RE: What would you consider to be evidence for God?
September 7, 2015 at 7:56 pm
(This post was last modified: September 7, 2015 at 8:00 pm by TheRocketSurgeon.
Edit Reason: Edited to specify whom I meant by "they".
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snowtracks Wrote: It’s a matter of comparing the naturalistic model to the creation model and choosing the one that best fits the observable data from all the sciences. The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has a policy statement that implicitly and strictly adheres to a materialistic understanding of the nature of science. So scientists accepted a self-imposed limitation to the hypothesis they are willing to accept. Hence, all their conclusion must adder to the principle of methodological materialism including origin of the universe, and life or phenomena such as human consciousness. To publish or secure grants that have the AAAS policy or similar (Nature, Nova, Smithsonian, public and most private universities, etc), the researchers must exclude by policy any creation model evidence. Nothing wrong with AAAS institutions setting rules for their members (policy statement, not a conspiracy); however, the problem is that they have excluded conclusion before the research even begins (as stated by Richard Lewontin American evolutionary biologist ‘…materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door‘)*; and that most readers don’t know of this a priori restrictive policy. Some researcher even are convinced of the creation model, but will of course interpret the finding naturalistically. Therefore, most of the ‘science’ this board’s posters are so enameled with is really pre-loaded ’science’. In the case of evolution, big gapping holes in the theory is explained by an appeal to future discoveries, but real science is based on what is known not what is not known.
* https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Lewontin
You must be joking. Please tell me you don't really think this. Yes, science discounts "magic" as an explanation, since that has done us pretty well in explaining things so far, such as our AMAZING discovery that the sun is not Apollo's magic chariot that rides across the sky each night.
I am a former biologist, and my fiancee, a Christian (by the way), works in a genetics lab and has no issues with the Theory of Evolution. None. There are no researchers, Christian or Atheist, of any serious capacity who are "convinced of the creation model", not the least reason being that there is no "creation model", other than to read the Bible. Evolution has so much solid evidence that a lifetime of study would not be enough to learn all of it; biologists spend entire lifetimes just nailing down some of its aspects and focusing on sub-regions, but a general overview is simple enough that everyone should be able to grasp it. For instance: we know how DNA is inherited. We know. We use particular loci (markers) to trace heritage for paternity testing, and to convict (or exonerate) people in courts of law. There are literally hundreds of things we know are in our DNA that can only be explained (and fairly simply) via common ancestry with other great apes, such as transpositional elements and endogenous retrovirus "scars". It's not a scientific conspiracy; science encourages genuine dissent, and a scientist can win great fame by disproving a well-accepted model/theory. If I was able to disprove evolutionary theory, by clear and convincing evidence, I would collect my Nobel Prize next year. The problem is that they [Creationists] do not have evidence at all, they have misrepresentations of what science actually claims (straw men) that they tear down before credulous people who don't know the difference, and those people then think there are two sides of a debate.
People like the liars at the Creation Institute (now called the Discovery Institute to hide its intent) who try to portray a "controversy" on the issue, but there really is none... you can check this fact for yourself, by looking at the "list of scientists who doubt evolution" that they released in 2005 and seeing that almost literally every person on that list is either not a biologist/biochemist (who would be in a postition to know the difference), or disavows their appearance on the list and acknowledges both evolution and common descent.
Don Exodus on YouTube already proved it is a lie, and you don't have to believe me on that. You can see for yourself:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ty1Bo6GmPqM
The Creation/Discovery Institute does this because they believe that if they can muddy the waters enough, then it's a net win for Christianity (their version), a tactic they admitted to when they published the "Wedge Document", which they later took down as they began their quest to appear more legitimate, but which the good folks at the National Center for Science Education preserved for us:
http://http://ncse.com/creationism/gener...e-document
As for the original question, it would have been fairly simple for the Deity whom they claim "inspired" the writers of the Bible to tell those writers something that a sheepherder people in the Ancient Near East would not have known on their own, such as for instance genetic inheritance (which Genesis gets totally wrong in chapter 30, mistakenly describing something we call "Lamarckian inheritance", a debunked hypothesis of how species adapt to their environments), or Germ Theory, or Atomic Theory... or even the Heliocentric model of the solar system (though to me, that wouldn't prove God so much as its absence seems to indicate a lack of divine inspiration).
The "divinely inspired" writers of Genesis got everything wrong that we would expect humans of the Ancient Near East to get wrong, based on their time and culture, just as the "divinely inspired" authors of the Qur'an and the Enûma Elish got things wrong according to their cultures. You reject those stories as human-crafted nonsense the same way the rest of us reject yours.
A Christian told me: if you were saved you cant lose your salvation. you're sealed with the Holy Ghost
I replied: Can I refuse? Because I find the entire concept of vicarious blood sacrifice atonement to be morally abhorrent, the concept of holding flawed creatures permanently accountable for social misbehaviors and thought crimes to be morally abhorrent, and the concept of calling something "free" when it comes with the strings of subjugation and obedience perhaps the most morally abhorrent of all... and that's without even going into the history of justifying genocide, slavery, rape, misogyny, religious intolerance, and suppression of free speech which has been attributed by your own scriptures to your deity. I want a refund. I would burn happily rather than serve the monster you profess to love.
I replied: Can I refuse? Because I find the entire concept of vicarious blood sacrifice atonement to be morally abhorrent, the concept of holding flawed creatures permanently accountable for social misbehaviors and thought crimes to be morally abhorrent, and the concept of calling something "free" when it comes with the strings of subjugation and obedience perhaps the most morally abhorrent of all... and that's without even going into the history of justifying genocide, slavery, rape, misogyny, religious intolerance, and suppression of free speech which has been attributed by your own scriptures to your deity. I want a refund. I would burn happily rather than serve the monster you profess to love.