War, or peace with science and Christians?

[OldEnglishSheepdog]

If you have time to listen, Click here - http://evolutionarychristianity.com/blog/audio-downloads/

And scroll down to: January 3, 2010: Edward B. (Ted) Davis -

[nebula]

I doubt anyone here has done the type of scholarship and research this man has.

(Dr. Davis was actually one of my professor's. Believe me when I say he is a brainiac.)

[OldEnglishSheepdog]

OK, I listened to it and it was very well done.

I particularly liked this part around min 20-22:

"Historically, there has been an actually very rich conversation between theology and science, that there have been certainly instances of genuine conflict and Galileo in part got caught up in such a conflict in the 17th century. There is no effort here to say there was no conflict historically. But the effort is, is to say that the conflict metaphor is woefully inadequate to describe most of what has taken place... the interactions are incapable of being described by and single, simple metaphor."

Very well said.

I think the Volunteerist approach that he references arises as a natural consequence of the acknowledgement that the philsophy of empircism stems from the presupposition of an orderly and consistent universe being the product of an orderly and consistent Creator, that I mentioned earlier.

I would argue that this view rules out his conclusion that Genesis creation cannot be true. He says Himself that God could have done it however he wants, regardless of our expectations.

The Resurrection is no less controversial, so to me this seems like cherry-picking.

Edited January 6, 2011 by OldEnglishSheepdog

[OldEnglishSheepdog]

The problem with this can be summarized with following bullets

1) Matter and energy are of the same essence.

Of course.

One can transform one into the other.

True.

Since it looks like that the total of mass-energy in the universe is constant and equals zero, there is no evidence of a net creation of it.

Sure there is, and this doesn't even qualify as an objection because it does no damage to my premise from which the inescapable conclusion of creation follows.

The laws of physics demonstrate that the universe is not eternal, and the second Law of thermodynamics shows that energy is degrading into less and less usable forms and will continue to do so until it reaches an equilibrium in which no usable energy transfer is possible.

Therefore it had a beginning since if this process was eternal this process of degrading would have been going on for an infinite length of time.

An infinite regression is impossible in a finite universe.

Any physicist can also think of tons of naturalistic explanations for the origin of the universe.

Like what?

The World Ensemble hypothesis and any other hypothesis are not only completely devoid of evidence, and completely disregard the statistical improbability of the universe coming together by chance, given its fine tuning to support live, but most importantly any materialistic reductionists theories only serve to displace the problem.

It doesn’t solve anything to redirect the problem to a larger scale.

Of course, they can be all wrong, but the God Hypothesis is not the only one and it clearly not compelling.

What makes that clear?

You haven’t demonstrated any fault in my premise and the conclusion of that premise follows inescapably from the syllogism I presented.

You present neither any competing modal logic nor evidence to support a competing theory, so I have to point out that what I’m presenting has yet to be demonstrated to be “clearly not compelling”.

2) The space-time continuum (our universe) had no beginning, since beginning, eternal etc. refer always to a time dimension which is part of the continuum itself. Think of it a 4-dimensional sphere (or another more complex 4-dimensional solid figure), that never started and will never end. It just is. This is very easy to show mathematically.

Except that this is largely rejected and has no actual evidential support.

Is it your assertion then that there was no big bang and the universe is eternal?

Isn't it true that people were championing the concept of an eternal universe until Einstein (despite his convictions to find the contrary) demonstrated that it was no longer tenable to do so?

Infinity doesn’t even make mathematical sense in the physical universe. If you take infinity and subtract 14, and then from that result subtract infinity, what do you have? What if you remove every odd number from infinity? Then you get an equal (infinit) proportion of odd and even numbers, each of which would be equal to the sum of the two?

Infinity is an immaterial construct that has yet to be demonstrated to have any application in any from in material reality, therefore any suggestion that it has application in space-time is, to date, science fiction, and against the evidence to the contrary.

That entropy exists and we haven’t reached equilibrium demonstrates again that this is not the case, because an infinite regression would have already spent the usable energy an infinity ago.

3) The evidence that the putative God must be the Christian one is insufficient. Many religions had miracles, "historic" proofs, eye witnesses etc. It happens all the time even nowadays. There are many people ready to believe that the prophecies of Nostradamus really happened. But when you analyze more carefully, you notice that his prophecies are fuzzy enough to always come true, depending on human interpretation. And it is not difficult to write a new book with stories that describe the realizations of prophecies written in the old book, especially if the writers of the new book read the old one.

While by Biblical standards Nostradamus would have been stoned as a false prophet, and the Biblical prophesies are so specific that hundreds of years before Jesus’ birth His arrival in Jerusalem was predicted to the day (as one of hundreds of specific examples), this is a separate argument.

Why don’t we first see if the evidence points to a god, and then deal with which god is the real God?

Edited January 6, 2011 by OldEnglishSheepdog

[OldEnglishSheepdog]

You still miss the point. Time space is not eternal because eternity deals with a time coordinate which cannot be used at the point we improperly (for the same reason) call the beginning.

If the Universe came into being, then that time is part of the continuum, means that in the most real and tangible sense possible, time began.

This is affirmed by the impossibility of the Second and Third Laws of Thermodynamics spanning endlessly into the past.

And the fact that the so called "beginning" looks so special to us is because our brain evolved to have a useful but naive intuition of space and time.

This doesn’t work as support, because this isn’t evidence. This is an argument that requires evidence.

Not only that, it’s a genetic fallacy to discredit a view (that a person could interpret the beginning as a special event) based on the origin of that view (we evolved to have this view - which by the way would imply that this view is part of our DNA sequencing which is utter speculation without any empirical support).

But, for the sake of argument I’ll suppose it’s correct for a minute here.

This intuition fails is some of the points of this continuum for the same reason it fails when we try to understand quantum physics.

Let us make a small analogy. Take a sphere with a north pole and a south pole like our earth. Consider the different latitudes corresponding to different time snapshots of space. Small creatures living on this toy universe will perceive tme passing as they will be dragged southwards. They will notice that (above the equator) space expands in time (increasing latitude) and deduce that the universe must have been born at the north pole with a big bang. Some will say that God must have created the Universe at the north pole because it is impossible to have something happening before naturally (something which is more northern than the north pole cannot have a natural cause). But if you take the whole sphere as a whole, there is no beginning, the sphere simply exists. And the north

pole is not special, topologically.The little creatures just used coordinates that do not apply there. By using other coordinates near the north pole we lose the special status of this point. This has been shown by Steve Hawking when he introduced new coordinates near this "singularity".

I get that, I read the ant and balloon analogy in “A Brief History of Time”, but if memory serves, wasn't that more relating to the shape of the continuum then whether or not time could have had a point in which it came into being?

In any case it doesn’t address the physical impossibility of an infinite regression as pertaining to the Second and Third Laws of Thermodynamics, and so there had to be a tangible, physical beginning.

Simply put, if we're on our way forwards with entropy (and we are) then back in time we weren't as far along all the way back to some initial point.

Not only this, but your assetion seeks to reject the cumulative case of the explanatory power of creation, by isolating a single aspect of that explanation and presenting alternate theories that have no evidential support and, if true, would then fail to account for the order and consistency of the universe that suggest an orderly and consistent cause (necessarily a Creator, according to the syllogism) and the universe's conspicuous fine tuning to support life.

So, while the theistic approach has the explainitory power to fully satisfy each of these, the alternatives struggle to offer possibilities (without any supporting evidence) that could potentially offer explainations of each iscolated consideration.

Occum's Razor give credibility to the explainatory power of the single thesis with the wider explanitory power, at the outset, unless something concrete is presented to contradict the premise.

Edited January 6, 2011 by OldEnglishSheepdog

[OldEnglishSheepdog]

To be continued... Running out of batteries

Sure thing, I could use a recharge myself.

Thanks so much for the conversation so far!

[OldEnglishSheepdog]

Let us then use another model, maybe more in line with your line of thoughts.

There is a slight misconception concerning entropy and the 2nd law. There is absolutely nothing in the laws of nature that prevents entropy to suddenly decrease. The recurrence theorem of Poincare shows that.

But we’re not talking about a decrease. Ebbs and flows don’t matter. If time didn’t have a beginning point then decreases don’t solve the problem, they simply delay the problem, and delays are inconsequential if time is effectively infinite.

The trick is probability and enough "time".

I would argue that there’s more to it than probability, but even if this is totally correct, then an effectively infinite amount of time would, with essential statistical certainty, have run entropy through its course.

Of course, if this is so it is separating the principles of the second and third Laws of Thermodynamics, because we’d still be dealing with an infinite regression of events in a finite universe, so the problem remains.

Reversal of entropy is not impossible but highly improbable.

Here’s where I’ll argue that it’s not about probability. Given the third Law of Thermodynamics, we’re still stuck with an infinite regression. Some initial first cause had to generate the series of successive causes and effects in the material world, regardless of how un-linear the manifestation of time.

So, while interesting, the argument that follows is not something that there is any evidence for, but simply a theoretical construct that defies the evidence.

We’ve never seen time reverse. If someone claimed that they had proof that time had reversed momentarily and that it had an impact on natural reality, we’d probably be ready to dismiss the claim as a bit crazy, and again the Third Law of Thermodynamic would still have an exception.

Natural Laws are so deemed to be in place because they are not observed to be broken under any circumstances.

If a naturalist argument is predicated on the breech of natural laws, then it conforms to the definition of miracles provided earlier in the thread of the believing in the defiance of the Laws of nature, which was presented as proof against theism.

That puts the naturalist and the theist on equal footing (and reduces the claim that theism is incorrect because it believes in the magical breaking of natural laws to inconsistency), and means that we each (theists and naturalists alike) place faith in the breaking of natural laws to support our worldviews.

Again, I content that the theist response has the advantage of a wider scope of explanatory power, and includes a mechanism by which these Laws that have otherwise never been observed to be broken could have been transcended via a transcendent, eternal, orderly cause that accounts for each all the evidence of the finite, orderly, life-permitting universe.

There is no empirical evidence upon which to reject this theory and accept the naturalist theories in its place, so I would argue that there is a measure of faith required in accepting either, but that Occam’s razor decrees that the evidence supports the theistic approach (as I mentioned above) and therefore I think demonstrates that the less “blind” of the two options for faith is in fact theistic faith.

Which brings me to a bit of a change of approach that I’d like to make, if you’ll permit me to do so. I read something you wrote on another thread about faith and it struck a chord with me, so I’d like to back up a bit now to the other point you were bringing up earlier about why it has to be a Christian God.

One of my favourite Christian apologists (William Craig) always notes in his debates that the God of the Bible is not only reasonable, but He is experienced. He not only wants us to have a reasonable, defensible faith in Him (as seen in Isaiah 1:18; 1 Peter 3:15; and 1 Thess. 5:21; Deut. 6:5) but He also wants us to enter into loving relationship with Him which is experienced not by wrestling with intellectual concepts but in the same perceptual way we have other experiences, and since this is the case, getting caught up in arguments for his existence can actually distract from the experience of feeling His prompting.

This kind of experience is no less reliable than any other experience you can come to trust in your life. Memory, for example, cannot be empirically proven to be accurate. For all we can prove, we don’t remember anything but simply create back-stories for anything we happen to be looking at, and nothing could explicitly prove otherwise. But we know that’s not the case, because we experience the reality of the reliability of our memory and have no better reason to suppose that trusting in our memory is delusory.

The same is true with God. I trust you’ve seen in your interaction with Christians here that to become Christian is not to abandon logic and scientific investigation (as is the nature of the contention of the title of the thread), so if it isn’t demonstrated that belief in God is a delusion, then there’s no reason not to trust in the witness of our experience of Him.

This is how I became a Christian. I was impressed by the living witness of God among the Christians in the church I started going to as a teenager, but mostly, I was suprised to learn the Bible was not what I thought - of a bunch of kids stories that only Ned Flanders could believe in.

When I heard what was actually in the Bible, I was shocked. I couldn’t deny that what Jesus said was what I wanted for my life, and that the example He set was what a person ought to be. So I opened myself up to entertaining the notion that it might be true and experienced an amazement about what God was offering me – that He loved me, died to save me, and was offering me an eternal relationship with Him if I would simple recognize that I didn’t deserve it but would humbly accept the freely given gift of salvation.

I have studied other religions and other worldviews and I am confident that none of them could offer both a rational, logical, scientific approach to understanding reality as well as such an undeniable immaterial experience of the reality of God, and I can testify that I enjoy both.

So I’d like to invite you, if you haven’t done so already, to approach the Bible (maybe in re-reading the gospel of John or Matthew, maybe even Isaiah 53) not so much looking for answers to specific questions, but with a willingness to entertain the possibility of God communicating His truth through His word in the life and example of Jesus.

I don’t believe you need to have faith to have faith, so to speak. God says “Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool” (Isaiah 1:18).

And while God tells us that “my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the LORD” (Isaiah 55:8), if we really open ourselves up to receiving what God is offering, (which in the Bible is often called having eyes to see and ears to hear – which I interpret to mean not looking to reject but really entertain the gospel as a possibility, suspending skepticism until you get the whole thrust of the message) we will find Him waiting for us “Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me” (Revelation 3:20).

“If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9).

Sorry to jump around like that, but I hope this addresses some of your earlier concern as well.

By all means we can continue in whatever direction you prefer from here.

Edited January 7, 2011 by OldEnglishSheepdog

[OldEnglishSheepdog]

Sorry about the wait, I've been away from the computer.

The problem with that is that I hear the same exact things from my Muslim and Hindu friends. As an outsider, I have no substance to decide they are wrong and you are right.

Except I qualified that the personal experience is only valid if my logical reasoning to suppose that it is, is sound.

Muslims claim that their religion is the fulfillment of the Bible, yet it contradicts the Bible on nearly every point on which it makes Biblical references. The apologists claim that is because the Bible has been corrupted, but the Koran states the reliability of the previous scriptures (the Bible) and the earliest Bible manuscripts predate the writing of the Koran by centuries.

The Law of non-contradiction simply rules out the possibility that the Koran is true.

As for Hinduism, it is mysticism. It makes absolutely no claim whatsoever of being anything other than a focal point, invented by people, to attempt to account for the metaphysical.

Well, I could come up with ideas too, but that wouldn't make them right. If there is a God (as I think I can demonstrate is the best explanation for what we observe) why would we think we could know anything about Him unless He told us? The Bible says that "my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD" (Isaiah 55:8), and I've put my foot in my mouth enough times thinking I've figure out other people to know that I couldn't possibly just use induction to determine the characteristics of something powerful beyond the scope of my comprehension (necessary since even the creation is beyond my comprehension, as you mentioned in pointing out the difficulty we have contemplating metaphysics).

All religions are either admittedly made up by people and therefore fail by the test you've mentioned here, or they claim to be from God and I have yet to see the thesis that the Bible is so disproven, so I maintain that I have good reasons to insist that my experience, unlike the experience of people holding other beliefs that are contradictory or simply man-made, is valid as a testimony.

The only positive correlation I see between the different creeds is the following:

- Believers in X come usually from families or cultures that already believe in X

That most people may not resist the status quo makes no impact whatsoever on what is or isn't truth, and supposed correlations don't relate in the least to my personal experience, nor the arguments I've used to support that my experience is valid.

I am not a fortune teller, but I am very good at guessing the parents' religion of a Christian, Muslim, or Hindu (amongst the thousands of different creeds in our history). In other words: our faith is an accident of birth.

This thesis can't even account for the rise of Christianity in pagan Rome, wherein it was a capital offense to become Christian, nor the mass conversions that have occurred in Asian and are currently happening in the Middle East lately.

I chose to become Christian and then spent years feeling guilty about my choice because I felt like I grafted onto the first promise that was made to me. It wasn't until I studied religions of the world in university that I was able to categorize all religions into three simple categories and realized that the choices were actually quite finite and straight forward

1. Religions of the word of God - meaning religions that claimed to be the words of god (very few choices, of which I found only two stand up to any real, consistent scrutiny)

2. Mysticism - man-made philosophies that have no bearing on a cause and effect reality, and therefore no accountability whatsoever, and therefore nothing more than speculation.

3. Animism - man-made magical practices that pretty much no one accepts except witchdoctors.

Since I am not a racist and I think that all human beings have comparable intelligence and sensitivity, I do not see how we can declare Christianity more compelling than Islam (for instance).

Race has nothing to do with it.

Islam is not something that is characterized by a 'race' of individuals. It is a value set that's accepted across many ethnic groups, and by many people in groups that your approach would falsely categorize as 'Christian'.

Islam is not compelling simply because it is contradictory, not because of the supposed 'race' of those who accept the values therein.

Since all people can breed and produce fertile offspring and all skin 'colour' is actually just greater or less of the same chemical, I don't accept that there are different 'races', at all, but this whole concept is nonsequitur.

All these religions have their prophecies,

This is actually demonstrably false. If you look into major world religions, you will find that you can't support this assertion.

miracles,

Also demonstrably false.

eye witnesses

Most couldn't possibly, like mysticism.

etc. You may say: yes

I don't.

but only Jesus showed us what goodness and how loving our God is. But this assumes that a putative God is good and merciful, which is what we surely wish, but it is not necessarily true. There is no evidence whatsoever that a God must be necessarily good and loving.

I would like to show you that the evidence is that there is a god, that it is a personal God, that the Bible is true, and that therefore what the Bible says about God must be the truth, not the other way around.

Edited January 19, 2011 by OldEnglishSheepdog

[OldEnglishSheepdog]

I would like to show you that the evidence is that there is a god, that it is a personal God, that the Bible is true, and that therefore what the Bible says about God must be the truth, not the other way around.

I am always ready to change my mind if enough evidence is presented. Bring it on.

It was my understanding that I was in the process of doing so.

I pointed out that the explanation with the widest explanatory scope is the most likely, so unless something can be demonstrated to be false in the premises that I've presented, then their conclusions follow logically and inescapably and no other thesis can account for the cumulative case I've presented regarding the evidence of an orderly and consistent universe, and the universe's conspicuous fine tuning to support life, not to mention that we really do all believe that there is a finite amount of time that transpired between the cause of the universe and it’s effects, demonstrated for the evolutionist in that it’s nearly unanimously accepted in scientific circles that the universe is ~14 billion years old, so regardless of ebbs and flows of entropy, effectively an absolute starting point is necessary to account for that which we observe in the universe.

In addition, there logically cannot be only a material universe since numbers, personalities, the rules of logic, and the scientific methodologies themselves are immaterial, so materialistic reductionism is ruled out at the outset by anyone who seeks to account for the material universe.

So the evidence is that there are immaterial elements to our universe, and that our universe had an immaterial cause.

Any worldview that seeks to account for the immaterial must be consistent, internally, as well as consistent with reality.

As I pointed out, there are really only three kinds of worldviews that account for the immaterial, one of which we pretty much all reject on the basis that it operates on a kind of methodological magic, and another that doesn’t even try to suggest that it is anything more than principles made up by people with no possibility for accountability.

In the end when you die, upon what grounds does the eastern mystic suppose that their myths and philosophies are correct? If in nature we accept that reality doesn’t chance to accommodate our preferences, but in fact there are consequences and repercussions, and we can’t deduce what they are if we had no prior familiarity with the specifics of the natural Laws that are in place, what would lead someone to believe that we can just make up, or follow what someone else has made up, about that which transcends the natural/material?

There is nothing that recommends any of those systems, and no evidence that demonstrates their internal consistency nor their consistency with reality.

Among those that claim to have the word from God, again they have to be consistent. I’ve already explained why Islam isn’t and can go into much more detail if necessary.

The only other major world religions that even claim to have such messages that don’t claim to follow the Bible (OT and/or NT) that I know about are Mormonism, Sikhism and Baha’i. If you’re interested, we can go through the inconsistencies of these systems, but if I had to guess, may I suggest that you’re not tempted to accept what they’re purporting? So I’m not sure if it would have much value here.

That brings us, by contrast, to the Bible.

As I presented earlier, the supposition of the scientific method makes sense if you suppose that the universe was created by an orderly and consistent Creator who wanted to create life, so that the universe would be orderly and consistent, and life-permitting.

If that Creator wanted to create intelligent life that was capable of comprehending His existence He may have wanted to communicate with that life.

The Bible tells us He has done so, and telling us specific things that will come to pass before they happen demonstrates the Word of the God who is in control of His creation, “I have told you now before it happens, so that when it does happen you will believe” (John 14:29).

Biblical prophesies foretold the very day Jesus was going to ride into Jerusalem from Daniel chapter 9, specifics of the destruction of the city of Tyre like that it would be thrown into the sea and scraped down to the bare rock so that fishermen would dry their nets on its remains from Ezekiel 26, the specifics of the fall of the Persian empire and the rise of Alexander the Great, and his fall and the political specifics of his successors in Daniel, and the destruction and unprecedented re-creation of the nation of Israel, that would become a focal point to the whole world (even though the land they occupy is insignificantly small and Jews are about 0.2% of the world’s population, and there are struggles over land and millions of refugees around the world, providing no reason to focus so much on Israel –which occupies a large proportion of the UNs attention), found all throughout scripture.

Ultimately, if you’re trying to define ‘evidence’ as some kind of a material smoking gun, such an expectation is doomed to disappointment. We are talking about the immaterial, so the evidence will be immaterial.

I submit that the evidence is greatly supporting that there is an immaterial cause to the universe, and that immaterial cause is the God of the Bible, but because the evidence must be immaterial, I would invite you to try to account for the cumulative arguement by any single hypothesis, or to present a case of a worldview which is equally consistent and probable, before trying to account for individual points within this case.

Edited January 24, 2011 by OldEnglishSheepdog

[OldEnglishSheepdog]

and the universe's conspicuous fine tuning to support life

OK, one at a time...the fine tuning argument.

Question: did God have any choice in defining the constants of Nature, so that life can arise?

Answers:

- Yes, since He is almighty. Therefore, it is logical possible to have life with completely different constants. And fine

tuning is not required anymore.

- No. Then He is not almighty. He must also follow some design rules set by....whom?

That question is entirely irrelevant, because in either case all you'd establish is the extent to which we understand God, not whether or not the evidence points towards God's existence.

No matter how I answer this question, no better evidence is being presented to support an alternative to God's existence.

As I submitted earlier, if the premises upon which the case is built are reasonable then you have to entertain the cumulative case, giving it the benefit of the doubt to see if it is a good overall case, before you start to pick apart individual points, if you want to give it a fair evaluation.

Any intelligent person can come up with skepticism, regardless of whether or not something is the case. The issue isn't whether you are capable of introducing some level of skepticism, but whether or not the case presented is the best explanation of the evidence, and, if not, what does the evidence point towards.

But your conclusion in your syllogism following "Yes, since He is almighty" only maintains that if there is fine tuning towards life, then it is evidence of God's existence.

Life, as we know it, is very delicate. If you change any of the initial conditions that govern the universe by a hairs breath, the universe ceases to be life permitting, which makes it extremely unlikely (statistically dismissible as by chance) that all of the life-permitting conditions would just happen to be met at the outset.

If life were sustained in a different and equally delicate way, then again conditions would have to be set just so to sustain that life, which would be equally statistically dismissible, and to suggest that life can be more robust as to occur regardless of the initial conditions, then we'd need some evidence to support that such is reality, but what we have is evidence that life is actually very delicate and requires very specific initial conditions just to be possible.

You'd have to demonstrate that life can and does survive readily despite the universal conditions in order to remove likelihood from the case that God set the universe up to support life. Until then, the concept that life could exist in what we understand to be non life permitting conditions is speculative fiction.

Again, we're talking about where the evidence points, not if we could speculate a theoretically possible alternative, regardless of how unlikely and speculative, which lacks any broader explanatory scope.

Edited January 25, 2011 by OldEnglishSheepdog