To start off let me say that I am an atheist, But not to long ago consented myself a deist. Now I have never beloved that A god or gods have any say in what goes on in our life. Just created the universe and let it be. But living in the bible belt of Texas I know for a fact that I am one of the only ones in my tri-county area to thank like this,
To start off let me say that I am an atheist, But not to long ago consented myself a deist. Now I have never beloved that A god or gods have any say in what goes on in our life. Just created the universe and let it be. But living in the bible belt of Texas I know for a fact that I am one of the only ones in my tri-county area to thank like this,
Now to my question, Do you personally believe in miracles? And if so how do you know from an objective stand point that they were miracles? Ex, A man has cancer, it seems without doubt he’s going to die still his family prays for him, and somehow he makes a full recovery. The family being a very religious one claims god is to thank. But a deist/atheist point of view is “well he would have gotten better in time with or without prayer.” We Need much more irrefutable proof of a miracle, its like I always said,
God seems to help those with curable sickness but will never grow back an amputees leg.
God seems to help those with curable sickness but will never grow back an amputees leg.
... no idea why the last line repeats. oh well
> Now I have never beloved that A god or gods have any say in what goes on in our life. Just created the universe and let it be.
So in the question "who created our universe?", you'd answer God, but the answer "God" wouldn't be for any other question.
> But living in the bible belt of Texas I know for a fact that I am one of the only ones in my tri-county area to thank like this,
You can't possibly know this for a fact. Why do you state that you know it for a fact? This is assumed a posteriori knowledge, which you don't possess.
> Now to my question, Do you personally believe in miracles? And if so how do you know from an objective stand point that they were miracles?
Why should I believe anything? What do you define as a miracle?
Assuming the universe is materialistic, then a miracle would be something unpredictable; if the universe is deterministic, then a miracle would be something unexpectable; another definition of miracle is that which we can't explain. If it can't be explained, or up to the time it was explained, it was a miracle. I'm not sure if one of these is what you have in mind for "miracle", or perhaps something else.
> Ex, A man has cancer, it seems without doubt he’s going to die still his family prays for him, and somehow he makes a full recovery.
Seems without doubt for WHO and HOW has this person concluded this? If we're talking about family relatives, don't you think it's possible for them to misjudge a situation when they're worried about a close person of theirs?
(Seems means perhaps; without doubt means certainly, "perhaps certainly" is not correct)
> Ex, A man has cancer, it seems without doubt he’s going to die still his family prays for him, and somehow he makes a full recovery. The family being a very religious one claims god is to thank.
Why is God the one to thank when a relative doesn't die, but not the one to hate when a relative dies? Why is God the one to thank if an enemy dies, why don't we thank God when an enemy lives?
One could answer "it had to be so and God only knows why". If that is the answer, then clearly we must not thank God because a relative of ours lived; for only God knows why he lived. Perhaps he lived to do evil wrongdoings.
> But a deist/atheist point of view is “well he would have gotten better in time with or without prayer.” We Need much more irrefutable proof of a miracle, its like I always said,
It's impossible to have proof of a miracle. Think about it, what kind of proof suffices? I can't think of anything.
> God seems to help those with curable sickness but will never grow back an amputees leg.
If the sickness is curable why would you ask for Gods help? Is he some sort of lackey, running around for everyone?
You said you were a deist, and now an atheist. That which is common between deists, atheists and theists is that they believe. Deists believe in a creator, theists believe in a God, atheists believe in his absence.
My question to you is, why do you believe? Why not simply contemplate of the possibilies of Gods, creators and such beings, and accept that you can't really answer the question "Which God exist, if one does?"
>What do you define as a miracle?
In my mind a miracle is something that defies all laws of a physical world, and is caused by the direct intervention of a higher power namely a god or gods.
>My question to you is, why do you believe? Why not simply contemplate of the possibilities of Gods
this is a very good point and i agree. To me it seems logical from both a scientific and a philosophical to say with out doubt that there is/isn't a god or gods. but i still call myself an atheist mainly for time saving reasons, but if we were to get deep into my beliefs and dissect them, then i would consider myself a agnostic fundamentalist
>You can't possibly know this for a fact. Why do you state that you know it for a fact? This is assumed a posteriori knowledge, which you don't possess.
this was merely an attempt at humor through sarcasm and hyperbole (a failed attempt now i see)
>If the sickness is curable why would you ask for Gods help?
my poit exactly, you never see prayers to cure aides or other such as of now incurable disease Emphysema, Polio, Ebola, etc.
Well, I don't believe in miracles, but I'm not saying that one may not occur, or hasn't occured (or is not occuring...)
I'm not believing because I see no benefit in believing in miracles. For my current goals and philosophy I think believing in miracles is not helpful.
However, it's known that psychology plays a big part in diceases and viruses, especially to therapies with heavy drugs. If such an individual is convinced to believe in miracles, that may give him hope (which, logically, is false), but which may improve his psychology, and as a result, his condition.
stuff happens... end of story.
the universe is not only stranger than you imagine, it is stranger than you can imagine.
with that in mind, if it happens, that means it can happen and therefore it's not a miracle, but an event. miracles are impossible.
> the universe is not only stranger than you imagine, it is stranger than you can imagine.
How do you know?
Miracle can be defined as something which is usual, unespected and never seen before. There is always possiblity of something unusual to happen. we judge what is a miracle and what is not by common sense, that is, we call it miracle when we couldn't excpect it to happen before.
I can not deny miracles, but I dont beleave who talks about miracles.
I have a question:
Why are you so condescendent with the science that requires you to ask for proof of everything else? It doesn't hold up well against close examination in many cases. That's why it keeps being reformuled every 'x' time.
Requiring evidence for every small thing means you are a moron, not a smart person that will never be fooled. See, I'm not really gona put a camera inside my stomach so you see the miracle healing that took place in there...
The fact that I don't need the meds I used to, should be enough, but apparently it isn't.
[Insert Doctor Manhattan speech here]
>>9
Spontaneous remission is a well-documented phenomenon. No need to invoke supernatural entities.
Also, the reason accepted scientific theories change every so often is not because they don't hold up to close examination, but because new evidence that cannot be explained by existing models requires a new model to explain. It amazes me that many people, Christians in particular, have trouble understanding this.
Here, have a youtube video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgGxIxSetJg
I don't have trouble understanding that, I have trouble with science because it accepts downright lies, like psychs
>>12
I watched the video you linked, and it contains zero references to what you call "downright lies, like psychs". I'm not sure what that refers to. Psychology? I can assure you that while there are conflicting models of human psychology, not all of psychology is a "downright lie".
Psychic powers? Those have little to no acceptance by science. But here's my reaction to the video:
Oh wow, a VenomFangX video. Didn't he delete his YouTube account after getting into legal trouble for donation fraud in his videos a year or two ago? But let's avoid the genetic fallacy and look at the content of the video.
>However, energy is reliant upon time, so if time didn't always exist, neither could energy. (01'45")
Is it really? Let's ask Wikipedia:
>In physics, energy (Ancient Greek: ἐνέργεια energeia "activity, operation"[1]) is an indirectly observed quantity that is often understood as the ability of a physical system to do work on other physical systems.[2][3] Since work is defined as a force acting through a distance (a length of space), energy is always equivalent to the ability to exert pulls or pushes against the basic forces of nature, along a path of a certain length.
Hmm, no mention of time here. It's true that you cannot actually exert pulls or pushes along a path without time to do so in, but the ability to exert them could still exist at any given moment without time passing, couldn't it?
Moving on.
>It is impossible for eternity not to exist, and I'll show you why. Let's say that there was nothing, at a point in ... not time, but let's just say before time there was nothing. So, nothing, no time, no matter, no space, no eternity ... nothing. Zero times anything is nothing ... zero. Zero times zero is nothing. Nothing can only create ... nothing. So something must have always existed, and it couldn't have been matter, couldn't have been time, and it couldn't have been space. [Going on to claim that this something was an eternal and unchanging creator god]
First of all, there is a difference between the mathematical concept of zero and the philosophical concept of nothing. I can have a zero amount of money in my bank account, and it will accrue zero interest, but this doesn't mean my bank account has nothing in it.
Multiplication should also not be casually confused with creation.
Furthermore, a statement like "before time there was ..." makes no sense, as the concept of "before" becomes meaningless when considering a situation without time. Cosmologists have said that asking what occurred before the Big Bang is like asking what is north of the North Pole. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_argument#Scientific_positions; see also http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CI/CI200.html)
Quoting Wikipedia again:
>Extrapolation of the expansion of the Universe backwards in time using general relativity yields an infinite density and temperature at a finite time in the past.
Our most precise estimate, based on observation of cosmic microwave background radiation, puts a value of 4.339 ± 0.035 ×10^17 seconds on that finite amount of time since the beginning of time (or at least since the end of the Planck epoch, up to 10^–43 seconds after the Big Bang) and now.
Now, infinite density is easy to get by putting either any amount of mass into a volume of zero, or infinite mass into a nonzero volume. Note that for there to be any mass does not necessarily require the existence of matter, thanks to mass–energy equivalence. Just as energy cannot be created or destroyed, neither can mass. Infinite temperature is trickier. (continued in another reply, as I've hit the character limit)
>>12
continued from >>13:
Temperature refers to the mean kinetic energy of particles, and for there to be kinetic energy, there needs to be motion within space–time. However, before the end of the Planck epoch is where several current laws of physics break down, and gravity was presumably unified with the other fundamental forces, so it could be argued that the kinetic energy was in fact potential energy caused by the immense gravity of all that mass in an either zero or infinitesimal volume. I have not studied physics beyond A Level (which I finished eight years ago), though, so I'm not exactly an authority on cosmogony. This is also why I had to refer to Wikipedia a lot—I sold my old physics textbooks years ago.
>Now, you might already believe in God, but you just don't believe in the Christian God—or maybe I've just convinced you that there is possibly a god, but how does that prove it's the God of the Bible? Well, although the Bible itself is proof enough that it is from God, how can I prove that just from what we're talking about here, without using the Bible, that the Christian God is the true and living god? Well, surely, the god that gave you eyes is the god that sees, surely the god that gave you ears is the god that hears, and surely the good that gave you a sense of morality is moral himself. So, that sounds a lot like the Christian God, and if you don't know about the Christian God, pick up a Bible and start reading. (07'23")
Oh dear, where to begin? Using the Bible as proof of god is a nice bit of circular logic, but thankfully he decides not to refer to it after the first mention. So is he trying to say that no deities other than that of Christianity ever had eyes, ears or morals? That's pretty much as if I were to point to a grizzly bear and say "Look at this animal. It has a nose, a mouth, lots of fur, and can walk around on either two or four legs. That sounds a lot like a gorilla to me, so clearly this must be a gorilla."
>So, if you still believe that you are the result of blind chance, that this universe was created by not a god, but just always existed or just that it was a cosmic birth from nothingness, um ... you have more faith than I do. (08'02")
Again with the blind chance argument. Assuming this is a potshot at evolution, I'll just refer you to http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB940.html and be done with that part. And even if the universe did come from "nothingness", that could be perfectly sound. (See http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CF/CF101.html)
The video goes on to restate the cosmological argument in floating 3D text, which I've already dealt with above. (http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CI/CI200.html, a more detailed response can be found at http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/theism/cosmological.html)
I feel like I've lost a few IQ points just for listening to that video enough times to transcribe the parts I take issue with. Finally returning to the point of your post.
>I don't have trouble understanding that, I have trouble with science because it accepts downright lies, like psychs
As stated above, I don't know what you mean by "downright lies, like psychs". Please elaborate.
>>15-16
>>13-14 here, thanks for the kind words. Actually I've never been a member of a debate club, and have merely been observing the masters at work in comment threads on ScienceBlogs etc. I'm convinced that my flatmate, who is actually studying for a BA in Rhetoric, could run circles around my arguments. It took me almost three hours to write up those posts, too.
>>17
Well, one thing I've always liked about slow text boards is the effort people are willing to put into their posts. Really makes sites like 4-ch worth reading.
Since there seems to be a refuter here, I'll leave my experience mentioned:
I had ulcers and they healed in a nights sleep.
Explain the miracle, I'll add more later, I've seen (and been posessed by) demons, so gl.
But I will start with something soft, such as my now gone ulcers.
>>19
It was something we can't explain via our current idea of science but definitely isn't God.
What now, theists?
>>19
We are very pleased to hear of your improving health, but when you speak of "ulcers," what do you mean, exactly? Are you speaking of a skin ulcer, a stomach ulcer which apparently can be mimicked by gastric reflux disorder, or something else?
miracle = act of god
act of god = macroscopic instantaneous non-deterministic event
macroscopic instantaneous non-deterministic event = violation of macroscopic causality
violation of macroscopic causality = macroscopic nonlinear event
macroscopic nonlinear event = macroscopic instantaneous non-deterministic event
macroscopic instantaneous non-deterministic event = mircale
miracle = act of god
therefore if god exists, the stupid fuck can't explain himself very well
Perhaps God does it for the lulz. What if He is trolling us all?
kill yourself
無神論
no