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blossom comments on Avoiding Your Belief's Real Weak Points - Less Wrong
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Can anyone point out the weakest points in christianity? You need to know enough about it and you need to give it considerable thought.
(I am christian. As long as I can remember I have adopted a mindset of skeptical thinking and self doubt, but since I in real life don´t know many people who are smarter than me and knows enough to say anything about christianity, I ask you. My mom is agnostic and pretty clever, but she can come up with better arguments for a God than I can. A fair warning, I doubt that many here knows enough about christianity to actually come up with something, but I would be positively surprised if someone did. I have some weak points of my own, but it would be very useful to see if I have missed something instead of just sticking with that.)
A list that pops up for me, but I don't think they are exactly unusual (and most if not all of them can be found somewhere on this blog):
I thought this made obvious sense for temperature regulation reasons. (The eye is a much stronger example.)
I agree, if you are limited to the stupid designs that natural selection can produce. But if you are god, you should be able to do better!
Then why do mammals need a different temperature in their testicles? Like mammals, birds also regulate their own temperature, and they do just fine with internal testicles.
They evolved from dinosaurs. It could have something to do with that. Mammals are fundamentally different from reptiles and birds. Blame evolution.
Didn't mammals evolve from reptiles, too? I think your argument would be stronger if you only left 'mammals are fundamentally different from birds'.
Yes they did, but birds are much more related to dinosaurs than mammals are. All life forms evolved from Unicellular organisms.
And why, do you think, did it take biologists until XIX century to agree upon the unicellular part?
If you really believe God is responsible for everything, "blame evolution" isn't really a good answer. Are you claiming that God is constrained in how he could set up evolution?
I think God created the world, then he let it have it´s run. I wouldn´t say that he "set up" earths evolution in any specific way... Except for the creationists (are they even considered christian?) I don´t know any christians who would deny evolution today.
Creationists describe themselves as Christians, and it's hard to see how anyone else could be in a better position to tell them what they are, especially within Protestantism, where there's no central authority on what the religion is and is not.
I have always believed that you need to worship Jesus as a god, as someone divine, in order to call yourself christian. The source I have used as support for this claim is The 1986 edition of this encyclopedia For the record, it was ultimately supervised by four professors and actually written and produced by many more, including docents in religions.
Jiro says that "blame evolution" is not a good answer. But I have the right to believe in evolution even though I believe in a God. There is no need for a contradiction there.
Most US creationists would indeed say that they do worship Jesus as a God. Most of the Christian's with whom you interact might not believe in creationism but it's a mistake to assume that the people you know are representative for the whole world.
See the gallup poll for the US.
Argument by authority doesn't bring you far on LW. Especially when you make trivial errors such as questioning whether creationists are Christian.
I did not downvote this, but I think whoever did meant it as 'actually, you are NOT entitled to believe in evolution'. (People who view evolution through the lenses of genetics and biotechnology and not, say, botany and zoology, intuitively seem to me less baffled by it - not always a good thing. You have to be as baffled as you possibly can, to seek out any weak spots at all.)
The reason that "blame evolution" isn't a good answer isn't that evolution specifically is incompatible with Christianity. The reason is that "blame anything" isn't a good answer, whether it's evolution or something else. God is supposed to be in complete control over the universe. The argument "God only let it happen because of X" is nonsense no matter what X is, because God can do anything he wants; he's not subject to constraints.
I will admit, I don't know much about bird testicles. But looking into it for 5 minutes suggests that there seem to be more significant streamlining concerns for aquatic and flying animals than normal ground animals, and the different convection for being suspended in water / moving quickly through air suggests to me that it might be easier to do temperature regulation if they're internal (as might come to the mind of any man who's gotten into a cold pool).