192 comments

• Comment Link Friday, 07 December 2012 04:49 posted by Kenneth

  Tss, that is so gibberish Jake, to say that love your enemies as said by Jesus Christ. The old testament was inarguably one of the most malevolent, fictional, yet holy books in all of times, and how can an even loving god be sacrificing his own son for the redemption of mankind? How can it be? There's so many alternative plans your genie could have done instead of sacrificing and torturing and being a bloody mess about it. "The Christ myth has served us well." As pronounced by Pope Leo X. How can you even prove that atheistic people are committing atrocity? How about Hitler? You can't deny the fact that Hitler was a catholic. Religious faith is bias and is propaganda. If all of these fundamentalists and religionists hold different variations of truth, one can easily conclude that all of these religions are all bloody scams. There's no truth in religion, you people should come back to Science, Reasoning, Logic and Reality. You should get out of your boxes limiting your thoughts and thinking. "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." By Carl Sagan
  
  Science is progress, religion is regress.

• Comment Link Friday, 07 December 2012 01:47 posted by Richard Knijnenburg

  A problem with this discussion is that it is too narrow: the motion shouldn't be "science refutes God" (capital God because the against-guys are specifically Christian) but "science refutes added meaning". Let me define "added meaning" as the complete set of properties that is outside of scientific thinking. Examples of elements of this set are "love", "truth", "understanding" and "meaning" itself (a bit of recursion never hurt anyone outside of grad school).
  
  Now, I'm not arguing science can't e.g. describe the processes underlying a reported feeling of "love", but I'm arguing the subjective feeling of "love", i.e. how I, or you, or anyone else is experiencing it as part of the self is outside of the range of what science can do, simply because no one can truly know that experience - just analyze reports on it and measure the electro-chemical responses in the brain. Which, by the way, I assume to be the full basis for the self.
  
  What interests me as someone who wishes to understand and know as much about the (my) universe as I can is the range of answers to the question "why is there something instead of nothing", with the "why" in that question obviously part of my defined set of "added meaning".
  
  Science can't refute added meaning, so it can't refute God/god/gods.
  
  What science can and does do is add to the set of added meaning, because it is the only tool available to determine how things are instead of how we would want them to be.
  
  So having said that, you might understand why I'm firmly in Michael Shermer's corner, considering myself a skeptic, but I would still vote no on this motion.

• Comment Link Friday, 07 December 2012 01:21 posted by David Douglas

  Isn't God mostly a WORD???

• Comment Link Thursday, 06 December 2012 23:08 posted by John Bamford

  The problem here is the motion itself: Science can't "refute" God anymore than it can refute the existence of unicorns. You can't prove a negative. However, the burden of proof lies not with science but with theism: It is theists who are obligated to provide evidence in support of their belief, and it is precisely this they cannot do. For they have none. What science has done --- rather than "refute" God --- is show that God is not a necessary hypothesis to explain anything about the universe. Every thing that apparently once needed God as an explanation has been shown to be quite fine without "him". Belief in God is nothing more than an unjustified belief, supported by no evidence whatsoever.

• Comment Link Thursday, 06 December 2012 22:32 posted by Bill

  This is for Nik Catalina who posted on 12/5/12 at 23:16
  
  Your quote from Socrates is logically flawed. By asserting that you know only that you know nothing you are violating your own premise. i.e. you do know something! (it happens to be that you know nothing!).
  
  And, so it goes with many of the arguments against God. Quite emphatically, you can know something. It is NOT all relative.
  
  A lot of people, when asked what it would take from them to believe, respond with, "Well, I'd have to see clear proof. I'd have to see these so called miracles performed in public, in the light of day, in front of hundreds of witnesses".
  
  BUT that did happen! Not once, not twice, but so many times that "many books could be filled describing just the miracles performed!". And these miracles were performed before a religiously savvy people on the look out for charlatans. A people who labeled Him a heretic and put Him to death. Yet, none disputed the miracles.
  
  The Christian Bible clearly addresses this in Romans 1:20. Creation bears witness to God. Men become vain in their imaginations (devising ever more preposterous theories to deny God) and... professing themselves wise they became fools (deluding themselves with their own cleverness).
  
  There are many reasons to desperately want God not to exist. At the top of the list is most likely the ferverent desire not to be a created being. Being a created being means not being at the pinnacle. It opens up so many uncomfortable questions about: origin, meaning, morality, and destiny.
  
  Rather than refute God, science affirms his existence. The Psalmist tells us the Heavens declare the glory of God. How wonderful that science allows us so many more ways to appreciate and take part in that creation.

• Comment Link Thursday, 06 December 2012 22:05 posted by Kevin R

  A miracle is an event that is not explicable in terms of natural cause and effect which serves as a sign of divine presence for those who see it.
  
  The atheist clearly doesn't have room for this, but that doesn't mean it isn't true.
  
  The belief that miracles are impossible is experimentally indistinguishable from the proposal that miracles can and do happen, since they cannot be repeated and independently confirmed except by different witnesses. There is no experiment that can be done to prove or disprove miracles. All you can have is the testimonies of multiple independent witnesses.
  
  Ian Hutchinson is correct. Scientists can consistently believe that miracles happen without believing that science has the competence to adjudicate the matter.

• Comment Link Thursday, 06 December 2012 19:30 posted by Michael S. Green

  GOD BASED MAGNETISM explains it all.

• Comment Link Thursday, 06 December 2012 19:04 posted by remnantofjoseph

  Those demanding "evidence" "proof" or "signs" are the first to reject them when they see them because they do not understand them! Science cannot explain the spiritual because it does not understand the spiritual. It's limits are the walls of understanding or "knowledge".
  
  Proof will continue to surface but rather than evaluate, hard line athiests will search for "plausible" reasons to reject. They can't understand the spiritual.
  
  Many arguments I hear in these types of debates against God or religion are based on incorrect interpretations or understandings. If I had the same incorrect assumptions about God and His plan (understanding of why) and I had not had any personal experience with God, I would fall to the same arguments.

• Comment Link Thursday, 06 December 2012 18:13 posted by John

  This debate didnt even reference the work of Stephen Meyer ( "Signiture in the Cell") This new research showing how the cells function is programmed with digital code. As far as I see it , it has turned the origin of Species upside down. Watch the lecture and see for yourself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbluTDb1Nfs

• Comment Link Thursday, 06 December 2012 17:33 posted by TJ

  Here. The Trinity is binary...1 + 0 = 1. The plus is activity. The 1 is the same as linguistic I, and the 0 well, nothing. How do you create something out of nothing...just add I to it!