I agree.



Same here.

This guy's right. There is an increase in fatal landslides in Chine this year.

Sorry. I read "the earth would just keep going downhill".

How can a world go downhill? It has to be on the top of a hill.

What's "hill" in a cosmological sense?

You mean moral downhilling? You can't prove that as much as I can't prove it's not happening.

God losing ground? People don't read the Bible right, that's the basic and biggest problem.

Not quite. Science does not prove anything, but it provides evidence to support atheism. It also makes predictions, which all have more to do with the ideals of atheism than with theism.

Science does contraindicate (quite wrongly) the teachings of the Bible.

Atheism is not teaching anything, and it has one and only one tenet. It is not a system of philosophy; its sole function is to reject those philosophies that use the figurehead of one or more gods. It's only tenet is "there is no deity or a major ruling supernatural force". You can't argue against that with scientific methods, or scientific theory.

You can argue against religions and their tenets, on the basis of empirical evidence, an nothing more. Empirical evidence has unearthed many-many contradictions with the teachings of the Bible. (Not because the Bible is wrong but because people don't read it right, with the right attitude.) In this sense science does support (but not prove) atheism, inasmuch as science finds discrepancies between the real, observable world, and how it has been described in the Bible. Science does not support atheism directly. It does not speak against God. But it shows how scriptures have many inaccuracies in them that were supposed to be absolute truths, uttered by God.

Atheism of course mines this resource given to it by science and relies heavily on it for attracting popular support.

In this sense science offers some benefits to atheists, but it proves nothing.

There will be a time when science will support religions. I don't know how, I am not a prophet. But it will, because what goes up must come down. I predict that in the future of man there will be darkness again, when people will all believe in one God, worship Him, and be eternally happy in their hearts, but for the wrong reasons. Then a smart alec will come along, say that "hey! sex's good, not evil what is this? Why deny it from ourselves," then religion will diversify, thought too, enlightenment will follow and everyone will be sad and miserable and hungry, for all the wrong reasons.

I, for one, haven't got laid in 12 years, and I blame atheism for it. Not God.

We will have to disagree there. The main reason that religion as started to fall is Science. At this point, I don't see it happening that Science starts to agree with religion.

Doesn't the depend on what religion you're talking about?

When the western scientists discovered Quantum Mechanics, the Eastern Mystics politely bowed their heads and softly said, "Have we not told you so?"

There is nothing in conflict with Eastern Mysticism and Science and there never has been anything in conflict. Not evolution, not the Earth revolving around the sun, not the discovery of the Big Bang, not Quantum Mechanics, not even the possiblity of their being parallel universes or an infinite multiverse. In fact, the Eastern Mystics would just shrug their shoulders to all of that and say, "So?"

There's nothing at all in science that disagrees with Eastern Mysticism in terms of it's fundamental philosophy.

It's only the Christian Bible that is at odds with science. It's the Christians who were up in arms about the Earth not being at the center of the universe. It's the Christians who are upset about the discovery of evolution, etc. It's the Christians who need to have Jesus born of a virgin, and raising from the dead, along with a bunch of dead saints. It's the Christians who need to have a World-wide flood occur at some point while mankind was living on the Earth. It's the Chrisitans who need to have Moses parting the Nile. It's the Christians who need to have Lot's wife turn to a pilar of salt, etc.

Why talk about religion in general when it's actually these very specific mythologies that are in conflict with science?

I'm not even convinced that the Wanka Tanka of the American Indians was in conflict with science. That was more of a pantheistic type philosophy too.

So why pit science against all religions when no such conflict exists?

I don't see where the pantheistic view of religion has 'fallen' at all. It most certainly hasn't 'fallen' in terms of scientific discoveries. In fact, Albert Einstein basically suggested that Buddhism should be adopted by the scientific community.

"The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend personal God and avoid dogma and theology. Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things natural and spiritual as a meaningful unity. Buddhism answers this description. If there is any religion that could cope with modern scientific needs it would be Buddhism." - Albert Einstein

You could be right. I don't know the future. But I know that a doctor told my mom to start smoking when mom was 14, to lose weight. And I saw a Woody Allen film in which 200 years into the future, a medical researcher guy gives Woody a cig to smoke and says, "here, this will calm you down". In between, science tells us it's bad to smoke. Or take the hydrogenated vegetable oil fiasco. Half of the heart-attacks could have been prevented on this continent in the last fifty years if doctors and med researchers did not push margarine on people as "better for you than butter".

I think you're more likely right than I am. But I doubt you see into the future. In a couple of thousands of years science might not be a crack in the wall of, but the strongest bastion on the fortress of religion. More likely not. But it's possible.

Then again, I may be biassed. I am a Christian.

For once, I agree with what you said here, with no reservations.

Knowledge is ultimately faith. Human knowledge.

The problem starts on whom to believe. If you have to choose between two truths, and neither is more true than the other, meaning that neither is absolutely true with no chance of it being wrong, but both could be true but not for sure, then which do you choose to believe?

This is the crux.

The only empirical truth available to man is "cogito ergo sum", that is, I think therefore I am. It's true in every individual's case who can think. The existence of everything else cannot be proven to an individual.

But it's very important to see that "I exist for sure, nothing else can be sure to exist" is not equivalent to "I exist for sure, and nothing else exists, that's for sure."

Other things can still exist. It's a degree of certainty that is the difference, to which an individual can be assured that something exists. That the individual exists, from the the thinking individual's point of view, has a likelihood of 100%, that is, absolute certainty. Does the Sun exist? God? Trees? My wife? I could go around and stick a percentage sign on everything else, outside of my thinking mind, and attach my personal value of certainty to which these things exist. (I might do this one day, after I retire.) I am 100%. Nothing else is 100%.

But it's up to me to decide which "else" has how high a believability to exist. Some people put 99% for the sun, 99% to pain, and 99% to God, truncating the values to the nearest full percentage for the sake of simplicity and of speeding up the discussion.

Most people attach the % value to how convincing they find the idea.

Science has rendered God very likely not to exist. Not by disproving it, but by proving that older explanations to explain phenomena needed God, and newer, scientific explanations don't need god to explain the same phenomenon. Furthermore, science is more of an organized system of belief, it jives more with the logical minds of thinking humans. Religion, Christianity in particular, but all other religions invariably, explained things by saying "God made it this way" or "god wants it this way" or "god only knows why it's this way."

Science's main advantage over the God-gap types of explanations is that it creates predictions that people can depend on. "God made it rain today" will state nothing on whether it would rain the next day. If you have a long way to walk to your field to harvest the wheat, it would help you more to know whether it's worth going out, in case it won't rain, or not worth going out to the field, since it's going to rain all day, and you can't harvest when it's coming down.

This is the single most deadly type of mechanism that makes people to turn away from God. It's not the evil communists, not the evil atheists, not the heathen, not the pagan; it's the fact that we can support our lives and our children's lives more dependably if we listen to the scientists than if we listen to the priests.

People are, among other things, sensitive beings. They don't like being lied to, they don't like being betrayed. If a person INSISTS that God will help him with the harvest, because he believes with a high certainty that God will hold the rain back on harvest day, and his neighbour relies on science's prediction, then the pious is more likely to turn away from God when he sees his own children die of hunger, than the fat science-reliant farmer, who still believes in God (why not?) but used science to fatten his larder, and thus does not feel he's been betrayed. The guy who stuck with God with a strong faith, and his health, wealth and family falls to ruins due to that, IS going to take it personally, and IS more likely to turn his back on religion than the fat farmer.

God made Science and saw that it was good. Science in turn did not disprove God because God is not meassurable not even probabalistically.

Hm. Did God make (create) science (knowledge)?

If yes, then there had been no knowledge before God created it.

Could God have been absolutely, 100% ignorant for eternity to a point when he actually created knowledge?

Or had He had the knowledge ahead of time? In that case he did not create knowledge.

It is most likely that knowledge was part of God since eternity.

The know-how to do something is dependent on knowledge. God may have had infinite power to create, but creation also requires knowledge of the know-how of the creation process.

So a more important question is how could God create anything before he knew how to create? This means that knowledge must be acquired before creation can happen; and the original post said that knowledge was created. This is absurd, so it could not have happened that way.

I therefore reject the assertion that God made science.

This is one of those things that the Bible recorded right, by not saying in Genesis that God created knowledge.

"Whew," say two hundred archbishops in the Vatican.

existence beyond mind and/or faith

Your belief in "spirit", as you say, is nothing at all like any scientific theory, except in the fact that at the present time, strings can't be proven, in String Theory. Other than that, your belief is a faith, just like a christian's. Things like String Theory are based on math and science. There is no math or science which points to a "spirit". Belief in a spirit is just wishfull thinking and like most wishfull thinking, is an anathema to actual scientists and scientific principals.

Why don't you show me the math that shows spirit is a real thing and not a fantasy? I've seen the math on String Theory...

Ok, just to save time, let me start off your rebuttal. I didn't burst your bubble. I'm stupid. I just don't understand. You study spirit in the same way scientists study String Theory--by thinking about it, so there is no math.

exactily!!

Hate to break it to you, but love can be measured. It is merely a complex set of chemical reactions. It can be measured, quite acurately(unlike my spelling), too. It can also be induced in a person by adding certain biological chemicals or by applying certain magnetic fields to specific parts of the brain.

Any belief system precludes the ability to see things as they are. Science does not support Mysticism, Eastern or otherwise. And Einstein, though a very great intellect, was not always right.

Welcome back. And I missed your wit!

Hate to break it to you, but you're confusing love with lust or infatuation. Love is not measurable by any physical means. To believe that it is, is to do nothing other than display a compelte ignorance of the very concept.

If you think I'm going to give your opinions more merit than Albert Einstein's, then all I can say is don't hurt yourself when you fall off your pedestal.

In fact Steven Hawking said it very well also, when he asked the following question:

“Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?” – Steven Hawking

Science is truly nothing more than a mathematical description of what we actually see happening before our very senses. That’s it. Period Amen. That’s all that science is. It’s nothing more than this, and can never be anything more than this based on its very method of inquiry.

So science is extremely limited in what it can even make statements about. To even compare science with genuine knowledge is to show a total ignorance of what science even is.

Both Einstein and Hawking, as well as many other scientists, have revealed that their minds truly are capable of grasping concepts that go far beyond what science can even grapple with.

So all you’re displaying to me is a completely ignorance of the very capabilities and limitations of science.

If you think science can even begin to encompass all that can be known, then you truly are living in a very limited cerebral box indeed.

It’s true that science can be used to disprove certain false beliefs. (i.e. The notion that the Earth is the center of the universe, or that mankind hasn’t evolved from primates, etc.) Science has indeed shown that precisely the opposite is true.

However, to use these observations as an excuse to get overly-cocky and start running around proclaiming that science can ultimately be used to disprove any notion of spirit that can be conceived of, is nothing short of irresponsible ludicrous arrogance.

Not only has science not even come close to making any such observations, but to even suggest that it might potentially be used in such a way in the future would be nothing more than an act of totally blind faith on the part of the person who is making such an absurd assumption.

Any attempt to use science to support or push for an atheistic agenda, is truly despicable. It’s a totally false notion that is not, and cannot even be, supported from a scientific point of view.

It’s an abuse and an insult to the very discipline of science to even imply such a thing. There is nothing scientific about such claims, and as I’ve already pointed out, the true giants of science do not even support such a notion.

Thanks, Archimedes. I turned to Christianity from having been a staunch atheist.

I practice my own version of Christianity. It is quite a maverick of an approach. I believe the Bible and I read it as it is written. It makes much more sense now than before, with all of those Bible-scholars bending it out of shape, to prove some absolutes that are not absolutes at all, since they are actually false, or at any rate completely contradicting the Word. But them scholars still call them absolutes, because their pay depends on it.

I was not confusing anything. While love has been a great mystery, it's been de-mysterfied, to coin a phrase.

If anything, I'm scientific spiritualist. I believe in spirit in the say way that a string theorist believes in strings, or a quantum physicists believes in a quantum field. No more, no less.

Anyone who truly understands my position on these boards will gladly confirm that I have confessed time and time again to being agnostic, and that all of my investigations into the the posibility of spirit do indeed including very rigorous methods akin to those used in the physical sciences, albeit necessarily modified to address non-physical issues.

In fact, if science can be said to support anything at all, the only thing it can be used to support is agnosticism. We simply don't yet know the answers to these things. To suggest in any way that science should be seen as support for atheism (A firm rejection of any theism), is truly a misreprentation of science. Science couldn't even work if it took that stance on every topic.

And my example with string theory shows this. If string theorists weren't even permitted to hypothesize the existence of string BEFORE they can prove their existence, then no scientist could even work on such a 'theory'.

Science is always hypothesizing the existence of things before they can be proven. The hypothesis that there may very well be an underlying spiritual nature to the unvierse is no different from any other hypothesis. And I would personally argue that there are indeed many reasons and indications that warrant such a hypothesis.

So as far as I'm concerned, approaching spirituality from a scientific point of view is not only doable, but it may very well even prove to be quite fruitful in the end.