If any of you guys didn't hear, Bill Nye (Yes, the science guy) did a debate with Ken Ham (Biblical literalist and creationist) on topics featuring creation/evolution.
Not a bad way to spend 3 hours.
Also: BILL BILL BILL BILL BILL BILL BILL BILL BILL BILL BILL BILL BILL BILL BILL BILL BILL BILL!
ID:1489627
 Feb 5 2014, 12:32 am
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Feb 5 2014, 4:15 am
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Ganite
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Ahh Middle School science class memories. Loved those Bill Nye days in class.
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Creation science is totally bogus. The only reasonable way to be a scientist and to believe in the literal bible creation, is to separate that belief from your practice of science. You would have to claim that God basically set everything up to appear older than it really is. That is of course a possibility, however there is no evidence in favor of such a story. We can't really prove it wrong either, but at least we do have evidence in support of evolution and so on.
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Thanks for the link, I took a snow-day off from work and needed something fun to watch.
<3 ya Bill! | |
Being a pretty hard-line atheist myself that was raised to be very evangelical (grew up in a creationist household), I can sort of understand where most creationists are coming from.
I mean, it's HARD to visualize time on the scale of billions of years, and staring the face of a universe that is dying all around us, completely stranded on a cooling planet constantly trying to kill us by swinging between too hot, too cold, too dry, too wet, etc. Meanwhile, the rest of the universe is being baked with radiation or simply outright hostile to life. I mean, facing that kind of a world is scary. Realizing that you are a tiny, insignificant member of a species that is more likely to go extinct than live another million years? That's a hard prospect for people to accept. However, I think biblical literalists like Ken Ham are preying upon peoples' narcissism in order to get more donations so he can pay himself more every year to do nothing but spout debunked trash based on a very poor interpretation of a single book he probably hasn't even read all the way through. I can definitely respect people who do have faith in a creator, but if there were to be a creator of the universe, it would undoubtedly have spoken the laws of physics into existence, thus creating the universe over 13.7 billion years of gradual cooling. And he most certainly didn't tell some old guy to build a boat and pack it with every animal on the planet, much less come down on earth to have himself tortured and crucified so that he could absolve humanity from a curse he put on them in the first place. Nye did a good job on this one, though. He really kept it classy and that bit at the end where Ham said that no mountain of evidence that he was incorrect would change his mind? And then Bill goes up and says: All it will take for him to change his mind is a single piece of evidence. Just one. That was absolutely wonderful. | |
Yea, I thought Bill did a good job, too. He seemed very calm and open-minded for the whole debate, which can be difficult when debating someone who takes the bible literally.
At the very least, he's shaken the caricature that people like Ken Ham portray "mainstream" scientists as. For anyone who was on the fence, hopefully he convinced them to take a second look at their beliefs, and maybe reconsider what should be taken in a literal sense versus a figurative one. | |
I watched it last night, and it was utter destruction. But I still think it should have never happened. I'm sure you've heard other people express this opinion, but most creationist are too far gone to ever come back.Its pointless to expose creationist to facts because they don't care about facts. All this debate does is legitimize their lunacy so they can point at it and say," See! We got a scientist to come down and to talk to Ken Ham, they must be equals right? Creationism is just as viable right?"
We already have several states in America teaching creationism under the table so to speak, and i'd rather not see a resurgence in this nonsense. Not in the 21st century. | |
Ter13 wrote:
that bit at the end where Ham said that no mountain of evidence that he was incorrect would change his mind? And then Bill goes up and says: All it will take for him to change his mind is a single piece of evidence. Just one. I think that sums up the entire debate right there. You can never have 100% proof of something, but when all the evidence you have gathered so far leads away from a certain conclusion, you really should stop pursuing that conclusion until evidence comes along that changes things. | |
On the topic of "prospects hard for people to accept", I love this quote by Aizen ( yes, from Bleach ) because it describes the world perfectly:
"There is only plain, hard facts. And yet, all beings who exist in this world take only those 'facts' that are convenient to them, and take them to be the 'truth'. They do so because they know no other way to live. However, for those powerless beings that make up the majority of this world it is those 'facts' that are inconvenient for their own self-affirmation that make up the real 'truth'" At the end of the day, the majority of us will only cling to whatever is most comfortable for us to believe. A lot of atheists claim they are atheists due to a lack of evidence, when a lot of the time, they are simply atheists because they refuse to live their life according to the laws of the bible and reject the idea that after death, they would be thrown into a lake of fire for an eternity. And vice versa. A lot of people are Christians because they are fed up with this world and desire something greater. They cling to the thought of Heaven and a peaceful afterlife where everyone lives in harmony, because that belief calms the mind and provides hope. Rarely do people accept "evidence" or "truth" that represents an inconvenience for them. You hear people like Bill Nye claiming they would change their perspective if evidence of God was shown, but how true is that? I'm willing to bet that if a chariot of fire swooped down from the heavens, Bill Nye would spend the rest of whatever remains of his life trying to form some naturalist explanation for it, rather than give up and acknowledge the supernatural. Because for him to do the latter would simply be too large of an inconvenience. He would then have to accept that he is most likely bound for an eternity in a searing lake of fire for his blasphemy, and who wants to live their life accepting that kind of thought? Next to no one. By nature, we are not very good at accepting reality. That's why when a loved one dies, one of the first experiences is denial. Your mind starts racing, telling you that what happened actually didn't occur. Because we only want to have convenient thoughts and realities. That's why we have murder suicides when the man of the house loses his high paying salary job. The reality of your wife leaving you, your kids not having anything to eat or a place to live, the embarrassment brought on by all of your peers, it's an overwhelming negative thought that results in the man grabbing a firearm, killing his family and then himself. Neither side knows for sure, because creationists weren't alive BC to confirm the events of the bible are true, and none of us were alive 3 million bajillion trillion years ( or however long naturalists claim ) ago to confirm Big Bang and the list of other explanations science provides us with. All we have are two sides, and 7 billion people choosing whichever one is more pleasing to their mind. It has absolutely nothing to do with which side "has more evidence". If you believe this is about evidence you are sadly mistaken. | |
a lot of the time, they are simply atheists because they refuse to live their life according to the laws of the bible and reject the idea that after death, they would be thrown into a lake of fire for an eternity A lot of people are Christians because Whoah whoah whoah... I'm gonna stop you right there. People don't pick their beliefs. They are compelled by beliefs to hold them as true or false. There is no choice in it at all. I am an atheist because I am not compelled by any god-concept, not because it's convenient. Not because I chose to live with the convenience of a life without accountability. I actually believe not having a spiritual overseer makes me MORE accountable for my actions, because I can't just apologize to a sky wizard and have everything be forgiven. My actions are permanent, and affect the world. I won't be held accountable for them forever, but they will shape my one life, and the one life of the people around me. To me, that makes doing the right thing that much more important than if I had an immortal soul, theology aside. Christians are Christians because they are compelled to believe in Christianity. When you look at the statistics, people who are born in Christian households are highly likely to be Christian. You do not see a majority of Muslims spontaneously having children that worship Zeus. People are raised in the culture of their families. Meanwhile, you do see a larger number of people being born in the faith of their parents and then changing to another, or completely abandoning it. People who are born in secular households much more rarely convert to religion than people deconvert. This is because religious inclusion is strongly tied to the shaping of young minds. When you teach children that the world is a particular way, they are more likely to be compelled to believe things that conform to those biases. This is why secularly raised children will rarely be convinced by religious argumentation, because their worldview is based in a kind of reasoning that makes adopting religious beliefs incredibly difficult. Meanwhile, religious reckoning is much more lateral than moving to secularism, so you see more people changing religions than abandoning them, and religious reckoning is taught in a microcosm of secular lives in the west, which is why you see a trend toward secularism in the west, because religious thinking is brought on board with secular reasoning. This creates dissonance and builds a bridge for deconversion. But nobody chooses their beliefs. Beliefs are distinct because we can't chose them. They can, however, be chosen for us through argument and education. Neither side knows for sure, because creationists weren't alive BC to confirm the events of the bible are true, and none of us were alive 3 million bajillion trillion years ( or however long naturalists claim ) ago to confirm Big Bang and the list of other explanations science provides us with. Okay, cultural anthropology, archaeology, and the examination of cross-cultural first-hand accounts can be used to get a good idea of a large number of the events described in the bible. Just because no currently living person was there doesn't mean we don't have first hand accounts. Just because we don't have first hand accounts doesn't mean we can't know. Just because we have first hand accounts doesn't mean the accounts are accurate. Just because someone was alive when it happened doesn't mean they know what happened. Neither side knows for sure Define for sure? We do know with extreme levels of confidence that the universe is greater than 6,000 years old. The "apparent age" argument is irrelevant, because if a supernatural being intervened 6,000 years ago and made it look as if the world is actually 14 billion years old, the universe is 14 billion years old, because the only way we can confirm the age of the universe is by dating the universe itself through observable, constant models. Thus, the apparent age becomes the real age regardless of supernatural involvement. Why? Because the supernatural wiped away all possible evidence for itself by obfuscating the universe to cover the fingerprints of its creation. All we have are two sides, and 7 billion people choosing whichever one is more pleasing to their mind. It has absolutely nothing to do with which side "has more evidence". If you believe this is about evidence you are sadly mistaken. We don't have two sides. There are around 40,000 different sects of Christianity. There have been over 1,000 religions that have existed since the dawn of human civilization. Each is distinct, and each claims to be the right one. What if someone was born before the right religion was created? Did they pick the right religion? Was it possible for them to have the right faith? If we can't know which faith is right, how do we pick one? How do we know that the right faith will even exist within our lifetime? What if the right faith isn't even discovered on our planet at all? What if we're actually the wrong species to be chosen? What if our universe isn't the only one, and another universe is the one that got the real revelation? Not ours? There aren't two sides. This is an illusion crafted carefully by religious charlatans who want to delude you into fighting secularism. There is no such thing as "The Christian community". There is no such thing as "The muslim community". There is no such thing as "The theistic community." These are lies bred upon false equivocation. Your last argument is a vast oversimplification of the issue. In a game where there are an infinite number of moves, and there is only one correct move to make, and if you choose wrong, you are punished for all time, the only sensible move to make is none. | |
Ter, i'm going to save you some time and tell you you're talking to a guy that has had quotes submitted to FSTDT. Nothing you say is going to interrupt his speech or make him take a second look at what he's saying. He's been saying it for years.
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You're very wrong. Our beliefs are choices. We are selfish, reality-denying creatures in search of our own idea of perfection. So we cherry-pick what works for us and what doesn't, similar to your comparison of morality in your first paragraph. You came to the conclusion your path is a more "accountable" one by weighing both sides and making a decision. That's what works for you, that's what makes you feel like you're a better person, so that's what you side with. You may not have a fear of the supernatural, but you have a fear of being inferior, at least when it comes to morality. Not siding with creationists gives you the impression you know more, which is important to you, since you seem to have done a lot of research on the topic to the point where you even know how many Christian sects there are. People who have an intense desire to feel intelligent usually side with naturalists, since naturalists tend to not rely on faith, but things that they can and/or must prove via their intelligence. The examples I listed weren't the only circumstances under which someone would choose atheism, they were just a few examples, but there are dozens of factors that play a part. It's not so much "I'm not compelled.", but rather "This feels right." We're bound by what feels right. Social interaction, security, sex, wealth, purpose, success, drugs, alcohol, all these things feel good, so that's what we go after. My bottom line is, if God revealed himself to you this instant, you would still deny his existence.
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Boxcar wrote:
Ter, i'm going to save you some time and tell you you're talking to a guy that has had quotes submitted to FSTDT. Nothing you say is going to interrupt his speech or make him take a second look at what he's saying. He's been saying it for years. And yes, Box is right. He's basically re-iterating my point in my first post. Everyone clings to their beliefs, no one in this thread is going to change their opinion on anything, including me, which is why I'm not really debating, but rather writing what I've observed. I don't really care what you guys believe, I just thought it'd be useful to point out that all the talk about "evidence" was baloney. The only way someone would change is if someone presents an idea that even further conveniences them than the one they are currently holding onto right now. No one here can convince me they go through life looking for the hard, depressing way out. | |
EmpirezTeam wrote:
I just thought it'd be useful to point out that all the talk about "evidence" was bologna Fixed for you :P Evidence is the entire point of this debate. If you think that evidence is somehow not important to this discussion, then I'm pretty sure you are not qualified to participate, considering the fact that you refuse to acknowledge the one thing being discussed. EmpirezTeam wrote: That's why when a loved one dies, one of the first experiences is denial. Your mind starts racing, telling you that what happened actually didn't occur. I know from first hand experience that this is not the case. Believe it or not there are some people who are able to accept death and to grieve without totally losing their minds. EmpirezTeam wrote: My bottom line is, if God revealed himself to you this instant, you would still deny his existence. Your bottom line is a rather flimsy accusation - nice choice. Some people think that praying for something and then getting it is an example of God revealing himself. If something like that happened to me I might shrug it off as coincidence. If a giant glowing being flew down from the sky and spoke to me in a booming voice that he was the lord, I might question it at first (having never seen that before, I would be skeptical). But really if this god did not seem to be some kind of illusion then I would totally NOT deny its existence. I wouldn't immediately run to get baptized but I would certainly acknowledge such a being. Do you think I'm as illogical as you are? | |
Put down the reefer.
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Sorry man, but I'm really not into anything like that. I really don't know what inspires me. Sometimes I feel like I have lived much longer than my age. I guess I just tend to absorb much more information than most other people.
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Try this out then. http://www.iqtest.dk/main.swf Maybe youre seeing things we cant.
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