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The burden of proof

Lukaris

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Lukaris,

For the most part of your post you just quote some scripture and christian mythology. That does not even closely qualify as an argument. It is impossible to make a rational argument based on scripture or dogmatic struggles within chiristianity. That's simply not relevant.

So please then. Define that energy in a scientific way or just admit that its only myth.
What myth? If the conservation law says it is neither created nor destroyed this is a constant. We believe God is eternal and constant what is the conflict here? It is not unscientific to believe in a creator and science. The church fathers had an understanding of energy that was Aristotelian (all they knew) now that is different. Again, the conservation law is consistent & it cannot be challenged by relativity. What was incorrect about the general understanding of the church fathers that energy is uncreated since they believe in a creator? An atheist will not accept this; such is an impasse.Again, I am not trying to prove anything since a Christian must have faith "For by grace you have been saved through faith, and not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast." (Ephesians 2:8) ^ What is all of this other clutter re prophecies, thought this was simple theist/atheist perspective on science? I guess I am just an atheist towards atheism.
 
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athorist

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What myth? If the conservation law says it is neither created nor destroyed this is a constant.
What conservation law are you using? From your previous posts I got the understanding that you are referring to energy-conservation. You maybe do not know this, but energy-conservation is not a fundamental law of nature. It mathematically follows by Noethers theorem out of certain symmetries (I can go into more detail of that, if you ask me to). This point aside, when you're invoking energy-conservation, then you are clearly talking about the concept of energy that is used in physics. In order to do so you will need to properly define that energy in a way that is meaningful to physics, which you have not done. What work can be done by that energy? Can you give the formula?


We believe God is eternal and constant what is the conflict here?
You can believe that. The conflict is that this has nothing to do with energy.

It is not unscientific to believe in a creator and science. The church fathers had an understanding of energy that was Aristotelian (all they knew) now that is different.
That definition of energy hardly has any law of energy-conservation. I'll shut up if you deduce it for ne, but since you obviously have no idea what physicists mean when talking about energy I'm not holding by breath.

Again, the conservation law is consistent & it cannot be challenged by relativity.
See above. The fallacy is that you are not talking about a concept of energy for which conservation laws hold. You are actually not talking about energy in any way that would be meaningful to physics.


What was incorrect about the general understanding of the church fathers that energy is uncreated since they believe in a creator?
Well the church fathers can say what they want. It just has nothing to do with science or physics (as in energy-conservation).

An atheist will not accept this is an impasse.Again, I am not trying to prove anything since a Christian must have faith "For by grace you have been saved through faith, and not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast." (Ephesians 2:8)

Scripture. Never an argument to anyone who is non-christian, since the bible provably contradicts itself on several instances. (I'll point you to the respective passages if you insist, but I find it rather boring to debunk claims that the bible is consistent - it's been done over and over again)
 
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Jon0388g

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Ezekiel 29:1-20


PS: This pretty airtight rebuttal of biblical prophecies is written by a friend of mine and not by me. But I'll happily run with it and will happily defend it.


I see you have 'seen' the prophecy argument.


It is a typical tactic used by any critic of any kind. Copy and paste without any honest research of your own, "how very scientific of you":D


I literally laughed out loud at the 'rebuttal' of Isaiah's prophecy. Instead of showing us the Bible's error, you expose your sore lack of understanding/insight/knowledge/anything. From your method of rebuttal I'm afraid it would be fruitless in even attempting to explain the prophecies to you, so, I'll leave it here.



And there was me thinking I'd have an honest, objective contender to discuss with.




Jon
 
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athorist

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I see you have 'seen' the prophecy argument.


It is a typical tactic used by any critic of any kind. Copy and paste without any honest research of your own, "how very scientific of you":D


I literally laughed out loud at the 'rebuttal' of Isaiah's prophecy. Instead of showing us the Bible's error, you expose your sore lack of understanding/insight/knowledge/anything. From your method of rebuttal I'm afraid it would be fruitless in even attempting to explain the prophecies to you, so, I'll leave it here.



And there was me thinking I'd have an honest, objective contender to discuss with.




Jon
Well sad to hear that you don't want to discuss with me anymore. Just because I've been honest enough to tell that it was copied? I stopped counting the various proponents of ID that come to our forums and just quote-mine stuff, posting it, and claim it is theirs. Somehow none of them had the decency to just tell us it's copied. And does the fact that it is copied in any way change it's content? Do you think I just pasted it without reading it or knowing it? My feelings are hurt...

I said, I'll be happy to defend it, so if you have any issue with it why not just point to it? Maybe it has flaws? But obviously you just seem to have found an excuse for chickening out...

EDIT: typos
 
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salida

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1) You claiming god raped people and caused genocide? No, actually the people did this. Show me where god did this in the bible?

2) Bible evidence of prophesies and other sources:

Life of Christ
The Tribe of Judah, Gen. 49:10, Luke 3:23-28
(Genesis was written 4004 BC to 1689 BC)
(Luke’s time period is 60-70 AD)
This is a detailed prophesy

Royal Line of David, Jer 23:5, Matt 1:1
(Jeremiah 760 to 698 BC)/(Matthew 60-70 AD)
This is a detailed prophesy

Born of a Virgin, Isaiah 7:14/Matt 1:18-23
(Isaiah 760 to 698 BC)/(60-70 AD)
This is a detailed prophesy

Lets discuss the city of Tyre which is mentioned in Ezekiel 26 (592-570 B.C.). You will find 7 prophesies that were fulfilled. 1) Nebuchadzessar will destroy the mainland of Tyre (26:8) ,
2) She will be made a bare rock, flat like the top of a rock (26:4), 3) Fisherman will spread nets over the site (26:5), 4) Fisherman will spread nets over the site (26:5), 5) The debris will be thrown into the water (26:12), 6) She will never be rebuilt (26:14), 7) She will never be found again (26:21)

Some references for above: I'm not going to list all seven because I don't have hours to type this. For 1: Nebuchadnezzar laid siege to mainland Tyre three years after the prophesy. The Encyclopedia Britannica says: "After a 13-year siege (585-573 B.C.) by Neb II, Tyre made terms and acknowledged Babylonian suzerainty". When Neb broke the gates down, he found the city almost empty. The mainland city was destroyed in 573 but the city of Tyre on the island remained a powerful city for several hundred years. For 5: This occurred with Alexander the Great - in the Encyclopaedia Brittannica, "Alexander III, after defeating Darius III at the Battle of Issus (333 B.C.), marched southward toward Egypt, calling upon the Phoenician cities to open their gates, as it was a part of his general plan to destroy their use of the Persian fleet. The citizens of Tyre refused to do so - so Alexander laid siege to the city of Tyre on the mainland. Possessing no fleet, he demolished old Tyre on the mainland and with that debris built a mole 200 feet wide across the straits separating the old and new towns, erecting towers and war engines at the farther end. 3a) A secular historian named Philip Myers not a theologian - found this in a history book: Alexander the Great reduced Tyre to ruins in 332 B.C. The larger part of the site of the once great city is now bare as the top of a rock. 3b) In addition, a place where the fishermen that still frequent the spot spread their nets to dry.

Rise of Empires
In the book of Daniel, Chapter 2 – four kingdoms are described in the interpretation
of the dream of Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon: Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greek – Daniel 8:21, 10:20/ and a fourth great kingdom to follow which was part iron and clay – which is the
Roman Empire – during this empire, Christ came and the church was established – Daniel 2:44.

Historical Accuracy

The Bible is loaded with historical statements concerning events of hundreds of years ago, yet
none of them has been proven to be incorrect.
(Bible compared to other ancient documents)
New Testament – starts at 25 years – between the original and surviving copies
Homer- starts at 500 years/Demosthenes – at 1400 years/Plato – at 1200 years/
Caesar – at 1000 years

Number of Manuscript Copies

New Testament – 5,686/Homer – 643/Demosthenes – 200/Plato – 7/Caesar – 10

Consistency – Written by 40 men over a period of time exceeding 1400 years, and has no
Internal inconsistencies.

Claim of Inspiration- It claims to be spoken by God, 2 Tim 3:16-17). No other religious book makes such claims.

External Evidences

(Prophesies Outside the Bible)
These cities were prophesied to be destroyed and never to be built again- and they haven’t.
Niveveh – Nahum 1:10, 3:7, 15, Zephaniah 2:13-14
Babylon – Isaiah 13:1-22
Tyre -Ezekiel 26:1-28

Bible before Science

He hangs the earth on nothing – Job 26:7
(Job was written at least 1000 years ago – some scholars think it could have been even 3000
years ago)
Note: Man only knew the above for 350 years.
Earth is a sphere – Isaiah 40:22/Air has weight – Job 28:25/
Gravity – Job 26:7, Job 38: 31-33/Winds blow in cyclones, Eccl 1:6

Documents that Prove Bible is True

Gilgamesh Epic, The Sumerian King List, Mari Tablets, Babylonian Chronicles

Archealogical Evidence (Still adding to this list today- it hasn’t stopped)
Excavations of Ur, Location of Zoar, Ziggurats and the foundation of Tower of Babel









 
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salida

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To (Continue) your answers:

3) God didn't invent science? So, are you claiming that man invented gravity (physics) and the law of thermodynamics? Man also created animals? Man has cloned animals. Your car had a creator - a man created the ignition switch, he placed the electronics in it, invented the engine and spark plugs. The point is: the car didn't create itself all by itself but a man created it. Well, the human cell is more complicated than a car - unless you take a biology class called Cell Structure and Function or a general biology class you won't know this. I will just mention one part of the cell because I can't type hundreds of pages here. How about DNA? DNA manages an amount of information beyond human comprehension as it does a large amount of things in a tiny fraction of a second. It gives instructions to each part of the cell such as: generating power, manufacturing a great quantity and variety of products (proteins), designating the function and relationship of these products, guiding key parts (molecules) to their final destinations, packaging certain molecules in membrane bound sacs, managing transfer information, disposal of waste, growth, and reproduction.

4) Outside biblical evidence - I mentioned it in my answer already under (bible evidence of prophesy and other sources). Look these sources up for yourself on the internet and verify my answers - I won't do everything for you.

***Saying something is "irrelevant" etc. won't make your view of the world more true but it just proves that your dissing the facts and not doing the research yourself. Prove what I'm saying is true or false - do you know how to research things? If you don't intend to - this proves that you like to argue. Arguing is useless - its like arguing and trying to tell me the sun is the moon or a frog is a horse ha in this case.
 
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salida

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The Bible doesn't contradict itself at all. What this demonstrates is that one doesn't understand it at all. A contradiction is when two things can't occur at the same time- show me your supposed contradiction. I have heard them all from those who don't understand the Bible - and they are always incorrect.
 
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athorist

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1) You claiming god raped people and caused genocide? No, actually the people did this. Show me where god did this in the bible?

Err... so you're telling me that the people did the great flood? Wasn't that genocide on a global scale?

And btw, if you care to actually read what I write, then you will find out that I said god endorsed these actions. Which is easy to prove through the bible:

Observe what I command you this day. Behold, I am driving out from before you the Amorite and the Canaanite and the Hittite and the Perizzite and the Hivite and the Jebusite. Take heed to yourself, lest you make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land where you are going, lest it be a snare in your midst. But you shall destroy their altars, break their sacred pillars, and cut down their wooden images (For you shall worship no other god, for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God.)
Exodus, Chapter 34, verses 11-14

You will chase your enemies, and they shall fall by the sword before you. Five of you shall chase a hundred, and a hundred of you shall put ten thousand to flight; your enemies shall fall by the sword before you. For I will look on you favorably and make you fruitful, multiply you and confirm My covenant with you. You shall eat the old harvest, and clear out the old because of the new.
Leviticus, Chapter 26, verses 7-9

Thus saith the LORD of hosts ... go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.
1 Samuel, Chapter 15, verses 2-3

2) Bible evidence of prophesies and other sources:

[snip]

How about just commenting on the refutation that I proposed, instead of just heaping unfounded assertion upon unfounded assertion. Provide some evidence, please. What you posted there hardly qualifies, it's just pointing to scripture. How about citing some research?
 
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athorist

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To (Continue) your answers:

3) God didn't invent science? So, are you claiming that man invented gravity (physics) and the law of thermodynamics? Man also created animals?
We're confusing science with laws of nature here, are we? Equivocation fallacy!

Man has cloned animals. Your car had a creator - a man created the ignition switch, he placed the electronics in it, invented the engine and spark plugs. The point is: the car didn't create itself all by itself but a man created it.
How is that relevant? It proves nothing except that your reasoning is flawed.


Well, the human cell is more complicated than a car - unless you take a biology class called Cell Structure and Function or a general biology class you won't know this. I will just mention one part of the cell because I can't type hundreds of pages here. How about DNA? DNA manages an amount of information beyond human comprehension as it does a large amount of things in a tiny fraction of a second. It gives instructions to each part of the cell such as: generating power, manufacturing a great quantity and variety of products (proteins), designating the function and relationship of these products, guiding key parts (molecules) to their final destinations, packaging certain molecules in membrane bound sacs, managing transfer information, disposal of waste, growth, and reproduction.
Err... and this does not prove your point. It's a huge non-sequitur.

How about commenting on some real science? You come off a bit pretentious lecturing me on biology, considering that I already posted this:

Direct Experimental Tests Of Evolutionary Concepts

Cavefish as a Model System in Evolutionary Developmental Biology by William R. Jeffrey, Developmental Biology, 231:, 1-12 (1 Mar 2001) - contains experimental tests of hypotheses about eye evolution

Crystal Structure Of An Ancient Protein: Evolution By Conformational Epistasis by Eric A. Ortlund, Jamie T. Bridgham, Matthew R. Redinbo and Joseph W. Thornton, Science, 317: 1544-1548 (14 September 2007) - refers to the reconstruction of ancient proteins from extinct animals by back-tracking along the molecular phylogenetic trees and demonstrating that the proteins in question WORK

Evidence for rapid speciation following a founder event in the laboratory by J.R. Weinberg V. R. Starczak and P. Jora, Evolution vol 46, pp 1214-1220, 1992 - EXPERIMENTAL GENERATION OF A SPECIATION EVENT IN THE LABORATORY

Experimentally Created Incipient Species of Drosophila by Theodosius Dobzhansky & Olga Pavlovsky, Nature 230, pp 289 - 292 (02 April 1971) - EXPERIMENTAL GENERATION OF A SPECIATION EVENT IN THE LABORATORY

Founder-flush speciation in Drosophila pseudoobscura: a large scale experiment by A. Galiana, A. Moya and F. J. Alaya, Evolution vol 47, pp 432-444, 1993 - EXPERIMENTAL GENERATION OF A SPECIATION EVENT IN THE LABORATORY

Genetics of Natural Populations XII. Experimental Reproduction of Some of the Changes Caused by Natural Selection by Sewall Wright & Theodosius Dobzkansky, Genetics, 31(2): 125-156 (1946) - direct experimental tests of natural selection mechanisms

Hedgehog Signalling Controls Eye Degeneration in Blind Cavefish by Yoshiyuki Yamamoto, David W. Stock and William R. Jeffery, Nature, 431: 844-847 (14 Oct 2004) - direct experimental test of theories about eye evolution and the elucidation of the controlling genes involved

Initial Sequenceing of the Chimpanzee Genome and Comparison with the Human Genome, The Chimpanzee Genome Sequencing Consortium (see paper for full list of 68 authors), Nature, Vol 437, pp 69-87, 1 September 2005 - direct sequencing of the chimpanzee genome and direct comparison of this genome with the previously sequenced human genome, whereby the scientists discovered that fully twenty-nine percent of the orthologous proteins of humans and chmpanzees are IDENTICAL

Origin of the Superflock of Cichlid Fishes from Lake Victoria, East Africa by Erik Verheyen, Walter Salzburger, Jos Snoeks and Axel Meyer, Science, vol 300, pp 325-329, 11 April 2003 - direct experimental determination of the molecular phylogeny of the Lake Victoria Superflock, including IDENTIFYING THE COMMON ANCESTOR OF THE 350+ SPECIES IN QUESTION and NAMING THAT ANCESTOR as Haplochromis gracilior

Phagotrophy by a flagellate selects for colonial prey: A possible origin of multicellularity by M.E. Boraas, D.B. Seale and J.E. Boxhorn, Evolutionary Ecology Vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 153-164. Feb 1998 - direct experimental test of hypotheses about the origins of multicellularity

Resurrecting Ancient Genes: Experimental Analysis Of Extinct Molecules by Joseph W. Thornton, Nature Reviews: Genetics, 5: 366-375 (5 May 2004) - direct experimental reconstruction in the laboratory of ancient proteins from extinct animals

Sexual isolation caused by selection for positive and negative phototaxis and geotaxis in Drosophila pseudoobscura by E. del Solar, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, vol 56, pp 484-487, 1966 - direct experimental test of selection mechanisms and their implications for speciation

The Master Control Gene For Morphogenesis And Evolution Of The Eye by Walter J. Gehrig, Genes to Cells, 1: 11-15, 1996 - direct experimental test of hypotheses concerning eye evolution including the elucidation of the connection between the Pax6 gene and eye morphogenesis, and the experimental manipulation of that gene to control eye development

The Past As The Key To The Present: Resurrection Of Ancient Proteins From Eosinophils by Steven A. Benner, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA., 99(8): 4760-4761 (16 April 2002) - direct experimental reconstruction of ancient proteins from extinct animals

This list is by no means complete, because over eighteen thousand critically robust peer reviewed papers were published in evolutionary biology in 2007 alone. The number of papers published in the subject since Darwin first published The Origin of Species probably exceeds a million or so, if someone were ever to perform the requisite accounting.

Maybe you address that research, instead of just making unfounded claims that are not even relevant to the topic?

4) Outside biblical evidence - I mentioned it in my answer already under (bible evidence of prophesy and other sources). Look these sources up for yourself on the internet and verify my answers - I won't do everything for you.

***Saying something is "irrelevant" etc. won't make your view of the world more true but it just proves that your dissing the facts and not doing the research yourself. Prove what I'm saying is true or false - do you know how to research things? If you don't intend to - this proves that you like to argue. Arguing is useless - its like arguing and trying to tell me the sun is the moon or a frog is a horse ha in this case.

Which facts? None of what you presented can even remotely be qualified as facts. Check your semantics!
 
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athorist

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Oh, and btw, you're clearly in the wrong thread. This one is about "the burdon of proof" - it's about epistemology. "Teaching the difference" would be the apropriate thread, don't you think? Guess it was convenient to dodge the research that I cited by posting in the wrong thread...
 
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Sarapin

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I get a feeling that under your questions (like many critics) that you may presume that since the existence of God cannot be 'proven' (I use the word lightly) that He doesn't exist. I have seen many atheists argue this line that since Christians or other deistic followers cannot prove the existence of God that that is reason enough to presume that He doesn't exist. The first part of my post is an attempt to address this line of thinking before I start to answer your question...

It is important to note that the inability to prove an assertion doesn't mean that the alternative is right ... we see this in action throughout the court system. The case of O.J. Simpson would be a classic example. The case went through the criminal court system where he was found 'not guilty' of murdering his ex and her boyfriend, but he was found liable when faced with civil action by his ex' parents. In other words, the jury found in the civil case that it was more likely than not that he did in fact murder his ex and her boyfriend.

So, two things are amplified in this case:
1. The conclusion that is reached is heavily dependent on the standard of proof required.
2. The decision 'not guilty' doesn't automatically correlate to 'innocent'. What it means is that there simply was not enough evidence to find him guilty in the criminal system.

Therefore, applying these same principles to the issue of God's existence ... you firstly have to determine the rules of evidence (what is classified as 'evidence' and what is not) and the standard of proof required (to what degree one has to prove something) before any of this becomes meaningful...

The next section takes the above reasoning and applies it to your question:

So while the burden of proof may be on those proclaiming the existence or occurrence of something, it doesn't follow that just because it may not be provable on some higher level of degree that the entity doesn't exist or the event never happened.

When Christians claim that God exists, then one could argue that the burden of proof is on them to explain why they believe such. However, by the same token, the same is true with atheists who assert that matter is all there is. By that I mean, for example, that the burden of proof is on them to show that life came from non-life, that intermediate life forms could exist and survive with half-formed organs and that they actually existed, and so on, all without divine intervention.
 
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athorist

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Sarapin,

thank you for that reply. You are actually the first poster in this thread who seems to get what I am trying to discuss - that's a relief.

I get a feeling that under your questions (like many critics) that you may presume that since the existence of God cannot be 'proven' (I use the word lightly) that He doesn't exist. I have seen many atheists argue this line that since Christians or other deistic followers cannot prove the existence of God that that is reason enough to presume that He doesn't exist. The first part of my post is an attempt to address this line of thinking before I start to answer your question...
I absolutely agree with the above. Indeed proving the non-existance of supernatural entities is impossible in the same way as proving the existance is. I absolutely agree. That's why I technically consider myself agnostic towards those claims. For practical purposes (anything that has to do with day-to-day life) however I am defacto atheist. I am agnostic towards the deistic concept of god in the very same way that I am agnostic towards the tooth-fairy, a living Elivis and (surprise!) string theory. Actually a living Elvis has a higher ontological status than string theory, since actual sightings have been reported...

It is important to note that the inability to prove an assertion doesn't mean that the alternative is right ... we see this in action throughout the court system. The case of O.J. Simpson would be a classic example. The case went through the criminal court system where he was found 'not guilty' of murdering his ex and her boyfriend, but he was found liable when faced with civil action by his ex' parents. In other words, the jury found in the civil case that it was more likely than not that he did in fact murder his ex and her boyfriend.
I don't know american laws very well, but where I come from a person is considered innocent until a court has decided the opposite. Saying otherwise might ensue drastic legal actions and is actually considered a crime. That may be different in america though. I am not well-enough informed on the O.J. Simpson case to comment on it anyway, but again: I totally agree that the existence of a deistic god cannot be proved/disproved. However I see no reason to base my life on the assumption that such a god exists in the same way that I see no reason to base it on the assumption that tooth-fairies exist. But I will concede to you that it ultimately is an undecidable proposition without hesitation. Nota bene that we are talking about a deistic god here. For theistic gods it's different: The religious texts that describe theistic gods (not only the christian flavour of gods) clearly fail to comply with observational reality. The compliance of those texts with reality might however be the material for an entirely new thread. (There is a "Is scripture reality" thread up, as far as I have seen, however the thought-police does not allow me to post in it).

So, two things are amplified in this case:
1. The conclusion that is reached is heavily dependent on the standard of proof required.
I don't want to argue semantics, but I will have to quickly point out that their may be different standards of evidence, but certainly not of proofs. If something has been proven, then thats a pretty much eternal thing. Being a mathematician it may however be that I have a different thing in mind than you have when talking about a "proof".

2. The decision 'not guilty' doesn't automatically correlate to 'innocent'. What it means is that there simply was not enough evidence to find him guilty in the criminal system.
That is clearly a difference between the legal system in america and the legal system in germany. In germany "not guilty" and "innocent" are synonymous in a legal context. But we are not talking about laws here anyway.

Therefore, applying these same principles to the issue of God's existence ... you firstly have to determine the rules of evidence (what is classified as 'evidence' and what is not) and the standard of proof required (to what degree one has to prove something) before any of this becomes meaningful...
Good point. Let's get our definitions straight then: I would define "evidence" as being rooted in observational reality. Evidence for a scientific theory, for example, would be experimental falsifiability. "Proof" would be a formal proof, however one would have to decide and agree on a formalism, but let's not get too technical here and just stick with higher order predicate logic.

The next section takes the above reasoning and applies it to your question:

So while the burden of proof may be on those proclaiming the existence or occurrence of something, it doesn't follow that just because it may not be provable on some higher level of degree that the entity doesn't exist or the event never happened.
That's were I'd invoke Occam's Razor and Russells teapot (I can't link due to my low postcount, but there is a fairly large amount of information on this on the internet - wikipedia may be a good place to start).

Do you think there is a tiny golden teapot orbitting Alpha-Centauri? Why not? Can you prove that it does not exist? Indeed the claim about such a teaport cannot be refuted, but still there is no reason to believe that claim for any practical purposes. Because assumptions are not to be unneccessarily multiplied.

By the same principle a deistic god can safely be assumed to be non-existant. If you don't agree to that principle, then you will have to believe in Aliens, the tooth-fairy and invisible unicorns aswell.

When Christians claim that God exists, then one could argue that the burden of proof is on them to explain why they believe such.
Wait a minute, here. That's not a deistic concept of deities anymore, we're in deep theistic waters here. The theistic position is much harder to uphold than the deistic one, since it goes along with the assertion that a certain flavour of religious scripture is true. Proof/Refutation becomes a possibility here because we have scripture that can be compared to the observational reality.

However, by the same token, the same is true with atheists who assert that matter is all there is.
Ah... switching back to a deistic/dualistic stance here, aren't we? I have an itch to scream out loud "equivocation fallacy", but I'll refrain from doing so because I can see what you're aiming at. However your reasoning is flawed at this point, I'm afraid.

By that I mean, for example, that the burden of proof is on them to show that life came from non-life, that intermediate life forms could exist and survive with half-formed organs and that they actually existed, and so on, all without divine intervention.

You're mixing up several things here: Evolution and Abiogenesis are not the same thing. There is a vast amount of evidence for evolution. We can actually watch speciation events happen in our laboratories. Just take a look at a tiny excerpt from the huge amount of research that has been done on this subject:

Evidence for rapid speciation following a founder event in the laboratory by J.R. Weinberg V. R. Starczak and P. Jora, Evolution vol 46, pp 1214-1220, 1992 - EXPERIMENTAL GENERATION OF A SPECIATION EVENT IN THE LABORATORY

Experimentally Created Incipient Species of Drosophila by Theodosius Dobzhansky & Olga Pavlovsky, Nature 230, pp 289 - 292 (02 April 1971) - EXPERIMENTAL GENERATION OF A SPECIATION EVENT IN THE LABORATORY

Founder-flush speciation in Drosophila pseudoobscura: a large scale experiment by A. Galiana, A. Moya and F. J. Alaya, Evolution vol 47, pp 432-444, 1993 - EXPERIMENTAL GENERATION OF A SPECIATION EVENT IN THE LABORATORY

Genetics of Natural Populations XII. Experimental Reproduction of Some of the Changes Caused by Natural Selection by Sewall Wright & Theodosius Dobzkansky, Genetics, 31(2): 125-156 (1946) - direct experimental tests of natural selection mechanisms

Abiogenesis is a different issue, indeed I have not seen someone make a convincing case for or against it, however the research done by biologists clearly indicates that it is at least a possibility.

What I'd like to understand is where do you get the nonsensical idea from that atheists believe in organisms with half-formed organs from? I've never seen somebody make that argument, so I would think it is a rather clumsy attempt at constructin a straw-man. You were maybe referring to the old canard of irreducible complexity, which has been extensively covered by biologists. The most famous example here would be the evolution of the eye being impossible according to creationist propaganda. This claim has been utterly smashed in the Dover trial, but nevertheless let me point you to a few (out of the many thousands) of papers on this subject:

Cavefish as a Model System in Evolutionary Developmental Biology by William R. Jeffrey, Developmental Biology, 231:, 1-12 (1 Mar 2001) - contains experimental tests of hypotheses about eye evolution

Hedgehog Signalling Controls Eye Degeneration in Blind Cavefish by Yoshiyuki Yamamoto, David W. Stock and William R. Jeffery, Nature, 431: 844-847 (14 Oct 2004) - direct experimental test of theories about eye evolution and the elucidation of the controlling genes involved

Phagotrophy by a flagellate selects for colonial prey: A possible origin of multicellularity by M.E. Boraas, D.B. Seale and J.E. Boxhorn, Evolutionary Ecology Vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 153-164. Feb 1998 - direct experimental test of hypotheses about the origins of multicellularity

The Master Control Gene For Morphogenesis And Evolution Of The Eye by Walter J. Gehrig, Genes to Cells, 1: 11-15, 1996 - direct experimental test of hypotheses concerning eye evolution including the elucidation of the connection between the Pax6 gene and eye morphogenesis, and the experimental manipulation of that gene to control eye development

I have more papers like those saved on my harddisk, and I'll be happy to share them if you are interested in reading them. Until then I suggest refraining from ridiculous claims about "half-formed organs".

sincerly,
athorist
 
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Lukaris

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That definition of energy hardly has any law of energy-conservation. I'll shut up if you deduce it for ne, but since you obviously have no idea what physicists mean when talking about energy I'm not holding by breath.
In case you have turned blue, here is a basic definition of energy - "capacity of a physical system to perform work. Energy exists in several forms such as heat, kinetic, or mechanical energy, light, potential energy, electrical or other forms. According to the law of conservation of energy, the total energy of a system remains constant, though energy may transform into another form. 2 billiard balls colliding, for ex., may come to rest, with the resulting energy becoming sound and perhaps a bit of heat at the point of of collision." http://physics.about.com/od/glossary/g/energy.htm

See above. The fallacy is that you are not talking about a concept of energy for which conservation laws hold. You are actually not talking about energy in any way that would be meaningful to physics.

Well the church fathers can say what they want. It just has nothing to do with science or physics (as in energy-conservation). Well here is a definition that has the legacy of ancient Greek physics in mind & attributed to God."To create pertains to energy, and to beget pertains to nature. But nature and energy are not identical."(St. Cyril of Alexandria, 5th c). "Energy is one thing and that which has the capacity to energize is another. For energy is the essential activity of the nature. That which possesses the capacity to energize is the nature from which the energy proceeds." (St. John of Damascus, 7th c). Again, I do not care if you buy this but do not presume to know what was the mindset of these clerics when evidence shows otherwise. The concept to create (a Creator)is consistent with the science definition of energy above since God worked and rested on the 7th day yet God remains constant. "Howbeit that was not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural;and afterward that which is spiritual." (1 Corinthians 15:46).
 
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Staccato

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What I'd like to understand is where do you get the nonsensical idea from that atheists believe in organisms with half-formed organs from? I've never seen somebody make that argument, so I would think it is a rather clumsy attempt at constructin a straw-man. You were maybe referring to the old canard of irreducible complexity, which has been extensively covered by biologists. The most famous example here would be the evolution of the eye being impossible according to creationist propaganda. This claim has been utterly smashed in the Dover trial, but nevertheless let me point you to a few (out of the many thousands) of papers on this subject:

(Abridged)

I have more papers like those saved on my harddisk, and I'll be happy to share them if you are interested in reading them. Until then I suggest refraining from ridiculous claims about "half-formed organs".

To answer your question simply, the source of these misconceptions is exactly what you suspect: a misunderstanding of evolution theory and the influence of the Discovery Institute.
Many Christians will state that you cannot dismiss God out of hand until you read His Word, the Bible. The least they can do is read a couple of paragraphs out of an 8th grade biology textbook before they slate evolution with strawmen.
And don't forget the good ol' Darwin quotemine from The Origin of Species:

To suppose that the eye [...] could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree

Conveniently missing the next few sentences:

When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei, as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself originated; but I may remark that, as some of the lowest organisms, in which nerves cannot be detected, are capable of perceiving light, it does not seem impossible that certain sensitive elements in their sarcode should become aggregated and developed into nerves, endowed with this special sensibility.

Whether this is due to deliberate ignorance or simply a misunderstanding of the facts and listening to the likes of Michael Behe for too long I will leave up to you to decide. But do not try to burn down the strawmen, because you're only wasting fuel. They, peculiarly, seem to multiply without boundary or reason. And people say they have difficultly imagining how inanimate chemicals created animate life when we see the frankly indecent propagation of hay-based homunculus before our very eyes ;)
 
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