(January 23, 2015 at 4:45 pm)Godschild Wrote: There's nothing implied I knew all these people personally, I knew who was involved not only because I was attacked, I witnessed almost every event. I'm not going to write out the entire event and give every detail, that would encompass a small book, this thing happened over a two year period. The very few people who died were very old, old enough you would expect them to pass away at any time. I know you'll never accept this because you would have to question what you do not believe.I'm not saying that you didn't know them; that's entirely within reason. I'm saying that we must take your word for it that you knew which ones were "good" or "bad" people. I'm guessing that if you polled the people who left, you would not get a clear consensus on who was good/bad, because those are traits that can be defined and read very differently.
The second is the more pertinent point, to me. If we are considering that this might have been the hand of god in action, then it seems to me that there should have been a clear difference in the fate of the people involved. Otherwise it seems as if the hand of god in action is not much different than the normal random occurrence of sickness in a group of people over a period of time.
As for your last sentence, this discussion is an example of me questioning what I do not believe. I don't believe that god involved himself in the split of a congregation by making most of the "bad" people and only a few of the "good" people ill. It just doesn't seem like there was anything abnormal about what happened, that would make me think some supernatural influence would need to be accounted for.
"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