If irrefutable evidence of the existence of a god ever came to light, I would change my religious views immediately. Can many believers make the reverse claim?
If there ever was irrefutable evidence there is no God, I'd be the first in line to come over to the other side. I'd be stupid to say otherwise and I have no respect for the faith of a theist who would say otherwise. My belief in God is based on reason, logic and science, and I have little respect for those who share my belief but it's based on blind faith. However, such irrefutable evidence will never be found, just as there will never be irrefutable evidence of my belief in God. This is the kind of thing that can only be settled once we die and find out for sure, or not if the athiests are correct.
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They aren't separate positions, one's a position on knowledge (or knowability) and the other is a position on belief.
You can be both agnostic and atheist, or agnostic and theist for that matter.
To determine if you are an atheist just answer the question "do you believe in one or more gods". If the answer is not yes, then you are an atheist.
Great post Photon. Put me on the gnostic side of things not that it makes me a good debater, just that I know a little. Belief or non belief doesn't have much to do with the real question although they both have their advantages.
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Well given that science has already discovered and accepted things that are beyond what can be understood with our five senses, I think this characterization is unfair (not to mention poisoning the well).
Well I guess I was being a little argumentative but I get tired of some followers of science not being willing to explore other means of investigation or even give it any respect when a scientist should be the most open to unexplored realms.
Perhaps science has accepted things that are beyond what can be understood with our five senses but I look at it as using evidence gathered by these senses and using our mind to understand these findings even though they may not be directly observable. What I'm talking about is different than what our mind can understand and involves calming the mind or as I think it may have been Jesus said, 'be still and I will come into you'.
If there ever was irrefutable evidence there is no God, I'd be the first in line to come over to the other side. I'd be stupid to say otherwise and I have no respect for the faith of a theist who would say otherwise. My belief in God is based on reason, logic and science, and I have little respect for those who share my belief but it's based on blind faith. However, such irrefutable evidence will never be found, just as there will never be irrefutable evidence of my belief in God. This is the kind of thing that can only be settled once we die and find out for sure, or not if the athiests are correct.
Sure there can be.
If JC shows up again and starts performing miracles, I'll convert.
I have a very open mind about the possibility of there being a god or god, but I have yet to see any compelling evidence to indicate one exists. Just because I don't believe in a god doesn't mean my mind is completely closed to the possibility of there being one.
If irrefutable evidence of the existence of a god ever came to light, I would change my religious views immediately. Can many believers make the reverse claim?
I don't approach the subject as being a matter of belief or non belief, to me it's a question of knowing or not knowing. Science will probably never bring irrefutable evidence of god being a fact or not, they are different realms, so the only way to find out is take a different path. As Socrates said, "know thyself".
How will you know it's JC and even if it's JC it doesn't prove there is a god? Miracles are gauche and just misdirect from finding the truth.
If this person can perform things such as transmutation, clear entire hospitals out from his healing of the sick, walk on water (things Jesus did in the bible), then it should be fairly easy to prove, no?
If this person can perform things such as transmutation, clear entire hospitals out from his healing of the sick, walk on water (things Jesus did in the bible), then it should be fairly easy to prove, no?
Well I guess if you believe in that part of the Bible. Myself I just think it was added to gain uneducated believers or was put in because the authors couldn't explain the events, and they had little to do with Jesus' teachings.
Saying that there are no facts for a religions God is not the same as claiming there is no god.
Incidentally I would not recommend A Case for a Creator, from what I understand it gets science completely wrong (both in what science says and what it uses for its own arguments).
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Originally Posted by MoneyGuy
Wrong science? It's written by a skilled interviewer who was an athiest attempting to disprove God who interviewed some of the most brilliant scientific minds of our time. He went in with a preconceived notion and had it dispelled. Your contention is wrong.
Having already read A Case For Christ, I can say that the author of these books gets everything completely wrong and Photon's and Trout's posts are accurate. The guy takes everything out of context and has a clear agenda.
If Lee Strobel is an atheist then I'm jesus christ himself. If he claims to be an atheist (BTW his wiki page says he's a christian) then is posing as an atheist to make his work seem legit.
Those books are nothing but christian propaganda. Nobody with any scientific background would take the Case for Christ as anything but wild speculation mixed with extreme bias. It was ridiculous beyond comprehension.
Edit: I should add. I am not meaning to attack you MoneyGuy, just the author who falsely presents the information. When I first picked up A Case for Christ I was actually looking forward to reading something that talked about the possibility of exploring the historical jesus. I guess I should have known because it was passed out by those religious fanatic groups at the U of C (the abortion protest people, pretty much the same group).
I figured it was christian propaganda but it seemed like an intriguing novel. Talk to a bunch of independent experts and write a book about it. I was hoping it would be like those Discovery Channel shows that talk about the real Exodus or the real events that occured to inspire Noah's Ark.
It wasn't. Not at all.
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Just because one's beliefs are compatible with science doesn't mean they are true or even plausible.
Alien abductions are also compatible with science.
Merely not impossible isn't a compelling reason to believe something.
I think I mentioned before that I've read part of Collins' book before, and I don't think puts forth a compelling argument as a reason for belief. He himself says one can't prove god's existence with science (but then tries to rationalize his beliefs with science anyway).
In his area of expertise, he rightly calls out creationists and IDers for using "god of the gaps" arguments and provides evidence to support evolution. But in areas that aren't his expertise (morality, cosmology, etc) he falls into the same type of flawed god of the gaps arguments.
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1) If there's a loving God, why does this pain-wracked world groan under so much suffering and evil?
2) If the miracles of God contradict science, then how can any rational person believe that they're true?
3) If God is morally pure, how can he sanction the slaughter of innocent children as the Old Testament says he did?
4) If God cares about the people he created, how could he consign so many of them to an eternity of torture in hell just because they didn't believe the right things about him?
5) If Jesus is the only way to heaven, then what about the millions of people who have never heard of him?
6) If God really created the universe, why does the evidence of science compel so many to conclude that the unguided process of evolution accounts for life?
7) If God is the ultimate overseer of the church, why has it been rife with hypocrisy and brutality throughout the ages?
8) If I'm still plagued by doubts, then is it still possible to be a Christian?
If Lee Strobel is an atheist then I'm jesus christ himself. If he claims to be an atheist (BTW his wiki page says he's a christian) then is posing as an atheist to make his work seem legit.
I didn't say he's an athiest. He was an athiest whose wife became a Christian so he set out to discredit Christianity, but became a thiest in the process because God seemed to be the only logical conclusion.
I haven't read A Case for Christ so can't comment. I find A Case for a Creator to be well reasoned. I'm also enjoying Athiest Universe and find it to be very well done. He's a smart man and a great writer, even if he is wrong.
Here is how Collins, as a scientist and educator, currently summarizes his understanding of the universe for the general public (what follows are a series of slides, presented in order, from a lecture that Collins gave at the University of California, Berkeley in 2008):
Slide 1
Almighty God, who is not limited in space or time, created a universe 13.7 billion years ago with its parameters precisely tuned to allow the development of complexity over long periods of time. Slide 2
God’s plan included the mechanism of evolution to create the marvelous diversity of living things on our planet. Most especially, that creative plan included human beings. Slide 3
After evolution had prepared a sufficiently advanced “house” (the human brain), God gifted humanity with the knowledge of good and evil (the Moral Law), with free will, and with an immortal soul. Slide 4
We humans use our free will to break the moral law, leading to our estrangement from God. For Christians, Jesus is the solution to that estrangement. Slide 5
If the Moral Law is just a side effect of evolution, then there is no such thing as good or evil. It’s all an illusion. We’ve been hoodwinked. Are any of us, especially the strong atheists, really prepared to live our lives within that worldview?
Collins provides this text for our contemplation and then describes how it boosted him over the church transom:
Lewis was right. I had to make a choice. A full year had passed since I decided to believe in some sort of God, and now I was being called to account. On a beautiful fall day, as I was hiking in the Cascade Mountains during my first trip west of the Mississippi, the majesty and beauty of God’s creation overwhelmed my resistance. As I rounded a corner and saw a beautiful and unexpected frozen waterfall, hundreds of feet high, I knew the search was over. The next morning, I knelt in the dewy grass as the sun rose and surrendered to Jesus Christ. (Ibid, p. 225)
It is simply astounding that this passage was written by a scientist with the intent of demonstrating the compatibility of faith and reason. While Collins argues for the rational basis of his faith, passages like this make it clear that he “decided” (his word) to believe in God for emotional reasons. And if we thought Collins’ reasoning could grow no more labile, he has since divulged that the waterfall was frozen into three streams, which put him in mind of the Holy Trinity.
Collins argues that science makes belief in God “intensely plausible”—the Big Bang, the fine-tuning of Nature’s constants, the emergence of complex life, the effectiveness of mathematics, all suggest to him that a “loving, logical, and consistent” God exists; but when challenged with alternate (and far more plausible) accounts of these phenomena—or with evidence that suggests that God might be unloving, illogical, inconsistent, or, indeed, absent—Collins declares that God stands outside of Nature, and thus science cannot address the question of His existence at all. Similarly, Collins insists that our moral intuitions attest to God’s existence, to His perfectly moral character, and to His desire to have fellowship with every member of our species; but when our moral intuitions recoil at the casual destruction of innocent children by, say, tidal wave or earthquake, Collins assures us that our time-bound notions of good and evil can’t be trusted and that God’s will is a mystery.[4]
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Here is how Collins, as a scientist and educator, currently summarizes his understanding of the universe for the general public (what follows are a series of slides, presented in order, from a lecture that Collins gave at the University of California, Berkeley in 2008):
Slide 1
Almighty God, who is not limited in space or time, created a universe 13.7 billion years ago with its parameters precisely tuned to allow the development of complexity over long periods of time. Slide 2
God’s plan included the mechanism of evolution to create the marvelous diversity of living things on our planet. Most especially, that creative plan included human beings. Slide 3
After evolution had prepared a sufficiently advanced “house” (the human brain), God gifted humanity with the knowledge of good and evil (the Moral Law), with free will, and with an immortal soul. Slide 4
We humans use our free will to break the moral law, leading to our estrangement from God. For Christians, Jesus is the solution to that estrangement. Slide 5
If the Moral Law is just a side effect of evolution, then there is no such thing as good or evil. It’s all an illusion. We’ve been hoodwinked. Are any of us, especially the strong atheists, really prepared to live our lives within that worldview?
I can go with Collins almost to the end of Slide Two, or at least science does not rule out that much to that point. Neither of those slides describe the literal Christian God as I understand it.
Here is how Collins, as a scientist and educator, currently summarizes his understanding of the universe for the general public (what follows are a series of slides, presented in order, from a lecture that Collins gave at the University of California, Berkeley in 2008):
Slide 1
Almighty God, who is not limited in space or time, created a universe 13.7 billion years ago with its parameters precisely tuned to allow the development of complexity over long periods of time. Slide 2
God’s plan included the mechanism of evolution to create the marvelous diversity of living things on our planet. Most especially, that creative plan included human beings. Slide 3
After evolution had prepared a sufficiently advanced “house” (the human brain), God gifted humanity with the knowledge of good and evil (the Moral Law), with free will, and with an immortal soul. Slide 4
We humans use our free will to break the moral law, leading to our estrangement from God. For Christians, Jesus is the solution to that estrangement. Slide 5
If the Moral Law is just a side effect of evolution, then there is no such thing as good or evil. It’s all an illusion. We’ve been hoodwinked. Are any of us, especially the strong atheists, really prepared to live our lives within that worldview?
Collins provides this text for our contemplation and then describes how it boosted him over the church transom:
Lewis was right. I had to make a choice. A full year had passed since I decided to believe in some sort of God, and now I was being called to account. On a beautiful fall day, as I was hiking in the Cascade Mountains during my first trip west of the Mississippi, the majesty and beauty of God’s creation overwhelmed my resistance. As I rounded a corner and saw a beautiful and unexpected frozen waterfall, hundreds of feet high, I knew the search was over. The next morning, I knelt in the dewy grass as the sun rose and surrendered to Jesus Christ. (Ibid, p. 225)
It is simply astounding that this passage was written by a scientist with the intent of demonstrating the compatibility of faith and reason. While Collins argues for the rational basis of his faith, passages like this make it clear that he “decided” (his word) to believe in God for emotional reasons. And if we thought Collins’ reasoning could grow no more labile, he has since divulged that the waterfall was frozen into three streams, which put him in mind of the Holy Trinity.
Collins argues that science makes belief in God “intensely plausible”—the Big Bang, the fine-tuning of Nature’s constants, the emergence of complex life, the effectiveness of mathematics, all suggest to him that a “loving, logical, and consistent” God exists; but when challenged with alternate (and far more plausible) accounts of these phenomena—or with evidence that suggests that God might be unloving, illogical, inconsistent, or, indeed, absent—Collins declares that God stands outside of Nature, and thus science cannot address the question of His existence at all. Similarly, Collins insists that our moral intuitions attest to God’s existence, to His perfectly moral character, and to His desire to have fellowship with every member of our species; but when our moral intuitions recoil at the casual destruction of innocent children by, say, tidal wave or earthquake, Collins assures us that our time-bound notions of good and evil can’t be trusted and that God’s will is a mystery.[4]
Cheese. The guy took the "leap of faith". When I was doing by Astro-physics degree the Math we were doing was all about the big bang. Nothing existed before that.
So.....how did it start. What WAS the big bang? Out of no where? Nothingness to somethingness? WTF? No way!
When and how did it all start? Like most Physicists we are looking to discover GOD. Or the beginning. THE ANSWER.
Sorry to see you are so bitter about Christians. I suggest Buddhism to calm your soul, especially Zen. You won't be so angry if you can appreciate something other than yourself.
Cheese. The guy took the "leap of faith". When I was doing by Astro-physics degree the Math we were doing was all about the big bang. Nothing existed before that.
So.....how did it start. What WAS the big bang? Out of no where? Nothingness to somethingness? WTF? No way!
When and how did it all start? Like most Physicists we are looking to discover GOD. Or the beginning. THE ANSWER.
Sorry to see you are so bitter about Christians. I suggest Buddhism to calm your soul, especially Zen. You won't be so angry if you can appreciate something other than yourself.
What we are looking for could be "god", however, none of the teachings in the bible are reflective of the big bang as we understand it today. The bible was a fabrication by humans in a time and area that may have needed such a book of rules.
So.....how did it start? What WAS the big bang? Out of no where? Nothingness to somethingness? WTF? Possibly!
Somewhat NSFW, language.
"Forget Jesus, the stars died so that you could be here today." -Lawrence Krauss
__________________
Last edited by GreatWhiteEbola; 12-29-2011 at 01:53 AM.
