Does this website disprove God? (need experts! long read!)

[jakobp]

http://www.godlessgeeks.com/WhyAtheism.htm

I was reading this site and it made a some really strong great points, i'm not an expert in this stuff so i was wondering what somebody who has knowledge on god and his existence can say!

[Silvertusk]

Point 1 - Nature has laws - that points to God for me - Where did the laws come from?

Point 2 - Quantum mechanics - Things do not pop out of nothing - wish athiests will stop saying that. The "nothing" is a field of energy which the particles appear and disappear out of - so it is not nothing.

There are many well-respected physicists, such as Stephen Hawking, Lawrence Krauss, Sean M. Carroll, Victor Stenger, Michio Kaku, Robert A.J. Matthews, and Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek, who have created scientific models where the Big Bang and thus the entire universe could arise from nothing but quantum fluctuations of vacuum energy — via natural processes.

My point exactly - vacuum energy is not nothing.

Point 3 - Arguement from design. They say nothing about the fine tuning of the initial conditions of the universe that gave rise to such "emerging complexity"
Point 4 - Evolution - do not have a problem with that - still need initial conditions

Notice that all through the article the writer constantly appeals to all these natural laws. Well they all must have come from somewhere. And you have still have the initial question about why there is anything at all rather than nothing.

He then goes and talks about the fact that Jesus didn't exist at all - that is when I completely lost interest. If that is the best Athiests can do then I am very content with my irrational ridiculous blind faith.

God Bless

Silvertusk.

[Stu]

I wouldn't place too much worth in that site -- the first paragraph sets up a convenient strawman argument right off the bat with his little coin thought experiment.

(1) Next he addresses Galileo and Empirical Science.
What the author, Mark Thomas, fails to realise is that Galileo was a Christian! as were many of the great scientific minds of the past like Newton Though this irony often escapes those like Mark who would attempt to rewrite (or forget) history to suit their current world views.

He attempts to equate the Roman Catholic Church with religion as a whole, which is false. Which leads into:

(2) God of the Gaps, or Argument From Ignorance and here he errects yet another strawman:

Until just a couple of hundred years ago, most people thought that a god or gods controlled everything. Why did the wind blow? Why was there lightning and thunder? Why did the sun, moon, and stars apparently go around Earth? Why did someone get sick and die? Why did anything happen? Well, obviously, God did it. If a person doesn’t know how something works or why something happened, they can say, “God did it.” This is known as the “god of the gaps,” or the “argument from ignorance,” and it is at the heart of the conflict between science and religion.

God gave us free will to act and do as we please, if we so choose. He created the universe and the laws that govern it independently of Himself. We (humans) exist within an self-governing reality. We attempt to understand the wonders that God created -- THAT is what Galileo and his contemporaries attempted to explain. The earth for instance revolves around the sun because of gravitational forces.

(3) Next he addresses Why God(s)? Why Not?
It's a fair question, and perhaps one that is best answered from a spiritual viewpoint -- our relationship with God that we experience everyday.
Of course if we look to historical evidence we know that Jesus existed as flesh and blood (even the majority of atheists admit as much) and he died, and there were 12 witnesses attesting to His resurrection.
Take a look at the the Bible's historical accuracy -- the incredibly detailed records of mankind's lineage.

(4) Next he asks What Tools Can We Use?
Well scientific laws of course! The first law of thermodynamics states that the total energy of the universe is constant and cannot be created or destroyed -- well that conflicts with a chance universe.

(5) Next he tries to knock down Revelation and Experience through nothing more than assumptions and incredulity. To the people that experience God in their lives everyday He is very much tangible.

(6) The God of the Gaps is an old, tired and just plain false accusation. Mark proves this in his very own article by referencing Galileo
Intelligent Design is ANYTHING BUT a God of the Gaps argument, you only need to reference any of the literature out there at the moment like The Myth of Junk DNA -- in fact it was THE ATHEISTS WHO told us not to waste time searching for function within non-protein-coding DNA. Whereas the design proponents predicted design according on telelogcial bases!

(7) The First Cause is a valid argument. Only nothing can from nothing. No matter how complex or what circular logic you attempt to use to confuse the matter the fact remains that there has to be a first cause. And an outside (nature) supernatural force is the best possible explanation.

(8) The Big Bang doesn't conflict with God. However it does conflict with the First Law of Thermodynamics -- where did all that energy come from - which the author fails to address. And while atheists attempt to solve this using the multiverse theory, it NEVERTHELESS results in an infinite regression of those universes back to the first universe.

I know my points have been short and limited, but I don't have the time to go through them all -- in fact you will find all the answers you seek in the resources located on this very website
He lists a series old tired arguments that have long since been refuted.

[narnia4]

Absolutely nothing new, all of that stuff has been dealt with time and time again including on this very site. I sure wish that atheism weren't the main opposition to Christianity that you have to deal with online... not just because I think it is a threat, but because it doesn't take long to hear all the typical arguments again and again even after they've been easily refuted dozens of times. Go to almost any apologetics website and you'll find answers to these questions.

[DannyM]

Good grief, the first words are this:

Just about everyone is an atheist when it comes to other gods — the gods that other people believe in or that nobody believes in anymore. I’m an atheist about all gods because there's no reliable evidence for any god, or even for Jesus.

This really is amateur time. A Christian cannot be an atheist with regards to another religion’s god since the Christian already believes in God. A Christian cannot be both a theist and atheist at the same time. If I choose a woman to marry, would it make sense for my single friend John to say to me that I’m still single with regards all other women. Married bachelor time! A Christian cannot be called an atheist. The Christian is not without God and the Christian doesn’t hold a belief in no god.

It really gets no better than that. He invokes logic as his tool of choice:

How can we examine these claims? What tools can we use to determine truth of external reality? We have (1) empirical, verifiable evidence; and we have (2) logic. Evidence and logic are the best tools we have to determine how the universe really works. These tools have been extraordinarily successful in science, engineering and medicine, and in our daily lives. This is the standard that most of us expect in dealing with the real world; we expect doctors to use the latest medicine, and engineers to use empirical data when building bridges. Why should we use anything else for examining external reality?

Oblivious to his own inconsistency. I won’t bore myself by repeating it here, but see the thread on presuppositional apologetics.

Amateur time. But why expect better?

[Murray]

Ignoring the historical evidence of Jesus is lacking of logic and reason. They try so hard to disprove Jesus, and the funny thing is, they probably know they are wrong but they keep telling themselves they are right so they can stay in their little angry bubble...

It's funny, in these articles they never address Pilates letter to Caesar describing Jesus’s appearance in depth along with the crimes that he is charged with.

There is more historical evidence than there is for alexander the great, Socrates, Leonidas, ect...(the list can go on and on and on for pages and pages).

The simple fact is, atheist cannot disprove Jesus, and yet they try. They try by making outrageous arguments that have so solid base at all, but just random gibberish thought up by a college boy with too much time on his hands to try to convince himself his selfish and immoral ways are fine and have 0 consequences.