Did Nothing Create Everything?
- Thread starter SetiAlpha6
- Start date
Stopping there for the night...
Xelasnave.1947
Valued Senior Member
The rock was probably a fountain in the garden of a lost civilization who were wiped out by the Younger Dryas flooding event often thought to be the basis for the flood myths written about in Sumeria and later incorporated by the Hebrews in their Bible.
It is thought this ancient civilization constructed many such fountains to beautify and irrigate their gardens. It is thought that they did not construct such fountains for agriculture where it clear systems were designed to minimise water evaporation unlike these mystical rock fountains. Many of their ancient fountains have been incorporated into local myths as locals were mystified as to how the water came up thru the rock but it is thought the original metallic piping was taken in the first few years after the impact event as mining and metal working was confined to coastal cities which were all of course wiped out. This rock is irrefutable evidence of the lost civilization.
Alex
Xelasnave.1947
Valued Senior Member
This artist impression is incorrect as there was considerable top soil gardens with many plants and life size gold statue s which of course have been removed..it is believed that although very technically advanced the lost civilization could only use gold and used to call free copper dirty gold and only used it for children's toys unfortunately none of these have survived proving these ancient folk did not think enough of them to bury them with their dead.
Alex
SetiAlpha6:
The thing is, if somebody says something happened magically, like you're saying here, I'd need to see some evidence of magic. The evolution of complex life on earth appears to have happened naturally, not magically. You've heard of the theory of evolution, haven't you?
No. To believe that, I would need evidence that it occurred. Just like I'd need evidence to believe that God Did It.
Me too!
The thing is, if somebody says something happened magically, like you're saying here, I'd need to see some evidence of magic. The evolution of complex life on earth appears to have happened naturally, not magically. You've heard of the theory of evolution, haven't you?
Somebody else corrected you on this error. I hope you now recognise your mistake. The early universe was in relatively low entropy state, and entropy has been increasing ever since then, just as the laws of thermodynamics say it should. There's nothing that needs "overcoming".
It sounds like you don't have a very good understanding of entropy. You know, for instance, that it only has to increase in a closed system? A person, for instance, is not a closed system. We eat food, like you say. We get energy from our environment, and we emit waste heat and other waste out to that environment. Fighting entropy in this case has nothing to do with intelligence.
No. Atheism is just a lack of belief in gods. No faith is required not to believe something. When I say Mickey Mouse isn't a real mouse, that's not a statement based on faith.
Sure you do. You dismiss the big bang theory and evolution, for starters, for faith-based reasons.
No. It's possible to be an atheist and believe in all kinds of woo that doesn't involve gods, as such. Mind you, that's a sort of inconsistent kind of atheism - the kind espoused by people who haven't really thought things through to their logical conclusion.
Do you think Catholicism does any better when it comes to proof that it's true? Or your preferred brand of Christianity (whatever it is)?
If you think it's necessary to prove Naturalism true, you're kind of missing the point. Methodological naturalism only says that we should assume there's a natural explanation for everything until such time as that assumption proves untenable. So far, it all seems to be working out just fine - no need to introduce superfluous gods.
You have the onus of proof on the wrong person. The default is that nothing exists unless you have some evidence for its existence. That means that if you say God exists, or that the Rock of Moses exists, or whatever, it's up to you to persuade the rest of us that you're right.
Name one supernatural process that you have studied, embraced and understand. Show us - using suitable evidence - why this cannot be a natural process.
I don't recall you providing any evidence for Creation of anything by a God.
And this thing about "dead chemicals": what do you mean by that? Is your body not made of these "dead chemicals" you speak of? Or perhaps you think you have special "living chemicals" in you? Or, perhaps you have some positive evidence for the existence of soul? Whichever it is, I'm not seeing you making an evidence-based case for your belief.
There's a long history of people claiming to have identified specific places as the locations of biblical events. How many people have claimed to have found the remains of Noah's Ark, or remnants of the One True Cross, for instance?
What you are doing is obvious cherry picking. You start out with the answer you want to get to, then you go off and try to make the geography fit the story, one way or another. Find a split rock in the desert? Need a magical fountain? Voila! The rock must have been the source of the magic fountain! Even better if you can find some other stuff in the general vicinity that you can shoehorn to fit the story you want to tell.
But let's suppose that, somehow, you do manage to show that this guy called Moses led a bunch of people through the desert along a particular route - and I point out that the scholarly consensus is that nobody has found such a thing yet. Then what? How are you going to prove that water miraculously flowed from your chosen rock? How are you going to show that any of the miracles in Exodus actually took place as advertised? And even if you somehow get past those hurdles, how are you going to show that your preferred God was responsible for any of this?
Entropy is not a problem. Cells are not closed systems. Move on.
We don't know yet. Scientists are working on it. We do know some things, though. For example, chemical processes alone can easily form amino acids under the right conditions; we've observed it in the lab and in studies of comets (to take one example).
But you're setting up a false dichotomy here. What you're trying to argue is: if scientists can't explain exactly how life began, then God Did It. But that doesn't follow at all. God is not the default if scientists don't know the answer yet. You don't get to have your God of the Gaps. If you say God Did It, it's up to you to explain how and when he did it, and present your own supporting evidence. How's that coming along for you?
Science is done by people. People are fallible. Some people are dishonest. It's no different in science than it is in religion. Tell us why there are so many religious frauds, when the good priests have a system that ought to prevent them from happening? And why are they still used to knowingly deceive the public long after they have been debunked?
Which of God's miracles on Mt Sinai have been verified? Where's the proof?
SetiAlpha6:
You really need to study evolution, just a bit. If you keep ignoring it, you make yourself look ignorant, like this:
You really need to study evolution, just a bit. If you keep ignoring it, you make yourself look ignorant, like this:
Evolution is not a (purely) random process. Think about natural selection, for starters. Not random.
No.
Your use of the word "goal" betrays the trap of teleological thinking that you've fallen into. You think that everything has a pre-destined purpose, planned out by somebody or something. Really, though, goals are ideas that humans use to try to make sense of the world. A cell doesn't have "goals", as such, apart from the ones that we humans impose on them as a convenient metaphor. We might talk of "selfish genes" "trying" to survive to the next generation, but that's an athropomorphic metaphor for what is actually happening. Again, a good starting point is to consider what actually happens with natural selection. There is no pre-defined "goal" in natural selection. Life does not "aim" to become more complex, or more intelligent, or stronger or faster, or whatever. Nature forces it along those paths.
How could a cell "care" about anything at all? Isn't "care" just another human concept you're trying to nail onto something? Realise that "care" in such a context is a metaphor.
Not a stupid question. Creationists and teleologists just like you stumble over this stuff regularly. The problem is your worldview: the one that says that everything must have a "purpose" and that God imposed "goals" on all things, and stuff like that. You struggle to cope with the notion that there's actually no Big Plan. Worse, you seem uninterested in even considering the alternative.
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What's your argument or evidence for that statement?
See, the thing is, you're already on the record as having a poor understanding about how entropy applies to life and evolution. But here you are, again, making overconfident pronouncements about what is and isn't possible in nature. Why do you do that?
The problem that you're going to have with scientists is that you'll need to to provide convincing evidence that a historical event must have been due to God, at least at the level of more likely than not. Probably that means that you'll need to show that your chosen historical event (a) actually occurred in the way you claim it did, and (b) could not have come about by natural means. It's a high hurdle, but extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence.
Seriously? The US?! You're talking about the One Nation Under God, are you not? A nation in which about 75% of people or more self-identify as Christian. If there's Naturalistic programming taking place there, the teachers are doing a lousy job of it! Also, why were you immune to the programming? Are you special?
Only if God is not affecting physical things in the natural world, which pretty much rules out the sort of Gods people tend to worship. For instance, if God answers prayers by making physical changes in the world, then science will be able to detect those changes, and they will thus be proxy evidence for God's existence. But you know what? Studies of the efficacy of prayer have been carried out by scientists, and the results have been no better than placebo. That doesn't mean God doesn't exist, of course. It just means that he doesn't seem to be answering prayers - at least not in any way that skews the usual statistics of, for example, recovery from fatal illnesses, as far as we can tell.
What strikes me as strange is that this All Powerful God of yours is so keen to hide himself away from his Creation. Surely, if he was so keen for us all to Believe in Him, he could come right out and convince us fairly easily that he is real. Why doesn't he do that, do you think? Why does he rely on us drawing dubious inferences from the existence of split rocks in Arabia, instead?
And there's scholarly consensus that this real mountain is undoubtedly the location of the acts of the Abrahamic God that you speak of, is there? Why haven't we seen headline news proclaiming that Proof of God has been found at last? Why haven't all the Buddhists converted to Judaism in the face of this marvellous convincing evidence?
That makes three different locations where the presence of God may not have done anything, I'd say.
You know, I've seen lots of split rocks in my time. It has occurred to me that - just maybe - rocks can be split by natural processes. But no, that can't be right. Only God could split a rock!
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How do you know God did it?
