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Forums - General Discussion - What is your take on creationism/creationists?

finalrpgfantasy said:

when i read that they say that earth is only 10,000 years old i started to laugh, there are even objets older than that.


There have been reports of stars, and other items in the universe, that showed up as older than the age of the expected age of the universe.  In regards to knowing the age of the universe, there is no guarantee that time has been constant.  If you consider the Big Bang to be valid, it is entirely possible that there is distortion on how time worked back then. 

A problem with the creationist side is they will generally find weird things that don't make sense, and then do big logic jumps that there then HAD to be a Garden of Eden somewhere.  Get people to question everything, and then anything is plausable.  The anti-theist side does this with God also.  Cause some questioning, then make everything all the same, then roll out a pet theory that feels comfortable.



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Religious people in general are polite, and that's what matters to me.



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Nirvana_Nut85 said:

Well considering that scientific data is about as manipulated by the Elite as religions today I dont see how any of you can justify your answers when both are propagated. Look what they did with man made global warming for example. It came out in the media last year that the University that the U.N had hired had been manipulating the data they were providing to make it appear as if the Earth was getting warmer when in fact temperatures had been cooling in the past 10 years.  http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100017393/climategate-the-final-nail-in-the-coffin-of-anthropogenic-global-warming/ (There's alot more sites to look into if you google "climate Gate")

I agree with you, its all so manipulated its retarded, so many facts thrown together and spun with crap to controll the masses. the  theory of evolution cannot explain a lot and its retarded to say that we just popped up on this little planet.

I am friends with people from many religions, a few who are catholic, a jew, christians, and atheists, and we talk and argue but in the end we all accept that everyone is different. why cant everyone be that way.

I take the Bible to be semi-historically accurate, but based largely on the mayan relgions. in my opinion the ancient astronaut theory seems to be the most likely, but im always willing to hear ideas and amend my own beliefs.



Except that evolution doesn't say that we just popped up on this little planet. It says it happened over billions of years. That certianly isn't popping up.

A more literal reading of many creation myths however could be read in such a way.



FaRmLaNd said:

Except that evolution doesn't say that we just popped up on this little planet. It says it happened over billions of years. That certianly isn't popping up.

A more literal reading of many creation myths however could be read in such a way.


Evolution doesn't explain the origin of life, the planets, the universe. It only explains the diversity of life we see on Earth.



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richardhutnik said:

To some degree, all aspects of life that people trust in requires faith.  Even a belief in rationality is an act of faith.  There is some weird things in reality that defy rational thought. 

If you want to talk about purely rational, then I can bring in Popper and say that you can't even prove anything at all, including causality.  This means you merely disprove things.  But then, you only disprove for a certain set of conditions and not univerally for all conditions in the universe (God would fit this).  So, thus, you can't even prove anything at all.  All you can do is have reasonable inferences from that which is, and hope it is consistent enough you can trust in it.  The reality is we can't prove that the laws of science work everywhere at all times, or the same laws will continue to work.  We can't even prove that the universe wasn't created last Thursday, and just set in motion either.

But, all this talk doesn't lead to any practical dealing with anything.  We go to science, because it works relatively well for the human race as a methodology to get control over the universe and make plans that will come to pass.

As far as "rationalism" doing anything, science has found that human beings tend to have emotions in their decision-making and they have difficulty making any decisions unless emotions are involved.  There is also the case of people intuitively making decisions, and these decisions can be very good ones.  As far as saving money, I am fully aware that myself telling myself that "you need to save money, because it is rational" doesn't cause me to save money. 

You're just playing with words, here, but let's get to the meaning.

I have "faith" in laws of physics not changing suddenly so that the airplane I'm travelling in doesn't plummet from the sky because its wings are suddenly useless. That's a statistical inference: it never happened since humanity kept track and we have no evidence that it ever happened even before that.

Thus, it's "faith" only in the sense i which if I extracted 999 times  out of 1000 a black ball out of an opaque urn and only one white ball, I have "faith" that the majority of balls inside the urn are black.

It's an assumption that the world follows some laws that we can rationalize mathematically in some way. It's apprently a big assumption, but it has been tested again and again billion of times every day in all fields of human activity, even before the scientific method as we know it was formally adopted. As such even though blind induction is still a logical no-no, the theory that laws of physics keep working on our human time scales is the best tested theory of all in a Popper-ian sense.

The faith that a god or other mystic force created our world or keeps to meddle with it, on the contrary, has no value as a scientific theory according to Popper exactly because we can't falsify it.

You can say it's faith in both cases, if you want, in the same way that the number of atoms in the universe is the same as the number of living unicorns in Wales this instant. They're both numbers, after all. But leaving aside this superficial abstraction, the underlying concepts are both quantitatively and qualitatively different.

Last but not least rationalism in epistemology has little to do with "behaving rationally" in everyday's life, but has all to do with using rational tools for the exploration of the world's behaviour. Proof be that there are rational, scientific studies on human behaviour according to "gut feelings" , brain areas and inconscious risk assessment, see e.g. Damasio's "Descartes' error". Please point me to a real case where rationalism fails in this sense, since you say that

"There is some weird things in reality that defy rational thought. "



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RockSmith372 said:


Evolution doesn't explain the origin of life, the planets, the universe. It only explains the diversity of life we see on Earth.

Of course evolution only deals with what it deals with. It'd be absurd to think its a complete model for everything.



I just find it sad that some people will refuse to accept scientific facts because they believe that everything a book says must be 100% true,regardless of scientific facts.Plus they start with a conclusion and then try and make up the rest.



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WereKitten said:

You're just playing with words, here, but let's get to the meaning.

I have "faith" in laws of physics not changing suddenly so that the airplane I'm travelling in doesn't plummet from the sky because its wings are suddenly useless. That's a statistical inference: it never happened since humanity kept track and we have no evidence that it ever happened even before that.

Thus, it's "faith" only in the sense i which if I extracted 999 times  out of 1000 a black ball out of an opaque urn and only one white ball, I have "faith" that the majority of balls inside the urn are black.

It's an assumption that the world follows some laws that we can rationalize mathematically in some way. It's apprently a big assumption, but it has been tested again and again billion of times every day in all fields of human activity, even before the scientific method as we know it was formally adopted. As such even though blind induction is still a logical no-no, the theory that laws of physics keep working on our human time scales is the best tested theory of all in a Popper-ian sense.

The faith that a god or other mystic force created our world or keeps to meddle with it, on the contrary, has no value as a scientific theory according to Popper exactly because we can't falsify it.

You can say it's faith in both cases, if you want, in the same way that the number of atoms in the universe is the same as the number of living unicorns in Wales this instant. They're both numbers, after all. But leaving aside this superficial abstraction, the underlying concepts are both quantitatively and qualitatively different.

Last but not least rationalism in epistemology has little to do with "behaving rationally" in everyday's life, but has all to do with using rational tools for the exploration of the world's behaviour. Proof be that there are rational, scientific studies on human behaviour according to "gut feelings" , brain areas and inconscious risk assessment, see e.g. Damasio's "Descartes' error". Please point me to a real case where rationalism fails in this sense, since you say that

"There is some weird things in reality that defy rational thought. "

There are several definitions of faith, both of which are connected to some degree.  The first is the considering of statements about reality to be true.  The second means a reliance upon something.  In both these cases, it depends on what one considers to be trustworthy as a means of either giving information that is accurate or to utilize and base one's life upon.  In short, what does one consider sources of authority that is reliable that one checks with.  This can be one's own reasoning, one's own senses, or other methodologies like religions systems, experience of others, or science.  In all these, at the core, is an act of faith to trust that source of authority.  So, in this, it comes down to faith.

In regards to falsifying, what has been shown to be falsified is the belief in causality.  We have multitudes of examples of how doing something for the Xth time ended up not yielding the same results.  Without being able to prove causality, then even the ability to falsify anything is suspect.  One can only falsify that something happened at a certain time in a certain space, and that it has had multiple times.  See "The Black Swan Theory" in regards to this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory

So, the only thing we can say is that we personally don't have evidence for such being here.  But that doesn't mean it is so.  Also, we can't even say that such will still be true tomorrow, due to the issue with black swans.  Not taking ownership over this, and accepting it, leads to people to develop flawed models that seem to work, but end up being subject to the butterlfy effect.  We have witnessed a meltdown in financial markets due to people building mathematical models on how both housing prices ALWAYS go up somewhere (most recent) to one that factored in Russia not defaulting on its loans (look up Long-Term Capital Management for info on this).  In both cases, a LOT of people got hurt, because individuals persumed that, based on their pure reasoning, and math, they couldn't be wrong.

Groups also have been known to have groupthink, so they make bad decisions based on that, eventhough it seems rational.  And individuals will seeming to be totally rational in their decisions.  However, such individuals will end up seeing their rational decision-making be flawed, because it ends up not being purely rational.  Or, even if it is, there are cases where using intuition, to feel out that maybe the data is wrong (without physical evidence to support it in the current sample space), leads to better results. 

In regards to the faith that there is a god/God meddling in reality isn't really worth much.  However, if such a God does meddle favorably, then that is favorable.  In regards to how possibly believing that which is not true now may be more beneficial than believing what is, there is the case of the placebo as one.  Also, people who end up doing visualization of that which is not there now, but see it as it is, show performance improvement. 



NKAJ said:

I just find it sad that some people will refuse to accept scientific facts because they believe that everything a book says must be 100% true,regardless of scientific facts.Plus they start with a conclusion and then try and make up the rest.

So, you find it sad that some people don't have the same level of faith in science as you do?  Well, some people don't.  By the way, I am not sure where "fact" comes into science.  I see the following as dealing with science, not "facts":

* You start off with a hypothesis, which is a conclusion about the nature of reality.  It usually comes about intuitively, as a flash of insight from either other experimentation or an observation about reality, or other theoretical work (string theory fits this as there is NO scientific experiments done to validate it now).  You then end up looking for research to end up verifying it may have some validity or not.

* After some research has verified it has some merit, it becomes a Theory. 

* When a Theory ends up being able to be verified to the extent that it is good for making predictions, then there are some Laws said to come about are able to be used to make other predictions and develop mathematical models.  From these comes the ability to create technology that has an impact on the human experience, for good or evil.

In this, I don't see any "facts".  I see "facts" are brought up as things that people have a degree of faith in that people who consider a piece of information a "fact" will consider those who don't consider it true to be "stupid", "misinformed", "liars" or whatever other negative term people come up with.