*evening out the relative entropy of elements of the universe

So now that I have bored you all with geek speak, let's get back to playing diplomacy, how's that :)?

the existance of God or 'a Higher power' has nothing to do with intelligence... through out history there have been geniuses who devoutly believed in God and ones who didn't

it has to do with your heart, it is a choice that comes straight from the soul

Those who truly have faith for something can not have their belief shaken, no matter what. No amount of reasoning or fact finding or evidence can shake their faith, and I believe that is an admirable quality, whether it is misguided faith or not (as long as that faith is good-natured and within the law of course).

Quite simply, if viewpoints are based on faith from an individual rather than what they think to be factual, then you can not touch them.

damn ireland
post much?

Religious people often like to say that belief in God is a choice. Speaking for myself, I don't think I can choose to believe in God. I could choose to pretend to believe in God, but really I would know in myself that I didn't actually believe. By the same token I can't choose to believe the world is flat. I know it isn't. I can't choose to believe that I can fly either, or make myself invisible, or do magic. I know I can't. I don't see my beliefs as choices. I can choose to examine the evidence for a proposition, but the conclusions I draw are not a choice. That's how it is for me anyway.

This thread seems to have been sidetracked from it's original intention, but that's fine 'cause I'm learning stuff.

Now a question to those who believe in God. If a piece of parchment was discovered by, say the Pope or any other ultra-religious guy whom you trust, on the site of the dead sea scrolls that matched absolutely the rest ofthe original bible that said something like....

"Everything that follows is a work of fiction, referrence to people living or dead are entirely coincidental"

Would you still believe in God, or think that someone is hoaxing you?

And and question to the Big Bang theorists - If you had a glass of Water that you knew 100% to be water and someone came along and turned it into wine and said something like "Now do you believe?" would you believe or just think that someone was hoaxing you?

Maniac:
"If you had a glass of Water that you knew 100% to be water and someone came along and turned it into wine and said something like "Now do you believe?" would you believe or just think that someone was hoaxing you?"
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It would not prove the existence of a god. Hoax would certainly be my first guess - I have seen many magic tricks where for the life of me I cannot figure out how they did it... but, never the less, I am not in danger of believing in actual magic. My faith, if you will, is that the universe has laws and follows them. Supernatural does not exist - by definition. That brings me to my second guess - in which I will reference the Cargo cult... wherein the technology of any sufficiently advanced civilization will appear to be magic... so my second guess is that the person I'm dealing with has some alien technology that transfered the wine and water (like a Star Trek energizer)... last guess would be god-like powers (like the Q in Star Trek Next Generation) but still not necessarily God proper (how could a god-like power prove they were the one and only?) Perhaps needless to say, it would take a lot for me to believe anything other than hoax.

Thanks for that Dexter.

So what would it take to make you believe in God?

To Dexter. Why would you sooner think that aliens exist rather than God? Personally I don't see why anyone wouldn't want to be able to have a personal relationship with the creator of the universe, IMHO. Rather than fighting against him wouldn't it just be easier to believe in him? And even if the entire Bible were found to be false, I would still believe just because of what I have seen him do. I with my own eyes have seen him heal people. Why would you want to deny the existence of a God who loves everyone so much?

@jman777 - It's rather difficult for someone to want to have a relationship with something they don't even beleive is real. I'm not saying one way or the other here what I beleive, but that's a fairly unconvincing argument for a belief in God. I'm sure there are a lot of people who would love to have a relationship with all kinds of things that don't exist (for some reason the first example that came to my head was Alf, how weird/random is that?), but they don't just go ahead and beleive that those things exist because it would be nice to have a relationship with them. You seem to be assuming that everyone has the same underlying faith in the existence of God that you do, and that by not "believing" in him they are simply denying something to themselves.

I'm not trying to shake your personal faith, or convince you not to beleive in God. I agree with an earlier post in which someone said they felt that personal faith was in many cases quite admirable. I'm just trying to point out that you seem to be assuming that everyone sees things the same way you do, and are simply choosing to pretend they don't. That's just not the way everyone sees things.

Maniac, What would it take for me to believe in God? I'm not sure exactly - I guess, to paraphrase a supreme court justice, that I would "know it when I see it" - but more seriously... I believe many things on an operational basis that I am not actually sure are true. I could see being convinced rather easily that there are powers in the universe greater than humans (all it would take is a demonstration) - but to define it as God would be problematic. What walks like a duck and quacks like a duck is not necessarily a duck (unless those are by definition your only two criteria)... someone could easily decide that a goose is a duck, for example.

@General_Ireland and Dexter.Morgan: thanks for your highly instructive explanations concerning entropy and 2LT, I enjoyed reading them very much.

@Maniac: with respect to the water-to-wine thing, I think my first reaction would be scepticism as well. Science is the process of evaluating the available observational evidence to formulate models and theories that encompass and explain the evidence; these models are subsequently examined, tested and compared with new evidence to determine whether they are correct or can be modified to better suit the evidence. So, if someone could turn water into wine under controlled laboratory experiments and the result could be reproduced again and again to exclude the possibility of a hoax, I would believe in their ability to turn water into wine (and that in turn would be a marvellous discovery which we would have to find an explanation for). Would it cause me to believe in the rest of the claims of the Bible? Of course not, those claims would have to be verified individually as well.

@jman77: concerning Dexter’s mentioning of the ‘Cargo Cult’; it’s far less unreasonable to believe in aliens than to believe in a god, and I would like to explain to you why this is. We know that organic life has developed on our own planet, and since there doesn’t seem to be anything special about our planet or the star that is the source of its life, it’s possible that organic life exist elsewhere as well (indeed, I find it difficult to imagine that it doesn’t!). Likewise, since life has developed into intelligent life on our planet it’s also not unreasonable to suggest that intelligent life may have developed elsewhere in the Universe as well. If such an alien civilization had had, say, 10,000 years more to develop than our own it would probably have access to technology which to us would be indistinguishable from what we might naïvely call ‘magic’. On the other hand, postulating the existence of a transcendent, omnipotent, omniscient sorcerer that somehow created everything in the visible Universe is beyond far-fetched, unless you can motivate it by some kind of evidence. Therefore, judging from the available evidence, the existence of aliens is far more likely than the existence of a god or gods. I'd like to say that I don't think the Unvirse was created by aliens, I'm simply arguing that, considering the available evidence, the existence of aliens is less unlikely than the existence of gods.

I’d like to make one thing clear: it’s not about ‘fighting god’ as you seem to think. On a naïve level, I think we would all like the idea that someone or something is watching over us (however, in addition to this, I think that theism contains a number of highly worrying features that far outweigh this cosy ‘invisible protector’ concept, but that’s a different discussion…), and scientists are not fighting god any more than they’re fighting, say, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, Superman, Winnie the Poo or any other product of the Human imagination. We’re not interested in suppressing one theory that we don’t like in favour of one that we do like. ‘Like’ never enters into it. The motivating force behind a scientist’s work is to describe and understand Nature. So, if there was any evidence to support the existence of a god, I'm sure the scientific community would be happy to believe in such an entity. However, there simply isn’t and that’s why we don’t believe in it. Without wanting to sound rude, I think you should consider the possibility that it might rather be the religious people who are fighting reality, rather than the scientists who are fighting god… ;)

jman777, why aliens over God? Easy. Belief in aliens requires no additional changes to my belief system. Aliens, as part of this universe, would still follow it's laws... and considering the vastness of the universe and my views about abiogenesis and evolution being nearly inevitable given the right conditions and a whole bunch of time, I see the existence of aliens as inevitable. God, on the other hand, lives apart from physical laws... God is by definition super-natural. Further I fully believe that the Universe can exist without God - and that if there was a God (other than a theoretical indifferent God, we would know because we would be constantly interacting with him/her/it. The absence of evidence of God is not proof - but it is never the less rather convincing to me.

And as far as what I want? What I want has nothing to do with it. That is wishful thinking. Besides, as far as great things in the universe, again I see them happening despite the apparent absence of a God and I find that quite inspiring in itself. My opinion is that people heal themselves (and each other)... love is a powerful force - but I don't see why a separate third party of God is necessary for love to exist.

I will anticipate a question: "How can I believe that the universe can exist without God?"
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1) because evidence suggests that it is likely the case (no evidence of God), 2) because you don't need a maker if something has always been... and I believe it most likely that the universe (more accurately, the omniverse) has always been existent. The apparent absence of a maker leads me to believe that - and without a supernatural maker, laws of conservation of matter-energy require it.

Moving on...

I have really enjoyed reading the ID/Evolution/Wider Physics discussion here, but perhaps it should get it's own thread? It seems like a good enough topic and far enough afield from the original topic of this thread that it perhaps deserves to exist in a thread by itself.

As to the original intent of the thread, I will have to echo what countless others have said in that to change my mind I have to see new evidence, a better explanation, or someone had to show me a different way of looking at the issue that I find convincing.

As to the issue of getting more entrenched during discussions, that's certainly a danger, and I've seen myself do it a few times. I think my first participation in a discussion here was on Capitalism, and in hindsight, and even later on in the thread, I realized I was taking positions that were perhaps a little more hard-line than my actual beliefs. I don't think anything I said was false, or not something I believed in at all, but I realized later that I was perhaps making it appear as though I felt Capitalism had some inherent good, rather that simply being a system that is useful for creating good in many situations (but isn't inherently good in and of itself and is certainly a poor tool, or even destructive when not handled properly, or used to try to fix problems it is not suited for). After that I have tried very hard to try to check myself and make sure I'm not going further in a discussion than I actually want to.

All of that being said, any conversation/debate I'm likely to really get deeply into is probably on an issue I care about, and that I've already spent a great deal of time thinking about, researching, and likely discussing with other people. So I'm less likely to be convinced by someone else in such a discussion, not because I'm unwilling to be convinced, but because I've likely already thought about the issue a lot, and have probably already thought of or encountered most of the arguments that someone who disagrees with me are likely throw at me, and I've looked at them and judged them to be unconvincing for some reason. That's not to say it's useless, I'm always willing to look at new arguments or to talk to people who may have a deeper understanding of arguments I've already heard, but if I have a strong opinion on a topic it's probably because I've thought about it a lot and looked at the issues involved, so I will admit I'm not likely to be easily swayed.

SOMETHING has been around forever... and it seems simpler to imagine that it is the universe (which I know exists) then a maker (which I have no evidence of). God is not disproved and probably can't be disproved... but Occam's Razor suggests a more likely solution to the question. Of course it leaves open the possibility that we (the universe) are collectively God (the holy ghost idea being a rough equivalent - or The Force, if you prefer)... but is that simply a case of semantics?

Sorry that "moving on..." was a reference to my own last post, but this one turned out to be longer than expected and I had to go do some work halfway through it, so I just wanted to be sure that people didn't read that 'moving on..." as dismissing what they had to say! It was, if anything, dismissing what I had to say!

:-) I'm all for moving on... you know, now that we've resolved this whole universe/god question.

Topic?

I agree with DrOct that our religion vs. science discussion has probably moved a bit too far from the original subject, and I would support moving it to a new thread if we need to discuss it further.

so how about jman's answer to the original question.

Jman - what would it take for you to change your way of thinking, about ID, the authenticity of the bible, the specialness of the human race, or what ever else you want to use as an example