Daniel Smith
Posts: 970 Joined: Sep. 2007
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Quote (Assassinator @ Nov. 04 2007,13:05) | I agree that lots of people also have preconcieved ideas about a god. But there is also something else, it looks like you're emotionally attached to your preconcieved ideas. Note that the word "God" doesn't mean anything by itself, it's rather a coat rack (i hope i translate that correctly) on wich people put there own image of the word "God". The word "God" is thus worthless to science. Science can only work with certain images of the word "God". It's so easy to modify that image. Not even that long ago, and even today, people still beleive that God created and designed everything around us, but not in the way you would beleive it. The role of God has changed, it's like the God of the Gaps. Quote | The fossil record and the molecular evidence are both consistent with a belief that God designed and implemented life on this planet. |
Explain yourself. Because i don't see why. I'm only seeing a certain interpretation of the available evidence so the evidence fits in your beleifs. But is that interpretation in agreement with reality? Ofcourse, you can ask the same with other interpretations. Quote | The fossil record shows "explosions" of lifeforms suddenly appearing and then diversifying. |
You shouldn't take the world "explosion" too literally. It still took several millions of years, and that's VERY long and LOTS of generations fit into that. Quote | The molecular evidence shows an extremely complex, sophisticated, multi-layered coding system that defies any unguided evolutionary explanation. |
No, it does not. It's complex in your eyes, nothing more. Hell, we may meet aliens who laugh at our simple planet with our simple lifeforms. It's simply not an argument to say it's complex compared what we can do. The fact that we don't get it, is no argument for design, it's only an argument for our limited knowledge. Quote | Now, I could take your questions and turn them around and ask them of you: What is your goal? What are your preconceived ideas? Are you willing to let them go and consider the possibility of a designing God? |
My goal? To learn more about reality. My preconcieved ideas? No idea, i don't give a ratsass if our planet was made by a God, erupted out of natural laws or made by aliens from starsystems thousands of lightyears away for an experiment. I just care about what's true. Ofcourse i consider the possibility of a designing God, but as i sad before there is no evidence or objective sign for such a being. |
You are right. I am emotionally attached to my preconceived ideas - and I will only let go of them when convinced otherwise. And (I've said this before), I am not advocating a "god of the gaps", I am advocating a "God of all that is". I give him credit for everything - even those things that man thinks he has explained. Just because we can explain something doesn't mean we have eliminated design from the argument. I can explain many of the systems at work within my car, does that mean it wasn't designed? Obviously not. It only means I have gained an understanding of the designer's systems. So... my definition of God is that of an eternal, infinitely intelligent, cognitive agent that exists in a parallel dimension to our own. Thus, he is a being not bound by time and capable of doing anything. Now, I realize that that last part seems like a cop-out, since someone who can do anything also explains everything, but let me also point out that - if life were created by a being of infinite intelligence - we would expect to find certain things within life. Let's use your aliens as an example. If we were to find an object that we believed to be created by an alien race more intelligent than our own, we would expect to find technology superior to our own within that object. The fact that we find technology superior to our own within the mechanisms of life can be used as an argument that the designer of life was at least orders of magnitude more intelligent than us. Now some will argue that the molecular mechanisms - in all their sophistication - are the result of natural processes, but then isn't it up to them to show that these natural processes can create such sophistication and elegance? So far, I've seen no convincing evidence that natural processes can produce complex, functional systems such as we have in life. None.
-------------- "If we all worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true is really true, there would be little hope of advance." Orville Wright
"The presence or absence of a creative super-intelligence is unequivocally a scientific question." Richard Dawkins
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