(April 1, 2014 at 5:26 am)max-greece Wrote: My understanding is that God is supposed to withhold that knowledge - which is the point of his demanding faith.It's obviously an explanation for why god won't just show himself to us today. But it's such a poor explanation that you wonder why anyone would use it. Aside from the problem you describe, there is the glaring contradiction that the biblical god had no qualms about making himself known to humans in the past.
If they do have that knowledge or certainty doesn't that make God a liar?
It may just be a case of "any port in a storm." When your god doesn't bother to ever show up, you have to come up with some excuse. On the other hand, do they really feel that "he won't show himself because otherwise you'd believe in him" is a good argument?
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
