count only the original one its something like 30,000 posts, and if you sum up all the threads (it was busted apart due to board performance issues) then its probably around 150k now...

2) Anyone keen to bet a case of beer that this thread will soon eclipse all other serious threads in terms of length?

It is very unlikely to catch MOFNMOF...

 

[lamont]

I just wonder what it will take in terms of proof for Creationists to see the absurdity of their 6000 year existence thing. For me it's on the same level of absurdity as believing in a flat Earth.

Since you can see the Andromeda galaxy with your naked eye, and you can measure its distance as being 2.5 million light years (this takes a little explaining), and that light must have taken 2.5 million years to travel to your eyeball...

I don't understand how you get 6000 years out of that...

 

[Soggy]

Since you can see the Andromeda galaxy with your naked eye, and you can measure its distance as being 2.5 million light years (this takes a little explaining), and that light must have taken 2.5 million years to travel to your eyeball...

I don't understand how you get 6000 years out of that...

That's just your belief. You can't prove that it took that light 2.5 million years to get here because you were not here 2.5 million years ago! It could be a painting in the sky.

 

[lamont]

my point is that you CAN'T offer *any* proof of God's existence.

I can't even wrap my head around what God is supposed to be. If God created the universe then what created God? If nothing created God, then maybe nothing created the universe? If God created space and time, then what does God exist in, and how could there be an act of creation without there being a sense of time and a "before" and an "after".

That's not even getting into the whole issue of the supernatural being that fiddles around with stuff in this universe, and nowhere near the old man with the beard who created the universe 6,000 years ago, which I have huge issues with... Most of it is just nonsense to me. The First Cause / Prime Mover thing is the most compelling, but that really seems to fall apart on examination as well and isn't self-consistent. So can we get a definition of what God is? Best I can come up with is the God which just is the entire universe and everything in it, no more and no less, and I can kinda dig on that one...

 

[Soggy]

yeah, what Steven Colbert said...

 

[lamont]

That's just your belief. You can't prove that it took that light 2.5 million years to get here because you were not here 2.5 million years ago! It could be a painting in the sky.

Well we can measure parallax to the nearest stars and use that to establish luminosity-distance relationships which lets us measure the distance to clusters of stars, which gives us RR Lyrae and Cepheid variable standard candles and we can see those directly in Andromeda and get a distance measurement.

We can also meaasure the distances of all the stars in the Milky Way galaxy and come up with a size estimate for our galaxy and assuming Andromeda is similarly sized, we get a consistent estimate of the distance, which is a good double-check that things make sense. We can also compare globular clusters that we see in Andromeda with globular clusters in our own galaxy. The 2.5 million light years to Andromeda estimate hangs together fairly well...

And then there's everything in Astronomy between Andromeda and the Hubble Deep Field...

And its not a painting in the sky because it all moves around. The parallax of close stars is certainly difficult to explain. There's also dynamic features like variable stars, supernova, etc. So it's one heck of a complicated painting. Its also kinda weird how nuclear physics and gravitation does such a good job at predicting the lines in stellar spectra and such...

 

[Soggy]

<-- Wonders if Lamont can "wrap his head around" sarcasm

 

[lamont]

<-- Wonders if Lamont can wrap his head around sarcasm

(sometimes I like to play the straight man)

 

[lamont]

Another thing is that once you've gotten the distances to a few clusters of galaxies you start to build up the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram with temperature/color-absolute luminosity relationship for clusters of stars. That lets you infer the absolute luminosity for any cluster of stars, which lets you figure the distance to the stars. So, you just plot the H-R temperature-luminosity relationship for clusters in Andromeda and you can determine the distance...

There's a really massive pile of evidence that Andromeda is 2.5 million light years away, and it all hangs together...

If God created the Universe 6,000 years ago, then he created it with photons already in flight simulating precisely a Universe which was substantially older. Someone much earlier in this thread posted something like "if God created the Earth, did the first trees have rings?" which I guess is an answer to this. If God created the Universe 6,000 years ago to look exactly like it was 12-18 billion years old, then really I'm calling B.S. on God, though...