<**WARNING!!**>
This is long ... skip it if you don''t want to bother.


David20321 -
I''d like to apologize on the behalf of all Christians if that is how Christianity has been expressed to you. For what you have said is NOT what we as Christians (well, Catholic Christians) believe. I''m not going to post it here, because that''s not the point of this forum (and if you REALLY wanted to, such conversations should be done over email, or a different forum).

Let me be philosophical:

As far as prooving God''s existance ... well ... what do you mean by proof. Aquinas has 5 "proofs", if you will, for the existance of a higher entity (god-like), but it doesn''t reveal much about it/him/her, save that it is there. Basically there is the argument from design, first mover, first cause ... I forget the other two (first do-er?), but they''re pretty similar to the first cause and first mover proofs. But I think that the proof you want is non-existant. In fact ... you never have such proof, even in your experiencial life. Ask yourself this ... can you really "know" anything? How do you know? What sort of proof do you require in your daily experiences? The fact is, SOME amount if "faith" is necessary in order to function as human beings. The amount of faith necessary depends, though, and can be quite small. The fact still remains that it is always there.

How about Newtons laws of motion (a thing at rest tends to stay at rest unless acted upon - what set the Big Bang in motion) and the Second Law of Thermodynamics (if the natural state of things is disorder, why is the universe ordered to begin with, and how come we see things become more ordered, i.e. the emergence of life)?

I would say there''s more of a probability that a God-like entity does exist than not, because if you deny a God-like entity, then all you really have left is chance. In a weird sort of way, there is no true athiest, because an atheist attibutes to chance the role of the "first thing" ... and chance takes the place as the god-like entity (a rather impersonal one at that, but it is the thing you believe made everything the way it is, and in fact the thing that keeps it all in motion). Thus in a way (maybe a small stretch) an atheist''s "god" is chance.

If you study probability, you know that as sequences of events get longer and longer, the probabilities of a desired outcome become much smaller and smaller. Thus something as simple, and yet as complex as the development of life would be fundamentally improbable on the smallest orders of magnitude. The whole probability that intelligent life came out of chaos is unfathomable. The chances are infinitely higher that a tornado would blow through a junkyard and produce a flying 747. If you wanted to think of it in codelike terms, think of someone trying to sell you a piece of hardware that is filled with data from a random number generator (a bunch of bits flipping randomly between 1 and 0), and expecting it to run a masterpeice of OpenGl in a user friendly environment with 100% stability. Would you buy it? Is it "probable" that the hardware should work? Yes. Is it "possible"? You''d have to be a fool to actually believe it. heck, I wouldn''t buy it!

So yes ... there may be a probabilty that the universe has no cause, no purpose, no creative entity, but that probability is so terribly improbable, it is (I say this with respect) foolish to hold onto that fact as an option. At least, if you have studied probability, you would be familiar that there comes a point that when the probability becomes small enough, you can count it impossible with a certain level of confidence. In this case your level of confidence would be 99.9999... to about a million decimal places.

ok ... I''m done. I''m not trying to convert anyone here. I leave you to your own beliefs. I just wanted to clarify that not all Christians are believing in something just to feel good, or without reason. It''s not an acualy proof, I''m afraid - more just talking from a common sense approach (I for one am terrible when it comes to dealing with algorithms and such). The argument as it stands is actually a philosophical argument, not theological. The ancient philosophers had much to say about it (Plato, Aristotle, etc.), and it is not dependant upon any divine revelation.

I''m sorry if I''ve caused hurt feelings . Please realize that I say this with the utmost respect for you as individuals and fellow programmers. Hey ... if we all agreed all the time life would get boring pretty quickly, wouldn''t you say?

eriol

First off, I want to apologize for two things. Firstly, my horrible spelling. It was never something I was good at. Secondly I want to apologize to every that my last post may have offended. I don''t believe that you are in any way inferior, just because your non-Christian.

David20321 -
I would like to point out to you that your beliefe about Christianity excluding all other religions is incorrect. I''m not sure where you heard it, but whoever told you must be talking about a different Christianity. My Christianity stresses that the particular label of the religion does not matter, but what gets you to Heaven is your personal relationship with the allknowing, infinate, and personal God, Jesus Christ.

This post has been very interesting to follow. I enjoy discussion religion with people who share my beliefs, and people who oppose them. I think its a good test of both people''s knowledge, and what they believe. But I must agree with many other people that have posted in saying that this isn''t exactly the place to post about religion. Thanks everyone for listening, I''m going to take my own advice now and shut up.

The Kid

I don''''t know what the future holds, but I know who holds the future.

Well, I don''t want to quote someone or dismiss someone''s thoughts on their beliefs. I live in America, I have the right to believe anything I want, to imagine anything I want, and fantasize about any woman I want (ooohhhhh Kirstin Dunst .

But what gets me is that every rapper that wins a grammy or something thanks god when some have killed or sold drugs or worse, yet they act like it was excuseable because fo their surroundings. The only person I would be thanking for an award is all the stupid bastards that bought my record that contains songs I didn''t write and regerutated lyrics that express nothing or change anything. People blame ''Marylyn Manson'' or other hard rock bands for causing white kids to shoot up schools, but say nothing about rappers who get arrested from shooting a gun or drug possesion because for some reason America has embraced rappers as ''telling it how it is'' when all they do is add to the drug problem and gun violence among teenagers.

If you don''t agree with me oh well.

There are a lot of unexplained things that happen... people disappear and are never found, all dinosaurs die... but they all have explanations, we just don''t know them. I''m kind of curious about what the bible says about dinosaurs, and bacteria, and black holes, or were they not discovered yet when it was written... I don''t worship chance, that would be kind of a boring religion, but I don''t believe that just because some chemicals on a giant floating rock(Earth) mixed together to form a chemical reaction that over millions of years kept getting more and more complicated until these chemical reactions started writing 3d computer programs that it was all started by an omnipotent super-being. Over the course of an infinite amount of time, everything that can happen is bound to happen. Your argument about the 747 makes sense, but you have to take into account that all the parts of the 747 are in the junkyard, and there were billions of tornadoes through billions of years.
The Kid:
Also about the all non-Christians going to hell... as I understand it, what you said is that if you have a close relationship with the "all-knowing, infinite and personal God, Jesus Christ" you go to heaven, doesn''t that mean that anybody who worships, say, Buddha or Athena or Zeus or Allah or are Jewish or whatever will all go to hell because they don''t believe that Jesus is the all-mighty messiah.
Eriol:
I am aware that it is unlikely that a certain pattern of chemical reactions occured on Earth to eventually form interesting patterns known as life, but it is also just as unlikely that if you flip a coin (1 is heads, 0 is tails) 20 times you will get 01110100101001001011 as if you get 11111111111111111111. Any particular turn of events is equally unlikely, but that doesn''t mean that, say, John Doe won the lottery or Bill Gates got 100 billion dollars, even though it''s incredibly unlikely, because God chose him.
Chance is just a way to express the unknown, I can''t tell what the lottery number is going to be so I express it as a probability. One such possibility is that there is an allmighty being known as "God" who had a son called "Jesus" who got crucified by Romans and then got reincarnated... but in my experience I have never seen oceans part and people come back to life and sticks turn into snakes and burning bushes talk, so it seems more like a strange fantasy novel written by some happy writer a long time ago whose book sold a lot of copies.
You seem to want to talk about chances, so here goes: There is no way to prove that either God is "Jehovah" or God was "Allah" or whether there were 20 gods like "Mercury" and "Zeus" or whether there were no gods. Since there is no evidence or proof of any of these ''theories'' over any of the others, they are all equally likely. Since there is an infinite number of possible beliefs, they are all infinitely unlikely, so I choose to not believe in anything, I just think they all are ''possible'' but there is no proof of any of them so there is no reason to believe strongly in any of them.
Also IMHO inanimate objects have no purpose until a person or creature decides on one, e.g. a rock just lying on the ground has no purpose, until someone picks it up and throws it, now it''s purpose is to hit something. What caused the big bang? No idea, we don''t know about anything that far back, I haven''t met anybody who was alive when it occured. According to newton I guess a force acted on it, caused by something else, there are a lot of scientif and religious theories about it, like that the universe expands and then contracts, starting another big bang etc. This seems as likely if not more likely than an omnipotent being snapping his fingers and saying "Let there be a big bang!" long before language was invented.
Oh yeah and if humans were created six days (maybe 7 or something im not sure exactly how many days it supposedly is) after the rest of the universe how come the rest of the universe and animals and rocks and stuff were all around billions of years before humans. Anyways how would the guy who wrote the bible know what happened millions of years before he was born? Or was it supposedly written by God? How did God get it published? Who was his editor? What kind of typewriter did he use, or did he use a pen? Why not write it in the sky with fire so people would believe in him?
Talking about physics; I''m sure somebody mentioned this here, but if God has infinited energy, and E=M*A according to Einstein, then he would have to have infinite mass, which means he would instantly suck up the universe and we''d all die...
Sorry if my facts about Christianity are incorrect, but I don''t believe in it strongly so I don''t own a bible .

"A man who believes he talks to God is religious, but a man who believes God talks to him is insane."

I''m all for christian stuff in these forums. Being a Catholic myself, I find it kind of stupid when people out there demand freedom of speech and then get upset when someone signs their name with "#DEFINE Jesus 1"...

Whoever signed their name as such; do not be afraid to show other people your beliefs.

- "What is God ?"
- I have two pills: the blue one will help you see what is God
the other one will erase your memory of our encounter and let
you live peacefully.

...

Woah woah woah!

I didn''t try to prove to you WHO this infinite being was ... I just tried to illustrate that the existance of the universe depends on some first cause. I didn''t even prove it to be a "who" in the regular sense - from my argument, who says it''s even anything remotely like a human identity.

My point was more to get you to think ... and I think it''s working . But I wasn''t basing my argument on religion. This is philosophy - pure and simple. Did I bring the Bible into my argument? Sounds like you have some issues with the Bible (though I think most of them are due to misunderstandings - I don''t believe in the literal translation of Genesis either ). I''d be more than willing to discuss it with you - but I want to keep purely religious matters off this discussion - let''s stick with philosophy ... actually we SHOULD be sticking to OpenGl.

Just to point out - Think how many billions and billions of years it would take for ONE 747 to come out of a junkyard, even with millions of tornadoes wrecking through it. For one thing - they wouldn''t be cooperative (that would suggest some higher order) - and more likely they would be undoing the work that each "may" have done. It''s a one shot deal ... and boy would THAT take long!!

Now think of the Earth! The Earth is WAY too young (and the universe too for that matter - yes ... we do have scientific approximations to the age of the earth and the universe) for such random chance to have already happened. And in addition, life is a delicate balance. If anything were to have gone not quite right ... a few degrees less here, a few more miles more there, a random spin off ... the whole thing could immediately fall apart. And such random instances would be expected in a totally random situation. Thus the perpetuation of order seems to be an indication that chance is not the only thing in effect. For chaos comes out of chance ... not order.

You raised some other interesting points ... but they still fail to answer to the fact that there had to be SOMETHING to start the process off. If you don''t, then there''s infinite regression ... and infinite regression is an impossibility. For one thing, it would take an infinite number of steps to have reached our version of the Big Bang. In which case, we couldn''t be carrying on this conversation right now .

Your point about God (or this being let''s say ...) having infinite mass made me laugh (not to be offenseive, the thought just struck me as funny). I imagined a huge balloon suddenly implode and carry the universe with itself. Anyway ... who says to say that it''s physical (why not spiritual)? Or entirely perfect for that matter? My argument doesn''t cover these points ... again, just pointing out that such a being must exist.

Religion and theology go more into the sphere of "who" or "what" this being is. But philosophy can lead you up to the point of recognizing the existance of such a being. Again ... I''m not trying to convert you . I''m doing my best to discuss upon common ground, and respect your point of view. But you shouldn''t be too quick to just ignore ideas because they seem different, or you just can''t understand it at first glance. Explore. Ask. Learn. If you seek Truth earnestly ... you''re bound to find it. At worst it''s a bunch of stories ... but what if some of them turn out to be true? And what if they are true, and you had the option of finding out, but never did? What would be the consequences? Are there consequences? Do you want to risk it?

Consider Pascal''s Wager:
If I believe in God (let''s say as Allah, or Yaweh, or Buddah, etc.) and God exists, then I have won everything.
If He doesn''t ... well then, I''m just dead (non-existant) and I haven''t lost anything either.

Yet if I don''t believe in God and God exists ... I''ve lost everything. And if He doesn''t exist ... well, I haven''t won anything either ... I''m just dead (non-existant).

There are some pretty high stakes being offered - paradise, inferno, reincarnation, obliteration ... are you going to take the risk? You don''t lose anything if you do. Even if you don''t want to ... isn''t it at least in your favor to at least look into it?

Again ... just trying to get you thinking. Hope I''m not coming across hard or anything. You have my respect. Take care, David20321!

eriol

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Original post by eriol
As far as prooving God's existance ... well ... what do you mean by proof. Aquinas has 5 "proofs", if you will, for the existance of a higher entity (god-like), but it doesn't reveal much about it/him/her, save that it is there. Basically there is the argument from design, first mover, first cause ... I forget the other two (first do-er?), but they're pretty similar to the first cause and first mover proofs. But I think that the proof you want is non-existant. In fact ... you never have such proof, even in your experiencial life. Ask yourself this ... can you really "know" anything? How do you know? What sort of proof do you require in your daily experiences? The fact is, SOME amount if "faith" is necessary in order to function as human beings. The amount of faith necessary depends, though, and can be quite small. The fact still remains that it is always there.

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The problem with that is that these five "proofs" aren't actually proof, but assertions, each of which would require to be proven themselves first.

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How about Newtons laws of motion (a thing at rest tends to stay at rest unless acted upon - what set the Big Bang in motion) and the Second Law of Thermodynamics (if the natural state of things is disorder, why is the universe ordered to begin with,

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First of all, who said the universe was ordered to begin with? Nobody, it's just less ordered now.

How about this: Newton's laws are just approximations of reality. They work, up to a certain level. (Einstein's laws are more accurate at extreme values)

We do not understand everything about what set the big bang in motion. Quantum physics? I have no idea. Neither does anyone else. Is that a good reason to belive a magic man did it? No. Magic men in the sky have always been used to explain things we didn't know anything about. Lightning? oh yea, a long time back that was considered "proof" of god(s).

Moreover, I think you need to read up on your thermodynamics. (hint: Xian pamphlets and websites are not a good source of scientific information...)

The second law of thermodynamics says, "No process is possible in which the sole result is the transfer of energy from a cooler to a hotter body." Or put another way:
"The entropy of a closed system cannot decrease." Entropy is an indication of unusable energy and often (but not always!) corresponds to intuitive notions of disorder or randomness. Some xians thus misinterpret the 2nd law to say that things invariably progress from order to disorder.

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and how come we see things become more ordered, i.e. the emergence of life)?

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The earth is not a closed system. Maybe you heard of photosynthesis. Where I live, they teach it in junior high.

Basically, energy from the sun is used by plants, to manufacture sugar. Sugar, that is energy to animals, including humans...

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I would say there's more of a probability that a God-like entity does exist than not, because if you deny a God-like entity, then all you really have left is chance. In a weird sort of way, there is no true athiest, because an atheist attibutes to chance the role of the "first thing" ... and chance takes the place as the god-like entity (a rather impersonal one at that, but it is the thing you believe made everything the way it is, and in fact the thing that keeps it all in motion). Thus in a way (maybe a small stretch) an atheist's "god" is chance.

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"Chance", huh? Well, all things have to turn out one way or another. You have not demonstrated why it would take god(s). Excuse me now, while I go and sacrifice a goat to chance

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If you study probability, you know that as sequences of events get longer and longer, the probabilities of a desired outcome become much smaller and smaller. Thus something as simple, and yet as complex as the development of life would be fundamentally improbable on the smallest orders of magnitude. The whole probability that intelligent life came out of chaos is unfathomable. The chances are infinitely higher that a tornado would blow through a junkyard and produce a flying 747. If you wanted to think of it in codelike terms, think of someone trying to sell you a piece of hardware that is filled with data from a random number generator (a bunch of bits flipping randomly between 1 and 0), and expecting it to run a masterpeice of OpenGl in a user friendly environment with 100% stability. Would you buy it? Is it "probable" that the hardware should work? Yes. Is it "possible"? You'd have to be a fool to actually believe it. heck, I wouldn't buy it!

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Wow, I have just read the same example for the zillionth time. Wonder how every xian always "comes up" with excactly the same example about the boeing 747...

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So yes ... there may be a probabilty that the universe has no cause, no purpose, no creative entity, but that probability is so terribly improbable, it is (I say this with respect) foolish to hold onto that fact as an option. At least, if you have studied probability, you would be familiar that there comes a point that when the probability becomes small enough, you can count it impossible with a certain level of confidence. In this case your level of confidence would be 99.9999... to about a million decimal places.

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You are not presenting how you calculate this number. It cannot be calculated. But statistics are fun. Try this:

Take a deck of cards, shuffle it good. Then lay it out on the table. Isn't it amazing? The probability of the sequence you see appearing is 1/52 for the first card, 1/52 x 1/51 at the second card, 1/52 x 1/51 x 1/50 by the third card and so on. The probability that you produced the sequence you just did is 1/52 x 1/51 x 1/50......x 1/3 x 1/2 x 1/1 ( more simply, 1/(52!) ), or 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000012398

WOW, that is statistically impossible! Do it again two times, and you have done the statistically impossible, THREE TIMES IN A ROW, completely without any help from god(s).



Edited by - mr BiCEPS on May 14, 2001 4:35:03 AM

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Original post by eriol
Just to point out - Think how many billions and billions of years it would take for ONE 747 to come out of a junkyard, even with millions of tornadoes wrecking through it. For one thing - they wouldn't be cooperative (that would suggest some higher order) - and more likely they would be undoing the work that each "may" have done. It's a one shot deal ... and boy would THAT take long!!

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Once again, I must ask you how you calculated that the probability of life is equal to that? As you might know, we do not know how life formed, and thus it is impossible to make such calculations.

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Now think of the Earth! The Earth is WAY too young (and the universe too for that matter - yes ... we do have scientific approximations to the age of the earth and the universe) for such random chance to have already happened. And in addition, life is a delicate balance. If anything were to have gone not quite right ... a few degrees less here, a few more miles more there, a random spin off ... the whole thing could immediately fall apart. And such random instances would be expected in a totally random situation. Thus the perpetuation of order seems to be an indication that chance is not the only thing in effect. For chaos comes out of chance ... not order.

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Sure, the individual is fragile to environmental changes, but a population as a whole is often not. Some will have what it takes (if not, the species will die) to live through the changes, these are the ones that will mate, end have and offspring with similair traits.

You might know that there are people that are immune to HIV, let's assume that HIV hits all people in some way. Who survives to bring forth the next generation?

You seem to have misunderstood the evolution thing, it is not random, quite the contrary, actually. only the specimens best fitted for their environment will survive. This will make formation of new species rather fast, on a geological timescale.

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You raised some other interesting points ... but they still fail to answer to the fact that there had to be SOMETHING to start the process off. If you don't, then there's infinite regression ... and infinite regression is an impossibility. For one thing, it would take an infinite number of steps to have reached our version of the Big Bang. In which case, we couldn't be carrying on this conversation right now .

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As you might know, time and space are dependant of eachother. So, per def. the universe has existed for all time.

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At worst it's a bunch of stories ... but what if some of them turn out to be true? And what if they are true, and you had the option of finding out, but never did? What would be the consequences? Are there consequences? Do you want to risk it?

Consider Pascal's Wager:
If I believe in God (let's say as Allah, or Yaweh, or Buddah, etc.) and God exists, then I have won everything.
If He doesn't ... well then, I'm just dead (non-existant) and I haven't lost anything either.


Yet if I don't believe in God and God exists ... I've lost everything. And if He doesn't exist ... well, I haven't won anything either ... I'm just dead (non-existant).

There are some pretty high stakes being offered - paradise, inferno, reincarnation, obliteration ... are you going to take the risk? You don't lose anything if you do. Even if you don't want to ... isn't it at least in your favor to at least look into it?

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Oh yea... Pascal's wager... The worst case for a believer is no afterlife, and the worst case for an atheist is eternity in hell. At a first glance, it seems like a good deal. However...

[*]How do i know what god(s) I should belive in? What if I belive in Jesus, but end up face to face with Hades or someone else? That would be a bummer, wouldn't it?<br><br>
[*]Are the god(s) morons? Don't the god(s) know, that you're believing for the sole purpose of not having to rot in hell?<br><br>
[*]If there actually are no god(s), you <i>will </i> have lost a great deal. A large part of your life will have been wasted going to churches, praying, etc.<br><br>
[*]It is often self-refuting, depending on the person's description of the god. If you believe that the god will forgive anyone for anything, or judge people purely on how they lived their life and not what they believed, or that everyone gets to Heaven regardless (unless maybe they were evil serial killers), then the Wager is meaningless. You might as well say "Believe in God, or you'll…hm.. go to Heaven anyway." In such a case, it doesn't make a scrap of difference whether the person believes or not.<br><br>Edited by - mr BiCEPS on May 14, 2001 5:10:57 AM

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Original post by Anonymous Poster
do not be afraid to show other people your beliefs.

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Be afraid, be very afraid.

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Just because you''re outnumbered doesn''t mean you''re wrong.

www.directdeveloper.co.uk