Does God exist? (8 Viewers)

[BradCube]

Sure, that's fine. I don't really need any more than that to point out the logical flaws, but now that we've established our rules, my opening point on this will have to wait until a bit later tonight, for I'm short on time.

No prob, I can empathize with your the dilemma

I find that there is no good reason to believe God is behind something when a perfectly natural explanation exists, with self-contained logic that does not require an outside force.

I'll wait till after we work through any prima facie logical flaws of the conception of God I defined but after that would you be keen to discuss some arguments from natural theology? I find that natural theology gives me good enough grounds to lean the probability in favour of God's existence. Not a proof (seeing as technically this doesn't exist outside of maths), but evidence nevertheless.

As for the atheism vs. agnosticism, I believe there is no difference. Agnosticism is usually stressed by theists as a middle ground in order to make atheism seem more irrational, however there is nothing irrational about atheism.

It depends on which definition of atheism you are using. Often people on internet forums will deny that atheism is different from agnosticism usually on the grounds that they view it as a sort of a-theism - the lack of theistic belief. You seem to be happy to affirm something more akin to what Dawkins or Hitchens propose - that God does not exist.

Do you say Zeus does not exist? Or Thor? Or the Flying Spaghetti Monster? Or Unicorns? There is as much evidence for all these entities as God; yet you deny their existence (presumably).

Yeah, I don't really buy this sort of reasoning. For the majority of cases you're simply proposing different conceptions of God (with the noted exception of unicorns). So yes, I deny that these conceptions correspond with reality but not without reason. Again, this will come back to arguments based largely in natural theology.

Why does it suddenly become irrational to deny the existence of the Christian God simply because more people believe he exists now? It does not.

You've constructed a bit of a straw man for me there. I've never said that rationality for belief in the Christian conception of God is tied up in the number of people who believe in His existence.

So I shall clarify, I am atheistic about God in the same way you are atheistic about Thor.

Does that make sense?

Sure, it makes sense. I just hope you realize that you too are making a positive claim to knowledge. I actively deny the existence of Thor and so I assume you too also deny that God exists on the whole.

 

[DNETTZ]

I refuse to debate or engage on these grounds because im a religious bigot and therefore I am above such arguements!
[drips with sarcasm and lols that this has gone for 1000+ pages without conclusion - religion is debatable, now agree and stfu and accept other people's opinions and stop whining about how we like applying morals to everything]

 

[Gedi-Master]

Okay. It's all bound up in the word "know", implying "knowledge". Epistemologically speaking, knowledge is, at the basic level, justified, true belief. In other words for one to "know" that p, (p is any proposition), one must believe that p, one must be justified in believing that p, which usually requires the appropriate evidence to ensure that one's belief that p is not merely a result of chance, and finally p must obviously be true in order for it to be considered "knowledge".

Now to the crux of the point. If God knows that I will drive to Uni on Wednesday, there is no room for error. This is the nature of true knowledge. q must happen, because it is a justified and ultimately true belief that it will. Choice doesn't even enter at any point.

Okay.

I've already explained, in terms of epistemology, why God having knowledge of everything, and in this case the past, present, and future of every one of us, means we don't have free will. If you do not understand, read up on some basic philosophy and/or re-read my initial post on the topic.

Actually you haven't explained how knowing what will happen limits your freedom, all you have said is that God knows what will happen, and what will happen must be true (which i agree with). However, just because God knows exactly what we are going to do doesn't mean that we aren't free to choose, simply it means that he has 'seen' what we have chosen before we chose it due to his omniscience, and because his view of time is not our own, rather you could think of it as being an external vision of time, whereas we are part of it, living in the present.

please explain how God having knowledge of future events, takes away your freedom to choose

 

[LachieM]

Nope, I'm saying that the event itself is still genuinely open to your will. God knows what you "will" do, but this does not imply that you "must" do this, only that you will. If you were to do differently then God would have known otherwise.

Unless you're suggesting that God's knowledge fluctuates with our choices (which I will assume you are), then you still don't solve the problem of what will happen effectively being the same as what must happen, which I outlined before.

Going on my assumption that you mean God's knowledge fluctuates, we can consider two scenarios, both of which invalidate God's knowledge as actual knowledge and thus render him un-omniscient. Our actions are restricted by time, which means God's knowledge of our actions must also be restricted by time (whether he exists outside of time or not), lest he, as I argued before, knows what we do before we do it, making free will an illusion. To suggest this fluctuation over time implies that either:

A) God held knowledge of what we were supposed to do before we did it; if we go against this in out free will, God's knowledge changes and thus what he held as knowledge before the action was false, and hence not knowledge at all. God is not omniscient.

B) God doesn't know at all what we will do before we decide it. God is not omniscient.

There is no escaping the fact that omniscience by definition conflicts with free will. There is no logically sound way of escaping this.

 

[Scorch]

No prob, I can empathize with your the dilemma

Sure. I'll put my opening points on the subject at the end of this post after rounding off the opening comments.

I'll wait till after we work through any prima facie logical flaws of the conception of God I defined but after that would you be keen to discuss some arguments from natural theology? I find that natural theology gives me good enough grounds to lean the probability in favour of God's existence. Not a proof (seeing as technically this doesn't exist outside of maths), but evidence nevertheless.

I'd be happy to. My opinion of the whole idea, however, is that if you believe in something in the first place, it is entirely possible that you can find things in nature that will 'suggest' it is true, if you understand what I mean. It is rather tangential, to be honest, but I'm happy to hear your ideas about it, for sure.

However I'd like to point out that we seem to be on a relatively similar page when it comes to the idea of a God not tied down by religious discourse/scripture; it's not disprovable but there's no conclusive proof. Where we disagree is where we place our criteria in terms of what reasons to believe something to be true.

It depends on which definition of atheism you are using. Often people on internet forums will deny that atheism is different from agnosticism usually on the grounds that they view it as a sort of a-theism - the lack of theistic belief. You seem to be happy to affirm something more akin to what Dawkins or Hitchens propose - that God does not exist.

I find them both interchangeable, to be honest. I admit that there is no verifiable way to prove that God does not exist, however theism is the one making the positive claim here. Their claim is that God exists, and they make it without any single shred of evidence to suggest that he does.

Thus, as I believe the only good reason to hold a belief about reality is if there is proof to show that reality to be true, I find the most rational position to take is to assume that God probably doesn't exist, as there is zero evidence to suggest that such a view of reality is true. We have managed to explain very large cosmological problems and the minutiae of living existence with great degrees of certainty, and such explanations are entirely self-contained (they do not require any external power of creation to explain).

Thus the gaps into which one can fit God continually shrink; the origin of life and the origins o the universe being the two main ones. However in the last twenty years human understanding of these two phenomena has come leaps and bounds, and our lack of full understanding of such things is due to our lack of ability to analyse the evidence due to technological limitations, not lack of capability.

Yeah, I don't really buy this sort of reasoning. For the majority of cases you're simply proposing different conceptions of God (with the noted exception of unicorns). So yes, I deny that these conceptions correspond with reality but not without reason. Again, this will come back to arguments based largely in natural theology.

Okay, we'll leave this point for a minute.

You've constructed a bit of a straw man for me there. I've never said that rationality for belief in the Christian conception of God is tied up in the number of people who believe in His existence.

I wasn't answering your point, but rather my own point, but we'll get to it all in due time.

Sure, it makes sense. I just hope you realize that you too are making a positive claim to knowledge. I actively deny the existence of Thor and so I assume you too also deny that God exists on the whole.

To sum up my belief regarding God (and not religion) as simply as I can:

• I think God probably doesn't exist.
• I recognize that while there is no conclusive proof to show he doesn't exist, we cannot disprove the existence of a God in some form.
• I find it most rational, then, in the absence of any relevant evidence, to [a] not claim knowledge any human cannot possibly possess and in such a case, it is most rational to assume that if there is no evidence to suggest that an entity exists, it probably doesn't exist.

So it's not so much a positive claim to knowledge, at all. Perhaps to compare Thor with the more vague conception of God is unfair, but I would find no logical problem in comparing such ideas of Thor or Zeus to the Christian God; they are just as feasible.

With regards to religion, I find it utterly useless in any attempt to explain God, even if he does exist. It can barely stand up to the understanding of the universe that modern high school students have in any developed country, it is full of ethical, logical and moral dilemmas, bears distinct marks of being written for political, selfish means and fails to get basic cosmology, history, biology and physics correct.

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With the opening points out of the way (though I'm more than happy to answer points on those things still), I'll make my points slowly but surely against the idea of God we discussed earlier.

The first of my points is directed against the idea of omni-benevolence, omnipotence and omniscience.

The Earth, as part of its natural workings, has built in mechanisms that cause great physical destruction to living beings around it. Tsunamis, volcanoes, earthquakes and tornadoes, to name a few, are entirely natural phenomena with entirely natural causes; in fact they are almost necessary for the natural functioning of the world. It has only been in the past hundred years (out of the 200,000 year history of our species) that we have gained some measure of understanding about what drives these phenomena and some ability to predict them, but we are rendered only slightly less powerless in the face of their power.

We should then consider the meaning of omnipotence, in terms of creation. An omnipotent God was not simply doing the best he could with the tools he had; he created the natural order, the natural world and everything in it. He is responsible, in his omnipotence, for the creation of every single minute aspect of the world, and he is responsible for the fact that the world he created is naturally extremely dangerous to those that inhabit it.

This was by no means necessary or even sensible; there is no good reason for the world to have to function such that it spews hot lava in massively powerful explosions that kill those surrounding it, for example. Yet it does, and this is a natural thing.

The possibilities, then, are that God is either:

• Omnipotent and omni-benevolent, but not omniscient: He is all-powerful, all-loving and wants the best for us, but does not know any other way to create a world for his creation than with in-built death-traps.
• Omnipotent and omniscience, but not omni-benevolent: He is all-powerful and knows everything (including a better way to create a world for his helpless creations sans death-traps), but doesn't really care or isn't a God that personally is involved with humanity.
• Omniscience and omni-benevolent, but not omnipotent: He is all-loving, all-knowing, but is limited by other possibilities such that he is not omnipotent and thus unable to create a world without these processes of death and destruction as part of its natural order.

This is simply by way of starting; I've specifically avoided attempting to relate it to human suffering (such as poverty, war and such) or the idea that humanity is somehow 'flawed' as they are more specifically religious ideas, so I have dealt with natural suffering instead.

 

[LachieM]

Actually you haven't explained how knowing what will happen limits your freedom, all you have said is that God knows what will happen, and what will happen must be true (which i agree with). However, just because God knows exactly what we are going to do doesn't mean that we aren't free to choose, simply it means that he has 'seen' what we have chosen before we chose it due to his omniscience, and because his view of time is not our own, rather you could think of it as being an external vision of time, whereas we are part of it, living in the present.

please explain how God having knowledge of future events, takes away your freedom to choose

Which is exactly why free will is an illusion, whether God has an external view on time is superfluous. What you are saying is completely empty. If what we "choose" is already known of us, then what choice is involved at all? Exactly zero. There is the illusion that we may choose to go right rather than left, but ultimately this is meaningless because it made no difference whatsoever to a pre-determined future - which is by definition what the future is if it is already known.

Where the future is already known, free will can only be an illusion. I feel like I'm banging my head against a wall here, although I appreciate that you at least understand my argument from epistemology...to some extent. "The planets, including the Earth, orbit the Sun, here is logical support", "No they don't, you can plainly see that the Sun goes around the Earth". Recognize the illusion here? That's all free will can possibly be if the Judeo Christian God exists as envisaged by theists.

 

[Gedi-Master]

Which is exactly why free will is an illusion, whether God has an external view on time is superfluous. What you are saying is completely empty. If what we "choose" is already known of us, then what choice is involved at all? Exactly zero.There is the illusion that we may choose to go right rather than left, but ultimately this is meaningless because it made no difference whatsoever to a pre-determined future - which is by definition what the future is if it is already known.

who said that it was pre-determined? pre-determined means that it was established in advance, where did u get that definition from?

What I am saying is that the future has been foreseen, which is actually what the future is if it is already known. What I am saying is that God, (once again) due to his omniscience, has KNOWLEDGE, or knows what we are going to do, but rather for him could be what we have already done, what we are going to do, or what we are doing as he is not restrained by time. Thus for us as we are restrained by time, are determining our own futures and God you could say is spectating and intervening when required to.

Please explain how God foreseeing the future takes away from our freedom to choose

 

[Gedi-Master]

If what we "choose" is already known of us, then what choice is involved at all? Exactly zero.

no it isn't actually,

it is full choice

which is,

the choices that we made, the choices that we are going to make, and the choices that we are making which God already knew we would make.

 

[BradCube]

I'd be happy to. My opinion of the whole idea, however, is that if you believe in something in the first place, it is entirely possible that you can find things in nature that will 'suggest' it is true, if you understand what I mean. It is rather tangential, to be honest, but I'm happy to hear your ideas about it, for sure.

Sure, I'm happy to admit that people are more keen to find supporting evidence for their existing beliefs - this is the rational thing to do in order to ensure that we don't "flip flop" between beliefs unnecessarily. Though make sure to keep in mind that this reluctance is an entirely separate issue from the evidence or arguments themselves. We must always make sure to address the evidence on it's own merits lest we fall into some sort of genetic fallacy.

I find them both interchangeable, to be honest. I admit that there is no verifiable way to prove that God does not exist, however theism is the one making the positive claim here. Their claim is that God exists, and they make it without any single shred of evidence to suggest that he does.

But the one claiming that God does not exist is also making a positive claim. The only one that bears no burden of proof is the one who simply "lacks belief" in God.

Thus, as I believe the only good reason to hold a belief about reality is if there is proof to show that reality to be true, I find the most rational position to take is to assume that God probably doesn't exist, as there is zero evidence to suggest that such a view of reality is true. We have managed to explain very large cosmological problems and the minutiae of living existence with great degrees of certainty, and such explanations are entirely self-contained (they do not require any external power of creation to explain).

Do you see the problem your rationale faces here? You too are asserting something about the actual state of reality (namely that God does not exist) yet you are not providing proof to show that such a reality is true.

Thus the gaps into which one can fit God continually shrink; the origin of life and the origins o the universe being the two main ones. However in the last twenty years human understanding of these two phenomena has come leaps and bounds, and our lack of full understanding of such things is due to our lack of ability to analyse the evidence due to technological limitations, not lack of capability.

Ha, that is quite a bold statement! I'll leave it for now as I'm sure we'll get into it later

I recognize that while there is no conclusive proof to show he doesn't exist, we cannot disprove the existence of a God in some form.

Why not? Isn't that exactly what you are trying to do by pointing out logical inconsistencies in various conceptions or forms of God?

I find it most rational, then, in the absence of any relevant evidence, to [a] not claim knowledge any human cannot possibly possess and in such a case, it is most rational to assume that if there is no evidence to suggest that an entity exists, it probably doesn't exist.

I don't think a simple lack of evidence provides the necessary level of warrant to justify making a jump to the claim that "God probably doesn't exist". I've mentioned this earlier in this thread but I would propose the following schema for positively arguing for the non-existence of an entity (e).

A person (x) is warranted in believing in the non existence of e if:

1) e is such that if it existed then we would expect to find evidence (or any other epistemic grounding for belief) of e's existence
2) x, justifiably believes they are in a good epistemic position to search and examine for such evidence
3) x finds no such evidence, evidence contrary or evidence improbable with regard to the existence of e

The Earth, as part of its natural workings, has built in mechanisms that cause great physical destruction to living beings around it. Tsunamis, volcanoes, earthquakes and tornadoes, to name a few, are entirely natural phenomena with entirely natural causes; in fact they are almost necessary for the natural functioning of the world. It has only been in the past hundred years (out of the 200,000 year history of our species) that we have gained some measure of understanding about what drives these phenomena and some ability to predict them, but we are rendered only slightly less powerless in the face of their power.

We should then consider the meaning of omnipotence, in terms of creation. An omnipotent God was not simply doing the best he could with the tools he had; he created the natural order, the natural world and everything in it. He is responsible, in his omnipotence, for the creation of every single minute aspect of the world, and he is responsible for the fact that the world he created is naturally extremely dangerous to those that inhabit it.

This was by no means necessary or even sensible; there is no good reason for the world to have to function such that it spews hot lava in massively powerful explosions that kill those surrounding it, for example. Yet it does, and this is a natural thing.

The possibilities, then, are that God is either:

• Omnipotent and omni-benevolent, but not omniscient: He is all-powerful, all-loving and wants the best for us, but does not know any other way to create a world for his creation than with in-built death-traps.
• Omnipotent and omniscience, but not omni-benevolent: He is all-powerful and knows everything (including a better way to create a world for his helpless creations sans death-traps), but doesn't really care or isn't a God that personally is involved with humanity.
• Omniscience and omni-benevolent, but not omnipotent: He is all-loving, all-knowing, but is limited by other possibilities such that he is not omnipotent and thus unable to create a world without these processes of death and destruction as part of its natural order.

This is simply by way of starting; I've specifically avoided attempting to relate it to human suffering (such as poverty, war and such) or the idea that humanity is somehow 'flawed' as they are more specifically religious ideas, so I have dealt with natural suffering instead.

In my mind there exists a forth option:

• God is omnipotent, omnibenevolent and omniscient: God is all-powerful and knows everything including the best way to bring about the greatest good. God's greatest good isn't synonymous with human flourishing and happiness but instead includes bringing the maximum amount of people possible into relationship and knowledge of him (such a relationship could also facilitate Gods desire to raise responsible moral agents). Human suffering as the result of natural evil could facilitate humans in coming into relationship with God and/or the raising of responsible moral agents. Thus is it entirely possible that God has morally sufficient reasons for allowing natural evil to exist in the world.

As long as this is even possible, then there is no apparent contradiction between God's being omnipotent, omnibenevolent and omniscient. In order to show that such a proposition is not possible, one must be able to show that there are other possible worlds in which more people come into lasting relationship and knowledge of such a God and that such worlds are also better in living conditions than the actual world. In my opinion such a burden of proof is untenable - indeed knowledge to this level would look like omniscience!

 

[LachieM]

who said that it was pre-determined? pre-determined means that it was established in advance, where did u get that definition from?

What I am saying is that the future has been foreseen, which is actually what the future is if it is already known. What I am saying is that God, (once again) due to his omniscience, has KNOWLEDGE, or knows what we are going to do, but rather for him could be what we have already done, what we are going to do, or what we are doing as he is not restrained by time. Thus for us as we are restrained by time, are determining our own futures and God you could say is spectating and intervening when required to.

Please explain how God foreseeing the future takes away from our freedom to choose

WHICH MEANS IT IS PREDETERMINED. I don't get why this is so difficult for you to understand. God KNOWS everything, including every moment in time. Whether he exists outside time or not is completely irrelevant because it is superfluous to this base assumption of God's omniscience with which even you agree, and from which, and only from which, my argument stems. KNOWLEDGE, by its mere definition, is polar. Assuming belief and justification I'll simplify it for you:

1) A proposition is true, thus it is knowledge.

2) A proposition is false, thus is is not knowledge.

God knowing all of time implies truth. Due to the polar nature of knowledge there is thus only one way time can possibly unfold according to this knowledge. Any other way would deviate from this "true" way and thus would conflict with the base assumption that God is omniscient. There is no ambiguity in such a scenario.

An analogy: There is one path along you can go (representing the one way time can unfold, in accordance with God's omniscience). To leave the path is impossible: there are no forks in the road, and not a single place where you can deviate from the path. It doesn't matter what you think, choice does not come into the matter because there is no opportunity for it to do so. You must just keep along the one path for there exists only one path. THERE IS NO CHOICE.

I don't know how I can make myself any clearer. Please do not end your next post with the disgusting insinuation that I didn't make an argument in the first place: "Please explain how God foreseeing the future takes away from our freedom to choose".

 

[brendroid]

LachieM, sorry to interject here but your analogy of the path intrigues me

Couldn't you argue that you have a path which does have forks, and this represents all the choices that you could have made (but, because everything is predetermined in your analogy, you can only take the left forks for example). Even if something is predetermined, there is going to be the 'illusion' (at least) of another choice, which could create a path with multiple forks that are left abandoned.

Also, this is just my own personal little thing I thought up from the top of my head, so if there are fallacies in it they are entirely my own and the result of my not thinking through them clearly enough (so editing and fine tuning of this small idea would be good). Say a person knows the choice that another person is going to make (though they aren't omniscient, seeing as they are only a person), does this make the choice of the other person predetermined, because a third party is aware of the choice that they will make?

On the scientific side, I've heard though that there is evidence for chemicals or something in the mind that affects the choices that are made by humans, which would suggest a certain level of pre-determination and little free will in the process.

 

[LachieM]

LachieM, sorry to interject here but your analogy of the path intrigues me

Couldn't you argue that you have a path which does have forks, and this represents all the choices that you could have made (but, because everything is predetermined in your analogy, you can only take the left forks for example). Even if something is predetermined, there is going to be the 'illusion' (at least) of another choice, which could create a path with multiple forks that are left abandoned.

Also, this is just my own personal little thing I thought up from the top of my head, so if there are fallacies in it they are entirely my own and the result of my not thinking through them clearly enough (so editing and fine tuning of this small idea would be good). Say a person knows the choice that another person is going to make (though they aren't omniscient, seeing as they are only a person), does this make the choice of the other person predetermined, because a third party is aware of the choice that they will make?

On the scientific side, I've heard though that there is evidence for chemicals or something in the mind that affects the choices that are made by humans, which would suggest a certain level of pre-determination and little free will in the process.

Your own addition to my analogy does make sense, although is not necessary and doesn't really contribute anything to the argument other than the realization that there exist hypothetical choices which may have been made had God not existed or not been omniscient. Wording the analogy could get a little clumsy with this much addition and elaboration so I will go back to the concept itself.

These "forks" may exist in the sense that we can speculate on what may have happened had we "made a different choice", but each represents a "false" reality; the only true one being predetermined by the omniscient God, and hence the only one we can possibly follow, no matter how much we consider the matter.

On the topic of whether another person can know another's future choice without omniscience, it depends on whether or not the person in question knows, in the epistemological sense of the word. If they do, then yes, it would be logical to say that the chooser's future is predetermined, at least for that event. The proposition that a person may know such a thing in the epistemological sense of the word is absurd though, so the idea isn't really useful.

I have no real comments to make on the issue of chemicals in the brain determining actions. I know practically nothing of neurology except for some gross anatomy and I'm not really prepared to argue anything with regards to this. It's an interesting topic nonetheless.

 

[BradCube]

Unless you're suggesting that God's knowledge fluctuates with our choices (which I will assume you are), then you still don't solve the problem of what will happen effectively being the same as what must happen, which I outlined before.

Going on my assumption that you mean God's knowledge fluctuates, we can consider two scenarios, both of which invalidate God's knowledge as actual knowledge and thus render him un-omniscient. Our actions are restricted by time, which means God's knowledge of our actions must also be restricted by time (whether he exists outside of time or not), lest he, as I argued before, knows what we do before we do it, making free will an illusion. To suggest this fluctuation over time implies that either:

A) God held knowledge of what we were supposed to do before we did it; if we go against this in out free will, God's knowledge changes and thus what he held as knowledge before the action was false, and hence not knowledge at all. God is not omniscient.

B) God doesn't know at all what we will do before we decide it. God is not omniscient.

There is no escaping the fact that omniscience by definition conflicts with free will. There is no logically sound way of escaping this.

Sorry mate, I didn't even notice that you posted this until I was going over some posts from a few pages back. I've just started writing a short paper that deals with this issue specifically and hope to finish it off over the weekend. As a result, I'll refrain from replying directly to you here as the paper will serve as a better means of placing all of my thoughts in one coherent response.

 

[pman]

This is a poor example. Given that the evolution of hominid ancestors of humanity over the past 2 million years is scientific fact, as is the fact that humanity itself has been around for almost 200,000 years, could you please tell me how, from a religious viewpoint, you could deal with this idea without [a] re-interpreting or willfully misunderstanding chunks of the evidence or contradicting the account of the Bible?

Three words, "In the beginning"-Genesis 1.1....there is no time frame given in the bible whatsoever...The bible states that humans came from clay, perhaps it means the bacterium that would have been present in the clay as ancient Hebrew has no word for bacteria (that i know of anyway). The time frame is given as days but, to an eternal being, th concept of a day may be very different to our concept of a day. To God, 1 day may be any period of time at all. If we came from the bacterium, God may have slowly evolved us from our primordial form.

Somebody said something about micro-evolution, If we take this as gods method, micro-evolution seems a distinct likelihood.

 

[LachieM]

Sorry mate, I didn't even notice that you posted this until I was going over some posts from a few pages back. I've just started writing a short paper that deals with this issue specifically and hope to finish it off over the weekend. As a result, I'll refrain from replying directly to you here as the paper will serve as a better means of placing all of my thoughts in one coherent response.

If you could link me to it or post it here or whatnot, that would be lovely, thanks.

 

[LachieM]

Three words, "In the beginning"-Genesis 1.1....there is no time frame given in the bible whatsoever...The bible states that humans came from clay, perhaps it means the bacterium that would have been present in the clay as ancient Hebrew has no word for bacteria (that i know of anyway). The time frame is given as days but, to an eternal being, th concept of a day may be very different to our concept of a day. To God, 1 day may be any period of time at all. If we came from the bacterium, God may have slowly evolved us from our primordial form.

Somebody said something about micro-evolution, If we take this as gods method, micro-evolution seems a distinct likelihood.

There are passages in the Bible which may be reconciled with science using speculation and metaphorical interpretation, but you also have things which cannot be reconciled at all; they are far too specific and completely wrong.

They (the floods) rose greatly on the Earth, and all the high mountains under the entire heavens were covered. The waters rose and covered the mountains to a depth of more than twenty feet.

If you do the calculations (as I have) you will come up with a rough value for the volume of water required for the Floods. The value you end up with is approximately four times all the water on the Earth's surface. Even the huge amounts of groundwater sum up to be off by a factor of something along the lines of 10^3 or 10^6 (I can't remember which), which I would assume is meant by "the great vaults of the Earth" bursting open. And this is on top of the sea water/ice caps/etc itself. There is simply no way to reconcile the Bible with the science/math in this case. You are "cherry-picking".

Ignoring all the speculation as to "what they could've meant", you go completely astray with "God may have slowly evolved us". Evolution doesn't need an agent to consciously direct it. As Richard Dawkins put it, evolution is a "blind watchmaker".

I'm not sure what you mean by micro-evolution, but it's more than just a liklihood in any case; it's one hundred per cent true (even most creationists agree with this). That's how there are different breeds of dog and so on - human directed micro-evolution; although nature is able to blindly evolve species just as well, and has done so to an enormous extent. Macro-evolution is just taking this micro-evolution to the logical conclusion that after billions of years enough change will have accumulated to result in a huge variety of discreet species and extreme complexity. God is superfluous to whether or not evolution works.

 

[SylviaB]

Why the fuck would the Christian god use evolution to make humans

 

[Garygaz]

Why the fuck would the Christian god use evolution to make humans

I'm personally agnostic, but hypothetically if there was a god, i don't think we could use our limited intelligence/understanding of creation to try and evaluate something's decision which is infinitely more powerful/intelligent then us.

 

[pman]

There are passages in the Bible which may be reconciled with science using speculation and metaphorical interpretation, but you also have things which cannot be reconciled at all; they are far too specific and completely wrong.

see my response to the next bit

If you do the calculations (as I have) you will come up with a rough value for the volume of water required for the Floods. The value you end up with is approximately four times all the water on the Earth's surface. Even the huge amounts of groundwater sum up to be off by a factor of something along the lines of 10^3 or 10^6 (I can't remember which), which I would assume is meant by "the great vaults of the Earth" bursting open. And this is on top of the sea water/ice caps/etc itself. There is simply no way to reconcile the Bible with the science/math in this case. You are "cherry-picking".

we have already had this discussion, sea levels cannot rise all that far above where they currently are, it was most likely caused by a tsunami or something if the flood did indeed happen..I believe that if you search back a couple of pages, you'll find a post where i outlined that most religious scholars outside of the USA don't regard the old testament as pure fact...its a myth, not meant to be entirely literal although often mis-interpreted that way.

Ignoring all the speculation as to "what they could've meant", you go completely astray with "God may have slowly evolved us". Evolution doesn't need an agent to consciously direct it. As Richard Dawkins put it, evolution is a "blind watchmaker".

where does the bible completely rule out evolution..I'm not going to try and misinterpret a passage to say evolution is real but i do challenge you to find one where it says its false.

I'm not sure what you mean by micro-evolution, but it's more than just a liklihood in any case; it's one hundred per cent true (even most creationists agree with this). That's how there are different breeds of dog and so on - human directed micro-evolution; although nature is able to blindly evolve species just as well, and has done so to an enormous extent. Macro-evolution is just taking this micro-evolution to the logical conclusion that after billions of years enough change will have accumulated to result in a huge variety of discreet species and extreme complexity. God is superfluous to whether or not evolution works.

i'm giving a reason why it is possible, not saying its likely...of course it is a reality

Why the fuck would the Christian god use evolution to make humans

why not?

 

[tommykins]