Edtharan

It's like this. He's saying, "It is mathematically impossible to solve the equation 2x + y = 9." And I say, "No, one solution would be if x = 4 and y = 1." Now you're saying "But you haven't proven that x = 4 and y = 1." I know I haven't. I haven't even tried to, because it's not necessary in order to refute his claim. The existence of a solution proves that he is wrong when he says that no solution is possible.

I am certanly not saying that kind of thing. To deny that "2x + y = 9" has a mathematical solution you have to abandon all logic, which I have not done.

But I will continue this analogy as you have brought it up.

Sure, if Y equals 1 then X has to equal 4, but there is an infinite number of posible solutions to that equation, so stating that it definitly is X=4 and Y = 1 is logically and mathemtaiclly incorrect.

However, if we can establish that Y can not equal 1 by looking at Y in other contexts where it is supposed to ahve the same value, then we can rule out that X = 4 by the fact that Y does not = 1.

This is what I ahve set out to do. If God is infintly good and infinitly powerful and knowledgable, then it would be imposible for unnecesary suffering to exist in the universe if God is not cruel.

In this case, Y = 1 is the same as the non existance of unnecesary suffering and X = 4 is the same as God not being cruel. So to show that there exists unnecesary suffering (Y is not equal to 1), then it rules out the God is not cruel (X then can not equal 4).

If you treat suffering in an egaineering "Black Box" approach (it doesn't matter what gores on inside it, just what the inputs and outputs are), it allows you to asses if an act of suffering is necesary or not.

See, with two black boxes that have different internals, but produce identical outpus form the same input, you can say that the two systems are equivelent. So if two acts produce the same outcome from the same inputs, then they can also be said to be equivelent.

Now we look inside the black boxes to see how much suffering each "box" produces. If one "box" produces less suffering, then that box is less cruel.

As God has infinite power and knowledge, then He would be able to understand a system and create a system that is identical to another so that it produces the same outputs. If I can come up with a way to produce the same outcome for an act but has less suffering than the same act that occurs in the real world, then God could also come up with that and impliment it.

This means that if it is posible for a human to rteduce suffering at all, then God could do so as well.

But, if it is posible for a Huamn to reduce suffering, then this means that the act has an equivelent that has less suffering tha then one allowed to occur by God.

This means that God has not minimised suffering and is therefore cruel. In the case where suffering can be reduced, in terms of your analogy, Y can not = 1 and therefore X can not = 4.

So if there is a single case where huamns have reduced suffering in the world, then God can must be cruel (or non existant).

ANd, here is an example:

1) Illnesses exist in the world.

2) If God exists, then He created these illnesses.

3) If humans can cure or prevent illnesses this is proof that humans can reduce suffering that would have otherwise occurred.

This means that God is cruel as He caused unnecesary suffering (as the amount of suffering can be reduced by entities other than God).

One counter argument that you will probably think of is that illnesses were put there by God for a higher purpose. But, we have free will and can act against the will of God (other wise Adam and Eve were acting exactly as God wanted them to and thus any punishment was not necesary), so the fact that we can cure innesses is not automatically in line with God's will.

If God's will was that we develop the ability to cure illnesses, this might be at first glance a valid reason for illnesses, but our development of the knowledge to make the cure involves the suffering of these people. However there is evidence (the bible itself) that God can directly communicate or even implant knowledge into the brians of humans, so it would be possible for God to have reduced the amount of suffering by directly giving people the knowledge to develop the cures for illnesses.

But, if God's purpose for illness was not for us to develop a cure, but for some other reason, then God could ahve prevented us from finding any cures for illnesses (or directly affected the individual without the need for illnesses to be created in the first place).

What this means is that if God exists and illnesses exist and can be cured by humans, then they are an unnecesary suffering . The fact that illnesses do exist and they can be cured by huamns means that there is unnecesary suffering, and as unnecesary suffering exists, God must be cruel (or non existant).

To simplify this, I have shown that Y can not equal 1 and so X can not equal 4 (in terms of your analaogy). Sure there are an infinite number of other posibilities, but they are limited so that X can not equal 4 or Y can not equal 1. This means that you can any posibility as long as God is cruel or the christian God is non existant. As I have said, it could be that God(s) is cruel and there are an infinite number of ways this could be, or it could be that there are no Gods and that suffering has no spiritual purpose. There are sill an infinite number of posibilities, (as there are for that equation), but I have reuled out God as omnibenevolent (Y does not = 1).

THere is a lot of stress in leaving a religion. There is stress in accepting the unknown, and also in that you have to accept that you life is finite. But there is the more insidious stress in which former friends and family start to leave you out of their social circle.

As a social species, this "banishment" condition is extremely stressfull and can cause great harm to the individuals that suffer it.

It is not jsut people who leave a religion that have these health problems, but anyone who is rejected or is forced to retreat from social interactions (through medical conditions or such).

Let me restate the argument thus far.

Catholic Church: There exists an entity which is omnibenevolent and omnipotent.

Poster: Such an entity cannot exist, because omnibenevolence and omnipotence are incompatible with the existence of suffering.

Me: On the contrary, if suffering has a beneficial end, as the Catholic Church teaches, there is no incompatibility.

 

Poster have not engaged that point at all. Unless he do, his proof of the nonexistence of God fails.

 

I have not offered any positive proof of the existence of God. I am simply refuting poster's proof of his nonexistence.

My arguments is that Yes, there might be some suffering that has benificial ends, but just because some are benificial this does not mean that all are benificial, or, that even though some suffering is benificial, the degree of suffering does not have to be as great as it is.

If either of these arguments are true, then there is unnecesary suffering and this is what is incompatable with an omnibenevolent and omnipotent God.

So if there is just one case where suffering is unnecesary (in whole or in part), then this acts as disproof of an omnibenevolent omnipotent God. Sure, the God might be omnipotent but not omnibenevolent, or He might be omnibenevolent but not omnipotent, but as the Christian God has to be both, then if either of these argument are true, then the Christian God will have been disproved.

As my arguments says: If the same outcome can be produced from multiple actions, but one produces less suffering, then the Omnibenevloent omnipotent God wold choose to take that action over the others (this is not to say that He had to take the action, only that if He is Omnibenevolent/potent then that is the one He would take).

As God has demonstrated the power to directly affect the minds (and therefore the brains) of people in the bible, then we know that God could "rewire" our brains to give us any knowledge He wants. This would not interfere with our free will as all we are given is the knowledge and not made to act on it.

God could, therefore, provide us with the knowledge that suffering is supposed to give us, or give us the knowledge of how to redeam ourselves in other ways (omnibenevolent and omnicient so He would know these things) wihtout suffering. And, even then, as we are supposed to be infinite beings (eternal life), then any suffering we do have is of a finite size and virtually meaningless in terms of infinity which means it's redemptive powers are also infintesimal (so there has to be better ways of redemption, or redemption means practically nothing).

So even if suffering is used as redemption, suffering is not the best way to achieve it. This means that suffering for redemption is unnecesary and that any act of suffeirng for knowledge (including the knowledge of "redemption without suffering") is also unnecesary.

Once you introduce infinities (eg: God or life), then any suffering is unnecesary and unnecesary suffering is not compatable with the Christian God.

Yes, Epicurus has the same unsupported assumption that you do. Namely that the temporary existence of evil is malevolent. Without supporting that assertion, the argument has no teeth.

 

I will grant you that if evil were to be permanently ascendant, your argument would have something. But we haven't seen to forever yet, and according to Christian doctrine, evil loses.

This is why I have been sticking to looking at whether God can be considdered cruel rather than as evil, as according to doctrine God is Godd and he would have a greater knowledge of the ultimate Godd/Evil balance. When looking at cruelty, morality is not a necesary component.

It is posible to determine (in the imediate rather than ultimate cause) if a curelty is necesary or unnecesary. If there is more than one option that achieves the same result and that they differ in the amount of suffering that they give, then the act that produces the lesser suffering is the less cruel act. This means that an act that has greater suffering must therefore contain an element of unnecesary suffering. So by showing that there are acts that produce the same results and have less suffering than the ones that God has taken, then you can prove that God causes unnecesary suffering and is therefore cruel.

If you then what to label this cruelty as evil, that is up to your moral code (and the moral code described in the bible says that unnecesary suffering is evil, but I am not arguing for or against that).

Nonsense. That is not what "knowledge of good and evil" means at all. Adam and Eve were not created so retarded that they didn't know up from down or obedience from disobedience. Your arbitrary interpretation of the name of the tree flies in the face of all Jewish and Christian tradition. Unless you can support it beyond "this is the hunch I had when I read it" or "this is what I read on Internet Infidels," it's not even worth rebutting.

But, if they had no knowledge of what evil is, then how could they know that disobedience is a sin? Sure, then might know what the definition is, but they wouldn't know that it was wrong.

In light of the totality of scripture, the thorns and such are best understood not as God throwing a tantrum, but rather as a necessary step in the redemption of man.

 

Col 1:24: Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ

Look at what I said about how if there is more than one option that achieves the same result, but that one involves less suffering than the others.

God created Adam and Eve, therefore He created the brain structures of them. This means He has the power to manipulate the structure of our brains as He wants. Therefor God has the power to place into us the understanding of what the suffering is ment to achieve and a method of redemption. Also as God is supposed to have an infinite patience and capacity for forgiveness. This means that there should be an infinite number of ways to achieve forgivness and redemption.

This also means that thorns and suffering are not necesary for the forgiveness of God, not for redemption. This means that there is another option for God to take that will lead us to redemption and His forgivness that does not involve suffering. But, God chose to take the path of us suffering, thus by His actions He has caused unnecesary suffering (remember if there is another option with less suffering the extra suffering is therefore unnecesary) and is thus cruel.

Again, suffering is better understood as a necessary surgery than a torturous punishment.

True, but doctors have to avoid unnecesary surgery (and thereofre suffering). This just re-enforces my position that if God causes unnecesary suffering He can be seen as a cruel God.

The problem is a cruel God can not be a God of inifnite love, as the christian beliefs requier that God be infinitely loving, then if christians believe in the bible, then they can not believe in an infinitly loving God, or that if they believe in an infinitly loving God they can not believe in the God as described in the bible (and a God that exists in reality either).

The bible (and reality) describes a cruel God and a curel God is not compatable with an infinitly loving God. You have to believ in one or the other, not both as they are incompatable.

This is incorrect. Adam and Even had the ability to sin from the start, and exercised it in the original sin. Before they were judged by God and expelled from the Garden of Eden, they were already suffering: Adam and Eve were hiding in fear (Genesis 3:8-10). Eating the fruit gave them knowledge, not ability. They suffered as a result of the original sin. And they knew what not to do:

Adam and Eve were created naked and existed in the garden of eden naked, however once they ate the fruit, they new that their nakednes was a sin. They were allowed to be naked before eating the fruit and for it not be a sin, but then once they ate the fruit the act of being naked was now a sin. This means that the same action before and after eating the fruit are now considdered differently. They gain the ability to Sin (from being naked) by eating the fruit.

Gen 2:17 But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.

Yes, and He took no other steps to prevent this occuring, even though he knew humans were curious (He created them this way), and he knew that the serpent was decietful and would try to trick them into eating the fruit. Not only that, God would ahve known that the serpent was in the process of tricking htem and could have appeared to Adam adn Eve and reiterated the punishment for eating the fruit and then said that they were still free to choose.

Imagine a police officer (maybe in plain cloths), witnessing someone trying to convinve two other people to commit a crime for him. He could walk up to them (ofcourse this wouldf be if there was no risk to him) and tell them that He is a police officer and that if they go through with the crime he would know them and be able to identify them, and not only that, he would warn whoever they were going to comit the crime against of their intended actions.

The two people planing the crime would still be free to comit the crime, but they would do so knowing that they would be caught and that the crime could be stopped.

Now, imagine that cop not attempting to prevent that, but then lying in wait to catch these people.

Which of these seems more Just to you. Would trying to prevent a crime seem less cruel than letting it happen just to catch two otherwise innocent people. Who is the real criminal to be punished in this (the serpent, but he just gets away with having to crawl around - which serpents seem to do quite well with as it helps them in their hunting - so this is less of a punishment to a serpent than a reward, wher as humans get constant punishment in the form of origninal sin).

There is an erroneous idea that suffering is evil. The comission of sin is evil: that is, going against the instruction of God.

I didn't say that suffering is evil!

Please read what I am arguing for. This counter argument by you is now an official strawman. Please stop trying to imply that I said that suffering is evil. I DID NOT SAY THAT!

Considering: "As God is all knowing, He would have know that these events would have occurred. As He knew that these events would have occured and lead to suffering, and that there are valid actions that God could have taken to prevent them and chose not to do so, then He can be seen as cruel in that He knew ahead of time and had the power and opportunity to prevent the suffering and did not." (spelling corrected)

 

Above there is the erroneous statement that God is cruel, that is inclined to suffering, where clearly God gave instructions on how to avoid evil and its consequences (Gen 2:17): the valid action that God took, without destroying free will, but that Adam and Eve choose to disobey.

(thanks for the corrected spelling BTW - I have a mild dysphasia/dyslexia)

It wasn't a statement that God is cruel, but a conclusion (there is a difference).

Imagine this scenario:

You are in charge of a train yeard. You release a set of carriages from where they are and let them roll down a hill to where they are needed. However, you see two people crossing the tracks where they shouldn't be, but you have the oppertunity to switch the carriages to another track so it won't hit them but it will still end up at the other end where you wanted them to be (maybe by way of another switch).

Now, would you be considdered cruel if you just let the carriages continue on the track they are on and thus let them hit the people crossing (they were not supposed to be there, so it could be argued that it was there fault they got hit). Or, would you see it as being the better thing to do to switch the carriages to the other track to avoid it hitting the people (nad then calling in the train yard guard to arrest the people for tresspasssing).

See, God could have taken actions to avoid or mitigate the suffering caused by Adam and Eve, and yet still allowed them to commit sin. God chose to "let the carriage continue on the same track" even though He could have switch it. BY this fact alone I can call God cruel as He chose the resulting action that caused the most suffering (He could have intervened at the last minut before they took a bite, but once their intention to do so was known - and as God is all knowing, He would have knowntheir intention, there would have been no way to hid it). As less suffering could have been cause, then that extra suffering is unnecesary, and as God chose to have that extra (and unnesesary) suffering occur, then He is cruel by that alone.

This of course is just one example of unnecesary suffering caused by God that is in the bible.

How do you know that it is unnecessary? Maybe you lack God's cosmic perspective to judge this?

Well, in the Bible, God creates Adam and Eve without sin or suffeirng. Thus it is posible (if God exists) for there to be no suffering. Thus any suffering is not necesary.

At the end of each summer students are required to go back to school. Not all students enjoy the change from summer fun to homework. But this suffering pays off in the long term even for those who wish summer would never end.

Yes, this is true, and I even stated that there could be necesary suffering. It is the unnecesary suffering I am talking about.

I know I have to put forward an argument that there exists unnecesary suffering, and I think I have done that. But I have also acknowledged that there is suffering that might be necesary. I am not in dispute about this. So pointing out that some suffering might be necesary does not counter my point that some suffering is unnecesary and that if there is unnecesary suffering then God must be cruel (or non existant).

Science is of the mind and tries to factor out the subjectivities of the heart. Religion is of the heart. If you have a pure science mind, religion will not compute, since you have been trained to repress things of the heart, so you can become fully objective. One needs to develop the heart to collect religious data. That type of internal emotional-intutitive data is the basis for faith. Faith is not of the mind (cerebral) since the definition of faith is belief in things that are not seen. Faith is processed through the heart (thalamus and limbic system).

There are some scientists that hold religious views and have faith. So this position is disproven. It is certainly posible to follow science and still believe in God (if God exists).

The thalamus and limbic are ancient parts of the brain, which got people by in life, before the cerebral mind was populated with scientific relationships. The thalamus is the most wired part of the brain. It can trigger thalamo-cortico-thalamic circuits; inspired ideas to populate the cerebral. But to trigger the thalamus circuits, the mind (cerebral) alone is not enough, since the induction also needs the limbic system to output chemicals, into the cerebral spinal fluid. Different emotions imply different SPF chemical combinations, with the output of the thalamo-cortico-thalamic circuits altering as a function of what we feel. The atheist hostility is one possible limbic combination with the thalamo-cortico-thalamic circuits tuned to this. This will inspire new ideas against religion. Religion works with all the combinations. There is a sweet spot that inspires the data of faith.

What evidence do you have that religion allows for more limbic system combinations? Have you got studies that show that people who believe have more activity in the limbic system?

Unless you can produce such studies, then this is an unsupported claim and it is posible then that people who study science have just as many combinations, or even more than people who believe in religion.

Hang on a minute - the vast majority of those vaccinations have been totally unnecessary, and some doubtless ineffective (there's always a percentage that are).There are parents who argue that very point and refuse to have their children vaccinated, with no harm at all resulting to the children.

 

So it's entirely possible that the suffering my parents made me undergo WAS totally unnecessary, and that they just couldn't be bothered accurately assessing the risks and pain vs the benefits of vaccinations. Does that make them inhumanly cruel monsters? Must do by your logic.

Two words: Herd Immunity.

With vaccinations, the suffering of the child is typically quite small. Also, there has to be enough of the population with immunity (vaccination) for the desease to be prevented. If there is less than this requiered number, then the desease can continue to exist in the population and with evolution can develop resistance to the immunisation and break out rendering the immmunisations worthless.

This is along what I was saying of necesary suffering to prevent greater suffering.

Now, God, created these deseases, to He would ultimately be responsible for the suffering of these who either get the desease or have to suffer vaccinations. In this case, God has causes suffeing on both fronts, but if God had just not created deseases in the fiorst place, then neither of these sufferings would ahve occured. Again, this points to unnecesary cruelty as God would have taken an action that lead to suffering of desease or from vaccination.

And again, your arguments are not addressing the issue and are actually supporting my position of: God is cruel.

At one stage as an adult I didn't darken the doorstep of a dentist for several years. When I did go back I was told that my teeth were in excellent condition, as I have been at every dentist's visit thereafter. Again, we can conclude that that the childhood dentist's visits quite likely weren't necessary either.

 

Assuming some parents at least know their kid's teeth are perfectly fine, and knowing as I know (and many adults do) that one can skip the odd dentist's visit with absolutely no harm resulting, are those parents in such a situation who make their kids go edvery 6 months inhuman monsters? Certainly they're causing unnecessary suffering to the child, are they not?

As we are not all knowing and all powerful, we can not know what the future will hold. Because we are finite and limited, we have to live with the fact that we can not know the future. Thus we need to work to prevernt suffering that might occur. Thus, we go to the dentist and such to prevent greater suffering that might occur. In this case it is a necesary suffering as we are limited.

Now, as I have argued, God could have created us with teeth that are so tough that we never needed preventitive care for our teeth and not created the bacteria that cause tooth decay. But as these were the actions God chose, and He could have chose differently, then God chose to cause suffering. This is the actions of a cruel God, one that activly chosses to cause suffering when there is a valid option that does not cause suffering exists.

You seem to be saying here that perfect or at least a very high level of knowledge and control of one's circumstances and actions are required for one to be guilty. And that to convict or punish people when any less rigorous levels are attained is cruel.

God made Adam and eve free of sin and evil. It was only when they ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil did they aquire the ability to sin and comit evil acts. But, who put the tree there (God could have put it somewhere that Adam and Eve could not have got to - or just not created it in the first place). God also created the serpent (the serpent is never reveald as the devil), and He could have crated it as a more moral creature who would not have lied to Adam and Eve.

As God is all knowing, He would have know that these events would have occurred. As He knew that these events would ahve occured and lead to suffering, and that there are valid action that God could have taken to prevent them and chose not to do so, then He can be seen as cruel in that He knew ahead of time and had the power and opertunity to prevent the suffering and did not.

As an asside, Adam and Even prove that having the ability to sin is not necesary for free will as God created them without sin and it was only by eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil were they able to get the ability to Sin and the capacity to suffer (as punishment form God). But, Adam and Eve were given free will right from the start, so they had free will and did not have to have the ability to sin to have it.

This proves my earlier argument that God could eliminate sin and suffering from the world and still allow us to have free will. This means that all suffering is by Gods choice, and that He could have chosen differently. This is proof of God's cruelty (as it is written in the bible none the less - so if you believe in the bible then you have to believe in God's cruelty too).

Not so. We lock up many a criminal who had less-than-perfect knowledge and less-than-perfect self-control. And rightly. We do it because the level of knowledge and self-control required for culpability - be it for crime or sin - doesn't have to be absolute, nor anywhere near absolute. Nor especially high, for that matter.

Yes, we are no all knowing, so we have to work within a finite limit of knowledge. This means we will make mistakes and errors, but God has perfect knowledge (that is what all knowing means) of everything, so He does not have to work within these limits and thus He can not make mistakes like we are forced to.

One simply has to have ENOUGH knowledge to distinguish the right from the wrong or the legal from the illegal course of action in a given situation (even if one doesn't understand ALL the whys and wherefores of the one being right and the other wrong) and ENOUGH self-control that the act is voluntary on your part.

 

Even incredibly young children have sufficient capacity and self-control, at least in some circumstances, to be culpable. And so their parents punish them when they do wrong. Adam and Eve had at least as much knowledge and self-control as a child, surely.

Yes, and God has far more knowledge (infinitly more) and far mroe self control (infinitly more). So this means that God is infinitly more culpable for His actions than we are.

So by your arguemnts, God has voluntarily given us suffering that is unnecesary. This is what makes God cruel.

Sorry if I misunderstood you. I'm glad we agree that this would be a disaster. I am interested in hearing more about your objective atheistic morality, but I suppose that's off topic for this thread.

yes you did. I never argued that God is evil because of unnecesary suffering, I argued that God was cruel becasue of unnecesary suffering.

Cruelty is not necesarily evil, but yes, it can be. This is not to say that God is evil, just that by allowing (and even creating) unnecesary suffering He is by definition cruel.

You keep arguing that unnecesary suffering does not make God evil. I agree. (will not necesarily evil, but potentially evil).

It is cruely that I am talking aobut.

No, I'm happy to discuss perceived flaws in my belief system. My point was that in tearing down Christianity because of suffering, you are attacking a religion which allows suffering to have a value, which strikes me as counterproductive.

I am not talking about necesary suffering. This can be a good thing (like if it prevents a greater suffering). What I am talking aobut is unnecesary suffering.

So suffering that has a value greater than the cost of the suffering can be seen as a good thing. I never disputed this.

I am talking about suffering that can be avoided and that God would have the power to avoid. This is the specific type of suffering I am tlaking about.

There are plenty of actual real world examples where this kind of suffering takes place (I amd other here have pointed some of them out). The factr that unnecesary suffering occurs is proof that God, if He exists, is cruel (does not prove He is evil, just cruel).

As such suffering exists, then God has to be cruel (or the only other option is that God does not exist).

The problem with a cruel God is that they are not Just or Infinitely Good (they can be finitly good though). As these are necesary aspects to the christian God, then if God is cruel, then He can not be the God of christianity (athough He might be the God of another religion).

What I am attempting to show is that the beliefs of christianity are not compatable with reality. The christian God is not a cruel God, but the existance of unnecesary suffering means that God that christians believe in has to be cruel (or non existant).

As you argued earlier, God might be able to do anyhting that is posible and that included Him being subject to the laws of logic. If God is not subject to the laws of logic, then He has the capability to do anything at all that can be imagined. As I have shown it is possible to imagine was to eliminate all suffering if God has this power, then if God is not subject ot the laws of logic, it turns out He is still cruel.

This means that the actual definition of Omnipotence is irrelevent (as you were trying to argue that it was), and in either under your s or my definitions of omnipotence we end up with a cruel God. But a cruel God is not compatable with christian beliefs.

So if the God that has to exist can not be the cristian God, then how can you claim that the cristian God is the actual God.

In terms of the subject of this thread: If christans really believe in their religion, then they have to believe that the world is not how it really is. That is: they are delusional.

Third option - God wants us to suffer, not for the sake of suffering, but because the suffering serves a good and worthwhile purpose.

My argument was that there is suffering that is not necesary. If it serves a good and worthwhile purpose, then it is not the type of suffering I was arguing against.

Did my parents want me to suffer as a child? Clearly they did, or they wouldn't have dragged me to the doctors for all those painful tests and vaccinations, wouldn't have forced me to sit through hours of school for 13 years, wouldn't have made me brush my teeth which I found painfully tedious.

No, your parents didn't want you to suffer, it was due to their lack of omnipitance that they could not prevent you from suffering.

Could they have avoided that suffering? Well, yes, in that they could have kept me out of the doctors' and dentists' offices, kept me out of school and let me never brush my teeth.

No.

If they had the power to make your teeth perfect and not rot, then they would have kept you out of the dentist because it would be unnecesary. If they had the power to prevent you from getting sick, then you would never have had to go to the doctors.

It is because your parents are finite, limited beings that they have to use what power they have (the power of the doctors and dentists) to prevent greater suffering from occuring to you.

As God created sickness, and could prevent our teeth from decaying (by not creating the bacteria that cause tooth decay - or creating a material that does not decay and having our teeth made from that), then He could have prevented this kind of suffering if He wnated to.

The fact that this suffering was avoidable doesn't mean that they were cruel or horrible, though, because they knew that these things all served a purpose and all had benefits, and THAT, not mere senseless cruelty, is why they did these things.

CAUSING unecesary suffering is cruel. Causing necesary suffering is not cruel (but not good either).

If God exists, then He created these things, and thus created the suffering that goes with them. He also created our ability to suffer, so not only did He create the things that can cause us to suffer, He could have created us without the ability to suffer in the first place.

Thus, God is the CAUSE of our suffering, and as He could have done it otherwise, this suffering is unecesary. As causing unceseary suffering is cruel, then God is cruel.

You'll say 'oh, but God could achieve the purpose without the accompanying suffering'. But here's a newsflash - God COULD have done lots of things that He CHOSE not to do. And vice versa. He COULD have created us as asexual beings, for example, neither male nor female and reproducing without the joys and pains of the dating and mating process.

Yes, choosing to cause suffering, when there was a viable alternative to do so without causing suffering is curel.

Remember I am talking aobut unnecesary suffering, not necesary suffering. As you are sayning that God could ahve chosen not to cuase us suffering and yet achieve the same goals, then this suffering is cruel. As God this the cause of this unnecesary suffering, and could stop it any any time, then God is cruel.

He COULD have not bothered sending Christ to save us after Adam and Eve sinned and left us all damned.

 

He COULD have just not bothered with creating us in the first place.

 

God makes choices. He's allowed to, it's His universe. Not ours, so our choices are much more limited

Yes, and if those choices are cruel, then God is cruel.

Also, about Adam and Even, God knew that the serpent was lieing to them and He could have stepped in at any point and told Adam and Eve that the serpent was doing this. Adam and Even would still have been free to eat the fruit of the tree and commit sin, but God CHOSE to allow them to act with imperfect information (which is a way of removing free will) and so they sinned (the inevitable result of being lied to). Not only that, the serpent was only made to "crawl on his belly", where as Adam and Eve were cast out of eden and made to suffer, but even more so, the decendents of Adam and Eve, who never had the choice to comit that sin were then also made to suffer the same punishment as Adam and Eve.

Punishing those that are not guilty of a crime is wrong and unethical. Haivng that punishment as unnecesary suffering is also crule. So God now is immoral and cruel. Your arguments are just getting you in deeper and deeper here. They are not actually addressing the issue (that unnecesary suffering is cruel and one who causes that unncessary suffering is also cruel) and not only that, they are just providing more evidence that God really is cruel (ie: You are saying that God is the one that makes the decision to cause uncesesary suffering and that He could have chosen otherwise).

Yes, this is pretty much how Aquinas formulated it eight hundred years ago. He thrashed it very soundly. Peter Kreeft's "Making Sense out of Suffering" is a great book on the subject. As is CS Lewis's "The Problem of Pain". Really, this argument has been beaten so hard that it's kind of astonishing to me that it keeps coming back.

 

The thing is, it doesn't have intellectual teeth, but it has emotional teeth. When we hear stories of terrible, pointless suffering, such as your woman giving birth in the forest, our hearts rend. "It shouldn't be like this!" we cry. And our tears cloud our thoughts.

 

The thing is, despite our tears, you can't do anything but assert is that suffering is inherently evil. It is at least possible that our suffering, and the suffering of the woman in the forest, and even the suffering of children, is somehow a necessary part of a greater good.

God has, according to the bible, been able to give people direct knowledge of things. So He could give us directly the knowledge of the lessons lernt from suffering without anyone having to suffer. Thus suffering as a leraning tool, or for any other use (other than to cause suffering) is not logical (as there are was to achieve the exact same effect without the need for suffering at all).

Giving someone this knowledge does not violate freewill, so it can not be for this reason either.

In shoprt, there is no reason for suffering that makes any logical or rational sense, other than the two I have presented:

1) God does not exist

2) God wants us to suffer (suffering for the sake of suffering)

We can't know. Our lives are the lives of amoebas in a microscope slide; only the scientist on the other side of the microscope can truly see the big picture. And apparently, the scientist thinks that suffering is not inherently evil, because he voluntarily endured the worst suffering that our world has to offer. He suffered as much as the woman in the woods. He suffered every bit as much as the baby that was devoured, and he came out glorified on the other side and told us, "Be not afraid."

I am not saying that suffering is evil or good. It doesn't actually matter to my argument if it is either. What matters is if suffering is avoidable or not. God has the power to avoid us suffering, so if God is truly omnipotent (even in the way you describe) and loves us, then He would eliminate avoidable suffering, which as God Created suffering, and I have shown that there are ways to avoid (some if not all) suffering then why does God still allow this avoidable suffering?

I don't deny the emotional punch of suffering. But using it to tear down the belief structure which allows suffering to be redemptive rather than just bad luck is tragically misguided.

So you object to somone pointing our flaws in your belief system...

The reason the bible requiers suffering is for redemption, but this suffering is necesary for God to forgive us. I can forgive people without them needing to suffer, does this make me a better "person" than God? If God can't forgive without somone having to suffer for it, then I truely am greater than God because I can do something that He can't (forgive wihtout having anyone suffer for it).

This is what you are really trying to argue: God is incapable of fogiveness without causing someone to suffer for it.

As it is possible (and therefore God should have this power even according to your definition of omnipotence), then God shoudl have this power too, or He is not Omnipotent.

You misunderstand the doctrine of omnipotence. What it means is that God can do anything which can be done, not that God can do anything which Edtharan can say. Asserting that he can control our every move and leave us with free will is like saying he can draw a four-sided figure and it will be a triangle.

 

Jimmy Akin does an excellent job explaining this point here:

 

My linkhttp://www.jimmyakin.org/2010/08/th.html

LOL. God created suffering, so then would He not have the power to uncreate it, or not create it in the first place...

So Cain swings his club at Abel, and is instantly transported to an alternate reality where Abel is some kind of simulacrum? In this new reality, Cain clobbers Abel; in the first reality, robot Cain gives Abel a big hug?

 

So every sin results in the creation of a brand new reality populated with homonculi that exist only to do the sinner's bidding. It won't be long until every human on earth is isolated in their own little pocket realities, interacting only with these faked instances.

Have you heard of the "Many Worlds" interperetation of Quantum Mechanics, this is similar to that (instead of sin though, it is every time an interaction between particles occurs).

God, could then cause these seperate realities to merge again later. Again, using Quaqntum Mechancis and the Many World interperetation of it, these mergers would be like the "Sum over Histories" that are used to calculate quantum behaviours.

This means such "Many Worlds" interperetation of Sin actually makes a mathematical sense and thus comes under what is posible. So, as you siad, God can do anyhting that is posible, and if He can create a Universe, why not more, and why not use that power to eliminate suffering.

You think this would actually be superior to the Christian view that God actually respects our choices? That our acts have some sort of impact on the world, beyond our private personal sandboxes? Suit yourself, I guess. But you're not presenting any sort of logical argument against God here, you're simply pouting that he doesn't do things the way you like.

 

 

The set of all even numbers is limited, but infinite.

In this, the choices are still respected, just that God uses His power (that the bible says He has) to eliminate suffering. As God can eliminate suffering, then why does He allow it.

So to sum up:

1) God created suffering (or at least our capacity to suffer)

2) Not all suffering is necesary (that is suffering is not needed to teach)

3) With the suffering that does exist, there are way to avoid it that are logically possible (as it is possible to figrive without the need of suffering, therefore redemptive suffering is not necesary)

4) God does not do anything to stop us experiencing this suffering

therefore, either:

A) God does not exist

B) God wants us to suffer for the sake of suffering

This measn that either God does not exist or God is cruel (and thus not a God I would want to worship if He did exist - fear yes, but not worship).

This sounds like you want God to be a parent who plays tennis with their child but lets the child win every game until they're 21, lest their fragile self-esteem be hurt by losing.

Nope.

That child won't in any way grow or develop as a tennis player, much less as a person able to cope with both good and bad things happening, unless they learn

 

a.) that they CAN lose and

B.) that inevitably they sometimes WILL lose a game or two, but that it's not the end of the world because they can use it constructively to learn and develop greater skills, and can become a good player in spite of occasionally losing.

God has the ability (because he has infinite power) to do both. He could let "the child win every game until they're 21", and the child would still grow and develop as a tennis player (hey, I did it with my neice and nephew and board games, and God is supposed to be more powerful than me - the trick is to let them win, but challenge them at every stage).

A close run game and advice will allow you to show how some thing will work and some will not. Usually what I do is say why the move I am doing will not work and why the move they do will.

See God, like any good parent, wants His children to learn and grow and develop their potential, and excel as human beings. In other words to become great as saints and people.

 

Which involves a learning process, and also involves the risk of hurt and failure.

God has the power and knowledge to be able to just instill us with this knowledge and not have it affect our free will or anything.

In the face of an all powerful God, your arguemnts are not valid.

The only way you can make your arguments valid is if you put limits on God, but then He would not be the christian God if you did that. God is more than just a "parent", He is a parent that can do anyhting He knows, and He knows everything.

Job 42:2: " know that You can do all things,

And that no purpose of Yours can be thwarted. "

"No purpose of Yours can be thwarted": This means that no matter what else occurs, the purpose that God sets out can not be changed unless He wants it to be changed. So if God wanted there to be no sin, but still allow free will to choose it, He can do that!

This means that the only reason that anything occurs is because God wills it to be that way. Thus, if there is suffering in the world, the ONLY reason it is there is because God wants us to suffer, and for no other reason.

A loving God would not want us to suffer if He could prevent it. As the only reason for suffering is because God wants us to suffer, then we can conclude that either God does not exist (and suffering has some other cause/reason), or God is a monster who wants us, mere mortals completely under his dominance (Job 42:2 remember), to suffer.

He doesn't want them to be mediocre - not doing anything wrong, but being only moderately good and obedient, and that only by default rather than by choice.

Again, only if you limit God ability to do things. If God is all powerful then God can make us do what He wants, and still have free will.

The often-used metaphor of gold or silver being refined to it utmost purity by being put through fire is apt here - the fire in our case being the trials and tribulations and risks attached to the possibility and reality of sin.

However, God being all powerful could sort the Gold or Silver atom by atom (the technology to do this actually exists now, made by finite humans - or are we more powerful than God), or even just create it pure form the start and prevent any contamination from occuring at all.

The reason that people have a problem with this is because we humans are not very good at understading infinity.

As an example:

Can God create a rock so heavy He could not lift it?

If God has infinite power, then He must be able to make a rock that is too heavy for Him to lift, but also if He has infinite power He can lift any rock no matter how heavy it is.

For us, this seems like a contradiction, but to a being of unlimited ability it is not. God can create a rock thatis too heavy for Him to lift, but then He just lifts it.

So can God eliminate our ability to sin, but still allow us to choose to sin?

Yes, even finite power beings can solve this.

How I would do it is allow people to choose to sin, but not have thier actions effect anyone else. IF I had the power, just create a temporary reality to put them in with "faked" entities that they sin against. In computer games this could be done by creating an instanced area as the user tries tocommit one of the sins.

If a mere mortal can think up a solution to the problem of being allowed to sin but not allowing them to sin, then a being with infinite power and infinite knowledge could do the same.

Only if you let God not be infinite in power or knowledge (but then could He be called a God then, certainbly not the christian God at any rate), can you impose such limits on Him (remember any limit imposed means that God is no longer infinite).

And if these priests have made up this religion, why have they done so? Why would they require of themselves to take vows of "Povery, Chastity and Obedience"? Why would they reqiure celibacy among the Priesthood? Why would the supposed founders of this faith willingly suffer imprisonment, torture and even willingly go to their own execution? These things are counterintuitive of the type of thing you propose above.

Actually they aren't, they are exactly what is needed to achieve the things that Marat was talking about.

In a society that is authoritarian (that is it controls by using authority), you need to have ways to control the members of that society. Rituals and enforced vows are vary good ways to do so. Look at ant conutry's military forces, look at how much emphasis they put on rituals and vows. Military's around the world rely on such vows and rituals to keep the people in that society (military units and such) together and allow the people in them to sacrifice themselves for the benifit of that unit.

And, when you look at the miltary the officers and generals all still subcribe and put a lot of worth into these self same rituals and vows (probably more so than the new recruits do).

Humans are a social species, and such socially bonding rituals, and the giving up somehting to prove your devotion to the group are vary powerful psychological motivations to keep the individuals working as a group. This is why religions requier people to give up things (vows of poverty or chastity) and they have elaborate rituals: It exploits the human social bonding behaviours (and yes I do mean exploit as in how a drug exploits the reward behaviours of the brain).

First I know of nothing in any religious context that indicates God is "nervous", let alone, "perpetually nervous" about his support among we His children. This view on your part places limits on God, like there must be larger things for Him to be concerned with in the Cosmos and why would He waste His (presumably) limited time worrying about us. Why should we assume that an all powerful God cannot handle all things in the Cosmos with equal attention to detail?

On of the fundamental tenets of christianity is that God is infinite. So he does not have "limited" anything, let along attention time. God is supposed to be all powerful and all knowing. What this really means is that nothing is beyond Gods powers (and attention time is a power). Also, if God created the universe, then He must exist outside of Time as Time is part of this universe (and thus was created with it). If God exist out side of time, then any "time" (in reference to God) is meaningless, so there would be no problem with much attention any thing would take up.

What you are doing here is redefining God to fill in the Gaps of what you know to be real. This "God of the Gaps" is an extremely weak religious position because it means that God is only limited to the unknown, and when the unknown becomes known, then God looses power. But, if as christianity says, God is all poweful, then there can be nothing that can reduce Gods power. In other words, to take the position of the God of the Gaps as you have, and still claim to be a christian is to say that you don't believe in the Christian God (you are essentially worshiping a false idol - somthing which is very much against christian beliefs).

From your responses, we can conclude that you really don't believe in God, just that you think you do.

As to the other matters, my answer is that there is much we do not know about God and that the descriptions you provide above have more to do with our limited understanding than with the reality of God. We read, write and process things in ways that we understand; in structures that we can grasp. That is why God is called king, and why our relationship to Him is described in "King - Servant" ways. That is the structure that those doing the writing understood.

This is called "Shifting the Goalposts". By taking this position, you can argue that nomatter what anybody says, the requierments for a good argument against you is imposible, not because the arguments are wrong, but because you can change your position whenever you like for any reason.

To put this in a very simple analogy:

It is like if I was trying to argue that the ocean is red, but then when you show me the ocean is blue, I just turn around and say " But I was argueing that the ocean was blue." It makes no sense and is an intelectual dishonesty (as well as being a logical falacy too).

As to why would God be, "so preoccupied with whether a collection of tiny minds on Earth believed in his existence, whether those people were praising and blessing him, or whether they were slipping away from his control by worshipping false gods....", the answer can be found in the great commandments and in the Life of Christ. Love...

For God so loved the world that He sent His only Son....

I give you a new command, that you Love one another as I have Loved you...

Your arguemnt is only true if two conditions are met:

1) God Exists as stated in the bible

2) God loves us

If either of these are false, then your argument is false.

As I (and others) have shown in this and other thread you have started, God does not really act as if He loves us, also ther eis no proof that God exists.

So (1) is in doubt as no evidence support it and (2) is disproven. As both need to be true for your argument to be true, this line of arguemnt from you is a really shaky argument to take.

The disproof of (2) goes like this:

God as described in the bible is both All Powerful and All Knowing. Therefore God knows of our suffering and has the power to prevent it without that prevention impacting on anything else. If God loved us, then He would not wish us unnecesary suffering. As suffering is not necesary (God can still achieve whatever suffering is meant to achieve without us having to suffer because He is al powerful), then if suffering exists, the only reason for it to exist is if (a) God wants us to suffer (not the actions of someone who loves us), or (B) God does not exist.

As the only two conclusions disprove either (1) or (2) from above, your argument can not be true. As your argument is not true, it can not be used as proof of anyhting.

 

****

Marat,

 

That position is actually a bit silly. It assumes that people always act rationally. It also makes broad sweeping generalizations that are not warrented with respect to evaluating the philosophy itself. For example, it assumes that all Christians think alike or have the same degree of faith. There's a huge difference between someone like Mother Theresa and a twice-a-year christian. The latter is very likely to "wail in despair" when some "serious but mundate tragedy ruins only this life for them." The former would rejoice in that she could unite her suffering to the cross of Jesus for the salvation of souls.

 

It is true that a weak faith can be destroyed. Jesus Himself told us this in the parable of the sower (which specifically addresses those who have shallow faith that is destroyed when trouble comes their way). And, yes, too many Christians 1) do not really know their faith, and 2) do not deeply inculcate it into their souls. Those that do are extraordiarly powerful, even if weak by the standards of this world, because God acts through them to do great things. Mother Theresa is a good example of this, as well.

 

You must judge a philosophy on its merits, not on those who fail to live up to it.

However, God is supposed to be all powerfull. This means He could eliminate all Sin wihtout it causing any detrimental effect to His other plans, or violating our free will. This is what being all powerful means.

So why does God not do this, but instead leaves us able to sin and fall from His grace. It could be otherwise if God willed it, but He dosn't. The only conclusions are that God does not exist, or He wants us to be tortured in Hell (not the act of a loveing God at all).

What if I were to write, "It was raining cats and dogs" and someone were to read that phrase 2000 years from now, what would they think?

Well if all they used was that one book, then yes, they would come to incorrect conclusions. However, if they use other resources that allowed them to understand what was ment by "Raining Cats and Dogs" then they could indeed understand it.

It is done all the time in anthropology, and even extends back further than the time the Old Testement describes. Based on these we can know what the intent of the works are, the translations we have of them (including the translations of the bible) are the result.

If you really want to argue along these, lines, the orginal Old Testiment had multiple Gods as the creator of the world, and there was a woman before Eve (Lillith) that God created.

There are many such problems that crop up when you look at the Bible using Anthropology. It is only becuase these have either been glossed over, or outright changed to suit the agendas of a particular time or person (do a bit of research on the Apocrapha for this) that we have the work of the biuble we have today.

So if you want to uderstand the message in the Bible and not get tricked by local idoms (eg: Raining Cats and Dogs), then go learn history (non biblical as that has the mistakes built into it), Archeology and Anthrolopogy (and aincient languages). When you do this, you will see that if there are any messages in the bible, they are on equal footing to any work of fiction, even if that is just fiction in that it is a religion you don't believe in, such as the story of Horus from aincient Egypt - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horus (interesting how Horus was born of a "divine fire" that resembles the story of Jesus' birth, and the Horus story was around long before the old testiment was around as events in the Old Testiment take place after the egyptians had established their civilisation and beliefs).

What is interesting is that you are not willing to accept these other beliefs as true, but you are willing to accept beliefs that are areguably a copy of them. The beliefs you hold are based on these other beliefs which you are not willing to admit are true (or are you a worshiper of Horus?).

I understand all this, but my favourite proof is that 'there hasn't been enough time' . It may well be 'highly likely' but not in the timespan !

Ok, lets look at the time frame for it.

The Urey/Miller Experiment was conducted around 50 years ago. The experiment ran for 1 week and produced around 10% to 15% of the carbon into organic compounds. This was in around 500 cc (0.5 litres) of material.

Now Earth formed around 4.5 billion years ago, and life was definitly around 3.8 billion years ago. This gives us 0.7 billion years or 3,640,000,000 weeks.

The Earth's oceans contain around 137,000,000,000,000 cc (137,000,000,000 liters) of material.

So, if in 1 week and in just 0.5 litres of material they could produce around 10% to 15% organic compounds form the available carbon, then in the 3,640,000,000 and 137,000,000,000,000 litres of material it could certainly produce more of it.

Based on the work by Dr Jack Szostak, then the organic compunds needed to kickstart life would have been abundant (and were present in the Urey/Miller experiment) and would occur fairly quickly (Dr Szostak's experiments would not have taken billions of years to perform).

In other words, based on the scientific evidence, there is far more than enough time for life to have got started.

And again, lets put this into perspective. Just say that in the Urey/Miller experiment there was just a 1 in a trillion chance that a replicating system could form. So in the 0.5 litre over 1 week, there is only a 1 in a trillion chance that the replicating structure Dr Szostak described formed (the chances of this are a lot better, but I am just using these number to show that even at extremely long odds then the sheer amount of material and time invloved is enough).

This gives a 2 in 1,000,000,000,000 chance per litre/week of the structure forming.

Ok, now lets plug in the number from Earth:

498,680,000,000,000,000,000 in 1,000,000,000,000 litre/weeks.

In other words a 498,680,000 to 1 odds in favour of life forming. With those odds, it seems a greater long shot that life couldn't start. And remember, this is with the numbers in your favour (you would need an error of around 500 million more in your favour to bring it to a 50/50 chance. Also, due to the experiments by Dr Szostak, the odds are more likely billions in favour of life (and not if favour of your position).

Sory, but this completely disproves your "Evidence for God" that life didn't have enough time (or it the odds were against it).

If this is your best evidence for God, then you will have to, in the face of this evidence, say that your evidence is pretty weak at best (and virtually non existant if being realistic).

It is [math]f_l[/math] that I object to most. It is usually set to 100% even though we have never observed this happening anywhere but on Earth. Is there any scientific evidence which supports the number they use?

 

With one data point all we can say is that [math]f_l = 1 \pm 1[/math].

I don't think I have ever seen it set at 100% because that would mean Mars would have had to have life (in the past) as well as a number of moons as well (Europa, etc). As these have the necesary conditions to support the formation of life (liquid water, organic chemistry and energy sources) then these would have to already have had life detected on them. As we don't know whether Mars ever had life (but we do know that it did have a watery past), and we have not yet made a detailed enough study of the Moons with the potential we can not conclusivly say that it will be at 100%.

At best we could say that life has a 1 in 6 (approximately as there is around half a dozen candidates in our solar system for life to have got started on). But that is one of the more higly optimistic values I have heard.

Ventner's work was creating an organism with artificial genes - not artificial life.

 

Can you link to the description of the lab experiments making artificial life that Szostak has carried out? I couldn't find them.

Here is an interview with him:

And a link to a PDF copy of the article in Nature: http://genetics.mgh.harvard.edu/szostakweb/publications/Szostak_pdfs/Mansy_et_al_Nature_2008.pdf

Proof can also be relative to the times. For example, if we go back 100 years in science, many science theories had also been proven, yet many have been superseded. Before relativity we could vigorously prove Newton's laws of gravity. Yet Einstein came along to show, that what had been proven, was no longer 100% valid. Don't get me wrong, proof is important. But history shows that all the proof in the world, can at times, still result in a temporary life expectancy for theory.

 

If you look at the Newton-Einstein example given, what was more fundamental, was not the proof, but the conceptual framework for the proof. This has become watered down in modern times, since we rely too much on probability and random. This allows bad proof to be filtered out, so less than perfect conceptual models can linger. If Newton had figured out the statistical technique, Einstein could have been nipped in the bud. We could have said, Newtonian is valid within a margin of error and then treated the new Einstein theory as trying to reinvent the wheel.

 

Back in the day, the same level of bad proof would not be allowable like today, since the old timer didn't use the modern fudge math. That is why back then was called the golden age of science. Now it is more like the silver and bronze age; semi-rational since cause and effect are not necessary for conceptual models.

The reason that the old theories have been superceeded is not that we have "bad proof" or they had "bad Proof" it is because we have better and more accurate tools to measure things with. The old theories didn't have the accuracy of today's measuring devices and so could not see the small irregularities that would have caused them to come to a differnet conclusion.

For instance, Newton did not have the means to measure accurately the precession or mercury, and neither did he have atomic clocks and lasers to measure the difference in time dialation that can be observed from Earth (Ie: the difference in time dialation at the bottom of a hill compared to the top of a hill - this has been done).

As these effects were unknown to Newton, he coudl not (obviously) have included them in his theory of gravity.

As our measureing devices get more powerful and more accurate we learn of phenomina that goes unexplained by previous theories. This doesn't mean that the previous theoies are wrong, just that they are a special case of the new theoies that do account for the newly discovered phenomina.

Is it? I have never seen that done. We have been unable to make synthetic life on Earth, so we have only one single abiogenesis event where life came from no-life spontaneously. I don't think we can use one data point to provide a probability.

You might want to have a look at these.

First: The Drake Equation:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation

There are still a few unknowns in this, but we are startign to get a good handle on some, like how common planets are.

R^*: we know this fairly well

f_p: we have a good idea of now with all the planet hunting projects going now.

n_e: we are starting to be able to put a number to because of the Kepler mission

f_t: we can take a good guess at, and if we find life on another planet in our solar system then this will give us a better idea and based on our increaseing understanding of chemistry we are failry sure this is going to be a moderalty high number

f_i: well we don't really know as we only have one data point and until we learn of another civilization we can't really pint this one down

f_e: again, a complete unknown

L: we can base this off only our civilization, but being a single data point it is still just a guess.

So there are only two factors that are complete unknowns, two more that are uncertain but we have a decent basis for the guess, another two that we have a basic idea of and are getting more accurate data daily and the others we know quite well.

When you put some of the numbesr in it, there should be quite a few civilizations out there at the moment and more that have long since become extinct (iirc: there is a good chance that there is an alien civilization within 100 to 200 light years of us).

So when we say that we believe that there are Aliens out there, it is becuase the chances of them existing are quite high, but it is a chance so we do acnowledge that they might not exist.

As for the second part:

Craig Ventner ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_Venter ) has succeeded in creating an artifical organism in the lab.

Also Dr Jack Szostak (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_W._Szostak) has put forward about (ie repeatable in the lab) explaination of how life could have got started and the environments needed to do so were present on early Earth.

So you are wrong in both parts of your reply.

So we can create it in the laboratory ?

Every stage of the development of living systems as described in that video has been replicated in the laboratory, so the answer here is: Yes B)

Could God have done something similar ?! It sounds more plausible to me than a multitude of extremely unlikely events happening in a relatively short timespan. It's much more likely given how it easy it seems to be !

If it can be done without the need for God, then why introduce Him?

Remember, these are not chance events, so your argument here is invalid. These events are selected for due to the laws of physics and chemistry. Also, the vast amount of material that woudl be involved in this makes even these "extremely unlikely events" rather common.

As the events are not unlikely, and there is a massive amount of material involved, then it is actually a highly likely event.

We know the conditions for this to occur exist, black smokers (volcanic vents) on the sea floor produce the chemicals needed and also set up convection curents (as described in the video). The chemicals involved have a preference to react in the way described and will form the structures as described.

Once you have competition between the pre-organisms and the contents of those pre-organisms are also subject to that selection, then you will get a form of evolution occuring. They are not "living" at that point, but they are just a couple of steps away form it and the atributes that give these pre-organisms an advantage drive them towards being living systems (eg: Information contained in the internal structures, internally driven replication, metabolism, activly seeking out needed materials and other resource, etc).

With this, you will also find that there is no "line in the sand" that needs to be crossed to turn these pre-organisms into living organisms, it will be a gradual development and through out it you won't be able to point to one and say this is not alive, but the one that came fom it is alive. But you will be able to look back over many "generations" and see that it have now become recognisably alive.

Of course there is an objective way for telling which parts of the Bible are literal and which contain figurative language. Check out the Catholic Church.

 

What makes the Catholic Church unique is that it is commissioned by Jesus Christ to interpret, teach and preserve the Divine Revelation contained in Holy Scripture.

 

The best source for the Catholic Deposit of Faith is:

 

Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition, ISBN: 1-57455-109-4

 

Link: http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc.htm

So, if you are right here, then we should burn witches, stone adulterers, tourture and kill those that don't believe the same as you do and keep women as slaves.

Right...

Sorry, these were all held as true by the caotholic church and they justified it by it being in the bible. If you are right then you yourself break this every day of your life.

Hvae a look at this: http://www.ajjacobs.com/books/yolb.asp

I am not a philosopher, or a theologen. I am a simple Christian. I could not tell you even what these "principles of logic" are, let alone whether I properly apply them. You asked for my explanation of the passage, and I wished to give it, but with the understanding that I expressed.

If my explanation fails because I have not properly applied some principle of logic...

What can I say?

Then you can say that your arguments are irrational and are not logical. But, as God gave us these abilities, then it would be a sin you have committed by not using them.

The "laws" of logic are not that hard to learn and they are practially part of a primary school education. So if you don't understand logic, at least enough to hold a rational conversation, then you need to go out an learn them. I know people with IQs of around 90 that can still form logical and rational arguments, so it is not all that difficult to do.

I think the real problam is that if you were to use logic, you would get into a lot of trouble with you own beliefs.

Analogy time here....

If you saw some thugs coming down the street would you automatically kill them?

No - because you have no cause to kill them. To kill them without cause is murder. Which is not Love.

 

If your family was being attacked by these thugs who were intent on raping and killing you and them, would you kill the thugs?

Would you kill the thugs out of hate for them or Love for your family?

While I grant that the emotion of anger and hate would be a huge contributing factor in you ractions, the real motivator would be the Love of your family rather than your hate fo the thugs.

So it is possible to Kill out of Love.

Yes, but if those thugs run away, would you still chase after then and kill them, or would it be ok, once you have killed them, to go out and kill their families and pets?

No of course not, and that is the point that was being made.

The livestock did nothing wrong, the women and children did nothing wrong, so why are they the ones that are also killed?

To do all this extra stuff is not out of love. Protecting your own family from such things could be argued, but taking vengance on innocents and livestock, no, that is not from love at all, that is pure hatred and viciousness.

Cypress, The "Elan Vital" proposition has been disproved (wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89lan_vital ). Also see Vitalism ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitalism ).

Ass kicking Guy! The video? Total chutzpah. I'm just not smart enough to take it all in. Life may have began here thru many different venues, but somehow got started. Our problem? How to keep it going to advance mankinds goals without killing us off?

Actually you almost hit the nail on the head.

It is not that we don't know who life could have got started, it is just that we know of many different ways it could. the problem is working out which one.

So when it is said that we don't know how life got started, it is a bit like saying that we don't know which flavour of ice cream to have. We know that ice cream exists, and can see that all the different flavours exist, we just need to select the one that we actually wnat.

With abiogenisis, we know life exists (eg: Ice cream exists), we also know that there are many routes to life getting started without the need for external (divine or othwise) intervention (this is the various flavours of the ice cream), we just need to work out which way it actually got started (the flavour we want).

The main importance of this is so we can work out what the chances are that life got started else where, and ways to look for it. It is possible that life got started in several ways here on Earth, and we need to sort that out too.

However, the main thing is not that we don't know how to start life without external intervention (we know that it is certainly possible), it is that we are spoilt for choices as to how it did get started.

This is exactly the kind of answers I was hoping to question without seeming totally ignorant. So when I ask a question(s), it isn't that I'm trying to outsmart you, 'cause I'm really not in a position to do so. But, if in fact substance of the B.B. was there before time and space began, how could it have possibly been so without space of some sort surrounding it? I know it has something to do with Einsteins theory of relativity, but I just don't know how to connect the two.

This is based off of Stephen Hawking's model of a finite but unbounded universe.

One of the Mathematical tools used to make sense of a lot of physics is "imaginary Numbers". These are number that when squared give an answer that is a multiple of -1. They are a well established mathematical number. What is interesting is that much of the maths that describe the physical world can be simplified by using imaginary numbers to formulate the equations for them.

One such useage is with Time and Space. I don't fully understand the maths of it, but when you apply imaginary numbers to space/time, time becomes identical to the space dimentions. And, just as space can be curved you can also curve time as well.

It gets interesting when you look at black holes, the singularity that forms in a black hole in normal space/time actually disappears when you use imaginary numbers for space/time.

The best way to visualise this is like the Earth. At the North pole (or any other point really), there is a mathematical singularity. Because this point is a point, it has no size, and thus no dimensions. This would be like a black hole in space/time.

If you then use the analogy of the distance south as Time and the area of the slice through the Earth as Space, then you can see how both space and time can seem to emerge from a singularity.

However, even though it is a mathematic singularity, it doesn't cause the laws of the universe to brek down. Also, at that point, things can exists (so long as they have no dimentionality to them).

This is why I meant when I said that only space and time didn't exist at the big bang.

It also shows you why nothing can exist before the big bang, because if you try to move in any direction from the singularity you will end up going south. You can't go norht of the north pole.

Now, you might speculate that you could go "up" from the norht pole, but to do that you would have to leave space/time (or at least our space time), and this is what Mr Skeptic was talking about.

As long as you stay within our space/time, you can not go north of the north pole.

With a universe that colapses and re-expands, you would essentially have a series of sphere that interconnect, just touching at the point that is the singularity, in an osculation. It would look like a sting of pearls necklace (if you could see it form outside of our space/time).

Most of the time we interpret Scripture literally, but we must realize Scripture speaks metaphorically or symboically at times, which is not to be taken as anything but a symbol or metaphor. But it is proper to realize that those metaphors do mean something specifically and are not to be generalized or brushed off as something totally allegorical, at least not as the primary interpretation. Usually those metaphors and symbolic language can be understood clearly by other passages of Scripture or oftentimes good ol' common sense. Some symbolic language such as we see in Revelation takes a great deal of study which requires all of Scripture to be consulted and factored in.

So that is a "No" on being able to tell us which parts are metaphorical and which arn't then.

That is done by following the Church that Jesus Christ established, that is the Catholic Church.

So we have to already know which bits are alegory and which bits aren't before we acan know which bits are alogory and which bits arn't?

You must remember that the Bible says that the devil will pretend divinity, so if we believe the bible, then the bible could ahve been written by the devil pretending to be God (hey, Iif I were the devil that would be the first thing I would think of doing ).

Do you honestly believe that ?

 

A very, very slim chance IMO. 14 billion years since the Big Bang, with life on this planet only for the last 4 billion. We've only evolved enough to be able to string a few sentences together in the last few thousand.

 

So it took 10 billion years for life to even appear.

Another 4 billion for it to evolve into intelligent life.

 

If it took 10 billion years to even get the right mix to spark it off. Then 4 billion is nowhere near long enough for it to even survive in the first instance and then manage evolve.

 

Lets imagine one cell (or a whole load of them) sparks into life, then die, 1 microsecond after they're produced. Then it's back to square one (i.e wait another 10 billion years or so for the spark to happen again).

 

You may argue that it took 10 billion years for the conditions to become right and all it needed then was a spark (from somewhere, and as of yet only guessed at). Fair enough, but even if that did happen, then they've still got to survive. And even if they did manage to survive, then they've still got to evolve to where we are today.

 

Isn't it just much more likely that that something we can't explain (bearing in mind there's plenty of things we can't explain), just designed and created 'everything' for another reason we can't explain ?

Basic chemistry can show how life could get started without needing rare events to occur.

Watch this video:

It gives a good explaination of how life could have got started without rare events. Also, as explained in the video, the origin of life and evolution are different things. Evolution only is relevent once you have replicating systems, before that it is just chemistry.

Cells didn't spontainiously appear as you seem to think (it is a straw man often given because they don't really understand why is meant by abiogenisis). A gradual process that can even be shown to occur (and has been shown to occur) in the labrotory as well as in real environments.

The requierment for life to appear is that enough complex chemistry can occur with complex atoms. In the early universe there wasn't much in the way of carbon, nitrogen and even oxygen (but there was a lot of hydrogen). In stars, Hydrogen is fused into heavier, more complex atoms (like helium, lithium, berilium, boron, carbon, nitrogen oxygen and so forth).

This takes time to produce large amounts, and then it is still locked up in the star, so these stars have to fuse their available material (which polutes the star) and cause it to go super nova and spread it's material through out the galaxy it is in. This could take several generations of stars to build up enough material (the carbon, nitrogen and oxygen) to allow enough complex chemistry to occur to produce life.

It also would ahve taken a bit of time for the hydrogen gas clouds to form galaxies, and then form the first stars (and then the subsiquent stars). Based on the physics, this would ahve taken around 10 billion years, so this fits with the time as well.

Just because you don't understand the processes and thereby know the times it would take to do so, does not mean you can claim there wasn't enough time for life to have got started.

You could counter this by saying that he had to appeal to the attitudes of the time and place where the message was first being delivered in order to gain plausibility for the whole doctrine, but this is supposed to be an eternal message valid for all times and places, not one temporarily bound. If parts of it are temporarily bound because of their need to appeal to the contemporaries and locals, then which parts of the message are eternal and which are not? Where is the key for distinguishing them provided?

Actually this is not a valid counter argument if one were to believe that God is Ominpotent. God would have the ability to get His message accross dispite the times and atitudes. If God was really Omnipotent, then the message would be eternal and understandable across all time wihtout needing to appeal to the conteporaries and locals.

It would be possible for God to write His message in such a way that no matter what language you were able to read, every body in the world would instantly be able to read it without any translation needed. This would be a miracle, and if such a miracle did occur, it would certainly convince me of the existance of that God.

For an Omnipotent being this would be a trivial task, which makes me wonder: If God does exist, why doesn't He do such a thing?