i have come to the conclusion that science cannot prove or disprove the existence of god.
however the scientific evidence available is compelling enough for me to believe that a creator is responsible for life on earth.. i have read much about powner and understand the work he is doing.
i am interested in your views as to his credibility.
Phizzy,
I think we're on the same page. I've been told that I often come off as an arrogant know-it-all, so to combat that, I sometimes tend to overstate my sympathy for an opposing argument. That said, I don't really care too much what other people choose to believe, as long as it doesn't start affecting me adversly. And I certanly enjoy some healty debate.
i was baptized in 1968. last meeting 2010. i have to say i was never 100% in.
there were times i absolutely believed, but i never really gave it my all.
never liked service, assemblies, meetings.
I was definintely never 100% in, at least not once I was to the age where I could think for myself to some small degree (11 or 12 maybe). If ever someone where to challenge doctrine, though, I could (and would) argue the WTs stance like I was. Despite that, I always saw things about which I though 'well, I can kinda see their scriptural justification of that, but if this were a cult, that'd sure be a convenient stance."
i have come to the conclusion that science cannot prove or disprove the existence of god.
however the scientific evidence available is compelling enough for me to believe that a creator is responsible for life on earth.. i have read much about powner and understand the work he is doing.
i am interested in your views as to his credibility.
No it is not, this old canard is often repeated on here, give it a rest fellers, the job has been done.
I'm not saying that it's impossible to prove that the god of the bible (or the god of islam or whatever particular god) doesn't exist. I think there's clear evidence that there's no god that's really interested in us. However, it is impossible to disprove the existence of a god-like being that just doesn't give an eff about us and doesn't want to be found. Though, I suppose you get to a point where it'd be difficult to describe that entity as being god. It's really all in semantics. And from a practical perspective, I don't see it ever happening (at least not in my lifetime) that we can disprove the existence of god in a way that will convince the majority of the populace, but that's not so much a limitation of the evidence as it is evidence that people hold fast to clearly false ideas.
Just to be clear I'm an athiest, just saying that one must be open to all ideas until they're proven wrong. Entertaining an idea, though, is not the same as accepting it. In this case, I see no advantage to accepting the idea of god, but there does seem to be some downside, therefore I remain an athiest until there's good reason not to be.
As for the ever-so popular idea that if scientists re-create the initial formation of life, they're just showing how god did it - I don't see that as a valid argument. This becomes apparent (at least to me) once it's put into a different context. There was once a time when all natural phenomenon was explained as being an act of god. Imagine a man from that time observing lightning strike one of his friends, and deciding based on this event that god is evil. A scientist begins to study lightning, and demonstrates to this person that lightning can be re-created by creating a sufficiently high charge of static electricity. The man says, "you've merely shown how god killed my friend!" The scientist then goes to perform more tests and determines that in a storm extremely strong charges build up in clouds, even going so far as to demonstrate how this build up of energy occurs naturally. The man says "Yes, but the winds created the weather pattern that created the storm. You've done nothing more than show how god did it!" The scientist then demonstrates that the winds are created by complex interactions between the rotation of the earth, the energy imparted by the sun, etc. all of which are demonstrably natural phenomena requiring no intervention to trigger. The man says, "yes, but god placed the earth here with everything set up just so that my friend would die! You've merely shown how god did it!" At what point does it end? This just becomes the "god of the gaps" where a believer insists that god is hiding in every dark shadow, but when a light is shined on it, it's just another natural phenomenon.
hye folks-just wanted some info.
is wearing a wire to a jc or any other meeting an easy-to-do thing.
how do you go about trying to find to an agency that hires out equipment?
Just go to the app store and search for voice recorder or something like that. There's probably a thousand apps for the job.
who else thinks something is afoot with this?
is the gb deciding to go back to pre-1971 times with perhaps the cobe as the man in charge and the rest just ministerial servants.
so for this reason they want younger men in those postitions?
I'm with XBEHERE...while I'm hesitant to say that it's definitely a part of a master plan, I think the fact that it's only one position that's affected (and notably the position with the most authority, not the position that requires the most time/effort/thought) and a relatively high cut-off is evidence more for it being part of a larger picture than against. If this was something done in isolation, it doesn't really make sense. The CO could evaluate the COBE on visits, and if he's senile, remove him or ask him to step down. If, however, they're planning something bigger, it makes sense to start small and work your way up. Afterall, that's how you boil a frog.
i have come to the conclusion that science cannot prove or disprove the existence of god.
however the scientific evidence available is compelling enough for me to believe that a creator is responsible for life on earth.. i have read much about powner and understand the work he is doing.
i am interested in your views as to his credibility.
Thanks for the links, I'll have to look it over.
You may well be right that people are born with strong predisposition to believe in god or not. There's a reasonable amount of evidence to show that people are at least somewhat hard-wired to believe in one way or another. It certainly could have been the case for me, my parents did absolutely everything they could to indoctrinate me with belief in god, yet by the time I was in my early teens and developing critical thinking skills, I'd already begun to have strong doubts and generate alternative (and invariably more palatable) alternatives to explaining something with "god did it."
Though, it's entirely possible that, in my case, this was more because of a strong inclination to play devil's advocate, especially whenever I detect a fallacious argument. It may have been just that the arguments made for the existence of the WT god were so rediculous that I dismissed his existence. Being that that's the only god I've ever known, it was easy to leap from that to dismissing the existence of god entirely. I don't know...
Anyways, I completely accept the possibility that god is there as it would litterally never be possible to completely disprove the idea of god (shoot, try disproving that god didn't creat the universe with all of us in it complete with false memories just 2 seconds ago) but I think it's fairly easy to arrive at the conclusion that if god exists, he's likely either disinterested or a total dick. Either way, it's practically the same as no god, since I'm not inclined to worship either of those options.
There's a program (not sure if it's made it across the pond or not, but I'd assume it has) called "Through the wormhole" (narrated by morgan freeman) that's discussed some of these topics that you might find interesting. Of course it keeps things at a relatively high level, but it definitely goes more in depth than most anything else on TV. Topics discussed are pretty varied, but there's been a few episodes on the origin of life, evolution, god, etc.
i have come to the conclusion that science cannot prove or disprove the existence of god.
however the scientific evidence available is compelling enough for me to believe that a creator is responsible for life on earth.. i have read much about powner and understand the work he is doing.
i am interested in your views as to his credibility.
If you have any links that go further into detail, I'd love to read it. I'm familiar with the case made for a creator based on the so-called left-handed amino acids being the only ones used, but I don't see it as particularly strong evidence of god, but I haven't seen much of these latest developments.
who else thinks something is afoot with this?
is the gb deciding to go back to pre-1971 times with perhaps the cobe as the man in charge and the rest just ministerial servants.
so for this reason they want younger men in those postitions?
I think the idea presented in the other thread that seems most logical is that they're getting rid of the older folks who remember the most lies/dissapointments from WT, and replacing them with younger ones who will be more likely to be loyal through big changes to come, since they've not been through it before.
i have come to the conclusion that science cannot prove or disprove the existence of god.
however the scientific evidence available is compelling enough for me to believe that a creator is responsible for life on earth.. i have read much about powner and understand the work he is doing.
i am interested in your views as to his credibility.
The only answer I can come up with is that he has always existed and he is infinate. That doesn't really satisfy me to be honest. But the chemistry Powner was talking about satisfies me that there is a Creator.
Yep, that's the answer you always get to when thinking about the beginning of god, and I agree that's not especially satisfying. I'd be just as satisfied to assume that some basic form of life has always existed and has been spreading through panspermia.
I'll agree that it seems that the chemistry is incredibly complex, and maybe even extremely unlikely to happen by chance. However, every few years there's some discovery that seems to point to it being slightly easier and more likely to happen than previously believed. Just the other day there was a thread on here about the discovery of metabolism without cell walls. At this point, I'd say we're just a few missing steps from linking properly non-living matter to life, and there doesn't seem to be any reason to believe that the trend won't continue.
However, even if it does turn out that life is so incredibly unlikely to happen by chance, I still don't see an absolute need for a creator. Current cosmology suggests that it's possible, even likely that there are an infinite number of other universes out there. So, no matter how unlikely, it stands to reason that anything that is possible to happen, would have happened in one of those universes. It's only in the universe where life somehow formed by chance and evolved into intelligent, sentient beings that we can wonder about how this incredibly unlikely event ever happened.
This was one of the very first thoughts that I found I couldn't fully rationalize away as a JW. I was always something of a lover of math/science, and whenever the talks about the origin of life were given I could never understand why the apparent perfection of the earth and the laws of physics to support life was evidence of a creator. I always saw it as neutral evidence at best and at worst as somewhat discounting the idea of a creator. Sort of the same argument as above - if life is so unlikely to happen as is suggested, then wouldn't it make sense that it would only happen by chance in a place that is perfectly suitable for it to happen? It would be greater evidence of a creator if we lived somewhere that was extremly inhospitible to life, as such an environment would be more likely to require intervention in order to create and maintain living matter.
I don't know if you can tell, but you've hit on a topic that I love discussing, and since I have no outlet for that it comes out whenever there's an oppurtunity.
i have come to the conclusion that science cannot prove or disprove the existence of god.
however the scientific evidence available is compelling enough for me to believe that a creator is responsible for life on earth.. i have read much about powner and understand the work he is doing.
i am interested in your views as to his credibility.
It's obviously impossible to prove that god doesn't exist. In my opinion, though, the idea of god doesn't actually explain anything, it just moves the problem further away at best, and realistically it makes the problem more complex: How did the incredibly simple, uninteligent microscopic first life form come to be? Of course an all-knowing, all-powerful being must've created it! You've just taken the question of how something relativly simple came to be and answered by supposing the existance of something incredibly complex. Science explains this by progressively stepping backwards to simpler and simpler things, whereas creationists explain it with one big leap to something that would have to be more complex than the observable universe. That's not satisfying to me, so in the lack of any evidence I see no use in entertaining the idea further.
Sorry, kinda side-tracked your origonal question. I'm not sure how credible he is, but it wouldn't shock me if life could be synthesized in our lifetime. They've already been able to create an entire custom genome from scratch and insert it into an existing bacterial cell (and observe the results of some of the tweaked genes) so it's not a tremendous leap to get to building life from scratch.
