Faith-killing questions from the trenches, and answers
Top 10 Reasons to Not Be a Christian
Q & A Session Audio
- “There is no scientific evidence whatsoever of any miracles ever actually occurring.”
- “The Jesus story just is an accumulation of myths of legendary people, all rolled into one über nice guy.”
- “Science and faith are incompatible ways of thinking. Separate realms that should be kept separate.”
- “The history of science is the story of one religious superstition after another being eradicated by reason and logic.”
- “The Bible is a translation of a translation of tales cobbled together by Constantine in 300AD.”
- “St. Paul invented Christianity by making a nice rabbi named Jesus into a god.”
- “Evolution disproves God.”
- “In their arrogant superiority, Christians think everybody else is going to burn in hell for all eternity.”
- “The Bible is riddled with contradictions and therefore cannot be the perfect word of God.”
- “More people have been killed in the name of religion than any other cause in the history of the world.”
This story starts with my brother Bryan, a tough-questions seminary student. He got a Masters degree in theology at a very conservative seminary where they work them real good, and he toed the line and he learned all the stuff that he’s supposed to learn, and he moved to China.
He’s in China for a couple of years and he basically turned into an agnostic and came within spitting distance of becoming an atheist, which really shook me up.
Bryan is a very smart guy, and one of the questions that he asked was this.
He goes, “Okay, Perry, I’ve been to seminary. I know Greek, I know Hebrew, I know Aramaic, and when I read the New Testament I do not see any reason whatsoever from the text why we should not have miracles today. So where are they?
1. “There is no scientific evidence whatsoever of any miracles ever actually occurring.”
And I’m like, “Uh…let me ask my sales manager and get back to you.” I hate it when people ask ‘elephant in the room’ questions.
Now, if you’ve been in any strand of Christianity for any length of time, you will encounter miracle stories. For example, “We prayed for my sister Debbie and she had cancer, and all of a sudden she didn’t have cancer anymore.”
Every now and then, I don’t care where you are in Christianity, you will hear those. I’ve heard a few of them, but I was in very short supply of such stories and I hadn’t thought about it much. I had always been taught that those miracles went away and they either don’t exist anymore, or at least never happen “on command.”
And Bryan’s cutting to the chase; he’s like, “Well, I don’t see any reason why they shouldn’t.” And I knew he was right. So what’s the deal? Let’s start in on this.
I went looking and I’ll teII you that one interesting book that I found along the way was by Richard Casdorph, who is a medical doctor. He wrote a book in the 1970s called Real Miracles. This is an older version of the book. It’s called, The Miracles – A Medical Doctor Says Yes to Miracles.
What this guy did was there was this lady back in the 1970s named Catherine Kuhlman and she would do these healing services. He followed her around and he documented what happened to these people. He documented the “before” and the “after” and he did so with X-rays, medical reports, letters from doctors, all of that kind of stuff. This book is 10 case studies. I’ll tell you what some of the chapter names are:
- Malignant Brain Tumor
- Multiple Sclerosis
- Atherosclerotic Heart Disease
- Carcinoma of the Kidney
- Mixed Rheumatoid Arthritis and Osteoarthritis
And he goes through, one by one, with X-rays, doctor’s reports and everything and says, “This guy had this before and it’s gone now. Here’s the X-ray, here’s the letter from the doctor, and there it is.” This is not by any means the only such book, but they exist.
Another example of this is God and The Sun at Fatima. Catholics will know what Fatima is (probably most Protestants won’t) but I think back somewhere around 1913, just before World War I, some children were playing and they had a vision of the Virgin Mary. She said that something really amazing is going to happen here at this certain date and they told everybody. Everybody showed up and they all saw it.
This book is by Stanley Jaki, who is a physicist and a Catholic priest and a science historian. He goes into 360 pages of interviewing people and documenting all this. This is as close as you can get to a scientific investigation of a miracle.
Another book that I ran across that I found real interesting that isn’t really about miracles but is about the metaphysical world is called Margins of Reality, by Robert Jahn and Brenda Dunne.
They worked at the Princeton University Engineering Anomalies Research Lab. The lab was closed in 2007, but for almost 30 years there was a lab at Princeton and they would investigate paranormal phenomena. And they proved to five 9’s of statistical confidence (that’s almost six Sigma) that people could deflect falling objects by concentrating. They proved that they could send and receive telepathic messages.
Now, most of the scientific community does not know what to do with this stuff. It freaks them out, but it’s there. This is a fascinating book. So I started investigating this, and I also started looking for personal experiences.
A couple of years ago I was in India with my friend, Jeremy. He has spent a lot of time doing healing and practicing Biblical healing. We were at a little church service and Jeremy goes up to the pastor and says, “Tell these people that if they want healing prayer at the end of the service, I’ll pray for them.” So the pastor tells all the people and everyone was like, “Well, okay, I’ll go over there!”
Jeremy was like, “Perry, Perry, come over here and help me!” I’d never done this before. There was a woman whose whole left arm was paralyzed. She had had brain surgery a year and a half before. She had an indentation in her head from the surgery. She had been having seizures ever since the surgery and she had no feeling in her left arm. She wanted us to pray for her.
So Jeremy’s like, “Okay, Perry, start praising God, start praying for this lady!”
I’m like, “Okay, me Robin, you Batman, I’ll do whatever you tell me to do,” and we started praying. He would poke her on the hand – “Can you feel that?”
“No, can’t feel that.”
He’d pray some more and ask, “Can you feel that?”
“I’m starting to feel something!” So he would pray some more and at the end of 20 minutes, all the feeling was back in her left arm. She was so excited, she didn’t know what to do with herself.
A guy came in with a broken wrist, holding it like that; by the end, he was jumping up and down, he was so excited.
There was another lady who had a severe shoulder injury and she couldn’t move her shoulder past about here. I put my arm on her shoulder and I could feel this crunching going on in her shoulder and we prayed for her for about 30 minutes. The crunching was all gone and she was moving her shoulder and she was all excited.
Then I go home and I’m like, “I wonder if this actually stuck. I wonder if it did.” So I emailed this guy and I asked him, “How are these people doing, anyway?”
He said, “In the glorious name of the Lord Jesus Christ, Mr. Perry Marshall, I am so excited to tell you, they are telling everybody they can’t wait for you to come back!”
I said, “Wow, this is great!”
Now, I’ve got to cover 10 of these things in 50 minutes, which is kind of insane, so I don’t have time to go any more. The church that I attend, a Vineyard Church, we practice this.
I of all people know what it’s like to sit here and pray for someone and go, “I feel really stupid! What if this doesn’t work?” You know, sometimes there’s no obvious result, but sometimes there is. You know what? It’s less risky than going to the emergency room.
I have a few friends who actually go to the emergency room every Tuesday night and they pray for people, and trippy stuff happens sometimes. If you want to read some more of these stories, go here. You can read the whole India story in more detail.
This brings up another thing. You know a lot of the people talk about Christians living by faith. Well, I totally understand and agree with that, but I also think that as you mature as a Christian, you live more and more by experience. That faith leads to results which gives you experience, and there’s kind of an upwards spiral and it’s not just like, “Well, you know, life is miserable, but by and by in the sky, someday God’s going to make the world a better place.”
No, it can be now. I think the Kingdom of God is now. I think a lot of Christians kind of have this, “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach to the higher gifts, and I guess the question that I’d like to raise for people that want to take that approach is, well, if we took the New Testament and took all of the miracle stories out, what would we have left?
I think my brother was right. I don’t see any place in this book that says these miracles are supposed to stop. There’s a little challenge for you on that.
Note: For more information on documented healing events, see my extensive article on miracles which includes videos of live healings taking place, links to mainstream media coverage and recent reports in scientific journals. Read and watch here.
2. “The Jesus story is just an accumulation of myths of a legendary people, all rolled into one über-nice guy.
Let me expand on that a little bit. People say, “The God and the Jesus that Christians worship today are actually amalgams formed out of ancient pagan gods. The idea of a virgin birth, a burial in a rock tomb, a resurrection after three days, eating a body, drinking blood, had nothing to do with Jesus.
“All those things were already in other myths and legends before that, so they just took them all and they kind of rolled them into these Jesus stories. So Christianity is a snowball that rolled over a dozen pagan religions and as the snowball grew, it freely attached pagan rituals in order to be more palatable to converts.”
By the way, I got this verbatim from an email that a guy sent me, so I just went and fished one up, and there you go. This is a very common thing. Well, I would like to reduce this to a question, so let’s look at the logical question behind the question.
I think the question is this:
“If a myth precedes a fact, does that make the fact a myth? Does it logically follow?”
Well, let’s take 9/11 as an example. On 9/11/01, as we all know, two planes flew into the Twin Towers. The Last Jihad by Joel Rosenberg, on the first page puts readers into the cockpit of a hijacked jet, on a kamikaze mission into an American city, but it was written nine months before 9/11.
Does that make 9/11 a myth? Or how about Debt of Honor by Tom Clancy. 1996 – a Japanese 747 crashes into the Capitol, killing most of the top functionaries in the U.S. government.
Or here’s a good one – The Lone Gunman TV series. The pilot episode was about an attempt to crash an airliner into the World Trade Center. It was a government conspiracy to increase defense spending by making it look like a terrorist attack. It aired in March 2001.
So the next time someone tells you that Jesus was a myth, ask them this question: “Name one other resurrection story that stuck. Just one.” I don’t know of any. I think there’s a reason for that.
3. “Science and faith are incompatible ways of thinking. They are separate realms that should be kept separate.”
I’ll tell you a little story. Back in the early 20th century there was a great deal of optimism in the mathematical profession that we were closing in on a theory of everything. What mathematicians were looking for was a set of constructions that made all of the propositions of mathematics form a nice, tidy, complete circle.
Let me explain what I mean by this. How many of you took high school geometry and it was stuff like, “This triangle has three equal sides; therefore, it is an Equilateral triangle.” And then you do all these proofs and you work all this logic from it.
Well, if you take that high school geometry book, there are always four or five things that the book starts with as premises that everybody knows are true but no mathematician has ever been able to prove are true.
For example, “We know this is true, no one has ever been able to prove it. We know it’s true because it works and it’s all consistent, but we can’t prove it.” And they were like, “Someday we’re gonna prove it!”
Well, in 1931 a guy named Kurt Gödel proved that it would never happen. And actually, I think that Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem is just as important as Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Most people have never heard of it, but let me explain what his Incompleteness Theorem says.
This is the kindergarten version. It says, “Anything you can draw a circle around requires something on the outside to explain it, which you cannot prove.” This applies to everything. It applies to a bicycle; if you build a bicycle, the fact that it’s there relies on something outside of the bicycle.
It’s true of a geometry book, a software program, the English language, or the universe. Gödel’s Theorem was a crushing blow to mathematicians. It was as if they realized, “You mean, we’re never going to make everything flow into a perfect circle?” No. Can’t be done.
Actually, the universe is like an MC Escher painting where you climb up the steps and all of a sudden you’re at the bottom again. There’s a book called Gödel Escher Bach, which takes Gödel’s Theorem, Escher’s paintings, and Bach’s music and shows how they’re all basically the same.
For instance, in Bach’s music the notes escalate and they go up and up and somehow all of a sudden it starts with bass notes again and you didn’t even notice. What does this have to do with the question, “Science and faith are incompatible ways of thinking”?
Gödel’s Theorem says that you cannot do science without faith; it’s impossible. You start with a fact – “I know this because of this, and I know this because of this,” you always go back to some fact that you can’t prove.
Now, what does science do? Science says, “If I drop this cup from my hand onto the ground, it’s going to fall every time. Only past experience shows that to be true. I cannot prove that it’s going to fall again. I always have to rely on some assumption that I can’t prove in science.”
One little extra thing I want to throw in here; the statement that, “Science and faith are incompatible ways of thinking, separate ways of thinking that should be kept separate,” is that a scientific statement?
No, it’s a philosophical statement.
Even a statement about keeping science and philosophy separate requires philosophy. And the statement itself presumes that philosophy gets to say something about science.
That’s exactly what Gödel was talking about.
I’ve written a much more thorough treatment of Gödel’s Incompleteness theorem here: http://www.cosmicfingerprints.com/blog/incompleteness/
4. “The history of science is the story of one religious superstition after another being eradicated by reason and logic.”
I want you to think about something:
Where did science come from?
If you study the history of science, you’ll find out that it got started in Greece and didn’t go anywhere. It got started in Rome and it fizzled out and didn’t go anywhere. It got started in ancient Egypt and in China – didn’t really go anywhere there either. It got started in Islam, and every time in those places, it stalled.
Why did it succeed in Europe after failing everywhere else? We all know it launched there and took off like a rocket.
Here’s why I think it happened. In the Apocrypha, the part of the Bible that the Catholics read and the Protestants don’t, Wisdom of Solomon 11:21 says:
“Thou hast ordered all things in weight and number and measure.”
I submit to you that this verse is where science started. That all things are weigh-able, measurable and countable. That there’s a systematic explanation for what goes on in the universe. So far as I know, no one else in the ancient world made a more definite statement about science than Solomon did right here.
Western Christianity believed that the universe was governed by fixed, discoverable laws, and that’s what gave birth to science. The reason that science succeeded in the West and failed in all those other places was that in all those other places, there was no theological basis to believe this.
If you believe that it rained today because Zeus is in a snit with Apollo, how are you going to come up with a systematic explanation that doesn’t invoke some kind of arbitrary, whimsical source?
Christian theology believed that God could create the world and then on the seventh day that He could rest and the universe would continue to do what He told it to do. Therefore, the great scientists viewed the study of science as a way of studying the mind of God.
I would rewrite the question to say this: “The history of science is a story of faith in a harmonious universe being rewarded in weight, number, and measure.”
1,000 years ago you couldn’t take that for granted. Now we all take it for granted, because we figured it out.
5. “The Bible is a translation of a translation of tales cobbled together by Constantine in 300 AD.”
People make a lot out of this. Constantine got everybody together and they hammered out what they agreed was going to be the Bible. “You know, we just don’t buy these books, we’re going to keep them.” A lot of people have this idea that this is when the Bible that we have today came to exist.
I want to show you a book that will correct that notion. This is called Faith of the Early Fathers by Jurgens. I have to mention here that this is another Catholic book. I was raised Protestant. I was a preacher’s kid. We were uber-studious Protestants. We took ourselves real seriously. Some of you know what I’m talking about – “Oh, that kind…starchy!”
We thought that Catholics were bad people. You know, “Go tell them how bad they are!” Well, then I grew up and my brother-in-law, Alan, studies church history. He gets a Ph.D. in church history at Iowa State, not some conservative place.
He went to Iowa State because they had the biggest and best library he could find on church history.
It turned out that most of his professors were atheists. To get a dissertation pushed through these guys was a Herculean task. But he and I would talk about theological stuff, and it was kind of funny because every time I would raise some theological question, he would always say something like, “Well, yeah, the first people to probe that question in detail were the monks in Western Italy in 800 AD and what they said was…” and he’d go off on something.
Anything you could come up with, someone had already thought about it and written about 1,200 books on it. I thought Christianity started all over again with Martin Luther after this burned-out period…oh, come on! Heavens, no.
So this is a Catholic book. I have great respect for Catholics and Catholic theologians and all that. I know somebody will probably want to get in a fist fight about that with me at the end, but I’m telling you anyway.
This book is a collection of all of the earliest writings, and actually there’s three of them. I just brought the first one. It starts at about 80 AD and it’s letters from all these guys that ran churches. Letters from pastors to their congregations, and letters to disciples from their mentors, and it ends somewhere around St. Hilaire of Poitier and St. Cyril of Jerusalem. I don’t know what year this was, probably about 400-500 AD, and it starts at 80.
It goes in order, so you can read 80 AD and then you can read 110 AD and then you can read 125 AD and 300 AD and so forth. In every chapter there are footnotes of the Bible verses they’re quoting. It’s exactly the same.
Pastor Bill Hybels at Willow Creek could use this to preach a sermon out of any page in this book and it would be just fine. It would be scriptural and it would be original Christianity, no different than we have today. Most of these early letters sound an awful lot like the New Testament letters that Paul wrote.
Anyone that tells you that Christianity started in 300 AD is just as ridiculous as saying it started in 1517 when Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door.
6. “St. Paul invented Christianity by making a rabbi named Jesus into God. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were just later fabrications.”
Obviously, the book that I just talked to you about does speak to that, because you can go all the way back to 80 AD and you have a whole body of literature that’s already telling a consistent story.
What’s usually said is that Paul wrote his letters in 40-50 AD and the Gospels were written in 60 – 90 AD and that’s too long. All of these myths would have accrued, so yes, Jesus was probably just this radical guy and he had these radical teachings and then they wanted him to be God and so they made the story about Him being God, and the people were so desperate and oppressed by the Romans that they found it believable – well, let’s do a comparison.
Paul Tibbetts was the pilot of the Enola Gay, which was the plane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima in 1945. He wrote a book in 1998, shortly before he died, called Return of the Enola Gay. How many years after 1945 is that? Fifty-three years after the bomb was dropped.
I found this book at my father-in-law’s house because he’s into World War II. You go over there and he always has The History Channel on. I started thumbing through this book, and the reason Tibbetts wrote the book was to correct revisionist history.
Revisionist history said, “If we had just been a little nicer to the Japanese, we should have just gone over there and talked to them, and they would’ve…”
Tibbetts is saying, “No! Let’s get this straight.” He goes into extensive detail about the political situation and all this stuff that was going on behind the scenes. He tells what it was like to get in that plane, what it was like to let the bomb loose and go into a 135 degree angle and feel the shock wave from the bomb and the brilliant flash of light and think, “Oh my word, what did I just do?” and all that.
Now, does anybody doubt that his autobiography tells you more or less accurately what happened? Is anybody going to reasonably doubt that he doesn’t remember what happened, 53 years later? I don’t think so!
So if Jesus died in 33, what’s 53 years out from 33 – isn’t that 86? That’s like getting to the outside limit of when they said the Gospels were written.
Is there any reason to think that the Gospels were any less reliable?
Considering there are four of them and considering they don’t all perfectly line up or quote everybody verbatim the same way, they don’t all tell stories the same way – four independent accounts – can anyone reasonably think that the Gospels are any less reliable than his story? I don’t think so.
And if you compare it to other things in history, a lot of those things were written even further after the fact than that. I would like to point to the consistency of early teachings about Jesus and raise the question: Why do substantially different teachings about Jesus only appear after 150-200 years? Isn’t that kind of what you would expect?
I rest my case.
7. “Evolution disproves God.”
That’s a good one. I like that one. I have a question for you. Who knows what that is? DOS – how many of you have used DOS somewhere in your early childhood? This is a screenshot of DOS 3.0, 3.3, which is about 1985. You all remember DOS:
C:> dir
C:> dir /w
C:> format c:
When you tried to format the hard drive, did it say “Are you sure?” I don’t remember. Early versions did.
Now here we have Windows XP with Internet Explorer, which is about 2005. Let me ask you a question: let’s say that DOS never got modified by the guys in Redmond, Washington and it evolved into Windows XP all by itself.
Imagine that DOS adapted, that it had a capability built in to where it would sense that it needed an Internet connection and it needed a web browser and it needed Outlook, and that it needed a mouse and updates and antivirus software. And let’s say that it would rearrange its code and then test different versions with some version of natural selection until the pieces started to work.
Did that happen? No. If DOS had actually evolved all by itself, off without any exterior tampering, tinkering or code writing from any software engineers, and it had just done that, would you be more or less impressed with the person who wrote the first DOS program?
You would go, “How did you do that?” You could go to China and for $2 you can buy a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of Windows. All those versions, especially the ones in China, they don’t have the little 3D thing on them. It’s grey and it has Magic Marker on it ‘Windows XP’.
Now, the copies of copies of copies of copies, they all had mutations, didn’t they? And the marketplace had a chance to select them. Does anyone know of copies of Windows that were better because of the mutations?
No.
Now, I just tried to apply the usual theory of evolution to DOS and everybody got a chuckle out of it. First of all, everything that evolves that we have any experience with, evolves because of some ability to do so or some kind of design or something acting upon it.
At the very least, if we’re going to even imagine that DOS could have evolved into Windows XP, we have to imagine that it has some kind of special program inside that’s ready and willing to rearrange all the pieces.
You know what? I am totally open to the possibility that God planted a cell in the ocean and that cell had some kind of magnificent program that could eventually evolve into everything that’s on Planet Earth. I am open to that.
And if that happened, then God is even more impressive than the version of God that says, “Well, OK, now we need apes, so let’s put an ape there, and now we need people, so let’s put a person there..”
I’m not trying to get into some debate about Genesis 1; this is simply an engineering argument. If evolution is true, then God is even more impressive than they thought God was before anyone thought of evolution!
8. “In their arrogant superiority, Christians think everybody else is going to burn in hell for all eternity.”
Let’s get the most riling questions out on the table. I want to point some scriptures out to you. Little things are kind of tucked in there that are easy to miss.
John 15:22 – Jesus says, “If I had not come and spoken to them, they would not be guilty of sin. Now, however, they have no excuse for their sin.” Hmm, that’s interesting.
Luke 11:30 – Jesus said, “The Queen of the South will rise at the judgment with the men of this generation and condemn them, for she came from the ends of the earth to listen to Solomon’s wisdom and now one greater than Solomon is here.”
Let’s look at this again. “The Queen of the South will rise at the judgment with the men of this generation and condemn them” – so what does this tell you about judgment? This isn’t like some cowering guy staring at God, getting pounded; this is anybody who has anything to say about what he knew, didn’t know, did and what he did not do, and what they did perhaps in a comparable situation.
Let’s look at this one. Matthew 11:21 – “Woe to you, Korazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! If the miracles that were performed in you had been performed in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes.”
Well? That’s a statement about two people, now, isn’t it? “Tyre and Sidon would have believed if they had Me.” Do you think that gets taken into consideration? I think so.
Acts 17:29 – Paul refers to idol worship and he says, “In the past, God overlooked such ignorance, but now He commands all people everywhere to repent.”
Now, this always comes up, somebody always says, “Well, what about the guy in Africa that never heard about Jesus?” They’re like, “I have to get this guy figured out before I decide if I’m going to go for this Jesus thing. I’m not sure if this is fair. I think this is all a setup. What about all these people?”
Here’s my concern: If you’re that guy, I’m not real worried about him. Not that the missionaries shouldn’t go talk to him and all that. In the Great Commission – “Go ye into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature” – God told us to do that for a reason.
This is just my opinion, but I suspect that guy in Africa, he has no missionary, Bible, or anything, I think if he looks up in the sky and goes, “Somebody made all this, whoever You are, I’d like to know you,” I think God can respect that prayer.
What I’m concerned about is that guy will rise up in the judgment and testify against the guy who used him as an excuse. If you look at all of these verses, the theme is, “Hey, guys, you knew an awful lot. What did you do with it?”
“If Tyre and Sidon had seen what you have seen, they would have repented in sackcloth and ashes.” The people he was talking to saw a lot. They saw the dead raised, they saw the blind see.
9. “The Bible is riddled with contradictions and therefore cannot be the perfect word of God.”
I’m going to take an interesting approach with this. I brought with me three different versions of the Bible. I’ve got a King James New Testament, a New Living Translation Bible and a New American Standard. I could have brought an NIV, but all you guys probably have one, because that’s kind of the popular Bible translation.
Do they all read the same? No.
I had to sign this thing before I came that I understood that Willow Creek has a doctrinal statement. One of the things in the thing that I had to sign was that I understand that Willow Creek says that the scriptures are inerrant in their original writings. That’s a very common thing that you’ll find in the Protestant church, that scriptures are inerrant in their original writings.
Do we have the originals? No. What we have are thousands of Greek manuscripts and there are slight differences with some of them. You could make a whole little tree of this copying error and that. You could put it all together and we could open all three of these Bibles up to John 5 or Ezekiel 34 or Revelation 12 or any book and we could read them side by side.
And rather than getting 12 decimal places of precision, I think what we get is more like there’s an outer edge on one side or the other on how you can interpret something, and then there’s something sort of in the middle.
Maybe the King James seems to be here and maybe the NIV seems to be here, and maybe the Catholic Bible seems to be here. But they’re all kind of within this range of variation. So there’s some wiggle room, not like 12 decimals of precision, but more like maybe two.
No matter what Bible you read, did Jesus rise from the dead in all of them? Is adultery a sin in all of them? Is it not all right to lie, cheat, and steal in all of them? Is there a debate between predestination and free will in all of them? Yes.
I had this realization one day; “Hey, wait a minute! I don’t have to sit here and nitpick every last verse that some skeptic wants to pick a fight with me about and make me explain everything that doesn’t quite seem to fit together, because you know what? This is like a puzzle that you’re trying to put together and some of the edges are fuzzy and I can’t put it perfectly together. And that’s all right.”
I was emailing back and forth with an atheist and he’s quibbling about the different tomb stories of the Resurrection. I don’t think they contradict each other, but in order to make them fit, you have to make a couple of assumptions before they fit.
He’s trying to duke it out and I said, “I don’t feel like defending the idea that the Bible is infallible. I’ll just say for today that I have four stories that were pretty close! So what do you think?”
He didn’t know what to do.
I said, “Well, Jesus died on the cross, you are a sinner, God created the world, 12 disciples went out and preached. The story’s pretty clear. How many of these little nit picky things from the New Testament that you brought up because you found them on some website do you have to get all straight before you get the big picture here?”
Try this on for size; the Bible is the word of God with a lower case w. But if we’re going to use a capital W, what is the Word of God? Jesus! Jesus is the Word of God. The Bible is the written testimony, inspired by the Holy Spirit, testifying to the Word of God. There’s a verse that says, “No one can confess Jesus Christ is Lord apart from the Holy Spirit.”
Let’s not put the Bible above the Holy Spirit.
You realize if you want to sort out all those puzzle pieces, you need the Holy Spirit to help you do it. And a person who does not have the Holy Spirit is not even going to be willing to do that. That’s why they’re arguing with you.
So when I get in these debates, I say, “Let’s just assume that this is like any other piece of history. Someone wrote it down as best they could, and here we have it. Let’s make a judgment from what’s in front of us. So what do you think?”
Did they just make all this up? Like perhaps, Jesus didn’t really die; they pried him off the cross and he was almost dead and then he was in the tomb, and people in the Middle East had these clever ways of reviving almost dead people and then he popped out. He looked so good, he looked like Superman, and everybody said, “Wow! You’re the Son of God!” Yeah, that’s what happened! Sure, that’s what happened!
Guys that are pulled off crosses when they’re almost dead always inspire people three days later to like change the world! That’s what happened!
Sorry, I’m getting a little sidetracked… here’s a fun one:
10. “More people have been killed in the name of religion than any other cause in the history of the world.”
Let me show you a book, called The Black Book of Communism. How many of you think this is cheery? Oh, yeah, if you’re feeling a little too good today, just read this one. This book documents the genocide of 160 million people in the 20th century alone – mostly by atheist governments.
Remember the Cultural Revolution under Chairman Mao? Well, that was a great period in China’s history, wasn’t it? How about Stalin? Oh boy, Stalin loved children. Yep, that guy just loved puppy dogs and children. He was such a nice man. 160 million people! Do you realize that’s more people than all the religious wars of the whole history of the world put together?
Some people say, “Well, it was just a coincidence that they were atheists.” All right, well, you can believe whatever you want to believe, but there does seem to be a correlation. Let’s recognize the question behind the question.
First of all, I don’t think you can overstate just how dangerous a worldview atheism actually is. I’m sure there are atheists here, and I’m glad that you’re here and you’re welcome.
When my brother slid into his faith crisis, I wanted to argue with him and he wouldn’t; and I’m not sure that would have been the healthiest thing if we had argued. I think it was probably a good idea that he declined, but I was ready to go. In truth, he was dragging me with him. I was scared because he was raising all kinds of questions.
I started going to Willow Creek 15 years ago and I started leading Seeker Small Groups. Those groups are where people who do not necessarily believe the Bible or Christianity get together at a table, and so every other Sunday for a couple of years I got seekers in there pummeling me with questions, and I thought I’d heard everything. Well, when Bryan and the Internet came along, I had no longer seen everything!
It was intense. Bryan was asking all kinds of penetrating questions and I was going to all these websites and it was like walking into machine gun fire. One of the things that I did was decide that I had to duke this out. So I started this website, www.CoffeehouseTheology.com, and it has emails that you can sign up for and see what it’s all about, if you like. If people replied to the emails, the emails came back to me.
The reason I did that was that I wanted to know if enough people came through the website and sent me emails, if Christianity cannot stand up to the test, I was going to find out! I decided that I was going to take everyone on and I was going to see if someone can punch a hole in this thing. And there were some scary moments. I was like, “Oh my goodness, these are big questions!”
I probably answered 10,000 emails during the last 6 years. There have been a LOT of people and a lot of conversations. The first thing I’ll tell you is that nobody’s punched a hole in Christianity. I think it stands up very well. If you have a question, there’s a book or website or something that has a good answer to it.
Here’s the other thing; nobody comes out swinging like the new breed of atheist like followers of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and all of those guys. These guys are furious! People talk about Muslims being extreme? Well, I get emails from a lot of Muslims and none of them come out swinging like the atheists do. They’re angry. And Richard Dawkins says things like, “Teaching your children that there is a God who would reward or punish you, people that do that are worse than child molesters.” That’s what he says.
It’s a war. What’s the track record? 160 million dead people. Now, this is not a battle of guns, because the pen is mightier than the sword. This is a battle of the pen. This is a battle of truth and belief systems. I think Christians have a moral obligation to know what’s going on, because if you don’t know what’s going on, you’ll get picked off by a skeptic.
The reason we have science today is because Christianity said there is a logical rational universe that was designed by an intelligent Creator. And the reason we have democracy is because Paul said, “There is neither male nor female, Jew nor Greek, slave nor free; all are equal in Christ Jesus.”
The most cherished Western values come from Christianity. Don’t surrender them to someone who has an axe to grind.
“Science contains no dogma. There are no authorities who dictate what science is or who can practice science. As much as you would like to think so, there are absolutely no canons or creeds dictating what scientists must do or preach.”
This assertion is thoroughly impeached by the persecution of scientists who became pioneers.
Read the biography of Ignaz Semmelweis. It will tragically expose the almost tautological underlying cornerstone of Dogma: science is free of dogma.
One need not venture to Austria in 1860 to expose that science has its high priests. It is only needed to look at the National Science Council’s expulsion of Peter Duesberg for daring to formulate a hypothesis contradicting the etiology of Aids.
Specifically, but not exclusively three dogmatic tenants of science are the belief that there is only one true answer to a question, all answers are knowable, and that those answers may be combined into a single coherent theory.
Since science rests for its authority on mathematics and no mathematical system can be demonstrated to prove that “right” (or “true”) and “wrong (“not true”) can always be determined (see, Turings paper on the “Entscheidungs problem”), science rests on an unprovable assumption which it accepts as a given–or “dogma”: scientific methodology can ultimately find THE answer.
This assumption is as dogmatic as that of the evangelical who believes, a priori, in the power of prayer or the infallibility of Jesus.
No, Greg Richards, you are wrong: science is full of dogma. Science is always trying to kill the findings of innovators such as Tom Bearden, John Bedini and others simply because they discover energy sources that fly very wide of the so-called “laws” of thermodynamics. Who made these “laws”? Scientists. Who supports and defends them against all odds and at any cost? Scientists.
Who shot down Virginia Steen-McIntyre’s discovery of human habitation in Mexico 500 000 years ago? Scientists! Go here for the full story http://www.s8int.com/hueyatlaco.html – there seems to have been some political pressure applied, but it was done by … you guessed it: a scientist. Who was and is the most vehement opposer of John Anthony West and Robert Schoch’s dating of the sphinx to 36 000 B.C.? None other than Zahi Hawass and Mark Lehner, Egyptolist scientists. o not delude yourself that “science has no dogma”. If you are a scientist, I double dare you to come out in favour of anyone who opposes the ‘mainstream’ view and you will see how quickly you will be ridiculed, vilified and thrust out into the cold, dark world of stark reality. The worst liars of all are those who lie to themselves and believe those lies.
One can prove a negative–at least to a reasonable individual. For instance, put ME in a cell with surveillance at 9:00 p.m. on Christmas Eve 2010 in New York City and then take me to court to prove at 9:00p.m. on that night I was in Sydney Australia at that particular time and the attempts to prove that I was would require such a constellation of implausible hypotheticals that the meaning of the word “prove”, me, and Australia would soon become meaningless.
That’s not what “proving a negative” means. You were proving you were in New York. You were not present in a million other places. The logical fallacy is: “Well he wasn’t in Sydney, so he WAS in New York.” It just doesn’t follow.
In logical terms “proving a negative” would be something like: “Reagan lowered taxes, therefore we didn’t have a recession…”, or “The bombing of Nagasaki saved 100,000 American lives.” Neither negative conclusion can ever be proven.
So it’s the old “God of the Gaps” argument which has been thoroughly discredited. “We haven’t figured out how this works, so it must be an act of God.” It goes nowhere because as we learn more and more about the world, God’s role gets smaller and smaller. God is the God of the whole show. This is how God works. He set it all up so we could discover it and marvel and give thanks.
Dear Perry,
I firstly want to assure you that I do believe in the existence of a superior being/creator, but my understandng of this being is different from that of most other people who also believe in the existence of such a being and to which these people append the title of ‘God’. However, this is not the reason for this mail.
I find it extremely amusing and at the same time very confusing that evolutionists, who are convinced that life is the result of a chemico-electrical orgasm in the remote past and therefore has no purpose or meaning in the Scheme of Things, should think that THEIR theory is so important! After all, if life has no meaning or purpose, then all living things, including evolutionists, must have no purpose or meaning. This being the case, why are they so strident in trying to disseminate their silly theory in the first place? They should really not mind what happens to them, yet they scream as loudly as all the rest for their ‘right’ to exist and be heard, even though their theory demands that life is an ‘accident’, a freak occurrence, and therefore has no ‘rights’.
Did evolution occur? Absolutely … but it could not have taken place without ‘outside’ assistance. Evolution was PUSHED, coaxed and chivvied along: it could simply not have happened on its own. Everything in the evolutionary chain of events points to someone, or something, undergoing a learning curve, so that who- or whatever created the universe appears not to be omniscient, but is rather making many mistakes along the way. However, unlike mankind, the being that is making those mistakes is learning from them.
Look at the photographs taken of the universe. All one sees is utter chaos. Is this the work of a ‘perfect’ being? If it is, how is ‘perfection’ then defined? Perfection is a static state, because being perfect allows no room for improvement. That which is perfect cannot become better than it is: it can only either remain as it is or suffer degradation, so that it becomes imperfect. It appears to me that the being called ‘God’ is dynamic and is forever trying out new sequences and experimenting with different combinations of events and admixtures.
‘Good’ and ‘evil’ are man-made constructs: they do not exist anywhere else in nature. No other creature is inherently ‘evil’. Even diseases are natural events, designed to keep a balance in nature. Nature is in charge of the universe and therefore the planet. Mankind cannot stop natural phenomena such as tornadoes, tsunamis or earthquakes from happening, nor do man’s exhortations to his various ‘gods’ have very much effect on the outcomes of natural events. Why? Because God does not interfere with His experiments, one way or the other, until they reach their conclusions. Can WE affect the outcomes of these events? THAT is another matter altogether, one that is only now being explored by quantum physicists. Such movies as ‘The Secret”, ‘What the bleep do we know’ and ‘Down the rabbit hole’ and Gary Craigs Emotional Freedom Technique are beginning to scratch the surface of the answer to this question. It appears that ‘miracles’ can and do happen and that every single person on Earth has the ability to effect them!
Hi Keith, the reason the universe is in what we perceive to be chaos is because God subjected it to decay, not because He is “learning” from mistakes, since He doesn’t make any. Everything we see is “unraveling like a garment”, because of the fact that sin enterd into the world and sin always leads to death. As for the seeming chaotic stars, God actually put them there so that we can determine the seasons, look it up in Genesis. Everything serves a purpose, even in a fallen creation. Hope you come to a saving knowledge of the truth in Christ Jesus.
Sven, “Sin”(and the ‘necessary’ atonements) is another man-made construct, a concept designed by the ancient priests to keep the ‘rabble’ in their places. They were too lazy to do any other work, so they enslaved the people with their ‘religions’ and made the people pay tribute to them in both physical and psychological ways.
Everything dies, whether it is ‘sinful’ or not: birds do it, bees do it, even monkeys swinging in the trees do it, so enough about ‘sin’ leading to death. Did you know that doctors cannot even say for certain when a living organism has died? Coffins have been unearthed and opened, the marks of people having tried to escape have come to light. ‘DEAD’ people have been buried alive! I know one man in our area who recently had move the grave of his deceased wife. She only died a few years ago. To his horror, he and the rest of the family found scratch marks on the inside of the coffin and the fingernails of the corpse were broken, the finger and toe tips, ankles, knees, elbows and heels worn down to the bone, attesting to her desperate struggle! If you ask around, you will find that this phenomenon is far more common than you realise. How can anyone, therefore, speak of ‘death’ when no-one knows what it is or when it actually occurs?
One thing I do not understand about the Christian and Judaic God is His pschyotic need to ‘test man’s faith in Him’ right from the word ‘Go’, by putting the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden and then forbidding the inhabitants to have anything to do with it. Genesis endeavours to hammer a certain fact into our heads by saying, using both repetition and reiteration, no less than FIVE TIMES, that God made mankind in HIS OWN IMAGE… male and female. This means that God has both elements, not just the masculine. After all, without the female element, God would not have painted the butterflies, fishes, mammals, insects and birds in all their brilliant and gaudy colours. Thus God is both practical and creative in the artistic sense. It also tells us that we have all of God’s attributes, including His inquisitive and inventive natures. There are millions of creatures, both extant and extinct, that attest to God’s experimental nature. The whole ‘evolutionary’ process points to this. Your God KNEW this, so that He KNEW that there was no way that the Edenites would be able to resist experimenting with the forbidden tree, yet He stuck it there, in plain sight and told them not to touch it! Come on, give God some credit for intelligence, will you?
The universe is in a constant state of flux, not decay, each galaxy expanding and contracting like a beating heart. The universe(s) are doing the same.
God put all the clues we need right here on Earth, where we can see them and learn from them. You see these clues in the changing of the seasons; the growth and decay of living organisms; the changing of the shapes of the land masses and the ‘evolutionary’ changes that are taking place. We are meant to look at these things and endeavour to UNDERSTAND how God works, not sit here crying about His ‘mysterious ways’. God’s ways are only mysterious to the ignorant: those who do not WANT to take the time and trouble to understand Him and His works.
To me, God is everything and everywhere. I see Him in the same way that I view the ocean. The ocean contains and supports life. In fact, there would be no life on Earth if it were not for the waters in the oceans. The waters of the oceans flow not only around the lifeforms it contains, but also through them: all living organisms are composed of a vast amount of water. Thus it is with God: He not only flows all around us, but also through us. We are all part of God. The Universe and all the other universes far beyond our perception are all part of God, every atom and every galaxy are part of God. God IS omnipresent, but omniscient? Not yet … and as long as He keeps experimenting, changing things around, trying new sequences, He will not be omniscient.
To Martin Lagerwey –
You haven’t properly addressed my question. You have mentioned:
1. “But science is progressively able to explain more and more about origins and sees little evidence of God. ”
Evidence of this?
2. “Explaining an atom, or energy, (and lots of it) is relatively much easier.”
A clear indicator of how shallow-minded science can be. I thought science was meant to debunk myths, to continue to pursue truth – not to be content with explanations previous thinkers have already come up with many years ago.
By the way, prayers are much more effective than any scientific evidence whatsoever, countless times over.
http://www.2christ.org/prayer/
Here’s a list to begin with.
Hello Trevor
1. Are you asking for evidence that there is little evidence for God? My position is that science, by asking questions and testing evidence has come to understand a lot about how the world began and operates. It has noticed certain natural laws that are predictable.
One evidence that science finds explanations of origins is Darwin’s natural selection and the origin of species. Theories such as this explain what God was previously thought to have done and consequently many scientists and students no longer see sufficient evidence of God. I know that you do, but many don’t.
2. An atom is a relatively small mechanism with few moving parts. If the universe is atoms, and one is explained, then all others are explained. If God is magnificent, omnipotent, all knowing and more complex than all of life that He created, that is harder to explain. More complex is more improbable, that is the criticism of creationism.
Science does debunk myths and a scientist is not shallow just because he disagrees with you.
[By the way, prayers are much more effective than any scientific evidence whatsoever, countless times over.]
Your list of healings are anecdotes and no scientist would accept them as proven without closer testing. I totally accept that the people that prayed did believe what they are saying. I do question that they are miracles in the sense that there is no natural explanation. I am not saying anyone is deceptive. I’ve prayed for healings when I was a believer and my experience is that science is more reliable. I would trust my doctor if I had a broken arm, not prayer, even then. Prayer seems to work occasionally, gravity works always.
Anecdotes are persuasive but they are not evidence. Darwin’s brother checked the health of the royal family for whom everyone prayed back then. He concluded that they were not healthier than everyone else. A similar test was done recently by Harvard (see link). They fared no better. If prayer worked, don’t you think that car insurance premiums would be cheaper for christian drivers (safer?) as they are for over 25yrs (safer) drivers?
http://freethoughtpedia.com/wiki/Harvard_prayer_experiment
Maerin
I need to make a correction to my last post where I claimed that Darwin’s brother tested the health of the royal family to determine if prayers for their health resulted in an actual improvement. In fact it was his cousin, Francis Galton who made this observation.
Martin and Trevor, you are both in need of enlightenment. Although prayer may help in some cases and science appears to have some answers, neither are the be-all and end-all of anything. Although I suffer with angina pectoris and asthma, I use no medications to manage them and I cannot remember when last I prayed, yet I hold them both in check – I have not had an asthma ‘attack’ in over ten years and my heart does not plague me more than one a year or so, this for the past five years. I am 61 years old; get very little exercise; I eat more fat in a day than most people consume in a month and I smoke about 20 cigarettes a day. I have studied Gary Craig’s Emotional Freedom Techniques and have effected some rather stunning cures using it, even though it does not have scientific accreditation and certainly does not include prayer.
I am not an atheist, as my posts on this page will attest, but I do not trust doctors because they wanted to amputate my right thumb after it became necrotic following a snake bite. I took my rotten thumb home and fixed it myself using honey. I do not know why I used honey specifically: I just knew that the honey would do the trick. This ‘intuitive’ knowledge has no scientific explanation and I did not kneel down and ask for assistance from above.
The ball is now in your respective courts.
I think that your “intuitive knowledge” may have come from stories you had heard but could not remember from other people, or perhaps books. Just because you cannot remember where you heard something or when you learned it, does not mean that you will not retain that knowledge. I recently went over to a friends house, and was asked to put something into the kitchen garbage. I had not been over at his place before, but I had the “intuitive knowledge” of where I could find the garbage bin. I cannot remember the specific point when I realized all those years ago that in most western societies, the garbage in the kitchen is under the sink. But I knew it and “intuitively” used that “knowledge”.
As for the emotional freedom techniques, I have never heard of them, but I suspect that they follow a basic tenet that, when you look at them from this perspective, reduce stress. This may happen in various ways, such as not bottling up anger. Stress relief and prevention can have amazing effects on your health. This is perhaps part of the reason for the benefit of “healing prayer”. Just believing that there is someone who cares and who will make you healthy again can go a long way in actually getting healthy again. Ask cancer patients who overcame their cancer, and most will tell you that they generally kept a positive outlook throughout their treatment.
Hey Gregor,
Your ‘intuitive’ knowledge about the garbage under the kitchen sink would not help you here in South Africa: most people keep their pots and pans there, so that, if you hurled your junk there, you might just find yourself having to clean up the mess you made … and before you say anything about this being a Third-world country, just remember that most of the whites here come from the same place that your forebears did and that we have many Westerners settling here on an annual basis.
I used the honey story as an example: I have had more than just one flash of ‘intuitive knowledge’, but then, I live much closer to Nature than you probably do. I never use insecticide sprays, leaving the cleaning up of the insects in the house to sundry spiders, lizards and toads that roam around (unmolested by my dogs) inside the house.
I do not kill snakes: the one that bit me was in my hand at the time. It later went to one of the snake parks. Even my wife knows that she only has to remain calm and still when confronted by a snake in her garden, as they only bite when hungry or threatened.
She will take any snake I hand her … in fact, she has held in her hands some creatures that would have most Western women wetting themselves and screaming.
Her father is Portuguese, from Lisbon and her mother is of French descent. I am also a white South African, Scottish on my father’s side and Spanish on my mother’s.
If I may misquote Shakespeare: ‘There are mopre things in heaven and Earth than you or I will ever be able to fully understand’.
That is why I said “most western societies”. I’m assuming that due to temperature, having a designated area for garbage in the kitchen is not exactly ideal or appetizing.
As for living closer to nature, I live in the Canadian Rockies in a town of 1000, have been almost caught in several avalanches, have been hunting (proper hunting, hiking into back country and hunting from there on foot) since I was 14, and have worked in the back country in wintertime. Now in all that time, I’ve seen what “intuitive knowledge” will make people do, and in a few of those cases I had to end up dragging people out of the way of a falling tree or some such thing. See, the fight or flight response is somewhat intuitive, but pretty useless if you are running straight from a falling tree without thinking first “Where is the tree going to go?”. With me, because I’ve worked with some bad fallers, it has gotten to the point where when I see a tree falling towards me, I don’t even think about running away anymore, I gather up my things, knowing I have a few seconds, and then just move to the side and out of harm’s way. But that is experience, which I have learned.
As for the Shakespeare quote, I completely agree, but that does not make these things “un-understandable”. And that is why I am an atheist. If something exists, then it is possible to explain it. Maybe not with the present set of technology or theories, but it IS understandable. That is my beef with the “supernatural”, that being “outside”, or super to, nature thing. It just seems much too convenient and easy for me to blame something, like a sunset, on a god migrating through the underworld, rather than exploring and determining the laws of physics that govern planetary motion and the nature of the planets themselves.
Gregor, you are a man after my own heart! We do not have much by way of forests here in South Africa, but I have been in the Tsitsikamma on the Southern coast of our country, so I am well aware of their appeal.
My wife and I had never been in any kind of forest until we visited the Tsitsikamma and due to our particular circumstance and publicity at the time, we were given permission to enter a restricted area into which even the forest keepers did not venture. We followed a stream for the better part of seven hours, on an overcast day, through thick, ferny undergrowth topped with massive, many-centuries-old trees. It was wintertime then and the night-time temperatures went down to close to 0 (Celsius). As the world about us was darkening, I decided that it would be prudent to turn back. I asked Veronica which way she would go and she suggested following the stream back the way we had come. I shook my head and struck out away from the stream, in a completely different direction. By my digital watch it was twenty to five in the afternoon, so that, had we retraced our steps, we would have been overtaken by the night and would have been stuck in that unfamiliar place. Although we wore parkas and thick trousers, it would not have been enough as it was threatening to rain. In keeping with the regulations, we had no fire-making equipment with us. Remember that we could at no time see where the sun was, due to the foliage and the heavy cloud cover. Forty minutes later the sun had set, it was all but pitch dark … and we were on a road, about a hundred yards from our starting point.
There were no paths to follow, we had neither map nor compass with us, yet I ‘knew’ exactly where I was, even though I had never visited that area of the world in my life before and we had arrived there just before dark the previous evening.
Gregor, I know the savannah: I cannot ‘get lost’ in the grasslands or in the desert because I am always aware of landmarks and the position of the sun, but this was my first experience in a forest. Now how did I know in which direction we should go if instinct had not guided me? The strangest thing is that if I cannot see the sun I do not know where North is and thus cannot determine my position! This was not a fluke: I knew where to go, just as surely as I know my own name.
Since you are an atheist and possibly in agreement with the theory of evolution, I imagine that you do not accept the possibility of reincarnation. I have been exposed to too much substantive evidence to dismiss it, so much so that I am willing to assert that animals have ‘souls’ (for want of a better word) and that they return in essence, when not in corporeal form.
Avoiding falling trees is to me a no-brainer: see which way it is falling and move around to the other side, staying far enough away to avoid possible bounce. Of course, one should ensure that one also avoids possible broken branches that could come down anywhere. I have survived flooded rivers and stormy seas by the simple mechanism of ‘becoming one’ with the water: I do not fight it, but let it take me where it will. The trick with rivers is to look for a curve and move toward the inside of the curve. If there is no curve, move toward one of the banks and look for a place to get out. The sea is different: just stay afloat by ‘double breathing’: certain opera singers and players of wind instruments will understand the technique, which fills both the upper and lower portions of the lungs and uses them as separate areas – this requires some practice. Being able to swim and being able to hold your breath for long periods are, naturally, advantages that will ensure your survival. Oh, another thing, this involves children: most kids are drown-proof, meaning that they can ‘drown’ and remain under water for extended periods without actually dying, especially in icy water. If the child has drowned in warm water, turn it upside down (this actually applies to anyone who has drowned) so that the head is lower than the body, thus draining the water out of the lungs. Then resuscitate, my preference being the Holger-Nielson method. Kids taken from frozen water need a different approach: they must be warmed up very slowly indeed. I know of cases where the child was resuscitated, with no damage to the brain, after thirty minutes under frozen water. Most people are declared dead far too soon after drowning and the wrong approach was used. The brain has to be reminded to get the lungs and heart going, as I have shown when I ‘miraculously’ bring still-born baby animals to life by holding them against my bare chest and gently squeezing and releasing the thorax. It appears to me that the animal’s brain has not ‘kicked in’ and needs the sound of my breathing and heartbeat to remind it what to do. My success rate using this method is well over 95%, with the revivified animal growing normally. Straight-forward resuscitation only achieves about 30% success rate, requires twice as long to obtain results and the animal shows growth and behavioural aberrations. I ask for no explanations: I know only that it works.
I agree that everything can be understood – we were given brains that have the capacity to contemplate even our own existences… and that of a higher form of existence – which some people call ‘God’. This capacity is not apparent in any other living creature. Where does this capacity originate? Why did nature exhibit so much ‘overkill’ when developing the human mind? We could probably have survived with much less brain power: the ability to create purpose-made tools and use them in combination with other purpose-made tools, so that we end up with machines would almost certainly have given Homo sapiens a decided advantage over all the other creatures, so why do we have minds that permit us to deliberate issues – that make no contribution toward the survival of our species – as you and I are doing here? My explanation is one that makes sense to me. There are others, but they do not take everything into consideration, as mine attempts to do.
Is my ‘instinct’ actually knowledge that has carried over from a previous lifetime? I am endeavouring to find this out.
Sorry, the waters in which the kids drowned were under a frozen surface, the kids would have ‘suffocated’, not ‘drowned’ in frozen water.
I don’t understand your point.
Are you suggesting that science and prayer are both unreliable and we should follow your intuition? Do you suggest I eat too much fat, stop exercising or start smoking cigarettes?
Following your intuition has some value but one person I met is in prison for negligent homicide for refusing to take his sick child to the doctor (he was inspired to pray instead). Your attitude to your health bothers me a bit.
Gregor,
I admit that I read about the benefits of honey many years before the snake bit me. I have also read a vast number of treatises about hydrogen peroxide (which, I discovered a few months ago, is released by the honey when it comes into contact with necrotic tissue), various books on alternative medicane, herbs and many more dealing with ‘standard’ medicine. I have worked in a hospital and am therefore not a stranger to medical procedures. My training should have taken over and permitted the doctors to remove my thumb, but my own sense of self-preservation would not allow this to happen.
Why did I choose specifically to use the honey, then? I must tell you that the doctors struggled, using antibiotics, antiseptic treatments and a plethora of other means, to try to save my thumb, but all in vain. The honey treatment showed definite improvement within 24 hours and cleared up the necrosis in 48 hours. Why did my brain tell me to use the honey and not any of the many other treatments?
I notice that you choose to comment specifically on my thumb, but not on the other health issues: interesting, to say the least.
Martin,
I am suggesting that both science and prayer are subject to question. We are all individuals and what applies to one may not necessarily be of any value to another. In this reapect, my wife and I are chalk and cheese: her blood type is B, while mine is O. She needs a great deal of fruit and vegetables in her diet, whereas, as I have indicated, I require a lot of fat. She exercises her body, while my brain does most of my exercise.
There is a great deal of difference between intuition and religious proclivities. My father died as the result of his refusing to have a blood transfusion (he was a Jehovah’s Witness) when this course of treatment was suggested by his oncologist. Whether it would have saved him or not is all up in the air: it may have, but then again, it might just have been money wasted. A blood transfusion did not save my dad’s brother, who died of exactly the same type of cancer a few years before my father, so it follows that the
suggested medical treatment is not always the answer.
I do not see why my attitude toward my health should bother you at all: you do not know me from a bar of soap. I am fully aware of what I am doing, but more importantly, I fully accept the consequences of my actions or inactions. My decisions are my own: I do not permit myself to be swayed by the advice of friends, relatives or ‘experts’, nor do I hold them responsible when the things I decide to do go awry.
The difference between you and I is simply this, I know that the seemingly inexplicable can and does happen. I do not look for scientific or divine explanations, because I know that the human mind is far more powerful than either science or religion will give it credit for. No scientist and no religious zealot will ever discover the true power of the human mind, which cannot be measured in a laboratory. I do not know the power of my own mind … perhaps I am afraid of what it would be able to achieve if I pushed it, but I do know this: I can cause certain natural phenomena to occur when I want them to and I can cause others to cease when they are causing damage to me and my animals: when I ask for rain, I get it and I when I
ask hailstorms to go elsewhere, they do. I cannot explain why this happens, but I know that it does and it has, without fail, for the past thirty one years. I do not question why or how: all I know is that I CAN.
My point, then, is that both science and religion can supply only empirical conclusions. Both put forward postulations based upon the narrow perceptions of their adherents. We do not know what lies beyond our human sphere, but there is something out there: something for which neither science nor religion can find adequate excuses.
Completing item 2, I have another event earlier on the Twin Towers. In the Transformers comics 1986 “Optimus Prime” and “Megatron” fighting among themselves and destroy the towers in the same order they were destroyed by two planes. This also does not make the history of the towers is a legend.
HOW COME NO VIRGINS, SAINTS OR HOLY SPIRITS HAD APPEAR IN LATIN AMERICA UNTIL THE SPANIARDS CAME TO THE CONTINENT?
We don’t know that they never appeared before, but reason goes to show that at least the mental framework for processing what they were seeing didn’t come until the Spanish brought it.
Perhaps I’ve missed it, or havn’t found it yet (There’s a lot here) But in order to properly understand the terms of your assertions and arguments – Would you please define ‘God’.
–noun
1.
the one Supreme Being, the creator and ruler of the universe.
Hi Perry
I want to add a little bit to your comment on the “top 10 reasons” number #8 , perhaps you could add it to your response in the main text as this comment will surely disapear in time.
I call it the red indian theory: how could that poor guy believe on Jesus sitting all that way in mexico 2000 years ago? (I guess it can apply to aborted children too…)
Read Rom 2:11-16, retyped here for convienience from the NKJV.
Rom 2:11 For there is no respect of persons with God.
Rom 2:12 For as many as have sinned without law shall also perish without law: and as many as have sinned in the law shall be judged by the law;
Rom 2:13 (For not the hearers of the law are just before God, but the doers of the law shall be justified.
Rom 2:14 For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves:
Rom 2:15 Which shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the mean while accusing or else excusing one another;)
Rom 2:16 In the day when God shall judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ according to my gospel.
The red indian in mexico was created just like any other human on earth, with a conscience within his/her spirit, God writes it in our hearts, the knowledge of right from wrong , they WILL know right from wrong and as in Rom2:15 thier own consciences will either excuse or condemn them before God.
God is divinely Just, and Loving and Gracious and and … such a pity men judge him by thier own fallen characteristics.
Yours in Jesus
And thanks for a great website…
Martin:
With reference to Darwin and the Royal family I’m pretty sure you would agree that’s quite
likely too small of sample to be meaningful one way or the other and yet you are seemingly using it as some sort of anecdotal proof while at the same time dismissing anecdotal proof as
inconsequential.
As a researcher at one of America’s top medical schools I can tell you that there is a fundamental flaw in ALL such research methodologies and that is this: one cannot incubate either the placebo or “nocebo” effect. One would think that as routine as bypasses might seem, I have yet to see a patient who required one receive the news without a moderate degree of concern. There is something about confronting the necessity of heart surgery, neurosurgery that involves the brain, or surgery as an intervention in cancer treatment that
causes patients a good deal of anxiety indifferent to the high probability of a successful outcome.
Let’s take the latter and put you in our hypothetical experiment:
You have been diagnosed with a meningioma–a benign brain tumor that affects the membranes of the brain and spinal chord. You are informed about the surgical risks including but no limited to damage to healthy brain tissue; infection; cerebral edema,
an approximate 20% chance of post-surgical seizures requiring medication; neurological problems such as issues with coordination, speech, and muscle weakness. Then, too, there is the probability of deep venous thrombosis, and pulmonary embolism.
“However”, we tell you, “there is a new drug–very, very promising that has been found to remove the need for surgery in patients with a Grade 1 meningioma that produces relatively mild side effects in a small patients and these are side effects are transitory. Would you like to participate in a clinical trial before going under the knife?”
We explain the methodology to you. You may be in the control group or the experimental group. You may get the drug or a placebo. Even the doctors won’t know.”
“I’m in,” you say as you recall a friend who died from a post-surgical blood clot.
Let me ask you this: if you are, as most people would be, apprehensive about brain surgery
do you think you might have 1) a pronounced “hope” that you received the drug and that it was as advertised and/or 2) considerable apprehension that you would not be in the group that was administered the drug or that even if you were, you would be among the 30% that received no gain from treatment?
The “internal landscape” of subjects in such experiments is presumed to be accounted for by
statistical measures.
Nonsense.
I have seen unarticulated “hope” keep people alive that should have been toe-tagged and doubt send people to the morgue.
We have no way of measuring cognitive variables that can produce stunning physiological responses and these unknowns lurk in the numbers behind all research.
There are similar problems with the ever-popular “twin studies”. Put simply, “identical” twins are, to be course, genetic freaks. It is astonishing that we continue to employ such individuals in important studies and draw conclusions from them that we imply speak to
the general population.
This has been a very long way of suggesting that I would put my intuition above scientific method every day of the week.
I would also like you to consider that there ARE occasions when the testimony of a single individual–an anecdote–can impeach the findings of research that has included thousands or tens of thousands.One need only look at the current revolutionary controversy about the efficacy of PSA testing.
At the end of the day, the “savage” who lived three thousand years ago knew as much about the great mysteries of human existence as the scholar.
Yes, the royal family experiment needs more details before we know how much credibility to ascribe to it. I mentioned it to illustrate that people have been testing the question ‘does prayer work’ for quite some time. The recent Templeton foundation experiment is a much larger and controlled experiment. If the effect of hope is as strong as you suggest then the group who knew they were being prayed for would be at a disadvantage. Either way if prayer was as powerful as religion teaches, such an experiment should show an effect between the other two groups.
Identical twins are not freaks, they are just genetically identical. I agree that experiments do have to be carefully constructed to gain accurate data. I disagree that intuition is more useful than scientific method. Intuition may be useful and inspired but may also be misguided and dangerous.
Scientists once believed that stomach ulcers were caused by worrying. Some scientists had a suspicion that it was bacterial. They designed a test ‘scientific method’ and quickly convinced the medical world. It would be a concern if merely an anecdote would cause such a change.
To Martin:
Firstly, I sincerely apologise if my comments have been harsh or demeaning in any way. I most certainly do not mean them in such a way, it is simply how I normally express myself.
Now, on to my explanation.
The fact that natural selection has occurred clearly suggests that there has been a higher authority at work, hasn’t it?
Ultimately no matter what theories we can come up with and prove, it all boils down to one question: Is there a God?
If we feel that there is no God, then we should reflect upon our thinking. For nothing happens by chance. The universe wasn’t created by chance (it couldn’t have just been there), and neither did natural selection happen just by chance that there were the necessary chemicals/factors required for such a thing to occur.
There has to be something, a higher authority, that had created everything from the beginning and of absolutely nothing. Our origins stem from the work of this higher authority. Everything does. Natural selection is His work. Evolution is His work. Microorganisms are His work. And countless more! Since such theories, such as the Big Bang and the natural selection theory, had to be caused by something, doesn’t it explain that some higher authority created us?
I am most certainly not against the whole notion of science. I am a science student myself and am immensely passionate about the subject. I understand that I have much more to learn. I am only 17 years old, and am nowhere near the levels of expertise and knowledge scientists have. But what I do know is one obvious fact, one that doesn’t need science to prove: God does exist.
And considering the fact that science was supposed to debunk myths and to enlighten us humans, why shut ourselves from the complexity of God?
“If God is magnificent, omnipotent, all knowing and more complex than all of life that He created, that is harder to explain.” How so? Isn’t it already evident from all creation?
Its as simple as saying I know water exists. And it does, obviously.
I’ll admit, I’m inexperienced and you’re probably irritated with my audacity.
But the Lord is someone whom I am immensely passionate about.
God has been working in countless lives, and in limitless ways. All I can say is that perhaps you should reflect on the many things God has done for you. It might be simple things like protecting you when you cross the road, or helping you to get good grades.
When was the last time you gave thanks? For material wealth, and for life?
Yes, so the patients in Harvard who were prayed for didn’t turn out healthier than the other patients who weren’t prayed for. But what makes you think that prayer would make a person healthier than normal?
Perhaps you should relook at what prayer really means?
The concept of prayer is simple: it is a communication link to God. Its essentially like talking to your father or mother. It can comprise anything, from requests to light-hearted conversation, to giving thanks, and to pour out your sorrows.
You can ask for a request from your parents, say perhaps a video games console, for example, and they may refuse. But they’re doing it for your good, because ultimately they may have prevented you from neglecting your studies. Or maybe you desire two video games consoles, but they only give you one. It can work in many different ways.
The prayer for God to keep them healthy might have been answered in the way that He prevented their conditions from getting worse, or that He could have ensured a safe, normal recovery rate, rather than a rapid one. Or He could have answered them in another way. I’m not sure.
Maybe you should look a little harder, beyond what you can see or feel? We shouldn’t be limited just by our own senses, after all.
With all respect,
Trevor.
Trevor,
“For nothing happens by chance.”
And any good naturalist will agree with you. The tricky part of naturalism is that they believe that given enough of the initial conditions, anything can be predicted.. This comes from an old friend of mine who is an atheist and a theoretical physicist. At the end of the day, nobody really believes in chance. In other words the universe we see, is to them like a fractal. The result of the continuous application of (relatively) simple laws to the initial condition(s). Information theory may disagree, but they’ll reject the existence of information as anything more than a useful model.
Just some small advice from someone who has debated many many atheists and non Christians:
As a Christian, you will be assumed to be superstitious and irrational. Don’t let it bother you. However, have some respect for the atheist’s views. Upon the premise of naturalism, they are logical, self consistent(as far as possible) and well thought out. There is no magic bullet that will change their mind. In fact you can’t. Only God can. Naturalism is a state from which you can not leave through any argument or evidence. It comes with the ability to explain away anything you see or hear. Truly, there are none so blind as those that will not see.
However, if you are careful and logical you can persuade a naturalist to respect your point of view. Perhaps God will work through your words and change hearts, or perhaps they’ll shut Him out entirely. All you can really do is pray. But I do consider it helpful to have mutual respect. Nobody will listen to you until you respect them and they respect you, so I am glad of the tone of your post.
The problem is, these are issues close to the heart. A friend and I often debate, and we have the civilized agreement to never take it personally. But unless you can come to such an agreement, remaining calm is always good. Atheism is, by nature limited to the very intelligent or very lazy. So, as much as some might like to see the end of all religion, it can’t happen. So, don’t let those guys worry you either. Christianity on the other hand is for anyone and everyone.
May God bless and keep you.
Andrew
Why would natural selection indicate the presence of God? If anything, it should be seen as one of the reasons why the existence of God is unlikely. What does natural selection do? It weeds out the less reproductively successful from those that are more reproductively successful. If God existed, why would there be reproductively less successful members of a species? All that natural selection theories tries to explain is how flaws are gotten rid off. To word it differently, it’s like an editor of an article. If God were the writer of the article, would it really require an editor? You may answer this by stating that natural selection allows life to remain adapted to the environment, and that if the environment changes, so do the organisms living in the environment. This would be God’s way of keeping his article ‘current’. But why would the environment change if God were controlling it? There would be absolutely no reason to change it. God would have created the perfect organisms to live in an environment that would never change, and therefore the organisms wouldn’t need to change. But this is not the picture that we find. What we find is an environment that is highly unstable if looked at over longer time scales, ranging from an Earth without icecaps to a ‘snowball’ at times. But why just look at Earth? If God created the universe with the plan to put life into it, then he did a very poor job, if I may say so. If you were asked to design an entire city, but ended up designing an area that 99.99999999999% road, with maybe a quarter of a house somewhere under a bridge, you would admit that you did a miserable job of “designing a city”. If God designed the universe for something, it wasn’t life, and it most definitely wasn’t us. I’d have to say that, judging by how things are out there, completely hostile to any known form of life for 99.999999% of the place, the universe was created for stars. That’s because there are a lot of them, and they are using that space pretty niftily, might I add. If God created the universe for life, we wouldn’t need all that space out there. What for? If God created the universe for life, and more specifically, us, then it would look like the literal picture that Genesis draws. A mostly livable place, where everything else is meant to support that livable place.
As to your statement of water existing, that is not what science attempts to do. Science would ask something more along the lines of: “Ok, here we have this ‘water’-thing. What is its nature? How does it behave? Is it similar to something? Is it different from something? Is this always ‘water’s’ nature? Can we come up with a checklist that, if we use it when identifying a substance, will tell us with at least 99% accuracy whether that something is water or not?”
I’m not sure what you mean when you state to reflect upon the things that God has done for you, whether it be something like protecting you when you are crossing a road or helping you get good grades. I don’t know about you, but I generally look both ways before crossing a road, and I also use my ears to make sure there isn’t someone squeeling some tires around the block. That has kept me safe when crossing the road. When I go hiking in the mountains, and I’m hiking off a peak at night, the forethought that this might happen, and me taking a head lamp protects me then. As for grades at school, that is a test of your ability. You either get good grades, because your work was well done, or you get bad grades because it was not well done. Now, being a university student, I’m fully aware that “well done” really means “suits the marker and/or professor, stands our positively from the rest, and has at least some entertainment value to it, which will keep the marking T.A./professor interested in your paper/project/lab findings/midterm essay …”. But the end effect remains the same; you are either good at what you do, or you are not. You either pulled that all-nighter to get that lab written because your laptop was locked away in a building due to an asbestos alarm, or you didn’t. You either read through the help files that come as part of ArcGIS and understood what that specific filter does, or how to use the raster calculator, or you didn’t. The end effect is that it’s all up to you, and no one else. And as for wealth? I have money because I worked for it. And I had work because I’m a good employee and because I know enough to realize the greater importance of networking rather than some particular and highly specialized set of skills and therefore invested my time accordingly.
As for “not limiting us to our senses”, that is what God supposedly gave us to work with. Why give them to us if there are far better ways of getting on with life? If for example we could just imagine our environment into being, who would care about senses? We could just wish water to whine, it would be so, and we wouldn’t have to come up with ways to distinguish between the two. We could just know things, and based on that knowledge give them existence. However, that is sadly not the nature of existence. And because of that, our senses are the only way in which we can test the environment. This biases us greatly towards certain forms of knowledge acquisition, due to the need to reformat data so that it may be interpreted through our limited senses. However, take it from a guy who deals with the problems of making existence and its infinite complexity fit into either a continuous fields or distinct objects; it beats the living daylights out of working with a system based on binary.
Trevor,
I have studied natural selection in some detail. There is one key reason why Darwin knew it would be controversial. That is because it describes a natural mechanism for speciation. Life is fine tuned by the changing natural environment and therefore seems designed. The controversy is that it doesn’t suggest a higher authority. Natural selection didn’t happen by chance, as you correctly say, it happened by nature selecting who survives and who becomes extinct, nature, not God. You do not understand the theory.
What does a person who gets bad grades say to God? What does a pedestrian hit by a car say to God. Every suffering person belies your argument that God helps. You have to count the hits and misses too. I understand your love for God and I perceive your arguments are based on faith and not science. You are already convinced that God exists and claim ‘I know’ as if it’s a proven fact, when you mean ‘I strongly believe’
You have defined prayer in two different ways
1/ Giving thanks, praise, worship etc.
No answer is needed for this kind.
2/ Petitions. (Please may I have a video console)
If you don’t get what you asked for, because you didn’t need it – then your prayer was not answered, in the sense that the Bible promises ‘ask and you shall receive’.
‘Yes, so the patients in Harvard who were prayed for didn’t turn out healthier than the other patients who weren’t prayed for. But what makes you think that prayer would make a person healthier than normal?’
Answer; they had prayers asking for improved health so they should have improved health. If God said “no” to them all, then why bother? The random ones got the same result.
Martin,
I am afraid to say that your argument falls flat on its face.
You said: “Life is fine tuned by the changing natural environment and therefore seems designed. The controversy is that it doesn’t suggest a higher authority.”´You continue: “Natural selection didn’t happen by chance, as you correctly say, it happened by nature selecting who survives and who becomes extinct, nature, not God. You do not understand the theory.”
It is you who does not understand, because, in order for nature to be able to select “who survives and who becomes extinct”, Nature would have to be sentient.
I have heard many weird and wonderful explanations concerning evolution. I remember a woman once extrapolating about the appearance of the wolf in America. Her reasoning was that the pronghorn antelope had become too successful and that ‘a wolflike creature was needed to keep their numbers in check’. I was then much younger than I am now, but it struck me that this was one of the most nonsensical arguments I had ever heard!
In the first place, who – or what – would have made such a decision, if the theory of evolution denies the existence of a higher, sentient being? Secondly, since the wolf was unknown at that time, how would anyone or any thing know what to produce in order for it to be ‘wolflike’ and lastly, the wolf had first to evolve from whatever creature it had been before and in order for it to make any impression on the burgeoning population of the pronghorns, such a change would have had to have happened overnight, because the pronghorns would most definitely not halt their breeding until the wolf made its appearance, now would they? By the time the wolf appeared, a few thousand years later, the pronghorns would have wiped themselves … and all the other creatures … out, by eating all the vegetation on the American continent and thus dying of starvation. If anything, the pronghorns would have adapted, first by becoming browsers and eating the lower leaves of the trees, then learning to stand on their hind legs like the African Gerenuk and then perhaps learning to climb trees to get at the upper leaves, as goats do. As the pronghorn is firmly a ground-based grazer and has not seen fit to learn to browse or climb trees, there was obviously no such pressure to do so in their past, so that this argument is shot cleanly out of the water. Why was there then a ‘need for a wolf-like creature’? There clearly was not, so that the wolf must have arisen from some other agency or process and for some other reason.
I agree with you, however, that prayer does not appear to have much effect under any circumstances, but anyone who has read my earlier posts on this page will realise that I am persuaded by my own experience that we all have the potential to control the outcomes of almost anything that happens to us. Some of my ability has rubbed off on my wife, so that she is, to a lesser degree, able to control certain elements in her life, including rain-making, but not the redirecting of hail storms. V also leaves the healing to me, though I sincerely wish that she would learn how it is done, simply because I will not always be here for her.
Yes, of course I will die, but strange as it may seem to some, I am not afraid of dying. When my time comes, if my abilities fail me and I am unable to fend it off, I will accept my demise with more than just a little curiosity about what lies on the other side. I suppose that it would be prudent to state here that my research has led me to accept the possibility of reincarnation, so that there is always the chance that I will come back.
Keith
In response to your reply
“It is you who does not understand, because, in order for nature to be able to select “who survives and who becomes extinct”, Nature would have to be sentient.”
It would not.
Nature selects fitter species that are better suited to their environment. Less suited species don’t survive because “fitter” species ate all the food already. Nature is not sentient. Nature is mechanical and dispassionate. A magnet that picks up (selects) iron and not copper is not sentient.
The difficulty for you, as a believer in God is that the selection process (decision maker) is internal to nature and no higher sentient being is implied (or denied). The second difficulty for you is that you still don’t understand evolution.
Abundant antelope are a potential food source for a carnivore and when one evolves, it should survive well. The antelope are not asking to be eaten. This theory is not nonsense, you simply do not understand it.
It is rather disingenuous to use the most weird explanation for evolution that you heard of to disprove it.
Could you send some rain this way please?
Martin, you are absolutely right when you say that I do not understand the theory of evolution: it makes absolutely no sense and, in fact, cannot even get off the ground. Certainly, there appear to be certain progressions that show how some creatures may have arisen from other, earlier forms, but this does not prove evolution. The accepted evolutionary theory falls flat before it starts because it cannot explain how a mess of chemicals suddenly became fully-functional life forms. It cannot explain the mechanism behind mimicry, so that there are certain spiders that look exactly like ants, so that even the ants cannot tell that the spiders are not ants. How did the spiders do this and why did ALL spiers not resort to this camouflage?
On April 7, at 8:58 (above) I said:
“I find it extremely amusing and at the same time very confusing that evolutionists, who are convinced that life is the result of a chemico-electrical orgasm in the remote past and therefore has no purpose or meaning in the Scheme of Things, should think that THEIR theory is so important! After all, if life has no meaning or purpose, then all living things, including evolutionists, must have no purpose or meaning. This being the case, why are they so strident in trying to disseminate their silly theory in the first place? They should really not mind what happens to them, yet they scream as loudly as all the rest for their ‘right’ to exist and be heard, even though their theory demands that life is an ‘accident’, a freak occurrence, and therefore has no ‘rights’.
Remember that you are supposed to be a sentient being and as a believer in the theory of evolution, you realise and understand the futility of it all. So why bother?
Your response, please?
The wolf/antelope question remains unanswered. Why was it necessary for the wolf to arise in the first place? The antelope would have solved their own overpopulation problem by starving to death, as I pointed out. And yes, I did use the silliest explanation I had ever heard, but this is not being disingenuous: I merely pointed out the lengths to which credibility has to be stretched in order to try to make any sense of a self-defeating theory. I admit that certain religions also stoop as low in order to explain their beliefs, so that both schools are guilty of mental presidigitation.
The theory of evolution does not not explain why some creatures went through a multitude of changes and others remained as they were and in some cases, still are and it cannot explain why there has to be so many different types of the same creatures. It cannot explain why Australasia has creatures that are completely different from any others on Earth; it cannot account for the giants and the miniscule hominids that have left their traces in many parts of the world. It cannot explain why there are pyramids on every continent and even under the sea. The theory of evolution cannot explain how the Harappa valley and the Sinia peninsula went up in clouds of radioactive smoke thousand of years ago. The theory of evolution relies on the long-abandoned idea of
the sponataneous generation of life.
I am me and I reserve the right to believe what I want to believe, to reject that which makes no sense to me and to go out completely on my own, which I have done. I don’t believe anybody’s theories or dogmas, but I do believe the results of my own experiments and my own eyes.
My mother and watched, back in 1986, as five discus-shaped objects performed some of the most impossible aerial manoeuvres we had ever seen. This in broad daylight, at around ten in the morning, well below the level of the cumulo-nimbus clouds overhead. They were in view for all of twenty or so minutes and the only camera we had was a Polaroid, which could not capture them as they were out of its range. Classic UFOs. I have seen them, so I have no choice but to know that they exist. That is as far as it goes, as I cannot bring myself to speculate about their origin. All I know is that, in all the years that my father worked as an aircraft engineer, neither my mother nor I had ever seen anything like these craft or the things they did on that day. I have seen all manner of airborne things, from birds, insects, hot-air balloons, radio sondes, weather balloons, caterpillars and spiders floating on gossamer threads, kites, fireworks, papers and other debris raised by whirlwinds … but they were none of these and frizbees do not remain aloft for that long or fly in loose, changing formation. Two of the objects broke away from the others at different times and joined up again, about ten miles away from the others, going South, while the others soared up into the clouds above our heads. In all, they must have covered well over 130 degrees in one direction and 90 degrees in another. Distance in one direction: well over twenty kilometres and then off into the distance in another. No discus shape can travel that slowly and remain in the air, nor can it rise on a thermal without describing a spiral path.
I do not hold that God create man, but I do accept that God created beings that created other beings and so on and that we may be a thousand levels down: the creations of creations of creations of creations.
This may be too much for you to wrap your head around, so I’ll wait for your next response.
The rain: I have never tried to call for rain in any area other than the one I am in, so this will be a very interesting experiment! If you would be so kind as to give me your Google Earth co-ordinates so that I can see more or less where you are, I will endeavour to suggest that it rains there within a few hours of reading your reply. I would love to know the outcome!
Keith
You recognize that you don’t understand evolution theory therefore you should realize that you cannot effectively critique it. For example you notice that it does not address the origin of life. Well evolution is a theory to explain the origin of species and does not claim to explain biogenesis. Natural selection has not been shown to apply to non-living systems.
Not all spiders will imitate ants. Mainly ants that benefit by living among them or eating them will mimic them. Imagine a spider that lives apart from ants, or is larger than ants, or hides in other ways, or is nocturnal, why bother. Mimicry is well explained by natural selection. This is my area of study. Any biology text book will explain this well but your questions suggest to me that you haven’t read one.
A wolf does not “need ” to arise to eat antelope, if they do evolve, as they did, there seems to be a good food source available for them.
Natural selection does explain and even predict that isolated populations on islands such as Australia, New Zealand and Madagascar would develop different animal and plant groups. Each of your questions belie the fact that you haven’t understood the theory.
Your main question concerns the fact that even non believers search for truth and engage in healthy debates. Even if (as atheists think) God or heaven don’t exist, we survive best if we understand the world correctly. Can you not see how the desire to see the world accurately would evolve? Since I am going to die, why not die now? I enjoy my life. I don’t think you have thought this question through.
Martin, it appears that English is not your first language, as I was not questioning your wanting to live, but rather your obstreperous dissemination of a futilistic theory. You also use other words in the wrong context. I therefore realise that you are not able to fully understand the content of my post.
The reason that I do not understand the theory of evolution is not for lack of perusing books about it, but because my brain does not find any logic in it. Let us go back to the spiders, even though this phenomenon occurs throughout the animal and plant kingdoms. I do not understand why there must be so many spiders, with similar habits, with identical habitats and diets and yet they cannot interbreed. There are even spiders that eat other spiders, so how does that fit into the theory, regarding the survival of the Order Araneida? You state: “Imagine a spider that lives apart from ants, or is larger than ants, or hides in other ways, or is nocturnal, why bother.” It does not explain why it is necessary for there to be so many different types of spiders! One single species of spider with a multitude of different adaptations would have been sufficient. I cannot make head or tail of the need for so many different kinds, both Families and species, all hampered by the inability to interbreed.
There are not enough (if any) transitional species to provide a convincing argument for the theory and in many places on earth, so-called ‘evolutionary progressions’ are either completely missing or in the wrong geological strata, so that ‘later’ developments appear above those of supposedly ‘earlier’ manifestations.
T.H. Morgan pointed out that natural selection can only produce greater numbers of individual species, but cannot produce new ones. Natural selection (the survival of the fittest) only ensures that the fittest will survive: it cannot account for the appearance of completely new and different species.
Neither the theory of evolution nor natural selection can adequately explain how the bombardier beetle came into existence. Richard Dawkins’ rather ingenuous observation of the beetle “using chemicals that just happened to be around” explains absolutely nothing, because the beetle first has to isolate the compounds (let’s not even consider the fabrication of the elements required to make these compounds!); has to put the correct quantities of H2O2 and hydroquinone into its mixing chamber and then fire the catalyst at exactly the right moment for the explosive reaction to occur. If triggered too early, the beetle will probably blow itself to kingdom come; too late and you’d have a damp squib. So how did the first bombardier get it right first time, and repeat the sequence correctly in subsequent events, so that it could pass the technique down to posterity? How could it possibly have initiated this process, seeing that we humans, with our much more powerful brains, are unable to force even minor changes in our own anatomies? By ‘natural selection’? Before the bombardier beetle arrived on the scene, there was nothing to select from! The bombardier had to make its appearance fully capable of firing its defensive cocktail, so that it could not have ‘evolved’ from any other precursor that did not have this mechanism in place. None of this could have happened without definite, deliberate, planning. If nature designed this mechanism, then nature, as I stated before, must be sentient. How did the beetle develop the organs necessary for the chemical ‘explosion’ to take place?
Is it really I who does not under the theory of evolution, or do you not understand simple logic, so that you cannot add 2 and 2 together and arrive at an answer that is greater than 0, but less than 10?
JLB Smith is credited with having discovered and named the Coelacanth back in 1938. The truth is that Smith was at home when the fish was brought to Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, curator of the JLB Smith Institute. When she saw the creature, she telephoned her boss and excitedly told him that a coelacanth had been brought to her by a group of fishermen for identification. Smith exploded, questioning both her sanity and credentials, reminding her that the coelacanth had been extinct for sixty five million years. When he saw the fish the next day, (he did not think that Miss Courtenay-Latimer’s intrusion into his rest warranted any farther notice), he received the shock of his life. Smith never apologised to Marjorie and hogged all the limelight for himself. This is typical of the attitudes of all the academics I have ever encountered: they think they know everything, the rest of us know nothing and will never capitulate when shown to be wrong. I have made many mistakes … my theories may be faulty, but my conjectures are my own, unadulterated by the opinions of anyone else.
I fully endorse the observation of John Muir that, just when you try to take anything on its own, you find that it is hitched to the rest of the universe. We, I believe, are not an isolated incident. There is life everywhere in the universe. Our galaxy alone is so vast that we should not be very surprised if we have not found evidence of life on other planets: we have only been looking in earnest for the past century. So I accept the possibility of panspermia, because it does not fall outside my understanding of God, the universe and all that in it is.
You have not given me your co-ordinates, so I cannot see whether I can send you some rain.
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Keith, do not wait to see what’s on the other side…without Jesus before you die, you will die in your sins and your abilities will be useless…funny how there is a possibility of a reincarnation, but the possibility of a loving God is not.
Jonathan, have you read my earlier posts on this page? It appears that you have not, because, if you had, you would have seen that I do believe in God, but mine is a God that you and your kind, the zealots who have been brainwashed by your religion(s), cannot even begin to understand.
Go up to my post of April 15, 2010 at 2:17 am and see what I wrote there. My God observes me, making no comment and He will no judgement of my words and deeds. In the final analysis, He will leave the judging to my most profound critic: me.
I still want to know, as this has not been answered yet, and I quote from the above-mentioned post:
“One thing I do not understand about the Christian and Judaic God is His pschyotic need to ‘test man’s faith in Him’ right from the word ‘Go’, by putting the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden and then forbidding the inhabitants to have anything to do with it.”
My God does not have to test my faith: He knows that I know that He exists. My God wants to see how I react under given circumstances: circumstances that arise as a result of my own decisions, words and actions.
God knows that He does not have to hold me in check with a plethora of laws and commandments: He endowed me with all the tools I need to get through this life and He wants to see how I employ them.
My God therefore loves me far more than yours loves you: mine permits me to make mistakes, the great test being whether – and what – I learn from making them. If I am unable to make the grade, God may ask me to return and try again (reincarnation), perhaps many times over. Your implacable God, on the other hand, threatens to punish you for the rest of eternity if you do not measure up to His expectations, but He only permits you one, single chance to get it right.
God gave me everything I need, so I do not ask Him for help – ever – but I do not negect to thank Him for all He gave me and to assure Him that I love Him, even though He knows it.
The title of Perry’s opriginal post is “Top 10 Reasons To [Not] Be A Christian”. I am simply stating why I am not a Christian … and why I do not accept the theory of evolution. I am not a Christian, nor do I follow any other religious or scientific persuasion, but an atheist I am not.
Mr.Keith Taylor, sir, may I give my ‘uneducated’ but Christian views to your ‘half believer’ stand. All non-believers have yet to see God’s spirit spurns on all sorts of imaginations hoping to rope a good reply. All religions teaches good things with examples of evils and believe in God. There is a great book, Bible (actually 66books combined by 40 authors, see) about living a great life. It teaches both good and bad things such as Israelites Kill their enemies as sanctioned by God in OT if, strictly, followed is dangerous. We need to ask: do we need to kill someone to be somebody. Definitely, NOT! As in OT God decrees, ‘Do Not seek revenge…agst people..Love thy neighbour which means fellow human beings’ while NT God says,’It is mine to avenge..’ tells you exactly the WORD of God to believers. The WORD is called Religion or you can take it as Culture, Manners to live PEACEFULLY. How else are we expected to lead our life correctly with others all the time? Can one accept this teaching of living and many other teachings to keep oneself out of TROUBLE or everybody shall has his own ways is the ISSUE! Atheist or unbelievers cannot read the teachings of the Bible because it condemns them. Also hard for young people who are tempted by peers, good careers,etc. Bible is GOOD HISTORY (of God’s teaching Story) on GOOD and EVIL regardless you believe there is God or not! Do not worry God shall look for you like me, if you are not evil! The 64millions dollars question is why should you read it if you have conditioned your mind not to read it due to your pride in your abilities. I was once like that and I am still proud sometimes which I think habits takes a longtime to change.
Thomas, I HAVE read the Bible and many thousands of other books besides, despiote what some of my critics have to say. I have my own concept of God: I do not need anyone else to tell me who or what or why God is. I have these abilities only because they come from God and He wants me to use them to the best of my ability. As I have said before, He gave me the legs to walk, so I must not expect Him to carry me around on His back. Why ask God for help whan I know that I can do it all myself? Why ask for healing when I have this ability? Why bother God for rain when I know that I can cause it to rain whenever I need it? God gave me these powers because He wants to see how I put them to use: so that I could be independent. Therefore, I am independent: I follow no religion and I make my own decisions. It is as simple as that.
I do not believe in “Good and Evil”: some people act ways that may not meet with my approval and may even seek to harm me, but that is THEIR affair, not mine. I will defend and protect myself, very vigorously if need be. I may even severely injure my attacker, but only if it is the only way out of the situation. If someone wants the things that I have, I will gladly teach him/her the skills they require to achieve them. Is that not better than ‘charitably’ giving my stuff away? I have never asked for anything without offering my skills and/or talents in return. I want nothing for nothing, but if a windfall comes my way, I am truly grateful.
As for ‘all religions teaching good things’, I disagree: although they advocate fine things, some of the greatest atrocities the world has known has been committed by religious zealots in the names of their various deities. The histories of some of the most enigmatic civilisations ever known have been obliterated because certain people regarded them as the ‘work of the devil’.
As I see it, the (weak and crumbling) foundation of all religions in the present time is that they all require you to believe in human beings other than yourself. While they say you need to believe in God, or His representative, neither of those two are actually available for personal consultations or interviews. Instead, you are referred to other human beings, such as pastors, priests, or scientists who are believers. The bottom line is that if you weren’t there when Jesus allegedly was alive, and you, personally, didn’t have firsthand experience with Jesus, you must trust the alleged accounts of other people who, likewise, weren’t there and thus have also had to believe the accounts of still other people. The religious documents were not actually written down by God or Jesus, so that means they were written down by human beings and also translated or passed via word of mouth by human beings. Thus, you are not really believing in God, but in the concepts that other human beings are presenting as allegedly issuing from God. If your personal intelligence is assumed as God-given, why must it be subordinated to other people with agendas to satisfy the requirements of a human-constructed control system we call “religion”.
IMHO, the genuine Creator of all is far more powerful than to entrust the communication of truth to a select few fallible and corruptible human beings. Again, while the implicit assumption is that truth originated with God or His representative, the reality is that neither of the two are available for direct query, so we are again referred to pastors, etc. for answers. Shouldn’t each of us who seeks answers have the opportunity to find the truth directly and not have to rely on other fallible people and questionable agendas and motives for access to truth? IMHO, we all have been given that opportunity, and we are free to exercise it outside of the constricting and suffocating bonds of (dis)organized religion.
I find it very interesting that the way God is presented and what He allegedly demands is much like a human ruler or potentate, complete with punishment and revenge against “enemies”, and rewards for the obedient followers. That kind of Creator is way too limited and finite to earn my worship.
A brilliant exposition, LariAnn. I wish we had more brains as insightful as yours around these parts! Keep it up … and what do you believe?
Keith, what do you mean “make the grade?”
Jonathan, I look at it this way: God made me in His own image. In my mind, God is spirit (energy) and is unable to do certain things in this form. He therefore created life and spread it thoughout the universe in order to see how “He” would react under different conditions and when exposed to different stimuli. We are thus extensions of God – nerve-endings if you like – and God is experimenting with Himself. We are God’s proxies, doing as we do, each in our own unique ways. The differece between our nerve-endings and God’s is that our nerve-endings are not imbued with intellect, intelligence or the free will to do as they choose under any given stimulus, but we do have these qualities.
Basically, then, ” to make the grade” one must act in as close to a God-like manner as one is able to do. What is a “God-like manner”? That is for you to decide: that is why you have the intellect, the intelligence and the free will: you have to interpret these things in your own unique and exclusive way.
God does NOT dictate terms to us and He will not punish us for any knee-jerk reactions we may exhibit. However, He does want to see whether we can “turn on the power” when we need it. We all have latent, hidden powers: we are far more powerful than most people realise. We have the ability to perform “miracles”.
I have been in certain situations from which there appeared to be no escape, yet I emerge unscathed, not because I asked God for assistance, but because I exercised my own will upon my predicament and found a way out of there. In some instances I had to think and take certain actions to make my way out, but at other times the threat simply – and it would seem to other people, inexplicaply – went away.
I suppose that you want an example of such a ‘miracle’. One day I was cutting a piece of steel pipe with a ‘baby’ grinder. This is simply a small, one-handed angle grinder. My left hand was holding the pipe against a brace I had made, while my right was plying the grinder. The grinder caught and ‘jumped’. Now these tools do not have a ‘trigger switch’: the power switch is situated at the back, so that the grinder is ‘always on’ until the switch is thrown to the ‘off’ position. The spinning cutting disc of the grinder landed squarely on the underside of my left wrist because I was holding the pipe by pulling it against the brace. In the time it took for my refexes to pull the disc away, it had bitten into my left wrist. I switched off the grinder and looked at the injury. The cut was one and a half inches long and a quarter of an inch wide. The disc had worn ragged and looked like the edge of a serrated knife blade. By measuring the edge of the blade, I determined that the disc had entered my wrist to a depth of about a quarter inch. By rights, it should have severed the tendons and the artery, but it hadn’t. I know from the days when I donated blood that my veins and arteries move out of the way when the needle penetrates my skin, but I did not realise that my tendons had this ability too.
Jonanthan, I do not bleed. When I was still a teen, I decided that my blood would remain in my body and not run around on the outside as everyone else’s does when they are injured. It would require a massive injury to make me bleed to any extent, but I am certain that I would be able to limit even that. The grinder cut was not, in my opinion, of any great consequence, so I switched the grinder back on and continued my work. A friend, who lives nearby, suffered a similar injury on the back of his wrist and he shed so much blood that it looked like a battle had taken place. My blood simply filled the gap and stopped there: not a drop was wasted. By evening, a few hours later, my injury was no more than a red-brown scab. I have a scar because I did not take the time and trouble to treat it with anything: it was not, in my opinion, worth any notice.
“Making the grade”, then, is realising that you have enormous power and using it when necessary, the criterio being that you should not use it to the detriment of any other living being or to irreparably damage nature.
Keith, i’m very interesting with your view. i’m sorry before if my english not so good. i’m a christian but maybe have a little different view with common christian. that difference not come by teaching from a sect or a kind of group, but from my own thinking like you. but unlike yours that you so sure about your belief, i still find another view too. i’m still a half of your age, not as experienced like you. i believe Jesus is exist, He is a God and bible is true. but how to interpret the verses, i believe not must same with the common. but in common, i like this article.
first about the tree of knowledge. i think God not to test us. He just want to give us a choice. if you stay in eden, you will all depends on God, everything will serve for you but you know not any knowledge (like religious zealot), if you eat that tree, you will seek the knowledge but your soul are thirsty (like atheist scientist), but Jesus offer a water for the thirsty so the knowledgeable person will have a peaceful heart too. the water is true love, since He is most perfect example how to love your neighbor. i don’t want to make you believe my think, i just want to share it a little.
for the same thinking of us are i believe God give us free will and reincarnation for us to learn. but in my view, reincarnation is to learn how to love like Jesus did.
that i don’t understand is your miracle. that you can call rain, not bleeding etc. i don’t get it. i believe man have some extra ability but it must be a practice like martial art so it will not bleeding, or calling rain with help from a ghost. because that is common in here. are you believe in ghost and demon? are you have an explanation with that thing?
can you explain how you practice to call rain and not to bleed? so i can understand your belief of man power.
i just only want to discuss and learn, so i hope you can explain, not to defend it. thank you.
So, nowadays we lack scientific evidence of miracles?…it depends on what you have in your head as the concept “miracle”, and of course, what you need to see in order for it to be a miracle, if you expect your eyes to see a living dead or sand dunes with some photoshop-like colors, well…maybe you haven’t seen any, because you have been looking in the wrond direction.
Here’s one miracle, one of many in my life, call it coincidence, call it nonsense…all I know is, a miracle to me, fullfills something, it doesn’t need to be all special FX from Hollywood…nor it needs to be seen live on CNN…something inexplicable just happens, and you can almost feel good after it does.
I was taking photographs in Arizona, in Page, specifically, and after seeing the beautiful upper Antelope canyon, I decided to take a shot at the lower canyon, it was around 2:00 pm and I had to be in Las Vegas by 8 pm, I had to make a pit stop in Zion, Utah and as you can see I was running out of time.
At first I was reluctant to doing a U-turn and go to the Lower canyon, still, I felt I had barely enoguh time and decided to do a U.turn, when I slowed down, I didn’t notice the soft shoulder and I got stuck there, just the rear right wheel got stuck, to make matters worse, it was the first time I had ever gotten stuck in soft sand.
A 4×4 noted me trapped, and decided to give me a slight push with his car…nothing, after several attempts, he quit and left me (rightfully so).
I was seating like crazy and was a little worried that I would stay there and never make it to Vegas on time.
Soon after a couple saw me there as well, and gave me a push, this time, it was them with their hands pushing…2 slim people would never do what a 200 hp 4×4 couldn’t. Not surprisingly, they didn’t move me an inch.
I started deflating the tire, dropped some water on the sand and also scraped some away (and I didn’t have floor mats to help me with traction)…I turned around and suddenly, in the middle of nowhere I see a thick black(thinsulate)winter glove..I know it gets cold in Arizona during winters…but to see a perfectly new glove (just one by the way) in the middle of July…I felt it was God giving me a hand to get out of the problem…what are the odds?
After I set it between the tire and the sand, these guys give me another push and the car instantly pulled away…I was so relieved..traveling alone, witha deadline to meet and no extra money…got out of the problem helped by either chance or God? (I think the Latter)
Yes I did whatever reason dictated me to (being an engineer myself), and people helped me (with whataver meand they had), but if it wasn’t for that glove, I’m sure teh outcome would’ve been different.
No, I wasn’t in a situation of life and death, nor was I stranded for days, nothing was at stake either…I see that as a miracle.
If in the end some kid threw garbage out of the window andI found it useful..I believe God has His ways.
I’m a proud CATHOLIC.
God bless you all.
Wolf
Wolf, what car were you driving? In my experience, pushing a car that is stuck in sand only makes matters worse. Pulling it gives much better results as it tends to lift the cae, where pushing it drives all the weight downward. If you want to try an experiment to prove this, put a heavy weight into a wheelbarrow and put the wheel into a hollow. Now try pushing it out. It is almost impossible. Turn around and try pulling it out: you should not be surprised if you meet with success. Panic, as your state appears to have been, does not help one to think clearly, either.
You see yourself as having experienced a ‘miracle’, yet someone who understands the physical laws of leverage would probably have pulled you free with very little trouble. The glove was there because someone lost it. This falls into the category of coincidence. Miracles require that the event has an element that simply cannot be explained and even then they have to be separated from sheer force of will.
I am not even a Christian, nor do I follow any other religion, yet I am able to accomplish some rather inexplicable things. This is not God working for me, but rather Him working THROUGH me: I use the power with which we are all born, but which is taken away from us by people who need a ‘scientific’ explanation for everything. You are a Catholic probably because you were raised as one. I was raised first as a Methodist and then my parents became Jehovah’s Witnesses. I sought my own path and discovered that God does not take sides against nature, which He put in charge of the universe, but that I can change the outcomes of certain events because I want them to end differently from the ‘inevitable’ outcomes. They may appear to be miracles to some people, but I have learned that anyone can make some very strange accomplishments, simply by mentally ‘forcing’ them to take place. Of course, you have to believe in yourself … you ONLY have to believe in yourself. Jesus said more than once to certain people that “your faith has healed you”. He did not mean their faith in his powers, but their faith that they would be healed. They literally and figuratively healed themselves because they believed that they would be healed if they could touch something belonging to Jesus. Once they touched that part, the mission was accomplished and they healed themselves in that instant. Such is the incredible power of the human will.
Dear Keith, I agree, it’s always God through me (I understand your physical principle of pulling instead of pushing, I was driving a rear-wheel drive BMW 325, but the shoulder where I got stuck had elevation change, meaning the front of my car was facing the road, the rear inside the ditch,, but how could anoyne pull me without equipment?, certanily doing it by hand would be hard because gravity was against me)
See, I did it all myself, the fact that in the middle of a new situation, with some panic, I was able to think straight, I agree on what you say it’s God through me, I as able to think straight, I removed the extra sand from the front of the tire, poured some water on it so it would be more compact and solid, deflated the tire a bit so it would have more traction (area of contact at least) and then, there was this glove, that I am SURE helped the whole situation, God didn’t put the glove between the tire and the sand, nor did he pull me out of the issue all bi Himself, He placed the glove nearby, so I would do it myself (coincidence?, maybe) I call it a miracle because it was an opportunity, it’s either you take it or leave it, sounds to me like many of the chances we get in life and we either overlook them, or take them.
My faith has healed me because I’m not arrogant to say I pulled myself 100% out of the problem, I recognize His helping hand, and I am grateful to believe. Yes, it’s me doing the action, but the aid is there. That’s what I call the miracle, I don’t expect God to act for me.
I defend what I believe (as we all do), I still have that “capacity for amazement”, say, like a child does, not because I’m naive, but because I can still appreciate (note that I’m not implying that you don’t)
I see that you have faith in something superior, call it whatever you call it, therefore I think we’re somewhat on the same page here, I’m sure you’re a happy man because of that, I hope this is the case. I see that your writings do not say “God does not exist”, you explain about religions and why not belong to them, and I respect that.
In the end, what matters is: people becoming better people through life, and without God, it’s a lot harder.
Keep it up and God bless you (Dios te bendiga)
Wolf
The question is: What interpretation of these historical facts best explains the sudden origin of early Mormonism, belief in a new scripture, and the explosive growth of the church, even in the face of severe persecution?
Hey Keith, what happens if someone harms someone or damages nature beyond repair?
Jonathan, intentionally harming others signifies your attitude toward life in general and anyone who does so should quietly accept being victimised and persecuted in their turn. It is simply a matter of reciprocity, or to put it into other words: “Do to others what you would have them do to you”.
Harming nature is simply being stupid: without the processes of nature, life cannot continue on this planet. Many of us are aware of the devastating phenomena that have been occurring lately and many explanations have been put forth, but most people do not know what is causing them. Some of them are natural trends, like “global warming”, but others, such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tornadoes and the like can be exacerbated by human activities. We do not know what effect the testing of atomic and nuclear weapons has on climate and on the stability of geologic structures. We have seen massive sink-holes appear around mining areas and the occurrence of “dust bowls” in once prime agricultural land, when artificial fertilisers have been used in place of natural, organic matter. Anyone who still thinks that chemicals can deliver greater yields than natural methods had best Google “Permaculture” and “synergistic gardening”. A properly set out Permaculture garden will deliver five times the quantity of produce that any other method can.
Many rivers in the world are choked up with refuse and other pollutants and New York has to ship out millions of tons of human faeces and dump it into the sea, thus killing off hundreds of square miles of ocean every year. The ‘great pacific garbage patch’ is a mass of plastic and other waste products that have been swept up by ocean currents and is now threatening a vast number of marine organisms and creatures.
It’s pretty basic, don’t you think? As I keep saying, God does not interfere in any way, and He will not come running to mankind’s assistance if we manage to wipe ourselves out. As far as He is concerned, it will simply be the result of one of His experiments, neither good nor bad: just a result.
Keith, does God even care about people then? Is your God right for me? Is he the only God? You seem like a very interesting man with a lot of life experiences(I could probably be entertained for hours), what would you say to someone who was looking for spiritual guidance? I know a lot of what you say is true (pollution, Catholic church persecution etc.), but is that really it? If someone hurts someone or destroys nature they should just “quietly accept being victimised and persecuted in their turn”? Would that be it? Sorry for all the questions and I am not trying to be rude.
Johnathan,
In the first place, you need never apologise for asking questions of me. I welcome them with open heart, mind and arms. You are not being rude at all: nobody who seeks enlightenment by asking questions can ever be called “rude”.
To these questions: “1 Does God even care about people then? 2 Is your God right for me? 3 Is he the only God?”
1 Yes, God does care about people, but no more than He cares about any other of His creations. Man, however, is a rather unique creature and whether God created mankind or mankind was created by some other of God’s creations is an open question. Whatever the case, we are either directly created by God or are part of a chain-reaction, as it were, being an extension of some other creation. We have been imbued with an intellect that is unmatched in the Earthly Animal Kingdom and appendages that, when combined, give us the ability to carry out certain actions that are not available to any of the other living organisms on Earth. This makes us unique ON EARTH, but is it very unique to the rest of the universe? Many religions and some branches of evolutionists believe that we are. However, there are many ancient myths that have lately been investigated by such free minds as Erich von Daniken, Zecharia Sitchin, Alan Alford and others that indicate that we are not very unique at all.
2 Is my God right for you? Only you can answer that question, Jonathan. There are many religions, sects and cults, all of which have their own ideas about their various deities, but are their ideas correct? Do they reflect the true God? Is God a bellicose, sadistic martyr who gives you only one shot to get it right or is He truly forgiving, so that He will give you the opportunity to rectify previous mistakes via reincarnation? That is for you decide. My Boss lets me do as I please and does not want me to ask Him for guidance, so I don’t. I live by the maxim: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” That’s it: no more and no less.
3 Is He the only God? This depends upon your perception of God. Have you ever seen the movie “The Gods must be Crazy” by Jamie Uys? If not, then I suggest that you do as it gives a rather amusing notion of God from the point of view of the Bushmen. It appears that there are many concepts of gods and other deities on various hierarchical levels, but as far as I am concerned my Boss is right at the top. He is the originator of everything and there is no other above Him.
If you are looking for spiritual guidance, you have to look within yourself. It is of no use praying, because we have all the tools and more than all the intellect we will ever need. If you cannot find it there, it is of no use looking elsewhere, because you are going to find that there are many conflicting opinions about God. The rest is common sense. If you hurt someone, expect to be hurt in return. If you damage Nature, expect things to go wrong. We dig up the Earth’s waste products (coal and oil) and use them as fuel, but we do not make proper provisions, so that oil spills, methane explosions, sinkholes and a plethora of other disasters occur. This is not God at work: this is man demonstrating how immature he is by playing with things that he does not fully understand.
I used to think that miracles had never happened. That it was all just some kind of delusion. That is until I actualy looked into it. It does appear to me now that miracles do happen and have been happening for some time. People do seem to be cured miraculously of their ailments.Some throw away their crutches. They are cured, they do’nt need them anymore.Even the blind have recovered their sight in some cases. Cancers have been cured. There are many documented cases. Miracles seem to be happening every day in some places. Some people make pilgramage to places where miracles actualy happen. A favourite place to go for some of the faithful is Lourdes in France. People go there and pray to the Blessed Virgin Mary to intercede with The Lord Jesus on their behalf. Many miracles have happened at this holy place.
In the name of Mary, Mother of God. There have been many documented cases. The walls of the buildings surrounding the holy grotto are lined with crutches and abandoned wheel chairs.Prayers of thanks are scrawled and written on the walls. Little bits of paper with prayers and supplications are stuffed into every little nook and crack. But it seems to work. Miracles do happen here.In the name of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Those who have faith in the BVM believe that she is up in heaven right now. With Jesus, her son, sitting next to God, His Holy Father.
So yes, miracles do happen, just go to Lourdes if you don’t believe me. Don’t take my word for it. Check it out.
If you can’t get to Lourdes you might be able to get to Ireland.Theres a place there where miacles happen as well.
Theres another place in Portugal too. There are in fact lots of such places where miracles happen, I can’t list them all. Its just a case of finding the nearest holy grotto really.
But the important thing to remember is that you must have faith in the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of Jesus our Lord and Saviour.
Actually you don’t even have to believe in the
BVM. Miracles have been reported in other places and attributed to other divinities. So, Praying to any divinity seems to be the key. Just so long as you believe.
Keep the faith .Live long and prosper.
Hey Robert, we Taylors crop up everywhere! “Miracles” of the kind you write do happen, but are they really miracles, or something else? As you so rightly observe: “Miracles have been reported in other places and attributed to other divinities. So, Praying to any divinity seems to be the key. Just so long as you believe.” However, one does not have to believe IN A DIVINITY, one only has to believe that the cure will be accomplished.
Go to Gary Craig’s emofree.com site and pick up a gratis copy of his introduction to Emotional Freedom Technique manual. Learn the basics and use them on friends and family. As Gary states, you do not even have to believe that anything will happen, but IT DOES! I have helped people with all manner of ailments using it. Belief, then, is not a criterion. All that matters is the wish to be rid of whatever the problem may be. Using the technique correctly will dissolve it, as long as one can find the underlying (emotional) cause. Sometimes this takes a while and many sessions, but in a significant number of cases the ailment simply (“miraculously”) disappears … and in most of those cases it never returns. Miracle, or the sheer power of the human will? I know that it is the latter because I am able to do some pretty ‘inexplicable’ things. The only intervention that God made was that He GAVE me (and every other person on Earth) this power. We have to discover how to wield it. I do not ‘believe’ that I can effect the things that I do: I KNOW that I can. There is a world of difference between blind belief and certain knowledge.
Have faith in yourself: that is all that matters.
Alan, what causes any new religion, sect, craze or fad to arise? The Protestant cults arose because certain people were dissatisfied with the Catholic dogma. Then there is policy and church politics. Differences of opinion resulted in the formation of a number of different persuasions. Then these had petty squabbles and split even farther, so that we have not only Adventists; Methodists; Quakers; Evangelists; Jehovah’s Witnesses; Baptists … but also lesser groupings under the same banners. Then there are the Moonies; Scientologists; Suicide cults: the list is endless. These all have followers because people are disenchanted by other religions and beliefs. The same happened to me: I found myself in a spot of bother and, according to my religious belief at the time, I went to church and asked God for assistance with the matter. The following took place: a gentle, kindly “thought” popped into my head “What are you doing here, boy?”
“I’m in trouble, so I came to ask for help.” I thought back.
“Ah, I see. Do you not have all the tools you need to get through this life?”
“Yes, I do.” I admitted wordlessly.
“Do you not have The Brain to use in times like these?”
Me: “I have.”
Thought: “Then why are YOU, of all people, coming to ME for help? The decisions YOU made got you into this mess, now make the decisions you need to get yourself out of it. I’m counting on you.”
I said wordlessly: “Thank you Boss”, stood up and have never entered a church since, except when invited to attend weddings and funerals. I am not averse to entering the edifices erected by other people to glorify their versions of God. The Boss (that’s how I refer to Him) lets them do as they jolly well please. He is not angry at them for defaming Him or for giving Him the blame when things go wrong and He simply shakes His head when people look for a scapegoat upon which to pile their own shortcomings (Satan, or the Royal Nonesuch). The Boss does NOT intervene in any way in our affairs: we have to do it all by ourselves, but most people need other people, the self-proclaimed “representatives of God” to “show them the way”, as LariAnn Garner observes above in her April 26, 2010 at 1:29 pm comment.
Ask yourself a simple question: “Why am I here?” Do you really think that you are simply the result of an ancient, adventitious chemico-electric erethism of the planetary organism? Do you really think that you are here for the sole purpose of testing your faith in a “lovingly” intractable and perversely sadistic God? Don’t you think it is time that you climbed out of the boxes that other people have fabricated and looked down upon the landscape from a scaffold or tower of your own construction?
Islam originated in the same way that Mormonism did. It is all about fame and power and bending people to your way of thinking. Me? I really don’t care whether you accept me and my expositions. Your brain and your mind are your own and you must use them in any way that you see fit. Through it all you should ask yourself “Do my actions and reactions reflect those of a God?”, because, even if you adhere to the theory of evolution and do not believe that such a Being exists, then you have to accept that we are the most intelligent and intellectual beings in the universe, making US the only candidates who can occupy such a position, because there is nobody else out there, not so?
Martin Lagerwey – Your comment on mimicry is interesting. I am interested to know of a biology book you mention that describes how mimicry occurs. I will qualify that and say I am not interested in one that makes the broad sweeping statement that a creature evolved to look exactly like another creature of a different taxonomic group, or even a plant by innumerable tiny changes in accordance with the Darwinist paradigm. That of course is not science it’s just an idea. I await impatiently.
I remember Richard Dawkins described in one of his books how a misguided clergyman admired the work of God when he saw how the pistil of a certain orchid resembled a female bee. A male bee would alight upon the orchid flower and copulate with it thereby collecting pollen on its back as it did so. Dawkins scoffed at the misguided clergyman pointing out it was just natural selection. Thinking about it more closely natural selection would require the first tiny incremental change by a random mutation of the orchid’s DNA to just happen to make a change in the pistil’s morphology to slightly resemble a female bee. This is quite credible. The idea of NS doesn’t recognize one mutation which caused a complete change from a normal pistil to one that looked exactly like a female bee. That would be highly improbable and that argument stands for all evolutionary changes. The essence of NS is gradualism. So in accordance with Darwinism there had to be many small changes each caused by a blind random mutation and each fortuitously looking a bit more like a female bee until after the umpteenth change it looked exactly like a female bee in shape size and colour and maybe smelled like one too. Doesn’t that sound rather fanciful?
Hello Martin Ward
My study is in Butterflies and a good example of mimicry is the African mocker swallowtail Papilio dardanus which has four distinct female forms, only three of which mimick fairly well, three local Danaus and distasteful species. Each mimetic form appears only in the habitat range of theie corresponding models.
Locally, (Australia) I breed the Delias aganippe (Jezebel) butterfly which mimics the mistletoe (toxic) flowers (different to American mistletoe). Delias harpalyce feeds on a separate mistletoe species and is sufficiently different to imply that it continues to change incrementally as the host flower changes.
My suggestion concerning biology textbooks are probably too general for you but if you google mimicry, with a species name you will find some good papers on them. Heliconuis, Urania, Delias and Danaus are good mimetic species to check.
The evolution / design debate seems to me to have a much more powerful driver than the debate on details. Science by definition will look for natural mechanisms to explain speciation, origin of life etc. The design debate introduces supernatural causes that defy any natural explanation. Proponents of design tend to attack evolutionary theory in particular but offer no actual alternative mechanism. Their motivation may be influenced by prior belief in God.
For myself, a few aspects of evolution do seem fanciful, mimicry isn’t one of them. Incremental change has clearly been demonstrated. (think of dogs). The orchid pistil that resembles a female bee was either done by incremental and random mutations filtered by NS, or by some other natural mechanism, yet to be understood. If incremental changes can be observed, or shown by DNA typing or some other mechanism, it is science.
Martin Ward: bravo! I have come across Dawkins and regard him and his ilk as bereft of intellect. The letters behind their names were awarded to them by other, equally self-important, but narrow-minded ‘academics’. Your question about mimicry is of great import, because it has yet to be fully explained to me, but to the unthinking evolutionists it is “self-evient”, meaning, of course, that they haven’t the foggiest notion, but dare not say so for fear of being ridiculed by their peers. Well, if they would only PEER beyond the ends of their noses, they would discover that they have no explanations. They and members of other disciplines studiously ignore evidence that runs contrary to the main-stream beliefs of their fellows … that is when they do not deliberately destroy them to hide such evidence. Don’t waste your time trying to get rational explanations from this clan, because rationality, to them, is a wall that obscures their chosen beliefs. Unfortunately, this also applies to creationists, who have no clue as to what is really going on and rely solely upon the interpretations given to them by their religious leaders.