Evolutionary creationism sticking point

Faith & Science Conversation
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I like the quote. May I ask the source?

There are a number of chestnuts in Tom Robbins’ meditation on making love stay which sound a complimentary chord. My favorite being:

“When the mystery of the connection goes, love goes. It’s that simple. This suggests that it isn’t love that is so important to us but the mystery itself. The love connection may be merely a device to put us in contact with the mystery, and we long for love to last so that the ecstacy of being near the mystery will last. It is contrary to the nature of mystery to stand still. Yet it’s always there, somewhere, a world on the other side of the mirror (or the Camel pack), a promise in the next pair of eyes that smile at us. We glimpse it when we stand still.
The romance of new love, the romance of solitude, the romance of objecthood, the romance of ancient pyramids and distant stars are means of making contact with the mystery. When it comes to perpetuating it, however, I got no advice. But I can and will remind you of two of the most important facts I know:

  1. Everything is part of it.
  2. It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.”
    ― Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker
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All you have to understand for the point is a happy father and son and joy in the relationship.
 

If Lamborghini was all there was? (I would enjoy that immensely. :grin:) And of course, after God created, anything he created would be less valuable than him.
 

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I dislike that because it appears to elevate mystery above love, or even supplant it. Neither of a loving and lovable father playing with his loving and beloved child care a whit about mystery. Philosophizing from the sidelines, so to speak, does not enhance the relationship.

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I think this is right. It seems to me that ever since humans started asking questions, it’s been a headlong rush for certainty. We are the only animals who see the existence of the future; but we cannot see the future itself. We are the only animals who ask questions; but we seem to need those questions answered. I don’t hold to that nonsense about “it’s the question that’s important, not the answer” or “it’s the journey that matters, not the destination”. Those statements are ridiculous on their face. But we can’t let our desire for an answer or the labor of the journey cause us to settle too easily. The temptation of the easy path is hard to resist. In the Christian story, eating the fruit and taking the short-cut leads to death. “Broad is the gate that leads to destruction, and many there are who find it”, as The Man said.

I’ve offered way too many sacrifices on the altar of Certainty, and resist the pull to continue to do so daily. I make periodic forays into internet forums to see how well I’m doing, and am generally discouraged. But… well… St. Paul says the path to life goes through death, and that we must die every day. So… on I go. :wink:

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Or maybe it is a reminder not to settle for the literal in a metaphor. Love in human relations is a poor substitute for awe and reverence.

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It is from Orthodoxy, by G. K. Chesterton, chapter ii, “The Maniac”. It is an absolutely brilliant chapter (in a brilliant work), and remains for me one of the most meaningful things I’ve ever read.

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It needs not substitute. They can coexist quite well.

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So what is Heaven supposed to be like? Is it going to be free of pain, suffering, and death?

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There’s been a lot of ink spilled on the “problem of suffering” and how it suggests there might not be a God at all. The idea boils down to “If a good God existed, he would have made a world without suffering. Clearly, lots of suffering exists, so there must not be a good God.” But I think my absolute favorite piece of writing on that subject is this insightful gem by Frederica Mathewes-Green:

“Let’s Create a Perfect World”
So you think that the existence of suffering proves that there is no God. But can I ask a question? How would you eliminate suffering? What would a world without suffering look like? You have free rein-make it any way you like…

Read the rest…

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RNA polymerase is a very large molecule…. A CHEMICAL.

“a multi subunit enzyme that catalyzes the process of transcription where an RNA polymer is synthesized from a DNA template.” RNA Polymerase - Definition, Function and Types | Biology Dictionary

Maybe you read from here: PDB-101: Molecule of the Month: RNA Polymerase which calls it “a huge factory” lol.

You said: With computer algorithms beating us at all of our own strategy games

NOT because of any intelligence. Computers are programmed to be able to run through all possible moves and pick the best one, faster than you can blink an eye. And the same goes for AI. A lot of scientists want to call it “artificial intelligence” but that is just a choice of words. And a choice of words that suit atheist scientists.

You said: I put to you that intelligence doesn’t require anywhere near as much as was previous supposed. All it really consists of is the ability to follow a set of rules.

So are you saying that we are meat robots programmed by evolution I guess, to follow a set of rules. WOW is all I can say. BTW who made up the rules? Or did they make themselves up?

Viruses are much bigger than RNA polymerase and also made of many proteins, but they can’t do a ■■■■ thing on their lonesome. They are taken up by LIVING cells and replicated.

Let’s not worry about consciousness because there is no science that can even speak of it qualitatively, let alone quantitatively.

Symmetries were a notion of the Ancient Greeks in looking at and defining nature and natural laws. What symmetry breaking is there? It is only that we have come to understand more, especially with quantum field theory etc., and we define and describe things with different constraints. So, I agree that a claim can be true, but that doesn’t mean an argument for that claim is correct.

You said: “I see a necessity for choices of faith in life and suspect the arguments people make they end up replacing their faith in the things they argue for, with a faith in the things they argue with” .

This may be true for some. An atheist for instance will have faith only in the physical. However faith, as I see it, depends on the level of awareness. A person, who is aware of themselves as something more than the body, i.e., as a spiritual being, will try and explain their faith in certain terms that an atheist can’t accept. However it is not possible to explain the faith a person has. It is like consciousness. It is self-evident. There is no objective scientific experiment that can be done to give evidence for subjective experience.

By “physical” I mean “matter”. matter is condensed energy in a sense E=mc2. Matter is considered to be based on information. Here Professor Leonard Susskind PhD of the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics at Stanford University. The World As Hologram.

At: 21:47 information in quantum mechanics comes in discrete units and they’re called particles

23:31 bits of information fall onto the horizon they behaved as if they were little impenetrable objects which collected on the horizon and simply couldn’t push each other out of the way and achieved some density almost as though you had a bunch of coins on the table and you try to pack them in as tightly as possible but on the horizon and not in the interior of the black hole so that was the first surprising

47:32 you can describe a region of space any region of space by data on the surface as if it were a hologram the maximum amount of information in a region of space is proportional to the area of the region

47:45 I like to say that the world is a pixelated world and not a voxelated world

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That’s a strange use of the word “faith”. Why would you need faith in something that you can demonstrate to exist?

You probably don’t accept the beliefs of people from other religions, but surely you can understand how they can believe those things through faith. I think atheists can understand how faith works, even if they don’t believe those same things.

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And you are a collection of chemicals also. This is irrelevant. Those chemicals are a part of a system/process performing all kinds of tasks including recognition. To be sure, attributing thought to RNA is absurd, but as part of a system which does have such functions like recognition, speaking in that way need not imply any such thing.

They are intelligent according to a concrete measure of intelligence and that is enough to challenge antiquated notions and prejudices which are not founded on any concrete measures of anything. More importantly they point to the need for de-mystifying human intelligence and breaking it down to a collection of many different abilities, as well as debunking an excessive glorification of intelligence, not to mention a lot of stuff which can be called magical thinking (which is what I do when there is no logical connection between cause and effect).

That is the old computer programs for not very challenging games like chess, which don’t have quite so many possibilities. The new ones use learning algorithms much like evolutionary algorithms which can find solutions to problems far better than we can. And thus they can beat us with games which have far too many possibilities to search with any computer no matter how fast.

You guess wrong. That is ONLY the conclusion when you put God into the role of watchmaker and clever designer. My suggestion is discard such non-Biblical notions and go back to the Biblical image of God as a shepherd who deals with living things and not machines.

I think God made up the rules but that is a matter of faith which cannot be proven because it is demonstrable that rules can be created without designers. We know that by symmetry breaking rules (natural laws) can be made up by themselves.

Symmetries are even more a notion of modern science, such as in quantum field theory. We now know that every law of conservation is derived from a natural symmetry of the space-time physical universe. I suggest you look up “spontaneous symmetry breaking.”

It is a choice… for whatever reasons a person has. An inability to explain those reasons point to a lack of rationality and possibly self-dishonesty. Perhaps they don’t even want to look at their reasons too careful because they don’t want to admit them even to themselves. Of course, their reasons are nobody’s business except their own… UNLESS they go sharing and/or pushing them on other people such as in a discussion forum.

That coincides with my physical/natural, which avoids putting so much unjustified focus on such things as matter. The other definition, physical/bodily is an older definition which is still used for a number of things such as “physical therapy” and “physical education,” for example.

I have a similar notion which I use to suggest that the physical universe is indeed much like a computer simulation or pixelated representation and the greater more authentic reality is to be found in the spiritual.

BUT I think only the physical is fundamentally objective while the spiritual is fundamentally subjective. The mathematical space-time laws of the universe don’t care what we want or believe and that is the basis of its objectivity, while the spiritual is not mathematical and what we want and believe is very important for the spiritual… but this also makes our perception of the spiritual unavoidably diverse.

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Reminds me of Vitalism at the turn of the 20th century. It was thought that there was something akin to a spirit in all living things that allowed them, and only them, to produce organic molecules.

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Interesting. I had only encountered this idea in works of fiction such as the Dark Crystal or in vague references to alchemy. There is of course no such “stuff of life” and it is good to have a name for the idea as you have provided. Thanks.

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I’m listening to Jared Byas’ new book, “Love Matters More,” and really liked his quote from Rabbi Jonathan Sacks:

Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean.

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You are using Richard Dawkins definition of “faith”, that being “believing without evidence”. This is not true. Faith means that we have repeated evidence of something as to have faith in it, faith that it will happen or that it exist. For instance we have faith that the sun will rise every morning and bring us the daylight. We have faith that the DNA in cells is replicated in mitosis. And so on.
I have seen in a huge number of cases how inhumane people try to manufacture belief in their underhanded foul game play. Why do that if a simple idea can be sold. It can’t. To manufacture belief they use a concealed threat. It makes the person react with fear, but without being able to appraise their bodily reactivity. Thus you can get the person to panic in one case and fall in love with the same threat in another as is done in the love at first sight cheat.
They will believe the idea mentally presented to them for two reasons.
One is that they believe that idea that just pop into Mind is their own idea.
And the other is if there is what they see as related emotional reactivity. The reason is because we weigh up ideas with associated emotion. Of course in cheats the idea is only concurrent.
True it is that you can sell ideas by being respected as an authority, but sooner or later people start asking questions if they are affected and get a first hand view. So for instance the chemical imbalances in the brain causes mental illness theory was sold to the public by psychiatrists as science when there was no research ever done.
This is also being done with religion, but you find that people grow up, begin to ask questions and when they get no credible evidence they leave the religion, some join other religions, some become agnostic and some atheist depending on their own beliefs, their faith in what they believe as reality.

I see that all religions are about the same thing, only the way that it has been explained is different. We say There is no other God, but God in Islam, whereas we say there are 33 million gods and goddesses in Hinduism. BUT Those gods and goddesses are attributes of the Oneness, Brahman. It is no different to the 99 Names of God in Islam. Just a different way of saying the same basic thing.
I can recall several past lives here on earth and a variety of religions from shamanism to Egyptian religion and the worship of God as Amoun-Ra. And others, including last one in India I was a Hindu. In this life I am Muslim (Shia).
I don’t think anyone’s faith is based on simply ideas being passed down. No one believes without some evidence. Prophets may explain in different ways according to people’s understanding and may help in ritual practice and worship, but all religions have a basic belief in being a spiritual being, ethical pathway to life in a spiritual realm and God’s existence.
Atheists, in my opinion, are just younger spirits that haven’t had enough rebirths as to experience or sense their spiritual nature while being embodied and experiencing the lure of the physical existence.

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Then you are saying that atheists have repeated evidence for consciousness coming from the physical.

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There is no evidence that consciousness comes from the physical so atheist as anyone else can’t have any faith that consciousness is the result of anything physical.

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The faith that atheists have is the faith that there is no God and that science will fill in all the gaps even if we currently don’t have all the data. Atheism is different from agnostics in this way.

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Heaven is a celebrati0on of lives well lived…