romansh

Islam and Christianity on the whole claim that an angel came to Miriam (likely Gabriel) foretold of some kind of Divine birth. Thirty odd years later one of the religions claims that the product of this divine birth was crucified and rose from the dead. The other religion claims the crucifixion/death was a bit of the hoax. Now perhaps more enlightened interpretations of these religions might take all this as an allegory or something. And then try an imbue meaning into the allegory. Personally, I prefer to imbue meaning into the world around me ... have to admit I am struggling a bit.

This is ten years old now ... interesting So it would, at least at times, seem science and religion are in conflict.

Just curious ... how do your videos go down on more Evangelical fora?

Just as an aside ... here is an internet friend of mine. Gus has had a massive influence on me. He has an unusual take on Christianity and has completed his training as a minister. I don't buy into everything, but you may find him interesting. He is on facebook, though he has been quiet the last couple months or so.

We never observe anything directly. So I will ask again (not rhetorical) how many fractions of a second ago does the past start for you? But for me archeology and paleontology do meet my strict definition of a test.

Arguing in the philosophical sense is fine and is part of debate and dialogue so no problem. But asserting God gave us supernatural properties like free will and that they are untestable does not score highly on debate and dialogue scale.

How many picoseconds into the past is not testable? What about archeology and and paleontology? We're testing the past there. When we look at the stars everything is in the past. What about Oklo? That event gives an insight (a test) as to whether the fine structure constant has changed over the 2 billion years. Spoiler alert, no, at least not in experimental error. Our sense of "now" is an agglomeration of events in the brain over the last 2 seconds ... with high speed sports "now" reduces to a few tens of microseconds. And as an engineer are you truly suggesting your discipline does not test the future?

If it is not testable it may as well not be there. Also when you say something is not testable do you mean we don't know how to test it? You do a lot of asserting my friend. Again is it simply that you don't know how we might come to understand? Dopamine, seems like a good place to start. And if you are referring to Biblical myths perhaps you could provide some refences to free will in the Bible. And here I don't mean references to choice.

Again I think I agree. For me philosophy and science are in the same box. Science uses the philosophical tools of induction and deduction, and always has one eye on epistemology, and without reference to reality, philosophy is blind. For me, the free will debate is a scientific one not a metaphysical one. Though I have to admit it does reduce to semantics at times.

I think I agree with what you are saying here. Sure there is much we don't know or understand. In fact as we learn and understand how this universe ticks [or might tick] in its various aspects, what we don't understand grows exponentially. This where I find awe. Einstein: The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.

Exactly While I am convinced the concept or notion of human rights exists, they must be illusory ... much in the same way I have the concept my kitchen chair is red. I (we) tend to conflate something appearing to have a colour and something being coloured. Good you accept that your alleged god created the supernatural sinfulness. So supernatural responds to cause and effect and interacts with the universe. Fair enough. Is there any part of this supernatural that is independent of cause and effect? And if so, how do you know? I get it ... to be able to hold onto a more literal belief in your Bible parsimony becomes complicated pretty quickly. And yet you claim properties that are typically attributed to a god.

So it is the alleged "supernatural" bit that is subject to sin? As it is difficult to ascribe morality to atoms that are just going about doing their thing. But it would appear that the alleged non materialistic aspects are affected by the universe and in turn can affect the universe. So in what way are these alleged non materialistic aspects independent of cause and effect?

What? At best you can say we have not addressed these questions. I am reminded of Auguste Comte's prediction" ... but we can never known anything of their [planets] chemical or mineralogical structure; But he was even more convinced this was true of stars. Little did he know that several years earlier the underlying physics had been developed to determine compositions of stars. So I personally am a little more circumspect about assertions regarding what can and cannot be addressed. Have you ever heard of the Wedge document? You may want to look it up if you have never heard of it. While this may very well be true, we don't need to use this as an excuse to make up stories about the beginning of the universe and how it is unfolding.

What is your motivation to be an apologist? What are the antecedents to your beliefs? What are the properties of your brain that make it necessary for you to be an apologist?

What is the basis for your assertion? Your sentience is independent in some way of this universe? Your so called sentience is independent of the atoms/compounds that make up our bodies? Independent of all the experiences that have shaped you? Evolution has not shaped the way humans respond to certain inputs. You effectively are claiming to be a mini-god. A first cause generator for certain chains of events. Irrelevant to free will. With respect to religious authority ... Calvinism has a more nuanced view as does Buddhism (dependent origination). And as you point out free will is essential to many interpretation of Christianity. You seem to think you are someway independent of the universe. Good luck with that. You are not a first cause generator. Quite often the metaphor of puppet/string/puppeteer is used ... quite incorrectly. There are no puppets, no puppeteer ... we and everything else is the string. This worldview leads us to a far more interesting place. The bit of string that we describe as Kellerman does not care. The bit string described as rom finds it really interesting, but understands, ultimately it does not matter.

I disagree that this is evidence of free will. What would unfree sentience look like? Just because you are aware of pondering problems does not mean that your ponderings are free in anyway. For clarification the universe does not have to be pre-determined, but just think is not our sentience and our awareness of it shaped by our previous experience, by chemistry. There is a wealth evidence to show that our sentience is a product or at least affected by our chemistries. Where does our sentience go when under anesthetic? Again sentience is irrelevant to the topic of free will.

What? Sentience while an interesting topic does not address whether our wills are free. Feelings of pain emotions etc, have little to do with: are we somehow free from antecedent causes. See here you add another layer of complexity divinity in our sentience. What was potentially a difficult phenomenon to unravel, certainly beyond me, you add more obfuscation to the matter with divinity. You can assert facts all you like ... but it does not make them so. eg: These are reconstructed from fMRI relatively a crude. The point being science is beginning to build tools that can have insights into what we think of sentience (and consciousness)

No! That is the accepted paradigm. It is a mistake or at least misleading (frequently taught) to think of the second law in terms of order. That is an extrapolation of general relativity ... to where perhaps it is unwise to extrapolate. So what you say here is: reality could not have existed at all points in the past. Theories like the Block Universe postulate that not only all points exist in the past they exist in the future too. Of course this means this theory is wrong as it means we don't have free will and if we don't have free will, then dying for our sins becomes a nonsense. And indeed if you accept everything has an antecedent cause then you were destined to write your nonsense as I am mine. And we should bear in mind the scribes who wrote the testaments could not help but write what they did. See you on the free will thread!

Beg to differ. You claim to know that the universe is staggeringly improbable. So on top of that you claim the the existence of what at first glance would be an even more staggeringly improbable deity. An intelligent six year old, would understand that the universe exists and would not make up stories about how it came into existence. An intelligent six-year-old when asked how the universe come into existence would answer "I don't know."

And you are ascribing an integrity to your capacity to evaluate the data 2000 y after the fact. Not if one takes an agnostic stance ... it simply results in a lack of belief. You might see it as a red herring and yet over 74 million people voted for Trump and perhaps even believed in him to some extent. My point is perhaps 40 y after the death the scribes were also conned. Why were the apocrypha suppressed? Why is there so little written about this in the contemporary documentation? Perhaps it just was not important enough?

Although I can't call myself an engineer, I do have a PhD from an engineering university department ... I find the teleological argument a nonsense. An intelligent six year old could argue sensibly against it. The fact the universe exists in all its complexity is a fact (as facts go). Then suggesting a god did because you have insufficient intelligence to envisage how a universe might have come into existence spontaneously is an argument from incredulity. I am agnostic on the matter. Having said that the the chances of it being a Christian god creating the universe I find to be outrageously unlikely ... to the point I am an atheist to the concept of a Christian god ... I would give Zeus similar odds.

No it is not a reasonable conjecture. Take a look at the antics of the fake news provocateurs back in January. Anti vaxxers, flat Earthers. There have been really nice people on this very website taken in by Trump lies and this is over the last five years. So your forty years, over several languages Aramaic, Judean, and possibly Greek holds no sway. The fact that scribes could copy accurately is neither here nor there. The question is what they wrote down how believable was it? What was their motivation? What was their capacity to evaluate what they were writing down? So your reasonableness fails. While I am not overly familiar with the Rosetta Stone ... it works. It's like an engineer's handbook, for the most part it works. Bible stories ... not so much.

Are you conjecturing 2000 years after the fact that the authors were reliable?

For me ... Rex Wyler, put his journalistic/investigative talents to good use in the Jesus Sayings NO! What we have is a book (set of) largely anonymous authors claiming pharisees heard him say it. Your argument begs the question I am afraid. Also I would be careful not to conflate the myth of Christ with the historical Jesus.