@love4mary
“If I jumped to conclusions phooney about some of your statements regarding my son, I apologize.”
No problem whatsoever. It is perfectly understandable that you are protective of your son, and I’m sure you only want what is best for him, that is not something I was calling into question. It is your theistic beliefs that I currently find irrational and am trying to understand. I’ve read reasonably widely and found nothing that supports the god hypothesis.
“My level of knowledge does not even come close to most here in the forum, I can only speak for myself concerning what was logical for me in my conversion.”
Don’t sell yourself so short. Sure, some people learn easier than others, and some things are really hard to understand, but that is no reason to stop pushing the boundaries of our understanding.
"Big Bang: Where did the gas come from
Fusion of dust forming planets: Where did the dust come from
Life started from a single cell: Incredible diversity of life
Organization: The complex way higher life forms are put together
and function"
Indeed, I’ve found great pleasure in finding out how the universe really works. From this list of questions are you implying that you don’t understand the big bang, you don’t understand gravity, you don’t understand chemistry, you don’t understand biology, you don’t understand evolution… and therefore you think god exists? These are just arguments from ignorance. Don’t take offence at that word, it simply means unaware of the facts. Everybody is probably ignorant of something, but ignorance can only ever be evidence for the ignorance itself.
“These questions may not have had an impact on you, but to me,they were HUGE. I could not answer them, in fact, I have never read anyone who can. It was when I started to think about the implications of these questions that God opened my eyes to Him.”
They are great questions, that’s for sure. Some of them have been
comprehensively answered, some of them are only hypotheses at the moment. They are all better answers than ‘goddidit’ because at least some of them are mathematically sound, and are made with the aim of being falsifiable, and don’t require belief without evidence.
“As I stated above, I am far less educated then most on this forum, but to my simple mind, God truly exists and proves it daily with a beautiful Sunrise/set,wild flowers in the meadows and my majestic Tennessee mountains”
Again, there’s no need to belittle yourself unless you feel uneducated about something, want to find out about it… but haven’t because you have the catch-all answer of “God”. Anybody can have a catch-all answer if it doesn’t require evidence. Mine could be “Uni the universe creating unicorn did it” for example. But it answers nothing when you make it up to answer everything.
You don’t have to believe in God to appreciate the beautiful sunrises and sunsets, flowers, animals, landscapes, etc. Trying to understand what you are seeing doesn’t detract from the beauty either. Next time you’re staring at a sunset consider that we are floating around on a lump of rock that weighs 5,972,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons at the edge of a gigantic gravity well, and you’re staring into the
past at a star about 8 light-minutes away and you can see it because it is losing about 4 billion kg per second due to the fusion of hydrogen into helium and the resultant radiation. Big numbers, but look at what else is in the universe:
youtube.com/watch?v=Tfs1t-2rrOM
We live in a beautiful place, but it is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena (to quote Carl Sagan). I looked through a telescope at Saturn on Monday night, and it is as breathtaking as ever. It’s kind of sad that we will soon be edge-on to the rings and not able to see them for a while.
“I will continue to pray (and not badger my son) for his re-conversion of heart, I will continue to keep open the lines of communication with him and pray that by living my Catholic Faith with a joyful heart, he will at least be curious enough to ask WHY!”
By all means, do.
), but that it was understandable.