catholic church: republican policies are immoral.

Discussion in 'Religion and Spirituality' started by Free Thinker, Apr 20, 2012.

  1. i wouldnt think about it too long if i had a need to believe as you do. thinking is the enemy of faith.



    "Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has; it never comes to the aid of
    spiritual things, but -- more frequently than not -- struggles against the
    divine Word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God."
    father of modern Protestant christianity, Martin Luther
     
    #101     Apr 23, 2012
  2. jem

    jem

    I thought about it while moving my car.

    It is a specious argument.

    Big Foot has left no trace of his existence.

    But, our universe is tremendous evidence (I did not say you have to make conclusions... just evidence) of a Creator.

    You have a choice creator or unexplained method of creation by natural causes.

    Both take faith.

    In fact as I have proven to you on other threads... the idea that we got here by random chance appears like a long shot to todays top scientists... which is why they are proposing "directed" evolution and multiverses.
     
    #102     Apr 23, 2012
  3. there is more evidence for bigfoot than a greyhaired old guy in the sky. bigfoot has left tracks and there are videos and pictures of him not to mention many testimonials.


    “The invisible and the non- existent look very much alike.” ¯ Delos Banning McKown
     
    #103     Apr 23, 2012
  4. jem

    jem

    Why do you always irrationally run to a specific Creator.
    Is that what they teach you in how to be and irrational atheist school?


    The evidence for a Creator is the creation. Hence it is one of the logical choices to explain the creation.

    Its positively stupid to know we have a car and claim it is illogical to suggest there was a "car maker" in absence of contrary evidence.
     
    #104     Apr 23, 2012
  5. science is giving christians new and interesting gaps for them to cram their ever-diminishing god into – but the inevitable effect of that is to make the god they’re arguing for the nebulous existence of so far removed from the god of the bible as to make it a completely separate entity.



    Throughout history, God has been shrinking. The time when the world was small and God was in control is always in the far distant, half-remembered past. The closer we approach to the present, the less common miracles are and the less accessible he becomes, until the present day when divine activity has dwindled until it is indistinguishable from the nonexistent. Where the Bible tells us God once shaped worlds out of the void and parted great seas with the power of his word, today his most impressive acts seem to be shaping sticky buns into the likenesses of saints and conferring vaguely-defined warm feelings on his believers' hearts when they attend church.
     
    #105     Apr 23, 2012

  6. Umm no. Not even close. The vast majority of scientists, and especially those in fields of cosmology, biology etc, are atheists. They are NOT proposing directed evolution. Period. Give it up. This is the same line of irrational selective thinking that has you denying GW.
     
    #106     Apr 23, 2012
  7. Lucrum

    Lucrum

    :D

    A flaming liberal big foot believer. Nice.
     
    #107     Apr 23, 2012
  8. jem

    jem

    That is now completely off point. You were comparing a Creator to Big foot.

    But you answer is also bullshit.
    Since the discovery of the big bang and DNA... science has been decimating the idea of creation by random chance, year by year and discovery by discovery.
     
    #108     Apr 23, 2012
  9. "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."
    -- Carl Sagan
     
    #109     Apr 23, 2012
  10. jem

    jem


    you confuse atheist and agnostic.

    You obviously do not know what the heck you are talking about when it comes to science. There are zero scientists who say they have evidence life evolved from not life.

    so your choices...

    directed evolution
    pan spermia
    Creator
    eventually discovery of natural causes by random chance or something else.



    http://web.mit.edu/rog/www/papers/does_origins.pdf

    We now know that the probability of life arising by chance is far too low to
    be plausible, hence there must be some deeper explanation that we are yet to
    discover, given which the origin of life is atleastreasonably likely. Perhaps we
    have little idea yet what form this explanation will take—although of course it
    will not appeal to the work of a rational agent; this is would be a desperate
    last resort, if an option at all—but we have every reason to look for such an
    explanation, for we have every reason to think there is one.
    In a detailed survey of the field, Iris Fry (1995, 2000) argues that although
    the disagreements among origin of life theorists run very deep, relating to the
    most basic features of the models they propose, the view sketched above is a
    fundamental unifying assumption (one which Fry strongly endorses). Some
    researchers in the field are even more optimistic of course. They believe that
    they have already found the explanation, or at least have a good head start
    on it. But their commitment to the thesis above is epistemically more basic,
    in the sense that it motivated their research in the first place and even if their
    theories were shown to be false, they would retain this basic assumption.
    3
    There is a very small group of detractors, whom Fry (1995) calls the “Almosta Miracle Camp” including Francis Crick (1981), ErnstMayr (1982),
    and Jaques Monod (1974), who appear to be content with the idea that life
    arose by chance even if the probability of this happening is extremely low.
    4
    According to Crick “the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a
    miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to been satisfied
    to get it going” (1981: 88); the emergence of life was nevertheless a “happy
    accident” (p. 14).
    5
    According to Mayr, “a full realization of the near impossibility of an origin of life brings home the point of how improbable this
    event was.” (1982: 45). Monod famously claimed that although the probability of life arising by chance was “virtually zero. . .our number came up in the
    Monte Carlo game” (1974: 137). Life, as Monod puts it, is “chance caught
    on a wing” (p. 78). That is, although natural selection took over early to produce the diversity of life, its origin was nothing but an incredibly improbable
    fluke.Does Origins of Life Research Rest on a Mistake? 459
    However, the vast majority of experts in the field clearly define their work
    in opposition to this view. The more common attitude is summed up neatly
    by J. D. Bernal.
    [T]he question, could life have originated by a chance occurrence of atoms,
    clearly leads to a negative answer. This answer, combined with the knowledge
    that life is actually here, leads to the conclusion that some sequences other than
    chance occurrences must have led to the appearances of life. (quoted in Fry 2000:
    153)
    Having calculated the staggering improbability of life’s emergence by chance,
    Manfred Eigen (1992) concludes,
    The genes found today cannot have arisen randomly, as it were by the throw of
    a dice. There must exist a process of optimization that works toward functional
    efficiency. Even if there are several routes to optimal efficiency, mere trial and
    error cannotbe one of them. (p. 11)
    It is from this conclusion that Eigen motivates his search for a physical principle that does not leave the emergence of life up to blind chance, hence
    making itreproducible in principle:
    The physical principle that we are looking for should be in a position to explain
    the complexity typical of the phenomena of life at the level of molecular structures and syntheses. It should show how such complex molecular arrangements
    are able to form reproducibly in Nature. (p. 11)
    According to Christian de Duve (1991),
    . . .unless one adopts a creationist view,. . .life arose through the succession of an
    enormous number of small steps, almost each of which, given the condition at
    the time had a very high probability of happening. . .the alternative amounts to
    a miracle. . .were [the emergence of life] not an obligatory manifestation of the
    combinatorial properties of matter, it could not possibly have arisen naturally.
    (p. 217)
    Not all theorists follow De Duve so far as suggesting that life’s emergence
    mustbe inevitable. While nota specialistin the area, Richard Dawkins (1987)
    captures the attitude that appears to dominate scientific research into life’s
    origin. According to Dawkins,
    All who have given thought to the matter agree that an apparatus as complex as
    the human eye could not possibly come into existence through [a single chance
    event]. Unfortunately the same seems to be true of at least parts of the apparatus
    of cellular machinery whereby DNA replicates itself (p. 140)460 NOUS ˆ
    In considering how the first self-replicating machinery arose, Dawkins asks
    “Whatis the largestsingle eventof sheer naked coincidence, sheer unadulterated miraculous luck, that we are allowed to get away with in our theories,
    and still say that we have a satisfactory explanation of life?” (p. 141) And
    he answers that there are strict limits on the “ration of luck” that we are
    allowed to postulate in our theories.
    6
    According to Dawkins, an examination
    of the immense complexity of the most basic mechanisms required for DNA
    replication is sufficient to see that any theory which makes its existence a
    highly improbable fluke is unbelievable, quite apart from what alternative
    explanations are on the table


    http://web.mit.edu/rog/www/papers/does_origins.pdf
     
    #110     Apr 23, 2012