# Questions on Christianity (Again...) **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [August 30, 2010, 2:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-on-christianity-again/551952 "2010-08-30T02:13:22Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Philip\_J\_Fry](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/6de8d8/32.png) [@Philip\_J\_Fry](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Philip_J_Fry)\ **Post date:** [August 30, 2010, 2:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-on-christianity-again/551952/21 "2010-08-30T14:13:32Z")
And to continue the majority discussion, I don’t think there is one universal Christian view on how God judges those who lived before Jesus. I think it is clear that some were saved, but it is not spelled out exactly how many or on what basis. The reason is I think, that for us, and for anyone with access to the bible it is an irrelevant (although interesting) question. We have the bible, Christianity is easily discoverable by us, so we cannot claim ignorance in any way. Personally though I think it was probably about: - Desiring to be in relationship with God - Recognising their own evil and the need for the forgiveness of God. These sorts of people may have been saved in a pre-Christian setting, but perhaps not. I can’t be sure. Fry. ---
**Author:** ![Polycarp](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/82dd89/32.png) [@Polycarp](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Polycarp)\ **Post date:** [August 30, 2010, 2:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-on-christianity-again/551952/22 "2010-08-30T14:14:56Z")
> [@Tom\_Tildrum](#): > > > [@cosmosdan](#): > > > > some believe they got their chance to accept Jesus after his resurrection. > > This was Dante’s view, as expressed in the _Inferno_. The first level of Hell was not a place of punishment but rather a relatively pleasant holding area for virtuous people who died before Christ’s coming. When Christ passed through Hell after his death, some followed him to Heaven. The Emperor Trajan is the only one I can call to mind. And in this Dante reflects the traditional teaching of the time. People who lived before Christ, or in places Christianity had not yet gotten to, would be judged on their personal ‘righteousness’ (ethical behavior), with Jesus’s atonement giving them too the opportunity for Heaven. ---
**Author:** ![Polycarp](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/82dd89/32.png) [@Polycarp](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Polycarp)\ **Post date:** [August 30, 2010, 2:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-on-christianity-again/551952/23 "2010-08-30T14:26:12Z")
> [@aigonz](#): > > Hi Matthew > > \<\\> > > No it doesn’t. > > \> The original Hebrew from which we derive day is ‘yom’, which does not necessarily refer to a 24 hour period. It can be used to refer to any period of time of a ‘fixed duration’. > \> The 6,000 years is based on calculations by 17th century scholar James Bishop Ussher. These calculations were required to use a number of assumptions, because the genealogies are not complete. Regrettably Mr Usshers work has been been taken as authoritative by some who see religion as needing to be in conflict with science. > > The Bible is not inconsistent with an ‘old’ earth, and Christianity does not rely on a 6,000 year old planet. Nicely said. It’s often missed that Ussher (Archbishop James Ussher of the [Anglican] Church of Ireland) was a scholar and historian, not a YEC freak. He was working with the best knowledge of the time, using the Bible only when historical records known at the time failed. Historical geology at that point (mid 1600s) had not yet been developed; geology was predominantly descriptive and physical in its scope. That rocks laid down in the Cambrian were orders of magnitude older than those from the Cretaceous was not yet understood; not only were radioactive decay measurements not understood but radioactivity itself was not yet known. The astronomical studies that led to cosmology were only just beginning – Galileo and Kepler’s work was less than 50 years old, and Herschel was a century in the future. Observational cosmology would not be in vogue for another 300 years. Stephen Jay Gould’s essay “A Fall in the House of Ussher” examines the archbishop’s work in the context of his time. That chronology, unfortunately, was coopted by Bibliocentric nutballs of the YEC variety, giving Ussher an undeserved bad name. ---
**Author:** ![Skammer](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/skammer/32/143_2.png) [@Skammer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skammer)\ **Post date:** [August 30, 2010, 2:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-on-christianity-again/551952/24 "2010-08-30T14:32:30Z")
First of all, Christianity is very diverse, and different Christians have different answers for your questions. It’s important to emphasize, as has been stated above, that young-earth creationism is not only a small minority of Christianity in the world today, it’s a _tiny_ minority of all Christians in the history of the church. I’ll try to answer your questions from a “mainstream” point of view, i.e. as best as I can to represent the closest thing to consensus from Christian thinkers and theologians. > [@](#): > > Before Jesus was born, before Moses, the bible and Christianity’s role in people’s lives was inexistant, right? Obviously there was no Christianity before Jesus Christ. In fact you could argue there was no Christianity during Jesus’ lifetime – he considered himself a Jew. It was his followers who became known as followers of Christ - Christians. So yes there were plenty of civilizations besides the Jews who lived and died before Jesus came around. > [@](#): > > The people who lived in Mytilene and Damascus go back about 10 centuries BC. They believed in their own Gods. If God has existed forever, why didn’t he pass on his words and his existance to those who lived so long ago? Surely he should’ve pronounced himself so that humans wouldn’t go down the wrong path. God did pass on his words and evidence of his existence before Jesus. The primary way he did it was choosing a man - Abraham - to reveal him self to and make a covenant with, and then interacting with Abraham and his descendents through many many generations (the people who came to be known as Israelites). Outside of this tribe, the Bible says that God revealed himself in other more limited ways: primarily through nature and people’s conscience. > [@](#): > > Did they go to Hell for believing in other Gods, even though the Christian God was unknown to them? The Bible is not clear on this, and most Christians would admit the real answer is “We don’t know.” But most common theory is that God, being Just and Merciful, would not condemn anyone for rejecting a God they did not know, and judges people based on how they respond to the revelation they have received. A prehistoric tribe who worships a creator-god who embodies goodness and love: how is that different from Yahweh? So we trust that God deals with them fairly. > [@](#): > > The bible says that Adam was created on the Sixth Day, and the Bible states that that was 6000 years ago. So how did all those other people exist? What about the dinosaurs, which existed a minimum of 65 million years ago? The oldest dated rock is between 4 and 3.8 billion years old. It has been calculated that our Planet itself is 4.6 billion years old. Our universe is 13.8 billion years old. Why did everything take so long? What’s the Christian explanation to all these questions? This has been addressed above, but to reiterate: the Bible does not say how old the earth is. Most Christians are not literalists when it comes to Genesis and do not have trouble accepting a 5-billion year old earth or evolution of the species. This may not be true in the US, but in general – if you look at the official doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church or most other major denominations – they do not reject evolution or the scientific understanding of the universe. They do however believe that the hand of God was behind it, and is the ultimate Creator and Mover of the universe. ---
**Author:** ![aigonz](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/4491bb/32.png) [@aigonz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aigonz)\ **Post date:** [August 30, 2010, 7:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-on-christianity-again/551952/25 "2010-08-30T19:52:03Z")
\<\\> With respect Captain, the chronology is not complete, so how can it be considered accurate? For example the chronology from Adam to Solomon is straight forward, but there are gaps from Solomon through to the destruction of the temple. From Ezra/Nehemiah to the birth of Christ the chronology is guess work. The work of Thiele is now more widely accepted by ‘Egyptologists’. However all of this only addresses the speculated chronology of man. The ‘days’ of creation do not have to be 24 hour periods. The Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (1980, Moody Press) states “It can denote: 1. the period of light (as contrasted with the period of darkness), 2. the period of twenty-four hours, 3. a general vague “time,” 4. a point of time, 5. a year (in the plural; I Sam 27:7; Ex 13:10, etc.).” I share your scepticism about modern dating methods, however let’s not subject the Word of God to ridicule simply to pursue a singular interpretation that is not demanded. ---
**Author:** ![Der\_Trihs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/der_trihs/32/233_2.png) [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)\ **Post date:** [August 30, 2010, 8:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-on-christianity-again/551952/26 "2010-08-30T20:09:55Z")
> [@Philip\_J\_Fry](#): > > > [@Der\_Trihs](#): > > > > That fails on multiple levels. As is often pointed out when arguments like yours are brought up, adding a god or gods as a creator doesn’t solve anything; it just pushes any questions you have a step back. Nor, whether you like it or not is an infinite past unscientific. Nor again are uncaused effects impossible; they are common in quantum mechanics. And the “empirical sciences” work just fine even if there are uncaused effects, as evinced by the fact that they actually work. That’s largely what empiricism means, after all. > > I disagree, for several reasons: > > 1. An explaination, to be the best explaination, does not need to have it’s own explaination. The idea that God just pushes the explainations back a level is fundamentally confused in that way. To require that explainations require their own explaination means that nothing can be explained because we would end up with an infinite stack of explainations You just eviscerated your own argument. If “explanations don’t need explanations” then we don’t need your idea of using God to explain where the Big Bang came from, either. > [@Philip\_J\_Fry](#): > > 1. It fundamentally mis-understands the issue. The relevant issue at hand is can the universe as we see it exist without other entities existing. The God hypothesis suggests there there is necessarily something else apart from the material world. In that way, if true, it significantly adds to our understanding of reality. Since there’s no evidence of God (beyond a lot of subjective, contradictory and thus useless claims), no evidence that gods are possible or how such a being would work if it was possible, it adds nothing since we can’t say anything meaningful about such a hypothetical god.. > [@Philip\_J\_Fry](#): > > 1. What I mean by an infinite past being unscientific is that it contradicts known scientific laws. A few examples: > > - The second law of thermodynamics. This states that entropy always increases, or at best remains static. Therefore if the universe had existed for an infinite time the universe we observe should have maximal entropy, and be in a heat-death like state. This is not what we observe. The fact that things like stars can exist, and that entropy is still increasing shows that the universe cannot have existed for eternity. > - The Borde - Guth - Vilenkin theorum. It has been shown that any expanding universe must have a past space-time boundary. This theorum is independent of the precise details of the gravity (general relativity, quantum gravity, string theory, ect), and also descriptions of the moment of the big bang. It even holds in various multiverse scenarios. > You may wish to claim that these theories are in some way wrong, because you know that the universe must have existed for an infinite time, but that is exactly the same rationale as the YECs. Nonsense, there are various theories that DO hold that there is an infinitely old universe. Such as the idea that our universe is part of a much larger eternally expanding one, or the spawn of a previous universe much like our own, or any number of others. > [@Philip\_J\_Fry](#): > > 1. The claim that “Nor again are uncaused effects impossible; they are common in quantum mechanics” is again a fundamental mis-understanding of quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is not strictly deterministic, but it is probabilistic. The probability of events happening are very much bound by the laws of cause and effect, making quantum mechanics statistically deterministic. Quantum mechanical events are not “uncaused” in any proper understanding of them. It is even possible to use the statistically deterministic nature of quantum mechanics to make useful devices. So the tunnelling microscope for instance. Because the probabilities of electrons tunneling through a barrier are deterministic, it is possible to use this to image surfaces. If tunnelling was truely uncaused then this would be impossible. That doesn’t follow at all. > [@Philip\_J\_Fry](#): > > 1. I agree that science does work. The question is why. If you are happy to state the everything that exists does so for no reason without any cause, it is hard to see why anything else should work according to cause and effect. It is the ultimate case of special pleading. “God” doesn’t solve that alleged problem, it just claims that God is the Cause and that you shouldn’t think about his cause. It’s a copout not an explanation. > [@Philip\_J\_Fry](#): > > You have it around backwards. I claim that we can know things correctly because God has created in us the ability to know. This can happen either by guiding evolutionary processes or by direct creation, it doesn’t matter. That’s just an attempt to steal the credit for the work of millennia of human effort and use it to buff your god’s image. “God” didn’t give us the ability to understand the world, nor did evolution for that matter; we did. We built upon the flawed intellectual tools given us by evolution to develop techniques that gave us a truer understanding or the world. > [@Philip\_J\_Fry](#): > > Evolution in a godless world cannot create people with the same ability to know. Therefore if we believe we are created through evolution and believe that there is no God we are undermining our ability to know in the first place. Nonsense again. Belief in God is all about the denial of the validity and usefulness of understanding, of facts and logic. That’s why it’s called faith. Belief in God is a crippling of the mind; not a necessity for understanding the world. Given the mountains of evidence for the existence and inevitability\* of evolution, both of ourselves and life in general you picked an especially bad example to bolster your case; disbelief in evolution requires either severe ignorance or deliberate denial of reality. It is after all one of the solidest theories in science; you might as well deny gravity. > [@Philip\_J\_Fry](#): > > If evolution in a godless world shows that we cannot have confidence in our beliefs, in what way can we say that we know evolution, or anything else for that matter, to be true? > Fundamentally the combination of evolution and atheistic naturalism makes it impossible to form a coherent, rational epistimology. That’s pure nonsense. “Atheistic naturalism” does that just fine, since it is perfectly compatible with observed reality; it’s theism that by its faith based nature can never be anything other than empty, baseless nonsense. - Because the nature of life makes evolution inevitable, not because any particular path is. ---
**Author:** ![aigonz](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/4491bb/32.png) [@aigonz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aigonz)\ **Post date:** [August 30, 2010, 9:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-on-christianity-again/551952/27 "2010-08-30T21:06:50Z")
\<\\> 1\> These are not ‘theories’, at least not in the scientific sense. Theories require observable phenomena and empirical data. Other than the self evident reality of the existence of this universe, there is no such data or phenomena to support such ideas. Infact they barely rise to the level of hypotheses. 2\> Such as they are, these ‘ideas’ or ‘beliefs’ only push the problem back one step. From where did the expanding or previous universe(s) derive it’s existence? ---
**Author:** ![Superfluous\_Parentheses](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/8edcca/32.png) [@Superfluous\_Parentheses](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Superfluous_Parentheses)\ **Post date:** [August 30, 2010, 9:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-on-christianity-again/551952/28 "2010-08-30T21:22:14Z")
> [@Alessan](#): > > > [@Superfluous\_Parentheses](#): > > > > Anyway, back on topic (somewhat): about the “salvation before Jesus” thing; what’s the OT view on salvation, if there is one? > > Salvation from what? I dunno. I’m not a Christian. I meant in general, “what about the afterlife”. More or less. ---
**Author:** ![Superfluous\_Parentheses](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/8edcca/32.png) [@Superfluous\_Parentheses](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Superfluous_Parentheses)\ **Post date:** [August 30, 2010, 9:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-on-christianity-again/551952/29 "2010-08-30T21:44:30Z")
> [@Philip\_J\_Fry](#): > > > [@Der\_Trihs](#): > > > > That fails on multiple levels. As is often pointed out when arguments like yours are brought up, adding a god or gods as a creator doesn’t solve anything; it just pushes any questions you have a step back. Nor, whether you like it or not is an infinite past unscientific. Nor again are uncaused effects impossible; they are common in quantum mechanics. And the “empirical sciences” work just fine even if there are uncaused effects, as evinced by the fact that they actually work. That’s largely what empiricism means, after all. > > I disagree, for several reasons: > > 1. An explaination, to be the best explaination, does not need to have it’s own explaination. The idea that God just pushes the explainations back a level is fundamentally confused in that way. To require that explainations require their own explaination means that nothing can be explained because we would end up with an infinite stack of explainations This really is just a semantic game. If you _define_ the best explanation to be the one that doesn’t need an explanation, then you end up with some kind of cause. Fine if you want to define it like that, but why would **anything** have a cause? Argh. I’ve done this too often: here’s the deal: whatever, if anything, “caused” the universe, is NOT AUTOMATICALLY A GOD. It could just be some “natural law”. > [@](#): > > 1. It fundamentally mis-understands the issue. The relevant issue at hand is can the universe as we see it exist without other entities existing. The God hypothesis suggests there there is necessarily something else apart from the material world. In that way, if true, it significantly adds to our understanding of reality. Yes it would be extremely interesting if it was true. Give us some evidence that it is. > [@](#): > > 1. What I mean by an infinite past being unscientific is that it contradicts known scientific laws[…] So? No mainstream scientific theories of the universe hold that it’s infinitely old. Quite the contrary. > [@](#): > > 1. The claim that “Nor again are uncaused effects impossible; they are common in quantum mechanics” is again a fundamental mis-understanding of quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is not strictly deterministic, but it is probabilistic. The probability of events happening are very much bound by the laws of cause and effect, making quantum mechanics statistically deterministic. Quantum mechanical events are not “uncaused” in any proper understanding of them. It is even possible to use the statistically deterministic nature of quantum mechanics to make useful devices. So the tunnelling microscope for instance. Because the probabilities of electrons tunneling through a barrier are deterministic, it is possible to use this to image surfaces. If tunnelling was truely uncaused then this would be impossible. I’ll give you this in a narrow sense (and it is an interesting argument), but it won’t get you anywhere either. > [@](#): > > 1. I agree that science does work. The question is why. If you are happy to state the everything that exists does so for no reason without any cause, it is hard to see why anything else should work according to cause and effect. It is the ultimate case of special pleading. Science “works” because scientists work hard at eradicating the stuff that doesn’t work. What more explanation do you need? ---
**Author:** ![Philip\_J\_Fry](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/6de8d8/32.png) [@Philip\_J\_Fry](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Philip_J_Fry)\ **Post date:** [August 30, 2010, 10:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-on-christianity-again/551952/30 "2010-08-30T22:27:04Z")
> [@Der\_Trihs](#): > > > [@Philip\_J\_Fry](#): > > > > I disagree, for several reasons: > > > > 1. An explaination, to be the best explaination, does not need to have it’s own explaination. The idea that God just pushes the explainations back a level is fundamentally confused in that way. To require that explainations require their own explaination means that nothing can be explained because we would end up with an infinite stack of explainations > > You just eviscerated your own argument. If “explanations don’t need explanations” then we don’t need your idea of using God to explain where the Big Bang came from, either. I am having trouble grasping the level of confusion that would prompt such a comment. > [@Der\_Trihs](#): > > Since there’s no evidence of God (beyond a lot of subjective, contradictory and thus useless claims), no evidence that gods are possible or how such a being would work if it was possible, it adds nothing since we can’t say anything meaningful about such a hypothetical god.. First of all your statement that there is no evidence of God sounds a lot more like a statement of faith than of something you could actually observe. Secondly, the God hypothesis states something very meaningful in that it is saying that in addition to the natural world there is also an uncreated, eternal being that brought the natural world into existence. It is true that these statements don’t tell us much about that God, but it is flat out wrong to suggest that it says nothing meaningful. > [@Der\_Trihs](#): > > Nonsense, there are various theories that DO hold that there is an infinitely old universe. Such as the idea that our universe is part of a much larger eternally expanding one, or the spawn of a previous universe much like our own, or any number of others. First of all, the Borde - Guth - Vilenkin theorum expressly covers the “part of larger expanding universe” theory so no, you are wrong on that count. Even if our universe was part of a larger expanding universe that larger expanding universe must also have a finite past. Vilenkin himself says in his 2006 book “Many worlds in one” > [@](#): > > It is said that an argument is what convinces reasonable men and a proof is what it takes to convince even an unreasonable man. With the proof now in place, cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past-eternal universe. There is no escape, they have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning > [@Der\_Trihs](#): > > That doesn’t follow at all. Just wishing it doesn’t make it so. Care to give some sort of argument as to why? > [@Der\_Trihs](#): > > “God” doesn’t solve that alleged problem, it just claims that God is the Cause and that you shouldn’t think about his cause. It’s a copout not an explanation. The existence of God is one possible explaination of why the universe works according to laws of cause and effect. It sounds like “God is not an explaination” is another one of your statements of faith. Socondly fundamental to the nature of God is that He is uncaused. So the question “who created God?” is answered simply as “no-one”. God is not created and therefore his existence requires no explaination. > [@Der\_Trihs](#): > > That’s just an attempt to steal the credit for the work of millennia of human effort and use it to buff your god’s image. “God” didn’t give us the ability to understand the world, nor did evolution for that matter; we did. We built upon the flawed intellectual tools given us by evolution to develop techniques that gave us a truer understanding or the world. The fundamental question here is not so much about ability, but about inherent capability. Every physical thing is limited by its physical form. Humans, by sheer force of will, cannot grow gills nad breath underwater. We lack the necessary biological components to make that happen. So the qestion here is whether or not it is in our capacity to correctly understand the world, or are we mistaken and only think that we understand the world. If God created us in some fashion, then God would have created us with the intrinsic mental capacity to understand the world correctly. If we are created by blind evolution, then we cannot be sure that we are created with that mental capacity. > [@Der\_Trihs](#): > > Nonsense again. Belief in God is all about the denial of the validity and usefulness of understanding, of facts and logic. That’s why it’s called faith. Belief in God is a crippling of the mind; not a necessity for understanding the world. Given the mountains of evidence for the existence and inevitability\* of evolution, both of ourselves and life in general you picked an especially bad example to bolster your case; disbelief in evolution requires either severe ignorance or deliberate denial of reality. It is after all one of the solidest theories in science; you might as well deny gravity. I am not denying evolution. In fact I suggest that of the two of us it is you that is doing the most denying and twisting of scientific theory. The infinite universe is or the universe that comes into exsitence from nothing is, I think, the atheist equivalent of creation science. Something that is believed, not because the scientific evidence supports it, but because it must be true for the atheist worldview to work. > [@Der\_Trihs](#): > > > [@Philip\_J\_Fry](#): > > > > If evolution in a godless world shows that we cannot have confidence in our beliefs, in what way can we say that we know evolution, or anything else for that matter, to be true? > > Fundamentally the combination of evolution and atheistic naturalism makes it impossible to form a coherent, rational epistimology. > > That’s pure nonsense. “Atheistic naturalism” does that just fine, since it is perfectly compatible with observed reality; it’s theism that by its faith based nature can never be anything other than empty, baseless nonsense. The argument of Plantiga is that since naturalistic evolution destroys our own abiltiy to know it therefore undermines its own epistemology and becomes incoherent. This sort of thing is hardly new. It is a fundamental problem with the modernist view of reality. So for instance the existentiallists were reacting against essentially the same problems, although in a more atheistic way. Obviously it doesn’t show that theism is true. However it does show that these types of modernist naturalistic materialism are at best believed irrationally. Fry. ---
**Author:** ![Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e99b99/32.png) [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Diogenes_the_Cynic)\ **Post date:** [August 30, 2010, 10:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-on-christianity-again/551952/31 "2010-08-30T22:50:37Z")
> [@Philip J. Fry](#): > > First of all your statement that there is no evidence of God sounds a lot more like a statement of faith than of something you could actually observe. No, it’s a statement of hard, cold fact, actually. If you beg to differ, please show us the evidence. > [@](#): > > The argument of Plantiga is that since naturalistic evolution destroys our own abiltiy to know it therefore undermines its own epistemology and becomes incoherent. This is desperate special pleading by Plantinga. Evolution is a fact, son. Trying to attack empiricism at an epistemological level is just wild, scrabbling sophism. Never mind that the argument is fatuous, it’s also false in the presumption that empirical method is held out as necessarily epistemologically reliable. Yes, Descartes was right, demons might be controlling our brains, yet we have no reason to believe that they are, and we have nothing to _replace_ empiricism with. More significantly, this lame-ass argument also applies to religious beliefs, since all religious beliefs are derived empirically. Nothing you believe about God has anything you can show to be a reliable, epistemological basis. ---
**Author:** ![Philip\_J\_Fry](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/6de8d8/32.png) [@Philip\_J\_Fry](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Philip_J_Fry)\ **Post date:** [August 30, 2010, 10:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-on-christianity-again/551952/32 "2010-08-30T22:55:35Z")
> [@Superfluous\_Parentheses](#): > > > [@Philip\_J\_Fry](#): > > > > I disagree, for several reasons: > > > > 1. An explaination, to be the best explaination, does not need to have it’s own explaination. The idea that God just pushes the explainations back a level is fundamentally confused in that way. To require that explainations require their own explaination means that nothing can be explained because we would end up with an infinite stack of explainations > > This really is just a semantic game. If you _define_ the best explanation to be the one that doesn’t need an explanation, then you end up with some kind of cause. Fine if you want to define it like that, but why would **anything** have a cause? Argh. I’ve done this too often: here’s the deal: whatever, if anything, “caused” the universe, is NOT AUTOMATICALLY A GOD. It could just be some “natural law”. I agree that you cannot say, on the basis of these arguments, much of the properties of the acency repsonsible for creating the universe. What is significant here though is that it shows that something else apart from just the physical, natural world exists. I also think that “natural law” cannot be responsible for the creation of the unverse, for three reasons 1. “Natural law” is itself a very loaded term. If a law existed outside of the universe to bring it into being, the natural question is then what agency does that law have? Is it possible for a law itself to have agency without being brought into action by some other agent? I don’t think it makes sense to talk of natural law as though it has an agency all of its own. If it has agency it ceases to be merely a law and starts to be something much more like a God. 2. “Natural Law”, as we understand it, may very well be a property of the universe itself. Therefore for natural law to create the universe requires that the universe already exists, which is absurd. 3. All natural laws that we observe work with pre-existing matter in pre-existing states. It is unclear how natural laws would work in situations were there is no pre-existing matter and pre-existing states. If the natural law that lead to the creation of the universe was uncreated, then it should still be in operation now, and indeed should have been in operation for eternity. This, I think, is absurd which is why I think this unlikely. > [@Superfluous\_Parentheses](#): > > Yes it would be extremely interesting if it was true. Give us some evidence that it is. What evidence would you accept? Perhaps we could start with the Kalam cosmological argument: 1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause. (God does not begin to exist) 2. The universe began to exist. 3. Therefore, the universe has a cause. The cause of the universe must necessarily be outside of it and have some sort of agency. > [@Superfluous\_Parentheses](#): > > So? No mainstream scientific theories of the universe hold that it’s infinitely old. Quite the contrary. > > I’ll give you this in a narrow sense (and it is an interesting argument), but it won’t get you anywhere either. Then we agree? My main points here are that: 1. The universe does have a begining. 2. Entirely causeless things do not happen, and therefore the universe cannot come into exsitence without cause. Do you disagree with those points? > [@Superfluous\_Parentheses](#): > > > [@](#): > > > > 1. I agree that science does work. The question is why. If you are happy to state the everything that exists does so for no reason without any cause, it is hard to see why anything else should work according to cause and effect. It is the ultimate case of special pleading. > > Science “works” because scientists work hard at eradicating the stuff that doesn’t work. What more explanation do you need? Science works because the world is ordered in a uniformity of cause and effect in a way that is empirically discoverable. If this were not true, then science wouldn’t work. There is no fundamental reason why the world should be ordered like this. Why it is ordered in this way really is the question. The theist would say that it is ordered by God in that way. I am not sure if there is a good explaination from an atheist point of view. Fry. ---
**Author:** ![Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e99b99/32.png) [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Diogenes_the_Cynic)\ **Post date:** [August 30, 2010, 11:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-on-christianity-again/551952/33 "2010-08-30T23:02:08Z")
Cuaseless things happena ll the time. Also, this universe doesn’t have to be the only one. Are you familiar with multiverse or brane hypotheses? Also, trying to answer the question of what "caused’ the big bang with a “a very powerful sorceror” is just begging the question since you now have to explain what caused the sorceror. ---
**Author:** ![Philip\_J\_Fry](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/6de8d8/32.png) [@Philip\_J\_Fry](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Philip_J_Fry)\ **Post date:** [August 30, 2010, 11:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-on-christianity-again/551952/34 "2010-08-30T23:05:57Z")
> [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](#): > > > [@Philip J. Fry](#): > > > > First of all your statement that there is no evidence of God sounds a lot more like a statement of faith than of something you could actually observe. > > No, it’s a statement of hard, cold fact, actually. If you beg to differ, please show us the evidence. The burden of proof rests with the person making the claim that there is no evidence. I am happy with the statement that there may or may not be evidence for the existence of God. If you want to say that there definitely is no evidence then you must shoulder the burden of proof. > [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](#): > > This is desperate special pleading by Plantinga. Evolution is a fact, son. Trying to attack empiricism at an epistemological level is just wild, scrabbling sophism. Never mind that the argument is fatuous, it’s also false in the presumption that empirical method is held out as necessarily epistemologically reliable. Yes, Descartes was right, demons might be controlling our brains, yet we have no reason to believe that they are, and we have nothing to _replace_ empiricism with. > > More significantly, this lame-ass argument also applies to religious beliefs, since all religious beliefs are derived empirically. Nothing you believe about God has anything you can show to be a reliable, epistemological basis. I don’t think you really understand the argument. It is not an arguement against empiricism. It is an argument against the combination of atheism and empiricism. I think empiricism can work quite well in a theistic context. The arguement is that we can only be confident in empiricism when we are confident that the world can be discovered empirically. Theistic worlds can have this property. Atheistic worlds may or may not, we can’t know. Therefore we can’t know if empiricism will work in these contexts. Also, I think it entirely appropriate to challenge empiricism on these grounds. Your epistemology appears to be stuck in the 19th century. Perhaps you should read some more modern philosophy then Descartes and then get back to us. This is essentially the same questions that existentialist and post-modernist writers grapple with, even if they come to different conclusions. Fry. ---
**Author:** ![Boyo\_Jim](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/87869e/32.png) [@Boyo\_Jim](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Boyo_Jim)\ **Post date:** [August 30, 2010, 11:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-on-christianity-again/551952/35 "2010-08-30T23:06:09Z")
Many of those who insist the world was created six thousand years ago also insist that dinosaurs and men walked the Earth together. So perhaps some of the messengers carrying God’s word were trampled or eaten by dinosaurs. ---
**Author:** ![Philip\_J\_Fry](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/6de8d8/32.png) [@Philip\_J\_Fry](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Philip_J_Fry)\ **Post date:** [August 30, 2010, 11:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-on-christianity-again/551952/36 "2010-08-30T23:11:10Z")
> [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](#): > > Causeless things happena ll the time. Name one. And quantum events, as discussed before, are not properly causeless. > [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](#): > > Also, this universe doesn’t have to be the only one. Are you familiar with multiverse or brane hypotheses? The Borde - Guth - Vilenkin theorum works with multiverse and string theories, theories, so even if true these universes still must have a finite past. More to the point, are you familiar with these theories? > [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](#): > > Also, trying to answer the question of what "caused’ the big bang with a “a very powerful sorceror” is just begging the question since you now have to explain what caused the sorceror. Not if the sorceror does not come into being, but has always existed, as theists believe God does. ---
**Author:** ![Philip\_J\_Fry](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/6de8d8/32.png) [@Philip\_J\_Fry](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Philip_J_Fry)\ **Post date:** [August 30, 2010, 11:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-on-christianity-again/551952/37 "2010-08-30T23:13:16Z")
Before this thread becomes even more de-railed, **MatthewGerlach** do you have any more questions? What does he think about the explainations put forward so far? Fry. ---
**Author:** ![aigonz](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/4491bb/32.png) [@aigonz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aigonz)\ **Post date:** [August 30, 2010, 11:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-on-christianity-again/551952/38 "2010-08-30T23:26:59Z")
\<\\> I echo the request for an example, and perhaps with the extra requirement that it evidence the coming into existence of something from nothing. \<\\> Oh yes, but the multi-verse notion (which is based on pure faith and that alone) simply pushes the problem back one step. Ultimately, if physical reality had a beginning, it must have had a cause. ---
**Author:** ![Superfluous\_Parentheses](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/8edcca/32.png) [@Superfluous\_Parentheses](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Superfluous_Parentheses)\ **Post date:** [August 30, 2010, 11:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-on-christianity-again/551952/39 "2010-08-30T23:32:18Z")
> [@Philip\_J\_Fry](#): > > I agree that you cannot say, on the basis of these arguments, much of the properties of the acency repsonsible for creating the universe. What is significant here though is that it shows that something else apart from just the physical, natural world exists. > I also think that “natural law” cannot be responsible for the creation of the unverse, for three reasons I’m interrupting here, because there is NO evidence that leads us to assume that there in fact IS a cause for whatever we currently call the “universe”. > [@](#): > > 1. “Natural law” is itself a very loaded term. I agree. I’m already sorry for using it. > [@](#): > > If a law existed outside of the universe to bring it into being, the natural question is then what agency does that law have? Is it possible for a law itself to have agency without being brought into action by some other agent? I don’t think it makes sense to talk of natural law as though it has an agency all of its own. If it has agency it ceases to be merely a law and starts to be something much more like a God. Are you arguing that gravity or electricity have intent? If not, please explain why those “natural laws” are not subject to intent. If you are, please explain why there are general “natural laws” concerning these phenomena. I’m assuming you’re positing a general intent in the universe. > [@](#): > > 1. “Natural Law”, as we understand it, may very well be a property of the universe itself. Therefore for natural law to create the universe requires that the universe already exists, which is absurd. I’ll give you this, but as I mentioned earlier, this is more a matter of semantics. And it does not prove anything about the meta-physical. > [@](#): > > 1. All natural laws that we observe work with pre-existing matter in pre-existing states. That’s only true because we stopped using the word “law” WRT physical phenomena more than 100 years ago. We DO reliably observe and describe phenomena that DO NOT rely on pre-existing matter or state. > [@](#): > > It is unclear how natural laws would work in situations were there is no pre-existing matter and pre-existing states. I’m not going to take your word for that, but I certainly can’t do more than take an interested layman’s stab at it. > [@](#): > > If the natural law that lead to the creation of the universe was uncreated, then it should still be in operation now, and indeed should have been in operation for eternity. This, I think, is absurd which is why I think this unlikely. And somehow you think you’re arguing FOR a creator? I don’t get it. > [@](#): > > What evidence would you accept? > Perhaps we could start with the Kalam cosmological argument: > 1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause. (God does not begin to exist) > 2. The universe began to exist. > 3. Therefore, the universe has a cause. > The cause of the universe must necessarily be outside of it and have some sort of agency. 1. Apparently not (don’t insert god here). 2. Fairly likely. 3. Maybe/we don’t know shit about that. 4 (your conclusion): No that doesn’t follow at all. This argument has been refuted ages ago. You can easily see why. > [@](#): > > Then we agree? My main points here are that: > > 1. The universe does have a begining. > 2. Entirely causeless things do not happen, and therefore the universe cannot come into exsitence without cause. > Do you disagree with those points? Yes. And you too. Prove me wrong. Start with: Causeless gods do not happen, and therefore gods cannot come into existence without cause. ---
**Author:** ![Superfluous\_Parentheses](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/8edcca/32.png) [@Superfluous\_Parentheses](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Superfluous_Parentheses)\ **Post date:** [August 30, 2010, 11:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-on-christianity-again/551952/40 "2010-08-30T23:36:07Z")
> [@Philip\_J\_Fry](#): > > The burden of proof rests with the person making the claim that there is no evidence. Bollocks. Show a single shred of evidence and prove him wrong. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-on-christianity-again/551952.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-on-christianity-again/551952.md?page=3)