daniel and religion

[crowTrobot 2]

How can the prophecies be explained away?

the two you link are pretty convoluted and contrived anyway, but it's worth pointing out again that many scholars think that new testament authors KNEW about OT prophecies and in some cases very likely embelished their accounts of jesus' life to make it fit them.

[crowTrobot 2]

Being a Christian,doesn't mean you have to check your brain at the door.

no, but it means you have to carefully and selectively bias your logic to fit your belief. there is a bigger picture that christians choose to ignore.

[dirtysal 0]

I guess maybe the difference is some take The Bible seriously.

[Batman 0]

I just received the book today and am going to start reading it! Thanks again!

For those who tuned in late, what book, and how can I get a copy, too? I'm currently readng The Case for a Creator, by Lee Strobel. I'm back to this thread, as Paul Phillips has come out as an atheist on his 'blog, and I needed balance :)J

[Batman 0]

Being a Christian,doesn't mean you have to check your brain at the door.

no, but it means you have to carefully and selectively bias your logic to fit your belief. there is a bigger picture that christians choose to ignore.

And what exactly is that bigger picture? Usually, a claim like that would be backed up with actual facts.J

[timbo83 0]

Being a Christian,doesn't mean you have to check your brain at the door.

no, but it means you have to carefully and selectively bias your logic to fit your belief. there is a bigger picture that christians choose to ignore.

And what exactly is that bigger picture? Usually, a claim like that would be backed up with actual facts.J

I usually back up my beliefs with scientific evidence. For instance, i do not believe that the grand canyon was created by the noah's ark flood roughly 2000-3000 years ago but is billions of years old, based on carbon dating.this is not a stab at you but i think thats what he was referring to :-)

[Batman 0]

I personally don't have the guts to gamble my eternity that the Bible might be wrong.

so are you joining every other religeon for the same reason then? gotta cover all your bases you know.

Actually, if you new anything about that which you were criticizing, you would know that it's ok to go all in with the God of the Bible.J

[elaear 0]

you're talking about evolution vs. biblical literalist creationism. that's not really an issue, because no intelligent person will believe in the latter. what may be an issue is whether evolution might have been "guided" in some way or not.

i used to believe that evolution may have been "guided", but it just doesn't really make sense, if you really think about it. kenneth miller discusses this in his book in great detail. he points out that by forcing God to have to "guide" the evolution of mankind, you would be limiting god's powers and underestimating his genius. by creating a physical world where its own laws can create an intelligent being to worship Him instead of directly manipulating the world, He would be allowing his creatures free will and therefore choice between good and evil. miller elaborates on this further and gives more reasons on why a world run by random events is more conducive to a loving God than one forced to interfere with everyday events.

we currently have no proven expanation for why speciation seems to work in spurts or for how complex organs evolved, and we aren't really even close to understanding a mechanism for life emerging spontaneously.

this is wrong. speciation in spurts can be explained by gould's punctuated equilibrium, and we have plenty of evidence for how several complex organs have evolved (the eye is a common example).

it is certainly a matter of faith to think that we know enough to eliminate any chance of "god" completely, although it is of course nonsense to use our ignorance about such things to justify belief in the christian god.

this i agree with completely, and have never said anything contradictory to this.

and btw we don't have a clear understanding of what gravity is at all, and relativity is not universally accepted as scientific fact - many scientists consider it likely to be just a scale-dependant approximation of a potentially radically different underlying truth, since it appears to be incompatable with quantum mechanics.

true, we don't know everything about gravity, but if you drop something, it will fall. this is fact.relativity is fact and can be proven with a few simple thought problems (the light+mirror clock, for example), so long as the speed of light remains constant at all velocities.

[elaear 0]

i've always wondered...do you believe that everyone who doesn't believe in Jesus goes to hell? if so, what about people who have never been exposed to Christianity?

For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuseRomans 1:20Jesus warned us, "Take heed that no man deceive you." And we do, indeed, live in the Age of Deceit. Our entire society is totally driven by many myths, none more basic or insidious than the convictions of Evolution, the religion of our age. (Dismissing for this discussion the observations of microevolution, the variations within species, but rather using the term in its connotative sense, referring, in fact, to biogenesis: the notion that we are all the result of a series of cosmic accidents.)The ancient cultures worshiped gods of wood and stone. It is difficult to comprehend the insanity of paganism: who can tally the blood that has been spilled on the altars of the gods who are not and the demons who are! We, however, in our contemporary paganism, have invented the most insulting "god" of all. Instead of ascribing the awesome magnificence of the Creation to any of the false gods of the past, we have chosen to ascribe it all to randomness, or chance. That has to be the most insulting ascription of all: we have decided that no Designer was necessary - it all "just happened." "First there was nothing. Then it exploded!"http://www.khouse.org/articles/2000/256/

see above post. the amount of ignorance and blind faith in those two paragraphs astounds me.

[elaear 0]

i've always wondered...do you believe that everyone who doesn't believe in Jesus goes to hell? if so, what about people who have never been exposed to Christianity?

i really wish someone would answer this already. if it's such a hot question, surely someone should have a response to it.

[timbo83 0]

enjoying this debate guys. Elear, I agree with you that that is a good question. I have also wondered why so many religions exist in the world. Just under 1 billion people follow Christ (so 1 in 6 of the world) whilst over the half of the worlds population is MuslimSince there are a bunch of poker players here, what odds would you take? :?

[elaear 0]

I personally don't have the guts to gamble my eternity that the Bible might be wrong.

so are you joining every other religeon for the same reason then? gotta cover all your bases you know.

Actually, if you new anything about that which you were criticizing, you would know that it's ok to go all in with the God of the Bible.J

perhaps it is "ok" to go with the God of the Bible, but completely unnecessary, imo.this is how i see it (from my very logic-based point of view):every religion says "follow me, and you shall reach the light, or you shall be condemned!" if it doesn't say this, then there's no point in following that religion.if it does say this, then either all religions are right, or they're all wrong. if only one of them is right, then i will NOT believe in that religion, because if it does, then it will be condemning billions of good people, and i will not follow such an unjust and evil god.if all religions are right, then there's no point in following any one religion.if all religions are wrong, then there is no god (or any other spiritual essence, for that matter). i do not believe this, simply by experiencing life and everything that is in it (beauty, love, free thought, etc.). i just don't believe that there is no meaning in life.therefore, i believe that if you simply live a good life and put yourself in +EV situations, you'll be fine in the long run. what will happen, you ask? no one knows, and no one could ever possibly know.

[dirtysal 0]

true, we don't know everything about gravity, but if you drop something, it will fall. this is fact. relativity is fact and can be proven with a few simple thought problems (the light+mirror clock, for example), so long as the speed of light remains constant at all velocities..

Greek philosophers generally followed Aristotle's belief that the speed of light was infinite.Even Kepler (1600 A.D.) maintained the majority view that light was instantaneous.Descartes (who died in 1650) strongly held to a belief in the instantaneous propagation of light. He strongly influenced the scientists of the period and following. It wasn't until 1677 that a Danish astronomer named Olaf Roemer announced that the anomalous behavior of the eclipse times of Jupiter's inner moon, Io, could be accounted for by a finite speed of light. It took another half century for that notion to be accepted. It wasn't until 1729 that James Bradley's independent confirmation finally ended the opposition to a finite value for the speed of light. Roemer's work, which had split the scientific community for 53 years, was finally vindicated. This emotional inertia concerning the velocity of light seems to continue to haunt the dogmas of physics. The speed of light has been measured 163 times by 16 different methods over the past 300 years. However, Australian physicist Barry Setterfield and mathematician Trevor Norman, reexamining the known experimental measurements to date, have suggested a highly controversial discovery: the speed of light appears to have been slowing down! 1657: Roemer 307,600. +/- 5400 km/sec 1875: Harvard 299,921. +/- 13 km/sec 1983: NBS (laser method): 299,792.4358 +/- 0.0003 km/sec The speed of light is now measured as 299,792.4358 kilometers per second.(This is approximately 186,000 miles/second; or one foot per nanosecond.) The Canadian mathematician, Alan Montgomery, has reported a computer analysis supporting the Setterfield/Norman results. His model indicates that the decay of velocity of light closely follows a cosecant-squared curve, and has been asymptotic since 1958. If he is correct, the speed of light was 10-30% faster in the time of Christ; twice as fast in the days of Solomon; four times as fast in the days of Abraham, and perhaps more than 10 million times faster prior to 3000 B.C. Needless to say, this view is highly controversial and the majority of physicists intensely reject this hypothesis. Some confirmatory trends have been reported in 475 measurements of 11 other atomic quantities by 25 methods in dynamical time. But it could again, as it did in the days of Roemer, take fifty years before it is resolved. But there is another most disturbing discovery that strangely may prove to support the Setterfield view.

[crowTrobot 2]

And what exactly is that bigger picture? Usually, a claim like that would be backed up with actual facts.

bigger picture in terms of christianity necessarily being the "right" religeon, in terms of the contradictory nature of god from old to new testament, in terms of contradictions among the gospels, in terms of why god would want to leave any doubt about his existence or why his plan of salvation makes no sense. you have to use selective logic to justify any of that.

[crowTrobot 2]

this is wrong. speciation in spurts can be explained by gould's punctuated equilibrium,

i said proven explanation - your talking about a theory that many evolutionary scientists have problems with.

relativity is fact and can be proven with a few simple thought problems

true on a large scale, but if you have to factor in quantum corrections (as seems to be the case) relatively breaks down on very small scales.

[dirtysal 0]

very good article that's relevant to this discussion.The Code of BloodThe famed double-helix DNA typically includes three billion rungs of a digital, error-correcting code. A digital (symbolic) code derives its significance from arbitrary, but consistent, definitions. A digital language requires context; conventions external to the code itself. An effective digital code demands careful, skillful design.The genetic alphabet is a 3-out-of-4 design employing four nitrogenous bases: Adenine, Thymine, Guanine, and Cytosine for DNA (Uracil is substituted for Thymine in the RNA). These bases will be abbreviated as A, U, G, and C in the chart in Figure 1. Sugar molecules (ribose or deoxyribose) bind the chemical alphabet; phosphate molecules bind the sugar molecules together to form the now- famous double helix.There are 20 amino acids that are assembled into the over 100,000 various functional proteins observed. The DNA/RNA code is shown in Figure 1.The genetic alphabet of the four nitrogenous bases are taken three at a time to form one of 64 possible triplets. Each triplet has a specific meaning: 61 specify one of the 20 amino acids; three are used as punctuation codes to parse its sentences. UAA, UAG, and UGA are used as "stop" codes; GUA and GUG, depending upon their position in the molecule, can also act as "start" codes. There is also redundancy, in the form of homonyms (alternative codes for a given amino acid), to improve its error-correction characteristics.(It is interesting that evidence to date indicates that this alphabet and its associated codes have not changed throughout the history of the earth.)These codes are stored in the DNA "master blueprint" and copied by transcription machinery into the working copy RNA, which is then translated into the "sentence" which assembles the amino acids into the necessary proteins. The translation process is similar to a magnetic recording head reading a computer tape. Most proteins involve a specific amino acid chain between 100 to 500 amino acids long.The Transcription ProcessRecent articles reviewed the remarkable transcription process.While the unwinding and rewinding of the DNA takes place, an equally sophisticated process of reading the DNA code and "writing" new strands occurs. The process involves the production and use of messenger RNA. The DNA coding sequences are separated by intervening sequences, which must be detected and removed. (These are similar to the "equidistant letter sequences" that we find hidden in the Biblical texts.) The remaining coding sequences are then spliced together to form the messenger RNA molecule.An Example of Specificity The DNA/RNA coding system must arrange the amino acids into specific sequences to form each required protein. While similar to letters of an alphabet in sentences, only a specific sequence of amino acids will produce the essential result. The precision of this sequence is its specificity. Since they involve a fixed alphabet in very specific sequence, it is quite straightforward to mathematically analyze the specificity. One of the most important proteins - perhaps the most important - is hemoglobin. It is responsible for both the red color of our blood and for the oxygen chemistry based on our breathing. The Torah notes that "life is in the blood."The formula for hemoglobin is detailed in Figure 2:In the chart there is only one specific sequence of the amino acids that is hemoglobin. Hemoglobinopathy occurs if even one amino acid is replaced; it is usually lethal. (Sickle cell anemia being but one example.)Using the formula for alternate linear arrangements of these amino acids indicates that there are about 10650 permutations possible, but only one of them is hemoglobin. (The actual number is 7.4 x 10654. There are indications that some of the amino acid positions may be "neutral," like spaces, which are less significant. The current research indicates that these may be up to 10% of such positions, which would indicate that there are only 516 rather than 574 significant amino acid positions, in which case the specificity would reduce to 7.9 x 10503.) This is still a pretty good finite approximation for infinity! The likelihood of this specific sequence occurring by chance is clearly absurd.(In speculating about obtaining this precise sequence by 10500+ random trials, remember that there have been only about 1017 seconds in the generally accepted age of the universe, so you would have had to work rather quickly. Also, realize that there are only about 10 66 atoms in the universe, so you can't waste material on false tries!)Think about it. It isn't just unlikely; it really is impossible. It was very skillfully designed. If you really want to be a skeptic, you need to practice like the Red Queen in Alice Through the Looking Glass , who said:"I practice believing impossible things at least twice day...[check]"It takes a lot of commitment to blindness and fallacies to be an atheist. There are, of course, no dead atheists (James 2:19).If someone claims to be an atheist, ask him to prove it. It must include a claim to know everything - since God could be hiding behind any area of knowledge the claimant has overlooked... I personally don't have the guts to gamble my eternity that the Bible might be wrong.http://www.khouse.org/articles/1998/163/

[elaear 0]

true, we don't know everything about gravity, but if you drop something, it will fall. this is fact. relativity is fact and can be proven with a few simple thought problems (the light+mirror clock, for example), so long as the speed of light remains constant at all velocities..

Greek philosophers generally followed Aristotle's belief that the speed of light was infinite.Even Kepler (1600 A.D.) maintained the majority view that light was instantaneous.Descartes (who died in 1650) strongly held to a belief in the instantaneous propagation of light. He strongly influenced the scientists of the period and following. It wasn't until 1677 that a Danish astronomer named Olaf Roemer announced that the anomalous behavior of the eclipse times of Jupiter's inner moon, Io, could be accounted for by a finite speed of light. It took another half century for that notion to be accepted. It wasn't until 1729 that James Bradley's independent confirmation finally ended the opposition to a finite value for the speed of light. Roemer's work, which had split the scientific community for 53 years, was finally vindicated. This emotional inertia concerning the velocity of light seems to continue to haunt the dogmas of physics. The speed of light has been measured 163 times by 16 different methods over the past 300 years. However, Australian physicist Barry Setterfield and mathematician Trevor Norman, reexamining the known experimental measurements to date, have suggested a highly controversial discovery: the speed of light appears to have been slowing down! 1657: Roemer 307,600. +/- 5400 km/sec 1875: Harvard 299,921. +/- 13 km/sec 1983: NBS (laser method): 299,792.4358 +/- 0.0003 km/sec The speed of light is now measured as 299,792.4358 kilometers per second.(This is approximately 186,000 miles/second; or one foot per nanosecond.) The Canadian mathematician, Alan Montgomery, has reported a computer analysis supporting the Setterfield/Norman results. His model indicates that the decay of velocity of light closely follows a cosecant-squared curve, and has been asymptotic since 1958. If he is correct, the speed of light was 10-30% faster in the time of Christ; twice as fast in the days of Solomon; four times as fast in the days of Abraham, and perhaps more than 10 million times faster prior to 3000 B.C. Needless to say, this view is highly controversial and the majority of physicists intensely reject this hypothesis. Some confirmatory trends have been reported in 475 measurements of 11 other atomic quantities by 25 methods in dynamical time. But it could again, as it did in the days of Roemer, take fifty years before it is resolved. But there is another most disturbing discovery that strangely may prove to support the Setterfield view.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-decayin other words, completely full of crap. this is why i hate creationists -- they will commit to any bogus science so long as it is conducive to their religious views.

[crowTrobot 2]

yet another biased presentation. all the *apparent* odds reguarding DNA signify is that we are ignorant about the selective mechanisms. for example there is some indication that quantum mechanics may cause rapid mutations.in any case how do you get from DNA odds to believing in the bible? where's the link that says a DNA-designer "god" if he exists is necessarily the christian god?

[elaear 0]

i said proven explanation - your talking about a theory that many evolutionary scientists have problems with.

last time i checked, punctuated equilibrium as a theory has held up pretty well. if you could send me some scientifically credible (read: non-creationist) links that say otherwise, i'd be happy to read them.

true on a large scale, but if you have to factor in quantum corrections (as seems to be the case) relatively breaks down on very small scales.

well, everything breaks down in very small scales -- that's how quantum physics was born. however, it would be pretty inconvenient to calculate how much force it would take to launch a spaceship using schrodinger's equation. if you want to be THAT strict on what is "fact", then you might as well throw every practical physics equation out the window.

[elaear 0]

HAHAHAHA... wait wait wait, are you trying to say random mutations and natural selection cannot produce practical proteins? excuse me while i clean the urine off my floor from laughing too hard.there's no point in replying to you anymore. it's all too clear that you will believe any bullshit these creationist pseudo-scientists will hand you. you only believe what you want to believe (anything that is Bible-friendly) and ignore everything else, even if it's an infinite times more reasonable. i'm sorry, but at least in this thread, i'll choose to save my words for those intelligent enough to understand them.please stop posting these obvious false claims against evolution -- it's disturbing an otherwise interesting discussion.

[matthew r 0]

im still waiting for someone to bring up scientology as the most logical answer for life as we know it... XENU RULZ #1

[dirtysal 0]

my final post in this thread,believe whatever you like,I'm all in with The God of The Bible!For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse because, although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools, Romans 1:20-22

[webSmith 0]

enjoying this debate guys. Elear, I agree with you that that is a good  question. I have also wondered why so many religions exist in the world. Just under 1 billion people follow Christ (so 1 in 6 of the world) whilst over the half of the worlds population is MuslimSince there are a bunch of poker players here, what odds would you take? :?

not sure where you got this info from. most estimates are in this neighborhood:current #s:christian = 33%muslim = 20%hindu = 13%no relgion = 12%chinese folk relgion = 6%buddhism = 6%

[elaear 0]

my final post in this thread,believe whatever you like,I'm all in with The God of The Bible!For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse  because, although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools,  Romans 1:20-22

ah, the classic quote the Bible and run away because you ran out of stupid things to back up your stupid claims against science tactic! i am all too familiar with that one. remember in a previous post when i said creationists like to put their hands over their ears and yell "LALALA"? yeah, this was what i was talking about.two words: blind faith.ya know what, you're right! forget all this science mumbo-jumbo! jump off a cliff and pray that God will save you, since God shall let you overcome gravity (because clearly gravity is only a product of science and God will save such a bless'd soul such as yours). if he doesn't save you, then, oh well, you'll be going to heaven if you don't survive anyway!

[matthew r 0]

i've got a crisp 5 dollar bill that says you went to catholic school or were otherwise raised catholic