Head over to the above-linked thread for the continuation of the religion conversation.

Which I look forward to. But for serious, back to discussion of Contact.

Christians will argue that there are passages in the Bible which do exactly that.

Religious people argue a lot of things.

I've seen them argue that. I've never seen one provide such a passage.

Right, but Ellie's point was why wouldn't God provide something unknowable to humans at that point but which could later be verified, like Pi or E=MC2. What's in the Bible (and any other religious text) is and always will be unverifiable, that's the problem.

The difference is I'm aware of the fact that my universe is fictional.

Here's a page of Muslims doing that kind of thing regarding the Koran:
http://www.missionislam.com/science/book.htm

Nope. As I say, they argue that the Bible contains information that the people of the time couldn't possibly have known, but there isn't a single passage on that page representing information that couldn't have been plainly obvious to anyone at the time, and/or reasonably guessed.

I mean, just take the astronomy bit. They're going to try to argue that a Bronze Age shepherd wouldn't be able to say "There are more stars than I can count" just by looking at them? And couldn't have deduced that the fact that there are multiple visible stars indicates that they're all individual and different from each other?

Really?

They try to gussy it up by painting a coat of recent scientific knowledge on top of it to pretend it's validation, talking about analyzing the spectra, but the Bible said nothing about spectral differentiation, it just said one is different from another, which again would be obvious to any half-retarded person looking up outdoors at night.

I'd have been far more impressed if it contained information that was counter-intuitive based on mere observation -- like, say, that though we perceive multiple stars that they all originate from the same source and something in our atmosphere makes it diffract into the apparent multitudes (in an alternate universe where this is true, of course). Then for an ancient book to say such a thing as this but only be able to demonstrate it empirically millennia later, well, that book would be worth a second look. But that's not what the Bible does, it only says things that would be perfectly intuitive to anyone with eyes and a child's intelligence.

Or take the bit about blood, from Leviticus. Yes, blood "carries water and nourishment to every cell, maintains the body’s temperature, and removes the waste material of the body’s cells. The blood also carries oxygen from the lungs throughout the body."

But the Bible doesn't say any of that, the Bible says only that "the life of the flesh is in the blood" which would again be apparent to any idiot who'd watched things die after they had lost a significant amount of blood -- which both hunter-gatherer and agrarian societies would be dealing with on a regular basis.

Etc.

And in other places, they're just wrong. Human flesh is NOT made of "dust." We know that this is NOT true. Why is it being touted as an example of the Bible containing scientifically accurate information?

So to reiterate, I've heard these arguments, but I have never seen a Christian provide a passage that contains modern knowledge that human beings at the time could not possibly have known. The Bible contains no such information. Likewise the page about the Quran, which in places is even more shameless in its apologetical retcons.

I've just seen this film for the first time, holy crap can that Zemeckis guy shoot a picture. For the most part I really liked the balance between athiesm and faith, although it could have ended with a more ambiguous stance.

Needs another critical viewing, then once more with the commentary.

There were some pretty soft edges on some of those mattes huh?

Okay, obviously very late to this party, but I just watched/listened to this commentary, and I think some things.

I want to quote Jeff, and I will figure out the real way, but I don't want to get all muddeled up, so I am just going to use old fashioned quotation marks:

"God might exist. Or something else might exist that's definitely not God as you or anybody else understands it. Or maybe there's nothing at all but cold protons and the fading echo of the big bang."

Why can't God just be science? That is to say, maybe God is what makes shit work fairly consistently, like prime numbers are always prime numbers, and evolution makes sense because there is an order in which things happen? That has always been my problem with Christianity, like God hates science, okay, he made all of it, you guys! Get it?

I went to Catholic school for about 14 years, and I would be an atheist, because that intellectually makes the most sense to me, but at my core I have trouble unbelieving in God.

So I agree with Jeff, that maybe nothing, but maybe something that is totally unlike anything we can imagine, very much not an old guy with a white beard in a nightgown who is judging us every second, exists, but maybe not.

But why use the word "God" when you don't mean anything like what "God" is understood to mean when everyone else uses it? It's like me saying I just bought a car when I really mean a sandwich. The entire point of language is that words have agreed-upon meanings as shorthand for concepts. Instead of describing the attributes of a tree, I can say "tree" and you automatically picture something at least in the neighborhood of what I mean, though the specifics may vary ("tree" may invoke an oak for you, a pine for someone else; "God" may invoke Yahweh for you, Vishnu for someone else).

If you're going to use a word to mean something entirely unlike what everyone else means when they use the word, it defeats the purpose of using the word at all and renders it literally meaningless. 

I certainly believe -- hell, I'd even venture to say I know -- that there's stuff out there in the universe that is entirely unlike anything else in our experience, and probably lots beyond our comprehension, and probably stuff we maybe will never even know is out there because of the limits of our perception. But I'm not going to call any of that "God," because "God" is a set of concepts and attributes. How can I simultaneously claim there's something out there we know nothing about while claiming to know enough about it to give it a label, especially one so loaded?

I have no idea what you just said.

I think there are a couple of incongruent points of view in Gibson's post: god as structure and god as deity.

If you interpret god as science; relativity, quantum mechanics, etc. then I can understand the concept of god. God would be the structure behind the interaction, no more interested or aware of what happens to Joe from Nashville than a formula is in the eventual application of its equation.

If you interpret god as a deity, who crafts the rules that run everything, yet is also deeply concerned about what Joe in Nasville thinks, then I cannot understand this concept. For god to have an opinion or self-direction requires a conciousness, and to me this is an untenable point of view.

I still believe (ha!) that there is a god-gene; something evolved over time to provide more cohesive social structure. We're social animals and have evolved to create society based on agreed laws, generally based on this concept of god the diety. If this god-gene exists, I lack it.