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I am religious and believe in free will

70 (27.6%)

I am religious and do not believe in free will

10 (3.9%)

I am not religious and believe in free will

113 (44.5%)

I am not religious and do not believe in free will

61 (24%)

Total Members Voted: 249

[Rolan7]

This Penny Arcade strip seems relevant.  Though I have no idea what, if any, side it supports.  I just found it funny:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/08/04/the-ongoing-saga

[Rose]

This is all moot anyway because the bible is clearly wrong because it contradicts the Quoran.

[Adragis]

The Quoran likewise contradicts the Bible.
It also contradicts modern science, as the Bible also does.
Pretty much all the religions contradict, because different gods.
You don't even have to be so specific.

Although by that logic modern science is also wrong.

[Frumple]

Of course modern science is wrong? To a fair degree, anyway. It's just the least wrong we have at the moment. Point of science is largely not to be right, but to be as little wrong as possible, given existent limitations.

Still, should try the vedas and whatnot. They got some neat stuff in 'em about zappy bits, iirc.

[Adragis]

Except the things we have definitively proven.

[Frumple]

Pretty much, yeah. S'always open to the possibility something screwed up, providing someone can provide applicable evidence for it. And every once in a while, someone does, from what I can recall. Not much major in recent times, but recent times are recent and short and there's a fair amount of science that happened before it.

Lot of times it's not so much outright disproving as refinement and improvement, but it amounts to about the same thing. Science has gotten fundamental things wrong often enough in the past most of it is self-aware enough to realize we've probably got it wrong now, somehow, and we'll likely get it wrong again in the future. Just less so. Is a lot of the beauty of it, really.

[Rolan7]

Science is strong because it is open to being revised.
Science provides hypotheses which survive peer review.  But, seemingly inevitably, new hypotheses arise which are even more precise.

Sure, Newton was wrong, but his model of physics was incredibly useful and reliable.  At the tiny speeds one observes on Earth's surface.

[Descan]

As somebody who wasn't raised Christian, this conversation is bewildering.

Of course Jesus wasn't god. Was he a religious leader? Sure. Did he have a connection with god? Probably. Was he, himself, God? No, of course not.

Meanwhile I'm sitting here just humming "Can't prove the bible with the bible."

you can't prove that the big bang happened.
You can't prove the age of the earth
You can't prove that your chair will be able to support your weight the next time you sit in it.

It's all faith based

The thing about this quote is that Descan wasn't saying the Bible can't be proven. He said the Bible can't prove the Bible, but you could, theoretically, prove the Bible right through other means.

Yeeeep.

[Adragis]

It's basically tantamount to 'because it is' arguments.

[Descan]

RE: Science and wrongness: http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm

[i2amroy]

Science doesn't prove, though. Only provides overwhelming evidence in support.

Indeed. The only things in the realm of science that you can actually "prove" are those in the more theoretical based sciences like math and computer science, and that's only because those particular fields are based solely on rules that we made up ourselves (thus letting us know all of the "base" rules to their full extent), unlike things like physics where we only know some of the "base" rules, and those that we do know we only know to a limited degree of precision. As scientists work more and more on a given theory they are able to refine those laws to a higher and higher degree of precision, but AFAIK at this point it is actually impossible for us to ever reach the point of actually being able to "prove" something based on the physical world since everything we've done so far seems to indicate that many of the constants that it is based on are infinitely precise (like pi), meaning that you will always be able to calculate any given answer to "one more decimal point".

Which isn't to say, of course, that it is impossible that a base theorem like the world being a sphere could be overturned. It just means that anything that replaces it is going to have to give identical answers to what a sphere would in 99.99999999% of the time, since we have huge mountains of evidence pointing towards the Earth being a sphere. Quantum mechanics is actually a great place to see this in action right now, since we have about 10 different readily accepted theories floating around at the moment, all of which give the exact same results for every single experiment we've ever done. The only places that they differ is in experiments that we haven't done, since all of them, by definition, have to at least provide matching results for every single experiment already performed in order to have any chance at all of being closer to the "true" answer than the current ones are.

[i2amroy]

Ooh, that brings up a good question- do we invent math, or do we discover it?

My university asks this at every math faculty interview (of which the department does 1 every Friday as part of their weekly faculty/student research presentations ). The best answer I've heard so far went something like this:

I think that it's kinda both. We create the basic rules of the system, you know, define what a determinant is or what converting a graph into a matrix entails, but then we discover all of the cool facts and implications of those rules, like the Four Color Theorem. So in that way it's both created and discovered, because we are creating the lowest level of the rules on our own, but then we are discovering all of the neat implications that we didn't think of when we were creating the lowest levels of the system.

[scrdest]

Ooh, that brings up a good question- do we invent math, or do we discover it?

Yes.

[TD1]

You don't have faith in Homer, or Gilgamesh. Neither do I. I just add the Bible to that list of ancient fairy tales.

I'd actually like an answer as to why the Bible is taken as being reliable (by believers) in nearly everything it says, but Homer isn't. The Bible tells a story of God (gods if you include Jesus as a separate entity) and their interaction with humanity, and so does Homer. Homer tells the story as if it is true, just like Homer does. And if you're taking age into consideration, the Old Testament can be dated to around about the 12 Century BC, whereas the Iliad can be brought back to the 8 Century BC - in their written forms. Homer's works at least are well known to have been handed down as part of an oral tradition.

If you justify faith in one, why not the other? Is it just your culture? Is it whimsy? Is it because God specifically speaks to you?

[Helgoland]

I'd actually like an answer as to why the Bible is taken as being reliable (by believers) in nearly everything it says

Dude, not everyone has this literalism fetish that you share with the more hardcore protestants. Even the pope will happily tell you that the bible is wrong in many places - though he'll use another word, of course -, since it was written down by fallible men who were only inspired by God.
TL;DR: You're operating on a false premise.