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Difficult to speak to someone who puts you down from the get go.
I haven't seen this before.
There is far more similarity than difference, and the differences are relatively minor. In the case of cognition, the minor differences passed a tipping point, becoming hugely significant; the synergy of advanced sense of self, temporal awareness, language, and culture - all traits which are present in various animals in primitive forms, but insufficient to synergise and reach that tipping point.
Indeed. My degree was in human biology, which included anatomy, evolution, and anthropology.
Not exactly. Supernatural beliefs, in general, are forms of superstitious thinking. Superstitious beliefs in ancestral spirits may have rational origins, in as much as ancestors were real and aspects of them could be said to live on in the memories of their descendants (as Robert Montgomery so poetically put it, "The people you love become ghosts inside of you and like this you keep them alive"), and perhaps god beliefs piggy-back on this concept, but they take it one step beyond, into the imaginary.
Even if one accepts the biblical Jesus as a real charismatic preacher who believed he had divine connections, that doesn't demonstrate the existence of a God - history is replete with people making exactly the same claim; they differ in their lifestyles and messages. It happened that Jesus' lifestyle and message had particular resonance. One could say that sooner or later someone would turn up in the right place at the right time with the right message...
The god beliefs. The paragraph is about the basis of god beliefs. I was using the term to illustrate how spurious attribution of agency is part of everyday language (like saying "The car refused to start"). So, god beliefs 'exploit' our overactive tendency to attribute agency & purpose, our apprehension at personal death, and our natural desire for comfort & security.
Sorry about that - see above. I'll try to keep it simple.
The soul doesn't definitely exist - people have tried to detect it for years without success. The problem of interaction, which that page explained (and you say you understood) explains one important reason to doubt its relevance, if not its existence.
Yes; don't look too closely - if it feels right it must be right - right?
I don't remember what I said...but here's an example:
How am I misrepresenting it?
??
Perhaps you could explain what you mean -
What I'm saying is that it's too complicated to have happened by chance. I just can't believe that everything came about just so,,,,just right,,,,to cause all we see around us.
Yes, I really shouldn't be here.
You DO have to intellectually understand what you believe to be true.
I just can't believe that a tribal deity from the middle east created a man from dust, so...
And swimming pools are just the right size to contain the water they are filled with.
Humans made it up - we call it a language because some consider the way it interacts with other molecules to have language-like properties. I guess. But it is not an actual languiage.
And there will never be enough, will there?
Why don't you think so? How much do you actually know about it? What the folks at the Discovery Institute say? Or other creationists?
Well, you shouldn't be so dismissive of the information people are trying to give you to counter the disinformation you seem to have grabbed onto.
But that is not what the genetic code really is.
Then perhaps instead of just repeating the questions, you could try to learn?
Not really.
But a nucleotide has NO instructions or information associated with it, certainly not in the context you are referring to.
It doesn't seem that way to me. And I've been teaching about this stuff for a few decades. I will not pretend to be an expert on this particular issue, but when one goes a bit more in-depth - beyond the wading in the shallow end of the DNA-science pool, one finds that it is not quite as simplistic as creationists will have their target audience believe.
So you understand the child's answer (not to be mean) - it is easy to "understand" the mythology of ancient middle eastern numerologists because it is mere story-telling. How did the world get here? Why, our God did it! How did people get here? Why, our GOD did it!
So what caused God?
