The Mike Huckabee 2008 thread

[nepenthes_ak]

Faith is something drastic

 

[Outsiders71]

Faith is something drastic

Faith:
Acceptance of ideals, beliefs, etc., which are not necessarily demonstrable through experimentation or reason.

How is this drastic?

 

[Finch]

True, however science doesn't have the evidence from the start of time either.

Agreed, there are large gaps in the knowledge. we think we have a good general idea, but thts subject to change as new evidence comes to light. Thats not really a comment on evolution but a comment on the state of knowledge about the earliest beginnings of things like how life really started or what exactly caused the big bang.

Governor Huckabee’s Clemency stats from 7-15-96 through 12-31-06:

Pardon requests: 3646
Pardon denied: 2401
Pardon granted: 858

66% of the requests were denied.

Commutation requests: 4925
Commutation denied: 4257
Commutation granted: 165

86% of the requests were denied.

Firearm rights only requests: 127
Firearm rights only denied: 49
Firearm rights only granted: 64

39% of the requests were denied.

No denying that Dumond is political weapon against huck, that is unsurprising. But what these numbers dont say is that many of the pardons were against the parole board's recommendations?

Faith is something drastic

lol. I disagree.

I could have sworn his last wearabouts was guessed to be somewhere in Pakistan

thats what i heard too, but is the guy really stupid enough to remain where we think he might be?

 

[phissionkorps]

At any rate, we're "friends" with Pakistan....which is slightly smaller than 2x the size of Cali. So again, not very big.

 

[Mokele]

Evolution in the broader sense, meaning all the life on Earth is a result of randomness and the speciation of a one celled organism that lived in the oceans billions of years ago, cannot be proven. I think it's important to define what we're arguing here and I've tried to several times. If you and phissionkorps can prove me wrong feel free, but you can't.

Every organism on the entire planet uses the same codons for the the same 20 amino acids. There is NO reason why these particular 20 amino acids are special (there are literally millions of possible amino acids), and no chemical reason why a given codon should correspond to a particular amino acid. Yet the amino acid code is the same in all living things. If living things were independently created, why would they have the same codons?

Viri embed themselves in the DNA, but sometimes a mutation occurs and the virus DNA is disabled, leaving it embedded in the cell's DNA. If stuck in a germline cells, the dead virus will be passed on to offspring. The chance of the same dead virus being embedded at the same place with the same disabling mutations are astronomically tiny, yet we see *numerous* dead viri that appear precisely in the same places and with the same mutations in apes, with the greatest similarity in chimps.

There are only two explanations for this:
1) all living organisms are descended from a single common ancestor, and humans evolved from other apes.
2) God is a malicious trickster out to *deliberately* mislead people by planting astonishingly compelling evidence, and is therefore evil.

Mokele

 

[herenorthere]

Faith itself isn't drastic, but trusting the lead of someone else's faith is. If he wasn't lying, and the odds on that are never good, it was George W. Bush's faith that took us into Iraq. Maybe that's the worst of all possible combinations - a faith-based liar.

By the way, in many years of participating in or following evolution vs. creation debates, the grand total of people I've seen change sides based on the strength of the other's argument is 0.

 

[Outsiders71]

Every organism on the entire planet uses the same codons for the the same 20 amino acids. There is NO reason why these particular 20 amino acids are special (there are literally millions of possible amino acids), and no chemical reason why a given codon should correspond to a particular amino acid. Yet the amino acid code is the same in all living things. If living things were independently created, why would they have the same codons?

If God is the creator of all living things, then why would it surprise you that they have the same codons? Why would it be necessary for God to create everything individually and so genetically unique from everything else? Logically it would make more sense that if everything was created by the same Creator, that the living things would then have similar makeups.

There are only two explanations for this:
1) all living organisms are descended from a single common ancestor, and humans evolved from other apes.
2) God is a malicious trickster out to *deliberately* mislead people by planting astonishingly compelling evidence, and is therefore evil.

Mokele

I think the problem here is with human logic. If you accept the premise that there is a God, why then don't you accept that there are limitations to our minds? It would be like a young child trying to explain to a middle-aged parent an aspect about life that they are innocently naive to^1000000. We are the young child in this scenario, thinking we know everything but we don't. This by no means doesn't mean we should give up trying to understand the natural world around us, what it means is accept that there are limitations to what we can figure out. God is not evil, and how did He plant the evidence? The better question is why would He need to plant evidence when He told us that He created it all? It was the greedy human mind that decided that we know all and came up with the conclusion that God doesn't exist, we're here by random chance.

I understand the above probably won't mean anything to you because the acceptance that there could be a Creator behind the scenes means some kind of intellectual-inferiority in the atheist scientific-world. Even still, the scenario you given cannot prove how things began. Just as I cannot prove to you by text alone that there is a God who created everything. So therefore we can choose to agree to disagree, and have faith in what we believe to be true.

 

[likeAstone76]

I understand the above probably won't mean anything to you because the acceptance that there could be a Creator behind the scenes means some kind of intellectual-inferiority in the atheist scientific-world. Even still, the scenario you given cannot prove how things began. Just as I cannot prove to you by text alone that there is a God who created everything. So therefore we can choose to agree to disagree, and have faith in what we believe to be true.

wow.

 

[Outsiders71]

Faith itself isn't drastic, but trusting the lead of someone else's faith is. If he wasn't lying, and the odds on that are never good, it was George W. Bush's faith that took us into Iraq. Maybe that's the worst of all possible combinations - a faith-based liar.

By the way, in many years of participating in or following evolution vs. creation debates, the grand total of people I've seen change sides based on the strength of the other's argument is 0.

I don't think Iraq is the result of Bush's so called faith in God. Our faulty intelligence, on top of 9/11, resulted in a hasty and irrational decision.

Whenever I posted about evolution, the thought that I would change their views wasn't in the equation. The point that was trying to be made is that evolution in the broader sense (involving origin) requires faith, just as it requires faith to believe that God is the creator of all things. There is no universal answer to this question and there never will be until we die and find out for ourselves.

 

[xvart]

I don't think Iraq is the result of Bush's so called faith in God. Our faulty intelligence, on top of 9/11, resulted in a hasty and irrational decision.

And it's always good judgment on the part of the president to operate with thousands of lives and trillions of dollars based on irrationality. I mean, I argue with my wife on some pretty irrational issues...

xvart.

 

[Outsiders71]

And it's always good judgment on the part of the president to operate with thousands of lives and trillions of dollars based on irrationality. I mean, I argue with my wife on some pretty irrational issues...

xvart.

I'm not here trying to defend President Bush but I believe anyone that was in the office at that time would have done the same thing. You can't place all the blame on him, he didn't photoshop the intelligence reports. Everyone was on edge after 9/11, we didn't know what to expect next, nor wanted to sit around and wait for it to happen. If you want to bash Bush, do it on the failure of him to be honest about Iraq and his game plan in Iraq. We should have sent in everything we had at the beginning, instead of waiting until last year to send in a "surge". Either way we need to stay there now until the Iraqi's can handle it themselves, then leave. Leaving early would be two wins for the Islamic-extremists, a loss for the Iraqi people and a loss for the United States.

 

[endparenthesis]

I think the problem here is with human logic. If you accept the premise that there is a God, why then don't you accept that there are limitations to our minds? It would be like a young child trying to explain to a middle-aged parent an aspect about life that they are innocently naive to^1000000. We are the young child in this scenario, thinking we know everything but we don't. This by no means doesn't mean we should give up trying to understand the natural world around us, what it means is accept that there are limitations to what we can figure out.

There's a fundamental problem in this argument that no one making it ever seems to notice, and it's one of the things about the religious that drive the non-religious so nuts.

You can't claim that something is far outside human understanding, and then claim to have some understanding of it in the same breath. Why this is an intellectually fraudulent act should be clear.

Scientists (scientists living their principles, anyway) are fully aware that we don't understand everything. They'll admit to it freely. Our perceptual limitations are the bread and butter of millennia of philosophical thought. And this is the difference between them and the religious. Scientists and skeptics look out into the expansive darkness before them and say, "If anything is out there, I don't yet understand it." The religious look out into the same darkness and say, "There's something out there, and I understand it." To their credit they may not claim to fully understand it, but somehow this "faith" thing makes them feel entitled to claim some kind of special knowledge about it. And then when challenged on that knowledge they turn around and hide behind the unknowability of it all... a tactic that only they seem not to see through.

Yes, you and I are the young children in this scenario, thinking we know everything when we don't. Except you're trying to tell the other children what it means to be an adult. You claim to have some special understanding about adulthood (or at least have a "faith" about it) that the kids around you don't. By your own logic, should you really be taken seriously here? Mustn't your views on the cosmos be just as hopelessly naive as ours are due to your status as a mere human being?

And this metaphor doesn't reveal the full extent of our naivety. Children know that adulthood exists. They have an idea of where their understanding is headed. We don't know what exists in the void. It could very easily be something having nothing to do with a deity that no one has ever even considered before.

Scientists have been disciplined to be honest with themselves and others about what they know and don't know. The religious have not, and typically show no interest in becoming so. When an intellectually honest skeptic argues with you against your position on a deity, he's not telling you, "I know for sure that there is no god." A person saying this is lacking an understanding of falsifiability (a basic scientific principle) and you'd be right to call him on it. What he's usually really telling you is, "You don't know what's out there and please stop claiming that you do." And by your own admission above you should agree that you don't.

Something knowable is open to logical evaluation. Something unknowable is open only to idle speculation. You can't have it both ways... keeping only the most convenient qualities of each and throwing the others away.

This "both ways" approach seems unfortunately to be the very definition of "faith" as far as I can tell.

 

[Mokele]

If God is the creator of all living things, then why would it surprise you that they have the same codons? Why would it be necessary for God to create everything individually and so genetically unique from everything else?

So God just doesn't have much of an imagination?

And what of the dead viri? Why would God insert useless bits of dead viri into the genetic code of humans and chimps at precisely the same positions and with precisely the same mutations? These regions of DNA are NOT transcribed, so have no functional significance. The ONLY explanations are common descent and a malicious, deceitful God.

I think the problem here is with human logic. If you accept the premise that there is a God, why then don't you accept that there are limitations to our minds? It would be like a young child trying to explain to a middle-aged parent an aspect about life that they are innocently naive to^1000000. We are the young child in this scenario, thinking we know everything but we don't. This by no means doesn't mean we should give up trying to understand the natural world around us, what it means is accept that there are limitations to what we can figure out. God is not evil, and how did He plant the evidence? The better question is why would He need to plant evidence when He told us that He created it all? It was the greedy human mind that decided that we know all and came up with the conclusion that God doesn't exist, we're here by random chance.

How can you honestly believe that denying the evidence in order to cling to ancient myths is anything but giving up on understanding the world?

Nobody decided "hey, let's undermine religion by showing that God didn't make us!". Instead, the evidence all around us in the natural world unavoidably led to the conclusion that all life evolved from a common ancestor, which does NOT in any way negate God.

I understand the above probably won't mean anything to you because the acceptance that there could be a Creator behind the scenes means some kind of intellectual-inferiority in the atheist scientific-world.

I'm wondering where you got the delusion that common descent necessarily led to atheism? Have you done any serious reading or research on this topic, or do you just swallow what your pastor says without thinking? In fact, the MAJORITY of scientists believe in God, including in biology. Gould, the scientist whom I quoted on 'evolution as a fact and theory', believed in God.

What's in the Bible is an allegory about creation which is meant to say more about humanity's inherently sinful nature than about the actual history of the Earth. Unless you take the theologically indefensible position that every line is literally true, there is no reason why modern evolutionary theory is not compatible with Christianity. Why is the only conception of God direct intervention? Why is it so hard to accept an idea of God who created via evolution?

Mokele

 

[scottychaos]

I hold a theory that 99% of Christians seem incapable of grasping, and I have no idea why..

God and Evolution do NOT need to be incompatible!
only the Bible and evolution are incompatible.
God is bigger than the Bible..the Bible is just a book.
God is much bigger than the Bible...and I highly doubt the Bible contains everything there is to know about God..probably it contains more like 0.00000000000000000000001% of everything there is to know about God.

I believe:
1. evolution is real..because the evidence is undeniable.
2. God is real, because I choose to believe that.

therefore:

God created life, and evolution is His method of letting life evolve.

I dont believe the Book of Genesis literally..Adam and Eve.
I also dont believe in the Noah's flood myth.
because they CANT be true...because the planet proves they are not true.

So if you have two things contradicting each other..the Bible and the plant Earth..
which is more likely to be wrong? a book or a planet?
If the planet contradicts the book..which is clearly does..the book HAS to be wrong..
because its very likely that imperfect humans wrote the Bible and got a few things wrong,
but its NOT likely that humans laid down all the layers in the Earth's crust and planted dinosaur skeletons in it..

Creationists say "The book is right and the Planet is wrong"..
I just dont get that..how can the planet be wrong??
sure, they come up with laughably weak "proof" to prove the book is right..
but no can take it seriously..

IMO, God wants us to be smart about this..He gave us these brains for a reason..
IMO, denying the evidence God has left for us in the planet, as proof of His creation, is
really doing Him a huge disservice..
The planet Earth is a much better record of God's awesome work than the Bible is..

God can be real and not be incompatible with Evolution..
I dont know why some Christians are so threatened by this!
I guess because they cant admit some parts of the book might be wrong..
but eventually they are going to have to admit it..

IMO..accepting evolution only INCREASES the greatness and awesomeness of God!
why not give God the credit He deserves for evolution??
clinging to the book at all-costs minimizes God greatly IMO..
makes Him smaller..who are we to say what God can and cant do?

The planet cant lie...you have to believe what it says..
Humans could not have possibly made up the planet..its impossible.

A book however can very easily be wrong...Humans could have thought they were writing God's actual words..but I dont know of any Human who could ever claim with 100% truth that they know all that God has ever said and done..
therefore I have no problems believing certain parts of the Bible are simply myth, and should not be accepted as literal fact. Genesis falls firmly into that category.

Scot

 

[Outsiders71]

You can't claim that something is far outside human understanding, and then claim to have some understanding of it in the same breath. Why this is an intellectually fraudulent act should be clear.

If I believe that God is the creator of everything, and I believe the Bible is His word, then why not? I never claimed to have an understanding of how everything happened. I claimed that I have faith in God and His word which states He created everything.

Scientists (scientists living their principles, anyway) are fully aware that we don't understand everything. They'll admit to it freely. Our perceptual limitations are the bread and butter of millennia of philosophical thought. And this is the difference between them and the religious. Scientists and skeptics look out into the expansive darkness before them and say, "If anything is out there, I don't yet understand it." The religious look out into the same darkness and say, "There's something out there, and I understand it." To their credit they may not claim to fully understand it, but somehow this "faith" thing makes them feel entitled to claim some kind of special knowledge about it. And then when challenged on that knowledge they turn around and hide behind the unknowability of it all... a tactic that only they seem not to see through.

This is not true at all, and the responses in this thread can verify that. Especially the ones that say I should be wiped from the gene pool because I don't believe in the broader sense of evolution. The argument you make that "religious" somehow know more because of their faith is wrong. For instance if you believe in the big bang theory as the source of how the universe started, how is that not equivalent to believing that God created the universe? They both require the same type of faith, just in a different source. This scenario has nothing to do about knowledge, but everything to do with faith. I will tell you that I believe God created the universe, because He revealed that to me in His word. You may claim this to be "special knowledge" but to me it is not necessarily knowledge but faith in God. Just as there is no true knowledge in the big bang theory, it's just a scientific guess. What you have there is faith in the scientific community to answer one of the big questions of life, not knowledge. You can explain both like some kind of knowledge but they are in fact not knowledge at all, but faiths.

Yes, you and I are the young children in this scenario, thinking we know everything when we don't. Except you're trying to tell the other children what it means to be an adult. You claim to have some special understanding about adulthood (or at least have a "faith" about it) that the kids around you don't. By your own logic, should you really be taken seriously here? Mustn't your views on the cosmos be just as hopelessly naive as ours are due to your status as a mere human being?

First off this was just an analogy. Secondly I'm not trying to apply my personal faith upon everyone and claiming that every other belief is wrong. Not at all. What I'm trying to say is there is no answer that can be applied universally upon everyone, because every explanation of life requires some kind of faith and it's not fair for the scientific community to try and claim they have the golden answer because they don't. Yes everyone is equally naive on the macro level, but in the micro level I believe in my faith and accept it as truth.

Something knowable is open to logical evaluation. Something unknowable is open only to idle speculation. You can't have it both ways... keeping only the most convenient qualities of each and throwing the others away.

Do you think the beginnings of the universe, and the origin of life on Earth are things that are knowable and are open to logical evaluation? I don't. I believe they are both unknowable and are only open to idle speculation and faith.

 

[xvart]

I'm not here trying to defend President Bush

My apologies, I didn't mean to direct that at anything you were saying. I was making a general comment about the presidency.

Scientists (scientists living their principles, anyway) are fully aware that we don't understand everything. They'll admit to it freely.

In fact, if we knew everything, there wouldn't be scientists.

xvart.

 

[Outsiders71]

So God just doesn't have much of an imagination?

Again why is it necessary for God have an imagination?

How can you honestly believe that denying the evidence in order to cling to ancient myths is anything but giving up on understanding the world?

The fact is there isn't 100% evidence, and it's not possible to ever have 100% evidence about the origin of life on Earth. If you want to take the little evidence there is and stretch it by faith, go for it. You can put your faith in whatever you choose to, no one is stopping you.

Nobody decided "hey, let's undermine religion by showing that God didn't make us!". Instead, the evidence all around us in the natural world unavoidably led to the conclusion that all life evolved from a common ancestor, which does NOT in any way negate God.

God is clear about how life on Earth was created and it was not through the speciation of one cell.

What's in the Bible is an allegory about creation which is meant to say more about humanity's inherently sinful nature than about the actual history of the Earth. Unless you take the theologically indefensible position that every line is literally true, there is no reason why modern evolutionary theory is not compatible with Christianity. Why is the only conception of God direct intervention? Why is it so hard to accept an idea of God who created via evolution?

Mokele

Can you please explain to me what is allegorical about Genesis 1:26-30 and Genesis 2:7? They are affirmations from God that we are not a result of speciation.

 

[Outsiders71]

I hold a theory that 99% of Christians seem incapable of grasping, and I have no idea why..

God and Evolution do NOT need to be incompatible!
only the Bible and evolution are incompatible.
God is bigger than the Bible..the Bible is just a book.
God is much bigger than the Bible...and I highly doubt the Bible contains everything there is to know about God..probably it contains more like 0.00000000000000000000001% of everything there is to know about God.

Then do you not accept the Bible as the word of God? He clearly states that He created man.

I believe:
1. evolution is real..because the evidence is undeniable.

Please show this undeniable evidence starting from the first living organism, to now, showing all the speciations from that original organism.

I also dont believe in the Noah's flood myth.
because they CANT be true...because the planet proves they are not true.

How so? There are more historical accounts of a flood than just from the Bible. Do you believe that Jesus actually lived on this Earth 2,000+ years ago? Or is the Bible wrong about that as well, even though there's documents from Jewish and Roman historians about Jesus?

 

[scottychaos]

Then do you not accept the Bible as the word of God? He clearly states that He created man.

r

I believe God created Man..just not in the Creationist "Adam and Eve" sense.
I believe Humans arrived at this point via Evolution.
God still created life...no scientific issues there at all.

Please show this undeniable evidence starting from the first living organism, to now, showing all the speciations from that original organism.

You can find tons of it yourself..lots of evidence has already been given in this very thread..but you wont believe it anyway, so its pointless to try to convince you. No matter how much evidence is shown to you, you will still believe "there is zero evidence"..

How so? There are more historical accounts of a flood than just from the Bible.

"Historical accounts" are meaningless..
they could all be small, local floods.
and anyone writing all those "historical accounts" would have no way of knowing what was happening 10 miles from from their home..
"Historical accounts" are meaningless..
The Planet disproves the world-wide Noahs flood myth.

Do you believe that Jesus actually lived on this Earth 2,000+ years ago?

Of course..because the geologic record does not contradict the existence of Jesus!
nothing contradicts the existence of Jesus!
people can still choose not believe in Him..but no one can not believe in Him because of science.

and thats totally unrelated to what im talking about..
im talking about Creationism and Noah's flood only..

I never said ALL of the Bible is wrong..
just certain parts of it.
the parts that can easily be disproven by our planet.

Scot

 

[endparenthesis]

This is not true at all, and the responses in this thread can verify that. Especially the ones that say I should be wiped from the gene pool because I don't believe in the broader sense of evolution. The argument you make that "religious" somehow know more because of their faith is wrong. For instance if you believe in the big bang theory as the source of how the universe started, how is that not equivalent to believing that God created the universe? They both require the same type of faith, just in a different source. This scenario has nothing to do about knowledge, but everything to do with faith. I will tell you that I believe God created the universe, because He revealed that to me in His word. You may claim this to be "special knowledge" but to me it is not necessarily knowledge but faith in God. Just as there is no true knowledge in the big bang theory, it's just a scientific guess. What you have there is faith in the scientific community to answer one of the big questions of life, not knowledge. You can explain both like some kind of knowledge but they are in fact not knowledge at all, but faiths.

The responses in this thread weren't made by scientists except those made by Mokele (if there are other scientists here, my apologies for not being aware), and I seriously doubt the gene pool comment was made by a disciplined skeptic, whoever it was.

This whole faith argument is an infamous one and it's the fundamental problem addressed by epistemology, and I'd highly recommend doing some study in it outside of this thread. But I'll say a few things on it here.

It's hard to really do justice to the definitions of and differences between belief and knowledge in a single forum post, but I will say that belief will often tend to emerge in a top-down way (making the conclusion first) whereas knowledge will tend to emerge in a bottom-up way (it follows naturally from the evidence). Belief is speculative, preemptive, and is often confused with knowledge by the person holding the belief. Belief seems to arise from a natural aversion to uncertainty in humankind rather than arising from reason.

Many religious people will say they merely "believe" or "have faith" in something, but then their actions will suggest that they internally treat those beliefs as knowledge. Someone who engineers his entire life around the desires or instructions of a possible deity as any very religious person might is not merely being speculative. But he has convinced himself that it's just a "belief" because that seems to provide him with a level of intellectual protection when he argues those beliefs to others. If he admits that he treats the beliefs as knowledge then he opens himself up to rational critique.

Faith in the big bang and faith in a deity are two very different things, and even those philosophers who say that nothing is truly knowable will agree that there are still "degrees" of knowability.

The big bang theory was developed from the bottom up. It's based in evidence. It's subject to change in the face of new evidence (anyone who can demonstrate why the theory is faulty would win a Nobel Prize). The big bang theory thrives even amidst the open examination of alternative ideas. So, though not perfectly provable (I can't even perfectly prove that I exist), it has a reasonably high degree of knowability... enough that we can successfully operate on it until future evidence shows up. It bravely floats in that place between ignorance and certainty that humans find so abhorrent.

The notion of a deity was developed from the top down. It's based in anthropomorphization and desire. We don't have evidence that necessarily leads to a deity, and most arguments for a deity (e.g. intelligent design) don't actually argue a deity... they argue against the absence of a "first cause" (of some sort) while saying absolutely nothing about the characteristics of the first cause (making the arguments as substantial as the "anyone but Bush" arguments for any political candidate of the last election). The notion of a deity is not subject to change in the face of new evidence. The open examination of alternative ideas is discouraged by those who hold the notion (show me the equivalent of a Nobel Prize awarded by any Christian organization for conclusive evidence against genesis, the flood, etc). The notion of a deity is the result of jumping ahead in an attempt to avoid that dark, uncertain, abhorrent void. After all, there are many possible explanations for all the things people attribute to a deity, but I've never met a theist who is all that interested in what they might be (someone taking a bottom up approach would find those explanations utterly fascinating).

So the assertion that the two are just the same kind of faith is borne out of a false dichotomy... the position that something must either be truth or faith with nothing in between. When degrees of knowability are applied, the big bang theory (and the other forms of scientific faith that you mentioned) and the notion of a deity can barely be compared. Bottom-up vs. top-down makes all the difference.

That last statement might seem to contradict the last statement of my previous post, but it was really that dichotomy that I was addressing. If a deity is declared to be unknowable, then the person making the declaration cannot also claim to know the deity in any way. If the deity is admitted to have degrees of knowability, then we can start evaluating that deity using logic and evidence.