(January 10, 2015 at 6:35 pm)Simon Moon Wrote:(January 10, 2015 at 6:19 pm)bob96 Wrote: You are confining God to the rules of our universe. God is outside of our universe. He created the rules.
Again with the unsupported assertions.
Please explain how you went about discerning this to be true.
My faith in God comes from the Bible.
The bible, ~6000 years ago said that the universe had a beginning. Scientists for centuries believed that the universe had no beginning. When evidence for a beginning began to appear, some leading scientists put up fierce resistance because they thought it would give too much support to those who believed in Creation. They did not get their way, however, as the evidence for a beginning was too strong.
Arno Penzias won a Nobel Prize in physics for discovering a trace of that beginning - an echo of Creation - the so-called cosmic microwave background. He later told the New York Times, "The best data we have ... are exactly what I would have predictged, had I nothing to go on but the five books of Meses, the Psalms, and the Bible as a whole."[1]
Another reason for my faith in God is the complexity of life. Philosopher Antony Flew, for much of his life, was Richard Dawkin's predecessor as the world's most famous athiest. He frequently and vigorously debated Christians. However, in recent years, he has become convinced that biologists' investigation of DNA "has shown, by the almost unbelievably complexity of the the arrangements which are needed to produce life, that intelligence must have been involved."
Richard Dawkins himself flip-flopped on his position on the complexity of DNA. He previously stated that if god created DNA, it was a terribly inefficient design, where the vast majority does nothing. ie "Junk DNA".
"The standard evolutionary picture tells us that evolution is messy, incomplete and inefficient."
However, when the ENCODE group published their findings, he changed his stance.
"The ENCODE group has produced a stunning inventory of previously hidden switches, signals and sign posts embedded like runes throughout the entire length of human DNA. In the process, the ENCODE project is reinventing the vocabulary with which biologists study, discuss and understand human inheritance and disease."
Dawkins in 2009:
"It stretches even their creative ingenuity to make a convincing reason why an intelligent designer should have created a pseudogene -- a gene that does absolutely nothing and gives every appearance of being a superannuated version of a gene that used to do something -- unless he was deliberately setting out to fool us...
Leaving pseudogenes aside, it is a remarkable fact that the greater part (95 percent in the case of humans) of the genome might as well not be there, for all the difference it makes."
Dawkins in 2012:
"I have noticed that there are some creationists who are jumping on [the ENCODE results] because they think that's awkward for Darwinism. Quite the contrary it's exactly what a Darwinist would hope for, to find usefulness in the living world....
Whereas we thought that only a minority of the genome was doing something, namely that minority which actually codes for protein, and now we find that actually the majority of it is doing something. What it's doing is calling into action the protein-coding genes. So you can think of the protein-coding genes as being sort of the toolbox of subroutines which is pretty much common to all mammals -- mice and men have the same number, roughly speaking, of protein-coding genes and that's always been a bit of a blow to self-esteem of humanity. But the point is that that was just the subroutines that are called into being; the program that's calling them into action is the rest [of the genome] which had previously been written off as junk."
[1] Arno Penzias, interview by Malcolm W. Browne, "Clues to the Universe's Origin Expected," New York Times, March 12, 1978