[Zag]

Nothin' like a good, old-fashioned, religion fight. [img]/images/graemlins/laugh.gif[/img] I'd like to throw in a few random thoughts that I haven't seen offered yet. Although I consider myself to be between agnostic and atheist, much of what I say supports the theists.

Re an O3 God allowing evil to happen on this world: Remember that, according to most religions, the time spent on this world is an infinitismal fraction of your overall time. Any suffering that happens here is unimportant in the grand scheme. But interfering in any way would be to remove to possiblity of free will. (Of course, then, how do you explain his interfering in the past, according to every holy book in the world?) So calling him degenerate just because he is more concerned with freedom than with alleving a trivial amount of suffering is disingenuous.

In any case, an omnipotent, omniscient God is inconsistent with free will. When he put the first bunch of quarks into motion, He could have known the exact consequences, all the way down to exactly how every person is going to live his life. Enter Heisenberg!! (as in, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle) The only way an omniscient diety could create beings with free will is if there are things that are fundamentally unknowable, such that even an omniscient being doesn't know them. Frankly, it's brilliant!

People who try to come up with "scientific" evidence of something as stupid as creationism really burn my behind. If you say, "Because of my faith, I choose to believe this in spite of the evidence," then I have no problem with it. But don't use the word "science."

In the early part of the last century, scientists still believed that the universe had existed forever and would exist forever. When they came up with the Big Bang theory, all the Bible and Torah-wielding fundamentalists should have stood up and declared loudly, "See? We were right!!" The fact that they didn't demonstrates them to be idiots and dangerous idealogues.

Looking at evolution strictly genetically, along with probability analysis makes for a compelling argument that there was some external entity guiding the DNA recombination -- the level of complexity in the DNA of the higher mammals shouldn't have been able to happen in the amount of time the Earth has been around. On the other hand, less than 10% of your DNA actually does anything, so most of the complexity is just chaos.

On the other, other hand, some evolutionary steps are pretty hard to see how they could have happened, other than because they were a stepping stone to intelligence. For instance, why are humans the only non-aquatic mammals not covered with hair? Because the deity wanted to force them to evolve enough intelligence to make clothing? (i.e. they ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and realized that they were naked.)