jwocky wrote:Oh my ... first of all, knowing a lot of engineers in real life, the assumption that any design work by an engineer is inevitably "intelligent" is just that, a rather dubious assumption. We knew in history people who tried to invent the octagonal wheel, revolvers firing around corners and real life planes started with enormous rubber bands. To bring up an example from our world, there si a reason, any new plane model needs so much testing under such extreme safety precautions because you can't rely on the assumption engineers don't do stupid things. And then the definition of stupid depends also strongly on what you define as "smart". Id an autopilot system that prevents pilot intervention "smart"? So, engineers and "intelligent design" are not necessarily the same.
I admit some engineers can seem pretty dumb, but any sane human being (and I admit some engineers may not be sane) I definitely infinitely more intelligent than a protein that decides to become a cell, a cell that decides to grow into a fish, or a fish that decides o turn into a salamander, or a salamander that decides to turn into a monkey. The engineer can think, "This focke wulf doesn't have enough engines--what do we do? Ah, I know--we just take these surplus bomber engines and install them." A piece of protein, or a cell, or a fish, or a salamander, or (for the most part) a monkey is not capable of such thinking. Therefore I don't think it's safe to compare the evolution of Focke-Wulfs with the evolution of life.
About the question whether Earth is the only place where life could thrive. Given, we have about 100 billion stars out there and for each, there is a mathematical chance to have at least one planet in a life-supporting range (given the possibilities of life forms based on Si instead of C, there are theoretically two or three of such zones around a star), the conclusion can only be that the probability of life on planets other than Earth is actually well beyond what we would consider a statistical certainty because most peptide chaining reactions take only a few seconds, the "probability of number of stars multiplied by number of reactions per time unit multiplied by number of reaction sets" would reach a value of beyond 1 in less than a year. Of course, faster, if the assumption of average one habitable planet is too conservative. Thus, the assumption, Earth is the only place that can carry life is wrong. However, if you claim, Earth is the only place you want to live ... that is entirely legit.
Perfectly true, we as yet have no idea whether there are other earths out there. The important thing about our little sphere is that there must be a thousand conditions that could doom human life if not just right--the thickness of the atmosphere, the temperature, the distance from the sun--tiny changes in any and more could erase life, and yet here I am.
About the existence of God ... well, here is the point. We can't by any pure scientific methods prove the existence of God, BUT we also can't prove the non-existence of God.
Go to Luciano, Italy, and tell me if the flesh and blood is possible.
The same has to be said about any other deity and in the rare cases, in which for example the fossile record indicates some kind of intervention, we can't be sure who, when or if we just missed a parameter. Maybe in some hundred years, someone finds something, but for now, we can neither prove nor dismiss the existence of any form of higher or higher developed being. Therefore, God, Allah, Buddha, Shiva, Ixtipochtli, Amun and whatever deities people chose to believe in are still a matter of FAITH, not knowledge.
I beg to differ :ahem:
The exception from the rule is the person usually labelled as Jesus Christus whose historical existence can be proven by unrelated secondary literature, but then this would be a mere prove of existence, not so much a real prove of his sacred origins which would be still out of the range of our possibilities (see Flavius Josephus, see the apocryph gospels of the Codes Sinaicus, Codex Tchako and Nag Hammadi in comparison to the Irenaeus edited forms of the canonical gospels).
So the bottom line is, we don't know. We believe, or we don't. And since we don't know, there is no gain in trying to take other people's faith away from them. Which is, weird enough, what organized religions do as a standard group behaviour (Atheism in that consideration fits the bill of a religion in this aspect the same as many social or political ideologies with tendencies to assimilate every aspect of human life). Thus, excuse me, I tend to avoid any form of organization that wants me to force the organization's view on other people. Aside of that, there is always a difference between the person in the pilot seat and the ground personal ... just saying.
I beg to differ. There is truth; there are proofs of truth;if you have the truth, one should give it to others.
Most values of Christianity (for reasons of space, I limit this to Christianity here) are also the same as dictated by other value concepts of civilized life. "You shall not kill" is for example a rule we all can adhere, even we get this idea from different sources, be it religion, philosophy or law. "You shall not kill" and if you do, the law comes after you, not the family of the victim is already part of the Code of Hammurabi, which stems from about the time between 1792 to 1750 b.C., which makes it not only 1750 years older than the origins of the New Testament but also roughly 1150 years older than the Babylonian Talmud (aboutish 600 b.C) which appears to have been the main source for the Old Testament. So the values, we find in the Bible are not exclusively to the Bible. We maybe today think, we inherited those values in our social ground net from Christianity, but in fact, they are older, so much older. That doesn't mean, anything, the Bible tells you is wrong or it is automatically right. The commandments are pretty clear and aside of their orgins, there is not much to discuss about them.
It's called the natural law; that is, the conscience in every human mind which says do this and not that.
But all other conclusions, for example from the "more likely a camel goes through needle's eye than rich one into heaven" (sorry, my Bible is a German one, I translate her on the fly) are based on texts that were originally written in languages not fully translatable (ancient Greek, different dialects of Aramaeic), then were three times edited to fit political situations (Irenaeus of Lyon, the Council of Constantinople and later for King James and Martin Luther versions and how many others there are) and then interpreted by mere mortals like you and me in a way that fit their thinking. The chaos is beyond description. Just an example how things happen. The Greek word "homos" means "man" in the same sense as in English. As in mankind, as in every human being. However, there is this second meaning. "homos" can also refer to a male, even the word "aner" would be more common in texts actually written in Greece while "anthropos" would be more common for "general human being". However, the ancient Greek written by so-called educated people had its little variants or you can call it glitches. By all means, only a few of those were native speakers in ancient Greek and for sure, John, the Gospel writer was none of them. Unfortunately, the "scholars of theology" at the Councils of Constantinople (there were at least three) were obviosuly also no native speakers and thus, they translated "homos", the already idiomatic wrong word again wrong and made it male in their "scholarly" interpretations. Which is the reason, the Catholic church has still trouble with the idea of female priests. So, personally, I take every conclusion made by mortals like me based on texts that were three times adapted to political demands and at least two times sloppy translated with a biiiig grain of salt. But then, it is not that easy for a normal person to get back to the original sources or at least as far as copies remain from the past. A relative simple (about 36,000 word) Aramaic dictionary costs well over $200 ... ouch, that hurts, and the White translation of Flavius Josephus still will set you back for easily $150 ... ouch, that hurt too. And then you read the thing and find, that good old scholar Dr White also sloppied a little around in his interpretations because he lacked some detail knowledge for example in ancient seafare and therefore connects Josephus story of being ship wrecked in the Eastern Mediterranean to Petrus and judges it as intentional lie instead of seeing what it was, common practice that led commonly to ship wrecks with 500 or 600 people drifting in the sea. He just didn't know better and he trusted his subjective perception instead of doing more research. So even with such well-reputated translations, one has always to second guess. It's a lot of work, a lot of money, but if you want to make up your mind for sure, you have to dig. Because if you take the Bible as it is, you don't really trust in God's word, you rather trust in the personal interpretations of a hundred politicians and bad translators. Nobody said, translators and editors are unable of "design" and that such a design would be necessarily "intelligent", right? And even the gospel authors themselves ... well, Mark wrote about thirty to fifty years after Jesus death (which pretty sure happened in 33 or 34 a.C. because Pilatus returned in early 35 to Rome). So Mark may had a chance to speak to eye witnesses. The other three authors of the canonical gospels were too late to have that chance. And John obviously didn't live in Jerusalem or anywhere in Galilee or Judaea. He shows in his own writing, how unfamiliar he was with Jewish rites and traditions andf, eve3n more important, with the political circumstances at the time of Jesus in the realm of Herodes and the Roman government which had replaced the Tetrarchy. He also wrote in ancient Greek and his choice of words proves, he was no native speaker in that either. So you can take John for the gist of it, but never for the single word. So yes, that is a short overview over the most significant problems with using modern Bibles and I stop now before I bore people to death.
I am not a linguist.