Wilco and atheism

[bobbob1313]

SO if a creator demands a creator, does not the other theory demand some form of creator?

[ikol]

SO if a creator demands a creator, does not the other theory demand some form of creator?

 

Nah, just a suspension of the entire basis of science.

[Party @ the Moontower]

I'm still holding on to the fact that love ain't a bunch of chemical reactions

 

 

It seems that when one gets married the chemicals sorta lose their sweet stink, with less friendly smells like gas, kids, and the smell of bills taking over the scene.

 

Does asparagus change the smell of love?

 

I learned that when I reached puberty. Damned sheets...

 

So, you don't do it anymore?

[caliber66]

And I suspect that's the point of his argument. On some level, perhaps not even a conscious one, he knows it's going to be insulated against scientific knowledge for at least the remainder of our natural lives. And since he's the one who demands of atheism an answer to "the big question," that allows him to run into the comforting arms of Jesus, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, His Holiness My Neighbour Vinnie Delducca, etc.

I don't say that atheists have to have an answer for the creation of the universe (and you're welcome to address me directly, by the way). I do say that someone will have to satisfactorily explain the genesis of the universe and the (natural) provenance of all the matter and energy therein before I will renounce my belief in some higher power.

[Party @ the Moontower]

why would anyone care if someone else had faith? what's it to you?

 

I have no faith in faith, but some people of faith are sad I have no faith, and feel I am so lost without it.

[Party @ the Moontower]

I personally don't like any time anyone writes off someone else's personal beliefs. You can dislike organized religion, and all of the trappings that come along with it, but if someone just has personal faith, how does it affect you? Does your personal lack of faith affects other's day to day life?

 

Seriously. Why does someone have to be right or wrong? I'm an atheist, but I'm ok with other people believing. It simply doesn't affect me.

I'm with you on this, unless it's shoved in my face. Telling me I'm damned to hell, which I don't believe in anyway. I live in the bible belt of Missouri, 100,000 churches within 100 miles.

[uncool2pillow]

I don't say that atheists have to have an answer for the creation of the universe (and you're welcome to address me directly, by the way). I do say that someone will have to satisfactorily explain the genesis of the universe and the (natural) provenance of all the matter and energy therein before I will renounce my belief in some higher power.

Well said!

[lost highway]

I don't say that atheists have to have an answer for the creation of the universe (and you're welcome to address me directly, by the way). I do say that someone will have to satisfactorily explain the genesis of the universe and the (natural) provenance of all the matter and energy therein before I will renounce my belief in some higher power.

 

I don't understand why these things become mutually exclusive in these discussions. The discovery of a heliocentric solar system at one point was nearly as great a leap as any kind of 'genesis' revelation modern physics could some day conjure. I don't find any of these things to be at odds with a reasonable persons conception of God. If it is, they are horribly due for some metaphysical restructuring. In other words: Their idea of God is dumb.

 

It's like those anti-evolution, don't believe in dinosaurs folks. They make God look so dumb. If you backlash everytime the universe presents knowledge that doesn't gel with what you had going, then obviously you have a shallow cosmology to begin with.

[fineartoflife]

This has become an argument over who is smarter, and quite frankly, I don't care.

[bobbob1313]

This has become an argument over who is smarter, and quite frankly, I don't care.

 

I can safely say neither myself nor The Maker are the smartest people in this argument.

[bjorn_skurj]

The best argument from reason I have ever read for the divinity of the Nazarene is the first part of C.S. Lewis' "Mere Christianity."

[bobbob1313]

Why should people have to justify their beliefs to people on the internets?

[TheMaker]

SO if a creator demands a creator, does not the other theory demand some form of creator?

 

No, because you're asking a question rooted in a false premise, and I suspect you're being disingenuous in asking it (although that might be giving you too much credit). The existence of a creator doesn't demand a creator per se; it merely demands some form of proof, like anything else. You have already arrived at a conclusion - that the universe demands a creator - and are insisting that skeptical inquiry honour it by providing either corroborating evidence or, I guess, blatant supposition. That's not what science does. Science gathers evidence, analyzes it, and only then arrives at a conclusion. Hypotheticals enter the picture all the time, obviously, but none that I can think of is quite so presumptuous or asinine as asking "Hey, do you think the universe definitely has a single creator, and that we can and must identify said creator now?" Absolutely nothing in the natural world tips in the direction of that hypothesis. It's been said that history's greatest scientists are the ones who ask the best, or most intuitive, questions. The question you're asking is not even an interesting one, to be perfectly blunt. You're just grasping at a syllogism, and it strikes me as pretty ridiculous. The only reason you're even asking the question in the first place is because this stupid notion of a "creator" has been banged into humanity's head like a steel fucking rail over the course of several millennia.

 

I don't say that atheists have to have an answer for the creation of the universe (and you're welcome to address me directly' date=' by the way). I do say that someone will have to satisfactorily explain the genesis of the universe and the (natural) provenance of all the matter and energy therein before I will renounce my belief in some higher power.[/quote']

 

And exactly where is the logic in that? I'm not being sarcastic, honestly. It's just that I can find none in your statements. You might just as well say "unless someone can explain why cancer is robbing so many good men and women of their lives, I will not renounce my belief in some higher power," or "until someone can explain the relative stability of our solar system, I will not renounce my belief in a higher power." These were scientifically unaddressable conundrums once, just like yours happens to be today, and they too are rooted in physics. They may not seem as daunting or unanswerable as your pet conundrum, but that's only because science has progressed, after many hundreds of years, to such a stage that it can now satisfactorily address the underlying problems that once prevented us from understanding the nature of these apparent conundrums.

 

You're feeding science a totally irrational challenge, drawing an outlandish correlation between the existence of the physical universe and an imagined "creator" of some sort. Classic argumentum ad consequentiam; you've got your conclusion, now you just need your corroborating evidence. Man, that must be a real handy way of looking at the universe! But I'm afraid you can approach your little challenge using nearly any variable - "until science proves X, where X represents a ponderable that cannot be satisfactorily addressed by science at this time, I refuse to renounce my belief in a higher power" - and you'd still be thrusting the cart way the fuck in front of the horse. The nuts and bolts of your challenge are immaterial; the nature of it is what matters, and it just doesn't wash, dude. I'm truly sorry about that.

 

Look at the things man has shrugged off and ascribed to "god's will" over the years, simply because we had exhausted our limited resources in search of answers to questions that had long proved elusive. And look at how much of it we can explain today, with the sum total of human knowledge informing our investigative process. All you're doing is asking the biggest question you can conceive of, caliber66, and holding it to science. I've said it before in this thread, but it clearly bears repeating: atheism is fundamentally unlike religion in every way, and it is not bound by your god delusion. It is not methadone for believers who suddenly realize they're standing on incredibly shaky intellectual ground. Once again, skeptical inquiry is proven humble, whereas spirituality is outed as being fueled by nothing more than fragile human ego. On a long enough timeline, I remain confident that science will be able to explain the origin of matter in the universe. And it irks me that you and I will both be long dead when it happens, cal, if that's really what it's going to take for you to start thinking for yourself.

 

I can safely say neither myself nor The Maker are the smartest people in this argument.

 

Yeah' date=' Beltmann posted a few times, didn't he? I've never met the guy, but he acquits himself beautifully over the internets. He is automatically the smartest guy in any VC thread, in my opinion.

 

Why should people have to justify their beliefs to people on the internets?

 

Why shouldn't they? People are people. When we step away from our computers, we're all just people off the internets.

[bobbob1313]

Why should people have to justify their beliefs to people in general? I just don't see what good can come from someone's deeply held religious or personal beliefs. If you think it is just because it has been "hammered into their skulls like a fucking steel train spike" or whatever, that's fine. Where the belief came from isn't as important as what the person gets out of the belief, in my opinion.

 

And as to your response to my "universe begetting a creator" post:

 

It was more like, if you are going to quesiton where a creator came from, then why can't someone else question where everything came from? In this case, since you are the one asserting that God does not exist, and trying (very hard, it seems) to prove to everyone else that he does not exist, the burden of proof does in fact fall on you. Nobody here is necessarily trying to prove that God does exist. They are defending their beliefs against your attacks. You are the one on the attack in this situation.

 

I just don't see how someone believe that a higher power created everything has any fucking bearing on your life or your belief that it came from nothing. If it comforts people and brings them some (you might argue empty) satisfaction to their life, what is it to you?

 

And you never responded to the Bjorn's assertion that a need to believe in a higher power might be hard wired into our brains. It makes sense, or at least, it makes sense that we might look somewhere to explain the things that don't make sense to us using whatever facts or logic are at our disposal. Nothing about science can deny the very existence of god, so why can't you just let them coexist peacefully? Sure, science can disprove certain assertions in the human written bible, but nothing about science can prove or disprove the existence of god, so I don't see why they have to be treated as hostile.

 

And don't use the argument that religious people try to force their beliefs on you, because two people engaging in close minded douche baggery doesn't absolve either person of their part in it.

 

And you're argument might not fall on completely deaf ears if you weren't such a fucking condescending prick.

 

Seriously, this is what I don't get about this argument from both sides. Why can't you just believe what you want, and I'll believe what I want and leave it at that? Fundamentally, I agree with you. I see religious as not much more than a security blanket for most people, a way to justify the world around them and make it seem more orderly. But that isn't necessarily a bad thing. I think it's a very good thing for most people's sanity. And I'm perfectly content with knowing that I have my belief and other people have theirs, and that's a good thing. Fucking Caliber isn't going to be going to war over religion anytime soon, so what the fuck does it matter what he personally believes?

 

And if science does prove the origins of the universe, then what? People will still believe that God put that in motion. Because people want to believe in God. And again, for the umpteenth fucking time in this post, I must ask how does that affect you in even the smallest way? Other people's perception of the truth doesn't change either your perception of it or the actual truth itself. Just like you're disbelief in God won't change anyone's mind on the matter, other people's belief in God won't change anything that you believe.

 

Damn, man. I've been called "J Nick Jr" (as an insult, I suppose), but man The Maker has got to be like the fore bearer of the whole god damned family line then. At least J Nick isn't quite as combative...

[TheMaker]

Why should people have to justify their beliefs to people in general?

 

Because some beliefs are ridiculous on their face. It's just that simple (WILCO CONTENT YOU GUYS HOLY COW). As a society' date=' we have long held religion and spirituality above the argumentative fray, partly because religion professes to be unfalsifiable, and perhaps also because spirituality is something that is regarded by many as a "personal belief." In questioning it, we always run the risk of offending certain people's sensibilities. So respecting it out of hand is a great position to take, I suppose, if you prefer being nice to not being an idiot.

 

We're taught to respect people's beliefs about god, but if you think about how silly that is, you might just start to laugh (or cry). We aren't taught to respect people's beliefs about physics, or astronomy, or anything else that deals with the physical world, for that matter. If somebody stated with the utmost confidence that they believed a celestial teapot orbited the sun between Earth and Mars, and if they attempted to qualify this belief by adding that the teapot is too small to be detected by even our most powerful telescopes, you would correctly regard this person as a total goddamned nutbar. His belief is a stupid one, unsupported by evidence, and we are quite right to call a spade a spade.

 

If you encounter somebody who is convinced that saying a few Latin words over his breakfast cereal is literally going to turn it into the body of Julius Caesar or Elvis, it's a very safe bet that this person has lost his mind. But if he believes that a cracker becomes the body of Jesus at the mass, he's very likely perfectly sane; he just happen to be a Catholic. But the beliefs are equivalent, and they are equivalently crazy.

 

I don't know about you, but I am not going to be shamed by superstition into respecting patently ridiculous beliefs. I hope we can at least put [i']this[/i] question to bed now. Call me a fucking asshole, if it makes you feel better about my willingness to pick away at the festering scab that is religious thought. Really, it's okay with me. I'd rather my beliefs were insensitive than absurd.

 

It was more like, if you are going to quesiton where a creator came from, then why can't someone else question where everything came from?

 

Oh, they can question it all they like. I never said it was unwise to abstain from questioning anything, just that some questions are stupid and rooted in conclusions that aren't supported by evidence. There's an appreciable difference there, I should think.

 

I'm sure that most people, regardless of their religious affiliation (or lack thereof), have pondered the riddle of existence to varying degrees of intensity over the course of human history. What irks me is that people seem so eager to project their wildest notions onto the universe, as if wishing or "feeling" something is enough to make it so. It's fun to think about a higher power, sure; for a rational mind to actually make the jump to believing in one without any evidence whatsoever, though, is just ridiculous. To make that jump using fabricated or folkloric pseudo-evidence is unfathomable to me. Stump-dumb as it may be, however, crap like Christianity and Islam continues to thrive in the modern era.

 

Nobody here is necessarily trying to prove that God does exist. They are defending their beliefs against your attacks. You are the one on the attack in this situation.

 

Nobody is offering proof of god's existence because none exists. It's a real open-and-shut sort of affair, I'm afraid. What people seem to be arguing for is the viability of religious thought, which in reality is nothing more than a string of half-apologies (in the form of religious moderation, agnosticism, hippie-dippy pseudo-religion, etc.), vague metaphysics, and intellectual self-censorship. It's bullshit, it's stupid, and I don't have it in me to muster any respect for it whatsoever.

 

Look, the onus is always on the believers, simply because they are the ones professing belief in something that cannot be manifestly known, yet they claim is knowable. Something that is beyond the corporeal, but which often makes explicit truth claims that cross over into the physical world. These paradoxes are silly and absurd, and yet they must be reconciled if religious claims are to be taken seriously. The material world is known. It's real, it's proven, it's testable, it holds up under intense scrutiny. This god nonsense? It's just a jumbled mess of half-ideas and mostly crazy vagaries. A few people have admitted in the course of this discussion that their beliefs are illogical. That's great, because now I'm finished with them as far as this conversation is concerned. I can no longer take them seriously, because they have advertised, under no real duress whatsoever (because for fuck's sake, I'm ultimately not that awesome at being right or being a bully), that they are willing to believe absolutely anything. End of argument, really. Where the hell can you go from there?!

 

I just don't see how someone believe that a higher power created everything has any fucking bearing on your life or your belief that it came from nothing. If it comforts people and brings them some (you might argue empty) satisfaction to their life, what is it to you?

 

Because I'm a mean sonofabitch who gives more of a shit about what's real than what makes people happy. Good enough?

 

No, I'm just kidding. Er, kind of...

 

Banning stem cell research, outlawing abortion, increasingly deadly Jihadist activity, unrest in the Middle East, the displacement of and discrimination against indigenous peoples, forced conversion, ultimately just the general curtailment of human curiosity and scientific progress. These things concern me. They concern you, too. (And if they don't, Jesus fuck, what the shit is wrong with you?)

 

And you never responded to the Bjorn's assertion that a need to believe in a higher power might be hard wired into our brains. It makes sense

 

Yes, it makes perfect sense to you and Bjorn. Of course it does, because it allows you to point to atheists and regard them as "The Other" to an even more intense degree than you already do. "What's up with this sociopath, and why isn't the god part of his brain working?" It's a cute idea, but it doesn't wash with me, simply because at no time in my life have I ever believed in anything like a god.

 

For the record, though, I am perfectly willing to consider the idea that, yes, there is a "god part" of my brain, and it is defective, but it certainly seems like an incredible stretch to me. Given the mutual incompatibility of the world's religions, their obvious man-made origins, the lack of proof to support any of them... it's just not likely. However, given human curiosity, the persistence of "the big question" throughout human history, the startling number of people in the world who claim to have experienced euphoric revelations that have gone unexplained by medical science, perhaps there's something going on in some part of the brain that we've yet to explore. We live in a universe where even the basic quality of ninety-something percent of all matter is unknown to us, and the majority of our own planet's surface remains unexplored. Who knows what percentage of our potential we've realized? I'm willing to admit that the idea of an omnipotent god is something primordial that people are confusing with naive concepts informed by nothing more than their own limited understanding of the universe. Sure, why not? But right now, the idea of a walkin', talkin' god-man is just stupid.

 

Nothing about science can deny the very existence of god, so why can't you just let them coexist peacefully? Sure, science can disprove certain assertions in the human written bible, but nothing about science can prove or disprove the existence of god, so I don't see why they have to be treated as hostile.

 

1) Religion: ridiculous on its face. Doesn't make any sense at all, and 2) Guilt by association. If the justifications are bullshit, it stands to reason that so too is the belief. I treat religion with the same hostility that I reserve for the rantings of my neighbourhood derelict (the one that treats a spoon like a walkie-talkie and insists that the moon landing was a hoax). Again, we should not entertain nonsense simply because we are afraid of turning our backs on tradition or hurting people's feelings.

 

And you're argument might not fall on completely deaf ears if you weren't such a fucking condescending prick.

 

Yay! On that note, I'm going to sleep, where God makes me a viking. DISPROVE IT, MOTHERFUCKERS! THE ONUS IS TOTALLY ON YOU!

[caliber66]

And exactly where is the logic in that? I'm not being sarcastic, honestly. It's just that I can find none in your statements. You might just as well say "unless someone can explain why cancer is robbing so many good men and women of their lives, I will not renounce my belief in some higher power," or "until someone can explain the relative stability of our solar system, I will not renounce my belief in a higher power." These were scientifically unaddressable conundrums once, just like yours happens to be today, and they too are rooted in physics. They may not seem as daunting or unanswerable as your pet conundrum, but that's only because science has progressed, after many hundreds of years, to such a stage that it can now satisfactorily address the underlying problems that once prevented us from understanding the nature of these apparent conundrums.

I'm afraid I don't see it the same way, and you're still preaching. I absolutely agree that it is possible that science will develop a satisfactory answer for my question, but the existence of the universe is enough for me to believe that it was created, until it can be demonstrated otherwise. I understand that this is not enough for you, and that's fine.

 

Look at the things man has shrugged off and ascribed to "god's will" over the years, simply because we had exhausted our limited resources in search of answers to questions that had long proved elusive. And look at how much of it we can explain today, with the sum total of human knowledge informing our investigative process. All you're doing is asking the biggest question you can conceive of, caliber66, and holding it to science. I've said it before in this thread, but it clearly bears repeating: atheism is fundamentally unlike religion in every way, and it is not bound by your god delusion. It is not methadone for believers who suddenly realize they're standing on incredibly shaky intellectual ground. Once again, skeptical inquiry is proven humble, whereas spirituality is outed as being fueled by nothing more than fragile human ego. On a long enough timeline, I remain confident that science will be able to explain the origin of matter in the universe. And it irks me that you and I will both be long dead when it happens, cal, if that's really what it's going to take for you to start thinking for yourself.

I'm sure you could possibly be more condescending, but you'd probably have to try pretty hard. I have looked at my choice critically, and, thinking for myself, I am comfortable with my belief. Every time you mention the word "humble" with regard to your position, I chuckle a bit.

[Central Scrutinizer]

Not really, no. You might want to review my comment about how science is fueled by curiosity, not ego, and how rigorous the scientific process actually is. Religion is just pabulum, fit for babies. That's all she wrote.

"Science is fueled by curiosity, not ego." Gee, the top research universities, the top tech firms and countless patent holders can wrap themselves up in that one.

[Central Scrutinizer]

I asked the deacon at my church to clarify the whole creation thing for me.

 

He explained that although the bible says that the world was created in a week, that doesn't necessarily mean that it was created in 7 days. Methuselah lived 969 years according to the bible but we all know that isn't humanly possible. Sometimes things had other meanings in the time that the bible was written. He thinks that the age translated to how "great" a person was or how important a person was in society.

 

He explained that the first day may have been the whole "big bang" thing. Billions of years later, when the dinosaurs roamed the Earth was a "few days" later in biblical terms. Perhaps when Adam was created he was a Neanderthal and not human like we are. He doesn't discredit evolution, but believes it's still all the work of God.

 

I can live with that explanation. Science and religion in harmony...

You have to consider the basis of the old testament. It was an oral history of a people, told and retold until it could be written down (and written down and revised, and argued over). As a "god-breathed" document, I would personally find hard to buy, knowing how people like to muck up the works. But it is a historical record of a people, and their morality (and immorality, woo hoo!) and how they exist and thrive). There's no science experiments. There's no big bang recipe. Trying to apply science to it is like trying to put rabbit ears on a duck.

[Central Scrutinizer]

I don't understand why these things become mutually exclusive in these discussions. The discovery of a heliocentric solar system at one point was nearly as great a leap as any kind of 'genesis' revelation modern physics could some day conjure. I don't find any of these things to be at odds with a reasonable persons conception of God. If it is, they are horribly due for some metaphysical restructuring. In other words: Their idea of God is dumb.

 

It's like those anti-evolution, don't believe in dinosaurs folks. They make God look so dumb. If you backlash everytime the universe presents knowledge that doesn't gel with what you had going, then obviously you have a shallow cosmology to begin with.

If our pursuit in life is the basic questions: "who am I?" "why am I here?", anything that brings us closer to that answer is the goal, and brings us comfort (unless the answer is "42").

 

I can safely say neither myself nor The Maker are the smartest people in this argument.

Damn, bob(2) and I had you in the pool.

[Good Old Neon]

Given the vast volume of water that has passed beneath the bridge in my absence, plus also the fact that y

[Good Old Neon]

The Dragon In My Garage

by Carl Sagan

 

"A fire-breathing dragon lives in my garage"

 

Suppose (I'm following a group therapy approach by the psychologist Richard Franklin) I seriously make such an assertion to you. Surely you'd want to check it out, see for yourself. There have been innumerable stories of dragons over the centuries, but no real evidence. What an opportunity!

 

"Show me," you say. I lead you to my garage. You look inside and see a ladder, empty paint cans, an old tricycle -- but no dragon.

 

"Where's the dragon?" you ask.

 

"Oh, she's right here," I reply, waving vaguely. "I neglected to mention that she's an invisible dragon."

 

You propose spreading flour on the floor of the garage to capture the dragon's footprints.

 

"Good idea," I say, "but this dragon floats in the air."

 

Then you'll use an infrared sensor to detect the invisible fire.

 

"Good idea, but the invisible fire is also heatless."

 

You'll spray-paint the dragon and make her visible.

 

"Good idea, but she's an incorporeal dragon and the paint won't stick." And so on. I counter every physical test you propose with a special explanation of why it won't work.

 

Now, what's the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If there's no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists? Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true. Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value they may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder. What I'm asking you to do comes down to believing, in the absence of evidence, on my say-so. The only thing you've really learned from my insistence that there's a dragon in my garage is that something funny is going on inside my head. You'd wonder, if no physical tests apply, what convinced me. The possibility that it was a dream or a hallucination would certainly enter your mind. But then, why am I taking it so seriously? Maybe I need help. At the least, maybe I've seriously underestimated human fallibility. Imagine that, despite none of the tests being successful, you wish to be scrupulously open-minded. So you don't outright reject the notion that there's a fire-breathing dragon in my garage. You merely put it on hold. Present evidence is strongly against it, but if a new body of data emerge you're prepared to examine it and see if it convinces you. Surely it's unfair of me to be offended at not being believed; or to criticize you for being stodgy and unimaginative -- merely because you rendered the Scottish verdict of "not proved."

 

Imagine that things had gone otherwise. The dragon is invisible, all right, but footprints are being made in the flour as you watch. Your infrared detector reads off-scale. The spray paint reveals a jagged crest bobbing in the air before you. No matter how skeptical you might have been about the existence of dragons -- to say nothing about invisible ones -- you must now acknowledge that there's something here, and that in a preliminary way it's consistent with an invisible, fire-breathing dragon.

 

Now another scenario: Suppose it's not just me. Suppose that several people of your acquaintance, including people who you're pretty sure don't know each other, all tell you that they have dragons in their garages -- but in every case the evidence is maddeningly elusive. All of us admit we're disturbed at being gripped by so odd a conviction so ill-supported by the physical evidence. None of us is a lunatic. We speculate about what it would mean if invisible dragons were really hiding out in garages all over the world, with us humans just catching on. I'd rather it not be true, I tell you. But maybe all those ancient European and Chinese myths about dragons weren't myths at all.

 

Gratifyingly, some dragon-size footprints in the flour are now reported. But they're never made when a skeptic is looking. An alternative explanation presents itself. On close examination it seems clear that the footprints could have been faked. Another dragon enthusiast shows up with a burnt finger and attributes it to a rare physical manifestation of the dragon's fiery breath. But again, other possibilities exist. We understand that there are other ways to burn fingers besides the breath of invisible dragons. Such "evidence" -- no matter how important the dragon advocates consider it -- is far from compelling. Once again, the only sensible approach is tentatively to reject the dragon hypothesis, to be open to future physical data, and to wonder what the cause might be that so many apparently sane and sober people share the same strange delusion.

[austrya]

You have to consider the basis of the old testament. It was an oral history of a people, told and retold until it could be written down (and written down and revised, and argued over). As a "god-breathed" document, I would personally find hard to buy, knowing how people like to muck up the works. But it is a historical record of a people, and their morality (and immorality, woo hoo!) and how they exist and thrive). There's no science experiments. There's no big bang recipe. Trying to apply science to it is like trying to put rabbit ears on a duck.

 

 

I agree and that's the point he was trying to make. That people shouldn't take the old testament so literally. He wasn't directly trying to apply science to it, just showing how it might have worked together, if that's what someone wants to believe.

[mfwahl]

The Elegant Universe is awesome. Seriously trippy shit. I tried to read the book, but it made my brain hurt.

 

As far as any religious beliefs I have, I like hearing Jospeh Campbell talk about myths. I do find many things in different religions cathartic and transcendent but I just don't have the faith to say one thing is true. I recommend watching Bill Moyers' interview with Joseph Campbell that aired on PBS a long time ago. Talks about everything from the Garden of Eden to Luke Skywalker.

[MattZ]

Yeah, Beltmann posted a few times, didn't he? I've never met the guy, but he acquits himself beautifully over the internets. He is automatically the smartest guy in any VC thread, in my opinion.

 

It never fails. These threads get going and the only thing that people can agree on is that Beltmann is one smart dude. Cracks me up to no end.

 

I am not an unbiased observer here -- I fall in TheMaker's camp (although my camp isn't quite so abrasive). Thanks to everyone for the thoughtful responses. This has been fun to read.

[Good Old Neon]

I agree and that's the point he was trying to make. That people shouldn't take the old testament so literally. He wasn't directly trying to apply science to it, just showing how it might have worked together, if that's what someone wants to believe.

 

But why