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The good guys lost
- Dec 19, 2016
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But President Trump can! Perhaps he's supernaturalso it is impossible to form a belief without evidence.
But President Trump can! Perhaps he's supernatural
There is no evidence of the laws of thermodynamics being violated that I am aware of. The shorthand "order from disorder" is just that, a shorthand.
The only outstanding question I am aware of regards the state of the universe prior to the big bang. And, quite simply, we don't know.
That is why entropy has never been a convincing argument for me
I'm an ex-Christian, now an atheist. To find the truth, I often revisit beliefs I have. Right now I am revisiting theism.
I'd love to hear the best evidence you have for God. How would I find out if he's real?
I'm really looking to listen, not argue. So while I may respond to tell you why the argument doesn't convince me (if it doesn't), please understand I'm just helping you understand my position so you can counter me.
I appreciate anything you have to offer.
I'm an ex-Christian, now an atheist. To find the truth, I often revisit beliefs I have. Right now I am revisiting theism.
I'd love to hear the best evidence you have for God. How would I find out if he's real?
I'm really looking to listen, not argue. So while I may respond to tell you why the argument doesn't convince me (if it doesn't), please understand I'm just helping you understand my position so you can counter me.
I appreciate anything you have to offer.
The way I look at it is that entropy is irrelevant before the big bang because time begins at the big bang. Entropy is all about a thermodynamic system moving from one state to another. Changing states requires spacetime to occur within.There is no evidence of the laws of thermodynamics being violated that I am aware of. The shorthand "order from disorder" is just that, a shorthand.
The only outstanding question I am aware of regards the state of the universe prior to the big bang. And, quite simply, we don't know.
That is why entropy has never been a convincing argument for me
I'm an ex-Christian, now an atheist. To find the truth, I often revisit beliefs I have. Right now I am revisiting theism.
I'd love to hear the best evidence you have for God. How would I find out if he's real?
I'm really looking to listen, not argue. So while I may respond to tell you why the argument doesn't convince me (if it doesn't), please understand I'm just helping you understand my position so you can counter me.
I appreciate anything you have to offer.
Hi, good thread!So long as the religion interacts with the natural world, I think methodological naturalism can provide us evidence. The supernatural forces can never directly be tested, but they can be indirectly tested.
Doesn't methodological naturalism exclude the supernatural by its own definition? I'm thinking in the sense of methodological naturalism only being able to tell us either "we don't know the cause" our "there is a naturalistic cause". It's our discomfort with too many unknowns that lead us to supernatural explanations rather than naturalism itself.Of course with methodological naturalism, there will always be the response "we don't know the cause". But given a sufficient evidence, I would personally accept theism as a more likely explanation.
How would we test this by the scientific method though. Miracles are inconsistent one-offs (if one even believes in them). We would have to set up some kind of conditions where we could repeat miracles on demand, while controlling variables, to be able to say anything about their causes. And even then science could not lead us to a supernatural conclusion because it would be next to impossible to be sure that we have ruled out every possible natural explanation. So I'm afraid when it comes to the supernatural it seems unlikely that we are going to have any so called 'gold standard' evidence.For example, it would be very convincing if prayer had a non-zero chance of healing an amputee because we have a good understanding of human regeneration, and regrowing limbs is well outside of our ability
I agree that fine tuning is a poor argument. It starts with a huge assumption that the constants were set randomly with a roll of the cosmic dice. We just have no idea if that is the case. Maybe they couldn't be anything other than what they are or there could be some relationship between them all.But the fine tuning argument for the universe isn't convincing because we have no clue as to the cause of the constants or to what degree they are constant. We only have our observation of the values
Snowflake forming from a cloud.I never said anything about laws or such.
I said "things always tend toward disorder".
I can cite 1 milllion examples to support the case.
I can't think of one that denies the case.
Big bang is the lowest entropy state of the universe and heat death is the highest.I don't know anything about any "Bang"
except all bangs I know of are chaotic in
nature and don't create order.
Science is based on what one can reproduce.
What we can see leads towards less usable energy.
See: Heat death of the universe - Wikipedia
Trusting things we can't see is faith and religion.
So far I have only been in discussion with Christians, largely because of my personal background. I have investigated other faiths when I was de-converting and didn't find any evidence that made them more convincing that Christianity.
What are you saying, Jesus is separate from God, because that's what it sounds like. That would be pluralism. If someone believes in one God....Jesus would be included automatically.
So glad to see Ravi Zacharias mentioned here. His apologetics are great and he speaks specifically to people who claim to be atheists.Hi,
Are you just revisting theisic forms, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam. Judiasm, or are you expressly revisiting Christianity?
It will make a difference in how one responds. One response might be covering general evidence for God (Theism) or specifics evidences of the prophesied promised Messiah who was pre-existent with the Father, born of a virgin, lived out a sinless life of love and mercy, performed many miracles, suffered and died for our sins, rose from the dead, ascended into heaven where He sits at the right hand of power, and has promised that when the Gospel is successfully preached to all nations that He will return in glory to fulfill the establishment of a new man, not made after the image of fallen Adam but made after the image of Christ Himself. I do not know how deep into Christianity you went or why you rejected both the Christian worldview as well as theism. That would be an important consideration. It's better to have specific targets on which to base a discussion upon.
Before we get too immersed on what empirical points and logic you want to cover it might be better to get a better understanding of your personal background with respect to Christianity and Theism.
One suggestion in order to establish a baseline by which we might better engage in dialog might be to critique the talk and Q&A below.
Another suggestion might be to provide some background on what you generally found problematic in Christianity or more generally Theism.
After this we should be able to cut to the chase.
Sincerely, Pat
I only have subjective evidence for you. That evidence is my changed life. I was an atheist turned Christian (about 4 years ago). For three years prior to my conversion, I was living as a transgender (female to male), injecting male hormones under the supervision of a physician. When God converted me, he mercifully took that delusion away from me and gave me contentment with the gender he created me as.
That was about the most immediate, significant change, but there were others. Formerly an avid curser who delighted in the creative use of profanity, I now really dislike hearing vulgar language, especially the use of the Lord's name in vain (when before one of my favourite curses was J-- F--in C---). I had also enjoyed such profane things as pornography as well as taboo subjects like incest as well as much worse things than that; my mind was rather twisted.
Then there was the process of sanctification which is more slow than not and also as much as you seem to move forward you realize you take several steps back as well. Yet someone revealed something quite profound to me today while at work: Prior to my conversion and even in the beginning years as a Christian, I was a very negative person, especially so at work. Today at work, one of my coworkers, just out of the blue was like, "You're a very positive person, Mrs. Dark Lord." Imagine my shock at hearing that! Three years ago, that would have been said as a sarcastic joke!!
I'm an ex-Christian, now an atheist. To find the truth, I often revisit beliefs I have. Right now I am revisiting theism.
I'd love to hear the best evidence you have for God. How would I find out if he's real?
I'm really looking to listen, not argue. So while I may respond to tell you why the argument doesn't convince me (if it doesn't), please understand I'm just helping you understand my position so you can counter me.
I appreciate anything you have to offer.
Yes, I agree with you about Ravi. He is naturally gifted by God to address the doubts of skeptics. May the Lord continue to bless his ministry.So glad to see Ravi Zacharias mentioned here. His apologetics are great and he speaks specifically to people who claim to be atheists.
I think whatever it is you believe, you have to buy something that is difficult to believe. With atheism, you have the miracles of getting something from nothing, getting life from non-life, getting order from chaos, and getting the immaterial from the material. Essentially, atheists use Naturalism of the Gaps reasoning where they don't know what caused it, but know that it wasn't God. While God of the Gaps reasoning is just as problematic, there are ways of concluding that God exists that is reasoning from what we do know rather than what we don't know.
Everything that begins to exist has a cause, so if the universe began to exist, then it has a cause. The cause of the universe would have to be immaterial because the cause of matter an energy can't be composed of matter and energy. So we can use logic like this to deduce what sort of attributes that it has, and if we find that the cause of the universe must have the attributes of the God of classical theism, then it is reasonable to refer to this cause as God. As much as it is difficult to believe in the miracle of God creating the universe, it is logical, straightforward, and much easier to believe than the miracle atheism that the universe exploded from nothing uncaused, especially when "nothing" has no properties, so it has no potential for a universe to explode from it.
Likewise, there are many good reasons why Christianity should have died out after the death of its leader, like all of the other Messianic cults had. Any few of those reasons would have been sufficient to prevent it from succeeding, but all of the reasons together makes it next to impossible for Christianity to have succeeded without the resurrection of their leader, so you believe something that is extremely difficult to believe either way regardless of whether or not you believe that Jesus was resurrected. As hard as it is to believe, his resurrection is what best accounts for the facts. I recommend this article:
The Impossible Faith
I would start by seeing that the Scriptures shape our worldview instead of our worldview shaping the Scripture. What I don't mean is that you have to adopt the scientific beliefs of the Scriptural writers, they were people not divine. I am a theistic evolutionist and I believe that Scripture is correct about Jesus and God and the unseen but it's not a science or history textbook, and it shouldn't be treated as such.How would I find out if he's real?
Well i'm sorry to say that your knowledge of what atheism is, what it entails, and what science says are ignorant at best and a straw man at worst. With atheism (What is Atheism? | American Atheists), you just don't believe in a god, you could still be an atheist and believe in an after life or believe in ghosts but it does not entail the abandonment of these beliefs or any others for that matter aside from a god one.
Nothing before the big bang is more of a misconception and a big one in line with this theory. In a nut shell, the big bang describes the evolution or expansion of the universe from a point smaller than a proton but it does not describe or even mention how the universe came to be. Nor does it imply that a singularity (Infinite temperature, finite mass, zero volume, infinite density) is on par with philosophical nothing apparently or even exists in reality. The most coherent answer ever given, is i don't know. The fact that a singularity arises in the math implies that there is a problem with general relativity and we need a quantum theory of gravity to describe what is going on at a point so close to t=0. Heck, one planck second after the big bang is the closest we can get before all of known laws of physics breaks down.
So if you are going to make straw man claims about atheists claiming the universe came from nothing, first prove that there was literally nothing before the big bang. If you can spot the contradiction in the statement above then you can get a cookie. Philosophical nothing cannot be shown to exist as it is the absence of existence and is thus such a paradoxical & ill-defined concept that it has no meaning or fluidity in our known reality.
Take these four statements below for example:
1. Something always existed in some form or another.
2. Something came from a previous nothing.
3. There was something then nothing.
4. There was always nothing.
These are some of the only possibilities that could come to mind and some seem illogical while others impossible. "4" is quickly disregarded due to the large body of scientific evidence to the contrary. "2" & "3" seem to make the assumption that something can come from nothing and vice versa, which seems to be paradoxical in light of their basic definitions. Even if you say that god created the universe from nothing, god was something, and thus the universe came from him. If the universe even did come from nothing, then it could be argued that what we thought was nothing, was really something with no detectable properties to indicate otherwise. Thus the only reasonable answer to give is that there always existed something, whether that be god, allah, yahweh, the flying spaghetti monster, or some other more plausible answer. My bet is on the last of the list, but remember to not ever make a god of gaps argument because of the question mark that is t=0.
Also, please stop being scientifically ignorant and look up abiogenesis, the second law of thermodynamics, and chaos theory in classical mechanics. Really the universe started out ordered and will continue to become disordered. Also, it isn't really naturalism of the gaps, more like, I found an explanation that gives testable, falsifiable results and agrees with all other previous data thus making it the most likely explanation. God is not this, you just want to assume him into existence. Lastly, where does science get the immaterial from the material?
Lastly, lastly, here is a good refutation of the Kalam cosmological argument upon which I assume you are using.
1()
2() Here is a fallacy built off of the argument called the Kalam cosmological argument fallacy.
This is the best I could do in short time so hope you find it challenging.
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