One question for Christians

[Bad Writer]

It's also all you've got. Feasibility =/= it really happened.

Never said it did, but it gives me no basis to doubt that it did in fact happen.

It doesn't? "Sir, we have no reason to believe he murdered the subject, but we have no reason to doubt that he didn't either! Let's go with the latter, because I say so! All in favor say 'Yea'!" This is you, SW.

And hypothesizing how abiogensis naturally occurred is much more thought-provoking than saying "Goddidit", every time, hands down. If you think they're wasting their time on these theories, then you need to give them a better one. But wait...you just say "Goddidit", and that's an argument from ignorance. Well excuse these scientists for trying their best not to be ignorant like the fools who spend 15 seconds to hypothesize a God instead. If you have proof that God exists, then perhaps you might have something worth bringing to the table, otherwise, you are wasting your breath on these men.

More special pleading, you do not know there ever was a primordial soup either but you seem to be fine with hypothesizing about how such an environment could give rise to life. I know there was an ark.

How do you know there was an ark? You don't know that any more than I know there was a primordial soup, and but I don't need to hypothesize a God in order to come up with conditions for the soup. This god is carrying more baggage than the original spark of life! If you want to pin me with special pleading, you should stop doing it yourself, unless you're just fine proceeding in this manner. And if that's the case, then blaming me for something you yourself do is being hypocritical. Are you okay with being a hypocrite?

As for the flood originating with Noah, you have no proof. Stop it.

You still seem to have this backwards, you reason from the truth of scripture, not to the truth of scripture.

No one should ever reason from a story book, even if it claims to be real. Does that clarify my position any?

Legends are no more likely to be false than they are to be true. Are you saying that Cody made the entire story up because he knew that in the future people would begin questioning the flood accounts in Genesis? Really?

Hey, you said it, not me. That jump in logic was all you.

Cody is an accepted historical reference, Smith is not. It’s funny how you keep pretending like you do not accept anything upon faith, when the majority of what you believe is based solely upon faith.

What, Smith wasn't a real person that made up fantastic stories? What the fuck am I taking on faith, exactly? If you try to pin that rot on me, then you'd better think about it real hard before you do.

The Biblical account is the only one that is feasible. The other accounts are obviously corrupted versions, which would be expected. If you’re going to reject the Noah account then you’re going to have to explain away evidence that supports it, so you do in fact have to explain why so many cultures have the same story.

I'm not going to explain away any of that. It's your claim, so it's your belief. I haven't accepted it as a belief, so the burden of proof is all on you to change my mind. You sure do try hard to shirk your responsibilities to your outrageous claims.

That’s correct, without God promising future uniformity in natural law there is no way to justify the assumptions science operates upon. Secondly, God doesn’t have to change the laws of physics to introduce a rainbow, here merely has to change the weather. Rainbows requires specific conditions, if those conditions were only first present after the flood…voila…the first rainbow. Essentially you’re arguing that the laws of physics would have to change in order for people to observe their first solar eclipse; not at all. Although this all is a bit of a moot discussion because Genesis never says the rainbow first appeared after the flood, it merely was made a sign of the covenant after the flood, much like the fact that the first bread and wine wasn’t produced in the upper room when Jesus made it a sign of the new covenant.

Once again, I can't help voluntary ignorance. I'm not discussing these things with you.

Just razzing you for calling something a creature but then asking how we know it has a creator, well you tell me since you used the term creature. Would be like asking how we know an offspring has a parent.

Oh, so attaching the word "creature" to someone is empirical evidence that such a thing has a creator, much like offspring has parents? You need help with differentiating your colloquialisms and inherited words from those whose meanings are always self-evident.

And this has become your issue, not mine, since you've decided to tell us that the Biblical account of the Flood is true. Start making a list and come back when you've figured this one out.

A list of what?

It appears...I lost a word or two there. Well, your guess is a good as mine at this point.

Did I say something about a refrigerator? Here, I'll do some work for you. Perhaps the rain waters were the source of fresh water?

There’s reason to believe that most of the salinity we find in sea water (which is increasing due to run-off) is a direct result of the flood, so the ocean itself would not have been dangerous to drink prior to the waters receding and pulling the sodium with them during continental run-off.

Right, let's just make up insane theories about global floods and forget how that all affects the ecosystem. I'm no Marine Biologist, but it doesn't exactly take one to postulate that most everything, if not all things, would be dead in the water after such a catastrophe. So I assume you must think they had help from God to survive such an event, or their habitat needs were altered for this one time. Look, I understand that you think your God can do all things, but for those of us who don't believe in your god, we're going to keep to what seems more plausible.

Still...I don't think green plants would last all year in a cellar system, would they? My refrigerator can barely keep my lettuce fresh for a week. And where is Biblical proof of a cellar system?

Most root cellars can keep food fresh for years, even in hot desert climates. The ark would have only need a cool and dark area to keep the food. I do not know how they did it, but it’s certainly feasible that they did.

Special pleading then. Great. "I don't know how they did it, but it must have happened!" Sorry...no, that's an argument from ignorance. Or was it both?

We must be doing something wrong today if we can barely scrape past 100. McDonald's, anyone?

It’s called genetic entropy. It is evidence that completely contradicts the Darwinian Paradigm, people should be living longer today than they did in the past, but they’re not.

Right, right. For all the trillions of people that have walked the earth, only the couple dozen or so that you listed, not including those referenced in the Holy Babble, were documented as living beyond 200 and 300 years of age. How is that evidence that ALL of us should be living longer like them?

What I said wasn’t un-scientific; he obviously was aging slower because he lived so much longer.

No...that's not scientific. It's an idea based on how you think the aging process works.

If you’re allowed to tell stories about how amino acids “piggy backed” on the backs of crystals on some fictional beach in an environment we know nothing about 4.5 billion years ago, then I am allowed to hypothesize about how Noah may have looked.

Assuming Noah was real, of course. However, I don't tell stories. Scientists can prove that Amino acids are real and that they can naturally form when under certain conditions. But, please, tell me more of these Fairy Tales that you are so taken with.

Continue to draw fallacious analogies all you want, it does nothing to support your position.

No, no, fairy tale analogies fit in very well with the world view you hold to. I'm quite content doing this.

So you probably think Lawrence Krauss is a whack-a-do.

The author of “The Physics of Star Trek”?

I own that book, FYI. So you compare something he wrote as a side-hobby to being of equal importance to his actual work? Who's making fallacious analogies now?

Abraham didn’t slay Isaac.

Oh, forgive me for my ignorance, I suppose I forgot that part. So then what would have happened if the Angel hadn't stopped him? You know as well as I do that Isaac would have been dead, dead, dead in this story...unless, of course, Abraham read the script beforehand. I can see it now, "Okay, God. This is the part where you send your angel, right? Your angel will stop me from killing my son...right? God? Anytime now!" This story, right here, is proof enough to show that your God's morals are fucked up. If this is how he tests the faith of his children, then I want no part in it. That branch you think we're sitting on is as fictional as the words in that ancient text of yours.

They chose to in accordance to their sinful nature.

The sinful nature God gave them. I can do this all day.

We probably differ a bit on that subject.

We do! You believe in fore-ordination, and I sure as fuck don't.

Animals are corrupted creatures as well, that’s why they kill, rape, and do such vile things to one another. As for punishment, they are not created in the image of God so they do not have an immaterial aspect to their being, so no eternal judgment (Isaiah 31).

Oh, I see what you did there. You equated "vile things" to natural tendencies. Stop it.

So do you think we have the prerogative to kill the children we create? Do you think that we should let the Muslim fathers and brothers continue killing their daughters because they were raped?

No, God owns all of creation, and our children bear the image of God as well, that is not something we endowed upon them, but God did; so we do not have the prerogative to destroy them because He who owns us forbids it.

:yawn: Special logic is a bitch.

You claim to be a weak atheist, I am not aware of any atheists who believe in the existence of the immaterial, just like you can assume I am not a materialist because I am a Christian.

I can fathom nothing. That immaterial enough for you? Why is everything so black and white with you?

You’d have to justify the assumptions science operates upon without appealing to a creator in order to support this belief. I already tried forcing you to do this, you seemed unwilling to do so.

It's not going to appeal to supernatural claims, meaning, it will never fill in the gaps with "Goddidit". You can do that all you want, but it will only stunt your intellectual growth.

But according to Mormonism they apparently do not have their own system because their systems must follow a set of rules that apparently transcend all gods. Who made those rules? Who gives the man his powers in order that he may become a god? I thought that Mormons believed that only matter and intelligences were eternal? Apparently, so is the law of eternal progression, and yet it’s neither matter nor an intelligence. The whole theological system is just a huge mess.

How is the idea of one eternal god not also begging the question? Mormonism is wrong not because of its doctrines, but because it's made up!

I wouldn’t say I reject Islam and Mormonism because they are outrageous; I reject them because they are logically inconsistent and incoherent.

They use special pleading the same way you do to make their religions seem logically consistent and coherent. You don't see it because you're too far in. I can talk all I want, but the only one in a position to help you right now with your delusions is yourself.

All I am saying is that that position has a different meaning than what you are claiming it has. If someone came up to you and claimed, “I am a Christian since I believe that Muhammad was a prophet and that the Quran is the revealed word of Allah.” Would you try to correct them or would you simply agree that they are a Christian? I am not being disrespectful, I just think you’d qualify as more of a non-theist than an actual atheist.

You keep spreading this shit all you want, but every atheist here, and even those not here, will tell you the same thing that I am. Are all of us wrong about our position? Do you get to decide what we are, or do we? I mean...I don't exactly call you a Taoist, do I? That would be silly of me.

I'm afraid any debate with you is pointless if you take this kind of attitude with valid sources.

Wikipedia is not a scholarly source and I explained to you why the view you hold concerning the burden of proof doesn’t work. Are you going to address my points?

I did, but you ignored the fact that I pointed out that those articles are a combination of outside, legitimate sources. Are you going to keep bugging me about this, or are you going to let it go? I don't agree with your ideas about Burden of Proof, and I never will. There, is that better? Now, if you ask me to prove your claims wrong or right anymore, I'm going to need to end this.