chambochae

I've seen you get this wrong so many times now. The laws of physics, including the laws of thermodynamics, only apply to things inside our universe, not NECESSARILY the universe itself. In order to prove your reasoning, you would have to prove the laws of physics apply to the universe as a unit, in other words you would have to prove that the laws of thermodynamics apply outside this universe, and for all you know the concept might not even make sense. In the same way that for all we know pi could be a number other than 3.14... , or that 'numbers' have no recognisable definition, or that the concept of 'definition' doesn't make any sense at all! You are reasoning with things that you just don't know hold any relevance whatsoever to the situation.

Please :) I would argue that it is important. Genesis sets the scene for God being Good. The rest of the Bible either assumes God is Good, or has God/Jesus saying God is Good. If God and Jesus- (perhaps unknowingly, perhaps he was in on it) were lying, then the god that christians worship does not exist. How can you get your relationship right with someone you do not know anything about?

I put this question to Christians. How do you know God was telling the truth when he dictated Genesis?

I think it's mildly hilarious that this topic keeps turning up like a bad penny.

Bottom line is: A God existing is infinately unlikely. If you narrow it down further and say: The Christian god, out of all the possible gods, well that's even more unlikely. As is any scientific process you could name. Knowing this, I find it impossible to put my faith in anything, be it a God or any other process which could explain the existence of our universe.

If you download a program called Guitar Pro 4, (free trial version), then go to http://www.mysongbook.com, search for (the allmighty) "Less Than Jake", download the tab files for the songs which have the sax (trial and error here I'm afraid, mysongbook doesn't tell you which instruments have been tabbed other than guitar, bass, percussion and vocals, but for example the All My Best Friends Are Metal Heads tab does include the sax), and open it up in Guitar Pro! There ya go :D Then again, I don't play the sax, so this info might be useless to you. Here's a screenshot of the sax in metal heads so you can see what I'm getting at: The top line is guitar tab, but the bottom is music. Is that useable? :D

Skyclad. Folk metal with heavy political influences.

Also, God is sometimes used in a very degrading sense. For example, I once saw someone on the internet say along the lines of "Praise the lord! God has given me good exam results! I walked out of the exam room knowing I had done terrible, but I got a B! Thankyou God!!!!" Now that person should have been thanking THEMSELVES for their OWN achievment, not god. I really got the impression that that person believed god had given them good results. Now that is evil.

And you have proven that how? God is a matter of faith. Just stop trying to reason against Him, you can't reason against faith. Er, the first word in the sentence was "maybe". I was simply voicing some thoughts.

Maybe there is a god, but he couldn't care less whether we believe in him or not, and there is no afterlife at all.

Yet, it would be kinda cool to find out (or not, as the case may be) what happens...

Correction, Your God, not everyone believes in your god. Jesus's death was hardly a sacrifice for an Omnipotent being, a sacrifice is to lose something, what did God/Jesus lose that he couldn't replace? correction, THE God. Prove it. "Prove he isn't" => I can't. But I'm not the one making the claim.

Is 'God' included in this 'everything' you talk of? Anyways, do you know what is outside the universe? Do you know what was around before the universe existed? The answer is no. So how do you know that everything just appeared? Just because we can't see what caused it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. That goes for everything, including god. But god is just one theory.

I love that song!! btw, it's the Charmed intro song :P (By some guy) I know... :P @chambochae: Theres this festival atm in belgium, called graspop. Some of the artists performing: Dimmu borgir, After Forever, Alice Cooper, Slipknot, Motorhead, Ice earth, epica, children of bodom, Cradle of filth, agnostic front, .... http://www.graspop.be/pages/kalender_tijd.php To bad I couldn't make it to that :( And OMG... I wanted to go to this one!!!!! http://www.musicpages.be/artikelsview.php?id=87 Festivals in Belgium.. aaah Oh man.... I wanna live in Belgium!! It's so close too... just across the channel! :x 8)

Oh so we were giants in those days, I see. I expect all their bones shrunk back to, coincidentally, our size once they were buried? It's mildly amusing that religion has to come up with such absurd excuses as soon as science throws up an inconvenient obstacle. Called 'evidence'. It's also rather ironic that these excuses are far more implausible than the scientific theories they are trying to discredit.

There's lots of info out there if you google. It looks like there was a type of dinosaur which made a footprint similar to a humans. The 'human' tracks also appear to have a 6 foot stride. Can you stride 6 feet?

I've been listening to Opeth Mastodon Exodus Queensryche Blind Guardian Dimmu Borgir But right now I'm listening to a Nightwish album my friend burnt for me, and I am BLOWN AWAY!!! It's incredible! :shock:

Frogact, many people in this topic has shown how it is unlikely that (a) god exists. The way I personally came to that conclusion is because we simply, and probably will never, know what caused the big bang because whatever it was is now outside of our universe (or just hidden within it [god is hidden if he exists], it makes no difference). This means that as far as we are concerned there is an infinate number of things that could have caused the big bang, a god being one of them. SO the probability of a god having created the universe is 1/infinity. Which is infinately small. Therefore the likelihood of a god existing is infinately small. (not very likely). Until you find proper evidence for the existence of god, that likelihood is NEVER going to increase. (I'm afraid the atheists have the upper hand here, since the probability that they are correct is (infinity - 1)/infinity. Personally, I havn't guessed at anything for sure. Though if I had to, I would put my money on two universes colliding in the multiverse, purely because I like that theory. What this probability does show is that there's absolutely no point trying to persuade anyone otherwise, since "your guess is as good as mine." Also, I needn't have used the Big Bang specifically, I could have just said "A tree" or "an apple" or simply "the universe".

perverted religion, not true Christian faith how? Have you been reading the topic at all?

Then where does the intelligence come from? Matter cant possess it. Alright, I'll rephrase it: "Evolution is definately a process which achieves results comparable or better than results achieved by intelligent means." But it is still evolution. We may have designed the software, but when the GO button was pressed, no humans had any input. Evolution did it all. Without the evolution, that car may never have been designed, and certainly not within the time scale it was. It was a car tailored by evolution to complete a circuit in the shortest time possible within the restraints of the rules of the sport. Just like, designing an organism which is tailored by evolution to survive better than it's fellow organisms within the constraints of the environment it is placed in. And your evidence for this is...?

If you're completely ruling out intelligent design, it had to have happened by chance. You cant have it both ways. intelligent desgin or chance, it had to be one or the other. natural selection relies on traits that show up by chance. 2*5 isn't 10 by chance, though it was chance that made me choose 2 and 5. In the same way, perhaps the mutations happen by chance, but if those mutations are no good they get discarded, in a particularly intelligent manner. Perhaps this is an example of a mechanical process mimicking (bettering) intelligent design. And evolution is definately a very intelligent process. For example, in the news recently has been the people who used the laws of evolution to evolve better formula 1 racing cars, which actually shave seconds of circuit times. It is clear that evolution can achieve things that mere intelligence, as we know it, couldn't even dream of. I think it says something that we have relied on intelligence to make the fastest cars for years, and yet are now discarding it for, as you put it, chance.

but he can't prove the theory of evolution which he teaches as fact. And the bigger point of the conversation is that belief in God is faith based. But for those who do need proof there are so many just in creation alone. In the intelligent design of it all. from a fish that uses bait to catch it's prey to a butterfly that can make itself look like something scary to birds to a beetle that was engaging in chemical warfar before man ever even had an inkling of what that was. I could go on and on. There is no way that anyone will ever be able to prove to me that the world I live in happened by chance. It just couldnt be. Of course! That would be absurd! No one (I hope) is saying the world around us happened by chance. They happened by evolution. Let's use one of your examples. An insect is which is usually black, tends to get eaten a lot by it's predators. But one day, an insect is born with a mutation which causes it to have an area of white on it's back. (colouration is quite a common mutation). Now it just so happens that this insect doesn't get eaten because the predators are wary of the white spot, and so the 'white spot' genes carry on with the baby insects, and so on and so forth, until you've got a new insect which has an eye shaped spot on it's back to warn off predators. (whilst this happens other traits such as leg length, wing shape, practically everything is devolping aswell, to create a new species). The white spot was 'selected' because it caused the insect to survive better in it's environment than the other insects around it. Survival of the fittest, and natural selection. I said this in the previous post, but it is the most convinving evidence I know of that evolution happened: The evolution of the eye. We have a fossil trilobite to account for every single stage in the evolution of the eye, from the very first slightly light sensitive cells, to the full blown multi-faceted eye. A fossil for every stage in between, we can see how it developed over millions of years into what we would call an eye. But not only that, we can observe every single stage of the evolution of the eye in living animals today, proving that every stage of the eye was a useful trait, and an advantage over the previous stage. That is one reason why I believe evolution has happened. Cube 5: The fact about the bible is that because some events in it are true, people assume it is all true. That's quite an assumption, don't you think?

The difference is of course that the professor could go and have a scan or similar procedure to prove he has a brain, whereas no one knows how to prove god exists. Actually it works both ways. For example, when scientists found that the universe is expanding, they thought hmmm, I wonder why? Thus the big bang theory. The Big bang theory then predicted there would be the echo of the big bang in the form of radiation all around us, coming from every direction. Then some other scientists accidently detected that exact same radiation, the radiation which the theory predicted would exist. I would say that's pretty convincing. So a theory can be made to explain anomalous results, and new evidence can also be used to back up (or discredit) existing theories.

Agreed totally ;) ps. i hated my re teacher wouldn't it be fair to say the same about NOT believing in God, since it is higly likely that you came to this decision under the influence of someone or something other than yourself? That is true, although I would not call myself gullable, because the main reason I do not believe in god is because of the lack of evidence for his existence. You can't question lack of evidence, so gullability doesn't apply. Perhaps ignorance... naivety... stubborness... but not gullability. Besides, for me not believing in god wasn't a decision at first, it was more of a default state. So really I never made a decision which you could call gullable anyway. I think it's the same for a lot of atheists. I didn't decide not to believe in god, I just havn't decided to believe in him. Now I am old enough to question whether I should have made the decision to believe in him, I still find I don't see that I should, or could. That's it really. I couldn't believe in god, even if I wanted to. I need evidence! Proper, hard evidence. Not the "look inside yourself" kind, because who knows what happens in the human mind? I couldn't trust that kind of evidence. I would need actual solid evidence for the presence of god, then I would believe in him. I would have to.

But if there, in all those years, no logical explonation has been found... What makes you think that there will be found one soon? Besides, as I posted on Scape, the bible is REALLY trustworth book, can't be bothered to explain why because I have to study. :P But as soon as we get the database back, I'll show you why. ;) It took me a day to write it and look that up :\ And yet, ultimately, it was written by humans claiming to have a voice in their head. Therefore, in order to call the bible trustworthy, you first need to prove God exists. Then you need to prove he's not a liar. Then you need to prove that God instructed humans to write all of the bible. I'm talking mainly about genesis here. 1: For example, it is entirely possible that God does exist and he did instruct humans to write the bible, then one of those humans thought "hmm, this needs some kind of introduction" and proceeded to write genesis without divine instruction, making it up as he went along. Entirely possible. 2: Meesy, in my opinion, we will never find a logical explanation as to what caused the big bang. This is because we are a part of this universe, we are inside it, we cannot see out (even if "seeing" has any meaning at all outside), we cannot go outside to have a look (a heck of a long way to travel, even if "going" has any meaning outside, and even if going outside were possible). But science is a continuous process. We are continually learning more, it doesn't all happen in a day. So who knows, maybe we will know someday. 1: If the Christian God did exist, and He did inspire the Bible, I do not believe he would let a book of lies be incorporated into it. There are plenty of other books that were written, such as the Gnostic Gospels, which were not included in the Bible because they were just made up by humans. (They also disagreed with the rest of the Bible and were historically inacurate) 2: Since we cannot observe or prove how the universe was created, that leaves open the possibility of God, among other things. 1: Whether a god exists or not is one matter, but whether the christian god exists is another entirely. It is true that the christian god probably wouldn't let someone add a book of lies to the bible (although I've been told he never interferes), but the fact is we have absolutely no evidence to suggest that the christian idea of god does exist. For all we know the god that told humans to write the bible could have been having a laugh. It's every bit as likely as the christain god existing. Oh, the gullability of the human species... 2: Of course, that's what I've been saying. Personally I'm not interested in placing a bet where the odds of winning are 1 in infinity. JohnnySmum... this is a topic about religion, that's why we're talking about it...