Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Club for Open-Minded Discussion & Debate

[Sir Percival]

Right, you could say God is a perfect human model; though the Bible also lists attributes that are quite definitely not human, in the area of character. The Bible says God created humans in His image.
I wouldn't say eternity is timeless in that sense. All non-infinite beings experience things linearly, and there are Bible passages that mention learning and activity in the ages to come. It's more like endless life.

How God manifests himself? Miracles, and various level of subjective revelation to individuals. It's part of his plan and artistry to do things differently in different places, so some areas experience a lot more spiritual events than others.

[Xris]

Is it a perfect god creating imperfection or an imperfect god recreating his image? Sorry but it becomes a bit vague and silly. The believer has to constantly adjust the description of this god to answer the current question.

Why should a perfect god create imperfection? Why did this god create us? Was it for his benefit or ours? If its for his benefit? how strange. If its for ours? dont we get a say in our creation? Certain questions will be attempted and when they can't we get the usual excuse that gods motives are somehow excusable because we dont understand them.

[Cronos988]

Right, you could say God is a perfect human model; though the Bible also lists attributes that are quite definitely not human, in the area of character. The Bible says God created humans in His image.
I wouldn't say eternity is timeless in that sense. All non-infinite beings experience things linearly, and there are Bible passages that mention learning and activity in the ages to come. It's more like endless life.

And how is time measured in the afterlife? Time depends on mass and space to work. But since all the mass of the human body clearly stays here on earth, how can a "soul" experience time?

How God manifests himself? Miracles, and various level of subjective revelation to individuals. It's part of his plan and artistry to do things differently in different places, so some areas experience a lot more spiritual events than others.

Note that I said manifestation in the physical world. Subjective belief is no such manifestation. Miracles are physical, but how do you identify a miracle objectively?

[Wooden shoe]

Cronos wrote:

The Bible also says (or rather assumes) that we will go either to heaven or Hell, with our whole personality intact.


Assuming there is a heaven or hell, retaining personality in heaven woud exclude a blissful state. Personality requires memory and this would mean retaining all our earthly concerns.
Worrying whether your loved ones would join you is not something I can call blissful.
So individuality would have to disappear and most likely it would mean becoming part of some energy pool.
Now aren't you excited to get there?

[Sir Percival]

I Corinthians 15 says there is a spiritual body which we will get. I think this means that it is physical, but in way we don't know about, more permanent, more directly under our will--probably even the rate of our thoughts and movements will be much more under our control. There will still be events and processes, so time will be happening, but in a less constraining way.

Miracles and people's experiences are hard to quantify scientifically, maybe that's intentional to give more room for thought and study, and to reward those who search open-mindedly, honestly, and diligently.

[edelker]

Hello All,

Cronos988 wrote,

“What is interesting is that according to the bible, God is essentially a "perfect" version of a human, a model so to say.”


I just wanted to comment about this particular point within a context all on its own: If being “perfect” involves getting angry at people for merely eating a piece of fruit and damning them to an eternity of torment, them AND their entire posterity, disliking human unity due to fears of being figured out (Gen 11), committing genocide because group X doesn’t fit some preconceived Divine plan, and a whole host of other obviously troubling emotions and psychological states—then ‘yes’ god is perfect.

Two other minor notes here: (1) there is no obvious biblical view of god! Quite obviously, given the biblical written sources we can see that no definition that people like Percival advocate as “best possible” etc. has any intelligibility since the god variously depicted here and there in the biblical literature is not only quite humanesque, but something, at times, we would easily, and rightly, consider quite morally evil! One’s more kind definition of god will largely have to stretch beyond the rather troublesome biblical literature’s often primitive and deplorable representation of such a being. (2) The difficulty with calling anything “perfect” is that one must begin with some a priori—non-empirical view; a view, by the way, that has more to do with metaphysics than science! Perfection is a troublesome concept precisely because it belongs to a realm of abstract thought that depends on cultural, personal, and-in this case-spurious theological assumptions. Defining ‘god’ as perfect is both a practical as well as an intellectual impossibility.


Sir Percival wrote,

“Right, you could say God is a perfect human model; though the Bible also lists attributes that are quite definitely not human, in the area of character”


Pure opinion. This is merely Percival’s own subjective view of what he thinks the bible to be saying here. Besides, this further misses the entire above point: if god is of wholly other ontological properties, properties that are conceptually indefinable by theological fiat, then achieving an intelligible conception of ‘god,’ especially as it applies to a scientific conversation as this, is as impractical as it is impossible.



Percival wrote,


“The Bible says God created humans in His image.”


It is an utter theological mystery as to what this could even mean. Any conclusions are wholly guess work. Just a note.


Percival wrote,

“I wouldn't say eternity is timeless in that sense. All non-infinite beings experience things linearly, and there are Bible passages that mention learning and activity in the ages to come. It's more like endless life.”

Again, guess work. This is inferred but cannot be deciphered with any sureness.

In the context of evolution/creation debate anyone who would choose to start with such a theologically uncertain-tentative position for a much more empirically and logically responsible science as evolutionary biology is surely doing so for reasons existing well beyond anything scientific itself!

Thanks all,

Eric D.

[Wooden shoe]

Thank you Edelker for your post.
This concept of a grand fatherly, lovey fuzzy God may be a nice idea, and make people feel kind of warm, but certainly can not be found in the bible.


Edelker wrote:
In the context of evolution/creation debate anyone who would choose to start with such a theologically uncertain-tentative position for a much more empirically and logically responsible science as evolutionary biology is surely doing so for reasons existing well beyond anything scientific itself! [Quote]

This fight put up by the christian community ever since Darwin, seems to have the "flight" emotion as a strong motivator.
By "flight" I mean the blaming of someone or something else when we ourselves have been wrong. So instead of re-examining the belief system as many denominations have done, they try to destroy the theory of evolution and accuse the scientists of having an atheist agenda.
Science as a whole is very content to stay out of religion, but when religion is trying to take the place of science, scientists will speak out.

[Basichelp]

ASTONISHING,

It's difficult to credit a God/Darwin debate going on after 150 years, after genetic science, the fossil record, anthropology and archeology etc. I don't understand where the religionsists are coming from.

Please, with all due respect, tell me why you are so antithethical to science. Science establishes valid knowledge of reality - or, if you prefer, valid knowledge of Creation! Why, if you religionists believe reality was created by God, would you turn your back on knowledge of God's creation??

Personally, I know I don't know whether God exists or not, and know this is a reasoned response to the question. I hope God does exist, but it's a mistake to allow hope to become belief.

If you consider the historic social and political role of religion - it's easy to understand why faith was required of people, and why the Church was antithetical to science. It wasn't merely that Galileo showed the Bible to be factually inaccurate: 'earth fixed in the heavens' - but that the authority of the Church was bound up in it's epistemic approach i.e. divine revelation.

But if you personally consider yourself, and people like you think themselves thinkers who've arrived at God after lengthy philosophical consideration, how can you turn your back on demonstrably valid knowledge of...creation?

Otherwise, if your ideas are not arrived at, but recieved - why not acknowledge that religion is a shortcut that saves you having to think about things. Either way, stop presenting religion as truth. It's passe - and we should be well beyond this by now.

Religionist claims to truth give governments - in turn claiming political legitimacy with reference to the divine rights of kings, and variations on the theme - i.e. manifest detiny, the authority to ignore scientific facts about the world, while using science as a tool to further ends based in primitive, often hateful ideas - dressed up as divine edicts.

think on it, huh?

bh.

[Sir Percival]

The battle has not generally be between science and religion, per se, rather,it has been between the establishment and the rebels. In the middle ages, the establishment was religious, and also held certain false scientific views, and they squelched disagreement in either area. At present, the establishment is humanistic, and anti-supernaturalism is one of their fundamental commitments. Now the rebels are more often the religious people, who challenge evolution and other things. The establishment has been wrong about science many times, and it's quite possible they could be again. The reasons people disagree with (macro)-evolution include real scientific thought.
Of course we all have other motivations for our beliefs. Many atheists don't want there to be a god, religious people do. Many Christians want to believe the Bible is accurate and trustworthy, while others want to discredit sources they feel were stifling or controlling. The scientific method is not a sure protection against bias; since there is always an element of uncertainty in interpreting scientific findings.
If I thought the evidence was conclusive, it would affect my beliefs, but since most of the evidence for evolution I've heard are just appeal to authority, to popularity, or ad hominem, or just explanations of how it could have happened, I'm not convinced.

[Wooden shoe]

Sir Percival wrote:
The battle has not generally be between science and religion, per se, rather,it has been between the establishment and the rebels. In the middle ages, the establishment was religious, and also held certain false scientific views, and they squelched disagreement in either area.


Copernicus's writings were published in 1543, so during the protestant reformation, and blaming the protest on the establishment is a red herring. The protests came from the religious community, both catholic and protestant, and for good reason, because his findings showed the bible to be in error.
The bible showed very clearly that its writers believed in a flat earth which was the center of our planetary system.
At the time of Darwin the religious belief in the steady state was also firmly based on the bible where it states that everything was created by God without exception, so again Darwins findings showed the error in the bible.
After fighting these scientific truths for years, finally when the religious can no longer fight, they come out with saying that their interpretation was wrong, not the bible.


Persival wrote:
Many atheists don't want there to be a god, religious people do.


There may be some stupid atheists who think that way, but any intelligent ones really don't care, they are just opposed to the concept of God as displayed in the so-called revelations used in religion.
The big majority will acknowledge there might be something in the universe that is beyond our knowledge, however only give this such a small chance that it can be ignored.

Would you please give examples where science has had to admit error on widely accepted theory in the last 600 years?

[edelker]

Hello All,


Wooden shoe wrote,


“By "flight" I mean the blaming of someone or something else when we ourselves have been wrong. So instead of re-examining the belief system as many denominations have done, they try to destroy the theory of evolution and accuse the scientists of having an atheist agenda. Science as a whole is very content to stay out of religion, but when religion is trying to take the place of science, scientists will speak out.”


It is a fair statement that asserts that science may indeed encroach on religious grounds. However, it does so not because, as a discipline, it wishes to but only because religions like these versions of Christianity envelopes all interpretations of our world. Allowing science, for these religionists, to have ‘control’ over any such cosmological narrative is viewed as dangerous! They cannot have it even when such theories as evolution by natural selection have no certain disastrous implications for Christian theology in general.


Scientists ought to do everything they can do in order to keep the record straight. The amount of misinformation, lies, and deceit produced by the creationist’s community ought to be most disturbing to people of faith who seek truth and honesty as an essential part of their own religious tradition! Everything from recent documentaries to old Henry Morris books, the amount of time that scientists, educators, philosophers, and interested others have to spend correcting the information is a monument to the vast and unfortunate ignorance and confusion of our times concerning this matter.



Sir Percival wrote,


“The battle has not generally be between science and religion, per se, rather,it has been between the establishment and the rebels. In the middle ages, the establishment was religious, and also held certain false scientific views, and they squelched disagreement in either area. At present, the establishment is humanistic, and anti-supernaturalism is one of their fundamental commitments. Now the rebels are more often the religious people, who challenge evolution and other things. The establishment has been wrong about science many times, and it's quite possible they could be again. The reasons people disagree with (macro)-evolution include real scientific thought. The reasons people disagree with (macro)-evolution include real scientific thought. Of course we all have other motivations for our beliefs. Many atheists don't want there to be a god, religious people do. Many Christians want to believe the Bible is accurate and trustworthy, while others want to discredit sources they feel were stifling or controlling. The scientific method is not a sure protection against bias; since there is always an element of uncertainty in interpreting scientific findings.”


Fine! Demonstrate how a supernatural view can find, predict, and empirically explicate the natural data we have! It’s simple. The problem is NOT with evolutionary science, it begins with how do you make theologically NON-naturalistic, NON-rational, and NON-definable conceptions as ‘god,’ supernatural,’ ‘spiritually spontaneous’ creations, and so on explicable by provable-empirically designed means? By your own definitions, you cannot! The two domains have been, and are, fundamentally different. Evolutionary biology isn’t simply made out of whole cloth conceptions. It has been confirmed and is used to predict fossil findings, genetic behavior, and a whole host of other phenomenon that creationism nor ID can possibly match. Creationism isn’t a science! It is a religious viewpoint about certain writings in the bible. It has no power to explain, expound, or predict natural phenomenon!


The issue about ‘macro-evolution’ and the reason creationists disagree with it is because the vast majority of such people either do not understand it or simply refuse to accept it. The biological sciences do not make a distinction between macro and micro-evolution, nor can they. When these terms are ever used, they are done so for explanatory reasons only. First off, let’s keep something in mind: Creationists and Creationism predicted that species would not change! That was the old school creationism. All life remained fixed within their own ‘kinds’ or what have you (the bible gives no official taxonomy of course, so Creationists had to guess at the categorization). After it was shown that plants, many animals, and the microbial worlds change, and changed dramatically at times, right before our eyes, creationists began to sing a different tune: ‘well, that’s just micro-evolution’ is now the usual phrase. What they miss, of course, is the significance of such changes! All evolution is—is changes in allele (types of genes) frequency over time! That’s it! That’s BOTH micro-and macro evolution! Because most creationists think that evolution teaches that X somehow magically changes into Y that evolution is teaching changes in KIND! First no one knows what “kind” is! Secondly, what evolutions shows is changes in gene frequency over time that cause speciation change or alterations in specie population behavior! In other words, we start out with genetically shared frequencies, then, over time, through environmental changes affecting gene combinations via reproductive success, you get macro-taxonomic variations. So, once you admit that small changes in gene frequencies are possible, then you cannot say it is somehow impossible over time to have macro-phenotypic differences. In other words, if micro-evolution happens, given sufficient time, macro-evolution is inevitable! Both genetic science and paleontology have concluded that this time-change variation is a FACT not a speculation event by academic dreamers merely guessing at the natural world!


The only way one can escape this logic is to argue against an old earth and that what ‘appears’ to be old is younger than we think-somehow! It is the ‘somehow’ wherein the guess work, confusion and ignorance over the dating of the earth occur and opens another discussion altogether. But similarity in bio-chemistry-gene frequency and the fossil record reveal the awesome accuracy of evolutionary theory.


Scientists hardly are protected against bias. However, the various checks and balances within the scientific enterprise will eventually, or highly likely, weed-out such bias. How so? Easy….such biases can’t stand up to scrutiny! Other scientists make their bread and butter researching the findings of others! To accuse millions upon millions of scientists of being duped into buying an outrageous theory is more conspiratorial theorizing than credible analysis of the scientific community!




Sir Percival wrote,


“If I thought the evidence was conclusive, it would affect my beliefs, but since most of the evidence for evolution I've heard are just appeal to authority, to popularity, or ad hominem, or just explanations of how it could have happened, I'm not convinced.”


This is the religious view. You cannot take god and prove anything! The concept is too philosophically vague and scientifically impossible to be of any empirical worth. The only ones using metaphysically driven narrative explanations to natural phenomenon are creationists. The evidence is overwhelmingly convincing. Gene frequency similarity, for instance, reveals relatedness of species: evolutionary theory predicted that all of life is interconnected. The genes studied between species reveal the predicted relatedness of taxonomic groups. You obtain these similarities only through relatedness. These similarities are varied in the very way you would expect that they would be if evolution were so. This is pretty air-tight! This is just one piece of evidence. Another is how fossils are found many times or what sort of fossils will be found. Something like archaeopteryx was hypothesized prior to being found. Just like Tiktaalik was also a predicted fossil well within the region expected. The evidence is there, one only has to avail oneself of the literature to see it.


Some appeals to authority are necessary because the subject-complexity around these sciences are simply too overwhelming at times. However, one can gain a good sense as to why there’s such scientific consensus on such matters. I doubt that the religious can find nearly the consensus on the meaning and nature of ‘god’ as scientists do on the nature of biology.


Thanks all..have to run for now,


Eric D.

[Chasqg]

Prof Dawkins has a lovely readable style in 'Watchmaker' but his logic is dreadful.

I went through the book very carefully for a book I've been writing myself. One example:

'(..man-made artefacts like computers and cars) are complicated and obviously designed for a purpose, yet they are not alive, and they are made of metal and plastic rather than of flesh and blood. In this book they will be firmly treated as biological objects.'

It is not rational to in any way equate an abiotic car with a biotic being. 'Why would anyone think that it is?' is the puzzle for me.

There is no space here to go into the whole book. I do go into it in my own book.

[Meleagar]

ASTONISHING, Please, with all due respect, tell me why you are so antithethical to science.

Seeing as "religionists", as you call them, invented the methodology and principles of modern science, and accounted for virtually all its discoveries for up until very recently, I think you would be hard-pressed to make the case simply because many of them (not all by a long shot) disagree with some aspects of evolutionary theory, that they are "antiethical"to science itself.

Science establishes valid knowledge of reality - or, if you prefer, valid knowledge of Creation! Why, if you religionists believe reality was created by God, would you turn your back on knowledge of God's creation??

Being skeptical of Evolution is no different than being skeptical of any theory - like Galileo being skeptical of geocentrism. Trying to paint a whole group of people as "denying reality" because some of them are skeptical of some aspects of a scientific theory bad is reasoning and a poor argument.

BTW, science doesn't establish valid knowledge of anything. Science is a data-gathering tool; logic is what uses the tool and interprets the results into valid knowledge.

If you consider the historic social and political role of religion - it's easy to understand why faith was required of people, and why the Church was antithetical to science.

The church was never antiethical to science. It funded scientific researchers, created an infrastructure to house and distribute scientific information, and made science a mandatory part of its official syllabus, teaching it in their universities. The church was responsible for establishing science as a necessary, meaningful and more importantly, a financed institution.

It wasn't merely that Galileo showed the Bible to be factually inaccurate: 'earth fixed in the heavens' - but that the authority of the Church was bound up in it's epistemic approach i.e. divine revelation.

Again, entirely untrue. There were many that believed that Galileo's theory entirely comported with the Bible. What happened with Galileo was really not much different than what has happened in the secular world when a scientist puts forth a theory that seriously challenges the current paradigm; the reputation and egos of many people in power are at risk. Galileo's censure had almost nothing to do with religion, and had everything to do with the same kind of politics that embroils new ideas and efforts in any human-run institution.

But if you personally consider yourself, and people like you think themselves thinkers who've arrived at God after lengthy philosophical consideration, how can you turn your back on demonstrably valid knowledge of...creation?

Again, skepticism of some parts of a theory, or even about the whole theory, is not "turning one's back" on science.

Otherwise, if your ideas are not arrived at, but recieved - why not acknowledge that religion is a shortcut that saves you having to think about things. Either way, stop presenting religion as truth. It's passe - and we should be well beyond this by now.

The problem with your argument is that it begs the question, and you don't follow your own argument back to necessary premises. Science is valid .. why? How is the validity of science arbited? By logic. Where does logic come from? Can you point it out in the physical world? No.

Logic is comprised of necessary first principles that simply must be accepted as true, because one cannot validate them without using those same logical principles. Thus science itself relies upon assumed, necessary first principles that are purely conceptual in nature. If logic arbits the data gathered by science and can sort it into true and false statements about reality based on extrapolation from those first principles, then logic can find other data and sort that data, whether scientific or not, into necessarily truthful statements about reality.

Don't forget, science and empiricism are both philosophies, and as such are necessarily arbited by logic; there are other philosophies, like theism and morality, that an appropriate, logical examination can reveal also contain necessarily true statements, such as "there is a god" and "morality must describe an objective good".

There are also problems with some aspects of evolutionary theory - such as, the generation of highly functional, specific, complex biological information - that appear to be outside of the logical bounds of unintentional processes to acquire. Because one doubts, based on such logical examination, the claims of current aspects of evolutionary theory (such as the power of RM & NS to acquire such targets), doesn't mean one has turned their back on science, but rather rightfully uses logic to be skeptical of unsupported and unproven claims.

Religionist claims to truth give governments - in turn claiming political legitimacy with reference to the divine rights of kings, and variations on the theme - i.e. manifest detiny, the authority to ignore scientific facts about the world, while using science as a tool to further ends based in primitive, often hateful ideas - dressed up as divine edicts.

Science is as open to corruption and misuse as religion. For example, it was science that authorized Eugenics programs throughout the western world that ended up with tens of thousands of "undesirables" being sterilized; it was Darwinism that for more than 100 years lended validity to arguments about racial superiority.