https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsUP2dftN9w
I could and have watched this video over and over again. When I was a theist an argument we often used against evolution was:
"How come there are still moneys and apes if we descended from them?" I know its a weak argument, but because I'm new at this I'd love to know what atheist and christians think about this statement.
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It demonstrates the lack of understanding of evolution.
"How come there are still moneys and apes if we descended from them?"
That statement is an "Are you smarter than a fifth grader?" statement.
If there are poodles why are there still wolves?
I prefer to ask theists about nipples and fingernails. Raccoons and Coatimundis have 6 nipples and claws. Humans and chimps have 2 nipples and fingerails.Why?
Not only does the question stump them but talking about nipples makes them uncomfortable.
Yes to lack of knowledge Cyberln
And no most of us weren't thinking smarter than a fifth grader. I love the nipples comment. Definitely will bring that up :)
JamieB,
Why do humans, primates, and elephants have nipples on their chests between their front limbs but horses and cows have nipples on their groins just forward of their rear legs?
Jamie,
You might be surprised to know that most Christian colleges teach evolution today. own a book that was written by a Christian Biology professor on this "Biology Through the Eyes of Faith: Christian College Coalition Series" by Richard Wright.
They have for decades and if you were home schooled by 6 day creationist parents and then went to almost any Christian college
you would have been taught evolution - much to the chagrin of your parents.
But with that background you might find this an interesting read.
Larry
The Council of Christian Colleges and Universities Series
Stressing the biblical message of stewardship, biologist Richard T. Wright celebrates the study of God's creation and examines the interaction of the life sciences with society in medicine, genetics, and the environment. The author brings a biblical perspective to theories on origins, contrasting creationism, intelligent design, and evolution. Highlighting the unique nature of biology and its interaction with Christian thought, Wright demonstrates that Christian stewardship can be the key to a sustainable future.
This comprehensive work, one of a series cosponsored by the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, addresses the needs of the Christian student of biology to align science and faith. It demonstrates that the study of biology penetrates to the core of human existence and has much to contribute to the construction of a consistent Christian worldview.
https://www.amazon.com/Biology-Through-Christian-College-Coalition/dp/00...
Larry
I am surprised. That's good to hear.
Larry A : "You might be surprised to know that most Christian colleges teach evolution today. own a book that was written by a Christian Biology professor on this "Biology Through the Eyes of Faith: Christian College Coalition Series" by Richard Wright."
That's good. Maybe someday Christian Colleges will drop all the other iron aged bullshit and become real universities.
Already has happened quite a bit, many of the older universities, Harvard, Cambridge, Yale, etc have religious/church origins, where they are obviously not christian schools anymore, in all but a few mentions in ceremonial matters.
@Larry A. "to align science and faith."
How can you do that? The whole basis for science is that nothing is taken on faith. Everything has to be tested, and reviewed, and every statement, no matter how famous the scientist who made it, is open to challenge. Christianity is all about the blind acceptance of certain fundamental tenets, such as the existence of god and heaven. So the alignment of science and faith requires compromise on one side or the other. Which is it?
Well @Larry A., we all know that before December 20, 2005, that was not so, a federal judge had to come, John Jones III, to make clear in a federal sentence, Kitzmiller v. Dover, that the evolutionary fact is a fact and intelligent design a pseudo supernatural explanation about something that already has a demostrated scientific explanation. And don't make me talk about "Biology Through the Eyes of Faith: Christian College Coalition Series" by Richard Wright, because you and I know what's about.
If God cannot be comprehended than how can people comprehend that God exists?
@Truthforsale: God as a concept is very understandable, because it was necessary to make comprehensible what was intellectually beyond our reach. Today it isn't anymore.
A comprehensible God cannot be a God.
Humans can't understand something that is immortal, omnipotent, omnipresent, supremely good, a creator and a giver of purpose. If any entity has even one of these, we can't comprehend it. We can try, and use those to make conclusion that makes sense to us, but that doesn't constitute an understanding of God; only an attempt.
Even if an entity has one of these incomprehensible qualities we can't relate. So in that respect how can we know that something with all or a combination of these isn't a Demon or some other nefarious being playing tricks on us, if such a being COULD even exist, which is extremely unlikely enough as to believe that it does not exist.
Therefore we still can't comprehend the God that is set before us by, at the very least, monotheistic religions.
Truthforsale
Why can't you comprehend any god that may exist? You comprehend enough to write you can't comprehend. I think the christian god was an advanced alien that came to earth and did genetic experiments on humans, and told them it was a god that created them. Angels could be explained as another alien race coming to earth to interact with humans.
@Xenoview: "I think the christian god was an advanced alien"
And I think my ancestors were an unbroken line of survivors, a series of badass tail-less apes who fought and thought their way to the top of the food chain, crossed every ocean, and filled every continent, all without the help of any sky-fairies of either the theistic or extraterrestrial kind. We are homo sapiens. And once we get the god-monkey off our backs, we'll go on to even greater glory.
I am not talking about a specific God. I am talking about the qualities that are usually associated with Godhood.(Especially monotheistic ones)
We can image what omnipresent, omnipotent, immortality.., etc, IS and we can label the definition in consensus and choose, in a word, to have said word represent a Human understanding of what the definition is. We can't experience them. We can't measure them. We can't BE them. Therefore, we cannot comprehend them (or whatever word you choose for something that we can't, and probably never will, grasp).
It's not a particular God that is in question for logical reasoning, but what qualities that constitute a God, or Godhood, which are not comprehensible in actualization for human thought, that are in question. ;D
Definition of GOD. (Dictonary.com)
noun. 1. (theol) the sole Supreme Being, eternal, spiritual, and transcendent, who is the Creator and ruler of all and is infinite in all attributes; the object of worship in monotheistic religions.
If you are saying god is incomprehensible, to be god, then why bother try to comprehend it? We can safely ignore it. Lots of people spend their entire lives on trying to understand god, then go and instruct others what to do about it. Either their god is comprehensible or these people/religions are just lying. And in both situations we are much better off just ignoring it.
Truly, if this god idea is supposed to be incomprehensible why bother talking about it?
I am atheist, but I also believe in the small possibility of a greater being, and an even smaller possibility that, that greater being may have played some role in our being here. I emphasize small, its far more likely there is not one. I am just not so arrogant to say I know everything. I am willing to bet eternity of hell that any one particular god is not real, and so are you and everyone else atheist or theist... which to me leads to the insanity of believing and worshiping in any one god, especially all these human created god ideas.
Discussing the existence of God ( and our lack of comprehension even if a God does exist ) is only for several reasons. Some examples are: Entertainment, "Enlightening" others to not believe in something that does not exist, Letting someone try to out reason you, Opening a debate, etc...
I am with ya there, debating people on the existence of their god can be fun. But more importantly due to all the damage religions cause, pointing out to believers of god why they are wrong is important work, even if it is mostly ineffective in believers cocoon of comforting lies and suspension of all reasoning and logic on related subjects.
@Truthforsale: I never dispute the existence of god, god doesn't exist and is demonstrable, there's no more, it's as simple as that the concept today isn't necessary for absolutely anything. I don't enter into any theological discussion, theology is like astrology, but if you want to make some anthropological commentary on the concept of divinity I'm willing to discuss it. Nor do I try to convince anyone about anything, for that there're books of history and science, haven't to convince anyone of anything except that he/she/you need to read.
No more.
Because we can't comprehend God's qualities, as I said, we can't truly comprehend God. Nobody has experienced being all powerful or immortal. We would not be able to tell the difference between living 1 million years as opposed to forever. We can't truly understand the feeling an intelligent entity has if it is immortal or has no beginning or end. We can only speculate. We can try to define what All-Powerful is, but we don't know what that experience is like. We sure have tried though. It's these arguments that can logically lead to the belief that there is not a God, because there cannot be a God. ;D
@Truthforsale: That's a theological stupidity that doesn't hold historically. The concept of god isn't born as you've described it, it's more, the concept of god that you've used is exactly one thousand six hundred and thirty-two years, and supremely good, a creator and a giver of purpose, as a concept, is even more modern, although, of course, robbed of the cults to the mother that sink in the time.
There's no attempt to understand god, god is an invented concept, the human being invented that concept; gods, goddesses, god, goddess, all those concepts were invented by the human being as a way to understanding, to do comprehensible what was intellectually beyond our reach: The rays fall because the gods fight each other, thunder is heard in the distance because god is angry; diseases, floods, earthquakes are punishments of God.
Today the concept of god isn't necessary to explain any of that, not even to explain the existence of the universe, therefore the invented concept of god is unnecessary.
I'm going to leave aside the assertion that a concept that the human being has invented is incomprehensible by part of the one who has invented it, that is a nonsense. Another issue is a believer to deceive himself by saying it, or saying that there's a divine plan that we, poor sinners, don't understand, or that the ways of god are inexcrutable, if we were talking about someone who instead of giving that to god would do it to a doll, cow, stone, snake, he/she would be locked up in a psychiatric hospital... or founding a new religion. It isn't worth gossiping about it.
God, gods, goddess, goddesses are concepts, concepts very understandable, comprehensible and historically very delimited and located, and as concepts are very simple.
Because they are only concepts created by humans; there can be no God. Is that better wording for you? ;D
@JamieB: In fact we don't descend from them, they and we are cousins, it means that we have a common ancestor, we descend from a common trunk.
It's slightly complicated to assert what that common trunk was, but if I had to give my opinion, I personally incline to the proconsulidae's family. Why? Because they had a constitution very similar to that of the chimpanzee, they lacked a tail and lived 22 to 15 million years ago in the Kenyan area, all coinciding temporally and geographically with the anthropological theories about that common trunk. But, as I say before, asserting something in that direction is complicated and we have to give time to science.
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Sbmontero
I think I know that guy :)
Thank u for that education.
Wonder what humans would do with their tails if we had them. There's probably no use for them but they'd be fun to chase and wag.
@JamieB: hahahhahhaaha In fact yes, we have tail, although we have hidden it.
(and between you and me, if somebody bite it us... we laugh... shhhh don't tell to anyone)
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Never had my coxis bitten but I imagined it wouldn't feel great. I fell on my butt as a teen and fuck it hurt like hell for a week. Poor coxis:(
@JamieB: hahahhahah well, let's call it nibbling, not biting.
Lol :0 I get it now......slow American girl
SBMontero,
Have you ever thought about how a lot of space aliens are depicted as humanoids? That would mean that their evolutionary path was identical to ours and that their home world planet was also identical. And not only do some of them closely resemble s but they also think like we do. It's almost like the God characters in the Bible and in the Koran.
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