Which would you believe in more?

[Onde Aander]

I should add that technically speaking, it's not correct for me to claim that "nothing exists outside the universe". What I can say is that by defining the universe as "everything there is" we are actually defining a boundary through which no information could enter or exit our realm of perception; so if there were something else "outside", we could never experience it, and hence its existence is 100% irrelevant and it can neither be said to exist, nor not to exist. As far as we're concerned, it doesn't exist - and it certainly can't contain God or heaven or hell lol.

[[ROJOES]ronjons]

God not boring sounds pretty cool is he the fonz

Feb 12, 2011 7:22:35 GMT -5 Onde Aander said:

God was supposed to play quarterback in the Superbowl but he got lost and confused on the way and ended up playing pool in a smoky downtown bar -

[[ROJOES]ronjons]

Hehe it could the record for one of the longer posts. I give it points for style. Would've got 10/10 if it were shorter giving my knackered old brain some thinking room. In short, it's a gamble to believe everything emerged from: the cycle of order-and-chaos; over first cause. To me the celestial bookmakers are still out on that one.

[Onde Aander]

Feb 12, 2011 20:17:59 GMT -5 darthjimmy68 said:

So which came first based on this, the chicken or the egg?

If God can create a chicken, surely it's within his power to create an egg at the same time

[[ROJOES]ronjons]

Feb 12, 2011 20:17:59 GMT -5 darthjimmy68 said:

So which came first ... ... the chicken or the egg?

Chicken and Egg went for a valentines weekend. Lying in bed after a bout of passion, the Egg turns round to the Chicken "I think that answered an age old question".

[Onde Aander]

I don't see how the chicken and egg question is actually a problem. I am an advocate of the theory of evolution, so a chicken and its life-cycle is not something that appeared instantaneously, but evolved gradually by way of speciation and adaptation. If you're not on board with the theory of evolution and believe that God had a hand in it, that's fine - chickens and eggs aren't a problem for God, either. It's not a problem for evolution, and it's not a problem for God, so why is it a problem at all? It's just a figure of speech as far as I'm concerned.

[Onde Aander]

Well hey, I looked up the Origin of Life on Wikipedia and it seems the relevant question to ask is: Which came first, replication or metabolism? Lol.

[Fober-dud]

ondeaander said:

I think it's simply a misperception that we believe there must have been a "creation event" at all. The reason we keep searching for this "creation event" is because we are taking our intuitive understanding of daily life - in which all things appear to move in one direction in time and have a beginning and end, cause and effect - and we are applying that intuition to the whole universe - as if the universe would be subject to the laws of which it is the cause. We think: "Everything I've ever seen is subject to cause and effect, therefore the universe must have a cause, a beginning and an end, therefore (since in my personal experience, complex things don't appear randomly out of thin air, but are created by humans or complex physical processes) there must have been a creator." This is simply NOT a valid approach. Let me say that again. THIS IS NOT A VALID APPROACH. I will not even entertain arguments over this point. There is NO REASON TO BELIEVE THAT THE UNIVERSE SHOULD BE EXPECTED TO HAVE A BEGINNING, AND END, OR A CAUSE. To exaggerate only slightly, it's like thinking that because we use crayons to colour a piece of paper, that the whole world must have been coloured in by a giant toddler with billions of crayons, and it was only black and white before that. You just can't apply cause-effect logic backwards like that; for the same reason that in the dictionary, you can't use a word in its own definition (otherwise you're not providing any new information). If TIME is one of the effects of the creation of the universe, we can't talk about the "time before time". That's simply stupid. It's a critical error.

Okay, I've read your entire post and have decided to cover my thoughts on only this particular paragraph currently because I can't remember all of the positions you hold as stated in the composition of your entire post. Therefore, I will take this paragraph at face-value, with none of your other positions to support it.

So, if you have a critical premise in another paragraph that you feel should be brought up, please bring it up.

First, when you tell us what is in the mind of "the person who believes in creation", I feel you convey too much subjectivity and apparent shallow thinking in their approach to their conclusion. (I find that this particular phenomenon is pretty prevalent in the course of your paragraph). As a person who believes in creation, I know that I don't subscribe to the notion of these shallow thought-processes that you would accuse my beliefs of being guilty of.

I don't see where you would think that the argument for creation has no leg to stand on simply because someone would find it a ready belief to adhere to out of personal experience and observation, as that is the core of what the method of physical science is as I understand it (Now I understand that an ordinary citizen is more prone to flawed logic than an applied scientist who is familiar with the methods of science, and thus the average citizen is probably less likely to come to those conclusions by scientific method, but I believe my point stands).

If belief is brought about by evidence which is brought about by personal experience and observation, and that evidence happens to support the existence of creation and a beginning, I think you could say that the whole thought process was applied in a technically-speaking "scientific" manner, even if you don't agree with it personally. Science is defined as: "Mankind's observations of the physical world.", if I remember right.

As an artist, I will always be the "creator" of the art I draw, and I find that if there in fact was a creator, and I was made by him / it, I would expect to find a distinguishing "fingerprint" of his in the world around me, just like I can expect to find my own in my "creations". The world shows much evidence of this "fingerprint", but this viewpoint I hold is fundamentally a subjective one.

Time, mass, light, space, life, death, and every other fundamental in the universe (that we've observed) are all bound together and form what we know as reality. There are rules, there are laws, there is almost a formula to the way things work in the universe. Science is all about finding formulae, rules, and structure that we encounter in this physical world in order to understand it better. The thing is, and this is a critical point, science by definition, is man's creation, and thus can only offer perspectives from men's point of view. So we don't have the capacity to be able to state that we have knowledge of Ultimate Truth, because we lack an Ultimate Perspective. That is a fundamentally true statement and objective viewpoint as far as I know.

But, we do have science, and therefore we would be wise to use it to understand as best we can what all "this" is, and perhaps what it could mean.

And perhaps some would look to the Bible for answers, some would look to Science, but the reason they search is to find Truth, which requires verification (or evidence), in order to convince someone of their position by. Some would disagree on methods of finding evidence, but if someone found actual, objective evidence to support their viewpoint, then it would probably be worth verifying for yourself to see what conclusion you would come up with, even if they didn't adhere to your "methods" in the finding of their evidence.

In closing, I would hope that you, (and everybody else) take no offence at my comments, as I never meant to be hateful, judgemental, or to assume any negative form of communication on this post.

I will factually state things in the context of a debate that could be taken as intending to hurt or insult, but when I state them, I only intend them to be read and taken in a factual way, as this is a debate.

Anyway, peace from the fob.

[[ROJOES]ronjons]

Feb 14, 2011 4:35:51 GMT -5 Onde Aander said:

Well hey, I looked up the Origin of Life on Wikipedia and it seems the relevant question to ask is: Which came first, replication or metabolism? Lol.

so after a romantic tussle Reproduction turns to Metabolism and says, ' I guess that answers the ...'. that doesnt work.

[Onde Aander]

First, when you tell us what is in the mind of "the person who believes in creation", I feel you convey too much subjectivity and apparent shallow thinking in their approach to their conclusion.

Subjectivity is rather unavoidable, and I wouldn't use "shallow thinking" to describe human intuitions which are quite natural but tend to hinder our thinking when we're trying to make a non-anthropocentric model of how the universe came to be. It's not an insult at all - it's really a lot to ask, to re-conceptualize the world from a non-human perspective (what you called "objective"). It is already amazing that we are able to ask the question.

The thing is, and this is a critical point, science by definition, is man's creation, and thus can only offer perspectives from men's point of view. So we don't have the capacity to be able to state that we have knowledge of Ultimate Truth, because we lack an Ultimate Perspective.

That's a great observation. I will take it a step further and suggest that there is no such thing as an Ultimate Perspective. The whole concept of "ultimate reality" is an abstract model which can never be fully realized. It is a correspondence between observations - made possible only by human consciousness. Evidence allows us to make new connections but it does not free us from the limitations of our human perspective. Physical science is a model, and a good scientist does not claim that it is an "ultimate truth". Concerning the origin of the universe, creation is also a model (though a "good" creationist will claim that it IS an ultimate truth). It just happens to be a poorer model, because there's a whole lot of evidence that contradicts it.

If you make certain assumptions and apply the scientific method, I'm quite sure you can come to the rational conclusion that God created the universe and man in his image. What you will find, though, is that some of those assumptions are not necessarily true, even though they seem intuitively correct because our perspective is unavoidably human. If you bring these assumptions into question, they leave gaping holes which can only be filled by either ignoring them (faith) or by revising the theory. As they say, "the Devil is in the details."

If you feel the need to employ the scientific method to prove or disprove what's in the Bible, then clearly you don't have faith. And if you follow the scientific method all the way to whatever conclusion it takes you (contrary to some, who decide on a conclusion and then reverse-engineer a way to prove it) - you'll end up believing very little of it. But then, I don't really understand why anyone would try to read the Bible like it was a physics textbook. I find aspects of Genesis quite meaningful and accurate, when taken metaphorically. The details of how Noah managed to fit pairs of all the world's species of animals in the ark (and how they could possibly have had sufficient genetic variation to repopulate the species after the flood) is about as relevant as the chemical composition of the pixie dust which made Peter Pan fly. There is only one way to follow the scientific method, but there is more than one way to understanding why we are here. To me, it's a bit silly to argue about an "ultimate truth" which can't even be said to exist (because as you pointed out, it is not directly observable).

[[ROJOES]ronjons]

Yea wot 'e sed.Reality is bunch of stuff happening.

[[ROJOES]ronjons]

...history is just one fucking thing after another.

that's scoring 9 out of 10 loses a mark being off topic, but short, stylish and gets to the fupping point.
Forum swastika armband in the post. Can join me goosestepping up and down this board.

Feb 16, 2011 16:12:53 GMT -5 @psxmayhem said:

What, this way? www.korea-dpr.com/

The politics of leader Kim Jong Il, General Secretary of the Workers’ Party of Korea is politics of love and trust, both in name and in reality.

The objective of politics is to bring love for the people into bloom, ardent love and trust in the people make them patriots and the revolution starts, socialist politics is , in essence, benevolent politics-this is Kim Jong Il’s out look on politics

This Kim Jong-il sounds like a swell guy. Maybe we could convince him to lay on some Conquest servers? That website has a forum; I might try it. Bound to get a better response than with E.A.

Haha could remodel gimli character to kim jong of the glittering nuke silos no way he'd turn that down.

[Fober-dud]

Answering your reply post Onde, I have to admit that I don't know who is closer to the truth between you and me, but for now I'll leave it at that as I currently have nothing further to add to this particular discussion.

In reply to your post Mayhem, I read it all and found it very interesting. I didn't understand about 55% of the jargon, but I may read it again with a dictionary at a later point and try to understand better what you're trying to say.

Perhaps at that point I may respond with my thoughts on the discussion, but life has been busy recently so I won't make any promises about replying. At the very least it was an enjoyable piece to read though, and I give you props for writing it d:D.

Peace from the fob.

[[ROJOES]ronjons]

I dont get too hung up on quantum theory it's a messy fudge prob looking for a simple underlying explanation (plus me no like hurting brain).

[Taco]

One cannot affirm a negative in the absolute. It's like saying that I have infinite knowledge in order to tell you that there is nobody with infinite knowledge.