On Existence and God
“Go to heaven for the climate and hell for the company.”
― Benjamin Franklin Wade
“Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever 'til the end of time!
But He loves you. He loves you, and He needs money! He always needs money! He's all-powerful, all-perfect, all-knowing, and all-wise, somehow just can't handle money!”
But He loves you. He loves you, and He needs money! He always needs money! He's all-powerful, all-perfect, all-knowing, and all-wise, somehow just can't handle money!”
― George Carlin
"If anybody wants to believe they're descendants of a primate, they are welcome to do it"
-Mike Hucabee
“Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are god. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are gods.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever
“I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
“There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point… The truly adult view, by contrast, is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
To say anything negative about Stephen Hawking is like bulling a blind man. He has an unfair advantage, and that gives him a free pass on some of his absurd ideas"
-Kirk Cameron
“Doubt as sin. — Christianity has done its utmost to close the circle and declared even doubt to be sin. One is supposed to be cast into belief without reason, by a miracle, and from then on to swim in it as in the brightest and least ambiguous of elements: even a glance towards land, even the thought that one perhaps exists for something else as well as swimming, even the slightest impulse of our amphibious nature — is sin! And notice that all this means that the foundation of belief and all reflection on its origin is likewise excluded as sinful. What is wanted are blindness and intoxication and an eternal song over the waves in which reason has drowned.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality
“We can judge our progress by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers, our willingness to embrace what is true rather than what feels good.”
― Carl Sagan
It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
– Carl Sagan
"If I came from a monkey, how come there are still monkeys around today"
-- Every ignorant person on Earth
Nice to see that there was some balance in this post.
ReplyDeleteSagan says there are many intermediate forms in the fossil record to support speciation and moves quickly to another assertion. That is not quite true. Darwin himself said:
ReplyDelete"The number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed on earth, [should] be truly enormous. Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory."
John Lennox quotes Zoologist Mark Ridley:
"The fossil record of evolutionary change within single evolutionary linages is very poor. If evolution is true, species originate through changes of ancestral species: one might expect to be able to see this in the fossil record. In fact it can rarely be seen. In 1859 Darwin could not cite a single example."
I happen to believe that micro-evolution is a factual force of nature. So the statements above were not cited as an argument against mutation and natural selection. The citations are intended to show the questionable quality of Sagan's responses.
Armstrongists believe in creationism and that is the justification for Dennis' post. But the theme takes collateral issue with the Christian movement as a whole and that is why I am responding. One day I believe micro-evolution, at least, will be accepted by all of Christianity (many denominations already acknowledge evolution). At that time, Darwinian natural selection will just be seen as another tool God used for biological development.
As Carl Sagan articulated in the clip you referenced, folks have many different notions about who and what God is. Some of those notions are very implausible (like an old white man with a beard watching everything that happens with a voyeuristic intensity). Sagan, nevertheless, suggests that other notions (like viewing God as the sum of all of the cosmic laws that we've observed) might have some validity. In other words, to suggest that some of humankind's most bizarre notions about God demonstrate that "God" doesn't exist is illogical/absurd.
ReplyDeleteIn a previous post, some of the commentators talked about being God-haunted. Sagan acknowledged that all human cultures have had their notions about the Divine. I think that that is a very interesting and suggestive phenomenon. It seems that we have been programmed to think in these terms - that it comes naturally to our species. No doubt our study of this phenomenon has revealed (and will reveal) many reasons for why this is so, but it seems the height of folly to me to dismiss it as a superstitious relic of our ignorant past without relentlessly pursuing why this God-haunting exists!
Finally, I (like many theists) have no problem acknowledging that I am the product of billions of years of evolution. For me, there is no shame in acknowledging my single-celled or primate forbearers. I am very comfortable with the scientific evidence that supports this explanation for the variety of life that exists on this planet. Evolution does NOT preclude the existence of a Creator. Once again, it is quite illogical to suppose that evolution disproves God. And, while I would agree that abandoning our questions and failing to grasp truth and reality are the hallmarks of ignorance, I also do not believe that turning our backs on the ethereal is a hallmark of intelligence.
Miller Jones noted: "Evolution does NOT preclude the existence of a Creator. Once again, it is quite illogical to suppose that evolution disproves God. And, while I would agree that abandoning our questions and failing to grasp truth and reality are the hallmarks of ignorance, I also do not believe that turning our backs on the ethereal is a hallmark of intelligence."
ReplyDeleteBut it does destroy the doctrine of Original Sin and our need to be saved as a result of those supposed first sins for which we are somehow also accountable for. Christ as Second Adam fails as a truth as well. The silence of women in the church also falls as "for the woman sinned and not the man" is simply a fairytale used to elevate the male and subjugate the female church member in both church and their "role" in a marriage.
Non_Ecliptic_Orbit said...
ReplyDeleteSagan says there are many intermediate forms in the fossil record to support speciation and moves quickly to another assertion. That is not quite true. Darwin himself said:
And Sagan was correct. There are enough, more than enough to establish the reality of intermediate forms. Darwin had NO actual fossil evidence on which to draw his conclusions about evolution. He understood the reality of it by observation with the fossil evidence to follow. It has.
We have filled in more spaces in human evolution in the past 20 years than the previous 300 as we now know what we are looking for and where to look for it.
God does not need to and will not fill in the gaps. Or at least, not for long.
Stephen Jay Gould, Harvard Evolutionist and famous writer of 1990s and 2000s (deceased):
ReplyDelete"The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persist as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils..
Gradual evolution does not appear to be supported in the fossil records. Rather, there are giant unexplained leaps , or what are named "explosions", like the Cambrian Explosion.
ReplyDeleteAlthough there are hominids that are pre Adam, perhaps we can view Adam as the first human that was sapient enough to make a choice, not through instinct , but rather through reason. Choices that involved accountability and answerability. Adam can be viewed as the first sapient creature that understood and questioned the ideas of the future, destiny, origin, imagination etc.
The gap between the most intelligent primates and man is a chasm that is very difficult to explain thru just evolutionary steps alone.
The brain of a chimpanzee and human is almost identical. So there must extra mental machinery to account for this giant difference in mental functioning. The machinery must be "spiritual," ie, sub atomic and not discernable to science at present.
ReplyDeleteEvolution cannot explain this.
Dennis:
ReplyDeleteThe discovery of a few transitional forms may demonstrate that this phenomenon did occur. What is lacking is the statistical density that supports the idea that it was a common and ubiquitous process. Since Sagan was citing the few transitional forms as support to global, ever present process, Sagan was wrong. Macro-evolution is still poorly supported by the fossil record. More and more soft tissues are being discovered, including embryos, in the record so that is no longer an easy dodge.
11:51
ReplyDeleteYou sound like Robert Kuhn who developed wcg doctrine on the difference beteen man and chimpanzee.
How would you account for the difference between young stupid children crossing roads with cars without looking and my infinite wisdom, advanced reasoning and lawn mowing skills at my age?
Ok, agreed chimpanzee produced no Chopin, neither did the advanced me ever live longer than one day in a tree or cross a river jumping between trees.
Nck
Dennis, you know perfectly well that the WCG never taught the doctrine of Original Sin, not the common definition. Of course Adam sinned but the idea that his sin changed "perfect" human nature to a sinful nature is not biblical.
ReplyDelete