[Mongoose]

Dear Lord.  I didn't even have to read this one; hop to page 8 and there's the standard creationism vs. evolution debate.  You people need to stop being so predictable.

[Flipside]

We can't help it, it's too much fun

[WeatherOp]

Yeah, it is fun isn't it.

[pyro-manic]

Originally posted by jpheu
Pyro,
If you insist on arguing this here then I must first have definitions.  How do you define God?  (was that flame-baiting?)

Not at all. For the sake of my point, god is the supreme being, the highest consciousness, the ultimate incarnation of intelligence and understanding (omniscience, omnipresence, omnipotence, etc) that created the universe. Whether or not God exists (or whether or not I believe in God) is not important to what I'm trying to say. I'm saying that the men who wrote the bible cannot have written the entire truth. It's kind of hard for me to make myself clear (eloquence isn't one of my traits ). Um...

OK, try this: You're standing on a high place (top of a mountain, a tall building, doesn't matter really). You look out, and see before you an incredibly beautiful view. There are cliffs and oceans and forests and cities and all kinds of spectacular things to see. It is every season of the year, happening all at once. The sun is shining off lakes, while at the same time the leaves are gold and red, and the wind is blowing across cornfields, and snow is falling softly, and frost is forming on the leaves. The sun is setting, and fully bright, and an eclipse is in progress. At the same time, you are eating the most delicious meal possible, and are tasting all the courses at once. You are also sleeping, and running a marathon, and fighting, and making love all at once, and you are experiencing everything with perfect senses, where distance, time etc. do not matter.

Now, take everything you are experiencing, and try to make an ant understand it.

That is like God explaining the nature of reality to us as humans. It is something which, no matter how hard God tried, he could not convey sufficiently to a person without elevating him to the same state of existence. It is simply not possible. A mortal man cannot comprehend such things accurately and fully, so he can only make sense of the things which make sense, so to speak. So the bible is at best God's word as interpreted by men, and is not the supreme "Truth" that many people believe it to be.

Hope that helped you understand my viewpoint.

[jpheu]

Pyro,
The problem with that argument is that I didn't make the ant.  If God created everything, like you said, don't you think he could communicate with it in a way the created can understead?  Example, Robots.  Man made robots, and man can communicate with them in the language they can understand.

[jpheu]

Again,  If you guys want to keep bantering about particulars of the creation/ evolution debate you can, but I insist the evedentiary proof will not lead to a decisive outcome.

[Bobboau]

you don't know much about programing languages do you, becase if you did, you would know that the language we comunicat to robots with has no subject, only actions, it is imposable to acurately describe the world to a robot, as we have created them.

[Flipside]

He won't buy it Bob, it'll take God leaning through the clouds, shrugging and saying 'Don't look at me!' before he believes anything other than exactly what he chooses.

Not a fault in the person, but a really annoying place to stand if youre in a discussion

[jpheu]

Bobboau,
It was an ANALOGY.  We, as humans, certainly cannot create something as intricate as another human.  God has, and He knows us so well that He has communicated to us in a language we can all understand.  God can't reveal His entire world to us either.  We would have no way of comprehending it.

[Bobboau]

and that I think was the point, we would be incapable of understanding the wholeness of what ever any supreem being would want us to know.

[jpheu]

Bobboau,
But as our creator He knows us intricatelyand communicates with us on our level, not on His.  Like (analogy) We do with robots.  In order to communicate with them we communicate on their level.  The same can be said with anything we communicate with.  Babies, dogs, other people.

[jpheu]

Originally posted by Flipside
He won't buy it Bob, it'll take God leaning through the clouds, shrugging and saying 'Don't look at me!' before he believes anything other than exactly what he chooses.

Not a fault in the person, but a really annoying place to stand if youre in a discussion

The nature of belief, the very definition, is something we choose .  It might be based on scientific, emotional, spiritual, and factual evidence but ultimately we choose what we believe.  Psychologist Victor Frankel postulated this.

[vyper]

Are you lot still at this?

We're bordering on the free-will/determinism debate here now.

[jpheu]

Vyper,
I ventured into that debate on another forum
http://www.homewithgod.com/forum/showthread.php3?s=&threadid=2974
If you care to look.

[Janos]

Originally posted by vyper
Are you lot still at this?

We're bordering on the free-will/determinism debate here now.

I'm in again! Work takes it's toll on furious internet crusaders-

Though I pretty much try not to take part on more spiritual aspects of religious debates, since as an avowed atheist it always end in flames.
However trying to side science with religion is ultimately a futile attempt. As an empirical "philosophy" science can not discuss the relevance of religious faith. It can only focus on more concrete points - for example creationism. Evolutionary theories - the most heatly debated area of science because it directly contradicts with Genesis myth - do not prove or disprove God as such (quite a few religious people I know are practically theists, since they personally find no difficulty in accepting the scientific results along with personal faith), nor are they atheist in very strict sense. They handle with evolution of species, quite a strictly limited and small area of biology, though one of the most important.

Religion is, though, very well studied subject in scientific circles, but all concrete studies only handle the personal and cultural variations and aspects of faith.

The most disturbing features in these debates are seeming endlessness. The subject of debate has, in this thread alone, surfed from cladistical comments all the way to deeply religious aspects, determinism/free will quagmire, transitional species, science vs. religion and all that jazz. It would be so much easier if we had someone as a referee to shout "red herring! strawman! stay on subject!" all the time, because debaters themselves often become so entangled in the discussion that it kinda starts to go on on it's own weight.