Atheists, how does Cognitive Dissonance effect/influence your beliefs?

Read the Sumerian tablets, best interpretation is Zecharia Sitchen, which were written several thousand years before the bible and explains far more than the bible ever did. The tablets tell of the beginnings of earth and why we have these explosions of life at different times. It describes the first explosion of life, but if it happened again a few billion years later then it would explain the Cambrian explosion.

A generalized "beginning" does not imply a specific creator or process of creation. Might as well claim the fact that the universe began means that Brahma did it. Or a giant cow licked all the frost off a giant's armpit.

The apparent suddenness of development of life in the Cambrian is because that's about the point where hard parts developed, allowing more frequent fossilization. Animals and plants with mostly or only soft parts don't fossilize at all well, and the fact that we have any of them is wonderful. Remember that the "explosion" took place over 70 to 80 MILLION years, which is plenty of time.

And then there's the question of why you are invoking the Cambrian at all, since you don't believe in anything happening over 70 million years, but think it all happened in six days within the historical time period, and that every fossil from the Pre-Cambrian on up is a fake. What's the point in mentioning science you don't believe in? Talk about cognitive dissonance!

"Science is about discovering, not creation."

As an engineer, I would agree with you there. Engineering is taking the knowledge gained from science and using it to create things.

Where is your evidence that at the start of the Cambrian period there were only single-celled organisms? We already know from the Pre-Cambrian Ediacara fauna that there were multicellular organisms around at the start of the Cambrian. The Cambrian "explosion" is an explosion of organisms with hard skeletons, which were more likely to be fossilised.

Who is it who twists the evidence to fit their world view? Genesis says the universe was created in six days. It also says that day and night existed on Earth before the creation of the Sun. Both of these ideas are patently wrong, so creationists take one of two approaches:

(1) Ignore the evidence.

(2) Re-interpret what it says in Genesis to fit the evidence, for example claiming that the days were not literal days, or that the light was something other than sunlight.

You seem to fall into the second camp.

Doesn't the Bible say that the first living things on Earth were grass, herbs and fruit trees? Can you show me the Cambrian fossils of those?

"Discoveries in Science have started pointing towards 2 things:

1) There was a beginning to our Universe

2) Life started rapidly on Earth and not via millinnia of purely random reactions.

"

"What the Burgess Shale Fossils show is that during the Cambrian era, there is no way Evolution could have advanced life from one-cell protozoans to the complexity of crustaceans in the twenty or so million years of the Cambrian. There simply was not enough time, because some 550 million years ago, at the start of that era, the only life on Earth was the most simple of forms, one-celled bacteria, algae, protozoans."

Lying for Jesus is still lying.

psst... your lack of education is showing

It's been known for a long time that the Universe had a beginning (and that means a beginning explained by science, not by some sky-fairy)

Life may well have started rapidly because it was preceded by approx. 1 billion years of precursor reactions which eventually created the required self-replicating molecules. Once all the required conditions are in place a threshold is reached and a rapid cascade of reactions becomes likely, particularly if driven by enzymes or catalysts.

The Burgess Shale fossils show no such thing. Fossilisation is a rare event even under ideal conditions. The so-called 'Cambian Explosion' is not an explosion of life but an explosion of life that is capable of fossilisation, notably by the rapid evolution and exploitation of carapaces, shells and other hard structures that easily fossilise.

One simple biochemical mutation would enable a creature to capture dissolved carbon dioxide and fix it into a shell; one simple mutation would create the citinous proteins found in arthropod exoskeletons. Both these mutations were most likely preceded by precursor changes and were driven by the pressures of natural selection.

In any event, explosive evolution very rapidly exploits new niches or biological structures such as would be afforded by exoskeletons so that, if anything, 20 million years is a remarkably long period of time for such changes to be observed.

EDIT: you list 'scientific blunders'. Science is always prepared to admit mistakes and accept new ideas and evidence. Contrast this with the blind, ignorant and dogmatic approach of religion which claims all knowledge was somehow encapsulated in a Bronze Age book that features such gems as a 6,000 -year old Earth, a talking donkey and a zombie. Yeah riiiight...

Science is not there to discover. It is there to explain and model.

Chemical reactions are very rarely random. The steel in your car does not randomly react, but does so in a very predictable fashion. Much is done to stop it from oxidizing, which is what it would do naturally.

The Cambrian 'explosion' lasted 50,000,000 years. That is hardly rapid. In fact it is thousands of times slower than the creationists claims of the evolution of 'kinds' on the ark into the diversity of species we see today.

Your link claims that the Earth was created before light, and before the Sun and the Moon. Science has shown that this is rubbish. In fact science has repeatedly shown that the Bible is rubbish.

One of us appears the have cognitive dissonance. It is not me. I wonder if you can work out who it is.

Cognitive Dissonance is what the young earth Creationists suffer from. I stick closely to the facts.

I think you need to read up your evolution before trying such a technical attack on evolution. The theory of evolution does not have a set speed, change happens when there is a 'vacancy' in the ecology.

I've looked at the bible and it has nothing to offer even if it is massively interpreted to fit the facts.

As for the 'God' bit, give me just one bit of evidence that would stand in a court of law.

Dissonance normally occurs when a person perceives a logical inconsistency among his or her cognitions. This happens when one idea implies the opposite of another. For example, a belief in animal rights could be interpreted as inconsistent with eating meat or wearing fur. Noticing the contradiction would lead to dissonance, which could be experienced as anxiety, guilt, shame, anger, embarrassment, stress, and other negative emotional states. When people's ideas are consistent with each other, they are in a state of harmony, or consonance. If cognitions are unrelated, they are categorized as irrelevant to each other and do not lead to dissonance.

Did your supposed deity create animals before or after humans? The bronze age desert nomads who wrote Genesis couldn't even keep that straight, and you want me to believe it's divinely inspired? Time to grow up.

i love that so many people are so ignorant toward the people who don't share the same views, and assume things

can you prove the existence of god without referring to the bible?

if you put babies on a deserted island and raised them from a distance, would they believe in your god? or would there be one of them to make claims and the rest to follow?