Scientists

Hello Tom,

Eon:Of course the same could be said of religion - do we not still have discrimination, hatred, conflict and opression?

Tom: We would have it anyway.  Don't atheists exhibit the same behaviour?

Not the atheists I have met. The athiests I know are actively against discrimination, hatred and oppression. Though I'm sure there are as many atheists who just happen to be jerks as there are Christians who happen to be jerks.

Just my experience.

Take care,
SJ
 
Oh crud!
I totally forgot to repost that one that didn't come back on. This cursed server.
Eon, this is to your 19th Century thingie down below.
Well, it's true. For one, Darwin stole the idea of evolution from a Christian creationist named Edward Blythe. Blythe was saying that there is natural selection, but it can only select, and not create.
Natural selection work with an organism's ability to change within limits so that plants and animals can multiply and fill every possible area of the world with variations of their selves based on a theme that is suited for that area of the world. That's natural selection. So basically, where did all the twelve billion dogs come from? Not evolution. If you take a dog and breed it with a dog, you get a dog. You keep breeding these dogs, you get more dogs, but slightly different from their parents. Keep breeding those dogs and you get dogs, but different dogs from their parents. And so it is. For one, evolution is bullcrap because of that. If I took two dogs, and I committed a legacy of my descendants to breeding these dogs and their pups in their family, and twelve million years later, they will still be dogs, not cats or koala bears or fish. Try it.
But if it's disproved, then why not give some credit to creationism?! Screw getting grants, shouldn't we want to give a different view of the origins of man, since evolution is as true as the fact that if I chew enough gum my jaws will evolve into latex, having adapted to the substance?
BUt I hear you Eon: they need the moolah. But in a few years, they'll be dead and it will be their kids dealing with it, and if these scientists today take a stance to say, "Ahem, evolution is bunk because..." it will create shock factor, for sure, but then, what of the effects? People looking for an alternative source to our origin?
Who knows. It's not like it's going to happen anytime soon.
 
Okay, now I've read some of the other posts.
Guys, you must know one thing, especially you Tom. There is no way we can prove God exists. But we can still research into God and find evidence to support Scriptures and the Bible. We can find texts, temples, cities, idols, artifacts, tombs and stuff like that. That's all we do. And it is a good thing. WE shall never prove God, though. It is impossible. God can only be believed in. Take the Ten Commandments. I thought about this. Moses destroyed the first Ten Commandments, the ones PHYSICALLY WRITTEN BY GOD. We no longer have that among us. Where is the Ark? Gone. Maybe destroyed (doubtful). Where is the Temple of the Jews? Destroyed. Twice. Romans and Nebuchadnezzer.
And science is nothing but discovering what is already existing, and synthesizing things, such as in medicine, to provide a new item for something, like a disease.
And flight? Did man invent flight? No. WE looked at the birds, checked out their wings, and saw, hey, when the eagle dives, the wind flips around and under his wings...let's do that with something big enough to hold a guy...That's science. And I will not bash it, because it is not a bad thing (all the time)
Christianity is not something that immediately puts a barrier between me and you. I am still affected by sin, I still commit it, I still associate with the sin of the world. There's no escape from it. The only thing I can do is refuse to sin, put a stop to it. I don't have to sin, but I do.
And truly, look at the scientists as Pascal, as Pasteur, as Bacon, as Newton. Great scientists. Dude, cure to polio. The guy was a Christian. Dude, law of gravity finally attributed to the effects of what keeps us down. Guy was major Christian.
I have a question for you Eon: if we still remained in the primitive age, would you still be walking around seeing science? Yes. Science is merely a study. The stuff happens with or without us to give a name for it. You know that. God happens with or without us. I walk around and I see the effects of God everywhere. He made this all. Wow. So God did this all for us, and now we can finally actually study his creations and further ourselves on this world. In fact, Eon, you have a blinder faith than me. You put your trust in the scientists and their research. Well, science and their research just wiped out that 17-year old Mexicana girl with the wrong blood type. Huh. Interesting.
Before science, for me, is God. God made it possible for us to use science for our good and to glorify him in yet another way.
 
You see, scientists - being human, make mistakes. So do Doctors. They have in the past, they will in the future.

But still we have measurable, concrete, specific cases of progress.

Like - I can point to a car and say Science.
I can point to a Jet and say Science.
I'm typing on my Computer now - science.

Catch my drift?

What has science done for me? Well, I'm taller, healthier, more comfortable, better educated, more empowered and better informed for a start. I could go on.

What has religion done for me? Not God, but his tangible presence on earth. A far more dubious list...
 
I can point to all that stuff and say "God" as well, for enabling humanity to have such a significantly larger intellectual capacity when compared to other creatures so we can dominate the planet and be able to make such complex things.  Being able to identify something as made by science doesn't mean that you don't have blind faith in it.  I ask again, do you fully understand all of the terminology and theory associated with quantum mechanics?  If not, than you are accepting some of it as truth despite your ignorance, and therefore you are exhibiting "blind faith".  You're saying, "well, I don't fully understand the hows and whys, but Dr. Science says it so it's good enough for me".  Is that any different than what a lot of Christians do?  Than why is part of your attack plan to fire at "blind faith", when you do the EXACT same thing?  Also, you have to keep in mind that many people here, myself included, know a great deal about their faith, and therefore our deductions are not being made out of ignorance, and are definitely not baseless.  That's not blind faith, it's more of an educated theory, which is what scientists do all the time.  Don't believe me?  Look up Max Planck.  He was so shocked with his theory that even he was reluctant to accept it despite it's solid mathematical model.  And, he can't see the photons either, just like we can't see God.  Are you sure Christian behaviour is really that much different, or are you running out of arguments?
 
If you take a powerful enough microscope, you could see the photons. No scope is powerful enough to pick up God. Which is so cool.
To me, here is something Eon. I point to the Golden Gate Bridge and say: "Man's ingenuity and science." I point to man and say: "Man's ingenuity and science?" Hardly so. What made man? Some superbeing far beyond man. Something intelligent made the bridge, and it wasn't God. Something made man and it wasn't man. I don't know your beliefs on origin, and I would like to hear them. At some point in time, you can't just go back and say man made man because look at my parents. We would go straight back in lineage to the start of it all. Who made our Ultimate Parents? Man? I scoff. Someone intelligent had to create such an efficient life form. How does our body know where to send our osteocytes when we hurt a bone, or when the dead bone cells need replacing, or the bone is having Wolff's Law applied to it and build up to the bone for bigger ones? Man makes the osteocytes do that? Not even science knows how the osteocytes know where to go and what to do. Explain that.
 
Max Planck didn't have access to such a device, neither did Albert Einstein. They looked at evidence and made a theory. To be honest, I've never heard of such a microscope, you have any linkage?
 
[b said:
Quote[/b] (Mr_Eon @ Feb. 25 2003,1:54)]What has science done for me? Well, I'm taller, healthier, more comfortable, better educated, more empowered and better informed for a start. I could go on.

What has religion done for me? Not God, but his tangible presence on earth. A far more dubious list...
Click to expand...
According to "scientific" studies people who believe in God live longer and report happier lives than those who do not. Both have the benifits of medical sciences etc but one lives longer that shows some measurable differance.
 
[b said:
Quote[/b] ]According to "scientific" studies people who believe in God live longer and report happier lives than those who do not. Both have the benifits of medical sciences etc but one lives longer that shows some measurable differance.
Click to expand...
I'd love to see those studies, as I find it very hard to believe.
 
Can you see? Then photon's exist.

We can measure them, we can sample them and we can create them. So what? You want a picture of one?

There is a difference between faith and blind faith. I have never seen my brain either, are you saying I should believe I don't have one? I am aware of its effects on the universe, those effects are measurable, and so I choose to accept that it exists, without cracking open my skull to make sure.

Eon
 
That post was made in desperation I see, because you only further proved my point.  You have no idea how the idea of photons came about do you?  Well, you're in a little trouble then, because even Newton and Hooke debated about the composition of light, and both had evidence supporting their claims!  Yet you say "you can see, therefore photons exist" and you know NOTHING about them!  I'm going to save you a google search and give you some backround.  Light was formerly known as an electromagnetic wave, which was a theory developed by James Clerk Maxwell.  However, there was one minor problem with it that Hertz noticed when doing an experiment, despite the fact that it finally gave an explanation for the wave-particle duality of light.  Planck had to propose a new theory to explain this(which even HE was reluctant to except, and was hoping that a better theory would be found), and eventually Einstein used his data to develop the photon theory.  You see, you claim photons exist "because we can see", but the only reason you're using that terminology and making that assumption is because a scientist told you to, not because you understood the terminology and the theory.  That, my friend, is blind faith, because if you study the various theories of light and why they were developed you would notice how they could seem valid given the available information and obeservations.  However, the Christians on this board have read and studied their Bibles.  A lot of their ideas are probably derivatives of ideas they recieved at another point in their Christian growth, but they have complete knowledge of the hows and the whys of Christianity.  That, my friend, is NOT blind faith.  Better double check the validity of your accusation next time you make one.

Also, what scale are you using to measure individual photons?  You can measure their speed, but their mass has been decided by mathematics and not measurement. According to Einstein, photons must be massless particles in order to travel at the speed they do, because if their mass is any number higher than zero than they cannot travel at the speed that they do, according to Einstein.  And I'll buy you a dinner if you can produce a photograph of a photon for me.

As for the little example of your brain.  That's not faith.  Everyone has one, and you can't operate without it.  Saying that you havn't seen it and therefore there is a possiblity it doesn't exist is rediculous.  Besides, you should realize that I don't have to physically see something to deduce that it exists, and guess what?  Neither did Einstein, Newton, Dalton, Aristotle, Planck, Hooke, Young, Rutherford, Thompson, Bohr, and pretty well every other scientists who has had to develop their theories from evidence, experimentation, and obeservation of effects, not physical sight of what was happenning.  Furthermore, why is it that you claim I can't see God in my life?  That's a pretty ignorant statement I think, because you have no idea of my life experiences, and therefore you have know idea what I have seen and what I have learned.
 
Sorry, are you claiming that Photons are non existent, and that the entire of Quantum theory is unsound, or are you not?

Planck's constant is only the first step of quantum mechanics, although a very important one, and has been verified by experimental data. Firstly by Einstein, who did lots of THEORETICAL experimentation as you've claimed, but secondly by Millikan, whose painstaking experimentation seems to agree awfully closely with Einsteins theoretical number crunching... Perhaps a little too closely to be coincidence?

As for Christianity - well, you may well see more in your book than I did. Personally I think it's a charmingly quaint tribal history for a group of people I've never really had that much admiration for - let alone a wish to emulate. I can't speak, as you say, for what you might have experienced in your life or not - but if God has taken a direct hand with you, then you probably should have reminded him that there's a lot of other things that could use his attention while he's stirring himself.

And if *I* am a litle uncertain as to exactly what a Photon is, that's hardly proof here or there as to whether Einstein didn't know what one is. I am not too dismayed that, under certain conditions, particular photons exhibit the characteristics of a wave form. After all, I work in an industry that creates 3D worlds out of triangles, so I understand better than most that a curve is really a series of intermediate points joined together - the closer the points and the  farther the observation distance, the more complete the illusion.

Eon
 
I can see a fight brewing on the horizons...yea!
If I can't find a photon, does it exist? If enough people say it's true, does that make it true? Something called consensual reality. Can we actually PROVE Einstein existed? Can we take the genes of his descendants (if any) and check his rotted body to see if they match? Probably so. Does that prove anything?
If you and me and four million other people believe enough that standing in a roaring fire will not harm us, does that make it true? Is it beliefs that make something happen? Does it need a name to exist? Does light need to be studied to exist? Does gravity need to be known of by Newton to exist? Does God need ME to say whether or not he is God?
No. There is no consensus to debate the existence of a being unseen and almighty. Cripes, the guy resurrected three days after death! Who am I to dictate that I tell whether or not he exists? Will the atmosphere listen to me if I tell it to cease, that I don't believe in it, therefore it's not true? Do I need to slit my veins to prove I have blood in them?
Do I need America to tell me whether or not God is real? Answer those questions, and say Yes to the last one and I shall be an atheist for the rest of my life.
 
[b said:
Quote[/b] ]Sorry, are you claiming that Photons are non existent, and that the entire of Quantum theory is unsound, or are you not?
Click to expand...

How you came up with that idea is beyond me, but obviously not.  I'm saying that you're exhibiting blind faith with respect to photons.  You're claiming photons exist because we can see, my counter-point was that you're saying that because you know it's the theory of modern physics, not neccessarily because you understand it, and in the past people could have said "light is a wave because you can see" or "light is a collection of particles because you can see" depending on which theory they followed.  Being able to see light does not make you understand or believe the quantum theory.  Heck, Plato thought that light was emitted from the eye, and even the mighty Euclid backed him up on this!  Being able to see something doesn't prove the existance of photons.  In order to do so, you have to accept theories of modern physics.  Quite frankly, given the evidence and how well it works, I think anyone who does not trust this theory at this point is missing the mark.

[b said:
Quote[/b] ]Planck's constant is only the first step of quantum mechanics, although a very important one, and has been verified by experimental data. Firstly by Einstein, who did lots of THEORETICAL experimentation as you've claimed, but secondly by Millikan, whose painstaking experimentation seems to agree awfully closely with Einsteins theoretical number crunching... Perhaps a little too closely to be coincidence?
Click to expand...

To make it more obvious, if you see how Planck developed his theory, you have no choice but to conclude that he's correct.  Like I said, the thoeries of the day were working so well that Planck himself was hoping for a "better" explaination to come along.  You seemed to be exhibiting blind faith before I challenged you.  I'm curious as to why you never fired back with fact when it comes to photons, but merely said "because you can see", but it just made it easier for me to support my point.

[b said:
Quote[/b] ]As for Christianity - well, you may well see more in your book than I did. Personally I think it's a charmingly quaint tribal history for a group of people I've never really had that much admiration for - let alone a wish to emulate. I can't speak, as you say, for what you might have experienced in your life or not - but if God has taken a direct hand with you, then you probably should have reminded him that there's a lot of other things that could use his attention while he's stirring himself.
Click to expand...

God is capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time.  Don't you think he can multi-task?

[b said:
Quote[/b] ]And if *I* am a litle uncertain as to exactly what a Photon is, that's hardly proof here or there as to whether Einstein didn't know what one is. I am not too dismayed that, under certain conditions, particular photons exhibit the characteristics of a wave form. After all, I work in an industry that creates 3D worlds out of triangles, so I understand better than most that a curve is really a series of intermediate points joined together - the closer the points and the  farther the observation distance, the more complete the illusion.
Click to expand...

Matter also has a wavelength, which is a property of waves(search for De Broglie's waves to find out more).  Therefore, it doesn't surprise me that a photon would exhibit the characteristics of a wave form either.

I'm curious as to why you are reluctant to admit that you're not exhibiting blind faith by taking what a scientist says as fact without full knowledge of the topic at hand.  Science is a major portion of my studies and I'm forced to rely on the superior knowledge of my senior peers.  Sometimes I don't fully understand it myself.  Some things such as time dialation and lengths changing as you approach the speed of light is difficult to visualize.  Still, it seems to work, so I have to accept it.  

Anyways, I'm going to take a rest from my normal aggressive debate style and add some humour to the discussion with a funny story that I think you all might get a good kick out of, I did.  Eon, you mentioned Robert Millikan earlier, and this story is about him and his students.

Ok, so when you're preparing a science paper, often your professor will add his name to it and he'll get all the glory for it if it becomes successful.  It comes with the territory I suppose.  Anyways, Millikan was notorious for this.  There was a rock in California where one of the religious groups in the area had wrote "Jesus Saves" on it.  I believe it was visible from the highway but I'm not positive.  Anyways, here's the funny part.  Later on, Millikan's students went up the the rock and wrote added to it, "but Millikan takes the credit".  When my uncle, who has a Ph.d in chemistry, told me about that, I laughed so hard!  I mean, picture it.  You're driving along the highway and you see a rock that reads:

"Jesus Saves
but Millikan takes the credit"
 
[b said:
Quote[/b] (MeanMrMustard @ Feb. 26 2003,12:39)]
[b said:
Quote[/b] ]According to "scientific" studies people who believe in God live longer and report happier lives than those who do not.  Both have the benifits of medical sciences etc but one lives longer that shows some measurable differance.
Click to expand...
I'd love to see those studies, as I find it very hard to believe.
Click to expand...
The Medical Benefits of Faith

There are sound medical reasons to take these beliefs seriously. An analysis of 42 studies involving 125,286 patients, published in the June 2000 issue of Health Psychology, found that those with some sort of religious involvement live longer

*** Right from the web md ***

go to health.msn.com and search faith and you will see several studies that prove state that.  and note Msn is obviously not a Christian site.
 
[b said:
Quote[/b] (Strider @ Feb. 27 2003,9:56)]
[b said:
Quote[/b] (MeanMrMustard @ Feb. 26 2003,12:39)]
[b said:
Quote[/b] ]According to "scientific" studies people who believe in God live longer and report happier lives than those who do not.  Both have the benifits of medical sciences etc but one lives longer that shows some measurable differance.
Click to expand...
I'd love to see those studies, as I find it very hard to believe.
Click to expand...
The Medical Benefits of Faith

There are sound medical reasons to take these beliefs seriously. An analysis of 42 studies involving 125,286 patients, published in the June 2000 issue of Health Psychology, found that those with some sort of religious involvement live longer

*** Right from the web md ***

go to health.msn.com and search faith and you will see several studies that prove state that.  and note Msn is obviously not a Christian site.
Click to expand...
I hate to be on the "other" side, but that says any religion. Not just Christianity.
 
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