Do you understand those on the other side?

[Jose Fly]

As I've pointed out many times (probably too many times), I grew up in a fundamentalist Christian environment. I was taught young-earth creationism from an early age, was told prayer and reading the Bible were the answer to most of life's problems and questions, and witnessed all sorts of "interesting" things such as speaking in tongues, faith healing, end times predictions, etc.

Yet despite being completely immersed in this culture, I can't recall a time in my life when I ever believed any of it. However, unlike some of my peers at the time I didn't really find it boring. In fact, I found a lot of it to be rather fascinating because.....very little of it made any sense to me. I just could not understand the people, their beliefs, their way of thinking, or much of anything that I saw and heard. When I saw them anointing with oil someone who had the flu and later saw the virus spread (of course), I could not understand what they were thinking. When I saw them make all sorts of failed predictions about the Soviet Union and the end times, yet never even acknowledge their errors while continuing to make more predictions, I was baffled. Speaking in tongues was of particular interest to me because it really made no sense to me.

In the years that I've been debating creationists it's the same thing. When I see them say "no transitional fossils" or "no new genetic information" only to ignore examples of those things when they're presented, I can't relate to that way of thinking at all. When I see them demand evidence for things only to ignore it after it's provided, I can't relate. When I see them quote mine a scientific paper and after someone points it out they completely ignore it, I can't relate.

Now to be clear, I think I "understand" some of what's behind these behaviors (i.e., the psychological factors), but what I don't understand is how the people engaging in them seem to be completely oblivious to it all. What goes on in their mind when they demand "show me the evidence", ignore everything that's provided in response, and then come back later and make the same demand all over again? Are they so blinded by the need to maintain their beliefs that they literally block out all memories of it? Again....I just don't get it.

So the point of discussion for this thread is....how about you? For the "evolutionists", can you relate to the creationists' way of thinking and behaviors? For the creationists, are there behaviors from the other side that baffle you, and you just don't understand? Do you look at folks like me and think to yourselves, "I just cannot relate to his way of thinking?"

Or is it just me?

[William]

Sir Penrose and Isaac Asimov came to similar conclusions re ideas of big and small - they fold into one another as if they were a single item.

What makes 'big' or 'small' is determined by the consciousness experiencing these things.

[Inquirer]

Sir Penrose and Isaac Asimov came to similar conclusions re ideas of big and small - they fold into one another as if they were a single item.

What makes 'big' or 'small' is determined by the consciousness experiencing these things.

What I fiddled with in my twenties and labelled "Tardis Theory" was just a mathematical diversion. GR takes the concept of "curvature" seen in 2D mathematics and extends that to time and 3D space.

On a ball for example, one can make measurements wholly on the 2D surface and determine that the surface is curved, with a differentiable coordinate system (like say latitude and longitude) one can describe curvature in terms of surface measurements of distance between points, Gauss did a lot of work on this - all in 2D.

The equations we get in 2D can be easily extended to 3D or 4D or any number, so in GR we get a set of equations that can determine curvature by measurements "on" the surface, that is measurements in space-time. In the case of GR the measurements are essentially based on the geodesic (aka "shortest distance between two points") and light always follows a geodesic (i.e. light always travels the shortest "distance" between two point where that distance is composed of space and time).

Anyway I digress, back to an ordinary ball. Place an elastic band near the north of a ball, so it forms a ring with a small area inside and larger area outside.

Stand inside that ring and let the ring slide over the ball in a southerly direction, you stay "in" the ring but walk close to the edge, following it as it grows and slides and then begins to shrink as it now approaches the south pole of the ball.

Well eventually you appear to be standing outside a small ring centered on the south pole, however you never crossed over the elastic ring, you always stayed on the same side, you must therefore still be inside the ring.

Therefore by manipulating space you were able to make the inside much bigger than the outside, one can extend that to 4D space-time - in science fiction anyway!