How do I turn the table on atheists?

[Charlemagne_II]

atheistgirl

**Perhaps, but as you well know, well done science is vigorously tested and retested peer reviewed and published and if errors are found they are corrected. You simply cant do that with a concept of ‘‘God’’. **

God is not a scientific concept. That’s why. Theologians do peer review other theologians, and religions do peer review other religions. It is generally found that some religions are more truthful than others, just as some scientists are more truthful than others.

As to correcting errors, that is done all the time by apologists, including many at CAF.

The testing of a theological hypothesis is done ultimately by a combination of reason, revelation, and faith. The methodology of religion, because it is centered on the supernatural, should not have to meet the same standards of proof as are required of science. To expect this is to expect that if there is a God, He exists in the universe rather than as the Creator of it.

You are free to be a victim of scientism, but you needn’t expect Catholics to be seduced by the vanities of the scientific community. They have enough of their own vanities to contend with.

 

[tqualey]

Hi, Karebear92,

I really do not want to be difficult about this … but, I still disagree

Yes, children of all ages can be told of the Love of God, how Jesus loves little children and that Jesus died for our sins. Then there are OT stories about Moses leading the Chosen People out of slavery, Noah, building the ark to save as many people as he could and David slaying the bully Golieth. That is fine and for little children it is great! But, this is not what I am talking about.

My concern is with young adults who go about memorizing entire chapters of the Bible, who commit to memory various verses and who think this is knowing the Word of God. In a number of ways, it is more like the Pharisees and other religious leaders during the time of Christ that had everything memorized - yet missed the Messiah Who was standing in their midst. This is NOT a criticism of memory - but, it must be combined with understanding. And, again, this is the springboard for why there are so many competing Protestant groups - all claiming that they know the scriptures yet all are fighting over what it means.

What is needed is thoughtful and patient study.

God bless

Sorry, what I meant was they can hear the stories and understand that Jesus died on the cross. I have known the story for as long as I can remember, and as they age their understanding of what that means grows. I agree that they can’t interpret it all themselves, but everyone can read over and over until they have the entire Bible memorized, but they can still learn and understand it more deeply.

 

[atheistgirl]

Theologians do peer review other theologians, and religions do peer review other religions. It is generally found that some religions are more truthful than others, just as some scientists are more truthful than others.

First off thanks for the interesting reply. You just know Im going to say the testing of hypothesis by revelation and faith is something I think I would struggle with

I found this on catholic.com, while doing some reading from the catholic perspective, and it’s interesting, because to me it sounds very fundamentalist, BUT it did help me understand better the perspective:

Concerning cosmological evolution, the Church has infallibly defined that the universe was specially created out of nothing. Vatican I solemnly defined that everyone must “confess the world and all things which are contained in it, both spiritual and material, as regards their whole substance, have been produced by God from nothing” (Canons on God the Creator of All Things, canon 5).

So I can see now that, for a catholic, it is utterly utterly irrelevant what science may discover. You are compelled to believe because the church has infallibly defined that you must, that the universe and everything in it was created by God from nothing.

You have no choice in the matter, regardless of what science discovers.

I was quite surprised finding that because earlier I posted how impressed I was regarding the churches openness to science and discovery. However, reading the above has somewhat altered that opinion.

Sarah x

 

[Al_Moritz]

So I can see now that, for a catholic, it is utterly utterly irrelevant what science may discover. You are compelled to believe because the church has infallibly defined that you must, that the universe and everything in it was created by God from nothing.

You have no choice in the matter, regardless of what science discovers.

I was quite surprised finding that because earlier I posted how impressed I was regarding the churches openness to science and discovery. However, reading the above has somewhat altered that opinion.

Sarah x

You have to be careful here. I am afraid you fall into the trap of confusing science with metaphysics. Metaphysics is in part concerned with the ontology (the nature of existence, of being) of things, science is concerned with the laws of nature and with how things work according to these laws. Creation out of nothing is a metaphysical question, not a scientific one. Even if something was before our Big Bang, or even if we lived in an oscillating universe, any scientific discovery regarding that would have no bearing on this metaphysical question.

Science can neither discover that the universe was not created out of nothing nor that it in fact was, since this is simply not a scientific question, susceptible to observation and experiment (I say this being a scientist myself). Even if the universe was eternal, it would still depend on God’s creative activity from eternity, as Thomas Aquinas already said many centuries ago (it is a common misconception that his five ways to show the existence of God depend on the universe having a beginning).

Given all that, the statement “You have no choice in the matter, regardless of what science discovers” simply does not apply. There is nothing to discover for science on this issue.

 

[karebear92]

Hi, Karebear92,

I really do not want to be difficult about this … but, I still disagree

Yes, children of all ages can be told of the Love of God, how Jesus loves little children and that Jesus died for our sins. Then there are OT stories about Moses leading the Chosen People out of slavery, Noah, building the ark to save as many people as he could and David slaying the bully Golieth. That is fine and for little children it is great! But, this is not what I am talking about.

My concern is with young adults who go about memorizing entire chapters of the Bible, who commit to memory various verses and who think this is knowing the Word of God. In a number of ways, it is more like the Pharisees and other religious leaders during the time of Christ that had everything memorized - yet missed the Messiah Who was standing in their midst. This is NOT a criticism of memory - but, it must be combined with understanding. And, again, this is the springboard for why there are so many competing Protestant groups - all claiming that they know the scriptures yet all are fighting over what it means.

What is needed is thoughtful and patient study.

God bless

I think we agree. I said the best thing about the bible is one’s understanding of it grows with them. The bible is intended for all people (that is not to say that all people understand) Everyone can read it, but nobody understands it until they study it. I said that you can read it over and over and over again, even commit it to memory, yet you will still always be able to understand it more deeply. Obviously we have the church to help us, but even those teachings grow as we understand why they explain it in the way they do. The Bible is intended for all people to grow in faith and understanding with; it is not just for the biblical scholars.

 

[atheistgirl]

You have to be careful here…There is nothing to discover for science on this issue.

When I consider how much we’ve advanced in the last 500 years, it’s simply mind boggling. I dare say you are correct, but I cant help wonder what we will know in 5000 years from now. And I just thought it was interesting that if we could prove, scientifically, however that may be, that the universe is NOT created out of nothing - that a very definite X exists at the centre of the universe which causes it to be - and that X had, because of the new and unique physical laws and properties we also discovered, always existed and was never created - I just thought it was interesting that catholics would still be required, as it was declared infallibly, to believe that the universe was created out of nothing, when in fact we would know, empiracally, it was created out of something.

You caught my attention on what you said about Aquinas’ proofs, as when I went through them, I didnt find them convincing. When you have time, Id love to hear you expand on the ‘‘if it the universe was eternal it wouldnt make any difference as it would still need God’’ bit because I admit I read them with the underlying assumption he was saying it had a cause, and it didnt occur to me to think about the proofs in terms of if the universe was eternal.

Sarah x

 

[Charlemagne_II]

atheistgirl

When I consider how much we’ve advanced in the last 500 years, it’s simply mind boggling.

While I often find myself disagreeing with Al, on this point he is right.

This is a metaphysical question, not a scientific one.

It would never be possible for science to prove that the universe is eternal. I guess common sense tells us that. No matter what theory you’d come up with, it would not be observable or testable for corroboration.

What we do know is that there was a Big Bang, which started the universe. There is nothing detectable before the universe because time began with the Big Bang. That much is scientifically demonstrable in theory, even if it cannot be corroborated by observation. So Genesis is at least right in asserting what science finally discovered only in the 20th Century.

Genesis, 1000 B.C. : “Let there be light.”

Carl Sagan in Cosmos, 1980 A.D.

“Ten or twenty billion years ago, something happened – the Big Bang, the event that began our universe…. In that titanic cosmic explosion, the universe began an expansion which has never ceased…. As space stretched, the matter and energy in the universe expanded with it and rapidly cooled. The radiation of the cosmic fireball, which, then as now, filled the universe, moved through the spectrum – from gamma rays to X-rays to ultraviolet light; through the rainbow colors of the visible spectrum; into the infrared and radio regions. The remnants of that fireball, the cosmic background radiation, emanating from all parts of the sky can be detected by radio telescopes today. In the early universe, space was brilliantly illuminated.”

That to me is what’s really mind-boggling.

 

[tonyrey]

Hi, Tonyrey,

I think you are quite right about it being more pernicious. It sounds s-o-o-o-o sophisticated that ‘…we just do not know enough…’… But, when you consider how long mankind has been around - and virtually all of these ancient civilizations had a belief in several gods.

Thinking of which … I always got a chuckle out of St. Paul in Acts 17 … it looks like the Athenian City Fathers were trying really hard to reign in the proliferation of gods. Sort of like today’s billboard advertising - it apparently had become an eye-sore! So, it lookis like the “Unknown God” altar was one of those political compromises … don’t know if it was with Athens City Hall or the Athens Chamber of Commerce - but, in any event, St. Paul acting under God’s direction was able to turn the tables on them…

At least the Greeks weren’t inconsistent in their attitude towards God. They were humble enough to allow for their ignorance rather than regard it as a virtue that required no further action on their part!

 

[tqualey]

Hi, Al Moritz,

Thank you for that insight into the roles of metaphysics and science.

One of the problematic areas with science is that, from time to time, we go off on the wrong path. While we can spot the mis-steps as we look backwards, one really never knows where the next mis-step will wind up taking us.

My guess is that atheism needs to belive in science because there really is nothing else to believe in if God is denied. While science can measure and quantify and develop experiments for the real world, the ‘world of ideas’ is a totally different plane - and we have not even begun to address the spirit.

I enjoyed reading your post.

God bless

You have to be careful here. I am afraid you fall into the trap of confusing science with metaphysics. Metaphysics is in part concerned with the ontology (the nature of existence, of being) of things, science is concerned with the laws of nature and with how things work according to these laws. Creation out of nothing is a metaphysical question, not a scientific one. Even if something was before our Big Bang, or even if we lived in an oscillating universe, any scientific discovery regarding that would have no bearing on this metaphysical question.

Science can neither discover that the universe was not created out of nothing nor that it in fact was, since this is simply not a scientific question, susceptible to observation and experiment (I say this being a scientist myself). Even if the universe was eternal, it would still depend on God’s creative activity from eternity, as Thomas Aquinas already said many centuries ago (it is a common misconception that his five ways to show the existence of God depend on the universe having a beginning).

Given all that, the statement “You have no choice in the matter, regardless of what science discovers” simply does not apply. There is nothing to discover for science on this issue.

 

[Al_Moritz]

You caught my attention on what you said about Aquinas’ proofs, as when I went through them, I didnt find them convincing. When you have time, Id love to hear you expand on the ‘‘if it the universe was eternal it wouldnt make any difference as it would still need God’’ bit because I admit I read them with the underlying assumption he was saying it had a cause, and it didnt occur to me to think about the proofs in terms of if the universe was eternal.

Sarah x

Not every cause is necessarily a cause that is temporally “prior” to its effect. Even if the universe was eternal it would still have a cause. Its being would depend on another being, God, and so God would be its ontological cause. And if the universe has a beginning, God would still be its ontological cause as well, and He still could not be a temporally prior cause, since time was created at the universe’s inception. That the latter is the case is something every cosmologist will tell you.

As for "if it the universe was eternal it wouldn’t make any difference as it would still need God’’, this has to do with the metaphysical concepts of act and potency that Aquinas uses, following Aristotle. In order to understand Aquinas’ five ways you need to understand the underlying metaphysical concepts of act and potency, substance and accidents, “esse” and “actus essendi”, as well as the different kinds of causes (he distinguishes four, with the efficient cause that science uses being only one of them). I suggest to read Feser’s compact and clearly written book Aquinas (dirt cheap at Amazon) in order to understand Aquinas’ philosophy.

Just glancing over the naked texts of the five ways without knowledge of the underlying concepts is not sufficient to judge their merit and potency. It is like trying to judge the concepts of biological evolution or of an origin of life by natural causes (the merits of both of which are considerable) without some necessary knowledge of (bio)chemistry, genetics and biology.

 

[OMGJ]

Hello. May the grace of God be with you all.

Ever had one of those moments where something kept on bothering you and you just can’t shake it? I had stumbled upon this discussion last week while searching for answers to the “does God exist” question. I was not intending to reply but the comments and questions raised in this post had been bothering me and there’s this urging in me to reply.

Firstly, I want to say that I thank everyone here for their posts. I believe that God has been using you mightily. You might not know it but certainly there are readers of this that are being moved by God by your comments and questions (case in point, me).

Second, I want to address the question presented by the thread: how to turn the table on atheists. I believe it depends on what table you are trying to turn. Are you trying to turn the table in their minds or the table in their hearts? If you are trying to turn the table on the idea/concept/belief in God in their minds well I believe that you will be facing an endless, circular battle. The evidence has been presented for the case of God and it had been presented on this thread many times over. You can keep on arguing the point but there will be no end to it. But I will say this, I believe that they are a blessing from God. Their skepticism and disbelief and questions can and has been used by God to help those who are too afraid to ask those same questions and lead them to a deeper and fuller understanding of God’s nature and love for them.

But if the question was with regards to turning the tables in their hearts then I believe St. Francis said it best “Evangelize always. Use words when necessary”. If you want to prove to a non-believer God’s existence, show them that He is alive in you. Jesus’s mission for us wasn’t “challenge them and win them with your superior intellect”. His challenge was “Love thy neighbour as yourself”. Bottomline, if you want to trully turn the tables on an atheist, if you want to flip their world upside down, love them. Not saying do not engage them in their debates. But for a definition of what love trully is, you guys know where to look. But as a refresher, it does not say that love is mean-spirited, sarcastic or condescending. Food for thought.

Lastly, I want to address atheistgirl.

Sister, I thank you for your honest questions. I sense your struggle through your posts and commend you for seeking for the answers. I would like to encourage you to keep on seeking because I believe that it is in our nature to ask “why”. And that if you are trully seeking for the truth, I am confident that you will find it within Catholicism. I read or heard it somewhere (most likely in this website even) that science is our search for the truth while Christianity is God’s revelation of the truth. It only follows that eventually, your search will lead you to find this revealed truth.

I will say this about your search though, related to what I said previously, if you REALLY want to know if God exists, you will need to experience Him. You cannot know Him merely through documents and encyclicals or even just a read through of the Bible. The evidence of God’s presence is in His people who know and love Him. At some point your search needs to go from your mind seeking the answer, to your heart doing the asking.

I will be praying for you.

 

[Charlemagne_II]

OMGJ

I will say this about your search though, related to what I said previously, if you REALLY want to know if God exists, you will need to experience Him. You cannot know Him merely through documents and encyclicals or even just a read through of the Bible. The evidence of God’s presence is in His people who know and love Him. At some point your search needs to go from your mind seeking the answer, to your heart doing the asking.



A great first post! Welcome to the club.

 

[emisher]

Hello again everyone. Welcome OMGJ!

Had a few minutes, thought I’d check in

Atheist girl,

I have to say I agree with Al (I think that is who said it). Regarding the possibility that science will ever be able to prove definitively what caused the universe to come into existence. There really is no way for us to ever know what was going on beforehand. Science depends upon observation, but there is nothing for us observe regarding anything outside the universe, or what was going on beforehand. We may get more clues (with CERN, for instance) that ABC caused it but there’s still no way to prove that God didn’t use ABC, so it just goes around and around.

Let me ask you this—I know you’ve said in an earlier post that you just couldn’t wrap your mind around the uncreated Creator. I think you said in an earlier post that you do acknowledge some similarity between the belief in an eternally existing universe/es and an eternally existing God, but that fact is that the universe can be observed and analyzed where with God we cannot. Fair enough. But let me ask you–will you at least concede that an eternally existing entity of some sort is at least existentially possible? And if you already did this forgive me.

As for not being able to observe any evidence for God, we will never be able to prove this defintively, but we can do what scholars, scientists, historians do all the time. Look at the evidence and gather enough evidence to come to a satisfying conclusion, that is enough, for us to embrace and put into the textbooks. Well, I think we can do the same with God. And as the Catholics in here would agree, we believe that the chief evidence has come from Jesus who came to give us that “evidence”, enough for us to make a reasonable assent of faith. We believe that God is more than an abstract force and that is why he came— to give us more concrete evidence, to put a face to the invisible God.

Your position is one of —but what if there is more to find out? Indeed, what if there is more to discover (in analyzing the whole life and claims of the historical man Jesus? That is by working backwards from Jesus and the Church you could find, through simple logic, that he must be more than a mere man. That maybe he came to tell us that there is more than the observable universe?

 

[emisher]

cont…

OMGJ I agree. At some point, it has to move further into your heart and you have to trust. There will always be questions, and difficulties with various areas such as violence in the OT, or a whole host of things. But they can be resolved, there’s always more to learn.

Atheist girl, I wanted to share some things, I’ve written regarding violence in the OT, Jephtah, etc. Maybe we could continue after the Thanksgiving holiday.

But before I leave I wanted to share an example from my own experience of my conversion. I grew up like most American guys, steeped in porn and “self-pleasure” I was taught that sex was for fun, and through the influence of porn films that women were objects for my enjoyment. When I was in my early twenties, I became very interested in religion for the first time as I didn’t grow up with any religion at all. I had a co-wrorker who was a born again Christian and we used to talk a lot. She taught me the basics of Christianity. She told me to say the sinner’s prayer that most Evangelicals advocate in order to “get saved.” I think it was probably several weeks later that I finally just decided one night to say it. I had never prayed before in my life and it felt weird. I also prayed to meet someone. I had been very lonely for about 7 years. I went out on a million dates but didn’t click with anyone. Much to my intrigue, only 1 month later, I met my wife. I found out later, that this co-worker had been praying for the same thing.

Now I know what you’re thinking–pure coincidence! And you know what–that’s exactly what I thought too. I never really prayed much after that. But as the years went on I began to think about God again, and strange things kept happening, strange “coincidences”–over and over again, until I felt like I was being stalked by God-- truly. It took 8 more years fro me to finally throw up my hands and just admit that I couldn’t intellectualize this stuff anymore. Things that were happening–It was just too weird.

As I began to make my way to the Catholic Church, I just couldn’t really submit to the teachings against masturbation. (I hope this isn’t too revealing for some) I was enslaved to it. I didn’t want to do it anymore. My wife was hurt by it. I wanted to be rid of it’s hold on me, but I just couldn’t envision stopping–ever! But I wanted the Eucharist, I wanted to be part of this ancient Church, the same Church that men and women way back in the Roman world were part of.

Eventually, I just said, —in order to be a Catholic I have to believe in grace. Do I believe in it or don’t I? I finally said, yes I do. So I just stopped doing it, cold turkey and I prayed very hard—you know, Lord, I don’t understand how I can ever be free of this, I want to trust these Christians, and the saints that you will be there to free me and change my desires, that it is possible to be satisfied with only my wife, but I just don’t get it. Help me!"

And within a few months, I was free… I no longer desired it anymore. And I’ve never desired it since. (not that there aren’t temptations) I began to hate it as I saw what it was doing to my marriage and what it had done to me for the last 30 years. It trained me to see women as objects. It trained me to seek a addictive type of instant pleasure fix, very similar to a drug type of high.

I hear feminists say that the Church is anti-woman and I just have to shrug my shoulders—I think about the ways in which I was trained by our sexually permissive secular culture, to use women and all the other guys I knew who used them and then I think about the way I’ve been taught through the Catholic faith to respect women, to love, respect and serve your wife, etc and I know the truth.

So this is a long way to say that at some point you have to decide to enter into the mystery. This is a very scary prospect, to actually believe that there is a God who will be there to catch you so to speak in your leap of faith…But as many people have learned, once you do that—get ready because when God shows up, your life will never be the same again.

God Bless all and have a Happy Thanksgiving…

 

[OMGJ]

A great first post! Welcome to the club.

Thank you. I want to say that I love the quote from Heisenberg in your signature.

 

[OMGJ]

emisher

Thank you for your testimony. You have no idea how timely your witness is for me. I am deeply moved and blessed. Thanks for allowing yourself to be used by the Lord mightily.

 

[emisher]

emisher

Thank you for your testimony. You have no idea how timely your witness is for me. I am deeply moved and blessed. Thanks for allowing yourself to be used by the Lord mightily.

What a joy to know that my life could help another on the journey!
Thanks be to God!

 

[Al_Moritz]

Atheist girl,

Let me ask you this—I know you’ve said in an earlier post that you just couldn’t wrap your mind around the uncreated Creator. I think you said in an earlier post that you do acknowledge some similarity between the belief in an eternally existing universe/es and an eternally existing God, but that fact is that the universe can be observed and analyzed where with God we cannot. Fair enough.

Our particular universe can be observed and analyzed, but it had a beginning. If there is a wider eternal universe that created our particular local universe, it is outside the realm of scientific observation, because science can in principle not look beyond the particle horizon.

Particle horizon: the maximum distance from which particles (i.e. also particles carrying information) could have traveled to the observer in the age of the universe. It represents the portion of the universe which we could have conceivably observed at the present day. Any other universe would lie outside this particle horizon.

As renowned cosmologist Lee Smolin writes in Life of the Cosmos, p. 78 (emphasis mine):

“A fantastic consequence of general relativity theory [is] that the part of the universe that we will ever be able to see does not include the whole of it. The part of reality we can in principle ever see has boundaries. And there are necessarily regions of space and time beyond those boundaries.”

Therefore, just like God, a putative eternal parent universe cannot be observed via the scientific method – not now, not in 5000 years, not ever. Thus there is no observational advantage in postulating eternal matter. Naturalism is no more ‘scientific’ than theism.

As you said:

Science depends upon observation, but there is nothing for us observe regarding anything outside the universe, or what was going on beforehand.

 

[Mystic_Banana]

Our particular universe can be observed and analyzed, but it had a beginning. If there is a wider eternal universe that created our particular local universe, it is outside the realm of scientific observation, because science can in principle not look beyond the particle horizon.

Particle horizon: the maximum distance from which particles (i.e. also particles carrying information) could have traveled to the observer in the age of the universe. It represents the portion of the universe which we could have conceivably observed at the present day. Any other universe would lie outside this particle horizon.

As renowned cosmologist Lee Smolin writes in Life of the Cosmos, p. 78 (emphasis mine):

“A fantastic consequence of general relativity theory [is] that the part of the universe that we will ever be able to see does not include the whole of it. The part of reality we can in principle ever see has boundaries. And there are necessarily regions of space and time beyond those boundaries.”

Therefore, just like God, a putative eternal parent universe cannot be observed via the scientific method – not now, not in 5000 years, not ever. Thus there is no observational advantage in postulating eternal matter. Naturalism is no more ‘scientific’ than theism.

As you said:

That’s the problem with space, but there is also the problem of time. Post-diction is also a dodgy business… any observation of the study of ancient history, and especially prehistory, reveals how much things can swing left right and centre at the drop of a single new find. The reality is, however, that in the end, the past is no longer there - we can’t entirely unravel what happened, historically, or, causally, with any guarantee of accuracy.

Another illusion

 

[MindOverMatter2]

The reality is, however, that in the end, the past is no longer there - we can’t entirely unravel what happened, historically, or, causally, with any guarantee of accuracy.

Another illusion

This is not accurate, depending on what you mean by “no-longer there”.

The past “exists”; it just doesn’t exist in the present. It no-longer exists as the present; but it does exists in the eternal-now. So to it is true that the future exists, its just doesn’t exist in the present. However the future only exists as an expression of the present and the past, and not by itself. This doesn’t mean that time is an illusion, it just means that it is relative. In the eternal now there is no moving present, no past and future; there are just co-ordinates signifying a various points in space-time.

To make it easier to understand, imagine that time and space are the same thing. If this were true then the expansion of space is the expansion of time. It thus follows that particular points in space are particular points in time. Therefore the future is only the future relative to your position in space and how fast you are traveling through it, and the past is also relative to your position in space and the rate at which you travel through it.

…so if i find a force powerful enough (using gravity and something else) you can fold space ; and if that were possible the future and the past could become one, making time travel possible…

…my nose is now gushing with blood due to the sheer force of that thought. My thinking days are numbered; i only have a Pentium twelve processor!!