Why do you think anything in nature has a specific purpose?
You continue to repeat yourself without explaining. Why is this illogical, and why do you think everything needs a purpose? What does this have to do with forests of chairs?
This thread is going in a circle, no matter how many degrees are in it.
Welcome to the boards.
I’m all for learning about why God must exist, but I can do without the snide comments:
This is a pretty strange thing to say, since you present no physical evidence of God, merely your written words, personal feelings and belief. As has been pointed out, you also use circular arguments.
Like yours?
Please realise that we have a lot of viewpoints on this board, from atheists, through agnostics to members of various religions.
(I assume purely from your method of posting that you are a Protestant Christian, who probably believes in Creationism.)
Do you mean that anything that is created with a specific purpose doesn’t occur by accident?
That’s simply a definition. If it’s created deliberately, it’s not created by accident.
What I confidently expect you really mean is:
‘things occur in nature that look as if they have a specific purpose. Therefore someone created them, and that proves my particular God exists.’
It doesn’t.
So far the evidence has shown that the Universe expanded from a Big Bang billions of years ago.
Various religions have attempted to show that there is a God who created it all. So far there is no reason to believe that any God exists, let alone a particular one.
Yes, the definition of a forest is a lot of trees.
Actually I would be far more likely to believe in God if there were forests of tables and chairs. At least it would show some intention to cater for humans.
Actually it isn’t. We both agree that the Universe exists. You assume that because it exists, it must have a Creator. OK, then if God exists, who created Him?
You assume that there is a purpose. You need to because your starting point is that God exists and so there must be a purpose.
If you pour enough water into a container, it exactly fills the container. Your argument is like saying 'the water precisely fills the container, therefore someone designed the water to do that."
Have a read of some modern physics and you’ll see time is pretty tricky stuff. Time depends on the observer, for example.
It’s true we have a cultural definition of time based on our solar system, but I shouldn’t think the year is as accurate as the rate at which certain things decay, or the distance light travels in a year.
Hey Baskerville, stop hounding us. 
First of all, time is defined much more strictly, by atomic clocks. The period of the earth changes a bit year by year, and is not nearly a precise enough measure.
Second, time is intimately involved in physical processes. By measuring these in stars thousands of light years away, we can be pretty sure that time (with due account for relatvistic effects) is the same there as here.
It would be quite nice if you took the effort to read and understand a physics book or two before broadcasting your hypotheses.
Nothing that is blue is orange. This is not an argument.
A “degree” is an arbitrary man-made measurement. There are 360 degrees in a circle because we have decided it will be so.
Where’s the proof of this?
You’re the one making the claim that there is any purpose. Prove that.
Not to derail the thread, but I must say I disagree with this. For one thing, you imply undirected randomness. This is not really true, as there is a direction – improved survival skills. In all of the myriad combinations for cells to fit together, it seems inevitable that some sort of neural pathway would eventually develop, and from there improvement of the model would be inevitable. Given that, it’s almost surprising that there aren’t more highly developed brains found in nature.
What is the purpose of the (postulated) existence of god(s)?
ted, I’m not a moderator, so this is in no way an “official” comment, but it is generally considered bad form here to initiate a debate then more-or-less decline to respond to people who have taken the time and trouble to comment. If you want to debate, do. IMHO, dropping in on your own thread with a string of inscrutible platitudes is not a debate. Meanwhile, I again recommend Hawking’s A Brief History of Time.
It is absolutely contestable that “the specific purpose” of trees is to be tables and chairs. We haven’t even made a significant portion of all the trees that have ever existed into furniture. That’s like saying “the specific purpose of human beings is to be lampshades” just because some tiny fraction of us might have been turned into lampshades (I’m aware that claim is disputed).
More on-point: There ARE 983 degrees in a circle…or four…or however many humans have chosen to divide a circle into. You’re surely aware the term “degree” is a human-originated subdivision of the circle’s arc? It’s purely arbitrary – look at the division of circles into 400 gradients, for example.
Conceptually, there are an infinite number of points making up a true circle.
So you see, some of your examples are complete nonsense right off the bat – that doesn’t help you break free from the prison of circular reasoning, and it sure doesn’t lure me inside, to speak for myself.
Sailboat
Have you ever read The Red Queen’s Race ? It talks about this, and has an explanation. There’s ( at least ) two kinds of evolutionary adaptation; adaptation to a more or less static condition, like a cold climate, and adaptation to something that co-evolves in an “arms race”. In the first case, once you evolve to where you can handle the condition, you stop; there’s no further pressure. In the second case, you need to “run as fast as you can to stay in the same place”.
Most creatures evolve just enough brainpower to handle their lifestyle and stop; brains are expensive. According to the “Machiavelli Theory” of human intelligence, we reached the point where our fellow human’s machinations were our greatest threat, and therefore our greatest source of evolutionary pressure. Since we have the same gene pool, the result was runaway intelligence; any mutation that gave hominid A an advantage over hominid B, would end up spreading to everyone’s offspring, negating it’s advantage for A’s offspring. Until hominid C comes along with yet another mutation, kicking off another cycle.
Like peacock tails, where bigger = more attractive to females, our brain size just ran away with itself, until we reached a practical limit; the human female’s birth canal, in this case.
Excellent point. Thanks.
Far be it from me to speak for any Ted, friar or otherwise, but consciousness “is something to us”, we experience it (self-referentially, actually). Now, one can study The Condition Human “externally”, as it were, describing the whole mental process as a complicated electrochemical response to environmental stimuli, chosen for in evolutionary terms due to its ability to provide the organism with a forecast of likely future outcomes and incorporate those awarenesses into mechanical-instinctive calculations of what actions will best ensure survival…
…but with regards to
… such an argument fails to address the statement at hand, since, while it affirm Mindless Matter in Motion, it negates the emergence of Mind; it says that consciousness as we know it (as we think we know it) is no more than an illusion.
And although it’s useful (in selective situations) to study human behavior as if we were mere response-driven dependent-variable critters, it is so thoroughly not how we experience ourselves that it’s pretty useless as a perspective from which to comprehend one’s own life and self in relationship to world. As much so, in fact, as radical solipsism (i.e., “The world in its entirety, including my own ‘past’, exists only in my head right now as a ‘dream’ of sorts”).
Ockham’s Razor can slice away all other postulates as “things we can do without in our model of reality” until the little Ockham’s Razorblade inside grows dull — doesn’t matter, if we find that in actual practice we can’t do without those things after all in the pursuit of living and understanding our lives.
Which explains why so few people have invested in one.
Hmm. And if you need proof, you have no faith! Right?