God, Heat, Cold and darkness?
 

A science professor begins his school year with a lecture to the students, "Let me explain the problem science has with religion." The atheist professor of philosophy pauses before his class and then asks one of his new students to stand.

"You're a Christian, aren't you, son?"

"Yes sir," the student says.

"So you believe in God?"

"Absolutely."

"Is God good?"

"Sure! God's good."

"Is God all-powerful? Can God do anything?"

"Yes."

"Are you good or evil?"

"The Bible says I'm evil."

The professor grins knowingly. "Aha! The Bible!" He considers for a moment. "Here's one for you. Let's say there's a sick person over here and you can cure him. You can do it. Would you help him? Would you try?"

"Yes sir, I would."

"So you're good...!"

"I wouldn't say that."

"But why not say that? You'd help a sick and maimed person if you could. Most of us would if we could. But God doesn't."

The student does not answer, so the professor continues. "He doesn't, does he? My brother was a Christian who died of cancer, even though he prayed to Jesus to heal him. How is this Jesus good? Hmmm? Can you answer that one?"

The student remains silent.

"No, you can't, can you?" the professor says. He takes a sip of water from a glass on his desk to give the student time to relax.

"Let's start again, young fella. Is God good?"

"Er...yes," the student says.

"Is Satan good?"

The student doesn't hesitate on this one. "No."

"Then where does Satan come from?"

The student falters. "From God"

"That's right. God made Satan, didn't he? Tell me, son. Is there evil in this world?"

"Yes, sir."

"Evil's everywhere, isn't it? And God did make everything, correct?"

"Yes."

"So who created evil?" The professor continued, "If God created everything, then God created evil, since evil exists, and according to the principle that our works define who we are, then God is evil."

Again, the student has no answer. "Is there sickness? Immorality? Hatred? Ugliness? All these terrible things, do they exist in this world?"

The student squirms on his feet. "Yes."

"So who created them?"

The student does not answer again, so the professor repeats his question. "Who created them?" There is still no answer. Suddenly the lecturer breaks away to pace in front of the classroom. The class is mesmerized. "Tell me," he continues onto another student. "Do you believe in Jesus Christ, son?"

The student's voice betrays him and cracks. "Yes, professor, I do."

The old man stops pacing. "Science says you have five senses you use to identify and observe the world around you. Have you ever seen Jesus?"

"No sir. I've never seen Him."

"Then tell us if you've ever heard your Jesus?"

"No, sir, I have not."

"Have you ever felt your Jesus, tasted your Jesus or smelt your Jesus? Have you ever had any sensory perception of Jesus Christ, or God for that matter?"

"No, sir, I'm afraid I haven't."

"Yet you still believe in him?"

"Yes."

"According to the rules of empirical, testable, demonstrable protocol, science says your God doesn't exist. What do you say to that, son?"

"Nothing," the student replies. "I only have my faith."

"Yes, faith," the professor repeats. "And that is the problem science has with God. There is no evidence, only faith."

The student stands quietly for a moment, before asking a question of His own. "Professor, is there such thing as heat?"

"Yes," the professor replies. "There's heat."

"And is there such a thing as cold?"

"Yes, son, there's cold too."

"No sir, there isn't."

The professor turns to face the student, obviously interested. The room suddenly becomes very quiet. The student begins to explain. "You can have lots of heat, even more heat, super-heat, mega-heat, unlimited heat, white heat, a little heat or no heat, but we don't have anything called 'cold'. We can hit up to 458 degrees below zero, which is no heat, but we can't go any further after that. There is no such thing as cold; otherwise we would be able to go colder than the lowest -458 degrees."

"Every body or object is susceptible to study when it has or transmits energy, and heat is what makes a body or matter have or transmit energy. Absolute zero (-458 F) is the total absence of heat. You see, sir, cold is only a word we use to describe the absence of heat. We cannot measure cold. Heat we can measure in thermal units because heat is energy. Cold is not the opposite of heat, sir, just the absence of it."

Silence across the room. A pen drops somewhere in the classroom, sounding like a hammer.

"What about darkness, professor. Is there such a thing as darkness?"

"Yes," the professor replies without hesitation. "What is night if it isn't darkness?"

"You're wrong again, sir. Darkness is not something; it is the absence of something. You can have low light, normal light, bright light, flashing light, but if you have no light constantly you have nothing and it's called darkness, isn't it? That's the meaning we use to define the word."

"In reality, darkness isn't. If it were, you would be able to make darkness darker, wouldn't you?"

The professor begins to smile at the student in front of him. This will be a good semester. "So what point are you making, young man?"

"Yes, professor. My point is, your philosophical premise is flawed to start with, and so your conclusion must also be flawed."

The professor's face cannot hide his surprise this time. "Flawed? Can you explain how?"

"You are working on the premise of duality," the student explains. "You argue that there is life and then there's death; a good God and a bad God. You are viewing the concept of God as something finite, something we can measure. Sir, science can't even explain a thought."

"It uses electricity and magnetism, but has never seen, much less fully understood either one. To view death as the opposite of life is to be ignorant of the fact that death cannot exist as a substantive thing. Death is not the opposite of life, just the absence of it."

"Now tell me, professor. Do you teach your students that they evolved from a monkey?"

"If you are referring to the natural evolutionary process, young man, yes, of course I do."

"Have you ever observed evolution with your own eyes, sir?"

The professor begins to shake his head, still smiling, as he realizes where the argument is going. A very good semester, indeed.

"Since no one has ever observed the process of evolution at work and cannot even prove that this process is an on-going endeavor, are you not teaching your opinion, sir? Are you now not a scientist, but a preacher?"

The class is in uproar. The student remains silent until the commotion has subsided.

"To continue the point you were making earlier to the other student, let me give you an example of what I mean."

The student looks around the room. "Is there anyone in the class who has ever seen the professor's brain?" The class breaks out into laughter.

"Is there anyone here who has ever heard the professor's brain, felt the professor's brain, touched or smelt the professor's brain? No one appears to have done so. So, according to the established rules of empirical, stable, demonstrable protocol, science says that you have no brain, with all due respect, sir."

"So if science says you have no brain, how can we trust your lectures, sir?"

Now the room is silent. The professor just stares at the student, his face unreadable.

Finally, after what seems an eternity, the old man answers. "I guess you'll have to take them on faith."

"Now, you accept that there is faith, and, in fact, faith exists with life," the student continues. "Now, sir, is there such a thing as evil?"

Now uncertain, the professor responds, "Of course, there is. We see it everyday. It is in the daily example of man's inhumanity to man. It is in the multitude of crime and violence everywhere in the world. These manifestations are nothing else but evil."

To this the student replied, "Evil does not exist sir, or at least it does not exist unto itself. Evil is simply the absence of God. It is just like darkness and cold, a word that man has created to describe the absence of God. God did not create evil. Evil is the result of what happens when man does not have God's love present in his heart. It's like the cold that comes when there is no heat or the darkness that comes when there is no light."

The professor sat down.

The professor is an idiot. I'll expand, probably Saturday. Or if I'm not deathly tired from being up all week, perhaps Friday.

I was hoping for a response from you.

I will look forward to it

Oh :rolleyes: here we go, be prepared of a few hundred pre-empted replies filled with contradictory examples..

Seeing as that's what he was hoping for, I'll deliver.

This whole thing is ridiculous, but lost all legitimacy here, if not earlier.

Looks like a general e-mail forward, but still makes some decent points.

When you think about it, God being real or not, people better their lives by living in his faith, and that alone is good enough not to debate it amongst anyone but yourself.

It does make some valid point I think... the brain thing is pushing it though.

I disagree.

Once again, disagreed. Whether or not people better their lives through faith is debatable. However, even if it could somehow be proven that belief in god is a necessity for life to exist, it says nothing about the truth behind the claim. I think the truth is very important, despite what implications discovering that truth may have on society.

I may be reading too deep into this, but are we to assume that the student is a manifestation of God, or is "His" being capitalized just a typo?

I think you're reading to deep to find some extra un-related flaws

Honestly, how can you disagree that millions of people have bettered their lives after converting to some sort of faith, that's just being ignorant on your part. Look at Convicts that go into the prision system for so long and they finally want to change, what do they do? They turn to Faith/Religion, and come out better as a whole.



You are in fact reading too deep into it, you can't debate God with science, didn't you read the entire story? This is a whole entirely different argument, and you're taking a completely false spin on it. :rolleyes:

Why is it you call people ignorant before hearing the argument. I would argue that's ignorance on your part. I think I can make one hell of an argument that religion, all in all, has been not just somewhere in the middle, but egregious to humanity, and the ecosystem as a whole. But when I have time.

Reread and come again. Honestly, that doesn't seem to be your strong point with my posts lately. Neither of my posts (this one, the rape one) that went completely over your head were even that long. I didn't disagree with the OP in that quote, it was you I disagreed with, specifically "and that alone is good enough not to debate it amongst anyone but yourself." I presented the reason why it should be debated, namely because it contravenes and imposes itself onto the realm of science. And I'm putting the spin on things?

D3v is just honestly incapable of holding an intelligent unemotional conversation, much less a debate. For a long time I've thought of people's capabilities in terms of a series of tunnels (or tubes). Each tunnel allows for a particular thought process. Some people have many tunnels, and thus have the ability to consider many particulars at a time, as well as more quickly since there is more throughput. Think of it as mental multitasking. However, other (stupid) people may have only one tunnel, and are just physically limited by it. These people cannot usually be reasoned with, as they are simply incapable of it. As silly as it is, I take solace in it.

MJ did the exact same thing

It's not worth the time or effort to even try sifting through MJ's replies searching for an actual response behind all of the backward-ass logistically placed comments that aren't even relevant to the argument itself.

You did basically the same thing, scroll up a few lines, calling the professor an idiot is the same presumption giving you have heard his side, and we've all heard your opinion on things on numerous occasions.



I don't think you're getting my point, you are breaking this down too much, the simple fact that you are trying to turn this into an argument about an argument is idiocracy.

Yea. Two lines. Heaven forbid!!! You're going to get eaten by the long-winded-post monster D3V! Grow up.

Incorrect. The professor is an idiot because he was not able to promulgate simple syllogisms to his students that would have entirely trashed a lot of what the second student was rambling on about. You, on the other hand, have a problem with the idea that I'm trying to convey. You've basically already made your mind up. That much is obvious when you're calling me ignorant based on something I haven't said. I can pinpoint exactly why the professor is an idiot. What he should have done that would have stripped him from his current title of idiot. And I wholeheartedly intend to friday or saturday. You, on the other hand, just have a problem with my ideology. You won't say why. You'll just say I'm ignorant, and decree by fiat that I'm wrong. Open your mind. Grow up.

I'm simply pointing out the incessant hypocrisy in your statements.

I r likeing to oose big words.

Is it really that necessary? You sometimes make yourself out to be too smart and by the time I'm reading your posts I've totally forgot what you were talking about in the first place. It's hard to follow your train of thought sometimes.

It is the quintessence of effective communication to articulate suitably succinct statements.

This thread is actually pretty entertaining.

That's basically my point, that and his origional point gets skewed beyond even giving a shit when he breaks down every possible aspect, of everything.

This isn't the first time either, it's basically every argument, it's basically resorting to making an essay, rather than a point.

So you are arguing that your opponent's arguments are too effective to be considered valid arguments?

The workings of your mind are suddenly very clear.

It's an interesting read up until the end. Claiming that evil, darkness, etc, is just the absence of God? I don't think so. If anything, evil is the absence of good, darkness is the absence of light, but neither are the absence of God.

And everything we know is based on dualities. If we didn't know evil, how would we be able to know good? If we didn't know hot, we wouldn't know cold. That's pretty basic, and is partially the reason I don't believe that a christian "heaven" is possible.

I wouldn't want to live in a place where there's no evil of any sort, only good, because without having evil, you cannot enjoy good. Without war, we wouldn't enjoy peace so much.

A good example of "bad" really being partially "good" is with nazi death camp prisoners. The people who went through that and survived most likely see EVERYTHING as being good relative to what they went through. As much as it sucked, it's also quite a gift, because now they can go through anything, and enjoy even the simplest things that we take for granted. Imagine how good food looked to them after they went months on less than the body needs to survive. Imagine how great it felt for them to actually sleep in a bed, without having 5 other people crammed in with them and a shoe as a pillow.

I don't mean to make it seem like it's a GOOD thing that they went through what they did, but it does make everything else seem much, much better.

Well, the syllogism would be the basis to almost all the arguments I make regarding this thread. Perhaps I'll define it first, because it would be too damned tedious without it.

So your point is my arguments are too precise to be taken seriously?

Edit: Nevermind, Grav beat me to it.

If you don't like them, quit being a puling bitch and don't read them. If my arguments are filled with so much damned awesomeness that you can't/won't rebuke them, ignore me. But for fucks sake, quit bitching.

You never fail to stop.

Still, you are arguing about ARGUING itself. And secondly, nobody ever has to believe anything you say, after claiming to be a young black kid, which we all know is false.

Yea....you're definitely not arguing about arguing...

You do realize that every one of my so-called "arguments about arguing" have been an on-topic reply to one of your posts? Hypocrite.

And that logic in the last sentence is infallible.

Evolution is real! Oop! He says he's black. Evolution is therefore false!

Your attempt to makes a relevant post, fail # 2,104

Of course. Relevant points to you only consist of one liners. Adderall might be able to fix that, though.

This post is D3v Dumb™

So this thread just basically turned into Mj and D3v bitching at each other..

Oh well, I thought it was atleast an interesting read.

Yea...sorry about that. This is a good thread...didn't mean to contribute to its degeneration. Would be awesome if this sillyness between me and D3V could be deleted...

It's too entertaining to get rid of. D3v, like Grav said, is one of those "one tunnel" people.

A better solution would be for me to find a reason to ban D3v.

I'll second that, I didn't really mean for it to get out of hand, I would like however, to move it into a debate thread to furter a legitimate discussion.

A little late, but whatever. I'll start at the beginning of where the student begins to ask the professor questions.

At the beginning what we see is the student slips the professor up. But the problem is with linguistics. There were subtle errors in the students line of questioning that a professor of philosophy should have the perspicacity to pick up on. Heat is a quantitative measure of energy. Cold and hot are qualitative descriptors of different levels of heat energy. So do hot and cold exist? They have no physical manifestations, but that's not what we're looking for. They're simply subjective descriptions. The entire argument the student makes lies on the imperfections of the English language in describing the physical world.

The same argument can be extended to the student's light and dark argument, except this time the inherent deception of the English language is even more subtle. The student plays on the double-meaning of the word light. Yes, light and dark are opposites. But light can also be a quantitative measure of energy. The lack of energy is what darkness is, not the lack of the qualitative descriptor 'light.'

Now on to the evolutionary argument. There is a huge difference between 'believing' in the theory of evolution and believing in God. Though you may not have seen the evidence for the theory of evolution with your own eyes, you are accepting that the evidence is there. If you want to be shown the evidence, go to a museum, go to a university, go to a myriad of different places and it's all there for you. While the student may not have seen the evidence, I certainly have. On top of that, the theory of evolution makes sense. It is so damned obvious that I would say that in essence, all the theory of evolution is is four simple observations about the world. The rest is the natural, obvious, extrapolation from these observations.

When believing in God, on the other hand, you are accepting that no evidence for his existence exists, except for subjective revelation. You don't believe in God because people tell you we have the evidence for God, and then describe to you what it is, you believe in him because other people believe in him and they told you to. And that is a terrible reason. Not only that, when specifically talking about the Christian God, you must reject the plethora of evidence piled on against his claims. On top of that, the God hypothesis doesn't even make sense. "He exists outside of space and time." WHAT?!?!?!

"No one has observed the process of evolution at work?" I have. I worked with a grad student last semester as an undergrad assistant. Many people have. That statement is the pinnacle of ignorance.

And once we reach the point where the student is asking whether or not the professor has a brain this whole thing just becomes too ridiculous? The idea that the professor has a brain is pure observation. Every living human has had a brain that we have tested. Over, and over, and over again. The professor, belonging to the set HUMAN, therefore has a brain. It's not faith. It's science. There's a difference. And since the professor could not make an appropriate retort to this, I was forced to conclude he was an idiot, and he got his degree online.

Faith should be better defined here. I wouldn't call ideas based off of empirical data faith. Such as the professor having a brain. The belief in God does not require that sort of a faith. It requires blind faith. So much blind faith if you're a Christian, in fact, that you would need to believe that downtown New York and downtown San Francisco are 30 feet apart. After being in downtown New York. Honestly, that is how off the bible is on the age of the Earth.

Now, I can accept the student's argument that evil is the absence of God. But we already have a word for this without all the metaphysical bullshit. Evil is the absence of goOd. You have to add an extra o. We can't quantitatively measure evil and good, but I suppose here "good" would have to take on dual-meanings as well. To say that evil is the absence of God is just to be presumptuous.

Here's a perfect fucking quote for your MJ.


If that doesn't sum it up flawlessly, then I don't know what can.

[I'm not saying that science is all that there is. Of course not. There is the beauty and joy in art, music, and the like. I've never said otherwise.

Why would you even say this? This is akin to a "you're too smart, so you're stupid" cop out argument. Your finishing statement isn't even correct. Please don't pollute the good threads with your presence.