Science, religion and the problem of evil

[womba]

ninetailedfox wrote:

Intelligent design? Ive got something that tastes much better, I have a dish of the theory of STUPID design.:) Christian fundies and birth defects prove my theory, and theres other things, like the dodo bird, and the way some animals kill each other off out of sheer madness.

I'm curious. What about christian fundies and birth defects ?

Thanks

[papa joe]

BibleThumper wrote:

To fully comprehend, or vaguely understand as to 'see through a mirror darkly, one must accept the premise that sin exists.
It is this sin that is carried by every person that corrupts the perfect creation and causes man to accept evil as good. Anything that is anti God (anti Christ) is evil.
Given that the Creator has limited Himself to being only acceptable of the perfect, He causes life to end at a preset time, some more some less, and provides a method of escape from the eternal death to which he prescribes the one convicted of sin.
This perfect sacrifice is no other than the perfect creator who takes upon Himself the total punishment of sin and asks only that we, you, have faith to receive his pardon.
I submit that all that is good and perfect comes from Jesus and all that is corrupt and imperfect is caused by Satan, but praise God even us imperfect persons can receive his goodness.
To the wise of this world, the foolishness of preaching is garbage. To the perfect Creator, the wisdom of this world is garbage ("filthy rags"):.
It's yours, ours, to choose!
Lord forgive me for my lack of Bible Thumpin', but all that I am comes from you and your word.

That's what I love about these bible thumpers. Their religion decides what is good and what is evil. And anyone who thinks differently is the pawn of the devil. Wake up. Both God and the devil are only in your head.

[Billy Jack]

Organisms are intelligently designed to eat organisms taking them in one end and exhausting the residue out the other.

The ultimate spin of all philosophy resides in the whorl of death, and the meaning of nothing.
Nothing has no meaning because it has no properties. Nothing is uncomfortable for our politicians...

[Phil Johns]

without life there can be no death.
without evil would we know goodness?
To know our beginings we will need to know what our demise will be.
Then it wont matter it will anti-matter.LOL
Life is only for living and making choices
war or peace
love or hate
pleasure or pain
Make the right not wrong choices...THINK ABOUT IT

[john doe]

hes the biggist ass i ever heard,so how does the world should look like to you dip shit,hehehhhahahheehehee

[Rick]

The cruelty of nature is obvious to me. But why should we revel in natures law. Compassion is the surpassing intelligence of humanity. Likely imparted by divine human being.

[Leria]

practicing human wrote:

<quoted text>
...but the "idea" of evil is relative...one humans evil may be another's salvation depending on whose side of the conflict you are on

Bingo. That is the truth about 'good' and 'evil': it is all viewpoint, therefore no one should force their view of good and evil on someone else EVER.
I am willing to make a SMALL exception if they are physically harming or causing injury to someone else WITHOUT THEIR PERMISSION, but outside of that..... simply butt out of my personal choices, they are not any of your business.

[Jim]

Let it reign.

[Hand in Hand]

People are always so quick to say, "Science is right," or "Religion is right." Why can't it be both?

The Bible was created to explain the unanswered quetions of our universe. It was not meant to be understood literally. The Bible in fact, fits almost perfectly with history if interpreted in such a way.

The "days" in Genesis were not the "days" that we know of, they were instead a random measure of time needed to fully complete a task. God created animals, before man, and then perfected his animals; he created dinosaurs, only to decide his creatures were not what he wanted, so he removed the race and created new species from the old ones.

God then created man for the purpose of being his physical hand in controlling his animals. The corruption of man came from our ability to love, for there can be no love without free will, and men often lie and kill for love.

[Ajepa]

Leria wrote:

<quoted text>
Bingo. That is the truth about 'good' and 'evil': it is all viewpoint, therefore no one should force their view of good and evil on someone else EVER.
I am willing to make a SMALL exception if they are physically harming or causing injury to someone else WITHOUT THEIR PERMISSION, but outside of that..... simply butt out of my personal choices, they are not any of your business.

Therefore if you own a car dealership it would be ok for me to steal one or two of your cars and you wouldn't try to shove your "viewpoint" down my throat???

[James]

ninetailedfox wrote:

The thing I dont like, is christianity is all about do as I say and not as I do, and that makes for poor morality and ethics. I think people should use thier own brains and ideas, and move beyond guilt/shame/fear worthless without a God type of beliefs, but most people dont want to move on, so they would rather destroy true science for some fake christianized science.

Sure. Propose this life concept to the 100+ million victims of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao Tse Tung, all of whom went to great lengths to stamp out both religion and any reference to any God. Anything could be defended in the absence of an absolute moral code, and anything was. Many people, such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens talk at length about the evils done in the name of God, such as the Crusades and the Inquisitions, but ignore the vastly greater evils done in the name of humanism. One of the primary difficulties with the amoral position that science claims to hold is that the results of an absence of a moral code are very well known. People do not tend toward "in every day and every way we're getting better and better," and that you could demonstrate scientifically.
Like so many, you fail to distinguish between the acts of people who claim to follow a religion and the claims of the religion itself, which frequently have no connection.
And to the scientists who say that the universe isn't well designed, perhaps one or more of those geniuses could come up with a comprehensive alternative design, even just down to the level of detail that we know of the existing one, and then create it. Then we could all enjoy the better universe. We can't even make "An Inconvenient Truth" decision to produce more ethanol without messing up the food supply by significantly altering the existing supply and demand chain, with the delightful result that more of the world's poorest are now starving.

The statement underlying this topic is perhaps the ultimate in arrogant "scientific" foolishness, given all that we do not know about the existing universe. "Junk DNA," anyone? Newton, Einstein, and others had a better understanding of what they did not know, as did even Darwin some of the time, but how Darwin could make some of the claims he did at the same time as he honestly admitted the limitations of his position is a mystery.

[billy pilgrim]

Man, who cannot create even an ant, has created thousands of Gods. Wow!

[works 4 me]

JEANNIE wrote:

There was nothing. Then there was a Big Bang and a universe came into being, complete with everything needed for everything that is. Where did the empty space come from, into which the universe is expanding?
Explain.

Jeannie, you hit on the very question that everyone interested in science comes to grips with in high school. But no one discusses it much after that because there are no answers. Some day we might explain the big bang but there will still be the question "Why does anything exist?".
No one can explain how anything can come from nothing. I mean really nothing. It cannot have a single property or rule.

Scientists continue to work in the space-time continuum which has properties. They would love to have more answers, that is why they are scientists, but suggesting you can get all of them would get you labelled a nut. Getting a few more answers than we had before gets you a Nobel prize.

[RJH]

I read a lot of emotion in the statements both for Darwin'ism and religion. The great thing about that is that the God I follow allowes you to decide freely. Alway's aware that you live forever with your decision.
If you look at science today and recent findings you will see that science is finding the locations mentioned in the Bible and more and more people are deciding that this book is as much a history book as a religious guideline.
Go ahead and make your decision. Me and my family we will follow Jesus!

[Gaelic Skeptic]

Good thing for God that Darwin was around to explain what went wrong, and how He is not really necessary.

[Roku Roku Roku]

regis wrote:

Thew Universe, life, how we got here, etc. can't be explained by Darwinism eihter. There has not been enough time for things to have come to pass as they presently are. Even Darwin acknowlegded a Creator. Unfortunatley that was edited out of his "Origin of Species" by modernists of the time. You know the modernists. Marx, Lenin, Freud, Jung, Meade, Darwin, etc. Those 19th century anti-Christian socialists and communists of a hundred years ago... most of whom have been discredited long ago. Yet our post-modern acadames and politicians cling to their outdated, out-moded world views, thinking that if we just try again we can get it right this time.

If by the term Darwinism you actually mean the Theory of Evolution, you are at least partially correct in your post. How the universe and life began is not part of Evolution. It only deals with how life changes. The rest of the post is just wild claims with no factual support.

[works 4 me]

James wrote:

<quoted text>
Sure. Propose this life concept to the 100+ million victims of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao Tse Tung, all of whom went to great lengths to stamp out both religion and any reference to any God. Anything could be defended in the absence of an absolute moral code, and anything was. Many people, such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens talk at length about the evils done in the name of God, such as the Crusades and the Inquisitions, but ignore the vastly greater evils done in the name of humanism. One of the primary difficulties with the amoral position that science claims to hold is that the results of an absence of a moral code are very well known. People do not tend toward "in every day and every way we're getting better and better," and that you could demonstrate scientifically.
Like so many, you fail to distinguish between the acts of people who claim to follow a religion and the claims of the religion itself, which frequently have no connection.
And to the scientists who say that the universe isn't well designed, perhaps one or more of those geniuses could come up with a comprehensive alternative design, even just down to the level of detail that we know of the existing one, and then create it. Then we could all enjoy the better universe. We can't even make "An Inconvenient Truth" decision to produce more ethanol without messing up the food supply by significantly altering the existing supply and demand chain, with the delightful result that more of the world's poorest are now starving.
The statement underlying this topic is perhaps the ultimate in arrogant "scientific" foolishness, given all that we do not know about the existing universe. "Junk DNA," anyone? Newton, Einstein, and others had a better understanding of what they did not know, as did even Darwin some of the time, but how Darwin could make some of the claims he did at the same time as he honestly admitted the limitations of his position is a mystery.

What claims did Darwin make? He wasn't the first person to propose a theory of evolution. Lamarck and his own grandfather had done that. Also Cuvier. They all failed at finding an answer to the creation of new genes, which was not understood until the 1960s when the structure of DNA became more precisely known.

What Darwin did do what to examine the evidence for continuous change, even thougfh he could not account for how the changes arose. The breakthrough was what has come to be called "Darwin's finches", the study of finches in the Galapagos. There were a number of species of finches, yet few, if any, other land birds. These finches existed nowhere else.

To Darwin, it became clear that one species of finch had somehow made it from South America (blown there by a storm) and had settled down. From it, the other species evolved. The different species had different beaks, which meant they did not compete for the same food sources.

From this observation patterns elsewhere began to make sense, but no one could explain the origin of new genes.

By the way, Darwin lived in an England where landowners kept stock books for horses, pigs and cattle going back to the Norman Conquest. They all new perfectly well how to breed for some changes but they knew, in the end, a horse would still be a horse and a dog would still be a dog.

They also knew that a horse and a donkey produced something a bit different from each but it was (almost) always sterile. A mule! That ruled out getting changes by interbreeding species.

No, Darwin was quite conservative. I don't know of any unsupported claims he made. He may have had speculations, but that is not a claim

[Quo Vadis]

The only problem of evil be the greed of running the world and controlling the population with micro chips like the elitist want to do. I'd say everyone else be doing fairly alright and behaving themselves by comparison of how they act.

[LWsciencejunkie]

Both science and religion have done great good and great evil. The irony is that perfectly intelligent and competent human beings have, throughout the history of both science and religion congratulated their own efforts, works and motivations as "good" and their opponent's as "evil". Warfare is the perfect crucible. Two opposing armies in the trenches, both believing absolutely that they are fighting for and praying for victory to the same God. Both armies manned by a cross-section of the best and worst of humanity. They meet and they maim and they murder and they suffer and they die. At home, their parents, sisters, wives, sweethearts and clerics are praying as fervently as are those of the opposing side. "Please, oh, God" they pray, knowing absolutely that their Almighty, all-knowing and all-merciful God hears their heartfelt cries, "Let mine live and prevail and theirs fail and die".
Good and evil, like beauty and ugliness, are NOT objective, but subjective; "in the eye of the beholder".
And that's just regular old perennial warfare between men.
Disease? You may be puking up your guts and eviscerating yourself with diarrhea, but the microbes causing your agony, even your stinking and undignified death, are enjoying their manifest destiny. What's more, by ejecting you and yours from the gene pool, that microbe will never again be able to ravage future generations so savagely. Good news for the human survivors, if not your once-happy family.

Just because you don't understand it or don't find it congenial, doesn't mean that the universe is not unfolding as it should.

[CopyCat]

With such deep, probing intelligence you have to wonder how much longer humans will be here.