Again - get some new material.
Truth is truth. If someone does not accept it, then you don't change the truth to suit that person.
You mean you did that voluntarily?
Oh ha ha.
(admittedly, that was pretty cute)
Peace,
tammy
If there is a God why didn't he sign our DNA
by scotoma 153 Replies latest jw friends
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tec
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scotoma
God and Religious Experience
There are theists who say they do not need to offer arguments for God's existence because they
experience Him directly. What precisely is meant by this "experience"? It is either similar to ordinary
sense experience (i.e., seeing, hearing, and the like) or it is not. Let us consider first the possibility that it
resembles ordinary sense experience. This would be the strongest position for the theist to take because
we generally trust our senses. Let us suppose there is an isolated group of people who occasionally
experience a feeling which they describe as "a devil hitting the inside of my head." Would this experience
tend to prove that there were in fact devils inside their heads? Or does the phrase 'a devil hitting the inside
of my head' simply describe a feeling that could just as easily have been described by the word
'headache'? This example demonstrates the problems we encounter in ascribing otherwise unverifiable
causes to experiences which are private to each individual.
In response to the above example, a theist might point out that we would normally believe a
friend's claim that he had seen a wolf in the woods. Therefore, we should believe him if he claims to have
encountered God. Of course, his claim to have seen a wolf would be based on his eyesight - and we
would first have to know if his eyesight is reliable. We would not want to believe an eyewitness's visual
report if we knew him to be nearly blind. Furthermore, our person who says he saw the wolf should be able
to tell the difference between photographs of dogs and those of wolves. We would not trust someone's
report if he could not tell a wolf from a dog. If the theist's experience of God is like sense experience, then
how do we know that the theist is not like a nearly blind man who is unable to distinguish wolves from
dogs? To know that the religious sense is reliable, we would have to test it to see if it could be used to tell
the difference between gods and other types of things a theist might be sensing instead. The reliability of
our eyesight is tested every day. If we do not walk into walls or over furniture, and if we are capable of
distinguishing one person from another, then our eyesight is considered reliable. But how do we test this
supposed religious sense? We would have to already know that God exists before we could find that the
religious sense was reliable in detecting him. This is because a test would consist of discovering whether
God was in fact near when a theist sensed His presence. And to know this we would have to have some
independent means of knowing that God exists.
Now let us consider the possibility that religious experience is not like ordinary sense experience.
We know the conditions under which ordinary sense experience is considered reliable. But how do we
know that God-experiences are at least as reliable as these sense experiences? We have no way of
knowing that an "intuition" of God accurately confirms His existence. To test such an intuitive "sense" we
would have to demonstrate that whenever we have an intuition of God's existence, God in fact does exist.
But in order to show this, we would have to have an additional intuition. A further, independent intuition of
His existence could not serve to confirm the accuracy of the first kind of intuition because it too would
have to be confirmed for exactly the same reasons.
In summary, either religious experience is like ordinary sense experience or else it is not. If it is
not, we have no way to test whether it is as reliable as sense experience. If it is like ordinary sense
experience, then we have no way of testing its accuracy without assuming God's existence independently
of the evidence.
____Atheist Debaters Handbook -
Pterist
*** Pterist: ...and we also know genetic algorihms, which function by the principles of evolution, can produce software ***+
It certainly can, and in parallel rather than in serial, in our digital world ;) however, the issue is the source of code, not the manipulation or discovery!
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cofty
Pterist - A great deal is now known about the origin of the code.
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EntirelyPossible
No, he didn't arise from nothing, he is from time indefinate to time indefinate, he has no beginning and no end, he is the cause of everything and nothing caused him, he just is.
Time is part of the physical universe. Time and space are intrisically bound. Are you suggesting God is bound by the limitations of existing in physical spacetime? What exactly is "time indefinate"? Is there more than one since he goes from one to the other? If he didn't arise from nothing, then he arose from something?
"We live in a special time, the only time, where we can observationally verify that we live in a special time.”
Laurence Krauss is awesome.
Unfortunately, many miss... and most refuse to accept... the truth of what this means: that He didn't "make" all of us. Some have another's "signature" on them.
Please. Enough to suggesting people that don't accept hallucinations and myth are sons of the devil. It's kind of amusing, but also sad to see that so many people would rather believe in myths and invisible people than learn about the real beauty of reality all around them.
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MrFreeze
Maybe he was just so embarrassed by the human race that he opted not to claim it as his own by signing it. I mean, he probably did see Honey Boo Boo coming. Who would want to lay claim to that?
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bohm
Pterist: but thats not the original question you posed. So having cleared out the issue of a programmer, you are now asking for the origin of life, well, there are multiple scenarios for the origin of life which does not require god.
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Satanus
I just read the fist page, so if this has been said, sorry. Our dna is around 98% chimp. That means its chimp signed, ie, humans and chimps came from the same origin. That origin is not god.
S
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