There isn't even a consensual unscientific definition.

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

It's a basic tenet of the faith. The Ascencion and the Assumption are Holy Days of Obligation, for starters. (That's days you have to go to church, for those who didn't grow up Catholic.) Perhaps they didn't teach it in your First Communion classes because, you know, they assumed you should already have known it, and the shock came not from impertinent questions but from shock at your basic ignorance of your own faith! (No offence meant, of course.)

Yes, and I assure you that I'm not excusing her behaviour.

Since the Shroud of Turin is documented to have existed before Leonardo da Vinci did, let us say I find that latter unlikely. I'm also curious as to how you expect them to prove that relics are anyone's bones in particular without DNA. I grant you that, for the older and better-known saints, it's pretty much true that you can build about fifteen people out of the various relics. But there's limited proof that can be done.

Well, I was raised Catholic and am currently Pagan, so I'm used to answering a lot of questions.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Wow! I'm out of town for a couple of days and I miss out on a lot of stuff.

First, I want to clarify a couple of things. Creationists don't go around saying "we can't expain it so God did it".
Creationists actually say that there is so much evidence in the universe and everything in it that it points to intelligent design. The way the universe functions and is organized points to intelligent design. The odds that the universe exists the way it is and for life to exist on this planet are so astronomical as to be impossible. ( i have numbers if you want them) The answer isn't always that "God Did IT!", but that you can't avoid the fact that there is intelligence behind it. There are so many things in the universe that don't make sense unless there is intelligent design. I could make a list of things, but you could too. I am curious about what people think happened to all the anti-matter. If the big bang is true, then there should be equal amounts of matter and anti-matter in the universe. There should be whole galaxies made of the stuff. There isn't. There's very little detectable anti-matter in the universe. The law of averages states that there should be equal amounts of both. Where did it go or was it ever there? This is a fantastic discussion, so please keep it going.

The problem is that all the things that creationists point to as evidence for ID can just as easily (and usually more easily) be explained by evolution, as Michael Behe's pwning in Dover, Pennsylvania ably proved. There is simply no evidence anywhere that unequivocally points to an intelligent designer and nothing else. The issue of "God did it" isn't about motive, it's about falsifiability. God cannot be disproven, so he cannot be employed as a scientific cause. God can do anything, he doesn't need to leave any evidence of his work behind, and he doesn't need to follow cause and effect or obey the laws of physics, so there is no way to investigate the God hypothesis scientifically. "God did it" is a philosophical brick wall that stops rational inquiry dead. As the introductory sign to the Creation Museum in Kentucky puts it, "Don't think. Just listen and believe." With God, that's all you can do.

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I think fish is nice, but then I think that rain is wet, so who am I to judge?

It's gotten to the point where careful investigation is needed just to tell parody from reality. I think that means reality is broken.- Noclevername.

Well, I don't completly think I made my point. Creationist scientists aren't going around saying "God Did It" and leaving it at that. The inquiry doesnt' stop there. The big difference is that Creation scientists are still on a quest for knowledge. They still want to know how it works or why it works. They don't stop at "God did it." They all firmly believe that "God did it." They are still trying to find out how "God did it". "God did it" isn't the end of the quest for knowledge, it's the beginning.

Where do Creationist start with their quest for knowledge? God.
Where does everyone else start? Random acts of nature.

I know this example has been thrown around a lot, but if you can look at a watch, or a car, or computer and know that there is a designer that built it then how hard is it to believe that one red blood cell, that is vastly more complex, was designed and not a random event. I hope this helps.

You cannot scientifically analyze God or his works. Since God is omnipotent and capable of performing miracles, he can skip from thought to result without any need for physical action or effect. Since science only studies the physical universe, there is no point in attempting to understand how God Did It from a scientific perspective.

The issue, as I said, is falsifiability. Take the proposition, "The Moon is made of green cheese." This is a scientific hypothesis, because you can prove it is wrong. You can send a craft to the Moon, sample its soil, and, if necessary, grind the Moon to dust to show that there is not a single trace of green cheese anywhere within it. The Green Cheese Hypothesis is falsifiable. God doesn't work like that. You can imagine scientific ways in which He Might Have Done It, but, because God can do anything, you can never develop a testable hypothesis that shows how He Did Not Do It. This means that God is not a scientific hypothesis; from a scientific point of view "God Did It" is as far as you can go.

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I think fish is nice, but then I think that rain is wet, so who am I to judge?

It's gotten to the point where careful investigation is needed just to tell parody from reality. I think that means reality is broken.- Noclevername.

You may not be able to analyze God, but you can analyze His works. If we are to assume that God is infalliable and true, then God will follow the laws He placed on His creation. Since God is not deceptive then we can analyze the universe with a scientific inquiry as to how God did it. Again, "God did it" is not the end of the search for knowlege, but the beginning. Creationist are not debating the existance of God or "That" He did it, just how He did it.

Just for the records: If you mean by other religions, other Christian religions, then your thinking is wrong.
Protestants in Germany (and as far as I know in several other countries) do have confirmation. (Typically at the age of 14). It is held together with first Communion.
As far as I know (not sure) Martin Luther said that with 9 or 10 a kid ain't old enough to be aware of what all this is about and therefore changed that point.

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Andre

"They did not know it was impossible, so they did it!"
Mark Twain

That's all well and good. Scientific evidence does not, after all, disprove God, since God, as I said, is not disprovable. Many scientists, while fully accepting the accumulated evidence of 400 years of scientific observation, nonetheless believe in God. The issue arises not when one decides to use science to study the wonder of God's creation, but when one's preconceived notions about God and the Bible interfere with objective viewing of the evidence. There is clear evidence in the fossil record that animals did not all exist at once, but existed in separate geological eras separated by millions of years. No dinosaur, despite Creationist wishful thinking, has ever been found in the same geological stratum as an anatomically modern animal, and no Cambrian creature has ever been found in the same stratum as a dinosaur. (If either was ever found, by the way, evolution would be disproven instantly, which is why evolution is a scientific theory and creationism is not) These strata have been dated radiologically to be millions of years apart. Astronomers routinely detect light that has traveled millions of light years to reach our eyes, which means that it must have left its source galaxies millions of years ago, or we wouldn't be able to see it. We can accept the evidence, or we can twist it, ignoring the bits that don't fit, into our preconceived ideas of what should have happened. This is not scientific thinking. In science, you go where the evidence takes you. We may wish to see the world as the flawless creation of a beneficent God, but there are just as many horrific and terrible creatures as there are beautiful and charming ones. More, if absolute numbers are counted. As David Attenborough likes to say, the same God that created the leaping gazelle and the majestic lion must also have created the malarial mosquitoes and the worms that eat into children's eyeballs. No one ever films them and they don't end up in zoos, but they affect our lives far more profoundly than the gazelles. So to see nature as the product of a benevolent creator, while perfectly fine and good, runs the risk of blinding the observer to the objective reality of the natural world.

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I think fish is nice, but then I think that rain is wet, so who am I to judge?

It's gotten to the point where careful investigation is needed just to tell parody from reality. I think that means reality is broken.- Noclevername.

That might be the attitude of most Creationists, I don't know. But the Creationists who get in the media (and build museums) don't share that attitude; their prevailing and often-expressed attitude seems to be that any support or acceptance of human evolution makes you a Godless Commie(TM).

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

There’s too much here to debate. I’ll touch on a couple of things.
One, radiometric and radiocarbon dating are notoriously inaccurate. Radio carbon dating is good for only about 80,000 years. Knowing that, why do they always find C14 in coal deposits that took millions of years to form? If a diamond formed about 3 billion years ago, why do they still find C14 in it? If dinosaurs did die out over 65 million years ago, how do you explain the T-rex soft tissue that was found in a fossil dig in Montana that was reported in 2005? If radiometric dating is as accurate as claimed, then why do rocks of known age (new lava rock for example) always date into the millions of years? Samples taken from Hawaii and Mount St Helens that are known to be just a few years old always date to the millions?

What is objective? Science is not objective. People want to believe that they can be un-biased, but nobody is. Even our discussion is biased. You started with one preconceived notion and I started with another. Whose is ultimately correct? Just claiming that your unbiased isn’t enough. That is a bias in itself. You said “We can accept the evidence, or we can twist it, ignoring the bits that don't fit, into our preconceived ideas of what should have happened”, and I can say the same thing. Just because we have similar DNA to a monkey doesn’t mean we evolved from monkeys. It doesn’t’ mean we have a common ancestor, but a common designer. Everybody’s car has round wheels, but not all wheels fit on all cars. Some are not interchangeable.

If the geologic strata are indeed correct, how do you explain petrified trees that stand upright in several different layers of strata that are millions of years apart?

Your results will always reflect your bias that you start with.

Be nice. Your just throwing stones. Most creationist that claim that your are a Godles Commie, problaby have other problems to deal with. I've looked through some of the stuff from creationist that built the museum and they haven't called anybody Godless unless they claimed to already be. "Richard Dawkins for example".

Yes, that's why science has developed so many means to minimize the effects of bias, like duplicatable test results and double-blind testing. And so far, the evidence has held up to these methods.

I'm pretty sure the "facts" you just listed are ATM, and if you want to say anything further in that line of thought you'd be better off doing so in the ATM section. The rules here prohibit promoting ATM concepts in other threads.

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

I would like to see them answered though; those are commonly used creationist arguments and I know they have been disproven, but I would like to know exactly how.

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I think fish is nice, but then I think that rain is wet, so who am I to judge?

It's gotten to the point where careful investigation is needed just to tell parody from reality. I think that means reality is broken.- Noclevername.

No, I'm saying what I have seen. I didn't claim to know what all or most of Creationists think, as I said in my post. The ones I have seen or heard all seem to share the attitude I mentioned.

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

Ah. Thank you kindly. I knew that there were some differences in sacraments, but not that one.

Thumping, I hate to get into an "am not/are too" debate with you, but you're flat wrong. Once you say "God did it" (which quite a lot of creationists do give as their only answer), there is no inquiry left or needed. You have your answer. If you look at why it happened, you are acknowledging that "God did it" is not a suitable answer and that science has the right system, and when you do that, there is no answer not made out of willful ignorance that does not result in awareness of the overwhelming evidence for evolution.

You really need to get thee to a library. Your "facts" are all wrong. The reason, for example, that new lava "always" gives an ancient dating is that, well, it doesn't. Sometimes, there are crystals within the lava that really are that old. More frequently, it's because someone is applying the wrong radiometric dating system. You seem unaware that there's more than one; C-14 dating is only used up to a certain age. After that, other forms are needed. The lava dating that you don't seem to realize is completely debunked comes from people applying incorrect science in the first place. If you haven't already, you need to go to http://www.talkorigins.org, because they know what they're talking about and you don't.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Don't you mean everybody argues that the universe is expanding?

There are a few of us who argue otherwise.

Welcome to the board - I think you posted good philosophical questions and responded well to the answers. We try to limit discussion of faith simply because faith implies absence of evidence: We try to understand evidence without imposing faith-based bias. But as you observed, that is not always easy.

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jwj

The Reluctant Cosmologist