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begin; 15 they will shine in the sky to give light to the earth”—and it was done. 16 So God made the two larger lights, the sun to rule over the day and the moon to rule over the night; he also made the stars. 17 He placed the lights in the sky to shine on the earth, 18 to rule over the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God was pleased with what he saw. 19 Evening passed and morning came—that was the fourth day.
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http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?se … ersion=GNT
whatever version of the Bible, it always happens in that order:
Light – Day 1
Plants – Day 3
Sun – Day 4Grimes and Arabs 1; jbale 0
Not another one,
The Sun was in existence before the Earth, this is a fact so there is no point debating how plants on Earth survived without the Sun. In fact plants are only around 450,000,000 years old and the Earth is around 4,500,000,000 years old.
that might be your belief, but after your photosynthesis boo-boo your scientific credibility is kind of tattered.
i suggest you focus on what happens Days 1 and 2, before any of the items you’re fixated on ever come into play.
that might be your belief, but after your photosynthesis boo-boo your scientific credibility is kind of tattered.
i suggest you focus on what happens Days 1 and 2, before any of the items you’re fixated on ever come into play.
"that might be your belief, but after your photosynthesis boo-boo your scientific credibility is kind of tattered."
No the Sun is older then Earth this is not my belief this is a
fact
, my "boo-boo"? Photosynthesis
requires
the Suns light this is also a
fact
. You don’t need a degree to know basic key stage two science. Seeing as you’re struggling to grasp KS2 Stuff may I suggest you start here – http://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/ks1/science/
"I suggest you focus on what happens Days 1 and 2, before any of the items you’re fixated on ever come into play."
Why would I focus on a myth?
Well, spoken, wit. I expect you’ll shoot baley down in flames. The fact is that God wouldn’t have needed the sun or anything else to precede his creation of plants. He merely has to think something to create it and sustain it. If he wanted the sun to take over at some stage, fine!
baley, I bet you’re nor even aware of the absolutely established fact that subatomic particles are non-local, originating from somewhere other than space-time. The singularity at the Big Bang – which latter was postulated by a Catholic priest by the name of Georges Lemaitre. So, that shoots you lot down in flames, just for a kick-off. Its no exaggeration to say that the fact that the world was created and is sustained by a personal God has been mathematically proven in multiple ways. Maths of course, the sine qua non of physics, is too fuzzy for atheists!
Now tell me this. How does light or the agency governing its speed, know who’s traveling where and at what speed and in what direction, so that when traveling in the same direction, it always strikes the back of the ‘observer’ at its absolute speed, no matter what speed he is traveling at? Now how could causing that to happen be possible to anyone but an omniscient and omnipotent god? That is not a rhetorical question. I expect an answer, baley.
I’m not a literalist, myself, as regards the Bible. It is a very mysterious book, since it endeavours to convey to our sorry wee, mortal minds extraordinary supernatural truths; the greatest of which is that ultimate truth is personal, God not being abstract or some great, impassible monolith, as atheists see him – all together too grand to concern himself with the affairs of men.
The Psalmist sings: ‘Love and truth walk in your presence, O Lord;’ not, as we would normally expect, ‘You walk in the presence of love and truth, O Lord.’ Meaning itself, the meaning and significance of everything, originates in and resides in our personal God.
Take these words of Jesus:
‘I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and whoever lives and believes in me shall never die.’
Jesus could have spoken much more plainly and said something like: ‘Your true life begins after you die, and I am the means whereby you pass from this life to that fulness of life, if you believe in me (and try to act accordingly).
Then, speaking from the perspective of our mortal bodies: ‘If you believe in me, your body will die, but your spirit will not’; finally reiterating that point, indicating that there will be no interruption in your consciousness.
But he was not writing a car manual, he was drawing us into mysteries beyond the capacity of the mundane, analytical intelligence to grasp unaided. That faith, that life of faith he spoke of, modifies our intelligence in such a manner as to to gradually make spiritual understanding of the great mysteries available to us in varying degrees; it’s an ongoing process.
He knew that we were very concerned about those abstract concepts of life and death, but he began his mini-treatise pointing to himself, speaking in the most extraordinary terms, as the resurrection and the life. A lot of meaning packed into so few words. Ultimate truth is personal; and why wouldn’t it be, since the ultimate truth, the Most Holy Trinity is personal, and we are called to join him/them as one great family.
This is something that many Protestants don’t get. They think we are taught we must pray to God through the Virgin Mary, our spiritual mother. But this is very far from the truth. We are more likely than anything to ask God to persuade Mary or Joseph to pray for us! It’s all about family! Not the game show, ‘Come on down!’ But, ‘Come aboard!’ ‘If you’re Irish, come into the parlour!’ comes to my mind, but that’s not really that relevant here! But we’re under no obligation to pray to God through any intermediary.
So Jesus spoke in such a strange manner, so that we didn’t go away thinking we’d understood it, as if it was just regular info. This way, the ordinary Joe and Jane, who customarily have the humility and wisdom to meditate on the mysterious nature of Jesus words, were the ones Jesus knew would gradually learn from his words; not the ‘learned and the clever’, who’d just find it all tiresomely strange and ‘garbled'(!)
When Jesus said, ‘I thank you, lord of heaven and earth for revealing these mysteries to mere children, while hiding them from the learned and the clever, he was actually complimenting the intelligence of his apostles, disciples and the majority of the people who would have followed him, the mostly uneducated people, his own people, the Anawim (bowed down), who never lost their faith in God, in the teeth of the very difficult circumstances of their daily lives. Jesus’ Beatitudes and Sermon on the Mount seem to be convey a deep sense of gratitude on his part for what they had taught him about the true spiritual priorities, not by words, but by their actions and attitudes in those very difficult circumstances.
In fact, children are the only true intellectuals. The intellectual integrity of all adults is compromised in some measure. Their desire for knowledge is not disinterested, it’s aimed at ‘getting on in the world, usually over and above the need to provide for their family, etc. ‘Where your treasure is, there your heart is,’ so the more successful we are in worldly terms, the least interested we tend to be in spiritual truths, particularly, insofar as they conflict with our own worldly priorities.
I am not a scientist and I do not claim to be a member of the scientific community as I have previously mentioned in a previous post on this thread. I am merely a (unbiased) person who has evaluated the evidence available to me to draw a conclusion. I wish there was an afterlife, I want there to be a God but I am able to draw a conclusion that is unwelcome to me. It’s called being a logical and rational person.
I do not need to provide evidence for a claim I am not making, you Grimes are claiming that a God exists beyond all doubt, I am claiming I have a reached a position to which a God does not exist beyond all
reasonable
doubt. That is the difference between us, I would be willing to change my position if new evidence were to emerge. You are so biased towards your position you are unwilling to ever change your position whatever evidence is presented.
You know full well I cannot prove something which doesn’t exist to not exist, if I claimed an apple god existed and the apples have spirits:
1. It would be up to me to prove my claim
2. Not for you to disprove
3. It would be impossible to disprove the claim beyond all doubt, possible to disprove the claim beyond all reasonable doubtI can’t really answer your question as to me it makes no sense…
There is no agency that governs the speed of light, it’s constant.
How does that prove a God exists and what does it have to do with God?
Why not use the speed of sound?
You thought light years was a time, when it’s a distance so I know you’re incapable of producing a question involving the speed of light which leads me to believe you lifted that question from uncommondescent.com and is probably the product of your dear friend Mr. born again 77. I am not answering questions through a proxy.I could ask you, how can your memories/personality/emotions/consciousness survive brain death? Where in the body is the spirit? Where is God if you believe God is all around but at the same time exists outside of time and space. Try and give a shot at answering those. Remember brain cells are individual and irreplaceable.
"Its no exaggeration to say that the fact that the world was created and is sustained by a personal God has been mathematically proven in multiple ways."
Please remember that we know how planets form, also remember NASA has a billion dollar time machine called ‘Hubble’ and the real scientists can see billions of years into the past and see new planet formation. If it was already mathematically proven then why haven’t the real mathematicians announced this truly amazing discovery? Because you are now making up claims to support claims which are already in doubt.
Conclusion: I can’t prove a God doesn’t exist, you can’t prove a God exists; you’re making a claim and I’m not making one so who should prove which? I can’t understand how you disregard evolution as rubbish dispite the evidence. Probably because it would compromise your belief in God, but every major religious institution has now accepted evolution as fact. You believe what ever nonsense you want to believe and I’ll keep an open mind waiting for evidence of an afterlife/God; then I would change my position. I accept the remotest possibility that time and maybe even the universe was intelligently created but as for religion, all religions I can’t see any evidence and I’m sure they’re all absolute rubbish as humans would (if a God created time and the universe) would never be able to fully understand the mechanisms of how that God created it. I’m getting pretty bored of spending time replying to something that doesn’t really matter to me so maybe if you look round the web there would be atheists willing to explain your questions in more detail.
Put it this way Grimes, I care more about football and Liverpool getting in the top four then what happens when I die or what happeneded before I existed.
In fact plants are only around 450,000,000 years old and the Earth is around 4,500,000,000 years old.
450 million years is approximately the time land plants evolved. Photosynthesis evolved much, much earlier: at least 2 billion years ago in Cyanobacteria and quite probably as early as 3.5 billion years ago, a ‘mere’ 1 billion years after the earth formed
Wit and Grimes,
If light was let be by God before the sun, moon and stars were let be what was the source of this light?
Conclusion: I can’t prove a God doesn’t exist, you can’t prove a God exists
Well finally it would appear that the very hot favourite has hosed-up as it was entitled to do
999 God does exist
999 God doesn’t exist
1.01 I can’t prove a God doesn’t exist, you can’t prove a God existsThere probably is no God and there probably is evolution: thus spake this evolutionary agnostic
In the big bang fireball-red corner is Jbale; in the blue misty-eyed corner Grimes; I the dodgy referee somewhat biased to red; and Wit the judge with a bias to whom I’m not sure
A total misunderstanding on your part, baley. The purpose of an open mind, as Chesterton pointed out, is to close on the truth. In this, I would make a ‘fundamentalist’ seem open-minded.
I speak with certainty, since I know that what I know in this matter cannot and will not ever be disproved, so the challenge to reason is not to equivocate about it, but to keep a grip on it; what I know for certain, I must not disown as one opinion, no better and no worse than any other. If I said I was not certain that what I believe in this matter is the absolute truth, simply to gain ‘brownie points’ with moral-relativist liberal types, I would be lying; which, above all, in this context, is not an option.
‘There is no agency that governs the speed of light, it’s constant.
How does that prove a God exists and what does it have to do with God?’The reason why not the speed of sound, is because the speed of sound, like everything else in our day-to-day world, is not absolute, but relative. If I’m traveling at 500 mph in the same direction as sound waves:
‘The speed of sound is the distance traveled during a unit of time by a sound wave propagating through an elastic medium. In dry air at 20 °C (68 °F), the speed of sound is 343.2 metres per second (1,126 ft/s). This is 1,236 kilometres per hour (768 mph), or about a kilometre in three seconds or a mile in five seconds.’ – Wikipedia.
… those sound waves would hit me at 768 – 500 mph, i.e. 268 mph.
This does not happen with a light beam. No matter what speed I am going in the same direction, it will always hit me at its absolute speed! Now HOW is that customised, personalised speed adjustment made, without every individual person and his whereabouts being known by that light beam or an agency governing it. And would either be able to have such knowledge and act in this way, without being all-knowing and all-powerful: what we know as God.
I believe that physical light and spiritual light, aka God, form a continuum, a confusion of concepts, corresponding, respectively to secular faith/knowledge and spiritual faith/knowledge. An example of secular faith/knowledge is, for practical purposes, at least, my faith/knowledge that when I press the wall switch, the light in the room will come on.
As it happens scientists have now found that everything reduces to information, in fact, binary computer code, although software so sophisticated that we could only ever dream about it. Not even that – beyond our imaginings.
Biomimetics is a field of science which exploits precisely the super-sophisticated knowledge with which nature is replete. For example, they have optimized the logistics of passenger aircraft taking off and landing at major airports by ‘aping'(!) the way ants organise their logistics! But that’s just one of thousands, perhaps millions now, of lessons scientists are learning from nature.
Always nice to see your quirky Irish input, Droney! I have an old Irish priest friend, one Canon Michael Cassidy, with the most wonderful, quirkiest sense of humour this side of the black stump. Every now and again, he comes up with some daft saying of his, such as:
‘It’s the meanness of the thing!’
‘I never went to school, but I used to meet the scholars on their way home.’Others elude me at the moment, but if they come to mind again in good time, I’ll post them.
A total misunderstanding on your part, baley. The purpose of an open mind, as Chesterton pointed out, is to close on the truth. In this, I would make a ‘fundamentalist’ seem open-minded.
I speak with certainty, since I know that what I know in this matter cannot and will not ever be disproved, so the challenge to reason is not to equivocate about it, but to keep a grip on it; what I know for certain, I must not disown as one opinion, no better and no worse than any other. If I said I was not certain that what I believe in this matter is the absolute truth, simply to gain ‘brownie points’ with moral-relativist liberal types, I would be lying; which, above all, in this context, is not an option.
‘There is no agency that governs the speed of light, it’s constant.
How does that prove a God exists and what does it have to do with God?’The reason why not the speed of sound, is because the speed of sound, like everything else in our day-to-day world, is not absolute, but relative. If I’m traveling at 500 mph in the same direction as sound waves:
‘The speed of sound is the distance traveled during a unit of time by a sound wave propagating through an elastic medium. In dry air at 20 °C (68 °F), the speed of sound is 343.2 metres per second (1,126 ft/s). This is 1,236 kilometres per hour (768 mph), or about a kilometre in three seconds or a mile in five seconds.’ – Wikipedia.
… those sound waves would hit me at 768 – 500 mph, i.e. 268 mph.
This does not happen with a light beam. No matter what speed I am going in the same direction, it will always hit me at its absolute speed! Now HOW is that customised, personalised speed adjustment made, without every individual person and his whereabouts being known by that light beam or an agency governing it. And would either be able to have such knowledge and act in this way, without being all-knowing and all-powerful: what we know as God.
Indeed, a key implication of this is that the proper framework of reference of light photons is outside of space-time, as apparently, is the case with all photons. I believe it is held that it was a stream of photons emanating from the Singularity at the Big Bang which has formed the basis of all the matter in the universe.
I believe that physical light, and spiritual light, aka God, form a continuum, a confusion of concepts, corresponding, respectively to secular faith/knowledge and spiritual faith/knowledge. An example of secular faith/knowledge is, for practical purposes, at least, my faith/knowledge that when I press the wall switch, the light in my living room room will come on.
As it happens scientists have now found that everything reduces to information, in fact, binary computer code, although software so sophisticated that we could only ever dream about it. Not even that – beyond our imaginings.
Biomimetics is a field of science which exploits precisely the super-sophisticated knowledge with which nature is replete. For example, they have optimized the logistics of passenger aircraft taking off and landing at major airports by ‘aping'(!) the way ants organise their logistics! But that’s just one of thousands of lessons, perhaps millions now, that scientists are learning from nature.
And our hapless materialists claim that this whole world all came together and is being sustained, by chance, a seemingly endless series of coincidences, even though the theoretical possibility of even a single protein being created by random chance has been proved mathematically impossible within the life-span of our universe. When you bring up these matters, they just ignore them, even though mathematics is the bedrock of empirical science.
Always nice to see your quirky Irish input, Droney! Still holding up the pub transom, I see. I have an old Irish priest friend, one Canon Michael Cassidy, with the most wonderful, quirkiest sense of humour this side of the black stump. Every now and again, he comes up with some daft saying of his, such as:
‘It’s the meanness of the thing!’
‘I never went to school, but I used to meet the scholars on their way home.’Others elude me at the moment, but if they come to mind again in good time, I’ll post them.
I am not a scientist and I do not claim to be a member of the scientific community as I have previously mentioned in a previous post on this thread. I am merely a (unbiased) person who has evaluated the evidence available to me to draw a conclusion. I wish there was an afterlife, I want there to be a God but I am able to draw a conclusion that is unwelcome to me. It’s called being a logical and rational person.
I do not need to provide evidence for a claim I am not making, you Grimes are claiming that a God exists beyond all doubt, I am claiming I have a reached a position to which a God does not exist beyond all
reasonable
doubt. That is the difference between us, I would be willing to change my position if new evidence were to emerge. You are so biased towards your position you are unwilling to ever change your position whatever evidence is presented.
You know full well I cannot prove something which doesn’t exist to not exist, if I claimed an apple god existed and the apples have spirits:
1. It would be up to me to prove my claim
2. Not for you to disprove
3. It would be impossible to disprove the claim beyond all doubt, possible to disprove the claim beyond all reasonable doubtI can’t really answer your question as to me it makes no sense…
There is no agency that governs the speed of light, it’s constant.
How does that prove a God exists and what does it have to do with God?
Why not use the speed of sound?
You thought light years was a time, when it’s a distance so I know you’re incapable of producing a question involving the speed of light which leads me to believe you lifted that question from uncommondescent.com and is probably the product of your dear friend Mr. born again 77. I am not answering questions through a proxy.I could ask you, how can your memories/personality/emotions/consciousness survive brain death? Where in the body is the spirit? Where is God if you believe God is all around but at the same time exists outside of time and space. Try and give a shot at answering those. Remember brain cells are individual and irreplaceable.
"Its no exaggeration to say that the fact that the world was created and is sustained by a personal God has been mathematically proven in multiple ways."
Please remember that we know how planets form, also remember NASA has a billion dollar time machine called ‘Hubble’ and the real scientists can see billions of years into the past and see new planet formation. If it was already mathematically proven then why haven’t the real mathematicians announced this truly amazing discovery? Because you are now making up claims to support claims which are already in doubt.
Conclusion: I can’t prove a God doesn’t exist, you can’t prove a God exists; you’re making a claim and I’m not making one so who should prove which? I can’t understand how you disregard evolution as rubbish dispite the evidence. Probably because it would compromise your belief in God, but every major religious institution has now accepted evolution as fact. You believe what ever nonsense you want to believe and I’ll keep an open mind waiting for evidence of an afterlife/God; then I would change my position. I accept the remotest possibility that time and maybe even the universe was intelligently created but as for religion, all religions I can’t see any evidence and I’m sure they’re all absolute rubbish as humans would (if a God created time and the universe) would never be able to fully understand the mechanisms of how that God created it. I’m getting pretty bored of spending time replying to something that doesn’t really matter to me so maybe if you look round the web there would be atheists willing to explain your questions in more detail.
Put it this way Grimes, I care more about football and Liverpool getting in the top four then what happens when I die or what happeneded before I existed.
I’ve only been carrying on this stuff because you were, baley. Once I’ve said my piece, as far as I’m concerned it’s up to my interlocutor what he makes of it.
Science and (scientists) are the first to admit when a phenomenon defies explanation; they may have theories but, if not proven, will admit so. Others, will simply assume it’s the work of "their" god.
If you were able to transport a disposbale cigarette-lighter back in time to, say as recently as the 17th century, it (the lighter, not the time travel)would be heralded as either a miracle or the work of Satan. Would you believe their explanation Grimes? Yet you believe the rantings of people from 1700 years earlier!!! How come? Is it not possible that some things that cannot yet be explained by science will one day? Isn’t that more likely than it being the work of a god?
To argue nowadays that some aspects of quantum physics cannot be explained by science and that therefore it must be the work of god really is a desperate defence of the fairy-stories that are religion.
(It seems almost laughable that only a few years ago, after torrential rain in the North of England, the Bishop of Carlisle (2007 I think) blamed the downpours on god’s wrath at the sanctioning of pro-homosexual laws )There were two separate articles in various papers in the last month which had nothing to do with religion but in their own way show how science is constantly confirming Darwinism (if you like) and science above the mumbo-jumbo of religions. The first was the discovery of the remains of a large, extinct fish that had the first signs of "limbs" for land movement. So, one up to the evolutionists over the intelligent-design crew I think.
The second was a theory (only a theory mind, science has yet to verify it), that spontaneous human combustion (thought of by people over the ages as a sign that the devil was at work) was probably due to an excess of acetone in the victim’s body.
But still people want to believe the rantings of backward, semi-literate people who didn’t yet know that the Earth was not flat or that it orbited the sun; they still take these people’s word on life-after-death.
Even if your god is true, can you ask him why for instance, he hasn’t answered the many prayers of Madeleine McCann’s family and friends? Some god. Or is that another part of his great plan? Put your faith in him/her/it if you want, but if that’s what god is, he (or it) sucks.======================
Genesis 1:1 – "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" – solves the riddle of what scientists refer to as the singularity problem.
The singularity problem is the notion that scientists cannot figure out what existed prior to the theoretical initial blast of creation now termed the big bang.
The big bang theory has been theoretically scientifically validated by one primary observation: That the collection of various galaxies and their components appear to be expanding outward into space. This is called the "Hubble Constant," named after the famed astronomer.
The logic is that if the galaxies and their components are all expanding, they must have originally arisen from a single point.
Assuming such a single big bang did occur, what made it occur?
In any explosion – or any event for that matter – the laws of the physical universe tell us that there must exist the elements to produce that event. In other words, every event, and every thing in the physical universe has a source. This we have learned by scientific observation and many decades of research.
Science, as promulgated by all scientists now and in the past, must abide by certain laws of logic, one being that scientific theories, no matter how abstract, must abide by fundamental and observable realities.
Therefore, for the supposed big bang theory to be a scientific theory, it must abide by the universal rule of the physical world that every event must have an elementary source.
For this reason, scientists have been meticulously listing the atomic elements that must have existed prior to the big bang in order for the explosion to have taken place.
But then they arrive at the singularity problem: Where did these elements come from? And where did the atomic energy come from that caused such a great explosion?
This is what baffles scientists, and what has provided the grist for many a theory about what existed prior to the big bang. Theories have ranged from string theories to various wave and energy theories, to the famous "theory of everything."
However, at the end of all of these theories, scientists find the same problem: What caused these? What elements, power or energy produced them?
Furthermore, as we look at the eventual assembly of the various beautifully organized structures of the physical universe, be they galaxies, solar systems, planets, oceans, mountains, plants, fish, animals and humans – and their continued evolution driven by a magnificent spiral-shape molecule that looks strikingly like a galaxy, called DNA – we must arrive at the conclusion that whatever was before such a creation event must also have had the potential to produce all of this arranged complexity.
In addition, we must also scientifically accept that all of the personalities among the organisms we see around us – every human and every animal and other living organism – must also have arisen from something.
What was the source of all of these personalities? What is the source of love? What is the source of individuality? What is the source of desire? What is the source of the fear of death? Certainly, if we were all simply physical machines, there would be no fear of death. We would all look forward to merging back into matter as opposed to struggling for survival.
All of these elements, which all came into being, add to the singularity problem. Where did the capability for matter to produce all of this come from? The big bang theorists simply have no logical explanation.
This first verse in Genesis provides the answer. God – the Original Being from a dimension of another substance – the spiritual dimension – brought the energy and the elements together to produce the physical universe.
This is the only valid scientific conclusion that can be made. Why?
Because first of all, the only valid source of the ‘singularity’ must be from another dimension. Since "something" cannot come from "nothing," and a beginning indicates a period of "nothing," the only valid source of the "something" must be a transmutation from another dimension.
Secondly, in order for the physical universe to have the capabilities it has: such as spiraling galaxies, gravity, DNA, atoms, molecules and so on, there must be an organizing source. Something must have provided an organizing principle.
An organizing principle requires what? Purpose: A purpose for the organization. Something that is organized infers there is a purpose for the organization. This requires an organizer with purpose.
Thirdly, life must originate from a living substance. Matter cannot become life. We can see this clearly. A living organism desires survival. A dead piece of matter does not. This means there is a difference between the two. So how did life come into being?
Since living organisms struggle against the laws of the physical universe – notably that every organism dies – then the life element within living organisms must not be physical. If they were, then there would be no struggle with death. Every organism would happily accept death as a merging back to matter if life came from matter.
The struggle against death, and the very nature of the evolution of species indicates quite the opposite. Organisms struggle to stay alive – and evolve in order to stay alive – because the element of life is not physical element.
The only scientific conclusion that maintains the laws of nature points to a Powerful and Omnipresent Being, coming from the spiritual dimension, producing the physical universe and impregnating it with life.
==============================You’re right Wit animals evolve to survive and hence are naturally selected to survive, this was Darwin’s main point; survival of the fittest.
That’s a thoughtful article and an interesting read but doesn’t ‘explain’ anything: it just ‘explains away’ concepts and problems that are, at present, beyond human understanding and comprehension
I for one certainly don’t believe that our understanding of physics and the universe ended with the discovery of Relativity, Quantum Physics and Quarks
The Big Bang Theory
(theory)
for example does not rest easily with me largely for the reasons outlined in the article though my unsettling scepticism does not need to be comforted by the invocation of an intangible and nebulous God: that is the lazy man’s rationalization
The age of the earth has been alluded to: do you, Grimes and Wit, believe that the radiometric dating of rocks and fossils that has in relatively recent times revealed the earth to be approximately 4.5 billion years old and life approximately 3 billion years old is nonsense, and if so why
Who wrote the Book of Genesis and what were his/her sources?
By the way Grimes, I’m not Irish
Yes Drone; I’m with you on that.
We don’t know with 100% certainty that "big bang" is correct. There are lots of things we can’t answer and can’t begin to comprehend (eg. what came before "big bang": if the universe is expanding what is it expanding into? etc.) Whatever the answer is (and the odds are that humans will never find out), I’m not too enamoured by the answer that it was the creation of some god who sent his only son down to a semi-literate bunch of peasants. As Christopher Hitchens points out, at the time of J.C., why didn’t this god send his lad to China, where, in comparison to Palestine, there was a degree of scientific understanding? That might have been a better way to spread the "truth".
If god’s plan was so "god-like", how come, 2000 years later humanity still disagrees over how to worship him and knocks seven bells out of one-another because of his lad’s inability to get his message across? (And that’s just Judeo/Christianity, Mohammed made just as great a botch in getting his adherents to believe in one strain of Allah worship.)
I’m happy to accept the possibility that something beyond my comprehension created the lot but don’t need to go beyond that in imagining some being has ever since waited for humanity to evolve and sits in judgement of our every action. Spinoza got that in the 1600s; 400 years later and in spite of an enlightenment in the sciences, too many nowadays still do not.
BTW, does this god who gives people NEDs, who is all merciful and loving (except to unfortunates like the McCann family and a few hundred-million others) allow Dogs, Cats, Sheep, Pigs etc. into his heaven? If not, why not?
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