Any creationists here ?

You know how big of a shitstorm that would create.

Parents freaking that their christian child has to listen to other religions being taught in addition to their own beliefs. Then the kids with rock hard religious views thanks to their parents brainwashing yelling at other kids. Then everyone yelling and getting pissed.

Actually fuck it, this sounds like my kind of class
 
All of you creationist followers are just looking at things the wrong way...

In general there are two ways of looking at what goes on in the world around us. In the more familiar, which derives from the cultural heritage of the Judeo-Christian and Graeco-Roman traditions within which modern science is done, the world is composed of isolable entities – electrons, or atoms, or molecules, or organisms, or tables and chairs – which possess discrete properties and interact with one another according to definable laws. In the second, less familiar view, the world is one of continuous process, out of which transitory entities occasionally crystallize… This latter way of conceptualizing the world is perhaps more akin to non-Western philosophical traditions, such as those of India and China. For most of the past hundred years, theorists have had to come to terms with such a world-view, for instance when they alternate between treating light as a stream of particles and as a wave, or when their mathematical symbolism demands that they speak of magnetic or gravitational fields. Many of the problems in the biological sciences derive from the cultural difficulty we [in the West] have in perceiving a world of fields and processes rather than of objects and properties.

-- Steven Rose

 
The Argument From Design is often stated by analogy, in the so-called Watchmaker Argument. One is asked to imagine that one has found a watch on the beach. Does one assume that it was created by a watchmaker, or that it evolved naturally? Of course one assumes a watchmaker. Yet like the watch, the universe is intricate and complex; so, the argument goes, the universe too must have a creator. The Watchmaker analogy suffers from three particular flaws, over and above those common to all Arguments By Design. Firstly, a watchmaker creates watches from pre-existing materials, whereas God is claimed to have created the universe from nothing. These two sorts of creation are clearly fundamentally different, and the analogy is therefore rather weak. Secondly, a watchmaker makes watches, but there are many other things in the world. If we walked further along the beach and found a nuclear reactor, we wouldn't assume it was created by the watchmaker. The argument would therefore suggest a multitude of creators, each responsible for a different part of creation (or a different universe, if you allow the possibility that there might be more than one). Finally, in the first part of the watchmaker argument we conclude that the watch is not part of nature because it is ordered, and therefore stands out from the randomness of nature. Yet in the second part of the argument, we start from the position that the universe is obviously not random, but shows elements of order. The Watchmaker argument is thus internally inconsistent. Apart from logical inconsistencies in the watchmaker argument, it's worth pointing out that biological systems and mechanical systems behave very differently. What's unlikely for a pile of gears is not necessarily unlikely for a mixture of biological molecules. I rest my case...
 
The watchmaker analogy is simplistic and somewhat flawed device used primarily for the purpose of demonstrating one of the arguments for creationism, and could be regarded as an intuition pump. The analogy is flawed which makes it relatively easy to dissect and disprove logically as you have done, however the main premise, not its inner workings is what's at issue here. The watchmaker analogy exists to call into question the immense unlikelihood of our own existence, and life as a whole, and suggests that something, more like a mind than it is anything else we know, is behind it, as opposed to random chance.

 
70,000 million million million stars. If you figure that each star has at least one planet, thats a hell of a lot of chances for life. Is the probability of primordial chemicals forming into a very basic organism so very low that given 70,000,000,000,000 chances it doesn't happen? And if it is indeed so incredibly difficult for a conscious mind to form on its own, how did an omnipotent conciousness come about? Having trouble answering that? Its because it didn't...
The universe is 70,000 million million million times bigger than us and 90% of us humans are so arrogant as to believe that a god created it either for us, or after having created such a masterful universe, decided to toss a few humans on a tiny speck of dust called earth. I honestly don't understand how theists can think that.
 
I know arguing on the internet is pointless, but here it goes since you seem to be making quite a few absolute statements about things which cannot be answered in any definite way, and that neither you nor I have even the slightest hope of ever understanding properly. Since you disproved the watch analogy by picking it apart into little bits and falsifying them, I'll do the same.

Firstly, you state that there are millions of stars, and a lot of chances for life out there. I agree, I did not state otherwise.

Secondly you ask how an omnipotent consciousness came about. I do have trouble answering that, in fact I have absolutely no idea how an omnipotent consciousness could come about. How did something occur from nothing? I also have no idea, I just know that it did, as I exist, and so do you. The question of whether all these millions and millions of stars and life forms came about by random chance, or by something closer to a mind than it is to anything else, is not a scientific one.

Thirdly, the universe is significantly larger than 70 million million million million times our size.

Fourth, I do not know where you got the 90% statistic from, but theism does not go hand in hand with arrogance. There may be arrogant theists, there may be humble theists, but keeping an open mind to the possibility that we are something more than a mechanical dance of atoms is not something I would consider arrogant. I would consider you claiming to know with certainty that theism is wrong, that god does not exist, and that the hundreds of millions of theists around the world are faulty in their beliefs to fall under the category of arrogance however.

Lastly, I do not understand why our relatively small size in the universe compares directly to our relative worth. Personally I would consider a single human life to be infinitely more important than an entire lifeless galaxy of stars and planets. Perhaps that is arrogance, however I will never place the value of an object, no matter how large, over the value of life.
 
day-1-create-light-day-4-create-light-source.jpg
 
its a logic one though. i would prefer that we all came from nothing instead of one omnipotent creator being created from nothing and then he created us.

such an unnecessary step from a logic standpoint.

think about it, if its so impossible that our life is created without design, how could an even more complex entity have been created out of nothing? doesnt make any sense.
 
IF that entity existed it would be nbd to create everything.

For us to come from solar dust that just existed in space that just existed, and magically hit each other with solar wind that existed, and after trillions of years magically formed everything we see. Um yeah sure.
 
Oh FFS, I just wrote out a reply before realising that it's really not worth getting involved. Everyone, religious or not should read some Richard Dawkins, so many of the points debated here are covered in his books more thoroughly and eloquently than anyone here can come close to.
 
Religion should not be taught in public schools and our constitution is very clear about that. Keep all your delusional beliefs to yourself people. This country was meant to be a secular state, and America has unfortunately been hijacked by the nutty, anti science, and delusional religious right. Hopefully we can regain that common sense and reason we once had during the enlightenment.
 
Compare to Finland, where we have a national religion, Evangelic Lutherians, taught in schools to every single person who is a part of the church (baptized) and yet we are one of the most atheist countries in the world.
 
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