Rex
The fossil record and the evidence for origins are still very much in dispute.
By whom and to what extent? How many informed opinions differ from the general consensus?
I think you will find out that whilst there is disagreement over areas of comparative detail, the number of reputable scientists worldwide who doubt that the fossil record shows millions of years of evolution due to inheritable change is well below 5%.
The massive evidence itself can in many cases demonstrably be taken for creationism and in fact was, until the scientific and parts of the theological community (who compromised into surrender) decided that disposing of the notion of God would be their philosophical position. This did indeed happen over a period of time but now the tide is turning and that scares the unbeliever and threatens his own worldview.
What utter drivel. For a start you are making a monstrous straw man against millions of believers who believe in god AND evolution.
You to essentially claim that a bronze-age goatherds ideas about how the world might have been made by god are the definative version, even when they are so obviously flawed as ónly be fit to join all the other silly creation myths on the refuse heap of mans past. Your personal beliefs belittle god by their insistance on primative literalism and your suppostion that god would be incapable of making the world using evolutionary processes.
Your talk of turning tides is just lies. Please post evidence of the worldwide reversal of opinion you claim. I know you're not too hot on evidence though, so I won;t hold my breath...
NO, the apologisms are a command of scripture in the pastoral letters. My faith is rooted in the Rock of my salvation, in the person of Jesus Christ. He assures me of the faith that He gave me in the first place! God and man, both, remember that. He still bares the holes in his side, wrists and ankles.
I suppose you think that was an answer? All you do is make it worse for yourself. Faith without works is dead and faith without evidence is very often a load of bollocks. The fact your beliefs have so little evidence to support them they require an industry of apologetics spanning multiple centuries to support them is a clear enough indication of how 'right' you are. Gravity needs no apologetics, if you're not willing to set your standards of evidence higher than that of the tooth fairy, so be it.
The general theories are most solid concerning micro-evolution and almost completely unsupported and indemonstrable concerning macro-evolution.
Empty vessel. Let us see you disprove a few of the well documented examples of macro evolution. Toddle off to Talk Origins and pick one, there are hundreds there. I'd rather you did it that way as then we might get your own words and see how much you personally know - or whether you are just repeating what you have been told because you have 'faith'it is true (but not enough knowledge of the field to really have the vaugest idea).
Darwin said that proven ‘irreducible complexity’ would effectively debunk his theory. It has been and his theory is a ‘has been’, yet it is held as 'true' by the weight of tradition by those who would deny God.
Nice to see you are entirely ignorant of the well known and extensive evolutionary theories and responses to the issue of so-called "írreducible complexity", or you would not make such a rash statement. And what the hell has Darwin got to do with it? He might have first published evolutionary theory but to take quotations from Darwin as sacrosanct and current is as ignorant and deceptive as to take medeival documents on architecture as sacrosanct and current.
Whether or not I like the comparison is not the issue (genetic fallacy). You made a comparison between a (commonly viewed) a claim of someone who is mentally imbalanced, with someone who has some evidence of fact in their assertions……
Evasion and hyperbole. Please prove you have more evidence for you being right as regards your beliefs than a UFO believer has for theirs.
Let’s see, how can I say this nice and with tact? HOGWASH! You present a false dilemma. I am actually avoiding the ‘suicidal argument’ of this day and age, “all roads lead to the same place; all religions lead to God; belief is more important than evidence.” Pluralism cannot be true. A God powerful enough to create by His word alone needs no evolutionary method to arrive at the point where mankind is living in a completed world! I do not care where you would ‘lump me in’, it is entirely irrelevant!
And an animist would probably not care where I lumped him in, as he would be as convinced as you as to his rightness, and havve the same inability as you to prove it to anyone other than someone engaging in the same set of presuppostions. You, the Pope, bloke with bone through nose; none of you can prove your paranormal beliefs are better than the other. Thus you being lumped into the "Ï am right because I am right" posse is ENTIRELY relevent.
Oh, you mean Constantine,
Yes, a pagan...
whose mother was a believer.
But he was a pagan.
He found it politically expedient to issue an edict that decided the issue of the heresy of Arius. You are using a genetic fallacy instead of answering my assertion about the consistency of scripture.
No old chap, you are presupposing your claimed consistancy (although going from the god of war and child-rape to the god of love is not that consistant in my eyes) is an indication to something other than it being assembled by people looking to assemble something vaugely consistant.
Unless you have evidence to the contrary, Ocham's Razor would lead us to believe the consititution and content of the Bible was entirely based upon the perceived needs and beliefs of those doing the choosing of the cannon. You have no proof the books rejected by the "Pagan working party on what Christianity will be based on" were any less right or inspired than those which were rejected. You assume lots.
The destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD; the virgin birth, death and resurrection of Jesus…….
There I go saying ambiguous prophecy and 'prophecy' after the date of the evnt don't count, and you ignore me. I find it stunning to believe that you can't see the Jesus story may have just been a story, based upon an interpretation of OT passages regarding the Messiah, but having no physical reality. Your 'faith' allows you to accept no end of suppositons.
Hogwash again, this is precisely the reason why Christianity wins just about by default when the philosophy of naturalism is exposed for what it is. Christianity has prophetic, historical and practical evidence far beyond any religion. Indeed, no religion has any evidence even close to that of Christianity.
Well, there's several hundred million Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Shintoists, etc., who think you are wrong and have the same level of proof in their beliefs as you have in yours. All you do is SAY you are right.
Would the real god of the Universe allow whether he was real or not to be determined by anything other than the mantra-like repititon of a group of people who can't prove beyond doubt their Messiah even existed? Why would a loving god allow his very exostence to be a mater of speculation, and his desires for man to be the source of many wars and arguments throughout history?
No, because of the above it is my belief that I know Jesus Christ personally as my savior and Lord. All who genuinely cry out to Him will be saved.
But your beliefs are not facts. You know Near Death Experiences? Did you know that their nature and format are cultural and belief based, i.e. these intensely real experiences are INTERNAL based upon the brain content of the person experiencing them, not anything to do with an afterlife (unless there is kind of a multiple choice afterlife where every one gets to go to their own idea of heaven). You can personally experience Jesus all you like; I'm not basing my life on YOUR brain chemistry.
You can see Christ throughout the O.T. and we can look back at the Cross of Calvary today and see the salvation of mankind.
Really? So Jesus approves of giving virgin girls under 14 to soldiers as war booty. Wow. I didnt know that. I do notice that you don't respond to that particular point I made... come on apologist, apologise! Damn, if you can't justify a god of love condeming girls to sexual slavery what good are you as an apologist?
Your analogy is again delightfully ignorant…..
It is one you cannot disprove.
You really have not investigated this at all have you? You apparently are content to read funny little arguments from amateur internet skeptics because it suits your spiritual poverty.
Are you saying no religons are ever made up? You're mad if you are, as there is clear evidence they have been throughout history, from Egypt to the modren day. If religons can be made up, surely the first thing one should do is make sure you're not believing in a made-up religon. Can you do that? No, not with certainty. You simply allow your powerfull ability to presuppose to cover all the gaps.
UH, the last that I looked the apostles did not kill each other, no one has claimed that they did and they certainly did not conquer the Roman empire and impose Christianity on it!
Aw, come on, next thing you're going to tell me is that cultures are expressed by religions, rather than religons being expressed by cultures. You must believ that the way you are arguing. Cute. Wrong, very wrong, but cute.
Does that fact really escape your notice? 'Islam today' is remarkably silent when it comes to killing Jewish babies, flying airplanes into buildings, blowing up Iraqi schoolchildren, and the deaths go on and on because the suicide and homicide bombers are following the teachings of ISLAM.
Seems you are so convinced as to your opinion you close your ears to millions of moderate Muslims.
Just as two hundred years ago most Christians were misogynistic racists who fully supported the use of force in Empire building and the imposition of religion by force or bribary, so too the less develped Islamic cultures in the world are a complete nightmare.
Just as Christianity now embraces equality, human rights, and the pursuit of peace, so too will Islamic cultures as they mature.
And do you know what made Western culture mature? SECULARISM. And that's exactly what will make Islamic culture mature.
However, someone whose dad is a misogynistic goatherd will still have a dad who is a misogynistic goatherd and all the effects of being raised by him, even when he has Air Nikes and a mobile phone. Cultures evolve at a generational speed, not at the speed of consumer society.
I found that you could take the same evidence and argue for intelligent design.
Apart from the fact that it is a self-falsifying belief system as it fails to meet the requirements it insists must be met, i.e. that of complex things having a designer. Another one of your presuppostions.
Open your eyes to the creation, it did not come about by any random acts of universal chaos.
You are obviously lying about having really studied evolution at all. No one who had studied evolution would charaterise it as "random acts of universal chaos". So, like I said previously, you don't know what you are talking about as regards evolutoon as you don't even know what it is.
You Don’t expect to find a completed 747 is a aircraft junkyard.
You is funny. Could you please use arguments that havent been busted open six ways for several decades? Nur, of course you don't find a completed 747 in an aircraft junkyard, but if you think for one minute that is a comparison to evolution you are again showing your ignorance about evolution.
You find it at the end of an assembly line in Washington state, designed by engineers and built by craftsmen, all using brains that are designed in irreducible complexity.
Nice to see you don't realise that the brain is one organ that most certainly is NOT irreducably complex. Why claim to know about evolution when you don't? I thought Christians weren't meant to lie?
However, the prodcution line is a good metaphor (stripped of any suggestion of planning or directed action) as complex entities are the end result of a 'production line' of millions of years of minute inheritable change.
No, it is alive and well everywhere but parts of Canada and western Europe.
What percentage of people with a science degree worldwide believe macro-evolution did not happen without divine influence? I know there are various stupid lists you will probably be tempted to post from some Creationist site or other; don't, they are already refuted and traduced, and all I'd do is post hatchet jobs others have done on them. I think it is generally accepted about 95% of science graduates accept macro-evolutoion took place under various forms of natural selection.
I.D. is arrived at by the investigation of all of the evidence. It is not limited to the presuppositions of those who contend there can be no supernatural....
ID refutes itself. And you make a straw man there; "those who contend there can be no supernatural" is a distortion, what is actually fair to say is "those who contend there is no evidence for the supernatural"
What is more merciful, an eternity separated in from God or complete and utter destruction? You are talking about a metaphorical description of hell that may or may not be appropriate.
Golly Rex, I wish I had your magic Christian Prophecy Decoding Ring. Great how you know what was metaphorical and what wasn't. How do you know if the Genesis account was a metaphor Rex? I know you'll not answer this by the way, as you can't. You just presuppose it isn't a metaphor.
And now you decide you'll not contiune.. well, I can see why. Even you must realise how inadequate and unfounded your beliefs seems when subjected to investigation;
- You make false claims about knowing about evolution (and thus having the compitence to have an informed decison). Yet in your very description of the process you show you know next to nothing about the subject.
- You insist your beliefs are correct, yet also insist the beliefs of other religionists (with the same level of proof for their beliefs as you have for yours) are wrong.
- You make unsupportable claims about a worldwide resugance in the belief in Creationism or ID.
- You have no way of excluding the possibility that Christianity is not largly made up.
- You have no way of excluding your claimed personal experiences are not anything other than your brain chemistry being a bit inclined that way.
- You claim the ability to know when the Bible is being metaphoirical or not.
I could go on, but given the above it is not surprising you are running from this discussion.
But thanks, I always appreciate you taking the time to totally undermine what you believe in by talking part in a debate in a public forum. Next time you need a trouncing, come on in...
