Broken Thinking Skills & Pointless Discussion

I think the main point is that science shouldn't be a stumbling block for those seeking to keep their faith. YEC is pretty much an own goal when it comes to keeping people in the faith.I can only speak for myself, but I have run across many people who have the same experiences as I have. I was a pretty curious kid growing up in the church, and I made peace with science and Christian theology at a young age. It wasn't a stumbling block for me. Rather, it was a whole host of other issues that led me away from the faith, such as the problem of suffering and the rather strong correlation between where you are born and what religious beliefs you accept. When I asked myself if I would be Hindu if I grew up in India and the answer was probably yes, that made me question a lot of things.

First, I'm not blaming God. What I am doing is seeing if the world I see is consistent with the loving God described by the Bible. What I see is a universe that is indistinguishable from one where God does not exist.Second, I am not talking about the actions of men. I am talking about suffering, such as the millions of children who die from malaria or cancer.

How are you able to see this? Can you take a photo and share it?Or are there invisible entities that no one can perceive doing things that no one can perceive, and a deity that no one can perceive that is somehow stopping it all. That's quite a winding road of a story you have there.

What I see is injustice caused by men, and no supernatural deity doing anything about it. Again, the universe is indistinguishable from a universe where God does not exist. I am talking about horrific suffering from disease through the fault of no one. That is indistinguishable from a universe where God does not exist.

What God?How can we even know a universe can exist without invisible pink unicorns?How can we even know a universe can exist without the Flying Spaghetti Monster?The burden of proof is at issue here. I make the claim that I can correctly predict the rank and suit of the first card drawn from a shuffled deck. We set up an experiment where we track how many times I correctly predict the drawn card. It turns out, I correctly predict the drawn card once out of every 52 draws, on average.Is that consequential? Yes. It shows my claimed predictive power is no better than randomly guessing. Someone without my claimed powers of prediction would do just as good at predicting cards as I do. It is no different than if my claimed powers didn't exist.The same for God. The world operates in such a way that there is no obvious changes caused by God. Children still die of cancer even though there is supposedly a loving God. That makes no sense. Would a loving parent let their child die if all they had to do was snap their fingers and cure their cancer? No. People make all sorts of claims about experiences with supernatural beings that occurs in their heads, most of which you would reject. Why would a objective measurements matter when using a method based on objective measurements? Gee, I don't know. Let me think about that.
[/sarcasm]That would be indistinguishable from a world where God does not exist.Sorry, but I'm not impressed by arguments that require me to die before I can get evidence as to their truth.Added in edit:Carl Sagan's "The Dragon in My Garage" probably does a better job of explaining the problem:

quote:

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"A fire-breathing dragon lives in my garage"

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Suppose (I'm following a group therapy approach by the psychologist Richard Franklin[6]) I seriously make such an assertion to you. Surely you'd want to check it out, see for yourself. There have been innumerable stories of dragons over the centuries, but no real evidence. What an opportunity!

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"Show me," you say. I lead you to my garage. You look inside and see a ladder, empty paint cans, an old tricycle — but no dragon.

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"Where's the dragon?" you ask.

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"Oh, she's right here," I reply, waving vaguely. "I neglected to mention that she's an invisible dragon."

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You propose spreading flour on the floor of the garage to capture the dragon's footprints.

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"Good idea," I say, "but this dragon floats in the air."

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Then you'll use an infrared sensor to detect the invisible fire.

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"Good idea, but the invisible fire is also heatless."

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You'll spray-paint the dragon and make her visible.

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"Good idea, but she's an incorporeal dragon and the paint won't stick."

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And so on. I counter every physical test you propose with a special explanation of why it won't work.

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Now, what's the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If there's no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists? Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true. Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value they may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder. What I'm asking you to do comes down to believing, in the absence of evidence, on my say-so.
--Carl Sagan
The Dragon in My Garage - RationalWiki

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