@loujost wrote:
“I think one lives a fuller and more truly meaningful life if one does not believe in myths just because they make you feel good.”
How do you define “a fuller and more truly meaningful life?”
On what basis would you believe in myths?
The abundance of religions and their presence in every single culture in human history is not a proof against God.
I didn’t say it was. I mentioned it because your leap of faith lands you in just one of the many possible religions, so it is a dangerous leap even for someone who believes that there is a god or gods.
I am sure you are aware that people generally have been under many other illusions, and the commonness of an opinion is no argument for or against a belief. People used to all believe the world was flat. People all used to to believe the sun goes round the earth, and that heavenly bodies followed their own rules quite different from earthly ones.
Roger, I try not to believe in myths, at least if I can recognize them as such. I try to question all my beliefs constantly. That’s one of the reasons I visit these sites, to test my opinions and see if I might be missing something.
My “fuller life” is one that accepts reality as it is, rather than as we wish it were. And the reality is we die and disappear. This adds so much to the importance of every day, of every act. People who live for their imaginary future life are missing out on almost everything important here.
Eddie, I just wish you would not be so dismissive of standard evolutionary theory based mainly on your gut feelings. Most real experts don’t see evidence for deeper processes that may have theological implications. Some of the processes you mention, such as epigenetics and redeployment of ensembles of genes, are just more dramatic examples of random genetic variation and natural selection. Epigenetics, for example, is controlled by DNA that is exposed to natural selection. Some biologists like to toot their own horn and make their fields sound more revolutionary than they are. Caveat emptor!
Then there’s even less reason for him to misrepresent the evidence, wouldn’t you agree?
@Lou, it is good to hear that you do have beliefs.
Now talking about an imaginary future. It seems to me that people are always looking to the future, which since it is still in the future, is “imaginary.” Also it seems that we should be building a future that we would want, not a future that is evil, so living for a imaginary future is good, not wrong.
The reality is that we live only once and are gone, and you are right, this means that we must make the best of our time here. The reality also is that what we do now, we are responsible for. In my opinion God’s Reality, that you do not accept, holds us to be responsible for what we do and who we are, rather than enjoy our failure to treat other people fairly or simply suffer for the short term unfairness of the world.
It seems to me that if you are really concerned about the apparent unjust nature of life, then you would be a supporter of heaven rather than a critic.
There is no real scientific consensus of what life really is, in terms of what is good and right. Our friend Caleb said that the Golden Rule was a good start, but it comes from the Bible, so it is rooted in myth. Besides it makes me feel good about myself, so there must be something wrong with it.
When I talk about God, I am talking about a world view about what the world really is. If God is Love, that means God’s world has a particular character where the Golden Rule works. If God is Logos, rational Truth, then God’s Creation has a particular character where people need to be honest and fair. These are falsifiable statements, and they are not false.
I cannot say I understand how one can say that atheism allows one to see the world as it really is, because atheism is not a statement of what is, but what is not. To me it means that there is no rational purpose behind the universe and reality, so life logically is random without rational purpose and meaning.
Thus per atheism we are here to survive for no reason, but since life without purpose and reason is per se evil, suicide is the rational alternative to life. Of course science cannot exist without a rational universe.
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loujost,
Many well respected scientists believed and believe in a single God and did such dangerous leap of faith. It is not a threat to intelligence, to have faith in God.
Here’s a list of some Bible believing scientists who believed in the God that you have chosen, to neglect.
Joseph Lister, Louis Pasteur, Isaac Newton, Johann Kepler, Robert Boyle, Georges Cuvier, Charles Babbage, Lord Raleigh, John Ambrose Fleming, James Clerk Maxwell, Michael Faraday, Lord Kelvin, Henri Fabre, George Stokes, William Herschell, Gregor Mendel, Louis Agassiz, James Simpson, Matthew Maury, Blaise Pascal, William Ramsay, Lord Rayleigh, Bernhard Riemann, David Brewster, John Woodward, Rudolf Virchow, James Joule, Nicholas Steno, Carolus Linnaeus, Humphrey Davy.
I use that term “with theological implications” to distinguish minor tweaks of evolutionary theory, which I don’t think interest you at all, from ones with wider implications, like irreducible teleology.
Sorry but I don’t see any evidence that epigenetics does not have a genetic basis. If you know of some, let me in on it.
I will have to look more at the “laws of form” business. There too, I thought what is meant is just a concise description of the results of variation and NS, incorporating historical accidents which impose developmental constraints, and physics imposing other constraints, and perhaps the more or less continuous nature of evolutionary processes introducing other constraints. But I haven’t looked at that in a long time.
Let’s see, I can make bigger lists of scientists who don’t believe in your god, and other lists of people who believed in other gods. I would like to ask any of those scientists on what evidence did they base their decision to believe in the Christian god? Does that evidence really hold up? The answer is pretty clearly “no”.
“So, being the public-spirited advocate of scientific knowledge that I am, I supply the deficit.”
If only you would produce the same ‘public spirit’ against IDism’s claimed ‘scientific knowledge’, we’d be in a different and better place.
“If deeper laws of form are involved, that raises the same kinds of
questions as those raised by appearances of cosmic fine-tuning.”
Like I said above, that’s not true if, as it seems, the laws of forms are not separate impositions but rather just concise ways of describing evolutionary constraints that are entirely explainable by standard processes.
You say that you are looking for evolution to focus more on FORM, rather neo-Darwinian mechanisms. I would like to point out that in my view of ecological evolution, FORM follows PURPOSE and ecology focuses on Natural Selection by survival through adaption.
Are you sure about that? Can you give me a reference or two to their argument against that?
Those scientists would strongly answer you that they “marvel at the complexity of life”, and, that they believe in the resurrected Jesus Christ.
You like bigger numbers? “A bigger number” of people believe in God. Those who understand that there is a supreme being very much outnumber the population of atheists.
You argue that the evidence those scientists would present you favoring the existence of God would not hold up. Obviously. We clearly understand that you are much more than many of the greatest scientists we know, scientists who are responsible for the development of indisputable foundational scientific disciplines. I wonder what on earth would you be able to achieve with a state subsidy…!
It’s great interacting with you loujost. I leave you the final words to close this interaction with me.
Remember that until Darwin, it was difficult to explain the appearance of design in nature without invoking a god.
Most of today’s greatest scientists are predominantly atheists, by a large margin.