but science (knowledge) has never done anything but gave me more faith. No I can't explain it, that's just the way it is for me. It would not matter to me if we discovered inhabited planets all over. I would see that as the generosity and magnificence of God.

I know my thinking will not be received well and I will not attempt to defend it.

OTOH, I had this author's take interesting and worth perusing.

There is no need for you to attempt to defend your thinking. That is what faith is all about and yours is perfectly fine and widely shared.

I appreciate your input here. TP.

Is not the eternal Tao

I hear you, even if you say it simply.

Most of my life. Non theist scripture that is very simple, yet hard to understand

I would probably benefit from another go round.

Life is hard. Silence is good.

I always have a copy around.

Everything can be corrupted. Some of the Toaist rulers were not so nice.

"I've got my mind made up and there's nothing you can do or say or show me that will convince me otherwise."

There's nothing wrong whatsoever with bending the evidence to invariably arrive at your predetermined conclusion. AMIRITE???

The high point for me was towards the end when they were each asked "What, if anything, would ever change your mind?"

Ken Ham: "Nothing."

Bill Nye: "One piece of evidence."

And I don't really think it's a badge of honor.

'Science (knowledge) has never done anything but given me more faith. It would not matter to me if we discovered fossils all over. I would see that as the evil and deceitful nature of Satan. I will always be a creationist.'

Science is not knowledge.


Science is a system of observation, experimentation and confirmation.

Science-ORIGIN Middle English (denoting knowledge): from Old French, from Latin scientia, from scire ‘know.’

That's what's wrong with a liberal arts education!!!!!

(that was a joke y'know. My lousy governor Pat McCrory thinks a liberal arts education is a waste of time....even tho' he had a liberal arts education.)


BTW.... Latin is so cool!

but 2 things gave me a vocabulary that enabled a perfect score on that portion of the SAT. 1 was reading everything that had words and the other was studying Latin. There a huge amount of English words that derive from Latin.

I also studied Latin 4 yrs in high school, as well as French for 3 and more French in college, though I sure cannot speak French.

When it came time for daughter to choose high school, I ruled out my alma mater because at that time (late70's) Latin was in decline in high schools. Latin has since come back in favor in college prep courses, along with rise in other languages - Spanish, Chinese, etc.

I grew up with French speaking grandparents and I never felt comfortable speaking French. At one time I could read it well and understand spoken French but when it came out of my mouth all I heard was a horrible Texan accent.

It's tough to imagine anyone believing one god runs the entire universe, but it's not too difficult to imagine a planet or solar system having its own spiritual plane. A galactic deity, of sorts, even.

As someone who feels primarily agnostic, I find it hard to reach the kinds of conclusions this author does, but it's still interesting to ponder.

Slip Slidin' away. ..

Actually it is.


"Spiritual plane" being nonsense.

your god(s) can't run the universe 'cause that is too tough to imagine, but it/she/they can run a galaxy of billions of stars with billions of planets because somehow that isn't too tough to imagine. I'm missing how the universe-godlets are categorically different than the galactic-godlets such that one is unimaginable while the other is imaginable.

I agree that the original biblical god ruling over its little planet from it's enveloping celestial sphere wasn't difficult to imagine at all, it is just a quaint and stupid cosmology from the perspective of 3,000 years later.

Where exactly is this spiritual 'plane'?

If you believe God is a "being" who is "out there" somewhere, and "does things" for reasons humans are supposed to understand, learn, and abide by, this is terrible news indeed.

On the other hand, if you don't believe any of those things about the Divine, it is amazing and wonderful news indeed.

interestedly,
Bright

I heard this story yesterday (without the god part) and was really taken by it. I love the idea that we are not alone but can not even begin to speculate on what there might be.

Hope you are well, TB.

The options are too infinite.

Not speculation, not hope, not desire nor dream of possibility. not faith in its existence but fact that there is extra-terrestrial life.

Which is something your religion refuses to do; allow itself to be examined empirically, because unlike SETI, the probability of religion being true is infinitesimally small, while the probability of life outside Earth is infinitesimally large.


But you knew that already. And ignored it, again.

any accepted scientific standards that I am aware of.

that Earth does have life. Because of this fact, we cannot, with any certainty, say that there is no life anywhere else. It might be rare, it might be common, but we have just started developing the tools to be able to detect them. It seems a little early to claim there is no life out there. In addition, we know what conditions are necessary for life to develop on Earth, so can extrapolate from that to other parts of the universe. Liquid water, an energy source(geothermal/tidal and/or solar), and a good mix elements, particularly carbon, to allow for complex chemistry.

The thing is, we know, for a fact, that these needs are met in other places in the solar system, much less the rest of the galaxy. What we haven't seen yet is confirmation of life, a microbe seen in a microscope, or simple multicellular life. Hell, amino acids have been found in space, as have some the molecules responsible for forming DNA. Both free floating in interstellar clouds and locked within asteroids and comets.

Right now it's a hope, but it certainly isn't a faith, we simply can't say for certain one way or another, but there are reasons to be optimistic.

Please bear in mind that I think the article in the OP is stupid.

Next question?

"God is a concept by which we measure our pain"


Actually "god" is a word that regularly gets a new definition when needed. Kinda like what this article is talking about.

This actually appears in the novel series known as The Expanse. In book 1, Leviathan Wakes, the Mormons band together to build a giant earth ship for deep space travel to coloniZe a planet in a nearby solar system.

Of course, if it's already inhabited, that would kick off the First Interstellar War...

Better re-think.

wryly,
Bright

This is an excellent and disturbing point.

...to which I would contribute $ to help make it happen.




Evildoer am I

He insists that the Bible be taken literally in every aspect, and then generalizes from that point.

The Genesis Book of the Bible is a creation story. The story is not concerned with describing every single aspect of creation, but the point is that there is/was a creator.

To say that mankind is created in the image of God refers to the intellectual and spiritual capability. All humans share a common genetic heritage, and similar intellectual capabilities, but we are not all equal in every aspect.

From the article:
"Nothing in that mentions alien worlds, which of course the ancients knew nothing about. Man was told to rule over the fish on the earth, not on other planets. But god would have known of these alien worlds, so it is curious he did not instruct the authors to include the language."

What need would there have been for the Creator to mention other planets? I found the rest of his words similarly dismissive of the message of the Bible.

One question for Schweitzer, and any here who subscribe to this viewpoint:

What caused the big bang and how was the matter formed that exploded?

I would give him a failing grade for his essay based on his laughable argument.

As to your comment:
"The absence of a scientific explanation does not in any way lend validity to supernatural explanations or the existence of any god, let alone your particular deity."

I would reply:
My belief in a Creator is not a science-based belief. I have said that in this forum. But I accept that and it does not diminish my belief. People can believe that there is no Creator, no supernatural beings, no divine inspiration. But there will never be "proof" for either side.

He's talking about people who accept wholesale the Biblical account of creation, the fall, and salvation from Original Sin.

So he IS guilty of a ridiculous straw man argument.

As to certainty, there is no certainty in life. We agree on that at least. I would hope also that we can agree that the universe was created. The "how" is our difference.

But unless or until science can explain everything about the universe and what existed prior to the creation of the universe, there is no "proof" of anything. It has been posited that at one point the universe did not exist, and then it did.

My creative force is an essentially unknowable entity, and yours is, perhaps, a chemical or physical reaction of some sort that caused something to form from something that existed prior to the creation of the universe.

You can determine by the content of his arguments, who, specifically, he is addressing. It's pretty clear he's not talking about Buddhists, or Hindus, or Scandinavian Pagans.

But I will admit that only believers in the Bible are affected by Schweitzer's straw man argument. Does that make the argument any better, or does it make Schweitzer somehow better because he limits his argument to Bible based religions?

Expansion rather than explosion is what I should have written.

The second part essentially refers to how matter behaved, and continues to behave in some cases, immediately subsequent to the expansion.

My question, an obvious one admittedly, is where did the matter come?

No matter how the universe was created, it was created from something. How was that something created?

And THAT question cannot be answered. If you prefer to believe that there was no creative force or entity that is your right, but there will never be any proof for your belief.

Belief without proof is the essence of faith.

That doesn't resolve your problem, it just inserts an additional step, "god" in the process. How did this god come into being? There is no evidence that the universe was created from "something", that is merely your assertion that "it must be so".

"belief without proof is the essence of faith" - indeed, but science doesn't "believe without proof", science is fine with ignorance. We don't know how the universe started, we do know that there is plenty of evidence for what the universe was like in the fractions of a second after it started, but we remain ignorant, for now, of its origin.

The way he goes into the Bible and looking to see what it says about modern scientific discoveries, and comes to silly conclusions.

My feeling is that the author of the article, like Richard Dawkins and others, feels no need for a deity and cannot admit that one might exist.

But all who so believe are believing without proof.

They'll say that it's being misinterpreted, or that the instruments are faulty, or that the scientists are cooperating in a big lie in order to keep their research funding.

They deny the evidence of evolution. The deny the evidence for the age of Earth. They deny the evidence for human caused climate change. Why would this be any different?

If the evidence doesn't fit their dogma, then the evidence must be wrong!

A lot of time they never really "got it" when working on their degree

and that life has evolved elsewhere

I can't see why that should affect my religious views. Schweitzer wants to go on record declaring this response as nonsense, by referring (say) to the trial of Galileo. I find Schweitzer's understandings of culture, history and religion limited

The trial of Galileo, now four centuries ago, can perhaps best be understood as part of the Counter-Reformation -- that is, the official Catholic reaction to the Protestant Reformation which had begun a century earlier. By Galileo's era, nobody who wanted to do astronomical calculations doubted the computational usefulness of the Copernican scheme, compared to the Ptolemaic scheme, and even the Church's own astronomers were happy to utilize the Copernican view when they needed to work out astronomical questions, as (for example) in the case of the Gregorian calendrical reform. Galileo's real crime, for that time, was his challenge to Papal authority:his famous Dialogue put official Catholic views in the mouth of "Simplicio," which suggested to diverse folk that Galileo was calling them simpletons

Nowadays, of course, we say that the annual parallax of some stars can be observed; and from this we conclude that the heliocentric view has been established. But the critical observations were only made two centuries after Galileo, the technology being inadequate in his time; and therefore the parallax argument could not be thrown at those who wanted to use Biblical-literalist arguments against Galileo in order to consolidate Papal power. It is certainly true that church history is riddled with such power-struggles, waged in theological terms; but not all theological thinking is motivated by such crass struggles

in the Universe.

What is up with writers on Huffpost? Are they just stupid or something?