2> ‘We know it did because it did’? What nonsense.
3> I never said cooperation didn’t have a place in evolutionary theory. But it is conditional on a mutual benefit. Evolutionary theory cannot explain random acts of kindness, and this is just one of many parts on whihc it fails.
4> It amuses me to what lengths people will avoid arguing the moral dilemna of atheism face on. You resort to “Because it’s a human child and forcing human children to have sex causes them harm”, which is a blatant attempt to avoid the question. We cause harm to each other often out of benevolence. Answer the question. Why is the rpe of a 3 year old morally wrong?
5> The question to religion iis a further attempt at evasion. The topic is the existence of God.
Are you enagaging in a sensible discussion, or an episode in self delusion?
“…they couched their mathematics in a highly misleading language, when they maintained ‘the creation of the universe out of nothing’ . . .”
“the foregoing is far from being a spontaneous generation of everything from naught, but the origin of that embryonic bubble is really a causal process leading from a primordial substratum with a rich physical structure to a materialized substratum of the vacuum.”
Premise a> God is all powerful.
Premise b> God created the natural universe.
Based on these two premises, it is entirey logical that God could interact with the natural universe in a way that would ‘reveal’ himself to us in some way.
2> You are mistating my ccase. I did not say God is seperate from ‘existence’. God is seperate from the natural universe. Both are ‘in existence’, just like me and my fish pond.
Also, it is not satisfactory argumentation to label something as ‘magic’ simply because you don’ understand it. Do you understand quantum physics? Has a virtual particle ever been observed? No to both questions. Are these then magic?
Design
The evidence to design is well documented, and there is wealth of material on the web if you are really interested. However to whet your appetite, the following is a list of just some of the intellectuals who have been persuaded on the evidence for an intelligent agent in creation:
Fred Hoyle (British astrophysicist), George Ellis (British astrophysicist), Paul Davies (British astrophysicist), Paul Davies, Alan Sandage (winner of the Crawford prize in astronomy), John O’Keefe (astronomer at NASA), George Greenstein (astronomer), Arthur Eddington (astrophysicist), Arno Penzias (Nobel prize in physics), Roger Penrose (mathematician and author), Tony Rothman (physicist), Vera Kistiakowsky (MIT physicist), Robert Jastrow (self-proclaimed agnostic), Frank Tipler (Professor of Mathematical Physics), Alexander Polyakov (Soviet mathematician), Ed Harrison (cosmologist), Edward Milne (British cosmologist), Barry Parker (cosmologist), Drs. Zehavi, and Dekel (cosmologists), Arthur L. Schawlow (Professor of Physics at Stanford University, 1981 Nobel Prize in physics, Henry “Fritz” Schaefer (Graham Perdue Professor of Chemistry and director of the Center for Computational Quantum Chemistry at the University of Georgia), Wernher von Braun (Pioneer rocket engineer), Carl Woese (microbiologist from the University of Illinois), Antony Flew (Professor of Philosophy, former atheist, author, and debater)
This is not an argument from authority. It is simply an encouragement to anyone with an open mind that the existence of an intelligent creator is plausible from design.
On the contrary. I don’t ‘accept’ the marriage of a 9 year old, or for that matter a 13 year old. I just don’t consider theses events help define child abuse, because many will diagree that a 13 year old is a child.
You miss the point entirely. If an event occurs within something that is not ‘nothing’, then it is far from clear that it is uncaused. The existence of virtual particles (which by the way spend at least some time as parts of other particles) arise from vaccum fluctuations. How then can they be described as ‘uncaused’?
Because it’s a human child and forcing human children to have sex causes them harm.
What other possible answer could there be? I’m not taunting you here, I really can’t imagine any other reasonable answer.
How? They’re uncaused. Did you not read the Hawking essay that you pointed us to? He describes it clearly. The term “vacuum fluctuations” (one c, two u’s in both words) is simply another way of saying the uncertainty due to Heisenberg’s famous principle.
“Nonsense”? Hardly. Our present moral system, including the prohibition against murder is something that had to be learned and developed. It didn’t just appear. We can see that process in history.
Nonsense again. Evolutionary theory explains it easily; it can be a useful strategy to act generally benevolent even if there’s no immediate benefit. And evolution doesn’t have much if any places where it fails, it’s one of the best confirmed theories in science. It’s certainly far better than your “god did it” idea, which has never, ever been anything but wrong in all of human history. Why should I believe this is the one time it will turn out to be right after all these centuries?
I already answered it; if you don’t like the answer too bad. The opinion of a god certainly has nothing to do with it even if gods were anything other than a delusion. And there IS no “moral dilemma of atheism”.
Which is a religious idea and nothing more. I was making the obvious point that you keep harping on how your god is somehow necessary for morality without demonstrating that to be true, and despite religion having a long history of being overwhelmingly a force for evil.
Meaningless. There is no such evidence; a list of people who supposedly support creationism doesn’t matter especially since the creationists and religious believers in general have a pervasive history of lying about who supports them; and again, creationism fails to answer any meaningful questions.
No it doesn’t. It’s just an observation. Your “objective morality” doesn’t exist. Give it up. Morality is just a matter of opinion. Something is “wrong” if I DECIDE it is wrong. I don’t “recognize” it as wrong. I DECIDE it. So do you. So does everybody else. We’re all George W. Bush when it comes to morality.
Any entity needs a place ot exist, so if God is an entity He would first need a place , so who created that? If God always exised then existence would have to proceed Him, unless God and existence are the same thing!
Design can come from chance. One can drop ink on a tablet and it can look like a star or any thing, Some things happen just because they do…no plan or by design. It is a matter of Belief in how one views it.
Not just a place; some kind of underlying order. An intelligent being is a complex, ordered thing that requires some kind of underlying set of rules to exist.
Evolutionary theory also suggests – indeed, makes explicit – that a fine way to benefit from reciprocity involves banding together in cooperative groups, often while enshrining cultural values that promote a concern for innocent life.
That’s not really an “A, yet B” combination; the second part isn’t at odds with the first part, it follows from it.
No problem, I appreciate your questions are genuine.
Are you referring physical harm? If so, I have answered that already. We inflict physical harm in other instances in the name of good (eg an innoculation). Who is to say that the harm imposed in child abuse is ‘wrong’?