Collins: How a scientist can believe in God

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A_Wanderer said:

Humans are animals, sentient and intelligent to be sure but still animals; imbuing us with innate moral goodness doens't make it so.

Exactly what is the evolutionary advantage of possessing a conscience. How are morality based decisions any better for a species than those reached by the tried and true and uncomplicated reason of instinct?
 
Mindlessly killing another member of the tribe would be a disadvantage, having an emotional reaction against such behaviour would prevent that and enhance the ability of the tribe to cooperate. There are plenty of other animals that have cooperative strategies.
 
So believing that there is a God, a creator that created us in his image with the same sense of morals and feelings and goodness and love is farfetched

and this is the best argument you can come up to convince me is this....

think that there we are hard wired to empathise and care in certain situations, I think that this reflects an evolutionary product of our ancestors social groups. It is advantageous for a tribe or pack to look out for eachother, especially when the others share a good proportion of genetic material.

I am sorry but it just does not convince me.

Our morals, are feelings and need to be loved, to be needed and to be wanted, the feeling of uniqueness and individuality we all have set us far apart from animals and to claim it is some hardwired fluke of evolution seems more fantastic to me than the fact that perhaps we were made that way intentionly for a purpose so we could co exist together because thats what we were put on earth to do,

I do not believe you can brush a sense of justice and a sense of what is right or wrong and the very act of being able to love someone as something that evolution suddenly decided made us able to survive longer, because it involves more than that

Maybe you can see it from a clinical scientific view only, and I get it from a whole different perspective that I have lived my life and experienced a lot and seen a lot of things go on around me personally and from a worldwide viewpoint



but if evolution is responsible for the situation we are in now well it sure messed up because humans are the ones destroying the planet. Wonder why it give us higher thinking power and more abilities than our animal ancestors just so we can wipe them and ourselves out?

The majority of the times when animals kill its for food and there is a certain balance.

When men kill its for a whole different reason. usually power greed hatred, things animals are incapable of feeling which makes us different than them again.

and though animals kill each other why hasnt evolution give them this same sense of moral protectivness?
the funny thing is animals never wipe each other out to the point of extinction only humans have managing that job.

To try and tell me the abhorrence I feel for seeing my fellow man slaughter each other senselessly as well as destroying the animal life around them, is down to some trick of evolutionary survival doesn't work for me

It's something much more than that. And whether you are an atheist or a religous person doesnt really matter because even if you don't believe in God you are still endowed with his qualites because thats the way we were made

I believe Love and life are not an accident.. it is a gift, how we choose to use it is up to us


Maybe it is not very a very scientific or scholarly viewpoint, but perhaps I am just looking at it as a humble human being who has feelings, and I don't feel I need a scientific excuse to have them or explain them away

And I am not a person who accepts the first thing she is told easily, just because it makes me feel better, that is not the reason I believe in God,

he give us the ability to use our brains to think and to work things out and to question everything around us, to find satisfying answers that make sense,

but it all comes down to what you are looking for, some of us are satisfied with our lives and that this is all their is, because that is all they want so don't want to look any further

Others want to believe they are soley responsible for themselves and don't have to answer to a highter power so choose to go that path

There are hundreds of different religions and philosphical ideas to satisfy everyones needs and fancies so they choose the ones that suit them and their lifestyle

I discovered God chooses who he will reveal himself to, it will most likely not be the high minded or the brilliant brains in the world, because his motivation is not to prove his existence, but to draw us into a close lovng relationship with him, which is far more important to him.

Once more he give us the free will to accept or reject it, he has no desire to force his will upon us because he wants our motivation to be out of love

Oh thats how I turned from being an athiest myself and even though I didn't believe in God I didn't drink, smoke, or swear I hated cruelty to animals, and could never hurt anyone so I had high morals, and I was not a bad person who suddenly seen the error of my ways because I was scared of buringing in some hell forever. I despised religion because I seen the trouble it caused

I scorned people who believed in God as weakminded because they couldnt accept death was just the end and needed some crutch or some higher power to turn to so i wasn.t looking for God

And when I started studying the bible it was to prove it wrong, but suddenly it was the only thing that made sense .. so there is irony for you

and I discovered much to my surprise that even if religions were bad that did not mean that God was or that he approved of the way they behaved and in the end they also had to answer to him, so I could not judge him on the way they acted

So yeah I believe God exists and I don't care if science can prove it or not, I have seen enough evidence with my own eyes to prove it to the point I can't deny it and I don't care if people think I am foolish, in fact I don't expect anything else, when the bible itself says the world and the people in it would become more Godless.

So all you athiest out there wanting to do away with religion and God.. in a weird way you are proving the bible right and only convincing me more that God know what he is talking about

And for all you people who ask if God exists well why isnt God doing something about the awful things going on in the world, he is

but I got to go to bed now and I have rambled on enough
night all
 
God explains perfection; in nature this is half the story as imperfection rules; look at the appendix in humans. In morality it is much more philisophically problematic, if there is an inherently good guiding force outside individuals then every murder, rape, genocide and war is the product of people deliberately resisting that innate moral goodness and making a choice for evil - or that this higher power saw fit to enable such evil with cause (Jihad anyone?). This is opposed to the other option that every person is capable of surrendering to base instincts if they have to and we have the capacity to not empathise; if we dehumanise the target of our violence we are capable of doing anything, we cease feeling anything but routine towards such violence. This is not to say that we are all killers, just that when we commit acts of violence and violate basic social norms the crisis of concience is not coming from above but within.

Now love is a great example of biology at work, it bonds people together; without these secretions mothers would have no compulsion to care for their young (a very important mammalian feature that is seen in the most ancient groups), friendships couldn't form, there could be no long term social groups - as the materialistic nature of these feelings is unravelled (the big O - oxytocin) I think there is less room to say that all that pleasure, warmth and love that most all people are capable of feeling is the product of an outside God any more than we could say that God controls a womans oestrogen levels.

We are social animals; our young need years of raising, we have the capacity to see and recognise expressions, to speak and to build elaborate social networks - all of these abilities are reinforced by the way that our brains work and our brains work that way because if they didn't then we couldn't function in social groups.

I have no desire to do away with religion, thats peoples prerogative and their right - but by the same token the right to not believe is just as protected and to vocally advocate it at the expense of theism is just as legitimate as any evangelism.
 
I think that the question of "why" rights are important in the absence of divinity requires clarification because it is thought provoking.

At base level I think that sentience and intelligence put people as equals in some respect, I am not sure if it is arbitrary because it needs definition - one that I don't think is adequately explained as in Gods image. I certainly would consider an artificial intelligence to be on par with a human and deserving of those same sorts of rights and liberties.

The second line of thoughts is society being the sum of human interaction, that our interacting in sociery and with other people is based on the understanding that we will not be harmed unless we harm other people; that it is our individual desire for self-preservation that is the engine of social systems. But to argue that rights exist due to society and society is the reason that rights need to exist is circular logic.

In the absence of any outside power we have consensual interactions with mutually recognised terms; ones that occur every day between innumerably more people than the dozen relatives that our homonid ancestors lived and died with millions of years ago.

The rights we have are not guaranteed by universal law but mutual agreement. I am not flummoxed at the question and the fact that I have had to think about it rigorously is not as much a problem for me and my arguments as much as it is to those who freely put rights and liberties as divine and not give it a second thought.

To suggest that the force for good behaviour is as real as the force of gravity is to suggest that 50% of the time an object will fall upwards - since the force for good seems to operate with different results every time. Not to mention the absence of any decent explanation for the mechanism of it, the mediator particle for this "good" etc.
 
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I should also make a point that taking people today and looking at something as complicated as intelligence or concience which we do not have a definitive and unifying scientific theory for and treating them as single traits with either definitely positive or definitely negative for the purposes of natural selection is a bad way to look at it.

The big guns will be coming when there is a proper theory of the mind that can put speculations to the test.
 
dazzlingamy said:

A lot of religious people make the argument (including here in FYM) that atheist are not moral seeing we have no "moral code" to abide by unlike religious people who have their scriptures etc to follow.

Well, I'm a religious person and I would never make that argument. I know many moral atheists and many immoral believers.

dazzlingamy said:
Because we have no higher power telling us what to do, instead we CHOOSE to act moral?

Well, whose to say that a believer doesn't ALSO choose to act morally. It's a bit of a mischaracterization to suggest that those of us who believe in God, only live moral or ethical lives because God tells us to.

Much as you, as an atheist, hate to be diminished to this "amoral" person, I, as a believer, hate to be diminished to a person who is unable to distinguish between right and wrong unless it's spelled out for me by my religion.

When it comes to the atheist and the believer, the only difference is in where they believe their innate sense of right and wrong comes from. Those who believe in God, believe it orginates with Him, those who do not believe in God believe it orignates within humanity. But both CHOOSE to act morally (or not).

And it's the "or not" that really interests me. . .
 
A_Wanderer said:
God explains perfection

No. God addresses imperfection. A big part of what religion attempts to do is to try explain or understand imperfection, the failure of the system, not the success. God addresses the immorality in humanity, not humanity's "innate moral code" or even Absolute Moral Truth.

After that C.S. Lewis quote Indy mentioned, Lewis goes on to talk about how even though we all have this basic sense of how we ought to be, we also seem to be failing to live up to it.

When I look at the world, I see a human animal that has a very clear self-destructive streak. My faith tackles not the question of why people are good, but why people--against all reason, against all common good, against all preservation of the species--can be so bad. And it addresses how this disconnect can be resolved.
 
A_Wanderer said:
I should also make a point that taking people today and looking at something as complicated as intelligence or concience which we do not have a definitive and unifying scientific theory for and treating them as single traits with either definitely positive or definitely negative for the purposes of natural selection is a bad way to look at it.

The big guns will be coming when there is a proper theory of the mind that can put speculations to the test.

Anatomy can hint as to where a conscience may lay, the cerebral cortex. Neuroscience, how it works, synaptic transmission. Granted, today we know much about the brain of man...but the mind of man, that's still a big mystery isn't it?

Materialists may reject dualism and holdout for future scientific enlightenment, but I find the theological rationale for a conscience in man much more plausible than any evolutionary or sociological explanation I've heard. If Man is truly created in God's image, than he is a moral creature. In addition, on some level we should be able to understand Him. Not fully, but on some level. The conscience is that voice in all of us.
 
We are material beings, biological entities, and like everything else products of how matter and energy interact in the universe - we can reduce our function to individual parts and explain it through scientific investigation; see things as they are which is more plausible than any supernatural explanation which by definition can't exist in the real world.
 
A_Wanderer said:

To suggest that the force for good behaviour is as real as the force of gravity is to suggest that 50% of the time an object will fall upwards - since the force for good seems to operate with different results every time. Not to mention the absence of any decent explanation for the mechanism of it, the mediator particle for this "good" etc.

Again, the difference being that man has been given freewill to obey or disobey. Rocks, not so much.

I don't expect to ever find a "God wavelength" to scientifically explain the conscience or prayer. I don't even understand how I can talk to myself, but I can.
 
Prayer has been debunked repeatedly in studies; statistically it doesn't help to have somebody praying for you any more than not praying for you.

Concience is again a function of the human mind, which in principle is reducable and explainable.
 
A_Wanderer said:
We are material beings, biological entities, and like everything else products of how matter and energy interact in the universe - we can reduce our function to individual parts and explain it through scientific investigation; see things as they are which is more plausible than any supernatural explanation which by definition can't exist in the real world.

" than any supernatural explanation which by definition can't exist in the real world."

Well that's a rather monopolistic position. Only science -- founded in materialist premises -- using evolution and mind-science -- can explain the nature of man. And nothing else.

And someone will have to explain to me how we can have "real" morals without a moral absolute. Or how man, a finite creature could set such an absolute?
 
But we don't have absolute morals since people are capable of most abhorrent behaviour, and there is no such thing as magic in the real world; no ESP to God; no conciousness after brain death.

The philisophical loophole of free will may give an illusion of infalible truth to a believer but to the outside observer it seems quite an ad hoc answer to a fundamental flaw.

There is no solid evidence for the God solution, for that reason I don't see why it should be put up on the same level as observable facts.
 
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A_Wanderer said:
But we don't have absolute morals since people are capable of most abhorrent behaviour, and there is no such thing as magic in the real world; no ESP to God; no conciousness after brain death.

The philisophical loophole of free will may give an illusion of infalible truth to a believer but to the outside observer it seems quite an ad hoc answer to a fundamental flaw.

There is no solid evidence for the God solution, for that reason I don't see why it should be put up on the same level as observable facts.


Would a million people starting the 2+2=5 club make the mathematical law of addition any less real? And wouldn't it take an absolute 2+2=4 (anytime, anywhere), to prove them wrong?

Moral Law is less clear only because man lives in a confused state.

And you're right, there is no such thing as magic in the real world. (Ever hear of a chap named James Randi? The best debunker around.) There is, however, a supernatural world. That's why no x-ray or surgeon's scalpel will ever find the human soul. It's not of this world.
 
A_Wanderer said:
It doesn't exist, it's make believe.

A_Wanderer ain't got soul?

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