Posted on 12/18/2004 5:56:30 PM PST by PatrickHenry
"There is no scientific theory of souls. How would you measure souls? How would you detect their presence? If you can provide me with a "Soul-meter" then I will gladly do some experimental work and derive a theory of souls. Until then, souls will have to remain in the realm of theology and philosophy and stay out of science."
Spoken like a 'god'!
Sorry, you are evidently here to play games. I'm not. Either
back up your garbage claim or stand silent as the liar you are. Simple. If you need to use ad-hominem, you surrender the point. That's logic. Don't like it, tough.
I wondered the same thing, until our non-physics-inclined friend "clarified" with a reference to "spin". It's a reference to conservation of angular momentum, and it's one of those arguments generally promoted by folks who never took Physics 101 back in college:
The moons of several planets in our galaxy here spin counter to the direction of the planets. If, as your big bang theory posits, a whole bunch of nothing was spinning and condensed down to a speck in the nothing, then exploded. The nothing that exploded into everything would preserve angular momentum in all that exploded from it. This is a falsifiable law. Planetary bodies are not the only things subject to this law, galaxies, stars and so on are all subject to said law. Galaxies, however, do not all spin the same direction either.
I've seen this one before, and the flaws should be immediately obvious. First, conservation of angular momentum refers to the total angular momentum of the entire system - in no way does it mean that all the exploded bits have to spin in "the same direction" as the original unexploded thing. You can certainly have rotation in the opposite direction, so long as the total angular momentum is the same afterwards as it was before - a tiny smidgeon of thought will probably suggest many ways in which you can have a system with, say, 10 bodies spinning in all sorts of directions that has the same total angular momentum as a 10-body system where all spin in the same direction.
The next major problem is that nobody has bothered to explain why the angular momentum of the "pre-Big Bang" universe is a meaningful concept, or how we would measure it if it were - indeed, we should probably begin by turning "pre-Big Bang" into a meaningful concept itself. How things "spin" when spacetime doesn't exist I don't know, which doesn't suggest to me that it is a meaningful concept, but there you go. I suppose you could go out and measure the angular momentum of every object in the universe, total it all up, and arrive at a total angular momentum for the whole system in order to arrive at some conclusion about total angular momentum in the past, but obviously I'm not going to wait by the phone for the results of that calculation ;)
So if evolution is not falsifiable, how can you argue that the evidence has shown it to be false?
You stated earlier it the soul was "considered a hypothesis".
"Because it cannot be a theory until it is tested."
BEEP! That is not my problem you E's better hurry up your evolution process and testing equipment!
You do not believe Scripture...
"Beep. Circle takes the square. I do not believe in some peoples' interpretations of Scripture, however. I also do not consider Scripture to be a filter through which to perceive reality. The Almighty gave me a brain; I don't turn it off simply because of a few tens of thousands of words in some text."
"The Almighty gave me a brain", where is that WRITTEN, WHERE is your evidence for an Almighty?
I'd think the introduction of The Pill, and the ready availability of automobiles had more to do with the slackening of morals in the 60s than any other causes.
The date on the Hebrew text of the OT sounds right. What's the point?
Nice to have you as a referee to tell us when we're wrong, why, etc. I have no rock to crawl under; am I to join you under yours then? Or are we to expect you're here to stir up trouble as you blaze in waving your lip to say nothing?
We see the same thing happening with the biological sciences today.
See also The Flat-Earth Bible.
An interesting discussion. :-)
http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/apr2002/1017882364.As.r.html
Oh, I wouldn't debate that. Causal relationships don't need to be complex. In this case I don't believe it is. It's simple. It's like deciding to steal for the first time. The first time doesn't make one a master thief. And getting caught doesn't presuppose an end to the crime spree. The degeneration of societal norms of morality is arguably a staged affair that traces back through a number of steps and causalities. I just see this factor as the crack in the damn that blew. When you look at the data, the incidents start their climb at the same time evolution made it to the classroom and started calling God a liar, mom and dad a liar and all of mom and dad's church friends liars because 'we have the evidence'. Doesn't take kids too long to realize that if the creation story is being sold as a lie, the rest of that book ain't worth a plug nickel and what we decide to do doesn't matter in the scheme of things. Kids don't just make that leap overnight en masse without something culturally defining the excuse.
All those terrible things really started happening around the time we sent men to the moon. Coincidence? Think about it!
From this, may we conclude that christians have been creating excuses to explain away the obvious impossibillities of genesis since the days when the disiples were still around?
The texts have been entrusted to the same class within the Hebrew culture for thousands of years. As far back as you care to look - checking against every other known copy, you'll find the text consistant. That's not a tough act to follow, it's near impossible considering these folks did it by hand in an unforgiving form on scrollpaper that you just don't get out the white out and correct for errors. How do I know? Simple, the text and it's history speaks for itself. I've gone the extra step and actually bothered reading it and testing God on much of it - panned out well for me. I chose to believe my experiences. Just too many things you can't chalk up to random chance. May be hard for you to understand as you chalk up everything to random chance on evolution with far greater odds than anything I'm aware of against it. But there you have it. My faith is in God, yours is in chance and "millions of years". We both have a religion. The difference is, I don't feel I should have to pay taxes to teach yours in schools while mine is restricted in public - the height of tolerance as it were. If religion has no place in the classroom, evolution don't belong there. It ain't science.
No, the data doesn't track that way. That's 5 years after the spike begins. Care to try something else?
We didn't really go to the moon. As we know about all the 'facts', it was either
a) It was a conspiracy by the evolutionists.
b) It was part of God's conspiracy to place anti-young earth data amoung us to keep us confused.
No, from this we can conclude that the commentor on what Peter was talking about didn't bother to read it, much less read it for context. He read far enough to find something that looked like what he wanted and it bit him. The disciples didn't have anything to cover for.
Galileo was persecuted and tried for the heresy of believing that the sun was the center of the universe rather than the earth. Nothing was mentioned about the sperical shape of the earth. Erastothanes actually measured the circumference of the earth a couple of centuries before Christ. Hard to do if he believed that the earth was flat. Throughout most of the time thereafter, it was generally accepted that the earth was round.
thanks for sharing
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