We know there's a God because...

I'd just like to point out that it is Ray himself who seems to be ignoring those who have refuted him in this thread, and not AZPaul3 or anyone else.

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The problem I'm seeing in this line of reasoning is that it looks at the system (i.e. nature) as a whole, and not at the individual parts, as if nature were undertaking a major project in producing life.

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Emotion is an individual part. It would have been more accurate and just as meaningless to say I was looking at an individual part and failing to see the whole.

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This is inherently the same as first assuming God to see if God exists: you have already assumed everything is a coherent, goal-oriented process.

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You must have someone else in mind. Nothing in my post assumes a goal-oriented process. I do assume the present is a result of the past - do you object to that?I never stated that nature intended to bring about emotions. Intentions don't even matter. Whether or not it is my goal, if I blindfold myself and wander around for a few days I won't find myself on Saturn.What I find is that if I assume the absence of God, there is no reasonable way to account for the presence of many things, and emotions are on the list.

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The theory of evolution by natural selection states that the various parts of the system are in competition with one another, not working together toward a specified goal. Thus, each organism (and some would take this down to the level of each cell or each gene) can be thought of as selfish.

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Your capacity to project selfishness onto things does not make them selfish. Is my car selfish for keeping its gas in the tank and not draining it on the ground? Or is it just doing what it must because that's how it's built?And if that's what the "theory" states, it's handily dismissed by observing ants, wolves, white blood cells, and tons of other lifeforms.

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If something else outcompetes you, you generally die off. Thus, nature favors the animal that is more aggressive, not the animal that is more thoughtful.

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That attempts to answer the later part of the issue: once emotions exist, how would they fare in competition? You're long on assertion and short on evidence. And you assume emotions would exist without explaining how they'd come about.

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Animals that crave sex do better at reproducing than animals that stop to try to understand why they should have sex.

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Really? I wasn't aware of that. Survival of the horniest, eh?

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That's where emotions come from.

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Oh, from assuming they're available and asserting that animals possessing them would "win the competition"? As groovy as this may seem to you, it's just not my bag.

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But the only change I'm postulating to the real world is that all religious texts (and the knowledge contained therein) do not exist. The world is otherwise just as we find it today. Would there be no new miracles, no new fulfilled prophecies, that men could observe and conclude that there must be a God?

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Part of this is precluded. Without access to prophecies, one would be unaware if their fulfillment.There are plenty of miracles to be found if one is alert. I've had at least 6 tires blow out on me, and I know other people who've encountered the problem. It frequently results in making a vehicle uncontrollable. But nobody I know has been killed or even injured as a result.Teenagers, and children in general do lots of things that should get them hurt or killed. The number who are actually harmed is very small - I'd call it under 10% of what it should be if the world were purely natural. And frequently the ones who get hurt are the ones that keep trying stupid stunts far beyond the point where they should know better.These things are habitually dismissed by those who desire another conclusion. In fact, there's not much choice: dismiss them or give up something they cherish. But it wasn't so long ago there was acknowledgement of "Providence" even among those who weren't keen on any "religious texts". It's a matter of opening one's eyes and mind, or at least declining to close them.

CTD, People like me are in the habit of habitually dismissing subjective opinion. The miracle is that you had that many tyres blow out on you, they should have stopped doing that decades ago because of design improvements. But anyway, how many tyre blowouts occur before a fatality occurs to the driver? You haven't a scooby. As far as you are concerned it could be anything, meaning you have no idea if 6 is miraculous or merely humdrum.Mark

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There are 10 kinds of people in this world; those that understand binary, & those that don't

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Teenagers, and children in general do lots of things that should get them hurt or killed. The number who are actually harmed is very small - I'd call it under 10% of what it should be if the world were purely natural.

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I have trouble imagining what you base this assertion on. Less than 10% of the expected number of teens and children get hurt when touching live cables? Can you define an accident that should get one killed? Usually to detect satistical aberrations like the ones you assert, you need a comparison or an overall statistic.
Comparing
CensusScope -- Population Pyramid and Age Distribution Statistics
with
http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_gcgvacci.html
we get the result that 21,42% of US citizens in the year 2000 were 14 years old or younger, and 20,51% of drowning victims were in that age group. There is a high probability that people in that age group are being watched when near water. We know that people of that age group also have a tendency for reckless or thoughtless behavior.
Looking at ages 0-4 years only, we find that they make up 6.82% of the population, but 11.5% of drowning victims.
If anything at all, we can conclude that God likes to watch toddlers less than teens.
According to your estimate of 10%, 'the world if it were purely natural' should also contain more than double the number of children that it actually has.
Ergo, the world you perceive subjectively does not correspond to the objective world.Edited by black wolf, : quote syntaxEdited by black wolf, : added summaryEdited by black wolf, : correction

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People like me are in the habit of habitually dismissing subjective opinion. The miracle is that you had that many tyres blow out on you, they should have stopped doing that decades ago because of design improvements. But anyway, how many tyre blowouts occur before a fatality occurs to the driver? You haven't a scooby. As far as you are concerned it could be anything, meaning you have no idea if 6 is miraculous or merely humdrum.

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Mark

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You don't know what I do or don't know, so why do you even bother posting this trash? Are you limited to spamming insults, or something?

Well, what if we lowered the bar a little and didn't ask for completely certainty. Just by examining the world around us, is there anything that would lead people to suspect that there is a God? What about the argument from design?--Percy

Complexity logically requires a designer. I can't fathom how complexity would evolve from non living to living without intelligence.

The designer would have to be non-complex, otherwise he'd "logically" require his own designer. And can he be both non-complex and intelligent? And if he's non-complex, then his creations illustrate that complexity can come from non-complexity, meaning that they wouldn't require a designer.Is that avatar of yours running around in confused circles, Phat?

If you mean that the examination should lead all to conclude the same thing when exposed to the same argument then no, I don't think there is anything. Some will look at a clear, star-filled night and ache with a suspicion that there is/must be/could be something more. RobinRohan was such a one - gazing upon starfilled nights and vast oceans caused him discomfort.Others will look at the same thing whilst saying they are perfectly content to hold that this life is all there is. They are not driven towards the same conclusion by that same 'evidence'.

Hi Percy, I could think of a lot of things but I will mention 3 here.Hawking states, "If the rate of expansion one second after the big bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, the universe would have recollapsed before it ever reached its present size."Odds of this happening by chance 10^128.If the gravitational force were altered by 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000001 percent, neither Earth nor our Sun would exist.Odds of this happening by chance 10^128.For physical life to exist, the mass density of the universe must be fine-tuned to better than one part in a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion.Odds of this happening by chance 10^128.You have better odds of buying 100 Power Ball tickets and winning all 100 Power Ball lotteries consecutively.All together there are over a 100 finely tuned constants that have beat those odds. If any one failed we would not exist.It seems like anyone could look at that kind of scientific data and come to the conclusion that there was something other than chance at work.But I suppose to many those odds would not matter because that would point to something higher than man which is unacceptable.God Bless,God Bless,

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"John 5:39 (KJS) Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me."

Unless you were a Christian you wouldn't really be able to appreciate any attempt of mine aimed at describing it. Not to be insulting, but the attempt would be like trying to explain the quality red to a blind man. There are even more high school students who leave school convinced that ToE is fact when they are not in a position to comprehend the scientific evidence for themselves. They believe what others say the evidence says.Point being, if you are totally convinced that God exists then you are totally convinced. If a penny on the pavement suffices for one then that's the persons business. If it's God having to make himself personally evident to another then thats the persons business.Being convinced of something doesn't make it the case. It's just conviction that it is the case. In another thread I argued that all evidence is ultimately personal evidence - including the evidence that the world around you is real.It's down ultimately to whether you trust your own perceptions as reflecting what actually is the case. I trust my perceptions w.r.t. to the world around me being real. I also trust my perceptions w.r.t. to the reality of Gods existance. Both issues are down to me alone. I cannot appeal to a higher court than that.Question for you: you know what you thought 5 seconds ago. All you have is personal evidence for it. Now, did that thought really occur?

As ever, this is all completely wrong...But let's save time and assume it's correct. Hmmm, you mean like the String Landscape, perhaps? That gives rise to essentially an infinite number of Universes with all possible parameter values - and thus the probablity of our Universe coming into being was about 1 in 1. Perfectly acceptable to me as I'm a theist - it's just that those extremely erronious probabilities of yours do not point to "something higher than man". They point to deeper physics.

Hi cavediver, Remember Hawking said if expansion one second after the big bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million,
either way. Smaller or larger. In other words it had to be exact.So what do you think the odds would be of this happening by chance?Then what would the scientific odds be of this happening by chance?God Bless,

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"John 5:39 (KJS) Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me."

CTD, Insults? I fail to see where I insulted you. You posted evidentially vacuous subjective opinion & claimed the rest of us can't see the evidence. This is your problem, not mine for pointing it out.I directly responded to your point: My point is that your "evidence" is entirely subjective, you have no idea whatsoever what the non-miracle state is compared to the miracle state. As such, you are utterly unable to claim anything as evidence of the miraculous. Very well, please supply the statistics of tyre blowouts that should result in death/injury if miracles don't occur, & do the same if miracles do indeed happen. Failure to do this renders you completely unable to test the hypothesis that a miracle has occurred. It also means your claim that the rest of us are dismissing evidence is false, there is no evidence to be dismissed.Mark

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There are 10 kinds of people in this world; those that understand binary, & those that don't