Well, if not, we could always move it into a new topic or something.

Of course, however, that aspect of our mythologies should not be purged, just because it runs counter to our thought of science. I'd still teach the legend of Yggdrasil, because it's just not the same without; I just wouldn't say it's some universal truth.

*nods* For the same reason, I wouldn't delete the first 10-or-so chapters of Genesis from the Bible. With Genesis, at least, the problem isn't the text at all; the problem is people reading the text in a way that it was never intended to be read. The Bible isn't a history book, much less a science textbook.

I can't say that I agree, but I'll take the bait and talk about scientific knowledge in general. We don't know all that there is to know about nature, so some of our scientific laws aren't necessarily perfectly accurate or may be empirically true even if we can't figure out why. This doesn't mean that we should throw them out entirely. Using what understanding we do have, we can move on to a better understanding over time. The phrase "standing on the shoulders of giants" comes to mind. It means that all of our developments are based on the knowledge and achievements of those who came before.

Why did I posted this:

?

First, if I believe in theory "The Book of Genesis", I believe that everything is described picturesquely. That means that I believe that intelligent designer (God/Yahweh) created us but not in 6 days, than millions, billion...
Dinosaurs, mammoths...maybe God tested everything to create perfect climate, plants and animals for us...
You know, like when you are expecting baby, you want to buy everything new, furniture, toys...

If everything is random, why are we then only inteligent species? Why is everything subjected to us?

Look at other's religions, mythologies genesis. It's very similar.

There are other intelligent species. They may not build cities or ipods, but sentience and intelligence is not exclusive to humanity. There are plenty of animals with unique characteristics.

Yeah, Transhumanists are pretty out there. I can't really relate to that sort of reasoning...



Sometimes things simply look random because we haven't figured out the pattern yet. But that doesn't necessarily mean that "God did it"; that's a cop-out answer used to try to explain what we haven't figured out. People used to use it all the time. Earthquake? God did it. Thunderstorm? God did it. We shake our heads at those folks now, because we now understand how those phenomena arise. Just like, one day, people will probably shake their heads about folks who continued to cling to that same "God did it" belief regarding things like evolution and genetics.



If he's all-knowing and perfect, why couldn't he get it right on the first try?



Yeah, but if God had already "tested out" this world with dinosaurs and mammoths, then all we really got was a slightly used, second-hand world. Thanks a lot, God.



We're not the only intelligent species. I'd even argue that a lot of us aren't very intelligent. As for why everything is subjected to us... well, that's probably because we're a greedy species who thinks it owns everything, and has created myths about that to justify our abhorrent behaviour against the rest of the planet (Genesis 1:26).

Except, as fakepeeps said, God is traditionally portrayed as all-knowing and all-seeing, as being able to see the past, present, and the future all at once. If He wanted to create a universe, a planet, plants/animals, etc., He wouldn't have the make attempts. He wouldn't have to stab around before getting things right. He'd know exactly what to do from the get-go, and He'd make it happen. (He also wouldn't need to take days to do it, but whatever... )

People who try to mash Genesis and science in an attempt to "reconcile" the two often try to say this sort of thing, though. They'll also say that a Biblical "day" is millions or billions of years in attempt to merge the creation account with evolutionary theory, but that doesn't work very well, either. For instance, in the creation account, God creates plants before He creates the sun. If a "day" is a few million years...Well, I don't know of many plants that can survive even a few weeks without sunlight, much less a few million years.

When all is said and done, the Bible is not -- and, more importantly, was never meant to be -- a science book. You cannot and will not ever make Genesis and modern science "fit together." It doesn't work. But the thing is, this doesn't mean that either is of necessity "wrong," which is the beef I have with both creationists and people who use the creation account to try to undermine the validity of the Bible and the existence of God. The purpose of science is to explain stuff to the best of our limited but ever-expanding ability: how things work, how things came to be, that sort of thing. The purpose of the Genesis creation account and the story of the Garden of Eden, specifically, is to delineate our connection to God, to show us what our relationship to Him was/is supposed to be and then to show us what it became. Nothing more. The creation account is a part of that, but it's quite obvious that it's not supposed to be a literally accounting of events that actually happened.

And, IMO, there's no conflict between science and the Bible, so long as you do not take the latter literally (and it was never meant to be taken literally.). IMO, what God "created" is our souls, the one thing that, at least so far as we know, DOES make us different from the other organisms that we share the planet with. When the Scripture said that God made us from dirt, it's not meant to be taken literally. In my mind, it's as if God picked us up from the ground, the dirt, cleaned us up, and made us better by giving us a connection to Him, our souls, our "breath of life." (As in, spiritual life, not biological life.) THIS is what is "in God's image;" our bodies, badly-engineered as they are, quite obviously are not. (Creationists like to say that all of the stuff that's wrong with our bodies is the result of the Fall, but that's reading a hell of a lot into an account that they, in the next breath, will claim is a complete account that is supposed to be read literally. The irony amuses me.)



As others have said, we likely aren't the only intelligent species. Our tests for "intelligence" have been/still are heavily biased toward "intelligent=like humans." Many animals on this planet show behaviors that were previously thought to be the exclusive domain of H. sapiens. Animals like the apes, the cetaceans, and elephants. The lines are blurring.



The cynical answer: Because we made it that way.
The spiritual answer: Because we have a connection to God; the plants, animals, etc. do not. Were I a Deist, I'd say that we were meant to watch out for things when God left. Unfortunately, we haven't been stellar caretakers.

@fakepeeps7

Do you really don't like God/god/gods?

@iCad

When I posted "why are we then only inteligent species?", I was thinking that we are intelligent than other.
Animals are also intelligent, I didn't say that they aren't.
I like animals more than humans. Why? Cat will never leave her kittens, but people will leave their children and that's sad.

But even that has been questioned. The problem is how "intelligence" is defined. There's a technical definition, but people use "intelligence" in forms other than that technical definition, because it's simply easier.

I don't like your god, no.

I'm not too keen on some of his followers, either.

But again, we don't know that we're more intelligent than any other animal. We just think we are because, last I knew (and this isn't my specialty or anything), we don't really have any way to measure without bias whether or not a non-human animal is "intelligent." We can only compare them to us.

I like animals, too. But as for cats not leaving their kittens: Tell that to one of our barn cats who, after about 4 days abandoned her litter of 5 kittens. I don't know if her milk dried up (She's feral, so we can't get close to her and she's one of the three that we haven't been able to trap and have fixed yet.) or what, but she became completely disinterested. My daughter is raising the kittens. Cute little buggers. Three weeks old now.

So really, non-human animals are just as "bad" as humans, and vice-versa.

It seems that there are individual animals like humans - irresponsible.

fakepeeps7, are you here just to decrease our faith?
"I don't like your god, no." - This is very subjective. Everyone has subjective opinion about God next to the objective one that is public. So, you can't know my subjective opinion, well, you can only if you have telepathic abilities.

I think that fakepeeps was talking about the Christian God, as opposed to your personal view of God. And, yes, saying that one doesn't like a particular God is subjective as it is an opinion, but your love for God is also an opinion. In a debate forum, each is equally valid as an opinion, though the point is to provide evidence and reasoning.

Yes. I sit awake at night trying to figure out ways to turn all the believers on the MTS forums into atheists! (That was sarcasm, in case you couldn't tell.)



I don't think there's such a thing as an objective view about God. We wouldn't have myriad religions on this planet if that were the case.



I never claimed I could. But you've made your opinions pretty clear here, so I can infer quite a bit about your beliefs.

Well, you are looking at me and my posts like I am trying to convert all atheists into Christians!

Again, telling me what I'm doing and thinking and saying...

Are you psychic? I think that's frowned upon in Catholicism.

I am not. Are you?

iCad, do you know which is the most frequent reason why the cat leaves kittens? Because humans are playing with hers kittens or touch them, and mother cat can sense humans smell.

That's not true with cats, or birds for that matter. The most common reasons a mother cat will abandon her young is if she is very young, and doesn't know how to care for him (probably because she was taken from her own mother too young), or if something is wrong with the kittens (that's nature's way), or -- and according to my vet friend the most common -- she doesn't like where they are located. Her "abandonment" is attempting to find a new nest for them. She'll leave for a couple of hours and humans will hear the piteously mewing kittens and think mom has abandoned them--when really she's just trying to find a safer home.

Sorry, but although they may have human scent, they have their own production.

Do you know why a cat may clean itself after a person touched it? One thought is because it stimulates their body to give off their own scent which covers over the human scent.

Even kittens have this. The mother can probably do the same to the kitten. I -really- doubt it's because they've been handled by humans.

I know that mother cat likes to hide her kittens in the most inhospitable places. Last year, our cat has hidden their kittens and when we were in shed, she was pretending stupid, just so we wouldn't have found kittens. A car struck her when she went hunting, although they had food. She wanted to learn them to hunt. She was a really good mother.

When my mom was a kid, she and her siblings had hamsters. One of the babies got touched when it was still tiny... so the mother ate it.

Hamsters are not a good basis to go on; they're quite strange in the whole cannibalism thing.

But how do you know that other organisms don't have souls? I have yet to see any evidence that humans have them either.

Perfect point! If there is a heaven then I would be MISERABLE if I were there without my animals. Only I can live forever, but dear Puzzle and Wind Song and Iggy and Gumpert and Ears and and and . . . the list goes on . . . are only dirt?

The idea that only humans are capable of the "greater glories" is just more evidence that religion was invented by humans.

Except what about earlier beliefs, polytheistic or pantheistic beliefs, before the time of monotheism.

Don't take me wrong, I'm not necessarily disagreeing, I'm just saying though that you cannot base the whole off of what could possibly an idea birthed later on, an idea which only applies to an amount, rather than the whole.