Is there any material or physical reason that would disallow the existence of God.
In that case, no - as best as I can tell the God hypothesis is unfalsifiable. Several versions of God have potentially been falsified to certain levels of confidence. An honest God that wants us to believe both that he exists and created the World 15,000 years ago is probably false.
Now we are starting to narrow down and define exacally what evidence is to the support of belief. Given the above statement by yourself, it would follow that belief in God, a supreme being that is eternal in character and nature is both rational and reasonable due to the nature of physical things. In other words my belief or faith (not in the religious sense) is supported by reasonable, logical and rational evidence, correct? Again, in other words there is compelling evidence that he does exist.
There is certainly
something that compels you to believe in God. And it is this something I'd like to get to grips with. What is it?
So in this context it is reasonable to believe by the dictionary definition 1. my belief is supported by good evidence, whether one agrees with it or not.
It is certainly reasonable to deduce from what you are saying that you believe that your belief is supported by good evidence. The problem is, that whenever we look for at the totality of related evidence I can not find a reason to be compelled to be accept the Christian view over the Islamic view. So why are you so friggin' confident that the Christian view of the Creator being is the right one?
If I had two theories, both of which I felt had the same level of evidence in favour of them - I wouldn't arbitrarily pick one to believe in - so why have you?
Also, initially, in response to your first question about the virgin birth, it would not be unreasonalbe to believe(based on material, physical reasons) that if God does exists, he could alter or intervine in the material that he created, to bring about what you describe as a miracle, correct?. In other words this is as reasonable a BELIEF as you have in evolution
Right - but on exactly the same grounds it would also be
equally reasonable to believe that if God does exist, he didn't at least in this case create a miracle. So why are you so confident that, in this case he did?
If my REASONS for holding such beliefs are still not valid and not evidence thus far, how could you hold a BELIEF that something is incomplete (by this I assume you mean conclusive evidence) and at the same time BROADLY CORRECT and consider it a valid example of evidence and BELIEF?
I'm not sure you've given much in the way of reasons. At the moment you seem to have
1. I believe in a being that can create miracles because the universe is a miracle.
2. Since the virgin birth is a miracle it is possible that this being did it.
3. Therefore I am confident that the virgin birth did in fact happen.
But that reasoning can't be everything. After all, you don't believe that every single proposed miracle that as ever been dreamed of is true, do you? Do you believe that Muhammad flew around the Middle East on a horse?
And by incomplete I do not mean does not have conclusive evidence, sorry. If I say that computers work by processing 1s and 0s I would be broadly correct but very incomplete. If I say they work by a series of transistors processing various voltages which are later logically translated into 1s and 0s and later these are translated into the various outputs that a computer has I would be being a little more complete (but still incoomplete) and still being broadly true.
Secondly, how do you "accept", that life has changed dramatically over millions of years? By accept do you mean Believe based on incomplete or complete evidence.
I mean the evidence in favour that statement is so strong and uniquely compelling that it would be perverse to deny it as a fact.
In other words you might be correct about the method on how this took place, or you could be incorrect. But if I am not mistaken, you do believe that evolution was that method, correct.
Nearly. I consider that evolution happened/happens is a fact and I am confident that the theory of evolution can explain at least partially how it happened/happens.
So there is no more confusion after this, why dont we drop the religioous definition of faith, because I think I have clearly established that there is only substantiated faith or belief or not.
That's fine - I've not used it. I merely pointed out that in debates and arguments in the past religious people have simply refused to discuss their reasons and evidence for believing specific things like the virgin birth and have retreated to statements along the lines of 'it's a matter of faith, I don't need evidence' and said that is why there is the disparagement of this kind of thing.
Thirdly it would not stand in contrast to the type of evidence for believing that Mary was a virgin, when she was carrying her child.
But why do
you believe that but you don't believe that Muhammad flew around on the back of a horse? What criteria are you using to be so confident of one, and not of the other. If it isn't the old 'its a matter of faith', then what is it?
I know in your mind you want it to be different, but there are simply to many other explanations besides that of evolution to explain the existence of things, as I have indicated.
Evolution of course, does not explain anything and the theory of evolution certainly doesn't explain existence - it just explains how life changes.
When it comes to explanations for how the universe came to exist, how life came to originate I have no confidence in one particular theory because as you say there are many. Some look more promising than others, and some could just be made up in someone's head for all we know.
The question is - since there are so many, why are you so friggin' confident that yours is the right one?
I do accept that life has changed dramatically on earth over the last few billion years as a fact. The part after the or statement is not one that I understand
Nor do I understand how a God could create matter from nothing, if indeed he did, or how he could impregnat a women with the miraculous, but there is certainly enough evidence to suggest he exist, correct?
A bit of confusion there Bertot. Sorry about that, my fault. My sentence about saying that I didn't understand the part after the 'or' was poorly worded. I was referring to your sentence where you said:
quote:
Second one, do you believe (know for a fact) that the theory of evolution is true, or do you just have faith (in the sense you fellas use it) that all the available information says it did.
I was just saying I didn't understand that section, the next paragraph I wrote was me trying to translate and answer it as best I could:
quote:
I don't have faith in the sense that I described the religious people using it earlier that the information says it did...
Though I appreciate you don't know how he did it, how do you know that he did do those things, but he didn't help Muhammad's airborne equine activities?
Here we have in your instance and mine, the only possible way to believe anything that we did not see occur. By using the available evidence to come to a conclusion that is viable and reasonable. Call it faith, call it belief,call it late for dinner, its either reasonable or it is not. The flying Spagetti monster is not.
To paraphrase you, "Is there any material or physical reason that would disallow the existence of the Flying Spaghetti Monster?"
But yes - I don't doubt that given the amount of confidence you have in these statements you believe that there is available evidence that Mary was a virgin and that there are reasons why you are confident that this was in fact the case.
There are the Gospels, I don't remember which ones explicitly state she was a virgin was it two of them? OK so that's our evidence the writings of people who for the sake of argument we'll concede were witnesses. I'm fairly sure they didn't do a gynaecological check but they were witnesses to other miracles and presumably they believed Jesus or Mary or whoever told them of the virgin birth when they said that was the case. So the virgin birth is at best, second hand. No problem there.
There were witnesses to the Muhammed horse flying expedition that wrote about it. And Muhammad himself dictated words confirming that he was in direct contact with God.
So, what makes you confident that
1. Mary was a virgin
2. Muhammad didn't fly on a horse.
No rush on replying. I'm in Scotland away from the internet until approx Wednesday.
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