Thread: What do you believe in?

Originally Posted by LX_Emergency

The book of Genesis is not and never was an instruction on how to create a world.

Also....if the world is not in existence yet....what measures a day?

Yes. yes. know; don't take it literally and all that....A heavenly day? But I never really beg to differ... :-)

"...and there was evening, and there was morning-the first day."(Genesis 1:5)

In another forum I had an argument with atheists about how science tries to explain how the universe works, and religion explains (for a given value of 'explains') how or why the universe came to be. And I mentioned that science does not explain many 'why's, such as why the speed of light is a constant in every reference frame, or why pi has the value it has, or why...

That earned me quite some opposition, and I was told that at least science tries to explain, and how scientists are working on those questions etc. And I was being called sheep
They were attacking the specific examples I listed, instead of looking at the meaning behind my post. I took a couple of days to collect my thoughts, and wrote a follow up. And for some reason, it killed the discussion stone dead. Since we were on the subject here, I decided to post a copy here to explain my view on the boundary between science and religion.

Fwiw, I think science gives us a tool to analyse the universe, and I believe God is what made the universe the way it is.

Ok last days I've been a bit busy, and had no time to get back with a comprehensive reply. To get at where I left the discussion: I was arguing that there are always, by definition, questions that science cannot answer. My position was countered that at least science was trying to find the answers, and might one day have them. My list of examples (which were just that) was countered point by point.

So let me put it a different way. Every scientific theory has one or more axioms underpinning it. The axioms are the starting point for all derivations, and by their nature cannot be proven either way. No matter how much we refine our theories and understanding, there will always be more or different axioms.

And when you get down to it: an axiom is an unprovable leap of faith. Before you counter this with 'at least a scientific axiom makes sense', there are plenty of axioms which don't. For example, one of the fundamental axioms of geometry is that 2 parallel lines still cross at infinity. I once read a book by a mathematician who talked about the axioms of geometry. He explained that people have tried to do away with that axiom, precisely because it does not make sense. But the absence of that axiom, or changing it to say that parallel lines never crossed, caused the entire card house to collapse and produced gibberish results every time.

I am not a mathematician (I'm an EE) so I cannot describe the problems in detail. I just used it to highlight that there are counter intuitive leaps of faith in science too. I grant you that these still have the benefit that they are testable down the road, through the derivations which could be verified. On the other hand, the axioms might still be wrong, simply because the testable areas are not large enough, and thus be only simplified approxiamtions of what is really going on (yet still unknown). Newtonian mechanics vs relativistic mechanics is a nice example of this. But I digress.

Anyway, the nature of science is to rely on axioms. Hopefully, science will one day produce a grand unified theory which encompasses the realm of quantum theory and relativity. If and when that happens, there will still be at least one axiom left. One leap of faith which is unprovable, and which might still be wrong because the universe turns out to be even more complex than we can imagine. Or perhaps there are alternate universes which can interact with ours in some way, and our universe is just a specific case of a more general universe configuration, with some traits suppressed. Who knows.

But no matter how, what, when or why: unless the very nature of science changes, there will be one axiom left. That is where science stops. And that is where religion cannot be excluded. Note that I am talking about religion in general, not any specific religion. On a sidenote: Kurt Godel's incompleteness theorem also proves that our knowledge will always remain incomplete. There will always remain areas which are unprovable. Again, this is not just because there are gaps in our scientific knowledge at this moment, but because the existence of gaps has been proven to be unavoidable, and inherent to any axiomatic system.

Also note that I am not claiming to prove the existence of a God or other supernatural being, nor am I trying to validate any particular one. That is logically impossible. That is why it is called 'faith', and everyone should decide for themselves if, what, and why they believe (or not).

I hope that that clarifies my earlier position.

I quite like that Bruno. It is very much where I stand on the whole thing as well.

Science and religion are not black and white, + and - light and dark. They are not opposites.

They'd be more like Blue and red, sugar and salt (those are complimentary). Each is used for different things and can coexist perfectly well next to each other in the mind of an intelligent person.

Originally Posted by Str8Raz0r

"...and there was evening, and there was morning-the first day."(Genesis 1:5)

So how many minutes is that? How many hours? The word day means nothing unless you're on earth....

Originally Posted by LX_Emergency

So how many minutes is that? How many hours? The word day means nothing unless you're on earth....

There are a few theories on that at well... I personally believe in a six day creation as one would measure a day today. Of course the earth seems to be slowing down a bit, so maybe it was a little quicker. One interesting idea is the "Gap Theory." It mentions that there is no time recorded in Genesis 1:2 and this could perhaps be the billions of years that "gap" some old-age estimations of the Earth and Creationists Young-Earth. Of course this is an idea, and doesn't seem (I haven't studied it very well yet) to compromise God's word. I am sure I could find glaring holes if I looked hard enough.

By the way.... Have fun and safe shaving!

I read that the original hebrew word meant 'period of time' as well as 'day'. When arguing about the bible, we should always keep in mind that the words might have meant something slightly different but similar.

We know that the universe is billions of years old. From archeological evidence, we know that humankind has been around for longer than what new-earth believers accept as the age of the universe. Personally, I think that the whole discussion is besides the point.

God created the laws of the universe. There is no reason whatsover that he would have needed to 'snap his fingers' and work within 6 exact 24 hour intervals when he had already set up the framework that would make it happen. There is no need for magic when we accept that God made the laws of physics. Besides, at the time, noone would have understood the laws of physics. They didn't know math. They didn't even understand fractional, negative, imaginary numbers, or even the number 0. Not exactly the basis for talking about details.

Genesis as it is written is how I would explain it to a scientifically illiterate person. It is how I explained it to my 6 year old. that doesn't mean the scientific explanation is wrong, or that there is a genuine conflict.

Originally Posted by Bruno

We know that the universe is...

Is that also a belief derived from axioms?

Originally Posted by hoglahoo

Is that also a belief derived from axioms?

Fair point.
However, every source of information we have, looked at from various different scientific angles, points to the universe being billions of years old.
So far we have no reason to doubt the conclusion.

Originally Posted by Bruno

So far we have no reason to doubt the conclusion.

It's a shame the catholic church doubted it for so long. One has to wonder what they based their doubt on. What I am trying to say is that when it comes to religion, you cannot take any scientifically or even commonly held 'belief' for granted