Did a God or Gods create the universe? EDITED

[Alan Fraser]

TIG posted the same link to Alain de Botton at the bottom of p. 56. Personally, I think de Botton makes some very valid points. There seems to be a basic need in mankind for the kind of order, ceremony and reinforcement that he points out that religion is actually very good at. It might be fine for the likes of Richard Dawkins to intellectualise about the nature of reality, but you can't really expect some white-haired little old granny (maybe of limited educations and who recently lost her husband) to do the same. She just wants some order, familiarity and TLC.

[Stinkie]

Thirty-five year-old atheists with an MA want the same thing. At least this one does. As you suggest, Dawkins' stern outlook isn't for everyone. Far from it, I think. No-one wants to be on a diet all the time - not when there's gravy, and pie, and sausage rolls.

[brodie]

@unknownuser said:

No, Brodie, sorry. You have a way with words, I'll give you that,

I was tempted to stop reading at this point.

@unknownuser said:

but you're nonetheless glossing over the fact that the very nature of Alan's presuppositions and yours is vastly different. Yours are based on a leap of faith, which makes them inherently irrational. Alan's, on the other hand, have nothing to do with faith whatsoever -they're rooted in a tradition of empirical research and logical deduction. Equating both stances, at least to my mind, is intellectually dishonest.

I simply disagree. I think the commonality is that we both have a definitive position on God's existence by which we categorize ourselves. I think the person that would be outside of a discussion of faith would be something like what I might call a non-theist - someone who has simply never really thought one way or the other about God. At least where God is concerned such a person would have no faith at all. But for people like you and I, we have both collected a portion of data and determined that based on that data the best conclusion is that God does (or doesn't) exist. We both think we've come to the most logical conclusion based on the data but neither of us has complete omniscience. In effect, based on our individual knowledge and conclusions neither of us believes we have as much faith as the other person.

As a minor example, science might not know how life came to exist on earth within the relativelyshort amount of time that it did, but you have faith that it occurred naturally and perhaps someday science will discover exactly what that natural cause was.

-Brodie

[brodie]

@alan fraser said:

I never mentioned the resurrection. I did however notice that you earlier referred to evidence of the resurrection. There is none. There is no evidence (outside the pages of the Bible) that any Jesua Bar Joseph ever existed at all...no court records, no mention in any contemporary Jewish or Roman chronicles or records of anyone of that name travelling around the province, preaching to vast crowds, no legacy of followers resulting from those sermons...nothing at all. Most of the early christian groups were formed as a result of the later efforts of St Paul, who never even met Jesus....if he existed.

Is that your position? That Jesus never existed?

@unknownuser said:

I don't presuppose anything. You keep doing this...creating some kind of equivalence where none exists. You can't presuppose the absence of something. I don't presuppose the absence of a god any more than one presupposes the absence 300 foot statue of Marilyn Monroe orbiting Alpha Centauri. It simply doesn't figure in my philosophy. That is entirely different from presupposition; only theists presuppose.

My post above, addressed to Tom, touches on this.

Perhaps 'presuppose' was misleading in this case. A didn't mean that in an a priori sense in this case. Perhaps I should have said that you've 'concluded' there is no God and so the resurrection is, necessarily, impossible. My point is that I think you've made up your mind before you come to the table and so ANY possibility no matter the historical unlikelihood makes more sense than resurrection.

@unknownuser said:

Yes it absolutely does follow. You don't 'lose' something as profound as positive proof of god...and certainly not if that god is anything remotely worthy of the name. We're talking of an omnipotent being who takes the trouble to reveal himself, not some struggling grade teacher, striving to get her pupils to remember something as far as the next SATs.

How do you know that you don't "'lose' something as profound as positive proof of god"? Aren't you just assuming this? I've given you an example where a completely revolutionary technology (concrete) was essentially lost for some 1300 years. My argument doesn't rely on some lost proof, but I think you're being a bit illogical here.

As for God, many people have wondered, if He exists why He hasn't made himself more apparent. We can get into that if you wish but the general idea is that God wants to be known but He doesn't force himself on people. This isn't simply a cop-out, but fits very well with what the Bible teaches us about God.

@unknownuser said:

If you can give historical evidence of the Resurrection, I'd be delighted to see it. Like I said, I don't harbour presuppositions.

I'd be happy to, perhaps we can widdle the matter down a bit though so we don't take a tangent. You've, no doubt, looked into the resurrection to some extent and reached some conclusion or explanation. Would you care to share that explanation? That might better give me a direction to go.

@unknownuser said:

Concrete is a bad example. the secret was never lost, it just became scarcer for a while; but in any case, it's an irrelevant comparison.

As an architect by training, I quite like the example actually. I've never heard the theory, though, that you're referring to. Who was it, exactly, that you suppose had this knowledge which generally is believed to have disappeared with the Roman empire?

@unknownuser said:

Not in the least...just some of them. At the time of the history recorded in the scriptures, there were highly advanced cultures all over the planet. There was Egypt and Assyria, there was the Indus Valley and China. All these places had civilization, culture and writing.
You therefore have to ask yourself why on earth a god would reveal himself to a bunch of nomadic goatherders of no fixed abode and only an oral tradition of record keeping?

One certainly does need to raise that question. Similarly, when Jesus came he presumably could have at least chosen his followers to be well studied rabbis and leaders within the community and yet he chose a mixed group of fairly regular young jewish men and assorted commoners. But then throughout the Bible God is alwayspicking insignificant folks to get his purposes done. It's certainly a pattern we see over and over again.

@unknownuser said:

I mean, it's so easy to lose such a revelation isn't it? How terribly convenient...just like the tablets in the Ark of the Covenant.

I suppose if the people died out it would be easy. If there were a big catastrophe like the fall of Rome (yes I'm kicking the dead concrete horse) then it could be lost. Thankfully, that didn't happen though and I suppose God wasn't too worried about that perhaps.

@unknownuser said:

If you have any intellectual honesty, you also have to question the relationship between the primitive Middle eastern concept of the scapegoat, a blood-sacrificial animal which could be used to absorb evil and thus remove it from society; and the concept of a blood-sacrificial man who was also a son of god that could do the same thing for sin.

I think you're misunderstanding the Christian position. The idea isn't exactly that God created this cool sacrificial system with a scapegoat and lo and behold Jesus fit in there quite nicely. The idea is that the sacrificial system, including the scapegoat was sort of a 'type' or 'shadow' of what was to come. Much more could be said, but that's the jist of it.

@unknownuser said:

I presuppose nothing, but consider everything...something that definitely cannot be said of most christians...especially in the USA...and their incredibly parochial view of religion.

It sounds like I'm perhaps more of a perspectivist than you then. I think we all come at a question with our own presuppositions and biases. No one can be 'truly' and 'completely' objective in that sense. The trick to ascertaining the truth, from this frame of reference then, isn't not having presuppositions, but rather identifying what those presuppositions are in order to better deal with them. I suppose it's a bit like an alcoholic first needing to admit he is an alcoholic before addressing the problem.

@unknownuser said:

Apparently you presuppose that what you were taught in church and Sunday School is true, at least in part. I don't make any such presumption. I don't see why the beliefs of a Middle Eastern Bronze Age society should shape my life in the advanced industrial age any more than any other such society. There's good stuff in there and there's bad. I've generally found that all the good stuff can be found in just about every other society...of any religion or none.

My only predisposition towards being a theist was growing up in America. I didn't grow up going to church or sunday school. The point isn't whether or not the beliefs of an ancient society are good or bad. The reason to believe them or not is because they're true or false. If Jesus didn't exist or didn't resurrect, I don't much care how good the beliefs are or whether or not they make my life better or worse. I don't want to believe what makes my life better or easier, I want to believe what's true. In many ways my faith in Jesus makes my life neither better nor easier, but I stay faithful because it's true.

@unknownuser said:

Pretty much any religion on earth can be distilled down to "Treat others as you would like them to treat you." Atheists operate according to exactly the same rule. None of us need any deity to tell us the best way to get along; we're perfectly capable of working that out for ourselves. If we hadn't worked that out aeons before Biblical times we almost certainly wouldn't be here now.

I disagree, I think not only was it not worked out eons before biblical times, but by in large, it's not yet been worked out to this very day. Beyond that, though, I think you overestimate ancient morality. After all, it wouldn't have been necessary to suggest an 'eye for an eye' sort of morality had it not been acceptable to kill a person of lesser rank who gouged out your eye or knocked out your tooth.

-Brodie

[Alan Fraser]

Well, now I'm really bored. So sorry, Brodie, I've got no intention of addressing all that tedium (which in places is self-contradictory)...especially as you continue to insist on turning the argument on its head and demanding the burden of proof from those not making the claims. My position on anything in the Bible is irrelevant.

I don't misunderstand the Christian position at all. Unlike you, I did grow up going to church and Sunday School...Anglican and Methodist. I even still attend from time to time. not only that, but I spent many years teaching in an educational establishmen run by Catholic nuns. So I don't need any lessons in the theology, thanks.

I do not need to disprove anything in the Bible to justify my position...any more than you have presumably taken the trouble to disprove all other claims by all other religions in order to justify yours. I only need to be satisfied that Life, the Universe and Everything can be proven to function without the need for a deity...and it can.

You can disagree all you like with my and Tom's position, but you are still wrong in equating theism and atheism as equally valid logical conclusions based on the evidence to hand. Faith is called faith for a reason. What you are trying to do is redefine it as a logical conclusion based on hard evidence...or data as you call it. It is no such thing.

You are perfectly entitled to your faith, but you cross the line when you start equating evidence for god with empirical scientific evidence. You are blurring a colloquial use of language with a specific, technical term...like people who insist on saying about Evolution "It's only a theory." as if it's no more than a hunch.

[andybot]

@alan fraser said:

You are blurring a colloquial use of language with a specific, technical term...like people who insist on saying about Evolution "It's only a theory." as if it's no more than a hunch.

false equivalence is the whole premise of creationism in the US. Such a waste of precious educational resources/ time.
Indeed Brodie - faith is faith, science is science. Never the twain shall meet.

[Stinkie]

I was going to say the same thing Alan did. Good thing he beat me to it, so I needn't put on the dreaded thinking cap on again.
Nor get the dictionary out.

One thought, though. I find it odd one would even want to suggest faith and science are equally valid in the same way. To my mind, that's a negation of faith's very core: the irrational act of actively embracing a concept one, by definition, cannot proof to be true or even compeletely understand.

[brodie]

@alan fraser said:

Well, now I'm really bored. So sorry, Brodie, I've got no intention of addressing all that tedium (which in places is self-contradictory)...especially as you continue to insist on turning the argument on its head and demanding the burden of proof from those not making the claims. My position on anything in the Bible is irrelevant.

I was looking for your position on a historical event that we might refine the discussion a bit rather than meandering on irrelevant points. If we don't even agree that Jesus existed any discussion on the resurrection would have been putting the cart before the horse. If you don't want to have that discussion that's fine. You'd asked for historical proof though so I was just trying to go down that road.

@unknownuser said:

I don't misunderstand the Christian position at all. Unlike you, I did grow up going to church and Sunday School...Anglican and Methodist. I even still attend from time to time. not only that, but I spent many years teaching in an educational establishmen run by Catholic nuns. So I don't need any lessons in the theology, thanks.

I meant no offense. I simply found the question rooted in a theological misunderstanding despite your history. Maybe it's a misunderstanding on your part, maybe it's a denominational misunderstanding, I don't know.

@unknownuser said:

I do not need to disprove anything in the Bible to justify my position...any more than you have presumably taken the trouble to disprove all other claims by all other religions in order to justify yours. I only need to be satisfied that Life, the Universe and Everything can be proven to function without the need for a deity...and it can.

Maybe you're satisfied with the current naturalistic explanations for things like the creation of the universe and abiogenesis. I'm not.

@unknownuser said:

You can disagree all you like with my and Tom's position, but you are still wrong in equating theism and atheism as equally valid logical conclusions based on the evidence to hand. Faith is called faith for a reason. What you are trying to do is redefine it as a logical conclusion based on hard evidence...or data as you call it. It is no such thing.

It's one thing to say I'm wrong, it's another to refute my points.

@unknownuser said:

You are perfectly entitled to your faith, but you cross the line when you start equating evidence for god with empirical scientific evidence. You are blurring a colloquial use of language with a specific, technical term...like people who insist on saying about Evolution "It's only a theory." as if it's no more than a hunch.

I'm not sure what you're referring to here. I've spoken of philosophical arguments for the existence of God and I've spoken about historical evidence of the resurrection, for example. But it's not my position that God can be proven by some sort of repeatable scientific process through experiments and observation.

-Brodie

[Box]

And where is this historical evidence of the resurrection?

[david_h]

@unknownuser said:

Such a waste of precious educational resources/ time.

I agree. . .I've been following this thread from a distance. . . .a long distance. . . interesting thoughts on both sides and eventhough this debate has been going on for 2000 years I was absolutely sure that it could all be solved here on the SU forum. It's where I go for answers.

...as this thread keeps repeating . . .Science is of the mind--Faith of the heart. . .and never the twain shall meet? I don't personally believe that, but I believe it's out of my range of knowledge.

So where have you guys landed on this thing?

Any "converts" one way or the other?

No? . .. I thought not.

Maybe Eric (boofredlay) can set up a little speed challenge voting poll thing--each side declare victory. . .and put this one to bed.

VS

[Box]

You left out this one David

---

[david_h]

[brodie]

@unknownuser said:

One thought, though. I find it odd one would even want to suggest faith and science are equally valid in the same way. To my mind, that's a negation of faith's very core: the irrational act of actively embracing a concept one, by definition, cannot proof to be true or even compeletely understand.

I think that the idea that faith is supposed to insinuate a lack of proof is false. When I say I have 'faith' I don't mean that it's in opposition to 'proof.' I mean 'faith' in the sense of 'trust.' It's in a similar sense that I have faithin my doctor to take care of me. It's not in contrast to the proofwhich I have that he'll heal me, but rather because of it (he's done it before, he's taken an oath, he went to school and obtained the necessary knowledge, etc.).

That said, there is a sense in which there's no irrefutable evidence for God. But that's not what I expect to find.

-Brodie

[brodie]

@box said:

And where is this historical evidence of the resurrection?

I appreciate the question but honestly I've got little heart to get into it at this point. I don't think anyone here is terribly interested in having the conversation. At this point it feels like too broad a conversation to get into. No doubt we'd need to get into why the gospels are a viable historical source of information, even if we don't accept them as 'gospel' truth. And then we'd have to get into alternative theories. And then we'd get pushed back into arguing the existence of God. We obviously all find that pattern tiresome. While many here seem to have a thorough understanding of the scientific method, I don't see much evidence of a familiarity with the historical method and what the differences are.

-Brodie

[Box]

I am very familiar with the historical method, which is why I asked to see your evidence.
If you are going to point to the bible as your evidence then the conversation is pointless.

[andybot]

@unknownuser said:

...as this thread keeps repeating . . .Science is of the mind--Faith of the heart. . .and never the twain shall meet? I don't personally believe that, but I believe it's out of my range of knowledge.

Sorry, I just said that one for fun. I think the two operate in separate spheres that can be complimentary, sort of like Brodie's doctor example. There is still a person to person trust relationship, but the doctor better be operating from scientific knowledge, not scripture...

[brodie]

@box said:

I am very familiar with the historical method, which is why I asked to see your evidence.
If you are going to point to the bible as your evidence then the conversation is pointless.

Well, at least that's a starting point. Before I start spouting random factoids about the Bible, though, is there a specific reason you don't believe that it can be used as a historical source of information? To keep things concise I'd like to stick to the gospels here as it's primarily where we find information on the resurrection.

Edit: one notable exception I probably should have mentioned is 1 Cor 15:3-8 which deals directly with the resurrection and is generally accepted to be a sort of extremely early creed

-Brodie

[Box]

The bible is an historical novel, written by many many people over centuries.
People who have heard stories, people with political agendas, people with their own ideas.
Parts of the bible can be verified as accurate to certain historical events other parts are simple allegory.
There is no doubt the book exists and existed from way way back, but it still a book written by men.

If you got a bunch of different people together, some SU novices, some SU experts and some with specific plug-ins to sell and some who just wanted to be there because it felt good, and asked them to edit all the posts on Sketchucation into one definitive book on how to work with SU, you would have a bible. Some of it would be accurate, some would be biased and some would be plain wrong. It would make a great read and people would swear by it because it is written, but it don't make it the inerrant word of Mike Lucey.

So, show me some non biblical evidence.

[IdahoJ]

@unknownuser said:

To my mind, that's a negation of faith's very core: the irrational act of actively embracing a concept one, by definition, cannot proof to be true or even completely understand.

An excerpt from an article I've read here: http://www.zeitun-eg.org/thomas.htm

@unknownuser said:

"What's less easy to understand is the thought-out, rational pursuit of God against one's better judgement. Loving God and seeking to serve God against one's interests, plus the sheer difficulty of the attempt to love one's neighbor, is, it seems to me, the best proof of religion."

or just plain faith, IMO.

Then Jesus told him, "Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed." (John 20:29)

Pretty well sums it up for me.

Cheers.

[brodie]

Box, you're speaking in vast generalities and I'm trying to hone in on something we can sink our teeth into. I think there's some extra-biblical evidence we can talk about but it's not nearly as convincing or persuasive, in my mind, as a good historical look at the evidence within the Bible.

For example, if we dig into 1 Cor 15:3-8 a bit...

@unknownuser said:

For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance[a]: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas,[b] and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.

This is generally believed by historians to be an early creedal statement that dates to within a few years of Jesus' death.

Jesus died in the early 30's and Paul was converted some 3-5 years later. 1 Corinthians was written in the mid 50's putting the statement at MOST about 20 years after Jesus' death. But Paul implies that he 'received' the creed which historians believe to have an Aramaic character which would suggest that it was created at a time when the church was made primarily of Jews rather than gentiles. Based on these and other historical evidences, this points to the very early date of the creed. This counters the notion that the resurrection could have been some sort of later evolution of an idea that developed over time.

Starting here, do you have any disputed on historical grounds?

-Brodie