Is Christianity nonsense?

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Don't be so patronising. Also, way to totally mis-represent my position (pretty much the standard trick of theists who attempt to disprove science). I even addressed "rogue" scientists in an earlier post. Of course scientists are humans and humans are prone to error and bias. I didn't say they weren't; I said that's not what science is about. I'm not attempting to set scientists up as some paragons of human virtue which is why I pre-empted this exact argument you are making with my statement about rogue scientists. My central point remains: the scientific method works. Are you going to argue against that?

I might address the rest of your contentions when I am less busy again later. Suffice to say it wont be difficult.

Why would an intelligent designer keep synapsids around when a mammal can replace them perfectly? If both synapsids and mammals were to coexist, the competition for resources would be too much and eventually, the population won't be sustainable for either species.

@ Doctor:

Hey Doctor, you prove MY point if you claim the evidence is consistent with creation. No, it isn't. What it IS consistent with is a Creator who tries his damndest to make it LOOK like evolution happens even if it doesn't. So God would stick two ape chromosomes together end to end to make a human chromosome, plant a fossil record of evolution that didn't happen, put other clues such as patterns of nested hierarchies in the placement of endogenous retroviruses and pseudogenes in the DNA of related species, and the patterns all produce the same tree of life as is described by the fossil record? Right.

In other words, your God, if He did not use evolution as a tool of creation, is a malicious prankster. THAT is what you are really saying even if you do not realize it.

Last edited by TheBicyclingGuitarist on 19 Sep 2012, 2:02 pm, edited 1 time in total.

And to bury fossils of dinosaurs etc in different geological strata too depending on their position in the evolutionary tree! What a prankster indeed! Or woz it the devil wot dunit?

LOL TallyMan and thank you. I was editing my post adding that bit about the fossil record when you made your post. I really should do all my editing BEFORE posting, but sometimes I feel a need to get my main points out there even if they are not complete or polished.

Religion is the equivalent to your belief system No? Religion is important but more of a self exploratory topic.

If we are talking about the belief in extra-dimensional beings then obviously most of that is faith based.

I personally have come to the conclusion that a non-empirical universe is a very nonsensical universe and for that reason a bunch of giant rocks bouncing about by themselves without awareness feels pointless to me.

In short the anwser to the question at hand..... Organized religion becomes very nonsensical a LOT no denying it at all.....
Individualized religion and the art of self-exploration involving critical thinking and asking the big questions is no doubt one of many means to give some abstract idea of meaning of life.... Christianity becomes very deluded unfortunately and that results in a lot of disagreements and sometimes worse... Christianity has a lot of good core values but unfortunately people don't demonstrate it in a way which is affective.

Why would an intelligent designer create living things that depend on resources for survival and require certain animals to die out to be replaced by new ones? Does "God" enjoy creating things that will die? Is "God" really just such a horrible designer that it can't create everything perfect from the very beginning?

By the way, I made a typing error in my previous post. "In either case, this would mean that 'God' is no better at designing things than humans. Maybe 'God' is even worse at designing things than humans." There, I corrected it, so now we don't need to correct the mistake in both of our posts.

Because an intelligent designer would also design natural laws for the very same reason it would design free will. A crucial part of life is the laws of thermodynamics, which are dependent on something to get energy from.

It's really no different than a programmer designing programs that use resources.

It's just plain ridiculous to be having this kind of debate while molecular biologists in every corner of the world are busy reading and cataloguing the genomes of different species. One of the most striking discoveries is that of the same short but vital DNA sequence turning up in the cellular machinery of everything that has cells (and also the odd large virus such as mimovirus IIRC). Genomic analysis is now virtually a diy activity and the evolution of life is a totally open book to anone who cares to read it.

When read, the story shows a fascinating series of kludges worked out to solve very early problems with rogue cellular mechanisms. It is clearly not an elegant designer-solution but is typical of the pragmatic fixes arrived at by the blind force of natural selection. We often get a sense of this in the larger scale anatomies of whole animals but it's much easier to make objective assesments of short DNA sequnces that can be read much like computer code.

This is, to me, by far the best analogy. If we take programs written by different students to solve the same problem we soon recognize it when someone has written concise, elegant code. And we also see instantly when someone else has gone about it somewhat more haphazerdly and has painted themselves into a design corner that takes bridges of extra code as a workaround. This is precisely what is being found in the core code of all living things and conclusively rules out any sort of intelligent overview of the design selection process.

I understand that this is so much so that people are also working on improvements that are obvious when seen with the benefit of oversight. The pay-dirt for this could be improved efficiency in photosynthesis for example. As more examples become available the nonsensical idea that God was the original author should fade gracefully away.

What makes no sense is why an all-powerful, all-knowing, intelligent designer won't create things in such a way that they don't have a need to eat or drink for survival, when it has the ability and the knowledge required to create living beings that can live perfect lives, without needing these things for survival, and still allowing them to have free will and give them the ability to appreciate the good things in life, without needing to experience suffering. If it has the ability and the knowledge required to create a perfect life like this, but chooses not to, then it must prefer a system where things die and suffer, which would make it sadistic. If it does not have the ability or the knowledge to do this, then it is just a horrible "intelligent" designer.

Yes, it's nonsense. But even though it's nonsense, it was still difficult for me to break away from. I believed the Bible compulsively even though I knew it was irrational and macabre. I still had the compulsion to be paranoid of God months after I stopped believing in Christianity. Separating myself from Christianity was a long and painful process that involved reprogramming my subconscious, and it took months to complete. Now I'm completely free of it and feel no compulsive connection to it. Someone who's a strong believer in Christianity like I was would need a very good reason to separate themselves from it. I found a better and more reasonable system of beliefs, and made them my own. Christianity as well as some other religions are a psychological disorder of their own in my opinion, and the thought patterns caused by them can't easily be changed. I'm a Spiritualist and a Transtheist now, and I feel no compulsion nor paranoia. I'm a free thinker now and I'm never going to let mind mind be trapped in a box again.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxKWxExuPew[/youtube]

I already addressed this patronising nonsense in my last post so I wont do it again.



Your point was not proven at all. You don't appear to have one. The fact that the find happened doesn't "prove" evolution. The fact that an animal existed which was such a perfect in-between stage of two different groups is suggestiveof evolution though and adds to all of the other evidence. The fact that "fishapods" existed can hardly be called evidence of ID which is what you are suggesting. You're also suggesting that, because ID (edited: this previously said evolution because I typed the wrong word AGAIN :/) could fit a particular set of facts then that must mean it is correct. Those are both pretty preposterous arguments. I wouldn't be entirely surprised to find you were trolling; I'm not accusing you of it... perhaps creationists are just lifes trolls.



The major difference between computers and organisms that would allow an alien to be certain that computers were designed is that computers do not have accidental design faults maintained and included in later models that can cause them to catastrophically fail that are fairly easy to spot for a creator but not for a mindless mechanism. As computers have moved on they have become more efficient in pretty much every way because in computer design when a fault which can cause catastrophic failure an unreasonable % of the time is discovered it isn't maintained and in fact worsened in later revisions - it is addressed. That is what intelligent designers do. In animals on the other hand many such faults can be demonstrated. There are *hundreds* of them and some of them are really crazy basic stuff that any "intelligent" and certainly no "perfect" designer would do. You'll probably truck out the argument about "we simple humans can't fathom the mind of god". Well I'll point you back to your earlier fallacious invocation of Occam's Razor to argue that god is a more simple explanation for these matters than evolution. Applying your own argument: do you believe that a perfect and omnipotent designer who designs serious faults into very large percentages of his creations for unfathomable reasons is more simple than the idea that, over hundreds of millions of years, many incremental changes occurred with no specific intent behind them - and that this simple mechanism resulted in a few pretty serious accidents due to lack of creative oversight? I think it's insulting to a potential god to suggest that to be the case tbh. Now, if you said that your god had set the universe in motion and seeded some things from the beginning, making an occasional intervention to ensure the most important things happened, and then left things to go with no further involvement then that would make sense. Of course I still don't believe this other position because I don't believe in religion but that position couldn't be so easily made to look so silly.



No it isn't circular reasoning. He is pointing out that these things are consistent with the testablepredictions made by evolution. As I already said: ID makes no testable predictions. You are the one employing circular reasoning. Every time somebody presents a piece of evidence which supports evolution you, in essence, state: "Well god could have done that too. You are claiming that piece of evidence proves evolution and it doesn't so evolution is wrong and intelligent design is right". Each time you fail to consider all of the evidence as a whole because you view everything through the assumption of there being an intelligent designer. The blinkers stop you from being able to consider all of the other evidence at the same time. I've got an image in my mind of a lawyer with a huge pile of boxes labelled "evidence". He's taking pieces of evidence out of the box, looking at them and saying "no, that's not enough", tossing them over his shoulder. He never looks over his shoulder to see the huge pile behind him which would be more than enough to build a watertight case.

Science has nothing to lose and everything to gain if evolution were to turn out to be wrong (although at this stage that is about as likely as discovering that gravity doesn't happen i.e. not bloody likely). You have everythingto lose if intelligent design is wrong. That is the reason that you cannot accept evolution and desperately cling to ID because your belief system centres on a literal interpretation of the bible. If you accept that ID is not the case then what of the rest of your faith which is built on that book? Also: shampoo and conditioner? Next time I speak to a creationist I'll be sure to ask if they belong to the shampoo and conditioner school of intelligent design.



The bible can't rule anything out just like any other religious text can't (except for ruling out its own internal consistency and historical veracity - it does that rather well!) . They all say different things and yet people find personal truths in them, the exact same benefits that religion can bring to some people's lives coming from every religion and every contradictory "divinely inspired" text, and they all believe them as fervently as you believe the bible. They have religious experiences and visions like christians do. To explain that other religions "work" too you have a few positions to choose from. There are no other logical positions available:

1.These visions are divinely inspired. This would contravene the bible given that it is explicit that Jesus is the only means to salvation.
2. All of the believers in the other religions who have religious experiences are delusional, psychotic, mentally ill, whatever you wish to call it.
3. That religious experiences experienced by followers of other religions are in fact delivered by Satan or demons to deceive people into a path of sin.
4. All religious experiences are a neurological phenomenon triggered by particular types of belief systems combined with certain stimuli and perhaps particular brain physiology. and have nothing to do with divinity.

I am obviously a subscriber to option 4. I'd be interested to know which position you take.



Your point evades me with this. Cosmology has moved on a lot from the 1930s. Back then some scientists believed a different model than the currently accepted one. Some of them struggled to reconcile the new evidence with the previous model and felt they had to invoke a god to explain it to themselves. Your point appears to be that this series of statements can be considered as a proof of Genesis. Really? That scientists 80 years ago struggled with a new concept and felt they had to invoke divinity means that Genesis is correct? And you accuse others of fallacious arguments? Really?



Ah yes but here is the difference and one of the major faults that ID advocates make. Invoking the gravity argument is a bad idea because it's well trodden ground for those of us who enjoy goading creationists. Gravity is an observable effect. General relativity makes some good predictions about gravity and so it's the currently accepted model (for many applications). But general relativity doesn't prove gravity. Gravity just is. There is a mountain of evidence for it. The people looking at different models to general relativity are not trying to "disprove gravity" as you are trying to disprove evolution. They are trying to disprove, or improve upon, the model which we currently use to explain an observable phenomenon. Gravity happens. It is actually at the point now where, really, evolution is the same. It happens. We can see it happening both directly and indirectly. There's ridiculous amounts of evidence for it; evidence of every type: experimental, observational and indirect, circumstantial evidence. The question is no longer: Does evolution happen? It does. Yes, some things cannot be perfectly explained or, if you like, predicted by evolution so biologists question their models of the mechanisms of evolution which make predictions just as physicists question their models that make predictions about things like gravity e.g. the fact that general relativity cannot be reconciled with quantum mechanics at this stage. You suggest that because our current model of the mechanisms of evolution is not perfect and may not explain a few things, this means that evolution is not correct and we should throw it out and be forced to invoke a god. That is directly equivalent to suggesting that, because general relativity and quantum mechanics cannot be reconciled, we should throw out all of the predictions they make. Well that is just not true.

Evolutionary theories make many testable predictions which have been tested and confirmed countless times. There is a whole lot of evidence. The only evidence for creationism is a book. Well, actually a bunch of different competing books which all say totally different things, which don't make testable predictions for which we have evidence and which all provide the same function in people's lives just as well as all of the others in direct contravention to what the contents of most of said books have to say on the matter i.e. they mostly all directly preclude that any other religion can offer salvation/understanding/whatever and in some cases promise dire consequences for anyone who says otherwise. That in itself could be considered a pretty whopping piece of contradictory evidence to intelligent design.

Last edited by invisiblesilent on 20 Sep 2012, 6:39 pm, edited 1 time in total.

There will likely always be groups of people who cling to the delusion that a god created everything including all life (some even saying 6,000 years ago!), despite the mountain of proof to the contrary. Their belief systems are more important to them than the truth so they close their eyes and ears to the facts. When I was at university there was a small group of Muslim students and they excluded themselves from the classes on evolutionary molecular biology (it was forbidden knowledge because evolution contradicted the Koran). I see the same thing with fundamentalist Christians.

Their misguided beliefs (about science and nature) become consolidated and reinforced when they get together in their churches, temples and mosques. Everyone there believes the same thing, so they feel their beliefs must be correct due to all those other people sharing them. There is no sense of wanting to find out for themselves what truly is real and what is propaganda. To do so might even mean expulsion from the group. They have been spoon fed what to think and believe by their holy books, priests and peers and dare not look beyond that.

Fundamentalist Christians/Muslims etc sometimes pick up a smattering of knowledge and try to use that to defend their belief system but invariable display their ignorance due to their lack of grasp of the principles involved in evolution or their lack of knowledge of the scientific method and their ignorance of the sheer volume of facts about evolution. Some try to discredit evolution as just another theory - of no more value than quack theories about "What really happened to Elvis" - again this is due to their lack of comprehension of the scientific method or a deliberate attempt to deflect from the solid base of evolutionary knowledge.

Full credit to those Christians and Muslims who do their research openly, without bias and deeply into evolution such as TheBicyclingGuitarist and even today's Catholic church, who fully acknowledge that evolution is a fact. They are still able to incorporate their religious beliefs alongside the facts. To ignore the facts would be absurd, yet fundamentalists such as the Jehovah's Witnesses continue to do so.

Scientists start from the foundation of wanting to find out about and understand nature and discover the facts and truth whatever those facts are and whatever truth it unveils, but fundamentalists start from their holy books and try to force nature to fit. However, it doesn't fit. So they get more and more desperate in their attempts to try to force it. Fundamentalists aren't interested in the truth or facts, merely trying to hang on to their religious belief systems, no matter how flawed they are. At least fundamentalists can't kill those who ask questions nowadays or those who uncover "inconvenient truths" - in the West at least.

I doubt Doctor has learned anything reading these threads; he will probably cling to his delusions until the day he dies; confident in his belief that the Earth is flat, the sun revolves around the Earth, the Earth is the centre of the universe, and that a god created everything 6,000 years ago and put him here to spread that word to the unenlightened.

Wouldn't nude nuns look exactly like other nude women?

Did anyone deny the existence of genes or evolution?



What exactly isn't elegant? Pretty much any gene in the human body has a function; there's no such thing as "junk DNA". We just do not know the function of the entire human genome yet.




Amateur code is actually easier to decipher than profesaional code, given that it contains a lot of if-statements with copy paste code, few (if any) complex algorithms and little communication betweeen the classes. Seeing the pattern is easy, but editing it can be extremely tedious.



Please give examples on how genetics are similar to copy-paste code, objects that aren't properly implemented and wasteful code that could be implemented easier with less resource use. Einstein once said that the most incomprehensible about the universe is that it's entirely comprehensible. By looking at features such as the four forces, the universe is very orderly.

Don't get me wrong, I do not advocate the God of gaps—nor am I a follower of intelligent design creationism (as this disputes evolution, the Big Bang and many natural laws).



In pre-industrial times, full efficiency might actually upset the CO_2 balance.