Welcome to Gaia! ::

Rissa, if you'd please refer to my signature.

Okay, I'm not going to take the quiz because I already know what I believe, but I think I need to explain it a bit.

I'm a Christian. Simply Christian, and not the kind a lot of people hate because they've gotten the wrong side of the story. I don't follow the doctrines of any specific denomination, but rather I'm what you call a "Non Denominational" believer. I simply believe that there is a God, and that the sole authority of my faith comes from the Bible (and Him), and not from the mouth of a man who can "interpret" what it says (though a good minister helps to understand scripture instead of wording it into what he thinks it means). Therefore, I believe that God cannot be labeled as Catholic, Baptist, Methodist, or what have you because God is God. In a sense, I too, dislike religion because it has deviated so far from what it was originally. Rather, I follow faith, which is different from that of religion because religion was created by man.

I also believe that the persecution of any person for any specific reason is wrong, because as a Christian, I am taught to love my fellow man. God is love, so therefore, if I love God, then I must love everything because he does, which means I don't care if you're gay, bisexual, Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, Pagan, or whatever. It's not my place to judge you, but rather I except you as you are, though I may disagree with your beliefs and you with mine. I don't think it right for people to spurn and hate each other simply because we think differently. WHERE'S THE LOVE, MAN?

So yeah. Basically, I'm a giant hippie at heart. heart

I could call myself agnostic, but that tends to imply thinking that any of the earth's religions could be accurate. I don't believe this. I summarily reject and disbelieve in humanity's various Invisible Sky Wizards the same way I disbelieve in Odin and leprechauns.

In terms of a divine being, I am unwilling to hazard even the faintest notion of a guess. I will not say there isn't one, but I won't say there is one either, but I don't ******** know. I feel scepticism and/or disinterest is the strongest position on this subject.

Just because they haven't discovered how life intitially formed doesn't mean they eventually won't. At one point we didn't know how stars formed, and we also assumed they were simply made by a divine being. Now we have a pretty general idea of how stars were formed, and have no need to assume "God" did it.

Why not believe in the Big Bang if that's what the evidence suggest? If you were a scientist actively pursuing a different theory, with your evidence and measures, I would happily listen to your opinion, and possibly even cede my agreement with the scientific consensus on the matter and relocate myself to "sceptical and/or disinterested". But as it stands you don't "believe in" it the same way an Atheist doesn't "believe in" a divine being. You yourself have no evidence to suggest there WASN'T a big bang, and a large scientific consensus exists that there WAS one. The idea of the Big Bang just does't sit well with you, and that doesn't cut it.

One current hypothesis as to the origin of life is that at some point certain molecules formed that were able to recreate themselves. This process expanded and the complexity of the molecules increased to include several molecules. Eventually these became the first single-celled organisms, and things proceeded from there.

It is a fundamental fallacy to assume that just because we don't know the cause of something means that there isn't one, and thus a divine being had to fill in the gaps. If a divine being thought things out this far, why waste the effort and not make everything fit?

I didn't overlook your evidence. Your evidence is based on the assumption that you can't have life without life already there. You say that because those temperatures destroy life, it therefor could not have happened.

I believe I refuted this argument by saying that there are currently theories as to how life could come out of purely physical processes. Modern science is incredibly young, and has progressed incredibly quickly, yet you've already decided that life CANNOT have been the result of natural processes. Processes such as the one I described, in which certain self-replicating molecules grew in complexity until they could be considered life, if true, refute your argument. And on top of this, your argument about heat is irrelevant to your argument to begin with. The big bang was composed of nothing but hydrogen in the current model. Living organisms aren't made out of pure hydrogen, so you don't even need to argue that temperature would kill it all, because it couldn't have existed before the big bang to begin with.

And I will repeat my argument. Why would an all powerful, resourceful, and obviously incredibly creative deity go through all the work of creating an infinitely complex scientific system only to get lazy when it came to creating life? It doesn't make any sense at all.

Once again, just because we don't understand it now, doesn't mean we won't ever understand it. Doesn't mean we will, but at one time we thought atoms were the smallest unit in the universe. We used to think the earth was at the center of the universe, and that it was flat. At every generation there is someone that thinks that we have reached the pinnacle of scientific knowledge, that there are just some things that we can never do, never know. And with each passing generation scientists happily smash down those barriers. Why? Because they're more interested in testing and researching than making assumptions about things they don't know yet.

As an addendum, there are kinds of bacteria that can only exist inside active volcanoes. Our ideal conditions are not universally ideal conditions.

See, this is information I like. This points one way or another. Though...by 'inside' do you mean in the molten rock...or just near it? What are the temperatures there?