64% in US think creationism should be taught in school.

[Bluemofia]

The placebo effect maybe?

 

[mdwh]

Sure it does or we would not be having this discussion. Let me tell you of a personal experience I recently had.

I was driving home on a Friday night about midnight and came up on an accident just past a river bridge in a country area. I was maybe the 3rd car on the scene of a 3 car accident. It spanned both lanes of the two lane highway. I pulled to the side just past the accident and got out to render aid. The first thing that I saw was one of the folks in the accident was trying, unsuccessfully to light a road flare to divert traffic..he was so shaken he couldnt get it to work, so I grabbed the flares and did that. While I did this I noticed a woman down on the side of the road with a couple of people giving her help. Seeing that she was being helped I then checked the other cars for people...everyone else involved in the accident seemed to be ok..only the woman was the one significantly injured. So I went back to check on her...by this time she had maybe 10 people around her with her feet propped up and covered in coats. All of a sudden the poor woman starts to have seizures and I think omg here we go she is going to die. I looked at the people around her...everyone looked scared, but were doing all they knew to do. The only thing I could think of to do that no one was doing was pray. So I started praying for this woman I didnt know while people were trying to keep her covered as it was raining. After a min or so of this the womans eyes shot wide open and I swear to God it looked like she looked me right in the eye...not anyone else..just me. Then slowly her breathing settled down and she stopped having the seizure. I had been praying the whole while. Thinking she was going to be ok, I stopped praying and started to walk away to check on someone else....and here is where the really odd thing happened...the second I started to walk away she started having another seizure. I immediately turned around and started praying for her again and amazingly her seizures once again stopped. At that point I felt God was telling me to just continue to pray for her which I did until the ambulance arrived. By the time she was being loaded onto the ambulance she more alert and trying to speak. It turned out that a van had stalled in the middle of the highway just past the bridge..a second car had slowed behind the van and was commencing to pass it on the right when a car driven by the woman hit the passing car. A pretty nasty accident. All in all it was a totally amazing experience.

Now I tell you that story fully realizing that what I experienced is possibly explainable by science or even coincedence. But, my spirit and my heart speaks to me differently and tells me I was there for a specific reason that night. To me, it validated my faith and speaks to a purpose in life that maybe I hadnt felt before. It was amazing.

It's a nice story, but that doesn't answer my question at all.

Firstly, as you admit yourself, there is nothing here unexplainable by science. A person seemed worse than they were, then they recovered - sometimes that happens. The fact that someone nearby was praying is no more relevant than if someone nearby was picking their nose. Correlation does not imply causation - especially if your sample size is 1! I might be more interested if a doctor had examined her and said there was no way she could recover, but as it is, there is no evidence of something unexplainable by science.

Secondly - religion doesn't explain it either. "God did it" isn't an answer - how does God do it, by what mechanism, and what is God, and where did he come from? If God is all-powerful and all-loving, why does he only heal her when you're praying?

So this is neither something unexplainable by science, nor something which is instead explained by religion.

I have no idea if creationism as they want to teach it is valid or not...and I am smart enough to not discount evolution outright either. I guess my point is if you are able to feel what I felt that night...well...it makes the whole thing seem moot in a way. I mean, if God is big enough to touch me and the people around me at that accident that way, then he is big enough to incorporate both evolution AND creationism in his plan.

But only if you're praying at the moment, it seems. As soon as you turn your back and stop praying for a moment, he'll let people die.

 

[MobBoss]

But only if you're praying at the moment, it seems. As soon as you turn your back and stop praying for a moment, he'll let people die.

If thats what you think then you missed the entire point of the whole thing. I have seen horrible things happen to people and yet good things rise out of the ashes of it. Take for example Hurricane Katrina. Why would god do that many people ask....and yet, for many people in the slums in the poverty stricken 9th Ward that hurricane was the only way they would ever have left that situation and able to start anew somewhere else.

Personally, I wouldnt want to live in your belief system...it has no hope. When things go bad, just remember to pick your nose and wish for the best.

 

[klazlo]

I think that the poll about 64 % for creationism is seriously biased.
Option 4: creationism has nothing to do with science.

 

[blackheart]

If thats what you think then you missed the entire point of the whole thing. I have seen horrible things happen to people and yet good things rise out of the ashes of it. Take for example Hurricane Katrina. Why would god do that many people ask....and yet, for many people in the slums in the poverty stricken 9th Ward that hurricane was the only way they would ever have left that situation and able to start anew somewhere else.

Personally, I wouldnt want to live in your belief system...it has no hope. When things go bad, just remember to pick your nose and wish for the best.

So it wasn't really an act of God, more of an act of nature?

 

[Atlas14]

Creationism makes for nice Bible-telling stories on a rainy, Sunday at your local church. But leave God out of the explanation of evolution. He is irrelevant in such a topic. If organisms are clearly changing now, evolving and defying those 5 principles stated in the Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium theory, observable principles of microevolution occurring in laboratory and natural environments, why would the past be any different? Did God get tired of creating new unique species and instead is lnow leaving the rest up to genetics, mutations, natural selection, and geographic/sexual isolation of populations?

 

[Akka]

Personally, I wouldnt want to live in your belief system...it has no hope. When things go bad, just remember to pick your nose and wish for the best.

Well, that's the difference : reality doesn't care if you'd like to live in it or not. Reality IS. If anything, you simply explain why people believe in reassuring things despite the lack of proof.
And on the contrary, when you don't have the big guy in the sky that will solve your problems if you pray enough, you can actually, rather than pick your nose, work and fight to actually understand and correct problems and difficulties (learn, understand, discover => science), rather than simply say "God did it, don't bother" (accepting anything as the will of God without any human intervention nor understanding possible => Creationism).

 

[RoboPig]

I think that the poll about 64 % for creationism is seriously biased.
Option 4: creationism has nothing to do with science.

if you look on the first page it shows you that a religious organization setup this poll so it is biased. a fine example of fundamentalist propoganda

 

[mdwh]

If thats what you think then you missed the entire point of the whole thing. I have seen horrible things happen to people and yet good things rise out of the ashes of it.

Hang on - you cited the fact that she mysteriously got worse again when you stopped praying as evidence that prayer worked. That's what I was responding to. If you're now saying that some good would have come from her death, why did you carry on praying? If God helping her had no correlation to you stopping prayer, then you can't claim that as evidence - you can't have it both ways.

Personally, I wouldnt want to live in your belief system...it has no hope. When things go bad, just remember to pick your nose and wish for the best.

You are seriously saying that picking one's nose and wishing for the best is a good system, whilst my system to concentrate on helping in ways I know will work, rather than praying or picking my nose, is one with no hope?

 

[MobBoss]

Hang on - you cited the fact that she mysteriously got worse again when you stopped praying as evidence that prayer worked. That's what I was responding to. If you're now saying that some good would have come from her death, why did you carry on praying? If God helping her had no correlation to you stopping prayer, then you can't claim that as evidence - you can't have it both ways.

You are seriously saying that picking one's nose and wishing for the best is a good system, whilst my system to concentrate on helping in ways I know will work, rather than praying or picking my nose, is one with no hope?

Never said that something good would come from her death..but I have seen that happen in other cases. The entire point that I was trying to make was that God was talking to me there....by using the woman, he sent me the message that yes, prayer does have an effect and that yes, he wanted me to keep praying for that woman. I have stated it the best way I can. If you want to just be obtuse in order to poke little holes here and there over verbage or what not, then there is no more sense in carrying on this thread.

Mobboss throws his hands in the air and walks away.

 

[mdwh]

Well I have nothing against people who want to believe in prayer themselves, so I won't argue that any longer - but back to the original point, "religion" does not *explain* anything about these events either, nor does teaching things like creationism allow us to find out about the world in the same way that the scientific method does. Just as I would not want paramedics to be taught that the first thing they do on a scene is spend 5 minutes praying, I do not want time in science lessons taken up by non-science.

I am not going to criticise the evidence for your personal beliefs, but if we are deciding what gets taught in schools, then evidence is important, and anecdotal evidence is not enough (otherwise we'd be teaching magic, astrology, homeopathy, superstitions and who knows what else as fact in schools).

 

[MrCynical]

@Mobboss. I admit that your story interests me, but I have a severe problem with the explanation that the woman starting having seizures whenever you stopped praying. Let us take this as true, I would hate to believe that God would let someone die just to make a point to you. It would indicate either God is very focussed on you at the expense of others (good from your point of view, not so good for the rest of us). Alternatively we have God effectively saying "Worship me or I'll let this person die". Both these explanations are morally repugnant to me. While I personally would class myself as an agnostic, the God I would worship would not do something like this.

 

[philippe]

( laughs with evryone)Lol,another debate!
Wow im hoping your wifes and men can expect as much energy in bed as in this thread.
Be rational guys
And to think that im sitting in a Christian school and my religion teacher (who's a ex-priest) believes in evolution and even recognises the fact that "god" is a succesor of Elohim.


Intelligent design is the wish of an Christian to fundate his grounds,creationism has no proof and evolutionism is rational but is not furfilling...


go home guys,show's over


Americans want to do it? Let them!
Belgium will reap the fruits of this!
In 30 years New York will be Nieuw-Brussel!!

i gotto go back to my cave now ,in endless muttering....

 

[Swedishguy]

I don't think it is appropriate to creationism in science class.

 

[ArneHD]

How did you find this thread anyway? It's over two years old.

 

[philippe]

Is that a post of mine?
omg.. this is embarrising, damn you Swedish guy!
No rezs in this instance!

 

[AL_DA_GREAT]

There needs to be strong scientific evidence before something is taught in school.

 

[brennan]

Well then i'm starting a campaign for the compulsory teaching of (thread) Necromancy right now...

 

[CurtSibling]

Creationism should be in religious classes, and religious classes only.

Putting it into a science curriculum is political and ridiculous.

EDIT!
Dammit SwedeGuy!
Don't dredge up elder-threads!

 

[Swedishguy]

How did you find this thread anyway? It's over two years old.

Tchehehe.

Is that a post of mine?
omg.. this is embarrising, damn you Swedish guy!
No rezs in this instance!

Tchehehe.

Creationism should be in religious classes, and religious classes only.

Putting it into a science curriculum is political and ridiculous.

EDIT!
Dammit SwedeGuy!
Don't dredge up elder-threads!

Tchehehe.

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