Is the basis for your faith so weak and unfounded that you cannot even examine it, and so you must only take the word of some other person as to what it is you should believe?

I question everything as i started above. I am not perfect and neither is my faith.

My main problem with this thread is people dening the existance of God. Makes me so mad i am ready to throw this Laptop of mine across the room or start cussing everyone out here.

My beliefs are not real deep with the exception of the few I hold dear.

Grayhaze: you are a lost cause to me.

#418 by Kona0197 - 9/18/2003 4:00:56 PM Grayhaze:If there is no God explain to me why I have seen bones that were broken heal themselves? Why have i seen smokers who smoke a pack a day for 50 years quit and never relapse? anything is possible in the name of Jesus.

Broken bones heal. We've known that for a few years now, and it's part of the reason we use splints and casts on a broken leg as opposed to the laying of hands.

Smokers can quit through sheer willpower or a number of other techniques, including hypnotism and aversion therapy. Again, this isn't anything miraculous.

421 by Kona0197 - 9/18/2003 4:07:18 PM Grayhaze: you are a lost cause to me.

As are you to me Kona. As are you to me.

ingui I read that also and I found it odd they would think animals do not rationalize.

#416 by Ingui - 9/18/2003 3:54:29 PM Just read this today while on lunchbreak. First thing I thought of was this thread

Erm. I posted that link (or a similar one) in #330.

[Message Edited]

Broken bones heal. We've known that for a few years now, and it's part of the reason we use splints and casts on a broken leg as opposed to the laying of hands.

I was talking about the bones healed right in front of your eyes in a moments time without splints or a cast...

nonbeliever!

Kona, na, I wouldnt want you to believe or have any other faith than you hold as your truth; you ro anyone else for that matter.

Though I do find it odd, just as you find mine funny as so you stated...

it's all good...

.

it's all good...

tell grayhave that... I am about ready to bring out my evil smileys..you know the ones that make real inappropriate comments and such?

but he is not worth it

#425 by Kona0197 - 9/18/2003 4:16:32 PM Broken bones heal. We've known that for a few years now, and it's part of the reason we use splints and casts on a broken leg as opposed to the laying of hands. I was talking about the bones healed right in front of your eyes in a moments time without splints or a cast...nonbeliever!

Do you have any... dare I say it... evidence of this miraculous event? That's a rhetorical question by the way.

As for me being a non-believer, I'm glad there's no misunderstanding there. I'd hate for you to read my comments and think I believe in God. What a waste of typing that would have been...

kona0197 bows out and relizes not everyone believes in God

#427 by Kona0197 - 9/18/2003 4:20:38 PM .it's all good...tell grayhave that... I am about ready to bring out my evil smileys..you know the ones that make real inappropriate comments and such?but he is not worth it

Kona, I want to make it clear to you one last time. I have no problem with you holding your beliefs and living your life in whatever way you choose. What I do have a problem with is the insinuation that by not believing in your God I am less of a person and am in need of 'saving' in some way. I'm not a problem to solve, but rather an individual who has examined all the evidence available to me and come up with my own beliefs based on that evidence.

You have to understand that your continual evangelism doesn't serve any purpose other than to offend and irritate those of us who don't share your beliefs. If you simply stated what you believed and didn't outright deny us our own beliefs then we could all live together in harmony. If you attack a dog, expect to get bitten.

and am in need of 'saving' in some way. I'm not a problem to solve, but rather an individual who has examined all the evidence available to me and come up with my own beliefs based on that evidence.

First of all, I am not trying to save anybody. I would waste to much time and effort trying to do so. I will leave that to a church.

Second of all, sorry if it sounded like I was preaching. I did not mean to come accross like that.

My question to you is: why is it that you seem to be afraid to question (or at least critically examine) the basis of your faith? Is the basis for your faith so weak and unfounded that you cannot even examine it, and so you must only take the word of some other person as to what it is you should believe?

Hey Grayhaze and Aleatoric .."I'm your hucleberry" Chew on this...

In our everyday experience, just about everything seems to have a beginning. In fact, the laws of science show that even things which look the same through our lifetime, like the sun and other stars, are running down. The sun is using up its fuel at millions of tonnes each second — since, therefore, it cannot last forever, it had to have a beginning. The same can be shown to be true for the entire universe.

‘Where did God come from?’

Is this logical? Can modern science allow for such a notion? And how could you recognize the evidence for an intelligent Creator?

Recognizing intelligence
Scientists get excited about finding stone tools in a cave because these speak of intelligence — a tool maker. They could not have designed themselves. Neither would anyone believe that the carved Presidents’ heads on Mt. Rushmore were the product of millions of years of chance erosion. We can recognize design — the evidence of the outworkings of intelligence — in the man-made objects all around us.

Similarly, in William Paley’s famous argument, a watch implies a watchmaker.2 Today, however, a large proportion of people, including many leading scientists, believe that all plants and animals, including the incredibly complex brains of the people who make watches, motor cars, etc., were not designed by an intelligent God but rather came from an unintelligent evolutionary process. But is this a defensible position?

Molecular biologist Dr Michael Denton, writing as an agnostic, concluded:

‘Alongside the level of ingenuity and complexity exhibited by the molecular machinery of life, even our most advanced [twentieth century technology appears] clumsy. . . . It would be an illusion to think that what we are aware of at present is any more than a fraction of the full extent of biological design. In practically every field of fundamental biological research ever-increasing levels of design and complexity are being revealed at an ever-accelerating rate.’3

The world-renowned crusader for Darwinism and atheism, Prof. Richard Dawkins, states:

‘We have seen that living things are too improbable and too beautifully “designed” to have come into existence by chance.’4

Thus, even the most ardent atheist concedes that design is all around us. To a Christian, the design we see all around us is totally consistent with the Bible’s explanation that God created all.

However, evolutionists like Dawkins reject the idea of a Designer. He comments (emphasis added):

‘All appearance to the contrary, the only watchmaker in nature is the blind forces of physics, albeit deployed in a very special way. A true watchmaker has foresight: he designs his cogs and springs, and plans their interconnections, with future purpose in his mind’s eye. Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. . . . It has no mind . . . . It does not plan for the future . . . it is the blind watchmaker.’5

Selection and design
Life is built on information, contained in that molecule of heredity, DNA. Dawkins believes that natural selection6 and mutations (blind, purposeless copying mistakes in this DNA) together provide the mechanism for producing the vast amounts of information responsible for the design in living things.7

Natural selection is a logical process that can be observed. However, selection can only operate on the information already contained in genes — it does not produce new information.8 Actually, this is consistent with the Bible’s account of origins; God created distinct kinds of animals and plants, each to reproduce after its own kind.

One can observe great variation in a kind, and see the results of natural selection. For instance, dingoes, wolves and coyotes have developed over time as a result of natural selection operating on the information in the genes of the wolf/dog kind.

But no new information was produced — these varieties have resulted from rearrangement, and sorting out, of the information in the original dog kind. One kind has never been observed to change into a totally different kind with new information that previously did not exist!

Without a way to increase information, natural selection will not work as a mechanism for evolution. Evolutionists agree with this, but they believe that mutations somehow provide the new information for natural selection to act upon.

Can mutations produce new information?
Actually, it is now clear that the answer is no! Dr Lee Spetner, a highly qualified scientist who taught information and communication theory at Johns Hopkins University, makes this abundantly clear in his recent book:

‘In this chapter I’ll bring several examples of evolution, [i.e., instances alleged to be examples of evolution] particularly mutations, and show that information is not increased . . . But in all the reading I’ve done in the life-sciences literature, I’ve never found a mutation that added information.’9

‘All point mutations that have been studied on the molecular level turn out to reduce the genetic information and not to increase it.’10

‘The NDT [neo-Darwinian theory] is supposed to explain how the information of life has been built up by evolution. The essential biological difference between a human and a bacterium is in the information they contain. All other biological differences follow from that. The human genome has much more information than does the bacterial genome. Information cannot be built up by mutations that lose it. A business can’t make money by losing it a little at a time.’11

Evolutionary scientists have no way around the conclusions that many scientists, including Dr Spetner, have come to. Mutations do not work as a mechanism to fuel the evolutionary process.

More problems!
Scientists have found that within the cell, there are thousands of what can be called ‘biochemical machines’. All of their parts have to be in place simultaneously or the cell can’t function. Things which were thought to be simple mechanisms, such as being able to sense light and turn it into electrical impulses, are in fact highly complicated.

Since life is built on these ‘machines’, the idea that natural processes could have made a living system is untenable. Biochemist Dr Michael Behe (see p. 17 this issue) uses the term ‘irreducible complexity’ in describing such biochemical ‘machines’.

‘. . . systems of horrendous, irreducible complexity inhabit the cell. The resulting realization that life was designed by an intelligence is a shock to us in the twentieth century who have gotten used to thinking of life as the result of simple natural laws. But other centuries have had their shocks, and there is no reason to suppose that we should escape them.’12

Richard Dawkins recognizes this problem of needing ‘machinery’ to start with when he states:

‘The theory of the blind watchmaker is extremely powerful given that we are allowed to assume replication and hence cumulative selection. But if replication needs complex machinery, since the only way we know for complex machinery ultimately to come into existence is cumulative selection, we have a problem.’13

A problem indeed! The more we look into the workings of life, the more complicated it gets, and the more we see that life could not arise by itself. Not only is a source of information needed, but the complex ‘machines’ of the chemistry of life need to be in existence right from the start!

A greater problem still!
Some still try to insist that the machinery of the first cell could have arisen by pure chance. For instance, they say, by randomly drawing alphabet letters in sequence from a hat, sometimes you will get a simple word like ‘BAT’.14 So given long time periods, why couldn’t even more complex information arise by chance?

However, what would the word ‘BAT’ mean to a German or Chinese speaker? The point is that an order of letters is meaningless unless there is a language convention and a translation system in place which makes it meaningful!

In a cell, there is such a system (other molecules) that makes the order on the DNA meaningful. DNA without the language/translation system is meaningless, and these systems without the DNA wouldn’t work either.

The other complication is that the translation machinery which reads the order of the ‘letters’ in the DNA is itself specified by the DNA! This is another one of those ‘machines’ that needs to be fully-formed or life won’t work.

Can information arise from non-information?
Dr Werner Gitt, Director and Professor at the German Federal Institute of Physics and Technology, makes it clear that one of the things we know absolutely for sure from science, is that information cannot arise from disorder by chance. It always takes (greater) information to produce information, and ultimately information is the result of intelligence:

‘A code system is always the result of a mental process (it requires an intelligent origin or inventor) . . . It should be emphasized that matter as such is unable to generate any code. All experiences indicate that a thinking being voluntarily exercising his own free will, cognition, and creativity, is required.’15

‘There is no known natural law through which matter can give rise to information, neither is any physical process or material phenomenon known that can do this.’16

What is the source of the information?
We can therefore deduce that the huge amount of information in living things must originally have come from an intelligence, which had to have been far superior to ours, as scientists are revealing every day. But then, some will say that such a source would have to be caused by something with even greater information/intelligence.

However, if they reason like this, one could ask where this greater information/intelligence came from? And then where did that one come from … one could extrapolate to infinity, for ever, unless …

Unless there was a source of infinite intelligence, beyond our finite understanding. But isn’t this what the Bible indicates when we read, ‘In the beginning God …’? The God of the Bible is an infinite being not bound by limitations of time, space, knowledge, or anything else.

So which is the logically defensible position? — that matter eternally existed (or came into existence by itself for no reason), and then by itself arranged itself into information systems against everything observed in real science? Or that a being with infinite intelligence,17 created information systems for life to exist, agreeing with real science?

The answer seems obvious, so why don’t all intelligent scientists accept this? Michael Behe answers:

‘Many people, including many important and well-respected scientists, just don’t want there to be anything beyond nature. They don’t want a supernatural being to affect nature, no matter how brief or constructive the interaction may have been. In other words … they bring an a priori philosophical commitment to their science that restricts what kinds of explanations they will accept about the physical world. Sometimes this leads to rather odd behavior.’18

The crux of the matter is this: If one accepts there is a God who created us, then that God also owns us. He thus has a right to set the rules by which we must live. .

You might say, ‘But that means I have to accept this by faith, as I can’t understand it.’

You actually expect me to concentrate long enough to read all that Rated PG? Have you seen how long it takes me to make a skin?

The rated PG: thanks for the mail yesterday. made my day. And thanks for baking me up sorta.

As for me being a non-believer, I'm glad there's no misunderstanding there. I'd hate for you to read my comments and think I believe in God. What a waste of typing that would have been...

To say there is no God is to say you have enough knowledge to know there is no God. But an atheist can never have enough knowledge to be certain there is no God. He would have to know everything, because if there is something outside his area of knowledge, that something could include God. An atheist would have to be everywhere in and out of the universe all at one time, because if there is anywhere he cannot be, God could be there.

No atheist can claim total knowledge, therefore atheism is self–refuting, because knowing everything and being everywhere is to be like God. Since no one can prove ‘there is no God’, the question becomes irrelevant and so does atheism. Thus, Creation cannot be ruled out as a potential alternative.