The Reasons why "Just Following Jesus" Doesn't work

[TheRocketSurgeon]

I took a look at your artical and I will admit that the panda's thumb article was confusing since I don't have a Bachelors or a PHD in any kind of science. Yet, the New Yorker article and some other articles helped me to understand some of what he was talking about. What I found from looking around is that what we have is data about the cambrian period. Before there were not so many animals and then there were a lot in the cambrian period. It would seem that scientist have done some inferring with chemistry and have used computers to play out the scenario which they have drawn conclusions from. I haven't looked into that so I don't know what criterion they are using. Those who believe in a creator have filled in the gaps with science as well but they believe that it points to a creator. So my conclusion is we have data about the cambrian period, and this data has been interpreted in different ways. This got me asking some more questions which lead me to seek some popular scientific views on our "origins". 

That's why I tend to cite both the "hard science" articles and popularized versions, whenever possible. I don't expect everyone to have a 100% grasp of biology, unless they are a biologist. On the other hand, when I see people making false statements about science (building strawmen in order to tear them down, usually), or stating things as fact when they are either unproven or absolutely disproved, I will expect the person making such claims to learn enough science to realize why those statements are as poorly worded/conceptualized as they are. (Edit to Add: Oh, and thanks for actually reading what I linked!)

As to the Cambrian Explosion, it's a common misconception that life was less common before the divide. It's fossils that are hard to find from that era, simply because life had not yet evolved a mechanism for producing hard materials which are more easily preserved as fossils. We do have some examples (Google for instance the "Burgess Shale"), and have discovered quite a lot more about that era than we knew until recently. As for the "chemistry" part, it's that we know the way DNA reproduces, and can determine if the amount of diversity we see occurring in that time period (which still encompasses several million years) is faster than the known rates of evolutionary change. Turns out, it was well within the limit.

So where did life come from? I read that we could have all come from a comet, panspermia, bringing with it proteins that were needed to create life.  This plus many other theories, and found what they are saying is we are star stuff, and some therefore conclude we are not created beings rather things grown up out of happy happenstance.  So I concluded, if that is the case doing right or wrong really doesn't matter, as whatever happens... happens. Or as I would say "so what". So what to slavery, so what to religion etc. As in the great words of King Solomon “Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.”(ecc 1:1) Now if there is a God then things are made for a reason and therefore they have a purpose and meaning.  Giving men the reference point to understand morality and life and making sense of all the "gray areas".  

I think that, technically, the comets are alleged to have brought the component materials of the amino acids/sugars and other basic building blocks that would make up RNA (perhaps preempted by TNA - Threose Nucleic Acid), and eventually DNA. We can observe the existence of these chemicals (via radio telescopes) in interstellar clouds because every molecule "vibrates" at a particular set of frequencies, and these can be seen from earth. Experiments have been performed here on earth by irradiating other, more basic chemicals found in the clouds, and they saw the development of those same molecules as we see in the clouds. Those materials may well have crashed in comet form into the warm, early oceans on earth and seeded the locations where it was favorable for abiogenesis to occur. NASA/JPL conducted experiments which showed the formation of "protocells" in similar warm-water conditions, due to naturally occurring fatty acids (lipids) in the water (the stuff that makes up sea foam), where the materials were shot into warm water and were immediately enveloped by the lipid layer, forming a type of cell.

The reason we say "we are star stuff" is simple: nuclear fusion. Originally, all that existed was hydrogen and perhaps a little helium left over from the "Big Bang". The gas pockets drew together by gravity and ignited fusion. When hydrogen atoms fuse into helium atoms under the influence of the great heat and pressure at the center of a star, it produces an ever-higher chain of products, up as high as iron. During the intense reaction we call a Supernova, even higher elements like uranium can be formed, and flung into deep space. None of this is controversial; we know that's how it works. Our star is a second- or third-generation star, based on its makeup and the fact that it has planets made of heavier materials. Therefore, everything on earth that is not helium or hydrogen, including us, was made in the fusion heart of a star. Neat, huh?

As for the "meaningless" part, I hope you're just parroting some preacher, and you don't really think that we think life is meaningless without a religious figure to create the world via magic. First, there are many, many, MANY scientists who are Believers, and they see Creation not as a magical, one-time event, but as an ongoing process which an infinitely-patient Creator could easily use to bring about The Plan™. Most of them see Creationism as diminishing God, not defending God. Secondly, we secularlists don't say that without God things are meaningless (that's a bad line from a bad character in a Dostoevsky novel who actually says that), we say that man must make his own meaning, and must do it with as much reason and compassion as possible, since there is no paradise awaiting us and this is the only life we get.

My favorite verse of the Bible is Ecclesiastes, chapter 1:

18 For in much wisdom is much grief,
And he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.

I want to thank you for taking the time to watch the debate, and for your insights into the credentials of Dr. Meyer; though I would think that holding a Masters and Ph.D in the History and Philosophy of Science would give someone a good perspective as to how science got where it is now, and where it may be heading too. Also he was a former geophysicist and college professor and holds a B.S in Physics/Earth Science. 

We all have filters the question is are we willing to put them to the test? Can these filters we use give us clarity or do they blind us?

Your final questions are exactly right. Everyone has bias, and filters information that they'd prefer to hear (it's called "confirmation bias", as I believe I've mentioned to you before). That's why the most important part of the Scientific Method is Peer Review, in which the methodology and assumptions that were made in order to arrive at the conclusions of the paper are criticized by scientists around the world, especially your closest competitors. It's this method that also shreds the attempts by groups like the Discovery Institute to claim they have an alternative explanation for things... scientists who are Christians tend to be especially harsh, as they don't like having their faith made to look bad by the ignorant ramblings of people who have an agenda. You can claim that atheist scientists have a materialist agenda, but that claim is harder to make when you realize that a significant percent of the scientists questioned about their faith say they are Christians (even more if you count all religions), and they would have no reason to support materialism if there was another explanation that was equally viable.

Here is the Discovery Institute's response to the Wedge Document.

Yes that was an interesting read. I had already read the WD, of course. I actually know the lady from Louisiana, Dr. Forrest, as Louisiana is where I went to university (not at her school, but we worked with them on occasion). I had not heard anyone claim that it was a part of an attempt to "establish theocracy" or anything like that. The reason it's called the Wedge Document is in reference to a political tactic of throwing out enough static/noise to make it look like there's something going on, in order to distract voters from noticing the more important issues (the most common example is abortion, though lately it appears to be this whole transgender thing) they should really be aware of. In the case of the DI's Wedge Document, they make it plain (as you can see) that they have a specific agenda, and they lay out their methods for doing it... they have been hugely successful at giving the appearance of success, while in fact never producing a single idea (let alone a theory) that was not instantly shredded by the Peer Review process.

The champion they mention, Michael Behe, was utterly destroyed when under oath in the Dover trial, when the lawyers who cross-examined him showed him the papers displaying the very things he had written (and claimed on the stand) were impossible and could not be shown to happen. Of course, laypeople don't read the scholarly articles... they trust that men like Behe have done so, and would not mislead them. Behe was also forced to admit that, if the expanded definition of science that the DI (and he) were trying to push was to be employed, it would encompass fields like Astrology and other pseudoscience. At least he was smart enough not to lie under oath, as he retracted several of the claims made in his books.

However, by giving the appearance that there is a controversy (such as their repeated statement that evolution is a theory "in deep crisis", when nothing could be farther from the truth), the Creationists can keep people from questioning the fundamentalism that certain types of Christian churches/denominations teach, as I did, when they encounter facts that run contrary to the prior beliefs. They want people to do what you're doing, and saying, "Well after all neither side really knows, so I'm going to keep on believing what I did." But we do know, and we can show anyone who wants to know why we know what we know... but it won't be done on an internet forum. It takes literal years of intense study to learn a fraction of the amount of evidence, and to understand what makes it evidence in the first place. When you say "well they interpreted it their way", that's simply not true. They gave their reasons for interpreting the data, and what methods they used, and invited the world to tear it down if possible. All science works this way.

The simple fact is that the Discovery Institute was (as they admit openly) founded to counter the "materialism" in science... but what does materialism mean? It means until we can demonstrate, actually demonstrate, that magic is a real thing, we must pursue natural explanations for natural phenomena, and reject the human tendency to jump to storytelling when we don't understand something. Once upon a time, we thought that the sun, thunder, and lightning (and so on) were the acts of the gods, because we didn't know what caused it and it was in our nature to make up gods to cover what we didn't understand. Due to the Enlightenment and the tireless work of scientists, we now know what natural phenomena cause all of those things, and reject the old, magical explanations.

What does materialism not mean? Well, for starters, you (and they) can stuff that "well therefore there is no right and wrong" crap. I'm sorry if that sounds harsh, but I'm sick to death of hearing it. None of the assertions made, concerning moral reasoning, in that response article are true. It's a pretty deep and well-studied field, but the simple answer is that we are a tribal, social species, and moral behavior is a social conditioning as well as (for most of us) partly instinctive because it would be utterly detrimental to our survival as a species to be anarchic in that way. It's why you see ideas about what is moral vary so widely, when you study cultural anthropology, for one thing. Humans make up what is "moral", and yes, it changes over time... I know you don't think the Bible endorses slavery for non-Hebrews (you've said before that you think it's all indentured servitude, despite the Leviticus 25 verses that specifically spell out the difference between what can be done to fellow Israelites and what can be done to non-Israelites), but today we even consider indentured servitude to be morally reprehensible.

Finally (GET ON WITH IT!!! hehe), the DI's claim that materialists can't even punish criminal behavior that harms the society should be laughed out of the room... if nothing else, the Soviet Union's prison population (at roughly 2/3 the size of ours, per capita) shows that even those philosophical materialists were in no way averse to imprisoning anyone they felt broke the laws of the land. But don't confuse philosophical materialism with methodological materialism; they are not the same thing, though the DI doesn't seem to have bothered to look up the distinction, or pretends that they don't know the difference.

Sorry I ran so long with this, but I felt you deserved a full answer (at least, as full as this format provides for) to your thoughtful and quite reasonable questions. Thanks for not simply preaching at us again.

[TheRocketSurgeon]

Oh, I feel I need to explain that my "GET ON WITH IT" was a Monty Python reference, and not an intent to mock anyone but myself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1YmS_VDvMY

[Pat Mustard]

I have been a jerk and God has removed and is removing those thing not by religion but by reflecting on His glory. 

Thanks again for the conversation!

No you're still a jerk, if not worse. An intolerant, hatefilled, judgemental, shouty, delusional and close-minded jerk.

[drfuzzy]

I have been a jerk and God has removed and is removing those thing not by religion but by reflecting on His glory. 

Thanks again for the conversation!

No you're still a jerk, if not worse. An intolerant, hatefilled, judgemental, shouty, delusional and close-minded jerk.

And yet, her recent conversations with Rocket have been more reasonable.  She has clearly been doing some reading, which is a lot more than you can say about some theists here.  I, for one, am stepping back and watching - and I have enjoyed reading the recent posts.

[Redbeard The Pink]

First the ladies set out for the tomb early at daybreak (matt 28:1, John 20:1, Luke 24:1, Mark 16:1).

Ok, but how many, and which ones? John names only Mary Magdalene, Matthew names only her and the "Other Mary," Mark names 3 women, and Luke describes an entire crowd.


Also, was this before daybreak or after? John describes the visit occurring while it's still dark, but according to Mark and Luke it was light out.

They could already have been outside of Jerusalem. Around this time at the tomb the guards have fainted at the appearance of the Angels who roll away the stone.(Matt 28:34)

Ok, but was the stone rolled away before the women got there (like in Mark, Luke, and John), or after (like in Matthew?) Also, how many angels were there? One (like in Mark and Matthew) or two (like in Luke and John)?

 They also recover and run back to tell what happened (Mt 28:1112)  When the women arrive they find the tomb open,

Hang on, now...in the version of the story that actually has those guards, the women show up before the guards fall down and the stone is rolled away, and in this account you're trying to assemble you have them finding the tomb after the guards have already fainted, gotten back up, and run off. That part of your narrative does not comport with what's in Matthew. The other books say they found the tomb with the stone already moved, but those stories don't mention the guards at all, so there's no support for the idea that the thing with the guards happened before the women ever got there. In the only book with the guards in it, the women see them faint.

Mary M (John 20:12), runs to find Peter and John who were probably in Jerusalem since they followed Jesus to his trial and John to his crucifixion. The other ladies go into the tomb and find the angels in there and receive the news of Jesus resurrection (Mt 28:1, Luke 24:1, Mt 16:16, Mt 28:5) . When Mary M reaches P/J they all run back to the tomb while the other ladies are possible taking another route back to find the tomb (John 20:2). P/J arrive at the tomb and enter to find it empty (john 20:3-7) and then Mary arrives and as they go back she encounters the resurrected Jesus (John 11-17, Mark 16:9). Then after Jesus appears to Mary, He appears to the other women on there way to meet other disciples. Later Jesus appeared to the disciple on the road to Emmaus (Luke 13-35). Then Later Jesus appeared to all of them in the room. (Luke 24:38-40)  for an more in depth explanation you can look at this link

Ok, this part of the story is where it really starts getting messy, but I'll try to cover everything I see wrong here.


First off, in Matthew Jesus appears to all the women at the same time (inlcuding Mary M), so there's no real support for separate encounters or for splitting the women up. The only account that makes it sound like Mary was by herself at any point is John, and that one doesn't really mention the other women at all. Splitting the women into two groups is mostly just scholars trying to force-fit the varying accounts into a single narrative that vaguely makes sense; it's not in the text, though.


Also, there's a discrepancy about who says what, and to whom (and in my opinion, it's actually kind of an important one). In Mark, the women do not encounter Jesus. The angel they encounter tells them to deliver a message to his disciples telling them to go to Galilee so Jesus could meet them there. In Matthew, they get the same message, but from Jesus himself. If you're the all-powerful, all-knowing, and infallible creator of the Universe and you're trying to deliver a message to your people, how are you going to mix up whether something was said by your son or one of your angels (or let the human writers mix it up)?

Here are some bible excepts that are God speaking out against slavery (physical and spiritual)  that is oppressive

Ok, well, "spiritual slavery" is not what we're talking about (and it's not a real thing), so I'm going to ignore those. Let's see what you've got.

 

Thus says the Lord,
“For three transgressions of Israel and for four
I will not revoke its punishment,
Because they sell the righteous for money
And the needy for a pair of sandals. (Joel 2:6)
 
 For we also once were foolish ourselves, disobedient, deceived, enslaved to various lusts and pleasures, spending our life in malice and envy, hateful, hating one another. 4 But when the kindness of God our Savior and His love for mankind appeared, 5 He saved us, not on the basis of deeds which we have done in righteousness, but according to His mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewing by the Holy Spirit, 6 whom He poured out upon us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, 7 so that being justified by His grace we would be made heirs [a]according to the hope of eternal life. (Titus 3:3-7)
 
“Is this not the fast which I choose,
To loosen the bonds of wickedness,
To undo the bands of the yoke,
And to let the oppressed go free
And break every yoke?
7 “Is it not to divide your bread [c]with the hungry
And bring the homeless poor into the house;
When you see the naked, to cover him;
And not to hide yourself from your own flesh? (isa 58:67)

Sooo...I'm noticing a pattern here...when I say that I'm gonna quote a passage that glorifies slavery, the passage I select tends to contain words like "slave," "enslave," and "slavery," whereas yours do not. You seem to be taking passages that you think refer to various aspects of slavery (kidnapping, bondage, selling people, etc.) but that in context do not actually pertain to slavery at all.

 

If He had no problem with it then he would have left the Israelites in their slavery (Exodus)

Yeah...that didn't really happen.

if He was ok with it He wouldn't have died for the sins of mankind so that they would not be enslaved to their sin.

Not the kind of slavery we're talking about, and also...that never happened, either.

Also it isn't religion that makes people lose sight of evil. That would mean that religion was the only thing to blame for evil, not the people, and that isn't true.

I said religion can make people lose sight of evil, but I never said it was the only thing that could do that. Take down your straw man and address the points I'm actually making, please.

It is the nature of man and his rejection of God that makes him blind of what is evil.

Evidence?

You don't have an objection porn, because people are willing to objectify themselves to it (right?).

Ummm...what?


I do not have an objection to consensual porn made by adults. If people who are of legal age and sound mind decide that they wish to subject themselves to being filmed during sex (for money or otherwise), then that is none of my business unless I am one of those people.

While I have an objection to porn, because it objectives people (which is evil).

I think you mean it "objectifies" people, and personally I don't think that's even true. It is perfectly normal for human beings to want to express themselves as wanting sex and wanting to be sexually desirable, and doing so does not reduce the person to an object. That is absurd.


Furthermore, even if porn did "objectify" people, if a person volunteers to express themselves as a sex object, there is nothing wrong with that. Luckily for everyone, what you object to has no practical impact on what society actually deems acceptable.


 

 Our country doesn't see the murder of an unborn child as wrong because they want to redefine what is life to suit their own desires. Things only get "gray" when people seek their own desires and reject what God says is right. (changing and redefining the meaning of words to suit their own needs and purposes)

Your god doesn't see anything wrong with mass genocide and forced marriages, so you really don't have the moral high ground here, even if abortion were evil (which it isn't).

Leviticus 25:44-46New International Version (NIV)

44 “‘Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves. 45 You may also buy some of the temporary residents living among you and members of their clans born in your country, and they will become your property. 46 You can bequeath them to your children as inherited property and can make them slaves for life, but you must not rule over your fellow Israelites ruthlessly.

 

NUM 15:15 The community is to have the same rules for you and for the foreigner residing among you; this is a lasting ordinance for the generations to come. You and the foreigner shall be the same before the LORD:
Lev 19:34The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the LORD your God.
Lev 19:33“ ‘When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them.
Lev 24:22 You are to have the same law for the foreigner and the native-born. I am the LORD your God.' ”
 
When these people come into their country as salves then they should be treated as a natural born.

Those passages are talking about free men. Foreign residents and foreign slaves were not the same thing, nor did they hold the same place in society. Again, you've picked a passage that does not talk about slavery to try to refute my interpretation of a passage that definitely does talk about slavery. You're basically out of context on this entire argument. None of the passages you've pulled are actually talking about slavery specifically; they've mentioned kidnapping, oppression, hospitality, etc. but not slavery. The passages I'm quoting say in plain language what your god thinks of slavery and how he commands Jews to conduct their ownership of slaves.

What I am saying is that DNA is information

Not exactly. Genetic coding is not "information" in the sense that you're using it.

and information comes from a mind

Even if I granted that, it's not completely accurate to refer to genes as information, so there's still no support for the statement that DNA had to be designed by a mind.

and that mind could only be God.

Even if we granted that DNA must have come from a mind (which we cannot do, since you have utterly failed to support such an assertion), that still wouldn't get us to that mind being your god. That would be a separate claim that would need to be supported by its own evidence, which you have again failed to produce.


"I don't understand where the 'information' in DNA came from, therefore God must have done it," is an argument from ignorance. No matter how you word it, this line of reasoning is fallacious and will get you nowhere while trying to convince a rational person.

Modern science seems to have a problem with saying what is actually alive or dead. Since our society started throwing out the Knowledge of God everything has become blurred and confusing.  There is no defined Truth, no lasting way of thinking.

The strength of science lies in the fact that it does not adhere to predefined "truths." A way of thinking lasts only as long as it seems to be supported by evidence.

What is male what is female, what is alive what isn't, what is an animal what isn't, what is right what isn't. You don't have any answers just a lot of data that you can't make since of because with the rejection of God you have rejected knowledge and wisdom.

Quite the opposite. Religion is the rejection of knowledge and wisdom in favor of sensationalism and fairy tales.

When I say that God is and that he created everything He did it outside of space and time. Since He is eternal and a spirit He isn't subject to space or time. A thing needs to have space so if it just is then there was space before there was a thing and so now you must explain where that space came from. Also a thing does not have a will where as God is a being and He has a will and decided to start time, space and life.

All you're doing here is attempting to define your god as something that should be able to ignore the Special Pleading Fallacy. If God is eternal, then other things can be or that's special pleading. If he does not require a creator, then neither do other things or that's special pleading. If God can exist without space or time, then so can other things or that's special pleading. If God can exist without being created by something with a will, then so can other things or that's special pleading. Regardless of how or why you think your god can "just is," the problem is that you are stating that nothing can "just is" except god.

[Pat Mustard]

Also, and I'm not an expert on this, as I understand it the Catholic Church keeps record of the baptismal figures, which for obvious reasons don't take into account the numbers who leave the church later. That's got to skew the percentage a little.

They changed canon law to close the avenue where you could renounce the church and religion oficially (in their eyes). Unless you wrote the right letter to your bishop before 2012, if you've been baptised the church considers you catlick until you die. There are a large number of open atheists (including myself) whose baptisms are used by the church to inflate their numbers and influence.

I'm sure the fundie churches poll similar shenanigans.

[Rekeisha]

As to the Cambrian Explosion, it's a common misconception that life was less common before the divide. It's fossils that are hard to find from that era, simply because life had not yet evolved a mechanism for producing hard materials which are more easily preserved as fossils. We do have some examples (Google for instance the "Burgess Shale"), and have discovered quite a lot more about that era than we knew until recently. As for the "chemistry" part, it's that we know the way DNA reproduces, and can determine if the amount of diversity we see occurring in that time period (which still encompasses several million years) is faster than the known rates of evolutionary change. Turns out, it was well within the limit.

thank you for the clarification. I think I need to look into it some more.

The reason we say "we are star stuff" is simple: nuclear fusion. Originally, all that existed was hydrogen and perhaps a little helium left over from the "Big Bang". The gas pockets drew together by gravity and ignited fusion. When hydrogen atoms fuse into helium atoms under the influence of the great heat and pressure at the center of a star, it produces an ever-higher chain of products, up as high as iron. During the intense reaction we call a Supernova, even higher elements like uranium can be formed, and flung into deep space. None of this is controversial; we know that's how it works. Our star is a second- or third-generation star, based on its makeup and the fact that it has planets made of heavier materials. Therefore, everything on earth that is not helium or hydrogen, including us, was made in the fusion heart of a star. Neat, huh?

That is amazing. Other than what you just explained with the science, why do you find this to be neat? (don't mean this to be a cold or poking question I would like to know from your point of view why this excites you)

As for the "meaningless" part, I hope you're just parroting some preacher, and you don't really think that we think life is meaningless without a religious figure to create the world via magic. First, there are many, many, MANY scientists who are Believers, and they see Creation not as a magical, one-time event, but as an ongoing process which an infinitely-patient Creator could easily use to bring about The Plan™. Most of them see Creationism as diminishing God, not defending God. Secondly, we secularists don't say that without God things are meaningless (that's a bad line from a bad character in a Dostoevsky novel who actually says that), we say that man must make his own meaning, and must do it with as much reason and compassion as possible, since there is no paradise awaiting us and this is the only life we get.

I know you don't think life is meaningless. Here is my train of thought of why I see a Godless universe as meaningless. Please point to were you disagree so that I can understand you better. 

By some way or another matter and material exists and they react in predictable ways. Since that is true worlds/galaxies are here, including our planet is created. Then through some unknown process life exists. We humans are lucky and make it to the top of the world system through simi-directed changes of natural selection and chemistry.  So then applying these statements to daily life now we can suppose several things. Emotions and thoughts are nothing more than chemical reactions that have evolved in the human species. The whole of life is a chemical reaction. This means that there is no right or wrong just chemical reactions. Your self ascribe "purpose" would also be the chemical reactions in your mind, one given you by the inner workings of natural selection, as is all or your thoughts and emotions. One day your body dies, because the right chemical reactions stop, and you end up decaying. People will have chemical reactions over your death and the cycle of chemical reactions will continue. Simple stoic strait forward premise. 

My question is, "is that true?" Is your love, anger, joy, happiness just chemical reactions? Do you have any control over your life or are all of your life's decisions just how you have evolved. If it isn't just chemistry then what are emotions and what are thoughts?
I believe that God is still miraculous in the daily workings of life. Knowing how things function doesn't remove the fact that God is doing it. God has made us to be physical, emotional and spiritual beings. All aspects of our being affect the other and the spiritual realm can not be proved by the physical because it holds different properties. Although it points to God and the spiritual affects both the physical and the mind. 

Your final questions are exactly right. Everyone has bias, and filters information that they'd prefer to hear (it's called "confirmation bias", as I believe I've mentioned to you before). That's why the most important part of the Scientific Method is Peer Review, in which the methodology and assumptions that were made in order to arrive at the conclusions of the paper are criticized by scientists around the world, especially your closest competitors. It's this method that also shreds the attempts by groups like the Discovery Institute to claim they have an alternative explanation for things... scientists who are Christians tend to be especially harsh, as they don't like having their faith made to look bad by the ignorant ramblings of people who have an agenda. You can claim that atheist scientists have a materialist agenda, but that claim is harder to make when you realize that a significant percent of the scientists questioned about their faith say they are Christians (even more if you count all religions), and they would have no reason to support materialism if there was another explanation that was equally viable.

I believe that there is a need for peer review but the problem is what if the peers are wrong. Lets say all of the science is right but the interpretation is wrong. Your filters effect what you want to see or don't want to see. People don't like to be wrong and even if there is overwhelming evidence for the truth the fear of being rejected by peers may cause them to get in line instead of pushing against the system. 

Finally (GET ON WITH IT!!! hehe)

I figured you weren't talking to me but I did miss the reference.

[TheRocketSurgeon]

I'm going to skip parts where you didn't ask a question, such as in the beginning. If I miss something you feel you'd prefer answered, please ask me again and forgive me for missing it the first time.

That is amazing. Other than what you just explained with the science, why do you find this to be neat? (don't mean this to be a cold or poking question I would like to know from your point of view why this excites you)

It's the sheer scale of it, and realizing that our entire solar system, from the sun to the planets to the tiniest atom of carbon in my body, was made by the process of nuclear fusion in a now-dead star system, many trillion miles away. It's a connection with the rest of the galaxy that our ancestors could only (at best) have guessed existed. I find most knowledge of this sort fascinating and awe-inspiring. It's why I studied science in the first place.

I know you don't think life is meaningless. Here is my train of thought of why I see a Godless universe as meaningless. Please point to were you disagree so that I can understand you better. 

By some way or another matter and material exists and they react in predictable ways. Since that is true worlds/galaxies are here, including our planet is created. Then through some unknown process life exists. We humans are lucky and make it to the top of the world system through simi-directed changes of natural selection and chemistry.  So then applying these statements to daily life now we can suppose several things. Emotions and thoughts are nothing more than chemical reactions that have evolved in the human species. The whole of life is a chemical reaction. This means that there is no right or wrong just chemical reactions. Your self ascribe "purpose" would also be the chemical reactions in your mind, one given you by the inner workings of natural selection, as is all or your thoughts and emotions. One day your body dies, because the right chemical reactions stop, and you end up decaying. People will have chemical reactions over your death and the cycle of chemical reactions will continue. Simple stoic strait forward premise. 

My question is, "is that true?" Is your love, anger, joy, happiness just chemical reactions? Do you have any control over your life or are all of your life's decisions just how you have evolved. If it isn't just chemistry then what are emotions and what are thoughts?

I believe that God is still miraculous in the daily workings of life. Knowing how things function doesn't remove the fact that God is doing it. God has made us to be physical, emotional and spiritual beings. All aspects of our being affect the other and the spiritual realm can not be proved by the physical because it holds different properties. Although it points to God and the spiritual affects both the physical and the mind. 

That's pretty much it, to be honest (except for the last paragraph). Not only are anger, joy, and happiness "just" chemical reactions (which can be seen in brain scans in predictable regions of the brain in all humans), but we're learning a lot more about the way the brain works in terms of us not having the degree of autonomous control over our instinctive reactions as we like to imagine we do. There's quite a lot of debate going on about to what degree we're in control of our own brains, so I'll leave that to the experts, but there's really no question that all of the things we once ascribed to the concept of a "soul" are in fact "simply" brain chemistry.

Of course, to whatever degree we have conscious control of ourselves, we should exercise that control in being better to one another, since we evolved as a social species capable of being moral actors (we also see moral actors in other intelligent, social species, as confirmed by scientific studies on that subject). The fact that it's "just" brain chemistry doesn't diminish the beauty or importance of our self-valuation of the products of these emotions and interactions with other humans, any more than knowing that the sun is just a fusion reaction at the heart of a huge ball of hydrogen diminishes the beauty of a sunset-- especially one viewed with your mate amid some hugs and tender kisses. We humans do and must assign values to the inanimate, the meaningless, but it doesn't diminish them because they have no innate value of their own. I have never understood why people think otherwise.

I even agree with your premise that (presuming God exists for the sake of argument) then "knowing how things function doesn't remove the fact that God is doing it", except that I don't think God has to use magic to make things happen, if the Creator set everything up (including our brain chemistry) to function naturally, from the very beginning.

Just because life is not inherently meaningful in some external, transcendental way does not make it utterly meaningless. A painting by a dead artist is 100% meaningless, in a literal sense: it's just smears of various-colored pigments, suspended in oil and scraped almost at random over a canvas. It has no value of its own... but human appreciation of that artwork is what gives it its value, and what gives the world a Picasso or a Van Gogh. It need not be things created by humans, either: the beauty of the Natural Bridge in the state park of the same name in Kentucky is awe-inspiring to see for yourself, but it was not made by anything other than time and erosion. And that's okay!

I can never figure out why people deny the human power to assign real meaning to things which do not possess meaning on their own. A rock by itself may have zero inherent meaning, but to a lonely child who makes it a "pet rock", it may have all the meaning in the world.

I believe that there is a need for peer review but the problem is what if the peers are wrong. Lets say all of the science is right but the interpretation is wrong. Your filters effect what you want to see or don't want to see. People don't like to be wrong and even if there is overwhelming evidence for the truth the fear of being rejected by peers may cause them to get in line instead of pushing against the system. 

The interpretation is often wrong, at least a little. That's why we only believe things to the degree they have been proved/demonstrated. That's why science is a process of continually questioning old ideas with new data and new potential interpretations (models) to fit those data. That's why we reward those who overturn old ideas and replace them with better ones. That's why we feel confident (as much as possible) in what we have demonstrated to be a functional explanation of natural phenomena. It's about what means are used to eliminate the bias, and see if the truth can be arrived at by more objective means via consensus.

The difference is that the religious are a group with a unified explanation pre-sorted and pre-ordered as they are being presented to them in the Holy Scriptures, which are unquestionable (to them), and therefore constitute a uniform filter that the whole group employs at all time. The scientists, on the other hand, only come with their basic human filters and prejudices, scattered across the entire spectrum of humanity, and they have no uniform ideological dogma to protect. A scientist from communist China is not going to agree with a scientist who is a Jesuit monk from Italy, and neither of them are going to agree with a Buddhist from the US Midwest, et cetera. They will all approach the methodology of the published paper with skepticism and will accept the conclusions of new papers only to the degree warranted-- and they will writer their own counter-papers to show the Italian monk is wrong, for instance, and why.

What makes me angriest, as a scientist by training, is to see groups who don't have a real explanatory model, just a story that claims to explain by magical means, taking that story and holding it up as if it is a plausible counter-explanation of equal credibility to the scientific models carefully constructed by groups of scientists who have no reason to agree with one another. They manipulate their audiences by the use of scientific-sounding authorities which are in fact misrepresentations of either what a real scientist said, or some stuffed shirt with a bad degree who tries to pretend to be an authority in order to fool most of the people (who won't pay attention to what real scientists have to say, or notice that the Authority being quoted is out of step with everyone else in the field), just so they can keep people from "falling away" into scientific thinking about the world, as if that is contrary to God.

It IS contrary to God as they (and the Iron Age Israelites) imagined it to be, true... but if there is in fact a Creator, then science is the best method of finding out the actions of that Creator, not the best imaginings of Iron Age goat herder priests.

Think of it: if evolution is correct, and we are "just" animals like every other nipple-having mammal on the planet, then mankind is the first animal to rise up enough to recognize his Creator (and in some cases to deny the same, heh) and give worship to the source of all life, of which he is an integral part. It means we are both animal and a transcendent being, which made us worthy of the Creator's notice, and love. To accept evolution as the mechanism of Creation, and our relationship with the rest of life on earth, does not diminish God or man.

[SofaKingHigh]

Quite outstanding prose Mr Surgeon, cap doffed.

[Cyberman]

Indeed. All I might add regarding peer review is that the peers can absolutely be wrong, or biased or whatever. However, the process, whereby the material is dissected and experiments repeated, is impartial.