Evolution or Creation

Nothing, probably.But tell me this. Does jumping to the conclusion that makes you feel the best sound like a path to truth? If you think that you can decide that things are true just because of what you gain from it, what does the phrase "wishful thinking" mean to you, exactly?Edited by crashfrog, : No reason given.

Why do you think you would lose it, as an atheist?

You're not gonna, though. (Sorry.)That's why I asked. The benefits of religion "in the next world" are illusory; they don't exist. And these things? What makes you think that atheists are unhappy, unfulfilled, and lack peace and satisfaction? What makes you think that we benefit any less from circumstance and good fortune?It's not a question of losing Heaven, because Heaven doesn't exist. Nobody goes to Heaven. So what, exactly, do you lose in this life as an atheist? I can't think of a thing.

Yeah, but you're not right. That's the problem. You've wasted a lot of precious, finite time, for sure. If this time is all we have, isn't it all the more crucial that we be doing something worthwhile with it? You don't lose anything and you gain the truth. If you're motivated by truth, that's a big benefit. If you're motivated by cowardice, as you seem to be, then I guess that's no benefit at all.

I find Sam Harris's words appropriate here:

quote:

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Why rig a silly game in which only the poorly educated and mentally unbalanced are perfectly tuned to glimpse the truth of your existence, while smart, well-adjusted, and well-educated people (like yourself) must wrestle with doubt, barricade themselves behind euphemism, and cling to spurious "mysteries" to keep from tumbling into unbelief? You beckon me to a world in which George Bush and James Dobson have an effortless bead on the deepest conceivable truth; meanwhile, 93 percent of the members of the National Academy of Sciences may well be doomed for eternity by their skepticism. It's hard for me to imagine that this scenario seems even remotely plausible to you--but this is Christianity at a glance. I am not the first to notice that it is a strange sort of loving God who would make salvation depend upon a person's ability to believe in him on bad evidence.

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Andrew Sullivan and Sam Harris blog on the Bible, Islam, Jesus, Religion, Faith, and Death - BeliefnetAn exchange I think we'll be quoting extensively around here.

No, but I'm reasonably confident. That seems like a poor reason to believe. Do you think that God is interested in populating Heaven with people who saw belief as a matter of "hedging their bets"; people who thought they could game the system by professing belief just to avoid the hot place? That's quite a scam you people are running.

Hrm, what? You mean you've never seen the tobacco plant with the jellyfish genes? Glows in the dark, it does.

I just find it inconsistent with creationism, is all. I mean, here are creationists telling me that:1) Organisms were created in myriad seperate "kinds", where no cross-over is possible, and that these kinds are way too different to have possibly evolved from each other;
2) Genetic sequences are so fine-tuned and precise that the slightest change can mess the whole thing up and lead to disaster.Yet, here are the world's genetic engineers, dropping genes from jellyfish into tobacco plants like it's the easiest thing in the world. I've worked extensively with corn that was genetically spliced with genes from a bacterium. We're dropping human oncogenes into mice, so that they'll grow tumors we can test drugs on.It turns out that it's practically the easiest thing in the world to fold in genes from other organisms, and that it doesn't really matter where the gene was from. Jellyfish into plants. Humans into mice. There's almost no limit.How does that jive with the things creationists say? The ease with which this stuff as done means the creationist contentions I listed above are completely false. It's clear that there's a lot of room to play around with genetic codes; way more room than you would need to evolve men from mammals, for instance.

Dust is made of silicon; living things are predominantly carbon. Chalk up another loss for the Bible, I guess. No, they wouldn't. A diamond and a pencil are both made from the same element (carbon) but you wouldn't confuse one for the other. Leaving aside how poorly you've described the scientific consensus, the evidence does point to those things having happened. The visible universe was at one time a singularity of infinitely small size, and all living things do appear - to a remarkable extent - to have descended from an original common ancestor.Whether or not you're willing to believe that which the evidence best supports is up to you, I guess. You've already made it clear that you believe things because they make you feel good, not because they're true.

Where does he say that? You quoted him saying "nothing happened", not that there was nothing. And neither one of those is the same as what you originally said.Maybe the reason you don't believe it is because you don't really know what you're being asked to believe.

Point taken. Living things are mostly water, yes. Careless on my part.The components of soil differ depending on where you live, but if you subtract the elements that are there because of the decay of living things (mulch stuff and manure, in other words) then all you have left is the stuff that's basically powdered rock or sand, and rock is mostly silicon - right?If Adam was the first living thing that God formed, then he was formed from rock dust; but rock dust isn't carbon, it's silicon. Right? (The water was already there.)

Um, no, I didn't forget; in fact I mentioned that specifically, because it's what proves my point.With no decayed living matter, there was no carbon in the soil. So the dust would have been silicon-based. There would have been no way to make a carbon-based Adam from silicon-based dust.

Like it says in your quote, there's no known way that information about conditions prior to the Big Bang could enter our universe.I don't find it a very interesting question, I guess, since it's not possible to answer it. String theory is a Big Bang theory.

We covered this, I thought. They're only in the air and water because plants and animals put them there. Before the evolution of green algae there was no oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere. Before the presence of living things, it couldn't have been fertile. One more thing the Bible gets wrong. The truth. To someone who believes things that make him feel good, I can see how that's of no interest to you. It'd be the truth. That's pretty much it.

I thought we covered this. A singularity isn't a "nothing." It's very much a "something." In fact, by definition, this particular singularity was "everything."If you compressed all the mass of the universe into a point of infinite density, how could that possibly be a nothing?