<p>It already has been settled and there is no credible evidence that suggests the young age of the Earth. It is not an intellectually respectable position, as it has been scientifically discredited through multiple measurements taken independently.</p>
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<p>First of all, don’t reference my position as a “belief” or on any terms with religious connotations, because I do not hold any groundless, faith-based convictions such as a 6,000-year-old Earth, the coexistence of humans and dinosaurs, the nonsensical approach of evolution, or supernatural existence. You claim that your perspective is founded on science, but thus far, you have strictly opposed any scientific consensus (established objective and replicable determinations) that irrevocably overturns your position and are not willing to accept the abundance of the scientific evidence available.</p>
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<p>Do you understand the concept of sensory interpretation, or the method by which our brains process the raw feed of stimuli in relation to the previous data it has received?</p>
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<p>Your idea of separating the brain from the mind is like keeping the words “Cheech” and “Chong” from being mentioned in the same sentence. Neuroscience and psychology are no longer that academically primitive to consider that the brain and mind are not elements of the same biological structure. The brain is the coordinating center that gives rise to consciousness and the encompassing faculties that it carries, namely, the element of an individual that enables for the construal of sensory experience and to synchronize this perception with thought and intellectual activity.</p>
<p>If you are alluding to the concept of the soul, that is both logically and factually wrong. When did some god figure intervene in the course of human affairs and inject this “soul” concept? Between homo erectus and homo sapiens? (Don’t dispute the existence of the former or claim that it existed within the past few thousand years.) Some instantaneous insertion is necessary, since the absence of such would leave absolutely no moral foundation for the Catholic faith, in particular. And indeed, Catholicism is speciesist (assumption of human superiority) down to its very fundamental basis. Killing animals for meat and other products is plainly acceptable, yet euthanasia and abortion are patently amoral since human life, specifically, is incorporated. Actually, nearly all supernatural conceptions are speciesist by their very origin since they make the presumptuous conclusion that humanity has a special ontological significance. Therefore there is consistently an anthropo-normative bias in a culture’s abstraction of their god(s) and, by their impression, it/they use(s) such humanlike endowments to control humanity and every universal affair.</p>
<p>It is perfectly appropriate to debate the non-validity of one religion against the non-validity of another. The uncomfortable reality, to the dismay of the theist, is that no two religious beliefs are genuinely compatible and expound contrary assertions (and indeed contradictory claims when analogous truth-claims are propounded (e.g. the creation myth and the nature, extent, and constituency of the supernatural)).</p>
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<p>Two hundred years ago, you could have made the same charge against what mechanism created the present diversity of biological organisms. Cosmology has not yet had its own parallelized form of a Darwinian revolution that biology has experienced. In the future, it too can effectively expel any primitive mechanistic misinterpretations of origin, particularly the intellectual rubbish of intelligent design.</p>
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<p>Regarding your first point, there have been experimentally verified scientific demonstrations of something coming from nothing (the resulting concept of vacuum fluctuations as explained through the Casimir effect). Such has profound consequences for the universe on grand, cosmological scales. In fact, it is infinitely more probable that the universe was simply created via a grand-scale quantum-mechanical vacuum fluctuation than by some bearded bloke. The cosmological argument correctly recognizes the fallacy in the latter option and, through the foundations of logic, actively refutes it.</p>
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<p>Of course it does. To the theist, though, discussing such profound contradictions can only delegitimize the theological perspective.</p>
<p>You have absolutely no basis for your first statement. Moreover, the burden of proof is completely on the theist. Regarding point two, there are conspicuous inconsistencies regarding the incorporeal claims of a supernatural existence. Many theological believers claim that their god exists in its own realm outside of the empirical world. Yet, every time one claims that it did one thing or another in the physical world, those are scientific claims and it is not possible to conveniently separate the two. Religion makes existence claims, which, in turn, means scientific claims. Yet, these assertions are not subject to the rigor of scientific criticism, since, to those wishing to stay politically correct in order to avoid public attack, they are religious in origin and should be respected. However, given their irrational, spurious, and pseudo-intellectual foundations, they certainly do not deserve any respect whatsoever. Regarding point three, evolution is fact as is the scientific confirmation that the Earth is 4.54 billion years of age. Those who refute the validity of evolution either are unaware of the concept, don’t understand it, refuse it because it fundamentally encroaches on their own ideological sentiments, or a combination of the latter two. Regarding point five, alternative viewpoints that are not objectively verified, particularly those of a religious nature founded in primitive eras by men uneducated on the matter, should be treated with the utmost degree of skepticism. </p>
<p>For anyone with some sense of intellectual curiosity, religious explanations are conceptually unproductive and inconsequential since they merely heap more perplexing enigmas on top of the original ones, such as what created the universe, biological life, consciousness, morality, and free will, particularly when each, in one form or another, is rationally intelligible. </p>
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<p>In religious or supernatural context, anyone can make a fictitious claim about reality, such as the one demonstrated here.</p>
<p>Indeed I do. And as a computer programmer, I know that a physical sensory system is incapable of choices. It is forced to act in a certain way due to the configuration of it’s components. The only way we could confirm that our brains are configured in such a way that they correctly interpret sensory input would be if we were a higher intelligence than our brains.</p>
<p>I do not claim to have proven how to current state of affairs came about. However, it is nonetheless self-evident to me that human thought can not prove itself nonexistent, which is what Naturalism does.</p>
<p>As for “speciesism” you have a good point. If Naturalism is true, then humans are no more significant than any other creature. For that matter, they are no more significant than rocks.</p>
<p>Yet very few Naturalists will tell you that racism, murder, wanton destruction of the planet, etc. are acceptable. Yet if murder is just another re-arrangement of atoms, why is it any different from knocking over a chair? Is there not a double standard here?</p>
<p>Why should any theist expect that all religions should be identical? What would be ususual would be if thousands of years of civilization HAD left all humans with the exact same beliefs.</p>
<p>The big bang could have originated out of fifth dimensional space, in which our three dimensions are an infinitesimally small point, much akin to the size of the point that originated the big bang. If this were to be true, then we could never be sure exactly what caused the big bang to occur in fifth dimensional space, as we are limited to the three dimensions plus the dimension of time. Just an idea.</p>
<p>Suppose we did find the mechanism behind the Big Bang. We would then be in the exact same situation with that mechanism.</p>
<p>All of science up to this time has only found mechanisms for mechanisms. To assume continuing that trend for a long time will produce a non-mechanistic science is based on faith, not evidence.</p>
<p>At any rate, how would you tell the difference between a “non-mechanistic origin” and an act of god?</p>
<p>Neither are people, if they are nothing but complex chemical reactions. Unless you arbitrarily call something past a certain complexity “conciousness”.</p>
<p>^^ That’s a difference in an interpretation. But if one theory or another would both expect to see the same results, and both theories are outside the pale of logical cause and effect, what makes one more valid?</p>
<p>Are you suggesting the existence of a mutual exclusivity between the presence of complex chemical reactions and consciousness? If so, on what basis? I would, in stark contrast, argue that they are mutually necessary. Moreover, your response is irrelevant unless you are sincerely asserting either that humans are not conscious or that chairs are.</p>
<p>The fallacy is in placing god within the framework of natural laws, and thus assuming he would have a beard or a skin color. There is no fallacy in assuming the base cause of the natural laws to be sentient.</p>
<p>Again, what makes the arbitrary appearance of something from nothing different from an act of a sentient being that is the base cause of the natural laws?</p>
<p>I am indeed suggesting that complex chemical reactions alone cannot explain consiousness. My basis for doing so lies in my knowledge of physics and my experience in computer programming.</p>
<p>The laws of nature aren’t sentient, at least according to Naturalism. If I drop a stone it falls, not because it chooses to, but because it HAS to. By Naturalism, there is no difference between a dropping stone and a human brain. A human brain is just a bunch of molecules that interact the way they do because they HAVE to.</p>
<p>There is no way to justify the thought “the sky is blue” as being true if it was just the result of some molecules doing what they HAD to do. They could just as well have been in a slightly different configuration as then they would have HAD to cause the thought “the sky is cheese”.</p>
<p>You can say “our brains are configured such that they correctly react to stimuli.” But how can you claim THAT statement to be true? After all, you HAD to say it. You would have still HAD to say it if it were false, given that configuration of molecules in your brain.</p>
<p>My response is relevant because by the standards of Naturalism, there is no reason to make a distinction between a human and a chair. Since most Naturalists do make this distinction, they are working with a double standard.</p>