So, God either had an non-natural origin, or is dead?
Robertliguori
As it happens, the so-called “vacuum” is actually full of energy. But evading the question really doesn’t answer it. How could any mechanism at all — or any law, or any principle, or even any potential — for a universe ever have existed naturally if nothing preceded the universe, including mechanisms, laws, principles, and potential?
There is no need for God to have an origin since He is supernatural. His eternity is perfectly cromulent. 
The materialist’s paradox is like this:
Given: Nothing outside the natural universe exists or has ever existed
(1) The universe is eternal — then it must be dead since entropy has been observed reliably to increase over time.
or
(2) The universe had an origin — then there must have existed a potential for the universe to emerge, in contradiction to the given.
Gobear
In that case, you had a non-natural origin if you define natural as your own life and your experiences in it, just as the universe, if it had an origin, had a non-natural origin if you define natural as the universe and all that is in it.
Might I humbly suggest that one of you (Libertarian) sees one thing and the other party (Phoenix Dragon, gobear) sees another and that you are operating from different premises?
The proof shown is proof of God’s existence to Lib and others. That it is such does not require that it be proof to any other thing in existence, living or non-living. And conversely, that it is not proof to some living or non-living thing does not require that it be invalid. It is valid for whomever believe it is valid, and it is invalid for whomever believe it is invalid. Trying to convince one party of the validity, when they have examined the same evidence and found it to be lacking, is not going to get us anywhere but a 6th page full of the same arguments, which are quickly boiling down to “yes it is” "no it isn’t’ “yes it is”.
Perhaps what one ought to do for someone who believes God does not exist is to ask that person what would prove that God exists (warning: IMHO statement follows!), because if there is one thing true about God it is that He reveals Himself to people in any number of ways. The fact that you, Lib find His existence in, for example, a jar of peanuts and the proof above does not mean that gobear will look at same and feel God’s presence inside himself, or anywhere else for that matter.
I should note, Lib, if only for your amusement/edification that several of the pieces in your proof above are somewhat lacking (IMO, anyway). That many arguments against something are weak does absolutely nothing to proove the opposite. I would think that a suitably intelligent person would rather cite the most capable arguments that God does not exist and show their refutations rather than saying “well, lots of people have tried, and there have been some really bad failures”. Let us take a lesson from Descartes and construct the strongest argument against God’s existence, because then the refutation will actually mean something. And when you get to choose your definition for something, that it is easy to show that it exists … well hell, I can define Baseball as God and show that it exists. Does fuck-all to prove it, though:) I note for the last bit that while it implies a certain amount of credibility that X billions of people have believed Y about the world/aspect of the world, it does not dictate factuality or we would still be teaching a flat-earth model of the world.
My apologies Ben, I haven’t been around long enough to run into Tris. I have bumped heads already with NaSultainne, and I guess I expected better of him. Silly me.
Pun
Some of what you said went over my head, but much of it hit the target. In any case, if I am confident of anything, it is that whatever you are trying to say, you mean it in the most sincere and uplifting manner possible both for me and for my debating adversaries. I define God as Supreme Being, and I define a baseball differently. But to each his own.
I’m gettind spammed too much. I could have sworn the title of the thread was “The cock is growing”. :o
Haven’t the faintest. Until I (or someone whom I trust not to screw with the data) fires up a Big-Bang-a-matic and observes what happens before and during the creation of a universe, I am militantly agnostic about knowledge of said stages. Since we have no way of knowing what conditions were like before the universe was, we have no way of guessing how the universe came into being. Hell, we have no way of being sure that entropy is constant.
Sigh. If you accept that God can be exempt from your unusual interpretation of entropy, then you can damn well ascribe the same quality to the universe, or meta-universe that spawned ours as a child process, or whatever the heck caused the big bang in the first place. Don’t make me beat you over the head with TVAA.
Robertliguori
Conditions? Before? As the man who recently explained that there was no time before the universe, think about what you’re saying. What sort of condition might have existed before conditions existed?
You materialists really ought to make up your mind. Is it as Gobear says, that God is outside the purview of science and the natural world? Or is it as you imply here, that God is contained within the universe? If He is supernatural, then how is He restricted by laws of nature? And if He is natural, then how is His existence not contingent?
With the possible objection of the handful of materialist/pandeists who equate “God” and “Universe,” one thing I think we can all agree on is that if there is anything that meets the conceptualizations we place on the term “God,” whatever It is, It’s not a closed system subject to the Laws of Thermodynamics.
(And that’s intentionally written to receive the assent of both Christians and Jews, and agnostics and soft atheists, and any Pagans/Other: Please Specify__ that may be joining in these discussions.)
Look, you’re trying to imply that what, if anything, -ever came before the universe, is bounded by the laws of the universe, such as entropy. To me, this is as silly as positing that God is effected by entropy.
And yes, I claim that God (as He is commonly expected to be) is supernatural and outside the purview of science. This has different ramifications to different people.
Also, Lib, remember that an infinite amount of time has not passed since the inception of the universe. You can reasonably say that time started at the big bang, with the sudden influx of whatever fluxed in.
Apologies if this posts twice.
Very simply, Lib, what I was trying to say is that you are at an impasse with your adversaries. I could well be wrong, but that’s how it seems from this corner of things. You are as fervent in your belief that what you have posted is the truth as gobear et al. are in their beliefs that what they have posted is the truth. Unless and until that is rectified (if such is necessary), y’all aren’t going to get anywhere. And from my corner here I don’t see anyone budging. IMO, of course:)
Let me just quote a couple things:
Ernst Mayr-“Darwinism rejects all supernatural phenomena and causations”
Dr Scott Todd, an immunologist at Kansas State University- “Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such an hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic”
Burbidge, G., 1992. Why only one big bang? Scientific American-"'Big bang cosmology is probably as widely believed as has been any theory of the universe in the history of Western civilization. It rests, however, on many untested, and in some cases untestable, assumptions. Indeed, big bang cosmology has become a bandwagon of thought that reflects faith as much as objective truth."
And finally:
Professor Richard Lewontin, a geneticist (and self-proclaimed Marxist), is a renowned champion of neo-Darwinism, and certainly one of the world’s leaders in evolutionary biology. He wrote this very revealing comment (the italics were in the original). It illustrates the implicit philosophical bias against Genesis creation—regardless of whether or not the facts support it.
‘We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spiteof its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.’
Svt4Him, what is your point (if you havce one)?
You have provided four statements on rather disparate issues. Each of them are personal or philosophical opinions on individiuals that may or may not find agreement among other individuals in the same fields.
As it happens, the first two statements are entirely correct and would be embraced by the overwhelming majority of Christian scientists.
Darwinism does reject the supernatural because that is what science must do. If one comes up with a supernatural solution to a physical problem, it is no longer possible to seek further for the physical solution.
An “Intelligent Designer” would put a stop to scientific inquiry. Run into a problem? “The I D did it.” “OK, no point in pursuing that any more.” (This, in fact, is exactly the trap that ID*'s cuurent champion, Behe, did. He came up on a couple of processes that he was not bright enough to figure out, announced that they had to have been built by an Intelligent Designer, then stood around writing silly books while actual scientists went out and demonstrated how the processes evolved.)
(By Christian scientists, but not of course, by Christian Scientists.)
My point is there is faith required to believe in science, as it isn’t always as reliable as it is made out to be.
This line of reasoning always amazes me. By posting, you’ve pretty much said that Christians posting here show no fruit, or lack the fruit of the spirit, and I wonder how you can make that claim. If I’ve ever called someone a name, or attacked their character, then I’ll apologies and try not to do it again. But to address issues is a bit different. Now to be rebuked, if you don’t like that, then a forum is a bad place to be. By that I mean, and I’ll use the ref in the Bible when Jesus rebuked Peter, that a rebuke is simply someone saying something in disagreement with you. Any forum with more than one member, IMO, will have people who rebuke one another. But I fail to see how this fits into your description of all the bad Christians do, or how it in some way losses souls. As for respecting those who don’t believe in God, that’s really nice. I guess no true Christian would call anyone son’s of snakes, yet Jesus and John the Baptist did, yet I don’t see any of that here. But here is a letter from an atheist (and I still fail to see how atheism is not a religion, yet theism is)
that may address your concern:
"You are really convinced that you’ve got all the answers. You’ve really got yourself tricked into believing that you’re 100% right. Well, let me tell you just one thing. Do you consider yourself to be compassionate of other humans? If you’re right, as you say you are, and you believe that, then how can you sleep at night? When you speak with me, you are speaking with someone who you believe is walking directly into eternal damnation, into an endless onslaught of horrendous pain which your ‘loving’ god created, yet you stand by and do nothing.
If you believed one bit that thousands every day were falling into an eternal and unchangeable fate, you should be running the streets mad with rage at their blindness. That’s equivalent to standing on a street corner and watching every person that passes you walk blindly directly into the path of a bus and die, yet you stand idly by and do nothing. You’re just twiddling your thumbs, happy in the knowledge that one day that ‘walk’ signal will shine your way across the road.
Think about it. Imagine the horrors Hell must have in store if the Bible is true. You’re just going to allow that to happen and not care about saving anyone but yourself? If you’re right then you’re an uncaring, unemotional and purely selfish (expletive) that has no right to talk about subjects such as love and caring."
[goodcall]This line of reasoning always amazes me. By posting, you’ve pretty much said that Christians posting here show no fruit, or lack the fruit of the spirit, and I wonder how you can make that claim. If I’ve ever called someone a name, or attacked their character, then I’ll apologies and try not to do it again. But to address issues is a bit different. Now to be rebuked, if you don’t like that, then a forum is a bad place to be. By that I mean, and I’ll use the ref in the Bible when Jesus rebuked Peter, that a rebuke is simply someone saying something in disagreement with you. Any forum with more than one member, IMO, will have people who rebuke one another. But I fail to see how this fits into your description of all the bad Christians do, or how it in some way losses souls. As for respecting those who don’t believe in God, that’s really nice. I guess no true Christian would call anyone son’s of snakes, yet Jesus and John the Baptist did, yet I don’t see any of that here. But here is a letter from an atheist (and I still fail to see how atheism is not a religion, yet theism is)[/goodcall]
Did Elaine Benes write that? (and are you wearing a man-fur)?
As an atheist myself, I’d be grateful if you kept your pathological religion to yourselves. I know everything there is to know about the Christian message and I’m not interested. Really.
Moreover, your message may actually do more harm than good. It’s the fundies’ constant harping on the inherent sinfulness of gay peopole that gives cretins the idea that beating or killing gay people is acceptable. After all, they’re “bad.”
I have to agree with you, gobear.
I am (sortof) a fundie and know a lot of them.
They have a hard time seeing anyone else’s viewpoint, even if but a little.
I have nothing against gay people, so maybe I’m not a real fundie after all.
You kidnof Have to be, according to them.
Actually, Svt4Him, what I think is more telling is that, at some point in your life, somebody fed you this vision of God as a being who has no compunctions about visiting terrible, everlasting punishments on otherwise good people for the simple sin of not paying him enough lip service, and your reaction wasn’t, “How could the Creator of the universe be so abhorrently evil?” it was “Sounds great! Where do I sign up?” I have no trouble believing that you think you are doing good by witnessing for your God, but I do have some problems with your apparent definition of “good.”
Piffle. (And, no, it was not a “good call.”)
Christians posting, here, may or may not show fruit. The point to which you were responding addresses only one sort of Christian: the poster who wanders into a thread on science and quotes nine-commandment-Christians such as Hovind and Gish, or who wanders into a thread involving ethical decisions and proclaims that one or two verses taken (often out of context) from Scripture settles the issue (in their favor, of course) and who, when challenged, resorts to flinging around half-baked platitudes and condemnations without actually attempting to see either the logic and science (for which God gave them a mind) of their opponent or their own underlying triumphant hostility, gloating over their opponents’ supposed damnation, that they present in place of a sincere effort to bring the message of Jesus to all people.
These posters drive others away from God. Seeing people reject the message because the messenger is more filled with righteous self-satisfaction than with a spirit of love gives most observers the wherewithal to “make that claim.”
On the other hand, there are Christians posting to this board who do show the fruit of God’s gifts. They are simply not the ones addressed in this thread.