Creation has evolved!:O:

I agree; and that includes anything that is proposed as science, no matter what the title given to it. If it isn't examined and reexamined from every angle, it ain't science!

Science asks: could it be true what the temporary theory so far says?

Religion asks: why is it true what the unerring dogma says?

That describes pretty well evolutionists' and creationists' approach as well.

I guess there's a bit more to it than that ;)
Science may ask for truth as , but it's rather concerned with providing the most probable explanation of the (material) world based on evidence using traceable methods. It acquires data and draws conlcusions, but data as such can always be only a fragment of 'truth', which as such isn't a scientific, but rather a philosophical (or, more precisely, epistemological) concept.
Dogma isn't derived from religion as such, it's rather a binding interpretation of a given subject (e.g. in Christian religion a binding interpretation of the Bible). It implies the presence of at least some sort of clerical hierarchy that can both provide such an interpretation and see to its enforcement, and hierarchy in that sense doesn't necessarily exist in all religions (and not in all parts of Christendom).

Things that people disagree with are ALWAYS deemed irrelevant!:har:

I don't know. Ask Harlton Arp, astrophysicist. In 1960 he was awarded the Helen B Warner Prize for Astronomy by the American Astronomical Society. This is traditionally given to an astronomer making significant contribution to the science over the past five year period, and is considered a pretty ironclad endorsement by "big science."

Arp was one of a handful of scientists in the world with large blocks of observing time for the Mt Polomar, Mt Wilson and McDonald Observatory telescopes, more evidence of his inside position within astrophysics. However, Mr Arp decided to assemble an atlas of peculiar galaxies. His reasoning was that little was known about the evolution of galaxies through time and a photographic survey of galaxies, especially those of unusual form, would be helpful in connecting the dots.

Unfortunately, those photographs and the inescapable conclusions Arp drew from them brought him into direct conflict with the cadre of Big Bang and redshift theory physicists who ran Big Science Astronomical and who in large part still do. They had their entire careers tied up in the validity of certain theories. Their income, prestige and social standing within the scientific community depended on being right. You see, science is first a political structure, and THEN a classical scientific structure.

Arp had many dozens of photos showing something deemed impossible by the astrophysics establishment. Their dogma was that redshift is purely the effect of recessional velocity: the higher the redshift, the further the distance. Arp's photos clearly showed high and lower redshift bodies in physical contact with one another, and high redshift bodies in front of lower redshift objects. Armed with ten years' worth of evidence, Arp presented his findings.

Nothing. No publication. No reaction. His observing time at Mt Polomar and McDonald observatories was taken away (can't have any MORE heretical photos coming out! Who KNOWS what that crazy man will destroy next). His papers were denied publication. Harlton Arp was effectively banned from American astronomy. He essentially fled to Europe and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, where he spent the rest of his career. A good friend of mine, closely tied to Mr Arp, retired to Florida, where he was instrumental in jump starting my interest in amateur astronomy and from whom I learned the story.

Arp still maintains that his findings, although modified, of course, by subsequent discoveries is basically valid. In this story, from his website, he recounts the day when the brightest star in the astronomical sky, Fred Hoyle, came to visit and subsequently delivered an address to the Seattle Meeting of the American Astronomical Society, April 1972. This keynote address was considered the most significant event in Big Astronomy for the year. The address was traditionally printed in its entirety in the Astrophysical Jounal. Not that year. Fred Hoyle had jumped into bed with this prostitute, completely endorsing his line of research and the news would never see the light of day. Too many prominent luminaries in Big Science were threatened.

Science is first political. Then, if possible, it considers your lofty objective scientific principles. Arp is just the example I am most familiar with. But he is far from alone.

Sanjay Gupta, MD, in his book, Cheating Death, relates the catch 22 position of the use of failed CPR techniques and the reluctance of the American Heart Association and American Medical Association to adopt clearly superior techniques. The present CPR technique is a three part strategy: breathing, compressions, defibrillation. Recent studies have shown that the breathing has no measurable value, defibrillation is killing people, not because it doesn't work, but because too much time is being taken with it.

Actually the most important part of CPR turns out to be chest compressions. Dr Mike Kellum had a better idea, born from pig studies, which found that compressions alone, without mouth to mouth resuscitation, was much more effective in saving lives. He went to Mercy Hospital System in rural Arizona, where the emergency services director was fed up.

"Why are we spending time trying to bring no one back to life?" For the previous three years, Mercy Hospital System EMTs had responded to 92 cases of witnessed cardiac arrests, saving only 19, five of which ended up with serious brain damage.

They bucked the AMA and AHA, changing their CPR method to two hundred chest compressions, followed by a single shock from the defibrillator. No breaths at all during the procedure. They did insert what Gupta refers to as "a small device inserted into the mouth to pump in additional oxygen," in other words, to ensure that the patient was able to obtain oxygen, but that was all. The proceedure was 200 compressions, 1 shock, 200 compressions, 1 shock, 200 compressions, 1 shock. That's 600 hard, fast compressions in the regimen.

In 2006, four years after this policy was instituted, FINALLY the American Journal of Medicine could ignore them no longer. Finally, the rest of the country could be told that survival rates without brain damage had gone from 15% to 48% just from the institution of this heresy.

Tell me. Did YOU know about this? Do YOU think it was warranted to sacrifice the lives of two thirds of savable cardiac patients for four years in defense of certain luminaries' careers? How does your local health authority conduct CPR today. Will they kill your father or grandfather or you because people whose responsibility it is to disseminate cutting edge scientific discovery are not doing so in defense of their position and influence?

Heresy is a threat. It is also a promise that the future will be better than today. Embracing that better future means a carefully considered embracing of heresy. Challenge of authority is always the first step toward progress.

Some years ago I was struck by the thought that not all people are Christians. I was about 12 and until that time, I thought the budhists, muslims, hindus and all the others were just different Christians, or potential Christians. People still in the dark that can't wait to hear about Jesus. Then it dawned on me that billions of people have never read the Bible and don't give a damn about it. They all have their notion of how the world was created. So when you say "Creation" you invariably link it to the Bible.

But how about the Hindu version? Why don't we debate that? Or the ancient greek one? Just because Zeus is no longer worshiped does that mean that he wasn't for real? Or how about the mayans? So many of us believe that they knew when the world would end. Maybe they knew when the world started. But I have no doubt that you'd start laughing the moment you hear about the Earth Crocodile or the Golden Turtle.

What's funny is that most religions have incorporated astronomical truths into alegories (I'd say astrological but to my surprise, no.). Most religions have a pretty scientific approach to how the world was created. The Bible however was written long ago in a small and insignificant country that was too often ravaged by invaders for the poor scholars to do anything but pray... Really now, how many ancient jewish astronomers or mathematicians do we know about? Why would that be important?

Because the Church burned Giordano Bruno alive and almost did the same thing with Galilei and Copernicus. Yes but now we live in a different era, you might say. We know that the world is round now. Yes, but only because you've seen it on TV. Without images from space there'd still be some that believe the world is flat just because the Bible doesn't say that the world is round.

Fortunately, the church no longer holds science back. We have the protestants to thank for that. People like Newton who were deeply religious, who looked at facts and changed their view of God according to new evidence, always searching more and more. While it's not a fact that God exists or any form of him ever did, it is a fact that without God we would not have any reason to search at all. Existence itself would have no meaning, regardless of being created in 6 days or in the Big Bang. But should there by one out there, he just seems more like a Big Banger to me. :haha:

I'm afraid that the history is much more complicated than "Catholics bad, Protestants good." In England of the 1500s and 1600s, both were rotten to the core and killed people with the regard you give to swatting a mosquito.

Their persecution of each other made Roman persecution of early Christians look like Mardi Gras.

If there is one central tenent to any monotheistic religion is that God is perfect and man is fallible. All religions, being constructs of man, are therefore fallible as well.

I find those who claim to speak for God as absurd as those who claim that God does not exist. Both are shining examples of Mans arrogance.

August,

That brings up the important question about the differences between "Spirituality" and "Religion"

To me they are totally different, and in many aspects, independent of each other.

Others will disagree though.

Well I for one would be interested in hearing what you see those differences to be. Spirituality is a religions main reason for existence but certainly not the only one.

If there was no spirit to be saved then there is no point to any religion, so you may as well eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die!!:03:

But it's not a shining example of Man's arrogance to claim it exists in the first place?

Is there anything arrogant about saying god's existence is not proven, and its existence can be doubted until shown otherwise?

,Arp was not ignored back in 1960, he was given two awards for his work,,the Helen B. Warner Prize for Astronomy by the American Astronomical Society and Newcomb Cleveland Prize.

Arp originally proposed his theories in the 1960s, however, telescopes and astronomical instrumentation have advanced greatly; the Hubble Space Telescope was launched, multiple 8-10 meter telescopes (such as those at Keck Observatory) have become operational, and detectors such as CCDs are now more widely employed. These new telescopes and new instrumentation have been utilized to examine QSOs further. QSOs are now generally accepted to be very distant galaxies with high redshifts. Moreover, many imaging surveys, most notably the Hubble Deep Field, have found many high-redshift objects that are not QSOs but that appear to be normal galaxies like those found nearby. Moreover, the spectra of the high-redshift galaxies, as seen from X-ray to radio wavelengths, match the spectra of nearby galaxies (particularly galaxies with high levels of star formation activity but also galaxies with normal or extinguished star formation activity) when corrected for redshift effects.
Nonetheless, Arp has not wavered from his stand against the Big Bang and still publishes articles stating his contrary view in both popular and scientific literature, frequently collaborating with Geoffrey Burbidge and Margaret Burbidge.

Resources:

1. S. P. Driver, A. Fernandez-Soto, W. J. Couch, S. C. Odewahn, R. A. Windhorst, S. Phillips, K. Lanzetta, A. Yahil (1998). "Morphological Number Counts and Redshift Distributions to I<26 from the Hubble Deep Field: Implications for the Evolution of Ellipticals, Spirals, and Irregulars". Astrophysical Journal 496: L93–L96. doi:10.1086/311257.
2. W. J. Couch, R. S. Ellis, J. Godwin, D. Carter (1983). "Spectral energy distributions for galaxies in high redshift clusters. I - Methods and application to three clusters with Z = 0.22-0.31". Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 205: 1287–1312.
3. Postman, L. M. Lubin, J. B. Oke (1998). "A Study of Nine High-Redshift Clusters of Galaxies. II. Photometry, Spectra, and Ages of Clusters 0023+0423 and 1604+4304". Astronomical Journal 116: 560–583. doi:10.1086/300463.
4. R. S. Priddey, R. G. McMahon (2001). "The far-infrared-submillimetre spectral energy distribution of high-redshift quasars". Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 324: L17–L22. doi:10.1046/j.1365-8711.2001.04548.x.
5. "Smithsonian/NASA ADS Custom Query Form". Results for "Arp, H". Retrieved 2006-09-03.
6. H. Arp (1966). "Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies". Astrophysical Journal Supplement 14: 1–20. doi:10.1086/190147.
7. Helen B. Warner Prize for Astronomy
8. About the AAAS: History & Archives
9. Juan Miguel Campanario and Brian Martin, "Challenging dominant physics paradigms" (2004) Journal of Scientific Exploration, vol. 18, no. 3, Fall 2004, pp. 421-438 You see, these are the kind of claims that really, really need citations. Single cases, I am afraid, do not show a patern.Change takes time to initiate, you can not expect everything to change overnight. And yes, I did know this because I have gone through several first aid courses and was the designated field medic for my recon section while in the army. That being said, peer review is not a rapid process, since when someone is trying to get a paper published it is handed out to several other experts in the field who then try to find fault with it by repeating hte experiments described in the way described, only if they get the same results does the paper pass peer review, if however the results differ with the same methodology there is clearly a problem. All that takes time, nd then it takes even more time for cuting edge science to get into science classrooms, because classrooms do not teach the cutting edge, they teach science that has been shown to be good beyond reasonable doubt.

And as to the irrelevance of sir Newtons belief, sir Newton could have been a transvestite who had sex with cammels and sacrificed small children to Cthulu, that would have no bearing on the validity of his theory.

To be more accurate, I was referring to the differences between what I call
a. "personal religion" - Faith in your god and a personal relationship with your god or your prophet.

b. "organizational religion" - membership or subscription to a specific organized religious group e.g., church, temple, or mosque.

It is my position that a person can have "personal religion" without being a member of a organized church and that a person can be a member of a church without having any relationship with their god or prophet.

This is why I say the two can be independent of each other as one does not necessarily cause or require the other.

I understand that to go at the same direction like my own thinking on the two terms.

A being, a life form aware of it's mortality, by that is probably uncapable to not ask questions on from where we come, where we go, why all this is and how much time we have left. This asking mind that wants to know itself beyond the span of it'S life on Earth I call spirituality, and it is a most private, intimate thing, obviously, for nobody sees the world exactly the very same way like I see it. From some point on, everyone of us is alone again with his way to see existence and cosmos.

Religion is when this attitude moves from the priuvate into the public space, gets organised, institutionalised, starts to raise demands to others, establishes dogmas and priest'S hierarchies benefitting from not letting people ask questions and find their own answers, but giving the prepared answers that keep them in dependance from the priests. That way, what orginally was a private, intimate thing, turns into poltiics, and often brutal powerpolitics indeed.

Man cannot avoid to be a spiritual being. We all are, even those of us believing in deities - or those of use refusing the idea of deities. Even those of us trying to evade these questions on their own existence I outlined above, are spiritual. Their strategy to deal with them is to ignore them by finding distraction, and hoping to escape the pain of not knowing for sure.

Comparing this spirituality to religion's anything but selfless motives, that are instead searching for control and power and keeping the collective together and strong and in uniformity (by doing so both defining and protecting it's group identity), means that spirituality and religion are antagonistic. And your individual spirituality certainly does not need any form of arbitrary, foreignly created group identity that gets imposed onto you and claims yourself to be it's own. In order to adress your spirituality, you must refuse the religions and their dogmas, and where you follow the religions and their prefixed "answers", you prevent yourself from foicussing on your spirituality. You cannot be spiritual and relgious at the same time, therefore, it is either this or that. The decline of organised christian religion in the West hints at that, too.

I am atheist and anti-theist, not only don't I care for wether or not gods exists, but I am sure that gods do not exist. I see no explanatory value in assuming that he/her/it/they exist, I do not need this conception to find peace of mind in my life. The Christian churches, as well as the orthodox hierarchy in Judaism, and Islam, I consider to be our No.1 public enemies, all these putting our freedom, world peace, justice and reasonability at risk.

Nevertheless I consider myself to be a highly spiritual being. Although I am determindly anti-religious .

Obviously I base less on a strict linguistic definition of the Latin and Greek origins of the words spirituality and religion, but on a reflection of historic developements.

Ethics and moral behavior depend on your attitude towards life and cosmos. the way you see them decides the way you approach their many details and constant challenges they raise in your life. But the way you see cosmos and life, as I argued above, is forming your spirituality, whereas religion prevents that individual, pruvate, direct attitude. therefore the claim that withouit religion there cannot be morals and ethics, must be rejected. Religion is amoral by defintion, and you can see that in that where the is relgion in strong power and control some of the most imhumane and imoral crimes in the history of mankind have been committed, and extraordinary intolerance, coldheartedness and brutality gets practiced in the name of religion. Prime example of coorse is islam, but you also see the same pattern in orthodox Judaism and Christinian fundamentalism.

Morals are not there because of religion, but despite the existence of religion. the shape and nature of morals does not get formed by relgion, but spirituality.