The Problem with Christians

[Cyberman]

Snakes only bite hate-filled people. Gotcha.

[The Grand Nudger]

 The person w/o Love walks past the snake bitten. No. w/o Love there would be no life, or reason to live. None.

I'm sure every holy roller at the ER disagrees.  Reality certainly disagrees.  Snakes don't seem to have "love detectors"......  This does, however, present an interesting experiment that you could test your religious beliefs (and status as having love) against.   

All you need is a pit of snakes (no need to get the venomous kind, garden snakes will do) and the courage of your convictions.  Pics or it didn't happen.

[AJW333]

I gave you that to show that the Bible does in fact indicate that God created the universe, which was the issue at hand. How can you create the earth, the heavens and the stars and not be creating the universe?

You tell us. It's your fantasy, not mine.

I'd still like an answer to my quoted question, though. A coherent one, if you can manage it.

Seriously?? It makes no difference to the argument. It is clear from other passages that the Bible claims that God made the universe - that was the issue at hand.

[Esquilax]

Then, you can't plausibly say we have free will since there are countless ways in which one will find that the universe prohibits the expression of free will.

The universe is a bunch of planets, stars, suns moons etc. How are these responsible for influencing the decisions of man?

Just off the top of my head: "What? I can't dig to the core of the Earth? I'll die long before I do?! That's bullshit, my free will is being impinged upon!"

Or, hey: "I can't just float up in defiance of gravity and then breathe in space?! What the hell, god? Why you keep limiting my free will?"

Or, also: "How am I not able to just grow a third arm? God, where's my free will?"

This is sort of the problem I have with the theistic conception of free will in general, which I think conflates "will," with "ability to carry out that will." Free will is a property of the mind, an ability to make choices and goals for oneself, but it doesn't necessitate that you be successful at those goals, or productive in those choices. If I decide that I want to go to the beach tomorrow to get a tan, but it rains so I can't, has my free will been denied? Or have circumstances just occurred that prevent me from performing my freely chosen action? What if I decide to go to the beach, but owing to my living in a landlocked state, I can't: has my free will been impinged now?

To be clear, this is the only form of free will that you can be talking about without defeating your own argument, because if your definition of free will includes success in freely chosen actions necessarily, then free will is impinged upon every day simply by dint of our own physical limitations. If free will demands that I not only choose an action, but be successful in it, then the fact that I cannot fly under my own power due to physics that god put into place means that god is already limiting my free will. If free will doesn't necessitate that I be successful, then there's no reason at all for god to allow any form of human-imposed suffering, because that suffering could be freely chosen by those who wish to inflict it, without resulting in a successful end result for those people. In every case in which the free will argument is used as a defense, there is no definition of free will that would actually make it a cogent argument, which is where the problem lies. It's effectively useless as a concept when we're talking about a being like god.

[The Grand Nudger]

The bible makes many claims, each as dubious as the next.  It's strange, for example, that the bible doesn't accurately describe the formation of earth, or the emergence of animals, of our origins -even-.  Strange in that, purportedly, it's getting it's info from the guy who claims to have done all that.  I'd expect a creator god to know what happened, I'd expect a creator gods story to line up with reality.

This leaves us with a few possible explanations...none particularly flattering.  Either god (or the author purporting to write gods story) is misleading us about being the creator, or is misleading us in regards to the method, manner, and timeline of creation.  Or......the story has nothing to do with either any god, any creation, the author was simply mistaken.

Thoughts?

[abaris]

Seriously?? It makes no difference to the argument. It is clear from other passages that the Bible claims that God made the universe - that was the issue at hand.

The bible talks about many things. What does that add to the argument? I mean in the staying on mother earth sense. I certainly don't hope you to take a book, compiled and edited over at least a thousand years, to be a literal source of truth.

Well, scratch that. You probably do. That's why nobody finds any common ground with your arguments.

[Wyrd of Gawd]

The fact that you believe life was created from dust means you are clearly deranged.

When the earth was formed, it would have consisted simply of dirt, rocks and water. What else was there to create life with?

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God, according to your definition is omniscient and omnipotent. So the above is shit. This is what it's actually is. As it always is when things get uncomfortable.



By the way, in case you missed it, what's your proof for the supernatural existing?

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There was no dirt when the Earth was formed.  Do you even know what dirt is?

[Cyberman]

You tell us. It's your fantasy, not mine.

I'd still like an answer to my quoted question, though. A coherent one, if you can manage it.

Seriously?? It makes no difference to the argument. It is clear from other passages that the Bible claims that God made the universe - that was the issue at hand.

Why are you talking about a storybook? I thought you were trying to prove a god?

[AJW333]

In my brief time at this forum, I have been asked over and over again to prove the supernatural, and been derided for not providing an "acceptable" proof. When I ask for proof of abiogenesis, I see a completely different standard being applied. You accept abiogenesis on the basis that it is "most plausible," with no proof whatsoever. How is that a more credible position than me accepting the supernatural as "most plausible" on the basis of both personal experience and the worldwide, centuries old existence of countless testimonies? At least there are hundreds of thousands of people claiming to have witnessed the supernatural and yet not one who has witnessed abiogenesis.

1) Eyewitness testimony is scientifically demonstrated (that is, by testing) to be ridiculously unreliable as a standard of evidence.

And yet we put people to death on the basis of eyewitness testimony. Go figure. Clearly not all eyewitnesses are unreliable. So I grant you that many claims of supernatural activity would be false but that doesn't rule out every single one over the last 6,000 years, and there has been a lot of them. It's most plausible to me that some of the claims at least are reliable.

2) We do not say "most plausible" as "my favorite guess". We say "most plausible" because what we do know so far fits best with the model of reality, and it is reasonable to infer (which is why, again, dozens of groups of researchers--including the Jet Propulsion Lab, NASA's top scientists--are working on the issue, because it is clear there is something to find) that the historical, physical/chemical mechanism by which life's basic chemicals arose and began to replicate will be found.

This is where I don't agree because to get DNA from a very haphazard, disordered environment, you have to reverse entropy. There is no such thing as a random code, so how are a bunch of random chemicals going to write one?

[Silver]

Why are you talking about a storybook? I thought you were trying to prove a god?

It is the typical circular argument.