One question for Christians

[Statler Waldorf]

Just as you pick and choose what to biblically adhere to, you are also fond of picking and choosing dictionary terminology.

Shame on you.

You totally missed the point; I was well aware of the other definitions of “faith” and admitted to such (shame on you for picking and choosing by not presenting the other two definitions of the term). What I was pointing out was the manner in which scripture uses the term. Atheists who claim that when scripture uses the term faith it means believing in something with no proof or evidence they are guilty of the fallacy of equivocation. The apostle Paul says the evidence for God’s existence is so overwhelming that nobody has an excuse for not believing (Romans 1). The Israelites after the exodus knew that God existed but they did not have faith in Him, they did not trust that He would fulfill His promises to them. Shame on you for committing equivocation.

Was it global? Probably not, as that would require more water than is found on earth.

You see, if you cared enough to keep up on the current Creation model you’d know that this is not an issue at all because catastrophic plate tectonics caused the flood waters to recede, meaning the oceanic trenches were not as deep and the mountain ranges were not as high during the flood as they are today; we have more than enough water currently on Earth. Not only this but you’re engaging in special pleading since secular scientists (whom I am sure you agree with) have no problem believing that there was a catestrophic flood on the planet Mars sometime in the past and yet how much liquid water is on Mars?

http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_...rs_of_Mars

Could there have been just 2000 animals on board? Possibly. But were there? The fossil record says there were over 1 million species alive at that time that can still be found today, so no.

No, that’s inaccurate, it is nearly impossible to define species from fossilized fragments of bone because the definition relies upon reproductive capabilities. Secondly, secularists assume the flood never occurred when they examine the fossil record, so any appeal to their interpretation of the fossil record is guilty of begging the question. The research suggests that we can account for all of the species alive today and in the fossil record by having merely 2,000 animals aboard the ark. Darwin made the ark account feasible ironically enough.

Could all the animals have survived extinction for an entire year? Only if there was divine intervention to keep them alive, yes.

Divine intervention is always a possibility, but you’ve provided no justification for your belief that it is required in order to keep all of the animals alive on the ark.

If god created all the water specifically for the flood, how did marine biology survive at all?

God didn’t create any new water specifically for the flood.

Could all diets have been adhered to for the animals? No way.

Yes way, there’s not a single family of land animals that cannot survive upon a very simple vegetarian diet- even snakes can.

Could all special habitats be artificially constructed on an ark such as Noah's? No way.

There’s no reason to believe any animals required special habitats, I am not aware of a family of land animals that cannot survive at room temperature.

The list of improbabilities and impossibilities (without divine intervention, of course) goes on. In the realm of things that are not supernatural, the flood is impossible. You did not prove anything except that if you twist the evidence just right and just the right amount of God juice to the formula, you can have yourself a good ol' global flood. Congratulations on the SW brand of special pleading.

The only problem is that none of your alleged impossibilities were based upon anything factual. They are almost always due to a general ignorance of the current creation model and reflect no actual weakness in the theory. The answers to your objections are readily available from any one of the major creation institutions; the fact that you do not take the time to actually seek them out is telling. You want the flood account to remain impossible in your mind, this is why you refuse to obtain a greater understanding of the facts on the subject matter. What we want to be true has no bearing on what is actually true though.

My claim was that the Deluge was impossible, and I did so from a purely godless stand point. You never refuted that; you assumed that I had to add god into the equation, and that's a foul on you.

You can claim that a purely godless deluge is impossible all you want, I am arguing that the Biblical account of the flood is not impossible, which it is not.

And you have no way of knowing what that experience was.

Sure we do, we have over 500 cultural accounts of a global flood, and we have the infallible word of God giving us numerous details about the event, toss in multiple lines of scientific evidence and we can possess a fairly solid understanding of the event.

They always show how it's possible without an intelligence guiding it. You just choose to ignore that fact.

No, you ignore the fact that they always sneak intelligence into the experiment through the backdoor. They’ll provide a catalyst, but then remove it before it can destroy the results of the reaction, which never happens in Nature. Couple this with the fact that Cytosine could not be produced in a pre-biotic world without a huge amount of investigator interference, and the fact that pre-biotic processes never produce anything other than a racemic mixture in the experiment and your abiogenesis is dead.

The fact that there's scientific evidence just proves that there are laws in our universe, but the evidence does not preclude the existence of god.

You’re on the right track; evidence does require uniform natural laws. It also requires the existence of immaterial, immutable, universal laws of logic as well. It also requires that we can generally trust our senses and memory. It also requires that trials under identical conditions will yield identical results. How do you justify your belief in any of these things without the God of scripture existing? Remember, all you have to work with is matter in motion.

You're acting as if I didn't choose to use colorful language.

You did, you chose not to exercise restraint.

Something being supernatural is a qualifier that people attach to something that they can't explain by natural means. This does not preclude the existence of god; rather, it just means that we either don't understand the phenomenon yet, or we just never will. It's completely okay to say, "I don't know." Filling the gaps with god is irresponsible and is described as an Argument from Ignorance Fallacy. "We can't explain it so god must have done it." That's what astronomers were saying about the planets centuries ago, saying that they wandered the skies at random because God willed it to be so. Now we completely understand why those planets move the way they do, that it's actually not random, and that there are completely natural explanations for how planets, stars, and galaxies form. The best part is that there's no need to put god in that explanation either.

You’re way off the mark on this one. It’s not an argument from ignorance to conclude that events that defy natural explanation must have supernatural causes; it’s an inference to the best explanation. Arguing that an event that defies natural explanation must still have a natural cause that we just do not know about is the real argument from ignorance. Not only this, but you’d have a very difficult time explaining what a natural cause even is in the first place.

If you mean that faith is the same level of certainty that accepting this reality of ours as factual is, then you've made a grave error. Even the biblical definition of faith is not as sure as that. Faith is the knowledge of things that are unseen, the hope for that which is true, according to the Bible.

Something being unseen does not mean it is without proof or evidence. The apostle Paul says that the evidence for God’s existence is so overwhelming and undeniable that those who deny it are without excuse, in fact they must actually suppress the truth in their hearts to even do so (Romans 1). My point was that you seem unable to prove that even the natural Universe exists, and every attempt you have made to do so could just as easily be used to also prove God exists.

That definition itself is nonsensical, just like saying that God is both all just and all merciful, despite these concepts being completely at odds with one another. The Biblical version of faith is more irresponsible than the dictionary's, for it presupposes that something unseen is true, that if you have faith in something that comes from god, then it must be true, so you're okay.

Wait, we’re not allowed to believe in the unseen? Have you ever seen gravity? An electron? Logic? Julius Caesar? Your mind? A singularity? Your DNA? The minds of others? Love? A force? The Earth’s core? The list goes on and on and on…

The Greek actually reads....
“Now faith is the reality of things being hoped for, the proof of things not being seen”

That hardly sounds like believing in something without evidence or proof.

We can't rely on old definitions that make no sense. You can either understand what faith really means, or you can believe false definitions from a 2000 year old book and be even more wrong than using the other form of faith. At least the real version of faith doesn't mix knowledge in there with it. That would be silly.

Wait, so you do not have faith that your wife loves you? It’s funny how you call it an old definition for the word faith (never mind the fact that creating a new definition for the word and then applying that to scripture would be fallacious equivocation, we must understand how words were used at the time, and the Bible uses the word faith to mean trust) when it’s still the first definition in the dictionary for the word faith.

Any way you want to describe it, you can't weasel your way out of the fact that to everyone else, you're believing in something that hasn't proven to be real or true.

Everyone else? You act as if there are not 2.3 Billion other Christians who believe what I do. A more accurate statement would be that “everyone else” rejects your naturalism. What you’re asserting is still irrelevant either way, the proof of a claim is independent of what “everyone else” thinks, everyone else could believe that there’s no proof for the existence of gravity and I’d still believe in gravity.

That's your faith. That's why it's blind. That's why you're, for all intents and purposes, wrong.

Even if I was exhibiting blind faith (which I am not) it’s a logical non-sequitur to assert such faith is wrong.
Since scripture asserts that the proof for God’s existence is overwhelming it’s obvious it is not using the term faith to mean what you claim it means. It is clearly using it to mean “trust”. Lastly, as I have already pointed out you believe a have dozen or more claims upon actual blind faith, so the fact that you object to scripture commanding us to have faith is special pleading.

I can prove that I can perceive this reality by observing it and seeing if my sense can detect the same things that the senses of other people do.

How do you know what other people perceive with their senses without first appealing to your senses? Since these other people are part of this supposed reality, why are you allowed to appeal to their existence in order to prove this reality exists in the first place? So you know reality exists because you can perceive it and you know that you can accurately perceive reality because the reality you perceive is the reality that exists. That seems a bit circular. Atheism undermines the very possibility of knowing anything at all.

On the other hand, the people claiming the existence of god can't prove that they perceive him in a way that can be demonstrated, tested, and reproduced every time.

You cannot prove that you perceive reality accurately either. Given your justification provided in the post above, if I perceive that God exists and if someone else also perceives that God exists then God must exist. Why do you insist on making Christians play by a set of rules you yourself do not play by?

Really, I'd like to know why you're trying to get me to perform mental gymnastics on this. I'm calmly stating these things, and I'm proving to you very clearly the reality of my position. Surely you don't believe you're actually in the Matrix, do you? If you do, do you have proof?

I am proving that without the Biblical conceptual scheme you cannot make sense of anything; even something as basic as our ability to accurately perceive reality. I know I can accurately perceive reality because I have a Biblical conceptual scheme. I am the creation of a God who wants me to learn about His creation and about Him, so I was created being able to accurately perceive reality. Without God you cannot possess any confidence that you can know anything about the real Universe. To the extent that we can know anything at all, we can know that Yahweh exists.