₦airaland Forum

davidylan:
you're scraping the barrel, the germ theory was proposed centuries ago when there was zero evidence for how disease occurred. Today we have such sophisticated tools that we no longer need the theory, we KNOW for a fact that germs cause disease. Can we say the same for your theory of evolution? When are we going to have the empirical data to prove that it is real?

It was proposed using the facts discovered about disease.....disease wasn't caused by "evil spirits" but tiny micro-organisms...this was greatly researched to provide the comprehension called germ theory...
And evolution has been documented numerous times,from the speciation of ring species to the development of organs by some reptiles in response to environmental pressures,etc.
In sincerity what is it about evolution that makes you act as though it threatens your belief?...
You and I both know(biologically speaking) two individuals could never re-populate a species(without the lose of vigour and harmful mutations)
And you also should know the fossil record and methods used to determine lineages(like the hardy weinberg equation) are used to determine our relatives,so what isn't empirical about that?

nduchucks:
The tree needs to be cut down to expose the source of the water. I suspect that an aquifer is located within the proximity of that tree. Authorities must tear the tree down before Kafiris start worshipping the doggone tree. nansense!!

Nice deduction skills...

This is rare.....atleast it breaks the christian/muslim fanatical killings.

davidylan:
lol you seem to be tripping over your own confusion. So which is worse? The tiny earth appeared by magic or the gigantic universe appeared by magic?

Oh so now "no theory is a fact"? Does that also mean you agree that the THEORY of evolution is infact, not a fact? I'm glad you're now using your brain.

Nice logic....it's rational that "tiny earths" poof out of nothing by magic
And theories(evolution or otherwise) are not regarded as fact because they are incomplete comprehensions drawn from facts.
An example would be that it is a fact micro-organisms exist,it is a fact that they are harmful,neutral or beneficial to other organisms...so the comprehension drawn from the facts of all these and more is germ theory.
In science we can call theories factual(as in demonstrable) but we don't regard them as "facts",because to do so would mean our understanding is complete on that field.
And happy to hear from you, it's been a while....

There is no reason(besides the one you give to yourself) to go to church...

Jameselias:
blasphemy!!!!!!!!

Do mere words offend "god" or the people that believe it?

johnydon22:
let me quote my previous post to you since you intentionally skipped it.

Empathy is doing the things you do with consideration to the feelings of others so ask me again why it matters... next time search a word you dont know in the dictionary before asking such dumb question (i.e : Am not calling you dumb)

The society derives morality from empathy.

Right and wrong is encompassed in the dimension of empathy. . . as long as as anything you do hurts no one in anyway. e.g You kissing a girl do not hurt anybody in short in is pleasurable to both of you, so how can it be wrong?

You see anything that goes against empathy is wrong and anything that is in coincide with empathy can be termed right.

If i stole from you or insulted you, my actions are against empathy (cus it hurt you) that means i was wrong by stealing or insulting you..

If i shelter you when you are homeless, my actions are in coincide with empathy (its good for you) that action can be classified as right...

Nobody is evil and nobody is good.. we are all born neutral to a beautiful world.. and are all capable of great good and great evil. it is the decisions we make when faced with the choice of good and evil that determines what our actions are or will be

Johnny I believe they want you going in circles....you've said enough.

davidylan:
you just have to laugh at the confusion of these hare-brained folks who keep chasing their tails all over the place. The christian says God is uncaused and atheists descend in apoplexy, calling the christian an illiterate who peddles myths. The very next day, that same atheist claims that the earth may have been uncaused and then promptly labels this a "scientific idea"!

Not only that... many atheists have spent months here telling us that the big bang theory was scientific fact... if you believed something as fact, why would you even entertain the notion of an alternative? Ironic...

Funny right? The only difference is that he said the "universe" not "earth"....and I doubt anyone told you that it(the big bang) was a "scientific fact" because no theory is a fact,theories only encompasses facts.
It's always equivocation fallacies with you and I don't know if it's because you're a creationist....but at some point you must have been decent enough to know that "the universe" is not the same as "the earth",a "scientific theory" is just a comprehension made from a body of facts....
Either you ignore such simple things or choose to act unaware is beyond me.

vooks:
What belief?

Sideshows apart, do good and evil exist?

Don't dodge the question...answer it..

vooks:
So I hear

Isn't your belief also an authoritarian one?

vooks:
That kid is bad news. He executed his own uncle

Is the nation an authoritarian one?

vooks:
I forgive you for shallowness. davien kindly take him off the ring

vooks what do you think of north korea's leader?

vooks:
Oh dear!
Isn't it too early for ad hominem?

Why not address me before pulling a straw-man?

johnydon22:
Morality is a product of empathy and the society.

In every animal their is always a basic sense of morality.

So morality is driven from humanity, Humanity is deeply moral and so every human on earth have an intense sense of morality.

Morality means doing what is right no matter what you are told, but religion on the other hands means doing what you are told no matter what is right.

Now next time you ask where our morality stems from, Look within yourself and see where yours stems from, you may think it religion but thats a lie.

Your basic sense of empathy and morality stems only from your humanity...

johnydon he has a script to follow from answersingenesis...

vooks:
Calm down and don't get worked up yet.
Am examining where your 'I' leads us; hopeless subjectivity
But why should an atheistic, Darwinism student with majors in materialism be worried about VALUE? It's all survival for the fittest. Bleep VALUES.

Why would he be obligated to follow that script which is biologically manufactured and with zero bearing on his 'reality'?

I'm not worked up, I'm calling you out on your dishonesty....the above response is expected,funny enough you can't write to an atheist without those dishonest tags and when asked a question like "Can you tell me anything not contingent or in someway dependent/has no perceivable effect on matter?" what would you say?

vooks:
So human life is ONLY valuable as long as it increases 'well being and happiness'. And this depends entirely on your judgement

Hitler believed 'well being and happiness' would be achieved if he wiped ALL the Jews

Don't be stu.pid,learn the difference between "I value" and "it is valuable when",because I answered the question on where "I" get my values from...and hitler maximized pain and suffering to do that,thus is considered evil....so you have no point there
You just ignored the bulk of my posts and jumped to a scripted response...
Did hitler follow the former "preservation of life and the cease or reduction of overall unnecessary pain"

vooks:
Well, do you think a fellow human is more important than say a dog? Where do you derive your values from?

important in what sense?
And I derive my values from evaluations of the facts of reality and of the situation....life is preferable to death....joy pleasurable to pain...and that my actions have an effect on myself and those around me....
So I value the preservation of life and the cease or reduction of overall unnecessary pain,to increase well being and happiness....

Well atheism does not address the value of anything so your question is faulty....
Next humans are/have been valued with money,well-being,size,weight,numbers,etc try to be more specific...

plaetton:
Oh absolutely sir.
But its value ,like all scientific ideas, is that it opens a new window of thought and imagination.
It is no longer taboo to talk or speculate about a self-existent universe.

It's not the self-existent part that is worrying,but the fact that it is a thesis that can derive current observations to a certain point beyond that conventional ones are left out irrelevant..
Stuff like this are either extremely rare or falsified at one point....either case I wouldn't be supportive nor against this....just waiting for sufficient data to conclude on it..

plaetton this is very new information....It should be treated with caution at the moment.

These are some of the faulty reasoning skills I've observed theists use in a discussion....

"Belief is a choice"
You'd usually see a comment like "I choose to believe..." when actually beliefs aren't choices inwhich one could suddenly play out as though a deck of cards,but beliefs are held when a person is convinced that a statement or explanation is true or likely true(or even plausible)...
People don't pick beliefs, they are convinced by them...

"My belief is true because it would be bad if it wasn't"
This is basically an argument from consequence,it has no basis in facts,nor the reality of the situation but poses a barrier to keep believers in the belief...
Therefore to a believer it would be bad if there was no "life after death","heaven","reuniting with loved ones",etc because they don't want to ever consider a reality that is anything but oblivious to their existence..
So typically a theist may lay in comfort by having thoughts about the ideas that they believe have to exist(and as usual it would be bad if it didn't)
Many things would be bad if it wasn't true, that doesn't suddenly make it true,it would be bad if I had another accident tomorrow-does that mean I shouldn't go out because it would be bad if one thing were true?

"If you can't tell me every single detail, then I can believe anything"

To a theist,if anyone should offer an account that is based on the best evidence obtained up to that moment,it has to be either extremely simplistic or extremely detailed...
A theist lives in a mental constraint where things must either be 100% white or black,and yet theists still give apologetics towards doctrine that are by definition self contradictory(perfect justice and mercy co-existing when they are mutually exclusive)...
Can't tell every detail of 9-11? Well it was a cover-up..
Can't tell every detail of where hiv came from? well it was "god's plan for homosexuals"
Can't tell every detail on evolution? Then it's wrong..
Can't tell every detail on existence? "god did it"


"The evidence of god is in/or written in the bible/scripture"

To be perfectly clear,the bible is the claim-not the evidence....as much as theists may want you to believe the bible is "the proof",it is nothing but the pool of accounts from anonymous authors and hear-say accounts that have been re-interpreted over and over again till it is so vague anything can be said about the passages(this is why theists don't share the same ideas on doctrine)
And then again the process of reviving a dead language is somewhat futile because no context can be accurately played out as whether it should be figurative or literal..

"Disproving secular ideals/concepts somehow affects atheism"

This is usually when a theist thinks that disproving a theory that best accounts for a phenomenon would affect atheists...
It would have been great and even enlightening if they could disprove any theories(because it would broaden our knowledge),but all they can come up with is...
If the earth is 4.5 billion years,why is it still functioning-according to the theory of thermodynamics it should have exhausted all energy to do work(ignoring energy gained from the sun and the earths core)....

This leads us to the next faulty reasoning...

"By merging my understanding of scripture and modern knowledge,we can know everything about god's word"

This gives rise to fundamentalism and extremism...

If public schools don't teach a literal six day creation,all hell breaks loose.
If someone labels a drawing "Muhammed", all hell breaks loose.
If creationism isn't being endorsed,all hell breaks loose...

Sadly some people of faith go berserk when a modern interpretation of scripture is ridiculed or ignored,leading to various forms of violence and misinformation.

"I can't explain what happened but I believe it was supernatural"
This is an age old dogma of when humans knew very little of the world,the unexplainable were regarded as sacred secrets of existence.
It is basically using a bigger mystery to cover a smaller one...
Don't know where rain comes from? well a magic invisible tap is above the sky and there's also a guy there that turns it on when he's bored.
You'd notice that the above example is making a lot of deliberately untestable assumptions about where rain comes from...no mention is made of how one could know or even grasp this...

Nothing but a great big argument from ignorance....
atheist x doesn't know how object b came into being therefore my invisible pet dragon did it...

very insightful....

MzNelly:
worship=dedication and sacrifice.

so if I'm dedicated to the law and I'm willing to sacrifice myself for it I'm worshipping it?
And since anything you worship is "god"(according to you),the law is "god"?
Your definitions are vague and don't give a precise meaning..

LOSKYXANDER:
Armed with the best physics of the 20th
century, Albert Einstein came to a
conclusion with his theory of relativity. Just
consider the effect of mass on time. A
planet's hefty mass warps time -- making time
run a tiny bit slower for a human on Earth's
surface than a satellite in orbit. The difference
is too small to notice, but time even runs
more slowly for someone standing next to a
large boulder than it does for a person
standing alone in a field. The pre-big bang (before the beginning of the universe)
singularity possessed all the mass in the
universe, effectively bringing time to a
standstill. well, no one can comprehend the idea of eternity.
You learn more here science.howstuffworks.com/dictionary/astronomy-terms/before-big-bang.htm

It's good a Christian doesn't deny or misrepresent this for a change...

MzNelly:
god is anything you worship.

And how do you define "worship", is it mere adoration or something else

Mznelly what is "god"?

Dogma and bigotry makes it a crime....

LOSKYXANDER:
God simply has no beginning. Time exists in the mind while eternity is above our understanding. Besides I never knew there were so many atheists on nairaland

And how did you figure out all of this?

Ifeann:
Thanks for sharing, very nice metaphor .
The atheist will say “Well I don’t see Her, so it is only logical that She doesn’t exist.”

Logic doesn't tell the whole story.

I don't know where most christian theists get this mentality from,whether it's the usual "pastor said so" or "faith in the mutually exclusive",but what is substantial is that atheists do not regard sight as the utmost source of verification...illusions are very possible though.
And your analogy is very ironic,because the "atheist baby" somehow knows he is hooked by an umbilical cord which is by definition a feature of mammalian females and yet wants proof of the mother....
It's like saying you know what a square is but you need to see if it has a fifth side....the definition already gives the details...

Does "god" know everything?

jameselias please tell me what you've learned of the big bang...