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this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2024
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Asklemmy
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Evolutionary biology was the main one
Which is a bit silly to me, in that any religious person could simply explain evolution away as the mechanism by which a god or gods created humanity (to iterate on form until creating their supposed "perfect image").
God being a human who was also his own father is fine, but the suggestion that evolution could be part of god's plan is where we draw the line?
They had to reject it because any religion with a creation myth specifically says how the god created people. To accept an alternative story would reject the notion of the book as truth.
The religious are not looking for answers, they already have all the answers by definition of their holy book or whatever. They're looking for confirmation bias and reject anything that goes against that.
If you're talking specifically about the Abrahamic God, sure. But if it's about the existence of any higher being, then there's no contradiction here.
You even used the incredibly nebulous term "higher beings". Define it.
Anything that you would call a "god".
If I give an ostensive definition, I would say it includes the beings like the Abrahamic god, or Olympian gods, and exclude humans, animals, bacteria, the planet we live on, and objects we handle in our day to day lives. I'll tentatively draw the line at any being that is not bound to the laws of physics as we understand them today.
Why exclude humans, animals and bacteria? How about Sun? Jesus Christ? God-King Jayavarman II? A cat? Very small spirit of tiny stream? A holy stone (stone is not a human, nor animal or bacteria, a lot of stones were worshipped in various forms and meanings in history)? A tree chewed by pilgrims? Invisible Hand of the Market?
Incredibly arbitrary definition again constructed to wriggle your way from any concrete statement.
If we had the technological power, would humans run simulations of universes with Planck length precision? Obviously yes. So extrapolating from our one and only example of intelligent life (us), it seems like intelligent life enjoys stimulating universes. If our reality were the result of that kind of project, and the engineers lived outside the laws of physics, I would call them higher beings. And they could be as hands-off or as interventionist as they pleased.
Sure that's a valid defintion, albeit a super specific one and it directly exclude all (or almost all) known forms of religion on Earth.
Which part is directly excluded?
The one where there is not only zero proof of anything of it being real, but also zero (or nearly zero) religious people actually beliving that.
And if we were talking about whether it were real, or whether people believed it in those specific terms, you'd have a point. But since we're talking about your assertion that major earth religions are "directly excluded" by that definition of "higher beings," i still fail to see the exclusion.
I don't think OP is asking about the existence of humans, or animals, or any other physical entity. If they were, you can trivially say that you exist, and therefore god exists. That's unless you want to go into ontology and question what it means to "exist", which I'm pretty sure also isn't what OP intended.
I didn't asked about OP, i asked YOU to define it and you are weaseling out of it continously, you cannot even answer why did you exclude humans, animals and bacteria from your definition, while humans and animals have been historically worshipped in many cases.
I'm trying to help OP reach an answer to their question, therefore the definitions I'm working with are the same as that of OP. What I personally believe should be categorized as a "higher being" is irrelevant because if it's different from OP's definition, it won't help them reach their desired answer.
Nope. In Islam, God commands His servants to seek knowledge in all things. Muslims are obligated to seek knowledge because it will only continue to prove the existence of God.
Many did, and this position is called Deism. In most versions, god(s) started the universe with initial conditions that would lead to the formation of intelligent life, and then withdrew.
Could be, but evolution makes God redundant, and then it is the whole simplest explanation thing that kicks in, right?
Occam's razor doesn't mean that the simplest explanation is always true, but rather that it's usually the most likely to be true.
Using simplicity as a measure of how likely something is to be true always felt a little anthropocentric. How do we determine that something is simple if not via the systems and abstractions that are easy for human minds to comprehend?
No.. not necessarily. Why can't God command the creation of something and then allow the natural process to create said thing? Evolution doesn't disprove the existence of God.
At some point you're advocating for Deism. Which is fine enough, but doesn't really provide any satisfactory answers. You need to define exactly what you mean by "God" before any further useful conversation can be had.
The scientific process, including evolution, has dispelled the myths found in any religious textbook ever written, including their particular definitions of "God". I'd suggest you just drop the word and the associated baggage, and start from scratch. Come up with a new word, and define properties for it that make a coherent argument.
Well for one, I would recommend you drop the idea of what is God from the Christian perspective, they're clueless. That much is true. Islam is far superior in terms of intellect and sophistication, after all the Quran is the literal Word of God. Unlike the Bible, authored by pagan and anti-Christ men who had a liking to Egyptian mythologies.
(Quran 21:30) Have not those who disbelieve known that the heavens and the Earth were of one connected entity, then We separated them and We made every living thing out of water? Will they not then believe?
(Quran 24:45) And Allah has created from water every living creature. Some of them crawl on their bellies, some walk on two legs, and some walk on four. Allah creates whatever He wills. Surely Allah is Most Capable of everything.
(Quran 64:3) He designed you then made your design better.
(Quran 40:64) He formed you then made your forms better.
(Quran 71:17) And Allah has caused you to grow from the earth a [progressive] growth.
(Quran 76:28) We created them and strengthened their forms.
(Quran 82:6-9) O mankind, what has deceived you concerning your Lord, the Generous, Who created you, then proportioned you, and then balanced you; in whatever form He willed has He assembled you.
Going to be blunt, if you read these verses (and there's more verses) and don't believe that this aligns with a creation of something, which in turn evolves (strengthens in its form) then it was meant to be. There's nothing under the sun I could tell you that will pique your interest.
God has Willed it. This is the way.
That's not how any of this works. None of these require the process of biological evolution, they're clearly written as the islamic equivalent of intelligent design. Those describe some wizard creating something and then working to make it better, which is the opposite of how biological evolution works. Relying on "evolves" having several different meanings (
evolves (strengthens in its form)) is not an argument that is made in good faith. The process of biological evolution is not described in any religious literature, including yours.I assume you bolded this because it's important somehow. It's not, though. It's a vague allegory that has no predictive power, is not science, and has nothing to do with the process of biological evolution.
Religions don't teach science. However, in Islam, we are obligated to learn science amongst other subjects. The verses you and I quoted do NOT conflict with evolution.
But like I said before, there's nothing under the sun that I can tell you that will sway you.
Those verses don't conflict with evolution. They don't conflict with anything, because they don't mean anything. What scientific advancements happened because of those verses? None, because science advanced to the point where we understood how evolution works, and some religious people copied their homework and went looking for meaning after the fact. If those verses meant something, there would have been centuries of progress on evolution before Darwin. There wasn't.
There's plenty of things you can convince me of, you just have to provide evidence, which you haven't done.
What could I say that would sway you into realizing that your religion is as silly as the rest? If the answer is nothing under the sun, then you're using a cheap rhetorical trick of projecting your intellectual shortcomings onto other people in order to make yourself feel better about them.
The "god" part becomes an unnecessarily complex explanation. I prefer simpler explanations when they fit the data just as well as the complex ones. It also reduces te risk when trying to broaden out to other lines of enquiry.
As johsny said It makes the god explanation redundant for the large topic of species of life. There's no need to waste time or energy "disproving" god. The whole concept of god is simply useless to understanding - and so is a waste of time or mental energy.
But the so called explanations referncing god are typically such bullshit anyway nothing testable, no evidence, just "god did some shit", "isn't god cool/powerful". So they never were actually useful to scientific reasoning. However much they may pretend otherwise religions are so much more aligned with laws and social structures and norms of behaviour than they are about advancing science.
If you squint real hard, the first creation myth in Genisis is pretty close to evolution.