Your statement is rather useless and completely unprovable one way or another. The only conclusions one can draw from it are that (A) the author is omniscient and has always existed, or (B) the author wants to stir people up and get some responses. The first option appears unlikely, and no one really gets lasting benefit from the second option. What purpose does posting the statement serve?
A purpose was served in that it generated a response from you Jesse.
My statement is easily provable. You need only go a few sentences into Genesis.
God creates the heaven and the earth before the sun and the other stars. The earth is a consolidation of material drawn together by gravitational attraction. The material of which the earth is made was in the position for it to aggregate in this way because of the gravitational attraction of the sun around which the earth material was in an elliptical orbit.. It is not possible that the earth existed before the sun and that is provable by evidence of many kinds and available everywhere, that the universe functions according to the laws of physics.
The source of light on earth is the sun. When, in Genesis, God creates light and dark on the first day, but does not create the sun, moon and stars until the fourth day the account is false. The evidence is with us every second of every day.
When God creates grass and fruit trees on the third day his actions are contradicted by the evidence we have of the atmospheric composition of the young earth which would not have supported such highly evolved plant life. There were living organisms on earth millions of years before grass and fruit trees.
When we get to the fifth day and God creates all the living creatures the absurdity is entirely risible. The fossil record demonstrates very clearly the evolution of more and more complex animals and plants. Mass extinctions occur as environmental change occurs on the earth and new species evolve to take advantage of the changed situation.
I could obviously go on verse by verse, but what I have already said should stimulate anybody with an open mind to see that a literal reading of the bible shows it to be false. Genesis is a creation myth just like those of a host of other religions. It has no more merit than the dream time of the Australian aborigines or any other that you might choose.
Creation myths are the means by which primitive people tried to understand where they came from. They are the product of human minds and not the inspired word of God. Why would anybody want to continue to use such stories when we understand much more about how things really developed?
The purpose the posting serves is to stimulate discussion about religious claims and beliefs in order to establish whether they have any merit.
If you are still interested in this conversation, please define “God” within the context of your interpretion of the Bible (“interpretion” only included because that is all anyone, including myself, can give).
It only makes sense to define God, in an Abrahamic sense, by the references made to God in the bible.
God is something that existed before the universe, in the image and likeness of man, with the abilities to create all manner of things. God is something with the most fragile of human failings. One who demands worship and attention to the exclusion of all others. One who is jealous. One who sets a host of onerous rules and threatens terrible consequences for any failure to comply with them. One who is willing to destroy life on an enormous scale and to condemn whole nations for the most capricious of reasons. One who shows favouritism of a quite repellent nature and who makes gifts of land in all perpetuity to his chosen.
Obviously it would be possible to go on for a very long time defining the God of the bible by the claimed actions of that God. It is not a pretty picture. It amounts to a description of a very flawed human dictator. Just what one might expect to be the product of the minds of the male tribal leaders of primitive societies seeking to impose their own wishes on the members of their communities.
“God is something that existed before the universe, … with the abilities to create all manner of things.”
“the universe functions according to the laws of physics.”
If God existed before the universe, and is able to create all manner of things, then could God not have created the laws of physics?
If God created the laws of physics, then could God not have altered them?
If God could “create” anything out of nothing (“physically” impossible, yet here we assume that God is able to create and alter “physical laws”), then could God not have created light without a sun as the source?
Yes it is possible that God created the laws of physics, but it is a preposterous ‘if’ that the creator of the laws of physics is a human like father who is jealous, demanding of worship and absoute attention, capricious and murderous. Not only that, this father God of the bible threatens eternal torture to those whom he disfavours and demands absurd sacrifice, ritual cleaning dietary prohibitiions and much other nonsense in the Mosaic laws. It would make more sense to believe that he celestial teapot, the spaghetti monster or fairies at the bottom of my garden had created the laws of physics.
Presumably God could alter the laws of physics if he had created them, but there is no reason why he would have used these magical powers to create miracles in biblical times but to have stopped doing so now. Nietsche concluded that God must be dead. (Just as absurd a concept as religious belief itself). The truth, of course, is that the magic of the bible and Christians never happened any more than the magic of other religions and conjurors. Miracles were either deceptions or simple invention that was later embroidered in the story telling before the texts were finally fixed decades and hundreds of years after the events. For Christianity, the most significant fixation of authorised text was at the time of the Council of Nicea, three centuries after Jesus.
It is not physically impossible for something to be created out of nothing in a material sense. It happens all the time. It is a very difficult part of quantum physics, but particles of matter are created and disappear constantly due to quantum instabilities in which energy changes to matter and matter to energy.
If you choose to creat a God of limitless power, then of course he can do anything, but good philosophy and science tells us that it is always sensible to apply Occam’s razor. That is, if something is not necessary to explain a phenomenon, then it should not be used. For the earth to have been created without the gravitational pull of the sun that is necessary for its formation is a nonsense proposal. For a light source providing night and day without the sun is a nonsense proposition. For a God able to do anything it makes no snese to have done things in the nonsensical way related in genesis. It is not that God works in mysterious ways, it is that the bible is not the ispired word of God, but the simple stories of primitive people who did not understand much about the universe that they inhabited.
Whenever people who are desperate to believe, are confronted with evidence that their belief is false, they do not usually abandon their belief. Instead they generate ever more fanciful explanations for why their belief could be true. That is what you are doing Jesse.
Consider this. If God has the absolute power that you credit him with, and there is only one God, then there cannot be any struggle with the devil. All of the horror and misery in the world is God’s creation and he can only permit it because it pleases him to do so. The work of the devil is God’s own work.
No I don’t feel any need to be validated as a person by others. I hope that doesn’t sound arrogant. I have all the weaknesses and failings that fallible humans have. Among those failings will be believing some things to be true that are not true. That does not invalidate me as a person.
I try to continually improve my knowledge and I do that by considering the evidence for those things that interest me and coming to a conclusion about the validity of things on the basis of the evidence available. I do not accept anything on the basis of faith although I obviously I accept some things to be probably true or probably false on the basis of evidence which is insufficient to be completely conclusive. I like to discuss these things with others and my opinion often changes over time as a result of what I learn from these discussions, but I do not feel validated or otherwise because people agree or disagree with me.
January 20, 2008 at 01:25 |
Your statement is rather useless and completely unprovable one way or another. The only conclusions one can draw from it are that (A) the author is omniscient and has always existed, or (B) the author wants to stir people up and get some responses. The first option appears unlikely, and no one really gets lasting benefit from the second option. What purpose does posting the statement serve?
January 20, 2008 at 10:40 |
A purpose was served in that it generated a response from you Jesse.
My statement is easily provable. You need only go a few sentences into Genesis.
God creates the heaven and the earth before the sun and the other stars. The earth is a consolidation of material drawn together by gravitational attraction. The material of which the earth is made was in the position for it to aggregate in this way because of the gravitational attraction of the sun around which the earth material was in an elliptical orbit.. It is not possible that the earth existed before the sun and that is provable by evidence of many kinds and available everywhere, that the universe functions according to the laws of physics.
The source of light on earth is the sun. When, in Genesis, God creates light and dark on the first day, but does not create the sun, moon and stars until the fourth day the account is false. The evidence is with us every second of every day.
When God creates grass and fruit trees on the third day his actions are contradicted by the evidence we have of the atmospheric composition of the young earth which would not have supported such highly evolved plant life. There were living organisms on earth millions of years before grass and fruit trees.
When we get to the fifth day and God creates all the living creatures the absurdity is entirely risible. The fossil record demonstrates very clearly the evolution of more and more complex animals and plants. Mass extinctions occur as environmental change occurs on the earth and new species evolve to take advantage of the changed situation.
I could obviously go on verse by verse, but what I have already said should stimulate anybody with an open mind to see that a literal reading of the bible shows it to be false. Genesis is a creation myth just like those of a host of other religions. It has no more merit than the dream time of the Australian aborigines or any other that you might choose.
Creation myths are the means by which primitive people tried to understand where they came from. They are the product of human minds and not the inspired word of God. Why would anybody want to continue to use such stories when we understand much more about how things really developed?
The purpose the posting serves is to stimulate discussion about religious claims and beliefs in order to establish whether they have any merit.
January 27, 2008 at 03:44 |
If you are still interested in this conversation, please define “God” within the context of your interpretion of the Bible (“interpretion” only included because that is all anyone, including myself, can give).
January 27, 2008 at 10:17 |
It only makes sense to define God, in an Abrahamic sense, by the references made to God in the bible.
God is something that existed before the universe, in the image and likeness of man, with the abilities to create all manner of things. God is something with the most fragile of human failings. One who demands worship and attention to the exclusion of all others. One who is jealous. One who sets a host of onerous rules and threatens terrible consequences for any failure to comply with them. One who is willing to destroy life on an enormous scale and to condemn whole nations for the most capricious of reasons. One who shows favouritism of a quite repellent nature and who makes gifts of land in all perpetuity to his chosen.
Obviously it would be possible to go on for a very long time defining the God of the bible by the claimed actions of that God. It is not a pretty picture. It amounts to a description of a very flawed human dictator. Just what one might expect to be the product of the minds of the male tribal leaders of primitive societies seeking to impose their own wishes on the members of their communities.
January 28, 2008 at 00:11 |
“God is something that existed before the universe, … with the abilities to create all manner of things.”
“the universe functions according to the laws of physics.”
If God existed before the universe, and is able to create all manner of things, then could God not have created the laws of physics?
If God created the laws of physics, then could God not have altered them?
If God could “create” anything out of nothing (“physically” impossible, yet here we assume that God is able to create and alter “physical laws”), then could God not have created light without a sun as the source?
February 5, 2008 at 10:04 |
Yes it is possible that God created the laws of physics, but it is a preposterous ‘if’ that the creator of the laws of physics is a human like father who is jealous, demanding of worship and absoute attention, capricious and murderous. Not only that, this father God of the bible threatens eternal torture to those whom he disfavours and demands absurd sacrifice, ritual cleaning dietary prohibitiions and much other nonsense in the Mosaic laws. It would make more sense to believe that he celestial teapot, the spaghetti monster or fairies at the bottom of my garden had created the laws of physics.
Presumably God could alter the laws of physics if he had created them, but there is no reason why he would have used these magical powers to create miracles in biblical times but to have stopped doing so now. Nietsche concluded that God must be dead. (Just as absurd a concept as religious belief itself). The truth, of course, is that the magic of the bible and Christians never happened any more than the magic of other religions and conjurors. Miracles were either deceptions or simple invention that was later embroidered in the story telling before the texts were finally fixed decades and hundreds of years after the events. For Christianity, the most significant fixation of authorised text was at the time of the Council of Nicea, three centuries after Jesus.
It is not physically impossible for something to be created out of nothing in a material sense. It happens all the time. It is a very difficult part of quantum physics, but particles of matter are created and disappear constantly due to quantum instabilities in which energy changes to matter and matter to energy.
If you choose to creat a God of limitless power, then of course he can do anything, but good philosophy and science tells us that it is always sensible to apply Occam’s razor. That is, if something is not necessary to explain a phenomenon, then it should not be used. For the earth to have been created without the gravitational pull of the sun that is necessary for its formation is a nonsense proposal. For a light source providing night and day without the sun is a nonsense proposition. For a God able to do anything it makes no snese to have done things in the nonsensical way related in genesis. It is not that God works in mysterious ways, it is that the bible is not the ispired word of God, but the simple stories of primitive people who did not understand much about the universe that they inhabited.
Whenever people who are desperate to believe, are confronted with evidence that their belief is false, they do not usually abandon their belief. Instead they generate ever more fanciful explanations for why their belief could be true. That is what you are doing Jesse.
Consider this. If God has the absolute power that you credit him with, and there is only one God, then there cannot be any struggle with the devil. All of the horror and misery in the world is God’s creation and he can only permit it because it pleases him to do so. The work of the devil is God’s own work.
February 9, 2008 at 04:01 |
Are not all people desperate to have their beliefs validated, that they may feel validated?
Thank you for the interesting, thought-provoking conversation. I hope that you have a very good weekend.
February 9, 2008 at 11:28 |
Thank you for those good wishes.
No I don’t feel any need to be validated as a person by others. I hope that doesn’t sound arrogant. I have all the weaknesses and failings that fallible humans have. Among those failings will be believing some things to be true that are not true. That does not invalidate me as a person.
I try to continually improve my knowledge and I do that by considering the evidence for those things that interest me and coming to a conclusion about the validity of things on the basis of the evidence available. I do not accept anything on the basis of faith although I obviously I accept some things to be probably true or probably false on the basis of evidence which is insufficient to be completely conclusive. I like to discuss these things with others and my opinion often changes over time as a result of what I learn from these discussions, but I do not feel validated or otherwise because people agree or disagree with me.