I like your response, James!
Donât you think the remarkable success of science is overpowering evidence for the power of the mind?
The âbest of life for everyoneâ presupposes the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity which have no rational foundation in a natural, i.e. amoral, universe.
I think that the most authoritative knowledge comes from our experience of integrity, goodness, justice, kindness, compassion and unselfish love.
The origin and foundation of the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity are the teaching of Jesus that we are all children of one Father who cares for everyone and all that he has created.
The originality of Jesus consists in loving your enemies as well as your neighbour!
The point is that thereâs no such evidence for God of the kind normally taken as evidence for other phenomena. There is no set of observed facts that points to God, in the same way thereâs a set of observed facts that points to gravity or the orbit of the earth around the sun or evolution by natural selection. There are no equations that require the assumption of Godâs existence in order to be soluble, in the way that quantum mechanical equations require the assumption of the existence of certain particles. Even the historical evidence, whilst excellent for what people of the time believed, doesnât provide us with anything concrete upon which we can make the supposition that God exists, certainly not in the way we can suppose historical figures like Julius Caesar or Ramses II or Elizabeth I existed.
Thatâs because God set up an environment of free will to judge how we behave. If we were clearly certain, those who now oppose Him would be insincere servile flatterers and sycophants. But if you use your gift of reason, God does become evident.
If you have no faith in mankind how can you have faith in God who created mankind?
If God felt it necessary for people to believe in him, he would have made it evident in such a way that was undeniable. This is clearly not the case. Is belief therefore necessary for salvation? If there is indeed a God resembling the Christian conception of such, who has set up the universe as it is, this being will, from compassion and reason, accept honest unbelievers. If it doesnât, it is unworthy of worship in the first place. This also doesnât square with the fact that the majority of unbelievers seem to pursue an ethical existence without the carrot-and-stick motivation of religion.
Half a million? Try a few billion. Also, if crude oil and plastics were such essential items for our well-being, why did your God allow us to exist for hundreds of thousands of years before we learned how to utilise them? Couldnât an omnipotent God have more expediently provided any essentials for the welfare of its creations?
I donât know how to explain such a phenomenon - nor do I know sufficient details of the incident to actually mount an argument - but I would suppose that shared hallucination should not be ruled outâŚ
Yet things undoubtedly happen to us without our perceiving them.
Sure. Because the mind is the computer that processes the impressions from the senses.
The astonishing success of science has increasingly demonstrated that we are beholden to the physical universe.
Of course it does, but there is no reason to suppose such an explanation will come from beyond natural phenomena.
That is your opinion - in other versions, the most adequate explanation is an accumulation of properties that allows for an interactive relationship between an organism and its environment.
If natural processes of evolution and cumulative complexity allowed organisms such as ourselves (there are plenty of nonhuman examples, by the way) to manipulate our environment for our benefit, why is this reason for the kind of despair you evince in natural processes? Why not simply accept what is even though you donât have a complete explanation? As I said before, thereâs space here to assume a God, but itâs not mandatory.
There seems to be a wide difference in ideas of ethics exhibited in debates.
My faulty memory, its actually a little over half a billion. The Precambrian Era when life first started its appearance is about 600 million years ago. The first Homo Sapiens appeared about 250,000 years ago. It took many years to advance in technology to the levels today. God allowed us to develop on our own, he didnât start dropping iPods out of the sky.
Everyone up to 32 miles away witnessed the miracle. There was also the physical phenomena of the massive amount of water that disappeared. Previous to the miracle there was a drenching rain. Witnesses actually in the cova described having water up to their ankles. After the miracle they were standing on dry soil. Their drenched clothes became dry.
This is a tough one to explain to the satisfaction of most posters in these forums.
Again, its interesting how writings over 5,000 years old (Old Testament) outline a creating scenario similar to the most widely accepted âBig Bangâ hypothesis?
This site quotes another pro-religion site, which comes up with the 16% number, then arbitrarily dismisses it by referring to âanalogous poll studies!â
Wrong. We may perceive evidence, but that doesnât not mean that it exists only if we perceive it. For example, planetary orbits are evidence of gravity. Do you suppose that the planetary orbits would cease to exist if we could not perceive them? What happened before we invented the telescope?
Our minds interpret our perception of the evidence.
Yes. As is general conversation, riding a bike, tying oneâs shoelaces, and so on.
It has one. Evolution.
No, because there is no evidence for this âexplanationâ (which is anything but an explanation, because it **explains **precisely nothing.) On the other hand, thereâs bags of evidence for evolution.
And you finish with your usual motif, the Argument from Ignorance.
The âPro-Religionâ website is only quoting an unbiased World Religion study: