teddycole

Either God wants to abolish evil, and cannot; or he can, but does not want to. If he wants to, but cannot, he is impotent. If he can, but does not want to, he is wicked. If God can abolish evil, and God really wants to do it, why is there evil in the world? - Epicurus, as quoted in 2000 Years of Disbelief

We have to struggle for the truth- whether it is appealing or not. You are right about the grease analogy. This is what all religion is. It may be true that religion is another "way" to view existence but it's not an objectively true way. We have been programmed to seek meaning in nature by natural selection. If you were in a warehouse and heard a noise, one of the first things you would think about would be "what caused that?" so that you could prevent it from happening again. some people think it is god. Some people look for a tangible reason. Notice, if you will, that if something terrible happens to you as a theist, you can shirk your responsibility and call it part of god's plan. Say it was that you were diagnosed with deafness. Never mind the fact that you might have listened to loud music as a youth or failed to wear hearing protection in your job- this is god's plan for you. For the critical thinker, there is a certain amount of bad feeling that accompanies that particular realization but you are unable to justify it with a god so you seek to help others avoid it and you become more careful yourself. It really is in the way one views his life. If we are a created being, with another world one day, than this world loses a whole lot of meaning. I like this conversation a lot.

A bit more about meaning and this takes the form of a moral rather than scientific argument. Which has more value? The life that continues forever or the life which is finite? I used to think, believing in creationism and Christianity that this was just a cosmic bus stop on the way to the "real fun". My purpose, therefore was to have such faith in Jesus thati was bound to not get off at the wrong stop and would go straight to heaven after death. I thought "I shouldn't worry about those suffering people that much. After all, if they accept Jesus, they'll go straight to heaven when the inevitably die of starvation, disease, war, etc." I sometimes wonder if the call for people of faith to be moral for god's sake is not slightly less moral than doing something good for others out of pity for their condition or human solidarity. If this all came about by a natural process, and life doesn't have any divine purpose, isn't it more meaningful for an individual life to make do something good for the world in his limited time and doesn't that expenditure of limited time say more than expending infinite time? Yes. This post may be a little off topic, but I think it helps to clarify the philosophical implications of both viewpoints. Thank you.

Let's be honest with ourselves. By the anthropic principle, we are bound to talk about our universe as if it has a purpose. It very well may have one. But if it doesn't, that's just tough. The real question is- are you willing to have faith in something you cannot prove? I'll wager a bet that in every other aspect of your life that answer is "no". No one ever buys a stock because they have faith that it will go up. They look at charts and graphs on how it has behaved in the past and then use critical thinking to deduce a probable pattern of profit or loss. If you buy a 1984 Chevy Caprice with 200,000 miles on it and rust holes in it, you deduce that even though it would be nice if it would run with no additional help, logically it is improbable. You wouldn't buy that car on faith, hoping it would run for the next 100,000 miles and if someone told you that you would probably laugh at this. It is true that you cannot disprove creationism. God could be such a magnificent liar that the whole of archeology, paleontology, anthropology, cosmology, and many other disciplines could be simply studying the wonderful nature of god's misleadings. But if you take god's own self-proscribed character as purely good, this could not be. He must tell the truth %100 of the time. So it is because I take the idea of god so seriously that he is disproven. So instead of disproving creationism, you can put a chance value on it and from what we know about the natural universe in it's functioning and from what god says about himself in all of his "self-authored" books, this chance is very slim. It is much slimmer than belief in evolution by natural selection as the means by which we are here. Thank you

I think you missed the point of that sentence. I was getting that germ theory is not "just a theory" but in science it's validity as a theory is just as provable-just as testable as the theory of evolution, gravity, the laws of thermodynamics(once again, at one time they were theories), etc. Germ theory is disputable if the scientific community was given enough proof that it was false. Also, logic dictates that facts construct theories and, after a period of testing and full explanation, these will go on to become laws of science. Germ theory is yet still a theory as there are significant aspects in the way infections spread in a non-controlled environment about which we still don't have a full understanding. The case is similar to evolution but still evolution is a far better chain of logical "a+b=c" arguments than the dramatically non-provable creation hypothesis. I think we basically agree about semantics but what we should all agree on is that if creationism can empirically prove that the earliest life forms on this planet were created by a deity, we will change what we think. That is, if the large burden of testing and experimentation needed to prove a hypothesis can be given by the proponents of god, we will change. We would at least hope they would show the same courtesy.

In the entire debate, we must not stress facts as the predominant proof for either side. It is in the methodology used to decipher the facts already given. when one refers to "science" (little s), a good definition is- that thought process which combines critical thinking and experimentation with constant review to evaluate the empirical world. Under this definition, subjects such as History and Anthropology make the cut of science because they are truly scientific. Science (big s) is the mere formalization of the certain subjects which have culturally been considered as viable material for logical scientific evaluation. Looking at facts such as red drift, the ages of fossils by radiometric dating, micro-evolution in bacteria and viral populations, and even general growth trends in humans in the last century, faith interprets these facts in the framework of whichever god/gods they choose. Evolution is the enemy because the acceptance of evolution as the explanation for us and the planet takes god out of yet one more area in our collective logical discourse. First the church had to give ground in the field of astronomy with Galileo, Capernicus, and the abandonment of a geo-centric solar system. The theory of gravity and it's applications to modern physics weakened the church. Then they lost the ability to cite God as the source of plague and illness as the germ theory (also a theory but not one easily disputed). Weather came next. Then archeology and history could find no evidence that Jesus of Nazareth even existed as the nearest account for him is over 100 years after his supposed crucifixion! Modern Physics, Chemistry, Astronomy, Geology and Biology have taken the place of Alchemy, Astrology, tarot cards and, ultimately, religion. This is the mindset from which the average creationist is coming- that of the defensive. It is a joke that the Earth is 6000 years old. It is a lie. It would be harmless but for the fact that it carries with it some terrible delusions spoon fed to children about heaven and hell. Evolution is merely the final extension of scientific inquiry into the world in which we live which receives blowback in the public square. All other science is commonly accepted as true by the religious and non-religious alike but it is evolution which takes the blunt of all aggression. LET US BE CLEAR. Evolution is a mere extension of the 500+ years of scientific inquiry. Creationism may have been our first attempt to place ourselves in the universe by logic and based on what we knew about the world then, it made sense. It makes no sense now. Thank you.