Does God exist?

[marinyork]

Digressing more, has anyone got a FSM mug, I've always wanted one!?

 

[515mm]

Nice one Wafflycat. Expressed my feelings precisely as I would have done if I was that eloquent.

 

[wafflycat]

Digressing more, has anyone got a FSM mug, I've always wanted one!?

http://www.cafepress.com/venganza.250804201
http://www.cafepress.com/venganza.194657872
http://www.cafepress.com/venganza.194658172
http://www.cafepress.com/venganza.194657953
http://www.cafepress.com/venganza.194658507
http://www.cafepress.com/venganza.194658617
http://www.cafepress.com/venganza.194658388

Enjoy

 

[marinyork]

No I know wafflycat, thanks for the links anyway , just never got round to importing one just did wonder whether anyone had one and also wondered whether there was a small chance anywhere here sold them (probably not). Still probably worth it for a laugh. Hadn't seen the fourth mug before or the 7th. The 2nd one is the one I've had in mind.

 

[Jaded]

One thing I don't understand about god is this:

Why, if we are his ultimate creation, did he wait most of the 4.5 billion years of the life of the earth before he made us.

What was he doing before then - picking his nose?

Must have been bloody boring.

 

[Dayvo]

Taken from Paint Your Wagon:

'God made the mountains
God made the sky
God made the people
God knows why

He fixed up the planet
As best as He could
Then in come the people
And gum it up good . . . '

This place would be all right if it wasn't for us, er, other people!

 

[spandex]

I'm afraid I disagree there.

Putting the fear of a god into someone, trying to make them believe that they'll live forever, telling them that the dark-skinned person next door's religion is all wrong

these are doing real harm.

A lot more then we wish to admit

When I was in my teens I read a lot of Bertrand Russel's books, they made good sense to me. He was wrong though and most annoying, he had little understanding of what the Word Of God actually taught. Time and again he'd lambaste the Christian position on this or that when, as I later discovered, that wasn't what the Bible taught at all.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...



The Bible says we do. In fact:



What this passage is saying is that men are without excuse because the things that are clearly visible to them are ample evidence of the power and nature of God.

Are you wearing a wrist watch? If so, look at it. Where did it come from? I assume you bought it from a shop, which in turn bought it from a wholesaler who one way or another got it from the manufacturer.

What if I said to you that that's not where it came from at all. What if I said that millions of years ago, cosmic winds brought together atoms of steel etc and over time fused them together to form the watch, which just by random chance was accurate to one-hundredth of a second and was marked with culturally correct numerals!

I'm being ridiculous obviously. The skills involved in the manufacture of even a cheap watch are intense and it is clearly the result of design. How is it then that you could look at the hand right next to the watch and not see design?

Look at your hand for a minute. Think about all the aspects of its design, its self-adjusting servos, temperature and touch sensors. The dexterity and precision of its movement, heck it can even self-repair minor damage! With all the knowledge and technology at their disposal all the scientists in the world today could not build a human hand, it would be utterly impossible. And that's just a hand!

How can you think that such complexity came about by random chance? look in the mirror, does random chance produce symmetry? Make no mistake, origin of life by random chance is 'not' logical. For a kick off it breaks two laws!

It breaks the laws of bio genesis, the law which states that life only comes from life, and the second law of thermodynamics which has to do with entropy.

What the entropy laws state is that in the absence of intelligent input things flow from order to disorder. Things even out. Complex moves towards simple. If you left a wooden clock in a room for one-hundred years it would not end up in better condition than it was to begin with.

Evolution, or the part of it we're talking about here, states that the vast complexity of life resulted from random chance.

The first law, the law of bio genesis, states that life can only come from life. Many years ago some people, like Aristotle for instance, believed in what was called spontaneous generation. They believed that if you left a piece of meat to rot maggots would spontaneously form in it out of the rotting matter. Now we know that's not true don't we?

Yet the theory of evolution teaches that life formed out dead matter, by random chance. I have to say that if you have a theory that breaks two fundamental scientific laws, ipso facto you have a very bad theory!

You can't get around this. Science is using observable evidence, often acquired through experimentation, to confirm theories and move knowledge forward. Evolution fails this test. Evolution is not scientific, it is faith!

Don't think it's just me saying that. Charles Darwin said shortly before his death that " 'they' are making a religion out of my unformed ideas". Incidentally, Darwin also called the book of Romans "that royal book" and carried it with him everywhere.

How can Evolution be faith? Evolution is science proving how somthing has progrest and changed in time.

Ardbeg '77? My dear, the world knows you should be looking at the '74. Also, I shall draw a discrete veil over the canned beer. *shudder*

Ive had lots of the 77 and the 74 I think the 77 just and I mean just has it (just) but you are right. The cans I was tinking of saving on waght
and money as a can of of say spek hen is 15p cheaper then in a bottle and green king is 9p that was my line of thinking. But if its all free I dont care about the cost.

 

[jonesy]

....


So you think a mechanical watch 'could' come about by random chance? Interesting. I was thinking about a digital watch myself! ;0) Could you make one? maybe with the combined efforts of everyone on this forum we could make one, but I doubt it.

...

A false comparison. Of course a watch couldn't come about by random chance; nor could it evolve. Evolution requires reproduction with inherited characteristics: if you can give me an example of a watch giving birth, laying eggs or having sex then we'll take the analogy more seriously!

 

[jonesy]

I wonder what you make of this m.

....

For me at least this last point on how the devices of FSM/teapots, not forgetting Santa, are often used - rings true. Belief in God - a creator God, in Christianity, flows from the focus on/faith in Christ - his life, death and resurrection. And IMO, the answer to one of Richard Dawkins' questions "who created God" is most likely, from a Christian POV, an eternal God needs no first cause. It depends of course what you believe.

I'd agree that Russell's teapot is not of itself evidence for the non-existence of God (the untestable nature of the existence of God being one of the reasons it isn't a scientific theory); it is however a valid response to the arguments like those used earlier by Striker, namely that our inability to disprove the existence of God was evidence for his existence. You appear to be taking a position (correct me if I am wrong) that your faith is sufficient in itself and not based on attempts to fill gaps in current scientific knowledge, i.e. you are not using the argument from first cause, and more akin to the idea of Non Overlapping Magisteria- NOMA?

 

[wafflycat]

How can Evolution be faith? Evolution is science proving how somthing has progrest and changed in time.

Evolution is a scientific theory, which is currently standing up to scrutiny of the evidence available. If the evidence came along which could have a hypothesis set - have the hypothesis tested and results obtained, and this be repeated by others and stand up to the scrutiny of the peer review process, and this disproved the theory of evolution, then a good scientist would accept that. As it is... nothing has come along with *evidence* to disprove the theory of evolution.

 

[jonesy]

Evolution is a scientific theory, which is currently standing up to scrutiny of the evidence available. If the evidence came along which could have a hypothesis set - have the hypothesis tested and results obtained, and this be repeated by others and stand up to the scrutiny of the peer review process, and this disproved the theory of evolution, then a good scientist would accept that. As it is... nothing has come along with *evidence* to disprove the theory of evolution.

Indeed, and one of the key requirements of a scientific theory is that it is falsifiable. Anything like a fossil in the wrong place the strata, genuine irreducible complexity in a biological system, a manufacturer's serial number encoded in the DNA etc would blow it out of the water. But although the 'intelligent design' lobby are desperately searching for such things, no such falsifying evidence has ever appeared.

 

[Rhythm Thief]

Indeed, and one of the key requirements of a scientific theory is that it is falsifiable. Anything like a fossil in the wrong place the strata, genuine irreducible complexity in a biological system, a manufacturer's serial number encoded in the DNA etc would blow it out of the water. But although the 'intelligent design' lobby are desperately searching for such things, no such falsifying evidence has ever appeared.

Indeed, despite the best efforts of some creationists to find "facts" they can shoehorn into their ludicrous theory, in itself not a scientific approach.

 

[Jaded]

I believe in creation!

I believe that man created god in his image.

 

[Rhythm Thief]

No you don't ... Oh. I see what you've done there.

 

[spandex]

Evolution is a scientific theory, which is currently standing up to scrutiny of the evidence available. If the evidence came along which could have a hypothesis set - have the hypothesis tested and results obtained, and this be repeated by others and stand up to the scrutiny of the peer review process, and this disproved the theory of evolution, then a good scientist would accept that. As it is... nothing has come along with *evidence* to disprove the theory of evolution.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution