Japan Today: Japan News and Discussion

I don't know, my brothers and sister fought like cats and dogs sometimes .

Ok here's a question:

Let's assume that there is a "force" that drives our simple universe to the formation of "complex" life (however you think it happened). What evidence is there that this "force" must be worshiped?

Define "worship".

Definition for the sake of this question:
Required faith in it's existence.

The simplest explanation is usually the best one.

Nah, only if you're already a believer.

Well then I suppose that the fact that there was a force that created the universe makes us wish to worship it. If you consider the many theories that have come about the creation of the whole thing is studied and probed by people that spend their whole lives searching, such as the "Big Bang". Its a form of worship to search for the truth of that particular theory. And there are people that accept that research as truth even if they do not understand the math and the phyisic involved, just because someone thinks they know the truth. Even if they say they are not certain, they have followers that will point at it as the begining of all. Since the begining of human existance the forces of nature never required us to worship but the power had us do so. It was only later that someone decided that they knew better and forced folk to worship.
Now As far as my God, he ask us to worship, its just some worship in different way. Course I'm an odd duck anyway, I accept the possibility of things like the big bang and evolution and can still find God in there somewhere.

I don't know there are those that think the simpliest is the idea that they were being captured by aliens.

You bring up some very good points. I personally subscribe to the "faith" (philosophy) you allude to ("science") and yes, my worship is the desire to seek answers to how our world is made up (everyday that I go into my lab). But in my perceived universe, there is nothing but my consciousness that drives me and forces me to this "worship." I actually feel that it very well could have been an evolutionary advantage for our species to seek out and understand our universe at least to the point of "future prediction" (engineering is an example of prediction). Of course, if (hypothetically) this was an advantagious development in our species, then it likely lead to both the formation of organized religion AND scientific exploration. Both of these philosophies seek to answer similar questions but use different methods which finds them often in conflict with each other (to some people).

That being said, I feel religion has changed over the milenia. Before complex mathematics had been developed, ceremonies were a form of ensuring knowledge be both passed down and followed properly (ie. before complete understanding of a phenomena [sometimes medical], we needed ceremony to keep such knowledge). A form of required ritual to help ensure our species. Now we have things such as ASTM and such as a series of scientific standards of experimentation that serve the same purpose.

Woah woah, I think I got off topic ... In fact, now I am starting to consider the concept of consciousness (the collective firing of multiple clusters of neurons in my brain simultaneously [or within some small time]) as a form of "worship" required for life. In fact, are we not simply a planet in and of ourselves. Consider our body as a cluster of cells who all work in tandem to feed and nurture the whole. Now, consider the whole of the human species on this planet and consider the collective conciousness of our species. Most (non-cancerous) people strive to the betterment of the whole (or at least their region of the) planet. I'm going to need to think about this more

Great, thats how it should be think before accepting. For centuries it was an assepted pratice to allow the ones that read the books and preach the ideas to be in charge, unfortunately we still allow it somewhat, education and the ability to think outside the box does not make you right, but it opens a door that can bring you closer.

Gradual change over thousands and millions of years with a lot of false starts of several different bipeds, to finally have a sucessful creature which became us. (and I might add a lot of luck with our own ancestors). I think they still believe that the first sucessful human probably came out of the branch of bipeds in Africa. about 3 million years ago and that our present form, about 40,000 years ago.

Well, I'm not exactly sure what you are curious about. Science is incredibly wide. Science seeks to understand and develop an understanding of the world around us by investigation of evidence and reproducibility (reproduction of evidence). This evidence is then reviewed for the rest of eternity and debated. Eventually, new insight and new questions arise out of this new understanding.

As far as formation of humans as a species, evolution is the most commonly accepted theory. Note that "creationism" (the thought that humans were placed here and our development was acted upon by a supernatural cause) is NOT a scientific theory as it disregards the fundamentals of science (I am unaware of scientific alternatives to evolution, please tell me if I'm wrong). Check this wikipedia page out (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution) if you are interested, but you should really look into true scientific journals for more information on this. Wikipedia is often susceptible to abuse and this page is frequently attacked; though it is fixed rather quickly and mostly accurately.

An interesting investigation into the migration and genealogy of our species is the Genographic Project (https://www3.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/). It's pretty neat. It is a search into the "atlas of the human journey." I think just about anybody can be a part of the project if they submit a genetic sample and you can get some information on your genetic history as well.

However, if you are interested in the birth of the universe instead ... It sounds like you are alluding to the big bang (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_bang) when you say "single spot." Then this is even more highly contested and debated. Scientists are very certain they have a good understanding of how the universe we see came to be up until a relatively short period of time after the "initial state" as general relatively breaks down as you approach the singularity. There have been a lot of theories about the beginning of the universe (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-standard_cosmologies). With an increased number of simulations and experiments, we are learning a lot.

Check it out and report what you think. Did you really mean something else?

I think your questions are quite fair. Science cannot explain some things, like why existence occurs, why there is a a difference between energy and matter. I think science is about whats, and not whys, in generals.

About evolution, it is entirely logical that nobody remembered that their grandfather was an ape, since that is not evolutionary theory. Even if we were a sudden mutation from the current apes, we would have taken generations to develop complicated speech, much less writing. Many generations later, our ancestors grunts would have evolved into syntax, and much much later, writing. Evolution must be understood as being an incredibly slow process, taking many generations between noticeable differences.

What was the root? I have no idea, but ultimately it is a mathematical relation of molecules. Too many and it explodes, than it surfs from there. Resultants are gravity, and chemical bonding and all.

From my mind, it doesn't imply a God, but we if explored there, it couldn't be the Christian version. Existence is much bigger than the Bible's God, who occasionally writes books and video tapes our lives, it seems. But an abstract God could exist. Actually, the Hindu version of God is much more believable.

Personally, I'm voting these days against the existence of God, but I would never say it doesn't exist 100%. There will never be proof.

Hey Facius,
No worries, I am not at all laughing. I am very glad to hear that you are interested in at learning about evolution. It's good to hear you want facts because I will try to compile some here.



This is a very common misconception. We did not evolve from apes (as you and I know them). In fact, consider the other primates that currently reside on our planet as distant cousins. Way back, we can be traced to the same thing special origin, but neither of these three are the same. (an example of this ancestral tree is here http://www.handprint.com/LS/ANC/evol.html).

When thinking about "evolved to the SAME extent" you need to remember that evolution can take time a long time (not necessarily though http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=island-lizards-morph-in-e). It seems that through natural selection and perhaps environmental reasons, our branch of the tree developed improved use of tools and eventually agriculture and then we came to be as we are now. This (for us) took a very long time.

Let's look at the human fossil record sahll we? (http://anthropology.si.edu/HumanOrigins/ha/a_tree.html) The reason that there are no stories "my grandmother wasn't very evolved" is because you would never have noticed. Our life span is too short to see a drastic variance in the genetic makeup of our species. In fact, it tends to be a significant survivable mutation that is the basis of a new species.

For more on human evolution (http://anthropology.si.edu/HumanOrigins/ha/ances_start.html).



I do want to comment on this a bit. First, I want to know why the Bible is proof of the existence of a god. Regarding the healing stories, the only way to scientifically prove such a thing has happened you need to verify it with a double blind experiment and no one has been willing to do this. Also, you might be interested in looking into the placebo effect for some insight into alternatives to the religious healing theory such as "psychoactive placebo" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placebo).

With regards to your final questions as the origin of the universe. There are a lot of researchers trying to refine their models to accurately understand what happened before the big-bang (http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Model_Suggests_Pre_Big_Bang_Physics.html)

If I got anything about your statements wrong, please tell me. I hope this is a learning experience for all of us. I hope you look at some of these sites and give your thoughts. Thanks for the interesting discussion!

I see def beat me to posting, but I hope my post will be helpful, too. def, with regards to speach check this out http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/sci_tech/highlights/010710_neanderthal.shtml

Nice link. I read a while back that being fully bi-pedal as opposed to being partial-bi-pedal, standing upright, changes vocal chords. The popular Christian talking-point that grandpa wasn't a monkey is, both entirely true, and utterly unrelated to the topic of evolution.

Why didn't the German language evolve into English? German and English both
evolved from proto-Germanic and ultimately from Indo-European. And, as dat5h
said, we share the same distant ancestor with apes, as opposed to evolving from
any of the species of ape you see today.

There were other lines of primates that evolved pretty far, but they were made extinct
by our ancestors. Archeo-anthropologists find evidence of this all the time.

Chimps and other apes can learn sign language, and you never know - they may
someday evolve complex grammar and / or speech, if they don't become extinct
first.

In the meantime, apes did evolve special skills for surviving in their environment
(including communication skills), and humans without tools would not do so well
if placed in their "shoes."

Well damn, all that researching I was doing and these guys put it all together pretty well. Yes your not going to have any of or ancestors telling how we changed, because as stated, your not going to notice over a period of 100,000 generations (if the 3 million year level is correct), I mean you don't watch your hair grow in a 12 hour period sometimes its days to see a change and then you have to be watching and expecting it to change. We as a species have only thought of the concept for the last couple of hundred years (perhaps a thousand if you consider some of the religions with the idea) Written langunage is only what 5,000 years? Not much time to see much even then, not to mention we come in all shades and sizes already. There is fossil record of changes in other animals so there is the possibility. By the way, I believe the theoory isn't that we evolved from apes, but from an ape type creature (just splitting hairs I guess).
As for the universe, well there's stranger things then the first particle exploding to become the universe. Like a star billlions of light years away explode with such force that we can see it in our sky today (this just happened recently as a matter of fact) just imagine the power involved its almost unimagineable. The ability to slow time and shrink space, objects so massive that even time and light can not escape its gravity well. the fact that within my own life time the universe was thought to be a few galaxy of a few billion stars each to billions of galaxies with 100's of billions of stars, is it really so much harder to believe in a God, when the universe itself is almost unbelieveable.
But as for the big bang creating a perfect human body, remember it had a 15,000,000,000 year run with almost unlimited resources and conditions to bring about the last 40,000 years of human existance in this shape and form. Let me just say I'm a firm believer in My God and not a creationist, just look for truth from any and all sources and of yet I can easy, in my mind believ in both. Why is it so strange, and why must you believe in one and reject the other when both have the ability to make you wonder and question. One of my favorite quote is the one by Galileo that goes:

"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use."

By the way, never would I laugh At someone questioning (I'll laught with you but not at you)

Thanks, tnstaafl, for saying that. It's true, Facius, that you can still be a religious man and understand/accept evolution. I am not a religious man, but I have nothing against it (as long as it is used for good). That's why I thought it unnecessary for you to think people are laughing at you. I subscribe to the "no question is a dumb question" belief because knowledge is power, my friend.

What are people's opinions on the personification of god or gods? Can a god be rational, caring, greedy, wrathful, AND/OR just? discuss...

Well..we are taught he/she/it is a vengful God, and I allways read and believed a loving God. And if you consider the Ten Commandments, it says He/She/It is to be our only God and have no other Gods before me, so you could say a jealous God. But then all but one of those are in the Old testment, if that means anything. I think we have a tendcy to try to put a face on our gods to make them more human, including the emotions.Look at the Greek and Roman gods, about as human as you can get.

That was the beggining of my thought process actually (Roman and Greek gods). It seems to me that people (even today) often apply stories with god(s) that have (to me) an almost childish persona (please don't be offended). I'm sorry, but I don't know much about the Christian view of god (Funny, my dad is an Episcopalian). However, I believe that I have read enough tidbits of stories to say that there is much of this persona in the New Testament as well. Is this stemming from our deep seaded desire to be of godly status, when perhaps there may not be such a thing as we think today?

Sound pretty right. (Don't worry about offending me, I suppose it might be God who is offended, but I don't speeak for God and I suppose he should be big enough and powerful enough not to mind someone thinking a bit). Yes I can see a bit childish, especially in the old testment, like a stern father figure (course my father wouldn't wipe out a town). I think in the New Testment the calmer side was trying to be presented and so a gentler representative sent in Christ, someone to talk and not conquer. Maybe it was the sign of the times. The old was a world (western world) split with warring nations, evey time you turned around someone was attacking someone else. The New the world (western) was somewhat united under a few major powers and governed over a larger area, still violent but not as violent (or at least controled volience I suppose?) We talk about the nature of God is without understanding "the mistery" yet then we say its all written down simple and easy and no questions need be unanswered. Maybe Christ was a simpler answer to the question, a man (with the sprit) who laughted, talked, worked (really hard work to if you think about it), went to parties (brought his own brew), loved children, showed sympthy, and anger, felt pain, cried, had depression, sadness, and loved. A God that was easy to like or dislike depending on your viewpoint, but one we could understand rather then a formless being in the clouds.

I believe it's all part and parcel to Man's attempt at rationalizing the world around him. I think that anthropomorphizing things (and subsequently turning them into gods) is just another way to grasp what's going on, and also makes for a colorful way to pass the time.

Even in modern America we've got this. Will some archaeologist of the future find depictions of our New Year's rituals and think we worshiped the years as being that aged a complete lifetime in one revolution of the sun, as our popular characterizations of that time of year might suggest? Will they see us celebrating Santa Claus and know little of the 25th's significance to Christians? What will they think our most important gods and holidays will be? Will they say we had many gods, giving primacy to gods of leisure, comfort and wealth while salving our souls with gods of forgiveness and eternal bliss?

I think that such things evolve over time, and maybe what starts off as someone talking about "Old Man Winter" (by way of example), turns into superstition, and finally becomes codified into a formal religion of some sort. And I think it's a pretty natural and basic human impulse.

Scientists work with evidence the best they can, but evidence is not
"the answer." Instead, it is usually a clue from which the answer they
are looking for can be derived or calculated. As technology improves
and things like carbon-dating are invented, the calculaton changes,
hopefully for the better.

Contrast this with the Church, who before Copernicus (1473-1543) insisted that the sun revolved around the Earth. Only when there was overwhelming evidence did they relent
and rewrite their divine words. And look how long it took them to remove poor Galileo (died 1642) from hell in the process.

You mentioned that evolution is difficult to understand and I agree. There's a good
book called The Blind Watchmaker that I would recommend. It's not easy, but like
you said about the Bible, the more you read it, the better your understanding will
be.

Well the chruch was going by the early sciences of the Greek thinkers at the time. Which is probably not that strange that they would accept since it placed man at the center of the universe, but a little strange in that it would accept the teachings of confessed believers of other gods and believers of no gods at all. At least both Copernicus and Galileo were believers.

I read a very good book called Life of Pi. Very popular infact. The setting of the book is a narrative frame, a story within a story. In the the beginning of the book it said it will make you believe in God. As i finished the book, i was questionable about how it made me believe in God, but i realized it doesn't matter "which" God you believe in (ex, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist etc..) but the fact that you believe in a God at all. The two stories allign with each other, explaining the fact that there is an infinite possibilities to what you can believe in. It made me sit for 3 hours in my bed, literally i could not fall asleep thinking about the infinite and what God really is. IMO, every religion is created for a purpose, and every religion is co alligned with one another an has a specific purpose with one another.

Hmm? I don't believe in lost gospels. Personally, I call attention to this sort of thing because it shows that the Bible is an anthology, and was not crafted by God. It was crafted by many people in different languages, and altered according to the times.



I don't understand this part. I believe the gospel exists, just not that it's divinely written.

I have many questions to ask before I can heartily admit that God really exists. Can you answer the questions as follows?

There have been many Gods created so far by human beings. Who is/are the true God/Gods?

If God almighty really exists, why we should harass ourselves about our lives? Why did God create a man like Hitler?

It has often be pointed out that the Westerners first send churchmen to "uncivilized" countries. They wait until the churchmen are killed by "barbarians" and send army to "protect the churchmen." Eventually, they invade and colonize the countries. Why has the God been so mean against the people in developing countries?

The monotheistic religion like Christianity seems to have a paradox. There are many people in the world who had died without even knowing Christ. Heretics (Jews, Islam, Buddhists, etc.), those who had died before Christ was born (ancient Greeks/Romans), or those who lived in the American continent or Asia. Were they destined to go to hell?

Folks, excuse me for cutting in, but I want to tell you there will not be any proof of God ever.

The reason for that is because he live in a different Universe. It's a universe of Faith, not of Science. It's a Universe driven by perfection, not imperfection. It's a universe lack of logic and intelligence. It's a Universe that we named "Haven".

You see, Faith is something that you have to accept without proof. Thus, if you look for Proof, then we can no longer call it Faith, but Science. Isn't that logical?

By the way, if you have doing his work, you will get in to his universe, but you can't take anything with you, in particular your logic or intelligence. Do you know why? Okay, I can't tell you, but you will learn it from him directly if your destiny is to be with him in his universe. Sorry, but that is all I am allowed to tell you.

My friend I'm seeing a different side of you.

However I don't believe we don't take our logic and knowledge. Thats part of life and learning, and it is just expanded once we leave this form that limits it.

Don't let your eyes deceives you, tnstaafl.


I can't talk about it, but I swear, you can't take those two things with you to his universe. You either live it behind or your can't get in. It is impossible. The best example I can give you is that it will be like trying to get an elephant into a tiny bottle.