There is more evidence that god exists than there is evidence that He doesn't.

Such as?

give me one bit of evidence that god does not exist,

The idea of God cannot be either proved or disproved because it is with out any clearly definable trait, outside of the description in the holy books, which are just opinion. I never stated that there was any proof of Gods non-existence, as I know there can never be.

and I will give you evidence that he does

Please do, I cant wait to hear this ground breaking piece of evidence.

Saying that God doesn't exist is like closing your eyes and ears and mouth and jumping into the arctic sea

How is this so?

then saying the Earth doesn't exist. that is not true, you are merely ignoring Earth's existence in the face of all of the evidence that the Earth does exist.

Now you've lost me. I didn't say anything about the Earth not existing, that would be ridiculous. There is more than enough evidence for Earths existence. There is however none for God's existence.

who made us ? who gave us the hands to type? who gave these eyes to see? god!the almighty

See, I always thought it was your parents who gave you those things through this process called heredity. I guess chromosomes cannot split themselves.

...So you are believing in something just because you were intimidated by their process of mass, well sir you clearly got one logical argument there. Yup that makes perfect sense.(sarcasm)

That is arguing that because we exist we must exist because of your reasons. I say it is far more likely that we exist because of God. I am not arguing that we do not exist, because I think.

How you came to this conclusion based on what I said, is beyond me. I wasn't arguing this at all. Perhaps you didn't understand. let me phrase this in another way.

There are billions perhaps trillions of planets, maybe more. For the sake of argument let's say that the conditions on every planet are completely random (they aren't). Now if we pick a planet at random, that chances of that planet supporting life are very slim. Increase the pool of planets, and you increase the chance of finding one that supports life. Considering the sheer number of planets, surely you will find at least one that could support life, yes?

Your argument assumes that we were "destined" to live on this specific rock.

Here's a little bitty thing. You're a living being, right? So, if I throw you into a room with no air, water, or food, but with chlorine gas, acid pools, and rock, will you adapt? No, you wouldn't live long enough to have even the slightest possibility of adapting. If I threw you in with a load of other folks and you bred really quickly to try to evolve, it would still not be fast enough for you to survive it.

First of all, we are not speaking simply of Human life, we are speaking of ALL LIFE. Evolution began with the simplest of microspoic single celled organisms, which are vastly more resiliant and more diverse than human life. They can survive in conditions we never could.

Second of all, adapatation does not spontaneously occur within a single organism, it occurs in a population over multiple generations.

The idea is that whenever you present a new condition, there will be individuals within that population who are suited to survive in it. These individuals will then propagate, while those who weren't suited are eliminated from the genepool.

Of course you still need to have the conditions for the most resiliant of life to survive in, but this really isn't as "precise" as you may think. Some organisms can thrive in temperatures exceeding 248 Degrees Fahrenheit. Some can survive in extremely acidic substances. Others can survive under extreme hydrostatic pressure.

But the fact that Earth had any possibility of supporting life is quite incredible. I'm not saying the Earth ever had to change to support life. I'm saying that's how it was made, and the purpose for which it was made.

Except earth's current conditions have not always been so.

It is incredible that of all places, we find ourselves on a planet that supports life? For if earth did not support life, we would not be here to argue how amazing that simple fact must be, yes?

But life does appear here, incredibly, and this life happens to be the right sort of life for the environment on earth

And how amazing it is how the Icecube tray, forms itself perfectly around the shape of the ice cube?

Being that the earth is much more static than the life which inhabits it, is it not more reasonable and likely that Life adapted to the earth, rather than the earth being refined to accommodate life? After all we have discovered mechanisms by which this can occur.

when proving something exists, you need a corresponding amount of evidence that is proportional to the claim.

Saying that the universe was created by an omnipotent being is a very large claim.

therefore it would require a very large amount of evidence to prove this claim.

The only evidence for the Judeochristian G-d is a book that cannot be verified.

There is just as much evidence for G-d as there is for any other literature, including Harry Potter.

Yes, many people believe in G-d. To rely on this fact is to succumb to the logical fallacy argumentum ad populum.

The evidence against G-d is astounding.

fossils, mere snapshots of organisms that can be dated using radioisotope decay, suggests that creatures evolved overtime. Of course, this is evidence-not proof- that G-d did not create all life forms at once. Even if you do not believe this evidence proves evolution, it is a more legitimate source of information than unverifiable literature.

And evolution explains many phenomena that the bible simply cannot.

For instance, if every man or woman is a descendant of the same two people, how are there so many different varieties of people today?

Adam and Eve, collectively, could not have contained the entirety of all possible human genomes between the two of them.

For example, there are six known genes for different eye color. Adam and Eve could have between them up to four (one dominant, one recessive each).

If animals change over time, then evolution would be inevitable: as two different changes aid two different subsets of a species, given enough time they would accumulate enough of these changes to be considered different species in their own right, much like the Galapagos finches that led Darwin to theorize evolution.

However, if animals do not change over time, then there would be no more genetic diversity than could be possible from two normal human beings, in which case there would not be a wide variety of phenotypes today

Okay, this will probably sound annoying to you, but, those laws that allow for a better chance of life occurring had to come from somewhere.

These laws or 'forces' are simply OBSERVED CONSISTENCIES in the interactions of matter/energy, based on the principal that the same action yields the same result under identical circumstances. There is nothing magical about it.

Why do we all have this same, unspoken standard? It can't be a matter of learning from our parents, because it has existed all throughout history, even in peoples who didn't yet have contact with each other.

We have this "unspoken standard" because it is necessary for a stable society, and societies that didn't have this sense of common good, could not sustain themselves and would have quickly dissolved. Morality exists because it must.

It's really that simple.

Your post covers a huge amount of subject matter, but I'll do my best to respond to every point.

Your very first sentence is actually completely wrong if directed at a scientific atheist.

The Earth doesn't sustain life by chance, it does so because of a mathematical inevitability.

The universe is vast, at least 13 billion lightyears across. So of all the entities in the universe, at least one of them is bound to have accommodating conditions for life. In fact, if like some people, you accept the universe to be infinite, then there would be infinite planets with life on them.

Every single one of your points about complex life can be explained by evolution.

You make this point: But life does appear here, incredibly, and this life happens to be the right sort of life for the environment on earth.

As a person who seems to have some knowledge of science, surely you understand the main principle of evolution- that life has adapted, over thousands of years to FIT its environment.

I hope, as an intelligent person, you don't need me to explain to you how this is possible, but I'd happy to do so if you do.

Here you wrote: Okay, I'm going to jump here and re-build to that point. Let's start small and get bigger. Atoms. The fact that they exist is something that requires God. But that's not my argument, as it would simply end in you saying "I don't believe you." as neither of us can provide any evidence stretching that far back.

And then proceeded to write:

Here's a thing: All objects in motion will remain in motion and all objects at rest will remain at rest unless an outside force acts upon them. All atoms, and all matter is in constant motion. Who or what started that motion?

Can't you see that you went ahead and wrote what you had just said you wouldn't?

On your point about atoms existing and reacting in correct places: hundreds of different compounds exist in all environments, its only logical that some of these compounds will be useful, there are also plenty of useless and even harmfuls substances.

Water is a remarkable liquid, and that's precisely what makes this planet hospitable to life. It also has relatively high heat capacity, meaning it can store quite and lot of heat. But you seem to imply that a change in the temperature of the Earth's atmosphere magically 'activates' heat loss or gain from water, as if this is different to any other liquid. Heat always travels from a hot area to a cooler one, it's basic thermodynamics, and it's nothing unusual.

If you'll allow me to be slightly pedantic, not all prokaryotes have flagella- but this is only a minor point.

Your knowledge of photosynthesis is impressive by the way (A level biologist I'm guessing). However all of the intricate systems your describing came about through evolution.

One of the things worth knowing about evolution is that it doesn't always find a perfect solution, but that it finds the first solution that works. Now you'd think that, if there was a Creator, chlorophyll would be black, not green (it would absorb more light), but it isn't, because it was brought about through evolution.

I hope that, as someone with a logical and critical mind, you'll realise that the beautiful and complex world we live in is the result over thousands of years of natural selection, and also realise the genius and elegance of Darwin's theory.

It's as Douglas Adams said: "Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?"

I agree that there are certain people for whom belief in a deity is a necessary comfort. However, there are others, like myself, who can handle a harsh truth and who don't need God.

Your argument seems to be that people should believe in God because that belief is a comfort. My question to you is - Is it better to believe in something because it is comforting or because it is the truth?

It would be a great comfort to me to believe that civilians aren't dying in Iraq, but I'm not prepared to believe it simply on that premise.

As for your point about the Bible, the same could be said of any holy book, and they cannot all be right.

You asked the question - Who would have honestly bothered to come up with all that stuff?

Well, surely you know that the Bible was written over hundreds of years, with contributions from a huge amount of people, countless revisions and alterations.

I feel compelled to say something in response to your last sentence. It's pointless and very patronising, and will only serve to repel people from the christian faith.

This is a manipulation of language.

Perhaps I should break it down for you.

Atheism is a specific doctrine

doctrines can be dogmas: to the point that they are synonymous

and dogmas can be proclaimed by a church

but when you juggle around so many different definitions, they no longer apply to each other. You are manipulating language in that you are taking several words with multiple meanings and tying them together.

Here is one major crack in your train of logic.

atheism is only a religion if you use the definitions

b (out of a,b)

b (out of a,b,c,d,e)

1c (our of 1a, 1b, 1c, 2)

4 (out of 1a, 1b, 2, 3, 4)

that means that you had to pick through four levels of terms to arrive at the conclusion.

under this many levels, words no longer retain the same definitions. synonyms are not identical.

here is a thread on this you might want to read over.

http://www.skepdic.com/skeptimedia/skeptimedia37.html

but, to demonstrate my point, i will yet again use your line of logic to prove a ridiculous concept true.

here

Definition of MONEY

1

: something generally accepted as a medium of exchange, a measure of value, or a means of payment: as

a : officially coined or stamped metal currency

b : money of account

c : paper money

2

a : wealth reckoned in terms of money

b : an amount of money

c plural : sums of money : funds

3

: a form or denomination of coin or paper money

4

a : the first, second, and third place winners (as in a horse or dog race) —usually used in the phrases in the money or out of the money

b : prize money

5

a : persons or interests possessing or controlling great wealth

b : a position of wealth

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/money

so, money is a measure of value

1: the supreme or ultimate reality: as

a : the Being perfect in power, wisdom, and goodness who is worshipped as creator and ruler of the universe

b Christian Science : the incorporeal divine Principle ruling over all as eternal Spirit : infinite Mind

2: a being or object believed to have more than natural attributes and powers and to require human worship; specifically : one controlling a particular aspect or part of reality

3: a person or thing of supreme value

4: a powerful ruler

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/god

so, according to definition 3, G-d is a person or thing of supreme value.

since money is a measure of value,

and G-d is a person or thing of supreme value

then, logically, G-d is a large amount of money.

I am not manipulating words. I came to this definition in only two links, compared to your four.

so, if this train of logic is correct, then I will accept that atheism is a religion, as well as that G-d is a large amount of money.

otherwise, I reject both.

"It was the sin of man that cursed the world. God created and said it was "very good". We introduced the bad, and in so doing subjected ourselves to disease, suffering, and death. "

If man created sin, and G-d created man...

(do you see where I am going with this?)

Also, that is a clever mix of definitions right there.

saying that atheism is a religion is like saying that staying still is a form of transportation. After all:

staying still is moving nowhere

moving is a form of transportation

therefore staying still is a mode of transportation.

Or, better yet

G-d is in everything

everything is something

spaghetti is something

therefore G-d takes the form of spaghetti

Isn't the principle of explosion fun to exploit?

Firstly, I did not speak merely of complexity. I spoke of obvious set-up and thought behind it.

This is only obvious to a theist or deist, that which is not known does not give evidence to that which is made up.

But, you persist in saying that my arguments are not true because you don't believe them, without giving any reason why you do not believe them besides saying that you would prefer it if He did not exist. As such, I will have to try a different approach.

I don't believe them because there is no proof, none for the existence of God and none for any of these things that you say are attributed to him, you may as well have attributed them the the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I have not stated that I would prefer if God did not exist, you made that up.

Knowing that you are a Christian that also believes in evolution can you answer me a few Questions?

Why did God start us as replicating molecules, if we are the chosen race?

Why was there so many mass extinctions along the way?

Why did Christianity or even Judaism only come into existence in the last few thousand years?

Why is only OK since then to worship only one God?

I mean polytheism was perfectly acceptable before but not now.

Why is that when something new comes along the churches view it with disgust and label it heresy until someone proves it without a shadow of a doubt?

What happened to all the other Gods? Presumably they retired? Yea?

Intelligent Design and Creationist science go against the teachings of the Bible, creating their own schism of the most splintered faith system in existence, redirecting and reshaping the ambiguous teachings so that it fits their ideology.

I don't believe any of the Bible, some of the stories may be true but there is no proof outside of the bible itself, which no-one really knows if it is true word or not. The Gospels that were written well after the death of Jesus and the laughable old testament.

Why did these people die:

Because they were ideologists living in a less educated time. Religion was a primitive method to police the ignorant, it requires blind faith which I consider more dangerous than most weapons. Look at the suicide bombers in the middle east.

All of these stories are more than likely to be greatly exaggerated.

"You are saying that because the earth exists, God did not create it."

No, I am saying that that the existence of Earth does not prove that God created it. If you choose to drop this portion of the debate because you consider it a "useless argument" I will be happy to move on. We'll get more into what exactly I am saying in a later response.

"where did the atoms to cause your chemical reactions come from?"

This is a very simplified explanation:

http://www.lbl.gov/abc/wallchart/chapters/10/0.html

This series, while not professionally produced, does a reasonably fair job of explaining what happened in terms that non-physicists can understand: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FPUutjtqfw&feature;=more_related

The information regarding the formation of elements gets rolling in the first part at around 5:00 while the more specific formation of hydrogen and helium is detailed after 7:50. While this video has some very minor problems, they won't concern what we are talking about since we aren't debating string theory or the like. The basic presentation of facts, and supporting evidence, is accurate enough for this conversation. Also, be sure to watch the first few minutes too, as he does a good job of explaining why we don't know what caused the big bang, and what physicists are trying to do to solve that problem (well, he doesn't really explain it per se, but he gives you key words you can use for a google or library search.)

There are actually some theories out there about the origin of the Big Bang. But as of yet we just don't have incontrovertible evidence to support them because our math and/or technology is not advanced enough. None of the current theories are falsifiable, so there is no reason to just assume that they are true. The same goes for God.

"Also, can you prove that it is in fact possible to actually create life from lifelessness?" Nope. But there are a lot of very smart biologists, chemists and geologists working on that right now. It is the same concept as the cause of the big bang. There are theories, but I am not claiming them to be truth any more than I claim God to be truth. In the case of abiogenesis, the problem is we don't actually know what the exact range of conditions were on Earth way back when. This leads to a lot of trial and error, but the people involved won't give up until all of the evidence fits together like a nice big jigsaw. If you want to learn about the theories, just google abiogenesis. You've already proven to me that you have studied biology, so you should be able to dive right in.

"I am not referring to a few simple chances, like steps." I realize this. You are looking at the big picture. But everything is cause and effect. Having a whole bunch of atoms randomly form a person in one step is most likely impossible. But I know of no scientists who have stated that. In fact, that is more like what creationists are saying, only they use a literal deus ex macinae to navigate around they unlikelihood of this happening. Scientists, knowing how unlikely it is, look for the most likely beginning they can find, and build from there. Once it starts falling into place, it stops seeming as unlikely. Oh, and scientists don't think the Earth just popped into existence. Once again, that is what creationists are telling us. Which, now that I think about it, is probably why you accuse atheists of thinking that way. Because it is closer to what you have already been taught.

"I am referring to something like the chance of a monkey writing the complete works of Shakespeare, times a couple million" Do you happen to have the ACTUAL number handy? Maybe a link I could check out? Preferably one that explains how they derived that number. Also, it would be helpful to explain what corrections they are using to account for the fact that it is impossible to come up with a reliable number for an event whose various constituent factors we don't even know. In order to know how likely an occurrence is in the confines of a certain environment, we have to know what the confines of that environment are in the first place. We can make corrections to represent certain predetermined possibilities, but each correction reduces the reliability of our estimate.

"The size of the universe makes little difference. Say you fill two bags half with white beans and half with black beans. Assuming they are mixed evenly, removing the beans two at a time (one from each bag) will result in approximately 25% black-black pairs, 25% white-white, and 50% black-white, regardless of the number of beans or the size of the bags, so long as the number of white beans is equal to the number of black beans and they are divided evenly."

Actually the size of the universe does matter because it tells me how many chances I get to draw the desired combination. When I talked about the size of the universe, it was in response to your question about the chances of a star having a planet with all the right conditions to promote life. Assuming each star has the same odds of having such a planet (which isn't realistic, but I'm willing to work with it), then I get one draw for every single star that has ever existed. Even though the chances are evenly divided per star star, every draw that I get increases the probability that I will eventually get the necessary combination. And I will have many tries to get it right.

"The Bible is not to be taken literally." I completely agree with you. The problem is, how do you know if your interpretation is the right one? The more we have to interpret it (not to mention potential errors in translation and trying to decipher the colloquial and cultural peculiarities of an ancient society) the farther we might stray from the truth. This would be perfectly acceptable, perhaps even intellectually advantageous, if Christians used it purely for philosophical purposes. But many claim it is the inerrant word of God, so interpretation should be discouraged.

"There are some things that are obviously thought through, and no amount of coincidence could have allowed for them."

Feel free to provide as many examples as you like.

"I must make a comment about this arguing. It is easier to come up with counter-arguments than actual arguments. In other words, I come up with a reason why God exists and you do your best to shoot it down." That is how this sort of thing works. I am not making an extraordinary claim here, you are. If I were, the burden of proof would be on me. But you are the one making a positive claim here, so it is your job to provide positive proof. If you provide something I cannot refute with, I will concede the victory to you.

"however, you have given me no reason why He does not exist. You have told me you do not believe in him, and you have told me that he does not have to exist. But you have not given me any reason why He has to not exist."

I never said that He has to not exist. I did say I don't believe in him, you are right. That is because up to this point in my life, nobody has provided me with any evidence that requires divine intervention. Science makes more sense to me. It is logical and thorough and seeks to improve itself constantly. But I am skeptical of it, just like I am of religion. If either proffers truth, I will hold them to the same standards.

I do not have faith that He does not exist. And I do not go around trying to destroy another person's faith. But I do challenge everybody to think critically about their beliefs. Whether you believe in evolution or creationism, you can recognize that critical thinking is one of humankind's greatest assets and tools. You are a smart person. You can challenge my own critical thinking skills and make me a mentally stronger person. I appreciate that, and I think I can reciprocate.

It sounds like you want to bow out. I hope you don't. But if that is your choice, than Happy New Years to you!

is god true?

Then why do people suffer in Africa? Why do innocent people get killed, while the evil ones still run around? Why is there still racism?

I rest my case.

There is no evidence of God's existence, so I would say that God exists only in the minds of his followers.

"who do you think goes to sleep with your children at night,"

Okay, this is just weird. If you put your kids to bed alone, they wake up alone, and there is no evidence of them having any visitations as they slept, why should we assume that any entity has gone to sleep with them?

As far as the rest, there are observable explanations for the rest. Why assume that somebody "gave us" these things unless we observed it?

Also, since karma is a Hindu and Buddhist notion that is intrinsic to reincarnation in the physical world, Christians who do not believe in reincarnation in the physical world are probably being sacrilegious by supporting its existence

Sorry, for the delay. It has been a very long school week.

“Thumbs and dental sets aid the self.”

As do morals. Remember that traits don’t need to be discernibly morphological to be affected by evolution, behaviors also count if they are genetic. And as I pointed out previously, there is notable evidence that what we perceive as moral law has a genetic origin.

“Yes, we are social beings, but so are many other animals. Do they have morals?”

I bet if you watch 2 or 3 hours of programming on Animal Planet you will find plenty of examples of morality in animals, especially if the shows are about dogs or primates.

This article is about a book written on the subject. It provides both sides of the issue (it is a controversial issue), and then documents some of the examples of animal morality in a variety of species. And this is just the tip of the iceberg of examples that ethologists, ecologists and neurologists have turned up.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/wildlife/5373379/Animals-can-tell-right-from-wrong.html

“If it is such an evolutionary advantage, why isn't it more common?”

Actually it is. But even if it weren’t, it wouldn’t matter. You could use the same argument for thumbs or our omnivorous dental sets, which are quite handy, but even less common than morality. Or wings, those are useful, why don’t we have those? The answer lies in the fact that evolution is unguided, creatures make the best of what they get. Humans never ended up with claws or wings, but we took quite nicely to our more advanced intellects and social nature.

“And, as these morals tell us to value other beings above the self, wouldn't the beings with these morals die out, leaving the amoral to dominate?”

Although this can be an issue, at its core it works quite the opposite of what you are suggesting. Humans are great in groups, but in pre-industrial society we were horrible at being independent. Physically, we don’t really have anything going for us. Without weapons we are pretty lousy predators and not that great at avoiding being prey either. We don’t fly, we don’t climb trees particularly gracefully, we don’t have claws, fangs, shells, camouflage, many creatures are stronger or faster than us etc. Now we are pretty smart, but even the smartest person would be hard-pressed to survive in the wild on their own, and would make a good target for large predators. It is in the group that humanity’s salvation laid. By forming tribes, groups of families could organize, singling out people for specific tasks they are well suited to, hunting in groups, tending to children and the ill, and so on. The theory is that morality establishes itself to facilitate group relationships. By having a more-or-less universal comprehension of right and wrong we can not only guide our own lives, but also punish those who deviate from the societal norm. In lesser cases this could result in the individual being ostracized, getting smaller meals or poor-quality tools and weapons. In more serious cases or in particularly stern civilizations, one might get exiled or executed. And, an immoral person is not necessarily a stronger person. They would have to take on the whole tribe. So universalized morality helps keep the group running more smoothly and efficiently than if morality did not exist. Of course there have been plenty of examples of immoral people gaining power over the moral majority. But these cases almost never involve total extermination of the majority. An evil king still needs someone to plow the fields, bake bread and serve in the military. So the moral commoners still end up out-reproducing the King, and moral behavior continues to dominate.

“Many saints have worked miracles…”

How many lately? Have you ever noticed that miracles seem to get exponentially more common the farther back you go in time? Indeed, it sure does appear to have a strong inverse correlation with our attainment of scientific knowledge.

“and who was Jesus, if not the Messiah?”

Unfortunately, the only particularly detailed depiction of Jesus’ life comes from the Bible, and even that book is pretty vague about what he did for the first thirty years of his life. For instance, a variant of Buddhism became moderately popular in Alexandria and parts of the Hellenistic world during that period. Some believe that he had early exposure to Buddhist teachers, and may have excelled at some meditation practices (such as being able to appear dead for several days, a feat which has been documented among some meditation masters). This may explain the many similarities between the teachings and even life history of Christ and the Buddha.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallels_between_Buddha_and_Jesus

There are some big differences, yes. Jesus obviously didn’t supplant his Jewish beliefs entirely with Buddhism. But that doesn’t mean he didn’t borrow heavily from it.

Furthermore, Mystery Religions were pretty popular at the time. Christianity was not such a religion as it was open to anyone who wished to join. However, many of the Mysteries focused on such concepts as eternal salvation, and returning from the dead to cleanse humanity of its sins. The Romans accepted the Mysteries because they were always considered subservient to the state religion. It’s quite possible that Jesus combined certain aspects of the Mysteries with Judaism (and Buddhism), creating something new, and very controversial to the Romans.

All that we really know for sure is that Christ gained a large and devoted following (so did the Buddha, as have less estimable folks like Hitler) and that he was quite disliked by the Romans (a pretty common fate of common people who get the support of the masses).

“Why would anyone follow a fake?”

Many reasons. You even provided one reason yourself: “These were religious people following him.” Religious people have faith, and faith can be biased towards what you want to be true. Remember that the Jews believed themselves to be God’s chosen people, and they used that faith to weather unspeakable hardships. If someone very charismatic and wise came along claiming to be the Messiah, they might be more inclined to believe him, to elevate his impressive deeds to the status of miracles, to overlook small discrepancies, if they truly believed that this would be the time when their faith would be repaid. And most of his early followers DID believe in prophecy. Among them he might have become a folk hero, a man about whom many unverifiable legends spread. He may also have had legitimate leadership abilities, good ideas, and maybe even tactical abilities. So the Gentiles may have been swayed by the pervasive mysticism around him or they may have seen him as a genuinely capable revolutionary leader.

You talk about modern Christians being skeptical about the second coming. Well people in general are more skeptical about things than they were back then. At that time, the idea of dragons, giants, Gods and a whole bevy of mythological creatures were believed on faith. And most ideas about the workings of the world around us were based on faith too, and have been proven demonstrably wrong. Basically these people were ignorant and superstitious.

“How do you explain the founding of my religion, and it's massive following?”

Your logic is equally applicable to Islam and Hinduism (both of which have almost as many followers as Christianity.) Unless you believe that they are all right, you have to explain why they have such large and dedicated followings as well. Mostly, I’d say social indoctrination is the cause.

“This is not a theory, because people of 2000 years ago saw it with they're own eyes. They didn't say, "Theoretically, he's the Son of God." They said, "Oh my gosh! It's the Messiah!"’

That doesn’t mean they were right. They also believed in a flat earth, that beyond the “firmament” was water and that leprosy could be cured using a blood-soaked wand. Besides, eye-witness testimony (almost all of such that appears in the Bible was second-hand or committed to writing well after the fact) is not particularly reliable. Our understanding of what is really happening can be wrong, our memories and senses can be fooled and people can always lie.

“We are not gullible. We do not believe everything that people say we believe.”

I actually have a lot of respect for the fact that the Catholic Church has done more to debunk false miracles and mysticism than anyone else. But there are two problems:

1) This is a relatively new development. There was quite a long period where scientific investigation that went contrary to the Bible (and thus the supremacy of the Papacy) was ignored and even punished. So only fairly recent denouncements should be considered valid.

2) Even in the modern, scientifically-backed Church investigations there is still a pretty inherent confirmation bias. These are people who will always believe in miracles and that these miracles are sent from God. Even if they go 200 years without finding a new miracle, they will never turn their backs on the Biblical miracles, and will simply explain (without evidence) that God is unhappy with us, or doesn’t feel we need miracles anymore. These may not be gullible people, but if they are wrong, they will always be wrong.

“About parents, it may well be a reaction to need. But there comes a time when we no longer need them, and we know we no longer need them, long before we actually leave.”

And a lot of people start rebelling at about the time they realize this. This also is a point when many people are more likely to engage in criminal or immoral activity. I know several people who are quite straight-laced and straight edge now that were huge trouble-makers in their teen years. Basically, these kids start developing the approximate skills and knowledge of their elders, but lack the perspective to realize how minor a role they actually play in the grand scheme of things. Many teens get arrogant and impatient, and they see little to no value for the people around them so they ignore guilt for a while. Most grow out of this as they adjust to the real world in their 20s. And the desire for love and acceptance is transferable to others once one moves away from the family.

“Guilt is an emotion, and we very definitely recognize it as such. We can no more develop guilt by our own recognition of what is bad for us than we can develop love or sadness. If guilt is there, it is there from the beginning of our life. If it is not, then it never has been. There is no developing of it, only the development of being able to feel it more clearly.”

First, in this conversation you seem to be implying that guilt only exists due to moral implications, but that isn’t true. I am a pretty dedicated student, and when I don’t study properly or don’t do my best on an assignment, I tend to feel guilty. My individual assignments won’t affect my GPA unless they pile up, and my GPA has no indication of my morality. If I bomb out of school, it only affects me. However, if I bomb out, I will be in serious trouble financially and disappoint my parents and friends. So having guilt when I don’t live up to my potential is more rooted in possible detrimental factors and earning the pride of my favorite people. There are other examples. I once turned down a girl who I genuinely respected but wasn’t romantically interested in. She was pretty hurt by it, and I felt really bad, like she deserved me even if I couldn’t reciprocate her feelings. Obviously empathy was there, but there was no morality involved in that decision.

Additionally, Freud wasn’t arguing that guilt emerges within an individual. Like any other emotion, we all come packaged with it. What he was saying is that it exists to help us be wary of losing bonds with our loved ones, much as fear exists to keep us from hurting or killing ourselves by accident. It tends to manifest in children as a fear of losing love, mostly because children have a very limited world-view and are dramatic creatures.

As far as your analogy with writing, you have your reasons why you don’t think its quite accurate. I only have one, but it’s a big one. Writing is absolutely nothing like actually creating a world. When we write, we are pinning it on something that we are already familiar with. Even in sci-fi we at least have characters that we can identify with. In fantasy we may bring our conceptions of what a faerie wood might be like, and link it to our own understanding of forests. Darn near everything we write has some basis in our experience and understanding of the world around us and the people in it. Even with the most speculative fiction we still have some rules to work with to make a believable and compelling story.

But God, if he created the universe, didn’t have any preconceptions to draw from or rules to follow. He pulled everything out of his limitless imagination. This would be what he chose. The problem is, that he apparently chose a world where the innocent can suffer (and don’t always get their prayers answered), where people who are born with certain mental deficiencies don’t have the capability to be moral, where many different religions exist that are mutually exclusive, where his sacred writing REQUIRES interpretation, where the only way to believe he exists is through pure faith. And there are ways he could let us have free will and still guide or actions more effectively. For instance, He could make Heaven and Hell be places that anyone could reach and look into before they died, giving us concrete proof that our mortal actions have an effect on our immortal soul. In that kind of world, everyone would know what they were getting into, and there would probably be little need for other religious teaching to confuse us. He could do a lot of things that would solidly delineate what he tolerates and what he doesn’t without having to rely on faith or our own limited interpretations of his behaviors. Its not even about being good or evil, its about actually knowing what we are dealing with.

“Also, there is the fact of Original Sin.”

See, this has always been one of the biggest reasons why I don’t accept Christianity. If original sin is considered acceptable to God, than I want no part of Him. The idea that a person’s crimes could be inherited by their descendants was pretty common back in the old days. But it just won’t fly anymore, and for good reason. We are not our parents, or anyone else back in our lineage. We are ourselves, unique and answerable only for our own crimes in any reasonable system of justice. My Dad is a good guy, but let’s pretend that he was a monster. A murderer, rapist, kidnapper, etc. If I grew up, he never got caught, and I got held accountable for crimes that he committed before I was even born, is that justice?

As far as sin more generally, I will grant that the way the Bible is written, it is very restrictive and pretty confusing. There are constant refinements to certain rules (first we shall not kill at all, then there are people who its okay to kill, then we find out about people we HAVE to kill), there are contradictions, and there are many little tidbits that made absolute sense at that time and place but have no relevance now. With all of these convoluted restrictions in order, of course we are going to sin one way or the other. It is pretty much impossible not to break at least one of the rules. And chances are we are going to break a lot of them as children, when we don’t realize what we can’t do or why, but we aren’t intentionally doing wrong. Besides, the concept of original sin means we cannot live a sin-free life no matter how pious we are, no matter how saintly and perfect we want to be. It always seemed to me that Christians are more apt to place the importance on “accepting Jesus into your lives” than atoning for your sins. The former arguably trumps the latter, and the whole scheme seems to be about selfishness (attaining your spot in Heaven/avoiding Hell) than out of legitimate altruism.

“Jesus is God made flesh. He is the very same God who created the world, and he is completely God.”

Let me write out a partial transcript from this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnj7PlqmJ5o&feature;=fvwrel

“…but in the Gospels, which are the only documents claiming to record the Christ’s actual words, Jesus never implied any of that at all. Jesus only did what Akun-Atun did, promote himself as the sole prophet of the Sun God. At one point Jesus says that he is one with God, but he clarifies that he is only referring to his purpose, and he claims that any one of us can become one with God just as he is, and that we may perform even greater miracles than he did. But throughout the Bible, regardless of whatever else he may claim about himself, Jesus only ever described himself as separate from and subordinate to God, and he said that the God of Abraham and the bringer of the flood was someone else, somewhere else, who knows things Jesus doesn’t know, can do things Jesus can’t do, and who did things that Jesus didn’t do, but only witnessed, like creating the world. Jesus also spoke about God in third person, and to God in second person, and in one scene, God talks about Jesus in the third person too, when he introduces his son to the Jews. Then the Holy Ghost showed and up and took Jesus to a place he did not already know. None of this could be if Jesus were an avatar, or God in the flesh, because then Jesus, God and the Holy Ghost would all still share the same knowledge, power, identity and position in space and time. So it is pretty clear that Jesus did not believe himself to be the same God as the one he and the Jews both worshiped. When the Nicean Creed was being conceived, the committee took a vote on the identity and divinity of Jesus. Even that was subject to interpretation. Those who said that Jesus was a profit of God, but not the same essence of God lost the vote and were banished to prevent their ideas from influencing the Christian Formation. For a time, both sides labeled the other heretics.”

I know that you are not a Bible literalist, and I appreciate that, but since God’s alternate identity as Jesus is only knowable through the Bible, than it does not look good that the Bible does not actually support that idea. Further, the fact that the founders established the concept based on a vote doesn’t make the situation any more believable.

“If you were lying, for whatever reason, making up a religion, how long would you hold onto that lie? Would you not tell the truth, even when you only had to say that you lied to free yourself from intense torture and crucifixion? There have been scientists who were certain that they spoke the truth who lied to save their lives from instant, painless death, when they had received no torture. So why would a man who claimed to be the Son of God not say he was lying through all that he suffered, unless He was telling the truth?”

Well, as said above, there isn’t any evidence that Jesus actually claimed to be the Son of God, and it is possible that Romans, who were already concerned about the following he was gathering, made up the story to have a legal excuse to punish him, and probably set an example to others.

Another option is that Jesus legitimately believed he was God, but really was not. A person can be wrong without lying. A person can believe oneself to be someone or something that they are not, and still be otherwise sane and cogent and wise.

Or it could be that Jesus didn’t actually believe he was God, but really and honestly believed that what he was teaching would lead to the ultimate betterment of man and was courageous enough to sacrifice himself despite all the torture because he though it was for the greater good. He might have expected to become a martyr, but may never have guessed that a whole religion would be based on his action.

There 3 opinions on the question of God: Yes , No , and NULL. NULL is me and every time Yes or No bugs me with Yes or No question I always think "Why me?".

It's irrelevant that other humans could intervene and don't, the fact that this "god" does not intervene shows that it's not any sort of "morally perfect" being.

Even most ordinary humans want to intervene when they see evil -- they may be afraid to do so, or powerless to do so, but they generally see that as a shortcoming. So, what can be said about an omnipotent being that chooses to allow a woman to be raped, or an infant to die a slow, painful death of a wasting disease? Certainly not that it's "morally perfect".

There is nothing in your source that surprises or interests me. What did you intend to prove with it? That Christianity is popular? Popularity does not equal validity.

Your statement that God (whether you mean the Christian God, or a god in general) is a component of every religion except 'Muslumic' is astoundingly ignorant on more than one level.

I do not believe god is "true"... I believe he is make belief..

I also don't believe anyone can inpregnate someone with out sexual intercourse.

Well you see, I once saw my grandma pray to God when she wasn't feeling well...

Just then did I understand that god does not exis and he is not a real person but sometime we just wan't him to exist because he gives us faith. So bottom line, he is just alive in everyone's mind and not a human being.

You knew this was going to be a long response, right?

"I cannot superglue the tennis balls on because I do not have the authority to do so."

I'll admit my point was subtle, but you responded about how I thought you would. God, if he exists, has all the authority, power and imagination he needs. There is no reason he couldn't dream up a way to give us free will without helping us all use it to the best of our ability.

"About the article, I responded to its whole"

No. You. Didn't. You responded to the intro. The first half of the first page. As it goes along the examples and proposed applications build right up to the "bigger picture".

"It is not a "third impulse," as this defeats the entire purpose of what was said."

Fine then, we'll use Lewis' exact words: "third thing." You still didn't answer my question, although you tried.

"If the Moral Law does not exist, why do we feel guilt, chemicals or no?"

It's a bit like why we feel hungry when we don't eat, but more abstract. In both cases, it benefits our species.

"The only exceptions would be those with psychological disorders. "

Which is part of the proof that moral law comes right from the brain, not some ephemeral soul concept.

"However, as you insist on scientific proof"

Don't get me wrong, I love philosophy. In fact that's what I used to study before I switched over to science. But philosophy is basically about ideas, not facts. You are making a truth claim. To support or deny this claim we need facts. That is why science is a better tool for the job, although logic is important too, which is why I employ it when it's useful.

Now for the video:

While this video is well-produced and interesting, it is merely a collection of aging arguments that have been adequately disputed (and completely invalidated in several cases) for decades now. I will attempt to deal with each of the main points, but if you feel I missed something important, feel free to call me on it:

(the timestamps are rounded, but they make adequate bookmarks.

“The Negative Evidence”

8:50 Miller-Urey Experiment

Arguments against Stanley Miller’s famous experiment suffer from myriad flaws. The first is that they use smoke-and-mirrors to distract from the real point of the experiment: that organic molecules can arise abiogenically. The experiment was so simple that you can order kits online and make organic molecules in your own garage. And since then many researchers have tweaked the formula in a variety of ways. Not all of them yielded organic molecules, but several have, often producing different types and larger amounts than the original. Plus we have found organic molecules on meteorites, and we now even know that certain stars spit out vast clouds of the stuff. Organic molecules aren’t really all that rare in the universe, and can arise under a number of circumstances. So he may have had the wrong ingredients, but he still proved his point, and his opponents always steer the conversation away from that fact.

Also, even when his recipe was debunked, some researchers pointed out that the entire atmosphere doesn’t have to be suitable for these molecules to emerge. You just need one or two spots for the possibility. And it is now widely accepted that volcanoes (both modern and primordial) can create microclimate conditions very similar to Miller’s recipe.

But let’s say that his recipe couldn’t exist at all in the ancient atmosphere. There is actually another big flaw in his experiment, one that theists intentionally ignore: We shouldn’t be looking towards the atmosphere in the first place! There is insurmountable evidence that life began in the oceans (life has been around for at least 3.8 billion years, and has been on land only about 1/7th of that time.) Current theories make it quite clear that early life would never have been able to survive up here until it evolved quite heavily. Scientists prefer to research atmospheric experiments for two simple reasons: 1) we are even less sure about ancient conditions undersea than we are on land, 2) we don’t have the technology to properly simulate the speculative conditions, largely because of the water pressure involved. But when we learned that volcanoes made a great breeding ground for organic molecules, we realized that undersea volcanoes would be even better (Hydrogen has a harder time “floating off” under water, while other constituent elements would be clustered together for longer periods of time.) In fact, undersea volcanoes and steam vents almost certainly give us everything we need: Organic molecules, the heat needed to bond macromolecules together, the water needed to form lipid protobionts (which can reproduce pretty easily if they have the right arrangement) and free energy to simulate metabolism until such a process can evolve. Everything you need to form a sort of proto-life that would be subject to natural selection. Research in the area is very difficult because we can’t build technology to properly examine modern undersea volcanoes and steam vents. For all we know, proto-life is being created as we speak and being gobbled up by the extremophile archea that live in those conditions. Which is precisely why the theists are happy to keep the conversation atmospheric.

11:20 Dr. Jonathon Well’s “here’s how I know” test tube example.

This has nothing to do with the origins of life. I can’t tell what living cell he is using, but it doesn’t matter because all modern living cells, even the simplest bacteria, are almost infinitely more advanced than the proto-life I described earlier. They are pretty well locked-in to specific forms now, so an irreversible reaction doesn’t say squat about their formation. Not to mention that his little test tube doesn’t account for dozens of factors that existed in the world at that time. Another case of smoke-and-mirrors that doesn’t address the issue at all.

11:55 “Unsuccessful alternate theories.”

We already dealt with “chance” and “chemical attraction” in previous discussions. These are not meant to be independent theories. They are observed realities that help refine the overall theories. And I’ve already explained why they are valid. As far as “biological seeding from space”: this really isn’t necessary from what we’ve observed. However, since organic matter forms naturally in the conditions of space, it is still a viable possibility.

12:50 Darwin’s Tree of life and the next few minutes.

I think modern theists take Darwin’s work more seriously than modern atheists do. Of course his tree of life, and even his overall theory, had some flaws. The guy was working 150 years ago with limited resources and no knowledge of DNA or even atoms! The fact that the next century and a half of continual, global, research using steadily advancing technology has actually supported most of his theory is really astonishing and is a testament to his observational ability. When we find the errors he made, we correct them, and yet the basic theory remains quite solid.

“Lack of transitional forms.” I noticed how they glossed over this, even though many creationists have been dogging this point for ages now. My guess is that they didn’t want to be in the position of defining what a transitional fossil really is. Because if they use even the strictest scientific definition, there are literally hundreds of perfect examples. And if they make up their own definition, they invariably end up describing things that a trained biologist wouldn’t look for. They talk about mythological chimerical fossils that genetics tells us could never happen. Ironically, when creationists are asked for an example of what would convince them that evolution is true, they examples they provide are examples of things that would actually destroy the theory of evolution in one fell swoop. And since those types of fossils aren’t found, evolution still stands.

Regarding the Cambrian explosion, take a look at this (the response starts after about 1:40): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sui4CadfhDM&feature;=channel

And oxygen levels are just one of several good explanations for punctuated equilibrium. Numerous things were happening simultaneously that created the Cambrian explosion.

The really poignant thing here is that when Dr. Wells talks about the Cambrian giving birth to all modern animal forms, he’s actually referring to the Devonian period (and even this predates almost all current families, but at least we started getting land forms and seed bearing plants), which started about 70 million after the Cambrian. I was tested on this in my entry-level college biology course, and is easily verifiable online. A man as well educated as Dr. Wells would not be likely to make such an obvious mistake. I’m pretty sure he’s lying through his teeth, probably because he makes more money selling lies in book form than he did promoting truth as a scientist.

As far as parallel evolution, Dr. Wells was given an inch and took a mile. Recent findings do indicate that there was more than one common ancestor. In fact, that discovery helps solve the riddle behind the relationship between archea, bacteria and eukaryotes. It may not have been a “tree of life” but it certainly wasn’t a “lawn of life” either. It was more like a thorn bush. And phylogeny (both morphological and genetic) proves this. When he says “As scientists, it’s not our job to force the evidence into a theory that just doesn’t fit it,” he is brazenly ignoring the fact that that is PRECISELY WHAT HE IS DOING!

“Positive evidence”

20:20 Beginnings of the universe

We already dealt with this. However, when I hear this phrase: “this literally represents the origin of the universe from nothing”, I am compelled to point out that this only refers to what we can observe. We don’t know what, if anything, was “before” the big bang or is currently outside of the observable universe. It could be “nothing,” or it could be something that we don’t see because we live in an opaque fish bowl. As I mentioned in an earlier response, some quantum physics theories now propose that we are in a temporal cycle that didn’t have a true beginning because time might not be as linear as it appears.

So that phrase is not really all that literal anymore.

23:35 Kalam cosmological argument

Since this argument has Muslim origins, it is appropriate to let a Muslim destroy it. Muhammad Iqbal said: “Logically speaking, then, the movement from the finite to the infinite as embodied in the cosmological argument is quite illegitimate; and the argument fails in toto… It is, however, obvious that a finite effect can give only a finite cause, or at most an infinite series of such causes. To finish the series at a certain point, and to elevate one member of the series to the dignity of an un-caused first cause, is to set at naught the very law of causation on which the whole argument proceeds.”

Plus this is just a watered-down version of the ontological argument, which itself is a non sequitur.

“It sounds like the first chapter of Genesis to me.” But then there is the rest of Genesis, which describes everything after the beginning up to a few thousand years ago as happening in six days, but Mr. Strobel’s evidence flatly denies that postulation. Isn’t it sacrilegious to quote mine the Bible?

“The evidence of physics.”

26:40 Universal constants, forces, etc.

Let’s go to another video, shall we? (the response starts at 0:28) :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7aGEXMyFWyg&feature;=channel

Further, life actually has more wiggle room within these constants than black holes do (and black holes appear to take up much more space than life does). If the universe was fine-tuned for anything, it would be them. And considering the temporal abnormalities surrounding singularities, it might be that black holes are indirectly responsible for everything anyway. We just got lucky that the "fine-tuning" benefited us too. Life is merely a side effect of reality.

But the real kicker in all of this; the universal constants, Earth’s constants, the Cosmological constant; is that this analysis is all a result of backwards thinking. The forces that shape the universe and the Cosmological constant were a natural result of the Big Bang. The way energy functions is a natural result of those forces. Matter is a natural result of how energy functions. Stars and planets are a natural result of the interactions between the forces and energy and matter. The various paths that life has taken are all natural results of adapting to all of this. We define life based on what is possible within our universe. If the universe was different, we may not exist, but a completely different arrangement of life might. So we don’t need to rely on multiple universes, just like we don’t need to rely on extraterrestrial organic matter to account for the origins of life on Earth.

Really cool graphics though!

“Perfect solar eclipses”

Another video, this one aimed at a different source. He talks about a different subject matter for a while, but starts addressing perfect solar eclipses after 1:46.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=istxUVBZD2s&feature;=channel

As it turns out, our atmosphere is actually a mild hindrance to observing the universe, which is why the best telescopes are placed in space. As far as being in the right part of the galaxy to observe things, that could honestly be just luck. If life has evolved in a denser part of the galaxy, their observations might be more biased towards religion than science. So, pretty much the opposite of what this video is implying.

40:20 Evidence of biological machines and irreducible complexity

When Irreducible Complexity was first trotted out, several examples were provided: the eye, the immune system, etc. You will notice that this video only discusses the cell. This is probably because every other example has been falsified on multiple occasions. Aside from different organisms having different varieties of these parts that tend to get more complex as the creature evolves, there is also the fact of exaptation, the idea that one structure may have had a different use than it does currently, which leads to simpler structures becoming part of more complex systems. The only reasons that cells are still considered fair game is that they are more complex than the other things and that we don’t have a perfect lineage of this in the fossil record. But then again, protobionts and simple unicellular life forms have a very hard time fossilizing, and fossils that small are obviously pretty hard to find anyway. However, even among living organisms (all of which are vastly more complex than the earliest life) we see a pattern of “leveling up.”

All the principles still apply, especially since the time span of getting to modern cells is measured in billions of years. Irreducible complexity has not only never been proven, most examples of it are demonstrably wrong. The idea that Darwin falsified his own theory is, simply put, absurd. We have yet to find anything that could not have formed gradually over time. Nothing at all.

Also, cellular structures look like human-made machines simply because form fits function. Many of our simpler machines were designed based on observations of natural occurrences.

It is also worth noting that, Dr. Behe is arguably the biggest reason why Judge Jones ruled against I.D. being taught in school in the Kitzmiller vs. Dover. Despite aiming the opposite way, Behe ironically proved very well that I.D. is in no way a science, and very few legitimate scientists waste their time with him anymore, but creationists love him because he sounds smart.

49:35 the “language of DNA”

Allow me to quote myself from a different argument on this site. This was in response to someone equating DNA with code, but it applies to the concept of language just as well.

“…you are mistaking the ingredients for the recipe. It's a common mistake with this topic, but a very important distinction to make.

If you take specific ingredients and cook them in a specific way for a specific amount of time you get specific results. Those results will be basically the same whether you use a recipe or not. The results aren't guided by intelligence, but the recipes used to duplicate them are.

The same goes for DNA. We assigned the labels of A,T,C,G to represent different molecules. All molecules have specific attributes and ways of affecting other molecules that are determined by the laws of chemistry and physics. This establishes a chain of events that goes through a long and winding path between DNA and expressed traits. It is complex and astonishing, but complex and astonishing occurrences are not proof of intelligence. Our ability to make sense of it is. We were the ones who made the recipe, we put the word "code" in genetic code.

Now let's say that a geneticist who happens to be adept at cryptography discovered that a specific strand of DNA represented a mathematical equation that predicted how many hours that the person who bore the code would live. And after testing numerous people, they all died exactly when the code predicted they would, regardless of it was natural causes, murder or what-have-you. Then the ingredients would be the recipe. That would be proof of intelligent design. I know the standards sound high, but an extraordinary claim requires extraordinary evidence. And in a world where all observable things have limits, a being that has no limits is as extraordinary as it gets.”

As far as the ink and paper comparison, a professional microbiologist friend of mine had this to say on the topic when we had an online discussion a few months ago: “DNA isn't at all like the ink on a news paper ...for one more reason; you can put the news paper away and rest asure it won't multiply, generating offspring that uses alternate spelling, the alternate spelling offspring will not exhibit any adaptive advantages or disadvantages, etc... And the next day paper, what is it? Spontaneous generation?”

53:20 Odds of first life.

Ah, here we are talking about odds again. To get an idea why the odds of first life are almost always wrong, check out this page.

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/addendaB.html

Lots of examples here, but just reading two or three should give you the idea.

This video looked nice, but all it offered were out-of-date concepts that have been destroyed repeatedly, some logical fallacies and even a few lies. This is NOT a very good science video, and the money used to produce it could have been better spent donating to the needy.

'Darwin disproved his own theory' - how? when?

What you're describing is a theory known as 'irreducible complexity', and, as of yet, no one has managed has provided a an irrefutable example of it.

"How is this a rebuttal?"

Okay i'll explain in simpler words for you.

first you say

"Your logic of the origin of the universe is that nothing created something. Which we know by various laws of science is not the case for instance the law of cause and effect (all causes trace back to a first cause)."

The you say

"God has no creator, He is eternal. You can't apply the natural sciences to the supernatural."

That is a logical fallacy of self exclusion, it is almost childish that you even made that fallacy.

"Can you prove He doesn't exist? Didn't think so."

I have presented you with logical arguments, yet you refuse to even consider them and just tell me stories from a book, which has been conveniently re-written multiple times, meanings of things have changed multiple times. I mean seriously i wonder if you live in a bubble or something. At this point im actually feeling bad for you, for you don't know what it is like to experience freedom.

"You have yet to make an intelligent remark."

just telling you, you aren't making any real points, while my cuzin has used mathematics and studies in logic to make some plausible arguments.

"So are you denying the historical fact of the crimes these regimes committed? If so you might want monitor what you say for fear of confirming your lack of brain power to function as a sea sponge."

Nope i am not denying it, did you seem me say "oh that didn't happen??".

"The books were written by the next generation and secretaries of the Apostles. And He is risen not dead, you will have to find His body to prove otherwise."

This is exactly why i feel like you have the IQ of a peanut, There is no body that doesn't mean he is risen you fool, it means he was never there to begin with. And its just a fairy tale.

"How is this a rebuttal with no statement to contradict me? Maybe you should just limit yourself to Twitter, since you are speaking from opinion not verifiable statements."

Again, i already proved the bible is a fairytale, but you just can't accept it. Just because over 2 billion people read it doesn't make it true. You see any religion based on harry potter?

"When did we speak of this? You are bringing up the actions of men, not the word of God."

Again, you fail to understand simple things im implying. A God should stop these actions, a God should protect the victims. And not worry about the "sin" because in the end you say he loves everyone, but he lets them go through these brutal events and experience so much suffering and for what? to test there faith? If that is the case then God can easily be confused with the Devil.

"Is that why you don't wear a shirt, and shave your chest? I could see why you would reject such an obvious homosexual religion."

I don't see why this remark is needed but hey w/e helps you feel secure about your religion. And what i do and don't do with my body is only my concern.

"No, by definition you have to deny God to be an atheist. So therefore you would deny any evidence of His existence. That is not reasonable."

Lol clearly you don't understand atheists. We deny God because we have yet to see any evidence of his/her existence. And Again i feel like a broken record and i don't know why you can't get this through your head but, BIBLE IS NOT A SOURCE THATS PROVES ANYTHING, IT CAN'T BE USED TO SUPPORT ANY ARGUMENT. IT IS MERELY A STORY BOOK.

"Alone a sperm has no potential for life. I already said this to you." That was a typo sperm & egg* have the probability to meet

"Those cells have the ability to be a human life. When conception occurs you must give life a chance. It is murder to cease that life."

It is not a life until it can process some thought, can be aware of it's surroundings, or at least until it has the shape similar to a human From that point i agree its murder, But before that it is nothing but a blob of cells.

"You have not supported any of your conjecture. You are merely stating your opinion.

If sperm could make a life on it's own, then you would have babies crawling all over you chin."

SEE above

ALSO I find it very interesting that you didn't even acknowladge my source that i provided i will paste it again

http://www.google.com/search?q=Religious+wats&btnG;=Google+Search&hl;=en#q=Religious+wars&hl;=en&prmd;=ivnsub&tbs;=tl:1&tbo;=u&ei;=5JgtTZylPI-t8AaHm8XNCQ&sa;=X&oi;=timeline_result&ct;=title&resnum;=14&ved;=0CJQBEOcCMA0&fp;=a20cfd04ba3c5cf9

I hope your eyes don't miss it. but again you seem like you are blinded so lets see what happens.

EDIT-

I see that link is directing to the search result but not the link im trying to jump at, so im gonna write down this process

Search on google -> "Religious Wars"

Scroll down and you will see, "Timeline results of religious wars" that has 2000 years of history of religious wars.

EDIT

"Is a 58 percent chance that an atheist leader will murder a noticeable percentage of the population over which he rules sufficient evidence that atheism does, in fact, provide a systematic influence to do bad things? If that is not deemed to be conclusive, how about the fact that the average atheist crime against humanity is 18.3 million percent worse than the very worst depredation committed by Christians, even though atheists have had less than one-twentieth the number of opportunities with which to commit them. If one considers the statistically significant size of the historical atheist set and contrasts it with the fact that not one in a thousand religious leaders have committed similarly large-scale atrocities, it is impossible to conclude otherwise, even if we do not yet understand exactly why this should be the case. Once might be an accident, even twice could be coincidence, but fifty-two incidents in ninety years reeks of causation!""

That sir is a groundless statement, yes Stalin murdered. But thats the only guy you in the history who was an atheist and a ruler who murdered.

Rest Are Part of a religion and murdered in the name of a religion, many including your religion and many other religions.

How is this not knowable? We have the word of God, and countless eyewitness testimonies in the Bible. You may not believe what they say, but eyewitness testimony carries a lot of weight in a court of law.

No, you don't have any eyewitness testimony. You have a book, that not a word of which was written until about a hundred years after any potential eyewitness would have passed away.

That's like saying Superman exists because I read Lois Lane's eyewitness testimony.

You contradict yourself now. You say we are crazy for believing in what we do not know. Then you call it a "silly fairytale" implying you have methods to prove or disprove it. You ask how we can prove it, yet you have no testable method to disprove it. Thank you for proving you're just as dumb as you look.

This is why Christians today can only recruit from prisons and rehab centers, otherwise one needs to be indoctrinated to buy into the silliness.

Claiming something with no evidence puts the burden of proof on the one making the claim. "Fairytale" is fitting because I can say "Peter Pan exists" then simply claim that since you cannot prove he does not, I am right and you are wrong.

Yet you fail to see how fitting the analogy is, because you are heavily absorbed in your belief system. How do you expect to talk to anyone who does not believe as you do, if you are incapable of even understanding why believing something based on a fantastical book written over a thousand years ago, seems quite silly?

What the hell happened to my replies?

Anyway. You have no proof of god. I don't believe he exists. One would think an all encompassing being would leave some trace of his own existence somewhere.

For example, a black hole. Never seen it, no human in a hundred lifetimes from now will be able to see one first hand, yet we know they exist in space. So then, something so much bigger and more powerful should have some residual evidence of existence - logical, mathmatical, or some other form. There should be something.

Hence, while I cannot prove a negative and you certainly cannot provide your own proof of this mythical being's existance, I still feel I have the stronger arguement.

Everything must have been carefully thought out. It could not have just happened, as that is too much of a coincidence.

We should like to know by what scale you measure the acceptability of a coincidence. One observes that events frequently coincide; a fact which, combined with the timescale involved, renders the notion that a certain number of coinciding events is to be deemed unacceptable nonsensical.

Not only are there countless chances which all must have fallen correctly for life to have come to be by mere chance, these countless chances must have happened in order.

It is estimated that the Milky Way galaxy contains 100 billion stars. We do not presume to know how many planets such a number may entail, but we observe that as Sol has 8 satellites dubbed planets (we mourn the loss of Pluto, as it messes up our rhyme My very easy method just speeds up naming planets), it may be in excess of 800 billion. We submit that the odds of an improbable event occurring during at least one of 800 billion attempts are higher than those of it not occurring.

It's like the whole monkeys on typewriters thing. Supposing that the monkey's would even hit the keys (which they don't. They ignore the typewriters, one even pooped on it's typewriter) it would still be impossible. Because, yeah, they're infinite and all that, but who's to say that they won't all do the same thing infinitely? There's no rule that they can't try the same thing twice.

Given infinite variations, your theory suggests that at least one one monkey will write "The funeral baked meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables." repeatedly; an observation which defeats what I presume to be the purpose of your post.

Now, that only gets the number of letters, and says nothing of order. The above chance is repeated with every single button-press of the monkey, and every time the monkey hits a single key out of order, it has to start over.

But with infinite variations, it is mathematically impossibly for the probability not to be raised to 1:

then how much more would they be against coincidence creating life out of nothing?

We submit that the odds of an omnipotent being emerging from oblivion (and as it is presumed to have created matter, space and time) into oblivion, are lesser still. It violates the principle that Energy can neither be created nor destroyed, it can merely change from one form to another.

If you wish to create a credible, scientific argument for the existence of God, you must do so within established scientific principles; shouting MAGIC does not help your case.

Oh, and evolution isn't separate from creation. Evolution is part of creation.

We submit that as biblical humans cohabited with the first life to stalk the Earth, the theory of evolution is not compatible with the theory of creation, as it is observed that life has existed on Earth for far longer than humans.

'Isn't what you call the Moral Law simply our herd instinct and hasn't it been developed just like all our other instincts?' Now I do not deny that we may have a herd instinct: but that is not what I mean by the Moral Law. We all know what it feels like to be prompted by instinct - by mother love, or sexual instinct, or the instinct for food. It means you feel a strong want or desire to act in a certain way. And, of course, we sometimes do feel just that sort of desire to help another person: and no doubt that desire is due to herd instinct. But feeling a desire to help is quite different from feeling you ought to help whether you want to or not. Supposing you hear a cry for help from a man in danger. You will probably feel two desires - one a desire to help (due to your herd instinct), the other a desire to keep out of danger (due to your instinct for self-preservation). But you will find inside you, in addition to these two impulses, a third thing which tells you that you ought to follow the impulse to help, ans suppress the impulse to run away. Now this thing that judges between two instincts, that decides which should be encouraged, cannot itself be either of them.

Action is determined by which impulse is strongest. There is no need to posit a "third thing".

He goes on to talk about weaker and stronger instincts. It would be assumed that stronger instinct would win, but the Moral Law often sides with the weaker instinct.

...OR

You are only taking short term consequences into consideration. Often you will find that the moral action nearly always has long term benefits.

One might say that maternal instinct is always good. but haven't you heard of over-protective mothers? They love their children so much that the children hate it, and negative effects result.

Maternal instinct, isn't an instinct at all. It is learned, and thus not an instinct. Maternal instinct consists of picking up on subtleties in a child's behavior, this is something that is learned by a primary caretaker, even fathers can learn this.

About God helping those who help themselves, it's fairly easy to explain.

I'd agree. It's a coping mechanism to quell the cognitive dissonance inherent in believing in a loving, caring deity in a world where so much suffering exists. It's a tool to help explain why God apparently doesn't help so many who desperately need it and nothing more.

Also, many philosophers aren't religious, and many scientists are.

GOOD scientists learn to separate their religious views (if they have them) from their scientific views.

Disbelief in God and immortality among NAS biological scientists was 65.2% and 69.0%, respectively, and among NAS physical scientists it was 79.0% and 76.3%. Most of the rest were agnostics on both issues, with few believers. The highest percentage of belief was found among NAS mathematicians (14.3% in God, 15.0% in immortality). Biological scientists had the lowest rate of belief (5.5% in God, 7.1% in immortality), with physicists and astronomers slightly higher (7.5% in God, 7.5% in immortality).

About Mother Theresa and rich folk, this is also fairly simple. It is not about an heir of saintliness. It is what is given in relation to the giver. Yeah, Bill Gates may have helped more people, but Mother Theresa still gave more, regardless of numbers.

Look at it this way. There's a billionaire and someone who's working at McDonald's for a living. The billionaire donates a million dollars to the poor, but still has a few billion left for himself.

Warren Buffet has recently pledged 99% of his wealth for a charity donation, and is asking other billionaire's to pledge up to 50% of theirs. I suppose by this standard, he is more saintly than mother Theresa.

Some things to note about Mother Theresa:

"MT was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction. And she was a friend to the worst of the rich, taking misappropriated money from the atrocious Duvalier family in Haiti (whose rule she praised in return) and from Charles Keating of the Lincoln Savings and Loan. Where did that money, and all the other donations, go? The primitive hospice in Calcutta was as run down when she died as it always had been—she preferred California clinics when she got sick herself—and her order always refused to publish any audit. But we have her own claim that she opened 500 convents in more than a hundred countries, all bearing the name of her own order. Excuse me, but this is modesty and humility?"

http://www.slate.com/id/2090083/

C. S. Lewis was once an atheist. Sean Forrest has been a part of just about every faith there is in his search for the truth, and has come to believe that Catholicism is the truth, and now preaches it.

I was once christian. Whose word should take precedence?

St. Paul originally captured and killed Christians in the horrible ways they did back then, but converted so fully that he is now a saint

I find it interesting that you take pride in the fact that a mass murderer is declared a saint.

God always answers prayers, just not always in the way we expect.

You mean to say God answers prayers in a way consistent with chance and probability. He fixes problems, only those which can be resolved by natural means. Which to me is indicative of his non-involvement.

Pray for something which is impossible by natural means, and I guarantee it will not be answered.

I'm afraid that life existing "somewhere" is not enough. It must exist in a place that supports it.

Life being "supported" is a prerequisite of "life existing". If life exists it must necessarily follow that life is supported. My question is this: Why do you assume that Earth is the only planet that could or is supporting life?

The position that you are arguing against, life forming not as a function of design but from as function of chance, does not have the restraint (that your belief has) that Earth is the only planet that could support life.

God....who created him/her...........If to be human is 2 error..then GOD is fallabile..Gods were created to control human civialization/coupling... the need to explain or divine the meaing of life.......your god .....got it wrong

"Mutations are the loss of information"

no.

mutations are the result of imperfect DNA copying, resulting in genetic variation

"a : a relatively permanent change in hereditary material involving either a physical change in chromosome relations or a biochemical change in the codons that make up genes; also : the process of producing a mutation"

from merriam webster

note how it says 'change'. not 'downgrade'

it seems the only time you forget to quote the dictionary is when it disagrees with you...

and it is this, among other, mechanisms of genetic diversification that lead to survival of the fittest, pressuring organisms to change over time in the process known as evolution.

"Then you have Nicholas Steno who rendered a "drawing" of an extant shark"

you are using a 17th century scientist to prove your point?

talk about out-dated evidence

and the "holes in a shell"

is called evidence of interaction

which is used after the discovery of more substantial fossils

like this

http://images.suite101.com/897376_com_102_0803.jpg

"Here I will find evidence for you. This is an article about a fossilized "flying insect" which had no wings"

how does this prove that there were flying animals before land animals?

and I actually believe that there is significant evidence for a massive flood- I did not question that aspect.

"There are too many unknowns here"

actually, the orientation of the zircon molecules in uranium lead dating will give away any important disturbance, so when they are disturbed, it is visible.

http://geology.about.com/od/geotime_dating/a/uraniumlead.htm

" in case of the discovery of a mermaid-like chimeric creature, that even more pronounced convergence of modular units can occur than previously supposed?"

So, you are basing an argument off of theoretical evidence?

This is just ridiculous

Here is a link to the tree of life. It shows the relation between a mind-boggling number of species

the fact that no chimeric creature has been found suggests that fish and homo sapiens diverged very early on: were we to find a mermaid, it means that fish and homo sapiens diverged later on.

http://itol.embl.de/itol.cgi

"the existence of less-extreme chimeric creatures, notably ‘fossil whales’, argues strongly against a common evolutionary ancestry of living things."

That is not how divergence works.

as you go up the evolutionary ladder, species get more and more different from each other.

Using the example of people and fish: you will not find a mermaid fossil because every species did not spontaneously diverge from each other.

People came from apes who came from lemurs who came from rodents who came from primitive mammalia who came from reptilians who came from amphibians who came from fish.

land-whales, which your article suggests would be ridiculous, is really the process by which a normal land mammal slowly, over time, became aquatic.

it did not, as your article suggests, a chimera.

the other interesting aspect your article stated was that evolution was not in a consistently whale-based direction.

I should find this obvious to any person who understands evolution.

there is no end goal for evolution: there is an evolutionary pressure to change.

these changes are random, and any direction they took would be because of these pressures to survive.

each 'step' of evolution is its own species, not some half-way mark to becoming a whale.

http://darwiniana.org/whale1.gif

No need for a chimera mermaid to explain the divergence directly between a human and a fish.

and here is an article discussing LUCA, the last universal common ancestor: whose genome has been theorized.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18508609

Yes, but I was addressing your argument that the earth must have been "designed" to support life because of certain life-forms fit their natural habitat so perfectly.

Regarding the chance of life starting at all, I stated earlier that the chance of life starting 'somewhere' actually isn't that improbable because of the sheer number of planets. We also know that at one time earth wasn't so hospitable to life. Early in Earth's history it was a violent and unstable planet, it would not support the life that is on it today.

The Bible does not require blind faith at all.

Yes it does, have you ever seen God? No. Therefore you worship without any verifiable proof, Blind Faith.

Biblical faith is not “blind”—it’s supported by good science.

As opposed to bad science is it? The type that shows a lot of the Bible to be lies.

The Bible teaches both that there are laws of nature (“ordinances of heaven and Earth“—Jeremiah 33:25) and that miracles happen, such as the resurrection of Christ.

Can one miracle be proven, no, do we know that Jesus rose from the dead, no. All we have to go on is the Bible and that is not proof.

The idea that science goes against the Bible is therefore not a biblical concept. So we can accept the Bible on faith and a world where physical laws are a constant."

You have to accept the bible on faith, you have no other choice.

What evidence is there of miracles, science does mean knowledge, but it is also an academic discipline that deals with answering question through the scientific method, without something to test the scientific method can not be applied. Therefore miracles cannot be accepted scientifically.

Since the Bible has demonstrated itself to be accurate time and time again, we have knowledge from history that miracles have indeed occurred.

Like Noah's flood, right? The Bible is not historical fact it is at best the opinions of men who were ahead of their time. This is not evidence of miracles.

However, the miracles in Scripture are fully compatible with true science."

How exactly?

So therefore they justify their immoral acts like abortion (murder of unborn child), drugs, stealing, murder, rape. All of these things would be just fine for an atheist to do. Because he has no rules. Our ethical principles as a society derive from religious doctrine.

Idiotic. Are all atheists indiscriminate rapists, murderers, drug dealers, and thieves? Are most of them all of these things? Are most of them any of these things, to a more extreme degree than the average religion person? Clearly not. In fact, there is a disproportionately low number of atheists in prison, and countries with more nonbelievers tend to have lower crime rates. Even if it is not a direct cause-effect, you still have your work cut out for you providing any data for this absurd claim.

http://www.atheismresource.com/2010/atheist-dont-commit-as-much-crime-as-the-religious-do

Whether or not you believe that humans evolved, it is a fact that we have always been communal creatures. In order to survive in a community, its members have to develop a code of conduct that facilitates cooperation and group living. Usually, these revolve around not fucking with other peoples' shit. We see sets of morals in every single civilization throughout history, regardless of what God or gods they worship or if they worship a god at all. We also see rudimentary morals in community living animals like chimpanzees, again, mostly revolving around it being uncool to randomly kill your groupmates. Community members who are unable or unwilling to obey basic codes of conduct are not well integrated into the group; they do not reap the benefits of cooperative living, making them far less likely to survive and pass on their uncooperative genes, while their well-behaved relatives do get to do so.

God or fear of punishment are not factors behind the development of morals, or the adherence to them. They stem from the simple facts that we are empathetic creatures, and there are usually negative consequences to treating other people badly.

If the only thing keeping you from murdering and raping people is the fact that God said it's wrong and you'll be punished if you do it, then you have a problem. Nonbelievers who don't murder and rape don't abstain from it out of fear or because Daddy said so; they abstain from it because they have a modicum of compassion for fellow humans and are capable of placing themselves in someone else's situation. For the record, most believers are moral for the same reasons, compassion and empathy, so I am not sure why anyone would want to pretend it was due to an external force.

It's not clever its the English definitions of the words.

No, it is not clever- that was sarcasm. My point was that words can be manipulated.

You're a person.

People can be stupid.

You're a stupid person.

Wow, that is fun.

The difference here is mine served a purpose, and it was relevant to the discussion.

And yet my entire point was that you utilized a logical fallacy.

allow me to line up both logical fallacies so you can make an attempt to distinguish the two

Atheists believe there is no G-d

Staying still is moving nowhere

Religion is a belief in something

transportation is moving

therefore, atheism is a religion- because they believe there is no G-d

therefore, staying still is transportation- because they move to no new location

if your logic was sound, then mine was too.

and since I proved that G-d is nothing more than a bowl of pasta, we cannot both be true

it would seem that this technique of juggling definitions is nothing more than a logical fallacy, not a logical deduction.

I do, however, appreciate that instead of making a case for the line of logic to be valid, you simply [tried to] insult me.

My point, clean and simple, is that when you overextend definitions, you can prove anything to be true or false.

Red is a color

blue is a color

red is blue.

red is light at a wavelength of 630–740nm

blue is light at a wavelength of 440-490nm

therefore red is not blue

the statement "red is blue" is true

the statement "red is not blue" is true

the opposite of "red is blue" is "red is not blue"

the opposite of true is false

therefore true is false.

I don't think you fully understand what he is trying to say, Atheism is opposite of what religion is.

Religion

-Strict rules

-Strict traditions

-holy book for morality

-limitations on what you can and can't do (so much for free will)

-Must follow blindly without questioning

-Followers are controlled with fear of eternal punishment, or punishment of some sort for thinking freely

Atheism

-No Rules

-You Make your own traditions, up to you.

-Common sense and basic reasoning skills for morality.

-Do w/e you want

-Questioning is encouraged.

-Atheism uses nothing to control anything, simply uses logic to help people understand the reality.

That is what it is to me at least, I certainly don't speak for the atheist population.

"This is by 'your' definition of innocent. In the Bible innocent, is being without sin.

Nitpicking. Not only is this the functioning definition of 'innocent' in the real world, my point is completely unchanged if you remove the word altogether. Either God is responsible for everything, or nothing. Not just the good things.

On a side note, what about infants who die of terminal diseases before they have had time to sin?

It was the sin of man that cursed the world. God created and said it was "very good". We introduced the bad, and in so doing subjected ourselves to disease, suffering, and death.

God planned for this, and invented the concept of sin when he set the conditions for it. Humans could not have sinned before sin existed.

For you to blame God for the evil things of this world, is like blaming your mother for you misbehaving.

If my mother had created my environment and all the forces that operate it, and had planned out every detail of my life, then of course she would be responsible for my behavior, whether it was good or bad. It goes back to the analogy of the rat in a cage, which I notice you completely ommitted. There is free will, but our impulses and personalities do not spring from nothing. Minds are moldable, and what molds them is a combination of environment and genetics, both of which God is completely responsible for.

It is a belief plain and simple. You have no testable way to prove that God exists or He doesn't. Therefore you believe (or have 'faith') that He does not exist.

Christians have the same amount of evidence off of which to base a conclusion; none. The obvious difference is that atheists are not the ones making a claim; religious people are. Atheists simply choose not to accept the claim.

How much faith do you need to assert that Spiderman is not actually a real person?

Hey, look, I can paste definitions, too!

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/religion (atheism does not fit any of these numerous definitions)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheism ("Atheism, in a broad sense, is the rejection of belief in the existence of deities.")

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/mathew/sn-definitions.html ("Disbelief in, or denial of, the existence of a god.")

I am not trying to claim that atheism is any more or less verifiable than theism. I am just stating the obvious fact that a lack of religion is not just another type of religion. It does not make theism inferior to atheism if atheism is not a religion. Really, it doesn't.

Interestingly, I went to a couple of your sources and noticed that you declined to include alternate definitions that defined atheism as disbelief rather than belief. What stake do you have in convincing yourself that atheism, by definition the absence of theism, is a religion?

It is ironic that you are quoting from the dictionary, while earlier making special exceptions for the Bible when it comes to the definition of words. Apparently dictionary definitions only apply when they are convenient for you.

Finally, there are some significant parts of my argument that you ignored, particularly the first paragraph and the last. Do you not have responses? I am particularly curious about your answer to my point about atheism being a religion necessitating the creation of infinite religions based on the lack of belief in a particular entity, event, concept, and so on.

if god was there people would be living for thousands and millions of years and innocent people would never be the prey of death.

Don't blame God for the acts of men.

An experimenter puts a rat in a box with a piece of food. Whenever the rat gets near the food, the experimenter shocks the rat. After repeated exposures, the rat no longer tries to get the food; in fact, it is afraid of it, and strenuously avoids it. The experimenter says, "Don't blame me for the rat being afraid of the food. He has free will." Does this sound reasonable?

Now, pretend the experimenter is responsible for designing not just the box but the rat itself, all the way down to the most intricate functions of its brain. The experimenter knew that the rat would be hungry, because he created the rat to get hungry, and it knew exactly what effects the shocks would have, because he designed the rat's brain and nervous system. Do you see the comparison? Granted, the real world is far more complex, but in essence, there is no difference between humans and God, and the experimenter and the rat. Assuming Christianity is correct, God created us, and he created every single variable capable of influencing our thoughts and development from the moment of our conception. He had complete knowledge of every effect that each of his actions would have, even thousands and thousands of years from the moment he created everything. When he created the world in the way he did, and created people the way he did, he essentially set the world on a trajectory which it has no choice but to follow.

To address the specific example of cancer, God created cancer and God instilled in humans the suspectibility to it. The trajectory on which he set the world ensured that certain people would be in situations that would give them cancer, and because he is all-knowing, he knew exactly who each and every one of these people would be. He didn't descend from the heavens and give them an injection of cancerous cells or whatever, but if he is the all-powerful and all-knowing creator, then he is most definitely responsible for any and everything that happens to his creation, good or bad. People can't just shrug their shoulders when shitty things happen to innocent people and say it's not God's fault, especially if they try to give him any credit for the good things.

Atheism is a religion as well. Refer to definitions 3 and 4 for the application. An Atheist "believes" that God doesn't exist. You have no way to prove or disprove him, you act on faith that there is no God in the universe.

No, it isn't. Atheism is the rejection of your claim of a deity, and that's all. The very definition of religion that you cited should be enough information to discern that atheism is not a religion, but a lack of one. There is no service, worship, dogma, code of conduct, rituals, leaders, or required set of beliefs. If it wasn't for the persistent tendency of Christians to cling to semantics in order to 'prove' that atheism is a religion (to what end, I cannot imagine) then I would think the dictionary definition of atheism is fine. But as it is, it would be more accurately described as 'the lack of belief in God' rather than 'the belief that there is no God'.

If atheism is a religion, then the lack of belief in anything else is also a religion. As there are infinite things not to believe in, then there are infinite religions, and we would all belong to the vast majority of them. If there are infinite religions and we all belong to most of them, then don't you think that essentially cheapens religion into a meaningless concept?

"That is not what I am saying. The freewill applies to all people believers or not. God has set forth his law, it is up to the individual to obey them. God constantly tests our faith and love, we must not give up faith because of worldly pains."

So, to test our faith he decides to give 9/11 rescuers cancer and see how they hold up? He decides that a kid will be molested by a priest to test that kid's faith? he decides that a loved one will die a tragic death to test our faith?

I am sorry we are talking about a god or a insecure butthole.

"God punishes the sins of the father to the third generation. By this we are all born into sin. Plus, you can't tell me you have never broken a commandment. Whether you believe in God or not, He still expects you to follow his law."

What makes him different form the devil again?

And sir I am an Atheist, which means i have decided not to be an idiot and follow any religion.

"This is not true at all. He instilled in us the conscience to know what is right and what is wicked. But our minds are not that of a robot, we have free thought to choose what we want to do. The essence of true love is that of the choice to love or not. God gives us the choice to follow him or not. This shouldn't be that hard of a concept to understand."

LOL so you either follow him or burn in hell forever, thats not really much of a choice. One loving god you got there.

"You can't blame God for the evil ways of man. For God's law is perfect and Holy. It is our own selfish pursuits that lead to the wickedness of this world. You talk of the planes crashing into the towers as the work of God. But this is not, for it is the work of those who worship a false god and do evil. The great reward is eternal, the punishment is death and seperation from God. Those who follow God in life will be rewarded in Heaven for eternity. Those who do not follow him will live in this world, but will be dead in the next forever."

what makes you believe your god is any more true than another god?

"You are wrong there. The Bible is the utmost authority of the world through God's law."

you actually believ a ancint book, which is claimed to be the word of god, translated back and forth to many languages, and sold is not a scam but a credible source?

Sir you are a fool, and a ignorant pinhead.

You clearly don't understand the difference between debate and making groundless statements.

"I thought it was obvious I am quoting the Bible. And I did cite the book and chapter."

Again Bible is nothing more than a story book to me.

On a dfferent note, it seems you have been brainwashed. You clearly won't even look at the more than reasonable evidence that god doesn't exist, but would rather believe word of mouth over factual evidence. You believe that all religions but your are false.

That faith is synonyms with being naive.

If anything your behavior further displays just how dangerous religion can be, and how it can trap the human mind and make the person irrational. I truly hope you can gain some basic reasoning skills one day and realize that you are wrong.

"God gave us freewill to follow him, or not to follow him. The person who is raping or murdering is choosing to sin. Unfortunately no person is truly innocent when we are all sinners."

So let me get this straight, a child is about to get raped, or fellow human being is about to be attacked with a knife. You are saying since we are all sinners it is okay to let it happen? That even though "God" could do something to stop this from happening he says "No No its free will and that person has sinned so i shouldn't save him"

"Romans 5:12 "Therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned"" Everyone is a sinner? This is god we are talking about not just a Christian god. And everyone is a sinner is more of a opinion than a fact.

but i will give you a more real world example. to this

"7 He watches over those who do what is right. He puts them on thrones as if they were kings. He honors them forever."

so the rescue workers from 9/11 were awarded by god with cancer, which for many lead to a painful and brutal death. yeah they were kings alright in their beds where they could barely move from, and they totally felt loved by god when they were puking their guts out while attached to 15 tubes yeah one hell of a throne they got.

"6 He doesn’t keep alive those who are evil. Instead, he gives suffering people their rights.

7 He watches over those who do what is right. He puts them on thrones as if they were kings. He honors them forever.

8 But some people are held by chains. They are tied up with painful ropes.

9 God tells them what they’ve done. He tells them they’ve become proud and sinned against him.

10 He makes them listen when he corrects them. He commands them to turn away from the evil things they’ve done.

11 If they obey him and serve him, they’ll enjoy a long and happy life. Things will go well with them.

12 But if they don’t listen to him, they’ll be killed with swords. They’ll die because they didn’t want to know anything about him.

13 Those whose hearts are ungodly are always angry. Even when God puts them in chains, they don’t cry out for help.

14 They die while they are still young. They die among the male prostitutes at the temples.

15 But God saves suffering people while they are suffering. He speaks to them while they are hurting.""

this is not a god this is a narcissistic, conceited pin head(can use much harsher words to describe him)

And You contradict yourself

First you say

"God is mighty, but he doesn’t hate people. He’s mighty, and he knows exactly what he’s going to do"

then you say

"God tells them what they’ve done. He tells them they’ve become proud and sinned against him.

10 He makes them listen when he corrects them. He commands them to turn away from the evil things they’ve done."

that does not sound like someone who doesn't hate people. If he gave people free will any behaviour should be accepted and morally right correct? but it is not.

therefore, god is not true

PLEASE, if you want to dispute and present an argument don't forget to site your source.

and no holy book is a credible or scholarly source so please don't refer to them as if they are.

That's not necessarily the case. Science is simply knowledge.

No, science is a process. It is a search for knowledge using a specific method.

When we get into observing and testing we do this by the scientific method. This typically rests in the realm of naturalism. Just because an event is supernatural doesn't mean it can't exist in science, that just means it doesn't apply to scientific method or naturalism.

If it hasn't or can't be subjected to the scientific method, then it's not science. The supernatural cannot be subjected to scientific inquiry, because if there truly were an unseen intelligence causing a observable effect, these result wouldn't be consistent nor measurable. Nor would we be able to drawn any correlation betwixt the two.

The problem I have is when people say the Bible contradicts science

Why is that?

Especially seeing how scientific method is only used toward naturalism.

Science tests the natural, because this is the only thing we know how to measure.

Can it not be said that an eyewitness is an observer?

I suppose, but not the kind that is useful in science. If an observation cannot be consistently reproduced and tested then it cannot be used in any scientific investigation. It's not simply enough that somebody saw something.

Perhaps the experimentation (or repeatable processes) could be the numerous miracles in the Bible that were observed

And how do you intend to do that?

A science of supernatural occurrences can still be science

No it can't. For the reasons that I've already mentioned.

We see miraculous occurrences in Greek and Roman mythology, but none of those ideas are viewed as truth by anyone today.

So your argument is that it must be true because lots of people believe it?

The odds: Although I am pretty sure most statisticians would argue with your assessment, it occurs to me that I can work within the parameters that you are using. What if the odds aren't actually that low to begin with?

1. The accuracy of any given statistic is largely based on the methodology used to derive it. The application of the methodology is informed by our knowledge of the processes involved. As example: if you took a statistician who doesn't know anything about chemistry, and asked him/her to calculate the odds of a given group of atoms forming a specific bond, they would probably use a method that involves random shuffling. This is generally relatively simple math, and is used in many forms of statistical analysis. However, if you present the same problem to a statistician who does know the ins and outs of chemistry, they would take a totally different approach. This is because the observed laws of chemistry work in tandem to create preferences for the formation and behavior of molecules. Chemical mixing is actually not usually very random at all, so assuming random mixing would unnecessarily inflate the improbability of getting the desired reaction. Most of the time, the final estimate of probability would be much higher using the appropriate methodology than the random shuffling approach would indicate.

Also, the odds logically decrease when we assume limiting factors. But when we learn more about the universe around us, we sometimes end up having to remove certain limiting factors. For instance, just a few short months ago, it was assumed that all life used phosphorous in cellular respiration. So ready supplies of phosphorous were one of the limiting factors in searching for life. Now we know that at least one variety of bacteria can use arsenic instead. Suddenly, life's observed versatility increases, so the chances of finding life increase too. Likewise, we now know that life could potentially use amino acids outside of the main 20 that all Earth life uses.

2. The Big Bang. If the big bang theory is true (and it is backed by lots of evidence, as well as laws of physics that make it virtually impossible for it to happen in any way other than what the theory proposes. If God did create the universe, the big bang is the tool He used to do it.) than all of possibility starts right there. All matter and energy. Time. The forces that guide the laws of physics. And furthermore, all of that stuff was packed into a tiny little area that appears to have been expanding ever since. As the universe expanded, its average temperature cooled. As it did so hydrogen and helium were formed. After hydrogen and helium were formed, the possibility of stars emerged. And in those conditions, the first stars basically had to form, at least at certain locations. All of the heavier elements were born in the cores of stars, and various means of distribution occurred to spread them around in the immediate vicinity, creating more clouds of gas, which in turn created the possibility for more stars. All of this possibility was once clustered together, but individual pockets of increased potential continue to be pushed away from each other as the universe expands. So if you need a source for everything that has happened, there you go. In the smaller, more energetically active universe, quite a few things were capable of occurring because so many things were going on in close proximity. On the other hand, certain parts of reality had more activity/possibility than others, and these parts sort of "took the ball and ran with it" as they expanded away from each other. Many of these pockets of possibility took the form of stars and attendant planetary systems, which is why I assert that that you do need take into account the number of stars when addressing the odds of life: each one came from the first collection of possibility, but as they get further away from each other they each take different "evolutionary" paths, effectively increasing the variety of things that can happen in the universe.

You might be asking what the odds of the Big Bang happening in first place are. But since we don't know what was "before" or "outside", we have no basis of comparison, so no methodology for compiling those odds. Its kind of like asking what are the odds of God existing. How could we possibly measure that?

I, for one, am glad you don't take the Bible literally. Those people can get really annoying and illogical.

I apologize for ignoring your examples, it was not intentional. I got sidetracked talking about odds, plus you provided so many that dealing with them one on one would be very time consuming. And I won't deal with them at this point for that reason. If you provide keywords for some specific ones, I will gladly deal with them. The same goes for out of source citations. If you link to a source that supports your stance I will read it. But I don't relish the idea of rummaging through your various posts and cherry picking the ones most relevant to this discussion. If you think they are good points but don't want to re-type them, you can cut and paste them here and I will gladly deal with them directly. And just so you know, I added the C.S. Lewis book you mentioned to my library list, but I can't guarantee that I will get to it anytime soon.

"I must disagree with you view of this debate."

I must disagree with yours. I am providing an opposing viewpoint and responding accordingly. You are saying God definitely exists, I am saying that we don't know that. I don't have to be on the exact opposite end of the spectrum to disagree with you. My position in this debate is made clear by my words, not what the tag says. You will note that I have made no original posts in this particular topic, I have simply been responding to others. The tag just puts me in the "no, god is not true" category because I started out disputing someone who was tagged as "yes, god is true." Although I could create a new tag, I don't think that is appropriate in this specific instance, because it was published as two-sided debate. If this was a "popularity contest" style debate, I would be more willing to add a new tag.

"You appear to believe that it is a position of neutrality to not believe in God. This is not the case..."

What about agnostics?

And I wouldn't say you "suck at debating," but I do think you could be better. But so could I. I don't know about you, but that is one of the reasons I joined this site in the first place. To get practice. And I wouldn't be posting these long responses if I felt you were'nt worthy of my time.

This is not the case. The word “science” is used in many ways. Many secular humanists try to redefine science as “naturalism”—the belief that nature is “all there is.” In other words, by attempting to equate “science” (knowledge) with “naturalism” (a secular belief) they exclude the possibility of miracles before they even examine the evidence.

This is a strawman. Nobody is redefining science as naturalism, nor have they. Science does however exclude "miracles" in it's process of validation, although many things in science may seem miraculous. Science excludes the supernatural because it is not testable, nor falsifiable. The supernatural is not measurable nor does it obey the laws of physics, which is necessary to make scientific predictions.

Science does not say that the supernatural does not exist, it simply cannot comment on the supernatural. The techniques utilized in science unfortunately are limited to the natural.

Naturalism is not science; rather, naturalism is a fallacious philosophical bias.

It's neither. Naturalism is a philosophy, which is not any more inherently biased than Supernaturalism or spiritualism. Despite your insistence.

You and zer are both idiots.

You're claiming you know something which is unknowable. I'm claiming I don't believe in what you do not know. You call me crazy for not believing your silly fairytale.

It's a crazy person calling someone else crazy. The kettle calling the coffee black. In this case I'm the coffee except not crazy.

If you believe a lie with all your heart, that makes it no closer to truth. It is still a lie

>< says the kettle to the coffee.

Read my other posts here

I did, the complexity of the Universe is not evidence of God, this is anthropopathic. It seems that every time something new is discovered the creationists try to further push back the involvement of God.

This is not proof, and if you cannot provide a counter-argument, then I have won. Stating that you never stated that you can provide evidence that God does not exist is as good as giving up

I never stated that I had any proof, but you my arrogant friend have none either, your lack of understanding of the nature of the universe does not make compelling evidence.

This is a literary device a like to call an analogy. Perhaps you have heard of it. It compares two different things. You split my analogy into the two things and ignored the analogy in-between. I shall explain it to you in small words so that you can understand.

I'm quite aware of what an analogy is, but in order for them to work one has to equate two things that could be considered equal, you have not.

Let me explain to you in small words Mr arrogant theist.

God does not exist, but the earth does, there is a lot of proof for the existence of Earth but unfortunately none for the existence of God. But you say that God does exist, you must be ignoring the lack of any evidence of God. After this point I lost interest in following you BS analogy as it was broken down before it began and continued to become folly.

There is more evidence of God's existence than evidence that He does not exist.

There is no evidence for either side.

I appreciate your thorough response. You and I appear to possess a similar knowledge set as nothing you posted was new to me. However I disagree with your assessment of the information.

The chances of something happening become irrelevant the instant that something actually happens. No matter how unlikely an occurrence appears to be the fact that it happened shows that it was in the realm of possibility. All it took was the right elements being in the right place at the right time. When we say the chances of something happening are low, what we are really saying is that it is uncommon for all of those elements to actually be at the right place at the right time. But once those elements start coming together, the odds start changing. At this exact moment I am inside on a clear day in the middle of winter. Thus the chances that I will get hit by lightning right now are essentially 0. Fast forward to summer and stick me outside in a thunderstorm. Now the chances are still technically pretty low but have become high enough that it is a legitimate concern and I will promptly get myself indoors. This is kind of like chemical reactions. The number of reactions that an atom can have with other atoms is always FAR less than the number it cannot have, so it would seem that the chances of the element having any reactions at all are quite low. But all that needs to happen to change the odds is to introduce large quantities of an element that our initial atom is capable of bonding with. And if you form a molecule, the rules of the game may have changed substantially. Each constituent atom helps define the boundaries of possibility for the whole. That molecule may now be capable of things that were not possible with the independent atoms. Look at table salt: sodium chloride. Sodium is a metal and chlorine is poisonous. Neither of these elements are things I would advise you to put on your french fries. But put them together and they become an edible and delicious additive. The rules for table salt are different than the rules for sodium or for chlorine. And as things build and get more complex, the rules keep changing. Complexity is interesting because on the one hand it is logically harder to maintain a complex structure, but on the other hand the range of possibilities available to the whole increase. As long as the interactions foster integrity, the item will hold itself together. If the interactions foster change, the item will change. And more complex items don't just have a greater variety of things that can happen to them, they also may have a greater variety of things that they can do to other items. Once you get this cause-and-effect ball rolling, you create little pockets of increased possibility. It doesn't matter that most of space is essentially nothing, the areas that ARE something can have a wide variety of different things in a tiny area. The odds for any given thing happening increase dramatically when you get a whole bunch atoms and molecules together in the same space. When you say that the odds of any of things that you mentioned happening are small, you are speaking from more of a universal standpoint than from a local one, and seem to be implying that odds don't change.

The next thing you need to remember is that the universe is a vast playground of possibility. If space was as small as the Old Testament seems to suggest, than you would be totally correct in assuming that all these things would be hard pressed to occur. But we have more space to work with than we can even comprehend. We also have a vast scale of time here too. There are more stars than we know about right now, and there have been many that have come and gone well before you and I were born. It may be that ours is the only one where everything ended up being exactly right for life as we know it to occur, but even the most finite odds are given room to breathe in such a vast collection of space and time.

Implying that God had to do all of this just because the odds are low or the complexity is high is nothing more than jumping to a conclusion. It is a possibility, sure. But it is not incontrovertible evidence. It made more sense when humans didn't have the means to answer most of the questions we had. But the more we understand the universe around us, the less we need the intellectual placeholder of faith.

As with you, I could go on beyond this, but this will have to suffice for now.

God made the first itty-bitty organisms,

Why? It's simpler to assume that the organisms developed naturally.

and guided their evolution into our parents, and from our parents into us.

If we evolved then god didn't make us.

And no, chromosomes can't split themselves. That's what spindle fibers are for.

That was my point.

First of all, if you don't believe in God, why is your name christjesus?

The answer to your question is simple. What would be the point of our existence of we were merely God's puppets? God gave us free will, and expects us to use it well. He wants us to freely follow Him, for there is no point in making drones who follow Him. That would defeat the purpose of followers.

But, as God gave us the free will to obey Him, we must also have the free will to disobey Him, otherwise it would not be actual free will.

However, he gave us guidelines, rules ingrained into our very consciousness. All humanity has a sense of right and wrong. You may argue that this is merely a human standard that we learn from our parents. How, then, do you explain the existence of this standard throughout all history in every nation and culture, even in cultures that had never met?

Any way you argue, you are comparing reality to a standard. that standard is this sense of right and wrong.

So why are there still bad people? No one is intentionally evil. Evil is something that cannot exist without good. Evil is the desire of something good, which we attempt to achieve by the wrong means. If you have ever seen or read Death Note, then you will understand the perfect example of this. The main character wishes to build a world without evil, and does so by killing criminals. Then he kills all who oppose him, as they are opposing the world without evil. Then he kills people who fully support him, merely because they are no longer useful, or he finds them annoying. You can tell what he is doing is evil, but he believes fully that what he is doing is good, even as he kills innocents.

Satan is not just some evil dude who does bad stuff. Satan is the fallen angel. He was once good, but is now evil. He tempts us to do evil. To use C. S. Lewis's analogy, this world is like a territory that has been taken over by the enemy. Satan tries to convince us not to go to church, because that is when we listen to our allies who instruct us how to defeat the enemy. This world is at war.

Death is not something to be feared. Death is the entrance into eternal paradise, for those who have done good, or the entrance into eternal damnation for those who have done evil. Is you are an atheist, then what do you have to fear? If you truly believe that there is nothing after death, then there would be no punishment for trying to understand and coming to believe in God. For, if God is real, which I sincerely believe that he is, then you would end up in paradise. If he is not, then there would be no negative to believing. But if He is and you do not believe, there is the possibility that you could be punished. although there are many non-believers who probably went to heaven, because they are good people nonetheless.

You wrote a pargagraph? Wow, you have no life..

True is differnet than real. I would say in the minds of those who believe in god, he is true. That is not the spirit of the argument I sense though. In the spirit of this argument, I'm afraid to inform you this being does not exist.

Why does some intelligence had to have made us? The watchmaker argument is logically untenable...non sequitur. Much, Much, MUCH more evidence supports evolution than creationism.

Nope. At least not the way christianity or any other religion depicts it.

If theories about the Annunaki were true, then we could say the summerians worshiped a god, but that god was no more than an alien. It's just that the summerians were astonished by it, and they only had a basic concept of alien and outerworldly life.

Regardless of what my true opinion is, humanity needs God. Humanity needs something to believe in, something to live for, something to hope for, something to wait for

I belive in myself.

I live for my dreams and my loved ones.

I hope for the human being to become less stupid.

I wait for nothing, I go get it.

Without a God, humanity would be meaningless, are lives would be meaningless, and the thing that truly defines humanity would be lost.

Replace the word "God" by "inteligence" and it will make more sense. But still, no life is meaningless, regardless of it's beliefs. Are shrimps meaningless? I don't recall them having a god... yet they are what they are. And they taste splendidly. :D

Humans are animals just as shrimps are. Yet inteligent and proficient animals. Without a god they would be just the same.

Perhaps the Gods we worship on this earth today were created by those that came before us.

At this point you were going in the right direction. You were almost there.... but you let it slip.

I think not. Look at the bible, it's huge. Who would have honestly been bothered to come up with all that stuff. No-one is that boring.

Victor Hugo wrote an even bigger and boring story called Les Misérables. Although it's a great story, it's damn boring to read. Many other people wrote even bigger and more boring stuff. Remember one thing, there was no TV at their age.

I will pray for you.

Dont' bother. I'd feel better if you take the praying time and do something fun or useful to yourself instead.

My mother believes in god and she's not religious. I don't see anything senseless in it. She just believes in a higher being or whetever it is, but she doesn't believe, nor supports, religion and anything that it stands for. She doesn't go to masses, she doesn't care for eating meat in easter, and all that stuff christians do here in my country.

You can't state that complexity of life is an undeniable proof for the existence of god, well you can, but you would be wrong. First off, it's not like from the beginning of time, life has always worked perfectly and been so intrinsically complex. Life didn't get to be the way we know it today in one shot, nature has tried and exhausted almost every possible combination for life to see what works best (and when i say tried i don't mean that there was intent and design, i mean that most possible combinations have occurred), the reason we don't see these failures in design is because they didn't work and they did not survive long enough to proliferate their complexity. Life started out as simple biological molecules and through billions of years of evolution they became more and more complex, the complexity in organisms we have today is built upon the complexity of previous organisms. Would you say all of the failed organisms are evidence of creation? The organisms with unhelpful mutations which then died out? No you wouldn't, because god doesn't make failures, but nature has had failures, many of them, it has also had success and when only the fit survive, as you go by many generations you will become exponentially complex.

This would be like if I had no idea of the stock market and one day walked into wall street and saw the massive amounts of people and technology used to track the stocks and the massive amount of information on all the publicly traded business in the world. This stock market didn't start out so complex, it started out with primal barterers and traders and grew with economies and cultures.

Even if for some reason your arguments works, and complexity proves god (which it doesn't). It doesn't prove your god, it is just as likely to prove Zeus, Allah as it is to prove the christian god.

I see two basic problems with your assertions about organization:

1. "True organization does not exist. You say the universe is organized because there is no other way it can be. I say that is ridiculous."

Then you go on to talk about math. You started the whole thing out using the "slotted spoon" metaphor to identify faults within human understanding. Then you support it using language as an example, and later on, government. Taking this all in at once, it seems to me that you feel that because human thought processes and actions can't be perfectly organized, such a thing can't exist at all in the universe. Seems a little anthropocentric doesn't it? If things happen in specific ways whether we understand them or not, I would argue that they are indeed organized. It is simply our understandings that are not. Both religion and science emerged to deal with this phenomenon.

Math isn't organized? Each base numeral does not have a specific set of qualities that exist no matter how you arrange them? Different people working in different times and different languages can't develop geometry and calculus independently if given enough time? The rules that run throughout mathematics don't mean the same thing in every equivalent application? Once you dip down into the quantum scale, I'll admit, math becomes a bit distorted. But here in the macro world, it really is quite organized and universal.

2. You seem to be arguing that organization only exists if something is completely and perfectly organized and that if it isn't then it is purely disorganized. You are totally ignoring differences along the continuum. If you connect two points on a horizontal line, with point A representing pure disorganization and point B representing pure organization, then you can plot two points anywhere along the line and find a relative difference between the two. The farther to the right you go, the closer you get to pure organization and vice versa. Language will never be all the way to point B, but it will always exist to the right of non language, which hovers around point A. Government generally does the same thing. Governments can get sloppy, but it is hard for me to imagine anarchy as ever being more organized than most extant governments. And while math is technically subordinate to language, and language can never be pure organization, observing the math within things has a gravitational pull towards point B and away from A.

Sure, computations are a shortcut. But they can be verified through manual counting, or through different methods of calculation, or if the final result is what your calculation predicts. If the verification test fails, then we know that something is wrong with our understanding, and we can go step by step to figure out where we failed.

Chemistry is a good example. Entry level chemistry students are taught all sorts of models and rules, but these are simplified versions of reality and are never completely or universally correct. But the student has to start somewhere, and as they progress it becomes possible to learn the exceptions to rules. And WHY these exceptions happen in the first place, which can be hard to really understand until you go through the basics and develop the notions needed to make these distinctions. One's progression through chemistry is roughly equivalent to the history of the discipline itself. The earliest aspects are basically how the earliest chemists viewed these concepts, and are based on the most common and obvious rules. As you proceed, you start to get more specific in more or less the same sequence that the chemists themselves did, adding new rules when a new understanding is tossed on the pile. Will chemistry ever be a perfectly understood field? Probably not. But the more trial and error the field goes through, the closer to point B it gets.

"My point is, we can, in all but emotions, survive alone."

Evidence? Any stories of people who were born alone, lived alone and went on to reproduce? Any reason to believe that one could do so in all of the various environments we inhabit?

"You may be saying that we survived because we grouped up. Maybe we did. I never said we didn't ever get social nature, because we've got that now, too, and we've had it for quite some time."

Actually we've always had it. I'm kind of embarrassed that I forgot to mention this much earlier, but I guess I got a little sidetracked. Anthropological evidence shows that we've always been social. Indeed, that's a leading characteristic of primates. Its not like a few wandering individuals got together one day and said "hey let's group up." Us primates have been doing that instinctively for as long as we've been around.

And throughout the fossil record there are examples of social species in every era. I don't know if it goes all the way back to the very beginning, but I do know that evidence shows predator/prey relationships started developing shortly before the Cambrian explosion. Prior to there being predators, being social wouldn't be particularly disadvantageous. Actually, sexual reproduction requires at least a minimum of sociality. Even non-social sexually reproducing species have hormonal triggers that allow them to be a little less territorial during mating season. They would have to have this skill or the species would die off very quickly. So the potential for social interaction has to be at least as old as sexual reproduction, and is only bred out when a species' adaptations favor a more independent lifestyle. Even then, traces of it remain.

"Morality is all of nothing. Either it appeared all at once, or it was protected in its evolution, unless there was some crazy chance that allowed it to survive. It is not something which can so smoothly increase, as you say."

Not if it is genetic, and I've already highlighted repeatedly that it certainly appears to be. Morality can't just evolve in a different mechanism than any other evolutionary trait. That would pretty much require a second set of DNA.

"Random and concurrently helping each other does not work"

There hundreds of genetic experiments and observations that show quite the contrary. You are pretty knowledgeable about biology, but do you truly believe you know more about this than microbiologists who work with these principles every day?

"I am sure you have felt the desire for the happiness that you have never known."

Creativity. Imagination. The product of abstract thinking. The seeds that built civilization and philosophy and technology and religions and art. Often our emotions fire up and join in the game. They sense some lack because there is always a lack in life when one is as critical as human beings tend to be. The attempt to satiate this sense of lack by hijacking our thought processes and painting a picture of the world that is different from what we know. Or they just fire off in response to the nearly infinite chains of chemical reactions and electrical pulses that run up and down the CNS. Interesting and powerful? Yes. Supernatural? Not likely.

So the core of morality is not hurting others, and the purpose of guilt is simply to reduce that possibility? I'm just trying to make sure I understand what you are saying.

"Okay, some animals have morals, I'll give you that. I had already disproved myself a few hours after writing my previous argument, and have been thinking how stupid I was since."

Don't be too hard on yourself, many people don't believe in animal morality, including many highly intelligent scientists. It was only relatively recently in the grand scheme of things that the majority could even accept the we are animals, and it is taking quite some time and a lot of research to convince people that there are virtually no human behaviors that do not have some equivalent in the animal kingdom. It is quite natural, though unfortunate, for humans to view ourselves as being above everything in nature.

"you appear to be of the opinion that the only advantageous attributes of humanity are our minds and our morals."

The key sentences of my argument were: "Now we are pretty smart, but even the smartest person would be hard-pressed to survive in the wild on their own, and would make a good target for large predators. It is in the group that humanity’s salvation laid."

Although I do argue that morality is thoroughly intertwined with our social lifestyle, the emphasis here was on our group nature. And I did kind of gloss over our intellect, but I do actually give it heavy importance. I will go into a bit more detail about these factors later.

You do bring up some outstanding points about our physicality making us good predators, so I will back off on that. But what about as prey? Most large predators (even some bear species on flat land) can outrun us for bursts. These bursts are important for the predator because we don't get the advantage of endurance if we get overrun in this case. We get eaten. Also, bipedal running on an uneven terrain isn't very graceful compared to quadrupedal motion, which all mammalian predators aside from primates use. It is much easier to stumble or trip when you are built vertically like we are. Now let's assume a person did get away from a mountain lion. That cat can smell us from miles away (partially because of that sweating situation you were praising earlier), but we can't smell them coming up behind us. And swimming and our other aquatic skills? Alligators, piranha schools and sharks have us beat there quite nicely. I'll grant you that our physical attributes may be more impressive than I implied, and of course thumbs are a huge advantage. But can you honestly imagine humanity being this widely spread and populous without working in groups and being sentient? About intelligence, various comments that you made:

"and we have the knowledge to figure out what areas to aim for, when and how to dodge, and what objects we can use for defense or attack...learned to sharpen sticks on stones and made bows and sling-shots from sticks and rubber bands. when we grew older, we carved wooden swords and daggers, among other things, we even made a trebuchet...Humans can build things, work their way out of problems, and use tools"

These are all indicative of our high capacity for reasoning and memory. It is potentially very time-consuming to learn these skills, which is one reason why society gets increasingly more advanced the more we specialize. Which brings me back to the group nature:

"We do not require other humans for any reason but emotionally."

Not so. Most of our strength that you refer to has been greatly enhanced by group activity, as have our morals and intelligence. You increase your chances of catching prey or gathering vegetation if you do it in a group. You also increase your yields if you use tools, and your tools get better the more sophisticated they are. But more sophisticated tools take time to make. If you allow a few people in your group to make or repair tools while the others go out hunting, you give them more time to hunt (and give them the tools to do so more effectively), thus increasing overall yields and allowing you to have bigger groups, which allows you to bring in more resources, fashion even more sophisticated tools, get more efficient at surviving, get bigger groups ad infintum (at least until the resources run out.)

Then there is specialization. One of the most important maxims of economics is that there are gains to trade. At its most basic level, this can explained by the fact that people have different skill sets. Let's say you and I are stranded on an island together, and the only sources of food are coconuts and fish. Let's say you are better at climbing trees to get coconuts, while I am better at catching fish. Individually, we both spend time fending for ourselves, and we are both fishing and getting coconuts, but we are only just getting enough to survive, and our health is starting to deteriorate. Then you approach me, and offer a trade: I spend my whole day fishing instead of spending part of it getting coconuts, which is I am just not very good at. And you spend your whole day getting coconuts, which is quicker and easier for you than fishing. At dinner time, we trade. As a pair we are bringing in more food by focusing on our specialized skill sets than either of us could as individuals. Even if you are better at both activities than I am, if I am better at fishing than I am hunting, my comparative advantage would mean that we both gain from the trade more than working alone. And if you have a bigger group, you get a bigger variety of skill sets and comparative advantages, and everyone gets more time to do what they are good at, thus increasing the strength of the group. Also, groups allow specific people to take care of children while the rest work for the group. And if you get particularly ill in the wild, it is very hard to do what you need to survive, unless you have someone around to take care of you.

At this point you might be thinking "well, what about non-social species, they do just fine!" But they have different advantages and requirements. The simpler the life form, the easier and shorter gestation is, and the quicker the creatures can reach maturity. But humans take a long time to gestate (and women get quite vulnerable during the later stages of pregnancy. Imagine a pregnant woman in the wild on her own.) Most creatures can more or less take care of themselves after a year or two, but human children are just starting to walk in that period, and have a long way to go before they are able to fend for themselves. We also reproduce at a much lower rate than most non-social species. Some insects and fish produce thousands of offspring at a time. With those numbers, no parental care is required to ensure that at least a few will survive. But getting one human born takes 3/4ths a year, and miscarriages were common in the early days, so it was quite important that those that were born were well taken care of, and this process takes many years.

So here is where we get to your point about the evolution of morals. They probably evolved simultaneously with so many other aspects of our nature, and a sort of back-and-forth went on that continually enhanced all of the participating traits. For instance, our species' ancestors didn't take as long to gestate or grow to maturity as we do. But those who took care of their young had better chances of the young growing up and having their own kids. So we got a little more wiggle room. It became safer to take longer to grow up. So this allowed increasing complexity within species, which would increase gestation time. Increased complexity would also increase the time to maturity, so the pre-existing parental skills would become more important, and would eventually be better off forming life mating bonds. Families would initially defend their territory, but from time to time some families would be less territorial than others, and start living close enough together to interact. As they got less aggressive and more intelligent, they would start working together. The groups would get larger and more complex, and morality (which probably started evolving in a very basic sense due to the necessity of parental care and life-partner bonds) could start becoming more complex and would help foster even more effective relationships. Simultaneous evolution of traits is very common.

So why doesn't this happen more often? Like thumbs and wings, we take what we are given, and those traits that work well for us get promoted. Also remember that we are talking about tiny little incremental steps. A creature might be willing to let an intruder just an inch closer than anyone else but would otherwise defend themselves. So being .1% more moral should not pose a significant disadvantage, and if the other members of the population pick it up too, then it can start to grow. Also, different environments, niches within environments, and other life forms in the ecosystem create a very complex web of cause-and-effect that favor different traits at different times and places. Look at big cats. Almost all of them are solitary, coming together only to mate and raise cubs, then going their separate way. Most species can get away with this because cats are arguably the most efficient hunters on land, and many hunt prey that is either smaller than they are or is fairly safe. Lions are the key exception. They hunt very large and dangerous critters like elephants and giraffes (talk about legs that can kick! Giraffes have been seen decapitating lions, although it is very rare.) So lions benefit from hunting in groups. If a team of lionesses take down one bull elephant, the whole pride is good for days.

Okay I got off-topic there, but that is my response to your statement about the evolution of morals within the minority. In a nut shell, many different things evolved more or less concurrently, and helped push each other up. And some species just didn't need it for an advantage, as they had different traits that helped, so if morality attempted to evolve in them, it would get stamped out as you suggest. It is dependent on a huge, complex set of constantly changing factors. Its tough to wrap the brain around, but you are very intelligent, just think on it a while and you should find it to make sense.

"Going on that there is the possibility that there was asexual reproduction at the time, and genetic variation was based on mutation. Or there was non-social sexual reproduction, like flowers...or something."

Wow, you must have been tired to bring in asexual creatures (too simple for such complex behaviors) and plants (no behaviors at all)! I kid :)

But non-social reproduction is a good point, and I think i addressed it pretty well above. Corroborating this thought process is the fact the moral behaviors discussed are almost exclusively found in social creatures. Also, it tends to be most common in mammals (although more intelligent birds, such as the Corvidae family, do exhibit similar behaviors.) It is likely that the very first ancestors of moral behavior first emerged with the earliest ancestors of mammals or even earlier. Thus there would be a greater chance of mammals inheriting it than other branches of life.

"Then again, perhaps a species needs social nature to develop morals, and social nature is overrated. Perhaps minor social nature must be developed before morals and morals must be developed before major social nature. I don;t know, and this makes this argument quite difficult."

You're on to something here. I can see why your argument was getting more difficult. Despite your tiredness, you were channeling some very good thoughts in this post, which is why I tried to explain everything about this subject thoroughly and encouraged you to think on it more.

Now on to the other topics.

"It would be wrong to make a girl who loves you think that you love her back not for your own sake but because she deserves to be loved truly and you cannot give her that, so she would be unhappy with you."

Either way she was going to be unhappy. But, as you suggest, I did the right thing. So why should I feel guilt about taking the more moral act if, as you suggest, guilt arises when we act immorally? The reason I felt guilty was that although I was not attracted to her romantically, I did like her a lot and valued her friendship. I didn't like seeing her hurt, even though I knew I did the right the thing, and I was nervous that she would stop hanging out with me (which did end up happening.) More or less, my guilt was pretty much selfish. Is selfishness moral? And I don't see morality as being about making other people happy. Its about not doing things that make their lives harder, and more importantly, fostering the strength of the group. Happiness may be a secondary result of this, but its not the goal. If you do not kill someone who wasn't expecting you to kill them in the first place, you are not generating happiness.

"As for miracles, there are plenty of miracles. Look up people with "Blessed" in front of their names, rather than "saint."

I will do more research on this later, as I am running out of time (complicated lab tomorrow, need good sleep.) However, I must say that yes people needed more miracles in the past. They also wanted them more. Combine a desire to be happier, a standard belief in mythology and lack of knowledge of the natural world, and you can see miracles everywhere. As I said in my previous post, confirmation bias is potentially a huge problem with the assignment and investigation of miracles.

"But God is not evil. He did not create evil."

This is a common argument, but valid here I think: If God has the power to destroy evil but does not, than he is arguably evil himself. If I have the ability to save a child's life, but do not, what would you say of me?

"A murderer's children do not inherit the actual murders of their father, but they inherit the mentality that allowed for the murders..."

Mentality does not guarantee that they will commit crimes or be evil. Children of alcoholics often grow up to be alcoholics themselves, but the correlation is not 100%.I know a few people who were raised in alcoholic environments that refuse to touch alcohol for that very reason. I would agree with you that we all have the potential to be evil, but most of us aren't. Why would God give us morality to limit our evilness if he was already going to call us sinners no matter what. I still consider this concept to be one of the biggest flaws in Christianity. Frankly, I see the concept itself as being arguably immoral.

"Anyways, so, Jesus. You say that he did not claim to be God. You are wrong. It was Jewish authorities who arrested Jesus for claiming to be the Son of God, by his own words. Jesus did not correct his followers, as John the Baptist did, when they told him that they thought he was the Messiah. There is also the question of why Mary went along with it, even naming him "Jesus." If she was originally lying, she would cease to do so if she had any compassion for her son, for he suffered for it."

And the Romans crucified him for claiming to be God (ostensibly.) The Romans and the Jews could have made false accusations against him, or were responding to rumors. Mary could have been wrong. The Bible could have left out times when he did correct people, the faithful who wrote the New Testament years later could have exaggerated or omitted many things. As could the Nicene Creed, whose participants are known to have left out 7 books of the new testament and a dozen from the OT and voted on controversial issues, including Christ's divinity.

"No one can convince themself of their own lie unless they are insane."

Not if they don't realize it is a lie. There are countless cases of people who testify in court about things that never happened, but after lie detector tests and psychological examination it becomes clear that they honestly believed what they testified. Emotional bias is particularly good at manufacturing understandings and even memories that are not true. Especially in times of stress. Also, insanity comes in many forms, and not all of them are extreme or easily noticeable. Other mental disorders, such as bipolar disorder are pretty noticeable and can appear to be mild insanity to others, but aren't really. Personally, I don't think any of this was the case with Jesus, but it is actually a viable possibility.

"Religious people will not lie about their religion or scientific evidence, as a truly religious person would truly believe that what they speak is the truth, and what is also the truth cannot disprove the truth."

Kent Hovind did. He might not be "truly religious" by your definition, but he claims to be, and the people who believe in him say he is. I also still argue that Jonathon Wells, from the video you linked, had to be lying because you can't get a PhD in biology without learning about some of the key details he messed up.

"All Christians, Jews, and Muslims believe in the same God."

But not Jesus' divinity. And many Muslims believe that Christians are worshiping a false concept, a misinterpretation, of God. If there is one God, and if humans can know what his nature is, than any human with that ability, anywhere in the world, should be able to find the same God, and use the same processes to do so. Yet one's beliefs are heavily influenced by the time and place they grew up in. And individual religions splinter into so many factions that it is hard for an outsider to identify which one has the best interpretation.

"Christians were arrested and killed, facing many hideous deaths, having to practice their religion in secret."

And Jews have been continuously persecuted and vilified almost without reprieve, for thousands of years. Yet their faith still persists. The communist Chinese did some of the most horrendous things atheists have ever done the the religious, yet Buddhists and Bon practitioners still exist in Tibet. Faith is interesting. Sometimes you feel like you need it to get over hardships, but sometimes you get persecuted because of it. You call it a test of faith, and so you keep your faith. It is a self perpetuating cycle.

"Why have their been more religious than non-religious at any point in all history of intelligent life on earth?"

I explained this in an earlier response. Faith emerged to satiate our curiosity when we didn't know much, and allow us to focus on more pressing issues. And why have the numbers of atheists been increasing over the past few hundred years? Why is it that the more we know about the world, the more religions disappear?

"Why do we feel a desire for a happiness which we have never felt, and can never feel on earth?"

I'm not sure what you are talking about. The closest thing in my life that I can think of to that is my imagination. Imagination is very useful for inventing new things and solving problems. Imagination can also create Gods to help us feel like we have purpose that we don't otherwise have evidence for.

"Why did life not die out as soon as it appeared?"

Well, this is hard to answer without knowing more about the origins of life. However, as I explained in an earlier response, a basic principle in abiogenesis shows a step-by-step process to get the ball rolling: Formation of organic molecules, fusion of them into macromolecules, fusion of macromolecules into self-replicating protobionts, and some energy to maintain the replication process. All of these things are relatively simple and cover the big things that life would need to get started. Also, all of these ingredients are possible around undersea volcanoes and steam vents. Now these protobionts aren't alive. We can make them fairly easily, but cannot yet create true life (although I hear that an experiment currently undergoing peer review has just changed all that. This might be a rumor.) So obviously we don't quite know all of the characteristics. We can't say that it is irreducible complexity because all of the defining traits that we know about actually could get started piece by piece by naturalistic processes. There are only a scant few pieces of the puzzle remaining.

"Why do we never see life appear from non-living stuff?"

A) We know that life as we know it could not appear out of the blue. First life would be extremely simple, single-celled and microscopic. Not easy to discover unless you have a microscope trained on every square micrometer of the Earth.

B) If abiogenesis theories have any merit, and I believe they do, than undersea volcanoes and steam vents are the best place to find new life. But we can't actually get very close to the majority of these volcanoes, especially on the deep sea where there pressure and heat would destroy any of the delicate sensor equipment we would need to find life. It is possible life is being created right now. But archea live in these areas, and they might well be gobbling up any new life that ventures far enough away from the volcanoes for us to see.

C) Even if new life is not being formed, the conditions found now are far different than they were 4 billion years ago. Those conditions may have been more favorable then than now (especially the complete lack of predators until around the Cambrian.

"no one can scientifically explain the universe's actual beginning."

A couple hundred years ago no scientist could explain (or at least prove) why illness happens. They usually cited supernatural forces. Now we know that viruses, bacterias, fungi and genetic disorders are responsible for pretty much any illness. Around the same time, we couldn't explain why things fall down. Throughout much of human history we didn't even ask that question. Just because scientists can't answer a question now does not mean that they should stop asking the question. But the religions stopped asking centuries ago.

"All rules come from intelligence. Therefore, did not the laws of the universe come from intelligence?"

There is a vast difference between rules (state-created laws or curfews for your children as example) and scientific laws and forces, which we use our intelligence to describe, not create. Things are organized, as far as we can tell, because there is no other way for it to be. This was impossible to conceive of thousands of years ago when the big religions were created, but becomes more obvious the more we investigate.

"I told you that my analogy was not perfect, obviously it is not exactly on, but did you understand my meaning?"

I understand what you were trying to say, but if God is omni-everything, no analogy based on human perception could ever compare to the reality of what he would be. I respect your passion and approach to writing, though.

Wow...that took a long time. Good night.

God is real. Creation gives evidence to that fact. Enough said

Self supposing argument. The very thing being explained cannot be evidence for it's cause.

No, because that would be like asking if a chair were true or false, which sounds silly. A better question would be, "does god exist?"

"If a different sperm of the billion ejaculated hit the egg, the person born would be totally different! The chance of how you are alive are a million to 1!"

The chances of me specifically might be a million-to-one, but the chances of any of the sperm making it are much higher. No matter who emerged you would make the same argument, but it would always be silly argument.

"what is the chance that all the matter in the universe compressed to that small a level to give a required bang? "

It didn't. Matter is made of elements and elements didn't start forming until well after the big bang. The big bang instituted the emergence of energy and the laws of physics, neither of which take up space in the manner you are implying.

in fact, irreducible complexity has strong evidence against it.

consider, for a moment, that 98.5% of the Human genome does not actually code for ANYTHING.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11236998

it seems that evolution has, indeed, acquired a vast amount of vestigial baggage over the course of time. Much of it can be reduced.

If the planet can support life, according to theries of abiogenesis all you would need is

1) Iron

2) sulfur

3) heat

and all of these are abundant all over the universe.

the complexity is not necessary for life to begin. It develops later on, in a process known as evolution

"God made the first itty-bitty organisms"

or, rather than believe that some ultramegapowerfulmysterious person made life, you can take a look at iron sulfur world theory.

There is experimental evidence that suggests that iron sulfur particles are capable of setting up a lipid bilayer and self-sustaining metabolism given enough heat, such as in a volcanic vent.

Iron and sulfur are both very common, and an iron sulfur particle is simple enough to form spontaneously. So, G-d did not need to make itty-bitty organisms when they can, indeed, form from the earth spontaneously.

and if you argue that G-d made the iron sulfide particles, I would ask where G-d came from.

and if you say that G-d does not need a creator, I would ask why the universe needs a creator

and if you say that G-d does not follow the laws of the universe, I would say that he is in trouble with the physics police. If you can make up an argument that is free of logic, then you are not being logical.

goodness, these arguments with the blindly faithful are becoming so predictable I can have one all by myself!

Okay I was in a hurry last night as I typed the last argument and didn't edit properly. To clear up some potential confusion:

"You talk about modern Christians being skeptical about the second coming."- I was referring to the type of scenario you proposed, not the Second Coming as a general concept.

"there isn’t any evidence that Jesus actually claimed to be the Son of God"- I don't know why I typed "Son of."

And a correction:

I kind of misrepresented Freud's hypothesis the last time around. It is true that he thought that guilt was formed directly within people at childhood. This being the case, I don't fully agree with him any more than you do. But, I do think his basic premise, that guilt serves to promote better social interaction between people is potentially valid, at least in the way I presented it in this post. Keep in mind that in his time there probably wasn't any reason to believe that emotions or behaviors could actually evolve, so I just added the updated scientific understandings to his initial assessment.

Another possibility as that it is a direct side-effect of empathy, which would ultimately serve pretty much the same function.

whos lucifer? I never heard of anyone saying they beleive in Lucifer.

The presence of God can be clearly seen in the way any person was born. If a different sperm of the billion ejaculated hit the egg, the person born would be totally different! The chance of how you are alive are a million to 1!

The chances of any single blastocyst resulting from a fertilization is just as unlikely as any other. The only reason you place significance on the formation of the blastocyst that ended up being you is that you are here, and have the consciousness to think about it. There is nothing more or less remarkable or divine about the formation of you than there would have been about the formation of one of the other millions or billions of children your parents could have had instead of you.

If you have a dice with a million sides, each number only has a one in a million chance of turning up, but you know the dice is going to land on some number when you throw it; you don't need to have a God for that.

Give me the link.

I've gone through this video point by point before but I don't have 59.45 minutes. I'll look up the text and explain all the places your christian brothers lied to you in this video.

Thumbs and dental sets aid the self. Aside from early age, we are fully capable of fending for ourselves. Yes, we are social beings, but so are many other animals. Do they have morals? Have you seen a single other animal besides humans that has morals? If it is such an evolutionary advantage, why isn't it more common? And, as these morals tell us to value other beings above the self, wouldn't the beings with these morals die out, leaving the amoral to dominate?

Other communal animals are not as intelligent as humans, so we cannot expect their morals do be as developed as ours, but many of them do indeed show a rudimentary awareness of codes of conduct that best facilitate group cohesion. If they didn't, their groups would disintegrate. Many of these behaviors involve the respect of an authority figure (an alpha), and the protection of juveniles and infants within a group. Chimpanzees, in particular, harshly punish anyone who hurts an infant, regardless of their rank, and the hierarchy system requires highly specific behaviors to individuals of various ranks. Additionally, there are taboos on pedophilia, cannibalism, and incest, and these actions are seldom performed. Lions and wolves follow a similar model, to a simpler degree, in my opinion. But the fact remains that animals that live with others must develop behaviors that enable them to coexist with as little conflict as possible. With the degrees to which humans have taken empathy, intelligence, and imagination, our morals have just become more complex and varied.

So please explain seashells on mountains,

The earth is changing. Mountain ranges form, seas recede. Once, these mountains were at the bottom of oceans, but stratigraphy and the fossil records show us that a worldwide flood has not happened.

If the sun was to grow back to the size it was when you think where would earth be.

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/dave_matson/young-earth/specific_arguments/sun_shrinking.html

Explain how evoultion is not based upon faith.

It has been observed to happen. Scientists are honest about the parts of evolution which are as of yet unknown; they make hypotheses, and defend their ideas, but they do not speak in certainties and they do not substitute supernatural being for gaps in knowledge. It is not faith based. It is fact based.

There is it’s called creation. You just don’t accept it.

There is no evidence that God is responsible for creation. It is equally probable that creation is the work of the deities of other religions, who also claim responsibility for the world.

Nonsense looks to me like you don’t have a good argument or stable ground anymore.

Nope, the assertion that arguing something somehow proves its existence is, indeed, nonsense.

Thank you for the correction, but you still have eye witness. Still going to jail. Also, Scripture is made of several writers therefore several eye witnesses.

Eye witness testimony is notoriously unreliable, and it would be unsound to convict someone with nothing but that to incriminate them. Especially when others have contradicting testimony (i.e.: other religions).

Love your spirit, but you have no proof that scripture has been disproven by so called “science”. In fact, you are totally wrong. Look it up.

The willful ignorance of reality that must be required to maintain this view to be absolutely astounding to me. Here's just a couple gigantic errors in the Bible that seem to have conveniently slipped your mind: Noah's flood, a young earth, and creationism.

http://www.epicidiot.com/evo_cre/noahs_flood.htm#against

http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/faqs-youngearth.html

http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/search/topicbrowse2.php?topic_id=46

Wow, you said exactly what I said only with fluff. You still have nothing to disprove God is false. I have already proved God is true.

Okay, I'll try to explain this in simpler terms. Let me know if it still trips you up somewhere.

You are making a claim.

I do not believe you.

If you want me to believe you, you have to provide verifiable evidence.

I do not, as I am not making a claim, I am just rejecting your claim until you have sufficient evidence.

Finally, even if something doesn't exist, you are not going to find proof of its nonexistence because there is no such thing. If you disagree with this, please provide adequate evidence that unicorns do not exist.

What are you talking about, Allah is the same as Yahweh, just prophesied through a different man. The Qu'ran has the same opening stories as the Torah and the Bible. All of these are schisms of the same doctrine. To state that God is not present there but present in your religion is the reason why there is so much conflict. By the way Islam is increasing every year While Christianity is shrinking.

Magic is deception or "trickery", this statement is purely opinion on your part.

God snapping his fingers and bringing all of creation into existence, without an explanation as to how, is magic.

Do you remember the definitions I showed you? It is a belief there is no God or the disbelief in the existence in any deity. We have discussed this at length already. I was trying to shorthand our discussion, obviously I can't do that anymore with you.

'Disbelief' and 'belief' still have completely opposite meanings and are not interchangeable. Either atheists have beliefs, or they don't; make up your mind and stay consistent, at the very least.

This does not change the fact that the atheist belief is a dogma. It falls into the category of secular religion. You base your assumptions from emotion. Your feeling is the only 'evidence' you can present.

The conclusion of atheists is based on a complete lack of evidence for God. This is perfectly good reason not to believe in something, or at least to withhold belief until something convincing is presented, and this is not dogmatic, it is practical.

What discussion is this?

The history of our debates is as accessible to you as it is to me.

Atheism is the disbelief in any deity.

There you go, you finally got it!

“Main Entry: disbelief

Part of Speech: noun

Definition: doubt, skepticism

Synonyms: atheism, distrust, dubiety, incredulity, mistrust, nihilism, rejection, repudiation, spurning, unbelief, unbelievingness, unfaith

Antonyms: belief, trust”

http://thesaurus.com/browse/disbelief

To not believe in something you have to have some kind of way to disprove it.

I ask again, how would one go about disproving that nonexistence of anything? In order to think someone is probably lying when they say a genie just granted them three wishes, you do not need to prove that genies don't exist – because you can't. This does not mean you must believe that genies do exist.

Especially, if you want to state as a fact there is no God.

Which I haven't and wouldn't.

With atheism you are specifically saying you don't believe in God. This would not be an infinite number of religions.

With aunicorniasm you are specifically saying you don't believe in unicorns. With aleprechaunism you are specifically saying you don't believe in leprechauns. With azeusism you are specifically saying you don't believe in Zeus. With acactopusism you are specifically saying you don't believe in this cat/octopus hybrid I just made up and drew on the side of my homework. So on, and so on, literally forever. Presto, infinite religions.

I know God's word is the truth.

Sorry, you don't. You just think you do.

He tells us there are no other gods but Him. Therefore, I know those other creatures don't exist.

Since when are unicorns and mermaids gods?

Also, pretty sure plenty of other deities have claimed to be the only one/ones, explicitly or implicitly.

I take the word of God on absolute authority. His word is my evidence. I believe in His works in creation, and science proves many of the acts in the Bible happened (the Flood).

Looks like you got confused. Real science disproves this stuff, not proves it.

You have no foundational belief.

Hmm...this sounds like something someone would need to have a religion, don't you think? Good thing you're not trying to claim atheism is a relig—oh wait...

You don't have an answer for your origin.

Origin of life: abiogenesis. Origin of homo sapiens: evolution. Origin of me, personally: my parents.

On another note, why are you so afraid of the possibility that some questions cannot yet be answered? Better to admit a lack of knowledge, and search for truth, than to make something up and blindly believe it.

For whatever reason you refuse to recognize your Creator.

I am happy to recognize the things for which there exists convincing evidence.

"Those five precepts may appear in different strengths and forms, but they all appear, yes?"

Yes. Much like all of us have thumbs, or dental sets that can tear meat or grind plant matter. Evolutionary advantage.

"And, if irreducible complexity is but a hypothesis, so is Freud's idea of guilt."

True. And so is the idea of God. My point in bringing in Freud's analysis was there are multiple possibilities concerning the origin of guilt.

"Perhaps we do fear the loss of parents' love. But why?"

I was just giving you the abbreviated explanation. Freud went on in much greater detail. Simply put, children quickly come to realize, even as babies, that they need help to do things (like eat), and that the parents will provide that help. Eventually a kid starts to worry that if they frustrate their parent's enough, the parents might not provide that help anymore. So guilt may emerge as a reminder to stay on their parent's good side. As far as why its "parents" instead of anybody else; well its not really. Its really whoever is around, and other caretakers can fill the role just as nicely. The guilt could easily be transferred to them if they play the role of parent. But in most cases, our parents are always there (including during most of our happy moments, so they become positively associated, and since love is a positive emotion, it tends to flow towards them). It is one of the biggest forms of certainty a child could have. And it has been shown repeatedly that children who are raised in unstable environments often grow up with serious emotional or social issues, partially because their development wasn't as well-guided as most of the rest of us. As far as abusive parents, remember that kids aren't particularly rational, and have a hard time realizing that a situation they aren't familiar with can be better than where they are at. Heck, even adults have a hard time with this. Many women have a hard time leaving abusive relationships because they at least know what to expect from them. They place more reliance on their perceived love for their partner and fear of the unknown than on the unhappiness that the abuse brings them. And to a very real extent, the need to have a solid bond is just a representation of the fact that humans are highly social animals who have more strength in groups than as individuals.

"What kind of stories?"

Mostly speculative fiction: sci-fi mainly, with occasionally forays into fantasy and horror. Also have done some basic drama in my younger days. Lately I've been mostly writing poetry and song lyrics based on dreams that I have or philosophical issues that have been bothering me.

Sorry it took so long to get back, I had to find time to watch the documentary. Firstly, you don't offend me, I couldn't care less how you feel about me. I've read back over the posts and conclude that you started with insult, so I believe that I was responding to yours.

That aside as far as your video is concerned, I'm confused, are you a Roman Catholic or a creationist? I was of the opinion that Catholicism accepted evolution by Natural Selection as the means by which life has become what it is.

Your video touts several arguments, there is an argument from incredulity based I believe on this idea that chance somehow is the mechanism by which Atheist scientists believed it all began. This is a fallacy, the mechanism of natural selection, of cumulative processes gradually building to something far more complex.

There is an argument from cosmology, also based on incredulity. Does it not seem that in a Universe, where all of the right things needed to form life existed, that in a matter of time life would exist. It is Anthropopathic and indeed anthropocentric to cast a creator in to that mix with a view to explanation, this is extremely unscientific.

There is an argument from irreducible complexity. By the way Behe and co lost their bid with the bacterial flagellar motor.

It was demonstrated to be reducible and therefore is not an example, the flagellum can lose parts and still function either as a simpler flagellum or a secretion system.

It bugs me that in considering this hocus pocus based on ancient books with ambiguous explanations that men of science, men with serious qualifications would abandon the scientific method and incredulously invoke a creator. There is no evidence to support the existence of God in that video, and I feel there never will be. Any being that can design something like an eye, or a bombardier beetle is obviously more complex than said creations and therefore creates an infinite regression. God is something that creationist scientist fit into every hole that they find, and this is where your problem is going to be the more information that is uncovered.

Your video also makes reference to the fossil record, now that is grasping, I'm sure you know how rare a fossil is and how lucky we are to have them. To state that there would be an abundance of intermediate fossils is purely wishful thinking, how many intermediate fossils do we need? There are plenty.

This example is why I asked about your religious persuasion at the start of my post, being that your video was trying to make it look as though evolution didn't happen.

There is also the laughable example of placing a cell in a nutrient broth or whatever and bursting it and the distinguished "biologist" states that "even with all the things necessary for life to exist it will not. This I have to say i found unbelievable, it is as if he wanted it to happen before his eyes. I'm sure you are aware that this is not how it works. Craig Venter's work highlights the possibility of life arising from non-life naturally with the work he has done with creating the worlds first self-replicating artificial organism. That is life from non-life. Where was God there?

I also love the fact that creationists cite the laws of Thermodynamics. If matter or energy can not be created or destroyed where from did God get the matter or energy to start the Universe? If he took it from himself then it would contradict his omnipotence and see him existing as a lesser being than before he pumped all that matter and energy into the system.

"Sorry it's taken me so long to respond, I'm getting somewhat busy."

No worries. Now that school is back on, you can count on my own responses being shorter and farther between.

"However, I must just point out that just because previous things that were believed to be examples of irreducible complexity were proven wrong doesn't mean that there is no such thing."

That is true. And as I said, one could say the cell is open to debate, although that is mostly because we don't have a complete lineage for cells yet. What we do know is that the earliest cells were extremely simple, and if they were anything like we think they were, there is nothing irreducible about them. For now, irreducible complexity is resigned to being purely speculative, and should be treated as a hypothesis (not a scientific theory since strong supporting evidence has yet to be found), and not a fact.

"The Moral Law is cannot be a developed instinct or learned attitude as it has appeared in the exact same way in all history in all places in all the world."

Not true. The only five precepts of morality that are currently known to be universal are identified as fairness, harm (or rather, unwillingness to do harm), loyalty (to an in-group, such as your family or nation), authority, and purity. There may be others that turn up as research continues, but for now these make a good (and testable) outline of morality. Also, each of these qualities have been observed in other animals, especially our relatives, the primates. Furthermore, the behaviors of brain damaged subjects show that it is purely related to brain functioning, while twins-separated-at-birth studies show a genetic connection. The thing is, the strength of each of these spheres varies from person to person. The article I linked to shows that liberals and conservatives prioritize these spheres differently. Also, cultures in different geographical regions prioritize these values differently. Purity (identifying things as "impure" and staying away from them. This could include urine and feces, foul smelling food, and less obvious concepts like certain colors or numbers or getting tattoos) is the least emphasized value in Western cultures, while it plays a huge part in Asian and African traditions and religions. Think about it, diseases in Africa and Asia are notably nastier and harder to contain than in Europe and North America, so purity would be a more useful survival adaptation to Asians and Africans. Time appears to have an effect too. Fairness seems to be much more important to us now than just a few hundred years ago (when slavery was a global business and women couldn't hope for equal rights anywhere.) And even though all cultures have provisions against killing, all cultures also have exceptions to this rule, and these exceptions have gradually decreased over time. When the Bible was written, capital punishment for minor offenses was the norm all around the world. Now, the US is the only secular, first-world nation that still uses capital punishment (and even here it is quite rare) and some foreigners consider us barbaric for still doing so. So yeah, we all have a sense of right and wrong, and it is based on at least 5 central foundations, but to say that morality "appeared in the exact same way in all history in all places in all the world" is not true. The basics are still there, and each of the foundations have evolutionary advantage, but there is a lot of wiggle room.

"Moral Law causes guilt when we disobey it, and this is not a physical hindrance, like hunger."

Guilt is a little harder to pin down, although since strong emotions such as depression, joy and anger have been linked to chemicals, it is likely that guilt is a physical in origin, it just doesn't feel that way because it is an emotion. In one of his two theories of guilt, Freud argued that it is instilled in us by our parents: we fear a loss of love when we displease them. Proponents of this theory suggest that as we grow into adulthood, our fear of losing our parent's love may broaden to society in general. Although religious thinking teaches us that guilt stems from conscience, Freud implied that it was actually the other way around. Considering horror stories of how people act when they think nobody is looking, or how violent gangs appear in poor neighborhoods all around the world (conscience becomes less necessary, perhaps even detrimental, when your closest friends are themselves immoral; morality becomes a possible hindrance when you are starving to death) this seems to have some merit. How, or even if, this relates to the foundations of morality is something I'm not ready to comment on.

"Have you ever written a story?"

Yes. Quite a few actually. Why?

"I'm working on gathering evidence of various branches"

Good. That's how I like to work, so be as diverse as you wish.

Reading your post I came away feeling you really found GOD in your life. Which is a wonderful spiritual experience. But ,, there is always a but... But, your experience is not unique to the Christian faith. Many others have found this GOD relationship through other avenues, and describe their personal experience in a similar way. All I am saying is there are many paths to finding GOD...

1. Use shift 8, the star icon to make italics and two of them at the beginning and end of each quote to make it bold. It makes it easier to read, and I can only argue with theists extraordinarily drunk, otherwise your backwards logic and die-hard loyalty to ignoring every point I make gives me ulcers.

2. The first books were not written by moses. Give me a link to photographic evidence that they were written in this time frame and contain his signiture. You cannot. He likely did not exist and if he did the stories of him are greatly exaggerated.

3. My "conjecture" is based on statistics; that Christians make up over 80% of the US population, have more children per capita, do a stellar job of indoctrinating and flooding the web with bogus sources, and yet are dwindling in numbers can only mean that many Christians are seeing the light and the joke of a hoax your religion has been and is currently playing on the world, that the vast vast majority of Christians were born such and never gave it two thoughts, and that those you do convert only convert due to their own circumstance - and if it were not for Christianity's existance they would find another cult to follow is what I base my conjecture on... granted the last conjecture is based on a Minor in Human Behavior and not on statistics.

However, I fail to see what your conjecture is based on. Least mine is based.

4. Here's a game I like to play. Not that it has ever done any good with theologians. It is though the most convincing argument to those with no affiliation and debaters fall into it so rarely that I'm compelled to use it whenever possible.

Copied and pasted:

""You think we are just following a "Narnia" just to have a religion. That is it just something we do. This "Narnia" was written by the people who lived through the events that happened. You percieved those stories to be fantasy, yet you doubt them on your own conjecture. You weren't there to witness the events. For you to dismiss it, then you better have some compelling evidence to disprove it. You can't say science doesn't support it, because miracles are the violations in natural laws. So of course science doesn't support it, because this is what makes them significant events.""

In this case I only had to replace 2 words, usually it is three or four. Hopefully you see how ridiculous this last point of yours is.

your missing the foundation of this problem. WE chose to disobey God. We were tempted by evil to be our own Gods and we chose to disobey.

I think you are missing the very problem with the foundation, God could never have given man free will, this would contradict both his omniscient and omnipotent attributes. For he would have to have known exactly which way everyone was going to choose, having put all this into place with this knowledge of every outcome possible changes free-will into a pre-determined path, one which is unavoidable. So little cancer kids suffering in hospitals, people being raped, tortured. Genocide, famine, ethnic cleansing all of these and the countless other horrible realities of life were all planned by your omniscient deity, probably he is having a laugh, like a director watching his movie play out.

Jesus Christ died for us so we can be apart of him. So God can live in us. So we can be unified in his love.

This is another one, I cant honestly see why God would do this, it makes no sense, what point was he trying to prove, first of all god and Jesus are one, but also father and son, and also as it seems master and puppet. The horrific slaughter of Jesus which is technically God was needless, surely with his almighty power he could have planned a different set of circumstances or something. That is unless he loves a bit of hardcore torture porn and has a penchant for drama.

Evil is a virus. The more your set apart from God the more the virus dwells in you and eats you away.

This sounds like a scare tactic, the sort that you hear every Christian spout. Basically what you are saying is that I, my wife and my children all have evil growing inside them because we don't follow your contradictory ancient dogma, Sure buddy.

God should not be equated with magic. Did I ever speak a word of magic?

Your explanation is functionally, no different than magic.

And still, those observed consistencies had to come from somewhere.

Yes, logic. We need not invoke the supernatural to explain what is accessible to reason. Why must God prevent something from doing that which it is not caused to do? Is God preventing objects from falling up, or light from moving in a zig-zag? There is no reason to think this.

If one positive molecule is attracted to a negative molecule, then why should we think that another positive molecule would react in a different way?

Why must morality exist?

Because it is necessary for a stable society. If there was a society in which Murder was acceptable, then they would have killed each other off already, and thus only societies that prohibit murder would be left.

It's a rather simple concept.

Good grief, you're annoying.

Don't let it get to you mate, it is only a discussion.

I invite you to study on your own. You either forgot everything you learned about God or didn't pay attention in the first place

I have read a bit in my personal time on religions, but I'm loving your broad generalizations about me based on your incomprehension of what I'm actually trying to say. The thing is that I do use the term Atheist but as Dawkins states of himself I also hang just on the verge of Atheism and off the back of agnosticism. There is for me no definite evidence of God, I don't believe the Bible is trust-able and I especially despise organized religion, now I know it gives hope to a lot of people, but it also strips away individuality in an attempt to create a conformity through personal sacrifice. I have seen first hand the ridiculous behavior of devout Roman Catholics, walking bare-foot through the streets of my city carrying aloft a statue of Mary of something or other. How is this rational behavior, some pontiff or cardinal at some time decided it was a good thing to do and hey-presto it became something to do to prove your devotion.

I accuse you of being arrogant and having tunnel vision not because you believe what you believe (that is your choice) but the way you communicate that you believe me to be of less understanding and comprehension of the Universe and the spiritual and even the intellectual. Even in this argument you deem me a fool and call me annoying, your capacity to jump to insult is quite funny, and telling.

It's dumb to accuse someone for not believing in something that is not a part of their faith,

I didn't do this, I used Islam only as an example, I hoped that you would see this and as the intellectual theist provide maybe some evidence as to why your version of events are right and theirs is not. Instead you again throw insult.

Your argument is not worth responding to in full because you are a narrow-minded fool who is himself full of all of the vices he points out in other people.

Maybe I am, your attitude didn't stop me responding to your debates, for this is the point of what this site is about. If you can't answer to my posts then that I understand, but your defensive position and call for me to read your other debates (none of which answer my questions) show to me that you can't take this argument further than you already have.

I know your side of things already, even though I do not agree with them.

And I know your side of things even though I don't agree with them Is this not the root of debate.

Explaining faith to you is like trying to explain how to use the Internet to a stubborn old lady who refuses technology.

I know what faith is, I was once a part of your flock, I saw the argument from both sides eventually and decided for myself, yet again your analogy breaks down for I already know what it feels like to one hundred percent believe and I have already gone through the Roman Catholic paces, I don't know you so I'll refrain from casting broad generalizations about you but if I was to assume anything about you I would assume that the difference between me and you is that you have not walked on this side of the line and therefore are the analogous Old woman calling the computer evil and refusing to listen as the technology just seems out of reach, stubborn, arrogant and not open to the new, firmly imprisoned in the dogma and way of life that is out of date, maybe because the other side seems scary and opening yourself to it has been forbidden.

You don't know how much it could improve your life, and you don't want to try to understand. I implore your to research.

What makes you think my life needs improving, I'm quite happy where I am, doing what I'm doing in life.

There is more evidence that God exists than there is evidence that He doesn't.

What, to you, is satisfactory evidence that something doesn't exist?

They have heard the answer, they just refuse to believe it. You will never find an answer inside the natural sciences. Look all you want, but you will never find it.

For some people, 'magic' is not a satisfactory answer.

You are trying to change the definition of atheism. It is a 'disbelief' or a 'belief' there is no God. You don't know if what you think is true, therefore you believe that He doesn't exist. Do you not understand how the dictionary works? The word has several definitions. Any of the definitions can apply to the word. But all of the definitions don't have to apply, for a particular instance.

Belief and disbelief are antonyms, therefor your sentence takes on completely different meanings depending on which one you use to fill in the blank. Do clarify.

Any reasonable person, religious or not, falls somewhere on the map of agnosticism. This includes atheists who recognize that God is unfalsifiable and unverifiable on the existing evidence. I choose to identify as atheist rather than agnostic because I do not think any religion is correct, and if there is a force outside of nature, it does not matter to it in the slightest if we know or care about its existence. So, I do not operate within the confines of any religion, and I do not operate as if there is a force out there that cares if I worship it or even give it a passing thought. The tag of agnosticism carries with it the implication of uncertainty, and until new evidence is presented, my uncertainty is only a token one, in the interest of avoiding absolute statements.

I have already addressed this above. You are trying to change the definition of words here. It is a 'disbelief' or 'belief' there is no deity. You have faith that God doesn't exist. If you don't like this term, then perhaps you should reconsider what to refer to yourself.

Looks like I will have to borrow from a debate that you bailed on, once again.

"A quick lesson in the English language: when a word is prefixed with the letter 'a', the 'a' signifies a lack or absence of something. Examples include amoral, atypical, anaemic, abnormal. When we look at the word atheism, we see two components. 'A' and 'theism'. 'Theism' denotes the belief in a god, and the 'a' denotes an absence of such a belief. Ta-dah!"

I have already addressed this above. You are trying to change the definition of words here. It is a 'disbelief' or 'belief' there is no deity. You have faith that God doesn't exist. If you don't like this term, then perhaps you should reconsider what to refer to yourself.

You have missed the point. No matter how you define atheism, subjectively, it is not that much different from not believing in unicorns (or, believing in the nonexistence of unicorns, as you would probably insist on awkwardly phrasing it). Therefor, the act of believing in the nonexistence of unicorns would also constitute a religion. So would the act of believing in the nonexistent of Zeus, Ra, Spaghetti Monsters, Bigfoots, mermaids, and so on and so on forever. Each one of these would be a religion. You and everyone else would belong to most of them, which would be an infinite number of religions.

This is a whole lot of conjecture here. What contradictions are you speaking of? I have addressed the ones you brought up before. Do you have new contradictions for me to review?

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/jim_meritt/bible-contradictions.html

Not to mention the big ones like creationism and a young earth. I know you would like to believe these, because it means you can think the Bible is 100% true, but the available evidence simply does not support either of them. Until (and if) something new is presented, they will continue to be rightfully ridiculed when people attempt to pass them off as valid scientific theories. There is a good reason they receive no attention in peer-reviewed journals and other seriously academic forums.

That's how naturalism operates, not necessarily science.

When has science ever confirmed or denied the existence of something for which no evidence exists?

Evolutionists or atheists (secular) start from the point that God doesn't exist.

Evolution does not at all preclude the existence of God, it merely shows the errancy of the Bible. The two are extricable, even the case of a personal God.

The secular world view has to ignore God, and will deny any evidence that leads that direction.

Science does not deny evidence, at least not for long. What it does is refute and discard evidence that is faulty, which is all there is for things like creationism and a young earth.

When I am confronted with evolutionary evidence I am very critical.

So are scientists who support the theory, as they should be. Science is critical of every piece of evidence for anything, whether it is currently supported or not.

Especially seeing how the vast majority of evolutionary evidence is either artwork or "loose" speculation.

I have never debated anyone who both a) did not believe evolution a process was real and b) actually understood how evolution worked and what the evidence for it consists of. By making this claim, you have shown that you are no exception.

"This is not adding new information. This is replication of a similar base pair put into a different spot. We are not gaining new amino acids here"

there are only four base pairs in the human genome

Adenine

Guanine

Cytosine

and Thymine.

the combination of these base pairs form different amino acids

and different combinations of amino acids create different proteins

and different proteins lead to different traits in the animal.

the insertion, deletion, or substitution of a base pair (A,G,T,or C) results in a change in the amino acid

a change in the amino acid results in a change in a protein

and a change in a protein results in a change in a trait.

most of these traits are not beneficial, i.e. sickle cell anemia, caused by a change in only one base pair.

However, if for any reason the new protein is NOT harmful to the organism

as has been witnessed in such occurrences including bacterium developing resistance to antibacterials

some witnessed changes brought about by entirely random genetic mutations include:

the bacterium may increase production of the antibiotic’s target enzyme so that there are too many of them and the antibiotics cannot inactivate them all

the bacterium may produce an antibiotic-inactivating enzyme

the bacterium may alter the permeability of its cell membrane, or wall to the antibiotic

and since these bacteria survive in conditions where non-resistant bacteria cannot (unfortunately, hospitals) they spread throughout the population as other strains of bacteria die off, in a process known as survival of the fittest.

http://www.abc.net.au/science/slab/antibiotics/resistance.htm

"Where could this creature develop these attributes within its own DNA? What we know of genomes this would be impossible."

it would develop attributes based on random changes to the organisms genotype, which change the organisms phenotype (compilation of features).

most mutations would be negative to the organism, and it would die (i.e. diseases)

a rare number of mutations would prove to be helpful, and it would be better suited to its environment. It is the rarity of beneficial mutations that make the process take so long.

"That second article you know was linking those creatures through an ankle bone. This is evidence for you?"

Yes, this is evidence.

you can determine whether an animal is a carnivore or herbivore based on its teeth

and you can determine whether a woman has been pregnant based on fractures in her ribs

why do you doubt that a specialized ankle bone can clearly show that a limb that is amphibious?

First thing's first:

"philosophy is technically science."

When I say "science", I am referring to Modern Science. In its birth, science was a sub-set of philosophy that dealt specifically with the natural world (as opposed to Religions and other spiritual philosophies that dealt with supernatural phenomena.) Modern science is still all about natural phenomena, but it is now more constricted by the use of a universalized methodology. It is about quantifiable data, about measurements and consistent observations. It is about reporting what you see, not what you feel. By this definition (which excludes other uses of the word, such as "Political Science"), your assessment is backwards. All science may be philosophy, but not all philosophy is science. Philosophy ("love of wisdom") is about intellectual pursuits, regardless of the methodology or particular subject matter. But modern science is rooted in a very strict methodology that other forms of philosophy (ethics, religion, etc.) do not universally conform to. And frankly, I've always seen philosophy as ultimately rooted in speculating about what we should do, whereas science is not directly making those types of value judgments, so I'm not sure if modern science should even be considered philosophy anymore, even though it was born there.

Now onto Mr. Lewis:

"Supposing you hear a cry for help from a man in danger. You will probably feel two desires - one a desire to help (due to your herd instinct), the other a desire to keep out of danger (due to your instinct for self-preservation)."

His observation is valid, but his final reasoning is unsubstantiated speculation. Evolution is simply a process, it has no goals. However, because those that are benefited by the process survive, we sometimes argue that evolution's "goal" is survival. Furthermore, because the process works on populations and not individuals, this "goal" is more accurately survival of the species. While individual survival is a part of that overall "goal", it is not the only part. Thus "herd instinct" and "self-preservation" can both work towards survival of the species. So up to this point I totally agree with him. But then he goes on to describe the method that we use to choose between these impulses:

"But you will find inside you, in addition to these two impulses, a third thing which tells you that you ought to follow the impulse to help, ans suppress the impulse to run away. Now this thing that judges between two instincts, that decides which should be encouraged, cannot itself be either of them."

If there is a "third impulse", why does it have to be some universal construct that applies to all variants of this scenario? Most people might be more willing to help the man in danger if they know him personally, especially if they are related. This concept relates to kinship-based altruism which is well observed in various animal species. Then there is the other extreme, what if this person has wronged you in the past? Failure to help him could be argued to be an evolution of reciprocal altruism (we help others unless they prove they wouldn't help us) which has also been well-documented in other animal species (mainly primates, which we are). Also, there could be other factors. You might be a very brave and altruistic person, but you just happen to suffer from ophidiophobia (irrational fear of snakes.) So if this person is being threatened by fire, you may have no problem jumping in, but if they are being menaced by a large snake, you might not be psychologically capable of helping them. So morality isn't always the issue. As it turns out, in most occasions where there are conflicts between instincts within a person, "third factors" do manage to come into play, but Lewis immediately labeled them some kind of universal "Moral Law" without empirical justification. We now know something that he probably didn't: these factors are almost always chemical reactions, and there is no rational non-faith-based reason to assume that some God placed them there.

"Because we need something does not mean that we will have it. yes, those that have it are more likely to survive and pass it on, but how did they get it in the first place?"

You more or less answered your own question there. As far as "first cause", logic tells us that there has to be a first cause. But logic alone doesn't tell us what that first cause was. We create the concept of "unmoved mover" because that is a way of answering the question, but the very concept flies in the face of the line of reasoning being used in the first place. One second we say everything had to be moved, then we say that everything except an unmoved mover has to be moved. Its cheating. One minute we say nothing can come from nothing, then we say that God came from nothing. Instead of cheating, we should keep investigating until we find the unmoved mover, and then describe it at that time. Maybe we should consider that our original premise was wrong too. If time travel is a part of the creation of the universe (which is a proposition put forth by some of the current theories), than there would not need to be an unmoved mover, especially if the process is a true, ever-repeating cycle in which there never was a starting point at all. All speculative theory of course, but as much a potential answer as God.

"Also, many philosophers aren't religious, and many scientists are."

I never said otherwise. In fact, I know this extremely well. This man ( http://www.af.mil/information/bios/bio.asp?bioID=13751 ) is my uncle. He and his wife are both outstanding physicists who have taught nuclear physics at the Air Force Academy. They are also both life-long Christians who attend church every Sunday and made it a point to teach their children Christian values. The thing is, what they do in church and what the study professionally are two different things. When they work on experiments, they aren't studying Christianity and they aren't using faith. If the results of the experiment help affirm their faith, that's one thing. But the experiment itself was pure science, and would have yielded the same results whether or not they were religious. And you'll note that those doctors at the Catholic hospitals aren't practicing religion when they work there, they are practicing medicine. They get results from their knowledge and training, not from faith and prayer.

When I read your scenario involving the school children, I'm wondering why you wouldn't just superglue the balls on so the kids couldn't remove them so easily, or why you allowed 5 kids to do it simultaneously? Further, since this an allegory for God, why wouldn't an omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient being be able to teach all of the people the specific lessons simultaneously and in a way that would make the most sense to each individual? And what about all the people who do try to help themselves but just can't for whatever reason? Like all the very spiritual farmers in developing nations who are definitely trying very hard to feed themselves, their families, and their communities, and yet are turning up crop after crop of darn-near nothing? It doesn't appear that God helps everybody who helps themselves, and some of his bias seems to be geographical. I don't think an omnipresent entity would have problems with geography.

As far as the article, you ignored: a) Norman Borlaug; b) the fact that no matter how much of herself she was giving, Mother Teresa was only putting band-aids on wounds while the other two were dealing with the root of the situation; c) EVERYTHING else that the article was about.

"Faith is not in any way a hindrance. Give me an example of when faith is a hindrance."

Okay: http://www.philly.com/inquirer/local/pa/ 20101209_In_faith_healing_trial__Philadelphia_father_said_devil_killed_son.html

SO they believed that God would take care of them. They had a long standing policy of not going to the Doctor. They didn't realize how ill their child was, because they didn't go to the doctor. And then they had to face court charges for child abuse and manslaughter, adding greater sorrow to an already heart-wrenching tragedy. Now, it does appear that the child would have died regardless, but the chances of him surviving were pretty much nonexistent in the situation they put him in, and at the very least they wouldn't have had to go to court if they hadn't allowed common sense to be drowned by faith. AND: they still insist that this was the Devil's work. So they are admitting one of two things: either the Devil is more powerful than God; or the Devil is more powerful than their own faith. Either way, it sounds like faith was useless here.

And I didn't say that faith was always detrimental, but I do argue that it is a horrible way to go about gaining knowledge.

http://www.miketuritzin.com/writing/why-faith-is-a-bad-way-of-knowing/

Faith's best strength comes in to play emotionally, and even there it is not the only answer. Faith can make you happy, but you don't need faith to be happy.

"All religious at some point doubt, and this makes us stronger."

But then at some point they stop doubting, if they didn't they would no longer be religious.

"C. S. Lewis was once an atheist."

Richard Dawkins was raised in an Anglican environment and embraced Christianity until he learned of evolution when he was a teen. The two most aggressive atheists I know personally were raised in very religious environments, were devout Christians, and turned their back on religion as adults. Meanwhile I know a very philosophical middle-aged woman who explored numerous religions in depth, and decided that Buddhism was the one that made the most sense to her. What caused any of these people to flip over? Personal experiences and understandings. Irrelevant to our conversation.

"God always answers prayers, just not always in the way we expect."

That's just a cop-out. When our prayers do not appear to be answered, we can just say that "God works in mysterious ways". That isn't an answer. That doesn't allow for the fact that a naturalistic explanation is to blame for why you didn't get what you wanted. And it certainly doesn't tell you what God wants or is trying to do. You can only make that assertion after-the-fact, and since God can do anything, you can mold that assessment around any situation, using your own creativity to figure out His motivation. You will never know if you are right, you create a scenario where nobody can prove you wrong, and you might even overlook the lesson that this situation should have taught you. Oh, and I am glad that your teacher survived, but if you look at a time lapsed recording of some very busy highway, you will see periods where there aren't cars for brief periods here and there. These periods are rare, and we might not even think about them until their presence makes it easier for someone to survive. This situation you describe is unlikely, but not miraculous.

The two most pertinent definitions of random, from dictionary.com:

1. proceeding, made, or occurring without definite aim, reason, or pattern: the random selection of numbers.

2. Statistics- of or characterizing a process of selection in which each item of a set has an equal probability of being chosen.

I tend to automatically go to the statistical definition, and that is the definition I have been using this whole time. By that definition, science is not random, as I have explained repeatedly. If we agree on the first definition, than I guess I would say science is random, although it does not appear to be. That is, as I said in my earlier response, we are the ones imposing the aim and reason. Partially because that's just how our mind does things, and partially because we are reverse engineering everything. We are asking why something happens, and when we get the answer it feels like that was the only reason that it happened, but a more objective view shows us that these things could have proceeded quite naturally without intelligent action. The end results, the things that work, are just doing so as a step in the chain of events. That is all there really is to it. And in my opinion, that makes everything that science teaches me that much more amazing and beautiful.

"No random chance could have created something that is not random chance"

Explain that better.

As far as God as not being a thing, now you're just using semantics. Force, concept, persona,"Pure Who," whatever God is, we have never seen anything like Him, and that is precisely the reason why He works as an answer for everything. But that is just filling in the blanks. If we really want answers, we investigate, and whenever we do we find naturalistic answers. Every single time. Just because the origin of the Universe is bigger than anything else we have investigated so far, that does not mean the result will be any different.

"This is what I said through replication the DNA loses information (amino acids). The mutation is a loss of genetic information, there is never a 'gain' in new information."

"You can call it a change, but it's a change that loses information not gaining it."

No. With all due respect, you obviously have never learned about mutations.

a mutation can be either an addition, subtraction, or substitution of DNA.

http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/mutations_03

"Survival of the fittest is different from evolution"

the principles of Darwinian evolution are that

1) One of the prime motives for all species is to reproduce and survive, passing on the genetic information of the species from generation to generation. When species do this they tend to produce more offspring than the environment can support.

2) The lack of resources to nourish these individuals places pressure on the size of the species population, and the lack of resources means increased competition and as a consequence, some organisms will not survive.

The organisms who die as a consequence of this competition were not totally random, Darwin found that those organisms more suited to their environment were more likely to survive.

3) This resulted in the well known phrase survival of the fittest, where the organisms most suited to their environment had more chance of survival if the species falls upon hard times. (This phrase if often associated with Darwin, though on closer inspection Herbert Spencer puts the phrase in a more accurate historical context.)

4) Those organisms who are better suited to their environment exhibit desirable characteristics, which is a consequence of their genome being more suitable to begin with.

http://www.biology-online.org/2/10_natural_selection.htm

So, not only is survival of the fittest related to evolution- it is key to evolution.

"That was from your source not mine"

Yes: in the history section, not a modern scientist.

"You do realize this is a model right?"

yes. real bones are fragile.

"They constructed it from the discovery of a tooth"

no: the tooth was the first initial evidence of a megalodon.

since then, we have found more substantial fossils including vertebrate, and have extrapolated the rest based on existing sharks

"This is the evidence you support? How is 'art' more viable then eyewitness testimony?"

because this "art", as you call it, was constructed based on the proportional dimensions of a complete shark jaw and vertebrate, with the missing parts superimposed based on the skeletal construction of modern sharks.

"They have very little evidence it even flew"

other than

1) its similar anatomy to primitive flying insects

2) the fact that it left no tracks of walking, suggesting that it landed there

3) its stance is similar to the mayfly, which flies

"So in other words, a consistent environment."

yes, a consistent environment makes the process "straight forward".

"What about from catastrophic events"

that would fall under the category of 'significant events'

"this would definitely disrupt the time schedule"

which would be visible as a mark in the zircon structure

"All of these effects could "totally" disrupt the discordia"

which would be visible as a mark in the zircon structure

And there is none of the transitions in the fossil record

apes and humans diverged

we have found ape-human fossils

QED you are simply spewing garbage

According to natural selection the weaker species are eliminated

no: natural selection says that, within a species, those with traits better suited to their environment will survive, while those without traits suited to their environment do not.

"This animal would have to slowly gain the attributes and characteristics of a whale."

not necessarily.

it may develop the ability to swim

and then sleeker fur to swim faster

and then bigger feet to swim faster

and then a higher nose to breathe easier

and slowly it develops so many accumulated traits, each one in their own right aiding the species survive, until it is no longer recognizable.

"So how would you suppose a land animal with half fins and half legs would eat or catch food (even evade a predator). Natural selection would tell us this animal would be eliminated. Even if you believe it was a whale with a leg and fin mixture. How would it do a good enough job of swimming to catch it's food"

"The fossil indicates that archaic whales swam by undulating their vertebral column, thus forcing their feet up and down in a way similar to modern otters. Their movements on land probably resembled those of sea lions to some degree, and involved protraction and retraction of the abducted limbs"

I believe that answers your question.

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/263/5144/210.abstract

"We have to see intermediate forms, which we do not"

funny, I did not think you would be able to say any more blatantly wrong things...

here is an article discussing two important fossils of land whales

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/293/5538/2239.abstract

You still haven't answered where the original energy came from?

Let's say the answer is that nobody knows yet. Again, this might be a perfectly honest answer and all it proves is that nobody knows yet, not that your god did it. If you want to show that something exists, you have to do more than try to disprove contradicting theories. It's not like all these questions that we are still asking are multiple choice, and if it's not A or B then it's definitely C, no question about it.

Atheism is a religious belief, I have shown you this logic. And atheism is not a 'lack in belief', but specifically a disbelief in the existence in God.

You knit together some convenient definitions (pretending the inconvenient ones didn't exist), then ceased debating the point, picked up the same assertion in a different thread, and continued to insist that not having belief is somehow having a belief. This is not logic.

Christians believe there is a God. Atheists don't believe there is a God.

Atheists don't believe

don't believe.

Paring away the fact that atheism lacks everything needed to be considered a religion, from sacred texts to leaders to rituals to conjectures about the afterlife to origin stories or parables to codes of conduct to general organization of any kind, it really cannot be dumbed down any more than that. Atheists do not believe the claim that Christians are making.

How would this make all religion meaningless?

If lack of belief alone constituted a religion, you would belong to infinite religions because there are infinite things not to believe in.

What would it take for their testimony to be substantiated to you?

Evidence of the things that are claimed. Written accounts of "this happened, then this happened" don't mean anything when the observable facts contradict them or do not support them.

Do you believe in Socrates? We have less evidence for his existence then we do for Jesus. The witnesses of God's works and miracles out number those of any other phenomena. These are real people testifying to what they saw.

I understand your point about Socrates, but not one is telling me I'll go to hell if I don't believe in Socrates, and that Socrates performed various impossible acts or that Socrates is a part of a mind-bogglingly unlikely, self-contradicting and all around unpleasant doctrine that I must follow if I don't want to be tortured forever. Very little depends on Socrates' existence or lackthereof.

An entire generation of Israelites (over 600,000) witnessed God's miracles in Egypt. The crossing of the Red Sea for instance.

Does an account of this exist anywhere except for the Bible?

This 'real' science you speak of is naturalism. Miracles of that themselves are 'suspensions' in natural laws.

The 'real science' I speak of does not confirm the existence of something that has no evidence. If you consider this naturalism, fine with me.

Discredit it then, show me how their scientific method is wrong. You can't say they are bias (which they are toward the belief in God), when evolutionists are bias toward the non-existence of God.

"By definition, no apparent, perceived or claimed evidence in any field, including history and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the scriptural record. Of primary importance is the fact that evidence is always subject to interpretation by fallible people who do not possess all information."

This means that any evidence for the errancy of the Bible, even evidence they are unaware of or evidence that has not even been discovered yet is automatically discounted as false. This is not how science operates.

Ask scientists who endorses any particular theory what hypothetical discovery could be made that would destroy the foundation of that theory. They should all be able to give you an answer.

The people of this website would answer 'Nothing'.

Your 'reality' is the bias world views of atheists. I don't ignore reality, in fact I use the natural sciences to support my world view. But I am also critical of evolutionists who make arbitrary claims based on a loose "hypothesis".

To claim that the theory of evolution is just a loose 'hypothesis' is really grasping at straws.

For example? This does not change established scientific laws.

Egyptians believed the giant supernatural dung beetles pushed the sun across the sky every day.

Greeks thought that thunder and lightning were the work of Zeus, and that winter was caused by a sad harvest goddess, Ceres.

Whenever humans did not have the knowledge necessary to explain something in their environment, they usually attributed it to a supernatural being.

I never claimed that what people used to believe had any influence on scientific laws so I don't know why you brought this up.

Not all scientists deny God. In fact, a whole load of them are quite religious.

Okay, I can understand someone arguing that there is no proof of religion, at which point I inform them. However, arguing that there is no proof of evolution was unexpected. I assume you have some amount of education? You can find proof in a seventh grade science textbook, not to mention more informative sources.

We confess our sins to Jesus. And Jesus created the Eucharist, and lives in all of us. And Jesus taught us to forgive.

Well it's generally assumed of the ape super family. Regardless, the evidence to prove evolution is extremely flawed at best.

how so?

we have witnessed the mutation of many species of viruses, bacteria, and insects that developed immunity to antiviral medications, antibacterial medications, and insecticides.

and most people agree that evolution is factual.

please, feel free to look at the evidence for evolution and determine what is flawed about it

http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/0_0_0/lines_01

"The timelines suggest that, but the evidence doesn't."

what does that even mean?

the fossil timeline is a collection of physical evidence.

"Basic research would tell you that C14 dating wouldn't apply to something that old"

I apologize, this was not conducted with carbon dating, but with Uranium-lead dating.

http://geology.about.com/od/nutshells/a/ aa_earthbirth.htm

"The translation of the Hebrew must be taken into account. In English the translators of the KJV were not specific on what the actual source of the light would be. This does not mean there is an error in the original Hebrew."

There is absolutely no mention of G-d creating one great light and one mirror that reflects said great light. If you want to question the translation, the books says

G-d created two ____

which would make the sun and moon identical

either way, it is not the strongest argument, so I can accept that maybe the wording is off.

"What holes are these? I addressed your contentions"

Stating that the evidence for evolution is flawed is not addressing a contention.

I can do that too

the evidence for creation is flawed

the difference is that I have other proof that suggests that evolution is, in fact, not flawed

you have done no such thing.

concerning the law of cause and effect:

are you familiar with a cycle?

A causes B

B causes C

C causes A

there is no point of origin.

in accordance with thermodynamics, matter was never created.

Due to quantum interpretation of time, the infinite range of gravity, the observed phenomena of universe expansion, it is thought that the universe is cyclic. This would result in a pattern with no origin, much like the example I gave you.

and just because you cannot explain how something would occur does not mean it is magic.

And, there have been exceptions to scientific rules before.

maybe we will discover that there is, in fact, a way to create matter, which would explain how something could be created out of nothing

just as we discovered that there is, in fact, a way to create magnetic monopoles.

but in the meantime, the temporal cycle is most widely accepted because it has the most explanatory power and the fewest contradictions

actually, people do support gods other than your own.

they may not be unicorns, mogwais, or spaghetti

but historically, people have prayed to

Feathered Serpents

8 legged horses

animal/people combos

all of which had a lot of followers

"I was not stating it was going to stand up in our courts."

you implied that, eyewitness are credible because they are used in 'our judicial system' so you did imply that they would.

"I was stating that an eyewitness is seen as credible"

under very strict conditions, which the bible does not meet.

"You assume they are lying because you refuse to 'believe' the existence of God."

I do not assume they are lying. Like the judicial system, I simply do not count them as reliable evidence. It is not a matter of WHAT they are saying. Many aspects of the bible turned out to be true, but i only believe they are true because there is other, reliable, evidence (i.e. The Hittites were once thought to be a Biblical legend, until their capital and records were discovered at Bogazkoy, Turkey.)

You don't come on here and say "I don't believe",

Yes, I do.

instead you say "there is no God"

I have not said this.

I was trying to show you that you have no way to 'state as fact' that there is no God.

I know this. This is why I do not do this.

You have not refuted the assertion that if atheism is a religion, then religion is meaningless.

You are as ignorant as the rest of the atheists on this site. The Bible is a compilation of books full of eyewitness testimony. Thousands and thousands of people witnessed the works of God. Over 500 people witnessed the resurrected Jesus. There is evidence in the Bible. You just refuse to acknowledge the witnesses.

Unsubstantiated eyewitness testimony does not carry a drop of water when it comes to science. Bigfoot, UFOs, ghosts, the gods of other religions, and the Loch Ness Monster can all claim eyewitness testimony, to varying volumes.

The fact that we can through natural science prove there was a flood.

No, you can't. There is, as of yet, no proof of God that actually withstands real scientific scrutiny. You just think there is because to you, answersingenesis is a credible source.

There has been no real answer. The habit we need to grow out of is ignoring God.

Just because you must ignore certain aspects of reality in order to preserve your faith does not mean they are not real. There are many things once attributed to supernatural deities that now have scientific explanations.

It was a compilation of energy and matter. According to thermodynamics "new matter and energy don't come into existence". The law of conservation states that energy is merely 'recycled' but no new energy is created. Then the law of cause and effect says that "all effects have a known or unknown cause". So then there must be a first cause that started all causes. We know matter and energy can't create themselves. So then the Big Bang implies matter and energy came from nothing. In order for their to be something to expand, there has to be the 'something' first. Where did this matter and energy come from?

The Big Bang, like evolution, only deals with the effects of something after a certain point. Evolution makes no claims about the origin of life, and the Big Bang makes no claim about the origin of matter. These matters are dealt with by different theories and areas of science.

http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/question.php?number=631

I can defend my religion to any point that you bring up.

Then why repeatedly ignore statements that refute assertions you continue to make?

That is right you can't prove non-existence of God. But you and other atheists claim He doesn't exist. You can choose not to believe in Him. But you are a fool if you can 'for certain' claim He doesn't exist. You can shout your 'opinion' from the highest point in the world, but you can't state as a fact that He doesn't exist.

Okay, looks like I need to say this a third time. An atheist who claims they know God doesn't exist is being dishonest. So are Christians who claim they know he does exist. No one knows. We have all reached conclusions based on the available evidence, which amounts to nothing more than the Bible and for some people, this is pretty weak evidence.

You are arguing a point of view I have never taken and will never take, because I would never say that God definitely doesn't exist, in the interest of being scientifically correct. Good job wasting your time basically agreeing with me that the existence of God is unverifiable and unfalsifiable. Too bad it applies to you, too.

I did not ignore the argument. I have shown all of you how the atheist ideal is a religious belief.

A lack of belief is not a belief, and atheists lack belief. It doesn't get any simpler than that. Another point from a different debate that you failed to address:

If atheism is a religion, then the lack of belief in anything else is also a religion. As there are infinite things not to believe in, then there are infinite religions, and we would all belong to the vast majority of them. If there are infinite religions and we all belong to an infinite amount of them, then don't you think that essentially cheapens religion into a meaningless concept?"

Then they either ignore the natural sciences (big bang: matter created from nothing 'which violates both the law of cause and effect and thermodynamics)

The Big Bang theory does not state that matter came from nothing, it states that it expanded from a singularity. Try again.

or they just say "I don't know we haven't found out yet",

What's wrong with being honest? If we don't know the answer to a question, why is the answer automatically God? This is a sad habit that humans need to grow out of. All throughout history, people have answered difficult questions with a supernatural force, and all it has done it impede the pursuit of the real answer.

I would ask what works have these 'beings' done? Do they have the testimony of thousands of people recorded through history? What claims are related to them? Does anyone testify to their works?

1. At one point, God could not claim any of these things either.

2. Other gods in other religions can claim all of these things as well.

3. How many people testify to something has no influence on its veracity.

4. There is nothing currently known to humans that requires God in order to exist, therefor it is not definitive that he has done any works at all.

"And your 'claim' is that He doesn't."

no. my claim is that

"you have no proof that he exists, so why should I believe you"

An eyewitness is a verifiable source. We use them in our judicial system. If you want to dismiss an eyewitnesses testimony you better be able to discredit them.

actually, this would all be heresy in court. Since these people were not under oath, they may have been exaggerating.

Since these people are not available for the stand, they cannot be given credence (not only because they are dead, but any statement made by a person not at the trial cannot be used)

So, no, these would not qualify in a judicial system. Any person who has ever taken a class in trials would note the many objectionable (in the legal sense) aspects of the bible

"What evidence do you claim?"

a trail of chimp to human evolution suggests that man evolved from monkeys, not made by G-d.

fossil timelines suggest that animals appeared on land before they appeared in air

Carbon dating suggests that the Earth was formed in 740 million years, not 7 days

physical laws of gravity suggest that the sun emerged eons before the earth, not 4 days after it

the moon is found to not be a source of light at all (let alone a great light): it merely reflects sunlight.

Many stars are much, much brighter than the sun (a 'great light')

with so many holes in the bible, it can hardly be used as a reasonable book from which to observe anything as true.

"atheism believes on inadequate grounds (dogma), that God doesn't exist. Because like 'religion' this is a point that can't be proven through the natural sciences."

The difference is that you are suggesting a possibility that G-d exists.

that is your claim.

and therefore it falls upon you to have proof.

And the stories told in the bible are exactly the same as the stories told by scientists.

Because nobody saw G-d create the universe.

and of these 234 acclaimed miracles, how many are verified? We have nothing more than a single source that has no means of proof.

Therefore, rather than believing in the absence of G-d, I simply find your lack of proof inadequate.

And, without proof, your claim is rejected.

That is not to say I know He does not exist. If for any reason I were to see proof, I would hold my (personal) dogma that

"i believe in what I can prove"

the only difference would be that G-d would now fit in this category.

However, concerning religion, it would appear that no amount of proof could ever persuade a zealot that G-d does not exist.

therefore, it is a belief that G-d exists, as opposed to a dogma of

"I believe in what I cannot prove"

because, were this your dogma, you would believe in everything, including the flying spaghetti monster that you obviously do not worship.

"First of all, you picked and chose random definitions."

no, i picked and chose whatever definition fit my intention- which in this case was to demonstrate how unreliable your frankenstein technique of defining atheism was.

"Is that you atheists try to claim that God doesn't exist, yet you have no proof to make that claim"

lacking a belief is different than believing in something.

I believe in the big bang

I believe in evolution

but i do not believe in the absence of a G-d

in fact, like other atheists I lack a belief in G-d.

There is no unifying 'belief' of atheists.

however, since you pick and choose your own definitions, you manipulate a belief to be anything without proof

just as I manipulated a value to be anything concerning money.

"You can't say "I don't see Him" therefore He doesn't exist"

but I can say

"there is no evidence for me to believe in him, therefore I do not believe in him"

and, yes, the concept of

"I believe in what I can prove"

is a dogma

and possibly religious

but the statement

"I do not believe in G-d"

is a rejection of belief. Not a belief in and of itself

How exactly would you suggest going about proving that anything doesn't exist? It doesn't have to be God, a patently unfalsifiable entity, just anything. A unicorn. The Spaghetti Monster. Mogwais.

Hint: You can't.

I addressed your statement that atheists claim there are no gods, by explaining that most of them realize there is no way to know for certain if there is or not, they just choose not to operate within any existing religion because of their hypocrisy, lies, and contradictions. If they do think they know for certain, then they are lying to themselves as much as you are if you say you know that God does exist. You ignored this, and continue to spout the point that was refuted, just in a different place.

I suppose you would have to ignore that argument if you want to continue to tell yourself that atheism is a religion. Doesn't it make you a little uncomfortable to hold beliefs you cannot defend past a certain point?

"God has no creator, He is eternal. You can't apply the natural sciences to the supernatural."

You sir are just giving a new meaning to the word stupidity.

"We are to humble ourselves before God. It's because He is the Almighty Creator that you must humble yourself out of respect. Those who do not fear (respect and humble themselves) God will be arrogant and sinful in all aspects of their life."

You are just brainwashed aren't you. You can't even see how twisted it is to be humble because you fear a magical being in the sky. Seriously its like hitting your head against a wall, when debating a religious fanatic like you.

And don't get me wrong there are somewhat plausible arguments for your side, my cuzin who is a mathematics major and Christian presents me those but you sir are just stupid.

" http://www.conservapedia.com/Atheism#Atheism_and_Mass_Murder" LMFAO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

You say my sources aren't credible but you present me with that? It is a well known fact that this website is nothing more than a propaganda site. LOL!!!! it's got "conserv" in its name gee i wonder what its all about. Comon you really can't be that naive? You do know its a site created mainly for republicans and christinans.

And here is a more proper source to show you the reality of the amount of damage religion has done, not just in the last century but the last 2 millenniums

http://www.google.com/search?q=Religious+wats&btnG;=Google+Search&hl;=en#q=Religious+wars&hl;=en&prmd;=ivnsb&tbs;=tl:1&tbo;=u&ei;=Yx0mTen4CYSdlgfU5ISzAQ&sa;=X&oi;=timeline_result&ct;=title&resnum;=13&ved;=0CI4BEOcCMAw&fp;=1&cad;=b

"You prove you are uneducated here, you imply the Bible is a fairytale yet you have no way to prove or disprove it. Such claims are based on conjecture, and further prove your ignorance. That and of course you don't cite any sources for your theories (conjecture without evidence)."

Do you keep up with the world? Or do you play mental gymnastics to make yourself believ that you are right even though it has been proven you aren't.

It has been proven that everything written about Jesus was written about 20-30 years AFTER he died. There is no direct source confirming his existence, so clearly it was a fairytale (sure a popular one, but a fairytale none the less).

"Let me stop you right there, since the point flew way over that tiny brain of yours. You can't claim 'your ethics' when they all descend from religious law. Morals of not murdering and stealing date back to pre-Mesopotamian era."

Oh i see thats why people were burned alive in witch hunts and killed because they didn't follow the "true christian god" right got you.

"You can't claim 'your ethics' when they all descend from religious law. Morals of not murdering and stealing date back to pre-Mesopotamian era. That is before secular historians claim we formed settlements and became sedentary. So then it must mean these morals are 'wired' in us."

And yes my ethics, My religion was Sikhism and it does teach morals but again i was a kid so i didn't bother reading them. I simply learned, I was sad when i saw someone being hurt or crying it was as simple as that. I hated seeing people unhappy. Therefore i don't do things that makes a person's life miserable and unhappy.

"You contradict your beliefs here. Doesn't the atheist agenda say it's not human until its born."

Atheist agenda is to be reasonable, and EVERY ATHEIST IS NOT THE SAME. And i believe after 12 weeks the baby develops the structure that resembles a human being therefore now it is some what human like semi-human if you will, so at this point i would say its wrong. But before that it is up to the mother to decide. Not up to you or anybody, the mother and mother alone.

And other atheists may believe differently but again they have their reasons. As long as i have a proper argument to support my opinion it is acceptable. We do not have law that we have to follow in atheism.

" Sperm alone and an egg alone doesn't have the potential for life. A fertilized egg does have the potential for life. If it can become a living breathing human, then it's murder to cease this process."

Actually yes every sperm has the potential to be a life, if they were to meet. again a fertilized egg is just that a a fertilized eg which rapidly multiplies itself into many cells but they remain cells, They are not aware of themselves like we are, they are just cells.

"I think an important step for pro-choice people to take, is to demonstrate abortions on themselves. Since it's not murder it won't be suicide. Just call it an 'abortion' right?"

Again your stupidity has no limits, a human being walking around aware of it's surroundings is much different than a blob of cells that aren't aware of anything at all.

You said that God is so much more complex than simpler views. This implies that you are not willing to take a more complex view of things, if it truly is so. That implies that you would prefer that God not exist.

It does not imply that I'm unwilling to take a more complex view of things, it states that with only a limited knowledge of the Universe and it's workings it is too much of a leap of faith for me to just invoke a creator because there is things I can't explain, or can't be explained by current understanding.

I would prefer if God existed, it would give me a sense of fulfillment to know that there is something out there, but my better sense tells me that it does not have to exist in order for me to be here, without proof there is no argument as I view God the same way I view any fictional character such as a Unicorn or an Elf.

There is no proof of the Flying Spaghetti Monster's existence

Neither is there of God, the Flying Spaghetti monster of course is fictitious it was made up to prove a point.

There are biggies

like our sense of right and wrong,

There is a school of thought on our morality evolving from simple reciprocal altruism which evolved from kin selection, the you scratch my back I'll scratch yours thing.

and the fact that we exist

We exist because of evolution, an evolution that saw our beginnings as non-living replicating molecules such as RNA and through to the endosymbiosis of mitochondria and chloroplasts which are seen as proteo-bacteria, a completely different species to us. On then to the eventual formation of mammals which include us.

and that the whole of the universe exists.

Still not evidence, there are theories that explain this, but physics is where I'm out of depth.

There are those who have experienced visions or voices from God. These people could not be insane, as they actually turned out to be true.

There are those that think they are Napoleon as well, but these people are insane. Just because you don't want these people to be insane does not make it so. Why is it that there has never been one accurate prediction? That is outside of vague accounts that are ambiguous at best.

And, take Saint Joan of Ark,

Please, people became allies with Joan of Arc because she claimed she was communicating with the divine, is this really a surprise? What you claim to be historical fact has no concrete evidence.

Blessed Pope John Paul II made a little girl re-grow a bladder. Tell me that isn't proof? Hundreds of saints have worked such miracles on many, many people. Prayer has saved many more.

When did Pope John Paul do this show me a credible source. Prayer has been the part of tests that prove it to be ineffective.

I would give you better proof than this, but you do not believe this proof. If you study, you will find much historical fact in the favor of Catholicism outside of the Bible.

I don't believe that which is not proof. There is many things that prove the existence of Catholicism but non to my mind that prove the existence of God.

Why wouldn't He? I do not pretend to know the answer to this question, but I can guess that He wasn't going to go against His own natural laws.

So you agree that life arose from non-life then?

Why wouldn't there be? If God treated the world He created as a puppet show, there would be no point.

But I was of the impression that God was both omnipotent and omniscient, he could not have created all without knowing what was going to happen. Therefore life is, in the view of an existing creator a puppet show.

Divine Revelation. Look it up. Read about it for more than two seconds.

Your arrogant tone creeping in again. Presumably that before this people weren't ready, right? And everybody got free passes to heaven in light of the fact that God had not shown himself yet.

Polytheism was not perfectly acceptable at any time, as that is the worship of false gods. However, God would not punish them for doing so, as they did not know better,

Why would God punish anyone, he is omni-benevolent. The thing is our paths are pre-determined so nothing we do is our fault.

Polytheism came about from humanity's attempt at explaining God, sort of like the whole idea of Earth being the center of the universe.

Polytheism came about from mans attempt to explain the Earth, and all the wondrous things he saw, now we have explanations for lots of theses things.

That's why you aren't a heretic. Which means all of these brilliant new ideas you speak of came from religious.

I was brought up in a strict Roman Catholic house. It seems amusing that when people such as Darwin say that had the idea of Natural Selection he had been training to be a vicar. Then he rejected his religious beliefs the more he thought about it, seems to be a running trend among the educated.

There is no such thing as "other Gods" God is a single person. There are other gods, but these are not real, they are myth. As no other gods have ever existed, then they cannot "retire" as you say. This is the dumbest thing I have ever heard in an argument, as, by saying this, you assume I actually believe in every religion the world has ever encountered. If so, you are an idiot. If not, it was a dumb thing to say and you should have known better.

First of all this was not a dumb thing to say, you seem to find the idea of many Gods to be ridiculous making you atheistic to these Gods, I just include yours. I asked this question to highlight this point, it was not meant to be taken seriously and fuck you very kindly for once again showing your arrogance, you are exactly as every Roman Catholic I've met, arrogant and judgmental, personality traits openly condemned by your peers but religiously practiced by them. The very fact that you dismiss these Gods off-hand shows that you have Catholic tunnel vision the same I get from my mother every time I meet her.

Sorry, you lost me completely here. Honestly. Please clarify.

What I was stating is that even now people are splitting from the church because some want to believe one thing and others want to believe another thing. Some want literal biblical truth, others are happy with adding evolution or discrediting some of the bible as you do. Where do you draw the line how can so many schisms be right? What about Islam that is technically a schism of Judaism and Christianity, they just go one profit further. I suppose they are wrong and you are right? Right?

The Bible is not to be taken literally. When reading it, you must account for the knowledge of the time, the language

Surely divine revelation would have seen to it that these things were properly accounted for, it seems a bit of an ask to believe that God would have his message portrayed in a hap-hazard manner, ambiguous, unclear and difficult to verify as actual truth or just the ramblings of the more deep-thinking Goat-herders. When you start to pick and choose which bible parts you want to believe in and which you don't, you open up the possibility to a finite list of rules that one by one you'll have to chip away at.

Religious people can't be expected to know how everything works. We're just some random blokes like you.

Who said they should?

However, God gave the people of a long time ago messages. You can't disagree that the Old Testament has some prophecies that are pretty darn accurate. And they can't be manipulating things, because these "things" happen a couple centuries later. sometimes a bit more than a couple.

Such as?

I find it interesting you continue to site bible as a source, and a website where the article is written by professional writers isn't a credible source.

A wise man once said The difference between intelligence and stupidity is that intelligence has limits.

"This site has no evidence, just rambling conjecture and opinions of atheists"

If you had bothered to read something you would have seen those are logically structured arguments that do not use opinion but Reasoning to produce a answer.

And just because an atheist is presenting an argument doesn't mean its rambling.

"The Protestant does not have any 'strict traditions' or follow blindly without question. "

...you are kidding right?

" As a follower you do fear God, it is this way so you stay humble as a person. "

So You are only a humble person because of fear, if you don't see whats wrong with that, then you are just foolish.

" So therefore they justify their immoral acts like abortion (murder of unborn child), drugs, stealing, murder, rape. All of these things would be just fine for an atheist to do. Because he has no rules. Our ethical principles as a society derive from religious doctrine."

You could not be more wrong, you see any atheist running into a building blowing themselves up? you see any atheist molesting a child? (yes im talking about the priests). Now i believe you are confusing atheists with psychopaths but since you aren't educated i guess you don't know what that is.

But here is how my ethics and morals work. IF somebody hits me, rapes me, steals from me then I don't feel too happy about it, therefore i know it is also wrong to do it to others i DO NOT need a book or a god scaring me into not doing something.

As for abortion, It is only a human life after 12 weeks before that it is just a bunch of cells. It is like saying you want to save every sperm cell and every egg because it maybe a child one day. But again i don't know if you understand what i just said since you are clearly uneducated.

"I have shown you that you do follow rules. Common sense is only 'common' if it's shared by a group of people. Therefore your perception of morality is based on religious law. If you could do whatever you want then steal a car. You can simply say "No, I would get arrested", or because you know it's wrong (religious law). If you have no problem stealing a car then you are amoral. Therefore lacking morals by society's definition (based on religious law). "

See above

"Your logic of the origin of the universe is that nothing created something. Which we know by various laws of science is not the case for instance the law of cause and effect (all causes trace back to a first cause)."

No sir i do not know what caused the big bang, but i certainly don't rely on fairy tales to answer that question. (And please don't put words in my mouth, i know it maybe hard for someone like you but try not to delude yourself)

And this can back fire on you. If something can't be created from nothing, then who created your god?

"Sorry about what I said about your position in the debate."

Apology accepted.

"Okay, this will probably sound annoying to you..."

Not at all. In fact, both this point and your later point (comparing things to a standard) relate to each other rather nicely. And you are right about the Big Bang portion of this debate not really going anywhere, so I will set that aside (mostly).

Let me start by comparing science and religion. As different as they are, they do have something really basic in common: both attempt to answer questions that don't have an obvious answer. But it is in the methodology that they differ. Religion is fueled by faith. Faith doesn't necessarily require evidence, in fact the blind faith required by religion will often ignore evidence that refutes it, or attempt to change the evidence to fit its presumptions. Faith appeals to emotion more than to intellect. Faith creates answers to the big questions through minimal investigation (if investigation takes place at all). Faith turns to the supernatural. While most supernatural constructs (vampires, griffins, trolls) are presented as additives to the natural world, God is a much bigger tool that is presented as an answer to the natural world. By envisioning God as having no limits whatsoever, and as the source of everything we can observe, God can be used to answer almost any question. Humans are curious, and God can instantly satiate our curiosity. This is why Gods are virtually ubiquitous from one culture to the next. Thousands of years ago, humans simply didn't know how to answer all of the questions they had, but they really wanted to. So the archetype of God exists to answer the questions. This was actually probably very beneficial to early man, as it allowed them to focus on the more direct issues that had immediate consequences. They couldn't really rely directly on God/s to solve these types of problems, as He/they apparently wanted us to figure it out on our own. That is where investigative inquiry comes in. And as investigative inquiry became more sophisticated, branches of it essentially evolved into the sciences (much as basic philosophy evolved into religion).

Since the Gods aren't helping us with the immediate issues, faith doesn't really do much for investigative inquiry (except maybe faith that the answer is to be found), and can actually be a hindrance. As it turns out, the best tool to be used here is faith's polar opposite: skepticism or doubt. If we don't have a clue how to answer a question we make a guess based on the available evidence. But we know that guesses can be wrong, so we basically assume that they are wrong until the evidence proves them right. And if further evidence proves them wrong again, we chuck the bad guess and use our new information to make a better one. This is the basis of the scientific method. This makes science a self-correcting process, unlike religion, which purports to teach eternal truths. The scientific method generally forces science to get a little bit better, as well as constantly providing new riddles to solve.

The basic principles of the scientific method (falsifiability, duplication of results, peer review) have been around for ages now. Why? Because they get results. Sometimes very slowly, and at great frustration to many scientists, but they keep providing answers to things. And there is one basic principle of the universe that makes them work: everything has limits. Any item you study has things it cannot do, and things it must do, and will react in predictable ways in different environments. The more we explore a phenomenon, the more we learn about those limits, and often we learn the limits of other phenomenons in the process. You kept saying earlier that science claims things happen randomly. You appear to equate the absence of an intelligent designer with randomness. The thing is, the more we learn about the universe, the less random things get. Form fits function and function follows form. Things do what they do because they can, often because they must. And the only real reason that it looks like an intelligence is behind everything is because we our using our intelligence to learn what the limits are. Intelligence isn't behind everything, it's just behind our eyes, right where the brain sits. We assume that things are planned and designed because those are the only real ways we know how to do things. But to assume those are the only real ways to do things not only runs counter to our observations, but also is kind of arrogant.

I think we create Gods as a way of visualizing what we might be like without limits.

Indeed, the very fact that God is the only thing we know about that doesn't have any limits is all the more reason to be skeptical of his existence at all.

So, while we don't know for sure what caused the Big Bang, we can tell that the results of it happened because of the limits of every single particle involved, because certain interactions just had to occur due to cause and effect. Is it possible that an intelligence made those limits? Yes. But it is not the only answer. If you want to use science to look for God, you need go no farther than psychology.

And while we are talking about psychology, let's get to the second premise of yours. Why do we have these same unspoken standards? Several reasons. One is that we need them. Thought, like anything else in the natural world, has limits. And it needs those limits to function. And those standards are uniform also because we are related. Different as we may be, all of us with "normal" brain functioning still do things in pretty similar ways because of how our brains are wired. Again, function follows form. And this form/function interaction was modified by evolution. Our pre-human ancestors weren't as sharp as we are mentally, they couldn't do the same things we can, they couldn't conceive of the same things we can (although there is evidence that our extinct cousin the Neanderthal was getting there. It appears that they may have had religion themselves, which further validates the hypothesis that religion is rather primitive, and not enough to keep a species alive.) Since evolution tends to lead to an accumulation of beneficial traits, we might operate in similar ways just because it is the best way we can do things. Also, operating in similar ways would benefit our ability to work together in groups, which is another huge reason why we have lasted this long.

And now we even have evidence that morality itself fits those same rules: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/magazine/13Psychology-t.html?_r=2&ref;=science. This article is 8 pages long, but I highly recommend you read the whole thing. Although the theory is still being refined, we now have genetic evidence of a source for morality. If it truly is genetic, that means it passed the "evolution test" and is probably at least somewhat beneficial to us. And not just to individuals, some of these principles (fairness and harm) are useful for entire groups of people, perhaps humanity as a whole. Now, of course there will be differences to how people will respond to this genetic moral pull. Partially because most genetic traits have variety, allowing natural selection to do its thing. Also because these things can be overpowered by things like intellect and strong emotions. Additionally, brain defects can wipe out aspects of morality entirely (which would be a pretty nasty trick for God to pull, essentially damning brain damaged people to an eternity of Hell for being immoral when they can't even help it). The fact that people do vary so much even though they are naturally moral, and the fact that they can overrun morality with cognition might be exactly why religions try to dictate specific moral actions. They use the fear of punishment to keep people in line. Rather like a government, doncha think?

These days there are many extremely aggressive atheists out there who actively want to destroy people's faith. They aren't trying to be mean, they honestly think it is the best thing for humanity.

But I told you at the beginning of all of this, that I am not like that. I answer questions honestly and challenge everyone to think rationally, but it is all up to who chooses to listen to me. And if their faith is truly strong, I doubt anything I can say would break it.

But more importantly, I don't think it is necessary to quash a person's faith, even if I thought I could. A few thousand years ago, atheism was almost inconceivable for most people. All cultures had religion, or at least simple mythology. Now we have more atheists and agnostics than ever. When the USA was born it was the first truly politically secular nation. Now most countries are secular. It looks to me like we are evolving out of faith. Once upon a time, it kept us alive. Now, it can only slow us down.

"But because of sin, all things will die. God isn't giving cancer to anyone. It's because of sin we are made vulnerable, and therefore are capable of getting sick and dying. What killed the rescuers (from cancer) was the chemical mixtures used in making the buildings. The "free will" of mad men brought the towers down. Don't blame God for the acts of men."

Okay so let me get this straight all things must die because of sin? Now keep this in mind

A man devotes his entire life in medical studies, helps finds multiple cures for numerous diseases. Helps millions of people, yet get a deadly disease and dies a miserable death.

This Man was Christian lets say for the sake of the argument

Now theres a second man who has done exactly the same things but is an Atheist.*

Now tell me does god punish the second man and not the first?

Does God Punish them both? for trying to keep people alive and going against the rule that is, All things must die because of sin.

And also there are plenty of proofs that god doesn't exist, the problem is are you educated enough to understand them?

http://atheism.about.com/od/argumentsagainstgod/Arguments_Against_God_Atheological_Arguments_for_Atheism.htm

I assure you this is a very important statement in our argument.

I will repeat myself; if the statement retains its meaning with the omission of the word, and if, instead of addressing the statement, you quibble over the meaning of the unneccessary word, you are nitpicking and avoiding the point.

You still don't understand the concept here. Yes, God created everything. However we (all people) ruined the creation.

Are you implying that God did not expect creation to be ruined? If so, then he is not all-knowing. If not, and God did expect creation to be ruined, then he created the world with the intention of having it play out as it did. You have said that the coming of Jesus was foretold even before the creation of the earth, and this is a statement that supports the latter view, so either your beliefs contradict themselves, or you are making pointless statements.

I will attempt to explain this one more time. God created the first humans. God created their environment. They knew nothing but what he made for them, they had no thoughts that were not the product of the environment he put them in, they had no abilities or tendencies that he did not endow them with. Everything they did, thought, and felt, is a result of their experiences, and God engineered their experiences, completely and solely. This is just as true for them as it is for us.

The problem with your point of view is that you want to blame someone other then the offender. We see this in our culture with 'passing the blame' to someone else. No one wants to 'own up' to their mistakes. We want to blame someone else for the bad things we do. Why do you accept this?

As I am an atheist and do not actually believe God is responsbile for anything, naturally I have no one to blame but the perpetrator of any given act, whoever that may be. I am pointing out the implications of an all-knowing, all-powerful creator. There is no honest way to deny that the creator of the world, who made the decision to create the world as it is with complete knowledge of how history would play out, is not responsible for everything had happened after he created it. If he wanted to, he could have created an infinite number of alternate creations, with an infinite number of small adjustments or large ones. But he didn't. He made this one, and not the tiniest detail of it was an accident; it was designed to produce the world as it existed yesterday, and today, and as it will exist tomorrow and the next day. This means that everything is exactly as he meant it to be, and it always will be. If this is not so, then God is not all-knowing, because he could not accurately predict the future of his creation.

You and Atheism as whole claim there is no God.

Religion has made a claim that there is a God and atheists have decided the evidence as of yet is too weak to accept such a claim. There is a difference. We are not making claims, we are rejecting them, at least until something truly convincing is presented.

If pressed, I believe most atheists would say that they realize there is no way to falsify God's existence. If they do not, and claim they know there isn't a god, then they are being as intellectually dishonest as Christians who claims they know there is a god.

I would not waste time arguing the nonexistence of a supernatural force that cannot be falsified. What I do argue is ther personal God that had been constructed by Christianity.

It looks like Definition 2 would fit really well.

No, sorry. Atheism has no fundamental set of beliefs, no sects, or practices. They simply reject the claims made by others. There is a reason the word 'atheist' is synonymous with 'nonbeliever'.

Exactly alternate definitions. That's why I listed the source for you. Are you really that ignorant?

It is not ignorant to point out that your own sources make no distinction between the phrases 'believes there is no God' and 'does not believe there is a God', even though one implies the holding of a belief, and one implies the absence of any beliefs and when it comes to our disagreement, this distinction is a monumental one. Dictionaries are not written by people who are intimately familiar with the common points of contention in particular areas, thus there are many definitions that contain ambiguities and room for interpretation. Unfortunately, in this case, you are insisting on interpreting incorrectly.

Where is this an acceptable definition of Atheism, or are you trying to change words to make yourself right?

A quick lesson in the English language: when a word is prefixed with the letter 'a', the 'a' signifies a lack or absence of something. Examples include amoral, atypical, anaemic, abnormal. When we look at the word atheism, we see two components. 'A' and 'theism'. 'Theism' denotes the belief in a god, and the 'a' denotes an absence of such a belief. Ta-dah!

Really, this is a credible source to you. I can go there and say "Atheism is the belief that purple is the color gray". This is not a reliable or verifiable source.

And it will not appear on the page. The pertinent phrase is quoted from an external source, and the source is properly cited. In this case, the source happens to be the Encylopedia Britannica.

This site you feel can better describe the English language then the Merriam-Webster Dictionary? Your ignorance knows no bounds.

I take it you did not register the plain fact that this website was quoting from the Oxford English Dictionary. I wondered if I should point this out to you, then I thought, no, surely you could be bothered to read the bolded heading, or the first sentence. I suppose I was wrong, and I shall take pains to point out the obvious to you in the future.

I assume you are referring 'owph the Hebrew word for winged creature. Where is the special exception here? You were the one trying to imply it only meant birds. I was simply showing you that you tried to confine Hebrew to your terms not it's actual meaning. And the translation was from the Hebrew to English Lexicon not the dictionary which you are claiming.

I am not referring to this. I am referring to the fact that 'innocence' means something else when you want it to mean something else.

From now on, when necessary, I will append my arguments with a list of the important points you have failed to address. They are as follows:

1. An experimenter puts a rat in a box with a piece of food. Whenever the rat gets near the food, the experimenter shocks the rat. After repeated exposures, the rat no longer tries to get the food; in fact, it is afraid of it, and strenuously avoids it. The experimenter says, "Don't blame me for the rat being afraid of the food. He has free will." Does this sound reasonable?

Now, pretend the experimenter is responsible for designing not just the box but the rat itself, all the way down to the most intricate functions of its brain. The experimenter knew that the rat would be hungry, because he created the rat to get hungry, and it knew exactly what effects the shocks would have, because he designed the rat's brain and nervous system. Do you see the comparison? Granted, the real world is far more complex, but in essence, there is no difference between humans and God, and the experimenter and the rat. Assuming Christianity is correct, God created us, and he created every single variable capable of influencing our thoughts and development from the moment of our conception. He had complete knowledge of every effect that each of his actions would have, even thousands and thousands of years from the moment he created everything. When he created the world in the way he did, and created people the way he did, he essentially set the world on a trajectory which it has no choice but to follow.

2. If atheism is a religion, then the lack of belief in anything else is also a religion. As there are infinite things not to believe in, then there are infinite religions, and we would all belong to the vast majority of them. If there are infinite religions and we all belong to an infinite amount of them, then don't you think that essentially cheapens religion into a meaningless concept?

3. On a side note, what about infants who die of terminal diseases before they have had time to sin? (I am not asking this because I feel it is evidence of anything in particular, I am just curious how you explain it to yourself.)

I admit I was wrong about Judaism being the oldest religion. What I was trying to say is the worship of the God of creation is older then all other religions.

By "God of creation" I assume you mean Yahweh, but you must understand that other religions have their own gods some of which they regard as the creator. But even if I were to concede your point. Suppose people were worshiping Yahweh before any other deity, how does this translate in terms of veracity of your Holy book?

What is the historical evidence of the Rigveda?

The Rigveda is just one part of the larger Vedas, the rigveda does not contain the origins myths, it is more of a devotional text. I do not believe in the Hindu origin myths anymore than I believe in the Christian origin myths. They are both religions.

You have to admit the only proof we have of certain historical figures is the stories we have of them. This is both Christian and secular alike. Much of the evidence is in writings much like the Bible. In fact we have less evidence proving Socrates ever lived.

I would like to resubmit my source for the definition of science. Based on the fact it is the afore mentioned superior source for definitions in the english language. In which by its own words does not limit science to only naturalism or social. But merely its basic term is an understanding or knowledge.

It sounds like, from what you are saying here, that you are only using the first definition from this source. Definition #3 (Part B) seems to contradict what you are saying.

We cannot simply pick and choose which definitions best suit our arguments. It's important that while sometimes we may be using the same name/term to describe different subjects/actions.

An athlete who triumphantly defeats his opposition, could be said to have murdered the opposition, but this is not the same as murder as it would be used in a legal technical sense.

In this way it's important to make a distinction between informal and technical usages of words.

This is not a theory backed by any evidence.

What theory?

I was also expecting you to state your expertise.

I have a science degree in applied Social psychology.

Science doesn't only apply to natural phenomena.

You may state this Ad nauseam, but Science does not apply to the supernatural. No matter how much you don't like it.

Therefore the understanding of knowledge is not simply restricted to the testable and repeatable

All science must have the ability to test it's subject matter. I don't know what you are referring to with the statement "understanding of knowledge". Please elaborate.

I am not wrong, you are basing your assumption from the natural sciences that does not apply to all science!

There are two major branches of science. Natural Science and Social Science. Natural science covers fields such as biology, chemistry, astonomy, geology etc...

Social sciences include Psychology, Sociology, Anthropology, etc....

Both branches of science utilize the scientific method, which even you admitted precludes the supernatural.

The only other "science" is pseudoscience, which by definition is something which only 'appears' to be scientific, but does not follow scientific methodology (ie scientific method).

Give me a definition of real science. Quote a source for me to review. If not you are merely speaking on conjecture, in which you have no sources to equate your statements.

Columbia Encyclopedia:

science [Lat. scientia=knowledge]. For many the term science refers to the organized body of knowledge concerning the physical world, both animate and inanimate, but a proper definition would also have to include the attitudes and methods through which this body of knowledge is formed; thus, a science is both a particular kind of activity and also the results of that activity.

sci·ence

   /ˈsaɪəns/ Show Spelled[sahy-uhns] Show IPA

–noun

1.

a branch of knowledge or study dealing with a body of facts or truths systematically arranged and showing the operation of general laws

2.

systematic knowledge of the physical or material world gained through observation and experimentation.

It would not be possible in natural science. I was hypothesizing a way to study the supernatural sciences. You can't claim all of science, I have explained and cited my reasons. You have yet to cite a counter to my argument over what science is, and what naturalism applies too.

There is no accepted field as "supernatural science", recognized by any credible organization. It does not exist. It's an oxymoron, an etymological contradiction.

So perhaps in your fictional, made-up field of "supernatural-sciences" it would be possible to measure miracles, but not in real science.

Please expand on your theory.

It's not my theory, nor is it just one theory, You should read up on Psychoanthropology. Parts of our cerebral functioning can be traced to our neolithic past. Our very way of thinking was guided by human evolution.

Pareidolia is a good example of this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia

What is this evidence? Please list a source.

Vedic sanskrit texts such as the Rigveda dates to about 1500 BC.

The Torah was written 1312 BC

This little statement intrigued me. Who are you to comment on one's vocabulary.

{Laughs}

Easy firecracker, take that comment with a little tongue in cheek.

As a veteran myself, four years active duty and two deployments to Iraq. I am curious about your MOS? I was a 19K Armor Crewman on a M1A2 SEP tank.

I would not envy you, but I appreciate the importance of some good old fashioned armor. I was a 42A human resources specialist, but now I am 38B Civil Affairs Specialist.

My question is, why are you enlisted when you have a post graduate degree? This seems very strange that you would not be an officer.

Civilian education, has a promotion points cap which I have already exceeded. Although I could go Officer, I don't really want to. I rather enjoy the enlisted side.

Science is the knowledge, the scientific method is the process to prove that knowledge.

Ahh, you are getting closer. The only correction I would make to the above is that science is not just any knowledge, it is specifically the knowledge acquired from the scientific method. And so if something hasn't or cannot be subjected to the scientific method then it cannot be considered science.

The scientific inquiry based on naturalism. Just because it is outside the realm of naturalism does not mean it is beyond science wholly

That it is outside of what can be measured and tested, does however mean it is beyond science. The supernatural does not obey natural laws or explainable through natural phenomena. I don't understand why you so ardently insist on being wrong about this. I am the expert, trust what I say to you.

You cannot amalgamate your supernatural beliefs with the scientific. No matter how incessantly you try. The supernatural is and always has been a matter of philosophy. This is the problem with neo-evangelistic movements, they're always trying to use science to "prove" what they accept upon faith. They do not see the problem with this.

According to naturalism.

No, according to real science. Naturalism says nothing about what is valid in science nor is it concerned with such.

Yes it can for the reasons I mentioned.

You did not convey any reasons, you merely postulated an unknown undiscovered method of testing foregone 'miracles'. Everything I have expressed up until this point explains why this would not be possible. As is usually the case, it goes in one ear, and out the other. Or you are simply in denial, that some of the things you believe cannot be supported by science.

No, what I am saying is there is an exorbitant amount of eyewitnesses to the supernatural accounts in the Bible. The fact that so many people still believe in these accounts has to bear some weight.

Exorbitant? You are expanding your vocabulary! Glad to hear it.

Back to the discussion. Now whether these people all actually saw what they believe they saw, or whether there is some grand illusion created by their own minds, either way it is something worth being studied. That so many people experience the same or similar conditions means that there is a cause of some kind. It is not always the 'claimed' cause, however.

There are defense mechanism programed into our minds, that have helped us survive for over 2 millennium, but as a result distort our perceptions of reality. One of these being anthropomorphism.

The fact that so many people still believe in these accounts has to bear some weight. The religions of old haven't lasted.

What does the age of a belief have to do with it's veracity?

Yet the oldest of them all (beginning in Judaism) has continued to grow even to this day.

The oldest of them being Vedic Hinduism. This being supported by actual historical evidence.

"And why can God not have made us through evolution?"

Because the Bible tells us that he created the world in six days. Evolution and Christianity contradict each other. Do not implant man's theories into the inerrant word of God.

God is not true, but just a delusion.

Proof:

Definition of a god, he is morally perfect, he is almighty, he is all powerful.

I would assume a morally perfect being is able to decide if murder/rape of a innocent being is wrong or right. And since god is morally perfect he/she is aware of the fact that these immoral acts are being committed.

Now this morally perfect being has done nothing to stop these immoral acts from being committed which he supposedly deemed wrong himself in many holy books. And there is no reason he can't, since he is all powerful.

But murder, rape, abuse, etc. still take place without any intervention form a superior being.

Therefore God is not true.

You seem very sure of yourself, how do you know all this? Are you stating that, because science can not currently explain something then it has to be God, please, this is too much of a leap of faith and you are drawing a conclusion based on lack of evidence rather than having any.

Everything must have been carefully thought out. It could not have just happened, as that is too much of a coincidence. Not only are there countless chances which all must have fallen correctly for life to have come to be by mere chance, these countless chances must have happened in order.

It takes a great leap of faith to believe this. God is not an answer, it is a question, one that will be far greater a task to answer. The thing is though that the inception of life only needed to happen once, once it did then it would have the world as its oyster with everything it needed to grow and reproduce. Changing it's chances to becoming what it is today from very slim to reasonable.

I really don't want to get into another one of your analogies even though this one is better it is still not sound. There is evidence that life could have come about by chance, check the work of Craig Venter, if man in his limited years of genetic science can produce a living organism in a lab using non-living ingredients then surely a nutrient rich earth with 1.5 billion years could have done it.

http://www.jcvi.org/cms/research/projects/first-self-replicating-synthetic-bacterial-cell/overview/

If the chances are so high against monkeys on typewriters writing the complete works of Shakespeare, then how much more would they be against coincidence creating life out of nothing? That entire idea is stupid.

I'm glad you find an idea held by the vast majority of scientists as stupid, I mean who are you, Just because the chances of something happening are very slight, there is no way of stating that it is impossible, just as the monkey typewriter analogy, who are you say what can happen in an infinite amount of time, I know I cant. It seems to me that you are of the opinion that what cannot be explained must then be attributed to god.

I go into more detail on that below, if you want to see exactly how thought out creation is. Oh, and evolution isn't separate from creation. Evolution is part of creation. And yeah, it happened millions of years ago. What does that have to do with it?

Evolution is part of creation? The question is since when? It is being used because the evidence is too overwhelming, just like anything else, it was a heretical idea when it came out and was mocked by the churches. It is being accepted because it is undeniable and this is then attributed to God. It is exactly what I've been saying the involvement of God is pushed into everything you creationists can find a space to put it. Also the evolution of hands and eyes happened millions of years ago, that was my point, God didn't just give them to you especially. Also evolution is still happening now.

Why does anyone have to have made you? or Given you hands and eyes, all these things are the result of evolutionary changes acquired millions of years ago.

if god was real...why are the people suffering? Why do people do the horrible things they do? Why is the racism? why is the homophobism? Why isn't there any proof?

If god was real then Id like to meet him...so i can throw his failure in his face...

Atheists exist because they don't want to accept the fact that there is a God.

If there was valid evidence for God, I am sure most atheists would be happy to accept his existence.

If there was no God then why would you have to argue about it?

This is absolute nonsense.

Scripture is all the evidence I need for scripture cannot be disprove.

Fantastic for you, keep it up. Don't assume it's enough for everybody.

For example, if your fingerprint was on a murder weapon. You would most likly be charged with the murder.

Scripture is not forensic evidence by any stretch of the imagination. At best, it is bystander testimony. To continue with the murder metaphor, it is akin to coming upon a murder scene and convicting someone when there is absolutely no evidence for their guilt except someone shouting, "I saw them do it!"

Same with scripture it is the evidence that cannot be swayed or mistaken.

You are wrong on both counts. Scripture has been scientifically refuted in a myriad of instances. Religious people constantly squabble over various pet interpretations of the rest of it. Feel free to continue believing it, but realize it is poor evidence when you are trying to convince logical or scientific people of the validity of your position.

Therefore you must come up with evidence not I!

When you make a claim, it's your job to provide evidence for it if you want other people to believe it.

It is impossible to believe there is no God.

Atheists exist, so clearly, it is possible.

Just because God is the creator. Therefore, with us as the creation. God has to be the Creator.

The existence of the world is an effect, not proof that God caused it. There is no evidence except for scripture that God created anything, and scripture is not valid evidence by itself.

Catholics are wrong to believe in evolution. And they are wrong to repent to a man (priest) when you are to repent only to Jesus Christ.

"The Bible is not to be taken literally."

Are you insane? The six days is literal, yom means day not a symbolic time.

2 Esdras 6:38-54 "I said, “O Lord, you spoke at the beginning of creation, and said on the first day, ‘Let heaven and earth be made,’ and your word accomplished the work. 39 Then the spirit was blowing, and darkness and silence embraced everything; the sound of human voices was not yet there.k 40 Then you commanded a ray of light to be brought out from your store-chambers, so that your works could be seen.

41 “Again, on the second day, you created the spirit of the firmament, and commanded it to divide and separate the waters, so that one part might move upward and the other part remain beneath.

42 “On the third day you commanded the waters to be gathered together in a seventh part of the earth; six parts you dried up and kept so that some of them might be planted and cultivated and be of service before you. 43 For your word went forth, and at once the work was done. 44 Immediately fruit came forth in endless abundance and of varied appeal to the taste, and flowers of inimitable color, and odors of inexpressible fragrance. These were made on the third day.

45 “On the fourth day you commanded the brightness of the sun, the light of the moon, and the arrangement of the stars to come into being; 46 and you commanded them to serve humankind, about to be formed.

47 “On the fifth day you commanded the seventh part, where the water had been gathered together, to bring forth living creatures, birds, and fishes; and so it was done. 48 The dumb and lifeless water produced living creatures, as it was commanded, so that therefore the nations might declare your wondrous works.

49 “Then you kept in existence two living creatures;l the one you called Behemothm and the name of the other Leviathan. 50 And you separated one from the other, for the seventh part where the water had been gathered together could not hold them both. 51 And you gave Behemothn one of the parts that had been dried up on the third day, to live in it, where there are a thousand mountains; 52 but to Leviathan you gave the seventh part, the watery part; and you have kept them to be eaten by whom you wish, and when you wish.

53 “On the sixth day you commanded the earth to bring forth before you cattle, wild animals, and creeping things; 54 and over these you placed Adam, as ruler over all the works that you had made; and from him we have all come, the people whom you have chosen."

Exodus 20:11 "For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth and the sea and all that is in them, and he rested on the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and set it apart as holy."

These are six literal days of creation. There is no "interpretation" here, it is written in historical narrative not figurative.