I wonder how many Christians, Muslims, and Jews secretly believe there is no God, and how many Atheists secretly believe there is a God.

Okay, I've changed my mind; ill just reply to a couple of the arguments instead of all of them. 😉
@gany if you believe that the theory of evolution is "proved" then I am going to completely disregard your argument, because as Aura and I have already said, in science you can't "prove" anything. Just because it is the mostly widely held view doesn't mean it's right.
Also, it's not a matter of who has what evidence, it's how people interpret that evidence. As much as Aura likes to say science is objective, it's not, because where people are involved there can never be true objectivity (except maybe in maths. 😉)
@Aura, how do you know how much I am (or am not) skeptical of creation? Though when I was younger I certainly just swallowed it as fact, now there are certain things I do question about it, which is why I haven't brought any of them up, because I am not entirely sure of my own stance on it.

And I agree with Aura about grouping Christians together, not a good idea. Though I will argue that evolution and the Bible are contradictory, and in my opinion it is quite useless to try be a theistic evolutionists; leading atheists have even pointed this out. (I can't remember exactly who, I read it somewhere, I'll try find an example)

Here's one, from Dawkins himself.
https://youtu.be/BAbpfn9QgGA

LND, you mix up bias and objectivity.

Bias, in a liturgical sense, is best described as an "angle" or "edge" that we all tend to have. I am clearly biased towards what the science tells me, of course, but I have reasons for that. However, like I said, I am skeptical, and am more than willing to give up my acceptance of evolution if multiple landmark papers were to occur upending every theory that came beforehand about evolutionary biology, assuming they followed the specific constraints (scientific method), that we ourselves abide by.

Objectivity, on the other hand, is realizing what your biases are, acknowledging them, and making it clear what the implications of them are. In science, we usually state what these are when we describe the assumptions that we make and the limitations that we take into account. The classic "more work needs to be done in... " statement is a bell cow of this.

Science can be and is very often objective.

There is no such thing as "unbiased", but there is such thing as "objectiveness".

I would be willing to accept you as a skeptic to creationism if you were not so adamant about denying evolution when the current science field clearly states otherwise. While your job is to be a skeptic about evolution (as it is for me), you have to acknowledge the 1000s upon 1000s of thoroughly done studies (and also those that note the infeasibilities of creationism), held to a high standard, which support it, and hence, you as a scientist would "generally accept" it.

And I don't mean what spiritual or personal acceptance of the belief is, but I mean acceptance as a scientist.

Placing yourself in the lens of a scientist is not easy to do.

Edited 2/6/2020 23:32:11

I should mention, the science belief could be very well wrong, and your personally/spiritually held beliefs could end up being right. It could very well be the case that creationism is precisely what is true, and evolution could be precisely false. And that's fine. Religion is about believing and faith. Science is about skepticism and criticism. Its okay to be "Science states x, and as a scientist I must respect and acknowledge it, but I personally my faith leads me to believe in y truthfully". Science and Religion don't and should not be mutually exclusive to one another.

If you look at the history of religions, what human beings have attributed to God or Gods came out of a psychological need to explain that which we do not yet understand. We must learn to live with uncertainty, we must be capable of accepting that we don't know everything.

Out of curiosity, what gives Christianity any more legitimacy than pagan religions, than Zoroastrianism, than Islam or Judaism, or even the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and His Noodly Appendages?

Please please please can you guys find somewhere private to share these verses with yourselves.

Btw, this is also an interesting article I found: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/10/30/5-facts-about-evolution-and-religion/

A bunch of people have mentioned Islam and how we know it's not the truth, compared with Christianity. Here are some hadiths as to why (not posting the actual words because that could get me banned for their content):
https://sunnah.com/urn/1294400
https://sunnah.com/urn/1002010
https://sunnah.com/urn/42350
https://sunnah.com/tirmidhi/2/190
https://sunnah.com/urn/418130
https://sunnah.com/abudawud/43/167
https://sunnah.com/bukhari/63/75
https://sunnah.com/muslim/37/159
https://sunnah.com/urn/1262620
https://sunnah.com/muslim/3/30
https://sunnah.com/tirmidhi/40/8
Let me know if you guys want more, or if you can safely conclude that Islam is false.

Aura, the simple reason for why you haven't seen a lot of creationist research is twofold:
1. In the science community, creationists *are* in the minority; definitely there, but they are outnumbered.
2. Since you have been educated by the majority system, you were not exposed to a lot of the creationist literature that *is* out there. Because, let's be honest, even if you are skeptical of evolution, I would say there's a lot of scientists who just accept it as bible truth (pardon the irony). As such they have no interest whatsoever in exploring other theories - voila, you don't hear anything about creationism.

And one thing we have to recognise about your thousands and thousands of studies that support it, is that thousands of them are studying minute things that have almost no direct consequence to the theory of evolution; however, if you search "evolution" on Google scholar, you will get thousands of results. Why? Because at the end of scientifically examining something in detail (for example, a particular cell's function in the immune system), many scientists will throw a phrase into their conclusion along the lines of "we have now found out that this cell has evolved an entirely unforeseen role in the immune system..." Even if the study findings don't directly support evolution, the "objective" scientists are still inclined to assume that evolution is true and base their conclusion upon this assumption, whether the findings support it or not.

One organisation that does provide the kind of scientific resources you are asking for is Creation Ministries International. (they run a peer-reviewed journal, as well as publishing lots of articles designed for the general public, which are admittedly written peruasively, and some are merely "look how complicated this is, how could evolution have made it?". However, even among the articles, if you find the good ones, they contain many reliable sources and bases for their arguments, and as such deserve to be heard, if not accepted. But if you're looking purely for scientific method, they do have a journal.) If you truly are trained to be skeptical of evolution, then it is your job to search for material that opposes it, and weigh it up. Now, other than the Google scholar search you did, how many times have you actually searched for material against evolution? Or will you pull out your "I'm not looking for spirituality" thing again? 😉
You can't have it both ways; you can't claim to be a skeptic but not look for opposing evidence.

As for the article, it is kind of interesting, the only problem I had with it was the wording of the statement: everything was created in its present form.
While there are some people that believe that, they are the most of ignorant of the lot, because we can observe natural selection and speciation happening now. How it *should* have been worded is basically that God created everything in their present *kinds*, not forms. This is the predominant belief among creationists. As I have previously said, we don't dispute natural selection and speciation, because *we can see it happening*. For example, God created the cat kind, and from the original pair of cats on the Ark are descended all the species of cats today with *a net loss of genetic information*. We can see this happening. We don't, however, agree that from the first cell (1 2 skip a few) came a weird half-cat thing, and that through an *overall gain in information* we have all the cats today. We don't observe this happening, and there are precious few undisputed fossils that support it.
So basically what I am saying is that the article is perhaps (intentionally or unintentionally) misrepresenting the creationist argument.

There will always be niche communities, always be proponents that global warming is fake, always be proponents that the earth is flat. It's no different to me. My job isn't to seek and vet. My job isn't to spend my life trying to find every damn article about every little angle about every little thing that could be true or could be false. That's impossible.

Don't try to convince me I am just "majority bias". The vast majority of active research in science, you will find, are hotly debated. I have already said that if something in science has such profound, near ubiquitous consensus to be given the honor of being called a THEORY, then its well worth its merit, because something like this is incredibly difficult to achieve in such a hostile environment.

And yes, the multitude of studies do support evolution. Those little niche words? They are built off the founding principles of evolutionary biology. They are using it. Even a slight mention of it means they acknowledge and respect it.

A quick peruse through the "Journal of Creation" makes it seem to me that none of these "scholars" are actually conducting research, and rather content to pick apart at the flaws in recent studies, then make vague references to Genesis. Of course, I could be missing something, but this isn't research, its just pseudo-scientific blabber. Probably no suprise I did not encounter it on google scholar.

https://creation.com/valley-of-fire-nevada

"Figure 1. Valley of Fire State Park, Nevada. The red/orange colouring is due to iron minerals within the sandstone. The rocks were deposited during Noah’s Flood as the floodwaters were rising. The landscape was uplifted, faulted, and eroded in the second half of the Flood as the floodwaters were receding. The angular lines in the outcrop in the foreground are large-scale cross beds formed by the catastrophic water flows depositing the sand during the Flood."

"The first step is to find out what mainstream geologists have reported about the site. Then it is a matter of reinterpreting the geology within a biblical perspective, which can be done initially by applying an interpretation chart (or table). There is a good chart in the article about Wilpena Pound, Australia, which allows a preliminary reinterpretation of the mainstream geological information."

I'm going to give you a hint, when you're taking scientific information, and reinterpreting it to fit your worldview or agenda, it isn't science anymore. We have a term for what it is, maybe you've heard of it. It's called propaganda.

"I Googled Valley of Fire and found an article on Wikipedia.1 Although Wikipedia is not the most soundly based source and is written from a long-age evolutionary perspective, it is a helpful first stop and can give useful leads for further investigation. Google will allow you to find many other helpful articles too."

Scientific articles also certainly don't quote Wikipedia at me. They get quoted by Wikipedia, not the other way around.

The people writing for this site aren't scientists, they're people trying to make their religious views sound scientific, so that they are accepted by people who have a very simple understanding of the scientific method and don't realize how unscientific their postings are.

You mention that creationists are a small minority among scientists. This is true, but they're not even that when it comes to the scientists who are actually advancing their field of study. Virtually none of the worlds most prestigious scientists that are advancing their respective fields are creationists.

Edited 2/7/2020 02:44:00

https://creation.com/journal-of-creation-articles is what LND was referring to.

But the article nauz linked gave me a really good laugh for many of the same reasons he mentioned.

Also this:

"In fact, according to a 2009 Pew Research Center survey, American scientists are about half as likely as the general public to believe in God or a higher, universal power. Still, the survey found that the percentage of scientists that believe in some form of a deity or power was higher than you may think — 51 percent."

So 102% of non-scientific americans believe in God or a higher power. Nice.

Edited 2/7/2020 02:55:38

Also a reputable peer-reviewed scientific journal usually costs thousands of dollars to publish in ... and not to mention don't ask for donations... and don't typically have an outward lying face towards the general public.

Let's take a look at one: The journal of hydrometeorology.

https://www.ametsoc.org/ams/index.cfm/publications/journals/journal-of-hydrometeorology/

and an example volume:

https://journals.ametsoc.org/toc/hydr/19/12

Notice, no flairs or fancy titles, just RESEARCH. They have no intention on having any sort of layperson view this. Their audience is peer to peer. Expert to expert. This is a caucuss of discussion and debate. This is what you should be learning to look for (also the textbooks written by the most well-known of them) when you wish to find truly rigorous science.

Edited 2/7/2020 03:26:02

I will once again reiterate: Science should NOT be used to prove or disprove any religion. Science acts independently of religion and neither should be mixed with the other.

Okay, I'll use logic to refute god. Your god is almighty and overseer right?
If your answer is a big 'yes' then I can derive that any religion he makes must be flawless. By flawless I mean that there should not be a single defect or weakness in this so called god's religion.
Can you name a religion without any kind of frailty or weakness?

If your answer was 'no' then I'm afraid that either your god doesn't exist or he exists and is very lackadaisical to create a flawless religion.

the scientific method CANNOT and SHOULD NOT be used to prove anything

@marcus, it has now turned into a religion debate I guess.

give me a reason to not believe in the Bible and creation? there is over 25,000 manuscripts of The Old Testament and New Testament.

the most ever.

the second most ever is like 5,000


500 people saw Him after he arose. It was basically impossible to get 500 people to lie all about that back then.

Repeat any single one of the miracles mentioned in the Bible right before my eyes and I will convert.

how many of thise "manuscripts" is from before lets say 400 ad?

@ganymedes What's your definition of a flawless religion?

@Marcus Well we can't exactly do this over the internet. I've personally seen an old woman be able to lift her arm over her head after prayer when she wasn't able to before, along with other things. The biggest miracle is the fact that God forgave me from my sins.
Luke 16:30-31 - "But he said, 'No, father Abraham, but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent!' "But he said to him, 'If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be persuaded even if someone rises from the dead.'"
Matthew 16:4 - "An evil and adulterous generation seeks after a sign; and a sign will not be given it, except the sign of Jonah." And He left them and went away.

@Njord https://www.bibletranslation.ws/manu.html Here's a table of those for the New Testament.
https://www.icr.org/bible-manuscripts
"The New Testament was written in first century A.D. There are some 25,000 early manuscripts in existence, almost 6,000 of which (many being only recognizable fragments) are Greek texts and the others being early translations of the Greek New Testament. The earliest textual evidence we have was copied not long after the original.
There are many more writings of the Church Fathers quoting sections of Scripture; we could reconstruct the entire New Testament from their writings alone. There were millions of man-hours spent in cross-checking the manuscripts. There remains only 1 percent of all New Testament words about which questions still exist; no questionable passage contradicts any Bible teaching.
The Old Testament has been more accurately transmitted to us than any other ancient writing of comparable age. The textual evidence is greater for both the Old and New Testaments than any other historically reliable ancient document. The ancient scribes were very meticulous. There were only 1,200 variant readings in A.D. 500.
The quotations from pre-Christian writing confirm the text. The New Testament accepts the Old Testament as authentic, confirming the traditional authors, quoting from at least 320 different passages, and confirming the supernatural events cited in the Old Testament."

I'd like to know if you'd question the validity of all the other historical books in existence too, because the bible has significantly more manuscripts.