Going to Hell....

Fiction could be real?

Cool...


Dibs on Ygritte!

 

Hope this wasn't shared already. Thought it was interesting and mildly amused by the few who looked stumped.

 

See The Number of The Beast by Robert Heinlein.

 

Can the defiant forum atheist elaborate a little?

 

Intelligent design != whatever religion you follow. I also think people who are truly atheist are as misguided as the religious. Both have called the game without realizing we haven't even begun to scratch the surface.What if the big bang was simply the beginning of this simulated existence and every bit of evolution and "thing" that came to be was only theorized by the designer? That'd be way more interesting to me as a creator than designing a massive universe, plopping a bunch of "mini me's" (god's image) on one friggin rock and making them worship me all for a chance to not become a part of satan's army. I mean, I guess if god truly needs the souls for his eternal war, shouldn't he diversify and maybe mine a few planets with people a little less inclined toward violence and a better shot of ending up on his team?

 

I think you took the book analogy too literally.....

I think what that old man said in the very beginning is very consistent with what many atheists think/say about higher beings.

The irony was hearing what he said later, actually, I think it was a RIOT!
And he, too, couldn't put together the parallel of what he was saying when he made his explosion remark and the ridiculousness of it.....lol

 

So you like the mice and dolphin theory

 

Would it be taking it too literally to ask where the analogy stops? We can see that the book came from something because we created it, materials, design and everything. We can't say what created us so we ascribe it to an intelligent designer, much like the human designer who made the book. But just like the complex human designer couldn't have been created from nothing, a complex god must also then have a creator, no? At some point on the ladder, something came from nothing.IMO, it's way too human centric and dismissive of the massive universe surrounding us to claim knowledge that we're only one rung from the top.

Not familiar with the mice and dolphin theory. Unless you mean the Simpsons episode where the dolphins are actually plotting a return to land to destroy humans.

 

My personal view has always been that God created everything. I believe the complexity of ANY life, even that of a single cell amoeba, is too complex to have "evolved". That being said, I don't care how it happened. If a seed was planted a trillion years ago that grew into what we are today, or if it happened over the course of a true 6 days, it doesn't change what I believe. The Bible makes many references to our view of time being very different to God's. I'm not going to bash someone because they believe in evolution. I've extensively studied creationism and evolutionism and find there are just as many holes in both. Both require faith. Stephen Hawking is trying to make the case for what happened before the big bang. I don't really care. I simply think that life is too amazing and complex to say it just "happened". Just as I can't wrap my head around time being non-linear and eternity, with no beginning or end, I can't wrap my head around life having no intelligence behind it. String theory, multi-verse, non-linear time, quarks, quantum theory, I've read up on so much of it. It still doesn't change the base premise that God created it all and we are simply too infantile to even grasp a minutia of his plan.

Chino said it too IMO without saying it in so many words. There is no possible way to say, conclusively, that either side is right. Keep an open mind, always. I prefer to keep an open mind. I could be completely wrong, or completely right. Either side takes faith.

 

No. You accept the world as you perceive it, which is the best that any of us can hope to do.

 

Atheism (and agnosticism) are based on doubt rather than faith, no?...

 

I'd say that's true right up until the point an atheist makes the case to someone else that there isn't or cannot be something greater than us. To personally be an atheist is different than promoting atheism since there is no way to deal in absolutes on this topic. But with over 2,000 gods and origin stories in human history, I'm going to go out on a limb and say none of these are correct especially since they borrow so heavily from each other to almost be iterative.

 

I always identify as agnostic which really does mean "I don't claim to have any answers". Atheism to me says "No" to the possibility of an inconceivable entity of any sort being involved in our existence. But rather than say agnostics "doubt" since that is the perception of the religious, I'd say that agnostics acknowledge the unknowable. Anytime something "just takes faith", agnostics are out.

 

Do you believe intelligent design and evolution are mutually exclusive? A lot of the science you cited deals with the human concept of time and has been seeking to understand consciousness in many ways since Einstein's observation of "spooky action at a distance".