Theres no appropriate title

ummm....so i cruised over that this morning...ill have to get a deeper look into the PROOF that god does indead exsist...but so far...your proof is supported by things written by man..im a hands on kinda gal...i need something more than words written by man after the fact, saying...this is the truth...give me more than "because i said so" kinda crap...maybe my pov will change after i read thru it...im going to try to approach it thru an open mind...but what i have read already...reminds me of the baptist approach to preaching that i turned away from early on in life...so it could be difficult trying to read thru something that insults my intelligence at every turn...

 

You skimmed right of the top of it Test. The fact is all of it was written before the events took place. That is an actual fact-not my idea. =) Please keep looking.

 

Oh yeah,

In the emails I sent to these guys, I told them that the 1st 10 or 13 pages (I can't remember-are my notes only. That is not inspired whatsoever.

 

testflight, I would never try to intentionally insult you. Your question is valid. How do we prove that God exists? We can't prove that he does without a shadow of doubt, but that is why we say it takes faith. Not a blind faith, mind you, but a reasoned intelligent faith based on claims that can be confirmed.

- The universe (including time itself) can be shown to have had a beginning.

- It is unreasonable to believe something could begin to exist without a cause.

- The universe therefore requires a cause, just as Genesis 1:1 and Romans 1:20 teach.

- God, as creator of time, is outside of time. Therefore, He had no beginning in time, has always existed, and so does not need a cause.

"Whichever way you look at it—the evidence from the Bible, the incredibly complex, organized information in living things, or the origin of the universe—belief in an all-powerful, all-knowing Creator God, as revealed in the Bible, not only makes sense, but is the only viable explanation." (Don Batten, AiG)

In other words, how can we best explain given the facts we have here, how the universe came into existence. Yes, we all come into the argument with a presupposition. Mine happens to be from the perspective that God is the creator and has revealed Himself in His word. I firmly believe the facts prove Him out. Just a few items - involves some reading, but please take the time!

(These are quoted from AiG and written by Don Batten)
1. Natural law
There is a universal tendency for all systems of matter/energy to run down.30 Available energy is dissipated and order is lost. Without either a programmed mechanism or intelligent action, even open systems31 will tend from order to disorder, from information to non-information, and towards less availability of energy. This is the reason why heat flows from hot to cold, and why the sun’s energy will not make a dead stick grow (as opposed to a green plant, which contains specific, pre-programmed machinery to direct the energy to create a special type of order known as specified complexity).

Applied to the origin of the first life, this denies that such specified complexity can possibly arise except from outside information impressed on to matter. Applied to the whole universe, which is acknowledged as winding down to ‘heat death’ (that is, ‘cosmos to chaos’), this implies a fundamental contradiction to the ‘chaos to cosmos, all by itself’ essence of evolutionary philosophy.32,33

So, the universe had to be ‘wound up’ at the beginning and it could not have existed eternally. This requires some agent outside the universe to wind it up—just as a clock cannot wind itself!

2. Living things
Observed changes in living things head in the wrong direction to support evolution from protozoan to man (macro-evolution).

Selection from the genetic information already present in a population (for example, DDT resistance in mosquitoes) causes a net loss of genetic information in that population. A DDT-resistant mosquito is adapted to an environment where DDT is present, but the population has lost genes present in the mosquitoes that were not resistant to DDT because they died and so did not pass on their genes. So natural selection and adaptation involve loss of genetic information.

From information theory and a vast number of experiments and observations, we know that mutations (copying mistakes) are incapable of causing an increase in information and functional complexity.34 Instead, they cause ‘noise’ during the transmission of genetic information, in accordance with established scientific principles of the effect of random change on information flow, and so destroy the information.35 Not surprisingly, several thousand human diseases are now linked to mutations.

This decrease in genetic information (from mutations, selection/adaptation/speciation and extinction) is consistent with the concept of original created gene pools—with a large degree of initial variety—being depleted since.

Since observed ‘micro’ changes—such as antibiotic resistance in bacteria and insecticide resistance in insects—are informationally down-hill, or at best horizontal, they cannot accumulate to give the required (uphill) changes for ‘macro’ evolution, regardless of the time period.36

These small changes are erroneously used as ‘proofs of evolution’ in biology courses, yet they cannot be extrapolated to explain ameba-to-man evolution. Such extrapolation is like arguing that if an unprofitable business loses only a little money each year, given enough years it will make a profit. The observed changes do, however, fit a Creation/Fall model well.

3. Fossils
Although Darwin expected millions of transitional fossils to be found, none have been found, except for a mere handful of disputable ones. Evolutionist Dr Colin Patterson of the British Museum of Natural History responded as follows to a written question asking why he failed to include illustrations of transitional forms in a book he wrote on evolution:

‘ … I fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them. You suggest that an artist should be used to visualize such transformations, but where would he get the information from? I could not, honestly, provide it, and if I were to leave it to artistic licence, would that not mislead the reader?

‘I wrote the text of my book four years ago. If I were to write it now, I think the book would be rather different. Gradualism is a concept I believe in, not just because of Darwin’s authority, but because my understanding of genetics seems to demand it. Yet Gould and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when they say there are no transitional fossils. As a palaeontologist myself, I am much occupied with the philosophical problems of identifying ancestral forms in the fossil record. You say that I should at least “show a photo of the fossil from which each type of organism was derived.” I will lay it on the line—there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument.’37

Even the often-claimed transition between reptiles and birds, Archaeopteryx, shows no sign of the crucial scale-to-feather or leg-to-wing transition. While it is always possible to maintain faith in evolution by belief in unobservable mechanisms,38 the evidence of such a systematic paucity of the anticipated evolutionary ‘links’ on a global scale is powerful, positive support for biblical creation, regardless of any argument about how and when fossils may have formed.

4. The age of things
The evidence for a ‘young’ earth/universe is, by definition, evidence for biblical creation, as naturalistic evolution, if it were at all possible, would require eons. There is much evidence that the universe is relatively young,39 such as the decay of the earth’s magnetic field, including rapid paleomagnetic reversals,40 fragile organic molecules in fossils supposedly many millions of years old,41 not enough helium in the atmosphere,42 not enough salt in the sea,43 carbon-14 in coal and oil supposedly millions of years old, polystrate fossils that extend through strata supposedly representing many millions of years, inter-tonguing of non-sequential geological strata,44 small number of supernova remnants,45 magnetic fields on ‘cold’ planets, and much more (see What about carbon dating?).

Elapsed time extending back beyond one’s own lifetime cannot be directly measured, so all arguments for either a long or a short age are necessarily indirect and must depend on acceptance of the assumptions on which they are inevitably based.

Young-earth arguments make sense of the fact that many fossils show well-preserved soft parts. This requires rapid deposition and rapid hardening of the encasing sediment for such fossils to exist. Observations of multiple geologic strata and canyons, for example, forming rapidly under catastrophic conditions in recent times, indicate that the entrenched slow-and-gradual, vast-age thinking may well be markedly in error.46,47

5. Cultural-anthropological evidence
Hundreds of world-wide traditions among indigenous peoples about a global Flood, each with features in common with the biblical account, provide evidence of the reality of that account. Also widespread, but less so, are accounts of a time of language dispersal. Linguistic and biological evidence has recently revealed a hitherto unrealized genetic closeness among all the ‘races’ of people (see How did all the different ‘races’ arise?--Chapter 18), consistent with a recent origin from a small population source. This denies the previously widely held belief that human races evolved their characteristic features during long periods of isolation. Molecular studies suggest that, relatively recently, one woman provided the mitochondrial DNA which gave rise to the sequences in all people alive today.48 Such evidence may be squeezed into an evolutionary model, but it was not a direct prediction of it. However, it is directly consistent with biblical creation.

6. Design and complexity
Incredibly complex coordinated biological systems are known in which no conceivable part-coordinated, part-functioning, simpler arrangement would be other than a liability.49 Some examples are the blood-clotting mechanism, the bacterial flagellum (used for propulsion), the photosynthetic apparatus, and the pupal transformation of caterpillars to butterflies. Examples abound in living things.

The immense complexity of the human brain, its creativity and power of abstract reasoning, with capacities vastly beyond that required for sheer survival, is perhaps the most ‘obvious’ evidence for intelligent creation.

At the molecular level, the organization that characterizes living things is inherently different from, for example, a crystal arrangement. The function of a given protein, for instance, depends upon the assembly sequence of its constituents. The coded information required to generate these sequences is not intrinsic to the chemistry of the components (as it is for the structure of a crystal) but extrinsic (imposed from outside).

During reproduction, the information required to make a living organism is impressed upon material substrates to give a pre-programmed pattern, by systems of equal (or greater) complexity (in the parent organism/s) which themselves had the same requirement for their formation. Without pre-programmed machinery, no spontaneous, physico-chemical process is known to generate such information-bearing sequences—this requires the operation of outside intelligence.

The most reasonable inference from such observations is that outside intelligence was responsible for a vast original store of biological information in the form of created populations of fully functioning organisms.50 Such intelligence vastly surpasses human intelligence—again consistent with the concept of God as revealed in the Bible.

 

Sin will make you sick to your stomach when you look at it the way God does.
I know it does me when I look at my own.

The proof is there. That is historical fact in the later parts of that paper. You can't deny that. Are you telling me you don't believe in history?

 

pretty interesting reading here. i'm not as versed on this topic as say, drawing something, but, as with drawing, the end result is dependent upon the persons views.

all i know is that i've been learning more about my own faith, do i always agree with it? no, do i close my mind on matters and let it go at that? no. it's a continuing education that i hope to some day be able to express my thoughts as eloquently as some here have.

 

just out of curiosity, i went back to the first post to see where this topic started from. as for the topic, yeah, i'm on one side. opinions formed from personal experiences. i'm not going to go into details here.

 

Maybe one day Hamma

Hamma, look at your post #63.

There is more than enough correct historical fact in the end of those papers to come to an intelligent decision.

Zabdiel: /cries for Hamma
Zabdiel: /heart is truely sad

This has been a great debate everyone. I have written the paper and shown you mathematically just like I said I would. I am a man that does what I say.
No one ever argued someone to Christ.
The decision is in your hands. The proof is there. I really do hope all of you make the correct decision.

I love all you guys and I thank you all for being honest in this thread.

 

This is one of the reasons I hate fanatics. They bring up all these 'facts' (facts supported by the book that we're argueing about.. which would get you thrown out of any debate room while being laughed at for hours), and then when they can't support the belief by any more reasonable means than their own faith, they give you the 'well I'll pray for you while you're in hell' treatment. Screw that. Religious people have got to be some of the most frustrating, ignorant, closed-minded people I run into these days. Some of the things you've stated in this post, and in that paper, are purely rediculous and sickening. Stop.. Think.. and wake the hell up.

And as for you, Mani, how can you justify that the universe has not simply always existed but that god has always existed? If someone has to be created, what created god? The human mind simply can not handle the idea of infinity when it comes to a tangible thing.. so they created this god with supernatural powers to take the place of the universe having been around forever and simply being there because it's there. Trying to state that something needs a purpose to be alive is insulting. I don't have a pre-determined purpose.. I make my own purpose as I go through the natural course of life.

Faithfulness in a God, or the lack of a god, is a waste of time. The difference, however, is that the faith in the lack of a god has not caused all the death and suffering that faith in a god has. Those of you who love god in this post have yet to rebuke the fact that religion has not done ANYTHING good to outweigh the horrible things it's done.

 

Sometimes I could say the same about people who don't believe what I do, such as yourself Cyrus.

I don't need to justify anything. I simply am stating what I believe to be true based on what I consider to be observable, confirmable facts. Can I prove God exists? Read the debate above if you missed this topic, because I don't want to repeat myself.

So humanity, who has no idea about infinity, creates an infinite God? Explain that one to me. Why does humanity feel the need to explain the universe? Are you content with being ignorant of the reason behind it? I choose not to be - I choose to search for answers.

So what you are saying here is you have no reason to be alive, other than what you decide? May I ask what that reason is? Why is it insulting? I am not insulted by it. Why are you? I choose to believe I have a distinct and important purpose for my life, and this is in no way insulting to me.

 

I was raised Roman Catholic, Mani. I spent 8 years in religious education. I've been to the Vatican and I've walked through the Sistine Chapel. I listened to all of this babble for my whole life as well as looked into other religions. Gradually, I started questioning the BS that was being presented to me and have gotten to a point where I've realized it is totally rediculous.

It is a lot easier for the human mind to accept a supreme being with unlimited power to have been around for ever.. there's no reason to study or a need to comprehend it past believing in it. The idea that the universe has always been here and goes on forever is something you can not picture in your head. When you picture the universe in your mind, there's always some kind of boundry on the outer edges.

God giving me a purpose to live my life out with is akin to fate and predetermination. That, in itself, is insulting. To believe that I have no contorl over what I do and that I'm just going through my life realizing what was already planned out by god.



I noticed that you conveniently left out the part where I asked for one of you to justify the societal use for religion and how it's ratio of good vs bad is just a bit skewed.

 

I wasn't raised in any church - I have no background in religion, other than hearing it occasionally from people. I listened to the babble of humanity telling me I am my own god and I can tap that "untapped reservoir of power within me". I never found it and wondered why I couldn't. My studies led me to what I feel to be the only logical and reasonable conclusion, as stated previously.

Sorry about that! I missed this comment entirely. Religion is society's way of feeling pious about itself and rationalizing it's way to a god. Religion is a hollow, cold, and shallow way man has devised to place God in a box and then treat Him like a vending machine - pop a few prayers in and get a candy!

What I have is a dynamic, radical, and heart-changing relationship with a living, personal, and loving God who sent His Son Jesus Christ to this earth to die for my sins so that He may have me as a close friend. This philosophy has changed my life. I don't have religion - I have a relationship. I love Him for what He did vicariously, and in my place, on that cross around 2000 years ago. I will never demand you believe like I do, as that is not my place. I have simply shared what I believe and why I believe it and also the facts as I see them based on a starting axiom using the Bible as its source.

 

The agnostic in me is fine with the idea of a personal belief. An ambiguous belief in a god or a set of gods is the common element between all of the faith based religions, obviously. You, however, are basing your belief on the book of a specific organized religion. What would you believe if the Bible had not been written and something pretty different was the major religion of this side of the world? If Jesus had been killed at 10 years old by some bandits and his story, therefore, did not happen, what else would have been written or stories collected for you to have faith in? Basing your belief system on a specific religion's beliefs is, in my eyes, where it's flawed. Christianity is very young.

There have been countless other belief systems before christianity.. what makes their's correct?

 

Cyrus,

My friend-no disrespect, but we have been over this.

Prophecy

 

Every religion, including atheists, has prophecy. If you put a ton of prophecies in one religion, vague as they are, a lot will come true. That is not a justification.

 

Obviously you did not read the paper
-or-
You simply refuse to accept the Truth - I think it is the later

by the way-I have good news for ya, your not agnostic =)

 

Lots of speculation here but not much fact. The existence (life and death) of Jesus of Nazareth (also known as the Christ) is one of the most documented facts of history.

I choose the axiom based on what I believe to be the most credible starting point. The Bible of Christianity contains historical facts, yes, but so do other books. The Bible makes mention of real historical people, but so do other books. But the Bible has one thing that none other have: multitudes of recognized and identifiable fulfilled prophecies that are specific in nature and very detailed.

You have chosen what you will use as a starting axiom in this debate, and I have chosen mine. As we examine these presuppositions, we attempt to apply the facts, as we all have the same facts around us, and see which belief system can be confirmed (not proven beyond a doubt) using observational science.