Creation/evolution3

[Davka]

Try reading for comprehension. I specifically stated "the part where you feel things," as in the effects of agape and phila. I deliberately split the answer into the actions and the effects. To re-phrase, "The effects of agape and phila (in which there are emotions involved) are simply biochemical impulses . . . whereas the choices we call "agape" and "phila" are the results of thought processes - more biochemical impulses."

I foolishly thought you were capable of simple comprehension. Perhaps i was wrong.

I also stated that "All emotions, all human impulses, all choices and thoughts and irrational sensations - everything we experience is perfectly explainable in terms of physical phenomena." Are you claiming that agape and phila are not choices?

Really, your only chance of demonstrating that agape is not a physical process occurring inside the brain is to define agape out of existence.

Davka, when you were a Christian, did you ever debate apologetics with atheists?

I'm just wondering, because I suspect you could have won some arguments even though the Christian case is weaker than the atheist case.

Yeah, I did. but the only arguments i ever 'won" were those where the person i was arguing with didn't know the Bible as well as they thought they did, and i was able to quote chapter and verse to show them their error. More often than not, i was forced to acknowledge that there was no empirical evidence for my position.

The thing is, Christianity is not just a weaker case, it's an unsupportable case. In the end, all the arguments for Christianity boil down to:

1) I had a subjective experience or experiences which convinced me to become a Christian,
2) In my Christian life I experienced some seemingly extremely unlikely coincidences which further convinced me,
3) It feels really, really true, but
4) In the end, none of these subjective experiences can be shown to be attributable only to God, nor are any of them replicable or falsifiable.

As someone who accepts the Scientific Method as a trustworthy way of determining the nature of reality, fundamentally Christianity became more and more difficult for me to embrace. I dropped the YEC arguments pretty early on, and concluded that the first chapters of Genesis from Creation until Abraham and Sarah were not intended literally. Eventually I abandoned eternal torment in Hell, and towards the end i was toying with Universalism.

The only way i held on as long as I did was that there exists a huge publishing industry which provides lies dressed up as science, and it took me a while to find the holes in their arguments. Also, I spent a long time studying Hebrew, Judaism & Christianity in antiquity, historical context of the biblical books, and similar actual disciplines which are just as true for secularists as for theists.