Is it possible to believe in God, and be a darwinist at the same time?

Compare set 1 and set 2 below. Are they all different kinds of animals? In what ways are they not different?

In other words, what does "different kind of animal" really mean?



Set 1

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Set 2

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Aqueos Id,

The difference between a dog and a whale.

jan.

 

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This is not all about you. This is about the greater reality of theism that you like to ignore. The fact is that many religious people do it.

But what you do is essentially the same anyway. While you may think you're conceptualizing God in a manner that is consistent with all scripture, your conception is in opposition to those who believe that there is only actually one authoritative source of information on the topic. In fact simply by virtue of not being, say, a Christian fundamentalist yourself, you are discarding and/or ignoring details that many theists insist are essential to conceptualizing the nature of God and his relationship with creation correctly. For example, unless your faith is exclusively Jesus-centric, you are not accessing God through the correct channel, and therefore not accessing God at all. Why? Because Jesus is the part of God that makes such access possible. You can't relegate him to a position that is anything less than the only way to truly know God, and be saved, without rejecting the fundamentalist Christian conception.

Moreover, God, and the metaphysical mechanics of both the material and the spiritual world, are necessarily inextricably linked. For example, in the Christian fundamentalist universe (and by universe in this context I mean the entire ballgame of existence) we have souls that are born into the material world, live once, and are then judged according to the specific standards set out in the single and only scriptural source revealed and endorsed by him. Fuck with any aspect of this picture and you're well on your way to saying that God is not the God that the fundamentalists say he is. Fuck with any aspect of this picture, and you've made my case for me.

And this is just one example.

What do you mean you don't know what I mean by "spiritual duties"? What do you think being a practicing theist entails then? Writing a specific word down on a census form?

If you want to be a Christian fundamentalist, for example, the aim is to develop a conception of God that is consistent with the fundamentalist interpretation of biblical scripture, and then begin a personal relationship that evolves according to the manner in which the spirit moves you through the practice of your faith.

You're in denial about being in denial then. No surprise though since that's exactly what being in denial entails.

I've seen some of your efforts to harmonize biblical scripture with the scriptural foundation of other faiths and to say that they typically strain credibility would be an understatement. In order to complete your task, you have to abandon the literal interpretation that other theists hold so dear, and even then you better have a well developed repertoire of intellectual gymnastics at your disposal.

In fact as a former devout Christian who buried myself in the study of biblical scripture for years, I invite you to begin a thread on the matter so we can explore your position in greater detail.

Heh. That's merely an opinion. Deists have a different opinion. Thus rather than advancing your argument, you're highlighting mine.

Deists do worship god you nitwit. I've explained that several times now, and even pointed you in the direction of additional information should you wish to actually shock us all and learn something.

In fact I strongly suspect that a great many of them are more spiritually engaged than you are.

Yes, we all know you are afflicted with selective blindness.

The point is simple. If you actually believe in an sort of objective reality (and since you believe in a creator you clearly do) then the nature of that reality simply is what it is. Your own personal opinion on the matter has no bearing on it, nor do the personal opinions of any number of other individuals.

You didn't follow my advice did you? You didn't go and learn about Deism. Thus, you continue to look like an ignorant moron.

It's as if you're confusing Deism with naturalistic pantheism or something (which is a mistake you've made before).

You've got this completely backwards. Deists are opposed to such concoctions. They are trying to avoid making the same mistakes that are so common in the rest of the theistic world. Mistakes which have led to a plethora of inconsistent and contradictory theological and metaphysical views. In other words, they want to worship god in the purest way possible, free from any of those highly suspect anthropomorphic frameworks. And contrary to your ignorant assertions, this doesn't preclude the possibility that god actually is a personal entity.

 

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Whether or not one animal descended from another over geologic time is not a question of evolution but of Paleontology.

Obviously you didn't mean "dog" but "ungulate". In any case, the only choice for Creation Science is to deny Paleontology as well as Biology. This will get messy rather quickly. Just scratching at the surface, Creationists will need to deny Anatomy, Taxonomy, and Geology, and from there Genetics and its roots in Microbiology, and so on. The Genome Project goes in the trash. In a parallel tack, they will need to deny Chemistry and Physics, Math, all of it. Entire floors of all of the major libraries of the world, all journals and research projects, and at least 50% of all campus facilities become obsolete. All of the labs in the world go away, all of medicine and all hospitals and pharmacies. As we delve into the many inter-dependencies of one branch of knowledge we will have thrown them all out. I was going to go into some of the machines involved in making scientific assays to note that we'd have to discard computers, the web, all of telecom and electronics, and that eliminates aircraft, airports and radars, all motors, engines and fuels. No nukes, no source of power except for wood, except being in denial of its biochemical properties, we can't even get heat from it now. All food sources vanish for the same reason. Continue this on and pretty soon we are spirits in an immaterial world, and all else is illusion.

My point is merely to ask: where do you draw the line between personal conceptions of God and the weight of all of the evidence to the contrary? At what point do anti-science Creationists simply admit that they've been profoundly wrong? How much cynicism must religion produce before it's found to be broken?

 

Of course. The Creationist theory you're referring to is an absurd fairy-tale and has nothing to do with science. The beginning of the CTMU goes like this:

The real universe has always been theoretically treated as an object, and specifically as the composite type of object known as a set. But an object or set exists in space and time, and reality does not. Because the real universe by definition contains all that is real, there is no "external reality" (or space, or time) in which it can exist or have been "created". We can talk about lesser regions of the real universe in such a light, but not about the real universe as a whole. Nor, for identical reasons, can we think of the universe as the sum of its parts, for these parts exist solely within a spacetime manifold identified with the whole and cannot explain the manifold itself. This rules out pluralistic explanations of reality, forcing us to seek an explanation at once monic (because nonpluralistic) and holistic (because the basic conditions for existence are embodied in the manifold, which equals the whole). Obviously, the first step towards such an explanation is to bring monism and holism into coincidence.

http://www.ctmu.org/

What is needed is a scientific explanation of God and religion. Not an absurd one.

 

I have one, it was what we made up to explain things before there was science.

 

Yet you insist on filling these pages with assertions of your personal conception of God (you claim, for example, that there is only one and the variations of belief are due to human fallibility - other persons claim there are several Gods and the variations of belief reflect that), and you insist that people who know better deny important aspects of physical reality so that your personal conception of God will not be "diminished" in your eyes.

They work as metaphorical codifications of perceived spiritual-level patterns in the dealings of human beings with each other and the natural world. This abets escape from suboptimal equilibria, helps prevent arms races and other strategy traps, and establishes customary and therefore efficiently accomplished preparations as a society for very infrequent and unforeseeable but known and costly societal scale events.

It is only very recently, for example, that the bare outline of a scientific approach has been found that can leverage a society out of a prisoner's dilemma or Hardin's Common type trap. But the precepts any of the major religions have worked to that benefit for thousands of years.

 

No. Religion, God and science are equals.

 

But that is so . . . well, absurd.

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I have proven this with my A Being that Syntactically Self distributes Itself thread.

 

Does anybody detect a new wave of Ted/Jed hybrids or is it just me (Ted Talks, featuring Jed Clampitt) ?

All of the dingbats are running wild in the streets of SciForums. School has been out for a while now in the Tropic of Cancer and the video games have gotten boring. What better place to dump pent-up energy than by great literary insights into the meaning of Ultimate Reality: we are but a ship of fools floating in a cesspool of ignorance...

Religion is so depressing. It's so much more uplifting realizing that we are products of the sludge.

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Ah . . . I feel better already.

 

Especially so, when you've become enlightened over the years and recently, to the fact that much of what you were "taught" as a kid, is in actuality...folklore. Not even impressive folklore.

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Perhaps that is what life is truly to be about...to be a seeker of truth, wherever that twisting road takes you.

And we are all on that road, albeit in different places.

 

A slightly more accurate way to look at this road is as one surrounded by, or perhaps even besieged by, those who have either stopped walking it, or who never started. The travelers ears are thus filled with a constant barrage of cries:

"Hey you! Rest your legs over here, inside the one true church!"[sup][1] [2] [3] [4] [5][/sup]

"That's a lie! Don't listen to them! Come with us and see for yourself!"[sup][1] [2] [3] [4] [5][/sup]

"Pay no attention to all the petty doctrinal bickering my friend! As long as you embrace Jesus first and foremost, it doesn't matter. Just make sure that you do."[sup][1] [2] [3] [4] [5][/sup]

"Wrong! Your holy book, that tells of Jesus, is a corruption of God's true revelation! Trust it at your own peril, o weary wayfarer!"[sup][1] [2] [3] [4] [5][/sup]

"This is true blasphemy! Forgive these heathens, o lord, for they know not what they do!"[sup][1] [2] [3] [4] [5][/sup]

"Get a grip people! Don't you realize that you're all worshiping the same God? Our good pilgrim here can enter any temple she wishes, as long as her faith is true!"

"Nonsense! It's already been made clear that this sort of inclusivist and/or pluralist bullshit puts souls at risk!"[sup][1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8][/sup]

"Agreed! But what has also already been established is that your particular brand of exclusivism is codswallop!"

"Psst! Over here! The world is about to recycled. We're planning to escape to an alien ship trailing a comet by killing ourselves. Wanna come?"[sup][1] [2] [3][/sup]

"Actually you know what? Right about now that sounds kinda good!"

 

wegs

We would certainly all want to be on that road but there are many, tempting pulloffs and byways that lead many astray. We all want to think we are on the one true path, but it is impossible for every opinion to be true. As long as we recognize that we need to do everything in our power to verify what we think is true(I recomend the scientific method)and are willing to discard or modify what we think is true given new knowledge and understanding we are still on the road. When we insist that what we think is true IS true no matter what the evidence tells us, we have pulled into a cul-de-sac and are no longer on the road.

Belief in a god does not necessarily mean you are no longer seeking truth. But it often does if one gets the delusion that one knows what that god thinks about things or how he conducts his business. I revere Jesus as a wise teacher so extraordinary that his story has come down through history(garbled by hangers-on, unfortunately). Ghandi was another such man, there have been many such men, but not one of them was anything but a man(women get short shrift in history), not one of them had any more knowledge than that available to any other in his era and not one of them was perfect in all that they thought. Our task is to sift the wheat from the chaff, to take the wisdom and recognize the failings of all such men. If you then pool all of their wisdom and boil it down to consume you get "Do Unto Others As Ye Would Have Done To You". Jesus put it to his followers this way...

"Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me."

So many who want to be called Christian do a little charity with one hand while cheating and stealing with the other. But they rarely consider the corollary...

"Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me."

This verse ought to make a true believing Christian very nervous indeed. Politicians of a certain bent should lay in puddles of sweat every night over this statement. We are our brother's keeper, according to Jesus.

Grumpy

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I know, I know, spoon-feeding with Youtube videos, but hey, what can I say? I'm a Pinker fan.

[video=youtube;9GW7_1b_oHQ]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GW7_1b_oHQ[/video]

 

Thank you for this. While it is just the Internet, words are all we have here to communicate with and you make me think without talking to me like I'm a toddler.

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You don't even know how far that goes. I've had doubts and questions on many fronts with my faith over the years. For me, when you start digging further and further into your doubts, you wonder where this ends.

And then you stop seeking and you go on with life. And then, something else taps you on the shoulder and you start seeking again.

Point I'm making is...it is a slow fade and it takes time for people to journey through all the questions and doubts to figure out truth. It is hard when you have thought truth was one thing, and now you are not so sure. Never mind trying to figure out if something is wrong with me to want to seek truth. My Christian friends would be appalled at me and I can't share this with them. My atheist friends offline have wanted me to seek truth for a long time but they don't push.

I posted early on when I came here, how so many here seem sure of things.
How does one finally "rest" on that kind of certainty.

And maybe that is the road I'm talking about.
A road that through all the bullshit, gets you finally to a place of certainty.

That's all I want. To be certain, Rav.

Thank you...for everything.
You're pretty awesome.

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No-one is a Darwinist on a crashing aeroplane.

 

Some of the ones that have evolved wings don't care!

 

I think a lot of folks are stuck in a life in which the main truths revolve around finding the next meal and how to hang on to whatever threadbare existence they've scratched out for themselves. Some fraction of people have been fortunate and/or curious enough to get a decent education, and of those some have the opportunity and interest to look for truth beyond themselves. You see this reflected in some of the voices here. Then again, you see another kind of search, the one that involves dismantling truth.

In a way that's all we've been discussing in most of these threads.

 

There's nothing wrong with a person who seeks truth. You just have to find a good balance between thinking about and engaging with life. You'll definitely make a few people uncomfortable here and there, but you're simply embodying a fundamental aspect of human nature. It would be more unnatural to suppress it than it would be to embrace it. In fact I think you should embrace it warmly.

I am reasonably certain about many things, but decidedly uncertain about many others. I speak the most often, and the most confidently, and the most forcefully, on the matters that I am reasonably certain about. And many people are exactly like me in this regard. So the certainty that you see can be somewhat illusory.

This is not always the case however. There are some crackpot nutjobs out there who are certain about everything. Not something to aspire to.

I can definitely relate to that. But alas, the further I venture, the closer I look, the more I learn, the more mystery I find! So I've made peace with it. I've made peace with the great mystery of existence. In fact I even love it. Mystery means there's more to discover, and that in turns means that there will be plenty more opportunities for me to become awestruck, and amazed, and even profoundly perplexed. And those are cherished moments because they almost always eventually lead to inspiration, and growth.

When I'm not doing all that, though, I'm being all too typically human in every other way.

Speaking of awesome, you're something of a brilliant ray of sunshine around here, and it's refreshing

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