Ah, the old religion/science debate.

As an atheist, I find it hard to believe that a higher order created the universe and everything in it! Of course, I respect people who think otherwise, but I just can't get my head around the idea of 'a god' controlling the way the universe works.

well, since the bible is the only so called "proof" that Christians have, then there are alot of examples of God's anger.
i.e. The great flood (Noah), Adam & Eve getting kicked out of the Garden Of Eden.
And they're just off the top of my head, I'm sure there are plenty more too

There is a lot of scientific information that backs up many of the things brought up in the Bible. Also the story of the great deluge (the earth being covered with water) isnt just in the Bible. There are stories about it in about 95% of all religions that date back 2000 years plus. The story around it varies a bit, but the general idea is very similar.

Please dont say that the only 'proof' that Christians have is the Bible, because that far from the truth.

CRX Forum

Read this article for more information if you are interested.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deluge_%28mythology%29

CRX Forum

I'd love to know some of these instances where science backs up the bible, could you enlighten me? Or any other proof that exists to support christianity besides the bible.

The great flood does appear in many other cultures and religions but again there is no evidence that the ENTIRE world was ever covered in water. There is evidence that shows places in the middle east and egypt had a great flood but that is hardly the entire world.

I already knew about the deluge. Just because the story of Noah reflects that, and that there's proof that the flood did happen, there's still no proof, that I can think of right now, for the existance of a 'god' outside of religious text.
and I apologise for saying its the only 'proof', what I mean was that it's the most common source of argument used by Christians

http://www.halos.com/

Thats a good website that explains about polonium microspheres and how their existance can only be explained by the creation story, or a very short creation period of the earth, since they are found all over the planet and not in one isolated place.

To give a short explination of what its about, these spheres are tiny little bubbles that are found in granites. Granites are formed over millions of years as magma is cooled and impacted upon itself over very long periods of time. If you have ever seen granite you know that it is a very solid rock and very dence. This is caused by the magma cooling over this time period. However they have found polonium microspheres inside of granites all over the world. The only way that this can happen is when magma is still hot and then cools before it comes to rest, which is pretty much impossible according to science. It would be like taking molten metal and then instantly cooling it. There is no way that nature and definately no way that man can take something so hot and instantly bring it down to a non molten temperature instantly.

Read it over and their indepth articles for any questions or disblief they have. Its all explained there. Also its not a pro "OMG We are right youre the stupid evolutionist!" type of website. Just information with explinations.

CRX Forum

So quite obviously that points to god...I don't buy it

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/po-halos/gentry.html

A quick google search has tons of sites disputing this theory...

I love this topic. Sorry that this post is so long, I quoted just about every post so far. Quick background before I get started:
Theology is a passion of mine. My personal beliefs categorize me as a monotheist, although I was raised Catholic. I read though this topic and saw soooo many things I wanted to comment on so I started at the beginning and worked my through. I don't know if this counts as forum jackassery, but this seemed like the best route. I'm sorry if I offend anyone, I mean nothing by it. I do crack a few jokes here and there, please don't ban me. And if you feel anything is blatantly wrong, tell me. Hold on to your butts.

(SPEAKING OF THE BIBLE)


As a whole, one cannot say that the entire thing is a piece of fiction. However, it’s very hard to say that any religious text, excluding what the Scientologists use and the Book of Mormon, as a piece of fiction. Now I’m not saying that I believe that after the world ends it will be covered in milk and Shiva will blossom from a lotus flower and begin to recreate everything and the world will start over, but can you prove that it won’t happen and hasn’t happened before? People have faith in that series of events. People believe that to be the truth just as people believe the Bible to be the truth. There are instances where the Bible and historical fact, a term I like to use loosely, meet up. However there are also historical facts that meet up with the faiths of the Incas, Mayans, Hindus, Buddhists and others. No religion would maintain with without historical fact because fact inspires theory and theory is basis of both religion and science. So you can neither prove that, in whole, the Bible is nonfiction nor fiction. You can, however, classify it as fiction/nonfiction (i.e. “What is the What” by Dave Eggers)



Faith is blind and is accepting your ignorance. By having faith in anything, God or no God, Obama or McCain, protons, neutrons and electrons; you are realizing your own ignorance to truth and fact. Faith is the belief in something that one can neither prove nor disprove. Since you can neither prove nor disprove whatever you have faith in, you blindly believe in what you believe in. I don’t believe that Jesus was the Messiah and I don’t believe that Jesus’ real name was Jesus. I have my reasons to not believe that Jesus was the Messiah and the only way to truly know what Jesus’ real name was is to go back and ask him. Reason for not believing that Jesus’ name was Jesus is that the origin from the name is not the original text. It actually comes from the Latin translation in which Jesus means “God is Zeus”. Why that is, I don’t know. Anyway, faith is blind and ignorance is something to be proud of sometimes.


This is kind of a touchy comment, I’m sorry if it offends anyone. I couldn’t think of better way to word it.

As a Christian, you believe that Muslims believe lies. The modern Muslim will die to defend his lies.



You just disproved your comment on faith.



The divine being aspect comes mostly from people’s interaction with divine powers. I know I’ve had my religious experiences and I don’t know how to explain them other than interference by a divine being. You might enjoy a book called “A History f God” by Karen Armstrong. It covers the three main Monotheistic faiths, some creation stories and the philosophies that come from them. As far religious experiences go, check out “Anne” The Lay Apostle.



The main Pre-Judaic faith was called (I’m gonna butcher the spelling) Zeostorianism. The battle between the survival of Zeostorianism and what became known as Judaism happened on a mountain between a worshiper of El (translates best as God, also known as El Shaddah and El Oheim (sorry about the spelling again)) and the followers of Bhall (Bael, Bahl) for sake of brevity, we’ll call them cultists. The cultists persecuted the follower of El because he said the El was the only God and all of the other Gods were simply aspects and extensions of El. The cultists challenged the follower to a God off and went to the top of the Mountain and set up two large sacrificial bowls where the follower allowed the cultists to go first. The object was to see who’s God would set a fire in the bowl. The cultists did everything they could from anywhere from three to seven days, depending on which version of this story you read, with no fire. The follower kneeled down and said, “God, please light this bowl.” And there was a God-er fight! God lit the bowl and the some cultists threw themselves off of the Mountain while others joined the follower of El. Thus, Judaism potentially began.



Every single Christian holiday is an offshoot of an old pagan religion. Not to mention there are still several pagan faiths that exist within our modern societies.



No, they’re saying you can believe in whatever you want to believe in and I’ll believe in whatever I want to believe in and we’ll both accept our own ignorance and be happy with each other because hey, you seem like a pretty neat fellow even if you don’t believe in what I believe in.



YAY! Every faith that I’ve studied preaches that exact thing.



It didn’t become a big deal till the Romans made it their official religion because of the sheer amount of prophets at the time. No one had any reason to try to debunk Christianity because it was non-effectual until it became a major religion and governments started using that to oppress the proletariat rather than using the old ones. It was a much more peaceful form of oppression at the time.



No it can’t. You would have to first prove that everything in the Bible, every version of the Bible, is completely wrong, non-factual and blasphemous. You can’t do that without a time machine. You also can neither prove nor disprove the existence of any God.



I’m sure you’ve read The Chronicles of Narnia. Alzan spread his love to creatures that fought against him because they were doing what they believed in how they believed in it. No Christian should ever tell another person that they are going to Hell for anything. That judgment is left for God and God alone. That is big part of the New Testament. They should pity and try to calmly and lovingly “save” you without using the fear factor. My mother does that to me everyday. Everyday she prays that I’ll become a Christian again and always invites me to go to Mass with her.



The facts you’ve been talking about are still theory. There is no difference from believing in scientific explanation than believing in a religion. They are both theory with some historical background.



Amen. Just challenge your beliefs at every chance. Otherwise you’ll never grow and your faith, whatever it’s in, will never grow.


=====================================================
Grillranger already discussed what I was going to hit on CRXForum’s post
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Actually, faith is very much in the question, “does a God exist?” One cannot prove or disprove the existence or non existence of God so that is very much faith based.

Einstein is what’s known as a Deist. Most of our Founding Fathers were Deists as well.



There is no known way to find out. Maybe God built a super collider under Europe and made a black hole which spawned life in a universe smaller than his own and he was created in a super collider which made a black hole etc. Again, this is a faith question. you either have faith that God created it/us/everything and nothing, or you have faith in something else happening. Best to get a degree in whatever field that falls under, get some grants and start making black holes. Just don’t make one that will either swallow everything or open an interdemensional rift that goes to Hell and allow demons easy access to our pretty ladies.



The double helix wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for a trip on LSD. As far as how they developed, I personally believe in micro evolution with a touch of divine intervention, which is why I’m a monotheist and not a deist. Basically God slowly formed everything like a kid with an infinite supply of clay.



Every major faith carries the basic ideas of Love everybody and don’t judge someone for what they believe in. These ideas were obviously around before L. Ron Hubbard made his bet.



The idea of intelligent design is that and intelligent supernatural being intelligently molded everything and everyone. What are the odds of any video game world looking the way it does? It was created by someone’s imagination. Likelihood and calculations cannot really be used as arguments against Intelligent Design simply for pure fact that Intelligent Design includes the Intelligent Designer who is a supernatural phenomena which cannot be explained by likelihoods and calculations.

Nice sig.

The next three quotes all have the same response from me.






I want you to open Google Earth and find your home. Zoom in as far as you can. Are you zoomed in? Good. Your home represents everything that you can know. Now zoom out. Keep zooming. Keep zooming. Zoom out until you can see both poles, if possible. In fact, zoom out until the earth is about the size of a silver dollar. Your house still represents all of the knowledge you can ever know. The rest of your screen represents everything there is to know. As the last quote, Plato, Aristotle and many others have said, “True knowledge is knowing that you know nothing.”



It is and we are in the end times according to all major faiths. So world peace should come soon.



Amen. At the current state of the World, I don’t believe that world peace is achievable unless under some sort of global suppression of all peoples.



To know that you know nothing is not a defeatist perspective. It is, in fact, a very optimistic perspective. I know that I know nothing, but look at everything there is to know. I wonder knowledge I can create?



Some the most intelligent people in the world were also deeply religious and some of the most intelligent people in the world were also deeply spiritual and some of the most intelligent people in the world were also deists, theists and agnostics.



Proving that Einstein was a Deist and not Christian.



The story of the Tower of Babel was not a story of human unity but a story of humans trying to become Gods. That is not a good thing to try and do.


Wars will always be around. Otherwise there will be too many people. Same with disease and hunger.


The next three go together.






The garden of eden story is that really has nothing to do with actual sins of human kind. It’s a coming of age story and story of disobeying your father. God told them not to eat from the tree. They ate from the tree. God punished them but still stayed with them and showed them his love. It can also be a good foundation for the two God theory. (I’ll start another thread for that one. I’ve already taken up too much space on your screen.)



You might like Deism.




Literature is all about perspective. To the writers of those stories Sumer, the area which the great flood happened, was the entire world to them. There is evidence of the entire world being covered in water, just not at the time period of the great flood. In fact the evidence is trillions of moons prior to life.


Well, that's about all folks. again, I'm sorry if I offended anyone. Please comment back. I need a good glass of Scotch.

^^^^

Do you expect people to read that?

Not really.

OldManSinclair, you ever read any Michener? Specifically The Source? It's a pretty good read (although slow and sometimes heavy handed), but I think you'd like it.

I'll check it out.

Here's my view on it.

Space is infinite, right? (At least very close to it) There are millions of galaxies, billions of solar systems and an almost infinite number of planets in the universe. So... If we say that the chances that the conditions are right to spark life are a 1:10 to the power of a million billion millions, well, there are almost an infinite number of planets so it was bound to happen somewhere. Why not here?

The chances of a single sperm cell fertilizing an egg cell are insane. (I can't remember it, but the odds are against the sperm cell) But the fact that there are so many sperm cells leads to all of us being here.

Space is infinite, the universe is finite, the bounds of all matter and energy propelled by the big bang. It's called metric expansion, and what you’re talking about is the principal of mediocrity, or the Copernican principle. We are not special.

This debate is ridiculous for one reason. One side is based entirely on empirical evidence, observational experiments, mathematical models, rationalization, logic. The other is based on folk lore from centuries ago. No side can win, because both are arrogant, and one is completely unreasonable.

Hey, I'm a philosopher not an astrophysicist!

I used to be of the persuasion that we were most certainly created by a higher being. I held on to this belief, as if in fear of dropping into the dark abyss most people misunderstand as Atheism, or even Agnosticism. However, after weighing both sides over a period of years, I am inclined to believe more that the universe just happened. It makes sense to us, as sentient beings, that everything HAD to be created and everything has purpose. It's scary to think otherwise, because if the Universe truly is a product of chance, what's protecting us from getting hit with asteroids the size of Texas (who's protecting us besides Bruce Willis that is)? The idea that we're all subject to the whims of chance is nothing new, and if one takes an objective look at life, one would see that this is most likely the case. Otherwise, how else could one explain the senseless deaths that occur every day? How else could one explain "miraculous" recovery from terminal illness, yet no one in recorded history has ever "miraculously" regrown a limb (which one can assume wouldn't be beyond an omnipotent being's ability - this is, after all, a being capable of feats like creating the universe and healing cancer). I don't want to get bogged down in a discussion over God's existence though - there's another thread for that I'm sure.

My point is simply this: if there is a creator, great! However, I believe, logically, we could never be any more aware of this creator than video game avatars are aware of the players and programmers that director their "lives". Any being capable of creating such an infinitely complex mechanism such as universe, and life itself, is a being we will never understand. In all likelihood this being probably doesn't even take any more notice of us than we take notice of ants. Maybe there is a purpose to this universe, to the very existence of life itself - a pattern, a code, something we're not addressing in science or religion. Personally, I think the key to the secret of life lies in the fact that, to live, everything on this Earth must consume another living being to survive, in essence making it a part of themselves. Think about it: the theory of evolution is all about which species has enough advantages to be able to make it to the top of the food chain; what being is able to consume anything and everything with impunity. I think there's something to how the nature of life involves this constant consumption - that maybe that is how all life is connected. Ha, but I'm going into a philosophical tangent.

The idea of a "pointless existence" used to unnerve me, until I realized that such an existence isn't so bad. If we are products of total chance, than how fucking lucky we are to be around to even consider it! Think about it - the odds against your existence are so high, and yet here you are, reading this forum post. I don't know about you, but that gives me a very positive feeling, and I don't need to believe in a God or a sense of "order" to the universe to justify this feeling. I just need to believe in my own existence and how goddamn fortunate I am to just BE.

And that's my rant on this subject.