Archimedes and Avicenna only delt with and speculated about what they "thought" was truth. They were far from "knowing" truth. Any comparison between those two and Jesus Christ is vainglorious.

Dear Arellano:
If I could make a suggestion, perhaps it would be appropriate if you actually attended one of the lectures and heard what these scientists had to say before reacting. Sometimes it helps to actually know what they have to say before offering judgment. As for Chuck Smith’s contribution, it’s normally quite appropriate for the host of an event to make a few remarks. I have checked the schedule and find that his topic will be on Darwin’s published perceptions of “God”; I think perhaps that might indeed be a topic that the Pastor can address.

Now we all know that you absolutely hate Barbara Coe, please tell me you don’t also hate Chuck Smith as well. The shear volume of charitable efforts that go to Mexico every year from that Church would probably surprise you, but I suppose that does not matter if he’s not politically correct or should I say see’s the world exactly the way you do. I have learned by now that “reporting” is not your thing, excoriating anyone who does not see things your way is your primary objective, maybe someday you will stop being the propagandist and somehow figure out what a journalist actually does?

I will give your credit for one thing, I would not have ever known of this Darwin conference without your help, so I do thank you for that.

David: There's a difference between religious truth and scientific truth—go look it up!

Tonk: I've actually attended these types of conferences before—did a cover story on one for the Weekly a couple of years ago, with some guy wondering whether clone people could be saved. I don't hate Chuck Smith at all but found his sermon at the funeral of Lonnie Frisbee to be abhorrent—go look it up!

Well Gustavo, it looks like we have found common ground. I might disagree with your open border policies but I can't fault you for going after the anti-evolutionist wackos. One day people will see...when these people have infiltrated our schools, universities, research hospitals, and elected offices...that every other country in the world will start finding the cure to diseases and innovate new procedures while we stick around quoting bible verses. Truly sad. As Richard Dawkins said, "The Enlightenment is under attack." Well, I have a cold. Gotta go and pray for god to cure it. Maybe sacrifice a goat or two just to cover the rules in the old testament also.

"Religion has convinced people that there’s an invisible man living in the sky, who watches everything you do every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a list of ten specific things he doesn’t want you to do. And if you do any of these things, he will send you to a special place of burning and fire and smoke and torture and anguish for you to live forever, and suffer and burn and scream until the end of time. But he loves you. He loves you AND HE NEEDS MONEY!" - George Carlin.

Reply to Mnlandon:
Let me get this strait, your saying that if the “Creationists” somehow infiltrate our institutions that other countries will “start finding the cure to diseases and innovate new procedures while we stick around quoting bible verses.” How on earth does one equate to the other????

If you understand history it was essentially the Reformation that started the Enlightenment. The Reformation being the revival of “faith” out from under the control of the Roman Central Church State that freed men up to begin thinking creatively. It was in fact the quest to understand the Creators works that inspired many of the original scientists. Many of the greatest scientists of the Renaissance began their major works with a preamble dedicating there efforts to the Creator of the Universe. Almost every major higher educational institution in this country was founded by “Creationists” Christians. It was not until Darwin introduced the doctrine of “self creation” that main stream science began dedicating there work to each other (themselves) rather then the Creator. For you to say that someone’s faith in a Creator would somehow hold up there work in unraveling the mysteries of nature is very presumptive and illustrates a gross misunderstanding of reality. For a Creationist the pursuit of knowledge and truth are basic. You have to live in a cave to believe progress in medicine would stop if the influence of the Darwin skeptics somehow increased.

Reply to hay-zoose:
I just checked the Calvary Chapel website and I believe the Darwin Conference is FREE to anyone who attends, so please do hold on to your money. Oh, by the way, God does Love you… and there’s absolutely no reason you should “burn”, unless you choose that for yourself. Life is indeed very brief and the ultimate purpose of life is to choose where you will spend eternity. It’s actually up to you not him were you go!

Gustavo...you are a very good writer who does a great job shedding light on various issues in OC, specifically those tied to immigrants. I appreciate that very much. But...

Chuck Smith is not a hater...Rick Warren is not a hater. I know it's more interesting to demonize people (and of course it gets more readers) but these are, at the very least, decent men, and as i and many others believe, they are very good men who care about people. Where is the coverage on the absolutely amazing work that is being done by Rick Warren and the PEACE Plan? Where is the reporting that Rick Warren makes NO salary from Saddleback, has paid back any salary that he ever received from Saddleback, and lives off 10% of his income, giving the rest away? I know you care about justice issues and poverty...so you and Warren have something in common. If you want to see what someone truly cares about...see how they spend their money. You'll see that Rick and Kay Warren do a lot for the poor and marginalized of this world.

And by the way...Jesus loves you Gustavo. it's cool if Chuck Smith is not for you...or Warren for that matter. It's not about following men...it's about following Christ. That dude who turned the world upside down 2,000 years ago and was killed by folks that called him a wine bibber and hated him for hanging out with prostitutes and poor folk. Christ was all about the last, the lost and the least! His only harsh and very angry words were saved for the judgmental, hypocritical and proud!

Gustavo...check out a dude named Shane Claiborne. He's a crazy Christ follower who you might connect with. You can check some of his stuff on Youtube.

And to finish with something that i know we can agree on...pedophile priests and the abuse they commit is an egregious, horrible sin that has shamed the church and is a true tragedy. As you well know, that behavior has nothing to do with Jesus Christ.

Saludos y bendiciones,
El Curioso

Reply to The Tonk:
Things I put in the "superstitions/wishful thinking/irrational thought" category and quit believing in when I got old enough/mature enough/educated enough to make an informed decision - Santa Claus; the Tooth Fairy; the Easter bunny; psychics, volcano gods; life, uh, after death; invisible men in the sky (of whatever denomination); virgin births; ghosts (holy or otherwise); heaven (that's what we have Southern California winters for); burning in hell (that's we have Arizona summers for).

Reply to hay-zoose:
Ok, I understand where you’re coming from and I liked the reference to California and Arizona, very good. Most people and that seems to include you, cannot consider any possibility that there may be a reality outside or beyond time and space. That’s fair as all we can touch, see and hear are the elements of time and space. I call that seeing inside the box and the box is all there is. But the question still come up, were did the box come from. That's what the Conference at Calvary Chapel is about. To most people its just superstition but to some it’s an attempt to see beyond our own capacity to experience and look outside the box of time and space. I must say that some pretty smart guys have believed in life after death, this includes Isaac Newton, Copernicus, Kepler, Robert Boyle, Faraday, Kelvin, Max Planck and Albert Einstein. Although Einstein did not place his faith in a personal God, he recognized the impossibility of a non-created universe. The Encyclopedia Britannica says of him: "Firmly denying atheism, Einstein expressed a belief in "Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the harmony of what exists." This actually motivated his interest in science, as he once remarked to a young physicist: "I want to know how God created this world; I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know His thoughts, the rest are details." Einstein's famous epithet on the "uncertainty principle" was "God does not play dice" - and to him this was a real statement about a God in whom he believed. A famous saying of his was "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."

Reply to The Tonk

I normally don't waste my time arguing with Creationists because rationality usually doesn't work on them. But hey, I have a few minutes till bed.

You didn't understand my previous post and you asked how my statements equate. To ask me that question leads me to wonder if you even know your own side's platforms. In particular, the concept of 'irreducible complexity'. Creationists are trying to disprove evolution on the so called merits of this concept put out by Michael Behe. In a nutshell, irreducible complexity is...you know what guys, this is so complex that we just don't know how it could have come into creation so we are going to stop trying and say god did it. That my friend is not science in even the least. If you do not believe in the mechanisms of evolution you certainly will not understand and unlock the mechanisms of biology and THUS WE WILL NOT MAKE ADVANCES IN BIOLOGY AND/OR MEDICINE.

And stop spreading this tripe that Einstein was some believer. A simple googling of quotes (actually verifiable letters sent to other scientists and what not) show he certainly did not believe in your God and he did not believe in an afterlife. Now the christians are trying to change history with hit jobs like that one online video supposedly of a young einstein arguing with his teacher about how physics prove the existence of god while in elementary school. They didn't even research enough to realize that Einstein was not book smart at that age and even flunked a grade!

I am very tolerant of other people's desires to believe in a religion. However, when they start distorting history, damaging science, and legislating based on their own beliefs...it is then time for a vocal admonishing until they retreat to the deluded corners of which they came from.

"I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings."
-- Albert Einstein, following his wife's advice in responding to Rabbi Herbert Goldstein of the International Synagogue in New York, who had sent Einstein a cablegram bluntly demanding "Do you believe in God?" Quoted from and citation notes derived from Victor J Stenger, Has Science Found God? (draft: 2001), chapter 3.

"I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own -- a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms."
-- Albert Einstein, obituary in New York Times, 19 April 1955, quoted from James A Haught, "Breaking the Last Taboo" (1996)

Reply to mnlandon:
Very good, I am impressed, normally nonbelievers just respond to believers with disparaging names and ridicule, but you seem a bit more reasonable then most. I am pleased that you value rational dialog and have respect for diversity in thought. Having said that, I would like to respectfully clarify a few remarks in the last few posts. I can assure you that I did not misunderstand your original inference associating a belief in creationism with a subsequent demotivation in medical research. I think the problem is that my new friend grossly misunderstands Christian thought and the platforms of Creationism. Your impression is quite common and probably the product of assumption and pre-judgment.

The assumption that irreducible complexity infers that things are “so complex that we just don't know how it could have come into creation so we are going to stop trying and say god did it,” is a stunning misrepresentation of what the concept means. A Creationist would not even thing to consider it in that manner. We believe we know how it came into “creation” and the complexity points to the unlikely prospect that it formed spontaneously or evolved through trial & error. Trial & error implies natural selection and there in lies the difficulty. According to Darwin natural selection acts as a sort of survival of the fittest mechanism that trims out of the process unproductive or useless (week) components. This would include behavior strategies that would reduce the opportunity to reproduce or useless organs that use up energy and slow the organism.

If we use Dr. Behe’s analogy of the mousetrap we have a good example of “irreducible complexity” and how it relates to the nature of mutation. For the mousetrap to function properly all the parts must be present and in perfect order. What good is any component independent of the whole if it serves no purpose? How do you get something irreducibly complex to mutate over time when through most of that time the components are useless and not functional? Again, you must have all the parts complete and functioning for the mousetrap to work and serve a purpose. This defeats the concept of natural selection and means that unusable parts are tolerated indefinitely and by some “miracle” they eventually come together to form an eye for example.

Your suggestion that irreducible complexity means we should just give up because God did it, is not science or creation, it’s just a misunderstanding of the idea. In terms of progress in medicine, the correct way to look at it is HOW DOSE THE MOUSETRAP WORK AND HOW CAN WE FIX IT. This has nothing to do with where it came from or if the worker is skeptical about Darwinism. Requiring a belief (faith) in evolution in order to work in medicine assumes that evolution is a fact and that these ancient mechanisms are somehow relevant when they are not yet understood or properly explained by anyone. If evolution could be thoroughly explained and repeated it would not be simply a “theory”. So far all of our progress in medicine has been achieved without the details of evolution being explained, evolutionist just like to say it’s relevant because it supports there faith or should I say believe system. Creationist are just as interested in the process of nature as atheists, we want to figure out how things work as much as you or anyone living on this planet. A good example is the overriding biological concept of genetics (something biology does depend on) which was worked out by a priest on the grounds of his parish. This Christian man spent much of his life unraveling the mechanics of genetics using his garden. Curiosity in God’s creation and the love of people are more then enough motivation for scientists to move medicine forward, not to mention the motivation of making a living at it.

As for just what Albert Einstein did or did not believe will remain a subject of debate. If you look back at my last post you will see that I clearly stated that “Einstein did not place his faith in a personal God”. However, my point was that he did believe in “a” God and defended that position in his older age. I suppose his position was much like the obvious conclusion that one come to when holding a finely made pocket watch in ones hand. The presents of the watch basically confirms the skills of the watch maker. No body in there right mind would deny the existence of the watch maker, even if you had all the tiny parts confined inside a box and shook the box for every all you would end up with is a bunch of worn down parts.

Einstein was dealing with a conflict, after developing the theory of relativity; Einstein realized that the equations led to the conclusion that the universe had a beginning. As a result he added a cosmological constant to the equation to attempt to get rid of the beginning. He said this was one of the worst mistakes of his life. Of course, the results of Edwin Hubble confirmed that the universe was expanding and indeed did have a beginning at some point in the past. So, Einstein became a deist - a believer in an impersonal creator God: "I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings."

In correspondence Einstein said, "In view of such harmony in the cosmos which I, with my limited human mind, am able to recognize, there are yet people who say there is no God. But what really makes me angry is that they quote me for the support of such views."

"I'm not an atheist and I don't think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangements of the books, but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God."

Einstein’s conflict came when comparing the remarkable design and order of the cosmos to the evil and suffering he found in humanity. He rejected a personal God because he could not reconcile how an intimate God would allow this suffering. Now the existence of evil and the prepossess of God are another subject for another time. Let is suffice to say that you can’t choose between good and evil if you don’t permit the choice of evil.