Atheistic Darwinist Creationism and It's Just a Sack of Chemicals

[bhsmte]

I'll keep that in mind the next time someone asks me what I'm doing here.

You do that.

 

[AHH who-stole-my-name]

Fair enough.

We do have our "Great Commission."[VERSE=Matthew 28:18-20,KJV][VERSENUM]18[/VERSENUM] And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth.

[VERSENUM]19[/VERSENUM] Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: [VERSENUM]20[/VERSENUM] Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world. Amen.[/VERSE]

The Bible says that Faith without works is dead. That means to me walking the walk as well as talking the talk That along with the Christ's parable of the slothful servant speaks volumes of the duties of Christians.
I'm not taunting the man, but I believe that if someone claims to be something then for the credibility of that group, they need to act like it. I can respect that.

 

[TheBarrd]

Just out of interest, do you think that a woman convicted of adultery ought to be killed, and would it make a difference if she was pregnant? I have often wondered whether the woman of John 8 turned up at the crucifixion to show Jesus her baby (silly, I know, but nobody else seems to have thought of this possibility).

Let me get this straight...
You read the story of the woman taken in adultery, and you ask me if I think a woman convicted of adultery ought to be killed?
Uh...did you notice that Jesus said that only those who had no sin might throw stones?
The end of the story...the only One there Who met the criteria...Who had no sin...told her that He did not condemn her....and finally warned her that she was to "go and sin no more, lest a worse thing befall thee." What could be worse than being stoned to death by a self-righteous mob?????

And where in that story did you get the idea that there was a baby?
Methinks you are doing some pretty heavy editing...

 

[AHH who-stole-my-name]

Whenever a christian goes down this road; what is an atheist doing on a christian website? You can just about be assured, the atheist is making entirely too much sense, using too much logic and the cognitive dissonance is starting to take hold.

I've never seen any reason for religious people to debate their faith in the first place. I think if someone was so sure that a God gave them a duty to uphold then they would not have to justify that duty with any man. I think they should explain themselves but the idea of debating the existence of someone that you are convinced without a shadow of a doubt does exist would be like arguing color with a blind man. Faith is feeling and the triumph of hope over logic. That's what it comes down to and the two are totally incomparable. Believe what you want to believe, but do it completely or not at all.

 

[bhsmte]

Let me get this straight...
You read the story of the woman taken in adultery, and you ask me if I think a woman convicted of adultery ought to be killed?
Uh...did you notice that Jesus said that only those who had no sin might throw stones?
The end of the story...the only One there Who met the criteria...Who had no sin...told her that He did not condemn her....and finally warned her that she was to "go and sin no more, lest a worse thing befall thee." What could be worse than being stoned to death by a self-righteous mob?????

And where in that story did you get the idea that there was a baby?
Methinks you are doing some pretty heavy editing...

Just as an fyi and speaking of editing.

This story you are referring to, is agreed upon by the majority of NT scholars, as being no where to be found in the oldest copies of John and actually doesn't show up in any version until many hundreds of years later. Many scholars agree, it was simply added by a scribe later, who that is was a cool story.

So it appears, the story may have been added for marketing purposes.

 

[AHH who-stole-my-name]

Let me get this straight...
You read the story of the woman taken in adultery, and you ask me if I think a woman convicted of adultery ought to be killed?
Uh...did you notice that Jesus said that only those who had no sin might throw stones?
The end of the story...the only One there Who met the criteria...Who had no sin...told her that He did not condemn her....and finally warned her that she was to "go and sin no more, lest a worse thing befall thee." What could be worse than being stoned to death by a self-righteous mob?????

And where in that story did you get the idea that there was a baby?
Methinks you are doing some pretty heavy editing...

I think the stone thing was Christ saying follow the spirit of the law and not the letter. Many people think that Christ came to bring everything new, but he left a lot of the mosaic laws still intact.

 

[JasonClark]

That would be like finding a precambrian rabbit. Do you mean 1000 A.D./C.E.? It's certainly earlier than that because we have sources that are older than that with the passage in it.

No it was added to the bible 1000 years after Jesus is supposed to have died, about 150 years before the cathedral in my city was built.
Have a look here.
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2008/aprilweb-only/117-31.0.html

You can find others that say it did not appear until the 11th century.
The historian who are not religious tell it like it is but the historians who are religious tell it like they would like it to be.

 

[Archaeopteryx]

Not really. The question is, are we more than dust or an evolved sack of chemicals?

Yes.

 

[TheBarrd]

Because:
A) It offers insight into how christians (who form a substantial majority in the west and a politically powerful group in the USA particularly) think and what they believe
B) I find it important to expose myself to ideas such as Christianity, in case there actually is anything to them
C) It makes my ego inflate much in the same way that playing a minor leagues game and scoring a home run each at-bat might inflate Big Papi's.

A) You can quit worrying about it...Christians are obviously not such a politically powerful group any more...if we ever were.
B) Now, that reason I could agree with, if I actually thought you came with an open mind.
C) So much for the open mind...

Neuroscience is still a relatively new field, and it's trying to piece together how one of the most complex systems in nature works. That said, it's well-established that artistic ability is something that can be trained, and while there are differences in talent, almost all of art is hard work. Nobody is born capable of painting a landscape, they have to study and practice. And yeah, the answers are still fairly vague. It's a really hard problem. However, thus far, we have not found any part of a person's "self", of their personality, of who they are, that doesn't come down to brain chemistry. How is the mind not confined to the brain when we can fundamentally change who you are by changing parts of the brain?

Psychiatry is not as new as all that.
Sure...talent is something that can be trained into one. Why would someone sit through a bunch of study and practice if they have no interest? And how can you measure a person's interest?
Brain chemistry? Interesting that you should bring this up, since it wasn't so long ago we heard the famous atheist mantra all about how there was no way to fundamentally change who we are...

Psychiatry is not the study of the brain. It's a very different field; you're looking for Neuroscience.

No...Neuroscience would be the study of the brain.
Psychiatry would be the study of the mind. Not the same thing at all...

Demonstrate that there is a non-physical element to the human mind.

Define the physical aspects of a thought.

Also, bear in mind, a few hundred years ago, someone may very well have been saying "Science cannot delve into human health, because it has no way to deal with the non-physical demons and curses that make up so much of it". (Or, to put it bluntly, that assertions of non-physical entities have consistently and constantly been supplanted by functional, physical models of reality.)

Nice try, but no cigar.
Have you read of people being bled to rid them of their "bad humours"?

...So then how did you detect God?

How are you missing Him?

 

[TheBarrd]

You mean you wanted to see if I was full of crap or not. lol

I don't think I said anything about learning to Love Jesus Christ. I said learn to love.

I picked humanist out of lack of other options. I have no ideology other than what I believe is right for me. If they had that option then I would have picked that.

I suppose it really isn't your fault...you do seem like a really great guy.

No, he said "love of Jesus Christ". In other words, you managed to learn about love from the Master of love.

OH, and just so that you know...Christianity does have "other options". Jehovah's Witnesses are considered "fringe lunatics" by mainstream Christians.

 

[Archaeopteryx]

Something I've always been curious about...
Why would an atheist, supposedly content with his/her atheism, spend useless hours hanging out on Christian web sites?

If I had a penny for every time this question was asked...

Science cannot find God, for the very same reason that science cannot explain what a mind is or how it works. Oh, science can tell us all about the physical aspects of our brains...but things get a bit vague when it comes to explaining intelligence, or why one person can paint beautiful landscapes, while another can't draw a straight line, for instance. Psychiatry admits that it is "not an exact science"...nor can it be.
Science cannot delve into the human mind, because it has no way to deal with what is not physical...

You are decades behind on psychology and neuroscience.

God is a spirit. Science has no way to deal with that.

To the best of my understanding, religion has no way to deal with that either.

 

[TheBarrd]

I wasn't aware she was with child.

I think Astrophile is the only one with that information...

 

[JasonClark]

So then how did you detect God?

How are you missing Him?

You were asked how you detected god, instead of answering the question you asked a question,
I understand that is standard procedure when a Christian doesn't have an answer so a question should really have been expected,
knowing all of that perhaps you would like another chance to answer the question? or would you prefer to dismiss it completely and forget you were ever asked the question in the first place?

 

[Archaeopteryx]

We're purposely created, not just a bag of chemicals.

False dichotomy.

 

[Willtor]

No it was added to the bible 1000 years after Jesus is supposed to have died, about 150 years before the cathedral in my city was built.
Have a look here.
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2008/aprilweb-only/117-31.0.html

You can find others that say it did not appear until the 11th century.
The historian who are not religious tell it like it is but the historians who are religious tell it like they would like it to be.

Hmmm... From the article you cited:

"During the 5th century, the church was sorting out what, exactly, should be in the canon of inspired Scripture.Pericope adulterae, as it is known, first appears in a Greek text during this period, although it is alluded to by Greek writers as early as the 2nd century."

This comports with Wikipedia's writeup.* I can't comment on religious versus non-religious historians, but the version of the history of the text with which I'm familiar is this one.

Is the part of the article that talks about 11th century origins behind the paywall?

* - My understanding is that the allusion in second century texts is pretty controversial even though the article you cite takes it as a given. But its appearance in fifth century texts is not controversial... unless I'm mistaken, in which case, please correct me.

 

[Archaeopteryx]

What is the value of humanity in a Darwinist system?

I wasn't aware of the existence of a "Darwinist system"? Is it similar to Windows and Mac OS? Does it run Chrome?

 

[The Cadet]

A) You can quit worrying about it...Christians are obviously not such a politically powerful group any more...if we ever were.

Uh, speaking as an outsider living in Germany, no. In the USA, you guys are a huge, significant political force that has massive influence over virtually every single part of public policy. I'm sorry, this is just completely not true. It's convenient for the narrative that Christians are somehow oppressed, but it has nothing to do with what's actually going on.

B) Now, that reason I could agree with, if I actually thought you came with an open mind.
C) So much for the open mind...

Hey, I'm open to good arguments, but I never find good arguments.

Psychiatry is not as new as all that.

It also takes a fundamentally different approach. Psychiatry is like trying to debug your computer from within the software; neurology is like opening up the case and seeing what's going on inside. While the former is potentially more useful, it can tell you nothing about how the software actually is running, while with the latter, you can see, "Ah, if I remove this piece, suddenly I have no visuals, but the sound still works and the computer is still reactive; Ah, if I remove this piece, everything runs slower and my memory-intensive processes stop working". When we're talking about what's actually going on within the mind, psychiatry is very limited. It offers useful insights into how humans tick, but by its scope, it simply cannot tell us what the nature of our minds is. This is why the relevant field for this discussion is neurology.

Brain chemistry? Interesting that you should bring this up, since it wasn't so long ago we heard the famous atheist mantra all about how there was no way to fundamentally change who we are...

...You do understand that there's a pretty significant difference between removing a part of the frontal lobe and trying to brainwash someone, right? I think that with enough understanding of our brain chemistry, we could probably change sexual orientation and almost certainly could change gender orientation. We're not there yet. However, "pray the gay away" camps do not work.

Define the physical aspects of a thought.

Electrical signals traveling through a highly interconnected network of synapses would be the short, snappy, 5-second answer, but as with most things in science, the 5-second answer is a massive oversimplification, and I personally lack the expertise to really get down to the nitty-gritty of it. But let me ask you a question - what's the physical aspects of a computer program?

How are you missing Him?

Apparently I have a defective God Detector™. I'd send it back to get it fixed, but I don't know where to send it back to.

See, not to be a jerk, but when I talk about "bad arguments", that's kind of what I mean. I ask you "how do you detect god's existence", and your response seems to boil down to, "Isn't it obvious?"

Well, no. It's not obvious. If it was obvious, everyone would be a Christian.

 

[Archaeopteryx]

I wasn't aware of the existence of a "Darwinist system"? Is it similar to Windows and Mac OS? Does it run Chrome?

Well, I'll be...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system)

 

[JasonClark]

God is a spirit. Science has no way to deal with that.

Neither has religions and they were the ones who thought it all up in the first place, if they don't know the rest of us have no chance.

Gods and spirits are not of this world............. then how did you find out about them?
they revealed themselves to people thousands of years ago................ how do you know they were telling the truth?
we have faith........... ummmmmmmmmmmmmm, OK.

 

[JasonClark]

Well, I'll be...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system)

We all live and learn, who would have thunk it.