The Meat of the Matter

I LOVE your blog/website. I love your premise that you were a Christian and fell away, and now denounce your faith in Jesus Christ. You are like the opposite of Paul in the Bible.

Paul was a persecutor of Jesus to the fullest extent, even killing Christians. He was touched by Christ and became one of it’s greatest apologists.

You were raised in a foursquare church with a father who was a pastor. You loved Jesus at one time, and now have come to hate him so much that you have devoted a website and organization to antagonizing and debunking Christianity.

You might wonder why I love it? Well, I’m a person of great honesty and I love your passion. You were honest with you feelings and you sincerely believe what you believe. Since God cannot be proved or disproved, your faith is in physics and astronomy and science all of which has a constant history of change.

Within the scientific community there have been theories that were thought to be accurate (like Macro Evolution) but were discovered later to be bad science.

I’d like to bring up some topics for discussion:

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Science and the Bible:

Cosmos and Creator

by Mark Eastman, M.D.

They have been called the two greatest questions that face mankind:

Does God exist, and if He does, what is His nature?

Since the time of the ancient Greek philosophers, the answers to these questions have been sought by examining the nature of the universe and its life forms. In the 20th century more evidence has accumulated to answer these questions than at any time in history.

In the book of Romans, the Apostle Paul made a remarkable statement regarding the relationship between our understanding of the universe and the existence and attributes of God.

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because what may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse.
-Romans 1:18-20

According to Paul, not only is the existence of God inexcusably evident, but the invisible attributes of God can also be discerned with an examination of creation.

The Cosmos

By the turn of the 20th century many of the laws of physics had been described so successfully that many felt that all that remained was to confirm these laws to a few more decimal places. So successful were Isaac Newton’s descriptive laws of motion and gravitation and Maxwell’s laws of electromagnetism, that anomalies were often ignored or unrecognized by the physics community. However, when Albert Einstein published the first of his relativity theories in 1905, he shocked the physics community with a staggering new view of space, time, matter and energy. Though he did not know it at the time, his theories provided dramatic insights into the attributes of the Creator of the cosmos.

Among other things, what Einstein’s theories revealed was that the flow of time and the structure of space were relative to the velocity, mass and acceleration of the observers. That is, their observed values were not fixed: they were relative.

For thousands of years scientists and philosophers believed that time was nothing more than an abstract notion, conceived in the minds of men, and used to describe the change seen in the physical world. Time, it was believed, was not a thing, it was a mental contrivance. Einstein showed that this was wrong. Time, Einstein showed, was “plastic.” That is, it is a physical property of the universe, and that the observed rate that time flows depends on the physical conditions present at the measuring device.

In brief, Einstein’s special and general theories of Relativity, now confirmed to at least 15 decimal places, predicted that when a clock travels at high velocity it slows down relative to an another clock whose position is fixed. The same slowing effect is seen when a clock is accelerated or is advanced toward an increasing gravitational field. In addition, Einstein showed that space and time are tightly coupled; so much so that physicists now refer to space-time when speaking of these components. But this was just the beginning.

Several years after Einstein’s theories were published, astronomer Willem de Sitter found a mathematical error in Einstein’s equations. When corrected, he found a startling mathematical prediction buried within his equations: The universe was finite! Space-time, matter, and energy had a beginning.

In his book, It’s About Time, popular author and physicist Paul Davies remarks on this incredible discovery.

Modern scientific cosmology is the most ambitious enterprise of all to emerge from Einstein’s work. When scientists began to explore the implications of Einstein’s time for the universe as a whole, they made one of the most important discoveries in the history of human thought: that time, and hence all of physical reality, must have had a definite origin in the past. If time is flexible and mutable, as Einstein demonstrated, then it is possible for time to come into existence-and also to pass away again; there can be a beginning and an end to time.1

The Skeptic

I recently had an opportunity to speak on the origin of life at a major public university in Southern California. In attendance were a number of professors who are self-described agnostics. During the question period, one of the professors admitted that the evidence is compelling that the universe was indeed finite. He said that while he could not believe in God (because he couldn’t see Him, or study Him scientifically) he said he did believe that someday scientists would discover a law that would explain the origin and order of the universe and its life forms.

After pointing out that he had just expressed faith – the belief in things unseen, but hoped for – I asked him if he believed that the laws of physics, which work in our space-time domain, also had a beginning. He was forced to concede that they did because they would have no place to act before the space-time domain existed.

The final blow came when I asked him if he then believed that some “law” of physics could explain the origin of the laws of physics! He saw the point: The laws of physics cannot be the cause of the laws of physics! The cause of the universe and its laws must be must be independent of the space-time domain, exactly as the Bible claimed 3,500 years earlier!

The Creator

Paul’s statement regarding the attributes of God being discerned by an examination of the nature of the universe is quite staggering, considering the state of scientific knowledge in the first century A.D. At that time it was commonly believed that the universe was eternal. In the face of that commonly held bias, the Bible clearly taught that the universe was finite, and the Creator is independent of time and space-exactly as 20th century cosmology suggests.

In the Beginning God created the heavens an the earth… -Genesis 1:1

…&God, (v.9) who has saved us and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works, but according to His own purpose and grace which was given to us in Christ Jesus before time began.
-2 Timothy 1:8-9 NKJ

…in hope of eternal life which God, who cannot lie, promised before time began.
- Titus 1:2 NKJ

The finiteness of space-time not only points to a Creator who is independent of the cosmos, but it also gives us insight into the minimum resume of such a Being.

The Uncaused Cause

In my discussion with the agnostic professors, I asked them to give me the caveat, for the sake of my next argument, that God did indeed exist. They agreed. I then asked them what would be the minimum “resume” of such a Being. Remarkably, they were quite insightful in their deductions. They quickly recognized that such a Being would not only have to be independent of space-time, but must also be incredibly powerful, incredibly intelligent and able to act unencumbered, simultaneously inside and outside the time domain. Remarkably, without recognizing it, they had described the resume of the Creator as revealed in the Biblical text!

Among other things, the law of cause and effect asserts that a cause is always greater than its effect. Applied to the cosmos it means that the Creator must be more powerful than all the energy stored in all the stars in all the galaxies in the entire universe. Physicists believe that there are at least 1080 particles in the universe. Einstein’s famous equation, E=mc2 indicates that the energy stored in the mass of the universe is equal to the mass times the speed of light squared! From this perspective, the Creator must be an all-powerful, omnipotent Being. This very attribute is credited to God throughout the Bible’s text.

Ah Lord GOD! behold, thou hast made the heaven and the earth by thy great power and stretched out arm, and there is nothing too hard for thee.
-Jeremiah 32:17

Behold, I am the LORD, the God of all flesh: is there any thing too hard for me?
-Jeremiah 32:27

In my discussion with the professors, even they admitted that all the chemists, molecular biologists, and physicists in the world combined have been unable to create a DNA molecule from raw elements; hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, phosphorus, etc. Moreover, molecular biologists admit that living cells are metabolic machines which are vastly more complicated than any machine made by mankind. They agreed in principle that the nature of these cellular “machines” would require a Being possessing unfathomable intelligence. Such a Being would be, from our limited perspective, an all-knowing, omniscient Creator. Throughout the Bible’s text God is described in such terms. For example, in Jeremiah 1:5, God’s omniscience is illustrated in his foreknowledge of the prophet even before he was born:

Before I formed you in the womb I knew you; Before you were born I sanctified you; I ordained you a prophet to the nations.
-Jer 1:5

The infinite knowledge of God2 is proclaimed in 1 John 3:20 and in Psalm 147:5:

For if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and knows all things.
-1 John 3:20

Great is our Lord, and mighty in power; his understanding is infinite.
-Psalm 147:5

Finally, if our space-time domain is the direct creation of God, then once He created the cosmos, in order to organize and uphold the galaxies, solar system and its life forms, the Creator must be able to act simultaneously, inside and outside the space time domain. This attribute we call omnipresence. This too is an attribute that is ascribed to God throughout the Bible’s text.3

Am I a God near at hand,” says the LORD, “And not a God afar off? Can anyone hide himself in secret places, So I shall not see him?” says the LORD; “Do I not fill heaven and earth?” says the LORD.
-Jeremiah 23:23-24

For where two or three are gathered together in My name, I am there in the midst of them.
-Matthew 18:20

God: A Force?

At the end of my discussion, one of the professors asked, “Why did God create us in the first place?” I couldn’t believe my ears! To answer this question we needed to deal with another attribute that I believe is also a minimum attribute of God: Personhood. Although Albert Einstein eventually came to a belief in a Creator, he did not believe in a personal God. This was primarily because he believed that a benevolent God would not allow so much evil and suffering in the world. But is this reasonable? I don’t believe so.

As expected, at the end of the evening, like Einstein before them, the professors expressed the most common objection to the existence of a personal God: the problem of evil. Like so many skeptics today, they framed the question: “If God exists, if God is a personal Being, if God loves me, then why does he allow evil?” The answer to this question can also be discerned by an examination of “the things that are made.”

The answer is so startling and so beautiful and so important because it ties together not only the nature of God and the nature of mankind, but it also provides the answer to the ultimate questions in life: The answers to my origin, meaning, morality and destiny!

I also love that you have a theological background! You will be a wonderful person to talk with regarding your reasons for leaving the faith. What were your main reasons?

Have you ever thought of how we all began and how we were made? Do you believe that we are part of a cosmic accident? Do you believe that something was created from nothing? There is so much that we can discuss. So many scientific experiments that have historically tried to prove that life could be made from gases.

This is also an interesting read:

“UNRAVELING DNA’S DESIGN” By Dr. Jerry Bergman

Recent research into the structure and workings of genes and DNA has revealed incredible evidence of God’s wonderful design. Dr. Jerry Bergman, professor of science at Northwest College, Archibold (Ohio) has recently published an excellent technical paper in the Creation Ex Nihilo Technical Journal, 1 detailing how genes manufacture plants and animals.

We have excerpted portions of his report for this article.

Vast Databases

At the moment of conception, a fertilized human egg is about the size of a pinhead. Yet it contains information equivalent to about six billion “chemical letters.” This is enough information to fill 1000 books, 500 pages thick with print so small you would need a microscope to read it!

If all the chemical “letters” in the human body were printed in books, it is estimated they would fill the Grand Canyon fifty times! 2

This vast amount of information is stored in our bodies’ cells in DNA molecules and is coded by four bases-adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine. The key to the coding of DNA is in the grouping of these bases into sets that are further sequenced to form the 20 common amino acids. Together, these genetic codes form the physical foundation of all life.

We’ve all been exposed to the basic concepts of DNA and its double-helix structure in our high school biology classes. Perhaps you remember being taught that cells divide through the “unzipping” and subsequent replication of the double helix. In all likelihood, though, the incredible evidence of design in this process was not discussed.

A Complex Engineering Puzzle

Suppose you were asked to take two long strands of fisherman’s monofilament line-125 miles long-then form it into a double-helix structure and neatly fold and pack this line so it would fit into a basketball.

Furthermore, you would need to ensure that the double helix could be unzipped and duplicated along the length of this line, and the duplicate copy removed, all without tangling the line. Possible?
This is directly analogous to what happens in the billions of cells in your body every day. Scale the basketball down to the size of a human cell and the line scales down to six feet of DNA.

All this DNA must be packed so the regulator proteins that control making copies of the DNA have access to it. The DNA packing process is both complex and elegant and is so efficient that it achieves a reduction in length of DNA by a factor of 1 million. 3

When the cell needs to divide, the entire length of DNA must be split apart, duplicated, and repackaged for each daughter cell. No one knows exactly how cells solve this topological nightmare. But the solution clearly starts with the special spools on which the DNA is wound.

Each spool carries two “turns” of DNA, and the spools themselves are stacked together in groups of six or eight. The human cell uses about 25 million of them to keep its DNA under control. 4 (As shown in Figure 3 on the previous page, DNA is wound around histones to form nucleosomes. These are organized into solenoids, which in turn compose chromatin loops. Each element in this complex, yet highly organized arrangement is carefully designed to play a key role in the cell replication process.)

Cell Replication

The details of cell replication are too complex to be described in detail here. A simplified outline is given below to illustrate the incredible process involved: 5

1. Replication involves the synthesis of an exact copy of the cell’s DNA.

2. An initiator protein must locate the correct place in the strand to begin copying.

3. The initiator protein guides an “unzipper” protein (helicase) to separate the strand, forming a fork area. This unwinding process involves speeds estimated at approximately 8000 rpm, all done without tangling the DNA strand!

4. The DNA duplex kinks back on itself as it unwinds. To relieve the twisting pressure, an “untwister” enzyme (topo-isomerase) systematically cuts and repairs the coil.

5. Working only on flat, untwisted sections of the DNA, enzymes go to work copying the strand. (Two complete DNA pairs are synthesized, each containing one old and one new strand.)

6. A stitcher repair protein (DNA ligases) connects nucleotides together into one continuous strand.

Read and Write

The process described above is only a small part of the story. While the unwinding and rewinding of the DNA takes place, an equally sophisticated process of reading the DNA code and “writing” new strands occurs. The process involves the production and use of messenger RNA. Again, a simplified process description: 6

1. Messenger RNA is made from DNA by an enzyme (RNA polymerase).

2. A small section of DNA unzips, revealing the actual message (called the sense strand) and the template (the anti-sense strand).

3. A copy is made of the gene of interest only, producing a relatively short RNA segment.

4. The knots and kinks in the DNA provide crucial topological stop-and-go signals for the enzymes.

5. After messenger RNA is made, the DNA duplex is zipped back up.

Adding to the complexity and sophistication of design, the genetic code is read in blocks of three bases (out of the four possible bases mentioned earlier) that are non-overlapping.

Moreover, the triplicate code used is “degenerate,” meaning that multiple combinations can often code for the same amino acid-this provides a built-in error correction mechanism. (One can’t help but contrast the sophistication involved with the far simpler read/write processes used in modern computers.)

A Common Software House

All living things use DNA and RNA to build life from four simple bases. The process described above is common to all creatures from simple bacteria all the way to humans.

Evolutionists point to this as evidence for their theory-but the new discoveries of the complexity of the process, and the fact that bacterial ribosomes are so similar to those in humans, is strong evidence against evolution. The complexities of cell replication must have been present at the beginning of life.

A simple explanation for the similarities of the basic building blocks can be found if one realizes that all life originates from a single “software house.” He is awesome indeed!

“A simple explanation for the similarities of the basic building blocks can be found if one realizes that all life originates from a single “software house.” He is awesome indeed!”

Posting huge tracts of pro-Intelligent Design pseudo-science is on a par with proving 9/11 by posting similar “information” about Tower 7 and the melting point of steel, etc, ie: Ted, it’s not a “discussion”. Not unless you expect everybody here to waste their short span on earth going through each of your ‘facts’ and false analogies one by one only to be met by some more ‘facts’ and false analogies at each turn.

Jim’s new project is dead in the water if this is going to be the sort of constructive comments. As for the “happy to learn” you’re a goddamn concern troll of the highest orders with your multiple comments responding to nobody at all, you may as well be plugging your online poker site.

Just to demonstrate to Ted how annoying he is, and see if he is indeed “happy to learn”, here is my contribution to this “discussion”

***

Philosophers have a way of going on quests to find reasons for what already seems intuitively obvious. Especially if religion is involved–it is hard to see anyone believing in, say, God, just because of convoluted metaphysical arguments. The arguments are there, perhaps, as a defensive measure, just to provide that extra feeling of certainty.

Religion, however, is not the only area where philosophy blends into apologetics. Debates over morality have a similar flavor. We might wonder if all the arguments are but a veneer over philosophers’ deep-seated convictions about what must be right.

Atheism, Morality, and Meaning, although it is a book well worth reading, will not do much to allay such skepticism. Michael Martin is an eminent atheist philosopher, and he gives us a hard-hitting critique of those theistic arguments which claim that all is futile in the realms of morality and meaning if there is no God. It certainly belongs in the bookshelves of anyone who is interested in the debate over whether God is necessary for a moral life. However, although Martin does well in exposing some common mistakes of theistic moral arguments, he is less convincing when he argues for objective morality in a godless world.

A frequent accusation that religious believers level against skeptics is that, without God, anything is permitted. Doubt too much, and we summon the demons of moral relativism; we need God to extract us from that abyss. And so Martin is much concerned to establish that, even without God, we can have fully objective moral truths and the way to get a handle on such moral realities is through philosophical reflection rather than revelation and surrender to divine authority. If this were so, philosophical atheists could conclusively answer their religious critics. We would have a full-blooded morality; we could have everything our religions promised and better, as we would avoid the metaphysical baggage of spiritual realms and the mindless surrender to arbitrary commandments.

Even so, it is peculiar that Martin does very little to explore whether moral relativism is really such an intolerable option. After all, many atheists are relativists of some kind, if under that label we also include noncognitivists, error theorists and others who are comfortable with the idea that different courses of action may legitimately appear sensible, even moral, to rational people who happen to care about different ends. Gilbert Harman [1] argues that naturalists–those of us particularly impressed by modern science and concerned about locating moral perception and behavior in the natural world–are very likely to be some variety of relativist in this broad sense. We can, it seems to most naturalists, understand our moral lives within nature, without special moral realities and without there being objective moral truths wholly transcending our particular interests. However, old-school moral philosophers are much more inclined toward a fully objective, even absolute, morality. Morality, to them, is an autonomous discipline. Right and wrong are to be worked out within philosophical tradition, with little reference to our sciences.

Martin’s book is very much an old-school work. He theorizes about the nature of morality, but makes no use of what, for example, evolutionary psychology and cognitive science have learned about the nature of our interests and our moral perceptions. In fact, even when he discusses something like moral character, this becomes a philosophical abstraction curiously disconnected from the interests of real-world actors. He criticizes religious ethics, but only as an abstract set of demands presented by conservative theistic apologists, and never as a pattern of behavior rooted in a religious way of life. And so naturalists who shy away from full-blown moral realism are not very visible in this book, though most have no more use for a God than does Martin. Even the views of those relativists such as Harman, who are more willing to stay in the bounds of traditional philosophical debate, are nowhere to be found.

So in the end, though Martin does a good job exposing mistakes of conservative theistic moralists, his version of godless morality leaves too many questions hanging. Here is a partial list:

* Martin brings up ordinary language and everyday intuitions in support of moral objectivity. Fair enough, but many naturalists would argue that a wider view which takes modern science into account can better explain these commonsense notions of morality, without affirming moral truths. In physics, for example, we no longer accept that either common sense or metaphysical intuitions are at all reliable, unlike the days when ancient Greek cosmology offered the most sophisticated picture of the world. Similarly, many would argue that cognitive science has made enough progress that we can no longer afford to take our moral perceptions and ordinary moral language as unproblematically referring to an objective moral reality (for arguments over this claim, see May, Friedman, and Clark). [2]

* In analyzing theistic claims that morality requires God, Martin loses sight of religious life as a way of integrating common sense perceptions and moral intuitions. Religion comes naturally to our species; our brains are built that way. It seems compelling to most people that morality should be closely linked to supernatural realities. The reason is not that people have been taken in by bad reasoning, which is curable by philosophical analysis. Martin would have been well served by looking at the work of cognitive anthropologists Pascal Boyer [3] and Scott Atran [4], who make it clear why religion so often provides a commonsense, practical context for living a moral life.

* Martin uses ideal observer theory to make a case for objective morality. It is plausible enough that moral judgments would improve for someone who has all the relevant knowledge and can exercise an unclouded rationality. Naturalists who argue for a limited, partial objectivity in morals allow that some solid moral agreements can be reached; ideal observers could presumably achieve even tighter agreements. However, the question is whether, even granting that, we could have different enough ideal observers, with differing backgrounds and interests, that they would not converge upon the same moral dispositions. Ideal observers have a way of becoming too bloodless, thus it is hard to see why they should have an interest in morality in the first place. So philosophers try and patch up their ideal observers by incorporating “normal” human dispositions: compassion and the like. This, unsurprisingly, turns out to be a prime opportunity to design ideal observers which end up affirming the prior moral intuitions of the philosopher. These are well-known objections to ideal observer theories, and Martin does try to meet them. Never, however, very convincingly.

* The omniscient ideal observer sounds suspiciously like God, and Martin is careful to argue that this need not be so. However, he does not address a possible theistic objection. God is supposed to have created the moral order of the universe, and it is plausible to think that a God would have arranged things such that ideal observers would, in the end, converge on the same moral feelings. The objectivity of Martin’s morality depends on ideal observers regularly coming to agreement, and even if this were so, it would be a contingent fact about the world. Theists can argue that a God arranged the world so that things work out just so. The objectivity of moral truths would be best accounted for by a God who is both the ultimate ideal observer and the creator of the moral order.

* Martin supplements ideal observer theory with an appeal to “wide reflective equilibrium.” Few would disagree. However, as Harman [1] also points out, relativists make good use of such appeals: they demand that our sciences be brought more fully into the picture, to achieve an even wider equilibrium. When we do so, we find that we can explain a lot about our moral lives, from gut-level perceptions to the function of rules and principles in moral negotiations. And it appears, in contrast to what happens in science, that we cannot say our moral perceptions and rules lock onto objective external realities. At best, what we get are objectively good ways to navigate the social realm according to our interests. [5]

After addressing moral questions, Martin also answers the charge that, without God, we are condemned to a meaningless existence. Again, he makes some interesting arguments. And again, he succeeds in exposing the weaknesses of some important theistic apologetic strategies. However, he consistently limits himself to the brittle approach of conservative theists who seem, for whatever strange reason, to need to attach a stamp of rational certainty to their beliefs. But more-liberal religious people also worry about despair and nihilism being the fruits of atheism, without necessarily seeing this nihilism as being just a logical consequence of some metaphysical beliefs. Skeptics, they may suspect, by removing themselves from a religious life, lose touch with a way of perceiving the world which makes meaning and morality fundamental to everything.

In restricting his attention to conservative philosophical arguments, Martin also does not deal with more common motivations for finding meaning in “God’s plan.” For many religious people, even the setbacks in life, the petty nuisances, the struggles, become meaningful in the context of some Divine Drama, however hazily conceived. It may irritate no few rationalists, but the assurance of some purpose behind it all is more important than having even a vague idea of what this divine purpose might be. We faithfully play our part, and it is not in vain even when we apparently fail.

And with atheism–especially in its naturalistic versions–what to make of failure is often the big practical question. How does a godless person respond to genuine failure, to undefeated evil, to a world which is still stubbornly imperfect in the face of every humanistic effort to improve our lives? When a believer charges skeptics with holding that our lives are absurd, it is more likely they have such questions in mind and not a suspicion that atheists read too much Sartre. After all, especially naturalists tend to argue that ours is an indifferent universe, where truth, beauty, and good do not harmoniously present themselves to those who have mastered either piety or the art of philosophical contemplation. What then?

For all its intellectual defects, religion does appear to help many of us cope with such worries. And it does so within the context of a religious life. Divine commands, for example, may not be up to the job of grounding morality and supplying cosmic meaning. And Martin clearly shows why this is so. But to most religious people, divine commands are only part of the story–they do not work apart from the created moral order of the universe, the satisfactions of approaching the Perfect Good by cultivating a religious way of living, and the assurance that good will eventually prevail. Atheism denies this view of cosmic harmony, and it is no wonder religious people are inclined to ask whether the loss is too much to bear.

This is not to say that a more skeptical life does not have its own satisfactions. No doubt many atheists feel better off for their lack of faith. But again, those of us who do not feel troubled by the lack of a full-blown objectivity with regard to morals will also suspect that religious skepticism makes sense only within some ways of life, and that going without God will not work as a coping mechanism and an avenue to finding “meaning” in life for everyone. Some of us will go so far as to wonder if religiosity remains the most pragmatic, even rational, choice for many. [6]

Atheism, Morality, and Meaning succeeds in undermining some important theistic apologetics, and forcefully presents a vision of atheism which makes no concessions to religion in the realms of morals and meaning. All of this makes the book worth the cover price–and more. Nevertheless, readers who desire a broader survey of godless approaches to such questions will need to go beyond this book. And readers who start out with a more morally relativistic attitude than Martin will not find their views much changed in the end.

***

I am happy to learn!

My hope was that you can take a piece of the information above and respond in part. Jim set forth questions in another section with a lot of questions, and I attempted to do the same thing over time.

Oh well.

If it’s all just propaganda then there is no true discussion in my opinion. If it’s an us vs them mentality, then I don’t need to be a part of it.

I’m a firm believer in the human spirit and heart. I don’t want to “debate” for debating’s sake. We have a short journey on this earth even if we live to be 100 years old. It’s but a flash or a blink of an eye in the scope of the history of the world.

There is no reason to argue just to show different sides of an issue. The idealist in me wants to seek truth and talk it out with another who is interested in the same thing.

I can play a game with the best of them, giving examples and writings of theories and science and evidences, etc. but that is not the “enterprise” that I seek.

A couple of the problems with blogging are: 1- it takes a looooonngggg time to go back and forth for a single point (in comparison to actually talking face-to-face) 2- it can be like wearing a mask. We do or say things that perhaps we wouldn’t do in person (calling names, being ultra agressive, or simply taking on a persona or stance just for the sake of being a devil’s advocate).3- You can try to have a conversation with someone but it is hardly ever one-on-one, and it rarely finishes.

In the spirit of which you say go ahead leads me to think that we are beginning on the wrong foot.

I don’t know if you are an atheist or not. I did read about Jim’s heart, and I was actually writing to Jim because it’s his site, and it’s his premise that I responded to (him being an ex Christian…)

I wasn’t just completely starting my own agenda (My agenda is just to talk to another person who likes to talk about our origins and purpose in life).

I hope you are not offended. I come as a peaceful person who likes understand other’s opinions.

“and I was actually writing to Jim because it’s his site”

Not a good point of argument. My point is that if you are going to continue, Ted, to post here, then you should observe blog etiquette and not simply post in big articles in multiple comments, a la 9/11 truthers. That behaviour is incompatible with your stated mission of having a discussion.

As for the conclusion of the last article you posted, the fact that there is something apparently unexplained is no basis for inferring a divine creator, one who apparently has a penis, to judge from your ability to assign Him a gender.

Any proof that you have for the existence of a divine penis-sporting Creator, rather than faulty inferences from your questionable data, post it. The emphasis is clearly upon a believer in a Christian God, to show us all that He exists and that you are not simply delusional.

Supplementary Question : why do so many insane people believe they are Jesus Christ or that they hear the voice of God?