Terry --- I appreciate your knowledge, and I really admire you.
Let us subtract man from the consideration of how things were on Earth by going pre-history and looking at the pre-sin, pre-Fall of Man situation in nature. ; Before man, before the Fall you would have Earth unsullied by Satan and disobedience and pretty much things would be under the exact nature of what God had created. ; Right, are you with me?
In case you didn't know, I don't believe in the Genesis account, the tidy little package of man's fall, and therefore all the calamity, nah I don't buy it, besides whoever wrote Genesis borrowed the idea and added to it from more ancient peoples.
Rampant competition between species locked in a life or death struggle for survival. ; Weapons and defenses are everywhere evident in thorns, thistles, poisons and such in plants to horns, fangs, claws, armour-plating and venom in animals. ; ; Are you willing to look at this NATURAL situation and give your concept of God a big THUMB'S UP?
How long did this eat or be eaten scenario continue? What has science revealed about the length of this godly creation BEFORE man?
We are talking a loooooooooooooooooooooooong time. Millions and millions of years.
Are you willing to say all this competition, this struggle, this orgy of eating, fighting, struggling, swallowing, ripping and bleeding confirms your demand that a GOD is behind the design? ; ; What sort of God is this?
Yes I know that it was eat or be eaten, and only the strongest survived back then, a very violent time indeed. Perhaps there's a reason why dinosaurs existed, maybe they did something played some kind of role to make the conditions we live in today possible, I also don't know if God runs the show here on earth, or if another of his creations does, or if we were just put here and left to our own devices, if any superior being is supposed to oversee things here, then he is asleep at the wheel or, he is an evil and vindictive being.
Is it any wonder no religious person I've ever met will face this and discuss it without instantly dismissing it and turning a blind eye?
I'm not dismissing it, but then I'm not religious either, I'm only choosing to look at it more objectively, and I might decide to disagree with it.
The idea of a sweet, loving, benign Creator who created Earth just for man DOES NOT SQUARE with millions and millions of years of kill or be killed survival of the fittest plant and animal existence. ; No way.
Like I said before, maybe there was a reason why these things had to be as they were, maybe not.
You have to account for the facts. ; Even the myth of Genesis doesn't account for the facts. ; It tries mightily to introduce conflict as the fault of man. But, the Bible writers simply did not know about prehistory and the fossil evidence of countless generations of devoured meat and digested living matter that had come and gone a billion times before they sat down to concoct their tale of the Garden of Paradise and man's inept and insane behavior.
I agree.
Nope, if you are going to insist there is an intelligent design behind Earth, you have to account for the truth of the evidence, the whole truth of the evidence and nothing but the truth of the evidence. ; Death, fear, deception, struggle, bloodshed and chaos were all about life in its very nature from the get-go. ; ; Man is a late-commer. You can't blame him for everything.
Like I said, we cannot know everything, no one has survived from millions of years ago to tell us all the why's of our existence. Terry I've never spoken to an atheist before, I am curious to know why you feel as you do, please believe me, I'm not being sarcastic or critical, I really want to know. Is it anger at the world conditions and the fact that he or it doesn't intervene? Or just lack of valid evidence.
IC
