- The observable cosmos is 13.6 billion years old and has evolved into its present form.
- The earth is 4.6 billion years old and along with the rest of the solar system formed under gravity from a cloud of dust and gas in space.
- Not only is there no evidence that any consciousness can function without a living, physical brain, it is impossible to do so.
- Humans and chimpanzees have a common ancestor, and we split off from that ancestor six million years ago in Africa.
- Prehistoric religion goes back at least thirty thousand years.
- Historic religion started about five thousand years ago in Mesopotamia and Egypt.
- The oldest religion practiced today is Hinduism.
- The creation stories in Genesis 1-2 are taken from Babylonian mythology.
- No religious or spiritual healer has ever been proved to have genuine healing powers although many of them have been exposed as frauds.
There are many more such facts, but my point is that if you know what's going on, then you know better than to believe what religion claims.
If you're going to evangelize for "sciencey-ness", you should at least learn the important habit of citing your sources.
Here you go:
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
Sean Carroll has used the laws of physics to put the idea of an afterlife to bed, once and for all
www.ladbible.com
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
Many religions may be all but gone but some of the most time-worn faiths are still around. Find out more about the oldest religions still practiced.
theculturetrip.com
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
It took me less than ten minutes to find these links. It's important to understand that citing sources for what is commonly known is not required when writing research reports.
Anyway, here's another link you may find useful:
Learn a few tips and tricks to help you easily find information on Google. Tip 1: Start with the basics No matter what you're looking for, start with a sim
support.google.com
"Common knowledge", and yet your own sources indicate that nearly all of your confident statements here are not entirely accurate.
1. A different age
range is offered for the universe the absolute date that you have claimed, by at least 160 million years, and it is clearly noted even from the first paragraph that this is an estimate, not a "fact", and that at least one very significant set of data contradicts that estimate, raising some interesting questions that have yet to be quite answered. This particularly impacts your statement, as you specify the observable universe, which is the source of the problem: the better we are able to actually observe the evidence (by dint of being physically and therfore temporally closer to the source of the data) the less it seems to confirm the agreed-upon model.
2. Your provided number here is once again an absolute value rather than a range, and falls outside the range cited by your source by at least 10 million years.
3. Ah yes, the LAD Bible, that known reputable source. I note that the scientist cited in the article offers no more support for his assertion than you do, nor does your source claim that this is anything other than an opinion.
4. Wrong number again, and not found anywhere in your cited source, though at least this time you've picked a number credibly within the range of those currently being considered. That said, the actual time of divergence is not only unknown but indeed one of the most significant debates within contemporary paleoanthropology...
as your source correctly notes.
5. Also one of the hottest debates in the field at present, and your source correctly acknowledges the many, many competing theories on the evolution of religious practice, and indeed debates on how said phenomenon can even be defined let alone detected. But the number in your post is almost certainly wrong, and way too young. Inasmuch as there is any consensus on this question, nearly all archaeologists agree that Magdalanean phase art and ritual practices constitute evidence of religious thinking more than 20,000 years before the date you have offered. If we accept the somewhat less consensus opinioon that intential burials are a religious practice, you're wrong by a much larger margin of nearly 270,000 years.
6. Is true, though only trivially, as that's when writing systems complex enough to portray religious ideas were invented.
7. At least you agree with your source on this one, kind of. I question the authority of theculturetrip.com on this matter, however. This is, like many of the above, a topic of considerable dispute for a whole host of reasons, which we can get into if you're genuinely interested.
8. Your statement directly contradicts your source, which notes:
"Genesis 1 bears both striking differences from and striking similarities to
Babylon's national creation myth, the
Enuma Elish."
And says nothing about one having been "taken from" the other. The current scholarly consensus is that both were derived from common Mesopotamian beliefs concerning the nature of the universe, which almost certainly and would not have been considered "religious" issues at the time except insofar as particular (and different) deities were said to have played a role in the creation.
9. Is similar to 3. Why would the unsupported opinion of a professional magician have any bearing on what is or is not considered to be a "fact" in this case? Even if it did, I betcha good money we could find some other professional magicians who disagree with yours. Randi's book is just a book, and doesn't claim to be anything else I don't think.
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Read your sources. Better yet, investigate them. Anyone can be a scientist, not just the toney men in the lab coats, but it requires an open and inquisitive mind. Fundamentally, science is not a source of dogma. It is a conversation, and you'd learn more by engaging with it than by lazily parroting it.
And yes, I do know how to google. But I also don't need to, as I have a strong interest in most of the issues you've raised and immediately noticed that your numbers were out of date. My reason for commenting in the first place was annoyance at these inaccuracies. By encouraging you to cite your sources, my hope was that it would encourage you to
read some of them.
To put it another way, if you're going to preach at people, at least get your facts straight first.