Faith and belief - The Almighty God revealed through his grandness

The entirety of your opening post is a gigantic appeal to incredulity. You are amazed at the wonders of the Universe around you, and humbled by your relatively insignificant place in it...ergo God.This does not follow. Your personal incredulity has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on the existence of a deity. Your reasoning is a logical fallacy.It's perfectly normal and reasonable to be amazed by the Universe around us. It's complex, and the more we learn, the more we discover that we've only begun to uncover the way the Universe works. Looking at pictures from Hubble often fills me with a sense of awe - but that sense of awe is not evidence of anything. It's a subjective, emotional response, and as such cannot provide evidence for a deity any more than anger provides evidence that someone assaulted me.

Hi Peg, That's the very definition of an appeal to personal incredulity, with a few appeals to authority thrown in."Oh wow, that's amazing, ergo God."I don't care what Newton thought. I care about the argument. His personal beleifs are irrelevant, as are yours and mine. All that matters is the strength of an argument and the evidence that supports it. Nothing else matters.Thus far, all you or the OP have submitted are logical fallacies. This means your arguments are weak, and your conclusions invalid.Further, I take extreme offense to your "every intelligent person" insinuation.So let's see Peg's reasoning, shall we? Curiously, being "reasonable" to you personally has no bearing on whether your statements or belief are accurate representations of reality. You don't know that. None of us do - it's never been observed, but neither has it been shown to be impossible. And we have a significant reason to think it may have happened int he past - we know that life did not exist at one point in time, and now it does. This means that at some point life was either magically created, or it arose from nonliving matter. Parsimony requires us to lean towards the latter so long as we haven't discovered something that makes it impossible and so long as there is no evidence in support of "magical creation."By your silly logic, nothing that has not been observed can exist. Since your own deity has not been observed, your deity must not exist. This is a silly statement that results from your personal comprehension of the term "law" as it applies to science. A scientific law is not like a legal law. A scientific "law" (and we generally don't use that term any more) simply refers to a theoretical model of a specific phenomenon that appears to be immutable. For instance, the Law of Gravity states that mass attracts mass (in simple terms, anyway - in reality it's a warping of space that is a basic property of mass). This means that we have observed that this phenomenon is universal and never seems to change. It doesn't have anything to do with a magic man in the sky who writes down in a magic book with a magic pen "gravity will make mass attract other mass."The natural laws of the Universe do not necessarily require a lawmaker. You've simply defined that to be the case...but unfortunately for you, your personal "common sense" has about as little effect on reality as a child's imaginary friend. Ah, causality. Others have already mentioned the contradiction in making "God" an "uncaused cause." Either God also requires a cause, or you're just being a hypocrite. All of the actual scientific evidence shows that the Universe simply is, and that causality is more of an illusion generated by our linear experience of time.Please, please argue that "God" exists outside of the universe independantly of time and space. I double-dog-dare you. I'd have to say "yes," in that it can be shown that your reasoning behind all three is essencially a series of misconceptions, from the meaning of the word "law" as it pertains to science to understanding that having never observed something doesn't make it impossible.So what does this say about "every intelligent person," Peg? Does your definition of intelligence include reliance on logical fallacies and improper usage of terms?

Not just on Earth, Peg - from the conditions of the Universe at various points in the past, we know that no life could have existed. We know that there was a point in time where even atoms didn't exist as we know them because the universe was too hot and dense.This means that at some point life in the Universe came to exist. parsimony suggests that, barring a mechanism preventing it, life arose from nonliving matter. Preliminary experimentation has shown this to be still plausible if not yet demonstrated.Further, the so-called "Law of Biogenesis" that your argument is based around (despite you not having said as much - it's the same argument) refers only to extant forms of life. As in, maggots do not spring from rotten meat, they are rather the offspring of flies. It has no relevance to the origin of life itself.In order to disprove abiogenesis, you need to provide a mechanism that prevents it from occurring. You have not done so - you've simply said "we haven't seen it happen, so it's impossible." Preposterous. In the same way, one can say that Harry Potter has been "observed." The foolishness of your statement is boundless. I don't believe it. I accept it as the most likely occurrence in the absence of a better explanation for the existence of life.1) Life has not always existed
2) Life now exists
3) Without invoking an extraneous entity, abiogenesis is the only remaining option
4) Preliminary testing has shown that the processes of living things are simply chemical reactions, and have shown that many of the steps required for abiogenesis are plausible in an abiotic environment similar to the early earth.
5) Ergo, I think abiogenesis was probably the source of life on Earth.I could be wrong - but the other answers posited thus far either only move the date for abiogenesis back (aliens seeding Earth still had to have come from somewhere else), and require the existence of an extraneous entity for which there is no other supporting evidence (a deity, aliens from "another universe," etc). Parsimony dictates that abiogenesis is the most likely solution.That's different from saying "I believe this occurred." I don't know that your deity doesn't exist Peg, and I don't claim his existence is impossible. i simply don't believe in him becasue I see no evidence suggesting that he does exist.You, on the other hand, believe that abiogenesis has never happened without a shred of evidence to support such a claim. This is different from saying "maybe, I need more evidence to convince me." You affirmatively believe in the existence of your deity with less evidence and logical support than you require for your own dismissal of abiogenesis. That makes you a hypocrite. Apparently you believe that the pothole was formed specifically for the shape of the puddle.Life arose as it did because of the behavior of the Universe and evolved to fit its pre-existing mold. Your claim requires that the unvierse be purpose-built to support our specific form of life. That's rather arrogant, and logically fallacious to boot. And so your response to being called out on appeals to authority and arguments from incredulity is to actually appeal to the authority of a person making an argument from incredulity.Bravo, Peg. Did you have to take classes to fail so hard? Irrelevant. You've still failed to show that intelligence guides the universe. There's a funny thing about existing - if it doesn't exist in our Universe, you can't really say that it exists.The reason you know that a given object exists is by interacting with it. If you look at your keyboard, for example, light is reflecting off of its surface and being detected by your eyes. If something interacts with out Universe, it exists in our Universe. You can't have it both ways, where God just magically gets to bypass logic by existing "outside," and yet still has the ability to interact with things "inside" the Universe.Think of it like a mathematical equation:"2+2=4" represents the Universe.But what about "5?"The number "5" is outside of this equation - it cannot affect the equation. It is irrelevant. It doesn't exist in the Universe.Saying that something "exists outside of the Universe" is utterly meaningless. If it's not part of the Universe, it cannot interact with the Universe. If it cannot interact with the Universe, a) you'd have no way of knowing about it, and b) everything in the Bible would be false anyway.More to the point of your causality argument, causality is relevant only when time is a meaningful variable. You need a "before" and an "after" to have a "cause" and an "affect." Time is part of the Universe, just like Space and mass/energy. It would be rather difficult to apply the concept of causality to an entity for whom time is not a meaningful variable. How can you have a "cause" when time itself the the effect? It's utter nonsense, like asking what's North of the North Pole. Something "outside the Universe" cannot cause anything - the entire concept of causality becomes meaningless without one of the main components of the Universe.But all of your statements still show that you utterly fail to comprehend that words mean different things depending on context. It's the reason we use little numbered definitions in the dictionary. A scientific law is an observation of the Universe - it's descriptive. A legal law is written by an intelligent entity to dictate human behavior - it's prescriptive. The two are completely different, and simply because the two concepts share the same word doesn't mean both definitions are relevant at the same time in the same context. You can break human laws; go ahead and try to break the law of Gravity. The two have no relationship to each other.

You haven't shown anything. You pointed at the Universe, pointed at the Bible, and claimed that one proved the other when you did nothing to show that.In this entire thread you've done absolutely nothing more than make arguments from incredulity. That's all your OP was, and it's all you're doing now in your summation. You haven't shown anything beyond your ability to commit logical fallacies.Quoting the Bible doesn't prove anything. You're reading from a series of old books, nothing mroe. Your arguments are literally identical to taking the Harry Potter series, quoting a few passages, and exclaiming "look at what a magical world we live in! See? Hogwart's is real!It's utter nonsense. You're making an unfounded logical leap for no other reason than your personal incredulity. Stop right there. You just did it again.How exactly do you go from "the Unvierse is impressive" to "God made a huge sacrifice?" You haven't connected the two - not even with a Bible quote. You put together two entirely different statements and claimed that one leads to the other with nothing to show the connection.You haven't shown that God made a sacrifice.
You haven't shown that God even exists.
You haven't shown how the impressiveness of the Universe is connected to those two claims.Your argument is patehtic. Congratulations, you can quote the Bible. Shoudl I start quoting the Koran? Perhaps some Hindu or Buddhist texts? I could go through Egyptian or Greek or Norse beliefs. "How terrible Poseidon is! Behold the fury of the waves! The power of the sea reveals the glory of Poseidon and the might of his wrath!"That's all you've done. In my statement above, did I prove that Poseidon exists? How did I connect the "fury of the waves" to the existence of a Greek god?You've done nothing more. Your posting consists of nothing more than hot air. "Record 209 posts?" "Record?"If you stick around, you'll note that we typically don't close threads until they pass the 300-post mark, and even then some threads have been left open past 400.But this discussion hasn't changed anyone's mind. Let's be honest - nothing of substance was asserted by you in the first place. You did nothing but make an appeal to your personal incredulity, as if your internal, subjective sense of wonder actually had anything to do with the existence or nonexistence of your deity.Even Peg (who participated far more in the thread than you, the OP) did little more than add appeals to authority to your appeal to incredulity (and appeals to the authority of a person making an appeal to incredulity, which was extremely amusing and overloaded many irony meters).The utter inability displayed by theists in this thread to make reasoned arguments and the reliance on logical fallacies to prove their points demonstrates the total vacuousness of their position.