Evidence for Christianity

[Captain Scarlet]

Your biggest mistake here is assuming that God, whom Christians believe is the creater of time, space, beginnings, matter, and all else that encompasses life, is nothing more than a guy with the capacity to do magic tricks, if nothing more than to float around above us forever.

No atheists make such assumptions as we don't assume there is a christian god. As a christian you do not make a claim about an anonymous philosophical god, but a named and scriptural one. The claimed miracles (including creation) as described exactly amount to magic tricks. It is claimed in scripture that god created a universe from something which amounts to an incantation or magic spell. Jesus himself performed magic, healed by exorcism and bodily rose from the dead. You can put this argument to bed by describing the difference between the claimed miracles of christainity and the claims of magic by pagan religions, without reverting to a bare assertion that christianity is 'just true'

God was not created for us. Just because you can't prove the existence of God tangibly does not mean he doesn't exist. Atheists base their beliefs solely on the propositions of science. They forget that science is a limited facility; science itself asserts that you cannot prove anything, merely theorize. Your opinions and assumptions are as provable as the ones of those who believe in God, so why do you think your beliefs are somehow superior? If nothing more, we should be contained to an equal platform of argument, for the purpose of argument's sake. Science has no room for the supernatural, and the existence of God is clearly outside the realm of science.

There are powerful inductive arguments to suggest gods are created by men. I struggle to think outside the bounds of religion where such thinking is not ridiculed. You can't tangibly demonstrate anything that is perfectly intangible, becuase perfectly intangible things do not exist. Using this line of argument you could argue that there really was a coat for the emporer to wear (in a book we previously thought of as fiction), just an intangible one undetectable by science. The philosophical god may be outside of nature (and therefore in my view doesn't exist), but the christian god clearly is present in nature, he talks to folks, causes mayhem and misery, intervenes regularly and even sends himself down in human form to lecture people on humanism. The effects of a god are therefore clearly detectable by science. For example turning water into wine in seconds would be verifiable scientifically, but guess what no miracles have EVER been verified. I agree science is limited, the pesky trouble with it is, we know from our own experience that its truth claims tend to be borne out and we live our lives as if that is true. We do not spend our time theorising and praying for the lights to come on, we just apply electricity to them. I'm sure Edison did to.

So why are we spending time theorising about and praying to intangible unprovable non-beings?

Atheists are content in the idea that just because science hasn't figured out an appropriate explanation for something, it's obviously still out there (such as how atheistic theories grounded in science contradict so many laws of its own platform, they're thrown to garbage; somehow they're ok with this, because it only shows that scientists haven't yet found the right answer). Yet, because a Christian cannot provide a person with tangible proof in the existence of God, our beliefs are thrown back in our faces. Just because you cannot see something does not mean it doesn't exist. Tired as that line has become to hear, people still seem to look past the infallible truth it indicates.

This is a gross over-generalisation. Atheists are a very 'broad church' (excuse the pun). Raelians are for example athiests who beleive in intelligent deisgn (just not by a god). I agree there tends to be an overlap beteween atheism and scienece, but there is no cause and effect. The fact that all scientific theories are tentative, is the strength of science; it allows progression and culturally prevents the intellectual certainty (although not in all scientists) prevalent in montheisms. The reverse of your your argument above is: "If we don't know the answer it probably isn't out there so we should stop looking [and turn to Jesus]". This is replicated everywhere by christianity. I am an expat and live in Bangalore, India. There are christian churches here proudly boasting that the search for truth ends here. This is a breathtakingly arrogant and intellectually bereft claim.

Just because something cannot be seen does not mean it doesn't exist, I agree. I can't see the quantum foam for example, nor balck holes. But we can detect them. Nowhere in the natural sciences have we found a god, why is that if he interevenes all the time in the natural world?

The idea that we, a product of creation, have any type of right to demand an account or explanation from our Creator is a grossly ignorant and selfish assumption. Did Thomas Edison have to justify himself to a light bulb? People need to get over this idea that we even have the CAPACITY to understand or find the answers to everything.

This falsely asserts that we (and the universe) are the products of a creator living in a creation. We now know that is false. If a creator did bring us into existence by some kind of supernatural will, he obviously wants a relationship with us; then how is it ignorant or selfish to demand answers? If there is a creator he gave us the capacity to question and the curiosity to want to know, so why turn round and block this off? We might not have the CAPACITY to understand although as we are created in his image I find that hard to comprehend, but then it is just like we aren't INTELLIGENT ENOUGH to see the coat the tailors made for the emporer.