I have no interest in being converted myself, but I am very interested in what drove you from atheism to Christianity. More often it's the other way around, at least in my experience. Mind telling us what made you go that route? I'm interested in the logical process (if applicable), rather than in hearing your "testament" or "witness" or whatever born-agains call it. Thanks, if you're willing.

Not a big fan of Ayn Rand, but I have to say that a lot of her followers seem rather religious themselves, despite her own beliefs on the matter of god. Fascinating person, even if I find some of her philosophy to be reprehensible.

Well, since none of us can prove anything, we each must have faith in something.


Even if it is nothing at all.

Danielost, are they any different than Christians or Muslims trying to 'force' their own belief on anyone?

They are trying to convey to you what they believe, and why.
No difference, as far as I can tell.

Personally, I do not try to force.
I may, at times, try to convince though.

In present day times, Christians (for the most part) try to convince (which is different in tact from the force used in the past by 'us').
Muslims are more into force (which is in strict accordance with the Qur'an).
Atheists and agnostics are, as well, into convincing - again, for the most part.


We are in a fallen and evil world, Daniel.
All we can hope to do, is hold up our end as best we can - and in accordance with the Lord's wishes.

At the moment, the President is sucking up to the Muslim's - big time.

i've been participating in Marcus' other discussion about atheism, and i can assure you he seems like a staunch atheist to me. my guess is that he wanted to learn about religious people, not religion itself: i think he wants to know about the ways in which religion can lead individuals either to self-empowerment or timidity. he's not asking the questions of God, he's asking them of God's followers. but i could very well be wrong; maybe he's on the verge of a religious awakening. but my sense is otherwise.



i'll drink to that!



daniel, what makes you feel like another religion's being forced on you, if you don't mind my asking?

so it's not so much that a particular religion is being force on you, but rather that the religion you're familiar with is being systematically removed from government. all the money still says, "in god we trust." the pledge of allegence still says, "under god." on the other hand, it's not like anywhere in the government you'll find a document or anyting that says, "America affirms that God doesn't exist."

and i don't see that congress is trying to "make god disappear." to put it in a more jarring turn of phrase, they're trying to put him back in his proper place - the church. is it really that hard for you to see that all that god jargon everywhere can make atheists (as well as Jews, Muslims, and the multitude of other relgions represented in american citizens) feel like christianity is being forced on us?

if atheism were being forced on you, the dollar might read "in physics we trust." the pledge might go, "...one nation, under a giant ball of fusion-powered gas, indivisible, with liberty and justice for anyone that actually exists."

maybe the fact that evolution is a standard part of science education is a sign for you, but i had to learn about different religious beliefs as early as 6th grade as a part of history, and i revisited the topic of religion far more frequently than evolution in the following years.

in education, it's a matter of intellectual breadth. in government, it's a matter of non-partisanship. neither is force. the government is being de-christianized and secularized, but that doesn't mean it's being atheized. secular means 'separate from religion,' not 'against religion.' if you feel like something's being forced on you, perhaps that's an issue to discuss with a spiritual teacher or confidant (priest or minister, a parent or good friend... anyone you trust to 'get you' on a spiritual level).

but that's just my view of things.

Riiiiiiiiiight.
So there was a small number of animals on the ark, and they in turn evolved into the huge almost endless variety of what we have now, in about 6000 years?

That's about as dumb as the main creationist argument frankly.
Honestly, if one of my friends said that, i'd laugh and ridicule them until they saw sense. However, many of the people that buy into that stupid idea would probably be more than happy to use violence and intimidation to force their view.
Really, Creationists believe the world is like 6000 years old, so when did Noah build the ark? A week last tuesday? 10 years ago?

Creationists deserve nothing but scorn and disgust, they are no better than fundamental Muslims, and other conservative faith nuts. I'm not one for intolerance, but some types of people simply deserve it.

If I remember correctly, the war you mention is from other sources - and although they may provide some helpful information, they are not considered have the same weight as the canonical books.



Agreed. In fact, the Bible has many styles of writing - Genesis tends to be historical, Psalms is poetry, Proverbs is wisdom, and Revelation is prophetical. Revelation does indeed contain a lot of symbolism.

It is rather unfortunate that people want to ignore that aspect and pretend the Bible is either all literal or all symbolic. It is neither. It contains both literal and symbolic.

"johnwink" - you are not alone, BTW. Check out ex-atheist.com for somebody else who used to be an atheist and became Christian .



There was a rather large variety, and all of the information required for most of the traits we see today was already built into the animals in the ark.

Species that contain a large gene pool can actually change quite rapidly - this rapid change has been observed, and danielist has provided one of many examples.

Note, however, that this is selecting from an existing pool of information: If the pool is divided, the resulting animals have lost much of their ability to change further. There are limits: You can only go so far before the animal won't change any further. This decrease in genetic diversity can be observed in controlled conditions in a laboratory with species with short life spans, such as fruit flies or bacteria.

Mendel and Punnett both observed this, and came up with explanations for this: There are dominant and recessive alleles, and they combine together to for the phenotype we observe. Their basic principles still hold today, although they have been extended by our understanding of DNA and shown to be incredibly more complex than anybody imagined.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punnett_square
http://anthro.palomar.edu/mendel/mendel_1.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendelian_inheritance

As you can see, traits are not produced out of thin air: Although these are only simple examples, they show that there are only so many of traits, and a limited number of ways to combine them. The idea that "evolution" can easily go infinitely in any direction is false.



I am sorry to hear that. It's sad to see that closed minds are everywhere, not just in religious people.

that's unfair and untrue, and you've placed yourself on the same level as them by proscribing mistreatment.



i think you mean the Galapagos islands.



exactly; you're talking about bottlenecks, in this hypothetical case at least. the idea that the animals on the ark repopulated the earth's land, and furthermore evolved into the animal variety we see today, is ludicrous to anyone who understands the genetics of sexual reproduction. a male and a female aren't enough to repopulate a species, and having only 2 samples reduces genetic variaion to the point that evolution would slow to a near standstill until enough chance mutation had accumulated to reintroduce substantive genetic variation. 6,000 years is probably not enough time for such mutations to build up and proliferate. besides all that, there's the simple question: what would the predators have been eating? did they take an evolutionary side-trek and adapt to eating fish until the land had been repopulated, only to evolve back into hunting land animals -- all in the span of five to six thousand years? even if they could do that, what would the first adults coming off the ark have eaten? did they switch to plants (that miraculously survived the flood)?

evolution can happen very quickly, and as you point out there are many documented cases of it. the pre-cambrian explosion is probably the most prolific and obvious among them. contemporary evolutionary geneticists are finding that evolution can proceed much more rapidly than previously thought, and the reasons aren't totally understood. part of it has to do with the relationship between simple instructional genes and meta-controllers (genes that affect the control of other genets). if the two were equal (if all genes exerted influence on other genes) evolution wouldn't be possible. if there were no meta-genes, however, evolution would be choatic and aimless. the ratio between those genes varies by species, and the most rapidally and thus adaptable species (humans aside) have the lowest possible number of meta-genes they can have without crossing a threshold into evolutionary anomie.

rapid enviornmental change can lead to rapid evolution among a percentage of living species; it just depends on whether or not that species has the latent genetic variation to survive in the new environments and whether or not environmental interaction can bring out useful traits in the genes they already have.



sorry daniel, but you've reversed cause and effect. cheetahs have low genetic variation (but they do NOT have identical genes) mostly because they've been driven to the brink of extinction and because of their unusual mating patterns. humans have also been trying to domesticate them for millenia, which may have had an effect on their genetic variation.

here's an article that explains in better clarity what you're talking about: Low Genetic Variation on evolution.berkeley.edu.

IMHO, that was probably due to factors that happened after the flood, rather than at the flood. It's generally believed that God chose the animals to be included in the ark, rather than Noah himself.

In this case, I think dystopic has the right idea.



Is it? In terms of mendel's genetics, you grab one parent with all dominanat and another with all recessive genes (or with a mixture where the dominant and recessive overlap), and you have the potential to create all the variability you need, with no need to rely on mutations. In addition, seven pairs of many types of animals were bought to the Ark, rather than just a single pair.



Well, I dunno how many supplies Noah bought on his trip; it's possible he could've bought some extra supplies for after the flood was over as well as the flood itself. He had plenty of time to plan this out.

In addition, we know that many species are now extinct, including dinosaurs - it's possible there was indeed a mass extinction soon after the flood was over.

It's also possible that the diets of the animals on the ark were much less exclusive than the diets of modern animals, and that specialization came later due to environmental and genetic pressures.

Creationists do not deny genetic variation itself - we just deny that it can accumulate infinitely in any direction.

The word "evolution" disguises this by throwing a HUGE umbrella over many different mechanisms and pretending that proving one specific mechanism proves everything.

first who said they were stone or bronze age technology.

second it wasn't just one person working on the ark it was 8.

third it wasn't that big slightly smaller than a super tanker.

fourth dinosaurs didn't make the trip.

fifth Noah could only save the animals from around where he lived not all over the world. of course this could change if they had any zoos in the area. I know zoos were invented by the Aztecs.

sixth the fast reproducers would have had a year to multiply. the slower producers would have had a year of eating preserved meats and what not.

seventh every land animal on the planet is closely related to every other land animal.
it only takes three generations to turn a wolf into a dog.

eighth for a book that was written by a bunch of stone age bronze age Shepard's the bible is pretty accurate with the way scientists say that the universe and solar system started.

i did. unless you want to claim that Noah had later technology, but that's not in the bible. ergo, it's most likley the technology matched the era in which the events are proprted to take place. the most advanced civilizations in the middle east (and everywhere) 6,000 years ago were at the broze age level of technology. sure, there's evidence that Minoans had astrolabes and Egyptians had gold electroplating, but absolutely no evidence of the feats of engineering corresponding to what we'd call industrial age technology.



ah, well, i stand corrected. i wonder how many people it takes to build an oil tanker, and how long (let alone how long it'd take wihtout modern technology and materials).



maybe you should tell that to Cobra; i already know that since i know the flood never happened.



ah, that explains why there are animals in australia, the americas and antarctica today.



ah, so you've got twelve days of food for a single lion, then. lions need 15 lbs. of food per day (though they usually gorge for several day's worth of food, sometimes more than 100lbs in a sitting). so two lions would have needed almost 11,000 lbs. of meat to last that first year.

as for the rabbits, yeah, Noah could have probably bred about 78,000 rabbits in the first year, and he could have continued breeding them on the Ark, and certainly they'd produce enough food for two adult lions per month. but what the heck would they be eat? how much planet material would Noah need to feed them?

of course, Noah wouldn't bring all 78,000 rabbits. if he had the benefit of revelation, he'd only bring enough to keep the lions fed. 8 adult rabbits per day is 240 a month, which could be produced by only 20 pairs of rabbits. however, Noah would face a difficult choice. the lions need 8 adult rabbits; they wouldn't survive on 240 baby rabits a month. he could give the rabbits 6 months to mature to adulthood, but that means he'd need to have over 1,400 of them on the Ark at once, and feed them all. on the other hand, a 1-month old rabbit probably has the equivalent caloric value for a lion that a tic tac has for a human, so he'd need a lot more adults making baby rabbits if he wanted to feed the babies to the lions.

and this is just the logistics of two animal species. there's a reason zoos are so big. while animals don't have that much volume, they need space around them to survive. most need a lot of food. and you'd need a lot of fairly heavy metals to keep the stronger animals contained. does the story of Noah mention god granting all the animals the ability to survive on seaweed and fish, and radically changing their behavioral dispositions?



ah, so how many generations does it take to turn a wolf into a koala? a giraffe? what about a dung beatle? you can "turn a wolf into a dog" because dogs were domesticated very recently (10,000 years ago). in fact, you can breed a wolf and a dog and produce a fertile offspring, which means they aren't even separate species in the most common way of measuring it.



really? i must have missed that part when God said, "let there condense a multi-ton cloud of primarily hydrogen gas into a compact, gravity-bound sphere engaged in a sustained fusion reaction." but i only read the thing twice, so it must be one of the more obscure passages.

Hindus claim the same thing about their holy texts, and some Jews still search for the exact decimal value of pi in the Torah. better a libertal interpretation than a literal one, i guess.

round 2.



indeed, i was trying to provide a simple example. i know that nearly all traits are coded by multiple genes, often into the 100s (that we've managed to identify). data compression does fun things to sequences.

i rasied the example to highlight the extreme bottleneck we'd expect to see in virtually all land animals if their populations had been as low as 2 (or 14) within the last 6,000 years (hell, the last 100,000). but we've measured the effects of a bottleneck when they've occurred.

how did marsupials end up in australia and north america, but there are none anywhere in the old world, let alone Turkey? predators? australia doesn't have any big cats or indigenous canines. maybe they were killed off by hunters in the old world? they why not in the new world, which has big felines and canines, and marsupials? i certainly can't explain that in terms of variance alone; i need to turn to geo-evolutionary history, which tells me the americas and australia were once joined with each other and anarctica and share a common historical biome; anscestral marsupials must have evolved there and diverged after the continents split.

or maybe Noah took a side-trek before landing in Turkey, and then spent his last years destroying all fossil evidence of marsupials in the world world from before the flood.



early ship construction was canoes. the pacific islands were populated by way of outrigger. the most advanced ships in hellenic period were probably triremes, but they were built for sailing the calm waters of the mediterranean and the atlantic coast, and they still sank a-plenty. Chinese junks weren't developed until the second century BC.



evolutionary theorists like to fill in blanks too. it's said that god made the flood happen to punish man for his evil ways (gotta love that androcentric rhetoric). publicity of punishment is generally viewed a strong deterrant against further infractions of the law. so why would god, in all his infinite knowledge, leave details out of the flood story and make it less believable? any good sci fi writer will tell you that if you want people to buy something that fantastic, you can't miss the smallest detail. yes, of course, because it was written by a man who received god's revelation, not god himself. so why would god let such a man miss a few details? i mean, if god came to me tonight and said, "Thou shalt go to the store for 2% rBGH-free milk, extra large free-range eggs, and Knudsen's cottage cheese," and i wrote doesn, "milk, eggs, cheese," what do you think he'd do? brush his hands and say, "oh well, i tried hard enough for this convenant. maybe i'll make sure i'm more clearly understood next time." did he miss it completely? if they were indeed His words, i think He'd want them recorded exactly. lawmakers typically do. no, the story of the ark doesn't contain laws; it contains a punishment, which is an extension of law. but maybe god's different; as a mere mortal (who's happened to extensively study the internalization of laws and norms by human beings), i certainly wouldn't know.

maybe that is why they used wood. now your going to tell me that they couldnt have used wood becouse they were using rocks to cut them down