What is the evidence for creationism?
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My point is that no matter how much you look, you're not going to find evidence of creation, since the creation and the act occurred at the same time.
What would be the 'smoking gun'?
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Tenka, what would be the 'smoking gun'?
Even Adam himself would not be able to find evidence of creation.
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kaotic
Learn physics
This is not evidence that can be studied as a theory in science. This is from a book. There is no way that someone could put this in lab, and try to prove or disprove this. I can't understand for the life one me why people can't understand that you can't use something that involes god or any other form of supernatural deity as scientific evidence.
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kaotic
Learn physics
John, you can't call something science unless it can be studied in a lab, and be falsified. The reason the ToE is being "developed" by so many people is that there's so much evidence supporting the theory. If you want "Christian Science"to be developed you need to remove the word science, and replace it with Christian studies.
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Nathan Poe
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Which would mean that if God did do it, He tricked us all too well.
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Oncedeceived
Senior Veteran
No. I can't speak for other Christians of course but for myself it is not an assumption. I have enough personal evidence for God to know that God exists. It is the same as knowing that I exist, that people I can see and feel exist. I don't assume I exist, nor do I assume that my family exists...I know they exist.
Creationists are not the ones that need to prove anything. In the Christian worldview, evidence is provided by the intelligibility of the universe and our ability to understand that in the first place.
The Creationist is working in their worldview and you as an unbeliever are working in yours. Your worldview holds that there is no Creator. No evidence I can give nor any other Creationist can give would change that worldview due to your presuppositional view that there is no Creator.
The entire argument hinges upon assumption on the part of the unbeliever that there is no Creator.
The Christian worldview hinges upon the knowledge of God, which can not be an assumption if they know. Now if there is a Christian that believes rather than knows of God it could be an assumption based on a belief but that again comes down to the persons worldview.
As far as the Creationists worldveiw, it is not resting on an unproven premise. The uniformity and knowability of the world is what it rests upon. Creation is not self-refuting in any way. How do you assume it is?
Argumentum ad logicam
It is not anymore contradictive to come to the conclusion that God was uncreated than to come to the conclusion that life comes from non-living matter. It is clear that everything became in the first place so it holds that is not a stretch to believe it was created. There was a time when even time did not exist. So the created came from the uncreated in your worldview. That defies logic.
Simply saying that the world "came about" is circumventing the argument; it is in evidence that the world as it exists has not always existed. So logically, it was created or to be put another way, came into being.
- To cause to exist; bring into being. See Synonyms at found[SIZE=-1]1[/SIZE].
- To give rise to; produce: That remark created a stir.
- To invest with an office or title; appoint.
- To produce through artistic or imaginative effort: create a poem; create a role.
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Beastt
Legend
If nothing matters, then why believe and why care what others believe?
I never said nothing matters. I simply pointed out that it doesn't matter whether or not the false claims in the Bible originated in the Bible or not. If the book is suggested to be the word of God, then it should not contain falsehoods spawned by men prior to assembly of the texts which were became the Bible. By finding these numerous falsehoods in the Bible, it provides us with some insight as to the actual origin of the Bible -- not of God, but of man.
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Oncedeceived
Senior Veteran
Really? The evidence says that there was a time when the world did not exist as we see it. The evidence says that there was a time even before time existed. If the world did not exist, it had to come into existence did it not? It had to be created from something, correct?
The Creator in the Christian worldview does leave evidence. The evidence is in the uniformity and knowability of the creation. Without the Christian worldview, there is no reason to reason. We can not know the universe at all. How can we be assured without the Christian worldview that the universe is always as it is? There is no reason to believe that reason itself is true without it.
We assume this on our worldview. You on the fact that nature is uniform due to natural occurance and me on the worldview that God made it that way. In my worldview you can't rely on natural occurance without my worldview.
But logically, if God created the world as we see it there is no need for a visible break in the natural laws due to His creating them in the first place.
The conclusion is not based on the facts. The conclusion is based on your worldview. Science doesn't change one way or the other. In the Christian worldview, Science is the expression of understanding of an understandable and knowable world. So in the Christian worldview it is obvious there is a Creator, due to the knowability of the universe at all.
True. Science is not at odds with the Christian worldview other than the base or foundation of those who use it to support their worldviews.
Your assumption is that I don't understand and I do. So your assertion is incorrect.
Did it ever occur to you that your interpretation of a young earth/universe was the problem rather than it being in the Creator?
In the Christian worldview is was painful because you knew you were turning away from the wisdom of God for the wisdom of man. You would rather turn away than to reconcile yourself to God.
There is a time I think for every believer that is rather a cross roads of such, it came for me as well. I chose the wisdom of God and He has shown me that I was correct in that choice. It was not painful at all. The pain only was there when I was going to turn away. Now, God has given me more understanding and the evidence that was so prominent in my doubts has been cleared up with much more given in response.
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Chalnoth
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True, but there are very simple physical explanations for how these things came into being. Just because something came into existence doesn't mean that it was caused to exist by some intelligence.
For example, take a snowflake: do you think that God fashions each and every snowflake individually? Because we can understand the structure and makeup of snowflakes from simple physics. The snowflake, just like the Earth, was caused to come into existence by a series of natural events.
That's not evidence for a god. That is evidence against one. The Christian God is a being that does not conform to physical laws. In the Bible, this god causes a bush to be on fire without burning the bush, causes cities to be destroyed, causes people to turn into pillars of salt, causes manna to fall from heaven, causes people to rise from the dead, causes water to be turned into wine, causes bread and fish to be created out of nothing, and many other things.
Without any being that can act outside physical laws, the only conclusion one can make is that if any physical laws exist at all, then there must be a set of physical laws that are independent of space and time, and no violation of those fundamental physical laws will ever be possible.
Thus the signature of a god would be an event that cannot conform to any reasonable physical laws. The existence of unbroken physical laws is evidence against a god.
No. In science, we assume uniformitarianism not for any reason other than it is a necessary assumption to make forward progress. And we trust that if the universe is not as we assume, then our experiments will come out in some way that we do not expect. The next step is to discover which of our assumptions happened to be wrong, and it is very interesting that uniformitarianism has never steered us wrong.
Obviously that was my first idea. But having one belief proved wrong, I was able to open my eyes and consider my other beliefs to have the possibility of being wrong. Eventually I arrived at the obvious conclusion based upon current evidence: there is no god.
What? No. It was painful because I was questioning beliefs that I fervently held for many years. And this separation between the wisdom of God and the wisdom of man is false: God doesn't speak to us. Any of us. All that we have as evidence of God is an ancient book, the interpretation of which is very much up in the air. Even if one accepts the assertion that it was God's wisdom implanted into the Bible, it is man's flawed wisdom that interprets the Bible. Strange that such a wise being would leave a holy book that was so open to interpretation as the only evidence of his existence.
I don't expect there was pain. It is always much more painful to accept that you have been wrong for many years than to blindly follow like sheep.
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TeddyKGB
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Within an evolutionary model, it is an obvious truism that an organism capable of reasoning about its surroundings will not be terribly successful by chronically reasoning incorrectly.
Thus, from such a perspective, the world can be as mundane or as volatile as one can imagine, and successful reasoning beings must necessarily deal with the world as it is.
Indeed, I find your suggestion that beings capable of successful reasoning about a particular world just happened, according to a nontheistic worldview, to be placed into just such a world entirely backwards.
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Beastt
Legend
Personal evidence is the cry of every believer in every god and every religion. As such, it seems as unreliable as the evidence shows it to be. Personal evidence was the plea of those who wrote the Bible as it was with the author of Oahspe, the Book of Mormon and the Qur'an. But we need not look simply to cries of spirituality to try to assess the validity of such personal experiences because personal experiences apply to more than just religious beliefs.
So let us look to some examples of personal experience which were subject to specific analysis.
Members of the University of Wisconsin La Crosse team were recently subjects of a study to determine the validity of their personal experiences. They were first shown a video touting the performance benefits to be gained by utilizing superoxygenated water. They were then divided into two groups. Group A received superoxygenated water while Group B received only standard bottled water. Then both groups ran a 5K. Then the water provided was switched so that Group B received the superoxygenated water and Group A drank only standard bottled water. Overall, the subjects drinking the superoxygenated water shaved an average of 83 to 142 seconds off their time as compared to when they drank bottled water. The telling factor here is that while convincing, the video the subjects watched was a phony and the "superoxygenated" water they drank was simply tap water with no performance enhancing ability. Their "personal experiences" told them that they could run faster if they drank superoxygenated water and because they believed this, their performance increased, even though they were drinking only normal water.
Several decades ago the medical industry was being pressed to develop a surgery to reduce the suffering of angina pectoris, (pain in the chest due to insufficient circulation to the heart muscle). A procedure was developed wherein the mammary artery was tied off. It was hoped that this would increase blood pressure to the coronary arteries and initial patients reported substantial pain relief after receiving the surgery. Then a double-blind study was performed. Half of the patients scheduled for surgery received the full procedure. The other half received only an incision to give the appearance of surgery. It was found that all of the subjects reported the same degree of relief from pain, even though half had not received any medical procedure which could account for a reduction in pain. Their subjective experience told them that the procedure worked, even though half of them only believed they had received the surgery while indeed, they had not.
So a new procedure was developed. In the new procedure the mammary artery was severed and the end sewn into a depression cut into the heart muscle. It was hoped that the artery would grow and branch into the surrounding myocardium, thereby providing additional circulation to the muscle. Patients provided feedback indicating marvelous success. But years later when some of the patients receiving this procedure died, the autopsies revealed that the artery did not grow, did not branch, and therefore, did not provide the increased circulation hoped for. The indications of success were based on the personal experiences of the patients and those experiences turned out to be wrong.
Another recent study invoved 266 sufferers of chronic arm pain. They were divided into two groups. The first group was to receive a new acupuncture technique while the second group would be provided with a new drug therapy. Prior to the test, each subject was asked to rate their pain on a scale of 1 to 10. Then they were advised of potential side-effects from the treatments they would be receiving. After the treatments started 25% of the acupuncture group reported experiencing the pain, swelling and redness they had been advised might be a side effect of the acupuncture. Thirty-one percent of the group receiving drug therapy reported suffering the side-effects they had been warned of and three of those suffered so acutely that when a reduced dosage failed to relieve the side-effects, they withdrew from the study. At the conclusion of the 8-week study all of the remaining test subjects were again asked to rate their pain on a scale from 1 to 10. Overall, those receiving acupuncture reported a reduction of 2.64 while those receiving medication reported a reduction of 1.5.
Of course the interesting part of the study is that it wasn't a study of pain relieving procedures. It was actually a study of placebo effect -- personal experience, following suggestion. The acupuncture needles were special retracting needles. While it looked like they penetrated the skin, the skin was never punctured. The drug therapy consisted of small blue pills which looked similar to amitriptyline, but containing nothing but colored corn starch.
These are but a few of the experiments which outline the reliability of personal experiences.
Which again is subjective and therefore, not subject to demonstration to those outside of the Christian world view. What's more, many within the Christian world view do not subscribe to the same events of creation. As such, it is nothing more than a belief and one for which the evidence speaks clearly to the contrary.
The world view of the Creationist isn't supported by any matter of credible evidence. That of the non-believer is soundly backed by testable, repeatable and demonstrable evidence. It doesn't rely upon personal subjective opinion and proclamations of "personal experiences".
This is not simple assumption. It is what the evidence suggests. And while you may not subscribe to evidence; evidence is still the fundamental element without which science finds no suggestion of anything. Take away the evidence of unicorns and we find no reason to believe that unicorns exist. Take away the evidence of gremlins, and despite what pilots sometimes presented as their "personal experiences", we find no reason to believe that gremlins exist. But the story for creationists is substantially worse than for believers in unicorns and gremlins. Not only do they have to contend with a complete lack of credible evidence for their beliefs, but there is also a growing mountain of evidence showing mechanisms which eliminate the supposed need for a creator. So the evidence is not only non-existent in support of their beliefs, but evidence also exists to demonstrate those beliefs to be wrong. So the claim that it is only an assumption that there is no creator is simply a misapplied assertion.
As long as believers continue to utilize the word "know" or derivatives of the word, we can be assured that their argument is lacking. One's personal subjective experiences can never properly be referred to as "knowledge", no matter how strongly the individual believes in them. Were anyone to suggest that knowledge can be attained through personal subjective opinion in the absence of corroborating evidence, we would be forced to admit that the believers of each and every god and each and every religion are correct, despite the fact that many of these beliefs contradict one another. The fact is, these are no examples of "knowledge", concerning creationism, but only of belief. Using the word "knowledge" is an attempt to strengthen an argument which is otherwise devoid of strength.
It is most certainly resting, not only on an unproven premise, but an unprovable one. And again we see a claim of "knowledge" where nothing but "belief" can be properly applied. If we are to accept the Creationists claims of knowledge then we must also accept the same claims from Muslims, Buddhists and even those such as David Koresh who presented personal experience as their proof of the "knowledge" they proclaimed to hold.
This was explained and sits perfectly within the logic provided. Creationists claim that existence of the universe is evidence of creation. It is their claim that without a creator, the products of creation cannot exist. Thusly, anything which exists is evidence of a creator. But this creates a contradiction for them because they then insist that the creator himself, was not created and has no need for a creator. The argument becomes; "All things must be created and are therefore, evidence of a creator... except the creator." Making an arbitrary exception for the creator is known as "special pleading". And special pleading is a logical fallacy. It demonstrates the lack of validity to the whole assertion.
If everything requires a creator then that assertion also applies to the creator. If the creator does not himself require a creator, then the supposed objects of his creation do not require a creator. In short, if a creator can exist without a creator, then so can the universe itself.
This is incorrect because we can peer into the components of living matter and we find that it is composed, at its base level, of the same elements as are contained in non-living matter. What's more, we can watch as elements of non-living matter are converted into components of living matter. Research has succeeded in assembling a number of non-living, (non-biological), components, and facilitating the spontaneous assembly into cell-like structures which can replicate utilizing outside forces and which engage in Darwinian competition for resources.
This is not clear. To assume that everything became, is to assume a period of nothingness, (aside from the Creationists special exception for their supposed creator). Yet nothingness has never been witnessed and, of course, cannot be witnessed. The mere existence of a witness defeats the concept of nothingness. But to perceive that there must have been a period of nothingness suggests that somehow, nothingness results in a lack of nothingness, and as the mechanism for this, creationists insert a creator. But it is far more logical to note that there is no reason that nothingness is a more likely default state than somethingness. We never see anything created, we only see transformations. And we know the universe is undergoing constant transformation and have evidence of a substantial transformation known as the Big Bang. That doesn't mean the universe didn't exist before that transformation, it simply means it existed in a different form. And while we have substantial evidence to conclude that the universe has always existed in one form or another, we have absolutely no evidence to suggest that there was ever a period or "time", if you will, when it did not exist. And if the universe has always existed, then it requires no creator.
Your first failed assumption is that there was a period when the universe did not exist. You can't demonstrate any truth to this or any evidence which suggests this to be true. "Time" is a component of the universe in its current configuration so utilizing the word "time" becomes confusing. You suggest a creator which was not created, then insist that the universe must have had a creator. If your creator does not require a creator, then neither does the universe. Your special pleading exposes the fallacy of your assertions.
The key here is the phrase, "as it exists". Certainly the Earth has not always existed as we know it today. But there is zero evidence that the components from which the Earth is formed have not always existed. So logically, what you are referring to as "creation" is in fact, only transformation. And gravity accounts for the mechanism of that transformation which means there is no need for any unseen, outside force, such as the creator you're attempting to invent.
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Oncedeceived
Senior Veteran
It is not contridictory in the Christian worldview to understand that God being the Creator has the power to transend the laws and processes that He created.
How do unbelievers recognize them to always be true? If the natural worldview is true what would the reason be for the world to be uniform and comprehensible?
How did the universe come into being? The evidence shows that the universe as we know it was not in existence at one point. So without being created how does it exist today?
In the CWV (Christian Worldview) God was ever-existing. It was not that long ago that Scientists thought the universe was ever-existing and I am sure that you would not have felt that illogical...correct? That is due to your presuppositional worldview, not due to any logic; as shown by the presumption that the universe always existed.
Is not a painting created?
Are you saying that the universe was transformed?
In the CWV we understand that God brought into existence the complete universe. Einstein's theory of relativity claims that the universe's cause is outside of matter, energy and the space-time dimensions. It is not a stretch of logic to see God as that cause.
All the universe is the evidence of Creation.
As I have said, the universe being uniform and knowable is the evidence that it is Created in the CWV.
It matters not how many come before or after as to the truth of the CWV. Just because some other world view is shown as false does not make another false.
Reality is the existence of everything. Everyone has a reality. A reality may be shared or totally subjective; but reality is a common factor in all observers.
Really? So there is no evidence for the pictures in our minds, does that mean they are not real?
The two most common forms of the argument from ignorance, both fallacious, can be reduced to the following form:
- Something is currently unexplained or insufficiently explained, so it was not (or could not be) true.
- Because there appears to be a lack of evidence for one hypothesis, another chosen hypothesis is therefore considered proven.
So as you see your argument fits very well with this fallacy.
I agree but there is nothing in the naturalistic worldview that constitutes a reason for this uniformity/cohesiveness existing. We could live in a world that was always changing, one that would not be knowable due to its changing properties. So it is logical in the CWV that God is that source of uniformity/cohesiveness.
SO?
Again, so?
I have presented a logical view of Creation with a scienific rationale.
In the Christian Worldview, the image of God in us is the capability of wisdom/knowlege/intelligence.
I gave an article to support my hypothesis on plants without the sun.
False. I gave an example which was scientifically verified.
Not always.
This is solely your opinion. There is no blind belief in the CWV. IN the CWV it is not surprising to find other ancient books with traditions and traditional beliefs.
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Oncedeceived
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What simple explanation is there for the beginning of our universe?
What natural events?
How could it be evidence against one? That doesn't make any sense. It is perfectly logical for a Being who is capable of creating physical laws to be capable to control or conform them to His wishes.
But we see in new Scienfic findings that there are properties that defy fundamental physical laws.
That is a false assumption. We know of events that do not adhere to physical laws in nature does that give evidence that nature does not exist? That is illogical.
LOL Really. My point exactly.
There is absolutely no evidence that there is no God.
This is impossible for you to say. All you can assume to be true is that you have never heard God; to say that other haven't when they have is false.
All that we have as evidence of God is an ancient book, the interpretation of which is very much up in the air.
This in itself is flawed wisdom. If the CWV is correct which I claim; it is perfectly plausible. The Holy Spirit is the guiding force for our interpretations.
Again you make false assumptions and consider them correct. Blindly following like sheep is not correct in the way you are using it.
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Oncedeceived
Senior Veteran
This is true, but it is also true that very simple organisms may use only very simple actions without reasoning and remain successful.
That would be true in either worldview.
If intelligence was as important in ToE it would seem to indicate that the less intelligent life forms would be so unsuccessful as to be rare in the world which is relatively untrue.
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