Evidence for God from Science

Audie wrote:Let us know if you can decide to believe in astrology.

To whom is this question asked?

Audie wrote:Let us know if you can decide to believe in astrology.

I can decide NOT to.

Could you decide to believe in batboy and astorology?

That those are not fake emails, and that Brittney Spears really loves you?

I can look at evidence, and realize that something must be true, or maybe false. If to you that is "deciding" fine. To me, it isnt.

Audie wrote:Could you decide to believe in batboy and astorology?

That those are not fake emails, and that Brittney Spears really loves you?

I can look at evidence, and realize that something must be true, or maybe false. If to you that is "deciding" fine. To me, it isnt.

Honestly, you are an intelligent woman and i find it very hard to believe that you are having this much difficulty understanding what I am saying.
I am not asking you to agree of course, but simply to understand.
Your examples have nothing to do with my point.

Every choice you make IS a decision.

You said:
I can look at evidence, and realize that something must be true, or maybe false.

Yes, of course you can, you decide to take your understanding of the evidence and decide to CHOOSE to realize that something must be true or maybe false.

PaulSacramento wrote:

Audie wrote:Could you decide to believe in batboy and astorology?

That those are not fake emails, and that Brittney Spears really loves you?

I can look at evidence, and realize that something must be true, or maybe false. If to you that is "deciding" fine. To me, it isnt.

Honestly, you are an intelligent woman and i find it very hard to believe that you are having this much difficulty understanding what I am saying.
I am not asking you to agree of course, but simply to understand.
Your examples have nothing to do with my point.

Every choice you make IS a decision.

You said:
I can look at evidence, and realize that something must be true, or maybe false.

Yes, of course you can, you decide to take your understanding of the evidence and decide to CHOOSE to realize that something must be true or maybe false.

nah. its you not understanding what Im saying.

The core of this was something about deciding to believe in god.

i dont, and I cannot successfully lie to myself about that.

*facepalm*

I give up.

PaulSacramento wrote:*facepalm*

I give up.

shouldda known all along where your face belongs

PaulSacramento wrote:We are not talking about belief, we are talking about deciding what to believe and how.

How are you defining the difference?

PaulSacramento wrote:Everything we do involved making a decision.

I disagree! Things done as a reaction to something else, things done out of habit, reflex, I think there are lots of things we do without making a decision on it.

PaulSacramento wrote:You decided that: I don't believe I am capable of convincing myself of something I do not know is true or not.

No I concluded it

PaulSacramento wrote:Great, I don't know of anyone that CAN convince themselves of something they KNOW is not true.

If you can decide what you believe, you have the option of deciding to believe something you currently know is not true….. unless there are limits on this ability you claim we all have…

PaulSacramento wrote:You said:
I am reminded of a saying; Belief happens after reason and logic demands it; never before

What makes that view a view that you follow or agree?
You decided that you agree with that view, that's what makes it a view that you agree with.

No. The view sounds reasonable to me. Reason dictates I agree with it.

PaulSacramento wrote:When a person says that they can't just decide to believe in something that are making a statement that they DECIDED to make.

The statement is true weather I decided to express it or not.

Ken

PaulSacramento wrote:

Audie wrote:Could you decide to believe in batboy and astorology?

That those are not fake emails, and that Brittney Spears really loves you?

I can look at evidence, and realize that something must be true, or maybe false. If to you that is "deciding" fine. To me, it isnt.

You said:
I can look at evidence, and realize that something must be true, or maybe false.

Yes, of course you can, you decide to take your understanding of the evidence and decide to CHOOSE to realize that something must be true or maybe false.

That is not an example of choice, that is an example of conclusion.
When the facts indicate something is true, you’ve concluded it to be true via the facts. An example of deciding to believe would be a case when the facts indicate something is true, yet you still have the option to believe it is false in spite of what the facts indicate.


Ken

Jac3510 wrote:I can't speak for BW. Paul was already a committed theist. To suggest he was anything like an atheist would be absurd. Furthermore, I'm not saying God can't come to the most dedicated atheist and reveal Himself gloriously. I am saying, however, and I hold to the fact, the normal process of things (and the biblical process of things) is that we know God exists first and then we experience Him. In more theological jargon, we respond to the revelation He has already granted and in doing so He gives us more.

Of course, once you get past the starting line, experience and reason work together (not necessarily, as you (intentionally?) suggest as the latter being subjugated by the former), such that our experience gives us new data, new premises, to reason from, to compare with what we already know, etc. So once God is accepted, it is certainly possible to "feel" Him and, from there, more readily see the truths of His existence. Perhaps something like that was behind BW's experience.

But, again, the fact remains, that God's existence is a matter of reason, not of blind faith; it is something we know, not merely something we feel, and to relegate the knowledge of God to a personal convinction held absent of justification is certainly better than atheism (or agnosticism, or deism, or polytheism, or pantheism), but it's far from the biblical standard of a warranted faith in a reasonable God.

Thanks Jac, Paul wasn't a good example. The glorious revalation was what I had in mind and you've got it covered.

Best as measured in distance from a biblical standard is not an overly generous method of comparative religion.

biblical standard of a warranted faith in a reasonable God

I thought it was just faith in God, providing reasonable warrant sounds like work or deeds or straw.

Proinsias wrote:

biblical standard of a warranted faith in a reasonable God

I thought it was just faith in God, providing reasonable warrant sounds like work or deeds or straw.

Blind faith, as I said, is better and more commendable than no faith or faith in the wrong object, which are to be condemned. But, no, the biblical standard is a warranted, rationally motivated faith. Peter tells us to be able to give a reason for why we believe what we do. Isaiah asks the Israelites to "reason" with God. A standard feature in OT theology (and Judaism today) is the rehearsal of God's works (which isn't understood to be mere stories/myths/fables but a retelling of history so as to motivate belief). All miracles in the Bible, OT and NT, from Moses to Paul, were designed to prove not only that faith in God is rational but that to deny Him is irrational. I could go on and on. The point is that the Bible nowhere suggests that we should have a blind faith in absence of any evidence; rather, the condemnation of the atheist is precisely due to the fact that so much warrant has been given.

I don't know what you mean when you say "warrant sounds like work or deeds or straw."

I have always looked for the creator of our universe, I have always seen Him, I just never knew who He was. I see Him everywhere, feel Him everywhere. Something out of nothing by chance or God? No brainer for me.
But, other people see those same things and disagree.
When I said you cant prove God, i mean I cant. All I can do is tell you what I feel. I leave the proof up to God.

I picked my siggy carefully t

Providing reasonable warrant takes work and effort which John 3:16 does not call for. The man that provided the most influential reasoned arguments for God, Aquinas, spoke of them as straw in light of personal experience. Once the miraculous becomes reasonable anything is possible.

I never said that a warranted faith was necessary for salvation. As I have said time and again, blind faith is better than no faith. Blind faith is sufficient to save. It does not follow, however, that because it is sufficient to save that we are to remain in that state. The biblical standard, what God expects and demands of His children, is a rationally warranted faith.

As to your second two comments, no one takes Aquinas' remarks to be a repudiation of his arguments. On the contrary, his comments are a great illustration of my own point. He was granted a very private, very special revelation precisely because he embraced so fully the revelation already given him. But that's all contextual stuff. If you really want to explore it more deeply, look into the period of his life from 1272-74, and note especially the mystical experience he had in response to his writings on transubstantiation.

Lastly, no one is talking about what is "possible." Again, we are talking about what is warranted. God could have created the whole world, complete with all our memories, two seconds ago, and we would never know it. Do we have any reason to think that is the case? Of course not, and we have plenty of reasons to think that it is the case. So don't be so base and try to poison the well by implying that admitting the possibility of the miraculous makes reasonable discussion and warrant unnecessary. The position you are talking about is called fideism, and it is condemned both in Scripture and has been formally condemned by the church as heresy. If you want to say you are a better theologian and understand Scripture better than me and the great saints of the ages past, then I'll just shrug my shoulders and move on. If not, then we can agree with what I said from the get go: blind faith may be possible in the barest sense, but it is no better or more preferable than the person who places their blind faith in Jesus and then lives a carnal lifestyle. Is it possible? Sure. Is it biblical? No. And if someone wants to make that position the basis of their arguments against or understanding of Christianity, then they're just constructing a giant straw man and aren't worth dealing with.

Storyteller wrote:Can someone please explain (in simple terms) the difference between the two?

Am I right in thinking TE believe in evolution and PC dont?

Sure, that's easy.

Both account for the evidence that we see in the world.
Only, I believe PC fits with the facts better and makes more sense.

TE works, if you have a natural mechanism for the evolution of all life.
God creates the initial life, or even just the universe at the Big Bang, and then everything "naturally" unfolds according to God's plan and physical laws.
As such, TE still requires adequate natural mechanisms for the evolution of all life. Just like we can discover how the development of stars, planets and the like happened, we should see clear natural mechanism/s that can account for the diversity of life arising from say simple cellular life and even chemistry levels.

So then, what are adequate mechanism/s that can account for life evolving from simple to complex?
Thanks to 20th century science we now understand that biology also contains complex information content.
We are not just plasma, flesh and bone as Darwin saw, but rather have proteins that are like little machines, DNA as well RNA which performs function, carries messages and appears to follow a set instructions.

How does the information that codes for an "arm" come to be formed? What about a finger, fingernail? Coagulation (blood clotting) functionality? The eye? DNA for our brain? All our biological parts and functions can be seen as code and in informational terms.

All of the world's medical books probably just scrape the surface on all this information within our bodies, our DNA and the like. And so, if I'm to believe the "code" for a leg just naturally evolved, well I want to fairly know by what natural mechanism/s? I can see planets orbiting and the physics of the solar system is clear and makes sense to all. SO, I know planetary bodies and such naturally unfolded rather than each being created brand new.

What clear agreed mechanisms are there for all the biological-rich information that we see?
Natural selection acting on random mutation might work if you have all the information to begin with for it to select from, but to accumulate encyclopedias of information for this or that part and bodily function just boggles my mind. Perhaps it is the coder in me, and my understanding of information theory as it applies in computing. I don't know.

SO, when asking for the mechanisms of a natural evolution of life, the best any honest scientist will give you is, "there is no agreement, but here's what I believe..."
While some mechanisms are popularly favoured, there is no agreement on the mechanisms involved. Even collectively, or even logically thinking about what is possible, I can't think up an adequate natural mechanism to account for massive accumulation of biological information. If we were going from complex information to simple, then certainly -- but the other way?

The main line of evidence for natural evolution of life comes via common ancestral trees.
This is seen as strong circumstantial evidence based upon logical arguments despite the mechanisms not being known or agreed upon.
BUT, for me, this isn't an open-shut case -- such can also support Progressive Creation accounts where a common designer (God) creates life brand new and/or purposefully builds upon previously existing life.

Now, I'm sure the claws will come out from those who are adamant that the ToE (in reality theories) accounts for all life.
BUT, I hope that has helped you to form your own view rather than just take on today's popular view.

Oh, and if you haven't, then I encourage you to watch Unlocking the Mystery of Life.