Hi,
Good statement about faith "Must Obey!". That is why God seeming 'hasn't been around much'. He requires faith and for those who have faith He is not distant but near.
On the subject of making creation in seven days then surely, if He is who He says He is, then seven seconds who be plenty long enough?
Anyhow, time is immaterial to God as He exists outside of it (space too).
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?book_id=23&chapter=90&verse=4&version=31&context=verse
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?book_id=68&chapter=3&verse=8&version=31&context=verse
So you could read from these verses that God did not take literally seven days, but seven thousand years, conclude it was a very long time indeed, or say that the actual time was not important.
My own belief is that it is most likely seven days, but my second choice would be seven thousand years.
Regards,
Stephen
Could the widespread belief in God be evidence that he doesn't exist?
by DT 13 Replies latest jw friends
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Chalam
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quietlyleaving
Dt
Could the widespread belief in God be evidence that he doesn't exist?
or could it point to a deep seated human desire to think of their dead family members as not really dead and gone, when they die, but still living.
In ancieint times and even now people worship and in the past deified their dead ancestors. Their badness was forgotten and their herioc deeds were kept alive through storytelling and myth and somehow humans started aiming to be like them and worshiping them.
It seems to me that "God" came out of human loss and as a way of making sense of death. That to me would expalin why it is such a deep seated concept and why it so comforting at times of death.
Just thinking....
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serotonin_wraith
It does basically come down to a feeling at the end of the day. There's no reason at all to believe in a god. Every 'reason' I see in this thread can be refuted easily enough.
I think if we (or most of us) had an inborn belief in a god, there would be no need for parents to teach children all about their particular god. They would just know. I know that if I thought there was a god, I would have to look at the nearly 3000 gods that have been worshipped and decide if I thought any of them were real, before moving on to some deist creator, perhaps.
But as shown by some posts in this topic, some people have narrowed that huge list to just one god, and I bet they haven't even entertained the idea of looking into these other gods! In fact, they dismiss them without a second thought. Flippin' amazing! They truly believe they've overcome the 1 in 3000 odds that they have the correct god, and the 1 in however many thousands of religions. Yet somehow they cannot accept conditions being right on this planet for life to come about - even when there are so many planets in the universe that if the chances of life coming about were 1 in a billion, there would still be a billion planets supporting life!
It's evolutionary in a sense. I hadn't thought of the leaves rustling/intelligence example before. I see it as evolutionary in the sense that children have to trust what their parents say in order to survive, and if a parent happens to teach their child all about a particular god, the child will believe. They may give up that belief in the future or they may not, but the chances of them choosing another god over the one their parents taught them about is small. I'd bet all the money I have on saying Chalam wasn't raised a Muslim, for example.
So it can be childhood indoctrination, or a child who isn't raised in a religion can still come to believe in a god if they want there to be one, or they don't have the humility to admit that some things in this universe are still unexplainable to us here and now.