by The wanderer 43 Replies latest jw friends
Qcmbr
Why do we have to apply evolution to a spiritual being???
Because anything else is a copout, an attempt at using another dimension as an escape from a dilemma.
Quantum mechanics doesn't give you an out, either. In fact, a bit of reading on the subject suggests that it supports evolution, not just biological, but quantum states as well.
S
So Satanus are you saying that christianity isn't anything at all to do with spiritual things? Copout or not applying biological evolutionary processes to non-biological things is plain wrong.
Nice... the old 'God doesn't need to be explained' trick. The last great hope of the creationist!
Well, I'm afraid he does.
Let's go through the details.
In order for this god to create a universe, he must have space to create it in, and number of dimensions equal to or greater than that of our universe, otherwise it couldn't be contained in the god's universe. No time, no change, no movement, period, so he must also have time, in order to go from a state of not having a universe in front of him, to one of having a universe in front of him.
The gods need explaining just as much as the the humans and other life. I'm not saying they dont exist, but I am saying you cannot postulate the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient organism and then say 'I dont need to explain how it got there'. If you do, you just end up looking silly.
Back to evolution. Natural selection is validated process whereby you can go from incredibly simple proto-life to incredibly complex life. There is a mountain of evidence for natural selection coming from many different fields of science. We know how it works almost inside out. So we know the undesigned can produce the designed, we've been there, done that, got the t-shirt. And we know how we can proceed from there, we can design watches and boeing 747s.
If god exists, his existence must have come about by a process similar to natural selection, whereby the simple begets the complex. This follows from the logic that the starting point of everything must be simple, otherwise it cannot be the starting point.
Is the OP a question about evolution or the origin of the universe? Or is the author incredibly confused?
The comparison really attests our inability to figure out the emergence of anything except by anthropomorphical metaphors, i.e. analogy to our own ways of producing "things" (in that case through intelligence, design, technique and work).
As warriors the ancient mythmakers imagined a god wrestling the world against the forces of chaos; as craftsmen they imagined a god building the world as a carpenter or fashioning it as a potter (from Voltaire's time at least it is clockwork); as herdsmen or parents they imagined gods begetting the world... ID is just people designing "God" in their own image, as ever, in the 20th/21st-century technological era.
Language is bound to metaphors. Evolutionists use them too (e.g. the notion of "will" as recently discussed in another thread), but at least they know their metaphors are just metaphors. The ID team shows either the naïveté or the disingenuousness to take their metaphors as more than metaphors.
So Satanus are you saying that christianity isn't anything at all to do with spiritual things?
No, but because of all the dogma, fear and taboos, it's spiritual scope is very narrow. Your following satement shows this very clearly...
Copout or not applying biological evolutionary processes to non-biological things is plain wrong.
I may respond further to this, later. S
Skeptic - hold on mate - you've just made some major logical mistakes!
1/ No one said God doesn't need to be explained ONLY that evolutionary processes (that explain change within biological processes by a mutation) ar euseless for a God who claims perfection (no evolution) and to exist before His creation.
2/ If God exists He doesn't need a starting point (simple or otherwise) you see logically if something has a start it also must have an end. Neither conclusions are taught nor postulated by christian thinking.
3/ No one is knocking evolution but we do not know how it works inside out. We haven't made the scientists redundant with our omniscience just yet.
4/ This is not the last great trick of the creationist. I have plenty of tricks.
Wander, I was wondering if you are putting together a book? All of of your questions lead me to believe that you are collection research for something in the works.
OBSERVABLE and REPLICATED empirical evidence for the big bang theoryhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang:
Observational evidence:
It is generally stated that there are three observational pillars that support the Big Bang theory of cosmology. These are the Hubble-type expansion seen in the redshifts of galaxies, the detailed measurements of the cosmic microwave background, and the abundance of light elements. (See Big Bang nucleosynthesis.) Additionally, the observed correlation function of large-scale structure of the cosmos fits well with standard Big Bang theory.
Observations of distant galaxies and quasars show that these objects are redshifted, meaning that the light emitted from them has been shifted to longer wavelengths. This is seen by taking a frequency spectrum of the objects and then matching the spectroscopic pattern of emission lines or absorption lines corresponding to atoms of the chemical elements interacting with the light. From this analysis, a redshift corresponding to a Doppler shift for the radiation can be measured which is explained by a recessional velocity. When the recessional velocities are plotted against the distances to the objects, a linear relationship, known as Hubble's law, is observed:
where
The Hubble's law observation has two possible explanations. One is that we are at the center of an explosion of galaxies, a position which is untenable given the Copernican principle. The second explanation is that the universe is uniformly expanding everywhere as a unique property of spacetime. This type of universal expansion was developed mathematically in the context of general relativity well before Hubble made his analysis and observations, and it remains the cornerstone of the Big Bang theory as developed by Friedmann-Lemaître-Robertson-Walker.
WMAP image of the cosmic microwave background radiation The Big Bang theory predicted the existence of the cosmic microwave background radiation or CMB which is composed of photons first emitted during baryogenesis. Because the early universe was in thermal equilibrium, the temperature of the radiation and the plasma were equal until the plasma recombined. Before atoms formed, radiation was constantly absorbed and re-emitted in a process called Compton scattering: the early universe was opaque to light. However, cooling due to the expansion of the universe allowed the temperature to eventually fall below 3,000 K at which point electrons and nuclei combined to form atoms and the primordial plasma turned into a neutral gas. This is known as photon decoupling. A universe with only neutral atoms allows radiation to travel largely unimpeded.
Because the early universe was in thermal equilibrium, the radiation from this time had a blackbody spectrum and freely streamed through space until today, becoming redshifted because of the Hubble expansion. This reduces the high temperature of the blackbody spectrum. The radiation should be observable at every point in the universe to come from all directions of space.
In 1964, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, while conducting a series of diagnostic observations using a new microwave receiver owned by Bell Laboratories, discovered the cosmic background radiation. [3] Their discovery provided substantial confirmation of the general CMB predictions—the radiation was found to be isotropic and consistent with a blackbody spectrum of about 3 K—and it pitched the balance of opinion in favor of the Big Bang hypothesis. Penzias and Wilson were awarded the Nobel Prize for their discovery.
In 1989, NASA launched the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite (COBE), and the initial findings, released in 1990, were consistent with the Big Bang's predictions regarding the CMB. COBE found a residual temperature of 2.726 K and determined that the CMB was isotropic to about one part in 10 5 . [20] During the 1990s, CMB anisotropies were further investigated by a large number of ground-based experiments and the universe was shown to be almost geometrically flat by measuring the typical angular size (the size on the sky) of the anisotropies. (See shape of the universe.)
In early 2003, the results of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy satellite (WMAP) were released, yielding what were at the time the most accurate values for some of the cosmological parameters. (See cosmic microwave background radiation experiments.) This satellite also disproved several specific cosmic inflation models, but the results were consistent with the inflation theory in general. [21]
Using the Big Bang model it is possible to calculate the concentration of helium-4, helium-3, deuterium and lithium-7 in the universe as ratios to the amount of ordinary hydrogen, H. [22] All the abundances depend on a single parameter, the ratio of photons to baryons. The ratios predicted (by mass, not by number) are about 0.25 for 4 He/H, about 10 -3 for 2 H/H, about 10 -4 for 3 He/H and about 10 -9 for 7 Li/H.
The measured abundances all agree with those predicted from a single value of the baryon-to-photon ratio. The agreement is relatively poor for 7 Li and 4 He, the two elements for which the systematic uncertainties are least understood. This is considered strong evidence for the Big Bang, as the theory is the only known explanation for the relative abundances of light elements. [23] Indeed there is no obvious reason outside of the Big Bang that, for example, the young universe (i.e., before star formation, as determined by studying matter essentially free of stellar nucleosynthesis products) should have more helium than deuterium or more deuterium than 3 He, and in constant ratios, too.
OBSERVABLE EVIDENCE FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD:
ZERO (except for this recent photo...LOL )
Ah Kid-A I hope one day you get one irrefutable divine experience. Dang I hope we all do.
