Evolution and Creationism

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As long as it’s accepted that no scientific proposal put forward in any thread by anyone in this forum …
… is a fact. All scientific proposals, hypotheses or theories, are inventions of the human mind. Therefore, they are necessarily conjectural and corrigible. (For the benefit of @FiveLinden.)
 
It’s the apologetics forum.

Wouldn’t be very interesting if it was just a bunch of guys saying “yep”, would it?
No, it wouldn’t, but, that you keep coming back is an indication that you’re looking for something, proof maybe? Otherwise, your coming back makes no logical sense. So, again, wonderful!
 
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Yeah, I use CARM on occasion, but the vitriol there is amazing.
I’m not familiar with CARM, but, I am surprised, there are people who do believe in the tooth fairy???
 
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Let us say that your general premise is: “If living beings share an essential property then those beings have a common ancestor.” Is that your general premise?
No, my general premise is that stuff we can see things and careful observations of things tell us stuff without the need for philosophers. Just like people bake cakes and build bridges without philosophy. Your introduction of a false abstraction ‘essential property’ to replace the words I used for a real, observable thing ‘genetic material’ is an example of how observation and facts and the development of hypothesis and theories turn into knitting fog in the hands of philosophers.
 
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Freddy:
As long as it’s accepted that no scientific proposal put forward in any thread by anyone in this forum …
All scientific proposals, hypotheses or theories, are inventions of the human mind.
Indeed. That’s why we don’t describe proposals, hypotheses and theories as facts. I wouldn’t have thought it necessary to point that out. Although we are continually assailed by claims that this theory or that hypotheses ‘cannot be proven!’

Obviously not. Because they are explanations. Nothing more. But, and this is the important point, they are all based on facts. So we look at phylogeny and morphology and genetics and dna and the fossil record and parahomology…the list goes on and on…and we look for an explanation as to why the evidence presents as it does.

And we end up with an explantion that ties it all together.

What you will find (and what you have been involved with yourself) in these discussion is generally an attempt to discredit certain facets of the whole enterprise. Such as ‘There is horizontal gene transfer!’ Yes, we know that. ‘The fossil record is incomplete!’ Yes, of course it is. ‘Junk dna is not junk!’ Quite possibly. ‘We can’t reproduce with monkeys!’ Still waiting for why that’s such a bad thing, @buffalo.

But does anyone come up with a better scientific explantion? If we ask for one we get…

crickets
 
The generic problem with all cyclic models of the universe , pointed out by Richard C. Tolman in 1934, is that with each bounce the universe gets hotter, due to the 2nd law of thermodynamics, as work gets irreversibly converted to heat. Another problem is that, since 1998, astronomical observations have indicated that the universe is going to expand forever.
Penrose’s proposal is not that the universe collapses and then expands again. The fact that it is, and always will be, expanding is part of his hypothesis. There is no bounce. So there is no problem with entropy.

He states that in the early moments of the big bang there was no mass, hence no scale and therefore no time. And if the universe expands infinitely then mass will gradually evaporate (even black holes) leaving us with infinitely low energy and just protons. As protons have no mass, we are back to the original conditions of the big bang - no mass, no scale and no time. And that’s the start of the next aeon (as he describes them).

A 40 minute talk by Penrose on this is here:
. He talks about entropy at the 14:00 mark.

Is he right? Well, I have absolutely no idea. But if we were to make a list of ten of the people who really know what they are talking about in matters such as this then it would be madness to exclude him.
 
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Chet1:
f a god every revealed himself to me in a verifiable way, he’s have my worship in an instant
What according to your worldview would constitute a “verifiable way”?
I’m not sure. But God would know what would convince me. So if He chose to convince me then I’d be convinced.

Did you check out Penrose’s video?
 
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It is chiefly the legendary features of Buddha’s life, many of which are found for the first time only in works of later date than the Gospels, that furnish the most striking resemblance to certain incidents related to Christ in the Gospels, resemblance which might with greater show of reason be traced to a common historic origin. If there has been any borrowing here, it is plainly on the side of Buddhism. That Christianity made its way to Northern India in the first two centuries is not only a matter of respectable tradition, but is supported by weighty archaeological evidence by scholars of recognized ability, beyond the suspicion of undue bias in favor of Christianity such as Weber, Goblet, Alviela, and others. The Gospels stories of Christ circulated by these early Christian communities in India were utilized by the Buddhists to enrich the Buddha legend, just as the Vishnuites built up the legend of Krishna on many striking incidents in the life of Christ.

Ignorance of God

A basic defect in primitive Buddhism is its failure to recognize man’s dependence on a supreme God. By ignoring God and by making salvation rest solely on personal effort, Buddha substituted for the Brahmin religion a cold and colorless system of philosophy. It is entirely lacking in those powerful motives of right conduct, particularly the motive of love, that spring from the sense of dependence on a personal all-loving God. Hence it is that Buddhist morality is in the last analysis a selfish utilitarianism. There is no sense of duty, a sin. In the religion of Christ, we are prompted by reverence for a supreme Lawgiver, by love for a merciful Father, by personal allegiance to a Redeemer. Karma, the basis of Buddhist morality, is like any other law of nature,the observance of which is prompted by prudential considerations.

False Pessimism


Another fatal defect of Buddhism is its false pessimism. A strong and healthy mind revolts against the morbid view that life is not worth living, that every form of conscious existence is an evil. Buddhism stands condemned by the voice of nature, the dominant tone of which is hope and joy. It is a protest against nature for possessing the perfection of rational life. The highest ambition of Buddhism is to destroy that perfection by bringing all living beings to the unconscious repose of Nirvana . Buddhism is thus guilty of a capital crime against nature, and in consequence does injustice to the individual. All legitimate desires must be repressed. Innocent recreations are condemned. The cultivation of music is forbidden. Researches in natural science are discountenanced. The development of the mind is limited to the memorizing of Buddhist texts and the study of Buddhist metaphysics, only a minimum of which is of any value. The Buddhist ideal on earth is a state of passive indifference to everything.

How different is the teaching of Him who came that men might have life and have it more abundantly!
 
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Marriage is put down

Again Buddhist pessimism is unjust to the family. Marriage is held in contempt and even abhorrence as leading to the procreation of life. In thus branding marriage as a state unworthy of man, Buddhism betrays its inferiority to Christianity, which commends virginity, but at the same time teaches that marriage is a sacred union and a source of sanctification.

Against Manual labor


Buddhist pessimism likewise does injustice to society. It has set the seal of approval on the Brahmin prejudice against manual labor. Since life is not worth living, to labor for the comforts and refinements of civilized life is a delusion. The perfect man is to subsist not by the labor of his hands, but on the alms of inferior men. In the religion of Christ, a healthier view prevails. The dignity of labor is upheld,and every form of industry is encouraged that tends to promote mankind’s welfare.

Little towards uplifting humanity

Buddhism has accomplished but little for the uplifting of humanity in comparison with Christianity. One of its most attractive features, which, unfortunately has become well-nigh obsolete, was its practice of benevolence towards the sick and the needy. Between Buddhists and Brahmins there was a commendable rivalry in maintaining dispensaries of food and medicines. But this charity did not, like the Christian form, extend to the prolonged nursing of unfortunate stricken with contagious and incurable diseases, to the protection of foundlings, to the bringing up of orphans, to the rescue of fallen women, to the care of the aged and insane. Asylums and hospitals in this sense are unknown to Buddhism. In Sri Lanka, in the last decades, thanks to financial help from Japanese Buddhists, Buddhists have here and there opened some old peoples homes and orphanages.

The consecration of religious men and women to the lifelong service of afflicted humanity is foreign to dreamy Buddhist monasticism.

Again, the wonderful efficacy displayed by the religion of Christ in purifying the morals of pagan Europe has no parallel in Buddhist annals. Wherever the religion of Buddha has prevailed, it has proved singularly inefficient to lift society to a high standard of morality. It has not weaned the people of Tibet and Mongolia from the custom of abandoning the aged, nor the Chinese from the practice of infanticide. Outside the establishment of the order of nuns, it has done next to nothing to raise woman from her state of degradation in Oriental lands. It has shown itself utterly helpless to cope with the moral plagues of humanity.
 
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I see but if your heart is closed to him and if you don’t seek him out nothing will convince you. You’ll be more likely to convince yourself that what you saw, experienced, or felt, was just a dream, a coincidence, a even space aliens are toying with you. Unless you seek God in earnest you’ll just sit there and turn up the skeptic meter. You have to seek God and go to him not the other way around.

I am in China. I can’t watch youtube. But if I understand correctly the gist of it is that time had a beginning along with space and matter and they came into existence together with the Big Bang and the expansion of the universe.
we are back to the original conditions of the big bang - no mass, no scale and no time
Time had a beginning and will have an end. All of this is consistent with the truth of Christian Theism my friend.
 
I see but if your heart is closed to him and if you don’t seek him out nothing will convince you. You’ll be more likely to convince yourself that what you saw, experienced, or felt, was just a dream, a coincidence…
Mmm. So I need to want to believe. Now why would I want to believe in something in which I don’t believe. How could that even be accomplished? It would be like me suggesting that you should want to believe in Shiva.

As I said, if God wants me to believe then He’ll know how to do it. He is omniscient after all. So me not believing seems to be what He desires. He has given me the exactly the same indication that He exists as Shiva has. Literally none.

And I have enough runs on the board to know that very many people who want to believe in something end up doing so whether it is true or not. I’m not built that way. Scepticism should be the default position. You are arguing for exactly the opposite.

Thanks but no thanks.

And as regards the lack of access to Youtube, could you not use a vpn?
 
kids of course. Like Santa, but Santa was based on St. Nicholas but whatever. Kids grow out of it. Kids are still people.
 
God can do anything, but he lets humans have their free will. So God doesn’t just yell at you to become a Catholic. You got to seek it, sometimes it feels like it doesn’t work. Some have a better time. If God exists, Atheists can still go to heaven but its harder for them. If they didn’t anything about Jesus, like aboriginals. They have the chance to go to heaven, but they can’t commit mortal sins: Porn, Murder, etc.
 
Guess I did, I’ll have to go back and look for them, unless you feel like giving me the gist, there are nearly 400 comments to wade trough.
 
Guess I did, I’ll have to go back and look for them, unless you feel like giving me the gist, there are nearly 400 comments to wade trough.
A couple of us were equally unsure as to whether a full sized manekin of Patrick Swayze was orbiting the sun somewhere around the region of Mars. Likewise a china teapot. Russell's teapot - Wikipedia
 
And if the universe expands infinitely then mass will gradually evaporate (even black holes) leaving us with infinitely low energy and just protons.
Erm… Protons have mass. I suspect you meant photons, which have zero rest mass, not that they ever come to rest.
 
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