Shinyblurry!! Their playing your song!!

*quality

Boosting this quality contribution up in the Hot Listing - declared quality by jan.

Great article about "On the Nature of Things", by Lucretius,... the article makes the point that the rediscovery of this ancient Roman poem about godless physics is thought to have pulled European society out of the dark ages.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/08/08/110808fa_fact_greenblatt

http://www.newyorker.com/online/2011/08/08/110808on_audio_greenblatt
(good audio podcast by article's author)

Yep, Lucretius was a great mind indeed! One must also give credit to Epicurus, though, the philosophy of whom inspired that of the roman poet.

>> ^bamdrew:

Great article about "On the Nature of Things", by Lucretius,... the article makes the point that the rediscovery of this ancient Roman poem about godless physics is thought to have pulled European society out of the dark ages.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/08/08/110808fa_fact_greenblatt
http://www.newyorker.com/online/2011/08/08/110808on_audio_greenblatt (good audio podcast by article's author)

The bible specifically condemns making gods and goddesses out of things observed in nature. That there are many obviously false gods doesn't mean that there is no God. I might point at a few different people and label them HQPQ, but when they are proven not to be HQPQ does that mean he doesn't exist?

In contrasting the many gods and goddesses, you can narrow it down very quickly by just examining the ones that make claims of creating the Universe. From there you can examine the individual claims and see if any of them match reality.

>> ^shinyblurry:


In contrasting the many gods and goddesses, you can narrow it down very quickly by just examining the ones that make claims of creating the Universe. From there you can examine the individual claims and see if any of them match reality.


You're right. And funny enough, reality has nerve to disagree with pretty much every religion out there.

Also, Carl Sagan = insta-upvote. That is all.

I know that particularly you disagree with any criticism of evolution, and thus consider the account of a literal six day creation to be without merit. However, I will say that the Genesis account of creation ex-nihilio, something from nothing, uniquely matches the evidence from the "big bang". There is no other creation account which postulates a creation from no prior material.

>> ^ChaosEngine:
>> ^shinyblurry:
In contrasting the many gods and goddesses, you can narrow it down very quickly by just examining the ones that make claims of creating the Universe. From there you can examine the individual claims and see if any of them match reality.

You're right. And funny enough, reality has nerve to disagree with pretty much every religion out there.
Also, Carl Sagan = insta-upvote. That is all.

Not to piss on your parade but the Genesis account isn't entirely ex nihilo... there was the tohu-bohu (chaos) - or "dark materials" as Milton put it - out of which God made everything. Even formless emptiness is something!

>> ^shinyblurry:

I know that particularly you disagree with any criticism of evolution, and thus consider the account of a literal six day creation to be without merit. However, I will say that the Genesis account of creation ex-nihilio, something from nothing, uniquely matches the evidence from the "big bang". There is no other creation account which postulates a creation from no prior material.
>> ^ChaosEngine:
>> ^shinyblurry:
In contrasting the many gods and goddesses, you can narrow it down very quickly by just examining the ones that make claims of creating the Universe. From there you can examine the individual claims and see if any of them match reality.

You're right. And funny enough, reality has nerve to disagree with pretty much every religion out there.
Also, Carl Sagan = insta-upvote. That is all.

I agree, but the formless emptiness was itself created by the initial creation from nothing.

Genesis 1:1-3

In the beginning (Time) God created the heavens (Space) and the earth (Matter).

Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

And God said, “Let there be light (Energy),” and there was light.

>> ^hpqp:
Not to piss on your parade but the Genesis account isn't entirely ex nihilo... there was the tohu-bohu (chaos) - or "dark materials" as Milton put it - out of which God made everything. Even formless emptiness is something! <IMG class=smiley src="http://cdn.videosift.com/cdm/emoticon/wink.gif">
>> ^shinyblurry:
I know that particularly you disagree with any criticism of evolution, and thus consider the account of a literal six day creation to be without merit. However, I will say that the Genesis account of creation ex-nihilio, something from nothing, uniquely matches the evidence from the "big bang". There is no other creation account which postulates a creation from no prior material.
>> ^ChaosEngine:
>> ^shinyblurry:
In contrasting the many gods and goddesses, you can narrow it down very quickly by just examining the ones that make claims of creating the Universe. From there you can examine the individual claims and see if any of them match reality.

You're right. And funny enough, reality has nerve to disagree with pretty much every religion out there.
Also, Carl Sagan = insta-upvote. That is all.

@shinyblurry

It's nice to see you reading the Bible allegorically at last... you're on the right path!

>> ^shinyblurry:
There is no other creation account which postulates a creation from no prior material.

Ok, aside from the fact that you are wrong, even if you were correct that only Yahweh created the universe from nothing, it still doesn't disprove all the other glaring inaccuracies in the bible.

Unless you really want to argue that the earth is 6000 years old, which is so conclusively disproved I am honestly unable to comprehend the kind of broken thinking that goes into believing something so ridiculous.

@ChaosEngine

The only one out of those that doesn't use prior material is islam, and the creation story from the quron is just a rip off of Genesis, so I don't think it really counts.

As far as the age of the Earth goes, there are plenty of evidences to indicate a young earth just in the fossil record. You have polystrate fossils all over the place, which traverse multiple layers that were supposedly laid down over hundreds of millions of years. You have fossils supposedly millions of years old found with intact DNA, which has a max decay rate of 20 thousand years. You have fossils like these: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/wiltshire/8208838.stm

Radiometric dating is also not proven reliable. It is predicated on a number of assumptions (guesses), such as a constant rate of decay, the amount of the elements, etc. Particularly, it must be assumed to have been within a closed system. Since there is no such thing on planet Earth, there is no way of telling what the original condition of the rock was. Whether it was contaminated by heat, or groundwater, or leeching etc. That makes all such measurements extremely problematic. The different methods used also almost never agree with eachother. Frequently, they provide a wide range of dates which the scientist will cherry pick from to match his particular theory. Radiometric dating has also been proven to be inaccurate by testing on samples that have known ages. Tests run on rocks known to be a few hundred years old will come back with estimates ranging from a few million to over a billion years old. If you can't get reliable results on known ages, how can you trust results on samples with unknown ages?

You have the problem of the geologic column being a complete mess, where layers appear in different places in different parts of the world, sometimes in reverse order. You also have the circular logic of the fossils dating the rocks and the rocks dating the fossils. You have human and dinosaur tracks in the same strata. You even have ancient artifacts found which show human/dinosaur interaction and even domestication.

http://www.mondovista.com/dinostone.ica2.html
http://www.mtblanco.com/ForSale/2006/ICAStones.html

There are many reasons to think that the scientific timeline is grossly inaccurate, and these are just a few of those reasons.

Oh sweet monkey jebus, he is actually one of those young earth morons. Well, that's the end of that debate then. I can't even be bothered pointing out how wrong you are. This is not an issue for debate. There isn't some "controversy" you can engage in. You are calling black white and (once again in case you missed it) you are wrong.

Seriously, there is no hope for you. Go home. Stay there. Do not breed. Do not interact with the rest of civilisation. I'm not joking. You are what's wrong with the world today. Dumb-ass, ignorant, science denying morons that have confused being entitled to an opinion with being right.