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| Author | Topic: Quetzal, here's why I believe in God. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Tokyojim Inactive Member |
Dear Quetzal,
Way back in September, we had a discussion in the Free For All section under "We are the gods" topic. You challenged my worldview and said I needed to provide evidence for God's existence before you will take what I have to say seriously. I want to get back with you on that, but I do so with hesitation. There are plenty of materials on the web and in the bookstores which deal with evidence for God's existence. You are already obviously familiar with them so I'm not sure how profitable this dialog will be. I will post your challenge first and then my reply to your challenge in the next post. It is only a partial reply, but it will get us started. I will interact with your reply as well and we can talk for a little bit, but I already know how it will end. We will have to agree to disagree. I have learned some things through the dialogs on this forum and I think my participation has benefited me more than anyone else, but at the same time, it has taken too much of my time. So, I have not been participating as much lately as I did in the beginning and I don't expect that to change. If you can be patient with my slow replies, I would appreciate that. I'm trying to be careful how I use my time. I don't know if we'll ever get through all of your post. Certainly not to your satisfaction, but I find it interesting that it is always the Christians who are challenged to validate their worldview. Actually, I could challenge you to do the same for your worldview. First you would have to produce evidence that there is no god. If there is no god, then anything goes so actually, I guess that is all you have to do. But in the end, neither of us can produce "proof" of our worldviews, just evidence which we believe supports it. In the end, we all choose what worldview to put our faith in. In the end, it is all a matter of faith. OK Quetzal, here is your post. I'll post my reply after that. Regards, Tokyojim
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Tokyojim Inactive Member |
Quetzal, here is just the first part of your challenge to me from post number 48 in the Free For All Forum under "We are the gods" topic. Let's start with this. I cut the rest. If anyone wants to read the whole thing, please go back and look it up.
[QUOTE]Originally posted by Quetzal:
[B]Tokyojim: Hopefully, no one's already covered this. Anyway: quote: I would say my worldviewEshould be fairly obvious from my post. However, my particular philosophy has no bearing on the evidence or lack thereof for yours or dogmai's claims (or those of anyone else, for that matter). I'll be quite happy to evaluate whatever evidence you care to provide in support of whatever assertion you care to make.
quote: I have several problems with this outlook. In the first place, it is inconsistent with the basic fact that all life on earth is interrelated. For example, every living thing on this planet shares a specific biochemistry. If initial conditions had been different, life would either not exist or would be recognizably different. Along the same lines, all the processes that have shaped the various forms of life also apply to humans. We process energy in similar ways, we replicate, we are effected by the same abiotic environmental factors. Ultimately, at the macro level, anything that upsets the balance too far will also directly effect our existence. This mitigates against the idea that humans are separately created. Secondly, you have embarked on the extreme logical fallacy of using your conclusion as your initial premise. To make any argument about God or the bible valid or compelling, you must: - Start by showing that God does indeed exist. If you can provide evidence for the existence of a supernatural deity, I will be more willing to listen to various explanations about that deity and its interest in humans to the exclusion of all other organisms. - Once you have established the existence of the said deity, you can then provide your reasons for thinking that this deity is the Christian god. After all, the existence of a supernatural deity does not imply that the said deity is the Judeo-Christian one. Some evidence supporting your deity over others, such as Allah, Vishnu, and Zeus, would be beneficial to your argument at this point. - Once you do this, you can then show that God wrote the Bible. You should include information that will explain how logical impossibilities like the Noachian Flood, are possible. You should include the evidence needed to show that God intended the Bible to be taken literally, rather than a loose code of conduct. (With many thanks to my friend Nick/IAPW for the above). If you can do this, then I would be willing to consider any evidence you can offer that, indeed, humans are somehow special by divine fiat. If not, then you must proceed through a different epistemology. You must provide empirical evidence that man is somehow separate from animals. The use of abstractions such as kindE consciousnessE or intelligenceEdo not constitute evidence, nor does your say-so. On the contrary, the burden is on you to show with evidence that these vague, ill-defined concepts provide a quantifiable taxic barrier separating us directly from, say, the other primates. That intelligenceEDOES NOT exist in other animals, for example, as the default hypothesis is that animals Eespecially primates EDO share the same intrinsic biology/physiology, and differ only in degree. I look forward to hearing your argument. TJ REPLIES:OK, in the next post, I'll begin to reply to this challenge of yours Quetzal. Regards, TJ
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Tokyojim Inactive Member |
Quetzal, I will apologize in advance for this long post. It is long so I have actually broken it up in chunks. I probably wrote too much and just opened up a bunch of different cans of worms, but I felt some of these things needed to be said.
QUETZAL says:I have several problems with this outlook. (Biblical worldview expressed by Tokyojim in post 38 and also copied in Q's post #48 of "We are all godsEdiscussion in the Free for all Forum.) In the first place, it is inconsistent with the basic fact that all life on earth is interrelated. For example, every living thing on this planet shares a specific biochemistry. If initial conditions had been different, life would either not exist or would be recognizably different. Along the same lines, all the processes that have shaped the various forms of life also apply to humans. We process energy in similar ways, we replicate, we are effected by the same abiotic environmental factors. Ultimately, at the macro level, anything that upsets the balance too far will also directly effect our existence. This mitigates against the idea that humans are separately created. TJ REPLIES:Quetzal, I disagree with your presuppositions and interpretations of the facts based on your worldview. You are making an assumption here based on your worldview Ethat everything is interrelated. If you want to say everything has much in common, that is a statement of fact, but the other is a scientific guess or rather an interpretation of the facts based on your worldview which cannot be proven. You have to realize here that we are both biased when it comes to interpreting scientific observations. No doubt you will disagree with this, but evolution, because it cannot be repeatedly observed and tested in the laboratory, is different from other science. It involves more hypothesizing and interpretation of observations than does other science. Evolutionary science starts from a very biased position. The presupposition is that EThere is no Creator. - That is an assumption for which there is no proof. All kinds of evidences to support this will be brought up, like the one you stated above, but these so-called evidences have been derived at based on research that has been done and interpretations that have been made assuming that there is no Creator to begin with. In the next paragraph you accuse me of circular reasoning, but here it seems to me that you are guilty of the same. I'll confess if I'm guilty. I haven't gotten there yet. But do you see what I mean? You observe rightly so of course, that biologically speaking, living things have much in common and so the immediate conclusion is that they are all inter-related. (A case could also be made for the amazing differences among living creatures as well, but that's another subject.) If they have much in common, then they must be inter-related you say. A pretty solid guess if your worldview is true, but that is a big "IF". You can't then say that the "fact" that everything is inter-related(a deduction you made believing your presuppositions to be true), is proof for your presuppositions. Since there is no room for the supernatural in a naturalistic worldview, evolutionary scientists don't even consider God as a possible explanation for the facts they observe. What is the scientific basis for eliminating this option from the beginning? Anyway, the only answers available to them are naturalistic ones. Now obviously, if there is a God and He did actually create the earth, scientists are never going to come up with the right answer because they have eliminated Him from the equation from the beginning. Here is a quote that shows this bias that was given in the context of the debate about how evolution is to be taught in Kansas schools: Dr Scott Todd, an immunologist at Kansas State University: "Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such an hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalisticE Todd, S.C., correspondence to Nature 410(6752):423, 30 Sept. 1999. Although not a rational conclusion, at least he is being honest, isn't he? No matter what the data says, we are going to teach and believe the opposite. Granted he said -even if-, but that is the point. When the data and the facts don’t fit with a naturalistic worldview, they are ignored or simply covered up or discarded. Why? Because their own naturalistic unproven worldview is the standard by which everything else is judged. So, rather than consider that the worldview might be flawed, it is assumed that the data or the facts must be faulty or that we don't have all the facts yet. For that reason, the presuppositions of the naturalistic(atheistic) worldview at times take precedence over the facts.. Here is another one. Professor Richard Lewontin, is a geneticist and is one of the world's leaders in evolutionary biology. He recently wrote this very revealing comment. It illustrates the implicit philosophical bias against even entertaining the possibility of a Creator regardless of whether or not the facts support it. It goes without saying that he is an atheist. Now tell me if this is the proper attitude for a true scientist in search of true conclusions to hold to: (Italics added by me) "We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.E Richard Lewontin, "Billions and billions of demons" The New York Review, January 9, 1997, p. 31. Again at least you have to appreciate his honesty. He said it himself. We factored out God from the beginning. I wish others would be so forthcoming. Here we see an unsubstantiated absolute Ethe philosophy of materialism. Quetzal, you were complaining to me or to someone else about majoring on the philosophical side of things. It is precisely for this reason. The whole basis for evolutionary science comes down to this commitment to a materialistic philosophy! If the whole philosophy upon which evolutionary science is based on is flawed, how can we trust the scientific deductions that have been made based on it? Has anyone been up in arms about this kind of a clearly biased statement by this world-renowned scientist? Not that I know of, but maybe some scientists feel uncomfortable with his honesty or would disagree with what he said. However, when a creationist admits his bias, everyone is up in arms and charging him as being an unscientific religious bigot. It goes both ways. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. Now, you may not be as committed to the materialistic philosophy as this guy, I don't know. But you have been persuaded to believe the lies of those who are. Your philosophy, whether you realize it or not, has been by and large, derived by people with just such a bias, by people who have happily taken in all the unsubstantiated just-so stories of science. Not all admit it of course. Now, granted, we creationists do the same. We start with the basic assumption that there is a Creator and interpret scientific observations and facts based on that assumption. So this idea of all living things having much in common biologically speaking is absolutely no problem for creationists. I mean after all, everything was created by the same Creator and therefore of course you would expect things to look alike in the basics of things. It is a good design. It works well. Why re-invent the wheel? But when you get into the externals of various living things you see wonderful, amazing, and even mind-boggling differences among even creatures of the same species. Here is where we see God's amazing creativity and appreciation for beauty. Here's another quote: "In seeking to understand why the Haeckelian view(idea that the human embryo goes through various stages (fish, reptile, animal, etc) in the womb before becoming human.) persisted so long, we have also to consider the alternatives. We often are highly conservative and will hold to a viewpoint longer than is justified when there is no alternative or, worse, when the logical alternative upsets the rest of our world view." Keith Stewart Thomson, "Marginalia Ontogeny and phylogeny recapitulated", American Scientist Vol. 76, May-June 1988, p. 274 By the way, this fraud foisted upon all society in the name of science by Haeckel was exposed in the early 1900's. Yet the idea that his forged drawings claimed to give evidence for, received wide scientific acceptance and had a very real impact on our society far after the fraud was exposed. For instance, Carl Sagan himself, unashamedly used this idea to push for the legitimizing of abortion up until the second trimester when it was thought that the embryo had passed from fish and frog to a human. Now obviously, Sagan knew at that point that Heckel's drawings were a forgery and his views were undocumented. Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden, Book Club Associates, London, pp. 57E8, 1977. This book shows his support for this theory. And, on top of that, this scientific fiction is still taught in some schools and is still found in many textbooks today, although that number is lessening thankfully. Also, check out these articles in these encyclopedias. World Book Encylopedia, 6:409E10, 1994; Collier's Encyclopedia, 1994, 2:138, 1994; Why is this error/lie perpetuated? I think Mr. Thomson answered it well. Simply a commitment to remain faithful to their philosophical presuppositions. (imho) Honesty? No way! Good science? You decide. Deceit? Probably unless they are bold enough to try and claim total ignorance. Well, I'll stop there for now and continue in the next post. Regards, TJ
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Tokyojim Inactive Member |
Mr. Davies, Greetings!
quote:
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Tokyojim Inactive Member |
Quetzal, here is the next part of my reply to your post (#2 in this topic) I mistakenly entered my first reply as a reply to post #1. It should be listed as a reply to post #2. Sorry for the confusion.) We Creationists are in the minority here on the forum, especially YEC's. I'm sure there will be many who want to respond to my post. I cannot promise to answer every post. I simply do not have the time and will state it up front. I am here just trying to give Quetzal the reasons why I believe in God. I do not expect you or others to agree with me.
TJ's original quote:
quote: QUETZAL REPLIES:I have several problems with this outlook. In the first place, it is inconsistent with the basic fact that all life on earth is interrelated. For example, every living thing on this planet shares a specific biochemistry. If initial conditions had been different, life would either not exist or would be recognizably different. Along the same lines, all the processes that have shaped the various forms of life also apply to humans. We process energy in similar ways, we replicate, we are effected by the same abiotic environmental factors. Ultimately, at the macro level, anything that upsets the balance too far will also directly effect our existence. This mitigates against the idea that humans are separately created. Secondly, you have embarked on the extreme logical fallacy of using your conclusion as your initial premise. To make any argument about God or the bible valid or compelling, you must: - Start by showing that God does indeed exist. If you can provide evidence for the existence of a supernatural deity, I will be more willing to listen to various explanations about that deity and its interest in humans to the exclusion of all other organisms. - Once you have established the existence of the said deity, you can then provide your reasons for thinking that this deity is the Christian god. After all, the existence of a supernatural deity does not imply that the said deity is the Judeo-Christian one. Some evidence supporting your deity over others, such as Allah, Vishnu, and Zeus, would be beneficial to your argument at this point. - Once you do this, you can then show that God wrote the Bible. You should include information that will explain how logical impossibilities like the Noachian Flood, are possible. You should include the evidence needed to show that God intended the Bible to be taken literally, rather than a loose code of conduct. (With many thanks to my friend Nick/IAPW for the above). If you can do this, then I would be willing to consider any evidence you can offer that, indeed, humans are somehow special by divine fiat. If not, then you must proceed through a different epistemology. You must provide empirical evidence that man is somehow separate from animals. The use of abstractions such as kindE consciousnessE or intelligenceEdo not constitute evidence, nor does your say-so. On the contrary, the burden is on you to show with evidence that these vague, ill-defined concepts provide a quantifiable taxic barrier separating us directly from, say, the other primates. That intelligenceEDOES NOT exist in other animals, for example, as the default hypothesis is that animals Eespecially primates EDO share the same intrinsic biology/physiology, and differ only in degree. I look forward to hearing your argument. Q continues:Secondly, you have embarked on the extreme logical fallacy of using your conclusion as your initial premise. To make any argument about God or the bible valid or compelling, you must: - Start by showing that God does indeed exist. If you can provide evidence for the existence of a supernatural deity, I will be more willing to listen to various explanations about that deity and its interest in humans to the exclusion of all other organisms. *********************************************TJ replies: Quetzal, I could make the same request of you as well. To validate your conclusions about scientific facts that you make, you must first prove that there is no supernatural Being who could be responsible for the results and observations you make. Actually here, I was more just stating what the Biblical worldview is. I donft expect you to believe it. First of all, obviously no one can absolutely prove that God does exist or for that matter that He does not exist so we have to go to the evidence. We both must exercise faith for our own particular worldviews. Your question about the existence of God is a very good question. Here are my arguments for why I believe in the existence of God: Argument #1: Argument of the first causeAs you know, a fundamental and universally accepted law that is recognized in every field of science is the law of cause and effect. Any effect must have an equal or greater cause. No effect can ever be greater than itfs cause quantitatively or qualitatively, or in any other way. Now that is real rock solid science. And much scientific research, especially in physics, is based on this very fact. So, when it comes to life and the universe, somewhere there has to be an uncaused Cause and I believe that the first cause is an eternal all-powerful, all wise Creator. Fits quite nicely with what the Bible says. Let me put it another way. Anything that doesnft have to exist, requires a cause to explain it's existence. And it requires a cause which is sufficient to account for the effect. That is the key. For instance, think about a crack in the sidewalk and a picture. An earthquake or cold weather could have made the crack, and an artist could have made the picture, but not vice versa. An earthquake would not be sufficient to account for the effect. The whole idea of fossils is the same thing. We know that the designs in rock that a fossil leaves could not occur naturally so we have to find a sufficient cause. An animal who died suddenly and was buried is recognized to be the cause. You donft find that kind of order, complex arrangement of lines, and design in rock without a cause. The design is the clue that there was a greater cause. In this case, it is not a human cause. Dr. Henry Morris puts it this way: gIn the real world, every effect must have an adequate cause, but the usual laws of science do not seem to intimidate evolutionists. In the strange land of evolutionary credulity, wonderful things may happen Eplans draw themselves, mechanisms design themselves, order generates itself from chaos, and life creates itself. Yet evolutionists call creationists unscientific because they postulate an adequate Cause (divine intervention) to account for the marvelous Effect called life.h I personally feel that it is much more reasonable to believe in an adequate Cause with personality, intelligence, and power than to maintain blind faith in random chance, purposeless natural selection, and harmful mutations that kill the organism far mor often than they ever benefit it. Argument #2: Laws of ThermodynamicsIsaac Asimov defines the First Law as follows: eEnergy can be transferred from one place to another, or transformed from one form to another, but it can be neither created nor destroyed.f Or we can put it another way: eThe total quantity of energy in the universe is constant.f When the total quantity of something does not change, we say that it is conserved. c This law is considered the most powerful and most fundamental generalization about the universe that scientists have ever been able to make." Isaac Asimov: "In the Game of Energy and Thermodynamics You Canft Break Even," Smithsonian Institute Journal, June, 1970, p. 6. This Law presents an obstacle for evolution because it says there is a basic condition of stability, not change, in the universe, conservation and not innovation. Dr. Henry Morris says gThis fact in itself is not impressive to the evolutionist, as he merely assumes that the process of evolution takes place within the framework of energy conservation, never stopping to wonder where all the energy came from in the first place nor how it came to pass that the total energy was constant from then on. But it is the Second law, however, that wipes out the theory of evolution. There is a universal process of change, and it is a directional change, but it is not an upward change.hQuetzal, if you are a believer of the big bang, where did the original mass of whatever originate from and what caused the explosion? Are you of the unscientific position that matter is eternal? Or do you admit that it seems like matter had a beginning? The universe is an isolated system and therefore it is running down, a fact that I think most scientists would agree with. Energy is being used up. Eventually the universe and the earth too will reach a state of equilibrium or heat death when no energy is transferred from one form to another anymore. But if something is running down, unless you say there was an infinite amount of energy to start with, it would seem to imply that it had a beginning. The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics is one of the strongest scientific arguments agains evolution. As you know, it says that all systems in the real world tend to go downhill, from high information content to low information content, from high order to disorder, from complexity to decreased complexity. As entropy increases, order, complexity, and information is lost. And this is a very well established law applicable to all fields of science and recognized by almost all scientists whether they be biologists, geologists, chemists or physicists. If you are a naturalist, you must maintain that ALL biological processes are explainable using the scientific laws of chemistry and physics. If so, ALL biological processes must certainly act in accordance to the laws of thermodynamics and this dooms the theory of evolution. Let me try and anticipate some of your arguments against using the 2nd Law as evidence against evolution. 1) The first common argument used against it is that the earth is not a closed system so the 2nd Law does not apply. Actually there really is no such thing as a closed system in reality. The 2nd Law applies to both closed and open systems. Sure energy comes into the earth from the sun. But what happens? The sunfs energy destroys things. Ultraviolet rays are harmful. The energy must be harnessed to be helpful. That is the key point. A plant can productively use that energy only because it has pre-existing photosynthesis capabilities. If that were not there, the plants would not benefit from the sunfs rays. The ultra-violet rays constitute a big problem for scientists working on the origin of life issues. Dr. Henry Morris of the Institution of Creation Research says this: gThe fact is that the best known and most fundamental equation of thermodynamics says that the influx of heat into an open system will increase the entropy of that system, not decrease it. All known cases of decreased entropy (or increased organization) in open systems involve a guiding program of some sort and one or more energy conversion mechanisms.h(This includes plant growth, crystal formation, growth of human body, etc.) Now perhaps you will argue that natural selection and mutation qualify as a guiding program or an energy conversion mechanism, but natural selection can only work on pre-existing information and select from what is already available. Mutations are almost 100% harmful. The rare neutral mutation is meaningless and the even rarer beneficial mutation is still not an example of molecules-to-man evolution because it comes about as the result of lost genetic information, not the addition of new, more ordered information. So actually one of the most foundational and well-accepted laws of science itself stands in dire opposition to evolution.Evolutionist Charles J. Smith said this in his book entitled Problems with Entropy in Biology: "The thermodynamicist immediately clarifies the latter question by pointing out that the Second Law classically refers to isolated systems which exchange neither energy nor matter with the environment; biological systems are open and exchange both energy and matter. hHe goes on: "This explanation, however, is not completely satisfying, because it still leaves open the problem of how or why the ordering process has arisen (an apparent lowering of the entropy), and a number of scientists have wrestled with this issue. Bertalanffy (1968) called the relation between irreversible thermodynamics and information theory one of the most fundamental unsolved problems in biology. I would go further and include the problem of meaning and value.h Charles J. Smith, "Problems with Entropy in Biology," Biosystems (Vol. 1, 1975), p. 259. 2) Another common argument is to appeal to the existence of mineral crystals and snowflakes as an example of complex structures that form spontaneously from disordered parts.However, this doesnft work either. It is an example of increased order (albeit repetitive and very low information content), but it is nothing at all like the complexity we see in real life which is basically non-repetitive and of very high information content. For a further more in-depth treatment of the crystal argument, please see the third article listed at the bottom of this post. This 2nd Law is quite powerful evidence against evolution and points to a Creator at the beginning of it all as Dr. Morris shows here:gThe evolution model cannot yet even explain the Second Law, but the creation model predicts it! The Second Law proves, as certainly as science can prove anything whatever, that the universe had a beginning. Similarly, the First Law shows that the universe could not have begun itself. The total quantity of energy in the universe is a constant, but the quantity of available energy is decreasing. Therefore, as we go backward in time, the available energy would have been progressively greater until, finally, we would reach the beginning point, where available energy equaled total energy. Time could go back no further than this. At this point both energy and time must have come into existence. Since energy could not create itself, the most scientific and logical conclusion to which we could possibly come is that: "In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth."h If you want to understand the Creationist arguments on this issue, I would suggest you check the following 3 web pages. I have borrowed some of my information from here:Acts and Facts Magazine | The Institute for Creation Research Acts and Facts Magazine | The Institute for Creation Research Missing Link | Answers in Genesis I'll post some more another day. Bye for now,Regards, TJ
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