reports of communicative Contact events (Voices, Visions, Dreams) to humans on earth from God in heaven are direct firsthand witness testimony
the strongest form of evidence at Law
there may not be tangible physical forensic “hard” scientific evidence
but there is direct firsthand witness evidence
Law, like Economics, is based on the “reasonable person standard” that all people are sufficiently rational that their personal direct firsthand observations & experiences are credible
wild unproved hypothetical conjecture & speculation is not science
science is the study of cause-effect relationships
there is no way anyone can say with “95.123456789% certainty” what happened “before” the Big Bang
all human science ends at (before actually) the Big Bang
no, we have no clue what happened at the Planck Temperature – that’s what, 30 orders of magnitude hotter than anything reproduced at CERN ?
“Judge a tree by its fruit”
If the bottom line is “95% we know what happened before the Big Bang”…
No adults have ever actually believed in fire-breathing dragons, Tooth Fairies or Santa Claus
Tall tales told around the campfire to kids to pass the time are not comparable to reports of Religious experiences
As for “ghosts” & “psychic phenomena”, there is some overlap with Religion – all the “ghosts” of Saints seen at the Crucifixion (Matthew 27:53)
And the fact that many people have historically reported such “psychic phenomena” is firsthand direct witness testimony evidence that something is indeed happening
a credible report from a mature adult that they experienced something is not easily dismissible, “Your Honour, Objection… Bah humbug!” does not get the Judge’s sustain
mountains of direct firsthand witness testimony evidence, from all Jerusalem at the Crucifixion to all around this world, is really actually truly sincerely honestly genuinely evidence… that “earth is haunted”
Theistic speculation: “mmm… maybe Heavenly Powers are mucking with our minds?”
But, yes, there is tons of direct firsthand witness testimony evidence (Matt 27:53) that “earth is haunted”
Likewise, there is tons of direct firsthand witness testimony evidence for exotic ultra-high-performance air-craft maneuvering in our atmosphere – but note aircraft in the skies of earth is not evidence of aliens and spacecraft from the other side of space, evidence for UFOs on earth != evidence for aliens from space
UFOs – lots of evidence for exotic super-high-performance aircraft
Ghosts – lots of evidence earth is and long has been “haunted”
Religion – lots of evidence God in heaven has long been communicatively Contacting chosen human “Priests & Prophets” with meaningful intelligible audio-visual messages via “Voices, Visions & Dreams”
That’s what the direct firsthand witnesses have reported. In the absence of any other evidence, one way or another…
that’s our intelligence report so far
witness testimony evidence for
ultramodern aircraft,
“haunted earth” and
“Voices / Visions / Dreams” from heavenly powers
The latter two categories of reports share some degree of similarity and overlap
Happy Halloween – spaceship earth’s been “haunted” (with some sort of perception-altering psychic phenomena, Cosmic Rays??) for thousands & thousands of years (according to allevidence in so far), our minds have been playing tricks on us, or other-worldly influencers (Cosmic Rays?) have really been playing tricks on our minds
If direct eyewitness testimony evidence doesn’t satisfy you, and I didn’t say it should, then we have to actually hire FBI “X-Files” forensics teams to actually investigate (“bah humbug!” != investigation)
Now all I have to do is take care of the unicorns.
First of all I thought it a bit hilarious that people would defend a multiverse while dissing the unicorns, when the first most likely would include the latter.
And that brings us to the shear enormity of THIS universe which has to make us wonder if even this one universe is more than enough to make the existence of unicorns pretty likely, expecially considering considering the following…
There are actually candidates for unicorns right here on this planet.
a. The extinct Siberian unicorn was a large furred mammal related to the rhino.
b. Considering the considerable strength attributed to the unicorns talked about in the Bible, some other relative of the rhino doesn’t seem so far fetched either.
c. The near extinct Saola, or “asian unicorn,” rarely found in Vietnam and Laos, looks to be more closely related to cattle. It also has two horns, but close together enough they might be mistaken for a single horn, thus accounting for its nickname.
d. In the water there is the narwhal and the unicorn fish.
e. Then there is always the possibility of a one horned mutant of some other animal like the Saola, Okapi, or the Oryx which might have given rise to the unicorn myth.
Ok… I suppose there are also psychics and healing crystals mentioned which nobody has defended but I personally know where to find a lot of firsthand witnesses and believers of both of these as well.
The difference as far as I can tell is that a cause is one factor among others which sets off an event. God as Creator is much more than the cause, God is responsible for the totality of the process. Thus if science could find a cause to replace God, then God would be an unnecessary explanatio0n for the universe.
However if God is the Creator Who is responsible for creating the universe out of nothing, then God cannot be replaced, because by definition if the universe exists, then God exists. The only way to disprove the existence of the Creator God is if the universe has no Beginning. This does make faith in God falsifiable, and thus provable.
Amateur interpretation – as genetics show, there was significant discontinuity from post-glacial mesolithic to Neolithic farmers and bronze age herders
Only those few megafauna which survived into the bronze age are remembered, because earlier cultures’ memories didn’t persist??
Maybe mythic memory is not all that it is cracked up to be, and it took the written word to really solidify things.
I might also just observe that something as monumental and recent as the Civil War would be almost forgotten if it were not for written records and photographs and such. I cannot recall anyone ever telling me an oral story passed down about the Civil War not dependent on written records, though I am sure a few of you may have. Any examples?
I couldn’t stay away . . . I thought it might be helpful for an atheist to chime in on this topic.
First off, one doesn’t “prove” atheism. I guess I could “prove” that I don’t believe in deities by taking a lie detector test or something like that, but that is as far as proving atheism would go. Atheism is nothing more than a statement that someone does not believe in deities. Whether we know how a process like the Big Bang came about, or know about the history of the universe, it really doesn’t matter as far as atheism goes. There would still be people who don’t believe in deities. Even if we found a scientifically demonstrable non-supernatural cause for the Big Bang, there would still be people who push the supernatural further back to the origin of those newly discovered natural processes. You can’t disprove the supernatural in any meaningful sense, but you can lack belief in the supernatural.
If there was anything that a vast majority of atheists might share it is some form of skepticism, or more specifically pragmatic skepticism. Many of us are more focused on HOW we gain knowledge, the method by which we establish facts and understanding. This is why arguments like God of the Gaps arguments aren’t that compelling to most atheists. If there were ample positive evidence for deities acquired through skepticism, then that would convince many atheists to believe.
Good to hear your voice. I have missed your clarity of thought on many issues.
Ironically, that is actually something Christians should share with you atheist types, at least regarding false teachers in the church, and there is no reason it should not be applied in principle to all of life.
I have a family story about the War of Northern Aggression told to me by my mother that I actually sort of confirmed when I was digging into the family genealogy and found the military records of the family members involved. It is now written down of course.
I am also willing to make room for faith based beliefs, even if I don’t share them. In a theological discussion there are going to be premises that are taken on faith, and that is something atheists may not agree to, but Christians can.
One could just as easily argue that something can be true even if there isn’t a logical or reasoned argument to support it. It is best to remember that Atheism isn’t a claim about having truth, it is only a statement about belief. Skepticism isn’t itself a claim of truth, it is just a method out of many that we can use.
A good quote to tie all of it together:
" Science is […] a way of skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility. If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then we’re up for grabs for the next charlatan, political or religious, who comes ambling along."— Carl Sagan
Yes! Absolutely! Scripture calls us to rigorously interrogate everything to see if it is true:
“Test everything. Hold on to the good.” ~ 1 Thessalonians 5:22
“Now the Bereans were of more noble character than the Thessalonians, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.” ~ Acts 17:11
“Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.” Philippians 4:8
Let’s start with the form of the argument that’s on the Infidels page:
The argument may be formulated in three simple steps:
1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.
The entire argument, for me, has nothing to do with God. For cosmologists, it is obvious that something about the early universe requires an explanation, but this lack of explanation is not positive evidence for God. Just in the same sense, having a scientific explanation is not evidence against God. From a scientific perspective, the Kalam Argument, as an argument for God, is just a glorified god-of-the-gaps argument.
Here he defends the three points of the argument with a wealth of sources. A minor quibble from me: the sources are quite old in general but one quote in particular irritates me:
Therefore, as Cambridge astronomer Fred Hoyle points out, the Big Bang Theory requires the creation of matter from nothing. This is because as one goes back in time, one reaches a point at which, in Hoyle’s words, the universe was “shrunk down to nothing at all.”
Fred Hoyle was famous in part for being a Steady State advocate who was not shy about his steady state advocacy being motivated by his commitment to atheism as he made explicit in his mid 1900s popular level book, (insert title here- I’ll look up later). But the thing is, Fred Hoyle is a terrible choice of an authority to quote on this topic. His ideological commitments led him to fight against a well supported scientific theory. And Fred Hoyle’s quote is wrong for two reasons.
Cosmologists don’t even begin to say what happened at the very beginning of the universe. The creation of matter from “nothing” is not part of the Big Bang Theory. Furthermore no cosmologist actually thinks that there was “nothing” before our universe. Even Lawrence Krauss’ book a universe from nothing is not truly ‘nothing.’ You might have the laws of nature themselves or there might be a larger multi-verse structure or if the cyclical models are correct then our universe has been expanding in collapsing for at least multiple cycles.
The second error is much more scientific and it cuts to the heart of the notion of the beginning of our universe. Essentially general relativity describes a beginning of sorts but GR fails in the Quantum regime… BUT if our universe was really small, QM (quantum mechanics) would be important so GR really just provides a useful guideline to when our classical description breaks down. However…! There are a number of space-time theorem’s that do provide particular constraints on what this beginning could have been like. This is been a serious challenge for bouncing cosmologies, that really was not potentially solved until pretty recently. For a popular treatment of this see: https://www.quantamagazine.org/big-bounce-models-reignite-big-bang-debate-20180131/
For me, with regards to the second of my points, I find the Kalam argument highly dubious… Nor do I care either way. I’m not looking for a lack of scientific explanation nor a scientific explanation to affirm or deny a belief in a Creator. Models stand and fall with evidence. I don’t have much care for anything anyone before (especially we have GR) has to say about a cosmic beginning (there are a good amount of quotes from antiquity in the WLC post). I have a lot more to say on the topic, but this is a start and I’ve been super busy with grading and course development!
Exactly what is the “big bang theory?” An American sitcom? The creation of matter (from a vacuum decay followed by nucleogenesis which produced slightly more matter than antimatter) is part of a pretty standard addition to the original big bang theory, called inflation, used to explain some of the observations of the visible universe and the cosmic microwave background radiation.
Most scientists are simply not interested in speculation about what is completely beyond our ability to observe or measure.
You got the editor in me curious, I don’t know if you were picking on Matt’s capitalization, but I looked it up.
Most style guides I found said no caps on big bang theory (unless you are referring to the TV show). But the style guides were divided on “the Big Bang vs. the big bang.” Looks like the BioLogos website goes with the Big Bang.
Not so long ago I objected to someone trying to make a big deal out of the capitalization probably because He was comparing it to the capitalization of “God.” But even though I argued that the capitalization of this as the proper name of a theory was correct, the point is simply clarification. And so a little laziness when there is little danger of ambiguity isn’t a Big Deal.
Well, apples & oranges? Modern westerners not remembering much of anything doesn’t mean other cultures in other places at other times must have been the same
The ancient Greeks remembered the Trojan War and saga of Odysseus for 500 years through oral epic poetry by professional bards. The Eden & Flood myth show all the signs of having been recited orally prior to being penned, evidently for thousands of years
We don’t have bards anymore, and we don’t remember yesterday, but ours is an exceedingly exceptionally unique culture – most have always been extremely conservative, including conservation of cultural heritage memories
historical amnesia is a modern innovation (with the exception of cultural discontinuities, which has always involved the loss of the displaced cultures’ memories, which I think must have happened – along with genetic discontinuities – after the Mesolithic… after all, nobody remembered all of those exquisitely beautiful cave paintings until they happened to be rediscovered after thousands & tens of thousands of years, so somehow that archaic culture did not propagate mythic memories to modern times)
think what you have highlighted is the dramatic distinction between modern western culture (or, technically, lack thereof, as culture = information transmitted inter-generationally, like you “family Civil War stories”) and everyone everywhere everywhen else ?
