So you are your own god then.
I am not my own god, the same way that the farmer who grew the wheat and the miller who made the flour and the baker who actually baked the bread are not my gods. Bread is not something that needs to come from a god. Bread is something that man makes.
This is the fundamental difference between you and me. I do not need a god to exist in order to live my life. I don’t worship anything. Not myself, not another person, not money, not gods.
They don’t? They don’t take E=mc^2 as a absolute truth? They don’t read their ‘bibles’ such as newspapers (or modern internet equivalents) for finding out how to do things such as invest? They don’t watch TV for those things either? They don’t worship at the alter of modern medicine relying on their priests (doctors) and their potions (pharmaceuticals) for, usually temporary, relief. They don’t bow down and kneel to the accumulation of things (or in other words they don’t submit themselves to bondage to buy things)?
As I understand it, there are two ways Christians except the concept of evolution. The first is that God set up creation in the beginning (via Big Bang, or whatever) so perfectly as to cause the world we see to naturally come about. This presupposes a that God is so good that he could predict what time you would need to go to the bathroom this afternoon and which way it would splash just from the energy relationships of the first second of the universe.
The second is that God is actively guiding evolution to produce the results we see today. This requires a more involved, but less far sighted deity.
Full disclosure: I subscribed to the first school of thought when I truly believed in God. I figured that if God was as mighty, knowledgeable and powerful as the Bible claims, why would he need to keep tweaking things? I also felt (as do others, I am sure) that part of the reason for doing things this way is that faith is a requirement. If there were scientific evidence that could prove God, who would need faith?
Miller-Urey just showed that natural (non-biological) processes could create the the complex molecules that are required for life. This seems to be showing that simple molecules not much more complex than the ones produced during the Miller-Urey experiments can self replicate and evolve.
Jonathan
Well you are providing for your own needs, this seems like a quality that a god must have.
Um, no. They just read newspapers the same way you do, without venerating them as some kind of holy text. And so on for all the rest of it.
Right. How much more complex are they though?
Now that is funny.
If I define God as “my feet,” then God is in my shoe. If I define God as “the subway,” God took me to work. And if I say black is white and up is down, I’m probably going to get hit by a car when I cross the street- unless I kill myself by falling down an elevator shaft first.
In other words, yes, you can prove atheists believe in gods if you make up definitions for a lot of things and then pretend those things are equivalent to religious faith. But nobody’s going to take your argument seriously, owing to the fact that it’s absurd.
Only if you presuppose the need for a god. As the noted French mathematician/astronomer Pierre-Simone Laplace was said to have told Napoleon, on the occasion of the Emperor questioning the lack of mention of God in Laplace’s recently published Celestial Mechanics, “I have no need of that hypothesis.”
No, it won’t shut up the creationists. Neither will anything we say. Banging your head against the stupid doesn’t give the stupid a headache.
No, actually we don’t. E=mc^2 is a simplified approximation that works in many cases to describe a certain relationship (the mass of an object at rest and its energy). We use it because it is useful. There are many people who try and find a more useful formula, and if they do and can prove it we will use that. You seem to be arguing that to not believe in God means that you cannot accept anything as true. I try to take as little as possible on faith. i know it is not possible to verify everything and know everything, but I keep informed of the drugs I am prescribed and the workings of the markets I invest in.
On thinking about it, you comment is extremely deeming to religious faith. Do you consider your faith in God to be no more deep than your confidence in your bank teller correctly depositing your check, or your doctor correctly inserting an IV?
Jonathan
And you are communicating with people in vastly remote areas. That seems like a quality a god should have as well.
[Gozer]Are you a god?[/Gozer]
Jonathan
I rely on Albertson’s for my daily bread. Except I only visit the grocery store every few days, so it’s more like my bi-weekly bread.
Whoa, hold the phone – I’m starting to realize you’re not just playing Devil’s Advocate here. In which case, riddle me this…
WHY would God create our universe with the appearance of age?? Why would He create dinosaur fossils, geological strata, and laws of physics which allow us to objectively measure the distance of stars up to 14 billion light-years away? Was it all to intentionally deceive His children? Because there’s no chance I would trust ANY God who acts with such inherent deception – such an entity, if He existed, would be THE DEVIL and must be rebuked. So…why do you remain a believer?
I bet the stuff I find when I clean out my fridge could take it in a fight.
The stuff in my fridge won’t let me clean it out.
We need a provider of resources, which you claim you are your own provider. Providing our own resources is part of the original sin, Eve followed (worshiped) Satan in obtaining the fruit, Adam followed (worshiped) himself in trying to get back with Eve.
I read the newspaper as a text inferior to scriptures, and that text has to be taken into context of the scriptures.
No, I have a infallible God as my God, they have gods that are known to be error prone, but it’s the best they can come up with.
I, like you, read the newspaper as fallible.
The difference is that I think all texts are potentially fallible. It’s not at all as though my perspective on the newspaper is the same as your perspective on the Bible.
Anyway, whatever. This isn’t going anywhere.