[nathanm]

"And God shalt smite all ye who useth SpacePilot theme as pilots of space seeketh to driveth their rockets into God's nostril against divine commandment.  Repent, for He on high hath given ye two choices, and God doth degree SpacePilot to be the Devil's mischief and they that which chooseth it, chooseth eternal punishment." -Eccentricasties 2:14

[bubba966]

[Woodsea]

Nay, He who spake with forked tongue, is blind and full of Cana's wine.  SpacePilot be not of the devil, but of colours of the heavens.  
The good lord's canvas is not black and white but of the whole light spectrum.  Hide in the darkness if ye cannot stand the light.  
So sayeth,

[Anton K.]

Tbadder1
you are trying to apply logic to a belief, and believe me, logic simply does not apply here.  Trying to reason one's way to god is simply futile.  If you could, then there would be no need for faith.  

As I have noted before, faith is belief without evidence (or even belief in spite of evidence to the contrary).

Besides, it is not up to a non-believer to disprove the existence of god, it is up to the believer to prove his existence (or otherwise show that god exists).  Since faith (not logic ...

Well, i am the believer, and i definitely think logis does applies here.
Of course, we will never be able to fully explain ALL things by logic, like question where God came from, but same is also true if one denies existance of God
We are used to the fact that something never emerges from nothing, so anyway it is impossible for us to understand either of these 2 assumptions:
1. Someone (God) has existed eternally, has no beginning
2. Something (energy, matter) has always existed

Now, let's think on how life originated. Basically, there are 2 theories: creation and evolution (there is a fird one, that life was brought to Earth from another planet, but it still comes down to the question how the first leaving creature came to be)
It interesting that evolution is a THEORY. And if we consider the facts, there is much more faith needed to accept evolution, than creation.
Once we assume that somebody (God) has been there forever and without beginning, everything is quite easy.
On the other hand, things are far from being easy for evolution theory, even if one assumes that matter / energy always existed.
To name just a few:
1. All amino acids which constitute proteins in living creatures, have lef-hand structure, but in random chemical reactions yield equal nr of  left-handed and right handed amino acids. It looks very unlikely that just by chance only left-handed amino acids joined together to form a protein.
2. If evolution really took place, vast number of intermediate links between species should have been found, but this is not the case. Eg, they never found an animal with a neck being 3/4 of the length of the neck of modern giraffe. And there are hundreds of similar instances.
3. Languages. Old languages are more complicated than modern ones - no evolution here
More proofs can be provided if needed.
Also, a lot of well-known and respected scholars believe in creation, i would not say they all lack in logic.
To summarize: those who belive in creation are very far from being without logic, but yes, element of faith is also essential

[nathanm]

You are confusing faith with science.  They are mutually exclusive.  Evolution does not require faith, but Creationism certainly does.  Faith is belief without evidence.  All Creationists have to go on is the Bible.  ONE lousy book.  No facts, no observations, no incontrovertible evidence, just the feelings and opinions of people.  Evolution on the other hand has plenty of scientific data to back up the theory.  There is no objective evidence of the existence of supernatural omnipotent beings but there is for evolution.  This is simply a fact, opinion doesn't enter into it.  Science does not demand its students to adhere themselves to a fixed, rigid idelogoy.  It is a flexible thing and it is willing to abandon ideas that don't work if new ones are discovered.  Religion has none of these attributes.  To suggest that the theory of evolution requires faith is absurd.

But hey, if I were to argue against evolution I would say there is great evidence in that the mind of the pious masses does not evolve, as their beliefs are based on a crusty old book which too does not evolve.  Well, except of course when things get edited to suit the whims of the church in their effort to better enslave and retard the human mind.  Which, I must say, is going according to plan for millions of humans.

[Anton K.]

Nathanm, i am sorry, did not get this one, pls explain :  must not be Anton LaVey at any rate! HAR! (pls remember English is not my native language)

Evolution theory will not become a fact no matter how many times people call it a fact.
We all are free to BELIEVE in evolution, or in creation, or something else.
So far evolution theory has not been proved, i listed just a few problems of this theory to show that there is merit in people like me who believe in God, that faith does not have to be blind or fanatic
In fact, i wholeheartely agree that perhaps religion has caused more deaths than anything else.
But the fact that people have done awful things in the name of God does not by itself prove that God does not exist
Hey, there is plenty of fake money circulating around, but this does not mean there is no real money!

[Tyson]

Evolution theory will not become a fact no matter how many times people call it a fact.

You can say the exact same thing about gravity.  You seem to not have a good understanding of the role of fact and theory in arriving at scientific truth.  Facts are things you observe (ie, things fall to the earth), theory is what is used to explain such behavior (ie, gravity is a force that attracts obects of mass together).  

Now, you can say that "gravity is just a thoery", but I don't think I'll be seeing you jumping out of an airplane without a parchute anytime soon.

[Anton K.]

Now, you can say that "gravity is just a thoery", but I don't think I'll be seeing you jumping out of an airplane without a parchute anytime soon.

No, but i can throw a stone from the airplane and see it fall.
Can anyone please demonstrate evolution to me ? Or, let us make is easier, synthesize any DNA from amino acids?
The fact is none of us was there when universe/earth/first living creature came to be.

[nathanm]

Nathanm, i am sorry, did not get this one, pls explain :  must not be Anton LaVey at any rate! HAR! (pls remember English is not my native language)

Oh, just a dry, off-handed joke - LaVey is the guy who founded the Church Of Satan, which if you read their ideas is really a very atheistic group and not really into worshipping the "devil" per se.  I was just joking, didn't mean any offense by it. Heh!

Evolution theory will not become a fact no matter how many times people call it a fact.

We are talking about semantics here.  Scientists do not demand their claims are true, they TEST them to see if they are or they aren't.  Scientists have not said "Dinosaurs exist!  They were great demons and dragons of the ancient world! Believe in dinosaurs!  Repent sinners!"  They found bones out in the desert and studied them, they found fossils of past life.  This kind of stuff is real evidence.  Nobody ever asked anyone to believe in dinosaurs by an act of blind faith.  You won't find any Biblical artifacts in the museums of natural history.

I am not accusing Anton K. of being a fanatic or devoid of logic in all things, but in the subject of religion the definitions of what is faith and what is not is clearly defined.

[Anton K.]

as a sidenote: being born in communist/atheist Soviet Union, and becoming a religious person, it is a bit funny for me to have this friendly debate with you,
people of the west, who were probably raised with different principles

[Anton K.]

We are talking about semantics here.  Scientists do not demand their claims are true, they TEST them to see if they are or they aren't.  Scientists have not said "Dinosaurs exist!  They were great demons and dragons of the ancient world! Believe in dinosaurs!  Repent sinners!"  They found bones out in the desert and studied them, they found fossils of past life.  This kind of stuff is real evidence.  Nobody ever asked anyone to believe in dinosaurs by an act of blind faith.  You won't find any Biblical arti ...

Nobody has ever conducted an experiment in which evolution theory had been proved (though Louis Pasteur made a nice try)
It is not without reason, that in scientific community they say "evolution THEORY"
Take fossils: scientists have found ancient flies,  (preserved in bitumen of the trees), and guess what - they look almost exactly as contemporary flies!
What we can see and study now is THE RESULT, of either creation, or evolution (incl. dinosaurs)
And what about that neck of the giraffe?

And no, I am not Anton La Vey!

You can also check www.evolutionandtheicecanopy.net

[nathanm]

The fact is none of us was there when universe/earth/first living creature came to be.

Which is precisely why the atheist philosophy makes the most sense of all.  Since we cannot ever hope to know these things atheists do not bother to speculate on such things.  Personally I don't know how or when the Universe came to be, and I don't care or need to know.  I would rather not have a belief than have a belief in a story which is not consistent with anything humans can perceive; one which asks us to discard logic, evidence and facts and instead put all our hopes and efforts into what amounts to be little more than a fractured fairy tale compilation penned by numerous ignoramuses.

as a sidenote: being born in communist/atheist Soviet Union, and becoming a religious person, it is a bit funny for me to have this friendly debate with you, people of the west, who were probably raised with different principles

America is extremely religious for sure.  It is not easy to break from it.  I don't know anyone in my personal life who was not raised in a religious environment of one form or another.  It is so pervasive that most of the time one does not even realize how indoctrinated they are.  I know this was true of me for many many years.

The myth is that all our religions make us a better society as a whole, but really the opposite is true.  The more adamant a person is about their beliefs the more inflexible their minds are and often the more willing they are to fight for them. Thus we get more and more violence.  Even if there's no wars religion still mucks with politics and religious leaders continue their quest to stop people from using their minds, from enjoying life and from allowing their neighbor to mind their own business.

And what about that neck of the giraffe?

What about it?  It's really long, covered with nifty brown spots and is ideally suited for getting the creature's head in a good place to chomp on some high leaves.

Nobody has ever conducted an experiment in which evolution theory had been proved

I am not a student of archaeology, biology etc. so I am not prepared to debate you on these matters, but for the sake of argument we can safely say that even if evolution cannot be proven 'beyond a reasonable doubt' then it certainly has FAR more evidence in its favor than the book of Genesis, which has, precisely...none!

[Tyson]

Can anyone please demonstrate evolution to me ?

Ever hear of the fossil record?  Lots and lots of transient fossils are available.  Please see any textbook on biology, or any of the writings of Richard Dawkins or Stephen J. Gould.

If the (very strong) evidence of the fossil record does not convince, then nothing I say will convince either.  

You seem to be missing the point that for a theory to be valid, the preponderance of ALL available evidence must support it.  The fact is that there is NO debate in the scientific community about whether evolution takes place.

Let me put it this way, if you have done much serious reading or research on evolutionary biology, you would see that HUGE amounts of evidence ALL point to the fact of evolution taking place.  The fact that this point is even debated means one of 2 things.  Either 1) You've not read the material available or 2) You read the material but refuse to accept it for non-scientific/non-logical reasons.

And to get back to the gravity example, the reason you can accept gravity as a theory is 2 fold.  1)  You can see it perceptually, so it is more concrete and less abstract (and thus easier to understand/comprehend), and 2)  A falling rock does not challenge your belief in god.

[Anton K.]

OK, i can see your point. Well, I approach the matter at a different angle.  I can prove it to myself (and this is the most important to me) in a 100 different ways that evolution theory is WRONG.
Just one line of arguments: TECHNIQUES THAT COULD NOT HAVE BEEN GRADUAL DEVELOPMENTS
The web spinning of a spider would be impossible until the spinning mechanism was fully
developed. Is it reasonable to suppose that the parts necessary to web-spinning would be added one by one until at last they began to interact to perform this function?
A certain type of wasp, in order to provide food for its young stings a caterpillar in just the right place to paralyze without killing. The little wasps then feed on the live meat until they are able to provide for themselves. They never see the technique performed; yet when the proper time comes the recently matured wasps re-enact the performance according to the needs of their own young. This technique had to be performed rightly in the first and every succeeding generation, or else there would be no wasps, for the young cannot survive without this meat.. dead meat would be fatal to them.

As I said, there are literally hundreds of similar arguments. So, once i was convinced that evolution was impossible, i started to check the 2nd option (because somehow we humans all got here, or otherwise this must be kind of a matrix)
And as i tried to demontrate in my first post on this thread, faith is not without logic.

The myth is that all our religions make us a better society as a whole, but really the opposite is true. The more adamant a person is about their beliefs the more inflexible their minds are and often the more willing they are to fight for them. Thus we get more and more violence. Even if there's no wars religion still mucks with politics and religious leaders continue their quest to stop people from using their minds, from enjoying life and from allowing their neighbor to mind their own business.

 
I agree 99.999999999%  - not 100% because when a person is adamant about loving both their fellowmen and their enemies, this is a good thing, I think

[Tyson]

Anton K,
There is a book that addresses the specific point you are having trouble with, it is called "The Blind Watchmaker" and it indeed addresses the primary concept that people have trouble with when looking at evolution.  Namely, how does complexity arise from simplicity.  It is an excellent book and explains far better and in much greater detail that I could about this very issue.

[Anton K.]

Ever hear of the fossil record?  Lots and lots of transient fossils are available.  Please see any textbook on biology, or any of the writings of Richard Dawkins or Stephen J. Gould.

If the (very strong) evidence of the fossil record does not convince, then nothing I say will convince either.  

...

 Between every two ascending species there must be an almost infinite number of links, not just a dozen or so. The gradual specimens climbing up from a dinosaur to a feathered bird must number in the many thousands of steps with each step including many thousands of
individuals. According to evolution each upward step is the result of a mutation. Mutations are mistakes in the genetic code, like the abundance of cleft palate in the Philippine island of Cebu. A genetic mistake is of no advantage for survival in the environment in which it occurs, so the evolutionists say that the mutant somehow finds itself in a new environment where the mutation is an advantage to survival. This unlikely scenario must have been repeated millions of times. Our specimen racks are filled with many fossils with huge gaps between them. There ought to be a prodigious number of links between every two ascending species. There are few and these are questionable. Whenever an apparent one (to evolutionists) is found it makes headlines. It may as well be just another species that we didn't know about before.
David Raup, a paleontologist of the University of Chicago Field Museum, says:

Darwin predicted that the fossil record should show a reasonably smooth continuum of ancestor-descendant pairs with a satisfactory number of intermediates between major groups.
Darwin even went so far as to say that if this were not found in the fossil record, his general theory would be in serious jeopardy. Such smooth transitions were not found in Darwin' time, and he explained this in part on the basis of an incomplete geologic record and in part on the lack of study of that record. We are now more than a 100 years after Darwin and
little has changed.

Sir J. William Dawson, professor of Geo1ogy and Principal of McGill University, has stated the argument from geology very succinctly:

The record of the rocks is decidedly against evolutionists, especially in the abrupt appearance of new forms. Every grade of life was in its highest and best estate in the age when first introduced. Paleontology furnishes no evidence as to the actual transformation of one species into another.

One of the most objectionable habits of evolutionary teaching is that of presenting highly imaginative reconstructions in such a way that the uncritical would take them as realities. In webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Piltdown man was defined in such a way as to give no indication that the idea was theoretical (now known to be based on fraud). Neanderthal man
is always presented with his head thrust forward in the fashion of an ape, whereas it has lately been shown that he walked erect. Eohippus has everywhere been advanced as a transitional stage toward the horse. The Baroness Wentworth, a breeder of thoroughbred and Arab horses, writes of the exhibits of the horse in the American Museum of Natural History:
This pictorial Evolutionary series. . . . has been subjected to such wholesale fancy reconstruction of missing parts that, as presented to the public, its evidential value amounts to little more than that of a pictorial historical nov el.. . If we accept the reconstructions of Eohippus, his ribs were eighteen, Orohippus dropped to fifteen, P1iohippus jumped to
nineteen, and Equus Scotti is back to eighteen. Eohippus starts at six or seven lumbars, Orohippus shows eight and, some five million years later, Equus Scotti is back at six!" Doctor Austin Clark of the United States National Museum says that no matter how far back we go in the fossil record of previous animal life on earth we find no trace of any animal forms which are intermediate between the various major groups or phyla. When one considers the vast number of individuals presupposed by evolutionists to be in the many intermediate species, it is fair to suppose that some would have been found if they had been existent, what
with more than a hundred years of diligent search by the evolutionists themselves.
   
/b]

Tyson, fossil record is so strong, that they had to "construct" Piltdown man  - ever heard of it?

[nathanm]

It is a good thing, but one does not necessarily need religion to love others.  More often than not religion is founded upon ideas of hatred, intolerance and subjugation to those who do not share their particular supernatural delusions and oppressive codes of conduct.  They promote the stuff that sounds good of course, but it is usually a bunch of hogwash.

So if you love your enemies, why are they your enemies?  

Religion will evolve as well.  Eventually we will tire of our current gods, discard them and invent new ones to satisfy our whims to persecute and divide our fellow man.  Maybe we should start inventing some right now.  Need a new idea for a god people...anyone?  Anyone with an idea for a new god?  I'd like one that promises heaven-like rewards in the here and now, and not after I've snuffed it.  Oh yeah, and I want to ride a unicorn!

[rosconey]

Oh yeah, and I want to ride a unicorn!
thats got to hurt

i still cant understand when idiots use religion for killing-
thats why no religion is a good religion,a church of one

[Anton K.]

It is a good thing, but one does not necessarily need religion to love othe Religion will evolve as well. Eventually we will tire of our current gods, discard them and invent new ones to satisfy our whims to persecute and divide our fellow man. Maybe we should start inventing some right now. Need a new idea for a god people...anyone? Anyone with an idea for a new god? I'd like one that promises heaven-like rewards in the here and now, and not after I've snuffed it. Oh yeah, and I want to ride a unicorn!

Perhaps you have missed the latest news: a lot of new gods have been invented.
Like god "Me", doing anything I want to, regardless how it affects other people?
Nathanm, do you really think that if there is no God, mankind will have time to invent more new gods? You are such an optimist. Just look at the world around you, watch the news!
Can you guarantee me that some fanatic will not get access to the nuclear weapons and pulls the triger with a smile on his face? Are you sure that what people do to our environment will not affect us (me/you/tyson/etc)?
The history of mankind shows: we have failed. It is only a question of time when we destroy ourselves. So there better be God, for then there is at least some hope.

[Anton K.]

:
thats why no religion is a good religion,a church of one

have you investigated them all?