Freethought & Rationalism Archive

emotional · 06-30-2003, 08:41 AM

God also allowed the Holocaust, yet people continue to believe in His love. It is a difficult question, but faith triumphs over all difficult questions. I believe that the existence of the afterlife overcomes all the sadnesses of this life:

If there is no life after death, then the universe for all its joys is a sad work; but if there is life after death, then the universe for all its tragedies is a good work.

For a more comprehensive treatment of God and evolution, which I have found quite good, there is an article by John Haught.

Truly we live in an Age of Faith. "Age of Faith" is usually the appellation of the Middle Ages, but in fact they weren't so much an Age of Faith. In the Middle Ages, people had rational evidence - geocentrism and special creationism - to support their faiths. In contrast, in our day and age, science has done away with those former assurances, and it is more rational to disbelieve in God and the afterlife than to believe. Therefore the choice of God, theistic evolution and afterlife is one of pure faith, and ours is really the Age of Faith.

If you say there is no reason to believe in theistic evolution, I will agree with you. I find theistic evolution the best way to keep my cherished beliefs without having to go to war against the facts. Theistic evolution is a compromise, certainly, but it's the only way to keep vital faith without resorting to creationism. If someone should convince me that theistic evolution is an untenable position, I will inevitably become a creationist, because full-fledged materialism is for me not an option.

Warcraft3 · 06-30-2003, 09:38 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Oolon Colluphid
Sure. I happily tolerate (ie, �ignore�) it. What else is there to do with that which I, as a scientific rationalist, find completely superfluous?

But it�s worse than that.

Creationists specifically claim -- often unwittingly, due to an ignorance of biology -- that their god actually created all the parasites and pathogens (and remember that the easy majority of species are parasitic), and their god is therefore refuted (assuming it is also claimed to be �loving� etc).

But while theistic evolutionists, by having a god that may have interfered along the evolution trail to produce living things, or even allowed evolution a free reign, can shoehorn their god into things, their god is nowhere near off the hook(worm) WRT what gets called �natural evil�. Their allegedly loving god allowed 99.9% of species to become extinct; it allowed the evolution of bot-flies, Plasmodium, Ebola and Rickettsia prowazekii; it allowed the evolution of the living things that kill three children a minute from diarrhoeal diseases; it allowed evolution, predicated as it is on suffering and death. Creationists say god created this stuff; theistic evolutionists say he allowed it.

By what standard can such an entity be called �loving�? Why do the mechanisms of the living world not refute the existence of such a deity?

I find arguments such as these to be among the weakest from the atheistic viewpoint. You are looking at suffering from a temporal, human perspective. Suffering and disease are unpleasant, to be sure, but they are part of the natural order of things. (As a side issue, I believe humans suffering was limited until after the fall).

Just because God did not create/allow things to be the way that we think they should be does not mean He is unloving. When you look at the world and say, "Surely a loving God would not create things this way", what you are really saying is that YOU would not have created things this way.

The world is not a reflection of God being unloving (or non-existant), but is simply a reflection of a choice that He made. He chose to do it differently than you or I would have, and since His perspective is very different (in fact, it is fundamentally different) from ours we can not make character judgments from that choice.

Russ
"Strumming the ole violen"
:boohoo:

emotional · 06-30-2003, 01:44 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Wounded King
What about pseudoscience rather than 'alternative' science.

All right, call it pseudoscience. But from the YEC point of view, mainstream science is the pseudoscience while theirs is the true science. YECs never say "we are anti-scientific", they say "we are against the biased atheistic pseudoscience with its evolutionary, uniformitarian interpretations of nature".

On theistic evolution: I have found Howard Van Till's term "fully-gifted creation" for theistic evolution and I very much like it. The idea of a "fully-gifted creation" is both in harmony with science and philosophically very satisfying. A God of love and generosity has given the creatures the ability to be creative, to self-organise. I don't know if it can harmonise with the God of Christianity, but I have no stake in that matter, for I am not a Christian. The Bible, I do believe, was meant to be taken literally on its first chapters (Genesis 1 et al), and thus the God of evolution must be different from the God of the Bible. Again, I have no stake in the matter. All I care is that there should be an afterlife. If a "fully-gifted creation" is true, and I believe it is, then God's love must also provide an afterlife for all conscious creatures. That is where I stand

Further reference on Howard Van Till (PDF)

Golgo_13 · 06-30-2003, 02:45 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by emotional

If you say there is no reason to believe in theistic evolution, I will agree with you. I find theistic evolution the best way to keep my cherished beliefs without having to go to war against the facts. Theistic evolution is a compromise, certainly, but it's the only way to keep vital faith without resorting to creationism. If someone should convince me that theistic evolution is an untenable position, I will inevitably become a creationist, because full-fledged materialism is for me not an option.

Anything to avoid facing the facts and that cold meathook reality, eh?

Your views bring several things to mind. Some of them being the following:

Doublethink
n.

1. Thought marked by the acceptance of gross contradictions and falsehoods, especially when used as a technique of self-indoctrination: "Doublethink... is a vast system of mental cheating" (George Orwell).

2. Believing two contradictory ideas at the same time.

Quote:

Originally written by George Orwell's 1984:

The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed -if all records told the same tale -- then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.' And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered.

Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. 'Reality control', they called it: in Newspeak, 'doublethink'.

'Stand easy!' barked the instructress, a little more genially. Winston sank his arms to his sides and slowly refilled his lungs with air. His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink.

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself.

That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink.

"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?."

-Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See

"If on the other hand he went to pay his respects to The Door and it wasn't there... what then? The answer, of course, was very simple. He had a whole board of circuits for dealing with exactly this problem, in fact this was the very heart of his function. He would continue to believe in it whatever the facts turned out to be, what else was the meaning of belief? The Door would still be there, even if the Door was not."

-Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

"A man didn't understand how televisions work, and was convinced that there must be lots of little men inside the box, manipulating images at high speed. An engineer explained to him about high frequency modulations of the electromagnetic spectrum, about transmitters and receivers, about amplifiers and cathode ray tubes, about scan lines moving across and down a phosphorescent screen. The man listened to the engineer with careful attention, nodding his head at every step of the argument. At the end he pronounced himself satisfied. He really did now understand how televisions work. "But I expect there are just a few little men in there, aren't there?"

- Douglas Adams

"Even the skeptical mind must be prepared to accept the unacceptable when there is no alternative. If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family Anatidae on our hands."

-Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

emotional · 06-30-2003, 02:55 PM

Golgo_13,

I'll let you relish your feeling of self-superiority and I'll go on with my happy life.

I used to get offended by such posts, but no more. Now I just say "fuck 'em".

Golgo_13 · 06-30-2003, 03:29 PM

You do realize, of course, given by what you stated, that your beliefs are irrespective of evidence and exist prior to, and often, in spite of it, do you not?

Worst case scenario, you regress into a full-blown creationist, but reguardless of what is revealed, materialism is not and will never be a valid option.

In your mind, it will always be false with no exception, even if it isn't.

"...But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams."

- W.B. Yates.

I really try not to shatter others dreams like so much broken glass, but it's really hard not to. It is only when one hear the crystalline shards crunching underfoot that one realizes fully what one has done.

I had a friend that admitted that the only reason he was a decent human being was because his religion commanded him to be and he was restricting himself due to fear of a promissary note on supernatural punishment post mortem if he didn't comply and gave in to his true nature. I convinced him that his cherished notion was in error, and he has been running from the law for his unrestrained actions ever since.

Sometimes I feel it is my fault for what he has become, but then again his actions and choices are his own. Now if he based his morality on something logical like the consequences that would result from them, or if he was a moral human being of his own accord and not because he felt he had a supernatural hell-gun pointed at his head that would be fired if he didn't behave in a particular manner, he may have not gone off the deep end like he did.

It is not god's word that was important in this man's life, but his obedience to it. Call it "faith". He had it, he lost it, and once he came to the realization that everything he based his life around was a boldfaced lie, he couldn't cope with it.

But alas, I digress.

emotional · 06-30-2003, 03:42 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Golgo_13
You do realize, of course, given by what you stated, that your beliefs are irrespective of evidence and exist prior, and often, in spite of it, do you not?

Yes. It's a conscious decision on my part. I'm a believer in God, theistic evolution and afterlife by pure voluntary decision. I'm what is termed a voluntary fideist.

Quote:

Worst case scenario, you regress into a full-blown creationist, but reguardless of what is revealed, materialism is not and will never be a valid option.

There is no need, I'm happy enough as I am with theistic evolution. I used to be a VERY young earth creationist in the past, believing in a creation date of 3760 BCE, but then I visited Talk.Origins and came to the conclusion there's no use trying to fight mainstream science. Creationism was important to me when I was striving to keep my belief in Orthodox Judaism, but now that I don't have a stake in that belief, it's not important any more. All that's important to me is that there is an afterlife.

Quote:

In your mind, it will always be false with no exception, even if it isn't.

No scientific evidence, verified or unverified, can be allowed to take precedence over the existence of life after death. That is my dogma, my fixed assumption, and I have an absolute and desperate stake in that belief. If I stop believing in life after death, I shall find myself in a lunatic asylum very soon. I will not debate life after death, and I will not look at evidence against life after death. I believe in theistic evolution because it provides the promise of an afterlife.

TiredJim · 06-30-2003, 04:17 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by steadele
I find arguments such as these to be among the weakest from the atheistic viewpoint. You are looking at suffering from a temporal, human perspective. Suffering and disease are unpleasant, to be sure, but they are part of the natural order of things. (As a side issue, I believe humans suffering was limited until after the fall).

Just because God did not create/allow things to be the way that we think they should be does not mean He is unloving. When you look at the world and say, "Surely a loving God would not create things this way", what you are really saying is that YOU would not have created things this way.

The world is not a reflection of God being unloving (or non-existant), but is simply a reflection of a choice that He made. He chose to do it differently than you or I would have, and since His perspective is very different (in fact, it is fundamentally different) from ours we can not make character judgments from that choice.

Russ
"Strumming the ole violen"
:boohoo:

This is silly. By being "omni-benevolent" every choice he makes would have to be the most benevolent. Ergo, he would have to make the universe in the most accomidating way. If you believe humans are the chosen race, then he would have to make it most accomidating to humans. I'm sure you can think of at LEAST one way for the world to be more accomidating to you.

How about this as a start: why must living things be so fragile? If God created physics, why not create it so that humans insides are solid, and don't cut or bruise easily, and still work fine. That's impossible under current physics, but this theoretical God isn't limited to current physics.

Doubting Didymus · 06-30-2003, 06:30 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by steadele
Just because God did not create/allow things to be the way that we think they should be does not mean He is unloving. When you look at the world and say, "Surely a loving God would not create things this way", what you are really saying is that YOU would not have created things this way.

The world is not a reflection of God being unloving (or non-existant), but is simply a reflection of a choice that He made. He chose to do it differently than you or I would have, and since His perspective is very different (in fact, it is fundamentally different) from ours we can not make character judgments from that choice.

We aren't allowed to question gods benevolence, because we can never understand his mind?

Applying this premise, how do you know that god is not evil? You obviously can't point to anything good in the world as evidence, as by your own assertion, nothing about his character can be inferred from his desicions. What's your basis for making any claims at all about gods existance and nature?

Kevbo · 06-30-2003, 07:08 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by steadele
Just because God did not create/allow things to be the way that we think they should be does not mean He is unloving. When you look at the world and say, "Surely a loving God would not create things this way", what you are really saying is that YOU would not have created things this way.

The world is not a reflection of God being unloving (or non-existant), but is simply a reflection of a choice that He made. He chose to do it differently than you or I would have, and since His perspective is very different (in fact, it is fundamentally different) from ours we can not make character judgments from that choice.

Wouldn't the Gnostic position be a lot more rational on this issue? The Gnostic Christian position is that the creator-god is actually an evil imposter and really did create all this evil. They believe that there are higher deities that are actually loving, and that one of them came down to earth in the person of Christ. Think about it... how similar are Christ's teachings to those in the Old Testament? (Keep in mind that the New Testament was collated by those who considered Gnosticism a heresy!)

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06-30-2003, 08:41 AM	#81
emotional Banned Join Date: Mar 2001 Location: Boxing ring of HaShem, Jesus and Allah Posts: 1,945	God also allowed the Holocaust, yet people continue to believe in His love. It is a difficult question, but faith triumphs over all difficult questions. I believe that the existence of the afterlife overcomes all the sadnesses of this life: If there is no life after death, then the universe for all its joys is a sad work; but if there is life after death, then the universe for all its tragedies is a good work. For a more comprehensive treatment of God and evolution, which I have found quite good, there is an article by John Haught. Truly we live in an Age of Faith. "Age of Faith" is usually the appellation of the Middle Ages, but in fact they weren't so much an Age of Faith. In the Middle Ages, people had rational evidence - geocentrism and special creationism - to support their faiths. In contrast, in our day and age, science has done away with those former assurances, and it is more rational to disbelieve in God and the afterlife than to believe. Therefore the choice of God, theistic evolution and afterlife is one of pure faith, and ours is really the Age of Faith. If you say there is no reason to believe in theistic evolution, I will agree with you. I find theistic evolution the best way to keep my cherished beliefs without having to go to war against the facts. Theistic evolution is a compromise, certainly, but it's the only way to keep vital faith without resorting to creationism. If someone should convince me that theistic evolution is an untenable position, I will inevitably become a creationist, because full-fledged materialism is for me not an option.

06-30-2003, 02:55 PM	#85
emotional Banned Join Date: Mar 2001 Location: Boxing ring of HaShem, Jesus and Allah Posts: 1,945	Golgo_13, I'll let you relish your feeling of self-superiority and I'll go on with my happy life. I used to get offended by such posts, but no more. Now I just say "fuck 'em".

06-30-2003, 03:29 PM	#86
Golgo_13 Regular Member Join Date: Sep 2002 Location: Texas Posts: 207	You do realize, of course, given by what you stated, that your beliefs are irrespective of evidence and exist prior to, and often, in spite of it, do you not? Worst case scenario, you regress into a full-blown creationist, but reguardless of what is revealed, materialism is not and will never be a valid option. In your mind, it will always be false with no exception, even if it isn't. "...But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams." - W.B. Yates. I really try not to shatter others dreams like so much broken glass, but it's really hard not to. It is only when one hear the crystalline shards crunching underfoot that one realizes fully what one has done. I had a friend that admitted that the only reason he was a decent human being was because his religion commanded him to be and he was restricting himself due to fear of a promissary note on supernatural punishment post mortem if he didn't comply and gave in to his true nature. I convinced him that his cherished notion was in error, and he has been running from the law for his unrestrained actions ever since. Sometimes I feel it is my fault for what he has become, but then again his actions and choices are his own. Now if he based his morality on something logical like the consequences that would result from them, or if he was a moral human being of his own accord and not because he felt he had a supernatural hell-gun pointed at his head that would be fired if he didn't behave in a particular manner, he may have not gone off the deep end like he did. It is not god's word that was important in this man's life, but his obedience to it. Call it "faith". He had it, he lost it, and once he came to the realization that everything he based his life around was a boldfaced lie, he couldn't cope with it. But alas, I digress.

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