The answer to Evolution vs. Intelligent Design
POSTED BY: BadgersHat
UPDATED: Tuesday, April 25, 2006 22:38
VIEWED: 15240
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Western thinking, citizen. The need to disect and compartmentalize. Even as a teenager, I used to think, why couldn't God have come up with evolution? I mean, people can buy Noah's Arc, but not the notion that God designed all living things from the molocule up?
If there is a God, wouldn't all existence be the manifestation of God itself? Without thinking duelistically, aren't we and everything we see and touch and think, and more than that, God?
And if the Devine exists, who are we to presume to say that God couldn't create a 'Big Bang' to begin each new universe with?
The cells of our skin can repair a cut, do they have to be told how? They know how, just as the Universe (God) knows how to create itself.
Shepard Chrisisall
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The feeling of "more than us, bigger than us, the unknown, the unity" is mysticism. Not to split hairs, but Christian fundamentalists aren't mystics. They know exactly how everything works because god told them all, exactly.
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Quote:
Originally posted by SimonWho:
You're right in that science disregards for the most part non-repeatable, purely perceptional data. It does this for one simple reason: it's not very reliable.
Is love reliable? Can you rely on your best friend's sense of humor to make you laugh?
Take the most moving scene from a great film. Will everyone in the audience cry? No. Will a whole bunch of 'em cry? Yes. Will most of them feel moved? Yes. How is it that the filmic image of someone suffering can affect us as strongly as a close friend's pain? What's happening there? What is being transmitted from the actor through the film to the viewer? Anything? Something unreliable? Is it simply that we're "stupid animals?" And is love purely perceptional? I don't think so. Human emotion is perfectly real, but it doesn't follow physical laws; and yet we make sense of it every day.
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People are stupid animals. We, by and large, believe whatever our brains want us to believe. Feeling "touched by God" could be a genuine theistic event. Or it could just be someone needing to feel special, or having a minor blood clot, or just pure and simple faking it.
Wow. One thing that is not reliable is the emotion communicated in posting over the internet. You say, "People are stupid animals." I'm a little taken aback by your sudden...what? Vitriol? My sense is that you're not familiar with the kind of spiritual experience I'm talking about. Have you ever experienced what you would call a "genuine theistic event?" (I'm guessing, no, 'cause you prolly wouldn't call it that if you had
) Belief really isn't an issue with real mystical experience; anyone who tells you it is--they're the ones who are faking, you can bet on it. Nobody has to believe. You don't have to believe in a sun in the sky, or that people tend to have five fingers on each hand. I don't have to believe that I regularly receive the thoughts of other people without them saying anything or that I sometimes know what's going to happen before it does.
Free will is interesting. You can absolutely know what will piss your girlfriend off, as if she were wired with an anger button; but then, one day, you push her button and she just smiles. She's changed; same person, same history, same baggage, but a different result. Not random, not unreal, but willful. She made a choice that changed the way she sees you.
Consciousness does that. Consciousness is real, but it does not produce good lab results.
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Oh, and Quantum Physics has nothing to do with mysticism, it's just been hijacked by certain groups who half read a few of the books and decided that it was "beyond science". It is a science, bound to the same principles as all the other ones; theories backed up by data from repeatable experiments. The fact that it bears no resemblence to physics as we knew it is neither here nor there.
Well, see, there, you don't know what you're talking about because you don't credit mystical experience. We over here, on the mystical side, have been "beyond science" from the start. We read your quantum physics and your chaos theory with your attractors and such and we say, "Hey, they're actually getting kinda close with that stuff--you know, if you squint." How can you say quantum physics has no bearing on mysticism, when you don't credit mysticism in the first place?
HKCavalier
Hey, hey, hey, don't be mean. We don't have to be mean, because, remember, no matter where you go, there you are.
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Quote:
Originally posted by SignyM:
The feeling of "more than us, bigger than us, the unknown, the unity" is mysticism. Not to split hairs, but Christian fundamentalists aren't mystics. They know exactly how everything works because god told them all, exactly.
Why SignyM, do we have a non-believer in the fold?
Come with me, son, over to this here river. That's it, now step in with me, I have to hold your head under sos you'll understand The Lord. I know the truth of it. You'll see the light. Or maybe a fish...
Them that tell they know are funny people, no?
Chrisisall Book
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Quote:"Instruments register only that which they were designed to register, [the universe] still contains vast unknowns." - Spock
Originally posted by HKCavalier:
How can you say quantum physics has no bearing on mysticism, when you don't credit mysticism in the first place?
My earliest Shepard Chrisisall
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Quote:Baptism. Drowning. Near death experience. Understanding the lord. I get it !
Why SignyM, do we have a non-believer in the fold?
Come with me, son, over to this here river. That's it, now step in with me, I have to hold your head under sos you'll understand The Lord.
Nearly everything I know I learned by the grace of others.
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Has anyone ever paid attention to my tagline? I came up with it almost 20 years ago, trying to describe to a friend how I see the world.
We do not directly perceive the world around us. Arguing about Evolution or Creation (or ID) is not arguing about reality. It's arguing about patterns of comprehension. It's almost like arguing that Greek star constellations are right, and Chinese star constellations are wrong. The stars remain, and don't care one whit how we name them. It's arguing about which pattern of thought we are going to teach our children to use to filter their experiences through.
It's like having a heated debate over which travel guide is better - the Michelin Guide to Vienna or the Vienna Eyewitness Travel Guide, and never going to visit the city!
Yes, I believe one pattern fits better than the others. But that is a lens I choose to use to see the world around me, and it is not the world itself.
MAL "You only gotta scare him."
JAYNE "Pain is scary..."
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And my tag-line as well.
I believe there is only one universe. And it is not confused, we are. The universe doesn't agonize over wave/particle. Then, now, later. Entropy and work.
It is what it is.
And we know with our senses geared to certain energies and geometries and scales. And so our answers, indeed our questions, must probe into arenas we will never comprehend.
But intellect tells us that if we can use our models to accurately predict features and events, they surely must be related to the workings of the unknowable universe, and in some way are better than those which fail us.
Nearly everything I know I learned by the grace of others.
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Quote:
Originally posted by DarkJester:
Has anyone ever paid attention to my tagline? I came up with it almost 20 years ago, trying to describe to a friend how I see the world.
We do not directly perceive the world around us. Arguing about Evolution or Creation (or ID) is not arguing about reality. It's arguing about patterns of comprehension. It's almost like arguing that Greek star constellations are right, and Chinese star constellations are wrong. The stars remain, and don't care one whit how we name them. It's arguing about which pattern of thought we are going to teach our children to use to filter their experiences through.
It's like having a heated debate over which travel guide is better - the Michelin Guide to Vienna or the Vienna Eyewitness Travel Guide, and never going to visit the city!
Yes, I believe one pattern fits better than the others. But that is a lens I choose to use to see the world around me, and it is not the world itself.
MAL "You only gotta scare him."
JAYNE "Pain is scary..."
Very well said.
HKCavalier
Hey, hey, hey, don't be mean. We don't have to be mean, because, remember, no matter where you go, there you are.
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Quote:
originally posted by Chrisisall:
Western thinking, citizen. The need to disect and compartmentalize. Even as a teenager, I used to think, why couldn't God have come up with evolution? I mean, people can buy Noah's Arc, but not the notion that God designed all living things from the molocule up?
If there is a God, wouldn't all existence be the manifestation of God itself? Without thinking duelistically, aren't we and everything we see and touch and think, and more than that, God?
And if the Devine exists, who are we to presume to say that God couldn't create a 'Big Bang' to begin each new universe with?
The cells of our skin can repair a cut, do they have to be told how? They know how, just as the Universe (God) knows how to create itself.
Shepard Chrisisall
Chrisisall, you just said just what I was trying to say, albet in a more verbose and indeed actually understandable way...
Q: What do you have when you are holding two little green balls in your hand.
A: Kermit's undivided attention.
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