by blondie 41 Replies latest jw friends
If the evidence were in and proven, no one would be going to church anymore.
Witnessdater, you vastly underestimate the power of the human mind to decieve itself. There are other benefits to believing in God and attending religious services, than to serve logic. The denominations that insist on literal acceptance of the bible, say, as a "scientific" text, is a small subset of Christianity.
Indeed, physical creation testifies to the awesome power of God's holy spirit.
from paragraph 4. Should that not be worded "of God through his holy spirit". Doesn't the way they word it suggest the holy spirit as seperate from God? Since they think holy spirit is simply a force or power belonging to god that he "uses", that seems to me to be poorly worded at the very least.
JG,
I think you are misunderstanding me. He is presenting all of this "evidence" that evolution is what happened, and that the laws of cause and effect breakdown at the quantum level. He doesn't understand that he is talking about physical laws as we know them. And trying to apply it before the Big Bang, when there was nothing. The general rule of cause and effect still remains. The question "Where did everything come from" is a valid question. Obviously, if God created the matter of the Big Bang, it is by definition a supernatural occurence. Something does not come from nothing, but he seems to suggest that maybe it can. If we accept this as true, then anything is true, and the question self-destructs.
His answer is telling me that it is possible that the question is meaningless. I am telling him that if evolution and non-creation by intelligent being of the universe has been proven, then belief in God would have fallen WAY off. Churches would be devastated. Therefore, all of the "evidence" he is putting forth hasn't proven anything.
Witnessdater, I understood you perfectly, and I stand by my statements. The case for evolution has been well-founded for some time now. The holdouts include those of "faith" who depend on a certain world-view, just as previous generations depended on a belief that the earth was the center of the universe. Christianity survived that shake-up, and it will survive this one as well.
You should know that quantum events cannot be observed directly.
Drwtsn32,
Take a look at this from Behe. Facts are facts. Evolution is merley a word argument. Science cannot demonstrate it. Microevolution occurs, but never has there been a demonstration with fossilsor otherwise how we got from single cell organisms to all of the creatures today. Look in particular at his answer about slinging mud onto a wall and it accidentally creating Shakespeare. When science cannot explain it, as it cannot demonstrate evolution or intelligent design, then one has to go to philosophical thinking. This is where the evolutionists have no ideas that make sense. Nice try though.
jgnat,
I guess I would respond to your first comment then, would be to say that I do not study the Bible to serve my logic at all. My logic studies the Bible among other belief systems and sees absolute truth that was presented about the human condition by Jesus, and the prophetic schema that is evident, along with the fact that archaeological evidence of Lazarus, Thomas, etc and the questions of why the disciples would have dies for a lie all point to the Bible being true. There are obviously some metaphorical statements made within it, but the Bible does not claim to have verbal perfection, nor does it claim to be literal in all that it puts forth. And obviously, the resurrection of Jesus, if it didn't happen, the Bible falls completely apart. That is the central event of the Bible.
There is not any document, not even close, with the kind of documentary backup, including historians of the first century. Drwtsn will likely believe the writings of Homer, but probably not the Bible. If we have no meaning, origin, destiny, then life is meaningless indeed. Nothing in evolution has been proven, and none of it is falsifiable, because it doesn't at all state anything in strict terms of science. It is simply a theory. The theory of relativity is also a theory, but it is backed up totally by mathematics and natural physics. Evolution is a story. Sois intelligent design, which is also falsifiable, but hasnt been falsified. We have come much closer to falsifying evolution than the other way around.
Nothing in evolution has been proven, and none of it is falsifiable, because it doesn't at all state anything in strict terms of science. It is simply a theory. The theory of relativity is also a theory, but it is backed up totally by mathematics and natural physics. Evolution is a story. Sois intelligent design, which is also falsifiable, but hasnt been falsified. We have come much closer to falsifying evolution than the other way around.
Wow... nearly every single one of these statements is false. Please tell me you're just trolling. It's hard to imagine someone actually thinks this way.
"WHEN Albert Einstein published his special theory of relativity in 1905, he and many other scientists believed that he universe consisted of just one galaxy - our Milky Way. How greatly they underestimated the size of the universe! It is now thought that the heavens contain over 100 billion galaxies, some consisting of billions of stars. As ever more sensitive telescopes are used on earth or put into orbit around it, the number of known galaxies keeps climbing. ..."
But no Jehovah's Witness will ever contribute to those scientific advancements, because the Watchtower Society subtly discourages obtaining a higher education and condemns those who have done so and have made the very discoveries that the Watchtower Society quotes in this article...
"...And we will undoubtedly learn much more about the earth and the heavens in the years ahead. ..."
Not if it were left up to the Watchtower Society and its adherents...
The Watchtower Society plagiarizes the information obtained by REAL scientists and prints snippets in its magazines; in effect co-opting these discoveries in much the same way as the religious adherents who claim that their 3,500-year-old 'god' must have 'created' the 4.5 billion-year-old planet - or that this same junior 'god' of only 3,500 years inspired the vast array of much, much older 'heathen' religions...
Zid
"... Modern science is aware that matter can be changed into energy and energy into matter. ..."
"... Modern science is aware..." ??
How disingenuous... Modern science discovered that matter is composed of energy and that energy can be converted into matter...
"We are surrounded by evidence that God used his holy spirit in a very orderly way. ... Yet, when we raise our eyes and telescopes heavenward, what do we see? We find an immense and highly ordered system of galaxies, stars, and planets, all moving with great precision. ..."
Oh, goody... The Newtonian theory of an ordered universe... [from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton ]
"In this work [Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy], Newton described universal gravitation and the three laws of motion, which dominated the scientific view of the physical universe for the next three centuries. Newton showed that the motions of objects on Earth and of celestial bodies are governed by the same set of natural laws, by demonstrating the consistency between Kepler's laws of planetary motion and his theory of gravitation; ..."
In reality, the universe is quite chaotic - for example, astronomers have recently discovered that there are two smaller galaxies in the process of colliding with the Milky Way...
Of course, I can see how the need to believe in an "ordered" universe might comfort people who are dismayed by the uncertainties of chaotic reality...
"The most significant contribution of chaos theory is to show that 'chaos' and 'order' are not dichotomous or mutually exclusive categories. In fact, there is order within chaos and chaos within order. This notion defies the Newtonian ontological assumption that there is an ultimate orderliness and determinism in the universe... Chaos theory also shows that even when the relationships between a system's components are deterministic, the effects of the system may not be predictable in quantitative, precise terms. ..."
Moving right along...
The next bizarre mis-statement of scientific fact comes in paragraph 10:
"On the first creative day, Jehovah caused light to begin to appear at the earth's surface. That process would be completed when the sun and the moon later became discernible from the earth. ..."
Really??
How the heck could there be "light" in the beginning, when the sun and moon and stars were supposedly created on the FOURTH day??? And that the plants and trees and "seed-bearing" vegetation [grasses???] came into existence BEFORE the sun existed????
The Watchtower Society deliberately mis-quotes the bible in a vain attempt to appear moderately 'scientific'...
Yeah, right... Sheeeeeesh....
Zid
