Its not a dilemma for me, I know exactly as much as you, or anybody else do about god: Nothing.

All you can say here is that you don't know anything about God. If you don't know anything about God, then how can you know what anyone else knows about God?

Remember, I'm not the one who believes in imaginary things.

You seem to state here that your assumption that God is imaginary is a fact, which is just the same as merely imagining something is true.

The fact that people like you THINK you can no something and comfortably believe in something for which there is not a shred of evidence, is first and foremost YOUR problem.

There are good reasons as to why someone could believe in a God, but I wouldn't believe in a God based on those reasons alone. I believe in God because of personal revelation. The scripture says that this is the way that God reveals Himself to everyone. My question to you is, could God reveal Himself in such a way to you that you could be certain that He is?

When it comes to grounds for making knowledge claims, well, in my view knowledge, like the universe and life itself, is a bottoms up thing, we start at zero, and then build gradually on sound arguments and evidence. Like Carl Sagan once put it: "science is a candle in the dark" and that candle is shining ever brighter. Newton said he was standing on the shoulders of giants, and now we can stand on Newtons shoulders and see even farther.

My question to you here is, how do you ever get past zero? The ground of the sound arguments and evidence that you're perceiving is your own reasoning power. How do you justify your reasoning as being sound without using circular reasoning?

I answer the question about whether there is a god in exactly the same way as I would about santa clause. I'm pretty sure, based on the aforementioned hard-earned knowledge we do have, combined with the fact that we have NO information suggesting there might be one, that there isnt one. But at the same time I recognize that we cannot be absolutely certain. I do regard it as a fact as good as any that there is no god.

There isn't a good reason to believe Santa Claus exists but there are good reasons to believe that the Universe was created by an all powerful being. The idea of God has explanatory power. The very question of whether the Universe has an intelligent causation is a rational question. My question to you is, how would you tell the difference as to whether the Universe was or wasn't designed? How could you tell which Universe you lived in?

Its not a dilemma for me, I know exactly as much as you, or anybody else do about god: Nothing.

Remember, I'm not the one who believes in imaginary things.

The fact that people like you THINK you can no something and comfortably believe in something for which there is not a shred of evidence, is first and foremost YOUR problem.

When it comes to grounds for making knowledge claims, well, in my view knowledge, like the universe and life itself, is a bottoms up thing, we start at zero, and then build gradually on sound arguments and evidence. Like Carl Sagan once put it: "science is a candle in the dark" and that candle is shining ever brighter. Newton said he was standing on the shoulders of giants, and now we can stand on Newtons shoulders and see even farther.

I answer the question about whether there is a god in exactly the same way as I would about santa clause. I'm pretty sure, based on the aforementioned hard-earned knowledge we do have, combined with the fact that we have NO information suggesting there might be one, that there isnt one. But at the same time I recognize that we cannot be absolutely certain. I do regard it as a fact as good as any that there is no god.

This is more narrative than fact, but it is a fun narrative; most notable the inverse square law came around 1687 and his calculus was claimed in 1666, but only published in 1696 long after the Leibniz/Newton calculus controversy had begun. Philosophy minded people always credit Leibniz with being one of the smartest people ever, and Science people with Newton and fall in line usually with how they feel about the invention of calculus and such. The facts are always a bit more complicated than simple, cause driven narrative like this, but he is pretty much known for this kind of stuff, so whatever, Ill just have fun

How about Isaac Newton? His guess was 2060.

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At present this concept of design is just castle-in-the-sky nonsense. Empty piffle. A complete non-starter.

This is why the "mere mention" of "design" will get you "banned" from peer-review, because you could just as well have made a "mere mention" of Bigfoot and the loch ness monster in your zoology report, it's a big tell to your peers that you are a nut who fails to understand the nature of evidence and science, and a big sign that you are in for some fuzzy logic and dumb assumptions instead of solid science.

Design is a better hypothesis for the information we find in DNA, and the fine tuning we see in the physical laws. The reason design is a non-starter is because the idea this Universe was created by anyone is anathema to the scientific community:

Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such an hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic."

S. C. Todd,
Correspondence to Nature 410(6752):423, 30 Sept. 1999

It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the unitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine foot in the door.

Richard Lewontin, Harvard
New York Review of Books 1/9/97

No evidence would be sufficient to create a change in mind; that it is not a commitment to evidence, but a commitment to naturalism. ...Because there are no alternatives, we would almost have to accept natural selection as the explanation of life on this planet even if there were no evidence for it.

Steven Pinker MIT
How the mind works p.182

After essentially nullifying and disproving everything we have learned about biology the last 200 years, you still have all the work ahead of you, I'm afraid. You now have to build a completely new framework and model for every single observation ever made in biology that makes sense of it all and explains why things are the way they are. Shouting that a thing is "complex" is not cutting it, I'm afraid. You need a new theory of DNA, Immunology, Bacterial resistance, adaptation, vestigal organs, animal distobution, mutation, selection, variation, genetics, speciation, taxonomy... well, as Dobzhansky put it: "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution" That quote is more relevant than ever.

Your error here is conflating micro and macro evolution. Creation scientists believe in micro evolution and speciation. That is part of the creationist model of how the world was repopulated with animals after the flood. Macro evolution, the idea that all life descended from a universal common ancestor, is not proven by immunology, bacterial resistance, adaptation, animal distribution, mutation, seclection, variation, speciation, taxonomy etc. The only way you could prove it is in the fossil record and the evidence isn't there. They've tried to prove it with genetics but it contradicts the fossil record (the way they understand it). So Creationists have no trouble explaining those things..and common genetics points to a common designer.

You dont have to trust scientists, most of the EVIDENCE is RIGHT FUCKING THERE, in front of you, in your pocket, in your hand, around your home, in every school, in every home, in every post office or courtroom, in the streets. ACTUAL REAL EVIDENCE, right there, PROVING, every second, that the universe is billions of years old.

Every scientist since Newton could be a lying sack of shit, all working on the same conspiracy, and it would mean fuck all, because the evidence speaks for itself.

The earth is definately NOT ten thousand years young.

Have you ever heard of the horizon problem? The big bang model suffers from a light travel time problem of its own, but they solve it by postulating cosmic inflation, which is nothing more than a fudge factor to solve the problem. First, it would have to expand at trillions of times the speed of light, violating the law that says nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. There is also no theory compatible with physics that could explain the mechanism for how the Universe would start expanding, and then cease expanding a second later. It's poppycock. See what secular scientists have to say about the current state of the Big Bang Theory:

http://www.cosmologystatement.org/

As far as how light could reach us in a short amount of time, there are many theories. One theory is that the speed of light has not always been constant, and was faster at the beginning of creation. This is backed up by a number of measurements taken since the 1800s showing the speed of light decreasing. You can see the tables here:

http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/cm/v4/n1/velocity-of-light

@shinyblurry

I have a concession, perhaps a confession to make. An admission if you will. I accept your thesis: every scientist on earth, more or less (except a few religiously devout who still see the truth for what it is) are lying, or they are caving to the pressure of their lying peers, or they have been duped somehow to lie to you. In reality the universe is about 10000 years old, give or take. But all these scientists are, for whatever reason, contributing deliberately or undeliberately to the false claim that the universe and earth is many orders of magnitude older, something like billions of years old. Its all lies. Just about every scientist for the last 200 years have been contributing to this lie, and alternative ideas are being supressed for some dogmatic reason.

Lets suppose all that is true.

Suppose that all these lies, published in peer-review, has been backed up by equally lying peers.

Fine.

I give you that point

I dont think its logical, in fact I think its an insane conspiracy theory, but nonetheless, I concede the entire point. Right now.

How about that shit, eh?

Theres just still one problem for creationism, and its fucking everywhere, its called EVIDENCE. Like maybe you are reading this on a smartphone, with a GPS in it. That GPS unit is communicating right now with 2 sattelites, in freaking ORBIT, triangulating your position right now. Thats some insane science at work right there, but actually thats not the crazy part: The crazy part is that it wouldnt work at all, unless the people who designed that GPS system understood Relativity. Thats right, Einsteinian freaking relativity. The satellites, and their speed relative to earth, would actually give the wrong postion if they relied on Newtons laws.

THOSE VERY SAME principles and knowledge actually is used to tell us how far away stuff in the universe is. some stuff are actually (As in your-GPS-can-ACTUALLY-tell-you-exactly-where-you-are kind of "actually")really fucking far atway, like billions of light-YEARS. which means the light left from other parts of the universe literally BILLIONS of years ago, before they reached our telescopes. Like Bill Nye explained, a smoke detector works on principles that we understand about the half-lives of atoms, again the same shit used to understand the age of fossils and shit we find in the ground. the LCD screen you are likely looking at is an innovation that comes from understanding wavelenghts of light, again used to measure the distance of galaxies that emitted light billions of years ago.

You dont have to trust scientists, most of the EVIDENCE is RIGHT FUCKING THERE, in front of you, in your pocket, in your hand, around your home, in every school, in every home, in every post office or courtroom, in the streets. ACTUAL REAL EVIDENCE, right there, PROVING, every second, that the universe is billions of years old.

Every scientist since Newton could be a lying sack of shit, all working on the same conspiracy, and it would mean fuck all, because the evidence speaks for itself.

The earth is definately NOT ten thousand years young.

Newton made his discoveries to bring glory to God, and he changed the world many times over. There is no reason not to pursue the mystery of the cosmos; and no one is saying we know everything. It is not arrogance however to say what the origin of the cosmos is, and how the laws governing it came to be. After all, scientists pronounce these things on a continual basis. What is arrogant is to believe that this is solely the domain of science.

"For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountain of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries."

Robert Jastrow

Claiming that revelation is the only way to know anything is an absolute knowledge claim.

Claiming that God revealed to you that revelation is the only way to know anything is a justification by circular argument.

The claim is that without God you can't know anything. The proof that God exists in this argument, because we do know things, is the impossibility of the contrary.

God himself has not been established and so cannot be reliably used as the fulcrum of an argument. Even among those who believe in God, there is little consensus as to his nature and attributes. I realize that you think you have it right while others have been wrong, but billions of other Christians have no doubt thought exactly the same. Until someone has something demonstrable, I do not care. "God" is just a word that people ascribe whatever definition justifies their beliefs to. Trying to build upon "God" is like trying to build a house upon a foundation of Jello.

The argument is intended to establish the existence of God as a necessity for rational discourse. As far as what Christians believe about God, our beliefs about Jesus Christ, who He is, what He came here to do, His attributes and nature, etc, are universally agreed upon by almost everyone. The idea that there is all this infighting amongst Christians about who or what God is is false. The division has to do with various minor doctrines, most of which are not consequential to the core doctrines.

You are correct that the laws of nature could change in 5 seconds, but we have testable, reproducible results by basing our work upon those laws (or our best approximation of them) and that is more useful to me than the formless, shifting apparition which you implore me to love and fear in their place.

It's interesting that you formulate the dichotomy as either God or science, implicating that science is functioning for you as a sort of stand-in for God. After all, isn't it where you find your explanation for reality? Don't you place your faith in its omnipotence to find every answer and solve every problem? So yes, to know God you will have to displace the idol, but not science itself. Sir Issac Newton certainly didn't see it that way. He saw science as something which demonstrated Gods glory and did not conflict with his research. Obviously his view benefited all of mankind many times over.

>> ^GeeSussFreeK:

The glass myth is actually incorrect. I used to have this misconception, but glass is quite sturdy, with viscosity greater that many metals that are considered solids (depending on the glass of course).


Came here to yell about this

>> ^GeeSussFreeK:

The glass myth is actually incorrect. I used to have this misconception, but glass is quite sturdy, with viscosity greater that many metals that are considered solids (depending on the glass of course).


Tl;dr: "If the windows found in early Colonial American homes were thicker at the bottom than the top because of "flow" then the glass found in Egyptian Tombs should be a puddle."

The glass myth is actually incorrect. I used to have this misconception, but glass is quite sturdy, with viscosity greater that many metals that are considered solids (depending on the glass of course).