They don’t have to disprove it Phil.
This may be going out on a limb, me being agnostic and whatnot, but the soul resides in the place you make for it. Your faith is clearly important to you in a way that differs from my own view of faith, and that’s OK. What matters IMO is the value you place on your faith, and the enrichment it brings to your life. Why is faith important to you? (rhetorical Q, no need to answer) Science is not going to answer that question for you, nor should we expect that science will have that answer, ever.
I hope this helps?
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Yes and we atheists eat babies for breakfast, murder our mothers, and like to bathe in lavender infused blood of innocents. [/sarcasm]
Atheists are fully human, have the same feelings as anyone else, with the same strength and weaknesses that anyone else might experience. My own experience with Christianity is one of love for my fellow (wo)man, the Golden rule, and tolerance. It doesn’t surprise me that some seem to have forgotten these lessons, but it still saddens me.
The original draft of this comment was much shorter and to the point.
My last post was in reference to the original posters concerns about how his faith was being affected. I was not being mean or unloving, just factual. The Word of our God says that those who do not love Him are controlled by a carnal mind and that it is not subject to God and can’t be. So since God says that, those of us who trust, love and obey God should not place ourselves in the position of listening and being persuaded by those who don’t. We who once loved sin know what sin does to a person; we are not ignorant of its power to destroy. I know what atheists think and how they are inside for I was like them in my past, and yes, we all are slaves of some type of sin until we turn (repent) and submit ourselves to the Father and Jesus. We all need the salvation that Jesus worked for us through His cross and resurrection. A person, who does not acknowledge their slavery to sin and turn to God for deliverance, has nothing godly to give to those who are following Jesus. A person who does not love God is sinning 100 percent of the time because the greatest command is to, Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind and strength. This was me before I repented and placed all my trust in Jesus.
So if someone who does not love God is offended by what Gods says about them, their problem is with the Almighty. But if they will acknowledge their sins and turn to Jesus for salvation from sin, they will find forgiveness and Christ will live in them and deliver them from sin and God’s righteous judgment and wrath on all who continue in sin. There is love and forgiveness from God but only the repentant and humble will receive it.
So, I will always encourage and warn those who love Jesus to turn away from trusting the counsel of those who do not love Jesus. Those who don’t love God have no life in them for God is life. God is very clear when He tells us, Ps 1 1 Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked or stand in the way of sinners or sit in the seat of mockers. 2 But his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. 3 He is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither. Whatever he does prospers. 4 Not so the wicked! They are like chaff that the wind blows away. 5 Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the assembly of the righteous. 6 For the Lord watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish.
Since this is an open Christian forum, it is appropriate and beneficial for those who love Jesus to watch out for those who have the same love. It is our privilege and obligation to encourage and warn fellow believers to continue in love and faith for God and to call those who don’t to turn and receive the salvation and love that comes through trust (faith) in Jesus.
We atheists are as concerned about violating the rules set out in the Christian Bible as you are about violating the rules in the Koran.
Factual, or hypocritical; how would you know the difference? Christianity is ill-served by hatred.
Cody, this forum is not in fact your street preacher soapbox. It is not appropriate for you to indulge in off-topic exhortations here. It is not your privilege, and most certainly not your obligation to preach to participants. Read the forum guidelines, start abiding by them, and quit derailing conversations with sanctimonious twap which has nothing to do with the original post.
- Participate with an aim to gain deeper understanding about orthodox Christian faith and/or mainstream science, and constructively explore the relationship between them. Users whose participation in discussions seems primarily focused on promoting unorthodox religious beliefs, idiosyncratic ideas about faith and/or science, or anti-religious sentiments will be asked to take their proselytizing efforts elsewhere.
- Focus on discussing other people’s ideas, not on evaluating their character, faith, communication style, or perceived “tone.” Please avoid attributing beliefs, motivations, or attitudes to others.
- Contribute thoughts that are relevant to the topic at hand, and avoid intentionally steering a conversation off-topic.
- Assume legitimate Christian faith on the part of other people, unless they identify otherwise. The purpose of discussions here is not to judge the legitimacy or efficacy of anyone’s faith or lack of faith.
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I understand you to be saying that you have no interest in the Word of God in the Bible just as I would have no interest in the rules in the Koran. If that is the case, that is a very good reason that I encourage those who love Jesus to not take the counsel of those who do not love Jesus. As God’s Word says, 2 Cor 6:14 Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness?
So those who love God are commanded not to be yoked, bonded with those who don’t. But just as God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son to deliver them from sin, we who love God have that same love. That love compels us to do good to our neighbor but it also compels us to encourage the unbeliever to turn to Jesus for salvation and to continue to encourage believers to follow Jesus.
What I am asking is for you to use a bit of empathy. Imagine the same words being hurled at you from a Muslim.
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Altair made a statement about doubting his faith, I responded in accordance to the Word of God. This is totally appropriate and not off topic.
I will back out for now. PM if you want to talk. Thanks.
Good points and counterpoints, but not on topic so let’s move on. Will leave in the thread as perhaps the posts help us understand one another.
It does make me think, what does the issue of free will mean to our agnostic and atheist friends? My first secular reading was back in the late last century when reading Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock where he put forth the idea that if we just knew enough, we could predict pretty much everything we say and do, essentially saying everything is determined. I think quantum uncertainty pretty much squashed that at some level.
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That our actions are predictable doesn’t absolve us of responsibility for those actions. It might push the cause and effect back to the events that shaped our personality and morality. There is certainly free will, but many decisions are effectively made long before we know the questions.
NOT a comment about anyone in particular. 
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Altair, you ask questions that most thoughtful Christians grapple with at some point or another. Most Christian neurobiologists and philosophers of mind would concur that mind (or “soul” if you wish) and brain are not the same thing. For example, our increasing understanding of brain activity does not address either the problem of individual consciousness (why do I think “I am feeling pain” rather than “pain is being felt”) or the “binding problem” (why do I have a single consciousness that experiences and integrates many different stimuli at the same time?) Where Christian thinkers differ is on whether the mind/soul is an immaterial substance that interacts with the physical brain (interactive dualism) or whether it emerges from the brain and constitutes a different aspect of the same basic “stuff” (dual aspect monism). A good entry point into this debate is “In Search of the Soul: Four Views of the Mind-Body Problem” edited by Joel Green and Stuart Palmer.
As for free will, quantum indeterminacy rebuts Laplacian determinism and makes free will at least possible in principle. The neurobiological experiment that supposedly debunked the reality of free will was performed by Benjamin Libet in the 1980’s and has since been severely criticized. You can find a good discussion of the Libet experiment in Ch. 6 of “All in the Mind?” by Peter Clarke.
As for morality being a product of evolution, the hitch is that Darwinian evolution (which I accept as a professional biologist) cannot explain true (i.e., non-reciprocal) altruism directed at strangers to whom we are not genetically related. You can find a good discussion of non-Darwinian altruism in Ch. 9 of “Original Selfishness” by Daryl Domning and Monika Hellwig. I also wrote a short paper on this topic; it might be a little hard to find, but here is the reference: Ippolito, Daniel F. (2019) “C. S. Lewis’ Moral Law Apologetic in Light of Modern Evolutionary Biology” published in “The Faithful Imagination: Papers from the 2018 Frances White Ewbank Colloquium on C.S. Lewis & Friends”.
I am spending my current sabbatical on the very topics that seem to trouble you, so I would be happy to further pursue this conversation.
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Thank you very much for the answer! I am very glad to meet you. It would be very interesting and useful for me to conduct a dialogue on this topic. The statements of Dawkins, Denette, Harris, and other atheists baffled me. I am not an expert in biology, so I was confused. They say that science has proven the absence of purpose, good and evil, and so on in this world. And I don’t know how to relate to this. Are there any outstanding Christian scientists today, maybe Nobel laureates? I am interested in biologists, physicists and chemists. Thank!
Dawkins, Denette, and Harris should know better than to make such claims about science (I suggest you check sources to what they actually wrote). Dawkins is likely to say that science makes religion unnecessary.
Hi Alex!
There are plenty of outstanding Christian scientists; here are three books to get you started on the science/faith dialogue:
https://www.amazon.com/Language-Science-Faith-Straight-Questions/dp/0830838295/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=language+of+science+and+faith&qid=1613684513&s=books&sr=1-2 one of the authors, Francis Collins, is the current head of NIH and the former leader of the Human Genome Project.
https://www.amazon.com/Finding-Darwins-God-Scientists-Evolution/dp/0061233501/ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&keywords=finding+darwin's+god&qid=1613684580&s=books&sr=1-3 this one is a little more technical, but still readable.
https://www.amazon.com/Faith-Physicist-Theology-Sciences/dp/0800629701/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=faith+of+a+physicist&qid=1613684641&s=books&sr=1-1 The author is an Anglican physicist with a PhD in astrophysics.
Happy reading, and don’t hesitate to get back to me!
Cordially,
DFI
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It means I believe I can choose what I do. Whether or not it is true is secondary. Quite frankly, the illusion of free will is good enough for me.
In the short term I think determinism is mostly true for neurochemistry. Long term trends would probably be sensitive to small perturbations, be they quantum or otherwise (i.e. Butterfly effect).
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I recommend reading Anatomy of the Soul:Surprising Connections between neuroscience and spiritual practices that can transform your life and relationships by Curt Thompson. I would be a bit cautious about anything written by Caroline Leaf. She can be inspiring but much of what she writes has no scientific basis.
They are right in that there is no detectable, inferable purpose from sense data; in this world. From intruding in to this world is another matter. As for good and evil, they are not rational concepts either way.
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