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[NT] NTs and God
- Thread starter KLessard
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EcK
The Memes Justify the End
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His understanding of the topic doesn't sound to be that deep (the chance part was kind of a non argument) so i wouldnt call it getting schooled. But hey, it's still a thousand times better than the usual zealot talk. I can appreciate that.
EcK
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Yeah totally. They have this funny 'boing 747' argument, I do love it, it's really funny.
My point is it shouldnt be called chance, it's not chance, it's large numbers. It's not throwing one dice one 10 times X times and getting a 'lucky strike'.
It's throwing 10 times X dices one time, and just getting what statistics should give you.
EcK
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And the philosophers answer is even funnier. Did you ever hear about descartes arguments : D ? It's Hilarious!
here's a freeby : "Mind and body are not related, so god moves your hands when your mind decides 'I want to move my hand'.
Or that famous one: "think about the prettier\any superlative thing ever, well, if you can conceptualize it, it means god exists". I know, this is just totally awesome. Notice you can make up stuffs like 'think of the smelliest\ugliest\dumbest thing ever, Well, it's god". It's like they are handing us stick and asking to get beaten up or something
And the list goes on.
And the philosophers answer is even funnier. Did you ever hear about descartes arguments : D ? It's Hilarious!
here's a freeby : "Mind and body are not related, so god moves your hands when your mind decide 'i want to move my hand'.
Or that famous thing: "think about the most prettier thing ever, well, if you can conceptualize it, it means god exists". I know, this is just totally awesome.
And the list goes on.
Yeah well we all know Dualism has problems...
The funniest thing is how far people will go just to resolve their dissonance...they'd rather cling to hilarious reasoning than just throw out the concept of God (religious God at least).
People that have spent 20+ years devoting their life to religion just REALLY don't want to admit there's no God -- it means they wasted 20+ years!
EcK
The Memes Justify the End
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Yeah well, kids these days.
Chris_in_Orbit
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Never saw this thread so I get to respond to something super early in it.
I really think your comparison with the different types is really poetic; I like it.
Erudur
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Eck/Evan,
The series of leaps I mentioned are why I believe there is a supreme being that has eternally existed. I do not present it as a proof or an argument. And Evan, your response may be straining at some semantics. I probably could have used some different terms, but the definitions are broad enough to accurately describe the basic ideas.
Your problem is that you think that believing matter has always existed or has changed from simple forms to complex forms (self-aware forms no less) is science. It is not, it is philosophical and requires faith.
Eck you asked for an argument, but overlooked the substance I gave you for discussion. I linked an article with discussions by 16 leading biologists and philosophers. None of them are theists, and most used to be darwinists. My point by posting that article was to show that the science is considered incomplete by the top scientists in the field. For you to talk like its all settled is arrogance. People much smarter than you are not so sure.
And as someone pointed out earlier in this thread, one man who by many is considered the greatest genius in the modern era (Einstein) was a theist. That doesn't prove the existance of God by any means. But for you to treat theists with the trite condescension that you do, means that you are also dismissing Einstein as well as many other accomplished minds with the same condescension.
You're not as smart as you think you are. And you don't understand ID very well either.
On probability. I can jump in the air a million times. I can jump in the air a billion times. But no matter how many times I jump in the air, I will never reach the moon.
When you look at the basic building blocks of life, there are certain characteristics of these building blocks where the darwinistic premise that A eventually evolved to B simply cannot be explained by mutation and natural selection, no matter how many times you flip the coin. ID is the scientific evaluation of the characteristics of design versus probability. It makes no statements about who or what the designer is. It is the scientific evaluation of a concept that we all intuitively understand.
If we walk along the beach and see a sand castle, we know it did not come about by wave and wind acting on sand particles. There are things much simpler than living organisms that we know to be design like pre-historic rock carvings. ID scientists have spent time developing a scientific method for measuring the differences between a product of design and a product of non-directed processes.
I don't expect any one to believe in God based on these arguments. I do think that a reasonable and thinking person would realize that science has not disproven god/gods. But even more than that, the holes in the prevailing opinions on darwinism are beginning to show -- even to the secular community. As with all advances in science, the orthodoxy is slow to change. But it looks like it is changing with even the darwinists.
I find agnosticism a little more logical than atheism. It seems that atheists doth protest too much. Its more like they are mad at God so they go to great lengths to deny his existence. Its interesting to see the NF (Evan) and the NT (Eck) express their respective condescension to the concept. Though Eck, sorry dude. You seem way too hysterical to be an NT. Maybe you really do have a logical approach to your thinking but that has not shown up in this discussion.
The series of leaps I mentioned are why I believe there is a supreme being that has eternally existed. I do not present it as a proof or an argument. And Evan, your response may be straining at some semantics. I probably could have used some different terms, but the definitions are broad enough to accurately describe the basic ideas.
Your problem is that you think that believing matter has always existed or has changed from simple forms to complex forms (self-aware forms no less) is science. It is not, it is philosophical and requires faith.
Eck you asked for an argument, but overlooked the substance I gave you for discussion. I linked an article with discussions by 16 leading biologists and philosophers. None of them are theists, and most used to be darwinists. My point by posting that article was to show that the science is considered incomplete by the top scientists in the field. For you to talk like its all settled is arrogance. People much smarter than you are not so sure.
And as someone pointed out earlier in this thread, one man who by many is considered the greatest genius in the modern era (Einstein) was a theist. That doesn't prove the existance of God by any means. But for you to treat theists with the trite condescension that you do, means that you are also dismissing Einstein as well as many other accomplished minds with the same condescension.
You're not as smart as you think you are. And you don't understand ID very well either.
On probability. I can jump in the air a million times. I can jump in the air a billion times. But no matter how many times I jump in the air, I will never reach the moon.
When you look at the basic building blocks of life, there are certain characteristics of these building blocks where the darwinistic premise that A eventually evolved to B simply cannot be explained by mutation and natural selection, no matter how many times you flip the coin. ID is the scientific evaluation of the characteristics of design versus probability. It makes no statements about who or what the designer is. It is the scientific evaluation of a concept that we all intuitively understand.
If we walk along the beach and see a sand castle, we know it did not come about by wave and wind acting on sand particles. There are things much simpler than living organisms that we know to be design like pre-historic rock carvings. ID scientists have spent time developing a scientific method for measuring the differences between a product of design and a product of non-directed processes.
I don't expect any one to believe in God based on these arguments. I do think that a reasonable and thinking person would realize that science has not disproven god/gods. But even more than that, the holes in the prevailing opinions on darwinism are beginning to show -- even to the secular community. As with all advances in science, the orthodoxy is slow to change. But it looks like it is changing with even the darwinists.
I find agnosticism a little more logical than atheism. It seems that atheists doth protest too much. Its more like they are mad at God so they go to great lengths to deny his existence. Its interesting to see the NF (Evan) and the NT (Eck) express their respective condescension to the concept. Though Eck, sorry dude. You seem way too hysterical to be an NT. Maybe you really do have a logical approach to your thinking but that has not shown up in this discussion.
Lol. Don't give me anything extra just because I'm an F. I'd like to be treated the same way I would be if I didn't have a type next to my name.
I'm not offended.
I'll respond to your other post soon.
Kangirl
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This is an interesting quote from Einstein:
Note that I'm not directing this at anyone, but I don't think Einstein fits neatly into the 'theist' mold - neither does he fit into the atheist one.
Erudur - Im(personal)o, if there is a 'god' then he/she/it is not the type of thing that's going to be proveable using science anyway. In many ways I see the ID argument as flawed because its proponents have, in making it, actually bought into the idea that science is the only way to prove something exists. Why all of these points about pre-historic rock carvings etc.? Why isn't faith enough? Should it be enough? If god exists, and if one has *faith* that god exists, surely there is no need for rock carvings or weird fossils etc.?
Yeah, but each time you jump in the air, there is 0% chance of you reaching the moon. That's totally different from a coin toss, where this IS a chance of one of 2 outcomes each time.
Note that I'm not directing this at anyone, but I don't think Einstein fits neatly into the 'theist' mold - neither does he fit into the atheist one.
Erudur - Im(personal)o, if there is a 'god' then he/she/it is not the type of thing that's going to be proveable using science anyway. In many ways I see the ID argument as flawed because its proponents have, in making it, actually bought into the idea that science is the only way to prove something exists. Why all of these points about pre-historic rock carvings etc.? Why isn't faith enough? Should it be enough? If god exists, and if one has *faith* that god exists, surely there is no need for rock carvings or weird fossils etc.?
Yeah, but each time you jump in the air, there is 0% chance of you reaching the moon. That's totally different from a coin toss, where this IS a chance of one of 2 outcomes each time.
Eric B
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Belief in God has always been very hard for me, and it made perfect sense in the temperament system I was introduced into personality theory through, the Christian-based Arno Profile System. The manuals point out that the Choleric, especially in the area of Control, is very hard to come to faith, unless he was raised in it all his life
(and even then, he can always rebel against it). The Choleric's nature, basically is to try to BE God, so it is very hard to submit to one, especially when you can't see or completely understand him. When they do come to him, it is often to try to use or manipulate him for their own goals; especially power.
This is another big evidence that NT fits Choleric in Control (and not the readily "believing" NF).
So I've had 22 years of ups and downs trying to believe. Havng an NT need for mastery and control, you get suckered in by all those evangelists telling you that if you come to Jesus, you will get all of this "power". But once in, you then find that life continues the same ol' way, and the "power" is then said to something like be having a 'positive thankful attitude' when things don't go your way. The diametric OPPOSITE of what you had hoped for.
At one point, I had to reassess why I believed, and whether it was worth it. More recently, I have made significant changes, dropping belief in "futurism" (the idea that Christ is coming "soon" in the future), seeing all of that as having been fulfilled in AD70 when the Temple was destroyed.
What kept me holding on, basically, is Ne. There may not seem to be enough physical evidence, but then we don't know everything, and it still could be true. So I'm inclined to give it a chance. I have even noticed that the NTJ's seem to be a bit more adamant in disbelief than the NTP's. So perhaps we can re-ask the question along the lines of the cognitive processes. Also, Ti uses underlying frameworks, and while either creation or random evolution may fit better into a person's own model, still, Te is the one that demands empirical evidence, and is thus more likely to cast religion aside because of the lack of hard proof. Ti's subjectivity makes it more flexible.
Hence, I cannot just walk away from it, but continue to reexamine it and look at things through new angles. It's obvious that there has been much bad interpretation and reinterpretation through the ages. But at the bottom of it all, the writers must have meant something, so the closer we get to what they really meant, the clearer it will be.
So I still believe the Bible is true, and one reason is the sincerity I see in its "storyline". They really had a hope, and it does seem to fit with human experience. Man does have a sense of guilt and condemnation (whether he wants to admit it or not), and that is what Christ came to fix. It's when a lot of this other dross the church added later is removed (futurism, using Hell to scare people into obedience, the church as a money making institution with leaders as paid professions, its political involvement, many other doctrines and practices), then it does not seem as ridiculous as people have come to see it.
(and even then, he can always rebel against it). The Choleric's nature, basically is to try to BE God, so it is very hard to submit to one, especially when you can't see or completely understand him. When they do come to him, it is often to try to use or manipulate him for their own goals; especially power.
This is another big evidence that NT fits Choleric in Control (and not the readily "believing" NF).
So I've had 22 years of ups and downs trying to believe. Havng an NT need for mastery and control, you get suckered in by all those evangelists telling you that if you come to Jesus, you will get all of this "power". But once in, you then find that life continues the same ol' way, and the "power" is then said to something like be having a 'positive thankful attitude' when things don't go your way. The diametric OPPOSITE of what you had hoped for.
At one point, I had to reassess why I believed, and whether it was worth it. More recently, I have made significant changes, dropping belief in "futurism" (the idea that Christ is coming "soon" in the future), seeing all of that as having been fulfilled in AD70 when the Temple was destroyed.
What kept me holding on, basically, is Ne. There may not seem to be enough physical evidence, but then we don't know everything, and it still could be true. So I'm inclined to give it a chance. I have even noticed that the NTJ's seem to be a bit more adamant in disbelief than the NTP's. So perhaps we can re-ask the question along the lines of the cognitive processes. Also, Ti uses underlying frameworks, and while either creation or random evolution may fit better into a person's own model, still, Te is the one that demands empirical evidence, and is thus more likely to cast religion aside because of the lack of hard proof. Ti's subjectivity makes it more flexible.
Hence, I cannot just walk away from it, but continue to reexamine it and look at things through new angles. It's obvious that there has been much bad interpretation and reinterpretation through the ages. But at the bottom of it all, the writers must have meant something, so the closer we get to what they really meant, the clearer it will be.
So I still believe the Bible is true, and one reason is the sincerity I see in its "storyline". They really had a hope, and it does seem to fit with human experience. Man does have a sense of guilt and condemnation (whether he wants to admit it or not), and that is what Christ came to fix. It's when a lot of this other dross the church added later is removed (futurism, using Hell to scare people into obedience, the church as a money making institution with leaders as paid professions, its political involvement, many other doctrines and practices), then it does not seem as ridiculous as people have come to see it.
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Religion has always been indoctrinated. The only reason you have your religion is that it was ingrained into you by your parents, who had it ingrained into them by theirs, and so on, until its beginnings, whenever they may be.
When you take a moment and step back and ask whether or not you would have come to the conclusion that all of this was done by some omnipotent being, odds are, you would not have come to that conclusion yourself.
When you take a moment and step back and ask whether or not you would have come to the conclusion that all of this was done by some omnipotent being, odds are, you would not have come to that conclusion yourself.
Mycroft
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I'm impressed how far we made it into the thread before somebody trotted this one out.
Kudos for using something other than a bag and watch parts.
Misty_Mountain_Rose
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My experiences and feelings about God are confusing and difficult to explain, but I will try.
When I look at religions, (all religions) I see a common theme of people wanting to know that there is more to life than just this. More than just a random sequence of procreation and death with nothing guiding it. They don't like the idea of chaos.
I've also always seen a tendency for cultures to credit things they don't understand to some mystical being (IE cultures worshiping a Sun God that makes the sun come up or a woman who is released from the underworld every spring to make the flowers grow). Every culture for all written history has its Gods, Goddesses, Angels, Prophets... all of which are meant to explain what is unexplainable to them.
Also, another interesting point is that as more things became explainable by science, there came a (slow) movement from Polytheism to Monotheism.
Then there are cultures like the Native American cultures who believe that all things are connected and have a spirit. Or the cultures who believe in reincarnation. (An idea which I personally like)
I've studied all of these things, I suppose always trying to understand my own feelings about religion, but all it has done is lead me to create my own kind of idea about the Universe that doesn't mesh with just one religion.
I was raised in a Protestant family, church on Sundays with the Grandparents and what-not. Even then I was the child asking things like 'If God created Adam and Eve... who made God?' and 'How can he have 'always existed'. The idea of 'infinity' only made sense to me when I put it in the context of God being created by humans and not the other way around, which disturbed me because it went against everything I'd been taught.
THEN I read this book called "Many Lives, Many Masters". This book threw me for a loop, essentially declaring a kind of Reincarnation meets String Theory concept. (Awesome book by the way, if you like that kind of stuff)
I also attended a Franciscan University (because it was in my home town) and learned a lot of Franciscan teachings.
All of this, in conjunction with scientific theories has lead me to believe a few things in 'my' religion:
1. There is no robed 'man' sitting on a throne in the clouds dictating how things are going to progress. There just isn't, thats crazy.
2. All things are connected. Events, people, animals, things... they all serve a purpose.
3. Nothing can either be created nor destroyed, they simply change. This includes life and what we call 'soul' or the essence of who we are.
4. 'GOD' is an all encompassing word for how all of these things come together. (Some equate God with Love)
5. Our 'essense' and our 'purpose' is to learn. Each life that we have is meant to teach us something else. Many reincarnation theories say that we choose when to come back to 'life' and what we will be trying to learn while we are here. It also claims that many 'souls' choose to come back in groups, so that perhaps a friend that you really bond with was someone you knew in a past life and that the dynamics (teacher vs student) remain the same.
6. The people who are here to learn the same things as us have a similar 'vibration' or essense about them. (This is where String Theory becomes fun) We will be drawn to them and have things in common. They are fellow journeymen on the same quest so to speak, which gives rise to the term 'soul mate'.
7. Situations will repeat themselves with a common theme in your life until you 'conquer' it and progress to the next situation. All of them will be meant to teach you whichever concept you chose to perfect in your life when you chose to return: IE: Loyalty, Patience, Love, Honesty, Integrity, etc etc. (This is actually also mentioned in some Astrology books (another kind of religion). A good one is the intro to Love Signs of the Zodiac, which says that each sign is here to learn a specific thing. (A good scientist doesn't discount anything without examination!))
Its difficult to really explain these ideas fully, but maybe these will give you the jist.
When I look at religions, (all religions) I see a common theme of people wanting to know that there is more to life than just this. More than just a random sequence of procreation and death with nothing guiding it. They don't like the idea of chaos.
I've also always seen a tendency for cultures to credit things they don't understand to some mystical being (IE cultures worshiping a Sun God that makes the sun come up or a woman who is released from the underworld every spring to make the flowers grow). Every culture for all written history has its Gods, Goddesses, Angels, Prophets... all of which are meant to explain what is unexplainable to them.
Also, another interesting point is that as more things became explainable by science, there came a (slow) movement from Polytheism to Monotheism.
Then there are cultures like the Native American cultures who believe that all things are connected and have a spirit. Or the cultures who believe in reincarnation. (An idea which I personally like)
I've studied all of these things, I suppose always trying to understand my own feelings about religion, but all it has done is lead me to create my own kind of idea about the Universe that doesn't mesh with just one religion.
I was raised in a Protestant family, church on Sundays with the Grandparents and what-not. Even then I was the child asking things like 'If God created Adam and Eve... who made God?' and 'How can he have 'always existed'. The idea of 'infinity' only made sense to me when I put it in the context of God being created by humans and not the other way around, which disturbed me because it went against everything I'd been taught.
THEN I read this book called "Many Lives, Many Masters". This book threw me for a loop, essentially declaring a kind of Reincarnation meets String Theory concept. (Awesome book by the way, if you like that kind of stuff)
I also attended a Franciscan University (because it was in my home town) and learned a lot of Franciscan teachings.
All of this, in conjunction with scientific theories has lead me to believe a few things in 'my' religion:
1. There is no robed 'man' sitting on a throne in the clouds dictating how things are going to progress. There just isn't, thats crazy.
2. All things are connected. Events, people, animals, things... they all serve a purpose.
3. Nothing can either be created nor destroyed, they simply change. This includes life and what we call 'soul' or the essence of who we are.
4. 'GOD' is an all encompassing word for how all of these things come together. (Some equate God with Love)
5. Our 'essense' and our 'purpose' is to learn. Each life that we have is meant to teach us something else. Many reincarnation theories say that we choose when to come back to 'life' and what we will be trying to learn while we are here. It also claims that many 'souls' choose to come back in groups, so that perhaps a friend that you really bond with was someone you knew in a past life and that the dynamics (teacher vs student) remain the same.
6. The people who are here to learn the same things as us have a similar 'vibration' or essense about them. (This is where String Theory becomes fun) We will be drawn to them and have things in common. They are fellow journeymen on the same quest so to speak, which gives rise to the term 'soul mate'.
7. Situations will repeat themselves with a common theme in your life until you 'conquer' it and progress to the next situation. All of them will be meant to teach you whichever concept you chose to perfect in your life when you chose to return: IE: Loyalty, Patience, Love, Honesty, Integrity, etc etc. (This is actually also mentioned in some Astrology books (another kind of religion). A good one is the intro to Love Signs of the Zodiac, which says that each sign is here to learn a specific thing. (A good scientist doesn't discount anything without examination!))
Its difficult to really explain these ideas fully, but maybe these will give you the jist.
Erudur
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I agree that the existance of god cannot be proven by science. And ID does not claim to do so. It confronts the assumption by darwinists that their theory is proof. It is not. And its flaws are beginning to show.
Long before ID was given a name, I ran across a book by a molecular biologist (and self proclaimed agnostic) titled "Evolution, a theory in crisis." This guy may not be an ID proponent. His point was that darwinism didn't work when you look at the basic building blocks of life.
He saw "distances" between different steps in the evolutionary process that could not statistically be traversed. Hence the jumping to the moon analogy. Many of the "steps" assumed in darwinism have 0% chance of occurring.
I watched an ID debate where the darwinist was talking about how fruit fly dna was manipulated to "turn off" sections of code that changed the number of legs or wings of the fruit fly. The ID proponent's point was that while mutations and natural selection can explain the switching on or off of sections of dna code, they cannot explain the existence of the code itself. Its kind of like wind and wave action can remove a turret on a sand castle or thow up sand against a wall, but they cannot build the castle. The castle can only come about by an intelligent and directed process.
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