Why Creation Is The Only Logical Explanation...

originally posted by: edmc^2
As for God -


You're basing your belief on something you don't know - hence blind faith.

There, fixed it for you...

Now, you are on right path...

BTW, great explanation what religion and ID really means.

But we already know that Creation/ID is dead beast of past, don't we...

Some smart ID/creationist tried to place it into school and failed miserably because there was no single piece of evidence...



Enjoy video... and if you like to talk more about stupid design - click here... www.abovetopsecret.com...

a reply to: edmc^2

So why are we alive while the chair is not? What's missing?

Why are we alive? Because we fit the definition of life. Life is made up or organic matter and must have the ability to change, grow and reproduce and usually process chemical energy (metabolic processes). As I said life is just chemistry, the differences between a living thing and a non-living thing is not all that massive a gulf.

The source of life. An Intelligent Source of Life.

The God many believers argue for violates the definition of what it means to be alive on multiple counts. For one thing typically God does not possess a physical body, God is disembodied or at the very least non-physical. All life ever observed has been made of organic matter and even if in the future some kind of living AI is developed it will need the physical construct of a computer. Now of course we can't rule out with complete certainty the idea of non-physical stuff (dualism) or even non-physical life, but such a thing violates the current definition of life and we'd need some evidence or good reason to consider that this thing 1)Exists at all and 2) is Alive.

The God of the Bible is also changeless, he is the same "yesterday today and forever" and the God of the Bible is also supposedly PERFECT, a completely self-sufficient being, with no reason (no imperative) to reproduce AND no way to possibly lose or gain anything.

God cannot change, cannot grow, and lacks any biological means of reproduction.

As I explained, and you have not addressed, God also violates the entire premise of your argument, that all life must come from life... you say God is EXEMPT from the very rule you're using as evidence that he exists... that's a special pleading fallacy and I'd like you to address that.

At any rate even if I were to grant you your God for the sake of a hypothetical there is NO WAY for you to know whether God has a Creator of his own. You can say "well my God is perfect and there is none other beside him" but your source for these claims is the Bible. Your source is a religious document written by folks who believed there was no other God because God supposedly told them he was the only true God. But there's nothing ruling out God lying or God NOT KNOWING there was an UBER GOD that created him.

Your God, ironically, might simply be the most arrogant atheist in history, declaring himself as the ultimate being when really there is something greater than even him. There's no way to rule it out, because even if you make the ontological argument that God is the greatest conceivable being there's no way to prove that God's self-aggrandizement, as recorded in the Bible, is actually accurate. The Uber God above your God might just be keeping Yahweh in the dark about its existence, and Yahweh is just too stubborn an atheist to take the existence of an even higher power on faith

originally posted by: Titen-Sxull
a reply to: edmc^2

So why are we alive while the chair is not? What's missing?

Why are we alive? Because we fit the definition of life. Life is made up or organic matter and must have the ability to change, grow and reproduce and usually process chemical energy (metabolic processes). As I said life is just chemistry, the differences between a living thing and a non-living thing is not all that massive a gulf.

The source of life. An Intelligent Source of Life.

The God many believers argue for violates the definition of what it means to be alive on multiple counts. For one thing typically God does not possess a physical body, God is disembodied or at the very least non-physical. All life ever observed has been made of organic matter and even if in the future some kind of living AI is developed it will need the physical construct of a computer. Now of course we can't rule out with complete certainty the idea of non-physical stuff (dualism) or even non-physical life, but such a thing violates the current definition of life and we'd need some evidence or good reason to consider that this thing 1)Exists at all and 2) is Alive.

The God of the Bible is also changeless, he is the same "yesterday today and forever" and the God of the Bible is also supposedly PERFECT, a completely self-sufficient being, with no reason (no imperative) to reproduce AND no way to possibly lose or gain anything.

God cannot change, cannot grow, and lacks any biological means of reproduction.

As I explained, and you have not addressed, God also violates the entire premise of your argument, that all life must come from life... you say God is EXEMPT from the very rule you're using as evidence that he exists... that's a special pleading fallacy and I'd like you to address that.

At any rate even if I were to grant you your God for the sake of a hypothetical there is NO WAY for you to know whether God has a Creator of his own. You can say "well my God is perfect and there is none other beside him" but your source for these claims is the Bible. Your source is a religious document written by folks who believed there was no other God because God supposedly told them he was the only true God. But there's nothing ruling out God lying or God NOT KNOWING there was an UBER GOD that created him.

Your God, ironically, might simply be the most arrogant atheist in history, declaring himself as the ultimate being when really there is something greater than even him. There's no way to rule it out, because even if you make the ontological argument that God is the greatest conceivable being there's no way to prove that God's self-aggrandizement, as recorded in the Bible, is actually accurate. The Uber God above your God might just be keeping Yahweh in the dark about its existence, and Yahweh is just too stubborn an atheist to take the existence of an even higher power on faith

You forgot to put "/mic drop" at the end.

Because that is a mic drop kind of post.

a reply to: Murgatroid

Even if the chart is fake...the fact is real about embryos being similar among the animal kingdom...

The study of one type of evidence of evolution is called embryology, the study of embryos. An embryo is an unborn (or unhatched) animal or human young in its earliest phases. Embryos of many different kinds of animals: mammals, birds, reptiles, fish, etc. look very similar and it is often difficult to tell them apart. Many traits of one type of animal appear in the embryo of another type of animal. For example, fish embryos and human embryos both have gill slits. In fish they develop into gills, but in humans they disappear before birth.

This shows that the animals are similar and that they develop similarly, implying that they are related, have common ancestors and that they started out the same, gradually evolving different traits, but that the basic plan for a creature's beginning remains the same.

a reply to: Titen-Sxull

Thanks for an interesting post Titen. I enjoyed it. But I must say, I disagree with some aspects of what you said.

For instance you said:

life is just chemistry, the differences between a living thing and a non-living thing is not all that massive a gulf.

Quite to the contrary, there's a massive gulf separating the two. It's massive as Life and Death itself as one is simply alive while the other is not. One can impart life while the other can't. One can feel while the other can't and on and on. In the case of us humans, we can plan for the future while inanimate things can't. One can fathom the universe while the other can't. One can love while the other can't, on and on. But, if you're referring ONLY to the chemical elements in living things and non-living things, sure. Since both are made of atoms, I would even say there's no difference at all. But if this is your definition of life, then it is very shallow and devoid of true meaning. Which explains why it's impossible for an atheist to fathom the conscious spiritual side of man. Pity as there's much more to man.

As for:

The God many believers argue for violates the definition of what it means to be alive on multiple counts. For one thing typically God does not possess a physical body, God is disembodied or at the very least non-physical. All life ever observed has been made of organic matter and even if in the future some kind of living AI is developed it will need the physical construct of a computer. Now of course we can't rule out with complete certainty the idea of non-physical stuff (dualism) or even non-physical life, but such a thing violates the current definition of life and we'd need some evidence or good reason to consider that this thing 1)Exists at all and 2) is Alive.

Of course it "violates the definition of what it means to be alive" because you're defining God in terms of the physical law. It's like trying to define or explain the color blue to someone who was born blind. Or like explaining Mozart or Beethoven Concerto to a person born deaf. Try if you may, you can't do it. You will come up short. Why? Because the person you're describing it to has no foundation to base it from. To them, the world is colorless and soundless. You can give them an idea of what it is you're describing, but it'll be very limited. So a foundation is needed in order to give meaning to something that is beyond the mental comprehension. In the case of God, you have to define / describe
what an invisible life is. And since humans lack the ability to define / describe what is an incorporeal body is, then we have to turn to somewhere else.

In this case, the Bible is the ONLY source we can go to for accurate information. “God is a Spirit,” states John 4:24. Hence, it's impossible for us to form an image of what a Spirit Being looks like.

Thus, a command was laid to all:

“You must not make for yourself a carved image or a form like anything that is in the heavens above or on the earth below or in the waters under the earth.” (Ex 20:4)

[Deu 4:15-19 ASV] 15 Take ye therefore good heed unto yourselves; for ye saw no manner of form on the day that Jehovah spake unto you in Horeb out of the midst of the fire. 16 Lest ye corrupt yourselves, and make you a graven image in the form of any figure, the likeness of male or female, 17 the likeness of any beast that is on the earth, the likeness of any winged bird that flieth in the heavens, 18 the likeness of anything that creepeth on the ground, the likeness of any fish that is in the water under the earth; 19 and lest thou lift up thine eyes unto heaven, and when thou seest the sun and the moon and the stars, even all the host of heaven, thou be drawn away and worship them, and serve them, which Jehovah thy God hath allotted unto all the peoples under the whole heaven.

In the same vein, since humans are corporeal / physical beings, describing something that has no physical body is close to an impossibility. It can't be done, hence it doesn't fit your definition of what life is. But we can and are allowed to personify God as having "eyes, mouth, nose, hands" and so on in order to understand that he is a real person with real feelings. He inhabits a place of higher substance than us. And unless we're changed into or made into the same stuff that He is made of, we cannot see God.

As the Scripture say:

[1Co 15:42, 44 RSV] 42 So is it with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. ... 44 It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body.

[1Co 15:51-53 RSV] 51 Lo! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, 52 in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. 53 For this perishable nature must put on the imperishable, and this mortal nature must put on immortality."

[Mat 5:8 ASV] 8 "Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God."

[Heb 9:24 ASV] 24 "For Christ entered not into a holy place made with hands, like in pattern to the true; but into heaven itself, now to appear before the face of God for us:"

And since your criteria for defining God as life is constrained within the parameters of the physical natural world, therefore you see a "violation". It doesn't work that way. It's similar to the "violation" you see in a black hole or the "violations" in other phenomenons. Because you're applying natural laws, therefore, they break the rules. But even though natural physical laws seem to be violated, we accept them as realities and have no problem with them. But of course not with God - to you.

but you say...

... we'd need some evidence or good reason to consider that this thing 1)Exists at all and 2) is Alive.

Of course, we need evidence. Who doesn't? I do, otherwise my belief will be based on blind faith. But what evidence are you looking for?

Will a physical manifestation do? If so, why then many if not all atheist reject Jesus Christ being a real person? Yahweh / Jehovah sent forth his son to reveal Himself with evidence, yet you reject him as a real person. So physical manifestation is not the evidence you're looking for then. What about life begets life? Will this do? Obviously not because you still continue to doubt it as fact. What about intelligibility in nature? Will it do? Obviously not because you reject it too. What about a Law-Maker and Law-Giver of the laws of nature? Will it do? Obviously not. So what evidence are you looking for then? What about logic? This too fails to convince you. If a simple logic as explained in the Bible below doesn't even merit a consideration, then I say, you're not looking for this kinds of evidence.

"For every house has a builder, but the one who built everything is God." (Heb 3:4)

You're looking for pure material evidence. Something that you can touched. If this is the case, then you will need to be consistent in your belief as there are many things in the world that exist but are invisible.

....

The God of the Bible is also changeless, he is the same "yesterday today and forever" and the God of the Bible is also supposedly PERFECT, a completely self-sufficient being, with no reason (no imperative) to reproduce AND no way to possibly lose or gain anything.

God cannot change, cannot grow, and lacks any biological means of reproduction.

You must have misread and misunderstood the Bible when you read it. It's not about PHYSICAL change, but the UNCHANGEABLENESS the Bible speaks of about God are his promises. That is, they will all come true even though man is disloyal. They can't be changed!

[Mal 3:6-7 ASV] 6 For I, Jehovah, change not; therefore ye, O sons of Jacob, are not consumed. 7 From the days of your fathers ye have turned aside from mine ordinances, and have not kept them. Return unto me, and I will return unto you, saith Jehovah of hosts. But ye say, Wherein shall we return?

[Psa 105:8 ASV] 8 He hath remembered his covenant for ever, The word which he commanded to a thousand generations,

[Jas 1:17 ASV] 17 Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom can be no variation, neither shadow that is cast by turning."

So you totally misunderstood the Scriptures.

Finally, your final point...

As I explained, and you have not addressed, God also violates the entire premise of your argument, that all life must come from life... you say God is EXEMPT from the very rule you're using as evidence that he exists... that's a special pleading fallacy and I'd like you to address that.

At any rate even if I were to grant you your God for the sake of a hypothetical there is NO WAY for you to know whether God has a Creator of his own. You can say "well my God is perfect and there is none other beside him" but your source for these claims is the Bible. Your source is a religious document written by folks who believed there was no other God because God supposedly told them he was the only true God. But there's nothing ruling out God lying or God NOT KNOWING there was an UBER GOD that created him.

Your God, ironically, might simply be the most arrogant atheist in history, declaring himself as the ultimate being when really there is something greater than even him. There's no way to rule it out, because even if you make the ontological argument that God is the greatest conceivable being there's no way to prove that God's self-aggrandizement, as recorded in the Bible, is actually accurate. The Uber God above your God might just be keeping Yahweh in the dark about its existence, and Yahweh is just too stubborn an atheist to take the existence of an even higher power on faith

As I already explained, God doesn't violate the laws that He created and put in placed. Rather he works around them to accomplish what he wants to do. It's like you raising or lowering the temperature in your house.

As for God's own existence, yes, God himself told us...

[Isa 43:10 ASV] 10 Ye are my witnesses, saith Jehovah, and my servant whom I have chosen; that ye may know and believe me, and understand that I am he: before me there was no God formed, neither shall there be after me."

“Now to the King of eternity, incorruptible, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen. . .” (1 Timothy 1:17)

“Before the mountains were born Or you brought forth the earth and the productive land, From everlasting to everlasting, you are God.” (Psalm 90:2)

As for...

God is EXEMPT from the very rule...

that Life comes from pre-existing life and where say

that's a special pleading fallacy

I say, it's a fallacious assumption on your part. You're creating a false rule where you're assuming that God is a creation. He is not a creation but the Creator! Hence, if true logic is applied, there should be only ONE Creator. Otherwise, once you say that God has a creator, then it creates an unending question of who created the Creator of the creator of God, ad infinitum. You can't get away from that logic. There's no way around it other than believing and accepting the illogical view that there was no one, absolutely nothing was responsible for creating life.

You will also have to accept blindly that there's no true meaning to life. That all of the injustice done by man are just the product of the human brain. Hence, Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin, Genghis Khan, The Inquisition, ISIS, rapist murderers will never meet justice for what they have done. And that left on their own, mankind will someday destroy himself. That this is all the life that there is. A dog-eat-dog world where the strong and the fit will survive until no one is left.

But to those who believe in the Creator - an unchangeable promise awaits:

[Rev 21:3-4 RSV] 3 and I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "Behold, the dwelling of God is with men. He will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself will be with them; 4 he will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more, for the former things have passed away."

a reply to: SuperFrog

Sorry, I'm not a proponent of ID either. Although they have many valid arguments.

originally posted by: TzarChasm

originally posted by: Titen-Sxull
a reply to: edmc^2

So why are we alive while the chair is not? What's missing?

Why are we alive? Because we fit the definition of life. Life is made up or organic matter and must have the ability to change, grow and reproduce and usually process chemical energy (metabolic processes). As I said life is just chemistry, the differences between a living thing and a non-living thing is not all that massive a gulf.

The source of life. An Intelligent Source of Life.

The God many believers argue for violates the definition of what it means to be alive on multiple counts. For one thing typically God does not possess a physical body, God is disembodied or at the very least non-physical. All life ever observed has been made of organic matter and even if in the future some kind of living AI is developed it will need the physical construct of a computer. Now of course we can't rule out with complete certainty the idea of non-physical stuff (dualism) or even non-physical life, but such a thing violates the current definition of life and we'd need some evidence or good reason to consider that this thing 1)Exists at all and 2) is Alive.

The God of the Bible is also changeless, he is the same "yesterday today and forever" and the God of the Bible is also supposedly PERFECT, a completely self-sufficient being, with no reason (no imperative) to reproduce AND no way to possibly lose or gain anything.

God cannot change, cannot grow, and lacks any biological means of reproduction.

As I explained, and you have not addressed, God also violates the entire premise of your argument, that all life must come from life... you say God is EXEMPT from the very rule you're using as evidence that he exists... that's a special pleading fallacy and I'd like you to address that.

At any rate even if I were to grant you your God for the sake of a hypothetical there is NO WAY for you to know whether God has a Creator of his own. You can say "well my God is perfect and there is none other beside him" but your source for these claims is the Bible. Your source is a religious document written by folks who believed there was no other God because God supposedly told them he was the only true God. But there's nothing ruling out God lying or God NOT KNOWING there was an UBER GOD that created him.

Your God, ironically, might simply be the most arrogant atheist in history, declaring himself as the ultimate being when really there is something greater than even him. There's no way to rule it out, because even if you make the ontological argument that God is the greatest conceivable being there's no way to prove that God's self-aggrandizement, as recorded in the Bible, is actually accurate. The Uber God above your God might just be keeping Yahweh in the dark about its existence, and Yahweh is just too stubborn an atheist to take the existence of an even higher power on faith

You forgot to put "/mic drop" at the end.

Because that is a mic drop kind of post.

what drop - it's more like a dud.

originally posted by: edmc^2

originally posted by: TzarChasm

originally posted by: Titen-Sxull
a reply to: edmc^2

So why are we alive while the chair is not? What's missing?

Why are we alive? Because we fit the definition of life. Life is made up or organic matter and must have the ability to change, grow and reproduce and usually process chemical energy (metabolic processes). As I said life is just chemistry, the differences between a living thing and a non-living thing is not all that massive a gulf.

The source of life. An Intelligent Source of Life.

The God many believers argue for violates the definition of what it means to be alive on multiple counts. For one thing typically God does not possess a physical body, God is disembodied or at the very least non-physical. All life ever observed has been made of organic matter and even if in the future some kind of living AI is developed it will need the physical construct of a computer. Now of course we can't rule out with complete certainty the idea of non-physical stuff (dualism) or even non-physical life, but such a thing violates the current definition of life and we'd need some evidence or good reason to consider that this thing 1)Exists at all and 2) is Alive.

The God of the Bible is also changeless, he is the same "yesterday today and forever" and the God of the Bible is also supposedly PERFECT, a completely self-sufficient being, with no reason (no imperative) to reproduce AND no way to possibly lose or gain anything.

God cannot change, cannot grow, and lacks any biological means of reproduction.

As I explained, and you have not addressed, God also violates the entire premise of your argument, that all life must come from life... you say God is EXEMPT from the very rule you're using as evidence that he exists... that's a special pleading fallacy and I'd like you to address that.

At any rate even if I were to grant you your God for the sake of a hypothetical there is NO WAY for you to know whether God has a Creator of his own. You can say "well my God is perfect and there is none other beside him" but your source for these claims is the Bible. Your source is a religious document written by folks who believed there was no other God because God supposedly told them he was the only true God. But there's nothing ruling out God lying or God NOT KNOWING there was an UBER GOD that created him.

Your God, ironically, might simply be the most arrogant atheist in history, declaring himself as the ultimate being when really there is something greater than even him. There's no way to rule it out, because even if you make the ontological argument that God is the greatest conceivable being there's no way to prove that God's self-aggrandizement, as recorded in the Bible, is actually accurate. The Uber God above your God might just be keeping Yahweh in the dark about its existence, and Yahweh is just too stubborn an atheist to take the existence of an even higher power on faith

You forgot to put "/mic drop" at the end.

Because that is a mic drop kind of post.

what drop - it's more like a dud.

No, that's this thread. Titensxull's post just underlined the re-dud-ancy of the whole thing. ...see what I did there?

originally posted by: TzarChasm

originally posted by: edmc^2

originally posted by: TzarChasm

originally posted by: Titen-Sxull
a reply to: edmc^2

So why are we alive while the chair is not? What's missing?

Why are we alive? Because we fit the definition of life. Life is made up or organic matter and must have the ability to change, grow and reproduce and usually process chemical energy (metabolic processes). As I said life is just chemistry, the differences between a living thing and a non-living thing is not all that massive a gulf.

The source of life. An Intelligent Source of Life.

The God many believers argue for violates the definition of what it means to be alive on multiple counts. For one thing typically God does not possess a physical body, God is disembodied or at the very least non-physical. All life ever observed has been made of organic matter and even if in the future some kind of living AI is developed it will need the physical construct of a computer. Now of course we can't rule out with complete certainty the idea of non-physical stuff (dualism) or even non-physical life, but such a thing violates the current definition of life and we'd need some evidence or good reason to consider that this thing 1)Exists at all and 2) is Alive.

The God of the Bible is also changeless, he is the same "yesterday today and forever" and the God of the Bible is also supposedly PERFECT, a completely self-sufficient being, with no reason (no imperative) to reproduce AND no way to possibly lose or gain anything.

God cannot change, cannot grow, and lacks any biological means of reproduction.

As I explained, and you have not addressed, God also violates the entire premise of your argument, that all life must come from life... you say God is EXEMPT from the very rule you're using as evidence that he exists... that's a special pleading fallacy and I'd like you to address that.

At any rate even if I were to grant you your God for the sake of a hypothetical there is NO WAY for you to know whether God has a Creator of his own. You can say "well my God is perfect and there is none other beside him" but your source for these claims is the Bible. Your source is a religious document written by folks who believed there was no other God because God supposedly told them he was the only true God. But there's nothing ruling out God lying or God NOT KNOWING there was an UBER GOD that created him.

Your God, ironically, might simply be the most arrogant atheist in history, declaring himself as the ultimate being when really there is something greater than even him. There's no way to rule it out, because even if you make the ontological argument that God is the greatest conceivable being there's no way to prove that God's self-aggrandizement, as recorded in the Bible, is actually accurate. The Uber God above your God might just be keeping Yahweh in the dark about its existence, and Yahweh is just too stubborn an atheist to take the existence of an even higher power on faith

You forgot to put "/mic drop" at the end.

Because that is a mic drop kind of post.

what drop - it's more like a dud.

No, that's this thread. Titensxull's post just underlined the re-dud-ancy of the whole thing. ...see what I did there?

lol!!

originally posted by: Phantom423

originally posted by: Barcs
You silly people with your faith in science! OMG that is totally blind faith. The OP has proven god, conclusively. He has presented facts and logical evidence to support his view and has proven that science is just a guess.

I'd like to sequester this pic if you don't mind Phantom.

I love it.

originally posted by: edmc^2

originally posted by: Phantom423

originally posted by: Barcs
You silly people with your faith in science! OMG that is totally blind faith. The OP has proven god, conclusively. He has presented facts and logical evidence to support his view and has proven that science is just a guess.

I'd like to sequester this pic if you don't mind Phantom.

I love it.

Well, that's ironic.

a reply to: edmc^2

It's massive as Life and Death itself as one is simply alive while the other is not.

The difference between a living thing and a non-living is in the kinds of chemical reactions and interactions we see. Life grows, changes, evolves, reproduces and reacts to stimuli.

There is an ongoing debate in science as to whether or not viruses are alive, this all depends on how we define life.

Of course it "violates the definition of what it means to be alive" because you're defining God in terms of the physical law.

I'm simply comparing the generally held definition of God to the generally agreed upon definition of life. If you want to amend what the word ALIVE or LIFE means then you have to give a coherent reason for why your God should get a pass. Right now the God you're proposing is hypothetical and that entire rambling paragraph about color to a blind person is one big special pleading fallacy where you get to say your God is exempt from all the rules of logic and doesn't even have to be coherently defined.

If your interest is in having rational discourse you can't just introduce something which violates every law of logic and every definition of what it means to be alive and say that God can break those rules because the Bible says so.

In this case, the Bible is the ONLY source we can go to for accurate information.

Why? Other than your assertion, and your personal beliefs, what reason do I have to assume this? I fail to see why the war-like plague-bringing slavery-condoning deity proposed in the Bible is the only option for a Universe creating God. In fact such a being has such obvious hallmarks of fiction that it either does not exist OR has had its character completely altered by the human beings who wrote about it (or, the third option, the God of the Bible does exist and is just as evil, petty and incompetent as the Bible describes).

And since your criteria for defining God as life is constrained within the parameters of the physical natural world

It's not that a non-physical lifeform is utterly impossible but we would need a coherent definition, something that actually makes sense. Let's also not forget that Black Holes have been observed, we know they exist, your God is still unobserved.

If so, why then many if not all atheist reject Jesus Christ being a real person?

Because of the utter lack of archaeological evidence or contemporaneous accounts. The only accounts of Jesus' life are written in Greek decades and decades after he supposedly lived. Now I'll admit I'm no Mythicist, I think it quite plausible that a religious teacher named Yeshua did exist, however I reject the supernatural aspects of those stories as later additions, embellishments, myth-making and cult-building.

What about intelligibility in nature?

Given that we evolved with sensory organs to take in an observe the world around us it only makes sense that that world would be comprehensible to our minds. Evidently though that comprehensibility has its limits, as you pointed out our understanding breaks down when we look deeply at black holes, or the singularity at the Big Bang. It may be there are aspects of nature so bizarre as to be unintelligible.

Bare minimum evidence would be some kind of manifestation that I could confirm was not hallucinatory, meaning I could bring in outside observers to also observe whatever the phenomenon was. Having it be merely a personal experience is not enough, it needs outside confirmation, it has to be testable and repeatable. How about a prayer study where amputees regrow their limbs under strict observation but ONLY when the prayers are directed at Yahweh or Jesus? While such a study would not absolutely prove God was real or was the cause it would at least confirm the supernatural exists in some form and it would be easy to infer that it was Yahweh/Jesus who was responsible (even if that inference might not be correct).

Science operates under methodological naturalism, which means that a supernatural cause can never be affirmed fully but a supernatural effect COULD BE.

but the UNCHANGEABLENESS the Bible speaks of about God are his promises

So everything else about God is in-flux then?

Is God a perfect being or not edmc? A PERFECT being, by its very definition, cannot be corrupted, it cannot become imperfect, and is already self-sufficient (needing nothing) so it could not GAIN or LOSE anything.

He is not a creation but the Creator! Hence, if true logic is applied, there should be only ONE Creator.

This is a complete non-sequitur. Why must there only be one creator?

At any rate you're changing the rules now once again. You said that LIFE (full stop) can only come from other LIFE but the life you propose as the source of life on Earth violates the very definition of life AND violates the very premise I just restated. There is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING illogical about a creator having a creator and, in fact, there is no way for you to logically rule it out (unless you are proposing you know better than the Uber God who created Yahweh).

If life always needs to stem from other life than God is not exempt from that rule except by you committing a fallacy of special pleading. I'm going to try to restate your argument without the special pleading:

P1 All biological life must have its origin in a supernatural life we call God
P2 Biological life exists on Earth
C Life on Earth was created by God

Now obviously the truth of any conclusion is based on whether or not the premises are valid. Other than you asserting the fact that biological life cannot have emerged on its own from the very chemical processes that make up its foundations I have seen no attempt from you to prove the soundness of your first premise here. Of course the first premise already assumes God without having to explain why God is the only explanation for the origin of biological life.

No matter how you restate your argument it is logically defunct.

Hence, Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin, Genghis Khan, The Inquisition, ISIS, rapist murderers will never meet justice for what they have done.

Fallacy of appeal to consequence. All the wishful thinking in the world isn't going to mean that hell actually exists. At any rate the system of vicarious redemption set up by Jesus is hardly what I would call JUST, since it let's every person you've just mentioned into Heaven as long as they accept Christ before they die with a sincere repentance.

That this is all the life that there is. A dog-eat-dog world where the strong and the fit will survive until no one is left.

I'm glad that you get to sit there and tell me what I believe edmc, that's not presumptive of you at all.

I'm not a nihilist. I don't know whether there is anything we'd want to call a god out there or whether there is an objective meaning to life. I highly doubt there is. But I am hopeful that humanity will make the best of it after I'm gone. I am hopeful we will get our heads out of our asses and get out to see the stars as a unified species.

originally posted by: TzarChasm

originally posted by: edmc^2

originally posted by: Phantom423

originally posted by: Barcs
You silly people with your faith in science! OMG that is totally blind faith. The OP has proven god, conclusively. He has presented facts and logical evidence to support his view and has proven that science is just a guess.

I'd like to sequester this pic if you don't mind Phantom.

I love it.

Well, that's ironic.

Exactly - it fits you to the tee .

IF CREATION STORY WAS TRUE THE FOLLOWING WOULD EXIST:
If the story of Adam and Eve is true, we might expect that Adam and Eve would be able to pass their story onto their children, and that all cultures from then on would share a similar creation story. Early parents would have answered their children’s questions of “Where do we come from?” with the same story of Great Grandpa Adam and Great Grandma Eve and how the talking snake mucked everything up.
Additionally, if the Earth is, say, 6,000 years old, these stories only had to be passed down verbally for 2,500 years (or so) before being written down. This may seem like a long time, but with Biblical patriarchs like Adam, Methuselah and Noah living almost 1000 years each, the story should have a high level of continuity between the Garden of Eden and the time it was written down. There wouldn’t really be a need for a “special revelation” of the creation story, since it would be common knowledge from the beginning.

BUT IN REALITY THIS IS WHAT EXISTS:
What history bears out is numerous and varied creation stories from all over the world, and none are repeating the specifics of Adam and Eve, the talking serpent, original sin, and/or the expulsion from Eden.
While the early Jews may have shared some elements of their stories with their closest neighbors, their neighbors still told very different stories. And the more distant cultures, such as the Aztecs and Aborigines, remained completely oblivious to the Jewish story of creation.

…CLOSE THREAD//.

originally posted by: toktaylor
IF CREATION STORY WAS TRUE THE FOLLOWING WOULD EXIST:
If the story of Adam and Eve is true, we might expect that Adam and Eve would be able to pass their story onto their children, and that all cultures from then on would share a similar creation story. Early parents would have answered their children’s questions of “Where do we come from?” with the same story of Great Grandpa Adam and Great Grandma Eve and how the talking snake mucked everything up.
Additionally, if the Earth is, say, 6,000 years old, these stories only had to be passed down verbally for 2,500 years (or so) before being written down. This may seem like a long time, but with Biblical patriarchs like Adam, Methuselah and Noah living almost 1000 years each, the story should have a high level of continuity between the Garden of Eden and the time it was written down. There wouldn’t really be a need for a “special revelation” of the creation story, since it would be common knowledge from the beginning.

BUT IN REALITY THIS IS WHAT EXISTS:
What history bears out is numerous and varied creation stories from all over the world, and none are repeating the specifics of Adam and Eve, the talking serpent, original sin, and/or the expulsion from Eden.
While the early Jews may have shared some elements of their stories with their closest neighbors, their neighbors still told very different stories. And the more distant cultures, such as the Aztecs and Aborigines, remained completely oblivious to the Jewish story of creation.

…CLOSE THREAD//.

Hence, the Bible exists to tell us what really happened in the past. It's an accurate reliable record of what occurred in the past. What you cited can't even match the historicity of the Bible. In fact, it doesn't say that the earth is 6000 years but allows what science has found - 4 billion years old and a 14 billion-year-old universe.

...TRY AGAIN//.

Right...

This is how Bible should be shipped/fixed so that we don't end up with folks reading it literately...



Note how Father George Coyne calls those extremist approach to scriptures....

a reply to: SuperFrog

Right, that's the best you can do.

A sticker and a Vatican priest who has no clue of what's he's talking about.

originally posted by: edmc^2
a reply to: SuperFrog

Right, that's the best you can do.

A sticker and a Vatican priest who has no clue of what's he's talking about.

Right, priest who knows less then you... makes sense...

Yes, sticker points at some most important things that are wrong with Bible, while Father Coyne acknowledges that there is nothing connecting science and scriptures for simple reason - science came much after scriptures were written and there can't be any science in them. They are not to be taken literately, like we see here.

Please note, ad-hominem is not helping you here, it is rather pointing at simple fact that you are grabbing straws to preserve your belief, which brings us to one of my older topics: Simple reason science and religion are incompatible... based around this little quote from Tim Minchen:

Science adjusts it's views based on what's observed.
Faith is the denial of observation so that Belief can be preserved.

This topic is clear example of how true this quote is.

a reply to: Titen-Sxull

So everything else about God is in-flux then?

Is God a perfect being or not edmc? A PERFECT being, by its very definition, cannot be corrupted, it cannot become imperfect, and is already self-sufficient (needing nothing) so it could not GAIN or LOSE anything. This is a complete non-sequitur. Why must there only be one creator?

God is the epitome of perfection. Hence, He can't be corrupted and is self-sufficient. And as the Creator, it logically follows there's no other. Otherwise, to use your own words, it's a complete non-sequitur. It doesn't compute as I already said:

'Once you say that God has a creator, then it creates an unending question of who created the Creator of the creator of God, 'ad infinitum.'

It becomes an infinite regress of who created the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of ...the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator of ...God who created life. Now I'm not stopping you from asking the question 'ad infinitum', that 's your prerogative. But as you can see, it has no end. So I hope you see my point.

Now I'm not sure if you know about this but this is what philosopher's call 'complex question'. It's complex because the answer doesn't exist. In other words, you can ask the question over and over, a million, billion, trillion, quadrillion times and you'll never arrive at the answer. And as soon as you attempt to give an answer the question comes back again and again. Now how logical is that? And you say, "There's ABSOLUTELY NOTHING illogical about a creator having a creator?" Talk about a complete non-sequitur.

The fact is, in my opinion, (aware or not) the infinite regress is a clever question construed by atheists to make the discussion about God appear to have no logical answer. And that whatever possible explanations given will appear to look absurd. But by framing it this way atheist fall into the same trap because the same question can be asked of them.

That is if atheists believed that nature created life, then who created nature? If the law of gravity then what created it? If aliens then who created the aliens? Multiverse? If nothing, then where did nothing come from? If it always existed, then where's the logic in that?

But eventually we all have to admit that both sides will need to end up somewhere - one way or the other. To the atheist, it ends in "nothing", or law of nature, or quantum vacuum, or whatever they come up with. Some will say, "we don't know". But that is laziness and a cop out. Worse, it's 'blind faith', believing on something you don't know.

To the Christian, it ends with God who is the First Cause. The uncreated one, The Living God who created life and the universe.

As God himself said:

"...before me there was no God formed, neither shall there be after me."

[Isa 43:10 ASV] 10 Ye are my witnesses, saith Jehovah, and my servant whom I have chosen; that ye may know and believe me, and understand that I am he: before me there was no God formed, neither shall there be after me."

Also, I'm sure you know this already, The title "The Almighty" infer that there's no one above him. Hence "The Alpha and the Omega".

"I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the LORD( God Jehovah Isa 44:6; Gen 17:1; Exo 6:3 ), which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty."

dnkjb.net...

SO there you go. There's no other way to explain it plainly.

At any rate you're changing the rules now once again. You said that LIFE (full stop) can only come from other LIFE but the life you propose as the source of life on Earth violates the very definition of life AND violates the very premise I just restated.

Of course not. The rule is still the same - "LIFE (full stop) can only come from other LIFE"!

But I think, it's the way you're looking at things that are confusing you. You're assuming that the "the source of life on Earth" is a creation, thus bounded by the same rules. It's illogical to assume that he is. A creation can't be the ultimate source of life. It's a complete non-sequitur if you ask me.

But as the Creator, the ultimate source of life, God is able to IMPART life to anyone he desires - be it spirit beings (his only-begotten son and angels) or physical beings (humans).

As the scripture says - Jesus Christ is "the firstborn of all creation".

[Col 1:4, 15 ASV] 4 having heard of your faith in Christ Jesus, and of the love which ye have toward all the saints, ... 15 who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation;

And through Jesus Christ, all the rest of creations came to be.

[Col 1:16 ASV] 16 for in him were all things created, in the heavens and upon the earth, things visible and things invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers; all things have been created through him, and unto him;

As for the forming and the imparting of life to man the scripture explains clearly:

[Gen 2:7 ASV] 7 And Jehovah God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

With that, "heavenly (spiritual) bodies" and earthly bodies came to be.

[1Co 15:40 ASV] 40 There are also celestial bodies, and bodies terrestrial: but the glory of the celestial is one, and the [glory] of the terrestrial is another."

...