Sorry this took so long, life beckons.
I have not had the time to finish this, but I am well aware many of you want answers to many of your questions. Regardless of what I write, I know there will be many more points to address from so many of you, that quite frankly, I’m starting to feel like I’ve gotten myself in over my head. I was going to write much, much more in the following, but I simply do not have the time at the moment. I haven’t even gotten around to the most important point I wanted to address, and that is of Absolute Moral Laws. I was saving it for the last of the rebuttal, where I planned on putting the most attention at; but I just cannot at this present time find the time to do so.
Without getting too personal, a family member needs my attention right now; and between them, my job, my wife, trying to write my thoughts here, and putting some free time in somewhere; I can not articulate my thoughts as well as I’d like to. Some of you may view this whole thing as a giant waste of your time, and if you do, I am very sorry to have wasted it. I have enough written to give you all a good idea as to where I’m coming from, but this is a very far from cry from the rebuttal I intended to write. I haven’t even had the time to list my references and sources; let alone actually finish this.
I will try to come back to this as quickly as I can, and I mean that; but sometimes life tends to get in the way when you least expect it. I won’t even be around to see any of your replies to this particular post for at least a week or so, but I will be back. I did not intend to post a giant wall of thoughts and leave everyone to debate amongst their selves, but the embarrassment of my lack of involvement will have to take second to the center stage of life for the moment.
With what I feel is adequate explanation of absence, I shall move on to my half ass rebuttal. I hope to be back at some point to discuss this topic further with you all.
I think one member summed my feelings up on this rather well…
I agree. There is no way I can reply to everyone, so I’ll stick to the most important points brought up and we can go from there. From what I’ve read, the biggest glaring issue with the presented proof so far is the declaration of Absolute Moral Laws. Also, I have noticed many curious as to how I arrived at the Christian God, and not the God of Judaism or other monotheistic religions. Finally, I have noticed many members expressing a desire to know why I wish to bring this up at all, how qualified I feel to deliver such a declaration, and overall what the purpose of this debate is.
I will attempt to address these issues within this reply to the best of my ability. *{Author’s Note- This was written before I realized I wouldn’t have time to finish, so all topics mentioned above are not addressed within this reply.}
Firstly, I do not consider myself a highly educated man. I have only a high school education to go on, as I never attended college. I have never entered a classroom on philosophy or religion, and I am not familiar with some of the terminology used by some of the members. I have no idea what “Gödel’s Impossibility Theorem” is. I have never heard of the word Aristotelian, yet alone have a basis of knowledge as to what it is. I have never traveled outside of the U.S.A., and I live in the southeastern region of the country, which is well known for being “The Bible Belt”. I have a Christian upbringing, as stated in the OP, and I have a biased viewpoint, as also stated in the OP.
So, to answer the question of if I feel I’m qualified to deliver this declaration of proof, I will hastily say “NO!”.
Secondly, I am sharing this for a multitude of reasons. From an emotional standpoint, I came to a personal revelation from this viewpoint and it brought me such great pleasure, I felt the need to share with others what I view as something amazing; even though such is a naïve concept, and quite frankly will most likely never be accepted as adequate proof of God. That in itself is half the reason for sharing my feelings; I came into this knowing full well how much harsh criticism this topic would receive. I want to see the disagreement of others, for that disagreement fills another primary desire for posting this thread to begin with.
The other primary desire I speak of is to share this from an intellectual standpoint. I wish to share this viewpoint for the sake of broadening my own horizons, and possibly that of others. Mainly my own, as I feel I am ignorant of many world views. I hope to learn something from this, even if it’s only what others feel of this viewpoint. I presented this to gain knowledge, even through the harshest of criticisms. I feel there is no better way to gain a greater understanding of God than through the disagreement of others. I feel that it’s through those same disagreements that a greater basis of faith can be formed. What I mean by that, is by viewing counter arguments to my presented proof, I gain a greater faith in God. The same naïve part of myself that I mentioned earlier makes me want to think others may arrive at the same conclusion; however unlikely that may be.
Thirdly, how did I arrive at the Christian God, as opposed to other monotheistic religions? Why do I refer to the Christian God at all? Why not keep this focused on simply intelligent design; which some might agree would seem to possibly make more sense?
Well, to answer that I will have to give a bit of personal history, along with debatable facts. I say debatable facts, because the facts that I will provide are accepted to be true by some, while denied by others. I will try to keep the following as brief as possible and as clear as I can. To begin, I need to roll the clock back a bit. I’ll take you back to when I was only a child.
As a boy, I was raised by a loving mother; one of a Nondenominational Christian upbringing. When I was young, my mother and biological father went through a divorce, and soon after my mother met another man; one that would eventually become by father through adoption. My stepdad turned father was, and to this day is, a complex individual. He believes that there is a divine creator to the universe, but chooses to follow no particular faith. Through the raising of him and my mother, I have grown into the man I am today.
Through the years as I grew, I had many questions; most of which fell to my mother for answering. She answered my questions to the best of her ability, and taught tolerance and love for the rest of the world to me. She absolutely convinced me as a child that Jesus was our salvation, and that God loved us all. I believed that with all my heart when I was younger, and I knew that my mother was one of the greatest people on this planet. She had more faith in God than any other person I have ever met, and I knew God would always protect her. Through her spiritual teachings, I gained a great curiosity about the human race and the universe we live in. I have always thought about the universe around me, and how others besides myself live. I constantly find myself asking “what if”, “how”, and “why” about many things, especially when it comes to subjects that none of us have yet to find a definitive answer to. I have turned to many people over the years to talk about such subjects, but have never had the opportunity to pursue such within a formal education. I was taken care of when I was younger, but I have always lived a life that would most likely qualify as somewhere between “low class” and “middle class” America. As a result, my parents didn’t have the money to send me to college, and I have never had the resources to purse a college education myself.
So, like so many others, I attended public school and lived the average life of an American. All was mostly going well in my life, until the year 2002. My mother was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer, with the cancerous cells already present with her liver as well. With the above mentioned information presented in the above paragraph, I feel certain you can imagine my shock of discovering this. It destroyed me. I didn’t understand anything in the world anymore, and I hated God. I told myself that I didn’t believe in God anymore, and that all along, everyone else was right. I told myself that I was a fool. What an idiot to think there was such a thing as a divine creator…a loving God that cared for His people. What total fucking godamn bullshit, I thought.
My mother died in 2005. I was nineteen.
The years after her death were not kind to me, or I should rather say, I was not kind to myself and others. I hated everything, and I felt the need to express my hatred to others, through any means necessary. Every time I saw someone happy, it sickened me. I wanted to fucking kill them. I eventually started to hate myself for being such a worthless little bitch. I saw people in worse situations than me, people that didn’t even have the luxury of having a roof to sleep under, or food to eat; much less the luxury of having a loving mother to tell you “I Love You”. I saw just how many other people in the world were mistreated, right from the start, and I knew that there truly was no God. I knew back then that no loving God would allow so much pain and misery in this world. There I was, being sad and miserable over my mother dying, while others woke up everyday to the sound of war outside their home. I was pathetic, and I knew it. I made myself sick, and all I wanted to do was die. I made a couple of attempts at killing myself, but never could do it; for the knowledge of knowing others were far worse off than me made me want to be stronger than that.
I stumbled through life for several years, trying to put the pieces back together. I eventually gained my desire for knowledge back, but it wasn’t the same as it was before. I wanted to know the horrors of the world, and I wanted to see the pain of others. Due to my lack of a formal education, I turned to books and the internet for that information. I viewed things that made me see the horrors of mankind, and all the while confirmed my thoughts that there was no God. I developed the belief that all religion was false, and was purely a manmade creation formulated by the minds of early man. More or less, I considered myself an Atheist. I never studied the philosophies of Atheism, I only knew that the concept of a God was ridiculous. I believed that because I felt man was nothing but an animal; an intelligent species of evolved apes that could do nothing but eat and shit out this planets resources. I felt that I started to develop a hatred for mankind, for myself, and for any supposed God that might exist in some form. Wherever I traveled, I had nothing but contempt for my fellow man, and expressed that contempt wherever and whenever humanly possible.
I can’t remember the first, but I eventually discovered message boards. I know it wasn’t the very first, but I can remember spending a great deal of time at a site called Gamewinners.com. I joined the message boards there and I was an absolutely horrible human being. I was the definitive definition of an “online troll”, and I did everything I could to destroy the feelings of others. It brought me satisfaction knowing how bad I was making other people feel. Looking back on that time in my life now, to say I feel ashamed of my actions in a grievous understatement.
From the years of '05 through '09, I spent all of my time doing one of a set schedule of actions. Those actions consisted of: Working twelve to fourteen hours a day, five days a week; exercising, mainly in an attempt to torture myself for being such a miserable human being; harassing people online at regular intervals through online discussions and online video games; searching the worst things imaginable online; getting drunk; and attempting to understand the origins of the human race, which I hated so much. I wanted to find out how scientists, theorists, philosophers, physicists, astrophysicists, and the like understood the universe. I wanted to know how all of this began, and why the human race exists.
In my quest to find answers, I came across something known as the Drake Equation. I didn’t realize it at the time, but this equation would create a spark which would ignite a chain reaction throughout my mind; one that would eventually lead me to what I feel is the greatest discovery of my life. That discovery is what I have presented on this message board.
To explain what The Drake Equation is to those unfamiliar with it, I will fall to Wikipedia to copy and paste the information here. I am doing this in an attempt to shave some time off this rebuttal.
The Drake equation is a probabilistic argument used to arrive at an estimate of the number of active, communicative extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy. The number of such civilizations, N, is assumed to be equal to the mathematical product of (i) the average rate of star formation, R*, in our galaxy, (ii) the fraction of formed stars, fp, that have planets, (iii) the average number of planets per star that has planets, ne, that can potentially support life, (iv) the fraction of those planets, fl, that actually develop life, (v) the fraction of planets bearing life on which intelligent, civilized life, fi, has developed, (vi) the fraction of these civilizations that have developed communications, fc, i.e., technologies that release detectable signs into space, and (vii) the length of time, L, over which such civilizations release detectable signals, for a combined expression of:
N = the number of civilizations in our galaxy with which communication might be possible (i.e. which are on our current past light cone);
and
R* = the average rate of star formation in our galaxy
fp = the fraction of those stars that have planets
ne = the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets
fl = the fraction of planets that could support life that actually develop life at some point
fi = the fraction of planets with life that actually go on to develop intelligent life (civilizations)
fc = the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space
L = the length of time for which such civilizations release detectable signals into space
The equation was written in 1961 by Frank Drake, not for purposes of quantifying the number of civilizations,[better source needed] but as a way to stimulate scientific dialogue at a meeting on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). The equation summarizes the main concepts which scientists must contemplate when considering the question of other radio-communicative life. Criticism towards the Drake equation follows from the fact that several of its terms are conjectural, the net result being that the error associated with any derived value is very large such that the equation cannot be used to draw firm conclusions.
There is considerable disagreement on the values of these parameters, but the ‘educated guesses’ used by Drake and his colleagues in 1961 were:
⦁ R* = 1/year (1 star formed per year, on the average over the life of the galaxy; this was regarded as conservative)
⦁ fp = 0.2-0.5 (one fifth to one half of all stars formed will have planets)
⦁ ne = 1-5 (stars with planets will have between 1 and 5 planets capable of developing life)
⦁ fl = 1 (100% of these planets will develop life)
⦁ fi = 1 (100% of which will develop intelligent life)
⦁ fc = 0.1-0.2 (10-20% of which will be able to communicate)
⦁ L = 1000-100,000,000 years (which will last somewhere between 1000 and 100,000,000 years)
Inserting the above minimum numbers into the equation gives a minimum N of 20. Inserting the maximum numbers gives a maximum of 50,000,000. Drake states that given the uncertainties, the original meeting concluded that N ≈ L, and there were probably between 1000 and 100,000,000 civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy.
What I took away from the discovery of this equation was an insatiable curiosity. I was fascinated by this subject, and became obsessed with numbers; despite knowing jack shit about math. I wanted to know the odds of creation. I wanted to find out how probable it was that mankind was created by chance, as opposed to intelligent design; and I wanted to find out which was more likely. I stopped believing in a God, but I still wanted to know if it was possible for a deity to exist at all, considering my upbringing. As stated prior, I’ve never had the opportunity to pursue a higher education, but I did what I could to find source material to answer my questions about life. I researched the best I knew how into subjects of cell creation, star creation, planet creation, etc.
In my personal studies, I came across the subject of amino acid construction. I was amazed at the complexity of the human body. Assembling amino acids into the sequence required to produce a functioning protein is no easy task. What are the odds that this can happen by accident? Let’s assume we have equal quantities of all the amino acids in a huge barrel, and we want to calculate the odds of drawing out amino acids in a sequence that results in a functioning protein. Twenty different amino acids are used to make proteins, and nineteen of these come in two varieties: left or right-handed. Only the left handed ones are useful for making proteins. This means there are a total of thirty nine different kinds of amino acids in the barrel, but only twenty of them are eligible for use in protein construction.
As each amino acid is randomly selected from the barrel, it must bond to the amino acid selected previously. In this way a protein is formed piece by piece, but there is no guarantee that this bond will occur. In the absence of the proper enzymes( which in this experiment, do not exist yet since their existence depends on fully functioning cells, complete with DNA, RNA, etc. ), the chances of these bonds forming are very, very low. For the sake of argument though, lets take the probability of this bond forming to be fifty percent. To further increase the chances of success, lets calculate the odds of randomly selecting and successfully forming one of the shortest functional proteins that is common to living systems: the cytochrome- C enzyme. It is merely 110 amino acids in length, but lets shorten this further to only 100 amino acids.
Now for the math.
The odds of getting a specific chain of 100 amino acids by chance would be the probability of selecting the right amino acid( 1 out of 39 ), 100 times in a row, and with a fifty percent chance of the chemical bond forming between each. In mathematical notation, that probability is: Probability= (1/39)100 x (1/2)99. This comes out to be (1/10)190.
Written out, that number looks like 1 divided by 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
Numbers with that many zeros are absolutely meaningless to us. For comparison, a probability of 1 in 1050 would be the same likelihood that every person on the planet would win the Powerball Grand Prize once per second not just for the rest of their lives, but for the next 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years! Obviously that cannot happen, and yet this wildly improbable scenario is not nearly as improbable as the amino acid illustration above. Or consider the fact that scientists have calculated that there are about 1080 protons and neutrons in the whole universe. If one proton in the entire universe were painted purple, the chances of you randomly selecting it would be 1080. Even so, this is still far more probable that the amino acid illustration. So what do you think, did life arise by chance? I most certainly started to think not after coming to this realization.
After realizing this, I could no longer deny that this universe was created by intelligent design; so I found myself back to believing there was a God. The evidence was too overwhelming to hold on to the belief this universe was created by chance. With a newfound belief that there was in fact a God that created everything, I started to ponder how any of it made any sense. There are so many religions in he world, and I knew they couldn’t all be right. However, I did believe that there was a God, so I wanted to find out. I came from a Christian upbringing, but I wasn’t going to jump back on that bandwagon…at least not immediately. I wanted to know how other religions worked, and what others believed.
**Here is where I stopped. ~TO BE CONTINUED.~