There is no evidence for God, so why do you believe?

[Subduction Zone]

His costume (uniform?) is too tight!

Blasphemy!! Okay the choir will now sing:

 

[ElishaElijah]

The prophets all fail when one reads them without prejudice. Also, you need to know when some books were written. They were not all written by the people with their names on them.

The prophets all fail? How so? Daniel fails?

 

[Muffled]

Ooh, that's not a good sign. That indicates that God is likely not to exist.

If you want to claim to be evidence for God you would have to show why. Just making a statement and not being able to support it shows that you do not know if you are evidence for God and could be evidence against God. Mere belief is worthless when it comes to an evidentiary argument.

I believe I have a long post for that. I am sure you will find my belief backed by evidence.

I always have to remind people that, when I say I believe it is due to RF rules that no-one can know anything. Even if I believe I have absolutely sure evidence I still have to say, I believe.

 

[Muffled]

Can people get results other ways, seems like it.
God did for me in 5 minutes what I couldn’t do by first delivering me from my addictions, which enabled me to get to the root of why I drank and drugged to begin with by cleaning house and taking a moral inventory, making amends. This resulted in a clear conscience. Was born again and received Eternal Life and the power to change, live a godly life and also help people who are in a similar situation as I was.
I love God’s ways:


“Have you not known? Have you not heard? The everlasting God, the Lord, The Creator of the ends of the earth, Neither faints nor is weary. His understanding is unsearchable. He gives power to the weak, And to those who have no might He increases strength. Even the youths shall faint and be weary, And the young men shall utterly fall, But those who wait on the Lord Shall renew their strength; They shall mount up with wings like eagles, They shall run and not be weary, They shall walk and not faint.”
‭‭Isaiah‬ ‭40:28-31‬ ‭NKJV‬‬

One should not conflate "Hey! It worked for me!" with the truth. You belief may have been a key factor in your recovery. That is good. That does not mean that it is right in all things, In fact it is easy to show that some aspects of your beliefs are incorrect.[/QUOTE]

I believe in other words you are saying: Don't bore me with evidence I don't wish to acknowledge.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

[To observe abiogenesis naturally] find a rocky planet or moon with no life on it that has oceans and relative environmental stability, and watch for a few million years.

we haven't observed life anywhere else.

We've barely begun looking, and apart from superficial looks at Mars and Titan, not in the places in the solar system considered most likely to harbor life, like Europa and Enceladus. Mars very well may had life in the past, when it had oceans, an atmosphere, and a magnetic field to protect them, but if it still does, it may be subsurface and difficult to detect using rovers that can't dig very deep. The Huygens probe made a soft landing on Titan, but just took surface photos from its landing site for a few minutes before succumbing to the ambient surface environment, like the probes landing on Venus.

I guess that means that you don't have a rocket ship and a few millions years to observe abiogenesis. With those you could expect to see life arising de novo.

Why should it take millions of years?

Every stage of evolution before cultural evolution takes eons (see below). Nature moves more slowly than man in his laboratories.

Is it going to take that long in the Lab?

No. That's where the intelligence comes in. Man can accelerate natural processes artificially as he does with biological evolution (animal breeders, horticulture), or when making artificial diamonds.

Who has a closed mind? Depends where you are standing. Yours look very closed from where I'm standing.

Then I would suggest that you don't know what the phrase means. A closed mind is one closed off to evidence that contradicts a faith-based belief, like Ken Ham's mind. He's happy to brag that his mind is closed for business, seeing it as a virtue.

But it's not a virtue. Being closed to evidence means that if one is demonstrably incorrect, he can never discover that. He has no means to correct his error.

Have you looked at the any of the evidence for abiogenesis yet as I suggested earlier today. Are you making outlines of what you discovered and coming up with questions about the science, or are you planning to never look and just keep repeating that there is no evidence for abiogenesis?

God created nature. Of course I enjoy what God created. Without him it would just be another pointless accident.

You've been trained to think that way. The universe and our surrounding world don't need to have a point to be enjoyed. Maybe you've forgotten that. You once knew, before you began taking a god belief seriously and let others teach you that life is meaningless without theism. Now you believe that. I don't, and find life quite robust whether the universe is godded or godless.

I posted this recently in one of these threads, maybe this one. It says it all: "I don't think we're here for anything, we're just products of evolution. You can say 'Gee, your life must be pretty bleak if you don't think there's a purpose' but I'm anticipating a good lunch." One can find meaning and satisfaction in life without religious beliefs, which add neither. All one gets for that faith is hope that things will be better after death.

The chemicals didn't create themselves.

The Big Bang did.

I notice that you like to creep backward when discussing any of the five types of evolution. When discussing biological evolution, you oddly stated that you didn't care until somebody told you where life came from (would you care about an intruder in your home without knowing where he came from?). Now, you dismiss chemical evolution (abiogenesis) the same way, with a reference to the material evolution that preceded. What next? You don't want to hear about the evolution of mind and sentience (psychological evolution) until you know how brains got here? How about cultural evolution, the fifth and last of the evolutions, and the one that proceeded once the world had intellect. Are you uninterested in the history of civilization until you understand how a mind capable of technology evolved?

It's all one long, unbroken chain, going back to the beginning of universal expansion.

 

[Wildswanderer]

Then I would suggest that you don't know what the phrase means. A closed mind is one closed off to evidence that contradicts a faith-based belief, l

There's also such a thing as believing anything, that's a mind that's too open. Question everything and hold fast to the good.

 

[Wildswanderer]

No new atoms are formed. No atoms are destroyed.

Everything in your body ultimately came from your food, water, or the air. Everything.

You just contradicted yourself.

 

[Wildswanderer]

You have some gall to try to tell God how he made life and instead want to listen to what some Hebrew priests (almost certainly during the Babylonian exile) put on paper and sold it as "God wrote this". You really, really should study the history of the Bible a bit.

I have.

 

[Polymath257]

The Bible explains life, our purpose, who created us and why, wisdom and understanding of our world, way to eternal life and victory over sinful patterns, power to live a holy life.

So it doesn't explain how galaxies form? or why the background radiation has the nature it does? Or what sorts of living things there were 100 million years ago? Or how chemical binds form? Or what makes one thing nutritious and another poisonous?

So it actually gives no explanations at all?

How does your view of life empower you over lust, un forgiveness, hatred, envy, covetousness, perversions, addictions etc.?

I don't ask it to. Those are matters for me to decide for myself how to deal with, based on my values and goals.

What I am interested in is the truth of how things actually are. And the things you mention are irrelevant for that.

As far as what’s going to happen in the future, God has shown with accuracy future events and the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. Although He hasn’t shown the exact day of His coming but like a thief in the night and told us to be sober and watchful in our prayer.

So what? I find it incredibly unlikely that the Bible is an accurate description of what is going to happen. It's track record is poor and the things is claims are frankly unbelievable.

Have you read the Prophets? Don’t you see what’s happening in our world? Racing towards a one world government perfect for the one world leader to emerge, the antichrist.

Yes, I have read them. They are confused, vague, and rather silly. To interpret them in terms of current events is, I think, misreading them badly.

This is not the work of natural selection.

That makes me think you don't understand what 'natural selection' is.

 

[Polymath257]

You just contradicted yourself.

No, I did not.

What do you think was the contradiction?

No new atoms are made. No atoms are destroyed. But the atoms that were in the non-alive food are now part of you, which is alive.

 

[Wildswanderer]

What do you think it means for food to 'nourish' you?

The chemicals in that food are broken down and reassembled into the chemicals that make up your body.

No new atoms are formed. No atoms are destroyed.

Everything in your body ultimately came from your food, water, or the air. Everything.

You are alive because you are the materials in your food, water, and air, but arranged in a particular way. The materials you ate were not alive. But now they make up *you* and are living matter.

So, yes, that food is 'becoming alive': it goes from not alive to alive.

Ok then, I expect a baby to grow in the garden. Again, food doesn't create a body. No one should have to explain this. It's not creating life from nothing, it's nourishing what already exists.

 

[Wildswanderer]

Every stage of evolution before cultural evolution takes eons (see below).

Time, the magic wand that can make life from nothing!
Like I said, comic book stories.

 

[Polymath257]

Ok then, I expect a baby to grow in the garden. Again, food doesn't create a body. No one should have to explain this. It's not creating life from nothing, it's nourishing what already exists.

Wrong. What already exists helps to organize it into something alive. The material that was not alive is now alive. Nobody should have to explain this.

And yes, the material from the food makes up the body. This is common knowledge, I thought.

A baby does not grow in the garden because the arrangement of matter isn't the same there as in the womb. So it doesn't promote the organization in the same way.

Instead, the materials in the garden become the plants, insects, etc.

 

[Polymath257]

Time, the magic wand that can make life from nothing!
Like I said, comic book stories.

Some types of things take time. It takes time for a star to go through its various stages. We can't see a single star do that within our lifetime, but we can know that this is what happens over the course of millions to billions of years.

It takes 10,000 years for light generated at the center of the sun to make it to the surface. That is far longer than we have had written language. But we can still understand the process.

The chemical reactions required for life to get started are not likely to happen quickly. The process seems to have taken hundreds of millions of years based on the records we have. A process of that length is not going to be duplicated in a lab.

 

[Polymath257]

Ok then, I expect a baby to grow in the garden. Again, food doesn't create a body. No one should have to explain this. It's not creating life from nothing, it's nourishing what already exists.

imagine a fertilized egg cell. It is microscopic. then imagine the baby that will be in 9 months. That baby is much larger than the egg cell.

Where do you think the matter came from in going from the cell to the baby? Do you think it came out of nowhere?

And, as the baby grows up and becomes an adult, it becomes even larger and more massive. Where do you think the matter comes from to accomplish this?

 

[Wildswanderer]

All one gets for that faith is hope that things will be better after death.

No, what one gets is purpose and meaning for otherwise meaninglessness. You get up and you do the same thing you did yesterday, perhaps you create a product, so you can make money, so you can buy food, you can get up tomorrow and do the same thing over again until one day you die.

This is why people that don't even know God can identify with what Solomon says in Ecclesiastes. Most of the book is from the perspective of Life under the sun... But his conclusion is that it's actually all about God. BTW, the word interpreted "meaningless " is likely a poor interpretation. What the word " hebel" really mean is closer to a breath, or morning fog... This feeling of knowing that everything is temporary. So, it's not ultimately meaningless, but life here under the sun is like a breath you take, here and gone in an instant.
And the only thing that lasts is God's commandments. Of course Solomon didn't have the understanding of what God would ultimately do about disobedience...he lived in a time of laws with little understanding of grace. But that's a whole other discussion.

God also provides hope in this life not only the next, but this " hebel" life is gonna be gone in an eyeblink, and all our chasing the wind won't mean a thing.
Life here doesn't have to be bleak, because we know everything good is from God and we were created for him and to enjoy what he gives us.

 

[Subduction Zone]

I have.

I doubt it. Where and from whom?

 

[Wildswanderer]

Where do you think the matter came from in going from the cell to the baby? Do you think it came out of nowhere?

No it came from another life.. which is the point.

 

[Subduction Zone]

The prophets all fail? How so? Daniel fails?

When do you think that Daniel was written? If you understood this, then yes. Daniel fails.

 

[Subduction Zone]

Time, the magic wand that can make life from nothing!
Like I said, comic book stories.

Time is certainly a factor. But then time is a factor when humans breed. They don't have sex one night and instantly shoot out a baby. What? Nine months to make a baby? Comic book stories.