Page 3 of 15 FirstFirst 1234513 ... LastLast
Results 21 to 30 of 150

Thread: 4 Step Proof for God of the Bible

  1. #21
    DRay563 Guest

    Default DRay563

    Let me first establish that I am a Christian who believes in earnestly seeking truth. I feel it is my job, as well as the job of everyone else, to find that which is true within the bounds that God has established for us. That being said, it is important to analyze that which is real and to some degree rely upon scientific observation (that is, where it does not obviously contradict the Word of God), especially where science is virtually infallible (empirical and observational science, not predictive science). That being said, all of what I will say from this point forward is what I consider to be true based on logic, rational thought, and current scientific evidence, all of this presented from an Atheistic standpoint (as this argument cannot presume the existence of God to prove the existence of God). Let it also be known that my attempts to refute (or help refine) the argument of "4 Step Proof of God" is not for personal glory, but rather to help continue uplifting God and what is truth, for God is truth (John 14:6).

    Simply stated, If for eternity things have been evolving (biologically or non-biologically, etc.), by this very definition of evolving (in causes and effects, before or after the amoeba, even before or after the big bang), you would have had an eternity to be perfected (without sin) irrespective of when you personally started in the evolving chain according to calculus where the approximation of eternity is taken as eternity.

    (quote taken from the second sentence of the first paragraph of Step 1)

    I find several problems with this statement. First is that this statement goes against scientific evidence. The idea of an endless amount of time leading towards perfection is both counter-intuitive and counter-evidential. The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that all closed systems undergo an accumulation of entropy, such that even if there is a located decrease in entropy, the total amount of entropy in the system will increase. The nature of the Universe as a closed system has not been proven or refuted, as the understanding of the curvature of spacetime has three possibilities. Two possibilities, negative curvature and no curvature, lend themselves to an infinite and unbounded Universe that is an open system. One possibility, positive curvature, lends itself to a closed system, in which the Laws of Thermodynamics can and would apply. Therefore, if one were to postulate that the curvature of spacetime is positive and therefore a closed system, an eternity would lend itself to chaos (as this is what entropy is a measure of, the amount of useless energy or chaos in a system) rather than perfection. If one were to postulate that the curvature of spacetime was either negative or none at all, then this would lend to an open system and the Laws of Thermodynamics do not apply. However, there is nothing in the evidence that would suggest perfection would be a result of an infinite system; rather, only the possibility of anything as there would be infinite mass and infinite energy.

    The second problem I see is the direct connection between sin and the evolution of the cosmos. You have quite clearly defined the evolving nature of the cosmos as being both biological and non-biological, and that given enough time, this biological and non-biological evolution would result in perfection. Now, assuming that such a conclusion is true (even though I just spent a little bit of time establishing why I think it is not true), there is an inherent flaw in this line of reasoning. Sin did not enter the cosmos until approximately 6000 years ago. In fact, it says in Genesis that everything that God made "in the beginning" was good! Therefore, prior to any sin being in the world, everything was already perfect. Once sin entered into the world, there has been an overall degeneration of Creation.

    To provide an example of this, let us look at gene mutation and incestual relations. A common question asked is "where did Cain's wife come from?" Well, Cain's wife came from the same lineage he came from: the loins of Adam. Now, it's possible that his wife came from one of Adam's sons or grandsons, we aren't sure of this, so we shouldn't be terribly dogmatic. Fact of the matter is, one of Adam's sons had to marry one of Adam's daughters to continue to produce offspring (or Adam had to procreate with one of his daughters). This raises quite a few eyebrows, given not only the Levitical laws but also the obvious.... disfigurement that usually accompanies incestual procreation. The reason for this is obvious though. Let us say that a mother and a father have a son and daughter. The father has certain mutated genes (most of which are easily overcome by good genes) and he passes these mutated genes to his son and daughter. Now, the son and daughter decide to procreate.... and in doing so, they both pass along these mutated genes to their single child. Because of this close-relatedness and the gene mutation build-up within a family line, disfigurement is usually the result of procreation within a family line.

    However, this would not have been a problem during Adam's time, as there wouldn't have been mutated genes to pass along. Therefore, there wouldn't have been any problems with incestual relations resulting in disfigurement due to the accumulation of mutated genes. And this is where Cain's wife (or at least one of the sons' wives) came from: his sister. And this is a great example of the overall degeneration, not perfection, of the human race as time has worn on. This degeneration is the natural result of sin being in the world! Sin corrupts everything. Even the animals, originally plant-eaters (Genesis 1:30), many of them have become carniverous or at least omniverous, rather than getting closer to the alignment of their original state.

    As a clause to this problem that I see, let me say that there has been a recent emergence of order within the seen chaos. A professor at Yale did a study and proved that given an open system where there is an infinite source (the sun) and an infinite sink (the earth), there will be a local decrease of entropy. Hence the development of technology, the overall moral nature of mankind, the establishing of global laws.... etc. However, the evidence on earth does not establish the evidence universally. It a logical fallacy to give to the whole that which can be seen of a part (you wouldn't call a whole car blue just because the seatbelt was blue). Also, this recent emergence of order does not counteract or deny the degeneration of sinfulness as it has accumulated over the generations. This degeneration is becoming more and more painfully obvious, not only within the animal kingdom and within gene mutation, but also with the spiritual deadening of society as a whole (America is a great example) and the lack of emphasis on God as the key to life (and more of an emphasis on man's ability and scientific reasoning to explain life and reality as a whole).

    The third problem I see with this is that cause and effect has been debunked within the scientific community. Cause and effect are wonderful for Newtonian physics, even to some degree Einsteinian physics. However, once you leave these realms and begin moving into quantum physics, cause and effect don't apply. Cause and effect are principles based on the predictability of things. Given a certain condition, a certain object will do a certain thing, 100% of the time. In quantum physics, however, all objects live by the rule of probability. There is a certain chance that they will do a certain thing, given a certain condition.... but they could also do something else! Even more so, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle allows for the creation and destruction of particles, seemingly at random, within a false vacuum state of energy. Where we see nothing (space), there is in fact ambient energy and within this energy, particles are somewhat circumventing (but not breaking) the law of conservation of energy. They create themselves (a pair of a particle and an anti-particle) from this energy and then recombine into the same energy they were made from. There is no cause, no rhyme or reason discernable, other than the reason that there cannot be emptiness (the impossibility of a perfect vacuum).

    Now, I will say this. There is a cause for everything, and that cause is God. But, since the conclusion of this proof is that God exists, we cannot use the conclusion to prove the premise. Since, from an Atheistic and purely scientific standpoint, there is no deducable cause for the things we observe and measure in the quantum level, cause and effect is a law that doesn't apply in that world. That being said, it is unsound to use the law of cause and effect to prove the evolving nature of the cosmos (as the cosmos is made up of, and therefore bound to, the nature of the quantum level).

    Second, if the universe and time are without a cause and continued to exist in the eternity of the past in causes and effects, then this simply reverts us back up to Step 1 which shows why there can not be an eternity of the past of causes and effects.

    (quote taken from the first sentence of the third paragraph of Step 2)
    I have spent time arguing with an Atheist on the CARM boards about the nature of this type of argument. And I walked away with a very important conclusion that I hope you will accept rather than reject.

    There is no particular reason to argue for or against a "beginning" or "no beginning," as both can be reasonable and neither can be disproven, using merely logic and science. If one wishes to argue for an unbounded past, such that there is an infinite regression, this is possible as it would not take an infinite amount of finite steps to traverse such a regression. Let me explain.

    Traversal requires a beginning point and ending point. The end point is obviously where we are now, the present. The beginning point cannot be defined as "back unto infinity" because such a point is non-existent. It is logically inconsistent to define a point "infinity away" because there is no way to establish such a point except perhaps in your mind. That being said, any established point to traversal must necessarily be a finite distance away from the end point, being the present. Since such these two points, by definition, can only be separated by a finite distance, there is an infinite amount of regression time prior to these two points, and there was not an infinite amount of traversal required to get from one point to the other. Therefore, since you can only establish one point, there is not an infinite amount of finite steps required to traverse this gap.

    In fact, it is somewhat counter-intuitive to argue against this type of logic, as we believe that God always has been. Since there was never a time without God, it is more reasonable to assume an infinite regress than to not. Since we already have an infinite regress established, it becomes merely opinion to establish that God is the brute fact that must be rather than the Universe.

    You might, however, revert back to your argument of perfection, or even try and to establish my argument for eventual total chaos (I noted someone referred to the "Heat Death") and say that the Universe cannot be in existence for an infinite regress. However, current physics models allow for such a belief (even though, in reading them, I find them highly consistent with science fiction, they are none-the-less some of the current models for the existence of the Universe). Take for instance, one can believe in the infinite sea of indeterminite energy from which a quantum fluctuation is derived. Or, if you prefer, you can believe in the nucleation of true vacuum bubbles within a sea of false vacuum, and the collision of two such bubbles allows for
    unfathomable particle generation. Both of these models are derived from an infinite regress of an open system (in which Entropy will not be accumulated) and say that the visible universe is nothing more than one of many universes (derived from the concept that our Universe is in fact a black hole and the farthest distance we can see is our event horizon).

    These models allow for belief in something aside from God to establish not only the imperfection we see, but also the universe we see. There are still some problems with the theories, but neither is physics a comprehensive study of all that is. As was argued to me, and I have come to agree, it was merely my presuppositions that made me posit that God is the brute fact rather than some of the other explanations offered. I still posit God and my "opponents" still posit physics, but it is an important recognition to make that there are other reasons rather than merely science and logic that help us determine what we believe.... and that is our own conditioning.

    In Christ,
    Daniel

  2. #22
    Join Date
    Jul 2004
    Church of
    Sherwood Park
    Posts
    3,515
    Blog Entries
    30
    Rep Power
    26

    Default

    The 4 Step Proof states clearly that it "does not presume God first, since notice I did not mention God first." So, DRay, you may be overassuming that the Proof would "presume the existence of God to prove the existence of God."

    Interpolated predictive science is most valid on its trajectory in all walks of life. To simplify this is so, take for example, the increasing size of the sun. We know eventually one day, in about 5 billion years from now, the earth will be burnt up and be without the sea because of the increasing size of the sun. This a certainty. Scientists also agree the universe has been expanding at an exponential rate with no end in sight. The dark energy has shown to be greater in strength than dark matter and matter. The same can be said regarding the conscience towards sin. It has been exponentially increasing so we don't dare do some things we commonly did before.

    Step 1 is not saying eternity leads to sinlessness, but that if you had an eternity, you would have ample time to attain sinlessness. And as Step 1 shows, by interpolating the exponential progression of man's conscience, it is evidentially and experimentally reality. This revelation agrees intuitively.

    There is not a requirement for the knowledge of whether the universe is a closed or open system. The 4 Step Perfect Proof is perfect, and thus, does not rely on things unknown, only that which is known to know it is perfect as evidentially predicted.

    Chaos to man is merely randomness, but to the laws of cause and effect, it still has its causes and effects. This does not change the principle of Step 1, which indicates there could not have been an eternity of the past of cause and effect, otherwise you would have attained sinlessness. Whether a system is closed or opened, space is curved or not, makes no difference in our observing our exponential progression of conscience and thus, eradication of sins.

    The only required proof is observing the progression of man's conscience in the past 6000 years. If it is exponential, then it is true that eternity is more than enough time to reach sinlessness as we approach infinity. Ergo, there was not an eternity of the past of causes and effects, and man was created. Only Christ fulfills that characteristic when compared to all other gods.

    Your problem, I sense by the Holy Spirit, in reading the Proof is not reading the whole Proof. Let it all sink in before overlooking something vital to the Proof. Perhaps you stopped at the first couple of sentences of each Step, for I am merely repeating what the Proof already shows evidentially.

    Your next mistake is thinking sinlessness is pertaining to the Cosmos, when I am only focused on man in the Proof attaining perfection by God's grace. As was stated, "Note: this proof is not referring to nature merely reacting, but to man made in God's image, and only those men who are being perfected because they are born-again or saved. We are referring to only man, not animals, and only those men and woman who are saved." Sin first entered with Satan, so God made the earth desolate and waste in Gen. 1.2. When man was created in God's image 6000 years ago, sin soon followed again. This impacted the whole earth as well. But this time, God did not wipe out the whole earth, only locked man out of the garden and flooded the earth locally. You can take this as an exponentially increase in conscience. It is showing God will not flood the whole earth again and wipe out all creatures, but only 1/3 of the people of earth (Rev. 9.18) in the Tribulation. The Cosmos is not God's focus. God's focus is man made in His image to be in the image of His Son so that God can walk with man in the millennial kingdom and be the center of the new city in the new earth after the millennium. Even one day, the universe will dissipate, but man will continue on.

    We see in God's design from the moment of God placing man in creation to the time of man's perfection it does not need an eternity. Thus, you can take the starting point of man being placed in creation as approximating the eternity of the past to show that it does not require an eternity to be perfected.

    The loins of Adam that you presume Cain's wife came from is not to say a child of Adam, but included in all those in the Adamic race. This is not incest, but rather all human beings on planet earth, no matter what continent they were on were in the Adamic race. As soon as Adam was God-conscious all men and women were God-conscious. Just as when Christ died all men died and covered by His death, though not all receive His atonement. Be careful not to legalize the Scriptures. Cain came directly from the first Adamic man, but his wife may not have. We can't say because the Bible doesn't say, so it should not be an issue. You should take your own advice and not be so dogmatic. Your initial mistake premise is causing you some faulty reasoning.

    There is the added point too that if you claim incestuous relations to deny exponential progression of the conscience, then you are arguing against yourself, because today, such practice is rare. This is another example of an exponential progression. You said there is no mutated genes to pass along in incestuous relationships in Adam's time if his own children procreate with each other, but that is not true. If such a thing occurs, it automatically is a defect because any procreation, whether incestuous or not, is being born into sin from the fall of Adam and Eve.

    The meat-eating animals and insects stem from creation's fall instigated by Lucifer when he was cast out of 3rd heaven. When God flooded the earth in Gen. 1.2, naturally there was some residual creatures that would make up the food chain. Such sin was not completely eradicated, nor could it have been. Notice day 2 in the restoration of creation was not called a good day because up came some of those demons that were cast into the deep in Gen. 1.2, one tempting Eve. They were disembodied spirits that entered creatures, even man after man's fall. Man was protected in the Garden of Eden until his fall. What do serpents eat? Then, when man sinned even man was not protected from meat-eating creatures because man was cast out of the garden. What Gen. 1.30 is telling us was God's original design creating perfect, and the 6 days of restoration are a summary of bringing about that which was already there. Unfortunately, some negative things persisted, though it should not have been a worry to us if we remained not in sin.

    The emphasis in terms of conscience is in percentages. I have already made this point in Step 1 which you overlooked. Simply, percentage-wise murders per capita are decreasing, crime per capita is decreasing. Take for example, form of punishment. Decapitation is not common now, nor is brutal forms of punishment. Incest is less prone. One spouse is the norm. Though things are getting more complicated, there is this overall civility in society that exceeds that of previous generations. The Wild West of gun stand-offs is not something we do today. It is not to say there is still not problems and horrible things that happen still, but on a per capita basis there is an improvement.

    In the past the great majority were unsaved, and so it remains today. The ratio of saved to unsaved is much lower than you think then and now. The issues you raise are not a matter of worsening condition, since the things we can do now were not available in the past because the technology was not there. You would be comparing apples to oranges. Today we can still guillotine people to death, but we choose not to. Today, incest is still an option, but per capita is less the case. The fact that things are more complicated and we sin in these new scenarios is not a proper claim on things getting worse. It is merely a reflection of more complicated things. If things were this complicated 3000 years ago, man would sin much worse.

    In all forms of science, cause and effect still apply. There is nothing in quantum physics that precedes with an effect without a cause. To think so is just a mistaken assumption, since it can not be shown to be the case. Where is the humility in that? All probabilities have their causes. Just because in a deck of cards there are different outcomes, does not mean there is not the same 52 cards that cause those outcomes. Similarly, there is the same molecular components, but they still must abide in the same laws of cause and effect, just as the 52 cards must abide in the shuffle. Whatever you want to call the energy source! Whether there is a perfect vacuum or not is irrelevant for even the vacuum or non-vacuum has its cause. Whatever we are confused by is no justification for deciding that it is not under some law of operation of cause and effect. How silly. After realizing Step 1 of the Proof, then see that nothing happens all by itself, which is Step 2 in the Proof. Just because you can't discern, does not mean there is not a reason; otherwise, you are pointing to yourself as the center of the universe, that what you know becomes the guiding principle. But this is not reality, for obviously there is things going on you are unaware in their cause and effect.

    You'll just have to accept there is some things God does not want you to know. That would seem reasonable, if you were created by God. The Proof places the burden of the proof on you. It is a perfect Proof because it has stated a position that nothing in nature happens all by itself and that nothing is without a cause, which is backed. This is seen in trillions of examples in creation, yet not one example can be given for the idea that something can happen all by itself. Do you see therefore how the odds are against you in claiming that the quantum level can possibly happen all by itself? It is illogical to surmise that since so many examples can be given of all things having a cause and effect, that then something can happen all by itself without any evidence from you.

    By your admitting there is not an infinity of the past of cause and effect, then unwittingly, you have accepted Step 1, so precede to Step 2. Notice how you contradict yourself because you said, "There is no particular reason to argue for or against a beginning or no beginning." This contradicts what you said: "The beginning point cannot be defined as back unto infinity because such a point is non-existent." You have agreed with Step 1 because you admit there is not an eternity of the past of cause and effect since you said it is "non-existent". But then you said there is no particular reason to argue for "no beginning". This is doublespeak. You do the very thing you advise against. 1 Tim. 3.8 says be "not doubletongued". Wise men do this to be couth, but it is pretentious.

    In your reasoning about finite points, calculus solves your problem. You said "It is logically inconsistent to define a point infinity away because there is no way to establish such a point except perhaps in your mind." It is not necessary to give the exact date of a proposed eternity of the past by atheists and agnostics as they try to disprove God, for it is enough to know that it is not possible because we still sin. A point of eternity in calculus is taken as a spot to work from which approximates infinity. I think you should take a calculus class. If there was an eternity of the past (~) in causes and effects then you would have had an eternity to be perfected, but since you still sin proves that you were created by God, given Christ.

    Just because there has always been God is not reason to believe in an infinite past of creation. That is not even logical, for God would have created at some point. Intuitively it makes no sense that there would be an eternity of the past of causes and effects just because God exists. God can exist in the eternity of the past without His creation having yet been created.

    Even if there was multiple universe, the law of cause and effect still applies, no matter how confused you are by entropy, open and closed systems, vacuums, collisions, bubbles, black holes, various models, and event horizons.

    God alone has made it clear and revealed to us the Proof of His existence. It is the same thing He said in the Bible, look at the mountains and the stars, and ask yourself, did you do that? No. God did it! The 4 Step Proof merely digs a little deeper into that truth in 4 steps:

    1) If there was an eternity of the past of cause and effect, you would have had an eternity to be perfected, but you still sin, so therefore, you had to have been created and there was not an eternity of the past of cause and effect.

    2) Nothing in nature happens all by itself. It always has a cause. Thus, God did it. God is uncreated creator.

    3) Don't argue against some god, for we are speak of God uncreated. Disproving some god is not the subject of this Proof. None have been able to disprove this Proof of God in the 4 Steps.

    4) In the supernatural realm: there can not be an eternity of the past of gods creating gods and supernatural causing supernatural because then you would have had an eternity of the past of cause and effect to attain sinlessness, yet you still sin. Thus, God created according to His divine providence. This brings you back to Step 1, which is God's perfect Proof revealed by the Holy Spirit. And remember, this Proof first does not assume if God exists, but through the evidence it becomes the Perfect Proof for God of the Bible.

    In all of this we have seen God has proven Himself to be the cause of creation and reveals it to us intuitively in agreement with the workings of creation evidentially, predictably and intuitively.

  3. #23
    DRay563 Guest

    Default

    Quote Originally Posted by Churchwork
    The 4 Step Proof states clearly that it "does not presume God first, since notice I did not mention God first." So, DRay, you may be overassuming that the Proof would "presume the existence of God to prove the existence of God."
    If I misspoke, I apologize. I know the proof does not presume the existence of God. The proof is designed to prove the existence of God. As such, using God as an initial reason or as a premise is faulty logic. This is all I meant.

    Quote Originally Posted by Churchwork
    The same can be said regarding the conscience towards sin. It has been exponentially increasing so we don't dare do some things we commonly did before.
    Evolutionists use a similar observation to say that we have evolved a "moral gene" if you will. Remember, however, that sin doesn't just find its roots in immorality in relation to other people. How much sin happens daily when people use the Lord's name in vain, when people worship idols, when people lie, just to discuss three of the commandments?

    Quote Originally Posted by Churchwork
    Your next mistake is thinking sinlessness is pertaining to the Cosmos, when I am only focused on man in the Proof attaining perfection by God's grace. As was stated, "Note: this proof is not referring to nature merely reacting, but to man made in God's image, and only those men who are being perfected because they are born-again or saved. We are referring to only man, not animals, and only those men and woman who are saved."


    I am curious, then, how this applies to what I quoted from Step 1 of the proof in my first post? How is it that the proof focuses on man, when the proof clearly states, "
    If for eternity things have been evolving (biologically or non-biologically, etc.), by this very definition of evolving (in causes and effects, before or after the amoeba, even before or after the big bang), you would have had an eternity to be perfected (without sin)..." (quote taken from the second sentence of the first paragraph of Step 1)? Clearly there is at least some focus on the cosmos. This quote continues to say "...irrespective of when you personally started in the evolving chain according to calculus where the approximation of eternity is taken as eternity."

    Eternity has not been here for man. Man, as you have stated, has been here for 6000 years. In this, I feel you are tying together two things and jointly connecting them to eternity, when only one has the potential establishment of eternity. Let me be more clear:

    1) If for eternity things have been evolving, THEN
    2) These things cannot include man as man has only been here for 6000 years.
    3) The result of having an eternity of things evolving, provided by the proof, is sinlessness.
    4) The possibility of evolving in relation to sin, as sin does not have any relation to the cosmos, can only come into play for mankind, THEREFORE
    5) The evolution under discussion has only been here for 6000 years, THEREFORE
    6) The discussion of the possibility of cause and effect for a past eternity does not apply AS
    7) An eternity of things evolving does not pertain to the evolution of man which has only been around for 6000 years, THEREFORE
    8) Any said conclusion that eternity cannot have been here due to the observance of sin only maintains that MAN has not been here for eternity, not the cosmos, THEREFORE
    9) This proof does not establish that the cosmos cannot have been here for an eternity, but only man.

    My 9 step proof here establishes, in a nut shell, that Step 1 wrongly assumes that since man has not been here for eternity (as such an eternity would result in sinlessness, a seemingly ad hoc proposition), the cosmos cannot have been here for an eternity and therefore require an uncaused cause, i.e. God.

    Quote Originally Posted by Churchwork
    Sin first entered with Satan, so God made the earth desolate and waste in Gen. 1.2. When man was created in God's image 6000 years ago, sin soon followed again. This impacted the whole earth as well. But this time, God did not wipe out the whole earth, only locked man out of the garden and flooded the earth locally. You can take this as an exponentially increase in conscience. It is showing God will not flood the whole earth again and wipe out all creatures, but only 1/3 of the people of earth (Rev. 9.18) in the Tribulation. The Cosmos is not God's focus. God's focus is man made in His image to be in the image of His Son so that God can walk with man in the millennial kingdom and be the center of the new city in the new earth after the millennium. Even one day, the universe will dissipate, but man will continue on.


    I see a whole lot of stating, and not a whole lot of proving.

    Genesis 1:1-2, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters."

    In this, we see that God created. There is no indication of Satan or spirits, there is only that which God created and an earth that was formless and empty and water. How is it that from this you draw the conclusions about Satan and a pre-earth?

    I am familiar with the passage in Ezekiel 28:11-19 which is probably where you get the idea of Satan being cast down to earth.... but we must also remember that this passage is a prophecy concerning the King of Tyre. While there is clearly metaphorical representation of the King of Tyre to Satan, we should not be terribly dogmatic about drawing conclusions such as a pre-earth that was destroyed by a flood. We know of two things from Genesis. God made, and the earth was covered in water. We have nothing, from this, to say that God made anything other than what is determined in verse 2.

    Also, where do you get the idea of a local flood? This is completely unfounded in Scripture; rather, it is an super-imposed idea of the modern world as science says there is no evidence for a global flood.

    Genesis 6:13, "So God said to Noah, 'I am going to put an end to all people, for the earth is filled with violence because of them. I am surely going to destroy both them and the earth."
    Genesis 7:4, "[God speaking] Seven days from now I will send rain on the earth for forty days and forty nights, and I will wipe from the face of the earth every living creature I have made."
    Genesis 7:20-24, "The waters rose and covered the mountains to a depth of more than twenty feet. Every living things that moved on the earth perished--birds, livestock, wild animals, all the creatures that swarm over the earth, and all mankind. Everything on dry land that had the breath of life in its nostrils died. Every living things on the face of the earth was wiped out; men and animals and the creatures that move along the ground and the birds of the air were wiped from the earth. Only Noah was left, and those with him in the ark. The waters flooded the earth for a hundred and fifty days."

    This doesn't sound local to me. We both established that we should only agree with science when it doesn't conflict with the Word of God. What reason, beyond science saying that there is no evidence for a global flood (which there actually is), is there to say the flood was local?

    Quote Originally Posted by Churchwork
    The loins of Adam that you presume Cain's wife came from is not to say a child of Adam, but included in all those in the Adamic race. This is not incest, but rather all human beings on planet earth, no matter what continent they were on were in the Adamic race. As soon as Adam was God-conscious all men and women were God-conscious. Just as when Christ died all men died and covered by His death, though not all receive His atonement. Be careful not to legalize the Scriptures. Cain came directly from the first Adamic man, but his wife may not have. We can't say because the Bible doesn't say, so it should not be an issue. You should take your own advice and not be so dogmatic. Your initial mistake premise is causing you some faulty reasoning.
    You are implying, I think, that God created other humans, and that Cain's wife could have come from these other created humans? I would ask, what reason, other than maybe to lower a few eyebrows over incestual relations, would you have for trying to impress this into the Bible? God gave us a relatively comprehensive account of His creation, and mentioned making one man and one woman. While it's possible He could have created others, there is no reason to believe this unless you are trying to resolve some external issue (such as Cain's wife). As for God-conscious:

    Genesis 3:6-7, "When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened..."

    The Bible doesn't specify whether or not it was because they both ate of the tree that both of their eyes were open or if it was because Adam ate of the tree that both of their eyes were open. Therefore, to establish a doctrine such as "all men were God-conscious when Adam was" would be mere opinion. Also, in terms of understanding that having other created people is potentially contradictory to Scripture:

    Genesis 3:20, "Adam named his wife Eve, because she woudl become the mother of all the living."

    How is that possible, if God created other humans? If Eve were the ultimate mother, the bloodline for all humanity, then God could not have created other humans (unless they were other men, but I'm not sure how much sense that makes).

    Quote Originally Posted by Churchwork
    When God flooded the earth in Gen. 1.2, naturally there was some residual creatures that would make up the food chain. Such sin was not completely eradicated, nor could it have been. Notice day 2 in the restoration of creation was not called a good day because up came some of those demons that were cast into the deep in Gen. 1.2, one tempting Eve. They were disembodied spirits that entered creatures, even man after man's fall. Man was protected in the Garden of Eden until his fall. What do serpents eat? Then, when man sinned even man was not protected from meat-eating creatures because man was cast out of the garden. What Gen. 1.30 is telling us was God's original design creating perfect, and the 6 days of restoration are a summary of bringing about that which was already there. Unfortunately, some negative things persisted, though it should not have been a worry to us if we remained not in sin.
    Again, more declaration without Scriptural evidence. What residual creatures? Where is this found in Scripture anywhere? The only possible reason I can think of would be to help reconcile the fossil record, once again, science super-imposing something into Scripture. If there is another reason, one founded in Scripture, please enlighten me!

    Yes, there is no recognition in Genesis 1:2 of it being "good." But the light was called good on day one (Genesis 1:4) and when God separated the water and made the sky one day two, it wasn't good either, but there isn't a connection between this and some pre-earth that Satan and the demons inhabited.

    Quote Originally Posted by Churchwork
    The emphasis in terms of conscience is in percentages. I have already made this point in Step 1 which you overlooked. Simply, percentage-wise murders per capita are decreasing, crime per capita is decreasing. Take for example, form of punishment. Decapitation is not common now, nor is brutal forms of punishment. Incest is less prone. One spouse is the norm. Though things are getting more complicated, there is this overall civility in society that exceeds that of previous generations. The Wild West of gun stand-offs is not something we do today. It is not to say there is still not problems and horrible things that happen still, but on a per capita basis there is an improvement.
    Where do you get your data? I would be interested to see the comprehensive study that details this? I mean, the Holocaust? 6 million people dead. The current holocaust situation in Africa? Millions dying. Women raped multiple times.

    I just started reading Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller, and one of the things he discusses is that the system established in America is not one to help people become moral; rather, it is a system of checks and balances so that people will not be immoral. Everyone watches everyone so that everyone is good. But this doesn't change the inner nature of humans. We are all broken by our sin nature. If we were evolving towards sinlessness, then we would need the police less and less. The reason for any decline in committed atrocities should be more or less attributed to a better legal system and good law enforcers, not because we are becoming better in and of ourselves.

    If, in a certain amount of time, we could become better on our own, then we would have no need for Christ. If time is all that is needed for righteousness to be a natural fruit of man, why did God send His only Begotten to die for us? It doesn't make sense, unless you contend that the atoning sacrifice of Christ was a necessary step in the evolving process. This, however, has nothing to do with man being able to evolve on His own. Instead, we have an indication that God has intervened to help us "evolve" to be better. This, however, requires an intervening act of God, the very God this proof is trying to prove. Since we cannot use God to prove God, we cannot say that Christ came to redeem mankind as part of the evolving process. Since the premise is the decline of immorality in mankind as a whole, then there is no need for a Christ-figure to be a sacrifice as time is the only miracle worker provided by the proof. Given enough time, we will become sinless. Therefore, it doesn't follow that Christ was needed, doesn't follow that God ever needed to die for us. This proof undermines the whole basis of Christianity.

    Quote Originally Posted by Churchwork
    In the past the great majority were unsaved, and so it remains today. The ratio of saved to unsaved is much lower than you think then and now. The issues you raise are not a matter of worsening condition, since the things we can do now were not available in the past because the technology was not there. You would be comparing apples to oranges. Today we can still guillotine people to death, but we choose not to. Today, incest is still an option, but per capita is less the case. The fact that things are more complicated and we sin in these new scenarios is not a proper claim on things getting worse. It is merely a reflection of more complicated things. If things were this complicated 3000 years ago, man would sin much worse.
    Does the method really matter, so long as the sin is the same? If you contend that using a guillotine to kill people is a sin, it is not the tool (the guillotine) but the act itself (capital punishment). I myself do not have a formulated opinion about capital punishment, as I haven't sat down and really thought about it a whole lot. Maybe I should.... Anyway, the point is, technology just improves methods of sinning or not sinning; it does nothing to change the nature of the sin. Sin is the heart, embodied by the action, enhanced by the tools. If a person murders with a gun as opposed to a stone carved spear, what's the difference? It's still murder. If a man looks at pornography and lusts (technology has made this sin much more available.... and just so you know, pornography being one of the top industries in the world doesn't lend itself to less immorality) or watches a woman walk by and lusts, what's the difference?

    The difference, you might say, is that if we had given a man 3000 years ago the button to launch an atom bomb, he'd do so without hesitation. Maybe. Maybe not. It's pure speculation to say so. If one were to explain the consequences of firing the atom bomb, well known consequences today, he might not do it.

    In fact, I think that's the key. The accumulation of the knowledge of consequences to sin has had an overall impact on the observable quantity of sin. I include the word "observable" because, just because you don't see it, doesn't mean it doesn't happen. When men would steal in broad daylight, it was not because stealing was more practiced, it was because the chances of getting caught were much less. As the consequences are more severe (that is, if we took France's road and chopped off a man's hand after he stole), we'd see a much sharper decline in thievery. This merely has to do with a knowledge of consequence, not with the actual lack of intent.

    I pose you a question. If there were no government, no laws, no officers, only anarchy was the master of men in America.... what do you think the country would be like? Orderly or chaotic?

    Quote Originally Posted by Churchwork
    In all forms of science, cause and effect still apply. There is nothing in quantum physics that precedes with an effect without a cause. To think so is just a mistaken assumption, since it can not be shown to be the case. Where is the humility in that? All probabilities have their causes. Just because in a deck of cards there are different outcomes, does not mean there is not the same 52 cards that cause those outcomes. Similarly, there is the same molecular components, but they still must abide in the same laws of cause and effect, just as the 52 cards must abide in the shuffle.
    I think you are missing the point. While I understand your point, given the deck of cards, it doesn't follow as a good analogy for the quantum level. Let me give you an example, seen from watching Brian Greene's "The Elegant Universe" videos. A man walks into a quantum bar and orders a blue drink. The bartender says "I'll try." She comes back with a red one. Now, another copy of the same man walks up, and another, and another, until 9 copies of the same person all reach for the same glass simultaneously. They each pull out a different color drink (with a few duplications, like two of them had orange drinks), even though the glass on the table had a red drink in it. This is a good example of the nature of quantum physics.

    In the deck of cards, there are forces that establish which cards will be where. These forces are gravity, shuffling, the stickiness of the cards, among many other factors, and the probability of where cards will be are firmly based in this understanding. As such, if we were to verify every force and every detail that went into dealing the cards, we could say with 100% certainty which cards would be where. In quantum physics, in knowing (at least, within the realm of current scientific thought) every force and every detail that go into determining quantum behavior, we are still only left with probability. This also goes hand in hand with another aspect of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, which states that we cannot know both the location and speed of subatomic particles. It is this uncertainty that rules quantum physics, and as such, does not play into cause and effect.

    Granted, quantum physics does not state (to my current knowledge) that an effect comes prior to a cause. Rather, it states that there are things that happen without cause (an important element of cause and effect and this proof), such as the nature of determining which of the possible choices a particle will "choose" given a certain set of conditions.

    I am being particularly dogmatic about this point because cause and effect is a phenomena that is established within the scientific community. The name "cause and effect" has certain scientific understandings that you are, knowingly or unknowingly, appealing to in your proof. This appelation is caused merely by using the name "cause and effect," as it has certain connotation that the reader will associate with it. I am merely stating that these specific connotations do not hold up within the scientific community. Since the proof is undergirded with this scientific term, it must bow to the scientific understanding of the term, both where it is upheld and where it is shot down.

    Quote Originally Posted by Churchwork
    You'll just have to accept there is some things God does not want you to know. That would seem reasonable, if you were created by God. The Proof places the burden of the proof on you. It is a perfect Proof because it has stated a position that nothing in nature happens all by itself and that nothing is without a cause, which is backed. This is seen in trillions of examples in creation, yet not one example can be given for the idea that something can happen all by itself. Do you see therefore how the odds are against you in claiming that the quantum level can possibly happen all by itself? It is illogical to surmise that since so many examples can be given of all things having a cause and effect, that then something can happen all by itself without any evidence from you.
    Actually, seeing as science shows things without causes (of which I have delineated), there are in fact more examples (just merely unobservable ones to the naked eye) of things that are uncaused than there are caused. This is easily understood as things that are observable are made up of trillions of tiny particles unseen, atoms. These tiny particles are then made up even smaller particles, quantum particles, and these quantum particles outnumber the atomic particles. Since the quantum particles abide by quantum rules, and therefore cause and effect doesn't apply, and the atomic particles follow Newtonian and Einsteinian physics, where cause and effect does apply, we can reasonably and safely say that there are more cases of a lack of cause and effect than cause and effect. Since the burden of proof was placed on me based on the overwhelming cause and effect evidence, it is now placed on you to prove the legitimacy of cause and effect as there is overwhelming evidence against it.

    Quote Originally Posted by Churchwork
    Notice how you contradict yourself because you said, "There is no particular reason to argue for or against a beginning or no beginning." This contradicts what you said: "The beginning point cannot be defined as back unto infinity because such a point is non-existent." You have agreed with Step 1 because you admit there is not an eternity of the past of cause and effect since you said it is "non-existent". But then you said there is no particular reason to argue for "no beginning". This is doublespeak. You do the very thing you advise against. 1 Tim. 3.8 says be "not doubletongued". Wise men do this to be couth, but it is pretentious.
    I am not being pretentious, nor am I being doubletongued. If you feel I am, I apologize, for this is not my intention nor my goal. As I established from the beginning, I am merely seeking truth, not personal glory. Any self-contradiction is due to my imperfect nature, and I will gladly and willingly recognize such self-contradictions and flaws within my reasoning when pointed out at me.

    What I am saying is that a beginning to the Universe is in accordance with the kalam argument, such that "everything that has a beginning has a cause, and the Universe had a beginning; therefore, the Universe had a cause." However, as Step 1 doesn't seem to follow (as I attempted to prove earlier in this post), then Step 2 necessarily becomes a natural extrapolation of personal opinion. If Step 1 holds, then Step 2 becomes a natural following, to this I will agree. But, since I don't believe Step 1 holds sufficiently, Step 2 doesn't hold either.

    Quote Originally Posted by Churchwork
    In your reasoning about finite points, calculus solves your problem. You said "It is logically inconsistent to define a point infinity away because there is no way to establish such a point except perhaps in your mind." It is not necessary to give the exact date of a proposed eternity of the past by atheists and agnostics as they try to disprove God, for it is enough to know that it is not possible because we still sin. A point of eternity in calculus is taken as a spot to work from which approximates infinity. I think you should take a calculus class. If there was an eternity of the past (~) in causes and effects then you would have had an eternity to be perfected, but since you still sin proves that you were created by God, given Christ.
    I have taken 3 years of calculus, and 3 years of applying this calculus (although, two years of calculus and two years of application overlap, so really, only four years). I feel that I understand quite well the concept of infinity. Let's take an example:

    f(x) = 1/(x-1)

    The graph of this function would go to positive and negative infinity as you approach the point x = 1. At the point x = 1, however, would be an undefined y-coordinate. Why? Because infinity cannot be defined as a point. Try dividing 1 by 0 in your calculator. It gives you an error, because this is an undefined point. This is where the difference between calculus and reality comes into play. Calculus recognizes infinity as "finished sets," such that it sums up the infinite into the finite. Zeno's paradox is a classic example. If you travel half the distance every time, you can never reach a destination. The importance that calculus allows us to realize is that the summation of the infinitely smaller numbers results in a finite number, the actual distance you travel.

    An important aspect of calculus, however, that many people lose, is the difference between a calculus infinity and a real infinity, a calculus zero and a real zero. A calculus zero is as close as you can possibly come to zero without it actually being zero. A real zero is just that: zero. If you divide a number by a calculus zero, you get infinity. If you divide a number by a real zero, you get undefined. There is a very real and important difference in this!

    A point of eternity taken as infinity from which we can measure things does not apply to an infinite regress. The infinite regress is a real infinity, not a calculus infinity. It doesn't follow to assume that if we use the calculus infinity method to solve the real infinity, we should get the same result.

    Take for example, when solving a limit where you have the condition of zero divided by zero, you use L'Hopital's Rule to solve it until you get an answer. However, if ever have a math problem with zero divided by zero, something is seriously wrong. It is an impossibility, a mathematical flaw, not a calculus wonder! The difference is that the "zero over zero" condition for calculus is in fact a limit as something approaches zero, not an actual "zero over zero" situation.

    All of this to say, we cannot use calculus methods to solve for a real infinity, as calculus is based on limits and not actualities. The infinite regress is not the limit as it approaches infinity, but actually infinity. The two should not ever be confused.

    Quote Originally Posted by Churchwork
    Just because there has always been God is not reason to believe in an infinite past of creation. That is not even logical, for God would have created at some point. Intuitively it makes no sense that there would be an eternity of the past of causes and effects just because God exists. God can exist in the eternity of the past without His creation having yet been created.
    I'm sorry if I was unclear on what I was saying. Let me restate what I meant, as it seems I was unclear.

    If you believe God has always existed, then you believe in an infinite regress. Those who believe in an infinite Universe also believe in an infinite regress. Therefore, it is illogical to argue against an infinite regress (I included this only because many argue against the infinite regress, William Lane Craig being one of those [see his argument about Hilbert's Hotel], and I thought you might do so also). I believe that God created and that the Universe is not in a state of infinite regress. However, it does not follow that the Universe could not have been in an infinite regress as a brute fact anymore than God existing as a brute fact, which is usually what these types of arguments narrow down to.

    If for eternity things have been evolving (biologically or non-biologically, etc.), by this very definition of evolving (in causes and effects, before or after the amoeba, even before or after the big bang), you would have had an eternity to be perfected (without sin)... (quote taken from the second sentence of the first paragraph of Step 1)


    Another argument against this proof that came to mind is the very wording of the proof itself. In stating that to be perfect is to be without sin, there is a recognition of sin and therefore a recognition of God. Sin has a very religious connotation, and in fact, its definition is rooted in disobedience to God. You cannot have sin if there is no God, because you cannot disobey that which isn't. Therefore, in defining perfection, and therefore defining the ability to be perfect, you have established the concept of God. Since the proof is designed to prove God, you cannot use God as a premise to prove God. As such, the proof does not hold up.

    In Christ,
    Daniel

  4. #24
    Join Date
    Jul 2004
    Church of
    Sherwood Park
    Posts
    3,515
    Blog Entries
    30
    Rep Power
    26

    Default

    DRay,

    Step 1

    It doesn't help your case to disprove the Proof by saying what the Proof already agrees to such as your admitting the Proof doesn't claim God first before proving God's existence.

    We see an exponential improvement in conscience in man by citing many examples of things we just don't do anymore. This is how God designed us: to move forward not backward. That's why we don't do many horrible things we use to do. Evolutionists see it as a moral gene, so therefore, they should agree that they were created by God, otherwise they would be contradicting themselves. Evolutionism is not wrong, since the body is formed from dust. Evolution is just limited in its scope since it deals with the physical since the Amoeba. It doesn't explain that which precedes the biological.

    Just because man is in the cosmos does not mean it is about the cosmos, for it is centered on man. The cosmos is merely the conduit. God's point of focus is man made in His image, not the cosmos. The point of the cosmos is that it containing man, if it had been eternally existing in the past would mean also man had an eternity to be perfected within the cosmos when we approximate to eternity of the past. But since man still sins, therefore, you know you were created and there has not been an eternity of the past of cause and effect. Very simple truth.

    Your continual problem is not understanding calculus. Just because man was made in God's image 6000 years ago, does not discount the process by which God went through to bring man to that point. Therefore, if there was an eternity of the past of cause and effect it is irrelevant when man started in the evolving chain, for wherever man starts, it is accounted as being in the eternity of the past if there was an eternity of the past of cause and effects. But since man still sins, we know that is not the case and man was created. Step 1 remains true.

    Evolution, the dust in Gen. 2.7, did not begin 6000 years ago, for man's body was being formed biologically since the Amoeba.

    Creation, Desolation and Restoration

    Gen. 1.2 reads "And the earth became waste and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep: and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters."

    The word "became" is also used in 2.7 and 19.26, so it should be used in verse 2 also. In your creation, your god creates waste and desolate. In God's perfect creating, He creates perfectly in verse 1. Events then follow such as Lucifer's fall from 3rd heaven, fallen angels and the demons, causing God to make desolate in verse 2. He deals with this problem accordingly, but no such dealing is availed to your belief system to account for the tempter in the serpent.

    The details of Ez. 28.11-19 are laid out. The first part (verses 1-10) address the Prince of Tyre. The second part (verses 11-19)-which is a lamentation against the King of Tyre-points to the future Antichrist. Historicalists are against this teaching, because they are historicalists; so shall they be deceived by the coming Antichrist. I can give you much aspect and understanding of this when you are ready to hear. Suffice it to say, Satan is still the god of this world and he holds back the Antichrist until he has no choice but to release him.

    No doubt the Great Accuser will accuse of being dogmatic when it is pointed out there were the events of the fallen archangel Lucifer between Gen. 1.1 and 1.2, long before 6000 years ago.

    You're contradicting your own position in these words of yours: "Also, where do you get the idea of a local flood? This is completely unfounded in Scripture; rather, it is an super-imposed idea of the modern world as science says there is no evidence for a global flood." You said "there is no evidence for a global flood" and "where do you get the idea of a local flood." Why contend for no global flood when I have said there is a local flood? That is nonsensical.

    Noah did not know the world was round. His world was the world locally. So the verses pertaining to his experience of the flood are indeed local. Learn to put yourself in the shoes of the person in the day they were living. That's the selfless thing to do. Legalisms are for dullards. Scientific evidence has shown that part of the land gave way around the sea, flooding the whole area. The exact spot where scientists suspect the land giving way is known and also evidence of artifacts in the sea bed are also found. Those artifacts are particular to that time period.

    This is a nonsensical statement: "You are implying, I think, that God created other humans". There are not other human beings. There is only one kind of human being: human being.

    As we have discussed this I have found you to be wrong on everything we talk about. The Holy Spirit has revealed to me so much error in you, that I will know you by your fruit. Based on our private talks and in the open forum, the Holy Spirit has revealed you are not a Christian. And, you will not change your view.

    All Men and Women are in Adam and Eve

    Adam and Eve are the first God-conscious beings. As soon as they became the first all were in Adam, that is to say, all the dust formed to create the bodies, caused all mankind that flows from Adam. No matter what continent you are on, you have no excuse. All were in Adam: human beings. This happened about 6000 years ago. The number of souls exceeds that of the specific family line of Adam and Eve. Adam is spoken of in particular because from Adam to Christ is 76 generations in this lineage. We know 6000 years ago there were men on all continents. Therefore, your theory is disproven. For example, study the Egyptians to know there were cities back to of 10,000 BC, except that they did not have God-consciousness; thus, they would cease to exist. It was only until 4000 BC that man was created in His image as the Bible says so which science can agree to.

    Adam and Eve were not God-conscious when they ate of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. You misread me in claiming I said that. When Adam and Eve were created in God's image they had God-consciousness. Do you see the difference?

    Eve is the mother of all creation since she is the first God-conscious woman and all men and women are in her as all mankind is of the Adamic race. Your problem is you only see the physical legalistically, so you think all must physically be born of Eve by bloodline. But it is true that there were humans (not other humans since there is only one kind of human made in God's image) on other continents so that when we say all were in Eve, we do not mean they were born physically from Eve's womb, but spiritually speaking, all human beings flow from the Eve.

    Day 2 Was Not A Good Day

    What residual creatures? When you flood a planet or even take away its atmosphere (Gen. 1.2) it is possible for some residual creatures to remain living. It is from these creatures that the long period of restoration is summed up in the 6 literal summary days. When the firmaments were split to restore creation, day 2 was not a good day like the other days because up came some of those demons. You asked for proof, this is it. The 6 days are not "created" but the Hebrew word is "restored". The purpose of the Bible is not to give you a detailed scientific record. If you want to read between the lines, you will have to abide in these facts which agree with these verses and words the Bible employs.

    Day 2 follows Day 1. Day 1 follows the making desolate in Gen. 1.2, since the days are days of restoration. You are utterly confused, for you wrote, "there is no recognition in Genesis 1:2 of it being good." I did not say Gen. 1.2 is good, for I was talking about Day 2 not being a good day, because up came some of those demons God cast into the deep in Gen. 1.2. If you would like to study about Earth's earliest ages, read these two links. For example, many including C. I. Scofield believe that Jeremiah 4.23-26 refers to the condition of waste and void cited in Gen. 1.2. Read those two links to understand the details of this.

    Do accept your bad logic in knowing Lucifer was cast out of 3rd heaven, then not accounting for the time period from then to when one of his demons entered the serpent around 6000 years ago to tempt Eve. This creates a big hole in your theology.

    Raw Numbers are Not the Key

    You only see the raw horrific numbers, but on a per capita basis the numbers are better today than before. Whole nations would be wiped off the face of the earth in previous generations. Many children would not make it to the age of 5 percentage-wise, and no less for the reason of child-sacrifices. Though in Islam they still perform this ritual, teaching their children to blow themselves up. Israel was suppose to wipe out such evil nations in Canaan that did this, but Israel failed, and so such child sacrifices remain today.

    The number of police per capita is less today. A much greater percentage thousands of years ago were devoted to men in arms. It is quite narrow-minded to overlook this fact. You are only focused on the now, and not making comparisons.

    Though common grace is showing us improvements, this is not to mean that Christ is not needed for redemption. The good self can never save a soul, and still needs the blood of Christ for forgiveness of sins. This is why many souls are still going to go to hell. Though they appear to have received some common grace improvements, even so, they still need to be regenerated by the Holy Spirit. This is most evident in the fact that the Great Tribulation is still ahead of us (still hostility), there will still be a faction of those who will take the mark of the beast. The good nations will be transferred into the millennial kingdom, yet they must believe still individually. That's why I say that when I speak of sinlessness exponential improvements unto perfection, I am talking only about the saved specifically. Whereas, the unsaved will be forced into hell because they did not want to repent of their sins. They may have have had some refinement by God's common grace, but they remain unregenerate, eternally separated from God. God intervenes, even in common grace.

    This is entirely illogical: "Since we cannot use God to prove God, we cannot say that Christ came to redeem mankind as part of the evolving process." It is not that we can't use God to prove God, but that for the purposes of this 4 Step Proof, God has afforded us a proof that does not need Christ first to be mentioned to hold its own in proving God. We certainly can say that Christ came to redeem mankind. God gives us this stand alone proof. Thus, no man has any excuses.

    Ultimately, in this section, you are confusing regeneration and common grace. No matter how refined an unsaved person is, he will never be saved. He still needs Christ on the cross.

    Whether it is the weapon that changes that causes the sin or not, the fact remains on a per capita basis the death penalty is less. There would be a 1000 women in the temple giving sexual worship. Percentage wise this is far worse than all the pornography on the internet and brothels in the world today. Again, all this shows, is an exponential improvement. There were entire cities that were homosexual in the OT, but today it is much less the case.

    Would man push the button to create a nuclear explosion 3000 years ago if he had the technology. You bet he would. If for no other reason his conscience is not up to speed with knowledge. Thus his conscience is not nearly as strong as it is today, even if only a conscience that is affected by common grace and not actual regeneration of the spirit. Everyone knows the consequences of an Atomic bomb today, so don't make excuses for people by saying "If one were to explain the consequences of firing the atom bomb, well known consequences today, he might not do it." Indeed, man has not done it yet today which is a testament to the exponential improvement of conscience generally. If a man could throw his own child into the mouth of a fiery Moloch god, surely, blowing up a city is on his list of things to do.

    I must admit I find your ideas very dull, and boring to talk to, since you are always wrong in your conscience and self. Whether I am casting pearls before the swine or what is holy unto dogs, it makes no difference. You are not ready for this conversation.

    The policing of a state, or lack the need of, is a reflecting on the improving conscience of a society. In all of what has been said we continue to see how Step 1 remains true: If there was an eternity of the past of cause and effect, then you would have had an eternity to be perfected without sin, yet you still sin. Ergo, you were created by God, given Christ. The exponential progression of conscience, in believers unto regeneration, and non-believers unto hell remains an axiom we can prove continually. The difference being, non-believers never accept God's atoning sacrifice.

    Physics Agrees with Determinism

    In your drink analogy, it fails in that you confuse the scenario by that amount of your own lack of understanding of the laws of cause and effect in play. Just as the force behind the deck of cards pervades, so are laws also behind the working of quantum physics which you can't perceive. Just because you can't perceive them does not mean they don't exist, for we see the consequences of them. Humility dictates that it is so. The outcome is not "firmly based in this understanding" as you say. Your understanding is irrelevant. Whether you understand or not, does not change the fact the laws of cause and effect are still prevalent and in play. Just because men did not know there were other continents, thus not included in the flood, does not mean they didn't exist. When man discovered the continents and understood of their existence, does not mean they all of a sudden came into being.

    Your logic is undesirable in trying to distinguish quantum mechanics from deck of cards. You said "in knowing (at least, within the realm of current scientific thought) every force and every detail that go into determining quantum behavior, we are still only left with probability." It is the same with a deck of cards, whether we know all the elements involved or not. The reason men use quantum mechanics as an example, in their hostility towards God, is because it is so utterly complicated, that they can input their own crazy ideas, but your ideas fail you. You said, "It is this uncertainty that rules quantum physics, and as such, does not play into cause and effect." This is entirely illogical. Just because there is uncertainty is no grounds to saw there is no law behind it of cause and effect. Just as in a deck of cards, we don't know the next card that will come out of the deck, yet the law still exists in the probabilities of it. If an ace is missing, there is just that amount less chance of an ace appearing. Quantum mechanics is just way more complicated, but holds to the same principle of one thing causing another.

    The reason I know you are not a Christian is because you are contending for the idea that something is without a cause and happens all by itself. This is against the Word of God.

    Your version of quantum physics states, "that there are things that happen without cause (an important element of cause and effect and this proof), such as the nature of determining which of the possible choices a particle will choose given a certain set of conditions." Quantum physics does not state this. Though some may say this is what quantum physics states, it is not proven, and there is no reason for such an assertion, since nothing in nature exhibits this character. All the odds are against you since more than a trillion things have seen to have a cause, yet nothing is seen to be without a cause. Just because you can't understand the complexity does not mean you can arbitrarily demand causelessness. That's dumb, without humility and ultimately hostile to God.

    Cause and effect hold up within the scientific community (in all of nature seen), and I am not referring to pseudo-science that you are contending for where you claim like an atheist and agnostic things happen all by themselves just because they are too proud to accept there is something they don't know as being the cause. I agree with you when you say you are dogmatic, except that you are dogmatically wrong in contending for something so dogmatically that you can't show, or even come close to doing so.

    Herein is your pride and what keeps you eternally separated from God: "Actually, seeing as science shows things without causes (of which I have delineated)". Science never showed that things in creation happen all by themselves. Nor did you delineate it. I praise God that self-declarations from selfish souls is nothing but independency from God. Your open theism (claiming God is without infinite foreknowledge) and calvinist tendencies (claiming God is without foreknowledge of our free-choice) and puff the magic dragon teachings (pridefully claiming things happen all by themselves without evidence) is why you are going to hell. These are the tools you employ to separate yourself from God. And they are a symptom of your unregenerated spirit. They are the false fruit by which you are known.

    When I speak of causes in nature it includes unseen and seen causes, unseen being interpolated and seen being visible by the eye, which they both observe laws. In all instances everything has a cause. The only thing that does not have a cause would be the causeless cause, God. He is proven by the fact that nothing in nature happens all by itself. Ergo, God did it. And the exponential progression of conscience means there could not have been an eternity of the past of cause and effects, since it would not need to take an eternity to reach sinlessness perfection in the saved.

    This does not follow, "Since the quantum particles abide by quantum rules, and therefore cause and effect doesn't apply, and the atomic particles follow Newtonian and Einsteinian physics, where cause and effect does apply, we can reasonably and safely say that there are more cases of a lack of cause and effect than cause and effect." The problem with this statement is the false statement that quantum mechanics do not have causes and effects. That type of pseudo-science gets you nowhere. Nothing in quantum physics causes you to think something happens all by itself. You just lack the understanding to see that small in nature. It holds that since Newtonian and Einsteinian physics abide in laws of cause and effect, then it would be true of Quantum physics. If all we have ever seen in human history agrees, then there is no reason to think otherwise.

    Understand why you believe in puff the magic dragon. It is because in your spirit is the evil spirit who teaches you this and you accept it to be so deceived. You have yet to receive the Holy Spirit to oust the evil spirit in your spirit.

    Your idea is wrong: "Since the burden of proof was placed on me based on the overwhelming cause and effect evidence, it is now placed on you to prove the legitimacy of cause and effect as there is overwhelming evidence against it." Since there is no evidence yet against causeless effects, the burden of proof still falls on you.

    From the beginning you have established your desire for personal glory as evident by the constant error, paragraph after paragraph. These are not complicated things in their basic understanding, yet you say "As I established from the beginning, I am merely seeking truth, not personal glory." You are seeking personal glory, for such glory stems in so much error. You can not be so consistently wrong on every point if you were not seeking personal glory. Furthermore, we have seen in the unsaved, self-proclamations such as "Any self-contradiction is due to my imperfect nature, and I will gladly and willingly recognize such self-contradictions and flaws within my reasoning when pointed out at me." Yet after it was shown you your error, still you remained in that error, repeating it, saying it yet needs to be shown to you. What you claim is vastly different from actuality.

    Notice how you contradict yourself because you said, "There is no particular reason to argue for or against a beginning or no beginning." This contradicts what you said: "The beginning point cannot be defined as back unto infinity because such a point is non-existent." You have agreed with Step 1 because you admit there is not an eternity of the past of cause and effect since you said it is "non-existent". But then you said there is no particular reason to argue for "no beginning". This is doublespeak. You do the very thing you advise against. 1 Tim. 3.8 says be "not doubletongued". Wise men do this to be couth, but it is pretentious.

    And so you repeat your error: "However, as Step 1 doesn't seem to follow (as I attempted to prove earlier in this post), then Step 2 necessarily becomes a natural extrapolation of personal opinion. If Step 1 holds, then Step 2 becomes a natural following, to this I will agree. But, since I don't believe Step 1 holds sufficiently, Step 2 doesn't hold either."

    Since Step 1 does hold, and you failed to show otherwise, then Step 2 naturally follows. Step 1 remains so powerfully solid, ultimately given by God: If there was an eternity of the past of cause and effect (and we know all things abide in law of cause and effect, nothing to the contrary), then you would have had an eternity to be perfected without sin if you were saved. But, even, it applies generally in common grace to all people, as we have gone over numerous examples of improvements of conscience on a per capita basis. To date, you could find no problem with this observation and sound reasoning.

    The reason you still have issue even though you have no valid reason must be because you are unsaved. This is your false fruit which I know you by. The unsaved man makes a declaration without substance because self is his center apart from God. Hell is your future. Even now you have that foretaste in what the Bible describes as the tares who try to look like the wheat by their own strength, not relying on God's Spirit and Word.

    Calculus - Approximating Infinity - Agrees with Step 1

    What I find always intriguing is it doesn't matter the level of a man's knowledge, he is still unsaved. You can even be the leading scientist in an area, and still be unsaved.

    For example, you said of yourself, "I have taken 3 years of calculus, and 3 years of applying this calculus." Yet, you still contend against a point in the past which we can equate as approximating infinity for the purposes of Step 1 to show that it is not possible, because we still sin. Do you see how the mind, full of knowledge, can still be unrenewed?

    The application of approximating infinity in calculus for Step 1 is simply to say that it is unnecessary to know specific details of when and how, but merely accept that an infinity, if it had being going on for infinity, renders certain conclusions given what we know and see today in relation to sin. Since we see an exponential progression of conscience today compared through the past 6000 years, we know that according to exponential progressions the point of approximating infinity of the past demands that we would be without sin by now. Calculus says that an approximating of infinity is equal to infinity in practice.

    In your commentary on calculus you are letting things distract you from the point of what is pertinent to the Proof. You should go back to the roots of basic calculus (which I keep repeating), because you are confusing yourself and come across as someone who does not even know basic calculus, and thus will try to bog himself in inapplicable details to the relevant aspects of calculus for this Proof in its simplicity. Do you see how your mind is unrenewed, because your spirit is not regenerated?

    The reason I am deleting your account is because you add nothing, and continue to rationalize false teachings (fully detailed here), and will continue to do so, even unto hell. Since this site is for the Work for the Church, and not to discuss things that are obviously wrong, and you have not presented any new contentions to the 4 Step Proof, which you are warned against, this is warrant to expel you. Do you not realize what you are arguing for has already been discussed and you present no new information in your contentions?

    This is without distinction: "If you believe God has always existed, then you believe in an infinite regress. Those who believe in an infinite Universe also believe in an infinite regress." Just because God existed for eternity does not mean creation existed for eternity in the past. The infinite regress is different. The former is God's eternal life, the latter is God's creation. The latter are proven false because Step 1 proves them wrong.

    Desperation of an Unsaved Man

    Thus it does not follow what you believe when you say: "Therefore, it is illogical to argue against an infinite regress (I included this only because many argue against the infinite regress, William Lane Craig being one of those [see his argument about Hilbert's Hotel], and I thought you might do so also)."

    Disproving an infinite regress of creation proves God created, since there is no other option. William Lane Craig is a born-again believer. He believes there is not an eternity of the past of creation, so this proves God did it. Craig is a Christian and you are not a Christian. Do you see how that works? Praise the Lord for this discernment!

    In your profile you note several things: 1) you reject God foreknows our free-choice so you believe in an impotent god; 2) you reject that between Gen. 1.1 and 1.2 there is the happenings of Lucifer, fallen angels and the demons, rejecting God's Word; and 3) say you are not sure about a great many things in the questions at registration to this forum. I just wanted to record this here since your account is being deleted. Your being not sure is not against you, but definitely indications of your lack of spirituality.

    Since you state, "I believe that God created and that the Universe is not in a state of infinite regress. However, it does not follow that the Universe could not have been in an infinite regress as a brute fact anymore than God existing as a brute fact, which is usually what these types of arguments narrow down to," you are agreeing with Step 1 (not an infinite regress as proven), but then turn around in the next sentence and say just the opposite (could have been in an infinite regress). I am left with just the thought, be "not doubletongued" (1 Tim. 3.8). Certainly God's existence is not a brute fact, but certainly an obvious fact, just as there was not an eternity of the past of cause and effect, which is an obvious fact, otherwise you would be without sin.

    Sensitively the Holy Spirit is showing me that you are desperately trying to find flaw in the 4 Step Proof, and in so doing, making horrible mistakes because of your obsession with the task-this is your brute effort. The task has been presented not to convince you that it can be disproven, but to show you that you can't disprove the 4 Step Proof; and certainly, error prone ideas you put forth, expose you through and through. How soon you forget Rom. 1.20 which the 4 Step Proof corroborates.

    Don't be a Dullard

    You have nothing but error in your words DRay: "Another argument against this proof that came to mind is the very wording of the proof itself. In stating that to be perfect is to be without sin, there is a recognition of sin and therefore a recognition of God."

    The proof already discloses that recognition of sin is not recognition of God but observed in nature without mention of God, even though of course, sin is something God is ardently against. As the Proof says: "And, since we know we jail people for crimes, we know there is this sin that has consequence, and the mention of it does not presume God first, since notice I did not mention God first. This throws a wrench in lots of atheists'/agnostics' ideology." Why overlook this fact? It shows you did not really read the Proof.

    Though it is true sin is mentioned in religion, religion itself is particular to everyone, since religion is worship of something, anything. Whatever a person places first in their lives is what they worship. It is their religion, even that which is above God.

    This is a false statement: "You cannot have sin if there is no God, because you cannot disobey that which isn't." You can sin against man, man is. So we put people in jail.

    This statement is false: "Therefore, in defining perfection, and therefore defining the ability to be perfect, you have established the concept of God." Since the matter of sin can be discussed at least on some level without mention of God, as we have seen, then it does not demand the presentation of God first, even though certainly God is applying the redemptive design to the exponential removal of sin in the saved. Initial mistake premises lead to false conclusions.

    Last error noted: "Since the proof is designed to prove God, you cannot use God as a premise to prove God. As such, the proof does not hold up." Since the 4 Step Proof for God does not use God as a premise to prove God, then the Proof remains solid.

    Not everyone who says they are saved is saved. At least 99% of open theists are unsaved. We shall know them by their fruit.

    Praise the Lord for this discernment!
    In Christ,
    Churchwork

  5. #25
    Join Date
    Jul 2004
    Church of
    Sherwood Park
    Posts
    3,515
    Blog Entries
    30
    Rep Power
    26

    Default 4 Steps to Proving God of the Bible


    I read multiple articles at a site called fstdt, a critique by Juliet (and someone who calls themselves Yahweh inappropriately) of the 4 Step Proof for God of the Bible. It is a lengthy response to the 4 Step Proof, and I was praying how could I help them see the forest through the trees? So I sent them this message.

    Simplicity is usually the key and as Gary Habermas says, use the minimal facts approach, that is, focus on the aspects that are central to your proof and put everything else aside for the time being, which you can come back to later. The problem with Juliet is she has gotten so far off the proof itself. She needs to come back to it, otherwise she would be guilty of trying to be couth, cunning, and attempting misdirection like a magician or charlatan selling snake oil. So let me bring you back and let you deal specifically with the proof itself instead of going on a tangent. Don't let Satan steer you away from the proof itself.

    Step 1 is vital. It says, if anyone contends for an eternity of the past of cause and effects (and yes many have proposed this), then you would have had an eternity to be perfected (read the rest of the paragraph for why this is necessarily going to happen if there was an eternity of the past). However, since you still sin, you know there has not been an eternity of the past of cause and effects. Taking a sample of these past 6000 years in observing, quantifiably, the exponential progression of our conscience, you know it won't take another 6000 years to reach God's definition of sinlessness in the saved. It is not a valid excuse to say we are defining sin by God's terms. All you need realize is we do put people in jail with no mention of God because they sin. For our purposes all we need see is that sinlessness is at a bare minimum not making damaging mistakes such as mistreating another person or being unhealthy to yourself. Today, pagan nations don't usually throw their children into the fiery mouth of Molech. However, people do perform abortions and there are Islamic suicide bombers taught at the youngest of ages to be suicide mass-murders. Nonetheless, it is an exponential improvement in conscience since we would never commit to the actual throwing of the child into the idol of Molech's fiery mouth directly. Science and technology are NOT determinants of exponential improvements in conscience. Previously, it was common practice to marry multiple spouses. Today, this is frowned upon. Previously, it was common practice for two men to stand at a distance face to face in a gunslinging shootout. This would never be allowed today. Previously, men would be thrown into a stadium to be mauled by animals and gladiators would fight to the death. This is no longer conscionable. You could keep citing example after example.

    Second step: someone says, ok fine, but what if the universe started all by itself at some point? Look at the cosmos and know it is very complicated. Since nothing in nature happens all by itself, there is always a cause and an effect. Therefore, since nothing, in more than a trillion examples, ever proves something happens without a cause, we can with the greatest of probabilities conclude everything has a cause. Since everything has a cause that is in known existence, then logic states that which is uncreated must have created. This is step 2 in the proof.

    Step 3, which is misrepresented, does not say what Juliet says it said. Since the person, who can not overturn step 1 or 2, then tries to argue for something else, they try to argue against the attributes of some god, which is not the attributes of God of the Bible. Do you see how this is disingenuous? As the minimal facts approach is concerned, this proof does not care about other gods, but is merely proving God of the Bible, so if you want to put forth an argument, address it against God of the Bible and not trying to dispute some god.

    Once the person appreciates step 3, they provide their one last stand at the ok corral-Step 4. They say, well why can't there be gods created gods for an eternity of the past so that your God is created also? This is just an offshoot of step 1, but instead of dealing with things in nature, it proposes gods created gods in the supernatural to explain our existence. This violates the principle proven in step 1 which say if there was an eternity of the past of cause and effects, whomever the constituents are, you still would have had an eternity to be perfected due to our observation today of the exponential progression cited. Try yourself to think of some more examples of exponential progression of our conscience in the saved. Note the unsaved do not want to change so that is why hell is created. In eternity hell takes care of them, and Juliet.

    Do you see how the proof has remained the same proof since the beginning: not the beginning of my mentioning it, but with Moses recording it on papyrus. Ultimately the first person this knowledge was acquired by would be Adam since Adam was the first man made in God's image with a spirit of God-consciousness. We are all given the ability to know this, which is why even in a simpler form, it is known by just looking up at the stars and the sky to know that this is vastly intelligently designed. Do you see how the proof proves itself, does not make any claims on the inspiration of the Bible, but merely deals with the minimal facts approach? It focuses just on the 4 points. Now knowing this is true, that the uncreated created whom we can call God-the uncreated God would be God of the Bible since God is righteous, holy, pure and true. Such God would necessitate His mercy and that mercy is revealed when Jesus entered into creation to die on the cross for your sins to give you eternal life if you were willing to receive it. None compare to the love of Christ, He said He is God and proved it, fulfilling 62 prophecies (probabilities less than 1 in a trillion for any mortal man to get lucky), surrounding 40 writers over 1500 years, in a historical-religio context, showing God's redemptive design, and the apostles died for testifying to His resurrection and ascension. The resurrection of Christ is unique and best testified. No person is more well documented in antiquity. There are 42 writers, both Christian and non-Christian speaking of Jesus in the first 150 years of his death. This far outweighs the number of writers about the Emperor of Rome who died 11 years after Jesus died by a margin of 4 to 1. Skeptics have no considerable valid explanation against Jesus being God.

  6. #26
    Juliet Guest

    Default

    Churchwork,

    I appreciate your invitation to respond to your post. Some of things that will follow will, without a doubt, be extremely offensive to you. I'm going to be upfront: I have a tendency to come off as extremely elitist and condescending, and I have a tendency to talk down to other people (usually for good reasons).

    Let me also state upfront that I've read a lot of proofs for God, and yours, no matter how much effort you put into it, is really the worst one I've ever read. I'm not sure if you already know this or not, but basically you're reiterating a very ancient argument for god called the cosmological argument, a particular variant that most people know as Kalam's Cosmological Argument:
    (1) Everything that has a beginning of its existence has a cause of its existence.
    (2) The universe has a beginning of its existence.
    Therefore:
    (3) The universe has a cause of its existence.
    (4) If the universe has a cause of its existence then that cause is God.
    Therefore:
    (5) God exists.
    As near as I can tell, you're 4-step proof for God is really just an overly verbose way of stating the following:
    1) The Universe is finite, so it has a beginning
    2) Anything with a beginning has a cause
    3) A first cause follows from an uncaused cause, which is god
    4) Therefore god exists

    (^^^^ note: please dont mind that this may not be an exact formulation of what you've said. I noticed that you accused me of being tricked by Satan when I made previous comments that "overassumed" (I've never heard of that word in my life) parts of what you were trying to say.)

    You probably noticed that the cosmological argument really doesnt specify why god created the universe, what god did before or after he created the universe, or name any of his characteristics; essentially, the cosmological argument proves the existence of a deistic god, without providing any other details (and certainly no details that provide a basis for a religion). For this reason, you provided some reasons for why you think the god who exists just happens to be your conception of god.

    Now, while cosmological arguments in all of their flavors are very popular for their simplicity and intuitive reasonableness, but yours is the least persuasive flavor of the cosmological argument I've ever seen in the 15+ years I've been studying the philosophy of religion. Basically, you tried to explain each premise of your four-step proof down to its axioms (or something very near to them), but your explanations were horrifically dubious and presumptuous, just take your Step 1 for example, which you describe as:
    Step 1 is vital. It says, if anyone contends for an eternity of the past of cause and effects (and yes many have proposed this), then you would have had an eternity to be perfected (read the rest of the paragraph for why this is necessarily going to happen if there was an eternity of the past). However, since you still sin, you know there has not been an eternity of the past of cause and effects. ... For our purposes all we need see is that sinlessness is at a bare minimum not making damaging mistakes such as mistreating another person or being unhealthy to yourself.
    At first, this looks like a great big loop of circular logic (i.e. trying to prove Christianity based on the concept of sin, where the concept of sin is only meaningful if Christianity is true), but you redefined sin to mean any kind of harm you do to another person. At the very least, I can say you're not arguing in a circle...
    ... however, you are making some extremely unjustified and dubious presumptions:

    - you are using the existence of humans as a way to measure the age of the universe when you havent shown that humans have existed since the very beginning of the universe. Your argument from sin, that we progress to a more sinless state over time, and that given an infinite amount of time we should be sinless, might be true (its not, and I'll get to that a little later), but the age of the universe and the existence of humans arent intrinsically connected to each other. Theres no contradiction in saying that the universe stretches back into infinity (perhaps in an endless cycle of bangs and crunches), but things in the universe (such as humans) exist during fleeting moments in time; quite simply, the universe existed before humans, so humans could have a beginning (and hence still be sitting in their sinful state), but the universe could be infinite, no contradiction between the two.

    For that reason, your four-step proof for God breaks down at the first level, because you havent actually tied the sinfulness of humans to the age of the universe. By application of your argument (once we've established that its not connected to the age of the universe), the fact I still sin says nothing about the age of the universe, only the age of humans. Humans have not existed for eternity, and that is all we can gather from your argument.

    Believe me, there are other problems (such as whether we really are progressing morally, especially in light of the fact that most people are products of their culture and believe that their culture, no matter what it does, is more righteous than all other cultures), but I'm trying to keep my post brief. (You've probably never seen my posts on other forums, but I'm the most verbose person ever, and I can write and write and write for hours :) )

    Of course, I want to note that your Step 1 makes a bizarre claim that is never substantiated or explained: that given an infinite amount of time, that humans would become infinitely righteous... the problem being that you havent shown that humans will even exist indefinitely. I think its extremely likely that we will kill each other off long before infinity. So the human species has a start, and it has an end, just like every other species that has ever existed. If the universe were eternal, we would have ceased to exist an eternity ago.

    Basically, there are better ways to prove the finititude of the universe, you dont have to rely on the incredibly esoteric "sin" argument you have. I'll prove that universe is finite for you, using a more contemporary and well-accepted explanation:

    - If you've taken even a high school level science class, you should know the laws of thermodynamics, you should know how they're applied, you should know the difference between an open and closed system.

    - In laymens terms, you can never get out all of energy you put into a system, because some of it always becomes useless heat. Thats why, even in a vacuum, if you drop a ball on the ground and just let it bounce on its own, each successive bounce will be less intense than the last, until gradually the ball comes to a stop; where did all the energy go? With each bounce, the ball compresses slightly, which causes friction between the material inside the ball and converts a small amount of that energy into heat. Eventually, all of the kinetic energy is used up until it just stops.

    -- The same principle explains why perpetual motion machines are impossible. You've probably seen a hand-cranked generator that turns on a lightbulb (or if you go to the gym, some eletronic machines like a stationary bike are powered by our own peddling), then you're familiar with an electric generator. You've also probably seen an electric motor, like a vacuum cleaner, which needs a constant stream of electricity going through it to power the motor. Some people have thought they could create perpetual motion machines by hooking up a series of generators and motors in a circle, where each motor turns the generator crank and each turn of the crank supplies the motor with energy, so that essentially the machine could be self-powered and run forever. That sounds intuitively correct, and some people have certainly tried to make it work, but it just doesnt. The friction from internal mechanisms of the machines turns a small amount of each crank of the engine into useless heat, and the machine will begin to slow down more and more until it just stops. Unless you supply that machine with some outside source of energy, it will just grind to a halt.

    - The principle above is the second law of thermodynamics, where the amount of heat or entropy in closed systems tends to increase and their wont be any available energy left for movement. Because the universe encompasses everything, it is a closed system, so given enough time the universe will eventually use up all its available energy, and all movement will stop as a result of the same rules that ceased the movement of the bouncing ball. You might have heard of this scenario called heat death, which is projected to occur in 10^900 to 10^1000 years time.

    - If the universe is infinitely old, it should evidently be older than 10^1000 years, and so heat death should have already occurred. It hasnt, so the universe cannot be infinitely old, so it is finite.

    The heat death argument isnt exactly bulletproof for at least two reasons:
    - You've probably heard of the Big Crunch, where the mass in the universe will eventually slow the expansion of the universe and cause it collapse in on itself. It is concievable that the universe is born and dies through an endless cycle of bangs and crunches, so that concievably the universe could be infinitely old and gone through an infinite number of heat deaths through each bang-crunch cycle. (Its worth nothing that theres just not very good evidence that there really is a bang-crunch cycle, and we have no way of knowing whether this universe we live in is the first and only universe, or whether its just another aspect of the universe that has existed for eternity.)

    - Ironically, if God exists, then his continued existence negates the heat death, because his continued interference in the universe is constantly adding energy (that presumes that God isnt subject to the laws of thermodynamics himself), and the universe could concievably infinitely old if God is constantly supplying the universe with more energy.

    In short, Step 1 mangles the cosmological argument because your reasoning doesnt sufficiently show that the universe really does have a beginning, you're just using a very dubious calculation of the universe. The problem with Step 2 is the amount of question begging:
    Second step: someone says, ok fine, but what if the universe started all by itself at some point? Look at the cosmos and know it is very complicated. Since nothing in nature happens all by itself, there is always a cause and an effect. Therefore, since nothing, in more than a trillion examples, ever proves something happens without a cause, we can with the greatest of probabilities conclude everything has a cause. Since everything has a cause that is in known existence, then logic states that which is uncreated must have created. This is step 2 in the proof.
    There are 2 primary objections to this statement, the first is a theological objection, the second is a scientific objection:

    - Theological objection:
    This has probably never occurred to you, but if Step 2 is true, then your religion is false, even if God exists or not, because the statement "nothing in nature happens all by itself, there is always a cause and an effect" is a fundamental denial of free will, on the basis that the cause of all of their actions must come from a prior effect, which in turn must come from a prior cause, ad infinitum until the first cause which you believe to be God. If God is the ultimate cause of everything, he is the ultimate cause of all the evil in the universe, and people never actually made a free choice to believe or disbelieve in God, because all events were set in motion and determined from the very beginning. (Some people have no problem with predestination, but I think that view of God is extremely offensive to religion, because a god who predestines people to go to hell is a monster and not worthy of worship.)

    On the contrary, if people do have free will, then we have at least one example of something in nature happening outside of the laws of cause and effect, which serves to falsify Step 2.

    - Scientific objection:
    My biggest problem with your argument is that you havent actually shown Step 2 to be true, you only stated it categorically. At best, you're statement is just an intuitional statement, but it is ignorant and arrogant to an extreme to think you can refute science with your own intuitional preconceptions, and its ignorant to think you can define science with your intuitions.

    Intuition is one of the first, but least accurate tools for gaining knowledge of the universe. As is frequently the case, its just wrong, and there are many apparently "paradoxes" that have been developed with exploit our usually fallible intuitional beliefs:
    - The classic example, the Birthday Paradox: lets say started gathering random people into a room. How many people do you think we need to grab before we can say, with 50% probability, that two people in that room share the same birthday? How many people do we need before we have 99% probability that two people will share the same birthday? You only need 23 for 50% probability, and about 100 people for 99% probability. This completely contradicts our intuitional expectations that you need at least 365/2 people, but just look at the page I linked and you can play with the mathematics yourself.

    - Another classic example, the Drug Test: lets say we have developed a new drug test that can detect the presence of a narcotic with 99.95% accuracy. What are the odds that a randomly selected person who tests positive is a drug user? Intuitionally, we say that the person is 99.95% likely to be a drug user, but in reality, the person is only 50% likely, and here's why:

    Imagine you have a population of 1000 people, where 30 of them are drug users. Assuming that your drug test is 99.95% accuate, you can construct a chart to show the number of true negatives, true positives, false negatives, and false positives, like this:
    Code:
    TN - true negative, correctly identifies a non-drug user
    TP - true positive, correctly identifies a drug user
    FN - false negative, incorrectly identifies drug user
    FP - false positive, incorrectly identifies a non-drug user
     
    Population is 10000. 9500 are non-drug users, 500 are drug users
     
    TN = accuracy * number_of_non-drug-users
    TP = accuracy * number_of_drug-users
    FN = number_of_drug-users - TP
    FP = number_of_non-drug-users - TN
     
    TN = 95% * 9500 = 9025
    TP = 95% * 500 = 475
    FN = 500 - 475 = 25
    FP = 9500 - 9025 = 475
    No matter the population or accuracy of the drug, number of False Positives will equal the number of False Positives, so the likelihood of a person being a drug user if they test positive is only 50%, which completely contradictions intuition.

    Martin Gardner and Marilyn vos Savant are very famous for constructing other scenarios like the one above, that show how statistics frequently contradicts our intuitions.

    - The most obvious scientific example: you are used to the world of motion, where if you are on a platform moving at 60 mph and your friend throws a ball in the same direction of the train at 40 mph, an external observe would expect see the ball moving at 60+40 mph or 100 mph (relative to the ground). And if platform were moving in the opposite direction, then the ball would be only be traveling at -60+40 mph or -20 mph (where negative means opposite direction).

    So, how fast do you expect a beam of light to travel relative to the ground if your friend is riding on a train at 60 mph? Intuitively, you expect it to travel at c + 60 mph (where c is the speed of light, about 671 000 000 mph), but the beam moves at c. And if the train were travelling at 1000 mph, the beam of light still travels relative to the ground at c. No matter how fast the train travels, and no matter what direction, the light travels relative to the ground at a constant speed, which completely contradicts our intuitional expectations. Yet, its completely sound when you understand the math behind it.

    With that out of the way, it should tell you something about your intuitional beliefs: they dont define the rules of the universe. The statement "everything needs a cause" seems very intuitional, you havent actually shown that such a principle is actually true for the universe. In fact, its not true at all, at least not on the very tiny scale, and in fact very few of the rules which hold true above the atomic scale are true below it -- if you are familiar with science, this problem is extremely fundamental, because havent quite unified macro and quantum physics (which is to say that we have two seperate scientific models, the first being einstein physics which explains the movement of objects larger than single protons, and the second model being quantum physics explains the movement of objects smaller than protons).

    In the very tiny scale, the rules of "identify cause -> identical effect" is false, but rather "identify cause -> 40% probability of effect1, 30% probability of effect2, 25% probability of effect3, 5% probability of effect4". You stop dealing with causality and start dealing with probability distributions. In particular, when you stop dealing with causality, you get effects that really are completely acausal, specifically get these little things called virtual particles, which flash into an out of existence spotaneously and they appear to violate the laws of conservation of energy:
    Virtual Particles

    In many decays and annihilations, a particle decays into a very high-energy force-carrier particle, which almost immediately decays into low-energy particle. These high-energy, short-lived particles are virtual particles.

    The conservation of energy seems to be violated by the apparent existence of these very energetic particles for a very short time. However, according to the above principle, if the time of a process is exceedingly short, then the uncertainty in energy can be very large. Thus, due to the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle, these high-energy force-carrier particles may exist if they are short lived. In a sense, they escape reality's notice.

    The bottom line is that energy is conserved. The energy of the initial decaying particle and the final decay products is equal. The virtual particles exist for such a short time that they can never be observed.
    These little virtual particles are flashing into an out of existence all the time, and they do so without any cause at all and even when there isnt enough energy to create them. Even in a perfect vacuum, there is a sea of these things popping into and out of existence.

    This is just my speculation on the subject, but I think it provides a good explanation where the energy that gave rise to the big bang came from:
    - if you imagine the universe at the very beginning, where it had no space, no length, no width, and no depth, its is just a 0-d "point" for all intents and purpose.
    - imagine that one those virtual particles spontaneous pops into existence, just like the tend to do, what happens when one of those things pops into existence of that universe? In laymens terms, its what happens when you fill 2 gallon water balloon with 20 gallons of water, you get a boom! :)
    - given the particle, if there is no space, it has infinite density, and with infinite density it has infinite energy. And so the universe is born, but fortunately now that we have space, those little virtual particles dont mean so much now, but we are still thankful they are around.

    At least that is my own private speculation on the creation of the universe, and its compliant with the laws of physics without requiring the existence of any gods to assist the process.

    The problem with Step 3 is its unnecessary constraint that has no purpose and does not constitute a formal premise for a proof:
    Step 3, which is misrepresented, does not say what Juliet says it said. Since the person, who can not overturn step 1 or 2, then tries to argue for something else, they try to argue against the attributes of some god, which is not the attributes of God of the Bible. Do you see how this is disingenuous? As the minimal facts approach is concerned, this proof does not care about other gods, but is merely proving God of the Bible, so if you want to put forth an argument, address it against God of the Bible and not trying to dispute some god.
    So far, the argument for god looks like this:

    Step 1) The universe is finite
    Step 2) Everything which has a beginning has a cause
    Step 3) Please dont talk about any other gods apart from the Christian God
    Step 4) Therefore god exists

    Your constraint in Step 3 is meaningless, because its perfectly conceivable that god exists, but the very specific and particular Christian God does not exist. Steps 1 and 2 could be true and prove the existence of God, but they even constraining all discussion of your proof to the Christian God doesnt actually make the Christian God more plausible than all the others; the constraint is irrelevant. A deistic conception of God could be correct, where the deistic god (for some reason or another) creates the universe and abandons it to move along at its own devices, where the existence of humans is merely an unintended consequence of creation. God could create the universe without making human beings into a special creation, or even caring about humans or knowing about them at all, and it would be completely consistent with your first two steps in your proof.

    The constraint that we should only talk about the Christian God is artificial, and if you were trying to prove any other god, you could use the exact same arguments to prove the truth of every religion, so long as you changed Step 3 ever-so-slightly so that a critic is only permitted to talk about whatever god another wants.

    Finally, Step 4 is just another example of irrelevance:
    Once the person appreciates step 3, they provide their one last stand at the ok corral-Step 4. They say, well why can't there be gods created gods for an eternity of the past so that your God is created also? This is just an offshoot of step 1, but instead of dealing with things in nature, it proposes gods created gods in the supernatural to explain our existence. This violates the principle proven in step 1 which say if there was an eternity of the past of cause and effects, whomever the constituents are, you still would have had an eternity to be perfected due to our observation today of the exponential progression cited. Try yourself to think of some more examples of exponential progression of our conscience in the saved. Note the unsaved do not want to change so that is why hell is created. In eternity hell takes care of them, and Juliet.
    You havent actually connected the creation of the universe or any other gods with the creation of humans; there is no contradiction between there is an infinite regress of gods who have created each other, but humans were only created recently in history rather than created an infinitely long time ago.

    What seems like a perfect proof to you is actually an extremely poor, non-academic proof that could easily be mistaken for a parody. You need to seriously address the problems in Steps 1, 2, 3, and 4, because it fails to stand under its own weight, otherwise you will have taken the almost elegantly written Kalam argument and mangled it beyond theological repair. You do not have a proof of god, and definitely not a proof of the Christian god.

    However, after you restated your proof, you wrote the following:
    Such God would necessitate His mercy and that mercy is revealed when Jesus entered into creation to die on the cross for your sins to give you eternal life if you were willing to receive it. None compare to the love of Christ, He said He is God and proved it, fulfilling 62 prophecies (probabilities less than 1 in a trillion for any mortal man to get lucky), surrounding 40 writers over 1500 years, in a historical-religio context, showing God's redemptive design, and the apostles died for testifying to His resurrection and ascension. The resurrection of Christ is unique and best testified. No person is more well documented in antiquity. There are 42 writers, both Christian and non-Christian speaking of Jesus in the first 150 years of his death. This far outweighs the number of writers about the Emperor of Rome who died 11 years after Jesus died by a margin of 4 to 1. Skeptics have no considerable valid explanation against Jesus being God.
    If it means anything to you at all, I wanted to get my degree in New Testament history (however many odd things lead to others, and I earned degrees in Business/Finance instead), so I know about the history of the bible, when it was written, and so on, and I'm 100% positive I know more about the bible than you do. Long story story short, here are some facts to digest:
    - Israelites did not exist anytime before 1000 BC, and didnt begin to write down their stories until 900 BC.
    - We dont know how any of the apostles died, apart from Judas. The martyrdom of the apostles is something of an extra-biblical addition that isnt actually recorded in the bible or history, so much as it circulated by word of mouth until it became "accepted" as a fact.
    - We dont know anything about the life of Christ. We are fairly certain he existed, but his life is completely lost in myth and legend. Was he a good person who preached that people should humble themselves to God? Probably. Did he feed 5000 people with a few fish and two loaves of bread? Probably not. Was he crucified as a political criminal? Probably. Did he reanimate from the dead and begin preaching to people in the streets? Probably not.

    The supernatural elements of Jesus' life make it so difficult to believe. 2000 years ago, people were very superstitious, and they lived in a world where the supernatural was readily observable and obvious. You think that, with all the technology we have now, if the supernatural used to be so plainly evident to people without the aid of scientific instruments, then surely we could detect the supernatural even more readily with instruments!...
    ... but we dont. Precisely the opposite: the more we study the universe, and the more sensitive our scientific instruments become, we see the universe is really a system of interacting mathematical equations. Billions of experiments are performed every year, some with the expressed purpose of uncovering psychic and supernatural powers, but not even once have we reliably observed any instance of the supernatural. From the point of view of skeptic, its very difficult to believe that the records of Jesus's miracles and displays of the supernatural are actually genuine or even happened at all, simply because the growing implausibility of supernatural powers.

    - The most respected, mainstream scholars believe that Jesus existed, but that his life is exaggerated by a few zealous followers. If you want to know more about the historical Jesus, and certainly learn a lot more than you would learn reading second-rate apologetics all day, go to your library and pick up A Marginal Jew by John P Meier, The Historical Jesus by Gerd Theissen, The Historical Jesus by John Dominic Crossan, and for a little more background on the development of the bible its worth the time to read Truth and Fiction in the Bible by Robin Lane Fox.

    I honestly dont expect you pick up any of those, but I would really appreciate it if you knew a little more about your religion. Believe me, I've seen the pattern of belief a million times, and you are just a textbook example of someone who believed the bible was true long before you even had the faintest idea of why you thought it was true or even knew about it from an academic point of view.

    I'm not trying to be condescending, but you're just a garden-variety fundamentalist who believes first and tries to prove later, essentially no different from the fundamentalists of every other religion who do the exact same thing, and you're beliefs are no better off than theirs. Jesus fulfilled just as many prophecies as Mohammed, and there is no argument that you can provide to disprove that claim. Why? Because you're making categorical statements without qualifying them, and there is fundamentally no reason to prefer your categorical statements above a Muslims unqualified categorical statements about his own religion.

    Of course, if you're like me, then it should be fairly evident that all the gods of religion are false. They are made in the image of man, put man in the center of the universe, and give man an special place above any other animal; these kinds of gods are so obviously manmade fictions that they just cannot be believed. Even worse, the moral prescriptions these gods make are so completely naive (I could give a long long long list of naive morals if you like) that they just cannot come from a being who presumably has all the knowledge, all the wisdom, and the most perfect morals of any being in the universe; but it makes perfect sense if those naive moral commands come from egocentric, superstitious humans. A god might exist, but he certainly doesnt look like the gods of any religion.

    Alright, I think I've said all I've felt like saying. Also, I'm an admin/mod at [removed forum], feel free to stop by and talk to me some more if you feel like it :)

    Best wishes!
    Juliet

  7. #27
    Join Date
    Jul 2004
    Church of
    Sherwood Park
    Posts
    3,515
    Blog Entries
    30
    Rep Power
    26

    Default

    Quote Originally Posted by Juliet View Post
    Churchwork,

    I appreciate your invitation to respond to your post. Some of things that will follow will, without a doubt, be extremely offensive to you. I'm going to be upfront: I have a tendency to come off as extremely elitist and condescending, and I have a tendency to talk down to other people (usually for good reasons).
    These are not good traits to have, so don't accept them so willingly as righteous. Should a murderer accept killing, and if so, does he not belong in jail (hell)? I have seen your suffering, so I my heart goes out to you not in vain, but with prayers and by contacting you since you wrote so much on another site about the 4 Step Perfect Proof for God of the Bible, though you could still not disprove it. I would never pick up the bait of Satan to be offended.
    Let me also state upfront that I've read a lot of proofs for God, and yours, no matter how much effort you put into it, is really the worst one I've ever read. I'm not sure if you already know this or not, but basically you're reiterating a very ancient argument for god called the cosmological argument, a particular variant that most people know as Kalam's Cosmological Argument:

    As near as I can tell, you're 4-step proof for God is really just an overly verbose way of stating the following:
    1) The Universe is finite, so it has a beginning
    2) Anything with a beginning has a cause
    3) A first cause follows from an uncaused cause, which is god
    4) Therefore god exists

    (^^^^ note: please dont mind that this may not be an exact formulation of what you've said. I noticed that you accused me of being tricked by Satan when I made previous comments that "overassumed" (I've never heard of that word in my life) parts of what you were trying to say.)
    I am mindful that in your attempt to disprove the 4 Step Proof, you seek to do so from an argument in its 4 points that are not able to directly deal with the Proof itself, by your not addressing the 4 Step Proof specifically. Are you tricked by Satan, or do you willingly accept the evil spirit in your life? I believe the latter is more appropriately depicting your condition. Sinners want to go to hell. The word "overassumed" seems self-evident doesn't it? Try to put your petty self aside. If you assume something that is reasonable, it is not overassuming. In your cause, your reasoning is that of overassuming since it has no basis at all.

    I have read lots of proofs also, but the one I have shown you here is still the best one. Evidence bears this out. You would not be correct in thinking it is verbose, since it is stated quite simply: 1) There is not an eternity of the past of cause and effects, otherwise you would have had an eternity to be perfected, yet you still sin; 2) since nothing in nature is shown to be causeless, the uncreated must be the first cause; 3) don't argue against some god, for the proof is of God of the Bible; and 4) dealing with supernatural, if there are gods creating gods in a supposed eternity of the past you would still have had an eternity to be perfected as proven by witnessing the exponential progression in conscience (various examples were given). Very simple.

    As you can see this proof, which is the proof of God that God gives in the Bible-since He said look at the stars and the mountains and ask if you did that-is not structured at all like the cosmological argument and for you to say so shows your ignorance and unwillingness to deal forthrightly. Seeing your unwillingness to deal specifically by drawing inadequate comparisons, does not help your case at all. Step 1 doesn't initiate by saying anything about the universe being finite or not finite, but deals specifically with eternity and why there can not be an eternity of the past of cause and effects, and so we discover the universe was created through this evidence. Step 2 doesn't start off by saying anything with a beginning has a cause, but shows why the uncreated must be the creator due to nothing being without a cause in nature. The point of step 3 doesn't say that a first cause is caused by an uncaused cause as that is not the point of this step, but rather step 3 says on any matter which you try to make a disproof, don't try to disprove some god's features, but it is only God of the Bible that you are contending against here, so keep it to that. Step 4 doesn't come and say God exists or a god exists, but says if you want to propose additionally gods creating gods in the infinity of the past, then having had an eternity to be perfected, you would still not sin, yet you do. This proves God did it.

  8. #28
    Join Date
    Jul 2004
    Church of
    Sherwood Park
    Posts
    3,515
    Blog Entries
    30
    Rep Power
    26

    Default

    Quote Originally Posted by Juliet View Post
    Churchwork,
    You probably noticed that the cosmological argument really doesnt specify why god created the universe, what god did before or after he created the universe, or name any of his characteristics; essentially, the cosmological argument proves the existence of a deistic god, without providing any other details (and certainly no details that provide a basis for a religion). For this reason, you provided some reasons for why you think the god who exists just happens to be your conception of god.
    Since you have been invited to deal with the 4 Step Perfect Proof of God of the Bible and not bring up other matters, then you should show the courtesy to do so, i.e., stay on topic of the first post of this thread. Belligerency is a false fruit. The reasons given, as you continue to read, bear fruit of being not my reasoning per se, but God's reasoning is in revealing himself to us. I am disclosing this information, but it it agrees with what we find in nature and draws us back to God in proving Him. The reasons I give, since they can't be overturned with your ideas, should help you to see they remain as true as before. A deist god also can not overturn God of the Bible.

    Any god who created the universe but has no concern for it is a god who is not God of the Bible, since an ambivalent god would be without purpose and he would utterly vain. He would also not be real.
    Now, while cosmological arguments in all of their flavors are very popular for their simplicity and intuitive reasonableness, but yours is the least persuasive flavor of the cosmological argument I've ever seen in the 15+ years I've been studying the philosophy of religion. Basically, you tried to explain each premise of your four-step proof down to its axioms (or something very near to them), but your explanations were horrifically dubious and presumptuous, just take your Step 1 for example, which you describe as:
    Step 1 is vital. It says, if anyone contends for an eternity of the past of cause and effects (and yes many have proposed this), then you would have had an eternity to be perfected (read the rest of the paragraph for why this is necessarily going to happen if there was an eternity of the past). However, since you still sin, you know there has not been an eternity of the past of cause and effects. ... For our purposes all we need see is that sinlessness is at a bare minimum not making damaging mistakes such as mistreating another person or being unhealthy to yourself.
    I would not construe the 4 Step Perfect Proof of God of the Bible as a solely cosmological a argument, but rather simply the Perfect Proof of God of the Bible, relying on the depth of its 4 Steps of pure solid reasoning with a conscience.

    Since you are still unable to find any mistake with it, then it is in fact the best proof you ever seen.

    The proof itself has no axioms, for it is all proven in all its parts. As Step 1 shows, it is true, without assumption, and you could find no fault with it, so it remains solid.
    At first, this looks like a great big loop of circular logic (i.e. trying to prove Christianity based on the concept of sin, where the concept of sin is only meaningful if Christianity is true), but you redefined sin to mean any kind of harm you do to another person. At the very least, I can say you're not arguing in a circle...
    It is illogical to say a sin is only defined within the confines of Christianity, as the larger text of the Proof points out. If this was true, then we would not throw people into jail. It is because of sin they go to jail. There is no circular logic not even at first glance, for it is quite clear, there is sin, we see it in nature, and there are consequences to sin. However, there is also the washing away of sins in time through God's redemptive design. We observe this actually happening these past 6000 years. This is the evidence. Christianity also believes it is a sin doing harm to another. I don't think anyone questions that who is not utterly obnoxious. It's good you see there is no circular argument.
    ... however, you are making some extremely unjustified and dubious presumptions:
    As you will see there is no extreme unjustified and dubious presumptions except in your own heart in this discussion.
    - you are using the existence of humans as a way to measure the age of the universe when you havent shown that humans have existed since the very beginning of the universe. Your argument from sin, that we progress to a more sinless state over time, and that given an infinite amount of time we should be sinless, might be true (its not, and I'll get to that a little later), but the age of the universe and the existence of humans arent intrinsically connected to each other. Theres no contradiction in saying that the universe stretches back into infinity (perhaps in an endless cycle of bangs and crunches), but things in the universe (such as humans) exist during fleeting moments in time; quite simply, the universe existed before humans, so humans could have a beginning (and hence still be sitting in their sinful state), but the universe could be infinite, no contradiction between the two.
    Even crunches have a cause, so on and on, therefore, they too are restricted by a first cause law and under the "dust" (Gen. 2.7) being the cause of our bodies. Also, scientists are agreed that the dark energy is pushing out the gravity of dark matter and matter at an exponentially increasing rate since inception of the big bang, so the crunch idea is not even supported, but is just in your imagination.

    I never claimed that humans existed from the very beginning of the universe. Rather, step 1 of the proof is only saying if such a thing had occurred it would not be possible given the evidence of the exponential progression in our conscience. The age of the universe is not the issue, but whether there is infinite regression in the past and that the exponential progression of our conscience does not allow for an infinite regression in the past of our existence. Thus, in your misrepresenting step 1, you are arguing from sin and as usual, falsely accusing, from sin in accusing of arguing from sin.

    The universe is intrinsically connected to humans since our body was created from the "dust" (Gen. 2.7) of the stars. Scientists all agree to this finding. It took time for the dust to create man's body in God's divine providence, so this took place in the universe's time and part of its age at least.

    It is not possible for the universe to stretch back into infinity because of the very fact, as was shown, if you had an eternity of the past in the universe, then our existence now would have had an eternity to exist in all its previous forms, so that today there would be no sin. Since all we see is an exponential progression in our conscience, we know that sinlessness is ahead of us and we must have been created.

    Humans having been created, even so, we know the universe too had to have been created because at any point in the past of eternity from which humans would have been created approximates eternity itself (as calculus teaches), so that you know we would have had an eternity to be perfected.

    Consequently, this response shows you are still in state of contradiction, because we still sin. The evidence is against you and there is no reason you have whatsoever of these endless looping cycles of existence that are without a first cause. Hence, step 2 is quite important because it shows us that since nothing in nature is without a cause, the only possibility is the uncaused must be the cause, and none compare the uncauseness of Christ.
    For that reason, your four-step proof for God breaks down at the first level, because you havent actually tied the sinfulness of humans to the age of the universe. By application of your argument (once we've established that its not connected to the age of the universe), the fact I still sin says nothing about the age of the universe, only the age of humans. Humans have not existed for eternity, and that is all we can gather from your argument.
    For the reasons given in my response, your reasons don't stand up. The 4 Step Proof of God remains a solid at all points, starting at the first level of step 1, that we sin and this helps show us something in the exponential progression of our conscience to realize that there has not been an eternity of the past of cause and effects in the universe, otherwise we would be without sin now.

    The sinfulness of humans and exponential progression of our conscience shows us unequivocally therefore the age of the universe is not infinite. Once you see this connection, the fact you still sin shows you the vital principle of the age of the universe is not infinite. It bespeaks not merely of the age of humans, but also the age of the universe as we bring in calculus. Humans have not existed for eternity AND the universe has not existed for eternity. This is what we can gather. But we don't stop there, because some people like to claim the universe started all by itself and block out their mind to the proof of step 1. Hence step 2 is an important follow-up to corroborate step 1's findings.
    Believe me, there are other problems (such as whether we really are progressing morally, especially in light of the fact that most people are products of their culture and believe that their culture, no matter what it does, is more righteous than all other cultures), but I'm trying to keep my post brief. (You've probably never seen my posts on other forums, but I'm the most verbose person ever, and I can write and write and write for hours)
    That we are progressng morally by our conscience is proven by several examples given, and so many more can be offered up as well. Culture is an improving element as well, for our culture is a product of our conscience and actions that flow from it. While culture, which is environment really, impacts people, this does not take away from the fact we see an exponential progression in conscience. In my experience in this proof, this has always been the number one place where atheists and agnostics shut their mind down. I alway try to bring them back to this essential fact, but they divert to other matters and miss the initial proof which is the foundational piece of evidence. You will notice in yourself already, your willingness to shut your mind down to this exponential progression in our conscience as witnessed in so many affairs in humanity. Try to come back to it because that is the key element for you to receive Christ into your life for someone who is so verbose and admits his own verbal diatribe.

    So far now at this point we have seen you have made some extreme claims of a universe eternally existing without a first cause which you have no reason for doing. Therefore, your idea is extremely dubious and unjustifiable and a lame excuse to reject God of the Bible. Be intellectually honest with yourself that the real reason you like being in sin and reject God is because you don't want to enter His new creation and receive eternal forgiveness. So you fabribate ideas with your presumption and overassuming. Lacking humility is the root cause of your false claim. The cause of lacking humility is your hostility to your Creator. Your hostility is due to the fall of Adam and your unwillingness to be saved.

  9. #29
    Join Date
    Jul 2004
    Church of
    Sherwood Park
    Posts
    3,515
    Blog Entries
    30
    Rep Power
    26

    Default

    Quote Originally Posted by Juliet View Post
    Churchwork,
    Of course, I want to note that your Step 1 makes a bizarre claim that is never substantiated or explained: that given an infinite amount of time, that humans would become infinitely righteous... the problem being that you havent shown that humans will even exist indefinitely. I think its extremely likely that we will kill each other off long before infinity. So the human species has a start, and it has an end, just like every other species that has ever existed. If the universe were eternal, we would have ceased to exist an eternity ago.
    You'll find as you read this your claim is bizarre and mine is perfectly reasonable.

    It is so easy to misread. I did not say an infinite amount of time would allow for righteousness, but that if having had an eternity of the past in cause and effects, we would be without sin. We are only focused here on the matter of sin, not on righteousnesses. We don't even need to show if humans will exist for eternity (though we will) in the future. All we need show is that if there was an eternity of the past of cause and effects we would be without sin, and we showed this by showing today the exponential progression of conscience these past six thousand years. It can reasonably be expected that the human race will live such an extremely long time it is close enough to approach infinity.

    The human race can move out to solar system after solar system and galaxy after galaxy. Then it would be reasonable to believe that we can live for a heck of a long time and take up every last ounce of the universe for billions and billions if not trillions of years. Unlike every other creature we know, only humans have God-consciousness and a self-awareness of the degree of the soul made in God's image. So it is not reasonable to think we would have annihilated ourselves. There is no precedence for our even coming close to that point. Though Jesus said He needs to return otherwise we would have done great damage to ourselves, He is not saying ceasing to exist.

    The idea we would have annihilated ourselves does not hold sway since the evidence speaks for exponential progression of our conscience these past 6000 years, which is quite the opposite of your failing idea. Notice too you provide no evidence for your assumption. Again, the difference between Christians and atheists or agnostics is we can prove our case.
    Basically, there are better ways to prove the finititude of the universe, you dont have to rely on the incredibly esoteric "sin" argument you have. I'll prove that universe is finite for you, using a more contemporary and well-accepted explanation:
    You'll find the 4 Step Perfect Proof for God of the Bible remains the best proof in agreement with the Word.

    Actually, I am not proving the finiteness of the universe, for no reasonable scientist is even saying the universe will cease to exist. Rather, we have proved that the universe began. Your terms are inadequate.

    Sin is not esoteric. If it was esoteric, why are we so easily able to throw someone into jail who commits a crime in such definitive and well thought out terms?

    Understand the reason you don't want to deal with the sin issue is because your mind is darkened and your conscience is dead to obvious things such as sin.

    - If you've taken even a high school level science class, you should know the laws of thermodynamics, you should know how they're applied, you should know the difference between an open and closed system.

    - In laymens terms, you can never get out all of energy you put into a system, because some of it always becomes useless heat. Thats why, even in a vacuum, if you drop a ball on the ground and just let it bounce on its own, each successive bounce will be less intense than the last, until gradually the ball comes to a stop; where did all the energy go? With each bounce, the ball compresses slightly, which causes friction between the material inside the ball and converts a small amount of that energy into heat. Eventually, all of the kinetic energy is used up until it just stops.

    -- The same principle explains why perpetual motion machines are impossible. You've probably seen a hand-cranked generator that turns on a lightbulb (or if you go to the gym, some eletronic machines like a stationary bike are powered by our own peddling), then you're familiar with an electric generator. You've also probably seen an electric motor, like a vacuum cleaner, which needs a constant stream of electricity going through it to power the motor. Some people have thought they could create perpetual motion machines by hooking up a series of generators and motors in a circle, where each motor turns the generator crank and each turn of the crank supplies the motor with energy, so that essentially the machine could be self-powered and run forever. That sounds intuitively correct, and some people have certainly tried to make it work, but it just doesnt. The friction from internal mechanisms of the machines turns a small amount of each crank of the engine into useless heat, and the machine will begin to slow down more and more until it just stops. Unless you supply that machine with some outside source of energy, it will just grind to a halt.

    - The principle above is the second law of thermodynamics, where the amount of heat or entropy in closed systems tends to increase and their wont be any available energy left for movement. Because the universe encompasses everything, it is a closed system, so given enough time the universe will eventually use up all its available energy, and all movement will stop as a result of the same rules that ceased the movement of the bouncing ball. You might have heard of this scenario called heat death, which is projected to occur in 10^900 to 10^1000 years time.

    - If the universe is infinitely old, it should evidently be older than 10^1000 years, and so heat death should have already occurred. It hasnt, so the universe cannot be infinitely old, so it is finite.
    You actually don't need to get this complicated especially dealing with such big numbers that are such big assumptions and uncertainties. All you need do is look at the fact that we need nowhere near the time aloted for heat death to reach sinlesness just by observing the exponential progression in our conscience. It won't take another 6000 years to reach sinlessness, but even if it took a million years, this is a far cry from heat death.

    Also, you assume the universe is a closed system. There is noway anyone could know that. As far as we know it is expanding forever and spreading out more and more. This approach then you provide is too uncertain.

    And the matter of when heat death may occur does not need to come into play when considering the concept of an eternity of the past because eternity of the past does not need address the issue of heat death. All that is needed to be known is that since we still sin, you know the universe has not existed for eternity in the past, otherwise we would not be sinning now. This is pure logic. Even if we needed a full eternity, you know there has not been an eternity, because we still sin, and the exponential progression of our conscience approaches sinlessness itself because of the exponential aspect of the progression.

    You are quickly learning that sin is the center of the issue and proof for God.

    We are left with only one conclusion and the best method of that conclusion: the universe was created at some point at least 13.7 billion years ago, and scientists seem to agree.

    The heat death argument isnt exactly bulletproof for at least two reasons:
    - You've probably heard of the Big Crunch, where the mass in the universe will eventually slow the expansion of the universe and cause it collapse in on itself. It is concievable that the universe is born and dies through an endless cycle of bangs and crunches, so that concievably the universe could be infinitely old and gone through an infinite number of heat deaths through each bang-crunch cycle. (Its worth nothing that theres just not very good evidence that there really is a bang-crunch cycle, and we have no way of knowing whether this universe we live in is the first and only universe, or whether its just another aspect of the universe that has existed for eternity.)

    - Ironically, if God exists, then his continued existence negates the heat death, because his continued interference in the universe is constantly adding energy (that presumes that God isnt subject to the laws of thermodynamics himself), and the universe could concievably infinitely old if God is constantly supplying the universe with more energy.
    The 2nd step of the 4 Step Proof of God of the Bible easily takes care of this big crunch and big bang recycling for the eternity of the past. Since this is a suggestion there has been an eternity of the past, and all things in nature have a cause, then we can easily conclude that the first cause of it all is the uncaused, uncreated creator. Because the natural cause can not be the cause since all natural effects have causes, then we are left with no choice but to accept Christ. We discover that creator is Christ.

    Non-ironically, God's continued existence does not negate any heat death or its vital relevance because any miracles He performs entering into His creation need not add energy to such a degree you propose or even require any be added at all, or even that heat death is an axiom for the universe. And since the 4 Step Proof does not need to discuss such esoteric things as heat death and such big fat assumptions of things that are going to happen so far away, it need not be brought up, is not helpful and is a non-issue, relatively off-topic.

    This is why I told you at the start, stay on topic of the 4 Step Proof of God of the Bible. Satan likes to deflect onto other things, because he is the author of confusion. He uses confusion to go off topic all the time. People that like to disprove falsely something that is true tend to rely on the most far fetched things that are not able to be proven any time soon.

    So far since you can find no error in the 4 Step Proof, it remains our proof of God of the Bible.

  10. #30
    Join Date
    Jul 2004
    Church of
    Sherwood Park
    Posts
    3,515
    Blog Entries
    30
    Rep Power
    26

    Default

    Quote Originally Posted by Juliet View Post
    Churchwork,
    In short, Step 1 mangles the cosmological argument because your reasoning doesnt sufficiently show that the universe really does have a beginning, you're just using a very dubious calculation of the universe.
    Your mistake tries to introduce a cosmological argument into the frey that is so dissimilar to the 4 Step Proof, instead of dealing specifically with the 4 Step Proof itself. You would need to have left out someone elses' proof, and refocus back on the 4 Step Proof itself. This is a horribly mangled attempt when you try to do that. The call here is for you to be more specific in seeing the exponential progression of our conscience.

    Step 1 has been shown to perfectly prove why the universe had to be created and have a beginning. Your attempt to try to disprove it was to use dubious caclulations of things you just can't know about the universe such as whether there is a heat death or not or whether the universe could ever implode on itself. We just don't know that, nor whether the universe is a closed system, so it is better to take the humble approach and keep your assumptions, dubious at best, out of the discussion.

    Even if the universe were to implode on itself, step 2 easily destroys an infinity of the past of heat deaths and so does step 1, since heat death recycling is of meaningless value. If the purpose of the universe was meaningless, then there was no need for all the good things that were done on earth so far inspite of the bad things. Most people don't believe in such meaninglessness.

    What we have show so far so perfectly in step 1 is that it is a fact that you sin, you know there could not have been an eternity of the past of cause and effects since if there was we would not still be sinning. Interestingly, sinlessness can not happen within a heat death, unless there is an avenue out of the heat death, because sinlessness provides for no death as sin leads to death. Therefore, even if there was a heat death, it is not an issue because the sinlessness escapes the creation, like gravity seaps out of it as well. Scientists agree there is a loss of gravity in the calculations somehow as though we are losing some of it in its dissipation out of the universe. This also is a reason for possibly no closed system if it can escape out of the system.

    It is a most amazing proof step 1. We still sin. Therefore, even if the universe had an infinite amount of time to get us to be sinless, it still failed. Therefore, the universe was not infinite in the past. At some point God created and we are still in the redemptive design.

Thread Information

Users Browsing this Thread

There are currently 4 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 4 guests)

Similar Threads

  1. 4 Step Proof for God & Minimal Facts Approach
    By Churchwork in forum Minimal Facts Approach
    Replies: 14
    Last Post: 06-02-2016, 08:31 PM
  2. Regarding the 4 Step Proof for God
    By Marquis Naryshkin in forum Philosophy
    Replies: 15
    Last Post: 12-07-2011, 10:08 PM
  3. Questions About the 4 Step Proof
    By Silverhammer in forum Atheist/Agnostic
    Replies: 1
    Last Post: 10-14-2011, 05:07 PM
  4. 4 Step Proof for God - True or False?
    By whatisup in forum Atheist/Agnostic
    Replies: 1
    Last Post: 07-25-2011, 05:41 PM
  5. My Issues With the 4 Step Proof for God
    By adrian in forum Atheist/Agnostic
    Replies: 1
    Last Post: 08-29-2007, 02:49 PM

Bookmarks

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •