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  1. #133
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    Re: How can anyone still believe in God

    Quote Originally Posted by ActualSpamBot View Post
    Trap has a point, ultimately this debate comes down to faith. No amount of logic will convince the faithful that god is not there, and no amount of exhorting will convince a skeptic to take it on faith.
    Nonsense. You are well considered on this idea but this take is not. Faith is about trust, it is NOT believing without evidence. Faith is about trusting the God I know exists. But I must have logic and reason to believe such a thing.

    We are to love the Lord our God with all of our heart, soul, strength, and MIND. God wants us to think. He commands us to be able to explain why we are Christians, though unfortunately very few can. The church has failed miserably in being intellectual in this debate, though people like Aquinas up until now have laid very solid cases for God's existence.

    The very morality that exists and is implied in the opening post is excellent evidence that there is a Moral Law Giver.





  2. #134
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    Re: How can anyone still believe in God

    Quote Originally Posted by darb72 View Post
    One of my students asked why God didn't perform miracles anymore, since they were such a huge part of the Bible. I thought about an old song and used that to explain my views.

    There's an old Ray Steven's song called, "The Mississippi Squirrel Revival". This kid goes to church and is showing off a squirrel he caught to his buddy. The squirrel gets loose during service and hilarity ensues. The last verse ends, "Well you've heard the Bible story I guess, how He parted the waters of Moses to pass. Oh the miracles God has wrought in this ol' world. But the one I'll remember to my dying day is how he put that Church back on the narrow way with a half-crazed Mississippi squirrel."

    God showed us miracles back then because we didn't know about Him. The Christian religion is based on faith, and if God were going around sending plagues of locust, or splitting the seas every other day, then we wouldn't have faith. See, I can touch my computer monitor. I don't have faith that it's there. I have proof. I think the miracles God works now are less obvious. Like the German scientist working on the atomic bomb. They missed a simple calculation at the very beginning and that's why the good guys were able to win that war. That, to me, is a miracle because folks who work with radioactive material tend to be the sort of anal retentive types who double and triple check their figures.
    There are less than 300 miracles in the Bible, which was written over 1500 or more years. That is less than one every five years on average, but the miracles are concentrated into few segments of history. Moses, Elijah and Elisha, and Jesus and his followers. Miracles from God are done to give proof that the prophet is from God. That, it seems to me, are their purpose.





  3. #135
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    Re: How can anyone still believe in God

    Quote Originally Posted by ActualSpamBot View Post
    I'd say its the opposite. If there is no afterlife, then life is all the more meaningful and precious because its all we get. One shot, no more than 100 trips around the sun beginning to end. And then all that's left of you is the impact, good or ill you left for those after you.

    In a universe with a heaven, what is life expect another version of the womb? A short, limited experience before eternity. Heaven gives us a place to fix our regrets, settle old grudges, tell people we love them. But if its not there, then we have to use our life for that.
    If there is no spiritual realm, nothing beyond the material and the 4 space-time dimensions then life is truly meaningless. In the end, you leave nothing behind. The future of this universe, as current cosmology lays it out, is that the universe in the distant future will die of heat death. No stars will be left, space will continue to expand (as it is now) and will become so stretched out that atoms will no longer form because the space between sub-atomic particles will be too great for it. There will be no life, nothing, not even atoms.

    That is the future based only on materialism. What meaning does your life have when it will all be erased.

    And your experiences, etc? They are nothing but electrochemical reactions in your brain if there is nothing else. Your joys and pains are just a bit different in very similar processes, as are your memories. They are just arrangements of atoms.
    Last edited by Greg; 06-13-2013 at 11:50 AM.





  4. #136
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    Re: How can anyone still believe in God

    Quote Originally Posted by akashicrecorder View Post
    Just going to bump this thread because it was very interesting. Also, what a representation of atheists here! I'm pleasantly surprised. I'm a proud one myself.
    Why are you proud to be an atheist? If your beliefs are true your beliefs are nothing more than happenstance and how the atoms in your brain aligned. It has nothing to do with "thinking" because material brains can't "think." As the atheist Dawkins puts it, you are simply dancing to your DNA. Are you proud your DNA aligned itself in a certain way?





  5. #137
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    Re: How can anyone still believe in God

    Quote Originally Posted by akashicrecorder View Post
    You're saying every reaction needs an action to have caused it.

    So, what caused god?

    Oh, ... nothing caused god?

    So, more accurately, every reaction needs an action except for the pet causes you like. (Classic example of special pleading, a logical fallacy.)
    Aristotle figured out a long time ago that there must be an unmoved mover. There must be a first cause, an uncaused something. Otherwise you are left with an infinite regress of cause and effect that gets us to the present. How does one traverse an infinite? Where does one even begin that journey? Logically, there must be an uncaused cause, something that exists eternally.

    We now have excellent scientific evidence the universe, the natural world (time, space, matter, energy, gravity, electromagnetism, the weak nuclear force, the strong nuclear force), began to exist. Everything we call natural began to exist, all at once, at what is called the Big Bang. What could cause nature to exist? Can nature cause its own existence? Can anything cause its own existence?

    Whatever caused our universe to begin to exist must be timeless, spaceless, immaterial, and incredibly powerful. This is based on our current scientific understanding. Science only examines and measures the natural. Thus science's study can only go back to the Big Bang, or actually to a moment just after it since the laws of physics break down if we try and go back to the Big Bang.

    Do with that as you will.





  6. #138
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    Re: How can anyone still believe in God

    Quote Originally Posted by akashicrecorder View Post
    Science has already proved itself. Pardon the snark/truth (once again), but if you know of a reliable method of examining and understanding the world in an objective way that is NOT science, please tell me/the board what it is.
    Let me preface with restating what faith is and is not. Faith is not believing something without evidence. If I said I have faith in my wife would you think I believe she existed though I had no evidence of it? Of course not. Faith is trust. When Christians are called to have faith it means to trust in God, not believe blindly.

    Please give me a scientific statement that proves science. In other words, please tell me how I can use science to prove science.

    Science ASSUMES a number of things. You cannot do science without, dare I say it, faith. You must trust that there are laws of logic you can use. You must trust that mathematics is true. And finally, a great area of faith for an atheist doing science is you must trust that your atoms in your brain have aligned themselves in such a way that you have an accurate perception of what is going on inside your brain, your body, and the outside world.





  7. #139
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    Re: How can anyone still believe in God

    Quote Originally Posted by HoustonRaven View Post
    I seem to recall that two of the most intelligent scientists in human history, Sir Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, were both religious.

    Both thought they were attempting to figure out the mind of God.

    Both thought the universe was so splendid, so spectacular that it could only have been the work of something divine.

    Guess they're just "illogical".
    Newton was a Christian. Some of his work included writing about prophecy, mathematically taking what the Bible said in regard to Jesus and his return, for example. He actually came to the conclusion Jesus would return in 2055 or 2056 (Can't recall which). This is buried in one of his many, many notebooks.

    Einstein is different. At one time Einstein was an atheist. When he first developed the Theories of Special and General Relativity his math pointed to an absolute beginning of the universe. He understood the consequences, didn't like it and thus introduced his cosmological constant that removed the beginning. It required a divide by zero, by the way. When Hubble discovered the expanding universe and what it implied Einstein removed the constant and called it his greatest blunder. Since then we have found that a constant was needed (not one that requires a divide by zero, btw) to deal with the rate of the universe's expansion.

    Once the beginning was confirmed (and has been many other ways since) Einstein became something akin to a deist, though he wrote of his respect on occasion in regard to "that Nazarene." Einstein seemed to waggle between many things in regard to God and calling him religious is probably not fair.





  8. #140
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    Re: How can anyone still believe in God

    Quote Originally Posted by AirFlacco View Post
    Sorry, but I respectfully submit that Einstein was not a deist. He was Agnostic atheist like most scientists are, not a strong atheist. He believed in scientific pantheism although that term didn't exist in his life time but that's what he was.

    He believed the universe was eternal, so it could not have been “Created”.

    __________________________________
    I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modelled after our own - a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty.
    _________________________________




    http://www.pantheismtoday.com/videos...st-not-a-deist
    Einstein did NOT believe the universe was eternal post Hubble's findings.


    Einstein with Hubble discussing Hubble's findings.





  9. #141
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    Re: How can anyone still believe in God

    Quote Originally Posted by wickedsolo View Post
    Isnt it possible that the first domino just fell?
    So things can happen uncaused, then? Why doesn't a giraffe just happen right in front of me right now?





  10. #142
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    Re: How can anyone still believe in God

    Quote Originally Posted by wickedsolo View Post
    Aliens.

    Sent from my DROID X2 using Forum Runner
    LOL, so aliens are uncaused? They are now God? Aliens can only go back so far, as the universe is only so old and the matter needed for life is even less old since it was all created in stars that eventually died. The matter necessary for life didn't exist until about 4.5 - 4.7 billion years ago, oddly right about the time our sun and the earth formed. How "lucky" for us.





  11. #143
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    Re: How can anyone still believe in God

    Quote Originally Posted by akashicrecorder View Post
    So all things need a cause except supernatural things.

    Next step: Show the world something supernatural that can prove this statement.
    All things THAT BEGIN TO EXIST need a cause. Again, back to Aristotle and his idea that an unmoved mover, or uncaused cause, is needed.

    This isn't a dodge, whatever caused the universe caused time to exist and thus is outside of time, or eternal (which is different than forever in time).

    You know those stupid fisherman back 2000 years ago even described the God that existed before time began. Wow, who knew time began before 100 or so years ago?





  12. #144

    Re: How can anyone still believe in God

    Hey Greg.

    Nice to have you back from vacation.
    "A moron, a rapist, and a Pittsburgh Steeler walk into a bar. He sits down and says, “Hi I’m Ben may I have a drink please?”
    ProFootballMock





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