Geological Time in One Day

[Barquentine]

Someone told me recently that if the history of the earth were measured as one day (24 hours) then the dinosaurs lived from approx 10.45pm - 11.41pm and modern man (homo sapiens) appeared at just before 4 seconds to midnight. That would mean that Christianity appeared less than four thousandths of one second ago. Would it be fair to say that Christianity's claims to be able to say anything at all about the entire universe & its history are just ever such a tad arrogant? Shouldn't someone introduce Christianity to the concept of just a tiny bit of humility...just to be going on with?

[jake-the-peg]

And Modern scientific thought would have arrive just 1s to midnight.

I don't think that the length of time that a metod of thought has been around says anything about it's validity.

It's it's track record that's more important

[ll_billym]

How can Christianity arrive 1/4000th of a second to midnight and modern scientific method arrive 1 second to midnight?

Also, just because a discovery is recent doesn't mean it can't explain things that happened before it was discovered.

That said I don't class any religion as any explanation at all, and I have a really bad tendency to think that religious people are actually unintelligent. Wrong I know as it's just one area of their lives/knowledge but it's a struggle for me.

[Barquentine]

Unfortunately, some of the most intelligent people I know, Il_Billym, are Christians. Intelligence alone is no guarantee of being correct or successful; it's more about character & outlook. And, Jake, it's not the validity I take issue with; it's the astronomical arrogance in their assumption that they are right & know better than anyone else. Science displays absolute humility even in its methods - it only ever has 'theories' which it is ready to discard for a better theory only after the most rigorously self-disciplined & carefully repetitive testing. If religious people knew how recent and how small we are they would show more humility in espousing their dogged 'we know better than thou' blind faith. To top it all..the least-humble people in the universe preach to others the virtues of humility!!!!!!!!
PS - RoaldoM, did you omit an 'a' or an 'e' ? :)

[mibn2cweus]

An interesting feature of this recently acquired ability to apply logic, the art of non-contradictory identification, to thought, the faculty of reason, is that it comes with a convenient bypass switch commonly labeled as faith, which can be turned on and off whenever a cherished belief comes into conflict with perceived reality.

While the ability to be rational is by virtue of being a process limited, the progress of its development is subject to the alternative to think or not to think, evidently an option that for many is chosen only when the truth is on the side of their caprice, even if such occasion arrives only for a few seconds out of an average day, an exaggerated claim ~ perhaps

[fredpuli47]

Yes, mibn, the boundaries of faith- based thinking do shrink with time. Over time , the more we know, the less we have to believe the statements and beliefs of our ancestors.It was good of the Vatican to recognise that the Church ought not to have treated Galileo as it did ! Their apology was founded on the statement that all those statements in the Bible, which proved, through their divine inspiration, that Galileo was wrong, had been misunderstood ( 'faulty exegesis' was the phrase used) ! Nice try.

In the end, faith will only serve 1) to explain the utterly unknowable and that which is incapable of scientific 'proof' 2) to fill a human need for comfort.

Religion had a role in setting or enforcing moral standards, but one day people will notice that atheists manage to be as moral as the religious and all without the threat of divine sanction or the promise of reward !

[Barquentine]

Fredpuli, some atheists have moral boundaries, some don't - just as some religious believers ignore their own moral code; it's really about proportions. A much larger proportion of religious believers will have inhibitions about crossing moral boundaries. So generalised stereotyping does have some validity. Non-believers will have fewer inhibitions about testing the limits of what is acceptable. That still isn't a good reason for having such beliefs, especially with the arrogance with which they impose their moral standards on others.

[beso]

Many of the religious have less propensity to crossing moral boundaries because their foundation beliefs are rooted in the concept that their superior morality can justify the ill treatment and destruction of those who have different beliefs.

Killing the doubters has been an integral part of Christianity, Islam and Judaism for much of their history since Abraham started the rot with the idea that he would kill his own son for his bloodthirsty God.