"I was there", A simple message accompanied by a visual evidence could suffice

[Atheist Mormon]

31 minutes ago, SmileyMcGee said:

Would you mind defining some of the terms you're using? How would define "skeptic?" To me that term has been wasted on a group of people that can be as rigidly dogmatic as the most fundamental religionist. Also, can you define "evidence?" 

Let's start from "Evidence"; #-1 irrefutable one came with Charles Darwin's Evolution theory, #-2 Alfred Wegener's "Continental Drift" and the mother of all evidences naturally belong to Einstein's Relativity. And about the term "Skeptic"; I can't disagree with your explanation of "Rigidly dogmatic", but that comes from the demands we put on evidences, either you are going to produce them or not. Unlike "Religious Dogmatism" Skepticism rigorously demands evidence with testable, falsifiable means....I think this is where we became persistent.

[rodheadlee]

2 hours ago, Atheist Mormon said:

Yes, I got my own but it was a combination of hard work and modern medicine, no miracle was involved.

Yeah but can you see how ridiculous it would be for me to lose faith  after something like that ?

[strappinglad]

Atheist Mormon, a brief overview of the history of Plate tectonics shows many had to be dragged kicking  and screaming to accept it. Now they claim everyone was immediately on board. Does anyone still question it? I have heard rumors...  Einstein had doubts about his own theory, so did Darwin. Whenever I hear someone say " The science is settled " I await shoe dropping. Nothing can move faster than light as everyone knows. Experiments in quantum theory find some really disturbing weirdness about that speed limit. Shoes are hovering.

[thesometimesaint]

5 hours ago, Atheist Mormon said:

Let's start from "Evidence"; #-1 irrefutable one came with Charles Darwin's Evolution theory, #-2 Alfred Wegener's "Continental Drift" and the mother of all evidences naturally belong to Einstein's Relativity. And about the term "Skeptic"; I can't disagree with your explanation of "Rigidly dogmatic", but that comes from the demands we put on evidences, either you are going to produce them or not. Unlike "Religious Dogmatism" Skepticism rigorously demands evidence with testable, falsifiable means....I think this is where we became persistent.

Just because something can't be tested for falsity doesn't mean it's false or true.

[thesometimesaint]

1 hour ago, strappinglad said:

Atheist Mormon, a brief overview of the history of Plate tectonics shows many had to be dragged kicking  and screaming to accept it. Now they claim everyone was immediately on board. Does anyone still question it? I have heard rumors...  Einstein had doubts about his own theory, so did Darwin. Whenever I hear someone say " The science is settled " I await shoe dropping. Nothing can move faster than light as everyone knows. Experiments in quantum theory find some really disturbing weirdness about that speed limit. Shoes are hovering.

Plate Tectonic Theory wasn't widely accepted until the 1960's. Don't hold your breath till you can get a ride on a Star Ship.

[Atheist Mormon]

4 hours ago, thesometimesaint said:

Just because something can't be tested for falsity doesn't mean it's false or true.

Okay, it's not about proving "falsity" , such as in cases of Evolution, speed of light, or continental drift the falsity was not proven therefore those theories go on to be taught everywhere.

All skeptics want is an opportunity to prove the veracity of theories religion presents. At this point I don't see a way to test.

Edited May 5, 2017 by Atheist Mormon

[Atheist Mormon]

9 hours ago, rodheadlee said:

Yeah but can you see how ridiculous it would be for me to lose faith  after something like that ?

Nobody asked you to lose your faith in the first place. In my case my body & brain was everything I owned, nothing else. I never could learn rely on something extraordinary.

[rodheadlee]

42 minutes ago, Atheist Mormon said:

Nobody asked you to lose your faith in the first place. In my case my body & brain was everything I owned, nothing else. I never could learn rely on something extraordinary.

No but I was sorta hoping some of my faith could rub off on you.

[Atheist Mormon]

38 minutes ago, rodheadlee said:

No but I was sorta hoping some of my faith could rub off on you.

I truly like you Pal But if I were to credit anybody for my success in life, those would be women in my life, from my ex wife to current wife who are immeasurably  smarter than me, and that is a fact that I can literally point at. But "Faith" in supernatural being obscures my vision.

[snowflake]

11 hours ago, Atheist Mormon said:

Let's start from "Evidence"; #-1 irrefutable one came with Charles Darwin's Evolution theory, #-2 Alfred Wegener's "Continental Drift" and the mother of all evidences naturally belong to Einstein's Relativity. And about the term "Skeptic"; I can't disagree with your explanation of "Rigidly dogmatic", but that comes from the demands we put on evidences, either you are going to produce them or not. Unlike "Religious Dogmatism" Skepticism rigorously demands evidence with testable, falsifiable means....I think this is where we became persistent.

I think I have mentioned this before, but paleontologists all over the world are finding carbon 14 and soft tissue in dinosaur fossils. How can carbon 14 be in a 80 million year old fossil? Well c14 dating is considered to be accurate up to ~60,000 years give or take.  c14 in dinosaur fossils is "evidence" the dinosaurs were living less than 100,000 years ago. Making the "mother of all evidences" wrong.  Your faith and excitement in "scientism" and "evolutionism" is clearly palpable but certainly not settled. Science is never "settled".  Common sense tells us that blood vessels, and soft tissue cannot possibly last ~68million years.

Here is a video on soft tissue and carbon 14 found in dinosaur bones. 

 

[USU78]

On 5/3/2017 at 7:26 AM, Atheist Mormon said:

When I saw Utah's wilderness first time 26 yrs old, I had little or no knowledge about stuff like Evolution, paleontology or geology. It didn't take me long to be convinced about the origins of the Earth or Humans; it was simply a matter of evidence, which was so abundant in Utah in the form of Rocks, Fossils and geologic strata upon strata laying everywhere. 

It would be so wonderful if Jesus left a signature like this Dinosaur did. My lifelong struggle with belief would non-existent. 

 

So ... Relics good?

[Atheist Mormon]

8 minutes ago, USU78 said:

So ... Relics good?

No, you can interpret relics any direction you want, as Daniken does, whom I used to believe in a slavish mentality, in my youth..

It's funny how Daniken's cover was blown in my skeptical mind; Daniken found this animal skull (cow, lama or something), there was two perfect holes in it's forehead, in his book (Chariots of gods I think) he claimed " See the evidence of Ancient Aliens fired a gun and killed it". But the simple fact was an extinct Saber tooth animal nailed it....I felt deflated...that was it....everything fell apart afterwards.

[Atheist Mormon]

21 minutes ago, snowflake said:

I think I have mentioned this before, but paleontologists all over the world are finding carbon 14 and soft tissue in dinosaur fossils. How can carbon 14 be in a 80 million year old fossil? Well c14 dating is considered to be accurate up to ~60,000 years give or take.  c14 in dinosaur fossils is "evidence" the dinosaurs were living less than 100,000 years ago. Making the "mother of all evidences" wrong.  Your faith and excitement in "scientism" and "evolutionism" is clearly palpable but certainly not settled. Science is never "settled".  Common sense tells us that blood vessels, and soft tissue cannot possibly last ~68million years.

I seldom or never heard paleontologist relying on carbon 14 tests in Dinosaur age testing. They exclusively rely on strati graphic evidence. How do we know so sure Trilobites all over the Planet existed in PreCambrian or Cambrian times? I don't have faith in anything, I rely on evidence.

It is awfully hard to refute Human Origins after so many finds in Africa. And yes my ancestors were Primates or Monkeys once but it doesn't mean we were evolved from the same lineage, we diverged by the pressures and demands the environment put on us.

[thesometimesaint]

2 hours ago, Atheist Mormon said:

Okay, it's not about proving "falsity" , such as in cases of Evolution, speed of light, or continental drift the falsity was not proven therefore those theories go on to be taught everywhere.

All skeptics want is an opportunity to prove the veracity of theories religion presents. At this point I don't see a way to test.

Proving is for mathematics. Theory is for everything else. A scientific theory is simply the best explanation we have so far for any given observation. I have no problem with teaching the best explanation we have so far everywhere.

Because we have no agreed upon theories all religions present. IE; Sir Isaac Newton was a devout Christian but didn't have an explanation for the gravitational stability of our solar system.

SEE

 

Edited May 5, 2017 by thesometimesaint

[thesometimesaint]

Snowflake:

Not so fast there.

SEE http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/dinosaur-shocker-115306469/

[Gray]

17 hours ago, Teancum said:

Define antiquity and who are you comparing him to?

I would perhaps compare him to his contemporaries, like Pontius Pilate.

Here's a summary by Bart Ehrman:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bart-d-ehrman/did-jesus-exist_b_1349544.html

 

 

[clarkgoble]

1 hour ago, snowflake said:

I think I have mentioned this before, but paleontologists all over the world are finding carbon 14 and soft tissue in dinosaur fossils. How can carbon 14 be in a 80 million year old fossil? Well c14 dating is considered to be accurate up to ~60,000 years give or take.  c14 in dinosaur fossils is "evidence" the dinosaurs were living less than 100,000 years ago. Making the "mother of all evidences" wrong.  Your faith and excitement in "scientism" and "evolutionism" is clearly palpable but certainly not settled. Science is never "settled".  Common sense tells us that blood vessels, and soft tissue cannot possibly last ~68million years.

I think you're a bit confused upon this point. The problem with C14 dating is due to knowing how much C14 was in the atmosphere that would be absorbed by animals. You need to be able to correlate the half life readings to known dates to use C14. That was done up to around 30,000 years ago but past then we did't have the comparisons to use it well. Then a decade or two ago scientists were able to find accurate core samples of silt they could correlate which pushed the accuracy of C14 to around 50,000 years. However scientists are constantly on the lookout to find dated material that can push back the utility of  C14. That's why different methods are used for dates before that. 

The question of C14 in dinosaur bones is more about contamination. Using only C14 dating and no other methods simply will give erroneous results. Also note that the dating was done by Mark Armitage who is a creationist pushing an agenda. Typically to avoid bias you have 3rd parties do the testing. (So for instance when Mormons wanted horse bones that were potentially in pre-columbian strata dated they ensured no Mormons touched the bones and the analysis was done by a non-Mormon 3rd party -- the bones all tested as post-columbian) For a controversial item you typically use multiple methods if possible and spend a lot of time demonstrating no contamination. This wasn't done in this case. There are also some oddities in how the dating was done from what I can see. So far that I could find there's no real evidence for C14 in dinosaur bones. If there was C14 in dinosaur bones you could simply send any bone to a third party analyst and get consistent results. That this doesn't happen demonstrates that this reported case is either fraud or contamination.

For soft tissue again one has to carefully look at what scientists mean by that. The important and surprising find was a protein that survived all that time. This has nothing to do with common sense since common sense applies to common experience and not things like dinosaur bones. Common sense merely says things rot. This has nothing to do with that though.

There actually has been for quite some time suggestions that proteins could survive a long time (unlike say more complex molecules like DNA) but no proof. Then a couple of years ago scientists found protein that was preserved around 195 million years. This isn't full tissue the way you might find soft tissue in a recent corpse though. The studies I suspect you're referring to was finding collagen in an 80 million year old dinosaur and at 68 million year old T-Rex. It happened due to iron nano-particles that reshaped the proteins and thereby cell walls. But note that this isn't tissue surviving in the same form it was originally. It's been radically transformed even though we'd still call it soft tissue.

Edited May 5, 2017 by clarkgoble

[SmileyMcGee]

13 hours ago, Atheist Mormon said:

Let's start from "Evidence"; #-1 irrefutable one came with Charles Darwin's Evolution theory, #-2 Alfred Wegener's "Continental Drift" and the mother of all evidences naturally belong to Einstein's Relativity. And about the term "Skeptic"; I can't disagree with your explanation of "Rigidly dogmatic", but that comes from the demands we put on evidences, either you are going to produce them or not. Unlike "Religious Dogmatism" Skepticism rigorously demands evidence with testable, falsifiable means....I think this is where we became persistent.

I think you are taking for granted the incredible subjectivity it takes for you to attempt to describe direct experience. How do you go from non-judgementally observing sensory data to conceptualizing that data as a "footprint" to conceptualizing it as a "dinosaur footprint" to determining that it is a footprint of a dinosaur that lived millions of years ago, without making impossible assumptions that skepticism would say are baseless? You're no more a skeptic than a person who conceptualizes a feeling as evidence of God. You just have a different framework for determining what constitutes "evidence." 

[Pete Ahlstrom]

14 minutes ago, SmileyMcGee said:

I think you are taking for granted the incredible subjectivity it takes for you to attempt to describe direct experience. How do you go from non-judgementally observing sensory data to conceptualizing that data as a "footprint" to conceptualizing it as a "dinosaur footprint" to determining that it is a footprint of a dinosaur that lived millions of years ago, without making impossible assumptions that skepticism would say are baseless? You're no more a skeptic than a person who conceptualizes a feeling as evidence of God. You just have a different framework for determining what constitutes "evidence." 

The above seems to be a good defense to having belief. Perhaps it is just a frame of reference issue. Or maybe it's simply a way to justify any belief good or bad? One could say almost any belief is justified by claiming the frame of reference defense. 

[thesometimesaint]

1 minute ago, Pete Ahlstrom said:

The above seems to be a good defense to having belief. Perhaps it is just a frame of reference issue. Or maybe it's simply a way to justify any belief good or bad? One could say almost any belief is justified by claiming the frame of reference defense. 

Somewhat true. It is possible to believe something that is true or false. A justification would of necessity be deciding if it is true or false.

[Atheist Mormon]

32 minutes ago, SmileyMcGee said:

I think you are taking for granted the incredible subjectivity it takes for you to attempt to describe direct experience. How do you go from non-judgementally observing sensory data to conceptualizing that data as a "footprint" to conceptualizing it as a "dinosaur footprint" to determining that it is a footprint of a dinosaur that lived millions of years ago, without making impossible assumptions that skepticism would say are baseless? You're no more a skeptic than a person who conceptualizes a feeling as evidence of God. You just have a different framework for determining what constitutes "evidence." 

Sorry Smiley but you are giving me too much credit here; even a kindergarten kid can discern that footprint belonging to an animal called Dinosaur. I'm sure you've been one of those museums where full skeletons, very little is left to imagination, in fact last time I was lucky enough to talk the curator Paleontologist who showed me one of the TRex had a serious case of arthritis which was very obvious to observe after he pointed out, He even pointed out why a giant fish died, (I could not see it even though I did see that fish fifty different occasions), He died because of his vertebrae was broken.

Yes I have a very common framework of evidence what constitutes evidence. 

[snowflake]

2 hours ago, thesometimesaint said:

Snowflake:

Not so fast there.

SEE http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/dinosaur-shocker-115306469/

Not so fast, there to you.

These results are being found not just by one specific scientist with an agenda, carbon 14 is being found, proteins, left handed amino-acids are being documented at different universities from different specimens around the globe.

[carbon dioxide]

On 5/3/2017 at 7:26 AM, Atheist Mormon said:

When I saw Utah's wilderness first time 26 yrs old, I had little or no knowledge about stuff like Evolution, paleontology or geology. It didn't take me long to be convinced about the origins of the Earth or Humans; it was simply a matter of evidence, which was so abundant in Utah in the form of Rocks, Fossils and geologic strata upon strata laying everywhere. 

It would be so wonderful if Jesus left a signature like this Dinosaur did. My lifelong struggle with belief would non-existent. 

 

If the purpose of life was to get us to believe and follow God after we receive independent evidence, then God would not have bothered to cause our pre-earth life to be veiled from our minds.  We would remember everything before we were born in mortality and we would all believe because we would remember everything. If our purpose is to learn to believe with little to no evidence, then things are set up correctly here.  To believe in something after one has evidence is easy.  Anyone can do it and it does not impress God or anyone else. Having faith and sticking with it is what separates us from the rest of the pack. 

Science, evolution deal with temporal things and they perhaps explain the origin of our physical bodies but they do not explain the more important part of us which is our spirits. There is a reason man is fundamentally different than every other life form on earth.  Only man works in mathematics.  Only man engages in health care.  Only man builds advanced communication devices.  Only man sends objects beyond our planet. Only man has gone to the moon.  No other life form progresses and does things that man does.  5000 years from now if man is still here it will be only mankind that has moved on.  Apes, dolphins, birds, fish will all be doing the same thing 5000 years from now as what they do today.  Why?  Within the bodies of human beings inhabits the spirit sons and daughters of God.  An aspect that science can't understand or measure.  Our physical bodies don't make us special.  What inhabits the bodies of human beings is what separates us from everything else and makes us special.   You may require evidence to believe.  Jesus told Thomas that those who do not require evidence but believe regardless are the ones that are blessed.  Those who will not believe until they have the evidence will not be blessed.  They have their reward once they get the evidence they demand but they get little after that.

Edited May 5, 2017 by carbon dioxide

[Pete Ahlstrom]

30 minutes ago, thesometimesaint said:

Somewhat true. It is possible to believe something that is true or false. A justification would of necessity be deciding if it is true or false.

Ok. So, isn't the "frame of reference" concept used as a way for an individual to justify certain belief systems as being "true" for that individual? Isn't that concept of "frame of reference" able to justify almost any belief system as being true? All one has to say is that if only one changes their way of viewing the evidence to the "right" way, then the given belief system is true.  Given the right "frame of reference" I too could say that there is an all powerful sasquatch hiding in your garage.

[Teancum]

21 hours ago, JAHS said:

Because if there were no faith there would be no God-based religion. According to the dictionary the synonym for Religion based on a belief in God is faith.  Without faith all that you would be left with is another field of science that considers only empirical evidence.  If that's OK for you then fine. But most people don't want to believe that there is nothing beyond this life. They want to believe that there is a reason for living that will manifest itself in the next life (aka heaven). But since there's no proof of heaven or any way to test for its existence, faith is required to believe that it exists and is something to look forward to. And that gives people hope and happiness in this life and a reason for living. If they are wrong they won't know they were wrong. If they were right it will justify the faith they had while living this life and those who had no faith or religion are the ones who will have the regrets.
 

So in other words religion needs faith because there is not enough evidence to back up the claims of the religion. So have faith in a possible fantasy because facing reality may make life to hard?  So where does faith begin and end?  Based on what you say above we can just pick some belief and have faith in it regardless of its merits.  And why would those with no faith have regrets if there is an after life?  For you it seems faith is the ultimate principle on which to base one's life.

 

So then faith in what?  Which religion? Do you have faith in Islam?