Evolution leading to complex organisms is at least tricky to understand . How about the idiots who, for example, think Bush is comparable to Hitler? That's just as stupid as not believing in evolution, or believing the earth is flat, or whatever. We're surrounded every day by idiots who believe in bizarre things.

What I find amusing about that article I liked above, though, is the guy is teaching kids to doubt evolution on the basis that they weren't there to see it. Is that what he really wants to be teaching the kids? To doubt what they can't see for themselves? :D

1. The creation of life
2. The absorption of mitochondria into eukaryotes
3. The absorption of chloroplasts into plant cells

Why do most of the Christian holidays coincide exactly with pagan holidays that are centuries older?

What better way to convert people than offer them alternative holidays so that instead of studying both the pagan version and the Christian version, they have to either merge them or choose one over the other? This page [about.com] offers some details. Be careful of criticizing something that you haven't researched (I found the site I just linked to by clicking on the first link of Google results with criteria "pagan christian holiday").

If you say something to yourself similar to, "Obviously that part was allegory," then you have no leg to stand on. Either every single thing in it is literal (and the earth has four corners) or everything must be interpreted. Once everything must be interpreted, you cannot claim any sort of non-relativism.

Have you ever heard of the literary device hyperbole? In any given literary work, not every word is to be taken "literally"; one must understand the word in context. Moreover, when reading interpreted works like the Bible, one must understand not only textual context, but cultural context. You make things out to be a lot simpler than they are, which leads me to believe that you're acting like stereotypical Creationists in spewing out the same thing over and over again.

I'm not even sure what you mean by relativism; I would call it the search for truth and claim that absolute truth exists (you cannot deny that absolute truth exists for everyone, only that it does not exist for you given your worldview). If you speak of "what's true for me isn't necessarily true for you," then great, are you going to violate the law set down by your country because it isn't true for you? I would try questioning more important things, like whether Christ died or just swooned; here is where you get into theologically imporant material. However, do your homework before you start making ignorant comments about it.

Unfortuantely, this idea of a "hidden determinism" is simply logically impossible, given what we currently know about quantum mechanics. Hidden variables simply don't work. And if you believe God can do the logically impossible, then there's really no reason to debate further, since you can literally believe anything.

But for those who believe that God, if he exists, must be constrained by logic, then hidden variable determinism is simply not possible.

2) God could act via influencing things in ways that, due to quantum outcomes, would indeed be like magic to us, and undetectable or testable (hence we can still believe in a God that does miracles)

Again, see above, but I suppose if one believes God's own actions are not deterministic, then he could influence everything via QM. But it's unclear how God could actually achieve any particular outcome; ultimately he'd be violating statistical properties that could be measured with enough sensitivity. But if we're talking about very small changes over eons, then it might be impossible to distinguish a God-influenced universe from simply a "luckier" one. See the Anthropic Principle for more thoughts along these lines. :)

3) Evolution itself has plenty of room for a valid new theology based on the idea that God would WANT life to be free of God's direct design. This is known as "liberation theology" and though many Catholics disdain it, it's perfectly plausible.

Actually, I don't think you meant "liberation" or "libertarian" theology, but simply so-called "liberal" theology, which is more of a fuzzy notion about God and theology where every viewpoint is potentially valid and all persons must engage in their own spiritual journey to find truths they and their community find seem to work for them within the context in which they live. In some ways, it's Protestantism to the extreme, although the irony is that modern Christian fundamentalism has Protestant roots, where the authority of the majority simply substitutes for that of the Pope when interpreting scripture. But I digress...

To get back to the notion that God has a teleological purpose in mind for man, well, I'm sure you know that's well-explored territory in postmodern Christianity (a form of liberal theology itself). But I feel it necessary to point out the conflict between God's omnipotence, Free Will, and the Existance of Evil. Unless one believes in the Actual Choice conception of Free Will (which seems unpalatable, if not illogical), then one of the above three has to give, and we know it's not Evil. And given that Free Will is an essential element to Liberal theology, it would seem that God's omnipotence, even within the logical realm, must be discarded, and in that case one has to question just to what extent God can influence the universe teleologically.

In retrospect, I got way more out of the Philosophy of Religion classes in college than I did from Calculus...

Bruce

Remember, according to evolutionary theory, the life events of an individual are irrelevent.All that matters is whether it produces offspring (also some evolutionary advantage to protecting close relatives, but even that can be simulated quite easily), and supposedly the mechanism is crossover and mutation, ie in a GA, life experience is equivalent to the evaluation function.

My argument is that the Christianity, with the rest of the world has changed in the past few centuries, but that an abnormally large number of Muslim extremists have not also changed. As you consider the state of the world right now and going forward, I believe my statement is accurate.

Even in the last decades we have nice things like the Irish civil war (or struggle for freedom or terrorism) and the Basque civil war (or struggle for freedom or terrorism). It the very recent past we do have:

• Hutu vs. Tutsi (Same language, same religion for both sides)
• Serbs vs. Croats (Christians between each other, mostly)
• Serbs vs. Bosnians (aggressors are Christian)

As to whether I personally believe that God took chromosomes 2 and 3 from the pongoid apes and caused a "transcription error" to give rise to the human karotype is completely beside the point. The real question is whether an omnipotent God could do such a thing if he wished.

As an example of such an event actually occuring, in the early 1970's there was a sheep farm run by Richard and Beryl Lanyon about 12 miles north of the town of Boort in Central Victoria Australia. They had poll dorset sheep and a few goats, including one very smelly billy goat. This goat was quite odd, as he used to chase the ewes when they were in heat.

One morning Richard was feeling a bit crook, so Beryl went out to the fields to check on the lambing. She found a few very odd looking "lambs". Back at the house she discovered that Richard had been killing these every season for the last 2 or 3 years. Beryl however insisted that these creatures be allowed to survive.

Once they grew it was pretty obvious that they were some kind of goat/sheep hybrid. The very very unusual thing was that they bred true - they were fertile, and had baby fertile geeps for progeny, and not goats and sheep or mules.

Many geneticists declared this was of course impossible and was all some kind of wierd publicity stunt, as goats and sheep have different numbers of chromosomes. In 1973 or 1974 (It was a while back...) a New Zealand researcher found that the Billy goat was a mutant and had less than the usual 60 chromosomes, and one half of its' sperm had the right number of chromosomes to combine with the ewes.

Note that there's a terribly incorrect mention of this in the Wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheep#Hybrids_with_go ats [wikipedia.org] . The fact is that for many years these creatures were kept in the local nature reserve which was a region between Lake Boort and Little Lake Boort, and contained by an irrigation channel from the Loddon Valley Irrigation Scheme. The animals were also shown at the Royal Melbourne Show in 1973 or 1974, along with the billy goat. The goat became somewhat famous as he had to be shampooed several times a day to try to contain his musk, which overpowered the already quite smelly goat shed.

I heard that Dick and Beryl eventually killed the goat and all the geeps when it was pointed out to them that they demonstrated the possibility for new species to arise via mutations. They were terribly devout and conservative baptists, although lovely people. I spent quite a lot of time living on their farm with them whilst my Mum was in hospital in 1973.

Two people in the same period of history came up with this same idea at roughly the same time. That suggests that the environment and the emerging evidence had a lot to do with it

If anything that's more true of Einstein, not less:

1. Lorentz figured out the (yep) Lorentz transformations, contractions and time dilation five years before Einstein. He didn't realize how these laws encoded the very structure of space and time, but he was pretty radical himself, proposing a universal force acting on everything causing it to transform per the equations. You could probably do a lot of relativty calculations, maybe even field theoretic calculations from that perspective without getting it too wrong.

2. two different guys wrote down E = m (c^2) before Einstein without quite knowing what it meant

3. Poincare is understood to have been only a few months away from figuring it all out when Einstein finally did. As it is he's credited with the Poincare group formalism.

4. Einstein never thought of the spacetime manifold, that was Minkowski, three years later.

5. In figuring out General Relativity, Einstein collaborated extensively with the leading mathematicians of the time. In fact, if a lot of this math had not already existed (guess who thought up Riemannian Geometry) he probably would never have got his results

6. Mach was thinking about the nature of intertia as early as 1890. Einstein himself says Mach affected him profoundly.

7. Hilbert got the field equations for GR wihin a few weeks of Einstein, not independently true, but utilizing a whole new principle. Even today Hilbert's action based derivation is probably more fruitful in trying to extend relativity to incorporate other physics.

Given Maxwell's equations (1860) and the null result of Michelson and Morley (1885) it's pretty clear someone's going to come up with relativity - the miracle is that one person had so much to do with it, and did it so quickly. But I doubt any physicist really thinks no-one would've figured out relativity without Einstein, say by 1930-5. Just accounting for the muon decay data would've been hard enough without.

In fact, in physics lore quantum mechanics is often held up as an example of what might have happened with relativity without Einstein - a collaboration of less brilliant minds figures it out anyway. I mean, most physicists would agree that quantum mechanics and field theory, not relativity, are the crowning achievements of 20th century physics, and while there is no one person of Einstein's brilliance associated with them there are say fifteen or twenty quite brilliant physicists (Schrodinger and Dirac and Heisenberg and Pauli and Fermi and Yukawa and Feynman and Schwinger and Gell Mann and ...) doing their work. The bottleneck is not so much "the brilliant person" as "something to be brilliant about"

Similar things can be said about Newton and Kepler / Galileo / Liebnitz / Hooke / Descartes / Copernicus. That stuff about standing on the shoulders of giants isn't merely faux modesty. It really is true. Very rarely does science proceed via one person singlehandedly doing things no one else is even thinking about, and when this happens that one person is often ignored till everyone else gets the point. Consider Boltzmann or Mendeleev or Mendel.

And comparing Darwin to Hawking is a joke. I'd say Hawking isn't even one of the *twenty* greatest physicists of the 20th century, which isn't to say he isn't great, just not up there, certainly not with Darwin.

Sagan's story shows that he should have stuck to cosmology, since he had no training in the philosophy of religion. The matter of God has little to do with the assertion that "there's something in my garage", and really starts from the idea "there's a universe, could there be a first cause?" Natural evidence leads many to believe in a creator. I should give you some citations, so let's refer to the work of Richard Swinburne (although others, such as Plantinga, have written extensively on this). Arguments for general theism can be found in his work The Coherence of Theism [amazon.com] (Oxford University Press, 1993), but if you want a simpler explanation you could refer to his papers in Brody's Readings in the Philosophy of Religion [amazon.com] (Prentice Hall, 1992).

If God exists, then he would decide ethical rules since he is by definition the perfect being. In a world where humans have acted in against these guidelines, what are the ramifications of such these guidelines? Swinburne's Responsibility and Atonement [amazon.com] (Oxford University Press, 1989) contains the argument that if we assume the existence of God (a fait accompli for most philosophers), then the Christian doctrine of the saving death of Christ on the cross naturally follows.

If God exists and sets ethical rules, then he would naturally try to communicate these to us. There is no need to demand that he come down in a fiery flame and address the whole world at once. Rather, communication through prophets and the written word can be shown to be acceptable. See Swinburne's Revelation: From Metaphor to Analogy [amazon.com] (Oxford University Press, 1992).

The Christian doctrine of the Trinity, three Persons in one God, can also be shown to follow from the existence of a single Creator. For these arguments, see Swinburne's The Christian God [amazon.com] (Oxford University Press, 1994).

The concept of the saving death on the cross by the Son himself has already been argued by Swinburne in Responsibility and Atonement, but in The Resurrection of God Incarnate [amazon.com] (Oxford University Press, 2003) he shows that treating the evidence we have with the probability calculus (Bayesian theorem), we have yet another support.

So, as you can see, the existence of the Christian God can be deduced from natural evidence. In reality, the defence of the Christian faith has little to do with the strawman that Sagan builds up.

Only an ignorant asshole would say that science "proves" that there is no such thing as a soul. The concept of a soul is as much outside the purview of science as economics is outside the scope of evolution.

I am not so sure about that. AFAIK, a "soul" is just the non-scientific explanation of how humans think. If somebody created a program that passed the Turing test, would you say that it had a soul ? Probably not. However you couldn't convincingly say that it didn't have a soul either. Most likely such a program, if ever created (and I am not saying it is possible) would be empiric proof that a "soul" doesn't really exist, except in the sense that a soul is just an abbreviation for "human behavior".

Lets talk science fiction for a minute. It would be very interesting if after hundreds of years of studying the brain, science determined that thinking just couldn't happen in it using the known physical processes. Perhaps thinking really happens in another dimension (since our reality with its physical laws cannot support such complex behavior) and our bodies are simply remotely controlled dummies. This is somewhat similar to the religious idea of a soul, but I wouldn't say it its outside of the purview of science.