Do you think you are going to get anywhere if you have contempt for the people you want to convince? Or is it just mental masturbation you are going for here?
And considering you have conflated two vastly different atonement theologies before (and here, so it is Calvin’s penal substitution or Anselm’s satisfaction theory or Patristic ransom theory that you believe that all Christians hold - because it can’t be all 3), why am I not surprised that you cannot conceive of any other atonement theology?
You really, really should read the book. When a new type of plant developed, animals who had mutations to allow them to get nourishment from that plant would have a reproductive advantage, and spread. Fruits evolved so that they were attractive to animals, who would eat them, and their seeds, and spread the seeds far and wide - and supply fertilizer too.
Some biologist can correct the details, but in the Midwest there was some insect which ate buds from a tree, and whose reproductive cycle was tied to the date in the spring when that budding happened. When apple trees were planted they budded at another time. The insects, who could use apple trees also, speciated into a variety which bred at the time of the original tree and another at the time of the apple tree. No planning or design was required.
Small reproductive advantages have big impacts.
BTW, if we were planned, how come it took almost a billion years for us to show up? Why the dinosaur dead end (besides producing birds, that is.) How come we are so badly designed? None of these things are a problem with purely natural evolution.
If you can’t believe the universe came into being spontaneously, how come you believe that some god did?
As for evolution, if your god started the Big Bang, how come life on earth couldn’t evolve just the way evolution says it did? In fact, why couldn’t it start from chemicals? Why does your god care about us in particular, or any life? Maybe it cares about life someplace else and we’re still accidents.
You feeling uncomfortable about the naturalistic explanation does not cut it as a refutation.
I rarely get into these kinds of arguments, since the absence of any kind of God is so obvious to me, but I hate this particular argument: “Oh, the Universe is so complicated that it could not possibly have evolved, so a God must have done it!”
You cannot sit there and posit that an infinitely complex Universe was made by a God and then not even attempt to answer who made the God? Where did the God come from? What is the God? He is also infinitely complex; was there another God before Him? And before that one?
Seriously, everyone who thinks life can’t evolve should take a step back and study abiogenesis.
People have made some excellent points in this thread, particularly how freakin short of a time we have been around. There is nothing to say a massive extinction event isn’t coming up in our future, and indeed, it seems likely. Let’s hope we have left the planet by then!
To be fair nothing that he has said makes him seem like a Creationist by any reasonable definition. Theistic evolution yes. First cause, yes. But Martin Gardner more or less believed the same stuff. Not that it is justified.
No, you’re still wrong. As I explained clearly, the quote that you claimed came from Romans, does not come from Romans, and it also does not come from 1st Corinthians or anywhere else in the Bible. It comes from your imagination.
And since I’ve thoroughly debunked your entire point, you’re not going to get anywhere by claiming that I’m trying to divert attention away from your point.
Yes, I dispute that. Rituals of human sacrifice existed in many civilizations, but I’m not aware of any evidence that they “date back to when civilization began”. There’s decent evidence of human sacrifice being practiced by the ancient Aztecs, Mayans, Hawaiians, Celts, Carthaginians, Phoenicians, and perhaps a few others. Human sacrifice was not practiced within the Roman Empire in or shortly after the life of Jesus in the 1st century AD, and thus the topic is obviously irrelevant to the study of Jesus’s life or the development of the gospels.
I’m sure it’s not necessary to remind you that in your previous thread about the life of Jesus, you made numerous claims about events in the Gospels being copied from pagan mythology. For instance, you claimed that there was a myth of Bacchus turning water into wine. Other posters asked you to provide evidence that this was true; you first tossed out a list of books that you hadn’t actually read. Other posters, who had read those books, quickly pointed out that they didn’t say what you claim they said. Shortly after that, you ceased posting in that thread, having not provided the slightest tidbit of evidence to support any of your claims. Do you really want to embarrass yourself all over again with yet another untrue claim about the gospels being copied from pagan sources?
There are books that are used in academic settings for study of the gospels. I’d recommend The Fortress Introduction to the Gospels, by Mark Allan Powell, but there are plenty of others. None of these books make any mention of any part of the gospels being copied from pagan mythology, because no part of the gospels were copied from pagan mythology.
For starters, do you even know what the phrase “an idea in embryonic form” means? The way that you’re using it here implies that you don’t. To say that an idea is “in embryonic form” has nothing to do with the length of time that idea has existed; it means the idea is undeveloped or rudimentary. (Look it up) As I explained in my previous post, Paul actually wrote the longest, most detailed passage about justification through Christ in the entire Bible: 11 chapters on the subject. Therefore by definition the idea was not in embryonic form prior to the destruction of the Temple; it was fully developed prior to the destruction of the Temple. And thus the argument in your OP is false, QED.
Now regarding the question of whether Jesus claimed to offer forgiveness of sins, anyone can see that you’re using a double standard in the paragraph I just quoted. On the one hand, you’re demanding that I produce “proof”, while on the other hand you see no need to provide any proof; you merely “maintain” something and then act as if it’s true. It’s a thin rhetorical technique that’s obviously not going to fool anyone. Mathematicians and lawyers are highly focused on proof, historians are not. We discussed this at length in your previous thread, so you don’t have much excuse for continuing to be unaware of it. A scholarly article about ancient history rarely uses the word “proof” because there’s no way to prove that any person in the ancient world did or said anything; historians can only offer evidence and discuss the strengths or weaknesses of that evidence.
The four gospels were all written roughly 30 to 70 years after Jesus’s earthly life, with Mark at the early end of that range. As you know, most ancient biographies and histories were written centuries after the events that they describe. That means that the gospels are, by ancient standards, an excellent historical record.
In addition, Paul verified his teaching by discussing it with the apostles; he says so in Galatians 2. So then Paul ensured that his doctrine, which included justification through Christ, was in agreement with what the Apostles had taught since the beginning. So while you say that “there is no writing to the contrary”, in fact there is a lot of writing to the contrary: the four gospels and Pauline epistles. It would be accurate, on the other hand, to point out that there is exactly zero writing supporting your version of events.
Look at life expectancy, it didn’t start to pick up until the 19th and 20th centuries. Modern medicine started in the mid 1800s with the advent of germ theory, antiseptics, advances in A&P, anaesthesia, etc. Life expectancy at birth in pre-historic time and ancient rome was something like 18-35. Now it is about 80.
I have no idea how accurate this chart is.
Doctors existed in other countries sure, but that is like saying having a variety of crappy bikes for 6000 years, then having improving degrees of cars for 150 years is all just under the heading of ‘transportation’. A 2015 Honda is not the same as a crappy bike with the wheels falling off. And post 19th century medicine is not the same as medicine before in effectiveness.
I do not think it is debatable. In medieval times kids may go to work at age 6, but the brain needs time to develop to learn how to handle life. A person who dies at 5 or 8 is not going to have enough time to ‘learn lessons’ as their brain and social skills and life circumstances haven’t advanced enough.
Seeing how literacy only came into being a few thousand years ago, and only became widespread in the last few hundred years yes I am claiming most people have been illiterate. And any god that asks/demands that I be an illiterate farmer in a world w/o medicine and human rights isn’t a god worth listening to, it is a god worth actively defying.
Seeing how in the 21st century lots of people still have health problems (physical and mental) I am certain the rates were much higher before public health, medicine & nutritional science and back when predators, environmental harm, harsh physical labor and violence were more common. I fail to see why that is controversial. If I can find some ‘cites’ that most people had to deal with injuries and illness in prehistoric and pre-industrial times I will dig them up.
Sure, but I’m not an expert. Deism is just a comfortable, sensible (to me) medium between the two extremes. It explains a lot that cannot be explained by atheism or theism. Sure. I’ll open it 2nite.
Several have asked, “If not the universe, then why not God?” type of questions. I’ll address that.
It works the opposite, “if people can believe the universe spontaneously arose, then why can’t they believe God did too?” But evolutionists/atheists want to have it both ways. They want to say “The universe is fully capable of popping into existence all on its own, thank you” but they refuse to entertain the notion that if the universe could, then maybe so could God.
As a deist I believe God always was. There’s no need to speculate on who made Him. Just the fact the universe is here in all its complexities, including life forms that have evolved from two dead atoms coming together to innumerable complex life forms which perform thousands of unimaginably complex chemical functions ever second of the day to keep the organism alive.
It’s easy for an atheist to say, “It just happened without a god’s help” but I don’t think they realize the gravity of such a simplistic statement. But then they say, “Well, do you realize the gravity of your simplistic statement, ‘Yes, a God did it’ ?”
I always fall back on the watch on a beach metaphor because it’s easier to think someone invented the watch than to think the watch evolved by itself. And then I think of the PowerBall metaphor. Sure, if you want to believe it’s perfect possible for a 20 YO to win the Powerball every week for the next 3,120 weeks of his life right in a row–not likely but possible, then I have to respect your belief in such supernatural events. For me it takes less faith to believe in God than it takes to believe all this sprung up out of nothing.
Someone asked, “If God did all this, then how come it took a billion years to get here?” Good question. I’ve often wondered that myself. Now I’m going to go out on a limb and stir the stew up and raise a lot of guffaws even more when I say that another reason I believe in God is all the work MD’s and psychiatrists are doing on NDE’s—luminaries like Kenneth Ring, Pim van Lommel, Sam Parnia, Bruce Greyson, Michael Sabom, Peter Fenwick, and a whole slew of others who are arduously studying the survival of consciousness after death, not to mention Dr’s like Mary Neal, an orthopedic surgeon who describes herself as about the most concrete practical-thinking person in the world who would never in a million years give credence to any theory of survival of the mind after death. But now she’s going around lecturing about her NDE and saying “It’s as real as anything I’ve ever experienced.” She also admits that the death of her son was no surprise to her because it was revealed to her during her NDE that this would happen and it did. I just don’t see a woman as practical as Mary Neal believing in this stuff unless she experienced something very profound.
Remember, the evidence includes people who were able to say with precise detail what was going on in the OR and who was saying what to who while these people were clinically dead. That in itself is proof enough that something beyond the natural is going on here.
“Maybe so” necessitates “maybe not” too. Since there’s absolutely no need to posit a god in this process, why do it? It adds nothing to the narrative except an unnecessary and inexplicable complication.
In fact you have a need to *not *speculate on who made him, because if you did your belief system would fall to the ground.
No-one here has called the god hypothesis simplistic (which means “overly simple”). Quite the opposite - it is one step too complex. How can you fail to grasp this? You are positing an unnecessary entity.
None of this has anything to do with how abiogenesis or evolution works. Really, nothing. You are making a fool out of yourself here, like Clint Eastwood arguing with an empty chair. No-one holds the position you are arguing against. No-one thinks watches appear self-assembled, and most especially no-one thinks that “all this sprung up out of nothing” - except you, who thinks your god did so. Please please please read the book you’ve been recommended; you cannot argue usefully against evolution until you understand it. You are just wasting your time posting this specious nonsense, with which you will - quite literally - convince no-one.
