The real poll: religion

[Lorenzo]

http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/paleo/icecore/ ... spinfo.htm

We don't have to guess the age of the earth, up to around 200,000 years old, to know how long it has been snowing in Greenland. Ice cores taken by drilling 10,000 ft. through accumulated ice show "growth rings" (snow melted down each year and frozen) as clear as any accumulation of growth rings in a tree.

Several teams came up with the same results by drilling different places, and one team came up with about the same results drilling in the Antartic (215,000 years of accumulated growth rings). Scientists did not drill to date the earth, they did so to study climate changes through earth's history.

Each rings tell the story of a year in the age of the earth. With detailed accuracy, they can count back through the core samples to a ring that is full of lead and perfectly parallel it with the Roman era of smoltering lead pots. The volcanic activity of any mt. that history has recorded as having erupted can also be paralleled with the same accuracy to the very ring in the ice. Ash samples were caught in the snow flakes, trapped and melted into the ice layers.

The rings are detected by shining a high intesity light through the ice. The temperature of the air at the time of the freeze is registered in the elements of the trapped air bubbles in the ice.

BTW, carbon dating is only one of the various methods of dating.
http://members.attcanada.ca/~fnojd/dating.html
Compare several methods and see which ones agree.

[Ridseard]

Sorry, but not everyone who believes in God views God as some elusive, intangible, invisible, spirit like, everywhere but no where type being.

Granted. However, the point of the parable is to illustrate "death by a thousand qualifications." If the gardener is intangible, invisible, elusive, etc., etc., then he gets qualified into insignificance, so that he might as well be imaginary or nonexistent.

[anniemcu]

...Sorry, but not everyone who believes in God views God as some elusive, intangible, invisible, spirit like, everywhere but no where type being. Sara

Yup. I would have to agree with that. For instance, I do believe in G_D, though what I believe G_D is, is not anywhere near the same as what most people I've talked to about it with through the years (I'm 50, so there are some years in that discussion, LOL!) think G_D is.

I have faith that my view will alter as my knowledge increases.

[Marko]

For examples, there are no transitional fossils, except the eight or ten skulls or whatever, all of which are controversial. If evolution had taken place over billions of years, they should be finding a whole lot of transitional fossils. You have to ignore the law of entropy, which is observed science, in favor of evolution, which has not been observed. Scientists don't know how any of the mechanisms necessary for evolution could work. There are no known instances of new genetic information spontaneously appearing. These are just a few large obstacles which must be ignored to believe in order to believe in evolution.

I'd also like to point out that in the case of entropy, this is not just a lack of knowledge of how evolution works, this is evidence to the contrary.

Anyway, stick a fork in me, I'm done. No more posting in intellectual threads for me today.

as for the lack of the fossil record, there have been billions and billions of creatures on the earths surface, only a tiny miniscule wee portion of them are represented in the fossil record.
there is increasing evidence that the boundries between species are being blurred, and looking at the genetic similarities between animals who are closely related, and taking embriology into account, i find evolution an extremely credable theory.
There are numerous instances of mutation giving rise to what could be considered a seperate species, cant remember any examples (read "the blind watchmaker")
Mark

[Walden]

there is increasing evidence that the boundries between species are being blurred, and looking at the genetic similarities between animals who are closely related, and taking embriology into account, i find evolution an extremely credable theory.

Credible or incredible, this form of theory, around which natural science has chosen to place all of its learning, still requires faith, just like all these other issues in question.

[anniemcu]

If the gardener is intangible, invisible, elusive, etc., etc., then he gets qualified into insignificance, so that he might as well be imaginary or nonexistent.

"The Gardener" view supposes *we* are the focus of the gardener's attention and efforts - that we are what is being cultivated. However, if you actually have done gardening, you will have noticed that what you control is forever being influenced by what you cannot, or simply do not control. Even if you have a 'perfect' garden, there will be things in it that you did not have a hand in doing. Perhaps the earth is simply one dot of dirt in the vast garden, and what the microbes on that bit of dirt do are not of notice to the gardener at all. It is still important, but not necessarily in the direct loving attention of the gardener. We presume a lot when we put ourselves at the pinacle of G_D's creation.

[Marko]

Credible or incredible, this form of theory, around which natural science has chosen to place all of its learning, still requires faith, just like all these other issues in question.

people often assume that physics is more complicated than biology, cos physics books are full of difficult maths, hard concepts, and distances that are almost impossible to imagine, on a macro and micro level.
biology is so much more complex that it is impossible as yet to use maths to define the actions of a single component of a single cell, yet alone a whole organism. as well as dealing with impossible distances, we are also dealing with timescales that the human mind cannot contemplate.

so yes, natural sciences require slightly more "faith" than the more physical ones. I see this as the nature of the beast, I dont see any other "choice".
However I would define faith as "belief despite the absence of evidence"
in which case no branch of science should require faith.

[Walden]

However I would define faith as "belief despite the absence of evidence"
in which case no branch of science should require faith.

Yet they do. The reason is, that no man is able to find all the data required to be a competent scientist for himself, and must have faith that the data he has received from others is accurate.

[herbivore12]

However I would define faith as "belief despite the absence of evidence"
in which case no branch of science should require faith.

Yet they do. The reason is, that no man is able to find all the data required to be a competent scientist for himself, and must have faith that the data he has received from others is accurate.

I'm afraid this mostly reveals a deep misunderstanding of how science is done, rather than an insight into how scientists do their work.

It's a common problem with these discussions, when the faithful appear to hold up a list of science's shortcomings, and those lists only reveal that they don't understand the science, the evidence, or the process of coming to those conclusions (energy's comment on "upwards evolution", for example: no evolutionist has ever advocated such a thing -- that evolution would have a direction, or smooth trasition fromsimple animals to complex ones -- even Darwin thought evolution to be a branching, directionless process, not an upwards movement; that common misperception is the fault of bad biology teachers and uncomprehending preachers, not scientists).

Science is free of faith, in making its claims. That's not to say there are not faithful scientists, but in their work they cannot rely on faith; they can only do so in their religious views. Science would completely collapse if it weren't for a scrupulous adherence to honesty in the reporting of evidence; the mechanisms of peer review and repeatability of experiments and observations reveals the strength of data passed on by other scientists. In science, we really do test the claims made by others; that's one of the reasons science can be such a long endeavour, and so expensive.

In my own work in biology, mostly in the mechanisms of cancer/tumor growth and the development of new treatments, it may take ten, twelve, fifteen years to perform and repeat all of the experiments needed to verify a single mechanism in a disease, and to develop a treatment aimed at it. Thousands of patients will be treated before a sufficiently strong report can be filed with the FDA for approval of the drug. Scientists studying other things, such as evolution, cosmology, chemistry are no less scrupulous in performing multiple experiments and in sharing not only their data, but the methods and observations they used to obtain that data. Anyone can therefore verify the accuracy of those previous measurements.

Not so in religious faith, where inner revelations, personal experience, and passed-on tales of unverifiable claims and events form the basis of belief. Religious faith not only lacks evidence; its independence from evidence is considered a strength. I'm reminded of the story of doubting Thomas, and the criticism heaped on him by the faithful. The other apostles are held up to us as exemplars of virtue because faith was enough for them. Doubting Thomas, on the other hand, needed real evidence.

Any data passed on to me from another scientist can be verified by me, and almost certainly has been verified by many other scientists before me. It is not taken on faith, but rigorously tested. Not so with religious claims.

I've heard religious people rail against those who require evidence of God's work, or existence, or the rightness of the tenets of the religion. I've never heard a scientist preach to anyone that their ideas should be taken on faith. They say, here is my evidence, here is how I obtained it, please feel free to test my resulting claims. It's quite different.

[Ridseard]

"The Gardener" view supposes *we* are the focus of the gardener's attention and efforts - that we are what is being cultivated. However, if you actually have done gardening, you will have noticed that what you control is forever being influenced by what you cannot, or simply do not control.

You're carrying it waaaay too far. It is a parable, not an allegory. It is a completely fictitious story which illustrates the principle of "death by a thousand qualifications." Any similarity of characters in the story to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental and unintentional.

[madguy]

As a born and raised Episcopalian, who at one time had designs on becoming an Episcopalian priest, but got disillusioned in college, I've read this thread through.
I admire Athiests, because they firmly believe that everything started from nothing and ends in nothing. Although I still find mydelf praying each day, I cannot accept that there is a Heaven, because of all the space exploration in my lifetime...where is it?
There most certainly was a Jesus, but I tend now to believe he was more of a teacher, and not the son of God, along the lines of the "founders" of the other major religions and philosophies of the world.
But I feel that whatever belief gives people comfort is good for them.

~Larry

[Lorenzo]

A reader sent me this link about the ice core samples which may be of interest to all. I always encourage familiarizing one's self with boths sides of an argument.

http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs200 ... ecores.asp

It's always interesting to read an analysis of science by some religionist who has much to protect. Michael Oard, in his article for "Answers in Genesis" has his data wrong in a few places according to all the reports that have been published over the last 12 years. His opinion seems based on old reports, according to the footnotes.

The thing he doesn't include in his article is that these problems of variables in the layers of ice he refers to were ideas that the scientists discovered and corrected themselves. Michael didn't discover these problems. Scientists realized, when they first started drilling, that melting areas on slopes could produce new (untrue) layers of ice that had run off creating the illusion of additional years. So the scientist moved the operation over to the peak where no melt off, or build up of non-annual layers, would cloud the growth layers in the core samples.

The very fact that they can count down a couple thousand years of layers and find the very deposits in the ice that history verifies (lead, ash, dust, pollen, etc.) is astonishingly accurate. The compression Michael refers to in the bottom is a factor that was considered by the drilling teams 10-12 years ago. The weight of the ice fuses the layers together, but only in the last 40-50 thousand years (out of a possible 200,000 years)...and the evidence for their guess-work on this was substantiated by the scientists involved. In fact, they can count down 10,000 layers and verify the ash from errupting volcanos that were known to have last errupted about that time. Ash is like DNA, it has a fingerprint that identifies which mountain it came from.

The study of the drill teams was sponsored by govermental weather experts who had nothing to gain or lose by being objective with their reporting. They never discovered all this to prove or disprove anything or anyone. It's just that some religious organizations couldn't handle the results because it made them look as though they were in error much like the church when Galileo tried to tell them the earth turns (the sun doesn't rise). Church officials responded that the scripture says "as the sun riseth in the East.." and that was the end of it. Galileo's inventions (like the telescope) were declared instruments of the devil, and he was cast into prison for teaching heresy.

It looks as though religion is usually about 500 years behind. The church just recently pardoned Galileo, and things probably won't change much, except nowdays religion has no control over shaping the truth, which is a good thing.

[madguy]

"It looks as though religion is usually about 500 years behind. The church just recently pardoned Galileo, and things probably won't change much, except nowdays religion has no control over shaping the truth, which is a good thing."

Religion may no longer have control over shaping the truth, but unfortunately, the major denominations seem to think they do.
I could well be wrong, but it seems that a lot of the major religions expect their members to accept what they say as wrote. Just as an example, it's been proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Shroud of Turin cannot possibly be the burial cloth of Jesus, and still, certain Christian religions continue to insist it is. And again I figure that any belief that gives people faith and hope is good for them.
What gives me pause, is when we bring religious beliefs into the politics of the world.

~Larry

[jim stone]

This is from an earlier thread, some time ago.
Let me just say that some of the smartest people
in professional philosophy today (viewed
as such by atheist philosophers too) believe that God's existence
is a good bet, either because it can be demonstrated
by this argument or because scientific considerations
favor it. ....

Nobody needs to read what follows; it's
like a chess game. But we've been walking
on the shores of a deep sea--thought some of you might like to see what one finds a little further in.

'God,' as understood by classical theists, means 'the Supreme Being, that is, a being greater than which none other is conceivable, a being more worthy of maximal devotion and worship than any other imaginable.'

Now you and I need never have been. We owe our existence to other things--if it hadn't been for WWI my parents would never had met, and I would never have put in an appearacne. Such things are called dependent beings.

Well, plainly God, if s/he exists, isn't dependent--a being more worthy of worship than any other imaginable doesn't owe its existence to the agency of other things.

Also there might be accidental beings, which come into existence for no reason. They
needn't have been. Again, a Supreme Being, if there is one, isn't accidental. For if he were we could imagine a
being who isn't accidental, but
could not have failed to be, and that being
would be more worthy of maximal devotion
and worship.

In short, the greatest being imaginable, if he exists, isn't dependent or accidental. He would have the feature that he could not have failed to be--no matter how different the universe might have been in other respects, he still would have existed. Such a being is said to be a Necessary being.

Here is a lesser known argument from St. Anselm, about 1000 AD.

1. If God did exist, he would be a necessary being.

2. If we can think of anything that, in fact, does not exist, then, if it did exist, it would not be a necessary being (that is, it would have been something that could have failed to be).

(For example, we can think of unicorns and there are none, so if unicorns did exist, they would be the sort of things that could have failed to be.)

From 2 it follows that

3. IF (we can think of God and, in fact, God does not exist), THEN (if God did exist, he would not be a necessary being).

Explanation of the next inference.

A conditional is as statement of the form "If p then q.' The p statement is called the 'antecedent'; the q statement is called the 'consequent.'

Here is a valid argument-form involving conditionals; it's called 'modus tollens.'

'If p then q. Not q. Therefore not p.'

For example 'If it snows, then we ski. We don't ski. Therefore it doesn't snow.'

3 is a conditional. The antecedent is 'we can think of God and, in fact, God does not exist.' The consequent is 'if God did exist, he would not be a necessary being.'

Note that line 1, above, denies the consequent of 3.

Therefore 1 and 3 entail (by modus tollens)

4. It is not the case that (we can think of God and, in fact, God does not exist).

(This says that 'we can think of God,' and
'in fact, God does not exist' are not both
true.)

5. We can think of God (just as we can think of unicorns. We know what people are talking about).

4 and 5 entail

6. God exists.

This argument is one of many Anselm gave--it is way too clever to command religious faith, but sooner or later intelligent atheists need to confront it. Philosophers who believe it is fallacious disagree as to where the fallacy is. The case for theism is, I think, stronger than most atheists recognize.

Well, that ought to stop us from posting religious messages!

[jim stone]

Here's another argument from that thread (01).
This isn't meant to be decisive but to state a consideration
that supports theism. Mostly the philosophers who
support theism don't believe that anyone consideration
bears the entire burden--it's a cumulative case from
a variety of sources. The Big Bang certainly sounds
Biblical, for instance, and there is the argument that
if the rate of expansion had been infitesmimally
different, life would have been impossible. This suggests
the possibility that there was desiign. It's as if
I'm in prison, about to be executed, and the jailer
says that he'll free me if I pick all and only the aces
from ten decks of cards--and I succeed. It suggests the
decks are stacked by somebody who wants me to
live. (This is called the New Argument From Design).

The kind of reasoning here is called 'abductive' --inference
to the best explanation. All things being equal, the
best explanation of a certain phenomenon has a good
chance of being true. This isn't proof, just an increase
in probability. Here's the moral argument for theism.
Again, not meant to be decisive, just another piece
in the cumulative case.


Morality has traditionally been grounded in religion. Around the 5th century BC, educated Athenians became skeptical of the gods' existence. At the same time the Sophists, who were traveling teachers of rhetoric and who had seen the moral diversity between Athens and other cultures, began to argue that morality is simply a matter of cultural taste and prejudice. The Sophist, Protagoras, said: Each man is the measure of all things. If you think something is right,
it is right--right for you. It's impossible to make an ethical mistake.

Well that doesn't sound so bad, on its face;
it sounds tolerant. But it leads to consequences that are hard to swallow.
We shall have to say that killing
millions of children was right for Hitler (after all, he thought so), wrong for us. He had his subjective tastes and prejudices, we have ours. Who is to say who is right? However much I may dissaprove,
it's my taste against his taste. Objectively speaking, my view about child killing is no better than Hitler's.

The Sophists issued this challenge to people like me: produce a non-theistic objective standard by which we can judge who is right and who is wrong, or admit that morality is nothing more than subjective taste and prejudice.

That was 2,500 years ago and the effort to
meet the Sophist's challenge has not succeeded, IMO. Consider the plausible standard suggested above: Don't harm anyone's interests. That resonates, of course;
reasonable stuff. But we harm the rapist's interests when we
imprison him for years--that violates the principle but it isn't wrong.

Suppose
I owe you a lot of money and have promised
to return it today. I realize that, in your present condition, you'll probably gamble the money away and become an alcoholic. Giving you the money will definitely harm your interests. Well I think I should give it to you anyway; it's rightfully yours whether it's good for you to have it or not. Again, the right thing to do violates the principle.

This is the problem with the moral principles philsophers have produced to meet the sophist's challenge. They are intelligent and appear plausible initially, but they lead to counterintuitive consequences. We might say: An act is right if and only if it
makes the world a happier place. Happiness is pleasure and the absence of pain. So the right thing to do is to act so that the
benefits in happiness outweigh the costs in pain. Plausible.

But consider. Suppose I
can snatch some lonely homeless person, harvest his organs and save 5 lives at the cost of one (two kidneys, a liver, a pancreas, a heart). The organs will go to happy people whom people love. 5 lives at the cost of 1, the benefits do outweigh the costs, so a consequence of this moral principle (Utilitarianism) is that it's my duty to do it if I can; it would be wrong for me not to do it.

The difficulty is this: we haven't been able to meet the Sophist's challenge. We cannot seem to say, in any objective way that doesn't lead to absurd consequences, what the difference is between right and wrong. The theistic answer--right is what God commands;
wrong what God forbids, therefore, has its
attractions, especially as religious morality at its best (the ten commandments plus
the New Testament teaching of radical love)
is pretty inspiring. Most people look to
the best religious people, like St. Francis,
Mother Theresa, and Gandhi (who was powerfully influenced by Christianty), as moral exemplars.

This leads to what is called the Moral
Argument for Theism:

1. If God does not exist, there is no objective difference between right and wrong.

2. If there is no objective difference between right and wrong, then Hitler's views about killing children are just as good as mine. What he did was right from his point of view, wrong from mine. End of story.

3. What Hitler did to those children was fundamentally and objectively wicked.

Therefore God exists.

Doestoyevsky put it this way:

If God does not exist, then everything
is permissible.

Some things are not permissible.

So God exists.

The idea is that theism alone can provide the objective basis for morality which most people believe must exist somehow.
For those who disagree, well, there's the Sophist's challenge to meet. Best