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Umm this thread is not about evolution. Have you not noticed that no one here-on this thread- is disputing evolution?
We theists here are saying God is behind evolution. A process he created. Evolution is not the result of some random chance process. Chance is the author of chaos. Random events that amount to nothing. Evolution and DNA are too focused on an end result.
As if someone designed the process.
You theists just don't get how randomness does (and doesn't) figure into the equation. We are not on some never-ending roulette wheel, chance plays a part in where the boulder rolling down the mountain ends up, but gravity, the lay of the land, the mass of the boulder, the lubrication factor of squished wildlife guts, ect, all play a bigger part.
The universe is NOT random. It is a perfect example of cause and effect, with a little bit of "what if" thrown in that is simply magnified by the unimaginably huge size of the cosmos.
Throw enough chances for "what if's" in the mix and you're bound to get a Goldilocks warm, 75% watery planet full of sentient monkeys that worship magic carpenters *somewhere* in the universe, completely free of godly intervention.
But you can take 50 or so bronze age era goat herders and write a bible.
05-17-2012, 07:53 PM
2K5Gx2km
n/a posts
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Originally Posted by lee9786
Law of Cause and Effect - the cause is always greater than the effect. Something created the Universe, and it had to be greater than the Universe. The Creator must be outside of the Creation using general logic. Scientists now know the Universe is finite and had a beginning due to thermodynamic principles. If it is finite, that it has boundaries. What is outside the boundary? The Scriptures call it the Third Heaven.
Not at all: What do you mean by 'something' and 'universe?' No theory is 100% true and there are many theories besides the SBB. Even that thoery does not say that there was 'nothing' (in a philosophical sense) prior to the expansion - the 'something' may be some type of quantum state or other energy state. The total amount of that energy is definately greater than the 'matter' that we call the 'universe.' Matter and energy are just as easily thought of as eternal. No need for the metaphysical God of the gaps.
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It is not logical to conclude the Universe could create itself.
I do not think anyone has said such a thing - strawman
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No machine could create itself by the components within it. It needs an engineer that is external to the machine being designed. This is logical thinking as this is what we observe with designed machines.
False Analolgy and Non-sequitur.
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To conclude the space, time and matter came out of nothing is not logical. Concluding that it came from a high energy source is logical. Genesis 1 explains it all.
Once again who says that it came out of 'nothing' in a philosophical sense - the 'nothing' that physicists talk of is actually something - just something in a quit different sense than what we experience as the universe of matter.
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We will never know the mechanism of Creation because he tells us we can never know. It is taken on faith but it requires greater faith to believe the Universe created itself as it goes against logic.
How convient that God did not tell us and that we cannot know the mechanisms - yet, today, we know alot about those mechanisms apart from any special revelation.
What goes against logic is stating that the universe cannot be created out of nothing yet believing that God did just that - if the Creator must be beyond and outside of the Creation and he is ontologically different than the creation where did the means and material come from? The Law of Cause and Effect also has these two aspects - means and material. Resorting to 'God is all-powerful' is not an answer nor an explanation and still needs means and material.
It is either creatio ex nihilo, creatio ex materia, or creatio ex dio. Which one do you hold to? If you are going to believe in a intelligent Creator then the logical positon is either - that he created it out of himself, that matter and energy are eternal and the properties of physics and chemistry gave rise to what we know as the universe and its forms, or that matter and energy are co-eternal with this intelligence. Creatio ex nihilo is not the logical position.
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God works through the natural to achieve his purposes. Some examples..
Cell differentiation
Strong force - He's holding every nucleus of every atom together.
God can work miracles because he can manipulate matter and energy.
There is evidence that God works through prayers in healing and miracles still. The testimonies are just not acceptable to the skeptic mob.
Asumptions and god of the gaps.
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If there is a Creator, that would he be concerned about how we treated one another? Would he give us an absolute standard of morality to live by? Would there be an accountability to this Creator one day?
Non-sequitur. If there is a Creator this does not necessitate whether he would give us a moral standard by which we were to be judged in the furture.
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Sure. This is exactly what the Scriptures say the Judeo-Christian God is. This isn't that hard to believe. God says he revealed himself to us not only that his reality is written in our hearts, but in his word and in person as the Messiah.
Irrelevent to whether there is actually a moral standard from a Metaphysical being. This is not proof but subjective opinion from people thousands of years ago.
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It's not hard to believe at all, especially since what it stated thousands of years ago is coming to fruition right before our very eyes in his Word. The mystery of God is about finished, and we want to know him before that time comes.
Only if you have cognitive bias. These things have been 'coming to fruition' forever - even since Peter's time.
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Eternal separation from the source of life is a terrifying prognosis. It doesn't have to be that way.
So you are also motivated by fear to believe these things. Sorry to hear that - A God who threatens you with eternal torture for temporal sins unless you are able to untie the epistemological knot and navigate the metaphysical maze that plagues the theists and their theological musings is not a Being that inspires awe or is worthy of praise. You would think this all-powerful, all-knowing being would have a better strategy of informing his creatures in order to avoid this hideous telos.
Hopefully you can understand why people who didn't experience god in such a way would find the whole idea silly.
Such is life. Many people don't experince things in life and don't understand. The artist and the actor experience things of which the average Joe or Jane never do and the general population never gets it.
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Originally Posted by Asheville Native
My bad, I misread his point
But you can take 50 or so bronze age era goat herders and write a bible.
No worries, but do realize the NT writers were part of an advanced
civilization. The Romans and Greeks were quite advanced far as intellectual thinking was concerned. Iron age BTW. Not Bronze
No worries, but do realize the NT writers were part of an advanced
civilization. The Romans and Greeks were quite advanced far as intellectual thinking was concerned. Iron age BTW. Not Bronze
Yet it contains fantasies like the poof theory, the big boat and flood, people turning into pillars of salt, etc. True, the science of metallurgy had advanced, but the ignorance of the bronze age still had a firm grip, as it does today.
Because we Christians (most at any rate) experience God in such a way that know He is real. So we go with the Goddunnit POV.
.
Oh, I think you've misunderstood. I said I wasn't completely sure a creator didn't have a hand in creating the universe. One thing I am sure of though, and let me be clear, is that the God portrayed in Chrisitanity had nothing to do with it.
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Originally Posted by Mr5150
No worries, but do realize the NT writers were part of an advanced
civilization.
Advanced civilization yes, but compared to what? Cavemen? That isn't saying a lot.
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Originally Posted by Mr5150
Give it a shot, my friend. Lay the battery down next to the watch and see how long ot takes for the battery to remove the back cover and jump into place.
You see you guys spouting this ridiclous "watchmaker" theory and all the talk about "chance and randomness" are missing one huge critical flaw in your reasoning. Maybe someone else reading this can better articulate it, but alas, I will give it a try.......
What you are doing is you are putting far too much emphasis on the end result that we DID get, instead of looking at all the other possible results as equaly probable. With all the factors and variables at play at the time of the big bang, the results could just have easily been something else entirely. The possibilities were virtualy limitless. Lets go back in the sands of time to the big bang for just a moment and say for arguments sake that some other outcome had taken place and some other self aware life form with different attributes had formed INSTEAD of humans. Do you think that they to would say the chance of them forming without divine guidence would have been impossible? More than likely they would have.
It's like tossing a deck of cards on the floor, noting the pattern, and then giving special significance to THAT pattern, while failing to take in to account the equal probability of getting any number of other patterns. It is simply a false placement of significance.
Last edited by WhipperSnapper 88; 05-17-2012 at 10:05 PM..
Give it a shot, my friend. Lay the battery down next to the watch and see how long ot takes for the battery to remove the back cover and jump into place.
I think the challenge was the the parts in a matchbox. This was a refutation of the watchmaker argument in theistspeak with pictures of an old time machine and and newer digital version, I guess that flew over your head.
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Umm this thread is not about evolution. Have you not noticed that no one here-on this thread- is disputing evolution?
Yes you are.
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We theists here are saying God is behind evolution. A process he created. Evolution is not the result of some random chance process. Chance is the author of chaos. Random events that amount to nothing. Evolution and DNA are too focused on an end result.
As if someone designed the process.
And that is theistic evolution which is simply another pseudo nonscience way of declaring you are a creationist. I posted the link but I will now post some text from that link.
Theistic evolution is not a scientific theory, but a particular view about how the science of evolution relates to religious belief and interpretation. Theistic evolution supporters can be seen as one of the groups who reject the conflict thesis regarding the relationship between religion and science – that is, they hold that religious teachings about creation and scientific theories of evolution need not contradict. Proponents of this view are sometimes described as Christian Darwinists
This goes along with irreducible complexity which I will cite again.
Irreducible complexity (IC) is an argument by proponents of intelligent design that certain biological systems are too complex to have evolved from simpler, or "less complete" predecessors, through natural selection acting upon a series of advantageous naturally occurring, chance mutations.[1] The argument is central to intelligent design, and is rejected by the scientific community at large,[2] which overwhelmingly regards intelligent design as pseudoscience.[3] Irreducible complexity is one of two main arguments used by intelligent design proponents, the other being specified complexity.[4]
What you have is not belief in evolution, you have merely reframed the real science into a pseudo non science to incorporate the real findings of science and piggy backed god onto those findings.
It is creationism dressed up as science because you all know, there is ZERO evidence of a scientific nature that can be presented for CREATION(ism).
There are ZERO peer reviewed papers on any of these pseudo sciences as it is not even a science to begin with.
Really all it is is a religious belief and a disguised way to get religion into the science classroom. Only in America is this lame attempt practiced. Nowhere else is this even garnered as plausible alternative as only in America do you have folk like AiG and ICS; both xian evangelical organisations.
In one sentence, you lot have slapped BIG YELLOW STICKERS with Godunnit on the science of evolution.
It is not logical to conclude the Universe could create itself. No machine could create itself by the components within it. It needs an engineer that is external to the machine being designed. This is logical thinking as this is what we observe with designed machines.
However, the natural world as we observe it is NOT a singular-purpose machine that has no other purpose than one for which it was specifically designed. As well, it can hardly create new versions of itself to try out like a DNA based system can and so obviouslydoes, now can it, silly boy! There, in real and evolving life, it's a system that can, by it's utter and relentless adaptability, rather easily take advantage of available niches, opportunities that it could indeed perhaps utilize better than an existing organism. And it surely does, oh boy does it ever! Just look at us and where we came from!
So it uses it's built-in LEGO-like logic, supremely simple as that is, and thus not requiring of any special designer, someone with some "amazing" but totally implausible (dare I say... impossible? Yes, in fact I will use that very word: IMPOSSIBLE!) imaginary capabilities. Nope: not required. Just a mere 4-protein complex that can only arrange itself into a mere two different setups: Adenine-Cytosine and Guanine-Thymine. Simple as that! And yet, that fully stumps your imagination? Wow!
Then, it's arrangements are purely chance until they generate the required equally simple protein chains of the first unicellular organisms, through another simple process that includes the equally simple RNA molecule, which was also proving now to be the likely precursor of DNA, and probably of original simple life! Imagine that! The things that continue to show up, huh?
Quote:
To conclude the space, time and matter came out of nothing is not logical. Concluding that it came from a high energy source is logical. Genesis 1 explains it all. We will never know the mechanism of Creation because he tells us we can never know. It is taken on faith but it requires greater faith to believe the Universe created itself as it goes against logic.
Oh. You mean, like you speculate happened? Why do you guys never acknowledge that your version ("Out of nothing, but by the magic hand of God!") is even less likely than the predictable and evidence-filled BB hypothesis and subsequent Evolution? Why do you deny the proofs of Evolution? Why do you continue to conflate Evolution with Abiogenesis when intellectually you KNOW they are unrelated? And yet: Your God's universe came out of what again? His primal "nothingness"? This is logical to you why again? And all the scientific evidence is not, why again?
Quote:
God works through the natural to achieve his purposes. Some examples..
Cell differentiation
Strong force - He's holding every nucleus of every atom together.
God can work miracles because he can manipulate matter and energy.
There is evidence that God works through prayers in healing and miracles still. The testimonies are just not acceptable to the skeptic mob.
Ah; there it is: the MAGIC Solution. Why didn't you just say so? It's so much easier when you just employ MAGIC instead of logic, innitt? And... uhmmm.... sorry: its been more than proven that prayers never do anything. I'm still waiting for that limb regeneration. I'm still waiting for someone to come back from the dead. I'm still waiting for Him to heal a sick child with any more frequency than the secular child's recovery rates. Or for one's cancer-stricken auntie to survive. It simply doesn't happen, ever, as a direct result of prayer, except with the same frequency as a secular occurrence rate. Another interesting fact: Christian marriages fail far more often than atheist ones! Imagine that, huh? "What God hath wrought, let no man lay assunder!" Exclamation mark. Oh. Well... too bad it doesn't work out like that, eh?
In fact, the sick secular kid's recovery rates are slightly higher, since the proper medical science is often withheld by inanely devout Christian parents who insist on holding out for "God's wondrous healing hand, PTL, PTL!", where there literally is no such nonsense available to the failing child's health.
If there is a Creator, that would he be concerned about how we treated one another? Would he give us an absolute standard of morality to live by? Would there be an accountability to this Creator one day?
Perhaps so, if only He existed, and if He'd demonstrated, over literally millennia of documented history, that He's anything but a bad-tempered, soul-less, egotistical and outrageously hissy construct of the man-ego.
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It's not hard to believe at all, especially since what it stated thousands of years ago is coming to fruition right before our very eyes in his Word. The mystery of God is about finished, and we want to know him before that time comes.
Eternal separation from the source of life is a terrifying prognosis. It doesn't have to be that way.
That "fruition" part is entirely imagined, and very easily disproven, except to those who insist on believing it no matter what the endless, relentless and ever-growing evidence shows us all. His claimed deeds and accomplishments have been categorically disproven so many times it laughable, and yet, you folks still go on believing it despite the demonstrable logic. You also employ highly selective beliefs, certainly not literally going with everything the bible claims we have to live by (killing one's wife or children for various offenses, for existence...).
You[ I]do[/i] openly admit here, however, the terrifying fear of your eventual demise: to quote: "Eternal separation from the source of life is a terrifying prognosis. ".
Sorry... But only for you, and this intellectual anchor is seriously clouding your ability to think logically. Too bad!
You won't even answer simple questions, for god's Sake! The denialism is pathological.
I think the challenge was the the parts in a matchbox. This was a refutation of the watchmaker argument in theistspeak with pictures of an old time machine and and newer digital version, I guess that flew over your head.
Yes you are.
And that is theistic evolution which is simply another pseudo nonscience way of declaring you are a creationist. I posted the link but I will now post some text from that link.
Theistic evolution is not a scientific theory, but a particular view about how the science of evolution relates to religious belief and interpretation. Theistic evolution supporters can be seen as one of the groups who reject the conflict thesis regarding the relationship between religion and science – that is, they hold that religious teachings about creation and scientific theories of evolution need not contradict. Proponents of this view are sometimes described as Christian Darwinists
This goes along with irreducible complexity which I will cite again.
Irreducible complexity (IC) is an argument by proponents of intelligent design that certain biological systems are too complex to have evolved from simpler, or "less complete" predecessors, through natural selection acting upon a series of advantageous naturally occurring, chance mutations.[1] The argument is central to intelligent design, and is rejected by the scientific community at large,[2] which overwhelmingly regards intelligent design as pseudoscience.[3] Irreducible complexity is one of two main arguments used by intelligent design proponents, the other being specified complexity.[4]
What you have is not belief in evolution, you have merely reframed the real science into a pseudo non science to incorporate the real findings of science and piggy backed god onto those findings.
It is creationism dressed up as science because you all know, there is ZERO evidence of a scientific nature that can be presented for CREATION(ism).
There are ZERO peer reviewed papers on any of these pseudo sciences as it is not even a science to begin with.
Really all it is is a religious belief and a disguised way to get religion into the science classroom. Only in America is this lame attempt practiced. Nowhere else is this even garnered as plausible alternative as only in America do you have folk like AiG and ICS; both xian evangelical organisations.
In one sentence, you lot have slapped BIG YELLOW STICKERS with Godunnit on the science of evolution.
Or to put it more simply, theisitc evolution is merely a way to keep religous beliefs valid { a term I use lossely } in the face of undeniable facts which contradict and disprove them.
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Resorting to 'God is all-powerful' is not an answer nor an explanation and still needs means and material. 
The conclusions are always so obvious!
