Are religions manmade and natural or supernaturally based?

ICANT writes:"I believe in a supernatural God.Everybody says why?Scientific fact: The universe has not always existed.
Scientific fact: The universe had a beginning to exist.
Scientific fact: The universe exists.

I have my mind made up.

And there you go lying again. I did not call anyone a liar in that post, I merely pointed out the Morrison was certainly not critically examining the Gospel accounts, as a lawyer might be expected to do. Which is a fact obvious to anyone who bothers to read Morrison's writing.

Pressie writes: Let us know when the three ICANT's reach consensus.

Pressie writes:I take it that you write that scientists are the people who can't make their minds up.

Pressie writes:Hope you do know that it's a virtue and not a vice? In the industry I work in (economic geology) scientists change their minds all the time as new evidence comes along. It works. Very, very well. Getting closer to reality all the time.

PaulK writes: Imagine a lawyer appealing a court decision.Imagine that he submits a document which he identifies as minutes of the trialSuppose that this document is written by partisans of the accused, who were not present for the trial.That's the sort of lawyer Morrison was. At least according to you.Unless you admit that he was writing as an apologist, not a lawyer, a believer who unquestioningly accepted the Gospels as accurate - even when dealing with matters that none of the authors witnessed - you are not honestly presenting Morrison's work.

Frank Morrison writes: When, as a very young man, I first began seriously to study the life of Christ, I did so with a very definite feeling that, if I may so put it, His history rested on very insecure foundations.If you will carry your mind back in imagination to the late nineties you will find in the prevailing intellectual attitude of that period the key to much of my thought. It is true that the absurd cult that denied even the historical existence of Jesus had ceased to carry weight. But the work of the higher critics -- particularly the German critics -- had succeeded in spreading a prevalent impression among students that the particular form in which the narrative of His life and death had come down to us was unreliable, and that one of the four records was nothing other than a brilliant apologetic written many years, and perhaps many decades, after the first generation had passed away....It was about this time -- more for the sake of my own peace of mind than for publication -- that I conceived the idea of writing a short monograph on what seemed to me to be the supremely important and critical phase in the life of Christ -- the last seven days -- though later I came to see that the days immediately succeeding the Crucifixion were quite as crucial. The title I chose was "Jesus, the Last Phase," a conscious reminiscence of a famous historical study by Lord Rosebery....It seemed to me that if I could come at the truth why this man died a cruel death at the hands of the Roman power, how He Himself regarded the matter, and especially how He behaved under the test, I should be very near to the true solution of the problem.Such, briefly, was the purpose of the book I had planned. I wanted to take this last phase of the life of Jesus, with all its quick and pulsating drama, its sharp, clear-cut background of antiquity, and its tremendous psychological and human interest -- to strip it of its overgrowth of primitive beliefs and dogmatic suppositions, and to see this supremely great Person as He really was.I need not stay to describe here how, fully ten years later, opportunity came to study the life of Christ as I had long wanted to study it, to investigate the origins of its literature, to some of the evidence at first hand, and to form my own judgment on the problem it presents. I will only say that it effected a revolution in my thought. Things emerged from old-world story that previously I should have thought impossible Slowly but very definitely the conviction grew the drama of those unforgettable weeks of human history stranger and deeper than it seemed. It was the strangeness of many notable things in the story that first arrested and held my interest. It was only later that the irresistible logic of their meaning came into view.I want to try, in the remaining chapters of this book, to explain why that other venture never came to port, what were hidden rocks on which it foundered, and how I landed to me, an unexpected shore.

Omnivorous writes:Could you tell me what scientific work demonstrated that the universe has not always existed?

Omnivorous writes:You're just looking around, saying, "Whoa! Look at me, I exist! There must be a god!" People did that long before any notion of science. You're whistling in the dark, abusing science to justify the same conclusions drawn by primitive peoples.

ICANT writes:I don't care if you call the supernatural power God or Jimbo, there had to be a supernatural power to cause the universe to begin to exist.

ICANT writes:The pure energy that became the mass of the universe had to come from somewhere. It can not produce it's self.

ICANT writes:So I will let you take up your argument as to whether the universe has not always existed and had a beginning about 15 billion years ago with Stephen Hawking.

ringo writes:No. There didn't. That speculation doesn't answer anything.

ringo writes:By your reasoning, your creator requires a creator and that creator requires its own creator and so on, ad infinitum. It's a useless concept.

Omnivorous writes:Hawking doesn't say there was nothing before the Big Bang--he says we have no way to know anything about those conditions.

Omnivorous writes:You are cherry-picking narrative bits in order to misrepresent a contemporary, complex view.

ICANT writes:Did he say: "All the evidence seems to indicate, that the universe has not existed forever, but that it had a beginning, about 15 billion years ago."? yes/no No explanation necessary.Did he say: "This is probably the most remarkable discovery of modern cosmology."? yes/no No explanation necessary.Did he say: "Yet it is now taken for granted"? yes/no no explanation necessary.

Stephen Hawking writes:The conclusion of this lecture is that the universe has not existed forever. Rather, the universe, and time itself, had a beginning in the Big Bang, about 15 billion years ago. The beginning of real time, would have been a singularity, at which the laws of physics would have broken down.

Stephen Hawking writes:If space and imaginary time are indeed like the surface of the Earth, there wouldn't be any singularities in the imaginary time direction, at which the laws of physics would break down.