Could you tell me the name of the church you were working in? Do you know the name of the “satanist “ that were performing black magic? I’m especially interested in their name and the town it occurred in if you believe they may still be doing it. I’ve heard this claim so many times I can’t even recount them all. Was even given the name of a “ real deal satanist “ a few times and once one of them was a mechanic over in Pensacola. He verified that the stories I heard was true , by his retelling of them. Then I was like cool, show me. He could not show me anything. I even borrowed some of his cursed items and slept with them on my bed for a few weeks, and nothing. Im pretty sure that everyone these claims have been made, and they were tested by third skeptical parties…. They all came up fake.
There has been no one who goes inside St. Jude’s and healed cancer kids instantly in front of others. There has been no one that could see auras thst loomed several feet taller than someone that suddenly could not see that aura and tell where someone was standing behind a wall just barely taller and so on. Never been no teenage girl under supervision by medical authorities in a room with a camera who suddenly has claw marks ripped into her side before she crab walked around hissing and no many how many stories exist of “ brown people in third world countries “‘has any of those people actually turned out to be magical and so on. I think it’s all just story telling tropes.
Im not sure why is everyone so against predestination . I guess people haven’t experienced much evil in their lives.
Ignorance is bliss. This is the most true philosophical statement I have ever heard of.
And I’ve experienced enough evil in mine. Some people even more.
Id trade everyday free wil for beign a robot. Couldn’t care less no problem. Don’t know why Christians use it as an argument.
Only if you come at nature with certain assumptions about natural theology and think nature should reveal God or God is analogous to some kind of natural force. If you believe God is an extra-natural Person who communicates and relates, then he is actually revealed in the “universe” because subjective human experiences are part of reality. Dawkins conflates “the universe” with the natural world, something that is inherently objectionable to people who don’t see the world through a lens of scientific naturalism.
A mature universe would be orders of magnitude more dishonest than having a universe emerge through natural processes. Creating Earth with fossils already in the ground seems a bit dishonest.
If God wants us to believe through faith then I wouldn’t call it dishonest. However, it does bring into question past miracles that overtly violate natural laws such as the column of smoke or fire that guided the Hebrews through the desert.
God could make himself as obvious as the clouds in the sky. I think that would convince most atheists. I also doubt that anyone would have doubts about the origins of heaven if we were there, so God could have chosen to create in such a way that origins are obvious. Is it deceptive? I wouldn’t go that far.
Is that where the famous wager comes from? That was an interesting quote. Thanks for sharing.
I don’t agree with Dawkins and we appear to agree that the constants of the universe look fine tuned. I look at the big bang and apparent fine tuning of the constants and see it as a checkmark for theism. Others will disagree. But my question was for Christians here who 1) accept evolution and 2) reject any and all fine-tuning arguments. There is a large population on the forum that fit that description–at least I think so based on the comments I regularly read.
God wants us to base our faith on “sufficiently ambiguous evidence”?
Does the apostle Paul agree with you?
20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.
Was God a tyrant as he walked through the garden talking to Adam? As he performed supernatural miracle after miracle? The Bible consistently relays that in the presence of supernatural miracles, which would meet my definition of proof, the Jews constantly rejected God and Jesus. So for Christians that accept the historicity of many of the Biblical narratives, I am not sure the “tyrant” argument holds much water.
I am speaking to believers. Paul says:
20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.
How do you interpret this? Does creation clearly show God’s invisible qualities, his eternal power and divine nature-- or not? And if science is the means of learners about “what has been made” why do so many theistic evolutionists think evidence for God is nowhere to be found in it?
Thank you for the thoughts. Let me ask a few questions.
Can you expect something not part of the structure to incarnate into it and have divine knowledge? Is that even possible? If so, can God not interact with nature then? Wouldn’t miraculous interactions provide objective evidence of God’s existence?
Agreed.
Interesting outlook but I see how you ended up with that belief. Many Christians thinking that us entering into a relationship with God is what’s in our best interest and its kind of hard to have a relationship with someone you don’t know exists.
But it seems to me that you are saying “God may have had his reasons for designing a universe where he wants to know us but his existence is ambiguous.” I just find it odd that “God hiding his existence” is so less objectionable to some than “God made tree rings.”
A look at our history reveals great deal of good done by devoted believers in the name of God. I therefore believe that it would be in our best interest to strengthen the position of such people. Imagine if we were all absolutely certain ~80% of the population was hellhound (broad is the way)and we had eternal life as many Christians believe, we would be out there preaching the gospel without ceasing!
Faith is one of those words everyone–myself included-uses without really defining it. It is probably the hardest word I can think of to define. It makes arguing to or from it difficult.
I don’t disagree with that. I don’t find atheists to be evil and born again Christians to be good. I think God will see everyone’s heart and knows what we do and don’t do with our upbringing, environment and heredity. Jesus himself said that he will say to many “Christians” ‘Depart from me, I never knew you.’
I think focusing on bettering ourselves, being repentant, grateful and helping others is what God wants (or what any parent would want from a child). Certainly, a benevolent being wouldn’t require salvation to be predicated on human intellectual assent to His existence when He has made such an existence ambiguous, would he? The question is, how does this line up with scripture?
You answer yourself: “The issue I see is teaching Christians to stop treating the scriptures as something they aren’t,”
Evolution har forced the church to modify how it sees scripture so we want to claim “this is how it was all along.” We no longer accept “what’s written in the page” in many cases. And the New Testament and the Gospels in particular are “ancient literature” as well. All the revisions in the OT creep necessarily into the Gospels as well.
Seems, but apologetical thought has justified a lot more which is my point. From my perspective, God hiding his existence only seems a stone’s throw from this because from my perspective we are the climax of creation, stewards of the earth created in God’s own image.
My point is a bit more nuanced than that. Many Christians frame faith in the sense of “God wants to know us” and “have a relationship with us” Scripture also says creation clearly reveals God. Believing there is no evidence in nature of God is a far cry from both to me.
Agreed but faith is a very tricky word to define and its definition changes like the day of the week.
Super interesting question. I think one of Dawkins’ main mistakes is his assumption that the physical universe is primarily the place where God would “show” Himself. Of course I believe, along with Scripture, that nature declares the glory of God in so many ways. However, the human being, not the universe, is named in Scripture as the image of God. If the human is the image of God, then the depths of the human soul will be the best place of exploration for seeing God. “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” Dawkins thinks that he himself plays no role in whether or not he sees God. Clearly that’s a huge mistake. The Scriptures talk a lot about light and sight versus darkness and wilful blindness. There are a lot of things in the human heart that have to be in place in order for it to perceive God. Obviously, people who lack basic self-examination and who don’t believe they have sin within themselves have no reason to think they are blind or playing a role in their own unbelief. Who was it that said God hides Himself in the human heart, where we least think to look?
If would depend on how you view nature. Us atheists tend to see natural explanations as a lack of evidence for God, but many theists view it differently. I think there is a lot of room for disagreement here.
As to the church, it was a Lutheran church in Florida – I don’t think it’s my place to be specific since I no longer work there.
?? What “satanist”?? The closest I can recall coming to encountering any Satanists was in Oregon in the mid-1990s and some people found an altar out in the woods with burnt bones; they were afraid to touch them but took pictures and some zoologists at the university identified most of the bones; they were chicken, squirrel, cat, and small dog. The church the people who found them attended declared that the altar was Satanist, though I did research and couldn’t find any evidence that (1) there were any Satanist groups in the area or (2) that Satanists have ever actually sacrificed animals. The local sheriff attributed it to teenagers who’d watched too many bad fiction movies. Two of the people who’d found it came to me and asked what they should do, which is how I got involved. After determining that the crude altar was on public land, I told them there were two possibilities: either it was just people being bizarre so it was just a stack of stones, or it really was an altar involving evil spirits: in the first case, they could just knock it over and scatter the stones then clean up any other bones and ashes then bring forest floor litter – leaves, twigs, etc. – from a good way away and scatter it to hide any evidence there had been an altar; in the second case they should wait till Sunday and go to the Eucharist and thus strengthened go and just knock it over and scatter the stones then clean up any other bones and ashes then bring forest floor litter – leaves, twigs, etc. – from a good way away and scatter it to hide any evidence there had been an altar. I never heard anything more, so I don’t know if they did anything or not.
The only times I’ve heard of Satanists having anything to do with curses or anything like that was during the “Satanic panic” of the 1980s and they were all related to the fear frenzy about Dungeons and Dragons. I was a Game Master at the time running a modified D&D game and one of my rules was nobody played without parental permission (my players were high school kids), which resulted in encounters with parents, some of whom just wanted to know about the game (I invited them to sit in any time and observe) and some of whom were convinced that the game was Satanic and that the point of the game was learning to cast actual spells; I also invited them to drop by and observe, but I also asked them what they thought the central concept of the game was but never got anything but vague ideas it revolved around demons and learning to gain power over others – I tried not to laugh at that but suggested they ask their kids who were playing or wanted to play in my game what the central concept was. They were shocked to find out that their kids all reported that the game as I ran it was about being servants to someone and that ultimately everyone served the OTG, the One True God, because everyone is a pawn to someone and thus everyone was a servant to someone and it was everyone’s duty to be sure they weren’t serving anyone evil.
Okay, reading back it seems you confused Santeria with Satanism. Despite popular notions from uninformed Christian Charismatic/Pentecostal/‘non-denominational’ groups, the two have nothing in common. A Santeria priest would just shake his head at the idea of generic curse items; in Santeria curses have to be specific to an individual, with magic fashioned around what is known about that individual and preferably involving something personal from that individual. Curses also involved blood for the most part, and the ones I encountered used the blood of an animal that belonged to the target individual or if that wasn’t possible then the blood of an animal of some importance to the individual, e.g. if the person supported causes involving animals one of those would be preferred to some generic animal (though I often wondered what they would have done if they wanted to target a family I knew who all were part of an organization focused on saving killer whales), and if that wasn’t possible then whatever animal was available (chickens were common apparently on the premise that they were ‘connected’ with people via people eating eggs).
One curse aimed at the uncle of a kid in the church there used the uncle’s pet dog cut into four pieces and staked down at the corners of the property plus a chicken, its head cut off and placed by the front door while the feet were cut off and tacked up on the sides of the back door, and the chicken blood was dribbled at various points on the property plus used to write something on the back porch. [An odd thing about Santeria is that advanced priests are free to devise their own rituals, sort of like letting Catholic priests invent their own liturgies: for the one, flexibility is allowed while for the other it isn’t; what makes this odd is that Santeria is generally a “co-religion” with Roman Catholicism, with adherents attending Mass regularly yet in their daily lives turning to Santeria – which isn’t seen as a contradiction because every Santeria ‘spirit’ is identified with a Catholic Saint and vice versa.] Anyway, the uncle and aunt were terrified, as were the kids, and the one kid called me about twenty minutes before classes at the church school were supposed to start. He was determined to get to school but was afraid of the curse. I asked him,
Are you baptized in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit?", and he answered “Yes”. This was a Monday, so I continued, “Did you attend church yesterday?” (which I knew he had), and he answered “yes”; “Did you receive Christ’s Body and Blood at church?” and he answered “yes” (which I also knew): So I told him that the waters of his Baptism surrounded him and the curse couldn’t touch him, and that he had within him the Body and Blood of Christ and no curse could stand against him so he should just grab his backpack for school and a hammer from his uncle’s tools, go out the back door, use the hammer to pull off the chicken feet and toss them in the trash, then jog to school to get there on time. We prayed the Lord’s Prayer together, then off he went.
I relate this because people in the neighborhood had always said that Santeria spells and curses worked whether the target(s) knew about them or not, but in the next few weeks word started going around that curses had stopped working and the Santeria priests were worried. The cursed uncle and family had been too scared to tell anyone what the nephew kid had done because they were certain that or another Santeria priest would just curse them again, but when they heard what was being said they came to church and told the pastor/priest, who asked the kid, who revealed I was the one who had told him what to do. That people were talking about curses not working before the story itself was told strongly indicates that something had changed involving some sort of power that had been balked.
Later the pastor told me that he had sat the whole family down and explained that I was one hundred percent correct: no curses could stand against a Christian’s Baptism and the Body and Blood of Christ. So a month or so later when the kid who had called me found another sacrificed chicken dismembered and stuck around the house he just pulled down the chicken feet and cleaned up the rest.
A bonus was that several other families who were neighbors of that kid and his family started coming to church as well.
But besides the Santeria encounters (it’s weird to type that word since it means “Way of the Saints” even though it honors the saints more in the breech than in the normal “battle”) there are the accounts from missionaries I’ve known who worked in Africa who spoke of the supernatural as being not at all rare, from an encounter with a tribal shaman who confessed that his spirits had gone silent since the missionary brought the Name of Jesus to the village to an encounter with a different missionary and different shaman where the shaman got angry with the missionary and next time the missionary came to their village the shaman met him and started invoking tribal spirits against the missionary, and the missionary just looked at him and said something like, “In the Name of Jesus, get out of my way”, at which point the shaman fell down like in an epileptic fit, off to the side of the path into the village, then some time later when the missionary was teaching a Bible study the shaman came and knelt at the missionary’s feet and said that his spirits would no longer speak to him because they had been commanded to stay out of the missionary’s way and they could not stand against “his Jesus” and please could the missionary teach him to command spirits with Jesus’ name?
I’ve seen healings, though interestingly none of them were ever accomplished by one of the alleged miracle-working “healers” who don’t even deserve to be named. One example is one I think I’ve mentioned here before, involving a fellow college student who was sick enough she couldn’t keep food down and was running a frighteningly high fever who insisted she was not going to miss the Eucharist; to skip to the end, she went forward to the altar rail (Lutheran church) covered in sweat and practically radiating heat, and before she got up from kneeling after receiving the bread and wine the sweat was gone and the fever was gone. Another was similar and also happened at the Eucharist.
Then there was a rehearsal for a modern version of the Faust play; a student spoke the lines that were supposed to invoke Satan and suddenly the room was darkened and cold, the lights still on but muffled like someone had thrown a dimmer switch, a phenomenon that kept on until one student managed to clearly focus on the cross on the room wall and just pray “Lord, have mercy”; the lights behaved normally again and the chill left.
Another comes to mind: I met a seminary student from New Guinea who had only a rushed version of a college education before he got to seminary, who told how he had been studying the lore of his tribe in order to be a ‘shaman’ (I don’t remember the word he actually used), when one day someone gave him a little volume with the Gospels of Matthew and John plus the books of Romans and Galatians and after reading them his teacher/mentor told him he wouldn’t teach him any more because the spirits had been driven from his mind. So he went to the first church he could find and asked what he had to do to serve their God, and between them and a scholarship program for aspiring pastors he was off to the United States to a seminary that church was affiliated with. His English was terrible except for one thing: he could recite perfectly anything from the New Testament that he’d read (with a noticeable English accent acquired from his crash-course tutor).
One last one was when a bunch of us decided to check out a Charismatic conference: At the worship service in the evening, during a period of silent prayer, someone started speaking what sounded like gibberish. As she spoke, there were words streaming into my mind that were definitely not my thoughts. When she fell silent, the pastor quietly asked if there was an interpretation. I stood there wondering if those words had been one since I;d never experienced anything like that before. While I was muddling this over, someone else raised a hand and when the pastor nodded proceeded to deliver a statement that was different from what had streamed into my mind only in some word choices and sentence structure, so when the pastor asked if there was a confirmation I hardly hesitated to raise my hand, something two or three others did (I wasn’t up to counting, I was too busy adjusting my worldview to allow for the fact that I had just been a participant in something Paul had set down almost two millennia earlier).
Why no mass healings in hospitals? I think because mass events like that faded after the ones done by Jesus and the Apostles confirmed the message they preached and some wrote down. Why occasional healings along with occasional encounters with actual evil spirits? I’d say to remind us that God is, as Jesus noted, “still working”. There have been a couple of other events in my life that have also convinced me that the gifts of the Spirit still get distributed, just not abundantly and not really when people go hunting for them. Even in Jesus’ earthly life not everyone got healed or otherwise delivered, only those who crossed His path, and now we have the knowledge of what Paul said, that the Spirit hands out the gifts as He pleases, not as we would wish.
As for claw marks and such I think Hollywood has, as with the Cecil B. Demilles version of the Exodus, turned out spectacles that sell movie tickets.
As for “brown people in third world countries”, I have no way to judge 99% of that; I only assess what I encounter or people have told me personally who tell what happened to them.
I do believe creation shows God’s power – but it’s not something I can prove in a scientific sense, and I think that’s the key – the limits of science. I believe many things that cannot be “proven” scientifically, but it doesn’t stop me from believing them. So I agree with many others who accept EC/TE that looking for scientific proof of God is a bad idea, but that’s only because of the limits of science, not because God’s power isn’t visible.
I’ve known people who are against predestination because of all the evil in their lives.
I prefer a more complete version: Ignorance is bliss right up until it becomes hell on Earth.
After all, what you don’t know can kill you.
You’d prefer to be a spectator watching your own life pass by like it was a long feature film?
I say this from experience: that’s sheer hell! I suffer from a disorder that under the right (wrong!) circumstances cuts my conscious mind from control over my body, and it doesn’t matter what the body does while the mind is stuck watching, the experience is sheer mental torture. The only thing that could make it tolerable would be to turn off awareness and just not be.
Phil, the view that a value of 3 for pi is found in the Bible is not correct.
It doesn’t take a very thorough reading of the text to see that the bath had a rim (or “lip” in the link you provided).
A bowl with a rim or brim that is 10 cm across the top could easily be encircled by a cord of 30 cm because the sides slope.
But, back on topic, the universe looks very much to be like God exists. The wondrous creatures we see, the proportions of nature, many things point to more than random chance.
Consider the fact that the sun is 400 times the size of the moon and 400 times as far away. Without that combination, no eclipse would happen. So the heavens show us God’s involvement.
A few years ago I was in the Amazon rainforest and saw one of God’s creations: a moth with wings that looked like the eye of an owl and a snake. What amazing creations He has given us.
And for those willing to see, miracles still occur.
My point exactly. I think your examples are good in how we see God in creation as individuals, but fall short of proof of God or perhaps even as evidence of God. God is not going to beat us over the head with such evidence, but leave room for faith. To insist on proof or perhaps to manufacture false proofs seems to indicate an insecurity or like Thomas to insist on seeing the nail holes before believing, and is probably part of the fuel for all the emails I get for apologetic conferences. A whole industry has been built on that need for reassurance.
I don’t know of your condition and I’m deeply sorry if you suffer. I suffer too . I’m not mentally stable at the moment I’ve been trough a lot.
But I would prefer what I stated above over a world of chaos and suffering. Because that’s our world right. Now . If I was guaranteed no suffering and no evil I would gladly watch my life pass like a long film. Everything for order and peace .
That’s a favorite ‘coincidence’ of mine, too. We live 20 miles from the center of the umbral path of the 2017 total eclipse and in my reading, I tripped over one secular scientist saying it was ‘magic’. Sometimes people have to bend over backwards to ignore providence in their denialism.
Romans 1, 18 and following are talking about whole societies, not individuals; I presume the questions posed are about individuals.
As to Adam, conditions change with a phase change; the situation is not applicable.
Miracles are proof? All that a miracle proves is that something is going on that you don’t understand. They’re certainly not proof of God – Pharaoh’s priests managed miracles, too.
Christians accepting “the historicity of… the Biblical narratives” are not in a tyrant situation, they are in the faith situation I mentioned above. The tyrant situation holds when there is no possible way to reach any other conclusion.
Why should it be a problem for the entity who sustains the structure, in effect creating it again moment by moment, to incarnate into it or to do so with divine knowledge? As a bit of a frivolous illustration there’s the Tron idea, except in the situation with God the “program” is not running independently, it’s running within Him.
All that miraculous interactions prove is that something you don’t understand is going on; that God is behind them is only one possible conclusion.
Faith didn’t have such a mushy meaning back in the day, it’s been given one by all sorts of people doing damage to the word, from those who think it means “belief with no evidence” to those who think it means “confidence in nothing in particular”.
No, because my statement has nothing at all to do with evolution, it has to do with treating the Bible as what it is without any reference to any other field of knowledge. Nothing needs to be chopped or re-interpreted because evolution doesn’t impact the scriptures in the first place, nor does any other science, except to aid in appreciating what God has done.
Evolution only forces modification when what is being modified isn’t from the scriptures but has been imposed on them.
And since the only modification that needs to be done is to stop forcing things into the scriptures that aren’t there, there aren’t any “revisions in the OT” to “creep… into the Gospels as well”.
It isn’t the scriptures that are being revised, it’s things that aren’t in the scriptures in the first place.
You can’t interpret the Bible in a vacuum. Its impossible to interpret anything without recourse to background knowledge and assumptions about other things.
Dawkins is assuming, just as literalist fundamentalists do, that his worldview is obviously th only valid one and so he can judge everything by his worldview – so the only declaration of glory or anything else that Dawkins can conceive of is via science or scientifically measurable phenomena.
The problem is that almost everyone views the situation vis a vis God and nature in Deist fashion, as though God built a clock and left it running on its own. The Bible’s view, though, is that “nature” is merely what God is busy doing/creating moment by moment. Paul writes what he does from that perspective, so when he sees nature he recognizes that he is seeing God… and expects everyone else is as well. In the modern era, though, that expectation fails because we have all in essence become Deists.
That fits with what I just wrote above: what we are seeing is the Artist at work, yet the modern view sees the coherence of the work and on that basis fails to realize that there is in fact an Artist.
