torpex2002

a good starting place for any philosophy is an extension of what numerous species already have in place, empathy. it is alluded to in biblical scripture, do unto others, etc, which is sound game theory in any group of any animal, reciprocal behaviour, it's in an individuals interest to be nice to others in a group or they will be cast out from it, this is certainly true in most of our cultures, but this philosophy, while recognised by jesus, didnt come from him. it's been around a whole lot longer than him, and in more species than just ours. Put simply, when you do something that will or may affect others, put yourself in their shoes and think about whether you'd want it done to you. That produces sound morality, whether it's source is religious or not.

It seems to me that belief in gods is much more about emotional (usually called spiritual) wellbeing, than rationality. It was surely inevitable that emotional and highly ignorant beings would subscribe to various comforting but conveniently unfalsifiable myths they concocted, and that as their ignorance shrunk, so too would their belief in such myths. This is, after all, the very first lesson of scripture, genesis; trust that there is a god who made you, don't question this, don't seek knowledge of what is true or false (yes, that's what it says in Hebrew, not "good and evil") because if you do learn the truth, your blissfull ignorance will be stripped from you and you will realize you are indeed mortal. What people may believe is not my concern, I have no desire to tread on their beliefs, but since the OP has made a thread about rational proof, I feel I can tread freely on the subject of what is proven true or rationally accepted as true, vs what is not. Bertrand Russel summed up my views on the matter: “There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths. Almost inevitably some part of him is aware that they are myths and that he believes them only because they are comforting. But he dare not face this thought! Moreover, since he is aware, however dimly, that his opinions are not rational, he becomes furious when they are disputed.” The only difference is, I don't really think that beliefs in gods are feeble or contemptible, I just feel the need to respond to those who claim such beliefs are rational, reasonable, based on logic, or based on reality. the belief itself undeniably serves several valid and useful purposes that I can think of, but I maintain it remains just that - a very useful belief, not a reflection of reality. I also think the bulk of those who call themsleves christians appreciate this deep down, although for obvious reasons they generally cannot openly concede it. It does happen though, usually in private and anonimously. Islam overall, appears to be effectively where christianity was 3-400 years ago; highly dependent on religion for social functioning, a lack of tolerance for gender equality, homosexuality, leaving the religion, etc, however, the world is becoming a smaller place. I predict a rapid catch up to what are considered current western values. there's less and less hardcore muslims in general, and it seems the further away humans in general are from the equator, desperation, strife, struggle, hunger, disease, hopelessness, etc, the less religiously fundamentalist they tend to be. Short of writing an entire book, that's a summary of how I see theistic religions and beliefs, and a response to the OP for either forgetting, denying, or not appreciating what religious faith is all about.

My Prediction - In the next 10 or so years we'll see massive advances in the field of Augmented Reality. 8 or so years ago it was a gimmick for games using camera phones, now it's already a navigation aid using cameras in tablets and smart phones, it won't be long until it's standard as a HUD in cars, apps on mobile devices, and overlays in glasses for navigation, be it street shops or motorway junctions, facebook will adopt it for seeing how far away your friends are, dating sites will use it to show how far away your nearest potential "date" is, you'll be able to shop for things just by looking at them, all well within the reach of the next decade.

I just use Google analytics. Dump one file into your root directory to confirm you're the webmaster, view all manner of charts, navigation patterns, view your own site with an overlay of what percentage of hits each link gets, see your viewers country, browser, operating system, plus plenty of other features, charts and statistics.

Any person asking this question is either erroneously or dishonestly assuming that every ancestor of chickens was also a chicken, so I tend to (also dishonestly) answer the question as if it were referring to any type of egg: Eggs were around many millions of years before chickens.

There's no "making" morality subjective, morality IS subjective. Morality is a word which merely describes what various cultures have deemed is best for their culture, what is moral to one culture, nation or individual is NEVER moral to all. At the level of whatever you like, within any culture, state, nation, society and yes even religion, there is disagrement over what should be allowed and shouldn't, and the last time I checked, no thousand year old religiously followed book tells us what the age of consent should be (just as well since Muhammad married someone under the age of 10) nor, by the way, does scripture condemn rape, rather it says a rapist and his rape victim must marry. Scripture even tells us how to keep slaves, that women should be silent, the idea that anyone would genuinely think such books give everyone on the planet an objective sense of things we should and should not do, is to me at least, thoroughly repugnant. I trust you won't miss the irony here - it's only because morality IS subjective that we've moved forward from the times when that was the case. If we all followed what many claim to be "humanity's objective guide for morality," women would be the property of men, homosexuals would be stoned to death,* any city with even just one non believer would be burned to the ground, women would be considered "posessed" during their period, the list goes on... So, pretending for a second that we actually do have an objective basis for morality, it's not like any one community, nation or religion agree amongst themselves what it actually is. Whether there is an objective or religious basis for morality is actually irrelevant - the morality that all people subscribe to will still be subjective, blatantly so on all the finer points of what is acceptable in any given culture. That's how humans operate, as social beings in communities. We don't all kill each other for the same reason other species don't, we survive as a group or in groups. i very much doubt we agree on whether at least one book is fact or fiction, to begin with. In summary then, religious bases for morality are entirely obsolete when it comes to telling people what we should and should not do. However, I'd gladly concede that religion is historically the best way of getting a population to conform to a set of principles, whatever they might be. Particularly useful in times of hardship, desperation, need, hopelessness, etc. nothing seems to scare people into doing as they think they ought, more than the notion of an invisible all seeing judge, and an eternal punishment for not complying with it's wishes. *not forgetting, many devotees to such ancient writings still do consider these things moral and indeed, obligatory.

Very true, plus we humans still have the genes for webbed digits and all over thick body hair which, like the genes for tails, sometimes get accidentally activated. Same is true in Chickens having the genes for teeth. TBH, I find that similarities between us and other species can quite easily be claimed to be just as much evidence of a common designer as common descent, so here's something that can only be evidence of common descent, not common design.

seems I've exceeded the maximum quotes limit or screwed up the syntax so I'll try this another way. encody - "correct me if I'm wrong" not a problem. encody - "The DNA in such "similar" animals as the bat, bird, and human is (for the forearm and hand) radically different, although the basic physical design is the same." Strange, most evolution deniers like to mention that radically different animals all have very similar DNA, as a way to suggest a common designer, yet you've said it's the opposite way around. Very interesting. encody - Also, the Fossil Record?!! In terms of macroevolution, completely useless!! The fossil record tells us numerous things, for example humans are a relatively recent kind of mammal, mammals are a relatively recent kind of animal, and animals are a relatively recently kind of life form. The exact phylogenic tree that evolution predicts is mirrored in the fossil record; there were no humans around before mammals existed, there were no bunny rabbits in the cambrian period, etc, etc. All macro evolution is is a term invented by evolution deniers to dishonestly move the goal posts. once it's proven to them that live evolves, they sneakily say "but you can't prove that life keeps evolving any more than what we've witnessed." it's about as intellectually honest as saying "you can't prove that more than 200 years have ever passed because you've only seen a fraction of it." encody - http://www.detecting...ime%20Scale.jpg If you look at this, it appears to be evidence of evolution... but, the fossil record has never been completely observed. Nor will it ever be, very little of what ever lived gets fossilised, nor will we find all the fossils that do exist, but we still have many hundreds of thousands of specimens, and the picture painted unmistakeably says "life has evolved." Imagine the mona lisa - having a few small details of it missing in no way means you can't tell which painting it is. encody - Another major thing to take in mind is the Cambrian Explosion, an "explosion" of live never previously seen in any other time period, and then, all of a sudden, voilá, new explosion of life never seen before!!! BIG problem for evolutionists... The cambrian explosion was only a relatively rapid appearance of fossils from the cambrian period. Remember, the cambrian explosion refers to approx 40 million years, and life was flourishing before this period but not much of it fossilised due to lack of hard body parts, hence what appears to be an explosion only in relative terms, of how many fossils are found during and after this period. Why this any kind of problem for evolution, I'd love to know. encody - In case you haven't noticed, I don't believe in evolution. If you do, Prove Me Wrong. What is proven to you is partly up to you, and that's fine. Evolution remains a verifiable, testable, observable and undeniable fact, something which, if false, would have been incredibly easy to falsify, yet perhaps quite tellingly the only things the evolution deniers can do is perpetually encourage and spread the same tired old lies, misinformation, fallacies and ignorance, 99.99% of the time purely in defence of a religious belief which contradicts it. Now I have no problem with what anyone might believe, nor the reasons they do so, but on the topic of what is demonstrably true vs patently false, I'll get right into THAT discussion. ethanh - Louis Pasteur did experiments that proves life can only come from life – this scientific law has never been broken Firstly, very simple self replicating matter has been produced in the lab, using processes that do occur in nature. Secondly, I fail to see why not knowing how life originated, has the slightest bearing on being very able to know that life changes over time, as indeed you'd expect any self reproducing thing, anywhere. ethanh - How could life come from a big bang? Seems an unnecessarily extreme question, in any case, I don't know. Why couldn't it? ethanh - No one has found fossils of the stages between apes and humans that have been proven. If evolution is true, it would have been happening everywhere and there would have been at least one fossil to prove it. They would have already found the “Missing Link”, if it existed. Evolution is not linear, life varies, so it branches out, meaning life on earth is one large family tree, so all living things, alive or dead, are an intermediate stage between their distant ancestors and their distant descendants, should they be fortunate enough to have any. Again, this is precisely what we see in the fossil record, once there were no humans but plenty of mammals, plenty of animals but no mammals, plenty of living things but no animals, etc. As for stages between apes and humans, just as there was no humans around millions of years ago, there were none of the modern apes, but a hominid species was the ancestor of humans and apes. Think of the family tree. It may interest you to note how this misrepresentation is used to claim evolution is false. of course it's true there's no missing link between us and modern apes, that wouldn't make sense. what there IS, or rather was, is a common ancestor to us and the other modern apes. http://www.theistic-...minids2_big.jpg ethanh - If we came from a big bang, where would our sense of right and wrong come from? What is the purpose of our life? There is no purpose if we came from a big bang. I'll leave that question, it's clearly more about what you'd rather believe than what is true. Evolutionists say nothing of the sort, most Christians accept evolution. SOME atheists may say that. I personally don't think time itself is endless so nothing is eternal. either way, I fail to see what any god has directly to do with evolution, only the reasons people have for denying it. Nothing can create itself, that's an obvious paradox. But that's not what happens, a species can diversify into several other exclusive ones purely by their variations being selected for by the differing environments they find themselves in. for example, take lions vs tigers or zebras vs donkeys, it is possible for them to reproduce sometimes meaning they share a common ancestor, however it is very rare and their offspring (ligers and zonkeys) will always be infertile, which is what you'd expect of a lineage branching out into two that are no longer compatible. Firstly, again, nothing has ever created itself. Secondly, DNA was not "created." Thirdly, plenty of complex things come into being purely by well understood natural processes, eg the solar system due to gravity, crystals due to atomic properties, etc. as I said earlier, we did not evolve from apes, we evolved with apes, we have a common ancestor which was not exactly like humans or modern apes, who's lineage diversified into the species of ape alive today, us included. Evolution has "produced" DNA, "create" implies some intent to the process. No doubt DNA has not always been as complex, nor even a molecule that could be called DNA. The ancestor of DNA was probably RNA, which still exists in things like viruses, which are able to copy themselves but aren't strictly alive. Firstly, a person who believes in creation, ie a creator, does not necessarily refute evolution. Secondly, since you brought up popularity - of scientists accepting or denying evolution, there are more scientists called Steve who accept evolution, than there are scientists across the world who deny it. Ultimately though, how many people accept or deny it, has nothing directly to do with it's validity. I have, it's a constant source of amusement for the most part, as is the observation that folks clearly dig up the same old tripe there and post it on various forums, unaware that it's been pulled apart a thousand times before on other forums. You'd think people getting their info from there would want to prevent the inevitable subsequent embarassment by googling their facts first, but cleary for the majority it's about wanting evolution to be false, not about discovering what is true. I know it sounds arrogant but I do strongly advise anyone refuting evolution to decide which it is they want more; for evolution to be false, or to discover what is true. Persisiting in denying evolution publicly will almost guarantee you embarassing yourself more and more. For the intellectually honest evolution denier, www.talkorigins.org would be a good place to test creationist site claims on. I have no desire to step on peoples beliefs, but since we're discussing "is evolution real?", that shouldn't be a problem.

But that's what I'm getting at - murdering and stealing from others, not from their own. To be honest I shouldn't have used the word "murder" in a question like this since the word means specifically "unlawful" killing of people, which is a misnomer on the topic of where our sense of good and bad things to do comes from. Arguably so too is using the word "incest" when what counts as "close family" is again a matter of opinion.

Bit of a false dichotomy really. our sense of things we should and should not do comes from both places, instinct and upbringing - nature AND nurture. for example, the age of consent, what drugs are legal, what meat you can eat, sexuality equality, gender equality, voting age, drinking age, etc, etc, all depend on where you live and when you lived there. other things, eg murder, theft, incest, etc, are things that all cultures have condemned at all times, as you'd predict from beings able to empathise with each other, and which live in communal groups.

Until you can test it or demonstrate it, your god remains as unfalsifiable a concept as the completely undetectable dragon above your head, that is to say, it's a pointless thing to claim exists. I don't even contend that the universe necessarily required a cause, much less a creator, nor do I contend that the universe is definately something IN existence, or that existence must be bigger than the universe. in other words, causation is true IN time space, it need not be of time space itself, after all, there was no "before" time any more than there's a "north" of the north pole. Again, this assumes that the universe "came into being" when the state of "being" maybe limited to the universe, not, as you infer, something greater than it. as for everything else, they all came into being through reasonably well understood means, none of which required any intent, will or sentient being to do. Yes, but it appears to be nature, not any kind of being or personality. I think you'll find Science is a method of study created by people. I don't. I ask why do you assert something for which you seem entirely unable to substantiate, verify, demonstrate, validate or provide credible evidence for? What you believe is entirely up to you, but as soon as you start making claims about what is true, you can expect people to be a little critical and skeptical when you say somethings exists but it's supposed existence is conveniently unfalsifiable, again, like the undetectable dragon above your head.

I do love seeing evolution deniers in action. I'm constantly trying to work out whether they're denying demonstrable facts through ignorance, dishonesty or just knowingly lying through their teeth. It's important to learn which kind you're dealing with because the ignorant ones may well be willing to learn why they're wrong, while the outright liars will use every fallacy, quote mine and piece of misinformation that they can find online, which is a lot. Then, when they've thoroughly embarrassed themselves, along comes another with the exact same BS. It's a very tedious process dealing with evolution deniers one by one, in the time you've spent explaining to evolution denier 1 why what they've read online is... at best dishonest, evolution denier 2, 3 & 4 have read the same drivel and are just dying to embarrass themselves by test driving it. In short then, don't make the assumption that the evolution denier you engage in discussion with, has the slightest interest in what is actually true. In this day and age of the internet where the truth is in reach, there's less and less intellectually honest evolution deniers out there, the ones you tend to encounter are not merely ignorant, they're WILLFULLY ignorant. It's ironic really, they almost always think they're defending their faith or religion, while they're actually doing it a massive disservice by trying to deny undeniable facts. There's my rant for the day!