I am a dilettante - that is, I am interested in and I read about evolution and anthropology and archaeology.  Even as a very young child attending a Methodist church, I always found the stories in the bible to be entertaining - I never believed they were factual.  But this guy may be the expert you are looking for -

http://home.entouch.net/dmd/gstory.htm

Always remember, the bible was written about 900 BCE by people who were pastoralists and early agriculturalists - they didn't know about the single cell blue green algae in the pond that caused their stock to die, they had no way of conceiving of a million years let alone ~4.5 billion years, and if you tried to explain genetics, they would have been lost in the first few words.  Of course the bible is not factual.  Give the authors a break, they were first and foremost bronze/iron age goat herders.

Well, let me bounce this off the wall, and see where it lands; my wife of 25 years posited this earlier..."Do you have faith that I love you?" to which I answered (of course I answered accordingly, spare the rolling pin and spoil the cranium!) "Of course I do!"

Do I have proof that she loves me? If proof can be qualified by actions and words, then sure. Other than that, it's what I refer to as an "intangible". Love cannot be seen, touched, heard, tasted or scented. It's an emotion.

Within this same marital situation, she has faith in my fidelity. (Now there's a proposition that can sometimes be sticky!) Does she have proof of my fidelity? No. Only my word, and the fact that I'm hardly ever away from home. Of course there are indicators of that fidelity, but can they be qualified and called "proof"?

There it is, thought-candy to be consumed, parsed, and analyzed.

Good point! 

Or, there's also the possibility that it could reinforce my faith!

"A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion."

(Sir Francis Bacon)

    Welcome to the forum.  This is the Kill 'em with Kindness section, so anyone atheist or theist, that starts flinging insults or gets out of line will be removed from the thread.

However. I would like to point out, that even OUTSIDE, the Kill'em with Kindness section, most people get respect if they give respect ( just like real life).

I can safely say that the only people that I have ever seen have a problem here are the ones that start hurling insults and get extremely angry when people may hurl some back.

 I used to be very ultra-religious before a whole series of events (both intellectual and personal) lead me to no longer believe in god.

Feel free to post, chime in on ongoing discussions, or whatever else that suits you.

You may leave here an Atheist Just kidding.

If someone marries you, insists that she loves you and behaves as if she does while you see no evidence to the contrary then what more in the way of proof could you want? Not only is that proof but it's the only kind of proof there is.

Well you've said everything you needed to say and most of what I need to say.  I like how you have thought it out.  

Those indicators, like actions and words are your proof.  What actions and words do you have that we conclusively can agree are those of God?  Your actions every day prove to your wife that you are worthy of her trust that you will not cheat on her.  She doesn't have faith in your fidelity with the same standard of proof that you have faith in god.  She has a reasonable expectation of your fidelity based on experience.  

Can you name a person, place, or thing you believe in without proof of it's existence? (other than God)

Would Allah fit in as an "answer"?

Would Vishnu fit in as an "answer"?

Would Yahweh fit in as "answer"?

Or would the following fit in as an answer?

Humans have always made up god/s/supernatural/superstitions.

Out of all those claims, which one do you think has the least baggage and is most consistent with reality?

However .....http://biologos.org/questions/evolution-and-the-second-law

  "A common argument against biological evolution is that the theory contradicts the second law of thermodynamics.  The second law says that disorder, or entropy, always increases or stays the same over time.  How then can evolution produce more complex life forms over time?  The answer is that the second law is only valid in closed systems with no external sources of energy.  Since the Earth receives continual energy from the Sun, the second law does not apply.

A common argument against evolution is that the theory contradicts the Second Law of Thermodynamics that claims disorder, or entropy, always increases or stays the same over time.  This law has plenty of everyday examples. Buildings break down over time, and food spoils if not eaten soon enough.  In both cases, the amount of disorder increases with time, but the opposite is never true. Buildings don’t strengthen themselves, and no amount of waiting will cause rotten food become edible again.  But because evolution results in an increase in the order and complexity of species — which is a decrease in entropy — some critics claim evolution violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Defining the System

However, this objection is grounded in a misunderstanding of the second law, which states any isolated system will increase its total entropy over time.  An isolated system is defined as one without any outside energy input. Because the universe is an isolated system, the total disorder of the universe is always increasing.

With biological evolution however, the system being considered is not the universe, but the Earth. And the Earth is not an isolated system.  This means that an increase in order can occur on Earth as long as there is an energy input — most notably the light of the sun. Therefore, energy input from the sun could give rise to the increase in order on Earth including complex molecules and organisms.  At the same time, the sun becomes increasingly disordered as it emits energy to the Earth. Even though order may be increasing on Earth, the total order of the solar system and universe is still decreasing, and the second law is not violated.


Misapplication of The Second Law

To claim that evolution violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics is also grounded in a misunderstanding of where the law applies.  Nobody has ever figured out how to apply the second law to living creatures. There is no meaning to the entropy of a frog. The kinds of systems that can be analyzed with the second law are much simpler.

A living organism is not so much a unified whole as it is a collection of subsystems. In the development of life, for example, a major leap occurred when cells mutated in such a way that they clumped together so that multicellular life was possible.  A simple mutation allowing one cell to stick to other cells enabled a larger and more complex life form.  However, such a transformation does not violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics any more than superglue violates the law when it sticks your fingers to the kitchen counter.

There are many examples of order arising from disorder in nature. Research conducted by Ilya Prigogine¹ and others on systems far from equilibrium has shown that order can spontaneously arise in systems that are driven in the right way. It turns out that living systems are characterized as being far from equilibrium.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics also has interesting implications for cosmology, as it requires that universe began in a highly ordered state. "

Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos: Man's new dialogue with nature (New York: Bantam Books, 1984); Ilya Prigogine, End of Certainty (New York: The Free Press, 1997); Stuart Kaufman, At Home in the Universe (New York: Oxford University Press, Inc., 1995); and Christian De Duve, Vital Dust: Life as Cosmic Imperative (New York: Basic Books, 1995.

Never said or assumed it was, Brian37. I just posited that as merely one of the reasons that I tend to believe in a deity...

Of course I know the answer, because I'm comfortable enough in my own skin and with my own rationale to have already answered that with....yes. There's more than one road between here and WalMart. If some wish to refer to that outside influence as "Allah" or "Vishnu", then so be it. What matters is that they live their lives honestly, and for the betterment of all of their fellow life travellers.

No, I'm not going to toss "Pascal's Wager" into the slicer-dicer here, most have already parsed and responded to it.

Before I continue, I have to apologise for the pile-up that's happened in the past 24 hours. All day yesterday, I couldn't log in or even bring up the site. Seems there was a problem with one of the gateways or a DNS somewhere close to that end, I kept getting a 502 error. But I digress...

As for the hurricane, I know enough to know that it's caused by differing pressure systems, salinity of ocean currents and other factors. Poseidon? Nah.

As for the universe, no one can explain what drove the Big Bang. No one can explain what caused gravitation to split off from the uni-force, or what caused the sudden, FTL expansion of Georges Lemaitre's "primordial atom." (I know, the word "yet" seems a more than apropos response there, so I'll go ahead and acknowledge it now.)

Sorry if it seems like I'm reiterating a bit of the same ideas and material that are already present in the "genuine non-yelling kind and good..." thread, I just noticed the content there day before yesterday. (Last time I was able to log in and do some reading.) At this point, I'm thinking I might want to check out the discussion there for all applicable replies...

   Ok, so perhaps my posting was invalid, since you accept evolution as a reality. So let's touch on a different aspect with the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Where did the order of the universe come from? It could have been produced spontaneously by natural processes of a type that are now beginning to be understood in physics. One such process is called "spontaneous symmetry breaking." It's like the formation of a snowflake. An expanding universe allows increasing room for order to form. The universe could have started as a tiny black hole with maximum entropy, produced by a quantum fluctuation, and then exploded in the big bang. The laws of nature are misnamed. They are not necessarily rules that govern the universe, that sit out there in some kind of Platonic reality. They could just as well simply be human inventions, descriptions we have made of observations. We can make up different laws if we want, but they are not scientific unless they agree with observations. The laws of physics can be written in many different ways, but they agree so well with the data that we are confident they describe aspects of reality.



 

I don't see science opposed to religion. Science --mathematics, biology, chemistry, physics etc. etc. --  is what it is.   If anything, historically speaking, some science was an attempt to validate religion.  The inability to do so caused the "dogmatically religious" to shun science or manipulate scientific findings to conform to  beliefs. 

Fundamentally, both religion and science are attempts at explaining nature and everything we see/experience.  Unfortunately, they are exclusive in process and incommensurable in theories.  

Modern science, is a systematic way of quantifying realistic probability.  Religion is an ideology that has no need for such pragmatic pursuits.

They are not necessarily at odds with each other.  Science doesn't care about religion, except to perhaps study the chemistry behind irrational beliefs.  Religion, on the other hand, cannot honestly adopt science with its falsifiability, as part of its paradigm.  It must attempt to discredit science, or a the very least create "false" facts in order to appear compatible.  Hence all the creationist's drawings of people chilling with dinosaurs, or discrediting of carbon dating, evolution and other creationist claims.  

If anyone finds them complementary, they are either mistaken, or fail to comprehend either. 

If only there was a "like" button on RRS!