I don’t think any Christian knows 100% for sure if their god does or doesn’t exist. There is no way possible that they ever could without evidence. I just don’t buy the “god is real” argument from any of them.
How can they go off of something they have never seen, seen or touched evidence, met this deity in person, or met a prophet that could do magic and heal people?
There’s even Christians who lie & claim that they talked to this deity when they in fact did not. If anything they talk to themselves and think it’s “God” or “Jesus” that they’re “praying” to in their head. I don’t buy it.
And then when you ask for evidence. Most of them say. “The Bible is evidence” or “This book is proof” and I’m like NO! that isn’t evidence. It isn’t. They just either don’t get it or don’t wanna get it. The deflection tactics are terrible with them. Every Theist we’ve had on here since I came here, It’s like arguing with a brick wall. I’m throwing my hands up in the air.
This is exactly what they do to shut people like us up. They play dumb and deploy deflection and evasion tactics when they can’t convince you or myself that this imaginary and fictional deity is real when they have no evidence to verify that it is real.
It amazes me how delusional and in denial that they are.
Nothing quite as silly as quoting the bible to atheist. The bible had a big part in turning many atheist into atheist in the first place. The sheer laughable ridiculousness of much of it. Let’s see if I can sum up these verses in Romans: This god is so incompetent that he can’t even get all of his creation to believe in him so he’s angry and having a hissy fit. Instead of giving actual proof he exist and neatly solving the problem he’s instead decided to turn everyone gay?
Romans 1: 26 Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. 27 In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.
Really? By your “Thy will be done” does this mean your wishing this on us? With all the nastiness in the bible that’s the best you can do? This is pretty lame.
I agree, though making the unevidenced assertion (to atheists), that their disbelief carries immense risk, must be pretty close. As if an unevidenced assertion, can remotely be propped up by trying to bully us with an unevidenced threat.
It never seems to occur to them that the supposed threat from a being you don’t believe in isn’t very effective. You’ve made Zeus angry, be afraid, be very afraid. At least the threat of Zeus and his lightning bolts doesn’t make me laugh out loud as did that Romnans verse that threatened me with a same sex orgy.
We have in the past endured month after month of such behaviour, once from a creationist whose sole contribution was to insist it was impossible for only advantageous genes to be passed on.
It seemed he hadn’t realised the advantage was surviving long enough to pass on those genes. To be fair to him, he never once buckled from clinging to his idiotic and ignorant denials. Then there was Apollo, who insisted there was no such thing as an objective fact, that all claims could only be based on “pure reason”. Or programmingjorden who insisted he had defeated theism with his invention of “nonbeliefism”, after his spiel was broadly and emphatically rejected he left, only to return recently insisting he’d changed his name to God, to show theists once and for all that their beliefs were misplaced.
Showing that this is an erroneous assertation is not difficult. All you have to do is come up with one example of an advantageous mutation that is passed on. And one such example is the mutation(*) that codes for lactose tolerance in adults. This mutation stems from paleolithic times, when humans started farming and keeping animals for food. Enabling lactose tolerance opened up a new source of food, namely milk from cattle. So definitely advantageous. I’ve used this form of argument earlier, at other places, both online and offline, but without exception the creationists refuse to answer this one, and instead shift the attention to something else.
(*) Or rather, family of mutations, as the African mutations are not the same as the Europan and Asian ones.
Edit: ah, I now see the nuance “only advantageous mutations”. But this is not hard to counter, as the disadvantageous mutations will on the average be weeded out, while the advantageous mutations will on the average be kept.
Sorry I wasn’t clear, impossible for an insentient process like evolution, of course it’s child’s play for a deity was the inference. As I pointed out to him, in this context the advantage is surviving long enough to reproduce, this didn’t seem to sink in with him, though I suspected his ignorance was more than a little wilful.
On the whole, my distinct impression is that those arguing against evolution really have no idea what evolution is all about, and all they do is parrot some creationist website or forum. I have never seen real counterarguments, only arguments based on straw men, erroneous interpretations, cherry picking, general denial, etc. When their arguments have been demolished, they “disappear” for a day or two, only to come back again with “new” arguments or replies. It’s kind of obvious that when pressed, they go to their creationist forums to ask for advice. The advice they do get is, generally speaking, crap.
Many of them haven’t the most basic grasp of the scientific method, and don’t understand its most basic and essential requirements, like falsifiability and peer review.
They’re grasp of evolution as you say is woeful nonsense gleaned from the rubbish creationists espouse. Who knows what these idiots force into classrooms.
Then they quote scripture from the Bible that was written by men in 325 AD who were not Moses or the Apostles. That’s just misinformation. Anyone can crap out a religion. Anyone can write a book and make God claims. ANYONE can do that. Hence the Napkin Religion example.
Evolution, at least Darwinian Macro-Evolution coinciding with scientific method would certainly be a landmark discovery of great interest, and one which I’d be eager to learn about.
Would you be willing to share one piece of scientific evidence for Darwinian Macro-evolution? Thanks.
That’s not fair to ask him that if you’re just going to ignore my request to present physical evidence of a deity. Because I’m the first one in line. So you first.
The phrase “Darwinian Macro-evolution” is problematic; and to keep from authoring further insults, I don’t want to go down that rabbit hole. But could you at least tell us if you are asking about:
The theory as Darwin stated it.
Its modern counterpart.
Something else.
Can you tell us what you would accept as scientific evidence; and could you please give a fictitious example in this case; and a real world example in some other?
There may be a bit of confusion or miscommunication here. It may be helpful to review the conversation. I responded to someone who was starting to have doubts about God and was not sure how to proceed in light of the Theistic inclinations their family. I merely suggested that they be sure of any conclusions before committing and to follow truth no matter what.
You then responded to me by asking what I meant by truth and then proceeded to make a number of statements about your beliefs and made some assumptions about mine, and then asked me to back up the belief that you assumed I had with evidence.
The subject was “truth”. And You said: “Truth? Give me evidence.” That’s where I got a bit confused and asked for clarification. I’m not sure what you mean by evidence when it comes to the topic of truth. I wasn’t sure if you were asking me about epistemology, or to defend some belief that you assumed I held… e.g. the Quaran, etc.
When I asked for clarification, you responded with: “Present physical and objective evidence that your patron deity and Jesus exists. Back up your claim and prove that your superstitions are not imaginary.”
I never made such claims, or purported to have evidence for it. You then proceeded to berate me, becoming nasty, accusative and insulting, followed by the usual pile-on of the echo chamber with a barrage the same sentiment, at which point I concluded that continuing the conversation was clearly futile.
To be clear, while I do hold a personal belief in the God of the Bible based on what I consider to be evidence, I never once mentioned my belief (or any Theistic belief) in my comment, and I never at any point purported to be able to supply evidence for anything. Thus, you requesting “evidence” from me for something I never claimed or claimed to hold evidence for is entirely irrelevant, and is entirely different from my asking someone for evidence for their clearly stated belief in evolution.
Once again, I am not here to argue to be baited by captious comments. I am hear to listen, to learn, and to contribute when I can in a healthy productive way.
For clarity, here’s the record of our converstation:
You implied the existence of a deity when you left that Bible Scripture. You did make a claim.
If you’re going to quote Bible Scripture. Then you need to provide evidence. I could write a book too and make grand claims that deities and prophets exist and tell my followers to believe because it says so.
I wasn’t the only one that picked up that you were implying with your beliefs when you said “truth” the other members picked up on it as well. “Truth” is a Christians way of saying “God is real” which is a claim. So why are you singling me out in this discussion when you didn’t answer neither @Nyarlathotep or @Sheldon?
You did that to yourself with your commentary. I didn’t make you. If you didn’t want to land yourself in hot water and being called out for dumb shit then you should have just stuck with reading the threads and not commenting. But you couldn’t help yourself. I’m neither blind nor stupid, buddy. When you talk about “God” like he’s a real person, you’re making a claim. When you say something is evidence like you just did. Now the burden is on you to back up your claims or you lose all credibility here and you’re now a liar and bull shitter.
I greatly appreciate your approach here and I fully understand the need to begin this way. Attempting to understand what question is actually being asked and what someone means by evidence is a very valid and effective means to beginning any such conversation in a productive way. Greatly appreciated!
In answer to your question. I am looking to find a piece of objective, empirical evidence in keeping with the scientific method (i.e. must be observable and repeatable) which demonstrates Darwin’s “change of kinds over many years”. That is, that cats and dogs shared a common ancestry - a process that turns fish into mammals, dinosaurs into birds, fish or even apes into humans, and amphibious mammals into whales, and the like.
This would NOT include a change in the genetic material within one kind such as speciation or adaptation, like small changes in one kind of bird or fish resulting in a genetically different bird or fish, but rather one “kind” of animal being transformed by process of evolution into an entirely different kind (macro-evolution). This is difference is extremely important as micro-evolution is not scientific evidence for macro-evolution.
In the answer, please feel free to use any resource material necessary and to quote or cut and paste freely. I don’t care if the source of the information is original or not, I only care that it exists and is scientific.
