Not-a-question-as-such from Joel:
I don’t have a question as such. But I just wanted to point out my views…I am devout Christian.I am in fact very rational. I know the first thought that you will have when you hear the word Christian and Rational in the same sentence will be “Bull shit”. But I was on verge of becoming an atheist…And I had this thought.
Science is a continuous process of understanding the laws of nature and coming to a conclusion with a set of irrefutable equations. It is finding answers for the universe that we live in. Trying to explain the Universe that we live in.
But the Bible on the other hand (I will use the Bible cos Religion is an institution created by man and it is highly influenced by man’s thinking and principles) was written by God to answer and guide humans. It is the ANSWER and not a changing set of theories…It stood and it still stands and has been going on for thousands of years.
But science grows continuously, one theory postulated today can be nullified tomorrow. So unless and until science explains laws for everything (I MEAN EVERYTHING) in Universe and it contradicts the Bible. Till then people have no right to call the Bible false. Science is changing who knows what theory or findings might just come up tomorrow, Maybe someone will prove evolution false. We Don’t know.
The Bible never was against science in the first place. The Creation being the biggest of the problems…But I somehow feel that isn’t the problem..God didn’t specifically say ..There may be a hidden meaning? Maybe the days were the stages of evolution and creation of earth. first the light (maybe a big bang) then the separation of water and air and so on. May be god wanted to say that there were 6 stages of creation and evolution. We don’t know..But what Christians believe, is that. It is better to take the bible literally than to make assumptions and misinterpret it. They are correct in their way.
And the fact that it was written at a time when people were not knowledgeable to understand various complexities of physics and biology. It just makes sense that God wrote the process of creation in this manner..And the highlight of it not being the way he created universe but what he thinks of humans..a creation in his own likeness.
So lets just stop all this bickering. I don’t care what you believe. But do not blame Mans mistake on god. And science never contradicted religion.. for me its like
L.H.S (Science) = R.H.S (Bible.)
Answer by SmartLX:
Funny you should say that science is on the left hand side; in the context of God, Jesus is on the right, so the left is usually reserved for the damned.
Science adjusts its views based on new evidence, it’s true, so it’s always possible that the scientific facts we know today could turn out to be wrong. Putting it like this, however, unfairly categorises it as a dichotomy between knowing something absolutely (which might be impossible) and throwing it out altogether, when the truth is in between.
A good scientific theory explains a great deal while making as few assumptions as possible. If the facts explained by the theory or the assumptions on which it relies are found to be incorrect, the theory must itself change or perish. At any given point, though, a large amount of confidence in the theory can be well justified, especially if new evidence either supports the theory or only requires minor adjustments to it. For example, the age of the universe (since the Big Bang) had been estimated at 15 billion years, and there was a lot of evidence to back up the estimate. Then more evidence emerged, and the age of the universe was revised downwards – but only to 13.7 billion years. All the principles that led to the earlier estimate were still intact, but the measurements were better honed and scientists were able to be more accurate. Confidence in the means that led to the discovery of the magnitude of the universe’s age was unshaken, and likely even reinforced. There may be future revisions, but the next one is much more likely to be something like 13.6 or 13.8 billion years than to continue downwards at the same rate to 12.4 billion. The odds of a new estimate getting anywhere near 6000 years (with an inception period of six literal days for the Earth and all life on it) are infinitesimal.
You’re free to assert that the Bible is the word of God, but for people who don’t start with this presumption it’s just an old book, and if it wasn’t right on a particular point to begin with, then it never will be. The difference between the word of the Bible and a current scientific theory is that there is evidence contradicting a literal (sometimes even a figurative) reading of many passages from the Bible, whereas a current scientific theory is still current because it has weathered all criticism thus far without the need to change more than it has. The Bible simply ignores criticism because it is dogmatically unable to change.
It is a very weak position to say that the Bible is right because everything else might be wrong. Some aspects of science do have to be wrong for a literal reading of the Bible to hold up, but there’s evidence for these aspects of science and no good evidence that they’re wrong. Until contrary evidence turns up, the word of the Bible is not the rational choice over science in such a case.
Tag: scientific theory
Questionpalooza
Question from Tim:
I am an honest questioner/agnostic looking for answers. I was born into a Christian denomination, but no longer go to church.
Anyway, here are my questions for you:
1. Assuming evolution is true (and I believe it is), then shouldn’t you allow for the fact that since the Bible was written by human beings, and human beings evolve, so did God in the Bible? In the Old Testament, he was an angry God, but by the New Testament he was a loving God. Why do atheists continue to pick on the Old Testament God who is no longer relavent to our modern day society?
2. A follow-up to #1. The New Testament makes it clear that “God is Love”. Surely, atheists believe in love. Yet, you do not believe in God. Isn’t that a contradiction?
3. Why is it perfectly acceptable for scientists to make and believe in ‘theories’, yet it is not okay to believe in the theory of God, if we may call it that?
4. If atheists believe in ‘nothing’, then isn’t that much the same as believing in God? By that I mean, you cannot prove that ‘nothing’ exists, can you? Show me where ‘nothing’ exists in this world. Isn’t everything made up of something?
5. Why do atheists seem so hostile to even the possibility of God existing? Why can’t God be treated as a possible scientific explanation for the creation of the universe? It seems to me that it is just as hard to believe (if not harder) that there are multiple universes or that this universe was a random mistake that just somehow occured? Until we know the true reasons for the origin of the universe, why not keep God on the table as one possible answer just like any other, since none of the others have been proven yet either?
I may have some more questions for you later, but these are the main ones for now. I would very much appreciate hearing your thoughts and opinions on these matters, and I will consider them seriously.
Thank you for your time.
Answer by SmartLX:
Hi Tim.
1. Whether God is angry or loving only matters if you think God exists, so it’s of far more importance to theists than atheists, but we do tend to use it to challenge the basis of religious morality.
Whether God is more loving in the New Testament is debatable, because the Old Testament has no concept of Hell as currently understood by Christians. God doesn’t start condemning people to eternal punishment until the Gospels, so for those on His bad side, love doesn’t count for much. The whole purpose of Jesus’ sacrifice is morally questionable, as no other scapegoat has ever truly absolved anyone of responsibility for their own actions.
The idea of God evolving undermines the idea of divine morality even further. if God’s ideas of right and wrong can change, humans must live in constant fear that God will change His mind again, and a lifetime of good works will be invalidated or a sinful life suddenly vindicated.
2. Love is a function of the brain. It’s not an ethereal presence which floats around us, it’s an abstract description of an integral part of the human experience. When we talk about love, we’re describing what people do for and feel about each other. What Christian would accept that God is nothing more than bio-electrical activity and an abstract human concept?
No, God as envisioned by Christians (and of course the New Testament) is more than love. He’s an intelligent agent with His own will and powers independent of human beings. When Christians say “God is love” they are giving credit to God for all love, but they’re not limiting him to the scope of love. Love doesn’t literally bring people back from the dead, but a god apparently can. That’s why atheists can quite happily accept the existence of love, but still question the existence of God.
3. The existence of God is a hypothesis, not a theory as understood by scientists. A scientific theory, as defined by the National Academy of Sciences in the USA, is “a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world, based on a body of facts that have been repeatedly confirmed through observation and experiment.” God is a possible explanation for various things, yes, but God has not been confirmed to any extent through observation of and experiments on the natural world. When people deride evolution as “only a theory”, they don’t realise that their alternatives of creationism and “intelligent design” are not even that.
That said, the existence of God could be said to be a scientific hypothesis because it’s either true or it isn’t, and it could in principle be supported or contradicted by physical evidence. That’s no reason to think it’s at all likely, but it’s something.
4. Firstly, atheists don’t believe in “nothing” because there is at least something. We exist, and we live in some kind of a world, even if our senses are completely misguided. That’s something. Atheists also variously believe all kinds of things unrelated to gods, such as that everyone deserves an education, or that hard work pays off, or that ghosts are real, or that 9/11 was an inside job. It depends on the person.
I think what you mean is that atheists believe that there are no gods. Some do, and that’s called “strong atheism”, but most atheists simply lack a belief in any god. A god is a huge thing to believe in, and if there isn’t any apparent evidence for one, why would you? If no god has sufficient evidence to inspire belief in you, what you’re left with is atheism.
5. As I said, God is a possible explanation for the universe. Being an atheist doesn’t mean completely ruling out that possibility, it just means not thinking it’s really the case. There are plenty of agnostic atheists around, including me.
The nice thing about the idea of multiple universes is that there could be any number of them, up to and including an infinite number. If there are anything like that many, with a decent amount of variance between them, then the development of at least one universe with intelligent life in it becomes not just likely but a statistical certainty. That aside, without other universes to compare to this one, we don’t know how likely it is that a universe will have properties that allow life to form somewhere, whether there’s one universe or many. Rather than a random mistake, life-friendly properties might be common or even inevitable, such that life is an expected by-product of universes. Life as a whole does seem like the kind of bloody-minded (so to speak) organism that you’d pick up in your travels and struggle to shake off.
If you have related questions, feel free to comment here and carry on the discussion, otherwise go ahead and post unrelated questions as a new entry.