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Religious kids believe in fantasy

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ant

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Re: Religious kids believe in fantasy

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Flann 5 wrote:Hi Ant. Maybe, but I imagine there would be an infernal infinity of gibberish there too.That might provide a clue that it was not specified information.I wouldn't want to be the proof reader!

I was being flippant, of course.

:)
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Flann 5
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Re: Religious kids believe in fantasy

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Thanks Ant.Just in case you weren't being flippant I thought I should reply. I should have known though! Is seriousness a booktalk meme?
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Re: Religious kids believe in fantasy

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The link provides only the abstract to the study, but it seems to suggest that children raised in religious families are more inclined toward magical thinking. But I would expect there to be some correlation based on genetics alone. According to another study using twins, genes account for about 40% of the variability in a person's religiousness.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7 ... 878UKippU4
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Re: Religious kids believe in fantasy

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Someone buy Interbane a sense of humor.
Sorry for being short. I don't take handmeouts though. If humor wasn't in my genetic code, I'll just have to do without.
My point about Richard Dawkin's book was not about originality.Simply that he expresses thoughts in a coded form (written language) and these are visible on physical materials,a book. In writing the above sentence I'm using information in a coded form and a specified way to convey an idea.It's not random typing of alphabetic letters.Monkeys are good at typing gibberish.It's the specified structure of the sentence and the meaning of it that should convey that it was not randomly typed by a monkey but it's an intelligible communication of someone's thought. A reasonable deduction. That's Lennox's point. D.n.a is coded specified information. What the monkey types is random.What Dawkin's book contains is a hell of a lot of coded information. The message is way more than the medium.
The message is way more than the medium. DNA is unique in that it has arisen through physical processes, starting with information so simple that it could barely be called information. Start with a one. Add a zero to get 10. Add another one to get 101. Over time, the information accumulates. The random string of bits is slowly filtered out, what dies is lost and what lives continues. Rinse and repeat for billions of years and you get sentient creatures capable of the same sort of informational evolution, but intentional rather than through the processes of physics.

What information did ancient tribesfolk have? Verbal utterances similar to any animal we see nowadays? Such primitive information has grown over time to be more than any single person could hope to handle in 70 years of erudite life.
In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.” - Douglas Adams
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Flann 5
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Re: Religious kids believe in fantasy

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It's an unvarying observable fact that life comes from life.You can believe that the vast complex ordered universe somehow created itself and this was entirely undirected.That life arose essentially accidentally culminating in living thinking purposeful beings.All you need is aeons of time apparently.Blind purposeless forces made rational thinking purposeful beings, accidentally.
Alternatively, that an intelligent purposeful creator made all things.We are told that the appearance of design is an illusion.The complex biological systems of the body,brain etc were unintended and not designed by anyone.Accident and increment explains all.The complex systems themselves are real,not illusion. That they may have been intended and designed though is false apparently.There was no thought or purpose behind them.Those who believe in an omnipotent creator are deluded.
Evolutionary theory explains all things.I should be more grateful to Charles Darwin the great demystifier. Where would we be without him?
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Re: Religious kids believe in fantasy

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It's an unvarying observable fact that life comes from life.
Which is why it makes abiogenesis so difficult to understand and believe, as if it's wishful thinking rather than actual science. You're looking at it from the big picture backwards, where the only way to understand it is from the small bits moving forward.
Alternatively, that an intelligent purposeful creator made all things.
And yet, that answer is merely a placeholder for ignorance Flann. What would you answer if I asked how such an intelligent could exist outside of a physical framework, when it's an unvarying observable fact that intelligences only exist within a physical framework? Or if I asked what came before the intelligence, or gave rise to it? Or how could it be so old to have created Earth, if it's an unwavering observable fact that intelligences do not live that long? Or if it was infinite, what was the intelligence processing for infinite years in boredom? Could you imagine an infinite number of years thinking your own thoughts. How silly! Or why would it bother to create life, if a process such as abiogenesis could do the trick, when all it had to do was set the laws of physics in motion and step back? If this intelligence is hiding behind the scenes watching, why doesn't he make himself known? Is he a master player of games, hiding himself just enough so that people such as myself see no evidence of him, thus are damned to an eternity in hell, or to come up with other answers? If this entity is nonphysical, how does it "see" or "hear"? Is it magic/god's will/? How does it interact with the physical world to make changes? How does it see into the heads of people who pray? Is there a body, or only a nonlocalized area where the intelligence resides?

Your only answer is a complex utterance that boils down to "I don't know", that you believe is justified by a faith based axiom that knowing is impossible. How can that satisfy you, especially when there are physical mechanisms that are the answers to most all questions, if you simply learn more about them?

Evolutionary theory explains all things.I should be more grateful to Charles Darwin the great demystifier. Where would we be without him?
Evolutionary theory does not explain abiogenesis or the rise of consciousness. Those are separate issues, I think. What Charles Darwin envisioned wasn't the way evolution actually works, either. We're just dwarfs standing on his shoulders, even as he himself was a dwarf.
In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.” - Douglas Adams
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Re: Religious kids believe in fantasy

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Flann:
It's an unvarying observable fact that life comes from life.
But does it? Life is made entirely of non-life. What are you made of? Mostly water and carbon. The carbon in your body is made of exactly the same material as the carbon in a pencil. And the electrons which hold your body together are the same as those that hold together a gortex boot. What sustains us? We have to eat other animals. But other animals have eaten plants. And plants get their sustenance from the rays of the sun. Non-life.

And there are things which behave much like life, but are not yet quite living. Like viruses, and the even more bizarre, prions. The division between life and non life is not as cut and dry as you might assume.

It is an unvarying observed fact that we are made of atoms, and life is just one way for atoms to rattle around. We are a self-sustaining chemical reaction that seeks out new material to combust into heat energy in our digestive systems.

That life arose essentially accidentally culminating in living thinking purposeful beings.All you need is aeons of time apparently.Blind purposeless forces made rational thinking purposeful beings, accidentally.
This isn’t quite right.

Random accidents play an important part, but much more important, and usually overlooked is the fact of natural selection. Natural selection is the guiding barriers that shape life into what it is. The environment changes and things that cannot survive in the environment die off, while others thrive. The fact of their presence in that environment is yet another element of the environment that OTHER animals will be shaped by.

So take the example of the nut-cracking beaks of some birds. Random mutation changes the beak. Some beaks get weaker, some are more or less the same, and some are just a bit better. This is random. What is not at all random is that strong beaks are better at breaking nuts open than weak beaks. So it isn’t arbitrary that birds that eat nuts will grow to have better and better nut-cracking beaks.

This is what I was talking about in my previous post about the infinite monkeys at keyboards example. If all you have at work is pure random chance, an infinite amount of monkeys with an infinite number of keyboards and an infinite amount of time will write the complete works of all of Shakespeare. But to do it, this set up REQUIRES infinity. On the other hand if you have a selective force, as outlined in that link I sent, or as seen in the real world in natural selection, you don’t need an infinite amount of time. In fact, you can get VERY complex information very quickly.

Natural selection holds onto what survives. So the next generation will have that to build off of. To be clear. This is NOT a process of purely random accidental success.

We are told that the appearance of design is an illusion.
Design is not an illusion, exactly. It just wasn’t intended by any intelligence. Strong beaks are strong because they evolved along side nuts that got harder and harder to crack, in order to protect against strong beaks which were getting stronger and better at cracking nuts! As nuts get stronger, weak beaks die off, or pursue other prey. As beaks get stronger, weak nuts are consumed into extinction. So there is a push towards strong beaks and strong nuts in general. They are guiding the evolution of each other. Things are the way they are for the purpose of how they are used, but nobody decided that there ought to be birds with strong beaks and plants with tough shells.
The complex biological systems of the body,brain etc were unintended and not designed by anyone.Accident and increment explains all.
Correct. As long as you add in that a selective pressure needs to be present. That’s the part that moulds randomness into coherence.
The complex systems themselves are real,not illusion.
Yes.
That they may have been intended and designed though is false apparently.There was no thought or purpose behind them.
There was no thought… but there was a use. Purpose comes with baggage associated with a guiding intelligence. The course of evolution does not plan ahead. That’s why so many animals are extinct. If whales had always been intended to live in the water, why on earth would they breath air? Because there was no forward thought process. No “destination” in mind from the outset.

Those who believe in an omnipotent creator are deluded.
Deluded? Some maybe. I tend to think believers haven’t really explored the information that well. They’ve already been told what the answer is by their family: God did it. So they think they know that going into the discussion. So, any new information runs into this barrier in the mind. Always looking for something to grab hold of which will scream to them, “this is not true”. They expect to find these issues with scientific theories and when they run across something they haven’t quite understood, they think the inconsistency they see in the idea is a fault of the idea, when usually it’s their own misunderstanding of the material.

For instance, you have emphasized randomness quite heavily in your post. This tells me you haven’t got hold of evolution very well. This is not a problem really. You have as much time as you’d like to investigate the truth of evolution. Who could blame you for not knowing what you don’t know?

The problem arises, and delusion sets in, when the truth is set in front of people in coherent form, and it is ignored for no other reason than that people would simply PREFER to believe otherwise.

Evolutionary theory explains all things.I should be more grateful to Charles Darwin the great demystifier. Where would we be without him?
We would very likely have discovered the truth of natural selection without Charles Darwin, but who knows when that would have happened? A year after he published? Thirty years? But the good thing about the truth is that it is out there for the finding, and it doesn’t require any particular investigator. It only requires investigation, and the honesty to follow the clues where they lead you.
In the absence of God, I found Man.
-Guillermo Del Torro

Are you pushing your own short comings on us and safely hating them from a distance?

Is this the virtue of faith? To never change your mind: especially when you should?

Young Earth Creationists take offense at the idea that we have a common heritage with other animals. Why is being the descendant of a mud golem any better?
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Re: Religious kids believe in fantasy

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I think we understand that the problem is explaining complex things.The evolutionist resolves this by saying it happens in baby steps from simple to complex.When we look at complex systems such as human biological ones it looks extremely purposeful and designed to function as it does.The more complex the more this is so.The evolutionist is convinced that what evidence is there supports their interpretation.
Those who do not accept this, find problems with the evolutionary explanation albeit it is very widely accepted in the scientific world.Problems like the fossil record,the origin of life and of it's code
.Interbane states flatly that Lennox is wrong in his analogy of Richard Dawkin's book and the genetic code.And at the risk of being tediously repetitive,Lennox sums it up succintly in saying Dawkins position is that mind(human) and life comes from matter whereas Lennox says matter, life and it's code come from mind in the first place.Hence the analogy.This is the key issue really.Interbane says no,and resolves it to his satisfaction by postulating baby step information.As a professor of mathematics and history of science, I'm sure Lennox would have something to say in response to Interbane on this point.As an ordinary layman I'm not sure what that is.People like Stephen Meyer debate these things in a more knowledgeable way than I could.Suffice to say they would take issue with Interbane's baby step solution.

Ultimately,extremely complex systems look purposeful and designed in their working yet we are to believe they came from a non thinking purposeless source.The complex biological systems in our bodies function as though coordinated so we can live and function.We know that in our world complex systems like computer programs don't arrive by chance nor do complex technologies.This is essentially Paley's watch argument but it is true to our experience of things.
Last edited by Flann 5 on Wed Jul 23, 2014 6:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Religious kids believe in fantasy

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No doubt Lennox is a smart guy, but just listen to the last few minutes of his debate with Dawkins. Lennox's arguments are no stronger than your average preacher.

Dawkins sums it up nicely at the end.

http://youtu.be/qgREBxRUb0Q?t=1h34m5s
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Re: Religious kids believe in fantasy

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Hercules, Attis, Mithras... that's all mythology, those guys weren't real

but Jesus is real m'kay

Superman, Spiderman... those guys are fictional stories to inspire us... but Jesus is real, right?

dey terk ooor Jaysus :-D

Archetypes are archetypes, prince valiant, ebenezer scrooge, judas, john, christ, the devil... all archetypes

the kingdom is within

NOOOO!!!! not Jesus, Jesus is real m'kay :roll:

but christians don't have any problem differentiating, it's just that they can't tell the difference between an archetype and an historical figure.

and sad to say, it ain't just the christians with a problem there.

also it is tragic to see the stultifying effect of orthodox doctrine on what would otherwise be freer minds.

and always remember
Jesus wrote:I told you that you would die in your sins, for unless you believe that I am he you will die in your sins.
yeah right, fuck off Jesus :lol: and take that whinging bitch Satan with you :)
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