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Why can't this God just show himself then? Why not?
If he wanted you to know he existed, then why the cosmic hide-n-seek game?
All religions make the claim of being the one true religion for the one true god. They cannot all be right. It would make no sense if there was a god, to let false information propagate so.
Randomness, sheer randomness is what convinces me there is no god.
God indwells in the believe that when he makes his self knowed not the way we want it as to see with our human us what we want to see.
It would make no sense if there was a god, to let false information propagate so.
And I am among other things an engineer who grew up in a household of scientists, so I know a little about reason and science.
We are trying to get two different definitions to match, and they never will.
Although, I for one don't believe they are mutually exclusive.
Take care
Now here's something that even this atheist can agree with. Thank you, Oakback!
History, you certainly took that out of context. Please talk about the article in total, why did the Hindu's attack the Christians?
When you post as you did, I feel that it is both dishonest and inflammatory. Please be more careful in the future.
Reason, logic, and common sense, the world around me and science all tell me there is no God.
Of course the onus isn't on me to prove a negative but surely proving a positive should be pretty easy for believers ? When I have proof a deity exists I shall have no other way but to believe in him/her.
Worship him/her is a different matter however as I would have little respect for a creature so devoid of compassion and respect for me and other human beings but I would have to believe in at least his/her existence. :0
I may very well be wrong, but where I see a system such as ours, I can't help but believe it was created. I don't pick up a Shakespeare play and think it was more likely that it was written by a large number of monkeys hammering away at a keyboard.
Here again is the typical mistaken analogy, as if evolution purports to produce new species (such as homo sapiens) with their new characteristics fully formed and no no precursor species.
Evolution is a cumulative process; changes in the species build on previous changes. If you had found hundreds of partial 'Shakespeare' plays buried in the ground and found in strata that can be dated independently hundreds of millions of years apart, with each manuscript representing an incremental improvement toward a coherent play, perhaps your analogy would be apt. But the species of all those "monkeys" doing the "hammering away" would also be evolving in the meantime!
History, you certainly took that out of context. Please talk about the article in total, why did the Hindu's attack the Christians?
When you post as you did, I feel that it is both dishonest and inflammatory. Please be more careful in the future.
its correct read it.
There are countless stories across the world christians being attack by different religions.
Because they blame christians for a recent attack and the hindu reply with attacks.
But the thing is they attack like alot of other religions do people from the same religion that had nothing to do with one own irresponsibility for the attack
Even if The accusations are true we sell them open an attack on alot more christians.
I mean if somone from certain religion was going to hurt your religious leader would you go out and kill all those from the religion who try to hurt your leader?
two wrongs do not make a right
Last edited by HistoryasIS; 01-07-2008 at 11:13 AM..
Here again is the typical mistaken analogy, as if evolution purports to produce new species (such as homo sapiens) with their new characteristics fully formed and no no precursor species.
Evolution is a cumulative process; changes in the species build on previous changes. If you had found hundreds of partial 'Shakespeare' plays buried in the ground and found in strata that can be dated independently hundreds of millions of years apart, with each manuscript representing an incremental improvement toward a coherent play, perhaps your analogy would be apt. But the species of all those "monkeys" doing the "hammering away" would also be evolving in the meantime!
I'm not referring to humans, or anything here on earth... I'm referring to the beginning of the universe. A creator and evolution are not mutually exclusive.
I may very well be wrong, but where I see a system such as ours, I can't help but believe it was created. I don't pick up a Shakespeare play and think it was more likely that it was written by a large number of monkeys hammering away at a keyboard.
And you would be completely misunderstanding the principle of evolution whether cosmic or biological. I don't ever remember reading that the Big Bang burst forth all the cosmos in their present state. In fact, the Big Bang was mostly just a burst of hydrogen. All the rest came afterwards. No one has ever stated (creationists excluded) that cosmological evolution or biological evolution implies an end result from the beginning.
In the case of a bunch of monkeys hammering away at a keyboard, I'm not sure if this is your argument against evolution (biological), because no one would expect a monkey to ever spontaneously write "Where art though, Romeo?"
However, if we let a monkey randomly bang away at a keyboard, took every 24 letters (that's how many are in the selected quote - spaces included) that the monkey typed and let's say for example it looked like this:
asdfghjkl;'qwertyuiop[]z
We could actually say "Ok this is our base model and we need to get to 'Where art though, Romeo?' If you change one letter per generation (one random mutation) from our base phrase and let's say it looked a little something like this after 20 or 30 generations:
wlaksgfherpajdfhjfghspei
Again, I've gotten a little closer to my 'target' goal. This is now the most suitable to 'Where art thou Romeo?' than my first one. I could go on like this, and I can guarantee you that in a relatively short amount of time I would actually have my target phrase.
Now, here's the thing. Evolution doesn't have a 'target'. There is no 'preset' so to speak. The only thing I'm merely trying to show his how evolution would force change via natural selection.
We could actually go from asdfghjkl;'qwertyuiop[]z to 'Where art thou Romeo' if the most suitable letters are picked generation after generation. The first 20-30 generations may look like complete gibberish, completely out of the ordinary from the 'target' phrase, but given natural selection you would eventually filter yourself into the most suitable 'match' from your environment.
Now, I would like to say something else. The monkey's hammering away at a keyboard I certainly hope is not an argument that has been used by creationism. In fact, this is an argument that Richard Dawkins tackled in his book The Blind Watchmaker back in 1986. Really, you ought to read it. It's a fantastic book if you really want to understand how evolution and natural selection really work.
In fact, here's a couple of video's of just random things naturally selecting themselves to fit into a model. Oh, one other thing. Evolution does not imply perfection. So our target could still look something like this: "Whereart though Romao!" but we would be extremely close to our goal. This sort of imperfection is seen in the human (and any other creatures') body time after time. In fact, it's why all vertebrate animals have retinas wired backwards. Why my eyes are horrible, and why my sister has hair on her back (ok I just made that one up ).
Again though, I'd like to state that just understanding how and why this works should not be sole evidence that there is no God. However, it does tell me that there isn't a God responsible for the diversity of life on the planet, or at least, there is a tremendous lack of evidence for such a thing. For some reason, people think an understanding or acceptance of evolution turns them into an atheist.
its the end of the reef isn't it? i mean the evidence either way, nobody gets back to talk about it, huh.
but you asked for an atheist opinion and that would not be me.
there are no atheists on a burning sinking ship.
they disappear just like magic. wow.
stephen s
san diego ca
what if they're Buddhists?
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