Hello atheistforum

[brotherlylove]

I don't doubt that people have them and that the feelings are real. Feelings are what you feel, they're pretty much real by definition unless you're lying about them. I do interpret experiences differently from you. You explain non-Christian's experiences by invoking another spirit who fools them, I explain it with the clear scientific evidence that these experiences are natural and produced by altered states of consciousness.

How would you tell the difference?

Hm. Perhaps like you have trouble seeing born-agains becoming atheists, I have trouble believing you ever saw the world through a skeptical and science-minded lens. But I will assume you were at least close enough for discussion purposes. It would be presumptuous of me to think I can infer your journey better than you can report it.

It's not a trouble of believing that people fall away, because I've seen it happen. It's that people who are born again know God and love God. When you described falling away, you were talking about an intellectual decision you made. Yet, in your heart you rejected God, who you had been living for most of your life. How did you make the choice so easily if you actually did love God? Did you ever stop to think that you were falling into deception?

As for me, I was a genuine skeptic. I didn't believe in any supernatural claims, and I thought people who had those experiences were delusional. I wasn't really openminded towards any of it because I saw no evidence for it. I did however recognize the limitations of human knowledge, and our finite minds. I didn't put human understanding on a pedestal; on the contrary, the state of the world was a testament to how flawed it is. Even in science; did you know, when they were testing the first bomb, that they weren't entirely sure it wouldn't burn off the entire atmosphere? Of course, they didn't it anyway. Such is the way of science today. Just recently, I hear they made a super virulent form of the bird flu for no reason other than to see if they could. Eventually, one of these science projects is going to get turned lose on the planet; it's only a matter of time.

It seems on various skeptics and atheist forums, it's the ex-born-agains that are more common than the ex-liberal Christians. I suspect your sample is skewed because of the intense social pressure in fundamentalist religious communities to conform. Those who have doubts are more likely to leave the community without sharing that the reason is that they no longer believe in God anymore. Now I'm not claiming that born-agains are highly likely to defect, just that, anecdotally, there's a mild tendency for atheists to be ex-born-agains, bearing in mind we're a small minority. A friend of mine is an ex-missionary, another is an ex-preacher. My pastor is an atheist who started out as a Baptist minister. You may be right about it being rare for born-agains to become atheists, but you should consider that you may be underestimating the frequency. I suspect that a rigid faith is brittle.

I know you were born again because I know you had the Holy Spirit. I can tell by your personality, and the way we are interacting. I also think you still do have the Holy Spirit, that He hasn't left you, like the light is dimmed but not yet gone.

A rigid faith is a legalistic faith, usually. People justify their faith with their works but don't really know God. When times of trouble come, their faith fails because it wasn't founded on Jesus Christ.

I may be underestimating the frequency, but I think you may also may be overestimating the genuine conversions. I know of plenty of pastors who preach a false Jesus and a false gospel, wolves in sheeps clothing as it were. You'll know them by their fruits..

Actually, I found that in pretty much every instance in which my church and the Bible differed with science, it was science that was correct and could prove it. I love truth more than I love believing in a fantasy.

I love truth too, which is why I stopped believing in deep time and evolution. I came into my faith believing in these things, and was willing to incorporate them into my faith, but upon actual investigation of the facts I found that they were based on very flimsy, circumstantial evidence. The indoctrination I have received in school of evolution being a proven fact turned out to be a bald faced lie. The fossil record itself has overturned every prediction of evolutionary theory to the point where they had to come up with "punctuated equillibrium", which is the theory that tries to explain why they don't find any evidence of evolution. It's a fairytale for grownups, friend.

Yes, I've run into the 'you were in the wrong denomination, those speaking-in-tongue guys are channeling false spirits' approach to my experiences before. It's funny how some Christians are so quick to dismiss the genuiness of the experiences of others while expecting respect for their own claims.

I think there are saved Christians in every denomination, and as I said earlier, I don't doubt you were born again, I am just letting you know that those experiences aren't biblical. For instance, there was a man was being saved in a pentecostal church, and he didn't have a gift of tongues. He said when he was baptized he came out of the water faking speaking tongues so he wouldn't be judged, and lo and behold, people around him interpreted it. There is a lot going on in the charismatic and pentecostal churches which is not from God.

So the druggies and hookers and thugs and murderers and thieves aren't on the devil's good side? Do you know what an ad hoc explanation is and what the problems with it are? Didn't you start out claiming that you were suffering in life and Jesus made your life smoother? I imagine one of the joys of not using critical thinking is always being able to have things both ways.

There was someone I knew who was saved when he was a teenager, and immediately after conversion he came under spiritual attack. When he called upon the name of Jesus, the attacks would cease for a few days, but the devils would always come back. One day, he had the idea to call out to the name of Thor instead of Jesus. After he called out to Thor, the attacks stopped for good. Do you know why? Because once he stopped calling out to Jesus, the devils work was done.

The serpent is subtle, friend. If someone is living in quite a bit of sin, they are being egged on by the devil; he is running them down, trying to destroy them. He is hoping he can get them overdosed, suicided, killed by police, or so beaten down that they never get back up again. He is trying to kill them off or utterly ruin them before they can make a profession of faith. If it wasn't for the mercy of God, there would be no hope for them. If he could convince you to murder or get you addicted to hard drugs, he would do the same thing to you. As it stands, he is content that you worship the false idol of scientism.

Jesus has improved my life in innumerable ways, but that doesn't mean that trials do not come. The bible doesn't guarantee you a perfect life, in fact it says we are guaranteed to be persecuted. So you have simply misunderstood where I am coming from, because there is nothing contradictory in what I have said. To imply I am some sort of moron I would have thought was beneath you.

The evidence wasn't contrary to reality. We just lacked the means to detect it. There wasn't evidence the current state of the cosmos was eternal (except for the 1st Law of Thermodynamics), just a lack of evidence to base a convincing case otherwise. We didn't know the universe was expanding, for instance. I notice you're fine with claiming science supports a beginning to our cosmos while dismissing that the evidence that brings us to that conclusion necessarily makes it billions of years old.

It was the interpretation of the evidence that was contrary to reality, and that stemming from the conventional wisdom of the day. Scientists present their interpretations as proven fact, as we see in science textbooks. Entire generations have been indoctrinated into atheistic naturalism because of this, and it is still going on today. Do you agree or disagree with Richard?:

Richard Lewontin “does acknowledge that scientists inescapably rely on ‘rhetorical’ proofs (authority, tradition) for most of what they care about; they depend on theoretical assumptions unprovable by hard science, and their promises are often absurdly overblown … Only the most simple-minded and philosophically naive scientist, of whom there are many, thinks that science is characterized entirely by hard inference and mathematical proofs based on indisputable data

I regret being dismissive, but what actually happened is that you started getting your information from creationist sites that specialize in trying to find any weaknesses in scientific measurement of age that they can; instead of from mainstream scientific sources. This is like a conspiracy theorist being impressed by the inconsistencies in the account of Princess Diana's death and concluding it wasn't an accident, or by issues with 9/11 reports and conclude our own government bombed us. These kind of theories have a power to suck people in, because we seek patterns, and nothing is perfect. If you scrutinize anything involving humans for weakenesses, you will find something. It's not just celebrities whose deaths are missing details, it's just that celebrities are more compelling subjects for nitpicking the police reports to death. How many people in apparent good health drop dead while jogging? That doesn't mean the police are incapable of coming up with the most likely cause of death. It means that armchair critics with an agenda can distort any inquiry.

I'm sorry, but you're wrong. I've spent much of my life learning about science. I've read many a work of evolutionary biologists, such as the blind watchmaker, and I've read origin of species. I've even read books like the God delusion. I know more about the subject than your average bear. When I investigated this, I simply researched what the actual hard evidence for evolution was, and my primary research tool was papers from the secular scientific community. I was both horrified and astonished to find that what had been taught to me as absolute fact was founded in nothing but circumstantial evidence.

I don't reject evolution because I have a low standard of evidence and believe creationist websites, I reject evolution because I have a high standard of evidence that the theory of evolution falls far short of.

My signs seemed to run the other direction. My experience was not standard in that my family was split up and my parents belonged to different fundamentalist Pentecostal sects, differing in a point of doctrine but agreeing that the members of the other church were deceived and hellbound. Perhaps what you think of churches that practice glossalalia.

I believe the true church is the body of Christ, as scripture says, so I reject all of this denominationalism. The churches around where I live are all working together, crossing denominational boundaries, which is the way it should be.

It's what I would call salesmanship. A conspiracy necessarily implies a group of people got together in secret and decided to make these changes. I propose they are the result of organic changes to the narratives over the years before they were written, and perhaps an individual or two took the initiative to spice up the narrative independently. 'Pious fraud' is an age-old phenomenon. How can it be wrong to rig a statue of the Virgin to weep if it reinforces the faith of the people and gets them into church?

However, at no point does anyone need to deliberately alter the narrative. The reason it's so good is that it evolved. Narratives naturally vary, especially if based on oral tradition. The ones that are most compelling are retained.

Starting from the 2nd century we know what the scripture looked like and it is the same as it is today. We know what the early church believed because we have all of their writings. There is no room for pious alterations. From the beginning, Christians have believed in Christ crucified and Christ risen; that is why people went to gruesome deaths singing hymms, and that is why the early church survived the terrible persecution it faced.

It's almost like you're divorced from human experience. Just now, although there's no narrative to support Matthias witnessing the resurrection, you're believing it because it forms a better narrative for your argument if all the apostles who were martyred saw the resurrection, and hey, whose to say he wasn't there? That is exactly how narratives get changed, especially if there's a long gap between the event and writing it down. Wanting to believe is a powerful force, and we don't know for sure if the apostles believed in a literal resurrection. We do know that people will castrate themselves and commit suicide if their faith in a charismatic leader has them believing that a spaceship hiding behind a comet is going to transport their souls up if they show enough faith. Again, and I'm not sure why you keep bringing this up when I've repeatedly said this, I don't doubt the apostles believed...I'm just not sure exactly what it was they believed in.

There is a narrative support it:

Acts 1:21-22

Therefore it is necessary to choose one of the men who have been with us the whole time the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from John's baptism to the time when Jesus was taken up from us. For one of these must become a witness with us of his resurrection."

I erred in what I said because although I knew Matthias had been with them throughout the ministry of Jesus, I wasn't sure whether Matthias witnessed it or not, but this passage indicates he did.

Or in the gospels they were supporting cast while while in Acts and the Epistles they were the protagonists. You're assuming everything happened exactly as written as if by an unbiased observer. That these books are profoundly different from other books. However, if they were mere humans writing them from their own limited perspectives with their own biases, there's nothing to explain away. The change in character serves the interest of making the narrative more compelling. Harry Potter becomes more assertive and bold in later books, too.

Luke is the one who wrote Acts. You're in wide disagreement with most historians then, if you believe that they are fiction. Do you have any idea how meticulously detailed Acts in regards to historical data? Luke was an eminent historian and everything he wrote was so accurate that his writings have been used to make many archaelogical discoveries. Consider this conversation between Bart Ehrman, the agnostic bible critic and an atheist (infidel guy)

You're saying that people in a book knew that other events in a book really happened. You're assuming they were motivated by the big miracles they witnessed rather than being motivated much like any other ferevent believers and the miracles being added later by the writers. Not only didn't they know it wa a lie, they may not even have known all these stories themselves. If this kind of thing was happening in a Hindu story, like Krishna lifting a hill, most Christians wouldn't have trouble dismissing it as fanciful, which they can only do by applying a double standard in how they evaluate religious claims.

It's impossible to have a conversation about this unless you nail down what you actually believe. Please tell me what you believe. Are you saying now the gospels are complete fiction? Are you saying none of the people in the gospels are actually real? If so, what standards are you using to make these determinations?

You lower the standards because you believe. We would expect contemporary documentation from sources outside the NT if these extraordinary events involving earthquakes, dead people walking the streets, kings slaughtering children, and so forth actually happening. The lack of such is striking. What we have is believers writing an account decades later when the tale has had plenty of time to grow without outside sources confirming any of the miracles, which is exactly what one would expect if they didn't really happen as described. You should hear my Pentecostal parents. The fuel gauge reads E but they make it to the tent revival anyway. Suddenly fumes or an inaccurate reading are less likely explanations than a miracle. Two thousand years ago maybe a big crowd gets hungry and it turns out someone thought to bring snacks; by the time it's been retold a thousand times it all started with one sandwich. What you have to establish is that this religious tale is more believable than all the others...and you can't, because if you apply the same standards to all, the reasonable conclusion is that no religion has real miracles.

You dismiss any report of a miracle apriori because you are a naturalist, so you have already made up your mind before you examine the evidence. In your mind, there must be some other explanation. The lack of contemporary writings is not striking, it is actually quite usual. The bible is the most well attested to ancient manuscript there is; there is attestion from multiple sources as well as superior manuscript evidence. The fact is that the apostles knew exactly what happened and they have testified to it in the gospels. Where are the legends coming from when the church is run by those who were closest to Jesus and the most important thing they have are His words? They would have zealously guarded these truths from being changed in any way. You act like these people were all morons who were willing to believe anything, when in fact they were true believers, convinced by the evidence they saw with their own eyes, and unwilling to compromise the truth they knew came from God.

Who were these hundreds of witnesses? Where is their testimony? Y'know yesterday, I levitated my way to work. There were hundreds of witnesses. Do you think claiming there were hundreds of witnesses equals there being hundreds of witnesses?

Scripture records that hundreds of witnesses saw the resurrected Jesus, and it personally identifies dozens. What you're doing is avoiding the point. You claimed that they were just halluncinating Jesus, when in fact they were interacting and having lunch with Him.

The main assumption is that an omnipotent being isn't out to deceive them regarding the age of the earth and the universe.

And He isn't. Your blind certitude in deep time and evolution is what is deceiving you. You have closed your mind to any alternative.

Like the rate of atomic decay being constant instead of much faster in the past. It's a big assumption and about the only evidence for it is that the planet is habitable instead of destroyed by runaway fission back when elements decayed faster.

You have quite a bit of certitude for not doing much research. The clocks could have changed due to a global catastrophe, such as a global flood perhaps?

‘There has been in recent years the horrible realization that radiodecay rates are not as constant as previously thought, nor are they immune to environmental influences.
‘And this could mean that the atomic clocks are reset during some global disaster, and events which brought the Mesozoic to a close may not be 65 million years ago but, rather, within the age and memory of man.’

Frederic B. Jueneman

The clocks also could be changed by

1. high energy particles (neutrinos, cosmic rays, etc)
2. nearby radioactivity
3. pressure
4. chemicals

That is actually the least egregious assumption.

Assumption 1: A closed system. That nothing has contaminated the parent or daughter product over millions or billions of years. Problem being, there are no closed systems in nature and contamination is inevitable.

Assumption 2: That each system contained no daughter product, because if it did the reading would be false. Yet, how shall we confirm this? Answer, we can't, there is no way to know the initial conditions. Therefore, when you have your range of dates, just throw away the ones that don't match your assumptions.

Assumption 3: Clock started at the beginning, no daughter products were present anywhere. Only elements at the top of the chain existed. That, for example, all of the U238 in the world had no lead 206 in it, nor did any lead 206 exist anywhere. Yet, after a flood or the moment of Creation, all of these daughter elements would be present and the clocks would start from there.

You cannot get accurate dates using these assumptions, and when we test things we know the ages of, they give us inaccurate readings. Radiometric dating cannot be trusted.

Yes, I thought they gave the Greenwich Mean Time and day of the week for exactly when a rock was formed. Thanks for setting me straight.

They select the most likely date range out of the broader date range based on independent evidence. And, as always with science, the conclusion is tentative and will happily be modifed if new evidence suggests the original conclusion was inaccurate

The accepted dates are selected dates, and a date will not be accepted unless it is thought to be correct. IE, the conclusion interprets the evidence, and anything which doesn't match the conclusion is thrown away. The conclusion is based on the field relationships and ages that other geologists have already determined. So, the geologist already "knows" what the age is supposed to be for his rock before he tests it. If the dates come back a lot older, he will say that the rock had crystals that were older, that formed before the rock was solidified, or a dozen explanations. If it is much younger, he will say it was disturbed by ground water, or something else. What he will never do is question the method.

Strange that you should realize what a problem that is when real scientists do it, but how it applies to your side seems to completely escape you. Yes, scientists expect their findings not to contradict what they already know, it's hard to get through the morning without expecting your breakfast to be edible and your clothes to fit; that the rules aren't going to suddenly change on us is an inference, but it's hard to see how it's an inference that could be more strongly supported.

It's called conventional wisdom, and it is the death of real science.

Yes, and real scientists know what kind of objects a given dating method can measure the age of accurately, which it can't, and why they're accurate for some things and not others. Leave it to a creationist to use a method for dating a specific kind of volcanic rock on a sedimentary deposit and concluding the there's something wrong with the method. And some of those known ages? They're very, very, old.

Real scientists went to the grand canyon and dated 27 samples using the potassium-argon, rubidium-strontium, samarium-neodymium and lead-lead dating methods at state of the art laboratories and came back for wildly divergent results (variations of many hundreds of millions or billions of years) for the same rock. The results were so divergent that they were entirely useless in yielding any absolute ages for any rock.

So tell me, how do you know which dating method is accurate, or how could any of them be accurate given these results?

Gotta love quote-mining. Yeah, it has turned out that there are types of micro-organisms that are entire branches of the tree in and of themselves. There are more than three kingdoms, it's just that the others are composed entirely of microorganisms. Yay science for changing with new evidence. It's even possible that some day a whole different tree composed entirely of microorganisms that shares no common ancestors with us will be discovered, maybe deep underground, that represents a separate abiogenesis event. That addition to our knowledge would be amazing, and would do nothing to detract from the evidence for common descent for the rest of life.

There is no evidence for abiogenesis at all, so don't you think you're getting ahead of yourself? No matter how unlikely something is, if you say once upon a time, it suddenly becomes plausible:

However improbable we regard this event, or any of the steps which it involves, given enough time it will almost certainly happen at least once....Time is in fact the hero of the plot.

Given so much time, the impossible becomes possible, the possible probable, and the probable virtually certain. One has only to wait: time itself performs the miracles.

George Wald, Nobel Laureate, Harvard
Physics and Chemistry of Life p.12

You have also completely dodged the point that your nested heirarchies are plagued with non-nested patterns, such as this:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6568

Turns out the resemblence to birds was more than superficial

Talkorigins:

"Anyone who reads any evolutionary literature, even at a basic level, will quickly find out that birds are thought to have evolved from dinosaurs in the Jurassic about 150 million years ago, and that mammals are thought to have evolved from a reptile-like group of animals called the therapsids in the Triassic about 220 million years ago. No competent evolutionist has ever claimed that platypuses are a link between birds and mammals."

doh.

There are plenty of seams. Organs that are neither fully functional nor fully gone, whales with bones where their ancestors would have had legs, snakes with vestigial hips, pandas with poorly functioning 'thumbs' and a carnivorous digestive system, human beings not fully adapted to walking upright and thus prone to back and foot problems, connected breathing and eating tubes, joined waste excretion and reproductive features, human retinas placed to cause a blind spot; all signs of a natural process making do with what was already available and incapable of fully novel design without thousands of tiny, inching, intermediate steps. Evolution has to make do with altering what's already there, and that's what we see in the world around us; with plenty of examples of things a mere human engineer can see could have been done better.

What organs? Do you know it is the faulty assumptions of evolutionary biologists that led to an epidemic of removing "useless" organs of our bodies, such as adnoids, and appendixes. Turns out there is nothing useless about them. This is the fruit of evolutionary biology.

The so-called vestigial whale hips are there to strengthen the reproductive organs, and they're different for both males and females, which means they are best explained by creation and not evolution. a loss of legs does not prove evolution, in fact that is the opposite of evolution. I'll let Nature speak for the "poor" design of the Pandas thumb

""The radial sesamoid bone and the acessory carpal bone form a double pincer-like apparatus in the medial and lateral sides of the hand, respectively, enabling the panda to manipulate objects with great dexterity."

(Hideki Endo, Daishiro Yamagiwa, Yoshihiro Hayashi, Hiroshi Koie, Yoshiki Yamaya, Junpei Kimura, "Role of the giant panda’s pseudo-thumb," Nature, Vol: 347:309-310, January 28, 1999, emphasis added).)

The authors go on to marvel at the functionality of the panda thumb saying, "[t]he way in which the giant panda .. uses the radial sesamoid bone -- its 'pseudo-thumb' -- for grasping makes it one of the most extraordinary manipulation systems in mammalian evolution."

Doesn't sound very poor to me.

What is your point about the digestive system?

Back problems are not due to a poor design, they are due to a lack of exercise, sedentary lifestyles, poor posture, abuse and sometimes poor genetics. It is actually darwinian theory which led to a host of harmful back treatmet techniques based on the idea that we used to be on all fours, which today have been debunked and replaced by new models that are in many ways completely opposite to that paradigm.

Darwinist David Shuman said:

‘… no question [that] … the human back, given proper care and rightly understood, is an astonishingly effective mechanism. As much as the more frequently lauded human brain, the human back is the hallmark of our true nobility and a major factor in the … supremacy of … man.’21

They conclude that:

‘… given proper care, a fair shake, and just a little understanding, your back will take on any job you ask of it … . When it fails, in practically all of the more severe cases the failure is due to some sort of weakness

this "truly marvelous hunk of machinery, an amazingly durable arrangement ready to serve the purposes of a ditch digger or a banker, a prizefighter or a stenographer, equally well’ requires only regular maintenance"

Rather than paste a bunch of things, I'll address your concerns about the pharynx with this article: http://creation.com/is-the-human-pharynx...y-designed

Retina: http://www.trueorigin.org/retina.asp

If you're too biased to look at them, that's your issue.

It's bad science to determine what's good and bad in science based on whether it supports your religious views.

As I already explained, I was willing to incorpate evolution and an old age of the earth into my faith but after investigating, I found the evidence sorely lacking and changed my view. It's bad science to believe whatever scientists tell you is true. It's bad science to apply your skepticism to everything except your own views.

"What you don't understand is that creationist sites lie freely. They don't care about the truth, only supporting their agenda. They take quotes out of context, mislead about scientific conclusions were arrived at, and in general are liars for Jesus. I'd say they do more to make atheists than any atheists do."

I have found inaccurate statements on both sides of the argument. I'll give you a logic puzzle

atheists hate anything that advocates for creationism
creationist websites advocate for creationism
atheists hate creationist websites

Are you honestly going to say that every creationist website is just a bunch of deliberate lies? Do you have any idea what a ridiculous statement that is?

The conclusion was arrived at over generations of field and lab work, which at any point could have been thrown into an uproar by a dolphin fossil in the Precambrian or dinosaur bones showing signs of cooking and tool marks. You're asking us to reinvent the wheel every time we look at a fossil. It's not a reasonable demand.

Much like you dismissed over 50 young earth dating methods without looking at them, you will also dismiss evidence of anomalous artifacts and out of place fossils. I could give you hundreds of examples.

The word 'conspiracy' has a specific, well-understood meaning. Human nature is not a conspiracy, although it can be an explanation for why certain things seem like conspiracies that actually aren't.

I think it is a conspiracy in that any idea of special creation is universally shunned by the scientific community, even as the evidence mounts. There is more evidence today of special creation than there ever was.

Yes, for some reason the members of the American Academy of Science and the Royal Society, the most famous and accomplished scientists in the world, tend to be very disproportionately atheist.

And some of the famous and most respected scientists in history were theists.

There's no evidence of special creation to bother to explain away.

Except the evidence from design.

Much evidence can be adduced in favor of the Theory of Evolution from Biology, Biogeography, and Paleontology, but I still think that to the unprejudiced the fossil record of plants is in favor of special creation.

EJH Cornor, Cambridge
Contemporary Botanical Thought p.61

(on the cambrian explosion)
And we find many of them already in an advanced state of evolution, the very first time they appear. It is as though they were just planted there, without any evolutionary history. Needless to say, this appearance of sudden planting has delighted creationists.

Richard Dawkins - The Blind Watchmaker 1986

Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.

Richard Dawkins
The Blind Watchmaker p.1

Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed but rather evolved.

Francis Crick Nobel Laureate
What Mad Pursuit p.138 1988

You shouldn't speculate about what I believe, you aren't good at it. Scientists are better educated than most people and knowledgeable in their specific fields, but they're as ornery and close-minded as any other homo sapiens. They're so bad that it takes the scientific method to keep them honest.

Regardless of whatever raw data you have, the interpretation of that data is philosophical.

Science isn't aware of any persuasive evidence for a young earth and it's laughable the way you're projecting how you feel about the overwhelming evidence for an old earth onto them.

The evidence is overwhelmingly faulty, but that is all that overwhelming about it. There is more evidence for a young earth than an old one. Ask yourself why you find blood cells and muscle tissue in dinosaur fossils, or why all fossils contain carbon 14 when that should be long, long gone after millions of years.

And what those poor saps have in common is a firm grasp of the conclusion they want and an obsession with finding evidence to support it. I've heard somewhere that that's bad science

They would have a lot in common with evolutionists then, who keep jumping the gun on finding the "missing link", spreading the story to all of the newspapers, and then having the sad thing debunked a few months later.

The difference between you and me is that when I investigated science, I got it from actual scientists. I started off thinking evolution was hooey, but when I actually looked up from what my pastor told me and books like Evidence That Demands a Verdict; I found in museums and laboratories and universities and libraries how science is actually conducted, why it works, and how and why the evidence has led them to where they are. I suppose if the intertubez were around when I was in my twenties and early thirties I might have found it easy to cocoon myself with sources that told me what I wanted to hear.

The difference between you and me is, you abandoned God and bought the story the world sold you. You put down the truth for a pacifier. I came out of the world because I love the one who made it. It's not a dichotomy of science and religion, that doesn't even matter. What matters is what the truth is. You think what man says means something, but God says the thoughts of men are futile. You think the world is wise, God says the wisdom of the world is foolishness. You think what man does is great, but God says what man highly exalts God finds to be an abomination. You think you have a way that works, but scripture says there is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end its way is death.

However, the ones that are being published in peer review journals are not publishing articles that claim to disprove evolution or that the earth is young. The ones that are publishing such things are putting them into vanity journals. What makes a scientist real is doing real science that has results that add to our body of knowledge. Creationism hasn't done that yet.

http://www.discovery.org/a/2640

And your suggestion on how to investigate intelligent design is what? So far, all intelligent design 'researchers' have been able to come up with is: 'hey, that looks irreducibly complex to me!'

How can you say something like this and avoid the label of pathological bias?

I would love to hear one actual, true fact about life that evolution doesn't explain as well as or better than special creation. Because thinking I'm right isn't as important to me as actually being right. If I'm wrong I want to find out so I can correct myself.

Information in DNA

Based on evolution and continental drift a biogeographer can make accurate predictions in advance about the number of novel species to be found on an unexplored island if it's size, distance from the mainland, and how long ago geology suggests it was connected to the mainland, if ever. You know why it's so important to know how old the island is and whether it was connected to a continent? Because the farther an island is from a continent and the longer it's been separated from a continent, the more novel species it will have. Why? Because evolution needs space and time to produce those novel species. What's the special creation explanation for that?

That's strange, because the theory of punctuated equillibrium says that evolution can happen very quickly, so quickly in fact that this explains why we don't see any evidence for it in the fossil record. So this is all very variable according to evolutionists. In any case, I don't deny speciation; that is how the world was repopulated after the flood. It is something that can happen very quickly even according to evolutionary theory, and our own observations. You have your long age assumptions about continental drift, I have my young age assumptions, and speciation could support either.

Millions of secular people are religious. Secular and atheist aren't synonymous. A plumbing handbook is secular, too. People are secular if they believe we're all better off if our government remains as neutral as possible on religous issues. Do you have any idea of the carping and whining between Catholics, Protestants, and Jews when we had prayer in public schools?

Secular culture is opposed to Christianity, it doesn't tolerate it. It will tolerate Islam though.

True, science has just not come across anything that seems to require anything other than natural processes as an explanation.

You can explain mechanisms all day long, which does not speak to agency. Since you don't know where the Universe came from, or how it got here, or why it is the way it is, you are left with an incomplete explanation. You simply cannot say the Universe does not require God to operate when you don't know why it operates. If you think you can then explain the uniformity in nature.

Which reminds me of what I say when someone tells me I'm an atheist just so I can sin without being accountable to God: I've not noticed believing in God to be much of a barrier to sinning.

The barrier to sinning is how much you love God and trust in Him.

Years ago, I started using the term 'Christianist' to describe the Christians who annoy me to distinguish them from the majority of decent and mostly reasonable for day-to-day purposes Christians out there who treasure the same liberties and peaceful coexistence I do. Because Christians are more complicated than that, you can't lump them all together. Over-generalizing is a sin

I try to avoid labels. I think stereotypes make you stereotypical. I love everyone, even the ones who hate me, even the ones who are outwardly despicable.

Which reminds me of what I say when someone tells me I'm an atheist just so I can sin without being accountable to God: I've not noticed believing in God to be much of a barrier to sinning.

The church is apostate, and thus, it is looking more and more like the world every day.

Sorry to quote myself. I thought I would go back and try to figure out what has brotherlylove thinking I'm proposing a conspiracy theory. I believe it's the bolded portion above, and somehow over the course of our conversation that has become a claim that the apostles knew there was no resurrection and died for it anyway.

To clarify, it is a claim that it is common for religous people to use the tactic of trying to get someone to believe and promising them they will get evidence once they've done so. It's a technique that brotherlylove used himself. It's brilliant because it is so effective: once you truly believe, of course you will perceive evidence confirming that you were right to do so. Most people don't know that any charismatic religion can induce brain states of acceptance, religious ecstacy, feeling loved, of belonging, and so forth; so they are easily led into 'trying it' and finding 'it delivers'; when they could have tried Voodoo or Sufism and gotten equally 'profound' results. I've even had a Wiccan try to convert me by claiming that once I performed a few rituals and seen how well they work, I'd know her beliefs were true. My sister-in-law went on a whole 'just try believing' campaign on me a few years ago. From the other side it seems ridiculous. I can't imagine trying to get someone to 'just try not believing' for a while in order to try to get them to give up their theism. But maybe it's because I don't really care if someone is a theist. It's not like they'll go to hell if I don't enlghten them, so I'm not tempted to trick them into it. If my evidence and arguments are unconvincing, I hope they have a nice day. And you never know what seeds you plant might eventually come to fruition. I've seen more than one Christian come to an atheist board only to switch sides after a few hundred posts (and I've seen the opposite, too). Being exposed to ideas outside your group can make a big difference.

You don't realize the spiritual nature of all things, especially beliefs. It's entirely possible for people to come to illegitimate conclusions about their own beliefs, because most people don't understand the nature of their own beliefs. You take that as evidence that they have no actual reason for their beliefs beyond some delusion they are experiencing. For those who do not know God, they are experiencing a delusion, but a carefully engineered delusion.

I'll give you my theory on it. God controls everything, and that includes access to truth. That knowing truth is actually a priviledge. Your particular access will determine who you meet and what experiences you will have, and what you take from those experiences. You will find an entire Universe of meaning there, and so you won't notice that your access is actually tightly controlled. What determines your access level is your openness to truth. Inherently, what keeps you closed to truth are positions you take which you rationalize as being intellectual but are actually predicated on things like: what you hate, what you lust for, what you lie about it, what you hide, your many sins, etc..all of your unreasonable emotionally laden baggage, guilt, and secret sins you carry around from life. The evil you have done compromises your ability to reason and know truth.

God is always giving you opportunities to attain a higher access level and get closer to the ultimate truth (that Jesus is Lord), opportunities which test your character and inherent fairness and balance towards truth. He gives you access to real truth, but if you reject it, you are conversely left with nothing but lies, and these seem as truth. You also have temptations, and the more you succumb to them, the more the deluded you become; the more you sin the less able you are to reason and attain to truth. Sin literally makes you a moron.

That's just a general thought, not meant to be theology. It actually supports your theory in some ways and explains confirmation bias, but not for any reason you speculate.

But anyway, I was not trying to imply the apostles came upon this great brainwashing technique. I'm not even claiming they used it. It's not profound, and it's the kind of thing lots of people figure out independently: if you can get someone to agree to sincerely try to convince themselves your religion (or ideology, or self-help program, or psychic meditation regimen) really works/is true, they will do most of the hard work for you. The point I was making was about the proposal to believe first and trust the evidence will come; not about a conspiracy or anything to do with the apostles.

The evidence will come when you believe, and it will come, in my case, before I believed. The question is, where is it coming from. You think belief ends in the brain, but it is spiritual and extends into the spiritual realms. Regardless of what you're saying, the apostles had lunch with the resurrected Jesus on the beach, so either it's made up or they were with Him.