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Jesus and the Bible (Religious People 2.0)
Topic Started: Nov 21 2011, 09:33 PM (2,193 Views)
Zel
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Totally.

When I think of evidence for God, St. Thomas Aquinas instantly comes to my mind. I believe there was a story where he was pointing out to some children how effectively a pocket-watch worked, and how well organised the gears within the pocket-watch were placed, and stated that the world around us is far to complicated and complex to have just appeared out of nowhere, and claims that has to have been some sort deity or divine creator for the world to exist in the way it did.

Anyway, I was brought up as a Catholic, but the older I get, the less I seem to believe in Catholicism, or any religion, for that matter, and just accept that world was, is and will always be a massive space of mystery. I think defining the existence of the world as it has always been, would be the most impressive feat, if not, completely impossible.
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surrealmagnum


Now, let's finally get to the evidence. Again, I'm not writing reports on every area, just quick arguments.

Anthropology; the study of humanity: One thing evolutionists like to bring up is the 98% similarity between humans and chimps. But what many avoid pointing out is that humans contain 3 billion base pairs per cell. Equaling this out, a 2% difference = 60 million alterations. Now, the chimp-human evolutionary split supposedly began about 6 million years ago. But even with 10 million years, only about 1700 mutations would occur in the genome; way less than 60 million. That's just a small point of many to challenge the theory of evolution.

Language is another easy topic to introduce. Evolution (and its many, many flaws), says that things go from simple to complex. If language was an evolutionary trait that began with animal grunts, then it would follow that path, too, right? Well, it doesn't. Ancient languages are far more complex than both modern languages and ancient languages (like Latin), that have become more and more simple over time; the opposite of evolutionary predictions. Just for reference, modern English has lost 65-85% of vocabulary used in Old English.

Evolution: Microevolution, or adaptation, is real. We can observe it, confirm it, and even see it regularly. Macroevolution, the "logical" jump from micro to macro, or how species become other species, is not. There's way too many things to list, and since I already covered one of them in the live chat, I'll skip that one. Instead, I'll focus on a specific example. A giraffe's brain obviously doesn't burst when it bends down to drink water. It doesn't pass out when it returns to an upright state, either. This is because valves in its neck, which cut off the blood flow needed to raise it, are compliant with its size. Giraffes have really big hearts because the blood needs to make it to the brain. If the valves in its arteries, which cut the blood flow off, weren't there, its head wouldn't be able to take the pressure. There also exists a "sponge" under its brain that absorbs the final portion of it. When it raises upright again, the absorber pushes that oxygenated blood into its brain, while the valves open again. This system could not have evolved together. Early giraffes couldn't have had long necks because its brain would explode with pressure. It couldn't have had a heart that big either because it wouldn't need it, which, according to Darwin's theory, means it wouldn't evolve. There are plenty of other specific examples, too, but this is one of the more simpler ones to understand. (Not to mention that the fossil record is filled with way more imagination of what it should be than what is actually unearthed.)

Physics and fine-tuning: This was a part of the speech I gave the other day, if any of you remember me saying that... multiple times. :3 In the '60's, scientists discovered that the universe had a beginning. (I don't think anyone here disagrees with that, so I'll just skip over the reasons why.) It's called the Big Bang, and there's plenty of holes in the theory. Overall, though, the point of there being a beginning to the universe, which the Bible foretold long before we discovered it, is true. A quick thing you can do is ask what infinity minus infinity is. The answer? Infinity. Infinity does not occur in the physical-material world, so the only alternatives to this are abstract quantities (like numbers), and the mind. But if something had a beginning, then it would need to be caused, and numbers do not cause anything; they're simply constants. The only alternative left is a mind, or intelligence behind it all. Not only is this true, but the fine-tuning of the universe is astronomically precise. Just for quick examples, if the weak nuclear force (one of 4 fundamentals of nature), was altered by one part of 10^100 (a googol), life would not be permissible. Also, Roger Penrose of Oxford calculated that it's more likely our solar system formed from a random collision of particles than the probability set forth by non-theists alone. I'll leave it at that because physics can get confusing really rather quick. [Someone asked me to include the multiverse, or omniverse theory. We know from studies of the infinite that it doesn't exist, so infinite universes don't exist. What we're left with now is the possibility that they exist. Not the probability (there is no evidence that they exist... at all), but the possibility. I'd like too point out it's possible that we're all elephants, and we just see each others as humans because we're embarrassed by our figure.]

Chemistry; radioactive dating: This is filled with holes. Honestly, I don't see how anyone can see this as reliable, all things considered. To make a long story short, radioactive dating assumes everything decays and always has decayed at a constant rate. Just so you know, rate of decay is affected by everything from heat to water. It assumes there was no heat change (day and night, for a start), no water (rain, anyone?), and nothing else; only consistency. They even further "prove" its accuracy by comparing the results to use of dendrochronology efforts, by not even acknowledging that it's known to not be accurate nearly as much as it's set out to be. There was an English scientist that took a recently-formed rock from a volcano and dated it according to this method. He found that the results were off by a crapload. (I want to say millions, but I'm not sure, so let's stick to crapload.) That kind of dating is specifically the use of potassium-argon ratios, what with the crystallization and all that.

Now that I've covered a few of the sciences, let's move onto Christianity and why it's the best choice. To start off, I'll talk about its accuracy.

Most people say that the Bible is irrelevant because it's so old, and all the changes made to it have warped the original message. This is really, really wrong. I'll use the New Testament dates because I know them better. The earliest known records of the Gospels were written within the first century A.D. (first with Luke, then with John around 125 A.D.), which puts them a bit after Jesus died. (I'd like to point out the Constitution is 235 years-old at this point.) How do we know they're accurate copies of the original? Well, the copies are in Greek. What historians do is they compare the earliest documents in one area and compare them to the earliest ones in another area, and also with ones of later periods, like today. What's amazing is that the Bible has the most accurate copies ever made in any realm of... well, anything ever recorded and copied. I've heard there were only 1 in 10,000 words changed at all (which is ridiculously accurate, remember scribes wrote these by hand), but I've never had that confirmed, though people generally cite MSNBC as the source.

Next are the things God told the Israelites what to do, and what not to do. Off the top of my head, He told them not to touch dead bodies, eat pork, and to dig a hole before they went potty. These were unrivaled commands that came way before science knew anything about the dangers of these things. Touching dead bodies (as many cultures did, in things like weird rituals and stuff), results in what? You getting diseases. Eating pork, especially with no form of decontamination, results in what? You getting sick, once again. And why did the Bubonic Plague spread like wildfire? Because nobody dug holes before they went potty like they should've! But nothing in science told them this was dangerous. God told them, though, long before we ever knew for ourselves.

Nevermind the fact that the most influential person of all time is Jesus Christ. Just take a quick look at other religious figures. Buddha's body was cut up into (9?) pieces and scattered around the world. Muhammad's body had a temple built over it. Jesus' body was never found. I already touched on this in the first post, so I can just kinda skip over it here.

This is getting kinda long, so I'll just touch on a few more points. Pointing out the fathers of modern science; what were they? To name some off memory, Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, Mendel, Einstein; they all believed in God, usually Christian. And to write them off and say that they were pleasing the Church, or that everyone back then was a theist is ridiculous. If you actually read some of their books, you can see that they thought about the concept of a creator intensely, and still arrived at the same conclusion. When Newton discovered gravity, he didn't rejoice about how he didn't need to believe in God anymore, he was pushed by the yearning to understand more of how God set things in motion.

Scientists also have faith; faith that the universe is rationally intelligible, faith that we can understand the universe. You can't ask why we shouldn't be able to because the rejection of faith needs no evidence, just like how atheism doesn't need to show proof that it's right, theists have to show proof that theism is correct. Saying that God is no explanation is also illogical. How is accepting the answer to something being more complex than the question so hard? An apple falling from a tree is very easy to understand. But Newton's laws of gravity is an unfalsifiable answer, yet it's more complex than the action of an apple simply falling.

If you see a letter in the sand, you automatically recognize the semiotics of the letters and how they carry meaning. But to see that, and in turn notice the 3 1/2 billion letters in the human genome called codons arranged in a precise and crucial order in the trillions of cells in your body and say that it simply happened by chance and necessity if irrational.

So, that's it. I think I kept it pretty short, but if you have any specific questions or arguments, feel free to reply. Again, I only touched on a small portion of a small amount of scientific and logical areas, so I'm bound to miss things. Thanks.

Romans 15:13 "Now the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that you may abound in hope, through the power of the Holy Spirit."
Edited by surrealmagnum, Nov 23 2011, 05:06 PM.
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LikeaBoss
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So magnum thinks Christianity is the best religion?
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surrealmagnum


LikeaBoss
Nov 23 2011, 06:23 PM
So magnum thinks Christianity is the best religion?
"Now that I've covered a few of the sciences, let's move onto Christianity and why it's the best choice."

Yes. Why?
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Hasfarr™
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#SKCTID
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It's the terror of knowing what this world is about, watching some good friends screaming "LET ME OUT!"
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Rapidcar1™
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DK Elder
surl whats the URL to the icon u made me years ago?
DK ALL DAY >:E

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surrealmagnum


Matthew 18:18-20: "Verily I say unto you, Whatsoever ye shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever ye shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. Again I say unto you, That if two of you shall agree on earth as touching any thing that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of my Father which is in heaven. For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them."
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Rapidcar1™
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DK Elder
Jesus will devour your soul.

HE LOOVVVVESSSS YOU

Jesus had long hair cuz he was a hippie, but not a gay hippy cuz hes JESUS
DK ALL DAY >:E

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Sarchabid
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The most delicious
surrealmagnum
Nov 23 2011, 06:48 PM
LikeaBoss
Nov 23 2011, 06:23 PM
So magnum thinks Christianity is the best religion?
"Now that I've covered a few of the sciences, let's move onto Christianity and why it's the best choice."

Yes. Why?
That's a pretty strong judgement there. Sure, it's a great religion, but what you think is the best might not be what others think. Now, I don't know much about Christianity, or Hinduism for that matter. But every religion has its faults, no one religion is better than the other.
PSN: Sarchabid | The Most Delicious Admin
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LikeaBoss
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Sarchabid
Nov 23 2011, 10:26 PM
surrealmagnum
Nov 23 2011, 06:48 PM
LikeaBoss
Nov 23 2011, 06:23 PM
So magnum thinks Christianity is the best religion?
"Now that I've covered a few of the sciences, let's move onto Christianity and why it's the best choice."

Yes. Why?
That's a pretty strong judgement there. Sure, it's a great religion, but what you think is the best might not be what others think. Now, I don't know much about Christianity, or Hinduism for that matter. But every religion has its faults, no one religion is better than the other.
It is biased on his opinion, but apparently he thinks Christianity is the best religion because it "makes sense". I think.
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