Results 133 to 144 of 160
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06-13-2013, 11:31 AM #133
Re: How can anyone still believe in God
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.
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06-13-2013, 11:36 AM #134
Re: How can anyone still believe in God
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.
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06-13-2013, 11:41 AM #135
Re: How can anyone still believe in God
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.
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06-13-2013, 11:53 AM #136
Re: How can anyone still believe in God
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?
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06-13-2013, 12:05 PM #137
Re: How can anyone still believe in God
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.
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06-13-2013, 12:13 PM #138
Re: How can anyone still believe in God
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.
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06-13-2013, 12:31 PM #139
Re: How can anyone still believe in God
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.
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06-13-2013, 12:35 PM #140
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06-13-2013, 12:37 PM #141
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06-13-2013, 12:39 PM #142
Re: How can anyone still believe in God
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.
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06-13-2013, 12:42 PM #143
Re: How can anyone still believe in God
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?
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06-13-2013, 04:41 PM #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?”
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