Richard Dawkins has been the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford since 1995. The "On Faith" panelist did his D.Phil under the Nobel Prize-winning zoologist Niko Tinbergen. After two years as an Assistant Professor of Zoology at the University of California, Berkeley, he returned to Oxford in 1970 as Lecturer in Animal Behaviour and a Fellow of New College. The British evolutionary biologist is noted for his writings defending evolution. An atheist, his latest book is The God Delusion(2006). He is the author of eight other books: The Selfish Gene (1976), The Extended Phenotype (1982), The Blind Watchmaker (1986), River Out of Eden (1995), Climbing Mount Improbable (1996), Unweaving the Rainbow (1998), A Devil's Chaplain (2003), and The Ancestor's Tale (2004). A Festschrift volume, Richard Dawkins: how a scientist changed the way we think was published in 2006 by Oxford University Press. Dawkins, who holds eight honorary degrees in science and literature, has also presented BBC science documentaries, including Nice Guys Finish First, The Blind Watchmaker and Seven Wonders of the World. On Channel Four he presented Break the Science Barrier with Richard Dawkins and Root of All Evil?. In 1991 he gave the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures for Children on BBC under the general title Growing Up in the Universe. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature as well as a Fellow of the Royal Society. His medals and prizes include the Sillver Medal of the Zoological Society, the Michael Faraday Award of the Royal Society, the Nakayama Prize, the Cosmos International Prize, the Kistler Prize and the Shakespeare Prize.
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Richard Dawkins
British evolutionary biologist and author
Richard Dawkins has been the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford since 1995. The "On Faith" panelist did his D.Phil under the Nobel Prize-winning zoologist Niko Tinbergen. After two years as an Assistant Professor of Zoology at the University of California, Berkeley, he returned to Oxford in 1970 as Lecturer in Animal Behaviour and a Fellow of New College.
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If there is no God? Why do people keep asking why suffering happens? I thought, from my little logic I have, if you do not believe in God, there is no need to answer these "why" any more. It is but some unfortunate chemical reaction in the brain. Death is nothing but a recycling process.
Keep on blaming God. At least you believe God is there for you to blame on.
I agree that it is futile to die for a god that one envisions.
Jesus (as a person) has very deep insight. He believes that man loves God and, equally important, man loves one another.
If man only loves God, man may easily turn into terrorists or religious franatics. If man love God and love one another, the world should be more peaceful and the society would be much better off than what is now.
when I was young I had a great belief in God...
After that couple of years i was reading about this as this question about existence of God was irritating me....
then i realized that the concept of God is man made ..
In the evolutionary period when some unknown things used to happen,the man was having no idea about this so he thought that there is some power behind this and then he gave it a name --God thats it...
If u give all ur responsibilities and make a statement that for everything i do the responsible person is God then u make urself dependant...
and thats what makes u narrowminded and downgrade..
How can a God let a 2 year old girl die from a brutal beating at the hands of her parents. Why can a loving knowing God let this happen. There is no God that can let the innocent die. Tomorrow there will be another story in the news and another the next day. If there was a God then why would he let the innocent suffer?
Previewing your Comment
SEVEN REASONS WHY A SCIENTIST BELIEVES IN GOD
The following article of Mr A.Cressy Morrison, former President of the New York Academy of Sciences first appeared in the Reader's Digest of January, 1948; then, on the recommendation of Professor C.A.Coulson. F.R.S., Professor of Mathematics at Oxford University (the same university where Pr Richard Dawkins teaches), was republished in the Reader's Digest of November, 1960. – It shows how science compels the scientists to admit the essential need of a Supreme Creator. But Pr Richard Dawkins chose not to admit this scientific reality.
“We are still in the dawn of the scientific age and every increase of light reveals more brightly the handiwork of an intelligent Creator. In the ninety years since Darwin we have made stupendous discoveries; with a spirit of scientific humility and of faith grounded in knowledge we are approaching even nearer to an awareness of God. For myself, I count seven reasons for my faith:-
First:
By unwavering mathematical law we can prove that our universe was designed and executed by a great engineering Intelligence.
Suppose you put ten coins, marked from one to ten, into your pocket and give them a good shuffle. Now try to take them out in sequence from one to ten, putting back the coin each time and shaking them all again. Mathematically, we know that your chance of first drawing number one is one in ten; of drawing one and two in succession, one in hundred; of drawing one, two and three in succession, one in a thousand, and so on; your chance of drawing them all, from one to number ten in succession, would reach the unbelievable figure of one chance in ten thousand million.
By the same reasoning, so many exacting conditions are necessary for life on earth that they could not possibly exist in proper relationship by chance. The earth rotates on its axis at one thousand miles an hour; if it turned at one hundred miles an hour, our days and nights would be ten times as long as now, and the hot sun would then burn up our vegetation during each long day while in the long night any surviving sprout would freeze.
Again, the sun, source of our life, has a surface temperature of 12,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and our earth is just far enough away so that this “eternal fire” warms us just enough and not too much! If the sun gave off only one-half of its present radiation, we would freeze, and if it gave half as much more, we would roast.
The slant of the earth, tilted at an angle of 23 degrees, gives us our seasons; if it had not been so tilted, vapours from the ocean would move north and south, piling up for us continents of ice. If our moon were, say, only fifty thousand miles away instead of its actual distance, our tides would be so enormous that twice a day all continents would be submerged; even the mountains would soon be eroded away. If the crust of the earth had been only ten feet thicker, there would be no oxygen without which animal life must die. Had the ocean been a few feet deeper, carbon dioxide and oxygen would have been absorbed and no vegetable life could exist. Or, if our atmosphere had been thinner, some of the meteors, now burned in space by the million every day, would be striking all parts of the earth, starting fire everywhere.
Because of these, and host of other examples, there is not one chance in millions that life on our planet is an accident.
Second:
The resourcefulness of life to accomplish its purpose is a manifestation of all-pervading intelligence.
What life itself is, no man has fathomed. It has neither weight nor dimensions, but it does have force; a growing root will crack a rock. Life has conquered water, land and air, mastering the elements, compelling them to dissolve and reform their combinations.
Life, the sculptor, shapes all living things; an artist, it designs every leaf of every tree, and colours every flower. Life is a musician and has each bird sing its love songs, the insects to call each other in the music of their multitudinous sounds. Life is a sublime chemist, giving taste to fruits and spices, and perfume to the rose, changing water and carbonic acid into sugar and wood and, in so doing, releasing oxygen so that animals may have the breath of life.
Behold an almost invisible drop of protoplasm, transparent and jelly-like, capable of motion, drawing energy from the sun. This single cell, this transparent mist-like droplet, holds within itself the germ of life, and has the power to distribute this life to every living thing, great and small. The powers of this droplet are greater than our vegetation and animals and people, for all life came from it. Nature did not create life; fire-blistered rocks and a salt-less sea could not meet the necessary requirements.
“Who, then, has put it there?”
Third:
Animal wisdom speaks irresistibly of a good Creator who infused instinct into otherwise helpless little creatures.
The young salmon spends years at sea, then comes back to his own river, and travels up the very side of the river into which flows the tributary where he was born. What brings him back so precisely? If you transfer him to another tributary, he will know at once that he is off his course and he will fight his way down and back to the main stream and then turn up against the current to finish his destiny more accurately.
Even more difficult to solve is the mystery of eels. These amazing creatures migrate at maturity from all ponds and rivers everywhere those from Europe across thousands of miles of ocean all bound for the same abysmal deeps near Bermuda. There they breed and die. The little one, with no apparent means of knowing anything except that they are in a wilderness of water, nevertheless find their way back not only to the very shore from which their parents came but thence to the rivers, lakes or little ponds so that each body of water is always populated with eels. No American eel has ever been caught in Europe, no European eel in American waters. Nature has even delayed the maturity of the European eel by a year or more to make up for its longer journey. Where does the directing impulse originate?
A wasp overpowers a grasshopper, digs a hole in the earth, stings the grasshopper in exactly the right place so that he does not die but becomes unconscious and lives on as a form of preserved meat. Then the wasp will lay her eggs handily so that her children when they hatch can nibble without killing the insect on which they feed; to them dead meat would be fatal. The mother then flies away and dies; she never sees her young. Surely the wasp must have done all this right the first time and every time, or else there would be no wasp. Such mysterious techniques cannot be explained by adaptation; they were bestowed.
Fourth:
Man has something more than animal instinct the power of reason.
No other animal has ever left a record of its ability to count ten or even to understand the meaning of ten. Where instinct is like a single note of a flute, beautiful but limited, the human brain contains all the notes of all the instruments in the orchestra. No need to belabour this fourth point; thanks to the human reason we can contemplate the possibility that we are what we are only because we have received a spark of universal intelligence.
Fifth:
Provision for all living is revealed in phenomena which we know today which Darwin did not know such as the wonders of genes. So unspeakably tiny are these genes that, if all of them responsible for all living people in the world could be put in one place, there would be less than a thimbleful. Yet these ultra-microscopic genes and their companions, the chromosomes, inhabit every living cell and are the absolute keys to all human, animal and vegetable characteristics. A thimble is a small place in which to put all the individual characteristics of two thousand million human beings. However, the facts are beyond question. Well, then, how do genes lock up all the normal heredity of a multitude of ancestors and preserve the psychology of each in such an infinitely small place? Here evolution really begins at the cell, the entity that holds and carries genes. How a few million atoms, locked up as an ultra microscopic gene, can absolutely rule all on earth is an example of profound cunning and provision that could emanate only from a Creative Intelligence no other hypothesis will serve.
Sixth:
By the economy of nature, we are forced to realise that only infinite wisdom could have foreseen and prepared with such astute husbandry.
Many years ago a species of cactus was planted in Australia as a protective fence. Having no insect enemies in Australia the cactus soon begun a prodigious growth; the alarming abundance persisted until the plants covered an area as long and wide as England, crowding inhabitants out of the towns and villages, and destroying their farms. Seeking a defence, the entomologists scoured the world; finally they turned up an insect, which exclusively feeds on cactus, and would eat nothing else. It would breed freely too; and it had no enemies in Australia. So, animal soon conquered vegetable and today the cactus pest has retreated, and with it all but a small protective residue of the insects enough to hold the cactus in check forever.
Such checks and balances have been universally provided. Why have not fast-breeding insects dominated the earth? Because they have no lungs such as man possesses; they breathe through tubes. But, when insects grow large, their tubes do not grow in ratio to the increasing size of the body. Hence, there has never been an insect of great size; this limitation on growth has held them all in check.
If this physical check had not been provided, man could not exist. Imagine meeting a hornet as big as a lion!
Seventh:
The fact that man conceives the idea of God is in itself a unique proof.
The conception of god rises from a divine faculty of man, unshared with the rest of our world the faculty we call imagination. By its power, man and man alone can find the evidence of things unseen. The vista that power opens up is unbounded; indeed, as man is perfected, imagination becomes a spiritual reality. He may discern in all the evidence of design and purpose, the great truth that heaven is everywhere and in everything, but nowhere so close as in our hearts.
It is scientifically as well as imaginatively true; in the words of the psalmist: “ The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament sheweth His handiwork.”
A. Cressy Morrison
Former President of the New York Academy of Sciences
--------------
Ghyslaine ROC
Tuesday 29th of January 6008
Posted by: Ghyslaine ROC | January 28, 2008 7:45 PM
The following article of Mr A.Cressy Morrison, former President of the New York Academy of Sciences first appeared in the Reader's Digest of January, 1948; then, on the recommendation of Professor C.A.Coulson. F.R.S., Professor of Mathematics at Oxford University (the same university where Pr Richard Dawkins teaches), was republished in the Reader's Digest of November, 1960. – It shows how science compels the scientists to admit the essential need of a Supreme Creator. But Pr Richard Dawkins chose not to admit this scientific reality.
“We are still in the dawn of the scientific age and every increase of light reveals more brightly the handiwork of an intelligent Creator. In the ninety years since Darwin we have made stupendous discoveries; with a spirit of scientific humility and of faith grounded in knowledge we are approaching even nearer to an awareness of God. For myself, I count seven reasons for my faith:-
First:
By unwavering mathematical law we can prove that our universe was designed and executed by a great engineering Intelligence.
Suppose you put ten coins, marked from one to ten, into your pocket and give them a good shuffle. Now try to take them out in sequence from one to ten, putting back the coin each time and shaking them all again. Mathematically, we know that your chance of first drawing number one is one in ten; of drawing one and two in succession, one in hundred; of drawing one, two and three in succession, one in a thousand, and so on; your chance of drawing them all, from one to number ten in succession, would reach the unbelievable figure of one chance in ten thousand million.
By the same reasoning, so many exacting conditions are necessary for life on earth that they could not possibly exist in proper relationship by chance. The earth rotates on its axis at one thousand miles an hour; if it turned at one hundred miles an hour, our days and nights would be ten times as long as now, and the hot sun would then burn up our vegetation during each long day while in the long night any surviving sprout would freeze.
Again, the sun, source of our life, has a surface temperature of 12,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and our earth is just far enough away so that this “eternal fire” warms us just enough and not too much! If the sun gave off only one-half of its present radiation, we would freeze, and if it gave half as much more, we would roast.
The slant of the earth, tilted at an angle of 23 degrees, gives us our seasons; if it had not been so tilted, vapours from the ocean would move north and south, piling up for us continents of ice. If our moon were, say, only fifty thousand miles away instead of its actual distance, our tides would be so enormous that twice a day all continents would be submerged; even the mountains would soon be eroded away. If the crust of the earth had been only ten feet thicker, there would be no oxygen without which animal life must die. Had the ocean been a few feet deeper, carbon dioxide and oxygen would have been absorbed and no vegetable life could exist. Or, if our atmosphere had been thinner, some of the meteors, now burned in space by the million every day, would be striking all parts of the earth, starting fire everywhere.
Because of these, and host of other examples, there is not one chance in millions that life on our planet is an accident.
Second:
The resourcefulness of life to accomplish its purpose is a manifestation of all-pervading intelligence.
What life itself is, no man has fathomed. It has neither weight nor dimensions, but it does have force; a growing root will crack a rock. Life has conquered water, land and air, mastering the elements, compelling them to dissolve and reform their combinations.
Life, the sculptor, shapes all living things; an artist, it designs every leaf of every tree, and colours every flower. Life is a musician and has each bird sing its love songs, the insects to call each other in the music of their multitudinous sounds. Life is a sublime chemist, giving taste to fruits and spices, and perfume to the rose, changing water and carbonic acid into sugar and wood and, in so doing, releasing oxygen so that animals may have the breath of life.
Behold an almost invisible drop of protoplasm, transparent and jelly-like, capable of motion, drawing energy from the sun. This single cell, this transparent mist-like droplet, holds within itself the germ of life, and has the power to distribute this life to every living thing, great and small. The powers of this droplet are greater than our vegetation and animals and people, for all life came from it. Nature did not create life; fire-blistered rocks and a salt-less sea could not meet the necessary requirements.
“Who, then, has put it there?”
Third:
Animal wisdom speaks irresistibly of a good Creator who infused instinct into otherwise helpless little creatures.
The young salmon spends years at sea, then comes back to his own river, and travels up the very side of the river into which flows the tributary where he was born. What brings him back so precisely? If you transfer him to another tributary, he will know at once that he is off his course and he will fight his way down and back to the main stream and then turn up against the current to finish his destiny more accurately.
Even more difficult to solve is the mystery of eels. These amazing creatures migrate at maturity from all ponds and rivers everywhere those from Europe across thousands of miles of ocean all bound for the same abysmal deeps near Bermuda. There they breed and die. The little one, with no apparent means of knowing anything except that they are in a wilderness of water, nevertheless find their way back not only to the very shore from which their parents came but thence to the rivers, lakes or little ponds so that each body of water is always populated with eels. No American eel has ever been caught in Europe, no European eel in American waters. Nature has even delayed the maturity of the European eel by a year or more to make up for its longer journey. Where does the directing impulse originate?
A wasp overpowers a grasshopper, digs a hole in the earth, stings the grasshopper in exactly the right place so that he does not die but becomes unconscious and lives on as a form of preserved meat. Then the wasp will lay her eggs handily so that her children when they hatch can nibble without killing the insect on which they feed; to them dead meat would be fatal. The mother then flies away and dies; she never sees her young. Surely the wasp must have done all this right the first time and every time, or else there would be no wasp. Such mysterious techniques cannot be explained by adaptation; they were bestowed.
Fourth:
Man has something more than animal instinct the power of reason.
No other animal has ever left a record of its ability to count ten or even to understand the meaning of ten. Where instinct is like a single note of a flute, beautiful but limited, the human brain contains all the notes of all the instruments in the orchestra. No need to belabour this fourth point; thanks to the human reason we can contemplate the possibility that we are what we are only because we have received a spark of universal intelligence.
Fifth:
Provision for all living is revealed in phenomena which we know today which Darwin did not know such as the wonders of genes. So unspeakably tiny are these genes that, if all of them responsible for all living people in the world could be put in one place, there would be less than a thimbleful. Yet these ultra-microscopic genes and their companions, the chromosomes, inhabit every living cell and are the absolute keys to all human, animal and vegetable characteristics. A thimble is a small place in which to put all the individual characteristics of two thousand million human beings. However, the facts are beyond question. Well, then, how do genes lock up all the normal heredity of a multitude of ancestors and preserve the psychology of each in such an infinitely small place? Here evolution really begins at the cell, the entity that holds and carries genes. How a few million atoms, locked up as an ultra microscopic gene, can absolutely rule all on earth is an example of profound cunning and provision that could emanate only from a Creative Intelligence no other hypothesis will serve.
Sixth:
By the economy of nature, we are forced to realise that only infinite wisdom could have foreseen and prepared with such astute husbandry.
Many years ago a species of cactus was planted in Australia as a protective fence. Having no insect enemies in Australia the cactus soon begun a prodigious growth; the alarming abundance persisted until the plants covered an area as long and wide as England, crowding inhabitants out of the towns and villages, and destroying their farms. Seeking a defence, the entomologists scoured the world; finally they turned up an insect, which exclusively feeds on cactus, and would eat nothing else. It would breed freely too; and it had no enemies in Australia. So, animal soon conquered vegetable and today the cactus pest has retreated, and with it all but a small protective residue of the insects enough to hold the cactus in check forever.
Such checks and balances have been universally provided. Why have not fast-breeding insects dominated the earth? Because they have no lungs such as man possesses; they breathe through tubes. But, when insects grow large, their tubes do not grow in ratio to the increasing size of the body. Hence, there has never been an insect of great size; this limitation on growth has held them all in check.
If this physical check had not been provided, man could not exist. Imagine meeting a hornet as big as a lion!
Seventh:
The fact that man conceives the idea of God is in itself a unique proof.
The conception of god rises from a divine faculty of man, unshared with the rest of our world the faculty we call imagination. By its power, man and man alone can find the evidence of things unseen. The vista that power opens up is unbounded; indeed, as man is perfected, imagination becomes a spiritual reality. He may discern in all the evidence of design and purpose, the great truth that heaven is everywhere and in everything, but nowhere so close as in our hearts.
It is scientifically as well as imaginatively true; in the words of the psalmist: “ The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament sheweth His handiwork.”
A. Cressy Morrison
Former President of the New York Academy of Sciences
--------------
Ghyslaine ROC
Tuesday 29th of January 6008
According to what I have read, Pr Richard Dawkins is paid by our tax money to preach his religion of Atheism and nogodism. But, at the same time, Pr Dawkins has espoused the policies of various western regimes and that of Apartheid Israel. He sanctions the massacre of millions of defenceless people in the mainly Muslim and Arab countries.
In one of his talks (monologues) in front of a sheepish university crowd, he said that the cleverest man that has ever existed was Aristotle and that he descended from the cleverest of apes and that the white Europeans are descended from Aristotle, or something like that. Is this not an absolutely racist statement?
Is it not sheer cowardice on his part not to name the Muslims in the above post? Pr Richard Dawkins is the Master of Lies! It is a lie to say that Muslims kill for their God.
1. The deluded Professor still does not know that there is no such thing as the God of Muslims!
2. When Pr Dawkins speak of “religious extremists”, again it is sheer cowardice on his part not to say Muslim “extremists”. Who told the deluded Professor that Muslim “extremists” kill for their God? Is he a scientist or a propagandist who believes every lie that is propagated by a racist, anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, and anti-Islamic controlled media?
3. Any Muslim who is seen using violence against anybody, is it because of his religion or because of “his God” as Pr Dawkins alleges?
4. Why does not Pr Dawkins not say that those Muslims and non Muslims who are fighting against the invading armies of the West, of Apartheid Israel, of Russia, or of Bharat (Anglo-India), are only DEFENDING their lives, their families, their country, and their Way of Life?
5. It suits Pr Dawkins to LIE about the Freedom Fighters because he has espoused the racist and genocidal policies of the West, of Russia and that of Apartheid Israel!
6. The people who are fighting and dying by the millions, it is not because of their faith or for their God, as Pr Dawkins falsely alleges, but, it is simply for survival because they are being bombed day and night and their resources plundered by the invading armies that are glorified by Pr Dawkins, and they are prevented from being independent of the International Bankers.
7. Pr Richard Dawkins talks like a paranoid fool by telling, for example, the Bosnian Freedom Fighters not to defend their wives, mothers, daughters and sisters from being raped by the Serbs! Sixty thousand were thus raped! Pr Richard Dawkins is of the opinion that “where a man puts his penis is none of Congress's damn business.” So, he would also find no objection to the Israeli, British and US mercenaries who involved themselves in rape and sodomy on the prisoners of Abu Ghuraib!
8. By the way, fifteen per cent of those defending Sarajevo were Serbs! It is the racist controlled media that made the Bosnian “Ethnic Cleansing” a religious matter!
9. The mother of Rothschild once said: If my son does not want war, there will be no war! So, Pr Dawkins should read more serious stuff and not drown himself in fetid Western and Zionist propaganda.
10. Is it not strange, that out of all the countries, Muslim and non Muslim, that are fighting western invading armies, he does not find a single one having the RIGHT TO SELF-DEFENCE?
11. As Malcom X said once: It is a crime to teach a man not to defend himself when he is attacked!
12. When Pr Dawkins says: “There is no God”. He does not speak like a scientist, but like a blooming idiot! He is deluded himself, but he cannot see that.
13. Pr Richard Dawkins hates religion, especially Christianity and Islam (not Judaism!), and Christians and Muslims (not Jews!), and of course GOD! It is perfectly his right, but why should our tax money pay for his Atheist and Zionist preaching?
14. Pr Dawkins accused Muslims for 9/11 and for 7/7. Where is his evidence? He should watch Alex Jones’ TERRORSTORM or Eric Hufshmid PAINFUL QUESTIONS/DECEPTIONS or Dylan Avery’s LOOSE CHANGE or again listen to (or watch) David Ray Griffin about the Myth of 9/11!
15. Pr Richard Dawkins is taking us for fools. He has an agenda. He tells lies. He lies, lies and lies! And, this is a MOSSAD motto! “By deception we shall make war!”
16. Pr Richard Dawkins does not give a damn about the millions the US, his country Britain, and the West have slaughtered like cattle during the past centuries. The figure is staggering: 487 million killed! Between 75 and 150 million Muslims, and he dares say that Muslim “extremists kill for their God in order to get Paradise”!!!!!!!
17. And the Holocaust is ongoing! As a “Darwinist” or “Neo-Darwinist”, Pr Dawkins is in favour of the “survival of the fittest” by weapons of mass destruction that his protégés are the only ones to have, to manufacture, to sell, and to use!!!!!!!
Regards
Ghyslaine ROC
Tuesday 29th of January 6008
ok you dont see a great painting just appear from no where it has to have an artist.Yup you got it the painting is everything in the universe the artist is God!like anyone of us could create a whole universe!
ok you dont see a great painting just appear from no where it has to have an artist.Yup you got it the painting is everything in the universe the artist is God!like anyone of us could create a whole universe!
I hasten to add that I am a great "believer" in the science of psychology and psychiatry. It is a young science compared to the rest of medicine, and hence it has a long way to go in spite of making great advances in the short time that it has been around. Freud no doubt made a breakthrough contribution. The book by Samuel Shem is a satire. It is a novel hence it is not to be taken literally and the advice should not be taken as medical advice.
Re classification of human beings: I thought you might be interested to read a novel by Samuel Shem titled, "Mount Misery." It is a hilarious insider's take on Freudian psychoanalysis. The story goes to show how inaccurate classification of human beings can be, even by health professionals, and how each one is biased by the school of thought one has been trained in (I'm referring in this case only to mental health issues - physical diseases have objective standards and hence are something else of course). Freud is considered the father of modern psychology and his views have shaped scientific views about the human mind in an incredible way, although his very student, C G Jung disagreed with him and went on to found a very powerful school of his own.
Science, wonderful as it is, is oh so imperfect. The book is a very good reminder.
No, I have not put you in any box or drawer. The more I know about human beings the more I am convinced that the only way to understand anybody is know their biography, to know the culture, the thoughts, the people, the values that influenced them; their dreams and hopes, how they interpreted the experiences of their lives, and what core values they actually practice (not believe in or preach about!). Even then, every human being is unpredicable in every choice they make all their lives - the direct consequence of possessing a free will. Since I know nothing about you, I can't even begin to build a box for you, even though I know you would jump unpredictably out of every box I should construct for you anyway!!!
I wish to add that religion bashing atheists like Professor Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens, do not make a real contribution to reforming religions because they express their views as hysterical rants without providing facts and figures to substantiate their claims. The fact that they ignore all good done in the name of religions makes their claims far too biased to be given any serious consideration. Serious believers have only two choices: 1. Ignore the rants. 2. Be amused at the ignorance about religions inherent in the theatrical rants.
Example: Mr Hitchens represented the devil in the beatification ceremony of Mother Theresa of Calcutta. The Nobel Prize committee gave the Nobel Peace Prize (and they are not a religious organisation!), and yet Mr Hitchens had nothing good to say about her!
So much for where sometimes "clear" logic can lead a human being. So logic in itself is not guarantee that one will arrive at a truthful conclusion. Would a religion bashing atheist have the humility to admit that he might be logical and yet be dead wrong?
What would the religion bashing atheist have to say about religious evangelicals if they merely converted nominal believers into atheist-bashing fanatics - just bashing atheists, nothing else? Isn't it the essence of what Dawkins et al are doing - converting nominal atheists into religion bashers, and grouping together other religion bashers like themselves?
By all means write and talk about how religion is wrongly practised; do write about humanism in action from the perspective of an atheist. Believers like me would be all ears and take the writing seriously.
But until then, for every book published by Dawkins et al, a first year theology student/religious scholar, representing their respective religions should publish a book exposing the lies, half truths, and false, exaggerated claims made by the religion-bashing atheists.
what a tediouus and ill-tempered conversation between richmond and mr. mark -- what is interesting is (a) the cycle of incivillity and (b) the explosions of contempt. they are just exploiting this venue and trivialize it. i'd like to thank both of them for that.
it would have been sufficient for richmond to say, as a person of faith, i can agree with everything Dawkins says except for his statement that there is no God. and then go on to explain his concept of God. that would be very interesting.
as for mr. mark. i see no point in his shooting down richmond. we can't prove God doesn't exist. so i'd rather what mr. mark believes exists. not everyone is as intelligent as he is; therefore, not everyone can be as self-satisified. he has to risk more of his beliefs in his postings.
what a tediouus and ill-tempered conversation between richmond and mr. mark -- what is interesting is (a) the cycle of incivillity and (b) the explosions of contempt. they are just exploiting this venue and trivialize it. i'd like to thank both of them for that.
it would have been sufficient for richmond to say, as a person of faith, i can agree with everything Dawkins says except for his statement that there is no God. and then go on to explain his concept of God. that would be very interesting.
as for mr. mark. i see no point in his shooting down richmond. we can't prove God doesn't exist. so i'd rather what mr. mark believes exists. not everyone is as intelligent as he is; therefore, not everyone can be as self-satisified. he has to risk more of his beliefs in his postings.
what a tediouus and ill-tempered conversation between richmond and mr. mark -- what is interesting is (a) the cycle of incivillity and (b) the explosions of contempt. they are just exploiting this venue and trivialize it. i'd like to thank both of them for that.
it would have been sufficient for richmond to say, as a person of faith, i can agree with everything Dawkins says except for his statement that there is no God. and then go on to explain his concept of God. that would be very interesting.
as for mr. mark. i see no point in his shooting down richmond. we can't prove God doesn't exist. so i'd rather what mr. mark believes exists. not everyone is as intelligent as he is; therefore, not everyone can be as self-satisified. he has to risk more of his beliefs in his postings.
what a tediouus and ill-tempered conversation between richmond and mr. mark -- what is interesting is (a) the cycle of incivillity and (b) the explosions of contempt. they are just exploiting this venue and trivialize it. i'd like to thank both of them for that.
it would have been sufficient for richmond to say, as a person of faith, i can agree with everything Dawkins says except for his statement that there is no God. and then go on to explain his concept of God. that would be very interesting.
as for mr. mark. i see no point in his shooting down richmond. we can't prove God doesn't exist. so i'd rather what mr. mark believes exists. not everyone is as intelligent as he is; therefore, not everyone can be as self-satisified. he has to risk more of his beliefs in his postings.
what a tediouus and ill-tempered conversation between richmond and mr. mark -- what is interesting is (a) the cycle of incivillity and (b) the explosions of contempt. they are just exploiting this venue and trivialize it. i'd like to thank both of them for that.
it would have been sufficient for richmond to say, as a person of faith, i can agree with everything Dawkins says except for his statement that there is no God. and then go on to explain his concept of God. that would be very interesting.
as for mr. mark. i see no point in his shooting down richmond. we can't prove God doesn't exist. so i'd rather what mr. mark believes exists. not everyone is as intelligent as he is; therefore, not everyone can be as self-satisified. he has to risk more of his beliefs in his postings.
what a tediouus and ill-tempered conversation between richmond and mr. mark -- what is interesting is (a) the cycle of incivillity and (b) the explosions of contempt. they are just exploiting this venue and trivialize it. i'd like to thank both of them for that.
what a tediouus and ill-tempered conversation between richmond and mr. mark -- what is interesting is (a) the cycle of incivillity and (b) the explosions of contempt. they are just exploiting this venue and trivialize it. i'd like to thank both of them for that.
what a tediouus and ill-tempered conversation between richmond and mr. mark -- what is interesting is (a) the cycle of incivillity and (b) the explosions of contempt. they are just exploiting this venue and trivialize it. i'd like to thank both of them for that.
I'm glad that your invitation to me to join the elite club of atheists (humanist atheists rather, in my capacity as a believer by conviction, still stands. I'm convinced that humanists of all stripes could get along well together and work together for the common good of man; the only prerequisite being mutual respect for the other person's free decision to believe in God or not.
Linear logic vs Circular reasoning: This is not the first time I have heard that one believes in God only by resorting to a process called 'circular reasoning.' The Big Bang, along with matter, space and time as entities with a definite beginning at a definite point in time, is a scientifically agreed on fact (or theory if you prefer). As a believer I believe that the uncreated Creator of the Big Bang is God. What exactly is unreasonable about such a conclusion? It is linear logic. What exactly makes such logical reasoning circular? I'm sure you agree that there can be no scientific invention without a scientist, no mathematics without a mathematician, no music without a musician, no pot without a potter... But a mind boggling universe without a creator???
A two year old could stand before a fifty year old banyan tree and claim that the banyan tree has always existed. Existed longer than he has? Of course! Would it be wrong for someone to claim that the banyan tree not only existed in the form of a seed, but that someone planted the seed in the ground, without which act the tree could not have grown?
Eternal principles of science: The "eternal" natural laws has an even more eternal Lawgiver, that is all the believer claims. As to the "eternal" law of gravity (which no scientist invented), it ceases to be eternal outside earth's orbit. So I'm sure you agree that many such scientific eternabilities is very much limited to particular circumstances. That is not to discredit science which explains the circumstances under which those eternabilities function.
My knowledge of mathematics is very limited indeed. I was a Maths elective student in class 9 and 10, however that was when I was 15-17 years old (and didn't study any mathematics after that). I was a seventeen year old ages ago, so that now even an Australian fifth grader would know more mathematics than me. It beats my imagination however when I'm provided with the "proof" how 2+2 = 4 is the absolute proof God DOESN'T exist. That must belong to the category of advanced mathematics I didn't learn as a 15-17 year old. God is not the joker in a pack of playing cards, He is the "x" is a very important mathematical equation about the origin of the universe. The "x" is perfectly reasonable mathematics, at least as far as my limited knowledge of mathematics go.
Nein, nein, nein! I wasn't giving the atheists any daisies at all. I see no reason to be patronising with the atheists (especially since they all claim to have more access to reason than believers do), even if I do not see any merit in atheism per se. Humanism is something else, and I'm of the opinion that believers need to cultivate humanism consciously (although humanism comes with the package of belief, sadly not all bother to cultivate it) as much as atheists do.
Atheists do do believers one important favour: They help us to identify and rectify false religion. And obviously believers have provided Dawkins et al with all the inspiration for their books. So the relationship may be at best of mutual benefit.
Many thanks for the implied compliment that I do reasonable somersaults within the belief system. I could return the compliment too - within the limit of a finite universe, your capacity to do somersaults is not unlike that of a believer. Believers who do not reject science however operate both within the finite and infinite systems you know.
Atheism is not phenomenal, but it is nevertheless a phenomenon. As a phenomenon it can be studied. All religions after all have their scholars and theologians who devote their whole lives to studying their particular religions (and some even study other religions). So I don't see why many atheists shouldn't devote their whole lives to studying atheism - it makes much more sense than spending time merely bashing religions.
How sure are you that only your teeth are classified? You are classified into many groups you know nothing about. The person who belongs to a particular "class" doesn't even have to agree that he belongs to that category invented by someone else. I personally take no offence at being a member of a thousand categories, if somebody has bothered to classify me at all.
"I don't need to have seen God to point out the bizarre, deluded, self-important lunacy of atheism."
Why do the religionists continue to float such idiocies? Why must one feel that there is a supernatural god around who is "greater than" oneself?
As a human and an atheist, I know that my personal existence pales in comparison to that of some of my fellow humans - Einstein, Jefferson, hell, even Pavarotti! I'm hardly consumed with "self-importance" because I don't believe that there's some god out there who puts humankind in the shadows. Indeed, the petty, immature and loathsome god of the Bible is inferior to most humans I know.
What is self-important is to believe that the entire universe was created with oneself in mind, and that there is no one more important to god than oneself, and that this god "has a plan" for ME that he couldn't be bothered to extend to his creation for billions of years, to billions of people living today, and to the creatures that will follow mankind on this planet a few billion more years down the road.
Gerry hit it on the head when he pointed out the infantile tenor of religious beliefs where it's all about ME and no one else.
You know what, Scott? I am not even interested in your particular dogma. Nobody has seen god, as you clearly say. For your ilk of abolishers of reason, (which is the only basis for human dignity as compared to animals as far as I am concerned), the mere fact that nobody has ever seen or otherwise experienced a particular entity is unquestionable proof of its existence - that ends every discussion, no matter how many names your hatred against clear thinking you put forth: It is beyond stupid. Non-proof is proof! lmao.
Anything goes: 2x2=5, if "god" declares it to be. Thank you, not for me. I don't know any theologian of the slightest standing who claims there is a proof of god. That actually has already been abandoned centuries before your voyage back into the bronze age. The condition of faith is the non-existence of proof, can you process this little thought in your head?
You are a nice specimen of the infantile flock Jesus referred to when he said that only children's minds can come to his paradise.
children stamp their foot if they find out that black is not white.
Nice regurgitation of atheist pablum there, Gerry.
Yes, there is Atheist dogma. I specifically discussed the big one: That atheism is the "default position". No wonder this silly claim flies, since apparently adherents such as yourself can't even make the connection. Of course the reality is nobody is born an atheist or a believer, only ignorant(though children often show a surprising conviction in *something* greater than this world...while you'd be hard pressed to find the opposite position).
Meanwhile, I don't need to have seen God to point out the bizarre, deluded, self-important lunacy of atheism. I accept that I don't know and any belief I have (and you of course have not the slightest idea what that may be) is just that, belief. An opinion. Faith. Having never seen God, nor proof of his non-existence, I can have nothing more than that.
Any thinking individual without an agenda...or some money to make...understands that simple fact.
I didn't say the fact that we might have a "god" gene or any other ingrained neuron-based inclination is a proof in favor of atheism. It is, however, and therefore I maintain my welcome to the humanist crowd, a statement that there is no proof of a god beyond our own imagination about the existence of a god.
Therefore we encounter the circular arguments all the time, to which you fall prey: Because I belief in the existence of a god, there must be a god, and he told me through his scripture to believe that there is a god. Therefore I believe in god...etc. Circular all the time.
Eternal principle - you use this expression rather frivolously, based on your belief, which, of course, cannot be absolute (otherwise I, for instance, would believe in god). Mathematical (2x2=4), physical (gravity etc.) principles to me seem to be eternal principles, and I am very happy and satisfied with this eternity, which I admire, adore, if you wish. The rest are derivatives. We had some dimwit around who thought that god invented mathematics.
Your argumentation circles around the merits of religion as to its usefulness, which I don't contest in principle (I do contest it in its practical effect, but that is a completely different debate).
The simplicity of science can be debated. I don't know how advanced your mathematical knowledge is, but there may be a limit, even without referring to the supernatural, lol. You are confounding the wonderful, cozy simplicity (again, no proof for or against god) of your religion with the rather difficult research tasks scientists occupy their minds with.
Thanks for the daisies for us poor atheists. At least, we have some merit, even if it is only to provoke the increase of the faith of the faithful!
Religion does cut out reason as an a priori assumption. Within that system, of course, you can do the most beautiful logical, reasonable, sophisticated, intellectual somersaults - operative intelligence has no limits within that system. A compliment to you, since you are good at this part.
If you want to do justice to your fellow humans as to classification, you sure should look for a good carpenter to work out the millions of drawers.
The joke in your last paragraph misses the point: Classification in science is a means to understand phenomena and objects. I am not a phenomenon and not an object, or a robot, as I said in my last post. I am glad if my dentist can classify my tooth, ok, but not me.
There is no such thing as an atheist dogma, just as there is no such thing as a non-rabbit-breeder dogma. The logical ignorance is really impressive. All who are not fellow believers in one of the thousands of brands of superstition must be insulted, eliminated, killed. All those who gladly walk under a ladder are idiots, immoral criminals, homosexuals, sociopaths.
Ladder walkers have an (cut and pasted:) "Opinion without knowledge, in the presence of ignorance (everybody knows that walking under a ladder brings misfortune, even sends the walker to hell!), IS by definition belief (they belong to the "Holy Church of Ladder Walkers, HCLW") Faith. Nothing more. Just another religious conviction whose "proof" waits in a zone none of us can report back on."
So you know and have met god? So you have have come back from that zone? Welcome back! What does god look like? Have you taken a picture of him, I hope? You would be the first, and could make a lot of money on it.
The very first dogma of the new Atheists is a fallacy and thus nothing else Dick Dawkins & Crew ramble on about really matters. When they can grow enough to accept that atheism is NOT the "default position" then maybe they'll be worth entertaining.
But that's not likely to happen. Atheism IS a belief system and they can't admit it. The real Default is ignorance. NOBODY KNOWS, thus we all believe something. Atheism, since it is NOT the default position and exists in the same ignorance of God as every other opinion on the subject, is NOT an "absence of belief".
Opinion without knowledge, in the presence of ignorance, IS by definition belief. Faith. Nothing more. Just another religious conviction whose "proof" waits in a zone none of us can report back on.
Sorry, Dawkins, but you and yours are more patently dishonest than any religious hypocrite you cry about.
Frankly I don’t see how the idea that God may be ingrained into human consciousness supports atheism. If anything, it scientifically supports St Augustine’s explanation of why we seek God and how all cultures and peoples since the beginning of time have sought God and have explained God in one way or another. The descriptions may have differed, but the fact is unmistakable that they came to the same conclusion of the existence of an entity in/beyond the universe that is bigger than the created universe.
Thank you for welcoming to the elite club of atheists! I don’t mind you putting me into a drawer of atheists at all, as long the drawer has the correct label: “Atheist who believes in God and is a Christian by conviction.”
To the applicability of social function of religion: I prefer to speak based on my conviction as a Christian. Jesus Christ taught eternal principles. It is up to us human beings to use the brain that God has given us to interpret those principles and apply them in ways that is relevant to each culture and time. The application of the principles will continue to be an ongoing process, although the principles themselves remain eternal. “Love yourself, love your neighbor, and love your enemies” is pretty straightforward and pretty hard to put into real practice. Only loving God first puts the love of self, neighbor and enemies in a universal and eternal context. Globalization makes the command of Jesus even more relevant and even more urgent... Luckily Jesus taught through the example of His own life. It can’t be said of Him that He meant: “Do as I said, not as I did.”
I don’t see how having a world view that is comfortable and simple (even emotionally beneficial) is wrong simply because of its simplicity. In science as you are fully aware, the ability to explain complex things in a simple way is considered the mark of genius. After all, the complex DNA was explained with a simple double helix model. How could the DNA model have been more right if some mind boggling model had been used instead? So why is the idea of a Creator to explain the origin of a mind boggling universe so wrong simply because it is so simple?
The old fashioned social function of religions may be obsolete, and yet there is a need to work a social structure that is more stable than is the case today. The contribution of religion to a more stable social structure is sure to be invaluable. It goes without saying that humanist atheists have their bit to contribute to it. The claim by atheists that religion shuts out reason is however completely wrong.
As to feeling offended at being classified: Pleeeease don’t break up with me! I will take you out of the “dyed-in-the-wool-atheist’ immediately. But seriously, don’t we classify everything we possibly can, especially in science? If we could understand the language of the animals, plants, bacteria, viruses etc, I’m sure we would notice that they have broken up with us for that reason. I don’t know how predictably human beings behave based on any classification. Psychology, psychiatry and medicine in general would be a simple science if that were the case.
You are right – there are several theories. It could be said that as long as a scientific claim is based only on a theory, then an equal and opposite theory could equally well be true. St Augustine has a good theory about the origin of religion which makes a lot of sense to believers: Our hearts are made for you O Lord, and it finds its rest only when it finds its rest in you. (Words to that effect.) Darwin’s theory could well be interpreted with God included in the picture - the universe as being contained as a seed in the Big Bang. And who knows Darwin’s theory may not be the last word on the topic yet.
The classification of atheists on my part was an on the spot thing, so the idea is still very crude and unedited. I could refine it of course and add subtypes etc. Unfortunately the topic of classifying atheists (or religionists for that matter) doesn’t fire my passion at all. Anyone is most welcome to expand on my classification and do any kind of research of course.
I do find your idea of trying to find out the etiology of atheism quite interesting. It would shed light on why people give up religions; and religions could undertake necessary reform based on the insights provided by atheists.
I read your classification of religionists and rearranged a few words........NOT.
Since there are several Anonymii posting on this forum, it would be helpful to know when and where you posted your classification of religionists. It would ensure another Anonymous doesn’t turn up and claim to the real Anonymous who posted the classification. (Besides if I could read your classification for myself, then I could get around to rearranging a few words.)
Where are the evolutionary theorists who are attempting to integrate the findings of theoretical physics with biological genetics evolution? If quantum physics teaches us that conscious observation affects the manifestation of materiality within space-time, how do these findings affect the changes within biology? If there is a “god” gene or group of genes that express themselves in human behavior and thought, is this gene a hindrance to our future survivability or an aid to our realization of the Oneness of all things? Are traits of altruism and self sacrifice actually “higher” traits that when manifesting in humans create a greater chance of survivability? Did the great spiritual teachers experience an aspect of reality (a timeless transcendent absolute reality) due to having a “higher” genetic expression for an ability to comprehend the interconnectedness and interdependence of all that exists?
It amazes me that the essence of the teachings of the great mystics throughout the history of various spiritual (read consciousness) traditions were able to transcend the evolutionarily demanded selfishness of most humans and comprehend the illusory nature of selfness. Will this ability to transcend self allow for greater survivability of our species? Will those who practice a consciousness of oneness with all of the cosmos lead us to the great future of peace and understanding that will “save” humanity? Is the universe “creating” “god” through the expression of “higher” level consciousness within the explicate, subjective, relative order to exist within the implicate, objective, absolute order of reality where all space-time exists?
As theoretical physicist David Bohm stated:” “Ultimately, all moments are really one. Therefore now is eternity" Or as theoretical physicist Brian Greene says: "Just as we envision all of space as really being out there, as really existing, we should also envision all of time as really being out there, as really existing too."
Nobody likes to be classified like this. I remember breaking up a relationship because she tried to put me into a particular drawer of her own making. It isn't very nice, since it pretends to make a person predictable like a robot. I am no robot.
with your link to "Darwin's God" you actually admit that you are fundamentally inclined to be an atheist (welcome!), at least that the idea of god may be ingrained in our human existence, generating thoughts and ideas WE PRODUCE in favor of some social advantage (no matter from which evolutionary source they come), and not as something that is absolute independent of our thinking. I agree with this position, although personally I am more interested in the objective reality of things than in the picture people make for themselves of things in order to feel more comfortable. I therefore call myself an atheist, all while acknowledging that social function of religion.
The social value of religions has really never been negated, for better or (much) worse, depending on the historical existence (Luther believed fervently in witchcraft), surrounding (tribe) and education of a person.
Another question, of course, is if this formerly useful social function is still applicable today ("eternal truth"?) in a world of exponential growth of the number of people, the growing interdependence (globalization) and the amount of scientific and technological progress (think of Google Earth). Personally, I don't th
All Comments (463)
From reading some of the above comments i would have to suggest that a lot of us came down from the trees a little to soon!
Instead of trying to defend your GODS against reasoned argument, why don't you let them speak from themselves.
July 10, 2008 2:59 PM | Report Offensive Comments
Posted on July 10, 2008 14:59
If there is no God? Why do people keep asking why suffering happens? I thought, from my little logic I have, if you do not believe in God, there is no need to answer these "why" any more. It is but some unfortunate chemical reaction in the brain. Death is nothing but a recycling process.
Keep on blaming God. At least you believe God is there for you to blame on.
I agree that it is futile to die for a god that one envisions.
Jesus (as a person) has very deep insight. He believes that man loves God and, equally important, man loves one another.
If man only loves God, man may easily turn into terrorists or religious franatics. If man love God and love one another, the world should be more peaceful and the society would be much better off than what is now.
June 25, 2008 1:13 PM | Report Offensive Comments
Posted on June 25, 2008 13:13
when I was young I had a great belief in God...
After that couple of years i was reading about this as this question about existence of God was irritating me....
then i realized that the concept of God is man made ..
In the evolutionary period when some unknown things used to happen,the man was having no idea about this so he thought that there is some power behind this and then he gave it a name --God thats it...
If u give all ur responsibilities and make a statement that for everything i do the responsible person is God then u make urself dependant...
and thats what makes u narrowminded and downgrade..
May 17, 2008 5:09 PM | Report Offensive Comments
Posted on May 17, 2008 17:09
So true... it's almost frightening that we are/have been so alone out there through all those millions of years.
April 28, 2008 4:40 PM | Report Offensive Comments
Posted on April 28, 2008 16:40
How can a God let a 2 year old girl die from a brutal beating at the hands of her parents. Why can a loving knowing God let this happen. There is no God that can let the innocent die. Tomorrow there will be another story in the news and another the next day. If there was a God then why would he let the innocent suffer?
April 8, 2008 10:14 PM | Report Offensive Comments
Posted on April 8, 2008 22:14
Thanks boysb210f4d257f8dcb5dbab23a12af7a35f
February 1, 2008 3:11 AM | Report Offensive Comments
Posted on February 1, 2008 03:11
Previewing your Comment
SEVEN REASONS WHY A SCIENTIST BELIEVES IN GOD
The following article of Mr A.Cressy Morrison, former President of the New York Academy of Sciences first appeared in the Reader's Digest of January, 1948; then, on the recommendation of Professor C.A.Coulson. F.R.S., Professor of Mathematics at Oxford University (the same university where Pr Richard Dawkins teaches), was republished in the Reader's Digest of November, 1960. – It shows how science compels the scientists to admit the essential need of a Supreme Creator. But Pr Richard Dawkins chose not to admit this scientific reality.
“We are still in the dawn of the scientific age and every increase of light reveals more brightly the handiwork of an intelligent Creator. In the ninety years since Darwin we have made stupendous discoveries; with a spirit of scientific humility and of faith grounded in knowledge we are approaching even nearer to an awareness of God. For myself, I count seven reasons for my faith:-
First:
By unwavering mathematical law we can prove that our universe was designed and executed by a great engineering Intelligence.
Suppose you put ten coins, marked from one to ten, into your pocket and give them a good shuffle. Now try to take them out in sequence from one to ten, putting back the coin each time and shaking them all again. Mathematically, we know that your chance of first drawing number one is one in ten; of drawing one and two in succession, one in hundred; of drawing one, two and three in succession, one in a thousand, and so on; your chance of drawing them all, from one to number ten in succession, would reach the unbelievable figure of one chance in ten thousand million.
By the same reasoning, so many exacting conditions are necessary for life on earth that they could not possibly exist in proper relationship by chance. The earth rotates on its axis at one thousand miles an hour; if it turned at one hundred miles an hour, our days and nights would be ten times as long as now, and the hot sun would then burn up our vegetation during each long day while in the long night any surviving sprout would freeze.
Again, the sun, source of our life, has a surface temperature of 12,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and our earth is just far enough away so that this “eternal fire” warms us just enough and not too much! If the sun gave off only one-half of its present radiation, we would freeze, and if it gave half as much more, we would roast.
The slant of the earth, tilted at an angle of 23 degrees, gives us our seasons; if it had not been so tilted, vapours from the ocean would move north and south, piling up for us continents of ice. If our moon were, say, only fifty thousand miles away instead of its actual distance, our tides would be so enormous that twice a day all continents would be submerged; even the mountains would soon be eroded away. If the crust of the earth had been only ten feet thicker, there would be no oxygen without which animal life must die. Had the ocean been a few feet deeper, carbon dioxide and oxygen would have been absorbed and no vegetable life could exist. Or, if our atmosphere had been thinner, some of the meteors, now burned in space by the million every day, would be striking all parts of the earth, starting fire everywhere.
Because of these, and host of other examples, there is not one chance in millions that life on our planet is an accident.
Second:
The resourcefulness of life to accomplish its purpose is a manifestation of all-pervading intelligence.
What life itself is, no man has fathomed. It has neither weight nor dimensions, but it does have force; a growing root will crack a rock. Life has conquered water, land and air, mastering the elements, compelling them to dissolve and reform their combinations.
Life, the sculptor, shapes all living things; an artist, it designs every leaf of every tree, and colours every flower. Life is a musician and has each bird sing its love songs, the insects to call each other in the music of their multitudinous sounds. Life is a sublime chemist, giving taste to fruits and spices, and perfume to the rose, changing water and carbonic acid into sugar and wood and, in so doing, releasing oxygen so that animals may have the breath of life.
Behold an almost invisible drop of protoplasm, transparent and jelly-like, capable of motion, drawing energy from the sun. This single cell, this transparent mist-like droplet, holds within itself the germ of life, and has the power to distribute this life to every living thing, great and small. The powers of this droplet are greater than our vegetation and animals and people, for all life came from it. Nature did not create life; fire-blistered rocks and a salt-less sea could not meet the necessary requirements.
“Who, then, has put it there?”
Third:
Animal wisdom speaks irresistibly of a good Creator who infused instinct into otherwise helpless little creatures.
The young salmon spends years at sea, then comes back to his own river, and travels up the very side of the river into which flows the tributary where he was born. What brings him back so precisely? If you transfer him to another tributary, he will know at once that he is off his course and he will fight his way down and back to the main stream and then turn up against the current to finish his destiny more accurately.
Even more difficult to solve is the mystery of eels. These amazing creatures migrate at maturity from all ponds and rivers everywhere those from Europe across thousands of miles of ocean all bound for the same abysmal deeps near Bermuda. There they breed and die. The little one, with no apparent means of knowing anything except that they are in a wilderness of water, nevertheless find their way back not only to the very shore from which their parents came but thence to the rivers, lakes or little ponds so that each body of water is always populated with eels. No American eel has ever been caught in Europe, no European eel in American waters. Nature has even delayed the maturity of the European eel by a year or more to make up for its longer journey. Where does the directing impulse originate?
A wasp overpowers a grasshopper, digs a hole in the earth, stings the grasshopper in exactly the right place so that he does not die but becomes unconscious and lives on as a form of preserved meat. Then the wasp will lay her eggs handily so that her children when they hatch can nibble without killing the insect on which they feed; to them dead meat would be fatal. The mother then flies away and dies; she never sees her young. Surely the wasp must have done all this right the first time and every time, or else there would be no wasp. Such mysterious techniques cannot be explained by adaptation; they were bestowed.
Fourth:
Man has something more than animal instinct the power of reason.
No other animal has ever left a record of its ability to count ten or even to understand the meaning of ten. Where instinct is like a single note of a flute, beautiful but limited, the human brain contains all the notes of all the instruments in the orchestra. No need to belabour this fourth point; thanks to the human reason we can contemplate the possibility that we are what we are only because we have received a spark of universal intelligence.
Fifth:
Provision for all living is revealed in phenomena which we know today which Darwin did not know such as the wonders of genes. So unspeakably tiny are these genes that, if all of them responsible for all living people in the world could be put in one place, there would be less than a thimbleful. Yet these ultra-microscopic genes and their companions, the chromosomes, inhabit every living cell and are the absolute keys to all human, animal and vegetable characteristics. A thimble is a small place in which to put all the individual characteristics of two thousand million human beings. However, the facts are beyond question. Well, then, how do genes lock up all the normal heredity of a multitude of ancestors and preserve the psychology of each in such an infinitely small place? Here evolution really begins at the cell, the entity that holds and carries genes. How a few million atoms, locked up as an ultra microscopic gene, can absolutely rule all on earth is an example of profound cunning and provision that could emanate only from a Creative Intelligence no other hypothesis will serve.
Sixth:
By the economy of nature, we are forced to realise that only infinite wisdom could have foreseen and prepared with such astute husbandry.
Many years ago a species of cactus was planted in Australia as a protective fence. Having no insect enemies in Australia the cactus soon begun a prodigious growth; the alarming abundance persisted until the plants covered an area as long and wide as England, crowding inhabitants out of the towns and villages, and destroying their farms. Seeking a defence, the entomologists scoured the world; finally they turned up an insect, which exclusively feeds on cactus, and would eat nothing else. It would breed freely too; and it had no enemies in Australia. So, animal soon conquered vegetable and today the cactus pest has retreated, and with it all but a small protective residue of the insects enough to hold the cactus in check forever.
Such checks and balances have been universally provided. Why have not fast-breeding insects dominated the earth? Because they have no lungs such as man possesses; they breathe through tubes. But, when insects grow large, their tubes do not grow in ratio to the increasing size of the body. Hence, there has never been an insect of great size; this limitation on growth has held them all in check.
If this physical check had not been provided, man could not exist. Imagine meeting a hornet as big as a lion!
Seventh:
The fact that man conceives the idea of God is in itself a unique proof.
The conception of god rises from a divine faculty of man, unshared with the rest of our world the faculty we call imagination. By its power, man and man alone can find the evidence of things unseen. The vista that power opens up is unbounded; indeed, as man is perfected, imagination becomes a spiritual reality. He may discern in all the evidence of design and purpose, the great truth that heaven is everywhere and in everything, but nowhere so close as in our hearts.
It is scientifically as well as imaginatively true; in the words of the psalmist: “ The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament sheweth His handiwork.”
A. Cressy Morrison
Former President of the New York Academy of Sciences
--------------
Ghyslaine ROC
Tuesday 29th of January 6008
Posted by: Ghyslaine ROC | January 28, 2008 7:45 PM
January 30, 2008 5:12 AM | Report Offensive Comments
Posted on January 30, 2008 05:12
SEVEN REASONS WHY A SCIENTIST BELIEVES IN GOD
The following article of Mr A.Cressy Morrison, former President of the New York Academy of Sciences first appeared in the Reader's Digest of January, 1948; then, on the recommendation of Professor C.A.Coulson. F.R.S., Professor of Mathematics at Oxford University (the same university where Pr Richard Dawkins teaches), was republished in the Reader's Digest of November, 1960. – It shows how science compels the scientists to admit the essential need of a Supreme Creator. But Pr Richard Dawkins chose not to admit this scientific reality.
“We are still in the dawn of the scientific age and every increase of light reveals more brightly the handiwork of an intelligent Creator. In the ninety years since Darwin we have made stupendous discoveries; with a spirit of scientific humility and of faith grounded in knowledge we are approaching even nearer to an awareness of God. For myself, I count seven reasons for my faith:-
First:
By unwavering mathematical law we can prove that our universe was designed and executed by a great engineering Intelligence.
Suppose you put ten coins, marked from one to ten, into your pocket and give them a good shuffle. Now try to take them out in sequence from one to ten, putting back the coin each time and shaking them all again. Mathematically, we know that your chance of first drawing number one is one in ten; of drawing one and two in succession, one in hundred; of drawing one, two and three in succession, one in a thousand, and so on; your chance of drawing them all, from one to number ten in succession, would reach the unbelievable figure of one chance in ten thousand million.
By the same reasoning, so many exacting conditions are necessary for life on earth that they could not possibly exist in proper relationship by chance. The earth rotates on its axis at one thousand miles an hour; if it turned at one hundred miles an hour, our days and nights would be ten times as long as now, and the hot sun would then burn up our vegetation during each long day while in the long night any surviving sprout would freeze.
Again, the sun, source of our life, has a surface temperature of 12,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and our earth is just far enough away so that this “eternal fire” warms us just enough and not too much! If the sun gave off only one-half of its present radiation, we would freeze, and if it gave half as much more, we would roast.
The slant of the earth, tilted at an angle of 23 degrees, gives us our seasons; if it had not been so tilted, vapours from the ocean would move north and south, piling up for us continents of ice. If our moon were, say, only fifty thousand miles away instead of its actual distance, our tides would be so enormous that twice a day all continents would be submerged; even the mountains would soon be eroded away. If the crust of the earth had been only ten feet thicker, there would be no oxygen without which animal life must die. Had the ocean been a few feet deeper, carbon dioxide and oxygen would have been absorbed and no vegetable life could exist. Or, if our atmosphere had been thinner, some of the meteors, now burned in space by the million every day, would be striking all parts of the earth, starting fire everywhere.
Because of these, and host of other examples, there is not one chance in millions that life on our planet is an accident.
Second:
The resourcefulness of life to accomplish its purpose is a manifestation of all-pervading intelligence.
What life itself is, no man has fathomed. It has neither weight nor dimensions, but it does have force; a growing root will crack a rock. Life has conquered water, land and air, mastering the elements, compelling them to dissolve and reform their combinations.
Life, the sculptor, shapes all living things; an artist, it designs every leaf of every tree, and colours every flower. Life is a musician and has each bird sing its love songs, the insects to call each other in the music of their multitudinous sounds. Life is a sublime chemist, giving taste to fruits and spices, and perfume to the rose, changing water and carbonic acid into sugar and wood and, in so doing, releasing oxygen so that animals may have the breath of life.
Behold an almost invisible drop of protoplasm, transparent and jelly-like, capable of motion, drawing energy from the sun. This single cell, this transparent mist-like droplet, holds within itself the germ of life, and has the power to distribute this life to every living thing, great and small. The powers of this droplet are greater than our vegetation and animals and people, for all life came from it. Nature did not create life; fire-blistered rocks and a salt-less sea could not meet the necessary requirements.
“Who, then, has put it there?”
Third:
Animal wisdom speaks irresistibly of a good Creator who infused instinct into otherwise helpless little creatures.
The young salmon spends years at sea, then comes back to his own river, and travels up the very side of the river into which flows the tributary where he was born. What brings him back so precisely? If you transfer him to another tributary, he will know at once that he is off his course and he will fight his way down and back to the main stream and then turn up against the current to finish his destiny more accurately.
Even more difficult to solve is the mystery of eels. These amazing creatures migrate at maturity from all ponds and rivers everywhere those from Europe across thousands of miles of ocean all bound for the same abysmal deeps near Bermuda. There they breed and die. The little one, with no apparent means of knowing anything except that they are in a wilderness of water, nevertheless find their way back not only to the very shore from which their parents came but thence to the rivers, lakes or little ponds so that each body of water is always populated with eels. No American eel has ever been caught in Europe, no European eel in American waters. Nature has even delayed the maturity of the European eel by a year or more to make up for its longer journey. Where does the directing impulse originate?
A wasp overpowers a grasshopper, digs a hole in the earth, stings the grasshopper in exactly the right place so that he does not die but becomes unconscious and lives on as a form of preserved meat. Then the wasp will lay her eggs handily so that her children when they hatch can nibble without killing the insect on which they feed; to them dead meat would be fatal. The mother then flies away and dies; she never sees her young. Surely the wasp must have done all this right the first time and every time, or else there would be no wasp. Such mysterious techniques cannot be explained by adaptation; they were bestowed.
Fourth:
Man has something more than animal instinct the power of reason.
No other animal has ever left a record of its ability to count ten or even to understand the meaning of ten. Where instinct is like a single note of a flute, beautiful but limited, the human brain contains all the notes of all the instruments in the orchestra. No need to belabour this fourth point; thanks to the human reason we can contemplate the possibility that we are what we are only because we have received a spark of universal intelligence.
Fifth:
Provision for all living is revealed in phenomena which we know today which Darwin did not know such as the wonders of genes. So unspeakably tiny are these genes that, if all of them responsible for all living people in the world could be put in one place, there would be less than a thimbleful. Yet these ultra-microscopic genes and their companions, the chromosomes, inhabit every living cell and are the absolute keys to all human, animal and vegetable characteristics. A thimble is a small place in which to put all the individual characteristics of two thousand million human beings. However, the facts are beyond question. Well, then, how do genes lock up all the normal heredity of a multitude of ancestors and preserve the psychology of each in such an infinitely small place? Here evolution really begins at the cell, the entity that holds and carries genes. How a few million atoms, locked up as an ultra microscopic gene, can absolutely rule all on earth is an example of profound cunning and provision that could emanate only from a Creative Intelligence no other hypothesis will serve.
Sixth:
By the economy of nature, we are forced to realise that only infinite wisdom could have foreseen and prepared with such astute husbandry.
Many years ago a species of cactus was planted in Australia as a protective fence. Having no insect enemies in Australia the cactus soon begun a prodigious growth; the alarming abundance persisted until the plants covered an area as long and wide as England, crowding inhabitants out of the towns and villages, and destroying their farms. Seeking a defence, the entomologists scoured the world; finally they turned up an insect, which exclusively feeds on cactus, and would eat nothing else. It would breed freely too; and it had no enemies in Australia. So, animal soon conquered vegetable and today the cactus pest has retreated, and with it all but a small protective residue of the insects enough to hold the cactus in check forever.
Such checks and balances have been universally provided. Why have not fast-breeding insects dominated the earth? Because they have no lungs such as man possesses; they breathe through tubes. But, when insects grow large, their tubes do not grow in ratio to the increasing size of the body. Hence, there has never been an insect of great size; this limitation on growth has held them all in check.
If this physical check had not been provided, man could not exist. Imagine meeting a hornet as big as a lion!
Seventh:
The fact that man conceives the idea of God is in itself a unique proof.
The conception of god rises from a divine faculty of man, unshared with the rest of our world the faculty we call imagination. By its power, man and man alone can find the evidence of things unseen. The vista that power opens up is unbounded; indeed, as man is perfected, imagination becomes a spiritual reality. He may discern in all the evidence of design and purpose, the great truth that heaven is everywhere and in everything, but nowhere so close as in our hearts.
It is scientifically as well as imaginatively true; in the words of the psalmist: “ The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament sheweth His handiwork.”
A. Cressy Morrison
Former President of the New York Academy of Sciences
--------------
Ghyslaine ROC
Tuesday 29th of January 6008
January 28, 2008 7:48 PM | Report Offensive Comments
Posted on January 28, 2008 19:48
Dear you all
According to what I have read, Pr Richard Dawkins is paid by our tax money to preach his religion of Atheism and nogodism. But, at the same time, Pr Dawkins has espoused the policies of various western regimes and that of Apartheid Israel. He sanctions the massacre of millions of defenceless people in the mainly Muslim and Arab countries.
In one of his talks (monologues) in front of a sheepish university crowd, he said that the cleverest man that has ever existed was Aristotle and that he descended from the cleverest of apes and that the white Europeans are descended from Aristotle, or something like that. Is this not an absolutely racist statement?
Is it not sheer cowardice on his part not to name the Muslims in the above post? Pr Richard Dawkins is the Master of Lies! It is a lie to say that Muslims kill for their God.
1. The deluded Professor still does not know that there is no such thing as the God of Muslims!
2. When Pr Dawkins speak of “religious extremists”, again it is sheer cowardice on his part not to say Muslim “extremists”. Who told the deluded Professor that Muslim “extremists” kill for their God? Is he a scientist or a propagandist who believes every lie that is propagated by a racist, anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, and anti-Islamic controlled media?
3. Any Muslim who is seen using violence against anybody, is it because of his religion or because of “his God” as Pr Dawkins alleges?
4. Why does not Pr Dawkins not say that those Muslims and non Muslims who are fighting against the invading armies of the West, of Apartheid Israel, of Russia, or of Bharat (Anglo-India), are only DEFENDING their lives, their families, their country, and their Way of Life?
5. It suits Pr Dawkins to LIE about the Freedom Fighters because he has espoused the racist and genocidal policies of the West, of Russia and that of Apartheid Israel!
6. The people who are fighting and dying by the millions, it is not because of their faith or for their God, as Pr Dawkins falsely alleges, but, it is simply for survival because they are being bombed day and night and their resources plundered by the invading armies that are glorified by Pr Dawkins, and they are prevented from being independent of the International Bankers.
7. Pr Richard Dawkins talks like a paranoid fool by telling, for example, the Bosnian Freedom Fighters not to defend their wives, mothers, daughters and sisters from being raped by the Serbs! Sixty thousand were thus raped! Pr Richard Dawkins is of the opinion that “where a man puts his penis is none of Congress's damn business.” So, he would also find no objection to the Israeli, British and US mercenaries who involved themselves in rape and sodomy on the prisoners of Abu Ghuraib!
8. By the way, fifteen per cent of those defending Sarajevo were Serbs! It is the racist controlled media that made the Bosnian “Ethnic Cleansing” a religious matter!
9. The mother of Rothschild once said: If my son does not want war, there will be no war! So, Pr Dawkins should read more serious stuff and not drown himself in fetid Western and Zionist propaganda.
10. Is it not strange, that out of all the countries, Muslim and non Muslim, that are fighting western invading armies, he does not find a single one having the RIGHT TO SELF-DEFENCE?
11. As Malcom X said once: It is a crime to teach a man not to defend himself when he is attacked!
12. When Pr Dawkins says: “There is no God”. He does not speak like a scientist, but like a blooming idiot! He is deluded himself, but he cannot see that.
13. Pr Richard Dawkins hates religion, especially Christianity and Islam (not Judaism!), and Christians and Muslims (not Jews!), and of course GOD! It is perfectly his right, but why should our tax money pay for his Atheist and Zionist preaching?
14. Pr Dawkins accused Muslims for 9/11 and for 7/7. Where is his evidence? He should watch Alex Jones’ TERRORSTORM or Eric Hufshmid PAINFUL QUESTIONS/DECEPTIONS or Dylan Avery’s LOOSE CHANGE or again listen to (or watch) David Ray Griffin about the Myth of 9/11!
15. Pr Richard Dawkins is taking us for fools. He has an agenda. He tells lies. He lies, lies and lies! And, this is a MOSSAD motto! “By deception we shall make war!”
16. Pr Richard Dawkins does not give a damn about the millions the US, his country Britain, and the West have slaughtered like cattle during the past centuries. The figure is staggering: 487 million killed! Between 75 and 150 million Muslims, and he dares say that Muslim “extremists kill for their God in order to get Paradise”!!!!!!!
17. And the Holocaust is ongoing! As a “Darwinist” or “Neo-Darwinist”, Pr Dawkins is in favour of the “survival of the fittest” by weapons of mass destruction that his protégés are the only ones to have, to manufacture, to sell, and to use!!!!!!!
Regards
Ghyslaine ROC
Tuesday 29th of January 6008
January 28, 2008 7:33 PM | Report Offensive Comments
Posted on January 28, 2008 19:33
ok you dont see a great painting just appear from no where it has to have an artist.Yup you got it the painting is everything in the universe the artist is God!like anyone of us could create a whole universe!
January 21, 2008 2:09 PM | Report Offensive Comments
Posted on January 21, 2008 14:09
ok you dont see a great painting just appear from no where it has to have an artist.Yup you got it the painting is everything in the universe the artist is God!like anyone of us could create a whole universe!
January 21, 2008 2:09 PM | Report Offensive Comments
Posted on January 21, 2008 14:09
Hello people37c4e4247e67b611f8e45ffbd447e8bf
December 24, 2007 11:34 AM | Report Offensive Comments
Posted on December 24, 2007 11:34
Hello peopledf3933c1d44939e2183ee167f0562a15
December 22, 2007 8:53 PM | Report Offensive Comments
Posted on December 22, 2007 20:53
Yhanks yoube54890fb9f06c6e30233561f6624142
December 22, 2007 10:59 AM | Report Offensive Comments
Posted on December 22, 2007 10:59
Great boysbae4cf599cec7c53f2751b0c4ea305b1
December 21, 2007 10:30 PM | Report Offensive Comments
Posted on December 21, 2007 22:30
Hi boys!af5cb5a50ba25e698f53191f88ee4f25
December 10, 2007 5:25 PM | Report Offensive Comments
Posted on December 10, 2007 17:25
Hi boys!df9742fe7c547dbcafb14fd73d282ace
December 10, 2007 7:09 AM | Report Offensive Comments
Posted on December 10, 2007 07:09
Agreed Wholeheartedly, Richard dawkins is a great man!
December 6, 2007 3:46 AM | Report Offensive Comments
Posted on December 6, 2007 03:46
Yhanks you13d3d5
November 28, 2007 12:17 AM | Report Offensive Comments
Posted on November 28, 2007 00:17
I hasten to add that I am a great "believer" in the science of psychology and psychiatry. It is a young science compared to the rest of medicine, and hence it has a long way to go in spite of making great advances in the short time that it has been around. Freud no doubt made a breakthrough contribution. The book by Samuel Shem is a satire. It is a novel hence it is not to be taken literally and the advice should not be taken as medical advice.
November 2, 2007 4:43 AM | Report Offensive Comments
Posted on November 2, 2007 04:43
Dear Gerry
Re classification of human beings: I thought you might be interested to read a novel by Samuel Shem titled, "Mount Misery." It is a hilarious insider's take on Freudian psychoanalysis. The story goes to show how inaccurate classification of human beings can be, even by health professionals, and how each one is biased by the school of thought one has been trained in (I'm referring in this case only to mental health issues - physical diseases have objective standards and hence are something else of course). Freud is considered the father of modern psychology and his views have shaped scientific views about the human mind in an incredible way, although his very student, C G Jung disagreed with him and went on to found a very powerful school of his own.
Science, wonderful as it is, is oh so imperfect. The book is a very good reminder.
No, I have not put you in any box or drawer. The more I know about human beings the more I am convinced that the only way to understand anybody is know their biography, to know the culture, the thoughts, the people, the values that influenced them; their dreams and hopes, how they interpreted the experiences of their lives, and what core values they actually practice (not believe in or preach about!). Even then, every human being is unpredicable in every choice they make all their lives - the direct consequence of possessing a free will. Since I know nothing about you, I can't even begin to build a box for you, even though I know you would jump unpredictably out of every box I should construct for you anyway!!!
Best wishes
Soja
October 10, 2007 3:43 AM | Report Offensive Comments
Posted on October 10, 2007 03:43
I wish to add that religion bashing atheists like Professor Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens, do not make a real contribution to reforming religions because they express their views as hysterical rants without providing facts and figures to substantiate their claims. The fact that they ignore all good done in the name of religions makes their claims far too biased to be given any serious consideration. Serious believers have only two choices: 1. Ignore the rants. 2. Be amused at the ignorance about religions inherent in the theatrical rants.
Example: Mr Hitchens represented the devil in the beatification ceremony of Mother Theresa of Calcutta. The Nobel Prize committee gave the Nobel Peace Prize (and they are not a religious organisation!), and yet Mr Hitchens had nothing good to say about her!
So much for where sometimes "clear" logic can lead a human being. So logic in itself is not guarantee that one will arrive at a truthful conclusion. Would a religion bashing atheist have the humility to admit that he might be logical and yet be dead wrong?
What would the religion bashing atheist have to say about religious evangelicals if they merely converted nominal believers into atheist-bashing fanatics - just bashing atheists, nothing else? Isn't it the essence of what Dawkins et al are doing - converting nominal atheists into religion bashers, and grouping together other religion bashers like themselves?
By all means write and talk about how religion is wrongly practised; do write about humanism in action from the perspective of an atheist. Believers like me would be all ears and take the writing seriously.
But until then, for every book published by Dawkins et al, a first year theology student/religious scholar, representing their respective religions should publish a book exposing the lies, half truths, and false, exaggerated claims made by the religion-bashing atheists.
October 8, 2007 5:35 AM | Report Offensive Comments
Posted on October 8, 2007 05:35
what a tediouus and ill-tempered conversation between richmond and mr. mark -- what is interesting is (a) the cycle of incivillity and (b) the explosions of contempt. they are just exploiting this venue and trivialize it. i'd like to thank both of them for that.
it would have been sufficient for richmond to say, as a person of faith, i can agree with everything Dawkins says except for his statement that there is no God. and then go on to explain his concept of God. that would be very interesting.
as for mr. mark. i see no point in his shooting down richmond. we can't prove God doesn't exist. so i'd rather what mr. mark believes exists. not everyone is as intelligent as he is; therefore, not everyone can be as self-satisified. he has to risk more of his beliefs in his postings.
October 3, 2007 1:34 PM | Report Offensive Comments
Posted on October 3, 2007 13:34
what a tediouus and ill-tempered conversation between richmond and mr. mark -- what is interesting is (a) the cycle of incivillity and (b) the explosions of contempt. they are just exploiting this venue and trivialize it. i'd like to thank both of them for that.
it would have been sufficient for richmond to say, as a person of faith, i can agree with everything Dawkins says except for his statement that there is no God. and then go on to explain his concept of God. that would be very interesting.
as for mr. mark. i see no point in his shooting down richmond. we can't prove God doesn't exist. so i'd rather what mr. mark believes exists. not everyone is as intelligent as he is; therefore, not everyone can be as self-satisified. he has to risk more of his beliefs in his postings.
October 3, 2007 1:34 PM | Report Offensive Comments
Posted on October 3, 2007 13:34
what a tediouus and ill-tempered conversation between richmond and mr. mark -- what is interesting is (a) the cycle of incivillity and (b) the explosions of contempt. they are just exploiting this venue and trivialize it. i'd like to thank both of them for that.
it would have been sufficient for richmond to say, as a person of faith, i can agree with everything Dawkins says except for his statement that there is no God. and then go on to explain his concept of God. that would be very interesting.
as for mr. mark. i see no point in his shooting down richmond. we can't prove God doesn't exist. so i'd rather what mr. mark believes exists. not everyone is as intelligent as he is; therefore, not everyone can be as self-satisified. he has to risk more of his beliefs in his postings.
October 3, 2007 1:34 PM | Report Offensive Comments
Posted on October 3, 2007 13:34
what a tediouus and ill-tempered conversation between richmond and mr. mark -- what is interesting is (a) the cycle of incivillity and (b) the explosions of contempt. they are just exploiting this venue and trivialize it. i'd like to thank both of them for that.
it would have been sufficient for richmond to say, as a person of faith, i can agree with everything Dawkins says except for his statement that there is no God. and then go on to explain his concept of God. that would be very interesting.
as for mr. mark. i see no point in his shooting down richmond. we can't prove God doesn't exist. so i'd rather what mr. mark believes exists. not everyone is as intelligent as he is; therefore, not everyone can be as self-satisified. he has to risk more of his beliefs in his postings.
October 3, 2007 1:34 PM | Report Offensive Comments
Posted on October 3, 2007 13:34
what a tediouus and ill-tempered conversation between richmond and mr. mark -- what is interesting is (a) the cycle of incivillity and (b) the explosions of contempt. they are just exploiting this venue and trivialize it. i'd like to thank both of them for that.
it would have been sufficient for richmond to say, as a person of faith, i can agree with everything Dawkins says except for his statement that there is no God. and then go on to explain his concept of God. that would be very interesting.
as for mr. mark. i see no point in his shooting down richmond. we can't prove God doesn't exist. so i'd rather what mr. mark believes exists. not everyone is as intelligent as he is; therefore, not everyone can be as self-satisified. he has to risk more of his beliefs in his postings.
October 3, 2007 1:34 PM | Report Offensive Comments
Posted on October 3, 2007 13:34
what a tediouus and ill-tempered conversation between richmond and mr. mark -- what is interesting is (a) the cycle of incivillity and (b) the explosions of contempt. they are just exploiting this venue and trivialize it. i'd like to thank both of them for that.
October 3, 2007 1:29 PM | Report Offensive Comments
Posted on October 3, 2007 13:29
what a tediouus and ill-tempered conversation between richmond and mr. mark -- what is interesting is (a) the cycle of incivillity and (b) the explosions of contempt. they are just exploiting this venue and trivialize it. i'd like to thank both of them for that.
October 3, 2007 1:29 PM | Report Offensive Comments
Posted on October 3, 2007 13:29
what a tediouus and ill-tempered conversation between richmond and mr. mark -- what is interesting is (a) the cycle of incivillity and (b) the explosions of contempt. they are just exploiting this venue and trivialize it. i'd like to thank both of them for that.
October 3, 2007 1:28 PM | Report Offensive Comments
Posted on October 3, 2007 13:28
Dear Gerry
Thanks for the lengthy response.
I'm glad that your invitation to me to join the elite club of atheists (humanist atheists rather, in my capacity as a believer by conviction, still stands. I'm convinced that humanists of all stripes could get along well together and work together for the common good of man; the only prerequisite being mutual respect for the other person's free decision to believe in God or not.
Linear logic vs Circular reasoning: This is not the first time I have heard that one believes in God only by resorting to a process called 'circular reasoning.' The Big Bang, along with matter, space and time as entities with a definite beginning at a definite point in time, is a scientifically agreed on fact (or theory if you prefer). As a believer I believe that the uncreated Creator of the Big Bang is God. What exactly is unreasonable about such a conclusion? It is linear logic. What exactly makes such logical reasoning circular? I'm sure you agree that there can be no scientific invention without a scientist, no mathematics without a mathematician, no music without a musician, no pot without a potter... But a mind boggling universe without a creator???
A two year old could stand before a fifty year old banyan tree and claim that the banyan tree has always existed. Existed longer than he has? Of course! Would it be wrong for someone to claim that the banyan tree not only existed in the form of a seed, but that someone planted the seed in the ground, without which act the tree could not have grown?
Eternal principles of science: The "eternal" natural laws has an even more eternal Lawgiver, that is all the believer claims. As to the "eternal" law of gravity (which no scientist invented), it ceases to be eternal outside earth's orbit. So I'm sure you agree that many such scientific eternabilities is very much limited to particular circumstances. That is not to discredit science which explains the circumstances under which those eternabilities function.
My knowledge of mathematics is very limited indeed. I was a Maths elective student in class 9 and 10, however that was when I was 15-17 years old (and didn't study any mathematics after that). I was a seventeen year old ages ago, so that now even an Australian fifth grader would know more mathematics than me. It beats my imagination however when I'm provided with the "proof" how 2+2 = 4 is the absolute proof God DOESN'T exist. That must belong to the category of advanced mathematics I didn't learn as a 15-17 year old. God is not the joker in a pack of playing cards, He is the "x" is a very important mathematical equation about the origin of the universe. The "x" is perfectly reasonable mathematics, at least as far as my limited knowledge of mathematics go.
Nein, nein, nein! I wasn't giving the atheists any daisies at all. I see no reason to be patronising with the atheists (especially since they all claim to have more access to reason than believers do), even if I do not see any merit in atheism per se. Humanism is something else, and I'm of the opinion that believers need to cultivate humanism consciously (although humanism comes with the package of belief, sadly not all bother to cultivate it) as much as atheists do.
Atheists do do believers one important favour: They help us to identify and rectify false religion. And obviously believers have provided Dawkins et al with all the inspiration for their books. So the relationship may be at best of mutual benefit.
Many thanks for the implied compliment that I do reasonable somersaults within the belief system. I could return the compliment too - within the limit of a finite universe, your capacity to do somersaults is not unlike that of a believer. Believers who do not reject science however operate both within the finite and infinite systems you know.
Atheism is not phenomenal, but it is nevertheless a phenomenon. As a phenomenon it can be studied. All religions after all have their scholars and theologians who devote their whole lives to studying their particular religions (and some even study other religions). So I don't see why many atheists shouldn't devote their whole lives to studying atheism - it makes much more sense than spending time merely bashing religions.
How sure are you that only your teeth are classified? You are classified into many groups you know nothing about. The person who belongs to a particular "class" doesn't even have to agree that he belongs to that category invented by someone else. I personally take no offence at being a member of a thousand categories, if somebody has bothered to classify me at all.
Best wishes
Soja
September 28, 2007 5:20 AM | Report Offensive Comments
Posted on September 28, 2007 05:20
Scott writes:
"I don't need to have seen God to point out the bizarre, deluded, self-important lunacy of atheism."
Why do the religionists continue to float such idiocies? Why must one feel that there is a supernatural god around who is "greater than" oneself?
As a human and an atheist, I know that my personal existence pales in comparison to that of some of my fellow humans - Einstein, Jefferson, hell, even Pavarotti! I'm hardly consumed with "self-importance" because I don't believe that there's some god out there who puts humankind in the shadows. Indeed, the petty, immature and loathsome god of the Bible is inferior to most humans I know.
What is self-important is to believe that the entire universe was created with oneself in mind, and that there is no one more important to god than oneself, and that this god "has a plan" for ME that he couldn't be bothered to extend to his creation for billions of years, to billions of people living today, and to the creatures that will follow mankind on this planet a few billion more years down the road.
Gerry hit it on the head when he pointed out the infantile tenor of religious beliefs where it's all about ME and no one else.
September 19, 2007 9:28 PM | Report Offensive Comments
Posted on September 19, 2007 21:28
You know what, Scott? I am not even interested in your particular dogma. Nobody has seen god, as you clearly say. For your ilk of abolishers of reason, (which is the only basis for human dignity as compared to animals as far as I am concerned), the mere fact that nobody has ever seen or otherwise experienced a particular entity is unquestionable proof of its existence - that ends every discussion, no matter how many names your hatred against clear thinking you put forth: It is beyond stupid. Non-proof is proof! lmao.
Anything goes: 2x2=5, if "god" declares it to be. Thank you, not for me. I don't know any theologian of the slightest standing who claims there is a proof of god. That actually has already been abandoned centuries before your voyage back into the bronze age. The condition of faith is the non-existence of proof, can you process this little thought in your head?
You are a nice specimen of the infantile flock Jesus referred to when he said that only children's minds can come to his paradise.
children stamp their foot if they find out that black is not white.
September 19, 2007 7:25 PM | Report Offensive Comments
Posted on September 19, 2007 19:25
Nice regurgitation of atheist pablum there, Gerry.
Yes, there is Atheist dogma. I specifically discussed the big one: That atheism is the "default position". No wonder this silly claim flies, since apparently adherents such as yourself can't even make the connection. Of course the reality is nobody is born an atheist or a believer, only ignorant(though children often show a surprising conviction in *something* greater than this world...while you'd be hard pressed to find the opposite position).
Meanwhile, I don't need to have seen God to point out the bizarre, deluded, self-important lunacy of atheism. I accept that I don't know and any belief I have (and you of course have not the slightest idea what that may be) is just that, belief. An opinion. Faith. Having never seen God, nor proof of his non-existence, I can have nothing more than that.
Any thinking individual without an agenda...or some money to make...understands that simple fact.
September 19, 2007 6:05 PM | Report Offensive Comments
Posted on September 19, 2007 18:05
Dear Soja,
I didn't say the fact that we might have a "god" gene or any other ingrained neuron-based inclination is a proof in favor of atheism. It is, however, and therefore I maintain my welcome to the humanist crowd, a statement that there is no proof of a god beyond our own imagination about the existence of a god.
Therefore we encounter the circular arguments all the time, to which you fall prey: Because I belief in the existence of a god, there must be a god, and he told me through his scripture to believe that there is a god. Therefore I believe in god...etc. Circular all the time.
Eternal principle - you use this expression rather frivolously, based on your belief, which, of course, cannot be absolute (otherwise I, for instance, would believe in god). Mathematical (2x2=4), physical (gravity etc.) principles to me seem to be eternal principles, and I am very happy and satisfied with this eternity, which I admire, adore, if you wish. The rest are derivatives. We had some dimwit around who thought that god invented mathematics.
Your argumentation circles around the merits of religion as to its usefulness, which I don't contest in principle (I do contest it in its practical effect, but that is a completely different debate).
The simplicity of science can be debated. I don't know how advanced your mathematical knowledge is, but there may be a limit, even without referring to the supernatural, lol. You are confounding the wonderful, cozy simplicity (again, no proof for or against god) of your religion with the rather difficult research tasks scientists occupy their minds with.
Thanks for the daisies for us poor atheists. At least, we have some merit, even if it is only to provoke the increase of the faith of the faithful!
Religion does cut out reason as an a priori assumption. Within that system, of course, you can do the most beautiful logical, reasonable, sophisticated, intellectual somersaults - operative intelligence has no limits within that system. A compliment to you, since you are good at this part.
If you want to do justice to your fellow humans as to classification, you sure should look for a good carpenter to work out the millions of drawers.
The joke in your last paragraph misses the point: Classification in science is a means to understand phenomena and objects. I am not a phenomenon and not an object, or a robot, as I said in my last post. I am glad if my dentist can classify my tooth, ok, but not me.
September 19, 2007 12:19 PM | Report Offensive Comments
Posted on September 19, 2007 12:19
Scott,
There is no such thing as an atheist dogma, just as there is no such thing as a non-rabbit-breeder dogma. The logical ignorance is really impressive. All who are not fellow believers in one of the thousands of brands of superstition must be insulted, eliminated, killed. All those who gladly walk under a ladder are idiots, immoral criminals, homosexuals, sociopaths.
Ladder walkers have an (cut and pasted:) "Opinion without knowledge, in the presence of ignorance (everybody knows that walking under a ladder brings misfortune, even sends the walker to hell!), IS by definition belief (they belong to the "Holy Church of Ladder Walkers, HCLW") Faith. Nothing more. Just another religious conviction whose "proof" waits in a zone none of us can report back on."
So you know and have met god? So you have have come back from that zone? Welcome back! What does god look like? Have you taken a picture of him, I hope? You would be the first, and could make a lot of money on it.
September 19, 2007 11:32 AM | Report Offensive Comments
Posted on September 19, 2007 11:32
The very first dogma of the new Atheists is a fallacy and thus nothing else Dick Dawkins & Crew ramble on about really matters. When they can grow enough to accept that atheism is NOT the "default position" then maybe they'll be worth entertaining.
But that's not likely to happen. Atheism IS a belief system and they can't admit it. The real Default is ignorance. NOBODY KNOWS, thus we all believe something. Atheism, since it is NOT the default position and exists in the same ignorance of God as every other opinion on the subject, is NOT an "absence of belief".
Opinion without knowledge, in the presence of ignorance, IS by definition belief. Faith. Nothing more. Just another religious conviction whose "proof" waits in a zone none of us can report back on.
Sorry, Dawkins, but you and yours are more patently dishonest than any religious hypocrite you cry about.
September 19, 2007 9:26 AM | Report Offensive Comments
Posted on September 19, 2007 09:26
Dear Gerry
Frankly I don’t see how the idea that God may be ingrained into human consciousness supports atheism. If anything, it scientifically supports St Augustine’s explanation of why we seek God and how all cultures and peoples since the beginning of time have sought God and have explained God in one way or another. The descriptions may have differed, but the fact is unmistakable that they came to the same conclusion of the existence of an entity in/beyond the universe that is bigger than the created universe.
Thank you for welcoming to the elite club of atheists! I don’t mind you putting me into a drawer of atheists at all, as long the drawer has the correct label: “Atheist who believes in God and is a Christian by conviction.”
To the applicability of social function of religion: I prefer to speak based on my conviction as a Christian. Jesus Christ taught eternal principles. It is up to us human beings to use the brain that God has given us to interpret those principles and apply them in ways that is relevant to each culture and time. The application of the principles will continue to be an ongoing process, although the principles themselves remain eternal. “Love yourself, love your neighbor, and love your enemies” is pretty straightforward and pretty hard to put into real practice. Only loving God first puts the love of self, neighbor and enemies in a universal and eternal context. Globalization makes the command of Jesus even more relevant and even more urgent... Luckily Jesus taught through the example of His own life. It can’t be said of Him that He meant: “Do as I said, not as I did.”
I don’t see how having a world view that is comfortable and simple (even emotionally beneficial) is wrong simply because of its simplicity. In science as you are fully aware, the ability to explain complex things in a simple way is considered the mark of genius. After all, the complex DNA was explained with a simple double helix model. How could the DNA model have been more right if some mind boggling model had been used instead? So why is the idea of a Creator to explain the origin of a mind boggling universe so wrong simply because it is so simple?
The old fashioned social function of religions may be obsolete, and yet there is a need to work a social structure that is more stable than is the case today. The contribution of religion to a more stable social structure is sure to be invaluable. It goes without saying that humanist atheists have their bit to contribute to it. The claim by atheists that religion shuts out reason is however completely wrong.
As to feeling offended at being classified: Pleeeease don’t break up with me! I will take you out of the “dyed-in-the-wool-atheist’ immediately. But seriously, don’t we classify everything we possibly can, especially in science? If we could understand the language of the animals, plants, bacteria, viruses etc, I’m sure we would notice that they have broken up with us for that reason. I don’t know how predictably human beings behave based on any classification. Psychology, psychiatry and medicine in general would be a simple science if that were the case.
Best wishes
Soja
September 19, 2007 5:13 AM | Report Offensive Comments
Posted on September 19, 2007 05:13
DEAR E FAVORITE
You are right – there are several theories. It could be said that as long as a scientific claim is based only on a theory, then an equal and opposite theory could equally well be true. St Augustine has a good theory about the origin of religion which makes a lot of sense to believers: Our hearts are made for you O Lord, and it finds its rest only when it finds its rest in you. (Words to that effect.) Darwin’s theory could well be interpreted with God included in the picture - the universe as being contained as a seed in the Big Bang. And who knows Darwin’s theory may not be the last word on the topic yet.
The classification of atheists on my part was an on the spot thing, so the idea is still very crude and unedited. I could refine it of course and add subtypes etc. Unfortunately the topic of classifying atheists (or religionists for that matter) doesn’t fire my passion at all. Anyone is most welcome to expand on my classification and do any kind of research of course.
I do find your idea of trying to find out the etiology of atheism quite interesting. It would shed light on why people give up religions; and religions could undertake necessary reform based on the insights provided by atheists.
Best wishes
Soja
September 19, 2007 4:27 AM | Report Offensive Comments
Posted on September 19, 2007 04:27
Dear Anonymous of 17 Sept 2007 10:11 AM
I read your classification of religionists and rearranged a few words........NOT.
Since there are several Anonymii posting on this forum, it would be helpful to know when and where you posted your classification of religionists. It would ensure another Anonymous doesn’t turn up and claim to the real Anonymous who posted the classification. (Besides if I could read your classification for myself, then I could get around to rearranging a few words.)
September 19, 2007 4:07 AM | Report Offensive Comments
Posted on September 19, 2007 04:07
Where are the evolutionary theorists who are attempting to integrate the findings of theoretical physics with biological genetics evolution? If quantum physics teaches us that conscious observation affects the manifestation of materiality within space-time, how do these findings affect the changes within biology? If there is a “god” gene or group of genes that express themselves in human behavior and thought, is this gene a hindrance to our future survivability or an aid to our realization of the Oneness of all things? Are traits of altruism and self sacrifice actually “higher” traits that when manifesting in humans create a greater chance of survivability? Did the great spiritual teachers experience an aspect of reality (a timeless transcendent absolute reality) due to having a “higher” genetic expression for an ability to comprehend the interconnectedness and interdependence of all that exists?
It amazes me that the essence of the teachings of the great mystics throughout the history of various spiritual (read consciousness) traditions were able to transcend the evolutionarily demanded selfishness of most humans and comprehend the illusory nature of selfness. Will this ability to transcend self allow for greater survivability of our species? Will those who practice a consciousness of oneness with all of the cosmos lead us to the great future of peace and understanding that will “save” humanity? Is the universe “creating” “god” through the expression of “higher” level consciousness within the explicate, subjective, relative order to exist within the implicate, objective, absolute order of reality where all space-time exists?
As theoretical physicist David Bohm stated:” “Ultimately, all moments are really one. Therefore now is eternity" Or as theoretical physicist Brian Greene says: "Just as we envision all of space as really being out there, as really existing, we should also envision all of time as really being out there, as really existing too."
Z-Bob
P.S.: Gaby, I am glad you enjoyed the website.
September 17, 2007 2:46 PM | Report Offensive Comments
Posted on September 17, 2007 14:46
And another thing, Soja:
Nobody likes to be classified like this. I remember breaking up a relationship because she tried to put me into a particular drawer of her own making. It isn't very nice, since it pretends to make a person predictable like a robot. I am no robot.
September 17, 2007 11:44 AM | Report Offensive Comments
Posted on September 17, 2007 11:44
Soja,
with your link to "Darwin's God" you actually admit that you are fundamentally inclined to be an atheist (welcome!), at least that the idea of god may be ingrained in our human existence, generating thoughts and ideas WE PRODUCE in favor of some social advantage (no matter from which evolutionary source they come), and not as something that is absolute independent of our thinking. I agree with this position, although personally I am more interested in the objective reality of things than in the picture people make for themselves of things in order to feel more comfortable. I therefore call myself an atheist, all while acknowledging that social function of religion.
The social value of religions has really never been negated, for better or (much) worse, depending on the historical existence (Luther believed fervently in witchcraft), surrounding (tribe) and education of a person.
Another question, of course, is if this formerly useful social function is still applicable today ("eternal truth"?) in a world of exponential growth of the number of people, the growing interdependence (globalization) and the amount of scientific and technological progress (think of Google Earth). Personally, I don't th