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God Is Real…Why modern physics has discredited atheism.
“If we need an atheist for a debate, we go to the philosophy department. The physics department isn’t much use.”
–Robert Griffiths, winner of the Heinemann Prize in mathematical physics.
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“What is mind? Never matter. What is matter? Never mind!“
–T.H. Key
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Virtually everyone is familiar with the popular conundrum, “Which came first…the chicken or the egg?” But probably very few people realize that the question of God’s existence, in a very real sense, boils down to what is likely the ultimate chicken-or-the-egg conundrum: Which came first, mind or matter? In other words, is mind (or “consciousness”) the product of matter, or is matter the product of mind? Is our universe—at its core—a material universe, or is it a mental (or spiritual) universe?
It will come as a surprise to many that modern physics has done much to answer this question. And the answer which modern physics provides will require many people to completely reframe their perception of the world in which they live.
Stephen C. Meyer, author of Signature in the Cell, holds a PhD in the history and philosophy of science from Cambridge University. In this book, he reveals the following:
“Since the time of the ancient Greeks, there have been two basic pictures of ultimate reality among Western intellectuals, what Germans call a Weltanschauung, or worldview. According to one worldview, mind is the primary or ultimate reality. On this view, material reality either issues from a preexisting mind, or it is shaped by a preexistent intelligence, or both…This view of reality is often called idealism to indicate that ideas come first and matter comes later. Theism is the version of idealism that holds that God is the source of the ideas that gave rise to and shaped the material world.
The opposite view holds that the physical universe or nature is the ultimate reality. In this view, either matter or energy (or both) are the things from which everything else comes. They are self-existent and do not need to be created or shaped by mind….In this view matter comes first, and conscious mind arrives on the scene much later and only then as a by-product of material processes and undirected evolutionary change. This worldview is called naturalism or materialism.”
There really is no third stance. Everyone therefore needs to ask themselves, “On which side of this debate do I fall?”
Well…when Max Planck (the Nobel Prize winning physicist who founded quantum theory) says…
“As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.”
and Albert Einstein says…
“Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe–a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble.”
and the Nobel Prize winning physicist Eugene Wigner says…
“When the province of physical theory was extended to encompass microscopic phenomena, through the creation of quantum mechanics, the concept of consciousness came to the fore again; it was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to the consciousness,” and “The content of consciousness is an ultimate reality.”
and the great physicist Sir Arthur Eddington says…
“The idea of a universal mind or Logos would be, I think, a fairly plausible inference from the present state of scientific theory.” ["Logos" is defined as "the word of God, or principle of divine reason and creative order."]
and the knighted mathematician, physicist and astronomer Sir James Jeans says (in his book The Mysterious Universe)…
“There is a wide measure of agreement which, on the physical side of science approaches almost unanimity, that the stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine. Mind no longer appears as an accidental intruder into the realm of matter. We are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail mind as the creator and governor of the realm of matter.” (italics added)
…there can be no question on which side of this debate modern physics falls. For a glimpse of the quantum research which has led physicists to draw conclusions such as the above, and to understand why materialism (with its belief that “either matter or energy, or both, are the things from which everything else comes” and “are self-existent and do not need to be created or shaped by mind”) can no longer be deemed scientifically plausible, please view this video of the famous double slit experiment. As this article titled The Mental Universe by Johns Hopkins University physicist Richard Conn Henry reveals, “The ultimate cause of atheism, [Isaac] Newton asserted, is ‘this notion of bodies having, as it were, a complete, absolute and independent reality in themselves.’”
The simplest explanation of why modern physics has done away with materialism/naturalism is this: Material things cannot have “a complete, absolute independent reality in themselves” because, as modern physics has demonstrated, the material world cannot exist independent from consciousness (mind). There is no reality independent of mind.
Here is how University of California, Berkeley physicist Henry Stapp puts it in his book Mindful Universe:
“…According to contemporary orthodox basic physical theory, but contrary to many claims made in the philosophy of mind, the physical domain is not causally closed. [italics are his] A causally open physical description of the mind-brain obviously cannot completely account for the mind-brain as a whole.”
“In short, already the orthodox version of quantum mechanics, unlike classical mechanics, is not about a physical world detached from experiences; detached from minds.”
Princeton University quantum physicist Freeman Dyson echoes Stapp’s above comments:
“Atoms are weird stuff, behaving like active agents rather than inert substances. They make unpredictable choices between alternative possibilities according to the laws of quantum mechanics. It appears that mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent inherent in every atom. The universe is also weird, with its laws of nature that make it hospitable to the growth of mind. I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God. God is what mind becomes when it passes beyond the scale of our comprehension.”
Physicist George Stanciu and philosopher Robert Augros provide an excellent nutshell explanation of why the naturalist/materialist worldview is no longer scientifically or philosophically supportable in their book The New Story of Science, that further elucidates the above points:
“In the New Story of science the whole universe–including matter, energy, space, and time–is a one-time event and had a definite beginning. But something must have always existed; for if ever absolutely nothing existed, then nothing would exist now, since nothing comes from nothing. The material universe cannot be the thing that always existed because matter had a beginning. It is 12 to 20 billion years old. This means that whatever has always existed is non-material. The only non-material reality seems to be mind. If mind is what has always existed, then matter must have been brought into existence by a mind that always was. This points to an intelligent, eternal being who created all things. Such a being is what we mean by the term God.”
Mainstream biology, however, continues to embrace the naturalist/materialist view of the world. Why is this? Part of the answer lies in the fact that physics is the branch of science that most closely approaches the boundary separating science from philosophy and religion. It approaches this boundary much more closely than biology. Physics, in other words, is the branch of science that deals with the most fundamental or “big picture” aspects of our reality.
Relevant to the disagreement between modern physics and mainstream biology on this topic, biophysicist Harold J. Morowitz writes in his article Rediscovering the Mind:
“What has happened is that biologists, who once postulated a privileged role for the human mind in nature’s hierarchy, have been moving relentlessly toward the hard-core materialism that characterized nineteenth-century physics. At the same time, physicists, faced with compelling experimental evidence, have been moving away from strictly mechanical models of the universe to a view that sees the mind as playing an integral role in all physical events. It is as if the two disciplines were on fast-moving trains, going in opposite directions and not noticing what is happening across the tracks.’”
Physicist Richard Conn Henry explains why people (such as atheist biologists) cling to materialism/naturalism despite the fact that it has been completely discredited by modern physics:
“Why do people cling with such ferocity to belief in a mind-independent reality? It is surely because if there is no such reality, then ultimately (as far as we can know) mind alone exists. And if mind is not a product of real matter, but rather is the creator of the illusion of material reality (which has, in fact, despite the materialists, been known to be the case since the discovery of quantum mechanics in 1925), then a theistic view of our existence becomes the only rational alternative to solipsism.” ["Solipsism" is defined as "the view or theory that the self is all that can be known to exist."]
Naturalism/materialism, simply put, is critical for maintaining an atheist worldview. Mind must be the eventual product of mindless matter for atheism to stand. An atheist must therefore ignore, remain ignorant of, or rationalize away the insights of modern physics in order to prevent his/her belief system from collapsing. And because materialism/naturalism is the predominant cultural context within the insular world of atheist biologists (as well as other branches of academia), this is done collectively. As Oxford University and University of Massachusetts Professor of Biology Lynn Margulis (winner of the U.S. Presidential Medal for Science) put it in The Altenburg 16: An Expose of the Evolution Industry:
“…people are always more loyal to their tribal group than to any abstract notion of ‘truth’ – scientists especially. If not they are unemployable. It is professional suicide to continually contradict one’s teachers or social leaders.”
It would be overly simplistic, however, to state that a cultural preference for atheism among the ranks of biologists is the only factor motivating mainstream biology’s embrace of naturalism. Biologists are in the business of providing explanations for the phenomenon of life. Therefore, an admission by biologists of the existence of a creator would also be an admission that there are aspects of the phenomenon of life that are beyond the bounds of science. One should not be surprised that biologists would find such an admission humbling and unpleasant. It is crucial, then, for readers to understand that what is presented by atheist biologists as a scientific conclusion of atheism is in reality an assumption of atheism made on philosophical grounds that precedes and therefore filters and distorts scientific inquiry. Harvard University geneticist Richard C. Lewontin famously admitted in 1997:
” …It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.”
(For a more in-depth exploration of mainstream biology’s rigid adherence to materialism, please read the post entitled “If the Evidence for God is So Strong, Why Are So Many Smart People Unconvinced?“. Please also read The Ultimate Cart-Before-the-Horse (Why Atheism is Illogical), which is closely related to this essay.
Perhaps Werner Heisenberg, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics for creating quantum mechanics, explained the divergence between biology and physics (with regard to God) best when he wrote:
“The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.”
With the phrase “the bottom of the glass,” Heisenberg is referring to the study of the most fundamental aspects of reality…which are investigated by physics.
For a more in-depth discussion of why materialism/naturalism is no longer scientifically supportable, please read The Matter Myth by physicists Paul Davies and John Gribbin. Much of the first chapter (entitled The Death of Materialism) is viewable by clicking on the above link to the book at Amazon.com. Please also read The New Story of Science by physicist George Stanciu and philosopher Robert Augros. The entire book can be read by clicking on the preceding link. Chapter 4 entitled “God” begins on page 53, but it is recommended that readers read the book in its entirety.
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Additional citations from extremely important contributors to modern physics (indeed, the majority of the most important physicists) relevant to this subject matter appear below (as well as other prominent figures such as philosophers). Please also view the post entitled, “Some quotes to consider….if you think science leads to atheism.”
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“…This sense of wonder leads most scientists to a Superior Being – der Alte, the Old One, as Einstein affectionately called the Deity – a Superior Intelligence, the Lord of all Creation and Natural Law.”
–Abdus Salam, winner of the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in electroweak theory. He is here quoted in his article entitled Science and Religion.
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“I have looked into most philosophical systems and I have seen that none will work without God.”
“Science is incompetent to reason upon the creation of matter itself out of nothing. We have reached the utmost limit of our thinking faculties when we have admitted that because matter cannot be eternal and self-existent it must have been created.”
–Physicist and mathematician James Clerk Maxwell, who is credited with formulating classical electromagnetic theory and whose contributions to science are considered to be of the same magnitude as those of Einstein and Newton.
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“For myself, faith begins with a realization that a supreme intelligence brought the universe into being and created man. It is not difficult for me to have this faith, for it is incontrovertible that where there is a plan there is intelligence—an orderly, unfolding universe testifies to the truth of the most majestic statement ever uttered—-’In the beginning God.’”
–Nobel Prize winning physicist Arthur Compton, discoverer of the Compton Effect.
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“Those who say that the study of science makes a man an atheist must be rather silly.”
“Something which is against natural laws seems to me rather out of the question because it would be a depressive idea about God. It would make God smaller than he must be assumed. When he stated that these laws hold, then they hold, and he wouldn’t make exceptions. This is too human an idea. Humans do such things, but not God.”
–Nobel Prize winning physicist Max Born, who was instrumental in the development of quantum mechanics.
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“I believe that the more thoroughly science is studied, the further does it take us from anything comparable to atheism.”
–Lord William Kelvin, who was noted for his theoretical work on thermodynamics, the concept of absolute zero and the Kelvin temperature scale based upon it.
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“Both religion and science require a belief in God. For believers, God is in the beginning, and for physicists He is at the end of all considerations… To the former He is the foundation, to the latter, the crown of the edifice of every generalized world view.”
“There can never be any real opposition between religion and science; for the one is the complement of the other.”
“I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”
Religion and Natural Science (Lecture Given 1937) Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers,trans. F. Gaynor (New York, 1949), pp. 184
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“God is a mathematician of a very high order and He used advanced mathematics in constructing the universe.”
–Nobel Prize winning physicist Paul A. M. Dirac, who made crucial early contributions to both quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics.
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“In the history of science, ever since the famous trial of Galileo, it has repeatedly been claimed that scientific truth cannot be reconciled with the religious interpretation of the world. Although I am now convinced that scientific truth is unassailable in its own field, I have never found it possible to dismiss the content of religious thinking as simply part of an outmoded phase in the consciousness of mankind, a part we shall have to give up from now on. Thus in the course of my life I have repeatedly been compelled to ponder on the relationship of these two regions of thought, for I have never been able to doubt the reality of that to which they point.”
–Werner Heisenberg, who was awarded the 1932 Nobel Prize in Physics for the creation of quantum mechanics (which is absolutely crucial to modern science).
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“We all know that there are regions of the human spirit untrammeled by the world of physics. In the mystic sense of the creation around us, in the expression of art, in a yearning towards God, the soul grows upward and finds fulfillment of something implanted in its nature. The sanction for this development is within us, a striving born with our consciousness or an Inner Light proceeding from a greater power than ours. Science can scarcely question this sanction, for the pursuit of science springs from a striving which the mind is impelled to follow, a questioning that will not be suppressed. Whether in the intellectual pursuits of science or in the mystical pursuits of the spirit, the light beckons ahead and the purpose surging in our nature responds.”
–The great physicist Sir Arthur Eddington, as quoted in his classic work The Nature of the Physical World:
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“Science is a game – but a game with reality, a game with sharpened knives. If a man cuts a picture carefully into 1000 pieces, you solve the puzzle when you reassemble the pieces into a picture; in the success or failure, both your intelligences compete. In the presentation of a scientific problem, the other player is the good Lord. He has not only set the problem but also has devised the rules of the game – but they are not completely known, half of them are left for you to discover or to deduce. The uncertainty is how many of the rules God himself has permanently ordained, and how many apparently are caused by your own mental inertia, while the solution generally becomes possible only through freedom from its limitations. This is perhaps the most exciting thing in the game.”
–Erwin Schroedinger, winner of the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics “for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory.”
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“It has occurred to me lately—I must confess with some shock at first to my scientific sensibilities—that both questions [the origin of mind and the origin of life from nonliving matter] might be brought into some degree of congruence. This is with the assumption that mind, rather than emerging as a late outgrowth in the evolution of life, has existed always as the matrix, the source and condition of physical reality—the stuff of which physical reality is composed is mind-stuff. It is mind that has composed a physical universe that breeds life and so eventually evolves creatures that know and create: science-, art-, and technology-making animals.”
–Nobel Prize winning Harvard University biologist George Wald, as quoted in his address to the Quantum Biology Symposium titled Life and Mind in the Universe. Wald is a noted exception to the widespread tendency of biologists to embrace materialism for ideological reasons (despite the fact that materialism has been completely discredited by modern physics).
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“…Discussing the creation of the universe in terms of time and space is like trying to discover the artist and the action of painting by going to the edge of the canvas. This brings us very near to those philosophical systems which regard the universe as a thought in the mind of its Creator, thereby reducing all discussion of material creation to futility.”
—The knighted physicist, mathematician, and astronomer Sir James Jeans.
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“The more I study science the more I believe in God.”
“I want to know how God created this world, I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know His thoughts, the rest are details.”
–Albert Einstein
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“It is evident that an acquaintance with natural laws means no less than an acquaintance with the mind of God therein expressed.”
–James Joule, propounder of the first law of thermodynamics (on the conservation of energy). Joule also made important contributions to the kinetic theory of gases. The unit of heat known as the “Joule” is named after him.
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“An equation for me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God.”
–Srinivasa Ramanujam, who is widely regarded to be one of the greatest mathematicians of all time (on a similar plane with such greats as Archimedes and Newton).
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“Is intelligent mind an ultimate and irreducible feature of reality? Indeed, is it the ultimate nature of reality? Or is mind and consciousness an unforeseen and unintended product of basically material processes of evolution?”
“If you look at the history of philosophy, it soon becomes clear that almost all the great classical philosophers took the first of these views. Plato, Aristotle, Anselm, Aquinas, Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Locke, Berkeley, Kant, Hegel—they all argued that the ultimate reality, often hidden under the appearances of the material world or time and space, is mind or spirit.”
–Keith Ward, retired Professor of Philosophy at Kings College, London, and a member of the Council of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, as quoted in his book Doubting Dawkins, Why There Almost Certainly is A God.
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“It is as impossible to conceive that ever pure incogitative matter should produce a thinking intelligent being, as that nothing should of itself produce matter.”
–Philosopher John Locke, who was one of the most important Enlightenment thinkers.
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“It seems that the world that appears to us is not reality as it is in itself. It is a construct of human consciousness. Materialist philosophers argue that consciousness is a construct of matter. But Plato and almost all the great classical philosophers, East and West, suggest the opposite. Matter, at least as it appears to us, is a construct of consciousness.”
“…Consciousness is real and creative. It is not just a by-product of the world we perceive. Without consciousness, that world, the world we perceive, would not even exist. Another quantum physicist, John von Neumann, said, ‘All real things are contents of consciousness.’ This is about as far from materialism as you can get – and it is an interpretation of modern physics, not some weird religiously inspired theory.”
––Keith Ward, retired Professor of Philosophy at Kings College, London, and a member of the Council of the Royal Institute of Philosophy (mentioned above), as quoted in his book Is Religion Irrational?
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**But one does not need to be a physicist or mathematician to understand why the materialist / naturalist worldview does not hold water. Please see my post titled Riddles for Atheists for a greater understanding of why theism is a better explanation.
“If the evidence for God is so strong, why are so many smart people unconvinced?”…the evidence of God is not strong…quotes from two people is no ‘evidence’ at all, and should not be used to conclude that “there can be no question on which side of this debate modern physics falls.”
an atheists position is not that of being able to explain how the universe came to be…it is the position of “i dont know” and you dont either because you dont have any special powers that i do not have…if i say that i believe I can fly and then say “prove that i cant fly” that doesnt make it true that i can…
there are many explanations for the beginning of the universe, so what ‘evidence’ is there that the christian worldview is the right one? there is none, because i could create a story of a supreme being that is not backed by science and claim that my worldview best explains it(transcendental proof)
the burden of proof is on the person who claims there to be an invisible omnipotent being, not the person who calls ‘bullshit’ and seeks a reasoned explanation
I am afraid it is alot more than just two people. In my “Some Quotes to Consider” post, I cite a heck of alot more than 2 people. In fact, these quotes reveal that most most astronomers believe in God and most physical scientists believe in God or at least consider the existence of God to be a very real possibility.
Here, again, you try to restrict and modify the definition of “evidence” to suit your own ends. Here is how the Oxford Dictionary defines “evidence:” “The available body of facts or information indicating whether a belief or proposition is true or valid.” Citing the opinions of highly qualified scientists and philosophers clearly fits within this definition. If it did not, the court system would not accept the testimony of expert witnesses as evidence.
I will rehash what I said to another person who made a similar argument to yours: Your use of this modified, restricted definition of “evidence” is highly suggestive that you wish to casually discard with evidence that contradicts your views because you are fully aware that you have no substantive counter-argument.
No, the burden of proof is just as much on the person who believes that the universe just magically popped into existence on its own one day. I “seek a reasoned explanation” for how this came to pass. Did the universe result naturally from physical law? How were these physical laws established? Did they evolve through Darwinian natural selection out of utter nothingness?
How did the first life emerge? Was it brought here by aliens from outer space, as atheist biologist Richard Dawkins asserts in this video and as atheist biologist Francis Crick suggests, as revelaled in this article? This is the best that atheists can come up with. Which species of alien do you think it was? The Klingons? The Romulons?
Scott
No, the burden of proof is on the person who believes that the universe just magically popped into existence one (or six) day. Not on one that defers to it always having been there, or suggests possibilities without claiming them as evidence.
No, the burden of proof is on the person who believes that the universe “has always been there,” because this stance completely contradicts the science of the Big Bang, which is virtually unanimously accepted by scientists.
Without any evidence associated with the earliest instant of the expansion, the Big Bang theory cannot and does not provide any explanation for such an initial condition; rather, it describes and explains the general evolution of the universe since that instant.
Is this a cut and paste from Victor Stenger? I showed you what Physics World magazine (the membership magazine of the Institute of Physics) thinks of his book God: The Failed Hypothesis. Hint: Not good.
Further, it should be said that it is the Standard Big Bang model that says that the Big Bang was the beginning of the universe and of time itself. This model, like all scientific models, is subject to being revised at a later date (thus pushing the beginning of time to a point before the Big Bang). However, what is NOT subject to revision is the fact that the universe (or any potential “multiverse” or “oscillating universe” in which our universe might be situated) had a beginning at some point. I demonstrate this in my post entitled “Isn’t the universe eternal? (Thus doing away with the need for a creator). You can either click on the link above or go to the “snippets” section at the top of the main page to read the essay.
Please do not make me rehash all the quotes from astrophysicists who are making “theistic conclusions.”
Nope. Cut and paste from Wikipedia (Big Bang), since you rely so heavily on that web site…
In other words, common knowledge, until one of your physicists revises it.
Quoting you:
““The available body of facts or information indicating whether a belief or proposition is true or valid.” Citing the opinions of highly qualified scientists and philosophers clearly fits within this definition.”
It says FACTS and INFORMATION, not opinions. If most believe it, does it make it right? Not really, because for hundreds of years the world thought it morally right to kill and enslave negro people, and deny woman basic human rights.
In the court system, their testimony is not called opinion, it is a fact because they saw with their own eyes and have scientific, physical evidence to boot, or they contradict themselves. With just witness and no corroborative physical evidence, their testimony is invalid, and no one can be condemned. An opinion has no tangible proof, therefore it is not a fact and not evidence.
Also, how did life emerge? Considering time and space is only a perception of the mind, (change the physical mind and you can change the body’s perception of space and time, just as a stroke can change your personality) then life could have always existed. Time doesn’t create life because time is a perception. Life perceives time and creates it. Just my opinion on the origins of life there. Because it’s my opinion does it make it a fact? No, but I do have some evidence for it.
Thank you for your time.
If most people believe it, does that make it right? Certainly not. That is a valid point.
But if you are characterizing the views of these scientists as opinion’s without corroborative evidence, then you are way off base. If you actually read the quotes from the scientists in this post, you would realize that they came to these conclusions from their research.
Also, your comparison of scientific issues (such as those discussed in this essay) to an issue of morality, such as that of slavery, is hardly appropriate. Moral issues are the realm of philosophy, not science. No amount of “corroborative physical evidence,” as you say, could prove or disprove the morality of slavery because morality is not a scientific issue.
If you are looking for “corroborative evidence” for these scientists’ views regarding the role of consciousness in producing physical reality, then you can start with a review of the famous “double slit” experiment with this video.
Dave, agnosticism is “I don’t know”, not atheism. Please read up a bit, then return.
Well, Dave, those who choose spontaneous generation—the only choice outside of Creation—do not usually take the time to study the strong possibilities people such as Youngren offer. In addition, most enter his website with longtime beliefs that are difficult to discard. If you have the opportunity, read Antony Flew’s concept of “No True Scotsman”—it’s easy to find. Furthermore, it might be to your benefit to ask those you are acquainted with—assuming many share your beliefs–to define spontaneous generation. I am pretty sure you will discover that few know anything regarding the subject, let alone possess the ability to logically explain how life generated from non-life. The world of science is at a loss for such an answer, and I am sure your friends will fare no better (such an answer would rock the world). If you accept my challenge, please come back and let me know if your pals do have legitimate answers. I know they won’t; but if they do, I will be waiting.
Bob
Excuse me for butting in.It does not matter how educated one is when discussing this immotive subject.What is the point when you could end up a heck more wrong
than you think regardless of your qualifications.
Bob
The fact that people may enter the website with longtime beliefs makes those beliefs no less valid than others who have held opposite beliefs but entered the website earlier, so I don’t understand your point.
I wonder if you can answer a few fairly simple questions for me:
1. Who created god?
2. If god created the world in 6 days, and rested on the 7th, what did he do on the 8th day?
3. If god exists, how can you or I know which of the thousands of gods to follow?
If you’re open to some reading that catalogues the enormous damage inflicted in the name of religion, try Chris Hitchens’s book God is Not Great.
1) God was not created. He exists independent of time. Please read the book “New Proofs for the Existence of God” for philosophical proofs that God is the “unconditioned reality” in which all “conditioned realities” (such as our own) are rooted.
2) 8th day? Is this an attempt to obfuscate? Please review the videos about the six days of creation which I provide in my “evolution” post by MIT physicist Gerald Schroeder. You may want to begin with a review of Einstein’s concept of time dilation so that you understand where Schroeder is going.
3) To answer this question, please read my essay titled “So Whose God is the Best?”
Christopher Hitchens’ book is a joke. Please read this review of his book God Is Not Great from the Washington Post.
Is the old school boy jibe “who created God” the best u can offer? If aliens is the explanation of how life began on earth, would u say “yeh, but who created aliens?” All youre doing is setting up an infinite regress of creators, universe aliens.
Apart from the definition of God being a necessary being that exists outside time, u must address a finite universe We have Alex Vilinken, the Russian cosmologist who declares “With the proof now in place, current cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past-eternal universe. There is no escape: we have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning.”
If u still claim matter is eternal then all u are left with is the problem of an infinite past of finite physical events. Infinity is a large number for a mathematician but an abomination for a physicist.
Bad religion no more refutes the existence of God than bad science undermines its great achievements.
BTW, we are still in the 7th day of creation! Read the Bible rather than “The God (Dawkins’) Delusion”, u might learn some thing about the real world and even science.
Right on. And if life on earth came from aliens, where did alien life come from? The “OK, I want numbers post” points out that Oxford University mathematician Roger Penrose calculated the odds of life forming by chance since the time of the Big Bang as one in a billion, billion, billion (repeated a billion times). Remember that his numbers do not specify where in the universe the life could have formed, so these odds would apply to alien life as well.
Also please review the post entitled “Can life evolve from lifeless chemicals?”
Dashan, I recommend reading “Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why” by Bart Ehrman…you will certainly learn much.
Danno:
Dean Overman (a former Templeton Scholar at Oxford University) replies to Ehrman and his book Misquoting Jesus in A Case for the Divinity of Jesus:
Most New Testament scholars are puzzled by Ehrman’s reaction to his discovery at Princeton Seminary that the manuscripts contain some scibal errors… When Ehrman realized that Mark (or a scribe copying his work) may have made a mistake by referring to Abiathar rather than Abiathar’s father, Amimelech, Ehrman decided to throw away his whole Christian faith: “Once I made that admission, the floodgates opened. For if there could be one little, picayune mistake in Mark 2, maybe there could be mistakes in other places as well.”
[New Testament scholar] Evans is perplexed because this hardly seems like a sound rationale for doubting the reliability of the whole New Testament. It is important to recognize that Ehrman’s position is that if the Bible contains one mistake [made by someone such as a scribe], the whole Bible should be disregarded. This is a non sequitur; it does not follow logically from his discovery.
Please read this review of Ehrman’s writings and then this one.
Ehrman’s claims are based on flimsy evidence, dubious logic and upon attacking straw men.
Or ignore it as something that opposes your ideology.
Well Dashan, I have read the bible, and it says a number of remarkable, contradictory, ridiculous and spurious things. It says, for example, that god created Adam – now we all know that he did not. It also says that he fashioned Eve from one of Adam’s ribs – again we know that he did not. The bible is little more than a collection of fairy stories, written hundreds of years after the events they purport to describe, and cannot be treated seriously by any thinking person.
Take one simple example – that god created man. The bible says this happened millions of years after the first man walked the earth. The bible is silent on evolution (which Scott Youngren has since contorted his dogma to embrace, if not claim) and yet we know about the neanderthals, zinjanthropus, cro-magnon etc. We know this because we have the fossils, we can trace the development of man, the size of his brain, the shape of his head, the length of his limbs. We know about his home, his food, his migrations.
Please tell me, which part of the real world and science deals with the bible’s shocking misinformation? It’s almost as if god, religion and the bible were made up by people trying to control behaviour and gain power. Crikey, maybe that’s it!
It seems to be you have a limited god concept, or a Christian centric perception of deity. There are more god concepts than just the christian one. Most atheist I have run across seem to have some kind of grudge against Christianity, and bulk god into there archaic views.
Yes, of course I have a Christian centric perception of God…because I am a Christian. Everyone’s concept of God must be centered somewhere. Even an atheist has a concept of God that has central tenets. The central tenet of the atheist’s concept of God is that God in non-existent.
But just because I am a Christian does not mean that I think Muslims and Jews, etc. have everything wrong about God. In fact, Christian, Muslim, and Jewish concepts of God share many more commonalities than differences.
Danno, what is your education in?
Mostly life. Yours?
“Danno, what is your education in?”
Just a thought danno,
Can I also ask :by whose authority do u hold that your life experiences lead u to an authoritive worldview?”
Remember that Darwin reasoned that any species with apes as cousins would be highly disadvantaged to come up with anything that resembled a truth statement.
Dashan, just a thought: by what authority do you find the arrogance to question someone else’s right to hold a view?
Remember, people like you that selectively quote Darwin have to also accept his evidence that comprehensively demolishes your creation theory.
So life being brought here by aliens from outer space clearly demolishes the creation theory? I have probably linked you to this video of Richard Dawkins endorsing the hypothesis and this article which reveals that atheist biologist Francis Crick endorsed it (and there have been plenty of other atheists too), but here I go again.
Do you agree with your fellow atheists that life can be explained as the result of aliens creating it and bringing it here in their spaceship? Do you have any theories as to what planet they came from, or at least to what galaxy they came from?
They probably weren’t like the Klingons because the Klingons were too mean to do such a nice thing like bring life here. Same with the Romulons.
Recall that Charles Darwin himself wrote in later versions of On the Origin of Species that life may have “been originally breathed by a Creator into a few forms or into one.” He also said elsewhere, “When thus reflecting I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man; and I deserve to be called a theist.” You may want to consider these facts if you have an ornament on the back of your car that has the word “Darwin” inside of a fish with legs.
What it all boils down to is this: There is either something or there is nothning. If there is nothning we need not continue the discussion. If there is something, were did the something come from? Either choice requires a leap of faith. To believe there is no God requires faith in the light of the evidence. To believe there is a God requires faith since it can’t be proven beyond any doubt. Both science and religion rest on faith.
Conclusive science may rest on faith, not science in general. But what true scientist says anything other than accepted law, if anything, is conclusive?
I think the following excerpt addresses this issue well (From the book New Proofs for the Existence of God by Robert J. Spitzer…which I highly recommend).
“John Henry Newman termed such a network or evidence an ‘informal inference,’ i.e., reaching a conclusion by considering the accumulation of convergent antecedent probabilities. For Newman, truth claims did not have to be grounded in an infallible source of evidence or in a strictly formal deduction. They could be grounded in the convergence (complementary and corroboration) of a multiplicity probalistic evidential bases. Certitude is not grounded in one base alone, but in a multiplicity of likely or probable evidential bases.”
This is just a fancy way of saying that the existence of God is not demonstrated by science or philosophy alone, but by a working together of the two.
Here is another pertinent quote from the same book.
“So what can science tell us? It can identify, aggregate, and synthesize evidence indicating that the finitude of past time in the universe as we currently know it to be or conceive it could be. Science can also identify the exceedingly high improbability of the random occurence of conditions necessary to sustain life in the universe as we currently know it to be or conceive it could be.”
So we are talking here about the existence of God in terms of (high) probabilities. Final, conclusive proof or disproof of the existence of God cannot be provided by science because, as Spitzer puts it, “unlike philosophy and metaphysics, science cannot deductively prove a creation or God. This is because natural science deals with the physical universe and with the regularities which we call ‘laws of nature’ that are obeyed by the phenomenon within that universe. But God is not an object or phenomenon or regularity within the physical universe…” This is where atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Victor Stenger demonstrate their ignorance of philosophy when they assert that science disproves God. It is not a matter of proof or disproof, but of probabilities.
All this talk about the existence of (a) God. Those people who are atheists say the there is no proof. Those whose faith makes them believe that there is a God also don’t have any PROOF. How about this:
The non-atheists say that God is eternal and say that you must believe that, and take it on faith.
It could be argued (with the SAME argument) that the UNIVERSE is eternal. This means that LIFE has ALWAYS existed (albeit not always in the same form) just as the stars and planets, etc. have ALWAYS existed (albeit not in the same form). EVOLUTION, on the other hand has also ALWAYS existed and therefore things CHANGE.
Is this not just as valid an argument as the belief that GOD has always existed?
It would explain all of the EXISTENCE arguments on both sides.
I am very glad that you asked this question. Big Bang cosmology has shown that the universe is NOT eternal. I recommend the book New Proofs for the Existence of God by Robert J. Spitzer (who was assisted by Dr. Stephen Barr of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Deleware). Below is a relevant excerpt:
If you wish to explore this subject matter in more depth, this book also states that “David Hilbert (the father of finite mathematics) has given new probative force and depth to the argument for the intrinsic finitude of past time (implying a timeless Creator) in his article On The Infinite.” You may want to read this article.
Hilbert, one of the greatest mathemeticians of the 20th century said, “The infinite [as in infinite past time] is nowhere to be found in reality. It neither exists in nature nor provides a legitimate basis for rational thought. The role that remains for the infinite…is solely that of an idea…”
Scott
Big Bang cosmology has shown that the universe is NOT eternal. False.
Without any evidence associated with the earliest instant of the expansion, the Big Bang theory CANNOT and DOES NOT provide any explanation for such an initial condition; rather, it describes and explains the general evolution of the universe since that instant.
There is no information evidential of time or no time before the Big Bang, nor is it likley there will ever be, since the Big Bang is evidenced by cosmic microwave background radiation. What evidence could possibly be available to confirm or deny existence before the Big Bang???
You have not responded to the arguments in my post entitled “What does standard Big Bang cosmology say about the universe being eternal?” Rather, you have just ignored it and restated your previous assertion.
Here is specifically what you need to respond to: Contemporary mathameticians, such as David Hilbert (one of the greatest mathameticians of the 20th century) say that infinite past time is not possible. Hilbert says, “The infinite [as in infinite past time] is nowhere to be found in reality. It neither exists in nature nor provides a legitimate basis for rational thought. The role that remains for the infinite…is solely that of an idea…”
Therefore, whether there was existence before the Big Bang is ultimately irrelevant. The real question is whether the universe began at some point, or existed eternally. Since infinite past time is not possible, it clearly began at some point…..either at the Big Bang or at some point prior to that.
To shed further light on this topic, let me call attention to another fact: In 2003, physicists Vilenkin, Borde, and Guth corroborated to formulate a proof that demonstrates that infinite past time is not feasible. It is known as the BVG theorem. Alexander Vilenkin is very blunt in regard to the implications of this theorem:
“It is said that an argument is what convinces reasonable men and a proof is what it takes to convince even an unreasonable man. With the proof now in place, cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past-eternal universe. There is no escape, they have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning” (Many Worlds in One [New York: Hill and Wang, 2006], p.176).
That being said, Standard Big Bang Theory DOES say that the Big Bang was the beginning. Read this article from All About Science.
The lack of infinite (as in the lack of infinite past time) is nowhere to be found in reality. It (creation) neither exists in nature nor provides a legitimate basis for rational thought. The role that remains for the lack of infinite…is solely that of an idea…
You’ve been saying that the Big Bang was the beginning, undeniably. Now you’re saying it may have been before the Big Bang, but are certain of no eternity. And then say it was in fact the beginning. BVG theorem doesn’t prove anything, doesn’t account for models providing exception to the theorem, and doesn’t deny the Big Condensing, the prior Big Bang, the prior Big Condensing, or the Big Bounce. No evidence to prove otherwise. I can’t find many references on the theorem though, other than Christian spins claiming proof. But who should look beyond the immediate when googling?
From your Christian article:
“According to the many experts however, space didn’t exist prior to the Big Bang.” Not all experts? Or at least most?
“…reasonably certain that the universe had a beginning.” Kinda, I’m pretty sure, maybe, I think so, strongly…
So it DOESN’T say it was undeniably the beginning.
No, what I am saying is that the Standard Big Bang Model declares the Big Bang to be the beginning of time. But this model, like all scientific models, is subject to revision at a later date. Therefore, future advances in science could show that the beginning of time was earlier than the Big Bang.
However, future advances in science will NOT be able to demonstrate infinite past time (an eternal universe).
I have not changed my stance in any way.
Also, future advances in science will NOT be able to demonstrate A LACK OF infinite past time (an eternal universe).
Arie, you make a very good point in a clear logical way. Expect to be abused roundly for your common sense.
“John Henry Newman termed such a network or evidence an ‘informal inference,’ i.e., reaching a conclusion by considering the accumulation of convergent antecedent probabilities. For Newman, truth claims did not have to be grounded in an infallible source of evidence or in a strictly formal deduction. They could be grounded in the convergence (complementary and corroboration) of a multiplicity probalistic evidential bases. Certitude is not grounded in one base alone, but in a multiplicity of likely or probable evidential bases.”
Then I can surely conclude that you now accept “macro” evolution and common descent without reservation, as the above description of “concilience” applies better there by 1000 orders of magnitude more than it does to this vaporous “evidence” for gawd, right?
No?
You got some ‘splainin’ to do!
OK Kyle, if you want to believe in macroevolution, that is fine with me. In fact, there are many Christians who believe in macroevolution. But once again, macroevolution refers to an intermediate cause, not an ultimate one. The question of ultimate causes would be “Is life a result of random, unintelligent processes, or of intelligent ones?”
Can you demonstrate how life emerged through random processes when life is something several orders of magnitude more complex than any man made technology?
OK, then those multiple evidential bases also apply to God!! And here some of them are:
1) The dizzyingly complex nature of the simplest life form and the huge chasm in complexity separating lifeless matter from the simplest life.
2) The anthropic fine tuning data as presented in my essay “Is there a God? What is the chance our world is the result of chance?”
3) The remarkable similarity between the biblical and scientific accounts of creation (as presented in the videos by MIT physicist and biblical scholar Gerald Schroeder that I link to in my “Doesn’t evolution…” essay).
Those are just three.
What would you say are the multiple evidential bases for macro evolution? Remember how I have demonstrated that mainstream biology is well aware of Darwinism’s failures.
Above you offer the possibility that macro-evolution is true. Have you softened your stance on macro-evolution as a possibility?
I thought that one of Kyle’s points from another post was quite reasonable.
you are happy with micro evolution. why shouldn’t micro+micro+micro+micro+micro over many hundreds of thousands or even millions of years = macro. micro changes to an arm for example? in the beginning there are only micro changes to its length of small detail… then little by little micro changes of all sorts occur over millenia, each time only changing it a little bit in comparison to its previous nature. By the end of a million years of micro evolution you might have an arm that closer resembles a paddle. Why do ducks have webbed feet? or you might find an arm once used for running and balance has slowly evolved into a hoof of some kind.
At what point does micro become macro? Such changes happen over huge timescales. At what point is micro evolution inadequate to describe the change. Speciation has taken place when a group evolves from the land to the sea or from a foot to a hoof. Surely such differences become to large and pronounced to be considered micro and for species to subjected to this changed to be called the same.
‘What would you say are the multiple evidential bases for macro evolution?’
genetics. the fossil record. transitional forms. anatomical vestiges. the science of modern biology. witnessing evolution in the present day – catching it in the act.
Nick:
This article discusses the topic in detail. Evolution occurs within genetic limits. Here is one important excerpt from the article:
“Take a look at Darwin’s observation of the changes in finches. Isolated in the Galapagos Island, Darwin discovered finches that had much longer beaks than those found off the island. His assumption was that evolution was changing this species. However, these finches remained finches. Princeton professor Peter Grant completed an 18 year study of the finches on this island. He concluded that during drought years, the finches with shorter beaks died off because with a limited supply of seeds, only those that could reach the grubs living under tree bark could survive. With limited resources on a small island, these finches could not migrate to find food. We clearly observe natural selection, but not macro-evolution. However, it is not a permanent change. The finch offspring with shorter beaks prospered during seasons of plenty. Natural adaptation is the function of micro-evolution. There are three plainly observable principles to micro-evolution. 1. A trait will alter because of a stimulus. 2. The trait will return to the norm if left to nature or returned to its original conditions. 3. No new information is added to the DNA.”
Darwin used breeding of the rock pigeon as a basis for his theory that gradual changes in species will evolve into new species. All pigeons are descendents of the rock pigeon. This pigeon is the same pigeon that can be found in most city parks. Through selective breeding, Darwin was able to produce many drastic variations of pigeons. He observed very rapid changes in traits that he could alter by this selective breeding and concluded that if he could make these changes within a few generations of pigeons, in time a new species of bird would develop. There are several flaws with this theory. 1. His intervention was the trigger for these various breeds. It did not occur naturally. 2. When left alone, his pigeons returned back to the ancestral rock pigeon within a few generations. If his theory were valid, they should have continued their ascent. 3. Darwin never lived to see that there was a natural barrier that slowed changes after a few generations and eventually reached a stopping point.
“Change can be rapid when leaving the ‘norm’, but slows and eventually stops as the ‘ceiling’ is reached. There is a limit to the number of combinations a specific trait can have. Another good example of this comes from the book, ‘How Now Shall We Live’. 150 years ago, sugar cane farmers committed to increasing the sugar content in their sugar beets. At the time the project began, sugar content was at 6%. Through selective cross-pollination, within a few generations of beets the sugar content soared to 13%. Over the next 75 years these growers were able to inch the sugar content up to 17%. Now, 75 years after they were able to achieve the 17% barrier, the sugar beet remains at 17%. This is a clear example of the DNA code barrier that limits the variation of a specific trait. This example shows the same principle that Darwin unknowingly discovered. Rapid change, then slow change followed by no change.”
Please view this video of Richard Dawkins being asked if he can cite an example of a genetic mutation or evolutionary process by which genetic information can be added to the genome. After the interview, Dawkins wrote a 3 page reply (which I have read) in order to refute the idea that he was stumped. But if you read that reply (click here), you will realize that he still does not answer the question, “Can you cite an example of a genetic mutation or an evolutionary process which has shown to add information to the genome?”
Rather, Dawkins just discusses ways in which shifting of already existing genetic material occurs, NOT how new information can be added to the genome. He discusses ways in which information content of the genome can be increased, but not how the overall information capacity of the genome can be increased. He therefore very artfully and elaborately dodges the question.
There is a lot of material on YouTube claiming to debunk this “stumping” of Dawkins. I am very much open to being shown how this might be the case. Can you demonstrate how he was not really stumped?
To conclude, though, as I mentioned to Kyle, the question of macroevolution is really not a question that pertains to the question of the existence of God because it is a matter of an intermediate cause rather than a question of an ultimate cause (intelligent, or random and unintelligent). Discussing macroevolution is therefore very much a tangent to the theme of this website.
I can give an example of where information was added to the genome.
It is a rare occurance and is very specific, which is perhaps why people don’t have it committed to memory. You have showed me this video before and I have read his reply before. I would have to side with Dawkins here.
They mislead him into making a video and were in his house under false pretences. Upon realisation of such an event in hearing such a leading question asked, might you not suffer a moment of hesitation and realisation, perhaps even fear, in a similar situation? Were some atheists to disguise themselves as Christians, enter your house and reveal their different identities and agenda half way through an interview, might you suddenly feel some concern or confusion? It is not fantasticly admirable practice.
I would rather not continue over this video because it detracts and is diversionary. Perhaps Dawkins was stumped, perhaps he was caught out and lacked an answer. However, in many professions things of obscurity and rarity are not always committed to memory. Lawyers refer to textbooks all the time, as do doctors; politicians will read speeches rather than memorize them all, receptionists will check their diaries, clergy may consult the scriptures etc. etc. It’s like saying, ‘once I failed a test’. It doesn’t mean that it can’t be retaken and passed.
Could you quote the scientific source for verification of the claims in the article? There’s elements of truth in there and some faulty conclusions as well. Micro evolution doesn’t have to have a ceiling. The direction, balances and proportions could be changed again and again. Once a new point is reached, regression to the original genus is not necessarrily the following trajectory, it will likely be a different and slightly newer version of a similar organism.
Here is a quick paste of something I read a while ago regarding bacteria, but also involves acquisition of an alltogether new ability.
Nylonase flavobacterium have evolved in the last 70 years…. They are brand new on the scene as they digest nylon.
Nylon is a man made polyamide that did not exist prior to 1935. If something wanted to digest this new and man made thermoplastic it would have to do something new, as the food source was not only new but unnatural. Plastics do not exist too readily in the wild… or at all. The nylonase flavobacterium developed new and improved enzymes unlike others previously existent in order to digest this synthetic material.
These new enzymes were not required prior to the existence of nylon and since we have only had that for 70 years, it is demonstrable evidence of evolution via mutation, improvement and natural selection.
I can agree with you on your assessment of evolution not being an ultimate cause, but rather an intermediate cause.
However, it is important to understand it because it is a big part of our world and as many on this site have proved, is a big part of this discussion. You have an entire essay devoted to evolution and creation and have raised the issue of Darwin as a major theme in many places.
It is an intermediate cause, but the reason it has become such a prevailing topic on this forum, is that you invoke ultimate causes in to it, so you would be making an ommission if you said it was only an intermediate cause. Understanding evolution properly does not mean that God is removed as a possible ‘first cause’, an ‘uncaused causer’. You invoke God as the creater in macro evolution, perhaps via divine intervention and individual creation of species. This is an ‘ultimate’ inference that you postulate. I have repeated often enough that I am not against the possibility of God, I just think it is important that we understand the mechanisms of our world before we can begin to make postulations and assemble worldviews. I will refer you to another prominant Christian Darwinist. A prize winning Cambridge paleobiologist named Simon Conway Morris. Here is an interivew with him.
http://www.christianpost.com/news/interview-leading-christian-darwinist-speaks-about-science-faith-origins-27362/
Nick, this video details what I mean when I say that Dawkins’ written reply (to which I linked you in my previous post) does not answer the question. Dawkins written reply basically admits that he cannot answer the question. His being stumped in the video is one thing. His failure to answer the question even in his longwinded written reply is another thing entirely. You are correct that his being stumped on the spot cannot prove much. But the fact that he is still stumped in his written reply does demonstrate that his views on macroevolution have not been backed up by science.
Lee Spetner, who holds a PhD in physics from MIT and served a fellowship in biophysics (the application of physics to biology) at Johns Hopkins University explains, “I really do not believe that the neo-Darwinian model can account for large-scale evolution [i.e., macroevolution]. What they really can’t account for is the buildup of information. …And not only is it improbable on the mathematical level, that is, theoretically, but experimentally one has not found a single mutation that one can point at that actually adds information. In fact, every beneficial mutation that I have seen reduces the information, it loses information.”
L. P. Lester Ph.D. and R. G. Bohlin Ph.D write in The Natural Limits of Biological Change
“With the inability of mutations of any type to produce new genetic information, the maintenance of the basic plan is to be expected….
There are limits to biological change and these limits are set by the structure and function of the genetic machinery.”
It is this buildup of information that stumped Dawkins in both his in-person and, later, written reply.
Darwinian evolution is not rigorously tested. In fact, one of the greatest philosophers of science of the 20th century, Karl Popper, declares that the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection is not even testable. He says: “I have come to the conclusion that Darwinism is not a testable scientific theory, but a metaphysical research program.” What Popper means, to my understanding, by “metaphysical research program,” is that Darwinism is something that requires a certain set of metaphysical presuppositions (i.e: materialism).
Evolutionary biologist and paleontologist Henry Gee (senior editor of the science journal Nature) said it best (in 1999): “No fossil is buried with its birth certificate. That, and the scarcity of fossils, means that it is effectively impossible to link fossils into chains of cause and effect in any valid way…To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bedtime story—amusing, perhaps even instructive, but not scientific.”
The Curator of the invertebrates department at the American Museum of Natural History, Niles Eldredge, who was also the adjunct professor at the City University of New York, is a vigorous supporter of evolution. Dr. Eldredge openly admits that the traditional evolutionary view is not supported by the fossil record. He says, “No wonder paleontologists shied away from evolution for so long,” as he writes, “It seems never to happen. Fastidious collecting of fossils, from the bottom upward, up sheer cliff faces, zigzags, minor oscillations…all showing the same results. That life forms all appear, fully formed, complete in body parts, at their first discovery”. “When we do see the introduction of evolutionary novelty, it usually shows up with a bang, and often with no firm evidence that the organisms did not evolve elsewhere! Evolution cannot forever be going on someplace else. Yet that’s how the fossil record has struck many a forlorn paleontologist looking to learn something about evolution.“
This above quote by Eldredge addresses the George Gaylord Simpson quote that you tried to “reinsert into context.” Simpson gives a rationalization of why the fossils supporting macroevolution are not there, but in Eldgrdge’s words, “Evolution cannot be forever going on someplace else.”
Keith Stewart Thomson (B.SC. Birmingham, AM, PH.D. Harvard) is currently a senior research fellow of the American Philosophical Society and an emeritus professor of natural history at the University of Oxford. He was appointed director of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History in July 1998. In 1987 he was appointed president of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, the oldest American natural history institution. He had earlier been a dean at Yale University and director of Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History. He is the author of several books and essays that deal with paleontology, the history of science and evolution.
And here is what Thomson said to the American Scientist in 1997: “A matter of unfinished business for biologists is the identification of evolution’s smoking gun… The smoking gun of evolution is speciation, not local adaptation and differentiation of populations.”
Evolutionary biologists Lynn Margulis (winner of the U.S. Presidential Medal for Science) and Dorion Sagan wrote in 2002: “Speciation, whether in the remote Galapagos, in the laboratory cages of the drosophilosophers, or in the crowded sediments of the paleontologists, still has never been directly traced.”
Biologists Scott Gilbert, John Opitz, and Rudolph Raff, in the Journal Developmental Biology write: “Genetics might be adequate for explaining microevolution, but microevolutionary changes in gene frequency were not seen as able to turn a reptile into a mammal or to convert a fish into an amphibian. Microevolution looks at adaptations that concern the survival of the fittest, not the arrival of the fittest… The origin of species—Darwin’s problem—remains unsolved.”
Sorry for again rehashing these quotes, but they are important.
Your example of “nylonase flavobacterium developing new and improved enzymes unlike others previously existent in order to digest this synthetic material” does not answer the objection of organisms modifying within genetic limits. Why does it follow that adapting to digest this manmade material cannot be done within genetic limits?
Can Simon Conway Morris demonstrate that this addition of genetic information to the genome can occur?
When people like Kyle become so infuriated, you have demonstrated some of the causes very well here. Though it may be counterproductive to become enraged, I can understand where the frustration comes from. I am not enraged, but perhaps you realise why it may happen.
You are presented with evidence or specific examples and (not every time, but) often you simply won’t engage specifically with these examples. You will bring up your website/resource of quotations and relist some appropriate ones, but often they are repeated or recycled, even in the same conversation and may well be unrelated to the specifics at hand.
To constructively resolve an issue you must take things one example at a time. You must look in detail at the case for and against one example solely and conclude on this matter in isolation. By jumping from place to place you are not being specific and engaging in the detail of the live issue. This becomes eratic and single cases are not resolved. People then cannot keep up with the amount of information you are bringing up and quite possibly the result becomes huge swathes of text, as happened with Kyle and some others. I try to take it one thing at a time and try to get a single adequate resolution, otherwise endless texts will continue.
Here are 4 or 5 of the live issues currently on the table:
nylonase flavobacterium.
New information evolving in nature (from your stumped video).
I asked for the scientific resource or peer reviewed location of your article that you initially quoted and linked. You know for science to be legitimate it must be recognised or at least reviewed by a reputable source to some extent with some critical analysis.
micro+micro+micro+micro+micro=macro.
answers to your question: ‘What would you say are the multiple evidential bases for macro evolution?’
-genetics. the fossil record. transitional forms. anatomical vestiges. the science of modern biology. witnessing evolution in the present day – catching it in the act.
These 5 are issues where we could discuss actual data, where images and photographs could be found, where fossil record evidence can be located and displayed. Tangible modern evidence is also available in modern biology such as in skeletons and DNA.
If your quotations are really able to demonstrate the falsehoods or truths in this data, then you should be able to show this with more than quotations. eg. photographs. live examples. studies. scientific reason. peer reviewed articles. logic. repeatable experiments. testable experiments.
This is what will convince me and others like me. Quotes may be correct, but people in science do not go simply by peoples word. You need to be pursuaded empirically as well.
You need to demonstrate with a working block of reason and tangible evidence as to why these things are not true. Where is the respected refutation of what is demonstrated in bones, genetics labs and natural history museums? Quotes need to be substantiated with proof. Someone’s word is seldom enough to demonstrate a point as truth. The quotes may be correct, but medical progress is not founded on quotes, neither is technology or physics or astronomy or engineering. If an issue is brought up, people including myself require more than a quote to back up what you say.
A working diagram, or an insight into the mechanism you claim, a photo or a link to an empirical counter example. Tested and sanctioned counter evidence from reputable sources – the very same sources that you quote – Simpsons, Eldridges, Goulds, Stanleys. You use these people in your responses, so they would be ideal people to persuade me of the truth inferred by the claims you make.
You have engaged in your above answer here with the flavobacterium, but this is as much direct engagement with an example as you have shown. It was short and dismissive, but at least it was what is required. Please expand on this, I do not understand you’re criticism here.
These bacteria have evolved an entirely new ability to digest nylon. Nylon is a new substance – 70 years old. Therefore the bacteria have evolved this ability at some time in the last 70 years. This is acquired new data or information, which is an example of what was asked of Dawkins in your video.
Morris, I would imagine, would concur that genetic novelty is a rare but real phenomenon.
Nick,
It is you who are not engaging the issues. I just don’t think this is getting through to you. Here are the simple facts:
1) The burden of proof lies with those trying to prove a theory…. not with those wishing to disprove it.
2) Not even Richard Dawkins can cite an example of a genetic mutation or evolutionary process shown to increase the genetic capacity of the genome. Without this capability, macroevolution cannot occur. You have not responded to this point.
3) Not only does the fossil record not support macroevolution (please don’t make me rehash the quotes again…. and I can come up with many others) but the fossil record cannot even in principle support macroevolution, as the citations I provide demonstrate. Species appear in the fossil record fully formed without any signs of ancestors. If these quotes are taken out of context, you need to reinsert them into the correct context. This means that you must tell us what the correct context is…. not just provide additional text that preceded and followed the quote which I provide. That is just providing additional text, not context.
4) You say that I wont engage deeply in your examples. Well, of course I wont. Here is what you are not getting: If Richard Dawkins could not come up with an example of an genetic mutation or evolutionary process shown to increase the information in the genome, why should I think that you can? If he can’t come up with such an example, it doesn’t take much of a leap of faith to assume that this is because there are no such examples.
5) Micro+micro+micro+micro cannot equal macro because species adapt within genetic limits. You have not responded to this objection.
6) Yes, we cannot just go on quotes. Yes, we need to be persuaded empirically as well. You are right. Macroevolution cannot be demonstrated empirically because it is not testable. Ancestry in the fossil record and in the genome can only be inferred. The fact that species and phyla appear suddenly and fully formed in the fossil record (without ancestors) means that there is no empirical support for macroevolution. As Lynn Margulis demonstrates, not a single biologist can come up with a singe unambiguous example of a new species emerging through an accumulation of mutations.
7) Continued support for Darwinian evolution (in museums for example) is the result of the fact that science cannot proceed without a paradigm (or theoretical framework) upon which to build. As Thomas Kuhn points out in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, paradigms don’t go away when the science no longer supports them. Rather, they go away when the science no longer supports them, AND a new paradigm comes along to take its place. Scientists didn’t just give up on Newtonian physics, for example, when Newtonian physics failed to explain certain subatomic and astronomical phenomena.
Rather, scientists abandoned Newtonian physics when Newtonian physics failed to explain certain subatomic and astronomical phenomena AND Einstein’s physics came along.
The reason things don’t get through to me and others, is that we are not satisfied with the level of proof.
1) No, the burden of proof lies with all parties. Whatever you wish to argue, you are obliged to engage with proof and reasonable demonstration of your view. How would it look in court if a lawyer was to stand up and announce that he needn’t bother, the burden of proof lies with the opposition? We each must bring forward a credible case.
2) I have answered this question twice with an example that you may test, research and reply to. Nylonase flavobacterium are one example where some genetic novelty has appeared in a biological system and this has happened within the last 70 years. The video reply you linked picks a small piece of Dawkins’ article and claims that this represents the answer. Dawkins believes it to be a complicated issue. You will find that the overall opinion of Dawkins is that in fact genetic novelty is evident all over the place and whilst is a rare occurance as a recordable event, is existent across the spectrum. Further he notes that he has authored 3 books on this subject, wherein he explains in explicit detail how novelty is acquired. The nylonase is an example that I have suggested rather than Dawkins. I heard of this example through a reliable source, which I will quote if asked.
3) I have refuted this previously. The question and tasks you ask here are somewhat mammoth. For me to reinsert all the quotes you used to context would be an undertaking in itself. I’m sure I could do that reasonably well here, but the lengths of texts involved and the time spent on explaining each case would be large. That is not to say it could not be done for all or perhaps just one or two. The fossil evidence does not contradict Darwin. Again this is something that can be demonstrated via pictures, museum visits, video’s, diagrams, live digs – the evidence stockpile is huge and the new evidence continues to come in. Your quotes are not completely wrong but tell only a small fragment of the tale. The quotes you use will say that the fossils appear fully formed. How else would they appear? Skulls in half? No backbones? Providing you find a complete fossil, it will always be fully formed, or else it would not have been alive I would say. A half formed animal would not live, for example a half formed cat, would not last long in any condition let alone the wild. The fossil record is incomplete, but this is obvious, half the animals that exist are eaten before they can be fossilised, or disintigrate or lost to geological time. It is rare that fossils occur. We are fortunate to find any fossil, so gaps will appear in the record without doubt. This is why the quotes you reference say what they say. Why is this very surprising? We don’t have examples of every lineage, because we are very fortunate to find any fossil at all. We do have demonstrable examples of transitions in the record, as Simpson says, ‘without doubt’. The whole of science agrees with this.
4) Again, I have given an example here in point 1. I am confident that Dawkins could give more and better examples than I have ventured already, he has written 3 books on just these issues. Did you read the entire article, or just rely on the 5 minute video that you found. Can you be sure that this video is absolutely correct and has explored the entire piece? Another example of increased information being passed on in biology is in down syndrome. This is a condition, that by definition has increased or new information from the normal amount. Here is a brief dictionary definition of the cause of the condition. Down syndrome, or Down’s syndrome trisomy 21, is a chromosomal condition caused by the presence of all or part of an extra 21st chromosome.
5) I did not reply to that, you are right. I don’t think that genetic limits would constrict the opportunity for macro evolution. This would need more consideration, amidst all these other points and I will give it some as I have already written much. My initial question would be, ‘what is meant by genetic limits?’ Following that I would say, ‘if there are genetic limits, why should this prevent macroevolution in any way? Surely the array of geneteic variety that is self evident on this planet just by looking out of the window is enough information for evolution of all kinds and in all directions to take place.
6) Well said regarding the the scientific process. The rest is not so well said. It is testable. It has been tested. It continues to be tested. New examples and understandings are being uncovered, reviewed and verified all the time. Lynn Margulis, who I would say is a credible reference, is someone that refers to herself as a Darwinist remember. It is neo-Darwinism which she rejects in your quote. I know there is a difference between the two and perhaps she will be proved right about neo-Darwinism, but without doubt a Darwinist she claims to be. I remain interested by her and I think to myself she may be right about neo Darwinism, but she makes no such claim about basic Darwinism.
7) This point could be entered at great length. I would refute the idea that it is failed until we find something new.
Let’s say though, that they just need a paradigm. It seems to work. It fits all the data. The courts, the government and the school systems all agree that it fits the data, in America and Europe, as well as all over the world. The universities, the museums and the labs all agree that it fits. If something better comes along then perhaps it will be replaced. This is only problematic if the paradigm does not fit. Currently it is universally agreed that it fits very well.
Newton’s revelations were not all proven completely wrong. He set us on the right path and the understanding progressed. He was not condemned or ridiculed, but celebrated as Einsteins understandings took us even further. His contribution was amongst the most significant in history. Darwin shares a similar position. Perhaps Gould’s punctuated equilibrium will ammend some ideas about Darwinism and will take us forward. I think this is a real possibility, but even if this is the future of our understanding, it is pasted all over his website and in his memory that Gould was a Darwinist with a slightly different take, but a Darwinist without doubt.
1) The issue at hand is macroevolution. In order to support macroevolution, it must be backed up by evidence. Here are some facts that you have repeatedly failed to respond to:
–As Oxford University and U of Mass. biologists Lynn Margulis points out, not a single biologists can come up with a single unambiguous example of a new species emerging through an accumulation of mutations. Your response to this (correct me if I am wrong) is to propose your own example. Nick, this just wont do by any reasonable standards of rational discourse.
–The fossil record clearly demonstrates that new species emerge suddenly and with no evidence of any ancestors. I have cited expert after expert as to this fact. If these quotes are taken out of context, you need to reinsert them into what you feel is the correct context. This does not mean merely inserting the quote into additional text, it means telling us what is the larger context. You have not inserted any of these quotes into what you feel is the correct context.
2) Once again, Nick, if atheist biologist number one (Richard Dawkins) cannot cite a single example of a genetic mutation or evolutionary process shown to increase the information in the genome (in either the interview or his written reply afterwards), why should anyone take your example seriously. Why should I spend my valuable time investigating nylonase flavobacterium when a prominent atheist biologist cannot cite any examples? Do you know more about this subject than Dawkins?!
3) Fossils appearing fully formed means that there is no trace of any ancestors to the fossils in the fossil record. You can still believe that macroevolution occurs, but there is no evidence in the fossil record. What then is the evidence supporting macroevolution? To quote the late great Harvard University paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould in a 1977 issue of Natural History, “the extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology — we fancy ourselves as the only true students of life’s history, yet to preserve our favoured account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we never see the very process we profess to study.” Yes, Nick, he said “never.” When Gould says “our favored account of evolution by natural selection” he is describing what is the “cultural context” (to use Margulis’ words) prevalent in biological circles.
In the Cambrian, we go from single celled organisms to all of the major phyla in a “blink of the eye” in geologic terms. How can any reasonable person believe that, in light of this fact, a gradual process of random mutation and natural selection can be behind it? It boggles the imagination.
Nick, museums provide a presentation of the dominant paradigm. If you were to view museums in the 19th century, you would have seen a presentation of, for example, the miasma theory (also called the miasmatic theory), which held that diseases such as cholera, chlamydia or the Black Death were caused by a miasma (ancient Greek: “pollution”), a noxious form of “bad air.” Do you suppose that a museum’s or a diagram’s presentation of the theory that “bad air” explains diseases provides evidence for that theory? Of course not… you seem to believe that what is presented in museums and diagrams is evidence.
Also regarding museums, please read this article by MIT physicist Gerald Schroeder. Key excerpt:
“The British Natural History Museum in London had an entire wing devoted to the evolution of species. And what evolution do they demonstrate? Pink daisies evolving into blue daisies; small dogs evolving into big dogs; a few species of cichlid fish evolving in a mere few thousand years into a dozen species of cichlid fish. Very impressive. Until you realize that the daisies remained daisies, the dogs remained dogs and the cichlid fish remained cichlid. It is called micro-evolution. This magnificent museum, with all its resources, could not produce a single example of one phylum evolving into another. It is the mechanisms of macro-evolution, the change of one phylum or class of animal into another that has been called into question by these data.”
The following bold text is an excerpt from Oxford University mathematician John Lennox’s book God’s Undertaker. Has Science Buried God?
Evolutionist Derek Ager admits: “It must be significant that nearly all the evolutionary stories I learned as a student, from Trueman’s Ostrea/Gryphaea to Carruthers’Zaphrentis delanouei, have now been ‘debunked’. Similarly, my own experience of more than twenty years looking for evolutionary lineages among the Mesozoic Brachiopoda has proved them equally elusive.”[35] Museums once featured Australopithecus africanus as an ancestor to humans—A. africanus includes “Mrs Ples“ (now thought to be a small “Mr Ples”) and the Taung child (Dawkins pp. 189–193). Donald Johanson, the discoverer of ‘Lucy’, places Australopithecus africanus in a side-branch not leading to man[36] and many museums have now demoted this once certain human ancestor to a non-ancestor. As we saw above, Charles Oxnard is one of several experts who do not believe that any of them were on the human line, contrary to what Dawkins told Wendy Wright. However, museums will not remove all the australopithecines, like they should; this is because their displays of ‘human evolution’ will collapse without them.”
The problem that macroevolution has with the fossil record goes far beyond just gaps. Nobody should expect the fossil record to be seamless. The problem is that it provides nothing but gaps. People such as George Gaylord Simpson can try to fill those gaps with “extrapolation and inference,” but that is not evidence… it is extrapolation and inference. The fossil record cannot even IN PRINCIPLE support macroevolution. Evolutionary biologist and paleontologist Henry Gee (senior editor of the science journal Nature) said it best (in 1999): “No fossil is buried with its birth certificate. That, and the scarcity of fossils, means that it is effectively impossible to link fossils into chains of cause and effect in any valid way…To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bedtime story—amusing, perhaps even instructive, but not scientific.” Again, Nick, NOT A SCIENTIFIC HYPOTHESIS THAT CAN BE TESTED. Only extrapolated and inferred so as to fit a worldview.
What then can be cited as evidence for macroevolution?! You say that the “whole of science” agrees with macroevolution. Nick, your problem is that you persistently confuse a paradigm with evidence. Did the scientific community’s endorsement of the “bad air” theory of disease provide convincing proof of that theory? No, of course not, it just demonstrated that “bad air” was the dominant paradigm at the time for explaining certain diseases.
Yes, inserting all of the citations I provide into what you feel is a larger context would be a huge task, as you suggest. You can start by inserting A SINGLE ONE OF THEM into a larger context. You haven’t done that. Rather you have just added additional text to one of them.
4) You are confident that Dawkins could give better examples. Then please proceed to provide them. He wrote several books on the issue? Then that is all the more reason that he should have been able to provide an example in either the interview or in his written reply. Yes, I read Dawkins entire article over several times. It is clear that his written reply does not produce a reply to the question, “Can you cite an example of a genetic mutation or evolutionary process shown to increase the information in the genome?” Downs syndrome provides such an example? The why doesn’t Dawkins mention it? Here is why: As this articlefrom the Mayo Clinic points out:
“Most of the time, Down syndrome isn’t inherited. It’s caused by a mistake in cell division during the development of the egg, sperm or embryo.”
“Translocation Down syndrome is the only form of the disorder that can be passed from parent to child. However, only about 4 percent of children with Down syndrome have translocation. And only about half of these children inherited it from one of their parents.”
“When translocations are inherited, the mother or father is a balanced carrier of the translocation, which means he or she has some rearranged genetic material, but no extra genetic material. A balanced carrier has no signs or symptoms of Down syndrome, but he or she can pass the translocation on to children.” (italics added) That’s right, NO EXTRA GENETIC MATERIAL.
5) Why should genetic limits inhibit macroevolution? Because it means that a species can only adapt to its environment within certain limits. This prevents a new species from emerging. Once again, not a single biologist can come up with a single unambiguous example of a new species emerging from an accumulation of mutations. This is one reason that scientists form elite universities have to hold secretive meetings to discuss “post-Darwinain” research. What is meant by genetic limits?
“Take a look at Darwin’s observation of the changes in finches. Isolated in the Galapagos Island, Darwin discovered finches that had much longer beaks than those found off the island. His assumption was that evolution was changing this species. However, these finches remained finches. Princeton professor Peter Grant completed an 18 year study of the finches on this island. He concluded that during drought years, the finches with shorter beaks died off because with a limited supply of seeds, only those that could reach the grubs living under tree bark could survive. With limited resources on a small island, these finches could not migrate to find food. We clearly observe natural selection, but not macro-evolution. However, it is not a permanent change. The finch offspring with shorter beaks prospered during seasons of plenty. Natural adaptation is the function of micro-evolution. There are three plainly observable principles to micro-evolution. 1. A trait will alter because of a stimulus. 2. The trait will return to the norm if left to nature or returned to its original conditions. 3. No new information is added to the DNA.”
Darwin used breeding of the rock pigeon as a basis for his theory that gradual changes in species will evolve into new species. All pigeons are descendents of the rock pigeon. This pigeon is the same pigeon that can be found in most city parks. Through selective breeding, Darwin was able to produce many drastic variations of pigeons. He observed very rapid changes in traits that he could alter by this selective breeding and concluded that if he could make these changes within a few generations of pigeons, in time a new species of bird would develop. There are several flaws with this theory. 1. His intervention was the trigger for these various breeds. It did not occur naturally. 2. When left alone, his pigeons returned back to the ancestral rock pigeon within a few generations. If his theory were valid, they should have continued their ascent. 3. Darwin never lived to see that there was a natural barrier that slowed changes after a few generations and eventually reached a stopping point.
“Change can be rapid when leaving the ‘norm’, but slows and eventually stops as the ‘ceiling’ is reached. There is a limit to the number of combinations a specific trait can have. Another good example of this comes from the book, ‘How Now Shall We Live’. 150 years ago, sugar cane farmers committed to increasing the sugar content in their sugar beets. At the time the project began, sugar content was at 6%. Through selective cross-pollination, within a few generations of beets the sugar content soared to 13%. Over the next 75 years these growers were able to inch the sugar content up to 17%. Now, 75 years after they were able to achieve the 17% barrier, the sugar beet remains at 17%. This is a clear example of the DNA code barrier that limits the variation of a specific trait. This example shows the same principle that Darwin unknowingly discovered. Rapid change, then slow change followed by no change.”
6) So you respond to the point made by one of the most important philosophers of science (Popper) that Darwinism is not testable by merely asserting that it is testable? Who do you think that is going to satisfy?
Please tell us how Darwinism can be tested. I would be interested to hear.
This is not just about Margulis. It is about multitude of other experts who I have cited (please don’t make me recycle the quotes). If you want to say that Darwinism is true instead of neo-Darwinism, then you are stuck with explaining the lack of gradualness in the fossil record. When Margulis declares herself to be a Darwinist, we are then left wondering why. I will tell you why in her own words: “…people are always more loyal to their tribal group than to any abstract notion of ‘truth’ – scientists especially. If not they are unemployable. It is professional suicide to continually contradict one’s teachers or social leaders.”
7) Please do refute this.
“It fits the data?” (as you say). Nick, just what data would that be?! Emission theory or extramission theory is the proposal that visual perception is accomplished by rays of light emitted by the eyes. This used to be the dominant paradigm. The fact that it was the dominant paradigm shows that it was the dominant paradigm, not that it was an adequate explanation.
No, Newton was not completely wrong. And neither was Darwin. He clearly got the microevolution part right.
Yes Gould was a Darwinist. That means that he feels Darwin provided a piece of the puzzle, but not that he felt Darwinism was adequate.
Nick, why don’t I make this my “closing argument” and you can make your next comment your “closing argument.” I just think that we are going in circles here and that we are not getting anywhere. You clearly want to believe in macroevolution even though there is no support for it. That is fine, I don’t think I can stop you from believing in something that you want to believe in.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8Vn35Ybr90
…Lol. Just a joke
Nick,
For the record, I have a full time job and other responsibilities. If you want to infer victory when I don’t respond as quickly as you are able to, that is fine with me. But, for future reference, my lifestyle dictates that there will sometimes be long period between replies.
Scott
First off, for the record, I apologise for the joke. I thought it a mild bit of humour that wouldn’t be too offensive. It is a bear dancing, not anything course. Of course I respect the fact that you have time constraints, I would be entirely unreasonable if I were to criticise you for this and I certainly do not. It is admirable how you maintain and reply to those on your site. I will admit that it was a prompt in search of a reply. I do not think this to be too improper. It is reasonable to prompt for a reply sometimes if desired. To become indignent or rude would be another matter, but I intended to be neither of these things. So, apologies. If you have time constraints, there is no criticism from me whatsoever, but I think a prompt is sometimes legitimate to find out the reason for a missing response in whatever circumstance (not just on this website).
I will reply to your other comment, but not tonight.
You level an awful lot of accusations at me in this answer, as well as questions and challenges. It is hard not to reply to your comments here. You wish to make this your closing statement on macroevolution. I am not sure whether it is or is not. If I were to reply to all of your comments here, I would say there is a chance that you would wish to respond.
Perhaps we have been going round in circles, I’m not sure. I find myself confused as to how a rational person can not accept the idea of evolution. You have proven yourself to be reasonable and willing to change on previous occasions, albeit after much resistance (but there is nothing wrong with that), such as the Kirk Durston paper and by giving Attenborough a proper chance.
I just find myself a little confused at the situation.
I would be curious to ask a couple of questions with regards to evolution. Do you think that your views, which seem to be in accordance with intelligent design, should be taught to children? With your outlook on evolution, are you seeking to try to understand it if there are challenges to your understanding, or are you just seeking to promote your ideas about evoloution?
You have levelled many challenges at me in your previous answer, including the idea that there is no data to support Darwin, that I am guilty of creating my own baseless data, as well as accusing me of failing to acknowledge your challenges, ‘that the fossil record cannot even IN PRINCIPLE support macroevolution’, that no examples of genetic novelty are found in nature and many other challenges and questions.
There have been many instances where data brought up has simply been dismissed or even ignored. If you would like to see the data you have persistantly denied exists and challenge me to bring up in your comment, it can be brought to light. I don’t think that you actually want to acknowledge this data, which is why you repeatedly deny it exists.
There are 7 points in the last discussion which could each be extensively answered at length and in great detail, providing all the data that you do not wish to see. I will leave it up to you whether you want to see this data or not, but I will respond to the single issue of your Dawkins stumped video. This covers points 2 and 4, which are basically the same topic. I have chosen this point because it is a challenge that you put to me, so I am meeting it and because you have accused me of making things up in attempts to answer this problem, which I have not.
I will post the response to these 2 points on your evolution page, as we are on the wrong page here for the topic and to save space. This leaves points 1,3,5,6,7 all unanswered in detail and I will leave them for the moment. I think that one of these points alone would be long enough to write several books of evidence on. I’m not sure whether I will answer the rest of these points, but I felt the need to at least answer one in detail, to show that I am not fabricating responses and that the data I talk of indeed exists. I’m not sure whether you will accept this data or not, but I will be very surprised if you think it is false or wrong.
Yes Nick, I wish to see this supposed data. Please re-ask any questions that you feel I have not answered so that I don’t have to go scrolling through a bunch of comments.
Nick, you seem to have a peculiar habit of asserting that there is support for your views, but then not following through and producing it. You also seem to have the peculiar habit of responding to experts that I cite with empty assertions. For example, I cited two people (a very famous philosopher of science, and a prominent biologist) who say that macroevolution is not even scientifically testable. You response was something to the effect of “yes it is testable.”
By any reasonable standard of rational discourse, this is just plain insufficient. It is necessary for you to make some sort of case for it being testable.
Another example of your assertion-in-lieu-of-an-argument habit is your failure to put even one of the supposed “out of context” quotes that I have provided back into what you feel is the correct context (not just greater text).
I have answered this point on the evolution page with regards to this sugestion of unsubstantiated assertions.
Replying to this point on that page, is it fair to say that I have satisfactorily answered the points 2 and 4 about Dawkins’ stumped video with substantiated evidential proof?
Nick,
Please copy and paste for me points 2 and 4 about the Dawkins’ stumped video and your answer. I have a lot of “points 2 and 4″ with all the comments that come in. Please view this multi-part video by evolutionary biologist and mathematician David Berlinski regarding Darwinian evolution.
My favorite clip is this one titled Head Scratching Mathematicians. Many mathematicians, including John Von Neumann, one of the greatest of the 20th century, declared that Darwinian evolution is mathematically not possible. Von Neumann “laughed at” Darwiniain evolution. Fred Hoyle, from Cambridge University, was another such mathematician, although Berlinski doesn’t mention him in this video. Hoyle dismisses Darwinian evolution in his book Mathematics of Evolution.
Another favorite clip is this one. The vast majority of mutations are harmful. Scientists have a very hard time finding beneficial mutations.
This clip supports what I said about widespread acceptance of Darwinism as a psychological and sociological phenomenon.
This clip describes what I was talking about when I mentioned “genetic limits” constraining evolution, thereby erecting a barrier between micro and macro evolution. It also describes how computer simulations have been unable to replicate Darwinian evolution despite the fact that they should very easily be able to do so.
Please also read my new “snippet” titled Why Darwinian Evolution Can’t Be Cited As Evidence Against God.
Here are points 2 and 4 as you have answered them in your previous post. You go on to talk about Down Syndrome in point 4 but I have not pasted that, as there are another 2/3 paragraphs. I have answered this point in detail with substantiation and evidence at the bottom of the evolution page. It is the last post on the page so is easy to find and includes a peer reviewed paper, as well as testimony from biologists. I have stuck to this single issue. I can copy/paste it here, but I thought I’d defer to that other page, as the space seems to have run out here, plus that is the appropriate page for the topic. I will read your snippet. I think that, that is something that I have said all along. Darwin does not eliminate the possibility of God. In fact I recently read you making the point that Dawkins says that a case can be made for a Deistic God, and you are correct in saying this.
2) Once again, Nick, if atheist biologist number one (Richard Dawkins) cannot cite a single example of a genetic mutation or evolutionary process shown to increase the information in the genome (in either the interview or his written reply afterwards), why should anyone take your example seriously. Why should I spend my valuable time investigating nylonase flavobacterium when a prominent atheist biologist cannot cite any examples? Do you know more about this subject than Dawkins?!
4) You are confident that Dawkins could give better examples. Then please proceed to provide them. He wrote several books on the issue? Then that is all the more reason that he should have been able to provide an example in either the interview or in his written reply. Yes, I read Dawkins entire article over several times. It is clear that his written reply does not produce a reply to the question, “Can you cite an example of a genetic mutation or evolutionary process shown to increase the information in the genome?” ‘
Here are the key excerpts from the Mayo Clinic article about Down Syndrome:
“Most of the time, Down syndrome isn’t inherited. It’s caused by a mistake in cell division during the development of the egg, sperm or embryo.”
“When translocations are inherited, the mother or father is a balanced carrier of the translocation, which means he or she has some rearranged genetic material, but no extra genetic material.”
I am not sure how you have refuted this.
Nick, I just watched the Ken Miller Nylonase video that you linked me to. Miller says that this new enzyme “evolved from junk DNA…. flipping around of the genetic material.” This is exactly what I was talking about with regard to Dawkins’ reply to his “stumped” video. Dawkins talks about how the useful information content of the genome can be increased by rearranging junk DNA so as to make it into useful DNA. However, he does not show how the total genetic CAPACITY of the genome can increase. In other words, the genetic information in the genome can be rearranged so that there is more useful DNA and less junk DNA. But Dawkins does not show how the total capacity of information in the genome (useful and junk combined) can be increased. Your nylonase example therefore is just another example of the rearrangement of already existing genetic capacity, NOT an example of an increase in capacity.
P.S. True Science and True Religion (correctly understood )never contradict each other. Both reveal Truth but of different kinds. Truth is One. There is no contradiction between the Genesis account of creation and the scientific truths that have been established as fact. Science is simply the discovery by men about how God does things. As Issac Newton once said: “There are two books, the book of nature and the scriptures”. Both reveal Truth about God.
Roger
Define “CORRECTIVELY UNDERSTOOD”
When is anything correct,if everything is interpreted to suit one’s inclinations,beliefs and disbeliefs.Flawed beings wishing to believe in flawed GODS.
Actually 95% of science has no impact on religion. Religion cares not if water is H20 or H30. What is certain is that we must ask why science works at all in a universe if it is only physical matter and energy. Do we believe Hawking that the Laws of Science are sacrosanct creating themselves and then the universe out of nothing? Or do we agree with Oxford Nobel Prize scientist (&atheist) sir Peter Medawar,’That there is indeed a limit upon science is made very likely by the existence of questions that science cannot answer & that no conceivable advance of science would empower it to answer It is not to science, but to metaphysics, imaginative literature or religion that we must turn for answers to questions having to do with first and last things.’
Look people, if you dont believe there is a God then you should be reading an article entitled “reasons God is not real.” rather then argue the point that we just simultaneously appeared on this earth. not believing in a God is taking a bigger chance than believing in a God, at least if you have faith in your religion you have something to fall back on, whereas not believing at all just plummets you into a free fall because you believe we just rot in the ground that is your problem not mine, so stop arguing your veiw points like we care if you want to know about Jesus Christ, thats one thing but argue he isnt real, thats another so go figure out whats going to happen to you when you die instead of giving your best efforts to corrupt people all you show is that there will never be any peace between anyone because of people like you and your ignorance. Remember The Two Pillars of ‘political Correctness’ are:
A)Willful ignorance
B)A steadfast refusal to face the truth
I am years younger than you and you have a imbecilic reason not to believe, at age 16 I have more faith in my God than you do in anything concerning your life. Of course it comes naturally when you believe that after you die you just fade away like a dislocated apparatus, so come back when you have a more stable argument, wait, no don’t come back on this site go somewhere else to spread false knowledge.
Jon Coleman Allen
What truths do you know? Should you not hear the arguments from both sides before stating your convictions? Or flippantly dismiss arguments as false knowledge, the ones that don’t agree with yours? I don’t think anyone is trying to strip people of their faith, just evaluating the validity of both sides of the argument, or the purported evidence. I think Scott appreciates the arguments as they either strengthen his, or encourage him to revise them accordingly.
I was replying to Jon, not you Scott. See Jon’s comments, particularly the last one.
Jon Coleman Allen
Wow, you must have been out of breath after writing that diatribe. You didn’t even pause to re-read what you posted, you just spewed it all out there.
Let’s examine the “points” you try and make:
1. “Not believing in god is taking a bigger chance than believing in god because then you have something to fall back on.” So your belief in god is a bit of a gamble, predicated on an extremely selfish motive that “you want to have something to fall back on.” And here was I thinking you believed in god so you could serve him and spread light and joy into the world!
2. “all you show is that there will never be any peace between anyone because of people like you and your ignorance.” No, Jon, the main reason there’s no peace in the world is because of religion. Fanatical idiots like you who believe that their imaginary friend is more important than the muslim’s imaginary friend, or the jew’s imaginary friend and so on. Even within religions like the Sunnis and the Shi’ites, massacring wach other in the name of religion. Do you even know who these people are? Shia and Sunni were two of the sons of the prophet Muhammad who moved to take power when he died. And now their adherents massacre each other in a desperate and futile effort to prove who’s right. How’s your peace looking now?
3. Wilful ignorance and steadfast refusal to face the truth – yup, that’s you. But we tolerate your ignorance and applaud your ability to believe in the complete absence of evidence. Just please don’t call people imbeciles, OK?
Mike,
Even if you don’t believe in God and have a personal vendetta against capitalizing the word, when quoting someone, you should type his or her quote exactly as it appeared in his or her original post (unless, of course, you have parenthetical additions). Come on, man.
I think both sides have good arguments, but with the Big Bang theory all but proven in this modern world, it is a lot more philosophical (in my opinion) to believe that there is no God (which requires a belief in an eternal Universe) than it is to believe in a God. Like has been said before, each is a leap of faith; however, believing in SOMETHING, and therefore believing that the Universe was created, follows the Laws of Physics much more easily. The Universe is clearly within the realm of time …… you and I cannot return to any moment in our respective pasts as if it were the present. So, it is a valid restriction for our world to require a creator. God, on the other hand (if He exists), would NOT be in the realm of time, obviously (if He created the Universe and therefore the realm of time, then He would not be bound by its laws). If you do not want to believe in God, that is fine; there are plenty of solid arguments on each side. But do not use the “who created God?” question or the “well, if God is eternal, then it’s just as reasonable to think that the Universe is eternal” argument, because those just are not logical.
Bingo. The idea of an eternal universe has been completely disproven. If this assertion I have just made is wrong, then Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity (which has proven accurate to 5 decimal places) and the Big Bang are wrong.
So here is what we are left with: 1) Either the universe or God is eternally existent and therefore does not require an explanation. 2) Since the universe has been proven to be finite, and to have had a definite beginning, we know through the process of elimination that God is eternally existent.
The above is rather simplistic account, so readers hoping for a more in-depth exploration of this topic are encouraged to read Robert Spitzer’s book New Proofs for the Existence of God.
How does the ‘new’ atheism differ from the ‘old’? Firstly, whereas the old atheism recognised itself as a philosophy of absurdity or despair, the new atheism rides a wave of scientific optimism (into a brickwall, perhaps?).
Philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) was more honest than most when he wrote:That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms…on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built’. Russell reduces our hopes, fears, loves and beliefs — all our mental experiences, in fact — to accidental atomic interactions. The logical result is ‘unyielding despair’.
I just wonder if any atheist here has ever thought his worldview through to its logical conclusions? Here’s Sam Harris’s honest attempt to put atheism in its true perspective:
“We seek pleasant sights, and sounds, and tastes, and sensations, and attitudes. We satisfy our intellectual curiosities, and our desire for friendship and romance. but our pleasures are, by their very nature, fleeting. And we can do nothing more than merely reiterate them as often as we are able. If we enjoy some great professional success, our feelings of accomplishment remain vivid and intoxicating for about AN HOUR.” Then What?
Tiny little meanings then within a paradigm of meaninglessness? Does that equate to “intellectual fulfilment”, Richard Dawkins?
Now this despair doesnt prove God exists but it does ask why the disbeliever would want to waste his ever diminishing life debating a topic that he just lack belief in? Can I suggest that atheism in the 21st century is taking on all the trappings of becoming a ‘religion’ in its own right or should I say an ir-religion because
it is now a well organised, well funded & resourced, worldwide
institution. It is well led by outspoken celebrities and
academics, via radio, TV & internet. It actively seeks to spread its
‘superior’ worldview while worshipping at the altar of science
not realising its core assertions are mostly faith based; it vigorously
defends its opinions on human experience, spirituality, ethics,
morality, politics. It typically has its own symbols & rituals, seeks
donations, membership & converts. Not surprisingly, it arrogantly
proclaims its superior worldviews. AN last but not least, it has a dimension of
myth if it believes that “The laws of nature first created
themselves and then created the universe out of nothing” (Stephen Hawking)
I am presently creating a youtube video on this topic expanding on proofs for
these observations.
Unfortunately, Dashan, the idea that atheism leads to despair is not relevant to the debate. Even if all atheists were suicidal, this does not make theism more probable, only more preferable.
There is also no way to call atheism a religion. It has no scriptures, it has no Church, it has no official leaders, it barely has a centralized view. God doesn’t exist- but otherwise the spectrum goes from the Dalai Lama through to Richard Dawkins.
If atheists have symbols and mythologies, I’d like to see them. This would be most interesting. I am certainly not aware of an ‘anti-cross’ or anything similar.
“The fact that a believer is happier than a sceptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.”
– G.B. Shaw
I agree with this site, except my theory of god is somewhat simpler (basically, not as long)
I believe there’s a god, which is why we’re here. You’d have to be an idiot to think that we ended up here by complete accident, and managed to somehow develop our brains to such a level to create the computer you’re sitting at.
I believe that there is plenty of god evidence – the reason why people don’t find it so easily is because god isn’t boastful, and he doesn’t hold his head up high. That makes him so much more respected in the heavens.
So, he says ‘seek me and you will find me’ because god is not about getting the most amount of people to him, but more about getting people who he can trust, and who he will love and they will love in return.
Simples :)
Rose:
I wrote an essay that makes a point similar to yours. You may want to check it out: “If God Is There, Why Doesn’t He Just Show Himself?”
I would be careful about calling atheists idiots….many of them are highly intelligent people. The problem is that high intelligence does not guarantee objectivity. Indeed, intelligence can be used to distort as easily as it can be used to clarify.
Scott
A questioner asked Bill Craig on youtube if God needed miracles to identify himself 2000yrs ago why dont we see any today. Bill Craig replied what sort of miracle or evidence would u deem suitable for such a task? Writing on a cloud?
Certainly life’s experience as a father and grandfather is all the proof I need. Now we have modern science showing that Naturalism is a very poor recource for those who deny design and fine-tuning as an act of an Intelligent Designer.
Craig quotes Barrow & Tipler who have calculated that there are 12 steps for life to come from non-life, each of which is so unlikely if driven by chance that the sun would have burnt out many times over before life emerged. So if Evolution is true it is actually a MIRACLE that is compelling evidence for divine creation.
I am an individual that has recently come to believe in God. Previously I was a science believer 100%. If you cannot prove it then it does not exist.
However if research is carried out at a deeper level then many of the scientific theories that are held up as evidence of there being no God are filled with gaps in knowledge. What happens in these scenarios? Another scientific theory is created to fill these gaps.
An example of this is “black matter”. Physicists could not provide evidence of enough matter to hold the universe together. So miraculously black matter is created and they have their hidden ingredient. Where is their evidence that dark matter exists, do we have somewhere in the world a little vial of dark matter that finally disproves the creation of the universe by natural laws and random flukes. No we don’t.
As a Christian I believe in God and that he created me and all things around me.
As a scientist I would believe faithfully in scientific theories mathematical calculations and the creation of all that surrounds me by chemical reactions and application of heat and pressure over millions of years.
People world wide now say they have no religion and a common expression is that “science has killed God”. I would say that science has become a religion in its own right and that in its efforts to disprove our God has not only created the arrogance of scientific human beings in that they can explain everything, but is in the process of creating a God of its own.
It is all made much more simple if we do not take every line of text in the bible as an encyclopaedic record of what has been. It is a poetic and human account of why we are, and who we are in all of our frailties. Therefore:
God is the Why?
Science is the How?
Scott NM
• Oxford Nobel Prize scientist (&atheist) sir Peter Medawar,’That there is indeed a limit upon science is made very likely by the existence of questions that science cannot answer & that no conceivable advance of science would empower it to answer It is not to science, but to metaphysics, imaginative literature or religion that we must turn for answers to questions having to do with first and last things.
• We only have 2 choices: an immaterial, non-contingent, all powerful reality we call God designed our rationally intelligible universe, or u believe it was magically built by numbers. Relativity, quantum mechanics & all scientific laws are defined by universal immutable complex & abstract math’ formulae. The Atheist then must explain how such immaterial, absurdly complex realities like maths emerged in a world consisting only of matter & energy.
When we die is that it?
Just imagine if when you were a baby in the womb you were able to hold a conversation with your mother floating there in the warm darkness with no other reality that what surrounds you.
If your mother was to start talking to you, and began explaining to you the truth of what lay ahead what would you think.
There will be the pain of birth , the bright light, then you will find yourself in a different universe surrounded by your family in a world of smells taste colours and touch. To the baby in the womb this reality would be as far fetched as any suggestion to any one of us today regarding what awaits us in heaven or the afterlife. Indeed who would the baby think the voice was? God? He has no idea of what a mother is he knows his black warm floating reality. Nothing else.
Take things forward as few or as many years after birth as you care to. Can anyone of any age post an accurate description of what life in the womb was like? Can we remember what the trauma of birth was like?
No obviously we cannot but does this mean that neither of these things were part of our existence on the way to where we are now?
The truth is that what we believe makes life in the present more bearable and it helps explain our reality and our reason for being, science or faith. Religion also has the added boon of setting down a good set of rules that can make us better people. The decline in religion in our modern world has certainly done nothing to improve the morality or the decency of society.
Science has done more harm than religion ever will to the global population.
So why doesn’t god just show himself? Could it be because he’s some kind of tricky task-master determined to make us behave well and not be evil, in order to get everlasting rewards if we follow the (admittedly highly confusing and often contradictory) rules? If so he must be an extraordinarily shallow and insecure kind of supreme being. And if so, how do we explain the unspeakable evil performed in his name over millennia and continuing to this day? If being godly means being good (or at least not being evil) then it doesn’t really work.
And what about the existence of fantastic good works and the absence of evil in atheists? It makes no sense. Unless there really is no god, or gods, or deities of any kind, living in the magic invisible kingdom in the sky. Then it makes perfect sense.
All I ask is for one tiny teensy believable verifiable incontrovertible piece of evidence that god does exist. I promise not to try and barge into heaven and I will die a happy and chastened man. But there is no such evidence is there? Not even a bit. Oh well.
Why doesn’t God show himself? Please read my post entitled, “If God is there, why doesn’t he just show himself?”
The absence of evil in atheists? Quite the contrary…atheists (in the form of the officially atheist communists) are responsible for FAR FAR FAR more killing than all religious groups combined. I demonstrate this in my post entitled “Doesn’t religion cause killing?”
Fantastic “magical kingdom in the sky?” The fact that there is a supernatural reality is demonstrated by the fact that the Standard Big Bang Model states that, prior to the cosmological event known as the “Big Bang,” there was no natural world. Not only was there no matter, but there was no space, no time, no energy. How then could the natural world arisen except from the supernatural?
Please read the post entitled “Is there a God? (What is the chance that the world is the result of chance?)” and then write back to justify your assertion that “there is no such evidence.”
Mike you miss the point completely. Like you I used to think “if God is so good then why does he let so many bad things happen”.
And yes many atrocities are committed in God’s name but that does not mean God is responsible.
You need to look at it from a different perspective. I have three children, perhaps you have too. All that I know is that I teach them right from wrong, and give them what I believe to be good morals and a sound base of knowledge to build their lives on.
However at the end of the day all three of my children are individuals and their personalities are completely different from one another. They will grow up to live their own lives,They have never belonged to me, I have just been given the job of protecting, feeding, guiding them and providing them with a set of rules that will hopefully make them better people, have positive effects on those around them and provide them with the opportunities to live happier lives.
This is the way I see God and his relationship with us. He has provided us with all of the raw ingredients to live happy and fruitful lives. He has provided us with a set of rules that if followed benefits not only our well-being but that of everyone around us. However like any parent with their children there is no ownership. We are free to choose what we want to do right or wrong good or bad. It is not Gods fault if people twist the words of the Bible/Koran/Torah etc to fit their own political goals.
I remember watching a documentary about Denis Nielson the serial killer. He was one of several siblings who were all raised in a good home with exactly the same moral code and belief system. But, he went on to become a serial killer. Religion is good, the message it preaches is love peace and honesty, self respect and respect of others. Anyone who deviates from this path, Ian Paisley, Osama Bin Laden and any other extremists out their are not religious. End of story. Anything taken to the 100th level of the extreme is a bad thing and religion is no different.
Finally, what worth would there be in having a faith if you never had the right to choose it or turn away. God has given us the free will to choose so that when we do he can be sure it is for the right reason, Love, and not simply because we have to because we have seen him and can prove 100% that he exists.
All I know is that since I started living my life around the rules of my faith my life has improved considerably both in the physical world and in the spiritual/psychological world. You should try reading some literature that argues for faith as well as against faith. You may be surprised what you discover.
Why are people who do not believe in God so eager to force their opinions on Christians anyway? If you don’t believe fair enough. I didn’t for a long time but I was perfectly happy to let others worship as they saw fit. It didn’t make me angry or offend me.
It seems to me that atheism is taking a swerve towards extremism itself. You just need to read a Dawkins novel to feel the hate. What is the problem? There is nothing anywhere in the bible that taken in context and allowing for the times that it was written that does not encourage understanding and love. That is the issue here, not whether we definatley know there is a God or not, but is the message and the rules it lays out beneficial. And I for one think we could do with less stealing, violence, adultery etc etc etc.
Scott, thanks for taking the time and effort to respond. I wish you had made a case or refuted any of my suggestions, but you didn’t and I understand why.
Good on you for believing in what you choose to even if its totally faith-based and without any evidence to support it. I’m pleased that choosing this path has made you happier, even if it’s a somewhat deluded state. I’m not being nasty – delusion is the belief in something in the absence of any evidence.
Why does god insist that we love him for “the right reasons”? What is the meaning of the term “god-fearing”? Is it possible the biblical novels are morality tales designed to make people behave better, by promising eternal riches and everlasting happiness if they do, and an eternity in damnation if they don’t? If you were going to make a up a story to try and control people’s behaviour, you have to admit (if you’re prepared to look at it objectively) that this would be a pretty good story to tell.
I’m not eager to force my opinions on anyone – who set up this website anyway? Certainly not me. I haven’t set up any websites called There is no God Evidence, even though it’s the case. Your worshipping and belief systems cause me no anger or offense, and I don’t know why you implied that they do. I’m a curious person with an enquiring mind, the ability to reason and a thirst for knowledge. My questions are legitimate, sincere and respectful – you need not fear them, only the light they throw on the crucial lack of any evidence whatsoever of any “gods”.
I completely agree that we can do with less stealing, violence and adultery and it may shock you to know that despite my absolute conviction that there is no god, I’ve never indulged in any of those acts. However I do know of countless examples of violence, rape, murder, stealing and torture committed by christians in god’s name, so I can’t escape the thought that perhaps religion and the belief in god is a bad thing. Please don’t be like the other Scott who tries to defend these well-documented facts (that continue to this day) by pointing to what he calls “state-sponsored atheism” supposedly used as a raison d’etre by such as Hitler and Stalin. It completely misses the point.
Currently reading New Proofs For The Existence of God by Robert J. Spitzer.
Hard going in bits with all of the cosmology and matter, energy stats but certainly worth a read.
Also read Mother Teresa In My Own Words 1910-1997. It is a collection of quotes and explanations of her beliefs. It is a prime example of what it means to be truly devoted to God and his love. A very humbling read and as relevant to modern life as it would have been in the 1st century. An atheist would perhaps see what good religion can do instead of concentrating on the negative aspects created by people who do not truly follow the will of God.
This is the same Mother Teresa that campaigned vociferously against the use of condoms, thus perpetuating the misery of AIDS and other STDs, not to mention unwanted and unaffordable pregnancies in the thousands if not millions?
The same Mother Teresa that wrote, in correspondence with her confessors and superiors over a period of 66 years, that for the last nearly 50 years of her life she felt no presence of god whatsovere, not in her heart or in the eucharist?
Is this the same will of god that commanded Abraham to sacrifice his first-born (or more likely second-born – the novels contradict each other in many places) son, to prove his love of god?
TO MikeD -(Never Read any of Teresa writings)The lack of the use of condoms is not to blame for the misery of AIDS and other STDs and therefore her stated campaign has no bases in ur points. It can, however, be stated the blame can be contribruted to not obeying God’s Law. i cannot attest that her campaigned coincides with the statues of God which proclam that we are to wait til marriage for intercouse and should not step outside the bountries of holy matrimony for sex. i could see her reasoning, If these rules where followed there would be no STDs. i also do not see the point of you stating she felt no presents of God the last 50 years of her life; did that take away from the wonderful things she did in the name of God. Her work started because of the presents she felt due to her faith in God and that ‘feeling’ didnt stop the work God started in her. many Bible indiviuals and even israel as a nation felt distance and seperation from God. Jesus himself felt total seperation from God.
-Re.Is this the same will of god that commanded Abraham to sacrifice his first-born?
yes the same will of God that illustrated the faith of Abraham, not only for generations past and present, but also to the angelic realm(good and evil). To put more trust in the creator then in his own intellectual reasoning. To put more trust in God then intellectual reasoning.
Brandon – thanks for your considered reply. It was hard to understand in places but I think I got there. Some points and questions for you.
1. I’ll decide what I choose to read, thanks very much. I do wonder though, why you want me to acknowledge the Albanian nun’s actions but not her own words?
2. Please explain the reasoning and evidence behind your statement to the effect that using condoms does not control the spread of AIDS and STDs. That’s exactly what they’re designed to do and they work pretty well but that’s only based on more than 100 years of hard evidence.
3. Whenever I ask why so many murders, rapes, torture, terrorism and other atrocities have been perpetrated in god’s name (and continue to this day), I’m told by people of your ilk that “god gave man the ability to choose their own actions.” If that’s the case then surely the Albanian nun also has the ability to choose what actions to take. How come “god started” the good works but he’s not responsible for all the bad and evil deeds perpetrated in his name? To be fair to you, that wasn’t a point you made in your posting, so maybe you agree that god is either responsible for all the things done in his name (both good and bad) or he’s responsible for none of them. You can’t have it both ways.
4. What kind of shallow insecure god would “test” the faith of one of his disciples by commanding him to murder his own son? What purpose could this possibly serve? Again, religion is full of hypocrisy – check the section on this site that says If god is real, why doesn’t he just show himself? The “answer” is that he’s so needy he wants us to love him just for him, in the complete absence of any evidence. He could easily prove his existence of course, but then we’d love, fear and obey him(/her/it) out of knowledge rather than faith, and apparently that would make his/her/its brain explode. In that case, why did he command Abraham to kill his son to “prove his faith”?
5. To put more trust in the “creator” than your own intellectual reasoning? That just illustrates your lack of intellectual reasoning – if you can’t work things out for yourself, keep on believing in that magic guy in the sky. Good luck with that.
God is not real, idiots !!
Everybody take notice! I absolutely love it when atheists resort to insults!
A person with a strong argument relies on their argument to make their case. But a person who realizes that their views cannot withstand scrutiny must turn to something else…such as insults.
Using insults is therefore a tacit acknowledgement that you are angry because you know that you cannot logically support your views.
Or, it could mean that in Junior’s considered opinion and in the absence of any evidence that there is a (real) god, anyone that believes there is a (real) god is an idiot. I’m not calling you an idiot of course, but if the funny hat fits…
Then the idiot hat must fit Einstein, Max Planck, Issac Newton, Charles Darwin and the multitude of Nobel Prize winning scientists that I cite…by your logic. Wow, you must be the smartest person EVER.
Perhaps we should contact the news media to alert them.
There is no absence of evidence, just an absence of evidence that can penetrate your perceptual filter. Here are a couple of pieces:
1) Recall from my “Is There A God?….” essay that astronomers who do not make theistic or deistic statements are becoming rare. Also recall, from this essay, the topic of anthropic fine tuning. Regarding this subject:
“…As [Nobel Prize winning physicist] Tony Hewish once remarked, the accuracy of just one of these parameters is comparable to getting the mix of flour and sugar right to within one grain of sugar in a cake ten times the mass of the sun.”
2) Recall from my “What It Boils Down To” essay that modern physics views matter as being rooted in consciousness….which is consistent with theism.
Once again, abundant evidence….just none that can make it through your perceptual filter because you are biased against God because you resent the idea of having a higher moral authority in power over you.
Scott, you seem very angry for some reason. Your attitude is that of a person aggrieved. I find this unusual because only a short time ago you were announcing to everybody that you love it when people call you an idiot, and I didn’t even do that.
I don’t think you’re an idiot at all, but you’re clearly misguided and obsessed with getting more brownie points from the big guy.
Constantly citing names of people you think believed in god is not, in fact, evidence of anything (other than your inability to produce any real, actual evidence), and means nothing. Pointing to other people’s essays, books, rarity and your interpretation of what they think alters nothing – there is still no evidence. It’s your perceptual filter that makes you believe in invisible magic people in the sky, in the face of all logic and absent any evidence.
Good on you! Blind faith is to be admired for its persistence if nothing else, as long as it doesn’t hurt anybody – except that religion has done so for over two thousand years, and continues to do. I’m not so keen on that, but it evidently causes you no sleepless nights – that perceptual filter must be set to “black-out”.
How amusing of you to think this has anything to do with resentment of an “idea about having a higher moral authority in power over me”. To be honest I don’t even know what that sentence is supposed to mean, you got your words pretty jumbled up there.
I don’t need a higher moral authority in power over me – and guess what Scott? Neither do you! I’m capable of forming my own opinions, making my own decisions and acting in the way that I (and the flesh-and-blood people that made our laws) have decided is best for me, my family, the society, country and world in which we live. You could do that too, if you cast aside your emotional crutches and got on with life. Call it a miracle if you like, though I take no credit. I’m just happy to help out a misguided well-intentioned person who’s clearly searching for the meaning of life. It ain’t what you think it is.
No anger…just exasperation and frustration.
OK. Let’s try to keep this discussion cool and rational. Here is some specific evidence. 1) The “anthropic fine tuning” of our universe (as presented in my “Is there a God..” essay) which shows that the emergence of our universe by chance is virtually impossible.
2) The majority of NDE experiencers report an encounter with a “personal God.” This is the conclusion of 30 years of research. 3) Modern physics has determined that matter is rooted in consciousness…suggesting a pre-existent consciousness. 4) Astronomers who do not draw theistic or deistic conclusions are becoming rare and the few remaining dissenters hint that the tide is against them.
What are your SPECIFIC replies to points 1, 2, 3, and 4? We have no choice but to take a failure to provide specific counter arguments as a tacit acknowledgement that you do not have any counter arguments.
So, to be clear, your rebuttal to this specific evidence is to declare that it is not “evidence.” Because I have pointed to other people’s quotations and books, my arguments must be discarded because I did not perform the science and research by myself. Am I correct that this is the substance of your argument? Or is there something I left out?
Are you attempting a radical redefinition of the term “evidence?” I accept the Oxford Dictionary definition of evidence: “The available body of facts or information indicating whether a belief or proposition is true or valid.” All of the 4 above items, and others at the site, fit this definition. What is your new and improved definition of the term “evidence?”
Are you saying that Christianity has caused more killing than atheism? I am afraid that you have that backwards. Atheism has been behind more killing than all of the world’s religions combined. See this post for details.
Blind faith?! Atheism requires far more faith than theism. Atheists believe that the universe and life exist because they are just “brute facts.” This takes a HUGE amount of faith.
Is a cosmos finely tuned for life (as presented in my “Is There A God…” essay) just a brute fact? Is the emergence of life from lifeless chemicals (which scientists admit has no scientific explanation, and never will–see here) a brute fact? If you believe such things, then that is your religious faith…good for you.
Please cite for me your evidence that the universe and life are just brute facts that need no explantation. You demand evidence, I give it to you and then you 1) declare that it is not evidence because you apparently have some radical new definition of the term “evidence” 2) fail to produce any evidence to support your view, but rather take it on BLIND FAITH and then 3) Insist that I am the one operating on blind faith.
…and a person with no argument points to other people’s arguments.
So I need to be unique in order to make a point?
Not at all; I’m still waiting for you to make an original one.
So, that would be a NO then.
Are you back to your argument that my reasoning can be dismissed because I did not come up with it all by myself? We’ll that certainly is an original argument. I guess you have me beat in the originality department.
OK, let’s be clear and rational. Your rules on this site about what constitutes abuse are conveniently twisted to suit your purpose, and your actions show hypocrisy, but never mind.
Re your “points” above:
1) Your opinion that anthropic fine tuning of the universe exists is only an opinion and not a fact. Your further opinion that such fine tuning of the universe proves anything is just an opinion, and not a very well thought out one. Your further assertion that it proves that the emergence of the universe by chance is virtually impossible is not evidence of anything. And by saying “virtually impossible” you admit that it is possible. So, no evidence there.
2) The “majority” of people with NDEs reporting an encounter with something that, in extremis and with a lack of oxygen and all sorts of chemical reactions happening in their brains, appears to be a “personal god” is not evidence of anything. If they took a photo of this god with their iPhone and brought it back, that might be evidence. If they brought back information about something they heard, saw or learned while they were near death, which was not otherwise known or could not be known, that might be evidence. Even you contradict yourself in many places by saying there’s no such thing as a personal god, more of an overall creator. Yet when you die you get your very own god – there must be around 8 billion of them, which is hardly likely, is it? So, still nothing that could remotely be called evidence. Need I go on? Oh, alright then, I am rather enjoying it – although I admit I expected more from someone of your professed intellect. Maybe you should widen your range of reading to include something of the real world.
3) Look Scott, I’ll be honest – I have no idea what that sentence is even supposed to mean, but any mumbo jumbo that only “suggests” a pre-existing consciousness is hardly evidence of anything. We’re looking for proof here, hard evidence. So, you’re 0 from 3. What’s next?
4) Wow, you’re really clutching at straws now! You believe that certain types of astronomers are becoming rare, and you believe that this evidence? Good luck getting that past your court of law – it doesn’t even come close to fitting your own definition of evidence. You want everyone to believe there’s a god (one god, many gods, 8 billion gods, I get confused) and seem to think that if all the astronomers think there’s a god then it will make it so. It won’t make it so Scott. If there is a god there would be evidence of it somewhere. Come on, the planet’s been here for 4.5 billion years – you’d think there would be ONE piece of evidence, but there’s nothing. Some of god’s DNA, a photo, an artefact, a message, something! But there’s nothing but blind faith from struggling souls looking to make sense of their miserable existence. Me, I’m enjoying my existence very much thank you, and never more so than over the past month or so, shooting down what passes for argument on your blog. Good bye.
1) It is interesting how you characterize anthropic fine tuning as “only an opinion and not a fact.”
“It is relatively unusual that a physical scientist is truly an atheist. Why is this true? Some point to the anthropic constraints, the remarkable fine tuning of the universe. For example, Freeman Dyson, a Princeton faculty member, has said, ‘Nature has been kinder to us that we had any right to expect.’”
–Physical scientist Henry F. Schaefer III, five-time nominee for the Nobel Prize, as quoted in his essay Stephen Hawking, the Big Bang, and God.
“A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.”
–Cambridge University astrophysicist and mathematician Fred Hoyle commenting on the incredible fine-tuning necessary for life to exist (as quoted in The Creator and the Cosmos by Hugh Ross).
“Had the original energy of the Big Bang explosion been less, the universe would have fallen back onto itself long before there had been time to build the elements required for life and to produce from them intelligent, sentient beings. Had the energy been more, it is quite possible that the density would have dropped too swiftly for stars and galaxies to form. These and many other details were so extraordinarily right that it seemed the universe had been expressly designed for humankind.”
–Owen Gingerich, former Research Professor of Astronomy and of the History of Science at Harvard University.
“Had the resonance level in the carbon been 4 percent lower, there would be essentially no carbon. Had that level in the oxygen been only half a percent higher, virtually all of the carbon would have been converted to oxygen. Without the carbon abundance, neither you nor I would be here now.”
“I am told that Fred Hoyle, who together with Willy Fowler found this remarkable nuclear arrangement, has said that nothing has shaken his atheism as much as this discovery.”
–Owen Gingerich, as above.
“There is for me powerful evidence that there is something going on behind it all. . . It seems as though somebody has fine tuned nature’s numbers to make the Universe. . . The impression of design is overwhelming.”
“It may seem bizarre, but in my opinion science offers a surer path to God than religion.”
–Physicist Paul Davies, winner of the 2001 Kelvin Medal issued by the Institute of Physics and the winner of the 2002 Faraday Prize issued by the Royal Society (amongst other awards).
Michael Turner, the widely quoted astrophysicist at the University of Chicago and Fermilab, describes the fine-tuning of the universe with a simile: “The precision is as if one could throw a dart across the entire universe and hit a bullseye one millimeter in diameter on the other side.”
Mike, if you think that anthropic fine tuning is just opinion and not fact, then you just go ahead and believe that….but you will not find a single physicist who does not acknowledge that things had to be just right within a very extremely narrow range for our universe to exist.
I use the term “virtually impossible” because it is impossible by the standards of any reasonable person. It is not completely impossible that Charlie Sheen could be declared to be the new pope by the Vatican sometime in the next 48 hours. But any reasonable person would declare this to be impossible, therefore it is “virtually impossible.”
2) The problem with your characterization of NDEs as the result of chemical/electrical activity in the brain is that there have been numerous cases where the NDE experiencer has detailed memory of events that happened when they had no brain activity whatsoever. In the BBC documentary “The Day I Died” (to which I provide a link in one of my essays) one such case study is presented. Pam Reynolds had all of the blood removed from her brain prior to surgery, yet she recalls minute details of what happened during her surgery. There are plenty of other such examples of awareness existing after complete cessation of brain activity and I will provide them at your request….just ask.
Further, there have been several cases where people who were born blind were able to see during there NDE. This event is very life changing for these people because they didn’t even know what it meant to “see” before their NDE.
Can you give a bunch of people a hallucinogenic drug and expect them to experience the same thing during their hallucination? Of course not, and that is why meeting a “personal God” cannot be labeled hallucination….far too many people have experienced the same thing. Hallucinations are too unique to the individual to have common experiential elements such as meeting a “personal God.”
3) You are still asserting that there is no evidence for God? You feel that evidence must come in the form of something material? Please recall what physicists are saying about the material world being a manifestation of consciousness (see my “What It All Boils Down To” essay. Are you going to assert that these physicists don’t know what they are talking about and that the material world is the only reality? Go right ahead…that is your religious belief.
Please remind me exactly which of my arguments you have “shot down.” Am I correct that you feel that the hypothesis that aliens brought life here in a spaceship (“directed panspermia”) shoots down creationism? Recall that this is the best that the atheist cream-of-the-crop (such as Richard Dawkins and Francis Crick) can come up with to explain the origin of life.
I can’t help noticing that you seem to find the idea that there is a God to be disturbing and offensive. You put a lot of emotion into your replies. Could you be one of the people described in my essay entitled “If the Evidence for God Is So Strong, Why Are So Many Smart People Unconvinced”?
If we accept a number of theories suggested, then does Satan exist? Does Buhda? Does Zeus? Does Isis? (I could go on but I think you get the point) Looking at the quotes from credible sources, (many scientists) although taken out of context and without regard for their situation (facing the consequences of Galileo in some circumstances) can the ‘term’ God be replaced with Satan, Buhda or any other deity and be as equally convincing? I find I am caught up in my own hypocrisy, celebrating Easter, Christmas and other Christian holidays without having faith. I respect the values that religion brings in terms of celebrating family and respecting civil laws but the condemnation of other religions or groups based on faith is beyond reproach. Thanks for the lively discussion, whether I believe in their point of view or not I’ve enjoyed the intelligent approach several individuals have expressed.
Does Satan exist? Yes. Does Buddha? Please recall that Buddha never made any claims to divinity…he only claimed to be a man. Buddhism is a non-theistic belief system. It neither accepts nor denies the existence of God. Rather, it simply has no comment.
Does Zues? Does Isis? Here, you fail to make the simple distinction betweeen a symbol and it’s object. Because the human mind can only barely scratch the surface of the reality of God, we rely on symbols such as “Zues” and “Isis” to communicate God’s reality.
Can the biblical “God” be replaced with another deity? Can the number “4″ be replaced with the Roman numeral “IV”?
Can the number “4″ be replaced with tally marks (“IIII”)? Of course it can. All of these are symbols representing the same reality.
The question is, which symbol best represents the reality which exists behind the symbol? I think you would agree that the Hindu/Arabic symbolic system (from which the number “4″ comes) is best because it gets hard to represent larger numbers with tally marks or Roman numerals. In a similar light, some symbols represent the reality of God better than others.
You say that you don’t have faith…but you clearly do. It may not be Christian faith, but you have some sort of faith. I suspect that it is atheist or agnostic. If you have an atheist faith, you believe that the universe “just is” (or a “brute fact” as the atheist philospher Bertrand Russell put it). Such a belief requires an enormous amount of faith considering what we know about the universe having a clear beginning (as I demonstrate in my post entitled “Isn’t the Universe Eternal?”…in the snippets section and in my post entitled “Is There A God? What is the Chance That the Universe Is the Result of Chance?”)
The physicist quotes are taken out of context? As I have reminded numerous other atheist commenters, when one claims that a statement is “taken out of context”, it then becomes necessary for that person to supply a convincing case for what the correct context is. If you cannot re-insert these statements into what you feel is the correct context, making “out of context” charges are empty and meaningless.
Furthermore, it is very difficult to take a categorical statement such as, “This mind is the matrix of all matter” out of context. In this example, did Planck really say, “….this mind is the matrix of all matter, just kidding”?
Or was he being held at gunpoint by a theist, perhaps….as well as the other physicists?
This is my view of some of the preceding auguments.
If one asks oneself or others, “Is there a ‘god’”? The asnwer must be “We do not know, so we cannot know, yet, whether god created the universe”
If one asks oneself or others, “Could the universe have been created without ‘god’”? The answer must be ” We do not know, so we cannot know, yet, whether the universe was always there in one form or another” It is possible that there may be more than one universe.
In my experiance proclaimations that state that ” any other way is impossible”, are likely to be proved wrong! To say that believers and non-believers have to be on one side or the other is to conform to a rule that someone made up! Do not conform to the proclamation of others! Use your own judgement and if you don’t know, be honest and say it! We may never know the answer, in the meantime do not let religious or non-religious gurus make money from their rantings. Do not be frightened by the existance or non-existance of god or satan. Their names were invented to do just that and to make people conform by threats of heaven or hell. If their is a god I think it would not be vindictive, that is a human trait. All the auguments as to whether god exists or not is but a grain of sand amongst all the matter of the universe, because we simply have no proof.
You say “do not conform to the proclamations of others.” But when you say that the answer to the question of God’s existence must be, “We do not know, so we cannot know,” you are yourself making a proclamation. Agnosticism (which you seem so subscribe to) is a belief system that says, “when it comes to God, we cannot know the truth.” But my question to agnostics is, “How can you know this?”
My statement heading was ‘This is my view of some of the preceding arguments’ clearly ‘my view’. I did not intend to make a proclamation and I’m sorry if you have that impression.
I believe you have no proof whether I am or am not an agnostic. I’ve not said that I disclaim any knowledge of god, nor said whether or not I believe in god. I believe you are not an authority on god and even less an authority on me!
I believe no-one can produce proof as to the existance or non-existance of god therefore I believe the intention of my previous statement stands. I believe when it comes to god one is entitled to believe or not believe, that is ones prerogative.
I believe, if there is a god and it wants to prove itself to me it will do so. If there is no god it can’t. However it does not stop me from believing, even if there is no proof.
I believe all the arguments as to the existance or non-existance of god is as bad as one religion saying to another ‘my religion is the only route to god’. Total dogmatism. Nevertheless one has ability to augue if one can find an opponent willing to do the same.
As far as absolute and unassailable proof that God exists (or does not exist), you are correct that this cannot be achieved. But if you think about it, there is probably nothing that we as humans can have absolute proof of.
Do you have absolute and unassailable proof that your employer will pay you on the next payday? No, you don’t…but you make a leap of faith based upon the information that you have at hand (your employer has probably paid you on all of the previous paydays), and that is why you continue to go to work.
It would not be wise to stop going to work because you don’t have absolutely airtight proof that you will be paid. You would be fired pretty quickly if you did.
Similarly, it would not be wise to live your life as if there is no God because you don’t have absolute and unassailable proof.
Your statement, “I believe all the arguments as to the existance or non-existance of god is as bad as one religion saying to another ‘my religion is the only route to god’. Total dogmatism,” is itself a dogmatic statement. You fail to notice that your truth claim necessarily excludes all other truth claims. The “there are many routes to God” truth claim is itself a dogmatic and exclusive truth claim because it necessarily excludes all other truth claims. You are in effect saying “I have found the truth and the truth is that there are many roads to God.” This is no less dogmatic than the Christian who says, “I have found the truth, and the road to God is Jesus Christ.”
Timothy Keller comments on this subject in his book The Reason for God:
But even as believers should learn to look for reasons behind their faith, skeptics must learn to look for a type of faith hidden within their reasoning. All doubts, however skeptical and cynical they may seem, are really a set of alternate beliefs. You cannot doubt Belief A except from a position of faith in Belief B. For example, if you doubt Christianity because, “There can’t be just one true religion,” you must recognize that this statement is itself an act of faith. No one can prove it empirically, and it is not a universal truth that everyone accepts. If you went to the Middle East and said, “There can’t be just one true religion,” nearly everyone would say, “Why not?” The reason you doubt Christianity’s Belief A is because you hold unprovable Belief B. Every doubt, therefore is based on a leap of faith.
Keller goes on to ask the skeptic:
How could you possibly know that no religion can see the whole truth unless you yourself have the superior, comprehensive knowledge of spiritual reality you just claimed that none of the religions have?
Somewhat rephrased, Keller is here saying that the belief that no religion can have a “comprehensive knowledge of spiritual reality” is really nothing more than a claim that you have a comprehensive knowledge of spiritual reality.
You mis-quote me!
I did not say that proof can never be achieved, I said we have no proof, yet, whether god does or does not exist. I did not say that proof can never be achieved.
Respond if you want but any deviation from an accurate reflection of my words suggests to me that further discussion may be a waste of my time.
I find your analogy ‘there is probably nothing that we as humans can have absolute proof of’ and ‘do you have absolute and unassailable proof that your employer will pay you on the next payday’ a very weak and poor one.
You are being dogmatic when you use the analogy of ‘it would not be wise to stop going to work’ with ‘Similarly, it would not be wise to live your life as if there were no god…’ and I think it’s nonsense. If I ‘stopped going to work I would not get paid’ is more than probably true but believing or not believing in god has no repercussions. Not for me anyway. Please don’t tell me god will punish me, I’ve covered that previously, saying, I believe god would not be vindictive.
I don’t need to add the adjectives ‘absolute’ or ‘unassailable’, to me ‘proof’ stands just as well on it’s own. So here are a couple of examples of what I believe to be provable. You are human. Your father impregnated your Mother.You came from your Mothers Womb. You speak English. You have been communicating with me. Please correct me if you were a virgin birth!
Then you start being dogmatic again, telling me ‘ …. payday? No, you don’t… but you make a leap of faith based …….’ Well no I don’t actually, your wrong again! I don’t make leaps of faith! You may, but don’t tell me what I do.
Quoting from Timothy Keller Is no more likely to persuade me one way or the other than you are, for he is Human and fallible and I think, no more an authority on god than me! Even quotes from ‘religious’ books will leave me trying to understand because I know they were written by man and he is fallible! I’ve never heard of anything written by god, but that does not mean that it hasn’t.
I do not believe I’m a sceptic, in the sense that I am a doubter, a disbeliever (in god), I prefer the third way which is ‘I don’t know’. I’m still trying to understand and will continue to make what sense of it I can. I will probably never give up and I hope I won’t get so confused by the enormity of it that I just say “god must have done it”!. I probably am a sceptic, at times, when I’m told something I think is untrue. Humans tell lies don’t they? And they make mistakes!
And finally, if I choose to believe or not believe in god I believe it will make not one iota of difference to my life, however if I find the answer to ‘is there or is there not a god’ I think it will make a big difference to my life. Some Human telling me, there is or is not, doesn’t do it for me.
I do not know why people seem to want to argue whether or not there is a god, does the strength of their argument over another give them a feeling of superiority? Would it not be more fulfilling to get representatives of all beliefs to stop bickering and decide that, since they don’t know the answer, it would benefit mankind doing more meaningful work.
If you want to continue ‘talking’ I would prefer to hear what you think, not quotes from others. I can read them for myself, but if you want to end it I’ll be happy either way.
Regards John
You find my analogy of having faith that your employer will continue to pay you to be a very poor and weak one?
Please pay attention to the crucial difference between merely characterizing an argument (“very poor and weak”) on one hand, and actually responding to it with a rational rebuttal, on the other hand. In other words, please point out exactly why it is “very poor and weak” rather than just asserting that it is so.
You can prove that I (or you) are human and that we came from our mother’s wombs? How can you prove in an absolute, airtight way that your whole life isn’t just a big dream…that you are just dreaming you are human? You can’t, you just take it as a leap of faith. But it is an entirely reasonable leap of faith based upon the information that you have before you. Socrates said, “The only true wisdom is that you know nothing.”
Yes, Timothy Keller is human and fallible. Please recognize, however, that it is his argument that you need to respond to, not him. The fact that you allude to his human fallibility (which is universal among humans, by the way) instead of responding to his argument is highly suggestive that you are trying to divert attention from the fact that you don’t have a good reply to his argument.
If you would prefer to hear what I think rather than reading quotes from others, let me start here: I think that you are trivializing and obfuscating the issue of God’s existence because you fear that acknowledging God is a threat to your moral autonomy. You do not want to place an restrictions on how you choose to live. I think that you have been fooled by society into believing that living a life that acknowledges God is “less fun” than a life that acknowledges him.
Why do I want to discuss this issue? Because it is the most important issue that could ever be discussed. Please review my posts entitled “When I die, is that it?” and “Has anyone ever met God and returned to tell about it?” (and view the associated videos) to see the clear evidence that there are eternal, after-death implications to the way you choose to go about this life.
Resorting to quotes from baffled scientists does not constitute evidence, only opinions. Proper science isn’t based on opinion polls. The typical rationale for a supernatural creator is based on the inability of an individual mind, including those of the scientists quoted, to comprehend how events might otherwise come to pass. They all commit the fallacy of intellectual surrender. Because one cannot conceive of a non-supernatural solution does not mean there isn’t one. It’s logically impossible to prove the existence of “God” because it requires demonstrating that no other explanation is possible for the phenomenon in question. Can’t be done. At the same time, there’s no way to prove that a supernatural prime mover does not exist. So far, the original universal event, the ultimate nature of physical reality, and the origin of consciousness and human questioning are all beyond our reach. God has yet to smack me on the head and say “Here I am, Bubba”, so I see no other course than to remain a skeptic.
Your characterization of these scientists’ statements as “only opinions” is highly disingenuous and inaccurate. These scientists have come to their conclusions based upon research. Their research has demonstrated that “a conscious and intelligent mind” is “the matrix of all matter” (in the words of Max Plank). If you would like an example of this research, I encourage you to view this video of the famous double slit experiment (which demonstrates the crucial role of consciousness in constructing reality).
When, for example, the physicist Eugene Wigner says, “it was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to the consciousness,” he is stating a research conclusion, not a mere opinion.
By stating, “God has yet to smack me on the head,” you betray your inability (or perhaps unwillingness) to perceive the world outside of a materialist framework. In other words, you are unable or unwilling to perceive that there exists consciousness independent of a physical medium.
Describing yourself as a “skeptic” is an incomplete description. Recall that disbelieving in one thing necessarily involves believing in something else. You are skeptical of what this group of extremely prominent scientists has concluded, but you are clearly a believer in materialism….despite the fact that materialism is a discredited relic of pre-20th century models of the universe.
Based upon what you have written, I would say that you disbelieve in God for the reasons cited in my essay entitled “If the evidence for God is so strong, why are so many smart people unconvinced?”
I don’t want an intellectual debate, I would just like to share a personal experience. I always had this feeling of loneliness deep seated within me. It stems from my mother dying when I was 2yrs old and being taken away from my dad when I was 5. Well I went to this convention, we arrived Friday night the next morning I prayed God put the people in my life I am supposed to meet today.and an old man from Sweden sat next to me on this park bench and told me his story how when he was 2 his mother died and when he was 5 his father died I said is that right my mom died when I was 2 and got taken away from my dad when I was 5. He started bawling and hugging me saying we will never be alone again. Right at that moment I had the clarity of Gods existence and it has never left, so debate all you want for me I believe. I should add there where a hundred thousand people that could have sat next to me!!!
Not a coincidence. God is relational being and so we are relational beings.
I have been reading your argument hoping to find answers. what do i believe in? Im very confused right now. I’m just a middle school kid who doesn’t know if she’s an athiest an agnostic or a christian or what. i find a reason to believe and then i find ten more not to and then i find ten reasons to believe and one not to and i dont know what to do. Currently, i’m leaning toward athiesim because i really think that its all mental. We need the hope that someone is watching over us and we’re not alone, but in reality, it’s all just a security blanket. But i WANT to believe. I want a god. If there is no god, what is there to believe in? Instead of coming to a conclusion or at least getting a few answers, i find myself even more confused. Maybe i should just put it out of my mind and worry about life and someday i’ll know. I live with both athiests and christians and i’m torn.
Maddie:
Lets take a look at the atheist argument which says that people believe in God because they need a “security blanket.” Does the fact that people (like yourself) want there to be a God provide evidence that there is no God?
Look at it this way: Does the fact that people get thirsty provide evidence that there is no such thing as water? No, it in fact does the exact opposite. God put that desire to know him inside of you for a reason.
A lot of the material at this site will be hard to digest until you get older. That being said, I want to leave you with something to think about. Have you heard of a man named Richard Dawkins, the author of The God Delusion? Mr. Dawkins is probably the most famous and prominent atheist out there right now. He has written several books which make the claim that science shows that there is no such thing as God.
But do you know what explanation he gave for the origin of life when asked in an interview? He presented the idea that life was brought here by aliens from outer space. Click here to see an excerpt of an interview where he proposes this idea.
When you say “it’s all mental,” you are onto something. People come up with complicated ways of convincing themselves that there is no God so that they can avoid the discomfort of having to answer to a higher power. Many people are just disgusted with the idea that they cannot live their lives however they choose because they might have to answer to God someday. To do away with the discomfort that comes with the idea that they may be judged someday, they come up with complicated ways of disbelieving in God.
And by surrounding themselves with other people who do not want to believe in God, they convince themselves that disbelieving in God is the right way to think.
So, you’re saying that aliens from outer space is LESS PLAUSIBLE than a magic guy who lives in the sky? Given the absence of any evidence to support either theory you can’t make that call. Get some evidence, then we’ll talk.
Mike:
“Magic guy who lives in the sky” is a crude caricature of God, not something that anyone actually believes in. Your caricature of God is ridiculous, but the concept of an eternal being which is the non-contingent cause of all reality is not ridiculous…especially in light of what physics and cosmology have to say (as presented in this post as well as other posts such as “Is there a God? (What is the chance our world is the result of chance)).
Please reply to the specific points made in these posts rather than continuing to produce ridiculous caricatures and then proceeding to criticize those caricatures (also known as “building a straw man and then shredding it”).
Aliens being the cause of life on earth is not plausible whatsoever because then we are left with the question of how alien life emerged from lifeless matter.
Regarding this subject, Scientific American magazine states in an article dated October 1996 entitled Confronting Science’s Logical Limits that, “It has been estimated that a supercomputer applying plausible rules for protein folding would need 10 to the 127th power years to find the final folded form for even a very short sequence consisting of just 100 amino acids.” Unfortunately for atheists, the universe is only about 15 billion years old….not nearly long enough for such a protein sequence to emergeanywhere in the universe (not just earth). Furthermore, it would take random, unintelligent processes a heck of a lot longer to find this “final folded form” than a supercomputer programmed to do so. And protein folding is only the first step for producing life from lifeless compounds.
Mike, why don’t you go ahead and respond to the specific point that I have made above in order to show that you can contribute a logically constructed response to an argument rather than a caricature of an argument.
I, too am not looking for an intellectual debate, and I fully appreciate all you atheists, agnostics, etc who are here have taken the time to read our arguments.
I would just like to say that the Christian faith is culturally very widespread and there are millions of believers from all over the world; how can you believe that it was all made up? One of the most basic principle of Christianity is that you give your entire life over to God, you lay down every selfish motive and surrender all your time, fortune and talent to Him. That is a pretty big commitment for us humans, who are hopelessly self-centered by nature. If God was fashioned from our idealistic minds, surely we would have made the cost of being a Christian a heck of a lot less.
Also, the Bible is written by several people, most of which never met one another, yet what they wrote agrees.
The crucifixion of Christ is historically documented and the evidence of his resurrection is also extremely good.
Sir Edward Clarke KC wrote to the Reverend E. L. Macassey: ‘As a lawyer I have made a prolonged study of the evidence for the events of the first Easter Day. To me the evidence is conclusive, and over and over again in the High Court I have secured the verdict on evidence not nearly so compelling. inference follows on evidence, and a truthful witness is always artless and disdains effect. The Gospel evidence for the resurrection is of this class, and as a lawyer I accept it unreservedly as the testimony of truthful men to facts they were able to substantiate.’
There is a lot of very logical reasoning backing up Christs’ resurrection and I hope that you might read the chapter on The Resurrection of Christ in John Stott’s book ‘Basic Christianity’ before you attack the basis of my belief in the resurrection. I read the chapter for the first time as an atheist and I looked for loopholes in every word but I found none. And if Christ lived, was crucified and rose from the dead as it is written in the Bible, surely that is conclusive proof of God’s existence.
I’m not saying that I know everything about God, Jesus, the way He works, the Bible or the history behind it all. As a matter of fact I know very little, but it is enough to convince me. Nobody knows everything about God. But I do not believe that faith is blind and stupid. Faith is humble, and it sees more clearly than many others without it. I do hope that I don’t come across as forcing my beliefs on you, because I truly respect you and your beliefs, like I know you do mine, but when you have felt God touch you like I have felt Him touch me, trust me, there is nothing you will want more than for everybody to experience His Grace and Love. Jesus is like a really good book. You read it, you love it, and you want everyone you know to read it too. God loves you, and He wants the best for you. I know this seems out of place among all your scientific debate and you can laugh at me all you want, but there’s no doubt in my mind that God is with us.
I don’t think the Bible is made up to make people behave better either. You see, the Christian God is the only God out of all the religions that states that you cannot get eternal life by your own power. You can be good all you like but the ONLY thing that can get you to Heaven is by receiving Christ. “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.” (Ephesians 2:9)
Also, God is not really up in the sky, he is a divine being that is omnipresent.
Perhaps we cannot prove that God exists with science, but if you take a look at someone who loves God you will see that they’ve got something in them that non-believers don’t. Please – do yourself a huge favour and open your mind and your heart to the possibility of a God, and not just that, a loving, awesome God.
@ Maddie G.
Rest totally assured there are no gods. I guarantee it 100%. This whole thread starts out as some kind of “Science proves god exists” nonsense. Science doesn’t care if god exists. Science is not trying to prove the existence or non-existence of god(s). Science doesn’t waste time on fantasies.
Syoungren is convinced by these scientists opinions that god exists but alas that is all they are, opinions. The fact still remains we can look into our recorded history and see when man created each and every god. The christian, muslim and jewish gods included. I am sure man created many gods before the ones we know about from recorded history including sun gods, moon gods and fire gods. The christians still cling to a fire god to this very day they call the devil. Pure fantasy and I am sure it was all quite entertaining when they were first told around the campfires at night some 2000-3000 years a ago. That would be their version of TV. And apparently it is still entertaining to some because these cults seem to linger on long past their expiration date.
Seriously, what is all this noise about a pregnant virgin? Mary was married to Joseph. What did they do, skip the honeymoon? Like I said, pure fantasy. A god called god is just too stupid to be taken seriously.
ATTENTION ALL READERS, THIS IS VERY INSTRUCTIVE:
Your argument, Terry, if self-defeating and self-contradictory. First, you denigrate the importance of opinions, and then you immediately proceed to produce your opinion. Amazing.
Further, your opinion that opinions are unimportant is itself an opinion. When atheists resort to self-defeating and self-contradictory arguments, one can be certain that they are feeling cornered.
Who should we listen to? The opinions of most (if not all) of the most important contributors to modern physics, or the opinion of a guy who makes the self-defeating argument that opinions don’t matter?
Please also recall that physics is the branch of science which deals with the most fundamental “big picture” aspects of our reality and therefore most closely approaches the line dividing science from metaphysics and religion. And the opinions of these scientists is based on their research, not upon their private religious convictions. To this end, I will rehash what Max Planck (the founder of quantum physics) had to say about this subject:
When you say, “The fact still remains we can look into our recorded history and see when man created each and every god,” you fail to make the simple distinction between a symbol and its referent. Because the source of our world (God) is infinite and immaterial, we can barely scratch the surface of God’s reality. The best we can do is to use symbols (that we garner from our finite, material reality) to represent the reality of God.
Each society creates symbols using the categories of thought existent in that society. To an ancient society which regarded the sun as mysterious and awe-inspiring, for example, the sun god would be an appropriate symbol to represent the mystery and wonder of the infinite, immaterial intelligence which created our world (God). The fact that the symbolic representation of God produced by such a society is not appropriate to our society does not detract from the reality behind that symbol.
For further illustration, take the following example: The number “four” has been represented in different ways by different societies. In our society, we use the numeric symbol “4″. The ancient Romans used the Roman numeral “IV”. One could also use tally marks (IIII), etc..
Does the fact that Roman numerals are rarely used in our society mean that the mathematical concept behind the that symbol has been debunked? Certainly not.
Roman numerals would not be appropriate for our society because it would be quite difficult to perform algebra or calculus using them.
Next, Terry, I would like to point out that (as is typical of many atheists) you make the error of exposing theism to intense scrutiny while simultaneously failing to expose your own views to even the slightest scrutiny.
For example, I will assume that you are a materialist since you clearly are not a theist or idealist. (If I am incorrect in this assumption because you subscribe to some third school of thought which I have failed to consider, please describe your view).
How can you really believe that the material world is all that exists in light of the declaration of modern physics that, independent of conscious observation, the subatomic realm consists of nothing but potentialities? As Planck put it, “there is no matter as such.”
Your belief that the material world is fundamental can only be classed as a superstition which irrationally clings to outmoded, pre-20th century physics.
Lastly, your view that the virgin birth is ridiculous is based upon viewing the world though the lens of materialism, which, again, has been discredited by modern physics. You confuse your experience of reality with reality itself. I will rehash an excerpt from one of my essays below (with slight modifications):
One of history’s most prominent apologists for atheism, Bertrand Russell, helped to articulate materialism (the belief that reality is fundamentally material) into a philosophical worldview when he said, “all experience is likely to resemble the experience we know.” The virgin birth can easily be dismissed as fairy tale using this line of reasoning because it doesn’t “resemble the experience we know” as a part of our everyday life. But Russell would have been well advised to take to heart Hamlet’s reminder that “there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
And what Shakespeare knew intuitively when he wrote Hamlet, Nobel Prize winning physicist Tony Hewish knew logically when he wrote:
“The ghostly presence of virtual particles defies rational common sense and is non-intuitive for those unacquainted with physics. Religious belief in God, and Christian belief that God became Man around two thousand years ago, may seem strange to common-sense thinking. But when the most elementary physical things behave in this way, we should be prepared to accept that the deepest aspects of our existence go beyond our common-sense intuitions.”
syoungren: ATTENTION ALL READERS, THIS IS VERY INSTRUCTIVE: <— Is this supposed to give your opinions some credibility? It doesn’t.
syoungren: First, you denigrate the importance of opinions, and then you immediately proceed to produce your opinion.
Terry: I didn’t denigrate anything. (Thanks for the straw man, I’ll put it out in the corn field to scare away theists.) Opinions are just opinions and have no value regardless of their source. They certainly are not to be taken as truth or facts. [Opinion definition: A belief or conclusion held with confidence but not substantiated by positive knowledge or proof.] http://www.thefreedictionary.com/opinion
syoungren: Further, your opinion that opinions are unimportant is itself an opinion.
Terry: What value do you place on opinions?
syoungren: Who should we listen to? The opinions of most (if not all) of the most important contributors to modern physics, or the opinion of a guy who makes the self-defeating argument that opinions don’t matter?
Terry: Are you saying one persons opinion is more important than another persons opinion? It is no wonder you are so confused. You are very opinionated yourself. Of course if we just stuck to the facts there wouldn’t be much to write would there. In your case there wouldn’t be anything to write because theists have no facts to support their claim. All a theist has is his opinion and belief.
syoungren: And the opinions of these scientists is based on their research,
Terry: If all they got out of it was an opinion, their research wasn’t much help to them was it?
syoungren: not upon their private religious convictions.
You would know this How? Can you read the minds of theses scientists? Do you even know what their religious convictions are? There is only one scientist I know of who was very clear on his convictions. That was “Carl Sagan” a publicly proclaimed atheist even to his death. Has the Cosmos changed since his death. I think not.
syoungren: For example, I will assume that you are a materialist since you clearly are not a theist or idealist.
Terry: More assumptions on your part. I am an atheist. [Atheist definition: Someone who rejects the theist claim for any reason. No belief or disbelief is required.] http://churchoflogic.com/whatisanatheist/
Terry: This whole discussion is based on the fallacy of “Appeal To False Authority” where the authority is a scientist. What makes a scientist an authority on god(s). As pointed out before. Science doesn’t attempt to prove or disprove the existence of god(s).
syoungren: Max Planck: “We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. “
Terry: Again, all you have are assumptions and opinions. You somehow seem to believe that the opinions of this handful of scientists gives your theist claim some credibility. It doesn’t.
Terry:
syoungren: Each society creates symbols using the categories of thought existent in that society.
Terry: What is “thought existent”? Theist are well known for making things up and then believing the things they made up are real. This is just one example. Did you make this one up yourself? Here are some more examples of things theists have made up: God, Allah, Jesus, Heaven, Hell, Devils, Angels, Soul, Sin, Spirits, Miracles, Resurrection and Afterlife. None of these theistic terms have anything to support their existence. These are just “Tools” used by theists to lure people into their faith-based religious cults. Syoungren is just an example of how well and how deeply these infections can control the human mind. It takes a lot of conditioning over a long period of time to get people to believe in the absurd concepts of theism. (walking on water, sticks that turn into snakes, raising the dead etc.) Any rational person would simply reject these absurdities for what they are but not the theist. The theist will do everything possible to twist, bend and shape these absurd concepts into tools to use against people who don’t believe what they believe. Even to use them against other theists that don’t agree with their beliefs. The Christians reject the Muslims claims. The Jews reject the Christians claims. The Muslims reject the Jewish claims. See, we are all atheists.
syoungren: Lastly, Terry, I would like to point out that (as is typical of many atheists) you make the error of exposing theism to intense scrutiny while simultaneously failing to expose your own views to even the slightest scrutiny.
Terry: What error? Absurd concepts require intense scrutiny. The atheist makes no claims to scrutinize. Rejecting the theist claim does not create a new claim. However, if you want to scrutinize atheists be my guest. Have at it. Give it your best shot. Just stop making things up out of nothing. Come up with something real and genuine for the whole world to see. Not just your opinions or the opinions of other people.
syoungren: How can you really believe that the material world is all that exists
Terry: Without something to support the supernatural world it is the only rational thing to believe in. Only someone under the influence of a religious cult would believe otherwise.
Terry:
1) You don’t denigrate the importance of opinions?! Bizarre!! What does your statement, “Opinions are just opinions and have no value regardless of their source,” mean? Terry, you seem lost and confused. You are making self-contradictory statements, again.
Should we discard the following statement merely because it is an opinion?: “The Surgeon General states that smoking promotes lung cancer.”
2) What value do I place upon opinions? Well, I certainly place no value whatsoever on the opinion of a guy whose opinion is that “opinions have no value regardless of their source.” As far as the opinions of the most important contributors to modern physics (the branch of science which deals with the most fundamental aspects of reality), I place very high value on such opinions. This is especially the case when nearly identical opinions have been formed by most if not all of the most important contributors to modern physics, as the result of their research.
3) Am I saying that one person’s opinion is more important than another person’s opinion? You betcha I am. When you need an opinion on a medical issue, do you value the opinion of your doctor more than that of your plumber? I certainly hope so for your sake.
4) You are not a materialist? OK, fine. If the material world is not self-existent, and it was not created by God either, then how do you explain its existence? I am interested in your novel opinion. Your statement that you are an atheist reveals to us what you do not believe, but please describe for us what you do believe. Please recall that disbelieving in one explanation for the existence of the universe necessarily means that you believe in some other explanation. This gets back to the issue I mentioned before about atheists placing extreme scrutiny upon theist beliefs while simultaneously failing to place any scrutiny whatsoever upon their own beliefs.
5) How would I know that these opinions are based upon their research rather than upon their private religious convictions? Because, first of all, if you actually read the quotes, you would see that these scientists state that they are basing their opinions upon their research. For example, the Nobel Prize winning physicist Eugene Wigner says, “it was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to the consciousness.” And Max Planck says, “I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.”
Secondly, I give you an example of this research with the link to the demonstration of the double-slit experiment. What is your reply to this. Are you going to “skip over it?”
6) This whole discussion is based on the fallacy of “Appeal To False Authority” where the authority is a scientist? OK, let’s take a look at the “Appeal to False Authority.” This article reveals the following:
Fallacy: Appeal to Authority
Also Known as: Fallacious Appeal to Authority, Misuse of Authority, Irrelevant Authority, Questionable Authority, Inappropriate Authority, Ad Verecundiam
Description of Appeal to Authority
An Appeal to Authority is a fallacy with the following form:
Person A is (claimed to be) an authority on subject S.
Person A makes claim C about subject S.
Therefore, C is true.
This fallacy is committed when the person in question is not a legitimate authority on the subject. More formally, if person A is not qualified to make reliable claims in subject S, then the argument will be fallacious.
Terry, are you suggesting that the most important contributors to modern physics are not qualified to make reliable claims about the subject of physics?! This would be a truly unique claim. Or are you trying to say that they are not qualified to comment on the existence of God? If so, then who is qualified to comment on the existence of God? Just Carl Sagan?
7) All I have are assumptions and opinions? I somehow seem to believe that the opinions of this handful of scientists gives your theist claim some credibility? As I pointed out before, this is not just some “handful of scientists,” as you characterize it. Rather, this group represents most if not all of the most important contributors to modern physics (Einstein, Planck, Born, Maxwell, Eddington, Dirac, etc….).
8) What is “thought existent”? Let me rephrase that for you: Each society creates symbols using the categories of thought that are existent in that society.
9) You state: Here are some more examples of things theists have made up: God, Allah, Jesus, Heaven, Hell, Devils, Angels, Soul, Sin, Spirits, Miracles, Resurrection and Afterlife. None of these theistic terms have anything to support their existence. I am going to give you some evidence for a few of these things that you have mentioned above and you can proceed to respond to them. With regard to the existence of God, this essay provides evidence, as does my essay entitled “Is there a God? (What is the chance our world is the result of chance?)” When you reply to the “Is there a God?” essay, please try to make your reply more substantive than declaring that I have just provided another opinion despite the fact that I have cited research and scientific facts.
With regard to the soul and to the afterlife, please read my essays entitled “When I die, is that it? Or do I have an existence beyond my physical body?” and “Has anyone met God and returned to tell about it?” Please post any rationally constructed, fact based rebuttals that you may have.
10) Absurd concepts require intense scrutiny? Your view that the concept of God is absurd must be based upon some counter-explanation for the existence of the universe and for such things as the existence of life. Otherwise, you would have no basis upon which to place this opinion. So tell us, Terry, what are your counter-explanations? Can we explain the existence of the universe by stating that it “just is,” like the atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell who declares that the universe is a “brute fact”? Don’t be shy, we would love to hear your explanations so that we can engage in an interesting debate.
How do you explain the existence of life? Would you agree with some of your fellow atheists (such as the biologists Richard Dawkins and Francis Crick) that life on earth can be explained by the fact that it was brought here by aliens from outer space? Click here to see Dawkins endorsing this idea in an interview and click here to read an article which details Crick’s endorsement of the idea.
If so, would you please tell me what planet you think the aliens came from. I am conducting a survey of atheists so that I can determine what planet they believe is the most likely candidate.
11) There is nothing upon which to base the existence of a supernatural world? I am afraid that there is a lot upon which to base a belief in the supernatural world. The following is an excerpt from the book Life After Death, the Evidence, as it appears in one of my essays:
We experience space in three dimensions and time in one dimension; Einstein brought them both together into the new four-dimensional entity of spacetime. Scientists [post-Einstein] tell us that reality is divided not into four but rather eleven dimensions, ten of space and one of time. So where are the other dimensions? Well, string theorists say they are hidden dimensions, somehow positioned so that they are invisible and inaccessible to us. As physicist Lisa Randall puts it, “We are in this three-dimensional flatland…Our world is stuck in this three-dimensional universe, although extra dimensions exist. So we live in a three-dimensional slice of a higher-dimensional world.”
The three-dimensional slice of a higher-dimensional world that we experience on a day-to-day basis is what we refer to as the “natural world.” The other dimensions can be termed “supernatural” because they are not part of our everyday experience. But just because we do not experience them does not mean that they are not real.
Further, as I demonstrate in my essay entitled “Is there a God? (What is the chance that our world is the result of chance?),” the origins of our universe clearly point to a supernatural. As the astronomer, physicist and founder of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies Robert Jastrow put it:
“Astronomers now find they have painted themselves into a corner because they have proven, by their own methods, that the world began abruptly in an act of creation to which you can trace the seeds of every star, every planet, every living thing in this cosmos and on the earth. And they have found that all this happened as a product of forces they cannot hope to discover…. That there are what I or anyone would call supernatural forces at work is now, I think, a scientifically proven fact.”
Scott: Should we discard the following statement merely because it is an opinion?: “The Surgeon General states that smoking promotes lung cancer.”
Terry: Your kidding right? That is NOT an opinion. Smoking has “in fact” been linked to lung cancer. Over 40 carcinogens have been identified in cigarette smoke. The Surgeon General doesn’t give out “opinions”.
Scott: What does your statement, “Opinions are just opinions and have no value regardless of their source,” mean?
Terry: Just exactly what it says. No confusion on my part but you seem a bit bewildered by it for some reason.
Scott: Well, I certainly place no value whatsoever on the opinion of a guy whose opinion is that “opinions have no value regardless of their source.”
Terry: Ouch. Just kidding. It didn’t hurt a bit.
Scott: This is especially the case when nearly identical opinions have been formed by most if not all of the most important contributors to modern physics, as the result of their research.
Terry: And yet they are still just opinions. In spite of all their research.
Scott: When you need an opinion on a medical issue, do you value the opinion of your doctor more than that of your plumber?
Terry: Really? Your going to go there? Comparing doctors to plumbers? When I have a medical or plumbing issue I don’t expect opinions at all. I expect answers. They get paid the big bucks for their knowledge, not for their opinions. If all I can get from a doctor or a plumber is an opinion I need to find a different doctor or plumber. If a doctor can’t give me the information I want because it simply doesn’t exist I expect him to tell me that it doesn’t exist. I don’t expect him to give me opinions instead. If you want to trust your health and plumbing to opinions that is your business.
Scott: If the material world is not self-existent, and it was not created by God either, then how do you explain its existence?
Terry: I don’t know and I am ok with that. There is no reason to believe that we will ever know how it all started or if it all started. I have no need to conjure up a god of the gaps to explain something there is no answer for. Making up a god to explain something is exactly how your god was created. The first theist convinced the next theist and so on and so on and so on. One of you theist lies to it and another one swears to it.
Scott: I am interested in your novel opinion.
Terry: Sorry, I have no novel opinion. Too bad because I can see how much you enjoy opinions.
Scott: Your statement that you are an atheist reveals to us what you do not believe, but please describe for us what you do believe.
Terry: Why? You don’t have enough beliefs already? Are you collecting beliefs? It is good to have a hobby.
Scott: Please recall that disbelieving in one explanation for the existence of the universe necessarily means that you believe in some other explanation.
Terry: Nonsense. I don’t reject the theist claim because I have a claim of my own. I reject the theist claim because it is absurd and completely unbelievable unless you have been conditioned to believe these absurdities are real. I used to be a theist. I know how the theist thinks. It is clear you have never been an atheist. If you were you could never go back and pretend these invisible man made creatures are real. As you can see I have fully recovered from the theistic infection that was thrust on me by my parents, relatives, neighbors and a theistic society.
Scott: This gets back to the issue I mentioned before about atheists placing extreme scrutiny upon theist beliefs while simultaneously failing to place any scrutiny whatsoever upon their own beliefs.
Terry: Good grief. Go ahead. Scrutiny away. No one is holding you back. Do all the scrutiny you want.
Scott: Terry, are you suggesting that the most important contributors to modern physics are not qualified to make reliable claims about the subject of physics?! Or are you trying to say that they are not qualified to comment on the existence of God?
Terry: They can make opinions about physics all they want. This is their field of study. They can make opinions about god(s) all they want too. I am saying that their physics research in no way supports their opinions of god(s). In fact opinions can be made about anything, by anybody. This is what makes an opinion so useless. I’m not a scientist but I can come up with many opinions about science. I’m not a doctor but I can come up with many opinions about medicine. I am not a plumber but I can come up with many opinions on plumbing. Are you getting it now? The fallacy of your comments is where you use “their” opinions in a feeble attempt to support “your” opinions. It seems to me there was a name for that fallacy but I don’t recall what it was. The logic from my college days is a bit rusty but you get the drift, right?
Scott: If so, then who is qualified to comment on the existence of God?
Terry: No one should comment on the existence of god(s). There is nothing to support the existence of god(s). The god theory is too stupid to be taken seriously. It is right up there with The FSM and the IPU. If the theists weren’t infected and banding into evil religious cults there would be no need to comment on god(s).
Scott: Rather, this group represents most if not all of the most important contributors to modern physics (Einstein, Planck, Born, Maxwell, Eddington, Dirac, etc….).
Terry: So what? Do they have the answers? Of course not so why do you even drag them into your theist claim unless you believe they somehow give your claim some credibility. They don’t.
Scott: Your view that the concept of God is absurd must be based upon some counter-explanation for the existence of the universe and for such things as the existence of life.
Terry: The concept of an invisible intelligent life form from another dimension that has sex with human females is all I need to call the god concept absurd. Zeus I hear was quite a sweet talker with the human females too. A counter explanation is not required.
Scott: Don’t be shy, we would love to hear your explanations so that we can engage in an interesting debate.
Terry: Do I have my own theory? Of course I do. Maybe some time I will explain it to you. You won’t like it though. Too much logic. It doesn’t have enough fantasy in it for your tastes. On the other hand it is my “opinion” and you do enjoy opinions don’t you. By your standards an opinion from a professional atheist should rate high on your scale.
Scott: How do you explain the existence of life? Would you agree with some of your fellow atheists (such as the biologists Richard Dawkins and Francis Crick) that life on earth can be explained by the fact that it was brought here by aliens from outer space?
Terry: I have no idea how life got to our planet? But, then again, neither do you. We know the planet didn’t start with life on it so it either came from outer space or sprang up here. Just not from the magic wand of some invisible wizard in the sky. I wasn’t there to observe the event so I don’t know. Do I “believe” there is life in the universe other than the life on our planet? You bet your boots I do. Can I prove it? Of course not (yet). Is my belief unfounded? Of course not. There is life on this planet so there is no reason to believe there isn’t life on other planets. Do I believe there are alien visitors camped out on the dark side of the moon. Of course not. Your cheap attempt to discredit Richard Dawkins and Francis Crick (Whom I have never heard of until now) only shows how desperate you are. I may not know where life came from but I do know we are getting closer to creating it. http://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/player/national-geographic-channel/all-videos/av-7729-7975/ngc-creating-life-from-scratch.html. Proving once and for all that there was no god(s) required for life to start in the cosmos.
Scott: If so, would you please tell me what planet you think the aliens came from. I am conducting a survey of atheists so that I can determine what planet they believe is the most likely candidate.
Terry: Don’t know (yet). Give it enough time and you may get your answer. Of course we won’t likely live long enough to find out. Too bad. I would enjoy being there for such an event.
Scott: Robert Jastrow: “That there are what I or anyone would call supernatural forces at work is now, I think, a scientifically proven fact.
Terry: Why would we call them supernatural forces? I wouldn’t. There is much we don’t know about the cosmos but to bring the supernatural into it would first require some supernatural evidence of which there is none.
Terry: Conclusion: Of course you do realize that there is nothing in any of your posts that supports your imaginary friend. Not a shred of real evidence beyond opinions, hearsay, personal feelings and misguided concepts. That is because these are the only things that a theist has to work with.
There were two places in my post that didn’t show up. I had them enclosed by less than and greater than symbols. My bad. I realize these are html tags and shouldn’t have used them in my text. The two places where it just says Terry: should have been followed by these comments.
The first one is: *** This is me skipping over a bunch of theistic prattle about symbols. ***
The second was is: *** This is me again skipping over more opinions from dead people who are unable to clarify their positions. ***
This reply is all too typical of atheists who have found themselves backed into a corner. Of course you are skipping over my arguments….you cannot produce for us a rationally constructed rebuttal. You must therefore resort to characterizing my arguments (“prattle” and “opinions from dead people”) so that you can divert attention from the fact that you cannot rationally rebut them.
The difference between characterizing an argument and actually responding to it in a rational fashion is a crucial distinction for any rational discourse.
You don’t actually believe that the roman numbering system gives your god any credibility do you? Are you serious or are you just yanking my chain?
Are you going to actually respond to the argument? Using strident rhetoric instead of producing a counter-argument is a telltale sign of somebody who does not have a counter argument.
And he said unto him, If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead.
I couldn’t have put it better myself.
Matter… Atoms conveniently morphing and bonding into diverse elements.
All from nothing… expanding into a previously non-existing space? Time? (who needs that anyway) Inanimate to animate? (It’s alive Igor!) Evolution (or is it adaptation)
Big enough leap to Sentient… bigger leap to self-Conscious? (Hey I reason and even know myself – I don’t know how & why… but I AM) All by accident!
NO….. All fairy tales for grown-ups!
In the Bible, in the very first sentence, God mentions the three things that are essential for us to experience and live this physical reality.
“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”
“Beginning”, references time. The “Heavens” reference 3 dimensional space, and the “Earth” references matter. How could anyone at that time know that ALL 3 of these must be present, perfectly and precisely as they are in order for us to exist in this reality?
The Torah has been proven to have been written thousands of years ago, way before any science (Physics) had been done. Also each of time, space and matter contains within it, another 3 aspects. Time cannot exist without any of past, present, and future. Space cannot exist without any of length, depth and width. And finally, matter. You guessed it… it comes in three forms. Liquids, solids, and vapours.
Personally… I think this is one way that God reveals his triune Godhead.
Praise, Honor, Glory, Power are yours forever Lord God!
Finally… To quote King David (a man after God’s own Heart) – “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. They are corrupt, they have done abominable works”
That last sentence is without a doubt the reason why one says “there is no God”.
In order to do evil works!
No God…. No Godly morality. Just an ever devolving moral relativism, suited for something less than an animal!
P.S
I applaud you for what you do.
Yet – and in the best of sense – I don’t envy you in the least. I certainly don’t have the patience that you do with these folks (not yet anyway)
He’s still working with me on that one…lol
I would also like to point out that this site after brief observation is mostly the rantings of seemingly one person, with many preaching or praising that fact.
Little is being shown of any actual facts or proof but of the lack thereof. For instance, the main argument is that the big bang was the start of our universe, that it was created, that it was a start, it had to have come from somewhere etc. Seemingly conclusive evidence of God. However, if using that argument you could ask what preceded God? If your answer is that God has always been and ever was couldn’t you make the same logical conclusion that the Universe has always been and always was without the need for God? Or maybe, the universe always goes through big bangs and contractions and has been doing so for eternity I.E. has always done that.
As we can see. The big bang needs no creator, for if it does, God must need a creator and so on. These very simple logical arguments are quite easy to see and follow. God does not exist, and we do not need a God to give the Universe and ourselves meaning. It seems as though the problem is with our primitive understanding of reality.
Nothing preceded God. There must be an ultimate uncaused cause (or non-contingent reality). Here is why: The law of causation (without which science would be impossible) says that everything with a beginning has a cause. Something that is caused (or is “contingent”) can do nothing (zero) to cause itself. And an infinitely long chain of zeros still adds up to zero. So, your statement that “God must need a creator and so on,” is invalid. Please review my post entitled “Why is there something rather than nothing,” which includes commentary from Oxford University Professor of Philosophy Antony Flew on this subject matter.
My post entitled “Isn’t the universe eternal?,” does away with your notion that the universe may be eternal. Click on the preceding link or view it in the “snippets” section. Please read and respond.
Please also review this article regarding the possibility that the universe is eternal. Some excerpts:
The conclusion to be drawn from the scientific data was inescapable, as [astrophysicist and founder of NASAs Goddard Institute for Space Studies} Dr. Robert Jastrow… wrote: “The lingering decline predicted by astronomers for the end of the world differs from the explosive conditions they have calculated for its birth, but the impact is the same: modern science denies an eternal existence to the Universe, either in the past or in the future.”
As far as the notion that “the universe always goes thorough big bangs and contractions and has been doing so for eternity,” you are describing what is known as the “oscillating universe theory.” Please read this article. Put simply, the oscillating universe model violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
Your arguments are very simple, as you say, but they are also very flawed. Let’s take this a step further: I will be generous and assume that your assertion that “the universe always goes through big bangs and contractions and has been doing so for eternity,” is correct. What does this achieve? An eternally oscillating universe cannot eventually produce a universe finely tuned for the existence of life (as described in my essay entitled, “Is there a God (What is the chance that the world is the result of chance?)”
How can I be so sure? Bare probabilities are causally inert and require a causal mechanism to achieve a result. What do I mean by this fancy statement?
Let me illustrate: Take the statement, “If a person could, hypothetically, live forever, that person would eventually win the lottery.” We know this statement is false because no matter how long a person lives, that person will never win the lottery unless they actually play the lottery. Going to the convenience store to buy lottery tickets on a regular basis is the causal mechanism that allows the bare probability of winning the lottery to result in an actual lottery win.
In a universe that has no intelligent and conscious cause, there can be no causal mechanisms. Even an infinite amount of time (or an infinite number of cycles of expansion and retraction) cannot produce anything without a causal mechanism. Further, the very occurrence of cycles of expansion and retraction requires a causal mechanism. What do you propose caused this eternally expanding and contracting universe? Bare probabilities?
Mocking Christians!
“we are fully capable of leading moral, healthy lives without a bright puffy cloud in the sky”
This is what I find so ironic about so-called “evolved” atheists.
For instance take the well recognized “Christian” fish symbol – dating back 2 millennia.
Jason, why do atheists (so intelligent and evolved) have to take this “Christian” symbol and distort it… adding legs and a tool. CLEARLY mocking “Christians”
Aren’t you Atheists intelligent and creative enough to design your own symbol…must you take this “Christian” symbol and mock & provoke Christians through it.
BECAUSE that is what you are doing!
A person who has not contemplated God or Evolution… and isn’t a Christian , wouldn’t know what any of that symbolized. ONLY the people who are on either side of the debate would recognize this symbol… distorted or otherwise.
I suppose that’s your “we are fully capable of leading moral, healthy lives without a bright puffy cloud in the sky”
Kind of morality. No Jason… that’s called moral relativism.
Jason, just answer me one Question HONESTLY.
Can you do that?
Do you have ANY doubts about whether there is a God?
I will attempt to respond to each statement and order them to make it easy to read/follow.
1) As far as the symbol is concerned, there are many signals used by atheists. The fish with legs probably is used to mock Christians and there is nothing wrong with this. A person’s religious beliefs should be open to debate and discussion, much like politics. This is the 21st century. Christians I’m sure poke fun at Atheists for not holding the same beliefs as them. I should know, I was a Catholic for 19 years of my life, even serving as an alter server for many years. Many Christians told me, Atheists were comparable to homosexuals. Godless heathens. Naturally, we have some catching up to do.
2) There are many reasons why things are immoral and things aren’t. Everyone would agree that murder for instance is wrong, because it deprives that person, permanently, of existence and experience. We need no higher order to tell us this is wrong, it is quite obvious why. The same logical arguments can be said for other things. “Do not do that because God will be sad”, is basically telling you what to do without reason. I also find it very petty that God would care about the many trivial things that go on in life, yet he has allowed such horrors to occur every single day.
3) I still maintain that he was an Atheist, possibly an Agnostic at the best. To say he believed in God is simply wrong, as he did no such thing. Again, when he used words like “God” he was talking about the natural order of the Universe, NOT in an omnipotent creator, as you Christians would assert. I’m talking of Einstein by the way.
4) We are beginning to develop theories that our universe may be apart of a larger, greater universe, I.E. String theory or Multi-verse theory. The main point to consider is that to this date there is still alot of debate and conjecture, because frankly it is a pretty complex problem to attempt to solve. Explaining creation. Instead of defaulting to “This problem is very hard, I give up, God did it”. As an Adult and not a child, this has left many people, dissatisfied and is why we are finally discussing the obvious truth that he was never there.
5) 2nd law of thermodynamics, causation etc. is great. We must consider that some of these rules may not have applied in the current universe that we see today. I.E. The rules may have been different at some point in time.
6) The proof of you can’t prove he’s not there is a very weak argument. You could literally say that about anything. If a tree falls in an empty forest can you prove to me that it fell? Unless someone sees it, or sees it after it has fallen, the answer is no.
Yet the tree does fall. Every time, consistently. We do not need to be there to prove that it does. Its called gravity, and its consistently observed everywhere.
7) Probability is just that. If there is a .0000000000000000001 chance of something happening, there still is a chance. You can’t say “That is extremely rare, it must be impossible, God did it”. Impossibility and rarity are different.
My intent here is to criticize your religious beliefs not to make anyone mad or to convert you to my atheism, but the more people like me that speak up the more aware we all become that Christians are slowly becoming a minority, and Atheists, Agnostics and non-religious person’s are, the majority.
1) I am unconcerned about symbols.
2) You say, “We need no higher order to tell us this is wrong, it is quite obvious why.” You feel that it is obviously wrong because, “it deprives that person, permanently, of existence and experience.” But why is it obvious that depriving a person, permanently of existence and experience is wrong? The only response that an atheist can provide to this question is one of the “it just is” statements that serve as the foundation for the atheist faith. The universe “just is.” Life “just is.” Commonly agreed upon morality “just is.” If that isn’t faith, nothing is. As far as the horrors that occur every day which you speak of, please read my post entitled “If God is good, why do evil and suffering exist?”
3) You still maintain that Einstein was an atheist? That is called believing in something in spite of the facts rather than because of them. Einstein made the categorical statement “I am not an atheist….” How are you going to get around that? By the way, as I mentioned in my previous reply, Einstein also said, “In view of such harmony in the cosmos which I, with my limited human mind, am able to recognize, there are yet people who say there is no God. But what really makes me angry is that they quote me for the support of such views.” You, Jason, would be one of the people who made Einstein angry.
Einstein was really talking about the natural order of the universe when he used the term “God”? Well that is an interesting idea….he was using code language. If by the term “God” he really meant the natural order of the universe, why did he say “Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe–a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble”? Was the term “spirit” also a code word for “the natural order of the universe”?
4) We are beginning to develop theories that our universe may be apart of a larger, greater universe? I address this topic in detail in my posts entitled “Why is there something rather than nothing?” and “Isn’t the universe eternal? (Thus doing away with the need for a creator).” I mentioned these essays in my previous replies, but you failed to respond.
Even without your failure to address these essays, Jason, what would our universe being a part of a larger “multiverse” prove? I personally have no reason to doubt this possibility. At face value, it seems perfectly reasonable to assume that an infinite God would create infinitely. Where did this multiverse come from? From the laws of physics (which is where Stephen Hawking suggests our universe came from)? OK fine, you want it you got it. Where did the laws of physics come from?
Once again, the atheist is forced to fall back upon another “it just is” statement: The laws of physics “just are.” This is a huge leap of faith, pure and simple. And it is a much bigger leap of faith than theists (Christians and others) must make. Which is a bigger leap of faith: 1) Believing that the laws of physics (and other laws for that matter) came from a lawgiver who is a conscious and intelligent being, and that conscious and intelligent beings such as ourselves came from a conscious and intelligent source OR 2) Believing that the laws of physics (and the laws of thermodynamics, morality, etc.) “just are” and that conscious and intelligent beings emerged as a result of random and unintelligent processes without any causal mechanisms?
If a person takes time to critically examine the atheist faith, he or she will quickly realize that (contrary to the atheist pretense of being highly logical), atheism is full of “it just is” assumptions that are nothing more than exhortations to cease rational inquiry. Don’t ask where the universe came from, “it just is.” Don’t ask where the laws of physics or the laws of thermodynamics, etc. came from, they “just are.” Don’t ask where life came from, “it just is.” (Or perhaps life on earth came from aliens from outer space…as prominent atheist biologists such as Richard Dawkins, the author of The God Delusion, and Francis Crick, who was famous for being the co-discoverer of the DNA double-helix, suggested). Click here to see Dawkins endorsing the idea in an interview. Click here to read about Crick’s endorsement of the idea.
Theists do not in any way encourage scientists to say, “This problem is very hard, I give up, God did it.” This is because theists (and most other people) know that science is limited to the observation of phenomena within the physical and natural universe. Why it is that there exists a physical and natural universe in the first place is not a scientific question. Rather, it is a meta-scientific question (or metaphysical question). In other words, study of phenomena within the physical and natural universe is a fundamentally different field of endeavor than examining why it is that there even exists a physical and natural universe in the first place.
5) The 2nd law of thermodynamics may not have applied at some point in time? But if the universe is oscillating through phases of expansion and contraction, as you suggest, then the 2nd law of thermodynamics must continuously apply, and then not apply, and then apply again (like a light switch going on and off). Is that what you are suggesting? If that is what you are suggesting, then what is the causal mechanism that allows for this cycling on and off of a law of thermodynamics? Random chance? Another “it just is” statement?
6) Yes, you could say that about anything. What can you prove to me 100% conclusively that does not require any leap of faith whatsoever? I challenged you to prove to us that the sun will rise tomorrow morning, but you haven’t even tried? Go ahead.
Gravity is consistently observed everywhere? OK, but I am going to adopt your line of reasoning about the 2nd law of thermodynamics and apply it to gravity: Maybe there are times or places where gravity does not apply. Prove to me 100% conclusively that this is not the case.
7) Probability is just that? You haven’t responded to my point that bare probabilities are causally inert. Rather, you have ignored it.
The bare probability that, say, the oceans will instantly turn into maple syrup tomorrow is meaningless. For the bare probability of this event occurring to result in the event actually occurring, there has to be a causal mechanism. Even one chance in two is not enough….without a causal mechanism.
As I said in my previous example, if a person could hypothetically live forever, that person would still have exactly zero chance of winning the lottery unless that person actually played the lottery. The causal mechanism of going to the store to buy lottery tickets on a regular basis is necessary for the bare probability of a lottery win to result in an actual lottery win.
I would also like to point out that it does bring me a sense of pleasure to ruffle a few feathers. Many Christians interrupt my Sunday football by knocking on my door to ask me if I’ve been saved. I don’t want to be saved, as I sincerely like the fact that when I die I will not be coming back. It makes me appreciate the life I have now, instead of wasting it like most people do, clinging to the hope they can live in a paradise that isn’t there.
Jason you should read back to yourself your points.
Hopefully – if for a moment – you can be objective… something will jump out at you.
I’m not going to debate you Jason.
I know what I had!
&
I know what I have now!
I once also was religious (I too was a RC)
A finally surrendered to Jesus years back … and now I have a relationship.
I have Forgiveness, Salvation, Purpose, Hope, Truth, & God’s Eternal LOVE. Righteous living in eternal joyful and peace with Jesus in Heaven. He really is the truth, the way & the life. Absolutely!
What do you have Jason? Apart from an unquenchable thirst for corporeal pleasures.
You will always thirst. You will never be satisfied.. this worldly thirst will increase and mutate until you won’t even know yourself.
Look at you own life (as you touched on) … the change that has happened in your life. … who you were once and who you are now. But still … all because you had FAITH… faith in something else apart from God… in yourself …a scientist who writes volumes of books with theories that will never be provable. Do you ask yourself why you align yourself with these theories? What part of your being does this belief serve? Jason think! Whose book do you want to have faith in… Man’s or God’s? Jason I will pray for you. I truly will.
Before I go; and so that you don’t just assume that I had some stroll in the park kind of life; just know that I was physically & brutally abused by my father until I was old enough to fight back.
I was ALWAYS (until they passed on) physiologically abused by my Father and to a lesser degree by my overprotective mother. I was also sexually abused as a child. When I got older I quickly ran to alcohol, drugs and then SEX – Sex was a free drug that you could produce yourself. It evolved from dirty magazines, to Porn, to casual sex, to Adultery… to full blow orgies. Also… The occult, gangs, you name it! I was a bassist in a Heavy Metal band and I saw violence you wouldn’t believe – I was always there in the midst of this garbage yet something always kept me from going-over the edge – that proverbial point of no return.
Jason trust in JESUS… not religion or science.
H e is striving in you still.
Open the door to HIM.
I will pray for you… I hope you will reconsider your direction.
May God be gracious to you as he was with me.
Al
It seems that religion has helped shape your life for the better, which is good. I’m glad you’re not doing the things now that you once were and I’m truly sorry for your life when you were growing up as these horrors are you speak of are the same I had mentioned in an earlier post.
While I may be missing out on some of the direction and comfort you enjoy by having a relationship with Jesus/God I cannot bring myself to do so unless I fully believed in it. Many of the questions I had when I had doubts came back with the same answers, faith, trust, God. I found all of these answers, incomplete. At that point, the only people that attempted to answer all of these questions in an unbiased, uncaring, and truthful way was science, and if they hadn’t they were working on the problem (such as how the universe came into existence).
Once I also got used to being an Atheist, not believing in God was a good thing. Instead of being sad about being alone, it was good to know I was fully in control of my life, to live as I saw fit and to finally have autonomy, true freedom. Instead of waiting for hell or paradise for those that do good or bad on earth, I realized it is up to all humans to change the world for the better. Instead of feeling ashamed because I want to do something my church finds immoral (i.e. have premarital sex), I now have the freedom to express these normal human desires.
I’m happy it has changed your life for the better though. And since it has maybe believing in God/Jesus Christ is a good thing for some.
“you gotta serve somebody; it may be the devil or it may be The LORD… but you gotta serve somebody” American cultural icon Bob Dylan
Jason,
I see that you’re a smart guy; and it sounds like you’ve been through a lot yourself.
But Jason believing that everything came from nothing and it all just happened by accident takes MORE FAITH than it does to believe that a loving God created all things. …Yes a loving God! You just don’t know him yet. You know Religion only!
Remember that LOVE is TRUTH, JUSTICE, MERCY, JOY, PEACE, SELFLESS, ENDURING, PATIENCE, etc
Jason you had religion in your life – SO DID I– it was baloney and not what God wants. These institutions are shaped by men; filled with rules & regulations many unscriptural and their chambers echo with insincere, incessant and repetitious prayer.
Especially the neo-Pharisees aka the RCC I was RCC for over 30 years I should know. What a burden this institution was to me. It kept me from knowing Jesus – who ALONE saves!
Jason I beg you to ask God to open your eyes… buy a KJV of the Bible as well as a New Century Version. Read the NCV and when you need to compare passages refer to the KJV. Also… Don’t go to any church.. until the Holy Spirit moves you to do so.
When I go to Church now I go for fellowship and to praise God through song. Nothing more! I also go to a non-denominational Church. But that doesn’t mean you have to – you can still attend a denomination just be gracious to others and only go for the above mentioned. Fellowship with others and to praise God in song.
If you allow God into your life HE WILL COME IN and HE will answer all your questions in time as you grow in His word. If you do it sincerely! I KNOW THIS! .
I know that in time you will surrender to Jesus and he will abide in you. You will desire to conform to him. You won’t need rules HE WILL BE YOUR EXAMPLE. HE WILL BE YOUR STRENGTH and He will always be with you.
Jason this is what the LORD says…
Romans 1:20
NCV There are things about him that people cannot see — his eternal power and all the things that make him God. But since the beginning of the world those things have been easy to understand by what God has made. So people have no excuse for the bad things they do.
KJV For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen , being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse.
Crikey, it seems very complicated trying to figure out which god is right, which version of the bible to read and in what circumstances. But finally I got it, and it seems apposite to let everyone know under the heading “What it all boils down to.” Or should that be, what it all boils down with… Finally friends, I have found my religion, my creator, my god, my rules to live by, and I am complete. I have become a Pastafarian, I worship the Flying Spaghetti Monster and I find his teachings to be no less credible than any others, and his doctrines and commandments (or, more accurately, his 8 “I’d really rather you didn’ts”) much more convenient, logical and meaningful to live by. I urge you to rise up, my friends, and worship his noodly goodness, for only then will you be free – Ramen.
OK, you’ve got the mockery part down pat, and you’ve obviously been reading Richard Dawkins (hence the “Flying Spaghetti Monster”)…now how about a logical argument supporting your atheist views. When you use mockery to substitute for a logical argument, it is obvious to virtually everyone that you don’t have a logical argument.
Further, I’d like to use this opportunity to point out that atheists love to scrutinize theism, but they seem unable to apply any scrutiny whatsoever to their own views. A conscious and intelligent source for such things as the universe and for life is deemed as absurd as a “flying spaghetti monster” by atheists. But when you ask an atheist where the universe came from (or the multiverse, or oscillating universe, etc…), you get an answer that is far more absurd than a “flying spaghetti monster.” Atheistic explanations for the universe all fall back on some sort of “it just is” argument. This is despite two clear facts:
1) The universe clearly had a beginning…as I demonstrate in my post entitled “Isn’t the universe eternal?” (located in the snippets section) and as is virtually unanimously accepted among cosmologists.
2) Everything with a beginning requires a cause (as according to the law of causation, without which science would be impossible).
So the atheistic belief in an uncaused, “just is” universe is even more preposterous than a “flying spaghetti monster.” Atheist physicist Stephen Hawking tries to get around this by arguing that the universe “emerged naturally through natural law.” OK, fine….where did the laws come from if there is no lawgiver? All that Hawking has done is kick the can down the road so as to avoid having to answer a question that is inconvenient to the atheist ideology.
Further, one must ask: What is so preposterous about a conscious and intelligent source for the universe when we know for a fact that conscious and intelligent creatures exist (us)? How can the view that consciousness and intelligence emerged through random material processes be deemed anything other than preposterous when materialism has been clearly demonstrated to be false by modern physics? I have yet to hear an atheist provide a coherent answer to this question. Atheists therefore must resort to mockery to fill in the void created by their lack of logical, coherent argument.
Ask an atheist where life came from, and you get answers more absurd still. Atheist biologists Richard Dawkins, Francis Crick and others endorse the view that life was brought to earth by aliens from outer space (as I detail in my post entitled “If the evidence for God is so strong, why are so many smart people unconvinced?”) If this is the best that the atheist cream-of-the-crop can come up with, and if the vast majority of people throughout history have shared a belief in God, who has the ridiculous views?
After wrestling with all this for years I have decided to take Pascals Wager and behave as if I believe in God because I have no other rational explanation and nothing to lose. I do lean towards this side of the argument although my calling is nowhere near as strong as some who post on here. It is my hope that if I try to behave like I believe then at some point things will become clearer.
But this seems to be a tendancy with many people as they get older. A nagging feeling that one needs to atone for their wrongdoings and a fear of oblivion often drives us into the folds of some religion or another. Why did Blair become a Catholic? Nothing to do with being able to be absolved then?
Steve,
Since you seem to have some lingering doubt, let me strongly recommend some books for you to read:
1) The Wonder of the World by Roy Abraham Varghese, The Christ Connection and There Is Life After Death, also by Varghese. The longtime “frontman” for atheism, Oxford University philosopher Antony Flew, listed The Wonder of the World as one of the two books that most influenced him to change his mind and endorse theism. Flew was the atheist philosopher who wrote Theology and Falsification, which has been the most reprinted philosophical tract of the last half-century.
2) The Hidden Face of God by former MIT physicist Gerald Schroeder (as well as Schroeder’s other books such as The Science of God). The Hidden Face of God was the second book that Flew mentioned as most strongly influencing him to accept the existence of God.
3) Who Moved the Stone? by British journalist Frank Morison. When Morison set out to write this book, his purpose was to prove that the story of Christ’s resurrection was false. As a result of his historical research, however, he came to the opposite conclusion.
Scott
Thanks for your kind reply.
I don’t think it is doubt that I have, moreover I often find myself confused by the plethora of argument out there, You have neatly boiled it down to a simple choice of whether one believes in a beginning as in the big bang or infinity and pure chance.
The big bang is the theory ticking most of the boxes at the moment. But where I have a problem is in the fact that Aristotles theories ticked boxes for 2000 years until Newton and when his theory started to look dodgy along comes Einstein to set us all straight. Now we have quantum mechanics and concepts of dark matter. Who is to say that the big bang theory won’t be turned on it’s head at some point.
I’m not sure the answers are found from looking backwards anyway. And does God want us to know the answers?
Would it not be a more reasonable explanation to say the answers will never be found from studying the universe be it the big one or the quantum one. Every solution will yield one more question.
Surely the simple logic is that if we had certainty regarding God and Heaven, why would we spend one minute longer here?
If I knew that paradise and total peace awaited me, why would I want to be dragging myself out of bed at 6 every morning to go to work or suffer a tootheache or watch my mother die or experience a thousand things that I’d rather not. Why would I not short-circuit the system and jump of a cliff (maybe lemmings are more enlightened than us)?
No, if God has a plan for us, the absolute last thing He would want to do is to let on what it was before it was fulfilled. That would allow us to choose whether we wished to carry out the plan or just foerget it and head on into Heaven.
We can never be certain. Faith is the perpetuum for life. Life doesn’t happen without Faith. Why have Life? Well only God knows the answer to that.
I don’t know about you but I gain more Faith from reading about near death experiences NDE’s than I do crunching over the big bang vs. infinity arguments.
Perhaps looking forward is better than looking back.
Steve
Yes, you are correct to assert that the Big Bang is a scientific model that is subject to revision just like all other scientific models. But is not an accurate characterization to say that belief in God in some way rests on the Big Bang theory or that it is a neat and simple choice between the Big Bang or pure chance.
The fact that the universe clearly had a beginning indicates that it clearly had a cause. This is the law of causation, without which science would be impossible. Nevertheless, many atheists continue to believe in an eternally existing universe because this is the only way to assert that the universe “just is” and doesn’t need a cause. (Please view my post entitled “Isn’t the universe eternal?” in the snippets section). This is just one way in which one can clearly see that atheists must make much bigger leaps-of-faith than theists. The simple fact is that the past eternal universe (upon which atheism relies) has no more chance of coming back than the flat-earth theory….regardless of what scientific developments the future may bring.
Remember that heaven is not a guarantee. Life is an opportunity that God has given us to be redeemed from evil and to learn to love (and therefore to be in relationship with Him, because God is love). Not everyone succeeds in this task. Please view the NDE videos at the bottom of my essay entitled “Has anyone met God and returned to tell about it?” The one about the former atheist college professor is one of my favorites.
I no that God is real but i dont know why He will not answer my prayers….i trust in Him and every thing but He NEVER aswers my questions or prayers why….
Emily:
One author wrote, “Delays can actually be part of God’s purpose; seemingly unanswered prayer can be as much a part of God’s will as answered prayer.”
You see, God often knows what is good for us better than we do. God often uses hardship, for example, to mold us and teach us spiritual lessons.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading your post syoungren. Keep up the good work. Your logic is to the point and your points a valid. I like everyone seek for truth and I am glad that there are some people who do not blindly follow one way or the other but are willing to put in the research. you should do a talk show or something.
Hey, I’m 16 and for the past 3 years, I’ve been reading a whole bunch of material which may be right or wrong, idk. I’ve been struggling trying to find out the existence of god and so before I begin to write down my questions, I just want to know if there is anyone here who can answer them.
Go ahead and ask me them.
okay, here are my questions, who was jesus? is it true that everything from the bible came from old texts within africa thousands of years ago before christ? I read this book called “The Secret” and it discusses the Law of attraction and the author was going into details about how the world came into creation through thought and how many years ago, leaders decided to create “God” as a way to control people, also I’ve read somewhere that we use god as a way to make ourselves feel better for the fear of death and how its just our minds that are creating these weird delusions to trick us. Now, I know I’m still young but I’ve been questioning alot of things lately, I guess it came to me because I had a conversation with this man who was agnostic, and he literally broke down the bible in front me talking about how god just punishes people and how majority of whats written in it is about him punishing his people. I felt like collapsing because t I didnt know what was true anymore, sometimes I’m barely able to sleep at night because i’m constantly reading trying to find out if jesus was god or is there a god at all. also, was there an adam and eve? and i saw somewhere that people are hiding pieces of eden or something and using it to control people. idk if I’m being decieved, I just want to know whats the truth. also, in regards to Noahs ark, i found it puzzling as to how he was able to get “all” of the species of insects, bugs and animals. please clear this up for me, I would really appreciate it.
one more thing, I’ve watched some speeches from dr yosef ben jochannan and richard dawkins but i do find it abit hard to fully comprehend what they are saying.
If you are worried that Richard Dawkins has a good argument against God, then ask yourself this: When asked how life on earth originated, why does he respond by suggesting that it was brought here by aliens? Click on this video link to see what I mean. If life was brought here by aliens, then where did the aliens come from? Dawkins doesn’t give an answer to this. He just suggests that it was “some sort of Darwinian process” even though Darwinian processes only apply to living things.
Jesus is the son of God. He came to offer himself as a sacrifice for the sins of mankind so as to repair our damaged relationship with God. Click on this link to explore more. I must strongly recommend a few books. Who Moved the Stone? was written by British journalist Frank Morison. When Morison set out to write the book, his intent was to demonstrate that the resurrection story of Jesus was false. In the process of researching for the book, however, he came to the opposite conclusion.
The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel is a similar book in that it was written by a journalist who set out to determine if the stories in the bible about Jesus had any basis in fact. When Strobel set out to research the topic, he was a hard-core atheist. But when he concluded his research, he was a believer in the divinity of Jesus.
A Case for the Divinity of Jesus was written by Dean Overman, who was a Templeton Scholar at Oxford University (and brilliant). You may want to wait to read this book until you get older as it is more scholarly.
Regarding Adam, I recommend that you read this article written by Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist and biblical scholar Gerald Schroeder. Below is the except that regards Adam:
Adam was the first human, the first Homo sapiens with the soul of a human, the neshama. That is the creation listed in Genesis 1:27. Adam was not the first Homo sapiens. Maimonides in The Guide for the Perplexed (part 1 chapter 7) described animals co-existing with Adam that were identical to humans in shape and intelligence, but because they lacked the neshama, they were animals. The Guide for the Perplexed was published in the year 1190, seven centuries before Darwin and long before any evidence was popular relative to fossils of cave men and women. So from where did these ancients get the knowledge of the pre-Adam hominids? They learned it, correctly we discover, from the subtle wording of the biblical text. Those animals in human shape and intelligence would be the “adam” listed in Genesis 1:26, when God says “Let us make Adam.” But in the next verse God creates “the Adam,” the Adam, a specific being [a nuance in the Hebrew text first pointed out to me by Peggy Ketz and totally missed in the English translations!]. The Mishna in the section, Keli’im, discusses “masters of the field” that were animals but so identical to humans that when they died one could not tell them apart from a dead human. Masters of the field implies farming – a skill that predates the Adam by at least 2000 years according to pollen studies in the border area between Israel and Syria. Nahmanides (year 1250; the major kabalistic commentator on the Torah), in his long discussion of Genesis 2:7, details the flow of life that led to the Adam, the first human. He closes his comments there with the statement that when this spirituality was infused into the living being, that being changed to “another kind of man.” Not changed to man but another kind of man, a homo sapiens / hominid became spiritually human. The error in the term “cavemen” is in the “men.” They were not men or women. Though they had human shape and intelligence, they lacked the neshama, the human spirit infused by God. Cave men or women were never a theological problem for the ancient commentators. And they did not need a museum exhibit to tell them so. It is science that has once again come to confirm the age-old wisdom of the Torah! (For a detailed discussion of the ancient sources cited here, see the two relevant chapters in my second book, The Science of God.)
So, to summarize, Adam was not the first member of the homo sapiens species (our species). Rather, he was the first member of the homo sapiens species infused with the human spirit (soul).
Regarding Noah’s Ark, please view this article. It discusses your questions.
Please note that some Christians believe that not all biblical stories were intended to be descriptions of literal historical events. Rather, some Christians believe that some of the biblical stories were intended as metaphors to communicate spiritual truths.
wow, thanks for taking the time to answer my questions syoungren. you’ve really helped me out, but may I ask you one more thing, how do you know for sure that God is with us and its not just our minds fooling us giving us delusions?
Let me answer that by referring you to some of the essays that I have written. Some of the essays include videos. Since you are only 16 and haven’t yet been to college, some of this stuff might be challenging. If that is the case, please feel free to ask me any questions that you might have. You can click on the links I have created for you below to go to the essays that I would like to refer you to first:
Is There A God? What is the chance that the world is the result of chance?
Has anyone met God and returned to tell about it? (This one has several short videos).
Some quotes to consider… if you think science leads to atheism.
If God is there, why doesn’t he just show himself?
I watched the video and I understand, thankyou for that but can you also answer my other questions?
hey one more thing, what about the image of jesus thats been giving to us? i’ve been looking into some things and found out that the image of christ isnt christ but of Cesar Borgia. why is a man who isnt christ being shown as christ?
I don’t know who told you that. As far as I can tell, the commonly recirculated images of Jesus come from the Shroud of Turin. Click here to see what I mean.
its not him, listen to this, “The original King James Bible of 1611 had the Apocrypha in it, but in 1928 under the Vatican, they made an agreement to take 14 books out of the King James holy bible. Why you might ask, well because thousands of years before they put this image up to be Christ(the image of cesare borgia), they found out that it was written of in the Wisdom of Solomon located in the Apocrypha, that they would do this and the reason for it. So knowing this was written of in the Wisdom of Solomon, the Roman Catholic Church took it out of the bible so the people wouldn’t figure out their deception. It is a noted fact that when they did this, they knew exactly what Christ people really looked like, they knew Christ and his people were not Europeans, but instead were actually Hebrews, who were dark brown people. So let’s findout in the bible first what Satan was going to do, and then will find out what exactly was written in the Wisdom of Solomon that the Apocrypha had to be taken out and credited as unscriptual and not divinely inspired, by the Catholic Church.”
also, Scott, i need your thoughts on this. I’ve been reading that Jews created Christianity. I’ve read this within “The White Mans Bible” by Ben Klassen and I gotta say, its pretty scary. I reccommend you read this. I’ve taken an excerpt of it:
lexandria, Egypt, Center of Learning. Alexander the Great
I
ary
ly
lso Hotbed of Christian Subversion. By the time of Julius
ce.
n of
an.
ypatia. During the fourth century A.D. there lived in Alexandria
e
eautiful, Intellectual, Athletic. Hypatia was born in the year 355
the time she was 20 she could walk 10 miles without fatigue, could
A
died at the early age, of 33. Before his death in 323 B.C. he
founded the illustrious city of Alexandria in Egypt. Ptolemy
(Ptolemy Soter), Pharaoh of Egypt, started a Museum and Libr
in Alexandria about a generation later. This library grew and
eventually comprised of 400,000 volumes. In the continuing
intellectual growth an additional Library was established in an
adjacent quarter of the city in the Temple at Serapis. It eventual
comprised of another 300,000 volumes. During the next several
centuries Alexandria was not only the capital of Egypt, but the
intellectual capital of the world.
A
Caesar in the first century B.C. Egypt became a Roman provin
When Constantine became emperor in 313 A.D. he decreed
Christianity the official religion of the Empire to the exclusio
all others. By this time Alexandria had become a hotbed of
Christian subversion, and Constantine’s edict encouraged the
Christians to attack the intellectuals, whom they termed as pag
H
a lovely intellectual woman by the name of Hypatia, the daughter
of Theon. She grew up in an ideal intellectual climate, since her
father Theon was a teacher, a mathematician and a philosopher. H
taught her astronomy, astrology, mathematics and rhetoric.
B
A.D. She grew up to be a tall, slim, beautiful woman. Not only was
she highly gifted intellectually, but she was unusually athletic. By
472
swim, row, ride horseback and climb mountains. She had bodily
grace, beauty of face, and above all an abundance of intelligence.
Exposed Superstitions. By the time she began giving lectures of
h
fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fancies. To teach
superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child-mind
accepts and believes them, and only after great pain and perhaps
tragedy can he be in after-years relieved of them. In fact, men w
fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth — ofte
more so, since a superstition is so intangible you cannot get at it to
refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable.”
Supported by Prefect. Orestes, who was the prefect of the c
a
by fettering the mind through fear of punishment in another world
is just as base as to use force,” Orestea applauded her. News of this
event was carried to Cyril, the then Bishop of Alexandria. He was
infuriated and declared he would excommunicate Orestes.
Bishop Opposed Her. But neither Cyril nor Orestea could u
e
Rome. The quarrel grew more acrimonious, with Bishop Cyril
venting his pathological hatred more and more against Hypatia.
Viciously Attacked by Christian Mob. In March of 415 A.D.,
se
was 60 years old, she left the lecture hall one night to enter a
carriage and go home. She was viciously attacked by the Nitrian
Monks leading a fanatical, hate filled Christian mob. After firs
stripping her naked, she was barbarously murdered. She was then
dragged through the streets by the mob, her flesh cut from her
bones and finally burned piecemeal.
Promoting Truth and Culture Her O
to
er own she was saying such things as: “Fables should be taught as
ill
n
ity,
ttended her lectures. When in one lecture Hypatia stated: “To rule
nseat
ach other, since both derived their power from the Emperor in
veral years after Bishop Cyril had come to power, when Hypatia
t
nly Crime. Her crime? She
ld the truth about the Christians’ unreasoned and superstitious
473
lies, she promoted learning and culture, and thereby undermined
the power of the tyrannical Jewish-Christian power structure.
* * * * *
No Evidence Whatsoever. W amine what substantiated
vidence there exists for the basic claims of Christianity, such
e
al
at is the basis of all the Christian hocus-pocus is contained in the
e
at
irst few
enturies grew into the Roman Catholic Church, guaranteed its
ves
st
hen we ex
e
claims as life in the “hereafter,” the existence of hell, the existenc
of heaven, the existence of spooks in the sky, and even the actu
historical existence of that central figure of Jesus Christ himself,
we find there is no evidence whatsoever. We repeat — none
whatsoever that has the slightest basis in fact or genuine history.
Authors Unknown. The sum total of all the so-called “evidence”
th
so-called “gospels” — Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Who wrot
these garbled, self-contradictory concoctions nobody really knows,
and it doesn’t much matter. Certainly there is nothing known about
these characters except they are “credited” with writing the
“gospels,” but what research can be done on this jumbled mess
indicates that a number of unknowns had a hand in putting it
together from some earlier myths. It is, however, extremely
doubtful that there ever was a Matthew, Mark, Luke or John th
had anything to do with writing the so called “gospels.”
Authenticated Itself. The Christian church, which in the f
c
own “authenticity” and its own charter by a process of what is
called arguing in a circle. It claims its principal authority from the
gospels, based on Matthew 16:18 in which Jesus purportedly gi
the church its charter: “And I say also unto thee, that thou art Peter,
and upon this rock I will build my church: and the gates of hell
shall not prevail against it.” The Roman Catholic church claims it
is the church referred to, and has its credentials from Jesus Chri
himself.
474
Round an
“g
the authenticity and authority of the Roman Catholic church? Why,
the gospels do. A perfect example of bad logic known as “arguing
in a circle.” You have heard kids do it all the time. All it takes is a
massive dose of propaganda dumped on gullible yokels to make it
stick. It is the same as two con men working in collusion to be
each other’s chief character witnesses.
Federal Reserve used same Con Gam
to
international Jewish bankers. They print up billions of worthless
counterfeit Federal Reserve Notes, known as dollars. They are
backed by anything. Who guarantees the counterfeit notes? Why
the Federal Government does. Who elects, controls, owns and
manipulates the Federal government? Why, the international
Jewish bankers do. Just as the average White yokel accepts the
counterfeit dollars on faith, so also does he accept the Christia
“spooks in the sky” story on faith. At this point it is well to
remember our definition of faith: foolishly accepting as true a
concept or an idea without bothering to check for valid evid
* * * * *
d Around. So who guarantees the authenticity of the
ospels? Why, the Roman Catholic church does. Who guarantees
e. The principle is similar
one used by the Federal Reserve, a private organization of
not
n
ence.
Capitalize on Superstition and Gullibility. The Christian
hurches strongly discourage anyone from seeking legitimate
ic,
inds
c
evidence. For that matter, they also vigorously condemn log
reason, or the idea of thinking for yourself. They put a high
premium on faith, i.e., child-like gullibility. They do not like to
have you asking questions. They want gullible fools whose m
can be programmed to believe whatever they are told to believe.
Otherwise, they make it plain, hell fire and damnation will be your
dire penalty. Either you believe the spooks in the sky story as they
tell it, or you fry in the hereafter. It is a powerful club and it has
475
worked wonders on the gullible and superstitious for centuries. As
we have pointed out earlier, the combination of gullibility and
superstition has wreaked havoc on the White Race, and the Jewish
mind manipulators have exploited those two human weaknesses
the most — to our detriment and to their benefit.
* * * * *
to
Where did Christianity come a Jewish religious fanatic
und it as the New Testament describes?
ast question is a flat no.
sus Christ did not invent or found Christianity. All evidence that
ut of
they
s of
to
ne
. At this time the Christian movement,
lthough purportedly nearly 300 years old, still did not have a
ers
a
from? Did
fo
Christ Never Existed. Our answer, to the l
Je
can be gleaned from a scholarly examination of authentic history
points to an obvious conclusion: there never was any Jesus
Christ roaming about in 30 A.D. or thereabouts teaching a new
religion. (We have gone into more detail about this subject in
NATURE’S ETERNAL RELIGION.) The whole story was
invented and concocted much later. It was patched together o
fables, myths, bits and pieces of other religions, until finally
had a movement going that pulled in the Roman Emperor
Constantine. It was this Roman Emperor, who had the mind of a
criminal, (he murdered his own wife and son, and thousand
others) who in the year 313 A.D. really put Christianity into
business. The Romans, who had always been extremely tolerant
all religions, were now told by an edict of Emperor Constanti
that Christianity was now the supreme religion of the empire to the
exclusion of all others.
Still No Bible at 300 A.D
a
written text or “Bible.” Under the powerful and dictatorial
direction of Emperor Constantine a convocation of church fath
was called at Nicaea, a town in Asia Minor. At this meeting
number of scripts and writings were dragged together and a heated
476
controversy ensued over a period of several months. Many wri
were considered, discussed, argued over, and reviewed. Some were
revised, some were rewritten, some were rejected. The final
package that emerged from the Council of Nicaea was what was
called the New Testament, a contradictory, demented
conglomeration of far-out nonsense. To it was patched the Jewish
“Old Testament.” The Christian movement now had a
with Constantine as final arbiter. When the gathered bishops would
or could not agree, he would threaten to bring in his army, whic
was standing by outside, to enforce compliance.
Ready to Crush All Opposition. Constantine exercis
p
enforcement to now promote Christianity and crush all opposition
Christianity was now on its way.
* * *
tings
“Bible,”
h
ed the full
owers of his position, financially, militarily and in terms of legal
.
* *
Jews Concocted Christianit id the ideas of Christianity
ome from? As we have shown throughout this book, the Jews,
h
the
ilitary
ative
ELIGION we
ave already discussed the Essenes as being the precursors of
y. Where d
c
who were scattered throughout the Roman Empire, have been
Master Mind-manipulators of other peoples from the earliest
beginnings of their history. They have always been at war wit
the host peoples they have infested like a parasite. When during
Jewish Wars of 68-70 A.D., Rome put down the Jewish rebellion
in Judea and leveled Jerusalem to the ground, the Jews were
thirsting for revenge. They were looking for a way to destroy
Rome, the Roman race and its total empire. They had tried m
opposition and failed miserably, being no match for the superl
Romans. They looked for an alternative — mind-manipulation
through religion — and they found the right creed in a relatively
unimportant religious sect called the Essenes.
The Essenes. Since in NATURE’S ETERNAL R
h
477
Christianity, we will not repeat it here. Suffice it to say the
teaching of the Essenes was the basic fabric on which Christian
was built. It was a suicidal teaching. The Jews recognized it
such, remodeled it slightly, then fed this suicidal poison to the
Romans. How well they succeeded we have recorded elsewhere
this book.
Horrible C
e
horrible concept of hell as a powerful club on the minds of its
victims, to frighten, to terrorize and to stampede its gullible vi
into submission.
ity
as
in
oncept of Hell. In the succeeding chapters we want to
xamine more closely how the Jews used Christianity and its
ctims
478
CREATIVE CREDO No. 48
Fear and Terror as Christianity’s Ultimate Weapon
motions Activate, Paralyze. There are certain human emotions
apitalize on Panic. In this chapter we want to focus on the
hilt, have
ears: Real and Imaginary. Fears can be real, or they can be
nt
ool to Enslave. Real fears are a helpful protective device that
gle
ost people’s fears are imaginary. Most fears are unreal and
E
that stir men into action. Among these are love, hate and anger.
There are certain emotions that paralyze and incapacitate. The
foremost among these are fear, panic and confusion.
C
phenomenon of fear and how the diabolical Jewish mind-
manipulators have utilized this treacherous weapon to the
capitalized on this human frailty and used it as a powerful weapon
to intimidate, to paralyze, to whip their victims into line in order to
enslave them.
F
imaginary. A real fear is one that is based on a real and immine
threat of danger. For example, if a criminal who has broken into
your house is holding a gun at your head threatening to kill you,
your fear is based on reality. On the other hand, if you have a fear
of a spook in the sky that no one has ever seen, heard, felt or smelt,
then such fear in all likelihood is based on fantasy and is unreal.
T
Nature has built into most creatures as an aid in the eternal strug
for survival. Unreal fears are a form of psychosomatic sickness and
are detrimental to the physical and mental health of its victims.
They do more than unnecessarily make such people sick. They
warp their personalities, paralyze their activities, and make them
easy prey in submitting to the will of even weaker and inferior
enemies. In short, fear can be and is a perfect tool with which a
weaker adversary can enslave a stronger.
M
unreasonable. The latter can be termed as phobias.
479
T
which different people are afflicted — fear of heights;
claustrophobia; fear of snakes; fear of failure; fear of su
of rejection; fear of love; fear of disease (hypochondria); fear of
going insane; fear of the future; and a thousand other fears, most
which are in part, or wholly, imaginary.
F
phobias that has afflicted mankind through the tens of thousand
years going back to the Stone Age is the fear of imaginary ghosts,
fear of the Unseen. In his ignorant attempt to explain the
Unknown, man inverted ghosts, spirits, demons and spook
thousands. All of them were attributed with supernatural powers,
and most of them were deemed as hostile and malevolent. They
were insanely feared, catered to, and endless attempts were made
to placate them. It is this phobia, this fear of spooks in the sky (and
elsewhere) that is the basis of practically all of history’s endless
religions.
M
phobias and superstitions stepped the wily Jew, to aggravate and
amplify existing fears and to capitalize on them to the hilt. These
master mind-manipulators of all time harnessed the full potential
of all such inherent fears and exploited those fears and phobias of
ot
here are any number of unreal and unreasonable phobias with
ccess; fear
of
ear of The Unknown. One of the oldest and most universal
s of
s by the
aster Mind-Manipulators. Into this murky picture of fears,
also, check this out, it was from “Natures Eternal Religion”
In the previous material it has been fairly well proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that Christianity is a suicidal philosophy or
teaching. If taken seriously enough by its followers it will destroy them, and if a whole race or nation takes it seriously enough
and faithfully attempts to follow the teachings of the The Sermon on the Mount then that whole nation will destroy itself.
The great Roman nation, the finest civilization produced by the White Race in classical times, in the first few centuries A.D., did
take Christianity seriously, and it did destroy itself, never to rise again.
Where did Christianity originate ? If we read the Jewish Bible, the Old Testament and the New testament, we will not get the
correct answers. The fact is Christianity is,a and was, a Jewish creation, dreamed up, composed, and promoted by the
hierarchy of the Jewish Race, undoubtedly, by the Elders of the Sanhedrin itself.
It is, in fact, an unholy teaching designed to unhinge and derange the White Gentile intellect and to cause him to abandon his
real responsibilities of doing that for which Nature created him. It is an unnatural and completely perverted attitude towards the
natural surroundings with which Nature has provided us.
Whereas the full impact of it completely destroyed the Roman Empire within less than two centuries after it became the
adopted religion of Rome, it is today still an overriding influence hanging like a shadow over affairs and thinking of the White
Race throughout the world. It is, therefore, important that we trace its origin, despite the fact that much evidence has been
deliberately destroyed and many roadblocks have been p[laced in the way of objectively even considering the evidence that
still survives.
Anyone recapturing his senses and looking at that evidence will find hat its origin is much different from what our church fathers
today would have us believe. However, let us take at face value what the church fathers and the “Holy” bible are teaching us
today. The first page of the New Testament, Matthew 1, immediately makes it clear that Jesus was a Jew and it traces his
genealogy all the way from Abraham through David through Joseph to Christ. At another place it gives the genealogy of Mary,
and makes sure that we are fully aware that she, too, is a Jew.
Here, immediately, the first major contradiction is revealed, glaringly revealed, that is, if Jesus was the Son of God how could
he also be the son of Joseph ?
Anyway, be that as it may, we now look at the disciples of Jesus and the apostles and we find that Matthew, who supposedly
wrote the first book in the New Testament, was also called Levi, son of Altheus and was, as so many Jews are, a tax collector
in Capernaum. We find that the Apostle Mark, who wrote the second book of the New Testament, was also called John Mark,
he son of Mary, in whose home in Jerusalem the early Christians gathered and he was a cousin of Barnabas. We find, that
above all, Mark was also a Jew. We now come to St. Luke, who was probably the only Gentile in the group of twelve.
Historians regard him as a Gentile physician. However, he was under the complete dominance of Paul, who was a proselyte
Jew, and Luke spent most of his life as a disciple traveling around in the company of Paul, the Jew.
We now come to Apostle John whom we find is also a Jew, along with his brothers Peter and James.
We now come to the Apostle Paul, who changed his name from the real name of Saul, born in tarsus, of Jewish parents, and a
man who was reared strictly in the Jewish tradition of the Pharisees of his time. Of the 27 books of the New Testament, it was
Paul who is credited with writing 14 of them and credited with writing well over half of the New Testament itself.
And so it goes. Of the 12 disciples that Christ supposedly had, all of them Jews with the possible exception of Luke and as we
noted he was completely under the influence of Paul. It is more than passing strange that, according to the New Testament
itself, the writers, preachers, and apostles of this “New Teaching,” as well as the supposed founder himself, are all Jews with
very little exception. It is more than passing strange also that the Jews themselves never accepted this highly suicidal teaching
but were tremendously active in promoting and foisting it on the White Gentiles in general,and the great Roman nation in
particular.
We do not doubt that these Jewish characters were fanatically active in promoting the suicidal new teaching of Christianity, nor
do we doubt that they had not only hundreds but thousands of Jewish helpers that were the “Hidden Hand” that promoted the
spread of this teaching among the Romans and Gentiles in the Roman Empire. There is, however, serious doubt that such a
character as Jesus Christ ever lived at all, and there is, however, overwhelming evidence to indicate he did not exist, but was
figment of the Jewish of the Jewish imagination.
The beginning of the Christian era found Rome near the height of her civilization. Her supremacy, in the then known world, was
pretty much unchallenged and it was the beginning of a long period of peace. To be specific, Pax Romana (Roman Peace)
lasted approximately 200 years beginning with the reign of Caesar Augustus. Rome was highly literate, there were many great
writers, scholars, historians, sculptors and painters, not to mention other outstanding men of philosophy and learning.
Yet it is highly strange that despite the great commotion and fanfare that supposedly heralded the birth of Christ and also his
crucifixion (according to the bible), we find not a single historian nor a single writer of the era who found time to tale note of it in
their writings. Outside of the fabricated biblical writings, no Roman historian, no Roman writer, and no Roman play-writer, has
left the slightest hint that he had the faintest awareness that this supposedly greatest of all greats was in their very midst and
preaching what is claimed the greatest of all the new gospels.
Whereas Caesar left voluminous writings that are still extant today and can be studied by our high school boys and girls, Christ
himself, who had supposedly the greatest message to deliver to posterity that the world has ever known, left not the slightest
scrap of paper on which he had written a single word. This, in fact, the biblical literature itself confirms and mentions only that
once he did write in the sand.
Today we can still study Cicero;s great orations and writings. He has left over 800 letters behind that we can study to this day.
We can study whole books of what Marcus Aurelius wrote, we can study what Aristotle wrote, what Plato wrote, and scores of
others wrote that were contemporary with the first beginning of the Christian era, or preceded it. But strangely there is not a
word that is in writing hat can be attributed to Jesus Christ himself.
Furthermore, the Greeks and the Romans of that era, and even previously and afterwards, had developed the art of sculpturing
to a fine state. We can find busts of Cicero, of Caesar, Of Marcus Aurelius and innumerable other Greek and Roman
dignitaries and lesser lights, but nor one seemed to think it important enough to sculpture a likeness of Jesus Christ. And the
reason undoubtedly is there was none to model at the time. There were undoubtedly numerous skilled artists and painters at
that time, but again strangely enough none took the time or the interest to paint a likeness of this purportedly greatest of all
teachers, who in fact was proclaimed the Son of God come to earth. But no painting was ever made of this man, who, we are
told, gathered great multitudes around him and caused great consternation and fear even to King Herod of Judea himself.
Now all of this is very, very strange, when, if, as the Bible claims, the birth of Jesus Christ was ushered in with great fanfare
and great proclamations. Angels proclaimed his birth. An exceedingly bright star pointed to his place of birth. In Matt. 2:3, it
says, “When Herod, the king, had heard of these things he was troubled and all Jerusalem with him.” We can hardly gather
from this that no one was aware of the fact that the King of the Jews, the great Messiah, was born, for we are told in the
preceding verse that the Wise Men came to King Herod himself saying, “Where is he that is born King of the Jews, for we have
seen his star in the East and we are come to worship him.” Evidently the event was even lit up with a bright star from heaven.
In any case, King Herod, we are told in Matt. 3, was so worried that he sent the Wise Men to Bethlehem to search diligently for
the young child to bring it to him so he undoubtedly could have him put to death. As the story further unfolds we learn that
Joseph heard of this and quietly slipped out in the night taking with him his wife, the young child and a donkey and departed for
Egypt. When Herod found out that he had been tricked it says that he “was exceedingly wroth and sent forth and slew all
children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under.”
Now this is a tremendously drastic act for a King to take, that is, to have murdered all the children in the land that were under
two years of age. Again we can hardly say that the birth of Jesus was unheralded, unannounced and unobserved, according to
the story in the bible. However, it is very, very strange that this act of Herod, as drastic and criminally harsh as it is, is nowhere
else recorded in the histories or writings of any of the other numerous writers of the times. All we have is the claims of those
people who wrote the New Testament. In fact, whoever wrote the New Testament invented so many claims that are
inconsistent with the facts that they even made a rather glaring error by pulling King Herod into the story. History tells us that in
the year 1 A.D. When Christ was supposedly born, Herod had already been dead for four years. He could hardly been
disturbed or very wroth about the birth of anybody in the year 1 A.D.
There is further great evidence that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John never wrote any of those chapters that are supposedly
attributed to them. What historical evidence can be dug up reveals that they were written much later, not at the time that Jesus
supposedly said all those things, but somewhere around 30 to 50 years later by a person or persons unknown. Furthermore,
when we compare the first four books of the gospel with each other, which supposedly tell more or less the same story, we find
that they contradict each other in so many details that one need only read them for himself to pick them out. I neither have the
time, the space, not the inclination to go into all these contradictions. They are too numerous.
I do not contend that it really makes a great deal of difference whether there ever was a Jewish character by the name of Jesus
Christ that led to the creation of a new religion to be foisted on the White Race for their destruction. The point is that, in any
case, it was the Jews collectively who created and promoted this new teaching upon the White Race and it did destroy the
Roman civilization.
Nevertheless, the evidence is overwhelming that these ideas long preceded the Christian era and it was not Christ who came
out with them but a Jewish sect called the Essenes who lived on the border of the Dead Sea. It was they who had already
evolved the ideas contained in the Sermon on the Mount but have been attributed to Christ. Not only had they evolved the
same ideas as set forth in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, but the wording, the phraseology and the sentences were the same
and they preceded the supposed time of the Sermon on the Mount by anywhere from 50 to 150 years.
The Essenes were a Jewish religious group living in approximately the first century B.C. And the first century A.D. We have
important sources of their contemporary writings in the historian Josephus and also in the philosopher Philo. They are also
mentioned by various other Roman and Greek writers of those times in which their religious teachings are revealed in
considerable detail. However, in the last twenty years the thousands of Dead Sea Scrolls, many of which were written by the
Essenes themselves, reveal a tremendous amount of insight into their religious teachings, and above all, reveal that they
preceded and preempted the Sermon on the Mount word for word, so that the so-called “new” teachings of a figure supposedly
appearing from heaven in the year 1 A.D. And preaching during the years 3- to 33 A.D. Were neither original nor were they
new.
Furthermore, we learn that the Essenes were notable for their communistic society, their extreme piety and purity and their
practice of celibacy. They possessed all their worldly goods in common and looked upon private property as an evil which
might divert them from sanctity. They engaged in agriculture and handicrafts, considering these occupations less sinful than
others. They also practiced baptism, and this practice preceded the the Christian era by at least one hundred. So the Christian
apostles can hardly be credited with having instituted the ritual of baptism, as is claimed.
Why, the average reader might ask, haven’t we been told more about the Essenes if they were the original practitioners of
Christianity? There are two good and overriding answers for that. The Christians on their part, although the early Christian
fathers were well aware of the Essene teachings and writings, took every measure possible to destroy them and purge them
from circulation. The reason being they did not want their presence known because it would undermine their dogma that Christ
was the originator of the New teaching. It would make impossible the claim that this was a great new revelation sent forth by
God himself amid the hosannas and singing of angels. The Jews, on the other hand, did not want to reveal the presence of the
Essenes because they wish to completely hide any connection between the Jews and the new religious teaching that they
were about to administer unto the Gentiles. They even went to great lengths to appear hostile to it.
Before I go further into the highly illuminating and highly interesting Dead Sea Scrolls I want to make just one further point that
is that the original manuscripts on which the New Testament supposedly based is always alluded to being translated from the
“Original Greek.” Since the New Testament repeats over and over again and again that Paul spoke to his flock in Jewish and
that Jesus spoke in Jewish and that the Apostles were Jewish, why, then, is it that the manuscripts were all in Greek?
The historical facts add up to this : the Jewish hierarchy and undoubtedly the whole conspiracy was well coordinated and had
many, many members and co-workers. It was not written at the time of Christ at all, but the movement was given great
promotion by the combined efforts of the Jewish nation. As they organized and promoted their ideas further, these were
reduced to writing considerably later than the years 30 to 33 A.D. When Christ supposedly came out with these startlingly and
“new” revelations. The conclusions are that they were written by Jewish persons whose identity we shall never know and were
written by collectively by many authors, were revised from time to time and not only in their original formation and formulation
but have been revised time and time again throughout the centuries to become more effective and persuasive propaganda.
However, we want to go further into the teachings of the Essenes and who they were and why their particular teachings were
pounced upon by the Jews to be formulated into a well distilled poisonous brew and then fed to the Gentiles.
The Dead Sea Scrolls, which are more numerous and much more revealing than the Jewish press of today has informed us tell
us much about the teachings and the life of the Essenes. One of the important things that they tell us about the Essenes is that
they vanished from the face of the earth after about two centuries of existance and the termination date being somewhere
around the year 100 A.D. They were, needless to say, only a very small sect of the Jewish tribes and not a part of the Jewish
conspiracy as such. Being outside of the mainstream of Jewish activity and thought, the Jews nevertheless observed from
them that this kind of teaching could ruin and destroy a people. The Jews, looking for a way to destroy the Roman nation, who
in the year 70 A.D. had destroyed and levelled Jerusalem to the ground, noted well what these teachings were and decided to
perpetuate them on the Romans.
Essenism was really a revolutionary new form of social order, an ideal cooperative commonwealth in miniature. Instead of the
Messiah, the ideal of the Essenes was the “Teacher of Righteousness.” They established a new cooperative communitarian
brotherhood and they were the first religious society to establish and observe the sacraments of baptism and the eucharistic
meal. Most important of all they were the firs group to condemn and abolish the age old institution of human slavery.
Furthermore, the “Teacher of Righteousness” as promulgated by the Essenes may not have been the first pacifist in history,
but he was the first to implement his pacifist theories with an overall practical measure, which if generally adopted, would
abolish war. This, of course, was a wonderful religion for the Jews to sell to the Romans, for if they convert the Romans into
submissive pacifists they could certainly soon thereafter dominate them in full. And this they did.
The Essenes lived in the area of Qumran near the Dead Sea and according to Philo, the Jewish Philosopher and writer
contemporary of that age, “the Essene brotherhood would not allow the manufacture of any weapons or allow within their
community any maker of arrows, spears, swords or any manufacture of engines of war, nor any man occupied with a military
avocation, or even with peaceful practices which might easily be converted to mischief.” Not only does Philo tell us about the
Essenes, but also Josephus and Pliny, both contemporary historians, tell us much about the Essenes.
As mentioned before, much is emerging also from the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The overriding fact that emerges from the
study of the writings of the historians of that time and the Dead Sea Scrolls is this tremendously significant fact : namely that
the beliefs, teachings, and practices attributed to Jesus Christ,although not exactly identical in all respects with those of the
Essene school, were nevertheless, closer to those of the Essenes than to those of the Bishops of the Ecumenical Council
which determined the Nicene Creed of orthodox Christianity.
So we can come to the obvious conclusion that the Christian beliefs and doctrines as supposedly enunciated by Christ in the
Sermon on the Mount did not originate at all at that time but at least 100 years earlier from a Jewish sect called the Essenes
living near the Dead Sea; that the Elders of Sanhedrin recognized this teaching as being deadly and suicidal; that they further
took this doctrine and distilled and refined it into a working creed; the Jews then, with a great deal of energy and tremendous
amounts of propaganda (in which they excel), promoted and distributed this poisonous doctrine among the Romans.
Setting this creed down in writing ion what is now called the New Testament evolved over the next several centuries. It was
written by persons unknown to us today but undoubtedly of Jewish origin. Furthermore, to give it a mystical and heavenly sent
deification, they invented the person of Jesus Christ, and claimed that he was the Son of God. Then, having laid the ground
work for this new church, they consolidated that power at a meeting in Nicene, where the creation of the new church was
solidified, the creed formalized and given official sanctification.
Thus, in short, was launched the new church and the new religion of “Jesus Christ” which was fabricated out of thin air. Not a
single trace of the Jesus Christ personage can be found in authentic history. Nevertheless, this newly fabricated hoax of Jesus
Christ, the Son of God this idea, with all its suicidal doctrines, was soon to pull down in ruins the great Roman Empire and the
great White civilization that went with it.
Never again did the White Race shake off the control if the Jews. Never again did the White Man regain control of his own
thinking, of his own religion, his own finances, nor his own government. Unto this day the White Race has not regained control
of its own destiny.
It is the unalterable goal of our new religion, Creativity, and the Creativity Movement, to again have the White Man regain
unconditional control of his own destiny and his own future.
To do this we, first of all, have to straighten out the White Man’s thinking. That is what this book is all about.
Darwin:
A legitimate historian would laugh at this stuff and label it garbage. This is just anti-semitic conspiracy theory stuff that tries to blame everything on Jewish people. Legitimate historians would never make such nonsense statements as:
“Christianity is,a and was, a Jewish creation, dreamed up, composed, and promoted by the
hierarchy of the Jewish Race, undoubtedly, by the Elders of the Sanhedrin itself.
It is, in fact, an unholy teaching designed to unhinge and derange the White Gentile intellect and to cause him to abandon his
real responsibilities of doing that for which Nature created him. It is an unnatural and completely perverted attitude towards the
natural surroundings with which Nature has provided us”.
You don’t really take this stuff seriously even for a minute, do you? It’s pretty much a joke.
Darwin:
This is a bunch of garbage written by a white-supremecist nutcase. It is not worth your time, or mine to even read. Serious arguments need serious consideration, but this is something that truly needs to be dismissed offhand.
For example, the stance that Jesus Christ never existed is not taken seriously by legitimate scholars (whether they be Christian or atheist or agnostic). Jesus’ existence is confirmed by the writings of several non-Chrisitan historians from Jesus’ era, such as Josephus, Tacitus, and Pliny the Younger. Click on this article to see what I mean.
Hey Scott, I’ve still been researching facts about the truth concerning the bible, jesus, and many other other religions and I feel that I have a reached a point where I can acknowledge the existence of god, but yet, I still find myself still lost. One recent site I’ve been on was telling me that “jesus” isnt the true name of god but is in fact “yahushua” or “iseus” or “Elohim” and that jesus comes from the greek god zeus and now i’m confused on whether or not christianity is somehow linked to judiasm. Another recent thing I’ve read was the significance of “amen”. If “Amen” was a pagan idol within egyptian mythology, then why is “amen” being said after christian prayers? Also, is the Torah the true biblical text? What’s the real truth concerning god and life itself?
Darwin:
Please read my essay titled Isn’t Christianity A Myth? I discuss this topic. Please feel free to ask me any questions when you are done.
Scott
Thanks Scott, I’ve carefully read the essay numerous times and I can honestly say that I understand what you are saying. I guess right now, its hard for me because there are times where I’m not sure what to believe and who is telling the truth now a days. I read plenty of articles each day and I hear new information being presented by various people but I’m just not sure whether or not their telling the truth. Usually, I just tend to end up being more lost than how I originally start. Like for instance, I read that the term “believe” is just a scam because in between its “LIE”. For some reason, even the little things get to me. I just want to know the truth so I can be free of this fear. Another question I have is which bible should I read. I see a whole lot of controversy over the KJV about how reliable or unreliable it is.I just want to know what should I do.
Darwin:
I’ll tell you what: Let me know what atheist arguments are upsetting you and we will discuss them and examine them closely.
Regarding beliefs being a scam, that is a strange atheist argument. Many atheists seem to believe that they don’t really believe anything that hasn’t been proven by science. But one of the main points of this essay is that atheists strongly believe something that has been completely discredited by modern physics (and by virtually all philosophers, by the way). I am of course referring to materialism.
And about the reliability of the bible, please watch this video. Please also watch this video.
Scott
Hey Darwin. The KJV is a standard English translation. It’s not a perfect translation, as there are various disputed interpretations of certain words and phrases. However, overall it is a pretty good translation of the older texts and is one of, if not the most widely used English translations of the BIble. Bible scholars will use different translations as well and it is a disputed subject as to which translation represents the original texts closest. When you translate writing and text, especially from ancient languages, sometimes words and context can be slightly altered or misinterpreted. The accepted Bibles in circulation are all honest attempts to translate the ancient Biblical manuscripts and may suffer from some literary errors, but in general are close translations of the original scriptures. The texts of the Old Testament are very well documented, with many surviving Hebrew manuscripts having existed for almost 2200 years, yet which match almost word for word the existing books in the first Testament of the Bible. (I have heard of some scrolls called the ‘Silver Scrolls’, which are supposedly 700 years older than the Dead Sea scrolls, but I have not researched these before and am not sure if they are accepted… but perhaps these might be even more interesting) If you are interested Darwin, search the net for ‘The Dead Sea Scrolls’. There are various websites about them and one or two good documentaries on youtube. Do a search for ‘The Dead Sea Scrolls’ or ‘The Shrine of The Book’ in Jerusalem.
okay but what about the whole jews inventing christianity and over time, changes are made within the bible. and plus in the white mans bible, it relates to whats written within the king james bible. well I do know there are many versions but I’m using with what I have, idk which bible is the true bible. but for example, rape, slavey, war, all of that is written in the bible and says god approves of it. can you explain this to me?
Hey Darwin, I read your posts and I read that you’re interested in finding out about things.
Asking questions and reading is a great thing and I think you’re doing very well to try and explore ideas. There are many views out there and you could spend years reading a plethora of different world viewpoints.
You must be very careful in what and who you read sometimes, not all books are correct. Sometimes innacuracy is an inocent or benign thing, but when you begin to read racial accusations and obvious racist remarks, alarm bells should begin to ring. This author Ben Klassen, as Scott says, is an anti-semetic white supremecist. We live in an open society, so perhaps it is legitimate to print such ideas although I’m not even sure they are legal. You will find that he had a racist world view and his ultimate goal in life was to begin a racial holy war. This is the sort of thing that any member of society, be they theist, Christian, atheist or agnostic will have nothing but contempt for.
You are doing a great thing in asking questions and trying to understand the world. In doing so you must explore many ideas as there are so many. There are so many books and ideas to be uncovered and you will come across some crasy ideas and some good ones. There’s nothing wrongg with having different ideas, but when you begin to read some of the things that Klassen has written, you are not reading so much historical investigation as much of what he says is racist propoganda and further seemed to be innacurate. I hope you continue to ask questions and explore other books, as it is the best way to learn, but I don’t think that Klassen is a good place to look.
thanks nick.
I don’t even understand how I finished up here, but I thought this put up was good. I do not understand who you are, however certainly you’re going to a well-known blogger for those who are not already. Cheers!
Hey Scott, i have a question. Have you taken into consideration the teachings of the muslim religion and their interpretations of Jesus? Do they have anything factual? To be honest, I’m not sure about a lot of things and I still question religion a bit and I stumbled on a video with a spoken word muslim poet who made a response to a video from another poet video entitled “why I hate religion, but love jesus” and, I found his arguments confusing. I do have faith in god but constantly i feel like it keeps coming into question with everything I run into on a daily basis. I just hope that you can clear some of these things up for me, I’d really appreciate it.
i’am not christian (forgive me if that is some sort of sin to you) i am in fact a muslim – (please dont make generalisations since not everyone is the same and thats a fact) – but can sometimes be very agonostic when comes to religion – personally all religions are very confusing (even my own faith islam) since they all claim to be true yet in reality they can’t all be true becuase of the diverse and contradictory bieliefs held. Your site is amazing , you deserve recognition for this great source of knowledge you provide, becuase of this you kind of enlightened me and humbled me. many compliments from me a muslim …in general thanx ;)
Thanks Scott, and thankyou too Nick. You know, after a lot of thinking, I think i’ve finally realized it. I’ve payed to much attention to what people are telling me instead of really trying to reach out to God. I’ve just been taking in information without testing its reliability. So, my mission for right now is to just study the bible and see what God himself is telling me. Scott and Nick, I appreciate your replies to a struggling soul and so after I finish, I will come back and ask if you can clarify what I may have confusion about.
Darwin:
I think you have hit the nail on the head. Please come back and ask any questions you may have. I really do enjoy discussing this stuff with people.
It makes me very very glad to hear you say this!
Scott
Hello, Scott. I am a christian, because I do believe in the information you have presented on this website. I have some questions about morality in the Bible: It seems as if God wanted to keep us ignorant, and once Eve ate the whole apple, human’s were able to think. Why wouldn’t God want humans to think, as I know you have done a lot of thinking to put together this website.
Hey,
I don’t think that God wanted to keep us ignorant in general. Rather, it was only ignorance of good and evil that God thought was best for us. Humans were able to think before Eve ate the apple…they just didn’t have knowledge of good and evil.
Scott
hey scott, I’ve been reading the bible and some things are becoming more clear but I’m still abit confused. I’ve read that salvation is of the jews but didn’t Jesus die for everyone? And also weren’t the followers of Christ Israelites? And if they are Israelites, then why are we referred to as christians? Also, i’ve been seeing debates on whether Jesus was a jew or hebrew and whether he was black or white. I’m conflicted on this. Can you help me out?
Darwin:
My friend Dan Lucas is better at answering such questions than I am, so I asked him to answer. Below is a copy and paste of his reply:
First off, these are great questions — I often hear these questions posed from mature Christians to church pastors. But, to answer your questions simply and directly:
Salvation is not just of the Jews, it is a gift of supreme grace offered to all mankind by God and through the sacrifice of his only son, Jesus Christ. Through belief and acceptance of him as the savior, any man can achieve salvation. This is an important distinction because most religions attribute your actions to be a part of how you achieve salvation. Jesus made it very clear that this is not the way to heaven. This is a very important and core belief of any Christian. The only way to the father (commonly referred to as “God”) is through Jesus and the belief that he paid the ultimate price for all our sins. Through our love and acceptance of him, we receive salvation as a free gift of grace (a gift given though not deserved). There is a lot more to this discussion then that, but that would be going down another path altogether..
When you say “followers of Christ”, I am assuming you are speaking of the 12 apostles, also commonly referred to as “disciples”. The disciples were all technically from Israel, correct, but they were not necessarily the only followers of Jesus. They just happened to be the 12 men that left EVERYTHING behind and chose to follow and obey Jesus for the rest of their lives. The term “Christian” did not arise until well after the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. I encourage you to read the book of Acts for a great story of how the Christian “church” got its start. I can’t remember exactly when the term “Christian” started to be commonly used, but I believe it was around 50 A.D. You did not have to be from Israel to be baptized a Christian, and even Jesus was very clear that his disciples were to dedicate their lives to spreading the Gospel (“The Good News”) about his death and resurrection for the payment of man’s sin — to all mankind, not just Jews (or the Eastern Hemisphere, for that matter).
Jesus was a Jew. I am surprised this was debated and not sure what the difference between Jew and Hebrew is, but he definitely believed the Jewish bible to be divine, perfect, and God’s word. He was a Jew, yes, but is important to understand that he encouraged and loved all people, Jews and Gentiles (non-Jewe) alike. He did not differentiate.
Whether he was black or white is more of a matter of historical fact. I personally don’t even see it as relevant to spirituality. Actually, I would think him to be more of a darker skin being that he was born in a region that would suggest that. But, I doubt that he was of European skin tone or African skin tone. That wouldn’t make sense, and I would think it mentioned in the bible or other writings because it would have been very odd for a woman in that region to have a black of white baby, even if it was divinely conceived (which only a small percentage of people believed, anyway). The pictures we see of Jesus today where he is full out white are likely the result of European influence. But, at the end of the day, who really knows. And I don’t personally see that as relevant to your spirituality. Or mine, for that matter.
oh okay, I get it now. thank for clearing things up, but i’m a little confused when you said “but he definitely believed the Jewish bible to be divine, perfect, and God’s word”. Which bible is the right bible?
Hey Scott I have a question about the trinity doctrine. i understand that there is one god, but was jesus god and did he ever claim to be god, or is god the father the only true god?
Darwin:
My friend Dan Lucas is well versed in theological questions like this, so I let him reply. A copy and paste of his reply:
First off, this is a great question and is a topic that most Christians
grapple with – and have long, drawn out discussions about this in groups.
Even Christians that are “educated” in theology still sometimes struggle to
truly comprehend the subject in their hearts, even though they understand it
from a scholarly perspective. Your question is quite literally an entire
semester’s course in seminary school.
The term “trinity” describes a relationship not of three gods, but of one
God who is three persons. Trinity does not mean tritheism, that is, that
there are three beings who together are God. The word “trinity” is used in
an effort to define the fullness of the godhead, both in terms of his unity
and diversity.
Though the formula is mysterious and even paradoxical, it is in no way
contradictory. The unity of the godhead is affirmed in terms of essence or
being, while the diversity of the godhead is expressed in terms of person.
Though the term “trinity” is not found in the bible, the concept is clearly
there. On the one hand, the bible strongly affirms the unity of god
(Deuteronomy 6: 4). On the other hand, the bible clearly affirms the full
deity of the three persons of the godhead: the father, son, and holy spirit.
The term “person” does not mean a distinction in essence but a different
“subsistence” in the godhead. A subsistence in the godhead is a “real”
difference but not a “essential” difference in the sense of a difference in
being. Each person subsists or exists “under” the pure essence of deity.
Subsistence is a difference within the scope of being not a separate being
or essence. All persons in the godhead have all the attributes of the deity.
The doctrine of the trinity does not fully explain the mysterious character
of God. Rather, it sets the boundary outside of which we must not step. So,
the most important points to understand are:
1. The doctrine of the trinity affirms the triunity of god.
2. The doctrine of the trinity is not a contradiction: God is one in essence
and three in person.
3. The bible affirms both the oneness of god and the deity of father, son,
and holy spirit.
4. The trinity is distinguished by the work assumed by the father, son, and
holy spirit.
5. The doctrine of the trinity sets the limits of human speculation about
the nature of god.
Does this help you? If not, please ask more questions or ask for
clarification on anything!
First off, this is a great question and is a topic that most Christians
grapple with – and have long, drawn out discussions about this in groups.
Even Christians that are “educated” in theology still sometimes struggle to
truly comprehend the subject in their hearts, even though they understand it
from a scholarly perspective. Your question is quite literally an entire
semester’s course in seminary school.
The term “trinity” describes a relationship not of three gods, but of one
God who is three persons. Trinity does not mean tritheism, that is, that
there are three beings who together are God. The word “trinity” is used in
an effort to define the fullness of the godhead, both in terms of his unity
and diversity.
Though the formula is mysterious and even paradoxical, it is in no way
contradictory. The unity of the godhead is affirmed in terms of essence or
being, while the diversity of the godhead is expressed in terms of person.
Though the term “trinity” is not found in the bible, the concept is clearly
there. On the one hand, the bible strongly affirms the unity of god
(Deuteronomy 6: 4). On the other hand, the bible clearly affirms the full
deity of the three persons of the godhead: the father, son, and holy spirit.
The term “person” does not mean a distinction in essence but a different
“subsistence” in the godhead. A subsistence in the godhead is a “real”
difference but not a “essential” difference in the sense of a difference in
being. Each person subsists or exists “under” the pure essence of deity.
Subsistence is a difference within the scope of being not a separate being
or essence. All persons in the godhead have all the attributes of the deity.
The doctrine of the trinity does not fully explain the mysterious character
of God. Rather, it sets the boundary outside of which we must not step. So,
the most important points to understand are:
1. The doctrine of the trinity affirms the triunity of god.
2. The doctrine of the trinity is not a contradiction: God is one in essence
and three in person.
3. The bible affirms both the oneness of god and the deity of father, son,
and holy spirit.
4. The trinity is distinguished by the work assumed by the father, son, and
holy spirit.
5. The doctrine of the trinity sets the limits of human speculation about
the nature of god.
Does this help you? If not, please ask more questions or ask for
clarification on anything!
okay, i think i have a better understanding. It just confused me a bit because i see there’s one god but there were some things that the father knew but jesus didn’t, for instance: the end of the world. i thought how can they all be equal if there were some things that one could do, that the other didn’t. Also, there are a lot of evidence proving that jesus is god but what about the holy spirit? the trinity isn’t biblical but there is a concept, this mystery is truly hard to grasp. I mean, didn’t the council of Nicea 325 a.d bring up the whole “trinity” thing? i mean, for them to vote on the nature of god is pretty blasphemous, in my opinion. i dont even think gods nature was truly revealed to us. and what is the godhead?
What proof do you have of God’s existence..concrete..off your own lives.
God’s existence cannot be proven. But, if you think about it, there is basically nothing that can be proven to human beings in a conclusive manner. In other words, there is no human belief that cannot be subjected to some degree of doubt.
Suppose, for example, that I asked you to PROVE to me that the oceans are comprised of mostly water.
You might start by saying that there is a wealth of observational data demonstrating that this is the case.
But then a skeptic could reply by saying “Show me the data!”
If you then produced the data, the skeptic could then say, “How do I know this data wasn’t faked? Prove to me that this data is conclusive. How do we know that there aren’t large portions of the unexplored depths of the oceans that are comprised of mostly mercury? What percentage of the oceans did you survey to come up with this data?”
You see, it is not about proof…because that is basically impossible for a human being to prove anything such that there can be no remaining doubt. Rather, it is about preponderance of evidence.
The good thing about science is that no matter what you believe, it is still true. Religion was used to explain the unexplainable (Gods of lightning, thunder etc) but with the advances of science anyone who still believes that there is some holy trinity, allah or zeus waiting for them in the afterlife is just afraid of the dark.
I have heard this one so many times that I have written a couple essays in reply. In The God of the Gaps: Why God and Science Are Not Competing Explanations, I detail how the view that “science explains things without the need for God” amounts to a confusion of science with ontology. And in Why Trying to Explain Away God With Science is an ERROR, I demonstrate that the view that “science explains things without the need for God” is what is known as a category error, in philosophical terms.
And I am afraid that I have to throw down the gauntlet and ask you what SPECIFIC scientific discoveries have done away with the need for God. For the benefit of third party viewers of this discussion, I am going to confidently predict that you will not be able to answer this question (at least not coherently).
The most frequent atheist response that one hears to the above question is Darwinian evolution. But, as I point out in Why Life Could Not Have Emerged Without God, Darwinian evolution does not even attempt to answer the question of how life emerged from non-living matter. Rather, it only addresses the issue of how life diversified from a putative common ancestor (the first self-replicating molecule, which was itself several orders of magnitude more complex than anything humans have ever produced). Evolution, in other words, does not start with mud. Rather, it starts with this dizzyingly complex putative common ancestor.
Please also read Why Evolution Cannot Be Used to Rationalize Atheism where I demonstrate that the view that evolution “does away with the need for God” in biology is based upon philosophy, not science….and very poor philosophy at that.