A Christian-Evolutionist’s odd position in faith.

Some say it’s an oxymoron, but I am not sure. I do know I am one.

Creation is the hottest topic between the religious vs. atheist crowd. Science against faith stories. Evidence against faith. It’s a really a hot button for many. I have seen people become very personal and argumentative when it comes to creation. For some reason, this is the topic which carries a lot of emotional baggage with it. I have seen a lot of people behave offensively on this.

I have been a lot of things actually. I have been a devout YEC, an evolution basher, an enthusiastic Gap theorist, then a euphoric OEC and then a troubled Theistic evolutionist. And now I am more inclined to be just an evolutionist, and not so much troubled anymore. My transition has been across the board from atheist to agnostic to slightly deist to YEC to OEC and within that from Gap theory to Theistic Evolution. The more I studied, the more I figured that evolution was undeniable.

Apparently, a lot of believers don’t agree with me when it comes to that. I don’t blame them. It is not an easy thing to do. It took me some time to come to realize that there is probably no way that I may able to square things out between my faith and science, or between faith and evolution. That is my opinion, and some believers have no trouble reconciling science and creation, and I am fine with that.

However, my conclusion is that the biblical creation story quite certainly makes a strong case for

And then the warmth left the room

It happened very recently that I had a sit down with some of my christian friends. It was a usual thing, nothing special but as always a few theological fine points were up for discussion. When it came to me, I recalled my experience of finding God and then walking with him. There were smiles all around the room for we all had seen and shared some time and all of my friends had witnessed how my life had had a turn around for God. So recounting what I had been pondering for over a year in silence and what I had begin to properly understand quite recently I mentioned that I found it a real beautiful thing that God had used evolutionary mechanisms to derive life and that the whole structure was so self sustaining that even without any active interference from God, it had the tendency to carry on natural work. I also said that Adam and Eve may have been factual people but the story of Genesis 1 is more of a lesson rather than a strict scientific account and it was never meant to be taken literal. And that I do not think the story in all of its detail is factual.

Silence fell!

Everyone looked at me with mixed expression, raised eyebrows and might I add, a few frowns. A few of them shook their heads in dismay. And then, when I was just a wee bit nervous, I began to understand my mistake. The cat was out of the bag. And then came the barrage of questions and rhetoric and accusations, clocked at 200 miles an hour with no stops. To be honest for a moment I thought I was standing in front of the inquisition.

From being asked why I would reject “The word of God” to “Are you even a christian, do you even believe in a Christ?”…I was spared “the devil’s spawn” but one of my friends even implied that when he said that by holding on to such lies, I was “doing satan’s work” and “pushing others away from God and leading them astray”…one of them called me “spiritually blind” and that “the bible is worthless to you”.

I was dumbfounded, and I noticed while my friends were still there, the brotherly love and christian warmth that I had felt all those years, had left the room.

Article: Stellar Graveyard Shows Signs of Possible (Past) Life

Stellar Graveyard Shows Signs of Possible (Past) Life

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/10/gd61-signs-of-past-life/

Article: Craig Ventner: ‘This isn’t a fantasy look at the future. We are doing the future’

Craig Ventner: ‘This isn’t a fantasy look at the future. We are doing the future’

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/oct/13/craig-ventner-mars

Article: Do Scientists Pray? Einstein Answers a Little Girl’s Question about Science vs. Religion

Do Scientists Pray? Einstein Answers a Little Girl’s Question about Science vs. Religion

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/07/11/do-scientists-pray-einstein-letter-science-religion/

Article: Religion, Science and the Attack of the Angry Atheists

Religion, Science and the Attack of the Angry Atheists

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/max-tegmark/angry-atheists_b_2716134.html?1361283035&ncid=edlinkusaolp00000008

An amazing cat

Meet Oscar, the cat who can sense when someone is about to die.. (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1248539/Meet-Oscar-cat-knows-.html)

A YEC question about stars and time

Recently I cam across a question posted by a YEC regarding stars and older events in our universe. Here it is followed by my brief answer.

Now I am no astrophysicist, but I do know that science pretty well agrees on the big bang. Therefore the oldest event in the universe is everything originating at the same point.
It is said when we look deeper into space we see older events. Yet, how does that account for the older events happening closer together since the universe is in fact expanding with time? And the older you get the more compressed everything becomes. Is this not true for time as well?

Now I am no astrophysicist either but from what I know,  space time like a 3 dimensional grid (actually in theory it is 4 dimensional). FYI, the expansion is not at a consistent rate throughout history. Light as you know, the further it goes from the source, the more it scatters. But also remember that light is both wave and a particle. And that there is a lot of matter in the universe which affects light because of gravity.

Now, the expansion of the universe is happening, we know that. But why is it happening and what it really means to expand?

Consider a stick of gum and put four small objects on it, two objects on either ends, call them group L1 and group L2, mark their position and then stretch the gum. You will see that the distance between group L1 and L2 on either sides of the gum increased from each other but their location on the gum itself hasn’t changed at all, it is the same. The whole gum has expanded.

The same way, the universe expanded, and the expansion which is happening now is because of inertia of the Bigbang. But there is matter in the universe and there is gravity present so the bodies which get closer together, bond with gravity and thus they remain at the same distance at which they bonded. It is simply that their space, like in the gum example, is being stretched but because of their gravitation bond they are not expanding away from each other.

Meaning L1 and L2 moved apart but the two bodies in L2 remained bonded to each other while expanding away from L1 altogether.

Bodies which gravitate towards each other are released from the inertia effect of the big bang therefore they stay with each other because of the gravity in between them. This is the precise reason why the Andromeda galaxy is not moving away but in fact moving towards the milky way galaxy, because of the gravitational force present.

I have oversimplified it but that is the basic thing.

The Andromeda Galaxy. Andromeda is the nearest major galaxy to our own Milky Way Galaxy. Our Galaxy is thought to look much like Andromeda. Together these two galaxies dominate the Local Group of galaxies. The diffuse light from Andromeda is caused by the hundreds of billions of stars that compose it. The several distinct stars that surround Andromeda’s image are actually stars in our Galaxy that are well in front of the background object. Andromeda is frequently referred to as M31 since it is the 31st object on Messier’s list of diffuse sky objects. M31 is so distant it takes about two million years for light to reach us from there. Much about M31 remains unknown, including why the center contains two nuclei.

Materialism and Consciousness: an atheist talks

Consciousness makes evolutionary sense only if one does not start far enough back; if, that is to say, one fails to assume a consistent and sincere materialist position, beginning with a world without consciousness, and then considers whether there could be putative biological drivers for organisms to become conscious. This is the only valid starting point for those who look to evolution to explain consciousness, given that the history of matter has overwhelmingly been without conscious life, indeed without history. Once the viewpoint of consistent materialism is assumed, it ceases to be self-evident that it is a good thing to experience what is there, that it will make an organism better able so to position itself in the causal net as to increase the probability of replication of its genomic material. On the contrary, even setting aside the confusional states it is prone to, and the sleep it requires, consciousness seems like the worst possible evolutionary move.

If there isn’t an evolutionary explanation of consciousness, then the world is more interesting than biologists would allow.

The universe is a “Giant Brain”

The idea of the universe as a ‘giant brain’ has been proposed by scientists – and science fiction writers – for decades.

But now physicists say there may be some evidence that it’s actually true. In a sense.

According to a study published in Nature’s Scientific Reports, the universe may be growing in the same way as a giant brain – with the electrical firing between brain cells ‘mirrored’ by the shape of expanding galaxies.

The results of a computer simulation suggest that “natural growth dynamics” – the way that systems evolve – are the same for different kinds of networks – whether its the internet, the human brain or the universe as a whole.

A co-author of the study, Dmitri Krioukov from the University of California San Diego, said that while such systems appear very different, they have evolved in very similar ways.

The result, they argue, is that the universe really does grow like a brain.

The study raises profound questions about how the universe works, Krioukov said.

“For a physicist it’s an immediate signal that there is some missing understanding of how nature works,” he told Space.com.

The team’s simulation modelled the very early life of the universe, shortly after the big bang, by looking at how quantum units of space-time smaller than subatomic particles ‘networked’ with each other as the universe grew.

They found that the simulation mirrored that of other networks. Some links between similar nodes resulted in limited growth, while others acted as junctions for many different connections.

For instance, some connections are limited and similar – like a person who likes sports visiting many other sports websites – and some are major and connect to many other parts of the network, like Google and Yahoo.

No, it doesn’t quite mean that the universe is ‘thinking’ – but as has been previously pointed out online, it might just mean there’s more similarity between the very small and the very large than first appearances suggest.

Original article at here