Peasant Guild (Page 3 of 9)

Browen that is not true... Christians bring up there proof through the Bible..

Well, this is worthy of being contended. It is this viewpoint that has alone caused much of the world's mistreatment of animals. It wasn't that long ago that people were claiming animals didn't feel pain. Thankfully, people have abandoned that, but have embraced the still limited opinion that animals are incapable of feeling higher emotions, such as love, regret, and shame.

When seemingly convincing anecdotal evidence to counter this is presented it is brushed aside as "instintice responses". In other words, people claim animals only act in their self-interest. When a dog shows affection, or what seems to be guilt it does this because it knows these reactions reap rewards. This would prove a reasonable explanation, had it not been undeniably hypocritical.

I say this because that outlook can be applied to human behavior, as well. It is just as easy to say we always act in our own self-interest. We have friends and relationships because of the obvious benefits they provide us with. We make what seems like selfless sacrifices in these relationships, because we know that through reciprocity, we'll get ours, too. We have children for our own immortality, and treat them well so they take care of us when we need them to. We feels guilt, and regret, because, from an evolutionary standpoint, without these emotions we would fail as a social animal living in a tight social environment.

This can obviously be extended, but my point is, there is not clear-cut, easily justifiable way to claim animals lack moral capacity or the ability for selflessness anymore than we do.

"Didn’t men write the Bible?"
Absolutely. When you write a letter, do you write the letter, or does the pen? Obviously you do; the pen is merely the instrument you use. God used men as instruments to write His "letter" to humanity. They ranged from kings to common fishermen, but the 66 books of the Bible were all given by inspiration of God. Proof that this Book is supernatural can been seen with a quick study of its prophecies.

"What if someone claims to have read the Bible and says it’s just a book of fairy tales?"

Call his bluff. Gently ask, "What is the thread of continuity that runs through the Bible—the consistent theme from the Old Testament through the New Testament?" More than likely he won’t know. So say, "The Old Testament was God’s promise that He would destroy death. The New Testament tells how He did it." Then appeal directly to the conscience by asking if he has kept the Ten Commandments.

"What if someone claims to have read the Bible and says it’s just a book of fairy tales?"

Call his bluff. Gently ask, "What is the thread of continuity that runs through the Bible—the consistent theme from the Old Testament through the New Testament?" More than likely he won’t know. So say, "The Old Testament was God’s promise that He would destroy death. The New Testament tells how He did it." Then appeal directly to the conscience by asking if he has kept the Ten Commandments.

"The Bible has changed down through the ages."

No, it hasn’t. God has preserved His Word. In the spring of 1947, the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered. These manuscripts were copies of large portions of the Old Testament, a thousand years older than any other existing copies. Study of the scrolls has revealed that the Bible hasn’t changed in content down through the ages as many skeptics had surmised.

Worshiploud . . .

Fact: The Bible has been changed.
Fact: The Bible has been edited.
Fact: The New and Old Testaments have contradictions.
Fact: There is no proof that the Bible is supernatural.
Fact: This very lack of proof is the reason "faith" exists.

Opinion: Making your arguments based on this assumed faith will get you nowhere with people who do not share it.

Talk about ignorance. To dismiss scientific findings and discoveries, well accepted as truth by the scientific community, as some manifestation of an individual's wish, because you don't like the results is stupid. It's just stupid. Yeah, so you listed a couple examples of such mistakes that you learned because they are repeated and repeated and repeated by people like yourself . . . and? And so what. They were mitakes, people make them, and people correct them. Who corrected them? Other scientists. You think the Pope went out and conducted some field research and debunked these theories? No. That was done by other scientists. And then you turn that against them as proof that your "side" is correct in it's unfounded claims. It's just wrong. You see, Worshiploud, that's what scientists do. That's why they call everything theories (something used against them all too often). Science changes, it advances, it evolves. That is the very nature of science, and it's quite the opposite of religion, which is why I suppose you have obvious difficulty understanding it.

That's not true. It's false. Should you continue to repeat it, you will be a liar. I suggest doing a little research before you claim such things in the future. Chimpanzee's have more similar DNA to humans than any other animal on the planet. This is because they are our closest relatives, having broken away from us most recently in the evolutionary timeline. You can disagree with that last part, but it really doesn't matter at all.

Carbon dating, while not perfectly accurate, is accurate enough to still confirm everything you don't want confirmed. In other words, it's close enough to still provide a perfectly acceptable foundation of argument when the argument is the Bible vs Science.

I dealt with this above. But I'll stress again: What you're saying might make sense, if when a scientist claimed to make a discovery everyone blindly accepted it and moved on. But no one does that in science. There is no "faith" in science. This is why there are constantly debates in science. And when 0.01% of the "scientific community" make some collective claim that Darwin was wrong you guys like to quote it a billion times. All the while ignoring that 99.99% that says he wasn't. Well, I tend to listen to the vast majority of experts who have come to a logical agreement. Should there be convincing proof tomorrow that says the Earth was created in seven days and we aren't related to chimps, I'll believe that. Let me know when that happens.

No you haven't. Maybe your problem is that you think you have.

Right. So you accepted the Bible.

God, why didn't I think of that.

I'm obviously not going to let you make a claim like that without asking you to elaborate (not that it seems relevant at all?).

Rofl... oh man. I knew I shouldnt have commented on that, now we HAVE gotten entangled in a debate on religion.

Anyhow, have to agree with most (if not all) of what mold said.

I love how people trying to keep to the premise that the earth is indeed 5-6 thousand years old keep bringing up Carbon-dating (C14 is the term I do believe) because it is so 'inreliable'. Well then, it is somewhat inreliable and can miss the mark by a couple of thousand years every now and then. (Which considering the scale on which carbon dating works is actually quite a relevant error in the measurement.) I guess this is to be expected since the atmosphere does change over time, and trees ARE living organisms after all. Anyhow, it does not change the fact that whilst there is a relatively large margin of error, the theory in general is still consistent, even IF individual measurements are at times, unreliable. (And even this is highly dependent on the care exercised whilst measuring, and the equipment used. If done right, Carbon-14 can give pretty accurate results)

Another thing brought up A LOT by those who would argue such a thing, are tree-rings. I don't really care about those too much myself, since they do seem to indeed have quite some inaccuracy in practice. Besides, the technique is really not too useful beyond 4000 years, so it is not even relevant anyway. It is rather as if person A says: Look, I can show through method A and B that with a likelihood of 99.99% this object has property X. And person B replies: Yes... but with this (quite different) method C it is impossible to get a reliable result on whether or not this object has property X. (As you can see, this is all nice and well, but it does nothing to negate the validity of person A's claim.)

Now, let's just say that miraculously (religion acknowledges miracles after all) ALL the C14 measurements are systematically wrong and need to be adjusted in the same direction to such a degree that none contradicts a 5000 year old earth anymore. (Not even going to bother going into the statistic improbability, but the only non-negligible factor would be that the theory is wrong, which is highly improbable, but still infinitely more probable than all the seperate measurements having an error towards high age)

You'd still have plenty of other problems...
Let's continue with radiometric dating. Did you know that Carbon-dating isnt the only form of this dating method? It is considered interesting because it works on a timescale relevant to human civilizations (and because wood was and is used A LOT by civilizations), so we can do stuff like date Tutankhamun's coffin and derive from that the period in which he lived. But we have far more reliable dating methods, methods that have smaller statistical errors and do not rely on living organisms. Uranium-thorium dating should be named, which is useful until approximately 500,000 years. But even more worrying, uranium-lead dating is one of the oldest and an extremely accurate method (even has a built-in cross-check) with a margin of error of about 0.1% on a timescale of several billion years. (I believe it has confirmed rock samples of up to somewhere around 4 billion years old.)

Also, there are plenty of other problems... what about the universe? Weren't the heavens too, created by God? So how come we can see stars that are so far away, light must have been travelling voor millions of years to reach us. (Could even go to scales stretching beyond the age of the earth I guess, but sticking to stars a few million lightyears away since these measurements are very reliable.)

Anyhow, none of this disproves the existence of Christendom's God I suppose... but it does at least show that those who take the words of the bible too literally as absolute truth are not supported by reproducable observations.

Implying a relationship between 2 things doesn't mean anything really. Also, I find the second part highly ironic since it applies perfectly to the American breed of scientist (though they really aren't worthy of that title) that attempts to argue theories that were born, not from observation or flaws in an existing theory, but from a (pre)determination to construct something that does not disagree with the word of the bible. They are incidentally also rarely featured in magazines with proper peer-review since their theories do indeed tend to reject a lot of evidence (the cost paid for NOT rejecting the literal words of the bible).

Well, I'm glad you are so humble, since obviously the last thing you want to be is conceited. *sweatdrops*

No,

<3 for Fireborn!

IMO Science is Fact, Evidence, Calculated theories.

Religion is Faith. Myths and Stories.

Seeing as Religion has no Physical evidence to back it up i will stick to the sense god apparently gave me which is to believe it with my own eyes.

When i see proof god exists other than just hearsay i will be all for it.

Evidence? The scientific community embraced the following and were proven false.

Piltdown man: Found in a gravel pit in Sussex England in 1912, this fossil was considered by some sources to be the second most important fossil proving the evolution of man—until it was found to be a complete forgery 41 years later. The skull was found to be of modern age. The fragments had been chemically stained to give the appearance of age, and the teeth had been filed down!

Nebraska man: A single tooth, discovered in Nebraska in 1922 grew an entire evolutionary link between man and monkey, until another identical tooth was found which was protruding from the jawbone of a wild pig.

Java man: Initially discovered by Dutchman Eugene Dubois in 1891, all that was found of this claimed originator of humans was a skullcap, three teeth and a femur. The femur was found 50 feet away from the original skullcap a full year later. For almost 30 years Dubois downplayed the Wadjak skulls (two undoubtedly human skulls found very close to his "missing link"). (source: Hank Hanegraaff, The Face That Demonstrates The Farce Of Evolution, [Word Publishing, Nashville, 1998], pp.50-52)

Orce man: Found in the southern Spanish town of Orce in 1982, and hailed as the oldest fossilized human remains ever found in Europe. One year later officials admitted the skull fragment was not human but probably came from a 4 month old donkey. Scientists had said the skull belonged to a 17 year old man who lived 900,000 to 1.6 million years ago, and even had very detail drawings done to represent what he would have looked like. (source: "Skull fragment may not be human", Knoxville News-Sentinel, 1983)

Neanderthal: Still synonymous with brutishness, the first Neanderthal remains were found in France in 1908. Considered to be ignorant, ape-like, stooped and knuckle-dragging, much of the evidence now suggests that Neanderthal was just as human as us, and his stooped appearance was because of arthritis and rickets. Neanderthals are now recognized as skilled hunters, believers in an after-life, and even skilled surgeons, as seen in one skeleton whose withered right arm had been amputated above the elbow. (source: "Upgrading Neanderthal Man", Time Magazine, May 17, 1971, Vol. 97, No. 20)

Roy Britten wrote, October 15, 2002 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

It has long been held that we share 98.5 per cent of our genetic material with our closest relatives. That now appears to be wrong. In fact, we share less than 95 per cent of our genetic material, a three-fold increase in the variation between us and chimps.
The new value came to light when Roy Britten of the California Institute of Technology became suspicious about the 98.5 per cent figure. Ironically, that number was originally derived from a technique that Britten himself developed decades ago at Caltech with colleague Dave Kohne. By measuring the temperature at which matching DNA of two species comes apart, you can work out how different they are.

But the technique only picks up a particular type of variation, called a single base substitution. These occur whenever a single “letter” differs in corresponding strands of DNA from the two species.

But there are two other major types of variation that the previous analyses ignored. “Insertions” occur whenever a whole section of DNA appears in one species but not in the corresponding strand of the other. Likewise, “deletions” mean that a piece of DNA is missing from one species.

Together, they are termed “indels,” and Britten seized his chance to evaluate the true variation between the two species when stretches of chimp DNA were recently published on the internet by teams from the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, and from the University of Oklahoma.

When Britten compared five stretches of chimp DNA with the corresponding pieces of human DNA, he found that single base substitutions accounted for a difference of 1.4 per cent, very close to the expected figure.

But he also found that the DNA of both species was littered with indels. His comparisons revealed that they add around another 4.0 per cent to the genetic differences (see Coghlan, 2002, emp. added).