evolution stuff

It isn't. Appeals to mass beliefs and intelligence of those people does not constitute even a reasonable argument. Remember there are at least a billion atheists on this planet as well.

The large majority of the population has believed a lot of things. Also, billions of people believe in evolution. So why is that not proof of evolution? It's empirical evidence only if you are assaying beliefs, not the reality of those beliefs.

Also, I don't think there's much of ID that deserves to be taught alongside evolution. Before this whole controversy, it would not have been touched, and the only reason they generally do and should now is to clear up some of the miseducation people get about evolution. Yes, miseducation.

 

I think it also needs to be said that most Christian churches don't oppose evolution. The Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches and most mainline Protestant churches have no problem with it. Dr. Kenneth Miller, a devout Catholic evolutionary biologist, has been in the forefront of oppostion to Intelligent Design, as has Dr. Francis Collins, head of the genome project and an Evangelical Christian. So it's a fundamentalist thing. Many early Church Fathers, like St. Augustine, Justin Martyr, and Origin, taught that Genesis wasn't to be taken literally, and even said they though to do so was kind of stupid. As early as the 4th century, St. Augustine,one of the most respected thinkers of Christianity, established that Genesis isn't to be taken literally, and in particular, challenged the idea that the earth was created in seven days. Even earlier, Origen, another church father, wrote: "What intelligent person will suppose that there was a first, a second and a third day, that there was evening and morning without the existence of the sun and moon and stars? Or that there was a first day without a sky? Who could be so silly to think that God planted a paradise in Eden the way a human gardener does, and that He made in this garden a visible, palpable, tree of life, so that by tasting its fruit with ones bodily teeth, one should receive life?...If God is represented as walking in the garden in the evening, or Adam as hiding under the tree, I do not think anyone can doubt that these things are inteded to express certain mysteries in a metaphorical way." Obviously, these guys couldn't have forseen the intellectual deterioration that took place between Christians of the first few centuries AD and post-Darwinian Bible Belters. So the testimony of those billions of Christians can't be assumed to be anti-Darwin. A public opinion poll in 2001 found that 56.3% of adults agree that an overwhelming body of scientific evidence supports evolution, but 44.7% think the same for Intelligent Design. In a 2004 Gallup poll, 51% believed in evolution, 38% believing that God guides the process, with only 13% beieving in a strictly Darwinian natural selection.

 

what i meant was, the amount of religious ppl vs. the numbers of atheist and non believers. i dont have the figures but,
if america is 90% christian, then i think we can assume that the rest of the world as a whole has a very high percentage of ppl who are religious compared to atheist. especially factoring in the East.

 

sorry dude but you need to take a statistics course.
america is also 80%~ white english speakers. the rest of the world is definately not 80%~ white english speakers. Your example is like someone from denmark saying that only 5% of danes are practicing church going christians, so only 5% of the world would be church going christians.

and if you want to factor in the east, don't forget that china is officially athiest. Also, buddhism and taoism can both be seen as athiestic. Local religions like hinduism and shito aren't religions in the sense that is usually meant in the west, but more like greek mythology or voodoo. it's a collection of folk beliefs that has over time become more and more codified but not neccessarily coherent.

 

im not saying everyone is a white christian.
just that most people believe in some higher power,or something that trancends us.

 

I think that's probably true, especially if the Higher Power could be a higher self, karma, tao, or SBOT ("Somenthing Big Out There").

 

But this is not evidence. If evidence was based on the opinions of the masses, we would still believe the Earth is flat and the Earth would still be the center of the universe. It took a tiny minority to prove these so-called "facts" were incorrect.

Peace and love

 

Karma isn't a higher power as Christians would call God a higher power. A majority of Buddhists are atheists/agnostics, but some do believe in a theistic power. The belief or disbelief of a deity does not help w/ suffering, so it is not focused on. Also, I wouldn't say tao is a higher power either, it's more of a force that we are all part of, thus, it just is. Not higher or lower, these are quantifications for a nameless force beyond the duality of "higher" and "lower."

Peace and love

 

But they are powers, and are central to the belief-value systems of the faithful. In twelve step parlance, a higher power is something beyond yourself and greater than yourself, be it the group, a bedpan, a "force", or Good Orderly Direction". If you've been to a Buddhist temple, you realize that a majority of Buddhists are not atheists in the same sense that Richard Dawkins is an atheist. There is great ritual and devotion, and an expectation of returns in this life and the next. The tao relates to the basic structure of reality. "Higher" doesn't literally refer to direction but rather to importance.

 

I see how you are defining it, but I think there are too many connotations of "higher" as a force outside of us. That is not the Tao and that is not karma.

Peace and love

 

Inside, outside, upside down!

 

Care for a jolly caucus race?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvc7ql44T2A

Anyway, the point is, belief is not an argument for truth, no matter how many people are involved.

 

then i guess your comment on all the scientific minds that agree on evolution in the other thread doesn't matter at all then.

 

im pretty sure quarks and gluons are purely theoretical.

or has something changed?

 

That would be correct, but that wasn't merely an appeal to the beliefs people hold. I.e., I did not say "Lots of scientists believe in evolution, so it must be true." I What I was pointing out is that a lot of people who have studied it thoroughly and have not closed off options because of a religious belief have come to this conclusion. This conclusion makes sense to a scientific perspective, and I think that if you did not dismiss everything that may conflict with your current interpretation of god, you would find that it makes more sense to you.

 

but that's my whole point.

it really just doesn't make sense to me. accidents dont make sense.

besides there is never going to be enough proof about something when none of us were even there (i.e. the origin of the world) to discern one thing or another.

you have your faith, and I have mine.

 

It doesn't make sense b/c you have a pre-conceived notion of what evolution is without actually understanding the theory. It seems that you hold the belief that your faith is incompatible w/ evolution, so you make no effort to understand what evolution actually is. If you have a closed mind, no amount of evidence will convince you otherwise, unless of course your god comes down from his throne and tells you himself evolution happened. Short of this, it is useless to give you more and more facts if your eyes are closed.

Peace and love

 

the problem with "presenting both sides of the story" is that you are assuming there are only two sides of this story...If we are for whatever dumb reason to teach Judeo-Christian creationism in schools, then we should also teach every other creation story in the world, and also my personal theory that L Ron Hubbard went back in time and transplanted dinosaur bones
Come on people, when the subject matter is science, we talk about science.

 

science and especially evolution is so fascinating. I dont understand why people think that just because we can sort of explain something, it means that its not divine? If anything, the more I study sciences (biology especially) the more I believe in a purpose.

 

I know; that's how I feel. Just because I know the mechanics of how a blue schist is formed DOESN'T make it less divine. The physical side doesn't remove the spirit side; the two sides co-exist as they do in everything.

Peace and love