Jireh wrote:I have tons of positive evidence for the God of the bible - but that is not the issue of this topic.

Come on then Jireh, have at it. Care to share even an ounce or two of this positive evidence?

Someone suggested we just have to look at the flowers...so beautiful...

... not to mention boils...

Ah, but you need faith to see the evidence. If you just believed in God, you'd see the evidence for him all around you. But there's none so blind as will not see. Here endeth the lesson.

http://elshamah.heavenforum.org/t5-argu ... nce-of-god


Arguments for the Existence of God

1. The universe had most probably a beginning.
This is supported through scientific, and philosophical reasons. Therefore it had a cause. Since beyond our universe, there was no time, no space, and no matter, that cause must be timeless, beginningless, eternal, spaceless, transcendent, invisible, personal, and incredibly powerful. Why does it need to have these characteristics ? This cause cannot exist in the time/space/material universe because then it would exist within the very universe it created. That is impossible.
Whatever caused the universe, existed beyond the universe. Since the universe had a beginning in time, and since matter and energy do not spontaneously change and arrange themselves into something new, then the best explanation for the cause of the universe is an action that was a decision.The cause must be personal because an impersonal force would be deterministic and mechanistic, not possessing free will. A mechanistic being only operates according to the programming it received from something else. But if the cause of the universe received programming from something else, then we have again not provided the answer to the cause of the universe. We have just found a middle-man. The cause had to make a choice to create and only beings who are personal can make choices.That description fits best to the God of the bible.


2. The universe is finely tuned to permit life on our planet.
Over 120 fine tune constants are know up to know, and as more time pasts, more are discovered. This might be due to chance, to physical need, or to design. Chance is a very bad explanation. Some advocate a Multiverse. But to have just one life permitting universe, you need 1 to 10^500 attempts to get it done. Thats a 1 with 500 zeros. If we put it in comparison, that in our universe, there exist around 10^80 atoms, this shows how improbable it is, that a Multiverse could explain finetuning. Beside this, the Multiverse argument does not explain away God. A mechanism needs to be in place to trigger these multiverses. It could not be by physical need, since if so, why are there many planets, which are not life permitting, but our is ? So its best explained by design. Our earth/solar/moon system is a very strong evidence. Our solar system is embedded at the right position in our galaxy, neither too close, nor too far from the center of the galaxy. Its also the only location, which alouds us to explore the universe, In a other location, and we would not see more than stellar clouds. The earth has the right distance from the sun, and so has the moon from the earth. The size of the moon, and the earth, is the right one. Our planet has the needed minerals, and water. It has the right atmosphere, and a ozon protecting mantle. Jupiter attracts all asteroids , avoiding these to fall to the earth, and make life impossible. The earths magnetic field protects us from the deadly rays of the sun. The velocity of rotation of the earth is just right. And so is the axial tilt of the earth. Beside this, volcano activities, earth quakes, the size of the crust of the earth, and more over 70 different paramenters must be just right. To believe, all these are just right by chance, needs a big leap of faith. This is indeed maibe the strongest argument for theism.

3. Life. Abiogenesis has not been able to explain the existence of life on earth.
Science cannot explain it. There are strong reasons to believe, a natural origin is not probable, and a bad explanation. First of all, why whould dead rocks need to evolve, to create life ? Secondly, just one living cell is more complex than the most complex machine created by man. A living eukaryotic cell contains many hundreds of thousands of different complex parts, including various motor proteins. These parts must be assembled correctly to produce a living cell, the most complex ‘machine’ in the universe—far more complex than a Cray supercomputer.DNA molecules carry information . Information is always created by a mind. There i no natural mechanism known to man, to create information. Information is by essence spiritual, and not physical. There is no bridge to cross the gulf from material to spiritual. Even through millions of years of evolution. Its not possible.

http://www.icr.org/article/einsteins...tion-cross-it/

On the one side, we find the real world of objects, events, and tensional spacetime relations. On the other side, we find fully abstract representations that contain information about the material world. That articulate information is abstracted first by our senses, secondarily by our bodily actions, and tertiarily by our ability to use one or more particular languages . Between the two realms we find what appears to be an uncrossable gulf.


A small part of the evolutionists' problem is that hard objects are never observed spontaneously to transform themselves (on their own recognizance) into abstract ideas.

4. The moral argument, and value of life.
Life has no value. Everthing is permissible. There is no such thing as right and wrong because there is no all knowing and all powerful Creator to define what is good and what is bad. It becomes society who tries to define it. What does that matter though if the people making laws define right from wrong. They are just as human as any other person in the world. The only thing that truly exists is personal preference. What Hitler, Stalin, or any other mass murderer did was not wrong at all. They simply had a different personal preference than you do. The point is, you shouldn't tell anyone that they are wrong or even right because they aren't either of those things. You can believe that its wrong, but you have no place to ground it. People can do anything they want to do without getting punished for their actions if the world lived consistently with the belief that God doesn't exist. How do you explain where guilt comes from? How do you explain why all people in the world have this feeling called a conscience that seems to tell them that something is wrong, such as murder. How come people feel a heavy weight on their emotions called guilt when they do something wrong, such as lie and steal, and the best thing to do to take the weight off themselves is to tell the truth and/or ask for forgiveness. If God doesn't exist, then how could you rationally explain all that?


5. Without God, life has no reason to be, there is no ultimate goal
There is no purpose to life. Life has no ultimate goal. There is no reason for living. Sacrifice for someone else's life would be stupid. This argument shows that an atheist lives inconsistently with their own belief. If a murderer who believed murder to be ok, came into your house to brutally murder you and your family, would you think that HE is wrong to do that? If you said no, that he isn't doing any thing wrong, then you would be living consistantly with your beliefs. But if you said yes, then you would live as if there were objective morals. But if there is no god to define objective morality then there is only subjective morality. So by saying it is wrong makes it only your opinion, but not the murderers opinion. You would be "pushing your<br style="position: static !important; ">morality on him" which is the opposite of what you believe. You probably believe that "it is wrong to push your morality on another person." Even that statement right there is another objective moral statement. In other words you express your opinions, but don't always live by them.



6. Religious experiences and miracles
What ever culture you go into, people are incurably religious. In every culture you see three things. 1) Everyone, except the atheist, worships a being higher than themselves. 2) Everyone has a morality they cannot keep. 3) Everyone is psychologically unsatisfied. People feel an emptiness in themselves that they want to fill. If the material world was the only thing that existed and if all your material needs were met, you should be satesfied right? But how come people who have the most wealth are usually the most unhappy. They constantly want more and more. And how can you explain the millions of people in the world who say they have felt the closeness of God in their lives? I personally am included with them. I have felt God's presence in my life on a consistent basis. Now how can you rationally explain that without God's existence? There are many people in the world who report seeing miracles. In other words there are people who say that they saw a situation occur where there is no naturalistic explanation for it. I personally know people who have had miraculous situations occur, such as immediate healings. You might argue that science will someday explain those things, but right now you can't explain them. The best explaination is God, because if God created the world then it wouldn't be hard to believe that he can intervene supernaturally in this world.

Oh look. Copy paste spam from his vanity forum. Yawn.

I suppose the fact that leading physicists are working upon testable natural mechanisms for the instantiation of the current observable universe, is an inconvenience that he won't allow to sway him from his apologetic regurgitations.

So no actual evidence then?

What a surprise.

What ever culture you go into, people are incurably religious.

Interesting turn of phrase. Also wrong.

The rest of your 'evidence' is also laughable.

Fenrir wrote:So no actual evidence then?

What a surprise.

but the ignorant reaction is no surprise.....

Onyx8 wrote:

What ever culture you go into, people are incurably religious.

Interesting turn of phrase. Also wrong.

The rest of your 'evidence' is also laughable.

sure it is....ones you don't have reasonable counter arguments, and don't want to give up your world view, your answer is obvious.

Calilasseia wrote:Oh look. Copy paste spam from his vanity forum. Yawn.

I suppose the fact that leading physicists are working upon testable natural mechanisms for the instantiation of the current observable universe, is an inconvenience that he won't allow to sway him from his apologetic regurgitations.

your dismissive post evidences only and just one thing : you are not driven by a genuine search of truth, but on wishful thinking, no God to exist.

I'm just going to begin with the first point, I'm a little tired.

1. The universe had most probably a beginning.
This is supported through scientific and philosophical reasons.

Nope, we can track our local expansion of spacetime back to a certain point but our equations begin to break down when we reach it. We are not in a position to call this the beginning of the universe.

Therefore it had a cause.

Unsupported assertion, you're saying something began, therefore it had to be caused.

Since beyond our universe, there was no time, no space, and no matter, that cause must be timeless, beginningless, eternal, spaceless, transcendent, invisible, personal, and incredibly powerful. Why does it need to have these characteristics ? This cause cannot exist in the time/space/material universe because then it would exist within the very universe it created. That is impossible.
Whatever caused the universe, existed beyond the universe.

The universe is described as the totality of everything that exists. By definition, things that do not reside in the universe are things that don't exist. To posit the existence of a god that resides outside of the universe is to posit a god that does not exist, and I would have to agree with you.

Since the universe had a beginning in time, and since matter and energy do not spontaneously change and arrange themselves into something new

You'll actually find that radioactive decay and quantum fluctuations among other physical properties of matter show this to be false.

then the best explanation for the cause of the universe is an action that was a decision.The cause must be personal because an impersonal force would be deterministic and mechanistic, not possessing free will. A mechanistic being only operates according to the programming it received from something else. But if the cause of the universe received programming from something else, then we have again not provided the answer to the cause of the universe. We have just found a middle-man. The cause had to make a choice to create and only beings who are personal can make choices.That description fits best to the God of the bible.

What you are doing is simply pulling the notion of contra causal free will out of your arse to fit your presumption that your god exists and made the universe. Causal actions are impossible in your timeless notion of a pre-universe and your assertion that only freely willed actions are possible there is unsupported. You're simply rulling out natural causes for our local expansion of spacetime and asserting that some form of magical freely willed action is the only explanation.

Bugger it! On to point 2. No real need to quote it.

I have no idea why the poster thinks that a paragraph that asks:

why are there many planets, which are not life permitting, but our is ? So its best explained by design.

Alongside:

The universe is finely tuned to permit life on our planet.

This is just fucking laughable . A universe 93 billlion light years wide with a single data point example of a habitable planet floating in the cold, airless, hard vacumm of space tells us that the universe is decidedly not designed for living things. There is something like 300 billion stars in our galaxy alone. Whatever odds you calculate for life arising on one of these planets is measured against the hundreds of billions of planets orbiting the countless billions of stars in one of the tens of thousands of galaxies that we have observed. Fine tuning is bullshit.

3. Life. Abiogenesis has not been able to explain the existence of life on earth.
Science cannot explain it.

And for some reason the poster thinks that if science can't explain it then magic is the answer. Keep in mind that this has been the explanation for disease, dreams, witchcraft, thunder, lightning, floods, tides and crop failure to name a few. Absense of a natural explanation is not evidence for a supernatural explanation.

Secondly, just one living cell is more complex than the most complex machine created by man. A living eukaryotic cell contains many hundreds of thousands of different complex parts, including various motor proteins. These parts must be assembled correctly to produce a living cell, the most complex ‘machine’ in the universe—far more complex than a Cray supercomputer.

Complexity is not evidence of design. Here is a simple example:



The brick wall is designed and built using simple rules, this allows for structural stability and even redundancy (remove a number of bricks and the wall will likely stay up)

The pile of bricks is the product of natural laws but is much more complex than the wall. Remove a brick from somewhere in the centre of the pile and a number of bricks will fall off of the pile as well. Complexity does not equal design.

DNA molecules carry information . Information is always created by a mind. There i no natural mechanism known to man, to create information. Information is by essence spiritual, and not physical. There is no bridge to cross the gulf from material to spiritual. Even through millions of years of evolution. Its not possible.

DNA does not carry information. At the level of the cell, all DNA does is follow certain physical laws based on their biochemistry. The assertion that information is always created by a mind is nonsense even if it wasn't redundant.

Okay. I'm bored and sleepy now.

Jireh wrote:that cause must be timeless, beginningless, eternal, spaceless, transcendent, invisible, personal, and incredibly powerful.

God, meet my friend John. The tiny, spineless, paralyzed, blind, def, armless, NBA player of the year.

I take it we're not getting that evidence then?

For now though, I might address this point.

Jireh wrote:
5. Without God, life has no reason to be, there is no ultimate goal

How terribly sad that you think this way.

There is no purpose to life.

How about a few simple things like enjoyment, learning, procreation, sex for the fun of it and not just for procreation, beer, wine, bungee jumping, motor sports, heavy metal, travelling, fine dining, family, kinky dressing up sex........ jeez, the list could and should go on and on, it's nearly limitless.

Life has no ultimate goal. There is no reason for living.

See above.

Sacrifice for someone else's life would be stupid.

How so? I would gladly sacrifice myself for the life of my kids. I love them literally more than life itself, which is pretty good for me most of the time.

This argument shows that an atheist lives inconsistently with their own belief.

Just what in the blue blazes are you talking about? Atheism is concerned with a lack of belief, namely belief in God/s. Belief about anything else is completely seperate and can vary massively between atheists without them losing the connection they have in being atheists.

If a murderer who believed murder to be ok, came into your house to brutally murder you and your family, would you think that HE is wrong to do that?

Yes I would, and the fucker would rue the day.

If you said no, that he isn't doing any thing wrong, then you would be living consistantly with your beliefs.

No I fucking wouldn't. I would be a heartless cunt. I'm not a heartless cunt, I'm a loving father and a loving partner to my other half.

But if you said yes, then you would live as if there were objective morals. But if there is no god to define objective morality then there is only subjective morality.

There is only subjective morality. Try getting your head around this idea. Religious people should have a good handle on this one. For example, do you think it's OK to own slaves? The Bible says it is. God explicitly outlines where you can get slaves from, how you may treat them, how you may beat them and kill them. Now I think that it's seriously immoral to keep slaves and the majority of the world appears to agree with me and has laws which prohibit the keeping of slaves.
Now since the Bible condones it, God condones it and at certain parts even encourages it and still we, as human beings have decided it is immoral, tell me again where we get our moral thinking because it isn't from the Bible.

So by saying it is wrong makes it only your opinion, but not the murderers opinion. You would be "pushing your<br style="position: static !important; ">morality on him" which is the opposite of what you believe.

Which, given what I have written above, is clearly bullshit. I would be standing by my morality which includes a belief in the sancitity of life. Murderers offend that belief, so yes I would push my morality on him. That is not the opposite of what I believe. It is exactly in keeping with what I believe.

You probably believe that "it is wrong to push your morality on another person."

In certain circumstances it is unavoidable, see above. I wouldn't necessarily go around spouting off about my morals to anyone and everyone but in general there is no need to. They tend to be pretty much in line with the society I live in.

Even that statement right there is another objective moral statement. In other words you express your opinions, but don't always live by them.

Bullshit!!

Now, about that EVIDENCE.

Jireh wrote:

Fenrir wrote:So no actual evidence then?

What a surprise.

but the ignorant reaction is no surprise.....

That you would present the same assertions which have been presented innumerable times before and been found wanting innumerable times before really is not a surprise. The only ignorance evident here is that you think simply repeating unfounded assertions again and again serves some purpose.

Jireh wrote:http://elshamah.heavenforum.org/t5-arguments-for-the-existence-of-god


Arguments for the Existence of God

1. The universe had most probably a beginning.

This is a logical fallacy...an argument from ignorance.

Yes, it probably had a beginning...where is the evidence that the beginning was a god?

Jireh wrote:2. The universe is finely tuned to permit life on our planet.

Over 99.99% of the planet is instantly fatal to life.

Jireh wrote:3. Life. Abiogenesis has not been able to explain the existence of life on earth.

And another argument from ignorance.

Jireh wrote:4. The moral argument, and value of life.

Morals are the rules that societies build. The value of life is what WE give it.

Jireh wrote:5. Without God, life has no reason to be, there is no ultimate goal

So what?

Jireh wrote:6. Religious experiences and miracles

And cultures throughout history have also believed in magic. Until very recently, virtually everyone did.

So, where is any of this evidence for a god? I've seen logical fallacies and outright assertions...no evidence.

Jireh wrote:

Calilasseia wrote:Oh look. Copy paste spam from his vanity forum. Yawn.

I suppose the fact that leading physicists are working upon testable natural mechanisms for the instantiation of the current observable universe, is an inconvenience that he won't allow to sway him from his apologetic regurgitations.

your dismissive post evidences only and just one thing : you are not driven by a genuine search of truth, but on wishful thinking, no God to exist.

Either that, or people are just tired of the same old garbage being posted as if it is something new that hasn't been discredited innumerable times. Especially when people are just plagiarizing WLC's garbage.

Jireh wrote:

Onyx8 wrote:

What ever culture you go into, people are incurably religious.

Interesting turn of phrase. Also wrong.

The rest of your 'evidence' is also laughable.

sure it is....ones you don't have reasonable counter arguments, and don't want to give up your world view, your answer is obvious.

Jireh, my comment was directed at your demonstrably wrong assertion that people are incurably religious, given that there are people all around you who once were religious and no longer are.

The 'interesting' part was referring to your use of the word 'incurably' which implies that religion is something which it is possible to be 'cured' from.

If you would like to defend your comments feel free, but you aren't doing so well so far.