Hello atheistforum

[Mister Agenda]

How would you tell the difference?

I suppose it's a matter of perspective. I find spirits useless as an explanation because they can be used as an explanation for anything at all without really being anymore of an explanation than 'because of magic'. Accepting spirits as an explanation doesn't lead to anything useful, while regarding spirits as an insufficient explanation for anything is the difference between planetary communication via the internet and the horse-drawn wagon.

It's not a trouble of believing that people fall away, because I've seen it happen. It's that people who are born again know God and love God. When you described falling away, you were talking about an intellectual decision you made. Yet, in your heart you rejected God, who you had been living for most of your life. How did you make the choice so easily if you actually did love God? Did you ever stop to think that you were falling into deception?

It took a few months to get from born-again to agnostic theist from reading the Bible. I didn't reject God, I rejected the Bible as God-inspired. I didn't know what God was, but I couldn't believe the creator of the universe wasn't better then the magnified oriental potentate described in the OT. It was about 15 more years before I realized I no longer believed in the existence of God at all. Have you ever stopped to think that if this is where a respect for healthy criticism and critical thinking has led me, that I might not be the one who is deceived?

As for me, I was a genuine skeptic. I didn't believe in any supernatural claims, and I thought people who had those experiences were delusional. I wasn't really openminded towards any of it because I saw no evidence for it. I did however recognize the limitations of human knowledge, and our finite minds. I didn't put human understanding on a pedestal; on the contrary, the state of the world was a testament to how flawed it is. Even in science; did you know, when they were testing the first bomb, that they weren't entirely sure it wouldn't burn off the entire atmosphere? Of course, they did it anyway. Such is the way of science today. Just recently, I hear they made a super virulent form of the bird flu for no reason other than to see if they could. Eventually, one of these science projects is going to get turned lose on the planet; it's only a matter of time.

I can't say I really disagree with you here.

I know you were born again because I know you had the Holy Spirit. I can tell by your personality, and the way we are interacting. I also think you still do have the Holy Spirit, that He hasn't left you, like the light is dimmed but not yet gone.

I will take that as the compliment it is intended to be. Thank you.

A rigid faith is a legalistic faith, usually. People justify their faith with their works but don't really know God. When times of trouble come, their faith fails because it wasn't founded on Jesus Christ.

I do think legalism is a trap that Christian fundamentalism is prone to walk into. It can become 'bibliolatry'.

I may be underestimating the frequency, but I think you may also may be overestimating the genuine conversions. I know of plenty of pastors who preach a false Jesus and a false gospel, wolves in sheeps clothing as it were. You'll know them by their fruits..

Sure, who knows what the real rates/frequencies are? My sample size is small.

I love truth too, which is why I stopped believing in deep time and evolution. I came into my faith believing in these things, and was willing to incorporate them into my faith, but upon actual investigation of the facts I found that they were based on very flimsy, circumstantial evidence. The indoctrination I have received in school of evolution being a proven fact turned out to be a bald faced lie. The fossil record itself has overturned every prediction of evolutionary theory to the point where they had to come up with "punctuated equillibrium", which is the theory that tries to explain why they don't find any evidence of evolution. It's a fairytale for grownups, friend.

All I can say is that your experience has been incredibly different from mine.

I think there are saved Christians in every denomination, and as I said earlier, I don't doubt you were born again, I am just letting you know that those experiences aren't biblical. For instance, there was a man was being saved in a pentecostal church, and he didn't have a gift of tongues. He said when he was baptized he came out of the water faking speaking tongues so he wouldn't be judged, and lo and behold, people around him interpreted it. There is a lot going on in the charismatic and pentecostal churches which is not from God.

Of course, I don't think any of it is actually from God, but some of what goes on is certainly less sincere than other things.

There was someone I knew who was saved when he was a teenager, and immediately after conversion he came under spiritual attack. When he called upon the name of Jesus, the attacks would cease for a few days, but the devils would always come back. One day, he had the idea to call out to the name of Thor instead of Jesus. After he called out to Thor, the attacks stopped for good. Do you know why? Because once he stopped calling out to Jesus, the devils work was done.

When you're first converting, it's spiritual attacks. When those are over, you get tested. I recall a story about a roof collapsing on someone in Africa. Immediately, people (lets call them Witch Hunters) set about trying to figure out who the witch that caused it was. A skeptic pointed out the roof was weakened by termites over a period of years, it was bound to collapse sooner or later. The Witch Hunters replied 'sure, it was termites, but the timing was because of a witch'. I just don't live in the same world of invisible spirits that you do, I don't see agency behind everything that happens, and I don't feel a need to find an explanation for a run of bad luck. Stuff happens, and people are wired to look for intention behind it, but that doesn't mean it's there.

The serpent is subtle, friend. If someone is living in quite a bit of sin, they are being egged on by the devil; he is running them down, trying to destroy them. He is hoping he can get them overdosed, suicided, killed by police, or so beaten down that they never get back up again. He is trying to kill them off or utterly ruin them before they can make a profession of faith. If it wasn't for the mercy of God, there would be no hope for them. If he could convince you to murder or get you addicted to hard drugs, he would do the same thing to you. As it stands, he is content that you worship the false idol of scientism.

I would trust you if you were giving me information about your neighbor. You seem a trustworthy sort. I trust my dear old aunt implicitly, and if she told me something was hot, I wouldn't touch it. However, if she told me about the activities of invisible spirits, I would have to wonder how she came by such inhuman knowledge and how anyone could possibly tell if what she was saying is really true or not. There's no way to know if what you're saying is true, even if it is true, without evidence that anyone can observe to support it. Otherwise I can't tell whether your claims are superior to those of the Witch Hunter who says it's witches to blame.

Jesus has improved my life in innumerable ways, but that doesn't mean that trials do not come. The bible doesn't guarantee you a perfect life, in fact it says we are guaranteed to be persecuted. So you have simply misunderstood where I am coming from, because there is nothing contradictory in what I have said. To imply I am some sort of moron I would have thought was beneath you.

I apologize for that. The rain falls on the just and the unjust alike, I hear. It does seem like you're covered no matter what happens, though, which is a very convenient position to be in. I can think of events that would freak me out and make me question what I think I know, but there's nothing that could happen to anyone that isn't covered by your belief system. The same is true of the Witch Hunters and their witches.

It was the interpretation of the evidence that was contrary to reality, and that stemming from the conventional wisdom of the day. Scientists present their interpretations as proven fact, as we see in science textbooks. Entire generations have been indoctrinated into atheistic naturalism because of this, and it is still going on today. Do you agree or disagree with Richard?:

Richard Lewontin “does acknowledge that scientists inescapably rely on ‘rhetorical’ proofs (authority, tradition) for most of what they care about; they depend on theoretical assumptions unprovable by hard science, and their promises are often absurdly overblown … Only the most simple-minded and philosophically naive scientist, of whom there are many, thinks that science is characterized entirely by hard inference and mathematical proofs based on indisputable data

Richard has a point. It's not the scientists I trust but the process; which has repeatedly forced the scientists to change their views.

I'm sorry, but you're wrong. I've spent much of my life learning about science. I've read many a work of evolutionary biologists, such as the blind watchmaker, and I've read origin of species. I've even read books like the God delusion. I know more about the subject than your average bear. When I investigated this, I simply researched what the actual hard evidence for evolution was, and my primary research tool was papers from the secular scientific community. I was both horrified and astonished to find that what had been taught to me as absolute fact was founded in nothing but circumstantial evidence.

Well, I find your position inexplicable under those circumstances, I was amazed at how broad the support for evolution was across many different scientific fields. Every time I've heard a creationist objection, it's been easy to put my finger on exactly where they went wrong (except for the tl;dr walls of text, which aren't worth responding to because they rely on burying their opponent under more claims than can reasonably be responded to). But it isn't really true that great minds think alike, different people process the same information differently.

I don't reject evolution because I have a low standard of evidence and believe creationist websites, I reject evolution because I have a high standard of evidence that the theory of evolution falls far short of.

Maybe you're too skeptical about some things. That's what strikes me about my parents, how little evidence they need to believe their car was running on miracles and how much they need to believe the medical community isn't hiding an inexpensive cure for cancer.

I believe the true church is the body of Christ, as scripture says, so I reject all of this denominationalism. The churches around where I live are all working together, crossing denominational boundaries, which is the way it should be.

I agree, the splitting has gotten out of hand. I only wish the best for Christians, and i think it is in any case better for them to support each other in their search for meaning than to bicker over minor doctrinal differences.

Starting from the 2nd century we know what the scripture looked like and it is the same as it is today. We know what the early church believed because we have all of their writings. There is no room for pious alterations. From the beginning, Christians have believed in Christ crucified and Christ risen; that is why people went to gruesome deaths singing hymms, and that is why the early church survived the terrible persecution it faced.

Well, before the 3rd century there were still the Arians (believed Jesus was the son of God figuratively, not literally), the Ebionites considered him to be an ordinary man who was 'adopted' by God. Docetism held Jesus as not human at all, and you don't want to get into Gnosticism. But they did agree on the resurrection, if not necessarily on the physicality of the resurrected Jesus, who was sometimes described as having a 'spirtual body'. Again, I have never maintained they didn't believe in the resurrection.

There is a narrative support it:

Acts 1:21-22

Therefore it is necessary to choose one of the men who have been with us the whole time the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from John's baptism to the time when Jesus was taken up from us. For one of these must become a witness with us of his resurrection."

I believe they believed in the resurrection.

I erred in what I said because although I knew Matthias had been with them throughout the ministry of Jesus, I wasn't sure whether Matthias witnessed it or not, but this passage indicates he did.

No worries, I didn't know either.

Luke is the one who wrote Acts. You're in wide disagreement with most historians then, if you believe that they are fiction. Do you have any idea how meticulously detailed Acts in regards to historical data? Luke was an eminent historian and everything he wrote was so accurate that his writings have been used to make many archaelogical discoveries. Consider this conversation between Bart Ehrman, the agnostic bible critic and an atheist (infidel guy)

I'm afraid that I can't view the clip right now. I do know that Bart Ehrman has remarked on the problems of Luke when it comes to history, but in any case, I don't think it was wholly fiction, any more than I would think that a biography of George Washington written decades ago was wholly fictional because it contained the apocryphal stories of the cherry tree and throwing a dollar across the Delaware.

It's impossible to have a conversation about this unless you nail down what you actually believe. Please tell me what you believe. Are you saying now the gospels are complete fiction?

No.

Are you saying none of the people in the gospels are actually real?

No.

If so, what standards are you using to make these determinations?

Humility. It is very difficult to sort out what really happened exactly as described, what happened pretty close to the description, what may have been exagerrated, what may have been misremembered, or what may have been interpolated by a copyist. I don't know what exactly happened at the time of the events of the Gospels and Acts. And neither does anyone else. I'm inclined to think the mundane parts are more likely to have happened than the miraculous parts, just as I would think with any other religion's claims; because I think that is the most rational position to take.

You dismiss any report of a miracle apriori because you are a naturalist, so you have already made up your mind before you examine the evidence.

Actually, it was personally investigating claims of healings and paranormal events that led me toward skepticism. I found people believing in extraordinary things that always melted on close examination. I learned that many people are highly motivated to fool themselves and unable to evaluate their experiences critcally. An object levitating turned out to be an optical illusion. A kneecap growing back turned out never to have been more than a sprain according to the doctor. A person struck down with lameness was able to walk freely, only to be struck down again in a few weeks: just gout, which comes and goes. The worst cases were people who were clearly still ill but wanted to believe so badly in their cure that they were in denial. I wasn't able to find a natural explanation for all cases...only every single case where there was evidence available to examine. Even I wanted something that would prove there were miracles, but miracles have way more to do with how you process your experiences than what is actually happening outside your head.

In your mind, there must be some other explanation. The lack of contemporary writings is not striking, it is actually quite usual. The bible is the most well attested to ancient manuscript there is; there is attestion from multiple sources as well as superior manuscript evidence. The fact is that the apostles knew exactly what happened and they have testified to it in the gospels. Where are the legends coming from when the church is run by those who were closest to Jesus and the most important thing they have are His words? They would have zealously guarded these truths from being changed in any way. You act like these people were all morons who were willing to believe anything, when in fact they were true believers, convinced by the evidence they saw with their own eyes, and unwilling to compromise the truth they knew came from God.

True believers don't need evidence. Even today most people regard hearsay as strong evidence. It isn't, and that's what those writings are: hearsay, twice removed, and ancient. Have you seen what cops have to work with in trying to build a picture of what happened thirty minutes ago when multiple witnesses are involved and the events are mundane? Our minds continually fill in the gaps of what we don't see in the world around us, we make unjustified assumptions all the time, and unconsciously edit our memories to match what we think must be so. So-called 'recovered memories' have put innocent people in jail for preposterously unlikely crimes. I don't think the Apostles were morons, I think they were human, and products of their time and culture. Our ancestors used to be dinner for predators, they survived by not assuming that the rustling in the brush was just the wind. We come by our disproportionate sense of agency honestly, but it's not always a tiger behind the tree. Humans get by by being able to get the gist of what's going on and what has happened in the past, if we had to be 95% accurate in our perceptions and our memories of them to survive we'd be on the way to extinction. Not morons, just people. People are fallible.

Scripture records that hundreds of witnesses saw the resurrected Jesus, and it personally identifies dozens.

Then you should be able to give the names of 24 witnesses from the Bible. We've got the 11 remaining Apostles plus Matthias, Mary Magdelene, Salome', Mary the mother of James, Joanna, and who else? That's 17, so you only have to find 7 more. Presumably, we're not counting Paul since the men with him did not see Jesus.

What you're doing is avoiding the point. You claimed that they were just hallucinating Jesus, when in fact they were interacting and having lunch with Him.

I try not to claim too much. A vision was one possibility I suggested. Another was that Jesus was not actually dead but only in a coma and revived. Another was that much of the story was missing in Mark, the earliest Gospel, and that the rest was added later as the tale grew in the retelling.

And He isn't. Your blind certitude in deep time and evolution is what is deceiving you. You have closed your mind to any alternative.

What would convince you deep time is real? I can think of a number of things that could convince me it wasn't. I admit it's hard to imagine just how much scientific knowledge would have to be overturned to accommodate shallow time, it's easier to imagine evidence for Last Thursdayism (the universe was created as is last Thursday) than that science has gotten it so completely wrong. You're really in no position to chide me when you assume I thought the Apostles were morons when you think much worse of scientists, given the incentives to get their discoveries right and that you think they've been systematically wrong for generations. Maybe this will help you understand how I can think the ancients could be mistaken without being morons.

You have quite a bit of certitude for not doing much research. The clocks could have changed due to a global catastrophe, such as a global flood perhaps?

How on earth do you think water pressure or whatever affects atomic decay rates? What criteria did you use to determine how much research I did?

‘There has been in recent years the horrible realization that radiodecay rates are not as constant as previously thought, nor are they immune to environmental influences.
‘And this could mean that the atomic clocks are reset during some global disaster, and events which brought the Mesozoic to a close may not be 65 million years ago but, rather, within the age and memory of man.’

Frederic B. Jueneman

The chemist who is a fan of Velkovsky and writes for science fiction and fringe science journals? Was no one less reputable available to cite as a source? There's a Nobel Prize waiting for him if he's right and decides to go into lab work instead of writing.

The clocks also could be changed by

1. high energy particles (neutrinos, cosmic rays, etc)
2. nearby radioactivity
3. pressure
4. chemicals

That is actually the least egregious assumption.

So you do think atomic decay rates are affected by water pressure. That's an easy experiment to do. Please refer to it. How much pressure does it turn out to take to reset the atomic clock? Can that pressure level be found under several miles of water?Assumption 1: A closed system. That nothing has contaminated the parent or daughter product over millions or billions of years. Problem being, there are no closed systems in nature and contamination is inevitable.

Assumption 2: That each system contained no daughter product, because if it did the reading would be false. Yet, how shall we confirm this? Answer, we can't, there is no way to know the initial conditions. Therefore, when you have your range of dates, just throw away the ones that don't match your assumptions.

Assumption 3: Clock started at the beginning, no daughter products were present anywhere. Only elements at the top of the chain existed. That, for example, all of the U238 in the world had no lead 206 in it, nor did any lead 206 exist anywhere. Yet, after a flood or the moment of Creation, all of these daughter elements would be present and the clocks would start from there.

You cannot get accurate dates using these assumptions, and when we test things we know the ages of, they give us inaccurate readings. Radiometric dating cannot be trusted.

People with much more impressive credentials than Mr. Jueneman regard him as a crank. Not just because of his odd notions, but because he chooses to stay away from challenging working scientists by actually providing evidence of his claims and chooses to focus on persuading people outside the field of radiometric dating who aren't qualifed to assess his arguments (not science, just arguments).

The accepted dates are selected dates, and a date will not be accepted unless it is thought to be correct. IE, the conclusion interprets the evidence, and anything which doesn't match the conclusion is thrown away. The conclusion is based on the field relationships and ages that other geologists have already determined. So, the geologist already "knows" what the age is supposed to be for his rock before he tests it. If the dates come back a lot older, he will say that the rock had crystals that were older, that formed before the rock was solidified, or a dozen explanations. If it is much younger, he will say it was disturbed by ground water, or something else. What he will never do is question the method.

That's because he understands the method. When an anatomist finds a skeleton of a human with thigh bones that belong to a horse, she doesn't question anatomy, she figures something has messed up her specimen. That's because she knows what she's doing. Give her time to do some detective work, and she can probably figure out a lot about how those horse's bones got mixed in with a humans. In any other historical field, what you're describing would be counted as sound practice.

It's called conventional wisdom, and it is the death of real science.

Science seems to have muddled through okay with the exception of pleasing young-earth creationists, geocentrists, and flat-earthers.

Real scientists went to the grand canyon and dated 27 samples using the potassium-argon, rubidium-strontium, samarium-neodymium and lead-lead dating methods at state of the art laboratories and came back for wildly divergent results (variations of many hundreds of millions or billions of years) for the same rock. The results were so divergent that they were entirely useless in yielding any absolute ages for any rock.

Sigh. It's crazy to use all those dating methods on the same rock. Not every radiometric dating method applies to every sample. Different rocks have different concentrations of those elements depending on how the rock was formed. Some things do 'reset' the clock, otherwise all rocks would be billions of years old. Radiometric dating depends on 'clock resetting', but you have to know exactly what kind of rock you're dealing with.

So tell me, how do you know which dating method is accurate, or how could any of them be accurate given these results?

There are volumes written on the subject and classes available. I bet a geology professor would love having you in his class. These posts are already getting too long without me trying to provide you with an education in the science you're lecturing us about.

There is no evidence for abiogenesis at all, so don't you think you're getting ahead of yourself?

The only alternative is that biological life has existed for eternity. I thought you were in the camp that a non-biological entity made the first life from non-life. That's abiogenesis, even if it was done by a miracle.

No matter how unlikely something is, if you say once upon a time, it suddenly becomes plausible:

You're telling me!

However improbable we regard this event, or any of the steps which it involves, given enough time it will almost certainly happen at least once....Time is in fact the hero of the plot.

Given so much time, the impossible becomes possible

No it doesn't. The impossible can never happen, no matter how much time is involved.

, the possible probable, and the probable virtually certain. One has only to wait: time itself performs the miracles.

Not necessarily just time. The wildly improbable can happen in a short time given enough simultaneously opportunities. Have a billion dealers deal at once and the chance that someone will get a straight flush is pretty good.

George Wald, Nobel Laureate, Harvard
Physics and Chemistry of Life p.12

George Wald was not the pope of evolution. I know you guys think quotemines are the way to go because you use them amongst each other, but elsewhere it's regarded as less than cricket.

You have also completely dodged the point that your nested heirarchies are plagued with non-nested patterns, such as this:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6568

Turns out the resemblence to birds was more than superficial

Talkorigins:

"Anyone who reads any evolutionary literature, even at a basic level, will quickly find out that birds are thought to have evolved from dinosaurs in the Jurassic about 150 million years ago, and that mammals are thought to have evolved from a reptile-like group of animals called the therapsids in the Triassic about 220 million years ago. No competent evolutionist has ever claimed that platypuses are a link between birds and mammals."

doh.

What you want is an animal displaced from the tree, not just one with it's position on the tree adjusted. The platypus will not be the last creature whose place is changed due to following the genetic evidence instead of sticking with previous best guesses based on less information.

What organs? Do you know it is the faulty assumptions of evolutionary biologists that led to an epidemic of removing "useless" organs of our bodies, such as adnoids, and appendixes.

'Vestigial' does not a synonym for 'useless'. I did not say useless. I said 'not fully functional'. For instance, adenoids and appendixes are not so useful that we can't live full and productive lives without them, and they're not worth keeping if they become too diseased.

Turns out there is nothing useless about them. This is the fruit of evolutionary biology.

Doctors didn't remove appendixes and tonsils because of evolutionary biology. They removed them because their experience told them their patients did pretty well without them.

The so-called vestigial whale hips are there to strengthen the reproductive organs, and they're different for both males and females, which means they are best explained by creation and not evolution.

Again, 'vestigial' is not a synonym for 'useless'.

a loss of legs does not prove evolution, in fact that is the opposite of evolution.

So now you're saying the ancestors of whales did have legs?

I'll let Nature speak for the "poor" design of the Pandas thumb

It's not like your post isn't so long already that it takes very long to respond.

""The radial sesamoid bone and the acessory carpal bone form a double pincer-like apparatus in the medial and lateral sides of the hand, respectively, enabling the panda to manipulate objects with great dexterity."

(Hideki Endo, Daishiro Yamagiwa, Yoshihiro Hayashi, Hiroshi Koie, Yoshiki Yamaya, Junpei Kimura, "Role of the giant panda’s pseudo-thumb," Nature, Vol: 347:309-310, January 28, 1999, emphasis added).)

Almost as much dexterity as a real thumb. If only the designer had known about those.

The authors go on to marvel at the functionality of the panda thumb saying, "[t]he way in which the giant panda .. uses the radial sesamoid bone -- its 'pseudo-thumb' -- for grasping makes it one of the most extraordinary manipulation systems in mammalian evolution."

And when it comes to bamboo-eating animals, which is the winner when it comes to extraordinary manipulation? The gorilla.

Doesn't sound very poor to me.

It's not very poor. There is a better one, though. One a designer would have been aware of. Why would a designer use a second-best thumb? Evolution explains it nicely, the Panda's thumb is an adaptation of what it already had, in evolution, real thumbs don't spring up full-fledged, an organism has to go through lots of tiny stages to get there. It's bear ancestors didn't leave the Panda much to work with, but it's a very creditable job considering it had to be evolved from scratch.

What is your point about the digestive system?

Pandas have to put an enormous amount of time into eating because their digestive systems are more like an omnivore than an herbivore. More like a bear. Of course, as special creations, they're not actually related to other bears, the resemblance must be due to...the...uh...aesthetic advantages of having a bamboo-eating bear.

I'm afraid I don't have time to read the rest. I'm not retired or alone in life, I have work to do and other things that demand my attention; and I'm more interested in people's own thoughts than what they can copy and paste. If you want to count making posts too long for a reasonable person to adequately respond to in under an hour a victory, I don't mind. Best of luck.