Big bang question

I might be a bit different from the people you met because I was an atheist until I was 15. In fact atheist is the wrong word. I was oblivious to the fact that a higher being might exist. So I was just living life. So I started my reasoning into a Creator based on the existence of the universe, fine tuning and consciousness and then further in the journey as I was studying philosophies and religions I also stumbled onto the historical Jesus and made a leap of faith to historical Jesus.

Objective evidence however for the existence or non existence of a Creator will never exist for as long as humanity exists which is why we have these eternal debates but faith is basically reasoning based on educated guesses which incidentally seems to get stronger into the journey of a faithful person by experiencing paranormal events for example like seeing Orbs or Spirits.

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As you start this journey I would suggest focusing on understanding the difference between evidence and claims. I often see people who claim to have evidence, but what they actually have are claims.

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That is why I came to this forum. I want to be careful not to put any false information on my website. If someone discovers something I write as blatantly false, then my credibility is rightfully damaged. I see all kinds of “claims” made about politics and so many other topics with no supporting data, I don’t want to be one of those types of people.

How do you know this?

Common knowledge.
Why, do you have any new information?

What’s your view of classical apologetics?

Look I don’t want you to misunderstand me. I believe in God and Jesus Christ.
Classic apologetics are some of the reasons I mentioned elsewhere in another topic reasoning why I believe in God. So you don’t have to convince me.

The topic that we’re talking about is objective evidence. Where we can all go to a certain location and talk to God on demand while He shows us his power. THIS is the evidence that all humans in the existence of humanity are looking for and THIS will never exists unless it is shown to us by the Creator in due time.

Yes. Comedian Stephen Colbert, a Roman Catholic, has said that “Faith must be felt.”

Knowledge about these things is pretty uncommon. But I get what you are saying even if you are misusing your words You said it will never exist as long as humans exist, but you also understand that God can do this when and how he chooses.

Classical apologetics is a method of apologetics that uses purely rational arguments to prove the existence of God. It goes back a long ways, and is used by a handful of Christian apologists today. Sproul and Geisler were notable examples, but they both passed away recently. Bill Craig is still alive, but I’m not familiar with anyone else.

Most Christians have a distaste for these type of arguments. Which I can appreciate, but they are still, and powerfully, valid at disproving atheism. What remains to be known, or cannot be known through pure reason, is the real dilemma straight from the pit of hell or the height of heaven. It can be hard to tell.

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There’s an argument which disproves atheism?

When combined, the ontological and cosmological argument do the trick.

Not quite. Be very careful when you hear talk about “assumptions” in discussions about science and apologetics, because there is a lot of misinformation about them, especially in young earth circles, where the concept gets thrown around as if it were some kind of magic shibboleth that let them hand-wave away anything and everything about science that they don’t like. It doesn’t work that way.

In general, scientists don’t make assumptions unless there are very good reasons, either from evidence or theoretical considerations or both, to believe that those assumptions hold true. Even then, a lot of research goes into trying to establish the precise extent to which they hold up and under what conditions. One of the ways that they do this is by cross-checking different forms of measurement against each other; if you have two different methods of determining the age of a rock formation, for example, and both methods give the same result despite making different assumptions, then that is a pretty good indication that the assumptions concerned were in fact correct.

In order to challenge a scientific technique on the basis of its assumptions, there are three things that you have to do.

  • First: state exactly and precisely what the assumptions are.
  • Second: make sure that it really does make the assumptions that you are claiming that it makes, and that it hasn’t been superseded by a more modern technique that side-steps them or includes a built-in test for them. (Case in point: isochron dating.)
  • Third: Provide a coherent explanation as to how you could get the same results, with the same degree of precision and accuracy in the measurements, as what we see in nature, if the assumptions were in fact incorrect.

For example, if four different dating techniques all give the same age of 66 million years for a certain layer of rock, but you were trying to insist that that layer of rock was only five thousand years old, you would need to explain not just how all four different techniques could be out by a factor of more than ten thousand, but how they could all be out by exactly the same amount, to the extent that they still agreed with each other to within just 1%. Being wrong doesn’t work like that.

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Faith has nothing to do with ‘reasoning based on educated guesses’ for a start and absolutely nothing at all to do with ‘paranormal events’ involving visual hallucinations for an end.

Got a “preferred wording” for one, the other, or both? or your choice of references for each?

Yes it does, unless you were indoctrinated into faith. But out of free will, faith begins with questions of existence. Why do we exist? Why does the universe exist?
So the fine-tunning argument is one answer which can lead people into faith.
The miracle of Fatima can be another reason which can further confirm one’s faith or lead them into believing.

I would also suggest reading up on logical fallacies and good practices for logical arguments, at least for the evidence based arguments. A google search should net you several lists to study.

Indoctrination is not the opposite of ‘reasoning based on educated guesses’ and ‘paranormal events’ involving visual hallucinations.

What does free will, whatever that is, have to do with anything?

Just because a why question can be syntactically formulated doesn’t mean there’s a semantic answer.

Fine tuning is the biggest sharpshooter fallacy imaginable. Which therefore undermines faith.

As does dependence on claims of visions.

But yeah, faith is what we do in the light of what we hope for, whether we distort reality or not.

Sproul and Gerstner’s version of the ontological argument in their book Classical Apologetics is the gold standard in my humble opinion.

What’s your take on either one of the arguments?

It is opposite because it’s the “Shadows in a cave allegory”. Someone tells you and harps really hard on you that Those are reality.
While free will allows you to explore mysteries on your own which can lead you outside the cave.

This is not true at all. Because it explains that things are designed and have a purpose.

Faith happens when the opposite happens and reality is distorted in front of you.

At the heart of the fine tuning argument is the claim that someone had to fine tune our universe in order for it to have the features we observe. That claim needs evidence.

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