If evidence for god is in abundance, why is faith necessary?

[pocaracas]

Cheers and come again soon!
Best of luck with all your endeavors!



I appreciate your chipper attitude in this - I deleted the quotes as I replied to make scrolling less painful in this (something I need to work on as I post here). Ok, I'll respond in order: 

It took me a while to realize you were replying to me!

If you're having trouble with all the quotes, maybe you're not using the "source mode" when replying. For basic forum participation the normal mode is fine, but, for a proper discussion addressing multiple points, it's always better to use the source mode.
There are two ways to access this mode:
1) Each time you reply, just above the text box you use to type your stuff, you'll find a series of buttons. The one furthest on the right says "View Source". Click it!
1.a) If you use the quick reply box at the end of each thread, it uses the source mode... but the other person's quote won't be there, so that's not very feasible.

2) Go into your User Control Panel. At the top, next to the Alerts, you'll find a link to the "User CP", or use this link: https://atheistforums.org/usercp.php.
Scroll down until you find, on the left hand side, the "Edit Options" link.... or you can go straight in with this link: https://atheistforums.org/usercp.php?action=options.
On the right hand side, you'll then find a box with Other Options and one of the last items is "Put the editor in source mode by default". Activate it, and it will always be there for you. Enjoy using BBcode tags!

It's unfortunate that the other believers on this forum aren't representing Christ well, so I'm going to try and be better. 

How would you know if you're accurately representing Christ?
Just so you keep it fresh, flipping tables would not be beyond him!

Regarding your point on God creating time and all - first, I think because your comment about not caring about what people said in the Bible might make it harder to have a discussion, because that's where I'm drawing my points from.

So I've noticed.
However, I'm more interested in what makes you, a person living in 2017, assume that the bible is a trustworthy record.
See.... I don't care what that book says. I once tried to read it, but got hung up at the end of creation, with all those "god saw it was good"... I couldn't stop laughing at that expression. Anyway, I don't care about it, because it was written by people with the intent to be read by people.
And the people who wrote it poured into it whatever they knew. Some knew a bit about how people's minds work, even if they attributed it to something else; some were just compiling floating folk tales; some were listing the kings of the land and their stories... etc etc etc.

With that said, the link you posted (and I cannot WAIT to have enough posts under my belt to post links!) is a pretty good link for verses on God being omniscient according to the Bible. To actually answer your questions: the first verse there is probably the best verse in the OT regarding God's sovereignty.

This one?
""
“Remember the former things, those of long ago; I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me. I make known the end from the beginning, from ancient times, what is still to come. I say: My purpose will stand, and I will do all that I please” (Isaiah 46:9-10).
""

Do the words dictator and tyrannical mean anything to you?

I do wonder how this God used to talk to people so clearly, but now, and for the last 2000 years.... and for the hundreds of thousands of years before... nothing...

Feel free to look up verses on this, as well. So we can conclude that, Biblically, God created EVERYTHING, which means not only did God create time, but God created the rules of our universe, aka cause-and-effect. If God exists out of time, and is sovereign over everything, it would make sense God can do what He wants, when He wants, meaning He can be a part of time even though He transcends time. 

There's a contradiction and you don't see it.
To create is an action that, in itself, like all actions, requires time.
You are proposing an entity that can perform actions in the absence of a thing that's required for actions to occur: time.

But also, you are proposing that an entity exists "outside of time".
Not even going to the trouble of asking how that can be, but more to what I care about... How would someone come to possess that information about such an entity?

Oh, the bible says it.... "Biblically, God created everything"... well, I don't think the bible is a trustworthy record, so I don't accept it's account of how things happened, so... why do you?
What makes you accept the accounts on the Bible?
What makes you think it is a trustworthy source of information?
What happened in your lifetime, to you, that made you unable(?) to see it as the series mythological tales, with a bend into the propaganda, that it is?

I never said "magic" was what God used to create, and I don't use terminology like that on purpose.

Fair enough.
Then he's some high-tech alien from out of this Universe.

I actually did peek into Hoyle and even a pretty good (but still not entirely convincing) argument against him, and to make a long story really short, I agree, the man did not do a completely thorough calculation. The experiments that have been done have shown that it is within the realm of possibility for amino acids to form themselves, and even for a base pair gene to be formed from that - but highly unlikely. And that's just 1, and the simplest organisms that exist, the archea (which evolutionists believe we came from) are composed of HUNDREDS of base pair proteins. The odds of 1 forming on its own is 1/100,000,000,000,000,000,000 - 1 in 10^20. The odds of something happening is 1/10^50, as established by Lecomte duNuoy (I THINK that's how you spell his name), which is actually very liberal (it's 1 trillion times 1 trillion times 1 trillion times 1 hundred trillion), and the number of electrons in the known universe is estimated to be 1/10^80. If it's 1/10^20 times EACH base pair in an archea to form, and they're composed of HUNDREDS of base pairs, even in an ideal situation, even if we're talking about every planet and every moon and every asteroid and interactions that increase the odds of something happening just by happening more (which is not how probability works, you flip a coin, you're just as likely to get heads or tails each time you flip it), there's no way we can get down to that 1/10^50 that would still be possible, albeit barely. So, TLDR, I have done the math, and from what I can tell, based on what we know, it's not possible based on probability science that an award-winning scientist came up with. Even when you take into account the many combinations of base pairs you can get from an organism with hundreds of base pairs, that still gets you hundreds of zeroes. 

You did the math?...
I'm sure you also threw in a bunch of assumptions.
Care to share them?

I'm going to bet you that the first few assumptions are way off base.

Oh, and do keep in mind Avogadro's number: 6x10^23. A very important and handy number.
This number is the number of molecules of a perfect gas that you can find in a 1 Litre volume of that gas.
A liquid, such as water, is denser than a perfect gas, so we get more molecules per Litre.... roughly 55 times more. With that, you're already on 3x10^25 water molecules per litre or water. Give me the number of Litres of water on Earth and you will see that your numbers aren't that great.

Big numbers are impressive... but they do need to be put in proper context to be meaningful. And your comparison with the number of electrons in the Universe is far from proper context. A jump of 10^30, when the current estimate of 10^10 galaxies, each with 10^10 stars, gives you a 10^10 wiggle room for your "unlikely event" to happen within any particular star system.
By your math, any star system with a planet in the habitable zone (liquid water) must almost certainly produce life.

Hoyle never accepted the God of the Bible, even if he did say that we couldn't have formed from nothing, which indicates he wasn't entirely biased because otherwise he would've advocated for the God of the Bible.

Yes, some people end up being simply Deists, because they are honest enough to understand that "the god of the bible" seems too much manufactured.

I say that because people who DO accept Jesus are forever changed, and act like it, which is frustrating because there are people who claim to have accepted Him and their actions clearly don't reflect that. I wouldn't consider them true believers - if you really believed the world was going to end tomorrow, you wouldn't make plans for a week from now. You might still instinctively notice yourself acting like the world is going to go on beyond tomorrow, but as soon as you notice it or someone points it out to you, you'll modify your behavior.

People who accept Jesus, or any religious calling, do show some different brain activity.
That doesn't mean that whatever they're accepting is actually real.