At last, some evidence that we’ve dispelled some of Nolies’ ignorance: he’s learned how to spell “gentile.”
I followed this debate as it unfolded.
Can the existance of God be proven?
A Christain pastor against a Former pastor who is now an atheist…
True to form, Nolies. Incapable on discussing an idea that differs from your preconception, and twisting my words to say something completely contrary to what I actually said.
So you appear to believe that pre-technical sheepherders of 3,000 years ago were capable of understanding the big bang, evolution, deep time and the vastness of the universe, had it been explained to them, despite having absolutely no cultural or scientific context for such ideas.
Amazing.
But to dismiss our entire accumulation of knowledge over the last 3,000 years, and especially the last 400 since Frances Bacon as “arrogance” … I can’t find a word far enough beyond “amazing” …
“If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.” – Isaac Newton
Those same sheepherders believed the earth was flat, in the center of the universe, and that stars were points of light on a “firmament” that rotated over the earth. Am I arrogant to believe that the earth is a sphere which orbits the sun, and that stars are very large and distant?
And just for the record, I went to public school, too.
But I’ll bet you paid attention in class
Ah yes Isaac Newton a great Christain who believed in creation…
Who was not a biologist and died 132 years before the publication of On the Origin of Species. What’s your point?
And once again completely ignoring the real questions …
What if creationism is right?
It’s a shame the atheist stopped posting, since he was winning. The theist began to lose credibility when he saw total eclipses as evidence of God, and fell apart completely when he showed his ignorance of mathematics and physics.
Then…everything that we as a human race have taught ourselves about the sciences of geology, biology, botany, paleontology, chemistry, astronomy, and physics, using the original brain equipment that God issued us, will have turned out to be wrong.
How do you explain that? Our factory settings from Day Six were out of whack, we were never supposed to send our thoughts in those particular directions?
God created us to be Thinkers, Tinkerers, to be endlessly curious about how the world works. And while we were working out our genetic inheritance of thinking and tinkering, we have come upon these things that we call “scientific truths”. So if God created us to be Thinkers and Tinkerers, and while using these skills we’ve found out some things that seem to call our Creator’s very existence into question, where does that leave God? “Oops, guess I should’ve left out more of the critical thinking and put in an extra helping of mindless acceptance…”? Bet He’s feelin’ pretty stoopid right about now…
Or maybe…creationism is wrong, and all along we have been fulfilling the promise that was in us ever since the day that Adam was told by God to name all the animals. Fast foward from Adam…X number of years…to Carolus Linnaeus–that’s homo sapiens in a nutshell. He Who Names Things.
God created us to want to understand the world around us. And our understanding of the world around us is that it was not created in 6,000 years, Poof! just like that.
Nice!
Siege is rather fond of quoting this:
If I am forbidden by man to use my mind to address how God may have created, because in his opinion an excessively literalistic reading of story in Genesis 1-4 is the correct one, then I have failed to obey Him by following the command of man instead.
Nolies, rather than looking superciliously on us, consider explaining why our understanding of Scripture and how the world operates is wrong in your eyes. For me, the literalist reading means that either God was lying in dictating Genesis 1, or was lying in what He put in His creation that would give a reasonable person cause to believe it’s several billion years old. My God is not a liar.
Fred sums it up pretty good.
Interesting. Razorsharp’s idea of a worthwhile cite is a racist’s blog (read down below about “naked subsaharan Africans [with a] mean I.Q. of seventy”).
I think evidence is plentiful, has been presented in small quantity, and will be presented in any greater quantity desired. And, for the 1,378th time, evolution has zero, zip, zilch, goose egg to do with the origin of life. You might be able to figure that out from the dictionary definition, about dealing with how life forms change over time.
Razorsharp:
That is NICE.
Polycarp,
If you say that first off, life evolved because the scientific evidence says so. Then at the same time you say that I believe in Jesus, the Jesus of the bible. Then if you would witness to someone and if you would point to what the scripture says about the need for Jesus to get to heaven, haven’t you undermined your authority to even use scripture!
or was lying in what He put in His creation that would give a reasonable person cause to believe it’s several billion years old. My God is not a liar.
You say reasonable person?
When astronomers tested their theory and pointed the Hubble at one of the darkest places in space. If their theory on the Big Bang is correct then they should see the light that has taken Billions of years to get here and be able to literally look back in time and see Galaxies forming as they were billions of years ago when that light was first sent. You now what they found don’t you? Perfectly formed galaxies, so a reasonable person who say “We found nothing like what are premise dictated we would. Maybe our premise is wrong?” no instead they just added a few billion years to the age of the universe to account for what they found. So it shows that they are tied to the premise and science and investigation are irrelevant…
BTW the athiest quit because he was being beaten to a pulp…
Razorsharp, you are post #392 in this thread, are are reiterating points which were made and refuted long ago. If you wish to join the discussion on the creationist side, why don’t you go back and reread the entire thread. One of the things you will find is a long list of requests for **Nolies **to support these same arguments, which he has summarily ignored. Maybe you can help him out and answer some of them.
Not that I think he’s interested, but I’d like to provide Nolies with a link to the talkorigins transitional fossil FAQ.
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-transitional.html
One of the things that Creationists will tell you is, “Look at how perfectly animals everywhere fit their environments. This proves that the Creator personally designed them.”
However, I can think of at least three species that do not fit their environments perfectly.
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Whitetail deer have trouble in deep snow, and especially snow with a crust on top–their long slender legs just posthole and get trapped, and they can’t bound away to safety. This means that in the parts of their North American range where they encounter deep snow, they have to “yard up”, where they are easy prey for coyotes (and wolves, in the places where deer and wolves still co-exist). Question: If God specifically designed whitetail deer for their North American ecological niche, which includes places with deep snow, why didn’t He do a better job? Why didn’t he give them wide splayed feet like wolves, to enable them to run over the crust like wolves do? Why didn’t he give them more powerful legs with jumping ability like kangaroos, to enable them to punch through the snow and get away? Or else, why didn’t He simply explain to Odocoileus virginianus when He created them that they needed to limit themselves to habitats without deep snow?
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Anhingas. *"It has been suggested that the functions of the spread-wing postures in these birds is to dry the wings after wetting. Biologists once thought that deficient production of oils from the preen gland necessitate wing-drying behaviors. We now know, however, that the degree of waterproofing of feathers is primarily due to their microscopic structure, not to their being oiled…Anhingas…have unusually low metabolic rates and unusually high rates of heat loss from their bodies. Whether wet or dry, they exhibit spread-wing postures mostly under conditions of bright sunlight and cool ambient temperatures, and characteristically orient themselves with their backs to the sun. Thus, it appears that Anhingas adopt a spread-wing posture primarily for thermoregulation – to absorb solar energy to supplement their low metabolic heat production and to offset partly their inordinately high rate of heat loss due to convection and (when wet) evaporation from their plumage."*
Question: If God specifically designed the anhinga, why did He make them have such low metabolic heat production and such high rates of heat loss whenever they get wet, that they have to spend valuable time every day sitting in the sun and regulating their own body temperature? Other underwater fishing birds, like mergansers, don’t have to do this. -
Homo sapiens. Humans have no fur, and thus are vulnerable to hypothermia when the ambient temperature gets down below body temperature (Cite.) Which is 98.6 F. This means that if humans expect to survive in their ecological niche naked, without clothing of any kind, they need to have an environment that is, not merely “room temperature” of 72 degrees, but one that is constantly at least 80 or 90 degrees. In other words, the tropics.
However, even the tropics, it gets cold sometimes.
Tahiti. It gets down in the 60s at night sometimes. That’s cold enough for hypothermia. And those are average temperatures–that means that there are cold snaps where it’s even colder than the 60s.
Baghdad, which is close enough to the location of the Garden of Eden according to Genesis (“between the Tigris and the Euphrates”), is even colder. It gets down in the 30s in the winter. Definitely cold enough for hypothermia, and definitely not the place for a tropical species. You wouldn’t try to keep a parakeet outdoors in Baghdad year-round, it’s too cold. And the parakeet has feathers to insulate himself, up to a point.
Question: If God created Man to live between the Tigris and the Euphrates, where it gets darn cold in January, why didn’t He give him fur? As it is, homo sapiens is spectacularly ill-suited to survive in a non-tropical environment au naturel, without clothing.
Conversely, if God designed Man for a tropical climate, why didn’t He give Adam instructions to leave the Garden of Eden and find someplace warmer?
God only gave mankind “clothing” after Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit–the original game plan was to have them live permanently in the climate of Baghdad, where it gets down to the 30s in January. If all animals are perfectly designed by God to fit their environment, why didn’t God give Adam and Eve fur?
Ahh… the 'ol racist canard mixed in with a little subterfuge. Here is the actual quote:
Now, as one can plainly see, nothing was mentioned about being “naked”. Furthermore, the author stated that, “many evolutionists say that the black sub-Saharan Africans have a mean IQ somewhere near 70.” (paraphrase)
So, the lesson here is, if you are unable to come up with a reasoned response, resort to a smear.
Oh? I’ve undermined my authority to use Scripture? On what grounds?
Oh, and by the way, I’m not particularly interested in “getting to Heaven,” per se. I’m doing what my Lord and Savior calls me to to – commands me to do – here on Earth, secure in the knowledge that He loves me and will provide for me. One of the saddest things I find about evangelicalism is that it’s “all about ME” – “how can I placate God in such a way as to be sure that I will get to heaven?” That’s not what He told us to do. That’s not what He’s all about.
And finally, if God is the Creator of both the Universe and Scripture, then they should agree on what He put in both. If Genesis 1 is read as story, as a simplified account stressing that He and nobody else is responsible for Creation, that He created by His Word, that He called all parts of it good, that He created the Sabbath, and so on, then they agree quite nicely. By your literalist system, one has to doubt the evidence in front of his face, explain away what is self-evidently true, to warp poor excuses for a witness to His Glory and to His mighty hand into some semblance of fitting together, bent out of shape and mangled.
Look up “microwave background” sometime. And, BTW, you do see some proto-galaxies here and there in deep field astronomy. If Podkayne or another astrophyicist is wandering around and comes across this thread, I’ll ask her/them for further details; it’s not my particular area of interest.
Sorry, left out, there’s a neat discussion of “Human Thermoregulation and Hair Loss” here, but since it’s based on the assumption that humans evolved (the E-word! :eek: ) in a hot tropical climate and not in Baghdad, I doubt whether Nolies will be interested.
Ain’t no reason to go back and read the entire thread. See, when one comes upon a post such as this:
you can pretty much get the tone of the entire thread.
Oh, and you use the term “refuted” rather loosely.