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Gobee
Trad climber
Los Angeles
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Yes I believe God made us and the worlds as He said He did in Genesis. But I know He could have made it in an instant, just like in I Dream of Jeannie, blink, blink, POOF! However He took His time because He enjoyed Himself and to show us that we should to and also rest from are labor and give thanks to Him!
God made everything to fit His purpose, it's not an accident. Look at the heavens you can set a clock to them! All this is just the work of His fingers, and the earth is His footstool.
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Gobee
Trad climber
Los Angeles
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Sick double dynos
Freesolo, naked, no chalk or shoes!
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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The earliest physical evidence we have of religious belief (not necessarily the first in occurrence) is pre Homo sapiens and is found with the Neanderthal species and dates back to 300,000 years ago. Worship of bears, fertility symbols, the sun, and belief in an afterlife as evidenced by burying men with hunting tools and women with jewelry and mineral sticks used for body decoration. Therefore to reject notions of religion, the soul/consciousness etc. is to negate at least 300,000 years of hominid history.
Particularly with Homo sapiens there is every indication that religion, art and music flowered almost simultaneously, first in Africa and then all over the world. The modern conundrum of feeling that one has to choose between understanding nature through science or through religion, is a recent dichotomy and cuts us off from both our distant and our recent past. Perhaps this separation also explains, along with the disbanding of the family and the tribe, the modern phenomenon of widespread depression, drug addiction, and suicide? Perhaps ignoring hundreds of thousands of years of our history is not modern or progressive, but extremely detrimental to our species?
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WandaFuca
Social climber
From the gettin' place
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There is evidence of human beings and their ancestors scalping one another for at least 3 to 4 hundred thousand years too.
We continue to murder one another, but we are distanced from it; drones and bombers do much of our killing now. Maybe repression of our murderous impulses is causing drug addiction and suicide also.
Let's get back to the fundamentals of religion, better yet with human sacrifices. And let's all start scalping each other too; I'm sure it will be very liberating.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Given that some of the highest rates of alcoholism and suicide currently are among young military males returning from the Middle East, I don't think your repressed violence theory is right.
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WandaFuca
Social climber
From the gettin' place
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That's when they return . . .
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Well I just had a long interesting discussion about this in my Physical Anthro class the other night where over half the students had been on multiple tours. What they said is that it was definitely the stress they were under there and couldn't leave behind that caused the problems.
They were also very interested in the idea that some warrior societies just remove the equivalent of the 18-25 year old males from the larger society and put them all together practicing their hunting and warrior skills and learning their special protective magic until they show enough wisdom to rejoin the main group.
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WandaFuca
Social climber
From the gettin' place
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I was being facetious.
We may all have something that predisposes us to religious belief, but that doesn't mean there is a god, nor does it mean that religious belief is healthy for individuals or society in this day and age.
If one is indoctrinated into a religion, and then not allowed to follow his or her beliefs it could lead to addiction or suicide. But if there is a hole in each of us, I don't think religion, drugs or suicide need be the only choices.
Likewise, a thirst for violence may be a part of us. But I don't think killing others, addiction or suicide are the only answers either.
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jstan
climber
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If I read the reports of Ardi correctly (not a given) it seems the idea is being advanced that both the apes and man descended from Ardi. Then if you say Ardi is more human than ape, you come away saying the apes descended from man.
Previously it was thought we descended from a common ancestor which is quite different.
Which led me to my speculation that at precisely the point in time when we find people today are behaving more and more like monkeys, we discover the same thing happened some four million years ago.
We have been here before!
Edit:
Jan:
Thanks for onfirming my impression that Ardi is seen as more human-like than ape-like.
This is all a very subjective business but if it proves true, Ardi is a revolutionary find.
Now when I go to the zoo and talk to an ape I have to address him as "son."
All of this has direct application to climbers. In time climbers may break off from the human line and become a race of new knuckle draggers.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Wandafuca-
Thanks for the clarification. As an anthropologist, I admit that I sometimes take my discipline a little too seriously. Meanwhile I agree that just because religion has been a part of hominid evolution for hundreds of thousands of years doesn't mean that there is a God. That is a separate issue altogether. What does seem demonstrable is that humans are constantly searching for meaning, and that the search is part of the human condition.
It's too bad that for so many people, the existing religions no longer satisfy that search and that so many of the current religions, instead of expanding to another level, condemn those who no longer believe and continue on without reflection. Then again, many old religions have become obsolete and died out in the past so that may be what's happening here too.
One thing interesting about the military is how they have incorporated so many religious elements into their own secular rituals that one can go to a military funeral for example, which never mentions religion because the dead person was an atheist, and still feel that one went to a powerful group religious event. Secular or civic religion works too.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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jstan-
As I understand it, (and I'm still reading the articles in Science and trying to digest all this) Ardi has so many characteristics that are human-like, the still undiscovered common ancestor of Ardi and the chimp line (which DNA evidence says existed less than a million years before), will be less like an ape than anyone imagined.
From the chimp point of view this indicates a good possibility that the chimp ancestors once walked upright and only later reverted to knuckle walking on the ground.
From the human point of view, some archaeologists had previously claimed that two older species, Orrorin and Sahelensis (6 & 7 million years respectively) walked upright but no one believed that possible until now. Suddenly it seems feasible - all part of a 40 year trend in having to recognize that our most outstanding trait as humans is our legs, and not our brains (of course some of the recent threads on ST have made that point as well !).
Meanwhile, monkeys are distant cousins to both apes and humans and not more than a nuisance to the latter though one of the papers in Science notes that monkeys seem to have replaced apes in most areas so that the apes are only small and isolated remnant populations on the edge of extinction today. All in all, Ardi makes the apes look less important.
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Patrick Sawyer
climber
Originally California now Ireland
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I haven't been on the Taco Stand in the past few days, but wow, we can now put up avatar images next to our handles, coolaboola, I guess.
I wanted to post a similar thread some days back when I read that only something like 37% of Americans believe in evolution (as we know it). Incredible.
So does that mean that the majority (more than 50%) of Americans believe what was written by bearded men in tents in the Middle East some thousand of years ago.
Their thinking (perhaps?):
Ohhhhh, the sun is going away (solar eclipse) must be some God pissed off at us, for we have sinned. Quick, sacrifice a virgin, that should appease HIM.
Jesus Christ was real, but the shite idiots that thought up the religions that believe in the God of Abraham (Christianity, Judaism, Islam) and use it for their own agenda are just that, SH#TE. And of course other crap religions and cults (such as the cult of Scientology).
My own progression? Born and baptized a Catholic, turned agnostic in mid-teens and now an avowed atheist.
I was sitting on the porch the other day, here in Dalkey, contemplating my navel (and whether to walk the five minutes to the rock in the quarry), when this bloke enters through the gates and says (in an English accent) "nice secluded place you have here". Now I had heard him talking with my neighbor's daughter (I presume) over the hedges, and he then says "We were talking about the Lisbon Treaty (which went to referendum here in Ireland yesterday), and I replied "I am not interested" and he says "I am not either" and I say then you must be a Jehovah's Witness (who else turns up at your doorstep if there is not a political message), and was I right? You bet.
So when he said that he was a JW, I said that I was an atheist, and he asked what made me come to be one. "I believe in evolution, not creation, and that is enough, goodbye."
And off he went. None the wiser I'd think.
EDIT (Off Topic)
Hey eKat, I bought a new guitar (and piano) yesterday. I was thinking about Blinny's guitars but I don't think they are available here in Ireland. I was looking for a Martin or Gibson but the lad convinced me that I would be paying over the top and I bought a Cort, solid body and all.
Hey Bluey, don't you have Italian heritage? That Berlusconi sure make Italy look foolish, with his repeated comments about Obama having a suntan. Berlusconi puts his foot in his mouth as much as Dubya did (does), and is possibly even more corrupt (moral and otherwise) than Bushie boy. But then, gathering from your posts on Obama, you probably think he has a good suntan as well. But it is not just an Italian (and Italian-American) thing, this propensity towards bias and idiocy, some of the 'biggest' bashers of blacks, minorities and gays in San Francisco back in the 1970s/80s were Irish-American kids (many from the Sunset District at the time). I know, because I worked in the City at the time as well as played football with them (San Francisco Celtic and other teams).
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Gobee
Trad climber
Los Angeles
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Jan,
"The earliest physical evidence we have of religious belief (not necessarily the first in occurrence) is pre Homo sapiens and is found with the Neanderthal species and dates back to 300,000 years ago."
All of Pharaoh's trust in the god's of men(the sun god Ra, Sphinx, himself etc.), did not save him from the one true God of Moses!
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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What have Pharoah and Moses got to do with Neanderthal?
Just because the Bible accounts of history are old, doesn't mean they are prehistoric.
A little less literalism and you might begin to appreciate the symbolic and spiritual nature of the Bible - the part of it that has universal appeal.
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Flanders!
Trad climber
June Lake, CA
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you guys got me here, I have to admit it, I just don't get it .
BUT, neither did Cambridge astrophysicist Sir Frederick Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinge,
astrophysicist and professor of applied mathematics. Real scientists by the way, unlike the
psuedo-scientists like Richard Dawkins. Hoyle and Wickramasinge ran the mathematical
probabilities of the basic enzymes of life being formed through random chance and concluded
the odds at 1 in 1 with 40 thousand zeroes, or in simple terms so utterly implausible as to
be a non-issue.
Doug
P.S. Neither of these guys were those wacky ID nuts either !
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Bad Climber
climber
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Hey, Werner: The fate of our solar system and our own little star is well understood by astro-physicists. The amount of fuel (hydrogen), the rate of burn, etc. give a clear picture of the REAL end times: The swelling of our sun in its death throws to toast this lovely little earth.
Science can't tell us how to live or love. It just tells us a lot of the time how things work--including suns and fingers and the soaring truth of a the clouds at sunset as they drift over the top of Half Dome as I jugged the last pitch of Quarter Dome so many years ago.
bAd
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bc
climber
Prescott, AZ
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Flanders,
In response to your arguement from the math guys concerning the probabilities of life even getting started, this is from the talkorigins.org website http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-misconceptions.html#proof
"Nor is abiogenesis (the origin of the first life) due purely to chance. Atoms and molecules arrange themselves not purely randomly, but according to their chemical properties. In the case of carbon atoms especially, this means complex molecules are sure to form spontaneously, and these complex molecules can influence each other to create even more complex molecules. Once a molecule forms that is approximately self-replicating, natural selection will guide the formation of ever more efficient replicators. The first self-replicating object didn't need to be as complex as a modern cell or even a strand of DNA. Some self-replicating molecules are not really all that complex (as organic molecules go).
Some people still argue that it is wildly improbable for a given self-replicating molecule to form at a given point (although they usually don't state the "givens," but leave them implicit in their calculations). This is true, but there were oceans of molecules working on the problem, and no one knows how many possible self-replicating molecules could have served as the first one. A calculation of the odds of abiogenesis is worthless unless it recognizes the immense range of starting materials that the first replicator might have formed from, the probably innumerable different forms that the first replicator might have taken, and the fact that much of the construction of the replicating molecule would have been non-random to start with.
(One should also note that the theory of evolution doesn't depend on how the first life began. The truth or falsity of any theory of abiogenesis wouldn't affect evolution in the least.)"
Anyway, it seems to me that any number really doesn't matter, it only had to happen once. Why else do people keep buying lottery tickets.
And just what are the odds of a fully functioning, all powerful god showing up?
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jstan
climber
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"BUT, neither did Cambridge astrophysicist Sir Frederick Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinge,
astrophysicist and professor of applied mathematics. Real scientists by the way, unlike the
psuedo-scientists like Richard Dawkins. Hoyle and Wickramasinge ran the mathematical
probabilities of the basic enzymes of life being formed through random chance and concluded
the odds at 1 in 1 with 40 thousand zeroes, or in simple terms so utterly implausible as to
be a non-issue.
Doug
P.S. Neither of these guys were those wacky ID nuts either !"
Flanders has done something quite interesting here. He has attempted to use a statistical (scientific) calculation to show there is a god. As has been pointed out already the chemical properties of atoms makes their combination something less than random. Indeed astronomical IR spectroscopy now indicates the existence of enzymes in free space.
So the science quoted has been much improved since the reference he cites. That is the core advantage science has over faith. It can actually get better.
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Gobee
Trad climber
Los Angeles
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? On your death bed are you going to think that maybe your were wrong and there is a God and that you wasted your life looking for proof?
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jstan
climber
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Gobee you badly over reach yourself when you tell me what I will feel on my death bed.
I have long considered life to be just my preparation for that moment.
If able, I will briefly consider the things I wish I had not done.
Then, though I have no evidence at all that an after life exists, I will look forward to meeting once again the woman who gave me everything.
This last is merely a neurological process that I know will be there.
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