Are religions manmade and natural or supernaturally based?

Hi NoNukes, My question: "What is Gravity"?Your answer general relativity completely describes what gravity is.Then you say each link you gave gives me the effects of gravity.Holding an apple in my hand at arms length and turning my hand over and the effects of that, is that the apple will hit the floor. Simply gives me the results of gravity. It has nothing to do with what gravity is.Neither do the effect of gravity in your 3 links tell me what gravity is.God Bless,

Its kinda the same way with God. We can preach about the effects of the Holy Spirit
( love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.) as well as transformed lives---but we can't explain Who or What God is directly. If we say God is Love, our critics point to examples of what they claim to be other sources of love, such as human empathy,will, and emotion.I would assert that life in general is impossible without God, but of course how could i prove it?

Hi Phat, But they have not explained the beginning.They think they have figured out what happened after T=0^-9 but prior to that anything would be pure speculation. So the beginning is pure speculation.God Bless,

Hi Mod, Then where did it exist? Are we in agreement that the universe is self contained and there is nothing outside of the universe according to the standard theory?If that is true then there are two choices as to why the universe exists.It is either eternal or had a beginning to exist, which is it?If the universe has not existed eternally in the past in some form it had to have a beginning to exist.If it had a beginning to exist that would require non existence preceded the universe.And the universe spontaneously begin to exist from non existence.ORThere was a Supernatural Power which is outside of the universe to provide the energy and mass the universe was formed from.God Bless,Edited by ICANT, : No reason given.

Actually, what I said was that both a description of what gravity is, and a discussion of the effects of gravity were presented at each of the links I provided. Therefore reading them should allow you to distinguish one from the other. There is nothing confusing or contradictory about both types of statements being present in an article. Your claim was that in every search you had conducted, only the effects were given.I have no idea why people who don't understand physics think it is of any importance that they cannot find the answers located under their own noses. Why doesn't that lack of ability simply reflect on the searcher? IMHO, such arguments are extremely unpersuasive. Imagine if I told you that I could not find the Gospel according to Matthew in the Bible? The effects do not tell you what gravity is. But the statements about what gravity is, easly found in the links I provided, and the statement I gave you in my last post, and the one that Cat Sci gave you in his post do in fact answer the question of what gravity is.Gravity is the curvature of space time created by mass (and energy). Period. The effects or gravity include an apparent (but fictitious) force exerted by one body on another that is not due to either the electroweak force or the strong force. Here you have both a statement of what gravity is, and a statement of what the effects of gravity are. So now, not only have you been given links to an answer, I've explicitly given you an answer.If you don't find the distinction between substance and effects clear, then feel free to ask me yet again, what is gravity. But please, stop pretending that no answer has been given.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

Everywhere. Yes. It has a finite past. I think that leaves us with less room for equivocation, so let's use that. The concept of 'preceding' the universe makes no sense in light of the fact that there is nothing except the universe. The universe exists. It has a finite past. That's it. There was no points in space before there were points in space. There are no points in time other than that which is in the universe. There is no requirement that non existence precedes it, indeed there is a requirement that THERE ARE NO points in time before it.No preceding state to the universe, no time no space before it. It just is. Well, no. There are more than two possibilities. Many of them don't require a supernatural power. But let's stick with getting you to understand my godless universe before we start worrying about other possibilities.

How do you know that it was a he? Voice? Sexual organs? Adam's Apple?

I can only speak for myself. For me, it's easy. I don't believe in an eternally existing universe (well, not the universe we know).There's absolutely no empirical verifiable evidence for the existence of Spooks today. None. Zada. Yet, there's lots and lots of empirical, verifiable evidence that nature exists today and existed billions of years ago, too.Still not even one piece of empirical, verifiable evidence for the existence of Spooks. Not today. Not yesterday. Not 6000 years ago. Not billions of years ago. Yet, we do have empirical, verifiable evidence that nature existed for all those billions of years.The clincher for me is all those "arguments" is lots of religious people try about what their favourite Spooks did billions of years ago. Hey, people, those 'arguments" don't provide any empirical, verifiable evidence that those Spooks still exist today.To me those 'arguments' from what happened billions of years ago are not worth much in determining the existence of Spooks today.Edited by Pressie, : No reason given.

ORThere was a natural mechanism, of which we are presently unaware, that caused the universe to come into existence. The possibility that natural mechanisms, of which we are unaware, existed prior to this universe.Why do you keep neglecting this possibility?At the present time all our knowledge, our models of the universe, indicate that time and space existed at about T+10^-30. Prior to that we are ignorant.If you are going to speculate about prior to this time you are not limited to only your two possibilities.

I'm a radical, militant atheist and I don't believe that the universe spontaneously began to exist from non-existence.You do like your Gish Gallop, don't you?

Hi ICANT,I want to make sure you're pursuing a line of argument that has a chance of success. It seems as if you're arguing that if we don't know what something is, say gravity, or we don't know something's origins, say the universe, then that's evidence for the supernatural.There have always been things we do not know. Cavemen could have argued, "We don't know what lightning is, therefore it is evidence of the supernatural." Our knowledge has always been and will always be imperfect and incomplete. That fact is not, in and of itself, evidence of the supernatural.If this is at least somewhat the approach you're taking, could you make clear how you believe it will lead to evidence of the supernatural?Edited by Admin, : Grammar.

We know that there are human sources of love, don't we? There are human emotions, aren't there? If we can trace love to a human origin that does exist, why do we need to keep looking? You might as well assert God as the cause of a hydroelectric dam - we know it was manmade but God "must" still be the source. Citing God as the ultimate source for anything and everything becomes a useless exercise.

Hi NoNukes, The first source you gave says:

quote:

---

Two objects exert a force of attraction on one another known as "gravity." Sir Isaac Newton quantified the gravity between two objects when he formulated his three laws of motion.

---

So 2 objects of mass exert a force that attracts each other. Whatever is doing the attraction is called gravity.The first page shows a picture of the earth warping space on one side of the earth. What happens to the space on the other side of the earth? Does it warp out the same way? If it does what fills the void between the surface of the earth and this curved space?Your second link says:

quote:

---

Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity is one of the towering achievements of 20th-century physics. Published in 1916, it explains that what we perceive as the force of gravity in fact arises from the curvature of space and time.

​

Einstein proposed that objects such as the sun and the Earth change this geometry. In the presence of matter and energy it can evolve, stretch and warp, forming ridges, mountains and valleys that cause bodies moving through it to zigzag and curve. So although Earth appears to be pulled towards the sun by gravity, there is no such force. It is simply the geometry of space-time around the sun telling Earth how to move.

---

This says there is no such force as gravity.This says there is no such force that the mass of the sun and the mass of the earth attract one another.That would mean when I take the apple in my hand at arms length and turn it upside down the apple will stay in my upside down hand.The third link says:

quote:

---

As we have seen, matter does not simply pull on other matter across empty space, as Newton had imagined. Rather matter distorts space-time and it is this distorted space-time that in turn affects other matter

---

This one says matter does pull on other matter and it distorts space-time. It goes on to say this distorted space-time affects other matter.It does not say distorted space-time causes matter to pull on other matter.I still can't find what gravity is. I find that the effects of gravity is that things don't fly apart and we don't float around on earth like we would in zero gravity.God Bless,

Hi Admin,Talking about gravity if basically for educational purposes. But I did propose that The Supernatural Power I call God holds the universe together.God Bless,

Hi Pressie, I was privileged to meet Him in 1964 when I was dead for 3 hours.I know you won't believe that and I can't help your unbelief.God Bless,