Posted on 12/29/2011 1:01:09 PM PST by daletoons
Atheist militant Richard Dawkins has produced a children's book entitled "The Magic of Reality" and in doing so has joined the Millstone Swim and Dive Club. Spreading his venom for God to kids under the guise of Scientism is about as putrid as it gets. Children using simple God-given logic conclude the existence of a creator. It requires an abandonment of logic to attain self omniscience and declare there is no God. The materialist's faith in the escape hatch of "there just wasn't enough evidence for me" won't wash on judgement day. Here's a book idea: The ghost of Christopher Hitchens, Jacob Marley style, appears to Richard Dawkins and sets him straight. Dickey would probably make a hash of it, too bad Hitchens isn't still around to write it.
Words are our means of communication. Everything is essentially subjective. Really we over intellectualize everything. Water is wet, ice is cold. The Bible exists, it was written in a way that God comminicates with people. As do the heavens. The miracle of a child’s birth is enough for me to know there is a God. The blood system of our bodies, the eye structure itself is beyond amazing, that cuts heal, bones mend, that a chicken comes from an egg, and so on. The heavens are in an order they are dependable, there are changes, man creates his own chaos due to his unbelief. There is good and there is evil. I choose good. We know many daily choose evil. God’s presence will come to those seeking to know him. Those desiring to do whatever is right in their eyes, will not know God. It is a choice.
Morever, positing a God doesn't solve the "I don't know" problem. It just adds one more step of conjecture until you're back to "I don't know." What is the nature of God? You don't know. How could he have been around forever? You don't know. How did he make matter out of nothing? You don't know.
You've simply added an extra step between humans and the mystery of the universe. But your step is a detour. Once someone accepts the God explanation, thought stops and reading begins. What did this book say? What did those scrolls say? What interpretation does this spiritual leader posit? What did that mean? Now you aren't thinking anymore. You're just researching.
Cheers!
Don't be so hard on yourself.
".....if someone asks for evidence of God, we might say "truth," or "beauty," or "virtue." For a soul of sufficient purity and depth, this will be an adequate argument, especially once the implications are fully appreciated and worked out in an ontologically consistent manner. However, materialists, Darwinists, Lizards, and other metaphysical yahoos imagine that they can reject the whole of religion based upon a single argument taken out of context, just as a savage could reject the big bang based upon the obvious empirical evidence that refutes it.
"Do you see the dilemma? We get the occasional materialistic barbarian who demands "proof of God," but this is certainly no less difficult to provide than proof of the Big Bang to an eight year-old, which, even if you accept it, doesn't mean you actually understand it.
"Bear in mind that we are usually dealing with an unintelligent person who is demanding evidence that would satisfy his intellect. Now, this is something I could never do, as I have long since forgotten how to be so stupid.
Georege Costanza tried it, and it worked for a while ... then Kramer’s logic shattered the ‘do the opposite’ routine.
Like Mendel or Tycho Brahe or Michael Faraday or Henry Schaefer?
You have correctly identified a significant difference between scholasticism and empiricism, but you seem to have forgotten the Relapse (known by libs as the "Renaissance") and their slavish adulation of ancient authorities. See also "Galen".
Cheers!
I don’t demand evidence of God. I don’t need to: I can see at a glance that it’s a wish-fulfillment device that allows people to build an alternate universe of their choosing, one where evil is some day punished, where good is some day rewarded... I understand perfectly well WHY people choose escapism. All around me, people are escaping into a world more to their liking. Maybe they use drugs, maybe they create an avatar and live in Sims world, maybe they enter the World of Warcraft or Dungeons & Dragons. Maybe they dream of Heaven. I understand it perfectly. I just don’t do it. Anymore.
A few posts ago you mentioned that with science, there is nobody telling you you'll burn in Hell.
Why is it that atheists are ALWAYS hung up on Eternal Torment instead of Eternal Life?
And hence..."there is no god" because "I can quit believing anytime I want without penalty" but Christians are only into wishful thinking.
Got it.
Cheers!
Unfortunately, your belief in something (or lack thereof) does not change its reality.
Yet you claim to be "against God", ie: an "atheist".
"[A-theists] define themselves by their opposition to God.
"Without God, what would they be?
"The "hole" at the center of their being would be exposed, so they would merely be a-holes." ~ Gagdad
Why any American wants to believe in any Middle Eastern religion anyway is beyond me.
No my dear, it's "turtles all the way down" — a jocular expression for the infinite regress problem in cosmology, which is what one gets when one posits an "eternal universe." Such a model excludes both First and Final Causes. Yet without First Cause, how could the universe even get started (so to speak)? Without Final Cause, how could it have any meaning, reason, or purpose?
And this is the very situation we find ourselves in, when it's "turtles all the way down."
Anyhoot, I am not a "turtles all the way down," circular, "horizontally-bound" thinker like the little old lady who confronted Bertrand Russell (a great mathematician and thorough rogue! LOLOL!). From Stephen Hawking (A Brief History of Time, 1988):
A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down!"To say that the universe or anything else in it "evolves" logically implies a "starting point" from which the evolution began. And even though it may give most modern biologists the Heebie-Jeebies to say so, the foundational principle of Darwinism — survival of the fittest — clearly implies a Final Cause (albeit a pretty puny one....).
Yet BOTH the First and Final Aristotelian causes have been effectively abolished from modern science. So we're not supposed to talk about them.... (Too "politically incorrect," you see....)
I daresay you have never read the Holy Scriptures on the presupposition that what they are trying to convey to you involves the very Truth of Reality. I infer you only bother to read them (if you do at all) in order demolish what appear to you to be "lies" — having first set yourself up as the "sole criterion of Truth" in the matter. Because you see only "with the eye," you categorically deny the existence of all not-directly-observable phenomena in Nature. Strictly speaking, you deny all non-local causation in Nature.
Yet quantum physics verifies that non-local causation is a very real phenomenon.
I start with the presupposition that God has given us four Revelations: (1) the Revelation of Himself and His Will for us (i.e., the Holy Bible); (2) the Revelation of His Word, the Logos of God in the Beginning, in later salvational history as the Incarnate Son of God, Jesus Christ, at once "fully God and fully human," Who suffered a scandalously ignoble death on the Cross in order to release God's children, Christ's brothers, from the devastating eternal effects of sin and death; (3) the "Book of Creation," that is, of the physical/material universe itself (understood as the instantiation of universal law); and (4) the revelation of the Holy Spirit with us....
Then I realized that none of these revelations, being all divinely ordained, can possibly contradict one another in any way.
And so I am just so thrilled to see how findings in modern science actually seem to dovetail with what a proper reading/understanding of the Holy Scriptures tells us to expect in the natural world.
As the great evangelist Francis Schaeffer pointed out, in the Holy Scriptures: "God reveals Himself to us truly, but not exhaustively." Likewise, God tells us about the world of His Creation, truly, but not exhaustively. In the discovery of universal Truth, He's left Man with "plenty to do."
Which is why we have scientists; and philosophers; and theologians.
His Guideposts (so to speak) are both universal and eternal. They are there for "helps" to us, ever-reliable spiritual landmarks in the search for the Truth of Reality.
Just some thoughts, dear a_perfect_lady, FWTW. Don't know if they help you at all. Just to say I think you're in a bit of a cognitive rut, and I hope you can work your way out of it. May Godspeed you!
Here's wishing you and all your dear ones a HAPPY NEW YEAR!
Careful, you’ll force her to go shopping again.
"I don't think so" ??? Sounds like you aren't sure. Maybe you're really merely an honest agnostic rather than a religious a-theist.
Perhaps this could help for those who need to understand dimensions. My youngest physics major daughter found it and passed it on to me. It’s very good. I did OK until about half way through.
The Dimensions Explained
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uY_ZgAvXsuw
We are ALL agnostic. Everyone who has ever lived. ;^)
Yes, I know about the turtles quote. That’s why I said it that way. In the end, you believe because you want to. I don’t want to. That’s really all it boils down to.
Ah, so you're rejection of Christianity is not based on logic or reason but simply because you don't like the outcome.
Gotcha.
Unlike Christianity, where Jesus told his followers that he would return in their lifetime. He didn't...
Perhaps you could show us where He stated that, chapter and verse, as I am coming up blank on that.
but you'd better keep believing. You'd just better, boy... oh boy oh boy you better keep that faith, baby, or you're gonna burn.
Depending on works is not the way it goes, so it's not due to the effort on your part. So you don't have to worry about having the stamina to keep it up and too bad for you if you fail.
The option is easy and available to anyone without cost for simply throwing oneself on the mercy of the court. There is no reason for anyone to have to go to hell since God provided a way out so accessible to anyone that a child could do it. People are without excuse for where they end up.
However, your not liking it does not make it to cease to exist.
... she screeched while stamping her feet.
"...true knowledge of any kind--let alone knowledge that is deep and broad--leads directly to the threshold of the Divine, something all wise men realize because men were made to realize it.
"However, notice that I said “threshold,” for our natural reason can only lead to an honest confession of agnosticism unless one makes the conscious decision to take the next step over the threshold. If that weren’t the case, we would not be free to discover God--rather, we would be “theology machines,” which we are not, precisely.
"Many in the west have been so poisoned by secularism that it is difficult for them to any longer perceive God. For that is a key point. The existence of God may be easily proved, but only to a generous intellect that is inclined to accept the evidence. To the intellect that so not so inclined, no evidence will ever suffice. But make no mistake--it is absurd for a wholly contingent being (which is how an atheist must regard himself) to make any absolute metaphysical claims about anything whatsoever.
The intellect corrupted by secularism will nevertheless come up with its own substitute wisdom
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