Bringing religious scriptures into a discussion about science is an extremely slippery slope, unless you are fully conversant in both. The hyperlink that you have posted has no connection with the subject at hand and hence reflects poorly upon the "religious type people". We should learn lesson from what happened to church when it decided to go against science.
Dear Exiled-Pakistani sb, this behaviour reflects your religious mindset and attitude. You have discounted scriptures merely because somebody less intelligent than yourself ie priesthood has told you what is in the scriptures. You did not give same importance and reflection to this source of knowledge to try and make sense of it yourself as you chose to do with exploration of creation.
Have you not realised that you could not make sense of anything your parents told you till you enabled yourself to do that through loads of life experiences based upon loads of trials and errors? Why then you should expect that scriptures mean what others tell you when you are well aware from your own life experiences that not all people make same effort for learning things and that all of us make ample mistakes and go through many trails and errors to learn anything at all in life? On top of all this people try their best to mislead each other in order to take undue advantage of each other. So where does all this lead atheists? One error of judge to another. Out of frying pan into the fire.
Sciences is nothing other than a way to learn things through trials and errors and we have not learned anything till we are able to make proper sense of things and that means being able to explain all there is to explain. Just as we need to create models for making sense of universal realities what we think we know so we need to sit down and see what model can we create from the actual texts of the scriptures. Because the scriptures are all about real life realities so they too need to be explored and interpreted in light of real world realities. rulers, mullahs and money lenders worked together to make fool of masses and they used scriptures for that purpose as a tool to fool us and we accepted it instead of learning things and fighting back and exposing their lies with which they deceived masses and gave bad name to God, his message and humanity itself. Yes, we are highly learned people, aren't we? A thief comes to your house and takes over the house you inherited from your parents and you let him do that and then start cursing your parents for leaving you the house, what a clever move! I will agree with you but with a big difference. You are making a very big mistake in bundling religions, scriptures and priests all together.
This is where the actual problem lies that people automatically assume scriptural message is as told by mullahs. This is not true. It is because all knowledge needs to be discovered by people individually regardless it is related to the creation or the revelation. There is no sense in scientists dismissing scriptures just because priests have no clue what they are talking about when they attribute their nonsense to scriptures. A scientist must go through things oneself to get the actual needed evidences before dismissing anything. Facts are only those which are proven through proper study and the best possible explanation.
Science is also based upon trial and error method and is only accepted as basis because it makes some sense ie the explanations of available evidences make sense. But exactly the same is case in case of scriptures that explanations in them need to be analysed and accepted on basis of whether they make sense or not. If a workable model can be produced from the scriptures then scriptures become more reliable than science on its own. It is because God, men of science and scriptures all are on the same page. This is the proper way to look at things.
So I will be interested in people who have studied the scriptures and the science both. The basic thing to remember is that scriptures have nothing at all to do with make beliefs and rituals because they are promoters of a way of life based upon living for each other as opposed to way of life based upon law of jungle ie a way life based upon personal gains at the expense of each other.
You may have problem with my long post but have you ever tried to explain anything to anyone in detail? If you have then you should be aware that one liners only work when in everything else two people are on the very same page otherwise full review of each other's position is in order.
2)It is because the quran is not paid attention by people properly hence the link.
3)I look at reason based arguments on basis of revelation otherwise they make no sense whatsoever because they serve no purpose in my view. What I am saying is that there is a creator and sustainer because the quran says so but the question is why the saying of the quran is important? It is because you cannot rule out possibility of existence of God. If God exists then only God can tell what he is and what he is not, what he did or does or will do and why because we can only reason things as far as our reasoning can take us. This is why we cannot rule out possibility of God communicating with mankind. This is why the right question will be, has he or has he not revealed anything to mankind? If he has, what is the proof? In my view the explanations of things given in the quran make the best possible sense. This verifiable fact renders the quran important and that is why quoting the quran in this context is not circular reasoning as people will usually assume. But the question is, why people push aside the scriptures when they want to talk about God? The answer is very simple, because they have no such scriptures or the needed knowledge upon which they could rely so they rather use philosophy instead because some how existence must be explained and the same idea is used by scientists. They study universe to find answers of questions which they can never find unless they study the scripture and the universe together. They forget that unless we learn how to explain things for ourselves we can never make sense of anything be it universe or the scripture. The study of a proper scripture and universe together can help us discover the real truth just like study of a witness statement and the corroboratory evidences. It is a process that involves trial and error method and going back and forth between the sense we get from the study of the universal realities and the study of the scripture. A process totally ignored. This is why all the confusion.
Look at it this way. You are born and there is a television set there with a book with all necessary information in it about the tv set but at the time you do not know what it is, where it has come from, what it does, how it does it etc etc. You then educate yourself through your life experience discovering things and one day you have educated yourself enough that you can interpret the book that was with tv set and figure out the tv set as well. Now you are going to discover things from the book about the tv set which you did not know before and from the tv set you are going to discover things about the book which you did not know before. So human beings always discovered things they never knew before discovering them. Likewise when we are born we have this universe and ourselves and some books telling us things about ourselves and this universe etc etc.
The only way open for us is to try and understand them the best we can. This is how our mind works ie when it comes across something it does not know and wants to discover things about it, it tries to fool about with it and gradually finds out things about it and that is how it starts making sense. If we come across something and we want to find out things about it then we never look at it to confuse ourselves more about it than we already are. That will defeat our very objective about finding out things because then we will never discover the truth about something. This is why criticising the quran is wrong for anyone if one has never bothered to build a model out of it that works due to lack of his own knowledge about things. Only if with knowledge we reject something because we know it cannot be constructed into a working model that we can say this thing does not work because it lacks this, that and the other therefore it is not good.
Just saying there is no God then there is no revelation and likewise keep building a wrong model is not the right way to go in the first place. It is not right because then you are eliminating the possibility of existence of God as well as existence of revelation. Likewise when it comes to revelation, we cannot dictate to God what he should or should not reveal. All we can do is examine what is allegedly sent by God by first educating ourselves to the level of knowledge that is needed for interpreting it. This involves discovery of knowledge about both the real world realities and the scripture because we never knew either of them before we were born and grew up mentally and physically. This is why people need to understand this process and that it involves trail,and error method. This is like matching the witness statement with the evidences and the evidences with the witness statement to see if they fit together or how they fit together if at all and if not at all then why not. This matching is a process that involves discovering things not already known and keep going back and forth. This is why people when they interpret the scripture make mistakes because they do not understand how to do it. They make sense of the scripture the best they can according to what they know themselves because one cannot interpret a divine scriptures beyond one's own knowledge that one already has. This is why as time goes on and humanity learns more and more the scriptures will make better and better sense to those who will learn to discover what is in them and the universe. For the time being explorers of the universal realities are busy doing that and the mullahs are busy doing their works on scriptures isolated from each other. One side is trying to understand the universe from the scriptures alone and the other side is trying to know things about the universe from their study of the universe alone. The truth is both sides need to come together and try and understand both the things together. If both the things have same origin we will be able to fit them together in a best possible way but if they are not then we will never be able to do that. Since those who give it a try can fit things together therefore this gives the basis for both sides to come together and start exploring both sources of information for fuller understanding of things.
What I see here is that people already have some strange idea about God so unless any God true or false fits that idea, they cannot be satisfied but the question is, are they right in thinking about a God themselves and then rejecting everything presented to them?
Who told them God is or is not a being? Who told them what he can or cannot do? Who told them anything whatever they claim about God? Just going on and on about endless senseless possibilities is not the way to go unless one wants to drive oneself into confusion and chaos and thereby insanity. The question of God or no God cannot be decided without bringing in universal realities and scriptures. Only if we could be sure that scriptures do not make sense that we can say that scriptures do not make sense otherwise rejecting things out of hand is neither here nor there.
So the best thing for anyone who argues for or against God is to try to remove the contradictions that have been pointed out ie if you accept the possibility of existence of God then you cannot deny his interaction with his creation. If you accept interaction of God with his creation then it is not up to you to choose role for God because it is his choice how he decides to interact with his creation. All we can do is make sense of things if he has explained them for us. This means understanding the allegedly divine scriptures because we only have two sources of information about God ie the creation and the revelation.
This is why we cannot dismiss things just because we have not prepared ourselves to make sense of things. If you have then please do share, I have that is why I have given the link to what I make of the quran in light of universal realities.
regards and all the best.
