(October 10, 2013 at 3:08 pm)Sword of Christ Wrote: The NT already covered the possibility that the faith is a mistake.
"And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead. But he did not raise him if in fact the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied."
So this has already been covered, if you're wrong then you're wrong there's nothing you can do about it. But it goes on to give some assurance to the faithful that Christ was indeed raised from death as will we all be. That's the idea of the faith/belief. So you apparently lost your faith but we can put it down to defeatism/nihilism on your part not rationalism or science. God is perfectly rational as an existential concept and science does not or ever could in anyway disprove Gods existence. You either believe or you don't and you have the freedom of choice either way. What you believe right now could easily be an error of judgement on your part if you have have been taken in by a human made ideology which denies the existence of anything beyond this transitory world and claims it merely exists by purposeless accident. To believe in this I think there is an awful lot of stuff you just have to ignore or deny.
Really - there's a lot of stuff atheists have to deny?
Now lets see - here's a reply I made to you in another thread that I think you missed, talking of things that have to be ignored/denied....
Why am I an atheist?
Well I like to think of myself as a largely logical sort of fellow so here's my thought process:
Something started the universe:
Possibly nothingness started it or it started on its own but lets just say something did:
Did it start it deliberately or was in a accident? How can we know?
Did it have to have intelligence? Could it have been caused by another natural phenomenon? Like the collapse of a previous universe (assuming time applies outside this universe in the same way as it does in it). If time behaves differently this universe could have been started by its own ultimate collapse for all I know?
So suppose it was the deliberate act of a creator God - or a committee of gods perhaps (we'll use the singular from now on - just for ease):
Could have been an act of whimsy?
Could be a deist hands-off sort of God?
Now we know that it all started 13.72 billion years ago.
Apparently just under 70% of the universe is Dark matter.
Just under 30% is Dark energy.
The remainder is everything we can see - stars, planets, galaxies, pulsars - the lot. About 1% of the total.
Of that 1%:
We know (in the known universe) that there are about 100 billion galaxies containing some 10^23 stars.
We know that on the outer arm, of an outer arm, of an utterly average galaxy there is a planet called earth that was "borne" some 4.5 billion years ago.
Now on that planet life started about 4 billion years ago.
For 3.5 billion years - single celled life only.
About 500 million years ago - the Cambrian explosion - mutli-cellular life
....5 great extinction events......> mammals (60 million years ago).
.....200,000 years ago -> Man.
Now, is it reasonable to assume there's a god, your god, who wants us to worship him, needs us to tell him how wonderful he is, watches what we do and keeps a log, rewards good behaviour and punishes bad behaviour......
Gotta go with no. Frankly I'm on the no side for the deist God too.
Just doesn't seem to be required. No observation yet made needs a God to explain it.
There is simply no reason I can see to believe.
