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Chester :"Is the evolutionary model more plausible than the Christian one? Each person must decide and weigh the evidence. "
There is no actual evidence for the Christian model because there is no actual evidence that the stories in the bible are true.
This is not the same when it comes for the evolutionary model.
Scientific understanding requires both facts and theories that can explain those facts in a coherent manner. Evolution, in this context, is both a fact and a theory. It is an incontrovertible fact that organisms have changed, or evolved, during the history of life on Earth. And biologists have identified and investigated mechanisms that can explain the major patterns of change.
The classical proof is the improvement of crops and livestock through artificial selection. Natural selection and other evolutionary theories are also represented in various mathematical proofs, such as the “Price equation”.
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Chester : "But God was there and He has given man a written record of what happened. The Bible begins by very clearly answering the question with the first four words: "In the beginning God . . ." I believe that God has always been in eternity: and then He is the one who created "time" in which we live today. Scripture also says there will come a time when "time" will be no more.
The only other option I can see is that somehow something came out of nothing at some point in time! And that something that came out of nothing kept going till we have the universe we have today! “
While the Big Bang theory explains how the universe has expanded and cooled since it began, it is quite silent on what “pulled the trigger,” so to speak. We simply don’t know what started the process. How there could be nothing at one moment and an entire baby universe the next? But getting something from nothing is just business as usual for “virtual particles”.
Quantum theory predicts that every particle spends some time as a combination of other particles in all possible ways. These predictions are very well understood and tested.
Quantum mechanics allows, and indeed requires, temporary violations of conservation of energy, so one particle can become a pair of heavier particles (the so-called virtual particles), which quickly rejoin into the original particle as if they had never been there.
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Chester : "Response: Yes, indeed God is omniscient and omnipresent, but I don't see how that means he can in actuality experience something that has never happened. He has the power to make it happen and he did! He didn't want it to happen only "in his mind", he wanted actual fellowship.
For an all powerful God there no such thing “he can’t in actuality experience something that has never happened”. And because if God is this perfectly good, benevolent, all loving with infinite wisdom being, he won’t choose an actual fellowship plus billions of people suffering in hell for eternity instead of an only "in his mind" fellowship plus no people suffering in hell for eternity.
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Chester : "A perfect and omnipotent God who creates beings capable of ruining their own happiness is impossible." -- The statement contradicts itself: if God is omnipotent he could create whatever he wants -- You could argue that he wouldn't do this. “
You didn’t understand. Let me explain better.
Yes but because God is this perfectly good, benevolent, all loving with infinite wisdom being, it is impossible for our world to exist the way it is because he wouldn’t have chosen to create it. So because it does exist it means only 2 things:
1. Your perfect God with these perfect attributes does not exist.
2. There is a God but he is not this perfectly good, benevolent, all loving with infinite wisdom being. He is just an all powerful cruel, selfish, indifferent when it comes to his future creatures suffering being that just got sick of being lonely.
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Chester : “If the writer here wanted to say that all of the adults except Noah and his family were corrupt how would he say it? Probably he would say it just the way he did say it that "all the people on the earth were corrupt". The writer doesn't have to add all the exceptions (Noah and his family, and young children) because the reader already knows that. Not sure I can prove that directly from the text, but it is what makes sense to me.
So my question above: if the text says that Noah and his family were saved because they were the
only righteous and blameless people -- I think you have shown that this is at least what the text clearly implies, even if it doesn't say "only"
directly. “
“If the writer here wanted to say that all of the adults except Noah and his family were corrupt how would he say it?”
He could say: Among all the people that can discern right from wrong, Noah was the only righteous. Simple as that.
You think that the text clearly implies your point, even if it doesn't say "only" directly while I
think the text clearly implies my point, even if “all people” includes Noah to.
You can’t prove anything for sure, only make assumptions and give your opinion to prove your point. There can be many interpretations of such verses and others in the bible.
It is said the bible it has been written with divine inspiration. If this were true we would not be seeing so much confusion and discordance among Christian beliefs about what certain verse mean.
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Chester : “Back up and begin by looking around you at the world as you see it and live in it? Honestly and objectively (scientifically) analyze it? Did it get here by random processes? Do random process produce ever even one living cell? Or does what you see in the world point to a Creator and Designer? I think it clearly points to a designer - hence my starting point is what God (and the Bible) says.”
Some facts first:
Starting in the late sixties and early seventies, astrophysicists noted that several of the basic physical constants must fall within very narrow limits if there is to be the development of intelligent life—at any rate in a way anything like the way in which we think it actually happened.
Several aspects of our Universe, some of which seem to be prerequisites for the evolution of any form of life, depend rather delicately on apparent ‘coincidences’ among the physical constants .
- if the force of gravity were even slightly stronger, all stars would be blue giants;
- if even slightly weaker, all would be red dwarfs; in neither case could life have developed.
- if the weak and strong nuclear forces had been even slightly different, life, at any rate life of the sort we have, could probably not have developed.
Apparently life is possible only because the universe is expanding at just the rate required to avoid recollapse.
- there has to have been a very close balance between the competing effect of explosive expansion and gravitational contraction which, at the very earliest epoch about which we can even pretend to speak (called the Planck time, 10–43 sec. after the big bang), would have corresponded to the incredible degree of accuracy represented by a deviation in their ratio from unity by only one part in 10 to the sixtieth.
-other examples: the value of cosmological constant, of the vacuum expectation value of the Higgs field, and the ratio of the mass of the proton to the electron must all be fine-tuned to an incredible degree for the universe to be life-permitting .
Many like you(Chester) see these apparent enormous coincidences as substantiating the Christian claim that the universe has been created by a personal God(Yahweh) who intends that there be intelligent life; they take fine-tuning as offering he material for a good ""Yahweh created the universe" argument. Mostly they argue that the probability of these fine-tuning phenomena on Christianity is much greater than their probability on the chance hypothesis. Here the conclusion is not that probably "Yahweh created the universe" is true, but rather that "Yahweh created the universe" " is much better supported by these phenomena than the chance hypothesis is.
A good objection to fine-tuning arguments is the “many universes” suggestion: perhaps there are very many, even infinitely many different universes or worlds; the cosmological constants take on different values in different worlds, so that very many (perhaps all possible) different sets of such values get exemplified in one world or another. Couldn't there be an eternal cycle of ‘big bangs’, with subsequent expansion to a certain limit and then subsequent contraction to a ‘big crunch’ at which the cosmological values are arbitrarily reset? Alternatively, couldn't it have been that at the Big Bang, there was enormous initial inflation, resulting in many cosmoses with many different settings for the physical constants? In either case it isn't at all surprising that in one or another of the resulting universes, the values of the cosmological constants are such as to be life-permitting. Nor is it at all surprising that the universe in which we find ourselves has life-permitting values; we couldn't exist elsewhere. If so, then the fine-tuning argument is ineffective: the probability of fine-tuning on the many worlds suggestion is at least as large as the probability of fine-tuning on Christianity.
You didn’t responded to this:
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Chester :Here is a hypothetical question, but I want to make a point with it!: If God would "die", then what would happen?
Yes, I know God won't die! But if He would, I believe that everything in the entire universe would immediately cease to exist. God did not just create the world, but "by him all things consist" (Col 1:17). Man thinks that nature and science controls events on Earth! No, God does! No person can take their next breath without the help of God.
So, I don't see any real difference in the dilemma of God shortening lives by the Biblical flood, or God shortening lives in the tsunami in Indonesia, or God allowing lives to be shortened yesterday in the terrorist attacks yesterday in Istanbul. So, now you say, that raises more questions: I agree, but I think there are answers!
God shorten their life because of their moral choice.God did not kill all those indonesians because of their moral choice.There is a clear distinction.
Let's make an example :
I am in a specific moment in my life. A man is standing in my way of becoming millionaire . I can choose to kill him and remove the obstacle or choose not to and remain poor. God said not to kill but he also allowed people to not obey his rules(see Adam and Eve example).If i am a free moral agent i can choose whatever i want .If i choose to kill him and God comes and kills me because i choose poorly it means i am not a free moral agent .
People on the time of Noah chose as free moral agents to sin ,but God killed them for their choice suggesting they weren't allowed to.
So how is it then, are we or not moral free agents?
