[cconcepts]

Nice response - I don't want to hijack this thread by going through this with a fine tooth comb but a couple of points: 1) The God of the bible pursues relationship with the people he created, every other god is some form of "be holy, zen like, detached or well behaved enough and I might relate to you". 2) I've never used God as the only explanation to natural phenomena - condemning my argument by what someone else has said is equivalent to me condemning your argument because soviet/maoist leaders said illogical things in the name of atheism - it wouldn't be fair to you if I did that. 3) On a philosophical level, there is no such thing as absolute certainty. We all have to take faith in something. I have walked across a certain bridge 10 times and it has never collapsed. I will walk across it tomorrow having faith that it wont collapse extrapolated from past evidence. I believe animals evolve over time but I have never seen a fish sprout legs.

None of us have absolute certainty about anything we have to make our best analysis of the facts before us. I analysed the facts heavily and believe that the God of the bible is more plausible than any other explanation of our existence.

[super_mario]

> None of us have absolute certainty about anything we have to make our best analysis of the facts before us. I analysed the facts heavily and believe that the God of the bible is more plausible than any other explanation of our existence.

I don't agree with this view at all, and I would like to see an example of one such fact that is best "explained" by positing a supernatural agent. Invoking supernatural to explain something is not really explaining anything, and even worse, to rule out any possibility of it ever being explained. Because anything supernatural must by definition be beyond the reach of a natural explanation. It must be beyond the reach of science and the well-established, tried and tested scientific method that has been responsible for the huge advances in knowledge we have enjoyed over the last 400 years or so. To say that something happened supernaturally is not just to say we don’t understand it, but to say we will never understand it so don’t even try.

Science takes exactly the opposite approach. Science thrives on its inability, so far, to explain everything, and uses that as the spur to go on asking questions, creating possible models and testing them, so that we make our way, inch by inch, closer to the truth. If something were to happen that went against our current understanding of reality, we would see that as a challenge to our present model, requiring us to abandon or at least change it. It is through such adjustments and subsequent testing that we approach closer and closer to what is true.

What would you think of a detective who, baffled by a murder, was too lazy even to try to work at the problem and instead wrote the mystery off as supernatural? The whole history of science shows us that things once thought to be the result of the supernatural, caused by gods (both happy and angry), demons, witches, spirits, curses and spells, actually do have natural explanations: explanations that we can understand and test and have confidence in. There is absolutely no reason to believe that those things for which science does not yet have natural explanations will turn out to be of supernatural origin, any more than volcanoes or earthquakes or diseases turn out to be caused by angry deities, as people once believed they were.

Put another way, show me one fact for which scientific explanation no matter how inadequate was once the best explanation but for which relgious/theological explanation is now better one.

[cconcepts]

Where did the protons and neutrons that initiated the "big bang" come from? What set them in motion?

The balance of the fine tuned requirements of our universe, once understood to be "just so" are now, accepted as having a probability so slim that the likelihood of them occurring in the balances we find them in the known universe is infinitesimal (I'm talking about the gravitational constant, our distance from the sun, gas balance in the atmosphere etc etc). Tweak one of these balances just a little and life would never have occurred. The only answer pure impericists have for this "fine tuning argument" is the multiverse argument - that there are actually billions of universes and we just happen to be in the right one....thats grasping at straws and has absolutely no evidence to support it except that it allows them to continue claiming "there is no intention behind any of it".

You're talking like all Christians are anti-science. Some are, but they're sadly ignorant. Western science began as an attempt to better understand the mind of God. God was not taken to be a convenient excuse to explore nothing but motivation to know him better was given as justification to explore more. I know there are vocal luddites who do what you say but they do not represent all of us.

I believe this debate is relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tU3-crvTDc

[super_mario]

Unfortunately, none of those questions are improved by positing a god. First, you do not have any evidence that there is a god, but we do have evidence that there is a universe out there. Second, even if I grant you deistic god who may have perhaps started the universe, you still have all your work ahead of you to show that this god is the god of the bible (this is pretty damning when we have so much evidence about invention and evolution of biblical god, which as it turns out is a man made invention, see for example "The evolution of God" by Robert Wright, and "The Early History of God" by Mark Smith).

On the other hand, as I have already said in my previous post, positing a deistic god i.e. an idea that some god might exist who may perhaps have kicked off the universe but no longer takes interest in it is pointless. No one can in principle provide proof there is no deistic god, nor can anyone provide a proof that such a thing exists. At most we can say is such a hypothesis is no longer needed. It presupposes a lot more to assume an intelligent being capable of creating universes who either spontaneously came into being or always existed than to assume the same thing about the universe itself (i.e. dumb matter). This is why Occam's razor cuts such hypothesis as superfluous thing, because it does not explain anything new, but poses more questions.

Basically, what ever you want to say about this deistic god, how it came to be etc. you can just say the same thing about the universe itself. And you would be assuming much less (no intelligence, just dumb matter). And like Pierre-Simon Laplace said, it works without that hypothesis.

And some of the questions you talk about do have scientific answers, like distance to the sun, balance of atmosphere etc. And others have plausible answers that don't require supernatural.

I think reading something like Victor J. Stenger's "The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning" would be useful.

And besides, the false dichotomy you set up, either we have an answer for everything or else Jesus is the Christ and we must therefore all be Christians is just not true. There is a spectrum of options in between. We could not know any answers and Christianity be false (as I maintain it is), or perhaps Hindus have it right etc.

You must get comfortable with not knowing, and seeking rational answers. It is those who are certain and who claim divine warrant for their certainty that belong to the infancy of our species.

Religion was the first and worst attempt to make sense of reality. It was the best we could do at a time when we had no concept of physics, chemistry, biology or medicine. We did not know that we lived on a round planet, let alone that the planet was in orbit in a minor and obscure solar system, which was also on the edge of an unimaginably vast cosmos that was exploding away from its original source of energy. We did not know that micro-organisms were so powerful and lived in our digestive systems in order to enable us to live, as well as mounting lethal attacks on us as parasites. We did not know of our close kinship with other animals. We believed that sprites, imps, demons, and djinns were hovering in the air about us. We imagined that thunder and lightning were portentous. It has taken us a long time to shrug off this heavy coat of ignorance and fear, and every time we do there are self-interested forces who want to compel us to put it back on again. We are pattern-seeking mammals and owing to our intelligence and inquisitiveness, we will still prefer a conspiracy theory to no explanation at all. Religion was our first attempt at philosophy, just as alchemy was our first attempt at chemistry and astrology our first attempt to make sense of the movements of the heavens. But there is a reason why religions insist so much on strange events in the sky, as well as on less quantifiable phenomena such as dreams and visions. All of these things cater to our inborn stupidity, and our willingness to be persuaded against all the evidence that we are indeed the center of the universe and that everything is arranged with us in mind.

There are some highly intelligent believers, but history has no record of any human being who was remotely qualified to say that they knew or understood the mind of god. Yet this is precisely the qualification which the godly must claim, so modestly and so humbly, to possess. It is time to withdraw our respect from such fantastic claims, all of them aimed at the exertion of power over others. There is no moral or intellectual equivalent between the different degrees of uncertainty here. The atheist generally says that the existence of a deity cannot be disproved. It can only be found to be entirely lacking in evidence or proof. The theist can opt to be a mere deist, and to say that the magnificence of the natural order strongly implies an ordering force. But the religious person must go further and say that this creative force is also an intervening one: one that cares for our human affairs and is interested in what we eat and with whom we have sexual relations, as well as in the outcomes of battles and wars. To assert this is quite simply to assert more than any human can possibly claim to know, and thus it falls, and should be discarded, and should have been discarded long ago.

Some things can be believed and some things simply cannot. I might choose to believe that Jesus of Nazareth was born of a virgin in Bethlehem, and that later he both did and did not die, since he was seen again by humans after the time of his apparent decease. Many have argued that the sheer unlikelihood of this story makes it fractionally more probable. Again, then, suppose that I grant the virgin birth and the resurrection. The religious still have all of their work ahead of them. These events, even if confirmed, would not prove that Jesus was the son of god. Nor would they prove the truth or morality of his teachings. Nor would they prove that there was an afterlife or a last judgment. His miracles, if verified, would likewise leave him one among many shamans and magicians, some of them mentioned in the Old Testament, who could apparently work wonders by sorcery. Many of the philosophers and logicians take the view that miracles cannot and did not occur, and Albert Einstein took the view (which some stubbornly consider to be a deist one) that the miracle is that there are no miracles or other interruptions of a wondrous natural order. This is not a difference that can be split: either faith is sufficient or else miracles are required to reassure those, including the preachers, whose faith would otherwise not be strong enough.

But here is something that is impossible for anyone to believe. The human species has been in existence as Homo Sapiens for at least one hundred and fifty thousand years (some would say even longer). An instant in evolutionary time, this is nonetheless a vast history when contemplated by primates with brains and imaginations of the dimensions that we can boast. In order to subscribe to monotheistic religion, one must believe that humans were born, struggled, and expired during this time, often dying in childbirth or for want of elementary nurture, and with a life-expectancy of perhaps three decades at most. Add to these factors the turf wars between discrepant groups and tribes, alarming outbreaks of disease, which had no germ theory to explain let alone palliate them, and associated natural disasters and human tragedies. And yet, for all these millennia, heaven watched with indifference and then, and only in the last six thousand years at the very least, decided that it was time to intervene as well as redeem. And heaven would only intervene and redeem in remote areas of the Middle East, thus ensuring that many more generations would expire before the news could begin to spread! Let me send a voice to Sinai and cement a pact with just one tribe of dogged and greedy yokels. Let me lend a son to be torn to pieces because he is misunderstood. Let me tell the angel Gabriel to prompt an illiterate and uncultured merchant into rhetorical flights. At last the darkness that I have imposed will lift! The willingness even to entertain such elaborately mad ideas involves much more than the suspension of disbelief, or the dumb credulity that greets magic tricks.

It also involves ignoring or explaining away the many religious beliefs that antedated Moses. Our primeval ancestors raised temples and altars and offered the requisite terrified obsequies and sacrifices. Their religion was man-made, like all the others. There was a time when Greek thinkers denounced Christians and Zoroastrians denounced Muslims as "atheists" for their destruction of old sites and their prohibition of ancient rituals. The source of desecration and profanity is religious, as we can see from the way that today’s believers violate the sanctity of each other’s temples. Richard Dawkins may have put it the best when he said everybody is an atheist in saying that there is a god, from Ra to Shiva, in which he does not believe. All that the atheists do is to go one god further. Human solipsism can generally be counted upon to become enraged and to maintain that this discountable god must not be the one in which the believer himself has invested so much credence. But the man-made character of religion persists in a terrifying shape in our own time, as believers fight each other over the correct interpretation and even kill members of their own faiths over doctrine. Civilization has been immensely retarded by such arcane interfaith quarrels and could now be destroyed by their modern versions.

[cconcepts]

Wow, thats a large reply. Sorry for the delay.

I'm not going to give your well thought out points the response they deserve but let me respond with a few things.

Of course our interpretation of the bible evolves to some degree because our interpretation of anything reflects our culture. Jesus existed within a culture and so do the people that attempt to follow him. Wouldn't you be concerned if people's biblical understanding didn't evolve in some respect and we all wore togas and sandals to be biblical?

Paragraph two: no one can prove or disprove God therefore default to Occam's razor for the final decision. Occam's razor is useful for statistical thinking but imagine if we applied this "default to occam's razor attitude" with everything? Would Einstein have pursued and refined his general theory? Unlikely, he might have said something like "this is all getting a bit unusual and not what I initially expected, I think I'll just default back". As you suggest he has decided to "assume much less" and completely nullified his pursuit of truth for the sake of intellectual comfort - not having to deal with something that, on the surface, appeared bizarre and unappealing on our first analysis. It isn't fair to do this to ourselves when history has shown that truth is often stranger than we can imagine.

Fine Tuning: Sure, there are scientific answers to these things; "one in a trillion planets happens to be the right distance from the sun" well and good. But to have all these elements, each with such miniscule odds, is far beyond the probability of the known universe many times over. To the point that, folks like Richard Dawkins propound the multiverse theory in which there are billions of universes like our own and we just happen to be in the right one because there is no logical explanation to how all these elements came together just right in the universe that we know....to me its the multiverse that sounds far fetched but I'm willing to analyse it further.

False dichotomy; having investigated many world religions and seen the theme of "be good enough, meditate enough, pray enough and you might reach paradise/nirvana" repeated over and over again, it seems that God is a terrible guy who sits in comfort delivering proclamations that we can't keep up with. That is, until I look at Christ and see that, far from remaining out of the mess, he has entered it in pursuit of us (like a loving father would) and makes payment for us himself. When my child does wrong I pursue him even when he doesn't want to be pursued because I love him. To sit back and say "be good or daddy won't love you" would be horrific and manipulative and not lead to a meaningful relationship. Because the God of the bible treats humanity like a loving father treats his son is the reason I see it as the only other option. If the vengeful and distant gods of Hinduism etc are true then, I'm sorry, but I don't want to know them.

>"You must get comfortable with not knowing" - sorry but I have to disagree here. I don't think I'll ever be comfortable with not knowing. I desperately want the truth and see it as lifes purpose to pursue it. However, there comes a point where I have to leap off from the knowledge I have and make a few assumptions otherwise I am left with nothing to stand on. This is why science has hypothises - we don't have all the answers but we need to believe in something or we have no objective standpoint with which to consider anything true and, as a few despairing philosophy students will tell you "we could just be brains sitting in vats being sent sensory information through nerve endings, we can't prove anything." This is a weak position in which to pursue truth because "you can't prove anything" and so nothing becomes reliable. As CS Lewis has pointed out; "if you see through everything then you really see nothing at all".

Religion may have been used to make sense of reality but that doesn't mean it is its only purpose. If there is truth in religion then it must be the means of a creator to get in touch with creation (temporarily ignoring the fact that humans have used religion for all other kinds of selfish means that is wasn't intended for). So to say "we needed God once when we didn't understand stuff but now we know things so we don't need God" is the old cause and agency discussion. Just because I know how something was done doesn't mean I know the reason (or lack of reason) that it was done for. Also, as Edison pointed out, despite a bit of progress we still don't know one millionth of a percent about anything. Sure, we've made some great scientific discoveries. But every new discovery opens ten new questions. This is partly what makes science so awesome but we need to keep this humbling fact in mind when we start thinking we have 'arrived' at the fullness of knowledge.

I claim to know God a little because he chose to not leave us in the dark but deliver to us the bible for our own benefit. But the bible is available to a lot of people is therefore a 'distributed' revelation of truth. How can I use the bible to exert power of someone when they have access to it themselves. The people who are vulnerable to this kind of manipulation are those who won't investigate themselves but effectively say "someone tell me what to believe". Thankfully, these people are becoming less and less and people who understand what they believe are on the increase (relative to the whole). You, super_mario, are not susceptible to being one of these "tell me what to believe" people because of your inquisitiveness and obvious desire to seek out truth. I'm sorry that people have used the bible to "lord it over others" but the bible itself specifically says not to do this. People that do this anger me as much as they anger anyone else. The only objective source of truth in Christianity is the bible which is why we posit "sola scriptura" or scripture as the highest authority. Most have access to it so there is less chance of manipulation. Acts 17:11 encourages this attitude, to take whatever someone says and compare it with scripture to see if its true, rather than swallowing it wholesale.

Miracles: if we need proof of miracles to affirm our faith then I would say it is a shallow faith. Our faith should come from looking at the facts not, as you say, pursuing some shaman. Yes, I believe Jesus worked miracles. No, that is not the reason I believe he is the son of God. Some people have used some hand-wavy logic and tried to make explicit miracles evidence for God but, for people who think like you and I, this does not suffice and we are unlikely to see 100% conclusive proof. I see no need to go further into it than that.

Why did Christ come when he did: This is a good question and I have to admit that I am not a purveyor of all truth and so I can't say that I know the answer. Personally the flexibility of time, as proven by General Relativity has never made the timing issue a biggie for me. Also, the tragedies of this world are certainly that; tragic. However, if Christ's coming is true then the pains of this world must pale in comparison. This is not to say the pain people faced was irrelevant but that there is no doubt more at stake than I currently understand. You've piqued my interest though, I shall investigate this further. I think its a little unfair to refer to it as "dumb credulity". My faith in Christ comes from the best objective reasoning I can muster, which, I hope you can see, is not without rigour. I do not blindly accept that God showed up late. I'm interested in an answer, and, thanks to your suggestion, I shall pursue one.

"the man-made character of religion persists in a terrifying shape in our own time". I agree with this and think it sucks. However, religion has simply been the most powerful tool at humanity's disposal. Humans will wield the most powerful tool they can to get what they selfishly want, this has historically been religion. If there was no religion we would be wielding something else. Just consider Soviet Russia or Maoist China as an example. Humans are screwed up and we have used religion to express our screwed up-ness. Agreed. But just because people get killed in car accidents doesn't make cars the source of all horror on our roads, it is the feeble drivers behind the cars that are the problem.

Would love to take this conversation elsewhere and keep it going. Really appreciate your thoughtfulness and the challenges you are presenting to me, its healthy.